However, amidst the different patterns of happy marriage, some common threads can be drawn. What all these successful marriages shared was a division of role and responsibility mutually agreed by man and wife. For these were dutiful, proficient women. All but Barbara Stanhope did the expected thing and supplied a quiverfull of heirs for the lineage. Their competence in the household and authority over servants was recognized and respected. Male prerogatives were taken for granted, but not pushed to their limit. As far as can be gathered from letters, none of these husbands expected blind obedience in every detail of domestic life. William Ramsden, for one, relished a little insubordination in his lively wife; it amused Robert Parker to fulfil his wife's teasing commands; while William Gossip couched his orders as respectful suggestions. Unequal partnership was workable if a wife observed the general proprieties and a husband tempered his authority. Clearly, wedding put an end to wooing, but, fortunately for these couples, was ‘the beginning of solid and substantial love’.90 The letters of all these couples bespeak the tight bond of marital alliance. All these men and women managed to convey the impression that their married life was a shared endeavour; that together they would bear the revolutions of fate.
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It is not my purpose to suggest that the Georgian era was a golden age in the history of marriage. For every harmonious union described a parallel example of stale boredom or harsh discord could be offered. Conjugal disillusionment and disregarded loneliness were staples of eighteenth-century commentary, and the monotony of marriage was inadvertently publicized by many an authority. Weetonhall Wilkes warned that ‘There is great Discretion requir'd to keep Love alive after Marriage; and the Conversation of a married Couple cannot be agreeable for Years together without an earnest Endeavour to please on both Sides.’ The observant lap-dog Pompey the Little noted in 1751, ‘there is this little Misfortune attending Matrimony, that People cannot live together any Time, without discovering each other's Tempers. Familiarity soon draws aside the Masque, and all that artificial Complaisance and smiling Good-humour, which make so agreeable a Part of Courtship, go off like April Blossoms, upon a Longer Acquaintance.’91 But anticlimax was not the worst a woman had to fear. The potential for violence and cruelty in marriage can be glimpsed from the horrible complaints of the aggrieved minority who felt compelled to seek redress in the church courts, and from the depositions generated when noblemen sued their wives' lovers for financial compensation (the common law suit of ‘criminal conversation’), and pursued the ultimate dissolution of a parliamentary divorce. Complete marital failure was not unheard of.
Of course, divorce by act of parliament was prohibitively expensive and exceptionally rare; between 1670 and 1857 there were only 325 divorces in England, all but four of these obtained by men. Annulments were always staggeringly unusual, and to gain a legal separation in the church courts, divorce a mensa et thoro without the right to remarry, a female petitioner had to prove adultery as well as life-threatening cruelty. However, there were doubtless numerous private deeds of separation drawn up, and informal ‘divorce’ through desertion or mutual agreement must have been widespread. Still, the social prohibitions against informal separation were powerful, and the penalities faced by an estranged wife could be grim. Without the safeguard of a carefully worded deed of separation, a wife still suffered all the legal disabilities of couverture: any income from real estate, any future legacies or earnings, all personal property and total control of the children could be claimed by a vindictive husband. What is more, in strict legality, a wife could not leave her husband's house without his permission and an affronted spouse had the law on his side if he chose to drag his wife back.92 Only the most desperate, or the most protected, woman could countenance leaving a marriage on such terms. Understandably then, court records describe only the tip of a possible iceberg of everyday misery. This final section examines two case studies of marital breakdown which never reached the ecclesiastical court. The marriage of Elizabeth Parker and John Shackleton (covering the years 1765–81) is compared with that of Ellen Weeton and Aaron Stock (1814–22). Both cases are suggestive of the miseries women might endure with no obvious legal remedy. In the absence of a husband's goodwill and a family's support, the potential vulnerability of a woman's position comes into crisp focus.
