Class is a notoriously vexed concept, its definition and utility routinely questioned. Theorists have long debated whether
it should be described as an economic category or a social formation,
1 and whether the salient criteria used to sort populations ought to be wealth, income or living standards; occupation or profession;
consciousness, status, or power; identity, outlook, or interests; or some combination of these. Despite the dissension and
uncertainty, ‘class’ continues to be used as a shorthand to mark the divisions between, most broadly, the aristocracy or upper
class, the middle class and the lower or working class. As with ‘class’, so with the three-class model: critiques of it are
legion, yet it persists as a handy heuristic. For the period under consideration, the three-class model divides the landscape
such that the Victorian middle class includes, at the very least, manufacturers, bankers and lawyers; professionals, small
property holders and landlords; tradesmen, retailers and shopkeepers; clerks and clergymen, military and naval officers. Leonore
Davidoff and Catherine Hall note that included in the middle class were those whose incomes ranged from £100 to £1,000 per
annum. The numbers in this income bracket varied regionally, but across the nation at mid century about 8 to 10 per cent of
the population belonged in it.
2 The spectrum is broad – too wide and unwieldy for some – and it should not be a surprise that a Cadbury of Birmingham would
have little in common with a London grocer or Cornish schoolmaster.
If the range of those included in the Victorian middle class is wide, the flux within it is equally noteworthy. By mid century
occupations that earlier had little status – doctors and surgeons – gained respectability and became professional, and professions
that had never existed – engineers, surveyors, inspectors – were born. With the rise of print media, the ‘man of letters’
emerged, capable of making a living without the ignominious dependence on a patron (that the new patron, the ‘market’ and
its faceless readers was just as fickle, was both exhilarating and galling, as
Dickens was to discover). In contrast to previous centuries when one’s ‘station’ was inherited and fixed, the mid eighteenth
century onwards is marked by social fluidity, particularly for those in the middle class: take, for instance, a shopkeeper
whose son went into law and later married the daughter of local gentry.
3 Such upward mobility within one generation was a new feature of industrial capitalism – as, of course, was its reverse downward
mobility, the result of ventures gone bad, over-speculation or commercial failures. The spectre of plunging from ‘respectability’
into a lower status haunted those on the margins of the middle classes – teachers, small shopkeepers, clergymen – and makes
a considerable showing in the literature of the period: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is the classic example of a young woman
who belongs in the middle class by virtue of her origins and education, but as governess has slid down several rungs of the
ladder.
Because the term ‘middle class’ encapsulated such a vast spectrum in flux, some have proposed subdividing the group into upper
and lower strata,
4 while others have opted for the broader term ‘middle class
es’ in order to affirm both its plurality and cohesion. For despite its variety and flux, the middle class was not entirely
fragmented. It had a potent political, economic and social impact on Victorian Britain – evident, not least, in the 1832 and
1867 Reform Bills; the repeal of the Corn Laws that had protected agricultural and landed interests; the numerous sanitary,
education and health reforms shepherded through Parliament by middle-class professionals; and its many writers and intellectuals
from Carlyle to Darwin, John Stuart Mill to George Eliot, Disraeli to Trollope, Herbert Spencer to Hardy, who shaped the national
dialogue on industry, ethics, empire, Englishness and science. The historian R. J. Morris writes: ‘The 1830s and 1840s created
a middle class firmly led by its own elite and allied intellectuals … [A]n elite of commercial and professional men together
with their intellectual allies led the creation and assertion of a middle-class identity and authority which was produced,
disseminated and negotiated through a network of voluntary societies’.
5 Just what this ‘identity’ consisted of is, of course, the subject of further debate, but a few keynotes can be struck. To
begin negatively, the middle classes defined themselves as those who were
not landed. Davidoff and Hall write:
Perhaps the single greatest distinction between the aristocracy and the middle class was the imperative for members of the
latter to actively seek an income rather than expect to live from rents and the emoluments of office while spending their
time in honour-enhancing activities such as politics, hunting or social appearances. The liquid form of middle-class property
which had to be
manipulated to enhance its survival, much less growth, encouraged a different ethos, emphasizing pride in business prowess.
6
It was not only against the upper classes that the middle class distinguished itself: Davidoff and Hall argue that the middle
classes’ ‘oppositional culture’ was directed against
both the gentry and working class.
7As they note too, new types of income and income generation produced a new ‘ethos’. For some scholars, like Morris, this ethos
consisted of a voluntary or philanthropic spirit; for others, the ethos is the middle class’s paternalism; for some, its professional
development and organisations; and for yet others the religious spirit of the middle classes, fuelled by the evangelical and
Noncomformist revivals of the eighteenth century, is a key distinguishing factor. All agree, however, that the central poles
of the middle-class ethos were work and the home. A new ethic of work, a sense of self tied to one’s labour (no longer necessarily
manual), a faith in the free market and one’s expanding potential were beliefs that created the prosperity of the middle classes
and were also the defining features of this emerging class. Set off from the workplace and new business practices was the
home, elevated by Victorian domestic ideology as a haven. No people before the nineteenth-century English middle classes were
as attached to, invested in and shaped by their homes. The home – as concept, not simply physical space – was ideally presided
over by a nurturing and unsullied woman who acted as moral guide to the children, servants and husband, who was tainted by
competitive business practices.
