Abstract
Shortly after William Townsend died in 1754, a sales advert appeared for a house he owned known as Paradise (Figure 1.1):
To be Sold in the county of Gloucester A MODERN-BUILT HOUSE, with four rooms on a floor, fit for a Gentleman, with all the convenient Offices and Outhouses, at Paradise, about a Mile from Painswick, and five from Gloucester, pleasantly situated on the Side of a Hill, which affords beautiful prospects; with 34 acres of Arable, Pasture and Wood Lands, the greatest Part adjoining to the House, and 50 Sheep Commons on Painswick Hill; all Freehold, and the Lands of the Yearly Value of about 35L.1
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
N. Cooper, The Houses of the Gentry, 1480–1680 (London and New Haven, 1999), 244;
G. Worsley, Classical Architecture in Britain: The Heroic Age (New Haven and London, 1995). Cooper calls rectangular, hipped-rool houses lor the gentry ‘ubiquitous’ by the end of the seventeenth century.
C. Woodward, ‘Castle Godwyn’, Country Life (27 September 2007), 130–135, at 131. The house became known as Castle Godwyn in the later eighteenth century; D. Verey and A. Brooks, The Buildings of England: Gloucestershire I: The Cotswolds (London, 2002), 555.
J. Milne and T. Mowl, Castle Godwyn: A Guide and an Architectural History (Painswick, 1996), 6–7 suggests mason John Bryan. Dan Cruikshank posits architect John Strahan in Woodward, ‘Castle Godwyn’, Country Life (27 September 2007), 132.
Detailed analysis of Stenton’s construction is in R. Engle, ‘Historic Structure Report: Stenton’ [hereafter HSR] (Unpublished MS lor The NSCDA/PA, 1982).
F. Tolles, fames Logan and the Culture of Provincial America (Boston, 1957). For a discussion of the word genteel and its associations, see
R. L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992), 61–63.
For example R Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989) emphasizes change and the middle class.
J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Régime (Cambridge, 2000) advocates seeing Britain as an ancien regime confessional state with emphasis on aristocratic rule.
J. Summerson, Architecture in Britain, 1530–1830 (New Haven, ninth edition, 1993), passim; Worsley, Classical Architecture in Britain, 10–12, 29–31, 169–173; Cooper, Houses of the Gentry; For North America,
H. Morrison, Early American Architecture (Oxford, 1952);
J. Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life (New York, expanded and revised 1996), 156–158.
W. Whyte, ‘How Do Buildings Mean? Some Issues of Interpretation in the History of Architecture’, History and Theory, 45 (May 2006), 153–177.
L. Stone and J. F. Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540–1880 (Oxford, 1984).
E. Spring and D. Spring, ‘The English Landed Elite, 1540–1879: A Review’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, vol. 17, no. 2 (Summer 1985), 149–166, especially 151.
M. Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven and London, 1978);
J. Summerson, ‘The Classical Country House in 18th Century England’, in The Unromantic Castle and Other Essays (London, 1990), 79–120;
H. Clemenson, English Country Houses and Landed Estates (London, 1982); C. Saumarez Smith, ‘Supply and Demand in English Country House Building, 1660–1740’, The Oxford Art Journal, vol. 11, no. 2 (1988);
C. Christie, The British Country House in the Eighteenth Century (Manchester, 2000);
D. Arnold, The Georgian Country House: Architecture, Landscape and Society (Stroud, 2003);
R. Wilson and A. Mackley, Creating Paradise: The Building of the English Country House, 1660–1880 (London, 2000).
P. Guillery, The Small House in Eighteenth-Century London (New Haven and London, 2004), 10;
R. J. Lawrence, ‘Integrating Architectural, Social and Housing History’, Urban History, vol. 19, no. 1 (1992), 39–63;
R. Stewart, The Town House in Georgian London (London and New Haven, 2009);
B. Arciszewska and E. McKellar, (eds), Articulating British Classicism: New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Architecture (Aldershot, 2004).
P. Borsay, ‘Why Are Houses Interesting?’, Urban History, vol. 34, no. 2 (2007), 338–346, at 346.
K. Harvey, (ed.), History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources (London, 2009);
B. L. Herman, Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City 1780–1830 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005);
D. Hicks and M. C. Beaudry, (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies (Oxford, 2010);
R. Blair St George, (ed.), Material Life in America, 1600–1860 (Boston, 1988).
A. Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London, 1998);
H. F. French, ‘“Ingenious and Learned Gentlemen”: Social Perceptions and Sell-lashioning among Parish Elites in Essex, 1680–1740’, Social History, vol. 25, no. 1 (January 2000), 44–66;
R. G. Wilson, Gentlemen Merchants: The Merchant Community in Leeds, 1700–1830 (Manchester, 1971);
T. M. Devine, The Tobacco Lords: A Study of the Tobacco Merchants of Glasgow and their Trading Activities, c. 1740–90 (Edinburgh, 1975);
P. Jenkins, The Making of a Ruling Class: The Glamorgan Gentry 1640–1790 (Cambridge, 1983);
Susan Whyman, Sociability and Power in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural Worlds of the Verneys 1660–1720 (Oxford, 1999).
