Male Professionals in Nineteenth Century Britain: Families, Intergenerational Mobility, and the Rise of the Professions

Train to Opportunity: the Effect of Infrastructure on Intergenerational Mobility

This guide accompanies the following article: ‘I mak Bould to Wrigt’: First‐person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750–1900, History Compass 9/5 (2011): 365–373, DOI: 10.1111/j.1478‐0542.2011.00774.x Author’s Introduction Histories of the experience of poverty are hampered in the period before widespread literacy, owing to the infrequency with which the words of the poor could be inscribed privately and the mediated qualities of public or third‐party recordings (for example, where testimony was given by the poor in their capacity as defendants in criminal trials). Yet comprehension of the gradations of material poverty, and the social allegiances or divisions that it inspired, are vital to our understanding of nineteenth‐century society and can reveal some surprising disjunctions in what we think we know. Jane Humphries’ recent research on autobiographies recalling child labour, for instance, presses for a refocusing of our attention on the role of children in the industrial revolution. Therefore, a programme of work which considers the perceptions and experiences of poverty by drawing on first‐person testimonies can provide detailed insight into lived experience, and has the potential to destabilise our assumptions about the mass of ordinary working people. Author Recommends J. Burnett, D. Vincent and D. Mayall (eds.), The Autobiography of the Working Class. An Annotated Critical Bibliography (New York: New York University Press, 1984–1989), 3 volumes. A calendar of over 3000 working‐class autobiographies with an excellent index. Not all of the autobiographies listed have been published. R. Gagnier, Subjectivities. A History of Self‐Representation in Britain, 1832–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). A pioneering and interdisciplinary work about autobiography. J. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). A recent work which deploys working‐class autobiographies as both qualitative and quantitative sources to reconfigure our understanding of children’s collective contribution to the industrial revolution. S. King, Poverty and Welfare in England 1700–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). A textbook coverage of the transition from the old poor law to the new. P. Sharpe (eds.), Chronicling Poverty. The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–1840 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). The published papers of a conference held in London in January 1995, drawing together some authors central to the debate about the use of narratives to analyse the experience of poverty (particularly pauper letters). K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor. Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). A wide‐ranging book that considers a startling variety of testimonies including settlement examinations and fictional accounts of poverty. T. Sokoll (ed.), Essex Pauper Letters, 1731–1837 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). An edited collection of the raw material, with useful introductory essays about how to scrutinise this genre. D. Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom. A Study of Nineteenth‐Century Working‐Class Autobiography (London: Methuen, 1981). An early attempt to make use of the calendaring of working‐class autobiographies, with a particular focus on the history of working‐class family life and experiences of education. Online Materials The Workhouse http://www.workhouses.org/ An excellent website providing information about the Poor Law, pictures of workhouses and extracts of sources relating to workhouse life. Charles Booth Online Archive http://www.lse.ac.uk/booth/ Includes original documents from his survey of London poverty 1886–1903. Syllabus for a course on English poverty, from the final decade of the eighteenth century to the first decade of the twentieth : published first‐person narratives from observers of the poor which may be mined to provide a focus for discussion include: C. Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London (1902). M. Higgs, Glimpse into the Abyss (1906). J. London, People of the Abyss (1903) [full text online at http://www.jacklondons.net/writings/PeopleOfTheAbyss/toc.html ] H. Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1851–1862) volume 1 [full text online at Google books]. B. S. Rowntree, Poverty. A Study of Town Life (1901) [full text available via Google books], chapter 4. Texts written by the poor can be identified in Burnett et al. (referenced above). Topics for Lecture and Discussion Week I: Contexts and Methodologies: From Social History to Cultural History, and Back Again? Journal of Social History 37:1 (2003) [special edition considering the relationship between social and cultural histories]. Week II: Statutory Change: Out With the Old Poor Law, in With the New Suggested primary focus: C. Shaw, When I was a Child (1903), chapters 13 and 14 [which, at the time of writing, is being made available full‐text online at http://www.thepotteries.org/focus/011.htm ] OR J. Greenwood, ‘A Night in a Workhouse’, Pall Mall Gazette (1866), 12 January onwards [full text online at <jats:ext-link xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink

