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Manners and Class in the Revolutionary Era: A Transatlantic Comparison
C. Dallett Hemphill
| PITY the poor landlady at Westtown who came under young John Adams's scrutiny. The twenty-four-year-old recorded that, though "good Natured ... she has so many shrugs, grimaces, affectations of Witt, Cunning and Humour, as make her ridiculous. She is awkward, shamefaced, bashful, yet would fain seem sprightly, witty, etc." Adams wrote many such diary entries in the 1750s. A local parson, a prominent lawyer, even his parents were subjected to his detailed descriptions. Nor was he easy on himself. Adams made these observations as part of a conscious campaign of self-improvement. He strove to become master of his body and regarded this mastery as essential to establishing himself. His striving for manners was bound up with his striving for success. It is easy to forget that this Adams in his twenties was closer to his Massachusetts forebears' respectable but middling social origins than the unquestionably elite status his political career would eventually bestow on him, yet his background is crucial in understanding Adams and many of his contemporaries. Adams clearly wanted to be, and to be seen as, a gentleman and thought that proper deportment was essential. He did not think that high birth and great wealth were necessary elements for being a gentleman, and he accepted the idea that achieving social status took work. Adams's background and outlook were not unique. His contemporary Benjamin Rush, for example, had a similar social trajectory. These men had many counterparts in the northern colonies.1 Indeed many in England shared their project. |
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The idea that those in the middle could be equal to those at the top of society was new but, like the larger wave of bourgeois political, economic, and cultural assertion of which it was a part, it is difficult for historians to pinpoint its origins. Like all cultural change, this one happened piecemeal and is only clearly discernible in hindsight when all vestiges of the old order are gone. It took time for the old to wash away, yet that should not blind scholars to the appearance of the new. Historians have had a stubborn tendency to overlook this project, thereby missing the beginnings of middling culture in eighteenth-century Britain and America. |
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British historians have begun to address this oversight. Some locate the root of the neglect in an influential article wherein J. H. Hexter attacked the myth of the Tudor middle class. Historians thereafter were inhibited from discussing the rise of the middle class at any time before the period of incontrovertible bourgeois hegemony in the mid-nineteenth century. The result of this inhibition has been a strict bipolarity in the social classifications applied to eighteenth-century society between, for example, gentry and nongentry, or patrician and plebeian. These last terms suggest another, more surprising, source of the problem: social history. Ever since E. P. Thompson's dazzling The Making of the English Working Class, scholars have been transfixed by history from below. British historians have come to appreciate clear distinctions within the crowd, however, and have begun to focus on the group between the aristocracy and the lower sorts.2 American historians should follow their lead. |
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