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Business leaders and town gentry in early industrial Britain: specialist occupations and shared urbanism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2012

PENELOPE J. CORFIELD
PENELOPE J. CORFIELD*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX, UK
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Abstract:

Three major conclusions are derived from close study of Britain's pioneering directories in the 1770s and 1780s. First, they show that over 30,000 leading townsmen and women were enmeshed into the burgeoning knowledge grid through the public listings of their addresses, status and occupations. Secondly, a close examination of that information reveals a notable extent of occupational specialization – among both men and women, and among individuals and the nascent firms – thus confirming one of Adam Smith's key observations about the nature of Britain's increasingly commercialized, if still largely pre-mechanized, economy. Thirdly, aggregative analysis highlights systematic differences in the socio-economic characteristics of different towns: from manufacturing, commercial and professional centres to the great capital cities to the specialist leisure towns and resorts – all interlocking in an inter-dependent urban network. Hence this evidence suggests that a generic re-interpretation of all large towns as ‘residential leisure towns’ on the strength of their flourishing cultural life (as recently proposed by Stobart and Schwarz) is misleading, as it obscures significant systemic differences between different types of towns. At the same time, however, the interlinked urban network was generating a confidently shared urbanism, bridging between aristocratic and middle-class society. That link was exemplified by the listing of numerous titled and gentlemanly ‘town gentry’ alongside the business leaders – as the directories in effect flourished their collective calling cards.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , February 2012 , pp. 20 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

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2 But dockyard towns, being dominated by one large and easily identifiable employer, were slow to produce directories: see P.J. Corfield with S. Kelly, ‘The early town directories’, Urban History Yearbook 1984 (1984), 28–9, 31.

3 See discussion in Gunn, S., ‘Class, identity and the urban: the middle class in England c. 1790–1950’, Urban History, 31 (2004), 29–47, esp. 29–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the changing social vocabulary, see also Corfield, P.J., ‘Class by name and number in eighteenth-century England’, in idem (ed.), Language, History and Class (Oxford, 1991), 121–3Google Scholar.

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47 In a minority of directories, some names were listed in gender-neutral style with surname and initials only; and, unless there is other evidence to the contrary, these are taken to be males because such an austere styling was uncommon for women.

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51 As noted by Hunt, The Middling Sort, 130, 267 n. 10; and further discussed in Barker, Business of Women, 47, 75–6.

52 Hunt, The Middling Sort, 132.

53 Cases of decline in terms of outright population loss were comparatively rare, as generally a ratchet effect sustained towns within their local economies. One striking eighteenth-century example from the Dutch Republic was the outright decline of Leiden, a weaving centre producing light stuffs: see Clark, P., European Cities and Towns 400–2000 (Oxford, 2009), 115, 120Google Scholar. Its experience prefigured the relative decline of Norwich, another textile city producing very similar wares – England's second city in 1700 proving vulnerable to new textile competitors from the later eighteenth century onwards: see Corfield, ‘From second city to regional capital’, 139–66; and R.G. Wilson, ‘The textile industry’, in Rawcliffe and Wilson (eds.), Norwich since 1550, 219–42.

54 The Booth–Armstrong classification sorts occupations into sectors, based upon the nature of the product, work or service, as explained by W.A. Armstrong, ‘The use of information about occupation, part 2’, in Wrigley (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Society, 226–310. For later amplification, see Harvey, Green and Corfield, The Westminster Historical Database, 93–111.

55 Ibid., 72, 84, 91: this was the famous example cited by Booth himself in 1886, when the census-takers created a national classification. In the Booth–Armstrong system, hat-makers and hat-cutters are considered as manufacturers, while hatters and those with other hat-selling occupations are dealers.

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57 Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. II, 110: Smith immediately amplified his dictum by explaining that Britain's government was not run by shopkeepers but ‘influenced’ by them. In these decades, other commentators, such as Josiah Tucker, made similar assessments of the importance of commerce to the British economy.

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86 The Medical Register was published in 1779, 1780 and 1783; Bath also had lists of medical men in the 1770s, some 20 years before its first Directory: see Norton (ed.), Guide, p. 10. Later, the London and Provincial Medical Directory, which subsequently became the long-running Medical Directory and General Medical Register, appeared in 1848, as a conflation of existing London and provincial lists.

87 Anon., The Clerical Guide (London, 1817), later transmuted into the Clerical Directory, known as Crockford's (London, 1858 – present day). In 1917, it also absorbed the rival Clergy List (London, 1841–1917).

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95 Booth classified status individuals without occupation as ‘property-owning/independent’ but this category was later hidden within ‘miscellaneous’ by Armstrong: see Armstrong, ‘Use of information about occupation’, 229, 253. The category deserves to be resurrected but with a proviso that the sources of these people's incomes are unknown in detail: Harvey, Green and Corfield, Westminster Historical Database, 92–3.

96 Chandos’ first wife was Margaret Nicholl, daughter of John Nicholl (sometimes Nichol), a London merchant, who brought him a fortune of £150,000 and the Minchenden estate in Southgate (Middlesex), which became for some years the family's dower house; see T.F.T. Baker, R.B. Pugh et al. (eds.), Victoria County History: Middlesex, vol. V (1976), 159–60.

97 See variously the websites www.dukesofbuckingham.org.uk (most recently consulted 5 Aug. 2010); and www.chandoshouse.co.uk (most recently consulted 4 Nov. 2011).

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107 Mokyr's Lever of Riches provides an excellent introduction.

108 Data from Thomas Brinkhoff, ‘The principal agglomerations of the world’, www.citypopulation.de (accessed 1 Jun. 2009).

109 For different approaches to this very big theme, see, classically, Mumford, L., The Culture of Cities (London, 1938)Google Scholar; as well as studies by van der Woude, A., Hayami, A. and de Vries, J. (eds.), Urbanisation in History: A Process of Dynamic Interactions (Oxford, 1990)Google Scholar; Champion, T. and Hugo, G. (eds.), New Forms of Urbanisation: Beyond the Urban–Rural Dichotomy (Aldershot, 2003)Google Scholar; and [United Nations report], World Urbanisation Prospects (New York, 2004).