IHS Workshop: “Honest, Clean, Industrious”: Working Class Respectability

Through a case study of a working-class woman in Victorian London, this paper explores ways that working-class Britons expressed ideas of respectability both within their own communities, and with those who sought to influence those communities. Rather than emulating the ideas of middle classes and elites, workers created their own parallel concepts.

Stefanie Shackleton is a cultural historian of class, labor, and gender in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the settler colonies of Australia in the long nineteenth century. She earned her Ph.D. in History at The University of Texas at Austin in 2022 and is currently a 2022-2023 Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies, where she is expanding her work on the role of recreational learning in the shaping of working-class culture. Read more about her work at www.stefanieshackleton.com.

Respondents:

Carol MacKay
J. R. Millikan Centennial Professorship in English Literature
Distinguished Teaching Professor
Department of English
The University of Texas at Austin

Woodruff D. Smith
Professor of History Emeritus University of Massachusetts Boston, and
Senior Research Affiliate Alumnus, Institute for Historical Studies, University of Texas at Austin

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