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Journal of Contemporary History Copyright © 2000 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and
New Delhi, Vol 35(2), 307–318.
[0022-0094(200004)35:2;307–318;012306]

Jon Lawrence
Review Article
The British Sense of Class

David Cannadine, Class in Britain, New Haven and London; Yale University
Press, 1998; xiv + 242 pp.; ISBN 0-300-07703-3
Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1998; vii + 562 pp.; ISBN 0-19-820672-0
W.G. Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory: Volume III, Applied Social
Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997; xviii + 330 pp.; ISBN
0-521-58801-4

The British, we are often told, are a people uniquely obsessed by ‘class’. Not
class as sociologists generally understand it (i.e. relationship to the means of
production or structural inequalities in social capital and power), but ‘class’ as
an all-embracing word for describing (and defining) distinctions based on per-
ceived social differences. It is ‘class’ in this loose, vernacular sense that has
been most prominent, and most influential, in modern British history — a
point fully recognized in these three new books on the British sense of class.
Indeed, it is a central argument of David Cannadine’s stimulating and self-
consciously revisionist book, Class in Britain, that historians must rehabilitate
‘class’ as a legitimate subject of historical enquiry, but that they must do so
without ‘rehabilitating old-style class analysis’. ‘Class’, he insists, ‘is one of the
most important aspects of modern British history’, despite recent tendencies to
play down its significance (16–17). Quite so, but the question, of course, is
whether this bold attempt at ‘defining the subject afresh and envisioning it
anew’ can be judged a success. In large measure it can. According to
Cannadine we must accept that ‘class is best understood as being what culture
does to inequality and social structure’ (188). Cannadine is thus arguing for
the inherently constructed nature of class and class identities (so that the
distinction between ‘class’ and ‘socio-economic position’ would be similar to
the distinction many historians now recognize between ‘gender’ and ‘sex’).
Not surprisingly, therefore, this is a book concerned primarily with the
‘languages of class’, or rather with representations of the social order — for
Cannadine wishes to uphold a distinction between vocabularies of ‘class’ and
‘models of society’ (166). The former, he suggests, have done surprisingly little
to shape social identities, because, unlike models of society, they cannot
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capture the social imagination by addressing and interpreting social relation-

ships (here Cannadine assumes that identities are defined negatively — against
an external ‘Other’ — he plays down the positive, self-referential, and mythic
dimensions to identity formation).1 Cannadine argues that British perceptions
of ‘class’ have been shaped by three persistent, but conceptually distinct
‘models of society’: the triadic model (upper, middle and lower); the dichoto-
mous model (society divided between two adversarial blocs: ‘us’ and ‘them’),
and the hierarchical model (society as a seamless web of social gradations).
Between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth century, ‘class’ gradually
emerged as the term ‘most commonly used for describing all three models of
contemporary British society’ (19–20). It is this linguistic confusion,
Cannadine suggests, that has frequently allowed social observers to embrace
all three models of society simultaneously — apparently oblivious to their
mutual contradictions. In turn, this rich and diverse ‘repertoire of surviving
vernacular models’ of the social order helps to explain why Britons continue to
conceptualize social inequality primarily in terms of ‘class’ (170).
There can be no doubt that Class in Britain represents a powerful, and
welcome, critique of both ‘old-style’ class analysis, with its tendency to
collapse the distinction between ‘class as structure’ and ‘class as culture’,
and recent ‘post-modern’ histories that tend to ignore class altogether as a
category of analysis. Perhaps inevitably, however, the book does not entirely
fulfil its promise to envision its subject anew. In particular, despite the claim
that ‘changes in popular perceptions of British society have been at least as
important as changes in British society itself’, ‘popular perceptions’, as such,
remain largely unexamined. Instead, Class in Britain opts for the strategy of
analysing a wide range of public discourses on ‘class’, on the assumption that
popular understandings of class have largely been shaped by these discourses.
At a number of points, Cannadine argues that politicians have played an
especially prominent role in developing influential rhetorics about class, and
there is no doubt that the book is strongly skewed towards political concep-
tions of class (21–2, 168–9). Much less attention is paid to the nominally
‘objective’ languages of social description encoded both in administrative
practices such as the census, the poor law, tax collection and the law, and in
the symbolic organization of social space from the factory to the public
cemetery, and the school system to the church congregation.2 Arguably, it is
among these low-key but pervasive ‘languages of class’ that one finds the most
determined attempts to reconstitute social understanding in the nineteenth
century, not among the manifestly partial languages articulated by party
politicians. Indeed, one might go further and suggest that politicians have

