The Gentleman's Daughter

by Amanda Vickery

  Despite the conveniences of a permanent escort-service, many young matrons settled down to a period of self-conscious retirement once they docked in the safe-harbour of matrimony. ‘Has Matrimony put a stop to all your rambles?’ was the clichéd question asked of the bride Mary Stanhope in 1743. Yet this assumption was securely founded – in a surviving list of the nobility and gentry who appeared at the assembly rooms in York in 1789, married women without a daughter in tow were in a minority.120 The extent of cultural engagement a new mother could easily enjoy without censure varied, as seen, with wealth and geography; an afternoon stroll to a London exhibition with babies in train, being a very different venture to an all-day cross-country drive in an open chaise to a distant assembly. But even given the same urban opportunities, women varied, of course, in their tastes and inclinations. Though married with four children, the unsinkable Bessy Ramsden still relished a little cultural panache, thirsting after court pageantry, salacious trials, the Pantheon and the playhouse, as well as romping at school balls, children's parties and city assemblies. At each remission of illness in her nursery, she left her husband in charge and swept off to the West End in pursuit of recreation: ‘tonight Forsooth, She is frolicked away to the play.’121 Yet the cultural consumption of another Londoner Anna Larpent stands in marked contrast. Although Larpent made countless uncomfortable appearances in the appropriate arenas of fashionable display as an unmarried girl in the 1770s, her diaries for 1790, 1800, 1810 and 1820, written after marriage to John Larpent, chart a solemn engagement with metropolitan culture. As wife of the censor of plays, Mrs Larpent maintained a discriminating interest in the licensed stage, but tended to avoid the hectic gaiety of large assemblies and places of public congregation (apart from church), preferring small family gatherings and private music parties. She made exceedingly few visits to the pleasure gardens which had so discomforted her as a girl, although this is not to argue that marriage and motherhood immobilized her – she religiously took daily exercise in the lanes and delighted in taking her children and later her grandchildren off to exhibitions and edifying spectacles – but it shifted the focus of her consumption decisively. As the mother of sons, she evidently felt no compulsion to shepherd them around the usual venues when they reached marriageable age.122

  Chaperonage was an institution which offered an irreproachable public role to an older matron, albeit one played towards the back of the stage. One of Nash's ‘Rules to be observe'd at Bath’ promulgated in 1742 decreed ‘That the elder ladies and children be content with a second bench at the ball, as being past or not come to perfection’. The lower profile of the middle-aged was similarly reported in 1814: ‘The Assemblies of Nottingham are, as in all other places, the resort of the young and the gay, who go to see and be seen; and also of those, who, having played their matrimonial cards well in early life, are now content to sit down to a game of sober whist or quadrille.’123 The widow Abigail Gawthern of the same town recorded a packed social calendar in the early years of the nineteenth century, taking time from the management of her lead works and properties to accompany her daughter Anna to local assize balls, races, plays and performances of choral works in local churches, to escort her to the resorts of Bath, Clifton and Weymouth and to parade her about the usual London landmarks: St James's Palace, Kensington Gardens, Vauxhall, the Opera, theatres, the British Museum, the Magdalene and the Foundling Hospital. That this was matrimonial strategy could not have been recorded more explicitly. She kept a business-like tally of with whom her daughter danced and the various proposals that resulted: ‘At the assembly; Anna danced with captain Edwards, Mr Parker and Dr Marsden; P. said he should call the next day to declare his sentiments. Dec 15. Mr P. drank tea with us; he mentioned his strong attachment; refused on account of being as old again.’ However, Mrs Gawthern was not without some scruples about public entertainments, drawing the line at a riotous militia ball and a ticketed masquerade: ‘Gardiner called to offer Anna a ticket to the masquerade to go with some of his relations; I refused his offer not thinking it quite prudent, neither do I approve of that amusement.’124 These omissions notwithstanding, the social life of a woman in her forties could be frenetic.

