Class in Britain

Even in the heyday of the class-based history of modern Britain, Marxist scholars were never altogether at ease with the eighteenth century – a period which for these purposes may roughly be taken as beginning with the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and ending with the American Declaration of Independence in 1776. Before it came the supposed ‘bourgeois revolution’ of the 1640s; after it was another ostensible middle-class triumph in the 1830s. This much, at least, seemed clear. But what happened during the intervening period? According to E.P. Thompson, Hanoverian society was deeply split between a dominant ‘patrician banditti’ of Whig, agrarian capitalists, and the plebeian working people, otherwise described as ‘the poor’, ‘the crowd’ or ‘the mob’. And the relations between these two groups might best be understood, he insisted, as ‘crowd-gentry reciprocity’, when things were quiet and settled, or as ‘class struggle without class’, when this reciprocity broke down amid riots and popular protest. There was ‘class struggle’ because these were two deeply antagonistic groups, whose relations were never less than tense, and were often more overtly hostile. But there was no ‘class’ because such fully self-conscious collectivities did not yet exist, since the Industrial Revolution was still to come, and Karl Marx was not alive and around to tell them this was who they were and what they were doing.¹

But this is not the only way in which scholarly thinking about the eighteenth century has been changed and made more complex. For in recent years, historians have become more aware that Hanoverian England was part of a much greater, bigger British world, encompassing not only Wales, Scotland and Ireland, but also the eastern seaboard of North America, and large parts of the Caribbean.⁴ Here again, however, there is similar confusion: were these eighteenth-century societies polarised into two struggling collectivities, or divided into three with a dominant bourgeoisie, or were they still traditional, integrated hierarchies? And should these different – indeed mutually exclusive – ways of seeing these societies be understood in class terms or not? Historians have not been able to agree how they should describe these eighteenth-century social worlds, whether narrowly English or more broadly British, and it seems highly unlikely that they ever will.⁵ But this should occasion no surprise, for contemporaries saw their social worlds in essentially the same three ways – as hierarchical, as three-layered and as polarised. Appropriately enough, all three visions were often expressed in different and particular vocabularies. But they were also increasingly expressed in two vocabularies which were becoming common to all three accounts: one was the language of ranks and orders; the other was the language of class.

I. English Social Worlds

The most commonplace view of Hanoverian England's social structure was that it was providentially ordained, hierarchically ordered and organically interconnected. This perception of their society was generally associated with monarchs, aristocrats, courtiers, heralds, lawyers, clergy and scholars – those who enjoyed prestige and wielded power. But it was also accepted by the majority of the population as the time-honoured and authoritative way of seeing their world, and of understanding their place within it. It had originated in the middle ages, when all sorts and conditions of men were allotted their pre-assigned position in the unitary social order.⁶ It was further elaborated by Tudor and early Stuart commentators into a world-picture of a single, all-encompassing hierarchy of social ranks, which soon became widely accepted. One indication of this was Ulysses' speech, ‘Take but degree away,… And hark what discord follows’, in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. Another was the Prayer Book, with its divine injunction ‘to honour and obey the king, and all that are put in authority under him… To order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters… To do my duty in that state of life which it shall please God to call me.’⁷ To be sure, the Civil War had taken these orders and degrees and stations away, and terrible discord had duly followed. But the regicidal chaos of the 1640s and 1650s rendered this traditional social taxonomy more appealing rather than less, and it was restored along with King Charles II in 1660.

It was this venerable, layered, individualistic view of society which was most widely recognised and accepted in Hanoverian England. From the reigning monarch to the humblest subject ran unbroken this Great Chain of Being: via the five different ranks of titled nobility, to baronets, knights, esquires, gentlemen, leading citizens and professionals, to yeomen, husbandmen and artisans, and so finally to cottagers, labourers, servants and paupers.⁸ To those who lived at the apex, these gradations of rank and station provided what they regarded as an objective account of their world and of their place within it. For it seemed to them that this was the natural order of things, that it mimicked on earth the celestial hierarchies of heaven, and that it was thus divinely sanctioned. People were ranked ‘according to the stations which it hath pleased God to allot them’, and the resulting inequality was ‘not by chance, but by the sovereign disposer of the Lord of all’. ‘In the course of His providence’, wrote Thomas Broughton in 1746, ‘[God] has thought good to appoint various orders and degrees of men here upon earth.’ Samuel Johnson was of the same opinion, noting the ‘fixed, invariable external rules of distinction of rank, which create no jealousy as they are allowed to be accidental’, by which he meant they were beyond human intervention or alteration, because they were God's will and God's work.⁹

It was not only those at the top of eighteenth-century English society who were persuaded by this hierarchical model: these perceptions of the social structure were more widespread, appealing far beyond the confines of the privileged few. When Richard Gough wrote his History of Myddle in 1701, he began it with a description of the church seating plan, which extended in an unbroken sequence from the gentry at the front to the cottagers at the rear. This was how he saw society, and this was how society behaved and ranked itself. In 1733, when Sir Abraham Elton, Whig MP for Bristol, returned to the city having opposed Walpole's Excise scheme, he was welcomed by what were described as ‘all ranks and degrees of people’.¹⁰ Much more breezily, and with a secular and meritocratic concern that was unusual for the time, Soame Jenyne wrote of ‘the wonderful chain of beings’, which he envisaged extending ‘from the senseless clod to the brightest genius of human kind’. Such examples could be multiplied many times over: for this picture of a graded society, linked together in ‘one continued chain’ was the conventional social wisdom. Here, indeed, was the customary hierarchy of a traditional, agrarian society, ordered, immutable and ‘dogmatically va1idated’.¹¹

These vernacular descriptions of eighteenth-century English society were often articulated in the language of order, rank, station, degree or estate. But as Harold Perkin explained, nearly thirty years ago, in a suggestive insight that has never been given appropriate attention, there was another word which was regularly, interchangeably and increasingly used to describe this traditional, layered vision of the Hanoverian social world, and that word was class: class as hierarchy. As such, it carried no connotations of collective social categories or shared group identities, still less of deeply rooted social antagonisms: using this model of society, and putting men into classes, literally meant classifying them individually according to the prestige of their social rank.¹² In this connection, it is worth recalling George Watson's observation about the models and languages of nineteenth-century social description. ‘Much’, he notes, ‘of the profusion of class terms and class discussion in the mid and late Victorian era becomes more intelligible and informative if it is seen as based on a general assumption of rank and hierarchy.’ If ‘Hanoverian’ is substituted for ‘Victorian’, this remark remains equally valid.¹³

But for all its popular resonance, this hierarchical picture of eighteenth-century England was, like any vernacular model of society, both idealised and partial. It sought to fix everybody – literally, everybody – with an assigned place in a single, linear, interconnected chain or ladder. This was an appealing image: but it was indeed an image. Inevitably, it became less accurate or detailed the lower down the social scale it was applied, where minute gradations of status were often less apparent, and where it was more difficult to distinguish one person from another. It supposed all social relations to be individual rather than collective, presumed that prestige was largely inherited, took no account of social mobility, and paid inadequate attention to non-rural life and to the non-rural professions. In its strictest form, this meant the hierarchical model of eighteenth-century English society was often too idealised, and too inflexible to take account of the complex realities and shifting alignments of social structures and social developments.¹⁴ Here is one example of its recognised limitations. During the 1770s, customs officers at English docksides recorded in detail the particulars of emigrants departing for the American colonies. In addition to describing their occupation, they were also expected to rank them hierarchically according to their ‘quality’. But in practice it proved impossible to do so, in part because the emigrants came from a relatively narrow span of the social spectrum, and entries in this column were soon abandoned.¹⁵

The shortcomings of the hierarchical model meant that by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, commentators like Sir Thomas Smith and William Harrison had begun to move towards modified versions of it, based on a more limited number of collective categories, rather than the innumerable gradations of individual placings.¹⁶ During the eighteenth century, as the population of England expanded, and as its wealth and occupational structure became more diverse, there were repeated attempts to update and adapt the traditional model in this way. In 1688, Gregory King divided English society into twenty-six ranks and degrees. Richard Gough modified his strict hierarchy by dividing the parishioners of Myddle into ‘the chief inhabitants’, the ‘best of the parish’, the ‘good and substantial persons’, and the ‘poor people’. In 1709, Daniel Defoe produced a seven-tier classification, from ‘the great’, who ‘live profusely, to ‘the miserable, that ‘really pinch and suffer want’. In the middle of the century, James Nelson proposed five categories (‘nobility’ to ‘peasantry’), while Joseph Massie preferred seven (‘noblemen or gentleman’ to ‘labourers and husbandmen’). And in 1770, the author of The Cheats of London Exposed postulated a four-fold division, which ran from ‘The Nobs’, via ‘The Citizens and their Ladies’, to ‘The Mechanics and Middling Degrees’, and eventually reaching ‘The Refuse’ an early, vernacular inadvertent anticipation of W.G. Runciman's systactic categories.¹⁷

