By 1850 at the latest, the wages and living conditions of the working classes were finally improving. Greater economic rewards for the average person did not eliminate hardship and poverty, however, nor did they significantly narrow the gap between rich and poor. In fact, economic inequality worsened in Europe over the course of the nineteenth century and reached its height on the eve of World War I. In every industrialized country around 1900, the richest 20 percent of households received anywhere from 50 to 60 percent of all national income, whereas the bottom 30 percent of households received 10 percent or less of all income. Despite the promises of the political and economic revolutions of the late eighteenth century, the gap between rich and poor was thus as great or even wider in the early twentieth century than it had been in the eighteenth-century age of agriculture and aristocracy.

Despite extreme social inequality, society had not split into two sharply defined opposing classes, as Marx had predicted. Instead economic specialization created more new social groups than it destroyed. There developed an almost unlimited range of jobs, skills, and earnings; one group or subclass blended into another in a complex, confusing hierarchy.

Between the tiny elite of the very rich and the sizable mass of the dreadfully poor existed a range of subclasses, each filled with individuals struggling to rise or at least to hold their own in the social order. A confederation of middle classes was loosely linked by occupations requiring mental, rather than physical, skill. As the upper middle class, composed mainly of successful business families, gained in income and progressively lost all traces of radicalism after the trauma of 1848, they were drawn toward the aristocratic lifestyle.

One step below was a much larger group of moderately successful industrialists and merchants, professionals in law and medicine, and midlevel managers of large public and private institutions. The expansion of industry and technology called for experts with specialized knowledge, and the most valuable of the specialties became solid middle-class professions. Engineers, architects, chemists, accountants, and surveyors first achieved professional standing in this period. At the bottom were independent shopkeepers, small traders, and tiny manufacturers — the lower middle class. Industrialization and urbanization also diversified the lower middle class and expanded the number of white-collar employees. White-collar employees were propertyless, but generally they were fiercely committed to the middle class and to the ideal of moving up in society.

Food, housing, clothes, and behavior all expressed middle-class values. Employment of at least one full-time maid was the clearest sign that a family had crossed the divide from the working classes into the middle classes. Freed from domestic labor, the middle-class wife directed her servants, supervised her children’s education, and used her own elegant appearance and that of her home to display the family’s status and good breeding. The keystones of culture and leisure were books, music, and travel. The middle classes shared a code of expected behavior and morality, which stressed hard work, self-discipline, and personal achievement. For the middle classes, their moral superiority proved their worthiness to lead the uneducated working classes at home as well as the “uncivilized” (in their opinion) inhabitants of the new empires founded by European nations in the second half of the nineteenth century (see Chapters 25 and 26).

At the beginning of the twentieth century about four out of five Europeans belonged to the working classes — that is, people whose livelihoods depended primarily on physical labor. Many of them were small landowning peasants and hired farm hands, especially in eastern Europe. The urban working classes were even less unified than the middle classes. Economic development and increased specialization during the nineteenth century expanded the traditional range of working-class skills, earnings, and experiences. Skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled workers accordingly developed widely divergent lifestyles and cultural values, and their differences contributed to a keen sense of social status and hierarchy within the working classes.

Highly skilled workers, who made up about 15 percent of the working classes, became known as the labor aristocracy. They were led by construction bosses and factory foremen, men who had often risen from the ranks and were fiercely proud of their achievements. The labor aristocracy also included members of the traditional highly skilled handicraft trades that had not transitioned to mechanized production, as well as new kinds of skilled workers such as shipbuilders and railway locomotive engineers. Thus the labor elite remained in a state of flux as individuals and whole crafts moved in and out of it.

Below the labor aristocracy stood the complex world of semiskilled and unskilled urban workers. A large number of the semiskilled were factory workers who earned good wages and whose relative importance in the labor force was increasing. Below the semiskilled workers was a larger group of unskilled workers that included day laborers such as longshoremen, wagon-driving teamsters, and domestic servants. In Great Britain one out of every seven employed persons in 1911 was a domestic servant. These workers, most of whom were women, tended to be unorganized and divided, united only by the common fate of meager earnings. The same lack of unity characterized street vendors and market people — self-employed workers who competed savagely with each other and with the established lower-middle-class shopkeepers.

To make ends meet, many working-class wives had to join the ranks of working women in the “sweated industries.” These industries resembled the old cottage and putting-out industries of earlier times, and they were similar to what we call sweatshops today. The women, nearly always unorganized, normally worked at home and were paid by the piece, often making clothing after the advent of the sewing machine in the 1850s. Sweating became a catchall word denoting meager wages, hard labor, unsanitary and dangerous working conditions, and harsh treatment, often by a middleman who had subcontracted the work.

Despite their harsh lives, the urban working classes found outlets for fun and recreation. Across Europe drinking remained a favorite working-class leisure-time activity along with sports and music halls. A great decline in cruel sports, such as bullbaiting and cockfighting, led to the rise of modern spectator sports, including racing and soccer. Music halls and vaudeville theaters, the working-class counterparts of middle-class opera and classical theater, were enormously popular. Religion continued to provide working people with solace and meaning, although church attendance among the urban working classes declined in the late nineteenth century, especially among men.