White collars, gray lives? the lower middle class revisited

Journal of British Studies

Volumn 38, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 273-290

  Bailey, Peter ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; CONSCIOUSNESS; DAILY LIFE ACTIVITY; EDUCATION; ETHNOLOGY; FAMILY; GENDER IDENTITY; HISTORY; LEGAL ASPECT; MARRIAGE; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR; SOCIAL CLASS; SOCIAL DOMINANCE; SOCIAL STIGMA; SOCIOECONOMICS; SPOUSE; UNITED KINGDOM;

ACTIVITIES OF DAILY LIVING; CONSCIOUSNESS; FAMILY; GENDER IDENTITY; GREAT BRITAIN; HIERARCHY, SOCIAL; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; MARRIAGE; SOCIAL CLASS; SOCIAL IDENTIFICATION; SOCIAL STIGMA; SOCIOECONOMIC FACTORS; SPOUSES;

EID: 12344297151     PISSN: 00219371     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/386195     Document Type: Article

References (103)

1. Arlene Young, "Virtue Domesticated: Dickens and the Lower Middle Class," Victorian Studies 39, no. 1 (Summer 1996): 483-511.
2. George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith, Diary of a Nobody (London, 1892).
3. For critical commentary from the era, see James Hammerton, "Pooterism or Partnership? Marriage and Masculine Identity in the Lower Middle Class, 1870-1920," in this issue.
4. E. M. Forster, Howard's End (1910; reprint, Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 109.
5. Christopher Caudwell, Studies in a Dying Culture (1938; reprint, New York, 1971), p. 77.
6. George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (1939; reprint, Harmondsworth, 1990), p. 13.
7. Young, "Virtue Domesticated," p. 493.
8. Geoffrey Crossick, ' 'Metaphors of the Middle: The Discovery of the Petite Bourgeoisie, 1880-1914," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 4 (1994): 251-79.
9. Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (Harmondsworth, 1982), p. 376.
10. Chaplin is an obvious model, but more pertinently see the cartoons of Sidney Strube in the Daily Express (1918-48), whose signature "little man" was plainly an office worker. (I thank Peter Mellini for providing me with examples.)
11. See also Humphrey Jenning's film Listen to Britain (1942), in which a clerkly figure walks jauntily to work down bomb-damaged streets.
12. Geoffrey Crossick, ed., The Lower Middle Class in Britain (London, 1977).
13. For a parallel landmark in historiography, see Arno Mayer, "The Lower Middle Class as Historical Problem," Journal of Modern History Al (1975): 409-36.
14. For sociological accounts, see David Lockwood, The Blackcoated Worker: A Study in Class Consciousness (London, 1958)
15. Michel Crozier, The World of the Office Worker (Chicago, 1971)
16. Frank Bechhofer and Brian Elliott, eds., The Petite Bourgeoisie: Comparative Studies of an Uneasy Stratum (New York, 1981).
17. See R. Q. Gray, ' 'Religion, Culture and Social Class in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Edinburgh," pp. 134-58
18. Martin Gaskell, "Housing and the Lower Middle Class," pp. 158-84
19. both in Crossick, ed., The Lower Middle Class in Britain.
20. Hugh McLeod, "White Collar Values and the Role of Religion," in Crossick, ed., The Lower Middle Class in Britain, pp. 61-88. This is perhaps what the Chicago School meant by "moral deviancy."
21. Other than Crossick, only one contributor to the collection continued substantial work in the sector; see Gregory Anderson, "The Social Economy of the Late Victorian Clerk," in Crossick, ed., The Lower Middle Class In Britain, pp. 113-33
22. Victorian Clerks (Manchester, 1976)
23. Gregory Anderson, ed., The White-Blouse Revolution: Female Office Workers since 1870 (Manchester, 1988).
24. Richard Price, "Society, Status and Jingoism: The Social Roots of Lower Middle Class Patriotism 1870-1900," in Crossick, ed., The Lower Middle Class in Britain, pp. 89-112.
25. For example, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (London, 1987)
26. John Seed and Janet Wolff, eds., The Culture of Capital: Art, Power and the Nineteenth Century Middle Class (Manchester, 1988)
27. R. J. Morris, Class, Sect and Party: The Making of the British Middle Class: Leeds, 1820-1850 (Manchester, 1990).
28. H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, 2 vols. (London, 1934), 1:150-51.
29. For related historical accounts, see Anderson, Victorian Clerks
