‘But to Cover Her Shame’: Respectability, Social Mobility, and the Middling Sort in Early Nineteenth-century England

This article explores how one middling English family – the Wilkinsons, shopkeepers in industrialising Lancashire – experienced and negotiated threats to their respectability and social status during the early nineteenth-century. It contributes to the history of downward social mobility, responding to a recent call in this journal for more work on this topic. I use a rich epistolary archive to explore the Wilkinsons experiences.