The Gentleman's Daughter (51 page)

Linked to the celebration of marriage was the growing sentimentalization of motherhood. Of course, the veneration of the mother is at least as old as the Madonna. Elizabeth I would hardly have represented herself as the Mother of her People if the role did not evoke positive associations, and the Puritans did much to promote the honour of breast-feeding in the elite. However, what distinguishes the eighteenth-century discourse of motherhood from its predecessors is the overlaying of secular hosannahs on the ancient religious solemnizations. Breast-feeding became an ultra-fashionable practice, eulogized in the most gushing manner in the novels of Samuel Richardson. But for all the sugariness of the proliferating representations of motherhood, the experience for most was not one of undiluted sweetness. Being a mother, against a background of disease and debility, remained a bloody, risky, uncontrollable and often gut-wrenching experience, such that a painting of a cherub chasing a butterfly, or a description of a blushing nursing mother spoke only intermittently and even then superficially to the powerful feelings evoked. The Bible, and in particular the book of Job, still had more to say to most. The self-representation commonest among genteel mothers was not that of a sighing, contented Madonna, it was rather that of a self-made pillar of fortitude and resignation, built to withstand the random blows of fate.

Against a backdrop of continuity and muted change, there were some striking departures. From the late seventeenth century the comfortably off in the provinces benefited from an extraordinary expansion and sophistication of their material and intellectual worlds. The import of such extra-European goods as tea and coffee, porcelain and chintz, the proliferation of new products like upholstered chairs, creamware dining services and printed wallpaper, and the rising expectations of domestic comfort that accompanied them made for the rapid elaboration of genteel material culture. As mistress of the tea-table or arbiter of family taste, the privileged eighteenth-century female consumer embraced the material enrichment
of her world. Domestic processing continued on a prodigious scale, but eighteenth-century provisioning was increasingly a matter of orchestrating purchases from local, regional and distant suppliers and less a matter of manufacturing within the household. The eighteenth-century genteel household was less self-sufficient than its sixteenth or seventeenth-century counterparts.

In parallel, came the rise of politeness. This secular code of behaviour favouring easy and inclusive social intercourse within the elite, broadly conceived, was in the intellectual ascendant from the 1710s and found numerous adherents amongst genteel Anglicans and old Dissenters. Politeness, as expounded by Addison and Steele, meshed particularly easily with an unpained, inexplosive religion and a vernacular stoicism; it was a useful adhesive in the mixed society of provincial gentility; and it was particularly well received by ladies. The
Tatler
and the
Spectator
fostered and glamorized heterosexual sociability, thereby raising the prestige of those terrains which offered women a place beside their men, and the profile of the cosmopolitan gentleman who could do a woman honour. Not that politeness carried all before it; as much as a woman might want to promote a relaxed and dignified patriarchy, a man could be bent upon its disruption, as has been seen. Indeed, I suspect that a battle was waged for the soul of eighteenth-century gentility – with women, urbanites and upright patriarchs in one camp and unashamedly parochial sportsmen and irresponsible bachelors in the other.

Fuelled by polite ideals, the intellectual horizons of privileged, provincial women rolled majestically outwards in the course of the eighteenth century. To be sure, the most rapid increase in elite female literacy had occurred earlier, but what distinguished the eighteenth century was its dramatically expanding culture of female literariness. The pious soul-searching that inspired most seventeenth-century diarists is a distinctly muted theme in many eighteenth-century women's journals, leaving the page clear for sheer writerly virtuosity. In parallel, the near universal literacy of elite social networks and the elaboration of the daily and the cross posts (those between provincial cities) facilitated a immense intensification of female correspondence. The well-turned letter became an unavoidable performance of the long-standing female work of kin, but in addition it enabled unprecedented numbers of women to participate in worldly exchange and debate. It was in their tireless writing no less than in their ravenous reading that genteel women embraced a world far beyond the boundaries of their parish.

