Patrician Society – Plebeian Culture – Rise of the Middle Class?

1. Patrician Society – Plebeian Culture – Rise of the Middle Class? Sarah Richardson

2. Sorts of People in the Eighteenth Century • Problem for historians has been that the eighteenth century is often viewed through the prism of class. • Thus use terms such as the labouring poor or the lower orders. • Some divide their studies at the pivotal year of 1750, seeing closer links between the popular culture of the early eighteenth century and the early modern world and linking the second half of the century with the emergence of the working class. • EP Thompson in his famous preface to The Making of the English Working Class wrote: ‘I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ handloom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.’

3. Thomas Gainsborough, The Cottage Door (1780): an example of sympathy with the rural poor?

4. Thomas Gainsborough, The Housemaid, 1782-6

5. Critics of patrician-plebeian dichotomy • Thompson first propounded the ‘patrician-plebeian’ dichotomy: a thesis which is still well established and which accorded with the views of contemporary commentators such as Oliver Goldsmith and Henry Fielding. • It has come under attack from some recent postmodernist studies. • Thus Kathleen Wilson in The Sense of the People employed a different definition of the term popular. She sums up her approach thus: `The term "popular" is used like "populist" to describe language or arguments that are supported by, or that champion the rights of, "the people" in political debate and activities’. She goes on to say that her ‘examination of "popular politics" is an investigation of socially inclusive or accessible forms of political activity'. • She uses an inclusive definition, positing that a dichotomous approach emphasising high versus low, patrician versus plebeian etc. only exaggerates the role of the middling sort and conceals the extent to which popular culture was a shared culture. • The danger with Wilson's definition is that although it seeks to be inclusive it is so extensive that it ceases to have any meaning at all.

6. Popular Culture • Encompasses the common people’s world of: • work, • attitudes to the natural world, • education, literacy and knowledge, • health practices, • gender and generational roles, • religious beliefs, • recreational and leisure pursuits, • community customs. • rich oral culture

7. Prelude to the Riot in Mount Street (Richard Newton, 1792) A servants' dance: four men-servants face four maid-servants, in a country-dance

8. The Humours of a Country Wake (1794). Print shows duel between two men outside a tavern; other rural scenes and pastimes represented include a Jewish pedlar, a fiddler and street entertainers leading bear and monkey, a group of men watching a bull-baiting, a man running chased by bull and a country dance.

9. Relationships between elite and mass • Often characterised as paternalist but masters complained that the labouring poor were subordinate and undisciplined • Defoe in his Great Law of Subordination Consider’d or the Insolence and Unsufferable Behaviour of Servants in England duly enquir’d into (1724) argued that through the insubordination of servants:Husbandmen are ruin’d, the Farmers disabled, Manufacturers and Artficersplung’d to the Destruction of Trade… • Thompson argues that this was because labourers became freer and more mobile: • the advent of payment in money rather than in kind • growth of a sector of the population who were independent of the gentry – clothing workers, urban artisans, colliers, bargees, porters, labourers, and petty dealers. • gentry were increasingly remote from the populace • Leisure became secularised. There was a rich plebeian culture. There were hobbyhorses, sweeps on pigs, morris dancers, baitings, wrestling, dancing, and drinking.

10. Plebeian Pleasantry, after George Cruikshank 1818

11. Resistance • Thompson did not see the plebeians as a working class. But they were a political presence. • Resistance to the gentry took the form of anonymous threats or acts. • Plebeians employed what Thompson calls counter-theatre of threat and sedition • Crowd were capable of taking direct action. Crowds demanded immediate results: to break machines, intimidate employers, damage mills, enforce bread subsidies etc.

12. An effigy of a Whig minister on horseback conducted to be burned with a gallows and a bundle of faggots. 1756

13. Hints to Forestallers or a Sure Way to Reduce the Price of Grain, 1800

14. Food riot in Newcastle, 1740 • About two on Thursday morning, a great number of Colliers and Waggoners, Smiths and other common workmen came along the Bridge, released the prisoners and proceeded in great Order through the Town with Bagpipes playing, Drum beating, and Dirty Clothes fixed upon sticks by way of Colours flying. They then increased to some thousands and were in possession of the principal streets of the Town. The Magistrates met at the Guild Hall and scarce knew what to do… • They broke into the Hutch and took out fifteen hundred pounds, broke everything that was ornamental, two very fine capital Pictures of King Charles second and James second… they tore, all but the faces… and afterwards conducted the Magistrates to their own houses in a kind of Mock Triumph.

15. Changes • Elite sanction of popular culture was gradually withdrawn through the century. • The long-standing custom of bull-running at Tutbury in Staffswas at odds with polite society and suppressed by the Duke of Devonshire in 1778. • Custom was the essential underpinning for this society. • Custom dictated the local calendar • Widespread custom of ‘Saint Monday’ – the holiday taken at their discretion at the beginning of the week by a variety of handworkers demonstrated a resistance to change.

