Chapter4
of society.
The condition of England
Robert C. Allen, 2011.
The last chapter was about the benevolent face of the Industrial
Revolution. Now we tum our gaze to its dark side and consider
why this upswing in technological progress caused such
widespread suffering for so many people for so long. We begin
with a broad question: how did the technological revolution
change the structure ofsociety?
Class structure
We can answer the question with social tables, A social table
divides society into status or occupational groups, and the
number of households in each group and their average incomes
are specified. Gregory King prepared the first table for England
in 1688. It was well-known and defined the genre. Massie
updated King's table in 1759 1 Colquhoun revised it extensively
to describe England as revealed by the first census in 1801
(although I date his table to 1798), and Smee and Ba,cter made
further revisions using the occup'ational data in the censuses of
1841 and 1861, as well as information from income tax returns.
Since investigators relied on varying sources of informatfon and
employed different occupational breakdowns, comparison across
tab]es is not simple. Historians have addressed this problem by
amending the tables with recently compiled information on the
occupational distributions and the incomes, etc. Exact comparability
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is unlikely, but social tables do reveal major trends in the evolution
Box 4 summarizes the major social tables by reducing the various
occupations and statuses to six groups that can be traced across
the Industrial Revolution.
'The 18th-eentury tables did not include Scotland, and this
specification has been continued throughout to ensure consistency.
This is unfortunate; however, calculations with 19th-century data
shcrw that the ratios for Great Britain differ very little from those
for England and Wales shown here.
The 'landed classes'formed the top group, owning most of the land in
England, and agricultural rent formed the bulk of their income. Llke
all ofthe groups, this one>YaSdiverse. It included the king or queen,
the peers of the realm, the gentry, and also the parish clergy ofthe
Church of England, who were supported by glebe estates. The
landowners also included the small number of university fellows who
were supported by college properties. The landed classes were never
more than 2 per cent of the population, and the proportion stayed
roughly constant over time. The increase from 30�000 to 50,000
shown in Box 4 probably reflects the inclusion of female property
owners in 1846 and 1867 who had been left out of the earlier connts.
The landed classes were the wealthiest group in the country.
Box 4 How did England's social structure change over
the Industrial Revolution?
In the table that follows, the English population Is divided into six
dasses that can be followed from Gregory King's social table for
1688 to Dudley Baxter's table for 1867. The table shows the
number of households {called 'families' in the early social tables) in
each category in each )leilr. Households included servants. as well as
related Individuals. The landed dass, that owned most of the real
(Cont.)
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