This chapter sets out conditions in January, which saw Britain bracing for a war in Europe; starvation on the streets of London and major cities, where need outran resource and the organisation of welfare; a parallel discussion of food for the middle classes; and a series of accidents and building collapses, which also show up the lack of infrastructure in quickly expanding cities. All this suggests that the year might counter later appraisals of the 1850s as confident and optimistic. The opening of the National Portrait Gallery in London speaks to a nation perhaps more confident in its past than its present and future. The present had to deal with agitation for suffrage reform and the threat of French aggression in Europe. At the same time, is fiction being recognised as an important literary form in a year that saw significant personal upheaval in the lives of Dickens and Eliot.

This chapter engages with the issue of voice and freedom of expression by interrogating the function of the patient-editor. It explores the stories of the known editors and printers of the unpublished Moon (1882) of the New York City Lunatic Asylum and the first two series of the Gartnavel Gazette (1853–54; 1855), produced and internally circulated in the Glasgow Royal Asylum. The archives associated with these publications offer a glimpse into the relationships that periodical publishing involved. They show that asylum periodicals emerged out of conflict, negotiation, and collaboration – perhaps not unlike other similar publications at the time. This case study reveals that forces other than institutional supervision were at work. The editors’ class-based aesthetics and individual preferences in selecting material for publication, as well as conflicts among patients impacted asylum periodicals. The study of this newspaper also offers evidence that, far from polished records of asylum life, asylum periodicals embodied tensions. Patients’ grievances did find a place in their pages, even if complaints and attacks were softened with humour and irony.

The public discourse on class and stratification in Japan experienced a dramatic paradigm shift towards the end of the twentieth century. Although widely portrayed as an egalitarian and predominantly middle-class society during the period of high economic growth until the early 1990s, Japan was suddenly deemed a society divided along class lines under the prolonged stagnation that characterized the Japanese economy for three decades, from the 1990s to the 2020s.

Based on macro-sociological data, this chapter delineates the focal points of debate on the analysis of class and stratification in Japan as a general prelude to specific spheres covered later in the book – cultural diversity and class competition in relation to generation, region, labor, education, gender, ethnicity, and so on.

The chapter starts by examining the backlash among Orangemen in the Border Counties to Éire’s 1948 unilateral decision to leave the British Commonwealth and become a republic. Coming to terms with the new constitutional reality was traumatic, and adaptation was not facilitated by the Catholic hierarchy, which was in full crusading mood against domestic heresy and foreign communism. The chapter examines a few high-profile cases – including the 1956 Hungarian refugees episode and the 1957 Fethard-on-Sea Boycott – and explores the mix of complacency, insecurity and resignation with which both Jews and Protestants responded to the mounting intolerance of the church hierarchy. An age of anxieties, the 1950s was also an age of extremes for the Irish minorities. Just when they seemed to be at their lowest ebb, supine under clerical dictation, while the Orange Order was fighting and losing old peripheral battles, Irish civil society came to the rescue and liberal opinion started to question traditional deference to Catholic power.

The Foxes of Harrow by Frank Yerby, as well as Knock on Any Door by Willard Motley, were widely read novels adapted into films in the 1940s. The tendency among some scholars to not fully acknowledge that The Foxes of Harrow and Knock on Any Door explore the negative consequences of discrimination upon African Americans may be because both novels focus on protagonists who are not Black characters. Through the depiction of relationships between white and Black characters, Yerby and Motley subversively highlight ironic historical inequitable treatment of African Americans within a democracy. Film versions of The Foxes of Harrow and Knock on Any Door feature less content about civil rights due to concerns that post–World War II attitudes about race would affect profits. This examination contends that Frank Yerby and Willard Motley in The Foxes of Harrow and Knock on Any Door strongly advocated for civil rights within African American literature.

This chapter reviews recent research on identity and second language (L2) learning. It begins with an introduction that highlights identity as fluid, complex and intersectional. It then outlines conceptual frameworks commonly adopted in this line of inquiry, including poststructuralism and sociocultural and critical approaches. The chapter then identifies categories in L2 learning, including heritage and multilingual learners, gender and sexual identities, racialized identities and socioeconomic class. In the review of heritage and multilingual learners, we highlight recent research on translanguaging that illustrates linguistic hybridity and complexities, as well as the works that challenge Eurocentric tendencies by focusing on multilingualism in the periphery. The section on gender and sexual identities discusses research on gender nonconformative L2 learners and sexual minorities. The review of the research on racialized identities provides an analysis of racism and coloniality as apparatuses and conditions of L2 learning. Finally, through our overview of the works on social class, we reflect on class not just as an external condition of language learning, but as an identity that shapes and is shaped by language learning. This chapter concludes with a discussion of future research directions for identity and L2 learning.

