Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:38:31.994Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Middle-Class” Domesticity Goes Public: Gender, Class, and Politics from Queen Caroline to Queen Victoria

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Dror Wahrman
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In early 1831, the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton contributed a comparative essay to the Edinburgh Review on “the spirit of society” in England and France. A key issue for discussion, of course, was that of fashion. “Our fashion,” stated Bulwer-Lytton, “may indeed be considered the aggregate of the opinions of our women.” The fundamental dichotomy which ran through these pages was that between public and private: “the proper sphere of woman,” Bulwer-Lytton continued, “is private life, and the proper limit to her virtues, the private affections.” And in antithesis to the aggregate opinions of “the domestic class of women”—in his view, the only virtuous kind of women—which constituted fashion, stood “public opinion”; that exclusive masculine realm, that should remain free of “feminine influence.”

Some two years later, in his two-volume England and the English, Bulwer-Lytton restated the antithesis between fashion and public opinion, both repeating his earlier formulation and at the same time significantly modifying it. By 1833, his definitions of fashion and opinion ran as follows: “The middle classes interest themselves in grave matters: the aggregate of their sentiments is called OPINION. The great interest themselves in frivolities, and the aggregate of their sentiments is termed FASHION.” Here, Bulwer-Lytton no longer designated fashion as the aggregate of the opinions of women but, instead, as the aggregate of the opinions of the upper classes; and public opinion was no longer the domain of men but, instead, the aggregate of the opinions of the “middle class.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 32 , Issue 4: Making the English Middle Class, ca. 1700-1850 , October 1993 , pp. 396 - 432
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George, “Spirit of Society in England and France,” Edinburgh Review 52 (January 1831): 377–78Google Scholar.

2 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George, England and the English, 2 vols. (New York, 1833; also published in London), 1:87Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., 1:44, 176–77.

4 Davidoff, L. and Hall, C., Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London, 1987)Google Scholar. Although much of what follows is presented as a critique of Family Fortunes, it is so not because I believe this book to be weak but, rather, because I am continually struck by its compelling internal strength. In fact, the encounter with this book several years ago has influenced considerably my subsequent historical concerns, an influence for which I am most grateful.

5 Both quoted in the best study of this episode, Laqueur, T. W., “The Queen Caroline Affair: Politics as Art in the Reign of George IV,” Journal of Modern History 54 (1982): 417–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Charles Greville similarly noted: “Since I have been in the world I never remember any question which so exclusively occupied everybody's attention, and so completely absorbed men's thoughts and engrossed conversation”: The Greville Memoirs, 1814–1860, ed. Strachey, L. and Fulford, R. (London, 1938), 1:105–6Google Scholar, see also 99. For other recent discussions of this affair, see Prothero, I. J., Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London: John Gast and His Times (Folkstone, 1979)Google Scholar, chap. 7. Clark, A., “Queen Caroline and the Sexual Politics of Popular Culture in London, 1820,” Representations 31 (1990): 47–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hunt, T. L., “Morality and Monarchy in the Queen Caroline Affair,” Albion 23 (1991): 697–722CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes. An earlier statement of the argument can be found in Hall, C., “The Early Formation of Victorian Domestic Ideology,” in Fit Work for Women, ed. Burman, S. (London, 1979), pp. 15–32Google Scholar.

7 Davidoff, and Hall, , Family Fortunes, pp. 150–55Google Scholar.

8 Ibid., p. 25. And see Newton, J., “Family Fortunes: ‘New History’ and ‘New Historicism,’” Radical History Review 43 (1989): 5–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Mandler, P., Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830–1852 (Oxford, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Colley, L., Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992)Google Scholar; see also Langford, P., Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar, chap. 8. Indeed, one of the least satisfactory aspects of Family Fortunes is the strikingly stereotypical treatment of the upper classes, taking their most hostile and flat characterizations at face value and thus allowing for exaggerated distinctions between them and a counterstereotypical “middle class.” Thus for Davidoff and Hall an aristocrat was a man “whose skills lay with gambling, duelling, sporting and sexual prowess.” Even when some recognition that there were also other types of aristocrats does come through, Davidoff and Hall overall view those as exceptions to the more essential patterns of aristocratic behavior, “based on lavish display and consumption … disdain for sordid money matters, … casual attitude to debt and addiction to gambling” (pp. 21, 205). See further the criticisms in Vickery, A., “Shaking the Separate Spheres,” Times Literary Supplement (March 12, 1993), pp. 6–7Google Scholar.

