The Gentleman's Daughter (27 page)

Nanny Nutter's perspective goes unrecorded, though her actions do not suggest grateful loyalty to an irreproachable patron. After all, servitude was servitude. Nanny Nutter absconded from Alkincoats on at least four occasions. In September 1772 her father brought her back. In January 1773 messages sent to her sister and her parents were sufficient to induce her unaccompanied return. In December 1774 she was again returned by her father, but in September 1775 she ran away for good: ‘While I & Mr S. were both from home, Nanny Nutter threw her clothes out of the Red room window and run home. Keep her there.’
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This tendency to take flight was hardly unusual among Elizabeth Shackleton's servants. Nanny Nutter's youth and the proximity of a family refuge may have been further catalysts. On the other hand, Mrs Shackleton complained that Nanny was
growing wilful, describing her as ‘very Impertinent’ and ‘saucy’, though ‘a fine girl if she pleases’, while Nanny Nutter circulated stories of ill usage, as Mrs Shackleton discovered in December 1774:

In the event, John Nutter was easily pacified, though this may say less about his daughter's credibility than about his own financial circumstances: ‘John Nutter came here in a rage for to take Nanny Home for here she sho'd not stay he was soon appeased – was glad to leave her where he found her. Tho' most likely his Poverty not his Will consented.’ Either way, the cause of Nanny Nutter's unhappiness with Alkincoats and its mistress is unfathomable. What is beyond doubt, however, is that Mrs Shackleton's relationship with Nanny was charged with strong emotion. The diary entries recording the maid's final departure and re-employment are infused with bitterness: 2 September 1775: ‘Nanny Nutter run away – There may she remain forever’; 5 November 1775: ‘Nanny Nutter went to be chamber Maid at Carr. an ungratefull lying girl.’
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It could be argued that Nanny Nutter's career represents a special case. Certainly no other servant in Mrs Shackleton's employ warranted an entire diary. Nevertheless, when William Brigge ‘walked of with his box & cloaths & left a Pack of Malt in the Tub’ in August 1777, Mrs Shackleton was caught on the raw again, wondering how a boy who had grown up at Alkincoats could so betray her – ‘a Generous Deed after being brought up here & lived near ten years’. When Will repented his action three months later, Elizabeth Shackleton refused to see or re-employ him. Thus rejected, he enlisted in the 19th Regiment on Christmas day. Even servants of relatively short standing could gall Elizabeth Shackleton with their ingratitude: ‘Betty Spencer run off without leaving a word to any person. Left all the cloaths to dry & Iron – an Impudent Dirty Slut. Never shall she have any favour from me…’ At Pasture House, in the last four years of her life, Elizabeth Shackleton clung to her female servants with a pathetic sense of her own vulnerability. Her needs, both physical and emotional, are palpable in her response to the arrival of Molly Blakey – ‘I gave [her] my old black mode silk Cloke because I thought she was poor & came to me when I was desolate & quite without any help.’
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In her loneliness, Mrs Shackleton endowed her relationship with selected servants with a condescending sentimentality.

On the other hand, the sentimental content of mistress–servant relations should not be seen as evidence that Elizabeth Shackleton sought to dissolve the social distinction between governess and governed. To be sure, her expectation of a befitting gratitude amongst the servile was supremely hierarchical. Her attention to social differentiation could be minute and her resentment of disloyalty implacable. Elizabeth Shackleton considered her servants beholden to her; an assumption shared by her contemporaries, like the Leicester hosier Thomas Gossip who was irked that his selfish maid Mary had the temerity to put her own happiness before his convenience, when she ‘very foolishly threw herself away into the hands of a soldier without giving me the least notice’.
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Indeed, when elite masters and mistresses harped on the thanklessness of servants it led at least one contemporary observer to conclude, ‘They think highly of what they bestow, and little of the service they receive; they consider only their own convenience, and seldom reflect on the kind of life that their servants pass with them…’
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Of course, a formidable sense of social and moral superiority was dyed in the genteel wool. When Mrs Parker of Cuerdon heard from a servant that a relative was ill, she hardly knew whether to credit the report, since ‘it is only a Verbal Account from the Unintelligible Mouth of a Servant’.
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Patently, this county gentlewoman could not comprehend the full humanity of her servants. It is also worth remembering that mistresses were empowered by common law to use physical correction on these dependents. A Mrs Burnall who had gone too far in beating her maidservant was hissed at by the crowd on leaving the assize court in Nottingham.
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Elite employers took superiority as a birthright.

