19th Century occupation for a gentleman

This site is excellent regarding the Victorian years and does have a section on Professions and Trades, which may help.

http://www.victorianlondon.org/

Er, excuse me but...

if this young man's father had been an officer who was knighted then the father would have been a gentleman. One had to be a gentleman to buy an officer's commission.

He might consider the legal profession and read law but he would not say I want to be a lawyer.

Army, navy, church, were still traditionally younger sons' occupations. If the family own a printing/publishing business then they were in trade and not gentlemen!

The fact that there was a glut of barristers on the market (F.E.Smith famously commented that there was enough work in the UK for 2500 barristers, there were 10,000 barristers practising and 1500 did all the work - I'd not swear to the precise numbers) didn't stop gentlemen going to the Bar anyway; look at Trollope, whose pages are littered with underemployed barristers.

There are two branches to the English legal profession, and while being called to the Bar counted as a gentlemanly profession (that is, their wives and daughters could be presented at court) being a solicitor didn't and wasn't. As a solicitor, I might be disposed to resent this, but then I never claimed to be a gentleman.

I'm with pdr on the publishing business, even though the scions of publishing houses have done very well in the British establishment (Harold Macmillan was one of those Macmillans, wasn't he?). Beatrix Potter's father, a barrister who lived off an extensive private income* rather than off his professional endeavours blocked his daughter's marriage to the junior partner in her publishers, Frederick Warne & Co. until the young man did the gentlemanly thing of dying of pernicious anaemia and so resolving the dilemma. She eventually married a solictor, took up sheepfarming and became the first ever woman president of the Herdwick sheep society, so sucks to Rupert Potter.


*Earned two generations earlier in, I believe, calico printing; hypocrisy and hair-splitting were the great Victorian pastimes

Gentlemen did not work at any trade. They could be soldiers, churchmen and belong, as has already been said, to some aspects of the legal profession. There were various underhand ways of earning money - gambling or a 'business venture'. Society could be very critical of anyone who broke the laws of the social group they belonged to to the extreme of 'blackballing' them. Some gentlemen never reached the top echelons of society because their origins were in trade or some other socially unacceptable occupation.

It's incredibly tricky!

Incredibly!!!

You have to define what you mean by gentleman.

Do you mean the rather looser usage where members of the middle and upper middle class, educated, articulate and with money earned as merchant bankers, doctors, or from great-grandad's and grandfather's trading activities, could be called gentlemen? These are gentlemen by wealth and self determination.

Or do you mean 'we came over with the Conqueror and have been Barons and land owners ever since' gentlemen? These are gentlemen by birth and breeding.

Ship owner was common. No sailing necessary, but his ships travel to get spices, sugar, tea, coffee, or other cargo.

Having an insurance company that insured such ships was also a heady occupation.