1 For examples of the two approaches, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–
1837 (New Haven, CT 1992), and Anthony Smith, National Identity (London 1991).
2 For instance, see Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–
1864 (Chicago 1995); Paul Johnson, ‘Class Law in Victorian England’, Past & Present, 141
(1993), 147–69; Richard Biernacki, The Fabrication of Labor: Germany and Britain, 1640–1914
(Berkeley 1995).
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Lawrence: The British Sense of Class 309

generally been concerned more with immediate political success than with
long-term social engineering. Most, in consequence, have tended to legitimate
their politics by appeals to established understandings of class, rather than by
articulating a new social vision. The early Labour Party was, however, a
crucial exception in this respect, and the significance of its project to transform
popular perceptions of class will be considered more fully later in this article.
In so far as Class in Britain is concerned to reconstruct popular perceptions
of the social order, it relies heavily on the idea of persistent working-class
‘deference’, and a widespread belief in ‘hierarchy’ (e.g., 88, 115, 137, 158).
But the problematic concept of ‘deference’ is not interrogated, nor is there
any attempt to assess how far the claims of birth and status played a part in
politicians’ appeals to the public. Doubtless there were elections in which
subtly expressed articulations of social prestige proved crucial, but there were
many more in which, even in the nineteenth century, politicians relied on
exactly the opposite sentiments to secure election. Here the boast was not ‘I’m
your superior’ (however politely put), but ‘I’ve shared your hardships’, or, at
the very least, ‘I share your dialect/culture/passions’.3 Indeed, the need to dis-
play the common touch, and to place oneself on a level with the crowd, was
often a powerful disincentive for many to enter urban politics by the late nine-
teenth century.4 By then, popular politics were saturated with competing
languages of ‘class’ — mostly of a highly gendered nature — as politicians
sought to weave putative links between their policies and the imagined virtues
of British working men.5
In turn, the reliance on ‘deference’ as a tool of explanation can be linked to
an important underlying assumption of Class in Britain — namely, that the
centrality of ‘class’ to British social discourse must be understood as a product
of the persistence of hierarchy. Here one clearly sees the impress of
Cannadine’s earlier work on the British aristocracy and monarchy.6 He is
surely right to insist that Britain’s is a very different sort of society from that of
France, Ireland or the USA, principally because it has never experienced a
moment when those in power have consciously sought to expunge the historic
symbols of rank and privilege (52–3, 127–8, 171). Similarly, there is much
3 John Garrard, ‘Urban élites, 1850–1914: The Rule and Decline of a New Squirearchy?’,
Albion, 27 (1995), 583–621; Peter Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge
1971), 224–45; Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People (Cambridge 1991), esp. chap. 3.
4 Garrard, ‘Urban élites’, op. cit., 592, 602, 605.
5 See Keith McClelland, ‘Some Thoughts on Masculinity and the “Representative Artisan”’,
Gender & History, 1 (1989), 164–77; David Feldman, ‘The Importance of Being English’ in D.
Feldman and G.S. Jones (eds), Metropolis: London Histories and Representations Since 1800
(London 1989); Jon Lawrence, ‘Class and Gender in the Making of Urban Toryism, 1880–1914’,
English Historical Review, 108 (1993), 629–52.
6 David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven, CT 1990);
Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain (New Haven, CT 1994); Rituals
