ABSTRACT
The Victorian era is characterised by the growth of the middle class; but defining that class has provoked considerable debate. The first half of the nineteenth century is associated with the rise of the entrepreneurs in provincial centres and industrial cities of the north, whose growing economic and cultural power can be charted through the civic cultures of industrial towns and cities and the influence of pressure groups like the Anti-Corn Law League. There was a shift in hegemony in the late nineteenth century to gentlemanly capitalists, a group of financiers and landed elites in the south whose geographical location and rising economic power helped give them leverage with the central state. Histories of the middle class are com plicated further by the rise of the professions, such as law and medicine, the articulation of established civil service bureaucracies, and the new roles created by modern forms of education and administration. Such complexity and diversity raises questions as to whether it is useful to talk about a middle class as a group with a collective identity and a shared agenda (Kidd and Nicholls 1998: xxvii; Goodlad 2000: 143).
