Review

Reviewed Work(s): The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Community, and
Family Life in London, 1660-1730 by Peter Earle
Review by: Frank O'Gorman
Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 64, No. 3 (Sep., 1992), pp. 594-595
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2124608
Accessed: 29-05-2017 01:51 UTC

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594 Book Reviews

pray for his welfare" (p. 261). Yet this was in the wake of Raleigh's execu
Overbury scandal, and in the midst of an economic recession for which th
widely blamed.

JOHN P. KENYON
University of Kansas

The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Community, and Family
Life in London, 1660-1730. By Peter Earle.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989. Pp. xiii + 446.

The chief merit of Peter Earle's meticulously researched and timely volume lies in its
depiction of the economy and society of London between the Restoration and the age
of Walpole. Synthesizing his own elaborate research program and an abundance of
recent scholarly material, Earle guides the reader through the social structure of
London and the complexities of the manufacturing and commercial life of the capital.
The author describes the social structure in traditional, tripartite divisions. About
three thousand to five thousand households constituted the upper class (3-5 percent of
the population), about twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand households constituted
the middle classes, who are the subjects of this book (20-25 percent of the
population), and the remaining 70-77 percent made up the "mechanick part of
mankind" (pp. 3-16).
In this metropolitan society the typical unit of production was the individual ma
artisan working in his own workshop, often with his apprentices and journeymen
living above the shop. Contemporary developments, however, were both threatening
the independence of many small masters and making it harder for journeymen to
consider opening their own shops. As the market became more sophisticated and as
competition intensified, the amount of capital needed to run a business in the
metropolis steadily increased. The consequence for many industries was the emer-
gence of a complex hierarchy of four groups: first, national and international
merchants who actually produced little of what they sold; second, modest retailers who
produced goods both for their own customers and for wholesalers; third, small masters
who produced goods rather than sold them; and, fourth, journeymen who might work
for any of the previously detailed three groups. Even in heavier industries like
building, shipbuilding, and certain of the textile trades, in which a proto-factory
method of production was emerging, comparable hierarchical patterns were appearing.
This industrial structure invited the attention of middle-class entrepreneurs, inves-
tors, and merchants, and many of them made large amounts of money. There were,
however, relatively few "rags to riches" stories. As Earle remarks, "To get rich you
had to start rich or at least comfortably well off" (p. 31). Nevertheless, commercial
men probably represented the largest section of the middle class, especially, as Earle
is at pains to point out, a rapidly increasing number of inland traders. Professional
men, he calculates, made up at least one-quarter and perhaps as much as a third of the
London middle class. Nearly all teachers and clergymen were quite poorly paid, but
doctors and especially lawyers became quite prosperous.
In this society there were few lingering prejudices against business. No less than
one-quarter of Earle's sample of apprentices had fathers described as gentlemen,
esquires, or even knights. Initial costs of starting up businesses were often very low,

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 Book Reviews 595

and they were raised in a variety of weird and wonderful ways. Credit was
widely available. The habit of investment was universal, but only the wealthier
members of the middle class speculated in government stock. In one of the most
fascinating passages of the book, the author demonstrates a tendency for investment
in both joint-stock companies and in government stock to filter down only very
slowly from the mercantile bourgeoisie to the other members of the middle class of
London.
Peter Earle has much to say about the social life of the middling orders, and his
chapters on marriage, household, civic life, expenditure and consumption and, finally,
sickness and death are full of information, anecdotes, and useful-because carefully
qualified-generalization.
Nevertheless, the reader reaches the end of the volume wondering if there really was
a middle class at all, so variegated was its structure, wealth, and social behavior. The
author tries in his conclusion to convince us, and possibly himself, that, "in some very
general senses, the middle class can be treated as homogeneous" due to their
capitalistic instincts: his middle class consists of "people of capital who were
interested in profit, accumulation and improvement" (p. 332). This will not do. Many
members of the upper and lower classes would qualify as middle class on that
definition. Furthermore, Earle's assertion that "they shared many common experi-
ences" (p. 332) fails to convince. On closer examination, what he appears to be
arguing is that they shared many common problems, such as how to make a living, and
whom and when to marry. For me, at least, these similarities do not establish their
existence as a class.
In the end perhaps it does not matter that the book is somewhat mistakenly titled
The Making of the English Middle Class. What Peter Earle is really arguing is, as
he confesses, that the period 1660-1730 "saw fundamental changes in the lives of
the middle class and of the way in which such people were perceived both by
themselves and by the rest of society" (p. 334). The main reason for this significant
social shift seems to have been a dramatic numerical increase in the sort of people
with whom this book deals. The author should have probed this issue in much more
detail than he does. It is hardly sufficient to claim in defense of his neglect that
"what seems really important about the period is the qualitative rather than the
quantitative changes in the lives of middle-class Londoners" (p. 336). Both, of
course, are vitally relevant.
One of the further weaknesses of this book is its failure to link the social and
political environments of the metropolitan middling classes. After all, almost all recent
studies of the period have revealed the importance of their involvement in politics
between 1679 and, say, 1722. Furthermore, Earle fails to address the theoretical issues
that any study of class in this period must surely take into consideration. Such issues
include class consciousness, class terminology, class ritual, and class attitudes.
Disappointingly little is said about these topics. It should not be thought that he has
authored the "making" of the English middle class in the same sense that Edward
Thompson arguably authored the "making of the English working class." Within its
limitations, however, Peter Earle's book is both interesting and useful, and it has
succeeded in providing an energetic and scholarly, if provisional, treatment of its
subject.

FRANK O'GORMAN
University of Manchester

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