The Gentleman's Daughter (35 page)

37 ‘Fashionable Dress’ and ‘Fashionable Dresses’, from
Carnan's Ladies Complete Pocket Book for 1808
.

Elizabeth Shackleton updated her wardrobe for her own gratification and for social propriety. She doubtless would have agreed with the likes of Lady Sarah Pennington who decreed, ‘a Compliance with Fashion, so far as to avoid the Affectation of Singularity is necessary, but to run into the Extream of Fashions, more especially those which are inconvenient is the certain proof of a weak mind …’
⁷⁶
Nevertheless, a subterranean pleasure may have been derived from the display of London modes to Lancashire society, yet only once in her entire correspondence was an item recommended on those grounds. In an effort to reconcile her suspicious cousin to some ostentatious fabrics, Bessy Ramsden exploited the language of emulation: ‘[The Silks] were to be shure vastly pretty and the extraordinary trouble in the working of ‘em will be amply repaid you in the Envy & c they will excite among the Misses of Coln.’
⁷⁷
Granted, Elizabeth Shackleton adopted some stylish innovations which originated at court, but that did not necessarily mean she admired the ‘Ladies of Quality’ or wanted to be the Duchess of Devonshire. Besides, even if an item was originally bought for the express purpose of dazzling east Lancashire, it could in time become a repository of memories or a grateful reward: ‘I
gave Betty Cooke my strip'd & sprigg'd muslin Apron above Thirty years in my Possession.’
⁷⁸

It is also important to recall that not all categories of goods were equally susceptible to fashion. Metropolitan chic was more highly prized in clothing than in tableware, in tableware than in furniture and in furniture than in kitchenware. Nor did fashion obliterate all other associations. Elizabeth Shackleton's hair jewellery offers an explicit example of the possible coexistence of different systems of meaning. Constituted of human hair, such ornaments were potent extensions of the self. They were bequeathed to loved ones as heirlooms and were exchanged by lovers as tokens of mutuality and romantic esteem. Private associations notwithstanding, they also signalled an engagement with high fashion, enjoying along with other ‘love ornaments’ a massive vogue in the later eighteenth century.

Even if the new clothes, tableware and furniture bought by Elizabeth Shackleton were all broadly fashionable in form, their form neither expressed the full range of her motivations nor did it dictate the function these goods performed for her. Elizabeth Shackleton's records testify to the sheer diversity of meanings it was possible to attach to possessions. Of course, meanings were not absolutely rigid, since objects accrued different connotations according to use and context, yet some general patterns can be observed. Large or expensive items, bought new or inherited, were suggestive of history and lineage. The reassuring permanence associated with substantial pieces of furniture was akin to that conveyed by the built environment: furniture, carriages, roads, bridges and houses were all blessed in similar terms by Elizabeth Shackleton.
⁷⁹
Unsurprisingly, pieces of clothing and accoutrements expressed individuality, promoting the remembrance of original owner or donor. Kitchen utensils were valued for trusty service, ingenuity and sometimes novelty, while china and tableware signified genteel ceremony and pleasant sociability.

Of course it is possible that Elizabeth Shackleton was an isolated material obsessive, but this seems unlikely, given the corroborating references which can be found in other manuscripts. While demonstrating their expertise as fashionable consumers, Elizabeth's friends also sent her sentimental gifts, for, as Jane Scrimshire remarked, ‘
small presents
Confirm friend[ship]’. Bessy Ramsden used the language of remembrance to recommend her offerings – ‘I have taken the liberty to enclose a cap which you will do me Great Honour to except. It is by way of your seeing what Trimming will be wore in the second mourning. I do desire that you will wear it for my Sake and not put it up in Lavender.’ A preoccupation with family history expressed in things can be found in Ann Pellet's letters.
When Elizabeth was pressed to raise an apprenticeship fee, she asked permission to sell the diamond stay-buckles given by her Aunt Pellet. Mrs Pellet authorized the sale with the following proviso: ‘I … only beg you'll never give them out of your
family
, as I had [them] many yrs, was yr dear Grandmamma's – Mrs Scrimshire seem'd to entertain some hopes of my giving them to her, but I never once design'd it as t'wod be very unnatural to give [them] out of my family.’
⁸⁰

