The Gentleman's Daughter (3 page)

Of course, biological and familial imperatives governed the chief roles
available to women in professional, commercial and gentry families, as they long had done. Ladies' lives resembled a stately progress through recognized stations – maid, wife, mother and, if she was lucky, widow, dowager and grandmother – with different duties and liberties attached to each role. Each stage had its own frustrations, but in their difficulties women told each other to bow to the will of providence and do their duty. Indeed, it was a commonplace that the strict performance of duty generated a degree of secret pleasure, and ladies were relentlessly tutored on how to reach and enjoy the moral high ground: ‘You must also learn to be satisfied with the Consciousness of acting Right’, counselled Lady Sarah Pennington, ‘and look with an unconcerned Indifference on the Reception every successless Attempt to please may meet with,’ while Eliza Haywood promised ‘Sweet indeed are the reflections, which flow from a consciousness of having done what virtue and the duty owing to the character we bear in life, exacted from us …’
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Women's own letters and diaries do suggest that many did their duty to a round of inner applause, finding a certain exaltation in it. Ladies accepted patriarchy in theory, although, strikingly, the assertion of male authority often proved much more acceptable and manageable coming from fathers than from husbands and brothers. Still, when wronged, genteel women rarely questioned the justice of the gender hierarchy; rather they bemoaned the fact that their menfolk departed so sorrily from the authoritative masculine ideal. That said, none of the women studied here expected to endure tyranny, or in contemporary terms an ‘Egyptian bondage’, and they were fully conscious of what was owing to their dignity and rank. While not above the occasional exhibition of an almost theatrical feminine inferiority when petitioning for favours, the habitual self-projection of most was of upright strength, stoical fortitude and self-command. To be mistress of oneself was paramount – genteel ladies aimed to be self-possessed in social encounters, self-controlled in the face of minor provocations, self-sufficient in the midst of ingratitude, and, above all, brave and enduring in the grip of tragedy and misfortune. Abject feminine servility was the ineradicable mark of the kitchen maid not her employer.

For most genteel women, the assumption of their most active material role coincided with marriage, when they became the mistress of a household. Thereby, the administration of the household, the management of servants, the guardianship of material culture and the organization of family consumption fell to their lot. Most were well prepared for this deluge of responsibility; in girlhood, many had copied and seconded their mothers, others heeded advice that they should begin a reference manual on matters material to the running of a house. A lady's work was managerial,
but in this she resembled her husband. Gentlemen did not, after all, harvest corn or weave cloth themselves, but instructed servants, labourers and apprentices to do it for them: ‘To manage well a great Family’, acknowledged Richard Steele in 1710, ‘is as worthy an Instance of Capacity, as to execute a great Employment …’
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Even as conduct literature advocated female softness and obedience in one chapter, in another it minutely tutored privileged women on the exercise of power.

Yet the household and family were not the limit of an elite woman's horizon. Nor was the house in any simple sense a private, domestic sphere. Indeed, the idea that the home was a refuge insulated from the social world is one that would have perplexed the well-established in this period. Genteel families were linked to the world in a multiplicity of ways, as kinsfolk, landowners, patrons, employers and as members of the elite. All these social roles were expressed through a variety of encounters which took place in the home. Open-handed hospitality was still crucial to the maintenance of social credit and political power, and, as mistress of ceremony, the elite hostess might wield considerable practical power from the head of her dining-table. The women at the heart of this study presented themselves to the world in the mantle of politeness. Politeness was a tool which a well-born woman could use to extend her reach: she could use the language of politeness and civility to encourage heterosexual sociability, to demand social consideration and to justify criticism when this was denied. The accusation of vulgarity was as significant as a weapon to undermine male posturing and masculine brotherhood, as it was a device to disparage the less socially favoured. A polite lady also laid claim to wider cultural horizons through reading and exchanging periodicals, pamphlets, papers and novels, through letters, and through cultural consumption on an unprecedented scale. The domesticates of the morning were the polite adventurers of the afternoon.