of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies (Cambridge 1987); and ‘The Context,
Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the “Invention of Tradition”,
c. 1820–1977’ in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge
1983).
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merit in the argument that the Empire helped to sustain notions of ‘legitimate’
hierarchy well into the twentieth century — at least in some quarters (104,
158). That said, however, Cannadine makes too little of the transformations
in the meaning of ‘hierarchy’ between the eighteenth century — when most
still believed in a divinely ordered ‘Great Chain of Being’ linking everyone
from monarch to pauper — and the late twentieth century, when ‘hierarchy’
survived principally in the form of a widely-despised honours system, an
enfeebled House of Lords and a directionless monarchy. Perhaps more
seriously, he also exaggerates the ‘primordial’ and natural character of hier-
archy which, we are told, has ‘almost always been the most powerful, the most
popular and the most resonant’ model of British society (23 and 158 —
also 88, 137–43, 167–8). Thus, whilst we are repeatedly reminded of the
essentially imaginary character of all class description, it is nonetheless
assumed that the triadic and dichotomous models of society are purely con-
structed and political, whereas the hierarchical view of society has it roots
both in human nature (he cites Desmond Morris) and in objective social
realities (23 and 167–8). In fact, nothing could be more resolutely ‘political’
than the belief that hierarchy is natural and pre-ordained.
At this point it will be useful to bring in W.G. Runciman’s A Treatise on
Social Theory, since this expounds a very different view of twentieth-century
English history. Runciman argues that the years 1915–22 witnessed a funda-
mental transformation in the form of ‘capitalist liberal democracy’ practised in
England (2, 10–11, 60–4, 72–82, 134–8, 174–8). One of the most dramatic
manifestations of this transformation, he suggests, was a shift in mores and
manners which permanently undermined notions of ‘natural’ hierarchy and
the claims of birth (61–2, 89–90, 154–5, 209). Significantly, Runciman is
interested less in ‘deference’ as a world-view, than in ‘deferent practices’ — i.e.
reciprocal social roles performed to smooth relations between individuals
with very different levels of power and social prestige. It is these ‘deferent
practices’ that Runciman suggests ‘cease[d] to be functional for either side’ in
the years after 1914 (154–5, also xv, 206–7). Here Runciman is concerned
primarily with class as social behaviour; for him vernacular understandings of
‘class’ are about ‘differences in the way English people can be seen to behave
towards each other on account of life-style, education, inherited rank and con-
ventionally defined prestige’ (25). For Cannadine, in contrast, what matters
are the competing representations (models) of the social world that are
assumed to inform both social perception and social behaviour. Hence, whilst
Runciman is struck most strongly by changed patterns of social interaction
after 1914, Cannadine is more interested in the extent to which political
leaders sought to mount a rearguard defence of hierarchy — for instance,
through their careful re-packaging of regal splendour (Class in Britain,
137–43). Both perspectives are certainly valuable, but it is ultimately a weak-
ness of Cannadine’s approach that the connections between social representa-
tion and social life are left uninvestigated. At a number of points Cannadine
notes that people commonly embrace all three models of the social order
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Lawrence: The British Sense of Class 311

