Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T17:00:14.507Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Perspective, sources and methodology in a comparative study of the middle class in nineteenth-century Leicester and Peterborough

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

P. Jones
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Social history, and urban history in particular, has become increasingly concerned, in recent years, with studying the middle class. Historians have progressed from a concern with the ‘success’ or ‘rise’ of the middle classes, to a study them per se both in quantitative and qualitative terms: questions concerning their wealth, consumption patterns, residential preferences, representation within the political leadership as well as their beliefs, values and role in attention. Urban historians have a particular interest in the study of the local middle class, in a way that takes into account the finer detail of different kinds of urban environment and the complexities of the urban experience. Since much of urban history has been at pains to discover the variety of patterns in urban development and urban society, it is not surprising that recent specialized studies of individual towns and cities have revealed a great variety in the bases of class relations. Indeed, the traditional Marxist notion of a single national class interest is now open to qualification. The disparity between London and the provinces in respect of class interests has long been recognized. An extension of the proposition inherent in that disparity will contend here that there were different types of middle class located in different types of urban environment. Such a proposition is not in itself pathfinding or particularly new. There are problems, however, in deciding in what ways such a differentiated pattern can be drawn out, examined and presented in coherent form.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History Yearbook , Volume 14 , May 1987 , pp. 22 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 Trainor, R., ‘Urban elites in Victorian England’, Urban History Yearbook (1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 The success thesis has been challenged by Arnstein, W. L., ‘The survival of the Victorian aristocracy’, in Jaher, F. C. (ed.), The Rich, the Well Born and the Powerful (1973).Google Scholar

3 On economic aspects, see Rubinstein, W. D., ‘The Victorian middle classes: wealth, occupation and geography’, Econ. Hist. Review, xxx (1977), 602–33;Google Scholar and ‘Wealth, elites and the class structure of modern Britain’, Past and Present, no. 76 (1977), 99–126. However, there still needs to be much more quantitative analysis as in the work on the French bourgeoisie, for example: A. Daumard, La bourgeoisie Parisienne 1815–1848 (1963), and more recently, R. Aminzade, Class Politics and Early Industrial Capitalism (1981), which examines the bourgeoisie of Toulouse. On political representation there is J. A. Garrard (ed.), The Middle Class in Politics (1978) and Leadership and Power in Victorian Industrial Towns 1830–1880 (1883). On particular towns there is also J. A. Garrard, Leaders and Politics in Nineteenth Century Salford: A Historical Analysis of Urban Political Power (1976); and Jones, P., ‘The recruitment of officeholders in Leicester 1861–1931’, Trans of the Leics. Archaeological and Historical Society, lviii (1981–1982), 64–77.Google Scholar

4 Morris, R. J., ‘Organisation and aims of the principal secular voluntary organizations of the Leeds middle class’ (D.Phil, thesis, University of Oxford, 1971);Google Scholar Field, J. L., ‘Bourgeois Portsmouth: social relations in a Victorian dockyard town’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Warwick, 1979);Google Scholar and Koditschek, T. S., ‘Class formation and the Bradford bourgeoisie’ (Ph.D. thesis, Princeton University, 1981).Google Scholar D. Smith, Conflict and Compromise, class formation in English society, Birmingham and Sheffield, 1830–1914 (1982).

5 Read, D., The English Provinces 1760–1960: A Study in Influence (1964).Google Scholar

6 Foster, J., Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution: Early Industrial Capitalism in Three Towns (1974).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a critique of Foster see Gadian, D. S., ‘Class consciousness in Oldham and other north-west industrial towns’, Historical Journal, xxi (1978), 161–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Hennock, E. P., Fit and Proper Persons (1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 G. Crossick (ed.), The Lower Middle Class in Britain (1977) and ‘Urban society and the petit bourgeoisie in nineteenth century Britain’, in D. Fraser and A. Sutcliffe, The Pursuit of Urban History (1983), 307–26, and G. Crossick and H. G. Haupt (eds.), Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1984). See also R. J. Morris, ‘The middle class and British towns and cities of the Industrial Revolution 1780–1870’, in Fraser and Sutcliffe, Pursuit, 286–306.

