Religion: Introduction

‘The Church of England system is ripe for dissolution.  The service provided by it is of a bad sort: inefficient with respect to the ends or objects professed to be aimed at by it:  efficient with respect to the divers effects which, being pernicious, are too flagrantly so to be professed to be aimed at.’[1] So, in the nineteenth century religion was itself a major source of conflict in west-European societies; it also reflected the other fundamental lines of division. The battles between the official churches and their opponents initially brought together coalitions of those from different social classes.’[2]

In  the  first  half of the nineteenth  century  British  society became increasingly  polarised  and religious adherence played  an important  part in that process. British  society  was undoubtedly religious in  1830  and, despite the  somewhat pessimistic  conclusions contemporaries read into  the  Religious Census of 1851,  it remained so. This did not mean that religion found itself unpressurised. The two state religions, Presbyterianism in Scotland and Anglicanism in England, Wales and Ireland, were under pressure from within and from without and sought to broaden their popular appeal and strengthen their defences against hostile forces. The eighteenth century had seen the beginnings of a popular Protestantism grounded in evangelicalism.  This revitalised both Anglicanism and the existing Dissenting sects and, after 1800, led to the emergence of Nonconformity.  The third type of religion was grounded in Catholicism. All these types of religion made absolute claims for themselves  and  attempted  to  mark  out sharp  and  clear boundaries  between their  own communities and the  world  beyond. This was, as Hugh McLeod has rightly said, ‘the age of self-built ideological  ghettos’  that were able to maintain over several generations a network of institutions, a body of collective memories,  particular rites, hymns and legendary heroes. As the authority of the state churches was challenged, these groups sought to impose the same degree of control within their own sphere of influence that the state churches had once exercised. This section is concerned with the pressures that each kind of religion faced, how they responded to these pressures and what effects this had.[3]

 

The Church of England 1800-1851

The Church of England found itself in an uncomfortable position at the turn of the nineteenth century.[4] It had been fully integrated into the social environment of the eighteenth century with village and parish normally being coterminous.  Its great strength lay in southern England as it was there the bulk of the population and wealth was located.   Every settlement had its own church and so the population of each parish was of a manageable size.   The situation in northern England was less favourable.   Parishes were large and they were badly endowed and consequently attracted few clergy and many livings were held in plurality or by non-resident incumbents. For example, in 1831 Leeds, with a population of over 70,000 people, had only three places of Anglican worship. The Anglican Church  was  slow  to  recognise  the   full significance  of the  changes  taking place  in the  population structure  of  the country.   The elaborate legal procedure for creating new parishes further hindered its ability to cope with the changing situation.   The diocesan system of the north was equally inflexible and unable to meet the new situation.  Until 1836 the  whole  of Lancashire,  large parts of  Cumberland  and Westmoreland,  and the  north-west  part of  Yorkshire  were  all included in the unwieldy Diocese of Chester. There was no bishop based in Lancashire and the West Riding until the Dioceses of Ripon and Manchester were established in 1836 and 1847.

It was not just in the large towns that the Anglican Church’s position was serious.   Excessive emphasis has been placed on the alienation of urban society and this has tended to deflect attention away from the situation in the countryside. W.R. Ward argues that the real tragedy for the Church was not the failure to meet the needs of people in the growing cities but rather the failure in the countryside where all her resources were concentrated. Absenteeism and pluralism were rife and many church buildings were in disrepair. Where Dissent could establish a foothold in a village, the competition from the Church was often minimal.   Enclosure had the effect of reducing the popularity of the Church. Improvements in farming led to the commutation of tithes for land and many contemporaries believed that the increase in the clergy’s land was at the expense of the small tenant farmer. An even worse reaction against the Church of England resulted from the collection of the tithe in kind.[5] It was generally regarded as the ideal way of alienating the parson from his flock.

An   unresponsive   and  inefficient  pastoral  system   was exacerbated  by  a widespread belief that  the Church  must  be defended  at  all costs.   Like the unreformed Parliament, the unreformed Church had its own elaborate defence of the status quo. The French Revolution had deeply frightened the propertied classes and strengthened their belief that the society under their control must be defended as a divinely ordained hierarchy. In  this situation suggested reforms,  including those of  modest dimensions,  could easily  be  identified  with  revolution  and revolution with the destruction of Christianity. Even those who avoided the extremes of reaction felt it was their religious duty to preserve the constitution, the social order and the morality now under threat.   In 1834 a fifth of the magistrates in England were Anglican clergymen, embodying an enormous investment in social stability.

To critics like the journalist John Wade, whose polemic the Black Book appeared in 1820 and in a revised form as The Extraordinary Black Book in 1831, the abuses of the Church, its ineffective organisation and its conservative views were in need of reform.   This was not the view of the Church: its property rights had to be defended; it was not accountable to the public; it had, as an established institution, a prescriptive right to authority.   By a series of instinctive, but ill-judged actions, the Church identified itself with extreme Toryism and alienated opinion further in the 1820s and early 1830s. Abused by the radicals from outside Parliament, the events of 1828-1829 showed how little the Church could expect from its political friends. The repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts and Catholic Emancipation ended the special relationship between the Church and Parliament. Dissenters and Catholics would now participate in legislation affecting the Church.   The attitude of the bishops during the reform agitation of 1830-32 further tarnished the reputation of the Church and completed its identification in the eyes of the public with reaction.

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[1] Jeremy Bentham Church of Englandism and the Catechism Examined, 1818, pp.198-199, quoted in D.L. Edwards Christian England, volume 3, Collins, 1984, page 102.

[2] H. McLeod Religion and the People of Western Europe 1789-1970, OUP, 1981, page 22.

[3] J.D. Gay The Geography of Religion in England, Duckworth, 1971, valuable especially for its maps,  A.D. Gilbert Religion  and Society in Industrial England  1740-1914,  Longman, 1976 and W.R. Ward Religion and Society 1790-1850, Batsford, 1972. R.R. Currie, A.D. Gilbert and L.S. Horsley Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700, OUP, 1977 provides a statistical treatment of national religious trends but does little on trends for regions and localities. The four volumes of Religion in Victorian Britain, Manchester University Press, 1988: volume 1 Traditions, volume 2 Controversies and volume 4 Interpretations all edited by Gerald Parsons and volume 3 Sources edited by J.R. Moore is of immense value for detailed analysis. Nigel Yates Eighteenth Century Britain: Religion and Politics 1714-1815, Longman, 2007 and Stewart Brown Providence and Empire 1815-1914, Longman 2008 provide a recent summary of developments. Stewart Brown and Timothy Tackett (eds.) Cambridge History of Christianity: Volume 7, Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution 1660-1815, Cambridge University Press, 2006 and Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley (eds.) Cambridge History of Christianity: Volume 8, World Christianities c.1815-c.1914, Cambridge University Press, 2005 give a global perspective.

[4] On the Church of England see A. Smith The Established Church and Popular Religion 1750-1850, Longman, 1971 and E.R. Norman Church and Society in England 1770-1970, OUP, 1976. On social attitudes, see R.A. Soloway Prelates and People:  Ecclesiastical Social Thought in England 1783-1852, Routledge, 1969 and G. Kitson Clark Churchmen and the Condition of England, London, 1973.

[5] On this issue see E.J. Evans The Contentious Tithe: The Tithe Problem and English Agriculture 1750-1830, Routledge, 1976, especially pp. 16-41 and 94-114.

The aristocratic elite: Elites, elections and the establishment

It was in the field of politics that the new patterns of class alignment were to be found at their clearest. Between 1800 and 1850 the national political rulers were drawn exclusively from the landed classes and the City fraction of the commercial class, with the manufacturers and provincial merchants pursuing their interests in the towns and cities. From the middle of the centre this old patrician approach to national politics began to break down as the changing balance of power between the privileged classes led to changes in the composition of the political leadership.

The policy of the ruling Tory elite that dominated politics between the 1780s and 1830 was essentially a negative protection of the established social order: no parliamentary reform and no concessions to working-class or middle-class radicalism. However, the changing balance of power between the landed class and the manufacturing class meant that some economic reforms were eventually abandoned by government while attempts were also made to bolster agriculture. In 1813-1814 the state finally abandoned Elizabethan wage and apprenticeship regulations but in 1815 it introduced the Corn Laws. More economic controls were dismantled in the 1820s but the pace of economic change was not as rapid as many manufacturers demanded. It was not until the Whigs came to power in late 1830 that this changed.

The Whig government faced with the tension between maintaining the political hegemony of the landed class and satisfying the demands of their commercial and manufacturing supporters, speeded-up the move towards a laissez-faire, facilitative state and succeeded in forcing the 1832 Reform Act through Parliament. But the major area of political activity for the middle-classes was at the local level. Local politics was seen as more important that national politics and the Municipal Corporations Act 1835 more important than 1832.

The major line of division was not, however, between town and country but within towns. A county group of established merchants and manufacturers, generally Anglican and Tory, were oriented towards the local gentry. They competed with a metropolitan group of newer manufacturers, often Nonconformists and oriented towards the Whigs, for control of the council and the magistracy and to determine the choice of MPs. In Oldham, for example, there was a separation between the cotton dynasties who looked towards the merchant dynasties of Manchester and the older capitalists (especially colliery-owners) who looked towards the local landowners.

