All the available commentary suggests that gentlemen and gentlewomen were seen to perform distinct work roles, with discrete areas of expertise and responsibility. Contemporaries stressed the momentous change in a woman's life when she became ‘the mistress of a family’, while even conservative prescriptive literature emphasized female dominion indoors, and directed advice to women on ‘the government of servants’. It was widely accepted that the post of mistress could not be adequately filled by an upper servant. The desire for a prudent household manager had long been a real consideration in male courtship decisions and praise for a wife's competence was a traditional feature of the widower's eulogy. Not surprisingly, bachelors tended ‘to set up housekeeping’ with sisters or nieces wherever possible, while bereaved householders often called upon the services of their older daughters, or their dead wife's kin. For an effective housekeeper was a necessity, given the peripatetic life many sportsmen, administrators and businessmen expected to lead. When Robert Parker's grandmother and housekeeper lay dying, he was unable to fulfill his administrative responsibilities. ‘I was summoned to Lancaster upon the Grandjury, but cd not possibly go, as I had noone to take care of my Family. They say the judge is very severe upon the Non Appearance of jurors, if so Imagines I shall be fined …’ And so he came to recognize just how much his peace of mind and public service rested upon his grandmother's government: ‘you are not a stranger [to what] advantage has accrued to me [from] her Civility, consequently must know how great my loss will be.’105 A gentleman was expected to honour his housekeeper's authority. Most were only too happy to do so. Thus, the role of the dignified, efficient housekeeper was available to eighteenth and early nineteenth-century gentlewomen as a source of both personal satisfaction and public credit. For a house well regulated was a subtly burnished badge of decent gentility.
5
Elegance
GENTILITY FOUND ITS RICHEST EXPRESSION in objects. Indubitably mahogany, silver, porcelain and silk all announced the wealth and taste of the privileged. A shared material culture united polite families: almost anyone who was anyone in the North-West, for instance, be he lawyer, merchant or small landowner, bought his handsome, russet, dining-room furniture from the same workshop, that of the rising firm of Gillows of Lancaster. In the gleaming polish of these tables and chairs, visiting retailers and yeomen might discover something of the gloss they lacked. Yet, stylistically, Gillows furniture was characterized by a rather provincial fashionability, wanting the finesse of the Chippendales and the Linnells bespoken by the metropolitan elite.1 Hence, the most imposing and expensive pieces of genteel furniture distinguished the polite from both the vulgar multitude on the one hand, and the ultra-fashionable quality on the other. In short, these mahogany objects embodied the social distinctions of provincial gentility.
However ‘behold my social status’ is not the only message Georgian possessions conveyed, as John Gregory alerted his daughter: ‘You will not easily believe how much we consider your dress as expressive of your characters’, he revealed, ‘Vanity, levity, sluttishness, folly, appear through it. An elegant simplicity is an equal proof of taste and delicacy,’ he dourly concluded.2 That clothes expressed personality was a point which could also be made in lighter vein. Mrs Thrale's parlour games, for example, involved the likening of friends to types of silk (among other things). Thereby, Frances Burney was compared to ‘a lilac Tabby’, Sophy Streatfield to ‘a pea Green Satten’, Fanny Brown ‘a Jonquil Colourd Lustring’ and Dr Johnson a ‘Marone’.3 However, the eighteenth-century commonplace that objects had complex associations comes as something of a miraculous revelation to historians. It has long been taken as read that the motive driving all consumers was a simple obsession with keeping up with the Joneses,4 and if consumers in general have been seen as socially emulative, then the queen of grasping, envious shopping is the female consumer. Unquestioned belief in the shallow selfishness of female desire has dogged historical discussion for decades.
