Middle-Class Education and Employment in the Nineteenth Century: A Critical Note

Abstract

n his article 'Middle-Class Education and Employment in the Nineteenth Century' 1 Dr F. Musgrove argues that 'the expansion of education for middleclass boys that took place after the i830's was not matched by the expansion of middle-class employment'. Consequently, middle-class incomes were affected by the increased competition for comparatively fewer employment opportunities, and the higher middle class lost ground proportionally in income and numbers to the lower middle class. The professions in particular suffered a relative decline, and constituted 'a diminishing proportion of the nation's population'. If true, this interlocking argument would call in question the whole accepted pattern of nineteenth-century economic and social development. It is based, however, on errors of fact and interpretation which render it not merely doubtful but the reverse of what was happening to Victorian society. That there was an increased provision for middle-class education during the nineteenth century is not in dispute. What is questioned is the argument that the output of educated boys so far outran the expansion of middle-class occupations as to have an adverse effect upon middle-class incomes. This is a statistical question, to which the foundation or expansion of individual schools is not strictly relevant. Nor is it sufficient to prove that the number of boys at middle-class schools was expanding as rapidly as population. In the first place the middle class itself, as Dr Musgrove points out, was expanding faster than total population, and would require more school places for its boys. Secondly, something must be allowed for the longer school life per boy which normally accompanies a rising standard of education. Thirdly, Dr Musgrove argues, here and elsewhere,2 that a large proportion of upper and middle-class boys in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were educated at home, and their transfer to schools must account for part of the increase. Finally, among occupational groups traditionally recruited by a variety of methods, by no means all of them academic - until i858, for example, two out of the three kinds of medical practitioners were normally recruited by apprenticeship - a large part of the increase might be due to the swing to more formal education.