The Gentleman's Daughter

by Amanda Vickery

  Quite apart from this lack of decorum, which undermined Elizabeth Shackleton's social standing in the world, he also inflicted physical and verbal violence on his ailing and unhappy wife as we have seen: ‘never saw him so rude, vulgar, nor so drunk. He took his horse Whip to me.’63 On occasion, he sabotaged his wife's ceremonies, smashing wine bottles and china, turning over the card table and disrupting all play. He also interfered with the exchange of customary courtesies: ‘Mr & Mrs Walton were so kind as to send Harrison to enquire after my heath. Thinks myself greatly obliged to them. I wo'd have sent today to have enquired after them, but Mr S: wo'd not let me. He Cursed & D—d swore no servant of his sho'd run about the country with such foolish messages …’, and once threatened that she should be denied the use of his horses.64 By no stretch of the imagination could the behaviour of this surly drunkard be described in terms of Addisonian consideration or Chesterfieldian fastidiousness. John Shackleton utterly disgusted his wife on several occasions: ‘he shits in bed with drinking so continualy’; ‘The gentleman came home near 12 at noon & Sans Ceremony went snoring to clean bed – where he farted and stunk like a Pole Cat’; ‘Most exceedingly Beastly so to a degree never saw him worse – he had made water into the fire.’ In the full glare of humiliating publicity he made plain his complete want of physical restraint: ‘Mr S was very sick & spew'd Abundantly. Sat in Tom Brindle's House upon the Long Settle before the fire & exposed himself as Publickly as he co'd … a very nasty, dirty, stinking creature.’ No wonder that his wife once concluded ‘Mr S. like a Brute. No Man.’65 The descriptions of John Shackleton's inconsiderate, unmannerly, wild, beastly, barbarous, brutish, nasty, dirty, odious, hideous, stinking, horrid, rude, surly, cross and vulgar behaviour seem to have exhausted all the adjectives in his wife's overworked stock. His assault on Elizabeth Shackleton's world of dignity and distinction could not have been more complete.

  This is clearly only one narrative – the assault of bestiality upon refinement – in a shared story. Nothing survives of John Shackleton's view, nor of any independent criticism of his behaviour. How might John Shackleton have interpreted the struggle? Perhaps he saw himself simply protecting his manly pleasures? Perhaps he saw Elizabeth Shackleton's polite rules as so many artificial constraints on nature. After one offensive episode, he did report that his father thought Elizabeth ‘a great hypocrite’, so he may have cherished a belief in the sturdy authenticity of masculine excess. From his perspective, perhaps politeness was made up of so many insincere conventions: hypocrisy glorified into virtue, for it was certainly a continuing concern of the writers of courtesy literature that without inner goodwill, a polite performance could so easily become a sham, a veneer of polish concealing cynical self-interest.66 However, this is not to imply that men represent honest and unselfconscious pleasure while women are bent upon its repression, for John Shackleton's excess was undoubtedly as constructed as Elizabeth Shackleton's control – a point made by a notorious pundit of politeness, Lord Chesterfield:

  The character which most young men first aim at is, that of a man of pleasure; but they generally take it upon trust; and instead of consulting their own taste and inclinations, they blindly adopt whatever those with whom they chiefly converse, are pleased to call by the name of pleasure; and a man of pleasure in the vulgar acceptation of that phrase, means only a beastly drunkard, an abandoned whore-master, and a profligate swearer and curser.67

