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Sunday 10 July 2011

Respectability and the middle classes

The middle-class  search was for security, comfort and peace of mind and above all for that social acceptance and approval denoted by respectability.[1] These were, as J.F.C. Harrison says

....not perhaps very noble strivings, especially when pursued in a competitive and individualist spirit. Materialism in an undisguised form seldom appears very attractive.... (Yet) in retrospect the years 1890-1914 have come to seem like a golden age of the middle-classes.... It was a basically conservative civilisation, alternately complacent and fearful.... Yet it should not be forgotten that criticism of the middle-class was largely endogenous. The brilliant collection of writers, intellectuals, socialists and feminists who exposed and attacked bourgeois civilisation in the 1880s and 1890s were for the most part themselves raised within it.[2]

Being respectable essentially meant the maintaining of a reputable facade and encouraged all the hypocrisies fastened on by contemporary social commentators and novelists. Historians will never conclusively settle the argument about ‘Victorian hypocrisy’.

The rise of the bourgeoisie or middle-classes has often been used in ways that imply a reference to the country’s dominant group.[3] It is important to consider the relative power of the aristocracy and the emergent bourgeoisie. W.D. Rubinstein[4] used two major sources of extensive quantitative data to analyse the relative wealth of different groups of property owners: the value of individual property at death as recorded in probate calendars and assessments of incomes in different districts made by the Inland Revenue for the purposes of taxation.[5] Each of these measures is subject to some technical qualifications for, even before the imposition of heavy death duties on inherited wealth in the twentieth century the rich still had reasons to dispose of some of their property before death. Tax assessments of the living promise a solution to this problem but the measurement of income by area of residence is likely to undervalue the importance of capital holdings in other districts. Despite criticisms, a clear picture emerges from his data. First, the wealth of landowners was predominant for longer than many historians have assumed. Secondly, among the increasingly important non-landed wealth-holder, industrial employers came third behind bankers and merchants with only 30-40% of non-landed fortunes at their mid-nineteenth century peak.[6]

Until the 1880s, over half of the very wealthiest still had the bulk of their property in land.[7] Even when income from rents began to fall from the 1870s, large landowners were able to increase their incomes from coal and mineral royalties and from urban rents, while landowners of all sizes were able to supplement their incomes by diversifying into commercial and financial activities in the City of London, then experiencing rapid growth because of its emergence as the major service centre for the world economy. As a result, there was a marked concentration of non-landed wealth in London, particularly the City and this was to be found at the level of the middle-classes as well as the very rich.[8] Within the industrial regions much the same pattern is repeated: centres of commerce like Liverpool contained the highest general levels of wealth and even in a city like Manchester only one out of six recorded millionaires was a cotton manufacturer, the others were bankers and merchants.[9]

The growth of manufacturing employment and of the wealth of employers in the northern industries was important but their fortunes were only impressive a small town level. [10] Their patronage of the Arts drew positive comments, as, for example, in 1857

The taste of the middle classes, then, for modern pictures is a wholesome fact­ – good for painters, good for art, good for honesty and truth, which is the cause of all true art.[11]

This was partly the result of the limited extent of the ambitions of prosperous family-based firms, as well as of the greater uncertainty and lower rate of return from productive activity in comparison with landownership and finance and it was closely connected with manufacturers’ general avoidance of heavy fixed investment in plant and equipment. Even in their own regions, manufacturers were still overshadowed by the landowning classes.


[1] The briefest discussion of respectability can be found in Best, G., Mid-Victorian Britain 1851-1875, (Fontana), 1979, pp. 279-286.

[2] Harrison, J.F.C., Late Victorian Britain 1875-1901, (Fontana), 1991, pp. 65-66.

