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XVII-XVIII
72 (2015)
Aurea mediocritas
................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Alexandra Sippel
Aurea mediocritas? The Middling Sort
of People in the English-Speaking
World in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries
................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
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Alexandra SIPPEL. “Aurea mediocritas ? The Middling Sort of People in the English-
Speaking World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” RSÉAA XVII-XVIII 72
(2015): 29-39.
AUREA MEDIOCRITAS ?
THE MIDDLING SORT OF PEOPLE
IN THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD
IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
he 2014 volume addressed “Measure and Excess” in a variety of
perspectives ranging from human temper to literary genres, from
barbarian mores to the luxury of the opera, and from population counts to
the severity of laws. For its 40th anniversary in 2015, the Society chose as
its main focus of interest those of modest means, the middling sort of
people, and raised the question of whether they embodied “the golden
mean,” or in the words of Horace, “aurea mediocritas,” as they neither
sank to the depths of poverty, nor rose to the heights of the leisured
aristocracy. The poet recommended: “Who makes the golden mean his
guide, / Shuns miser’s cabin, foul and dark, / Shuns gilded roofs, where
pomp and pride / Are envy’s mark” (2.10).1 Though the Latin is in the
singular, the “middling sort” of people includes many different situations
and occupations and covers income ranging from some £50 to about
£800 per annum (Langford 64). Langford also recalls that Millar
considered the emergence of this class as a major change in the English
and British society after 1688, with the rise of the “commercial age”
(61). Besides, in that deeply religious age, and particularly among the
Dissenters, the middle station of life may have been the best possible
situation for pious and industrious men and women, who could behave
as recommended in the last chapters of the Book of Proverbs. Agur’s
prayer reads:
Two things have I required of thee; deny me them not before I die:
Remove far from me vanity and lies: give me neither poverty nor
riches; feed me with food convenient for me:
1. The Latin text goes “Auream quisquis mediocritatem / diligit, tutus caret
obsoleti / sordibus tecti, caret inuindenda / sobrius aula” (Horace).
T
30 ALEXANDRA SIPPEL
RSÉAA XVII-XVIII 72 (2015)
Lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, Who is the Lord? or lest I be
poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain
(Proverbs 30.7-9).
As to the virtuous woman, she was to work hard and take care of her
household, including her domestic servants (Proverbs 31). Based on
ancient and biblical tradition, it would appear therefore that the
relative affluence of the productive (albeit not “labouring”) classes
offered favourable conditions for them to achieve wealth and virtue.
This potential is perhaps best extolled in modern utopias where all
inhabitants are to take their fair share in the production of the goods
needed by all. Thomas More, the father of the genre, imagined an island
severed from the corrupt continent where the population would renounce
both private property and idleness. Under such circumstances, the
moderation of needs would lead to a moderation of employment, so that
six hours a day of productive labour for each would provide everything
that was needed. The guiding principles of Utopia would therefore entail
an equality of status that would undermine intestine competition and
encourage virtue and benevolence. Two centuries later (1764), the Whig
dissenter and political theorist James Burgh narrated the emigration of a
group of Dutch Puritan craftsmen handpicked by a Mr Van der Neck
who ambitioned to form a perfect community in Patagonia. None would
be admitted to go but those who lived from their own exertions, neither
in luxury nor in destitution. They formed the lower part of the middling
sort and were alone judged apt to abide by the rules of a utopian society
that entailed moderate, yet diligent, labour. More and Burgh’s models
construed utopia as a (non-)place where all would accept an equal
standard of living that guaranteed universal comfort, far from the
excesses of luxury. They would have time on their hands to be educated
to true virtue, thus allowing the seeds of a perfect society to come to
fruition. Writers of utopia could easily imagine societies based on an
idealised aurea mediocritas where all would willingly adopt a single
pattern of behaviour in order to contribute to the greater good. In the real
world, however, human passions – and pride prominently among them –
would prove much harder to curb, which allows us to see how utopia can
verge on tyranny or dictatorship (Sippel).
