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REVIEWS
| Men, Women and Property in England, 1780–1870. By R. J. Morris (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xiv plus 445 pp. £55, $95.00).
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| This work by Morris, a highly respected social/economic and urban historian at the University of Edinburgh, is heralded as "an innovative study of middle class behavior and property relations in English towns in Georgian and Victorian Britain." The book, moreover, "offers a new reading of ways in which middle class families survived and surmounted the economic difficulty of early industrial society" (cover jacket blurb). |
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The means, really strategies, which the merchant and industrial elite of Leeds (the author does not include practitioners in the professions) employed to preserve their assets are at once the focal point of the book and the author's signal achievement. In effect, survival strategies were devised at a time when financial institutions offered insufficient safeguards in coping with recurring financial crises and when illness or disease not infrequently cut down family entrepreneurs in their prime. |
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Although Morris' methodology—his concentration on Leeds' families from the 1820s to the 1860s—advertizes this work as one of social and economic microhistory, his interpolations from this localized analysis illumine middle class behavior on a macro stage. The author's presentation is in the form of fascinating vignettes of Leeds' affluent personages—distilled from wills, property deeds, account books, diaries, and letters. These 'stories' reveal how the lives of the privileged were "embedded in a network of family relationships" quite inseparable from their properties. |
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