Imagining the Middle Class

This book explores the origins of the influential view of modern society that places a middle class at its center as it developed in Britain during the so-called Industrial Revolution. Using a wider variety of sources and closer methods of textual analysis than previous studies of languages of class the author develops a nuanced model for the interplay of social reality and social language. He demonstrates that a middle class-based language of social description did not simply reflect changes in social structure but was rather the outcome of political circumstances in a period of radical political change.