The Gentleman's Daughter

by Amanda Vickery

  77 WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St/6/1/42 (1 Feb. 1726), B. Stanhope to J. Stanhope, Grays Inn. A similar note of apologetic submissiveness was sounded by two upper-gentry wives on early eighteenth-century Tyneside, though not all local ladies proved so timid: Levine and Wrightson, Making of an Industrial Society, pp. 314–18.

  78 See respectively LRO, DDB/72/25, 34 (n.d.), R. Parker, Alkincoats and Trawden, to E. Parker, Browsholme; LRO, DDB/72/19, 29, 31, 36 (1751), E. Parker, Browsholme, to R. Parker, Alkincoats.

  79 LRO, DDB/72/236, 75, 240, 298 (1770), W. and B. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

  80 LRO, DDB/72/208, 236, 198, 220 (1767–70), W. Ramsden, Highgate and Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

  81 LRO, DDB/72/297 (n.d.), B. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

  82 LRO, DDWh/4/27–9 (Aug. 1813), E. Whitaker, Edgeworth, to C. Whitaker, Roefield.

  83 LRO, DDWh/4/31, 32 (Aug. 1813), C. Whitaker, Roefield, to E. Whitaker, Edgeworth.

  84 Coburn, Letters of Sara Hutchinson, p. 346.

  85 Bond, Tatler, II, p. 299.

  86 Ladies Dictionary, p. 96.

  87 LRO, DDB/72/173 (12 March 1762), B. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.

  88 LPL, MS 8753 (1778), f. 84; LPL, MS 8754 (1779), 16 Feb., 21 March. The impact of literary models on personal expression is also explored in Darnton, ‘Readers Respond to Rousseau’.

  89 M. Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford, 1975), p. 88.

  90 Ladies Dictionary, p. 505.

  91 Wilkes, Genteel Advice, p. 88; Coventry, History of Pompey the Little, pp. 23–4.

  92 Ingrams, Church Courts, pp. 145–50, 171–188; Stone, Broken Lives (see n. 5 above); Hunt, ‘Wife Beating’; Amussen, ‘Being Stir'd to Much Unquietness’; Gowing, Domestic Dangers, pp. 180–231.

  93 It remains unclear whether it was John Shackleton's immaturity or inferior circumstances which principally prompted Edward Parker's ‘cold behaviour’. Either way, Mrs Shackleton was deeply hurt by her brother's behaviour. To Bessy Ramsden she had claimed his approbation was ‘necessary to restore sunshine’. Bessy Ramsden tried to offer comfort when it became clear that ‘friends’ did not approve the choice: ‘if Mr Shackleton's Circumstances were not equal to his merit the more Her [praise] who could be influenced by motives so different from the Sordid ones of a Selfish and ill-natured World’: LRO, DDB/72/188 (30 Sept. 1765), B. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats. Who Elizabeth found to represent her interests in the drawing up of the marriage settlement is unclear. Although this document is mentioned in the diaries, it has not survived.

  94 See respectively, LRO, DDB/81/13 (1771), fos. 62, 64; LRO, DDB/81/17 (1772), f. 75; LRO, DDB/81/20 (1773), f. 92; LRO, DDB/81/20 (1773), f. 4; LRO, DDB/81/29 (1776), f. 50; LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 60; and LRO, DDB/81/37 (1780), fos. 17 and 3.

  95 LRO, DDB/81/17 (1772), fos. 15, 68; LRO, DDB/81/20 (1773), f. 97; LRO, DDB/81/31 (1777), f. 22; LRO, DDB/81/39 (1781), f. 204.

  96 LRO, DDB/81/34 (1779), fos. 73–4; LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), f. 279; LRO, DDB/81/20 (1773), f. 65; LRO, DDB/81/19 (1773), f. 74: ‘We dined at Marsden. Made our Disturbances known to the family there.’

