ABSTRACT
English middle-class men in the late eighteenth century lived in a world which denied them substantive public power. Influential as they might be in their own business or profession, that influence could not necessarily be cashed in the political or social arena. But professionals, merchants, manufacturers and farmers, marginal to the world of rank and land, increasingly established their own associations and networks which gave meaning to their lives and in the process challenged the existing apparatus of power. For many of them it was religious faith which was the ultimate judge of stature, neither pedigree or particular material possessions. It has been argued that in the eighteenth century, 'the nation', those 'people' who had consented to the settlement of 1688 and constituted the responsible governors who defended the traditional rights of freeborn Englishmen, had been extended to include all those who could aspire to join 'polite society'. But being a member of 'polite society' required an independent income whether from land or the City of London.1 By the end of the eighteenth century this association of gentility with an income and style of life requiring neither mental nor manual labour was no longer acceptable to many of the middling ranks. A new claim was asserted, that salvation was the mark of gentility, that an artisan's son from a rural backwater who managed to educate himself and become a minister, had as much right to that epithet as an aristocrat.