The Gentleman's Daughter (56 page)

27
LRO, DDB/72/14 (3 Aug. 1751), E. Parker, Browsholme, to R. Parker, Alkincoats.

28
LRO, DDB Ac 7886/119 (n.d.), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme.

29
Lemmings, ‘Hardwicke's Marriage Act’, p. 358; and see generally pp. 339–60.

30
Savile,
Lady's New Year's Gift
, p. 28. On the tradition of female petitioning, see Larmine, ‘Marriage and the Family’, p. 87.

31
Accomplished Letter-Writer
, p. 123. A similar technique is demonstrated in
New Letter Writer
, pp. 19, 97.

32
Troide,
Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney
,
II
, pp. 146–8; WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St/6/1/99 (29 Nov. 1766), B. Atkinson, Horsforth, to J. Stanhope Esq.

33
LRO, DDB/72/4 (n.d.), R. Parker, Horrocksford, to E. Parker, Browsholme.

34
LRO, DDB Ac 7886/121 (
c.
1746), R. Parker to E. Parker. For further gloomy ruminations on the ‘Misfortune of having a small Fortune’ see LRO, DDB Ac 7886/119, 112, 93 (1745–6), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme. The objections to Robert Parker on moral grounds are more obscure. He was reputedly involved in the second Jacobite rising, but given the Parkers' Tory sympathies this could even have counted in his favour.

35
Wilkes,
Genteel and Moral Advice to a Young Lady
, pp. 81–2.

36
K. Lystra,
Searching the Heart: Women, Men and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America
(New York, 1989), pp. 157–91; E. K. Rothman,
Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America
(New York, 1984), pp. 56–84.

37
LRO, DDB/72/171 (28 Oct. 1779), A. Pellet, London, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

38
The mean age of marriage for noblewomen in this period was twenty-four years and
nine months: Hollingsworth, ‘Demography’, p. 11. Unfortunately, there are no demographic studies of the lesser gentry, but across the female population as a whole, the mean age at first marriage between 1750 and 1799 is also thought to be the same: Wrigley and Schofield,
Population History of England
, p. 255. Suffice it to say then that Elizabeth Parker must have been fully conscious of the passage of time.

39
LRO, DDB/72/10 (24 June 1751), E. Parker, Browsholme, to R. Parker, Horrocksford.

40
When financial negotiations surrounding the proposed marriage of Edward Parker to Barbara Fleming ground to a halt, the families were concerned because ‘an affair so publick’ unjustly tainted Barbara's reputation: LRO, DDB/72/82 (27 Dec. 1753), A. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.

41
Kelly,
History of Louisa Mildmay
, p. 15.

42
LRO, DDB/72/9 (n.d.), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme.

43
LRO, DDB/72/8 (16 June 1751), E. Parker, Browsholme, to R. Parker, Horrocksford.

44
LRO, DDB/72/6 (9 June 1751), R. Parker, to E. Parker, Browsholme.

45
LRO, DDB/72/10 (24 June 1751), E. Parker, Browsholme, to R. Parker.

46
LRO, DDB/72/11 (n.d.), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme.

47
Ingrams,
Church Courts
, p. 136. On the long-standing and persistent importance of ‘friends’, see Tadmor, ‘Family and Friend’; Gowing,
Domestic Dangers
, pp. 148–59; and D. O'Hara, ‘ “Ruled by my Friends”: Aspects of Marriage in the Diocese of Canterbury,
c.
1540–
c.
1570’,
Continuity and Change
, 6 (1991), pp. 9–41.

48
LRO, DDB/72/8 (16 June 1751), E. Parker, Browsholme, to R. Parker, Horrocksford; LRO, DDB/72/12 (3 July 1751), E. Parker, Browsholme, to R. Parker, Alkincoats; LRO, DDB/72/23 (n.d.), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme. On the weight attached to the opinions of relations, see LRO, DDB Ac 7886/115 (
c.
1746), E. Parker, Browsholme, to R. Parker, Alkincoats.

49
LRO, DDB/72/17 (13 Aug. 1751), E. Parker, Browsholme, to R. Parker, Alkincoats.

50
LRO, DDB/78/1 (1751), Parker Marriage Settlement.

51
A. P. W. Malcolmson,
The Pursuit of the Heiress: Aristocratic Marriage in Ireland, 1750–1820
(Belfast, 1982), p. 33.

52
LRO, DDB Ac 7886/119 (n.d.), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme.

53
Baronet's daughter Elizabeth Moseley tried to preserve her clandestine affair with an unsuitable lawyer, Arthur Collier, at Bath and elsewhere, doing all she could to stave off a decisive confrontation with her parents: Stone,
Uncertain Unions
(see n. 5 above), pp. 68–77. Secretive encouragement in the face of parental opposition was also conveyed by the heiress Elizabeth Jefferys in the 1740s and a Mary Martin in the 1760s: Brophy,
Women's Lives
, pp. 83–5.

