The Gentleman's Daughter

by Amanda Vickery

  44 ‘Theatrical Pleasures, Crowding to the Pit’, 1821.

  45 ‘Theatrical Pleasures, Contending for a Seat’, 1821.

  As with the opera, contemporaries drew sharp distinctions about status and sexual propriety based on a viewer's position in the auditorium. At Drury Lane the observant Evelina drew a distinction between ‘the most conspicuous’ and the ‘most private part of the house’. When Margaret Pedder saw Mrs Jordan in The Country Girl at the same theatre in 1786, she paid six shillings and sat in a front box, whereas James Boswell had lolled cheerfully in the pit at Drury lane with Oliver Goldsmith and his drinking companions in 1763. As at the opera, the upper boxes or green boxes were seen as the proverbial ‘flesh market’.25 Taken together, metropolitan plays, players, audience and mise-en-scène constituted a crucial component of the town talk so beloved by country cousins. But the social pleasures of the play should not be allowed to overshadow the aesthetic engagement of the female audience, which could be thoroughgoing. After all, it was due to the campaign of the aristocractic Shakespeare Ladies Club, formed in 1736, that John Rich and David Garrick reintroduced Shakespeare to the repertoire. This (largely) anonymous group has been credited with the permanent reform of literary taste. At the time they were praised for bringing morality back into fashion; their championing of Shakespeare against both raunchy Restoration plays and foreign imports, such as Italian opera, was celebrated in the name of virtuous patriotism – ‘a truly public Spirit’.26

  Provincial theatre flourished by mid-century, with the proliferation of town companies (the first at Norwich, York and Bath), the construction of new purpose-built auditoria in county towns, market towns and provincial resorts, and the success of touring companies. Few were the towns by the late eighteenth century which had not glimpsed the likes of Sarah Siddons or mounted a voguish play. Take the county of Yorkshire by way of example. In a typical season between 1769 and 1803, the actor-manager Wilkinson Tate took his acting troupe on an annual circuit of the Yorkshire theatres, including performances in York (January to May – Spring Assizes), Leeds (June to July), Pontefract (August), York (August – Race Week), Wakefield (September – Race Week), Doncaster (October – Race Week) and Hull (November to December).27 He obtained cash in advance by selling box subscriptions for each town's season, but relied on bespoke performances requested by the likes of the Honourable Lady Carolina Herbert (Wakefield, 22 September 1775), Lady Armitage (Wakefield, 20 September 1776), ‘The High-Sheriff and the Gentlemen of the grand Jury’ (York, 16 March 1782) and ‘the Ladies and the Gentlemen of the Card Assembly’ (York, 25 April 1782) to swell his coffers, since the advertisement of a grand presence tended to draw a wider audience of gawpers. The most exalted aristocratic patronage was to be had during the Wakefield and Doncaster race seasons. Subscribers could also lease a seat in the pit for the season, although there were cheaper nightly seats to be had as well in the first and upper galleries. By this means even towns like Leeds (which Wilkinson dismissed as ‘little better than a Botany Bay for actors’) could offer a fashionable array of new comedies, old tragedies and popular entr'acte entertainments, such as tableaux vivantes, a medley of songs, comic dances and pantomime romps. In just a single season in 1771 the New Theatre at Leeds mounted productions of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1597) and King Lear (1605), Rowe's, Tamerlane (1702), Young's, The Revenge: A Tragedy (1721), Vanbrugh and Cibber's, The Provoked Husband (1728), Hull's, Royal Merchant: An Opera (1768), Colman's, The English Merchant (1767) and his The Portrait (1770), Kelly's, A Word to the Wise (1770) and Cumberland's The West Indian (1771) for the edification of a ‘a numerous and polite audience’.28 Moreover, women made up an opinionated section of the polite audience for provincial theatre as their letters and diaries amply testify.29