Although the subject of divorce and the development of divorce legislation in nineteenth-century England and Wales have received some academic attention, much work remains to be done. Existing studies have examined either a small number of cases from a limited period of the newly formed Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes’ history; answered a specific question over a longer period; or conducted detailed micro-studies of individual and high-profile cases. None have examined the surviving petitions made to the court (held at The National Archives under J 77) holistically over an extended period. This article seeks to revive the field by suggesting a new interdisciplinary methodological approach that will combine historical and legal studies with digital humanities to offer the first panoptic view of J 77 petitions. Far from being dry legal documents, this article argues that they hold a wealth of rich detail about petitioners, respondents, co-respondents, witnesses, children, solicitors, barristers, clerks, and judges, and stand at an exciting intersection of several fields of enquiry. Adopting such an approach will generate important new insights about gender, class, property ownership, intimacy, religion, childhood, and sexuality in nineteenth and early twentieth century England and Wales.

Class, Social Mobility, and Voting: Evidence from Historical Voting Records

Reviewed by: Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Charity, Community and Religion, 1830–1880 by Alysa Levene Lindsay Katzir (bio) Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Charity, Community and Religion, 1830–1880, by Alysa Levene; pp. vi + 248. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020, $108.00, $35.95 paper, $28.76 ebook. Scholarly interest in the Jews of Victorian Britain has been steadily increasing in recent decades. Since the 1970s historians such as Geoffrey Alderman, David Feldman, Todd M. Endelman, and Vivian D. Lipman, among several others, have been telling remarkable and invaluable tales of Victorian Britain’s Sephardi and Ashkenazi communities. Their research has largely focused on patterns of assimilation and acculturation, especially among the upper classes, and has mostly centered on Victorian London, which is understandable given that London has always been home to the majority of Britain’s Jews. But Alysa Levene’s recent monograph, Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Charity, Community and Religion, 1830–1880, makes a compelling case for the centrality of provincial Jews to Anglo-Jewish history. [End Page 700] Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain expands upon studies like Bill Williams’s The Making of Manchester Jewry, 1740–1875 (1976), Nikos Kokosalakis’s Ethnic Identity and Religion: Tradition and Change in Liverpool Jewry (1982), and Ben Braber’s Jews in Glasgow, 1879– 1939 (2007) by looking at seven different industrial cities, making it the first monograph to research provincial Jewry so expansively. It is a socioeconomic history of the Jews of industrial Britain, and thus it revolves around the Jewish populations of Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Glasgow, and Hull. In it, Levene examines maps, statistics, census data, and communal records to understand social, geographical, and transpatial notions of community among provincial Jews. In particular, Levene uses the 1851 Religious Census, a survey of all identifiable houses of worship, including Nonconformist, Catholic, and Jewish, to assess communal bonds in a period of rapid migration and assimilation. In this evaluation of provincial Jewish communities, Levene challenges a prevailing view of industrialism: that it severed cherished family ties and replaced them with mere communities of circumstance. Her research centers on evidence of postindustrial kinship, including household arrangements, residence patterns, employment histories, and religious practices, rather than the endeavors of official communal leadership. While previous scholarship has especially focused on the histories of communal leadership, those facts were less relevant to the daily lives of average provincial Jews. Levene makes several other suggestions for further research, including a renewed focus on the mid-nineteenth century, as opposed to limiting inquiry to the early and late nineteenth centuries, both of which have received much more attention from scholars. Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain explores the mid-century as a period of growth in industrial towns and the Anglo-Jewish population, generally, as well as a time of meticulous recordkeeping by these communities. Those records remain largely unstudied. Levene makes extensive use of the Anglo-Jewish Database (AJDB), a digital archive based upon the 1851 census that also includes information on the Jews of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Calling the AJDB an underutilized resource, Levene encourages other scholars to make use of its data, an invaluable resource for Anglo-Jewish studies. In order to draw conclusions about communities that may have included gentiles living among Jews, Levene works from the same broad definition of Jewishness as the AJDB, defining a Jew as “anyone who was, or may be assumed to have been, Jewish by either birth, conversion or cultural affiliation, whether or not they retained that identity later in life” (14). Levene’s definition is especially appropriate to the mid-century, which saw an increase in intermarriages. Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain is divided into two parts. Chapters 2 through 4 focus on households, residence patterns, and finances. Chapter 2 deals with the household and family structures of provincial Jews. In it, Levene uses tables to share data, showing statistics such as numbers of Jewish households in each city, kinds of households (that is, the composition of families), and the presence of lodgers. In addition to data sets, Levene also provides anecdotal evidence of specific families. Levene concludes that Jewish kinship ties extended beyond financial convenience and instead revolved around feelings of...