References to Ignatius Sancho’s wife, children, and family life are interweaved throughout his letters. Sancho often wrote to his friends, briefly updating them on his family’s well-being and activities. When these brief references are collated and analyzed, an underrepresented perspective of Sancho’s family as a middling Black family emerges, where the Sanchos each embody the ideal representation of husbands, fathers, wives, mothers, and children. These references to the Sancho family in the Letters help make the Sancho family one of eighteenth-century London’s most well-documented Black families. More importantly, the family’s representation in the Letters answers essential questions about how the Black family were perceived in society and the role class, race, and gender play in shaping childhood, parental relationships, and family life. This chapter details the representations of Blackness, fatherhood, motherhood, and childhood observed in the Sancho family.

This Introduction reviews the structuring significance of the Europe-wide constitution-making upheaval of the 1860s, whose consequences shaped Europe’s histories during the later nineteenth century. Unfolding beneath the impact of combined and uneven development, a new metropolitan modernity defined the possibilities for social, cultural, and political change across a series of major arenas: state-making and nationhood; capitalist industrialization and class formation; liberalism and the rise of socialism; societal change and conditions for democracy; empire, colonies, and global rivalries. Developments between the 1880s and 1914, in particular the gendered and racialized languages of people, personhood, and the mass, set the stage for the violent conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century.

Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Emma (1815) share one easily overlooked but strikingly common aspect: in both, Austen describes privileged characters collecting people for their entertainment. Emma, the eponymous heroine of the 1815 novel, ‘collects’ impoverished women for her own amusement and that of her father, whereas in Sense and Sensibility, while his wife fills her time with collecting objects, Sir John’s ‘satisfaction in society was much more real’, focusing instead on ‘collecting’ young people who drive away the boredom country life would otherwise pose for him. While this description is arguably sinister, seeming to take agency away from those who are collected – almost always single women on the margins of gentility – the relationship in question is more ambiguous. Those less privileged benefit from the protection of the ‘collectors’ and, by allowing themselves to be ‘collected,’ are integrated into the neighbourhood in which they live. By considering this relationship, this chapter poses the question: What can Austen’s representation of the collector and the collected tell us about wealth, class, and gender in this decade?

This chapter examines two conservative novels written in the 1810s: Harriet Waller Weeks’ Memoirs of the Villars Family, or The Philanthropist and Lady Dunn’s The Benevolent Recluse, both of which are concerned to depict how the upper ranks can remake a moral economy based on a changing notion of benevolence and philanthropy. These novels have a didactic concern to represent philanthropy and benevolence as a particular ideological practice with a moral power to justify the traditional ranks within English society. In so doing, they engage in the period’s debates about the nature of poverty, and the redefinition of the social responsibility of the privileged towards the poor. In the end, both novels fail to produce a conservative ideology to rival the more bourgeois/democratic ideologies we find in other novels of the period that we still read today. However, in that failure is the beginning of a modern concept of philanthropy in the exchange logic of the commodity: a return on the gift invested. Thus, the reciprocity of moral obligations would now unify and justify hierarchical social relations under the guise of benevolence and moral judgement. Understanding philanthropy as acquiring this exchange value at this historical moment provides a framework for the discussion of these conservative novels, revealing their ideological significance to our understanding of this period, as well as why we may have forgotten them.

Many of the challenges facing social democrats today have deep historical roots. Labour politics were never simply encoded in the daily experience of the industrial working class; they had to be made. Labour had to adapt to an already acculturated working class, but over time, through a combination of rhetoric and public policy, it not only did so but it also changed the culture of that class. This chapter analyses both the practical strategies developed to build Labour’s base a century ago, and the parameters (and limits) of the vernacular social democratic politics that emerged from its eventual success. Vernacular politics are not ideological or partisan because politics is marginal to most people’s lives. Practically minded social democrats therefore need to identify where their goals chime most naturally with vernacular politics. This means recognising the predominantly contractual conception of social entitlement, but also where universalism has put down deepest roots: not just in health and education, but also in housing and in the care of the elderly and infirm. Above all, Labour needs to rediscover the ethical and emotional appeal at the heart of its historic claim to represent all working people: championing the dignity of labour and of place.

