ABSTRACT
The first attempt at a sociological breakdown of the whole spread of English society was made in an article on 'Present Tendencies of Class Differentiation' by F. G. D'Aeth, which appeared in the Sociological Review for October 1910. 1 This established seven social groupings by reference to income, occupation, housing, social customs, and education. Category A, 'The Loafer', lived in a slum on about 18s. per week - 'irregular labour, or drinks a higher wage'. Category B embraced 'low-skilled labour', earning approximately 25s. per week - 'some change clothes and put on collar in evening'. Category C represented the artisans, comfortably housed, earning about 45s. per week - 'table set for meals'. Category D covered smaller shopkeepers, clerks, elementary schoolteachers and the like, who earned perhaps £3 per week - 'furnish their houses; entertain visitors; some have young servant'. Category E comprised smaller businessmen, earning at most £300 per year, probably grammar-school educated - 'visiting cards; some dine late'. Category F included the heads of firms, professional men and administrators, earning at least £600 per annum, who had usually received a university education. And finally, Category G meant 'The Rich', with £2,000 a year or more. D'Aeth suggested that two standards of living existed and could be measured: 'the standard of simple necessities, and the standard of refined and educated necessities'. For an average family the former could be secured by earnings of about 25s. per week, but the latter required £600 per year. A. L. Bowley, the leading Edwardian social statistician, accepted as upper middle-class those with an annual income of £1,000 to £5,000; he regarded those with between £300 and £999 as the solid middle class, and those earning less than £300 down to £120 he perceptively described as 'uncomfortably off'. The family of young George Orwell, for example, found its aspirations difficult to sustain on £400 a year. He was born into 'the lower-upper-middle class'; people in this class (he remembered) owned no land, but 'felt they were landowners in the sight of God'. They went into the professions or the services rather than into trade. To belong to this class on £400 a year 'meant that your gentility was almost purely theoretical'. 2