Reviewed by: Execution Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain: From Public Spectacle to Hidden Ritual ed. by Patrick Low, Helen Rutherford, and Clare Sandford-Couch Michael Meranze (bio) Execution Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain: From Public Spectacle to Hidden Ritual, edited by Patrick Low, Helen Rutherford, and Clare Sandford-Couch; pp. xv + 199. London and New York: Routledge, 2021, $160.00, $48.95 paper, $44.05 ebook. The Capital Punishment Amendment Act of 1868 cut a caesura into the history of Britain's penal practices. For centuries hangings had been consistent features of Britain's public space, with the Law's ultimate display designed to clarify before the eyes of the public the penalties that accrued to those who violated its most serious mandates. After the Act, that display would be moved within walls, separated from the crowd that had traditionally been its immediate audience. Although hangings would continue, a new, more intense process of mediation would replace the visceral and visual sight of the body broken on the gallows. Execution Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain: From Public Spectacle to Hidden Ritual, edited by Patrick Low, Helen Rutherford, and Clare Sandford-Couch, tackles the implications and effects of this transition. Growing out of a conference held in 2018, Execution Culture is divided into two sections: the first focuses on the act of witnessing the execution and the second on the ways that executions were represented after 1868. The volume also raises a fascinating analytical question: how do you write the history of an absence? This question is partly addressed in James Gregory's treatment of the ways that the Capital Punishment Amendment Act of 1868 was depicted first by contemporaries and later in both popular and scholarly cultures. But it runs throughout the volume as both a methodological and analytical question. The first part of the volume, "Going to see a man hanged," takes up issues that will be most familiar to scholars of punishment. Rachel Bennett (on Scotland) and Matthew White (on London) show the myriad ways that the hanging, as well as fears about the effects of hanging, played across the nineteenth century. They remind the reader that, despite the apparent sameness of executions, they were, in fact, extremely varied in their placement, in the tactics deployed to manage both the condemned and the crowd, in the reactions of crowds, and in the penalties inflicted on the condemned both in life and death. Katherine Ebury (on the effect of the Act on the ways executioners experienced and depicted their task) and Rhiannon Pickin (on contemporary prison museums in the United Kingdom) tackle the problem from a different perspective. Here the question becomes the gap between those who engaged in the execution and wrote about the experience and those who, presented with a virtual experience of seeing an execution, return little marked to their daily lives. In Britain, after all, the death penalty now exists largely in popular culture. Ebury and Pickin's chapters lead nicely into the second part ("One had better narrate the circumstances as they occurred"), which is a series of investigations into the ways that capital punishment has been conceived and represented after it was moved behind prison walls. Samuel Saunders (on the periodical press), Rutherford and Sandford-Couch (on the depiction of a violent offender), and Seth Low (on the initial years of the Capital Punishment Amendment Act) offer careful readings of the ways in which the press framed both the execution and the condemned and of how the Act changed the practices of execution itself. Rutherford and Sandford-Couch in particular draw attention to the fact that, as executions receded from visibility, other spaces (the coroner's court, the criminal trial) [End Page 511] became increasingly important venues to watch the play of justice and the reactions of the condemned. Their readings, combined with Low's analysis of the tensions between local and national authorities, remind us that the elimination of public hanging created new issues even as it purported to solve old ones. Finally, Stephanie Emma Brown (in a study of Wales) demonstrates the complexity of national and racial issues by demonstrating that there was no simple creation of a so-called Other...

