The Origins of Middle-Class Culture: Halifax, Yorkshire, 1660-1780.

Does the category of class retain any analytic usefulness at all in this post-Cold War, post-categorical age? This book argues with some success that it does. Halifax, located in the heart of England's cloth-producing country, went from being a localized, largely agrarian economy to an export-oriented industrial one in a period of only a half to three-quarters of a century. The speed and comprehensiveness of this change make this Yorkshire town a suggestive locus in which to examine the formation of class culture. The progress of cloth manufacture in Halifax and other wool towns has been fairly extensively studied by several generations of business and economic historians. John Smail's not inconsiderable contribution in The Origins of Middle-Class Culture is to give us one of the most nuanced pictures we have yet seen of the micro-economy of individual households and businesses while effectively linking this to larger social, cultural and economic shifts.

Smail's book traces the emergence of a culturally distinct group he calls the "middle class" out of the ranks of a more generic "middling sort." In the course of developing this argument, Small supplies a rather detailed taxonomy of the two groups. Let us first take the "middling sort," which was in its hey-day in the late seventeenth century. The yeoman clothier, the archetypal representative of this class (in Halifax at any rate) relied on simple credit arrangements or cash, and enjoyed a simple, uniform material culture within a still largely local economy. He fraternized on terms of some familiarity with his social inferiors and he displayed little sense of an identity of class interest against other groups - his was a world view powerfully influenced by egalitarian puritanism. The clothier's wife and other household members had essential roles in cloth production, and these manufacturing households' business practices showed a pattern not of paternalism, but of a healthy respect for the claims of a largely independent body of cloth makers (Smail here importantly problematizes the too-easy identification between "pre-industrial" and "paternalistic").

The group Smail calls "middle class," by contrast, is an eighteenth-century phenomenon, developing in tandem with the growing export market for English cloth. In Halifax this group was already well-established by the mid-eighteenth century. Two excellent chapters on economic, cultural and financial shifts in Halifax between the late seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries provide a nuanced and nicely interactive account of the rise of this "class." As Smail shows, the differences between "the middling sort" and the "middle class" were substantial. Men of the middle class developed complex credit arrangements that gave them the capital they needed to launch large-scale, export-oriented enterprises. They oversaw a considerably more lopsided social structure than the middling sort had done. By the 1750s some were building imposing houses with front parlors and separate servants' entrances - not for them the functional homes of a previous generation. In place of the old (relative) democracy of faith they tended to practice "subscriber democracy" (the democracy of those who could pay) both in their churches and chapels and their civic and philanthropic societies. With work forces of 250 or more by the mid-century, it is unlikely that most of these merchant-industrialists knew their workers by name, much less socialized with them, and they alternated between paternalistic protestations of concern about their workers and laying them off with relative impunity during hard times. Either way, the new cultural and economic dependence of wage earners was powerfully manifest. And finally, "middle-class" wives, unlike their mothers and grandmothers, stayed at home or (at least according to Small) sallied out primarily for church and tea parties. Few of them any longer had an explicit role in production.

I merely summarize the broad outlines of the argument here. Smail uses business correspondence, personal papers, and apt comparisons between the generations of selected Halifax families to put a human face on the process of change. A man like George Stansfield, Jr., the largest manufacturer in Halifax at mid-century, emerges as a complex individual with distinctive ideas and practices with respect to family, civic life and business. There is a wonderful section on parish politics that shows clearly how narrow, interlocking directorates of wealthy merchants gradually acquired a virtual stranglehold over eighteenth-century civic life. The discussion of the canal-building Calder Navigation group offers a revealing view of the sociology of eighteenth-century "civic" entrepreneurship. There is also a strong section on the material culture of tea, coffee and chocolate and its relationship to gender. Not only are these diverse topics well-integrated one with another, but the whole is held together with a light touch and a clear and engaging prose style.

The central problem afflicting studies like these is a classificatory and hermeneutic one. Is "class" too abstract, and - simultaneously - too rough-grained to be a useful category of historical analysis? Would social historians be better off emphasizing diversity and cross-cut loyalties rather than formations invented by nineteenth-century philosophers and sociologists? What do we lose by trying to fit people into the sometimes procrustean bed of "class"? Smail confronts these problems with honesty and good sense. Class remains an important analytical category for him because it focuses attention in a way that no other term or discursive tradition has been able to do on the connection between economic relations and "the structuring of social consciousness." (p. 6) Smail's approach to "class" and (his preferred term) "class culture" is far from rigid or economically determinist however. For one thing, unlike many social and economic historians either of the left or of the right, he is entirely comfortable with postmodernism. Indeed his emphasis on the way in which class is, in the final analysis, a cultural construct: "a process by which a group at once construes and constructs its socioeconomic reality" (p. 9) works to reconcile neo-materialist and post-structuralist approaches. This is, of course, a not uncommon move in post-Gramscian dialectics, but Smail's formulation is an appealing one, because it moves so clearly and definitively past the unnecessarily agonized "either/or" logic that has characterized so much recent writing on the relationship between economic analyses (especially from the left) and postmodernism.

Smail is, perhaps, more interested in a different, though related methodological problem: class may be a useful category of analysis but how generalizable are the conclusions it helps generate? Here Smail is appropriately modest. In his view class can only be studied and, indeed, may only be said to "happen," in its local context. "[I] n the eighteenth century," he writes, "there was no single middle-class culture. Rather, a variety of local cultures developed, each a specific response to the local context, and in particular to the specific ways in which capitalist relations of production emerged in that locality." (p. 15) In other words, the historian can expect to find roughly parallel, but not necessarily simultaneous, developments in other towns, but each town will have to be subjected to separate scrutiny, with due attention to local particularities, if we expect to gain a satisfying account of the way class cultures evolved over time.

Any study of this kind will leave the careful reader with questions. One important one concerns the composition of Smail's "middle class." Arguably, what Small is outlining is less the making of a middle-class culture, in the conventional, fairly broad sense of that term, than of a mercantile/industrial urban elite culture. It is, consequently, difficult to say what applicability Smail's formations have to the much larger swathe of people who turned into the lower middle class, or even the "middle" middle class. Another area that gives pause is Smail's treatment of women and family life. The notion of the separation of the "sphere of the public" from the "sphere of the private," has, over the last twenty years, been widely adopted by historians seeking to integrate the history of women and the history of modern class formations. In fact, in several studies, most notably Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall's influential Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 (1986), the "separation of spheres" has become perhaps the defining feature of middle-class culture. Any formulation that popular is bound to attract skeptics and revisionism. In the last few years historians on both sides of the Atlantic have shown a growing tendency to view "separate spheres" more as an extremely malleable ideological construct than as evidence of what women or men were "really" doing in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Smail is to be praised for making a genuine effort to incorporate women and family life into his narrative. Still, a somewhat more critical interrogation of the categories of public and private might have added greater subtlety to that section of The Origins of Middle-Class Culture that deals directly with issues of gender.

All in all this is a useful book, an effectively-argued book, and, often, an elegant book, which is destined to influence both local studies and studies on culture and class in eighteenth-century Britain for the better. What K. Davies, more than three decades ago, memorably referred to as "The Mess of the Middle Class"(1) is considerably less messy as a result of Smail's timely intervention. It is a challenging task to bring greater clarity to a subject as troubled as the formation of the middle class, while simultaneously encouraging more subtlety, more attention to archival evidence and more analytic flexibility. It is very much to John Smail's credit that he has succeeded in doing all these things.

Margaret Hunt Amherst College

ENDNOTE 

1. K. Davies, "The Mess of the Middle Class," Past and Present 22 (1962): 77-83.