Imagining the middle class: the political representation of class in Britain, c.1780-1840

The social structure of early modern Europe, in all its variety and complexity, was a consequence of a mixture of factors: history, prevailing social attitudes and the extent of economic development. ‘Structure’ is a more helpful term than the term ‘class’, which tends to imply anachronistic nineteenth-century definitions arising from a market-economy-based interpretation of the period, where the production of material goods and the creation of wealth were dominant. Many older studies, it is true, stressed the decisive role of the middle class in bringing about change in the early modern period, blaming or praising it for such diverse phenomena as the Reformation, the growth of representative institutions and economic expansion. Marxist historical determinism still depicts the revolt of the Netherlands, the English civil war and the French Revolution as ‘bourgeois revolutions’. But such concepts are too rigid. Discontented nobles as well as an emergent bourgeoisie played a decisive part in political upheaval, both in the Dutch revolt and the French wars of religion. In most European countries there is little evidence of any consciousness of a dynamic and self-confident middle class, sure of its role and its destiny in society, as was arguably the case with the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. The noble ethos, not the values of the middle class, prevailed in early modern Europe. The ambition of the successful entrepreneur was to become a nobleman, not to remain simply a wealthy member of the bourgeoisie. Only in the more advanced economies such as the Dutch Republic and England did so-called ‘bourgeois’ values prevail in some measure.

It seems by now generally agreed that the movement for national unification cannot be explained in terms of the immediate interests or needs of the Italian bourgeoisie. If there was a ‘bourgeois revolution’, it was not the bourgeoisie which made it. The industrial bourgeoisie was in its infancy, and from the standpoint of its restricted interests the creation of a national market was premature. Even in 1860 Italian industrialists were far from ready to exploit the opportunity offered to them. There was, indeed, no Italian industrial bourgeoisie in the strict sense of the term, only a number of regional groups. Industrialists were in the main concerned to protect their little enclaves from competition. The impulse for free trade had to come from outside. Long ago, in his classic work on the Risorgimento in Lombardy, Greenfield observed that even in the most advanced region of Italy it was the intellectuals and publicists, not the industrialists or merchants, who were in the forefront of the movement for economic modernization. I do not think that this should lead the historian to discard the usefulness of the notion of ‘bourgeois revolution’ when applied to the Risorgimento but rather to reformulate it in a less mechanical fashion. The sense in which the concept can be applied to the Risorgimento has been well defined by Luciano Cafagna: ‘the Risorgimento movement exists within the European age of the bourgeois revolution … Through the Risorgimento it is the bourgeoisie which grows, not other social classes… Through the transformations… it is the bourgeois mode of property and of the use of the labour force which affirms itself, not others’.

Bu çalışmada Fransız Devrimi’nin Marksist yorumu ve buna getirilen Revizyonist eleştiri karşılaştırılacaktır. Bunun için nitel araştırma yönteminde kategorik ve sistematik içerik analizine başvurulacaktır. Çalışmada Fransız Devrimi, tarihin belirli bir zamanında meydana gelmiş tek bir vaka olma özelliği taşımaktadır. Marx ve takipçileri sosyalizmin kökenini Fransız Devrimi’nde aramışlardır. Bu da onları devrimin iktisadi dinamiklerine götürmüştür. Bu dinamikler içerisinde burjuvazi baskın bir unsurdur. 1950’li yıllarda revizyonistler bu yaklaşıma itiraz etmişlerdir. Revizyonist yazar ve düşünürlerin önde gelen şahsiyetlerinden Cobban, “Genel Meclis” (États Généraux)’te burjuvaziyi temsil ettiği iddia edilen “Üçüncü Sınıf”’ın burjuva bir karaktere sahip olmadığını öne sürmektedir. Bir diğer Revizyonist yazar, Furet, devrimle birlikte ortaya siyasal kültürün olayın doğru bir şekilde incelenmesini zorlaştırdığına dikkat çekmiştir. Marksistlerin iddia ettiğinin aksine feodal düzenin monarşi yargısının varlığı nedeni ile devrim öncesinde işlevini yitirdiğine inanmaktadır. 1789 yılına gelindiğinde feodal toprakların iktisadi mekanizması sürdürülebilir bir özellik arz etmemektedir. Devrimin, bu açıdan bakıldığında etkisi feodal dünyanın geriye kalan unsurlarını ortadan kaldırmakla sınırlı kalmıştır.

