National society, communal culture: An argument about the recent historiography of eighteenth‐century Britain∗

Perhaps the most powerful model influencing our conception of eighteenth-century British society is the framework posited by E. P. Thompson in 'Patrician society, plebeian culture'.' Thompson envisages the eighteenth-century power structure as a bi-polar field of force, whose poles were the gentry (or 'the agrarian bourgeoisie') and the plebs; between which existed a relationship of cultural hegemony, maintained given the limitations of the coercive powers of the patricians through a continually negotiated reciprocity with plebeian culture. The purpose of this article is to propose a complementary organizing principle, by focusing on what many have rightly pointed to as a major missing link in his scheme the complexities within the elites. My contention is that there was a profound cultural-political divide in British society in the eighteenth century, and in particular within its elites, between an emerging wide-ranging 'national society' and an alternative polymorphous communal-provincial culture; and that analysis in these terms will prove to be a helpful explanatory device, at times possibly more so than other categories commonly used by historians of the period.2 It will also be suggested that many contributions to the field in the last decade have been heading in this direction, at times without admitting it. Furthermore, in what follows space will be made in which to fit the ubiquitous but evasive eighteenth-century 'middling sorts':faute de mieux, this term, which was widely used by