Auchenshuggle Bugle

    POVERTY IN 19th CENTURY SCOTLAND  This engraving from the 1830s shows the Town's Hospital and Poorhouse, built in 1733 on Great Clyde Street  The economic and social changes ushered in by industrialisation dramatised the problem of poverty in Scotland by concentrating it in large pockets within the rapidly growing urban centres. The boom and bust economics of the free market added to the problem as it brought with it periodic mass unemployment which in a pre-welfare society left thousands of workers in poverty. The extent of the social devastation of mass unemployment in Victorian Scotland can be grasped from a comment by the Provost of Paisley made at the height of the 1842 depression: "Unemployment was the rule .... few workmen of Paisley were employed: they were broken up and found to be wandering about in every town in the country, begging for bread, independent of those thousands whom they had at home supported by charity".  Obviously the periodic occurrence of m

  19th Century - Income and Wealth The degree of wealth-holding in Scottish society is difficult to measure in the absence of reliable data, but from what research has been carried out into the subject there were some very wealthy Scots in the 19th century and a good deal of prosperous members of the middle classes. Of the forty largest fortunes in Britain in the period 1809-1914, six were Scottish. They included the Lanarkshire ironmasters, William Baird and William Weir, the Paisley thread manufacturers, Peter and James Coats, and Charles Tennant, chemical manufacturer. The only landowner to appear was the third Marquis of Bute. All were worth more than two million pounds when they died. Although on first appearances not as wealthy as some of the industrialists, the landed aristocracy were still fabulously rich compared to most Scots.  The Duke of Sutherland owned 90.5%, or 1,176,343 acres, of Sutherland in 1874 which yielded him an annual rental of £56,395; while the Duke of Buccleu