Real estate agent Edward Wakefield was a good friend of James Mill, father of John Stuart Mill. Both were also educational philosophers, but Wakefield proved to be delinquent about his son Edward Gibbon’s poor behaviours, having left most of his upbringing to his wife, Susanna (née Crash).

Unable to cope with young Edward’s tantrums, Susanna dispatched him off to her stronger-willed mother-in-law, Priscilla Wakefield, for her attention: to no avail, however.

When Edward was eleven, Priscilla wrote back in 1807: “my mind painfully engaged in the perverseness of dear little Edward – his obstinacy if he inclines to evil terrifies me“ (his) “pertinacious inflexible temper makes me fear for his own happiness and of those connected with him” (he) “has a mind that requires delicate handling“.

By 1811, at fifteen years of age, Edward Gibbon Wakefield had already been expelled from three schools.

When Wakefield found himself in the infamous Newgate prison from 1827 to 1830 for abducting and marrying his second heiress wife, Ellen Turner, he thought up a brilliant idea to keep the plebs in their place. All the landed gentry needed to do in new countries such as Canada, the United States and Australia was to ensure that poor and middle class people couldn’t easily afford the price of a block of land. Land prices must be kept sufficiently high that they could only aspire to pay for a site in the longer term. So, if you had virtual slaves working much of their lives to be able to pay off the cost of their own parcel of land, you didn’t need to import convicts or slaves to work for you!

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POSTSCRIPT

It works! Rather than keeping land prices cheap, or at zero, by capturing the annual site rent for the public purse, taxing purchases and incomes and pumping land prices to the moon continues to work wonders for private banking and real estate interests: not so much for working people though!

As we’re about to find out shortly, that regularly backfires badly.