The Gentleman's Daughter

by Amanda Vickery

  Not unnaturally, Ellen Stock's manuscripts offer the case for her own defence. Autobiography represented a self-proclaimed effort to win her daughter's sympathy: ‘it is surely proper that my daughter should be acquainted with the truth … It is for my little Mary principally I write this.’ To acknowledge such partisanship, however, is not to suggest that Ellen's account had no foundation in events (the assaults and arrests have been checked against local court records and found to be accurate), rather it alerts us to the inevitable partiality of her narrative. In her letters and autobiography, she represented herself as a blameless wife, beset by the unwarranted abuses of a tyrant. As proof of proper conjugality on her own part, Ellen Stock cited the dedicated mending of Stock's oldest clothes, a chore she hated, and the cheerful relinquishing of all her property save a lump sum of twenty-three pounds pocket money. Ellen maintained throughout that the attempt to please was my ‘daily and hourly study’.103

  When still a spinster Miss Weeton had disapproved of Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son (1774), because of the author's contempt for matrimony. She believed men and women should marry their social equals in order to achieve harmony and balance. From her criticisms of her then employer Edward Pedder, it is clear she believed the ideal husband was a dignified ‘senior partner’ who protected and esteemed his wife. The ideal wife was industrious and dutiful, yet more than a mere ‘shirt-and-pudding-maker’. Although appalled at Edward Pedder's despotic abuse of his young bride, the governess still counselled submission: ‘I say it is a disgrace to the dignity of the female character for any woman to strive to become master in her husband's house’, and could not condone Mary Pedder's flight to her father.104 But unequal partnership was no more palatable in her own case, partaking more of naked tyranny than benign paternalism: ‘He that should nourish, cherish and protect me … he is the man who makes it his sport to afflict me, to expose me to every hard-ship to every insult.’ In negotiating her husband's authority, Mrs Stock deployed all her persuasions, but quickly learned that Aaron Stock was not susceptible to influence: ‘no powers of rhetoric will work upon him…’ She began to feel that ‘a severity so everlasting’ justified some resistance. Drawing on her experience in the Pedder household, she developed a new strategy, outlined here in June 1816:

  The man who rules by tyranny, can never be obeyed by affection; he is submitted to from fear, and delights in abject submission; it gratifies the pride of his heart to see everyone trembling around him. But mark! the tyrant in power, is ever the slave when humbled; he knows no medium, and the only way of living peaceably with him, is … not to be afraid of him; for tyrants are always cowards.105

  Unfortunately, this ‘judicious opposition’ met with a modified success for ten months only. As Ellen Stock came to recognize her powerlessness (‘My late exertions have only been like the weak struggles of a drowning insect, and if I cannot be rescued I must inevitably sink!’) her written response to suffering wavered between stubborn indignation, a struggle to attain a state of Christian resignation and outright spiritual despair: ‘My life, my strength cannnot sustain me much more.’106

  A traditional tactic open to the persecuted wife was to call on the intervention of kin and the censure of public opinion, but if Aaron Stock's four siblings sympathized with their benighted sister-in-law, then they lacked the spirit to intercede, as her plaint reveals:

  if a few individuals would interest themselves for me, the fear of what the world may say, would induce Mr S. to treat me with more appearance of kindness. But he overawes all who come near him … Although many despise him, none dare shew any disrespect in his presence; and whilst they shew him so much outward attention, it is tacit encouragement to his tyranny at home.107

  In sum, Ellen Stock's manuscripts conjure a public opinion critical of blatant marital oppression, but ambivalent about personal intervention. She was taken in and supported by a neighbouring doctor and his wife and found a late servant willing to testify to Aaron Stock's ‘cruel usage’, yet most observers seemed to think that active mediation fell to kin.

