Living above the Shop: Home, Business, and Family in the English ‘‘Industrial Revolution’’

This article explores the living arrangements and familial relations of small business households in northwest English towns between 1760 and 1820. Focusing on evidence from inventories and personal writing, it examines the homes that such households lived and worked in and the ways in which space was ordered and used: indicating that access to particular spaces was determined by status. This study suggests both the continuance of the ‘‘household family’’ into the nineteenth century (rather than its more modern, ‘‘nuclear’’ variant) and the existence of keenly felt gradations of status within households making it likely that the constitution of ‘‘the family’’ differed according to one’s place in the domestic hierarchy.