These four classes grew out of the traditional "estate" system which had been common in Europe since the middle ages: the first estate being the landowners (meaning the aristocracy) the second estate being members of the church (these can be seen as the educated professionals: men of the church were virtually the only educated men, and thus acted as lawyers, doctors, teachers, and so forth) and the yeomen. Only the variety of jobs has changed, not the structure of the pyramid.
The Industrial Revolution, however, changed this traditional class system. Suddenly, there existed a huge number of additional jobs, and the old hierarchal system was useless. No-one connected with the new industry, from the owner of the mill to the lowest worker, fit into the traditional class system. They were not landowners, they did not hold "respectable" jobs, but they were rich.
What ended up happening was a fragmenting of the middle class, into a hierarchy of its own. Sir Leo Chiozza Money, in his study of incomes, divided up society into three classes: those in "riches," those in "comfort," and those in "poverty." The class of "riches" and "poverty" are both very straightforward, but he felt the need to divide up his middle class, those living in "comfort," into 5 groups.
At the bottom were people earning about 160- per year. This was virtually nothing, but it would mean that a wife wouldn't have to work, and perhaps even a servant could be hired. These could be considered to be the "lower-middle class" which we know of today. After this first bracket, came the next three, each with a span of a hundred pounds. These households most certainly didn't have a wife who worked, probably had a couple of servants, and lived in a much more obvious state of comfort than the 160-400 pound group. Finally came the Upper Middle Class, which consisted of households over 700 pounds. Although 700 pounds was by no means splendor, it was certainly enough to live a highly-comfortable life. It is still important to remember that this entire middle class made up only 8.2 percent of the total population of Britain and that 7.1 percent of that were in the lowest bracket.(Perkin, pg. 30) In the topmost bracket of the population, those in "riches," only 2.9 percent of the population earned 34.2 percent of the national income. It was only these people, this top 3% of the population, who had any chance at being accepted into Society.
The upper class was growing rapidly. Between the 1850's and the 1870's, the number of families earning 10,000 pounds a year had almost tripled, rising from 338 to 987. Even more amazing, the number of people earning more than 50,000 pounds a year had risen from twenty-six to seventy-seven in that time period. While the number of landed millionaires dropped, the number of non-landed ones rose from twenty-seven in the 1860's, to 101 in the first decade of the 20th century. It is impossible to tell how many of these people had been accepted into Society before their rise in income, but it is certainly safe to say, based on the snobbery of the great landowners towards non-landed families, as well as contemporary accounts of a Nouveaux Riches explosion, that a good many of these families were not part of the established elite. This, in itself, presented a problem.
