The Gentleman's Daughter

by Amanda Vickery

  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.50 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.51

  Individual variations notwithstanding, some concluding generalizations can be made. All these women were members of the lesser gentry (at least by marriage), all were intimate with the same Lancashire families and all were enmeshed in a tissue of friendships which embraced the upper trades and professionals. Too often the manuscripts of Georgian commercial families have been studied without reference to the surviving records of their landed neighbours. By reading the personal papers of commercial families in conjunction with those of the landed gentry, a neglected aspect of the pyramid of local society is revealed. In social and administrative terms, east Lancashire was dominated by landed gentry, polite professional and greater commercial families – a local elite who exhibited considerable cohesion. Their incomes, whether in rents, fees or profits, were broadly comparable. The menfolk of these families tended to be educated at northern grammar schools, not southern public schools, particularly so in the early to mid-eighteenth century.52 They served together on local turnpike commissions and were listed side by side on the Commissions of the Peace for Lancashire and Yorkshire. In addition to their shared role in administration, landed gentlemen, professional gentlemen and gentlemen merchants stood shoulder to shoulder on the grouse moor and riverbank. They combined for hearty, exclusively male meals, notably pre-expeditionary breakfasts and formal dinners at local inns. Meanwhile, their wives exchanged information on print and politics, local news, servants, prices and fashions, recipes and remedies, child-bearing and child-rearing. Whole families encountered each other at dinner-parties and ate off similar mahogany dining-tables – most of them bespoke from the same rising firm of craftsmen, Gillows of Lancaster. 53 These families employed a bevy of female servants, yet most of their households were sufficiently unassuming to escape the tax on male servants levied in 1780. All were mobile on horseback, by one- or two-horse chaise, or by hired post-chaise, for to have one's movements dependent upon the whim of others was anathema to respectable independence, or, as one anxious mother put it in 1731, ‘may look low in the eye of the world’. Nevertheless, few genteel families could afford the great status symbol of a crested coach and six horses – the possession of which was a universal shorthand for worldly wealth and social prestige.54 Nor did genteel families expect to decamp to London for the Season.

  Intellectual sympathy across the elite was pronounced. Establishment prejudice, Whig and Tory, and unenthusiastic Anglicanism is everywhere apparent. Nevertheless, both polite Dissenters, such as the gay Quakers and genteel Methodists could be absorbed into the elite, since the most significant religious faultline in the county ran between Protestants and Catholics, not between the different brands of Protestantism. Mrs Shackleton, for instance, saw a smattering of her circle embrace Methodism in the 1770s, and although she was far from impressed with the growth of the ‘methodistical tribe’ and thought it imprudent for her son John to marry the Methodist Miss Dawson, she did not cut off social contact. Moreover, she regularly entertained the Ecroyds of Edge End, a prominent Quaker family involved in the textile trade. By contrast, two local gentry families with whom Elizabeth Shackleton had virtually no contact were the Tempests of nearby Broughton and the Townleys of Townley, both of whom were Catholic. Indeed, of the latter she sniped in 1779, ‘Mr Townley of Townley raising 500 men to fight the combined fleets. Will a Roman Catholick fight for England or France?’55 Faced with a common enemy, Anglicans and wealthy Dissenters could unite in the name of Protestant gentility.

  Of course this local elite did not exist in a vacuum. Gentry and professionals were often linked by blood and friendship to the supreme county families; many commercial and gentry families had relatives struggling in lesser trades. All of these factors led to minute discrimination within the local elite itself – by their associations were they known – but snobbery was not a powerful enough solvent to separate into distinct landed, professional and commercial fractions families who had so much else in common. However, was the social cohesion of landed, professional and commercial families peculiar to north-east Lancashire? After all, the parish of Whalley is not England. Different social relations may have prevailed in areas without a large lesser gentry presence, a long history of manufacturing, or with a different religious history. Yet because few historians have concerned themselves with the lesser gentry, the case studies which would settle the issue are scarce. This is not to suggest, on the other hand, that north-east Lancashire was aberrational. Far from it. One of the distinctive characteristics of English social structure according to eighteenth-century foreign travellers was the extraordinary interpenetration of land and trade. De Saussure noted in 1727, ‘in England commerce is not looked down upon as being derogatory, as it is in France and Germany. Here men of good family and even of rank may become merchants without losing caste. I have heard of younger sons of peers, whose families have been reduced to poverty through the habits of extravagance and dissipation of an elder son, retrieve the fallen fortunes of their house by becoming merchants …’56 Moreover, cultural homogeneity has been stressed by many eighteenth-century historians, notably those unhampered by a prior commitment to a tale of Victorian middle-class emergence.

  From the Restoration, finds R. G. Wilson, the merchant oligarchy in Leeds had more in common in terms of social life with Yorkshire gentry than with humbler Leeds clothiers. Merchants enjoyed a similar income to the lesser
gentry, and had a comparable taste for luxury goods and fashions:

  There was a uniformity of upper-class taste and design in Georgian England, which saved the rich from the censures of vulgarity that were later levelled against the leaders of the new industrial society. There was no division between north and south, no clash between the gentility of the aristocracy and the barbarity of urban society … Before 1780 there was one pattern of living, that manifested by the aristocracy.

