The Gentleman's Daughter (23 page)

Still, child-rearing was not unremitting misery, it was widely recognized that caring for children could be profoundly rewarding and highly amusing. Self-conscious domesticity was no invention of the early Victorians. A studied maternity was relished by Jane Pellet in the 1750s who sent kisses to ‘little Marmouset (as lady G. Calls it)’, emulating the tender, blushing motherhood which redeems the lively Charlotte Grandison in
Sir Charles Grandison
. The satisfactions inherent in the most routine aspects of family life were proclaimed again and again by the Ramsdens of the Charterhouse in the 1760s and 1770s: ‘On my left hand sits Madam darning of stockings, on my right is our heir apparent reading the News; Betsy is making a Cap for her Doll, Tom and Dick are playing at Marbles on the carpet. To say more of Ourselves will be needless.’
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The fascinations of child-rearing were canvassed as readily at the end of the period: ‘I hope your little treasure and may I say your little
companion
is going on well,’ wrote a friend of Eliza Whitaker's in 1816, ‘engaging your attention by a thousand interesting little ways, he is just growing into the fascinating age.’
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Proud parenthood radiated from the young mothers and fathers of the Greene clan in the 1820s: ‘Willm & Ann are so proud of their little Girl, that they seem almost jealous of the Group that are advancing to put her nose out of joint. He, in the pride of his heart said the other day “They'll none of them have a nicer child than ours” They will all think the same of their own, I dare say.’
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Ellen Weeton Stock's letter-books leave no doubt that she lavishly cherished her dumpling of a baby girl:

From the first, Mary Stock provided her parents with sensual compensation for their disastrous marriage. Abundant affection and sentimental pleasure were widely expressed by genteel parents. Yet for all the sentimentality, the more compelling impression which emerges from their manuscripts is one of gritty emotional endurance. The cumulative impact of reading letters and diaries written in both joy and affliction is to bring home the sheer stamina upon which these parents had to draw. Yet there
is no evidence whatsoever that fond parents gave of themselves partially and warily with one eye on the bills of mortality and the other on a comfortable old age. Lawrence Stone's assertion that high infant and child mortality cauterized parental affection is doubtful, and his belief that ‘the value of children rises as their durability improves’ highly questionable. Few Georgian parents could stem self-sacrificing emotion when confronted with a stricken child: ‘Most willingly wou'd I make a pilgrimage barefoot as far as my legs would carry me, to get the poor little Fellow cured’, supplicated Reverend Ramsden in 1772. It was not for nothing that Dr Johnson listed ‘tenderness, parental care’ as one of his dictionary definitions of love.
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The production and rearing of children had a transforming effect on genteel women's lives, all but obliterating their past selves and public profile, but the vista from the conjugal bed was far from clear. Established pregnancy was as unpredictable in its outcome as it was inexorable in its progress. The biological bore quite differently on different women. True, biology was mediated by culture: it was the custom of denying the neonate colostrum which could lead to starvation in an enfeebled infant and often milk-fever in the mother. Yet physical factors beyond a mother's immediate control often determined family fortunes – the breadth of her pelvis, or the outbreak of an epidemic were not directly subject to the dominion of discourse. When medicinal waters failed to give Barbara Stanhope a child, she had come to the frontier of culture's power over nature. Needless to say, the notion that aspects of biological experience lay beyond human management would not have surprised the genteel. That the hand of God was seen to determine so much is testimony enough to their powerful sense of culture's limits. Submission to one's natural lot was the keynote of genteel maternity. From smallpox to shirt-making, the epoch of motherhood is minutely catalogued in women's records, but rarely is the totality of maternity put into words and never is it questioned. But then motherhood was not a discrete event, or the work of a day, it was the quintessential labour of love which knew no clock and spent itself in endless small services, a thousand little nothings. In its boundless details, mothering swamped genteel matrons even as it defined them.

This chapter has focused on the trials and pleasures of motherhood, in an effort to recreate one of the dominant employments of genteel women, but all this should not be taken to imply that a father's feelings for, or
involvement with his children was negligible. William Ramsden's paternal satisfaction gushed from his pen in 1763, writing

Ramsden often took sole responsibility for his children in the evenings when his more sociable wife skipped out to card-playing parties and, in a crisis, seconded her efforts in the sick-room. William Gossip was, in his own words, a ‘very affectionate papa’, to whom the expression of tenderness came easily. Willy was his ‘dear Jewel’, while Jack was his ‘Poor Rogue’ of whom he quipped ‘he does provoke me sometimes, yet I think I love him too’. Of his suffering Wilmer, he asked ‘Does he take notice of my not being with him? I am afraid the dear creature should think himself neglected by me.’ Moreover, Gossip preached to his sons what he practised himself: ‘my dear needs never be ashamed of showing affection to your relations’; apparently with some success, as his adult son George refused to take a foreign army posting, for fear that he would miss seeing his children grow up.
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Across the northern networks, male correspondents dwelt with anxiety and pride on developmental hurdles cleared and crises overcome. Paternal investment could be profound.

