The Gentleman's Daughter

by Amanda Vickery

  In parallel, came the rise of politeness. This secular code of behaviour favouring easy and inclusive social intercourse within the elite, broadly conceived, was in the intellectual ascendant from the 1710s and found numerous adherents amongst genteel Anglicans and old Dissenters. Politeness, as expounded by Addison and Steele, meshed particularly easily with an unpained, inexplosive religion and a vernacular stoicism; it was a useful adhesive in the mixed society of provincial gentility; and it was particularly well received by ladies. The Tatler and the Spectator fostered and glamorized heterosexual sociability, thereby raising the prestige of those terrains which offered women a place beside their men, and the profile of the cosmopolitan gentleman who could do a woman honour. Not that politeness carried all before it; as much as a woman might want to promote a relaxed and dignified patriarchy, a man could be bent upon its disruption, as has been seen. Indeed, I suspect that a battle was waged for the soul of eighteenth-century gentility – with women, urbanites and upright patriarchs in one camp and unashamedly parochial sportsmen and irresponsible bachelors in the other.

  Fuelled by polite ideals, the intellectual horizons of privileged, provincial women rolled majestically outwards in the course of the eighteenth century. To be sure, the most rapid increase in elite female literacy had occurred earlier, but what distinguished the eighteenth century was its dramatically expanding culture of female literariness. The pious soul-searching that inspired most seventeenth-century diarists is a distinctly muted theme in many eighteenth-century women's journals, leaving the page clear for sheer writerly virtuosity. In parallel, the near universal literacy of elite social networks and the elaboration of the daily and the cross posts (those between provincial cities) facilitated a immense intensification of female correspondence. The well-turned letter became an unavoidable performance of the long-standing female work of kin, but in addition it enabled unprecedented numbers of women to participate in worldly exchange and debate. It was in their tireless writing no less than in their ravenous reading that genteel women embraced a world far beyond the boundaries of their parish.

  Entwined with the eighteenth-century revolution in print was the so-called provincial urban renaissance – another development which provincial women embraced with almost indecent alacrity. Where a Stuart lady might have experienced the occasional social thrill at the assizes, a horse-race or a fair in a provincial centre, by 1750, in the same town, her Georgian counterpart could rejoice in assembly rooms, concert series, theatre seasons, circulating libraries, daytime lectures, urban walks and pleasure gardens, in addition to regular sporting fixtures and the assizes; moreover, none of these arenas was off-limits to polite women. Indeed, the abundance of moral advice on proper female behaviour in public is itself a testament to the vividness of their presence. From the early eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century the central elements of public entertainment were notably enduring. The rising tide of religious Evangelicalism did not efface the woman in public, rather it reorientated the public life of the more serious-minded away from worldly entertainment towards good works. By the end of the eighteenth century, the institutionalization of fashionable benevolence had created altogether new platforms for female association and public action. By the early nineteenth century, although their family duties remained, the public profile of privileged, provincial women had reached unprecedented heights – and, of course, their numbers had increased. Because the growth in national wealth in the era of the classic Industrial and Agrarian Revolutions was distributed so unequally, it generated a great many more families possessed of the resources required to participate in the modes of life that constituted gentility, both in town and country. Many of them, probably most, aspired to do so, despite the growth in economic, social and denominational tensions within local elites between 1790 and 1830.2

  This is not a story that sits comfortably with the accepted narratives and categories of English women's history, indeed, it is the very reverse of the accepted tale of progressive incarceration in a domestic, private sphere. Nor has the account had much to say about male appropriation of the public sphere. Instead, I have emphasized the concepts which animated genteel letter-writers and diarists not twentieth-century historians – in particular prudence and propriety, regularity and economy, politeness and vulgarity, fortitude, resignation and fate. Nevertheless, it would be blinkered to suggest that notions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ had no purchase in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century discourse. Yet even the most cursory sweep of Georgian usages reveals that the public/private dichotomy had multiple applications, which only sometimes mirrored a male/female distinction, and then not always perfectly.

