Beattie, J.M.

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

' 208 HISTOIRE SOCIALE - SOCIAL HISTORY Richard Overton, John Wildman and William Walwyn, were able to assume the leadership and act as an umbrella for both civilian separatists in London, and army sectaries in the New Model. Their hegemony over both groups did not last long, however. When the Army marched on London in August 1647, its commanders conspicuously failed to liberate Levellers like John Lilbume from prison. This failure drew bitter criticism from Leveller pens. However, the steady advance-ment of sectarians in the officer corps diminished their community of interest with the Levellers, and drew them closer to Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton and the other Army grandees. A similar split between Levellers and sectarians occurred in the City, though not till the end of 1648, over the issue of Pride's Purge and the King's trial. Again, the London separatists were more drawn to the Army grandees, with their promise of saintly rule and religious toleration, than they were to the Levellers, with their secular brand of radical politics. Thus it was the loss of sectarian support -most notably that of the Particular Baptists - that cost the Levellers their chance of political success. Most previous writers have seen the Levellers' failure in terms of their being 'ahead of their time', of their failure to appeal to the agrarian lower classes, and of their having no answer to the charisma and military genius of Oliver Cromwell. However, Tolmie's re-interpretation will have to be taken into account in any future examination of the Leveller movement. The Triumph of the Saints is based chiefly on the pamphlets and books (but not the newspapers) in the british Library's Thomason Collection. This is an ex-tremely rich source of material, but a search of the Society of Genealogists' Index of seventeenth-century Londoners, as well as the manuscripts in the Guildhall and other archives, might have uncovered additional information about some of the tantalizingly elusive separatist congregations. It is also puzzling to note the absence of any reference to some important recent works like Brian Manning's Religion, Politics and the English Civil War (1973), as well as some not-so-recent ones, like D. B. Robertson's The Religious Foundations of Le1·el/er Democracy (1951). These reservations apart, however, one cannot but admire Tolmie's lucid and coherent treatment of London religious separatism before and during the English Revolution. Perhaps he is right in asserting that the separatists' twin achie-vements were the destruction of the political theory of the divine right of kings, and the creation of that remarkably long-lived and influential cultural phenomenon known as English nonconformity. Ian GENTLES, York Uni1•ersity. LAWRENCE STONE. - The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977. Pp. xxxi, 800. Lawrence Stone's preference for the grand scale and his talents for syn-thesis are both abundantly clear in this massive book. It is a striking and original piece of work. There will be objections without question to various aspects of the ai:gument, but stripped of its excess and restated in its essentials the central theme is likely to hold up and to be important in stimulating and clarifying further work. Stone's argument is that fundamental changes in human relationships oc-curred in the three centuries he is concerned with and that these can be seen most COMPTES RENDUS - BOOK REVIEWS 209 clearly in the family and in sexual behaviour and attitudes. Indeed, he argues that three distinct family types were prevalent over this period, one giving way to the next though with some considerable overlapping in time. The transformation af-fected relationships both within the family - between parents and children and husbands and wives - and between the family and the wider society. The family became, for example, more self-contained. In the early sixteen century, and for centuries before, the family was open to the influence of kin and even to a signifi-cant extent of neighbours; its members' loyalties were broadly distributed. Mar-riage was dictated by economic or kinship concerns, not personal wishes. In ad-dition, the circumstances of life - its hardship, the frequency of death, the lack of privacy and a host of other matters - discouraged close and affectionate relationships within the family. Life was too harsh for the family to have formed a circle of affection, a haven of warm and loving relationships. This "Open Lineage Family" began to change significantly, Stone argues, in the course of the sixteenth century as kinship loyalties dissolved and as religious sensibilities shifted. Families became increasingly more cohesive and more self-contained. It is true that political and religious influences encouraged at the same time a greater emphasis on the authority of the father and brought a strengthening of patriarchal controls over children and wives. But this brought too an important change in parents' attitudes towards their children, especially concern for their behaviour, training and education. Such changes produced what Stone calls the "Restricted Patriarchal Nuclear Family" which flourished in the first half of the seventeenth century. There were even more stoking developments, however, after the Restoration when, Stone argues, an emergence of individual self-awareness linked to a growth of affective feelings wrought a transformation in emotional at-tachments among family members. The tendency for the family to be more cohesive and to cultivate privacy continued and was indeed accelerated. But in addition, what Stone calls 'affective individualism' came