The Gentleman's Daughter (49 page)

63 John Wootton,
John Warde and his Family
, 1735. The lively huntress Mary Warde can be seen on horseback to the left of the picture.

Despite the exceptional gentlewoman celebrated for her horsemanship, hunting had long been a proverbial expression of masculine competition and camaraderie. Certainly in the Pennines, local hunting songs of 1760s, 1770s and 1780s suggest a hearty culture of cocksure masculinity. Elizabeth Shackleton's scathing remarks speak to the display of braggadocio: ‘Baron Cun-lif-fe his valet, groom & Hunters all in Parade & high Glory set out for Wigan Hunt.’
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Although women often managed some indirect engagement with this sporting culture as dispensers of hospitality, male diversion could introduce a season of gender apartheid. Walton of Marsden, Townley of Royle and Parker of Browsholme went so far in 1775 as to purchase a hunting seat upon the Wolds in the East Riding, the gentlemen ‘to join in Housekeeping & to go Hunt there this winter’. Mr Lister left the north altogether in 1778 to reside at a hunting seat in Oxfordshire.
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Whether men embraced outdoor pursuits as means to be with men, or as an excuse to escape domesticity and polite conversation is unclear. Perhaps they just preferred sport. As the hapless Ralph Standish Howard confessed in 1727, ‘I long mightily to be in Lancashire again. Balls and operas and plays afford me no sort of pleasure in comparison with hunting and shooting …’
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Diversions such as hunting, fishing and especially bull-baiting and cock-fighting brought gentlemen into contact with their social inferiors and freed them of the burden of polite heterosociality. As Elizabeth Shackleton complained of the chase, ‘My son came home from Broughton Hunt where he sat up till three this morning afterwards went to Sleep in a nasty Alehouse at Marton. I like not these vulgar publick hunts …’
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The gentleman whose love of rural sport could deprive his wife and daughters of urban pleasure and the sociability of her equals obviously had a life beyond routine caricature. No wonder so many women felt out of their element in the country where nothing might be talked of but ‘The Militia, Farming & Justice business all day long’.
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Indeed, to the green and giddy Betsy Thoughtless what was heralded as ‘a happy tranquil manner of spending ones days’, seemed in reality ‘little better than being buried alive.’
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64 ‘A Fox-hunting Breakfast’, 1777, affectionately satirises the earthy, masculine associations of field sports. An accompanying ditty suggests men who dislike hunting are Frenchified effeminates.

Women's letters and diaries brim with commentary on the array of public diversions from which they fashioned a cultural life. As we have seen, a woman's repertoire of pleasures varied according to her wealth, age, tastes and place of residence. Unusually lucky was the woman who enjoyed equality of access with her husband to the much vaunted Georgian delights. This much is constant. On the other hand, the sheer range of urban entertainments available in the provinces from the last decades of the seventeenth century in some areas and the early eighteenth century in others was regarded as a striking novelty. In 1722 Macky maintained that ‘These assemblies are very convenient for young people; for formerly the Country Ladies were stewed up in their father's old Mansion Houses, and seldom saw Company but at an Assize, a Horse-Race, or a Fair’. With equal enthusiasm, John Ramsay of Ochtertyre recorded a ‘wonderful change upon female manners in consequence of playhouses, assemblies and concerts’. Previously, ‘the Scottish women made their most brilliant appearance at burials’.
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Of course, it is possible that commentators exaggerated the extent of transformation the better to celebrate Augustan modernity, yet it does appear that the cultural institutions so well-established in spas and county towns by the early eighteenth century significantly broadened the social horizons of privileged women in the provinces. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century rural existence could be boring to a proverb.
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From the 1720s to the 1820s the scope of public entertainment remained remarkably constant. Social news exchanged among the Barcroft and Whitaker networks and among a younger generation of Parkers suggests that the core cultural institutions of the 1810s and 1820s were remarkably similar to their counterparts eighty years earlier. The Preston letters Eliza Parker wrote to her father Thomas Parker of Alkincoats in the 1800s present an altogether familiar picture of bride's visits, tea parties, charity balls, assemblies, race meetings, handsome dragoons, fashionable glamour and a dwindling allowance (‘I can assure you we have done nothing but dress and undress all this week’
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). On the pleasures of Preston, they could have been written by her grandmother. Of course, over the century the density of provincial facilities increased. By
1800, assembly rooms, theatres and clubs were no longer the monopoly of the county towns and resorts. However, the polite renaissance was never universal. While the improved road network may have increased access to several oases of politeness, the provincial north for instance still had its stretches of cultural desert, as Alice Ainsworth sighed of her home town, ‘Bolton is
proverbially
dull just now’. In Haworth in the 1820s the Brontë's Aunt Branwell was said to have found the winter isolation of the Pennines very wearing after the cheerful visiting and lively society of Penzance.
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However, what emerges in sharper relief at the end of the period is the growing importance of an associative life for women, the extraordinary proliferation of institutions through which women could garner a new kind of public standing and radiate something of that public spirit revered by their brothers. Take the range of causes pursued by a typical antislavery activist of the 1830s and 1840s, retrieved by Claire Midgley. Ann Taylor Gilbert fulfilled all the duties incumbent on the wife of a Nottingham Independent minister, but she was also the leader of the women's anti-slavery society in the town, as well as the ‘founder of refuge for “unfortunate” women, collector for a provident Society, member of a Committee for the Management of a Free Library, visitor to the Blind Asylum, superintendent of a Sunday School for young women, conductor of a cottage service for young women, and active in the Ladies Anti-Corn Law Committee …’
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The ladies' debating societies may not have outlived Pitt's ‘terror’, but the institutionalization of fashionable benevolence constructed altogether new arenas for the expression of female conviviality and officiousness. By the 1820s it was routine for ladies' pocket books to print in their opening pages long lists of the charitable institutions patronised by the truly fashionable. Not that the seriousness of purpose behind the many missions of Christian duty should be underestimated. Strikingly, the philanthropic impulse propelled the idealistic out of their safe meeting-rooms into squalid, disreputable and often frightening parts of town. In 1859 a Shrewsbury minister's wife recalled the struggle with her fear when first asked to do make unattended visits on Butcher Row. On encountering a group of men loitering outside the pub, she panicked and fled home to her husband: ‘Being agitated, I burst into tears saying, “I cannot go out at night; it's no use trying”. However next day I managed better.’ As Anne Summers has concluded, the work of visiting was not just a dilettante fashion of passing free time, but an engagement of the self which involved the sacrifice of leisure and the development of expertise.’
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The nineteenth century saw an expansion of the terrain of female action, not a diminution.