Such modifications of the hierarchical model bring us, by scarcely perceptible development and increasing simplification, to the second way in which the eighteenth-century English saw their society, which was as broken up into three collective groups. Once again, there were ample precedents. There was Aristotle's ‘virtuous social middle’, moderately placed between the two extremes, thereby holding society together; and there were the three functionally distinct yet interdependent medieval estates, consisting of those who prayed, those who fought, and those who worked, an arrangement which was regarded as ‘part of the original design of the universe, the immutable structure of society.¹⁸ By the early modern period, this vision of society had become increasingly secularised, and by the second half of the seventeenth century, the three medieval orders had been superseded as collective categories by ‘sorts’, or by ‘ranks’, a word shared with the hierarchical model.¹⁹ It was to this model that Gregory King resorted, when he offered Robert Harley a much simpler taxonomy than his twenty-six ranks and degrees, which consisted of the ‘poorest sort’, the ‘middle sort’ and the ‘better sort’. Daniel Defoe, modifying his seven categories, settled for the ‘labouring sort’, the ‘middling sort’ and the ‘landowning sort’. In 1753, The Protester wrote of ‘the middling ranks of the people’, and William Thornton distingushed between ‘the middling ranks of this kingdom’ and the ‘higher class’.²⁰

Self-evidently, this idealised division of English society into three distinct and discrete categories into which everybody – again, literally, everybody – could be fitted was as much an over-simplified image as the hierarchical model, to which it was on occasions preferred, albeit in rather a different way. As William Thornton's words suggest, by the third quarter of the eighteenth century, this triadic picture of the Hanoverian social order was not only being articulated in the vocabulary of ‘ranks’ or ‘sorts’ (or, occasionally, ‘sets’): it was also being described in the language of ‘class’, a word which, like ‘rank’, was common to both the hierarchical and the three-layer models. An early and idiosyncratic anticipation of this was to be found in the Spectator in 1712, when ‘Hotspur’ allocated women into three ‘distinct and proper classes’, as ‘the ape, the coquette and the devotee’. More conventionally, Samuel Richardson employed the phrase ‘the middling class’ in Clarissa as early as 1748. Almost ten years later, Joseph Massie, who reflected contemporary usage in mixing up the language of rank, degree and class, modified his seven socio-occupational groups into ‘gentlemen’ and ‘middling and inferior classes’. And in 1777, Josiah Wedgwood wrote of the importance of selling his goods to ‘the middling class of people, which class we know are vastly, I had almost said, infinitely, superior in number to the great’.²¹

Since medieval times, and especially since the Civil War, there had also been available a third model of English society, the most simplified of all, which assumed that there was one single, deep division, in which people were polarised between high and low, the few and the many, gentlemen and non-gentlemen, superior and inferior, polite and common, learned and ignorant, rich and poor, nobility and commoner, ‘laced waistcoats’ and ‘leather aprons’, and so on.²² As this varied vocabulary suggests, there were many different ways in which the population could be divided into these two unequal sections. In the most simplified version of his tables, Gregory King distinguished between those who were increasing the wealth of the nation, and those who were lessening it. Here the criterion was economic. In Norwich, there was a service of thanksgiving to celebrate the failure of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, and it was attended by two segments of society: ‘the nobility and gentry’ and ‘multitudes of people of low life’. Here the criterion was prestige. And Thomas Bewick did not enjoy London because the metropolis was so sharply divided – from one perspective (financial) between ‘extreme riches’ and ‘extreme poverty’, from another (status) between ‘extreme grandeur’ and ‘extreme wretchedness’.²³

Like sheep and goats, or the saved and the damned, or ‘one half of the world’ against (or ignorant of) ‘the other half, this was a powerful and potentially adversarial model of a deeply riven society, which was held together neither by the individualised relationships of an elaborately ranked and classified hierarchy, nor by the middle class who bridged the social gap between those above and those beneath. As Henry Fielding made Jonathan Wild observe, this appeared in some ways the ‘great division’, between those who used their own hands, and those who used the hands of others, and it was often represented as a polarity between ‘the common sort of people’ on one side, and ‘the better sort of inhabitants’, on the other.²⁴ At the time of Walpole's ill-fated Excise scheme, the London Evening Post opined that ‘the sense of the people’ was against ‘the promotors’ of the measure. And in 1741, at Wymondham in Norfolk, the rejoicing at Admiral Vernon's victories over the Spanish was an expression of ‘the general sense and free act of the People, being in no way promoted by any leading gentleman’. But this dichotomous vision could also be inverted, as by Jonas Hanway who, in 1772, published his dismissive and hostile Observations on the Causes of the Dissolution which Reigns among the Lower Classes of the People.²⁵

Hanway's choice of words and blending of vocabularies is as instructive as William Thornton's. For as with the hierarchical and the tripartite models, this polarised picture of Hanoverian society was also being articulated by the second half of the eighteenth century in the language of classes. César de Saussure divided the English into ‘the lower classes’, who he claimed got drunk in the daytime on liquor and beer, and ‘the higher classes’, who he thought preferred to get drunk at night on port and punch. More seriously, and more subversively, John Wilkes distinguished in the 1760s between ‘all peers and gentlemen’ on one side, and ‘the middling and inferior class of the people’ on the other, in a manner which anticipated E.P. Thompson's subsequent formulation of ‘patricians’ and ‘plebs’, and he made it plain whose side he was on.²⁶ And in his novel The History of Sandford and Merton, Thomas Day drew yet another single line across the complexities of English society, when he put these words into the mouth of one of his characters: ‘Gentlemen in your situation in life are accustomed to divide the world into two general classes – those who are persons of fashion, and those who are not.’ These were arresting and appealing antitheses: but if three categories were an idealisation, then how much more was this true of two?

These, then, were the three basic, vernacular models of eighteenth-century English society, as they were of Montpellier in the 1760s: the hierarchical, the triadic and the dichotomous. Of these, the hierarchical was undoubtedly the most appealing, and the one against which the other two were propounded as alternatives. Inevitably, all of them were over-simplifications, albeit in different ways, of a complex social structure, which was gradually becoming ever more complex, and they were expressed in a range of vocabularies so varied as to lend ample support to Dr Johnson's lament about ‘the boundless chaos of living speech’. But while each model had its own richly specific language, there were also some words which were increasingly common to all three. The language of ranks, orders and degree, although nowadays most readily associated with the hierarchical vision of society, was by this time also used to describe the two- and three-layer models. And so, as Dr Johnson himself recognised, was the vocabulary of class. In his Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, he recognised two very different meanings of the word: one individualist and hierarchical, the other collective. His initial definition of ‘class’ was ‘rank or order of persons’. But he also recognised its alternative use: ‘a set of beings or things, a number arranged in distribution, under some common denomination’.²⁷

Already, then, by the third quarter of the eighteenth century, the language of class was being so widely and indiscriminately used in England that it was impossible to infer from the word itself which model of society was being alluded to. When James Nelson noted in 1753 that ‘every nation has its custom of dividing people into classes’, he was clearly using the word to refer to a variety of different models, as his own subsequent analysis, which was very eclectic and confused, served to show.²⁸ Nor is this the only problem. For the model chosen, and the picture of society it conveyed, often tell us as much about the perspective and position of the beholder as they do about the society he was beholding. Anglican clergymen and Tories like Samuel Johnson were enamoured of the hierarchical view of society, and of the divinely ordained subordination of some individuals to others. Likewise, Gregory King was a herald, a Stuart sympathiser, an admirer of the traditional, landed world, and it is scarcely coincidence that he substantially underestimated the numbers and incomes of the ‘middle ranks’ in his social survey. Daniel Defoe, by contrast, preferred the triadic model, regarding the mercantile classes as the leaders of the nation, and gave them approving prominence in his writings. So did Oliver Goldsmith, who claimed that ‘in this middle order of mankind are generally to be found all the arts, wisdom and virtues of society’, and that they were ‘the true pre-servers of freedom’.²⁹

As these examples of Defoe and Goldsmith suggest, those who embraced the three-stage model of English society almost invariably belonged to what they saw as the ‘middle’ part of it, and they were often trying to make the case that these people were ‘free from the vices of the highest and lowest part of mankind’, and were thus entitled to a greater say in the affairs of the country than they at present enjoyed. In short, they were deploying the triadic model, not as an objective description of the social order, but as a way of constructing and proclaiming favourable ideological and sociological stereotypes of those in the middle.³⁰ When William Beckford offered a very capacious definition of the ‘middling people’ as encompassing gentry, financiers, merchants, manufacturers, shopkeepers and yeomen, he was wanting to make the political point that they were very numerous and very admirable.³¹ And when William Thornton drew the contrast between ‘the public spirit of persons in the middling ranks of this kingdom’ and ‘the depravity of those in a higher class’ (note, incidentally, the familiar mixture of languages), he was doing very much the same thing: asserting, in a wholly unverifiable manner, the virtues of one ‘rank’ or ‘class’ at the expense of another.³² In essence, these were collective social groups as ‘imagined communities’: partly in the sense that no one actually knew just how many of them there were, but also because claims were being made about their moral qualities and modes of behaviour which were selective, exaggerated and unverifiable.