  Ellen Stock threw herself on her brother's mercy and moderate success greeted her attempts to shame him into action. It was perhaps the threat of local scandal which motivated his initial efforts. ‘I would not, at this time, have applied to you’ wrote Ellen in January 1818, ‘had it not been frequently said to me “Why do you not apply to your brother? As he lives so near, it is his duty to protect an only sister from the ill-usage of an unkind unfeeling husband”.’108 However, Tom Weeton's half-hearted intercession did little to deter Aaron Stock. In all probability Weeton simply desired that the affair be kept quiet, while his sister had long been convinced that only the ‘arm of the law’ would ensure Stock kept to his promises. Although a solicitor himself, Tom Weeton refused to defend his sister's interests in negotiation of the deed of separation, pleading his fear of inordinate expenses and that supporting her case would lead Aaron Stock to give up the lease on his mother-in-law's premises. He refused to act as her bondsman. Astoundingly, he chose to act for his brother-in-law instead, apparently encouraging Stock to even harsher terms and advising him to insist that Ellen Stock sign the deed heard read but unseen. Thereby, Mrs Stock unknowingly limited herself to seeing her daughter just three times a year and agreed never to visit Wigan, or to live within a two-and-a-half-mile radius of the town, in return for a yearly income of seventy pounds. Ellen Stock never forgave such ‘unbrotherlike conduct’, relieving her feelings in a twelve-thousand-word narrative sent to Tom Weeton in 1822 (which provides much of the detail of this account) castigating him for his conduct throughout: ‘Your cruel neglect was the astonishment of great numbers in Wigan, who said you would even be quiet if I were in murdering.’109 The confederacy of husband, brother and lawyer shows patriarchy at its most cruel and crushing.

  The Shackleton and Stock relationships provide ample evidence of the negative potential of marriage for women in our period. Although John Shackleton only threatened what Aaron Stock carried through, the two cases bear interesting similarities. Both the Shackleton and Stock marriages represented a second attachment for one of the parties, and both households contained stepchildren, whose presence inevitably complicated the creation of trusting, domestic unions. Both Elizabeth Shackleton and Ellen Stock felt their role as mistress to be in jeopardy, fearing their authority over servants was being undermined and, at times, experiencing miserable isolation in their own households. Yet, whatever the cruelty they suffered, neither woman questioned the validity of marriage, nor the principle of patriarchal authority, rather they mourned the fact that their husbands bore so little resemblance to their masculine ideal. Both automatically looked to their male kin for relief, only to find them distant and ineffectual, or sadistically obstructive. Both cases reinforce the general conclusion that faced with determined oppression, a wife who lacked powerful, sympathetic kin or interested neighbours could expect little formal redress. Stylistically, Ellen Stock's account differs from that of Elizabeth Shackleton in the degree of cohesion the aspiring authoress imposed on her retrospective narrative and the extent to which she reflected on her own apparently spotless marital conduct. Obviously, Ellen Stock's degradation outstripped anything suffered by Elizabeth Shackleton, who was released by death not divorce from bed and board. Ellen Stock's accusations of the ‘cruelty’ she met with from ‘a monster of a husband’ may sound extreme or even crazed, but appear a standard feature of the rhetoric of matrimonial breakdown when judged against the records of the church courts. When Lancashire and Cheshire women filed for a separate maintenance in the Chester Church Court in the later eighteenth century they made familiar allegations of barbarous behaviour: accusing their husbands of denying them sufficient victuals, clothing and other necessaries of life; showing hatred, aversion and physical brutality; threatening to murder or maim; and keeping company with prostitutes and adulteresses. Indeed, when Margaret Hunt examined separation suits at the London Consistory Court in the years 1711 to 1713, sh
e found that in half the cases, husbands had threatened to commit their wives to a house of correction or the madhouse. In fact, looking at in another way, an awareness of the acceptable grounds for a legal separation probably structured Ellen Weeton Stock's narrative, which unfolds like a deposition.110 Clearly, we should add the deposition to the novel and the letter-writing manual in any further consideration of the rhetorical models which informed the language of marriage in our period.

