Social Mobility in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England (review)

Social Mobility in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England. By Andrew Miles (London, Macmillan, 1999) 262 pp. $65.00.

The theme of social mobility has rarely been explored systematically in the historiography of modern Britain. The main problem has been the dearth and difficulty of the available sources. The census schedules, which Thernstrom used so effectively in the United States, pose nearly insuperable problems of record linkage in Britain.¹ Marriage records--the other main source--are generally available only in the incomplete form of the Anglican parish registers. For most social historians who have conducted local studies (the present reviewer included), these problems have discouraged systematic use of these sources. As a result, the phenomenon of social mobility has been gauged obliquely and impressionistically.²

Miles, however, using a random sample of 10,835 marriages from ten registrations districts, covering the period between 1839 and 1914, offers the sweeping quantitative survey of social mobility that we have hitherto lacked. He is well aware of the limitations of his source: Apart from their inherent incompleteness, the marriage registers offer only a snapshot view of intergenerational mobility between fathers and sons and/or daughters, at one moment (not always the same moment) in the life cycle of each. These deficiencies are serious, but they are not insuperable. Miles is sufficiently skilled in sophisticated statistical techniques to try to control for various errors and therefore milk the registers for all that they are worth. He has also supplemented this source with a smaller sample of 479, drawn from working-class autobiographies, which he uses to explore (more tentatively) the intragenerational career mobility on which the marriage registers are silent.

Miles pursues his analysis by aggregating the occupations listed in both registers and autobiographies into five basic groups: (1) professionals/upper middle class; (2) intermediate/lower middle class; and the working class--further subdivided into three sub-groups, (3) skilled, (4) semiskilled, and (5) unskilled. What he finds is largely what earlier, more local, and/or less systematic research would have led us to expect: The entire period saw only a moderate degree of upward or downward intergenerational mobility, most of it being incremental mobility into the adjacent sub-group directly above or below the originating one (23). The working class evinced a significant degree of intra-class homogenization. The sons of unskilled and semiskilled workers moved up, and (less frequently) the sons of skilled workers moved down. This trend toward fluidity became more pronounced at the end of the nineteenth century.

Although downward mobility was surprisingly common, most children of middle-class fathers were able to maintain their parent's status. This finding, however, may be an artefact of Miles' comparison between two individuals at different career stages. Because of the radical disparity in the size of the classes, the modest drift of workers into the petty bourgeoisie, and vice versa, had little effect on the overall composition of the former, while giving a noticeable flavor of openness to the latter. Miles speculates that the late nineteenth-century middle-class fertility decline may have opened up more slots for enterprising working-class youths to fill.

Miles' efforts to disaggregate his data further, to subject it to more elaborate correlations, and to massage it with sophisticated statistical tests produces results that are more uncertain and ambiguous. Sons in industrial districts were not markedly more mobile than those in less economically advanced sectors--although sons from rural, agrarian working-class families were the least mobile of any sub-group. There remained a substantial degree of recruitment directly into the fathers' occupation. Only in mining do the numbers (69 percent) bespeak anything remotely approximating a caste-like hereditability. The biggest change over time was the steady decline of this kind of direct parental or familial recruitment and the growing importance of education in a child's future career prospects. Retirement, on the other side of the career...