The English Landed Estate in the Age of Coal and Iron: 1830–1880

Abstract

Few present-day historians of English society use the phrase “the landed gentry” with the same easy confidence that Lecky could muster. They hesitate to draw too hard and fast a line between the landed and commercial classes, for they see in the society of the gentry something more than fox-hunting squires and Church of England parsons. The works of Miss Scott Thomson and of A. S. Turberville, for example, have revealed a class more elusive in its activities and outlook, a class that was becoming increasingly amphibious: at home in two elements, the city and the countryside and engaged in economic enterprise that was by no means exclusively agrarian. In other words, the life of the country house may be as broad as English life itself; and it may come as no surprise, therefore, to discover that the growth of industrialism between 1830 and 1880 impinged on the society of the gentry, diversifying the nature of both its economic activities and its income.