Self-Help and Civic Culture by Anne B. Rodrick

Author:Anne B. Rodrick [Rodrick, Anne B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780815396963
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

Reform and reputation: education, citizenship and municipal improvement, 1870–1900

‘We have got to take hold of the life of our cities.’1

The three decades between 1870 and 1900 saw dramatic changes in popular conceptions of improvement and its component parts, citizenship and education. In mid-century Birmingham, improvement had embraced the injunction to ‘be and do’, specifically locating individual self-culture within a larger community whose bonds of sociability emphasized responsibility to the corporation and the state. Citizenship was only incompletely linked to suffrage. Instead, it emphasized active participation in a broad civic culture through debates, lectures and a model of self-education rooted equally in the arts and sciences. Birmingham’s ‘excelsior class’ embodied these ideals, forming a relatively small but disproportionately influential group of young men who considered themselves, and were viewed by others, as a caste apart from their fellow workers who chose not to participate in self-culture. They adopted for themselves the responsibilities of informed civic participation long before most of Birmingham’s wealthier inhabitants took up similar duties, using the powers of debate to influence public opinion.

After 1870, this ‘excelsior class’ itself fractured into separate castes, as the pursuit of culture buckled under the combined pressures of industrial specialization and professionalized municipal reform. Certain models of intellectual rigor came under attack as specific castes of students sought to consolidate and defend their own claims to superiority. Both citizenship and education were subdivided into narrowly defined categories that reflected specific levels of entitlement and responsibility. These subdivisions were described in the language of caste, which became more pronounced as the century drew to a close. After about 1890 this language shaded into a harsher language of class that openly subordinated aspiration to economics. All of these changes took place against a background of innovative municipal reform that not only subsumed many of the traditional aspects of social and cultural voluntarism but also, paradoxically, enabled the dilution of ‘citizenship’ as an ideal of civic participation. These internal and external tensions began to erode the meaning of ‘improvement’ itself. As we shall see in Chapter 5, this process was completed between 1900 and 1914.

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