Like Brown’s gardens, the middling sort of people certainly had “a
capability for improvement” as they could afford education for
themselves and their children, and some leisure time to share the élite’s
cultural activities. Yet their very aspirations to join in the tantalizing
AUREAS MEDIOCRITAS 31
RSÉAA XVII-XVIII 72 (2015)
refinement of their betters condemned them to remain vulgar parvenus.
The papers in this volume illustrate the trajectories of a multifaceted
group that yearned for respectability. Jeremy Black’s analysis of the
middling sort as “the people” and “the nation” provides an insightful
departure point for the other six papers which all point to the ways in
which social status and cultural codes created a sense of national
belonging that reached out to those who had hitherto been excluded
because of their lack of inherited estates and titles. The next three
articles also address the political and social characteristics of the
middling sort of people who longed for improvement and citizenship.
The last three papers provide insight into dimensions of culture and
sociability.
Improvement and citizenship
Jeremy Black’s article provides a comprehensive overview of the
political significance of the “middling sort of people” in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries in Britain, and extends his reflections to young
America. After historiographical considerations covering a great many
monographs that explore the middle ranks under their manifold guises,
he more specifically focuses on how they formed “the people” (as in the
preamble to the American Constitution) or “the nation.” Indeed several
of the following papers suggest that by adopting their betters’ codes, the
middle ranks shared in the national culture and grandeur. Contrary to the
lower orders, they had all they needed to further improve themselves:
with some exertion, they could use their talents to achieve a higher
economic status that would allow them into the influential circles of
religion, culture and, perhaps, politics.
Black underlines the teleological dimension of contemporary
accounts that equated the numerical and economic rise of the middling
classes with the newly acquired freedoms of the English and then the
British in the wake of the Glorious Revolution (or of the Americans after
Independence). Several other papers point to the rise of the middle
classes’ sense of forming “the people” or “the nation” as a consequence
of changes, whether these were political revolutions (in the 1640s and in
1688 in England, in 1776 in America, or in the aftermath of 1789) or
religious revivals like the Evangelical Great Awakening that occurred on
both sides of the Atlantic in the 1730s. These upheavals reinforced the
reading – and writing – of pamphlets or treatises which, Black suggests,
32 ALEXANDRA SIPPEL
RSÉAA XVII-XVIII 72 (2015)
allowed the middling sort to take part in the debates and to contribute to
the development of party politics.
James Gillray (who died exactly 200 years ago) often portrayed John
Bull and his sound political awareness. He stands as the allegorical
character embodying both the middling sort and the British nation,
armed with common sense and able to identify and refuse the excesses
and eccentricities of France. Gillray’s Tree of Liberty, or The Devil
Tempting John Bull (1798) offers a telling picture of British political
virtue rooted in the mixed constitution: John Bull resists Charles James
Fox’s attempts to spread revolutionary ideas. Black also shows that
identifying the middle stations with “the nation” could be a way of
further denouncing the idleness of the declining landed élites who bred
idle men of fashion attracted to the deceptive delicacies of French
(sometimes Italian) cuisine, music, political fancies or erroneous
Cartesian thought.
Giuliana Di Biase’s paper “A Gentleman’s ‘moderate knowledge’:
Mediocrity as the appropriate Measure of Learning in John Locke’s
Some Thoughts Concerning Education” specifically addresses this
question of the appropriate education for a member of the English élite.
She underlines that although Locke hardly ever used the word
“mediocrity” in his writings – and never in his Thoughts Concerning
Education – the golden mean appealed to him as a personal ideal. The
Latin epitaph he composed for his own tombstone reveals that he hoped
to leave the memory of “a man contented with his modest lot”: “A
scholar by training, he devoted his studies wholly to the pursuit of truth.
