Social classes

Syrie Maugham was a businesswoman and beauty whose interior designs became a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. However her relationships with a series of prominent men left her personal life in tatters. Frances Larson tells her story.

In the second of a two part series, G.D.H. Cole analyses and compares several sets of census data to guage an accurate portrait of class demographics in Britain.

Mike Thomas looks back to a period of economic buoyancy in the Basque region, when a special relationship flourished between the people of Biscay and Britain.

Gated communities may be growing in number but they are nothing new, as Michael Nelson knows from personal experience.

The successful Broadway run of The Pitmen Painters, Lee Hall’s drama set in a north-east mining community, has introduced US audiences to a remarkable chapter in British working-class life, writes  Robert Colls.

In 1817, during a period of economic hardship following the war with France, a motley crew of stocking-makers, stonemasons, ironworkers and labourers from a Derbyshire village attempted an uprising against the government. It was swiftly and brutally suppressed. Susan Hibbins tells the story of England’s last attempted revolution.

Helen Castor visits the History Today archive to find Maurice Keen's 1959 analysis of an important collection of family letters that offer an unparalleled insight into gentry life in 15th-century England.

R.C. Richardson describes the fortunes of young women driven by poverty into domestic service. A number fell victim to predatory masters and ended up with illegitimate children, only to be ejected from households.

As bankers gain pariah status, William D. Rubinstein discusses Britain’s changing attitudes towards the wealthy.

In 1381 England witnessed a ‘summer of blood’ as the lower orders, emboldened by the labour shortages that followed the Black Death, flexed their muscle. Dan Jones tells the story of one of medieval England’s most dramatic yet curiously neglected events.

Paula Bartley takes issue with those historians who depict the suffragettes of the Pankhursts' Women's Social and Political Union as elitists concerned only with upper- and middle-class women.

Edward Royle explains how labels were used in early industrial Britain for propaganda rather than description.  

Bryan Palmer looks at the dialogue between Marxism, class struggle and working-class identity in the changing fortunes of working-class history in North America and beyond.