This book is not an attempt to write ‘The Making of the English Middle Class’. If anything, it explains why such a book cannot be written. It does not answer the question, was the English middle class made by 1832, or by 1846, or by any other date. Instead it wishes to expose the assumptions underlying these questions. It seeks to uncover and historicize the origins of a persistent image haunting the historiography of modern Britain, that of an emergent ‘middle class’, which like the rising sun, once nature has decreed its gradual emergence above the horizon, becomes inexorably ever more conspicuous and transforms our vision of the world. The question this book sets out to answer, then, is this: how, why and when did the British come to believe that they lived in a society centred around a ‘middle class’?

We used to have a remarkably straightforward answer to this question, which in broad outline went something like this. Sometime during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we have been told, an industrial revolution transformed Britain.