The Economics of Gentility in the British Atlantic World

The legal battle over the will of Bristol Customs official John Elbridge opened with a contretemps about a house and furnishings. The clash made clear that material goods mattered, and that their coded cultural and monetary values provided precise indications of their importance in defining social status. The multi-layered reactions documented in this court case offer insights into how the genteel in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic valued their material world. Britain from the late-seventeenth century saw the proliferation of small, compact, free-standing classical houses like the one owned by John Elbridge. Although much work has been done on topics like consumption, politeness and gentility, gender, and the domestic interior, few scholars have explored this type of house and its owner in any detail, especially the expenditures necessary to become established in the realm of the genteel. Based on an analysis of nearly one hundred houses and their builder-owners in England and British America, this paper constructs with precision the costs associated with building, furnishing, and maintaining a small classical house, and the range of resources necessary to support these efforts. It argues that the owners of such houses made mostly measured choices about their material acquisitions, offering a different narrative than the one often propagated of thrusting new men overstretching their means to acquire vast estates and build large country houses.