Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780-1840.

For decades historians have sought to date the emergence of the British middle class. Dror Wahrman believes that "the question, was the English middle class made by 1832, or by 1846, or by any other date" (p. 1) cannot be answered. In Imagining the Middle Class, he asks instead "how, why and when did the British come to believe that they lived in a society centred around a 'middle class'" (p. 1, emphasis in the original). By what means does Wahrman attempt to answer these questions? How do his findings fit alongside previous interpretations of British history? What does his project suggest about the practice of social history?

Wahrman's method is to scrutinize the public pronouncements of the period between 1780 and 1840 for phrases expressive of a "middle-class" conception of society, polity, and history: "middle ranks," "middle station," "middling order," "middle class," and "middle classes." He then examines the attributes bestowed upon this "imagined" category of the population and the polemical and analytical purposes to which they were put. Finally, he charts how understandings of the middle class and their usages changed over time.

Wahrman has consulted an absolutely astonishing number of pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, printed speeches and sermons, tracts, and treatises. For all the admiration his industry inspires, however, it has to be noted that he has confined his reading within very definite limits. The great bulk of Imagining the Middle Class is based upon explicitly political writings: texts about the French Revolution and British responses to it, about the crisis of public order in the years between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Peterloo Massacre, and about the reform of the constitution in the run-up to the great act of 1832. While Wahrman does move beyond political argument to a discussion of domestic literature in the penultimate chapter of the book, he all but ignores the voluminous publications that the leading social and economic questions of the day (the course of population change, the standard of living, and social-welfare provision) called into print.

Wahrman's story of how the British came to see their land as middle-class-centered unfolds in three stages. In the 1790s, nonradical opponents of Burke's interpretation of the French Revolution and Pitt's war against France invoked the middle class as the natural constituency of an intelligent and virtuous alternative course. In the tumultuous period between 1815 and 1820 both proponents of political reform and their opponents invested the middle class with those qualities that would conduce to the restoration of stability and harmony. In the drama of 1829-32, the middle class came to be seen as the new presence in British society that both necessitated the alteration of the constitution and set a limit to the extent of the innovation. For Wahrman, the 1832 Reform Act is very much the pivotal moment in the march of the British toward a middle-class-based understanding of social reality. It was, he writes, "an important catalyst in the decisive transformation of people's conceptualizations of their society . . . the crucial factor in cementing the invention of the ever-rising 'middle class'" (p. 18).

The tale Wahrman tells is thus of the triumph of a middle-class representation of British life, and he sees it as a direct attack upon "the foundations of the 'middle-class' narrative" - with its emphasis on a triumphant middle class - that "from the early nineteenth century has maintained its unquestioned sway over the writing of British history" (pp. 419-20). It will be immediately obvious, though, that Wahrman's revisionist account of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British history has a great deal in common with the "Marxist/socialist and liberal" traditions that have together encompassed "the lion's share of English history writing" (p. 413). Both versions see the period between 1780 and 1840 as a time when questions of class very much came to the fore in Britain. Both narratives reach their apogee in 1832. Both end with the middle class very much in the ascendant.

What, then, recommends, this new account of Britain's emergence as a class society over the received version of the story? According to Wahrman, his history is superior in three respects. It substitutes a language of the middle class that can be identified with certainty in the documentary record for a middle class over whose origins and composition historians have differed. It makes politics the agent of change in place of the supposedly underlying social and economic forces. It records a triumph that is highly contingent and provisional and not the inevitable working out of a logic of history.

On close inspection, the interpretive space that Wahrman claims separates the rise of a middle-class-based view of society from the familiar triumph of the middle class is not as wide as he would have us believe. Politics, in fact, have always played an important role in the standard middle-class storyline, as the emphasis in the older narratives on the Reform Act, the New Poor Law, and the Repeal of the Corn Laws indicates. The detailed attention in the literature to these initiatives and the tortuous paths that led to their enactment demonstrates also that the inherited version of events always accorded a good deal of indeterminacy to how and when the middle class secured the hegemony that its social and economic position held out to it.

Moreover, Wahrman's own story turns on a linkage between the social and economic, on the one hand, and the political, on the other, that is highly reminiscent of the Marxist and liberal historiographies that he repudiates. Mindful of recent studies that have emphasized the gradual pace of social and economic change in Britain between 1700 and 1900, Wahrman turns from the course of change itself to contemporary awareness of it. Here he finds the early nineteenth century to have been a moment of marked discontinuity when there "was probably an unprecedented qualitative leap in people's awareness of the processes of social change unravelling around them" (p. 228). Indeed, it was precisely people's sense "that society . . . was in irreversible flux" (p. 234) that gave the story of the rising middle class a decided advantage in the competition among different representations of British affairs. Far from subverting the received accounts of the making of modem Britain, then, Wahrman's findings about the history of a" 'middle-class' idiom" are exactly what his socialist and liberal predecessors would have expected to find had they extended their analyses to the linguistic plane.

In any event, Wahrman's method prevents him from testing directly the argument that the period 1780-1840 witnessed the emergence in Britain of a middle class conscious of its unique place in the social order and determined to assert that understanding politically. His interest throughout this study lies with the speech and not with the speaker. In so far as he identifies the voices that spoke of a "middling order" or a "middle station" in political debate, it is to locate them with respect to the controversy of the moment. Occasionally Wahrman describes the author of one or another of his texts as "of a rich mercantile and landowning family" (p. 390) or in similar terms, but he makes no systematic effort to place his speakers in their multiple social contexts. All the less does he attempt to isolate the linguistic practices of people of nonlanded wealth and professional attainments. The upshot of this failure to move from the languages of political argument to the languages of identity is that Wahrman can say almost nothing about how Britons whose experiences were of nonlanded, nonmanual-laboring life made sense of British society, politics, and history. All of the old questions about the middle class and its consciousness therefore remain open.

Dror Wahrman's richly documented history of how conceptions of the middle class informed political argument in Britain between 1792 and 1832 and shaped British thinking about the public and domestic spheres for years thereafter confirms once more the power of linguistic analysis to illuminate the past. At the same time, Imagining the Middle Class makes it clear that such modes of inquiry will only be of major benefit to social historians when they are able to advance our understanding of political action and private conduct. To that end, we shall have to match Wahrman's skillful dissection of what was said with an equally penetrating look at who was doing the talking.

Michael Dintenfass University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee