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In Search of the Urban Middle Class: Record linkage and methodology: Leeds 1832

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

R. J. Morris
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Extract

The developing techniques of historical nominal record linkage can make substantial contributions to the questions raised by our present understanding of the urban middle class in the first half of the nineteenth century. Cheap printing, institutionalization, and increasing political and state action provided a growing variety of information about individuals – directories, poll books, lists of shareholders, pewholders, stallholders, members of committees and societies, signatures to petitions and requisitions, wills, insurance policies, and by the 1840s marriage and census data. By their nature most of these listings were concerned with the politically and socially active, and with those above a minimal level of social status and economic power. In practice, this meant predominantly but not exclusively members of a potential middle class. Under certain constraints the lists may be merged to provide surrogate answers to some ghostly questionnaire regarding patterns of association, behaviour and social status, major social divisions and networks, and the characteristics of those who took part in institutions and activities traditionally identified with the middle class.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History Yearbook , Volume 3 , May 1976 , pp. 15 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1976

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References

Notes

1. See Morris, R. J., ‘The Organization and Aims of the Principal Secular Voluntary Organizations of the Leeds Middle Class, 1830–1851’, (D. Phil, thesis, University of Oxford, 1970).Google Scholar

2. Fraser, D., ‘The Leeds Churchwardens, 1828–1850’, Publications of the Thoresby Society, no. 116 (1971), 1–22Google Scholar;Nossiter, T. J., ‘Aspects of the Electoral Behaviour in English Constituencies, 1832–1868’, in Allardt, Erik and Rokkan, Stein (eds), Mass Politics (New York, 1970), 164Google Scholar, which shows a low level of cross-party voting in Leeds with the exception of the ‘voluntaryist’ election of 1847.

3. Foster, John, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (1974), 260.Google Scholar

4. Armstrong, Alan, ‘Social Structure from the Early Census Returns’, in Wrigley, E. A. (ed.), An Introduction to English Historical Demography (1966)Google Scholar; Smith, R. J., ‘Early Victorian Household Structure: a case study of Nottinghamshire’, International Journal of Social History (1970), 69–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nossiter, T. J., ‘Voting Behaviour, 1832–1872’, Political Studies, xviii (1970), 257.Google Scholar

5. The following paragraphs attempt to meet some of the problems of record linkage posed in Wrigley, E. A. (ed.), Identifying People in the Past (1973).Google Scholar

6. My thanks to Dr M. Anderson, Miss P. Corfield, Professor H. J. Dyos, Professor R. Floud, Dr J. Foster, Professor T. C. Smout and Dr W. Vamplew who offered many helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper; also to Alex Nolan and Neil Hamilton Smith of ERCC for advice on the passages dealing with the use of the computer.