# data[].attributes.body
With the industrialization, the British middle class grew larger and more influential as the number of financiers, factory owners and capitalist farmers increased. The upper class still possessed the land and titles, but the industrial middle class had the money.

# data[].attributes.body
George Cruikshank's British Bee Hive, sketched in 1840, depicts a range of Britain's professions within a strictly divided pyramid-based social hierarchy. In the 19th century the bee was a popular symbol of industry and co-operation.

# data[].attributes.body
The new industrialists developed not only a new style of business, but also a new lifestyle. Some of them imitated aristocracy by buying country estates and taking up such sports as hunting and horse racing.

# data[].attributes.body
Many of the middle class were relatively well educated. Many people in the middle class paid considerable attention to religion, believing it to be a good way to instill morality. They generally considered hard work the key to a good life and to social success.

# data[].attributes.body
The middle class criticized poor people for not working hard enough and were reluctant to help the poor on the grounds that it encouraged bad habits among the needy.

# data[].attributes.body
For women, there were always places in the ‘slop trade’, producing cheap mass clothing and uniforms for the forces and for prisons. The pay was pitifully low. A woman might make one shirt in a long day, sewing by hand in poor light – she had to buy her own candles – and she would be lucky to earn six shillings for a dozen.

# data[].attributes.body
Goods for sale: oysters, hot-eels, pea soup, fried fish, pies and puddings, sheep’s trotters, pickled whelks, gingerbread, baked potatoes, crumpets, cough-drops, street-ices, ginger beer, cocoa and peppermint water as well as clothes, second-hand musical instruments, books, live birds and even birds nests.

# data[].attributes.body
The shipbuilding yards and the new docks in London and the north east required huge labour forces, but demand was unpredictable.

# data[].attributes.body
If a man had enough initiative and energy after a long working day, he could attend evening courses on scientific subjects or Latin or shorthand at a Mechanics’ Institution, or at one of the Working Men’s Colleges founded in 1854.

# data[].attributes.body
Men could earn pennies as porters, as long as they stayed clear of the associations which had a monopoly of porterage in London. Boys could hold horses’ heads while the driver took a break, or sell newspapers or fast food in the streets.