The Gentleman's Daughter

by Amanda Vickery

  The scale of food processing was consistent with the overall tenor of Mrs Shackleton's provisioning. Many commodities were bought annually in staggering bulk, such as malt, flour, sugar, salt, wine, candles and soap. On arrival, these products were inventoried, labelled if appropriate, and put into storage. It was Elizabeth Shackleton and not the cook-housekeeper who monitored the amount of food in the household if the sheer number of inventories in her diaries are anything to go by.79 Indeed, long after her removal to Pasture House, Mrs Shackleton continued to order the groceries for Alkincoats. In addition to the role of head-provisioner, Mrs Shackleton assumed the duties of a guardian of supplies. Minute testimony to her surveillance is provided by numerous, annotated inventories and her reaction to waste. The squandering of supplies on the part of careless or prodigal servants was condemned. This mistress prided herself on sound stewardship and resented any interference therein. Predictably, interference was yet another of Mr Shackleton's offences: ‘Mr S. exceeding bad … as soon as ever he came down this morning he drank White Wine. S. threw that bottle down & another of red Port and broke them both, Sad terrible housekeeping indeed.’80 Nowhere in the diaries, however, is there any suggestion or expectation that the mistress of the house would herself prepare food on a routine basis. Mrs Shackleton did make her husband a special cream cheese as a peace offering, but the power of the gesture lay in the exceptional character of her labour. A lady did not make family meals, instead she took pains to see that her cook joined ‘Oeconomy with Neatness and Elegance’ in the spreading of her tables.81

  One of the most distinctive and traditional aspects of genteel housekeeping was the production and distribution of medicine. It is a commonplace that seventeenth-century gentlewomen saw the liberal dispensation of medicine and succour as part of their remit; a notable example being Lady Grace Mildmay and her herbal remedies.82 As already noted, the female role of sick-nurse was long established, all but inescapable, and long enduring. Medicinal recipes remained a familiar currency of women's correspondence throughout the period. Moreover, informal medicinal philanthropy still survived here and there. For instance, Lady Lawson, wife of Sir Henry Lawson of Brough, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, had a local reputation among the poor in the 1750s for being ‘skilful in medicines and bountiful in bestowing them’, while in Denbighshire, Lady Wynne was eulogized in 1748 for a lifetime of relieving the poor with food, clothes and physick: ‘a rare example in this extravagant and luxurious age’. In the Parker network, Barbara Stanhope was noted for ‘the art of Quacking’.83 Mrs Shackleton, for her part, was celebrated for the production of reasonably priced rabies medicine. She inherited a recipe and reputation for the making of rabies medicine from her first husband. Robert Parker (who studied medicine at Cambridge) and a Mr Hill of Ormskirk, Lancashire (apparently a merchant), had sold their ‘Cure for Hydrophobia’ throughout the 1740s and 1750s. Robert Parker's cure and public spirit was the subject of a letter to the Gentleman's Magazine in August 1753:

  One Mr Parker, a gentleman of considerable fortune near Colne, in Lancashire, has a certain and speedy remedy for that dreadful distemper [Hydrophobia] which I never heard to fail except once, which failure was occasioned by the persons own folly … There has been a great many hundreds cured by him, for which he takes no more than half a crown; I never heard he gave above one dose which always does the business; every patient is obliged to go to him for he gives it with his own hands, and will send it to nobody: indeed for a dog he will send it made up with a kind of paste.84

  After Robert Parker's death in 1758, Elizabeth determined to perpetuate his public spirit, so she took over the production of the medicine and sold it at the modest price of a shilling a bottle.85 In 1776 she passed the recipe on to her son John Parker, much to his satisfaction, but continued making the medicine right up to her death in 1781.86 Unlike Robert Parker, if we are to believe the Gentleman's Magazine, she was prepared to send the mixture long distances, although consumers also came in person, or sent agents from far afield. Appendix 6 shows that the market for her medicine extended north and west to Westmorland, Cumberland and Scotland, north-east to County Durham, and south to Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.

