The Gentleman's Daughter
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156 LRO, DDB/72/308 (9 May 1780), E. Shackleton, Pasture House, to R. Parker, London.
157 The first quotation is drawn from Sophia Curzon's complaint about Ranelagh, see Elwin, The Noels and the Milbankes, p. 103. For the second, see Smollett, Humphry Clinker, p. 37.
158 Barry, ‘Cultural Life in Bristol’ (D.Phil. thesis), p. 211.
159 HL, HM 31201, XVII, Methodized Journal of Anna Margaretta Larpent, facing f. 10, facing f. 23, f. 24, f. 38 and f. 30. Similarly, Miss Betsy Thoughtless had ‘her head turned with the promiscuous enjoyment, [of plays, balls etc] and the very power of reflection lost amidst the giddy whirl’, and almost an entire novel passed ‘before she could recover it to see the little true felicity of such a course of life’. Consult Haywood, Betsy Thoughtless, p. 18.
160 WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St 6/1/50 (25 July 1740), M. Warde, Squerries, Kent, to M. Warde, Hooton Pagnell.
161 LRO, DDGr C1 (27 Sept. 1762), B. Wiglesworth, Townhead, to Mr Greene; LRO, DDB/72/141 (2 Nov. 1754), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats; WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St 6/1/50 (12 Sept. 1740), M. Warde, Great Cressmgham, to M. Warde, Hooten Pagnall; CRO, D/Lons/L1/1/67, I. Carr, London, to Sir J. Lowther. Similarly, note LRO, DDB Ac 7886/186 (18 May 1747), A. Lister, Broughton, to E. Parker, Browsholme: ‘I can tell you the Country looks charmingly pleasant, and realy you can Scarce imagine how comfortable a little retirement seems after so much hurry as we have been in lately …’; LRO, DDWh/4/77 (28 April 1816), S. Whalley, Rocke Court, Fareham, Hants, to E. Whitaker, Roefield: ‘Bath certainly was very pleasant but I cannot regret its dissipated amusements in the contemplation of my more rational system and the prospect of revisiting our own best country in the course of this month.’; LRO, DDB/72/1188 (4 June 1805), E. Reynolds, to E. Moon, Colne: ‘She has I think spent a very gay time and I dare say has nearly [tasted] of all the amusements that town affords but she says she would not live in London for all the world.’
162 See respectively, WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St 6/1/50 (30 Dec. 1742), E. Winn to M. Stanhope, Horsforth; and LRO, DDGr C3 (20 May 1820), L. Boynton, 55 Burton Crescent, to Mr and Mrs Bradley, Slyne. On ‘Otium’, see Rostvig, Happy Man. On women and intellectual retirement, consider Perry, Celebrated Mary Astell, pp. 126–9 and Scott, Millenium Hall.
Conclusion
1 J. Vanbrugh, The Provok'd Wife (1697; Manchester, 1982), p. 143, act 5, scene 2.
2 For political and social links between new wealth and old elites in Manchester and in north-east Lancashire, see V. A. C. Gatrell, ‘Incorporation and the Pursuit of Liberal Hegemony in Manchester, 1790–1839’, in D. Fraser, Municipal Reform and the Industrial City (Leicester, 1982) and Joyce, Work, Society and Politics, pp. 1–50.
3 Myers, Bluestocking Circle, p. 207. I am indebted to Joanna Innes for this reference.
4 Wilberforce, Practical View, p. 434.
5 Home, Loose Hints, p. 228.
6 LRO, DDB/72/119 (14 Oct. 1757), A. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.
7 LRO, DDB/72/104 (28 Dec. 1755), A. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Alkincoats; LRO, DDWh/4/117 (n.d.), A. E. Robbins, London, to E. Whitaker, Lark Hill, Preston. These sentiments seem quite conventional, even amongst the nobility. For instance in 1790 Lady Sarah Napier wished for another daughter ‘to comfort me in my old age, when my boys are gone to school’, and Elizabeth Amherst confided ‘For my part, I believe I shall like girls best as they stay at home’: Lewis, Family Way, p. 65 and Brophy, Women's Lives, p. 42.
8 LRO, DDB/72/115 (24 Jan. 1757), A. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Alkincoats. See also LRO, DDB/72/161(a), (17 Nov. 1757), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats; LRO, DDB/72/227 (29 Nov. 1769), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to same; LRO, DDWh/4/69 (6 June 1814), M. Whitehead, London, to E. Whitaker, Roefield.