simultaneously, apparently unaware of the contradictions between the

different models (e.g. 19, 126, 145–6, 165). But he does not pursue this point
— rather, it is held up as further evidence of the fractured nature of the (post-
modern) subject. However, from the perspective of class as social behaviour,
these multiple imaginings can be seen more positively as cultural resources
scripting a rich variety of possible class identities and roles. According to
social circumstances, individuals may behave as though they live in a polarized
(dichotomous) social world or an ordered hierarchy. Often such role-playing
may be coerced (as in domestic service) or instrumental (as in appeals for
charity),7 but different models of society may also be embraced for less prag-
matic reasons: they may reflect social context. A polarized view of class
relations may be embraced at the workplace, but not extended to wider social
relationships, or a status-conscious view may be embraced to map differences
within a group, even though that group presents a solidaristic face to the out-
side world. Thus, whereas Cannadine simply catalogues Robert Roberts’s
deployment of all three modes of class imagining to describe Salford’s classic
slum (and concludes that his overriding impression was of ‘a complex, finely
graded hierarchy’ [126]), an alternative reading would suggest that Roberts is
offering two distinct perspectives: an internal ‘frame’, where fine distinctions
of status between workers were of paramount importance, and an external
‘frame’, where what mattered most was ‘the real social divide between those
who, in earning daily bread, dirtied hands and face, and those who did
not’.8 Of course, the fact that Roberts is reconstructing these ‘frames’ from a
vast social and temporal distance raises profound interpretative problems, but
it is not difficult to find contemporary Edwardian accounts that adopt a
similarly bifurcated perspective. For instance, in Seems So! (1911), Stephen
Reynolds and the Wooleys develop a sustained argument about the social and
cultural gulf between manual workers and ‘the likes o’ they there starch-collar
articles’. But despite its celebration of the ‘informal freemasonry’ generated by
working-class hardship, a recurrent theme of the book is the divisiveness of
working-class society and its lack of internal cohesion.9
Turning now to consider W.G. Runciman’s A Treatise on Social Theory at
greater length, it should first be stressed that patterns of class interaction form
only one element in this sweeping survey of twentieth-century English society.
Truculently unsympathetic to the claims of ‘post-modern’ theory, Runciman
displays no unease with the ‘totalizing’ ambition (xiv–xv). Rather, his aim is to
apply the methodology and theory outlined, respectively, in the first and
second volumes of his treatise to an analysis of how English ‘modes of pro-
7 Peter Bailey, ‘Will the Real Bill Banks Please Stand Up? Towards a Role Analysis of Mid-
Victorian Working-Class Respectability’, Social History, 12 (1979), 336–53.
8 Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (1971;
Pelican edn, London 1973), 19.
9 Stephen Reynolds and Bob and Tom Wooley, Seems So! A Working-Class View of Politics
(London 1911), xvi–xvii, xxiii, 121–2, 180–1. Significantly, Reynolds consciously combines the
dichotomous and hierarchic view of society, advocating a paternalistic, ‘New Toryism’ tolerant of
‘class-customs and class-aims’ (320).
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duction, persuasion and coercion’ have ‘evolved (or not)’ during the twentieth
century (xiii). Runciman’s methodology maintains a fourfold distinction
between reportage (presenting ‘sociological facts’), explanation (developing
‘explanatory hypotheses’ of these facts), description (recounting what people’s
lives ‘have been like for “them” ’), and evaluation (assessing social ‘facts’ in the
light of these subjective understandings [xiv]). In turn, his social theory might
best be expressed as an application of the Darwinian model of selection to the
social and cultural practices of human society. Thus in identifying the Great
War and its aftermath as a catalyst for fundamental shifts in the English
‘modes of production, persuasion and coercion’, Runciman emphasizes how
‘endogenous selective pressures’ favoured the reproduction of some changes in
economic, social and political practice and not others (135–6). It may not be
an approach that will appeal to all historians, but, despite the unfamiliar form
of Runciman’s argumentation, his text represents a major contribution to the
historiography of modern Britain. His elaboration of the case that funda-
mental, societal-level changes should be associated with the first, and not the
second world war, is powerful and essentially convincing. Similarly, his
picture of shifting patterns of class (or rather, in his words, ‘systactic’) rela-
tions is subtle and, for the most part, highly persuasive.10
Interestingly, Runciman’s account of ‘class in England’ is broadly similar to
that outlined by Ross McKibbin in Classes and Cultures, and it seems best to
consider the two works in parallel. Both studies insist (with Robert Roberts),
that twentieth-century England has been characterized by a fundamental
cultural gulf between manual and non-manual workers (Treatise, 45, 71, 87;
Classes, 45, 57–8, 98–104). Life-style, leisure and conditions of employment,
we are told, all worked to sustain distinct sub-cultures that can best be under-
stood as ‘working-class culture’ and ‘middle-class culture’ (indeed, this is the
organizing principle of the first half of McKibbin’s book). That said, both
acknowledge some degree of ‘blurring’ between class as economic role and
class as culture, but they do not let these ‘exceptions’ significantly modify their
analyses (Treatise, 67, 242–3, 252–3; Classes, v, 73). Of the two, Runciman
appears more sensitive to the inherent ambiguities involved in conventional
class distinctions such as that between ‘manual’ and ‘non-manual’ labour.11 He
recognizes that distinctions based on the conditions of employment (and on
ascribed status) are often of more significance in ‘common-sense’ definitions of
class than the nature of tasks performed at the workplace. He also recognizes
the broad range of ‘working-class’ occupations outside manufacturing

