Comprehensive research on women and early nineteenth-century cultural space is lacking, but new investigations do not suggest the sudden eclipse of elite women's public lives. Important new research by Jennifer Hall on the audience for opera for instance, does not support the conventional narrative. Of the 1820s and 1830s, Hall concludes that elite women were particularly associated with the boxes, over the doors of which the names of the female proprietors were inscribed. Female physical prominence was accentuated by their tendency to sit at the front of the boxes, while men stood behind. Gentlemen, by contrast, enjoyed greater mobility in the opera house paying attendance at different the boxes and notoriously the green room, descending to the pit and the newly inaugurated stalls. Early in the century, respectable women did sit in the pit and the stalls on occasion, but risked having their reputations compromised by proximity to the prostitutes gathered there. However, by the 1840s the pit had become a more respectable choice for a reputable female opera-goer, although the ultra-fashionable still sought to display themselves on the first tier.148 Against a backdrop of unsubstantiated assertion, such findings are suggestive of the weakness of the case which takes it for granted that privileged women were swept out of public space in the later eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. There is little solid evidence to support the assumption that a great curfew was rung when the dewy Victoria ascended the throne.
On the other hand, none of this is to argue that female publicity was not a matter of long-standing concern and debate. The advance of commercialized leisure and public congregations did not pass without the wringing of hands. Promiscuous sociability in the company of strangers was anathema to this profoundly snobbish and hierarchical society, so those venues that promoted open access and anonymity were obvious targets for criticism; the indiscriminate mingling of legions accommodated by the sprawling pleasure gardens was seen as an invitation to vice.149But if the nameless hordes and trifling diversions to be found at the pleasure garden made moralists uneasy, the possibilities for disguise and deception inherent in the quintessential masquerade drove them to apoplexy.150 It is not hard to see why so many moralists preached the unproblematic pleasures of private company, for it was in private company alone that a truly exclusive and predictable marriage market operated. Only in private company could the elite guarantee absolutely the qualifications of their companions.
It is important to emphasize, however, that not all public venues were tarred with the same gloomy brush – exhibitions, museums and edifying spectacles, the benefit concert, the church service, the friendly society, the small subscription assembly and the tragic play were rarely presented as perilous to virtue – and even the more risqué arenas such as pleasure gardens had their salubrious corners. The public world was large enough to admit of a range of diversions befitting a variety of moral tastes. As Goldsmith said of Bath, ‘people of all ways of thinking, even from the libertine to the methodist, have it in their power to complete the day with employments suited to their inclinations’.151 Similarly, the reformed Eliza Haywood brought herself to reason that ‘Public diversions … may be enjoyed without prejudice, provided they are frequented in reasonable manner, and behaved at with Decency: – It is the immoderate Use, or rather the Abuse of anything, which renders the partaking of it a Fault.’ Lady Sarah Pennington conceded, ‘Diversions, properly regulated, are not only allowable, they are absolutely necessary to Youth, and are never criminal but when taken to excess’, and no less a conservative than Dr Gregory acknowledged ‘Every period of life has amusement which are natural and proper to it. You may indulge the variety of your tastes in these, while you keep within the bounds of that propriety which is suitable to your sex.’ Even Richardson could be indulgent towards a women who loved to ‘go to the public places’, provided she was ‘an excellent manager in a family’ and ‘earns her pleasures by her early rising’.152In effect, moral commentary acknowledged and accepted the female consumption of culture, but sought to minimize its worst excesses and to tutor women's cultural choices: improvement and business should come before pleasure, Fordyce's sermons should be read before Sheridan's plays, an assembly was preferable to a masquerade, the company of known friends should be favoured over the advances of complete strangers. Not that moralists singled out young women alone. It is important to recognize that such arguments were but an aspect of the pervasive contemporary anxiety about luxury which was seen to threaten both sexes. The immoderate cultural indulgence of both men and women was a cause for concern. Moralists certainly feared that women would be tempted from the path of domestic virtue by the tawdry delights of the town, but they also were apprehensive that men would be lured away from business, family responsibilities and rational endeavour,153 note the anxious authorization to pleasure William Gossip afforded his hosier son in 1754:
I am not at all ag[ains]t your subscribing to the Concert at Leicester, provided it is carried on by people of credit & fashion among you, & not merely by mercenary performers. Those hirelings are the very worst acquaintances you can make; I know the nature of the whole tribe of them. Jardini & his band after occasioning some disturbances in the family are all discoverd & gone from Bramham Park. If your Concerts are to be attended with dancing I think you would do well not to engage in that part of the diversion for the reasons you gave me when here. I hope you have more spirit than to subject yourself to more slights …154
Indeed, the ability to resist the lure of the pleasure garden and the play in particular came to symbolize a Spartan superiority to fashionable indulgence. The young lawyer Thomas Greene, at pains to demonstrate his iron resolve and modest entertainments to his sister, protested he'd ‘Not been at Ranelagh since I was there with Mrs Wall, & but once since at Vauxhall. I go two or three times in a winter to see Garrick, & once or twice in a Summer to see Foote. I am generally in bed before twelve … From this you may judge of my Goings on & the Care I take of Myself.’155 Likewise, Robert Parker restored his mother's good opinion in 1780 through his sobriety and restraint: ‘Mr [Banastre] Parker says you are a downright Cit [citizen] Makes no doubt but you will be Ld Mayor. He co'd not prevail with you Nor tempt you to go with him to Ranelagh. We was all glad to hear it & told him so.’156
65 The untitled frontispiece to the Lady's Magazine (1780). The polite female consumer is deliberating between folly (in the form of gambling) and wisdom.
Over and above this long-standing fear about the commercial assault on Spartan virtue, lay a set of pragmatic calculations about the promiscuous sociability which ticketed venues promoted. How to enjoy the benefits of a widened marriage market while facing none of the inherent risks was the dilemma which exercised the propertied. For their daughters to be admired in public by a nobleman was one thing, to be ogled by a penniless adventurer was quite another, and the resorts were famously ‘crouded with Vulgars’. Even at Bath, Smollett's Matthew Bramble complained, ‘a very inconsiderable proportion of genteel people are lost in a mob of impudent plebeians…’157 Thus, warnings about the unsuitable mates lurking at commercial venues were the stock-in-trade of advice to young women entering the marriage market. Fanny Burney's Evelina famously reads like a handbook of the hazards of indiscriminate sociability for artless women. Virtually every time she ventured out to a pleasure garden, promenade, assembly or opera, the seventeen-year-old heroine found herself preyed on by uninvited, plausible or vulgar strangers, although, of course, she was ultimately seen to advantage by the unimpeachable Lord Orville and ended her tour of urban resorts in matrimonial triumph. From the outset, a desire for the glittering possibilities of public congregation was balanced by fears of the encroaching hordes. Hence the continued attempt to demarcate exclusive space within arenas which could be penetrated by anyone who could afford a ticket. Hence the prevalence of devices which limited the access of the vulgar and preserved the gentility of culture: subscription, dedication, benefit and charity, as Jonathan Barry has pointed out.158
A clear preference for a select party over a comme
rcial entertainment was a sure advertisement of a young woman's virtue. Being altogether a demure young woman, the teenage Anna Porter was aware of the distinction to be drawn between vulgar commercial leisure and selective polite culture and knew which the superior lady should prefer. At Ranelagh she remarked that she would have been more comfortably entertained at home with her friends ‘than I was in all that hurly burly’. At the Pantheon she mused ‘there is an emptiness, a lightness in all publick places’, which she dreaded liking since it warped the soul and drew it from nobler pursuits. At the opera she exclaimed ‘Surely the trouble and crowd of publick places is horrid!’ And the day after an extremely agreeable dance at Lady Macclesfield's she found upon further reflection that she ‘was fatigued & stupid & cried out on ye horrid effects of dissipation!’ At fifteen years of age, Porter made the lofty observation that ‘no pleasure equaled that of spending an Eveng in rational instructing conversation with sensible friends’.159