  The social comforts of old age are here exemplified by the redoubtable widow Ann Pellet. Her own duties as chaperon despatched, Mrs Pellet lived a retired London existence with her paid companion Miss Bowen, lodging with quiet families in Ealing, Kensington and Westminster. She avoided routs, assemblies and so on because she was averse to ‘a hurry’ and acknowledged she was ‘but little engag'd in the Beau Monde’ and preferred hosts who kept ‘no ill Hours nor any Fatiguing Pleasures’. Still, she had a weakness for whist and was happy in the harmonious company of just enough genteel ladies to guarantee a ‘Plurality of Card tables’. She relied on her old friends and acquaintances to come to her, as ‘she very seldom stirs out, Partly from inclination and partly from fears which proceed from the continual Mischiefs & Robberies commited in the Streets in the Evenings’. Despite writing from Ealing, so near the ‘Grand Metropolis’, Mrs Pellet feared her household was ‘Barren of Publick affairs’. Most of the town talk she retailed to country friends, she gleaned from the papers.125

  While female cultural access and public profile varied with wealth, location and life-cycle, it was virtually never as extensive or as high as that of equivalent men. Gentlemen invariably held public office and the pursuit of institutional duties tended to throw men more in the way of commercial leisure than their wives.126 Although the institutional life of the county was accompanied by a social culture in which women could take a part, it appears that unless they had a daughter to marry off they were unlikely to do so. Married men, on the other hand, enjoyed an easy sociability as a spin-off from their administrative duties. In the 1750s Michael Scrimshire of Pontefract often slipped away from legal matters to sneak in a day at the Doncaster and Wakefield races. Similarly, John Shackleton managed to combine a wool-buying trip with the Nottingham races in August 1780, and a spot of sea bathing at Heysham with his stint as a grand juror in 1778. Young merchants, manufacturers and professionals were clearly more constrained than inheriting gentlemen, but often travelled in the course of their business and could exploit their leisure time to advantage. For example, in the 1770s the apprentices John and Robert Parker successfully transformed their routine journeys from Lancashire to London into mini-tours, stopping off at Gloucester for music meetings and the like. Of course, throughout the period, the mobility of young men – from the continental grand tour to the local jaunt – stood in marked contrast to the limited peregrinations of provincial gentlewomen.127

  Nor were male cultural tastes always in harmony with those of women. Male recreation had a dimension which might conflict with a female taste for urban diversion – sport. Sport was a recurring theme, if not the dominant theme, of the letters men exchanged with men and the sporting calendar was a powerful determinant of a man's movements, for the pursuit of prey was the archetypal prerogative of the gentleman. Those blood-sports popular with the northern families studied here comprised hunting foxes, hares and otters, coursing (pursuing hares with grey-hounds), tracing (following a pre-set scent) and shooting moorgame (grouse), woodcocks and partridge. Moorland shooting was a constant feature of masculine culture in the rural north in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.128

  Although La Rochefoucauld asserted (on the basis of his Suffolk experience) in 1784 ‘women quite commonly in England take part in the shoot, and many of them are very good shots’, none of the genteel women studied here ever wielded the gun. Still there were obviously occasional ladies noted for their marksmanship – the singular Anne Lister of Shibden for one.129 Perhaps more common was the sportswoman who rode to hounds. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's experience suggests a significant minority of huntswomen in Nottinghamshire in 1711: ‘I had a general Hunting Day last Tuesday, where we had 20 Ladys well dressed and mounted, and more Men. The day was concluded with a Ball. I rid and danc'd with a view
of Exercise, and that is all – how dull that is!’ Similarly, Mary Warde spent every autumn in the 1730s and 1740s out riding and hunting in Norfolk: ‘I was seven hours a hunting this morning & rode hard enough to be extreamly tired …’, although her gregariousness seems more to the fore than her blood lust: ‘I meet a good deal of company Every Monday & Thursday Morning in the finest part of the Country, where a Pack of Hounds is the pretence. We ride hard or only saunter just as our Inclinations Engage us, to be Idle or alert.’ But by her own admission, she was in a minority: ‘We have a very large number of sportsmen & three ladies in our Hunt’, and the meeting a particularly accommodating one: ‘My notion of these sports is that it depends upon the company entirely. We had a gay set & two or three of the Gentlemen very Poetical.’130 These eighteenth-century Dianas were never numerous, as ambivalence about the propriety of female hunting was long-standing. Clarissa in The Lady's Magazine opined ‘though hunting might be diversion used by the ancients, it is far from being a delicate one, or commendable in a modern lady’. No less a radical than Mary Wollstonecraft was prepared to endorse ‘the exclamations against masculine women’ when directed against ‘their ardour in hunting, shooting, and gaming …’131

  62 James Northcote, R.A., Grouse-shooting in the Forest of Bowland, 1802, depicts hunting as a noble pursuit. The Lancashire hot-shots depicted here are William Assheton of Cuerdale Hall and the Revd T.H. Dixon Hoste. The forest of Bowland, like most of the Pennine moors, was famous for its rich shooting opportunities.

