The Gentleman's Daughter

by Amanda Vickery

  43 See respectively, LRO, DDB/81/26 (1775), f. 96, and LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 143.

  44 LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 191; LRO, DDB/81/39 (1781), f. 182. See also f. 23: ‘I sent to let my own dear Tom know how ill I was. He said he expected Company to dine with him, but if he co'd make it convenient to him he wo'd come some time this day here for 1/2 an hour. Bad work. He came after dinner was rather sly did not take much notice of me. He did stay tea.’

  45 LRO, DDB/81/22 (1774), f. 47. Thereafter, she refused to attend dinners where he was invited and once, coming upon him by surprise, called him a low-life rascal and threatened to spit in his face! See LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 89.

  46 LRO, DDB/81/13 (1771), f. 59; LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 40.

  47 Goldsmith, Richard Nash, p. 24. The absurdities of an undue ceremoniousness were often remarked on. Praise for a pleasing ease and gentility of behaviour contrasted with an affected formality can be found in the London journal of the Quaker Betty Fothergill in 1769: Brophy, Women's Lives, p. 119.

  48 LRO, DDB/81/37 (1780), fos. 18, 23, 122; LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 184.

  49 LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 198. On the loquacious gentleman as a comic trope, see Staves, ‘Secrets of Genteel Identity’.

  50 Childs, ‘Prescriptions for Manners’ (D.Phil. thesis), p. 220.

  51 LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), f. 37.

  52 LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 91.

  53 LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 173.

  54 LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 2; LRO, DDB/81/22 (1774), f. 77.

  55 LRO, DDB/81/22 (1774), fos. 115, 117.

  56 LRO, DDB/81/13 (1771), f. 75.

  57 LRO, DDB/81/22 (1774), f. 67; LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 180.

  58 LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 142; LRO, DDB/81/20 (1773), f. 83.

  59 LRO, DDB/81/20 (1773), f. 26.

  60 LRO, DDB/81/37 (1780), fos. 187–8.

  61 See Childs, ‘Prescriptions for Manners’ (D.Phil. thesis), p. 198.

  62 LRO, DDB/81/37 (1780), f. 17.

  63 LRO, DDB/81/37 (1780), f. 134.

  64 LRO, DDB/81/39 (1781), fos. 174, 175.

  65 LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), fos. 120–21; LRO, DDB/81/17 (1772), f. 87; LRO, DDB/81/20 (1773), fos. 21 and 4; LRO, DDB/81/22 (1774), f. 37. She also despaired that ‘his ways that of his family are Brutal’: DDB//81/39 (1781), f. 175.

  66 That anxiety about dishonest performance was always inherent in politeness is the argument of Carter, ‘Mollies, Fops and Men of Feeling’ (D.Phil. thesis), chap. 8. Childs elucidates the way that the early eighteenth-century concept of ‘good breeding’ became associated with outer manners at the expense of inner civility, leading to its replacement by the term ‘politeness’, ‘Prescriptions for Manners’ (D.Phil. thesis), pp. 120–28. Mason also documents the Augustan concern to achieve heart-felt civility rather than an empty formality, Gentlefolk in the Making, p. 263. A Republican critique of polite superficiality can be found in Bushman, Refinement of America (see n. 12 above), pp. 181–203. Kasson and Haltunnen both discuss American courtesy writers' uneasy attempts to distinguish false etiquette from a true feeling courtesy in the nineteenth century, Haltunnen, Confidence Men, pp. 92–123 and Kasson, Rudeness and Civility, pp. 173–81. Novelists also distinguished between ‘the politeness of manner, formed by the habits of high life’ and ‘that which springs spontaneously from benevolence of mind.’ See Burney, The Wanderer, p. 134.

  67 Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son (1774; Oxford, 1992), p. 49.

  68 Collier, a Short View of the Immorality, p. 7. This, of course, was part and parcel of his attack on the smuttiness of the stage. Why then, he continues, ‘Do the Women leave all the regards to Decency and Conscience behind them when they come to the Play-House?’

