The Lower Middle Class in Britain 1870-1914

Geoffrey Crossick, Geoffrey Crossick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781317239901
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Business

First published in 1977. This book records the emergence of a lower middle class in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Victorian society had always contained a marginal middle class of shopkeepers and small businessmen, but in the closing decades of the nineteenth century the growth of white-collar salaried occupations created a new and distinctive force in the social structure. These essays look at the place of the lower middle class within British society and examine its ideals and values. Some essays concentrate on occupational groups – clerks and shopkeepers – while others focus on aspects of lower middle class life – religion, housing and jingoism. This title will be of interest to students of history.

1 THE EMERGENCE OF THE LOWER MIDDLE CLASS IN BRITAIN: A DISCUSSION

Geoffrey Crossick

The neglect of the development of the British lower middle class by historians is unfortunate but not altogether unexpected. Indeed, there has been very little work on the history of the middle class as a whole.¹ The explanation for this skewing of emphasis towards working class history must lie in the way that social history has developed in this country; it was for a long time the banner under which the gross neglect of working class movements and popular experience was to be rectified. The motivation, guided by a political enthusiasm and concern for historical breadth that were inseparable, was laudable but may in the long run have proved inhibiting. In other countries, most notably France, a concern for theory and social analysis in history has driven social historians to examine the social process as a whole in order to explain its parts. The absence of these impulses, together with the empirical commitment of British historiography, have effectively narrowed the interests of too many social historians.

If this is the general explanation for the failure to attend to the development of the lower middle class,² there are also more specific reasons of which the most immediate is the sheer lack of heroism of this section of society. They fail to do anything very striking, it seems. They are not active on the historical stage. The contrast with the attention given to the Mittelstand, the generally equivalent group in Wilhelmine Germany, is instructive. This ambiguous and diverse group, more united in conception than in reality, is attracting serious attention from historians of Germany.³ At one level this interest derives from a concern to trace back the dynamics of fascism, but it also grows out of the fact that the Mittelstand, whether as an entity or in its component parts, was an active and increasingly problematic group in political and social life, organising, pressurising and impinging on the political process. The British lower middle class was prominent neither in this ambiguous sense of corporate identity nor in organisation. This not only explains why it has escaped the historian’s attention, but also the problems that it poses for historical analysis. There are few organisations, especially of a political nature, of the kind that provide so much evidence for the labour historian. The difficulty of penetrating lower middle class ideas and beliefs is therefore intimidating.

The lower middle class in Britain can be divided into two main groups. On the one hand was the classic petty bourgeoisie of shopkeepers and small businessmen, on the other the new white collar salaried occupations, most notably clerks but also managers, commercial travellers, schoolteachers and certain shop assistants. In addition there were probably the minor professional people, too frequently categorised as members of the established middle class, but probably containing amongst lesser solicitors and the like a range of small operators acting on the margins of their profession. The most immediate feature of the two main groups is their strikingly different market situations. The problems of establishing lower middle class stratification stem from that point. In effect, was there a single lower middle class? The question cannot be answered in this paper, though exploratory points might lead towards clearer definition and understanding. The formation of social strata always poses fundamental difficulties of analysis in social history, because it is not enough simply to show that people shared a common characteristic such as a certain level of income or a certain occupation. If stratification is to be shown then there is an axiomatic requirement to prove it through identifying actual social relationships and commitments.

One approach might be to seek contemporary opinions as to the composition of the lower middle class. These sometimes included labour aristocrats, and at other times excluded them. Charles Booth, in his Religious Influences series, firmly separated the lower middle class on the one hand from artisans on the other. Leone Levi did the same, including teachers, clerks, small shopkeepers, civil servants and, surprisingly, clergy in his higher stratum. Other observers were less sure. Contradictory evidence was offered to the enquiry on pupil-teachers, where witnesses revealed the inexactness of the label, and other instances can be accumulated of definitions of the lower middle class that included the better-paid skilled workers.⁴ What does all this reveal, beyond an increasing use of the term lower middle class’ during the period? It merely indicates that members of the established middle and upper class held a certain view of the social structure, and not even a consistent one. Given the undeniable respectability and stability of the non-manual lower middle class, the occasional inclusion of artisans with them presumably represents an important comment on how these observers from higher social strata saw the better skilled workers. A genuine definition of the lower middle class, however, must take far more account of both self-ascription and the effective stratification that is demonstrated through the evidence of social relationships. At that level there are grounds for believing that the distinction between marginal non-manual groups and labour aristocrats became an increasingly important one during this period. This will, indeed, be argued later. It is nevertheless difficult to tackle the realities of this stratification without studies of the place of these ‘middling groups’ in relationship to each other and to specific communities. It is upon the non-manual lower middle class that this essay will focus.