Although the breadth of commentary on consumption and property found in Elizabeth Shackleton's diaries is unparalleled among surviving Lancashire manuscripts, elements of her value system can be found in the records of other women outside her acquaintance.
⁸¹
But this is not to argue that every woman's relationship with material culture was the same. Elizabeth Shackleton was in her forties and fifties when she wrote the diaries, a younger woman might have ranked the purchase of novelties over the conservation of old treasures. Furthermore, a custodial attitude to property might be peculiar to the experience of widowhood and trusteeship. Not all women had Elizabeth Shackleton's opportunity to develop a housekeeping, curatorial ethos in their dealings with things. Sentimental materialism, along with mahogany furniture, may have been a luxury many women simply could not afford.

The diary and letters of Ellen Weeton lend themselves to an analysis of consumer motivation in terms of the pursuit of social acceptance, envy and wishful thinking: ‘If I were rich enough to buy furniture, and to take a house and keep a servant, I could have as much society – highly respectable – as I could wish.’ Nevertheless, amongst the palpable social anxiety and preoccupation with respectability, sentiments of striking similarity to Elizabeth Shackleton's are revealed. Ellen Weeton made every effort to pass on domestic expertise to her daughter by letter, urging Mary Stock to practise measurement, cutting out and sewing and sending minute accounts of her purchases, ‘for you will never be fit to be a housekeeper unless you know the value of most things in daily use’. Concerned to provide her daughter with a sense of family history, Ellen sent a bundle of humble heirlooms, cataloguing their past associations:

Even where things were coveted for social status, this does not preclude the simultaneous existence of more complex responses to material things. Social emulation and conspicuous consumption are useful concepts accounting for purchasing motivation under certain circumstances, but as portmanteau descriptions of eighteenth- and early ninteenth-century consumer behaviour and material culture they are dangerously misleading. Certainly the language of luxury and longing was available to and occasionally deployed by contemporary consumers, yet this was only one vocabulary among many. Wedgwood china figured in genteel material culture, but took its place alongside an assemblage of other artefacts equally important to their owner: inherited cabinets, family portraits, christening cups, favourite old teapots, home-made purses, scraps of faded gowns, and locks of hair set in gold. Material culture before Victoria will not reduce to a shallow search for competetive status in goods.
⁸³

One final question remains: to what extent could these material values be seen as distinctively female? Only further investigation of male consumption will truly clarify this. Nevertheless, recent research on the wills of both sexes suggests marked gender differences in attitudes to commodities once possessed. Women's records consistently reveal a more self-conscious, emotional investment in household goods, apparel and personal effects. On the rare occasions when male testators particularized their personal property they usually referred to tools or livestock.
⁸⁴
Exactly why this should be the case is in question, although possible answers come readily to hand. A gentlewoman was far more likely than her brothers to inherit personal property, while real property (land) tended to be reserved for male beneficiaries. As a result, most women had only movable goods to bestow.
⁸⁵
Denied access to the professions and public office, women could not pass on the invisible mysteries of institutional power or professional expertise to their descendants. A gentlewoman's skills were characteristically embodied in that ‘unskilled’ arena, the household.
⁸⁶
Small wonder if, in consequence, she turned to personal and household artefacts to create a world of meanings and, ultimately, to transmit her history.

