fundamental importance was the growth we have noted in the numbers and
wealth of the middling class of the metropolis—the overseas merchants,
financiers, company directors at the upper end of the bourgeoisie; and the shop-
keepers, professionals, tradesmen, master craftsmen, and the more skilful
among the artisans who made up its majority. Together, such men and their
families accounted for about a fifth to a quarter of the population of the City in
the early eighteenth century, rather more than that in the smaller, inner wards
around the Exchange, the Bank, and Guildhall. Contemporaries were con-
scious of a significant change taking place in the numbers of the ‘middling sort’
in London and in their wealth.^6 Their prosperity was a consequence of the
growth of trade and the increasing importance of London as a port, as a centre
of finance, manufacture, and services, and as a magnet for the social world.
What has been called a ‘revolution’ of consumption in the first decades of the
eighteenth century saw a substantial increase in the production and sale of use-
ful domestic goods and decorative objects—furniture, metal-wares of all kinds,
pottery, and the like. A greater abundance of such useful goods came within the
reach, not merely of the comfortably well-off over the first fifty years of the cen-
tury but of the broad ranks of middling families in London more generally.^7 The
availability of such goods, as well as clothes, draperies and linens, silverware,
books, and a host of other things, made for the considerable expansion we have
noted earlier in the number of shops in London—shops of all sizes and condi-
tions, including a significant number of large and well-appointed establish-
ments in which considerable attention had been paid to lighting, design, and
display. The centre of fashion and the emulation and consumption it drove was
the West End. But the City was not left entirely behind. Its main thorough-
fares—Poultry and Cheapside, for example—were lined with elegant shops by
the middle years of the century, many of them especially fitted to display their
goods on shelves, counters, and cases, as well as in large glass windows fronting
the street.^8Conclusion 467(^6) Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class(London, 1989 ), 4 – 5 , 13 , 80 – 1 , 334 – 5. For the iden-
tity, size, and growth in wealth of the middle class, see also Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, ch. 3 ;
Jonathan Barry, ‘Introduction’, in Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks, The Middling Sort of People:
Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550 – 1800 (London, 1994 ); Penelope J. Corfield, ‘Class by Name and
Number in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Corfield (ed.), Language, History and Class(Oxford, 1991 ); Mar-
garet R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680 – 1780 (Berkeley, Calif.,
1997 ), ch. 1 ; and for the West End and the beau mondein the last decades of the century, see Donna An-
drew and Randall McGowen, The Perreaus and Mrs Rudd: Forgery and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century London
(Berkeley, Calif., 2001 ), ch. 4.
(^7) Neil McKendrick,John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization
of Eighteenth-Century England(London, 1982 ), pt I; Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, 69 ; John Brewer
and Roy Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods(London, 1993 ), ch. 1 ; Earle, The Making of the Eng-
lish Middle Class, ch. 10.
(^8) Hoh-cheung Mui and Lorna H. Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth-Century England(Kingston,
1989 ); Roy Porter, London, 143 – 5 ; idem, ‘Material Pleasures in the Consumer Society’, in Roy Porter and
Marie Mulvey Roberts (eds.), Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century( 1996 ), 25 – 6 ; Claire Walsh, ‘Shop Design
and the Display of Goods in Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of Design History, 8 / 3 ( 1995 ), 157 – 76.
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