The Lower Middle Class in Britain 1870-1914 by Geoffrey Crossick

Author:Geoffrey Crossick [Crossick, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138645608
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

4 THE SOCIAL ECONOMY OF LATE-VICTORIAN CLERKS

G. L. Anderson

Of all the lower middle class groups which expanded with the structural shift in the late-Victorian economy from manufacturing to services, clerks were by far the most numerous and important. In 1861 only 91,733 men and virtually no women were employed as clerks; by 1891 there were 370,433 men and 18,947 women but by 1911 with 561,155 men and 124,843 women, clerks represented one of the largest and fastest-growing occupational groups in society.1 The majority of these clerks were employed in commerce, banking and insurance and were responsible for servicing that network of financial and commercial institutions which developed after 1870 in response to the growth of multilateral trade and the export of British capital. Moreover, the clerks’ economic role in staffing the service economy was matched by their social role as the most numerous of the expanding new suburban middle class in the cities. However, despite their economic and social importance, clerks have too easily come to be regarded merely as archetypal stereotypes of their age and even as cliché figures, a development largely caused by the popular image of the clerk being derived from such contemporary literary sources as Dickens and the Grossmiths. Unfortunately historians, until recently anyway, have failed to provide a more objective treatment of the lower middle class and have strangely neglected clerks along with other emerging white collar groups in the nineteenth century.2

The main purpose of this essay is, therefore, to examine an important and previously neglected occupational group. It is not intended, however, even if it were feasible within the present limitations of space, to provide a ‘total’ picture of clerks’ economic and social lives. There is little here of the domestic and leisure activities of clerks. Rather the essay sets out to explore their work and market situation and suggests that in the period after 1870, coinciding with the Great Depression and the downturn in British economic performance, many clerks in the face of new economic pressures were placed in an increasingly marginal position.

Not all clerks, of course, experienced these economic pressures to the same extent, or even at all, because clerks did not represent a uniform or homogeneous occupational group. There were, in fact, innumerable gradations of clerks covering a very wide spectrum of ability, career prospects, job type, status and remuneration. Moreover these differences occurred within firms and industries as well as between them. There was, therefore, a wide gulf indeed between such sought-after positions in the office hierarchy as corresponding clerkships, which involved a close working relationship with the employer and a thorough understanding of most aspects of a firm’s business and the routine clerkships which normally involved a familiarity with only part of the business procedure. Similarly those occupying routine but established clerkships were in a much more secure position, both in actual and status terms, within the office hierarchy than those apprentices and office boys, many of whom were employed on a short-term basis, at the bottom of the structure.

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