CONCLUSION

12—
The London Middle Class

Now that the middle class has been buried and its worldy goods redistributed, an attempt can be made at some conclusions in this last chapter. A start can be made by reconsidering the social structure which was discussed in Chapter 1, where it was suggested that a tripartite division provided a useful working model of the structure of society. This division can still be seen after our survey of metropolitan society and economy. There is an upper class, 'an upper part of mankind', who have often been described in a sort of shorthand as 'West End society' or 'the aristocracy and gentry of the West End'. There is a middle class or 'middle station', commercial and industrial capitalists and professional men who work hard to make profits and improve themselves. And there is a working class, a 'mechanick part of mankind', who have been found becoming more proletarian as they became increasingly divorced from the possibilities of upwards social mobility and improvement.

However, the problem of defining the dividing points in this social stratification is no less intractable than it was in Chapter 1. Who really belongs to this upper class, a group who were defined as living 'on estates and without the mechanism of employment'? Such a definition will stretch to cover an awful lot of people, from the King living on the income from his dwindling estates and on the 'estate' provided by a reluctant and watchful parliament through great aristocrats and wealthy gentlemen to retired shopkeepers and fairly impoverished widows. Can all these people be subsumed under one head? Contemporaries of course did divide the upper class into aristocracy and gentry, a distinction which is useful if one takes the extremely loose definition of gentleman current in the early eighteenth century. However, some people living off 'estates'

hardly fit even the loosest definition of gentry and one wonders if some additional label is needed, such as that very vague 'upper middle class' which the Victorians found so useful and which has survived as a way of distinguishing one sort of middle-class person from another down to our own times.

In 1794, Archenholtz noted the difference between the gentry or 'the great' and the mere 'rich', a 'difference which holds even in the hours of eating and drinking, in the kind of amusements, the dress and manner of speaking etc.', and he went on to say that the two groups held each other in mutual contempt.^[1] Such a difference was probably even greater in our period and one could well label the mere rich as upper middle class, a group rather less eminent then the 'aristocracy and gentry of the West End' but fairly easily distinguished from those below them by their wealth and genteelness if not their gentility. The Oxford English Dictionary defines 'genteel' as 'gentlemanly or ladylike in appearance', the suffixes making a rather nice distinction between such people and true gentlemen or ladies. Into this group one could put many Londoners who fit uneasily into the middle station or middle class proper, such as the more eminent professional men and their ladies and many of the wealthier commercial men such as the richer merchants and bankers, the latter group being described by some modern writers as the 'mercantile bourgeoisie' just to confuse the issue.^[2]

The expression 'lower middle class' has occasionally crept into the text of previous chapters, reflecting a need to make yet another division within the middle station. Lower middle is as anachronistic as upper middle, but it does help to describe a group who were growing in numbers and importance. These were the reasonably well educated and usually salaried people with posts in the government bureaucracy, such as customs officers and clerks, or in commerce, such as book-keepers. Once one sees these people with their low incomes but genteel pretensions as different from the middle class proper, one can soon find many others who conform to the same general type, such as schoolmasters, lesser clergy, much of the lower strata of the legal profession and, because of their income but not their education, such lowly members of the commercial middle

station as small shopkeepers. All these people took a middle-class view of the world in terms of their genteelness and their desire to be thought different from the common herd, but their incomes tended to condemn them to a lesser and often fairly desperate existence. In our period, the numbers of this prototype lower middle class were still fairly small but such people were destined to become the largest group in the middle classes as bureaucracy grew and as the expansion in the unit size of business demanded ever more 'white collar' workers.

Lower-middle-class incomes were often lower then those of many 'mechanicks' and this fact serves to emphasize the problem of treating the 'mechanick part of mankind' as a unitary group. By our period, this was becoming increasingly difficult to do as the distinction between the independent artisan with his own workshop and tools and the paid employee who hired his tools or worked in a master's shop became more apparent. There had always been journeymen and masters, of course, but what is seen in our period is the creation of a much larger class of permanent journeymen with no hope of ever acquiring their own workshop and becoming master in their turn. The numbers of semi-skilled and unskilled were also growing as the division of labour broke down former skilled jobs into their component parts and as the development of the workshop as a proto-factory created jobs for people who can only be described as labourers.