  63 John Wootton, John Warde and his Family, 1735. The lively huntress Mary Warde can be seen on horseback to the left of the picture.

  Despite the exceptional gentlewoman celebrated for her horsemanship, hunting had long been a proverbial expression of masculine competition and camaraderie. Certainly in the Pennines, local hunting songs of 1760s, 1770s and 1780s suggest a hearty culture of cocksure masculinity. Elizabeth Shackleton's scathing remarks speak to the display of braggadocio: ‘Baron Cun-lif-fe his valet, groom & Hunters all in Parade & high Glory set out for Wigan Hunt.’132 Although women often managed some indirect engagement with this sporting culture as dispensers of hospitality, male diversion could introduce a season of gender apartheid. Walton of Marsden, Townley of Royle and Parker of Browsholme went so far in 1775 as to purchase a hunting seat upon the Wolds in the East Riding, the gentlemen ‘to join in Housekeeping & to go Hunt there this winter’. Mr Lister left the north altogether in 1778 to reside at a hunting seat in Oxfordshire.133 Whether men embraced outdoor pursuits as means to be with men, or as an excuse to escape domesticity and polite conversation is unclear. Perhaps they just preferred sport. As the hapless Ralph Standish Howard confessed in 1727, ‘I long mightily to be in Lancashire again. Balls and operas and plays afford me no sort of pleasure in comparison with hunting and shooting …’134 Diversions such as hunting, fishing and especially bull-baiting and cock-fighting brought gentlemen into contact with their social inferiors and freed them of the burden of polite heterosociality. As Elizabeth Shackleton complained of the chase, ‘My son came home from Broughton Hunt where he sat up till three this morning afterwards went to Sleep in a nasty Alehouse at Marton. I like not these vulgar publick hunts …’135 The gentleman whose love of rural sport could deprive his wife and daughters of urban pleasure and the sociability of her equals obviously had a life beyond routine caricature. No wonder so many women felt out of their element in the country where nothing might be talked of but ‘The Militia, Farming & Justice business all day long’.136 Indeed, to the green and giddy Betsy Thoughtless what was heralded as ‘a happy tranquil manner of spending ones days’, seemed in reality ‘little better than being buried alive.’137

  64 ‘A Fox-hunting Breakfast’, 1777, affectionately satirises the earthy, masculine associations of field sports. An accompanying ditty suggests men who dislike hunting are Frenchified effeminates.

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  Women's letters and diaries brim with commentary on the array of public diversions from which they fashioned a cultural life. As we have seen, a woman's repertoire of pleasures varied according to her wealth, age, tastes and place of residence. Unusually lucky was the woman who enjoyed equality of access with her husband to the much vaunted Georgian delights. This much is constant. On the other hand, the sheer range of urban entertainments available in the provinces from the last decades of the seventeenth century in some areas and the early eighteenth century in others was regarded as a striking novelty. In 1722 Macky maintained that ‘These assemblies are very convenient for young people; for formerly the Country Ladies were stewed up in their father's old Mansion Houses, and seldom saw Company but at an Assize, a Horse-Race, or a Fair’. With equal enthusiasm, John Ramsay of Ochtertyre recorded a ‘wonderful change upon female manners in consequence of playhouses, assemblies and concerts’. Previously, ‘the Scottish women made their most brilliant appearance at burials’.138 Of course, it is possible that commentators exaggerated the extent of transformation the better to celebrate Augustan modernity, yet it does appear that the cultural institutions so well-established in spas and county towns by the early eighteenth century significantly broadened the social horizons of privileged women in the provinces. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century rural existence could be boring to a proverb.139 From the 1720s to the 1820s the scope of public entertainment remained remarkably constant. Social news exchanged among the Barcroft and Whitaker networks and among a younger generation of Parkers suggests that the core cultural institutions of the 1810s and 1820s were remarkably similar to their counterparts eighty years earlier. The Preston letters Eliza Parker wrote to her father Thomas Parker of Alkincoats in the 1800s present an altogether familiar picture of bride's visits, tea parties, charity balls, assemblies, race meetings, handsome dragoons, fashionable glamour and a dwindling allowance (‘I can assure you we have done nothing but dress and undress all this week’140). On the pleasures of Preston, they could have been written by her grandmother. Of course, over the century the density of provincial facilities increased. By 1800, assembly rooms, theatres and clubs were no longer the monopoly of the county towns and resorts. However, the polite renaissance was never universal. While the improved road network may have increased access to several oases of politeness, the provincial north for instance still had its stretches of cultural desert, as Alice Ainsworth sighed of her home town, ‘Bolton is proverbially dull just now’. In Haworth in the 1820s the Brontë's Aunt Branwell was said to have found the winter isolation of the Pennines very wearing after the cheerful visiting and lively society of Penzance.141