We shall encounter many more instances of this middle-class ideological stereotyping in the years after the 1780s: but this activity was never confined to those who saw society in triadic terms, and from the vantage point of the middle. In the same way, and as some of the examples already given suggest, those who embraced the binary model of society, and who were on the side of ‘the people’ invariably stressed that they were virtuous, respectable, independent, and predominantly consisted of the ‘middling sorts’ – as in Day's Sandford and Merton, where he inveighed, on behalf of the patriotic majority, against those he saw as the selfish, Frenchified, effete upper classes.³³ Once again, this was largely a rhetorical ploy: of which much more was to be heard during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And it often provoked the predictable counter-assertion from those at the top that, on the contrary, it was they who were virtuous, decent, public-spirited and high-minded, compared with whom ‘the people’ were merely ‘the rabble’ or ‘the mob’, drawn from the ‘lower sorts’ rather than from the ‘middling sorts’, whose views were of no significance whatsoever. Either way, these were unquantifiable numbers of people with unverifiable modes of behaviour: collective groups which existed more in the eye of the beholder than in social reality.³⁴

The two- and three-stage models were thus alternative accounts of eighteenth-century English society, not just in the sense that they described it collectively rather than individually, but also in that they were either latently or explicitly anti-hierarchical. Similar ambiguities emerge in the contemporary debate over who was or was not a gentleman. To the believers in the hierarchical model, he was a landowner, with a coat of arms: the direct descendant of the classical and renaissance ideal type, renowned for his courage, chivalry, generosity, hospitality and sense of duty.³⁵ To the believers in the tripartite model, it was more complex. Professional men liked to think of themselves as gentlemen, and this was increasingly the case. But those in trade or business or manufacturing were not so sure. Some wanted to claim that they were genteel: ‘town gentry’ if not necessarily ‘country gentry’. But as Defoe discovered, this was not always accepted: the ‘born gentleman’ and the ‘bred gentleman’ were ‘two sorts or classes of men’ obviously different.³⁶ In the case of the dichotomous model, there was a clear choice. Those on the top were by definition gentlemen – provided those beneath were morally or culturally or financially inferior. But if the upper class was depicted as selfish, effete and Frenchified, then the gentlemen were more likely to be on the other side. As so often, it very much depended on context, circumstance, point of view and polemical (or political) purpose.³⁷

In their purest forms, these three models clearly conveyed very different pictures of society, and their political and confrontational implications were to become increasingly apparent during the years after 1776 and 1789. But for most of the eighteenth century, contemporaries were willing and able to meld and merge them one into another, and to move backwards and forwards between them. Since the hierarchical model tailed off after the gentry, it could be easily elided into the dichotomous picture of society: the élite versus the people.³⁸ If the middle classes, who featured so prominently in the triadic model, were broken down into separate professions, they could be incorporated into the individualised ladder of ranks and orders. Alternatively, they could be divided into two, with the richer and more important attached to the landed establishment, while the rest went with the majority of the population, thereby returning to the binary model again.³⁹ And these sociological meldings and taxonomical glissades were made increasingly easy as the languages of ranks and of class were used interchangeably for all three of the prevailing models of society. The result was that whichever model they used, and for whatever purposes, most people did know what their place was in Hanoverian society. And it can hardly be coincidence that it is these same three models of eighteenth-century England to which historians have been drawn – most of them seemingly unaware that they are reproducing contemporary social descriptions which never amounted to ‘real social knowledge’.

II. British Social Worlds

Geographically, politically, socially and imaginatively, eighteenth-century Britain was a larger place than eighteenth-century England, spreading across the seas and half way around the globe. Contemporaries were well aware that they belonged to a dynamic and expanding society of diverse regions and multiple identities. But it is only recently that historians have begun to appreciate the archipelagic and transatlantic elements of this larger realm, and have started to explore the ways in which different parts of it were converging and coming together, and also the ways in which they remained (and were becoming) unalike. In terms of connections and convergences, Wales and England have been linked since Tudor times, while Scotland and England have shared the same crown since 1603 and the same legislature since 1707. Ireland recognised a common sovereign, was tied to Britain by the Protestant ascendancy, and was incorporated into the United Kingdom in 1801. And the British colonies across the Atlantic were not only subordinate to the king in parliament; they also absorbed hundreds of thousands of emigrants from the mother country during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. All were subjects of the same sovereign; most thought of themselves as Britons.

Yet there were also many significant variations within and between the constituent societies of this pan-British community. Geographically, they were very different: large parts of Ireland, Scotland and Wales were rugged and remote, with high mountains and thin soils; and the transatlantic colonies encompassed a wide range of landscape and climate. Economically, their performance varied: the American colonies were generally more prosperous places than England, while the countries of the ‘Celtic fringe’ were noticeably less so. Historically, they were of differing antiquity: Wales and Scotland boasted pasts as lengthy as England's; so did Ireland, but it had acquired a new landowning élite in the seventeenth century; and the American colonies had only been settled relatively recently by Britons. Numerically, they had separate histories: people were much more thinly spread on the land in Wales, Scotland and Ireland than in England; and while this was also true of the transatlantic colonies, population grew more rapidly on the American mainland than it did in England between the 1700s and the 1770s. Culturally, linguistically and ethnically, there were greater variations: the majority of the Irish population was Catholic; in Wales and Scotland, there were many who could not read or write or talk in English; and in the colonies, there were black slaves, native Americans, and immigrants descended from other European nationalities, as well as those of authentically British stock.

In colonial America, as in Georgian England, the traditional way of conceiving and describing the people was hierarchical. As in England, this model of society was specially favoured by clergymen, lawyers and those at the top of the ladder, all of whom accepted that this was the ideal, God-given state of affairs. In 1700, the Boston merchant John Saffin opined that God ‘hath ordained different degrees and orders of men, some to be high and honourable, some to be low and despicable, some to be monarchs, kings, princes and governors, masters and commanders, others to be subjects and to be commanded; servants of sundry sorts and degrees, bound to obey; yea, some born to be slaves, and so to remain during their lives’. ‘There is’, agreed Jonathan Edwards later in the century, ‘a beauty of order in society, as when the different members… have all their appointed offices, place and station.’ Thus regarded, the hierarchy of monarchical society, successfully transported and transplanted across the Atlantic ocean, was part of the great chain of existence that ordered the entire universe, part of what John Adams called that ‘regular and uniform subordination of one tribe to another down to the apparently insignificant animalcules in pepper water’.⁴¹

Like the English imperial metropolis, colonial America was a monarchical culture, and a title-conscious place, with ‘a prestige order which corresponded roughly with economic rank order’. Esquire, Gent., Master and Honourable were regularly but sparingly used, for those of great wealth, high political or civic office, broad-acred estates, or superior education, and titles in the militia were also important designations of status in an ordered system of dignity, honour and obligation. Cadwallader Colden noted that New Yorkers were divided into different ‘ranks’, beginning with the great proprietors owning over 100,000 acres; in New Jersey, Philip Fithian thought it was dominated by ‘gentlemen in the first rank of dignity and quality’; and visitors were much struck by the ‘great disproportion and distinction of ranks and fortunes’ from Maryland down to South Carolina.⁴² Throughout the colonies, church pews were assigned on the basis of the social position of the family head, and entering students at Harvard and Yale were ranked according to the standing of their parents. So great was this concern with status that several colonial families obtained grants of coats of arms from the English College of Arms during the third quarter of the century, and there were requests for a colonial peerage, to establish a ‘complete’ social hierarchy on the British model.⁴³