30. Anderson, ed., White-Blouse Revolution. "Christopher Hosgood, "'Mercantile Monasteries': Shops, Shop Assistants, and Shop Life in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain," in this issue.
31. Geoffrey Crossick, ' 'Urban Society and the Petty Bourgeoisie in Nineteenth Century Britain," in The Pursuit of Urban History, ed. Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe (New York, 1983), pp. 307-26.
32. See also Thea Vigne and Alun Howkins, "The Small Shopkeeper in Industrial and Market Towns," in Crossick, ed., The Lower Middle Class in Britain, pp. 184-210
33. Michael Winstanley, The Shopkeeper's World, 1830-1914 (Manchester, 1983)
34. Christopher Hosgood, " 'The Pigmies of Commerce' and the Working-Class Community: Small Shopkeepers in England, 1870-1914," Journal of Social History 22, no. 3 (Spring 1989): 439-60.
35. F. M. L. Thompson, "Town and City," in The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750-1950, ed. F. M. L. Thompson, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1990), 1:65-71.
36. Susan D. Pennybacker, A Vision for London, 1889-1914: Labour, Everyday Life and the LCC Experiment (London, 1995), pp. 33-95.
37. Chris Waters, British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884-1914 (Stanford, Calif., 1990), pp. 161-65.
38. Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918-1951 (Oxford, 1998), p. 157.
39. For LCC workers, see Pennybacker, "Changing Convictions: London County Council Blackcoated Activism between the Wars," in Splintered Classes: Politics and the Lower Middle Classes in Europe, ed. Rudy Koshar (New York, 1990), pp. 97-120.
40. Tom Jeffery, "A Place in the Nation: The Lower Middle Class in England," in Koshar, ed., Splintered Classes, pp. 70-95.
41. Thompson, "Town and City," p. 71. The occupation can be an emblem of scorn as well as pride: Private Eye persistently ridiculed Ted Heath, son of a jobbing builder and Thatcher's predecessor as Tory leader, as "The Grocer."
42. Hammerton, "Pooterism or Partnership?"
43. J. B. Priestley, Margin Released (London, 1962)
44. Arnold Bennett, Buried Alive (1911; reprint, Harmondsworth, 1976), pp. 90-91.
45. John Betjeman, "Thoughts on the Diary of a Nobody," quoted in Roy Porter, London: A Social History (Harmondsworth, 1996), p. 386.
46. Richard Church, Over the Bridge (London, 1955), p. 27, records life in a lowermiddle-class family in Battersea (later Dulwich), his father a post office clerk, his mother a teacher.
47. Pennybacker, Vision for London, p. 59.
48. On the difficulties of the marriage choice for "internal migrants," see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1975), p. 255.
49. See also McLeod, White Collar Values 63
50. John M. Robson, Marriage or Celibacy: The Daily Telegraph on a Victorian Dilemma (Toronto, 1995).
51. "At Trinity church I met me doom/Now we live in a top back room." V. S. Pritchett, A Cab at the Door (Harmondsworth, 1974), pp. 45, 167.
52. For the Churches, see Over the Bridge, p. 254.
53. For the lower-middle-class gent, see Peter Bailey, "Champagne Charlie: Performance and Ideology in the Music Hall Swell Song," in Music Hall: Performance and Style, ed. J. S. Bratton (Milton Keynes, 1986), pp. 49-69
54. reprinted in Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge, 1998).
55. See also Pennybacker, Vision for London, pp. 56-59
56. Young, Virtue Domesticated 485-490.
57. Frederick Gale, Modern English Sports: Their Use and Abuse (London, 1885), p. 60.
58. Church, Over the Bridge
59. Wells, The History of Mr. Polly (1910; reprint, London, 1963), p. 77.
60. Frank Mort, "Social and Symbolic Fathers and Sons in Postwar Britain," in this issue.
61. Mystifyingly, amid the many deftly exploited sources that support this brave and challenging piece, there is no reference to Ackerley's classic quest for the father from a previous generation; see J. R. Ackerley, My Father and Myself (London, 1968).
62. For an other account by a historian of his (much less troubled) upbringing in a lower-middleclass home, see J. F. C. Harrison, Scholarship Boy: A Personal History of the Mid Twentieth Century (London, 1995).
63. For work, see Meta Zimmeck, "Jobs for the Girls: The Expansion of Clerical Work for Women, 1850-1914," in Unequal Opportunities: Women's Employment in England, 1800-1918, ed. Angela V. John (Oxford, 1986), pp. 153-78
64. Anderson, ed., White-Blouse Revolution.
65. For the wider social context, see Pennybacker, Vision for London
