Middling Sort Research Articles

Sensibility and the American Revolution. By Sarah Knott. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xiv, 338 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 978-0-8078-3198-4. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-5918-6.)

Sensibility belongs as much to historians as to scholars of eighteenth-century literature. Sarah Knott appealingly bridges the two disciplines with her discerning, well-organized analysis of this cultural prism through which the “rights of man” were understood. Sympathetic friendship was a pervasive theme in revolutionary America, and sensibility was far more than an extravagant, easily ridiculed vocabulary. Sensibility had a “disruptive appeal” when the refined British spy John André was hanged, and it arose generally as patriots worked at “sustaining a cohesive army and supportive citizenry, forming communal bonds, knowing friend from foe” in the midst of war (p. 157). Sensibility as an American phenomenon was not confined to literary descriptions of vulnerable womanhood. It existed at the crossroads of medical and political thinking in Philadelphia. Exposing to light certain diseases of the mind, the study of nervous physiology yielded an improved understanding of human impulses. “The nervous body became an element of ordinary cultural life,” Knott explains. “Physicians were the primary agents of a dynamic popularization. They framed medicine as a set of modish ethics about self-formation, about the identifying and protecting of constitutions,” that extended from elite society to the middling sorts (p. 72). People learned that love of luxury produced indolence, too much excitability destroyed the faculty of reason, and nervous sympathies animated the soul.

A business education for ‘the middling sort of people’ in mercantilist Britain

The early modern period (1500–1800) saw England transformed from a relatively insignificant European nation into one of the world's leading economies. As the rate of economic change accelerated, the latter part of this era witnessed significant innovation in educational provision designed to meet the needs of a rapidly changing business and occupational landscape. The continued focus of grammar schools and universities on the supply of clerics and scholars ignored the growing administrative and managerial requirements of increasingly complex organisational entities located within the commercial and non-profit making sectors. Against a background of improved literacy, this paper reveals the creation of private schools and academies to satisfy new educational requirements, and that these institutions did so by devising a unified commercial education based on the inter-relationship between writing, arithmetic and double entry bookkeeping.

H. R. French. The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England, 1600–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. 305. $125.00 (cloth).

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'My purple will be too sad for that melancholy room': Furnishings for Interiors in London and Paris, 1660–1735

This article charts the changing use of particular textiles for bed and wall hangings by the 'middling sort' in London between 1660 and 1725, using some 1470 inventories of City freemen, filed in the Court of Orphans. It also tracks the, sometimes surprisingly dramatic, changes in colour preference. Both the materials and colour are then compared with data on bourgeois interiors in Paris. Having established what choices were made, the questions of how and why they were made are explored, including a discussion of certain economic, technological, social and cultural factors that may have influenced such decisions.

The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England, 1600-1750

The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England, 1600-1750

William Lambarde on the politics of enforcement in Elizabethan England*

The political life of early modern local communities has been the focus of intense historical attention in recent years. The question of how local politics were connected to national political debates remains obscure, however. An insight into this problem is provided by the document printed here, in which the antiquary and Kent J.P. William Lambarde lays out his views on the political motivations underpinning contributions to militia service and other local burdens. As well as illustrating the dynamics of policy formation within Elizabethan central and local government, he suggests that issues of national politics were of considerable importance in shaping local responses to government initiatives, among the ‘middling sort’ as well as the nobility and gentry.