  Private theatricals performed by the great, at their height in decades between 1770 and 1810, drew intense public interest in the period. In fact, in the publicity accorded them and the sheer size and social range of the invited audience, many private theatricals were often only ‘private’ in the narrow sense that the cast were not paid professionals. Audiences of 150 were not uncommon; spectacular performances at Blenheim, Richmond House and Hinchingbrook were reported to have depressed winter bookings at Bath. However, if the professional actress was an ambiguous figure still vulnerable to the imputation of prostitution, then amateurish flaunting cast a reputation for demure dignity in a dubious light, to put it mildly. The donning of disguise and the doffing of decorum might be thrilling for the participants, but it could be disquieting to attentive observers, as novels such as Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), Maria Edgeworth's Patronage (1814) and Fanny Burney's The Wanderer (1814) dramatically demonstrated.30 Yet perhaps the very shattering of the ideal of modest female reserve was politically calculated in the first place. In a brilliant new study, Gillian Russell reminds us that ‘many leading Whig families were identified as enthusiastic thespians; in this respect amateur acting can be regarded as part of a repertoire of behaviour – including libertine flamboyance, female exhibitionism, and the cultivation of public celebrity – that was used to define the Prince of Wales's party in defiance of the “Farmer George” probity associated with the King’. Russell argues that private theatricals were not only an important expression of country-house paternalism, but also a mechanism for the consolidation and enactment of social alliances amongst the political elite, an arena in which women glittered centre stage in conspicuous contrast to their negligible role in more traditional fora. Thus, in April 1787 a private performance of The Way to Keep Him at Richmond House occupied so many parliamentarians that a motion in the House of Commons had to be deferred.31 Of course, the modest family theatricals mounted by the gentry lacked the political punch and the titillating excitement of these aristocratic extravaganzas. Minimal publicity, a small audience, a suitable play and senior family members en costume put the stamp of innocent diversion on family play-acting. Still, an unsated interest in more outrageous productions remained widespread amongst the genteel.32

  Musical entertainment of all forms enjoyed a roaring vogue in the eighteenth century. The aforementioned Italian opera, spearheaded the development of the musical stage, while commercial concerts and music festivals were promoted in London from the 1670s. Borsay has unearthed evidence for at least a dozen towns experimenting with a public concert series by the 1760s, and a small but growing number of provincial music festivals in the cathedral cities. Taking Leeds again by way of exemplar, the evidence of newspaper advertisements suggests that the concert, in particular, was a well-established constituent of the cultural scene in the 1760s and 1770s, probably because of the appointment of William Herschel as director of public concerts in 1762. Leeds offered an annual autumn programme of subscription concerts of the works of Bach, Giardini, Boccherini and so on in its New Concert Hall, on Vicar Lane, and at the Old and New Assembly rooms in these decades. There were also a large number of single performances of organ and choral works mounted by local churches: Handel's Messiah and his Judus Maccabaeus, and Purcell's Te Deum and Grand Coronation Chorus being perennial favourites. In Leeds, as elsewhere, the Church remained an important provider of public music. Unsurprisingly, the concert audiences tended to be genteel and mixed sex, and the concert may therefore be seen as another new and vibrant cultural form which added further breadth to the social horizons of polite provincial women in the period.33

  Staged spectacles of all kinds flourished in the eighteenth century, from militia reviews to ladies' processions, from firework displays and magic shows, to the exhibition of ‘freaks’ and dancing dogs, but perhaps the unlikeliest spectacle which coined a profit was the trial. The awful theatricality of the criminal courts was much remarked on by contemporaries as well as modern historians, while the civil courts which dealt with interpersonal disputes presented an enduring fund of scandalous anecdote. On the northern circuit, the biannual assize courts at Lancaster and York and the annual sittings at Durham, Newcastle, Carlisle and Appleb
y offered the drama of capital trials to an eager public of men, women and children, as well as the gathering of the county in the host town for the accompanying race meetings, public assemblies and private parties. Although the thirteen-year-old Mary Chorley was too young to attend the Lancaster assize ball in 1779, the opportunity to witness the judge's triumphal entry and the posturing showmanship of the barristers in action offered thrills aplenty: ‘went to court and was much [amused] with hearing the lawyers plead. Mr Lee indeed a most provoking man for he is always in the right.’ However, the audience's thirst for spectacle was not always gratified. Susannah Gossip wrote from York with apparent disappointment in 1729, complaining ‘We had but little business at our assize only one man executed for murdering’, although she took solace in the presence of at least eighteen noblemen in town for the races and Lord Carlisle's ball.34

  46 ‘York Music Festival’, 1824. This was a four-day festival to raise money for the York county hospital and the Hull, Leeds and Sheffield General Infirmary. Clearly women predominated in the audience. Ellen Parker of Selby for one was transported by a similar concert in the Minster in 1823: ‘It was the “Messiah” & no words can describe how beautiful was the singing & grand the Choruses … there were 1500 applications for tickets … The gallery was filled with grandees–chiefly (the Ladies) in small bonnets.’

