The Gentleman's Daughter
Page 29
42 (facing page) Detail from ‘Prospect of a Noble Terras Walk’, York, c.1756 (plate 55).
7
Propriety
IN MARCH 1741 Miss Mary Warde rattled off a long list of her diversions for the information and, presumably, the envious admiration of a country cousin:
You enquire after our Diversions, Last Night finished the Ridottos, you know three is the constant Number I was at them all. I love to meet my Friends & seeing a greater Number, at that place than any other, makes me prefer that Gayety to all the rest. Plays are this winter in great Esteem. We have at the Old House two [antick dancers] that are very extraordinary in their way … at Covent Garden the Barberini shines, as a dancer, but quite of another kind … at the same house acts Mrs Woffington, the finest woman I ever saw, & what is almost incredible she is as Genteel a young Fellow & in Mens Cloths esteemed as an Actress better then in her own. Musick is at a low Ebb. Next winter we are promised a good Opera, tho' Oratorios & Concerts are very frequent which with very many private assemblys, & the Park in a Morning (where I generally Walk) fills up the round of making us very busy with nothing to do.1
Despite her disclaiming self-mockery, Mary Warde was not, of course, lacking things to do in the mid-eighteenth-century city.
Much has been made of the eighteenth-century elaboration of commercialized leisure in London and subsequently the regions – what Ann Pellet called the ‘variety of new diversions which the town [devises] to gather the company to Publick Places’.2 However, there is still a surprising vagueness and confusion about the extent of female participation in the overtly commercial high culture which characterized Georgian England. Most recently, historians influenced by Jürgen Habermas have chosen to characterize the new leisure culture as a component of the ‘public sphere’, ‘a forum in which the private people, come together to form a public, readied themselves to compel public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion’.3 For this was a civil society which came to occupy the cultural space vacated by a weakened court and an indolent church, to which governments might be called to answer.4 However, some have read Habermas's concept of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’ quite literally, as the foundry wherein middle-class cultural identity was forged.5 One of the most recent surveys of eighteenth-century cultural history, by Ann Bermingham, invokes Habermas to reinstate the traditional view that the public sphere was a bourgeois creation, increasingly closed to women and constructed in opposition to the private domestic sphere: ‘The public represented in this discursive and commercial space … imagined itself to be polite, rational, moral and egalitarian. In universalizing this self-image of enlightened rationality as well as its discursive and institutional formations, the bourgeoisie empowered themselves and disempowered those whom the discourse excluded or opposed … (the rural, the illiterate, the poor, the non-European, the women and children.)’6 By contrast, Lawrence Klein appeals to Habermas in discussion of the same issues, but to legitimize the opposite conclusion – that the public sphere of rational critical discussion which mediated between state and family, offered and validated a public role for women.
Of course, the term ‘bourgeois public sphere’ echoes the vocabulary of public and private spheres long deployed in feminist rhetoric and women's history. The received wisdom of women's history holds that there was once a far distant time when middling and propertied women enjoyed higher public status, but this modest gleaming of female public life was soon snuffed out by capitalism and the forces of reaction. Thus, R. J. Morris reflects on the assemblies, debating societies and ladies' associations of the 1770s: ‘There was a brief glimpse of female public action in the public sphere before the flood tide of evangelicalism swept the gender frontier back into the private and domestic.’7 Moreover, it is a cliché of recent scholarship that any well-dressed woman out and about, ran the risk of being taken for the ultimate public woman, the sexual street-walker. The cultural street-walker had to wait, it is argued, till the 1880s and the department store to make her debut.8
So were women excluded from the emergent commercialized high culture that characterized the eighteenth century, or ‘merely’ from its political expression? Were they culturally active at the beginning of the eighteenth-century and not at its close? Was a female public life seen as tantamount to prostitution? Certainly, an impression of female ascendancy at eighteenth-century cultural congregations has long been conveyed by social historians. As Langford concludes, ‘women not only shared fully in the literary and recreational life of the day but seemed positively to dominate it’.9 Yet, for the most part, the extent of female engagement with this new culture has been either asserted or denied. Either way it has rarely been systematically researched by historians. Much more has been done by scholars of English literature to reconstruct the role of women as cultural producers and latterly as consumers of print, but, unfortunately, to date there is no comprehensive survey of the public venues to which women were drawn and institutions in which they participated. Hence, there remains an extraordinary mismatch between the precision of the conceptual claims made about women in public and the exceeding murkiness of historical knowledge. What follows is, therefore, a necessarily wide-ranging and schematic reconstruction of the potentialities of public life for polite women in Georgian England.
