The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830-1900

by Francis Michael Longstreth Thompson

One of England's grand masters of history provides a clear and persuasive interpretation of the creation of "respectable society" in Victorian Britain. Integrating a vast amount of research previously hidden in obscure or academic journals, he covers not only the economy, social structure, and patterns of authority, but also marriage and the family, childhood, homes and houses, work and play.

By 1900 the structure of British society had become more orderly and well-defined than it had been in the 1830s and 1840s, but the result, Thompson shows, was fragmentation into a multiplicity of sections or classes with differing standards and notions of respectability. Each group operated its own social controls, based on what it considered acceptable or unacceptable conduct. This "internalized and diversified" respectability was not the cohesive force its middle-class and evangelical proponents had envisioned. The Victorian experience thus bequeathed structural problems, identity problems, and authority problems to the twentieth century, with which Britain is grappling.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, 19th Century, Victorian, British Literature, Academic, European History

382 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 1988

About the author

Francis Michael Longstreth (F.M.L.) Thompson is a British historian specializing in 19th and 20th century British social history. He was educated at Bootham School, York and Queens College, Oxford, where he took his Ph.D. in 1956. He was Reader in Economic History at University College London from 1963 until 1968 and was Professor of Modern History at Bedford College from 1968 until 1977. From 1977 until 1990 he was director of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and he served as president of the Royal Historical Society from 1989 to 1993.

Reviews

[Karen· · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my next life I'd like to be a social historian.

It apparently makes for a long life - F.M.L. Thompson was born in 1925, and there's no obituary been published yet.

And I like the attitude: people making decisions based on factors that you can understand, not people as driftwood tossed on the tides of economic policy or dialectical materialism.

Take infant mortality for example. That is deaths of babies and infants before they are one year old. The rate was shockingly high in the 19th century, we all know that, persistently over 150 per thousand live births, which is around thirty times higher than the current rate. And oddly, if you take the Victorian period, from 1830 up to 1899 there was almost no change in this rate, in fact it deteriorated, sixty years of no progress even though general mortality declined by around 20%.

It is often argued that death in babyhood was so frequent and normal that it was accepted with unemotional resignation or even with relief by parents who already had a surfeit of children....it has been widely held.. that it was emotionally draining and eventually pointless to lavish attention on, form bonds with, and endow with individuality, a wee mite that was like to die....
In the very worst districts of the largest towns eight babies out of ten would survive until they were a year old. If child mortality, which was also very high by modern standards, is taken into account then at least three out of every four would survive to the age of five in the early Victorian years, rising to eight out of ten by the 1890s. For each individual child this was an appalling prospect, and for the community as a whole it was a shocking state of affairs. But no individual mother was at all likely to take the gamble of deciding in advance which of her babies was destined to die young and which to survive, and dispose her affections accordingly. Or rather, even supposing that she knew about the statistics, any mother would be likely to behave as if these catastrophes were things which happened to other people, not to herself and her family. (My emphasis).

Well, yes.

And if you're still wondering why the infant mortality rate stayed so high in spite of improvements in sanitation, general nutrition, education and medical care which helped to bring down the overall mortality rate, well, the reason would appear to be the lack of hygienic alternatives to mother's milk: the normal infant diet was a bread and water pap, sweetened with a little treacle or sugar and occasionally coloured with a dash of milk. This was kept warm on the hob all day. Then add to that bacteria-friendly mix the usual doses of gripe water which all contained opiates, and there you are. It puts a whole new spin on Great Expectation's Pip being brought up by hand. He was lucky to have survived the process.

[Crystal Semple · Rating 3 out of 5]

Detailed social history of the emergence of a 'respectable' society within Victorian Britain, with particular focus on values of domesticity. Demonstrated a nuanced approach to class, revealing how the ideal of respectability differed between the seperate spheres and the classes. However, perspectives of working-class women at the time was limited as the book heavily focuses on middle-class women. This seems irrational as without the essential domestic labour of the working-class women, middle-class women would not be able to uphold their rigidly defined moral code. This is a great book if your interest is that of the middle-class within the establishment of a respectable society.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a thought provoking book. Thompson doesn't go for the "easy answer" when looking for causes and correlating facts. For example, he discusses at length the reasons that might have contributed to a falling birth rate in Victorian Britain and comes right out and identifies many traditionally given causes as ridiculous. (Okay, he's more polite in the terminology, but you are not left to guess what it is he thinks.) He provides a wealth of statistics, and then uses them to demonstrate some point -- although the reader is certainly free to reach a different conclusion.

I would not recommend this book to a reader approaching Victorian history for the first time. You do need to know a bit of "real history" in order to make sense of Thompson's statistics, discussions and conclusions. But for those who have some background in Victorian history, this work provides a useful and different way of looking at "how things fit together." If you are interested in social history, this would make a useful addition to your library. Please note, this is not an "easy read" but it a "rewarding read."

[Ean C · Rating 3 out of 5]

Does a good overview of British social history/life during the Victorian period. It may just be because I've been reading a lot on class change in Victorian Britain but this book doesn't really seem to say anything new (to be fair this book was written before the others that I've read so it definitely wrote this info first). I think it's a good overview but doesn't really hyper focus on any aspects to provide anything of real substance. I'd read this is you just wanted a one volume over view of life during Victorian Britain.

[Celia Yost]

Mostly this books goes through the things that people tend to think of as being characteristic of Victorian Britain--the rise of the factory, urbanization, the working class, prudishness--and shows how they were more complicated/less complete/less homogeneous than might be assumed. In general this is the sort of thing I like a book to do, but oh god, I do wonder at times what possessed me to want to know about the rate at which the cotton industry became entirely factory based as compared to wool. On the other hand, the author applies the exact same...thoroughness to areas such as family planning and prostitution, so I suppose there's a little something for everyone.

[Haythem Bastawy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Rise of Respectable Society is a book on Victorian social history. Unfortunately it throws the reader straight into the depth of information. I would have really appreciated an introductory chapter on the politics of this era in British history. There are also a lot of what I would call auxiliary information which distracted me to some extent from tracing the more important aspects of this era's social history. I found myself in an intense process of sifting throughout most of the book. The effort demonstrated by the author however is immense, and it would have been an undoubtedly spledid book if the intensity of the research done was on par with its enormity.

[Keith Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is logically laid out to allow you to walk through Victorian Britain. Don't expect flowery or elegant language, clever transitions of subject or huge amounts of emotional insight. It's factual and informative and despite some disjoints in the subject matter I found, what could be construed as reference, very readable.