The bourgeoisie is one of those historical phenomena that seems to be omnipresent in crucial developments of the European past, and at the same time eludes serious analysis by historians and other social scientists.1 As one of them summarized the problem three decades ago: ‘The trouble with the middle class is that it is always rising ‘. Even though the bourgeoisie ‘s destiny seems obviously enough the age of modernity, and its origins were surely to be found in the medieval town, the intermediate stages proved to be extremely hard to chart: somehow the bourgeoisie failed to appear at almost every rendezvous planned by its academic pursuers. With the destruction of the Industrial Revolution as a unifying concept, and the by now unanimous opinion that, whatever it may have been, the French Revolution was definitely not a bourgeois revolution, the last landmarks have disappeared.

The English bourgeois Revolution is a long process begun with the Long Parliament in 1640 and was given a finishing touch by the so called Glorious Revolution. Owing to its conspicuous religous character, the first and decisive step in 1640-60 had long been mistaken for a purely religeous one. But thanks to the works of Dobb, Hill, Lavrovsky and Sapruikin, it is almost unnecessary to-day to add any explanation about the fact that the revolution of 1640-60 was the main part of the English bourgeois revolution.However, some important questions seem to be remaining unsolved. How the development of capitalism in the classical form was possible in England on the basis of this premature and compromising bourgeois revolution, whereas the classical bourgeois revolution in France rather retarded the capitalist development there? In the history of thought, the Enlightenment as a typical bourgeois thought appeared in France under the ancien régime and disappeared amidst the bourgeois revolution by death of Condorcet, while the English Enlightenment was born from the pen of Hobbes amidst the revolution and developed into the classical political economy almost without interruption. This peculier English way of capitalist development in thought and society needs to be studied in detail. The revolution begun with the Scottish presbyterian movement against Charles I, was fought by the English Presbyterians assisted by the Independents and Levellers, and ended in compromise between the Royalists and Presbyterians. In short, it was fought on the level of the Presbyterians. In spite of this fact, thinkers of the English Enlightenment were more or less critical toward the Presbyterians. Examples are Hobbes, Fielding, Smith etc. The triangular relation among the revolutionary group (Independents, Levellers, etc.), the Presbyterians the thinkers of Enlightenment may be the central point of further analysis. Each of these three sections developed and changed its character through action and reaction. It might be possible to say the Enlightenment absorbed certain radical ideas of the first section while criticizing the second. The seemingly uniterrupted process of capitalist development in England contains a certain number of stages or elements distinct from each other. The present writer cannot keep from feeling that Hill's recent interpretation of the revolution as a process of resistance and triumph of the natural rulers is a postMarxian version of traditionalism.

The centennial of the founding of the Brazilian Republic, which coincides with the bicentennial of France's republican revolution of 1789, has not aroused the same debates as the French Revolution. The extent to which France's eruption represented a bourgeois revolution has been much questioned. Indeed, bourgeois revolutions everywhere have been subject to greater scrutiny and skepticism. This debate has excited much less passion in Brazil.Most historians have viewed the Brazilian Republic's birth as a rather unimportant event—and a failure. It was neither bourgeois nor a revolution. Rather, the overthrow of the Emperor on November 15, 1889 was a palace coup that replaced one authoritarian rural regime with another. According to this interpretation, no social change occurred as the population stood by “beastlike.” Historians often argue that although the army, which launched the coup, was able to maintain some autonomy in policy formulation for five years, it soon succumbed to the revived agrarian export elite, leaving behind few positive achievements. Yet at the time, the London Statesman declared that the overthrow of the Brazilian monarchy to be the world's most significant event in a very busy 1889. Historians are now starting to echo this sentiment, reasserting the importance of the early 1890s. Décio Saes, for instance, asserts that the 1889-1891 period marked the advent of the “bourgeois state” which confirmed on the political level the transformation set into motion by the emancipation of slaves in 1888.

