ABSTRACT
The idea of the family framed middle-class provincial life from the enterprise to the organization of consumption. Some families even created a formal 'family fund' to pool and redistribute individual incomes. Family may have started at the biological core of parents and children but the social concept of marriage was its heart and this strengthened over the period. A youngster would be told that he or she 'credited' certain family adults. Marriage was the economic and social building block for the middle class; it was the basis of a new family unit. The unusual demographic constellation of late marriage and large families produced certain significant family characteristics. The intensity of feeling between a father and his children must of necessity be attenuated when the family was numerous. The progression to a model of full-time motherhood as a central part of middle-class gentility can be traced in many of the local families whether the aims were primarily religious or more worldly.
