Social Mobility in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England

This text provides a systematic historical analysis of occupational and social mobility in England. Using a collection of over 10,000 marriage certificates to examine inter-generational change, and almost 500 autobiographical texts and abstracts to explore the dynamics of career mobility, it shows how the development of the 19th-century economy was accompanied by rising rates of mobility, which made English society more "open" while at the same encouraging a distinct process of working class formation. The book is for departments of history (courses in social history, economic history, industrial history, social-science history); and sociology (courses on population studies, class studies and the family).