gillo: (Dickens)
gillo ([personal profile] gillo) wrote in [personal profile] fenderlove 2012-02-20 12:30 am (UTC)

Why not have a look at a few specific names? Ruskin, the various Butlers, the major commercial houses like Liberty. For bankers, look up people like the Coutts family.

College-level professors in that specific period were mostly clergymen, except for those at UCL, which was founded in the early 1830s as a "godless institution on Gower Street". You could look up individuals like Lewis Carroll or any of the vast Darwin/Galton/Wedgwood/Raverat/Huxley clan who pretty much dominated Cambridge intellectual life of the period and intermarried most confusingly.

You could also explore fictional characters and families - Dickens has a fair number of the right sort of family, if rather exaggerated; Thackeray has some and there are a few in the non-Barsetshire Trollopes. You could reasonably assume a lot of younger sons of country gentry made their way to London, finding "openings" in the big commercial houses which dealt in the ever-growing trade within and outside the Empire.

Hope this is of use. If you want anything more narrowed-down, give me a yell. It's one of the periods I seem to have specialised in.

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