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Jon Stobart, "Life in the Georgian Parsonage: Morals, Material Goods and the English Clergy" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Dr. John Stobart
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. John Stobart
I was groomed to become one of
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Podcast Host
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Dr. John Stobart
I want to see action and I am demanding action. Do not just talk the talk, you need to start walking the walk now.
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Podcast Host
It's one of the most powerful interviews I've ever done in over 20 years as a journalist. Search Disorder in your podcast app to listen right now.
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Dr. John Stobart
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased to welcome back onto the podcast Dr. John Stobart to tell us about a book he published with Bloomsbury in 2025 titled Life in the Georgian Morals, Material Goods and the English Clergy, which takes us, as the title suggests, into literally the houses of Church of England clergy in the sort of long 18th century where there's rather a lot going on and we examine, as historians kind of many aspects of this time period. Consumption is massively rising, and that's of course, fascinating to look at for kind of any aspect of society. And it turns out it's also really interesting to look at in terms of the clergy who are maybe not the consumers we sort of automatically would think of. And yet kind of logically, of course, they're doing, they're consuming and they're part of this. But how are they part of this? Is there anything in particular that is kind of different about what the clergy is doing? Obviously religion is also changing around this time, so there's all sorts of interesting things kind of intertwined here, which I think will lead to a intriguing discussion. So, John, thank you so much for coming back onto the podcast to join me again.
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Dr. John Stobart
It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
For those who perhaps are not yet familiar with your work, would you mind introducing yourself again? Please and then tell us about the origin story of this book.
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Dr. John Stobart
Sure. So I'm a professor of history at Manchester Metropolitan University, background in writing about researching consumption in a variety of different contexts. Country houses, rural shops, auctions, lots of different places. I came to the clergy in a, in a kind of an interesting way, I think, because I was visiting Sweden talking about country houses as it, as it, as it turns out, and a friend said, oh, They've got a PhD student starting looking at something to do with the clergy. Did I have any recommendations about books I could, they could read on the kind of lifestyle of the English clergy. And I thought about it and thought, there's not a lot I can think of to recommend. And that kind of was a prompt to then sort of think, well, you know, as you've already said, the clergy are an important social group, part of this kind of rising middle ranks in the 18th century. And yet again, we don't know a great deal about them. And layering onto that, my previous kind of work on consumption, I was interested in exploring some of the kind of the ideas of morality in terms of consumption. Not just assuming, oh, of course people will want to, but how they shaped by their faith, by their morals, by other things like that. So it was an opportunity to think about some of those ideas as well. So I kind of. Various different ideas, various different prompts coming together for this particular book.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, yeah. I think many projects start off from the kind of. Oh, wait, hang on, where is that book? Oh, there isn't one. Okay, I guess I'm gonna have to go figure it out myself. So thank you for telling us about that origin story there. Picking up on the idea, as you mentioned, that the clergy were an important social group. We should make sure we actually know what that social group is consisting of. So who were the clergy in the long 18th century? How many people, for instance, are we talking about?
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Dr. John Stobart
Yeah, so I'm focusing particularly on Church of England clergy. And of course there are the equivalent. There are ministers, there are clergymen for non conformists, for Catholic Church. But I'm particularly interested in the kind of, if you like, the established church, the Church of England, and particularly the parish clergy, because of course there are deans, there are bishops, there's the hierarchy. But I'm interested in those people who are caring for parishes. Most of the people I've looked at in terms of this book are in rural parishes, but of course they're also in towns as well. Within that group there are rectors, there are vicars, and there are curates. There are various other people as well, but those are the three main groups. The rectors and the vicars would, what they call, hold a living. So that's the sort of the. They're in charge of the parish and they're paid through the tithes, which we might come back and say a little bit more about presently. But that's basically a kind of a system of payment based upon the agricultural produce of the parish. So they have a living and that could vary in terms of the income it produces from less than 50 pound to several hundred pounds in the early part of the 18th century. By the early 19th century, we'll probably double both of those figures. So there are livings that are worth over £1,000. There are still some quite poor clergymen, but far fewer. The curates lie kind of alongside and kind of underneath that, in a kind of a status wealth category. Often they're paid fairly poorly. There's early part of the 18th century, most of them less than £30 a year. That rose. But there's still a poorer sort of strata of the clergy, and they're effectively assistants to the rectors and the vicars in their parishes. So it's kind of hard to define an overall number given that kind of complexity. There are about 12,000 parishes in England, so that gives us an idea about the sort of number that we're looking at. It's a significant social group at this time, in numbers and in their kind of position within local society.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I want to talk about that position in local society a bit more. What was their class position sort of presumed to be in these contexts? And do we see it changing over this long 18th century?