54
LRO, DDB Ac 7886/129 (18 Nov. 1746), R. Parker to E. Parker. The sense that courtship was essentially a game is also conveyed in LRO, DDB/72/476 (10 May 1748), E. Parker, London, to R. Parker, Alkincoats: ‘It is to be hoped [that] at last some Damsel will take Compassion on us, for [the] very week Miss Plumb was married I had denial at two houses …=” Haywood's suspicions are relayed in id.,
Betsy Thoughtless
, p. 19.

55
New Letter Writer
, pp. 45–7.

56
LRO, DDB/72/16 (n.d.), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/93 and 97 (1745), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme.

57
Gibson's courtship correspondence is revealed in Hunt, ‘English Urban Families’ (Ph.D. thesis), pp. 256–9. However, Hunt attributes this language to a distinctively bourgeois taste for plain dealings, in contrast to upper-class linguistic excess. Non-bourgeois concern to live reasonable, affectionate, but self-possessed married lives is identified in Brown, ‘Domesticity, Feminism and Friendship’. Pratt's correspondence is relayed in Brophy,
Women's Lives
, pp. 129–37. Moderation and reliability are also to the fore in the one letter of courtship Stone reproduces in
Road to Divorce
, pp. 59–60, written in 1755 by a Nottinghamshire cleric to his sweetheart's guardian.
Similarly, when the stranger Mr Jones bid for Betty Atkinson's hand in 1766, he too disdained ‘employing artifice, or covert address’ and stressed that his conduct had never deviated from that of ‘the man of honour’: WYCRO, Sp St/6/1/99 (
c.
1766), J. Jones, to J. Stanhope. Eliza Haywood also linked rhetorical restraint with masculine honour: ‘Believe me, there is more true felicity in the sincere and tender friendship of one man of honour, than in all the flattering professions of a thousand coxcombs.’ See id.,
Betsy Thoughtless
, p. 174. For controlled language in the New World, consult Lewis, ‘Domestic Tranquillity’.

58
D. F. Bond (ed.),
Spectator
(Oxford, 1965), pp. 197–8. For the love-letter, see G. A. Aitken,
The Life of Richard Steele
(1889),
I
, p. 174.

59
Wilkes,
Genteel and Moral Advice
, p. 83.

60
LRO, DDB Ac 7886/95 (20 April 1746), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/119 (n.d.), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/126 (
c.
1746), R. Parker, Preston, to E. Parker.

61
LRO, DDB Ac 7886/129 (18 Nov. 1746), R. Parker to E. Parker; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/112 (2 Sept. 1746), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme. On the arranging of secret assignations, see LRO, DDB Ac 7886/97 (3 May 1745), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/122 (
c.
1746), R. Parker to E. Parker.

62
LRO, DDB Ac 7886/101 (1 July 1746), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme.

63
Ladies Dictionary
, p. 505; Myers,
Bluestocking Circle
, p. 92;
Gentleman's Magazine
(1738),
VIII
, p. 86.

64
Savile,
Advice to a Daughter
, p. 26.

65
On the reciprocal duties of man and wife, see Wrightson,
English Society
, pp. 90–92, and Houlbrooke,
English Family, 1450–1700
, pp. 96–8. Even Filmer, upon a wider reading, has proved much less ‘patriarchal’ than was previously thought: Ezell,
Patriarch's Wife
, pp. 129–44. According to Lawrence Stone, this prescriptive mutuality was novel and distinctively Puritan, giving rise to a new companionate ethos within marriage, discernible from 1660–1700. However, scholars of Christian prescription contend that Puritan conduct literature represents an amplification of, not a break with, pre-Reformation advice to the laity: Todd, ‘Humanists, Puritans and the Spiritualized Household’; Davies, ‘Continuity and Change’, pp. 58–78. On the personal inexperience of the writers of Elizabethan prescriptive literature, see Wall, ‘Elizabethan Precept and Feminine Practice’.

66
Larminie, ‘Marriage and the Family’.

67
Wrightson,
English Society
, p. 92.

68
D. Defoe,
Conjugal Lewdness
,
&c
(1727), p. 25.

69
Harrison, ‘Thorp Arch Hall’.

70
WYCRO, Leeds, TA 18/5 (30 Oct. 1746), W. Gossip, London, to A. Gossip, Skelton; TA 18/5 (16 Oct. 1746), same to same; TA 18/5 (25 April 1734), W. Gossip, Ware to A. Gossip, Ogleforth; TA 18/5 (8 Aug. 1746), W. Gossip, Skelton, to A. Gossip, Ripon; TA 18/5 (12 Dec. 1757), W. Gossip, Askam, to A. Gossip, Thorp Arch.

71
See respectively WYCRO, Leeds, TA 13/2 (n.d.), A. Gossip to W. Gossip; TA 18/5 (14 Oct. 1746), W. Gossip, Braintree, to A. Gossip, Skelton; TA 13/2 (‘Tuesday’), A. Gossip to W. Gossip; TA 13/2 (2 Nov. n.y.), A. Gossip to W. Gossip; TA 18/5 (23 Oct. 1746), W. Gossip, London, to A. Gossip, Skelton; TA 18/5 (20 Oct. 1746), same to same.