Elitism and electoralism

Until the 1860s the dominant form of political representation can be called ‘elitism’. This meant that the system of representation in which the interests of the privileged social class were mediated through their position as a dominant status group. In the first half of the century the notion of the gentleman was the means through which the landed class defined itself as the natural rulers of society. The patrician values of the landed class, the basis on which that class defined itself as an ‘elite’, justified their monopolisation of political power through personal participation in the apparatus of the state. Landowners regarded themselves as having the right, indeed the obligation, to exercise such power and to speak on behalf of those who were not entitled or competent to participate in the exercise of political power themselves. This ‘elitism’ was essentially a revamped version of the more parasitic, oligarchic representation of the eighteenth century and constituted a comprehensive system of political representation running from the level of national government, through county politics, to the level of the parish. The aristocratic elite were dominant at national level leaving the gentry to control local politics.

From the 1840s a rival principle of ‘electoralism’ became increasingly important. This involved a fundamentally different principle of political representation. Class interests were to be represented in the state not through a personalistic, elitist system but through those who were elected to decision-making positions by those whom wished to have their interests represented. Politics was to be based on an open and critical dialogue in the ‘public sphere’, where public opinion could be formed and decisions reached. Parliament and parliamentary elections were at the centre of this public sphere. Manufacturers may have been individualist in business but they introduced the idea of combination for political purposes. Pressure group politics, whether by ‘societies’, ‘leagues’ or ‘unions’ became the norm of metropolitan politics and the political interests of business were expressed in the Chambers of Commerce that were formed in the larger cities and spread more widely in the 1840s and 1850s. The move towards electoralism can be seen in the development of central headquarters for the Conservative and Whig parties at White’s Club and the Brooks’ Club and Reform Club respectively. These bodies acted as headquarters for the party activists and handled electoral registration, selection of candidates and liaison between local and national leadership and marked the first step towards party organisation.

Between 1840 and 1870 there was a period of confrontation between elitist and electoral politics. Prior to 1840 the elitist principle was largely undisputed. After this period formal party organisations were rapidly expanding, but the outcome was not simply the replacement of elitism by electoralism. Rather, the landed class had to come to a compromise with the manufacturing classes, and the structure of political representation reflected the nature of this compromise. At the heart of the elitist system of representation was the notion of deference. Walter Bagehot, a mid century commentator, saw the existence of the monarchy and the peerage was central to legitimation. They were the ‘dignified’ aspects of the state and their theatrical elements constituted a residue of tradition inherited from a long past. Although both performed real political functions, a peerage culminating in a royal family gave a ‘sacred’ quality to the laws and practices of the state. The landowners’ obligation to shoulder responsibilities for others was an integral part of this pattern, since deference was expected to be shown to those who carried out these obligations. But deference could not easily be transferred to an expanding urban context and so could not be relied on to provide an effective guarantee for the continuing political rule of the landed class. Elitism therefore came under increasing strain as urban influences grew.

This system of deference is apparent in the social backgrounds of the political rulers of the period. The 1832 reforms opened up the system a little, but the elitist pattern of representation remained largely unaltered. Of the 13 Cabinets formed between 1830 and 1868, peers and commoners were each dominant in six and the two Houses balanced in one. Those Cabinets in which the Lords had a majority tended to be relatively short-lived Conservative administrations and it might be assumed from this that the Commons was the more important institution. To some extent this is true, but those who entered the Commons were not substantially different from those in the Lords. Of the 103 men holding Cabinet office between 1830 and 1868, 68 were major landowners, 21 merchant bankers and 14 were from the legal and medical professions. In the Parliament of 1833 there were 217 MPs who were sons of peers or who were themselves baronets. By 1880 the number had only fallen slightly to 170. Not only were there close links between the Commons and Lords but the landowners who were active in parliament were drawn heavily from those who had diversified into other economic activities. In the period 1841-7 the total of 815 MPs in seats at some time included 234 non-peerage landowners. The 166 heads of landowning families in parliament included 26 who had active business interests and many more who held directorships in railways, insurance and joint-stock banks. Most of the 26 with active business interests were private bankers or merchant bankers and only 6 were manufacturers.

This elitist pattern of representation was not confined to Parliament or central government. It permeated local administration and played a central part in the military. The pattern of recruitment to the officer corps meant that the structure of authority in the army mirrored that in wider society and that the army constituted a pool of suitable recruits for political careers. Military participation was an important part of the experience of a large proportion of the landed class, with military participation being proportionately more important for the higher ranks of the peerage.

The rival groups of Conservatives and Whigs competed with one another for the support of the privileged classes. The Conservatives depended upon most landowners and farmers, together with the support of the colonial and shipping interest and those attached to the Established Church. They were, in Marx’s words, ‘the guardians of Old England’. The Whigs, or Liberals as they became in the late 1850s, were also drawn from the landed class, but attempted to articulate the interests of the manufacturing and commercial classes. The Liberals therefore consisted of the old Whigs, the manufacturers and the City faction. During the 1840s the Conservatives began to broaden the base of their support in the commercial and manufacturing classes but the eventual repeal of the Corn Laws led to this Peelite group splitting-off from the rest of the party.

Electoralism and elitism

Electoralism got under way in earnest in the early 1860s when the Conservative and Liberal parties set up national Registration Associations to take over the headquarters services provided by the political clubs. The reforms of the 1830s had finally freed many MPs from the webs of patronage and corruption through which government had managed them. The absence of party control until the 1860s often made it difficult for governments to control their supporters, though there is amply evidence to show that most MPs either supported one party or the other or voted accordingly.

The emergence of a national party system strengthened government in relation to parliament and began to integrate parliament into a formal system of electoral representation. The creation in Birmingham in 1877 of a National Liberal Federation by a caucus of local activists was an important step in furthering the process by which parties, as vote-getting machines, became the dominant feature of political representation. The gradual build-up of electoral organisations broke the old elitist system of representation and the period from the second Reform Act 1867 up to 1885 was essentially a period of alternating governments under Disraeli and Gladstone. The emergence of electoralism involved an important transformation of the political system as the mode of political representation gradually came to reflect the changing balance of power among the privileged classes. The old elitist pattern was modified not destroyed and the landed class remaining an important social and political force. The result, in the last third of the century, was the emergence of the ‘establishment’ as the newly prominent manufacturers and their party machines were admitted to the sphere of informality and personal connections that characterised the landed classes. In return for accepting the hegemony of the values and life-style of the landed class, the most prominent manufacturers were admitted as full members of the status group of ‘gentlemen’. The public schools, the professions and the church became essential supports for the establishment that now dominated British public life.

Between the 1880s and 1914 there was a fundamental restructuring of party politics as the Conservatives became the true party of the establishment. As the Liberals became more identified with intervention and reform, the Conservative party was a safe haven for those who feared the idea of the increasing political power of the working-classes. In 1886 the old Whigs and the Liberal Unionists split from the official Liberals over Ireland and made an electoral pact with the Conservatives and in 1912 the Unionists entered into full merger. The Conservatives became the Imperial party, the party of Queen and Empire, ‘social justice’ and ‘social reform’. The traditional landed and agrarian groups gravitated towards the Conservatives as did the commercial and financial interests and eventually the manufacturers. The establishment party drew support, not only from the privileged classes, but also from the middle stratum of clerks, shopkeepers and so on.

The establishment was an all-pervasive social and political force, dominating all aspects of the state. In the period after 1868 there was a greater representation of new wealth in parliament. In 1885 16 per cent of MPs were landowners, 12 per cent from the military but 32 per cent were from the law and other professions and 38 per cent from industry and commerce. Between 1868 and 1886 27 out of the 49 men holding Cabinet office were landowners, but between 1886 and 1914 the proportion fell to 49 out of 101. The fall in the representation of landowners was not simply a fall in the number of landowning MPs but also a fall in the average size of their estates. There was a fall in the number of hereditary titles represented in parliament but there was a constant number of knights until 1918 when the numbers increased. Businessmen were increasingly given knighthoods and baronetcies rather than full peerage. It was Queen Victoria who regarded the baronetcy as appropriate for the middle-classes who might find difficulty in coping with the expense and responsibility of a peerage. In 1895 there were 31 millionaire MPs and by 1906 only 22. This links to the decreasing importance of land as a source of millionaires at the end of the century.

The establishment, as a dominant status group, still monopolised the most important national and local political positions as well as recruitment to the army and to the important professions of the church and law. But even here there is evidence of change. By 1900 there were 60 bishops (26 had seats in the Lords) of whom only 30 per cent were recruited from the landed classes. Half the bishops had wives who came from the landed classes and 90 per cent of bishops were educated at Oxford or Cambridge. Similarly, just under three quarters of all judges between 1876 and 1920 came from the landed or business classes. Landed values were transmitted by the public schools and this ensured the continuing influence of this group.

At the heart of the establishment was the peerage. No longer allocated through political patronage, peerage gradually came to be seen as indicators of achievement in politics and public service. Thus, the accommodation between the landowners and the manufacturing and commercial classes was reflected in the awarding of peerage and other titles to non-landowners. Of the 463 people awarded peerage between 1837 and 1911, 125 were neither magnates nor gentry. These men made up 10 per cent of the new peerage at the beginning and 43 per cent at the end. The annual rate of peerage creation increased rapidly from the 1860s, the main new entrants being the politically active elements of the new commercial and manufacturing classes. Only after 1885, when the brewers Allsopp, Guinness and Bass and the railway contractor Brassey entered the Lords, did businessmen enter the peerage in any numbers. Between 1880 and 1914 200 new peers were created: a quarter from the land, a third from industry and a third from professions such as the army and the law. Between 1875 and 1904 162 peerage and 300 baronetcies were created but 2,659 knighthoods were granted in the same period. New orders of knighthoods were created for diplomatic and Indian services, the Royal Victorian Order was initiated for special public services and the grade of knight bachelor was expanded. The mixture of ‘old’ and ‘new’ in the establishment is brought out in the fact that between 1880 and 1914 more than a half of all knights had fathers who were peers, baronets, knights or landowners.