10 Rose, S. O., Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (Berkeley, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Rose, however, remains unclear about the origin of this development, sometimes insisting on its origins in preindustrial laboring culture (cf. pp. 141–42), while elsewhere leaving open the possibility of its trickling down from the ranks of the employers (p. 148; chaps. 2–3). For an earlier argument along similar lines, which focuses on the independent logic and dynamic of the emergence of the domesticity ideal among the nineteenth-century working class, see Seccombe, W., “Patriarchy Stabilized: The Construction of the Male Breadwinner Wage Norm in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Social History 11 (1986): 53–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Hall, C., “The Tale of Samuel and Jemima: Gender and Working-Class Culture in Nineteenth-Century England,” in E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives, ed. Kaye, H. J. and McClelland, K. (Philadelphia, 1990), pp. 78–102Google Scholar: Hall elegantly demonstrates how gendered constructions of the world—very similar to those which were allegedly specific to the “middle class”—were in fact an integral part of working-class life; but then she insists on locating the origins of this working-class behavior in quintessentially class-specific “middle-class” values, thus undermining her own finding. See also Wahrman, D., “National Society, Provincial Culture: An Argument about the Historiography of Eighteenth Century Britain,” Social History 17 (1992): 68–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 One tenacious point should be disposed of as soon as possible: in spite of some teleological attempts to place much emphasis on the shift from allegedly premodern “rank” to the allegedly modern term “class,” it can be readily shown that in fact the term “middle class” was throughout the first half of the nineteenth century interchange-able with “middle/middling rank” or “middle order,” indeed often for the same speaker (see examples below, nn. 32, 66, 73). Consequently my practice below and elsewhere is to refer uniformly to all these different variations on the precise wording of references to a social “middle” as the language of “middle class.”

13 Macrainbow, John [pseud.], A Volley at the Peers both Spiritual and Temporal, or, a Veto upon the Votes of Some of Them; Facts Respecting Baron Bergami … (London, [1820]), p. 11Google Scholar.

14 Editorial, Examiner, no. 654 (July 9, 1820), p. 442Google Scholar.

15 This is not to deny, of course, that the concept of “public opinion” had already had a long history, going back deep into the eighteenth century. The argument here is not about the origins and genealogy of the concept of “public opinion” (no more than it will be concerned with the genealogy of the notion of “middle class”) but, rather, about its uses, about the power with which it was invested in specific circumstances: and in this respect, there is little doubt that the period discussed here witnessed an intense peak in the political relevance of “public opinion.” Regarding the earlier historical lineage of “public opinion,” see Gunn, J. A. W., “Public Spirit to Public Opinion,” in his Beyond Liberty and Properly: The Process of Self-Recognition in Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Kingston, 1983), pp. 260–315Google Scholar, and “Public Opinion,” in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. Ball, T.et al. (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 247–65Google Scholar.