9 LRO, DDB/72/273 (7 Feb. 1775), B. and W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.
10 HL, HM 31207, Methodized Journal of Anna Margaretta Larpent, unfol.; see entries for 1773; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/205 (9 Jan. 1747), J. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Browsholme.
11 LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 183; Burney, The Wanderer, p. 249.
12 NRO, 2DE/39/1/21 (c.1777), Sir John Hussey Delavai to Lady S. H. Delavai at Grosvenor House. Samuel Richardson was critical of Miss Grandison's desire to get married in her chamber and had his heroine Harriet Byron marry the irreproachable Sir Charles Grandison in full view of the community: ‘that all our neighbours and tenants may rejoice with us. I must make the village smoke. No hugger-mugger doings – Let private weddings be for doubtful happiness.’ Refer to Richardson, Sir Charles Grandison (1986), IV, p. 336, VI, pp. 192–3. I thank Charlotte Mitchell for this reference.
13 Hughes, North East, p. 387.
14 On private families, see for example, Haywood, Betsy Thoughtless, p. 18: ‘Never did a mistress of a private family indulge herself, and those about her, with such a continual round of publick diversions. The court, the play, the ball and opera, with giving and receiving visits, engrossed all the time could be spared from the toilet.’ Also p. 534: ‘when the affairs of a family are laid open, and every dispute between the husband and the wife exposed before a court of judicature … The whole becomes a public talk …’ (I thank Naomi Tadmor for these references). Consider also Burney, Evelina, p. 116: ‘I only speak in regard to a public and dissipated life; in private families, we may doubtless find as much goodness, honesty and virtue, in London as in the country.’
15 A. Carlyle, Anecdotes and Characters of the Times (1973), p. 3. Similarly, Austen's retiring hero Edward Ferrars ‘had no turn for great men or barouches. All his wishes centred in domestic comfort and the quiet of private life.’ See, id., Sense and Sensibility, p. 16. William Ramsden also suggested that a Charterhouse schoolmaster could not sustain a social life in the public eye: ‘We live here out of the world. I know little what is doing in it till the papers tell us.’ See LRO, DDB/72/261 (1 April 1773), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats. In addition, Betty Fothergill, the daughter of a reputable Quaker physician, noted of an unaffected gentleman caller in 1769: ‘though he is not formed to make a brilliant figure in the theatre of life, he will shine perhaps in its private domestic scenes’. See Brophy, Women's Lives, p. 119.
16 YAS, MD 335/Box 95/XCV/i (28 May 1773), Mrs B. Lister, Gisburn Park, to T. Lister, MP.
17 As Atterbury observed, ‘a good magistrate must be endowed with a publick spirit, that is with such an excellent temper, as sets him loose from all selfish views, and makes him endeavour towards promoting the common good.’; cited in S. Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed. London, 1784), II, ‘Publick, adj.’ For more on men and public service see the excellent Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman.
18 Gentleman's Magazine, 23 Aug. 1753.
19 E. Chalus, ‘That Epidemical Madness: Women and Electoral Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in Barker and Chalus, Gender in Eighteenth-Century England, pp. 151–78; L. Colley, ‘The Female Political Elite in Unreformed Britain’ (unpub. paper delivered to the Eighteenth-Century Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, 25 June 1993); J. S. Lewis, Sacred to Female Patriotism: Class, Gender and Politics in the Age of Revolution, 1760–1832 (forthcoming).
