The Gentleman's Daughter

by Amanda Vickery

  66 ‘The Patriotic Parting’, from the Lady's Magazine (1782).

  Abbreviations

  RECORD REPOSITORIES

  BIHR Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, York

  CLRO Corporation of London Record Office

  CRO Cheshire Record Office, Chester

  CRO, Carlisle Cumbria Record Office, Carlisle

  ERO Essex Record Office, Chelmsford

  HL Huntington Library, San Marino, Ca.

  LPL Lancaster Public Library

  LRO Lancashire Record Office, Preston

  NRO Northumberland Record Office, Newcastle

  NYRO North Yorkshire Record Office, Northallerton

  PRO Public Record Office, London

  RCHM Royal Commission for Historical Monuments

  WPL Westminster Public Library, London

  WRO Wigan Record Office, Leigh

  WYCRO, Bradford West Yorkshire County Record Office, Bradford

  WYCRO, Leeds West Yorkshire County Record Office, Leeds

  WYCRO, Wakefield West Yorkshire County Record Office, Wakefield

  YAS Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Leeds

  JOURNALS AND MISCELLANEOUS

  EcHR Economic History Review

  HJ Historical Journal

  HWJ History Workshop Journal

  P&P Past and Present

  UBD The Universal British Directory (1791)

  VCHL The Victoria History of the County of Lancaster

  Notes to the Text

  Introduction

  1 HL, HM 31201, Mrs Larpent's Diary, XI, 1810–21, facing f. 5.

  2 Clark, Working Life of Women, pp. 14, 41, 296. Interestingly, Clark included the aristocracy and nouveau-riche businessmen in her category of ‘capitalists’ since the two groups approximated to each other in manners, see pp. 14–41.

  3 Consider Amussen, An Ordered Society, p. 187; C. Hall, ‘The History of the Housewife’, in Hall, White, Male and Middle Class, pp. 43–71; George, Women in the First Capitalist Society, pp. 1–10; Hill, Women, Work and Sexual Politics, pp. 49–51, 78–80, 126–9, 245–9. On ‘the restriction of women's professional and business activities at the end of the eighteenth century’, see Pinchbeck, Women Workers, pp. 303–5. And on the ambition of the wealthier farmer's wife ‘to achieve gentility’ by having ‘nothing to do’, see pp. 33–40.

  4 Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage, p. 396. All citations refer to the 1977 edition.

  5 M. George, ‘From Goodwife to Mistress: The Transformation of the Female in Bourgeois Culture’, Science and Society, 37 (1973), p. 6.

  6 Shevelow, Women and Print Culture, pp. 5 and 1.

  7 See W. E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (New Haven, 1957), pp. 341–93; M. Jaeger, Before Victoria: Changing Standards and Behaviour, 1787–1837 (1956), pp. 113–30; M. Quinlan, Victorian Prelude: A History of English Manners, 1700–1830 (New York, 1941), pp. 139–59. The classic work on vulnerable and cloistered femininity is M. Vicinus (ed.), Suffer and be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (Bloomington, Ind., 1971). The socialization of trainee domesticates is the theme of D. Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (Bloomington, Ind., 1983) and F. Hunt (ed.), Lessons for Life: The Schooling of Girls and Women, 1850–1950 (Oxford, 1987). On the inhibition of female sexuality and physical activity, read E. Trudgill, Madonnas and Magdalens: The Origins and Development of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (1976), pp. 65–78, L. Duffin, ‘The Conspicuous Consumptive: Woman as Invalid’, in S. Delamont and L. Duffin (eds.), The Nineteenth-Century Woman: Her Cultural and Physical World (1978), pp. 26–56, and H. E. Roberts, ‘The Exquisite Slave: The Role of Clothes in the Making of the Victorian Woman’, Signs, 2 (1977), pp. 554–69. On the rigid demarcation of public and private physical space, see A. Clark, Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770–1845 (1987). That an emergent middle class built itself on the assumption of separate gender spheres is the argument of Hall, ‘Victorian Domestic Ideology’, and ‘Gender Divisions and Class Formation’, both reprinted in id., White, Male and Middle Class, pp. 75–93 and 94–107. The most substantial restatement of the separate spheres thesis remains Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes.