But as this abortive proposal suggests, the lack of a resident monarch, of a titular aristocracy, and of the legal recognition of the attributes of nobility, combined with the presence of indentured servants and black slaves, meant that the hierarchy in colonial America was significantly different from the English model. As Colden pointed out, rich merchants and broad-acred planters were often of obscure and undistinguished ancestry: ‘the most opulent families, in our own memory, have risen from the lowest ranks of people’, and at the other end of the scale, there was a ‘great interval between poor whites and indentured servants and negro slaves.⁴⁴ This led many observers, both colonial and English, to conclude that by the standards of contemporary Europe, it was the lack of a fully articulated hierarchy which was most remarkable. ‘All mortifying distinctions of rank’, observed a British official in 1760, ‘are lost in common equality’, while Henry Hulton believed ‘the spirit of equality’ prevailed throughout Massachusetts, where they ‘have no notion of rank or distinction’.⁴⁵ These were clearly exaggerations. But compared with the extensive English language of hierarchy, it is easy to see why some chose to describe colonial America in these terms.

The fact that ‘rank of birth’ was generally ‘not recognised’, and that there were ‘no such things as orders, ranks and nobility’, meant that alternative models of social description were popular and well developed. In America as across the Atlantic, there was the three-stage model, often expressed in the language of sorts: usually ‘the better sort’, ‘the middling sort’ and ‘the meaner sort’. This was widely and imaginatively used, as when the Virginian Edward Stevens wrote of ‘the Rich’, ‘the middling kind’ and ‘the lower sort’. By the middle of the century, in America as in England, ‘class’ was being employed in addition to ‘sorts’: a New York auctioneer felt able to describe the goods he sold as coming from ‘first, middling and lower classes of householders’.⁴⁶ In England, the tripartite model of ‘sorts’ and ‘classes’ was especially popular among those who belonged to the middle class, or who wished to assert their growing importance, and in colonial America, where the upper class was neither titled nor aristocratic, and where the lower class was indentured or slave, the significance of the middle class was correspondingly greater. Indeed, some were already claiming that the thirteen colonies were almost wholly middle-class, like the Pennsylvania Journal in 1756, which opined that ‘the people of this province are generally of the middling sort, and at present pretty much upon a level. They are chiefly industrious farmers, artificers or men in trade;… and the meanest among them thinks he has a right to civility from the greatest.’⁴⁷

The third model of colonial American society was the binary distinction, which rejected the picture built around a pre-eminent middle class, and which became more widespread and more inflected with adversarial implications, as the century advanced. In 1693, Samuel White contrasted ‘persons of mean and low degree’ with ‘persons of good parentage, education, ability and integrity’. ‘In a little time’, one observer remarked apocalyptically in 1736, there would be ‘no middling sort’. ‘We shall have a few, and but a very few Lords, and all the rest beggars.’ ‘Rapidly are you dividing’, wrote ‘Brutus’ half a century later, ‘into two classes – extreme rich and extreme poor.’⁴⁸ in England, the biggest difference was between those who were regarded as genteel and those who were common, between those who wore the periwig and those who did not, between those who rode horses and those who did not. ‘We were accustomed’, Devereaux Jarrett recalled, ‘to look upon what were called gentle folks as beings of a superior order.’ But there were also specific local variations: between king and people; between those who were independent and those who were dependent; and between those who were free and those who were slaves. In colonial America, these ‘absolute antitheses’ were very popular.⁴⁹

As in Hanoverian England, so in colonial America, these were three distinct accounts of the social order which in practice were elided one into the other: the hierarchical into patricians and plebs, patricians and plebs into one predominantly middle-class whole.⁵⁰ As in England, they were articulated in languages which were sometimes specific to each model, but which were sometimes expressed in the shared vocabularies of ranks or classes. As in England, the hierarchical model was generally preferred by those at the top; the tripartite by those in the middle; and the binary by those concerned with (or, sometimes, fearful of) ordinary people's rights. As in England, these three models have been taken up by different schools of colonial American historians, whose interpretations closely (though not always consciously) mimic those of contemporaries.⁵¹ How much attention does the hierarchical account pay to social change? Who exactly was a gentleman?⁵² How are the middle classes defined, and who belonged to them? Where is the bourgeoisie in the dichotomous model? Was colonial America on the eve of the revolution becoming more hierarchical, more middle-class, or more divided between patricians and plebs? The answers depend on which contemporary (or which historian) you read.⁵³

Not surprisingly, contemporary descriptions of the social structures of the Celtic fringe sometimes drew comparisons with the thirteen American colonies or with England. But since they were to a considerable degree in the eye of the beholder, they did not always yield the same insights or results. In 1772, for instance, Benjamin Franklin made a tour of Ireland and Scotland, where he was impressed by the state of ‘landlords, great noblemen and gentlemen, extremely opulent, living in the highest affluence and magnificence’. But he was also appalled by the straitened condition of ‘the bulk of the people’, who were ‘tenants, extremely poor, living in the most sordid wretchedness, in dirty hovels of mud and straw, and clothed only in rags’. How different this starkly polarised society seemed to him from ‘the happiness of New England, where every man is a freeholder, has a vote in public affairs, lives in a tidy warm house, has plenty of good food and fuel, with whole clothes from head to foot’. For Franklin, the problem with Scotland and Ireland was that they were deeply riven societies, lacking the ample, prosperous and unifying middle class which was the very essence of colonial America.

Yet at almost the same time, after making their visits to Scotland, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson drew exactly the opposite conclusions from those which Franklin had reached. As a Tory who believed in the importance of tradition and hierarchy, Boswell regretted that the spirit of ‘shocking familiarity’ was now pervasive between what had previously been the different ranks of men. And for similar reasons, Johnson feared that ‘money confounds subordination by overpowering the distinction of rank and birth’. There had been, he later lamented, ‘a general relaxation of reverence’.⁵⁴ For Boswell and Johnson, then, the problem with Scottish society was not that there was a large gap between those at the top and those at the bottom, but that that gap had narrowed almost to the point of disappearance. From their perspective, everyone seemed to be increasingly alike, and living on the same level, with the extremes of rank and fortune much diminished. Theirs was a description of Scottish society as unlike that of Franklin's as it was possible to imagine. About the only thing the three of them seem to have agreed upon was that hierarchy was conspicuous by its absence. But in rejecting that model of Scottish society, they were almost certainly in serious error.

For there were many on the Celtic fringe who believed their societies were traditional, rurally based, divinely ordained hierarchies of degrees, orders and classes, which were based on esteem, prestige and inherited position – views which, as in England, dated back to medieval times.⁵⁵ The vocabulary of nobility and subordination pervaded the reference books on the Scottish and Irish peerages, while Welsh landowners were renowned for their obsessive interest in ‘pedigree and pride’. As in England, clergymen preached the need for pious acceptance of one's God-given station in life, and spoke the language of ‘ranks and conditions’. In the counties, subscription lists to books reflected the precise gradations of the local social ladder: the titled, esquires, gentlemen, higher clergy, parish clergy, and so on down the scale.⁵⁶ Nor was this vision of society confined to those at the top of it. In Anglesey, the Morris brothers set great store by such social niceties, and Lewis Morris was notorious for his snobbish obsession with rank and title. And in Scotland, in 1727, James Johnston, a cooper of Liberton, gave instructions in his will that his body was to be decently interred in the parish churchyard ‘according to my rank and degree’. This was a standard burial custom – based on a standard social perception.⁵⁷

Indeed, many of the foremost writers of the Scottish Enlightenment, although preoccupied with the virtues and dangers of the new, commercial society that was evolving in Edinburgh, were of an essentially traditional and hierarchical caste of mind, saw their society from this perspective, and gave expression to it in their use of the language of order and degree. Like his near-contemporary Samuel Johnson, David Hume believed in the importance of ‘birth, rank and station’ as the proper way of organising society, and feared ‘the mischiefs consequent to an abolition of all rank and distinction’.⁵⁸ In his Essay on the History of Civil Society, Adam Ferguson used the words ‘orders’, ‘ranks’ and ‘classes’ interchangeably, and made plain his belief in the importance of hierarchy: ‘the object of every rank is precedency’. In a similar manner, and for similar purposes, James Millar devoted an entire book to Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks. And Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is shot through with the same hierarchical view of society. ‘Birth and fortune’, he observed, were ‘the two circumstances which principally set one man above another’. They were, he believed, ‘the two great sources of personal distinction’, and they naturally established ‘authority and subordination among men’.⁵⁹