How do all these people fit into the social structure? The independent artisan who owned a workshop had most of the attributes of the middle class even if he did work with his hands. He used his own capital, hoped to make profits and had a fair chance of improving himself and his family and accumulating over his life-cycle. He might be rough and hardly genteel, but he was clearly in a totally different economic situation from the great majority of mechanicks. Such people have generally been regarded here as lowly members of the middle station, even if they did not share all the social and cultural attributes of this group. Moving down the scale, it is also clear that some distinction must be made between the skilled and the unskilled, even if both are employees rather then independent men. Most skilled men earned at least 15s. a week by the early eighteenth century; many earned a £1 or more. Even in the uncertain

employment market of London, where workmen might consider themselves lucky to work for two-thirds of the year, such wages were substantial and could produce a yearly income from £25 to £40 or more, very much the same as that earned by many of the salaried people in the lower middle class.^[3]

Such incomes placed artisans in a completely different world from that of the unskilled or labourers, who would be lucky to earn 10s. a week. Most would earn less and very much less if they were women. Wages at this level would produce an annual income of less that £20, quite often as low as £10 or £12, an income which could afford none of the creature comforts available to the artisan. In 1709, Defoe divided the population into seven groups, of whom two were 'the working trades who labour hard but feel no want' and 'the poor that fare hard', a good description of the difference between an artisan on £1 a week and a man who was unskilled or whose skill had become devalued by economic change and was earning only 10s. Double the income at this level meant not just a relative difference in comfort but a completely different life-style and it is doubtful if social analysis is helped by putting both men in the same class, even though they both depended on their hands for a living.^[4]

'The poor that fare hard' were not the lowest group in Defoe's analysis, for beneath them were 'the miserable that really pinch and suffer want'. There were many tens of thousands of such miserable people in London, who would have thought they were in clover if they could have earned os. a week for half the year. Such were the casual workers, hoping for a day's work from one of the official porters, from a builder or from the rakers who cleaned the streets, running messages, cleaning shoes, washing clothes, pushing wheelbarrows, hawking food, carrying pots from taverns, doing what they could to scrape together a living. Many were elderly or sick; many were women or children; many were simply under-employed in modern terms, idle, lazy or shiftless in contemporary usage. Such were the real poor, the paupers, men and women who occasionally lived well for a day or two as a result of a windfall piece of work, who occasionally sought outdoor relief from the parish and, in between these extremes, lived a wretched scraping life which was a mockery of that enjoyed by most Londoners.

At the start, a division of society into just three groups or

classes was made, and this still remains a useful division. But once this division was probed into, problems arose which were easiest to solve by expanding the number of strata in society. At the moment, these run to eight or possibly nine, starting with the aristocracy and gentry and moving down through the upper middle class, middle class proper, lower middle class, independent artisans, wage-earning artisans, 'the poor that fare hard' and 'the miserable'. Does this help one to understand the society any better? All these groups would be recognizable to contemporaries even though some of the labels are anachronistic. In practice, it is extremely difficult to distinguish from documents just who belonged to each group, though this would have been more obvious to contemporaries, who would have been able to note the speech, bearing, dress and social behaviour of their neighbours as well as having a much better idea then we have of their incomes. Even so, each group would have merged into each other and the divisions which have been drawn would have vanished in reality. Society was a continuously ascending hierarchy of people or families, each one a little better off or a little more genteel than the one below it, not a set of discrete, self-contained groups. 'Every Englishman', wrote a Swiss who knew the English well, 'constantly holds a pair of scales wherein he exactly weighs the birth, the rank and especially the fortune of those he is in company with, in order to regulate his behaviour accordingly.'^[5]

It was possible for the individual to move up or down this hierarchy and many did so. Hard-working artisans saved money and became members of the middle station or, more likely, saved enough to apprentice their children to a more genteel trade. Shopkeepers worked hard so that their children might be educated and become gentlemen or at least become professionals and so ease their way into the upper middle class. Gentlemen wasted their estate and tradesmen went bankrupt and descended to the gutter. There were few barriers to such downwards mobility and a slide once started could become uncontrollable. For those moving up, however, there were barriers, some of which were virtually unclimbable. The greatest barrier and one that was getting higher was that between the poor and the middle station. With no money and no education, there were few ways over this barrier even for the

artisan, for, as has been seen, the entry costs for middling occupations were rising and they were difficult to save even from a prosperous artisan income of £40 a year. Only patronage or a lucky legacy was likely to solve this problem. The other main barrier in society could be climbed, but it might take two generations to clamber over it. This was the barrier between the middle station and the gentleman. The self-made man of business 'may not always meet with respect equal to his large and acquired fortune; yet if he gives his son a liberal and accomplished education, the birth and calling of the father are sunk in the son; and the son is reputed, if his carriage is suitable, a gentleman in all companies'.^[6] Josiah Tucker's comment suggests that there well may be something in the original tripartite social structure given here. Borderlines might be blurred but there really was an upper and a lower as well as a middling part of mankind.

