Presidential Address: English Landed Society in the Twentieth Century: II, New Poor and New Rich.

Abstract

The notion that the great leviathans of wealth, who had for so long been accustomed to taking first place in a nation of snobs which contrived simultaneously to accept, admire, envy, and criticise their opulence, might actually become impoverished first began to gain some currency in the 1890s. True, this had been anticipated by a few specially pessimistic and debt–ridden landowners in the immediate anxieties aroused by the Repeal of the Corn Laws. Lord Monson, who had inherited from a cousin estates liberally furnished with dowagers and other inescapable expenses, and who was in despair at the tendency of income to fall while outgoings remained fixed, exploded to his son in 1851: ‘What an infernal bore is landed property. No certain income can be reckoned upon. I hope your future wife will have Consols or some such ballast, I think it is worth half as much again as land’. A similar but more sober banker's view had been put by Evelyn Denison, a classic gentlemanly capitalist, in 1847 when he announced his intention to sell much of his land ‘not because I am of the class of encumbered landlords, for I have luckily extricated myself from that, but because I do not think it worth while to keep a security paying 2 per cent, when I can get an equally good one paying ’.