  Elizabeth Shackleton enjoyed considerable provincial fame through her medicine. The potion needed no introduction in 1777 to the readers of the Leeds Mercury:

  A caution to the Inhabitants of Leeds, and the Neighbouring Villages. Within this fortnight past several dogs have gone mad in this town and neighbourhood, which have not only bit many other dogs, but what is more melancholy, no less than eighteen persons are now taking the Colne Medicine, having been bit also …87

  Shackleton's reputation can also be deduced from the social character of her custom, comprehending labourers, farmers and landowners in the locality, and retailers, titled gentry and the nobility across the north. Without straying from her medicine room, she enjoyed professional intercourse with the likes of Sir James Lowther, Sir George Saville, Lord Scarborough and the Duke of Hamilton. By this emphasis, the medicine business appears an exercise in modest enterprise, public spirit and, in modern terms, networking. There is no evidence that Elizabeth Shackleton actively exploited these exalted contacts, yet they must have reflected on her social credit at home. But how did medicine production marry with conventional huswifery? From a long historical perspective, the trade appears a curious hybrid of ancient responsibilities and new commercial practices. As noted, the elite housewife's talent for medicinal charity was well established. This traditional inheritance perhaps accounts for the ‘public-spirited’ pricing system, and the readiness with which the widow took over the job. On the other hand, the Parker remedy competed in a world of heavily advertised patent medicines and undoubtedly benefited from the commercial climate this advertising created, in particular an increased readiness to trust a bottled potion brewed by a stranger. There is no evidence that a paid advertisement was ever taken out in the northern papers, but it is probable that word of mouth promotion lent the product an important credibility which could only enhance the quality trade. Indeed, satisfied customers applied again and again. In sum, if the prime motive was the garnering of reputation, not profit, then Elizabeth Shackleton's marketing strategy was well designed. Gratifyingly, for this genteel housekeeper, messing about with pots and pans translated into public renown.

  Dedicated and fastidious though Elizabeth Shackleton might have been, she was by no means an unusual housewife. The surviving records of neighbouring landowners, the Listers of Gisburn Park, confirm an already familiar picture of genteel housekeeping in the rural Pennines. Letters written by Mrs Beatrix Lister and her daughter in the 1760s and 1770s concern medicinal remedies, the making of curtains, sewing waistcoats, the brewing of ale, the tending of bees and the grape harvest.88 In fact, the evidence we have for the early eighteenth century suggests that the content of rural housekeeping was remarkably enduring. The anonymous account books of a Furness Quakeress written in the 1710s and 1720s, reveal her buying seeds for a kitchen garden, buying cherries and sugar for preserving, paying someone to gather and pickle mushrooms, bringing beehives from Penrith, making cushions and paying women to help with the washing.89 Urban housekeeping, on the other hand, was further removed from husbandry, but the town and country contrast should still not be overstated. Between the ages of ten and thirteen, merchant's daughter Mary Chorley was taught the rudiments of housekeeping by her Lancaster aunts. In the 1770s she learned to bake, pickle, preserve, garden, make shirts, shifts and dresses, and to create homely remedies. In the same town in the 1780s clergyman's widow Jane Pedder made and mended her son's shirts, tended an urban kitchen-garden, and had a brew-house installed at her home in Bridge Street.90 Moving further afield, however, it becomes immediately apparent that keeping house in some polite towns represented a different proposition. As the wife of a solicitor in fashionable Pontefract in the 1750s, Jane Scrimshire had no poultry yard, hotbeds or dairy to superintend. Similarly, Bessy Ramsden made no mention of
keeping livestock or growing produce at Charterhouse Square between 1765 and 1780. Instead, she recorded her negotiations at the victualling office and bargain-hunting expeditions in the city. When Reverend Ramsden contemplated leaving London to take up a living in Cambridgeshire, Bessy Ramsden acknowledged her ignorance, telling her cousin ‘you must come to teach me to Farm as I shall want a deal of instruction for a country Life’. Nevertheless, these friends shared many assumptions about the constituents of housekeeping, as indicated when Bessy wrote thanking Elizabeth for the gift of a home-cured ham: ‘[I] shall keep it to credit our kitchen, for I always think they are a[n] ornament and look like good housekeeping.’91 Moreover, Bessy Ramsden not only performed all the family's sewing and mending, but had to do the same for forty Charterhouse schoolboys in the absence of the matron. As she tartly added ‘I dout Mr R. never menson this particular’. Meanwhile, Jane Scrimshire was engaged in pickling, preserving and distributing medicinal recipes to her friends.92 In short, while the exact content of housekeeping varied from country, to county town, to polite resort, to the metropolis, three common elements are identifiable: provisioning, sewing and rudimentary medicine. Of these three elements, it was the character of provisioning which was most dependent upon geography.

