Manners and class in the revolutionary era: A transatlantic comparison

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 63, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 345-372

  Hemphill, C Dallett ^a  

^a URSINUS COLLEGE   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 65849206245     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (234)

1. Benjamin Rush, Autobiography, ed. George W. Corner (Princeton, N.J., 1948), 25, 27, 30, 79, 85
2. J. H. Hexter, "The Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England," in Reappraisals in History (London, 1961), 71-116
3. For useful discussions of the problem, see Jonathan Barry, introduction to The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550-1800, ed. Barry and Christopher Brooks (Basingstoke, Eng., 1994), 1-11
4. and the editors' introduction to The Making of the British Middle Class? Studies of Regional and Cultural Diversity since the Eighteenth Century, ed. Alan Kidd and David Nicholls (London, 1998), xv-xvi
5. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963)
6. For an example of the recognition of the rise of the middle classes in pre-Hexter scholarship, see A. S. Turberville, English Men and Manners in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, Eng., 1926), 129
7. For an overview of these periods, see John E. Mason, Gentlefolk in the Making: Studies in the History of English Courtesy Literature and Related Topics from 1531 to 1774 (Philadelphia, 1935), 46-49, 58-82. A number of historians have discussed in the British context the middling authors, publication histories, and contents of some of the works that I have analyzed in the American context
8. See Mason, Gentlefolk in the Making, 85, 94, 102-5, 210-18, 270
9. Harold Nicolson, Good Behaviour: Being a Study of Certain Types of Civility (Boston, 1960), 194, 230-31
10. Joan Wildeblood and Peter Brinson, The Polite World: A Guide to English Manners and Deportment from the Thirteenth to the Nineteenth Century (London, 1965), 36-40
11. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago, 1987), 60-62, 167, 170
12. Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727-1783, New Oxford History of England (Oxford, Eng., 1989), 464, 483, 569-70, 606-7
13. G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992), esp. 77, 207, 213, 264-65, 289-99, 345-46
14. Christopher Brooks, "Apprenticeship, Social Mobility and the Middling Sort, 1550-1800," in Barry and Brooks, Middling Sort of People, 81-83
15. Shani D'Cruze, "The Middling Sort in Eighteenth-Century Colchester: Independence, Social Relations and the Community Broker," ibid., 187
16. Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and Family in England, 1680-1789 (Berkeley, Calif., 1996), 75-76, 200
17. John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1997), 181-82, 264
18. I will be drawing some arguments and evidence from my own Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620-1860 (New York, 1999), esp. chap. 4, 65-86, but I am placing and reconsidering them here in a wholly new comparative context
19. In addition to work on Britain, I will be comparing my findings with work on the American colonial South, esp. Michal J. Rozbicki, The Complete Colonial Gentleman: Cultural Legitimacy in Plantation America (Charlottesville, Va., 1998)
20. Bertram Wyatt-Brown pioneered the antebellum case in Wyatt-Brown Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York, 1982)
21. The colonial problem is illustrated by Edmund Morgan's hugely influential book (Morgan American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia [New York, 1975]), which gives a brilliant explanation of the coming of the Revolution that only pertains to the admittedly, but not solely, important Virginians
22. On a new society see pt. 2 of Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1991), 169-89 (on the other hand, and somewhat confusingly, he stresses in pt. 1 the lingering hold in the latter part of the eighteenth century of the hierarchical monarchical worldview)
23. On liberty-loving Englishmen, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967)
24. On the centrality of consumption, see T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York, 2004)
25. This paragraph and the next are informed by Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660-1730 (Berkeley Calif., 1989), 3-9
26. See also Michael Shinagel, Daniel Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 113
