The first important word is industry, and the period in which its use changes is the period which we now call the Industrial Revolution. Industry, before this period, was a name for a particular human attribute, which could be paraphrased as 'skill, assiduity, perseverance, diligence'. This use of industry of course survives. But, in the last decades of the eighteenth century, industry came also to mean something else; it became a collective word for our manufacturing and productive institutions, and for their general activities. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations (1776), is one of the first writers to use the word in this way, and from his time the development of this use is assured. Industry, with a capital letter, is thought of as a thing in itself- an institution, a body of activities - rather than simply a human attribute. Industrious, which described persons, is joined, in the nineteenth century, by industrial, which describes the institutions. The rapid growth in importance of these institutions is seen as creating a new system, which in the 1830s is first called Industrialism. In part, this is the acknowledgement of a series of very important technical changes, and of their transforming effect on methods of production. It is also, however, an acknowledgement of the effect of these changes on society as a whole, which is similarly transformed. The phrase Industrial Revolution amply confirms this, for the phrase, first used by French writers in the 1820s, and gradually adopted, in the course of the century, by English writers, is modelled explicitly on an analogy with the French Revolution of 1789. As that had transformed France, so this has transformed England; the means of change are different, but the change is comparable in kind: it has produced, by a pattern of change, a new society.

The second important word is democracy, which had been known, from the Greek, as a term for 'government by the people', but which only came into common English use at the time of the American and French Revolutions. Weekley, in Words Ancient and Modem, writes:

In this he is substantially right. Certainly, it is in reference to America and France that the examples begin to multiply, at the end of the eighteenth century, and it is worth noting that die great majority of these examples show the word being used unfavourably: in close relation with the hated Jacobinism, or with the familiar moh-nile. England may have been (the word has so many modern definitions) a democracy since Magna Carta, or since the Commonwealth, or since 1688, but it certainly did not call itself one. Democrats, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, were seen, commonly, as dangerous and subversive mob agitators. Just as industry and its derived words record what we now call the Industrial Revolution, so democracy and democrat, in their entry into ordinary speech, record the effects, in England, of the American and French Revolutions, and a crucial phase of the struggle, at home, for what we would now call democratic representation.

Industry, to indicate an institution, begins in about 1776; democracy, as a practical word, can be dated from about the same time. The third word, class, can be dated, in its most important modern sense, from about 1740. Before this, the ordinary use of class, in English, was to refer to a division or group in schools and colleges: 'the usual Classes in Logick and Philosophy'. It is only at the end of the eighteenth century that the modern structure of class, in its social sense, begins to be built up. First comes lower classes, to join lower orders, which appears earlier in the eighteenth century. Then, in the 1790s, we get higher classes; middle classes and middling classes follow at once; working classes in about 1815; upper classes in the 1820s. Class prejudice, class legislation, class consciousness, class conflict, and class war follow in the course of the nineteenth century. The upper middle classes are first heard of in the 1890s; the lower middle class in our own century.

It is obvious, of course, that this spectacular history of the new use of class does not indicate the beginning of social divisions in England. But it indicates, quite clearly, a change in the character of these divisions, and it records, equally clearly, a change in attitudes towards them. Class is a more indefinite word than rank, and this was probably one of the reasons for its introduction. The structure then built on it is in nineteenth-century terms: in terms, that is to say, of the changed social structure, and the changed social feelings, of an England which was passing through the Industrial Revolution, and which was at a crucial phase in the development of political democracy.

The fourth word, art, is remarkably similar, in its pattern of change, to industry. From its original sense of a human attribute, a ' skill', it had come, by the period with which we are concerned, to be a kind of institution, a set body of activities of a certain kind. An art had formerly been any human skill; but Art, now, signified a particular group of skills, the 'imaginative' or 'creative' arts. Artist had meant a skilled person, as had artisan; but artist now referred to these selected skills alone. Further, and most significantly, Art came to stand for a special kind of truth, 'imaginative truth', and artist for a special kind of person, as the words artistic and artistical, to describe human beings, new in the 1840s, show. A new name, aesthetics, was found to describe the judgement of art, and this, in its. turn, produced a name for a special kind of person - aesthete. The arts - literature, music, painting, sculpture, theatre - were grouped together, in this new phrase, as having something essentially in common which distinguished them from other human skills. The same separation as had grown up between artist and artisan grew up between artist and craftsman. Genius, from meaning 'a characteristic disposition', came to mean 'exalted ability', and a distinction was made between it and talent. As art had produced artist in the new sense, and aesthetics aesthete, so this produced a genius, to indicate a special kind of person. These changes, which belong in time to the period of the other changes discussed, form a record of a remarkable change in ideas of the nature and purpose of art, and of its relations to other human activities and to society as a whole.

The fifth word, culture, similarly changes, in the same critical period. Before this period, it had meant, primarily, the 'tending of natural growth', and then, by analogy, a process of human training. But this latter use, which had usually been a culture q/something, was changed, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, to culture as such, a thing in itself. It came to mean, first, 'a general state or habit of the mind', having close relations with the idea of human perfection. Second, it came to mean 'the general state of intellectual development, in a society as a whole'. Third, it came to mean 'the general body of the arts'. Fourth, later in the century, it came to mean' a whole way of life, material, intellectual, and spiritual'. It came also, as we know, to be a word which often provoked, either hostility or embarrassment.

The development of culture is perhaps the most striking among all the words named. It might be said, indeed, that the questions now concentrated in the meanings of the word culture are questions directly raised by the great historical changes which the changes in industry, democracy, and class, in their own way, represent, and to which the changes in art are a closely related response. The development of the word culture is a record of a number of important and continuing reactions to these changes in our social, economic, and political life, and may be seen, in itself, as a special kind of map by means of which the nature of the changes can be explored.