Geoffrey Crossick - The Lower Middle Class in Britain 1870-1914

Volume 10

THE LOWER MIDDLE CLASS IN BRITAIN 18701914

Edited by
GEOFFREY CROSSICK

1977 Geoffrey Crossick

Croom Helm Ltd

2-10 St Johns Road, London, SW11

ISBN 0-85664-348-3

Printed in Great Britain by

Lowe & Brydone Printers Limited, Thetford, Norfolk

Geoffrey Crossick

Hugh McLeod

Richard N. Price

G. L. Anderson

R. Q. Gray

S. Martin Gaskell

Thea Vigne and Alun Howkins

This book has been assembled in the hope of beginning a discussion rather than ending one. It stemmed from a conviction that the neglect of the study of the lower middle class had seriously hindered our understanding of a range of issues in the development of modern British society, concerning central areas such as politics, ideology and social relationships. I knew that various people were working on subjects that, if not necessarily directly concerned with the lower middle class, required them to think seriously about the relationship between their more general research and that stratum. It therefore seemed a good idea to open up a more serious historical assessment of the problem by inviting essays that would sink shafts into the subject at specific points with a view to illuminating the issues. There are grounds for seeing a book of essays as not just a substitute for the massive monograph on the lower middle class that would answer all our questions, should such a thing be possible, but also a more productive way of beginning a debate. These essays do not necessarily agree with each other, and were not invited with that purpose. All that has been sought is an explicitness that would make differences clear. For the same reason, my contribution has not attempted to pull all the essays together but rather to discuss some of the broader issues and draw wider European comparisons in an attempt to set a context for the specific studies that follow it. The British lower middle class has received too little attention from historians, to the detriment of our understanding of British social history. If the book convinces of that point, illuminates some of the issues, and opens up the problem for wider discussion, then it will have served its purpose.

Hull, June 1976

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 historians 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.