Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
The fall of class in nineteenth-century British history has become a familiar tale. Its rise in the historiography of eighteenth-century Britain has been less noted. This essay explores the reasons for this divergence and emphasizes its methodological origins. It highlights the need for a comprehensive history of class society and identity to replace the confused and contradictory picture of particular classes and communities that is currently on offer. To understand better the constitution of class society, it urges historians to talk less of consciousness and more of identity and to recognize that class is an imagined community much like any other. It proceeds to use this understanding of class identity to assess the turn to political language amongst social historians interested in class. The paper offers a sustained examination of the recent work of Joyce and Wahrman in particular and argues that insufficient attention has been paid to the variety of usable political languages and to the particular discursive contexts in which they are employed. It is argued that to acknowledge that class is so constructed is not to deny its existence or its importance and that historians need to look beyond political discourse to explain how class became so central to the self and the social in the nineteenth century.
1 Thompson, E. P., The making of the English working class (London, 1963).Google Scholar
2 Hobsbawm, E. J., Labouring men (London, 1964), pp. 272–315.Google Scholar
3 See Reid's, A. J. review in Historical Journal, XXX (1987), 225–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a good presentation of such criticisms.
4 The literature on this topic is huge. Perhaps the most authoritative expression of the gradualist case for growth is Crafts, N. R., British economic growth during the industrial revolution (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar. The history of the debate is most painlessly approached through Cannadine's, D. elegant, ‘The present and the past in the English industrial revolution 1880–1980’, Past and Present, CIII (1984), 139–67.Google Scholar
5 Berg, M. and Hudson, P., ‘Rehabilitating the industrial revolution’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., XLV (1992), 24–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 A flawed attempt at establishing the common working class identity of the second pair can be found in Lindebaugh, P. and Rediker, M., ‘The multi-headed hydra: sailors, slaves and the Atlantic working class in the eighteenth-century’, Journal of Historical Sociology, III (1990), 225–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 Joyce, P. (ed.), The historical meanings of work (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 1–30Google Scholar summarizes much of this material.
8 ‘The fall of class’ was Patrick, Joyce's original title for what became Democratic subjects: the self and the social in nineteenth-century England (Cambridge, 1994)Google Scholar. See Democratic subjects, p. 2 for this.
9 Cannadine, D., ‘Cutting classes’, New York Review of Books, 17 Dec. 1992.Google Scholar
10 Wrigley, E. A., Continuity, chance and change: the character of the industrial revolution in England (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 12–17, 34–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar and McKendrick, N., Plumb, J. H. and Brewer, J., The birth of consumer society (London, 1982), pp. 1–9, 21–2, and 1–34 more generally.Google Scholar
11 Perkin, H., The origins of modern English society: 1780–1880 (London, 1969).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
12 Thompson, E. P., ‘Patrician society, plebeian culture’, Journal of Social History, VII (1974), 382–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘Eighteenth-century English society: class struggle without class?’, Social History, III (1978), 133–65.Google Scholar
13 Colley, L., Britons: forging the nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992), p. 86.Google Scholar
14 McKendrick, N., Plumb, J. H. and Brewer, J., The birth of consumer society (London, 1982), pp. 1–34, esp. 1–9 and passim.Google Scholar
15 Brewer, J., Party politics and ideology on the accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 19, 197–8, 267–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar and The sinews of power: war, money and the English state 1688–1788 (London, 1989), pp. 180–2.Google Scholar
16 Langford, P., A polite and commercial people: England 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989), p. xiGoogle Scholar and passim and Public life and the propertied Englishman 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991).Google Scholar
17 More evidence of this trend is to be found in qualified form in Borsay, P., The English urban renaissance: culture and society in the provincial town 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 222, 318Google Scholar and in less qualified form in Earle, P., The making of the English middle class: business, society, and family life in London, 1660–1730, pp. 3–16, 328–37.Google Scholar
18 Thompson, E. P., Customs in common (London, 1991), pp. 87–90.Google Scholar
19 Colley, L., Britons, pp. 147–94.Google Scholar
20 Wahrman, D., ‘National society, communal culture: an argument about the recent historiography of eighteenth-century Britain’, Social History, XVII (1992), 43–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
21 This problem is exacerbated by the paucity of dialogue between eighteenth and nineteenth century historians, which is in turn reinforced by the existence of 1790s studies as almost a sub-discipline in its own right. Consequently, eighteenth-century historians generally take the presence of class society in the nineteenth century for granted, while their nineteenth-century counterparts start by assuming its absence in the eighteenth century.
