Marketable Values: Inventing the Property Market in Modern Britain, by Desmond Fitz-Gibbon

Abstract

Reviewed by: Marketable Values: Inventing the Property Market in Modern Britain by Desmond Fitz-Gibbon Katrina Navickas (bio) Marketable Values: Inventing the Property Market in Modern Britain, by Desmond Fitz-Gibbon; pp. v + 240. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018, $105.00, $35.00 paper. “House Hunting,” a cartoon in the July 1867 issue of London Society (1862–98), depicts a middle-class couple visiting a house agent’s office. Some of the features satirized are familiar to us today, not least the sharp-suited agent confidently giving a no doubt elaborate spiel about the properties for sale and to let, as advertised on his wall. This image appears in Desmond Fitz-Gibbon’s study, Marketable Values: Inventing the Property Market in Modern Britain, to exemplify change. Such a scene of house hunting, coordinated by agents and mediated by a specialist press, had been rare in the eighteenth century but was commonplace by the mid-Victorian era. Marketable Values is a well-written and thoroughly researched study that tells the story of a definitive transformation in the economic and cultural aspects of the property market. The rapid growth of urban Britain, fueled by industrialization and imperial expansion, pushed the sale of property in new directions. The property market was also shaped by changing practices, organizations, and representations created by what became a national web of agents, economic institutions, and media. Land had long been bought and sold in Britain, but Fitz-Gibbon specifies changes specific to the Victorian period. Particular factors resulted in a more abstract idea of a property market that was as much a cultural phenomenon as it was an economic structure. This convincing argument is supported by a wealth of evidence from trade journals, auction catalogs, and case studies, positioned within recent “histories of capitalism” and with an emphasis on the contingent and everyday practices of real estate marketization (7). A cultural rather than an economic study, there is no analysis of property market data. It focuses on England and Wales, with the proviso that the Scottish and Irish land markets operated differently, notably in terms of long-existing processes of title registration. The first four chapters carefully construct a picture of an emerging national land market through four factors. The first involves the shift from private property transactions toward a more widespread and highly visible market orchestrated by auctions; London Auction Mart and the Tollerhouse Yard provide the case studies. The second studies the development of real estate services that made house agents into central figures, manipulating inside knowledge of an increasingly national market. The middle classes moved from rented properties to an aspirational world involving advertisements, particulars of sale, property registers, and orders to view houses issued by the agents. Third, this cultural imagining of marketability was shaped further in the later nineteenth century by the growth of the property trade press, with specialist publications such as the Estates Gazette (1858–present). The fourth factor was the growing campaign for title registration, the foremost political and legal implication emerging from the developing market. Debates over whether or not land titles should be registered nationally revealed tensions created by the new marketability of land as saleable property. Fitz-Gibbon highlights the colonial context of title registration as another important corrective to traditional accounts of the history of English landownership. He shows that, through the peripatetic imperial career of such land registration agents as Robert Torrens, who operated in South Australia before returning to Britain, ideas and practices flowed back and [End Page 449] forth between England and the colonies. Given this emphasis on reciprocal exchange, it would have been enlightening to know more about the re-exportation of such methods back to empire, or how settler-colonial domination was more deeply embedded through these processes. The final chapter explores the limits of property marketability. Fitz-Gibbon revisits the history of the Victorian commons preservation movement that fought against the parliamentary and private enclosure of common land, and against impediments to rights of way and customary rights such as pasturage of animals on commons. The popularity of the preservationist campaigns from the 1860s onward reflected wider shifts in liberal opinion away from earlier calls for free...