9 Fraser, D., Urban Politics and Victorian England: The Structure of Politics in Victorian Cities (1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Trainor, R. H., ‘Authority and social structure in an industrialized area: a study of three Black Country towns 1840–90’ (D.Phil, thesis, Oxford University, 1981).Google Scholar

11 Morris, ‘Middle class’, 289.

12 Everitt, A., ‘The Banburys of England’, Urban History Yearbook (1974).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Waller, P. J., Town, City and Nation: England 1850–1914 (1983), 6–11.Google Scholar

14 Jones, P., ‘Office holding, politics and society: Leicester and Peterborough c. 1860–1930’ (M.Phil, thesis, University of Leicester, 1983), 207.Google Scholar

15 The Wyuern, 9 November 1894, Leicester Reference Library.

16 Morris, ‘Middle class’, 291.

17 Calhoun, C., The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism During the Industrial Revolution (1982), 215.Google Scholar

18 Crossick, ‘Urban society’, 309. See also A. Daumard, Maisons de Paris et proprietaires Parisiens au XIXe siècle (1965).

19 Jones, ‘Office holding, politics and society’, 60–71.

20 Cox, D., ‘The Labour Party in Leicester’ (M.A. thesis, University of Leicester, 1959), 71.Google Scholar

21 Collier, L. J., ‘The development and location of the claybrickmaking industry in the South and East Midlands since 1800’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1966);Google Scholar Cunningham, T. M., ‘The growth of Peterborough 1850–1900’ (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, 1972).Google Scholar

22 Jones, ‘Office holding, politics and society’, 208.

23 Will Book, 1895, Northamptonshire Record Office.

24 Cannadine, D., ‘From ‘feudal’ lords to figureheads: urban landownership and aristocratic influence in nineteenth-century towns’, Urban History Yearbook (1978).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Gash, N., Politics in the Age of Peel (1953).Google Scholar

26 Rate Book, 1909, Peterborough District Library.

27 ‘Fifty years of municipal life,’ Peterborough Advertiser Directory (1927), 538.

28 Morris, R. J., ‘In search of the middle class: record linkage and methodology’, Urban History Yearbook (1976).Google Scholar

29 Armstrong, A., Stability and Change in an English County Town: A Social Study of York 1801 (1974) uses the Registrar General's Classification of 1951 but with considerable adjustments, 13–15.Google Scholar

30 Jones, ‘Office holding, politics and society’, 200–8.

31 Page, D., ‘Commercial directories and market towns’, Local Historian, xi (1974), 85–9.Google Scholar See also Duggan, E. P., ‘Industrialization and the development of urban business communities: research problems, sources and techniques’, Local Historian, xi (1975), 457–65.Google Scholar

32 Page, ‘Commercial directories’, 85–9.

33 L. Stone, ‘Prosopography’, Daedalus, c (1971), 48–79; and Burke, P., Venice and Amsterdam: A Study of Seventeenth Century Elites (1974).Google Scholar

34 Marx, K., ‘The historical tendency of capitalist accumulation’, from Capital, Vol. I in Marx, and Engels, , Selected Works (1968), 232–5;Google Scholar and Marx, K., The German Ideology (ed. and introduced by Arthur, C. J., 1974), 72–82.Google Scholar

35 Morris, R. J., ‘The middle-class property cycle during the Industrial Revolution’, in Smout, T. C. (ed.), The Search for Wealth and Stability: Essays in Social and Economic History Presented to M. W. Flinn (1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 Read, R., Modern Leicester (1881).Google Scholar

37 Inland Revenue Return, Leicestershire Record Office, 4D 50/28; and Property Conveyance, 4D 50/31, (1874).

38 Hunt, E. H., Regional Wage Variations in Britain (1973).Google Scholar

39 Higgs, E., ‘Domestic servants and households in Victorian England’, Social History, viii (1983), 201–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Redfern, J. B., ‘Elite suburbians: early Victorian Edgbaston’, Local Historian, xv (1983), 259–71;Google Scholar and Branca, P., Silent Sisterhood: Middle Class Women in the Victorian Home (1975), 22–36.Google Scholar

40 Lees, L. H., ‘Social conflict in English industrial towns’, Urban History Yearbook (1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41 Morris, ‘Middle class’, 286–306.