Many commentators on formal education systems have highlighted the ways in which schooling promote social mobility through the identification of a meritocracy and the communication of knowledge and skills which generate economic change leading to social transformation. This paper argues that despite much evidence which is apparently to the contrary, the historical pattern is in fact the oppodte to this and that one key social function of schooling, even though unacknowledged by most participants, is the suppression of social mobility and the intergenerational defence of social and economic advantage.A model of the processes by which this occurs is sketched and several case studies of developing school systems are used to illustrate the general argument. The focus is on Britain during the most recent two centuries, although the arguments developed may be generalisable.

Many commentators on formal education systems have highlighted the ways in which schooling promote social mobility through the identification of a meritocracy and the communication of knowledge and skills which generate economic change leading to social transformation. This paper argues that despite much evidence which is apparently to the contrary, the historical pattern is in fact the oppodte to this and that one key social function of schooling, even though unacknowledged by most participants, is the suppression of social mobility and the intergenerational defence of social and economic advantage.A model of the processes by which this occurs is sketched and several case studies of developing school systems are used to illustrate the general argument. The focus is on Britain during the most recent two centuries, although the arguments developed may be generalisable.

This article describes the construction of a measure of the social order in the nineteenth century, which will subsequently be used as a basis for studying processes of social reproduction (or social mobility). The technique of correspondence analysis is used to map the ordering of groups of occupations in two time periods 1777-1866 and 1867-1913. The data are derived from the occupations at marriage of the groom, his father and his father-in-law (the occupations of brides, unfortunately, being very much under-recorded). Marriage, it is argued, is a socially significant act linking, on average, families that occupy similar positions in the social order and analyses of the patterns of social interaction involved provide a means of determining the nature of the social space within which similarity is defined. The three occupations provide three pair-wise comparisons and each comparison gives a mapping of the row occupations and the column occupations six in all. Since any one of these should provide a measure of the social order, assuming there to be any consistency in such a concept, we would expect that, at both time periods, the result of the analyses would be six closely-related estimates of the same underlying dimension. This is what is found; the inter-correlations are very high. Furthermore, there is a very strong relationship between the measures of the social order constructed for the two time periods. The analyses are presented within a framework that emphasises the value of the procedures used for understanding the nature of measurement in social science.

Part 1: Higher Education 1. Social Control and Intellectual Excellence: Oxbridge and Edinburgh, 1560-1983 2. Going to University in England between the Wars: Access and Funding Part 2: Informal Agencies of Education 3. On Literacy in the Renaissance: Review and Reflections 4. Through Cigarette Cards to Manliness: Building German Character with an Informal Curriculum 5. Schoolgirl to Career Girl: The City as Educative Space Part 3: Schooling, the State, and Local Government 6. Family Formation, Schooling and the Patriachal State 7. Technical Education and State Formation in Nineteenth-Century England and France 8. To 'Blaise the Trail for Women to Follow Along': Sex, Gender and the Politics of Education on the London School Board, 1870-1904 Part 4: Education, Social Change and Social Mobility 9. Can Education Change Society? 10. Schooling as an Impediment to Social Mobility in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Britain Part 5: Curriculum 11. Eton in India: The Imperial Diffusion of a Victorian Educational Ethic 12. Catholic Influence and the Secondary School Curriculum in Ireland, 1922-1962 Part 6: Teachers and Pupils 13. The Symbiotic Embrace: American Indians, White Educators and the School, 1820s-1920s 14. Classroom Teachers and Educational Change, 1876-1996 Philip Gardner Part 7: Education, Work and the Economy 15. Entering the World of Work: The Transition from Youth to Adulthood in Modern European Society 16. Politicians and Economic Panic Part 8: Education and National Identity 17. Education in Wales: A Historical Perspective 18. 'There's No Place Like Home': Education and the Making of National Identity

