ABSTRACT
The 'lower orders' made up the bulk of the population. Describing them in more specific terms is a social historian's nightmare. The 'common people' has been popular but is no less general. The 'labouring poor' covers the majority who did work and who were less than comfortably off, but the truly poor were usually so because they could not work or could not get enough work, while many skilled journeymen earned more than small-holding freeholders. 'Working class' is anachronistic in implying a stage in class formation and consciousness which had hardly been reached even by 1815. Its plural, 'working classes', allows for differentiation and even hierarchy among the lower orders but still reflects nineteenthrather than eighteenth-century usage. In a book spanning the years 1750 to 1850, the rresent writer opted for 'labouring classes'. It is still my preference. 1 For the most part the lower orders depended on selling their labour. For an artisan elite it was skilled labour power sold at a premium, but for most men and almost all working women it was unskilled labour. Only a small fraction would elude this category if we accept that, contrary to much contemporary opinion, paupers were largely made up not of a delinquent or a wilfully dependent population but of those who could not work either through incapacity or age, or who could not, in the vagaries of the labour market, find work.