72
WYCRO, Leeds, TA 18/5 (n Aug. 1746), W. Gossip, Skelton, to A. Gossip, Ripon.

73
WYCRO, Leeds, TA 15/11/9 (25 Sept. 1763), W. Gossip's Will.

74
See H. Owen,
Stanhope, Atkinson, Haddon and Shaw: Four North Country Families
(1985), p. 70; R. G. Wilson, ‘Three Brothers: A Study of the Fortunes of a Landed Family in the Mid-Eighteenth Century’,
Bradford Textile Society Journal
(1964–5), pp. 111–21.

75
WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St/6/1/68 (13 June 1757), W. Stanhope, Birmingham, to A. Stanhope, Leeds; Sp St/6/1/75 (20 Aug. 1757), W. Stanhope, Leeds, to A. Stanhope, Sewerby; Sp St/6/1/57 (26 July 1757), A. Stanhope, Leeds, to W. Stanhope, Bath.

76
WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St/6/1/70 (11 June 1757), W. Stanhope, Derby, to A. Stanhope, Leeds; Sp St/6/1/69 (15 June 1757), A. Stanhope, Leeds, to W. Stanhope, Bath.

77
WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St/6/1/42 (1 Feb. 1726), B. Stanhope to J. Stanhope, Grays Inn. A similar note of apologetic submissiveness was sounded by two upper-gentry wives on early eighteenth-century Tyneside, though not all local ladies proved so timid: Levine and Wrightson,
Making of an Industrial Society
, pp. 314–18.

78
See respectively LRO, DDB/72/25, 34 (n.d.), R. Parker, Alkincoats and Trawden, to E. Parker, Browsholme; LRO, DDB/72/19, 29, 31, 36 (1751), E. Parker, Browsholme, to R. Parker, Alkincoats.

79
LRO, DDB/72/236, 75, 240, 298 (1770), W. and B. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

80
LRO, DDB/72/208, 236, 198, 220 (1767–70), W. Ramsden, Highgate and Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

81
LRO, DDB/72/297 (n.d.), B. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

82
LRO, DDWh/4/27–9 (Aug. 1813), E. Whitaker, Edgeworth, to C. Whitaker, Roefield.

83
LRO, DDWh/4/31, 32 (Aug. 1813), C. Whitaker, Roefield, to E. Whitaker, Edgeworth.

84
Coburn,
Letters of Sara Hutchinson
, p. 346.

85
Bond,
Tatler
,
II
, p. 299.

86
Ladies Dictionary
, p. 96.

87
LRO, DDB/72/173 (12 March 1762), B. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.

88
LPL, MS 8753 (1778), f. 84; LPL, MS 8754 (1779), 16 Feb., 21 March. The impact of literary models on personal expression is also explored in Darnton, ‘Readers Respond to Rousseau’.

89
M. Butler,
Jane Austen and the War of Ideas
(Oxford, 1975), p. 88.

90
Ladies Dictionary
, p. 505.

91
Wilkes,
Genteel Advice
, p. 88; Coventry,
History of Pompey the Little
, pp. 23–4.

92
Ingrams,
Church Courts
, pp. 145–50, 171–188; Stone,
Broken Lives
(see n. 5 above); Hunt, ‘Wife Beating’; Amussen, ‘Being Stir'd to Much Unquietness’; Gowing,
Domestic Dangers
, pp. 180–231.

93
It remains unclear whether it was John Shackleton's immaturity or inferior circumstances which principally prompted Edward Parker's ‘cold behaviour’. Either way, Mrs Shackleton was deeply hurt by her brother's behaviour. To Bessy Ramsden she had claimed his approbation was ‘necessary to restore sunshine’. Bessy Ramsden tried to offer comfort when it became clear that ‘friends’ did not approve the choice: ‘if Mr Shackleton's Circumstances were not equal to his merit the more Her [praise] who could be influenced by motives so different from the Sordid ones of a Selfish and ill-natured World’: LRO, DDB/72/188 (30 Sept. 1765), B. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats. Who Elizabeth found to represent her interests in the drawing up of the marriage settlement is unclear. Although this document is mentioned in the diaries, it has not survived.

94
See respectively, LRO, DDB/81/13 (1771), fos. 62, 64; LRO, DDB/81/17 (1772), f. 75; LRO, DDB/81/20 (1773), f. 92; LRO, DDB/81/20 (1773), f. 4; LRO, DDB/81/29 (1776), f. 50; LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 60; and LRO, DDB/81/37 (1780), fos. 17 and 3.

95
LRO, DDB/81/17 (1772), fos. 15, 68; LRO, DDB/81/20 (1773), f. 97; LRO, DDB/81/31 (1777), f. 22; LRO, DDB/81/39 (1781), f. 204.