Morris

[R J Morris is a well known British historian who has written extensively on class in nineteenth century England. Here he is explaining some of the issues that relate to discussions about class and how historians have dealt with specific aspects of class. I can provide you with the specific books or articles that he refers to.]

1. How does Morris believe class should be viewed? How different is this from what he says most historians say about class?
2. How does he suggest that ideas of class can be studied in friendly societies?

R. J. Morris, Class and Class Consciousness, Chapter 4 Institutions and Events

NOW, class appears in the history books as (i) groups of people, (ii) institutions, (iii) a set of events, (iv) a form of consciousness, and as (v) an account of changing relationships between groups of people.

The terminology of class is used by many historians in a descriptive sense. It is used as a classification system to show the distribution of social fortune and behavior patterns among different groups in the community. Death rates, morbidity, age of marriage, housing types, education, religious behavior, drinking habits, leisure and dress have all been shown to differ between social groups which historians have labelled classes. Such labels have enormous descriptive value but little theoretical or dynamic content. The groups they describe have more in common with status groups than with the central problems of the conflict over the distribution of wealth and power, of class consciousness and of ideology.

It is unfair to dismiss this use of class as descriptive. The terminology of class is chosen for this task because it refers to the systems which distribute rewards in society, wealth, income, education, health and so on. The inequalities of class produce differences in rewards which are often interrelated (housing, income and health for example) and which produce differential social and cultural behaviour in matters as varied as sex and church_going. These differences in turn often serve to perpetuate the inequalities. With the exception of the literature on nineteenth_century education, historians rarely developed the argument to this point. The student must accept the descriptive information as valuable raw material, and seek for himself the systems of distribution, the causes of differentiation within the class system, and the manner (if any) in which these differences perpetuate inequality. [did Morris just say that historians really dont explain what classes actually do? Only what they are? ]

Another major part of the literature of class is concerned with institutions. Institutions have played a crucial role in class history, but their dominance has tended until recently to distort that history. Because such literature tends to be written about surviving institutions, especially trades unions, it creates a whiggish impression of class history, [this reference to whiggish history refers to the general idea that British history has been a struggle for increasing power for those groups outside of the political establishment and has moved towards greater inclusion of workers and a powerful centralized state] small beginnings and struggles followed by slow development leaving behind primitive violence and millennial dreams (like those of the GNCTU [this was an early 19th century national trades union - it didnt last very long] in 1834 seeking to transform society through a general strike). The process ended with legal recognition, tolerance from employers, wider membership and a recognised constitutional place in society. In a recent survey of the massive literature on trades unions Musson asserts that 'humdrum matters, relating to wages, hours, apprenticeships etc.' were of more fundamental importance than revolutionary movements. As he admits later, the study of union records tends to emphasise sectional concerns and not class aspirations [Musson, 1972: 11, 64 ]. For Cole and Postgate [1938] trades unions were `natural instruments of conflict'. So they were, but their study should not divert attention from other means by which occupational groups defended their rights against employers. There were traditional even semi_magical means, like the Society of the Horseman's Word in north_east Scotland whose members like horsemen in other grain_growing areas could control their horses by drawing and jading oils known only to themselves. If they wished they could make the horses impossible to control when an awkward master gave unreasonable orders [Carter, in MacLaren, 1976]. There were less formally organised structures like the respectable behaviour patterns of many artisans. Through the habits of saving, sobriety and self_control which this behaviour gave them, and through the prestige they gained in the eyes of certain sections of the ruling class, the artisans were better able to defend their economic position against their employers [Gray, 1976].

Organisations which represent the pre_history of our own political culture, like the Owenite socialists and the co_operative movement, have received considerable attention, but other means of class organisation, like the Friendly Societies, have had less. Friendly Societies had a far wider nineteenth_century membership than any other organisational form including the trades unions yet no attempt has been made to distil the aspirations of the members from the countless rule books which survive in local collections. There is a general neglect of employers and middle_class organisations with the exception of the Anti_Corn Law League [McCord, 1958]. There are histories of Chambers of Commerce and Literary and Philosophical Societies, but most such histories ignore the place these organisations had in class history. The employers and middle_class sponsors for whom most of these histories were written like to believe that class conflict had a minor place in British history, and such organisations were less prepared to identify themselves as class organisations than were the trades unions. Hence the danger that in a general survey (such as this) the impression will be given that class formation and class consciousness were matters for the working classes only. Both middle and ruling class (defined here as that which controlled the means of government and the means of production) had complex and influential class institutions and ideologies.

[compare the following remark with EP Thompson!]