Nevertheless, the supreme responsibility for babies and young children always devolved on the mother. When his children were around Ramsden found it difficult to think, work or write letters, witness his recorded speech when petitioned to write an overdue letter: ‘now Bessy says he how can you be so unreasonable: I that have always so much Busness upon my Hands; and besides you are always Bring[ing] your Brats in the way; that I cannot settel to any thing for them.’
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Similarly, William Gossip occasionally superintended at least some of his brood during his wife's absences, but he also recorded the disabling distraction of infantile needs: ‘Fathy is by me, & keeps such a perpetual Clack, that you must excuse me if I blunder. I can't get her to hold her tongue – at last we are silent …
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In the end, as he freely acknowledged, it was the unfailing consistency of Anne Gossip's ‘tender care’ (along with God's mercy) which stood between her blighted babies and eternity.

The inequities of labour notwithstanding, the letters of eighteenth-century
parents demonstrate the all-important reality that men and women experienced with one mind. The shared emotional capital invested in children shines out of the letters men and women exchanged. In their children, men and women were tied indissolubly to each other. In them they saw blended blood and shared destiny. Ultimately, we see the shocking precariousness of that destiny. The death of a child was a grievous loss, in the face of which common catastrophe parents had little choice but to draw deep on their stoical reserves and attempt to submit like proper Christians. Announcing the death of the ‘rare thumping lad’ he himself had delivered twelve years earlier, Dr William St Clare told the unsuspecting father,

The same belief in the sustaining power of a deliberate fortitude is found in comforting praise Walter Stanhope sent his wife Anne, who had lost three of her four children in infancy, ‘I am glad to find … that you have behav'd with prudence in these melancholy schemes, so as not to throw yourself down.’
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Again and again, parents struggled to resign themselves to their losses and to bear up under misfortune, clinging to the belief that their sacrifice fulfilled some divine purpose, that they had not surrendered their infants in vain. Mercifully, they did not see a child's death as a particular punishment for their own sins because the God who presided over the Georgian Church of England was not an especially wrathful deity. Instead, parents simply tried to accept a bereavement as a divine mystery. However, it would be wrong to suppose that the much-parroted language of resignation means that parents were easily reconciled to child mortality, then or earlier. Men and women brought exactly the same spiritual equipment to bear in the event of an adult's death. The bereaved were routinely urged ‘to submit with the greatest Resignation to whatever the hand of providence inflicts on us, & to persuade ourselves it is for our Good in some Respect or other…’
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When Abigail Gawthern lost her ‘dear Eliza’ to the whooping cough, she tersely recorded ‘it pleased God to release her, to the inexpressible grief of her father and mother’. In an addendum replete with unspoken pathos, she noted ‘she was two years and a half and six days old’. Maternal loss might be no less agonizing for the absence of hysterical expression, or the ‘sable trappings of woe’, for, as Mrs Gawthern herself later wrote, ‘heartfelt and unaffected grief turns with disgust from the hackneyed display of ostentatious sorrow’.
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If anything, the prevalence of the vocabulary of Christian endurance speaks to the unutterable power of parental grief, not to its weakness, suggesting rather the abysmal depths of misery into which men and women might sink if ever they relaxed their grip on the rafts of courage and resignation. Contemporaries feared the thundering force of parental grief, and maternal anguish in particular was recognized as a ‘species of savage despair’.
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Moreover, desolation could snuff out a mother's own life and her overlasting soul, so to survive grief was seen as an act of will. Thus, a studied fortitude was a crucial necessity once embarked on the parental course. For, as parents, men and women stood side by side, watching the unfathomable waters of providence lapping ominously and relentlessly at their undefended feet.

22 Title-page from Elizabeth Shackleton's Pocket Diary of 1776.

THE WRITERS OF ADVICE LITERATURE groomed genteel women for the exercise of power. The effective government of servants had long been seen as an essential duty. Women were tutored on the careful choice and moral regulation of servants, on the rewarding of the industrious and the expulsion of the immoral. They were told to sustain their sway through the exhibition of judicious reason, and were cautioned not to
weaken their authority through capricious direction or over-correction. Like good kings, good mistresses had no favourites and did not stoop to familiarities. Instead, they were to exhibit that general courtesy and good breeding which generated universal respect and affection. On this depended the credit and happiness of a family. A virtuous female superintendent was an indispensable member of the genteel Georgian household.