The Gentleman's Daughter (68 page)

162
See respectively, WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St 6/1/50 (30 Dec. 1742), E. Winn to M. Stanhope, Horsforth; and LRO, DDGr C3 (20 May 1820), L. Boynton, 55 Burton Crescent, to Mr and Mrs Bradley, Slyne. On ‘Otium’, see Rostvig,
Happy Man
. On women and intellectual retirement, consider Perry,
Celebrated Mary Astell
, pp. 126–9 and Scott,
Millenium Hall
.

1
J. Vanbrugh,
The Provok'd Wife
(1697; Manchester, 1982), p. 143, act 5, scene 2.

2
For political and social links between new wealth and old elites in Manchester and in north-east Lancashire, see V. A. C. Gatrell, ‘Incorporation and the Pursuit of Liberal Hegemony in Manchester, 1790–1839’, in D. Fraser,
Municipal Reform and the Industrial City
(Leicester, 1982) and Joyce,
Work, Society and Politics
, pp. 1–50.

3
Myers,
Bluestocking Circle
, p. 207. I am indebted to Joanna Innes for this reference.

4
Wilberforce,
Practical View
, p. 434.

5
Home,
Loose Hints
, p. 228.

6
LRO, DDB/72/119 (14 Oct. 1757), A. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.

7
LRO, DDB/72/104 (28 Dec. 1755), A. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Alkincoats; LRO, DDWh/4/117 (n.d.), A. E. Robbins, London, to E. Whitaker, Lark Hill, Preston. These sentiments seem quite conventional, even amongst the nobility. For instance in 1790 Lady Sarah Napier wished for another daughter ‘to comfort me in my old age, when my boys are gone to school’, and Elizabeth Amherst confided ‘For my part, I believe I shall like girls best as they stay at home’: Lewis,
Family Way
, p. 65 and Brophy,
Women's Lives
, p. 42.

8
LRO, DDB/72/115 (24 Jan. 1757), A. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Alkincoats. See also LRO, DDB/72/161(a), (17 Nov. 1757), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats; LRO, DDB/72/227 (29 Nov. 1769), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to same; LRO, DDWh/4/69 (6 June 1814), M. Whitehead, London, to E. Whitaker, Roefield.

9
LRO, DDB/72/273 (7 Feb. 1775), B. and W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

10
HL, HM 31207, Methodized Journal of Anna Margaretta Larpent, unfol.; see entries for 1773; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/205 (9 Jan. 1747), J. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Browsholme.

11
LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 183; Burney,
The Wanderer
, p. 249.

12
NRO, 2DE/39/1/21 (
c.
1777), Sir John Hussey Delavai to Lady S. H. Delavai at Grosvenor House. Samuel Richardson was critical of Miss Grandison's desire to get married in her chamber and had his heroine Harriet Byron marry the irreproachable Sir Charles Grandison in full view of the community: ‘that all our neighbours and tenants may rejoice with us. I must make the village smoke. No
hugger-mugger
doings – Let private weddings be for doubtful
happiness
.’ Refer to Richardson,
Sir Charles Grandison
(1986),
IV
, p. 336,
VI
, pp. 192–3. I thank Charlotte Mitchell for this reference.

13
Hughes,
North East
, p. 387.

14
On private families, see for example, Haywood,
Betsy Thoughtless
, p. 18: ‘Never did a mistress of a private family indulge herself, and those about her, with such a continual round of publick diversions. The court, the play, the ball and opera, with giving and receiving visits, engrossed all the time could be spared from the toilet.’ Also p. 534: ‘when the affairs of a family are laid open, and every dispute between the
husband and the wife exposed before a court of judicature … The whole becomes a public talk …’ (I thank Naomi Tadmor for these references). Consider also Burney,
Evelina
, p. 116: ‘I only speak in regard to a public and dissipated life; in private families, we may doubtless find as much goodness, honesty and virtue, in London as in the country.’

15
A. Carlyle,
Anecdotes and Characters of the Times
(1973), p. 3. Similarly, Austen's retiring hero Edward Ferrars ‘had no turn for great men or barouches. All his wishes centred in domestic comfort and the quiet of private life.’ See, id.,
Sense and Sensibility
, p. 16. William Ramsden also suggested that a Charterhouse schoolmaster could not sustain a social life in the public eye: ‘We live here out of the world. I know little what is doing in it till the papers tell us.’ See LRO, DDB/72/261 (1 April 1773), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats. In addition, Betty Fothergill, the daughter of a reputable Quaker physician, noted of an unaffected gentleman caller in 1769: ‘though he is not formed to make a brilliant figure in the theatre of life, he will shine perhaps in its private domestic scenes’. See Brophy,
Women's Lives
, p. 119.

