A Genteel Revolution: Practical Refinements of New England's Middling Sorts

FAIN: FT-57907-10

Christina Jayne Hodge
Stanford University (Cambridge, MA 02138-2019)

How did refined practices that were exclusive at the start eighteenth century become common necessity by its end, transforming values into the 19th century and beyond? The manuscript revision project A Genteel Revolution broaches this question through the life of Elizabeth Pratt, an American widow and shopkeeper from early eighteenth-century Newport, Rhode Island. Pratt left an unusually rich material and documentary legacy. Her life provides compelling evidence that middling sorts re-made gentility into a social practice that was successful even when partial. This conclusion offers a new perspective on lived status and the mythos of colonial gentility: it undermines any idea of a singular, essential elite culture against which others were measured.