Surprisingly, it was a satire of culture and attitudes in late nineteenth-century New York, Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, which did most to influence the way historians characterized the elite woman's role in the world of goods. According to Veblen, the lady of the ‘leisure class’ played a crucial role in the performance of conspicuous leisure. Innocent of paid employment, she was ultimate testimony to her husband's wealth and status, the clothes on her back the tangible proof of his purchasing power. Her unpaid work, the ‘painstaking attention to the service of the master’ and ‘the maintenance and elaboration of the house-hold paraphernalia’, was a category of leisure, since these tasks were ‘unproductive’.5 In short, the leisured lady's economic raison d'être was to consume and display what men produced, thereby driving her less fortunate sisters to new heights of envious imitation. Veblen's pessimistic interpretation of human motivation is apparent in Neil McKendrick's explanation for expanding domestic demand and economic growth in the eighteenth century. Though women's wages may fluctuate, apparently their wants remain the same. Speaking here for every waged woman he asserts, ‘Her increased earning released her desire to compete with social superiors, a desire pent up for centuries or at least restricted to a very occasional excess … It was this new consumer demand, the mill girl who wanted to dress like a duchess … which helped to create the industrial revolution.’6
Thus we are left with the assumption that women are simply innately covetous and congenitally wistful about the prospect of upward mobility – an impression which is reinforced by traditional histories of the luxury trades and, in particular, by historians of dress. Again, women's wants and strategies are reduced to the need to ensnare a male and a compulsion to keep up with, if not beat the Joneses, in the emulation of elite style. The proof of this frivolous craving for elite modes and therefore social cachet is found in travellers' reports, satirical social commentary and moralists' diatribes, as here, when Aileen Ribeiro quotes the cynical satirist Bernard Mandeville: ‘[The] poorest labourer's wife … who scorns to wear a strong wholesome frize … will starve herself and her husband to purchase a second hand gown and petticoat, that cannot do half the service, because forsooth it is more genteel.’7
Ancient prejudices have thus been passed off as actual behaviour. Meaningful research on women's consumption and material culture in the eighteenth century is conspicuous by its absence; a suggestive article by Lorna Weatherill stands virtually alone. By comparing the inventories of men and women (spinsters and widows), Weatherill discovered a higher concentration of decorative items among the possessions of single women, but concluded that the gender contrast was too muted to suggest a distinctively feminine material subculture. Yet, unfortunately, inventories cannot determine whether men and women attached different meanings to the same artefacts, something which must be ascertained if the question posed by Weatherill herself is to be answered: did men and women have different material values in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?8
Weatherill apart, most historians have dismissed women's dealings with material things as a ‘category of leisure’, domestic material culture as an arena of female vanity, not skill, and shopping a degraded female hobby, not unpaid work. Unnecessarily reliant on Veblen, historians have reproduced a sorely impoverished assessment of material culture; assuming that beyond their material function goods only convey information about competitive status and sexuality, and that consumables once possessed carry the same social and personal meanings for all consumers. Indeed, these ideas are so commonplace it could be thought that Thorstein Veblen had absolutely the last word on consumer motivation and the symbolic character of material things, which is demonstrably not the case. The last ten years have witnessed a massive rethinking of consumer behaviour in the fields of sociology, media studies and design history. Pierre Bordieu has questioned Veblen's bedrock assumption that social competition necessarily inspires imitation, since it could just as easily provoke differentiation. Bordieu's Distinction depicts a system w
hereby each class is actively distinguishing itself from other classes, in goods and lifestyle. Dick Hebdidge's work on subcultures and style presents evidence of the appropriation rather than the emulation of elite modes and symbols in the creation of solidarity among subordinate groups, while Jean Baudrillard has questioned whether material things have fixed meanings at all. Meanwhile, imaginative discussions of the meanings of material things have long been found in anthropological theory. Building on Marcel Mauss's dissolution of the gift/commodity distinction, anthropologists have asserted that while consumption is essentially social and relational, an awareness of comparative social status need not be competitive. So, in fact, having the same consumer items as the Joneses does not necessarily involve beating them, since a shared material culture is often a factor in social solidarity and cohesion. Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood assert that the primary information goods convey is not status but character, stressing the importance of things in the construction of identity. Similarly, Daniel Miller has argued that however oppressed and apparently culturally impoverished, most people nevertheless access the creative potential of the unpromising material goods about them.9 The impact of this writing is now being felt by historians, exhibiting an increased willingness to view consumption as a contribution to the creation of culture and meanings, and the general reassessment of consumption paves the way for the historical reclamation of the female consumer in particular.10