16
YAS, MD 335/Box 95/
XCV
/i (28 May 1773), Mrs B. Lister, Gisburn Park, to T. Lister, MP.

17
As Atterbury observed, ‘a good magistrate must be endowed with a publick spirit, that is with such an excellent temper, as sets him loose from all selfish views, and makes him endeavour towards promoting the common good.’; cited in S. Johnson, A
Dictionary of the English Language
(5th ed. London, 1784),
II
, ‘Publick, adj.’ For more on men and public service see the excellent Langford,
Public Life and the Propertied Englishman
.

18
Gentleman's Magazine
, 23 Aug. 1753.

19
E. Chalus, ‘That Epidemical Madness: Women and Electoral Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in Barker and Chalus,
Gender in Eighteenth-Century England
, pp. 151–78; L. Colley, ‘The Female Political Elite in Unreformed Britain’ (unpub. paper delivered to the Eighteenth-Century Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, 25 June 1993); J. S. Lewis,
Sacred to Female Patriotism: Class, Gender and Politics in the Age of Revolution, 1760–1832
(forthcoming).

20
Halsband,
Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
,
II
, pp. 135–6.

21
Jupp, ‘Letter-Journal of George Canning’, pp. 118 and 283–4.

22
Midgley,
Women Against Slavery
, p. 20.

23
L. Colley,
Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837
(1992), p. 281.

24
J. Ruskin, ‘Of Queen's Garden's’, in
Sesame and Lilies
(1907), pp. 71, 60.

AT THE HEART OF THIS BOOK lies a study of elite women in Georgian Lancashire,. a county noted in the period for an expanding manufacturing base, a growing service sector and numerous gentry. The research for the book was designed specifically to avoid the shortcomings of a number of previous studies of elites in the period, discussed in the introduction and chapter 1, which have too often taken for granted a crude distinction between an upper landed class and a middle class of professionals and businessmen. Rather than question the utility of this distinction, these studies have simply isolated the gentry, or the professions, or the commercial middle class as their subject of inquiry. Once a study is defined in this way, the links and parallels between these groups are inevitably played down, while differences between them are endowed with an analytical significance that is rarely subtantiated by direct empirical comparison. The research for this book was designed to avoid these pitfalls by examining
all
letters and diaries that survive for privileged women between about 1730 and about 1825 in the Lancashire Record Office at Preston, irrespective of whether the family's wealth came from land, the professions or business. This record office serves the post-1972 county of Lancashire, covering the central and most of the northern part of the old county of Lancaster, but excluding Furness and the southern plains, where the modern conurbations of Manchester and Liverpool lie. Supplementary archival material for the modern county of Lancashire and its fringes was found at the Wigan Record Office and the Lancaster Public Library. Equivalent material was then examined in other northern archives, particularly the Yorkshire Archaeological Society at Leeds, the branches of the West Yorkshire Record Office at Bradford and Leeds, and the branches of the Cumbria Record Office at Carlisle and Kendal. The purpose of extending the study in this way was twofold: to follow up the non-Lancashire friends and kin of the Lancashire families already examined, and to provide a broader perspective on the experience of genteel women in the north of England. It emerged that the sources examined in northern archives contained important evidence about women in London. It was decided to establish a fuller picture of the lives of genteel women in the metropolis by
examining a selection of appropriate manuscripts at the Guildhall Library London, the Corporation of London Record Office, the Essex Record Office and the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Although this exploration of London manuscript sources did not amount to a comprehensive review of the kind undertaken for Lancashire, it has served, at the very least, to counteract any tendency to ascribe excessive autonomy to developments in the north which were in fact national in scope and had their origins in London.

Correspondents of Elizabeth Parker (1726–81) and her first husband Robert Parker of Alkincoats (1720–58), including those who wrote to Elizabeth during her widowhood and her second marriage to John Shackleton (1744–88). An asterisk indicates the person concerned corresponded with Robert Parker only.

*
James Aspinall
, Burnley, Lancashire

A solicitor. Brother of John Aspinall, below.

