Child-Rearing and Social Expectations in Eighteenth-Century England: The Case of the Colliers of Hastings

C hild-Rearing and Social ExpectationsonmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONML in Eighteenth-C entury England: The Case of the Colliers of H astings M A R Y JO E H U G H E S Most historiansof the Western family share a basic assumption: the fam­ ily is a miniature polity. This assumption was, of course, common in tra­ ditional thought as well. For centuries the family was seen as a microcosm of the larger society, reflecting the timeless patterns of all Gods creation. Now, in current historical thought, this conception of repeating patterns has simply been invested with dynamic properties. That is, historians por­ tray the family as an institution which either absorbs or stimulates changes in the wider world. They still assume that there is some congruence be­ tween the microcosm and the macrocosm, and indeed that the family is as susceptible to cultural change as any other institution.1 For the study of childhood that is our subject here, this assumption has meant that the increased respect for the autonomy and happiness of children which many find emerging in the eighteenth century is often re­ lated to broad modernizing trends in society. The two recent studies of the English family of this period, Lawrence Stone's Fam ily, Sex, and M ar­ riage in England and Randolph Trumbach's The Rise of the Egalitarian Fam ily are both representative of this line of argument, though Trumbach is more cautious in drawing these parallels than Stone.2 Though Trum­ bach studied only the aristocracy and Stone all classes but especially the middle classes and gentry, both agree on the main outlines of a transition from a family that was hierarchical and emotionally distant to one based 79 80 / HUGHESonmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA on affe ction,incre ase dintimacy ,and gre ate rautonomy for family me m­ bers. The key factors in this transition include a shift in the basis of mar­ riage from property considerations to affection and a new affection and respect for children.3 Stone calls this phenomenon the rise of "affective individualism" and Trumbach the "rise of the egalitarian family."4 In both cases the use of words like "individualism" and "egalitarian" reveals the tendency to interpret family patterns along lines of political or economic modernization, as if there were some inherent connection, either cause or effect, between the public and the private spheres. If this hypothesis about the family is correct, one ought to be able to find within the records of individual families not just instances of this dramatic transition emerging but also some hint of how the dynamic of change actually occurs. That is, one ought to be able to locate a connec­ tion between private assumptions and public life. To do so it would be necessary to have very good records of the interaction of individual family members privately, as well as detailed evidence of their dealings with the public world, the world of social life, economics, and politics in which broad trends like the rise of individualism have some meaning. The Collier family, who lived in Hastings, Sussex, in the first half of the eighteenth century, seems an excellent case study for such an investiga­ tion. First, the Colliers lived just at the period when Stone and Trumbach have located a shift in English family patterns, and second, the Colliers left extensive records of both a private and a public nature. About two thousand family letters from the period from 1715 to 1780 have survived, and these records are supplemented by a large official, political, and legal correspondence and by a collection of deeds, wills, bills, and accounts.5 The official records and the family correspondence taken together afford the opportunity to examine closely the links between national affairs and domestic arrangements, in part because of the nature of the Colliers social position. For theirs was by origin a relatively modest provincial family, though one that attained connections in high places. John Collier, the head of the family, was the son of an innkeeper. He studied law, moved to Has­ tings as a young man, married the daughter of a local clergyman, and gradually rose to prominence in local affairs. In time his local influence and legal...