A Sense of Their Duty: Middle-Class Formation in Victorian Ontario Towns. . - Reviews - book review

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2002 by Bryan D. Palmer

A Sense of Their Duty: Middle-Class Formation in Victorian Ontario Towns. By Andrew C. Holman (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000. xi plus 243 pp. 2$70.00/cloth $27.95 paper).

On 7 April 1936 the communist cultural magazine, New Masses, published a special issue, 'Challenge to the Middle Class'. It featured 13 articles, cartoons, and an editorial. The middle class mattered to the likes of Mike Gold, Granville Hicks, Corliss Lamont, Lewis Corey [Louis Fraina], and Anna Rochester. It now matters a great deal to historians, one of whom is Andrew C. Holman.

Holman studies two towns between 1850 and 1890, years of central Canada's industrial capitalist revolution. His chosen locales, Gait and Goderich, are in the western part of Ontario; their respective populations in this period peaked at roughly 7,500 and 4,500. The former, however, owed its bustling prosperity to local manufactures, while the latter, a port city whose mercantile endeavors, regional salt-mining, and processing of flour were pinched by economic downturn, unfavorable American tariffs, and competition from US producers throughout the 1870s, had come by the 1880s to rely on tourism and its longstanding role as an administrative center of the old 'Huron Tract', land bordering the Great Lake of the same name.

Holman suggests that there is a strong need to conceptualize the structural place of the middle class before cavalierly tossing around notions of middle-class behavior and middle-class perspectives. He does this through an inquiry into the work of the middle class, which he argues defined itself as a "group apart from the upper and lower classes." A series of "loosely affiliated occupational identities" thus came together in ways that ostensibly collectively defined those who were neither bourgeois nor proletarian. Holman has no use for those who see capital and labor as the great contending classes of the nineteenth century, but he starts by acknowleding that without them the middle class would have been identityless (and nothing could be worse than that!). Beyond this he simply takes anyone who worked, but not with their hands, as middle class, the largest complement of which, Holman asserts, was composed of merchants, manufacturers, professionals, and bureaucrats. The merchant who advocated free trade, the manufacturer who clamored for tariffs, the salesman in the hardware store, the lawyer who drafted his will, the clerk who filed it, the barber who cut their hair, the school teacher who taught all of their children--this is a class, and one ostensibly sharing ideas and a culture. Holman defines the middle class by work, but avoids addressing just how it is that this variety of ways of earning a living shared anything resembling a structural experience.

Having stressed that the objective relations of work are a more foundational bedrock of middle-class identity than ideas, Holman turns to ideas and the practices that develop from them to locate the middle class. Enterprise was the foundation of this experience for the businessmen (if you happened to be a merchant, manufacturer, or master artisan), honor and authority figured centrally if you were a learned professional, and, for the lowlier, but still middling, clerks, hope in the future was a touchstone of middle-class identity. All of these elements of the middle class came together in fraternal societies and temperance crusades where, of course, there were also non-middle class people, the most numerous cohort being respectable workers. It was really the idle rich and the unworthy poor that the middle class separated themselves from in their construction of a new moral order, but then who publicly identified with these sorts? And, finally, as if these markers were not enough to establish class identity, t he middle class was further demarcated by its apparently unique reverence for domestic relations, this class having a seeming lock on the respectable familialism that sustained a gendered sensibility around separate spheres and an attachment to provisioning one's children with the accoutrements of the good life's continuity.

Within this homogenizing picture too much is congealed. We get an inadequate sense of difference as to class formation in Galt, a manufacturing enclave in the Hamilton-Toronto hinterland, and Goderich, a more geographically removed throwback to an earlier era, and one obvioulsy trying to adapt its antiquated structures of social relations to the possibilities of a new age. What did it mean, for instance, that the smaller town, Goderich, had twice as many government-employed clerks in 1881 than Galt? Holman demonstrates that lawyers in Goderich were more numerous, cohesive and prominent than in Galt, but why had this happened and what did it mean for middle-class culture?

To read this book is to gain insights into the nature of small-town life in Victorian Canada. Much can be learned from its pages, especially concerning propriety, respectability, and accommodation. These are important subjects. Whether they add up to a class experience nevertheless remains an open question, and Holman's book, for all its recourse to sociological jargon, is largely unconvincing in basic arguments. But it can be appreciated for the glimpses it gives into the secondary centers of Victorian Ontario, especially if you are not interested in class conflict, large issues of political economy, or a range of realms likely to give rise to social tensions and conflictual relations. There seems to be a lot of shying away from such histories in our time, and small towns are comfortable bastions of recluse for those who would rather not have to rub up against the dirty grit and painful injuries, both hidden and obvious, that clawed and scratched their way into the lives of those late nineteenth-century peo ple who lived the 'great transformation'.