This article explores the living arrangements and familial relations of small business households in northwest English towns between 1760 and 1820. Focusing on evidence from inventories and personal writing, it examines the homes that such households lived and worked in and the ways in which space was ordered and used: indicating that access to particular spaces was determined by status. This study suggests both the continuance of the ‘‘household family’’ into the nineteenth century (rather than its more modern, ‘‘nuclear’’ variant) and the existence of keenly felt gradations of status within households making it likely that the constitution of ‘‘the family’’ differed according to one’s place in the domestic hierarchy.
John Rylands Library, Diary of George Heywood, Eng MS 703 (subsequentlyHeywood ), 12.
2.
Ralph A. Houlbrooke, The English Family, 1450-1700 (London: Longman, 1984), 109; Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987), 364-9; Catherine Hall, ‘‘The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick-maker: The Shop and the Family in the Industrial Revolution,’’ in White, Male and Middle-Class: explorations in feminism and history (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 108-23; Jennifer Dawn Melville, ‘‘The use and organisation of domestic space in late seventeenth-century London’’’ (Cambridge PhD thesis, 1998), 20-1; Owen Ash-more, The Industrial Archaeology of Lancashire (Newton Abbott: David & Charles, 1969); Owen Ash-more, The Industrial Archaeology of Stockport (Manchester: Department of Extra Mural Studies, University of Manchester, 1975); R. J. Morris, ‘‘Family Strategies and the Built environment in Leeds in the 1830s and 1840s,’’ Northern History 37 (2000): 193-214. Thus, while trade directories sometimes listed separate addresses for an individual’s home and workplace between 1760 and 1820, these were generally one and the same for those engaged in retailing and most forms of small-scale production.
3.
Peter Laslett and Richard Wall, eds., Household and Family in Past Time: Comparative Studies in the Size and Structure of the Domestic Group Over the Last Three Centuries in England, France, Serbia, Japan and colonial North America, With Further Materials from Western Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (London: Collins, 1976); Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977); E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1591-1821 (London: Edward Arnold, 1981); R. B. Outhwaite, ed., Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage (London: Europa, 1981); Alan MacFarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1500-1840 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986); Naomi Tadmor, ‘‘The concept of the household-family in eighteenth-century England,’’ Past and Present 151 (1996).
4.
Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class (London: Methuen, 1989), 212-8. Peter Laslett’s mean household size for the early modern period was 4.8: P. Laslett, ‘‘Size and structure of the household in England over three centuries,’’ Population Studies 23 (1969): 199-223.
5.
Athenaeum Library, Liverpool, 1801 census enumerators’ book. This appears to be the only census listing pre-1841, which survives for any major northwest town: Richard Wall, Matthew Woollard, and Beatrice Moring ‘‘Census Schedules and Listings, 1801-1831: An Introduction and Guide,’’ 2004, http://www.histpop.org/pre41/. See also P. Laxton, ‘‘Liverpool in 1801: Manuscript Return for the First National Census of Population,’’ Transactions of the Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 130 (1980): 73-113.
6.
John Ralston, Views of the Ancient Buildings in Manchester (Manchester: D. and P. Jackson, 1823-1825); William Herdman, Pictorial Relics of Ancient Liverpool (Liverpool: H. Graves & Co., 1843); Athenaeum Library, Liverpool, Collection of Drawings by James Brierley of Liverpool Buildings.
7.
Peter Guillery, The Small House in Eighteenth-Century London: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 40. John Summerson made the same point earlier in his Georgian London (London: Pleiades Books, 1945).
8.
William Green, Map of Manchester and Salford (1794); Bancks’ Plan of Manchester and Salford (1832); Richard Horwood, Plan ... of Liverpool (1803). Although pre-Ordinance Survey maps are not always reliable and some caution needs to be exercised when using them for dating purposes or to reveal the outline plans of buildings: see Paul Laxton, ‘‘The Evidence of Richard Horwood’s Maps for Residential Building in London 1799-1819’, London Journal 24, no. 1 (1999): 1-22.