By far the most overworked dualism drawn on in discussion of leisure and culture was that of fashionable worldliness versus philosophical retirement, a ‘hurry’ versus peace, the gaudy town versus the rural glade. Urban ennui found expression in a self-conscious cult of rural retreat:
From the Court to the Cottage convey me away
For I'm weary of Grandeur & what they call gay
Where pride without measure
And pomp without pleasure
Makes life in a circle of hurry decay
Far remote & retired from the Noise of the Town
I'll exchange my Brocade for a plain Russet Gown
My Friends shall be few
But well chosen & true
And sweet recreation our Evening shall crown.160
After reciting the excitements of a dizzy social round, countless correspondents felt compelled to launch into unconvincing renunciations of the urbane and cosmopolitan. At the Preston Guild celebrations of 1762, the gentlewoman Mrs Wiglesworth attended four balls, four assemblies, plays and a dinner at the Guildhall, but still protested, perhaps a little too strenuously, ‘I assure you I was quite Happy when I got home for my Family & [the] Country is my delight, for that kind of hurrying Life would be very disagreeable to me’. Still the pull of Preston was certainly strong: ‘it was called little London, indeed if you had but Money you might see or buy anything that was Pritty, but for all that I was very glad to see Townhead …’ Amidst the bubbling assemblies of polite Pontefract Jane Scrimshire sighed ‘I Long for a little retirement. I grow more & more tired of Company one ought always to be on guard before…’ Returning from an extremely diverting season of ‘crowded Balls & every amusement’ at Tunbridge Wells, Miss Warde mused on what she clearly believed to be (or thought she ought to believe to be) the higher life of rural reflection:
I am glad you were so well-entertained at Scarbro' Walking on the Sands & the Variety of Moss you speak of must be vastly amusing, it shews a just way of thinking to prefer that Solitary relief from Company. I wish I could command one Equally so. I am very far from believing a Publick Life a happy one, or Capable of giving any real Satisfaction to the mind, but I own (tho' I never much wish for it), when I am entered into a scene of Gayety I have seldom the resolution to quit it in such a manner, tho' I never like many young People I know returned home with regret.
Even the desperate Isabel Carr, spurned mistress of Sir James Lowther, longed foolishly for a ‘little cottage’ on her lover's Westmoreland estate: ‘I will live in a wood, or the middle of a Lake, or anywhere in the world, let me be but near you’, although she later saw the error of her ways and likened rural banishment to colonial exile.161
However, it is worth emphasizing here that the avowed taste for a little rural seclusion (however unconvincing) was not necessarily an acknowledgement of the power of domestic precepts, rather it was a nod to ‘otium’ the Roman ideal of intellectual leisure. Originating in the rediscovery of Horace, a cult of ostentatious solitude reached fashionable heights in the grottoes and hermitages of the mid-eighteenth century and lived on in Romantic ruralism. To achieve perfect happiness a ‘man’ needed space for philosophical contemplation. Thus, a female prodigy who spoke several languages and attended scientific lectures was touted in 1742 as ‘quite a Phylosophycal wise lady quite above ye pleasures of publick diversions and follies of this town; tho' a very pretty woman …’ In 1820 Lydia Boynton drew on the same conceptual armoury when she sought to reassure her future parents-in-law that she was no empty-headed socialite. She tried to banish their ‘apprehension that a Country Life may prove dull & produce sensations of disappointment to me, after being accustomed to a London life’, anxiously urging them ‘to dispense all fears on that account – for the little knowledge and experience of the world I possess have taught me the transient pleasure & insufficiency great wealth & gaiety produce in comparison with the substantial enjoyments to be reap'd from rational houses & society.’ She was appalled that they could think ‘that I could for a moment drop a sigh of regret for the fluttering delusions of a Ball &c.’162 In disavowing frivolity, women laid claim to rationality. In forswearing one public life they colonized another.