22 Vickery, A. J., ‘Golden age to separate spheres? A review of the categories and chronology of English women's history’, Historical Journal, XXXVI (1993), esp. 383–401.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
23 Koditschek, T., Class formation and urban industrial society: Bradford, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar. Morris, R. J., Class, sect and party: the making of the British middle class, Leeds 1820–1850 (Manchester, 1990).Google Scholar
24 Hobsbawm, E. J., ‘The making of the English working class 1870–1914’, in Worlds of labour (London, 1984), pp. 194–213.Google Scholar
25 This phrase recurs in Joyce, P., Visions of the people: industrial England and the question of class, 1840–1914 (Cambridge, 1991), e.g. p. 15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
26 Dror, Wahrman, Imagining the middle class: the political representation of class c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar. I would like to thank Dr Wahrman for kindly allowing me to read his important study in manuscript.
27 For the first view, see Lawrence, J. and Taylor, M., ‘The poverty of protest: Gareth Stedman Jones and the politics of language – a reply’, Social History, XVII (1993), 15Google Scholar. And for the second, Joyce, P., ‘The imaginary discontents of social history: a note of response…’Google Scholar, ibid. p. 84.
28 Joyce, , Visions, p. 11.Google Scholar
29 Rogers, N., Whigs and cities: popular politics in the age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford, 1989), p. 128Google Scholar where he talks of ‘a sense of class’ informing London politics, though he is circumspect about attributing class consciousness in his conclusion on p. 304. In questioning Langford's concentration on middle class life in A polite and commercial people, Rogers bemoans the absence of plebeians from Langford's account, but does not seek to overturn his emphasis on the vitality and visibility of the middling sort. See Rogers, , ‘Paul Langford's “Age of improvements”’, Past and Present, CXLVIII (1991), 201–9, esp. 207CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Wilson, K., ‘Empire, trade and popular politics in mid-Hanoverian Britain: the case of Admiral Vernon’, Past and Present, CXXI (1988), 76, 92–3, 101–2Google Scholar. See also her ‘Empire of virtue’ in Lawrence, Stone (ed.), An imperial state at war (1994), pp. 128–64, esp. 131, 142Google Scholar. Her recent monograph, however, eschews totalizing accounts of class in favour of an emphasis on the instability of identity, and the role of politics in the construction of subjectivities. Nonetheless, she continues to talk of ‘class’ and the rise of middling consciousness. See Wilson, K., The sense of the people: politics, culture and empire in eighteenth-century England (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 11, 17 n. 27.Google Scholar
30 Joyce, , Visions, pp. 7–8.Google Scholar
31 jones, G. Stedman, ‘Working class culture and working class politics in London, 1870–1900: notes on the remaking of a working class’, in Languages of class: studies in English working class history 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 179–238Google Scholar; McKibbin, R., The ideologies of class: social relations in Britain 1880–1950 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 35–6, 294–7Google Scholar, and Joyce, P.Work, society and politics: the culture of the factory in late Victorian England (Brighton, 1980), pp. xiv, xvi, xx.Google Scholar
32 Anderson, B., Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (London, 2nd edn, 1991).Google Scholar
33 Clarke, P., Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 15–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘The electoral sociology of modern Britain’, History, LVII (1972), 31–55.Google Scholar
34 Corfield, P. J., ‘Class by name and number in eighteenth-century England’, in Corfield, (ed.), Language, history and class (Oxford, 1991), pp. 101–30, particularly 128–9Google Scholar; Williams, R., Keywords (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 60–9Google Scholar and Briggs, A., ‘The language of “class” in the early nineteenth century’Google Scholar, in Briggs, A. and Saville, J., Essays in labour history (1960), pp. 43–73Google Scholar. But see Wahrman, , Imagining the middle class, pp. 14–15, 258–9Google Scholar for a different view.
