ABSTRACT
The growth of class and class feeling is often seen as the most important social change generated by industrialisation. Sociologists use class terminology as a means of describing social groups who have a similar economic position. Most people in nineteenth-century Britain saw landowners as upper class, the middle class as the section of society ranging from big businessmen and professional people down to clerks and shopkeepers, and the working class as comprised of manual workers. More recently, it has been suggested that the existence of meaningful class boundaries can be measured by the degree of social mobility in society. Class solidarity or class consciousness was defined earlier as a consciousness of solidarity with those in a similar economic position. Looking at British society in the late nineteenth century, one has the clear impression that there were groups, albeit not totally homogeneous ones, in a similar economic position and, hence, there were classes in a sociological sense.
