Family Fortunes

Foreword
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Introducing James Luckcock of Birmingham - What was the English middle class? - Concepts and methods
Setting the Scene
Places: The town - Birmingham - The countryside - Essex and Suffolk
People: The family shop - the Cadburys of Birmingham - The family pen - the Taylors of Essex
Part One - Religion and Ideology
Introduction
1. 'The one thing needful': religion and the middle class
Church and chapel activity - The Evangelical revival and serious Christianity - Church against Dissent - The religious community
2. 'Ye are all one in Christ Jesus': men, women and religion
Doctrines on manliness - Doctrines on femininity - The ministry - The minister's wife - John Angell James: 'bishop' of Birmingham - Church organization: women voting and women speaking - Laymen and women
3. 'The nursery of virtue': domestic ideology and the middle class
The Queen Caroline affair - Middle-class readers and writers - William Cowper and Hannah More - Local writers on separate spheres - Domestic ideologies of the 1830s and 1840s
Part Two - Economic Structure and Opportunity
Introduction
4. 'A modest competency': men, women and property
Enterprise organization - Land and capital - Enterprise finance - Providing for dependants - The interdependence of enterprise, family and friends - The role of marriage in the enterprise - Training for the enterprise - Retirement from the enterprise
5. 'A man must act': men and the enterprise
Middle-class men and occupations - The search for a 'sound commercial education' - Commerce and trade - Banks and banking - Manufacture - Farming - The professions - The salaried
6. 'The hidden investment': women and the enterprise
Women and property - Women's contribution to the enterprise - The education of women and its effects - Women as teachers - Women as innkeepers - Women in trade - The marginal place of women in the economy - Women, men and occupational identity - How did women survive?
Part Three - Everyday Life: Gender in Action
Introduction
7. 'Our family is a little world': family structure and relationships
The role of marriage in family formation - Fatherhood - Motherhood - Children - Brothers and sisters - The role of wider kin
8. 'My own fireside': the creation of the middle-class home
What was a home? - The separation of home from work - The meaning of the garden - The lay-out of the home - Running the home - The question of servants
9. 'Lofty pine and clinging vine': living with gender in the middle class
Manners and gentility - Changing attitudes to sexuality - Mobility and gender - Gender and the social occasion - Gender as appearance
10. 'Improving times': men, women and the public sphere
James Bisset of Birmingham - Voluntary associations - Philanthropic societies - Leisure and pleasure - Men, women and citizenship
Epilogue
Appendices
1. Three poems by local authors
2. Sources for the local study
3. Tables
Notes and references
Select bibliography
People index
Subject index