35 It is true, however, that philosophical arguments about meaning and holism can only be applied to a signifying system of a certain complexity and centrality to selfhood. Language seems unique in these respects. Perhaps the most coherent statement of the case for taking the ‘linguistic turn’ has been offered by Joan Wallach Scott. See Gender and the politics of history (New York, 1988), pp. 1–14, 28–67Google Scholar and ‘The evidence of experience’, Critical Inquiry, XVII (1991), 773–97.Google Scholar
36 Mayfield, D. and Thome, S., ‘Social history and its discontents: Gareth Stedman Jones and the politics of language’, Social History, XVII (1992), 165–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lawrence, J. and Taylor, M., ‘The poverty of protest: Gareth Stedman Jones and the politics of language – a reply’, Social History, XVIII (1993), 1–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Joyce, P., ‘The imaginary discontents of social history, a note of response…’Google Scholar, ibid. 81–5; Mayfield, D. and Thorne, S., ‘Reply’, Social History, XVIII (1993), 219–333Google Scholar; Vernon, J., ‘Who's afraid of the linguistic turn? The politics of social history and its discontents’, Social History, XIX (1994), 81–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In Past and Present, Stone, L., ‘History and post-modernism’, Past and Present, CXXXI (1991), 217–18Google Scholar; Joyce, P., ‘History and post-modernism I’Google Scholar and Kelly, C., ‘History and postmodernism II’, Past and Present, CXXXIII (1991), 204–9, 2O9–13Google Scholar; Stone, L., ‘History and postmodernism III’Google Scholar and Spiegel, G. M., ‘History and post-modernism IV’, Past and Present, CXXXV (1992), 189–94, 194–208.Google Scholar
37 Joyce, P., Democratic subjects, pp. 192–204Google Scholar, also Visions (Cambridge, 1991), p. 329Google Scholar. This is echoed in Vernon, J., Politics and the people: a study in English political culture 1815–1867 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 295–6.Google Scholar
38 Vernon, J., Politics and the people, p. 1.Google Scholar
39 Famously bemoaned in Eley, G. and Nields, K., ‘Why does social history ignore politics?’, Social History, V (1980), 249–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
40 This process was, of course, far more theoretically informed in the French case. It gained much momentum from Furet's, F.Penser la révolution française (Paris, 1978)Google Scholar. Hunt, L., Politics, culture, and class in the French revolution (Berkeley, 1984)Google Scholar was, and is, a key text. Morrill's, J.The revolt of the provinces (London, 1976)Google Scholar was crucial in the English case, along with the work of Conrad Russell.
41 The work of W. Sewell and K. M. Baker has done much to encourage such an approach. Sewell, W., Work and revolution in France: the language of labour from the old regime to 1848 (Cambridge, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Baker, K. M., Inventing the French revolution: essays on political culture in the eighteenth century (Cambridge, 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
42 Jones, G. Stedman, ‘Rethinking chartism’, in his Languages of class, pp. 90–178.Google Scholar
43 See Joyce, , Visions, p. 10Google Scholar and Vernon, , Politics, p. 4Google Scholar for this line. On Stedman Jones's neglect of visual sources see especially Epstein, J. A., Radical expression: political language, ritual, and symbol in England, 1790–1850 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 70–1Google Scholar and Pickering, P. A., ‘Class without words: symbolic communication in the chartist movement’, Past and Present, CXII (1986), 144–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
44 Epstein, J. A., ‘Understanding the cap of liberty: symbolic practice and social conflict in early-nineteenth century England’, Past and Present, CXXII (1989), pp. 75–119CrossRefGoogle Scholar and chapter 3 of Radical expression. In Radical expression, see pp. vii, 4–5, 11–28, 71.
45 Epstein, J. A., ‘The populist turn’, Journal of British Studies, XXXII (1993), 177–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
46 Wahrman, , Imagining, pp. 14–15, 258–9.Google Scholar
47 Wahrman, , Imagining, pp. 16, 41–9 and passim.Google Scholar
48 Briggs, , The language of “class”.’Google Scholar
49 Hobsbawm, E. J., ‘The example of the English middle class 1870–1914’, in Kocka, J. and Mitchell, A., Bourgeois society in nineteenth-century Europe (Oxford, 1993), pp. 127–8.Google Scholar
50 Wahrman, , Imagining, pp. 14–15, 258–9Google Scholar and Briggs, , ‘The language of “class”’, pp. 43–73, passimGoogle Scholar. Crossick, G., ‘From gentlemen to the residuum: languages of social description in Victorian Britain’, in Corfield, (ed.), Language, history and class, pp. 150–78.Google Scholar
51 Wahrman, , Imagining, pp. 175, 213–14, 322, 347, 352 n. 51Google Scholar. Wahrman argues that radical publications generally employed dichotomous models of society to emphasize the distance between rich and poor, people and aristocracy. There is also evidence in his account of the use of terms like ‘lower orders’. He does, however, provide many citations referring to the ‘working’ and ‘labouring’ classes and these tend to come from more demotic sources. It is perhaps just such plebeian organs, rather than the more elevated periodicals Wahrman focuses on in his search for the ‘middle class’, that we would expect to display the transition from ‘rank’ to ‘class’ most clearly. Without wishing to construct an argument on the basis of a book's index, it is perhaps worth suggesting that the direction of Wahrman's efforts are revealed by the entry for ‘working classes’: it reads ‘see “middle classes”’.
