This focus on the household is partly the result of eighteenth-century advice manuals which often stated that women needed only a rudimentary working knowledge of accounting in order to manage household resources effectively when they married. 22 As John Richard Edwards has shown, by the eighteenth century commercial accounting was gendered as exclusively male by these manuals, while women’s accounting was understood to be useful only for household management. 23 From the seventeenth century and particularly from 1750 onwards, these texts stressed a need for women to acquire a basic working knowledge of arithmetic. By 1788, for example, Arithmetic Made Familiar and Easy to Young Gentlemen and Ladies had run to five editions. 24 The Accomplish’d Housewife, published in 1745, urged that ‘young Ladies’ should be acquainted with the ‘four fundamental Rules of Arithmetick’ by their seventh birthday. Beyond this, however, women were not encouraged to extend their knowledge any further than that required for the keeping of basic accounts. ‘We shall not puzzle our Female Readers with any farther forms of Arithmetical Calculations’, the book declared, ‘but shall close this Branch of their Education, with giving them a transient Idea of the best Method for keeping their Account’. 25 These ‘how-to’ accounting manuals frequently included exemplar accounts for their readers, offering a guide on which they could model their own. Though these manuals along with other genres such as the printed pocketbook contributed towards a high degree of standardisation in accounting by the end of the eighteenth century, we cannot know how many women studied accounting from them alone. 26 Though scholarship has recovered the role of single, married, and widowed women as independent and successful business owners and investors, there remains a clear gendered distinction in the scholarship between commercial accounting on the one hand and household accounting on the other, echoing eighteenth-century printed advice. 27 In a commercial, mercantile, and trading context, historians have argued that accounting acted as a marker of veracity, accuracy, and, most importantly, as a method of control. 28 Mary Poovey, for example, has shown how early modern bookkeeping, and especially double-entry bookkeeping, was ‘one of the earliest practices where a prototype of the modern fact was generated’. This was because using a formally precise system seemed to guarantee that the details it recorded were truthful and objective reflections of transactions. 29 The printed guide to accounting, popular from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, played an important role by clearly establishing what a financial account should look like. 30 These popular publications, in the words of Adam Smyth, ‘established a strong link between particular methods of arranging financial records and ideas of reliability and truthfulness’. 31 Some of this emphasis on rationality has filtered through to discussions of consumption and the household; Lemire, for example, has demonstrated how the ‘intellectual conflation of commercial categories with household practice’ marked a profound transformation across the long eighteenth century. 32 Helen Berry has explored this transformation in accounting as a medium of control for women, arguing that the Durham gentlewoman Judith Baker ‘rationalised’ expenditure on luxury items ‘through the application of strict account-keeping’. 33 Nevertheless, as this chapter demonstrates, distinctions between commercial accounting as a ‘rational’ masculine exercise and women’s accounting tied to the household as ‘the seat of sentiment’ continue to inform interpretation of these sources