[3] There is less literature on the middle-classes in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century than for the labouring population. Ibid, James, Lawrence, The Middle-class: A History, is an exhaustive study. Bradley, I., The English Middle-classes are Alive and Kicking, (Collins), 1982 takes a longer perspective but contains a few pages of assistance.   Read, D., The English Provinces c.1760-1960: a study in influence, (Edward Arnold), 1964 is a tentative attempt to explore provincial society where the middle-classes were at their strongest. See also, Trainor, Richard H., ‘The middle class’, in ibid, Daunton, Martin J., (ed.), The Cambridge urban history of Britain, Vol. 3: 1840-1950, pp. 673-713.

[4] Rubinstein, W.D., Men of Property: The Very Wealth in Britain since the Industrial Revolution, (Croom Helm), 1981, Elites and the Wealthy in Modern British History, (Methuen), 1987 and Wealth and Inequality in Britain, (Faber), 1988 provide valuable analyses of wealth-holding, point to the relatively low standing of manufacturers and argue that few businessmen brought landed estates and that the aristocracy was a closed elite. See also, Rubinstein, William D., ‘Wealth making in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: a response’, Business History, Vol. 42, (2000), pp. 141-154 and Nicholas, Tom, ‘Wealth making in the nineteenth and early twentieth century: the Rubinstein hypothesis revisited’, Business History, Vol. 42, (2000), pp. 155-168.

[5] Ibid, Rubinstein, W.D., Men of Property: The Very Wealth in Britain since the Industrial Revolution, pp. 9-26 considers the methodological problems in studying the wealthy.

[6] Nicholas, Tom, ‘Wealth making in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain: industry v. commerce and finance’, Business History, Vol. 41, (1999), pp. 16-36.

[7] Berghoff, Hartmut, ‘British businessmen as wealth-holders, 1870-1914: a closer look’, Business History, Vol. 33, (1991), pp. 222-240.

[8] Green, David R., ‘To do the right thing: gender, wealth, inheritance and the London middle class’, in Laurence, Anne, Maltby, Josephine and Rutterford, Janette, (eds.), Women and their money, 1700-1950: essays on women and finance, (Routledge), 2009, pp. 133-150, Rubinstein, William D., ‘The role of London in Britain’s wealth structure, 1809-99: further evidence’, in Stobart, Jon and Owens, Alastair, (eds.), Urban fortunes: property and inheritance in the town, 1700-1900, (Ashgate), 2000, pp. 131-152.

[9] Ibid, Stobart, Jon and Owens, Alastair, (eds.), Urban fortunes: property and inheritance in the town, 1700-1900, highlights the importance of property and inheritance in shaping social, cultural, economic and political structures and interactions within and between towns and cities.

[10] Morris, R.J., ‘The middle class and the property cycle during the industrial revolution’, in Smout, Christopher, (ed.), The search for wealth and stability: essays in economic and social history presented to M.W. Flinn, (Macmillan), 1979, pp. 91-113, Class, sect and party: the making of the British middle class, Leeds, 1820-1850, (Manchester University Press), 1990 and Men, women and property in England 1780-1870, (Cambridge University Press), 2005 consider Leeds as an example.

[11] A handbook to the gallery of British paintings in the Art treasures exhibition, a repr. of notices orig. publ. in ‘The Manchester guardian’: Being a Reprint of Critical Notices Originally Published in The Manchester Guardian, (Manchester art treasures exhibition), 1857, p. 14.

Wednesday 6 July 2011

Who were the middle classes?

Who were the ‘middle-classes’? [1] George Kitson Clark rightly counselled caution when he pointed out that

Of course, the general expression ‘middle-class’ remains useful, as a name for a large section of society .... (but) it is necessary to remember that a belief in the importance and significance of the middle-class in the nineteenth century derives from contemporary opinion .... They do not always say clearly whom they have in mind, and since the possible variants are so great a modern writer should follow them with great caution.... [2]

The middle-classes can be distinguished from the aristocracy and gentry not so much by their income as by the necessity of earning a living, and at the bottom from the working-classes not by their higher income but by their property, however small, represented by stock in trade, tools or by their educational investment in skills or expertise. Yet, the divide that was emerging was not the Marxist division between aristocracy and bourgeoisie but

...a cultural one, between the patrician landowner, banker, lawyer, clergyman or merchant on the one hand and the plebeian tradesman and manufacturer on the other. [3]

There may have been considerable room for agreement between capital and labour in attacking the political monopoly of the aristocracy, an agreement that was frequently reinforced by shared local, political and religious loyalty. The alliance between capital and labour was, however, often fraught by fears of bourgeois dominance and by suspicion of ‘betrayal’.[4] Paradoxically it was often the aristocracy that provided legislative support for the working-classes against opposition from manufacturers and industrialists.