It is hard to overestimate the impact of what has been termed the English urban renaissance on the scope of privileged women's social and cultural lives. The mushroom-growth of cultural institutions in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century provincial towns – assembly rooms, concert series, theatre seasons, circulating libraries, clubs, urban walks and pleasure gardens, and sporting fixtures – inaugurated an entirely new public, social terrain which celebrated, indeed depended upon, active female involvement.
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By the 1730s in most large towns it was possible for wealthier women to pursue a host of public activities and yet remain well within the bounds of propriety – as even the most fastidious observers understood it. From the early eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century the core of public entertainment remained remarkably constant.
However, by the end of the period the opportunities for institutional participation had expanded markedly. During the late eighteenth century there was a proliferation of charitable institutions through which women could garner a new kind of public standing and radiate something of that public spirit revered by their brothers. The institutionalization of fashionable benevolence constructed altogether new arenas for the expression of female conviviality and officiousness. Far from being eclipsed as the eighteenth century progressed, the public profile of privileged, provincial women had never been higher. The saga of progressive female incarceration is as inconsistent with the social history of the eighteenth century as it is incompatible with the new history of the indefatigable Victorians.
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My rejection of the conceptual vocabulary of ‘public and private’ and ‘separate spheres’ deployed so extensively in women's history rests above all on the fact that it has little resonance for the prosperous women studied here. In so far as they categorized their lives, they singled out their social and emotional roles: kinswoman, wife, mother, housekeeper, consumer, hostess and member of polite society. To make sense of their existence they invoked notions of family destiny, love and duty, regularity and economy, gentility and propriety, fortitude, resignation and fate. Hence, women's own writings suggest that the dominant historiographical debate about elite women's lives has been misfocused, curiously negligent of those women's own concerns; distinctions of limited significance have been over-emphasized, while central preoccupations have been missed altogether. To be sure, we can never definitively know what women writers took for granted, but if we are to construct an account in which they might at least recognize a reflection, we must take seriously the terms they actually used. Of course, only an antiquarian would limit analysis entirely to the historical actors' own conceptions of events, but historians must give those conceptions very serious consideration to avoid the most crass anachronisms. In identifying absences and silences we must be cautious. It is futile to berate Georgian women for ‘failing’ to perceive their limitations. It is also worth considering what we are measuring these past lives against; for instance, a typical letter written by one woman to another in our period might agonize over a child's illness, exchange local news and society gossip, offer opinions on literature and politics and request information about servants, fashions and consumables; perhaps, by modern standards, a touch parochial in its details. However, read this letter against the archetypal missive sent man to man in the same era and it looks like a national editorial, for a man's letters often chiefly concerned his own illnesses, minor matters of law and local administration, and above all sport – effectively summarized as my gout is still bad; here is the
gun dog I promised you; have you finished the will? Of course, genteel men had more opportunities than the letter through which to ventilate their intellectuality, but it is deeply questionable whether genteel women's mental horizons were any more hidebound than men's, even though their economic and political power was obviously much more circumscribed. Yet I would do these families a disservice if I set too much store by the factors that divided husbands and wives and neglected to mention the powerful experiences and convictions which they held in common. All shared an unassailable belief in the social consequence and intrinsic authority of the propertied; most were united in a sense of history and of place, of stoic philosophy and unenthusiastic faith; and many were welded together through heartfelt loyalty and love, bearing together the tragedies of what remained, in their own eyes, a hard life.

This book does not present a history of Everywoman; it offers a study of genteel women strongly anchored in the hills of the north of England. Yet because of the nature of their correspondence networks – northern women received copious post from letter-writers dispersed across the country, and concentrated in some numbers in London – claims to a broader viewpoint can also be made (see Appendix 1 for sources). It must also be said that the experiences of one particular woman, Elizabeth Shackleton (1726–81), dominate the book because of the astounding richness of her manuscripts: amidst literally thousands of letters she received and wrote, thirty-nine minutely detailed diaries document Mrs Shackleton's life over a nineteen-year period from 1762 to her death in 1781. However, while Mrs Shackleton's records are unparalleled in their range and detail, they are far from extraordinary in their content: elements of her experience and value system can be found across scores of other women's manuscripts. In effect, the diaries constitute that intact Delft platter (to borrow a metaphor) which allows us to identify and make sense of the shattered fragments scattered across other collections and archives.
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Still, the book is not an exhaustive account of all aspects of female experience, but a concentrated examination of the concerns that privileged women were prepared to commit to paper (two topics that were virtually never canvassed, for instance, were spirituality and sex). This book quite consciously uses the categories which emerge in women's own writings. Thus, female experience is carved up by the multiple roles they played. In the playing, these roles could be constraining, but a proper performance drew its own psychological and social rewards. For the women at the heart of this study considered themselves profoundly conventional. They were hostile to errant duchesses, adulterous wives, female fraudsters and pregnant servants, holding to the view that the woman who
set the world at naught was very far gone. It is hard to imagine them ever smiling on the likes of a feminist writer such as Mary Wollstonecraft, a mannish lesbian such as Anne Lister or a fashionable adulterer such as Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. What follows then is a study in seem-liness; a reconstruction of the penalties and possibilities of lives lived within the bounds of propriety. Yet, as it will emerge, even the bounds of propriety were wider than historians have been apt to admit.

