ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in this book. The book talks about John Shaw and Elizabeth's story in rich and compelling detail. Telling their story adds complexity people's understanding of wider patterns whilst reinvesting Elizabeth and John with a degree of agency and vitality that came not from the roles they filled, the categories they represented, or any conventional source of power, but from their desire for self-determination as both individuals and a couple. John came from a small, tight-knit, and insular family and properties he seems to have tried to echo in the firm he created. Marriage gave them space to create themselves, their family, enterprise, and world. Elizabeth and John might stand as personification of the great social transformation that took the humble, virtuous, middling-sorts of the eighteenth-century and wrought from them a new class, the high Victorian bourgeoisie.