The middle-classes of the mid-nineteenth century were an extremely heterogeneous body embracing at one end bankers and large industrialists with incomes from investment and profits of over £1,000 per year and at the other end small shopkeepers and clerks with annual earnings of under £50. The middle-classes can be divided into two broad groupings. The upper middle-class was divided into two fairly distinct groups: the financiers and merchants of London and the manufacturers of the North and Midlands. The former were generally wealthier, of higher social status and closer to the landed elites than the industrialists. [5]

Class 18

John Leach, 1852

London bankers and City merchants were among the wealthiest people in the country. Most of the largest fortunes, such as those of the Rothschilds, Morrisons, Barings or Sassoons, came from commerce or finance and not from manufacturing and industry. [6] The latter were dominated by the provincial elites, those men and families controlling the growing industrial complex. Factory owners were usually wealthy but not immensely wealthy.[7] By 1880, and perhaps earlier, Britain was as much the ‘Clearing House of the World’ as the ‘Workshop of the World’.

A lower middle-class emerged in the first half of the century and consisted of three main groups: first, smaller manufacturers, shopkeepers, dealers, milliners, tailors, local brewers; secondly, the rapidly expanding ubiquitous ‘clerk’ in both business and government; and finally, the growing professionals, schoolteachers, railway officials, an emergent managerial class, accountants, pharmacists and engineers. [8] Middle-class occupations’ grew from 6.5% of the working population in 1851 to 7.8% by 1871. Structural changes towards a larger service sector in the late-Victorian economy resulted in a growth in the number of clerical and administrative employees.[9]

Class19

Celebratory Dinner at Assembly Rooms, c1900, Bedale Museum

Aware of their ‘caste’, they maintained an important distinction between themselves as salaried or fee-earning employees and wage-earning manual workers. Dorothy Marshall argues that

Some of these employments were lucrative, some poorly paid, but the men who engaged in them were united in the conviction that they were socially superior to the manual worker, however skilled. The struggling clerk, who earned less than the expert fine cotton spinner, underlined his superiority by his dress, his speech and his manners. These, and not his income, were what distinguished him from the working-class.[10]

Little had changed when E.M. Forster wrote prosaically of Leonard Bast a clerk,

The boy, Leonard Bast, stood at the extreme verge of gentility. He was not in the abyss, but he could see it and at times people whom he knew had dropped in and counted no more. He knew that he was poor and would admit it: he would have died sooner than confess any inferiority to the rich....[11]

While sharing the aspirations and values of the class above them, the lower middle-class was under constant pressure to differentiate itself from the working-classes whose ways of life they rejected. There was an unresolved tension between the need to maintain the symbols of status and the constraints of economic reality.[12]

There was an obsession with religious certainty, moral zeal and purity and respectability but above all keeping up appearances at all costs throughout the middle-classes and this led the children and grandchildren of the late Victorians to accuse them of hypocrisy.[13] But this was not the only or perhaps the most abiding character trait of the middle-classes.