10 The term is developed as an alternative to ‘class’ to denote people who share a common
location in the economic, ideological or coercive dimensions of the social structure; see W.G.
Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory, Vol. II: Substantive Social Theory (Cambridge 1989),
esp. 12–13, 23–4. ‘Class’ is used only for a systact defined by its members’ common relation to the
processes of production (23).
11 McKibbin not only holds the distinction between ‘manual’ and ‘non-manual’ to be self-
evident, he also discusses ‘the working class’ for more than 50 pages before stating that his subject
is ‘manual’ workers and their families; Classes, 106–60.
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Lawrence: The British Sense of Class 313

industry, and the essentially arbitrary definition of many of these as ‘manual’

occupations (Treatise, 58, 233). Why, for instance, should custom define
drivers, security staff and most people in the ‘personal services’ as ‘manual’
workers, but not, say, nurses, farmers, or most technicians (not to mention
members of the more dexterous professions such as dentists and surgeons)?
Why, in the nineteenth century, were shop assistants and warehousemen
generally recognized, both by administrative ‘experts’ and by custom, as
members of the (lower) middle class, whereas by the late-twentieth century
their working-class, and, at least in the case of warehousemen, their ‘manual’
status was no less universally acknowledged? The answer of course, is
‘culture’, but that merely serves to underline the precariousness of the social
categories that shape works such as Classes and Cultures.
The ‘working class’ (conventionally defined), declined sharply as a pro-
portion of the total population during the twentieth century, from perhaps 80
per cent at the outbreak of the first world war, to barely 45 per cent by the
1980s. However, throughout the 1980s, enquiries into ‘self-ascribed class’
showed that approximately two-thirds of the adult population consistently
chose ‘working-class’ as the label that best described their class position.12 As
one would expect, Runciman is well aware of the importance of self-ascribed
class, noting both the powerful hold of the ‘middle-class’/‘working-
class’ dichotomy over the social imagination, and the persistent tendency of a
minority of respondents to ‘misdescribe’ their class position (66, 229n).
Unfortunately, he does not pursue the significance of ‘misdescription’ in the
Treatise, and it remains unclear why, during the 1980s, almost 50 per cent
more people should describe themselves as ‘working-class’ than customary
definitions would suggest were ‘working-class’.
Two factors spring immediately to mind as possible (overlapping) explana-
tions for this phenomenon. It may be that many born into ‘working-class’
homes, but now occupying ‘middle-class’ economic roles, have simply refused
to adopt the cultural practices and values that supposedly come with these
new roles.13 If so, this is probably because the idea of being ‘working-class’ has
been more positively valorized in British culture than Runciman is generally
prepared to allow (249, 283). Runciman hints that there may have been a
recent tendency for ‘increasing prestige’ to be attributed to ‘work’ (66), but I
would suggest that the roots of this distinctive British willingness to embrace
a working-class identity must be traced back much further. They lie in the
nineteenth-century triumph of the term ‘working’ classes to describe the great
mass of the nation’s wage labourers — in preference to the proffered variants

12 Roger Jowell et al. (eds), British Social Attitudes: The 1986 Report (Aldershot 1986), 151,
and idem, British Social Attitudes: The 9th Report (Aldershot 1992), 177. Between 1983 and
1991 the proportion of respondents describing themselves as ‘working’ or ‘upper-working’ class
varied between 64 and 69 per cent.
13 Contra both Runciman, Treatise, 116–17 and 154 and the dominant thread of the argument
about ‘habitus’ in Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979,
trans. R. Nice, London 1984).
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of ‘operative’ or ‘lower’ classes.14 Perhaps more decisively, they lie in the