Elizabeth Parker's happy marriage to Robert Parker of Alkincoats was shortlived. He died in 1758 at the age of thirty-eight, leaving her alone with three sons under five. But her increasingly jolly widowhood of seven years came to an end in July 1765, when she eloped to Gretna Green with a local woollen merchant John Shackleton. He was twenty-one years old to her mature thirty-eight. Why she married him is not recorded for posterity, but it cannot have been anything other than her own free choice to do so. In financial terms, she had no one to please but herself. However, she still had to answer to friends and family, which probably explains her scandalous elopement. When presented with the fait accompli, her outraged brother Edward Parker broke off personal communication with his sister for years.93 This was an inauspicious beginning to sixteen years of progressively unhappy marriage, the details of which are recorded in the diaries Elizabeth Shackleton kept from her marriage to her death. Doubtless affectionate, at least on Elizabeth's side, this match was far from advantageous. Indeed it was positively degrading – a fact which alienated powerful kin and exaggerated her reliance on the goodwill of the man she had chosen. Sadly she had founded her happiness on cracking clay.
For the first seven years of her marriage Elizabeth Shackleton recorded no instances of serious matrimonial strife. By contrast, the diaries written between 1772 and 1781 catalogue the steady worsening of relations during the last nine years of marriage. Coming so late in the marriage, the Shackletons' difficulties cannot be seen as simply the conventional problems of early marital readjustment. Elizabeth Shackleton's principal complaint against her husband was his heavy drinking. John Shackleton's drunkenness was first recorded, without comment, in July 1771, when a servant from Alkincoats found him stumbling back from a nearby farm, having lost his way, his silver buckle and his stock. Thereafter, Mrs Shackleton enumerated her husband's drinking sessions with disapproval. From 1772 John Shackleton expressed dissatisfaction with his wife and his marriage, of sufficient note to reach the pages of Elizabeth Shackleton's diary: ‘Mr S. very Cross. Never pleas'd at what I say nor do.’ It is hard to say whether discontent fostered his drinking habits or vice versa, but whatever the root cause, complaints about his ill-nature and savage temper increased during the 1770s. John Shackleton subjected his wife to verbal abuse: ‘Mr S: so cross, so rude, so in humanly ill natured as wo'd amaze, swore most horribly indeed at me.’ Amidst general curses, he issued malicious threats. In May 1773 he threatened to make a sale and leave, publishing her discredit in the ‘Publick papers’. In 1776 he claimed he would freely give a hundred guineas for a divorce, and in 1778 declared his antipathy was so intense, he was prepared to die. ‘Mr S. further said he wo'd destroy himself I was … nought to him, he co'd not live with me. Nor wo'd not. He quite hates me, dos not like me. He behaves most cruelly to me. I had a most shocking night. Cry'd and fretted.’ Once installed in his own home, Pasture House, Shackleton threatened bodily to throw his wife out, knock her head against her ribs, and to send for his father ‘to keep me orderly & to comfort him in his great trouble & to rule such an Ungovernable Bitch as myself …’94 He was not a happy man.
The incidence of physical abuse followed a similar pattern to that of verbal violence, first registering in January 1772 when Mrs Shackleton tersely recorded, ‘Mr S. coming rude, threw water on me & vulgar to a degree’. In July of the same year Shackleton threw a great lump of hard crust in her face, bruising her lips and loosening a tooth. Provoked by an imagined slight in September 1773, he broke up a family card game throwing his wife out of her chair and breaking a saucer. By the late 1770s he had graduated to direct assaults, striking his wife with his fists, bloodying her nose and mouth. By 1780 he had t
aken to his wife with a horsewhip. Even in her last and fatal illness, John Shackleton did not forbear: ‘he struck me violently many a time. Took the use out of my Arm, swell'd from my Shoulder to my wrist, the skin knock'd off at my elbow in great Misery and pain he afterwards got up & left my bed, went into a nother room pritty Matrimonial comforts god Bless and help me.’95