  8 See Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres’.

  9 Compare Amussen, Ordered Society, pp. 69 and 187, and Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, pp. 272–5.

  10 D. C. Coleman, ‘Proto-industrialization: A Concept too Many’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 36 (1983), pp. 435–48. See also R. Samuel, ‘Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand Technology in mid-Victorian Britain’, HWJ, 3 (1977), pp. 6–72.

  11 See P. Earle, ‘The Female Labour Market’, and Goldberg, Women, Work and the Life Cycle. On the generation of income, see Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class, pp. 158–74, and Holderness, ‘Credit in a Rural Community’. The constraints on female enterprise are richly elaborated in Hunt, The Middling Sort, and suggested by Simonton, ‘Apprenticeship’.

  12 Olwen Hufton was one of the first to question the validity of the decline-and-fall model of women's work, arguing that it rests on the dubious assumption of a lost egalitarian Eden which has proved elusive to empiral research: id., ‘Women in History’, p. 126. Her own narrative of change and continuity, 1500 to 1800, is much less dramatic, but her subtle, nuanced and multi-stranded story still convinces: id., The Prospect Before Her, pp. 487–508. Another important criticism of the golden age myth is Bennett, ‘History that Stands Still’.

  13 See Sekora, Luxury.

  14 Childs, ‘Prescriptions for Manners’ (D.Phil, thesis), pp. 285–7.

  15 M. LeGates, ‘The Cult of Womanhood in Eighteenth-Century Thought’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1 (1976), pp. 21–39.

  16 Hunter, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Englishwoman’, p. 87.

  17 Gentleman's Magazine, 58, pp. 222–4.

  18 See LPL, MS 8752 (1776), 13 and 15 Dec.; MS 8754 (1779), 6, 21 and 29 April. A salutary development in this context is the attempt to recover the history of the reader herself. Two essays which contest the conventional image of the leisured reader passively ingesting eighteenth-century texts in private are Tadmor, ‘In the Even’, and Brewer, ‘Reconstructing the Reader’.

  19 See M. Z. Rosaldo, ‘The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections on Feminism and Cross-Cultural Understanding’, Signs, 5 (1980), pp. 389–417; and Kerber, ‘Separate Spheres’, pp. 18–19.

  20 Lady Pennington, Unfortunate Mother's Advice, p. 65; Haywood, Miss Betsy Thoughtless, p. 370.

  21 Bond, The Tatler, II, p. 444.

  22 Borsay, English Urban Renaissance; Barry, ‘Cultural Life of Bristol’ (D. Phil. thesis).

  23 For pointed criticism of the domestic angels thesis, see, inter alia, Branca, ‘Image and Reality’ and id., Silent Sisterhood; Peterson, ‘No Angels in the House’; P. Thane, ‘Late Victorian Women’, in T. R. Gourvish and A. O'Day (eds.), Later Victorian Britain, 1867–1900 (Basingstoke, 1988), pp. 175–208. The earnest enterprise and managerial skill of which Victorian women were capable is amply demonstrated by Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy; Summers, ‘A Home from Home’. Ladies who displayed gumption, if not ‘political correctness’, are the subject of D. Birkett, Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Explorers (Oxford, 1989), and Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen. In fact, where historians have researched the activities of particular individuals and groups, rather than the contemporary social theories which allegedly hobbled them, Victorian women emerge as no less adventurous, capable and, most importantly, diverse a crew as in any other century. Read the excellent Jalland, Women, Marriage and Politics; Caine, Destined to be Wives; and Peterson, Family, Love and Work.

  24 This metaphor was deployed by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in assessment of Martha Ballard's diary; see L. T. Ulrich, ‘Martha Ballard and her Girls: Women's Work in Eighteenth Century Maine’, in S. Innes (ed.), Work and Labour in Early America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988), p. 72.

  1 Gentility

  1 See Klein, ‘The Third Earl of Shaftes
bury, pp. 186–214, and his imaginative ‘Politeness for Plebes’, pp. 362–82.

  2 Langford, Polite and Commercial People, p. 76. However, Langford uses a portmanteau category of ‘the middle classes’ to group enormous swathes of the population.

  3 This is not to say that the eighteenth century had no language of class, but it was one option among many and even when ‘class’ was preferred to ‘ranks’, ‘sorts’, or ‘interests’, a threefold classification was not the automatic choice: Corfield, ‘Class by Name and Number’. Not that gentility had a cut-and-dried definition either, a point developed in id., ‘The Rivals’.

