Gender and Family Networks in Victorian Sheffield

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports 2020 Respectable Women, Ambitious Men: Gender and Family Networks in Victorian Sheffield Autumn Mayle [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd Part of the European History Commons, History of Gender Commons, History of Religion Commons, and the Women's History Commons Recommended Citation Mayle, Autumn, "Respectable Women, Ambitious Men: Gender and Family Networks in Victorian Sheffield" (2020). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 7530. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/7530 This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by the The Research Repository @ WVU with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you must obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. This Dissertation has been accepted for inclusion in WVU Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports collection by an authorized administrator of The Research Repository @ WVU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Respectable Women, Ambitious Men: Gender and Family Networks in Victorian Sheffield Autumn Mayle Dissertation submitted to the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University In partial fulfillment for the requirement for the degree of Doctorate in History Katherine Aaslestad, Ph. D., Chair Joseph Hodge, Ph. D. Matthew Vester, Ph. D. Marilyn Francus, Ph. D. Alison Twells, Ph. D. Department of History Morgantown, West Virginia 2020 Keywords: philanthropy, domesticity, Victorian England, nineteenth-century Sheffield, family business, kinship, women and gender Copyright 2020 Autumn Mayle Abstract Respectable Women, Ambitious Men: Gender and Family Networks in Victorian Sheffield Autumn Mayle “Respectable Women, Ambitious Men: Gender and Family Networks in Victorian Sheffield” offers a family study of Nonconformist manufacturers in nineteenth-century Sheffield through several thematic case studies on such subjects as gender, family networks and businesses, bankruptcy, piety, and charitable work. This project focuses on the Reads, a family of middle- class Congregationalist smelters who owned a smelting works, named Read & Co., in nineteenth-century Sheffield. The Reads’ experiences contribute to recent scholarship on gender and kinship studies by addressing the role of nineteenth-century conceptions of masculinity and femininity on family, charity, and business and the enduring influence of nuclear families and family networks in modern Europe. Analyzing the Reads’ family network demonstrates that families utilized these structures to sustain and promote their businesses and philanthropic work during periods of financial crisis. The Reads’ charitable activism also reveals the integral role of inward religion and piety within their philanthropic ventures—aspects that many other studies of middle-class charity dismiss as primarily representations of middle-class respectability, social authority, and self-interest. Table of Contents Acknowledgements iv Introduction 1 Map 1 38 Chapter 1 39 Map 2 74 Read Family Tree 75 Chapter 2 76 Chapter 3 118 Chapter 4 147 Chapter 5 177 Conclusion 215 Bibliography 224 iii Acknowledgements I owe sincere thanks and gratitude to the many colleagues who I have been fortunate enough to be mentored, inspired, and encouraged by. Special thanks first and foremost to my dissertation chair and advisor, Katherine Aaslestad, whose patience, guidance, encouragement, and feedback carried me through the exciting and stressful periods of graduate coursework, candidacy, and dissertating. I would also like to thank the other members of my dissertation committee, Matthew Vester, Joseph Hodge, Marilyn Francus, and Alison Twells who supported my project and offered constructive and inspiring feedback. Of these four, special regard is due to Matthew Vester, who offered insightful comments and suggestions on various chapters, and Alison Twells, who showed kind interest and support for work that was largely inspired by her own. I was also fortunate to receive support and encouragement while conducting archival research in England. Special thanks to local historian and fellow Read-enthusiast, Penny Rea, who was kind enough to invite me to participate in her vital and inspiring work that honored the Read family’s legacy and whose discussions about the Reads’ and Wilsons’ roles in local history helped to shape this project. I also owe a great debt of gratitude to Tim Knebel and the staff at the Sheffield City Archives and Local History Library for their help and support. Thanks also to the archivists and librarians at the Sheffield University Archives, Nottingham Archives, Dr. Williams’ Library, and the Evangelical Library. Thanks, finally, to West Virginia University’s History Department, Women and Gender Studies Department, Humanities Department, and Eberly College of Arts and Sciences without whose generous grants and fellowships this research would not have been possible. iv Introduction Many of these records would be considered trivial and egotistical to strangers, but they are intended to be read by my own Family only, to whom references to ourselves will not be altogether devoid of interest. I wrote to amuse myself; and began to arrange my recollections interspersed with Montgomery’s letters, at the suggestion of my Elizabeth. They were for her-- Who will care for them now-- M.A.R.1 Though Mary Anne Rawson alleged that she only wrote the “Memorials of James Montgomery” for her “amuse[ment],” the text makes it clear that she deemed her family’s contributions as important parts of the community’s history. Mary Anne’s decision to create her own, in her opinion, more accurate biography on James Montgomery’s life that presented not only his achievements, but his personality and interests, evidences her belief in the importance of her family’s perspective on the life of this great man.2 It is telling that Mary Anne’s depiction of Montgomery’s life was not so much the story of Montgomery as the story of her family’s relationship with him—to the extent that she caught herself digressing from Montgomery’s story while relating details about her family’s lives. What’s more, Mary Anne’s self-conscious humility on its content and her final, tragic note on her daughter, Lizzie Rawson’s, early death, bely her earlier comment on the project only being written for the family—her ongoing compilation of these recollections proved her conviction that they should be preserved. Like Mary Anne’s “Memorials of James Montgomery,” this project seeks to reintroduce her family’s lives into the local and national narrative of British nineteenth-century history. 1 Mary Anne Rawson, “Memorials of James Montgomery,” James Montgomery Collection, (hereafter JMC) Sheffield University Archives (hereafter SUA). 2 Ibid. 1 Methodology and Notes on Primary Sources This project provides a series of case studies drawing on the Reads’ lives to reveal insights into the role of gender, family networks, kinship ties, and middle-class morality in family businesses and charitable endeavors. In effect, this dissertation acts as a blend between a microhistory and a family study: a study of the Reads that unveils how their experiences reflect their worldviews as Nonconformist, manufacturing men and women in nineteenth-century Northern England and the role of this community within British history. My work uses a combination of microhistory and family studies to analyze how individuals in the family worked together by studying their personal correspondence and diaries to determine the individual’s gendered, familial role in the family network. The Read’s family network sheds light on problematic assumptions in the current historical narrative: an overshadowing emphasis on marriage, motherhood, and fatherhood in family history and fiscal success and expansion in studies of manufacturing in the era of industrial capitalism. This study explores broader notions of family, the experiences of bankruptcy and financial crisis, and commitments to philanthropic activism through the perspective of gender and family networks. My project contributes to gender scholarship by examining how men and women in the Read family worked together using their gendered, kin roles to support the family business and pursue meaningful charitable work; revealing that each sex performed certain tasks or held specific responsibilities according to contemporary ideas about masculinity and femininity. Likewise, it reacts to seminal works of family history that highlighted the enduring influence of family networks and kinship ties into the modern era by presenting the Reads as yet another example of families that heavily relied upon their kinship networks to sustain their professional and philanthropic interests. 2 My work also reflects a theme in scholarship that connects middle-class associational life and charitable work in civil society with the creation of a middle-class identity that asserted its influence within the community as moral authorities. The Reads engaged in many causes that championed middle-class morality as the solution to public evils—anti-slavery, poor relief, temperance, and lower-class education. As other works on middle-class

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