determination of the early twentieth-century Labour Party, not only to under-
score the moral dimensions of being ‘working-class’, but also to broaden the
view of who belonged to the ‘working classes’. In nineteenth-century usage
the term had often been deployed deliberately to exclude both the ‘swells’ and
the ‘counter-skippers’ (shop assistants and the like),15 but Labour insisted that,
regardless of their occupation, the great mass of ‘ordinary people’ belonged to
the ‘working classes’ because they lived by ‘honest labour’ (unlike the so-called
‘idle rich’).
The early Labour Party thus set itself the Herculean task of challenging the
common-sense understanding of ‘class’ embraced by urban wage-earners for
generations. This was not, however, as foolish as one might initially imagine.
For one thing, Labour, even in its early days, was never a one-class party, any
more than trade unionism was a one-class movement. More fundamentally,
however, Labour leaders recognized that ‘class politics’ carried only negative
connotations in Britain. From the outset, Labour portrayed itself as locked in
a struggle for ‘the masses’ against ‘the classes’ — its mission was to end ‘class
legislation’, ‘class privilege’ and ‘class rule’. But for all its sensitivity to the
negative connotations of the politics of class, Labour could not escape the fact
that its principal objective was to transform the living conditions of ordinary
workers, any more than it could escape the fact that even its name was deeply
entwined in nineteenth-century struggles to assert the moral significance of
work. Hence the concerted project both to valorize ‘working-classness’, and to
redefine what it meant to be ‘working-class’.16
Though Labour’s project has long since been abandoned, its legacy can
surely be identified both in the tenacity with which many Britons hold onto the
identity of ‘working-classness’, and in the moral values that many inscribe
upon this identity.17 As I have already suggested, it is the tenacity, the apparent
concreteness, of class identities that forms the organizing principle of the final
work considered in this article — Ross McKibbin’s massive Classes and
Cultures: England, 1918–1951. With its first 200 pages devoted to chapters on
‘the upper class’, ‘the middle class’ and ‘the working class’, the book can be
seen as an impressive attempt to establish Cannadine’s ‘triadic’ model of class
relations as social reality — writ large in culture and in social space. Indeed, it
is hard to imagine a stronger case being developed for the existence of distinc-
tive class ‘sub-cultures’ in twentieth-century England — sub-cultures that
overlapped strongly with ‘class’ defined in terms of economic role. Though I
14 In contrast to David Cannadine’s emphasis on the division between ‘upper, middle and
lower’ class, Class in Britain, passim.
15 See Thomas Wright, The Great Unwashed (London 1868), viii.
16 See Jon Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in
England, 1867–1914 (Cambridge 1998), chaps 6 and 9.
17 Beverley Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable (London 1997),
chap. 5 takes an opposite, and to my mind misguided perspective. She argues for the ‘ubiquity of
the pathologizing of the working class’ in Britain, both historically and in the 1990s, and asks
‘who would want to be seen as working class?’ (76 and 95).
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Lawrence: The British Sense of Class 315

will go on to suggest that McKibbin overstates the fit between ‘class as

culture’ and ‘class as economic role’, it must first be stressed that this is a
work of considerable scholarship, and that it offers many subtle readings of
twentieth-century English social history. There are particularly impressive dis-
cussions of the social and political tensions that could divide ‘native’ and ‘new-
comer’ factions within the middle class (92–3, 101–2), of the tensions between
privacy and sociability in old ‘working-class’ communities (180–5, 204), and
of the problems caused by translating this ‘old’ working-class culture to the
new suburban council estates (188–98). These sections alone will make the
book an invaluable teaching aid for years to come.
On the other hand, there are some surprising omissions. In particular,
McKibbin pays little attention to recent work that, whilst retaining the organiz-
ing category of ‘working-class culture’, stresses the heterogeneity of that
culture, and the lack of ‘fit’ between cultural practice and occupation.18
McKibbin has certainly done much to explode romantic myths of a solidaristic,
collectivist (and essentially male) ‘working-class culture’ — Carolyn Steed-
man’s mother would certainly have found a voice in this cultural landscape19 —
but there remains a mythic quality to this rendering of ‘class’. One explanation
for this may be that McKibbin sometimes uses retrospective accounts of
working-class life and community that are themselves profoundly romanticized
(e.g. 140, 172, 182). He can also be criticized for relying largely on post-second
world war surveys of ‘working-class’ communities to draw conclusions about
life between the wars. This, it has been suggested, is problematic because war
and population loss had wrought fundamental social change over the inter-
vening years — change that made these old ‘working-class’ districts appear
much more static and ‘traditional’ than they had been in the 1920s and 1930s.20
However, I would like to end this article by suggesting that we should
consider pushing ‘revisionism’ further by questioning the whole concept of
‘working-class culture’ as a tool of historical analysis. In what sense, we
should ask, were cultural practices such as football, music hall, the pools or
the fish and chip supper ‘working-class’?21 Such practices were neither uni-
18 For instance, Alastair Reid, ‘Class and Organization’, Historical Journal, 30 (1987), 225–38,
and ‘Intelligent Artisans and Aristocrats of Labour: The Essays of Thomas Wright’ in J. Winter
(ed.), The Working Class in Modern British History (Cambridge 1983); Andrew Davies, Leisure,
Gender and Poverty: Working-Class Culture in Salford and Manchester, 1880–1939
(Buckingham 1992); Andrew Davies and Steven Fielding (eds), Workers’ Worlds: Cultures and
Communities in Manchester and Salford, 1880–1939 (Manchester 1992); Joanna Bourke,
Working-Class Cultures in Britain, 1890–1960: Gender, Class and Ethnicity (London 1994).
19 Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London 1986) —
still the most brilliant picture of the tensions between gender and mythic histories of ‘class’.
20 See Dudley Baines and Paul Johnson, ‘In Search of the “Traditional” Working Class: Social
Mobility and Occupational Continuity in Inter-war London’, LSE Working Papers in Economic
History, no. 45 (December 1998), 2–3, 22–5.
21 Eric Hobsbawm, Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the History of Labour (London
1984); Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London,
1870–1900’, Journal of Social History, 7 (1974); Neville Kirk, ‘ “Traditional” Working-Class
Culture and “the Rise of Labour” ’, Social History, 16 (1991), 203–16.
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versally popular among people conventionally termed ‘working-class’, nor

