middle class

middle class. The middle class has been an influential and often enigmatic presence in British history since the early 19th cent. It first gained sustained recognition as a group through the language of class used in the campaign for parliamentary reform in 1832. The use of the ‘middle classes’ (plural) recognized the vast range of status and wealth denoted by the term, from prosperous merchants and manufacturers to shopkeepers and master craftsmen. The theoretical identity of the middle classes was related to the control of property and capital, directly through ownership or indirectly through professional skills and accumulated savings. The increasing impact of this group on national life was identified with dissenting religion and with rapid changes in manufacturing and industry, especially in the coalfield areas. This account has been questioned in recent years. Historians have abandoned the notion of the ‘industrial revolution’ as a sharp break in continuity. Provincial manufacturers have been shown to be relatively poor compared to London-based merchants and aristocratic landowners. Dissenters had dominance and numerical superiority in a very limited number of areas. Indeed, the presence of a ‘middling sort’ since the late 17th cent. made an impact through patterns of consumption and urban life. However, middle-class formation requires not only middle status occupations, but also a self-aware social group, which can act and is identified in some sense as a unit. Dissent, manufacturing, and specific regional economic experiences may well have produced dynamic elements in middle-class development, such as the Manchester-based campaign for free trade and the development of municipal trading and government in Birmingham and Glasgow. Claims which base middle-class formation in economic change are countered by historians who see middle-class formation as a political and cultural development.

The British middle class never produced a formal class political movement. Few middle-class MPs entered Parliament immediately after the 1832 reform and middle-class politicians did not dominate the highest ranks of government until the 1860s. Middle-class formation and influence operated through two major social processes, which although not new became more important in the early 19th cent. The middle classes created an increasingly active public life of voluntary societies and pressure groups. These often had a major influence on the aristocratic-led government, such as the anti-slavery and Anti-Corn Law movements. Others, like the school societies and voluntary hospitals, became incorporated in the activities of the state. This associational culture created and spread middle-class values beyond the formal boundaries of the group.

Middle-class influence was also expressed through a domestic culture based upon gender subordination, increasing standards of material consumption, a desire for order and security, and for the separation of home and work. The residential suburbs which grew rapidly in the last thirty years of the 19th cent. were an important expression of this.

There is considerable debate over the outcome of the turbulent years before 1850. Some see a victory for the middle class and its values of respectability, of rational negotiation in social relationships, and of freedom for profit-seeking within the regulation and support of the state. Others see the failure of an entrepreneurial spirit in the face of gentlemanly aristocratic-led capitalism, a failure responsible for the slow-down in British economic growth after 1870. Part of the problem lay in the lack of a coherent middle-class set of values. Ideologists of both right and left look for an aggressive profit-seeking middle class central to the conflict between capital and labour. In practice, such values and actions were tempered by a paternalistic sense of obligation, often guided by the dictates of evangelical religion.

The years after 1870 saw an increasing number of low-paid, salaried, and professional people included in the middle class, notably schoolteachers and clerks. Increasing feelings of insecurity, growing ambitions for children, and a desire to sustain higher standards of consumption led to new strategies based upon smaller families, birth control, and saving through insurance policies. The opening of the civil service to competitive examination and the growing importance of professional and scientific knowledge after 1870 increased the value and need for middle-class education.

In the 20th cent. the relationships of the middle class to property and to the rest of society changed. The number of salaried and professional people increased, especially in the state sector and in the managerial structures of large manufacturing and commercial corporations. Even small firms were owned through private limited liability companies rather than directly. Middle-class property and privilege increasingly relied upon owner-occupied housing, distinctive forms of education, and superior pension rights. Older privileges were eroded by universal suffrage, by narrowing income differentials, and by the growth of a mass commercial culture.

See also class; professions.

R. J. Morris