Entwined with the eighteenth-century revolution in print was the so-called provincial urban renaissance – another development which
provincial women embraced with almost indecent alacrity. Where a Stuart lady might have experienced the occasional social thrill at the assizes, a horse-race or a fair in a provincial centre, by 1750, in the same town, her Georgian counterpart could rejoice in assembly rooms, concert series, theatre seasons, circulating libraries, daytime lectures, urban walks and pleasure gardens, in addition to regular sporting fixtures and the assizes; moreover, none of these arenas was off-limits to polite women. Indeed, the abundance of moral advice on proper female behaviour in public is itself a testament to the vividness of their presence. From the early eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century the central elements of public entertainment were notably enduring. The rising tide of religious Evangelicalism did not efface the woman in public, rather it reorientated the public life of the more serious-minded away from worldly entertainment towards good works. By the end of the eighteenth century, the institutionalization of fashionable benevolence had created altogether new platforms for female association and public action. By the early nineteenth century, although their family duties remained, the public profile of privileged, provincial women had reached unprecedented heights – and, of course, their numbers had increased. Because the growth in national wealth in the era of the classic Industrial and Agrarian Revolutions was distributed so unequally, it generated a great many more families possessed of the resources required to participate in the modes of life that constituted gentility, both in town and country. Many of them, probably most, aspired to do so, despite the growth in economic, social and denominational tensions within local elites between 1790 and 1830.
²

This is not a story that sits comfortably with the accepted narratives and categories of English women's history, indeed, it is the very reverse of the accepted tale of progressive incarceration in a domestic, private sphere. Nor has the account had much to say about male appropriation of the public sphere. Instead, I have emphasized the concepts which animated genteel letter-writers and diarists not twentieth-century historians – in particular prudence and propriety, regularity and economy, politeness and vulgarity, fortitude, resignation and fate. Nevertheless, it would be blinkered to suggest that notions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ had no purchase in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century discourse. Yet even the most cursory sweep of Georgian usages reveals that the /files/05/05/53/f050553/public/private dichotomy had multiple applications, which only sometimes mirrored a male/female distinction, and then not always perfectly.

A notional division of public and private which consigned women to domestic management and reserved policy to men had considerable hold on the eighteenth-century imagination. In a ‘Letter to a New-born Child’
written in the 1730s, Catherine Talbot counselled a female cousin, ‘Let the men unenvied shine in public, it is we must make their homes delightful to them’.
³
William Wilberforce believed that women were naturally more disposed to religion than men, with the result ‘that when the husband should return to his family, worn and harassed by worldly cares or professional labours, the wife, habitually preserving a warmer and more unimpaired spirit of devotion than is perhaps consistent with being immersed in the bustle of life, might revive his languid piety …’
⁴
And, of course, one would search long and hard for a pundit who did not believe that a woman's primary calling was matrimony and motherhood: ‘Domestic concerns are the province of the wife’, pronounced the Scottish judge Lord Kames in 1781, in a dour lecture outlining the conservative position on female destiny:

Ladies' advice literature always advocated energetic attention to household matters, and a substantial female investment in the home was taken for granted in genteel correspondence: ‘We believe you to be too good a wife and too tender a mother to be often abroad, which certainly is the best means of preserving good order at home’, Ann Pellet reminded her niece in 1757.
⁶
That boys would never be so domesticated was considered indisputable. In fact, a maternal preference for daughters was always explained by the commonplace that girls stayed at home: ‘If a little Miss sho'd come, I hope ‘twill prove a charming companion to you, which you cannot expect from the boys who will or sho'd spend most of their youth in schools.’ Sixty years later Anne Robbins displayed identical reasoning (if in slightly heightened language) when reporting her satisfaction upon the birth of her baby daughter: ‘Girls have more the power of being
home comforts
than boys and I hope she will prove one to [her] poor mother.’
⁷
Moreover, domestic life had many ardent female devotees who held that real happiness was found only at home. Predictably, the widow Ann Pellet subscribed to this view, wishing Elizabeth Parker ‘a safe return to your own little castle where may you ever find the highest comfort this life affords (viz) the Riches of True Content’. Genteel writers routinely drew on the symbol of the hearth to suggest intimacy and security.
⁸
Yet, in
practice, self-conscious domesticity and effective housekeeping did not automatically result in female seclusion. It is worth remembering that the most cloying celebration of home life which emerges in this book comes from the Ramsden household, whose mistress had an insatiable appetite for going out. Bessy Ramsden's letters advertised the cosy comforts of home and family, only to break off abruptly at the siren call of entertainment. As her husband concluded, ‘thus far last night [went Bessy's letter when] … came the Coach to the Door and away whisked Madam to the Assembly as usual’.
⁹
A happy housewife and an incurable street-wife, Bessy Ramsden saw no inconsistency in relishing domesticity at one time of day and independent socializing at another. Nor was the Georgian home presented in women's own writings as a sanctuary from the social world.

