This fine study examines the fortunes of a north Lincolnshire farming family from the mid-eighteenth century to the opening of the twentieth. The work is a testament to both the longstanding dedication and commitment of its author, Richard Olney, and to the quality of the work that can arise from the sustained application and skilful hand of local and regional history custom and practice. The book aims to discuss what was exceptional about the life of the Dixons of Holton-Le-Moor, and what was more typical and generalisable. It is an exploration of a number of members of the ‘middling sort’ who were occupying the agrarian economy and rural society of the period (if towards the upper end of that strata in certain respects), and their wider connections and associations. The research provides a broad account of the land and property management of the family at the level of individual farms and a growing landed estate, and their augmenting social position and influence within wider familial and kin networks, and in local and surrounding communities. The undertaking benefits considerably from the survival of an extensive collection of family papers of some remark, and additional archives, whether held in public repositories or private hands. The completed work is a very worthy output from Dr Olney himself, and from the wider endeavours of the Lincoln Record Society and its Boydell-produced Occasional Series.

The book opens with a scene-setting chapter on the ‘rural context’, and, with it, the positioning of the research in relation to central themes that entertain, and at times challenge, the local and regional historian. The significance of class and class consciousness, or lack of them, are considered, alongside the relevance of senses of community, the presence of communal and deferential relations, and affiliation with a set of communities of contrasting social and spatial reach. Place features as well as a further theme, with a description of Holton, a small parish, and its connections with surrounding and relatively small market towns, such as Brigg, Caistor and Market Rasen.

The seven chapters that follow are broadly chronological and person-centred. They locate a number of key members of the Dixon family in their times and places, social, economic and cultural. An account of the life of William Dixon (1697–1781), ‘Grazier’ and Senior, describes the arrival of the family into a somewhat unpromising parish, and the commencement of steady processes of local property accumulation, generally piecemeal from existing owners and tenants, whether absentee or resident, and the extension and deepening of social position. Progress in these regards meant that this particular William, dying in his eighty-fourth year, would see recognition of his status as that of ‘gentleman’. The two chapters that appear subsequently take readers into the nineteenth century, to the lives of William’s son Thomas (1729–1798), ‘tenant farmer’, and grandson William Junior (1756–1824), ‘old-style farmer’, and their further consolidation of property ownership and middling-sort position. The later William receives a second chapter, as ‘philosopher and philanthropist’, and the book turns more fully towards the social and cultural. An opportunity is taken here to explore belief, to an extent, but even more so charitable, friendly society, and local relief activities. Thomas John Dixon (1785–1871), from a generation on, also attracts the attention of a pair of chapters, as ‘man of business’ and then as ‘man of property’, and through an overview of his fortunes into the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The chapter that completes the chronological sequence focuses on the ‘ladies of Holton’, and the roles of some of the daughters of Thomas John with regard to estate management and community leadership up to 1906. However, their story is set against a background of more challenging economic and financial times, and a weakening of the local social and institutional fabric.

Chapter Nine takes a different methodological approach, and places the Dixons in a comparative context, seeing how their progress aligns with that of some of their north Lincolnshire peers. The determinants of family size, inheritance customs and the availability of non-landed resources are recognised by Olney to be decisive. The Dixons were relatively unusual in acquiring property in a piecemeal manner, and wholly within their home county and district. It is also clearly evident how individual members of the family and their personalities had an important influence in sustaining, if not in all cases growing, the estate and its wealth, and achieving this over the life courses of more than a couple of generations. Chapter Ten, meanwhile, examines the degree to which the Dixons assumed and expressed a sense of social class, for example through ambitions for their children, material accumulation and display, and local position and leadership. The Dixons were typical of their ‘sort’ for the area, relatively conservative and unpretentious.

This is a very illuminating study of both regional and much wider importance. It is a searching and successful exploration of a rural district and a social tier, enabled by the availability of papers for a family who reached lesser gentry rank. Illustrations amplify and enrich the work, with the reproduction of a number of manuscript sources, historical portraits, and scenes as they appear in the present day. The research is also of deep scholarship, well grounded in leading and influential writings on local and regional history, and in the Lincolnshire-specific literature.