The Gentleman's Daughter (36 page)

The theoretical content of eighteenth-century politeness has been closely studied through the examination of courtesy literature. Eighteenth-century writers on manners inherited the concerns of Castiglione and Sir Thomas Elyot, whose own tenets can be traced, like so much in western culture, to Athens and Rome. At bottom, Augustan manners were founded on Aristotelian moderation and Cicero's conception of ‘decorum’ – the notion that an individual's behaviour should vary according to his or her sex, social rank, occupation, age and immediate circumstances. Both philosophers endorsed the stoic code as hammered out by Epictetus. Not only did the citizen have a duty to use reason to restrain appetite and passion, but he ought to cultivate an indifference to pleasure and pain, eschewing all outward emotional display. To the classical legacy must be added that of seventeenth-century France. Salon civility or
honneteté
stressed the pleasing of others, especially women, by cultivating the arts of conversation. All these ideas were synthesized by English writers under the umbrella concept of ‘good breeding’, the most coherent expression of which is John Locke's
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
of 1693. However, by the 1730s the term ‘good breeding’ had fallen into disrepute, its currency debased by association with modish superficiality. In its place came ‘politeness’, which inherited the manners associated with good breeding, but not the philosophic seriousness of its originators.
¹²

What attitudes and practices did good breeding and politeness comprehend? Good breeding was intimately linked with education and nurture, conveying a sense of rounded personality, a cultivated understanding and a thorough knowledge of ceremony. Its lynchpin was the assumption that outer manners were the reflection of inner civility. Civil virtue was the product of a proper sense of self combined with goodwill towards others. Thus manners were not empty gestures, but the sincere expression of an ethical code. Politeness had been applied to manners from at least the 1710s, but implied a greater emphasis on external conduct at the expense of inner qualities. Interestingly, the polite model was not the aristocratic courtier, but the simple gentleman and gentlewoman. (From the tone and content of the advice, it appears that courtesy writers targeted the greater gentry.) The gentleman should maintain his rank through his manners: assuming an air of personal dignity, the appearance of easy assurance, a controlled deportment, the repression of emotional display, the assumption of distinguished speech, and by proper decorum in his relations with the world in all its various degrees. In similar fashion, the gentlewoman should be distinguished by an air of dignified ease and graceful control, taking care to treat others according to their status. In addition, she was encouraged to be clean, to adopt nice table manners and foster the art of diverting conversation. But her gentility, did not provide exemption from the rules for Everywoman, above all, she was to be modest and chaste.
¹³

38 A woman demonstrating the gesture ‘T
O GIVE
or
RECEIVE
,’ from F. Nivelon,
The Rudiments of Genteel Behaviour: An Introduction to the Method of attaining a graceful Attitude, an agreeable Motion, an easy Air and a Genteel behaviour
(1737).

39 A man demonstrating ‘The Complement
RETIRING
’ from F. Nivelon,
The Rudiments of Genteel Behaviour: An Introduction to the Method of attaining a graceful Attitude, an agreeable Motion, an easy Air and a genteel behaviour
(1737).

40 H. Gravelot, untitled lady, 1744.

41 H. Gravelot, untitled gentleman, 1744.

The practical application of contemporary theories of politeness is richly elaborated in Elizabeth Shackleton's diary. Probably no other source offers such a vivid, detailed and possibly petulant account of genteel sociability. It makes possible a reconstruction of the processes of home-based sociability and an elaboration of the language used to assess social behaviour in which it is apparent that the historians' perceived dichotomy between a private, interior home secluded from a public, exterior world is inadequate in the consideration of both of space and attitudes. The late eighteenth-century genteel home was not in any simple sense ‘off-stage’, nor were basic assumptions about the conduct of social relations abandoned, like muddy boots, at the front door. Sociability both in and out of the house was evaluated in the same terms – terms derived from the courtesy tradition of civility and politeness. Further, if the genteel home was a stage, then it was one with many different settings which could accommodate everything from elite conviviality to the dispensation of patronage and the conduct of business, from mixed sex companies to congregations of men. Of course, individuals occasionally engineered private or secret encounters in their own houses, secluded from the gaze of an audience. In Elizabeth Shackleton's first courtship, her suitor Robert Parker pleaded for the chance of a clandestine interview in her chamber: ‘I waited last night, Parky, till three a clock in hopes of spending an Hour wt you in private …’, but failing that he petitioned for leave to spend ‘a dinner or an Evening [with] you publickly’.
¹⁴
Yet most so-called ‘private’ encounters in the genteel home were exclusive social gatherings, for a powerful contrast was routinely drawn between the vulgar and the select, between inclusive sociability open to all and discriminating parties accessible to the few. It should be noted that in both these usages of public and private, the historian's distinction between a female home and a male world was
not
the dichotomy at work.

