 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(March 2021) |
The Cinderella Movement was a late nineteenth century British movement to provide food and entertainment for poor children. Individuals formed "Cinderella Clubs", named after the fairy tale character Cinderella, to address specific problems associated with children's welfare.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century conditions in many cities had become truly appalling. Poverty, disease, overcrowding were widespread despite the fact that Britain was undergoing a period of unprecedented prosperity. The division between classes was marked at all levels but that between manual workers and white collar workers was vast.
Many people debated and discussed the problems at length and various movements began to end this problem by a variety of social and political reforms. A few people took positive action and endeavoured to make practical immediate changes. One of these was Robert Blatchford.
Blatchford was a journalist based in Manchester, co-founder and editor of the Clarion Newspaper. He saw the poverty that existed among mill-workers and the existence that many of them lead and he resolved to do something about it. He started by writing articles encouraging like-minded readers to join him in the formation of groups who would provide food and entertainment for the children forced to live in industrial slums. They quickly became known as Cinderella Clubs after the popular pantomime character who is transformed from a child drudge. Julia Dawson was the first National Secretary and she made a significant role in managing the clubs, which provided food and entertainment to children in poverty. [1]
On hearing about Blatchford’s activities or reading his articles in other papers many formed their own Cinderella Clubs. Some members went further and helped the infant Independent Labour Party to become established, others tackled educational problems but all had the core belief in an end to the deprivation suffered by tens of thousands of working class children.
Little remains of that vast surge of benevolence but its effects are still around. There is still one city, Bradford, with an active Cinderella Club.
In the history of the United Kingdom, the Victorian era was the period of Queen Victoria's reign, from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. The era followed the Georgian period and preceded the Edwardian period, and its later half overlaps with the first part of the Belle Époque era of Continental Europe.
The temperance movement is a social movement promoting temperance or complete abstinence from consumption of alcoholic beverages. Participants in the movement typically criticize alcohol intoxication or promote teetotalism, and its leaders emphasize alcohol's negative effects on people's health, personalities and family lives. Typically the movement promotes alcohol education and it also demands the passage of new laws against the sale of alcohol, either regulations on the availability of alcohol, or the complete prohibition of it. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the temperance movement became prominent in many countries, particularly in English-speaking, Scandinavian, and majority Protestant ones, and it eventually led to national prohibitions in Canada, in Norway and in the United States, as well as provincial prohibition in India. A number of temperance organizations exist that promote temperance and teetotalism as a virtue.
The English Poor Laws were a system of poor relief in England and Wales that developed out of the codification of late-medieval and Tudor-era laws in 1587–1598. The system continued until the modern welfare state emerged after the Second World War.
The Independent Labour Party (ILP) was a British political party of the left, established in 1893 at a conference in Bradford, after local and national dissatisfaction with the Liberals' apparent reluctance to endorse working-class candidates, representing the interests of the majority. A sitting independent MP and prominent union organiser, Keir Hardie, became its first chairman.
Robert Peel Glanville Blatchford was an English socialist campaigner, journalist, and author in the United Kingdom. He was also noted as a prominent atheist, nationalist and opponent of eugenics. In the early 1920s, after the death of his wife, he turned towards spiritualism.
The factory system is a method of manufacturing using machinery and division of labor. Because of the high capital cost of machinery and factory buildings, factories were typically privately owned by wealthy individuals who employed the operative labor. Use of machinery with the division of labor reduced the required skill level of workers and also increased the output per worker.
In economics, a cycle of poverty or poverty trap is caused by self-reinforcing mechanisms that cause poverty, once it exists, to persist unless there is outside intervention. It can persist across generations, and when applied to developing countries, is also known as a development trap.
Working men's clubs are a type of private social club first created in the 19th century in industrialised areas of the United Kingdom, particularly the North of England, the Midlands, Scotland and many parts of the South Wales Valleys, to provide recreation and education for working class men and their families. They also began at this time in Australia, with a small number in Ireland, primarily Dublin.
Margaret McMillan was a nursery school pioneer and lobbied for the 1906 Provision of School Meals Act. Working in deprived districts of London, notably Deptford, and Bradford, she agitated for reforms to improve the health of young children, wrote several books on nursery education and pioneered a play-centred approach that has only latterly found wide acceptance.
