David Sugarman 246 power of patronage exercised by a variety of individuals and institutions who had the legal power to sell or give church property and sources of church income. Throughout the land “benefices were in the gift of the Crown, church dignitaries, colleges and public institutions, trustees, London companies and guilds, and an enormous range of private citizens. The cry was raised against the systemin the 1860’s: a clerical pamphleteer, the Reverend John Wild asked; ‘Is it right that nearly 7000 livings should be regarded as private property - destined either for the son or the market? > »> 124 The elitist structure of the civil service and the old patronage persisted long after the Northcote-Trevelyan Report and the advent of open competition in 1870.’’5 The “old school tie”, as E P Thompson observes, is in some sense an extension in modern dress of the Old Corruption.'-^ The Engels-Toynbee conception of England’s Industrial Revolution as occurring between 1780-1850 and symbolised above all by dark satanic mills - the flood from land and trades to the new factories - has been shown to be a gross simplification. Today, most historians stress the survival of cottage and workshop-based trades dominated by highly skilled self-employed artisans; and the very slow resort to factory-type manufacture until the so-called second industrial revolution that occurred between 1870 and 1900.'-^ The belated requirement that lawyers should have to undergo some form of compulsory education and examinations is paralleled in medicine, the army and the clergy. Then, there is the controversy which surrounds the so-called “peculiarities of English middle classes”. Many commentators have argued that the peculiarities of the English stem, in part, fromthe relative failure of the middle classes to produce an independent bourgeois culture. The new middle classes, so it is said, did not produce a sui generis culture because of their deference to the aristocracy: they surrendered to the temptations of gentrification and to the gentry-public school culture In Martin Weiner’s influential version of the ’-■* A. Haig, The Victorian Clergy, (London: GroomHelm, 1984), p. 46. ’’5 See, E.N.W. Cohen, The Growth of the British Civil Service 1780-1939, (London: Allen and Unwin, 1941); R. K. Kelsall, Higher Civil Servants in Britain from 1870 to the Present Day, (London: Routledge and Regan Paul, 1955); Committee on the Civil Service (the Fulton Committee), esp. , vol. 3(1), Social Survey of the Civil Service, (by A.H. Halsey and 1. M. Crewe), (London: H. M. S. O., 1968). E. p. Thompson, op. cit., p. 52; and see, generally, pp. 48-56. See R. Samuel, “Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand Technology in mid-Victorian Britain”, History WorkshopJournal, 3. 1977, pp 6-72; M. Berg, The Age of Manufactures, (London: Fontana, 1985); Sabel and Zeitlin, op cit., p35 and passim. '-s See Haig, op. cit., pp. 42-9; M.J. Peterson, The Medical Prt^fession in Mid-Victorian England, (Berkelev: University of California Press, 1978). This is a core theme in Perrv Anderson’s work: see, Anderson, “Components of the National Culture”, op. cit. and passim.; and “The Origins of the Present Crisis”. New Left Review, 128
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