  Nevertheless, one does wonder what John Shackleton stood to gain from such debauched conduct. Perhaps it reinforced his masculinity amongst his male peers and dependents? As a code, politeness was always in danger of collapsing into effeminacy. While mixed company guaranteed civilization, too much time spent in the company of women alone was seen as effeminizing. Real men had somehow to strike a mean between an ill-bred vulgarity on the one hand and simpering affectedness on the other. In his boorishness, John Shackleton could never be accused of continental foppery – a proof which may have been important to the merchants he caroused with. It is also worth noting that men enjoyed much more licence than did women to create solidarities through excess, as moralists like Jeremy Collier made clear: ‘Obscenity in any Company is a rustick uncreditable Talent; but among Women 'tis particularly rude. Such talk would be very affrontive in Conversation, and not endur'd by any Lady of Reputation.’68 However, given the high value put on status and self-control in eighteenth-century discourses on elite masculinity, John Shackleton had much more to lose through his humiliating lapses in dignity. If, as E. P. Thompson has suggested, the display of dignified manners was part of the studied performance of cultural hegemony, then Shackleton substantially jeopardized his social and political authority by his lack of restraint,69 – and unlike a roistering lord he could claim no intrinsic noble worth through blood. If anything, mercantile and manufacturing elites stood in greater need of the genteel social graces to sustain the connections crucial to the quality trade. For instance, Richard Greene, a merchant-adventurer, put down his failure in the tea business precisely to his inability to cut a dash in Calcutta: ‘Indeed my [dear] sister I am so unpolished a shrubb that I am ashamed of my awkward appearance when I am in Gentele company and I woud Actually give 100£ sterling could I even make a bow, but as I never had any expence thrown away on me for that purpose, I therefore must walk in a path below that which by birth I am intitled to in short I look upon it that the want of a little adress has been some thousands of pounds out of my pocket.’ Politeness, not vulgarity, was crucial to commerce. So, in fact, Shackleton's conduct achieved nothing for him but the sour triumph of sharing out that misery he experienced in a marriage with an ailing, ail-but toothless woman, seventeen years his senior. Possibly then his vulgarity was simply a destructive expression of impotent rage.70

  An unresolved problem is the extent to which the struggle here between restraint and excess was distinctive to this one unhappy couple. After all, civility and vulgarity may have been banners behind which two unusually unhappy spouses fought their matrimonial battles. Happier couples doubtless effected a better reconciliation between the rugged and the refined. Still, the argument that home-based, mixed-sex sociability nourished marriages and respectability while all-male, ale-house sociability reduced them certainly had a long-standing currency among moralists.71 The notion that men were rough diamonds in need of refinement was widespread. Even the young Lancaster Quaker Mary Chorley used the secular vocabulary of civility to criticize a graceless kinsman: ‘Today my cousin Ford behaved in a very manner [sic] to me. He flatly contradicted me thrice. I think he wants a great deal of polishing.’72 Variants of the same struggle over polite ceremony can be found amongst unhappy couples. The early eighteenth-century diary of a Hertfordshire baronet's wife, Sarah Cowper, offers a useful comparison. Sir William Cowper, for instance, rebuked his wife ‘before servants for giving my neighbour a few flowers without his allowance’, retained custody over tablecloths and sheets, thus humiliating Lady Cowper before guests, and made dinner parties so agonizing for onlookers that the county gave them a wide berth:

  Sir W. hath so ordered matters that at table we see not the face of a gentleman or woman in age but the most despicable people one can imagine, because none that wants not a dinner cares to see the uneasiness we are in … If I carve … he bids let them help themselves, if I let alone he calls on me to do it, and if I put them upon calling for a glass of wine, he saith sure they best know their own time … and so on in every like instance. In very solemn fashion I have desired him not to have me perpetually under correction, but to no purpose. He persists even before my sons which makes me chagrined and uneasy that they should see us so silly.

  The consequence of this humiliation, Lady Cowper complained was to make the household ‘the epitome of hell’. Where the authority of genteel femininity was scorned amongst the servants ‘the sins of men as cursing, swearing, whoring, cheating … the devil of envy, wrath, hatred, malice, lying reigns here without due control’.73

  Elizabeth Shacklet
on's use of the language of civility was profoundly derivative. Polite ideals had extensive currency in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.74 Even the journals of the unfortunate Lancashire governess Ellen Weeton are revealing in their manipulation of the discourse of civility. Weeton openly accused her sister-in-law of deploying a forbidding formality that left her socially paralysed, ‘apprehensive of forgetting some little ceremony, or transgressing some rule of etiquette’, a strategy inimical to true politeness. Yet Miss Weeton demanded if not kindness, than at least a ‘common civility’ from her employers, for ‘unless I were degraded something below human, I never would submit to haughtiness, tyranny and ill-temper’, and was gratified when she was ‘very politely received’ and made to feel ‘at home, and quite comfortable’.75 Interestingly, Weeton's journals impart a greater preoccupation with the minute rules of etiquette than is apparent in Shackleton's diaries, an anxiety about externals which could be function of the acute vulnerability of her social position, or a comment on the nineteenth-century codification of politeness, yet she still found in civility a comparable justification for resistance.

