To be one of "the middling sort" in urban England in the late seventeenth or eighteenth century was to live a life tied, in one way or another, to the world of commerce. In a lively study that combines convincing analysis with alternately poignant and hilarious anecdote, Margaret R. Hunt offers an original view of middling society during the hundred years that separated the Glorious Revolution from the factory age. Thanks to her exploration of a wealth of family papers and court records, Hunt is able to look beyond events - what the new commercial classes did - and examine what they thought, felt, and valued.

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