Abstract

Historians have often debated why so much energy was poured into efforts to reform working-class leisure and cultural pursuits in nineteenth-century Britain. This article uses a case-study of singing classes established in the early 1840s for industrial workers by local employers in the Manchester region to provide fresh answers to this question. It criticises a tendency to cast middle-class reformers as the primary agents of change in working-class leisure activities, arguing instead that many supposed innovations had been developed already by the Chartists, whose extensive transformation of working-class culture is increasingly recognised by scholars. The strike wave of 1842 permitted a dramatic manifestation of these cultural achievements, as the sounds of factory machinery were replaced by highly organised Chartist bands and choirs broadcasting radical messages. The establishment of a network of singing classes in the aftermath of the strikes was thus a belated attempt by the region’s middle classes to counter the dangerous eloquence of Chartist sonic culture. However, the subjective nature of musical experience meant working-class participants could derive quite different meanings from their massed singing than those their middle-class benefactors intended. In short, this article seeks to ascribe the central place to the Chartists, rather than middle-class reformers, in our explanations of why working-class leisure pursuits changed in the way they did, and to contend that the early Victorian singing-class mania, far from representing the reconciliation of middle and working classes in a shared liberal culture, might just as easily have furthered a radical cultural agenda.

中文翻译：

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罢工和歌唱班：宪章文化，“理性娱乐”和1842年后的音乐政治*

摘要

历史学家经常争论为什么在19世纪的英国，人们投入如此多的精力来改革工人阶级的休闲和文化追求。本文以曼彻斯特地区本地雇主为工业工人设立的1840年代初期歌唱班的案例研究为基础，为这个问题提供了新的答案。它批评了将中产阶级改革者作为工人阶级休闲活动变革的主要推动者的趋势，相反，它认为宪章主义者已经开发了许多假定的创新，宪章主义者对工人阶级文化的广泛转变越来越受到学者的认可。 。1842年的罢工潮使这些文化成就得到了戏剧性的体现，由于工厂机械的声音被井井有条的宪章乐队和合唱团所取代，这些乐队和合唱团播放激进的信息。因此，罢工后建立歌唱班网络是该地区中产阶级反对沙特主义声音文化的危险口才的迟来尝试。但是，音乐经验的主观性质意味着，工人阶级的参加者从群众的歌声中得到的含义与中产阶级的恩人的意图有很大不同。简而言之，本文旨在将宪章主义者而不是中产阶级改革者归于中心地位，解释我们为什么工薪阶层的休闲追求改变了他们的生活方式，并主张维多利亚时代早期的歌唱阶层的狂热，