ABSTRACT
In big firms, what recruitment that did take place from tended to draw less on the aspiring journeyman-type figure than on the incipient white-collar class, which was at least guaranteed to be competent at bookwork. In all sorts of ways, despite also the numerical growth of horizontally structured though localised transport workers and coal-miners, the working class remained riddled by differences of status within itself. The long-term background was the phenomenal expansion of the professional middle class, from 272,000 such men in 1851 to 684,000 recorded in the census twenty years later. The Public Schools Act of 1868 nicely balanced upper- and middle-class wishes by maintaining the traditional primacy of Classics while at the same time replacing already increasingly expensive ‘free’ places for the local poor with a system of ‘open’ competitive examination, necessarily involving costly pre-examination preparation.
