Marginal Revolution, the economics blog founded in 2003 by economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, has highlighted an essay by Samuel Hughes in Works in Progress, titled "The Seven Vices of Highly Effective Victorians" — a nod to Stephen Covey's 1989 bestseller The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People — which asks how and why the elites of Victorian Britain (the era named for Queen Victoria, who reigned from 1837 to 1901) succeeded and depicts a ruling class that operated very differently from its buttoned-up reputation. The post's author recommends the full piece, while conceding that the answer to its title question "remains somewhat of a mystery."

According to Hughes, the schools and universities attended by elite Victorians were "not terribly academic" and offered very little STEM instruction. As adults, these elites rose late, drank heavily, and devoted a remarkable share of their waking hours to partying. They loved feasting, sports, holidays, dancing, and dressing up. Contrary to their stodgy reputation, Hughes writes, they were "probably a lot of fun." Nor, the post adds, did the Victorians wake up early in the morning.

The essay traces how this elite was formed. Most socially elite Victorian boys began formal education at the age of seven or eight, spending about five years at a "preparatory school" before passing on to a "public school" (which, to the enduring confusion of international observers, was a kind of elite private school). The public schools formed a hierarchy, with the nine "Clarendon schools" at the top and just one, Eton College — founded in 1440 by King Henry VI — clearly at the apex. The nine schools took their name from the Clarendon Commission, the royal commission of the 1860s named for its chairman, the Earl of Clarendon, that examined Britain's leading public schools and whose findings led to the Public Schools Act 1868; they were Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Westminster, Rugby, Shrewsbury, Charterhouse, St Paul's, and Merchant Taylors'.

Eton's hold on the highest offices was pronounced: about 30 percent of nineteenth-century cabinet ministers and 40 percent of prime ministers were Old Etonians, a pattern documented in a historical study of the British cabinet's personnel between 1801 and 1924.

Boarding shaped elite childhoods. Most students at both preparatory and public schools were boarders, meaning that elite Victorians were generally sent away from home by the age of eight and spent their childhoods more with peers than with family. In this respect they were distinctive even in their own time: elite families in continental Europe and the United States were far more likely to keep their children at home and educate them at small local private schools.

Hughes calls it plausible that this system contributed to the lack of subnational loyalties within the British elite, in contrast to the distinct elites found in, for example, the Southern United States, Catalonia in Spain, and Hungary in the Austrian Empire.

The full essay is available at Works in Progress, a magazine of essays on progress published by Stripe. The original post, "How and why did the Victorians succeed?", was published on Marginal Revolution on October 8, 2026.