  This style of living set the gentlemen merchants apart from the self-made in the town, since ‘the barrier was not one of wealth but of social form’.57 Many achieved ‘a country life in business’ on the northern fringes of the town, and a healthy proportion sank their profits in a country estate and set about founding a landed dynasty, that being the peak of merchant ambition, according to Wilson. Many factors, therefore, eased the integration of lesser gentry and mercantile society: common business ventures (transport and mining), the exchange of financial services, a shared role in county administration and economic ties that were consolidated by intermarriage. This social and cultural integration can be found elsewhere if the search is made. Even John Smail concedes (rather at odds with his overall thesis) that ‘the evidence from Halifax amply confirms that the boundary between the commercial and professional elites and landed society was not very clear’. At least some members of the Halifax commercial elite supped, rode and intermarried with leading county families.58

  A similar story could be told further afield. The potentially lively social intercourse of commercial, professional and landed elites in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Nottingham is demonstrated by the diary of Abigail Frost Gawthern (1757–1822), the daughter of a grocer and the wife of Nottingham white-lead manufacturer. After her husband's death in 1791, Gawthern managed the works until 1808, when it was sold off, and administered considerable property in the town and surrounding countryside. Her daughter married a captain in the 100th Regiment of Foot in 1812. Of Gawthern's social position, Adrian Henstock concludes,

  Her circle of relatives and friends embraced members of all classes from the titled families, the county gentry, the clergy and visiting army officers, to the attorneys and respectable tradesmen, all of whom constituted Nottingham Society in this period and whose boundaries were often fluid. In her later life, Abigail Gawthern was both a Nottingham manufacturer and a county landowner.59

  The comparative inclusiveness of polite society in the provincial south is revealed by the diaries of James Oakes, one of the wealthiest manufacturers and bankers in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. Through his mother, Oakes was related to the Suffolk gentry and, through his father, to wealthy cotton merchants and dyers, whose sons went on to become barristers in London. Oakes's sisters married prosperous Liverpool merchants and when he visited Liverpool and Manchester, he was entertained by both mercantile elites and northern gentry. Like other prominent men in Bury, Oakes could claim a common cultural background with the gentry; he belonged to the same clubs and libraries, pursued a similar interest in agriculture and inventions, painting and architecture, entertained as liberally and enjoyed the same public assemblies and private parties. Oakes and his ilk also shared the burden and prestige of local administration with the neighbouring gentry and aristocracy: he served as County Treasurer, Receiver-General of the Land Tax, Deputy-Lieutenant, Justice of the Peace and as a regular member of the Grand Jury. All of which leads his editor Jane Fiske to conclude, ‘Bury society was comparatively open. There was no discernible line between urban and country gentry.’ On the other hand, ‘it was a finely graded society in which men were very conscious of status. … [and] Oakes always made a distinction between gentlemen in which he included himself, and the middling or trading sort and the lower orders.’60 Thus, again, the crucial social divide was seen to run between genteel commerce and retail trade, between the polite and the vulgar, not between land and trade as such.

  Nor is it likely that Bury was an oasis of social mingling in an otherwise snobbish south-eastern waste, given R. G. Wilson's recent research on the uniformity of polite taste in commercial Norwich and gentry Norfolk.61 By 1700 in Northamptonshire, Alan Everitt tells us, the majority of younger sons from gentry families turned to the Church or to trade in the metropolis, while daughters were more likely to marry a London merchant than a local gentleman.62 On finally reaching London, confirming evidence can be found amongst the papers of the patriciate. Nicholas Rogers's account of the ‘big bourgeoisie’ in Hanoverian London, stresses their social confidence and the polite culture they complacently shared with the gentry. They should not be seen as desperately emulative of the landed aristocracy he suggests, rather as secure possessors of urban gentility: ‘Refinement was not the exclusive preserve of landed culture. Merchants employed fashionable architects, portrait artists and statuaries; rubbed shoulders with the gentry at the local assembly rooms and spas; joined them at the races and the hunt; and invited them to share in the annual round of civic convivialities.’63

