Book Review

Canada and the United States

Andrew C. Holman's purpose is to describe and account for the formation, the structure, and the values of the Canadian middle class between 1850 and 1890. To accomplish his task, Holman has adopted Anthony Giddens's model of "structuration," which attempts to account for class formation in terms of both objective criteria (for example, evidence of social mobility) and subjective definition (for example, class "awareness"). Holman applies this model to the populations of two Ontario towns: Goderich, a lakeport and local administrative center largely bypassed by significant industrial and commercial development, and Galt, a busy manufacturing center that epitomized Ontario's mid-Victorian industrial revolution. The resulting case studies lead Holman to conclude that middle-class formation in Victorian Ontario was an urban phenomenon; that the structure of the middle class reflected the nonmanual occupational structures peculiar to each limited, local society; and that workplace relations were the essential building blocks of a broader middle-class culture. Its local hegemony ultimately was promoted through the activities of voluntary associations, through common perceptions of—and attempts to control—the other two classes (the "vulgar" rich and the "barren" poor), and through shared assumptions about the nature of private and public moral and social respectability.

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