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Dr. John Stobart
The church of England clergy are all, in theory, are all university educated. So inevitably, therefore, they came from reasonably wealthy families, or maybe a family that had a wealthy patron who would pay for a son to go through university, because that, of course, is quite an expensive undertaking at this point. So they're from reasonable backgrounds. A lot in the early part of the 18th century, especially, are following their father's footsteps. So it's sons of clergy who become clergymen. But as we go through the 18th century, and particularly in the late 18th century, early part of the 19th century, we've got a growing number from gentry or even aristocratic families that links a little bit to what I was saying before about the. The rising wealth, rising income of clergymen or at least some clergymen, and it then becomes an attractive, a convenient sort of role into which a younger son of a gentry or an aristocratic family might. Might be Placed. So the eldest son will inherit the estate. Another son might be sent into the army or the navy or to law or the church. These are all kind of perfectly respectable places to position your younger sons who otherwise. Well, they need a role, they need an income. So they occupy. The clergy occupy a rather kind of liminal position within their parishes. They're not really gentry, but they kind of are the gentry and they're certainly much wealthier than most people in the parish and they have a certain standing within the parish. We can see something of their status and that kind of rise in status. If we look at the houses, the kind of the. The physical structure of the houses that they're occupying throughout the 18th century, there is, you know, there is variability. Obviously a wealthier living will encourage a bigger, nicer, if that's the right word, house. But as we move just right at the end of the 18th century, into the early part of the 19th century, the. There's a couple of things that come together. One is that the clergy are required to reside in their parish, which previously hadn't been the case, but that was now introduced as kind of a regulation. And there was also a mechanism of funding improved building of rectories and vicarages. It's called the Queen Anne's Bounty. Initially it was to support curates incomes, but then they started effectively making loans to rectors or vicars who. Who could argue that their current house wasn't either wasn't inhabitable or wasn't sufficient for the needs that they had. So what we see as a result of that are some really quite impressive rectories and vicarages being built across the country. I mean, I think if you drive around England and you go to villages and you see a large house that is the old rectory or the old vicarage, it's likely one of these that were built early 19th century on the basis of the Queen Anne's Bounty, because they are substantial and these days, of course, very desirable houses. So there's a kind of a mark of their rising status in that improvement and in that construction of really quite impressive houses.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's helpful to understand, especially because, as you said, we can still see some of this today. What about then? What was in the houses? What sort of items do we find? Is there anything sort of different in a clergy's house than in someone else's house? Do we see changes over time? What's that like?
