While the social and economic histories of the building artisan have long been established, specifically in terms of professional mobility through financial prosperity and the challenges faced by industrialization and systems of wage labour, there has been relatively little appreciation of the house builder as an agent of architectural taste. Now recognized as having possessed both technical and supervisory skills, as well as being a successful employer and businessman, the building mechanicâs grasp of design and taste remains historically underdeveloped. At the root of this lacuna lies the apparently antonymous relationship between a life of refinement and a life of trade: a dichotomy between gentility (politeness) and industry (usefulness). But this belies an inherent irony in the history of the Georgian town house: âusefulâ people built and decorated houses for âpoliteâ people. Builders, not architects, raised the houses that formed the âenlightenedâ mosaic of streets and squares inhabited by the taste-conscious elite (the subject of Chapter 2); and from the 1780s, the house builder, not the consumer, customarily dictated the design and decoration of the interiors that constituted the requisite backdrop to a life of genteel refinement (discussed in Chapter 3). It follows then that builders had a vested interest in design: at the very least, their success in business depended on the appeal of their product in a flourishing marketplace.
The pertinent question is whether the building tradesman, as a figure of trade and commerce, might successfully negotiate the polite world of architectural connoisseurship: whether it was, in fact, appropriate for tradesmen to dictate polite taste. The âproblemâ associated with this perception of the building tradesman was, as we shall see, related to the particular product of his industry: the speculatively built brick house. Loudly condemned in architectural discourse and the public press, its inadequacies were both materially and ideologically related to the circumstances of its production and to the perceived social rank of its producer. But as recent scholarship has emphasized, the âproduction-centred definitionâ1 of artisanal identity is no longer tenable, and âthe complexity and richness of the lives of early modern craftsmen should not be reduced simply to their labour in the workshopâ.2
Did artisans from the building industry, from sawyers and lumber merchants to carpenters, bricklayers and house painters, generally belong to the middling or lower ranks of society? As discussed in the Introduction, the use of the term âartisanâ was often imprecise in eighteenth-century social discourse, embracing the different strata of professional organisation that existed between a master craftsman and a jobbing labourer.3 Indeed, despite its origins in aristocratic court culture, and mediated by its relationship to commerce, gentility facilitated social mobility and blurred social distinctions.4 Taken together, histories of social class in the eighteenth century confirm the changing patterns of identity and exchange relations predicated on improving material circumstances.
With the terraced house as the focus of this narrative, we are here particularly concerned with those individuals from the building trades who had the ambition to set up in business as house builders, the capital (or means to obtain credit) to facilitate that ambition and the agency and volition to engage with the protean world of architectural style(s). The point of this chapter is to examine the place of the artisan in the wider social spectrum; the textual and visual representations of the house builder in print culture; and the means by which the builder promoted and self-fashioned as an arbiter of architectural taste.
An artisan class?
In his Anecdotes of the manners and customs of London, during the eighteenth century (1810), James Peller Malcolm identified four social classes: âjourneymanâ, âtradesmanâ, âopulent tradesman and merchantâ and ânobilityâ. While the particular descriptions of each class that follow do not permit an easy association with the building capitalist that forms the focus of this study, the fact that the âopulent tradesmenâ is further qualified as one âthat has retired from businessâ permits the historian some scope to view the late eighteenth-century tradesman in terms other than his âdegradingâ manual vocation.5 In fact, the status of what we may term the âopulent building tradesmanâ â many of whose names are preserved in the historical record â suggests a social designation akin to the modern middle classes.
Historians of social class in Britain, Ireland and the United States agree on the difficulty in determining a âmiddleâ class in early modern urban settings generally, pointing to the social and economic mobility embodied in the type of commercial enterprise that formed an important aspect of the eighteenth-century building industry. In his account of the emerging middle classes and their impact on English national identity, Paul Langford notes that, âWhen contemporaries talked of the âmiddle sortâ, they generally had in mind a wide range of incomes and a great variety of occupations.â6 Reflecting on the fact that social standing depended on a diversity of circumstances and considerations, from the material (property and employment) to the abstract (politeness and breeding), Langford argues that individual positions were further âamplified or diminished by the traditions, perceptions, and outlook of the communities in which they were setâ.7
On the other hand, the artisan is also understood under the rubric of the âlabouringâ class or âworkingâ class, a distinction that creates further difficulties in establishing his place within the social hierarchy. E.P. Thompsonâs classic account of the formation of the English working classes, citing early nineteenth-century discourses on the place of journeymen and labourers in the social order, confines the generic âartisanâ to this station. Noting that the occupational tables of the 1831 census make âno effort to differentiate between the master, the self-employed, and the labourerâ, Thompson is nonetheless anxious to point out that âthere were great differences of degree concealed within the term âartisanâ, from the prosperous master-craftsman, employing labour on his own account and independent of any masters, to the sweated garret labourersâ.8 This interpretation finds accord with historians of class, taste, gentility and social mores across the early modern English-speaking world.
The difficulty attending the ascription of tradesmen to the middling, as opposed to lower, sorts relates to their lives in trade and commerce. Recent accounts of the eighteenth-century middle classes by Stuart Blumin (on America) and Fintan Lane (on Ireland), underscore this complexity. Lane defines the term middle class as âan ambiguous locutionâ generally, but squarely situates the âself-employed artisanâ in Ireland among the petit bourgeoisie of small businessmen and independent professionals: the haute bourgeoisie being made up of wealthy merchants and industrialists.9 Blumin, while underlining the distinction between American and European attitudes to social hierarchies, acknowledges a commonly held prejudicial association between types of work and social worth that was observed throughout the anglophone world: âwork with oneâs hands, even in a skilled and valuable craftâ, being recognized as âdistinctly degradingâ. This was in spite of the âclose identification of middling status with skilled manual workâ in cities throughout early national America.10 What emerges from these collective histories is the fluidity of social class during this period, and the corresponding understanding that âclasses were made not inheritedâ.11
Early to mid-eighteenth-century commentators on socio-economic groupings, including Daniel Defoe and Joseph Massie, placed the âworking Tradesâ in the middle of a system that was based on occupation, income and patterns of consumption as opposed to inherited social rank.12 Significantly, the then common linguistic triad of âhigherâ, âmiddlingâ and âlowerâ classes was reconfigured at this time, and âlower classâ was replaced with âworking classâ. This was symptomatic of a growing awareness of the social and economic significance of labour, a position given theoretical legitimacy by Adam Smith in The wealth of nations (1776). Indeed, just as social commentators became conscious of the new ways in which wealth and status was acquired, censuring its distribution among the widening âmiddlingâ sorts and its effect on social differentials like dress and manners, conversely these positions reflected âa belief in change and social mutability, rather than in a strictly graded or strictly denoted social hierarchyâ.13 This had wider repercussions in cultural terms. Although historically disparaged as members of the âlower ordersâ, the labourer and the craftsman were elevated within the social pecking order by eighteenth-centu...