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University of Warwick institutional repository: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap/36401 This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. Luxury and Labour: Ideas of Labouring-Class Consumption in Eighteenth-Century England by Jonathan White Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of History, University of Warwick, April 2001 This dissertation may be photocopied Table of Contents List of Illustrations i Acknowledgements ii Declaration iv Abstract v Introduction: Luxury and Labour: Ideas of Labouring-Class 1 Consumption in Eighteenth-Century England Section One: 1720-1739 1:Trade, Tax and Toil: Luxury and Labour in a Trading Nation 32 2: Reforming the Profligate Poor: Poor Relief and Charity Debates 68 in the Early Eighteenth Century 3: "The Slow but Sure Poyson": Mother Gin and the Act of 1736 99 Section Two: 1745-1755 4: 'Commerce is the Source of Wealth of this Island": Labour and 132 Consumption at the Mid Century 5: "New Species of Expence": Tea, Gin and the Labouring-Class 168 Domestic Sphere, 1745-1755 6: Policing the Labouring Classes, 1745-1753 201 Section Three: 1765-1779 7: "All Property is Threatened Across Party Lines": 233 The Debate over Wages, Profits and Prices 8: Customising Commodities and Commodifying Custom: 268 Leisure and Luxury, 1765-1777 9: Houses of Industry, Parish Annuities and the Needs of the Poor 294 1765-1772 Conclusion 329 Bibliography 338 Illustrations 377 Illustrations All sizes are in centimetres Figure 1: Anon., The Funeral Procession of Madam Geneva, engraving, Sept. 29, 1736, British Museum, 34.9 x22.8 Figure 2: Anon., To the Mortal Memo of Madam Geneva, Who Died Sept 29 1736, engraving„ Sept. 29, 1736, British Museum, 19.4 x 25.7 Figure 3: Anon., The Lamentable Fall of Madam Geneva, engraving, Sept. 29, 1736, British Museum, 29.5 x 30.8 Figure 4: William Hogarth, Beer Street, engraving, Feb. 1, 1751, British Museum, 30.2 x 35.8 Figure 5: William Hogarth, Gin Lane, engraving, Feb. 1, 1751, British Museum, 30.2 x 35.2 ii Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been possible without the support of various bodies. First, I would like to thank the AHRB for awarding me the grant that has funded most of the research I have undertaken. The Institute of Historical Research awarded me a six month research fellowship which has enabled me to complete the thesis. But most thanks must go to the Eighteenth-Century Centre's Luxury Project at the University of Warwick. Without the studentship awarded by Professor Maxine Berg and Professor Anne Janowitz this project would never have got off the ground. I would like to thank the staff at the various libraries in which I have conducted the research for the thesis: the British Library; the Bodleian library; the Cambridge University Library; the University of London library; the Institute of Historical Research, Senate House London. David Parrot, Ian Archer and Ruth Harris first whetted my appetite for research in history, so my thanks to them for their early belief and support. Many people have contributed to the development of my work and I would like to thank, in particular, John Chartres, Elizabeth Eger, Steve Hindle, Anne Janowitz, Ludmilla Jordanova, Karen O'Brien, Richard Sheldon, Carolyn Steedman and Dror Wahrman. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Colin Jones. He and Steve Hindle supervised my MA by research dissertation, a comparative study of charity and the state in England and France during the 1690s. Colin also encouraged me to delve further into the eighteenth century. Since then, he has continued to encourage, support and challenge my work and the thesis is far better for his influence. ifi I would also like to thank the many people at the University of Warwick who have been both friends and intellectual interlocutors over the last few years. The "Challenging History" reading group represents, to me, a perfect example of the combination of friendly and informal discussion and intellectual labour. I gained a lot from our theoretical musings and interrogations and I would like to thank David Ayrton, Tonya Blowers, Lynn Guyver, Ian Hill, and Ruth Livesey. Matt Adams, Duncan Hall, Seth Denbo and Chloe Underwood have kept alive the spirit of that group and have been with me throughout the, often painful, process of writing this thesis. My thanks to them for their unfailing support. From further afield, I want to thank the people who have offered accommodation, support and true friendship over the years: Sophie Bold, Libby Brooks, Richard McKenny, Nicholas Taylor and Laurence Zage. Several people deserve particular mention. Andrew McGettigan has been enormously influential over