The Gentleman's Daughter Read online

  The Gentleman's Daughter

  The

  Gentleman's Daughter

  WOMEN'S LIVES IN GEORGIAN ENGLAND

  AMANDA VICKERY

  YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

  NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

  First printed in paperback 1999

  Copyright © 1998 by Amanda Vickery

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

  For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact:

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  Designed by Gillian Malpass

  Printed in Great Britain by CPI Cox and Wyman, Reading

  The Library of Congress has Catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:

  Vickery, Amanda.

  The gentleman's daughter: women's lives in Georgian England/by Amanda Vickery.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. Women–England–History–18th century. 2. England–Social conditions–18th century. 3. Gentry–England–History–18th century. I. Title.

  HQ 1599.E5V47 1988 305.42.'0942.–dc21 97–45792 CIP

  A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library

  ISBN 978–0–300–10222–2 (pbk.)

  4 6 8 10 9 7 5

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  Note on the Text

  Map

  Introduction

  1 Gentility

  2 Love and Duty

  3 Fortitude and Resignation

  4 Prudent Economy

  5 Elegance

  6 Civility and Vulgarity

  7 Propriety

  Conclusion

  Abbreviations

  Notes to the Text

  APPENDICES

  1 Research Design and Sources

  2 Biographical Index

  3 Members of the Parker Family

  4 The Social Networks Database

  5 Elizabeth Shackleton's Servant Information Network, 1770–1781

  6 Purchasers of Parker Rabies Medicine, 1767–1777

  Tables

  Select Bibliography

  List of Plates and Acknowledgements

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  THE ROAD FROM PRESTON TO PH.D. is paved with clichés, but my gratitude is no less heartfelt for its predictability. At Penwortham Girls' Grammar School, my history teacher, Angela Gibson, singled me out and encouraged me, while my parents, Derek and Renée Vickery, made every sacrifice that I might, as the adage has it, go Down South. At nineteen, in London, I was lucky enough to come across Professor Penelope Corfield. She was inspiring as an undergraduate tutor, alternately soothing and bracing as a Ph.D. supervisor, and is now unfailingly helpful as a colleague, but still shrewd as a critic. She will blush, but I salute her.

  Institutions that have supported my career thus far and whose financial aid I happily acknowledge include the E.S.R.C., the Institute of Historical Research, Churchill College, Cambridge, and Royal Holloway, London University. Most recently, I enjoyed the Helen Bing fellowship at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, and an Ahmondson-Getty fellowship at the Clark Library, U.C.L.A. My blissful stay in California was infinitely enriched by Helen Bing's remarkable kindness and the friendship of Shelly Bennett, Tom Cogswell, Karen Kupperman, Amy Myers, Jack Myers, Kate Norberg, Jenny Stine and, above all, Roy and Louise Ritchie.

  In researching this book I have drawn heavily on both local and national record offices and the patience of their archivists. The following archives have all kindly permitted me to quote their manuscripts: the Lancashire Record Office, Preston; the Lancaster Public Library; the Wigan Record Office, Leigh; the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, York; the Yorkshire Archaelogical Society, Leeds; the West Yorkshire County Record Office, Bradford; the West Yorkshire County Record Office, Leeds; the West Yorkshire County Record Office, Wakefield; the North Yorkshire Record Office, Northallerton; the Cheshire Record Office, Chester; the Cumbria County Record Office, Carlisle; the Corporation of London Record Office; the Guildhall Library, London; the Westminster Public Library; the Essex Record Office, Chelmsford; the Kent Record Office, Maidstone; the Tyne and Wear Record Office, Newcastle; the Public Record Office, London; and the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. In particular, I must single out the kindness of Mrs Diana Parker of Browsholme, who permitted me to use the manuscripts in the Parker of Browsholme deposit in the Lancashire Record Office, alerted me to unused documents left at Browsholme, allowed me to photocopy countless manuscripts and was very helpful in advising me of illustrations. Two archivists and scholars who have been more than generous with their local knowledge and unpublished work are Faye Oldland of the Pendle Heritage Centre and Brett Harrison of the West Yorkshire Record Office at Leeds. I am grateful to all.

  For references, suggestions, critical readings and intellectual fellowship, I am deeply indebted to Jonathan Bate, Kelly Boyd, Mike Braddick, John Brewer, Amanda Craig, Anne Goldgar, Helen Hackett, David Jarvis, Lawrence Klein, Alison Light, Rohan McWilliam, Charlotte Mitchell, Roy Porter, Lyndal Roper, Naomi Tadmor, Pat Thane, Stella Tillyard, the anonymous readers of Yale University Press and especially Joanna Innes, who has read my work many times over and found supporting examples too numerous to acknowledge in the notes. Successive generations of students on the Royal Holloway Women's History M.A. course have also helped shape this book with their questions and comments. For help with illustrations I must thank Mr John Aspinall of Standen, Madeline Ginsburg, the Hon. Mrs Jackson, Mr Harry Matthews, Mr Stephen Startin, Mr and Mrs John Warde of Squerries, Paul Langford who suggested the cover picture, and particularly Neil Holland, who heroically stepped in at the last minute to sort out my photography crisis. Yale University Press has proved a model publisher. Celia Jones's copy editing has been careful and helpful, while my editor Gillian Malpass has cheered me with her sustained commitment to the book and a remarkable attention to detail throughout.