52 Consult, Wahrman, Imagining, p. 12Google Scholar for a clear statement that ‘political language’ should ‘be given its due as a key site for the shaping of the social consciousness of large groups of people’. It is perhaps the case that Wahrman makes ‘political language’ not merely ‘a’ key site, but the key site for the shaping of social consciousness.
53 Wahrman, , Imagining, pp. 6–7, 9.Google Scholar
54 Wahrman, , Imagining, pp. 226–35, 241–50.Google Scholar
55 Wahrman, , Imagining, p. 16.Google Scholar
56 Wahrman, , Imagining, pp. 55–6.Google Scholar
57 See Wahrman, , Imagining, p. 142Google Scholar for the argument that the popularity of talk of the ‘middle class’ in response to the triple assessment was partly due to its being an indirect tax on consumption which thus fell on the middling orders.
58 See Wahrman, , Imagining, p. 356Google Scholar for an example of this account of the English past which Wahrman argues originated in the 1820s.
59 Wahrman, , Imagining, p. 6.Google Scholar
60 Wahrman, D., ‘Virtual representation: parliamentary reporting and the language of class in the 1790s’, Past and Present, CXXXV (1992), 83–113, especially 90 and 109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
61 See Vickery, , ‘Golden age to separate spheres’, pp. 385–6, 390–1, 407, 413–14Google Scholar for evidence supporting this characterization of such literature.
62 Parry, J., The rise and fall of liberal government in Victorian Britain (New Haven, 1993), pp. 81–7.Google Scholar
63 See Joyce, , Visions, p. 329Google Scholar and Democratic subjects, pp. 131, 163. And also see Vernon, , Politics, pp. 290–1, 297, 309–10 and 324–6Google Scholar. Vernon is careful to argue that identity should be seen as unstable and that no choice need, or should, be made between class or populism. It is clear, however, that for him populism provides the most potent prism through which people view society.
64 Biagini, E. F., Liberty, retrenchment and reform (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 6–8Google Scholar and Biagini, E. and Reid, A. J., Currents of radicalism (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 1–9, esp. 5–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
65 It has been previously argued by Miles Taylor that Stedman Jones's emphasis on the declining resonance of radicalism in the 1840s does not sit easily with Biagini and Joyce's emphasis on its robust survival into the late nineteenth century. The point is well made and in accord with my concern for better contextualizing popular political language, but does not detract from the claim that a stress on the enduring appeal of radicalism has often been accompanied by a reference to ‘Rethinking chartism’. See Taylor, M., The decline of British radicalism, 1847–1860 (Oxford, 1995), p. 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar for this argument.
66 For instance, Epstein, , ‘The populist turn’, 180Google Scholar, and Cannadine, , ‘Cutting classes’, p. 56.Google Scholar
67 McKibbin, R., The ideologies of class, pp. 35–6, 294–7.Google Scholar
68 See Harris, J., Private lives, public spirit: a social history of Britain 1870–1914 (Oxford, 1993), p. 8.Google Scholar
69 Harrison, B., Peaceable kingdom (Oxford, 1982), pp. 157–60, 191–216.Google Scholar
70 On character see Collini, S., ‘The idea of character in Victorian political thought’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., XXXV (1985), 26–50Google Scholar. For property much can be gleaned from Offer, A., Property and politics 1870–1914: landowner ship, law, ideology and urban development in England (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 1–7, 41–2, 340–2.Google Scholar
71 Samuel Smiles, Self-help (1859), Character (1871), and Duty (1880).
72 Collini, S., ‘The idea of character’, p. 38.Google Scholar
73 Harris, , Private lives, public spirit, pp. 121–2Google Scholar makes this point well.
74 Harris, , Private lives, public spirit, p. 13.Google Scholar
75 Harris, J., ‘Political thought and the welfare state: an intellectual framework for social policy 1880–1940’, Past and Present, CXXXV (1992), 116–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, see particularly 140–1.
76 Briggs, A., ‘The language of “class”’Google Scholar, Briggs, A. and Saville, J., Essays in social history (1960), p. 70.Google Scholar
77 Williams, Consult R., Keywords (London, 2nd edn, 1983), p. 65.Google Scholar
78 On ‘masses’ and ‘mass’ see Briggs, , ‘The language of “mass” and “masses” in nineteenth-century England’Google Scholar, in Martin, D. E. and Rubinstein, D., Ideology and the labour movement: essays presented to John Saville (1979), pp. 62–83Google Scholar now reprinted in the Collected essays. Also Williams, , Keywords, pp. 192–7.Google Scholar
79 Hobsbawm, E. J., ‘The making of the English working class 1870–1914’, in Worlds of labour (1984), pp. 204–5.Google Scholar
80 Visions of the people has an entry for sociolinguistics in the index but none for soccer or football.
