The Gentleman's Daughter

by Amanda Vickery

  95 On spa seasons, see Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, pp. 139–42.

  96 WYCRO, Leeds, TA 18/5 (11 June 1746), W. Gossip, Buxton, to A. Gossip, Skelton, and WYCRO, Leeds, TA 18/5 (20 June 1746), W. Gossip, Buxton, to same; and Lumb, ‘Extracts from the Leeds Intelligencer and the Leeds Mercury, 1769–1776’ (see n. 28 above), p. 75.

  97 WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St 6/1/42 (9 July c.1727), B. Stanhope, Scarborough, to J. Stanhope, Bradford. Noted sea-bathers included John Shackleton, Tom Parker, Mary Chorley, Ellen Weeton and Charles Whitaker. For holidays in the 1750s the newly married Parkers of Alkincoats confined themselves to family visits to Browsholme, Skipwith and Pontefract. In the same decade the Scrimshires of Pontefract took holidays at Harrogate and Scarborough on health grounds and enjoyed frequent sojourns with their relatives the Tempests of Tong Hall, Bradford. In the 1760s and 1770s, the Ramsdens spent their summer vacations from Charterhouse School either touring the southern counties and coast in a post-chaise, or in rented accommodation in Dulwich, Enfield, Highgate or Islington. Letters written in the Barcroft and Whitaker networks reveal the ground gained by the seaside holiday in the early nineteenth century. In the 1800s Betty Parker booked the ‘best front lodging rooms’ in Blackpool for the month of August. In the same decade the newly married Mr and Mrs Reynolds decamped to the Isle of Wight. In the 1810s the Whitakers and St Clares took summer lodgings at Lytham, the Ainsworths and Horrockses at Blackpool, and the London-based Robbins family at Sandgate. In the 1820s Edward and Ellen Parker took their Selby brood to lodge at Cleethorpes and Scarborough.

  98 Cited in Corfield, ‘Class by Name and Number’, p. 44; LRO, DDB/72/1190 (11 May 1806), E. Reynolds, Bristol, to E. Moon, Colne.

  99 LRO, DDB/81/20 (1773), f. 36; LRO, DDB/81/32 (1777), f. 8; LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 207; LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), f. 6; LRO, DDB/81/37 (1780), f. 51.

  100 LRO, DDB/81/27 (1776), f. 50; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/56 (8 and 9 Aug. 1776), ‘Memoirs of Oratorio’; LRO, DDB/72/286 (12 Oct. 1776), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

  101 See, for example, Howell, Gentry of South-West Wales, pp. 175–7, and Jenkins, Glamorgan Gentry, pp. 241–4.

  102 LRO, DDB/72/330 (Feb. 1775), Mr E. Parker, Otley, to Mr T. Parker, Alkincoats. On the Listers' sojourn in Pall Mall, see LRO, DDB/81/7 (1768), f. 35 and the Claytons in Bath, LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 14.

  103 Goldsmith, Richard Nash, p. 21.

  104 See, for example, LRO, DDB/72/684–5, 687, 690–91 (1804–14), E. Parker, Preston, to T. Parker, Alkincoats and Newton Hall; LRO, DDB/4/87 (20 Sept. 1816), W. St Clare, Preston, to E. Whitaker, Roefield.

  105 LRO, DDGr C3 (22 April and 28 July), D. Ridsdale, Winsley, to Mrs Bradley, Slyne.

  106 LRO, DDB/72/1496 (20 March 1800), B. Wiglesworth, Townhead, to E. Barcroft, Otley; Gibson, George Woodward's Letters, p. 73.

  107 See respectively LRO, DDB Ac 7886/130 (2 Dec. 1746), J. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Browsholme; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/286 (18 July 1749), A. Pellet, London, to same; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/145 (7 March 1746/7), E. Parker, Piccadilly, to R. Parker, Alkincoats.

  108 See respectively LRO, DDB/72/102 (24 Oct. 1755), A. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Alkincoats; LRO, DDB/72/174 (16 Sept. 1762), B. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Parker, Alkincoats; LRO, DDB/81/6 (1767), f. 28; LRO, DDB/81/32 (1777), f. 8.

