or capital’ as their enemy. (They distinguished such laws from those that had not been made to protect INDUSTRY (q.v.), still in its old sense of applied labour.) In the Poor Man’s Guardian (19 October 1833), O’Brien wrote of establishing for ‘the productive classes a complete dominion over the fruits of their own industry’ and went on to describe such a change as ‘contemplated by the working classes’; the two terms, in this context, are interchangeable. There are complications in phrases like the labouring classes and the operative classes, which seem designed to separate one group of the useful classes from another, to correspond with the distinction between workmen and employers, or men and masters: a distinction that was economically inevitable and that was politically active from the 1830s at latest. The term working classes, originally assigned by others, was eventually taken over and used as proudly as middle classes had been: ‘the working classes have created all wealth’ (Rules of Ripponden Co-operative Society; cit. J. H. Priestley, History of RCS; dating from 1833 or 1839).
By the 1840s, then, middle classes and working classes were common terms. The former became singular first; the latter is singular from the 1840s but still today alternates between singular and plural forms, often with ideological significance, the singular being normal in socialist uses, the plural more common in conservative descriptions. But the most significant effect of this complicated history was that there were now two common terms, increasingly used for comparison, distinction or contrast, which had been formed within quite different models. On the one hand middle implied hierarchy and therefore implied lower class: not only theoretically but in repeated practice. On the other hand working implied productive or useful activity, which would leave all who were not working class unproductive and useless (easy enough for an aristocracy, but hardly accepted by a productive middle class). To this day this confusion reverberates. As early as 1844 Cockburn referred to ‘what are termed the working-classes, as if the only workers were those who wrought with their hands’. Yet working man or workman had a persistent reference to manual labour. In an Act of 1875 this was given legal definition: ‘the expression workman … means any person who, being a labourer, servant in husbandry, journeyman, artificer, handicraftsman, miner, or otherwise engaged in manual labour … has entered into or works under a contract with an employer’. The association of workman and working class was thus very strong, but it will be noted that the definition includes contract with an employer as well as manual work. An Act of 1890 stated: ‘the provisions of section eleven of the Housing of the Working Classes Act, 1885 … shall have effect as if the expression working classes included all classes of persons who earn their livelihood by wages or salaries’. This permitted a distinction from those whose livelihood depended on fees (professional class), profits (trading class) or property (independent). Yet, especially with the development of clerical and service occupations, there was a critical ambiguity about the class position of those who worked for a salary or even a wage and yet did not do manual labour. (Salary as fixed payment dates from C14; wages and salaries is still a normal C19 phrase; in 1868, however, ‘a manager of a bank or railway – even an overseer or a clerk in a manufactory – is said to draw a salary’, and the attempted class distinction between salaries and wages is evident; by eC20 the salariat was being distinguished from the proletariat.) Here again, at a critical point, the effect of two models of class is evident. The middle class, with which the earners of salaries normally aligned themselves, is an expression of relative social position and thus of social distinction. The working class, specialized from the different notion of the useful or productive classes, is an expression of economic relationships. Thus the two common modern class terms rest on different models, and the position of those who are conscious of relative social position and thus of social distinction, and yet, within an economic relationship, sell and are dependent on their labour, is the point of critical overlap between the models and the terms. It is absurd to conclude that only the working classes WORK (q.v.), but if those who work in other than ‘manual’ labour describe themselves in terms of relative social position (middle class) the confusion is inevitable. One side effect of this difficulty was a further elaboration of classing itself (the period from lC18 to lC19 is rich in these derived words: classify, classifier, classification). From the 1860s the middle class began to be divided into lower and upper sections, and later the working class was to be divided into skilled, semi-skilled and labouring. Various other systems of classification succeeded these, notably socio-economic group, which must be seen as an attempt to marry the two models of class, and STATUS (q.v.).
It is necessary, finally, to consider the variations of class as an abstract idea. In one of the earliest uses of the singular social term, in Crabbe’s
To every class we have a school assign’d
Rules for all ranks and food for every mind
class is virtually equivalent to rank and was so used in the definition of a middle class. But the influence of sense (i), class as a general term for grouping, was at least equally strong, and useful or productive classes follows mainly from this. The productive distinction, however, as a perception of an active economic system, led to a sense of class which is neither a synonym for rank nor a mode of descriptive grouping, but is a description of fundamental economic relationships. In modern usage, the sense of rank, though residual, is still active; in one kind of use class is still essentially defined by birth. But the more serious uses divide between descriptive grouping and economic relationship. It is obvious that a terminology of basic economic relationships (as between employers and employed, or propertied and propertyless) will be found too crude and general for the quite different purpose of precise descriptive grouping. Hence the persistent but confused arguments between those who, using class in the sense of basic relationship, propose two or three basic classes, and those who, trying to use it for descriptive grouping, find they have to break these divisions down into smaller and smaller categories. The history of the word carries this essential ambiguity.
When the language of class was being developed, in eC19, each tendency can be noted. The Gorgon (21 November 1818) referred quite naturally to ‘a smaller class of tradesmen, termed garret-masters’. But Cobbett in 1825 had the newer sense: ‘so that here is one class of society united to oppose another class’. Charles Hall in 1805 had argued that
the people in a civilized state may be divided into different orders; but for the purpose of investigating the manner in which they enjoy or are deprived of the requisites to support the health of their bodies or minds, they need only be divided into two classes, viz. the rich and the poor. (The Effects of Civilization on the People in European States)
Here there is a distinction between orders (ranks) and effective economic groupings (classes). A cotton spinner in 1818 (cit. The Making of the English Working Class; E. P. Thompson, p. 199) described employers and workers as ‘two distinct classes of persons’. In different ways this binary grouping became conventional, though it operated alongside tripartite groupings: both the social grouping (upper, middle and lower) and a modernized economic grouping: John Stuart Mill’s ‘three classes’, of ‘landlords, capitalists and labourers’ (Monthly Repository, 1834, 320) or Marx’s ‘three great social classes … wage-labourers, capitalists and landlords’ (Capital, III). In the actual development of capitalist society, the tripartite division was more and more replaced by a new binary division: in Marxist language the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. (It is because of the complications of the tripartite division, and because of the primarily social definition