  There is no evidence to support the theory that active housekeeping was in steady decline in these years, although, as noted for textiles, there may have been a shift over a much longer period in the composition of genteel housekeeping. This was a shift away from household production of raw materials and their manufacture towards final processing and management of a wider variety of goods purchased from retailers in a semifinished or finished state. A shift from partial self-provisioning to greater reliance on retail provisioning was almost certainly characteristic of the supply of medicines between the late sixteenth and the early nineteenth centuries and may have been true of foodstuffs, although the long-term history of household food supply is a subject that has hardly been researched at all. What did not change in our period was the active and demanding nature of the mainly managerial role housekeeping required of genteel women.

  In the 1800s Dolly Clayton used her pocket diaries in a similar fashion to Mrs Shackleton, recording meat purchases and bottling.93 Letters written in the 1810s give partial insight into Eliza Whitaker's housekeeping. At the very least, her household activities comprehended the active supervision of extensive scouring and whitewashing, general provisioning, the preserving of food, the making of ketchup, and an experiment with keeping poultry. Her friend Mrs Bishop of Roby near Skelmersdale was an enthusiastic farmer, who kept Eliza Whitaker minutely informed of crop yields and livestock. Like Elizabeth Shackleton, Mrs Bishop both kept pigs and prided herself on frugality. She was proud to announce in 1812, ‘we do not waste even a cabbage stalk. I inspect the curing of the bacon & (excuse boasting) it is excellent & much admired …’94 In the 1810s and 1820s in Selby, solicitor's wife Ellen Parker sewed clothes for her children and talked of the time consumed by her duty to ‘superintend our domestic concerns’.95 In the same decades the Tathams lived in comparatively straitened circumstances in Southall, yet they enjoyed a prosperity of roses, lilies, lilacs and laburnums and boasted that their bountiful kitchen garden kept them almost completely in fruit and vegetables. In July 1819 Sarah Tatham was ‘so much employd now’ with preserving ‘that Time outstrips me’.96 Anna Larpent's ‘domestic employments’ in Regency London included settling the accounts, writing letters on business and regarding servants, cutting out shirts and shifts, knitting, looking over household linen and generally ‘arranging family matters’.97 Attention to detail remained the hallmark of the effective housekeeper: ‘Various domestic businesses occupied me, not to be entered trivial in themselves, but necessary, the Atoms of which domestic duties are composed, which when formed in a Mass produce confusion if not attended to.’98 Early nineteenth-century mistresses were every bit as ‘busy in domesticities’ and minute in their supervision as had been their forebears.

  All the available commentary from the early eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries suggests that genteel housekeepers were interventionist household managers, who routinely performed specialist services for their families, such as shirt ruffling and mending and who were prepared to participate in heavy-duty housekeeping when necessary. Under ideal conditions, a mistress's labour was more managerial than manual, but in this she was not alone. Gentlemen did not, after all, dig ditches or pack cloth themselves, but instructed servants, labourers and apprentices to do it for them. Had any of these families experienced a radical upturn in their fortunes then perhaps a female withdrawal from all but decorative housekeeping and nominal supervision might be expected. Increasing wealth and a corresponding multiplication of servants would erode many of the functions of the mistress-housekeeper. Yet only a tiny proportion of the employer class could employ a vast army of servants with its own executive division, and even those who could were not necessarily liberated from management, for, as the moralists often inquired, who shall oversee the overseers, if not the mistress?

