The Gentleman's Daughter (6 page)

A less exclusive means of gauging the minimum wealth and status of these families is afforded by the records of the Bradford to Colne (Blue Bell) turnpike from 1755 to 1823. The basic qualification for a Blue Bell trustee was the possession of land worth at least a hundred pounds per annum. Twelve of the twenty gentry families who associated with Elizabeth Shackleton in 1773 and 1780 served as trustees.
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Thus, if the records of the Commission of the Peace and the turnpike are used in combination, virtually every family in Elizabeth Shackleton's network is encountered, confirming that most of her genteel friends were worth at least a hundred pounds per annum.
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Although she regularly encountered those families who easily passed the higher property qualification for Deputy-Lieutenant, she was not on intimate terms with them. Therefore, while clearly in contact with the principal county families, her inner circle was made up of local lesser gentry.

7 Carr Hall, near Burnley, Lancashire. The house was the property of the Townleys, but came to the Claytons by marriage in 1755. The Claytons belonged to the county gentry, providing deputy-lieutenants and militia officers for Lancashire and being registered as having five male servants in the servant tax returns for 1780. They were wealthy enough to decamp to Bath for the Season. Carr was demolished this century.

Moving from those families who lived principally on rents, 18 per cent of the social interactions Elizabeth Shackleton recorded in her diaries (family members excepted) involved a man who practised a profession, or his kin.
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(In only one case, that of a Bradford teacher ‘Schoolmistress Wells’, do we meet a professional woman.) However, it is important to remember that there is considerable overlap in personnel between the gentry and professional categories. Some individuals could be claimed by either camp – an unremarkable fact given the porosity of the boundary
between gentry and professionals.
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Eliminating those individuals who had qualified in a profession, but did not practise, it emerges that Elizabeth Shackleton interacted with fourteen professional families in 1773 and 1780. She had the most contact with the barrister John Barcroft of Clitheroe Castle. In this case, however, the intensity of interaction was a consequence of family business dealings rather than simple friendship. In 1773 John Barcroft advised the Parker family on at least thirty-four occasions, in letters, over dinner and during overnight visits, on the civil and legal ramifications of a complicated land purchase. But in 1780, with the sale completed, he and his wife met Elizabeth only once. Other professionals she encountered had more ambiguous claims to gentility. She entertained and corresponded with the lawyer Shaws of London and Colne, a stream of curates who officiated at Colne Parish church, the Slaidburn and Barrowford schoolmasters, and three local doctors and their wives.
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Over a third (229) of all the non-kin exchanges recorded by Elizabeth Shackleton involved an individual who was in trade. Even when business letters, calls and meetings are stripped out, there remain 190 exchanges with men and women who derived their principal income from commercial activity. However, as the case of the lawyer John Barcroft has already indicated, it is important to remember the extent to which Elizabeth Shackleton's encounters with all social groups had a ‘business’ element. In practice, offering a visiting professional some refreshment (as well as a fee) in return for his advice, differed little from the hospitality lavished on the milliner and mantua-maker. Similarly, notes written to local gentlewomen requesting information about the availability, skills and terms of fresh servants had as much of a business purpose as any letter written to a London merchant concerning the fine print of an apprenticeship. Nevertheless, in the case of trades-people, an attempt has been made here to differentiate intrinsically social correspondence from business letters, and ‘quintessential hospitality’ from that which accompanied an immediate financial transaction, in an effort to establish as unambiguously as possible the participation of commercial families in polite sociability.

Nearly a third of all the ‘quintessential hospitality’ offered by Elizabeth Shackleton at both Alkincoats and Pasture House incorporated trades-people,
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but, of course, Mrs Shackleton did not consider herself to be on terms of equality with everybody she had to tea, supper and dinner. She encountered the retailer Betty Hartley on over twenty-two occasions in two years, more times than she met or heard from many of the gentlewomen of her acquaintance. Yet in the diaries that record these occasions, Betty was often designated ‘Betty Hartley Shopkeeper’ in a rather smug
acknowledgement on Elizabeth Shackleton's part that hospitality was no natural enemy of hierarchy. Still, there was an important social difference between a retailer who received tea and condescension and a genteel wholesaler who met Elizabeth Shackleton on terms of near equality, if not superiority. A distinction between ‘the genteel Trades, all those which require large Capitals’ and ‘the common Trades’ had powerful purchase throughout the period.
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Drawing a distinction between upper and lesser trades, it emerges that bankers, merchants, manufacturers and the like accounted for over half of Mrs Shackleton's social encounters with trades-people, while retailers and craftspeople were involved in only a third of such interactions.
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Nevertheless, this analysis undoubtedly underestimates the number of merchants and manufacturers on visiting terms with the gentry, not to mention the number of gentleman who carried on an enterprise which has left no historical record. Outside the big towns, which published directories of tradesmen, smaller merchants and manufacturers are notoriously hard to identify.