In this book, this middling part of mankind has tended to be treated as if it were fairly homogeneous. This has been done for convenience as much as out of conviction, since it is obviously easier to generalize if one does not have to qualify every time one makes a point. Nevertheless, in some very general senses, the middle class can be treated as homogeneous. They were defined in the first place as people of capital who were interested in profit, accumulation and improvement, and there seems little need to make any qualifications about that. It has also been seen that, rich or relatively poor, they shared many common experiences: the period of training as an apprentice, the common problems of running a business, the common problems of when to marry and who to marry. Even in matters of consumption, there are striking similarities in patterns of demand between those who had accumulated a few hundred pounds and those who were worth ten times as much.

However, it would be wrong to leave the impression that a great merchant was essentially the same sort of person as the owner of a small haberdasher's shop. It has been seen that rich merchants, with their political and financial significance as well as their wealth, really belonged to what might be called the upper middle class. But one also needs to distinguish between people at lower levels in the hierarchy, between those who were worth several thousands and those who were only worth several

hundreds. Wealth brought prestige and power or the possibility of power in our period, just as it has in most other periods, even if the power was only that of a common councillor and the prestige was recognized by a seat at the front of Allhallows, Bread Street. Nor was wealth the only criterion distinguishing one middle-class person from another. Age was still a source of respect, rather than a social problem, and birth was still important, even in this class. A mercer whose father was a gentleman would have the social edge over a rather richer mercer of more lowly birth.

Birth and money were probably the most important distinguishing features within the middle class, but occupation was certainly another factor defining the degree of one's genteelness, as is often noted in Campbell's London Tradesman.^[7] Merchants were more respected then wholesalers, who, in turn, were better than retailers and manufacturers. And, within these broad groups, there were many other distinctions which could override an individual's actual wealth in determining his social position. There seems little doubt that it was smarter to be a Levant merchant than a Baltic merchant, to keep a mercer's shop rather than to be a haberdasher, to own a tavern rather than an alehouse. Such subtle differences in degree of genteelness affected behaviour and choice of friends and marriage partners; they also affected consumption, as was seen in Chapter o where it was possible to define a long list of ungenteel tradesmen who, despite their wealth, found it unnecessary to lay out money on a fashionable display in their homes.^[8]

Finally, some comment needs to be made on the title of this book, The Making of the English Middle Class. It is a historical joke that the middle class is always rising, a point made many years ago in a scathing attack on his fellow historians by the American J. H. Hexter.^[9] Since I have read his article, I have been able to avoid some of the pitfalls which he ridiculed. There is no suggestion here that either the king or the aristocracy were middle class; nor do I arrive at 'the ne plus ultra, a conception of the middle class that includes the whole human race from time immemorial'. Indeed, my middle class is very much the middle class defined by Professor Hexter, though he might not approve of the inclusion of small shopkeepers and manufacturers in the group. He might also not approve of the implication in this

book that the middle class had finally arrived, since he seems to think that the key dates in such an arrival were the French Revolution and the 1832 Reform Act.^[10]

However, I am not interested here in political power, nor indeed in that struggle between classes which dominates much discussion on the subject. The intention in this book has really only been to claim that the period 1660–1730 saw fundamental changes in the lives of the middle class and of the way in which such people were perceived both by themselves and by the rest of society, changes which have never been reversed and lead inexorably to the even more middle-class middle class of the nineteenth century and today. Nor do I claim that the middle class only appeared in the late seventeenth century, despite the desire of any historian to have anything that is important happen in his period.

In this respect, it was salutory to re-read Sylvia Thrupp's excellent book, The Merchant Class of Medieval London.^[11] This covers very much the same ground as is covered here, her 'merchants' being rather wider in definition than mine and including wholesalers and the wealthier retailers. And, of course, one finds that such people did very much the same sort of thing in late medieval London as they did in Augustan London. They bought and sold, made profits and accumulated, but they also had a 'love of ease and comfort and good living' and acquired 'all the modern conveniences of their age', many of these being the same conveniences as my middling people acquired. In the late fourteenth century, as in the late seventeenth century, fashion was tending to obscure class distinctions, so much so that in 1390 Bishop Brunton was distressed that he could not tell the difference between a countess and the wife of a citizen. In the 1720s, Defoe was also worried about fashion and class, and was distressed that he could not tell the difference between a housemaid and a fine lady, much to the amusement of his contemporaries.^[12]