The selection of venues for discussion here is guided by the definitions of public life offered by eighteenth-century women themselves. For Mary Warde in the 1730s ‘the publick’ incorporated the diversions and resorts frequented by the quality: ‘If Publick can Entertain I believe you will find the Wells as Gay & Splendid as they ever can be as the Inhabitants will certainly Exert themselves on the appearances of their Royal Highnesses.’ For Betty Ramsden going out ‘in Publick’ in the 1760s and 1770s involved a visit to the theatre, the assembly, the pleasure garden or a trial.10 Similarly, the Lancaster widow Jane Pedder's recitation of ‘Publick Places’ she frequented on a London visit in 1786 comprised the playhouse, the oratorio, the Tower, Bank, St Paul's museum, and the Chapel Royal.11 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu maintained that assembly rooms provided ‘a kind of public education, which I have always thought as necessary for girls as boys’, while in Sir Charles Grandison (1754), Richardson's Lady Betty expressed her delight in public places – meaning masquerades, ridottos and the inevitable Vauxhall and Ranelagh.12 In this formulation, then, the public was made up in large part of the comparatively new sites of commercialized leisure – assemblies, oratorios, theatres, promenades and pleasure gardens – venues which could be penetrated for the price of a ticket and where the great world could be encountered in almost all its variety. But these public venues were not primarily associated with an emergent bourgeoisie, far from it, rather, they were identified as the principal haunts of the people of fashion, the quality, the beau monde. The presence or the promise of royalty and nobility guaranteed the popularity of a venue with genteel spectators. Thus, the chapter first considers the royal court, before embarking on an examination of the opera, the theatre, the concert, the criminal and civil courts, the assembly, ridotto, masquerade and the pleasure garden. Then discussion turns to the woman walker abroad in the city, on promenades, shopping trips and cultural excursions. Finally, this section considers institutional participation looking at the church, charitable associations, intellectual clubs and print. Although the chapter concedes that ‘much of the public sphere … was seen as potentially compromising for women, a zone whose very attractions were its dangers and which could only be entered with caution and restraint’,13 it argues that this is by no means the whole story. Women of honour trafficked numerous public venues without the least criticism and used simple strategies to protect their reputations at more risqué diversions. In their thousands, they sallied forth in the armour of conscious virtue. Viewed as a whole, the female public world was both larger and much less menacing than historians have often allowed. Overall, if a cultural renaissance was in progress, then appointment diaries suggest that genteel women took their par
ticipation in it absolutely for granted.
If one of the key pleasures of metropolitan public life was the witnessing of royalty, nobility and greater gentry at close quarters, then the ultimate spectacle was obviously the royal court. After Whitehall burned down in 1697 the focus of court display was St James's Palace. Great ‘public’ festivities were held at court on the monarch's birthday, and on the anniversary of the accession and coronation, while smaller drawing-room assemblies were held every week in the Season (De Saussure in 1725 preferred those held on Monday and Friday evenings, to those on Sunday afternoons ‘as more ladies attend them’14). The royal family was also to be seen at prayer in the Chapel Royal – a conventional stop on tourist itineraries for over a century. Indeed, for all that the vigour and prestige of court society was in relative decline, and the fact that the pageantry of royal ceremonial varied from monarch to monarch, the ‘splendid appearance’ of royalty and nobility, was still greedily beheld by the genteel at every opportunity. In 1740 Mary Warde revelled in the celebrations for the Princess of Hesse's wedding, frequenting the drawing-room before the wedding, viewing the royal family at supper, watching the bride undressed in her apartment, and enjoying the next day a splendid drawing-room audience and after it a crowded ball of bejewelled duchesses ‘amongst as much Finery as can be Imagined’.15 Despite an avowed disdain for pomp and circumstance, the genteel lawyer Thomas Greene went to join the company at St James's Palace on Coronation day in September 1765:
it being the Coronation Day his Majesty of Course expected the Nobility & Gentry to wait upon him at Court … therefore I scoured up my sword (which has never had an airing since it came to England) & being equipped with that & a Bag-Wig I sallied forth in a Sedan Chair to St James & went to Court amongst all the great Folks, you may be sure I summoned all my Impudence upon the Occasion but I was determined for once to see that nonsensical Farce, which is nothing but idle Ceremony, tho' it may be what is necessary.16
43 ‘View of the Ball at St James's on the Celebration of Her Majesty's Birth Night February 9 1786’, from the New Lady's Magazine.
Nonsensical farce or no, Bessy Ramsden made no secret of her desire to feast on every morsel of the royal pageant. Her triumph was to procure a place in the gallery to view the queen's birthday court in 1766 and to have ‘had the honour of being with Her [Majesty] & the Children in their own Apartments’ on coronation day in 1773. Similarly, a visitor who scrutinized the royal family at prayer mused, ‘I like the Queen much; her appearance is not at all majestick but there is in her mien Countenance and behaviour (for I have had several opportunities to observe it) so much sweetness, affability & condescension that it is impossible to see her often without loving her’.17 For all the cultural mediocrity of the Hanoverians, an unflagging interest in the court and royal festivity is suggested by the letters of visitors and natives alike.