Class is no more a series of events than it is a social structure or a social institution; nevertheless the bulk of the literature on class examines a key series of events. The individual awareness of class and of class relationships was and is created through a host of incidents in schools, home, work, shops or in the observation of habits of speech, dress and manners. Any expression of class feeling is a summary of countless, often ordinary experiences. Arthur Munby, minor poet, civil servant, and son of a Yorkshire landed family, was acutely aware of the details of class distinction for he courted and married a servant girl, a maid of all work. Courtship was not easy: `She would not take my arm - for it was still daylight and many people were about - ... she hung back and whispered, "You know I have no gloves". Visual signals like this continually divided classes. A woman without gloves was no lady, especially if she was seen walking arm_in_arm down the street with a gentleman. In 1851, the Christian Socialist printed an anonymous account of `How I became a Chartist rebel'. The writer, a respectable but unemployed working man, visited the local Mendicity Society, was insulted by the board of gentlemen, and found that the `rules' forbad him to take his bread and cheese home to share with his family. That evening he became a Chartist [D. Thompson, 1971: 82-6 ]. (Tn the first half of the nineteenth century, the Chartists in England proposed reforms to give working men the vote and make Parliament more democratic.)

Although most class experience consisted of such incidents of humiliation and superiority which confirmed each individual's sense of his own class, historians, like those who wish to organise and lead class_based groups, need more than this to assert class identity. They tend to choose experiences in common, key symbolic events, and ideological concepts.

Historians, by the nature of their trade, tend to recount class as a series of events. Class in the industrial revolution is seen as beginning with the publication of Paine's The Rights of Man and the political activity and repression which followed. The Nore mutiny, the Luddites [who smashed machines thinking they could protect their skilled jobs] and protests against the Orders in Council, Peterloo, the Queen Caroline affair and the repeal of the Combination Acts take the story into the mid 1820s. The 1830s open with the Swing riots, the 1832 Reform Act [which gave Parliamentary representation to the middle class but continued to exclude workers], the passing of the New Poor Law [which was much hated and feared by workers] and the campaign of the unstamped press. Chartism and the Anti_Corn Law League [run by middle class industrialists who wanted free trade in England] dominate the 1840s, and the rise of the new model unions the following decade.

[now he describes what was called the Peterloo massacre]
On individual events historians disagree. On 16 August 1819 the Manchester Yeomanry rode into a massive crowd attending a radical meeting in St Peter's Fields, Manchester. Their aim was to arrest Henry Hunt and other radical leaders addressing the meeting. To do this they dispersed the crowd with sabres drawn, killing eleven and injuring some 500 more. For E. P. Thompson [1963] this was an act of open class aggression; for Donald Read [1958] the tragic result of the gap and lack of understanding between social classes in Manchester; and for Robert Walmsley, who has set the event in local context, it was the understandable response by the authorities to very real fears of revolution. Whatever the correct verdict, none of the three disputed the importance of the event, and nothing can alter the fact that Peterloo became a potent symbol of the repression of the `people'. It was condemned at mass meetings in most major cities, thus heightening the awareness of this social division in a way that personal experience could never do. The `butchers' of Manchester appeared in radical literature and on reform banners for several decades after 1819.
In many histories of class the events listed here appear like the battle honours of the working_class movement: most class histories are written as histories of the working class [e.g. Cole and Postgate, 1938; S. and B. Webb, 19191 The whiggish dimension was clear in these Fabian histories. Each event raised the level of working_class consciousness, driving the working class towards an institutionalised, constitutionalised and powerful place in British society. Indeed some historians and at least one sociologist see the progress of the nineteenth century not as an institutionalisation of class conflict, but as a continuous process of claims for civil rights which were progressively granted [Marshall, 1950).

Much of the literature of class contains detailed discussion of ong or more of_these organisations or events. Most of the events were conflict situations. Most of the organisations and movements were involved in conflict situations. Certain questions tend to recur. What social groupings were represented in these conflicts? With which groups did men of various social and economic back_grounds identify themselves? What sort of social relationships existed between such groups? We have already begged the question by assuming conflict of some nature. There are three realistic alternative forms of relationship: first deference, the acceptance of subordination as legitimate, as in the eighteenth_century landlord_tenant relationship; second co_operation in which values and aims were shared by socio_economic groups, but where, despite inequality, the subordinate group retained considerable independence, as did the members of the new model unions of the 1850s; finally apathy, the last defence of those with no power cynically to ignore the efforts of their superiors to get them to participate in social relationships.? The widespread refusal of wage earners to attend church was one symptom of this [Wickham, 19571.