Themes

Class was a central social category for much of the period 1750-1914. Previously, society had been described as consisting of ranks (‘landed gentry’) or interests (the ‘shoe trade’), but from the late eighteenth century a language of class became increasingly common. The ‘middling ranks’ became the ‘middle classes’, and by the early nineteenth century working men and women became the ‘labouring classes’ and then the ‘working classes’. The idea of the upper classes, always rather vaguer, followed later. 

Note that the most common usage was plural: ‘classes’ rather than ‘class’. There was no general acceptance of the firm ‘three-class’ model which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels made the cornerstone of Marxist analysis around 1850. There were very important cultural and status differences between industrial capitalists and the emerging professions of law or medicine; and almost equally wide distinctions between the skilled and unskilled, and between manual and non-manual, workers. Languages of class could describe a social position, determined for example by wealth, income, or education, but they could also denote a social identity, a label groups applied to themselves or to others. Because class identity can be a fundamental historical dynamic, this second notion, often described as ‘class consciousness’, has particularly generated historical debate. 

The emergence of a language of class does not necessarily mean that there was a corresponding actual change in the economy and society which was creating a new social structure. Without doubt, both the agricultural and industrial ‘revolutions’ of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries produced greater disparities of wealth, fracturing some of the connections which had bound communities together in pre-industrial society, and creating larger social groups in the growing urban centres. But these developments were uneven, and class was experienced in a multitude of ways: not just wages, but differential access to politics, education, or sport, and of social and cultural life. What class might be in the impersonal Victorian industrial city, could be very different to the small rural market town. 

Experiences of work did change. Many late eighteenth century workers had significant control over the pattern of their work, its pace and timing. They were paid for what they produced, not by the hour. Mechanisation brought greater control for employers who owned the machinery, and a greater focus on work time. Many previously skilled jobs were deskilled or disappeared completely, although at the same time new jobs, in factories or offices, were created. Work autonomy was greatly reduced. Women were often forced out of employment, or into specific occupations where wages were low. 

Recent historical scholarship has partly turned away from class, pointing out that other social languages (for example ‘the people’) were just as significant, and that individual experiences were shaped more by other categories, especially gender and race, but also age and religion. Nevertheless, from ‘working men’s clubs’ to the first, second, and third-class carriages on the railways, class was increasingly hard-wired into social experience in Britain before 1914. [485] 

This resource contains a varied selection of material on Class and Work, including E.P. Thompson, ‘Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class struggle without class?’, John Seed, ‘Capital and Class Formation in early Industrial England’, D. Smith, Conflict and Compromise. Class Formation in English Society 1830-1914 (1982), P. Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England. Rational recreation and the contest for control, 1830-1885 (1978), and the primary source collections, The English Rural Poor and The Urban Working Classes in Britain.