Employment and wealth in 1830s England

[finding_jay]

My character, Eleanor, is the daughter of a fairly well-to-do family living in 1830s England. They're on the cusp from upper middle class to upper class, but lose their money, though not necessarily their social status. My character's parents are trying to marry her off so as to keep face

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[swan_tower]

If you want a scenario where the family has status they can hold onto without money to back it up, then they need land, because that was the major boundary between "the better sort" and their lessers. By the mid-eighteenth century you had a lot of landed families who had fallen on very hard times financially, so the up-and-coming wealth was always on the lookout for a chance to marry one of their kids into the gentry or nobility; that status was worth something even if the person who had it was all but penniless. And in the meantime, there was a lot of conflict among the upper classes as to whether it was acceptable to invest the income from your land in something like trade. (A declasse move, but frequently necessary; land income had tanked since the glory days of, oh, the fifteenth century.)

Two ways the money could have been lost: railroads and canals. The big boom of railway-building was the 1840s, I think, but there were earlier speculative ventures, and since the industry hadn't yet taken off, it would be very easy for the father to have gambled on a project and then lost his shirt. Ditto canals, though I can't at present remember when the high point of building those was. It's the sort of thing an upper-class man might very well do, whether he originally came from a trade background or not. Financial speculation is also a possibility, but it wouldn't be quite like it is today, so if you go that route you're probably better off leaving it vague.

(Random side-note about marrying children off: it was far, far more common for the daughter of a wealthy-but-lesser family to marry into a poor-but-better family than the other way around, because society was patrilineal. If the daughter of a gentry or titled family "married out," any wealth/land/status/etc she took as her dowry then became the property of the upstarts. Which was, of course, a dreadful thing to have happen. That could be a source of tension for Eleanor, depending on who you're looking to have her marry.)

[finding_jay]

Fantastic, thanks for that awesome information.