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Dr. John Stobart
So in many ways, a clergyman's house didn't look terribly different from the house of another member of the middle ranks. Hesitating saying middle classes, because class isn't quite a word that works for the 18th century. So these middle ranks, there's lots of research being done on these people in terms of the inventories that are made when they die. So we have a very good idea of what people certainly had in their houses when they died. And if we look at the clergyman alongside other sets of people within these middle ranks, then they're not so terribly different. So there's lots. By the middle part of the 18th century, there's a lot of mahogany furniture, which is becoming fashionable, but also reasonably affordable by that stage. The bedrooms are quite comfortably furnished, with invariably feather beds and hangings on the beds for sort of warmth and for privacy and so forth. There's one thing which maybe does stand out a little bit with the clergy. They have a lot of silverware, but also quite a lot of tableware. They're quite well placed in terms of providing hospitality or entertainment. They can accommodate quite a number of people around a table, as it were. They also have a range of decorative items. So there are paintings, prints on the wall, ornamental china on a kind of a mantelpiece. Perhaps the distinctive thing in a clergyman's house are the books. There's often many more books in a clergyman's house than we might see in another member of the kind of the middle ranks, or even some of the gentry, for that matter. And some of those books are, of course, for their kind of professional needs. So there are books of sermons and guides to scripture, theology texts and so on. But there's also a range of other books on history, gardening, novels. It's not terribly different from a gentleman's library in many ways. What changes? Maybe in the early 19th century we see more newer tropical kind of hardwoods. Things like satinwood and rosewood become a bit more common. There's card tables, musical instruments, which, again, I mean, not in every house, but in many of them, which, again, sort of suggest an entertaining sort of function there. And there are. There's a lot more upholstered furniture. So there are what they describe as easy chairs, so what we now think of as an armchair, and sofas and things of that nature, so that the. The living spaces become physically more comfortable to be in and to sit in.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Please continue. This is all sounding nice and comfortable.
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Dr. John Stobart
No, absolutely. But as I say, overall, there's not a lot that would distinguish a clergyman's house from another member of the middle rank. They're very different. Sorry, they're very different. Yeah, they are really quite different from the houses of maybe Most of the people within the parish. So farmers might be of a similar level of wealth, but farmers often don't have such a kind of a rich domestic material culture. A lot of their wealth is of course, taken up in the. In the land, in the agricultural equipment, in the livestock and so forth. So their houses often aren't quite so comfortably fashionably furnished. So a clergyman's house would stand out within its parish from the size of the house, as we saw before. And I think also when you kind of go in and enter, particularly the parlor or the drawing room, and the name given to that room changes over time. So they're parlors in the 18th century, and by the early 19th century, they're drawing rooms, particularly in those sorts of rooms. These are sort of fashionable, polite spaces of entertainment that are really on a par with those. Maybe an urban, middling sort, all those kind of lesser gentry.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's really helpful to understand. Right. We want to see what's distinctive, but we also want to see kind of who they're grouped with. Right. Which is useful to sort of position within society. If we're thinking then, about these questions of sort of social standing, what about the kind of wider perception of clergymen at this point? Right. This is also a time where, for example, we see kind of caricatures of, like, everyone. Right. So what were the sorts of caricatures or critiques about clergymen in this sort of context that you've sketched out for us? And is this something else that we see changing over the period as well?
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Dr. John Stobart
Yeah, so this is one of the things I kind of explore in a bit of detail in the book. And I think within the parish itself, the clergy are generally quite well respected. There are complaints about bad behaviour, poor behavior, particularly drunkenness in the late 17th century, but these tend to decline in most places. And if there are complaints, it's about the clergy not performing their duty, so they're not properly leading services in the church, which is the sort of. The. Obviously the basis of their role. So if there are complaints from the parish, it tends to be that they're not doing that properly. And within the parish, of course, who they're socializing with is very often the people in the big house, the elite of the parish. So within a parish, there's kind of limited critique of their behavior, of their position and so forth. More generally, it's quite different. If we look across, you mentioned satirical prints, and those become increasingly widespread through the second half of the 18th into the 19th century. But also in plays, in novels, there's quite a lot of critical comment upon the clergy and their lifestyle. So things like Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews and