This essay represents an effort to understand how members of the middle class adjusted to the emergent urban-industrial order in the nineteenth century. In particular, I wish to inquire into what changes in social behavior, in emotional regulation, ultimately in identity this order entailed. I shall pursue these issues through the study of what may at first appear an unlikely source: the multitude of American etiquette manuals published between 1830 and 1910. Such materials can substantially enlarge our understanding of how behavior and identity were shaped and the cultural and social orders adjusted and maintained, as middle-class Americans encountered the momentous changes of a new urban-industrial society. This essay will concentrate on urban experience because here the problems of adjustment were most intense; but I would argue that as the process of capitalist development and modernization advanced, the styles of life and modes of consciousness first developed in cities came to a large extent to dominate the nation as a whole.
JAMES JOYCE, My impossible health, or the case of James Joyce, catalogue of an exhibition, London, Royal College of Physicians, 1977, pp. v, 35, [no price stated]. With so much narrow medical specialization it is refreshing to review this catalogue of an exhibition inter-relating aspects of literature, medicine, and history. It tastefully depicts the tribulations of a frustrated Dublin medical student, James Joyce (1882-1941), who, in spite of his "impossible health", became one of the foremost creative writers of his times. Joyce stoically endured nine eye operations: he also had rheumatic fever, arthritis, urethritis, and an inclination to alcoholism. Retrospectively the most likely diagnosis seems to be Reiter's syndrome or ankylosing spondylitis.What did Joyce think of his doctors? He got on well with physicians and surgeons, but referred to psycho-analysis as a form of "blackmail", and irreverently regarded Jung as the "Swiss Tweedledum" with Freud as the "Viennese Tweedledee".Denis Cole and other contributors to this fascinating catalogue and exhibition have rendered a service by opening up a new field of great and wide interest.
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