The Gentleman's Daughter (13 page)

By contrast, the Ramsden marriage was nothing if not a performance. The Londoner Bessy Parker was the sister of an Essex manufacturer and a London stationer. After her marriage sometime in the late 1750s she set up home at the Charterhouse School, in Charterhouse Square, where her husband the Reverend Ramsden was an usher. The Ramsdens were virtually never separated, and any letters they exchanged between them have not survived, so the reconstruction of their marriage is based on the comments they offered for the admiration and entertainment of outsiders. Verily, the letters they sent to their northern cousin in the 1760s and 1770s are one long advertisement for the delights and drolleries of family life. William Ramsden wallowed in domesticity; whether it be watching his
children play, his wife perform household tasks, or simply the arrival of his dinner: ‘here comes Supper (Dinr I should say) Smelts at Top, ‘Sparagus at Bottom, a smiling Wife – Who'd be a king?’ Bessy Ramsden was equally versed in the vocabulary of cosy intimacy and artless pleasure: ‘to morrow three weeks we brak up again for a month. Deary is looking out for some snug Country Box to carry me & my Lambkins to Grass …’ Predictably, they hated to be apart: ‘all the World goes to Margate’, sighed the Reverend, ‘but to me it proved a very insipid spot because I had left the Sweetener of Life behind, for Bessy was obliged to stay at home to nurse.’ Bessy Ramsden declared herself ‘melancholy’ without her husband and confidently assumed others would feel the same: ‘my Wife wonders how her loving Cousin cou'd trust her Deary so far from home. She & hers having never yet been twenty miles asunder & but two nights separated since they first became one flesh.’
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Yet the syrup was also salted with humour. Reverend Ramsden variously described his wife as ‘the Baggage’, ‘yr broad bottomed cousin’, ‘a trumpery woman’, ‘My Duchess’, ‘Dame Bessy’, ‘My Eve’ and ‘My Better Half. Bessy habitually referred to her spouse as ‘Mr R.’, ‘My Good Man’, or ‘Deary’. Both Ramsdens produced wry narratives recounting their tiffs and revelling in resentment. In fact, hardly a letter from the Reverend was sent that did not contain a dissertation on Bessy's features and foibles, from her big bottom, terrible handwriting and distaste for bathing, to her scolding tongue and social exuberance, in particular her weakness for gallivanting out to play. In truth, he congratulated himself on her independence – ‘mine Madam is a
saucy Hussy
, not to be imitated by you Obedient Wives’ – and rather welcomed the role of the beleaguered husband, carrying out his wife's orders with a certain long-suffering relish:

The conscious satisfaction the Ramsdens derived from almost every aspect of their relationship can perhaps be attributed to their late marriage. William Ramsden was at least fifty years old when he came to wed. Bessy Ramsden herself offered maturity as an explanation for their deliberate management of home life: ‘we go by clockwork which I [know] you will
think very formal stuff but then you will say it [is] not to be wonder[ed] when a old maid … [has] married an old Bachelor which of the two I am at a lost to tell which [is] the worse …
but happy are they when they come to gether
.’
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Whatever the cause of such connubial comfort, it is clear that not only did the Ramsdens enjoy each other, they also relished the theatrical performance of matrimony itself – dramatizing squabbles and intimacies with equal ease. This was the correspondence which tried hardest to shed charm on the mundanities of marriage. Yet for all the purring domesticity, this was also the marriage which nurtured the most mobile and extrovert wife.

The mundane was not valorized by the young Whitakers of Simonstone, a newly married couple of the 1810s who expected their emotions to take elevated flights. The alliance between Eliza Horrocks of Preston and Charles Whitaker of Simonstone united a cotton lord with the Lancashire gentry, but strategic concerns were as nothing compared with the power of love, or so their letters imply. Like many eighteenth-century couples before them, the Whitakers confessed to a mental struggle between reason and emotion. However, in their case this was a manifestly unequal struggle, feeling consistently outstripping self-control. Their letters lurched from declaration to declaration: ‘I shall
not often
feel disposed to leave you’, wrote the twenty-three-year-old Eliza to Charles in the first year of marriage in 1813, ‘I really seem quite an unmarried miss, having neither my husband to speak to, or a house to attend to. I adore my dependence. I hope ever shall I have reason to do so for that will ever insure the happiness of both.’ Ensconced with her father's family, Eliza waxed prolix on the pain of separation, the great void she felt and wondered if it was all worth it, since life was so short – strong stuff considering she was only away just over a week. Receiving no reply from Charles, Eliza wrote again dramatizing her fretful longing:

The importance of the marital bond was constantly stressed. Eliza and her aunts longed for ‘our better halves’. Without men they were incomplete.