  It is with a family as with a common wealth, the more numerous and luxurious it becomes, the more difficult it is to govern it properly. Though the great are placed above the little attentions and employments to which a private gentlewoman must dedicate much of her time, they have a larger and more important sphere of action, in which, if they are indolent and neglectful, the whole government of their house and fortune must fall into irregularity. Whatever number of deputies they may employ to overlook their affairs, they must themselves overlook those deputies, and be ultimately answerable for the conduct of the whole.99

  Be that as it may, the experience of peers and plutocrats who enjoyed an annual income in excess of three thousand pounds cannot be expected to resemble the work practices of the families who lived on a modest three hundred pounds a year. Such incomes were far too small to sustain the specialized staff necessary to liberate a woman from constant domestic attention. In any case, the difficulties gentlewomen faced maintaining a staff of just four maidservants, meant few were at liberty to languish on their couches.

  Elite women may have softened towards selected servants, but they all resented the upstart who tried to break down the forms of subordination. Furthermore, they expected to preside over housekeeping and were keenly resentful of encroachments on their authority. One of Mrs Shackleton's many complaints against her husband was that he meddled with her management. He berated her for reproving the servants and thereby encouraged their insolence: ‘Mr S. is quite cruel, ungenerous – takes the servants parts – Against me. He lets them abuse me scandalously & never contradicts them. All wrong I do. all right they do – God Almighty Bless Preserve & be with me.’100 And thus he dangerously undermined her authority. From Elizabeth Shackleton's rancour, it can be argued that she expected to exercise absolute authority over female servants and over male servants when they worked within the house. One of Ellen Stock's many grievances against her cruel husband Aaron in the 1810s was his determination to suborn the servants, rendering her isolated, impotent but perhaps above all degraded, in her own household.101 Sarah Cowper, the wife of a Hertfordshire baronet, acidly complained that her husband ‘restrains me in all my due privileges’: he rebuked her before servants for giving a neighbour flowers without his permission, he denied her custody of sheets and tablecloths, humiliated her before guests, objected to her tea and cocoa account and protected faulty servants. In sum, he prevented any administration on her part. Imagine her chagrin when she visited ‘where they tell of ladies that manage their domestic affairs in such a manner as argues they have much power: then home I come a humble mouse gnawing on the thought that in forty years I have not gained the privilege to change a cook maid on any account whatsoever. Who can help being uneasy at these matters? Though I keep silence my heart doth burn within me.’ The outrage felt by all three women suggests that John Shackleton, Aaron Stock and Sir William Cowper were all acting contrary to received assumption
s about gender and authority. In fact, Sarah Cowper was adamant that established convention was on her side: ‘I just now met with a note that tells the difference between a wife and a concubine. The wives administered the affairs of the family, but the concubines were not to meddle with them. Sure I have been kept as a concubine not a wife.’ Even the Old Testament stressed that a wife was not a servant in the family, but a partner in its government. As the fictional Betsy Thoughtless concluded when her ungrateful husband demanded that housekeeping expenses and her servant's wages be met from her pin money, ‘Is this to be a wife? – Is this the state of Wedlock? – Call it rather an Egyptian bondage; – the cruel task-masters of the Israelites could exact no more.’102 Women anticipated allowing men all the rights of their place, but at the same time determined to maintain their own. They certainly could not countenance degradation in their own households.

  A wife's authority was sanctioned by custom and case law. When Lancashire and Cheshire women filed in the Chester church courts for a separate maintenance, they repeatedly asserted the undermining of their authority over servants and domestic accounting as supporting testimony of male abuse. Moreover, the judges of the Victorian divorce courts were strikingly supportive on the frequent occasions when an aggrieved woman found herself ‘entirely deposed … from her natural position as mistress of her husband's house.’103 Ideally, a gentleman respected his housekeeper's contribution and did not trespass upon her household domain. In practice, he may not have been able to stop himself doing so, but by his actions he forfeited public sympathy and reputation. Beatrix Lister's reassessment of a vulgar, drunken guest in 1773, in the light of his esteem for his wife's housewifery, shows the reverse process at work: ‘Ye only thing that [made] him the least tolerable was, his commending his wife as a notable good houskeeper, & took great [care] of his children and himself.’104