27. Earle, "The Middling Sort in London," in Barry and Brooks, Middling Sort of People, 141-50, 156
28. Langford, Polite and Commercial People, 59, 65, 653
29. Hunt Middling Sort, 14
30. Kidd and Nicholls, Making of the British Middle Class? xxvii
31. Keith Wrightson supplies a useful discussion of terms in Wrightson, "'Sorts of People' in Tudor and Stuart England," in Barry and Brooks, Middling Sort of People esp 41-50
32. See also John Seed, "From 'Middling Sort' to Middle Class in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century England," in Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe since 1500: Studies in Social Stratification, ed. M. L. Bush (New York, 1992), esp. 115, 119-20
33. Michael Curtin, "A Question of Manners: Status and Gender in Etiquette and Courtesy," Journal of Modern History 57, no. 3 (September 1985): 395-423
34. Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford, Eng., 1998), 31-40
35. See also Mason, Gentlefolk in the Making, 34-35. 134, 167, 253
36. Nicolson, Good Behaviour, 190-91
37. David Castronovo, The English Gentleman: Images and Ideals in Literature and Society (New York, 1987), 5-7, 10, 13
38. Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, 102
39. Jorge Arditi, A Genealogy of Manners: Transformations of Social Relations in France and England from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Chicago, 1998), 101-21, 172
40. Peter Burke, "A Civil Tongue: Language and Politeness in Early Modern Europe," in Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas, ed. Peter Burke, Brian Harrison, and Paul Slack (Oxford, Eng., 2000), 36
41. Bryson's work supplies an excellent discussion of the dissemination of conduct literature in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Though, as in the eighteenth century, more titles appeared in England than in the colonies, the most popular works found their way into New England libraries (see Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities, 16-17, 231 n. 8)
42. For the presence of many of these works in early Virginia libraries, see Louis B. Wright, The First Gentlemen of Virginia: Intellectual Qualities of the Early Colonial Ruling Class (Charlottesville, Va., 1964), 128-48, 210, 219, 231, 246, 275
43. Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities, 19-20, 30, 33
44. Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility, 38
45. Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, Letters ... to His Son (New York, 1775)
46. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Learning How to Behave: A Historical Study of American Etiquette Books (New York, 1968), 11
47. Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge, 1982), 39
48. Curtin, Journal of Modern History 57: 412 n. 40
49. Langford, Polite and Commercial People, 94-95
50. Arditi, Genealogy of Manners, 190
51. Letters from Abigail Adams to John Adams, Mar. 16-18, 1776, Jan. 21, 1781, from J. Adams to A. Adams, Apr. 12, 1776, on Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive, Massachusetts Historical Society, http://www.masshist.org/ digitaladams/
52. Curtin and Mason say that "there was no important tradition of etiquette books in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England," only the translations of courtesy works (Curtin, Journal of Modern History 57: 409 [quotation]
53. Letters from Abigail Adams to John Adams, June 7, 1787, from J. Adams to A. Adams, June 10, 1783, on http://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/
54. Virgil Barney Heltzel, "Chesterfield and the Tradition of the Ideal Gentleman" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1925), in Abstracts of Theses ... Submitted to ... the University of Chicago ... (Chicago, [1928]), 4: 328
55. Mason, Gentlefolk in the Making, 107-8, 253, 286, 297, 369
56. Wildeblood and Brinson, Polite World, 36-38
57. Schlesinger, Learning How to Behave, 10, 11 (quotation, 12), 79 n. 14
58. Esther B. Aresty, The Best Behaviour: The Course of Good Manners - From Antiquity to the Present - as Seen through the Courtesy and Etiquette Books (New York, 1970), 151-52
59. Curtin, Journal of Modern History 57: 410, 412
60. Castronovo, English Gentleman, 36-37, 40-41
61. Langford, Polite and Commercial People, 71, 95
62. Arditi, Genealogy of Manners, 190, 208-10
63. The passage is from Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, The Elements of a Polite Education ..., ed. George Gregory (Boston, 1801), 427-28
64. Vicesimus Knox, Personal Nobility; Or, Letters to a Young Nobleman (London, 1793), 317-21