9.
John Schofield, Medieval London Houses (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994); Anthony Quiney, Town Houses of Medieval Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003).
10.
Earle, Making of the English Middle Class, 210-2. Earle based his findings on inventories and measured wealth according to the same sources. In 1797, it was stated that two small rooms were typically all that a poorer household in Manchester could afford: F. M. Eden, The State of the Poor, 3 vols. (London: B. & J. White, 1797), ii, 356-7; Jacqueline Roberts, Working Class Housing in Nineteenth-Century Manchester, 2nd ed. (Manchester: The author, 1999), 2; Joseph Aston, The Manchester Guide (Manchester 1804), 276-7.
11.
For a summary of these surveys before 2000 see Tom Arkell, ‘‘Interpreting Probate Inventories,’’ in When Death Do Us Part: Understanding and Interpreting the Probate Records of Early Modern England, eds., Tom Arkell, Nesta Evans, and Nigel Goose (Oxford: Leopard’s Head Press, 2000), 89-92.
12.
Giorgio Riello, ‘‘Things Seen and Unseen’’: Inventories and the Representation of the Domestic Interior in Early Modern Europe, Unpublished paper, May 2009, pp. 19, 31. Quoted with the author’s permission. Also see Mark Overton, Jane Whittle, Darron Dean, and Andrew Hann, Production and Consumption in English Households, 1600-1750 (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 14-8; John Bedell, ‘‘Archaeology and Probate Inventories in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Life,’’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31, no. 2 (Autumn 2000): 223-245.
13.
Jeff and Nancy Cox, ‘‘Probate 1500-1800: A System in Transition,’’ in When Death Do Us Part, eds., Arkell, Evans and Goose, 27; John S. Moore, ‘‘Probate Inventories: Problems and Prospects,’’ in Probate Records and the Local Community, ed. Philip Riden (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1985), 27; Riello, ‘‘Things Seen and Unseen,’’ 37-44.
14.
Moore, ‘‘Probate Inventories,’’ 17.
15.
Margaret Ponsonby , ‘‘Ideals, Reality and Meaning: Homemaking in England in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,’’Journal of Design History16, no. 3 (2003): 201-14, 204.
16.
Overton et al., Production and Consumption, 15; Riello, ‘‘Things Seen and Unseen,’’ 31.
17.
Although Riello, on a basis of a sample of late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century London inventories, argues that the appraiser might often be local, and familiar with the social and cultural milieu of the home in question: Riello, ‘‘Things Seen and Unseen,’’ 21.
18.
Inventory of Robert Barlow, whitesmith, Manchester, 1772, Lancashire Record Office, WCW, 1772; Inventory of James Barlow, chapman, Manchester, 1759, Lancashire Record Office, WCW, 1759.
19.
Jon Stobart , ‘‘Accommodating the Shop: The Commercial Use of Domestic Space in English Provincial Towns, c.1660-1740,’’Città e Storia, II, 2007, 2, 351-363, 354.
20.
Stobart, ‘‘Accommodating the Shop,’’ 351-63.
21.
Will of Robert Barlow, whitesmith, Manchester, 1772, Lancashire Record Office, WCW, 1772.
22.
Inventory of Robert Barlow, whitesmith, Manchester, 1772, Lancashire Record Office, WCW, 1772.
23.
Inventory of William Dickinson, grocer/chandler, Liverpool, 1766 Lancashire Record Office, WCW, 1766.
24.
Inventory of Daniel Higham, Hatmaker, Stockport, 1798, Cheshire and Chester Archives and Local Studies Service, WS 1798.
25.
Inventory of Jonathan Rushton, innkeeper, Macclesfeild, 1771, Cheshire and Chester Archives and Local Studies Service, WC 1771.
26.
Lorna Weatherill , Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660-1760 (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 10.
27.