This book is a collection of 17 studies about Peruvian history in the second half of the nineteenth century. Focusing on Lima and especially on the capital’s social and educated elite, most deal with intellectual, political, and cultural history. Aside from the epoch and the city under investigation, the articles are very heterogeneous in character. This makes the book a kind of reader in current trends in historiography pertaining to nineteenth-century Lima.Five articles are dedicated to an intellectual history of Lima’s upper classes: a chapter on the lawyer Francisco García Calderón, a discussion of liberalism in the 1850s, an essay on ideas of sovereignty, an analysis of nineteenth-century Peruvian historiography, and an exploration of the memory of the battle of May 2. The main focus of the book is political history, with chapters discussing the creation of departments and provinces, primary-education policy in Lima, and conflicts between church and state. In my view, the most interesting articles describe the exclusionary policies of Lima’s middle and upper classes. Using census data from 1876, Jesús Cosamalón shows that, unlike the poor in Santiago de Chile or Mexico City, Lima’s lower class was highly stratified along racial lines. As a result, Lima’s social structure was more closely linked to racial background than in other Latin American capitals. Race therefore played a crucial role in the policies of inclusion and exclusion among the political parties of the middle and upper classes: class was not only an economic issue. Carlos Aguirre employs similar arguments. By referring to contemporary discourse on criminality, he shows that in the second half of the nineteenth century, the educated classes created an image of lower-class criminality that was then linked to racially mixed or “dark” people. This was the image that drove authoritarian exclusionary measures planned at establishing greater control over the lower classes. Finally, Gabriella Chiaramonti demonstrates that in the 1870s, congressmen proposed and discussed laws restricting the right to vote to a relatively small, educated elite, which eventually came into effect in the 1890s.While these three contributions analyze political exclusion, other articles use culture as a starting point to examine the exclusionary practices of Lima’s middle and upper classes. Paul Rizo Patrón describes the ways in which the people enriched by guano fortunes attempted to integrate themselves into the European nobility. Similarly, Cristina Mazzeo holds that the main goal of a guano trader named Francisco Quirós was to stop being a merchant and become an hacendado instead. Francesca Denegri describes how the changing style of women’s clothes during this period was used to create a distinction between rich educated “whites” and the rest of Lima’s inhabitants. In the only article that focuses on early-twentieth-century history, Carlos Gálvez analyzes the ways in which less-wealthy people tried to conform to aristocratic, or at least upper-class, norms of death and burial.Many of the articles recap their authors’ previous research, while some present interesting new case studies. Most of the articles form part of current historiography trends in their analysis of nineteenth-century Latin American nation-states from a political and intellectual perspective, asking the question of why the realities of Peru’s political system differed so much from the ideals of its republican founders. The historiography of the last two decades has answered that political culture is related to, but not dependent on, economic and social structures; consequently, we must examine political culture to understand the nation-state. This explains why the concept “citizenship” gained so much importance and the concept of the “liberal revolution” replaced that of the “bourgeois revolution.”While most of the articles form part of this revisionist view of the nineteenth century, the title and the introduction of the book defend the concept of bourgeoisie. Carmen Mc Evoy makes the point that bourgeoisie is not only an economic concept but also a cultural one. From a cultural point of view, she argues, a bourgeoisie certainly existed in nineteenth-century Peru, characterized by a high level of education, moral values, and republican political commitment. But even if one were to accept that the concept of bourgeoisie has no economic implication at all, the articles collected in this book testify in great detail to the fact that the education, moral values, and political commitments of Peru’s middle and upper classes were not as similar to European bourgeois culture as Mc Evoy appears to think. The comparison she makes to the German Bildungsbürgertum, for example, does not work. Although I do not agree entirely with Mc Evoy’s interpretation, I nevertheless believe that the book is a good starting point for the study of the political, intellectual, and cultural history of Lima’s elite in the second half of the nineteenth century.