Yet while Celtic society was often viewed in this conventionally hierar- way, this mode of perception was qualified by the fact that none of these hierarchies was as complex nor as deeply rooted as in the original English model. In Ireland, the landed class was descended from alien, Scots-English military adventurers, who had only established themselves in the second half of the seventeenth century. As such it lacked venerable legitimation and autochthonous credibility, and since many of the landlords were absentee, it was widely believed that the resident hierarchy was much depleted at the top.⁶⁰ In Wales, the territorial élite was authentically venerable, but the great magnates were few and far between, and they tended, like the duke of Beaufort, to be absentee. And because of the severe demographic crisis, many estates passed by marriage to distant, non-Welsh owners, which further depleted the resident hierarchy. In Scotland, the traditional clan system was visibly disintegrating (hence Boswell and Johnson's remarks); in the aftermath of the Act of Union of 1707 grandees such as the dukes of Argyll and of Hamilton left for London; and as a result of the 1745 rebellion, many highland titles and estates were for a time forfeit. Here, as in Wales and Ireland, the extended hierarchy which was supposed to exist according to the vocabulary of ranks and orders was in practice incomplete.

Many conservative commentators and local patriots lamented what they regarded as this hierarchical shortfall. In Wales, writers like Ellis Wynne and John Byng described empty, crumbling mansions, their owners having departed for England, and yearned for the halcyon days of ‘the men that once were’. In Ireland, Thomas Prior produced his famous (and exaggerated) List of Absentees, which went through seven editions between 1729 and 1783, and observers like William King regretted that ‘no very topping noblemen or gentlemen’ were to be found in his neighbourhood. In Scotland, David Hume lamented that ‘we have lost our princes, our parliaments, our independent government, even the presence of our chief nobility’.⁶¹ Undoubtedly, there was truth in all of these claims. But to an even greater extent than the inflated accounts of the virtue and importance of the English middle class, these descriptions of incomplete Celtic hierarchies were examples of special sociological (and political) pleading. Those who regretted Irish landlords’ absenteeism, or the demise of the ‘ancient gentry’ in Wales, or the departure of Scottish grandees south of the border, undoubtedly exaggerated the incompleteness of their indigenous hierarchies as a way of protesting at the increasing dominance (and allure) of England and of London.⁶²

The traditional social picture of hierarchy was thus important and widespread in Scotland, Wales and Ireland, even though there was disagreement as to the nature and extent of that hierarchy. By contrast, the tripartite model of ‘sorts’ or ‘ranks’ or ‘classes’ was less in evidence than in England or colonial America, appropriately enough because those in the middle who were most inclined to use it were themselves less in evidence. In the Scottish Highlands, there were those who divided society between the clan chiefs and their families, the ‘tacksmen’ or middlemen, and the ‘lower rank of tenants and cottars’.⁶³ In Edinburgh, David Hume modified his hierarchical view of society by suggesting a tripartite alternative, the most important element of which was ‘the middling rank of men’, who came between ‘gentlemen who have some fortune and education’, and the ‘meanest, slaving poor’. Notwithstanding his belief in hierarchy, Hume was enthusiastic about the growth of the commercial, self-supporting ‘middling rank’, but like many men of similar views in England and America, he was not always clear or consistent in his descriptions of this group. Later luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment were more equivocal about the growth of the middle class than Hume, most famously Adam Smith. For while he was prepared to acclaim the probity and propriety of the ‘middling sorts’, he was increasingly concerned by the development of their excessive, self-interested, monopolistic affluence and influence.⁶⁴

In Ireland, the tripartite model of society was even less in use, although there were abundant medieval precedents. Except in the case of the Dublin merchant community, which was the only large group of middling men in the country, it was rarely employed in a confident or favourable way. On the contrary, it was more likely to be resorted to by those at the top of the social hierarchy to disparage the standing of those immediately beneath, especially the ‘middlemen’ who came between the landlord and his tenants. These were the people the earl of Kenmare had in mind when he denounced ‘the pride, drunkenness and sloth of the middling sort among the Irish’ – a nice reversal of the English (or colonial American) mode, which was much more inclined to exaggerate the same ‘sort‘s’ virtues. Arthur Young, who got most of his opinions on the subject from the Irish gentry, and who probably invented the term ‘middleman’, was no less critical.⁶⁵ Here was the use of the triadic picture of society for negative rather than positive stereotyping of those in the middle. In Wales, by contrast, this model seems to have been scarcely used at all (though, again, it had been in existence since medieval times), whether for negative or positive purposes. It is easy to see why. Of the five constituent parts of the greater British world, this was the one where the ‘middling sorts’ were least in evidence.⁶⁶

This brings us back to Benjamin Franklin's view, which many contemporaries shared, that the social structures of Wales, Scotland and Ireland were best understood in polarised terms. According to one English visitor to Ireland, there was ‘no middle rank between the great man and the beggar’, and it was widely believed that Irish society was divided between ‘the landlords’ and ‘the ordinary sort’, or ‘the poor’. It was the same in Wales. In Cardiganshire, in 1684, a distinction was drawn between ‘the rich’, who were ‘happy and high’, and ‘the vulgar’, who were ‘most miserable and low’, and ‘both to an extreme’. Sixty years later, in Glamorgan, there was still the same division, between ‘gentlemen’ and ‘the meaner sort’.⁶⁷ In Scotland, Forbes's Almanack separated ‘noblemen, gentlemen, merchants and others’, from ‘the vulgar’, while Adam Ferguson drew the line between ‘the superior’ and ‘the lower classes of men’. Adam Smith distinguished between ‘the rich and the great’ and the ‘poor and mean’ – or, in another formulation, between ‘a man of rank and fortune’ and ‘a man of low condition’. And he described Ireland in similar terms, as inhabited by superior and inferior ‘ranks of people’, by ‘the oppressors and the oppressed’, and by ‘the protestants and the papists’, whom he saw (as if in partial anticipation of Benjamin Disraeli) as ‘two hostile nations’.⁶⁸

For as this last quotation implies, these binary divisions and dichotomous identities were not just a replication of the Anglo-American pattern. They were also reinforced and reconfigured by local circumstances, which were the product of history, culture, religion and geography, and which were played out differently in each of the three nations. In Wales, the distinction between ‘patricians’ and ‘plebeians’ was accentuated by that between the native inhabitants who spoke Welsh, and the élite which was becoming increasingly Anglicised. During the eighteenth century, English became ‘the genteel and fashionable tongue’, while Welsh was dismissed as ‘a poor, anonymous tongue’, as ‘an incoherent jargon’, as the language of ‘brutes’. In Ireland, the same social division was initially reinforced by the division between those indigenous inhabitants who saw themelves as ‘Irish’ and the newcomers whom they dismissed as ‘English’. But as Adam Smith noted, this was gradually replaced by the more significant distinction between those who were ‘Papists’ and those who were members of the ‘Protestant Ascendancy’, a phrase first coined in the 1780s, but a concept current long before.⁶⁹ In Scotland, by contrast, the horizontal gulf was undermined, rather than reinforced, by the division between the Highlands and the Lowlands, a distinction which was not just a function of geography, but also of culture, with the clans, Catholicism and Gaelic on the one side, and a modernising, Anglicised, urbanised world on the other.

Inevitably, there was a considerable degree of over-simplification about these particular ways of dividing up Celtic society, just as there was with the more familiar Anglo-American descriptions and identities which they usually reinforced but sometimes undermined. In Wales, there were squires who continued to speak the native language, especially in those parts more remote from the English border. In Ireland it was not always the case that ‘patricians’ could be elided into Protestants and ‘plebs’ into Catholics: some Catholic landowners managed to survive; there were middle-class Protestants in Dublin, Cork and Waterford; and in Ulster, the majority of the population was neither Catholic nor Anglican, but Presbyterian. In Scotland, the social identities evolved in the Lowlands had more in common with England, whereas those of the Highlands in some ways more closely resembled Ireland. It was all very complex: more complex than in the case of Hanoverian England or colonial America. No wonder that Franklin and Boswell and Johnson did not see or did not understand everything, and did not agree about what they had seen.