All this wifely devotion did not fall on deaf ears. Back at Roefield (their villa in Clitheroe), enjoying the grouse shooting, Charles endeavoured to reply in the same ardent tone. As Eliza presented herself as yielding and dependent, so he reciprocated with delight in his dear little wife, his precious jewel. However, Charles Whitaker was no master of the genre, shifting from plodding protestations back to a chattier idiom with palpable relief:

Through images of possession and protection, however muddled, Charles affirmed his devoted attachment: ‘Oh my dear creature, how truly glad I shall be to have you home again. Be not surprised if I ever trust you from me again. Pray burn all my letters that no mortal eyes may see them. I have ordered all the walks in the wood to be swept clean and I hope to have everything in order at your arrival …’
⁸³
Ernest in tone and laboured in expression, these letters suggest that the young Whitakers had an investment in the ideal of ardent romantic emotion. Perhaps it was not enough for them to be simply loving in marriage. It appears that they wanted to be desperately, awfully in love, and love for Eliza Whitaker meant melancholy languishings and swooning submission. She wanted to adore her dependence on her solicitous young husband. Charles Whitaker treasured his ‘dear little wife’. The language of feeling they deployed was pregnant with allusions to tender mastery and pleasurable surrender.

However, for all this language of Big Man and Little Woman, the
Whitaker marriage was no different in practicalities to those that preceded it. For all the implication that love was a miraculous force blending two souls, it was not powerful enough a solvent to dissolve the customary distinctions between man and wife. Eliza Whitaker was an assiduous housekeeper, a resourceful, supportive kinswoman, a cultural consumer of some pretension and later an irreproachable mother. Charles Whitaker was as absorbed in field sports and county administration as any of his predecessors. Eliza Whitaker may have represented herself as a vulnerable, little woman in letters to her husband, but it does not follow that she behaved as such with others. Moreover, what was said to express throbbing feeling in separation was perhaps not expected to apply to everyday life. Furthermore, her quiverings may not have survived the honeymoon years of marriage. In fact, the play on charming subservience may have been cynically conceived in the first place, for Eliza and her Horrocks sisters were certainly criticized on precisely this count by a sharp-eyed acquaintance:

Perhaps Eliza Whitaker turned her swooning dependence on and off like the proverbial tap.

Demonstrably, conjugal idioms varied across the period. Some of this variety must be attributed to temperament and context – one would hardly expect the same vocabulary from a twenty-three-year-old newlywed as from a fifty-year-old father of four – yet linguistic models derived from letter-writing manuals, essays and novels also played a role, even if their dominance was incomplete. A neo-classical reserve tempered the protestations Robert Parker and Walter Stanhope were prepared to commit to paper in the 1740s and 1750s. Doubtless they agreed with Richard Steele, who thought marriage should be regarded as an everyday matter, and found it preposterous when women were ‘treated, as if they were designed to inhabit the happy fields of
Arcadia
, rather than be Wives and Mothers in old
England
’.
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Almost certainly they inherited the belief, still strong across the North today, that the trumpeting of marital affection is embarassing and anti-social: 'tis indecent, to be always slabbering, like a couple of Horses nabbing one other.’
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By contrast, the Ramsdens
considered themselves a liberal couple and were encouraged in their expressiveness by their reading of Samuel Richardson: ‘You may laugh at your humble servant if you please for I am not ashamed of my passion’, wrote Bessy Ramsden in 1762, ‘you know Sir Charles says a woman should never be ashame[d] of owning a passion for a worthy man.’
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A romantic faith in the authenticity and desirability of emotional transport can be detected in the leaden Whitaker exchanges. In fact, they moved on the fringes of the Lake Poets, so they may have drunk of such ardour at the source.

Admittedly, the mechanism by which a literary ideal informs private writing, the much touted ‘inter-textuality’ of literary studies, is notoriously difficult to substantiate. Evidence on the reception of texts is exceptionally hard to secure. However, occasional remarks are revealing of the ways in which enthusiasm for the Romantic or sentimental message may have shaped female discourse, witness a teenage Lancaster Quaker confiding her reactions to Richardson in the 1770s: ‘We have begun to read Sir Charles Grandison. I admire much the character of Miss Harriet Byron. I dislike as much Mr Greville and Fenwick as I love her … How I was affected by Miss Byron being carried from the masquerade by sir Hargrave’; ‘Miss Byron O how she will be afflicted when [Sir Charles] goes to Bologna.’ Mary Chorley quickly moved from sympathizing with the novel's characters, to musing on her own sensibility: ‘I really am at a loss to know what to say in my transactions. I think if I were to open my heart like Miss Byron and Miss Jewson the contents would fill a room.’ Literary formulae could have a stunning impact on personal expression.
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Yet, of course, fiction itself is hardly a monovalent force driving lovers down a straight road to the emotional expressiveness of the late 1960s.

It would be incautious to use these cases to construct a neat chronology of dignified restraint giving way to romantic release in the written expression of love. The Gossips were as cosy in the 1730s as any
gemütlich
Victorian couple; Barbara Stanhope as helpless and abject in her love in the 1720s as any heroine of a Gothic romance. More plausible is Marilyn Butler's thesis that politeness and passion were rival, not successive, philosophic and emotional ideals. Certainly, the 1760s and 1770s represented the sentimental heyday, when a group of committed writers displayed an optimistic interpretation of unpolished human nature of a piece with their liberal sympathies. Much of their confidence in subjectivity and sensation was inherited by the radical novelists of the 1790s, though unsurprisingly the same decade witnessed a conservative literary reaction ‘attacking the cult of self in politics, psychology and ethics’. In fact, by the early nineteenth century, a moderate language of love was again fashionable in
exalted literary circles.
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Competing emotional conventions had long been in play; fashions rose and fell, but they always had their competitors and contenders.