A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean

Commerce, capitalism and the political culture of the French Revolution

French Revolution, The

Book Reviews George C. Comminel. R e t h in k in g t h e F r e n c h R e v o l u t io n : M a r x is m a n d t h e R e v is io n ­ ist C h a l l e n g e . New York: Verso, 1987. Pp. 225. One of the broadly influential themes of contemporary research in the human sciences is the impossibility of a clear distinction between the two senses of “ history.” The word denotes both events and their narration, both what humans do and what they say or write about the things done. To the old dream of an invisible narration providing direct access to the truth of events themselves, structuralism and its successors have opposed keen aware­ ness that past events are available for present contemplation uniquely in narrative form. History is therefore always already a certain verbalization of history, and the events of which it speaks are less raw material than a manufactured product, less a point of departure than a point of destination. Because a historical fact acquires importance when a historical text represents it as consequential, the desire to separate facts from texts is hopelessly deluded. Whatever one’s attitude toward the epistemological consequences of structuralist and post-structuralist history, it must be admitted that the French Revolution furnishes an exemplary illustration of why they have gained currency. Even to identify the time span covered by the words “ French Revolution” requires us to choose among wildly varying opinions that range from a few months to many decades, and specification of the events that counted during whichever period is finally identified will be limited only by the amount of time available for library research. The history and historiography of the French Revolu­ tion have always been inextricable. It is therefore remarkable that a single interpretation of the Revolution was long an almost unchallenged orthodoxy. For historians of the left, the center and the right, what happened in France at the end of the eighteenth century was until recently a class conflict between bourgeoisie and aristocracy, a massive transformation of social and political organization that abolished feudal rights and obligations while establishing the conditions necessary for the development of modern economic liberalism. In the succinct language of The Communist Manifesto, the sociopolitical forms of feudalism “ had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.” Disagreements about what was responsible for the bursting were less important than agreement on what flew asunder, on what came together in its place. The broad consensus identifying the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution had a long and vigorous life, but it died a sudden and inglorious death. Over the last two decades, historians throughout the world have concentrated their research and rhetoric on refuting every explanation of the French Revolution that posits class antagonism between bour­ geoisie and aristocracy. The two components of France’s eighteenth-century elite simply shared too many economic interests for it to be plausible that economic antagonism drove them inexorably into political conflict. There was simply too much inter-class mobility for it to be plausible that frustrated bourgeois ambitions could find no alternative to bursting the world asunder. Georges Comminel’s Rethinking the French Revolution begins with an informed survey of the life and death of the social interpretation of the French Revolution. Comminel writes as a Marxist, but his dismissal of M arx’s idea that the history of the French Revolution is the history of class struggle between nobles and bourgeois is unequivocal: “ there is now lit­ tle doubt that the whole body of serious historical research stands in refutation of the idea 92 S u m m e r 1989 B o o k R ev iew s that a capitalist bourgeois class was driven to overthrow a feudal aristocratic ruling class to which it was intrinsically opposed” (18). Rethinking the French Revolution provides a useful overview of both the revisionist historians whose work justifies that statement and of the classical historians whose work is under attack. Even casual inquiry into the French Revolution demands knowledge of the historiographical issues raised when historical...

A number of different threads have run through feminist commentaries on the ‘middle classes’. First, the middle class/occupational structure has been seen to be ‘gendered’ in that it has reflected the division of labour between men and women in both the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ spheres. Thus historically, masculine exclusionary practices have formally excluded women from professions such as medicine and law, and kept them out of managerial positions. At the same time, women’s employment in the ‘lower professions’ and subordinate occupations such as clerical work has supported that of men. Furthermore, women’s work in the domestic sphere has also maintained men’s superior occupational status, by liberating them from domestic responsibilities (particularly amongst the ’middle classes’) (Crompton, 1986). This approach emphasises the intertwining of class and gender, that is, the difficulty of separating ‘class’ from ‘gender’ processes in giving an account of the occupational structure (Scott, 1986). A further strand of feminist critique has emphasised the way in which particular occupations have been psychologically and culturally ‘gendered’, that is, rendered ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’. Bureaucratic structures (through which senior managers progress) have been described as reflecting masculine qualities such as emotional distance, reason, and an emphasis upon abstract thinking, and parallel arguments have also been developed in respect of high-ranking professionals (Witz, 1992; Massey, 1995; Davies 1996).1

