The Gentleman's Daughter (48 page)

His whimsical language was a flimsy cloak for his naked assessment of the exigencies of romantic campaign. Certainly a deal of parental anxiety about public arenas was disingenuous. Most parents knew full well what they were doing when they towed their prize daughters from assemblies to plays: ‘What can be more indelicate’ asked Wollstonecraft ‘than a girl's
coming out
in the fashionable world? Which, in other words, is to bring to market a marriageable miss, whose person is taken from one public place to another, richly caparisoned.’
¹¹⁸
In fact, genteel parents were less concerned with sexual exhibitionism
per se
, than they were apprehensive about the qualifications of the young men who had seen the show.

Marriage, in theory, liberated women from the burden of chaperonage. In
Pompey, the Little
(1751), a dog's eye view of polite society, the flighty Cleanthe admitted that ‘
we Girls
are under so many Restraints, that one must wish for a Husband, if it be only for the Privilege of going into public Places, without Protection of a Married Woman along with one, to give one Countenance’. Still the burden of constraint that decorous women laboured under has not been thoroughly weighed. While it is clear that a lone maiden entering a commercialized entertainment would be regarded by many as an easy prey, or worse, young ladies probably enjoyed more freedom in other settings than we have been accustomed to think, although it is difficult to gauge female freedom absolutely because the privileged were inured to the presence of servants, and may easily have taken their company for granted when noting the excitement of a solitary expedition. Nevertheless, eighteenth-century novels suggest that genteel girls walking in pairs aroused little criticism (Miss Betsy Thoughtless and Miss Forward made pretences of going out together to the milliner and mantua-maker in order to meet young sparks), and even the stiffest high Victorians assumed that a lady could walk alone in parks and promenades in the mornings, and elsewhere at other times if accompanied by a friend or servant. Moreover ladies pocket diaries routinely printed the rates of hackney-coachmen to enable their readers to combat ‘the insolence and impositions of coachmen, particularly to ladies’, suggesting support and sympathy for the single woman traveller.
¹¹⁹
More striking still, in 1748 the young Jane Pellet took the brave step of leaving her stepmother's establishment and setting up in rented rooms on her own in Pontefract with just
a woman servant for protection. Her reputation survived unblemished and she soon married a rising young lawyer with county connections. Georgian girls did not labour under constant chaperonage.

Despite the conveniences of a permanent escort-service, many young matrons settled down to a period of self-conscious retirement once they docked in the safe-harbour of matrimony. ‘Has Matrimony put a stop to all your rambles?’ was the clichéd question asked of the bride Mary Stanhope in 1743. Yet this assumption was securely founded – in a surviving list of the nobility and gentry who appeared at the assembly rooms in York in 1789, married women without a daughter in tow were in a minority.
¹²⁰
The extent of cultural engagement a new mother could easily enjoy without censure varied, as seen, with wealth and geography; an afternoon stroll to a London exhibition with babies in train, being a very different venture to an all-day cross-country drive in an open chaise to a distant assembly. But even given the same urban opportunities, women varied, of course, in their tastes and inclinations. Though married with four children, the unsinkable Bessy Ramsden still relished a little cultural panache, thirsting after court pageantry, salacious trials, the Pantheon and the playhouse, as well as romping at school balls, children's parties and city assemblies. At each remission of illness in her nursery, she left her husband in charge and swept off to the West End in pursuit of recreation: ‘tonight Forsooth, She is frolicked away to the play.’
¹²¹
Yet the cultural consumption of another Londoner Anna Larpent stands in marked contrast. Although Larpent made countless uncomfortable appearances in the appropriate arenas of fashionable display as an unmarried girl in the 1770s, her diaries for 1790, 1800, 1810 and 1820, written after marriage to John Larpent, chart a solemn engagement with metropolitan culture. As wife of the censor of plays, Mrs Larpent maintained a discriminating interest in the licensed stage, but tended to avoid the hectic gaiety of large assemblies and places of public congregation (apart from church), preferring small family gatherings and private music parties. She made exceedingly few visits to the pleasure gardens which had so discomforted her as a girl, although this is not to argue that marriage and motherhood immobilized her – she religiously took daily exercise in the lanes and delighted in taking her children and later her grandchildren off to exhibitions and edifying spectacles – but it shifted the focus of her consumption decisively. As the mother of sons, she evidently felt no compulsion to shepherd them around the usual venues when they reached marriageable age.
¹²²

Chaperonage was an institution which offered an irreproachable public role to an older matron, albeit one played towards the back of the stage. One of Nash's ‘Rules to be observe'd at Bath’ promulgated in 1742 decreed
‘That the elder ladies and children be content with a second bench at the ball, as being past or not come to perfection’. The lower profile of the middle-aged was similarly reported in 1814: ‘The Assemblies of Nottingham are, as in all other places, the resort of the young and the gay, who go to see and be seen; and also of those, who, having played their matrimonial cards well in early life, are now content to sit down to a game of sober whist or quadrille.’
¹²³
The widow Abigail Gawthern of the same town recorded a packed social calendar in the early years of the nineteenth century, taking time from the management of her lead works and properties to accompany her daughter Anna to local assize balls, races, plays and performances of choral works in local churches, to escort her to the resorts of Bath, Clifton and Weymouth and to parade her about the usual London landmarks: St James's Palace, Kensington Gardens, Vauxhall, the Opera, theatres, the British Museum, the Magdalene and the Foundling Hospital. That this was matrimonial strategy could not have been recorded more explicitly. She kept a business-like tally of with whom her daughter danced and the various proposals that resulted: ‘At the assembly; Anna danced with captain Edwards, Mr Parker and Dr Marsden; P. said he should call the next day to declare his sentiments. Dec 15. Mr P. drank tea with us; he mentioned his strong attachment; refused on account of being as old again.’ However, Mrs Gawthern was not without some scruples about public entertainments, drawing the line at a riotous militia ball and a ticketed masquerade: ‘Gardiner called to offer Anna a ticket to the masquerade to go with some of his relations; I refused his offer not thinking it quite prudent, neither do I approve of that amusement.’
¹²⁴
These omissions notwithstanding, the social life of a woman in her forties could be frenetic.