But notwithstanding these local variations (and there were doubtless more than have been mentioned here), the general picture seems clear, and it is that which we need to keep in mind. In Wales, Scotland and Ireland, the same models of society were available as in Hanoverian England and colonial America: the hierarchical, the three-layered and the polarised. As in Hanoverian England and colonial America, historians have been drawn to the identical three models, most of them unaware that they have been replicating and reproducing them.⁷⁰ And as in Hanoverian England and colonial America, contemporaries were able to move from the hierarchical to the dichotomous model of their society with relative ease. Of course, there were differences: there were specialised vocabularies for Ireland, Scotland and Wales, just as there were for America; the triadic model of society seems to have been less well developed on the Celtic fringe than in England or the thirteen colonies; and the language of class also seems to have been less in evidence with regard to all three models. Nevertheless, this greater British world was remarkably consistent in the models contemporaries used to describe the social structure of its constituent parts. And the result was that, whatever description they used, most people knew their place. As one Irishman explained, this was something which ‘no one was clear in, but which everyone understood’.⁷¹

III. Social Life and Social Perceptions

Indeed, this phrase may be taken as applying more broadly to the whole of the greater eighteenth-century British world. For notwithstanding the local variations in social structures and the accompanying models of society, both within the British Isles and across the Atlantic, contemporaries moved back and forth between the hierarchical, the triadic and the polarised models with relative ease and widespread comprehensibility. But this merely raises another question. For how were they able to acquire, maintain, articulate and communicate these multiple yet generally reconcilable perceptions of themselves and the world on the basis of their actions and experiences as homines economici, as social beings or as political participants? Then as now, social models and social vocabularies existed and evolved to facilitate not only social understanding but also the living of interactive lives. How, then, was it possible for Hanoverian Britons to conclude, on the basis of their getting and spending, their social relationships, or their involvement in politics, that the society to which they belonged and in which they lived was best understood as a ladder of ranks or classes, or as three layers of ‘sorts’ or ‘classes’, or as divided between ‘the great’ and ‘the people’ or the ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ classes, or as a constantly changing mixture and meld of different bits of all three?

No one in the eighteenth century denied that the distribution of wealth in the greater British world was manifestly unequal, ranging from dukes with incomes well in excess of £10,000 a year to poor labourers getting by on £10 or less.⁷² But there were different ways in which this economic inequality was socially envisaged. One way of seeing it was as an infinity of gradations extending from the very rich to the very poor, as a hierarchy of property and income which closely corresponded to, and helped reinforce, the hierarchy of social prestige: dukes were generally richer than barons, merchants than manufacturers, shopkeepers than artisans, skilled workers than labourers, servants than paupers. A second approach was to recognise three social groups on the basis of wealth and work: landowners; those in services, finance, the professions and industry; and those with more humble occupations. Hence the tripartite model, which was especially appropriate for an economy which boasted the largest non-agricultural sector in Europe.⁷³ Or again, it was possible to envisage the structure of wealth as being divided along a single, elemental fault line, which underscored many of the binary social divisions: between what Adam Smith described as ‘those who have some property against those who have nothing at all’.⁷⁴ Not surprisingly, perceptions of the distribution of wealth, and perceptions of the social forms to which it gave rise, were closely interconnected.

These prevailing models of social description also resonated differently in the country and the town: for rural and urban society were not necessarily envisaged in the same way. Self-evidently, it was easiest to observe the ordered, traditional hierarchy of rank and degree in the countryside, where it had originated and where it still retained much of its credibility. Yet it was also in many parts of the countryside that the great gulf between those who owned landed property and those who did not was most striking: hence the easy transition, in the rural world, from the hierarchical to the dichotomous model. But this was only part of the picture. For eighteenth-century England was also the most urbanised nation in Europe, and there were large and growing metropolitan agglomerations elsewhere in the greater British world.⁷⁵ In London and Edinburgh, Dublin and Glasgow, Boston and Philadelphia, Norwich and Bristol, men and women were thrown together in their tens of thousands and sometimes in their hundreds of thousands. This was a totally different society: crowded, tumultuous, rootless, mobile, restless, sometimes segregated, sometimes not, where the customary models of hierarchy offered at best an inadequate and outdated guide to the social landscape.⁷⁶ It was necessary to find other ways of envisioning and explaining this fluid society, which is why it was in the towns and the cities that the tripartite model most vigorously evolved, and that the binary model of social division acquired a new, specific and keener articulation.

Notwithstanding party divisions and loyalties, politics also derived from and helped reinforce conventional ideas of social structure and social identity. It was commonly recognised that political activity and political influence were hierarchically determined: the further up the social scale one went, the greater the degree of involvement in elections, government and administration, and the more substantial the amount of power wielded over others.⁷⁷ But politics could also be convincingly explained in terms of the increasingly popular tripartite social categories. The upper classes influenced or controlled many constituencies, provided most of the parliamentary candidates, monopolised the Commons, the Lords and the cabinet, and governed the country. The ‘middling sorts’ dominated the local oligarchies which governed most towns, were actively involved as voters, canvassers and election agents in constituency politics, and could even exert a certain influence on parliament's legislative agenda. By contrast, the ‘lower orders’ had walk-on parts as rioters, players in crowd scenes and extras. Alternatively, there was the one great divide – between those who were officially involved in the formal political process, who were ‘within the pale of the constitution’, with the necessary property qualifications to vote or hold high public office; and those who were outside, ‘beyond the pale’, who played no formal part whatsoever. Beyond doubt, these were approximate, idealised categories: there were some middle-class MPs, and many people who had the vote were, by various criteria, working class.⁷⁸ But they generally seem to have worked, in that they helped to render political activity socially credible and comprehensible.

Those who made, implemented and encountered the eighteenth-century law were also able to make some sense of it in social terms. In one guise, the legal system reflected and undergirded a stratified society: there were elaborate gradations of courts, assizes and sessions, and complex ranks of judges and justices; and it was often claimed that those who were richer or of higher prestige got better justice and greater courtesy of treatment than those who were poorer or lowlier. From another sociological perspective, the working of the law could more appropriately be understood in triadic terms: the power of the ‘better sorts’ was significantly limited by the laws they themselves made and applied; the prime users and beneficiaries of the legal system were the ‘middling sorts’, as plaintiffs, defendants and jurors; and the majority of criminals were drawn, as they always are, from the ‘meaner sorts’.⁷⁹ But the criminal law (and in Ireland the Penal Laws) could also be seen as an instrument of upper-class rule over the rest of society, since those who made the law and those who implemented it came from the same superior social stratum, since there were special pieces of class-specific legislation like the Game Laws, and since the defence of property was a higher priority than the defence of life.⁸⁰ As with political activity, these were exaggerated accounts: seeing the law as the product of, and a reinforcement to, the hierarchical, or tripartite or dichotomous views of society. But once again, they seemed to make some sense of things.

The same may be said of education, and not only in terms of the characteristics of its institutions, but also in terms of the concepts and categories which it made available to those who were receiving it, which helped them establish their own social identities. Like politics and the law, teaching, learning and literacy were intrinsically hierarchical.⁸¹ There was an elaborate ladder of places of learning, from Oxford and Cambridge Universities, via Eton and Harrow, Manchester and Leeds Grammar Schools, to the humblest parish school. The higher up the social scale, the better, the longer and the more expensive the education that was available. And this could also be understood in a more simplified (indeed, over-simplified) way, as a three-tier sytem, in which people from three basic social backgrounds went to three basic types of institution: public schools and Oxbridge for the aristocracy and gentry, grammar schools and professional training for the middle classes, and parish schools (or nothing) for the rest.⁸² There was also the more fundamental division: between those who had a university degree and those who did not, or between those who were ‘educated’ and those who were not, or between those who were literate and those who were not. And however education was envisaged in social-structural terms, its purpose was more to teach people their place than to give them opportunities to advance. For education was a religious activity, and religion taught ‘rank, station, duty and decorum’, rather than social ambition or social mobility.

These were some of the ways in which eighteenth-century Britons could make social sense of themselves and their society on the basis of their experiences as workers and wealth-holders, as town or country dwellers, as political activists or spectators, as law-makers and litigants, or as pupils at school or undergraduates at university. Much of this continued to remain true during the nineteenth century, a great deal of it still holds good in Britain today, and throughout the pages which follow, this should be kept constantly in mind. Similar arguments could (and can) also be made with reference to (among other things) health, nutrition, life chances, accent, dress, transport, recreations, the armed services and the church. With equal plausibility, all these varied realms of human activity and social experience could be comprehended and communicated hierarchically, or triadically, or dichotomously, or in ways that moved from one conventional mode of social description and social understanding to another. Thus did social structures, social activities and social vocabularies mutually prop each other up.⁸³ It bears repeating that these social descriptions and social understandings were crude, selective exaggerations. They always were, and always will be. But in this greater British society, they worked, they made sense, and most people understood.