THOMAS BEDDOES HAS RECENTLY RECEIVED CONSIDERED ATTENTION Alternatively as medical practitioner whose German interests had a decisive influence his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, (1) or as an advocate of public hygiene devoted to value of (2) As figure who represents porous borders among discourses of well-being, politics, and literature, he compellingly embodies Romantic medicine that sought to produce health as social ideal. But Beddoes is also thinker of way in which Romantic medicine was itself haunted by dis-ease that suggested impossibility of something as basic as health. My task in this essay is to examine ways in which Beddoes' elaboration of hypochondria in Romantic period structures medically-inflected understanding of wellbeing. While literary and philosophical contours of Romantic hypochondria need to be further parsed in works by Schelling, Mary Shelley, de Quincey, and Hegel--not to mention those texts by more palpable hypochondriacs like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley--I want to attend to still under-read but crucially important medical text by Beddoes that sought to understand conceptual physiology of hypochondria and its implications specifically for sense of Romantic health. The three volumes of Thomas Beddoes' Hygeia: or Essays Moral and Medical, on Causes Affecting Personal State of our Middling and Affluent Classes (1802-3) constitute text that deserves to be read on its own merits for rich examination it offers of contours of deployment of health in Georgian Britain. Hygeia offers capacious understanding of physical or ideal pleasure and pain affecting minds and bodies of middle classes in Britain, and assigns particular priority to nervous disorders among an increasingly hypochondriacal society. (3) But this is already to pose several concerns at once, each of them crucial for understanding concept of Romantic health that Beddoes will develop and ways in which illness of hypochondria provides conceptual reserve upon which he draws as he works and unworks possibility of health. Beddoes, prominent and controversial Bristol physician, opens Hygeia with gesture that is, in retrospect, expressive of much more than simple humility. Admitting difficult task he has set himself in work that proposes to treat medically ills of increasingly wealthy merchant classes in Britain, Beddoes remarks, a writer in my situation finds himself obliged to fix upon an imaginary standard of (1:7). If Beddoes must imagine himself to be capable of providing care, work of his text likewise dictates that he imagine much more than just medical expertise. Medical advice flourished in Romantic era, and particular project of Hygeia bears patient consideration of ways in which it sought not so much to target an already existing bourgeois clientele but to produce that readership as object of medical treatments it offered. This also means, as Beddoes indicates, that physician responsible for such health must appear capable of caring for bourgeois body politic, which is to say, capable of diagnosing what constitutes specifically bourgeois wellbeing and illness. Beddoes' foray into what could only provisionally be called medical anthropology of the anatomy and physiology of external prosperity among British middling classes (1:29) is, moreover, anticipated by an entire genre of medical manuals that sought to provide members of bourgeoisie with capacity to manage their own health much as they took care of their own economic or intellectual well-being. Beddoes' own complicated relationship with these texts in Hygeia informs his efforts to model--in performative dissemination of medical advice--a reorganization of medical practice in Georgian England. But it is worth noting from outset he does not position such instructive medical texts and their ideologies of self-reliance as standard against which his own advice might be measured. …