  109 Day, Correspondence of Mary Delany, p. 195. However, Fanny Burney noted in August 1768 at the age of sixteen, ‘I never was at a public assembly in my Life, at [school] balls I have been often, and once at a private Ball at an Acquaintance, where I danced till late in the morning’. See Troide, Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, I, pp. 25–6. By contrast, in the 1770s the young Cornelia Knight enjoyed ‘the boisterous gaiety of Plymouth’ from as young as thirteen, but then ‘She was so very tall for her age that people tended to treat her like a young lady instead of a child, and at the assembly rooms she was obligingly partnered by her father's brother officers’; see B. Luttrell, The Prim Romantic: A Biography of Ellis Cornelia Knight, 1758–1837 (1965), p. 35 (I thank Joanna Innes for these references). Similarly, in Haywood, Betsy Thoughtless, p. 17, the heroine's adventures began when she was ‘just entering into her fourteenth year, a nice and delicate time, in persons of her sex; since it is then they are most apt to take the bent of impression, which, according as it is well or ill-directed makes or marrs, the future prospect of their lives.’

  110 Defoe, Tour Through the Whole Island, pp. 215–16.

  111 LRO, DDB Ac 7886/82 (7 Jan. 1745–6), J. Aspmall, Preston, to E. Parker, Browsholme; WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St/6/1/58 (n.d.), J. Spencer, Cannon Hall, to Mrs Stanhope. Similarly, Mr Walmsley wrote from Carlisle in 1745, ‘Here is A Good Match for you … if you are not promised’: LRO, DDB Ac 7886/86 (18 Jan. 1745), R. Walmsley, Carlisle, to E. Parker, Browsholme.

  112 LRO, DDB Ac 7886/211 (24 March 1747), Edward Parker, London, to R. Parker, Alkincoats; Robert Parker's annotations to LRO, DDB/72/483 (23 Aug. 1739), Edward Parker, London, to R. Parker, Colne; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/286 (18 July 1749), A. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Browsholme.

  113 WRO, D/D st C5/2 (8 Nov. 1727), R. Standish, Ingalstone, to Lady P. Standish, Standish Hall, Wigan.

  114 An amorous advertisement in the London Chronicle for 5 Aug. 1758, wherein a young gentleman appealed to a young lady seen listening to the orchestra at Vauxhall is reproduced in Boulton, Amusements (see n. 48 above), II, pp. 27–8. Another example, from the Public Advertiser in 1761, purporting to be from a woman to a young gentleman spied at a ridotto is cited in Bayne-Powell, Travellers (see n. 61 above), p. 179. For Wortley Montagu's aside, see Halsband, Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, I, p. 201.

  115 Stirling, Annals of a Yorkshire House, pp. 156, 158–9.

  116 WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St 6/1/50 (6 June 1742), M. Warde, Squerries, Kent, to M. Warde, Hooton Pagnell; Browsholme Letters, uncat. (7 July 1743), J. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Browsholme.

  117 Gibson, Woodward's Letters, p. 63.

  118 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 289.

  119 Coventry, Pompey, the Little, p. 16; Haywood, Betsy Thoughtless, p. II; Anon, Mixing in Society: A Complete Manual of Manners (1869), pp. 137–8; LRO, DDB/81/32 (1777), ‘Introduction’.

  120 WYCRO, Bradford Sp St 6/1/50 (22 May 1743), M. Warde, Squerries, to M. Stanhope, Horsforth; YAS, MD335, Box 26 (1789), List of the nobility and gentry who appeared at the assembly rooms in York.

  121 LRO, DDB/72/224 (2 May 1769), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

  122 See, for example, HL, HM 31201, Anna Larpent's Diary, VIII, 8, 1810–13, facing f. 19, facing f. 33, f. 36, f. 39, facing f. 46, facing f. 51, facing f. 52, facing f.63; and XI, 1820–21, f. 2, facing f. 3, f. 58, facing f. 122.

  123 Goldsmith, Richard Nash, p. 33; F. C. Laird, The Beauties of England and Wales, XII, pt. I (1812), Nottinghamshire, p. 149, quoted in Henstock, ‘Diary of Abigail Gawthern,’ p. 20.

