ABSTRACT
Gerald Howard-Smith, one imagines, would find life difficult – would be a fish out of water – in a place like Wolverhampton. The town, after all, was about as far socially, culturally and economically – if not geographically – from London and the Home Counties as it was possible to get. Wolverhampton, like the Black Country to its south and east, had a long-standing reputation for dullness, backwardness and provincialism. Punch, it has been said, reacted with ‘abusive astonishment’ when it learned that Queen Victoria had decided to visit the town on one of her first public appearances following the death of her beloved husband, Prince Albert in 1861.1
Surprising or not, Gerald’s decision to move to Wolverhampton from the south of England enables us to explore further certain key aspects of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century England. Class, class identity and class relationships remain, of course, among the most complex and contentious issues with which historians and social scientists ever have to deal.2 Yet for all the attention that has been lavished on the working class, there has been much less interest in the middle class. It is only recently, one is tempted to say, that there has been any serious investigation of the ways in which the various groups comprising the late Victorian and Edwardian middle class interacted with one another.3 Some believe however that, ‘The distinctions of status and wealth to be found within the middle class were greater than in either the working class or the upper class.’4
