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Each chapter follows a similar methodological approach that involves looking at a specific rusticist notion, the binary distinctions that help construct it, the historical background that contributed to its rise, a critically overlooked work that informed the writing process of a commonly studied piece, and how the commonly studied piece challenges the rusticist notion by revealing that the binary distinctions actually inform one another. Chapter 1 focuses on the rusticist idea that rural communities are pastoral, pre-modern sites untouched by the effects of modernity, the repeal of the Corn Laws, which eventually led to rampant poverty in the countryside, George Eliot’s travel memoir “Recollections of Ilfracombe” (1856) that chronicles her visit to a rural, sea-side community, and her first novel, Adam Bede (1859). Chapter 2 turns to the comparison that was often made between rural workers and nonhuman animals, the negative connotations it carried, which became even more pronounced following the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins’s dramatized account of their 1857 walking tour of rural England, The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, and Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864-65). The final chapter examines the expectation for male rural workers to be hearty, highly masculine figures, which was emphasized by both the use of the derogatory term Hodge to refer to rural workers and the passing of the Representation of the People Act 1884, Richard Jefferies’s post-apocalyptic novel After London (1885), and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895). Interrogating Rusticism helps elucidate often overlooked aspects of rural life in nineteenth-century Britain that can and should inform rural and urban interaction today as long-held stereotypes regarding rural life still persist and the world becomes increasingly more urban.
The rigid hierarchical social structures that dictated nineteenth-century English society were capped at the municipal level for anyone who was not an Anglican citizen of Britain. Rather than shirk this exclusion, many communities who fell outside of the upper echelon of society mimicked this practice internally. One such example of this adoption was the Jewish community in Britain; in order to be accepted into aristocratic Britain, a handful of generationally wealthy Anglo-Jews conducted a campaign to elevate themselves across the Victorian era through demonizing their less assimilated Jewish brethren. In 1828, Roman Catholics and Protestant dissenters were granted parliamentary access, and the absence of this ability shot to the forefront of concern in Jewish High-Society. What ensued was an attempt to mold their Jewishness into a form as close to Protestantism as possible, and a campaign to separate their community from the vast majority of Jews who were not Anglo-born. In an effort to distance themselves from the less palatable Jews, England's most privileged Jews placed perpetuations of antisemitic stereotypes upon other Jews in order to show their demonstrable difference. Anglo-Jews, successfully, made the case that the form of Judaism which they practiced was a more refined version of the exotic savagery that was the other type of Judaism. The influx of Eastern European refugees in the 1840s fleeing pogroms and antisemitic legislation aided Anglo-Jews in making the case for their separation from Ashkenazim. By othering, their non-anglo counterparts, the highest class of the Jewish society in Britain mimicked the British colonial mentality in verbalizing and specifying their superiority.