The English Working Class Analysis

The working class was the majority of the population and unquestioningly underrepresented in the British government during the Hanoverian era and, unfortunately, many eras before and after. Historians and scholars across multiple fields have studied the laws, workforce struggles, and the general social welfare of the lives of the lower class, but the narratives lack the big picture. A case study here may focus on men, another on women, and yet another on the black community, a specific field of work, or how specific laws shaped the lower class lifestyle, but without stepping over some lines can the true image of Hanoverian plebeian society be captured? E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class is inarguably the keystone of examining …show more content…
Executions were common punishment with the purpose of drawing in a crowd to encourage others to not commit the same crimes and though some crimes saw softer punishments in the Hanoverian period, such as homosexuality in 1807, then in the 1830s executions began to move toward executions being reserved for murderers by reduced sentencing. However, as the Industrial Revolution began crime rates grew and with that punishment of not only the poor adults but minors as well. This is historiographically significant because there is a disagreement of the reason for the increase of juvenile prosecution between “rapid migration, social dislocation and family breakdown that sometimes accompanied urbanization and industrialization.” It can specifically be said that the criminalization of minors in cities was specifically of the lower working class due to an influx of people that led to an “overcrowded labor market.” Furthermore, in the 1820s there were different averages of indicted minors, however all statistics were deemed high. Some had shown as high as 48 percent in larger cities. The foundation of this society was reason, virtue, and obedience from the heads of household to their servants, any unscrupulous deeds of the working class reflected directly on the employers. However, with the Industrial Revolution, it was undeniable to say that the era was changing. Still, these laws could be perceived as a desire to maintain gentility, which in fact echoed for the mantra of a roughly two-hundred-year standard that was set prior to the Hanoverian era. That standard of aristocracy required a code of “superior gracefulness” and scholarship in high society’s lifestyle such as: “manners, speech, clothes, architecture, furniture, landscape gardening” and this was a lifestyle undoubtedly challenged by the Industrial Revolution. Despite capital punishment