  97 LRO, DDB/81/20 (1773), f. 38: ‘C:S: dined here Reproved his son for Drinking. Who sets the bad example[?]’

  98 See respectively, LRO, DDB/81/37 (1780), f. 203; LRO, DDB/81/39 (1781), fos. 13 and 231.

  99 Hall, Miss Weeton's Journal, II, p. 134.

  100 Ibid., p. 154. On disloyal and suborned servants, see pp. 141 and 153. For Bessy Price's counsel see, p. 145. On Aaron Stock's preceding behaviour and the hard-won truce, see p. 146.

  101 Ibid., p. 159.

  102 The deed itself has not survived. For her view of the document, see ibid., II, pp. 184–5.

  103 See ibid., I, p. 3. For cross-reference to the local sessions rolls, consult ibid., II, pp. 178–9. For earlier official corroboration of Stock's violent temper, see also p. 140. On her ‘daily proofs’ of wifely dedication, see ibid, II, pp. 137 and 135.

  104 Ibid., I, pp. 303, 239, 223, 277, 259–60.

  105 Ibid., II, pp. 159, 141, 154, and 146.

  106 Ibid., II, pp. 161 and 159.

  107 Ibid., II, p. 161.

  108 Ibid.

  109 Ibid., II, pp. 184 and 180.

  110 Hunt, ‘Wife Beating’, p. 19. Compare Hall, Miss Weeton's Journal, II, p. 140, and CRO, EDC 5, Consistory Court Papers, 1744–1809, especially the Calkin, Davenport, Hamilton, Nevett, Mainwaring and Green cases. I am indebted to Tim Wales for telling me about this material.

  111 These are the stock phrases used to describe the brides whose weddings are reported in local papers. See for example, ‘Extracts from the Leeds Intelligencer, 1763–1767’, Thoresby Society Publications, 33 (1935), p. 186, and G. D. Lumb (ed.), ‘Extracts from the Leeds Intelligencer and the Leeds Mercury, 1769–1776’, Thoresby Society Publications, 38 (1938), p. 68.

  112 Austen, Sense and Sensibility, pp. 78–9.

  113 Haywood, Betsy Thoughtless, pp. 78, 247.

  114 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 121; Haywood, Betsy Thoughtless, p. 256.

  115 Gentleman's Magazine (1738), VIII, p. 86.

  116 HL, HM 31201, Mrs Larpent's Diary, III, 1799–1800, facing f. 196.

  117 LRO, DDB/72/98 (Nov. 1754), A. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.

  118 ‘Woman's Fate, by a Lady’, from the frontispiece of one of Elizabeth Shackleton's pocket diaries, LRO, DDB/81/36 (1780), f. 5; a republication of the anonymous poem ‘Woman's Hard Fate’ of 1733, retrieved by R. Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (Oxford, 1990), p. 136.

  119 See Thompson, ‘Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture’, p. 399.

  120 LRO, DDB/72/152 (14 Oct c.1756), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats; LRO, DDB/72/297 (n.d.), B. Ramdsen, Charterhouse, to same.

  121 LRO, DDB Ac 7886/24 (n.d.), A. Parker, Royle, to Mrs Shackleton; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/22 (n.d.), A. Parker, Royle to Mrs Shackleton.

  122 The Scots Magazine (1765), XXVII, p. 393; J.-J. Rousseau, Emile, Or On Education (1762; Harmondsworth, 1991), p. 408; Home, Loose Hints, pp. 229–30.

  123 Halsband and Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Essays and Poems, p. 109.

  124 The Montagu incident is related in Myers, Bluestocking Circle, p. 139. For another example of the use of ‘overcompliance rather than remonstrance’, see Brophy, Women's Lives, p. 91.

  125 Hall, Miss Weeton's Journal, II, pp. 145–6.

  126 LRO, DDB/72/298 (n.d.), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats; LRO, DDB/72/271 (n.d.), B. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to same.

