Patrician Society – Plebeian Culture
– Rise of the Middle Class?
Sarah Richardson
Sorts of People in the Eighteenth
Century
• Problem for historians has been that the eighteenth century is
often viewed through the prism of class.
• Thus use terms such as the labouring poor or the lower orders.
• Some divide their studies at the pivotal year of 1750, seeing closer
links between the popular culture of the early eighteenth century
and the early modern world and linking the second half of the
century with the emergence of the working class.
• EP Thompson in his famous preface to The Making of the English
Working Class wrote: ‘I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger,
the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ handloom weaver, the ‘utopian’
artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from
the enormous condescension of posterity.’
Thomas Gainsborough,
The Cottage Door (1780):
an example of sympathy
with the rural poor?
Thomas Gainsborough, The
Housemaid, 1782-6
Critics of patrician-plebeian dichotomy
• Thompson first propounded the ‘patrician-plebeian’ dichotomy: a thesis
which is still well established and which accorded with the views of
contemporary commentators such as Oliver Goldsmith and Henry Fielding.
• It has come under attack from some recent postmodernist studies.
• Thus Kathleen Wilson in The Sense of the People employed a different
definition of the term popular. She sums up her approach thus: `The term
"popular" is used like "populist" to describe language or arguments that
are supported by, or that champion the rights of, "the people" in political
debate and activities’. She goes on to say that her ‘examination of
"popular politics" is an investigation of socially inclusive or accessible
forms of political activity'.
• She uses an inclusive definition, positing that a dichotomous approach
emphasising high versus low, patrician versus plebeian etc. only
exaggerates the role of the middling sort and conceals the extent to which
popular culture was a shared culture.
• The danger with Wilson's definition is that although it seeks to be inclusive
it is so extensive that it ceases to have any meaning at all.
Popular Culture
• Encompasses the common people’s world of:
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–
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–
–
–
–
–
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work,
attitudes to the natural world,
education, literacy and knowledge,
health practices,
gender and generational roles,
religious beliefs,
recreational and leisure pursuits,
community customs.
rich oral culture
Prelude
to the
Riot in
Mount
Street
(Richard
Newton,
1792)
A
servants'
dance:
four menservants
face four
maidservants,
in a
countrydance
The Humours of
a Country Wake
(1794). Print
shows duel
between two
men outside a
tavern; other
rural scenes and
pastimes
represented
include a Jewish
pedlar, a fiddler
and street
entertainers
leading bear
and monkey, a
group of men
watching a bullbaiting, a man
running chased
by bull and a
country dance.
Relationships between elite and mass
•
•
•
Often characterised as paternalist but masters complained that the labouring poor
were subordinate and undisciplined
Defoe in his Great Law of Subordination Consider’d or the Insolence and
Unsufferable Behaviour of Servants in England duly enquir’d into (1724) argued
that through the insubordination of servants:
Husbandmen are ruin’d, the Farmers disabled, Manufacturers and Artficers plung’d
to the Destruction of Trade…
Thompson argues that this was because labourers became freer and more mobile:
– the advent of payment in money rather than in kind
– growth of a sector of the population who were independent of the gentry – clothing workers,
urban artisans, colliers, bargees, porters, labourers, and petty dealers.
– gentry were increasingly remote from the populace
•
Leisure became secularised. There was a rich plebeian culture. There were
hobbyhorses, sweeps on pigs, morris dancers, baitings, wrestling, dancing, and
drinking.
Plebeian
Pleasantry, after
George Cruikshank
1818
Resistance
• Thompson did not see the plebeians as a working
class. But they were a political presence.
• Resistance to the gentry took the form of
anonymous threats or acts.
• Plebeians employed what Thompson calls
counter-theatre of threat and sedition
• Crowd were capable of taking direct action.
Crowds demanded immediate results: to break
machines, intimidate employers, damage mills,
enforce bread subsidies etc.
An effigy of a Whig minister on horseback conducted to be burned with a
gallows and a bundle of faggots. 1756
Hints to Forestallers or a Sure Way to Reduce the Price of Grain, 1800
Food riot in Newcastle, 1740
• About two on Thursday morning, a great number of Colliers and
Waggoners, Smiths and other common workmen came along the
Bridge, released the prisoners and proceeded in great Order
through the Town with Bagpipes playing, Drum beating, and Dirty
Clothes fixed upon sticks by way of Colours flying. They then
increased to some thousands and were in possession of the
principal streets of the Town. The Magistrates met at the Guild Hall
and scarce knew what to do…
• They broke into the Hutch and took out fifteen hundred pounds,
broke everything that was ornamental, two very fine capital
Pictures of King Charles second and James second… they tore, all
but the faces… and afterwards conducted the Magistrates to their
own houses in a kind of Mock Triumph.
Changes
• Elite sanction of popular culture was gradually
withdrawn through the century.
• The long-standing custom of bull-running at Tutbury in
Staffswas at odds with polite society and suppressed by
the Duke of Devonshire in 1778.
• Custom was the essential underpinning for this society.
• Custom dictated the local calendar
• Widespread custom of ‘Saint Monday’ – the holiday
taken at their discretion at the beginning of the week
by a variety of handworkers demonstrated a resistance
to change.