These perceptions, experiences, descriptions and understandings were further underscored by the different ways in which Hanoverian society went public by putting itself ritualistically on display. Throughout the greater British world, hierarchy was constantly being dramatised and the established order made visible. Royal entries, progresses, birthdays, weddings, coronations and funerals provided the most magnificent displays of the formal hierarchy at its most complete and compelling, with elaborate processions in which the careful gradations of status ranking were observed and proclaimed.⁸⁴ From Birmingham to Boston, Manchester to Montreal, there were local celebrations and mimetic observances which replicated order and reaffirmed degree. And it was not only the marking of royal rites of passage which occasioned such vivid hierarchical pageants and processions: in the country, and in some towns, the rites of passage of local notables were observed with similar splendour. The formal entry of the lord lieutenant of Ireland into Dublin, the state opening of parliament, the installation of a university chancellor, the beginning of a new legal term, the processions marking the entry of electoral candidates into their constituencies: all these were opportunities for the pomp and circumstance of order and degree to be made public. And as Britons were confronted by, or participated in, these transcendant social dramas, it must have been easy to believe that this ritualised depiction of social gradations was indeed the real version of the natural order of things.⁸⁵

But for all their claims to transcendence, these processional rituals of state and church, royalty and nobility, superiority and subordination, were not the only versions of the social order which were acted out and theatrically displayed in the greater British world of the eighteenth century. There were alternative ceremonies of social structure, just as there were alternative models.⁸⁶ Many gatherings, whether political or social, formal or informal, deliberately staged or spontaneously acted out, affirmed a very different view of society in which the old, traditional hierarchy was set aside in favour of public displays of middle-class oligarchy and assertiveness. In the large towns and cities, where the social hierarchy was incomplete, urban rituals and civic ceremonials were as likely to exclude as to include those at the very top: mayor-making, saints’ days, assize sermons, and the like. And many of the rituals surrounding bourgeois sociability were equally restrictive: theatres and balls, parks and pleasure gardens, libraries and reading rooms – all welcomed the urban patriciate, while the aristocracy stayed away and the ‘inferior sorts’ were deliberately kept out, by cost, by membership requirements or by direct proscription.⁸⁷ The result was a different version of society from the inclusive procession, which proclaimed instead the dominance of the middle-class civic élite.

There was yet a third way in which the British social structure was represented and its social identities were dramatised which derived from and reinforced the dichotomous vision of things. For riots, protests and demonstrations offered a ritualised version of how society was and ought to be which was adversarial and oppositional rather than hierarchical or consensual. Instead of the deferential acceptance of subordination, or the confident assertion of middle-class identity, ‘the mob’, ‘the crowd’, or ‘the people’ might take to the streets to protest against what were regarded as unacceptable abuses of power by those in authority.⁸⁸ Thus was the binary interpretation of the social order made real and actual – in demonstrations against food-hoarding or turnpikes or the press gang; in opposition to Walpole's Excise scheme or Henry Pelham's ‘Jew Bill’; or in support of Pitt the Elder or John Wilkes. Here was a form of public, collective behaviour characterised by anger, dissent, protest, disaffection and non-acquiesence, by the reassuring (or ominous) claims of solidarity between (to quote John Wilkes again) ‘the middling and inferior class of people’, and by hostility to social superiors, who were depicted and derided as the corrupt, self-interested, self-serving élite.⁸⁹

Be that as it may, in the greater eighteenth-century British world, the models of social stability provided a more realistic guide, and a more powerful imperative, than the competing visions of social conflict or subversion. However much it was challenged, the hierarchical picture generally remained both pervasive and persuasive, and with it the attitudes of subordination and deference which it depended on and proclaimed. By contrast, the triadic description, with its stress on the socially specific nature of middle-class virtue, was rarely the vehicle of serious social grievance or realistic political demands. There may have been sporadic outbursts, as with those ‘middling sorts’ who supported John Wilkes during the 1760s, but they did not amount to anything definite or permanent or socially specific.⁹⁰ And under these circumstances, there was little prospect of the polarised model of society being realised, as distinct from dramatised, with ‘the people’ as a whole rising up in a mass movement, to subvert the established order and overthrow their social superiors. One of the reasons why the greater British world was generally so stable was that with alternative descriptions available, each of which was credible but none of which was entirely comprehensive, and with hierarchy as the most widely accepted, it was difficult to imagine how, or in whose interests, the existing social order might be fundamentally reconstructed.

To be sure, some contemporaries asserted the claims of the middle classes against their betters – of the triadic model of society against the hierarchical. But as other Britons observed, there was in reality no fundamental conflict between land and commerce, upper and middle classes, or between these two ways of looking at society. As Josiah Tucker opined in 1750: ‘these supposed distinctions of landed interest and trading interest are the most idle and silly, as well as false and injurious, that ever divided mankind’. In the same way, the ephemeral protests which publicised and dramatised the dichotomous vision of society, were more usually focussed on single issues or particular individuals than on a thorough-going critique of the social structure which presumed a fundamental division into conflicting collective identities. For British society was not only seen as aristocratic and hierarchical; it was also regarded as bourgeois and triadic, and sometimes as dichotomous and plebeian. It was none of these things separately because it was all of them together.⁹¹ From one perspective, many Britons saw themselves as subjects of a traditional monarchy; from another, they believed they were the citizens of the Venetian republic; from yet a third, there were those who sometimes – but only sometimes – felt alienated and excluded.

For the fact was that ‘the rich’ and ‘the poor’ were not going to come to blows, however much E.P. Thompson later argued (and wished) that they might have done and should have done. As Dr Johnson observed, ‘There is no doubt that, if the poor should reason, “We'll be the poor no longer, we‘ll make the rich take their turn,” they could easily do it, were it not that they can't agree.’⁹² In the end, and as this remark suggests, eighteenth-century Britain was not divided between two homogeneous, easily defined and perennially warring collectivities. Nor (and this was Johnson's second insight) was the nation held down by force: with the exception of the Scottish Highlands in the aftermath of the 'Fifteen and the 'Forty-Five, most people did acquiesce – in what they most often understood as a hierarchical society of ‘ranks’ and ‘classes’, in what they sometimes envisaged as a tripartite society of ‘sorts’ or ‘classes’, and in what they now and then saw as a more polarised society of ‘the great’ and ‘the people’ or the ‘upper’ and the ‘lower’ classes.⁹³ Indeed, the Jacobite risings are very much the exceptions to this which prove the rule: for these protests were not built round collective social identities so much as geographical identities: the Gaelic, Catholic, highland clans in revolt against the modernising world of the south.

With very few exceptions, therefore, eighteenth-century British politics was not concerned with the articulation, assertion or conflict of collective social identities – beyond the usually unstated but accepted recognition that a hierarchical society was the best of all possible social worlds, and that the people at the top of that hierarchy should be left to get on with governing it. Politicians did not talk about or try to create such identities in the way that their successors were to do in the nineteenth and even more in the twentieth centuries. And most people involved in popular protest had no intention of turning what they saw as a time-honoured, providential and credible hierarchy upside down. All of which is merely to say that Richard Pares's by-now venerable remark about Hanoverian England, that ‘the distribution of political power between the classes was barely an issue’, retains much of its validity, not least because while people were sometimes thinking socially in terms of class, either hierarchically or collectively, they were rarely thinking politically in terms of class. This in turn suggests that E.P. Thompson's famous formulation needs modifying to the point of total reversal. Instead of witnessing ‘class struggle without class’, it is probably more correct to observe that eighteenth-century Britain saw class without class struggle.⁹⁴

IV. Creating a Classless Society

This society, seen in these three different but usually reconcilable ways, did not endure indefinitely unchanged and unchallenged, and its transformation in some areas, and its termination in others, were both prefigured in the amazing year of 1776 after which social structures, social perceptions and the greater British world itself were never quite the same again. One reason was the signing of the Declaration of Independence by representatives of the rebellious American colonies – a declaration which contained the ringing affirmation that ‘all men are created equal’.⁹⁵ Of course, it has long been known that the American Revolution was not about equality for everyone, least of all for women or slaves or native Americans: they had a long time to wait and a long way to go. But in the broader British context, it was an exceptionally audacious and subversive notion, serving notice on traditional conceptions of hierarchy and aristocracy, orders and ranks, deference and subordination, and proposing a social structure not just (as colonial America already was) partially unlike that of the mother country, but totally and deliberately unlike.⁹⁶ It also bears stressing that this revolutionary way of envisaging a nation and organising its society was first portended thirteen years before the Bastille was stormed in Paris.

