It is time to listen to two old ladies talking. Their words were written down in the 1890s by an uncle of Miss V. E. Oates of Geslingthorpe Hall in Essex who deposited them in the then Leeds City archives in 1946, assuring the archivist, ‘my uncle was most accurate in all he said and wrote’. The memories focused on the years between 1820 and the 1870s. This was a record of chatter. It was about being a young woman in the Leeds of the middle classes. This was oral history by proxy with the voices of the two women talking of the best houses, intimate friends, gay parties and recording the alternations of enthusiasm and dismissal with which they judged the attractions of both sexes. The chatter began with Leeds but rapidly spread beyond the borough.

The argument of this book has proceeded in terms of property, of income, of trust and rents and dividends. The analysis has involved notions of status and network. These ladies recorded the way in which the processes and strategies involved were experienced and remembered by two keen-eyed participants once the account books had been put away, the advice manuals closed and the deeds lodged in the lawyer's office. The ladies showed a close knowledge of the Oates and Luptons. They knew of the Hey and Jowitt families but were not involved directly in those networks.