Shyamala Oliver Goldsmith's Victor Wakefield, very, very clear in their critique of the clergy, often by contrasting a model of the clergy with a clergyman behaving badly, as it were. So you can kind of see this is how it should be, this is how it too often is kind of thing. And even if we look in Jane Austen's novels, there's a lot of kind of gentle critiques, a not so gentle critique maybe, of the clergy. She's particularly concerned with their spirituality or their lack of spirituality. The idea that you become a clergyman because you're the younger son of a gentleman and there's nothing else you can do. It's a comfortable living, it's a comfortable thing to do, but you're not really. You don't have a call in, as it were. So there's lots of kind of criticisms, critiques floating around in the satirical prints. It's probably where they become most sort of sharply defined. And I think I can probably. There are six here. We've got a list going up here. I'm afraid there are six. Should be seven deadly sins, shouldn't there? But I've got six here. So avarice is something that they're very often criticized for. And one of the key kind of touchstones for that is the idea of pluralism, where a clergy might have more than one living. So they might be the vicar in one parish, there might be a rector in another parish, maybe many miles away. They're drawing income from both of those livings. But are they really performing their duty? If you've got two parishes, can you really be looking after both of them? So there's the idea that what clergymen are doing is constantly trying to get a better living, another living, to increase their income. Alongside that, there's then a kind of an accusation of idleness, because they're not fulfilling their duty. Well, they can't fulfill their duty if they've got two or three parishes that they're responsible for. So they're just drawing the income and they employ a curate, an assistant, as it were, to do the work for them. So there's that kind of avarice and idleness. Third criticism is that they're not charitable, that tithes in particular ought to be used to assist, to relieve the poor people in the parish. And really they're just being used to fund a nice lifestyle. And there's lots and lots and lots of satirical prints that play on the idea of clergymen refusing charity to a poor, often a kind of an injured soldier or sailor. And in contrast, you've got poor parishioners who've got literally their hand in their pockets ready to give the person money. So we've got this kind of contrast that characterizes this uncharitable nature. The fourth is kind of a pairing of kind of a lack of bodily restraint. It's kind of gluttony and lust come together there. Almost invariably, clergymen are portrayed as corpulent, shall we say, figures. Curates are always thin, curates are always really skinny and malnourished. The parsons, the rectors and the vicars, they're all very well fed. And there's again, lots of images with them. Some sat at the table, tucking into very full meals, enjoying wine and chasing after young and maybe not so young women. So there's that kind of gluttony and lust coming together. And really, those four, in a way, those four are complaints that have been made against priests and clergymen right the way back into the Middle Ages and earlier in some instances, but they continue through. And they continue right the way through the 18th and the 19th century. A couple of things that become more evident in the later 18th and 19th century. One is the specific issue of tithes, because traditionally, tithes are collected in kind. So in theory, what then happens is that the people who have to pay tithes, so they're the kind of the farmers, broadly speaking, within a parish, they're literally bringing to the clergyman a proportion of the produce that they've created in that year. So it's very often pictured in terms of a pig, the tithe pig. But it could be livestock, it could be crops, it could be a whole range of different things. And partly because working out what you're entitled to as a clergyman is quite difficult, and partly because there's a kind of resentment to paying these tithes that becomes a sort of a touchstone to these ideas of kind of avarice and being money drabbing and so forth. And what we see actually is a sort of a shift so that they're paid in cash rather than paid in kind. But even so, there's still a sort of an idea of calculating. And that's the difficult thing. The kind of. The clergymen are very calculating about how much they should be getting, and it's not a good look. And that's something that's. That's criticized the last thing. And this really does come in very strongly in the early part of the 19th century. This idea of worldliness, that you're concerned more with things of this world when you should be more focused on things of the next. And that couples with a kind of a growing critique of social pretension. So there's lots of satirical prints of clergymen as sportsmen, so they're shooting, or particularly they're hunting. And the joke there is often that they're not very good at riding and they're falling off the horse or whatever it might be. But it's this worldliness rather than a spirituality that is really the criticism. So there's a whole raft of things that sort of satirical writers or novelists or printmakers are identifying as problematic in a clergyman's lifestyle. It's a bit of a tough gig, as it were.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it's very interesting to see kind of what the critiques are. Right. They're incredibly specific in a lot of ways, which, of course, gives us all sorts of insight into kind of what people's experience, expectations were of sort of what should and should not be done. How did the church and clergy respond to all of this?
