Transcription
[Music] The Beehive is an extraordinary illustration, uh, produced by the graphic artist George Crookshank in 1840. And it's this extraordinary kind of, um, cross-section of all, uh, the different kinds of people that go to make up British society. From the Queen at the top, who is, says, "Queen by lineal descent," this absolute right to be that. 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, uh, freedom of all religious denominations, these things that make Britain great, Crookshank seems to be saying.
And then you go further and further down, and each strata has a different set of people, all, all arranged by occupation. So we have medical science, uh, we have lawyers, further down we have grocers and cheesemongers, until you get right to the bottom where we have chimney sweeps, uh, costermongers, people who are literally the lowest of the low. Now, while Crookshank 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, these roles that everybody's inhabiting, tea dealers, cheesemongers, drapers, are going to be like that forever. There was 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 [Music] 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. And the reason for this was that their world was changing in absolutely extraordinary ways. There were kind of new kinds of wealth. The rising middle class, which we hear about so much, is something that's, that's quite different because for the first time people are getting rich in, in new ways. They're getting rich through production, through manufacture, through trading money, through trading articles, uh, through building things, by becoming an engineer, a stockbroker. These are kind of new kinds of jobs. So there's a, a worry about where do these people fit?
What you get from the, uh, beginning of the 19th century is this kind of huge movement of population. People are pouring into this, the newly, newly important cities, and suddenly everybody is a stranger. And of course, you needed some way of, of placing people, of organizing your world, uh, of knowing who you were going to be friends with, who you were going to feel superior to, uh, who you were going to feel in awe of. And I think that that's where the, um, obsession with class comes from. This sense of trying to work out, who are these people, um, where do they belong, how should I behave towards them, what's my relationship towards [Music] them?
What it meant to be middle class, uh, 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, uh, 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, uh, a very particular way of understanding the economy, um, 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's 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.
Of course, it sounds wonderful, this idea that you can make yourself into anything you want to be. But along with that comes this judgmental sense that if you haven't made it, uh, there's something wrong with you, and that you don't really deserve any kind of respect. And we see the middle class is 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 the word "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. Um, they are worthy of, of charity and pity and, and Christian kindness. But the greatest part of, um, 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 into the much-hated institution of the [Music] workhouse.
It could feel like an extraordinary burden, this feeling that you had to deserve your good fortune. And it's something that Dickens captures so well in, in Great Expectations. Because if you remember, Pip, who is a young working-class boy, is finds himself, um, 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, um, is a criminal, but he doesn't know that. And he starts to feel, um, incredibly guilty because he hasn't actually labored for all the wonderful things he has, for the, the clothes he has, the food he eats, his his tough like ways. He hasn't really deserved them. And in fact, that's his undoing in the end. And, and, and Dickens was, you know, very, very critical of that idea that, um, that there was something intrinsically wonderful about working for your, for your place in the world.
[Music] There is, of course, another downside to this ideology of, um, of, 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, good middle-class stuff. But it, it doesn't sit very well with, uh, with, with a sort of Christian belief in the sense of, uh, Brotherhood of Man, um, and not, uh, not damaging anybody else by your actions. And one of the solutions that, uh, the middle class developed was by, um, as it were, keeping the man out in the world, in the world of free exchange, of, of kind of intense, 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, there's, there's a sort of hypocrisy involved in, um, kind of being immensely competitive in the outside world, uh, and then 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. [Music]