Sarah Pennell, ‘‘‘Pots and Pans History:’’ The Material Culture of the Kitchen in Early Modern England,’ Journal of Design History 11, no. 3 (1998): 201-16, 202. The study of Priestly and Corfield of Norwich houses puts the latest use of the term ‘‘fire house’’ as 1684: Ursula Priestley and Penelope Corfield, ‘‘Rooms and room use in Norwich, 1580-1730,’’ Post-medieval Archaeology 16 (1982): 93-123, 103.
28.
Susan Denyer, Traditional Buildings and Life in the Lake District (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd/Peter Crawley, 1991), 18. Ponsonby argues that overall the use of the term ‘‘house place’’ died out but points to its continued usage in rural areas in a Shropshire farmer’s inventory from 1804, and in a tradesman’s account book from Stone, a small town in Staffordshire, in the 1820s and 1930s: Margaret Ponsonby, Stories from Home: English Domestic Interiors, 1750-1850 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 105, 136.
29.
Priestly and Corfield, ‘‘Room Use,’’ 106; Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour, 150; Ponsonby, Stories from Home, 105; Guillery’s analysis of comparable small business homes in London, in this case, the homes of affluent weavers in Spitalfields, also suggests that the term kitchen was used here. Guillery, The Small London House, 100. However, Stobart’s analysis of shop keeping homes in the early eighteenth century suggests that this term was still in common use in these homes: Stobart, ‘‘Accommodating the Shop,’’ 358-9, 362.
30.
Schofield, Medieval London Houses; John Schofield, ‘‘Urban Housing in England, 1400-1600,’’ in The Age of Transition: The Archaeology of English Culture 1400-1600, eds., David Gaimster and Paul Stamper (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1997); Frank Brown, ‘‘Continuity and Change in the Urban House: Developments in Domestic Space Organisation in Seventeenth-Century London,’’ Comparative Studies in Society and History xxviii/4 (1986): 558-90.
31.
Stobart, ‘‘Accommodating the Shop,’’ 358.
32.
The Autobiography of William Stout of Lancaster, 1665-1752, ed. J. D. Marshall (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1967), 75, 80. See also Priestley and Corfield, ‘‘Rooms and room use in Norwich, 1580-1730’’; Melville, ‘‘The Use and Organisation of Domestic Space in Late Seventeenth-Century London,’’ 228-9.
33.
Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour, 11.
34.
Nathaniel W. Alcock, ‘‘Physical Space and Social Space,’’ in Meaningful Architecture: Social Interpretations of Buildings, ed. Martin Locock (Aldershot: Avebury, 1994), 207-30; Melville, ‘‘The Use and organisation of Domestic Space in Late Seventeenth-Century London.’’
35.
Liverpool Record Office, 920/COL 1-2, Life and ledger of John Coleman, c. 1797 (hereafter Coleman); Wellcome Library, Letter-book of Joshua Dixon, 1764-5, MS.2196 (hereafter, Dixon); Heywood.
36.
Melville, ‘‘The Use and Organisation of Domestic Space in Late Seventeenth-Century London,’’ 39. Dixon, p. 87: to William Shaw, 21 January 1765.
37.
Dixon, p. 8: to William Tate, November 2, 1764.
38.
Dixon, p. 54: to his mother, November 30, 1764.
39.
Dixon, p. 93: to his mother, January 28, 1765.
40.
Dixon, p. 130: to his mother, May 4, 1765.
41.
Dixon, p. 81: letter to his mother, January 19, 1765.
42.
Dixon, p. 109: to Jos. Pattison, March 9, 1765.
43.
Dixon, p. 130: to his aunt, April 23, 1765.
44.
Dixon, p. 3.
45.
Michael Morris, Medieval Manchester: A Regional Study (Manchester: Greater Manchester Archaelogical Unit, 1983), 34-51; C. W. Chalklin, The Provincial Towns of Georgian England: A Study of the Building Process (London: Edward Arnold, 1974), 89-98.
46.
