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A History of Private Life, Volume IV - From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War (Paperback, New Ed)
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A History of Private Life, Volume IV - From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War (Paperback, New Ed)
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The nineteenth century was the golden age of private life, a time
when the tentative self-consciousness of the Renaissance and
earlier eras took recognizable form, and the supreme individual,
with a political, scientific, and above all existential value,
emerged. The present book, fourth in the popular series, chronicles
this development from the tumult of the French Revolution to the
outbreak of World War I-a century and a quarter of rapid,
ungovernable change culminating in a conflict that, at a stroke,
altered life in the Western world. Guided by six eminent
historians, we move from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth
century, which conceived of man as a noble creature of reason, into
nineteenth-century Romanticism with its affirmation of
distinctively individual creatures in all their mystery and
impulsiveness, exalting intuition as a mode of knowledge. More and
more, men and women wanted to sleep alone, to be left alone to read
and write, to dress as they pleased, to eat or drink anything they
liked, to consort with and love whomever they fancied. Growing
democracies advanced those wishes to the status of rights,
expanding markets stimulated them, and migration encouraged them.
That new frontier, the city, simultaneously weakened family and
community constraints, spurred personal ambitions, and attenuated
traditional beliefs. The authors dramatize the nineteenth century's
organized effort to stabilize the boundary between public and
private by mooring it to the family, with the father as sovereign.
Such chapters as "The Sweet Delights of Home," "The Family
Triumphant," and "Private Spaces" describe the new domestic ideal
of the private dwelling as a refuge from perils and temptations in
the public arena, the father as benevolent despot, the wife as
contented practitioner of domestic arts, the children as small
versions of adults, equipping themselves to follow in their
parents' righteous footsteps. Particularly in England, the middle
class was central to the formation of this homely standard, which
spread to the working classes through evangelical preaching,
utilitarian writings, and economic changes and improvements that
resulted in a separation of home and workplace. At the same time,
the gentry was transforming castles into country houses, knights
into foxhunters, and landowners into gentleman farmers. The
domesticating process also expressed itself in hygienic practices
(soap, waterclosets, bathtubs), fashions in clothing, and vogues in
sports, courtship, and lovemaking. From the time of the French
Revolution, when private or special interests were looked upon as
shadowy influences likely to foster conspiracy and treason, through
the rapid transformations of the nineteenth century, the authors
reveal the more radical forms of modernity that arrived with the
twentieth century, with its explosions of trade and technology.
Besides the external development of goods and conveniences, the
expanses of the psyche were also being reorganized, bringing a new
openness about sexuality liberated from procreation and marriage.
Feminism, a relatively sporadic movement in the nineteenth century,
became a more persistent force, while young people and the
avant-garde continued to break the rules and push for change as an
end in itself. As always, law lagged behind reality: in practice,
more and more people rebelled against communal and family
discipline. The declaration of war in 1917 put a hold on some of
the flowering of individuality, but the unstoppable trend toward
personality nurtured by private life was only temporarily curbed.
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