With the resurgence of Social History in the 1960s and 1970s, historians sought to explain change and continuity in English family life. Investigations focused on family relations, domestic life, and life-cycle phases in different social strata – the histories of labour and education came into play as did economic and demographic change, and key political events. By the start of the new millennium, many debates had subsided, and others changed tack. In the first phase of the historiographical development, grand narratives of familial evolution were tested by equally ambitious arguments concerning continuities in ‘nuclear family’ life. In the next phase, new histories of household, kinship, gender, and emotions developed which called into question the ‘nuclear family’ itself. Several scholars now preferred to write about ‘household’, ‘parenthood’, ‘kinship’, ‘service’, and gender roles and relations. At the same time, the chronological horizons have shrunk. The vast temporal terrains surveyed by pioneering historians have rarely been explored thereafter as a single territory. And while the ‘long eighteenth century’ has attracted considerable attention, exact moments of change proved hard to pin down.
Barbara Crosbie's books stands proud against this historiographical backdrop and marks a step forward. Focusing on the eighteenth century, it questions processes of change and offers a methodology for investigating them. Key work by Wrigley and Schofield provides initial data for identifying a generational shift. The 1740s, when peaks of infant and child mortality gave way to population expansion, are taken as the starting point for generational research. But rather than discussing slippery processes such as an emerging concept of the ‘child’ and the ‘affective nuclear family’, Crosbie focuses on concrete changes in print culture, education, employment, fashion, and political life. Rich local evidence is gleaned from Newcastle upon Tyne, whose records have been studied with care. The book's three sections map the relationship between generational developments and cultural change, culminating in political contest in the 1770s, and leading to a ‘new era’ in the 1780s.
The first chapter explores the emergence of a new literature for ‘little masters and mistresses’ in the 1740s and subsequent changing literary styles and philosophical mores. In Newcastle, these were reflected in the number of advertisements for children's books in the local press which more than trebled from 1740 to 1765, and more than doubled again by 1775. The material culture of childhood was becoming more distinct as children's games appeared in the market, alongside sailor suits for boys and dolls. Transformations observed by pioneering historians are here explored with fresh evidence. The point is made that those who had enjoyed new goods around the middle of the century were prepared to spend more on children's education and fashion when they themselves became parents. The idealised cult of domesticity and motherhood which Davidoff and Hall have found in the late decades of the eighteenth century is identified earlier. A new interest in childhood is further traced in relation to the poor. The emergence of the new style children's literature happened to coincide with the establishment of London's Foundling hospital in 1741. Around the same time, testimonies by young children at the Old Bailey reveal an interest in schooling more than conceptions of sin. But the new emphasis on the innate qualities of children also resulted in negative perceptions of poor children, seen as ‘lazy, ragged, and thievish’. As new policies emerged, thousands of poor children were shipped out to nurse and put to work at an increasingly young age.
As Crosbie argues, it was not only within familial settings that attitudes towards childhood changed; change was also evident in the classroom. Here, Newcastle provides telling evidence. The New Grammar published in 1745 by the enterprising townswoman, Anne Fisher, was one of several reforming grammars appearing mostly from the mid-1730s to around 1770, which sought to define the principles of the English language in non-Latinate forms. The study of English was advertised by a growing number of schools, including schools for women which evidently went beyond the ‘practical skills’ commonly emphasised by historians. As pioneering research has shown, seventeenth-century dame schools catered for girls and boys. Now women established commercial schools for older pupils, and better educated girls found clerical employment in town. By the 1780s, when those who had been taught in the improved system had reached maturity, another wave of innovation was taking place for schooling ‘made easy’.
The more children went to school, the more traditional patterns of apprenticeship were tested. In Newcastle, the local guilds relaxed their practices to allow apprentices to maintain a closer relationship with their parents. More youths were apprenticed to their fathers, and many acquired their ‘freedom’ by patrimony. The ‘living out’ of apprentices also became more common, and some apprentices were even allowed to marry. Already by the start of the eighteenth century, many youths were no longer able to set up as masters at the end of their service, an important aspect of the processes of social restructuring and polarisation influentially charted by Keith Wrightson. As this book shows, in mid-eighteenth-century Newcastle, apprenticeship was further dissociated from the master's household and became ‘a more straightforward form of employment’. In 1746 and 1766, new legislation regulated the service of certain categories of apprentices and servants. As Crosbie notes, it is unlikely that the latter Act was aimed at apprentices escaping from the Seven Years’ War, as sometimes claimed, for that war had ended three years previously. Indeed, an Act passed in March 1763 conventionally enabled demobilised soldiers who had not completed their apprenticeship to practice a trade. Here one wonders if the changing laws served to displace patriarchal authority, or rather continued to utilise domestic and household frameworks for employment and relief while ensuring magisterial control and support, especially in cases pertaining to the Poor Laws.
The diary of a Newcastle lad offers a glimpse of ‘household-family’ life as experienced by a well-to-do apprentice living from 1749 (aged thirteen) under the authority of an unmarried master, alongside two non-related servants and the master's nephew who occasionally lived in the house and attended a local school. For Newcastle's skilled manufacturers and traders, apprenticeship could now be combined with schooling, perhaps to improve specialised writing and arithmetical skills (typically acquired at a relatively late stage). As this diary and related local sources suggest, however much parents invested in their children's education, the independent life of the middling apprentice undermined parental control and enabled youths to develop their own interests, a theme also pursued by Crosbie in contemporaneous literature and drama.
One of the many strengths of Crosbie's books is that it uncovers the cultural dynamism of a town such as Newcastle – a refreshing perspective after much research on the capital's role in generating fashion, literary tastes, and norms of politeness. In 1747, another Newcastle woman published a best-selling cookbook combining polite entertainment and frugal housewifery. Local fashion moved with the times to prefer natural hair to wigs. In the town's political life, young men were asserting their presence. When a contested election took place in 1774, those born after 1740, and educated in the manner described, were well positioned to support new ideas. The book's last chapter imaginatively investigates guild records and poll books to uncover age-related patterns in the town's franchise. The conclusion highlights the importance of generational ideological dialectics and cumulative change. Important arguments are made about the usefulness of generational insights for understanding non-linear historical developments.
The processes traced in Newcastle – from post 1740 ‘childhood’ to political ‘adulthood’ in the 1770s – punctuate the long terrain of the eighteenth century. But as the socio-cultural direction of travel unfolds from one chapter to the next – with erudite intellectual scopes from Locke to Rousseau and from the Bible to popular culture – the argument sometimes shifts from actual generations to more dialectical ideologies and conventional chronological explanations. In the conclusion, the initial demographic data are described as a matter of correlation. This is not to detract from the contribution of the book. All in all, this is original and compelling work, innovatively weaving together broad scopes and specificities, the local and the general. The reader will find it highly interesting and easy to follow. The academic conscious of the historian's craft will nod with appreciation seeing the author glide with seeming effortlessness from erudite contextualisation to tight exemplification, based on archival and printed-source research. Longstanding debates are shaken with original interventions that are bound to make an impact.