MS: single letter LRO, DDB Ac 7886/285. Another letter from him to John

Stanhope is preserved the Spencer Stanhope collection in WYCRO, Leeds (MS span: 1749).

John Aspinall
, Preston, Lancashire (d. 1784)

A gentleman barrister on the northern circuit, later Serjeant-at-Law. His seat was the austerely impressive Standen Hall, Clitheroe, Lancashire. When he wrote he was clearly an admirer of the young Miss Elizabeth Parker, in Preston like himself to attend the assemblies. Years later, however, he incurred her wrath when he opposed the interests of the Parkers and Listers in the disputed Clitheroe election of 1781: ‘He
within
these 30 years wo'd have esteem'd it a
Great
Honour and been Big of the application of being styl'd recorder of Clitheroe. What a wretch to behave so vilely to his most obliging, generous, worthy neighbours, Browsholme and Gisburne park … [He] most probably thinks Mr Curzon's Purse will enable him to make a Portico or add a Venetian window to the Beauties of Standen. What nonsense is he.’ Like most of the Lancashire elite, Aspinall was a customer of Gillows of Lancaster.

MS: single letter LRO, DDB Ac 7886/82. For the diary reference, see LRO, DDB/81/39 (1781), fos. 31–2 (MS span: 1745/6).

Elizabeth Assheton
(née Assheton), Broughton, Lancashire

One of the Asshetons of Cuerdale and Downham, who married a cousin, Richard
Assheton, brother of Sir Ralph Assheton of Middleton. Downham was one of the nearest gentry seats to Browsholme, so, unsurprisingly, Elizabeth Assheton was long-standing friend of Elizabeth Parker's; her sister Mary Witton was another of Elizabeth Parker's correspondents; her brother Ralph Assheton of Cuerdale was a trustee to Elizabeth Parker's settlement.

MS: single letter LRO, DDB Ac 7886/303 (MS span: 1749).

*
Henry Blackmore
, Lancashire

This man wrote to solicit Robert Parker's intervention in a local dispute.

MS: single letter LRO, DDB/72/481 (MS span: 1749).

James Bulcock
, 85 Borough High Street, Southwark, London

The Bulcocks were a large trading family who descended from an ancient yeoman family in north-east Lancashire. The older Bulcocks still resided in Colne and owned land in the area, while the younger Bulcock brothers appear to have been double registered in contemporary directories as both Colne tailors and London haberdashers.

MS: six letters LRO, DDB/72/299–302, 305, and DDB Ac 7886/54. For landholding data, see LRO, DDB/59 Bulcock papers, and LRO, DDB/62/239, Map (MS span: 1765–76).

Robert Bulcock
, Bishopsgate, London

A London-based wholesale haberdasher who sold (among other things) John Shackleton's callimancoes. His business was advertised in London directories for 1763 and 1777, and in the
UBD
1. He offered hospitality to the Parker children when schoolboys, and helped place John and Robert Parker as apprentices. In return, Elizabeth Shackleton supervised the education of his niece Nancy Bulcock. After a brief schooling with a Miss Wells of Bradford and a set of dancing lessons, Nancy became a milliner. She eventually married a hosier and hatter, a Mr Burbidge of Borough, Southwark, London.

MS: two letters LRO, DDB/72/450; DDB Ac 7886/64 (MS span: 1772–3).

*
Miss Elizabeth Carleton
, Appleby, Yorkshire

Status unknown. A one-time acquaintance of Miss Parker's enquiring about her whereabouts.

MS: single letter LRO, DDB Ac 7886/198 (MS span: 1747).

*
Thomas Cockshott
, Marley, Bingley, Yorkshire

This gentleman rented the Marley estate from the Parkers. He was married to a Mrs Hardy, the widow of a Horsforth attorney. The Cockshotts were longstanding friends of the Parkers and Shackletons, exchanging regular gifts of game and produce in the 1770s. They also purchased the Parker rabies medicine and communicated information about prospective servants.

MS: single letter to R. Parker LRO, DDB/72/64 (MS span: 1757).

M. Cookson
(nee Dawson), Leeds, Yorkshire

Daughter of the gentleman William Dawson Esq. of Longcliffe Hall, Settle. Wife to a prominent Leeds merchant, Thomas Cookson (1707=–73), who was elected to the corporation in 1742 and resigned 1744. Cookson's father, William, was briefly imprisoned in 1715 for alleged Jacobite sympathies; and was three times Mayor of Leeds.