  4 In the standard account, Mingay, English Landed Society, three tiers of landowners are distinguished: peers, gentry and freeholders. Unlike many grand surveys that have followed, Mingay paid due attention to all three categories and noted the factors that cut across clear social distinctions: much overlapping of income, the fact that the younger sons of peers did not inherit a title and became de facto gentry, and the degree of intermarriage both across and outside landed society, which generated a complicated kinship web linking land with merchants, professionals and even with tradesmen. Compare this wide coverage with Beckett, Aristocracy in England, who includes the lesser gentry in his definition of ‘aristocracy’, but confines his discussion largely to the peerage. Studies which pay full attention to the gentry in the eighteenth century (unlike their seventeenth-century equivalents) are surprisingly scarce, but on the titled gentry see Roebuck, Yorkshire Baronets. Attention is given to the lesser gentry in Jenkins, Making of a Ruling Class, and Howell, Patriarchs and Parasites. Both these studies stress the interconnectedness of landed society and the close ties between land and trade. In Glamorgan, mining and metallurgical ventures brought the gentry into business partnerships with merchants, younger sons turned to trade in Swansea and Bristol, and in terms of marriage the mercantile heiress was a perennial draw. Furthermore, the gentry enjoyed an interdependent relationship with local professionals and were often related by blood to the clergy. In south-west Wales, the wealthier gentry were often blessed with rich mineral reserves which they mined religiously, but owing to economic isolation and unprofitable agriculture, ‘the meaner sort of gentry’ could be worth as little as £100–£400 a year; in fact, in terms of wealth some of them might be classed with small freeholders. They had to make do with local schools, not English public schools; they lived in modest residences some no larger than a substantial farmhouse, not the handsome and bustling mansions enjoyed by the prominent; and they were left to the locality when the ‘great folk’ decamped to London every winter. It was just this level that the Stones ignored in their attempt to debunk the notion that the upper echelons of landed society were open to outsiders from trade: Stone and Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? By confining their discussion to owners of country houses of more than 5,000 square feet (in Hertfordshire, Northamptonshire and Northumberland), they exclude the very group from which, by their own findings, the majority of newcomers rose. The realistic outsider from trade probably aimed initially to penetrate the ‘parish gentry’, leaving it to later generations to advance to county or national level. For critical responses, see C. Clay in EcHR, 2nd ser., 38 (1985), pp. 452–54; E. and D. Spring, ‘The English Landed Elite, 1540–1879: A Review’, Albion, 19 (1985), pp. 149–66. The openness of the elite has also been challenged by Cannon, Aristocratic Century.

  5 Although there is no synthesis on a par with Mingay's, the middling sorts have become a focus of considerable historical interest in recent years. Political historians have moved beyond a focus on a patrician–plebeian struggle to emphasize the independence of middling political opinion. See, inter alia, Brewer, Party, Ideology and Popular Politics; N. Rodgers, Whigs and Cities (Oxford, 1989); and K. Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–85 (Cambridge, 1995). The history of cultural and material consumption has brought the lifestyles of the middling sort vividly to the fore: Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour; Borsay, Urban Renaissance; and Barry, ‘Cultural Life of Bristol’ (D.Phil. thesis). The history of the professions is now being written: Holmes, Augustan England, Prest, Professions in Early Modern England, P. J. Corfield, Power and the Professions in Britain, 1700–1850 (1995); Robson, Attorney in Eighteenth-Century England, and Porter, Patients' Progress. For case-studies of the provincial middling sort, see Smail, Origins of Middle-Class Culture; Wilson, Gentleman Merchants; Jackson, Hull in the Eighteenth Century; M. Hunt, Middling Sort; S. D'Cruz, ‘The Middling Sort in Provincial England: Politics and Social Relations in Colchester, 1730–1800’ (unpubl. Ph.D. thesis, University of Essex, 1990). The most substantial study of commercial families remains Earle, Making of the English Middle Class, but despite his ambitious title, echoing Edward Thompson's agenda-setting masterpiece, Earle sidesteps the conceptual debate on class and its ‘creation’ or otherwise. As a result, his conclusions are somewhat neutral, something which has limited the impact of his detailed research outside early modern social and economic history. Nevertheless, the book is a mine of information and offers a useful starting-point for long-term comparisons. For more on the metropolitan patriciate, see Rogers, ‘Money, Land and Lineage’.