Plus ça change? Well, I certainly would not deny that Sylvia Thrupp was writing about a group who were recognizably middle class in the sense adopted in this book. Nevertheless, there are important qualitative and quantitative differences which have to be stressed. Her merchants are certainly interested in making money, but the world in which they made it

was a very different place from the London of Queen Anne. One is struck particularly by the choking blanket of corporatism and fraternalism, of guilds and companies, of petty regulations and petty authority, which smothered the business lives of these late medieval merchants. Nowadays, one is told that Englishmen have been individualists since they crawled out of the Saxon forests in the mists of time, but to my mind there is little doubt that the Londoners of 1700 were much more individualistic than their ancestors of 1500.^[13] They were much more secular too, no longer bound by the endless round of civic ceremony and religious pageant which circumscribed the lives of the medieval merchants, and indeed their deaths. As Thrupp noted, 'the custom of setting aside at least one third of a man's movables . . . as a kind of voluntary death duty for pious and charitable purposes considerably hindered the accumulation of capital'.^[14] No such problem in our age, where such charity as still existed was designed to create an obedient and subservient working class rather than to ensure the immortality of the collective middle-class soul.

One should note too that Thrupp was writing about a very small city, less than a tenth of the size of the London of 1700. In the long run, it is likely to be sheer numbers that change attitudes and the numbers of the middle class were becoming quite large by our period. It was guessed earlier that about a quarter of the population of London belonged to the middle class and it seems a reasonable guess that there were a similar proportion of middling people in other English towns. Professor Wrigley has recently told us that the proportion of the English population living in towns with over 5000 people rose from 8 1/4 to 21 per cent between 1600 and 1750, and it must be assumed that the urban middle class rose at least as fast, probably faster, since, as has been seen, the second part of this period saw an acceleration of growth in manufacturing, inland trade and professional services.^[15] Such figures suggest that at least 5 per cent of England's population belonged to the urban middle class by 1700, a figure which would have at least to be doubled to allow for people of similar life-style and social attitudes who lived in the countryside—the better off farmers, inland traders and food processors, such as millers and maltsters, and manufacturers, such as clothiers and ironmasters. All these members

of the provincial middle class took their lead from the Londoners who have been described in this book.

So the actual numbers of the middle class were beginning to be quite important in our period and it seems hardly surprising that this should affect attitudes. Nevertheless, it is not the impact of numbers which I have principally stressed in this book. What seems really important about the period is the qualitative rather than the quantitative changes in the lives of middle-class Londoners.

I do not want to try to define what exactly is the essence of a middle-class existence. However, it is almost impossible not to notice the vast number of vaguely middle-class things which either originated in our period or, if they originated earlier, became common in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, such as clocks, laudanum, fire insurance, street lighting, novels, newspapers, tea-drinking and the three-piece suit. Or, how about eating too much sugar, statistics, economics, hobbies, clubs, the national debt, undertakers, accountants, workhouses and the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge? One sees the same sorts of development in the mental attitudes of the age as the world became more middle-class—the craze for reason and the study of mathematics, indeed the earnest pursuit of almost any form of knowledge, sentiment in literature and the theatre and a sensibility that sees the beginnings of 'Victorian' attitudes to the 'home' and to the place of middle-class women within it, the beginnings too of that middle-class compassion for animals which was to restrict the brutal tastes of the poor for what were now increasingly seen as cruel sports. 'By the eighteenth century', writes Keith Thomas, 'this outlook had become the orthodoxy of the educated middle classes and all those who, like Steele and Addison, upheld an ideal of cultivated refinement.'^[16]

One should remember too that most of these cultivated and refined middle-class people were also capitalists. It was once a common historical belief that the middle class as we know them were created by something called the Industrial Revolution which happened in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Historians nowadays are none too sure whether there ever was an Industrial Revolution and are even less sure when it happened if it ever did. This is not the place to enter into that

debate but, if the Industrial Revolution was something to do with innovation, machines, factories and the increasing impact of capital on the economic life of the country, then it may well have started in the London that has been studied here. All those labour-saving innovations that were mentioned in Chapter 2, those new industries and workshops, the growing financial sophistication, the increasing separation between the capitalists and a wage-earning working class: this may all seem small beer compared with what was to happen in Lancashire later in the eighteenth century, but it was certainly a beginning. As a contemporary noted in relation to the weavers' riots against the multiple spindle ribbon looms in 1675: 'That by the same reason the single loom weavers complaine of the engin looms, many self interest and envious people will complaine of the engins for water mills, saw mills, and engins for spliting of iron . . . and many other injenious, usefull and profitable inventions now in England, but we doubt not but injenuity will find encouragement in England.'^[17]

Ingenuity did find encouragement in England, unhindered as elsewhere in Europe by conservative attitudes towards economic or indeed social change. Such encouragement created an environment in which the London middle class could make money with no fear that it would be arbitrarily taken away from them and in which they could use that money to improve themselves. They used their wealth and their new-found social confidence to develop a new type of society which has proved to be a model, not just for the developing middle class of provincial England but for Europeans and Americans and indeed for the whole world.