Virulent hostility is laid open in Elizabeth Shackleton's diaries, but do they provide the whole story? Of course not. Local tradition holds that John Shackleton kept a diary of his own, but this document has long since disappeared, so at his side of the story we can only guess. It is also possible that Elizabeth Shackleton used her diary to comment on just the negative aspects of her marriage, not to encompass the whole. Perhaps her diary functioned principally as an escape valve, wherein she rehearsed her version of events during occasional disputes? By this view, their contents might reflect only the extraordinary aspects of marital interaction not its day-to-day character. However, even were this the case, infrequent conflict of such magnitude has important significance in its own right; the Shackletons were at odds over fundamentals not superficial specifics. As it was, however, the diaries did not fulfil an occasional confessional function. They grew out of the daily record-keeping of genteel housewifery. Comments on Mr Shackleton, good and bad, are woven into a tapestry of commentary on, among other things, the servants, housekeeping, local and national news, the family and, inevitably, the weather. Nevertheless, it is possible that the increasing incidence of recorded strife in the later 1770s represents not a real increase in quarrels, but rather Elizabeth Shackleton's use of a large journal in addition to her traditional pocket diaries. She now had more space to fill with evidence of her mistreatment. But it seems more likely that the intensification of strife was a genuine reflection of an ominous shift in the balance of power between the couple. By 1780, apparently their worst year together, the Shackletons were living in John's own mansion, Pasture House. Elizabeth Shackleton was fifty-two years of age, ail-but toothless and habitually ill. At thirty-six John Shackleton had no heirs and was suffering from attacks of gout. Both his confidence and ill will seemed to increase in his own house. Still, it would be wrong to see the diaries as a testimony to unremitting emotional travail. Mrs Shackleton gratefully accepted any sign of goodwill or penitence on the part of her husband. She continued to pray for his health and a blessing on his ventures. But these were brief periods of remission between bouts of drinking and aggression.
Given the extremity of her marital difficulties, what was Elizabeth Shackleton to do? Separation was not absolutely inconceivable amongst her social circle, since an old friend had parted from ‘her Drunken Hog’ of a husband in 1779 on account of his drunken cruelty and alehouse debts. But temperamentally Elizabeth Shackleton was no friend to single women and she looked upon the desperate Mrs Knowles as an outlaw. All of which suggests that she herself could not countenance the social suicide of a judicial separation. Probably the risk of scandal was deterrent enough, for she found the prospect of exposing her marriage to public scrutiny an odious one. All references to John Shackleton in Elizabeth Shackleton's social correspondence indicate that in vindication of her decision to elope, she had represented him to the world as the perfect gentleman. The fact that she noted with embarrassment an altercation witnessed by her polite neighbours and his public humiliation in a tenant's house suggests her pride on this score.96 A less drastic measure was to call upon the intervention of wider kin. But if anything, the situation was aggravated rather than tempered by John Shackleton's father. Christopher Shackleton of Stone Edge was himself an habitué of the alehouse and a day at Stone Edge preceded several of John Shackleton's outbursts, so Old Shackleton may well have fuelled his son's sense of grievance. Certainly, the father–son conference of 1773 designed to bring home the dangers of drink had no perceptible impact.97 Under different circumstances, Elizabeth might have appealed to her powerful brother. Although reconciled to Edward Parker of Browsholme in 1775, to call on his aid she would have to denounce Shackleton as a vulgar brute. Her failure to do so demonstrates her reluctance to lose face. In any case, such an admission would only confirm Edward Parker's worst prejudices and jeopardize the fragile reconciliation so recently achieved. Eventually, in 1780 she compromised, calling upon the mediation of her son, Thomas Parker: ‘My own dear Tom came here this forenoon to hear the disputes betwixt myself and Mr S. Mr S. made me into the vile offender, himself the person illused. He the upright. Myself the guilty. Time Time will shew.’ The outcome of arbitration was indecisive. They did not part, nor did the arguments cease. Weakened by illness, Elizabeth confided prayers and grim resignation to her diary. In 1781 she read a prophetic proverb in the printed preface to her last diary: ‘That honest Poverty is better than rich Roguery is a Maxim, which though many will not allow, is nevertheless a true one; for like a dead Wife it brings a man peace at last.’ Her last diary entry ends on a characteristic note of mournful dignity. ‘A wet close day, my foot most shocking painful, about one Mr S. & I went off to dine at good old Alkincoats good luck to us.’98 She was buried a week later in Colne Church. Shackleton remarried the next year.
