Civilisation Britannique, Peter John & Pierre Lurbe

CIVILISATION BRITANNIQUE, Peter John & Pierre Lurbe, pp. 20-25

SOCIAL CLASS

The statement that Britain is a « class ridden society » suggests that by comparison with other countries the British are over-concerned with social differences. Although such generalizations are hard to justify empirically, the phrase does contain a grain of truth. Frederich Engels described Britain as the “most bourgeois of all nations”, while George Orwell (1903-1950) felt that it was the “most class-ridden country under the sun”. Nowhere else it seems is there quite the same fascination with small subtleties of accent and education which define people’s social position.

Conceptually, class implies a number of different meanings and some of the criteria often used to codify these differences can be summarized as follows: birth and inheritance, income (source and amount), education and qualifications, occupation and type of work. In fact, when put together, these criteria represent a whole panoply of characteristics, behaviour patterns, traditions, attitudes and beliefs that form people’s perceptions of class. Similarly, what people say and think about class also produces its broad representation both historically and sociologically. This section will examine both these perspectives in the light of the changes that British society has undergone since industrialization.

1. REPRESENTATIONS OF CLASS

The novelists of the 19th century emphasized time and time again the wide differences which existed between the various social classes in England. They all assumed the existence of the phenomenon yet few attempted to define it. Similarly, in the 20th century, both novelists and sociologists have devoted a great deal of time to studying social class and its wider significances but the problem of definition still remains.

There can be little doubt that for a number of centuries the population of this country has been divided into a number of classes, each with its own interests, status and standards. But what were the criteria that defined class membership? And how could these separate groupings be identified?

The language and categorization of class

The word “class” entered the English language during the time of Cromwell’s Protectorate in a dictionary compiled by Blount:

“Classe, a ship or navy, an order or distribution of people according to their several degrees.” This latter meaning is the most important and comes from the Latin word “classis” meaning a “summoning”. It had two man purposes, firstly to designate classes of the Roman populace and secondly to describe an armed gathering. However, during the 17th century, the word “rank” or “station” was used more frequently to describe a person’s social status.

The actual use of the term in association with social status began in the 1790s. The phrase “middle class” first appeared officially in the Monthly Magazine in 1797, while the phrase “working class” can be found in the writings of the socialist Robert Owen from about 1813 onwards. However, the significance of the terminology did not fully manifest itself until the 1830s when the trade union periodical The Pioneer began to use the term “working class” more frequently. These terms had by the third decade of the century developed distinct connotations. By the turn of the century this had become more clearly defined when Charles Booth published his Life and Labour of People in London.  He took the level of income as the basis for the division of society into classes and gave each stratification a denoting letter.

The census of 1911 followed his example and assigned five broad social classes according to occupational standing:

1. Professional
2. Intermediate
3. Skilled
4. Partly skilled
5. Unskilled

Thus social class at the beginning of the 20th century was officially derived from the assumed social status of employment. This system of stratification was used in census gathering up to 1971. In 1980, it was finally changed so that social class was equated instead with occupational skill.

Economic change and the origins of class differences

A.Marwick in his Class: Image and Reality maintains that “class is a product of history and a historical perspective is vital to a fuller understanding of the nature of class in Britain today”.

During the first century of the Industrial Revolution, British society underwent fundamental economic and social change. The development of a large urban working class tied inextricably to the labour process, led to the development of what has been termed, “class consciousness”. Income and wage labour were now more than ever directly related to social mobility, attitude and conduct. The historian E.P. Thompson has pointed to two separate strands in the formation of class in the early decades of the 19th century: “conditioning and agency”. In this definition, class is partly determined by the changes in society and economy, but of equal importance is the shared experience of struggle which finds strength in a common unity.

The middle class on the other hand are historically more elusive. They could be distinguished by a number of functions. For instance, at the turn of the 18th century, tenant farmers or those with small holdings could claim to be middle class, but it was still the professional body of lawyers, doctors, clergy, journalists and engineers that formed its most distinct group. As the century progressed, the top end of this class became associated more with the ownership of industry and many managed to buy their way into the other dominant class, the aristocracy.

Up to the last quarter of the 19th century, Britain, unlike France, was governed by its landed aristocracy –men of substantial wealth whose power derived from hereditary primogeniture and the ownership of land. From the late 19th century, this aristocratic power structure began to give way to a developing plutocracy –the rule of the wealthy. Despite these changes, the legacy of its wealth and power lives on and although much of this power has been diffused, it still retains an essential hold on important centres of influence and power. The historian David Cannadine has analysed the decline of the aristocracy, and claims that a combination of factors brought about their demise: the expansion of the electorate in 1885; the rise of organized political parties; successive Land Acts and the confrontation between Lloyd George and the House of Lords in 1909-10. Thus, he concludes, the aristocracy lost their old ruling class confidence.

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