What ever happened later? It should be clear that although the 1830s represent a moment of closure for the story told here, a moment when a powerful consensus had left relatively little room for contention in the space between social reality and its possible representations, this was not a situation the dynamics and meaning of which necessarily remained stable over longer stretches of time. ‘The rise of the middle class’ narrative implied that the ‘middle class’ was there to stay; the heyday of the category of ‘middle class’ as key to social conceptualization was by its very nature less immutable.

At first, indeed, the language of ‘middle class’ might have seemed to go from strength to strength. Thus, it became centrally implicated in the major political conflict of the following decade – the agitation for the repeal of the corn laws, which finally succeeded in 1846. Following decades in which the issue of the corn laws had been discussed in specific sectional terms that were well suited for the very specific interests involved, the final crescendo of anti-corn law agitation in the early 1840s saw the introduction of the language of ‘middle class’ with increasing effectiveness: Richard Cobden used it in 1841, John Bright in 1842, Joseph Parkes in 1843. It was Cobden's oft-cited judgment that the Anti-Corn Law League had been ‘a middle-class set of agitators’ who had operated ‘by those means by which the middle class usually carries on its movements’. The government was now executed ‘through the bond fide representatives of the middle class’, Cobden told Peel; ‘The Reform Bill decreed it; the passing of the Corn Bill has realized it.’