ABSTRACT
Contemporaries strongly suspected that inequality was on the rise from the late eighteenth century, but such suspicions were rarely guided by data. While their theories differed, Marx, Malthus, Ricardo and others all developed models designed to explain why the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. I t would be striking indeed if it could be shown that income inequality was not on the rise in a period when suspicions of widening inequalities ran so deep, especially given the findings in Chapter 3 of rising earnings inequality to mid-century. Yet, the data have never been plentiful enough to offer an unambiguous victory to anyone who sought evidence rather than anecdote. For example, Engels and Marx thought inequality was on the rise in nineteenth-century England and they felt there was abundant evidence to support the position (Engels, 1974; Marx and Engels, 1930). Victorian apologists for capitalism denied it, Porter (1851) and Giffen (1889) countering the radical critique by using tax return data to document an egalitan'an trend across the nineteenth century. Modern contributions have generated more conflicting assertions and evidence. In 1940, Colin Clark used income tax returns to document a decline in the inverse Pareto inequality slope between 1812 and 1845. Harold Perkin (1969, pp. 135-6) countered with other income tax return estimates that showed the top percentile of taxed income recipients increasing their share between 1801 and 1848. Perkinconcluded that the first half of the nineteenth century witnessed a 'considerable shift in income distributions towards the rich and well-to-do', while Clark stated that 'the distribution of income in
Contradictions over early nineteenth-century trends have not abated. In an ambitious and pathbreaking article, which appeared over fifteen years ago, Lee Soltow (1968) offered rough measures of English inequality for the years 1436-196213. On the basis in large measure of the social arithmetic of Gray, King and Colquhoun, Soltow concluded that inequality dropped before 1688 and again after 1913, but he saw no clear trends in between, implying that the inequality that seemed so acute at the turn of the present century had always been characteristic of English society. It implied no increase in inequality across the nineteenth century, a position that Marx, Engels and the political left would find outrageous.
