‘A helpless class of shareholder’: newspapers and the City of Glasgow Bank failure

Thomas A. Lee

Accounting History Review, 2012, vol. 22, issue 2, 143-159

Abstract: The 1878 failure of the City of Glasgow Bank (CGB) was a significant event in the history of auditing and became the catalyst to remove the unlimited liability of bank shareholders. This study assesses the role of newspapers in relation to the failure. Newspapers typically portrayed CGB shareholders as socially vulnerable and financially ruined investors with small shareholdings. The study tests the accuracy of this stereotyping by comparing newspaper accounts with archival data of shareholders’ personal characteristics and financial circumstances. The analyses show that, at failure, CGB shareholders typically had significant shareholdings and were very different from their newspaper stereotype. Post failure, despite extraordinary share calls, a small minority of shareholders entered bankruptcy administration and a large majority revealed signs of relative prosperity. These inconsistencies are reviewed in the context of the Victorian press and an investing middle class.

Date: 2012
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/21552851.2012.681125 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:acbsfi:v:22:y:2012:i:2:p:143-159

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rabf21

DOI: 10.1080/21552851.2012.681125

Access Statistics for this article

Accounting History Review is currently edited by Stephen Walker

More articles in Accounting History Review from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().