were they exclusively enjoyed by people in ‘working-class’ (i.e. ‘manual’) occu-
pations. It is true that Britain was (and is) far from possessing a universal
‘mass culture’, but the distinction between ‘class as culture’ and ‘class as
economic role’ has always been much greater than historians allow. The
problem is, however, that we remain profoundly ignorant about the social
demography of post-1918 Britain — about who lived where and how they
lived their lives (the fact that most interwar social surveys chose to investigate
only manual workers’ families does not help here).22 As a result, it is all too
easy to slip into the trap of attaching common-sense class labels to cultural
practices, especially when they were widely used at the time. As Cannadine
reminds us, vernacular uses of ‘class as culture’ were (and are) profoundly
inconsistent and contradictory. Doubtless many people perceived the pub, the
chip shop, the football ground and the music hall as class ‘danger zones’ to be
avoided (or negotiated with care — e.g., only ‘on holiday’), but we should
not conflate their cultural self-making with an objective sociology of cultural
practices.
There can be no doubt that social distinctions expressed in terms of ‘class’
were strong between 1918 and 1951, but not uniquely so. After all, Thomas
Wright had been decrying the ‘snobby, genteel . . . counter skipper’ in the mid-
nineteenth century.23 What was distinctive about this period was the speed
and the thoroughness with which cultural distinctions found themselves
concretized in social space. By the 1930s, ‘middle-class’ culture meant
suburban culture, and ‘working-class’ culture meant the social life on terraced
city streets (and to a much lesser extent on the new council estates).24 The fact
that vast numbers of people living in pre-war terraced housing would
undoubtedly have been engaged in non-manual occupations — and may well
have thought of themselves as ‘middle-class’ for that matter — could not shake
this redefinition of class in terms of social geography. Nor was the new
construction ‘class as culture’ much affected by the fact that some of those
choosing to move out to live in ‘suburbia’ were manual workers in good,
secure jobs. It seems likely that home-ownership among manual workers
doubled between the wars (to about 19 per cent),25 and that in prosperous
southern cities, such as Bristol, at least 40 per cent of manual families were
owner-occupiers by the late 1930s.26 In turn, both government policy-makers

22 Important exceptions are B. Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty and Progress: A Second Social
Survey of York (London 1941); Herbert Tout, The Standard of Living in Bristol: A Preliminary
Report (Bristol 1938); and the ‘street survey’ element of Hubert Llewellyn Smith (ed.), The New
Survey of London Life and Labour (9 vols, London 1930–35).
23 Thomas Wright, Some Habits and Customs of the Working Classes (London 1867), vii.
24 For an argument constructed around this idea of ‘working-class neighbourhoods’ see Mike
Savage and Andrew Miles, The Remaking of the British Working Class, 1840–1940 (London
1994), esp. 62–8.
25 Mark Swenarton and Sandra Taylor, ‘The Scale and Nature of the Growth of Owner-
Occupation in Britain Between the Wars’, Economic History Review, 38 (1985), 373–92.
26 Estimated from figures in Tout, Standard of Living in Bristol, op. cit., 11, 22, 49; and
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Lawrence: The British Sense of Class 317