20 Halsband, Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, II, pp. 135–6.
21 Jupp, ‘Letter-Journal of George Canning’, pp. 118 and 283–4.
22 Midgley, Women Against Slavery, p. 20.
23 L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (1992), p. 281.
24 J. Ruskin, ‘Of Queen's Garden's’, in Sesame and Lilies (1907), pp. 71, 60.
Appendix 1
Research Design and Sources
AT THE HEART OF THIS BOOK lies a study of elite women in Georgian Lancashire,. a county noted in the period for an expanding manufacturing base, a growing service sector and numerous gentry. The research for the book was designed specifically to avoid the shortcomings of a number of previous studies of elites in the period, discussed in t
he introduction and chapter 1, which have too often taken for granted a crude distinction between an upper landed class and a middle class of professionals and businessmen. Rather than question the utility of this distinction, these studies have simply isolated the gentry, or the professions, or the commercial middle class as their subject of inquiry. Once a study is defined in this way, the links and parallels between these groups are inevitably played down, while differences between them are endowed with an analytical significance that is rarely subtantiated by direct empirical comparison. The research for this book was designed to avoid these pitfalls by examining all letters and diaries that survive for privileged women between about 1730 and about 1825 in the Lancashire Record Office at Preston, irrespective of whether the family's wealth came from land, the professions or business. This record office serves the post-1972 county of Lancashire, covering the central and most of the northern part of the old county of Lancaster, but excluding Furness and the southern plains, where the modern conurbations of Manchester and Liverpool lie. Supplementary archival material for the modern county of Lancashire and its fringes was found at the Wigan Record Office and the Lancaster Public Library. Equivalent material was then examined in other northern archives, particularly the Yorkshire Archaeological Society at Leeds, the branches of the West Yorkshire Record Office at Bradford and Leeds, and the branches of the Cumbria Record Office at Carlisle and Kendal. The purpose of extending the study in this way was twofold: to follow up the non-Lancashire friends and kin of the Lancashire families already examined, and to provide a broader perspective on the experience of genteel women in the north of England. It emerged that the sources examined in northern archives contained important evidence about women in London. It was decided to establish a fuller picture of the lives of genteel women in the metropolis by examining a selection of appropriate manuscripts at the Guildhall Library London, the Corporation of London Record Office, the Essex Record Office and the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Although this exploration of London manuscript sources did not amount to a comprehensive review of the kind undertaken for Lancashire, it has served, at the very least, to counteract any tendency to ascribe excessive autonomy to developments in the north which were in fact national in scope and had their origins in London.
Appendix 2
Biographical Index
PARKER CORRESPONDENCE NETWORK, 1751–81
Correspondents of Elizabeth Parker (1726–81) and her first husband Robert Parker of Alkincoats (1720–58), including those who wrote to Elizabeth during her widowhood and her second marriage to John Shackleton (1744–88). An asterisk indicates the person concerned corresponded with Robert Parker only.
*James Aspinall, Burnley, Lancashire
A solicitor. Brother of John Aspinall, below.
MS: single letter LRO, DDB Ac 7886/285. Another letter from him to John
Stanhope is preserved the Spencer Stanhope collection in WYCRO, Leeds (MS span: 1749).
John Aspinall, Preston, Lancashire (d. 1784)
A gentleman barrister on the northern circuit, later Serjeant-at-Law. His seat was the austerely impressive Standen Hall, Clitheroe, Lancashire. When he wrote he was clearly an admirer of the young Miss Elizabeth Parker, in Preston like himself to attend the assemblies. Years later, however, he incurred her wrath when he opposed the interests of the Parkers and Listers in the disputed Clitheroe election of 1781: ‘He within these 30 years wo'd have esteem'd it a Great Honour and been Big of the application of being styl'd recorder of Clitheroe. What a wretch to behave so vilely to his most obliging, generous, worthy neighbours, Browsholme and Gisburne park … [He] most probably thinks Mr Curzon's Purse will enable him to make a Portico or add a Venetian window to the Beauties of Standen. What nonsense is he.’ Like most of the Lancashire elite, Aspinall was a customer of Gillows of Lancaster.
MS: single letter LRO, DDB Ac 7886/82. For the diary reference, see LRO, DDB/81/39 (1781), fos. 31–2 (MS span: 1745/6).
Elizabeth Assheton (née Assheton), Broughton, Lancashire
One of the Asshetons of Cuerdale and Downham, who married a cousin, Richard Assheton, brother of Sir Ralph Assheton of Middleton. Downham was one of the nearest gentry seats to Browsholme, so, unsurprisingly, Elizabeth Assheton was long-standing friend of Elizabeth Parker's; her sister Mary Witton was another of Elizabeth Parker's correspondents; her brother Ralph Assheton of Cuerdale was a trustee to Elizabeth Parker's settlement.
MS: single letter LRO, DDB Ac 7886/303 (MS span: 1749).
*Henry Blackmore, Lancashire
This man wrote to solicit Robert Parker's intervention in a local dispute.
MS: single letter LRO, DDB/72/481 (MS span: 1749).
James Bulcock, 85 Borough High Street, Southwark, London
The Bulcocks were a large trading family who descended from an ancient yeoman family in north-east Lancashire. The older Bulcocks still resided in Colne and owned land in the area, while the younger Bulcock brothers appear to have been double registered in contemporary directories as both Colne tailors and London haberdashers.
MS: six letters LRO, DDB/72/299–302, 305, and DDB Ac 7886/54. For landholding data, see LRO, DDB/59 Bulcock papers, and LRO, DDB/62/239, Map (MS span: 1765–76).