  69 Thompson, ‘Patrician Society’, p. 389.

  70 LRO, DDGR C3 (6 Sept. 1774), R. Greene, Calcutta, to P. Greene, Slyne. By contrast, Lyndal Roper is persuaded that masculine excess is not simply destructive, arguing of male drinking and whoring in sixteenth-century Germany that as much as the councils railed against violence, they also needed to sustain it in case of war: ‘Blood and Codpieces: Masculinity in the Early Modern German Town’, in id., Oedipus and the Devil, pp. 107–24.

  71 Westhauser, ‘Friendship and Family’.

  72 LPL, MS 8754 (1779), 24 Jan.

  73 Quoted in Brophy, Women's Lives, pp. 178–9.

  74 On their wide circulation, see Klein, ‘Politeness for Plebes’, passim.

  75 Hall, Miss Weeton's Journal, I, pp. 177, 135–6, 217. She also asked her brother to jot down any rules of etiquette that she might have overlooked, sought out a pamphlet on the art of carving and showed awareness of the subtle distinction between a real invitation and an empty compliment. See pp. 212 and 111.

  76 LRO, DDGr C1 (6 July 1765), T. Greene, Serjeant's Inn, London, to his mother, Slyne.

  77 Beresford, James Woodforde, I, p. 86; Gibson, George Woodward's Letters, pp. 50, 73.

  78 LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), fos. 180, 201–2; LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), f. 249.

  79 LRO, DDB/81/23 (1774), f. 70.

  80 Leheny, The Freeholder, p. 56. The term ‘Hottentot’ denoting a rude and uncivilized person persisted in the literature of etiquette and courtesy. In his Never: A Handbook for the Unititated and Inexperienced Aspirants to Refined Society's Giddy Heights and Glittering Attainments (New York, 1884), Nathan D. Urner ordered gentleman ‘Never appear at breakfast, even in sultry weather, without your coat, waistcoat, collar and necktie. Are you a gentleman or a Hottentot?’ Cited in Kasson, Rudeness and Civility, p. 279. William Ramsden also likened rude companions to Hottentots: ‘I am sorry their Company was not better but there are Hottentots to be met with in many [parts] besides the Cape of Good Hope, and no where oftener [than] on a StageCoach,’ See LRO, DDB/72/172 (29 Dec), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Parker, Alkincoats. Hottentots had some local celebrity however, since ‘The Famous African’ had been exhibited at York races in 1741. See J. Jefferson Looney, ‘Cultural life in the Provinces: Leeds and York, 1720–1820’, in A. L. Beier, D. Cannadine and J. M. Rosenheim (eds.), The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989), p. 491.

  81 See respectively LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), fos. 265, 186–7, 190.

  82 LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 121.

  83 For this and other reactions to the letters, see Mason, Gentlefolk in the Making, p. 106.

  84 LRO, DDB/81/37 (1780), f. 178.

  7 Propriety

  1 WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St 6/1/50 (29 March 1741), M. Warde, London, to M. Warde, Hooton Pagnell.

  2 LRO, DDB Ac 7886/267 (28 Feb. 1748/9), A. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Browsholme. See Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, passim; Barry, ‘Cultural Life of Bristol’ (D.Phil. thesis), p. 245.

  3 J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Ma., 1989), p. 25; quoted in J. Brewer, ‘The Most Polite Age and the Most Vicious: Attitudes towards Culture as a Commodity, 1660–1800’, in Brewer and Bermingham, Consumption of Culture, p. 343. Other essays which use Habermas as a point of departure are in Castiglione and Sharpe, Shifting the Boundaries.

  4 This interpretation in political history can be traced to John Money's influential article ‘Taverns, Coffee Houses and Clubs: Local Politics and Popular Articulacy in the Birmingham Area in the Age of American Revolution’, HJ, 14 (1971), pp. 15–47. The local picture was developed in his own Experience and Identity, and translated into national terms in Brewer, Party, Ideology and Popular Politics.