increasingly to undermine the stem patriarchal authoritarianism in the seventeenth-century family and to encourage the flowering of warmly emotional relationships between husbands and wives, and be-tween parents and children. Personal affection came increasingly to dictate marital choices; companionship in marriage became an ideal ; children became increasingly important in their own right . In addition, these changes were accompanied by a revolution in sexual attitudes and by a more open and frank pleasure in sexual experience. In short, the essential characteristics of the modem family had emerged in England by the mid-eighteenth century in the form of the "Closed Domesticated Nuclear Family". Stone offers little in the way of explanation of these massive shifts. He re-jects such general explanations as 'modernization' or the rise of industrial capital-ism because they do not fit the chronology of change as he has identified it and because he thinks that the history of the family did not unfold in a simple linear way (the authority of the patriarch in the Victorian family being in his view a regres-sion). But if he does not press forward an explanation, he illustrates and supports his argument with a wealth of examples drawn from a wide variety of printed sources. One result is that the book contains a great deal of interesting information and is very informative on a number of matters. His sources derive overwhelmingly, however, from the upper ranks of the society and there is a certain ambivalence in the book about the consequences of this. On the one hand, it is plain that Stone is mainly concerned with the upper levels of society. Indeed, his argument is that the changes he has charted, especially the development of the closed and af-fectionate nuclear family, are generated in the first place in the higher bourgeoisie. His social categories are not all precise, but he argues for a form of cultural dif-fusion by which the newer characteristics of the family spread rapidly from this 210 HISTOIRE SOCIALE - SOCIAL HISTORY bourgeoisie to the richer gentry families and only later to what he calls the 'higher aristocracy' or sometimes the 'court aristocracy', and much later still to the bulk of the population. Most of the printed material Stone relies on relates only to the upper levels of the society and it is with them that he remains mainly con-cerned. But he cannot resist the temptation to deal also with the rest of the popula-tion whom he lumps together uncomprehendingly as 'the plebs' and whose life and culture his printed sources do not enable' him to penetrate. In several sections of the book he includes a limp page or two on the way the subject at hand might have affected the working population and in the section on sexual behaviour this rises to an entire chapter. But none of this gets very far because the evidence is so indirect. When he is dealing with the groups he knows best and from which his sources most clearly derive, Stone develops his argument vigorously and per-suasively. It is in some respects perhaps too vigorously argued, for he undoubtedly exaggerates some of the contrasts he is concerned to establish. The picture of the sixteenth century seems too dark and on the other hand his eighteenth-century family seems to be too completely liberated from the authority of the father and husband. The argument is more persuasive, it seems to me, when one discounts some of what appears to be hyperbole in the way it is presented. There are a number of other problems in the book. With so broad a theme some of the evidence has had to be pulled and pushed to fit. And I would say too that parts of the very long text might have been pruned with advantage. The re-telling of essentially familiar stories at considerable length in the chapter on gentlemanly sexual beha-viour - including for example the exploits of Pepys and Boswell - borders on the self-indulgent. But many of these problems are essentially superficial. At its centre the book develops an important argument about the ways that human relationships have changed in the past five hundred years. The argument will be refined and no doubt modified. But Stone's work will remain as a stimulus to research and clear thinking about the centrally important transformations he has sketched. * * * J. M. BEATTIE, University of Toronto. JoHN MoNEY. -Experience and Identity : Birmingham and the West Mid-lands, 1760-1800. Montreal: MeGill-Queen's University Press, 1977. Pp. 312. Nineteenth century Birmingham was a city whose political life was charac-terized by a degree of social cohesion and class co-operation not found in many other industrial centres. The contrast has often been made between the relative solidarity of Birmingham and the marked social cleavages which existed in Man-chester or Lyons in the last century. This difference between Birmingham and many other industrial towns has been attributed to the particular structure of the city's industrial base, as well as that of the surrounding region. In the nineteenth century Birmingham was the centre of an important metalworking district whose manufactures consisted of buckles, buttons, hatchets, steam engines, toys, nails, pots and a variety of cheap hardware items. Its workforce was skilled and could command relatively high wages. The place of work was still the workshop, not the large scale factory , and, most historians agree, there was little in the way of class 

LAWRENCE STONE. — The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800.

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LAWRENCE STONE. — The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800.

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)