Ellen Weeton's reflections and letter-books provide a more extreme example of matrimonial breakdown in Lancashire in the early nineteenth century. No evidence survives of the courtship of the thirty-seven-year-old governess and thirty-eight-year-old manufacturer, nor any record of how the pair met. Miss Weeton first mentioned the Calvinist widower Aaron Stock only two weeks before she married him, when she requested her brother Tom Weeton's opinion of Aaron Stock. (Stock leased a Wigan factory from Tom Weeton's mother-in-law.) Tom Weeton stood to gain a hundred pounds at his sister's marriage or death, by the terms of their mother's will. Whatever his personal knowledge of Aaron Stock, he must have reassured his sister, since the wedding took place in September 1814, when Miss Weeton ‘resigned my prospects of future happiness or misery for this life, into the hands of another’ and her legacy into the hands of her brother.99 The Stocks embarked upon married life in Aaron's house at the back of the factory, but moved to polite Standishgate once Aaron Stock's enterprise, bolstered by his wife's modest capital, began to prosper. Within ten months of marriage, they had a daughter of their own. Nevertheless, even these early months were inharmonious, judging by occasional letters of the period transcribed into her copybook and a retrospective narrative written in 1822.
Ellen Stock struggled from the outset to establish her authority in the household, but was thwarted by her stepdaughters and disloyal servants. In 1816 Mrs Stock described her husband's earlier behaviour in terms of ‘wayward humours,’ ‘ill-treatment’ and ‘tyranny’. In the same year reported strife led an old friend Bessy Price to wonder aloud if lengthy spinsterhood had rendered Ellen Stock incapable of that wifely servitude which guaranteed harmony. On the contrary, Mrs Stock insisted in June 1816, it was ‘firm, judicious opposition’ not ‘abject submission’ which elicited better treatment. By this method, Ellen Stock achieved ten months of uneasy equilibrium. By November 1816, however, relations had deteriorated to the extent that Ellen Stock was contemplating leaving her husband and taking up teaching again: ‘My husband is my terror my misery! and I have little doubt, will be my death,’ she confided to Bessy Price.100 For a brief period in the summer and autumn of 1817 Ellen Stock recorded enjoying a ‘degree of domestic comfort’: her baby daughter provided much diversion, her stepdaughters were cordial, the servants respectful and Aaron Stock prepared to be peaceable. However, amity gave way to strife by Christmas 1817. Events took a public turn in the new year, when Ellen Stock was physically turned out into the street and had to seek shelter from her brother in nearby Leigh. After two nights in Leigh, brother and sister returned to Wigan to effect either a reconciliation or a negotiated separation. Neither was satisfactorily achieved since Ellen Stock would not agree to Aaron Stock's terms:
Mr Stock wants me either to remain at home pennyless, as an underling to his own daughter, or to
be kept by anyone that will take me. I cannot agree to such a reconciliation, or such a separation, whilst he has plenty of money. I am obliged totally to withdraw myself from any domestic affairs, in obedience to my husband's orders; to live in an apartment alone; not to sit at table with the family, but to have my meat sent to me; and amuse myself as I can.101
Later the same month Ellen applied to her lawyer brother again cataloguing her grievances: Stock rebuffed all attempts at affectionate contact, kept her totally without money, made her eat the servant's fare or go without, informed servants of household affairs long before their mistress, encouraged his daughters to conduct the house as they saw fit, periodically ordered her out of room and house, and ridiculed her face and figure.
Tom Weeton's intervention two days later brought only temporary respite. Subsequent letters of recrimination indicate that on at least four occasions between the summer of 1818 and February 1822, Ellen Stock was forced to flee the house with Mary, taking refuge with neighbours in Wigan and friends across the north-west. Each flight ended in ignominy; financial pressure forcing her miserably back to Aaron Stock. In 1819 Stock demoralized his wife still further by relegating her to the back quarters of the Chapel Lane factory and sending Mary to boarding school. Thereafter, he rericted Ellen's access to her daughter and intercepted her letters. Between 1820 and 1822 Ellen Stock was assaulted by her husband, threatened with the lunatic asylum and twice arrested at her husband's instigation. Fearing she would be murdered or transported if she stayed and finding it increasingly difficult to procure clothes and even food in exile, Ellen Stock eventually agreed to an unjust deed of separation signed in early 1822.102
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