* * *
As far as genteel women were concerned, shopping was a form of employment and one that was most effectively performed by women – note the language Elizabeth Parker used in 1751 to reprove her fiancé Robert Parker when, through careless procrastination, he bungled her commissions: ‘you really are a proper person to intrust with business … the next time I employ you, you shall be more punctual.’ Thereafter, Robert Parker appeared more mindful of his wife's instructions, apologizing from York in 1756 for silver buckles bought ‘contrary to orders’ and from Skipwith for some fancy hats, ‘don't scold abt [the] latter, for cd not bear to see [the] plain’.11 A very similar note of respectful apology was struck by William Gossip in the 1740s and 1750s: ‘I have sent you what commisions I have executed, but I am afraid I shall never get all your locks as you would have them.’12 Occasional marital disagreements over relatively minor consumption decisions illuminate the sexual division of labour as understood by genteel women. The delayed arrival of a hamper of produce from Pontefract in December 1753, prompted the following explanation from solicitor's wife Jane Scrimshire: ‘I am sorry to hear your Apples were so long travelled … but things always happen wrong when Husbands will not hearken to their Wives for I co'd not persuade Mr Scrimshire to send them to Wakefield but now as far as the Dignity of a Husband will allow He acquiesces.’ A month later Mrs Scrimshire admitted herself still ‘extremely vexed’ with Michael Scrimshire about the spoilt produce (and presumably the principle). Thereafter she ‘wo'd not let him have any Management in sending [perishables]’, and declared herself ‘determined to have my own way this time’.13 Jane Scrimshire's conviction that the management of consumption was a proper female concern is echoed in letters from Elizabeth Parker's cousin Bessy Ramsden. When despatching a box of elaborately patterned silks from London in 1764 (‘in the very politest Fash[ion]’), Mrs Ramsden's apprehensions that they were ‘too full of work’ for her cousin's taste were dismissed by her husband Reverend Ramsden. Proved right, Bessy identified unwarranted male intervention as the source of the problem: ‘Dear Cuzz, the Plot against your Peepers was not of my laying. The Patterns were of my Husband's chusing, to shew (as he says) his Taste. I tell him he had sufficiently shewn that before in his Choice of a – Wife.’14
A uniquely detailed reconstruction of the management and mechanics of consumption is permitted by Elizabeth Shackleton's thirty-nine diaries. As has already been pointed out, the diaries were divided into ‘Letters to Friends and Upon Business’, ‘Remarkable Occurrences’ and ‘Accounts’. Unfortunately, for our purposes, the accounts were not an exercise in double-entry bookkeeping, being almost exclusively concerned with expenditure. If Elizabeth Shackleton kept a global account book (which seems likely) then it has not survived. Lost with it is the possibility of a precise correlation between income and expenditure over the life-cycle.15 Not that Elizabeth Shackleton's accounts of expenditure were imprecise and unsystematic, far from it. The accuracy of her record-keeping has been verified by comparing the purchases of furniture from Gillows of Lancaster listed in the diaries and the relevant ledgers that survive for the firm.16 Elizabeth Shackleton's furniture accounts were scrupulously exact in specification and accurate down to shillings and pence. In the case of furniture-buying, at the very least, the diaries offer an unerring record.
Among many other functions, the diaries served as a reference manual on the business of consumption and servicing a household. Mrs Shackleton kept a tally of the provisions, clothes and household goods she ordered from local retailers, usually with a note their quality or serviceability and price. When commissioning London relatives to purchase goods on her behalf, she sent remarkably detailed orders and specified how the proxy consumer was to be repaid and the means by which the purchases should be conveyed (either by coach, carrier or personally delivered). All this information was duly transcribed into the diaries. When parcels and boxes of metropolitan products arrived, Mrs Shackleton listed their contents, registering how well they had survived the journey and whether they suited her taste. A general interest in the price, specification and availability of consumer goods is catalogued in the diaries (‘Bought a small quantity of Mackrell at three pence a pound from Preston. I never saw any in Lancashire but once before’), while her correspondence reveals that she exchanged such information with her friends on a regular basis.17 Although ultimate control of financial resources in the Shackleton marriage remains obscure,18 there is no evidence that Elizabeth Shackleton felt financially constrained. The Shackleton marriage was riven with strife, yet there is no evidence of conflict over financial priorities, or Mrs Shackleton's independence as a consumer. The household sustained only a handful of servants, and certainly was not grand enough to support a house steward, a clerk of the kitchen or an executive housekeeper to manage and monitor family consumption. The sheer quantity of consumer detail in Elizabeth Shackleton's diaries offers powerful evidence that outside the households of peers and plutocrats the daily management of consumption fell to women and with it control of routine decision-making. It must be for this reason that American patriots made such efforts to ensure female co-operation in the colonial boycott of British imports, particularly tea, in the 1760s and 1770s. Similarly, it accounts for why early nineteenth-century associations of British women found consumer boycotting an ideal political strategy.19 Women enjoyed some recognized independence as routine consumers.