A person of the middle class appreciates the value of the position he occupies; and he will not marry, if marriage will so impoverish him as to render it necessary to resign his social position.[14]


[1] James, Lawrence, The middle class: a history, (Little, Brown), 2006 is a detailed study. Wahrman, Dror, Imagining the Middle Class. The Political Representation of Class in Britain c.1780-1840, (Cambridge University Press), 1995 analyses the emergence of middle-class consciousness. Nossiter, T.J., Influence, Opinion and Political Idioms in Reformed England: Case Studies from the North-East 1832-1874, (Harvester), 1975 and Crossick, G. and Hauge, H.G., Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth-Century Europe, (Methuen), 1984 contain some useful comments on the ‘shopocracy’. Vincent, J.R., Pollbooks: How Victorians Voted, (Cambridge University Press), 1968 is a valuable examination of a major source of middle class political strength and much else. Ibid, Bourne, J.M., Patronage and Society in Nineteenth Century England is excellent for the changing notion of ‘patronage’ and its effects on the middle classes. Crossick, G., (ed.), The Lower Middle Class in Britain 1870-1914, (Croom Helm), 1977 is the most useful collection of papers and Anderson, G., Victorian Clerks, (Manchester University Press), 1976 deals with one occupational group. See also, Searle, G.R., Entrepreneurial Politics in Mid-Victorian Britain, (Oxford University Press), 1993 and Morality and the Market in Victorian England, (Oxford University Press), 1998.

[2] Clark, G. Kitson, The Making of Victorian England, (Methuen), 1965, p. 96.

[3] Clark, J.C.D., English Society 1688-1832, (Cambridge University Press), 1985, p. 71; see also his The Language of Liberty 1660-1832, (Cambridge University Press), 1993.

[4] This can best be seen in the agitation between 1830 and 1832 that led to the Reform Act. Those sections of the working-class that had supported reform got little or nothing. This led to a powerful sense of betrayal that fed into the demands of the Chartists for universal suffrage.

[5] See, Nenadic, S., ‘Businessmen, the urban middle classes, and the “dominance” of manufacturers in 19th century Britain’, Economic History Review, Vol. 44, (1991), pp. 66-85.

[6] On banking and the middle-class see, Cassis, Y., ‘Bankers and English society in the late 19th century’ Economic History Review, Vol. 38, (1985), pp. 210-229 and City bankers, 1890-1914, (Cambridge University Press), 1994, 2009. See also, Camplin, Jamie, The rise of the plutocrats: wealth and power in Edwardian England, (Constable), 1978.

[7] Crouzet, François, The First Industrialists: The Problem of Origins, (Cambridge University Press), 1985, 2008, pp. 99-115, Howe, A., The Cotton Masters 1830-1860, (Oxford University Press), 1984, pp. 50-89.

[8] Crossick, G., ‘The Emergence of the Lower Middle Class in Britain: a discussion’, in ibid, Crossick, G., (ed.), The lower middle class in Britain, 1870-1914, pp. 11-60; Savage, Michael, ‘Career mobility and class formation: British banking workers and the lower middle classes’, in ibid, Miles, Andrew and Vincent, David, (eds.), Building European society: occupational change and social mobility in Europe, 1840-1940, (Manchester University Press), pp. 196-216.

[9] Anderson, G.I., ‘The Social Economy of Late-Victorian Clerks’, in ibid, Crossick, G., (ed.), The lower middle class in Britain, 1870-1914, pp. 113-133.

[10] Marshall, D., Industrial England 1776-1851, (Routledge), 1973, p. 96.

[11] Forster, E.M., Howards End, 1910, (Forgotten Books), 1958, p. 42.

[12] Hammerton, A. James, ‘The English weakness? Gender, satire and “moral manliness” in the lower middle class, 1870-1920’, in Kidd, Alan J. and Nicholls, David, (eds.), Gender, civic culture, and consumerism: middle-class identity in Britain, 1800-1940, (Manchester University Press), 1999, pp. 164-182 and ‘Pooterism or partnership?: marriage and masculine identity in the lower middle class, 1870-1920’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 38, (1999), pp. 291-321.

[13] Bailey, Peter, ‘White collars, gray lives?: the lower middle class revisited’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 38, (1999), pp. 273-290.

[14] Fawcett, Henry, The Economic Position of the British labourer, (Macmillan & Co), 1865, p. 44.