  127 LRO, DDB/72/139 (n.d.), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

  128 Wrightson, English Society, p. 104; Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship, pp.100, 137.

  129 Richardson, Sir Charles Grandison, pp. 400–01.

  3 Fortitude and Resignation

  1 LRO, DDB/72/50 (n.d.), R. Parker, Browsholme, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.

  2 LRO, DDB/72/49 (n.d.), R. Parker, Browsholme, to E. Parker, Alkincoats. Popular medical theory held that foetal deformity represented the wages of sin, or the consequences of maternal imagination, see Blondel, Power of the Mother's Imagination. Twenty-five years later, the family still believed that maternal shock could deform a baby. Elizabeth Shackleton was relieved that her grandson was born without a ‘mark [or] spot upon him’, after her daughter-in-law had been frightened by a pet monkey: LRO, DDB Ac 7886/47 (c.1779), E. Shackleton, Pasture to B. Parker, Newton.

  3 LRO, DDB/72/87 (21 March 1754), A. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.

  4 LRO, DDB/72/129 (28 March ?1754), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.

  5 LRO, DDB/72/88 (7 April 1754), A. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Alkincoats; LRO, DDB/72/54 (25 April 1754), A. Pellet, London, to R. Parker, Alkincoats.

  6 The rallying of the women is related in LRO, DDWh/4/130 (n.d.), M. Whitehead, London, to S. Horrocks, Pres
ton; LRO, DDWh/4/42 (4 March 1814), S. Greaves, London, to E. Whitaker, Roefield; and LRO, DDWh/4/43 (10 March 1814), S. Horrocks, London, to same.

  7 LRO, DDWh/4/132 (n.d.), A. E. Robbins, London, to S. Horrocks, Preston.

  8 LRO, DDWh/4/41 (2 March 1814), J. and J. Horrocks, Edgeworth, to E. Whitaker, Roefield.

  9 LRO, DDWh/4/49 and 64 (March–May 1814), B. Addison, Liverpool, to E. Whitaker, Roefield.

  10 LRO, DDWh/4/59 (II May 1814), C. Whitaker, Edinburgh, to E. Whitaker, Roefield.

  11 LRO, DDWh/4/130 (n.d.), M. Whitehead, London, to S. Horrocks, Preston; LRO, DDWh/4/56 (8 May 1814), B. Addison, Liverpool, to E. Whitaker; LRO, DDWh/4/69 (6 June 1814), M. Whitehead, London, to same.

  12 LRO, DDWh/4/117 (n.d.), A. E. Robbins, London, to S. Horrocks and E. Whitaker, Roefield.

  13 Whether or not pregnancy was a period of special authority as well as vulnerability, as has been argued for early modern Germany, is less easy to determine. For this view, see U. Rublack, ‘Pregnancy, Childbirth and the Female Body in Early Modern Germany’, P&P, 150 (1996), pp. 84–110.

  14 Stone, Practice of Midwifery, pp. XIV–XV.

  15 See CRO, EDC 5 (1800–9), Lees V. Lees.

  16 Read Ariès, Centuries of Childhood. Similar visions of a pre-modern nightmare are reproduced in De Mause (ed.), History of Childhood; Shorter, Making of the Modern Family, and Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage, pp. 113–27, 254–99.

  17 For an exhaustive critique of the Ariès thesis using personal manuscripts, see Pollock, Forgotten Children. Wrightson had earlier rejected massive shifts in his English Society, pp. 108–18, as Houlbrooke did subsequently in English Family, 1450–1700, pp. 127–65. The testimony of kind and loving parents stands revealed in Houlbrooke, English Family Life, 1576–1716, pp. 101–97, and Macfarlane, Ralph Josselin, pp. 111–25. The methodological weaknesses of the Ariès case, in particular the crude inference of modern meanings from past patterns of behaviour, are exposed in Wilson, ‘Myth of Motherhood’.

  18 See Plumb, ‘The New World of Children’.

  19 Pollock attempts to counter precisely these criticisms of her first book and thereby offer a revised agenda for the history of childhood in the introduction to her anthology, Lasting Relationship, pp. 12–13.

  20 To this end, some feminists have embraced the unreconstructed Ariès thesis. In some eyes maternal instinct is an ideological device generated in recent centuries to keep modern women down. For a popular account, see Badinter, Myth of Motherhood.

  21 Bloch, ‘Ideals in Transition’; Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, pp. 335–43.

  22 Perry, ‘Colonizing the Breast’.

  23 Laqueur, Making Sex, pp. 149–54.

  24 Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination, p. 400.

