ABSTRACT
The lower middle classes grew in numbers in the second half of the nineteenth century because of the growth of the service sector in the economy. Although clerks in legal and other professional firms were often in secure employment, albeit earning low wages, many in the lower middle classes were economically insecure. Although historians are now much more cautious than once they were about arguing that the Industrial Revolution led to the emergence of mutually antagonistic relations between social classes, there is no doubt that major changes in production techniques and the distribution of wealth generated substantial social change. In the middle years of the nineteenth century, the proportion of the population considering itself middle class, or bourgeois increased substantially. This change reflected both the diversity of industrial and commercial activity in urban Britain and the ever-growing need for specialised financial, legal and educational services in a more wealthy and complex society.