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Dr. John Stobart
So there's a lot of ink that's spent writing and publishing sermons on what became known as the worldliness problem. And the sermons that are particularly interesting are not those that are necessarily preached to an ordinary congregation, but it's those that are written and preached to gatherings of the clergy. So a bishop might have. They call them visitations, so he sort of visits his see and gets to meet the clergy and so forth. And there are sermons preached as part of that process, and they're kind of directed at what you, the clergy, ought to be doing. So those are the ones that are really quite interesting, and they draw a lot on Scripture, of course, because it lays out the basic issue of the problem, that you cannot serve God and mammon, so you can't be an effective clergyman but also be interested in these worldly things. So sermons are therefore criticizing the various sort of failings that we've discussed earlier and underlining the need for the clergy to behave better and in many ways to behave better than everybody else. Because, of course, they're in a particular position. They ought to be setting, if you like, a good example in terms of all of those failings, but also because they are in a kind of a little bit of a goldfish bowl, as it were. They're very much on public view, and this is something that's noted in various of these sermons, that you are very much in the public eye and you therefore need to behave impeccably. So There's a real concern within the sermons. They also though do draw on much broader ideas that are circulating at the time. So they engage with ideas of politeness, with its emphasis on restraint. So that's a sort of clergyman. Being polite in that sense is a good thing because that helps moderate their behavior, as it were. It also ties in with kind of shifts in secular views on luxury. So luxury, a more kind of secular moralist view on luxury in the 17th century had been that luxury was a bad thing, it was wasteful, it was harmful to society. Whereas you get a shift with people like Bernard Mandeville and particularly Adam Smith arguing that luxury could have benefits. So it might be a, might be a private vice, but it was a public benefit because it would generate demand, that demand would generate jobs and those jobs would give people income and so forth. So it's a sort of a shift in view of luxury and of consumption in general. And what it often boiled down to is worldliness in the clergy particularly being resolved with a bit of a balancing act. You needed to have an adequate maintenance, you needed sufficient income to live according to your station within the parish, but you also had to moderate your behavior, you had to be restrained. You don't want to be over consuming. So it's a sort of a sometimes called dignity, the dignity of the cloth. So you need to have a certain material well being, but also balancing that with your duty to your parish, your duty to use those resources in a responsible way and so on. So there's this kind of constant refrain, and again really throughout the 18th and into the 19th century of balancing these two ideas of moderation and dignity, duty, maintenance, those sort of things. Of course it's all a bit relative and there's a problem that the individual is deciding where that balance lies. And clearly different people are going to draw that balance in a slightly different way. So we see different behaviors from different clergymen inevitably in these things.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that does leave room for interpretation, but kind of interesting to see how those sorts of things are trying to sort of be handled. Are there any other kind of key actors here in terms of who is influencing kind of what the clergy do and don't do, how they live, how they go about consuming things. We've got the church, we've kind of got wider public opinion, we've obviously got the individual clergy, people, themselves, themselves. Does that result in a sort of clergyman way of consuming kind of?
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Dr. John Stobart
Yes and no. I think as I was saying earlier, it's quite often difficult to see. So if you were shown an Inventory, and they crossed out whose inventory was at the top of the page. It might be quite difficult to see, to be able to tell this is a clergyman's house rather than a. Well, let's say an attorney's house or a wealthy merchant's house, or a gentleman's house, or a little bit lower down, maybe a farmer's house. So they're kind of. It's quite difficult to pull out the things that are. That's very distinctive. And I mean, certainly by the early 19th century, there's a lot of things that wealthier clergymen have that make them look very much like gentlemen. So they'll have a carriage and a horse, they'll have servants, they may have coats of arms on their dinner service, examples of all of these things. So it can be quite difficult to know. I think there are probably three things that stand out, either in terms of the material objects that you'll find in a clergyman's house, in a vicarage or a rectory, or the ways in which the clergy are behaving. So in terms of the contents, I think the key standout feature is the library. And I don't mean necessarily a library by way of a room, I mean the library in terms of the books, because book ownership is something that is really very much more developed in the clergy. Now, as I was saying before, partly that's to do with, of course, a need for books to prepare their sermons and to be able to deliver the services that are required of them. But there's also. These are people who've gone to university, these are educated people, and they're also people who have gone from that kind of an environment into what can often be quite small settlements, villages, we know, without an awful lot of society with which to engage. So reading can be a really important activity through the day and particularly in the evening. And there's lots of examples of clergymen and their wives or daughters collectively reading in the evening. So books