The cultural turn in British historiography questioned the received understanding of ‘class’ as a stable, objective socio-economic category. However, nobody familiar with British life can doubt that ‘class’ has historically been, and remains, a vital constituent of that country's identity. So what does ‘class’ look like after the cultural turn? How does it appear when taken seriously as a cultural rather than a social or economic product? Simon Gunn's The public culture of the Victorian middle class, first published in 2000 and now available in paperback, offers an elegant, sophisticated and convincing answer. Gunn's analysis addresses the middle classes of Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds during the Victorian period. To argue that middle-class identity is irreducible to economic position is, in many ways, an unsurprising answer. Gunn's great contribution, however, is to elucidate the collective, performative nature of such identity without losing sight of its practical and material dimensions.

Indeed, Gunn devotes an early chapter to the changing architectural and physical structure of the three cities themselves. The possibility of public culture, he suggests, was predicated upon the removal of slums and industrial complexes from city centres, and their replacement with broad streets, squares and numerous spaces of consumption. He then explores three specific institutions within which bourgeois culture was elaborated: the club, the chapel, and the concert hall, before closing with a study of ‘the rites of civic culture’ – royal visits, processions, openings of buildings, and funerals – where the public face of the middle class was demonstrated. His analysis thus links social formation with both material form and bodily practice. For example, in the provincial concert hall, the bourgeoisie, clad in evening dress, sat in rows facing a paid orchestra performing full symphonies. Such collective acts of sustained listening, Gunn demonstrates, were public performances of the experience of ‘feeling’ (p. 150).

Gunn never loses sight of the obvious economic dimensions of such cultural practices, such as the pricing system for such cultural events which excluded all but the most well-to-do among the working classes. But his attention to the embodied, collective, spatially specific practice of class carries his analysis well beyond the ‘old’ social history. Meanwhile, his circumscribed focus on specific institutions keeps culture firmly grounded in practice. This allows Gunn to demonstrate how the rituals and institutional practices he outlines articulated middle-class authority. The period, he notes, was characterized by ‘the impulse to convert appearance in public into images of authority, to make social difference and the assertion of power over others visible by symbolic means’ (p. 30). Through such performances and rituals, power was explicitly, yet subtly, articulated. However, the public culture of the middle classes was never homogeneous. It operated in different ways in different places, which generated tensions and contradictions. Homosocial club life, for example, seldom harmoniously meshed with chapel attendance or domestic life. Most importantly, bourgeois public culture was divisive and exclusive, particularly with respect to gender. Women might organize and spectate, but they were seldom active members of civic life.

Gunn's analysis combines the sociological insights of Bourdieu and Sennett with more Foucauldian theories about the diffuse and culturally mediated nature of power. This is, above all, a book about the positive role cultural practice plays in the production and reproduction of social relations. However, writing at a time when theoretically inclined work in urban studies was taking a radically cultural turn, Gunn did not abandon the materiality and spatiality of the urban process. The decline of provincial bourgeois culture, he notes, was caused not just by cultural mutations like the rise of national newspapers and mass leisure but by technological ones like new transportation systems.

The public culture of the Victorian middle class, then, offers a convincing answer to the question of how class looks, after the cultural turn. If consideration of culture is necessary and vital, it is, ultimately, not sufficient. Other forces (technological, architectural, economic) are also necessary, even if the emphasis here is predominantly cultural. Gunn is to be highly commended for his ability to emphasize the richness and force of culture without precluding the operations of other forces. This measured, non-reductive analysis provides an exemplary work of cultural history. At the same time, it offers insights into and suggestions as to how British history might look beyond the cultural turn.