The middle sort of people in provincial England, 1600-1750 - By Henry R. French

The middle sort of people in provincial England, 1600-1750 - By Henry R. French

"We Had Carding": Hospitable Card Play and Polite Domestic Sociability Among the Middling Sort in Eighteenth-Century England

England’s eighteenth century snapped and fizzed with novelty: new trade routes, new entertainments, and a newly wealthy merchant/professional class who suddenly had the means and the time to enjoy them all. A new leisure culture evolved, one of gentility and politeness, of ease and good company, and the rising middle classes were eager to sample its many delights. Of these lures, cards and their attendant wagers were among the most fashionable and the most daring: high-living aristocrats, playing to all hours and losing vast sums, had linked card games with irresponsibility and immorality. Both were death to trade and profession: how could the middling sort possibly circle this enticing flame and yet keep their wings unsinged? This paper explores the many ways in which this varied but slowly coalescing group adapted card play, including gaming at cards, to suit their own patterns of home-based hospitality. In taming this particular beast, middling hosts and guests exploited its potential for forming and strengthening neighbourly and professional bonds. Throughout this process, the emerging priorities of these men and women, at once vulnerable to the eddies of oceans and markets, are consistent. For the middling sort, genteel sociability and restraint partnered one another.

The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England 1600–1750 By H. R. French

<i>The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England 1600–1750</i> By H. R. French

Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820-1865

Becoming Bourgeois is the first study to focus on what historians have come to call the middling sort, the economic group falling between yeoman farmers and the planter class that dominated the antebellum South. At a time when Southerners rarely traveled far from their homes, these merchants annually ventured forth on buying junkets to northern cities. The southern merchant community promoted the kind of aggressive business practices that proponents of the New South would later claim as their own. Frank J. Byrne reveals the peculiar strains of modern liberal-capitalist and conservative thought that permeated the culture of southern merchants. By exploring the values men and women in merchant families espoused, Byrne not only offers new insight into southern history but also deepens our understanding of the mutable ties between regional identity and the marketplace in nineteenth-century America.

“Rich like a Lady”: Cross-Class Dressing in the Brothels and Theaters of Early Modern London

Recent scholarly work on the signifying power of clothing in early modern London has analyzed its erotic potential, but scholars generally have focused on cross-gender, rather than cross-class dressing.1 Specifically, much critical attention has been paid to the cultural anxieties created by men cross-dressing to impersonate women on the stage.2 When literary critics have studied female dress during this era, they often have focused on the threat to male authority posed by women cross-dressing as men.3 Cross-gender dress is of obvious interest to literary scholars since it reflects the theatrical practice of the boy actor and the device of the cross-dressed female, two significant elements of the drama of this era. Early modern English drama, however, also represents the practice of cross-class dressing by which men and women who dressed in opulent clothes passed for persons of higher social status. Archival evidence suggests that-at least among the middling sort who appeared in sexual-transgression cases before the Bridewell Court-cross-class dressing was a more prevalent practice among actual women in early modern London than cross-gender dressing.4 The same overtly theatrical, erotically stimulating, and disturbingly deceptive techniques of costuming, which scholars have studied with respect to men on the early modern stage, were being used by women in off-stage performances.5The most thoroughly documented instances of female cross-class dressing in early modern London take place in the context of illicit sexual activity. For example, Elizabeth Reignoldes, wife of a saddler, appeared before the Bridewell Court in August 1599 to testify against Mistress Miller and Mistress Wilkinson, who were accused of bawdry. Reignoldes describes how:. . . when she came first to Mistress Millers house the said Mistress Miller caused this examinate [i.e., witness] to putt on a crimson damask petticote of white and redd and a great farthingale covered over with yellow cotton and a rough velvett gowne with a payre of satten sleeves cutt with a here trayne cutt and a rabata [a type of fashionable standing collar] imbrodered with white flowers of needlework with a border of gold buttons with a white zer [a type of hat] uppon her head at whiche tyme [she had sexual relations with one of the Lord Chamberlain's men and Mistress Miller received half of her payment] . . . And this examinate saieth further that Mistress Wilkinson did usually send for her this examinate to her house when any gentlemen or cittizens did come to her house and this examinate went and, when she came thither, the sayd Mistress Wilkinson would most comonly take her and lead her upp into a chamber where a gentleman should be staying using theis wordes saying, I have brought you a gentlewoman that wanteth for that she hath an old man to her husband, and then Mistress Wilkinson would go downe agayne . . . the gentleman had the use and carnall knowledge of this examinate's body and most comonly this examinate had 4 shillings, 5 shillings, 6 shillings or 10 shillings. . . . (Bridewell Hospital Court Minute Books IV, fol. 101) 6Since the records note that her husband is a saddler, Reignoldes is no gentlewoman but plays the role of one in order to service the Lord Chamberlain's men, gentlemen, or citizens at Mistress Miller's and Mistress Wilkinson's houses. The sumptuous clothing Reignoldes wore at Mistress Miller's house, which is described in particular detail in the testimony, falsified Reignoldes's rank through dress for the benefit of her potential partner. Likewise, Mistress Wilkinson's assertion to the gentleman client that Reignoldes was a gentlewoman in need of occupying (a euphemism for sexual activity) suggests another instance when Reignoldes performed as someone above her class. Both bawds seem intent to match their clients with a woman who appears to be of an equivalent social status to them-or at least one who can play that role successfully for them. …