65. For Chesterfieldian ideas in midcentury books for the middling, see Castronovo, English Gentleman, 39-40
66. Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities [New York, 1992]
67. Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780-1840 [Cambridge, 1995])
68. J. Hamilton Moore, The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor ..., 5th ed. (New-York, 1787), 228 [emphasis added]
69. See also [Anonymous], The Youth's Monitor; Or, A Collection of Thoughts on Civil Moral, and Religious Subjects, Selected from Different Authors (Leominsterf Mass., 1799), 11
70. On choice of company, see [Charles Allen], The Polite Lady; Or, A Course of Female Education ..., 2d ed. (London, 1769), 62-63
71. Mrs. [Hester] Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind: Addressed to a Young Lady ... (Boston, 1783), 104
72. Countess Dowager of Carlisle [Mrs. Peddle], Rudiments of Taste, in a Series of Letters from a Mother to her Daughter ... (Philadelphia, 1790), 60-61
73. Thomas Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (Philadelphia, 1798), 218 (quotation, 70)
74. [Fancois de Salignac de la Mothe, Archbishop Fenelon], Fenlon's Treatise on the Education of Daughters ... (Albany, N.Y., 1806), 237-38
75. Matthew Hale, A Letter of Advice to His Grandchildren (Boston, 1817), 137-38, 192, 194-95
76. On servility, see William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude in Reflections and Maxims Relating to the Conduct of Human Life, 8th ed. (Newport, R.I., 1749), 48
77. William Dover, Useful Miscellanies; Or, Serious Reflections Respecting Men's Duty to God, and One Towards Another (Philadelphia, 1753), 64
78. Tommy Trapwit, Be merry and wise; Or, A guide to the present and future generation, containing choice counsels, useful maxims, and prudent cautions (Boston, 1762), 14
79. On affectation, see [Anonymous], The Polite Academy; Or, School of Behaviour for Young Gentlemen and Ladies, 3d ed. (London, 1765), vi-vii
80. Allen, Polite Lady, 15
81. Moore, Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, 21-29
82. Gisborne, Duties of the Female Sex, 79
83. For works of American authorship, see Enos Hitchcock, Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family ... Containing Sentiments on a Mode of Domestic Education, Suited to ... the United States ... (Boston, 1790), 74, 79
84. James Mott, Observations on the Education of Children and Hints to Young People on the Duties of Civil Life (New-York, 1816), 18
85. For works addressed to the upper class, see Anonymous, Polite Academy, vi-vii, 5-6, 24-25, 28
86. [Chesterfield], Lord Chesterfield's Advice to his Son, on Men and Manners ... (Philadelphia, 1781), 59 (quotation)
87. [Anonymous], A Little Pretty Pocket Book ... (Worcester, Mass., 1787), 96-97. 119
88. John Griffiths, [A] Collection of the Newest Cotillions and Country Dances ... to Which is Added, Instances of Ill Manners, to Be Carefully Avoided by Youth of Both Sexes (Northampton, Mass., 1794), 11
89. [Anonymous], A Family Book For Children ... (Hartford, Conn., 1799), 40
90. Anonymous, Youth's Monitor, 10-11
91. [William Green], The School of Good Manners: Containing, Rules For Children's Behaviour in Every Situation of Life (New-London, Conn., 1801), 7, 9
92. Giovanni Delia Casa, Galateo; Or, A Treatise on Politeness and Delicacy of Manners (Baltimore, 1811), 168-70 (quotation, 169), 268
93. For a probable work of American authorship, see [Anonymous], The American Academy of Compliments; Or, The Complete American Secretary (Philadelphia, 1796) 56. Two authors gave young middle-class men and women elaborate instructions for proper walking, advising them in detail on the proper position and motions of the head, arms, and legs. These elaborate instructions resemble instructions for a dance Indeed such lessons were probably the sort the authors anticipated their readers would learn when they studied dancing
94. See Anonymous, Polite Academy, 37-39, 49
95. Francis D. Nichols, A Guide to Politeness; Or, A System of Directions for the Acquirement of Ease, Propriety and Elegance of Manners ... (Boston, 1810), 22-23
96. (see also Anonymous, Little Pretty Pocket Book, 107
97. Anonymous, Family Book For Children, 43 44
98. Della Casa, Galateo, 40). The same two authors gave elaborate descriptions for propriety in standing, detailing the proper positions of the head, arms, torso, and feet
99. As most authors were content with more general prescriptions on this matter, this exceptional advice is not described here (see Anonymous, Polite Academy, 22-23, 31-33, 36-37
