"Cultivation" and the Middle-Class Self in Nineteenth-Century America
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8894972 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Andrew Holman (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1992 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 183-194 |
| Publication date | 1992-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/cras-023-02-09 |
| OpenAlex | W1975388146 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
Christopher Mulvey. Transatlantic Manners: Social Patterns in Nineteenth- Century Anglo-American Travel Literature. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1990. Pp. vii + 243 and illustrations. John F. Kasson. Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America. New York: Hill and Wang, 1990. Pp. v + 305 and illustrations. Marlene Deahl Merrill, ed. Growing Up in Boston's Gilded Age: The Journal of Alice Stone Blackwell, 1872-1874. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Pp. ix + 270, appendices and illustrations. Harvey Levenstein. Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Pp. vii + 275 and illustrations. "Manners are the mirror of a people's mind," wrote Unitarian minister Orville Dewey in an 1844 Christian Examiner essay responding to European criticism of American national character. And we believe that each class in this country as compared with its respective class abroad, will be found from its relative position, to have manners more manly and sincere and more just, as between man and man; the higher less assumption, the lower less syco- phancy; the middling classes decidedly more cultivation.1 Throughout the Victorian era, a handful of American journalists engaged in a heated debate with their British counterparts over the character and quality of their respective middle classes. The debate reached its pinnacle, perhaps, in 1883, when the announced American tour of British writer Matthew Arnold (who had unceremoniously branded the British and Ameri- can middle classes alike as "philistine") served as a new catalyst. "What Mr. Arnold has not yet seen . . . E. L. Godkin's The Nation offered in some pretravel advice, "is a middle class which feels itself as good as any class
American literature · Art · Art history · Character (mathematics · Civility · Criticism · Gilded Age · Literature · Middle class · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Australian History and Society · Classics · History · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy · Religious studies · Travel Writing and Literature · Religious Studies
| Highly cited | No |
|---|