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  • Doing the Wife
  • Emma Griffin (bio)
The Diary of Edmund Harrold, Wigmaker of Manchester 1712-15, ed. Craig Horner, Ashgate, 2008; 216 pp; 978 0 7546 6172 6.

Craig Horner's recently published edition of the diary of Edmund Harrold (a Manchester wig-maker, barber and small-time bookseller) is a gift to anyone interested in ordinary life in eighteenth-century England. Horner's edition joins a growing collection of published eighteenth-century diaries, yet this diary differs significantly from the rest in both authorship and content. Most that have come to light thus far are the work of rural writers, so the fact of being written by a resident of Manchester sets Harrold's diary apart.1 More remarkable, however, is its author's social status. Eighteenth-century diarists were for the most part a well-educated and financially secure lot.2 Harrold was born into a reasonably comfortable existence, but he did not remain there and he certainly did not enjoy much affluence during the years covered by his diary. His father, Thomas Harrold, had owned a prosperous tobacconist business - it was valued at £371 at his death, when Edmund, his eldest son, was just five years old.3 But despite these auspicious beginnings, Harrold's life soon took a downward direction. He was plagued [End Page 320] by money difficulties and enjoyed a far less substantial income than his parents: he left no will and spent just 21s on his wife's funeral.4 Furthermore, not only was Harrold's financial situation precarious, he also earned most of his living from manual labour (wig-making and barbering), which once again is in marked contrast to most other eighteenth-century diarists.5

Perhaps most remarkable of all, however, is the content of Harrold's diary. Like other sources of its kind, his diary ranges over the minutiae of daily life: work, personal relationships, social life, and religious beliefs. Almost uniquely among eighteenth-century diarists, however, Harrold recorded his sex life and described in some detail the incapacitation caused by his drunken binges - 'rambles', as he dubbed them. His very heavy drinking no doubt played a role in his descent into poverty. In the rest of this review I am going to concentrate on the insights yielded by Harrold's diary into sex and drink in the eighteenth century.

Harrold was born on 26 April 1678. He was baptised at Manchester Collegiate Church and spent the rest of his life living and working in Manchester. He was married four times and had nine children, seven of whom died as infants or children. The diary covers the end of his marriage to his second wife, Sarah, and his remarriage to Ann Horrocks a little over half a year later. Two births also occurred during the years covered by the diary. He baptised his seventh child (Sarah's sixth), a daughter also named Sarah, in 1712. This daughter passed away four months later. In 1714 Harrold baptised his eighth child, borne by Ann, a daughter whom they called Mary. Ann died after three years of marriage, and after three years alone Harrold married for a fourth time. His fourth wife produced his ninth child, a son John; this child also died at four months. Harrold, aged forty-two. died a week before his son John.

The diary opens in June 1712. Sarah, was three months pregnant with her sixth child. Edmund kept a brief, almost coded, note of each time that he and his wife had sex, and (Sarah's pregnancy notwithstanding) there were plenty such occasions to record. Edmund wrote of each - 'I did wife': a phrase from which it is difficult to conjure images of mutual pleasure and enjoyment. He almost always added a few extra details: '2 tymes, couch and bed, in an hour and ½ time', 'standing at the back of the shop titely', 'new fashion', 'after a scolding bout', '2 times [in] 4 days', 'titely, old fashion', 'oddly', '2 times finely'.6 It is not much from which to reconstruct a couple's most intimate moments. Yet there is no reason to doubt that the sex between Edmund and Sarah was of a consensual nature. Sarah certainly...

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