Chapter 6: Social Mobility

This chapter will explore the social mobility of pauper-emancipists within the Vandemonian context. This research study began by identifying pauper-emancipists who died within the charitable institutions and then tracing them back through their lives. Doing so has allowed the identification of their changing employment and their skills development, as well as their struggles toward the ends of their lives. While oft forgotten, mobility can go up as well as down even though the focus is generally on the former. There has been a prevailing Australian belief that class and stagnancy were not as big of an issue compared to other countries: “There is not so much difference between the way the different classes speak, the way they dress or the schools they went to as in England, which makes it easier for individuals to move from social group to group. The lack of widespread extremes in social differentiation makes it easy for class-jumpers to ‘pass’” (McGregor, 1966, 110 cited in Clark et al., 2017). This chapter will critically explore this by investigating social mobility outside of, and within, Australia, before considering the pauper-emancipists themselves and their place within this narrative.