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The Victorian era has been described as the ‘age of the family firm’. 1 Family enterprises were an important source of wealth for the nineteenth-century urban middle class and business activity played a key role in accumulating, securing and maintaining family fortunes. The family firm also provided a source of respectable employment for family members. However, studies of business and entrepreneurship have often viewed the family in a negative light. Seen as a source of backwardness and conservatism, the family has frequently been regarded as a barrier to enterprise. Alfred Chandler, for example, has argued that the ‘personalised capitalism’of the nineteenthcentury family firm acted as a brake upon Britain’s entrepreneurial dynamism. 2 Indeed, many British historians blame the family for the country’s so-called industrial decline. According to Martin Wiener, businessmen’s aspirations for family gentrification …