  The perfect genteel alliance was both prudent and affectionate. Exactly how prudent a choice should be was open to interpretation, however. Possibly opinions on this matter differed most strongly from the contrary vantage-points of youth or age. Yet we would be naive to assume that young suitors themselves did not find their hearts beating faster at the prospect of ‘a most accomplished young lady, with a handsome fortune’, or even ‘an agreable young lady with a genteel fortune’,111 while money and magnificence were conducive to passion in many a female breast. Even one of literature's most ardent heroines, Austen's Marianne Dashwood, who claimed in 1811 that wealth and grandeur had nothing to do with happiness, could not conceive of marrying without a ‘competence’ of about two thousand pounds a year, to support ‘a proper establishment of servants, a carriage, perhaps two, and hunters’.112 The length of a man's rent-roll remained the ultimate aphrodisiac. Of course, families with fortunes to consider did not hand over their daughters to any old adventurer. Male suitors had to plan a romantic campaign with military precision; its skirmishes and reverses welcomed by the confident as a thrilling trial of their masculine audacity. No one expected courtship to be the work of a moment. Even for the perfectly matched, courtship always culminated in tedious financial negotiation, in which the interests of the parties were usually represented by their legal guardians; a device which at least meant that young lovers could project all mercenary motives on their elderly representatives. Courtship, settlement and marriage remained bywords for bargain and sale throughout this period.

  For all that, courtship was the supreme adventure for an agreeable young lady with a genteel fortune. Perhaps for the only time in her life, a woman was the absolute centre of attention, and often the protagonist of a thrilling drama. Many walked a tightrope of romantic excitement: imprudent encouragement smacked of filial disobedience and could end in disinheritance and disaster, but a fastidious decorum might dishearten a suitor and lead to aching disappointment. Nevertheless, however interesting a woman's dilemmas, her star was never higher and the girl of family, fortune and character could make a career of her coming out. The eponymous heroine of Elizabeth Haywood's Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) rejoiced in her reign: ‘As the barometer is governed by the weather, she said to herself, so is the man in love governed by the woman he admires: he is a meer machine, – acts nothing of himself, – has no will or power of his own, but is lifted up, or depressed, just as the charmer of his heart is in humour.’ Is it to be wondered that the lively Betsy preferred entertaining a ‘plurality of lovers’ and savouring the triumph of ‘awing the proudest into submission’, to settling down with the first man of virtue who came along?113

  Yet, the sought-after maiden exercised only a ‘short-lived tyranny’, as Mary Wollstonecraft warned. Few men expected to carry the elaborate homage and tedious forms of courtship into marriage. Indeed, the villainous suitor of Haywood's Betsy Thoughtless was only biding his time, having ‘armed himself with patience, to submit to everything his tyrant should inflict, in the hope that it would one day be his turn to impose laws …’114 And therein lay the rub. For all the poetry of courtship, marriage remained a social and economic contract written in sober prose, so many a bride was doomed to disillusionment. ‘How soon is the painted Scene changed’, reflected the clear-eyed Arabella, ‘and the same Woman, that just now personated a Lady is anon to be a Waiting-maid, a Cook and a Nurse: And well it is, if after all she can gain the Applause and Approbation of her Proprietor.’115 So whether a woman was content in marriage turned in large measure on her ability to resign herself to the traditional roles, responsibilities and relationship of husband and wife. As a philosophical Anna Larpent reminisced in 1800: ‘I have been married 18 years today I have had my roughs & smooths but the former chiefly arose from expecting too much.’116 Not that an automatic desire to rebel against matrimonial convention should be assumed. Many women exhibited a craving to do their duty as ardent as any hunger for narrow, personal gratification. For, as Ann Pellet observed, ‘there is certainly a secret pleasure in doing what we ought, tho' perhaps one don't meet with a suitable return’. In fact, ‘the consciousness of doing right’ in the face of the most extreme provocation seems to have offered some women a near-mystical satisfaction in their matrimonial martyrdom.117 Doubtless the highest conception of happiness for some was the knowledge that they had pleased their husbands: ‘To a slave's fetters add a slavish mind,’ requested one cynic, ‘that I may cheerfully your will obey.’118

