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certain contrary ones, such as the continuing decline of self-employed workers
from perhaps 20 per cent in the 1820’s to 11 or 12 per cent towards the end of
the century, and, with the growing size of units of production, the increasing
proportion of workmen to managers.
1
But on balance the general drift was
certainly upward.
The important questions, however, are whether the extent of the upward
mobility was greater or smaller than before, and whether in the mid-Victorian
period itself it was expanding or contracting. To the first the answer is the more
elusive, but it is probably negative. Leslie Stephen believed that ‘there is
probably no period in English history at which a greater number of poor men
have risen to distinction’ than at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the
nineteenth century—instancing writers, scientists and scholars rather than
inventors and industrialists. Since then, however, patronage and free education
for the intelligent poor had substantially declined, and it is doubtful whether the
mid-Victorians could produce such a galaxy as that cited by Stephen.
2
Samuel
Smiles’ industrial heroes risen from the ranks were mostly drawn from the
eighteenth and the early rather than the mid-nineteenth century, and even that
optimist betrays a feeling that the heroic age is past.
3
Finally, such evidence as
there is suggests that fewer new men founded landed families in the nineteenth
than in the eighteenth century. In three typical counties, Shropshire, Oxfordshire
and Essex, in 1873, fewer estates belonged to new families which had arrived in
the nineteenth than to those which had survived from eighteenth-century
founders.
4
On the second question there is much better evidence, and it all points to a
contraction of opportunities for social climbing during the mid-Victorian age. In
the two industries whose leaders have been studied, steel and factory hosiery,
both new industries in this period, the chances of rising from humble origins
were comparatively small and steadily declined.
5
The majority of entrepreneurs
and company officials, in hosiery in 1871 52 per cent, in steel in 1865 89 per
cent, came from the landed, business or professional classes, and most of the
rest, 33 and 7 per cent respectively, from the lower middle class of retailers,
3
Deane and Cole, op. cit., pp. 142–3.
4
G.H.Wood, loc. cit., pp. 102–3.
5
Cf. H.J.Perkin, ‘Middle-Class Education and Employment in the 19th Century: a
Critical Note’, Ec.H.R., 1961, XIV. 128.
1
Deane and Cole, op. cit., pp. 149–50.
2
L.Stephen, The English Utilitarians (1900), I. 111–12 (Burns, Paine, Cobbett, Gifford,
Dalton, Person, Joseph White, Owen, Lancaster, Watt, Telford, Rennie).
3
S.Smiles, Lives of the Engineers (1861–65), passim.
4
F.M.L.Thompson, op. cit., pp. 124–5.
5
Charlotte Erickson, British Industrialists: Steel and Hosiery, 1850–1950 (Cambridge,
1959), pp. 12, 56, 93, 129.
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