  Yet history is not everything, and it must be admitted that life is more fun than work. For disregarding my academic guise, I want to thank my oldest friends Gregory Battle, Jill Farrington, Neil Holland, Elizabeth Muir and all those wonderful girlfriends who have come after. The completion of this book coincided with the birth of my fearless daughter Hester and is competing with a complicated second pregnancy as I write, so to neglect to mention the unstinting support of my G.P., Fred Kavalier, the Camden midwives and everyone who has helped me at the University College Obstetric Hospital would feel perverse. In time-honoured tradition, my biggest debt is acknowledged last. John Styles has banned the gushing and detailed acknowledgement that I have been perfecting over the years. Still, if life with two demanding women resembles an uphill struggle, then he has nobly put his shoulder to the wheel. This book is for him.

  Note on the Text

  ORIGINAL SPELLING, PUNCTUATION AND capitalization has been retained throughout. Abbreviation of ‘the’, ‘that’, ‘which’ and ‘would’, among a host of other nouns and verbs, was universal. Where the text is hard to follow these contractions have been rendered in full in square brackets.

  The bibliography and biographical index contain details of most primary and secondary sources cited, and therefore abbreviations for these works have been used throughout in the notes; references to those works not included in the bibliography or b
iographical index are given in full in the notes at their first appearance in each chapter. Unless otherwise stated, the place of publication is London.

  Facing page: Map of Lancashire and Yorkshire showing the principal towns and villages mentioned in the text.

  Introduction

  IN 1820 GEORGE III DIED, the first iron steamship was launched, Shelley published Prometheus Unbound and an unremarkable middle-aged woman took stock of her past. She took out her old letters, burning some and arranging others, and thereby the ghosts of a decorous life materialized before her: ‘These letters brought back many events, but above all marked the progress of time & how it sweeps into its course over friends over feelings – our hopes & fears – We here see man in a mirror – they appear as when they pass by mere reflections.’1 It is from just such disconnected reflections that The Gentleman's Daughter is wrought. The letters, diaries and account books of over one hundred individuals from commercial, professional and gentry families form the basis of this book. Collectively, I have labelled this social group ‘the genteel’. It is the relayed hopes and fears of the women of these families, the merchants' daughters, the solictors' wives and the gentlemen's sisters, that are the central focus. To read the letters of the long dead is to summon up a veritable army of apparitions; to be bombarded with the complexities and particularities of countless comfortable lives lived outside the spotlight of history. So how is the historian to marshal all this teeming detail? What artful categories will create order from the chaos of the individual and the everyday? How should we write the history of the proper and the prosperous?

  The answer for many has been to offer a narrative of decline and fall, using women's manuscripts to illustrate a tale of increasing female passivity and ever-tightening domestic encirclement. In fact, it is almost impossible to open a book on wealthier British women between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries that does not offer a catalogue of declining female options; but, worryingly, what is presented as the key period of deterioration depends upon the author's own chronological specialism. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, so Alice Clark famously argued in 1919, the wives of craftsmen and manufacturers made a substantial contribution to the family enterprise, since the home and workplace were usually one. Gentlewomen were active in household and estate management, public affairs and even government; but as the century wore on, the rapid increase of wealth permitted the wives of prosperous men to withdraw from productive activity. In parallel, the spread of capitalistic organization concentrated manufacturing on central premises – separating the home and workplace, with devastating consequences for female enterprise. Once production left the home, the wife was divorced from her husband's trade and lost the informal opportunity to learn his skills. Creative housekeeping fell into decay. In contrast to their hardy and resourceful Elizabethan grandmothers, the moneyed ladies of the Restoration were distinguished only by their ‘devotion to idle graces’.2

  This resonant tale of the descent of seventeenth-century propertied Englishwomen into indolence and luxury has been frequently reiterated.3 Most of these accounts rest on the curious assumption that the performance of heavy manual labour is intrinsically empowering for women, so therefore the relief from drudgery saw women automatically devalued by society. Lawrence Stone, for instance, leaves us in no doubt about the frivolousness and futility of a woman's life once she had vacated the dairy and laid down the distaff:

  Wives of the middle and upper classes increasingly became idle drones. They turned household management over to stewards, reduced their reproductive responsibilities by contraceptive measures, and passed their time in such occupations as novel reading, theatre going, card playing and formal visits … The custom of turning wives into ladies ‘languishing in listlessness’ as ornamental status objects spread downwards through the social scale.4

  Some have built on the tale of woman's divorce from useful labour to assert that the early eighteenth century saw the ‘new domestic woman’ step forward to take the hand of the new economic man:

  With the eighteenth-century glorification of ‘Man’ came a radical narrowing of women's participation in and contribution to productive and social life, and a drastic diminution of women's stature. It was not merely a relative decline. Pre-capitalist woman was not simply relatively eclipsed by the great leap forward of the male achiever; she suffered rather an absolute setback.5

