Male Professionals in Nineteenth Century Britain: Families, Intergenerational Mobility, and the Rise of the Professions

Male Professionals in Nineteenth-Century Britain is the first statistically-based social, cultural and familial history of a fast-growing and socially prominent 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: Brighton, Bristol, Dundee, Greenock, Leeds, Merthyr Tydfil, Winchester, and the twin county town of Northumberland, Alnwick/Morpeth. 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. It touches on the history of 16,000 individuals. 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, and broader involvement in society measured by their members’ choice of marriage partner, their kinship and friendship circles, their political allegiance and their leisure activities. The book demonstrates that male professionals in the Victorian era were far from being a homogenous group, but were divided in many ways. The most important was wealth which played a key role in the social and occupational fortunes of their descendants. These divisions largely explain why some professionals and some individual professions were much more likely to display endogenous characteristics than others. The book also demonstrates that even the most successful professional families got poorer over time, and reveals how easily in the age of industrialisation branches of families and sometimes complete families could drop out of the elite.

Laurence Brockliss, Emeritus Professor University of Oxford; emeritus fellow Magdalen College Oxford, Harry Smith, Research Associate, King’s College London

Laurence Brockliss was lecturer in history at the University of Hull from 1974 to 1984. From 1984 to 2017 he was a tutorial fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, and a lecturer, reader, then professor of history at the University of Oxford. His principal fields of research have been the histories of childhood, education, science and medicine in Britain and France between 1400 and 1900. He is the author, co-author and editor of eighteen books and is a fellow of the British Academy.

Harry Smith is a Research Associate in the department of Geography at King’s College London. He has worked on various aspects of the economic and social history of the United Kingdom in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the history of entrepreneurship, and morbidity and mortality. He has published widely on these topics as well as on urban history.