Even the possession of docile and devoted servants did not relieve genteel women of the obligation to labour in their households, although the ambiguity of elite commentary on the matter combined with the tendency to take the presence of servants for granted make it hard to ascertain with certainty how much physical drudgery a genteel mistress took upon herself. Elizabeth Shackleton's diaries, for instance, do not differentiate systematically between everyday tasks performed by her alone, tasks performed with the aid of servants, and those performed exclusively by servants under their mistress's supervision. Consequently, interpretations may vary of daily entries such as ‘spent the day cleaning and scowering’, though most readers would concede that to make such a statement, the mistress must have been closely involved in labour of this kind. Certainly, there is no evidence in the northern manuscripts to suggest a gentlewoman lost caste through heavy-duty housekeeping. In fact, Mrs Shackleton wrote most approvingly of hard-working ladies, as here
in December 1780 at Pasture House: ‘Alice Waddington a most usefull Visitor. She strip'd of her Ornaments and best Attire & helpd washd & Iron.’
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Moreover, chronic staff shortages of the kind experienced by the Shackletons would have undermined even the most determined efforts to attain decorative idleness. No upper servant remained long enough to become truly accountable for the smooth running of the household and thereby relieve Elizabeth Shackleton of active supervision. A significant degree of co-operation between mistress and servants, markedly in food preparation and laundry, has also been noted in Meldrum's study of smaller establishments in early eighteenth-century London.
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The genteel mistress was hardly engaged in back-breaking toil, nevertheless the pattern housekeeper was determined that all be clean, neat, regular, well ordered and economical, a determination which translated into energetic attention to household operations. To guarantee that household tasks were done well, the elite mistress had to be on hand to direct and assist. In order to judge the quality of the work performed, she herself had to know how to sew a straight seam, clean a piece of silver, churn good butter or harvest sweet vegetables. ‘The proper discharge of your domestic duties,’ argued Lady Sarah Pennington, necessitates ‘a perfect knowledge of every branch of Household Oeconomy, without which you can neither correct what is wrong, approve what is right, or give Directions with Propriety.’ Hence, Pennington urged her daughter, ‘make yourself Mistress of the Theory, that you may be able, the more readily, to reduce it into practice; and when you have a Family to command, let the Care of that always employ your principal Attention, and every part of it be subjected to your own Inspection’. Even Rousseau's meek Sophie, who gladly substituted for the domestics when necessary, had principally learnt their multifarious functions because ‘One can never command well except when one knows how to do the job oneself.
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Just as prudent economy had many branches, so an elite housekeeper understood many skills. Her reach embraced the ordering and cleaning of the physical household, the production of clothes and household goods, husbandry and provisioning, and the making and dispensing of medicine. Her responsibilities were wide-ranging even if her drudgery was minimal.

The elite mistress managed her household property like a museum curator administering her collection, for the neatness and order of a house and furniture was a quintessential feature of genteel economy, a mark too reflective of character to be left entirely to the unexacting care of servants. Consequently, when Anne Gossip sent a box of new purchases home, she asked for the unpacking to be delayed until she could orchestrate it: ‘I had better be there when they are unpack'd ye can't know where to find
anything.’
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Precise attention to the physical arrangement of the household is minutely documented in Elizabeth Shackleton's pocket diaries:

When new commodities entered the household, whether bought, made or received as gifts, it was the mistress-housekeeper who decided their eventual destination. Mrs Shackleton often wrote of ‘putting things in their places’, ‘taking possession’ of cupboards and ‘regulating’ their contents. The diaries are littered with reminders of the whereabouts of individual items, and with
ad hoc
inventories of cupboards and boxes. When her sons left property in her willing charge, she wrote up minute catalogues in duplicate. She prided herself on safe, efficient storage and took palpable pleasure in her ample cupboards. In a well-regulated household, the mistress-housekeeper could literally itemize the physical contents of a house and knew exactly where to lay her hands on a particular object.
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Hence, when loyalist women petitioned the British government after the American War, they were able to present minute inventories of furniture, plate and kitchen utensils lost to the rebels, something most male claimants were unable to do – ‘a Variety of Articles’ being the best that one male refugee could recollect.
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How his wife would have sighed for those forgotten goods.