The Four Times of Day (Night),
Hogarth (1738)
Scene near Charing Cross.
Celebrations of Oak Apple Day. In
the foreground a drunken
freemason is supported by a
serving man; to left a barber is
seen at work through a window, a
chamber pot is being emptied
from a window above and below a
man and woman sleep beneath a
wooden shelter and a link boy
crouches beside them; to right the
Salisbury Flying Coach has crashed
while trying to avoid a bonfire in
the middle of the street.
A unified popular culture?
• Some historians wishing to stress cultural diversity in the
eighteenth century have moved towards models which
classify popular culture into subcultures.
• Barry Reay has written of popular culture splintering into
subcultures divided by locality, age, gender, religion and
class.
• Hugh Cunningham divided it into groups: ‘Boundaries of
class, of gender, of age, and of geography, are therefore
likely to be represented in leisure; and leisure activities may
themselves have reinforced or shifted those boundaries,
and not merely reflected them.’
• Problem with a dichotomous vision of society is that variety
and diversity are not easily accommodated.
Middling sort/middle class?
• Middle class difficult to define and not necessarily a useful term for
analysing the processes of change in the eighteenth century.
• Often termed : the middling people of England, the middling sort,
men of a middling condition.
• Originates as an interposition between rich and poor, persons of
rank and common people
• John Seed defines middle class as distinguished from the aristocracy
and gentry by the need to generate an income and from labouring
class by the possession of property and by their exemption from
manual labour.
• Margaret Hunt argues the term class emerged for contemporaries
to make sense of contemporary experiences, observations and
problems.
The Conversation Piece, Nollekens, 1740
Size of middling sort
• Social surveys of the eighteenth century give some idea of the social
hierarchy of society.
• 1% of the population were major landowners receiving around 15% of the
annual income; were mass of labouring poor; in between were ranks of
the middling sort ranging from judges, state officials and great merchants
to small farmers and semi-independent craftsmen.
• Harold Perkin in The Origins of Modern English Society estimates that
there is an overall increase in the middling sort from 435,000 in 1688 to
634,640 by 1803.
• For Defoe, the middling sort were not exposed to ‘the miseries and
hardships, the labour and suffering of the mechanic part of mankind, and
not embarrassed with the pride, luxury, ambition and envy of the upper
part of mankind.’
• Leonard Schwarz places 2-3% of the London population in the upper
income bracket (average income of £2,000 p.a. plus) and 16-21% in the
middling bracket (£80-139 p.a.) the remaining 75% are a diverse body of
the smaller independent artisans, wage labourers and the unemployed.
Importance of hierarchy
• John Smail, in his study of Halifax argues that the
middling sort viewed their world in hierarchical
terms
• But deference to the landed aristocracy was
imbued with a strong sense of independence.
• Margaret Hunt emphasises that the theory of
emulation should be re-evaluated.
• Was often a deep ambivalence if not hostility by
the middling sort to the values of the aristocracy
and gentry.
Formation of middle class – private
sphere
• Most businesses were family affairs
• Main business unit was the owner/manager or
the small partnership often consisting of family
members.
• Management functions were usually carried out
by members of the family perhaps supported by a
small group of clerks, overseers, foremen etc.
• Family provided capital as well as personnel.
• Central to this cultural identity was a new set of
gender relations.
Formation of middle class - religion
• Middle class were overwhelmingly affiliated to
organised religion.
• Membership of a congregation was an insignia of
middle class status and linked the middle class
family with the wider community.
• Co-religionists also often provided capital.
• Social values propounded by the churches and
chapels gave ideological legitimacy to patterns of
middle class life
• Membership of a religious congregation was
commitment to a whole social project.
Formation of a middle class – public
sphere
• Public sphere transcended the divisive boundaries of the religious
sects.
• Social world of the middling sort was determined largely by work
and residence. The emerging middle class had a sense of a distinct
social status and strong gender differences and thus created new
forms of sociability.
• Thus establishment of bodies such as subscribing libraries, Lit & Phil
Societies, Assembly rooms, debating societies etc were crucial.
• New forms of sociability made a class identity by creating a
distinctive social space for the commercial and professional elite.
• For the middle class sociability was more orderly and exclusive, and
it had been differentiated into public and private spheres
Local or national context
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Local context is crucial when looking for the origins of the middle class but towards
the end of the 18th century – Dror Wahrman identifies the 1790s as the crucial
decade – there was a transition from the local to the national.
Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall in Family Fortunes use example of Isaac Taylor
and his family and the struggle they had in maintaining their middle class identity,
forged in London, among the villagers of Lavenham in Suffolk.
Family brought their middle class culture with them from London and refreshed it
through letter writing, reading and the occasional visit to the metropolis.
Gradually a national middle class consciousness influenced the local context.
National articulation of middle class values occurred as a result of a series of
political, social and economic crises, notably, the war with the American colonies,
the French revolution and war with France, the pressure for political reform and
the increasing economic tensions between labour and capital.
But broader national articulations of middle class culture came from the myriad
local, mainly urban contexts where the process of economic change transformed
the middling sort into the middle class.