Abstract
The formation of the middle class in Britain, the United States and the Australian colonies is easier to document than to define. So many definitions have been written that some commentators conclude that the ‘middle class’ should be determined by self-definition as those people who considered themselves middle class and were acknowledged as such by their community or even more simply as a heuristic device for the purposes of history or sociology1 Nonetheless, doubt remains in some quarters, expressed in a continuing lament for ‘the great difficulty in locating a self-referential value for the middle class.’2 In this field of shifting interconnections and fuzzy boundaries, E. P. Thompson’s view of class — that it is not a category but something which happens in human relationships, recognizable in relations between people — presents the way forward. This book analyses the expressive practices of self-control, consumption and performance to document a set of convergences which define a large but distinctive middle class.
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Notes
G. Kitson Clark, The Making of Victorian England (London: Methuen, 1962) p. 119;
Peter N. Stearns, ‘The Middle Class: Towards a Precise Definition’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 21 (1979) p. 380.
H. L. Malchow, Gentleman Capitalists: The Social and Political World of the Victorian Businessman (London: Macmillan, — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1991) p. 5.
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Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976) pp. 60–9. Steven Wallech adds a convincing context to Briggs’s account of the change: ‘“Class versus Rank”: The Transformation of Eighteenth Century English Social Terms and Theories of Production’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol 47, no. 3 (1986) pp. 409–10.
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For example, Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society 1780–1880 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969) chs 6–9.
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The arguments are reviewed in F. M. L. Thompson, Gentrification and the Enterprise Culture: Britain 1780–1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) ch. 1.
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For example, Robert Ross, Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony 1750–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
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For example, Blumin’s and Pessen’s studies in Edward Pessen (ed.), Three Centuries of Social Mobility in America (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1974) pp. 59–92, 110–21.
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Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York: Norton, 1994) p. 225.
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© 2003 Linda Young
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Young, L. (2003). In between: the Problem of the Middle Class. In: Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598812_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598812_3
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