Oeconomiaand the Vegetative Soul: Rethinking Revenge inThe Spanish Tragedy

Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy creates a subtle apologia for the “middling sort” by challenging the socially constructed predicates of aristocratic privilege. A scrivener's son, Kyd undertsood oeconomia, or household management, as both the means for material advancement among the “middling sort” and a potential threat to aristocratic insularity. His translation of Torquato Tasso's The Householder's Philosophy, a work rarely studied by literary scholars, reveals an abiding interest in the political import of natural philosophy on class structure. More particularly, through his sophisticated revision of Aristotelian faculty psychology, Kyd appropriates early modern understandings of the vegetative soul—the source of all reproduction, nutrition, and growth inherent in all living things —to reveal middling ambition as a natural phenomenon. By representing the latent desire for growth and development as the consequence of an innate psychology, Kyd's play transforms revenge into an understandable outgrowth of thwarted ambition, a type of reproduction by absense, when all lawful means of material advancement become foreclosed. Rather than simply irrational and brutish, or, conversely, highly calculative, revenge appears throughout Kyd's play as instinctively reproductive as well.

To School or Not to School: Tudor Views on Education in Drama and Literature

Historians of education have identified the sixteenth century as a period of growth in endowed schooling which in turn led to increased education levels in the lower and middling orders of English society. This broadening of the enrolment base (for boys) gave rise to a number of problems at grammar school level such as discrimination in student selection criteria, issues with retention rates, and tailoring the curriculum to suit the differing needs of students. An examination of a number of prominent pedagogical treatises in circulation in the sixteenth century together with selected Elizabethan and Jacobean plays can provide insights into the Tudor education debate and its implications for the poor and middling sort.

The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia. By Michael A. McDonnell. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xx, 544 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8078-3108-3.)

In this volume, Michael A. McDonnell succeeds more fully than earlier neoprogressive historians in displacing the prevailing consensus view that a stable, well-supported planter elite led Virginia through the revolutionary era with little change to the commonwealth's hierarchical social and political order. Instead, he suggests that leading planters struggled with ordinary Virginians who held very different ideas on how to organize their society and to fight and finance the war. Those ordinary Virginians refused to fight or make other sacrifices when they perceived that doing so simply served the interests of their “betters” or that they were carrying a disproportionate share of the human or financial costs. They wanted to fight on their own terms rather than those dictated by traditional forms of military discipline. McDonnell recognizes important divisions within Virginia's non-elite population. The struggle of black Virginians against enslavement provoked fear among poorer whites, as well as resentment of the rich who profited from that dangerous human property. Equally important, poorer white landowners initially joined the gentry in imposing on landless whites much of the burden of military service. By the war's closing years, the need for more soldiers to defend Virginia and the ability of the “lower sort” to extract greater compensation for enlistments led state leaders to demand more military service and financial sacrifice from middle-class Virginians. The resulting, often violent, resistance of the “middling sort” crippled military mobilization and induced county-level leaders to ignore state authorities and accede to their neighbors' demands. Beginning in the late war years, the strength of such popular sentiments compelled county officials and state legislators to impose on Virginia's wealthiest citizens a greater share of the costs of raising troops and other government services.

