The Distribution of Personal Wealth in English Towns in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Personal wealth has been recognized as an important but neglected indicator of aspects of the social and economic structure of towns in the nineteenth century. This paper examines the level of personal wealth between English towns in the middle of that century. The data are derived from returns of assessed taxes for 178 towns, those boroughs which returned members to parliament in the I84os. The applicability of the returns as a measure of urban personal wealth is discussed. The distributions of total tax and tax per head reveal distinctive patterns, which are analysed in terms of the size, function and regional association of towns. A crude hypothesis is suggested to explain the inequitable distribution of personal wealth between towns in this period. THE nature and process of urbanization in the nineteenth century have received considerable attention from geographers and historians alike. Yet apart from a few statistical studies of the growth in town numbers and of urban populations, there has been a lack of comparative work on nineteenth-century towns.1 Much of this neglect can be attributed to the deficiencies in available source materials. Hitherto, with the exception of the censuses used for gauging the population and number of urban settlements, knowledge of this important period of urbanization has been chiefly derived either from local records, often of the highest value but difficult to co-ordinate in a broad national survey, or from contemporary accounts of a narrative or descriptive nature. The resulting studies have tended to concentrate on case-examples, predominantly of those industrial and commercial towns that were new to, and products of, the century, and that were expanding rapidly in population, area and functions.2 Such an emphasis has produced a biased view of nineteenth-century urbanization, for the examination of the new industrial cities has resulted in a neglect of the 'old towns', as Briggs has termed those urban settlements that existed and thrived before i8oo.3 There may be more that is worthy of attention in the expanding nineteenth-century industrial town than in the stable or slowly growing county town, the origins of which belonged to a previous century. It cannot be denied, however, that both were towns and formed essential elements in the nineteenthcentury urban fabric. As Briggs noted, 'no account of Victorian cities would be complete without some consideration of the relationship between the rapidly growing Victorian cities and those which changed far more slowly'.4 There is a need to examine the general problems of all nineteenth-century towns and cities-their structure and landscape, their social and economic organization-and to compare these features between towns as a whole.5 One of the most significant aspects of the social and economic organization within nineteenth-century towns was the level of personal wealth. The degree of urban personal wealth was