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Title: The English Middle Class (1854)
Description: Leading article of the New-York Daily Tribune, based on an article by Marx and altered by the editors, on the English middle class between the aristocracy and the working class, the English novelists and the Preston strike.
Author: Karl Marx
Date: 1854-08-01
URL: https://marxismo.school/archivo/marx-engels/originales/1854%20The%20English%20Middle%20Class
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*Published unsigned as a leading article, under the headline “The English Middle Class”, in the* New-York Daily Tribune*, No. 4145, August 1, 1854, p. 4; attributed to Karl Marx by the MEW (vol. 10), which states that the editors of the paper altered his article substantially; MEGA² (I/13) prints it among the Dubiosa. Text from the original newspaper (Library of Congress, Chronicling America). [Traducción al español](https://marxismo.school/archivo/marx-engels/1854%20La%20burgues%C3%ADa%20inglesa).*

With the rising power of the middle class element in England, it is natural to suppose that its old position toward the aristocracy should gradually become modified to suit the altered circumstances, and that the established relations between the two classes should begin to be practically inconvenient. Within the last five years some noteworthy occurrences have taken place in harmony with this supposition. About five years ago Jones Lloyd, the wealthy Banker, was made a Peer with the title of Lord Overstone; he had invested some of his enormous wealth in purchasing an estate in the County of Northampton, and the aristocracy, true to their old policy, determined to allow him within their ranks, not because he was a millionaire, but because he was a “lord of acres broad.” Now, what was the condition they demanded of Jones Lloyd? That he should quit all connection with banking and commerce. And Jones Lloyd submitted to the condition. Therefore it is evident the aristocracy have relaxed nothing of their traditional ideas concerning what is a meet qualification for a peerage. But will everybody of the *haute bourgeoisie* be as pliant as Jones Lloyd? Probably not. Nay more, we have an instance on record of the highest authority where a peerage was rejected during life and forbidden to the sons after death. We allude to the memorable case of the late Sir Robert Peel. He, the son and grandson of a Lancashire mill-owner and manufacturer, aspired in the latter years of his life to lead the great middle class, and though the peerage was for years within his grasp, he preferred to remain the first Commoner of England, and shrank from shelving himself from the sphere of public action in the House of Lords. We have the emphatic testimony of his life to the fact that somewhere within the middle class rests the attractive center of political power; and that clause in his will whereby he forbade his children ever to accept a peerage for any public services of his, when read by the light of the events of 1848, still fresh in the public mind—what a revolutionary example and precedent it was! Dying, he thus revenged himself terribly upon the aristocracy of mere birth for the many stings his sensitive soul had been made to suffer on account of his plebian origin, since as a boy he first went to Harrow. Lord John Russell has so far followed the precedent of Sir Robert Peel: the peerage has long been within his reach, but though a son and brother of a Duke of Bedford, he also refuses to shelve himself. Quite lately this determination of his must have been put to a strong test. The office of President of the Council is almost always held by a Peer, and when in the recent Ministerial changes he accepted that office it was generally believed that he would be raised to the peerage. But No! he preferred to remain a Commoner, to vacate his seat, address the Electors of the City of London, and be returned by acclamation. Sir William Molesworth likewise regards the rumor that he was about to be elevated to the House of Lords as an aspersion on his political character, and takes care to publish a positive denial that he was likely to *accept* a peerage.

So much for the peerage; but it would seem that the Knighthood as it carries with it no political power, has been flung away to satisfy the parvenue bourgeoisie. On this ground we can explain the elevation to that rank of Sir Joseph Paxton, the Duke of Devonshire’s head gardener, and Sir John Fox, a contractor. But will this satisfy the middle-class sense of self-importance in all cases? Apparently not; for Stephenson, the engineer, contemptuously declined the trumpery dignity, and still more recently Dargan, the railway contractor, has followed his example, thinking, no doubt, that to accept it would be putting himself in a false position. In vain Royalty woos him, visits him in his handsome mansion, an honor previously vouchsafed only to the highest aristocracy; the coy burgher shrinks from the extended hand of majesty, while Queen Victoria, grasping the arm of the reluctant citizen, affords an expression of the need that feudalism has of being propped up in these days by the industrial leaders of the epoch.

But while the middle class are thus slowly winning power from the aristocracy, it is natural to ask, how are the middle classes likely to use their newly acquired influence? This matter must be looked at from no class point of view, but from broad humanitarian grounds; and the question that overleaps all others is this one—how is the fate and social condition of England’s toiling millions likely to be affected by the change?

Some politicians of the so-called liberal school have talked largely of the “union of the middle and working classes,” but the idea is absurdly chimerical. Broad is the gulf that separates the employer from the employed—the master from the servant. As regards domestic service, let the last judicial words of Talfourd speak: “How painful,” said he, “is the thought that there are men and women growing up around us ministering to our comforts and necessities, continually inmates of our dwellings, *with whose affections and nature* we are as much unacquainted as if they were *inhabitants of some other sphere*.” And in order that there may be no confusion as to the respective inhabitants of the “two spheres,” the middle class ladies, oblivious of their own comparatively recent emancipation from serfdom, compel their female servants to wear “caps” as badges of the lower sphere, and seldom allow their maids to apparel themselves sprucely for fear of an obliteration, not of *land*, but of *money* marks.