Reviewed by: The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland by Sara L. Maurer Sarah McNeely (bio) The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland by Sara L. Maurer; pp. 235. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. $59.00 cloth. It seems appropriate that Sara L. Maurer’s first book, The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland, would be published in a year when Downton Abbey, a pbs television show whose plot revolves around a dilemma of ownership, has skyrocketed to fame. Downton Abbey is, of course, far from the first popular work to portray the complex ins and outs of British property ownership, a recurring feature of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction, from Jane Austen to Anthony Trollope. More important than its unlikely pop-culture relevance, though, is the model of scholarship Maurer presents in this original, insightful work, which bridges a gap between British and Irish studies. In The Dispossessed State, Maurer traces the revolution in attitudes about property rights in nineteenth-century English and Anglo-Irish narratives of ownership. In her examination of a range of nineteenth-century texts and authors who engage questions of ownership, Maurer brings together the two cultures, each holding radically different views on property and the state. In addition to examining literature and journalism, Maurer incisively draws on the political, economic, and legal theories that compelled changes in thought about the individual, property, and the state. In her discussion of the formation of Victorian ideas about property, Maurer argues that Ireland wielded a major influence on how the British conceived of their own national identity in terms of property. Though we tend to think of the Victorian British Isles in exclusively British terms, Maurer reminds us that in terms of property, inhabitants of the British Isles understood themselves not separately but as part of a complex relationship, “in terms that linked Irish and British culture” (4). This framing of the English and Irish relationship as deeply intertwined is strongly supported in the various texts Maurer surveys in her study of property, the state, and national identity. In her analysis of discourses of property and state emergent in literature of the nineteenth century, Maurer draws primarily on the fiction and non-fiction writings of Maria Edgeworth, John Stuart Mill, Anthony Trollope, George Moore, and George Meredith. In her chapter on Maria Edgeworth’s Irish fiction, Maurer begins by discussing Edgeworth’s own lack of ownership over her intellectual property. Her reading of Edgeworth’s novels is especially compelling when she explains Edgeworth’s dispossession of her own work. That Anglo-Irish and Irish right to property takes such a central position in her novels Castle Rackrent (1801), Ennui (1809), and Ormond (1817) is a fascinating connection Maurer mines, finding ultimately that Edgeworth’s literature unifies Anglo-Irish and Irish in a shared sense of dispossession. That is, Edgeworth’s view on property, apparent from her novels, is that those who own the land should rule Ireland. [End Page 211] Edgeworth’s particular view of property as a right pre-existing the state is almost directly opposed to the views articulated in John Stuart Mill’s journalism on the same question. As Maurer explains in her second chapter, Mill believed the state should create rights in property and exercise that power in Ireland. In chapter 3, Maurer discusses the appeal of indigenous property rights to Irish nationalists and others caught between the two prevailing discourses of property rights and the state in the Victorian years, represented by the previously discussed works of Edgeworth and Mill. Maurer’s succinct overview and explanation of competing narratives of property ownership in this chapter are extremely helpful to readers unfamiliar with Victorian ideas of property. Chapter 4 turns again to fiction, reading Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels in terms of property and the role of a wife, a relationship that, according to Maurer, presents a metaphor for “vicarious ownership” and enjoyment of the state by non-owners. The final chapter argues in favour of reading George Moore’s Drama in Muslin and George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways as responses to the proposal of the...

In this paper, I examine the structure and significance of godparentage in the process of social transition among the Finnish new bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century. Godparenthood is analyzed from the unexplored viewpoint of social upward mobility. Godparent relations are studied in two wealthy business families, the Parviainens and the Ahlströms, who both ascended from a farmer background to the economic elite within one generation during the latter part of nineteenth century. Characteristic of godparenthood interactions was the significant role of kinship, geographical vicinity and heightened consciousness of status and social class. Godparenthood was in many cases the first formal contact between families and an essential expedient to accelerate one's upward social mobility. This familial formalization could be strengthened and maintained by marriages, which is a finding substantiated by numerous pre-marital godparent links between families. Downward social mobility became an intra-familial barrier. Reciprocity in godparenthood relations between a newcomer family and an established upper class family was achieved only when the socio-economic status of the former equalled that of the latter. Various godparenthood patterns and phases could be distinguished particularly during periods of change in economic and social status. While the patterns differed by generation, in the socially turbulent second generation business acquaintances and others of the same profession were favoured over relatives. However, inter-familial variations in strategies increased due to social mobility and migration. The baptismal witness strategies of the rising Finnish business elite mainly adhered to the horizontal, trust-centred and kin-dominated godparental model of entrepreneurs presented by historians Guido Alfani and Vincent Gourdon. The overall picture is diversified by the disparity of the socially mobile generation, in which socially vertical relations dominated instead of the horizontal ones prevalent in the first phase of godparent acquisition. In the light of the Finnish case, godparenthood can be characterized more as a means to create and strengthen business relations than as a way to protect them.

