Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (review)

With Tadmor's fine book, family history has finally made its linguistic turn. Readers need not fear that they will find themselves in a swamp of cultural theory, dealing with opaque abstractions. On contrary, this book is firmly grounded in verifiable texts, informed by the sound idea that the terms that people use constitute an important dimension of their social reality. Tadmor provides a convincing demonstration of the ways in which the eighteenth-century English language of home, friends, kinship, and family differs profoundly from meanings now assigned to the same terms. She shows how the use of modern terms by historians of family has had an enormously distorting effect on our understanding of the past. The old debates about the continuity of the nuclear family or the existence of extended families are shown to have been based on linguistically anachronistic grounds. This finding will not be news to cultural anthropologists, sociologists of a symbolic interactionist persuasion, and historians of later periods who have already begun to explore the metaphors and images that constitute modern home and family, but it is hoped that this book will cause historians of the early modern period to embrace cultural approaches.

Using a limited but sensible range of sources, principally the diaries of Thomas Turner and novels by Samuel Richardson and Eliza Haywood, Tadmor's method is that of a literary scholar's close reading. She tracks down key words, analyzes their precise usages, and places them in what she calls the "linguistic community" of the middling strata of the day. Regrettably, the book is not concerned with changes over time. But it does provide a convincing thick description at the core of which is Tadmor's analysis of what she calls the "household-family." First and foremost, family meant all the residents of a house, whether or not they were related by blood or marriage. The separation of public from private had not yet occurred; the term family indicated contractural as well as sentimental ties. Yet, the terminology of family also extended beyond the household, blurring into a series of closely related categories that included not only kin in a modern sense but a range of others who have long since merged into the vague sphere of neighbors or mere acquaintances. In one of the most interesting chapters, the author demonstrates how broadly the term friends was used. Relations were often called friends, as were wives and husbands, but so too were fellow religionists, political clients, and business partners. As Tadmor points out, everything had a familial reference.

Family was omnipresent, but it did not necessarily extend as far over time as it did over space. Only the elites had a concept of lineage. People like Turner kept their memories short and their vocabularies flexible, using terms to negotiate social, economic, and political relationships that suited their interests. In effect, family membership was largely elective; despite some constraints on linguistic usage, people were much freer to shape family and friendship than were later generations. Over the course of the Victorian era, the language, as well as the image, of family rigidified. The fact that today language is loosening up once again is one of the reasons why Tadmor's book may be able to topple some of the anachronistic language that still plagues the field of family history. If so, family history of the early modern era will have to take on a much more ambitious agenda, disengaging itself from the myth of the nuclear family and connecting with political, social, and economic history in general.