Economic Disabilities

Abstract

A popular image of Victorian England portrays a preoccupation with work and industry — and indeed ambitions and professions were discussed and written about at great length. The devil finds work for idle hands, every Victorian child heard. But the greatest aim of the majority of Englishmen at all levels, noble to vagabond, was to live in comfort without working. In nineteenth-century England the lower classes worked because they had no choice; the upper classes played because they had a choice; and the middle classes worked until they had enough money to make a choice. The mark of financial success often was a life given to one’s own personal pursuits.¹ Middle-class merchants, especially Quakers and others of a benevolent mind, might retire to devote themselves to charitable works. But many middle-class Englishmen (such as sons of successful industrialists) aspired to comfortable unemployment as a requirement of the life of a gentleman. Attainment of such freedom from the claims of trade or industry made available the expanding opportunities of public life — except to women, for whom they were increasingly closed whether they worked or not.