are a really important thing, and alongside that, the presence of something they actually do call a study. So clergymen characteristically have a study. I think probably half of the houses I've looked at identify a study as a specific room. And that's a really unusual feature to have. So that's one thing. The second, I think, is the demonstration of hospitality. The notion of hospitality is an interesting one, and how it ties in with politeness and really what it's supposed to encompass. And it's an ideal that's supposed to be, some ways characteristically English, that you almost have an open door that you will provide for somebody who comes and, you know, you will feed them and look after them for a while. There's a couple of ways in which that's kind of nicely illustrated. A bloke called James Woodford, Parson Woodford, people might have come across his diaries. They're very famous. He gives annual tithe dinners, so people are coming to pay their tithes and he offers them a sort of a large kind of meal, lots of drink alongside that as well. And it's a kind of a sociable, hospitable thing to be doing that maybe eases the pain of paying your tithes. Maybe a better example, William Cole, who's one of correspondents of Horace Walpole, so people may have come across him for that reason. He's also a rector in Bletchley in Buckinghamshire, and he gave. Every week he'd give a dinner and it's quite interesting. So in his parlor, he. He would entertain the respectable people within the parish, so the farmers and so forth. And downstairs in the kitchen, the poor of the parish would be fed along with his servants. So he's entertaining kind of both, or he's being hospitable to both sort of sections of society. So as libraries and studies, this hospitality. The other thing that makes them stand out, of course, are the clothes. In theory, they're supposed to wear a cassock and a gown, but increasingly, through the 18th century, those are worn for church services, but not routinely. Woodford, for example, notes when he goes to a big gathering of the clergy at Norwich Cathedral, he notes how few people are wearing their casigan gown. They're mostly just in their. Their ordinary clothes. But those ordinary clothes would invariably be black, so there is almost a uniform. You would know a clergyman from. From. From the clothing. So that's the kind of another. It's not really the house, it's the person, but. But that's another way in which they. They really do stand out.
- [39:02]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah. Quite literally, in that case, right. You'd be able to look across the square and be like, oh, yep, there's the clergy. Right. Like, it's very, very clear kind of what's going on. So do we have any other instances or maybe examples you can give us to kind of put, I suppose, an individual human face on kind of what this looks like? Because what you've described so far sort of describes in many ways quite a comfortable lifestyle, but also one that kind of has a bunch of sort of competing demands. Right. Stand out in this way, but not that way. So can you give us Maybe some particular examples of, like how individual clergymen
- [39:36]
Dr. John Stobart
dealt with this in terms of the balancing of kind of dignity and moderation. Yeah.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And I guess, do we have specific examples of what made someone or a village be like, yeah, this clergyman's great because he's doing XYZ and he's not doing this, versus here's a particular. Not just a caricature, but here's a particular instance of clergy where it's like, no, no, no, this is really not what that balance should look like.
- [40:03]
Dr. John Stobart
Yeah. So I think. I mean, Woodford's quite a nice example in some ways, because what he illustrates very nicely are the ways in which a clergyman can be dutiful. They do the things that are required of them. I mean, actually, it's interesting. He notes when people come out of hours, as it were, they need a child baptizing because it's not terribly well, it may not live and they want it baptizing in case it dies. And he's always willing to do that. I mean, his diary is not something that makes a big thing of this sort of thing, but he notes it and it happens. So he's kind of being dutiful, so there's no kind of complaints about that. He's also very, very well bedded into kind of local society, both in terms of linking to the Custance family, who have the big house in the village, and he and his niece quite frequently visit there, but also they're visiting and being visited by neighboring clergymen from parishes in the area and other people of that kind of standing. So that probably three, four times a week they're in each other's houses for tea or for staying for dinner. It's kind of low key, but it's a sort of a sociability that beds these people kind of nicely into their setting. And there are other examples of. Also one very nice example to give here in terms of the notion that the clergy are not charitable, they don't look after the poor in that way. There are some really nice examples. A boat called John Crackenthorpe, rather a splendid name, keeps an account book. And in that he notes every time he gives money to a beggar, for want of a better word, somebody who calls at the door, who meets in the street or whatever it might be. And he notes the kind of the identity. He doesn't generally know their name, but he notes the identity. And often he tells a little bit of a backstory of what they've told him and therefore why he thinks they deserve some charity. They, the Amounts he's giving are not large. They're sort of sixpence or a shilling, although that all mounts up and it forms a reasonably significant part of his outgoings. But obviously he's interested in accounting these things. He wants to know where his money's going, but he's also interested in kind of collecting the stories and understanding a little bit about the people. So I think that's quite an interesting way in which we can see a clergyman caring to give, but also having an interest in these as people. They have a story, they have a life, as it were.