[…] His virtues, if he had any, were too slight to serve either to his own
credit or as an example to you. Let his vices be buried with him.”2 His
virtue and modesty as a man and as a scholar show in his assertion that
he did not ambition to more than what he had, and devoted himself to
“the pursuit” of truth rather than to “truth” itself. As she explores his
Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), Di Biase demonstrates how the
guiding principles of his epitaph pervade the entire work. The virtuous
gentry that was to govern England after 1688 had to be taught useful
skills and subjects, far from the excesses and pedantry of Cartesian
thought or scholasticism. Though he did not use the word in his
Thoughts, Locke’s first lesson was that of how to accept and make the
most of human mediocritas. Such moderation Locke thought particularly
2. Giuliana Di Biase gives the Latin text in her paper.
AUREAS MEDIOCRITAS 33
RSÉAA XVII-XVIII 72 (2015)
suited a limited Protestant monarchy like that of post-1688 England –
later Britain.
On the other side of the Atlantic in Massachusetts Bay Colony,
although citizenship was originally defined in religious terms, a literate
body of middle-class men succeeded in drafting and ratifying a
constitution. In “L’implication populaire du Massachusetts dans le
processus de ratification constitutionnelle” Isabelle Sicard explores the
evolution of citizenship from the 1630s until 1780 when the new-born
State of Massachusetts ratified its constitution. Her article draws on
earlier research to show how emblematic Massachusetts was as a
colony, and then a state, bathed in radical Protestantism where political
institutions were an emanation of the Puritan covenant. In the words of
Wald and Calhoun-Brown:
Colonial religious life developed on the principles of voluntary
affiliation and congregational independence. […] Membership in a
Church was an option rather than an automatic status, and carried
with it an obligation to participate in the running of the congregation.
In the judgement of the historian Sydney Ahlstrom, membership in
self-governing churches “prepared men to regard the social compact
as the proper basis of government. (Wald & Calhoun-Brown 45-46).
Sicard sheds light on the various ways in which “the people” – the
“fountain of power” – were to take part in complex constitutional and
religious debates at the time of the War of Independence. “To a degree
unparalleled at that time (though restricted by today’s standards), the
New England colonies achieved higher levels of suffrage, powerful
representative institutions, respect for the rule of law, and social
policies that encouraged the spread of education, science, culture and
charitable activity” (Wald & Calhoun-Brown 52). In other words, “the
people” of Massachusetts laid the foundation stone of a society that
would promote the characteristics of aurea mediocritas as the social
basis of the future United States of America: a group of articulate
people able to improve themselves by education and others by
philanthropy.3
Pierre-François Peirano’s paper entitled “ ‘A Ploughman on His
Legs is Higher than a Gentleman on His Knees:’ The Representation of
3. I would like to express my warmest thanks to my Toulouse colleagues Léna
Loza, Zachary Baqué and Françoise Coste for their helpful comments and references
about colonial and revolutionary Massachusetts.
34 ALEXANDRA SIPPEL
RSÉAA XVII-XVIII 72 (2015)
the Middling People in Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard Almanac”
addresses the formation of the golden mean in America from another
angle, using Benjamin Franklin’s aphorisms and maxims as his subject
matter. One of the Founding Fathers, Franklin – in much the same way
as Locke in Britain – epitomises the ideal member of the middling
orders as he worked himself to fortune and learning. If well followed,
the practical advice and moral maxims in Franklin’s Almanac would
lead the industrious to both wealth and virtue.
The Americans who would build the future of the nation were to
assume the role of Locke’s English gentry as the virtuous élite – but
unlike that landed class, their wealth would consist in “a trade” rather
than in “an estate.” In his Information to those who would remove to
America (1784), Franklin offered much the same idealised vision of
America as that of Crèvecœur’s 1782 Letters of an American Farmer
(especially Letter III, “What is an American”) in which the whole of
American society appears as an egalitarian agrarian utopia made up of
a homogeneous independent class:
Here are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops,
no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a
very visible one; no great manufacturers employing thousands, no
great refinements of luxury. […] We are all animated with the spirit
of an industry which is unfettered and unrestrained, because each
person works for himself. (49-50).
Later accounts of a supposedly egalitarian American society were
similarly optimistic, like John O’Sullivan’s of 1839.4 As we well know
though, two centuries were needed for the phrase “we the people” to
actually include all the people – women and men, rich and poor, whites
and non-whites.
