A Case Study of Defoe's Domestic Conduct Manuals Suggested by The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 LAURA A. CURTIS In his seminal book The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800, Lawrence Stone locates the origin of family life as we know it today in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. He distinguishes the modern family from its patriarchal predecessor by its closer, warmer relations and more equal distribution of power between husband and wife and parents and children. This new struc ture Stone calls "affective individualism." Underlying affective individualism were cultural values not, how ever, entirely new. Similar values had appeared briefly in earlier pe riods of other societies, but always among the wealthy urban profes sional and entrepreneurial bourgeoisie. What enabled these ideas to persist in England, Stone argues, was their germination among the "squirarchy," the predominant class politically, culturally, and so cially, with a "near monopoly of high prestige and status."1 The in corporation of the values of affective individualism among the landed elite in a new and appropriate family structure was unprecedented in Western history. Not only did the gentry adopt the family structure of the wealthy 409 410 / CURTIS urban bourgeoisie; it allied itself culturally with its city cousins in a common desire "to pursue whatever was the fashionable mode."2 The result was a "homogeneous social unit" that constituted a "car rier elite" for disseminating the ideas of affective individualism throughout the entire English population. "Thanks to the extraordi nary homogeneity of English elite society, and the ease of cultural and social connections between the landed classes and the wealthy bourgeoisie from the late seventeenth century," asserts Stone, "the latter's ideas about domestic behavior soon spread to the squirarchy, with Locke's Some Thoughts upon Education and Addison's Spectator as the key instruments of their propagation."3 Although critics have challenged various of Stone's theories, so far as I know, no one has as yet questioned his assertion that there was an essential identity of belief between the urban upper middle classes and the squirarchy. I propose, therefore, to focus more closely upon the horizontal movement taken for granted by Stone, in an effort to determine more precisely what ideas were being transmitted and to whom. Instead of dealing in detail with "universally read didactic writers like Locke, Addison, Steele and others," the importance of whose writing in creating fashion Stone points out is "impossible to overestimate,"41 will concentrate on Daniel Defoe, the importance of whose highly popular domestic conduct manuals is only too fre quently underestimated because, like much of his most influential anonymous writing, they were not generally attributed to him by his contemporaries, and the identity of their author was totally unknown to most later readers. Close examination of Defoe's works reveals: (1) the model of family structure he popularized so widely is closer to late seventeenth cen tury Nonconformist structure than to affective individualism; (2) the sequence in readership he projected for his manuals between 1715 and 1722 was increasingly the country gentry but decreasingly the wealthy and fashionable London upper middle class; and (3) Defoe's advice on domestic conduct is closer to Locke, who wrote to the middle-aged country gentleman, than to Addison, who wrote to the young, wealthy, and fashionable urban bourgeois. These conclusions suggest the need for modification of Stone's striking generalizations about the history of family structure in England: the late seventeenthcentury Nonconformist family seems to have endured as a model for the gentry, with affective individualism gaining adherents mainly among wealthy urban professionals and entrepreneurs. Furthermore, close examination of the ideas, the characters, and the style of writing in Defoe's domestic conduct manuals between Defoe's Domestic Conduct Manuals I 411 1715 and 1722 puts into question the orthodoxy of literary historians that Defoe, "a member of the vigorous and durable group of Noncon formist tradesmen," spoke "for and to the members of his own class."5 Instead, analysis of the domestic conduct manuals suggests that the anonymous Defoe was widely read by many social classes and that twentieth-century scholars may be only just discovering the truth of...
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May 1, 1988
Humphrey R Southall 