16 Examiner, no. 654 (July 9, 1820), pp. 433Google Scholar and again 434; no. 661 (August 27, 1820), pp. 555; no. 673 (November 19, 1820). Shortly thereafter it described this affair as “one of the strongest spontaneous expressions of public opinion that was ever evinced in any age or country”: no. 683 (February 4, 1821), p. 66 (and repeated in no. 685 [February 18, 1821], p. 105). Selected examples of the ubiquitous appeals to and emphases on public opinion during this agitation include A Warning to Noble Lords previous to the Trial of Queen Caroline: By a Loyal Subject (London, [1820?]), p. 9Google Scholar (where public opinion is denned as “the opinion of men”); Nightingale, J., ed., The Spirit of the Addresses Presented to the Queen, with Her Majesty's Answers (n.p., [1820?]), pp. 29–30, 39Google Scholar; Maclean, Charles, The Triumph of Public Opinion; Being a Standing Lesson to the Throne, the Parliament, and the People: with Proposed Articles of Impeachement … in the Case of Her Majesty Caroline, Queen of England (London, 1820), p. [1]Google Scholar; A Letter from the King to His People, 8th ed. (London, [1820]), p. 2Google Scholar; Bathurst, Henry, A Sermon, Intended to Have Been Preached before … the Queen, on the Occasion of her Public Thanksgiving at St. Paul's Cathedral … 29th of November, 1820: with an Introductory Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff (London, 1820), pp. 10–12Google Scholar; A Full Report of the Middlesex County Meeting, Held at Hackney, on Tuesday, August 8, 1820, To Take into Consideration the Propriety of Presenting an Address to the Queen … Speeches of Sir Francis Burdett … (London, [1820]), p. 15Google Scholar (Hobhouse's speech); The Proceedings in Herefordshire, Connected with the Visit of Joseph Hume, Esq., M.P. and the Detail of the Speeches Delivered at a Public Dinner … December 7, 1821 … in Approbation of His Parliamentary Conduct … (Hereford, 1822), p. 22Google Scholar. For an example in defense of the king, see [Wasborough, ], A Letter from the King to his People, 12th ed. (London, [1820]), pp. 2–3Google Scholar.

17 Davidoff and Hall, p. 151.

18 The King's Treatment of the Queen Shortly Stated to the People of England, 2d ed. (London, 1820), pp. 21, 31Google Scholar, and passim. Compare the speech of Sir Francis Burdett in a Middlesex county meeting, stating that the queen's cause was “calculated … to rouse the energies of every manly mind in support of the sex oppressed, in vindication of an injured woman”: A Full Report of the Middlesex County Meeting, p. 10.

19 See more on this contestation in Wahrman, D., “Imagining the Middle Class: Language and the Politics of Representation in Britain, 1780s–1830s” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1992)Google Scholar.

20 Both quoted in Laqueur (n. 5 above), p. 427.

21 J. R. McCulloch to D. Ricardo, November 28, 1820, and T. Malthus to Ricardo, November 27, 1820, in The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. Sraffa, Piero (Cambridge, 1952), 8:314, 308Google Scholar.

22 Examiner, no. 674 (November 26, 1820), p. 763Google Scholar; no. 676 (December 10, 1820), p. 785. Regarding the recurrence of “middle-class” language in the Examiner, a very crude enumeration reveals that during the nine months between the massacre at St. Peter's Fields in Manchester and the beginning of the Caroline affair (September 1819–June 1820), the language “middle class” was employed meaningfully in the Examiner at least eleven times, introduced into discussions of the hottest political issues of the day as well as of less contested topics. During the next seven months (July 1820–January 1821), dominated by the debates on the queen's trial, only three such instances can be found; which again contrasts with eight further such instances in the following three months (February–April 1821), once the Caroline agitation had subsided.

23 Lyttleton to Charles Bagot, August 9, 1820, quoted in Melville, Lewis, An Injured Queen: Caroline of Brunswick (London, 1912), 2:472Google Scholar.

24 Selections from the Queen's Answers to Various Addresses …, 1821, quoted in The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine 59 (February 1821), p. 562Google Scholar.

25 Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine 58 (July 1820), p. 486Google Scholar (signed R. de B.).

26 Black Dwarf 6, no. 15 (April 11, 1821), p. 509Google Scholar.

27 Laqueur, p. 442. The point is repeated in Hunt (n. 5 above), p. 716.

28 Reprinted in the Examiner, no. 660 (August 20, 1820), p. 543Google Scholar.

29 The distinction here is not simply one of female versus male voices; in numerous other instances of women's expressions of support for Caroline, a distinct link between familial or domestic issues and the language of “middle class” cannot be detected. A typical example was Two Letters to the Queen, and an Address to the Females of Britain: By a Widowed Wife (Ipswich, 1820)Google Scholar: going through numerous editions, this pamphlet, which was strongly in support of the confinement of women to the domestic sphere, represented women qua women as a gendered and classless repository of moral virtue. For more on women's voices, see below, Sec. V.