4. “The American people having derived their origin from many other nations, and
the Declaration of National Independence being entirely based on the great principle of
human equality, these facts demonstrate at once our disconnected position as regards
any other nation […]. [O]ur national birth was the beginning of a new history, the
formation and progress of an untried political system, which separates us from the past
and connects us with the future only; and so far as regards the entire development of the
natural rights of man, in moral, political, and national life, we may confidently assume
that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity. […] It is so destined,
because the principle upon which a nation is organized fixes its destiny, and that of
equality is perfect, is universal. […] Besides, the truthful annals of any nation furnish
abundant evidence, that its happiness, its greatness, its duration, were always pro-
portionate to the democratic equality in its system of government” (O’Sullivan, 429-30)
AUREAS MEDIOCRITAS 35
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Cultural and sociable usages
Improving one’s condition frequently aroused suspicion and irony
rather than respect. Economic success did not suffice to allow the
middling ranks into the dignified circles of society and they were
mocked and ridiculed for failing to properly adopt the cultural and
sociable codes that their betters had mastered and passed on for many
generations. If Bernard Mandeville is to be trusted, the early
eighteenth century was characterised by an emulation that re-created
a great chain of beings – albeit a fretful one – similar to the one that
had been disrupted by the rise to affluence of the middling sort,5 yet
different in so far as the new one was prey to constant alterations. His
remark on “pride” is quite insightful in this respect:
What is peculiar to this faculty of ours [Pride], is, that those who are
the fullest of it are the least willing to connive at it in others; whereas
the heineousness [sic.] of other Vices is the most extenuated by those
who are guilty of ‘em themselves. […] The Druggist, Mercer, Draper
and other creditable Shopkeepers can find no difference between
themselves and Merchants, and therefore dress and live like them.
The Merchant’s Lady, who cannot bear the Assurance of those
Mechanicks [sic.], flies for refuge to the other End of the Town, and
scorns to follow any Fashion but what she takes from thence. This
haughtiness alarms the Court, the Women of Quality are frighten’d to
see Merchant’s Wives and Daughters dress’d like themselves; this
Impudence of the City, they cry, is intolerable; Mantua-makers are
sent for, and the contrivance of Fashions becomes all their study, that
they may have always new Modes ready to take up, as soon as those
sawcy [sic.] City shall begin to imitate those in being. The same
Emulation is continued through the several degrees of Quality to an
incredible Expence [sic.], till at last the Prince’s great Favourites and
those of the first Rank of all, having nothing else left to outstrip some
of their Inferiors, are forc’d to lay out vast Estates and pompous
Equipages, magnificent Furniture, sumptuous Gardens and princely
Palaces. (Mandeville 149, 153-54)
The following three papers show how the middling orders were torn
between the desire to copy the upper classes and their original
ignorance, which more often than not prevented them from properly
mimicking their distinguished attitudes. Their very thirst for cultural
5. Marie-Laure Massei-Chamayou discusses below how the medieval concept of
the Great Chain of Beings had been disrupted by the emergence of the middling sort
of people.
36 ALEXANDRA SIPPEL
RSÉAA XVII-XVIII 72 (2015)
and sociable improvement morphed into vulgarity and debarred them
from being included in an élite that would extend to the monied and
not just landed classes.
Adam Smith suggested that a stroll in a landscape garden generated
pleasures similar to music as it aroused a variation of different feelings:
When we follow the winding alleys of some happily situated and well
laid out garden, we are presented with a succession of landscapes,
which are sometimes gay, sometimes gloomy, and sometimes calm
and serene; if the mind is in its natural state, it suits itself to the
objects which successively present themselves, and varies with every
variation of the scene. (Smith 287-88)
Pierre Dubois’s “Porous Places: Music in the (Late) Pleasure
Gardens and Social Ambiguity” ushers us into the “sumptuous” garden
of Vauxhall to partake in musical delights. Landscape gardens were
places where the middling sort could prolong their intellectual and even
political improvement. Michel Baridon demonstrated how gentlemen
improved their gardens and how those who visited them were in turn
improved by the places’ designs: “Le gentilhomme jardinier n’avait nul
besoin d’aller à Oxford et Cambridge pour se former le goût à
l’imitation des classiques; la contemplation de la nature et l’amour de
l’élégance rurale constituaient en soi une formation intellectuelle” (53).
