Abstract
It is the purpose of this concluding Chapter to summarise the investigation’s findings, and to point to their relevance both to the study of history and to the present. Several recent historical works which contain much of value about nineteenth-century British society are reviewed in the light of the approach adopted here, and a call is made for historical investigation to be more concerned with the functioning of past ideologies. This approach is, finally, warmly recommended to all those concerned (either as would-be social engineer or as victim) with the processes of social change in contemporary Britain.
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Notes
G. Therborn, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (1980) 84–5.
J. Shattock and M. Wolff, introduction to The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings (Leicester, 1982) xiv–xv.
See for example R. Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (1981);
R. Perry, Women, Letters and the Novel (New York, 1980);
J. Barrell, English Literature in History 1730–80 (1982).
Gihnour, op. cit.; N. Gash, Aristocracy and People (1979);
G. Watson, The English Ideology (1973);
D. Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (1982);
M. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (1981);
A. Offer, Property and Politics (1982);
L. and J. Stone, An Open Elite? (1984).
Gash, op. cit., 8; also
H. Martineau, Autobiography (1983) vol. I, 429.
Gash, op. cit., 18–20.
W. D. Rubinstein, Men of Property: the Very Wealthy in Britain since the Industrial Revolution (1981) 218–219.
Ibid., 110.
Ibid., 182.
Rubinstein, ‘New Men of Wealth and the Purchase of Land in Nineteenth Century England’, Past and Present, no. 72 (Aug. 1981) 125–47: 140.
G. Kitson Clark, The Making of Victorian England (1962) 230–74.
Rubinstein, ‘Modern Britain’, in Rubinstein (ed.) Wealth and the Wealthy in the Modern World (1980) 46–89; see esp. 79, and note, 84.
L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes (1987). This project was introduced in their ‘Marriage as an Enterprise: the English Middle Class in Town and Countryside, 1780–1850’, an unpublished paper read at the American History Society, Dec. 1982. I am most grateful to Leonore Davidoff for giving me a copy of this paper. Work like this fleshes out the very thin generalised essays so far available: e.g. A. S. Wohl (ed.), The Victorian Family (1978), E. Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (1976), M. Mitterauer and R. Sieler, The European Family (Oxford, 1982), and the more interesting J. Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society (1981). The best studies of family and dynastic power and influence are N. Annan, ‘The Intellectual Aristocracy’ in J. H. Plumb (ed.), Studies in Social History (1957); and Benwell Community Project, The Making of a Ruling Class (Newcastle on Tyne, 1978).
Offer, op. cit., 328. This difficult book has been remarkably well received by the historical profession: see e.g. review by P. F. Clarke, History, vol. 68, no. 222 (Feb. 1983), and D. Fraser’s review article ‘The Urban History Masquerade: Recent Trends in the Study of English Urban Development’, The Historical Journal, vol. 27, no. 1 (Mar. 1984), 253–64.
Offer, op. cit., 400–6; for the debate in the press before the 1880s see Chapter 6, above; that these questions were topical and controversial in the 1860s can be seen from Kate Stanley’s diary, 30 Dec. 1866: ‘There was a great discussion in the library at 5 o’clock tea on the land tenure question and entails and Papa got very angry against Amberley and Lyulph, the latter took it up & got in a rage with Papa’: B. and P. Russell (eds), The Amberley Papers (1937) vol. I, 539. F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (1963), 83, points out that there were annual Bills against primogeniture, strict settlement and entail in the House of Commons every year from 1836 to the 1870s.
Wiener, op. cit., 8. A similar view is often taken of the French society and economy: see R. Darnton, The Business of Englightenment (Harvard, 1979) 365.
Gash, op. cit., 1–3.
Wiener, op. cit., ix; see also
Gilmour, op. cit., 96.
S. Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons (1968) 272–3. Wiener also misses such readily available data as Burke’s Landed Gentry, which is cited by J. Scott, The Upper Classes (1982): there were some 400 landed gentlemen with over 2000 acres in 1833; more than 5000 in 1906, of whom 1000 were from industrial backgrounds. This failure to integrate quantitative data with research into ideology leads to general confusion such as that over the ‘bourgeois hegemony’ debate, discussed in Chapter 3.
F. Crouzet, The First Industrialists: the Problem of Origins (Cambridge, 1985).
L. and J. Stone, op. cit., 283.
Ibid., 108; see also
M. Girouard, The Victorian Country House (2nd edn, Yale, 1979) 7–11.
L. and J. Stone, op. cit., 134; compare
D. Cannadine, Lords and Landlords (Leicester, 1980) 38–9, 198–217.
L. and J. Stone, op. cit., 288.
Ibid., 291.
Ibid., 294.
Davidoff and Hall, op. cit., 28.
Ibid., 161.
Ibid., 195.
Ibid., 157.
Ibid., 167.
Ibid., 167.
Ibid., 146.
J. Scott, op. cit., 350.
A. Toffler, Future Shock (1970) 270.
Ibid., 293.
I. Barron and R. Curnow, The Future with Microelectronics (1979) 18–19.
Ibid., 232.
P. Elliott, ‘Intellectuals, the Information Society and the Disappearance of the Public sphere’, pp. 105–15 of J. Curran, A. Smith and P. Wingate (eds), Impacts and Influences (1987).
Ibid., 111.
C. Jenkins and B. Sherman, The Leisure Shock (1981) 72–3.
C. Evans, The Mighty Micro (1979) 218.
For recent histories of leisure, see H. Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution c. 1780–1880 (1980),
R. W. Malcomson, Popular Recreations in English Society 1700–1850 (1973),
H. E. Meller, Leisure and the Changing City (1976),
J. Walvin, Leisure and Society, 1830–1950 (1978); for an approach to the leisure of the historical ruling class, D. Cannadine’s review essay ‘The Theory and Practice of the English Leisure Class’, The Historical Journal vol. 21, no. 2, 1978, 445–67, has some valuable suggestions.
See John Wilson Croker, to Charles Phillips, 29 Dec. 1853: B. Pool (ed.) The Croker Papers (repr. 1967) 245.
See on this P. Bailey, ‘“A Mingled Mass of Perfectly Legitimate Pleasures”: the Victorian Middle Class and the Problem of Leisure’, Victorian Studies, vol. 21, no. 1 (autumn 1977) 7–28; the problem is discussed here in Chapters 3 to 6.
H. Martineau, Autobiography (1983) I, 191.
A. Trollope, Autobiography (1980) 382.
F. Darwin (ed.), The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887) vol. I, 113–19.
W. L. Guttsman, The British Political Elite (1963) 149.
G. Sainsbury, The Earl of Derby (1906) 100–1.
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© 1989 Andrew Blake
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Blake, A. (1989). Conclusion. In: Reading Victorian Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19768-2_7
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