Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850

Women in Culture and Society

by Leonore Davidoff, Catherine Hall

" Family Fortunes is a major groundbreaking study that will become a classic in its field. I was fascinated by the information it provided and the argument it established about the role of gender in the construction of middle-class values, family life, and property relations.

"The book explores how the middle class constructed its own institutions, material culture and values during the industrial revolution, looking at two settings—urban manufacturing Birmingham and rural Essex—both centers of active capitalist development. The use of sources is family business records, architectural designs, diaries, wills and trusts, newspapers, prescriptive literature, sermons, manuscript census tracts, the papers of philanthropic societies, popular fiction, and poetry.

" Family Fortunes occupies a place beside Mary Ryan's The Cradle of the Middle Class and Suzanne Lebsock's Free Women of Petersburg. It provides scholars with a definitive study of the middle class in England, and facilitates a comparative perspective on the history of middle-class women, property, and the family."—Judith Walkowitz, Johns Hopkins University

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Grad School, Gender, Academic, British Literature, 19th Century

576 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1987

About the author

MA at the London School of Economics

Leonore held visiting professorships and fellowships at American, Australian and European universities and was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2000 by the University of Bergen.

Reviews

[Jennifer Payne Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Davidoff's work is an eye-opening study into the lives of the families who transformed the north of England in the late 18th and early 19th century. Focusing on a cluster of risiing non-conformist families of Birmingham, particularly Quakers involved in the potteries, Davidoff and Hall give the reader an intricate portrait of the struggles inherent in British society of the time and their impact on such institutions as education, voting rights, and property. Anyone interested in the industrial North of England and the surrounding areas is advised to read this soon. Of particular interest is the updated introduction; I read this in graduate school in the early 1990s and it had already become a standard text in British social history. I'm so pleased to read how well their conclusions have stood the test of the past two decades of developments in British history. Finally, though large and seemingly dense, the narrative is highly readable. Recommended with no reservations.

[marz]

i think in my past life i was a victorian middle class housewife

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of the best-organized books with one of the most thoroughly explored theses I've read in grad school thus far. This book argues that gender and class always operate together, and that consciousness of class always takes a gendered form; in this case, that middle class men got to live the public life while women were largely forced to exist in the private realm. It examines the often-overlooked roles of middle class women in pre-to-early Victorian England and makes you feel that try as they might to push them into the background or the private world, middle class men really would have been nothing if not for the thankless work of the women around them.

The third section of the book, Everyday Life, was of particular interest. I found myself relying on Jane Austen novels as context for the social history while simultaneously having confusing bits of social customs in the Austen novels clarified by the evidence in Family Fortunes. It was a cool experience, although chapter 7 (which deals primarily with the family unit and marriage as the key to a woman's future) gave me a mild panic attack as I saw myself in the women and their struggles to maintain an identity in the face of social pressures to marry and have children.

[marissa sammy · Rating 2 out of 5]

The authors did their research -- a glut of it, at times, when single sentences have more than five footnotes attached. This was one of the earlier works about the division of labour in society for this class/time period, so the scholarship isn't as inclusive as one might hope it would be. Still, the book includes plenty of reference to primary material and recognizes the value of female writing and journaling as historical document.

[Martha · Rating 3 out of 5]

A tome of information, with an insightful exploration of how middle-class women in select areas of England between 1750 and 1850 actually became confined to the household and 'feminine' occupations such as women's philanthropy, per the religious and economic developments of the time. Some of these attitudes are still in place, in my parents' generation in the modern United States, I'm afraid!

[Rachel Barnett · Rating 2 out of 5]

Awful! I enjoyed parts of this book, particularly the details about the various sects of the Christian church and the detail regarding the emergence of the middle classes and the reasons for this, however the sheer amount of detail, and the repetition of the same ideas over and over, meant that this book was tedious. By the end of it I was ready to pulp the damn thing.

[Alexis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book for understanding the actual lives of the Victorian Middle Class and its development. If you want to start to understand how American class system styles developed, start with this text. You will recognize the social habits and patterns we have today.