  The trials that did most to gratify the prurient were those involving the rich and celebrated, a higher concentration of which were staged in the London courts. Although the Old Bailey was not an everyday site of gentry traffic, causes célèbres such as the Rudd–Perreau trial for forgery in 1775, or the trial of the Earl of Ferrers for the murder of his steward in 1760 drew elite women in droves. Lord Lovat's trial for fraud, for instance, prompted an unseemly scramble for tickets, presumably dispensed by an opportunistic porter: ‘all the young ladys are now wishing for tickets to be at Lord Lovats tryall for no bodys pity seems great for him they can go with less concern …’35 Voyeurism was so pronounced in the intricate Rudd–Perreau case that when the apparently well-born Mrs Rudd and the Perreau brothers were committed for further examination, ‘the public office in Bow-Street was so crowded with genteel people, that the magistrates thought it most prudent to adjourn to Guildhall, Westminster’. Ultimately, ‘the solemnity, that was with so much propriety assumed by the bench on this occasion, joined to the plaintive tone of Mrs Rudd's voice; the artless manner in which she told her story, and the decency of her whole deportment, produced a scene so truly pathetic, as to draw tears from many of the spectators’.36 More thrilling still were the civil suits for ‘criminal conversation’ and divorce. They offered, as the published Trials for Adultery, Or The History of Divorces promised, ‘a complete History of the Private Life, Intrigues and Amours of many Characters in the most elevated sphere’.37 Bessy Ramsden, for one, could hardly contain herself at the prospect of a ticket to witness the trial of the Duchess of Kingston for bigamy at Westminster Hall in 1776.

  There is nothing talk off now but the preparations for the Trial of the Duchess of Kingston. We had some ladies hear the other day who are to be at it … They are to go at seven o clock in the morning. It must be a fine sight … I think was a Ticket to be offered to me I would not have the prudence to refuse it.

  The Late Duchess of Kingston seem[s] to be forgoten all ready. When Her trial is printed which is now in hand, she will I suppose be renew[ed] again in convasation. Don't you think I had great self-denial in not going to the Trial When I tell you I had three offers?38

  47 ‘A Perspective View of the Inside of the Grand Assembly Room in Blake Street’, 1759. Burlington's magnificent new assembly rooms at York (opened in 1732) were said to outshine those of Bath.

  Through print, letters and hearsay the polite could take a horrid pleasure in the sensational details, even if they had not witnessed the cross-examination first hand. Scandalous trials and notorious or glamorous criminals added spice to polite conversation throughout the period.

  The supreme arena of polite leisure was the assembly – an evening gathering accommodating dancing, cards, tea and, perhaps above all, talk. While the precise origins of the assembly remain obscure, their popularity in the early eighteenth century is manifest in bricks and mortar. London and the spas led the way in the building of assembly rooms, but the provincial towns of the north were not slow to follow. Assemblies were mounted in custom-built or customized public rooms in Leeds and Liverpool from at least 1726, in Preston from 1728, in Sheffield and Scarborough from 1733, in Whitehaven from 1736, in Beverley from 1745, and in Manchester and Hull well before mid-century, while Burlington's magnificent new assembly rooms at York (opened in 1732) were thought to outshine those of Bath. When the new assembly rooms were opened in Leeds in 1777 a ‘most brilliant appearance of Genteel company’ attended the first ball, and ‘upwards of 200 gentlemen and ladies present, who all appeared to be competitors for politeness of behaviour, gentility and complaisance’ were congratulated by the Leeds Intelligencer. From the first, assemblies were synonymous with female diversion. A definition of the assembly in 1751 stressed both its social exclusivity and its mixed-sex constituency: ‘A stated and general meeting of the polite persons of both sexes, for the sake of conversation, gallantry, news and play.’39 Orchestrated heterosexual sociability was the raison d'être of the assembly.