The ‘establishment’ was a tightly knit group of intermarried families that former the political rulers of Britain and that monopolised recruitment to all the major social positions. The new party organisations were a part of this establishment, with the party headquarters and parliamentary leadership being drawn into the pattern of exclusivity of the London gentleman’s club where the ethos and values of the public schools were carried forward into adult life. In economic terms, however, the privileged classes remained relatively distinct. A unified propertied class had not been created by 1914.

The aristocratic elite: Deference and decline

The involvement of landowners on boards of manufacturing and commercial companies was complemented by the continuing movement of industrial and commercial wealth into land. At the same time the extent of intermarriage between the classes increased. By 1830 London bankers and merchants such as Lloyd, Baring, Drummond and the Rothschilds, brewers such as Barclay, Hanbury and Whitbread had bought into land, as had wealthy lawyers. Entry into land through purchase or through marriage continued after 1830 at very much the same rate as in the previous century. It must be presumed that the main reason for this was the status land brought since alternative and more profitable investment outlets were available. Later in the century industrialists such as Tennant, Armstrong, Coats and Wills bought into land.

To be a gentleman

The movement of the privileged social classes towards one another was marked culturally by the emergence of the status of the ‘gentleman’ with its associated life-style. The notion of the gentleman had long marked a fundamental status divide in society and, as the number of manufacturers and merchants increased so this social status took on an increased significance in social control. The relatively small size of the peerage in relation to the large manufacturing and commercial classes meant that even the admission of their most wealthy representatives into the peerage could only operate as a mechanism of social control if the peerage continued to be associated with the more informal and flexible concept of the gentleman. Acceptance as a gentleman by those who were already recognised as gentlemen defined a person as someone who mattered socially and politically. The fact that the status could be accorded or withdrawn at will by influential social circles without having to be justified in terms of any explicit, formal criterion, made it a curiously subtle and effective mechanism of social control.

The life-style of the gentleman, therefore, had to be accommodated to the practices of the manufacturing and commercial classes. The round of dining and visiting in the great country houses, the meetings of the Quarter Sessions, and rural pursuits such as fox-hunting and racing were already integrated into the London-based ‘Season’ of activities in which all members of ‘Society’ participated. After 1830 this became increasingly more formalised and acquired a new authority over those who regarded themselves as gentlemen. In part this was a consequence of the need to accommodate the rise of wealthy men from outside the ranks of the landed classes. L. Davidoff is undoubtedly correct when she states that ‘Society can be seen as a system of quasi-kinship relationships that was use to "place" mobile individuals during the period of structural differentiation fostered by industrialisation and urbanisation.’[1]

In this period ‘Society’ was rapidly growing in size and directories listing the families of gentlemen found a growing market. In 1833 John Burke published the first edition of his genealogical directory of county families: initially called Burke’s Commoners, it was subsequently given the more acceptable title of Burke’s Landed Gentry. The 1833 volume listed 400 county families, the qualification for inclusion being possession of at least 2,000 acres of land. The 1906 volume had grown to 5,000 families, of whom 1,000 were of industrial background. Burke’s General Armory was published in various editions from 1842 and listed all those families claiming the right to bear heraldic arms. Most of the 60,000 families included in the definitive 1844 edition owned little or no land. Such were the changes that were occurring to Society.

Presentation at court was regarded as central to the life of a gentleman and his family. By 1850 it had become an essential entry into Society, and the needs of the newcomers to Society were met by the publication of manuals of instruction and by Certificates of Presentation. The London Season, together with such events as yachting at Cowes and grouse-shooting on the Scottish moors, were central features of the life-style of the gentleman. It was, however, the Victorian public school that was the most important institution in forging a cultural unity between the landed classes and the newcomers.

To be educated a gentleman

The educated revolution initiated by Thomas Arnold at Rugby was intended to produce ‘Christian Gentlemen’, an amalgam of the traditional notion of the gentleman with the romanticism and humanitarianism of evangelical Christianity. The public school reforms of the 1860s led to the formation of the ‘Headmasters’ Conference’ as the central forum through which the major schools could exert control and influence over the lesser schools. By the 1870s the public school to Oxbridge route to top positions had been established.

The rise of new men aspiring to social leadership, the expansion of the number of suitable posts in government service and the increasing use of competitive examinations for recruitment, all lent force to the benefits of a public school education. The moral and leadership training deemed necessary for a gentleman played a central role in mediating the relations between economic changes and the cultural and political order. The code of gentlemanly behaviour passed on through the public schools defined what was ‘done’ and what was ‘not done’. Its central assumption was that the gentleman had certain definite duties and obligations towards other members of society. The latter were regarded as having a corresponding obligation to defer to the ‘natural’ superiority of the gentleman. Deferential behaviour was expected of subordinates as a sign of the legitimacy of the prevailing patterns of inequality. The economic dependence of farmers and rural workers on the local gentleman provided a fertile ground for at least an outward show of deference. In the urban context force was the normal and frequent sanction of authority in the first half of the century, but the code of the gentleman was eagerly adopted by the rising class of manufacturers.

The public school ethos was, in part, a response to the reforms of recruitment and promotion in the civil service, the law and the army but it ran counter to the rationality, efficiency and functionality of trade and industry. The capitalist spirit was regarded as ungentlemanly in the extreme. Traditional gentlemanly virtues eschewed any rigorous application to instrumental matters. In some respects therefore the public schools came to represent the balance between rationalised organisation and traditional power, a compromise between landed and entrepreneurial ideals. The notion of the public school gentleman was an expression of the modus vivendi between the landed classes and the newcomers and, as such, it legitimised their expectations of deference from the middle stratum and the working-classes below them.

‘Amateurism’: a cause of decline?

The dominance of the values of the gentleman and the associated cult of amateurism has been cited in the context of the arguments about entrepreneurial decline after 1870. The constant flow of successful businessmen from the ungentlemanly field of trade and industry to the more acceptable fields of politics and the land is held to have resulted in a haemorrhage of talent. It is certainly true that many manufacturers had for a long time seen the creation of a successful family business as the first step in a longer-term strategy of establishing a landed family. Members of the rising manufacturing class found a set life-style waiting for them once they had accumulated sufficient wealth. The successful businessman would become a ‘gentleman’, doubtless with a country seat, perhaps even a knighthood or peerage, a seat in Parliament for himself or his Oxbridge educated son and a clear social role. He ceases to be a ‘player’ in the entrepreneurial field and became a ‘gentleman’. There was nothing new about this. During the industrial revolution it was taken as a sign of successful entrepreneurialism, so why historians have argued is the same process in the late nineteenth century taken as an explanation of entrepreneurial failure.

More likely as an explanation of entrepreneurial failure were the attempts by heads of family firms to keep control of their own firms. Given this situation, there were positive incentives not to grow: once a certain level of income had been achieved, maximum growth could be traded-off against the pursuit of leisure or a political career. It was for these reasons that family firms did not follow the path towards large-scale amalgamation and new technology. So long as satisfactory profits could be earned from old, perhaps obsolete plant, there was no incentive to risk investment in new technologies that would not yield significantly higher earnings.

Conclusions

Victorian society was characterised by the move towards unity among the privileged social classes, in terms of both class and status situations. But there was never complete integration. Landowners and the City may have come closer together but manufacturers and provincial merchants remained apart. By the 1870s autonomous and assertive industrial dynasties were firmly entrenched in areas such as Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Cardiff and Newcastle. It was at this provincial level that manufacturers and merchants came closer together. The three privileged classes could no longer be clearly distinguished from each other. Although each class was based round a particular kind of property, they entered into ever more extensive business and personal relationships with each other. Each class also included people who were not active participants in the control and use of property, but who drew their income from this and had family links with the core of their class. Such people were to be found in politics, the professions and the intelligentsia; and these occupations constituted major areas of overlap between the fringes of the three privileged classes.

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[1] L. Davidoff The Best Circles, Croom Helm, 1973, page 15.

The aristocratic elite: Landowners and financiers: a narrowing circle?

Landowners complemented their estate business with interests in industrial and commercial ventures. This diversification was eased by the already close business links between landowners and City financiers. City financiers were also important in their own right as promoters if business ventures, especially railway companies. The railways were giant enterprises whose capital requirements outweighed those of all other businesses together. London bankers, especially Glyn Mills, acted as active promoters for railway companies and brought together the masses of ‘anonymous’ investors, many from the professions and many ‘widows and orphans’, who provided much of the railway capital.

The railway boom in the 1840s led to a situation where the 15 largest companies controlled 75 per cent of railway revenue and by the boom of the 1860s the top four companies had 44 per cent of revenue. As a result, from the 1860s many landowners began to take portfolio investments in the big main-line companies, a move away from their previous commitment only to local lines. The railway booms brought together some of the interests of the financial community and the landowners. But the development of railways was also to have an indirect impact on industrial funding. Limited liability had rarely been thought necessary by industrial entrepreneurs but, as the capital requirements of some industries increased, the trust and the partnership gave way to the joint-stock company. This enabled manufacturers to draw on a wider pool of capital and to provide for the various members of their families by issuing shares to them. By the mid-1860s about a thousand new joint-stock companies were being registered annually, though the majority were still run as partnerships. The spread of railway shareholding encouraged the growth of the London and provincial stock exchanges and so made it easier for expanding industrial enterprises to raise capital and for landowners to invest.

