The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England, 1600–1750 by H. R. French (review)

92 on happiness is to see it as a participant in a broader cultural enquiry into the question of what it means to live a good life in the modern world,’’ and observes, ‘‘As Barbauld’s reading of Rasselas makes clear, eighteenth-century thinkers could be as critical of ‘disembodied’ and ‘disembedded’ forms of theorizing as the communitarians of our own day. It is the novel, more than any other form of writing, that promoted this way of reflecting on moral problems.’’ The collection’s success in addressing the entwinement of literary and philosophical discourse in the eighteenth century is inseparable from its redressing the consequences of their institutionalized segregation in our time. One product of our own disciplinary practices has been the hegemony within literary studies of conventional and dated accounts of philosophical history, accounts that naturalize simplistic understandings of empiricism, as well as Western thought in general. In all these respects, Mr. Dick and Ms. Lupton’s volume is timely and much needed. The essays are listed in Contents, p. 130. Donald R. Wehrs Auburn University H. R. FRENCH. The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England, 1600–1750. Oxford: Oxford, 2007. Pp. xii ⫹ 305. $125. Mr. French’s The Middle Sort of People makes the intriguing, yet wellconsidered argument that the ‘‘middle sort of people’’ in seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century provincial England did not identify themselves as such. As he writes, this ‘‘study seeks to reconcile two apparently contradictory propositions—that we can identify distinctive ‘middling’ behaviour, experiences , attributes, and modes of identification ; but that we cannot translate this into self-identification with the contemporary category of the ‘middle sort of people.’’’ Sociologist Richard Jenkins ‘‘suggests that identity is formed by a constant ‘dialectic’ between internal and external perspectives.’’ Specifically, as Mr. French writes, ‘‘Jenkins’s interpretation insists that there has to be some interior identification in order for a social group to exist; otherwise it is merely someone else’s category.’’ Although the term the ‘‘middle sort’’ was used rhetorically during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, it was a loose, ‘‘malleable social category, whose membership could be altered to fit the rhetorical purposes of those who employed it.’’ In essence, although ‘‘middle sort’’ was an external appellation used loosely to identify those individuals of the middling ranks, no interior identification seems to have been made by those individuals , at least not in provincial England : ‘‘For those categorized by some social commentators as members of ‘the middle sort,’ there were few social or administrative transactions in which such a classification was meaningful or consequential, or in which it served as a banner for identification.’’ (As Mr. French notes, this was not true of London and several other major cities, partly due to the relatively large number of prosperous middling households in these urban environments, as well as to differences in metropolitan social interactions and hierarchies.) Using three separate locales as the basis for study—‘‘the cloth-producing region of southern Suffolk and northern Essex, townships in central and eastern Lancashire, and parishes in western 93 Dorset’’—The Middle Sort of People focuses on parish experience; it argues that the social identity of the provincial middling sorts was predominantly founded on their roles within their parish . Detailed examination of Household Hearth Tax assessments, probate inventories , parochial office holdings, and ownership of material goods support these findings. Within parishes, selfproclaimed ‘‘chief inhabitants’’ ranked themselves higher on the social scale than regular ‘‘inhabitants.’’ All ‘‘inhabitants ’’ paid taxes, a sign of relative wealth, and all shared similar parochial concerns and outlooks, yet ‘‘chief inhabitants ’’ generally possessed greater wealth and income, and most held parish/governmental offices. Wealth determined , contributed to, and confirmed status within the parish. However, though relative wealth becomes one of the markers (among others) that determines ‘‘middling’’ social status, it is important to recognize that the status brought about by this wealth had no real meaning external to the parish; that is, self-identifying as a ‘‘chief inhabitant’’ of a particular parish did not translate into viewing oneself as part of a larger, extra-parochial group (such as ‘‘the middle sort’’). Mr. French argues that any sense of extra-parochial social identity stemmed not from...