  5 For one Marxist historian, the growth of a reading public, the commercialization of leisure, educational improvements and the increased economic and cultural confidence of the eighteenth-century town all add up to, ‘the gradual coherence of a self-conscious middle-class public, whose provincialism was less an embarrassment than an expression of buoyant creativity’. See Eley, ‘Rethinking the Political’, p. 428.

  6 Bermingham, ‘Introduct
ion’, in Brewer and Bermingham, Consumption of Culture, p. 10.

  7 R. J. Morris, ‘Clubs, Societies and Associations’, in F. M. L. Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950 (Cambridge, 1990), III, p. 397. See also Hall, White, Male and Middle Class, pp. 75–93.

  8 See J. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (1992), pp. 41–80, on the ‘new urban female style of being at home in the city’ (p. 46).

  9 Langford, Polite and Commercial People, p. 109. Barry also sees an enhanced role for women in eighteenth-century Bristol, see his ‘Cultural Life of Bristol’ (D.Phil. thesis), p. 170. And women are centre stage in the rich description of provincial assemblies in Girouard, The English Town, pp. 127–44. The importance of platforms for female refinement is emphasized in J. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1997), pp. 56–122.

  10 WYCRO, Bradford Sp St 6/1/50 (10 June 1739), M. Warde, J. Warde, T. Warde and T. Duckworth, Squerries, Kent, to M. Warde, Hooton Pagnell; LRO, DDB/72/223 and 284 (n.d.), B. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

  11 LRO, DDPd/17 (19 March 1786), J. Pedder, Lancaster, to J. Pedder, Blackburn.

  12 W. M. Thomas (ed.), Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1893), II, p. 298, and Richardson, Sir Charles Grandison, p. 22. For similar examples, see Klein, ‘Gender and the Public/Private Distinction’.

  13 Brewer, ‘Most Polite Age’, p. 355.

  14 B. van Muyden (ed.), Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George I and George II: The Letters of Monsieur Cesar De Saussure to his Family (1902), p. 44. For elaboration, see R. O. Bucholz, The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture (Stanford, Ca., 1993), pp. 202–48.

  15 WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St 6/1/50 (28 May 1740), M. Warde, Squerries, to M. Warde, Hooton Pagnell.

  16 LRO, DDGr C3 (23 Sept. 1765), T. Greene, London, to Miss Greene, Slyne.

  17 See LRO, DDB/72/192 and 263 (1766–073), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats; LRO, DDGr C3 (n.d.), Anon., to Miss Greene, Slyne.

  18 See the excellent W. Weber, ‘L'Institution et son public: L'Opera à Paris et à Londres au XVIIIe siècle’, Annales, 6 (1993), pp. 1519–39, and Weber, ‘Opera and Nobility’ (unpub. paper). I thank the author for allowing me to quote from this. See also C. Taylor, ‘From Losses to Lawsuit: Patronage of the Italian Opera in London by Lord Middlesex, 1739–45’, Music and Letters, 68 (1987), pp. 1–26.

  19 Earl of Bessborough (ed.), Georgiana: Extracts from the Correspondence of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (1955), p. 104.

  20 C. B. Hogan, The London Stage, 1660–1800 (Carbondale, Il., 1968), ‘Part 5: 1776–1800’, p. xxvii; Burney, Evelina, pp. 38, 91; Conolly, ‘Censor's Wife at the Theatre’, p. 58.

  21 For example, in 1746 Jane Pellet reported, ‘Operas are so bad nobody will go but plays are more in fashion than they have been for several years that is they are better Acted but they tempt me very little as they are all Tragedians’: LRO, DDB Ac 7886/130 (2 Dec. 1746), J. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Browsholme. In 1771 Thomas Noel reported ‘it is quite the ton to go to’ plays: M. Elwin (ed.), The Noels and The Milbankes: Their Letters for Twenty-Five Years, 1767–1792 (1967), p. 31.