  25 Crawford, ‘Construction and Experience of Maternity’, pp. 13, 11–12, 28–9.

  26 See the sceptical Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, pp. 16–18.

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

  28 Richardson, Sir Charles Grandison, p. 403.

  29 See respectively As tell, Serious Proposal to the Ladies, p. 97; LRO, DDB/72/61 (22 March 1756), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to R. Parker, Alkincoats; and Crouch, ‘Attitudes Toward Actresses’ (D.Phil. thesis 1995).

  30 A. Wilson, ‘The Ceremony of Childbirth and its Interpretation’, in Fildes, Women as Mothers, pp. 68–107. Wilson himself traces this interpretation to Davis, ‘Women on Top’.

  31 Eccles, Obstetrics and Gynaecology; Donnison, Midwives and Medical Men; Schnorrenberg, ‘Is Childbirth Any Place for a Woman?’; Versluyen, ‘Midwives, Medical Men and “Poor Women” ’.

  32 Widespread acceptance of this view is a testimony to the influence of Foucault's theories about knowledge and power on the social history of medicine, in particular his vision of the way professions construct and legitimize themselves by delegitimizing the knowledge of others. For chapter and verse, see M. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York, 1975).

  33 A flavour of the debate can be tasted in D. N. Harley, ‘Ignorant Midwives – a Persistent Stereotype’, Bulletin of the Society of the Social History of Medicine, 28 (1981), pp. 6–9; A. Wilson, ‘Ignorant Midwives, a Rejoinder’, ibid, 32 (1983), pp. 46–9; B. and J. Boss, ‘Ignorant Midwives: a Further Rejoinder’, ibid, 33 (1983), p. 71.

  34 Porter, ‘Touch of Danger’.

  35 Wilson, Making of Man-Midwifery, p. 192.

  36 Lewis, Family Way, pp. 128, 151. Porter also stresses the doctor's role as ambivalent ally in matters clandestine, see his ‘Touch of Danger’, p. 224.

  37 Wilson, ‘Participant or Patient?’ Exactly how this story of conflict marries with Wilson's later vision of collective solidarity at the bedside is unclear. See above p. 94.

  38 Twelve parish reconstitutions suggest that between 1700 and 1749 the English family had on average 6.77 live-born children, and 6.92 children between 1750 and 1799: Wrigley and Schofield, Population History, p. 254. Gentry families probably bore fewer children, at least that was the case for the peerage. Noblewomen born before 1750 produced on average 4.51 children, those born between 1750 and 1774 had 4.91; those born 1775–99 had 4.98; and those born 1800–24 had 4.64: Hollingsworth, ‘Demography of the British Peerage’, p. 30. Infertility was usually blamed on a ‘barren’ wife. Amongst the genteel families studied here, Barbara Stanhope failed to conceive, which probably accounts for her trips to Scarborough to take the waters in the 1730s and 1740s. Unusually, the Parkers of Farmhill adopted a child in 1777. For female anxiety on this score, see Crawford, ‘Construction and Experience of Maternity’, p. 19, and id., ‘Attitudes to Pregnancy’.

  39 LRO, DDWh/4/28 (14 Aug. 1814), E. Whitaker, Edgeworth, to C. Whitaker, Roefield.

  40 LRO, DDWh/4/124 (10 Nov. n.y.), B. Addison, Liverpool, to E. Whitaker, Roefield.

  41 LRO, DDB Ac 7886/263 (8 Jan. 1749), J. Pellet, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Browsholme. Deaths in childbed are also noted in Henstock, ‘Diary of Abigail Gawthern’, pp. 49, 100 and 122.

  42 R. Schofield, ‘Did the Mothers Really Die?’ Comparable estimates of maternal mortality drawn from early eighteenth-century Halifax are offered in Wilson, ‘Perils of Early Modern Procreation’.

  43 L. A. Pollock, ‘Embarking on a Rough Passage: The Experience of Pregnancy in Early Modern Society’, in Fildes, Women as Mothers, p. 47.