  A notional division of public and private which consigned women to domestic management and reserved policy to men had considerable hold on the eighteenth-century imagination. In a ‘Letter to a New-born Child’ written in the 1730s, Catherine Talbot counselled a female cousin, ‘Let the men unenvied shine in public, it is we must make their homes delightful to them’.3 William Wilberforce believed that women were naturally more disposed to religion than men, with the result ‘that when the husband should return to his family, worn and harassed by worldly cares or professional labours, the wife, habitually preserving a warmer and more unimpaired spirit of devotion than is perhaps consistent with being immersed in the bustle of life, might revive his languid piety …’4 And, of course, one would search long and hard for a pundit who did not believe that a woman's primary calling was matrimony and motherhood: ‘Domestic concerns are the province of the wife’, pronounced the Scottish judge Lord Kames in 1781, in a dour lecture outlining the conservative position on female destiny:

  To make a good husband, is but one branch of a man's duty; but it is the chief duty of woman, to make a good wife. To please her husband, to be a good oeconomist, and to educate her children, are capital duties, each of which requires much training. Nature lays the foundation: diligence and sagacity in the conductor, will make a beautiful superstructure. The time a girl bestows on her doll, is a prognostic that she will be equally diligent about her offspring.5

  Ladies' advice literature always advocated energetic attention to household matters, and a substantial female investment in the home was taken for granted in genteel correspondence: ‘We believe you to be too good a wife and too tender a mother to be often abroad, which certainly is the best means of preserving good order at home’, Ann Pellet reminded her niece in 1757.6 That boys would never be so domesticated was considered indisputable. In fact, a maternal preference for daughters was always explained by the commonplace that girls stayed at home: ‘If a little Miss sho'd come, I hope ‘twill prove a charming companion to you, which you cannot expect from the boys who will or sho'd spend most of their youth in schools.’ Sixty years later Anne Robbins displayed identical reasoning (if in slightly heightened language) when reporting her satisfaction upon the birth of her baby daughter: ‘Girls have more the power of being home comforts than boys and I hope she will prove one to [her] poor mother.’7 Moreover, domestic life had many ardent female devotees who held that real happiness was found only at home. Predictably, the widow Ann Pellet subscribed to this view, wishing Elizabeth Parker ‘a safe return to your own little castle where may you ever find the highest comfort this life affords (viz) the Riches of True Content’. Genteel writers routinely drew on the symbol of the hearth to suggest intimacy and security.8 Yet, in practice, self-conscious domesticity and effective housekeeping did not automatically result in female seclusion. It is worth remembering that the most cloying celebration of home life which emerges in this book comes from the Ramsden household, whose mistress had an insatiable appetite for going out. Bessy Ramsden's letters advertised the cosy comforts of home and family, only to break off abruptly at the siren call of entertainment. As her husband concluded, ‘thus far last night [went Bessy's letter when] … came the Coach to the Door and away whisked Madam to the Assembly as usual’.9 A happy housewife and an incurable street-wife, Bessy Ramsde
n saw no inconsistency in relishing domesticity at one time of day and independent socializing at another. Nor was the Georgian home presented in women's own writings as a sanctuary from the social world.

