The Middlemost and the Milltowns: Bourgeois Culture and Politics in Early Industrial England (review)

In the turbulent decades of the early nineteenth century, marked by rapid economic growth and extensive social dislocation, Britain's traditional structure of politics and social relationships largely endured. Lewis contends that the middle class played no small part in Britain's comparative stability. The middling classes of Preston, Blackburn, and Bolton—cotton-manufacturing communities in Lancashire—are the subjects of this book. According to the author, a central theme unified the experience of this varied group—the quest to bring order to their lives and the wider world around them.

Lewis' work proceeds from extensive reading of recent theoretical and historical writing, notably an encounter with the "linguistic turn." The postmodernist subversion of historical writing has been especially significant for its marginalization of the category of class, insisting instead on the multiple and fragmentary forms of personal and collective identity. Lewis shares at least some of the defining assumptions of postmodernism. However, he also argues for the primacy of class in historical interpretation, noting that nineteenth-century Britons themselves made prodigious use of class vocabulary. Following Wahrman, Lewis conceives class as mainly a linguistic construct, which described, in loose terms, a social stratum, but more important, helped to create that stratum's meaning.¹ In Lewis' hands, middle-class identity is fluid, constantly contested and open to endless permutation.

Lewis organizes his narrative around the campaigns of Lancashire's bourgeois radicals against local Toryism and the rule of the Anglican- oligarchic state, efforts that enjoyed little success. Menaced by fears of the lower class, the majority of Lancashire's propertied classes instead supported the Party of Order and the coercive measures of the emerging policeman's state. Equally important in cementing bourgeois loyalty were the wide-ranging reforms that an increasingly flexible state introduced after 1830.

Lewis is a formidable cultural historian. He is at his best in his detailed treatment of the array of initiatives that middle class individuals and groups pursued to foster points of contact with the lower class, such as strategies of containment, incorporation, and indoctrination. His careful accounts of the vicissitudes of provincial religious life, the proliferation of voluntary associations, and the development of bourgeois ritesof consumption, among other themes, are superb. Lewis seems tohave left no relevant record collection unattended or document unscrutinized.

Taking issue with classic studies by Morris and Koditscheck, Lewis argues that the middle class was marked by profound divisions rather than cohesion.² Driven variously by fear, Christian duty, or enlightened thinking, reform efforts were often incompatible. Crucial for Lewis (and at this point, he shows his revisionist stripes), the absence of middle-class solidarity allowed for convergences in liberal and plebeian politics, forging cross-class alliances, however fragile and contingent. Such alliances, according to Lewis, "prevented the cracks of classes from yawning into chasms" (8). Further, Lewis argues that middle-class reform efforts, contradictory as they were, helped to affirm and consolidate a hegemonic system of belief centered on the virtues of a market economy and liberal civic culture.

A challenging and ambitious study like this one can be an easy target. Lewis is acutely aware that middle-class identity was forged in constant collaboration with, and opposition to, patrician behavior and images. Yet, the landed class remains conspicuous by its absence in this book. Likewise debatable are the specifics of Lewis' periodization. The gestation of middle-class identity was not solely a nineteenth-century affair, even in industrial Lancashire. How did the eighteenth-century heritage, particularly of radicalism, condition the nineteenth-century experience? These criticisms, however, do not diminish Lewis' achievement. This well-written and thoughtful study, drawing together the concerns of social, political, and cultural history, is a major contribution to our growing understanding of the middle class and its place in the making of the modern world.