  124 Henstock, ‘Diary of Abigail Gawthern’, pp. 98, 93 and 49. See also pp. 94, 95, 97, 103, 105, 109, 113, 135, 145.

  125 See respectively, LRO, DDB Ac 7886/84 (Jan. 1745/6), A. Pellet, Browsholme, to J. Pellet, Preston; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/286 (18 July 1749), A. Pellet, to E. Parker, Browsholme; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/267 (28 Feb. 1748/9), A. Pellet, London, to same; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/304 (16 Oct. 1749), A. Pellet, Ealing, to same.

  126 Elizabeth Parker did not accompany her first husband to meetings of the Colne vestry, the Blue Bell turnpike, the Slaidburn court, or the Clitheroe land tax assessment. Similarly, she remained at home when her second husband John Shackleton sat on the grand jury at Lancaster assizes or rode into the West Riding in fulfilment of his duties as a commissioner on the Blue Bell turnpike. Letters written in the same period by Jane Scrimshire of Pontefract, reveal her solitude during the frequent absences of her solicitor husband on the northern assize circuit. To her dismay, he was even obliged to be at York assize at the time of her third confinement in 1756. A similar pattern of male movement emerges from the later manus
cripts. John Barcroft of Noyna and Foulridge, father to the Miss Barcrofts, was steward of Clitheroe Castle, and keeper of the manorial court in the 1770s. Ellen Barcroft's husband Edward Parker was not only a practising solicitor in Selby, but also a deputy lieutenant for the county and a Justice of the Peace for both Lancaster and York. Consequently, their family holidays in the 1820s had to be engineered to fit with his attendance at the quarter sessions. A corresponding picture emerges from the records of the Whitaker network. Eliza Whitaker's father Samuel Horrocks was an MP, and her husband Charles Whitaker was a Justice of the Peace for the county of Lancaster, although he turned down the office of high sheriff in 1816.

  127 Cohen, ‘The Grand Tour’.

  128 The grouse moors above Colne were famed across Lancashire and Yorkshire. ‘Moorgame Day’ (12 August) and ‘Partridge Day’ (1/2 September) were sufficiently significant to be designated in Elizabeth Shackleton's diary. The Stanhope brothers, who rubbed shoulders with Robert Parker on the grouse moor in the 1750s were both considered hot shots. Michael and Jane Scrimshire attempted to lure the newly married Parkers to Bradford by offering tantalizing descriptions of the woodland shooting opportunities: ‘here is Hares, Partridges and Woodcocks in Plenty. They want nothing but shot to bring them to the table …’: LRO, DDB/72/153 (21 Oct. 1756), J. Scrimshire, Tong, Bradford, to E. Parker, Alkincoats. Robert Parker's alacrity was matched by that of his successor John Shackleton and his eldest son's ‘levelling skill among the partridges’ drew comment in the 1790s: LRO, DDB/72/842 (13 Oct. 1794), E. Parker, Browsholme, to T. Parker, Alkincoats. Enthusiasm for shooting burned bright in the early nineteenth century. Charles Whitaker's blood-thirst was proverbial knowledge across the county: LRO, DDWh/4/112 (n.d.), W. St Clare, Preston, to E. Whitaker, Roefield: ‘I suppose he will be busily engaged dealing death and destruction amongst the moor game.’

  129 N. Scarfe (ed.), ‘A Frenchman's Year in Suffolk’, Suffolk Records Society, 30 (1988), p. 41.

  130 Halsband, Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, I, p. 110; WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St 6/1/50 (26 Sept. 1742, 22 Oct. 1739, 16 Sept. 1741, 4 Dec. 1740), M. Warde, Great Cressingham, to M. Warde, Hooton Pagnell.

  131 Lady's Magazine, 14, p. 114; Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 80.

  132 LRO, DDB/81/22 (1774), f. 109. See also LRO, DDB/74/5 (n.d.), Hunting Poem made by the Gentlemen belonging to the Colne Hunt; LRO, DDB/74/3 (n.d.), Hunting Poem of Pendle, Colne, Marsden and Trawden; and LRO, DDB/74/4 (n.d.), Hunting Poem of Pendle, Downham, Wiswell and Bolton.