Besides, he continues: “Prôner l’asymétrie et l’irrégularité signifie que
l’on est ami des libertés et de la Constitution mixte” (Baridon 46). A
little like Locke’s education, taking a stroll in a landscape garden while
listening to Handel’s music was a distinctively British experience, one
that was perhaps all the more British as it was not French. Yet, though
audiences may have been culturally and politically elevated by the
shows, the lighter pieces that were included in order to please the
middling ranks tended to lower the quality of the programmes in much
the same way as comedy debased painting or literature in the traditional
hierarchy of genres.
Women were not immune to the pride that animated the competition
between all ranks of society. Alongside with the beau and the man of
fashion, they were a frequent target of satire. Ariane Fennetaux offers
an original view of middling class women as she adopts the methodo-
logy of material culture studies to dive into women’s pockets in her
paper entitled “ ‘Ty’d around my middle, next to my smock’: Pour une
approche matérielle des pratiques et valeurs des femmes des ‘middling
sorts’ en Grande-Bretagne au XVIIIe siècle.” This contribution draws on
AUREAS MEDIOCRITAS 37
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research to be published in The Artful Pocket: Social and Cultural
History of an Everyday Object – Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,
written together with Barbara Burman. In the present article she
explores how the manifold fabrics used to make these separable
pockets mirrored the occupations and habits of women, from the
domestic servant running errands to the lady giving alms. The making
and usage of the pockets was subjected to strictures from conduct book
writers who emphasised that they were indicative of the owner’s virtue.
Carried underneath the skirt and above the petticoat, pockets were
concealed and the display of their contents conformed to heavily
codified principles. Beside the pockets themselves, Ariane Fennetaux
explores a wide range of written accounts such as inventories or trial
court testimonies to examine the contents of these pockets. There was
a thin line dividing distinction from vulgarity, one that could be easily
crossed by those who wanted the subtleties of etiquette. Using one’s
smelling bottle immoderately unmistakably gave away a parvenue
who had attained the economic condition of the gentry but failed to
appropriate its attitudes.
Jane Austen, a descendant of the English gentry by birth, was rather
part of the middling sort by occupation and condition. Her life on the
boundary of these two worlds qualified her as an excellent observer of
the snobbery of the ones and aspirations of the others. Marie-Laure
Massei-Chamayou’s paper “La ‘Médiocrité dorée’ dans l’œuvre
austenienne: des ‘middle ranks’ à l’émergence de la ‘middle class’?”
sheds light on how Austen’s novels depicted the social intercourse that
went on among the landed and monied orders at the turn of the century.
Austen’s novels showed that the British élite was made to include new
members. Despite some resistance, money, rather than rank, became the
key to distinction in an age in which talents were commodified.
Reciprocal respect bound the monied, paying public and the proficient
professionals: the apothecary and his patients in Emma, or Austen herself
and her readership. Massei-Chamayou suggests that Emma offers the
best insight into the rise to élite circles with the opposing models of Mr
Weston, whose affluence has been built over several generations, and the
Coles, who are doomed to vulgarity because of their too rapid ascension.
The character of Emma shows the way to modernity as she accepts an
invitation from people inferior in rank: as both circles overlap, it is the
whole of British society that is changed. This article thus highlights the
performative power of Austen’s literature: by picturing the mingling
38 ALEXANDRA SIPPEL
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together of the middling sort and the declining landed gentry, she
allowed her readership – and all her contemporaries – to realise that
times had changed and that a new monied class had emerged: the middle
class.
Though the modern middling sort of people could breed hopes of
forming a class that could be educated to virtue, all sorts of pitfalls
were to be avoided, which required a great deal of moderation in one’s
aspirations. Unless, if we were to adopt Mandeville’s perspective, the
middling sorts were golden insofar as their boundless material, cultural
and political aspirations bred competition with their betters, which in
turn fuelled the economic growth and national grandeur of modern
Britain and America in the early days of consumer societies.
Alexandra SIPPEL
Université de Toulouse – Jean-Jaurès
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