and the New Survey of London Life and Labour continued to assume that
‘artisans and the lower middle class’ occupied the same types of houses,
whether owned or rented.27 Rowntree’s findings for York seem to confirm this:
confining his sample to (all) workers earning under £250 per annum, he found
that by the later 1930s more manual than non-manual workers owned post-
war ‘semis’, although the majority of all types of workers in this income
bracket still lived in pre-war terraced housing.28
There can be no doubting the determination of interwar ‘suburbia’ to define
itself against the old working class, especially when municipal developments
threatened to relocate ‘them’ on the suburbanites’ doorsteps. But it does not
follow that a manual worker who chose to embrace suburban life and culture
necessarily met the same hostility as the council tenants made invisible by
Oxford’s ‘Cutteslowe Walls’.29 There is even less reason to imagine that clerks
who ‘stayed put’ were social pariahs in districts dominated by pre-war
terraced housing. After all, Labour leaders were vociferously arguing that the
middle classes were workers too, and it is clear that, at least among organized
non-manual workers, many agreed with them. By 1931 the proportion of
unionized workers was little different between non-manual and manual occu-
pations (21 per cent compared with 24 per cent, Treatise, 75n), and non-
manual unions were fully integrated into the Labour project (as they had been
from the outset). White-collar trade unionists scoffed at their more snobbish
fellow-workers who sought to ‘mark [themselves] off from the common herd’,
and they celebrated their membership of ‘the workers’ movement’.30 Later, in
the early 1960s, Runciman’s investigations into the ‘embourgeoisement’ thesis
found that 25 per cent of non-manual workers rated themselves as ‘working-
class’ (research in Swansea produced a figure of 32 per cent). Significantly,
Runciman’s ‘working-class’ non-manual workers were more than three times
as likely to support Labour than other workers in their ‘class’.31 Here was a
Swenarton and Taylor, ‘Owner Occupation’, op. cit., 387; this assumes that four-fifths of non-
manual workers were owner-occupiers, and that the proportions of earners to households in each
class were broadly comparable. At the opposite extreme, A.D.K. Owen, A Survey of the Standard
of Living in Sheffield (Sheffield 1933), 31 suggests that only 2.7 per cent of working-class families
owned their home in 1932.

27 Martin Daunton (ed.), Councillors and Tenants: Local Authority Housing in English Cities,
1919–1939, 14–15; quoting a 1931 government enquiry into the state of the housing market;
Llewellyn Smith, New Survey, III, 133–6, and esp. 142.
28 Rowntree, Poverty and Progress, op. cit., 226–51, esp. 229–30.
29 The ‘Cutteslowe Walls’ were erected by private developers as a barrier between their
properties and the tenants of a council housing estate; see McKibbin, Classes, op. cit., 100. Peter
Willmott and Michael Young, Family and Class in a London Suburb (London 1960), 119–22,
take a different view of suburban exclusivity in their study of Woodford in the late 1950s, but
their poll findings do not support their case; see Colin Rosser and Christopher Harris, The Family
and Social Change: A Study of Family and Kinship in a South Wales Town (London 1965), 89–99
for contemporary criticisms of their overplaying of manual/non-manual divisions.
30 Railway Service Journal, March 1927, 85; June 1927, 191; see also Fellowship (Union of
Post Office Workers, Birmingham), June 1926 — after the General Strike.
31 W.G. Runciman. ‘“Embourgeoisement”, Self-Rated Class and Party Preference’, Sociological
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318 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 35 No 2

different version of ‘class as culture’ — class rooted in the myths of the labour
movement, in attempts to redefine the ‘working class’, and perhaps in ties of
kith and kin. This version of ‘class as culture’ was no less (and no more) ‘real’
than the ‘class as culture’ that became associated with a certain reading of
suburbia after 1918. Both were highly politicized representations of the social
order, rather than neutral descriptions of class relations. Historical investi-
gations of the British sense of class must be sensitive to the essentially con-
structed nature of these social visions, and thus to the inherent problems of
collapsing ‘class as culture’ into ‘class as economic role’.

Jon Lawrence
is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Liverpool.
His publications include Speaking for the People: Party, Language
and Popular Politics in England, 1867–1914 (Cambridge 1998), and,
with Miles Taylor, Party, State and Society: Electoral Behaviour in
Britain since 1820 (Aldershot 1997). He is currently working on
election customs and political disorder in
Britain between 1867 and 1939.

Review, new series., xii (1964), 137–54 (esp. 141 and 148); Rosser and Harris, The Family and
Social Change, op. cit., 92. See also W.G. Runciman, Relative Deprivation and Social Justice: A
Study of Attitudes to Social Inequality in Twentieth-Century England (London 1966), chap. 8.