Concentrating industrial power

The move towards joint stock capital was associated with an increase in the levels of economic concentration. In the 1880s the hundred largest industrial firms accounted for less than ten per cent of the total market. However, a spate of company amalgamation led to greater concentrations in the 1890s as the increased merger activity outpaced the growth of the market. Companies were floated on the stock exchange and might then grow by taking over their competitors; or rival firms might join together to float a common holding company. The families whose firms were floated or merged at this time often retained the ordinary, voting, shares for themselves and allowed debentures and non-voting shares to be sold to the wider public. This, family control could be maintained on the basis of a relatively small capital investment. The flotation of firms allowed capital to be raised from outside the family circle; and the joint-stock form allowed family wealth to be diversified and so made more secure.

Large amalgamation of family firms occurred in a rapid burst between 1898 and 1900, but the rate of flotation and merger remained at a high level until 1914. These were, however, often hamstrung by attempts to maintain the autonomy of the constituent family firm, leaving the large firms as merely holding companies with no real control over their subsidiaries. The desire to maintain family control was paramount and could lead to difficulties in managing the newly created company. For example, in the fusion of 59 firms that produced the Calico Printers’ Association in 1899, each of the 84 directors on the board was determined to safeguard the interest of his original company that, in the majority of cases, was still under his management. Because of this situation of family loyalties and priorities, those larger companies that succeeded in adopting a more centralised structure were generally either those in which one constituent firm was considerably larger than the others, or those in which a particular family managed to subordinate its fellows in the struggle for control. The families who lost out in the struggle for the fewer positions of control in the amalgamated firms were faced with the choice of either retiring into land or politics (the gentleman’s route) or moving into new business ventures (the so-called player’s route).

Families that wished to leave business often decided to sell out to a company promoter prior to the stick exchange flotation. These families sometimes retained a stake in the firm but were not involved in active control. These promoters were often keen to recruit peers to the board of companies of the companies that they floated, feeling that a ‘lord on the board’ would help the sale of shares. From the 1870s landowners joined the boards of joint-stock companies and by 1896 a quarter of all peers had directorship. Many of these men would have been invited on to a board for decorative purposes but many landowners found their directorships to be a significant supplement to their income. They may even have performed a useful function for the companies since the managerial problems of large firms and the need for delegated administration was similar to those faced on their estates. Companies may even have benefited from the ‘managerial’ expertise of the landowners.

A concentration of wealth?

The declining return of agriculture as a proportion of the returns of the economy as a whole was aggravated by the agricultural depression of 1873-1896. Smaller landowners were hit far more severely than the larger landowners who had been able to diversify into non-agricultural activities. The squeeze that this exerted on the smaller landowners exacerbated the growing awareness and criticism of the accumulation of wealth in land, commerce and industry. The result of this controversy and criticism was the establishment of an official investigation to scotch the claim that the bulk of British land was owned by 30,000 people. In fact this backfired: the investigation discovered that the land was owned by a much smaller number of people.

The results of the survey for 1873 were published in the Returns of Owners of Land (the ‘New Domesday Book’) and, although there is some confusion in the various summaries of the Return, certain conclusions about the ownership of land are clear. First, 80 per cent of land was owned by 7,000 people, of whom 4,200 in England and Wales and 800 in Scotland held 1,000 acres or more. Secondly, among these people a total of 363 held 10,000 acres or more, 44 having 100,000 acres or more. Most of the largest estates were in Scotland: there were a total of 35 estates larger than 100,000 acres, of which the 25 Scottish estates accounted for a quarter of the Scottish land. Thirdly, in total the large landowners held about 24 per cent of the land, the smaller rentiers held about 55 per cent and owner-occupiers held a further 10 per cent with the Church of England and the Crown holding a similar amount. Finally, this national picture was repeated at local level: in East Anglia, for example, 350 people owned 55 per cent of the agricultural land in Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.

It is also possible to reach some conclusions about income from land. Of the 2,500 people with an annual rental income of £3,000 or more in 1873, 866 received an income of £10,000 or more and 76 received £50,000 or more. Sixteen people received a rental income in excess of £100,000, the largest incomes going to the Dukes of Norfolk and Buccleuch and the Marquess of Bute. Any attempt to construct a list of Britain’s richest people is complicated by the fact that there was not a perfect correlation between income and acreage. Only 7 people had both 100,000 acres and £100,000 annual income: the Dukes of Buccleuch, Devonshire, Northumberland, Portland and Sutherland, the Marquess of Bute and the Earl Fitzwilliam. The survey did not extend to the rental income derived from urban rents and the wealth if men such as the Duke of Westminster were underestimated.

To identify Britain’s richest landowners more closely it is necessary to include the Dukes of Norfolk and Westminster, who had large incomes from relatively small estates and six men with massive estates though receiving less than £100,000 rental: the Duke of Richmond, the Earls of Breadalbane, Fife and Seafield, Alexander Matheson and Sir James Matheson. These fifteen people constituted the core of the British landed class. The continuing overlap between the rich and the peerage is obvious. Of the 363 people with both £10,000 income and 10,000 acres, together holding almost a quarter of Britain’s land, 246 were members of the peerage; and a further 350 peers had smaller estates.

Landed wealth-holders 1809-1899

	1809-1858	1858-1879	1880-1899
Millionaires	75	33	32
Half-millionaires	150	50	n/a
Total	225	83	--

 

This table shows the estimate by Rubinstein of the numbers of landed millionaires and half-millionaires -- that is those leaving land valued at £500,000 or more on their death. It is clear that the number of landed millionaires fell considerably between the first and second half of the century. It is, however, important to recognise that the holding of land through settlements and trusts tended to result in an underestimation of landed wealth in studies based on land held at death.

The position of landowners in relation to wealthy merchants and industrialists was deteriorating significantly. In his researches for Capital, Marx tried to assess the number of industrial millionaires by analysing the returns for Succession Duty so as to discover the number of personal estates of more than £1m. He found no deceased millionaires for 1815-1825, eight for 1825-1855 and in the three years 1856-189 he found four. More recently Harold Perkin has estimated that there were, in 1850, 2,000 businessmen with profits of £3,000 or more; 338 of these people received £10,000 or more and 26 £50,000 or more. In 1867 the wealthiest 0.5 per cent of the population received 26.3 per cent of the total income. By 1880 the number of businessmen with Schedule D profits of £3,000 or more had risen to 5,000 of whom 987 received £10,000 or more and 77 £50,000 or more. By 1880 the commercial and manufacturing classes had overtaken the landed classes in economic terms.

Top British wealth-holders outside land 1809-1914

 

	1809-1858	1858-1879	1880-1899	1900-1914
Millionaires	9	30	59	75
Half-millionaires	47	102	158	181
Total	56	132	217	256

 

The financial sector consistently accounted for between 20 and 40 per cent of all non-landed millionaires. Within the manufacturing sector, textiles accounted for about 10 per cent (rather more in the earlier period) and metals accounted for the same percentage in both of the earlier periods and then fell away. It can be concluded that both of the main industries of the industrial revolution were well-represented among millionaires. In the later periods the food, drink and tobacco industries together accounted for about 20 per cent of all non-landed millionaires, and from 1858 the distributive trades accounted for one-tenth.

Conclusions

The wealthy men of land, commerce and manufacturing were drawing closer together during the Victorian period, though landowners still tended to deprecate merchants and manufacturers as ‘middle-class’ and concerned with ‘trade’. This status exclusion was made easier by the existence of a vast number of clerks, shopkeepers and tradesmen who were oriented towards the commercial and manufacturing classes and appeared to form a continuous social category with them. In fact, the economic gulf between them was immense.

It was the development in the scale of business activity and the emergence of the joint-stock company that brought into existence a class of salaried managers and administrators who occupied an increasingly important position in the class system. These ‘professionals’ were distinct from manual workers by virtue of their higher earnings, the ‘career’ nature of their work and their participation in the control and surveillance of the labour process but they were distinct from the capitalists themselves. They constituted a loose middle stratum below the main areas of privilege, but enjoyed superior life chances to the majority of the population. They were, however, dependent on the business and private actions of manufacturers and merchants and were also direct beneficiaries of the new form of property that the joint-stock company represented. Yet with the landowners, manufacturers and merchants, the intellectual property of the professions represented an important shift in the definition of property in late Victorian Britain.

The aristocratic elite

Between 1800 and 1914 manufacturing industry grew steadily in importance to become the dominant element in the economy. These changes were reflected in the structure of class relations. The altered significance of agriculture in relation to industry tilted the balance of power in favour of the manufacturing class and the central position of Britain in the international flow of commodities and money ensured the continuing importance of the financiers and merchants of the City of London.[1] The landed interest was forced to come to terms with its changed circumstances.[2] However, by 1900 the landed, manufacturing and commercial classes had moved closer together in economic, cultural and political terms. Though they did not form a unified social class, these three classes could no longer be considered as totally distinct from each other and were, to some degree, on the verge of forming a single propertied class even though differences in their market situation continued to separate them.

