Abstract
Building a house fit for a gentleman presupposed land for it to sit on. The example of Paradise in Gloucestershire highlights important issues related to the settings of individual houses, their connections with urban and rural environments, and the character of their immediate landscapes and gardens. As a property, Paradise did not serve as a country house subsisting on rents from land. Its income of £35 per annum was insufficient to guarantee the independent existence of the gentleman it sought for an owner. At the same time, the house resulted from William Townsend’s manufacturing of cloth, a trade centred in the Stroudwater valleys but which had important, indeed necessary, links with the great commercial centre of London.1 Without these links and the resulting financial resources, the house would not have existed. Paradise had its aesthetic merits as well. The house’s ‘West Country baroque’ architecture likely took its cue from Bristol. It was ‘pleasantly situated’ with a ‘beautiful prospect’, providing an agreeable place of residence for a genteel owner. Factors of location, property, setting, and urban connection all helped to make Paradise ‘fit for a gentleman’.
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Notes
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Roger Leech has proposed that many of the dwellings erected by merchants near Bristol and elsewhere in the Atlantic world were suburban or country residences for occasional use, see R. H. Leech, ‘Charlestown to Charleston: Urban and Plantation Connections in an Atlantic Setting’, in D. Shields, (ed.), Material Culture in Anglo-America: Regional Identity and Urbanity in the Tidewater, Lowcountry and Caribbean (Columbia, SC, 2009), 170–187, at 184. My research suggests a somewhat different reading.
A recent article has conjectured that Goldney’s new house, constructed in the 1720s, was smaller than generally assumed and used largely as a ‘garden house’, or second residence. See R. H. Leech, ‘Richmond House and the Manor of Clifton’, in M. Crossley-Evans, (ed.), ‘A Grand City’ — ‘Life, Movement and Work’: Bristol in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Essays in Honour of Gerard Leighton, PSA (Bristol, 2010), 27–46, 36–38. Physical and documentary evidence raises some questions about this. Thomas Goldney II recorded the births of his children there, suggesting much more than a garden house retreat.
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Hague, S. (2015). Situating Status. In: The Gentleman’s House in the British Atlantic World 1680–1780. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137378385_4
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