A ‘boundless hospitality’ was a hereditary characteristic of the Parkers of Browsholme celebrated the
Gentleman's Magazine
,
¹⁵
and Elizabeth Shackleton certainly bestirred herself to maintain something of that liberality which bespoke her ancestry. While she could not compete with the likes of Warde of Squerries, Kent, who entertained an estimated 7,000 of his country neighbours on strong beer to celebrate Admiral Vernon's (premature claims of) success at Cartagena in 1741,
¹⁶
Mrs Shackleton's diaries testify nevertheless to a certain festal lavishness. As mistress of Alkincoats Hall and later Pasture House, she kept a table ‘publick’ or invited ‘a mixed multitude’ to dine on days of local festivity, such as the village sports day and on an appointed day after Christmas.
¹⁷
Tenants were offered drinks or sometimes dinner on rent day, and ‘tenants wives’ were invited to elaborate tea parties. Sheep-shearers, hay-makers, mowers and stonemasons were treated with alcohol and a fiddler in the servants' hall at the end of their labours. Family anniversaries inevitably involved some gesture of inclusion to the immediate community. On Thomas Parker's sixteenth birthday the tenants were treated to boiled beef, plum pudding and quantities of ale. On his twenty-first birthday in 1775 over a hundred people (including the tenantry) sang and danced at Alkincoats to the tune of a fiddle till four in the morning.
¹⁸
And when the British took New York in 1776, Tom Parker sent five shillings for a toast at the Arms and John Shackleton sent two shillings and sixpence to the ale house to pay for a round of drinks. In addition, local children came to Pasture House to toss pancakes on Shrove Tuesday and could expect the odd coin or piece of produce to come their way at momentous points in their lives, such as christening or breeching. The local colliers were given a dole of two shillings every Christmas. With a similarly conspicuous face-to-face charity, Elizabeth Shackleton interested herself in local women in childbed, visiting them, sending pitchers of gruel or gifts of old linen. The blending of charity and sociability suggested by some diary entries does conjure the memory of the older ideas of hospitality outlined by Felicity Heal, however there is a striking departure from medieval good lordship. The Parkers and the Shackletons were suspicious of strangers and felt under no Christian obligation to shelter all-comers. Even a visitor claiming kinship, displaying privileged knowledge of the family and bearing eight woodcocks by way of open sesame was suspected to be an impostor, refused hospitality and shown to the alehouse to spend the night.
¹⁹
Good, old hospitality had to be reconciled with polite exclusivity.

The personnel of polite society in the North have already been introduced. That these families were known to and accepted by Elizabeth Shackleton was a function of geography and birth. Few experienced a
formal moment of entry into the local elite. For strangers and incomers, however, social acceptance was not guaranteed. Known family connections, or the personal recommendation of a mutual friend smoothed an outsider's path. Both worked to the advantage of the young Owen Cunliffe of Sheffield, who moved into the area in the 1770s having inherited Wycoller through his uncle. It was his good fortune to meet John Parker in London who engineered his speedy introduction:

Thereafter, Mrs Shackleton was prepared to be complaisant: ‘saw young Mr Cunliffe at Church, seemingly a civil Man.’
²¹
Social acceptance was achieved only by degrees. The formal procedure is made explicit in a letter anticipating the arrival of the Bulcock family from Wapping: ‘I am not fond of Cultivating new Acquaintance at my time of day. It is rather a disagreeable Circumstance but will send Compts when I know they are come to Langroyd and if we approve them upon knowing will make Neighbours of them & shew them civility.’
²²
If visitors did not meet with unqualified approval, then a chilly civility might ward off further advances: ‘[My cousins] came here from Mr Claytons of Carr where they were cooly look'd on & their Invitation very slight.’
²³
However, there is no evidence that Elizabeth Shackleton ever sent her servants to say she was not at home, or that she used that great nineteenth-century weapon ‘the cut’.