Read The Gentleman's Daughter Online
Authors: Amanda Vickery
The Gentleman's Daughter
The Gentleman's Daughter
The
Gentleman's Daughter
WOMEN'S LIVES IN GEORGIAN ENGLAND
AMANDA VICKERY
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW HAVEN AND LONDON
First printed in paperback 1999
Copyright © 1998 by Amanda Vickery
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
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Designed by Gillian Malpass
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Cox and Wyman, Reading
The Library of Congress has Catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Vickery, Amanda.
The gentleman's daughter: women's lives in Georgian England/by Amanda Vickery.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Women–England–History–18th century. 2. England–Social conditions–18th century. 3. Gentry–England–History–18th century. I. Title.
HQ 1599.E5V47 1988 305.42.'0942.–dc21 97–45792 CIP
A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library
ISBN 978–0–300–10222–2 (pbk.)
4 6 8 10 9 7 5
A
PPENDICES
3 Members of the Parker Family
4 The Social Networks Database
5 Elizabeth Shackleton's Servant Information Network, 1770–1781
6 Purchasers of Parker Rabies Medicine, 1767–1777
List of Plates and Acknowledgements
THE ROAD FROM PRESTON TO PH.D. is paved with clichés, but my gratitude is no less heartfelt for its predictability. At Penwortham Girls' Grammar School, my history teacher, Angela Gibson, singled me out and encouraged me, while my parents, Derek and Renée Vickery, made every sacrifice that I might, as the adage has it, go Down South. At nineteen, in London, I was lucky enough to come across Professor Penelope Corfield. She was inspiring as an undergraduate tutor, alternately soothing and bracing as a Ph.D. supervisor, and is now unfailingly helpful as a colleague, but still shrewd as a critic. She will blush, but I salute her.
Institutions that have supported my career thus far and whose financial aid I happily acknowledge include the E.S.R.C., the Institute of Historical Research, Churchill College, Cambridge, and Royal Holloway, London University. Most recently, I enjoyed the Helen Bing fellowship at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, and an Ahmondson-Getty fellowship at the Clark Library, U.C.L.A. My blissful stay in California was infinitely enriched by Helen Bing's remarkable kindness and the friendship of Shelly Bennett, Tom Cogswell, Karen Kupperman, Amy Myers, Jack Myers, Kate Norberg, Jenny Stine and, above all, Roy and Louise Ritchie.
In researching this book I have drawn heavily on both local and national record offices and the patience of their archivists. The following archives have all kindly permitted me to quote their manuscripts: the Lancashire Record Office, Preston; the Lancaster Public Library; the Wigan Record Office, Leigh; the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, York; the Yorkshire Archaelogical Society, Leeds; the West Yorkshire County Record Office, Bradford; the West Yorkshire County Record Office, Leeds; the West Yorkshire County Record Office, Wakefield; the North
Yorkshire Record Office, Northallerton; the Cheshire Record Office, Chester; the Cumbria County Record Office, Carlisle; the Corporation of London Record Office; the Guildhall Library, London; the Westminster Public Library; the Essex Record Office, Chelmsford; the Kent Record Office, Maidstone; the Tyne and Wear Record Office, Newcastle; the Public Record Office, London; and the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. In particular, I must single out the kindness of Mrs Diana Parker of Browsholme, who permitted me to use the manuscripts in the Parker of Browsholme deposit in the Lancashire Record Office, alerted me to unused documents left at Browsholme, allowed me to photocopy countless manuscripts and was very helpful in advising me of illustrations. Two archivists and scholars who have been more than generous with their local knowledge and unpublished work are Faye Oldland of the Pendle Heritage Centre and Brett Harrison of the West Yorkshire Record Office at Leeds. I am grateful to all.
For references, suggestions, critical readings and intellectual fellowship, I am deeply indebted to Jonathan Bate, Kelly Boyd, Mike Braddick, John Brewer, Amanda Craig, Anne Goldgar, Helen Hackett, David Jarvis, Lawrence Klein, Alison Light, Rohan McWilliam, Charlotte Mitchell, Roy Porter, Lyndal Roper, Naomi Tadmor, Pat Thane, Stella Tillyard, the anonymous readers of Yale University Press and especially Joanna Innes, who has read my work many times over and found supporting examples too numerous to acknowledge in the notes. Successive generations of students on the Royal Holloway Women's History M.A. course have also helped shape this book with their questions and comments. For help with illustrations I must thank Mr John Aspinall of Standen, Madeline Ginsburg, the Hon. Mrs Jackson, Mr Harry Matthews, Mr Stephen Startin, Mr and Mrs John Warde of Squerries, Paul Langford who suggested the cover picture, and particularly Neil Holland, who heroically stepped in at the last minute to sort out my photography crisis. Yale University Press has proved a model publisher. Celia Jones's copy editing has been careful and helpful, while my editor Gillian Malpass has cheered me with her sustained commitment to the book and a remarkable attention to detail throughout.