  Still, marriage was not all sacrifice and submission. The deferential utterance is not an unerring sign of a deferential spirit, as Georgian men were only too aware. Wives, like servants, might only offer ‘eye-service’ – a superficial deference which masked a contemptuous heart. As E.P. Thompson has reflected, ‘The same man who touches his forelock to the squire by day – and who goes down in history as an example of deference – may kill his sheep, snare his pheasant or poison his dogs at night.’119 Lip-service to masculine dominion abounds in genteel correspondence, but some playfulness is also apparent. Wives made arch references to their formal subjection, as here, where Jane Scrimshire signs off a letter: ‘my Husband sends you His best wishes not forgetting your worthy Master’, and Bessy Ramsden mocks her schoolmaster husband: ‘then comes home my Lord and Master for his breakfast which must not be delay[ed] a moment …’120 In fact, some brides seemed to exult in the fact that they had a husband to order them about in the first place. The self-possessed Anne Parker of Cuerdon, for one, liked to dramatize her matrimonial encounters, advertizing her gracious submission to the great, northern gentleman she sought to tame:

  Now for an Account of what I saw at our Races which Entre Nous I woud have left & gone to Visit my friends at a Distance but my Robin Absolute (upon my hinting to him with Great Submission) my inclination of being absent mutterd an Ejaculation which sounded so Like Swearing I was half frightened & then told me in plain English He insisted upon my being at the Races & I might Invite any Company I chose to have with me at Cuerdon at that time. I believe I Pouted a Little for Softening his Voice he added I beg as a favor you will Stay the Races & you shall Visit who you Please afterwards. I then made Him a very Pretty Curtsey & said to be sure Mr Parker as you have an Inclination for me to be at the races I shall oblige myself for going to them on those terms (nicely said was it not).

  Anne Parker's complaints about ‘Mr Husband’ had the unmistakable air of self-congratulation: ‘To be sure I was born to be Contradicted (oh! foh! how I stink of Matrimony).’121 Perhaps she sought to exaggerate his bluff jurisdiction the better to spotlight her own civilizing mission, for the softening power of female influence was an article of eighteenth-century common sense and a point of covert female pride.

  A clever woman managed to assert herself within the paradigm of male supremacy and female subjection, it was often suggested. Lord Halifax's thoughts on the bride's empire of tears were endlessly recycled in eighteenth-century print. A Picture of true Conjugal Felicity of 1765 offered the example of the mild, agreeable Amanda, who consecrated her life ‘to the full discharge of her relative duties’ and put her excellent husband Manley so at ease, that she was able ‘to enjoy the amiable female privileges of ruling by obeying, of commanding by submitting, and of being perfectly happy from consulting another's happiness’. Their harmonious marriage represented ‘strength and softness blended together’. While Manley ‘must soften to be happy’, Amanda ‘must subdue by obedience’. Presumably Amanda's fluffy charm settled on Manley's authority like a smothering blanket. Rous
seau offered the same assurance that a woman could govern the governer: ‘Woman's empire is an empire of gentleness, skill and obligingness; her orders are caresses, her threats are tears. She ought to reign in the home as as a minister does in a state – by getting herself commanded to do what she wants to do.’ The stern law lord Hery Home reiterated this creed: ‘A man indeed bears rule over his wife's conduct: his will is law. Providence however has provided her with means to bear rule over his will. He governs by law, she by persuasion. Nor can her influence ever fail, if supported by sweetness of temper and zeal to make him happy.’122

  Of course, such advice was far from radical in its intentions, but it nevertheless identified a comfortable fiction that many women lived by: ‘I am glad [women] can find, in the imaginary Empire of Beauty, a consolation for being excluded every part of Government in the State’, despaired Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in 1737.123 If beauty alone failed to do its work, then a more drastic tactic was the exaggerated fulfilment of given orders, the parade of excessive obedience rather than open defiance, by which means a woman might expose the tyranny of an authority figure. Fanatically dutiful daughters threatened to sacrifice themselves on the altar of paternal dictate and good wives were not above the ostentatious exhibition of their bondage. Thus, when Mrs Elizabeth Montagu's husband refused her permission to visit a friend, she assented to his order, but proposed to decline the invitation citing his refusal as her specific reason. Her embarassed husband then relented and said she could go for three days. Not satisfied with this small concession, Montagu insisted that he frank the letter that contained her explanation:

  You would have laughd if you had seen the gravity with which he frank'd a cover for ye letter which I said I was to write to acquaint her with his denial, he thought I shd repeat my request, point du tout, I took the cover with great indifference & was determined either to have my pleasure or give a signal mark of my obedience to his noble exertion of prerogative.