How fully notions of domesticity and the gendered ‘division of labour’ were embraced, endorsed or even lived is a matter of
dispute: certainly the shrillness with which the rhetoric was repeated should give us pause – if it were widely endorsed,
why did it need to be continually invoked? For every Patmorian injunction or Ruskinian admonition, we can name a middle-class
woman such as Elizabeth Gurney Fry, Elizabeth Gaskell, Florence Nightingale, Barbara Bodichon or Harriet Martineau stepping
into the public sphere. Yet some caution is in order: while few women may have fitted John Ruskin’s idealised vision of womanhood
in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ (1865), that did not mean that nineteenth-century men and women entirely rejected the ideal or did
not try to live up to it. For the middle classes, home and ‘properly’ organised gender roles were not just ideological safe
havens, but also a mechanism to distinguish themselves from an aristocracy they considered profligate and the lower classes
where a home presided over by a woman was a chimera.
Dickens’s writings swarm with middle-class characters, defined by a messy mix of income, occupation and outlook; for Dickens,
being middle class was both more and less than a matter of money. Partly because his own life mirrored a range of middle-class
experiences – his father’s mercurial prosperity and penury; his own trajectory from law clerk to parliamentary reporter, to
successful novelist, to editor; his growing wealth evident in the increasingly westward London addresses; his domesticity,
albeit ruptured – and also because of the plethora of characters he created, Dickens is one of our richest resources for studying
the Victorian middle classes in all their variety and nuance. Amongst Dickens’s almost 1,000 characters, practically every
occupation, income bracket, status and outlook is represented, but middle-class characters predominate, and Dickens is masterful
in capturing the multiplicity of experiences and meanings of this class.
Clerks are represented by Carker, Guppy and Wemmick, while moneylenders are memorably captured in Quilp and Smallweed. Schoolmasters
are more than scolds: few readers are likely to forget (or forgive) Wackford Squeers or Creakle or Bradley Headstone. Ralph
Nickleby is not quite a merchant, but the successful Cheeryble brothers are, while Daniel Doyce captures the fate of fledgeling
inventors and businessmen. A range of professional men abound, from Allan Woodcourt the doctor to Vohles the solicitor, to
Bucket the detective, to Rouncewell the ironmaster to Tulkinghorn the lawyer of aristocrats, to Richard Carstone, apprenticed
to all the gentlemanly professions. The post-1832 phenomenon of middle-class men-turned-MPs is captured with Veneering and
Gradgrind, while the century-long phenomenon of striving to be a gentleman is tenderly and mockingly depicted in Dick Swiveller, Mr Mantalini and Herbert Pocket. Like them, Micawber
keeps losing money until he is packed off to Australia, while Magwitch gathers coin there. Dickens’s representations of middle-class
women are far more limited, although they include the infamous negative version of Victorian womanhood, Mrs Jellyby, who is
amply outweighed by Little Nell, Amy Dorrit and Esther Summerson, each the essence of domesticity.
More than range, however, Dickens captures one of the central features of the nineteenth-century middle class: the ability
to reinvent oneself, to begin life in one ‘station’ and make one’s way to another. This theme is developed in a number of
novels – the eponymous heroes of
Oliver Twist and
David Copperfield, Esther Summerson in
Bleak House, and Pip in
Great Expectations all ‘work’ their way up from their origins – while its complications are best demonstrated, ironically, in a character who
does
not rise but falls: Charles Darnay in
A Tale of Two Cities. Darnay is the adopted name Charles St Evrémonde, a French aristocrat, takes when he moves to Britain. Evrémonde leaves his
native country because he wishes to renounce his class privilege, which he believes is supported only by the ‘dark deference
of fear and slavery’ (ch. 9). His family estate he calls ‘a crumbling tower of waste, mismanagement, extortion, debt, mortgage,
oppression, hunger, nakedness, and suffering’, and he dislikes being ‘bound to a system that is frightful to me, [that I am]
responsible for … but powerless in’ (ch. 9). Consequently, he escapes to London, where he remakes himself as Charles Darnay,
tutor.
Despite his good intentions, however, Darnay’s birth is an inheritance he cannot shake and that haunts him; as the French
jury declares, he is ‘at heart and by descent an Aristocrat’ (ch. 10). When his uncle mockingly asks him what his ‘new philosophy
is’, Darnay quietly answers ‘work’ (ch. 9). Only in London can Darnay, by ‘labour[ing]’ with ‘perseverance and untiring industry’
(ch. 10), leave his past behind. Only in Britain can Darnay become the person he feels he is, not the one he is born as. Darnay
is not Dickens’s first or only self-made man, but he is striking for two reasons: that he chooses to be English and that he
chooses to be middle class. For Dickens, Englishness and the middle class are clearly intertwined; in England, Darnay can,
by his own (mental) labour, escape his family’s legacy of crushing the labour and life of peasants for generations. That the
‘choice’ to be middle class requires Darnay to renounce his wealth and status, that his is a downward trajectory, underscores
the extent to which Dickens views the middle class as a desirable median.