  133 LRO, DDB/81/26 (1775), f. 18; LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 82.

  134 WRO, D/D St C5/3 (17 Nov. 1727), R. Standish Howard, London, to R. Standish, Standish Hall.

  135 LRO, DDB Ac 7886/324 (1 Jan. 1775–1 March 1776), f. 4.

  136 Thus complained Sophia Curzon in 1778: Elwin (ed.), The Noels and the Milbankes, p. 103.

  137 Haywood, Betsy Thoughtless, p. 37.

  138 Macky, Journey Through England and Scotland, II, p. 41; A. Allardyce (ed.), Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1888), II, pp. 60–61, quoted in Langford, Polite and Commercial People, p. 109.

  139 Heal and Holmes, Gentry in England and Wales, pp. 289–318, note that the elite relieved the tedium of life in their country manors with long-stay visits, hunting and hawking. Indoor diversions included music, drama and gaming. The provincial towns offered the society of the inn, the bowling green, the racecourse and the cockpit.

  140 LRO, DDB/72/687 (16 July 1807), E. Parker, Preston, to T. Parker, Alkincoats.

  141 LRO, DDWh/4/78 (1 May 1816), A. Ainsworth, Bolton, to E. Whitaker, Roefield; E. C. Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bronte (New York, 1857), p. 51.

  142 C. Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (1992), pp. 73–4. Furthermore, Midgley finds that there were at least seventy-three ladies' anti-slavery associations founded between 1825 and 1833 (p. 47).

  143 Summers, ‘A Home from Home’, pp. 42 and 33.

  144 Marylebone Gardens closed to the public in 1776. Ranelagh House and the Rotunda were demolished in 1805. Bagnigge Wells became known as a lower-class resort from about 1810. Vauxhall had numerous fashionable galas and firework displays in the 1800s and 1810s, but went downhill rapidly from the 1840s and closed in 1859: Wroth, London Pleasure Gardens (see n. 54 above), pp. 21–2, 64, 324. See also HL, HM 31201, Anna Larpent's Diary, III, 1799–1800, f. 247: ‘Thursday at past 9 went with Seymour and John to Vauxhall where I had not been some years the evening was very delightful – but it was very thin. home about one.’ And Henstock, ‘Diary of Abigail Gawthern, p. 95: ‘To Ranelagh [in June 1802]; very few people there; much disappointed, having seen crowds of nobility and well dressed people there, the fireworks the best I ever saw … Ranelagh is now quite forsaken and talked of being taken down or converted into some manufactory.’ On the ‘carriage airing’ and social parade at the nineteenth-century seaside, see A. Dale, Fashionable Brighton, 1820–1860 (1947), pp. 16–17.

  145 Girouard, English Town, p. 144.

  146 Wilkinson complained that a Mr Gawood of the Low Church, Hull, had pronounced in January 1792 that anyone who entered a playhouse would be damned along with actors for all eternity. Another preacher, a Mr Lambert, claimed that the late seventeenth-century plague was God's punishment on the people for their excessive love of the playhouse. In 1794–5, a Mr Dykes banished from his chapel all those who had been to plays. With some exasperation, Wilkinson declared ‘It would be easier I believe to make a convert of a violent democrat to an aristocrat, than to make a methodist like the playhouse’. See Wilkinson, Wandering Patentee, I, p. 111, II, p. 122, IV, pp. 97–9, 201. For Larpent's reactions, see HL, H.M., 31201, Mrs Larpent's Diary, III, 1799–1800, facing f. 4.

  147 M. Nava, ‘Modernity's Disavowal: Women, the City and the Department Store’, in M. Nava and A. O'Shea (eds.), Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity (1996), p. 43; Walkowitz, Dreadful Delight (see n. 8 above), pp. 68–9; K. Dejardin, ‘Etiquette and Marriage at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Advice on Choosing One's Partner’, in J. Carré, The Crisis of Courtesy: Studies in the Conduct Book in Britain, 1600–1900 (Leiden, 1994), p. 175. On commercial spectacles, see R. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), esp. pp. 141–210, and T. Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford, Ca., 1990). On the space for female consumption, see Rappaport, ‘Halls of Temptation’ (see n. 66 above); G. R. Dyer, ‘The ‘Vanity Fair’ of Nineteenth-Century England: Commerce, Women and the East in the Ladies Bazaar', Nineteenth-Century Literature, 46 (1991), pp. 196–222.

