In Search of the Urban Middle Class: Record linkage and methodology: Leeds 1832

Abstract

The developing techniques of historical nominal record linkage can make substantial contributions to the questions raised by our present understanding of the urban middle class in the first half of the nineteenth century. Cheap printing, institutionalization, and increasing political and state action provided a growing variety of information about individuals – directories, poll books, lists of shareholders, pewholders, stallholders, members of committees and societies, signatures to petitions and requisitions, wills, insurance policies, and by the 1840s marriage and census data. By their nature most of these listings were concerned with the politically and socially active, and with those above a minimal level of social status and economic power. In practice, this meant predominantly but not exclusively members of a potential middle class. Under certain constraints the lists may be merged to provide surrogate answers to some ghostly questionnaire regarding patterns of association, behaviour and social status, major social divisions and networks, and the characteristics of those who took part in institutions and activities traditionally identified with the middle class.