The City, the lords and the boards

The nineteenth century saw the development of a closer relationship between property owners whether in agriculture or industry. The distinction between the two had never been complete, even in the eighteenth century where successful industrialists bought themselves landed estates and landowners exploited the mineral reserves beneath their land. It was, however, changes in the banking system in the second half of the century that stimulated a closer relationship between the two groups. In 1830 three different types of bank together formed the British banking system. At the heart of the London financial system were the private banks such as Hoares, Childs, Coutts and Martins, that had often developed out of older goldsmith businesses. The private banks of the West End tended to have many landed clients and were often heavily involved in the long-term mortgage business of the landed class. By contrast the private banks of the City itself were mainly concerned with the provision of short-term credit for merchant firms and, to a much lesser extent, manufacturing concerns. The Bank of England and, perhaps less importantly, the Scottish chartered banks were concerned with the management of government finances but also carried out some private banking transactions for the merchant houses that comprised its major shareholders. The Bank was by no means a central bank that regulated the rest of the banking system; its main role was to facilitate the formation of the financial syndicates that purchased government stock. The third type of bank to be found in Britain was the country bank, a private bank located outside London. These often arose as adjuncts of mercantile concerns and had strong banking links with both local landowners and industrialists. Though their businesses were highly localised, the country banks were tied into the national system of capital mobilisation through their use of London agents and correspondent offices, generally one or other of the London private bankers.

Major changes in the financial system began with the repeal of the ‘Bubble Act’ in 1825 and the two Companies Acts of 1856 and 1862.[3] These changes in the law made limited liability and transferable shares more easily available to businesses and did much to stimulate the establishment of joint-stock banks in London and the provinces. The country banks were often involved in the formation of joint-stock banks, a number of these being in London. Agency arrangements between London and country banks were, in many cases, formalised in mergers to form large joint-stock banks. The tightening up of the banking system, especially in the 1844 Act, enabled it to become more closely involved in capital mobilisation: agricultural wealth filtered through the country banks to London from where the money went to finance the industries of the north and midlands and to finance landowners’ mortgages.

By the 1860s and 1870s the City of London had become the hub of an international monetary system, with a particularly important group of ‘merchant banks’ specialising in the financing of foreign trade and in funding foreign government loans. Such prominent merchant bankers as Rothschild and Baring, together with others such as Goshen and Hambros, were generally based around the businesses of émigré merchants and bankers and often continued with their merchant businesses alongside their banking activities. The merchants and merchant bankers of the City formed a tightly integrated group with numerous overlapping business activities: they joined together to syndicate loans, they dominated the board of the Bank of England and they coalesced to run the major dock, canal and insurance companies. This City faction was united through bonds of business, kinship and friendship and its cohesion was enhanced by the frequency and informality in the exchanges, coffee-houses and other meeting-places in the square mile itself.

The landed elite: a basis in land?

In the eighteenth century the distinction between a class of landlords and a class of capitalist farmer tenants had been sharpened by the continuing process of agricultural improvement. By 1850 the enclosure movement was all but completed and a third rural class of agricultural wage labourers had been created. The trilogy of landlord, tenant farmer and labourer characterised Victorian rural society and formed the basis of both contemporary and current images of the rural world.

The landlord was the undisputed chief figure in terms of wealth, power and prestige and the class of tenant farmers had fallen below the levels of privilege attained by both manufacturers and merchants. The rentier landowners at this time held about three-quarters of the land in England and a considerably higher proportion in Scotland. Running a great landed estate was very much a form of economic management. The estate was treated as a unit of capital and was administered through various rules, procedures and routines similar to those used in the larger mines and ironworks. The estate was managed by the landowner through agents and stewards, to whom general executive responsibilities had been delegated and who undertook the collection of rents, kept accounts and supervised the tenants. Large estates employed both a resident land agent with delegated authority but often also a chief agent with a subordinate staff to handle specialised tasks such as timber, minerals and so on. There existed in the landed estates a partial separation of ownership from control: the legal relation of ownership was entwined in a complex mediation of control whereby general supervision of the affairs of the estate -- strategic control -- remained with the landowner while the general day-to-day administration was the responsibility of a managerial staff. Where land was let out to tenants, strategic control was shared between the landowner and the tenant. The landowner and his agents exercised supervision over tenants and made decisions over the renewal of tenancies as well as contributing to the capital requirements of the farms. The tenant was not only the active day-to-day manager of his farm, but also participated in strategic control. The relationship between landowner and tenant was cemented in the financial arrangements whereby the tenant received the profits generated by his farming activity and used it to pay his rent to the landowner.

The landlords formed a system of intermarried extended families, each ranging over several generations and degrees of cousinhood, and each dependent on the fortunes of a particular estate. Family strategy was an important structuring mechanism in economic life and the highly regulated marriage market helped to ensure both the maintenance of the traditional family life-style and the perpetuation of the family estate.

The landed elite: diversification?

It was under the continuing influence of such family strategies that landowners began to diversify their interests. During the nineteenth century farming offered a relatively poor return when compared to the investment opportunities that had been opened by the development of industry. For this reason, many landowners diversified into investments in minerals, in urban property, in railways and docks and in overseas mining concerns to supplement their, at lest static, agricultural earnings.

Many landowners, for example, began to develop those parts of their estates that were well-sited for urban growth.[4] Until 1850 the urban areas, apart from London, were relatively small and localised, but the pace of development soon increased. In London the major landowners included the Duke of Portland, the Duke of Westminster (in Pimlico, Belgravia and Mayfair) and the Duke of Bedford (Bloomsbury and Covent Garden). In smaller cities and towns prominent landowners included: the Duke of Norfolk and Earl Fitzwilliam in Sheffield; the Marquess of Salisbury and the Earls of Derby and Sefton in Liverpool; the Marquess of Bute in Cardiff and the Calthorpes in Birmingham. As fashion shifted from the spa towns to seaside resorts in the 1880s and 1890s, landowners such as the Duke of Devonshire profited from the growth of such leisure centres as Eastbourne, Brighton, Hastings and Scarborough

In 1886, 69 out of 261 provincial towns were largely owned by great landowners and a further 34 were owned by smaller landowners. Similarly, the Duke of Sutherland, the Marquess of Bute and the Earl of Dudley were prominent as mineral developers. Railways offered gains not only through investment but, more importantly, through the sale of land to railway companies and through compensation money. Where landowners did invest heavily in railways, this tended not to be in main-line companies but in the secondary lines that connected their mineral interests to the main arteries of the railway network. In this way, landowners saw railway investment as a way of improving the yield earned from the agricultural and mineral resources of their own estates.

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[1] On this issue see S.D. Chapman Merchant Enterprise in Britain, Cambridge University Press, 1992.

[2] F.L.M. Thompson English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century, Routledge, 1963 is the basic work. L. Stone and J.C. Fautier Stone An Open Elite? England 1540-1880, OUP, 1984, G.E. Mingay The Gentry, Longman, 1976 and J.C. Beckett The Aristocracy in England 1660-1914, Basil Blackwell, 1986, 2^nd ed., 1989 cover broader periods. These should now be supplemented by D. Carradine The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, Yale, 1990 and Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain, Yale, 1994.  General views, with sociological emphasis, can be found in J. Powis Aristocracy, Blackwell, 1984 and J. Scott The Upper Classes, Macmillan, 1980.

[3] On the development of banking in the nineteenth century see Michael Collins Banks and Industrial Finance in Britain 1800-1939, Macmillan, 1991.

[4] A good introduction to this subject is David Cannadine Lords and Landlords: the Aristocracy and the Towns 1774-1967, Leicester University Press, 1980 and David Cannadine (ed.), Patricians, power and politics in nineteenth-century towns, Leicester University Press, 1982.

The middle-classes: The professions

The emergence of a substantial and powerful professional group within the middle-classes was a phenomenon that gathered considerable pace in the later Victorian period.[1] The emergence of a larger group of professional occupations was a function of more global developments in nineteenth century Britain. The growth and maturation of the world’s first modern capitalist economy: the growth in GNP was impressively high between 1841 and 1901. It more than doubled in the period to 1871 and, in spite of anxieties about Britain’s weakening competitive position it managed an 83 per cent increase to 1901. An increasing, and increasingly prosperous, population: the UK population grew by a third in the last three decades of the century, a higher growth rate than for 1841-1871 though here the rate was influenced by the Irish famine and its aftermath. Together with its concentration in urban settlements: in 1841 48 per cent of the population of England and Wales lived in settlements of 2500 people or more; by 1871 this had risen to 65 per cent and by 1901 78 per cent. The diversification of the industrial structure with an increased emphasis on the service sectors: the service sectors’ share of the national income rose from 44 per cent in 1841 to 54 per cent by 1901.

It was in the towns and cities that the middle-classes burgeoned. Those with incomes over £150 per year increased by about 170 per cent from around 307,000 in 1860-1861 to 833,000 in 1894-1895. From the ranks of this expanding middle-class came not only those who retained the non-industrial tasks of the traditional professional occupations -- religion, law, medicine and education (the civil service and armed forces may also be seen as part of this group but, equally, they may be seen as part of ‘government’) -- but also those who helped to ‘professionalise’ other occupations connected with the demands of the post-industrial world: accounting, surveying, civil and mechanical engineering and the emergence of what has been termed the ‘service class’. For Harold Perkin the professions constituted the ‘forgotten middle-class’, temporarily ignored in the early stages of the industrial revolution as the aristocratic, entrepreneurial and working-class ideals vied for supremacy. This neglected groups nevertheless benefited from the expanded opportunities provided by industrialisation.

What is a profession?

Sociologists have long been engaged in a length debate searching for a definition of the term ‘profession’ and the attributes of professional status. By 1850 certain occupations had acquired a fairly high social status by mastering a core of esoteric knowledge and offering it to society for financial reward. However, it was the notion of service to the community that was held to justify a privileged position of trust ‘This great class includes those persons who are rendering direct service to mankind and satisfying their intellectual, moral and devotional wants.’ [2]

A promise of integrity and codes of conduct, identified with the established professions of religion, law, medicine and education, differentiated ‘professional’ from ‘non-professional’ occupations, and in return the state permitted the professions to license and to regulate themselves. The late nineteenth century saw a considerable competition for professional status as emerging occupations tried to join their more established colleagues. In order to do so they had to combine an ideology of service with a mastery of a differentiated body of knowledge. It is possible from this discussion to suggest certain characteristics of a ‘profession’. It requires control of a particular area of knowledge and expertise combined with a license to use this knowledge and expertise. This is combined with an ideology of service to the community of society generally. The activities of a ‘profession’ are controlled and regulated by the profession itself that seeks a degree of monopoly power via restrictive practices. The professions used their control of knowledge and collective organisation to establish a mandate to define the parameters of the work to be performed.

