A Sense of Their Duty: Middle-Class Formation in Victorian Ontario Towns (review)

On 7 April 1936 the communist cultural magazine, New Masses, published a special issue, ‘Challenge to the Middle Class’. It featured 13 articles, cartoons, and an editorial. The middle class mattered to the likes of Mike Gold, Granville Hicks, Corliss Lamont, Lewis Corey [Louis Fraina], and Anna Rochester. It now matters a great deal to historians, one of whom is Andrew C. Holman.

Holman studies two towns between 1850 and 1890, years of central Canada’s industrial capitalist revolution. His chosen locales, Galt and Goderich, are in the western part of Ontario; their respective populations in this period peaked at roughly 7,500 and 4,500. The former, however, owed its bustling prosperity to local manufactures, while the latter, a port city whose mercantile endeavors, regional salt-mining, and processing of flour were pinched by economic downturn, unfavorable American tariffs, and competition from US producers throughout the 1870s, had come by the 1880s to rely on tourism and its longstanding role as an administrative center of the old ‘Huron Tract’, land bordering the Great Lake of the same name.

Holman suggests that there is a strong need to conceptualize the structural place of the middle class before cavalierly tossing around notions of middle-class behavior and middle-class perspectives. He does this through an inquiry into the work of the middle class, which he argues defined itself as a “group apart from the upper and lower classes.” A series of “loosely affiliated occupational identities” thus came together in ways that ostensibly collectively defined those who were neither bourgeois nor proletarian. Holman has no use for those who see capital and labor as the great contending classes of the nineteenth century, but he starts by acknowleding that without them the middle class would have been identityless (and nothing could be worse than that!). Beyond this he simply takes anyone who worked, but not with their hands, as middle class, the largest complement of which, Holman asserts, was composed of merchants, manufacturers, professionals, and bureaucrats. The merchant who advocated free trade, the manufacturer who clamored for tariffs, the salesman in the hardware store, the lawyer who drafted his will, the clerk who filed it, the barber who cut their hair, the school teacher who taught all of their children—this is a class, and one ostensibly sharing ideas and a culture. Holman defines the middle class by work, but avoids addressing just how it is that this variety of ways of earning a living shared anything resembling a structural experience.

Having stressed that the objective relations of work are a more foundational bedrock of middle-class identity than ideas, Holman turns to ideas and the practices that develop from them to locate the middle class. Enterprise was the foundation of this experience for the businessmen (if you happened to be a merchant, manufacturer, or master artisan), honor and authority figured centrally if you were a learned professional, and, for the lowlier, but still middling, clerks, hope in the future was a touchstone of middle-class identity. All of these elements of the middle class came together in fraternal societies and temperance crusades where, of course, there were also non-middle class people, the most numerous cohort being respectable workers. It was really the idle rich and the unworthy poor that the middle class separated themselves from in their construction of a new moral order, but then who publicly identified with these sorts? And, finally, as if these markers were not enough to establish class identity, the middle class was further demarcated by its apparently unique reverence for domestic relations, this class having a seeming lock on the respectable familialism that sustained a gendered sensibility around separate spheres and an attachment to provisioning one’s children with the accoutrements of the good life’s continuity.

Within this homogenizing picture too much is congealed. We get an inadequate...