“Useful, Substantial, and Splendid”: Frugality, Health, and Advice in Elizabeth Moxon’s English Housewifry (1749)

Abstract

This article approaches English Housewifry (Moxon 1749) as a carefully calibrated system for giving advice rather than a mere collection of recipes. Drawing on a copy-text-based analysis of the title programme, Bills of Fare, index, and running prose, it shows how clauselevel resources, imperatives, agentless passives, let-constructions, prohibitives, and permissive you may, create a graded directive logic sensitive to task and risk. Ethical concerns with frugality and health emerge through purpose clauses and evaluative lexis, turning procedure into reasoned counsel. Beyond the clause, layout and scheduling in the Bills of Fare encode seasonality and service order. Framed in Systemic Functional Linguistics, the study reveals a voice of experienced domestic governance: firm where safety matters, flexible where taste and expense allow.