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White Collars, Gray Lives? The Lower Middle Class Revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Extract

The lower middle class has long had a bad press, for in common with other subaltern groups it has been more represented from without than within. Thus Victorian writers faced with the disquieting irruption of a new breed of petty bourgeois shop and office workers devised a parodic discourse of littleness, whose feminized tropes rendered the clerk as socially insignificant as the sequestered Victorian woman. George Grossmith's comic classic, Diary of a Nobody, pilloried the new social type in Mr. Pooter, whose smaller-than-life adventures stood for all that was ineffectual, pretentious, and banal in his class. Social commentators held the lower middle class responsible for the degeneration of civilization itself, stifled by their suburban respectability and addiction to mass culture. In Howard's End, E. M. Forster drew the clerk, Leonard Bast, with some sympathy but made him the book's major casualty, while belittling a class whose education was learned “from the outside of books.” In the interwar years the Marxist poet Christopher Caudwell likened the petty bourgeois world to “a terrible stagnant marsh, all mud and bitterness, without even the saving grace of tragedy.” George Orwell's fictional antihero from the same period, the insurance salesman George Bowling, characterizes the men of his class as “Tories, yes-men and bumsuckers.” It is still hard to hide a certain relish in repeating such charges, for putting the boot in on the lower middle class has long been the intellectual's blood sport, an exorcism, so we are told, of the guilty secret so many of us share as closet petit bourgeois denying our own class origins.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1999

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References

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57 Nicholls, Peter, Feeling You're Behind (Harmondsworth, 1985)Google Scholar; Osborne, John, Almost a Gentleman (London, 1991)Google Scholar; cf. his earlier volume, A Better Class of Person (London, 1981)Google Scholar, whose title carries a sexual innuendo also typical of the “underground” humor of the class.

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59 Traies, Jane, “Jones and the Working Girl: Class Marginality in Music Hall Song, 1860–1900,” in Bratton, , ed., Music Hall, pp. 2348Google Scholar. Ralph Gorse (“The Charmer” of the TV series), con-man son of a commercial artist, is a fictional example, described as “an astute social botanist.” This echo of Baudelaire is from Hamilton, Patrick, Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse (London, 1953)Google Scholar. The comics and comic writers from the class are naturally easier to identify, and they are many, from Noel Coward to John Cleese.

60 Clark, , The Painting of Modern Life, p. 258Google Scholar.