Those homely attributes would be the creation of a new type of person who had scarcely existed a generation or so before: the middle class professional. There had always been people of middling rank, of course, but as a distinct entity and force to be reckoned with, the middle class was an eighteenth-century phenomenon. The term middle class wasn’t coined until 1745 (in a book on the Irish wool trade, of all things), but from that point onward the streets and coffeehouses of Britain abounded with confident, voluble, well-to-do people who answered to that description: bankers, lawyers, artists,
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