  Nor was an investment in civility and the derogation of vulgarity confined to northern women. In the 1760s the lawyer Thomas Greene was enraged by the undignified conduct of his uncle, and particularly appalled by the want of consideration shown his mother. If it continues, Greene warned his mother, ‘we shall be under the necessity of discarding him in his old age … I will hear no Death-Bed repentences … So if he do continue to prefer drinking, and being a great Man, amongst a Parcel of Taylors & Coblers, to living soberly with you and me, let him follow his Inclination & take the Consequences for his wages.’76 Parson Woodforde disapproved of his brother's cockfighting precisely because it brought him into contact with vulgar company: ‘quite lowlife sort of people, much beneath Jack.’ Similarly, Parson George Woodward despaired of his gauche and churlish younger brothers: brother Jack had no polite conversation whatsoever, despite his travels, ‘for his curiosity seems to be little more than that of a stage coachman’ who interested himself only in roads, food, drink and landlords; while, in 1755 brother Tom ate the household out of meat, heedless of all the niceties of polite convention – ‘I asked him once, how he managed about suppers, as he never eat cheese or apple pie; he said if he did not happen to be where there was meat, he often eat no supper at all, but smoked his pipe instead of it’. Given this heroic lack of refinement, Woodward contrived to get his brother out of the way when the Warden of All Souls and his wife came to visit ‘(to speak the truth) I did not much care to show them such an uncouth relation of mine’. In the event, Tom invited himself to dinner with a local farmer and his mother and happily smoked all night.77 No suave urbanity for those who shirked the responsibilities of patriarchy.

  Of course, Elizabeth Shackleton's perspective was a distinctive one. As she ailed and aged, she waxed pathetic, believing herself spurned and disregarded at every turn. Awareness of her social descent through marriage probably sharpened her insecurity and bred a defensiveness about her social reception. Painful illness no doubt increased her sensitivity: ‘the treatment I meet with from all sides as I grown into years almost breaks my Heart and my legs swelling more & more.’ Doubtless she was not an easy companion herself, nor necessarily a dispassionate commentator on the incivility of others: ‘When we went to bed I went into John's room & told him I wonder we did not hear from Roben. He snappd & was very rude. Said he had most probably his reasons for not writing. I am sure I have not offended. They are unkind & uncivil to me.’ After the gentle rebukes she ventured to offer her intimates for various small slights, she seemed genuinely astonished to find them suddenly ‘Humpy Grumpy’, ‘quere’ or ‘upon reserve’.78 Yet it is in this very hypersensitivity that the real value of the diary lies for historians. In her irritation and unhappiness Elizabeth Shackleton exploited a conventional language to the full. Her perspective demonstrates the broad range of discursive uses to which civility could be put, some uses altogether unanticipated by Addison and Steele.

  Reliant on the rules of decorum, which decreed that inferiors should know their place, civility and politeness were hardly useful tools for everywoman, but for genteel ladies, civility offered an eminent vantage-point from which to patronize men and male sociability. When Elizabeth Shackleton complained ‘the friendships of the present times like those described by Addison are oft Confederacies in vice or Leagues of Pleasure’,79 she enlisted the essayist in support of her critique of Shackleton's social selfishness. But this vocabulary could be extended even further to derogate the masculine world of local associations, for, in Mrs Shackleton's immortal words, gentlemen were ‘Hottentots, not men, when assembled together.’ In all likelihood, she here drew on Addison's cautionary tale of the unfortunate Hottentot who was brought to England and ‘polish'd out of his natural Barbarity: But upon being carry'd back to the Cape of Good Hope … he mix'd in a kind of Transport with his Country-men, brutalized with ‘em in their Habit and Manners, and wou'd never agen return to his foreign Acquaintance.’80 Lacking the temporizing effects of female company at their meetings in local taverns, Mrs Shackleton observed, men threw off the mantle of civilization and revealed themselves as primitive barbarians. She thus tied the progressive evolution of civilized society to the presence of female company. Similarly, when John Shackleton got lost on the moors in 1779 trying to follow the high sheriff's official cavalcade to Blackburn on a beribboned horse, and his wife scorned his ‘Inconsiderate, wild, extravagant doings’, by extension she disparaged the self-important ceremonies of county administration. While no radical, she was ambivalent about inflated masculine rituals: after an impressive description of the three hundred or more gentlemen riding two by two behind the high sheriff, she loftily concluded of ‘this Grand Parade … so much for worldly ambition’. Although gratified that her son had a seat in the high sheriff's coach, her patronizing comment, ‘it will make him esteem'd of Consequence’, indicates a certain personal superiority to such a pompous demonstration of status.81 While Addison and Steele had explicitly linked heterosexual conversation to the advance of human society, it is unlikely that they had envisaged politeness as a tool to undermine the dignity of local government.