  148 Hall, ‘Refashioning of Fashionable Society’ (Ph.D. thesis), pp. 93–51.

  149 With blatant didacticism, Burney's Evelina was drawn down one of the dark walks at Vauxhall, possibly the notorious Lovers' Walk, where she importuned by parties of lewd, impertinent men. Even worse, at a mismanaged fireworks display at the unimpressive Marylebone Gardens, she got lost in a crowd and to her inexpressible horror found she had taken refuge in the company of prostitutes: Burney, Evelina, pp. 193, 195–6, 232–3. Pleasure gardens became emblematic of fashionable dissipation and the capricious lifestyle of metropolitan youth. The worldly Mary Warde confessed that she deserved the ‘excessive bad Cold’ she caught in May 1743, having ‘contrived to make the whole tour of Ranelagh and Vauxhall by Water …’ in a bitter north-easter: WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St 6/1/50 (22 May 1743), M. Warde, Squerries, Kent, to Mrs Stanhope, Horsforth. Ranelagh and Vauxhall were also blamed when the apprentice Robert Parker contracted a dangerous fever in 1773: ‘and Considering how most of the young folks of London live, I wonder they are ever well. The Misses when at home muffled up warm as if was winter and perhaps in the very same Evening you meet 'em at Ranelagh and Vauxhall half naked. The young men are violent in their Exercises and heedless when over. Mr Plestow seem'd to think R's fever was got in this Manner: but this I hope will be a warning to him’: LRO, DDB/72/260 (15 Jan. 1773), W
. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

  150 Samuel Richardson, for his part, consistently criticized the masquerade ball, having his ingénue Harriet Byron abducted outside one in her glaring costume: ‘But surely, I was past all shame, when I gave my consent to make such an appearance as I made, among a thousand strangers, at a Masquerade!’ and his exemplary gentleman Sir Charles Grandison pronounce ‘Masquerades … are not creditable places for young ladies to be known to be insulted at them’. Consult Richardson, Sir Charles Grandison, pp. 183 and 143. While a crude warning to parents was issued by Eliza Haywood when she described an innocent brother and sister at a London masquerade, who ‘no sooner enter'd than both were bewilder'd amidst the promiscuous Assembly – the strange Habits – the Hurry’. Inevitably, the pair were separated in the confusion and the sister was abducted and raped: Haywood, Female Spectator (1745), I, bk 1, p. 49.

  151 Goldsmith, Richard Nash, p. 48.

  152 Haywood, Female Spectator, I, bk 5, pp. 299–300; Pennington, Unfortunate Mother's Advice, pp. 20–21; J. Gregory, A Father's Legacy to his Daughters (1774; Edinburgh, 1788), p. 21; Richardson, Sir Charles Grandison, p. 180. Haywood also reiterated this point in Betsy Thoughtless, p. 438: ‘I would not have you deprive yourself of those pleasures of life which are becoming your sex, your age, and character; – there is no necessity that because you are a wife you should become a mope: – I only recommend a proper medium in these things.’

  153 Barry, ‘Cultural Life of Bristol’ (D.Phil, thesis), p. 195, Sekora, Luxury, passim.

  154 Harrison, ‘Gossip Family’ (unpub. paper), pp. 7–8.

  155 LRO, DDGr C3 (8 July 1776), T. Greene, Grays Inn, to Miss Greene, Slyne. Similarly, Jane Pellet archly wrote ‘Let [your father] know I have not been at either play or Ridotto since I left Browsholm and he very well knows I was not at any whilst there. The inference I wo'd have you draw is that I am very prudent’: Browsholme Letters, Browsholme Hall, Clitheroe, Lancs, uncat. (1745/6), J. Pellet to E. Parker.