  However, what emerges in sharper relief at the end of the period is the growing importance of an associative life for women, the extraordinary proliferation of institutions through which women could garner a new kind of public standing and radiate something of that public spirit revered by their brothers. Take the range of causes pursued by a typical antislavery activist of the 1830s and 1840s, retrieved by Claire Midgley. Ann Taylor Gilbert fulfilled all the duties incumbent on the wife of a Nottingham Independent minister, but she was also the leader of the women's anti-slavery society in the town, as well as the ‘founder of refuge for “unfortunate” women, collector for a provident Society, member of a Committee for the Management of a Free Library, visitor to the Blind Asylum, superintendent of a Sunday School for young women, conductor of a cottage service for young women, and active in the Ladies Anti-Corn Law Committee …’142 The ladies' debating societies may not have outlived Pitt's ‘terror’, but the institutionalization of fashionable benevolence constructed altogether new arenas for the expression of female conviviality and officiousness. By the 1820s it was routine for ladies' pocket books to print in their opening pages long lists of the charitable institutions patronised by the truly fashionable. Not that the seriousness of purpose behind the many missions of Christian duty should be underestimated. Strikingly, the philanthropic impulse propelled the idealistic out of their safe meeting-rooms into squalid, disreputable and often frighten
ing parts of town. In 1859 a Shrewsbury minister's wife recalled the struggle with her fear when first asked to do make unattended visits on Butcher Row. On encountering a group of men loitering outside the pub, she panicked and fled home to her husband: ‘Being agitated, I burst into tears saying, “I cannot go out at night; it's no use trying”. However next day I managed better.’ As Anne Summers has concluded, the work of visiting was not just a dilettante fashion of passing free time, but an engagement of the self which involved the sacrifice of leisure and the development of expertise.’143 The nineteenth century saw an expansion of the terrain of female action, not a diminution.

  Assuredly, over the long run, individual cultural venues and diversions rose and fell in fashionable taste. The cultural passeggiata in St James's Park fell away, but instead the nineteenth-century elite chose to ride the ring in Hyde Park. While the London pleasure gardens dwindled into variety venues and finally closed, the seaside promenade came into its own.144 Apart from a handful of Regency revivals, the large public masquerade had fallen out of fashion by the 1790s, but court-sponsored festivity continued as did public dancing, now in the guise of charity balls.145 Evangelical reaction may have dented the popularity of the theatre in some provincial towns (at least this is the argument made by many on the basis of Wilkinson Tate's recriminatory memoirs), but interestingly it seems not to have affected the discriminating enjoyment of the unimpeachable Anna Larpent, who actually rather enjoyed Mrs Inchbald's maligned Lover's Vows (1798): ‘I cannot see the least Immorality in this Drama’, she reported in 1800, ‘On the Contrary the cause of truth & Virtue seem served by it.’146 Public music and the opera survived virtually unscathed; and of course, the exhibition, the museum, panoramas and dioramas, the bazaar and the large department store took on even greater prominence for the later Victorians as places of female congregation and public promenade. Venues noted for female gatherings and heterosexual conversation in 1880s London included the British Museum reading room, mixed discussion clubs, galleries, tea shops, concerts and plays, and the craze for bicycling, tennis clubs, dramatics societies and garden parties had broadened the field of outdoor entertainment still further by 1900. Moreover, the respectable often walked unattended between one venue and another, leading Mica Nava to conclude that ‘middle-class women were much closer to the dangers and excitements of city life than the notion of separate spheres would lead us to anticipate.’147