It has been argued in sociology, economics, and evolutionary anthropology that family size limitation enhances the intergenerational upward mobility chances in modernized societies. If parents have a large flock, family resources get diluted and intergenerational mobility is bound to head downwards. Yet, the empirical record supporting this resource dilution hypothesis is limited. This article investigates the empirical association between family size limitation and intergenerational mobility in an urban, late nineteenth century population in Western Europe. It uses life course data from the Belgian city of Antwerp between 1846 and 1920. Findings are consistent with the resource dilution hypothesis: after controlling for confounding factors, people with many children were more likely to end up in the lower classes. Yet, family size limitation was effective as a defensive rather than an offensive strategy: it prevented the next generation from going down rather than helping them to climb up the social ladder. Also, family size appears to have been particularly relevant for the middle classes. Implications for demographic transition theory are discussed. 1. Resource dilution and decline In his 1890 classic Depopulation et civilisation, the French social scientist Arsene Dumont argued that adults with ambition tend to limit their family size because numerous offspring are an obstacle to success and achievement. For people who want to rise socially, he wrote, many children make inconvenient luggage (Dumont 1890(1990):77). The same holds for those who project their ambitions onto their children: numerous offspring dilute parental resources and therefore complicates or aggravates the social situation in the next generation (Dumont 1890(1990):73-91). Philippe Aries (1980), referring to Dumont, argued in an article amply cited by demographers (Dalla Zuanna 2007) that the decline of in the West is the consequence of the emergence of a child-oriented society. In such a society, parents' main investment consists of helping their children to get ahead. In the English-speaking world, Joseph A. Banks' Prosperity and Parenthood (1954) was instrumental in spreading the same ideas. Banks, who explicitly referred to Dumont's work, argued that social ambition was one of the motivating forces for family size limitation in the English middle classes. In economics, the negative effect of family size on the future social status of children, due to resource dilution, is known under the heading of the quality-quantity trade-off (Black, Devereux, and Salvanes 2005; Maralani 2008). Becker (1991) calls proper consideration of the interaction between child quantity and quality probably the major contribution of the economic analysis of fertility (Becker 1991:135). Becker's economic theory implies that a reduction in the number of children raises investments in child quality, where quality is measured by the current as well as the future well-being of children, including their income when they become adults. In a nutshell, the resource dilution hypothesis states that parental resources are finite and that additional children dilute the amount of time, money, and patience that each child receives from its parents. As a consequence of reduced parental investment per child, the opportunities to move up the social ladder, for example, through higher education are reduced (Downey 1995; Desai 1995; Maralani 2008). Historically, resource dilution is argued to have motivated limitation as inheritance systems became more egalitarian and as education became more important in securing a good social position in terms of wealth and prestige (Van Bavel 2006; Dalla Zuanna 2007). Despite its longstanding record in social and demographic theory, there is little direct empirical evidence backing the relevance of the resource dilution hypothesis for the historical decline in Europe (Downey 1995; Haaga 2001; Black, Devereux, and Salvanes 2005; Dalla Zuanna 2007). …