30 Oeconomist (Newcastle) 9 (September 1798): 238Google Scholar; see also the strongly masculine paean to the “middle class,” contrasted with an effeminate aristocracy, in Oeconomist 1 (January 1798): 5–8Google Scholar. On “independence” as masculine, see Davidoff and Hall (n. 4 above), p. 199; and cf. Rose (n. 10 above), p. 53.

31 The Declaration of the People of England to Their Sovereign Lord the King (London, 1821), pp. 38–39Google Scholar.

32 Mill, James, An Essay on Government, ed. Barker, E. (Cambridge, 1937), pp. 71–73Google Scholar, and, for the explicit exclusion of women, p. 45. It is worthwhile to point out again that, although Mill used here “middle rank(s)” instead of “middle class” (a point to which various critics have attached singular importance), this was in fact a distinction of little consequence. Indeed, Mill himself could be found using the two formulations interchangeably in one text: see his essay “Chas, Sur la Souveraineté” in Edinburgh Review 17 (February 1811): 416–18Google Scholar.

33 Mill, James, Elements of Political Economy, 3d ed., rev. and corrected (London, 1826; 1st ed., 1821)Google Scholar, in Mill, J., Selected Economic Writings, ed. Winch, D. (Chicago, 1966), pp. 241–42Google Scholar.

34 Mill, J., Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (London, 1829), new ed., ed. Mill, J. S. (London, 1869), 2:222Google Scholar. Compare also Mill's very similar discussion of the leisured class above bodily labor in the article on education for the supplement of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Although it incorporated yet again his basic insight about the most beneficial structure of society, in the context of education—as in the context of family affections—Mill formulated it without “middle-class” language: Burston, W. H., ed., James Mill on Education (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 41–119Google Scholar.

35 On William Thompson and his writings, see Pankhurst, R. K. P., William Thompson (1775–1833): Britain's Pioneer Socialist, Feminist, and Co-operator (London, 1954)Google Scholar; Thompson, N. W., The People's Science: The Popular Political Economy of Exploitation and Crisis, 1816–1834 (Cambridge, 1984)Google Scholar; Stafford, W., Socialism, Radicalism, and Nostalgia: Social Criticism in Britain, 1775–1830 (Cambridge, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 11.

36 [Thompson, William], An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness … (London, 1824), p. 173Google Scholar and passim.

37 1Ibid., pp. 259–60; see also pp. 184, 208–9.

38 Ibid., pp. 216–17.

39 Thompson, William, Appeal of One-Half of the Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery ([London?], 1825Google Scholar; reprint, London, 1983), pp. [xxi]–xxii. See Taylor, B., Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1983), pp. 22–24Google Scholar. On the influence of this book, see also Ball, T., “Utilitarianism, Feminism and the Franchise: James Mill and His Critics,” History of Political Thought 1 (1980): 110–12Google Scholar.

40 Thompson, , Appeal of One-Half of the Human Race, pp. 39, 77Google Scholar (my emphasis).

41 Ibid., pp. 35, 53, 61, 68–69, and passim.

42 Ibid., p. xxx (my emphasis).

43 Ibid., pp. 45–47.

44 Buller, Charles, On the Necessity of a Radical Reform (London, 1831), p. 19Google Scholar.

45 Macauley, Thomas Babington, “Utilitarian Theory of Government, and the Greatest Happiness Principle,” Edinburgh Review 50 (October 1829): 125Google Scholar. In Parliament, see Macaulay's identification of the “middle classes” with public opinion in his speech during the third reading of the bill in September 1831: Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 3d ser., vol. 7, cols. 305–6.