Conclusion
THIS HAS NOT BEEN A STUDY in nonconformity or rebellion. Propriety was the watchword of genteel women in Georgian England, and thus the majority were consciously resigned to the most enduring features of an elite woman's lot: the symbolic authority of fathers and husbands, the self-sacrifices of motherhood and the burdensome responsibility for domestic servants, housekeeping and family consumption. The fact that these elements were so abiding perhaps accounts for the extent of acquiescence – rebelling against roles that appeared both prehistoric and preordained would profit nothing. Resignation and accommodation were seen as the most sensible courses. That said, genteel women did not expect to live a life of grovelling subordination. Masculine authority was formally honoured, but practically managed; the dignity of genteel femininity demanded respect and courtesy; female stewardship of younger children, servants and housekeeping would brook little interference. Women were trained to allow a gentleman the rights of his place, but determined at the same time to maintain their own. At infringements of their jurisdiction, or humiliating instances of masculine tyranny, genteel women still boiled with indignation. After all, as members of the elite they partook, no less than their menfolk, of the haughty superiorities of wealth and rank.
In its essentials, this sketch of gender distinctions amongst the provincial elite could do service not only for the eighteenth century, but also for the seventeenth and perhaps even the sixteenth. But over these long-standing chords, newer themes sounded. The eighteenth century saw a sustained, secular celebration of romantic marriage and loving domesticity, alongside the institutionalization of a national marriage-market for increasing numbers of the elite through the London season and at the resorts; both developments heightened cultural preoccupation with the possibilities and problems of romantic choice. Yet for all the raised hopes and anxieties, most ‘love matches’ were still made within very strict limits. Admittedly, the father who dragged his unwilling daughter to the altar became seen as a gothic anachronism, but parents could achieve the same matrimonial ends through careful shepherding in and out of the more exclusive stalls of the marriage market and by inculcating a proper respect for position in their offspring. Indeed, the romantic appeal of rank and wealth hardly vanished, and few young lovers elected to live ‘in a cell on love and bread and butter’.1 In the event, the genteel sought matches that were as prudent as they were affectionate and the happiness of the outcome for the bride lay in the balance between the two.
Linked to the celebration of marriage was the growing sentimentalization of motherhood. Of course, the veneration of the mother is at least as old as the Madonna. Elizabeth I would hardly have represented herself as the Mother of her People if the role did not evoke positive associations, and the Puritans did much to promote the honour of breast-feeding in the elite. However, what distinguishes the
eighteenth-century discourse of motherhood from its predecessors is the overlaying of secular hosannahs on the ancient religious solemnizations. Breast-feeding became an ultra-fashionable practice, eulogized in the most gushing manner in the novels of Samuel Richardson. But for all the sugariness of the proliferating representations of motherhood, the experience for most was not one of undiluted sweetness. Being a mother, against a background of disease and debility, remained a bloody, risky, uncontrollable and often gut-wrenching experience, such that a painting of a cherub chasing a butterfly, or a description of a blushing nursing mother spoke only intermittently and even then superficially to the powerful feelings evoked. The Bible, and in particular the book of Job, still had more to say to most. The self-representation commonest among genteel mothers was not that of a sighing, contented Madonna, it was rather that of a self-made pillar of fortitude and resignation, built to withstand the random blows of fate.
Against a backdrop of continuity and muted change, there were some striking departures. From the late seventeenth century the comfortably off in the provinces benefited from an extraordinary expansion and sophistication of their material and intellectual worlds. The import of such extra-European goods as tea and coffee, porcelain and chintz, the proliferation of new products like upholstered chairs, creamware dining services and printed wallpaper, and the rising expectations of domestic comfort that accompanied them made for the rapid elaboration of genteel material culture. As mistress of the tea-table or arbiter of family taste, the privileged eighteenth-century female consumer embraced the material enrichment of her world. Domestic processing continued on a prodigious scale, but eighteenth-century provisioning was increasingly a matter of orchestrating purchases from local, regional and distant suppliers and less a matter of manufacturing within the household. The eighteenth-century genteel household was less self-sufficient than its sixteenth or seventeenth-century counterparts.
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