Patrician Society

1
Patrician Society Plebeian Culture Rise of
the Middle Class?

• Sarah Richardson

2
Sorts of People in the Eighteenth Century

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

3
Thomas Gainsborough, The Cottage Door (1780) an
example of sympathy with the rural poor?
4
Thomas Gainsborough, The Housemaid, 1782-6
5
Critics of patrician-plebeian dichotomy

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

6
Popular Culture

• Encompasses the common peoples world of
• work,
• attitudes to the natural world,
• education, literacy and knowledge,
• health practices,
• gender and generational roles,
• religious beliefs,
• recreational and leisure pursuits,
• community customs.
• rich oral culture

7
Prelude to the Riot in Mount Street (Richard
Newton, 1792) A servants' dance four
men-servants face four maid-servants, in a
country-dance
8
The Humours of a Country Wake (1794). Print shows
duel between two men outside a tavern other
rural scenes and pastimes represented include a
Jewish pedlar, a fiddler and street entertainers
leading bear and monkey, a group of men watching
a bull-baiting, a man running chased by bull and
a country dance.
9
Relationships between elite and mass

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

10
Plebeian Pleasantry, after George Cruikshank 1818
11
Resistance

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

12
An effigy of a Whig minister on horseback
conducted to be burned with a gallows and a
bundle of faggots. 1756
13
Hints to Forestallers or a Sure Way to Reduce the
Price of Grain, 1800
14
Food riot in Newcastle, 1740

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

15
Changes

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

16
The Four Times of Day (Night), Hogarth
(1738) Scene near Charing Cross. Celebrations of
Oak Apple Day. In the foreground a drunken
freemason is supported by a serving man to left
a barber is seen at work through a window, a
chamber pot is being emptied from a window above
and below a man and woman sleep beneath a wooden
shelter and a link boy crouches beside them to
right the Salisbury Flying Coach has crashed
while trying to avoid a bonfire in the middle of
the street.
17
A unified popular culture?

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

18
Middling sort/middle class?

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

19
The Conversation Piece, Nollekens, 1740
20
Size of middling sort

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

21
Importance of hierarchy

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

22
Formation of middle class private sphere

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

23
Formation of middle class - religion

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

24
Formation of a middle class public sphere

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

25
Local or national context

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