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Early-nineteenth century traders, manufacturers and retailers are often depicted as inhabiting a world where approval, trust and reputation mattered. Positive engagements with customers, fellow business-people and with the wider community were all, apparently, important. This has been made most obvious in the literature in relation to clients whereby shop-keepers eager to please an increasingly affluent population, offered liberal terms to encourage repeat business. Entrants to the market place, keen to forge new connections with peers, drew on established links to enhance their own fledgling businesses. Publicised via newspapers, they promoted their integrative rather than disruptive appearance. The career of Carlisle printer and publisher Charles Thurnam questions this narrative. Intermingled with his civic engagement, Thurnam's outbursts of violence and aggression, threatening behaviour, legal entanglements and witness intimidation reveal an approach seemingly at odds with the notion of a 'polite and commercial' people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessing the role of the enterprising middle-ranking widow amongst the urban elite in Derby, England, this article focuses on Mary Pickford, the contribution she made to the early textile industry, her political engagement, and her charitable concerns. The interrelated aspects of Pickford's life simultaneously contributed to her social standing and to Derby's economic development. The East Midlands was synonymous with the large-scale textile concerns of the Strutts and the Arkwrights about whom much has been written. Pickford's moderately-sized business, however, is more representative of the majority about which far less is known. As such, an analysis of her activities, drawn from fragmentary sources, recognises the significance of the individual and the enmeshed nature of female involvement in urban life, thereby adding to a greater understanding of industrial and urban growth in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This examination of a late-Georgian businesswoman, Barbara Ford of Ashbourne in Derbyshire, utilises an extensive but partial and fragmentary range of contemporary sources to demonstrate the significance of a familial network and its commercial undertakings in one woman's enterprise. The activities of Barbara's prosperous family, and its ability to exploit the changing economic circumstances of the age, were not lost on the newly-widowed Mrs Ford. It was not inevitable that she should enter the commercial world but her actions, viewed in the light of her extended familial network, are entirely consistent with their extensive business interests. The research places Barbara Ford in a local and provincial world where commercial success depended as much on interpersonal communication and reputation as it did upon business acumen. Rather than regarding Barbara Ford as an outlier, an atypical woman of middle-rank, forced into a commercial world by economic necessity, the evidence is strongly suggestive that her decision to continue her husband's business was guided by choice. Her reputation in the community was enhanced, not diminished, in consequence. Most of all, the research demonstrates female agency: the strength, skill, and determination of one woman to negotiate her way in an age that placed so many limitations on the lives of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]