The lower middle class has long had a bad press, for in common with other subaltern groups it has been more represented from without than within. Thus Victorian writers faced with the disquieting irruption of a new breed of petty bourgeois shop and office workers devised a parodic discourse of littleness, whose feminized tropes rendered the clerk as socially insignificant as the sequestered Victorian woman. George Grossmith's comic classic, Diary of a Nobody, pilloried the new social type in Mr. Pooter, whose smaller-than-life adventures stood for all that was ineffectual, pretentious, and banal in his class. Social commentators held the lower middle class responsible for the degeneration of civilization itself, stifled by their suburban respectability and addiction to mass culture. In Howard's End, E. M. Forster drew the clerk, Leonard Bast, with some sympathy but made him the book's major casualty, while belittling a class whose education was learned “from the outside of books.” In the interwar years the Marxist poet Christopher Caudwell likened the petty bourgeois world to “a terrible stagnant marsh, all mud and bitterness, without even the saving grace of tragedy.” George Orwell's fictional antihero from the same period, the insurance salesman George Bowling, characterizes the men of his class as “Tories, yes-men and bumsuckers.” It is still hard to hide a certain relish in repeating such charges, for putting the boot in on the lower middle class has long been the intellectual's blood sport, an exorcism, so we are told, of the guilty secret so many of us share as closet petit bourgeois denying our own class origins.

This was the confident opening passage in Charles Pooter's entry for 2 November in George Grossmith's famous satire, The Diary of a Nobody, serialized in Punch in 1888. Simultaneously it celebrated the lower-middle-class husband's eager commitment to domesticity and marital harmony and acknowledged, in its reference to an equally popular contemporaneous correspondence series running in the Daily Telegraph, avid lower-middle-class engagement with routine popular press debates on marriage and domestic issues. The Diary's readers are invited to relish the irony in Charles's characteristic exaggeration of his domestic felicity, since they know that before long Carrie's patience will again be tried by another of his pretentious and interfering domestic schemes and ineffectual efforts to assert his household mastery. Such tensions in the Pooter marriage were emblematic of wider insecurities in the lower-middle-class identity.

For over a century Charles Pooter's transparent claim to a gentility, independence, and mastery far above his actual station of a struggling suburban bank clerk has provided the dominant metaphor for lower-middle-class pretension, weakness, and diminished masculinity. His bogus authority was exposed as much at home as at his workplace, the bank, where he paraded as the pompous chief clerk. Indeed it was that theme of false authority, both in private and public, palpable even in his dress, that satirists delighted in puncturing. Grossmith was gratified by the range of the Diary's readership, especially among upper-class personalities.

It is now over twenty years since Geoffrey Crossick first urged historians to investigate the English lower middle class. On that occasion he suggested that small business interests and white-collar employees be designated the two wings of a residual lower middle class. Historians speculated that the members of this class were bound together by their marginality to the social, cultural, and economic world of the middle class and by their pathetic attempts to ape the gentility of their superiors. Such an analysis confirmed the unheroic nature of the lower-middle-class mentalité and explains Crossick's conclusion that this group “claimed no vital social role.” Crossick's more recent work, in collaboration with Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, offers a reevaluation of this earlier position and concludes that white-collar and small business interests should not be considered to occupy the same social station. Crossick and Haupt's work is significant because both authors make it clear that they now credit the petite bourgeoisie of small business families in Europe with a greater spirit of independence than they had earlier acknowledged. They argue convincingly that the petite bourgeoisie created their own social and cultural world, centered on the interrelationship between enterprise and family life, which enabled them to react more purposefully to outside social forces and agencies.

By hiving off these small business interests from the old lower middle class, we are left with a rump of white-collar workers who collectively formed a lower middle class that shared many common experiences and hence is attractive to historians as a potentially more cohesive social body.

He didn't die alone. My mother says she never left him, and at the end I was there—the elder son. She, my mother, prayed she'd find him dead every morning when she went in. But he wasn't. When I heard her talk like that I came. I knew it was different this time, from the small, flat pitch in her voice and because I was experienced. I had seen the signs of death before from other lives and had come to know its timing. So I knew and I came, quickly. My mother opened the door, briskly, as any nurse might do. It was what she had become. The bungalow was familiar, except that there was a faint but persistent smell of stale water, pills, and antiseptic. “He's in there, if you'd like to go in and see him,” she said. I thought he must be lying dead already.

At first I took the signs of his final illness as something other. He looked neglected. His face and hair were disheveled, and I noticed that it was one of the few times I had seen him unshaved. The contrast between his own disorder and the tidy landmarks of the bedroom (hers, not his) surprised me. Afterwards my mother said he had started crying when he heard me come into the house. I had only heard him cry once before, one night when he was drunk and his marriage was in extremis. Then the tears had been showy; now there was the intermittent sobbing of an old man, his body huddled up on the bed with his face turned to the wall.