46 Macauley, Thomas Babington, “Moore's Life of Lord Byron” Edinburgh Review 53 (June 1831): 547–48Google Scholar.

47 Alarming State of the Nation Considered; the Evil Traced to Its Source, and Remedies Pointed out: By a Country Gentleman (London, 1830), pp. 45–46, 64–65Google Scholar (my emphases).

48 Quoted in Read, D., Press and People, 1790–1850: Opinion in Three English Cities (1961; reprint, Westport, Conn., 1975), p. 119Google Scholar.

49 Baines, E., Household Suffrage and Equal Electoral Districts … Letters to Hamar Stansfield, Esq. (Leeds, 1841)Google Scholar, quoted in Morris, R. J., Class, Sect and Party: The Making of the Middle Class, Leeds, 1820–1850 (Manchester, 1990), p. 10Google Scholar.

50 Baines, Edward Jr., The Life of Edward Baines, Late M.P. for the Borough of Leeds (London, 1851), p. [5]Google Scholar.

51 Mill, J. S. “State of Society in America” in the London Review, vol. 2 (January 1836)Google Scholar; reprinted in his Essays on Politics and Society, vol. 18 of Collected Works (Toronto, 1977), p. 101Google Scholar.

52 Empson, William, “Character of the Austrian Government,” Edinburgh Review (July 1833), p. 479Google Scholar.

53 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, England and America: A Comparison of the Social and Political State of Both Nations (New York, 1834; originally 2 vols., London, 1833), p. 73Google Scholar.

54 Rose (n. 10 above), p. 145 and passim; see also Seccombe (n. 10 above).

55 Alison, Archibald, “The Chartists and Universal Suffrage,” Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 46 (September 1839), pp. 295, 300Google Scholar.

56 Speech of Sir Robert Peel, Bart. Delivered at Merchant Tailors' Hall, 11th May, 1835, 8th ed. (London, 1835), p. 9Google Scholar. For another example in 1835, see Three Letters to the People: By One of the Middling Classes (London, [1835]), pp. 125–26Google Scholar.

57 Scott, J., “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in her Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), p. 48Google Scholar.

58 In passing, it may be noted that 1832—the perceived heyday of “middle-class” power—also marked a new low point for the influence of the Church of England (which opposed the bill), whereas Evangelicals had already been marginalized for some time; facts which Davidoff and Hall (n. 4 above) note (pp. 97–98), but whose implications for their argument about the essential link between “middle classness” and Evangelicalism or religiosity they do not explore.

59 These assertions are presented in detail, and placed in a larger context, in Wahrman, “Imagining the Middle Class” (n. 19 above).

60 More, Hannah, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education; with a View of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent among Women of Rank and Fortune (originally 1799), in The Works of Hannah More, 7 vols. (New York, 1835), 6:13Google Scholar.

61 Ibid., pp. 38–39. This vision of immorality trickling down from upper-class to “middle-class” women was shared, on the other side of the political spectrum, by the rational Dissenter Mary Hays, in her (anonymous) Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (London, 1798), p. 81Google Scholar.

62 Mrs.West, [Jane], Letters to a Young Lady, in Which the Duties and Character of Women are Considered, Chiefly with a Reference to Prevailing Opinions, 3 vols. (London, 1806), 1:viiGoogle Scholar; see similarly her Letters Addressed to a Young Man, on His First Entrance into Life, and Adapted to the Peculiar Circumstances of the Present Times, 3 vols. (Charlestown, 1803; originally London, 1801), 1:viiiGoogle Scholar.

63 West, , Letters to a Young Lady, 1:138–39Google Scholar.

64 Ibid., pp. 193–94; see also her Letters Addressed to a Young Man, 1:73–74Google Scholar.

65 West, , Letters to a Young Lady, 1:140–41Google Scholar. Compare also with another important domestic ideologue, Ann Martin Taylor, who weighed those moral evils which at present times were “peculiarly injurious to those [women] of the middle ranks” against the potential beneficial consequences of their position and consequently addressed her advice book to them in particular: Taylor, [Ann Martin], Practical Hints to Young Females, on the Duties of a Wife, a Mother and a Mistress of a Family, 3d ed. (London, 1815; same year as 1st ed.), pp. [iii]–v, 2–3Google Scholar. On Taylor, see Davidoff and Hall, pp. 172–77.