Robert Bulcock, Bishopsgate, London
A London-based wholesale haberdasher who sold (among other things) John Shackleton's callimancoes. His business was advertised in London directories for 1763 and 1777, and in the UBD 1. He offered hospitality to the Parker children when schoolboys, and helped place John and Robert Parker as apprentices. In return, Elizabeth Shackleton supervised the education of his niece Nancy Bulcock. After a brief schooling with a Miss Wells of Bradford and a set of dancing lessons, Nancy became a milliner. She eventually married a hosier and hatter, a Mr Burbidge of Borough, Southwark, London.
MS: two letters LRO, DDB/72/450; DDB Ac 7886/64 (MS span: 1772–3).
*Miss Elizabeth Carleton, Appleby, Yorkshire
Status unknown. A one-time acquaintance of Miss Parker's enquiring about her whereabouts.
MS: single letter LRO, DDB Ac 7886/198 (MS span: 1747).
*Thomas Cockshott, Marley, Bingley, Yorkshire
This gentleman rented the Marley estate from the Parkers. He was married to a Mrs Hardy, the widow of a Horsforth attorney. The Cockshotts were longstanding friends of the Parkers and Shackletons, exchanging regular gifts of game and produce in the 1770s. They also purchased the Parker rabies medicine and communicated information about prospective servants.
MS: single letter to R. Parker LRO, DDB/72/64 (MS span: 1757).
M. Cookson (nee Dawson), Leeds, Yorkshire
Daughter of the gentleman William Dawson Esq. of Longcliffe Hall, Settle. Wife to a prominent Leeds merchant, Thomas Cookson (1707=–73), who was elected to the corporation in 1742 and resigned 1744. Cookson's father, William, was briefly imprisoned in 1715 for alleged Jacobite sympathies; and was three times Mayor of Leeds.
MS: single letter LRO, DDB Ac 7886/254 (MS span: 1748).
Mrs A. Cooper, Southampton Buildings, London
The precise social status of this worldly correspondent is unknown.
MS: single letter LRO, DDB/72/73 (MS span: 1781).
James Cowgill, Cambridge
This cleric was the son of the vicar of Downham and subsequently Clitheroe, Lancashire. He went up to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1732, and became a fellow in 1739. He was another admirer of the unmarried Miss Parker of Browsholme, and fancied himself as a poet. By 1743 he was appointed Vicar of Clitheroe. However, other letters of the period report him pursuing a small college living near Winchester, where it was said the fruit of the apricot tree growing by the house amounted to more than the yearly value of the living. His poverty was something of a running joke amongst the network: ‘Mr Cowgill is prouder and prouder since she [his wife] proves with child I fancy he is to do the office of a midwife for it will save money.’
MS: single letter LRO, DDB Ac 7886/89 (MS span: 1745).
Miss Elizabeth Cromblehome, Preston, Lancashire (d. 1817)
An exceedingly wealthy heiress, she was probably the granddaughter of the William Comblehome of St Michaels on the Wyre, who was ordained deacon by the Archbishop of York in 1723. There is no evidence to link her with the Preston corn merchants of the same name who registered in Baines's directory of 1825. She purchased furniture from Gillows of Lancaster. Later, through her residence at Churchtown, she became acquainted with the clerical Pedder family.
MS: single letter LRO, DDB/72/459. On her fortune, see DDPd/46 Cromblehome trusteeship, and on her furniture, see WPL, 344/51 Gillows Ledger, 1769–75 (MS span: 1773).
William Curron, Carleton, Yorkshire
An officer of the vestry of the parish church of Carleton, who wrote concerning the mooted enclosure of Carleton Common. His occupational status is not divulged.
MS: single letter LRO, DDB/72/451 (MS span: 1767).
Benjamin Ferrand, St Ives, Bingley, Yorkshire (1730–1803)
Only son of Benjamin Ferrand of St Ives (1676–1731) and Sarah (d. 1785), daughter and co-heiress of Thomas Dobson of the vicarage near Bingley. Benjamin Ferrand junior was lord of the manors of Cottingley and Oakworth, among others in the West Riding. He was a zealous turnpike trustee, a major in Sir George Saville's battalion of militia, Deputy-Lieutenant and Justice of the Peace for the West Riding of Yorkshire. Elizabeth Parker gave Ferrand the courtesy title of gamekeeper for the manor of Harden in 1764. Thereafter, he sent her a brace of moor game every season. Although a match was suspected between Ferrand and Beatrix Lister in 1774, it came to nothing and he never married. He was taxed on three male servants in 1780.
MS: two letters LRO, DDB/72/449–50 (MS span: 1764).
Margaret Fielden, Manchester, Lancashire
Mantua-maker based in Burnley, who travelled in the course of her business.