The Middling Sort of People

The Middling Sort of People

Author: Jonathan Barry

Publisher: Red Globe Press

Published: 1994-10-26

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 033354062X

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This volume of essays seeks to offer a radical re-evaluation of most of our preconceptions about the early-modern English social order. This book attempts to define the term "middle classes" and treat them as active participants of history, rather than as a simple by-product.


The Middling Sort of People

The Middling Sort of People

Author: Jonathan Barry

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 1994-10-26

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 134923656X

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This volume of essays seeks to offer a radical re-evaluation of most of our preconceptions about the early-modern English social order. The majority of people who lived in early-modern England were neither very rich nor very poor, yet a disproportionate amount of historiography has been directed towards precisely these groups. This book intends to define the term 'middle classes' and treat them as active participants of history, rather than as a simple by-product rising and falling according to others' activities.


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

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

Author: H. R. French

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2007-07-05

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0191537888

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Exploring the origins of 'middle-class' status in the English provinces during a formative period of social and economic change, this book provides the first comparative study of the nature of social identity in early modern provincial England. It questions definitions of a 'middling' group, united by shared patterns of consumption and display, and examines the bases for such identity in three detailed case studies of the 'middle sort' in East Anglia, Lancashire, and Dorset. Dr. French identifies how the 'middling' described their status, and examines this through their social position in parish life and government, and through their material possessions. Instead of a coherent, unified 'middle sort of people' this book reveals division between self-proclaimed parish rulers (the 'chief inhabitants') and a wider body of modestly prosperous householders, who nevertheless shared social perspectives bounded within their localities. By the eighteenth century, many of these 'chief inhabitants' were trying to break out of their parish pecking orders - not by associating with a wider 'middle class', but by modifying ideas of gentility to suit their circumstances (and pockets). French concludes as a result, that while the presence of a distinct 'middling' stratum is apparent, the social identity of the people remained fragmented - restricted by parochial society on the one hand, and overshadowed by the prospect of gentility on the other. He offers new interpretation and insights into the composition and scale of the society in early modern England.


The Middling Sort

The Middling Sort

Author: Margaret R. Hunt

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 9780520202603

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"A very full, nuanced, up-to-date, and lucidly expressed account. . . . The discussion is impressively wide-ranging (spanning cultural, economic, intellectual, social, and women's history), and makes valuable contributions to a number of current debates."--Johann Sommerville "A very full, nuanced, up-to-date, and lucidly expressed account. . . . The discussion is impressively wide-ranging (spanning cultural, economic, intellectual, social, and women's history), and makes valuable contributions to a number of current debates."--Johann Sommerville


Albion's People

Albion's People

Author: John Rule

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-11

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1317895932

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This second volume of John Rule's major two-volume portrait of Georgian England is a comprehensive and authoritative survey of eighteenth-century society, incorporating the exciting new research findings of recent years. It deals in turn with the upper class, `middling sort' and lower orders; with popular education, religion and culture; with standards of living in town and country; and with crime, punishment and protest. The book, which is as rich and varied as the age it explores, ends with an assessment of continuity and change across the century.


A Social History of England, 1500-1750

A Social History of England, 1500-1750

Author: Keith Wrightson

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 421

ISBN-13: 9781108206150

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The rise of social history has had a transforming influence on the history of early modern England. It has broadened the historical agenda to include many previously little-studied, or wholly neglected, dimensions of the English past. It has also provided a fuller context for understanding more established themes in the political, religious, economic and intellectual histories of the period. This volume serves two main purposes. Firstly, it summarises, in an accessible way, the principal findings of forty years of research on English society in this period, providing a comprehensive overview of social and cultural change in an era vital to the development of English social identities. Second, the chapters, by leading experts, also stimulate fresh thinking by not only taking stock of current knowledge but also extending it, identifying problems, proposing fresh interpretations and pointing to unexplored possibilities. It will be essential reading for students, teachers and general readers.


The Poverty of Disaster

The Poverty of Disaster

Author: Tawny Paul

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-10-17

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1108496946

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Examines debt insecurity in eighteenth-century Britain, a period of famously rapid economic growth when many people nevertheless experienced financial failure.


The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy

The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy

Author: Christopher Lasch

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1996-01-17

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0393313719

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This text challenges American notions of democracy and ambition, culture and civic responsibility, charting a decline in democratic values and debate. It states that this change is due to the "new elites" who, having lost their sense of communitarianism, will not accept ties to nation and to place.


The Pen and the People

The Pen and the People

Author: Susan Whyman

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2011-03-31

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0191615854

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Susan Whyman draws on a hidden world of previously unknown letter writers to explore bold new ideas about the history of writing, reading and the novel. Capturing actual dialogues of people discussing subjects as diverse as marriage, poverty, poetry, and the emotional lives of servants, The Pen and the People will be enjoyed by everyone interested in history, literature, and the intimate experiences of ordinary people. Based on over thirty-five previously unknown letter collections, it tells the stories of workers and the middling sort - a Yorkshire bridle maker, a female domestic servant, a Derbyshire wheelwright, an untrained woman writing poetry and short stories, as well as merchants and their families. Their ordinary backgrounds and extraordinary writings challenge accepted views that popular literacy was rare in England before 1800. This democratization of letter writing could never have occurred without the development of the Royal Mail. Drawing on new information gleaned from personal letters, Whyman reveals how the Post Office had altered the rhythms of daily life long before the nineteenth century. As the pen, the post, and the people became increasingly connected, so too were eighteenth-century society and culture slowly and subtly transformed.


A Day at Home in Early Modern England

A Day at Home in Early Modern England

Author: Tara Hamling

Publisher: Association of Human Rights Institutes series

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780300195019

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This fascinating book offers the first sustained investigation of the complex relationship between the middling sort and their domestic space in the tumultuous, rapidly changing culture of early modern England. Presented in an innovative and engaging narrative form that follows the pattern of a typical day from early morning through the middle of the night, A Day at Home in Early Modern England examines the profound influence that the domestic material environment had on structuring and expressing modes of thought and behaviour of relatively ordinary people. With a multidisciplinary approach that takes both extant objects and documentary sources into consideration, Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson recreate the layered complexity of lived household experience and explore how a family's investment in rooms, decoration, possessions, and provisions served to define not only their status, but the social, commercial, and religious concerns that characterised their daily existence. Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art