66 Wilberforce, W., A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes in This Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity, 5th ed. (London, 1797; same year as 1st ed.), pp. 237, 240Google Scholar, see also pp. 111–12. Note again the interchangeability of the different formulations for the social “middle.”

67 Young, A., An Enquiry into the State of the Public Mind amongst the Lower Classes: and on the Means of Turning It to the Welfare of the State: In a Letter to William Wilberforce, Esq. M.P. (London, 1798), p. 33Google Scholar; Gisborne, T., An Enquiry into the Duties of Men in the Higher and Middle Classes of Society in Great Britain, Resulting from Their Respective Stations, Professions and Employments (London, 1794)Google Scholar. Gisborne was particularly concerned with the potential immorality inherent in the mercantile world, devoting to it considerable more attention than to the moral risks of any other occupation.

68 Cobbett, W., ed., Parliamentary History of England (London, 1806-), vol. 36, col. 996Google Scholar, in the debates concerning the possibility of renewal of war.

69 Wollstonecraft, M., A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (London, 1792)Google Scholar, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Todd, Janet and Butler, Marilyn (London, 1989), 5:75, 126Google Scholar, and further in 129: “Women, in general, as well as the rich of both sexes, have acquired all the follies and vices of civilization, and missed the useful fruit.” Note again the interchangeability of the terms for the social “middle.”

70 Ibid., p. 145; see also Sapiro, V., A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (Chicago, 1992), p. 96Google Scholar.

71 See Wahrman, “Imagining the Middle Class” (n. 19 above).

72 Mrs.Ellis, [Sarah Stickney], The Women of England, Their Social Duties, and Domestic Habits, 6th ed. (London, n.d. [1850?]; 1st ed., 1839), pp. 13–14Google Scholar; Davidoff and Hall (n. 4 above), pp. 182–85.

73 Ellis, , The Women of England, pp. 21, 28, 36–37, 72–73Google Scholar, and passim; Ellis too used also the term “middle rank”: cf. p. 213. Compare also Mrs. Ellis's relentless panegyrics to the “middle class” for their intelligence, influence, and heritage of liberty as well as for their “fire-side pleasures” and “domestic joy,” in her The Wives of England, Their Relative Duties, Domestic Influence, and Social Obligations (New York and London, 1843), pp. 156–57, 161–62Google Scholar.

74 Woman's Rights and Duties Considered with Relation to Their Influence on Society and on Her Own Condition: By a Woman, 2 vols. (London, 1840), 2:59, 106–7, 131–33Google Scholar.

75 Davidoff and Hall, p. 182.

76 Wahrman, D., “Virtual Representation: Parliamentary Reporting and Languages of Class in the 1790s,” Past and Present, no. 136 (1992), pp. 83–113Google Scholar.

77 There is a surprising similarity between the arguments of Davidoff and Hall for England and arguments from the other side of the ocean which focus on evangelical religion and familial life for understanding the development of the American “middle class”; a likeness which again, if we happen not to believe in a universal “middle-class” formation which transcends the boundaries of historical specificity, should make the conceptual tools through which such similar accounts have been constructed suspect. See, notably, Ryan, M. P., Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar; Johnson, P. E., A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York, 1978)Google Scholar; Smith-Rosenberg, C., Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar. For similar associations made for French society, see Smith, B. G., Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J., 1981)Google Scholar.

78 Corbett, M., Representing Femininity: Middle Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women's Autobiographies (Oxford, 1992)Google Scholar; Kaplan, M., The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar; see also Spurlock, J. C., Free Love: Marriage and Middle-Class Radicalism in America, 1825–1860 (New York, 1988)Google Scholar.