Assuredly, over the long run, individual cultural venues and diversions rose and fell in fashionable taste. The cultural
passeggiata
in St James's
Park fell away, but instead the nineteenth-century elite chose to ride the ring in Hyde Park. While the London pleasure gardens dwindled into variety venues and finally closed, the seaside promenade came into its own.
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Apart from a handful of Regency revivals, the large public masquerade had fallen out of fashion by the 1790s, but court-sponsored festivity continued as did public dancing, now in the guise of charity balls.
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Evangelical reaction may have dented the popularity of the theatre in some provincial towns (at least this is the argument made by many on the basis of Wilkinson Tate's recriminatory memoirs), but interestingly it seems not to have affected the discriminating enjoyment of the unimpeachable Anna Larpent, who actually rather enjoyed Mrs Inchbald's maligned
Lover's Vows
(1798): ‘I cannot see the least Immorality in this Drama’, she reported in 1800, ‘On the Contrary the cause of truth & Virtue seem served by it.’
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Public music and the opera survived virtually unscathed; and of course, the exhibition, the museum, panoramas and dioramas, the bazaar and the large department store took on even greater prominence for the later Victorians as places of female congregation and public promenade. Venues noted for female gatherings and heterosexual conversation in 1880s London included the British Museum reading room, mixed discussion clubs, galleries, tea shops, concerts and plays, and the craze for bicycling, tennis clubs, dramatics societies and garden parties had broadened the field of outdoor entertainment still further by 1900. Moreover, the respectable often walked unattended between one venue and another, leading Mica Nava to conclude that ‘middle-class women were much closer to the dangers and excitements of city life than the notion of separate spheres would lead us to anticipate.’
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Comprehensive research on women and early nineteenth-century cultural space is lacking, but new investigations do not suggest the sudden eclipse of elite women's public lives. Important new research by Jennifer Hall on the audience for opera for instance, does not support the conventional narrative. Of the 1820s and 1830s, Hall concludes that elite women were particularly associated with the boxes, over the doors of which the names of the female proprietors were inscribed. Female physical prominence was accentuated by their tendency to sit at the front of the boxes, while men stood behind. Gentlemen, by contrast, enjoyed greater mobility in the opera house paying attendance at different the boxes and notoriously the green room, descending to the pit and the newly inaugurated stalls. Early in the century, respectable women did sit in the pit and the stalls on occasion, but risked having their reputations compromised by proximity to the prostitutes gathered there. However, by the 1840s the pit had become a more respectable choice for a reputable female opera-goer,
although the ultra-fashionable still sought to display themselves on the first tier.
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Against a backdrop of unsubstantiated assertion, such findings are suggestive of the weakness of the case which takes it for granted that privileged women were swept out of public space in the later eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. There is little solid evidence to support the assumption that a great curfew was rung when the dewy Victoria ascended the throne.

On the other hand, none of this is to argue that female publicity was not a matter of long-standing concern and debate. The advance of commercialized leisure and public congregations did not pass without the wringing of hands. Promiscuous sociability in the company of strangers was anathema to this profoundly snobbish and hierarchical society, so those venues that promoted open access and anonymity were obvious targets for criticism; the indiscriminate mingling of legions accommodated by the sprawling pleasure gardens was seen as an invitation to vice.
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But if the nameless hordes and trifling diversions to be found at the pleasure garden made moralists uneasy, the possibilities for disguise and deception inherent in the quintessential masquerade drove them to apoplexy.
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It is not hard to see why so many moralists preached the unproblematic pleasures of private company, for it was in private company alone that a truly exclusive and predictable marriage market operated. Only in private company could the elite guarantee absolutely the qualifications of their companions.