1 Malmgreen, Gail, Silk Town: industry and culture in Macclesfield 1750–1835 (Hull, 1985), p. 1.Google Scholar

2 In 1801 the population of Exeter according to the census was approximately 17,000; by 1851 it had risen to 32,618 (Newton, R., Victorian Exeter (Leicester, 1968), xiv).Google Scholar

3 Shapter, T., Parliamentary Paper: Report on Exeter, 1845.Google Scholar

4 London, 1987. The Old Tiverton Road project aims to use different source material from that used by the authors of Family fortunes in investigating similar questions based on a range of nineteenth-century middle-class households (on a rather lower social level than those discussed by Davidoff and Hall), chosen neither as a random sample nor primarily on the basis of those families having left written records, but because of their shared physical location. Moreover that physical location - the houses and the road - are themselves a central aspect of the study. In other words it is not the abstract concept of home and work which is being investigated here but the relationship between specific families, their homes and their public activities.

5 Higgs, Edward, ‘The tabulation of occupations in the nineteenth-century census with special reference to domestic servants’, Local Population Studies 28 (1982), 58–66Google Scholar; ‘Domestic servants and households in Victorian England’, Social History 8, no. 2 (1983), 201–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and ‘Domestic service and household production’, in John, Angela ed., Unequal opportunities (Oxford, 1986), 125–50.Google Scholar

6 Higgs, , ‘Domestic service and household production’, 132.Google Scholar

7 Laslett, T. P. R., Family life and illicit love in earlier generations (Cambridge, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Michael Anderson has estimated that the percentage of households including kin beyond the nuclear family in England by the mid-nineteenth century had risen to between 15 and 20 per cent (Family structure in nineteenth-century Lancashire, (Cambridge, 1971))Google Scholar. The present authors wish to suggest that any statistical estimate of numbers of wider kin in the household based on household listings is likely to be an underestimate, unless thorough family reconstruction has been carried out.

8 Laslett, Peter ed., Household and family in past time (Cambridge, 1972), 57–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Harvey, Hazel, Sidwell Street, ‘Discovering Exeter’ series, 5 (Exeter, 1986), 29.Google Scholar Hazel Harvey's guides to St Sidwell and Pennsulvania are extremely useful introductions to the history and architecture of the city of Exeter.

10 Besley's Exeter Directory, 1828, 22.Google Scholar

11 One of the case studies examined below involves the occupants of a household within St Ann's Terrace, whilst the remaining cases focus on the occupants of two of the presuburban cottages. We do not claim that these are typical examples. To date we have only managed to establish the operation of kinship ties in these cases, but that does not rule out the discovery of further ties in other households for which the family reconstruction is not yet complete.

12 Besley's Exeter Directory, 1828, 174Google Scholar; no advertisement for sale in the Exeter Flying Post, 1822–1828Google Scholar; advertisement for sale of 1 and 2 St Ann's Terrace, Exeter Flying Post, 4 05 1848.Google Scholar

13 This information is from Exeter parish registers of the period and Samuel Langston's will, held at the Devon Record Office. This is further evidence of the recognition of the importance of kinship to people of Langston's background.

14 Exeter Flying Post, 27 09 1804; 8 May 1817.Google Scholar

15 Besley's Exeter Directory, 1828, 78, 81Google Scholar; 1835, 10, 12.

16 Exeter Voters' Registers, 1843–1847.Google Scholar

17 The two houses were put up for sale following Langston's death, along with ten Exeter Turnpike Trust Deed Polls of £160 each and nine of £50 each, bearing interest at 4 per cent, and six other local turnpike trust deeds of £50 each, bearing interest at 4 per cent (Exeter Flying Post, 4 05 1848).Google Scholar

18 Although Langston's wife was also named Mary, it is known that the Mary Langsten whose death is recorded was his sister, born 1764, rather than his wife, who was born in 1752, because the entry in the parish register in 1837 has her age at death as ‘70’ years. Mary Langsten (Langston's sister) was very likely resident in the household in 1828, but the gender bias of nineteenth-century street directories was such that women were only listed when they were the head of house, in charge of a business, or of sufficient independent means to warrant a separate entry.

19 The origins of Ann Macdonald and her membership of the Stockham family came to light because she was named in Samuel Langston's will. The Macdonalds were resident at 1 St Ann's Terrace from 1850.

20 The Exeter Flying Post reported the bequest made to Peter Lisson, stating that he had come ‘into possession of a large property, a circumstance that we have no little pleasure in stating as an instance of good fortune that has befallen one who has been in his day a good soldier, and as a tradesman and citizen, a respectable and worthy man’ (Exeter Flying Post, 10 09 1835).Google Scholar

21 The evidence for the second marriage came from Langston's will, where he referred to his niece, Ann, ‘now the wife of Peter Lisson’. This marriage to the dead wife's sister (Ann Ballard, née Stockham) must have taken place before 1835 when a bill was introduced which simultaneously banned future marriages of this degree of affinity but retrospectively validated such marriages which had taken place before that date. For further information regarding this bill, see Anderson, Nancy F., ‘The “Marriage with a Deceased Wife's Sister Bill” controversy: incest anxiety and the defense of family purity in Victorian England’, Journal of British Studies 21 (1982), 67–86.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

22 Lawn Cottage was advertised ‘to be let for a term of years with immediate possession…adjoining Peerless Place [St James's Place], in a healthy neighbourhood and quite in the country’ (Exetery Flying Post, 12 01 1832; 26 July 1832).Google Scholar In fact as this was subsequent to the construction of St James's Place, the claim that it was situated ‘quite in the country’ appears to try to deny the suburban development that had taken place on the Old Tiverton Road in preceding years. (Unfortunately Lawn Cottage has been demolished. It was therefore not possible to include either an illustration or plan of the building.)

23 The kin link to Lewis Edward Toose was discovered when Jane's siblings’ births were being traced: one of her brothers was given the full name of his great-uncle: Lewis Edward Toose Vicary.

24 Higgs, , ‘Domestic service and household production’, 132–3.Google Scholar

25 In the 1851 census he is listed as a ‘retired upholsterer’, and an announcement of his marriage in the Exeter Flying Post described him as a cabinet-maker; in 1804 the Exeter Flying Post carried a notice of sale of Heard's business in Dartmouth, which he was forced to give up ‘in consequence of a recent family misfortune’ (Exeter Flying Post, 15 12 1808; 1 November 1804).Google Scholar

26 In carrying out his duties as a Constable Heard was assaulted in 1812 by John Westcott, a victualler, of Topsham, who later made a public apology and asked for pardon (Exeter Flying Post, 20 02 1812).Google Scholar

27 Exeter Flying Post, 5 06 1851.Google Scholar

28 Insufficient information is available on the family of Jane Hinton to allow any judgement of the family's financial circumstances to be made.

29 This hypothesis does not accord with some of the conclusions on the lack of kin support for the elderly reached by contributors to the recently published work edited by Pelling, Margaret and Smith, Richard M., Life, death and the elderly: historical perspectives (London, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar More work on this subject will be undertaken in future work on the Old Tiverton Road project. It has been pointed out to the authors that one of the cases - that of Langsten - may have arisen out of the fact that Langston had no surviving children and this explains the presence of more distant kin in the household. This is very likely true, but in our view it supports rather than diminishes our case for the importance of the kin network in the operation of the household in this period.