Thrift goes into print. Five centuries of household manuals

A word that meant thriving

"Thrift" did not start out meaning saving. Around 1300 it meant the fact of thriving: prosperity, getting on. The sense of frugality is recorded from the 1550s.¹ The word moved from the result to the habit that produced it. That shift is the story of this chapter. Once printing arrived, advice on how to run a house became a business of its own, and the habit it sold was thrift.

Florence, the 1430s

Before print, the Florentine architect Leon Battista Alberti wrote a four-book dialogue on the family. The third book is titled Economicus, and its subject is masserizia: the good keeping and use of what one has.² The old man who speaks it lists what the head of a household needs: family, riches, honor and friendship. Alberti drew on the Greek household books in Latin translation.² The line from Xenophon to the Renaissance villa was direct.

Verse for farmers, 1557

The first English best-seller on the subject was in rhyme. Thomas Tusser's A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie appeared in 1557 and grew into Five Hundreth Pointes by 1573, with a section on housewifery. It was among the best-selling poetry of its age, and it put many proverbs into print for the first time, including an early form of "a fool and his money are soon parted".³ Legend says Tusser farmed badly and died poor. His will shows he did not.³

The trade in household books

By the seventeenth century the genre had authors who lived by it. Gervase Markham's The English Huswife came out in 1615; by 1617 his booksellers had made him promise in writing to publish no more on certain subjects, because he kept reissuing the same material under new titles.⁴ Hannah Woolley published The Ladies Directory at her own expense in 1661 and was probably the first person to earn a living writing about running a house.⁵

In the German lands the same demand produced a whole genre, the "house-father" books, manuals for landowners on farm and household. Johannes Coler's Oeconomia ruralis et domestica ran to fourteen editions after its collected edition of 1604; the genre peaked between 1660 and 1730.⁶ Its name was still the Greek word.

The tradesman's repeating clock

Daniel Defoe's The Complete English Tradesman turned the household book into a business book. Its best line is about accounts: "A tradesman's books are his repeating clock, which upon all occasions are to tell him how he goes on."⁷ A repeating clock struck the hour on demand. The books were to tell the owner where he stood whenever he asked. One chapter is titled "Extravagant and Expensive Living; Another Step to a Tradesman's Disaster". Another is on credit, which Defoe treats as the tradesman's life and his greatest danger.⁷

Franklin's gleanings

The most reprinted household advice in English is Benjamin Franklin's The Way to Wealth of 1758. It is the preface to an almanac, framed as a speech by an old man at an auction, stringing together maxims from Franklin's earlier almanacs.⁸ "If you would know the value of money, go and try to borrow some; for he that goes a borrowing, goes a sorrowing." "Creditors have better memories than debtors."⁹

Two things about it are usually missed. The crowd, Franklin writes, "approved the doctrine, and immediately practiced the contrary".⁹ And at the end Franklin admits the wisdom was not his but "the gleanings that I had made of the sense of all ages and nations".⁹ Many of the maxims were old proverbs. One that is not in the book at all is "a penny saved is a penny earned". Franklin wrote "a penny saved is two pence clear" in 1737 and "a penny saved is a penny got" in 1758. The "earned" form is later.¹⁰

Franklin's earlier Advice to a Young Tradesman of 1748 supplied the lines a German sociologist would later use to open his account of the spirit of capitalism: "Remember, that time is money" and "Remember, that credit is money".¹¹

Three heads, fifteen minutes

In 1841 Catharine Beecher published A Treatise on Domestic Economy, the standard American household manual for a generation. Its chapter on economy of time and expenses tells every woman to keep an account of all she spends, for herself and her family, for a year, under three heads: food, rent and wages; education and books; benevolence and religion.¹² Her model is a boarding-house keeper who spends fifteen minutes each evening on her accounts and takes an inventory of stores and debts every Saturday.¹²

What five centuries add up to

Every one of these books says the same three things in the language of its century. Know what you have. Write down what you spend. Do not owe. What changed was who was reading: from a countess to a farmer to a tradesman to a housewife with a pencil. The advice went down the social scale as print got cheaper. The subject stayed what Xenophon had called it: the management of a house.