Chapter 2 focuses on types of workers. It examines how work varied by age and marital status, showing that while men’s work remained fairly stable across the lifecycle, women’s work varied significantly. Evidence of working ‘for another’, outside the family household, is analysed in relation to debates about paid work. Evidence of occupations and status indicators are compared with work tasks to address the debates about by-employment and explore the work of labourers and servants. Although women typically lacked such descriptors, some analysis of how wives’ activities varied according to their husband’s occupations is possible.

Chapter 5 focuses on constructions of occupational identity, which were central to notions of selfhood. Drawing on the diaries of three middle-rank tradespeople, and applying insights drawn from studies of female work to men’s productive activities, it considers the precariousness of work not only a function of maintenance, but as problem of identity. In an insecure economy, people took on multiple forms of employment in order to make ends meet. This complicated links between masculinity and work, because men were traditionally associated with a single occupation. The chapter investigates how men and their households established stable work identities. It considers the different forms that work took, and how words denoting labour such as ‘employment’ and ‘business’ were actually understood. Work was defined not only as monetised labour, but also as an activity that was productive or generated status and credit. Work’s value and contribution to identity and status changed over the course of the life cycle. It was carried out and understood in relation to others, especially men’s wives, rather than merely supporting notions of power and independence.