Social democracy may sometimes present itself as technocratic, but within its wider world of meaning, there are beliefs that speak to more radical change, even upheaval. The world of social democratic ideology is one of possibility, rather than something narrowly circumscribed. Using Charles Taylor’s concept of ‘common meanings’, this chapter explores the multifaceted nature of social democracy, which is significant for understanding how adaptable it has been as an ideological tradition. In elaborating what social democrats – and people on the centre-left more broadly – can think, the chapter presents analyses of literature from the twentieth and twenty-first century, with novels and poetry as representations of our social world. Rather than making empirical claims about what social democratic ideology is right now in a particular country or political party, the chapter explores the possible beliefs – very recognisable ones – of social democrats, and how those beliefs shed some light on the everyday dilemmas that people on the left of politics encounter. Three broad, common meanings of clear relevance to the world of social democracy are identified: money, class, and indignation. All three are discussed in relation to dilemmas social democratic actors must consider in contemporary politics.

This chapter argues that even though we all have a pretty good idea of what is meant by the term ‘social class’, it is far from being a straightforward matter. After all, there is only tenuous agreement about exactly what it is, how prevalent it is, how it organises the life opportunities of our citizens and how best to study it. To make it more difficult still, this is a subject that many feel uncomfortable discussing, let alone applying to themselves or anyone else.

This chapter surveys the implications of linguistic variation and diversity for language instruction. Sociolinguistic research amply documents the occurrence of regional and social diversity in all languages; variability is a universal property of human language. Everyone has implicit awareness of this in their native languages, and it needs focused attention in second language teaching and learning. It is a disservice to students to teach them a normative standard and neglect all else. Achieving communicative competence in a language requires some familiarity with dialect diversity, social and ethnic varieties, stylistic practices, and the social meaning of linguistic forms. It is important to teach basic facts about the social status of a language in the places it is spoken, and the presence of other languages: French is dominant in France, co-official with English in Canada, but mainly an L2 in ‘Francophone’ Africa; most Argentines are monolingual L1 Spanish speakers, but half of Bolivians speak indigenous languages as L1. Ongoing language change is important for learners to know about, both to comprehend the new forms, and to be aware of how they will be perceived.

This chapter will look at Wollstonecraft’s multilayered critique of domination which she applies across economic classes, races, and genders.  It will review some objections to the claim that Wollstonecraft’s feminism really is relevant to the concerns of today’s feminists. Namely, does Wollstonecraft address concerns relevant to all women, or simply that of eighteenth-century white, middle-class British women? I argue that it does, and that Wollstonecraft can and should be considered a precursor of decolonial and intersectional feminism. In order to do so I ask what she had to say about class, slavery and racism, gender and sexual orientation.

Folk music, and especially in the United States, has frequently been grounded in the fertile soil of labour struggles. Beginning with a cultural analysis of the Industrial Workers of the World and the little red songbook, the argument of this chapter is that folk offers a vision of the worker as a figure in which two contradictory phenomena are experienced at once. The experience of labour, in this account, is to live under a curse but to also embody the promise of collective redemption, to know that, when labour acts strictly as a class, it might yet abolish all classes and with that bring about the conditions of its own emancipation. Counterpoised to its many descriptions of wage work, folk articulates an alternative and hopeful vision of the worker as a collective subject defined by expansive solidarity, class antagonism, and common property. To make this argument, the chapter listens to three well-known folk songs from within the context of their composition and with an ear to the indivisible politics of class and labour: ‘Solidarity Forever’, ‘Which Side Are You On?’, and ‘This Land is Your Land’.

In this chapter, legendary artist Peggy Seeger draws together, in characteristically virtuosic fashion, the themes of this book as a whole through the trio of song, singer, and community. Communities, she argues, are the social soil upon which human cultures germinate. They breed and support singers who make, sing, and pass on songs, which in turn act as a group glue, thus creating new communities. She portrays herself as a ‘song-carrier’ and a storyteller, pointing out that folk songs provide us with great templates – opportunities for everyone to narrate their own story in their own way.