the practice was restricted to members of'polite society', often country house owners in their own right, who would be admitted quite informally, usually by the housekeeper whom they would tip (Plate 126). A shift towards the current pattern of mass visiting took place in the mid-nineteenth century as the railways opened up the countryside to city dwellers on day trips. Especially in the Midlands, great houses were open on set days and drew many thousands of visitors a year. However, as Peter Mandler has shown in The Fall and the Stately Home, most such houses shut their doors the late nineteenth early twentieth centuries. Faced with an increasingly hostile economic and political climate, owners no longer felt obliged to admit the public.