A Grocer's Tale: Gender, Family and Class in Early Nineteenth-Century Manchester

This article examines the diary of George Heywood, a journeyman grocer turned small shopkeeper, who moved to Manchester from Huddersfield in 1809. Heywood's modest lifetime ambitions were to own a grocery shop and find a companionable wife. As a lower-middle-class man of humble means and limited ambitions, Heywood does not fit the heroic mould of those working-class diarists and autobiographers of the nineteenth century that have more readily captured historians'attention. Yet it is precisely this 'ordinariness'that makes Heywood's journal important. His smaller-than-life adventures are the very stuff of lower-middle-class life, and reveal something of a petit-bourgeois world from which historians and social commentators have traditionally shied away. His diary allows us to glimpse one form of masculine identity that both fits with and complicates our notions of 'bourgeois' masculinity in this period. © Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.