E. McKellar, The Birth of Modern London: The Development and Design of the City, 1660–1720 (Manchester, 1999), 3.
R. W. Brunskill, Vernacular Architecture: An Illustrated Handbook (London, 2000), 27–30;
A. Green, ‘The Polite Threshold in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Vernacular Architecture, vol. 41 (2010), 1–9.
M. Johnson, English Houses 1300–1800: Vernacular Architecture, Social Life (Harlow, 2010), chapter 8. On politeness more generally, see
L. E. Klein, ‘Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century’, The Historical Journal, vol. 45, no. 4 (December 2002), 869–898, 870;
P. Langford, ‘The Uses of Eighteenth-Century Politeness’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 12 (2002), 311–331.
On landed society, see G. E. Mingay, English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1963) and The Gentry: The Rise and Fall of a Ruling Class (London, 1976);
J. Cannon, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1984);
J. Rosenheim, The Emergence of a Ruling Order: English Landed Society 1650–1750 (London, 1998). ‘The ‘Middling Sort’ are Well-Covered’, in J. Barry and C. Brooks, (eds), The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800 (Basingstoke, 1994),
M. R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley, CA and London, 1996);
H. R. French, The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England 1600–1750 (Oxford, 2007).
Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter, 14; J. Flavell, When London Was Capital of America (New Haven and London, 2010);
N. Landsman, Prom Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and Culture 1680–1760 (Cornell, 1997);
S. Conway, ‘From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners: British Perceptions of the Americans, circa 1739–1783’, The William and Mary Quarterly, third series, vol. 59, no. 1 (January 2002), 65–100.
The subject of social status has preoccupied British historians of the long eighteenth century but has been largely absent in accounts of early America. K. Wrightson, ‘Class’, in D. Armitage and M. J. Braddick, (eds), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2002), 304–305;.
Middleton and B. G. Smith, (eds), Class Matters: Early North America and the Atlantic World (Philadelphia, 2008).
C. Carson, ‘The Consumer Revolution in Colonial America: Why Demand?’ in C. Carson, R. Hoffman, and P. J. Albert, Of Consuming Interest: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, 1994), 483–697, 687.
See also C. D. Hemphill, ‘Manners and Class in the Revolutionary Era: A Transatlantic Comparison’, William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 63, no. 2 (April 2006), 345–372.
Wilson and Mackley, Creating Paradise; J. Stobart, ‘Gentlemen and Shopkeepers: Supplying the Country House in Eighteenth-Century England’, Economic History Review, vol. 64, no. 3 (2011), 885–904, 899.
see J. White, ‘A World of Goods? The Consumption Turn and Eighteenth-Century British History’, Cultural and Social History, vol. 3 (2006), 93–104;
N. McKendrick, J. Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1982);
J. Brewer and R. Porter, (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1993);
A. Bermingham and J. Brewer, (eds), The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text (London, 1995);
C. Shammas, The Pre-industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford, 1990);
L. Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture 1660–1760 (London, second edition, 1996).
T. H. Breen, ‘An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690–1776’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 25, no. 4 (1986), 467–499.
A. Vickery and J. Styles, (eds), Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America 1700–1830 (New Haven and London, 2006); Special issue on Georgian interiors in Journal of Design History, vol. 20, no. 4 (Winter 2007);
H. Barker and E. Chalus, Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities (London, 1997);
A. Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter and Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven and London, 2009);
N. Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship and Patronage (Cambridge, 2000);
A. Flather, Gender and Space in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2007);
J. Lewis, ‘When a House Is not a Home: Elite English Women and the Eighteenth-Century Country House’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 48 (April 2009), 336–363.
