ShmoopTube

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Thank you We sneak Charles dickens What was the social

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and political atmosphere in the early nineteenth century Ah la

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shmoop in many ways the nineteenth century is so important

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in british history because it's a period of transition it's

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really a period in which britain is modernizing and so

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emerging from earlier centuries you have very deeply and legally

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entrenched class distinctions So you have the royalty and the

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aristocracy You have the clergy you have the working classes

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you have the poor and in many ways again these

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were enshrined in law in the sense that different sucks

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of laws would apply to different classes There were certain

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things that you couldn't could not do as a member

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of each of these classes And it goes without saying

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i think that the monarchy for example and the aristocrats

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had the most power in the most money in the

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most freedom So one of the things that happens that

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really starts to reach a fever pitch i guess in

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the nineteenth century is the rise of the middle class

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which for all intensive purposes had not existed before by

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middle class In this country america we think of middle

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class more as a kind of income bracket But in

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this way i mean middle class more working class that

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you have to have a job to earn money to

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own things The aristocracy get that stuff by birth and

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by warfare but the working class has to earn it

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And so dickins is very much part of this emerging

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a middle class and one of the things that the

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growing middle class both growing in terms of population and

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in terms of power bring about the many reform bills

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So one thing that happens is widespread education reforms Mohr

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children are going to school than ever before and more

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children going to school for free than ever before So

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britain's strength to invent public education essentially and they do

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again We talked earlier about literacy rates so before working

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class and lower class people would not have had much

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access to that kind of education Literacy skyrockets during the

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nineteenth century and reaches present day levels you know probably

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run that the turn of that century into the twenty

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s So that's a huge change and also it's that

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kind of legalistic infrastructural economic change that enables dickens to

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be success because the more people who can read the

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more people will buy your books so that's a big

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deal that had a direct impact on him as well

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And then he mentioned things like divorce voting rights who

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could run for office those kinds of thing This all

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of that is changing and that power is being given

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more and more and more to the middle class And

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eventually nothing that would happen is we call the victorian

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period because of queen victoria who dies in nineteen o

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one and i would say that she is maybe one

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of the last monarch to really hold real power queen

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elizabeth God love her does not have a whole lot

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of real political power Most of this is in the

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hands of the prime minister and the british parliament But

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that's also a transition that happens is power gets devolved

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from the monarchy into the hands elected representatives in into

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the hands of the parliament So britain emergence as much

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more of a democracy than then when it went into

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the nineteenth century What was the class structure in england

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in the early eighteen hundreds What caused the power redistribution

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among the classes Why did literacy rates rise in the

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nineteenth century Reading is half the battle g i joe 00:03:34.045 --> [endTime] or something like that

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