Who were the professional groups in the late Victorian economy?

The counting of professional heads is as difficult as the task of defining professional status. The main source is the decennial census of population that exhibits numerous adjustments to the occupation classification. These reflected not only the structural changes in the economy but also shifting contemporary perceptions of what constituted a ‘professional’. This, for example, the ‘professional class’ in 1851 embraced not only those in the ‘learned professions’ plus ‘literature, art and science’ but also those engaged in government and defence. This classification included Victoria and the royal family as professionals but excluded accountants, architects and surveyors who were included on the list of industrial occupations. Taking the last forty years of the century numbers in this group in the United Kingdom rose from about 345,000 in 1861 to 515,000 in 1881 to 735,000 in 1901, an increase of 113 per cent across the period. Expressed as a percentage of the occupied population, the professional elements in society increased from about 2.5 per cent in 1861 to 4.0 per cent in 1901.

There are major problems of interpreting the available statistical data but it is possible to discern considerable variations in the growth rates of the several occupations. For 1861-1901, the growth in the established professions was modest. Numbers in religion, law and medicine rose by 30-60 per cent, compared to an overall increase in population of 61 per cent and an increase of 170 per cent in those with incomes over £150. However, some occupations exhibited much higher growth rates: dentistry established itself as a recognised activity after the Medical Act 1858 and the Dentists Act 1878; writing and journalism; music and entertainment, indicative of the expansion of leisure activities and their commercial exploitation in the late nineteenth century; teaching, stimulated by the expansion of both public and state schools; and the ‘industrial professions’ of architecture, engineering and surveying. After 1881, the expansion of most professional occupations was more modest. Two occupations experienced considerable growth. Most of the increase in the numbers of physicians and surgeons after 1861 were concentrated after 1881. Acting continued to exhibit above-average growth, its 174 per cent increase between 1881 and 1901 receiving special attention in the 1901 Census Report. Employment opportunities for women remained limited in the major professions and within them the more prestigious posts were meagre. In the main women took part in more subordinate activities and dominated three occupations, teaching, midwifery and nursing, where status was usually low: of the 230,000 teachers listed in 1901, 172,000 or three-quarters were women.

How did they emerge?

Between 1860 and 1900 there is clear evidence of the organising ability of these predominantly male professionalising occupations. New, protective organisations were established, and there was a considerable increase in educational and training activities. Many important landmarks, however, lay outside it: the establishment of the Law Society in the 1830s, the creation of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1818 and a similar body for Mechanical Engineers in 1847, the appearance of the Institute of British Architects in 1834 and the British Medical Association in 1856. In the period after 1860 earlier advances were strengthened. Local and provincial bodies combined to form national associations; royal charters were conferred on existing institutions; and other elements of enhanced status were evidence in statutory recognition, regulation and privilege.

In law, the separation of barristers from the subordinate branch of solicitors and attorneys remained. Barristers took steps to defend restrictive practices through a Bar Committee of 1883, reorganised in 1894 as the Bar Council. Solicitors, who had obtained a monopoly of conveyancing in 1804, obtained more work with the creation of country courts in 1846. Their association, the ‘Incorporated Law Society’ was entrusted with registration in 1843, given a new charter in 1845, given the right to conduct its own examinations in 1877 and established its own Law School in London in 1903. The number of members of the Law Society increased fourfold to reach 77000 by 1901 and the number of practising solicitors rose by 60 per cent over the same period to 16,3000. The creation of the ‘industrial professions’ was, by contrast, emphatically a creation of the nineteenth century. Railways acted as a major stimulus encouraging change in engineering, accounting, surveying and architecture as well as in specialist branches of the law. Two notable organisations were established before 1860: the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1818 and a similar body for Mechanical Engineers in 1847. In the period 1860-1900 a dozen more bodies were established, six in 1860-1873 and six more in 1889-1897. Membership of engineering institutions rose from about 1700 in 1860 to 23,000 in 1900.

There were several common features of the professionalising activities of this period. First, all had broadly similar aims to raise status, increase financial rewards and provide occupational security by means of differentiation, regulation and an emphasis on the gentlemanly virtues of education and middle-class morality. Secondly, both the transformation of the older professions and the emergence of newer branches were part of the general process of socio-political change in Britain with the middle-class striving for an idealised and organising image of itself. Thirdly, professionalising activities, whether stimulated by internal occupational factors like new knowledge, or by external changes like industrial growth, urbanisation and the railways, was a major element in the process by which middle-class elites established and protected their position in an industrial society. Finally, this involved both a separation from the working-classes and a power-sharing and therefore partial identification, with the old aristocratic order. The rise of the professions pointed both backwards and forwards: backwards in that professionalisation failed to shake off the trappings of aristocratic values; forwards in that it encouraged a greater degree of government intervention in the economy, the hallmark of the modern twentieth century state.

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[1] W.J. Reader Professional Men: The Rise of the Professional Classes in Nineteenth-Century England, 1966 is still the best short introduction to the subject but needs to be read in relation to T.R. Gourvish 'The Rise of the Professions' in T.R. Gourvish and Alan O’Day (eds.), Later Victorian Britain 1867-1900, Macmillan, 1988, pp. 13-36.

[2] 'Remarks on the Industrial Statistics of 1861', Return on Poor Rates and Pauperism, July 1864.

The middle-classes: Entrepreneurs

The quality of British entrepreneurship in the nineteenth century is continually being reassessed. Historians suggested until the mid 1960s that from being the organisers of change in the first half of the nineteenth century, British entrepreneurs had, by its latter decades, come to be responsible for Britain’s failure to retain her role as workshop of the world.[1]

Entrepreneurs and the Industrial Revolution: the need for reassessment

The view of entrepreneurs in the late nineteenth century as having declining initiative and flagging drive rests on a view of the dynamism of their predecessors of the classical industrial revolution. But is this assumption fully justified? It is grounded in a view that an economic transformation did take place between 1780 and 1830 and that entrepreneurs were the chief instruments of change with their reputations for courage and adventurousness, progressive efficiency, organisational ability and grasp of commercial opportunities, combined with a capacity to exploit it. Historians have questioned the promethean basis for economic change and, as a result, have begun to look seriously at the role that entrepreneurs played. The problem is the nature of the sample used to justify the progressive nature of entrepreneurs. The evidence that survives is from those concerns that were sufficiently successful to have created conditions favourable for untypical longevity. Historians have few records of where entrepreneurship failed. On the basis of this biased sample, the temptation has been to construct a composite ‘complete businessman’ possessing all the virtues and to extrapolate from these qualities not only to the hundreds of concerns mentioned in local histories, but even to those whose names have never been recorded. This has confused the issue. In fact the ancestors of the much maligned later Victorian businessman may not have been superior entrepreneurs in every facet of business activity and many who succeeded in the early years may not have fared so well in later decades.

Many industrial pioneers operated in a uniquely favourable economic environment. They faced a buoyant domestic market buttressed, especially in cotton, by a flourishing overseas demand. This allowed entrepreneurs like Robert Owen, Benjamin Gott and his partners and George Newton and Thomas Chambers to exploit profit potentials. In these generally favourable demand situations the perpetration of the grossest errors often went unpunished by bankruptcy. Imbalances of power supply, mill capacity and potential demand for the product often resulted and optimal factory layouts were rarely achieved. The focus on the successful entrepreneurs during the industrial revolution creates a degree of entrepreneurship that was perhaps not typical. More representative than the Arkwrights, Strutts and Peels were the Wilsons of Wilsontown Ironworks or the Needhams of Litton whose concerns suffered from serious entrepreneurial shortcomings coupled with gross mismanagement.

The hidden decades: 1830-1870?

The overwhelming majority of business records for this period have either been destroyed or have not yet attracted much attention. Analysis is thus either impossible or insubstantial. This is a grave misfortune. Many of the problems of the pioneers had been overcome: relatively sophisticated managerial techniques evolved and the markets of the world long remained open to British exploitation. However, such was the strength of the home and overseas markets, the former benefiting from the coming of railways and gradually rising living standards that the entrepreneur had no great inducement to alter the basic economic structure that had evolved before 1830.

The absence of any dramatic change in the scale of operations, the relatively slow enlargement of the labour forces of individual enterprises and the close coincidence of firm and plant, coupled with the fact that the majority of large companies were but ‘private firms converted’ meant that the nature of entrepreneurship and the structure of the firm changed little in the middle decades of the century. However, the decline of hitherto leading firms can be traced to this period. Marshall’s of Leeds began to decline in the 1840s, though it was to linger on for another forty years by which time many of its leading competitors in flax spinning had already gone: Benyons in 1861, John Morfitt and John Wilkinson a few years later. The Ashworth cotton enterprises, built up between 1818 and 1834 by Henry and Edward Ashworth, began their relative decline in the 1840s. In iron Joshua Walker & Co. did not long survive the end of the Napoleonic Wars, its steel trade being formally wound up in 1829 and its iron trade finally wasted away in the 1830s. Other ironmasters fared little better: John Darwin, one of Sheffield’s leading industrialists, had gone bankrupt by 1828. The Coalbrookdale Company, bereft of managerial guidance when Abraham and Alfred Darby retired in 1849 and Francis Darby died in 1850, faltered and was sustained only by sheer momentum and a continuing demand for the products of its foundry. Though these examples could be multiplied, little can be proved from them. What they do illustrate is that many more firms would have gone down in this period had they been confronted by the degree of competition encountered after 1870.