N. Tadmor, ‘The Concept of the Household-Family in Eighteenth-Century England’, Past and Present, vol. 151, no. 1 (May 1996), 111–140;
K. Harvey, The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2012), 12–13.
Harvey, The Little Republic. M. Finn, ‘Men’s Things: Masculine Possession in the Consumer Revolution’, Social History, vol. 25, no. 2 (May 2000), 133–155;
K. Harvey and A. Shepard, ‘What Have Historians Done with Masculinity? Reflections on Five Centuries of British History, circa 1500–1950’, The Journal of British Studies, vol. 44, no. 2 (2005), 274–280;
K. Harvey, ‘Men Making Home: Masculinity and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Gender and History, vol. 21, no. 3 (November 2009), 520–540;
H. French and M. Rothery, Man’s Estate: Landed Gentry Masculinities 1660–1900 (Oxford, 2012), especially chapter 4.
Worsley Classical Architecture in Britain, 169–173; D. Reiff, Small Georgian Houses in England and Virginia: Origins and Development through the 1750s (London, 1986);
B. B. Mooney, Prodigy Houses of Virginia: Architecture and the Native Elite (Charlottesville, VA, 2008).
S. G. Hague, ‘Historiography and the Gentleman’s House in the British Atlantic World’, in O. Horsfall Turner, (ed.), ‘The Mirror of Great Britain’: National Identity in Seventeenth-Century British Architecture (Reading, 2012), 233–259.
G Hood, The Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg: A Cultural Study (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991), 42.
C. Carson and C. R. Lounsbury (eds), The Chesapeake House: Architectural Investigations by Colonial Williamsburg (Chapel Hill, NC, 2013), 18.
M. Johnson, English Houses 1300–1800: Vernacular Architecture, Social Life (Harlow, 2010), 179, 187–189.
Landsman, Prom Colonials to Provincials, 7. The difficulty Americans encountered in jettisoning their connection with Britain is treated in K. Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Post-colonial Nation (Oxford, 2011).
M. Dresser and A. Hahn, Slavery in the English Country House (Swindon, 2013);
M. Dresser, Slavery Obscured: The Social History of the Slave Trade in Bristol (Bristol, 2007).
D. Armitage, ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History’, in Armitage and M. Braddick, (eds), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (London, 2002), 11–27, especially 18–21.
C. B. Estabrook, Urbane and Rustic England: Cultural Ties and Social Spheres in the Provinces, 1660–1780 (Manchester, 1998), 3, 152.
J. S. Ackerman, The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses (Princeton, 1995);
M. Airs and G. Tyack, (eds), The Renaissance Villa in Britain, 1500–1700 (Reading, 2007);
D. Arnold, (ed.), The Georgian Villa (Stroud, 1998);
B. Arciszewska, (ed.), The Baroque Villa: Suburban and Country Residences, c. 1600–1800 (Wilanow, Poland, 2009);
J. Archer, Architecture and Suburbia: From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690–2000 (Minneapolis and London, 2005).
Williamson noted this feature in relation to larger estates, see T. Williamson, ‘Archaeological Perspectives on Landed Estates: Research Agendas’, in J. Finch and K. Giles, (eds), Estate Landscapes: Design, Improvement and Power in the Post-medieval Landscape (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2007), 1–16.
P. Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991), especially 58–70.
J. Fowler and J. Cornforth, English Decoration in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1978);
Saumarez Smith, Eighteenth-Century Decoration: Design and the Domestic Interior in England (New York, 1993);
J. Cornforth, Early Georgian Interiors (London and New Haven, 2004); Vickery Behind Closed Doors.
For objects, A. Bowett, English Furniture 1660–1714: Charles II to Queen Anne (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2002) and Early Georgian Furniture 1715–1740 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2009);
C. Edwards, Eighteenth-Century Furniture (Manchester, 1996);
S. Richards, Eighteenth-Century Ceramics: Products for a Civilised Society (Manchester, 1999);
P. Glanville, Silver in England (London, 1986).
T. Murdoch, (ed.), Noble Households: Eighteenth-Century Inventories of Great English Households: A Tribute to John Cornforth (Cambridge, 2006).
J. Ayres, Domestic Interiors: The British Tradition 1500–1850 (New Haven and London, 2003);
P. Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660–1730 (London, 1989); Shammas, The Pre-industrial Consumer in England and America; Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture;
M. Overton, J. Whittle, D. Dean, and A. Hann, Production and Consumption in English Households, 1600–1750 (London, 2004).
The idea of emulation draws largely on T. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York, 1899). The work of Pierre Bourdieu, however, has suggested a measure of differentiation, where different social ranks exhibited consumption practices unrelated to a concept of ‘taste’ from above.
P. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (London, 1984); Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture, 194–196; Hunt, The Middling Sort.
The former view is in Stone and Stone, An Open Elite?; M. Girouard, ‘The Power House’, in G. Jackson-Stops, (ed.), The Treasure Houses of Britain: Five Hundred Years of Private Patronage and Art Collecting (New Haven, 1985), 23;
D. Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge, 1995).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Stephen Hague
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hague, S. (2015). Introduction. In: The Gentleman’s House in the British Atlantic World 1680–1780. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137378385_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137378385_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-67748-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-37838-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)