- [43:23]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, no, that's definitely really interesting to get an insight into. Right. Kind of the overall trends over time as well as the more specific stories. So thank you for giving us kind of both of those in the conversation and book. Is there anything else we want to add into our discussion? Anything, maybe, that surprised you in figuring all of this out?
- [43:42]
Dr. John Stobart
I think one thing that I certainly wouldn't want the listeners to go away with is an idea that the clergyman is kind of living in a little sort of isolated bubble in their parsonage, as it were. Their. Their decisions are shaped by other people as well. And I've mentioned the kind of the parish and the neighborhood, but the family is a really important kind of influence on their consumption, partly because family actually is a draw on your income. You have a wife to support, you have children to support. Okay. And the education of children could be really expensive. A guy called John Skinner, who's the rector in a parish in Somerset, he was calculating, in the early part of the 19th century, three children. It was costing him £400 a year to educate. So they could be quite significant outgoings. But wives are also really, really important in managing a household and managing the parsonage as a household and as a, if you like, as a unit of consumption. So I don't think we want to forget the context in which the clergyman is operating. Wives, children, really, really important. And I think the other thing just to. Just to sort of leave with is the way in which some individuals, by and large, the clergy, are not constantly writing in their diaries, agonizing over their decisions about consumption. Should I be doing this? Is it the right thing? Oh, dear. But there are. There are instances where. Where. Where. That's. Where that's very, very clear. And I might just kind of leave. Leave people with a. You know, a couple of. A couple of examples of that. One is John Penrose, who was a clergyman from Cornwall visiting Bath. Never very comfortable with the kind of social life in Bath. And he makes the comment that drawing an analogy between being in Bath and then leaving Bath and being in this world and then leaving this world, and the kind of the worldliness of Bath, in contrast to what he'll have when he goes home and the worldliness of this world, as opposed to when he dies and goes to heaven, of course, which is where he'll be going. And he kind of reflects on that at some length. And I think there's kind of a nice way of thinking about that balance. And there's another guy, and I'll leave you with this one, somebody called, rather appropriately, William Money, who he's from a gentry family, and he is at the early part of the 19th century, he's kind of on the evangelical kind of wing of the church. So he's quite kind of fired up, as it were, with spirituality. And just a line from one of his letters to his wife, he writes, I cannot tell you how uncomfortable I felt at the heathenish life we all passed in Weymouth. Weymouth, obviously has changed a little bit since then. I would rather live in the wilder desert with my Bible in my hands and my Redeemer in my heart than in the most polished society to the momentary exclusion of either. So there's a man who's very definitely got his. His priorities in the spirituality moderation duty camp rather than the dignity worldliness camp.
- [47:47]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I think that is a lovely place to conclude our discussion about the book. Is there anything you're currently working on you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [47:55]
Dr. John Stobart
Well, I'm trying to develop a project that's on domestic consumption in Jamaica, so completely different place. But the current writing project is a book on senses and the country house. So I'm going back to the country house, but trying to smell it and touch it and hear it as well as see it.
- [48:17]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that certainly sounds intriguing. So while you are off doing that, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Life in the Georgian Morals, Material Goods, and the English Clergy, published by Bloomsbury in 2025. John, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [48:33]
Dr. John Stobart
A real pleasure. Thank you very much.