Description
In “Power and the Professions in Early Industrial Britain,” author Penelope J. Corfield explores the development and emergence of what are now the “modern professions”–such as doctors, lawyers, teachers and other trades. The modern professions have a long history that predates the development of formal institutions and examinations in the 19th century. Long before the Victorian era, the emergent professions wielded power through their specialist knowledge and set up informal mechanisms of control and professional self-regulation, which defined and protected the stature of growing professions. Corfield devotes a chapter each to three primary professions of this model–lawyers, clerics and doctors–and makes references to to many other professions, including teachers, apothecaries, governesses, army officers and others. She demonstrates how as these professions gained in power and influence, they were, in turn, increasingly challenged by satire and ridicule. Corifeld’s thematic approach to the history of the professions is concerned with the complex nature of the relationship between power and knowledge during this period.
