Az Országos Kaszinó tisztikara és tagsága (1883–1943)
The purpose of the study is to carry out an empirical investigation into the officers and members of the National Casino. The institution was founded in Budapest in 1883 and became one of the most important scenes of the social life of the dualistic period, second only to the Hungarian Casino. The almost 800-record sample from the officers and members of the National Casino formed the database on which we have examine the age, residence, occupation, political activity and wealth status of the members. The results show that members of the National Casino were senior state employees, landed gentry, attorney, judges and intellectuals, usually without a mandate in the Parliament, and less that on third of them had estates larger than 100 acres. Beside the empirical analysis of the data, the study also attempts to analyze the self-definitions offered by various available contemporary texts. The sources for this were the texts of the lectures and ceremonial speeches held in the Casino as well as the casino reports published in contemporary newspapers. We have found significant discrepancies between these even during the dualistic period: while the members themselves were loath to refer to themselves as gentries, external observers all refer to the National Casino as the casino of the gentry. Later on the self-perception of the members and the view of outsiders become unified: during the two world wars the casino was defined as the casino of the middle classes. Comparison of these two sets of sources shows that the National Casino perceived as the casino of the gentry had actually been the meeting place of a well-definable segment of the middle class.
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