On Wednesday 5 May 1756, several members of the parish vestry of East Hoathly, Sussex, met together at the public house to discuss important affairs. The main item on the agenda concerned the ‘putting out’ of pauper children, one of the chief duties of parochial care, initially stipulated some 211 years earlier. The public meeting of 5 May was duly announced at the local church on a preceding Sunday. The authority of the parishioners involved (who included the local shopkeeper, the butcher, a victualler, and two farmers) was strongly reflected in their words. They agreed to put out one pauper girl to a neighbour at a cost of 18d per week for ‘so long as the parish shall think proper’. Her younger sister was to be dispatched elsewhere and maintained for the same sum, with the reiterated provision ‘to take either of them away at any time whensoever the parish shall think proper’. The drinks consumed by the parishioners present amounted to a total cost of 2s 6d (just under a fortnight's maintenance for each of the girls concerned), to be charged to the parish account, but the bill remained unpaid. This was, after all, one of many similar meetings, held at the same place and attended by more or less the same men. Payment could be deferred to be balanced quarterly, as usual, alongside other bills, with reciprocal reckoning of credit and debt. Later that evening, the men returned to their homes.

After decades of academic research on the history of the family in early modern England, scholars and students are both enlightened and perplexed. We now have a very considerable body of knowledge at our command. A field once dominated by ill-informed myths about family life in the past has been enriched with well-researched facts and many well-founded interpretations. Thus, for example, we now possess invaluable data on the demography of the family. We know the mean age at marriage of different populations, the average duration of marriage, rates of remarriage, and the extent of non-marrying populations. We know how many children families in the past were likely to have, how many were born out of wedlock, and how many were likely to die before they reached maturity. Beyond these facts and figures, we know much about conventions of courtship and marriage, as well as the history of marital breakdown. We are aware of different life-cycle stages, from childhood and adolescence to the experience of old age. We know about differences between town and country, rich and poor, east and west, north and south. Indeed, we have many studies that inform us about the experience of particular localities. We also know much about the different experiences of women and men in the past, and about the laws and customs that bred and nurtured these experiences.

This impressive accumulation of facts and interpretations attests to the productivity of historians of the family.

The kinship-family

Having reached this point we are faced with the question of kinship. If people in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England could understand relations with non-kin in familial terms, and if within families kin and non-kin could be contractually bound, yet if at the same time notions of lineage were also valued – how in view of all this did people perceive relations with kin? And how can their language help us to probe further concepts of family and kinship current in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England?

Starting from our main keyword so far, we can see that the word ‘family’ was also used in the eighteenth century to refer to circles of kin both within and beyond households. To present-day English speakers, this concept of the kinship-family seems obvious. This is the main usage of the word today, and English speakers have no difficulty in identifying it when it also appears in texts from the past. For instance, when present-day readers find in an eighteenth-century novel, such as The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, that Betsy thanks another character for his goodness to her and ‘all our family’, they can easily understand that this single and childless heroine is referring to her near kin, members of her nuclear family of origin.

Introduction

The broad spectrum of ‘friendship’ relationships, which were seen in the previous chapters to have played such an important role in the life of an eighteenth-century individual such as Thomas Turner and in the lives of so many people around him, also played an important role in contemporary cultural production. There were novels, essays, sermons, and diverse other literary texts which were preoccupied with friendship both directly and indirectly. For instance, Elizabeth Singer Rowe's Friendship in Death, first published in 1728, was one of the most popular works in the eighteenth century, printed in twenty-six editions by 1790. Sarah Fielding's The Adventures of David Simple, Containing an Account of his Travels Through the Cities of London and Westminster in Search of a Real Friend, first published in 1744, also continued to be reprinted until the end of the eighteenth century. Other well-known works such Joseph Andrews, Peregrine Pickle, Clarissa, or The Vicar of Wakefield presented a range of friendship relationships, explored interactions among friends, praised good friendship – and condemned false and evil friends.

It is not surprising that such literary texts were preoccupied with the issue of friendship. As we have seen in the previous chapters, in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England friendship encompassed a broad and extremely important spectrum of relationships, including kinship relationships, sociable relationships, occupational relationships, and even political connections and patronage. There can, therefore, be little wonder that literary works also dwelled upon such ties.

Introduction

In the eighteenth century, the term ‘friend’ had a plurality of meanings that spanned kinship ties, sentimental relationships, economic ties, occupational connections, intellectual and spiritual attachments, sociable networks, and political alliances. In this chapter, we shall investigate a spectrum of relationships designated in the eighteenth century as ‘friendship’.