Some firms that traced their origins to the Industrial Revolution were declining in relative importance; some were disappearing altogether; others were crowding in to take their chances in both old and new fields of enterprise. It would appear that the majority of British firms -- whether their products were sold directly to the customer or through intermediaries -- became increasingly specialised during the middle decades of the century. It was an ideal way to get started and, having become established, to survive.

1870-1914: The critical decades?

In the last two decades there has been a stimulating debate on the competence of entrepreneurs in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain. There was a declining rate of growth of industrial production, a relative deterioration in the international position and a sluggish rise in productivity and all have, to some degree, been blamed on declining entrepreneurial spirit. David Landes, for example, in summarising the case for the prosecution, suggested that British enterprise reflected a ‘combination and complacency. Her merchants, who had once seized the markets of the world, took them for granted; the consular reports are full of the incompetence of British exporters, their refusal to suit their goods to the taste and pockets of the client, their unwillingness to try new products in new areas, their insistence that everyone in the world ought to read in English and count in pounds, shillings and pence. Similarly, the British manufacturer was notorious for his indifference to style, his conservatism in the face of new techniques, his reluctance to abandon the individuality of tradition for the conformity implicit in mass production.’ [2]

The hypothesis of entrepreneurial failure took quite a beating in the late 1960s. The factual basis was broadened away from the areas of iron production and cotton to the new industries where the factory was encroaching on old craft and the multiple on the village store, to the manufacture of soap, patent medicine, mass-produced foodstuffs and confectionery. In these areas, it was argued, the very real commercial and technological successes had been generally underestimated. British historians piled case study upon case study that, if anything, confused the issue of entrepreneurial failure even more.

Assertions of British entrepreneurial failure imply a comparison with performance elsewhere, usually in Germany and America. McCloskey studied the iron and steel industry and found that the British iron and steel masters exploited the potential of world technology before 1914 as well as, if not better, than their much lauded American competitors though he was less convinced by the potential of the British coal industry. Similar studies of the cotton industry found that failure to introduce newer technology and reliance on mule-spinning did not lead to a decline in productivity. On the basis of these and other studies, McCloskey expressed the belief that there was ‘little left of the dismal picture of British failure painted by historians’. But doubts still remained. If the British entrepreneur is to be criticised for failing constructively to confront the organisational constraints that were progressively strangling the staple industries, especially their labour-intensive nature, and if he is to be criticised for failing more vigorously to enter new manufacturing industries, then arguably the same entrepreneur deserves some praise for moving into the service sector, whose relatively rapid rate of output growth and high productivity between 1870 and 1914 was so much superior to the old staples that its expansion provided what little buoyancy there was in Britain’s aggregate economic growth. The four decades before the First World War were not, therefore, a critical period of entrepreneurship. British entrepreneurial errors and hesitation were always present, even in the period of the classic Industrial Revolution. They simply became more apparent after 1870.

A gentrification of British businessmen?

There is a deep-seated and enduring conviction that British culture was the root cause of Britain’s industrial decline. The central tenet of this tradition is the belief that the British people, and especially those of the middle-classes, have long been averse to industry. For them the real Britain has been the ‘green and pleasant land’ of the traditional British countryside.[3] Those businessmen who could forsake industry and trade for a life of gentility have eagerly done so. This ‘gentrification’ of the English middle-classes caused a dampening of industrial energies and led to a decline in Britain’s economic prowess.

The politicians and civil servants whose actions shaped the economic environment in which private enterprise functioned were drawn from the gentry or, if of humbler birth, educated to the ideals of style, leisure and service at a public school or one of the ancient universities. The financiers and traders of London to whom they looked for economic expertise were also imbued with the same anti-industrial spirit. However, what little evidence there is suggests that the biases of British life were not nearly as hostile to manufacturing as some historians would have us believe. The upper middle-classes did send a significant number of their sons into business and the flow of elite sons into manufacturing and commerce was neither limited to genteel pursuits like merchant banking. Sons of landowners and professional accounted for roughly a quarter of British steel manufacturers active in the period 1865-1914 and both groups were substantially over-represented in this heavy industry in comparison with their incidence in the population as a whole.

Given the willingness of the landed and professional classes to embrace industry as a source of jobs for their sons, it is perhaps not surprising that British businessmen failed to ape the allegedly anti-industrial disposition of their social superiors. Industrialists and merchants, for example, long displayed an unwillingness to educate their sons at the public schools that served as the gateways to elite status in Britain. Just 21 per cent of the men listed in the Dictionary of Business Biography who had been born between 1840 and 1869 had been to a public school, and only 18 per cent of the entrepreneurs active in Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester between 1870 and 1914 were so educated. It is questionable whether the propensity of successful businessmen and merchants to become landowners in the late nineteenth century represented a new departure. Land and the status that its possession entailed had figured in the definition and distribution of prestige in Britain long before 1870. Since the purchase of estates by businessmen did not damage the economy in the decades before 1870 and since there is little evidence that the sons of businessmen were increasingly deflected to the lifestyle of landed gentry after 1870, it is hard to see why this tendency should have significantly weakened Britain’s competitiveness.

The decline of industrial Britain after 1870 was a matter of the decisions about tools and techniques, education and training and advertising and sales that the men who remained in the offices and on the shopfloors made. There is as yet virtually no direct evidence linking the choices entrepreneurs and managers made about production and marketing with the anti-industrial values to which they supposedly succumbed. If there was a ‘gentry cast’ to their minds, that strongly influenced business decision-making, historians have found few traces of it in the records of British enterprises.

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[1] P.L. Payne British Entrepreneurship in the Nineteenth Century, Macmillan, 2nd. ed., 1988 is a brief analysis of research. Michael Dintenfass The Decline of Industrial Britain 1870-1980, Routledge, 1992 is a challenging account of Britain's long-term decline since the 1870s and provides the most accessible, and briefest, discussion of this vexed question.

[2] D. Landes The Unbound Prometheus, CUP, 1969, page 564.

[3] The classic modern exposition of this view can be found in Martin Wiener English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980, CUP, 1981.

How far were the middle-classes the ruling class?

The rise of the bourgeoisie or middle-classes has often been used in ways that imply a reference to the country’s dominant group.[1] Before examining the development of the middle-classes in the nineteenth century it is important to consider the relative power of the aristocracy and the emergent bourgeoisie.

Wealth-holding

There are two major sources of extensive quantitative data that have been used by W.D. Rubinstein to analyse the relative wealth of different groups of property owners: the value of individual property at death as recorded in probate calendars and assessments of incomes in different districts made by the Inland Revenue for the purposes of taxation. Each of these measures is subject to some technical qualifications for, even before the imposition of heavy death duties on inherited wealth in the twentieth century, the rich may still have had other reasons to dispose of some of their property before death. Tax assessments of the living promise a solution to this problem but the measurement of income by area of residence is likely to undervalue the importance of capital holdings in other districts[2]. Despite criticisms, a clear picture emerges from his data. First, the wealth of landowners was predominant for longer than many historians have assumed. Secondly, among the increasingly important non-landed wealth-holder, industrial employers came third behind bankers and merchants with only 30-40 per cent of non-landed fortunes at their mid nineteenth century peak.

Until the 1880s over half of the very wealthiest still had the bulk of their property in land. Even when income from rents began to fall from the 1870s, large landowners were able to increase their incomes from coal and mineral royalties and from urban rents, while landowners of all sizes were able to supplement their incomes by diversifying into commercial and financial activities in the City of London, then experiencing rapid growth because of its emergence as the major service centre for the world economy. As a result of this, there was also a marked concentration of non-landed wealth in London, particularly the City, and this was to be found at the level of the middle-classes as well as the very rich. Within the industrial regions much the same pattern is repeated: centres of commerce like Liverpool contained the highest general levels of wealth and even in a city like Manchester only one out of six recorded millionaires was a cotton manufacturer, the others were bankers and merchants.

The growth of manufacturing employment and of the wealth of employers in the northern industries was undoubted but their fortunes were only impressive a small town level. This was partly the result of the limited nature of their ambitions for prosperous family-based firms, as well as of the greater uncertainty and lower rate of return from productive activity in comparison with landownership and finance and it was closely connected with manufacturers’ general avoidance of heavy fixed investment in plant and equipment. The result was that, even within their own regions, the manufacturers were still overshadowed by the landowning classes.

Political power

The Reform Act 1832, traditionally regarded as the beginnings of middle-class political power, cannot be taken as an index of the rise to power of the industrial bourgeoisie. The new franchise certainly increased the representation of the urban middle-class but it was also designed to reduce the power of newly wealthy owners of corrupt boroughs and to restore the traditional influence of the landed interest. As late as the 1860s, almost two-thirds of the country’s MPs came from landed backgrounds, over one-third were hereditary aristocrats and around half of the cabinets of both parties were still aristocratic.[3]

It was not until after the Reform Act 1867 that the first major changes in the nature of the political elite began to emerge. The Act extended the franchise to certain sections of the urban working-classes and this led to the replacement of local patterns of influence with professionally organised political machines. It was accelerated by further extensions of the franchise in 1884 but also by such reforms as the Secret Ballot Act 1872, the restriction of candidates’ spending on elections by the Corrupt Practices Act 1883, the dilution of the aristocracy through awards of peerages in recognition of wealth and political service that began in 1885, and the establishment of elections for local government in the counties in 1888 and 1894.