Yet history is not everything, and it must be admitted that life is more fun than work. For disregarding my academic guise, I want to thank my oldest friends Gregory Battle, Jill Farrington, Neil Holland, Elizabeth Muir and all those wonderful girlfriends who have come after. The completion of this book coincided with the birth of my fearless daughter Hester and is competing with a complicated second pregnancy as I write, so to neglect to mention the unstinting support of my G.P., Fred Kavalier,
the Camden midwives and everyone who has helped me at the University College Obstetric Hospital would feel perverse. In time-honoured tradition, my biggest debt is acknowledged last. John Styles has banned the gushing and detailed acknowledgement that I have been perfecting over the years. Still, if life with two demanding women resembles an uphill struggle, then he has nobly put his shoulder to the wheel. This book is for him.
ORIGINAL SPELLING, PUNCTUATION AND capitalization has been retained throughout. Abbreviation of ‘the’, ‘that’, ‘which’ and ‘would’, among a host of other nouns and verbs, was universal. Where the text is hard to follow these contractions have been rendered in full in square brackets.
The bibliography and biographical index contain details of most primary and secondary sources cited, and therefore abbreviations for these works have been used throughout in the notes; references to those works not included in the bibliography or biographical index are given in full in the notes at their first appearance in each chapter. Unless otherwise stated, the place of publication is London.
Facing page
: Map of Lancashire and Yorkshire showing the principal towns and villages mentioned in the text.
IN 1820 GEORGE III DIED, the first iron steamship was launched, Shelley published
Prometheus Unbound
and an unremarkable middle-aged woman took stock of her past. She took out her old letters, burning some and arranging others, and thereby the ghosts of a decorous life materialized before her: ‘These letters brought back many events, but above all marked the progress of time & how it sweeps into its course over friends over feelings – our hopes & fears – We here see man in a mirror – they appear as when they pass by mere reflections.’
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It is from just such disconnected reflections that
The Gentleman's Daughter
is wrought. The letters, diaries and account books of over one hundred individuals from commercial, professional and gentry families form the basis of this book. Collectively, I have labelled this social group ‘the genteel’. It is the relayed hopes and fears of the women of these families, the merchants' daughters, the solictors' wives and the gentlemen's sisters, that are the central focus. To read the letters of the long dead is to summon up a veritable army of apparitions; to be bombarded with the complexities and particularities of countless comfortable lives lived outside the spotlight of history. So how is the historian to marshal all this teeming detail? What artful categories will create order from the chaos of the individual and the everyday? How should we write the history of the proper and the prosperous?
The answer for many has been to offer a narrative of decline and fall, using women's manuscripts to illustrate a tale of increasing female passivity and ever-tightening domestic encirclement. In fact, it is almost impossible to open a book on wealthier British women between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries that does not offer a catalogue of declining female options; but, worryingly, what is presented as the key period of deterioration depends upon the author's own chronological specialism. In
the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, so Alice Clark famously argued in 1919, the wives of craftsmen and manufacturers made a substantial contribution to the family enterprise, since the home and workplace were usually one. Gentlewomen were active in household and estate management, public affairs and even government; but as the century wore on, the rapid increase of wealth permitted the wives of prosperous men to withdraw from productive activity. In parallel, the spread of capitalistic organization concentrated manufacturing on central premises – separating the home and workplace, with devastating consequences for female enterprise. Once production left the home, the wife was divorced from her husband's trade and lost the informal opportunity to learn his skills. Creative housekeeping fell into decay. In contrast to their hardy and resourceful Elizabethan grandmothers, the moneyed ladies of the Restoration were distinguished only by their ‘devotion to idle graces’.
2
This resonant tale of the descent of seventeenth-century propertied Englishwomen into indolence and luxury has been frequently reiterated.
3
Most of these accounts rest on the curious assumption that the performance of heavy manual labour is intrinsically empowering for women, so therefore the relief from drudgery saw women automatically devalued by society. Lawrence Stone, for instance, leaves us in no doubt about the frivolousness and futility of a woman's life once she had vacated the dairy and laid down the distaff:
Wives of the middle and upper classes increasingly became idle drones. They turned household management over to stewards, reduced their reproductive responsibilities by contraceptive measures, and passed their time in such occupations as novel reading, theatre going, card playing and formal visits … The custom of turning wives into ladies ‘languishing in listlessness’ as ornamental status objects spread downwards through the social scale.
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