Race and Class Overview: Parallels in Racism and Class Prejudice

Anthony S. Wohl, Professor of History, Vassar College

[Victorian Web Home —> Political History —> Social History —> Religion —> Science —> Economics]

[Those curious about the history of the Victorian Web (which began before the WWW in another hypermedia environment) might be interested to learn that this document was one of the very first written specifically for what became this site by someone outside Brown University. (The materials on public health that Professor Wohl also contributed came from his previously published book — GPL.]

Both Victorian science (pseudosciences such as phrenology), and popular literature assigned similar characteristics to the Irish, Blacks and members of the lower classes. Both were seen as:

• Unreasonable, irrational, and easily excited
  
• Childlike
  
• Having no religion but only superstition.
  
• Criminal: no respect for private property, no notions of property
  
• Excessively sexual
  
• Filthy
  
• Sharing physical qualities
  
• Inhabitants of unknown dark lands or territories ( Mayhew).

What functions in Victorian thought did such forms of prejudice have? Were these attitudes and prejudices a response to particular identifiable changes in British society?

How do these ideas contrast with those of the Victorian Gentleman?

Related Material

• Arthur Conan Doyle as Defender of the Unjustly Accused — Racism and the George Edalji case
• The Dysfunctional “Family of man” — Mary Anne Venning and Barbara Hofland Classify Human Races in Pre-Darwinian Primers

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Created 1987; links last added 7 May 2010