  22 The London stage and its public is a subject too massive to do justice to here. For further discussion, see Price, Theatre in the Age of Garrick; Donahue, Theatre in the Age of Keen; Nicholl, The Garrick Stage; and Pedicord, By Their Majesties' Command; Brewer, Pleasures (see n. 9 above), pp. 325–423.

  23 Conolly, ‘Censor's Wife at the Theatre’, pp. 53, 56.

  24 LRO, DDB/64/14 (c.1808), Ellen Barcroft's Journal, f. 5.

  25 Burney, Evelina, p. 25; LRO, DDPd/25/16 (c.1786), Margaret Pedder's Views of a Journey to London, f. 4; H. Phillips, Mid-Georgian London: A Topographical and Social Survey of Central and Western London about 1750 (1964), p. 154; The Connoisseur, 43, 21 Nov. 1754, p. 255. When the Ramsdens went to ‘Mrs Abbertsons Benefit’, they found the pit and the boxes so full, that they had to repair to the gallery, where they could catch no sight of Garrick: LRO, DDB/72/284 (n.d.), B. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats. Haywood's reckless heroine exposed herself at the playhouse ‘sitting in the third row’ with a woman of ill-repute and had to take the consequences. Ineffectually, she protested ‘Pish … I went to see the play, not to be seen myself’: Haywood, Betsy Thoughtless, pp. 201, 202, 204.

  26 Avery, ‘Shakespeare Ladies Club’; M. Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 147–58.

  27 A. W. McDonald, ‘The Season of 1782 on the Yorkshire Circuit’, Theatre Notebook, 37 (1983), pp. 104–9, and id., ‘The Social Life of the Performer on the Yorkshire Circuit, 1766–1785’, Theatre Survey, 25 (1984), pp. 167–76. For a parallel circuit, see S. Rosenfeld, The Georgian Theatre of Richmond, Yorkshire and its Circuit: Beverley, Harrogate, Kendal, Northallerton, Ulverston and Whitby (1984), and for a wider context consult, id., Strolling Players and Drama in the Provinces, 1660–1765 (Cambridge, 1939).

  28 G. D. Lumb (ed.), ‘Extracts from the Leeds Intelligencer and the Leeds Mercury, 1769–1776’, Thoresby Society Publications, XXXVIII (1938), pp. 60–3.

  29 Abigail Gawthern saw Mrs Jordan act at the Nottingham playhouse in Garrick's The Country Girl in 1790 and thought ‘she performed delightfully’. She saw Mrs Siddons act in Macbeth (1623), Garrick's Isabella: Or the Fatal Marriage (1757) and Otway's Venice Preserved: Or A Plot Discovered (1735) at the same theatre in 1807: Henstock, Diary of Abigail Gawthern, pp. 52, 131. Charlotte Dickson was awed by seeing Mrs Siddons in Centlivre's The Gamester: A Comedy (1705) in 1795: ‘I never saw a countenance so strikingly expressive’: LRO, DDB/72/1489 (7 July 1795), C. Dickson, Berwick, to E. Barcroft. Ellen Weeton enjoyed a comfortable front seat in the gallery of the Liverpool theatre in 1809. Though ‘wonder struck’ by Sarah Siddons as the sleep-walking Lady Macbeth, she thought the witches and ghosts laughably banal: Hall, Miss Weeton's Journal, I, p. 175. Charles Whitaker went to see one of Kemble's last performances as Macbeth in Edinburgh: LRO, DDWh/4/55 (7 May 1814), C. Whitaker, Edinburgh, to E. Whitaker, London.