The building appears in several early nineteenth-century prints: Ralston, Views of the Ancient Buildings in Manchester, plates 4 and 9; Chetham’s Library, Manchester Scrapbook, c. 1820, fo, 60 1822.
47.
Brown, ‘‘Continuity and Change,’’ 284-5; H. C. Morton, ‘‘A technical study of housing in Liverpool 1760-1938’’ (unpublished M.Arch. thesis, University of Liverpool, 1967), vol. C. p. 101.
48.
Earle, Making of the English Middle Class, 213; Bridget Hill, Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 12.
49.
Tadmor, ‘‘The Concept of the Household-Family in Eighteenth-Century England.’’
50.
Coleman, 3.
51.
Coleman, 49-51, 58, 60.
52.
Ann Owen appears in Pigot’s Manchester & Salford Directory for 1811 as ‘‘Ann Owen, wholesale grocer and tea dealer, 39 Hanging Ditch.’’ She was listed at the Hanging Ditch address until 1817, when she appears to have moved to 19 Withy Grove.
53.
Heywood, 42.
54.
Heywood, 43.
55.
Heywood, 45.
56.
Heywood, 15, 22, 29.
57.
Heywood, 22, 29.
58.
Heywood, 15, 28, 29, 42.
59.
Heywood, 36, 46, 69, 77.
60.
Pigot’s Manchester & Salford Directory for 1815 lists ‘‘Roylance and Jones, wholesale grocers and tobacconists, 43 Hanging Ditch’’ and as ‘‘grocers, 18 Old Millgate.’’
61.
Heywood, 69.
62.
Heywood, 36.
63.
Heywood, 38,
64.
Margaret Hunt, ‘‘Wife Beating, Domesticity and Women’s Independence in Eighteenth-Century London,’’ Gender and History 4, no. 1 (1992): 10-33; Amanda Vickery, ‘‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres?: A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History,’’ Historical Journal 36 (1993): 383-414.
65.
See Melville, ‘‘The Use and Organisation of Domestic Space in Late seventeenth-Century London,’’ 126.
66.
Tim Meldrum , ‘‘Domestic Service, Privacy and Eighteenth-Century Metropolitan Households,’’Urban Historyxxvi, no. 1 (1999): 27-39, 33-4.
67.
Jones’s paternalism might have been common in smaller households, where servants were treated as family members: Hill, Servants, 10-11. Indeed, Hill has shown that blood relatives were employed as domestic servants in some households (chap. 6) though there is no suggestion that this was the case here.
68.
Heywood, 40.
69.
Coleman, 30-1.70.
70.
Heywood, 7.
71.
Heywood, 54.
72.
Heywood, 55.
73.
Heywood, 55; Melville, ‘‘The Use and Organisation of Domestic Space in Late Seventeenth-Century London,’’ 19, 140-4.
74.
The shop and house at 18 Old Millgate appears in a sketch by Thomas Barritt from 1819: Central Reference Library, local images coll. m79357.
75.
Heywood, 76.
76.
Heywood, 79.
77.
Heywood, 96.
78.
Heywood, 54.
79.
Tadmor, ‘‘The Concept of the Household-Family in Eighteenth-Century England.’’
80.
Hill, Servants, chap. 6.
81.
Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800; Lawrence Stone and J. C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540-1880 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984); Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980); Priestley and Corfield, ‘‘Rooms and Room Use in Norwich Housing, 1580-1730’’; Brown, ‘‘Continuity and Change in the Urban House’’; Christoph Heyl, ‘‘We are not at Home: Protecting Domestic Privacy in post-Fire Middle-Class London,’’ London Journal 27, no. 2 (2002): 12-33.
82.
For more complicated readings of privacy in this period, see Tim Meldrum, ‘‘Domestic service, privacy and eighteenth-century metropolitan households,’’ Urban History xxvi, no. 1 (1999): 27-39; Amanda Vickery, ‘‘An Englishman’s Home is his Castle? Thresholds, Boundaries and Privacies in the Eighteenth-Century London House,’’ Past and Present 199 (2008): 147-73.
