The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London 1660-1730 is the first major study of a neglected yet extremely significant subject: the London middle classes in the period between 1660 and 1730, a period in which they created a society and economy that can be seen with hindsight to have ushered in the modern world.

 Using a wealth of material from contemporary sources--including wills, business papers, inventories, marriage contracts, divorce hearings, and the writings of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Pepys--Peter Earle presents a fully rounded picture of the "middling sort of people," getting to the hearts of their lives as men and women struggling for success in the biggest, richest, and most middle-class city in contemporary Europe.

He examines in fascinating and convincing detail the business life of Londoners, from apprenticeship through the problems and potential rewards of different occupational groups, going on to look at middle-class family, social, political and material life--from relationships with spouses, children, servants, and neighbors, to food and clothes and furniture, to sickness, death, and burial.

Stimulating, scholarly, and constantly illuminating, this book is an important and impressive contribution to English social history.

 PREFACE

This is a book about the London middle classes in the period between 1660 and 1730. The period was chosen because of the availability of sources and also because it was the lifetime of Daniel Defoe, on whom I have written previously and whose views on a wide range of subjects will be found scattered through the pages. The subject was chosen because it seems to me an extremely important one, despite the fact that it has long been the habit of social and economic historians to be slightly embarrassed by, if not downright critical of, the rise of bourgeois society. This has led to an absurd dichotomy in the academic mind, which simultaneously welcomes a rise in the living standards of the people and sneers at the self-improving, self-serving ambitions of the middle classes which made such improvement possible.

An unhistorical distaste for the bourgeois and for profit has been paralleled by the fashion of English historians, and particularly English urban historians, to play down the significance of London and to insist on a broad development of English economy and society in which provincial enterprise is seen as equally important to that of the metropolis. This may be true of the second two-thirds of the eighteenth century, but it is certainly not true of the period covered by this book, the period which defined and created the society and economy which ushered in the modern world. In this period, London was the only real city in England, and London totally dominated English urban culture and indeed invented it, so much so that the greatest compliment that could be paid to a provincial town was to be called a little London.

The book is in three parts. Part One starts with an introduction which attempts to define what contemporaries thought of as the 'middle station' or the 'middling sort of people' and what we would think of as the middle class. There then follows a description of the London economy, with the emphasis on the opportunities which existed for the middling people to make a good living. Part Two examines the business life of Londoners, starting with apprenticeship and going on to consider the problems and potential rewards of a business career in the metropolis. Part Three looks at the family, social, political and material life of the middle-class Londoner, thus hopefully providing a well-rounded group portrait of this enterprising and ambitious sector of English society. ...

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Hardcover: 446 pages
Author: Peter Earle
Publisher: University of California Press (June 22, 1989)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0520068262
ISBN-13: 978-0520068261

CONTENTS:
PREFACE
ONE—  METROPOLITAN ECONOMY AND SOCIETY
1—  The Middle Station
2—  The Metropolitan Economy

TWO—  BUSINESS LIFE
3—  Apprenticeship
4—  Business
5—  Investment
6—  Women and Business

THREE—  FAMILY AND SOCIAL LIFE
7—  Marriage
8—  The Household
9—  Civic Life
10—  Expenditure and Consumption
11—  Sickness and Death

CONCLUSION
12—  The London Middle Class

Notes
    NOTES
APPENDIX A—  THE SAMPLE
APPENDIX B—  REAL ESTATE HOLDINGS OF SAMPLE
APPENDIX C—  CREDIT PATTERNS FROM BANKRUPTCY RECORDS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
    PLATE SECTION
INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Peter Earle is Reader in Economic History at the University of London and teaches at the London School of Economics. He is the author of several books on maritime history and English social history, the latter including The World of Defoe and Monmouth's Rebels.

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