The Beehive is an extraordinary illustration, produced by the graphic artist George Cruikshank
in 1840. And it’s this extraordinary kind of cross-section of all the different kinds
of people that go to make up British society, from the Queen at the top, who is, Cruikshank
says, ‘Queen by lineal descent,’ it’s her absolute right to be there. Then on the
next tier you have the Lords and the Commons. And then we go down to other important institutions,
like trial by jury, freedom of all religious denominations, these things that make Britain
great, Cruikshank seems to be saying. And then you go further and further down and
each strata has a different set of people, all arranged by occupation. So we have medical
science, we have lawyers, and further down we have grocers and cheesemongers. Until you
get right to the bottom, where we have chimney sweeps, costermongers, people who are literally
the lowest of the low. Now while Cruikshank was in a sense, you know,
a radical commentator, he’s also deeply conservative with a small c. He has a sense
in which these roles that everybody’s inhabiting, tea dealers, cheesemongers, drapers, are going
to be like that forever. There’s no sense in which how you could get from being a sweep
at the bottom of the pile, right up to the top. It’s fixed and it’s permanent.
It’s a cliché but I think it’s an absolutely true one, that the Victorians were obsessed
with class. They were obsessed with placing people in particular social categories. Now
the reason for this was that their world was changing in absolutely extraordinary ways.
There were new kinds of wealth. The rising middle class, which we hear about so much,
is something that’s quite different because for the first time people are getting rich
in new ways. They’re getting rich through production,
through manufacture, through trading money, through trading articles, through building
things, by becoming an engineer, a stockbroker. These are kind of new kinds of jobs, so there’s
a worry about where do these people fit? What you get from the beginning of 19th century
is this kind of huge movement of population. People are pouring into the newly important
cities. And suddenly, everybody’s a stranger. And of course you
needed some way of placing people, of organising your world, of knowing who you were going
to be friends with, who you were going to feel superior to, and who you were going to feel
in awe of. I think that’s where the obsession with class comes from. This sense of trying
to work out who are these people, where do they belong, how should I behave towards them,
what’s my relationship towards them?
What it meant to be middle class was to hold a whole basket of values. One was a belief in the absolute power of the individual to
make their way in the world. That sense in which, if you work hard enough, if you work
harder than the next man, and it would be the next man, not the next woman, you will
make it in the world. You can overcome any number of obstacles and make yourself who
you want to be. Now of course along with that goes a very particular way of understanding
the economy. A belief in free trade, the free movement of goods and services, and actually
people as well, was fundamental to the idea of this new middle class. There were going
to be no old-fashioned monopolies. Men and goods and prices and corn and everybody, will
find their proper level if only we have free trade.
But of course it sounds wonderful, this idea that you can make yourself into anything you
want to be, but along with that comes this slightly judgemental sense, that if you haven’t
‘made it’, there’s something wrong with you. That you don’t really deserve any kind
of respect. And we see the middle class imposing that value system on the working classes in
a series of legislation in the 1830s, in particular the new Poor Law, which introduced the idea
that there were deserving poor and undeserving poor. Now the deserving poor are the very
elderly, the handicapped, people who really can’t be expected to help themselves. They
are worthy of charity and pity and Christian kindness. But the greatest part of the poor
were undeserving people. These are people who are lazy, stupid, just aren’t trying
hard enough, and for them there’s to be no compassion at all. They are going to be
spirited in to the much hated institution of the Workhouse.
It could feel like an extraordinary burden, this feeling that you had to deserve your
good fortune, and it’s something Dickens satirises so well in Great Expectations. Because
if you remember, Pip, who is a young working class boy, finds himself turned into a gentleman
by a mysterious benefactor. Somebody is funding his rise through society. He doesn’t know
who. In fact, it turns out to be Magwitch, he’s a criminal. But he doesn’t know that.
And he starts to feel incredibly guilty because he hasn’t actually laboured for all the
wonderful things he has, for the clothes he has, the food he eats, his toff-like ways.
He hasn’t really deserved them. And in fact, that’s his undoing in the end. And Dickens
was, you know, very, very critical of that idea, that there was something intrinsically
wonderful about working for your place in the world.
There is of course another downside to this ideology of making your way in the world.
I mean men are supposed to be out there fighting dragons in the sense of getting on in the
free market economy, beating the next man, undercutting him, getting a bigger fortune.
That’s all good middle class stuff but it doesn’t sit very well with the sort of Christian
belief in the sense of brotherhood of man and not damaging anybody else by your actions.
And one of the solutions that the middle class developed was by as it were keeping the man
out in the world, in the world of free exchange of kind of intense commercial opportunism
and competition, but by isolating his wife and his daughters in the middle class home.
Now in the middle class home all is sweetness and light and gentility. There is no competitiveness.
I mean inevitably there’s a sort of hypocrisy involved in kind of being immensely competitive
in the outside world and coming home and as it were becoming somebody who is, you know,
a good Christian, gentle, meek and mild. But perhaps more important than hypocrisy, it
must have been a terribly difficult tension to live out in yourself.