100. Nichols, Guide to Politeness, 12-13)
101. For a work addressed to the upper class, see Chesterfield, Letters, 1: 86 3: 101 (quotation), 104
102. For works addressed to the middle class, see Dover, Useful Miscellanies, 34
103. Trapwit, Be merry and wise, 7
104. Moore, Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, 224, 229-30
105. Anonymous, Little Pretty Pocket Book, 107 (quotation)
106. Griffiths, Collection of the Newest Cotillions, 12
107. [Adolf Franz Friedrich Ludwig Freiher vom] Baron Knigge, Practical Philosophy of Social Life; Or, The art of Conversing with Men ..., ed. P. Will (Lansingburgh, N.Y., 1805), 31
108. For a probable work of American authorship, see [Nancy Dennis Sproat], The Good Girl's Soliloquy: Containing, Her Parents Instructions, Relative to Her Disposition and Manners (New-York, 1819), 29
109. For works addressed to the upper class, see Chesterfield, Letters, 1: 71, 149, 2: 84, 3: 104, 172-73
110. Chesterfield, Lord Chesterfield's Advice to his Son, 32, 38-39 [1781]
111. For works addressed to the middle class, see Dover, Useful Miscellanies, 31, 34-35
112. Moore Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, 228-29, 254-55, 264
113. Anonymous, Little Pretty Pocket Book, 103, 106-7
114. Anonymous, Family Book For Children, 42-44
115. Green, School of Good Manners, 4-5, 8
116. Knigge, Practical Philosophy of Social Life, 29, 31
117. Della Casa, Galateo, 22, 26-27, 39, 171, 179-81, 268
118. For works of American authorship, see [Nancy Dennis Sproat], The Good Boy's Soliloquy: Containing His Parents' Instructions Relative to His Disposition and Manners (New-York, 1818)
119. Sproat, Good Girls Soliloquy, 10, 29
120. For works addressed to the upper class, see [George Savile, Marquis of Halifax], The Lady's New-years Gift; Or, Advice to a Daughter, 3d ed. (London, 1688), 106-8
121. L'abbé d'Ancourt, Lady's Preceptor; Or A Letter to a Young Lady of Distinction Upon Politeness, 5th ed. (Woodbridge, N.J., 1759), 9, 11, 16
122. Chesterfield, Lord Chesterfield's Advice to his Son, 38-39
123. [Louis Antoine de Caraccioli], Advice from a Lady of Quality to Her Children ..., 3d ed. (Newburyport, Mass., 1784), 184
124. Lady Sarah Pennington, "Lady Pennington's Unfortunate Mother's Advice to Her Absent Daughters," in The Lady's Pocket Library (Philadelphia, 1792), 147
125. For works addressed to the middle class, see [Sir Richard Steele, comp.], The Lady's Library (London, 1714), 1: 237
126. Knigge, Practical Philosophy of Social Life, 29-31
127. [William Kenrick], The Whole Duty of Woman, 2d ed. (Boston, 1761), 23
128. Trapwit, Be merry and wise, 11, 14
129. James Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women ([Boston], 1767), 126
130. Allen, Polite Lady, 114, 207-9
131. Moore, Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, 18, 99, 224, 228, 235, 254, 265, 267
132. Anonymous, Little Pretty Pocket Book, 108, 113
133. Joh[an]n Caspar Lavater, Aphorisms on Man (Philadelphia, 1790), 11-12
134. John Bennett, Letters to a Young Lady ... (Hartford, Conn., 1791), 2: 7, 27
135. Erasmus Darwin, A Plan For the Conduct of Female Education (Philadelphia, 1798), 86-87
136. Anonymous, Youth's Monitor, 9, 11-12, 26-27
137. Green, School of Good Manners, 8
138. F. L., The Female Friend; or the Duties of Christian Virgins, to Which is Added, Advice to a Young Married Lady (Baltimore, 1809), 112
139. George Brewer, The Juvenile Lavater; Or, A familiar Explanation of the Passions of Le Brun ... (New-York, 1815), 104
140. [Jean Baptiste Morvan], Abbe de Bellegarde, "Politeness of Manners and Behavior," in The Ladies' Companion (Worcester, Mass., 1824), 27
141. For works of American authorship, see [Jacob Bailey], A Little Book For Little Children, Containing a Few Rules For the Regulation of Their Tho'ts, Words and Actions (Portsmouth, N.H., 1758), 5, 7
142. Ahimaaz Harker, A Companion For the Young People of North-America (New-York, 1767), 199
143. Mott, Observations on the Education of Children, 20-21
144. Sproat, Good Boy's Soliloquy, 9
145. Sproat, Good Girl's Soliloquy, 10
146. Hitchcock, Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family, 74
147. [J. Williams], Youth's Virtuous Guide (Boston, 1818), 10
148. For works addressed to the upper class, see [William Ramesay], Gentleman's Companion; Or, A Character of True Nobility and Gentility in the Way of an Essay (London, 1672), 71
149. Chesterfield, Letters, 1: 93, 2: 9-10, 3: 172-73
