[Those curious about the history of the Victorian Web (which began years before the WWW in another hypermedia system) 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].]
hen Philip Mason returned to England from India he discovered that attitudes towards the servants were similar to those towards Ayahs and other servants in India: "their mental processes really are unbelievable," or "You've got to face it. Their minds don't work like ours." Mason comments: "I was struck more than ever — I think any Englishman is bound to be struck — by the parallels between the way people speak and feel about those who belong to a different class and the way they speak and feel about those of a different race" (Mason, P. Prospero's Magic. Some Thoughts on Class and Race. London: Oxford University Press, 1962, 2).
In The Governor Eyre Controversy (1962), Semmel writes that in the 1860s the contentious working classes and the rebellious Jamaicans were viewed in a similar fashion: in each case they were treated as "thoroughly undisciplined, with a tendency to revert to bestial behaviour, consequently requiring to be kept in order by force, and by occasional but severe flashes of violence; vicious and sly, incapable of telling the truth, naturally lazy and unwilling to work unless under compulsion." (Semmel, p. 135; also quoted in Biddis, M. ed., Images of Race, 1979, 26). Juan Comas (Racial Myths, Paris: Unesco, 1951) argues that "Racist doctrine becomes more dangerous still when it is applied, not to separate ethnic groups, but to different social classes within the same group" (18).
Last modified 1990