Abstract
ABSTRACTYounger sons of the gentry occupied a precarious and unstable position in society. They were born into wealthy and privileged families yet, within the system of primogeniture, were required to make their own way in the world. As elite men, their status rested on independence and patriarchal authority, attaining anything less could be deemed a failure. This article explores the way that these pressures on younger sons emerged, at a crucial point in the process of early adulthood, as anxiety on their part and on the part of their families. Using the correspondence of eleven English gentry families across this period, we explore the emotion of anxiety in this context: the way that it revealed ‘anxious masculinities’; the way anxiety was traded within an emotional economy; the uses to which anxiety was put. We argue that anxiety was an important and formative emotion within the gentry community and that the expression of anxiety persisted among younger sons and their guardians across this period. We therefore argue for continuity in the anxieties experienced within this emotional community.
Highlights
Younger sons of the gentry occupied a precarious and unstable position in society. They were born into wealthy and privileged families yet, within the system of primogeniture, were required to make their own way in the world. Their status rested on independence and patriarchal authority, attaining anything less could be deemed a failure
Using the correspondence of eleven English gentry families across this period, we explore the emotion of anxiety in this context: the way that it revealed ‘anxious masculinities’; the way anxiety was traded within an emotional economy; the uses to which anxiety was put
We argue that anxiety was an important and formative emotion within the gentry community and that the expression of anxiety persisted among younger sons and their guardians across this period
Summary
Under the system of primogeniture, younger sons inherited only a small portion of the ancestral estate and, from the late seventeenth century, very rarely any land They were positioned near the apex of social and gender privilege, but often reached adulthood fairly certain of a landless existence, uncertain of inheriting the resources to maintain this status, anxious about their capacity to earn their own livings and dependent on the honour of their families. The dynamics of family life, and the hidden selectivity of family archives, mean that, as Tables and show, some pivotal life events are much better documented than others, something James Daybell and Andrew Gordon note is a wider problem in collections of correspondence This reflects wider trends in which surviving letters often represent periods of change and crisis more strongly than periods of equilibrium. Epistolary cultures were ‘suffused with anxiety’ because of the separation of writer–reader, the lack of non-verbal communication, and tensions around paralanguage and
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