Henry French begins his excellent new book on middle-class society and identity in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England with an unexpected admission: he is not convinced that the middling sorts of England would have accepted being described as middling sorts. Almost to spite his own title, he goes on in this study to describe the middling sorts as a social group inhabiting a world of cusps and boundaries in which the parish and its institutions remained the lodestone of identity, and gentility rather than bourgeois respectability was the object of their aspirations. In place of a self-aware middling sorts of the kind increasingly commonly found in the literature on this period, French makes a compelling case for a less settled, less comfortable, and frankly less modern set of social positions.

Underpinning French's approach is an alert take on the problems of social categories and stereotypes in this period. Class, as he sighs in his introduction, used to be so easy. Now we hardly know where to look to find it. And when we think we have found it, we are taken to task for the sins of terminological determinism, leaden structuralism, or dubious materialism. Although French makes a good case for following more realist views of social identity, his concern with matching historians and contemporaries’ frameworks leads him to focus on concrete spaces of expression—in parish records, possessions, and so on. As he admits, this inevitably leaves much of the cultural work of identity out in the cold, and a more final answer on the questions of self-presentation and self-understanding that he engages with may demand a turn to these other, even more recondite, resources. That said, what he does achieve is very substantial and will appeal to readers concerned with issues far beyond the existence and identity of the middling sorts.

This is a study of provincial England—particularly three localities, the Essex-Suffolk borders, central Lancashire, and western Dorset—and it is in the parishes of these regions that French finds much of his richest material. One of the joys of this book, though, is the detail with which French has engaged with the social and economic characteristics of his sample areas. His chapter on the agrarian economy in these regions and the social inequalities, differences, and structures that it sustained manages to convincingly intertwine the continued expansion of the market with the hypothesis that it was income rather than ownership of land or capital that came to be the key measure of status.

French's take on the parish as an imagined community with an extensive and penetrating hierarchy and profound impact on the lives of its inhabitants fits with recent work. Working through evidence of ratepaying and the split taxation created between “respectable” inhabitants and the poor, French is able to make a convincing case for this boundary as a fundamental social division within local society. His case that parishes tended to be run by the relatively wealthy and that this oligarchic inclination came to shape how those living in the parish were represented and engaged with in official and unofficial discourse is convincing. His suggestion that the parish also provides a set of spatial identity boundaries is also interesting, although one wonders how well this translates into smaller, urban parishes in large towns or affected migration decisions.

The possessions as well as the parishes of the middling sorts are carefully analyzed in another of French's chapters. Perhaps unsurprisingly, French emphasizes the difficulty of identifying “middling” consumption patterns. Where he does find evidence of new household luxuries entering the houses of the well-off members of his sample parishes, he interprets this as aspirational purchasing modeled on the material culture of the gentry. Whether we would expect anything else even from staunchly self-identifying middle-class bourgeoisie is a hard question to answer though, and this material lends itself least easily to his argument. Gentility was, French suggests in his final chapter, the dream of the chief members of the middling sorts and provided one of the rare extralocal ideals that could shape the social imagination and cultural work of the English. Gentility was a source of authority and opportunity. As French notes, officeholding manifested and reinforced the identity of the gentlemen. Whether the level of income increasingly defined in property qualifications linked to officeholding was a characteristic reflecting moral qualities, as he suggests, or could have—at the same time—served to help open up gentility to incomers would be worth further consideration. The case studies that he exploits in this chapter are, however, thoroughly exploited, and together make a strong argument for the risks, attractions, and implications of gentility in the eyes of the middling sorts. The effect was, as French emphasizes, to crowd out a self-identification among the middling sort as being middling sort. They may have walked and talked like Bottom, but they hoped to become (or beget) Lysanders.

Ultimately, French's book provides a convincing case against extrapolating from metropolitan modes into provincial practices. The middling sort may not be dead, but they are limping a little. That said, the struggle that French faces (and faces honestly) in using his material to talk about identity rather than social stratification more generally means that there is perhaps still room for a late recovery.