Jesse Woodrum

5 December 2011

On the Horizon of Middle-Class Identity

The decade in which the 9 volumes of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy were published leads directly up to 1770.  Ten years short of when Wahrman asserts the beginning of the middle class as a identifiable group in Britain.  Though the scale of Sterne’s most famous work is intimate and largely not about major social issues, we can see some class interaction within it.  And for a writer who saw more of what was going on around him than most, a potential class upheaval did not seem to be on Stearn’s landscape.  One of the episode’s in Shandy­—and that’s really the only way to refer to the various digressive stories which constitute it—is called “The Story of Le Fever.”  In this episode, Tristram’s kind-hearted uncle Toby learns of the misfortune of a poor and sick Lieutenant who is staying at a nearby inn.  He is infinitely moved to compassion for the fellow soldier and offers him food and drink.  Deciding that is not enough he decides to martial all his resources to form a plan to help the poor Lieutenant recover his health.  The man soon dies and Toby sponsors the education and career of his surviving son becoming his adoptive father. 

            To offer this tale a political reading would be to see Toby as a representative of the benevolent father figure which conservative thinkers like Burke see as the function of the upper class within society.  Even one of Burke’s opponents, Thomas Cooper, whom Wahrman characterizes as a “Painite reformer,” in his defense of the poor sees them as “the most important Object of national Improvement.” (Wahrman pp. 79-80)  To our modern egalitarian sensibilities this may sound condescending, but he was in fact advocating a radical change in the perception of the lower classes.  Here he does not make a distinction between the uniquely industrious, emerging middle class, but to everyone who is not aristocracy—everyone else.  Certainly by 1792 this group was on the horizon, but his disagreement with Burke, who famously characterized everyone else as the “swinish multitude.” (Wahrman pp 79). 

            Sterne’s work—and his endearing portrayal of Uncle Toby—reveal him to be an incredibly sensible man in every 18^th century sense of the word.  And for all his tongue in cheek moments, he presents Toby and Le Fever genuinely as an example of Toby’s endless goodness.  He of course is writing about humanity in a grand sense which is more timeless than a novel about contemporary social issues.  But even to Sterne, everyone else, is to be pitied and cared for if necessary.  He never imagines the non-aristocracy as a powerful source of innovative ideas capable of its own (or even national) improvement. 

            While Sterne was discovering uniquely new modes of novelistic expression, many other writers were still imitating the Daniel Defoe’s influential Robinson Crusoe to tell more straight-forward, moralizing stories.  In one such “Robinsonade,” The Female American, an anonymous author continues Crusoe’s imperialist fantasy through a female character.  The characters in these novels find themselves in socially desolate locales and when they discover native inhabitants, they immediately form a society with a hierarchal class structure.  Unca’s interactions with the natives are presented as evangelical in purpose, but she finds it convenient—in the course of bringing them to the knowledge of the one, true God—to trick them into receiving her as a prophet.  Her summary of her changed circumstances indicates the strong bond between ideology and social structure.  “How greatly was my situation changed!  From a solitary being, obliged to seek my own food from day to day, I was attended by a whole nation, all ready to serve me…”  (Burnham pp. 118)

            A quarter century after the publication of The Female American, the French Revolution would foreground a debate about the nature of class, and the Burkean view that the upper classes are naturally superior and fulfill an important social role with their leadership would come under scrutiny.  While Unca is styled as the fountainhead of spiritual knowledge, the real-life parallel is the British landed-class’ figuring of themselves as the fountainhead of economic prosperity. This semi-feudal system of ownership and labor is at the heart of Burke’s (and others’) anxiety.  He is trying to shore up this ideology when he writes, at the close of the 18^th century, “The present war is, above all others...a war against landed property.  That description of property is in its nature the firm basis of every stable government.”  (Wahrman pp. 148) 

            Further, where religion does figure in the later public debate, it is typically used as a marker of middle class virtue.  Novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton writes “The middle classes, with us, have a greater veneration for religion.”  He elsewhere characterizes this class as “sober and provident conduct…in their domestic affairs,” and notes their “enthusiasm for diffusing religious knowledge among the negroes.” (Wahrman pp. 378)  This image of evangelism is separated from a power struggle and presented as genuine.  In the proto-society of The Female American the evangelism is intrinsically tied up with social power and material well-being.

            Near contemporary with the publication of The Female American was Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto.  It is even more fantastical, to the point of being allegorically fairy-tale-like.  The depiction of class is mostly bi-polar with people falling into the upper classes or the great mass.  Though Walpole places his narrative at a vaguely distant time and locale, the effect is of transforming the upper class into the ruling class.  The story is set up to ridicule patriarchal power through the despotic character of Manfred, and he has this King-Lear quality of political madness.  The novel’s hero, Theodore, fashioned as a “laborer” and “peasant,” in action and conversation is so gallant as to become a parody of chivalry.  It is mostly laughable when he defies the prince’s admonitions with, “I fear no man’s displeasure when a woman in distress puts herself under my protection.”  (Walpole pp. 48-49)  Of course when Manfred’s legitimacy is challenged the action reveals Theodore to be no mere laborer, but the rightful heir to Manfred’s estate and title.  His noble is justified, finally, through his lineage; and the Burkean association of privilege with heritage—as well as the classical perception that nobility is somehow innate—is confirmed. 

            The story of Otranto outside the text goes even farther to illustrating the mid 18^th century mindset.  Walpole’s first edition was tentatively anonymous ascribing the story to an ancient Italian text.  When the public discovered the contemporary source of the novel much of it was outraged that a wealthy aristocrat could have invented something so outrageously imaginative.  The then-novel genre of Gothic was seen as subversively invested in the supernatural.  That such imaginative themes were more acceptable when the source was so far removed from the audience than it was when the source turned out to be one of their own suggests a near-political fear of the unknown.  In the words of Michael Gamer asserts that Otranto struck “particular nerves” because of Walpole’s “social position” and “his relation to this historically specific question of imagination.”  (Walpole pp. xviii)  Though the text itself upholds traditional views of class and power, its complex reception reveals an anxiety about the proper ways for aristocrats to behave and about novelty in general. 

            In the pre-preface to his work Wahrman claims that “the British people [came] to see themselves as living in a society centered around d a middle class.” (title page)  But most of the literature leading up to is ideologically rooted in the classic picture of a two-part society consisting of the upper classes and the lower classes.  There seems to be little momentum for a middle-class identity until it burst onto the national conscience in the aftermath of the French Revolution.  The British were able to avoid their own revolution because they negotiated a new class-consciousness in a public debate which would change their perception of society until few were left to see the socio-economic landscape in the black and white terms it had previously been described with. 

Works Cited

Wahrman, Dror. Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780-1840. New York; University of Cambridge Press Syndicate, 1995. Print

Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2003. Print.

Burnham, Michelle. The Female American. Ontario; Broadview, 2004. Print.

Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. New York; Penguin, 2001. Print.