Height and labor market outcomes appear to be related to one another. The taller people are, the more likely they are to have better jobs and to earn more money. This is especially the case for men. However, whether height is causally related to labor market outcomes is an open question, which instrumental variable (IV) analysis may help to answer. To our knowledge, no study has yet used IV analysis to test these relationships in a historical context. The present study addressed this gap, by examining height’s relationship to occupational status and intergenerational mobility in a sample of Dutch men, birth years 1850 through 1900. Data were drawn from: the Historical Sample of the Netherlands, providing life course information on the research person; the Heights and Life Courses Database, providing information on the research person’s height at conscription; and the Male Kin Height Database, providing information on the average height of the research person’s full brothers. This combination of data sources yielded a sample of 1,465 men. Height z-score’s relationships to occupational status (characterized as HISCAM score), and to intergenerational mobility (characterized as the difference between research person’s HISCAM score and father’s HISCAM score) were examined. The average of brothers’ heights z-score was used as an instrumental variable. In terms of results, one standard deviation increase in height was associated with a 1.370 increase in HISCAM score (95% CI: 0.310–2.429), and a 1.127 increase in intergenerational mobility score (95% CI: −0.114–2.368). As Dutch men were growing taller and had greater abilities to choose their occupations, it appeared that tallness was associated with a better job, and increased intergenerational occupational mobility. This study thus offered preliminary evidence that height and labor market outcomes were perhaps causally related during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

REVIEWS Patrick Joyce, Democratic subjects, The self and the social in nineteenth century England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994). $54.95 US (cloth); $19.95 US (paper). Patrick Joyce's new book is both a development and a critique of the picture of popular culture and identity that he developed in Visions of the People. Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1840-1914, (1991): a development, in that he here broadens his attack on class as the fundamental structuring social condition and source of identity into a wholesale rejection of the very idea of the "social"; a critique, in that he accepts that in the earlier volume he did not perhaps go far enough down the post-modernist road, falling instead into the trap of replacing one paradigmatic identity — class — with another — the popular — while remaining wedded to "a nostalgia for collective social subjects and bedrock 'experiences' upon which values and culture could be based" (11). Here, he assures us in a substantial introduction which is the most complete expression to date of Joyce's modernist programme, he has "put the creation of subjectivities at the centre of [his] concern, taking nothing for granted as to how these were achieved" (ibid). The book essentially consists of three extended essays, each of about 30,000 words, through which Joyce attempts to chart the creation of (self-)identities, with a view to affirming the fall of class, no longer the "master category" of historical explanation, but "one term among many, sharing a rough equality . . ." (2). The first two of these essays are extended biographical studies of Edwin Waugh, the Lancashire dialect poet, and John Bright, die Liberal orator. The third is a much looser examination of the various narratives tiirough which Joyce suggests collective identity in nineteenth century England was created. Joyce stresses that although independent these tiiree studies engage with common themes and are best read in sequence. The central thesis is abundantly clear and pungentiy expressed. Joyce accepts the widespread contemporary use of class, and indeed the degree to which "The Britain of that time was almost caste-like in its Reviews75 observation of social differences" (130); but he highlights die flexibility of notions of class, "the sense of fluidity, die de-centredness of social vocabularies and identities" (131). Waugh and Bright are carefully chosen as "liminal figures" whose position on die borders of conventional class identities "dramatizes, and so reveals, die values and social relations of the time" (37). Joyce cleverly brings out the parallels and intersections of their lives. Both were born in Rochdale, and "die town was die conduit through which the rush of national events reached diem in die eventful years of die early nineteenth century" (87). Both kept diaries illustrating their different interior lives and processes of self-formation. Both made sense of their world in part through the narratives (of the Bulgarian agitation, for example) which are explored in die third essay. In both cases Joyce is able to use biographical study to dismantle conventional notions of class identity and reinforce his claim for a more complex process of self-identification. Waugh's diary, extant for die years 1847-1850, is for Joyce "Waugh's laboratory of die self, its confessional nature die ideal way to try out new personae as he scutded between self as author and self as audience" (80). Through it we can see a figure who drew little solace or pride from his work, and who looked beyond work to establish his social status and position. Using his diary as a repository of inner torments and anguishes, as a "narcotic of emotionalism" even (118-19), Waugh struggled to work out and dien to affirm his own sense of purpose, of identity and of values. Yet despite a humble background, lowly marriage, and insecure economic status, conventional notions of class cannot comprehend die result. As Joyce goes on to demonstrate through a study of Waugh's dialect writings, what emerges is a "religion of common humanity", rooted in "die getting of dignity" (28) through the "cult of the heart, of the sincerity of unalloyed human feeling" (46). For Waugh, dien, die poor are closest to real life, and though their labour...