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Updated: May 28, 2025
Alfred Tennyson had already published two volumes of poems; Browning had given to the world his "Paracelsus," and this very year his Strafford had been performed at Covent Garden, while it was still on the cards that his calling might be that of a great dramatist. Dickens, the Scott of the English lower-middle classes, was bringing out his "Pickwick Papers."
It struck me as a good example of the cleverness that is so much more useful than either genius or industry. I doubt if he had any clear notion of what was meant by psychology, but he had intuitively divined an obscure flaw in our complicated mentality, a flaw searching back to some unsavoury interlude in our history. Of course, by lower-middle class he meant servants.
My idea of comfort, I reflected, was probably lower-middle. It included a high tea, with real food to eat, and a book propped up against the tea-cosy while I ate. Once or twice in my life I have been at the mercy of a table d'hôte and I was not happy. Passenger ships, for example. They have all sorts of purées and consommés and entreés and fricassées and soufflés, but very little nourishing food.
The lower and lower-middle classes have always been peculiarly sensitive to the dangers of priestcraft and a relapse into Popery. Accordingly Chubb constantly appealed to this anti-Popish feeling.
Plenty of my shipmates marry into their own class the lower-middle class. "The silent person in black came in with a bottle in a basket, and filled our glasses with a white wine. My brother turned his glass round as he looked at me solemnly. 'I see, he said, and began to eat his fish.
"I suppose you mean the aristocracy are absent," Henrietta answered; "but I don't think you could have a better proof that if they were absent altogether they wouldn't be missed. It seems to me the place is about as full as it can be. There's no one here, of course, but three or four millions of people. What is it you call them the lower-middle class?
Generally speaking, one may say, that while our upper and lower classes are, if anything, rather worse in their morals than in England, we make up for the deficiency by a decided superiority amongst the middle both upper-middle and lower-middle class. Conversation is perhaps coarser here; but whatever may be the reality, the moral standard generally accepted is superior to that of London.
This silent chap in black, with the hair growing low by his ears, would be of that class, the lower-middle. And here I put the ivory-backed brushes down carefully and looked at myself as though I saw a stranger in the glass and what was more, by the same token, was not I, a seafaring man, also one of the lower-middle? Good heavens!
Yet just at this juncture the dignity of the body was strengthened and its power of self-assertion increased by the adherence to it of men of higher education and social position. The Quakers of the commonwealth period were almost all of the middle and lower-middle or trading classes.
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