66. Dina M. Copelman, London's Women Teachers: Gender, Class and Feminism, 1870-1930 (London, 1996).
67. William Archer, The Theatrical World of 1896 (London, 1897), pp. 298-305
68. Mario Borsa, The English Stage of Today (London, 1908), pp. 4-5.
69. Copelman, London's Women Teachers, pp. 167-68.
70. As Hammerton notes in "Pooterism or Partnership?" the physical proximity of the classes varied greatly with the neighborhood. But from the late nineteenth century increasing residential segregation and lower-middle-class apprehension at the political solidarity of the working class generated a more pronounced social distance between the two; see Copelman, London's Women Teachers, pp. 31-36.
71. See Geoffrey Crossick, "Culture and Sociability," in The Petite Bourgeoisie in Europe, 1780-1914: Enterprise, Family and Independence, by Geoffrey Crossick and Heinz Gerhard-Haupt (London, 1995), pp. 191-215
72. R. J. Morris, "Clubs, Societies, and Associations," in Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 3:395-443.
73. Stanley Pierson, Marxism and the Origins of British Socialism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), p. 155.
74. Christopher Hosgood, "The Knights of the Road: Commercial Travellers and the Culture of the Commercial Room in Late Victorian and Edwardian England," Victorian Studies 37 (Summer 1994): 519-47
75. " 'A Brave and Daring Folk'? Shopkeepers and Trade Associational Life in Victorian and Edwardian England," Journal of Social History 26 (Winter 1992): 285-308.
76. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, pp. 83, 84.
77. Gray, "Religion, Culture and Social Class"
78. McLeod, White Collar Values."
79. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, p. 15.
80. For a fictional, no doubt semiautobiographical rendering of the type, see Arnold Bennett, A Man From the North (London, 1898).
81. Peter Bailey, "Ally Sloper's Half Holiday: The Comic Press in the 1880s," History Workshop, no. 16 (Autumn 1983), pp. 4-31
82. reprinted in Bailey, Popular Culture.
83. For allodoxia-cultural misjudgment or "misplaced recognition of the hierarchies"- see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London, 1984), pp. 326, 327.
84. Pritchett, Cab at the Door, p. 56
85. Arnold Bennett, The Card (1911
86. reprint, Hammondsworth, 1975), p. 42.
87. Peter Bailey, "Theatres of Entertainment/Spaces of Modernity: Rethinking the British Popular Stage, 1890-1914," Nineteenth Century Theatre 26, no. 1 (Summer 1998): 5-24.
88. D. L. Mahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (Oxford, 1988), p. 8.
89. Francis Newton [Eric Hobsbawm], The Jazz Scene Harmondsworth, 1961, pp. 239-40.
90. T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (London, 1985), p. 258.
91. For other relevant models of modernity, see Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London, 1983)
92. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford, 1990), chap. 2
93. Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernity (London, 1991), chap. 1
94. Mica Nava and Allan O'Shea, eds., Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity (London, 1996).
95. For the voice of alienation, see John Davidson's poem about a struggling clerk, "Thirty Bob a Week," from the 1890s (Helen Gardner, ed., The New Oxford Book of English Verse [Oxford, 1972], p. 199).
96. And jolly Mr. Polly contemplated suicide at the prospect of bankruptcy, a frequent calamity for small shopkeepers; see Wells, Mr. Polly, 147-49.
97. Peter Nicholls, Feeling You're Behind (Harmondsworth, 1985)
98. John Osborne, Almost a Gentleman (London, 1991)
99. cf. his earlier volume, A Better Class of Person (London, 1981), whose title carries a sexual innuendo also typical of the "underground" humor of the class.
100. See David Lodge's introduction to Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (Harmondsworth, 1992).
101. Jane Traies, "Jones and the Working Girl: Class Marginality in Music Hall Song, 1860-1900," in Bratton, ed., Music Hall, pp. 23-48.
102. Ralph Gorse ("The Charmer" of the TV series), con-man son of a commercial artist, is a fictional example, described as "an astute social botanist." This echo of Baudelaire is from Patrick Hamilton, Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse (London, 1953). The comics and comic writers from the class are naturally easier to identify, and they are many, from Noel Coward to John Cleese.
103. Clark, The Painting of Modem Life, p. 258.