The Middle Station of Life — The Anxieties of Social Mobility

Robinson Crusoe’s father firmly believed that the ‘middle state’ of life was’ the most suited to human happiness’. As he told his son, those enjoying this station were ‘not exposed to the miseries and hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanick part of mankind, and not embarrass’d with the pride, luxury, ambition and envy of the upper part of mankind’. Medical writers tended to agree that the ‘middling’ orders of society were most favoured for health and longevity, as did many men who, like Josiah Conder, was thankful that ‘Providence’ had placed him in’ that sphere of respectable mediocrity’ which was ‘most favourable to happiness’. If those of the middle station were ever really contented, however, that perception had changed for many by the 1830s when Edward Gibbon Wakefield described the middle class as ‘uneasy’: though not labourers they suffered from the difficulties of agriculture, manufacturing, commerce, ‘and many more kinds of distress, of which the names and descriptions have appeared over and over again during the last fifteen years’. The variety of terms used by eighteenth-century writers — the ‘interests’, ‘ranks’, ‘orders’, ‘labouring poor’, ‘People’ or, like Defoe, ‘middle state’ that preceded the cohesiveness and political connotations of the term ‘middle class’ established in the 1840s — expressed a feeling that the great chain of being that specified a man’s precise place in the order of things was coming asunder.1