In English and British history, poor relief refers to government and ecclesiastical action to relieve poverty. Over the centuries, various authorities have needed to decide whose poverty deserves relief and also who should bear the cost of helping the poor. Alongside ever-changing attitudes towards poverty, many methods have been attempted to answer these questions. Since the early 16th century legislation on poverty enacted by the English Parliament, poor relief has developed from being little more than a systematic means of punishment into a complex system of government-funded support and protection, especially following the creation in the 1940s of the welfare state.
The Clarion was a weekly newspaper published by Robert Blatchford, based in the United Kingdom. It was a socialist publication with a Britain-focused rather than internationalist perspective on political affairs, as seen in its support of the British involvement in the Anglo-Boer Wars and the First World War.
The social novel, also known as the social problemnovel, is a "work of fiction in which a prevailing social problem, such as gender, race, or class prejudice, is dramatized through its effect on the characters of a novel". More specific examples of social problems that are addressed in such works include poverty, conditions in factories and mines, the plight of child labor, violence against women, rising criminality, and epidemics because of over-crowding, and poor sanitation in cities.
Domestic drama expresses and focuses on the realistic everyday lives of middle or lower classes in a certain society, generally referring to the post-Renaissance eras. According to the English Communications Syllabus, domestic drama refers to a dramatic story containing an emphasis on its “characters' intimate relationships and their responses to [the] unfolding events in their lives.” The characters, their lives, and the events that occur within the show are usually classified as 'ordinary' events, lives, and characters, but this does not limit the extent of what domestic drama can represent. Domestic drama does, however, take the approach in which it “concerns people much like ourselves, taken from the lower and middle classes of society, who struggle with everyday problems such as poverty, sickness, crime, and family strife.”a domestic drama is an drama that is usually being used in comedy.
The National Clarion Cycling Club is a British cycling club founded in 1894, and which retained strong links with the labour movement through the 20th century. At its peak, in 1936, it had 233 UK sections and 8,306 members. In 2021, it replaced its “support for the principles of socialism” with support for “fairness, equality, inclusion and diversity”. Today it has some 30 member sections across Great Britain and over 1,900 members.
Alexander Mattock Thompson, sometimes credited as A. M. Thompson, was a German-born English journalist and dramatist. From the 1880s, Thompson wrote for socialist newspapers and journals, co-founding The Clarion in 1891. He became an important librettist of Edwardian musical comedies in the early 20th century.
The sex industry consists of businesses that either directly or indirectly provide sex-related products and services or adult entertainment. The industry includes activities involving direct provision of sex-related services, such as prostitution, strip clubs, host and hostess clubs and sex-related pastimes, such as pornography, sex-oriented men's magazines, sex movies, sex toys and fetish or BDSM paraphernalia. Sex channels for television and pre-paid sex movies for video on demand, are part of the sex industry, as are adult movie theaters, sex shops, peep shows, and strip clubs.
Social work has its roots in the attempts of society at large to deal with the problem of poverty and inequality. Social work is intricately linked with the idea of charity work; but must be understood in broader terms. The concept of charity goes back to ancient times, and the practice of providing for the poor has roots in all major world religions.
The Calton weavers were a community of handweavers established in the community of Calton, then in Lanarkshire just outside Glasgow, Scotland in the 18th century. In 1787 the weavers went on strike. Troops opened fire on the demonstrators and six weavers were killed. In the early 19th century, many of the weavers emigrated to Canada, settling in Carleton Place and other communities in eastern Ontario, where they continued their trade.
Chronic hunger has affected a sizable proportion of the UK's population throughout its history. Following improved economic conditions that followed World War II, hunger became a less pressing issue. Yet since the lasting global inflation in the price of food that began in late 2006 and especially since the financial crisis of 2009, long term hunger began to return as a prominent social problem. Albeit only affecting a small minority of the UK's population. By December 2013, according to a group of doctors and academics writing in the British Medical Journal, hunger in the UK had reached the level of a "public health emergency".
Dora Julia Myddleton Worrall, known by her pen name Julia Dawson was a British journalist, socialist, and editor of the women's section of The Clarion. As an editor, she has been highlighted as an important example of women journalists turning the traditionally domestic 'Woman's Page' to feminist ends. She is notable for pioneering the use of the Clarion Van for spreading the ideas of socialism around Britain.
