American Cousins

So why did so many of the Wombwell family choose to leave England and make new lives for themselves during this period? An interesting question, particularly in a climate that is so immigration focused in its outlook that we almost never pause to examine the reverse phenomenon and consider the reasons for and extent of and the outflow of human capital.

According to the English Immigration to America website, over two million English people moved to the USA over the nineteenth century, inspired by stories of greater opportunities and equality. The USA was offering them an escape from poverty that they were not able to find in their own country.

As the century wore on, the voyage was becoming shorter, easier and safer. The English were also entering an environment where the culture and language were relatively familiar, and where they would be able to adapt relatively easily. By and large, their skills would have been welcome as the country progressed. It can have taken little more than a generation or two for the families to become almost completely Americanised. 

There were plenty of incentives for these Wombwells to move on therefore. They had in any case in moving to London left behind their ancestral farmland in Essex, and for all the glories and successes of Victorian England, the poverty of life in inner London has been well enough portrayed in the works of authors such as Charles Dickens to provide at least a taste of how much of a struggle life would have been for the less well-off members of the Wombwell family. The British Empire succeeded in generating enormous wealth, the monuments of which are visible today. The governing classes paid much less attention however to how that wealth might be put to use in developing the living standards of the urban under-classes.

From: http://immigrationtounitedstates.org/393-british-immigrants.html. Note the peak period, when the Wombwells emigrated. The Industrial Revolution had slowed down, decreasing opportunities.

Indeed as London expanded, the lands and pastures around Stoke Newington, for example, became prime property for the Victorian elite who built smart upmarket villas along Lordship Road, meaning, by definition, that the likes of the family of Zachariah Wombwell would be forced to move on, in the case of James Wombwell, for instance, to Islington, there to become a common labourer. 

Furthermore, once one branch had successfully made the trip and established a base camp, so to speak, it was very natural that other branches would follow. This is what seemed to happen with the American Wombwells. They were, as we put it somewhat pejoratively today, economic migrants.