Power and the Professions in Britain: 1700-1850.

Nowadays in this so-called information age the old cliche that knowledge is power has assumed new meaning. In one instance corporate entities are trying ever harder to catalogue and tap their intellectual assets such as knowledge and creativity and facilitate a speedy exchange of new ideas among their people. In another, the work force of corporate strivers has clearly grasped the reality that mastering such intangibles is key to climbing the corporate ladder. Business seems less a science than an art, with knowledge and imagination winning out.

What then do these notions about the corporate quest for competent and gifted performers have to do with the present work under review? Just about everything. This linking of knowledge with power is a crucial element if we are to believe Corfield in understanding the impact which the emergent professions had on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. They truly represented a new source of authority and power - quite comparable to those in our information age - in British life. In an increasingly sophisticated and consumer-driven society individuals armed with special knowledge or expertise acquired both new status and authority. Indeed, the expanding prerogatives of lawyer, doctor, and divine were such as to win the business and occasionally even the grudging respect of traditional power brokers, the landed and commercial interests.

Corfield is not, of course, the first to write recently about the professions in eighteenth-century England. Geoffrey Holmes has dealt effectively with the early period, 1680-1730, and Harold Perkin with the later, after 1880.(1) But Corfield breaks new ground by focusing on power (ch. 1), that of this new breed of professionals, and its crucial role in fostering societal change. This power is explained by mystery (ch. 2), an "intangible expertise" which elevated the professional above crafts and commerce. Yet power and mystery invited hum-buggery: to many, professionals were suspect in their new and diverse roles. Thus, they were subjected to ridicule and satire (ch. 3), a corrective to pretensions but also a tribute to their power.

Corfield devotes a chapter each to lawyers, physicians, and clergy (chs. 4, 5, and 6). She is best in treating lawyers, barristers and solicitors and their sundry undertakings. All three professions resorted to self-regulation to improve their image and counter charges of quackery and corruption. In 1729 an Act for the Better Regulation of Attorneys and Solicitors initiated a screening process for improving attorney performance. Churchmen, on the other hand, were goaded by external forces - a John Wesley, for instance - to mind their standards and improve upon the laxness portrayed in the ballad of the Vicar of Bray (1720). As doctors rose in prestige, they fought among themselves. Splintering into physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries, they, too, organized and indulged in self-regulation to escape the opprobrium of quackery.

Professionals sought more than immunizing themselves against such charges. They aggressively tried to enhance their status and, at the same time, fill their pocketbooks. Trollope said it well in The Bertrams (1858) when he observed that profession signified a "calling by which a gentleman, not born to the inheritance of a gentleman's allowance of good things, might ingeniously obtain the same by some exercise of his abilities."(2) In chapters on trend, ethos, and advancement (chs. 7, 8, and 9) Corfield touches, among other things, on the rewards system and how professionals related to class formation.

The former is important because it is so difficult both to obtain and interpret reliable income data. The class formation matter - really, origins of the middle class - is much heralded these days. Corfield on the professions contributes to this discourse.

In summary, Corfield has added significantly to the literature of the professions. Long the domain of sociologists, it now seems a shared one thanks to British historians such as Corfield, Holmes, Perkin, and Prest. This work is copiously footnoted and contains an excellent bibliography; it is punctuated with more than twenty contemporary prints, most satirical. Numerous tables provide a variety of quantitative data on the professions.

Albert J. Schmidt George Washington University 

ENDNOTES

1. Augustan England; Professions, State and Society, 1680-1730 (London, 1982) and The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (London, 1989). See also W. Prest (ed.), The Professions in Early Modern England (London, 1987).

2. As quoted from Corfield, p. 174.