Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: An Unlimited Partnership
- 1 ‘Did You Really Think Your Letter Would Prove Too Long?’ Epistolary Lives
- 2 John Shaw in Business
- 3 John and Elizabeth in Love
- 4 ‘Our Present Adventure’: India and Beyond
- 5 ‘To Work Hard for a Larger Family’: Managing Work and Family
- 6 ‘The Whole Circle of Our Acquaintance’: Networks and Sociability
- 7 ‘Happiness (in Earthly Things)’: Getting and Having
- 8 Conclusion: The Life They Made
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Introduction: An Unlimited Partnership
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: An Unlimited Partnership
- 1 ‘Did You Really Think Your Letter Would Prove Too Long?’ Epistolary Lives
- 2 John Shaw in Business
- 3 John and Elizabeth in Love
- 4 ‘Our Present Adventure’: India and Beyond
- 5 ‘To Work Hard for a Larger Family’: Managing Work and Family
- 6 ‘The Whole Circle of Our Acquaintance’: Networks and Sociability
- 7 ‘Happiness (in Earthly Things)’: Getting and Having
- 8 Conclusion: The Life They Made
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
‘Hearts in union mutually disclosed’
Making a Life
Late in the afternoon of Sunday 22 April 1832 John Shaw, a hardware merchant, sat down at his home in Wolverhampton, in the English midlands, gathering his thoughts and feelings so as to write to his beloved wife Elizabeth, ‘My dear Liz,’ then visiting her family in Colne, some 113 miles to north in the heart of industrial Lancashire. The day found him in a reflective, perhaps even pensive mood; his fleeting emotions ranging back and forth across past, present and future:
I got your [letter] … at the top of which I find a calculation of the years we have been married which appears quite correct although I was not aware it was nineteen years past – how quickly has time flown and should we be spared for another such period I suppose it will not appear to have been much longer. I much fear neither of us [is] sufficiently grateful and thankful for the protection and success we have so abundantly enjoyed during so long a period and hope and trust we may be more so in the future.
The nineteenth-century businessman of popular culture and myth is a gritty, bluff, no-nonsense character. Resourceful rather than romantic. The entrepreneur of academic writing – and he is another decidedly gendered figure – is variously a decisive, risk-taking, and, increasingly, creative agent. We are rarely asked to imagine that either character has much of a personal life, let alone an interior life.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Entrepreneurial FamiliesBusiness, Marriage and Life in the Early Nineteenth Century, pp. 1 - 8Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014