  Scholars of English literature have tried to chart the construction of domesticated femininity, although there is a certain confusion as to whether the new domestic woman was the epitome of bourgeois personality, or was an ornament shared by the middling ranks and the landed. Whatever her social background, it is agreed that the sweet domesticate was created ‘in and by print’. The most impressive study of early eighteenth-century periodicals concludes that ‘during the eighteenth century, as upper and middle-class Englishwomen increasingly began to participate in the public realm of print culture, the representational practices of that print culture were steadily enclosing them within the private sphere of the home’.6

  Another influential body of writing on women's history assumes that it was the years 1780–1850 that saw the rise of ‘separate spheres’; years, it is argued, during which the everyday worlds of men and women were definitively separated, as a result of industrial capitalism and the emergence of a class society. Propertied men came to exult in the public sphere of business and affairs, safe in the knowledge that domestic femininity kept the home fires aflame. Meanwhile, privileged women abandoned all enterprise, estate management and productive housekeeping to their servants in order to devote themselves to decorative display. Thus, Mrs Average led a sheltered life drained of economic purpose and public responsibility. Cramped by custom, corset and crinoline, she was often a delicate creature, who was, at best, conspicuously in need of masculine protection, and, at worst, prey to invalidism and hysteria. And yet she abjured self-indulgence, being ever attentive and subservient to the needs of her family. Only in her matronly virtue and radiant Christianity did she exercise a mild authority over her immediate circle. She was immured in the private sphere and would not escape until feminism released her.7

  As a story of change, this saga could be undermined at many points,8 but possibly the most damaging weakness is the fact that all these accounts, irrespective of the period they pin-point as the key moment of change, rest unquestioningly on the assumption that a thundering commercial or industrial revolution created a new gender order, indeed the modern gender system, in the very era under consideration. So, if the literature is read as a whole, it is hard to avoid the impression that the spheres definitively separated and the new domestic woman was born in virtually every century since the end of the Middle Ages. Like the insidious rise of capitalism, the collapse of community, the nascent consumer society and the ever-emerging middle class, the unprecedented marginalization of wealthier women can be found in almost any century we care to look. When confronted with the numerous precedents, nineteenth-century historians of this phenomenon may claim that early modern developments represent only the germ of what was to come on a grand scale for the Victorian middle class. But the obvious problems of periodization which result cannot be brushed aside with the explanatory catch-all of ‘uneven development’. The problem is exemplified if we try to reconcile arguments about early modern Norfolk with assertions about nineteenth-century Suffolk.9 Are we to believe that women were driven out of a public sphere of production and power in one district in the seventeenth century, while just over the county border the same development was delayed by well over a hundred years? Surely uneven development of this magnitude would have raised some contemporary comment, or at the very least female migration? The determination of authors to claim that the single turning point in gender history conveniently occurred in the period of their own book means that chronological inconsistencies continue to abound. They will persist until the quest for the instant when modernity began is acknowledged to be fruitless.

/>   In any case, the apocalyptic economic revolution so often invoked as the deep cause of the trouble, does not look quite so earth-shattering in the light of new research. Startling, all-consuming transformation may live on in the textbooks and the imagination, but a convincingly revised economic history has stressed the distinctively gradual growth of commerce and manufacturing in Britain since at least the fifteenth century. Furthermore, a closer look at the operation of early modern businesses raises doubts about the conviction that female enterprise decayed substantially between 1700 and 1850. First, it is clear that the explanatory power given to the notion of the separation of the home and workplace is unwarranted. If industrial change had involved a simple linear transition from family workshop to factory then certainly this process could have been devastating, but, as D.C. Coleman remarked in another context, there were many key early modern enterprises which simply could not be performed in a cottage by husband, wife and children. In mining, ship-building, iron smelting, pottery firing, glass blowing, paper making, soap boiling, fulling wool and so on, the place of work was of necessity divorced from bed and board from the very inception of the industry. Moreover, the factory was far from being the normal unit of production in the mid-nineteenth century.10 Economic change followed many roads and did not arrive at a single destination. Second, when we consider those businesses that women pursued in their own right, continuity is again more apparent than change. Studies of fifteenth-century York and seventeenth-century London reveal a picture not so different from the 1851 census, with urban women already clustered in the so-called feminine trades: petty retail, food and drink, and textiles. One would search long and hard for significant numbers of female goldsmiths, blacksmiths, cabinet-makers, curriers and so on at any point in British history. Interestingly, single women were prominent amongst rentiers, investors and money lenders, suggesting that wealthier women had long found trade an unappetizing option.11 But if female withdrawal from active involvement in a business was a likely consequence of increasing family wealth then any study of an expanding business, be it in fourteenth-century Norwich, seventeenth-century London or nineteenth-century Birmingham, would be likely to show a reduction over three generations in the formal participation of female members of the owning family. Of course, only genuine comparative research will substantiate this suggestion, but it is already clear that a lost golden age of prestigious, highly profitable and wide-ranging female work is a chimera.12