ABSTRACT
The characteristic feature of the English economy in the period from the Great Exhibition down to the outbreak of the First World War was continuing industrial expansion and increasing wealth for those who owned and controlled the means of production. Agriculture, the most basic and traditional industry, remained highly prosperous until the depression of the 1880s, when foreign competition began to shatter the near-monopoly of food supply which the English farmer had previously enjoyed: thereafter, the territorial aristocracy suffered some reduction in fortune as well as in political influence, though in 1914 they were still the undisputed leaders of social life. Their standard of conduct was the one imitated more or less closely and successfully by the new middle classes, called into increasing wealth and power by the growth of industry, commerce, and the professions. At the upper end of financiers, bankers, and railway directors they merged into, and not infrequently inter-married with, the landowning aristocracy: at the lower end of small shopkeepers and clerks they were scarcely distinguishable from the ranks of the skilled worker. For our purpose, however, they all had one thing in common which distinguished them from the working classes: an income which provided some margin over necessary expenditure and therefore permitted a choice in the selection of food.