  It is crucial to stress also that there were constructions of the ‘public’ and ‘private’ which did not correspond at all to a distinction between male and female worlds. In fact, the typical usage of ‘publick’ in the writings of genteel women was that defined by Johnson as ‘open for general entertainment’. Thus, when the young diarist Anna Porter listed all ‘the publick places and private entertainments’ she visited and enjoyed between 1773 and 1787, public places included the play, the opera, Richmond assembly and Ranelagh – all venues which could be penetrated by virtually anyone for the price of a ticket and where visitors could see and be seen. Private entertainments were attractively exclusive gatherings entered by invitation only. Therefore Jane Pellet was unabashed when a public ball ‘for the mob’ was cancelled on Twelfth Night in 1747, since she was honoured with an invitation from a duke to a fashionable ball in ‘his private apartment’.10 Genteel women played an active role, possibly even predominated, at both sorts of diversion. Clearly, a dichotomy between public and private was at work here, but the contrast drawn was that between the vulgar and the select, between inclusive sociability open to all and discriminating assemblies accessible to the few, emphatically not a distinction between a male world and a female home. The distinction between vulgar promiscuity and polite selection was a powerful key for the understanding of both commercial entertainment in urban resorts and social congregation in the genteel home. So it was that Elizabeth Shackleton designated days for ‘publick’ entertainment, when Alkincoats and Pasture Houses were open and common to all, when ‘a mixed multitude’ enjoyed her hospitality, but also complained about the common throng at a public ball in Burnley, ‘but a vulgar affair & a quere mixd multitude’. To be sure, even exclusive gatherings of ten elite couples were still profoundly social, yet they remained engagingly ‘private’ in the eighteenth-century genteel imagination, since a guest would not have to sit down to dinner beside a chance stranger, and this was a crucial distinction, if there were many like Burney's Mrs Maple who was constitutionally unable to hold a conference ‘with a person of whom she had never seen the pedigree, nor the rent-roll …’11 The public and private in this usage related to the differentiation of rank not gender.

  Literally hundreds of women, moreover, belonged to families that consciously conceived of themselves as public institutions. Public families, men and women included, were invariably eminent, titled and politically well-connected. They lived in the great world, constantly in the public eye, their doings reported in the public papers. For such families, the birth of an heir was a matter ‘both of a happy private and public nature’. Public families sometimes neglected their wider responsibilities, by snobbishly opting for ‘private weddings’, to the disapproval of moralists.12 Commentators tied themselves in knots deciding whether the ladies of these families belonged to public or private life. Thus, when Canning reflected on the death of the Duchess of Portland, his categories almost failed him: ‘She was a good and almost a great character. I say almost because I do not know whether a woman in private life can fairly have that epithet attached to her.’ Though obviously not a great statesman, she was virtually a national worthy. Similarly, Henry Ellison writing in 1781 was astonished at the ‘distinguished reception which Lady [Ravensworth] met with at the Playhouse, the Audience applauding her as she entered, a compliment I do not remember to have been paid to any individual, not in a public character.’13 The accolade testified to the publicity a lady of a great family enjoyed.

  By contrast, private families lived out of the world, lacking the means to enjoy cosmopolitan, social success. Some gentlemen and ladies of means deliberately elected to live a life of retirement, consciously chosing groves and books over metropolitan prestige.14 Many more were the men who acknowledged that because of their modest backgrounds and ambitions, they lived in private life. When a schoolmaster John Hodgkinson was offered a post of estate steward in 1791 he balked at his promotion to a higher sphere:

  I considered that I should be thrown into a more public life and into a society very different from what I had hirtherto mixed in. My life had so far been a secluded one compared with what was now opening out to me. I could not tell what effect this great change might make. My quiet and sober habits might be given up and others of a more dangerous tendency adopted. I troubled for my family and indeed for my own reputation.

  Clearly it was possible for men to draw moral self-importance from a life lived outside the glare of high society and political intrigue. When Alexander Carlyle, a leading moderate minister, began writing in 1800 aged seventy-nine, he too disclaimed any part in a public sphere, describing ‘the Humble and Private Sphere of Life, in comparison with that of many others, in which I have always acted …’15 Now it may be that both of these men were primarily concerned to dissociate themselves from worldliness and corruption, yet it is still striking and significant that a schoolmaster and a minister, precisely the men nineteenth-century historians would expect to invest in the concept of a male public sphere, should so defiantly cling to a vision of the private character of their own lives. While noblewomen might glitter in the public sphere, the majority of men were relegated to, or rejoiced in the private shade.

  Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that in genteel society a gentleman's life had dimensions that his wife's did not; a fact which is given a rare canvassing in a letter written by Mrs Beatrix Lister to her son Thomas Lister MP in 1773. She was urging the taking of dancing lessons: ‘I don't wish you to dance in publick, except it was quite agriable to you, but I think learning gives an ease to Carige & helps ye walking. Mr Spectator you know recomends it vastly tho' he realy values no man but for his publick Spirit, Justice & Integrity.’16 Two kinds of public masculine performance are invoked here, the social commerce of the landed gentleman and the disinterested public service of the office-holder. Of the latter, provincial ladies could claim little share. From the exalted member of parliament or lord lieutenant for the county, to the worthy magistrate and respectable member of the grand jury, feckless was the gentlemen who had not found a platform from which to demonstrate his public spirit.17 It was in the holding of office that the ideal of genteel adult masculinity inhered.

  There were, nevertheless, ways in which women might lay claim to a certain public spirit through disinterested service to their local community, the county or the nation; Elizabeth Shackleton of Alkincoats, for instance, perpetuated her dead husband's ‘publick spirit’ by selling his celebrated rabies medicine at an affordable price.18 Countless others promoted the common good through acts of charity. Furthermore, since political influence was largely a matter of property, the peeress and the heiress might simply assume certain rights and responsibilities irrespective of her sex, as Elaine Chalus, Linda Colley and Judith Lewis have pointed out.19 Aristocrats were quite capable of pulling rank over gender if the need arose. When the Duchess of Queensberry led a squadron of ladies to storm the gallery of the House of Lords in 1739, she reportedly ‘pished at the ill-breeding of a mere lawyer’.20 Even if the dominant discourses of femininity were belittling, the reverence for rank, wealth and position remained overwhelming.

  Not that female aristocratic power went uncontested. George Canning, for instance, deplored his aunt's tendency to take issue with him over matters of state and clutched at any hope of abatement:

  had no political differences – insomuch that I really thought Hetty had come to her senses, and seen that a woman has no business at all with politicks, or that if she thinks at all about them, it should be at least in a feminine manner, as wishing for the peace and prosperity of her country – and for the success and credit of those of her family (if she has any) who are engaged in the practical part of politicks.21

  Thus he invoked the notion of the softly feminine foray into politics which was reit
erated ad nauseam in Georgian and Victorian discourse; but, as some historians have pointed out, this patronizing concession offered a wonderful rhetorical opportunity which activists deployed to their advantage. When the Manchester Abolitionists appealed in 1787 for female aid in the Manchester Mercury, they promised that benevolent public action would be the ultimate expression of sensitive femininity, not its negation:

  If any public Interference will at any TIME become the Fair Sex; if their Names are ever to be mentioned with Honour beyond the Boundaries of their Family, and the Circle of their Connections, it can only be, when a public Opportunity is given for the Exertion of those Qualities which are peculiarly expected in, and particularly possessed by that most amiable Part of the Creation – the Qualities of Humanity, Benevolence and Compassion.22

  Similarly, Linda Colley's female patriots used the rhetoric of feminine virtue to legitimize their actions: ‘Posing as the pure-minded Women of Britain was, in practice, a way of insisting on the right to public spirit.’23 Equally, female philanthropists mustered the rhetoric of domesticity to justify their non-domestic activities. In arguing that organized charity represented an altogether natural extension of female domestic duties, a form of ‘social housekeeping’, activists defeated the opposition with its own weapons. Sentimentalists like Ruskin handed rhetorical success on a plate when they mused, ‘a woman has a personal work or duty, relating to her own home, and a public work and duty which is also the expansion of that’, and ‘wherever a true wife comes, [home] is always around her’.24 In so far as the language of domesticity became more powerful and pervasive in the period covered by this book, then genteel women became increasingly adept at manipulating it to pursue a range of activities and assume a set of responsibilities outside the home. Indeed, the well-documented struggles of privileged Victorian women to participate more fully in institutional public life represented less a reaction against irksome restrictions, recently imposed, than a drive to extend yet further the gains made by their Georgian predecessors. Propriety might have made a tight-fitting suit, but it could worn in a far wider range of situations than we have been apt to think.