150. For works addressed to the middle class, see Dover, Useful Miscellanies, 32, 34-35
151. Anonymous, Polite Academy, 20, 22-23, 24-25, 31-33, 37-39, 49
152. Moore, Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, 265, 280, 282
153. Anonymous, Little Pretty Pocket Book, 102, 104, 109, 119
154. Lavater, Aphorisms on Man, 30
155. Anonymous, American Academy, 50
156. Anonymous, Family Book For Children, 42, 44, 46
157. Della Casa, Galateo, 169, 268, 270
158. For probable works of American authorship, see Bailey, Little Book For Little Children, 7
159. [Anonymous], The Guide, Or, Counsellor of Human Life ... (Springfield, Mass., 1794), 40-41
160. E. P. Thompson, "Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class?" Social History 3, no. 2 (May 1978): 133-65 (quotation, 142)
161. Langford, Polite and Commercial People, 690-91 (quotation, 70)
162. Penny Corfield, "The Democratic History of the English Gentleman," History Today 42 (December 1992): 40-47 ("perennially dominated," 40)
163. Dror Wahrman expresses some reservations in Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, 4-18, as does Daniel Statt in his largely positive review of Langford and
164. Earle in Eighteenth-Century Studies 25, no. 2 (Winter 1991-92), 264-71
165. Shinagel, Daniel Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility, 53-55, 95-97 (quotation, 96), 123, 228, 230
166. Castronovo, English Gentleman, 10, 13, 17, 26-27, 31, 45, 53-54
167. Earle, Making of the English Middle Class, 5-8
168. Corfield, History Today 42: 40-48
169. Shinagel, Daniel Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility, 26, 116-17
170. Langford, Polite and Commercial People, 61, 91
171. Barry and Brooks, Middling Sort of People, 3, 19
172. D'Cruze, "Middling Sort in Eighteenth-Century Colchester," 183-84, 186, 199
173. Hunt, Middling Sort, 17-20, 178
174. Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, xviii-xix, 37 ("open form of sociability"), 51, 82, 91, 167-69, 178-79. In describing the explosion of publishing in eighteenth-century England, Brewer also notes the incredible variety of authors from high to low station
175. see 139-40, 144-49 (compare with Thompson, Social History 3: 143, on patronage)
176. See also Robert Mayer, "Nathaniel Crouch, Bookseller and Historian: Popular Historiography and Cultural Power in Late-Seventeenth-Century England," Eighteenth-Century Studies 27, no. 3 (Spring 1994): 408, 411
177. Lawrence E. Klein, "Coffeehouse Civility, 1660-1714: An Aspect of Post-Courtly Culture in England," Huntington Library Quarterly 59, no. 1 (1997): esp. 49-51
178. Burke, "Civil Tongue," 39 (quotation)
179. Nicholas Rogers, "The Middling Sort in Eighteenth-Century Politics," in Barry and Brooks, Middling Sort of People, esp. 159-63, 170-76, 178-80
180. D'Cruze, "Middling Sort in Eighteenth-Century Colchester," 190-97, 199, 204
181. Earle, Making of the English Middle Class, 8-11, 13
182. Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, 85-88
183. See Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge, 1981)
184. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, Conn., 1982)
185. Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (Cambridge, 1989): 33-35, 37-38, 40, 57
186. Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, 24
187. An important exception is Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, who recognizes a "discursively constituted" middle class in the late eighteenth century (see Smith-Rosenberg, "Dis-Covering the Subject of the 'Great Constitutional Discussion,' 1786-1789," Journal of American History 79, no. 3 [December 1992]: 857-59)
188. Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, chap. 3, esp. 107
189. For the older view, see Robert E. Brown, Middle-Class Democracy and the Revolution in Massachusetts, 1690-1780 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1955)
190. Jackson Turner Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 42-43
191. Gary B. Nash, "The Social Evolution of Preindustrial American Cities, 1700-1820: Reflections and New Directions," Journal of Urban History 13, no. 2 (February 1987): 125-26
192. Edwin Perkins, "Socio-Economic Development of the Colonies," in A Companion to the American Revolution, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Malden, Mass., 2000), 54 (quotation)
193. On the middling merchant lifestyle, see Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986), 16-17, 32
