Conclusion

Abstract

A R E historians justified in referring to the period between 1850 and 1873, or thereabouts, as the Great Victorian Boom? Our answer is a severely qualified affirmative. Because prices rose spectacularly for a time, because the secular rate of economic growth achieved its nineteenth-century maximum, because business expansion and speculation did occur and living standards eventually improved significantly, the labels Great Victorian Boom and Mid-Victorian Prosperity contain sufficient truth to conceal their several defects; but continued employment of these terms encourages distortion in historical perspective and invites error in interpretation. The difference between the rate of growth in immediately preceding decades and in the comparable time period after 1873 was relatively small, which hardly justifies attributing to 1850–73 a special unity. While economic growth was very significant in this period as a whole it must have been extraordinarily great at times, in 1853–6, 1863–5 and 1871–3, as it seems to have been very limited at others. What was possibly the most profound depression of the century occurred in 1858.