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Comment by a_humean | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the time scales here. Three years of very wealthy noble women marrying less but still very wealthy commoner men lead to major educational reform less than 10 years latter through changes in the house of lords?

Even if such a blip of an event were to have an effect, it would surely happen on a generational timescale (20-30 years) rather 5-7 years later. These peerages are quite literally generational inheritances of titles - you don't suddenly become a lord after getting married.

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Note that the article is talking about the Commons, not the Lords.

Still, it fails to mention the Reform Act 1867, passed by a traditionally landed Parliament and which substantially increased the franchise; it is this change that can be thought to have had at least some causal role in decreasing the proportion of members of great landowning or squire families among Members of Parliament from nearly 66% in 1866 to 58% following the 1868 general election;[0] the Commons that passed through the Education Act 1870 was thus still mostly drawn from the traditional landowning class.

[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1750-0206...

>Her brothers were 50% less likely to enter parliament

>...

>Constituencies that were no longer represented in parliament by the local peer were much less likely to oppose the introduction of state education

Women of the peerage take lower class husbands, sullying their family name. Their brothers lose their bids to enter parliament to people outside the peerage. Critically, those outsiders support educational reforms.

I'd be curious to know why the peers seemed to be willing to support outsiders over peers who had sisters with "poor taste" in men. Wouldn't such snobs prefer their own kind, however tarnished, over outsiders? Then again, the bitterest feuds are within families or between religions that are barely distinguishable from one another. Perhaps total outsiders were vastly preferable to peers who were letting their class down. If true, the peers own snobbery bit them in the arse.

Some people are too liberal to take their own side in an argument.

There were likely multiple concauses. The non-aristocrats winning parliament seats in that period were typically people who had made a lot of money in industry and commerce (or someone directly sponsored by such). Those individuals were very strong-willed; it's entirely possible that they wrestled control from the weakened aristocrats in many ways, and probably gossiping about "disgraced" young women was just one easy tool. Once elected, these people supported education reforms because they needed it: their businesses required a cheap but educated workforce. Not unlike what Google and friends need now (hence the big push to "learn to code").

There's a big conflator here with the industrial revolution then. Note that the 1860s and early 1870s was also a transition decade from an agrarian hereditary nobility to industrial capitalist nationalism in many other countries (notably: U.S. Civil War 1861-1865, German war of unification 1871, Italian war of unification 1871, Meiji restoration in Japan 1868). It's more likely that the economic development leading from the railroad, the oil well, the steel foundry, and the steamship led to capitalists winning seats in Parliament and pushing for policies to benefit their workforce, rather than the Queen's mourning leading to missing debutante balls and the peerage losing their influence.

Let us also admit the repeal of the corn laws and the great agricultural depression to the discussion, with the result that land became much less valuable and rents for great aristocratic estates cratered to the discussion. Lest we find ourselves struck with the obdurate ignorance that has cursed the person who wrote the article.

This feels like the sort of remote social context where we'd need deeper immersion to even know if we were on the right track. The past is a foreign country.

> Women of the peerage

This was relatively rare though and most peerages would never have legally passed to women. Especially if the woman had a brother, the peerages that could have, would have passed to their brothers instead.

> Their brothers lose their bids to enter parliament

afaik at that time, if you had a peerage with the right to enter the house of lords, you could go at any time.

I can imagine a scenario that could fit here. The woman's marriage to a poorer man caused a break up of the estate as a dowry which left her brothers less well off and unable to afford the social standing to acquire peerages in their own name. Her brothers, plural, can't all inherit a peerage, only one of them could. Likewise if her brothers planned to enter the House of Commons. Or maybe her husband chose to represent the location? The way the article is worded it feels like there is a confusion between the House of Commons and House of Lords.

It's also possible the conclusion is just a non sequitur and the marriages of the rich women to poorer men had nothing to do with state education and this was just a correlation.

I think "women of the peerage" here means daughters of peers not peers themselves.

Only the eldest brother would sit in the House of Lords and only after their father died. It was very common for a son due to inherit a peerage to go in to the commons before they inherited their title. Once a title was inherited one could only sit in the House of Lords until Tony Benn.

Should one consider the great expansion of peerage begun under the House of Hanover?

Plus, brothers not being able or willing to enter parlament might not be caused by hmwomen marrying down. The both phenomenons could have common cause - namely these families were going down socially for both genders.

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