  Elizabeth Shackleton's story is one of valiant politeness all but overcome. Ultimately, therefore, it presents a poignant study in repeated failure. But, by default, her perspective suggests the practical benefits which might accrue to elite women from the consolidation of polite codes of behaviour. Civility and politeness validated mixed companies where elite women were valued and ‘made much of’. It allowed the possibility that old and ailing women be given social consideration and justified their indignation when respect was denied: ‘I neither can nor will bear this treatment. It is neither proper nor suitable to my Infirmities nor years.’82 In theory, at least, civility protected elite women from brutal oppression, for ‘when the pale of ceremony is once broken’, wrote another Lancashire diarist, Dolly Clayton, in 1783, ‘rudeness and insult soon enter the breach’. Samuel Johnson may have scoffed that Chesterfield's Letters to His Son, ‘teach the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master’,83 but from the female perspective even a dancing master is a preferable companion to a disobliging bedfellow or an ill-mannered brute.

  Elizabeth Shackleton did not see the domestic interior as a complete refuge from the social world. She held cherished ideals about the conduct of social relations which were not shrugged off once she entered the stillness of her own parlour. In the idiom of the conduct-book writers, genuine politeness was not a formal suit only to be worn when the circumstances of ceremony demanded it. Rather, it was a garment that should never be laid aside, and which ought to be worn lightly and gladly, as if it were no encumbrance. Inside and outside, Elizabeth Shackleton contrived to achieve decorum, protocol, elegant ease, polite conversation and, perhaps most important of all, an amiable consideration between men and women. Both in what they reveal about the use of spac
e and the evaluation of behaviour, Elizabeth Shackleton's records give the lie to the notion that the walls of the house constituted the frontier between public and private worlds.

  Sociability tied the individual to their many communities. Through the exchange of compliments, gifts, dinners and teas with other elite families, the genteel reaffirmed their gentility and maintained a wide polite acquaintance. Through condescending hospitality they asserted their position as masters and mistresses of servants, as patrons of local businesses and as responsible landowners, but the doors of country mansions were not to be left open to the multitude like the gates of Ranelagh and Vauxhall. Elizabeth Shackleton designated days for ‘publick’ entertainment, when Alkincoats and Pasture Houses were open and common to all, but by their very existence, these occasions bring to mind the rest of the year, when these mansions were open only to select company on invitation. Public festivals remained very distinct from polite dinner parties. Indeed, Mrs Shackleton once invited her polite neighbours the Waltons to one of her feast days, but alerted them in advance to the fact that they would have ‘to sit down with a mix'd Multitude’.84 They declined the invitation. Under ideal circumstances, sociability was engineered according to the rules of decorum. Dependants were to be entertained in the ‘common’ parts of the house, obviously the servants' hall and the kitchen. Casual callers and presentable traders received tea from the common tea set, with an appropriate level of formality in the dining-room or parlour. Elite guests could expect to see the same rooms decked out in the best linen, best china and silverware, and behaved accordingly. When, in practice, visitors forgot polite correctness and made too free with her hospitality, Mrs Shackleton complained of the fatigue of vulgar, intruding people, silently accusing them of treating the house as if it were a public one. But in invoking the term public, the dichotomy implied here is that between vulgar publicity and polite selection, not between the archetypal male public sphere and a female cloister. Sociability was one of the means by which the public was regulated in the home. Ideally, it was regulated in ways that married with cheerful, domestic companionship and polite distinction, for Mrs Shackleton had a vision of matrimonial pleasure which involved ceremonies and civilities, not the abandonment of all social effort in an orgy of self.