It is probably fair to talk of a major restructuring of the British Establishment from the 1870s but how far did the middle-classes benefit from this? It did not give the provincial manufacturers a greatly enhanced position of power at the national level.[4] Membership of the ruling circle was being extended to include larger numbers of bankers and merchants but few manufacturers. However, though the great country houses were being displaced from the centre of political power, the network of power and influence was based even more firmly in the south of the country and the aristocracy still remained the leading group within the ruling classes. Who held what position and what social classes they came from may be less important that how and in whose interests they acted. It can be argued that the industrial bourgeoisie was able to exert sufficient pressure on the nation’s political elite to get the kind of government it wanted. However, the challenge to which the restructuring of the Establishment was a response seems to have come less from industrial employers than from occupationally-based pressure groups among both the professional middle-classes and the working-classes that had been able to win major reforms in the 1860s and 1870s and were to make important advances in the 1890s and 1900s.

Lancashire factory owners became a substantial group in the House of Commons after 1832 but their effectiveness was limited by internal political divisions and by their inability to create external alliances with other parliamentary groupings. In the longer term, the factory owners became less active in politics and more conservative in their social behaviour. Their strong attachment to the Tory Party echoed the traditional allegiance of the Lancashire aristocracy. The one apparent assertion of industrial against the landed interest was the debate over the Corn Laws that led to their eventual repeal in 1846. Repeal was directly advantageous to manufacturers who had a direct interest in keeping food prices down. Repeal, however, was by no means disadvantageous to the aristocracy much of whose land was devoted to pastoral farming and whose rents from arable land were in any case largely maintained for the duration of the long mid-century boom. It was the tenant farmer who stood to suffer most. The Anti-Corn Law League should be seen as a popular radical campaign that secured an unusual amount of financial backing from manufacturers because of the economic benefits they expected. Repeal should be seen as a result of aristocratic concession to popular opinion during a short-term crisis rather than of the long-term growth of bourgeois political power.

The middle-class ‘victory’ of 1846 was atypical of their success in this period and did not mark the beginnings of middle-class control of the political system. In this way it is possible to explain why the significant limitation of the hours of work in factories contained in the 1847 Factory Act was passed ion the face of strong opposition from most of the Lancashire manufacturers and why it was a further twenty years before the next instalment of parliamentary reform. Similar pattern can be seen in the 1870s, not only in the widespread aristocratic support for agricultural labourers’ demands but also in government attitudes towards labour policy in general. The main line of government policy was a liberal one of not only recognising but even strengthening the rights of employees to bargain collectively over wages and conditions. It had been possible for Britain’s ruling elite, based as it was on landownership, commerce and increasingly on foreign finance, to maintain social stability through liberal concessions to pressure from below without having the sacrifice its own immediate political and economic interest.

So if the position of manufacturers within the British ruling classes was a marginal one, what power did they have within their own industrial regions? It has long been held that, given their wealth, it would be surprising if they had not exercised considerable local power. However, what is striking about most of the recent research is the emphasis on the limits of that power, at least within the political arena. First, there was a clear counterweight to the provision of employment on the development of towns and that was the ownership of land: aristocratic influence persisted in many industrial towns until at least the 1870s. Secondly, there were other competing non-landed groups, above all the mercantile, retailing and professional middle-classes, who were in general more active in local politics than manufacturers. In Bolton and Salford, for example, over half the councillors in the 1840s had been manufacturers but this had fallen to under 40 per cent by the 1870s and continued to decline thereafter.

It would seem that the political dominance of manufacturers was confined to the smaller industrial towns and even there it would not have been unlimited. The powers of local government were acquired either by special private bills that had to be approved by Parliament, or by national permissive acts that generally required the establishment of more democratic local procedures.

Cultural influences

The middle-classes had a relatively lowly status in terms of wealth-holding and political power, but can it be seen as a leading or ‘hegemonic’ class in terms of its ability to shape policy through its impact on the attitudes and values of the country as a whole? How far did it mould society in its own image and indirectly influence the behaviour of the more prominent actors, who were after all themselves major property owners? Harold Perkin contrasted the ‘entrepreneurial ideal’ of the emergent middle-classes with the ‘aristocratic’ ideal but this characterisation has been questioned. It is difficult to define ‘bourgeois’ as opposed to ‘aristocratic’ values and it is perhaps better to avoid such intractable general problems and to focus on the simpler questions of whether the specific interests of manufacturers were represented in the attitudes and values of the ruling classes.

If the country’s literary culture is taken as an index of the concerns of its rulers, it is clear that in Britain manufacturers, far from reshaping dominant attitudes, were consistently rejected unless they conformed to existing social values. Economic success was viewed with some suspicion -- money was rootless and without the reciprocal obligations and duties of landowning. Up to the 1760s attitudes were ambiguous, but thereafter the trend was distinctly towards literary condemnation of new wealth reaching its peak in the rejection of provincial manufacturers between the 1840s and the 1930s. The only route to acceptance and ‘respectability’ was to adopt the values of civilised culture and public service associated with the ‘gentleman’, and later the professional man, and to abandon the values of mere money-making and sectional interest associated with new wealth. These elite values had an effect on the industrial bourgeoisie itself. Many of its members lived in town houses or holidayed at coastal resorts located on large landed estates. Most aspired to acceptance by the Establishment. The wealthier among them sent their sons to public schools and bought their own landed estates. Those who were active in political life did so in parties led by the aristocracy.

It is, however, clear that there was a significant space for the cultural influence of non-landed groups within the industrial regions. Here research parallels that on political influence with merchants, retailers and professionals just as active, if not more so, than manufacturers and there were important political and religious differences within local middle-classes.

Conclusions

The view of the nineteenth century as one in which all groups of property owners, landed and non-landed, were increasingly integrated into a new ruling class after 1850 can be questioned. Given the weight of evidence on the different economic functions, different geographical locations and different access to wealth and power of the groups involved, it is difficult to establish a viable case for this. In many respects the problem has arisen because of a misreading of the emergence of middle-class power in the first half of the century. It is true that the middle-classes were given[5] the vote in 1832, municipal government was reformed in 1835, they managed to get the Corn Laws repealed in 1846[6] and their ideological stance, characterised by ‘respectability’, was of growing significance. But these all occurred within a framework of aristocratic economic and political power.

There is little doubt that the ‘power’ of the middle-classes, however it is construed, did increase and that they became more influential in determining policy directions and agendas. However, this does not mean that they acquired political power in any meaningful sense. Political power in 1914 lay, to a considerable degree, where it had in 1832 with the aristocratic elite. Like the gap between the popular image and the reality of the aristocracy, the concept of the bourgeoisie was not wholly in accord with the realities of middle-class life. To talk of the bourgeoisie is not to employ a precise description so much as to imply a certain status or quality common to all those who ranked between the gentry and the working-class in the social hierarchy.

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[1] There is less literature on the middle-classes in the nineteenth and early twentieth century than for the labouring population. Lawrence James The Middle Class: A History, Little, Brown, 2006 is an exhaustive study. I. Bradley The English Middle Classes are Alive and Kicking, Collins, 1982 takes a longer perspective but contains a few pages of assistance.  D. Read The English Provinces c.1760-1960: a study in influence, Edward Arnold, 1964 is a tentative attempt to explore provincial society where the middle-classes were at their strongest. T.J. Nossiter Influence, Opinion and Political Idioms in Reformed England: Case Studies from the North-East 1832-1874, Harvester, 1975 and G. Crossick and H.G. Hauge Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Methuen, 1984 contain some useful comments on the 'shopocracy'.  J.R. Vincent Pollbooks: How Victorians Voted, CUP, 1968 is a valuable examination of a major source of middle-class political strength and much else.  For the development of the professions see W.J. Reader Professional Men: the rise of the professional classes in Victorian England, Weidenfeld, 1966. G. Best Mid-Victorian Britain 1851-1875, Weidenfeld, 1971 has essential discussions of 'respectability' and 'the gentleman'.  J.M. Bourne Patronage and Society in Nineteenth Century England, Edward Arnold, 1986 is excellent for the changing notion of 'patronage' and its effects on the middle-classes. G. Crossick (ed.), The Lower Middle Class in Britain 1870-1914, Croom Helm, 1977 is the most useful collection of papers and G. Anderson Victorian Clerks, Manchester, 1976 deals with an increasingly numerous occupational group.

[2] W.D. Rubenstein Men of Property: The Very Wealth in Britain since the Industrial Revolution, Croom Helm, 1981, Elites and the Wealthy in Modern British History, Methuen, 1987 and Wealth and Inequality in Britain, Faber, 1988 provide valuable analyses of wealth-holding, point to the relatively low standing of manufacturers and argue that few businessmen brought landed estates and that the aristocracy was a closed elite.

[3] G.R. Searle Entrepreneurial Politics in Mid-Victorian Britain, OUP, 1993 is the clearest modern statement of the position of the middle-classes in politics.

[4] The economic strength of this group, measured in terms of their share of the national wealth, began to decline from the 1870s under pressure from foreign competition.

[5] The use of the phrase 'were given the vote' is informative. It implies concession from the aristocratic elite.

[6] The chronology of repeal is again informative. Repeal occurred as a result of famine in Ireland rather than as a result of pressure from the League. Sir Robert Peel's resignation speech in mid 1846, where he praised the role of Richard Cobden and the League, misrepresented their significance and has misled historians ever since.