This book focuses on middle-class property in Leeds. Using the papers of various Leeds families, including letters and accounts, and a sample of probate records from 1830 to 1834, Morris studies the finances of middle-class families in Leeds, examining inheritance, trusts, and property ownership and development. Morris also studies family networks, though even here the focus is on how these networks influenced inheritance and other financial relationships. Gender is an important theme throughout, and the book ends with a discussion of attempts to reform married women's property law.

Much of the book consists of detailed family histories. Morris is able to take very complicated inheritance patterns and business relationships, many of which confused the participants, and tell a story that the reader can follow easily. These family financial histories are well researched, and contain a great amount of detail. The book also contains some data analysis, usually describing the percentage of cases in a sample that fall into different categories. For example, Morris identifies five different types of provisions for widows, and reports the frequency of each type of provision in a sample of wills. The statistics and graphs presented at various points in the book are not overly complicated and are well explained, so that even readers who are less than comfortable with quantitative history will have no trouble following the analysis. Morris handles the statistics well, and is aware of both their potential and their limitations. When using data on the “sworn value” of an estate in probate, for example, he carefully describes what this value does and does not mean. His confidence in using statistics is such that he is willing to make an estimate of the fraction of Leeds property held in trust (about 15 percent), while he is at the same time aware that this estimate requires “heroic assumptions” (p. 258).

From the family histories and data he presents, Morris draws some general conclusions about how middle-class families related to property. One concerns the “property cycle,” which describes the relationship between a man's age and the types of property he owned. Young men took an active part in business and began by borrowing working capital. As they accumulated resources their debts declined and their assets rose. After middle age men began to convert their assets into more passive forms that provided income without as much entrepreneurial labor, such as government notes or railroad shares. Early in the nineteenth century there was a shortage of such passive assets, and this explains why railroad shares sold so well when they appeared on the market.

We also learn about the inheritance patterns of the Leeds middle class. Widows were provided for, but usually did not receive ownership of the estate. Under English property law, if a widow remarried property that she owned became her new husband's, and might not pass to the children of the first husband. To avoid such conflicts, widows usually received only the income from property held in trust. The trust protected the inheritance of the children, while still providing for the widow. Most wills explicitly replaced dower with specific provisions for widows, an action which Morris suggests was intended to improve the certainty of property ownership rather than to reduce the widow's income.

Morris divides wills into three types according to their attitude towards specific objects owned. Some testators were “urban peasants” who passed on real estate and business capital to their heirs. Some testators, mostly women, were “things,” people who passed on specific items to specific individuals for personal reasons. Most testators, though, were “cash economy capitalists” who showed no concern for specific things but directed the executors to convert all assets into cash, pay outstanding debts, and then divide the remaining cash equally among the testator's heirs.

The Leeds middle class did not use primogeniture. Inheritances were equally divided among all children regardless of gender, though sons and daughters received their inheritances in different forms. Sons received liquid capital which they could use in business, whereas daughters usually received only the income from money held in trust. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall reach the same conclusion in their book Family Fortunes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), but whereas Davidoff and Hall emphasize the costs of this arrangement for women, Morris emphasizes its benefits. Morris suggests that the motivation for this difference was the law of couverture, which gave husbands control over property owned by their wives. The trust was a way of circumventing couverture, protecting the daughter's income from the bad decisions or bad luck of current or future husbands. The trust thus provided an important risk-spreading function for the middle class, protecting part of the family's assets should the husband be bankrupt. Thus, although Morris notes important differences in how men and women were treated, he suggests that these differences arose from the desire to protect women from unwise or unlucky men, and so fulfilled a valuable risk-spreading function for the middle class as a whole.