IN THE DOG DAYS OF 1778 a gentry family reopened their Pennine mansion for the shooting season. To mark their return the Waltons of Marsden Hall threw a sumptuous dinner for a clerical couple, for the local doctor and for their old friend and cousin Elizabeth Shackleton. All was elegantly arranged and the small company feasted on a cornucopia of ‘rich fruit’ from the Waltons' hotbeds and orchards: pineapples, peaches, nectarines, pears, plums, currents and gooseberries lay on the supper table in profusion. At the end of the evening, Mrs Walton dispensed choice treats. She handed over the vermicelli she had been commisioned to buy for her friend in York, gave a myrtle as a gift and loaned out some some fashionable pamphlets:
The Court of Adultery a Vision
and
An Interesting Letter to the Duchess of Devonshire
. ‘A most Elegant dinner’, concluded Elizabeth Shackleton with approval, ‘Very much made off’, she smiled. Thus the Waltons were received back into the genteel community with warmth and ease.
¹

The public significance of home-based hospitality has long been recognized by early modern historians. Indeed, it is something of a truism that the seventeenth-century family was a resoundingly public institution and the large country house a centre of influence and patronage, the stage on which a gentleman dramatized his power and magnanimity to his locality. In the words of Henry Wotton's
Elements of Architecture
of 1624, ‘Every man's proper Mansion house and home [is] the theatre of his hospitality, the seat of self-fruition’.
²
While the sad passing of good, old, rural hospitality which embraced all comers be they rich or poor, friend or stranger, was a proverbial seventeenth-century lament, social largesse nevertheless remained the hallmark of the gentleman and gentlewoman at home. Although Stone and Ariès have controversially argued that elite families
became increasingly inward-looking over the course of the eighteenth century,
³
most studies of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gentry and nobility, stress that open-handed hospitality was still crucial to the maintenance of social credit and political power. Landed families recognized, at least in principle, an obligation to ‘treat’ their dependants, while exerting themselves to sustain convivial relations with their equals and superiors.
⁴
Moreover, there is also a suggestion that Tory families in particular breathed new life into country liberality, ‘A true English Hospitality’ in the context of eighteenth-century political patronage.
⁵
As mistress of ceremony, the elite hostess might wield considerable practical power from the head of her dining-table, a phenomenon which reaches back well into the sixteenth century and lived on in the nineteenth.
⁶
Certainly, the idea that the home was a refuge insulated from the social world is one that would have perplexed the rural gentry in this period.

That social exchanges in homes have a ‘public’ function is also basic to newer perspectives on sociability in America. Accounts of mid-nineteenth-century urban manners demonstrate that the middle-class parlour was the platform upon which a self-disciplined performance was enacted, stage-managed by the watchful Victorian hostess.
⁷
Recently, historians of American visiting have used their material deliberately to question the /files/05/05/53/f050553/public/private dichotomy so widely deployed in women's studies. Research by Dallet Hemphill, for instance, on the Byzantine rules for social visits in ante-bellum conduct literature reveals that visiting was conceived of as a ritualized mixed-sex activity taking place on a terrain under feminine jurisdiction. Thus, she posits the existence of ‘the social sphere, an intermediate sphere between the public and private worlds. The social sphere was an important arena for intermingling between the sexes … It was in some ways a female sphere, but it was neither private nor domestic.’
⁸
By its very nature, sociability resists the categories of public and private, for its very function is to integrate the two.

Historians of eighteenth-century Britain and Europe have become preoccupied with the operation of this social world and its new behavioural code ‘politeness’. Built on continental traditions of civility, politeness was theoretically at odds with medieval conceptions of all-inclusive hospitality, since it justified the exclusive sociability of the well-bred, and distanced the vulgar. Nevertheless it assumed that dining-rooms and parlours were fitted for social traffic and cultural debate. After all, it was Addison's famous ambition to bring ‘Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, Tea-Tables and in Coffee Houses’.
⁹
The early eighteenths-century periodicals, pre-eminently the
Tatler, Spectator
and the
Guardian
, celebrated polite conversation
among educated men and rational women as the golden mean between pedantry on the one hand and gossip on the other. And it is the possibilities for women inherent in this edifying, conversable heterosexual sociability which recent studies have emphasized, playing down the more constraining definitions of female purpose which can also be found in the same periodicals.
¹⁰
While English polite conversation never granted to women as significant a role as did the French salon tradition,
¹¹
it nevertheless assumed the refining influence of women on the conversable world. By this view, ‘politeness’ was a way of conceptualizing an unofficial public sphere to which privileged women could lay legitimate claim.