But if the ability to reinvent oneself is particularly English and middle class, then it is also fraught with peril, as Dickens
suggests in the trajectories of Pip and Dombey. Both occupy several class positions but eventually settle in their ‘proper
place’, the middle class, after each has learned the lesson of the heart: that true ‘wealth’ lies in the unconditional love
of a Joe or Florence. Pip begins life in a working-class home but in the course of the novel becomes the literal and metaphoric
plaything of those with money to spare: first for Miss Havisham in her capricious plot to ‘wreak revenge on all the male sex’
(ch. 22), and then for Magwitch, who wishes in his own convoluted way to take vengeance on the rigidly classed society that
preferred to punish him rather than the ‘gentleman’ Compeyson. The conversion of a blacksmith’s apprentice into an English
gentleman is, of course, the fantasy of upward mobility, a reward for hard work and self-discipline, the story the middle
class promised itself. But Dickens converts that fantasy into a grotesque joke-nightmare as Pip’s
upward mobility is not premised on hard work or self-discipline but sponsored by the very antithesis of middle-class virtues:
criminal cash laundered in the colonies.
Yes, to be middle class is to have expectations – or aspirations – but not ‘great expectations’, Dickens suggests, and certainly
not any that attempt to bypass hard work and introspection.
8 At the close of the novel, a chastened Pip draws a distinction between his previous ‘expectations’ and the ‘opportunity’
(ch. 57) awaiting him in the East, the latter term containing within it the notion of making oneself. Having tried his hand
at being a gentleman of leisure, Pip eventually learns that hard work is his only path to redemption. As he tellingly says
of Clarriker and Co. – where he
steadily rises from clerk to partner – ‘We were not in a grand way of business, but we had a good name, and worked for our profits,
and did very well’ (ch. 58). Moderate and with profits built upon hard work and a ‘good name’ – in contrast to the source
of Pip’s earlier wealth, which was anonymous – the firm and Pip’s place there signal his arrival in his rightful place. Thus,
when Estella asks Pip if he ‘does well’, he replies: ‘I work pretty hard for a sufficient living, and therefore –– Yes, I
do very well’ (ch. 59). The pairing of hard work and well-being is a central strand of the middle-class ethos, its promise
to its denizens.
The other strand in this ethos is domesticity, and
Dombey and Son offers a lesson in the perils of neglecting the domestic. Dombey, at the start of the novel, is a wealthy businessman who
runs a successful ‘house’ – Dombey and Son – but lacks a home. He has fashioned his life resolutely on the ‘cash nexus’, to
use Carlyle’s term, with none of the restorative touches of femininity. He views his wives as property and of his first we
are told that were she to die ‘he would be very sorry’, as if ‘something [were] gone from among his plate and furniture, and
other household possessions’ (ch. 1). He is dismissive, demanding, and neglectful of both wives, behaviours identified with
the upper classes,
9 but his greatest failing is his treatment of his daughter Florence, whom he considers ‘a piece of base coin’ (ch. 1). Like
Pip, Dombey must find his way to the middle class, although in Dombey’s case the trajectory is of a precipitous downward mobility.
Only when bankrupt and after the ‘herds of shabby vampires, Jews and Christians’ (ch. 59) have bought every piece of his plate
and furniture does Dombey realise he has discarded his most precious jewel.
That the agent of Dombey’s redemption is a daughter whose love and submission eventually thaws this frigid man of business
is one of the dearest-held fictions of the middle class. Florence Dombey’s ‘sisters’ are Nell,
Esther Summerson, Amy Dorrit and Lucie Manette, all dutiful daughters who coax a little life out of ailing fathers or surrogates.
This is not the place to dilate on Dickens’s representations of women, but it is worth pointing out that even as Dickens subscribed
to the middle-class view of women’s moral power to guide and assuage the excesses of a grim marketplace, he also occasionally
fantasised about an escape from such domesticity. Wemmick’s domestic life in his self-constructed castle with his aged parent
in
Great Expectations is a lovingly detailed portrait of serenity, happiness and domesticity, all achieved without women. Dickens’s resistance
to the fiction of middle-class domesticity could be as telling as his embrace of it.
In Dickens’s criteria for defining class, too, lies contradiction: Dombey’s transformation from a wealthy businessman into
a middle-class man is achieved by his altered attitude towards his daughter and the domesticity she embodies. This transformation
explicitly indicates that for Dickens the middle class is not primarily an occupational or income category so much as an ethos
or adherence to a set of virtues, primarily work, self-discipline, independence and ‘properly’ organised gender relations.
And yet the novel also paradoxically requires that Dombey be financially bankrupt before he can ‘rise’ to become a middle-class
man. That he must lose all his wealth before he can be redeemed and then bring to his daughter’s modest household not only
his penitent love but also his very meagre ‘secret’ inheritance suggests that income or liquidity, while not primary to definitions
of the middle class, were not entirely marginal to it either. To be middle class in the nineteenth century meant to subscribe
to certain principles and ways of organising human relations, but these could not be severed from or achieved without a certain
income.