Outside the court, the most prestigious commercial entertainment and strongest concentration of sheer aristocratic glamour was to be found at the opera. For historians, the emergence of the London opera, particularly Italian opera at Sir John Vanbrugh's King's Theatre in the Haymarket (‘English opera’ with spoken interludes could be enjoyed at Covent Garden and Drury Lane), represents the cultural elaboration of Whig oligarchical power. The King's Theatre was established and largely administered by noblemen and gentlemen until the late eighteenth century, but even when handed over to professional management, Italian opera retained its social cachet. William Weber has calculated that in 1783 two-thirds of the male subscribers were, or had been, MPs or peers of the realm. The opera became another setting for the playing out of party politics from the highly visible front boxes. Moreover, Weber calculates that of the 354 subscribers to boxes, there were 49 peers, one peeress and 44 wives of peers.18 Even if not possessing boxes in her own right, a lady's presence, dress and deportment could be the subject of detailed commentary. Consequently, the female profile was as high, if not higher than the male. Indeed, the Countess Spencer wrote to her daughter Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire in 1782, to warn her that she had been seen too much at the opera in the company of the Prince of Wales, prompting rumours of romantic and political entanglement: ‘When, dear Georgiana, shall I see you out of scrapes that injure your character? If you and your sister would but give up the Opera or any public place this one winter, on the just pretence of nursing your children, how easily might all this [adverse publicity] still be avoided.’19 However, there were spatial distinctions to be drawn within the opera theatre. There were five levels of boxes, the fourth and fifth being the least exclusive. For the first fifty nights of the season the boxes were privately subscribed for, after which a second, less fashionable subscription was opened and more boxes were made available to the general public. Ladies could purchase tickets by the night for the pit, provided they wore evening dress, or for the galleries. In Fanny Burney's instructive novel Evelina, Or a Young Ladies Entrance Into the World (1778), when the eponymous heroine made her debut at the opera, she sat in the pit, ‘where every body was dressed in so high a style, that, if I had been less delighted with the performance, my eyes would have found me sufficient entertainment from looking at the ladies …’ and afterwards mingled with ease in the coffee-room; but on her second outing with her vulgar cousins she was put out to find herself ensconced in the uppermost, one shilling gallery. Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the most exclusive and stylish seats remained those in the prominent front boxes. For the genteel the constant attraction of the opera was the exhibition of glittering aristocratic femininity; even the serious-minded Anna Larpent was not immune from compulsive staring at the audience, as she confessed of a night at a comic opera at the King's in 1797: ‘But what with Staring at ye spectacle & Company for 4 hours I got sick & dizzy …’20
Equally alluring, though less concentratedly aristocratic, was the theatre. Despite waves of reformist effort aimed at suppressing the theatre, it had never succumbed. In fact, the argument that plays were as conducive to virtue as to vice was often rehearsed, and in some years play-going was claimed to be a more fashionable pursuit than opera-going.21 The London theatres, prominently the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, Covent Garden (built 1732–3) and the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, which had their share of rougher custom, were nevertheless frequented by the quality and royalty, whose showy presence added to the enticements of these establishments for the less socially favoured.22 Indeed, given the fact that London auditoria were as brilliantly lit as the stage itself, it is hardly surprising that sections of the audience might find themselves as closely scrutinized as the paid performers. Mrs Larpent was quite explicit about the object of a visit to Covent Garden in January 1793: ‘We went to see the Royal family at the play’; although, as it transpired, the king and queen stayed away from their favourite theatre as the news of the guillotining of Louis XVI had just come in. When eventually Mrs Larpent coincided with the royal family at Covent Garden in 1795, she had a sufficiently clear view of the Prince of Wales's box to record a detailed description of the enraptured expressions of the unremarkable Princess of Wales, the boredom of her ‘bloated, sodden’ husband and the officiousness of Lady Jersey, who hovered in attendance on the prince ‘with the air of a Persian Concubine’.23 From the letters written by provincial visitors, it is clear that a night at one of the London theatres was experienced in terms of magical transport, as in this description of a dramatic performance at the Opera House penned by the dazzled Ellen Barcroft in 1808:
it was scarcely possible when seeing Mrs Siddons … [as Margaret of Anjou] to persuade oneself that she did not really feel the passions attributed to that haughty Queen. The beauty of the house did indeed surpass my most sanguine expectations. In the centre of the ceiling was a beautiful emblematic painting & the same in the front of every box. The beauty of the scenes, together with the brilliancy of the chandeliers made the whole appear like enchantment.24