‘Baptists, Business and Respectability’: Elisha Smith (1754–1819) and Elisha Smith Robinson (1817–1885)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Studies of a rising middle class in the nineteenth century have suggested that economic success was often accompanied by political influence, and a growing sense of social respectability. Tracing the business interests of one family from a grocer’s shop in the Cotswolds in the late eighteenth century to the establishment of a Bristol-based, internationally-known company in the nineteenth century, this case study suggests that the growth of denominational life offered wealthy Baptists a particular place of respectability and service.