  The power and prominence of women at eighteenth-century assemblies were remarked upon again and again. Although some resorts boasted an official master of ceremonies, in many towns a band of gentlewomen and noblewomen were styled the ‘Governors’ of the assembly and often one of their number was singled out as reigning ‘Queen’ of the assembly. From the 1720s a committee of titled ladies, including Lady Panmure and Susanna, Countess of Eglinton, oversaw the conduct of the Edinburgh assembly rooms and ‘agreed upon certain rules’ of conduct and ceremony. At mid-century Miss Nicky Murray wore a gold medal as badge of her position as ‘Lady Directress’. Only in the 1780s was the management of protocol handed over to a male steward. Female management was equally to the fore in Derby, where a succession of lady patrons demonstrated their command of book-keeping and social discrimination, as an entry in the account book for 4 August 1752 indicates: ‘Delivered up the Assembly room to the right Honourable the Countess of Ferrers, who did me the great honour of accepting it. I told her that trade never mixed with us ladies.’ Strikingly, not only were the assembly rooms at Almacks run by a female committee, but the new Almacks gambling club set up in 1770 allowed female members the right of nomination and veto of prospective male members. Mrs Boscawen recorded that ‘Lord March and Brook Boothby were blackballed by the ladies to their great astonishment’. Women's prestige at ‘the exclusive temple of the beau monde’ was routinely remarked upon. As late as 1821, men about town still complained about the necessity of being on their best polite behaviour at Almacks before ‘the fastidious PATRONESSES, that parade up and down here, as the arbitresses of fame and fortune.’40

  Of course, the assembly was not the sole possession of the nobility and their intimates. Some gatherings were more exclusive than others, subscription balls were more select than all-inclusive public balls, but generally the stalwarts of the provincial assembly were the lesser gentry, the professions and the genteel trades. And nationwide, dancing masters acted as impresarios, mounting countless small assemblies for their pupils to which a wide spectrum of respectable parents was drawn.41 The Doncaster assemblies of the 1740s were regrettably not noted for ‘grand appearances’. In the 1760s the Mrs Wilson who was Queen of the Lancaster assembly had taken lodgings in town rather than submit to the expense of refurbishing the family house in Kendal. A fine appearance she may have had, but broad acres and a considerable fortune were obviously lacking. In 1780 Mrs Owen Cunliffe, the daughter of a Manchester manufacturer, presided over a small Colne ball and, lacking noble consequence, was dismissed as ‘The Little Queen’ by the acid Elizabeth Shackleton. In the 1790s a mere Mrs Shaw presided over the Otley assemblies and
saw ‘everything conducted with due decorum’. It was gentility, not nobility, which formed the backbone of these provincial congregations, as a no less delighted Eliza Parker reported of the July assemblies in early nineteenth-century Preston: ‘we have been very Gay a great deal of Genteel company is in Town … The first Assembly was a very good one and tonight is expected a brilliant meeting. I never saw so much dress required at Preston before.’ Meanwhile, London had its more modest assemblies, like the assemblies for the City of London and the Borough of Southwark patronized by Bessy Ramsden in the 1760s and 1770s.42

  Whether an assembly was ultra-fashionable or respectably genteel, commentators again and again drew attention to the high visibility of women and, unsurprisingly, the presence of young marriageable women by the score. Mary Warde noted of the assembly at Bury St Edmunds in 1740, ‘it has for a great many Years been famous for the number of pretty Women that the neighbouring Countys send to it … I fancy you have seen the Duke of Graftons & Lord Herveys daughters …’43 To some observers not only did women seem prominent in the ritual performance of the assembly, they appeared positively bumptious with power. Certainly this was Eliza Haywood's horrified assessment of the ‘Air of Boldness’ with which some fine ladies stormed public Assemblies:

  They do not walk but straddle; and sometimes run with a Kind of Frisk and Jump; – throw their enormous Hoops almost in the Faces of those who pass by them; – stretch out their Necks, and roll their Eyes from Side to Side, impatient to take the whole Company at one View; and if they happen to see anyone dress'd less exactly, according to the Mode, than themselves, presently cry out, – Antiquity to Perfection! – A Picture of the Last Age! – Then burst into a Laugh, loud enough to be heard at two or three furlongs distant.44