Kinship and Capitalism: Marriage, Family, and Business in the English-Speaking World, 1580–1740 by Richard Grassby (review)

78 nally ‘‘publishable in 1896’’ and on p. 209 that Woodhouse had ‘‘suppressed’’ the poem, ‘‘in particular those sections of the poem chronicling plebeian servitude, upper-class oppression, and his own version of religious and moral truth.’’ How was it ‘‘suppressed’’? The author says he cannot find a copy of the 1816 edition, which is fair enough, butitwouldbehelpful to know what is in the 1814 version, and why this might not represent a ‘‘true’’ publication, especially if this text is, as he argues, ‘‘one of the most important literary records of plebeian social and ideological critique of the late eighteenth century.’’ But this is a most welcome and useful book, a giant step forward for the study of the laboring-class poets, and a handsome replacement for Rayner Unwin’s fifty-year old study The Rural Muse, as the standard account of these poets. John Goodridge Nottingham Trent University RICHARD GRASSBY. Kinship and Capitalism : Marriage, Family, and Business in the English-Speaking World, 1580– 1740. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2001. Pp. 505. $65. Trying to restore ‘‘economic history’’ to its role as a ‘‘cordon sanitaire against the virus of cultural theory,’’Mr. Grassby has constructed ‘‘a relational database of 28,000 London businessmen between 1580–1740.’’ On the basis of this empirical sample, he dismisses LawrenceStone ’s‘‘modernizationmodel’’for changes in British family life. Stone’s claim that ‘‘traditional’’ families are replaced by ‘‘nuclear’’isdiscreditedandso, seemingly, are the interpretationsofthose literary critics—a benighted few in Mr. Grassby’s judgment—who continue to take Stone’s model seriously. While less critical of Marx and his followers, Grassby questions Marx’s attribution of changes in family structure to ‘‘the triumph of the capitalist mode of production that separated work from the household.’’ He also writes scornfully of ‘‘gender theorists ’’ because they only focus upon ‘‘the exclusion of women from power, often neglecting the family and economic dimensions .’’ Mr. Grassby’s iconoclastic Introduction , subtitled ‘‘Models and Myths,’’ is bracing reading for anyone working in eighteenth-century studies. Dismissive of both cultural and gender studies, he writes with refreshing directnessandpassion : ‘‘The views of most academics [on family] are determined not by current events but by the political and social traumas of their youth.’’ While his avowed empiricism should place him beyond bias, he does set himselfagainst‘‘theories of society’’ that deny ‘‘individual agency ’’ or that fail to observe ‘‘the average or typical family or household is an abstraction with no counterpart in reality.’’ He warns against studies that rely upon ‘‘literary sources’’—diaries, journals, life histories. Such ‘‘sources have the most flaws as evidence, though they are also the most widely used. In addition to their gender bias, authors freely invented facts, wallowed in their prejudices, generalized from their limited personal experience , and pursued their own agendas .’’He would rather rely upon ‘‘probate evidence,’’ on other ‘‘personal and family papers’’ written in response to ‘‘litigation ’’ and upon the records kept by churches and guilds. Believing that ‘‘Ideologies and methodologies come and go, but the facts are eternal,’’ Mr. Grassby proposes that Stone’s ‘‘model’’ and those of Marx and his followers oversimplify the ‘‘infinitely 79 varied’’ lives of businessmen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ‘‘The patriarchal family and kinship networks coexisted with possessive individualism. Thecapitalistethossurfacedintraditional families alongside conventional social ambitions.’’ Mr. Grassby’s iconoclasm pursues the ‘‘facts’’ so intently that, with the refreshing candor of an ‘‘independent scholar,’’ he sometimes vindicates the work of his targets. As part of his argument that, ‘‘Marriage in thebusinesscommunitydid not just transfer power over women from father to husband,’’he asserts that ‘‘Companionate marriage’’ flourished during his period of study, a position that vindicates Stone’s Family, Sex and Marriage . His work in ‘‘apprenticeship registers ’’ finds women joining ‘‘the cutlers, pewterers, drapers, glasssellers, girdlers, basketmakers, scriveners, gunmakers, weavers, clockmakers, goldsmiths, carpentersand stationers.’’However,thepercentage of women apprentices was so ‘‘tiny,’’ and the ‘‘disadvantage’’they suffered from ‘‘lack of capital’’so great, that he, like any good gender theorist, concludes , ‘‘Apprenticeship brought women into the economy without changing the patriarchal character of society.’’ Perhaps most revealing, as Mr. Grassby moves through the topics of marriage, family, men in business, and women in business, he repeatedly corroborates the demographic analysis that...