Introduction

Introduction

‘The middling order are odious characters’: social structure and urban growth in colonial Charleston, South Carolina

In recent years, the idea that Britain and its northern American colonies were part of a single ‘British Atlantic world’ has provided historians of both the Old World and the New with a novel perspective from which to explore their subjects during the long eighteenth century. With a case study of Charleston, South Carolina, this essay extends British categories of analysis across the Atlantic to uncover the origins of an American middle class. Emphasis is placed on the simultaneous consideration of all arenas of identity formation, with a view to demonstrating that examining either the cultural sphere or the economic one cannot bring a genuine understanding of the coherence of this eighteenth-century middling sort. Investigating the emergence of this social group in the widest possible sense, I show how the economic experience of these middling people forged common values which then found their expression in the cultural and political sphere. Since this middle sort achieved such coherence before 1776 I suggest that we must move away from accounts that depict colonial society as a place of binary opposites and occupational groupings, for such models cannot convey the complexity of the British Atlantic urban society that took shape during this era.

"The Manufacture and Lingua-facture of Ballad-Making ": Broadside Ballads in Long Eighteenth-Century Ballad Discourse

1.As Tessa Watt has observed, Any study of impact of printing in England must take account of fact that one of first widespread and widely affordable forms of printed word was song. Ballads were among earliest products of press, and they were also among largest classes of printed materials. Some three thousand distinct were printed 1550 and 1600, and number of circulating during this period may have reached as high as between 3 and 4 million.1 In 1557, Stationers' Company received its royal charter of incorporation, and from about 1586, a small number of stationers began buying up newly created rights to copy ballads. In 1612, printing of became exclusive right of five printers, and in 1624, this consolidation of rights culminated in formation of a syndicate called partners.2 Because it was more profitable to reprint for which one already held copyright than to acquire new materials, economic imperatives in effect made these stationers custodian[s] of tradition.3 Their warehouse of stock would influence market... for next three hundred years.4 By late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when scholars first began collecting from oral recitation rather than from print and manuscript sources, many of that they transcribed from the mouths of people may have owe[d] their survival to reinforcement of printed word.5The eighteenth century saw vast expansion of print trades throughout Britain. It also saw emergence of a substantial printed discourse about ballads. In commentaries in periodicals, in prefaces to printed collections of ballads, in essays printed in these collections, and elsewhere, a wide variety of authors commented both negatively and positively on balladry as a hybrid oral and textual practice. Today, many scholars follow great nineteenth-century scholar Francis James Child (1825-1896) in dividing into two principal categories, traditional (or popular) and broadside ballads, but in early eighteenth century this conceptual division did not exist. As Albert B. Friedman observes:The traditional (Sir Patrick Spens, Edward, and like)... canonized in Professor Child's monumental collection ... [were] not even tentatively differentiated from other until well along in eighteenth century. Before that time, a ballad, so far as either men of letters or plain citizens were concerned, was a doggerel poem written to a familiar tune, printed on a folio sheet or long slip, and sold at bookstalls or hawked about streets by ballad-singers.6For many eighteenth-century commentators, term ballad implicitly referred to a broadside ballad. In a 1735 letter to The Grub-street Journal, one Democritus condemned scandalous practice of ballad-singing as:the bane of all good manners and morals ... a continual nursery for idlers, whores, and pick-pockets; a school for scandal, smut, and debauchery; where our youth of either sex (of lower class especially) receive first taint, which by degrees so contaminates mind, that, with every slight temptation, they become abandoned, lewd, and strangers to all shame.He then argued that printers of (that is, broadside ballads) should have to pay stamp taxes as newspaper printers had to do:I am not so much of a lawyer, as to determine, whether come under stamp act, tho' it seems reasonable to suppose it. ... And pray, what reason can there be, that your Journal, and all other news-papers, should pay a duty to government, and yet every filthy ballad, that tends to nothing but poisoning minds of our youth, should pay no duty at all?7For Democritus, ballads are a hybrid oral and textual form linked to commercial printing. They are also associated with the middle sort and the lower class especially rather than with elites. …