Today the word ‘friend’ is not applied ordinarily to designate familial relationships, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries usages of ‘friend’ to designate kin were extremely common. At the same time, however, ‘friend’ was used to refer to a wide range of non-related supporters, such as patrons, guardians, employers, and other allies. In addition, ‘friend’ was used to describe well-wishers, companions, members of social circles, or select friends – as it does today. Ralph Josselin, for example, used the word ‘friend’ to refer to a wide range of kin, from his sisters, brothers-in-law, uncles, and cousins, to his wife's relations. About a century and a half later, Miss Weeton still described the travails of women who married without the consent of their ‘friends’, namely, their relations. In contrast, Samuel Pepys used the word ‘friend’ to designate a non-related patron, as he rushed to the death-bed of one Mr Pierce to promise him that he would ‘be a friend’ to his wife and family. The rector Benjamin Rogers also named his non-related patron, who had found him employment, as ‘the best friend I ever had’.

Introduction

However important the concept of the household-family was in eighteenth-century society and culture, there were also other concepts of the family that existed at the same time. The main subject of this chapter is the concept of the lineage-family. This concept of the family was both very significant and probably the one furthest removed from the concept of the household-family. The first section of this chapter examines the manifestations of the concept of the lineage-family in the diary of Thomas Turner. The second section offers a closer examination of Turner's references to the lineage-family with which he had the closest contact, the Pelham family. This chapter will also enable us to see how a middling eighteenth-century man such as Turner related to notions of lineage and ancestry, and the role such notions played in his cultural perceptions and social interaction.

Having established the main characteristics of the concept of the lineage-family, and having explored its usages in Turner's diary, we shall proceed to investigate its manifestations in our other texts. The third section will focus on the two conduct treatises, The Apprentice's Vade Mecum and A Present for a Servant-Maid, and the fourth section on Pamela and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless. These sections will allow us to ascertain the broad currency of the concept of the lineage-family within an eighteenth-century ‘language community’, and also to show how this concept was used as a building-block in the construction of eighteenth-century texts.

Introduction

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, we are told, the English family was characteristically nuclear. This depiction can be traced from the path-breaking studies of the Cambridge Population Group to the broad interpretative survey of Ralph Houlbrooke; from the aggregate analysis of parish registers to the individual testimony of Ralph Josselin's diary. Since the 1960s and 1970s it has become clear that the extended family household, what William Goode termed ‘the classical family of Western nostalgia’, was not the predominant household and family form in early modern England. English people in the early modern period did not have very large completed families, and did not live in large and complex households.

But what concepts of the family did people have in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England? Did they focus exclusively on the nuclear unit as the prototype of household and family relationships, or were other concepts of the family significant in their world view? If we attend to the language people used, it seems that the latter was the case. Very often, when English people spoke or wrote about ‘families’, it was not the nuclear unit that they had in mind. ‘Family’ in their language could mean a household, including its diverse dependants, such as servants, apprentices, and co-resident relatives. Accordingly, Samuel Johnson defined ‘family’ as ‘those who live in the same house’.

The meaning of the term has been noticed by many scholars: indeed, it is mentioned in the opening pages of several studies of the history of the family.

This book has attempted to examine some historical concepts of the family. Central to the project has been the exploration of the household-family. When people in the eighteenth century spoke or wrote about ‘families’, they certainly could have had in mind groups of kin living together, or separately, as in present-day usages. They could also have had in mind significant notions of lineage and ancestry. But more often, what they had in mind was a household unit, which could comprise related and non-related dependants living together under the authority of a householder: it might include a spouse, children, other relations, servants and apprentices, boarders, sojourners, or only some of these. This concept of the family was thus flexible and permeable, for it could accommodate diverse family members and many changes over time. But as we have seen, ‘family’ units such as these also formed structured frameworks, with some well-understood roles and relationships. Important contractual relationships, occupational and instrumental relationships, affective relationships, and indeed kinship relationships existed within households, and these were also construed and represented in ‘familial’ terms. Accordingly, when people in the eighteenth century moved in and out of households (which they did often as servants, apprentices, spouses, wards, boarders, lodgers, or even long-term guests), their actions were often understood in terms of the household-family, its roles and relationships. Similarly, acts of transgression and defiance of authority could also be understood in terms of the structural and relational framework of the household-family.