Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850"Family Fortunes is a major groundbreaking study that will become a classic in its field. I was fascinated by the information it provided and the argument it established about the role of gender in the construction of middle-class values, family life, and property relations. "The book explores how the middle class constructed its own institutions, material culture and values during the industrial revolution, looking at two settings—urban manufacturing Birmingham and rural Essex—both centers of active capitalist development. The use of sources is dazzling: family business records, architectural designs, diaries, wills and trusts, newspapers, prescriptive literature, sermons, manuscript census tracts, the papers of philanthropic societies, popular fiction, and poetry. "Family Fortunes occupies a place beside Mary Ryan's The Cradle of the Middle Class and Suzanne Lebsock's Free Women of Petersburg. It provides scholars with a definitive study of the middle class in England, and facilitates a comparative perspective on the history of middle-class women, property, and the family."—Judith Walkowitz, Johns Hopkins University |
Contents
Foreword | 9 |
Setting the scene | 36 |
Introduction | 73 |
men women | 107 |
Doctrines on manliness Doctrines on femininity The ministry | 130 |
Laymen and women | 140 |
domestic ideology and | 149 |
The Queen Caroline affair Middleclass readers and writers | 180 |
Introduction | 319 |
the creation of the middleclass home | 357 |
men women and the public sphere | 416 |
Epilogue | 450 |
470 | |
531 | |
542 | |
560 | |
Introduction | 195 |
men and the enterprise | 229 |
women and the enterprise | 272 |
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Common terms and phrases
19th century activities Anglican Ann Taylor areas associated bankers became Birmingham brother Bury St Edmunds census census sample cent centre chapel Chelmsford church clergy clubs Colchester Colchester Hospital congregation Cowper culture daughter Dissenting domestic duties early nineteenth century economic Edgbaston eighteenth century England enterprise Essex and Suffolk established Evangelical farmers farming father female feminine friends garden gender gentry girls History household heads husband income independent Ipswich Jane John Angell James labour ladies living London Luckcock male manufacturers marriage married Marsh masculine meeting merchants mid century middle middle-class minister moral mother nonconformist organization particularly political professional Quaker radical religious rural Samuel Courtauld serious Christians servants sexual sisters social Society sphere status Sunday school Taylor town trade Unitarian University of Essex Victorian village widows wife William Cowper Witham wives woman women wrote young