THE PROVINCIAL WOMEN AT THE HEART of this study hailed from families headed by lesser landed gentlemen, attornies, doctors, clerics, merchants and manufacturers. As a group they described themselves as ‘polite’, ‘civil’, ‘genteel’, ‘well-bred’ and ‘polished’. As brides they aimed to appear ‘amiable and accomplished’. Yet they did not pretend to be members of ‘the quality’, the people of fashion, the cosmopolitan beau monde or the
ton
, although they were not above harping on their exalted acquaintances among the nobility or the antiquity of their lineage when they saw fit. Their possessions were contrived to have a genteel effect, rather than a dazzling elegance, and their entertainments aimed at generous liberality not sumptuous magnificence. The pomp and splendour of a crested coach, six horses and equipage was beyond their grasp. As a shorthand description, I have labelled this group ‘the polite’ or ‘the genteel’. While polite manners could be practised at lower social depths and amplified at greater heights,
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this label captures the moderate social eminence I wish to convey, combined with an emphasis on outward behaviour, while not prejudging an individual's source of income. This choice of terms also reflects the findings of Paul Langford on the collaboration of ‘the landed gentry and the upper elements of bourgeois society … When they did so they constituted that category of the indisputably “polite”, which in the last analysis forms the closest thing to a governing class in Georgian England.’
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Above all, I have deployed these labels because ‘the polite’ and ‘the genteel’ are the only terms consistently used by the women studied here to convey their social prestige. They had no recourse to a vocabulary of ‘upper’, ‘middle’ and ‘lower class’.
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However prominent the polite in Georgian social observations, this social stratum has not been well served by recent historical investigation.
One element of it, the English lesser gentry, has hardly been researched at all and is usually written off as ‘parish gentry’, or smothered under the conveniently elastic label ‘aristocracy’.
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Commercial and professional elites have received more attention, but too often they are simply assumed to occupy a place in the social hierarchy one step below a monolithic landed upper class.
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Some of the work on the commercial world has highlighted the massive gentry recruitment to prestigious trades and the extent of intermarriage between the landed and mercantile elites. However, many such studies are designed to establish the Georgian origins of a cohesive nineteenth-century middle class and its cultural identity. Consequently, they exhibit little interest in exploring the extent of sympathy between the upper echelons of that emerging middle class and its landed neighbours. Thus John Smail's painstaking search for the origins of middle-class culture in Halifax leads him to argue that in the eighteenth century the northern middling sort defined themselves against the neighbouring gentry: ‘On the whole, although individuals within this group might aspire to become gentlemen, the middling sort recognized the social superiority of the gentry and the profound cultural gulf that separated them from the landed elite.' A prudential bourgeoisie is perennially contrasted to an aristocracy that is mad, bad and dangerous to know. Thus, Davidoff and Hall's account of middle-class formation in Suffolk, Norwich and Birmingham from 1780 to 1850 sets much store by the ‘oppositional culture’ of the late eighteenth-century middle class, arguing that they forged their collective identity in conscious contrast to an aristocracy that is itself caricatured as thoroughly profligate, indebted, licentious and dissipated. Despite the enormous numbers of lesser gentry, certainly well over ten thousand families in contrast to the two to three hundred that comprised the nobility in this period, their role in this epic battle of commercial versus aristocratic mores is virtually never mentioned. By implication, the lesser gentry should be subsumed into one camp or the other: either they represented the lesser echelons of aristocracy, somehow sharing the world view of noble families with one hundred times their income, or they should be seen as rural rentier bourgeois. As things stand, the lesser gentry inhabit a social no-man's land, apparently lying low while the shots of a cultural war whizzed overhead.
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