The social comforts of old age are here exemplified by the redoubtable widow Ann Pellet. Her own duties as chaperon despatched, Mrs Pellet lived a retired London existence with her paid companion Miss Bowen, lodging with quiet families in Ealing, Kensington and Westminster. She avoided routs, assemblies and so on because she was averse to ‘a hurry’ and acknowledged she was ‘but little engag'd in the Beau Monde’ and preferred hosts who kept ‘
no ill Hours nor any Fatiguing Pleasures
’. Still, she had a weakness for whist and was happy in the harmonious company of just enough genteel ladies to guarantee a ‘Plurality of Card tables’. She relied on her old friends and acquaintances to come to her, as ‘she very seldom stirs out, Partly from inclination and partly from fears which proceed from the continual Mischiefs & Robberies commited in the Streets in the Evenings’. Despite writing from Ealing, so near the ‘Grand Metropolis’, Mrs Pellet feared her household was ‘Barren of Publick
affairs’. Most of the town talk she retailed to country friends, she gleaned from the papers.
¹²⁵

While female cultural access and public profile varied with wealth, location and life-cycle, it was virtually never as extensive or as high as that of equivalent men. Gentlemen invariably held public office and the pursuit of institutional duties tended to throw men more in the way of commercial leisure than their wives.
¹²⁶
Although the institutional life of the county was accompanied by a social culture in which women could take a part, it appears that unless they had a daughter to marry off they were unlikely to do so. Married men, on the other hand, enjoyed an easy sociability as a spin-off from their administrative duties. In the 1750s Michael Scrimshire of Pontefract often slipped away from legal matters to sneak in a day at the Doncaster and Wakefield races. Similarly, John Shackleton managed to combine a wool-buying trip with the Nottingham races in August 1780, and a spot of sea bathing at Heysham with his stint as a grand juror in 1778. Young merchants, manufacturers and professionals were clearly more constrained than inheriting gentlemen, but often travelled in the course of their business and could exploit their leisure time to advantage. For example, in the 1770s the apprentices John and Robert Parker successfully transformed their routine journeys from Lancashire to London into mini-tours, stopping off at Gloucester for music meetings and the like. Of course, throughout the period, the mobility of young men – from the continental grand tour to the local jaunt – stood in marked contrast to the limited peregrinations of provincial gentlewomen.
¹²⁷

Nor were male cultural tastes always in harmony with those of women. Male recreation had a dimension which might conflict with a female taste for urban diversion – sport. Sport was a recurring theme,
if not the dominant theme
, of the letters men exchanged with men and the sporting calendar was a powerful determinant of a man's movements, for the pursuit of prey was the archetypal prerogative of the gentleman. Those blood-sports popular with the northern families studied here comprised hunting foxes, hares and otters, coursing (pursuing hares with grey-hounds), tracing (following a pre-set scent) and shooting moorgame (grouse), woodcocks and partridge. Moorland shooting was a constant feature of masculine culture in the rural north in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
¹²⁸

Although La Rochefoucauld asserted (on the basis of his Suffolk experience) in 1784 ‘women quite commonly in England take part in the shoot, and many of them are very good shots’, none of the genteel women studied here ever wielded the gun. Still there were obviously occasional ladies noted for their marksmanship – the singular Anne Lister of Shibden for one.
¹²⁹
Perhaps more common was the sportswoman who rode to hounds. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's experience suggests a significant minority of huntswomen in Nottinghamshire in 1711: ‘I had a general Hunting Day last Tuesday, where we had 20 Ladys well dressed and mounted, and more Men. The day was concluded with a Ball. I rid and danc'd with a view of Exercise, and that is all – how dull that is!’ Similarly, Mary Warde spent every autumn in the 1730s and 1740s out riding and hunting in Norfolk: ‘I was seven hours a hunting this morning & rode hard enough to be extreamly tired …’, although her gregariousness seems more to the fore than her blood lust: ‘I meet a good deal of company Every Monday & Thursday Morning in the finest part of the Country, where a Pack of Hounds is the pretence. We ride hard or only saunter just as our Inclinations Engage us, to be Idle or alert.’ But by her own admission, she was in a minority: ‘We have a very large number of sportsmen & three ladies in our Hunt’, and the meeting a particularly accommodating one: ‘My notion of these sports is that it depends upon the company entirely. We had a gay set & two or three of the Gentlemen very Poetical.’
¹³⁰
These eighteenth-century Dianas were never numerous, as ambivalence about the propriety of female hunting was long-standing. Clarissa in
The Lady's Magazine
opined ‘though hunting might be diversion used by the ancients, it is far from being a delicate one, or commendable in a modern lady’. No less a radical than Mary Wollstonecraft was prepared to endorse ‘the exclamations against masculine women’ when directed against ‘their ardour in hunting, shooting, and gaming …’
¹³¹

62 James Northcote,
R.A.
,
Grouse-shooting in the Forest of Bowland
, 1802, depicts hunting as a noble pursuit. The Lancashire hot-shots depicted here are William Assheton of Cuerdale Hall and the Revd T.H. Dixon Hoste. The forest of Bowland, like most of the Pennine moors, was famous for its rich shooting opportunities.