Male Professionals in Nineteenth Century Britain

Abstract

Male Professionals in Nineteenth-Century Britain is the first statistically based social, cultural, and familial history of a fast-growing section of the Victorian propertied classes. It is built around a representative cohort of 750 men who were recorded in the 1851 census as practising a profession in eight British provincial towns with distinctive economic and social profiles. The book provides a collective account of the cohort’s lives and the lives of their families across four generations, starting with their parents and ending with their grandchildren. The book aims to throw light on the extent to which nineteenth-century professionals had a distinctive socio-cultural profile, as sociologists and some historians have claimed, or were largely indistinguishable from other members of propertied society, as most historians today assume without further investigation. In exploring this question, particular attention is paid to the cohort families’ wealth, household size, education, occupational history, geographical mobility, choice of marriage partner, kinship and friendship circles, political allegiance, and leisure activities. The book demonstrates that male professionals in the Victorian era were not a homogeneous group, but were divided in many ways, especially by wealth. These divisions largely determine how far they and their families display endogenous or exogenous characteristics. The book also demonstrates that even the most successful professional families got poorer over time, and reveals how easily in the age of industrialization branches of families and sometimes complete families could drop out of the elite.