the years, tirelessly explaining philosophical positions, and challenging, unsettling and clarifying my ideas. He also knows a lot of good pubs. The two people who deserve most thanks for the fact that thesis has made it into any sort of print are Kate Retford and Maxine Berg. Kate has had to endure the painful progress of the thesis on a daily basis. Her patience knows no bounds. She has helped me to develop and express my ideas, listened to garbled streams of thought at the end of long days, tremendously improved my woeful writing and she has also read the whole thing from cover to cover. I cannot express the thanks I owe her for all the work she has put in and all the love and support she has given and continues to give. Only she really knows how much I owe her. iv Maxine also knows the pain that can be induced by my writing. She, perhaps more than anyone else, bears responsibility for what clarity the thesis possesses. Maxine has never stopped impressing on me the virtues of clearer and shorter sentences. I owe her a tremendous debt of gratitude for her early enthusiasm for the project, without which the thesis would not now exist, and for her continued faith in its value. She is one of the hardest working people I know, but has still found time to be an absolutely committed supervisor and advocate of my work. I cannot thank her enough for her ceaseless efforts over the last three years. Finally, I dedicate this thesis to my parents. I could not have asked for anything more from them. If I did they wouldn't have anything left. They have • been everything I could ever have asked for and more. Without their unconditional love and support, I would simply never have been able to undertake and complete this work. Declaration: I declare that this thesis is my own work and that it has not been submitted for a degree at any other university. None of the work that appears here has previously been published. Abstract This thesis examines changing ideas of labouring-class consumption in eighteenth- century England. Recent social and economic history has rewritten eighteenth- century England in terms of the formation of a commercial society. Against this backdrop, intellectual and cultural historians have uncovered the formation of concepts and practices appropriate for a civilised commercial society. Yet, in spite of the growing evidence that they were increasingly participating in the developing world of goods, little work has focused on the public discussion of the labouring classes' consumer desires. The study is based on the close analysis of pamphlet literature discussing the labouring classes. It tracks the ideas through which the propertied classes viewed labouring-class consumption and attempted to determine the exact status and function of their desires in a commercial society. From within an early eighteenth-century position which viewed the appetites of the poor as being a species of luxury, the thesis tracks the emergence of categories and concepts that made it possible to recognise the labouring classes' consumer desires as part of commercial society's progressive development. In the later years of the century, this optimism faded as the interests of capital accumulation and the demands of labourers were increasingly recognised to be contradictory. Ultimately, the thesis argues that we cannot understand the ideological representation of the needs and desires of the poor without also tracing the changing conceptualisation of their labour, in the same way that we cannot understand the formation of a commercial society without reference to proletarianisation and the attack on customary culture. The coalescing practices of a commercial society, and their ideological expression, rested upon the ever greater alienation of the labouring classes, from their human needs and powers. 1 Luxury and Labour: Ideas of Labouring-Class Consumption in Eighteenth-Century England Introduction In 1738, Thomas Andrews, a Wiltshire parson attempting to make sense of the riots which had engulfed the weaving districts that year, wrote that the miseries of the poor were in no small part due to 'the great Luxury of the present Age, which extends itself to, and corrupts, all Ranks and Degrees of People'. 'Luxury', he claimed, 'descends like a devouring Torrent on our middling People'. But it did not stop there. Nay sometimes', he exclaimed, 'it humbly enters the lowly Cottages of our Poor themselves'.' Such claims by the propertied concerning the habits of the poor are familiar to historians of eighteenth-century England. Quite definitely less familiar is the sort of claim made by a retired merchant, Malachy Postlethwayt, nineteen years later.

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