  6 See respectively, Smail, Origins of Middle-Class Culture, p. 28, and Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, pp. 21–2. One of the few historians to address the ambivalent position of the gentry is E. P. Thompson on the ‘agrarian bourgeoisie’, see id., ‘Eighteenth-Century English Society’, p. 162. Mingay estimates the number of families of mere landed gentlemen to have been between ten and twenty thousand. This is a conservative estimate based on an income range of £300 to £1,000 per year. See Mingay, English Landed Society, p. 26.

  7 In 1781 the populations of Colne, Burnley and Clitheroe (including their surrounding townships) stood at 2,757, 1,890 and 830 respectively, and in 1801 at 3,626, 3,305 and 1,368: James, Worsted Manufacture, appendix, p. 40; and according to the 1801 census cited in Baines, County Palatine of Lancaster, I, pp. 620, 566, 612. The best history of the area remains Whitaker, Original Parish of Whalley. Additional information is in Carr, Colne and Neighbourhood.

  8 In this, Colne followed the same economic trajectory as the adjacent textile areas of the West Riding of Yorkshire. In fact, historians of the textile industries consider the area to be an offshoot of the Yorkshire worsted field: Wadsworth and de Lacy Mann, Cotton Trade, pp. 88, 259, 278; Heaton, Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries, pp. 271, 286, 311, 380; James, Worsted Manufacture, pp. 631–2. On textile-related occupations in north-east Lancashire, see N. Lowe, ‘The Lancashire Textile Industry in the Sixteenth Century’, Chetham Society, 3rd ser., 20 (1972), passim, and Swain, Industry Before the Industrial Revolution, pp. 108–48.

  9 Aikin, Description of the Country, p. 279.

  10 Compare the road maps for 1740, 1750 and 1770 in E. Pawson, Transport and Economy: The Turnpike Roads in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1977), pp. 137, 139, 140.

  11 H. F. Killick, ‘Notes on the Early History of the Leeds–Liverpool Canal’, Bradford Antiquary, n.s., 1 (1900), pp. 169–238.

  12 Baines, Lancashire Directory, I, p. 620.

  13 For the history of rebuilding in this area, see Pearson, Rural Houses, pp. 118–25.

  14 See the Parker pedigree, Appendix 3, p. 384, and Genealogist, n.s., 31 (1915), pp. 102–5. The rental was calculated from the entries for 1767, recorded in LRO, DDX 390 (1766–79), Account book of Thomas Stirling, Steward to Edward Parker of Browsholme. See also LRO, DDB 84/1 Browsholme survey book, which reveals that the Parkers owned pastures in seventeen townships in both Lancashire and Yorkshire.

  15 LRO, DDB Ac 7886/239 (22 July 1748), M. Bowen, companion and secretary to A. Pellet, Great Ealing, London, to E. Parker, Browsholme: ‘Oh! that my dear Parkie & Pell was so advantageously settled, how happy cod I be to see my two dr favourites live in Splendour and Elegance …’ [Hereafter A. Pellet will be named as the author.]

  16 Rental calculated from LRO, DDB/76/4 (1758–75), T
rust Account of Thomas Parker. For confirmation of Robert Parker's landed qualifications, see also LRO, QSC/198, Commission of the Peace.

  17 LRO, DDB/72/8 (16 June 1751), E. Parker, Browsholme, to R. Parker, Horrocksford; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/121 (c.1746), R. Parker to E. Parker. On the significance of a ‘coach and six’, see above, pp. 13, 41, 55.

  18 For notes on the rebuilding, see LRO, DDB/72/23 (n.d.), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme. Under Parker's aegis, a Gibbs-style surround was added to the main doorway and the mullioned and transomed windows on the ground and first stories were replaced by sashes. The interior was completely redecorated with new paper and wainscotting. Alkincoats was demolished in 1958, but its appearance is recorded in photographs, see RCHM, no. 33819, and its structure in surviving plans, see LRO, DDB/80/30, ‘Plan of the principal floor of Alkincoats with the proposed additions and alterations’. An excellent discussion is provided in Pearson, Rural Houses, pp. 38, 39, 46, 49, 57, 118, 142a–b and pl. 94. For the remark about Elizabeth's social choices, see LRO, DDB Ac 7886/255 (10 Dec. 1748), J. Pellet, Pontefract to E. Parker, Browsholme.