Reviewed by: Power and the Professions in Britain, 1700–1850, and: The Writing of Urban Histories in Eighteenth-Century England, and: Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 Geoffrey Clark Penelope J. Corfield. Power and the Professions in Britain, 1700–1850 (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). Pp. 269. $85.00 cloth. Rosemary Sweet. The Writing of Urban Histories in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Pp. 356. $90.00 cloth. Dror Wahrman. Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). $69.95 cloth. $22.95 paper. In the last twenty-five years, the eighteenth-century British middle class has attracted unprecedented scholarly attention. While it remained outside the scope of Namier’s aristocratic focus and played a faint second fiddle to the plebeian preoccupations of E. P. Thompson and his followers, the middling strata of British society have recently taken center-stage in the historiography of British society and culture in the long eighteenth century. As Dror Wahrman reminds us, however, this newly fashionable subject in fact belongs within a long intellectual tradition in which the middle class is seen as morally, socially, or politically pivotal. What distinguishes the three books under review here is their careful treatment of the “middle class” or the “middling sort” as less than coherent categories, and their acknowledgement that the social middle as a group existed primarily as a rhetorical construction with overt political purposes. This is not to say that the social history of the middling sort has in these cases simply been ablated away by the withering gusts of the linguistic turn. Quite the contrary. Penelope Corfield’s study of the rise of the professions (mainly following the senior branches of clerics, lawyers, and doctors, but also including cadet lines like teachers, engineers, and architects) provides a wealth of concrete data detailing the growth, geographical diffusion, and economic fortunes of groups which claimed genteel status and social power by virtue of their specialist knowledge. According to Corfield, lawyers and doctors were especially successful at raising their social prestige and in reinforcing their prerogatives, mainly by acquiring a substantial degree of self-regulation and consolidating themselves into professional bodies, albeit with internal hierarchies. In contrast, the sundry confessional divisions and theological rivalries of the clergy in a religiously pluralistic state prevented a similar move towards professional collaboration and self-organization. [End Page 308] The critical ability exhibited by certain professions to set formal admission and performance standards for their members was a key factor in their social elevation and that of the professions, and in their capacity to wield monopolistic power over a body of expert knowledge. For Corfield, then, the rise of the professions presents a valuable case study for testing the famous Foucauldian power/knowledge equation. Not surprisingly, Corfield’s nuanced appraisal of professional power leads her to accept Foucault’s weak claim that power expresses itself as knowlege but to reject his stronger claim that such power-generated knowlege held its subjects in thrall. True, doctors successfully pushed aside medical parsons, female practitioners, and quacks of various stripes, but they contended less successfully against an enduring tradition of self-medication and an expanding volume of satire of the profession. Yet even here, Corfield is quick to point out the power-bequeathing as well as power-diminishing effects of satire, which “was not only a tribute to their power but simultaneously a communal goad to ensure that they lived up to their pretensions” (42). Although from a sociological viewpoint the class position of the professions has always appeared ambiguous, contemporaries had little difficulty assigning them to that socially—and conceptually—amorphous grouping known as the middling sort, whose ranks were expanding in tandem with the eighteenth-century urban renaissance and the diversifying service economy upon which it was based. The number of towns in England with a population upwards of 20,000 went from three to twelve in the first three-quarters of the century and, according to Rosemary Sweet, it was the middling sort in these burgeoning urban centers that formed the social locus for both the...

The thesis will examine the portrayal of women and their roles in courtship and marriage in three nineteenth-century novels: Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871), showing how gender differences played a significant part in Victorian society and more significantly, in the private sphere of the family. The significance of gender roles and how men and women interact with each other in the private sphere will be analysed in the social and historical context of the early to the mid-nineteenth-century England, using the historical criticism provided in Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 (1987) which examines the significance of gender roles in the life of the provincial English middle class. According to Davidoff and Hall, gender roles are a basis for the construction of the provincial middle class’s values, outlook, family life, religious ideology and economic structure (29). They observe that in historical texts and studies of the age, women are almost always neglected and they argue that women played as much part in shaping history as men did, giving evidence of women’s subtle influence, which often goes unrecorded or overlooked by other historians, in shaping the political, economic and philanthropic actions of men. This thesis will seek to explain that within the restricted social expectations, female writers of the nineteenth century have portrayed some of the strictest institutions of all, courtship and marriage, as a form of female empowerment against the dominating patriarchal world.