The Abyss: Class

We’ve left this until late, because it’s complicated. Some things are simple: are you a true aristocrat, a Peer of the Realm, entitled to a hereditary Sir, Lady, the Honorable, Lord, etc.? Are you a very close relative of such a person, and raised in that aristocratic world? Are you a ranking aristocrat, i.e. Duke, Earl, Viscount, or Baron? Are you English or foreign?

If the answers here are negative, you’re almost certainly some form of middle-class, unless the Host allows you to play a lower-class person, which we do not recommend.

The middle class is broad, encompassing most English men and women. You can roughly divide the middle class into four categories: professional, ordinary, trade, and service.[1] We recommend that the majority of PCs be professional or ordinary, apart from the very rare PC who is a servant to another PC.

The professional class includes people like Holmes, Watson, Jekyll, Utterson, and everyone like them. They may well be members of an established profession (medicine, law, finance, clergy, politician, military officer, architect, etc.), or they may have very similar social backgrounds and live off some other source of funds (an annuity, inheritance, private investment, etc.). Professional people are well educated and have considerable financial resources, as a rule. Most PCs should, in our opinion, be of this class. These are the only people who really fit the classic “Victorian” worldview, because they are the only people who stand to gain by its continuation.

The ordinary middle class includes people like shopkeepers, clerks, and so forth. They have steady, decent jobs, perhaps a servant or two, small houses (or flats connected to their shops), and so forth. They keep their money in small banks, try to put a little by for that Bank Holiday in Brighton or Paris, and generally get on with their ordinary, quiet lives.

Tradesmen include everyone who keeps things running in a hands-on sort of way, by producing, repairing, or transporting things. Here we are focused on people with steady jobs, not people who have to pick up such jobs irregularly. Plumbers, carpenters, artisans, and so forth are in this class; some cabbies are too, but a lot of them are lower-class people who have to pick up cab work on an irregular basis. Many tradesmen live pretty close to the edge, not having a lot of money laid away against disaster; many tradesmen’s wives also work (take in sewing, etc.).

People in service are servants of one description or another. Everybody in the middle class has access to servants on a regular basis; remember that Holmes and Watson had both Mrs. Hudson and Billy, the “boots.” A very wealthy household might have a great many servants (see “Upstairs, Downstairs,” for example), but the ordinary plumber likely just has a general-purpose maid. Consequently there are a great many people in service. Most of them come from lower-class backgrounds, and most of them have little or no education outside of the service world. Nevertheless, a servant who works hard and has a little luck can graduate to being a gentleman’s personal gentleman, a lady’s maid, or a butler, with a very secure and well-remunerated position. Service people are generally required to adopt a particular mode of dress on all occasions, which will mark them as in service to the world. Maltreatment of servants is not particularly common, at least not in an overt sense. People at the lower end of service are constantly in danger of slipping back into the great abyss of want, and most of them are therefore anxious to keep their positions.

The Lower Orders

There’s nothing fundamental against the lower classes as characters. The problem is that in a highly structured social world such as Victorian London, lower-class characters just don’t interact well with their superiors. A lowly servant, for example, cannot offer his perspective when his masters are discussing matters. A street-sweeper can’t expect to get away with Cockney charm and be listened to. If every PC is lower-class, that’s fine, but it’s a very different sort of game. In playtests of Shadows in the Fog, it became clear that the truly lower-class tended to get sidelined constantly, or else the group had to come up with some tortured explanation for why this lowlife creep could be an active participant. If you want to deal with this, it’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of group thought. We recommend that you don’t bother; just make middle-class and higher characters and leave it at that.

Notes

1. The “ordinary” middle class would likely be called simply the middle class, but that would be confusing here. Many people would not consider servants part of the middle class, but everything about service, at least once the person has a steady position, places such people well out of the lower classes; in addition, people in an advanced position (butlers, valets or ladies’ maids to the upper classes, etc.) are extremely respectable people, and treated so by all but the most foolish Johnny-come-lately middle-class snobs (the nouveau riche); certainly aristocrats generally treat such people with considerable respect.

{Military Service <--> Money}

-- ChrisLehrich^? - 23 Dec 2004