ABSTRACT
In few countries of the world is the general image of the landlord a particularly favourable one. In places this negative picture goes back some years. In Britain, the United States and France, the nineteenth-century city was often described as being controlled by wicked landlords owning rows of terraced houses or huge tenement blocks. Such landlords were hardly renowned for their gentle treatment of tenants and many a story appears in fiction of landlords throwing entire families of tenants onto the street. Clearly, large-scale landlords did exist and some, no doubt, deserved their bad reputation. And yet, recent accounts suggest that the large landlord was hardly the dominant figure in most nineteenth-century cities. Landlords may or may not have been kind, but on the whole they did not own a large amount of property. ‘In mid-Victorian Liverpool, for example, landlords of working-class property held on average between six and eight dwellings each ...’ (Englander, 1983: 52). In the United States and five Western European countries, before 1918, ‘it was the small local investor who provided most rented housing. At a time when their possibilities for investment were limited and risky, investment in housing was probably the main outlet for such capital’ (Harloe, 1985: 13). Many of these landlords were ‘working-class made good’; they were traders, publicans, builders or shopkeepers who had invested their savings in property.