And as regards the journeyman of all descriptions, in what relation does he stand to his employer? All know with what opposition the employers met the “Ten Hours” bill. The Tories, out of spite for the recent loss of the Corn-Laws, helped the working class to get it; but when passed, the reports of the district supervisors show with what shameless cunning and petty underhand treacheries it was evaded. Every subsequent attempt in Parliament to subject Labor to more humane conditions has been met by the middle class representatives with the catch-cry of Communism! Mr. Cobden has acted thus a score of times. Within the workshops for years the aim of the employers has been to prolong the hours of labor beyond human endurance, and by an unprincipled use of the contract system, by pitting one man against another, to cut down the earning of the skilled to that of the unskilled laborer. It was this system that at last drove the Amalgamated Engineers to revolt, and the brutality of the expressions that passed current among the masters at that time showed how little of refined or humane feeling was to be looked for from them. Their boorish ignorance was further displayed in the employment by the Masters’ Association of a certain third-rate literateur, Sidney Smith, to undertake their defense in the public press and to carry on the war of words with their revolted hands. The style of their hired writer well fitted the task he had to perform, and when the battle was over, the Masters, having no more need of literature or the press, gave their hireling his congé. Although the middle class do not aim at the learning of the old school, they do not for that cultivate either modern science or literature. The ledger, the desk, business, that is education sufficient. Their daughters, when expensively educated, are superficially endowed with a few “accomplishments;” but the real education of the mind and the storing it with knowledge is not even dreamed of.

The present splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers in England, whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together, have described every section of the middle class from the “highly genteel” annuitant and Fund-holder who looks upon all sorts of business as vulgar, to the little shopkeeper and lawyer’s clerk. And how have Dickens and Thackeray, Miss Bronte and Mrs. Gaskell painted them? As full of presumption, affectation, petty tyranny and ignorance; and the civilized world have confirmed their verdict with the damning epigram that it has fixed to this class “that they are servile to those above, and tyrannical to those beneath them.”

The cramped and narrow sphere in which they move is to a certain degree due to the social system of which they form a part. As the Russian nobility live uneasily betwixt the oppression of the Czar above them and the dread of the enslaved masses below them, so the English middle class are hemmed in by the aristocracy on the one hand and the working classes on the other. Since the peace of 1815, whenever the middle class have wished to take action against the aristocracy, they have told the working classes that their grievances were attributable to some aristocratic privilege and monopoly. By this means the middle class roused the working classes to help them in 1832 when they wanted the Reform bill, and having got a Reform bill *for themselves*, have ever since refused one to the working classes—nay, in 1848, actually stood arrayed against them armed with special-constable staves. Next it was the repeal of the Corn laws that would be the panacea for the working classes. Well, this was won from the aristocracy, but the “good time” was not yet come, and last year, as if to take away the last possibility of a similar policy for the future, the aristocracy were compelled to accede to a tax on the succession to real estate—a tax which the same aristocracy had selfishly exempted themselves from in 1793, while they imposed it on the succession to personal estate. With this rag of a grievance vanished the last chance of gulling the working classes into the belief that their hard lot was due solely to aristocratic legislation. The eyes of the working classes are now fully opened: they begin to cry: “Our St. Petersburg is at Preston!” Indeed, the last eight months have seen a strange spectacle in that town—a standing army of 14,000 men and women subsidized by the trades unions and workshops of all parts of the United Kingdom, to fight out a grand social battle for mastery with the capitalists, and the capitalists of Preston, on their side, held up by the capitalists of Lancashire.

Whatever other shapes this social struggle may hereafter assume, we have seen only the beginning of it. It seems destined to nationalize itself and present phases never before seen in history: for it must be borne in mind that though temporary defeat may await the working classes, great social and economical laws are in operation which must eventually insure their triumph. The same industrial wave which has borne the middle class up against the aristocracy, is now assisted as it is and will be by emigration bearing the working classes up against the middle classes. Just as the middle class inflict blows upon the aristocracy, so will they receive them from the working classes. It is the instinctive perception of this fact that already fetters the action of that class against the aristocracy. The recent political agitations of the working classes have taught the middle class to hate and fear overt political movements. In their cant, “respectable men don’t join them, Sir.” The higher middle classes ape the aristocracy in their modes of life, and endeavor to connect themselves with it. The consequence is that the feudalism of England will not perish beneath the scarcely perceptible dissolving processes of the middle class; the honor of such a victory is reserved for the working classes. When the time shall be ripe for their recognised entry upon the stage of political action, there will be within the lists three powerful classes confronting each other—the first representing the land; the second, money; the third, labor. And as the second is triumphing over the first, so, in its turn, it must yield before its successor in the field of political and social conflict.