194. Melancthon Smith, "Speech Before the New York Ratifying Convention," June 21, 1788, in Colonies to Nation, 1763-1789, ed. Jack P. Greene (New York, 1967), 564
195. Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 1, 17-19
196. See also Rush, Autobiography, 110
197. Ronald Schultz has similarly argued for eighteenth-century roots of the American working class in Schultz, The Republic of Labor: Philadelphia Artisans and the Politics of Class, 1720-1830 (New York, 1993), xi-xii
198. On eighteenth-century economic change and the growing definition of status by wealth, see James T. Lemon and Gary B. Nash, "The Distribution of Wealth in Eighteenth-Century America: A Century of Changes in Chester County, Pennsylvania, 1693-1802," Journal of Social History 2, no. 1 (Fall 1968): 4, 10-14, 24. Lemon and Nash also claim that middle-class Pennsylvanians were growing more prosperous in the prerevolutionary period (15)
199. See also Aresty, Best Behaviour, 129; Thompson, Social History 3: 138
200. Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), esp. ix-xi, 54-75
201. Alice Hanson Jones, Wealth of a Nation to Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1980), esp. 269-72
202. James Henretta, "Wealth and Social Structure," in Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Baltimore, 1984), 276, 278. And sometimes an older work is translated, edited, or otherwise appropriated for use by the new class. An example is Fenelon's Treatise on the Education of Daughters. It was originally written by a French aristocrat in the 1680s, but the Albany, New York, edition of 1806 referred to readers of "the middle ranks" (237). And the same work was described in an 1832 review as suitable in a democracy
203. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 84-87, 124-25
204. Wright, First Gentlemen of Virginia
205. Richard B. Davis, A Colonial Southern Bookshelf: Reading in the Eighteenth Century (Athens, Ga., 1979)
206. Kenneth Lockridge, The Diary, and Life, of William Byrd II of Virginia, 1674-1744 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987), esp. 20-25, 49, 50
207. For George Washington's copy of Youth's Behaviour, see Charles Moore, ed., George Washington's Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior (Boston, 1926)
208. Shinagel, Daniel Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility, chap. 1
209. Rozbicki, Complete Colonial Gentleman, 17-18, 23, 33-34, 72 (quotation, 74), 118, 120
210. On class conflict in Virginia, see Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999)
211. Michael A. McDonnell, "Class War? Class Struggles during the American Revolution in Virginia," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 63, no. 2 (April 2006): 305-44
212. Langford, Polite and Commercial People, 67, 105
213. Thompson, Social History 3: 142-43, 149
214. Langford, Polite and Commercial People, 5, 67, 105
215. Barry and Brooks, Middling Sort of People, 6-7
216. On cultural change, see Arditi, Genealogy of Manners, 176, 182, 221-22
217. Rozbicki, Complete Colonial Gentleman, 17-18, 23, 127
218. See also Burke, "Civil Tongue," 33
219. This paragraph and the following draw from Earle, Making of the English Middle Class, 4, 13, 335-36
220. Langford, Polite and Commercial People, 70, 76-77, 91
221. Earle, "Middling Sort in London," 152, 157-58 (quotation, 157)
222. Barry and Brooks, Middling Sort of People, 19, 24-25
223. Jonathan Barry, "Bourgeois Collectivism? Urban Association and the Middling Sort," ibid., 95, 101-2
224. see also Jonathan Barry, "Civility and Civic Culture in Early Modern England: The Meanings of Urban Freedom," in Burke, Harrison, and Slack, Civil Histories, 194-95
225. Adams, Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 2: 76
226. Langford, Polite and Commercial People, 565, 599
227. Seed, "From 'Middling Sort' to Middle Class," 134
228. Hunt, Middling Sort, 188, 202, 204, 213, 216 ("Grocers-Hall")
229. Burke, "Civil Tongue," 46-47 ("humiliative style," 45)
230. Priestly in Rogers, "Middling Sort in Eighteenth-Century Politics," 180
231. Toby Ditz, "The Instability of the Credible Self: Credit and Reputation among Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia Merchants" (paper presented at the Davis Center Seminar, Princeton, N.J., April 1995), 5
232. Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society Etiquette and the Season (London, 1973)
233. Earle, Making of the English Middle Class, 3 (quotation, 10), 334-37
234. For Roy Porter's attribution, see Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, rev. ed. (London, 1990), 304