23 ‘The Haberdasher Dandy’, 1818. Despite cultural preoccupation with the impulsiveness of consumer desire, most female consumers knew what they were about. Here the over-attentive male haberdasher fails to trick the calculating female customer into accepting short measure.
Women jealously guarded their role as family consumers, but men were hardly untainted by the world of goods and fashion; rather, men and women were expected to consume different items and in different ways. When county business or commercial ventures took northern gentlemen to well-supplied or fashionable towns, they fulfilled their wives' commissions by proxy. They rarely returned from such trips without an additional parcel of toys, novelties and souvenirs. While Elizabeth Shackleton saw to the purchase of her sons' linens well into their twenties, they hunted for flashier items for themselves, expending much energy in pursuit of the perfect embroidered waistcoat for instance.20 Undoubtedly, men considered themselves skilful consumers of particular types of commodity. When the Ramsdens fulfilled their cousin's commissions in 1765, Bessy Ramsden bought the ‘Gowns, Caps, Ruffles and such like female Accoutrements’, while William was accountable ‘for the Wafers, Paper &
Pocket Book’.21 To be sure, the way spouses carved up their shopping lists must have varied from couple to couple – after all it would be remarkable if a schoolmaster had not been able to judge the quality of stationery. Similarly, John Parker's apprenticeship as a linen-draper and his subsequent endeavours in hosiery must have equipped him to deal in fashionable textiles and perhaps accounts for his growing importance to his mother as a proxy consumer in the later 1770s. The particularity of skill notwithstanding, it is surely significant that the remarkably uxorious William Ramsden was the only man in all the northern manuscripts who ever recorded going to market to purchase humdrum groceries. Other gentlemen, however, did occasionally concern themselves with the purchase and donation of higher status provisions, such as snuff, good tea, wine and barrels of oysters; and they were, of course, obsessively involved in the acquisition and distribution of game.
While husbands were not expected to interfere with the daily organization of household consumption, none the less it seems likely they retained ultimate sanction over extraordinary purchases requiring the outlay of considerable capital. For instance, in the once and for all furnishing of Pasture House in the 1770s, while Elizabeth Shackleton ordered small pieces of deal furniture from local craftsmen, it was John Shackleton who went to Lancaster to bespeak their mahogany dining-table and his name that appeared in the Gillows ledgers. Moreover, when her newly married son Tom Parker embarked on his first furniture-buying expedition, Elizabeth Shackleton recorded his departure with all the fanfare of a rite of passage: ‘Tom going from Newton to Lancaster to buy new Mahogany Furniture. God Bless & Prosper with Grace, Goodness and Health all my own Dear Children …’22 Although men bought many goods for themselves and certain commodities for the household, it was women who were principally identified with spending in the eighteenth-century imagination. (Witness Eliza Parker teasing her father in 1796 from an auction, ‘my Mamma says you are getting money today and we are spending a little of it’.)23 The stereotypical distinction between the producing man and the consuming woman was endorsed by the regularity of female shopping. In sum, while substantive research on the differences between men and women's consumption remains to be done, the Lancashire manuscripts suggest the provisional conclusion that while female consumption was repetitive and predominantly mundane, male consumption was, by contrast, occasional and impulsive, or expensive and dynastic.24
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