Return of Owners of Land, 1873

The Return of Owners of Land, 1873 presents the first complete picture of the distribution of landed property in the British Isles since the original Domesday Book dating from 1086. The 1873 Return is also sometimes referred to as the "Modern Domesday". It arose from the desire of the Victorian governing landed classes, many of whom sat in the House of Lords, to counter the rising public clamour encouraged by some parts of the press about what was called the "monopoly of land". Karl Marx (d.1883) had been resident in London since 1849 and had published his Das Kapital in 1867 thus influencing political thought on the Continent and consequently prompting a concerned British Establishment to rapidly extinguish any spark of revolutionary sentiment in the United Kingdom.