  30 On the rage for private theatricals, see Rosenfeld, Temples of Thespis, p. 118. On the ambiguities of acting, see Crouch, “Attitudes towards Actresses' (D.Phil. thesis), pp. 98–132. The narrative possibilities inherent in amateur performance were seized on by novelists, but assessments of the morality of female exhibition differed. Fanny Price piously refuses to take part in Lover's Vows, which redounds to her credit: Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814; Oxford, 1970), pp. 109–76. The pure and perfect Caroline Percy declines an invitation to take part in Zara, which in the event demonstrates the vanity of her rival, yet Caroline remains a sympathetic member of the audience: M. Edgeworth, Patronage (1814; 1986), pp. 346–69. On the other hand, the ‘incognita’ is allowed to give a dignified performance as Lady Townley in The Provoked Husband (1728), which convinces many in the audience of her gentility: Burney, The Wanderer, pp. 70–96. I am indebted to Charlotte Mitchell for alerting me to these preoccupations.

  31 Russell, Theatres of War, p. 125. See also Rosenfeld, Temples of Thespis, p. 38.

  32 On gentry performances, see Russell, Theatres of War, pp. 129–31, and Rosenfeld, Temples of Thespis, p. 8. Though there is no indication that the northern families studied here mounted private theatricals themselves, their fascination with the fabulous productions of the fashionable is evident. When Lord Stanley and his friends performed the play Tancred and Sigismunde (1745) in gorgeous costumes at the Preston Playhouse in October 1773 at least two of Elizabeth Shackleton's friends wrote letters describing the scene in full detail: LRO, DDB/72/1581 (24 Oct. 1773), E. Parker, Preston, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats, and LRO, DDB/81/18 (1773), f. 81.

  33 Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, pp. 122–3. For Leeds performances, see Lumb, ‘Leeds Intelligencer and Leeds Mercury, 1769–1776’ (see n
. 28 above), pp. 16, 21, 70. For women's attendance at music meetings and oratorios in London, York, Pontefract, Preston and Nottingham, see LRO, DDPd/25/16 (c.1786), Margaret Pedder's Views of a Journey to London, f. 10; LRO, DDB/72/1198 (1 Oct. 1823), E. Parker, Selby, to E. Moon, Colne; LRO, DDB/72/142 (25 Dec. 1754), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats; Henstock, ‘Diary of Abigail Gawthern’, pp. 28, 105, 145. The analogue to public listening was private performance. Musical accomplishment was sprinkled across the networks. Mary Warde of Hooton Pagnell played the harpsichord in the 1730s and 1740s, Deb Scrimshire learned the spinet in the 1750s, Abigail Gawthern took music lessons from a Nottingham organist in the 1770s. On female musical accomplishments in general, see R. Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-Cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 28–50, 147–75. The world of amateur music-making is reconstructed in J. Brewer, ‘The Harmony of Heaven: John Marsh and Provincial Music’, in id., Pleasures (see n. 9 above), pp. 531–72.

  34 LPL, MS 8754 (1779), 27 March; WYCRO, Leeds, TA, Box 22/1 (18 Aug. 1729), S. Gossip, York, to W. Gossip.

  35 WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St 6/1/50 (31 Jan. n.y.), M. Barnardiston to Mrs Stanhope.

  36 ‘Forgery Unmasked’. This trial engrossed the viewing and reading public in 1775. Anne Pellet reported that ‘all conversation is I think turn'd now wholly on the infamous Mrs Rudd and her two accomplices. And may refer you to the Publick papers’: LRO, DDB/72/168 (13 July 1775), A. Pellet, London, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats. For her part, Mrs Shackleton was in no doubt as to guilt and innocence, noting in her diary the sufferings of the Perreau brothers at hands the of ‘that Infamous Vile Woman Margaret Caroline Rudd’: LRO, DDB Ac 7886/324 (1775–6), f. 31.

  37 Trials for Adultery, 1, title-page.

  38 LRO, DDB/72/283–4 (1776), B. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

  39 See Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, pp. 336–49; ‘Leeds Intelligencer and the Leeds Mercury, 1777–1782’, p. 6; Oxford English Dictionary, ‘Assembly’.