Making a Life

Late in the afternoon of Sunday 22 April 1832 John Shaw, a hardware merchant, sat down at his home in Wolverhampton, in the English midlands, gathering his thoughts and feelings so as to write to his beloved wife Elizabeth, ‘My dear Liz,’ then visiting her family in Colne, some 113 miles to north in the heart of industrial Lancashire. The day found him in a reflective, perhaps even pensive mood; his fleeting emotions ranging back and forth across past, present and future:

The nineteenth-century businessman of popular culture and myth is a gritty, bluff, no-nonsense character. Resourceful rather than romantic. The entrepreneur of academic writing – and he is another decidedly gendered figure – is variously a decisive, risk-taking, and, increasingly, creative agent. We are rarely asked to imagine that either character has much of a personal life, let alone an interior life.