Peter Bailey

White collars, gray lives? The lower middle class revisited.

The lower middle class has long had a bad press, for in common with other subaltern groups it has been more represented from without than within. Thus Victorian writers faced with the disquieting irruption of a new breed of petty bourgeois shop and office workers devised a parodic discourse of littleness, whose feminized tropes rendered the clerk as socially insignificant as the sequestered Victorian woman. George Grossmiths comic classic, Diary of a Nobody , pilloried the new social type in Mr. Pooter, whose smaller-than-life adventures stood for all that was ineffectual, pretentious, and banal in his class. Social commentators held the lower middle class responsible for the degeneration of civilization itself, stifled by their suburban respectability and addiction to mass culture. In Howards End , E. M. Forster drew the clerk, Leonard Bast, with some sympathy but made him the books major casualty, while belittling a class whose education was learned “from the outside of books.” In the interwar years the Marxist poet Christopher Caudwell likened the petty bourgeois world to “a terrible stagnant marsh, all mud and bitterness, without even the saving grace of tragedy.” George Orwells fictional antihero from the same period, the insurance salesman George Bowling, characterizes the men of his class as “Tories, yes-men and bumsuckers.” It is still hard to hide a certain relish in repeating such charges, for putting the boot in on the lower middle class has long been the intellectuals blood sport, an exorcism, so we are told, of the guilty secret so many of us share as closet petit bourgeois denying our own class origins.

Fats Waller Meets Harry Champion

ABSTRACT Though left for dead in scholarly accounts, the inter-war music hall recovered from competition from the new entertainment forms of the 1920s to enjoy a greatly revived popularity in the 1930s. A comparative analysis of the repertoire and performance of two major stars of the 1930s, one American, one British, reconstructs the contemporary popular aesthetic of pleasure and sexuality. It assesses the impact of American styles, and the prominent position of the halls in a quickening debate over the peoples pleasures and their place in national identity, at a time of international crisis and shifting social mores.