Class of modern Wits’.) Development of class in its modern social sense, with relatively fixed names for particular classes (lower class, middle class, upper class, working class and so on), belongs essentially to the period between 1770 and 1840, which is also the period of the Industrial Revolution and its decisive reorganization of society. At the extremes it is not difficult to distinguish between (i) class as a general term for any grouping and (ii) class as a would-be specific description of a social formation. There is no difficulty in distinguishing between Steele’s ‘Class of modern Wits’ and, say, the Declaration of the Birmingham Political Union (1830) ‘that the rights and interests of the middle and lower classes of the people are not efficiently represented in the Commons House of Parliament’. But in the crucial period of transition, and indeed for some time before it, there is real difficulty in being sure whether a particular use is sense (i) or sense (ii). The earliest use that I know, which might be read in a modern sense, is Defoe’s ‘’tis plain the clearness of wages forms our people into more classes than other nations can show’ (Review, 14 April 1705). But this, even in an economic context, is far from certain. There must also be some doubt about Hanway’s title of 1772: ‘Observations on the Causes of the Dissoluteness which reigns among the lower classes of the people’. We can read this, as indeed we would read Defoe, in a strictly social sense, but there is enough overlap between sense (i) and sense (ii) to make us pause. The crucial context of this development is the alternative vocabulary for social divisions, and it is a fact that until lC18, and residually well into C19 and even C20, the most common words were rank and order, while estate and degree were still more common than class. Estate, degree and order had been widely used to describe social position from medieval times. Rank had been common from lC16. In virtually all contexts where we would now say class these other words were standard, and lower order and lower orders became especially common in C18.
The essential history of the introduction of class, as a word which would supersede older names for social divisions, relates to the increasing consciousness that social position is made rather than merely inherited. All the older words, with their essential metaphors of standing, stepping and arranging in rows, belong to a society in which position was determined by birth. Individual mobility could be seen as movement from one estate, degree, order or rank to another. What was changing consciousness was not only increased individual mobility, which could be largely contained within the older terms, but the new sense of a SOCIETY (q.v.) or a particular social system which actually created social divisions, including new kinds of divisions. This is quite explicit in one of the first clear uses, that of Madison in The Federalist (USA, c. 1787): moneyed and manufacturing interests ‘grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views’. Under the pressure of this awareness, greatly sharpened by the economic changes of the Industrial Revolution and the political conflicts of the American and French revolutions, the new vocabulary of class began to take over. But it was a slow and uneven process, not only because of the residual familiarity of the older words, and not only because conservative thinkers continued, as a matter of principle, to avoid class wherever they could and to prefer the older (and later some newer) terms. It was slow and uneven, and has remained difficult, mainly because of the inevitable overlap with the use of class not as a specific social division but as a generally available and often ad hoc term of grouping.
With this said, we can trace the formation of the newly specific class vocabulary. Lower classes was used in 1772, and lowest classes and lowest class were common from the 1790s. These carry some of the marks of the transition, but do not complete it. More interesting because less dependent on an old general sense, in which the lower classes would be not very different from the COMMON (q.v.) people, is the new and increasingly self-conscious and self-used description of the middle classes. This has precedents in ‘men of a middle condition’ (1716), ‘the middle Station of life’ (Defoe, 1719), ‘the Middling People of England … generally Good-natured and Stout-hearted’ (1718), ‘the middling and lower classes’ (1789). Gisborne in 1795 wrote an ‘Enquiry into the Duties of Men in the Higher Rank and Middle Classes of Society in Great Britain’. Hannah More in 1796 wrote of the ‘middling classes’. The ‘burden of taxation’ rested heavily ‘on the middle classes’ in 1809 (Monthly Repository, 501), and in 1812 there was reference to ‘such of the Middle Class of Society who have fallen upon evil days’ (Examiner, August). Rank was still used at least as often, as in James Mill (1820): ‘the class which is universally described as both the most wise and the most virtuous part of the community, the middle rank’ (Essay on Government), but here class has already taken on a general social sense, used on its own. The swell of self-congratulatory description reached a temporary climax in Brougham’s speech of 1831: ‘by the people, I mean the middle classes, the wealth and intelligence of the country, the glory of the British name’.
There is a continuing curiosity in this development. Middle belongs to a disposition between lower and higher, in fact as an insertion between an increasingly insupportable high and low. Higher classes was used by Burke (Thoughts on French Affairs) in 1791, and upper classes is recorded from the 1820s. In this model an old hierarchical division is still obvious; the middle class is a self-conscious interposition between persons of rank and the common people. This was always, by definition, indeterminate: this is one of the reasons why the grouping word class rather than the specific word rank eventually came through. But clearly in Brougham, and very often since, the upper or higher part of the model virtually disappears, or, rather, awareness of a higher class is assigned to a different dimension, that of a residual and respected but essentially displaced aristocracy.
This is the ground for the next complication. In the fierce argument about political, social and economic rights, between the 1790s and the 1830s, class was used in another model, with a simple distinction of the productive or useful classes (a potent term against the aristocracy). In the widely read translation of Volney’s The Ruins, or A Survey of the Revolutions of Empires (2 parts, 1795) there was a dialogue between those who by ‘useful labours contribute to the support and maintenance of society’ (the majority of the people, ‘labourers, artisans, tradesmen and every profession useful to society’, hence called People) and a Privileged class (‘priests, courtiers, public accountants, commanders of troops, in short, the civil, military or religious agents of government’). This is a description in French terms of the people against an aristocratic government, but it was widely adopted in English terms, with one particular result which corresponds to the actual political situation of the reform movement between the 1790s and the 1830s: both the self-conscious middle classes and the quite different people who by the end of this period would describe themselves as the working classes adopted the descriptions useful or productive classes, in distinction from and in opposition to the privileged or the idle. This use, which of course sorts oddly with the other model of lower, middle and higher, has remained both important and confusing.
For it was by transfer from the sense of useful or productive that the working classes were first named. There is considerable overlap in this: cf. ‘middle and industrious classes’ (Monthly Magazine, 1797) and ‘poor and working classes’ (Owen, 1813) – the latter probably the first English use of working classes but still very general. In 1818 Owen published Two Memorials on Behalf of the Working Classes, and in the same year The Gorgon (28 November) used working classes in the specific and unmistakable context of relations between ‘workmen’ and ‘their employers’. The use then developed rapidly, and by 1831 the National Union of the Working Classes