In 1773 and 1780 Elizabeth Shackleton's diaries reveal she had dealings with at least sixteen families (outside her kin) engaged in upper trades.
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Nearly half of all upper trade contacts listed in the diaries involved one commercial clan: the Bulcocks of Bishopsgate and Borough High Street, London, and Colne, Lancashire. This family ran a tailoring business in Colne and another branch of the family operated as wholesale haberdashers at three outlets in London.
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They sold John Shackleton's callimancoes and helped place out the Parker boys as apprentices; in return John and Robin Parker took on a younger Bulcock as their own apprentice, and Elizabeth Shackleton supervised the education of the young Nancy Bulcock who became a milliner (and ultimately married a London hatter). In similar fashion, practical considerations governed the measured friendship which grew up between Elizabeth Shackleton and the textile wholesalers to whom her sons were apprenticed: the hosier Mr Plestow of Bishopsgate, London, and the draper Mr Brome of Fleet Street, London.
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Of the upper tradespeople closer to home, many were every bit as wealthy as the local gentry and met Elizabeth Shackleton on terms of social equality, if not financial superiority. The Leaches of West Riddlesden Hall, Yorkshire, for instance, were rich and socially prominent. The merchant Thomas Leach owned extensive estates in the West Riding, mined and shipped coal, and opened Bradford's first bank in 1777.
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The Wilkinsons of Maize Hill, London, and Broad Bank, Colne, were able to bid £23,000 for a local farm and kept a handsome carriage – something many of Elizabeth Shackleton's landed friends were unable to do. Moreover, of the local commercial families Elizabeth Shackleton regularly
encountered, seven produced one or more men who met the hundred pounds per annum property qualification to become trustees of the Colne to Bradford turnpike.
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In addition to polite networks of gentry, professional and greater commercial families, Elizabeth Shackleton was integrated into neighbourhood networks which incorporated farmers, artisans and labourers, many of whom were her tenants. That this was so should be no surprise. Small farmers and producers supplied her intermittently with foodstuffs and household goods, and local labourers and craftsmen found occasional employment in her house and the estate. In addition, the local community purchased her butter and rabies medicine. Most of the community could expect to receive some basic hospitality under Elizabeth Shackleton's roof, when bills and rents were paid, work delivered, grievances aired, patronage dispensed and so on. As a result, II per cent of all Elizabeth Shackleton's recorded interactions with non-kin involved a servant, a tenant, a farmer, a worker or some combination of the four, although many of her encounters with the poorer sort in her locality may have gone unrecorded.

The place Elizabeth Shackleton held at the junction of various networks is thrown into relief when her social interactions are analysed by region (see Table 1, p. 394). She participated in the social life of her immediate neighbourhood, engaging, as seen, with those who were manifestly her social inferiors in fulfilment of the needs and responsibilities of a local landowner. She socialized with many Lancashire merchants and professionals, but knew fewer such families from over the Pennines. Greater contact was maintained with mercantile and professional families in the metropolis, although in most cases these links were a function of preexisting local connections and kinship. At the same time, however, she participated in a gentry network which bridged the Pennines, yet this network was essentially northern and provincial. Elizabeth Shackleton enjoyed no social relationships with the London-based elite, and played no role in elite culture at a national level.

Moving from Elizabeth Shackleton to the other major gentlewomen in this study, an analysis of social interaction of equivalent precision is thwarted by the lack of documentation. The only means of establishing the social networks of Eliza Whitaker and the Barcroft sisters is through their surviving correspondence. As Table 2 (p. 395) makes clear, manuscript letters are hardly a perfectly designed source. By comparing Elizabeth Shackleton's correspondence network as revealed in the diaries with that which can be reconstructed from her surviving letters alone, it appears that those manuscript letters which survive do not necessarily
represent the full spread of a correspondence. Letters from kin, for example, are over-represented in the archives, although this is hardly surprising, given that most family collections were sorted by descendants for storage in old chests and dusty attics. Nevertheless, the proportions are not sufficiently divergent to render an analysis of social contacts based on surviving correspondence entirely meaningless. Handled with sufficient caution, statistics based on surviving letters can form the basis of some suggestive comparisons.

Table 2 summarizes the social characteristics of those correspondents who can be identified from the surviving letters of Elizabeth Shackleton, Eliza Whitaker and the Barcroft sisters. The proportion of gentry correspondents is broadly similar in each case, as is the proportion of letter-writing kin. Significant contrasts emerge in three areas: the social profile of non-gentry correspondents, the residence of all correspondents and their sex. The evidence of the surviving letters is at its most problematic where social profile is concerned, because of the large proportion of correspondents in the Whitaker and Barcroft networks for whom reliable status information has not been found. Nevertheless, the high proportion of upper tradespeople in the Whitaker network is striking and significant.
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In the light of Eliza Whitaker's own family background in manufacturing, this high proportion is not surprising. In the Barcroft network, on the other hand, the proportion of correspondents in trade appears rather low. Yet this is probably a reflection of the difficulty of identifying smaller merchants and manufacturers in rural areas.

The Parker, Barcroft and Whitaker networks varied in geographical scope. The Parker network naturally stretched into the West Riding of Yorkshire, since the majority of Elizabeth Shackleton's kin resided just over the border. Indeed, much Parker property was scattered about Craven in Yorkshire and John Shackleton's textile dealing took him to the Yorkshire worsted towns. The Parker's London links have already been explained. The preponderance of Yorkshire correspondents in the Barcroft network is unremarkable in a family from the east Lancashire border. However, the Yorkshire bias was reinforced by the fact that the Miss Barcrofts resided in Otley, just north of Leeds, for some years. The Whitaker network offers a regional contrast, being drawn most heavily from Lancashire itself, and particularly from Preston, Bolton and Liverpool. In social terms, Eliza Whitaker was oriented to the west and south, unlike most of her immediate neighbours who looked east into the West Riding of Yorkshire. Or, from another perspective, the Parker and Barcroft networks could be said to reflect the geography of the worsted industry, while the Whitaker network reflected that of cotton. Undoubtedly,
Eliza Whitaker's Preston upbringing and Bolton antecedents explains the bias towards central and south Lancashire. There was also a family presence and company office in London, which accounts for her metropolitan letters. The links between Eliza Whitaker and her scattered correspondents in the south of England are more mysterious. It is possible that these women were Lancastrian by origin and that the emergence of a national marriage market accounts for the diaspora. Another plausible explanation is that these women met at a boarding school which drew from a national pool.
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