Abstract
Eshott Hall, a local version of a five-bay gentleman’s house, was probably built around 1700 twelve miles from Alnwick in Northumberland.1 The Carr family had owned Eshott since the first part of the seventeenth century; the Georgia-born Thomas Carr, who had served as an army officer and Customs official, inherited the estate in 1770 and moved to England to take up his inheritance.2 Despite his American roots, Carr had little trouble fitting into provincial society. Gregarious and outgoing, he served as a JP and was elected High Sheriff in 1778. But, constantly in need of money and recklessly extravagant, Carr became a living caricature of the dissolute gentry, including multiple wives around the Atlantic world.3
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Notes
R. E. Carr, The History of the Family of Carr of Dunston Hill, Co. Durham, 3 vols (London, 1893–1899), vol. 3, 64.
L. E. Klein, ‘Politeness for Plebes: Consumption and Social Identity in Early Eighteenth-Century England’, in A. Bermingham and J. Brewer, (eds), The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text (London, 1995), 362–382, 364;
P. J. Corfield, ‘The Rivals: Landed and Other Gentlemen’, in N. Harte and R. Quinault, (eds), Land and Society in Britain, 1700–1914 (Manchester, 1996), 1–33, 21.
L. E. Klein, ‘Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century’, The Historical Journal, vol. 45, no. 4 (December 2002), 869–898, 896.
N. Landsman, Prom Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and Culture 1680–1760 (Cornell, 1997).
Several historians, especially Amanda Vickery have made efforts along these lines recently, for example, A. Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven and London, 2009).
C. Carson, ‘The Consumer Revolution in Colonial America: Why Demand?’ in C. Carson, R. Hollman, and P. J. Albert, Of Consuming Interest: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, 1994), 691.
K. Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Post-colonial Nation (Oxford, 2011).
A. Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London, 1998), 13–14.
L. Stone and J. F. Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540–1880 (Oxford, abridged edition, 1995), x;
see also, P. Gauci, The Politics of Trade: The Overseas Merchant in State and Society, 1660–1720 (Oxford, 2001), 90–93.
See, for example, D. Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge, 1995). Hancock recognized that ‘for every merchant building fabulous piles, there were at least three merchants who lit Isaac Ware’s generic description of the gentleman’, 343.
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© 2015 Stephen Hague
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Hague, S. (2015). Conclusion. In: The Gentleman’s House in the British Atlantic World 1680–1780. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137378385_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137378385_9
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