It is crucial to stress also that there were constructions of the ‘public’ and ‘private’ which did not correspond at all to a distinction between male and female worlds. In fact, the typical usage of ‘publick’ in the writings of genteel women was that defined by Johnson as ‘open for general entertainment’. Thus, when the young diarist Anna Porter listed all ‘the publick places and private entertainments’ she visited and enjoyed between 1773 and 1787, public places included the play, the opera, Richmond assembly and Ranelagh – all venues which could be penetrated by virtually anyone for the price of a ticket and where visitors could see and be seen. Private entertainments were attractively exclusive gatherings entered by invitation only. Therefore Jane Pellet was unabashed when a public ball ‘for the
mob
’ was cancelled on Twelfth Night in 1747, since she was honoured with an invitation from a duke to a fashionable ball in ‘his private apartment’.
¹⁰
Genteel women played an active role, possibly even predominated, at both sorts of diversion. Clearly, a dichotomy between public and private was at work here, but the contrast drawn was that between the vulgar and the select, between inclusive sociability open to all and discriminating assemblies accessible to the few, emphatically not a distinction between a male world and a female home. The distinction between vulgar promiscuity and polite selection was a powerful key for the understanding of both commercial entertainment in urban resorts and social congregation in the genteel home. So it was that Elizabeth Shackleton designated days for ‘publick’ entertainment, when Alkincoats and Pasture Houses were open and common to all, when ‘a mixed multitude’ enjoyed her hospitality, but also complained about the common throng at a public ball in Burnley, ‘but a vulgar affair & a quere mixd multitude’. To be sure, even exclusive gatherings of ten elite couples were still profoundly social, yet they remained engagingly ‘private’ in the eighteenth-century genteel
imagination, since a guest would not have to sit down to dinner beside a chance stranger, and this was a crucial distinction, if there were many like Burney's Mrs Maple who was constitutionally unable to hold a conference ‘with a person of whom she had never seen the pedigree, nor the rent-roll …’
¹¹
The public and private in this usage related to the differentiation of rank not gender.

Literally hundreds of women, moreover, belonged to families that consciously conceived of themselves as public institutions. Public families, men and women included, were invariably eminent, titled and politically well-connected. They lived in the great world, constantly in the public eye, their doings reported in the public papers. For such families, the birth of an heir was a matter ‘both of a happy private and public nature’. Public families sometimes neglected their wider responsibilities, by snobbishly opting for ‘private weddings’, to the disapproval of moralists.
¹²
Commentators tied themselves in knots deciding whether the ladies of these families belonged to public or private life. Thus, when Canning reflected on the death of the Duchess of Portland, his categories almost failed him: ‘She was a good and almost a
great character
. I say
almost
because I do not know whether a woman in private life can fairly have that epithet attached to her.’ Though obviously not a great statesman, she was virtually a national worthy. Similarly, Henry Ellison writing in 1781 was astonished at the ‘distinguished reception which Lady [Ravensworth] met with at the Playhouse, the Audience applauding her as she entered, a compliment I do not remember to have been paid to any individual, not in a public character.’
¹³
The accolade testified to the publicity a lady of a great family enjoyed.