  44 LRO, DDB/72/123 and 150 (1753), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats. For earlier examples, see Crawford, ‘Construction and Experience of Maternity’, p.22; Pollock, ‘Experience of Pregnancy’ (see n. 43 above), pp. 47–9; Macfarlane, Ralph Josselin, p. 84; Mendelson, ‘Stuart Women's Diaries’, p. 196; and Laurence, Women in England, pp. 76–9.

  45 CRO, Carlisle, D/KEN. 3/56/1 (c.18O1), conduct letter written by E. Kennedy. Noble women frequently had new wills prepared and occasionally penned farewell letters to their husbands: Lewis, In the Family Way, pp. 74–5.

  46 LRO, DDB/72/144 (19 Feb 1756), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.

  47 Side effects are discussed in LRO, DDB/72/142 (8 Dec. n.y.), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats and LRO, DDB/72/86 (21 March 1754), A. Pellet, London, to same; LRO, DDWh/4/113 (n.d.), Dr W. St Clare, to E. Whitaker, Roefield.

  48 LRO, DDB/72/86 (21 March 1754), A. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Alkincoats; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/78 (12 March 1754), J. Parker, Browsholme, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.

  49 LRO, DDB/72/447 (13 Oct. 1755), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.

  50 LRO, DDWh/4/72 (31 June 1814), B. Addison, Liverpool, to E. Whitaker, Roefield.

  51 See respectively LRO, DDB/72/158 (4 June n.y.), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats; LRO, DDB/72/1497 (23 March 1800), D. Ridsdale, Leeds, to E. Barcroft; LRO, DDWh/4/89 (29 Oct. 1816), B. Addison, Liverpool, to E. Whitaker, Roefield.

  52 LRO, DDB/72/210 (11 Nov. 1767), B. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats. Monstrously bellied women appea
led to William Ramsden's sense of the absurd. He thought that the overdue Mrs Jones of Snowhill resembled in both shape and size ‘one of her husband's brandy butts’, and mused aloud on whether Bessy's ‘prominence’ was a real ‘Impediment’: LRO, DDB/72/186 and 211 (n.d.), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to same.

  53 The treatment Whitaker received from Dr William St Clare represented a variant of the lowering system aimed at calming a plethoric constitution, a ‘habit’ routinely associated with pregnancy. This ‘excitement or irritability of [her] nervous system’ was alleviated by early rising and moderate exercise, taking care on staircases and not to overheat. A dietary regime was thought unnecessary, but St Clare prescribed laxatives to avoid constipation. At the onset of pain or uneasiness, Mrs Whitaker was to lie down on the couch or bed, regularly shifting posture. When she felt intimations of miscarriage, he advised laudanum. Details are found in LRO, DDWh/4/92, 95, 102, 108, in (1816–21), Dr W. St Clare, Preston, to E. Whitaker, Roefield. Noble pregnancies received similar treatments, Lewis, In the Family Way, pp. 129–35. The contemporary view of pregnancy as a period of physiological imbalance is summarized in Peters, ‘The Pregnant Pamela’.

  54 For the quotations see repectively LRO, DDB/72/446 (13 Sept. 1755), A. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Alkincoats; LRO, DDGr C3 (n.d.), M. Greene to Mrs Bradley, Slyne, Lancaster; LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), f. 95. On the general acceptance of maternal indisposition, see Pollock, ‘Experience of Pregnancy’ (see n. 43 above), pp. 46–7 and Lewis, In the Family Way, p. 149.

  55 Anne Stanhope sent for her sister in 1749, when her due date loomed. Similarly, in 1769 the unmarried Bridget Downes went to stay with her pregnant sister in Manchester and felt she could not leave for some months. Lady Egerton was reported returning to Heaton House for her confinement. Betty Parker chose to return to her mother's house in Newton for the births of at least two of her children in the 1780s. Eliza Whitaker was delivered of her first son at her old home in Preston. On the peerage, see Trumbach, Rise of the Egalitarian Family, p. 183, and Lewis, In the Family Way, pp. 159–62.