16. The Four Times of Day (Night), Hogarth (1738) Scene near Charing Cross. Celebrations of Oak Apple Day. In the foreground a drunken freemason is supported by a serving man; to left a barber is seen at work through a window, a chamber pot is being emptied from a window above and below a man and woman sleep beneath a wooden shelter and a link boy crouches beside them; to right the Salisbury Flying Coach has crashed while trying to avoid a bonfire in the middle of the street.

17. A unified popular culture? • Some historians wishing to stress cultural diversity in the eighteenth century have moved towards models which classify popular culture into subcultures. • Barry Reay has written of popular culture splintering into subcultures divided by locality, age, gender, religion and class. • Hugh Cunningham divided it into groups: ‘Boundaries of class, of gender, of age, and of geography, are therefore likely to be represented in leisure; and leisure activities may themselves have reinforced or shifted those boundaries, and not merely reflected them.’ • Problem with a dichotomous vision of society is that variety and diversity are not easily accommodated.

18. Middling sort/middle class? • Middle class difficult to define and not necessarily a useful term for analysing the processes of change in the eighteenth century. • Often termed : the middling people of England, the middling sort, men of a middling condition. • Originates as an interposition between rich and poor, persons of rank and common people • John Seed defines middle class as distinguished from the aristocracy and gentry by the need to generate an income and from labouring class by the possession of property and by their exemption from manual labour. • Margaret Hunt argues the term class emerged for contemporaries to make sense of contemporary experiences, observations and problems.

19. The Conversation Piece, Nollekens, 1740

20. Size of middling sort • Social surveys of the eighteenth century give some idea of the social hierarchy of society. • 1% of the population were major landowners receiving around 15% of the annual income; were mass of labouring poor; in between were ranks of the middling sort ranging from judges, state officials and great merchants to small farmers and semi-independent craftsmen. • Harold Perkin in The Origins of Modern English Society estimates that there is an overall increase in the middling sort from 435,000 in 1688 to 634,640 by 1803. • For Defoe, the middling sort were not exposed to ‘the miseries and hardships, the labour and suffering of the mechanic part of mankind, and not embarrassed with the pride, luxury, ambition and envy of the upper part of mankind.’ • Leonard Schwarz places 2-3% of the London population in the upper income bracket (average income of £2,000 p.a. plus) and 16-21% in the middling bracket (£80-139 p.a.) the remaining 75% are a diverse body of the smaller independent artisans, wage labourers and the unemployed.

21. Importance of hierarchy • John Smail, in his study of Halifax argues that the middling sort viewed their world in hierarchical terms • But deference to the landed aristocracy was imbued with a strong sense of independence. • Margaret Hunt emphasises that the theory of emulation should be re-evaluated. • Was often a deep ambivalence if not hostility by the middling sort to the values of the aristocracy and gentry.

22. Formation of middle class – private sphere • Most businesses were family affairs • Main business unit was the owner/manager or the small partnership often consisting of family members. • Management functions were usually carried out by members of the family perhaps supported by a small group of clerks, overseers, foremen etc. • Family provided capital as well as personnel. • Central to this cultural identity was a new set of gender relations.

23. Formation of middle class - religion • Middle class were overwhelmingly affiliated to organised religion. • Membership of a congregation was an insignia of middle class status and linked the middle class family with the wider community. • Co-religionists also often provided capital. • Social values propounded by the churches and chapels gave ideological legitimacy to patterns of middle class life • Membership of a religious congregation was commitment to a whole social project.

24. Formation of a middle class – public sphere • Public sphere transcended the divisive boundaries of the religious sects. • Social world of the middling sort was determined largely by work and residence. The emerging middle class had a sense of a distinct social status and strong gender differences and thus created new forms of sociability. • Thus establishment of bodies such as subscribing libraries, Lit & Phil Societies, Assembly rooms, debating societies etc were crucial. • New forms of sociability made a class identity by creating a distinctive social space for the commercial and professional elite. • For the middle class sociability was more orderly and exclusive, and it had been differentiated into public and private spheres

25. Local or national context • Local context is crucial when looking for the origins of the middle class but towards the end of the 18th century – DrorWahrman identifies the 1790s as the crucial decade – there was a transition from the local to the national. • Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall in Family Fortunes use example of Isaac Taylor and his family and the struggle they had in maintaining their middle class identity, forged in London, among the villagers of Lavenham in Suffolk. • Family brought their middle class culture with them from London and refreshed it through letter writing, reading and the occasional visit to the metropolis. • Gradually a national middle class consciousness influenced the local context. • National articulation of middle class values occurred as a result of a series of political, social and economic crises, notably, the war with the American colonies, the French revolution and war with France, the pressure for political reform and the increasing economic tensions between labour and capital. • But broader national articulations of middle class culture came from the myriad local, mainly urban contexts where the process of economic change transformed the middling sort into the middle class.