The Victorian Era

Who Were the Victorian Upper Class?

Article · Society & Daily Life · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

❦

The Victorian upper class was the apex of the class pyramid of the period: a small, well-defined, and tightly bound group of perhaps two per cent of the population that owned a disproportionate share of the wealth, the land, the power, the prestige, and the influence of the British nation. The peerage numbered 574 peers in 1837 and 596 in 1901; the landed gentry, the untitled families of established position, numbered some 6,000 in 1900; and the new rich — the great industrialists, the financiers, and the merchants — added a third tier of the upper class over the course of the period. The upper class set the tone of British politics, dominated the army, the church, the universities, the law, the high culture, and the high society of the period, and was the principal patron of the Victorian Architecture and Interior Design of the country house.

The Aristocracy

The Victorian aristocracy was the core of the upper class: a small group of perhaps 350 families that owned a substantial share of the cultivated land of the United Kingdom. The 1872 Return of Owners of Land showed that some 1,500 families owned half of England. The 1st Duke of Sutherland, with some 1.4 million acres, was the largest landowner in Britain; the 1st Duke of Devonshire had some 200,000 acres; and the 1st Duke of Westminster, the 6th Duke of Bedford, the 6th Duke of Rutland, the 6th Duke of Portland, and the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury were all among the great magnates of the period, with estates of 30,000 acres or more. The landed gentry with estates of 3,000 to 10,000 acres lived on £3,000 to £10,000 a year; the great magnates with 30,000 acres or more lived on £30,000 to £100,000 a year.

The great aristocratic families of the period included the Percys (the Dukes of Northumberland, with Alnwick Castle), the Cavendishes (the Dukes of Devonshire, with Chatsworth House), the Russells (the Dukes of Bedford, with Woburn Abbey), the Cecils (the Marquesses of Salisbury, with Hatfield House), the Spencers (the Earls Spencer, with Althorp), the Churchills (the Dukes of Marlborough, with Blenheim Palace), the Stanleys (the Earls of Derby, with Knowsley Hall), the Lowthers (the Earls of Lonsdale, with Lowther Castle), the Fitzwilliams (the Earls Fitzwilliam, with Wentworth Woodhouse), the Portlands (the Dukes of Portland, with Welbeck Abbey), the Sutherlands (the Dukes of Sutherland, with Dunrobin Castle and Trentham Hall), and the Wellesleys (the Dukes of Wellington, with Stratfield Saye). The great houses, the great estates, the great collections of art, the great shooting and deer forests, the great parks, the great gardens, the great farms, the great mines, the great urban property, the great industrial investments, the great financial investments, and the great overseas investments were the material expression of the class.

The New Rich

The Victorian period saw the rise of a new tier of the upper class, the new rich of the great industrialists, financiers, and merchants, who had made their fortunes in the Victorian Economy and Industrialization of the period. The most prominent were the Rothschilds, the international banking family founded by Mayer Amschel Rothschild in Frankfurt in the 1760s, with branches in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Naples; the Barings, the Anglo-American banking family of Sir Francis Baring and the 1st Baron Revelstoke; the Cadburys, the Birmingham chocolate manufacturers founded by John Cadbury in 1824, who moved to the model village of Bournville in 1879; the Carnegies, the Scottish-American steel manufacturers with the Carnegie Steel Company of Pittsburgh; the Tennants, the Glasgow chemical manufacturers and bleachers founded by Charles Tennant of Glenconner; and the Wills family, the Bristol tobacco manufacturers founded by Henry Overton Wills I in 1835, who gave the University of Bristol its Wills Memorial Building in 1925.

The new rich bought estates, built country houses, sent their sons to the public schools, married their daughters into the aristocracy, donated to the great charities, supported the hospitals, the universities, and the churches, and supported the Arts and Crafts movement and the Aesthetic Movement of the period. The new rich was the subject of the Victorian Novel of the period, of the Victorian Poetry of the period, and of the Victorian Theatre and Drama of the period.

The County Families and the London Season

The Victorian upper class was organised in two principal social systems: the country house and the London Season. The county families — the dominant social set in each of the English and Welsh counties — were the backbone of the country-house system: the principal families of the shires, the principal subscribers to the county hospital, the principal members of the hunt, the principal pew-holders in the parish church, the principal patrons of the assizes and the quarter sessions. The eldest son managed the estate, the daughters married into the county families of the next county, the younger sons went into the army, the navy, the church, or the colonial service, and the family seat was the centre of the social life of the county.

The London Season was the social calendar centred on the court, with the queen’s drawing rooms, the openings of Parliament, Ascot, Henley, Cowes, the great balls of the West End, the dinners of the great clubs (Brooks’s, White’s, Boodle’s, the Carlton, the Athenaeum, the Reform), the theatres (the Haymarket, Drury Lane, Covent Garden), the exhibitions of the Royal Academy, the state occasions, the court presentations, the debutante balls, and the society weddings that made up the social round. The Season ran from Easter to the end of July; the upper class migrated to the London house, the country house, and the seaside resort, and the autumn brought the grouse shooting (12 August to 10 December), the partridge shooting (1 September to 1 February), the pheasant shooting (1 October to 1 February), and the salmon fishing.

The debutante — the young woman of the upper class, presented at court at seventeen or eighteen, formally introduced to society, and out for two or three Seasons before marriage — was the centre of the social life of the late Victorian period. The presentation at court, the coming-out ball, the entry in the Court Guide, the entry in the peerage, and the marriage in the great London church were the central rituals of the upper-class woman. The Court Circular and the Morning Post carried the formal record of the debutante’s first season, and the Illustrated London News and The Lady carried the illustrated record.

The Country House

The country house was the seat of the landed gentry, the venue for the shooting parties, the house parties, the hunts, the weddings, the funerals, the Christmases, and the family celebrations. Chatsworth, Blenheim, Castle Howard, Woburn, Longleat, Hatfield, Alnwick, Welbeck, Witley Court, Mentmore, Eaton Hall, Holkham, and Petworth were the work of the great architects of the period, and they were the centrepieces of the Victorian Architecture and Interior Design of the period. The shooting party was the central institution of the country-house week, and the grouse moor, the partridge drive, the pheasant shoot, and the salmon beat were the principal preoccupations of the country gentleman. The house party was the central social institution of the country-house week, and the shooting party, the hunt ball, the country dance, the cricket match, and the lawn tennis were the principal recreations of the upper class.

The country house was supported by the army of servants, the stewards, the land agents, the bailiffs, the gamekeepers, the grooms, the coachmen, the gardeners, the woodmen, and the estate workers who staffed the great estates. The great house might have anything from 20 to 80 indoor servants, and anything from 50 to 200 estate workers. The economy of the country house — the rents, the farms, the timber, the minerals, the urban property, the railway investments, the overseas investments — was the economy of the upper class, and the income of the country gentleman was the income of the period.