32-603: The Penny Magazine was an illustrated British magazine aimed at the working class , published every Saturday from 31 March 1832 to 31 October 1845. Charles Knight created it for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in response to Chambers's Edinburgh Journal , which started two months earlier. Sold for only a penny and illustrated with wood-engravings, it was an expensive enterprise that could only be supported by very large circulation. Though initially very successful—with
64-518: A "public shift toward rational inquiry" which could be found within the pages of The Penny Magazine . This outlook has been supported by Mitchell who also feels that the lack of controversial material was significant "in the Penny Magazine ' s appeal to a mass audience." An additional factor in the early success of the magazine was the consistent use of illustrations throughout its years of publication. The publisher Charles Knight favoured using
96-449: A "slum of hope" from the 1920s and 1930s, members of this class are given hardly any chances of attaining membership of the formal economic structures. Diane Reay stresses the challenges that working-class students can face during the transition to and within higher education, and research intensive universities in particular. One factor can be the university community being perceived as a predominately middle-class social space, creating
128-484: A bound book, contained the issues for three months. It was initially called The New Penny Magazine to avoid confusion with the earlier, The Penny Magazine. Working class The working class is a subset of employees who are compensated with wage or salary -based contracts, whose exact membership varies from definition to definition. Members of the working class rely primarily upon earnings from wage labour . Most common definitions of "working class" in use in
160-506: A circulation of 200,000 in the first year—it proved too dry and too Whiggish to appeal to the working-class audience it needed to be financially viable. Its competitor—which included a weekly short story—grew more slowly, but lasted much longer. During the first few years of publication The Penny Magazine was highly successful in building an audience selling over 200,000 copies in 1832 with an estimation of nearly one million readers that year and easily outselling other periodicals such as
192-470: A key change in these Soviet-style societies has been a new type of proletarianization , often effected by the administratively achieved forced displacement of peasants and rural workers. Since then, four major industrial states have turned towards semi-market-based governance ( China , Laos , Vietnam , Cuba ), and one state has turned inwards into an increasing cycle of poverty and brutalization ( North Korea ). Other states of this sort have collapsed (such as
224-401: A self-identification with the working class group. This subjective approach allows individuals, rather than researchers, to define their own "subjective" and "perceived" social class. Karl Marx defined the working class or proletariat as those individuals who sell their labour power for wages and who do not own the means of production . He argued that they were responsible for creating
256-558: A sense of otherness due to class differences in social norms and knowledge of navigating academia. Working classes in different countries Penny Cyclopaedia The Penny Cyclopædia published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was a multi-volume encyclopedia edited by George Long and published by Charles Knight alongside the Penny Magazine . Twenty-seven volumes and three supplements were published from 1833 to 1843. The Penny Cyclopædia
288-407: A single picture. These images would often vary between machinery and animals. The popularity of illustrations and Knight’s desire for sales resulted in certain covers becoming scientifically inaccurate, for example an illustration of "The Boa Constrictor" (October 27, 1832) showed the creature attacking its prey with fangs drawn even though the reptile suffocates its prey. Austin argues that the idea of
320-410: Is defined and used in different ways. One definition used by many socialists is that the working class includes all those who have nothing to sell but their labour, a group otherwise referred to as the proletariat . In this sense, the working class includes white and blue-collar workers, manual and menial workers of all types, excluding individuals who derive their livelihood from business ownership or
352-495: The Edinburgh Journal and The Saturday Magazine . There were several contributing factors behind this early success for The Penny Magazine . Firstly the price, as being sold for 1 d. made it a financially viable option for the working-class audience it was intended for. Thus based on price alone there were few direct competitors for the periodical to be challenged by. The only direct competitor in this price range in 1832
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#1732844029348384-581: The National Cyclopedia were published in 1875 and in 1884-8. The last was a "revised" edition edited by J. H. F. Brabner . There was also apparently an American edition of the National Cyclopedia of Useful Knowledge The most famous of the derivatives of the Penny Cyclopaedia was the English Cyclopaedia , which would go on to form the basis of Everyman's Encyclopaedia . This
416-567: The Penny Cyclopaedia The National Cyclopedia of Useful Knowledge was published by Charles Knight in 12 volumes between 1847 and 1851. A second edition in 13 volumes was published between 1856 and 1859 by George Routledge . The work was then sold to the firm of W. Mackenzie who published it as the National Encyclopedia in 14 volumes in 1867, the final volume of which was a world atlas . Further editions of
448-526: The Soviet Union ). Since 1960, large-scale proletarianization and enclosure of commons has occurred in the third world , generating new working classes. Additionally, countries such as India have been slowly undergoing social change, expanding the size of the urban working class. The informal working class is a sociological term coined by Mike Davis for a class of over a billion predominantly young urban people who are in no way formally connected to
480-408: The global economy and who try to survive primarily in slums . According to Davis, this class no longer corresponds to the socio-theoretical concepts of a class, from Marx, Max Weber or the theory of modernization . Thereafter, this class developed worldwide from the 1960s, especially in the southern hemisphere. In contrast to previous notions of a class of the lumpen proletariat or the notions of
512-454: The wealth of a society, asserting that the working class physically build bridges, craft furniture, grow food, and nurse children, but do not own land or factories . A sub-section of the proletariat, the lumpenproletariat ( rag-proletariat ), are the extremely poor and unemployed, such as day labourers and homeless people. Marx considered them to be devoid of class consciousness. In Marxist terms wage labourers and those dependent on
