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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 38.1 (2007) 112-113

Reviewed by
Jamie Bronstein
New Mexico State University
Men, Women and Property in England, 1780–1870. By R. J. Morris (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005) 445 pp. $95.00

In Men, Women and Property in England, 1780–1870, Morris combines several different historical approaches to examine the emergence of the English middle class. By mixing econometric data with middle-class self-presentation in wills, correspondence, oral histories, and the occasional Victorian novel, Morris is able to draw firm conclusions about the sources of middle-class economic power, while putting some cultural flesh on quantitative bones. His revelations about the nature of middle-class real-estate ownership are particularly enlightening.

The experience of being middle class in England depended on gender, location, and birth order. In his first chapter, he introduces the Leeds family of Joseph Henry Oates. Plagued by hemorrhoids and by financial uncertainty, Oates struggled to maintain a sense of familial order and to create continued profit for the family firms after his father's death. His main goal was to support dependent family members.

Having introduced this microcosm of the larger problem, Morris turns to a valuable and searching essay that mixes a review of the secondary literature on the middle class with an examination of trends in income and property ownership. He concludes that the first half of the nineteenth century provided persons like Oates with the opportunity to control the urban public sphere and to associate with like-minded men. Ambitious entrepreneurs, working largely with family capital, might make fortunes (causing increasing economic stratification within the upper third of the middle class). But the unprecedented risks included bankruptcy, or, even worse, insolvency without the protection of bankruptcy, downward mobility, and illness or death that destabilized the economic unit.

Wills provide a window into the economic strategies of the middle classes. Morris shows that a priority was to maintain family unity through equitable divisions of property to daughters and sons and the restriction of income to widows to ensure that they would continue to support minor children and that they would remarry wisely. Despite stereotypes about domesticity, keeping a business viable for a succeeding generation or holding onto a family homestead were not as important. In a telling contrast with the will-making strategies of the aristocracy, for whom primogeniture was a way of retaining status, these equitable distributions of property helped to diffuse middle-class power. To the extent that women had their own property, they were much more likely [End Page 112] than were men to focus in their wills on prized possessions, and more likely to include friends, servants, and others outside the nuclear family in their circles of beneficence.

The middling classes were also notable for their investment strategies. Because many of them were able to amass considerable savings by spending as little as 20 or 30 percent of their incomes, members of the middle classes were avid investors, supporting the development of urban areas and, later, railroads and utilities on a national and international scale. Many followed a cycle of real-estate purchase whereby they would invest in "urban estates"—mixed-use parcels of real estate around their homes and businesses, which were used first for domestic occupancy, later for rental income, and after death for the support of widows and dependent daughters. For a discrete period in the nineteenth century, these strategies helped to commit the middle classes to promoting urban development.

Morris' book is clearly intended for specialists. Although his arguments are clear and well reasoned, and his prose welcomingly informal, the book contains long examples and repetitive tables that add little to the argument. Morris also might have been more attentive to what members of the middle classes had to say about property ownership and distribution in their letters, diaries, and public pronouncements. A chapter on networks and place is a step in the right direction, but it is based on oral histories from only two female members of the Leeds...

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