To be sure, the precise meaning of the Declaration of Independence and the significance of the subsequent Revolution depend on which of the characterisations of pre-1776 social structure is accepted as the starting point. For those who believe that colonial America was becoming more feudal, more hierarchical, more settled, more English, the Revolution wrought massive change, halting then reversing these developments, and directing the republic along a new path of social evolution in which ideas of equality and freedom vanquished those of deference and subordination, and in which political leadership ceased to be the exclusive preserve of those of great wealth or high social status.⁹⁷ For those who believe that colonial America was already a preponderantly independent and middle-class society, the Revolution mattered less, for it merely ‘completed, formalised, systematised and symbolised’ what were largely the already accomplished facts of social structure and social perception.⁹⁸ And for those who believe that colonial America was becoming polarised between the haves and the have-nots, the revolution did not change very much, as the new republic continued to be divided, as it had already been in colonial times, between a middle class and a working class which were becoming more numerous and (within limits) more self-conscious.⁹⁹

These matters remain much debated by American historians, and it is neither appropriate nor possible to try to resolve them here. But some remarks are worth venturing. However limited may have been the hierarchy which existed in colonial America, the founding fathers deliberately rejected and overthrew it by abolishing primogeniture and by declaring titles illegal. And this anti-hierarchical impulse was strengthened by the subsequent failure of the Federalists to create a ‘natural’ aristocracy or to entrench it in the Senate.¹⁰⁰ To be sure, the American Revolution did not abolish distinctions between rich and poor and, during the nineteenth century, these economic inequalities would become greater than those in Britain itself. But it did assault political dependency, did undermine social inequality, did outlaw formal distinctions of status, and by so doing, it did create a new sort of society and a new way of looking at society, increasingly unlike that in England (or anywhere else in Europe) which had originally settled and spawned it. As anyone knows who has crossed the Atlantic, the Americans are more independent and less deferential than the English. Theirs is a republican, not a monarchical, culture – which means they do see their society differently; and which is why, when they put their social structures on public display, they have parades (which are intrinsically egalitarian) whereas the British have processions (which are innately hierarchical).¹⁰¹

Of all the communities that the British have created across the seas and around the world, the Americans are unique in having so explicitly rejected the hierarchical social structure and the deferential social attitudes of the colonial metropolis, and in having rejected along with them the languages both of ranks and of class as the prevailing forms of social description.¹⁰² Indeed, it must have been just this prospect which George Washington had in mind when he observed, in 1788, that ‘the distinction of classes begins to disappear’; which Timothy Dwight was thinking of when he noted in 1794 that ‘one extended class embraces all, all mingling, as the rainbow's beauty ends’; and which Charles Ingersoll was alluding to when he claimed in 1810 that ‘patrician and plebeian orders are unknown’.¹⁰³ As is invariably the case, these social descriptions were stark exaggerations, and were themselves to become the bases for much subsequent American self-mythologising. But for all their limitations, special pleading and simplifications, these remarks were – and still are – much more applicable to the United States, where the inhabitants are citizens, than to the United Kingdom, where the inhabitants are still subjects. That is a measure of the differences between these two countries, wrought by and in the aftermath of 1776.¹⁰⁴

Anyone interested today in seriously attempting to transform Britain into something approaching a ‘classless society’, or even in the more modest undertaking of creating a completely non-hereditary second legislative chamber, needs to study the making and the aftermath of the American Revolution.¹⁰⁵ For it is the first and most significant occasion in the whole history of the greater British world when those in charge of one part of it envisaged, proposed, undertook and accomplished both the greater and the lesser of these two tasks. (In Ireland, after the Treaty of 1922, something similar did happen, and again in India after independence in 1947: but, of these, more later.) And as a result, the revolution not only brought about this new and self-consciously anti-British social structure in the United States which was deeply hostile to the idea of, and to government by, a leisured aristocracy, and in which most people thought of themselves and their society as ‘middle class’; it also detached the United States from the greater pan-British community, which means that the later history of American social structure and social description forms no part of this present account.¹⁰⁶

This was not the only way in which 1776 was a turning point in the history of British social structures and social perceptions. For that remarkably creative year also witnessed the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, a work which has already been quoted because of its conventional use of the hierarchical and dichotomous models of social description. But in this regard, his book was at least as innovative as it was derivative, and it was its innovative aspects which were the more influential (and more exaggerated) in the long run. In the first place, Smith took an idea, which had gradually but unsystematically been gaining ground during the eighteenth century, and elevated it to the level of a fundamental principle, when he advanced the proposition that social status and social identity were primarily determined, not by honour or prestige ranking, and still less by religion or politics or gender or family or leisure or locality, but by occupation and relation to the means of production: ‘the understandings’, he opined, ‘of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments’.¹⁰⁷ So far as is known, this is the first systematic attempt to argue that it was work which provided the key to social identities.

This approach also enabled Smith to reformulate the traditional tripartite model into something less descriptive and more powerful and portentous. Society, he suggested, was fundamentally divided into landowners, businessmen and labourers, because they were drawing their different incomes – respectively rent, profits and wages – from their different relations to the means of production, and as a result they were necessarily and inevitably competing with each other as to how much they obtained. It was, he concluded, these collective economic and occupational relationships which gave rise to collective identities: ‘the three great, original and constituent orders of our modern society’.¹⁰⁸ Here was the most sophisticated attempt yet to justify the three-stage model of human populations, by offering a rigorous and consistent explanation of what the three collective groups in it were, how they came into being, and why they would always be there. But for all the novelty of the argument, Smith did not articulate it in a correspondingly novel vocabulary. On the contrary, he followed customary usage, writing and thinking in the collective language of ranks and orders, rather than that of classes.

Yet in two ways, his analysis was an extreme (but very influential) over-simplification. It asserted that social identity was primarily determined by occupation and employment: but there were different views about that in the eighteenth century, just as there are different views about it in our own time. And like all tripartite divisions, however sophisticated, it did not do full justice to the complexities and diversity of the contemporary economic and social structure.¹⁰⁹ The best that could be said of Smith's three collective categories is that they were vague, ideal types which did not comprehensively describe society as a whole. Nevertheless, his analysis was taken up by James Millar in his later writings, and by David Ricardo, who converted Smith's ‘orders’ into the more usual word ‘classes’; and it thereby reinforced the triadic vision of society which was to become extremely popular, resonant and politicised in the half-century ahead. It also lay behind the economic, social and political analysis which was subsequently advanced so influentially by Karl Marx, who wrote the ‘history of all hitherto existing society’ around the class wars between a feudal aristocracy, a capitalist bourgeoisie and a labouring proletariat. As he later admitted, with Smith very much in mind, ‘no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society, nor yet the struggle between them’.¹¹⁰

There are many ironies here for historians of social structure and social description, and especially for those Thatcherites who have sought to appropriate Adam Smith as the evangelist and celebrant of laissez-faire, middle-class capitalism. One is that, as the product of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith had his doubts about the probity and wisdom of unbridled business culture. Another is that his very restricted references to the middle class were in no sense a celebration of their rising wealth or virtue.¹¹¹ Yet a third is that Karl Marx, the man Lady Thatcher claims most to hate, derived his basic models of social structure and social identity, models which she so deplores and abominates, from the works of Adam Smith, a man whom she so admires. For the idea that society should be understood in terms of collective and conflicting social groups – sometimes three, sometimes two, sometimes expressed in the language of class, but sometimes not – was well established as a capitalist concept long before it was appropriated as a communist concept. Far from being invented by a nineteenth-century revolutionary who looked forward to a proletarian utopia and a classless society, it had first appeared in a book by a Scottish political economist, who was steeped in the hierarchical view of society. As the next hundred years were to show, that traditional way of visualising British society still had a great deal of life left in it.

2 The Eighteenth Century: Class Without Class Struggle

I. English Social Worlds

II. British Social Worlds

III. Social Life and Social Perceptions

IV. Creating a Classless Society