ABSTRACT
Patterns of domestic culture had begun to change from the late seventeenth century. The growth in many sectors of the economy after the Revolution Settlement of 1689 had increased the number of minor gentry and of mercantile and professional families, thereby forming a new wealth-owning bourgeoisie. The growth of mercantile capitalism also brought about a perceptible transformation in the nature of traditional schooling and apprenticeship. Although throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries traditional crafts, trades, conduct and manners were increasingly described and explained in print, such knowledge was interwoven with older ways of learning, those of practice and demonstration. As the household economy, which had been the basic unit of wealth production under feudalism, became a part of much larger and more complex economic systems, there was a corresponding increase in family privacy.