  The social cohesion of landed, professional and gentry families was not necessarily the universal experience, but it was nevertheless widespread in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Of course, this engagement was not without its tensions. Satires disparaging the aspirations and pretensions of trading families circulated widely, and a political language that characterized land and commerce as enemies was certainly available, although its popularity fluctuated.64 There were obviously instances when political conflicts were aligned along a land/trade divide, but these were relatively few in the mid-eighteenth century, when social commentators often emphasized the shared interests of the comfortably off. As Bob Harris reports in a slightly different context, ‘In 1753, the essay-paper the Protester defined the “middle ranks” as the “Gentry, the Liberal Professions and the whole mercantile Interest”. William Beckford's often-quoted definition of the “middling people of England” it is worth recalling, included country gentlemen and yeomen, as well as manufacturers and merchants.’65 Undoubtedly the political tensions between land and commerce increased towards the end of the eighteenth century, and it is possible that manufacturers, unlike rentiers and financiers, became progressively frozen out of land-based polite society as the nineteenth century advanced. Indeed, it is Wilson's contention that while the Yorkshire elite could easily absorb greater merchants in the eighteenth century, it drew the line at manufacturers in the nineteenth. Certainly, a literary distinction between genteel merchants and vulgar manufacturers had popular currency throughout the period. The commentator and cleric Josiah Tucker, for example, distinguished in 1757 between ‘farmers, freeholders, tradesmen and manufacturers in middling life and … wholesale dealers, merchants and all persons of landed estates … in genteel life’. Meanwhile, novelists sympathetic to trade made heroes of merchants at the expense of new manufacturers. Nevertheless, the experience of the Preston cotton manufacturers John and Samuel Horrocks, whose children married into clerical and Domesday families, suggests the continued inclusiveness of Lancashire high society in the 1810s and 1820s and beyond, a feature which has been remarked by other studies of the county.66

  8 Standen Hall, Clitheroe, Yorkshire. The austerely elegant seat of Serjeant John Aspinall, a gentleman barrister on the northern circuit, who acted against the interests of the Parkers of Browsholme and the Listers of Gisburne Park in the disputed Clitheroe election of 1781. Elizabeth Shackleton suspected he had taken a bribe to ‘enable him to make a Portico or add a Venetian window to the Beauties of Standen’.

  It has been customary to imagine the gentry, the professions and the upper trades as distinct strata of the social hierarchy. It makes more sense, however, to see each as a thread in the complicated texture of genteel society – a woven fabric or an intricate cobweb being more exact metaphors to conjure social structure and social relations in the provinces. In parochial terms, the lesser gentry, the genteel trades and the respectable old professional families constituted the local elite. In national terms, c
ontemporaries thought of them as the polite, below the quality, but occupying a comfortable eminence from which to patronize the vulgar. These were the women who, in Eliza Haywood's understanding, were not ‘placed so high as to have their actions above the Reach of Scandal’, but those ‘who have Reputations to lose, and who are not altogether so independent, as not to have it their Interest to be thought well of by the World’. They belonged to ‘the Little Gentry’, who went ‘in such Crowds to all Places where their Superiors resort …’67 While these families were linked by a web of kinship to the great, it would be mistaken to see them as simply fawning junior members of a monolithic upper class. Their relation to the greater gentry and nobility was ambivalent: fascinated admiration, deferential respect, scandalized horror, amused condescension and lofty disregard can all be illustrated from the manuscripts of the genteel.

  The genteel read of the scandalous activities of London-based lords and ladies with an appalled and untiring fascination, but strongly defined themselves against such outrageous self-indulgence. Pamphlets such as The Court of Adultery: A Vision, which satirized ‘Tonish’ excesses and censured the likes of ‘Chats—H's sprightly dame’ (the Duchess of Devonshire), were read with general satisfaction. Dissertations on metropolitan immodesty were relished: ‘I recd a long and an entertaining letter from Mrs Ramsden of the present Indecent, Fashionable meetings of the conspicuous, Great Ladies of this Isle, fie for shame.’68 Even those on visiting terms with the great, tempered their deference with a little humour. Mrs Parker of Cuerdon gently satirized her titled guests even as she struggled to honour them: ‘tho’ I could not place Lady Egerton's Bum upon so rich a Sopha as she had at Home or Give Her so Elegant a dinner as she wou'd have had at Heaton House the best I coud procure for her was at her service.' She took every opportunity to point out arrogant perversity, such as that of Lady Jane Clifton, who refused an invitation to a Preston assembly with the excuse ‘Because the Ladies dress their Heads so High and she woud not dress hers so – Good Lord what a Reason – but she is a woman of quality’. With equal wry amusement, Miss Fanny Walker made fun of the ‘vastly formall’ London company at a Yorkshire house-party when she entertained ‘three of the longest chinned familys that ever was seen’.69 The old provincial families flattered themselves that they could see the real worth behind fine feathers, broad acres and smart connections. Most would have enjoyed the dry proverb Elizabeth Shackleton transcribed into her diary in 1768: ‘How wise was nature when she did dispence a large estate to cover want of sense’.70 Nor did the genteel automatically seek marital alliances with the fashionable: the mercantile Stanhope clan tried to talk their rich heir Watty Spencer Stanhope out of buying a London house as they feared he would surely end up marrying an expensive ‘Woman of quality’.71 Snobbery did not lead the lesser gentry automatically to associate themselves with the values of the fashionable aristocracy. Provincial gentility had rewards of its own. As Ann Pellet counselled her niece on the superior fortunes of the Browsholme family, ‘tho their grandure at present may seem a little more conspicuous – yet … a constant uniform life generally produces more solid happiness to a family than all the Glorious fatigues of dress & equipage’.72 Genteel society has a distinct history. It is to women's role in this that the discussion now turns.