Social Class In The 19th Century

In these three prints, William Heath exposes the life of an imaginary/virtual man and his family through 30 years and the different stages of their life. Climbing the social ladder is not always the happy ending of the story, Heath warns us. Change can be fast and unexpected. Through the study of these three prints, it will appear that the satire was used efficiently to depict the social change due to the changing economic context and its harsh impact on some families. Firstly, the use of the satire was an efficient way to discuss the social classes in the 19th century. We are shown three different scenes in various environments, and only the title helps us understand they all depict the story of the same man. These prints were published in …show more content…
These dates will immediately remind the reader of the major political events of the period: the Napoleonic wars which end in a victory for Britain but are also one of the reasons for the rise of grain prices. The first print makes clear that Farmer Giles is quite successful because the whole family is well-fed; one of the women is serving meat, a luxury at the time. Every woman wears the same bonnet, creating a sense of community. In the second print, they are all wearing fashionable hats which were a sign of wealth, as was tea-drinking or even the simple act of playing cards. Indeed, in this time leisure was reserved to the elite because lower-class people had to work all day to earn their living and the whole family, children included, had to take part in the family’s business. The third print is very different because Mrs Giles is seen working, there is no gathering and it is bills and not cards spattered on the floor. The author of Modern Britain says ‘William Cobbett felt strongly that in the south of England ‘bullfrog’ farmer who had done well out of the wars in the 1790s were abandoning their proper roles, as they (and especially their wives) sought a higher standard of living …show more content…
On the first print, a family is enjoying dinner, including the children and the dog. In the second one, the smiling faces have disappeared and the stomach of Farmer Giles has taken risible proportions, proving he is full of himself and of his success. There is still a dog, but it is much skinnier than the first one, and more importantly the children have disappeared: middle-class families don’t enjoy time together anymore. The last print only presents us two characters: Farmer Giles and his wife. With his wealth has gone his family. The farmer close to nature and to his family, is replaced by a condescending gentleman, surrounded by wealth symbols such as curtains or a servant, who ends up in jail and his children in the workhouse, as the letter in his hand says. He has lost a lot of weight, proving he is malnourished and the beer and the tea are now replaced by a bottle lying on the floor, probably gin. The environment is also very changing: the warm kitchen is replaced by a colourful room and then the jail’s stones in which a hangman is carved, perhaps announcing the last step of Giles’s life. The order of the prints is meaningful to the story: had Heath not put the 3rd print at the end, the series would be far less pessimistic. However in both the second and the third print, we can see similarities in Farmer Giles’s life although the prints seem contradictory: he isn’t smiling anymore; he is not