Domestic inspection and reorganization was routine for the genteel housekeeper, witness Mrs Shackleton detailing the ‘regulation’ of her linen one November morning in 1768: ‘I removed the Chest out of the red room in the Gallery & took all the linnen out of the linnen draws over the fireplace into the nursery & put the linnen draws near the fireplace in the red room in the gallery as they stood to damp before.’
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Mrs Shackleton monitored the condition of the household goods and kept a record of breakages, wear and tear, the mending of broken bits and the regular servicing of utensils. In genteel households cupboards were well-ordered, sheets crackled with starch and the utensils shone, for chipped cups, blunt knives, dirty linen and domestic disarray were all visceral emblems of the slattern; they announced the presence of a neglectful, indolent and probably sluttish mistress to her shuddering guests. Conversely, when Boswell encountered a lady of quality who had sacrificed herself in marriage to a rich, greasy old man, he felt nauseated: ‘She looks to me unclean … like a dirty table-cloth.’
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A well-regulated household was a clean household, for ‘nastiness’ would deprive a family of polite company. What exactly constituted an acceptable level of cleanliness in eighteenth-century terms is hard to assess, but it is apparent that even an undemanding definition assumed constant work. Although Alkincoats was refurbished in the 1750s and Pasture House was a completely new building, both houses were plagued by inefficient chimneys and leaking roofs. Mrs Shackleton engaged John Smith to sweep the chimneys (‘a most dirty do’), yet this did not remove the threat of dangerous fires in the store room and parlour chimneys, an occurrence reported in 1771, 1774 and 1775. Heavy rain also created chaos. With dismal regularity Mrs Shackleton awoke to find Alkincoats flooded with water, the fireplaces belching smoke and ‘a great deal of damage done’. The situation was no better at Pasture House: ‘A deluge at Barrowford, this house Every room smokes like a Kiln. The water runs down the Chinies and swims upon all the Floors.’
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Under such circumstances keeping an eighteenth-century household even moderately dry and orderly was an arduous and unending task.

The work involved in meeting Mrs Shackleton's standards of cleanliness is suggested by her bulk purchases of castile soap and the variety of dusters and cleaning rags mentioned in the dairies, including ‘china cloths’, ‘a cloth for to wipe the leads’, ‘knife cloths’ and ‘tin cloths’. Reference is made to the intermittent whitewashing, cleaning out of rooms and polishing of plate in anticipation of visitors. Elizabeth Shackleton associated herself with laborious tasks: ‘I wash'd all the China Pots & c in the Store room which was extremely well clean'd out – a very troublesome Job am glad it is over so safe and well. It answers the pains and looks very clean nice and well …’
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But whether she actually got her hands dirty remains a mystery. Mrs Shackleton's use of the personal pronoun is ambiguous, witness three references to a common household task: ‘We scowered all the Pewter & cleand all the things in the Kitchen’; ‘We scowered all the Pewter cleaned Coppers & Irons’; ‘a very fine day. The maids scouring pewter’.
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In each case, Elizabeth Shackleton may have meant that while her maids toiled, she stood by to direct and encourage. But even if the role she performed was essentially supervisory, she was unquestionably an interventionist superintendent, who at the very least had her own ideas about the best way to scour pewter. Mrs Shackleton certainly led the battle to keep the dirt at bay and was mortified when overwhelmed: ‘such a house for dirt as I never saw. It quite hurts me to see this good old place so deplorably nasty.’ The public pride she drew from running a clean household can be inferred from her humiliation in defeat: ‘What a nasty drunken beastly house for a stranger to clean …’
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Cleanliness
was powerfully associated with gentility. Nevertheless, the exemplary mistress who ensured the decent order of her house was expected to conceal her efforts behind cloak of gracious nonchalance, lest she radiate ‘the air of a housemaid’ and thereby discomfort her husband and her guests. Her aim was to contrive that a visitor took neatness and order for granted and remained blind to the scrubbing, washing and polishing she daily orchestrated.
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