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RR 2017/205Daily Life in 18th Century England (2nd edition) Kirstin Olsen ABC-CLIO Santa Barbara, CA 2017 ISBN 978 1 4408 5504 7 URL: www.abc-clio.com/ABC-CLIOCorporate/product.aspx?pc=A5378C Last visited May 2017Contact publisher for pricing informationDaily Life through HistoryAlso available in print (xviii + 458 pp. ISBN 978 1 4408 5503 0 £47 $61)
Any consideration of daily life in the past must begin with a framework - a set of relationships which gives some shape and structure to the thousands of mundane details that make up social history. The most useful framework in this case is the English class system. It was a system with yawning inequalities, and it reveals how access to the material amenities of life was distributed among the privileged rich, the middling sort and the poor. Class differences were flaunted, and the grand figures of society made no apology for their privilege - in fact, they boasted of it. The Duchess of Buckingham was greatly offended to be told by Methodists that her soul was as sinful as "the common wretches that crawl on the earth". For Her Grace, the social hierarchy was part of God's plan.
It is a famous fact that the English class system was deeply rooted but at the same time rather permeable. This lack of rigidity was its salvation. Movement between the classes was limited but real - and landownership was the key. It worked both ways: businessmen bought land, and landowners went into business. Thus, a forceful and enterprising man like Richard Arkwright, a mere barber from Bolton, could acquire the Willersley Castle estate, half-a-million pounds and a knighthood (though hardly a peerage), through the decidedly plebeian occupation of spinning yarn. On the other side, peers and gentry did not scruple to soil their hands with business. The Duke of Bridgewater dug his famous canal in Manchester to help sell the coal from his mines; the Duke of Chandos was another mining peer. But the finest money-making opportunity of all was public office. Political grandees enjoyed the fruits of office until the pips squeaked. Walpole's lucrative time in the government is famous - he was, in his own words, "No saint, no Spartan". But malfeasance could be risky. Thomas Parker, first Earl of Macclesfield, was a Derbyshire attorney's...