Naomi Tadmor. Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship and Patronage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. x + 312 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-77147-4.
Reviewed by Anna Clark (Department of History, University of Minnesota)
Published on H-Albion (January, 2003)
Naomi Tadmor's Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England makes a useful contribution to our understanding not only of family history, but of the eighteenth-century novel, neighborhood, and politics. She challenges the demographic preoccupations of conventional histories of the family, such as that of the Cambridge School, which assert that the English family was nuclear, individualistic, and largely unchanging. Rather than simply counting the members of households, she examines how eighteenth-century people understood the meanings of the words "family," "relation," and "friend." Tadmor analyzes words for their contemporary meaning in a wider social context, and as speech acts which both reflect and create relationships and expectations. Her sources are diaries, novels, and conduct books, with a concentration on the diary of the provincial tradesman, Thomas Turner, and the novels The History of Betsy Thoughtless, Pamela, and Clarissa.
Tadmor begins by examining the meaning of family chiefly for middle-class people such as Thomas Turner. For them, "family" included not only the nuclear family of father, mother, and children, but also servants and relatives, or all those under the household head's authority. A servant could be welcomed into the family, leaving it upon marriage. These relationships, however, were often "contractual, domestic and occupational" (p. 27). This is an obvious description for servants, but it could also relate to the position of the wife. Tadmor points out that middle-class households were run on the basis of the "family time table," involving the wife in an "occupational" relationship. This attention to the regularity of work and timekeeping suggests that the famous contrast between free-flowing family, pre-industrial time, and rigid industrial work time may be overdrawn. At the same time, these relationships also involved sentiment, affection, and loyalty, as well as the potential tension between obligation and emotion.
Tadmor carefully differentiates between the concept of the household family, held by a man of the middling sort, and the more elite "lineage-family." Middle-class families possessed a sense of their own ancestry and hoped to pass on their property to their offspring, but they clearly recognized that the elite family was different, as defined by ancient genealogy, property, honor, fortune, and national political clout. Lineage families, such as that of the Duke of Newcastle, incorporated humble men such as Turner into their orbits through vast networks of political obligations, trade, and patronage promised or withdrawn. But people of the middling sort also invoked "the concept of the lineage-family ... while contesting the value or the power of lineage and ancestry," as Tadmor notes (p. 101). Turner disapproved of the Duke's luxury and intemperance, while Richardson's heroine Pamela declared that "virtue" is more important than "nobility."
Family also had a wider meaning for those of the middling sort, referring to kin who did not live in the household. It was linked to the terms "friends" and "connections," all connoting a network of people, probably linked by kinship, who were expected to provide each other with advice, financial support, aid in finding positions, and approval of marriages. The vagueness of these terms does not mean they were unimportant, Tadmor points out; indeed, vagueness was useful, allowing individuals to call upon the reputations of their kinship networks without specifying an exact relation. As Tadmor states, to give a flavor of her workmanlike prose, "[t]he claiming of kinship was a speech act with which individuals proposed their relationships with one another and announced it by naming" (p. 144).
"Friends" and "connections" also had wider social meanings in politics and religion, as in the Society of Friends, the Methodist Connection, and the Rockingham connection; the Duke of Newcastle referred to his friends, or one might hear of the king's friends. By naming networks in this way, eighteenth-century people recognized the inextricable mingling of emotional bonds, financial obligations, and personal ties which created political and religious structures. In this sense, the Duke of Newcastle included among his "friends" aristocrats, tradesmen, artisans, and farmers who were expected to vote for him. In return, he was to provide jobs and positions for his supporters, financial assistance, hospitality, patronage of their businesses, and charity. While political historians of the eighteenth-century have always understood "friends" in this context, Tadmor's analysis expands our comprehension of eighteenth-century politics by linking together common understandings of every-day families as well as their similarities and differences to elite notions of family and friends. Eighteenth-century radical Catherine Macaulay, for instance, played upon these dual meanings in criticizing Edmund Burke's justification of the influence of friends and family in party politics. For Burke, this was legitimate influence, yet for Macaulay, it represented illicit familial corruption.[1]
Tadmor also demonstrates the usefulness of her careful definition of concepts in an analysis of Samuel Richardson's novel Clarissa. At the beginning of the novel, Clarissa understands her friends to be her parents, brother, and other relatives, but when they try to force her into an unwanted marriage, she says they are no longer her friends, they are just her relations. Friends were expected to provide guidance and support in the property transactions of marriage, but they were also supposed to recognize affective needs. At the same time, Tadmor points out the necessity of differentiating between friendship as a close emotional tie--such as that which links Clarissa and the young Anna Howe--and friendship in a broader sense where those with authority and power give advice and help. Anna Howe cannot extricate Clarissa from the dilemma into which Lovelace has forced her.
Tadmor does not differentiate, however, between the ways in which distinctive genres such as diarists, advice manuals, and novels use the concepts of friend and family, which limits the subtlety of her analysis. Furthermore, she does not address change over time, which is unfortunate given the contested historiography claiming that the eighteenth century witnessed the rise of the affective family. Other historians and literary critics, it is hoped, will take up the useful tools and rich analysis she has provided to trace the changing meanings of friends and family in history and the novel.
Note
[1]. Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Present Discontents (1770); Catherine Macaulay, Observations on a Pamphlet entitled, "Thoughts on the Present Discontents" (1770).
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Citation:
Anna Clark. Review of Tadmor, Naomi, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship and Patronage.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2003.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=7080
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