544-403: The welfare state are working class, and those who live on accumulated capital are not, and this broad dichotomy defines the class struggle . In The Communist Manifesto , Marx and Friedrich Engels argue that it is the destiny of the working class to displace the capitalist system, with the dictatorship of the proletariat (as opposed to the " dictatorship of the bourgeoisie ") abolishing
576-534: The English Working Class , E. P. Thompson argues that the English working class was present at its own creation, and seeks to describe the transformation of pre-modern labouring classes into a modern, politically self-conscious, working class. Starting around 1917, a number of countries became ruled ostensibly in the interests of the working class (see Soviet working class ). Some historians have noted that
608-497: The United States limit its membership to workers who hold blue-collar and pink-collar jobs, or whose income is insufficiently high to place them in the middle class , or both. However, socialists define "working class" to include all workers who fall into this category; thus, this definition can include almost all of the working population of industrialized economies . As with many terms describing social class , working class
640-743: The labour of others. The term, which is primarily used to evoke images of laborers suffering "class disadvantage in spite of their individual effort", can also have racial connotations, applying diverse themes of poverty and implications about whether one is deserving of aid. In other contexts the term working class refers to a section of society dependent on physical labour , especially when compensated with an hourly wage (for certain types of science, as well as journalistic or political analysis). Working-class occupations can be categorized into four groups: unskilled labourers, artisans, outworkers , and factory workers. Common alternative definitions of Working Class include definition by income level, whereby
672-507: The late 18th century, under the influence of the Enlightenment , European society was in a state of change, and this change could not be reconciled with the idea of a changeless God-created social order. Wealthy members of these societies created ideologies which blamed many of the problems of working-class people on their morals and ethics (i.e. excessive consumption of alcohol, perceived laziness and inability to save money). In The Making of
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#1732844029348704-413: The librarian Henry Ellis , the biblical scholar John Kitto , the publisher Charles Knight , the critic George Henry Lewes , the mathematician Augustus De Morgan , the surgeon James Paget , the statistician George Richardson Porter , the sanitary reformer Thomas Southwood Smith , and the art historian Ralph Nicholson Wornum . A number of mid-to late 19th century encyclopedia were published based on
736-468: The new reproductive medium of wood-engraving , which was cheaper and speedier than the steel-engraving alternative, to attract readers to his publication. Knight also had an advantage, due to being based inside London, he had access to a number of skilled engravers such as William Harvey , John Orrin Smith and Edmund Evans among others. It was through his association with inventor Edward Cowper , as well as
768-471: The same social unit , a third estate of people who were neither aristocrats nor church officials. Similar hierarchies existed outside Europe in other pre-industrial societies . The social position of these labouring classes was viewed as ordained by natural law and common religious belief. This social position was contested, particularly by peasants, for example during the German Peasants' War . In
800-528: The snake striking at its prey was more likely to stir the reader’s emotions and entice them into purchasing the magazine. Ultimately it would be these illustrations, so vital to The Penny Magazine ’s early success, which would lead to financial problems. Despite the production of an accompanying encyclopedia, The Penny Cyclopedia , the growing periodicals market caused Knight to lose significant market share whilst simultaneously having to pay more for illustrations to compete with other publishers. By 1833 Knight
832-461: The social relationships underpinning the class system before then developing into a communist society in which "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." In feudal Europe, the working class as such did not exist in large numbers. Instead, most people were part of the labouring class, a group made up of different professions, trades and occupations. A lawyer, craftsman and peasant were all considered to be part of
864-558: The timing of the Industrial Revolution , that enabled him to take advantage of the steam printing press to produce more illustrations for The Penny Magazine . The use of pictures was also advantageous with the magazine’s target market as over 75% of school children were illiterate and another 300,000 did not attend school in 1832 , the first year of publication. Similarly, in 1841 over 30% of males and nearly 50% of females were still illiterate, therefore using illustrations Knight
896-512: The working class is contrasted with a middle class on the basis of access to economic resources, education , cultural interests, and other goods and services, and the "white working class" has been "loosely defined" by the New York Times as comprising white people without college degrees. Researchers in Australia have suggested that working class status should be defined subjectively as
928-478: Was able to appeal to an audience with limited reading skills, while also enabling self-education. The illustrations became highly popular with Knight’s target audience as shown by the fact 1,887 illustrated articles were published in The Penny Magazine between the years of 1832 and 1845. The significant commercial value of illustrations for The Penny Magazine resulted in a whole front page being dedicated to
960-460: Was originally published in 27 thin volumes between 1833 and 1843. Supplements were issued in 1851 and 1858. Despite its name, each individual volume cost 9d. apiece. The contributors to the Penny Cyclopædia were not individually credited with the articles they created, although a list of their names appears in volume 27. The contributors included many notable figures of the period, including
992-466: Was paying over £20,000 per annum, forcing him to raise the price of the magazine to 4 d . and as a result he could not maintain his early commercial success. In 1898 Cassell & Co , began publication of a new weekly magazine. It ran from 1898 to 1903 as The New Penny Magazine, from 1903 to January 1925 as The Penny Magazine and from February 1925 to August 1925, as Cassell's Popular Magazine. There were numerous illustrations and each volume, when sold as
The Penny Magazine - Misplaced Pages Continue
1024-514: Was the Edinburgh Journal . Another aspect of its success as suggested by historians Rosemary Mitchell and A.L. Austin was the role of ‘non-radical information’. Austin states that the timing of the publication of the periodical in the same year as the Reform Act of 1832 was significant as this meant that "the working classes expected parliamentary authority to consider the laboring community's complaints" and that such questioning of authority led to
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