Domesticating the West: The Re-creation of the Nineteenth-Century American Middle Class

The relatively new study of the American middle class suffers from a lack of definition. Who was part of the middle class? What did being middle class entail? Answers are vague and elusive, which makes the concept difficult to quantify. Still, the study of the “middling sorts” is crucial to understanding nineteenth-century American history, and many historians are contributing to fill the gap. One of these scholars is Brenda K. Jackson, assistant professor of history at Belmont University. Jackson uses one couple, Thomas and Elizabeth Tannatt, to trace the movement of the middle class westward to the Inland Empire of eastern Washington. Using a biographical narrative, she illustrates that many middleclass Americans moved west after the Civil War to bolster their position, which was slipping in the East due to diminished opportunities. The Tannatts sought position through heavy involvement in community boosterism and local benevolent efforts, as did others in the period.

Samplers, Gentility, and the Middling Sort

Samplers are an important, yet often overlooked, component of class and identity formation in early America. This article reevaluates the genteel practices of the middling sort through analysis of ten samplers produced between 1798 and 1802 at Leah Galligher's school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Rather than emulating the upper sorts, these samplermakers incorporated gentility within their rank's pattern of life to produce a sense of middle‐class cohesion. Used by the schoolmistress to bolster her own suspect respectability and by her students as markers of their intermediate social position, the samplers reveal a complicated relationship between the middling sort and refinement.

History: The Long Eighteenth Century

Architectural history has much to learn from the field of history, such as a more thoughtful self-consciousness about matters of evidence and periodization, narrative and causal ity, agency and structure. But these general methodological issues are not my concern here. Rather, I start from Nancy Stieber's questions: What can we learn from those study ing space and the built environment in other disciplines and, in turn, what can we teach them?1 Ultimately, it is Stieber's second question, What can we teach them?, that interests me most. Critical for our discipline is the further question, What can architectural history teach history, that history might not learn by other means? As example I take a spatiotemporal unit of history with which there is a rich architectural correspondence: the period in British history denominated the eighteenth defined to stretch roughly from the Glorious Rev olution of 1688, when William Ill's ascendance launched Protestantism's and Whiggery's dominance, to the Reform Act crisis of 1830-32, which marks the eclipse of Britain's ancien r?gime. Recent work by architectural historians Bar bara Arciszewska, Dana Arnold, and Elizabeth McKellar invokes by name the long eighteenth century, but without the aim of explicating the period's historiographical issues, its lessons for architectural history, or the lessons architec tural historians might conversely teach historians. To sketch out these matters will help architectural history learn from (and then teach to) the long eighteenth century. Historians today identify a series of themes central to Britain's long eighteenth century. First, the period has come to be identified with linked consumer and financial revolu tions in which an expanding domestic marketplace for goods, services, and credit was changing British society irreversibly.2 Historians focus both on the rise of con sumption among the general middling sort as well as on the roles of London's powerful financial elite, a cosmopolitan plutocracy that challenged traditional landed interests at the economic, political, and moral levels but whose iden tity and extra-commercial activities remain opaque despite a wealth of historiographical interest.3 Surprisingly, histo rians and architectural historians have largely left architec ture out of their discussion of the long eighteenth century's consumer and financial revolutions. This despite the built environment's obviously important role in accommodating institutions of change, from assembly halls to banks; in sym bolizing the rising classes' cultural identities at home, work, and play; and in ameliorating the shock of the new by over laying the virtues of familiar order onto the unnerving fren zies of modern capitalism, as in the classicized market spaces of the City of London. A second related theme involves what historian Kath