One contemporary view was offered in the Spectator, where a contributor felt that there was such a stratum but was confused about what to call it. He described George Gissing’s In the Year of Jubilee as being about ‘that vaguely outlined lower middle section of society which, in the matter of physical comfort, approximates to the caste above it, and in its lack of the delicate requirements of life has something in common with the caste below it, but which is, nevertheless, so recognizably differentiated from both, that confused classification is impossible even to the most superficial observer.’ Gissing was the novelist of ‘the families of the imperfectly educated but fairly well-paid manager or clerk, of the tradesman who has “got on” pecuniarily but hardly “gone up” socially, and, to speak generally, of the typical ratepayers in an unfashionable London suburb.’⁵

Yet are we correct in seeing these people as a class,⁶ or as a single social group of whatever name? If the lower middle class was more than a residual category, then a major difficulty arises that is even more problematic outside Britain. Kocka observes that German writing in the decades before 1914 grouped together independent artisans, shopkeepers and salaried employees within the Mittelstand, with the peasantry placed in an ambivalent position.⁷ He is correct to emphasise the need for firm analytical distinctions between the groups involved, yet the question remains as to why it was that in many parts of Europe at this time old petty bourgeois groups and new salaried occupations came to see each other as in some ways in a similar situation.⁸ Some answers may emerge if we interpret these groups in terms of relationships rather than categories. Two key elements would then help explain the convergence. The first is that the groups in question were emphatically not working class, and felt stridently conscious of that fact. In other European countries popular culture emphasised and propagated this non-working class character, and the ensuing sense of honourable status gave a degree of unification to the lower middle class.⁹ Rising labour movements and social democracy only exacerbated this. The second element drawing together these diverse groups was that they shared a similar position of marginality to the established bourgeoisie, although one resting on diverse market situations. They both supported the broad features of the property-owning capitalist economy and what they saw as its traditional ideology, while also suffering in distinctive ways from the main trends towards economic concentration during the period. In addition, both operated in areas of the economy under relatively free market conditions, with the petty bourgeoisie suffering the full force of the market over sales, competition and interest rates, while white collar workers were particularly poorly organised within the labour market.

There are thus a priori reasons why these groups should in some ways have identified with each other, but they do not remove the objection that the concept of a lower middle class is analytically a poor one, for their relations to the means of production were not those of a class, and their internal division was fundamental.¹⁰ As a descriptive term for a contemporary observed reality it may, nevertheless, be usefully employed.

A final point of definition that is important is the local orientation of the lower middle class. Its members lived and operated within communities, and thus in the context of a complex stratification of both the middle class and the working class. They were in contact with a range of social groups, all of which intermeshed within a local society. The result was necessarily that different places would produce various forms of lower middle class social experience within the framework set by national economic and social developments. In small towns without a resident bourgeoisie or wealthy professional groups, or in working class districts of segregated towns, they were the social elite, running the churches and local government. It was shopkeepers and clerks who led the chapels in late-Victorian Bethnal Green, while the same was true of religious activity in the socially declining Kentish Town.¹¹ Booth’s coloured street maps take us even further and show in the long red line cutting through poorer areas how it was shopkeepers clinging to their main road premises who survived as the superior class in totally working class areas.¹² Comparable social groups contributed to Gambetta’s couche sociale nouvelle, but their more general importance in France stemmed from the fact that it was so much more emphatically a small-town society within which they might flourish.

In all these situations it is the local narrowness of the lower middle class that is so important. While the established middle class would be marked out by its external contacts, its links outside the locality with other towns and, for the most substantial, even national relationships, there was something irreducibly local about the lower middle class. This closed local dimension of its culture, in comparison with other groups, must have restricted severely its ability to cope with change, and must also have been responsible for much of the rigidity of values that only grew stronger as the period progressed.

After these preliminary points of explanation and definition, this essay will concentrate not upon examining the whole range of lower middle class experience, but on establishing the main dimensions that can assist an understanding of the wider social process. The former project is rendered impossible by the paucity of research on the subject, in addition to the necessary limitations imposed by the constraints of length. The most glaring deficiency lies in chronology. The precise dating of the processes discussed in this essay remains unclear, beyond generalised formulations, and this is a persistent problem of which I am conscious. Nevertheless, changes over time can be indicated, and areas for analysis presented. The essay will first examine the structural situation of the two sections of the lower middle class, the petty bourgeoisie and white collar workers. The differing levels of vulnerability of these groups will be raised as a preliminary to examining their aspirations, values and status consciousness. Finall...