The Gentleman's Daughter (16 page)

For all that, courtship was the supreme adventure for an agreeable young lady with a genteel fortune. Perhaps for the only time in her life, a woman was the absolute centre of attention, and often the protagonist of a thrilling drama. Many walked a tightrope of romantic excitement: imprudent encouragement smacked of filial disobedience and could end in disinheritance and disaster, but a fastidious decorum might dishearten a suitor and lead to aching disappointment. Nevertheless, however interesting a woman's dilemmas, her star was never higher and the girl of family, fortune and character could make a career of her coming out. The eponymous heroine of Elizabeth Haywood's
Miss Betsy Thoughtless
(1751) rejoiced in her reign: ‘As the barometer is governed by the weather, she said to herself, so is the man in love governed by the woman he admires: he is a meer machine, – acts nothing of himself, – has no will or power of his own, but is lifted up, or depressed, just as the charmer of his heart is in humour.’ Is it to be wondered that the lively Betsy preferred entertaining a ‘plurality of lovers’ and savouring the triumph of ‘awing the proudest into submission’, to settling down with the first man of virtue who came along?
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Yet, the sought-after maiden exercised only a ‘short-lived tyranny’, as Mary Wollstonecraft warned. Few men expected to carry the elaborate homage and tedious forms of courtship into marriage. Indeed, the villainous suitor of Haywood's
Betsy Thoughtless
was only biding his time, having ‘armed himself with patience, to submit to everything his tyrant should inflict, in the hope that it would one day be his turn to impose laws …’
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And therein lay the rub. For all the poetry of courtship, marriage remained a social and economic contract written in sober prose, so many a bride was doomed to disillusionment. ‘How soon is the painted Scene changed’, reflected the clear-eyed Arabella, ‘and the same Woman, that just now personated a
Lady
is anon to be a
Waiting-maid
, a
Cook
and a
Nurse:
And well it is, if after all she can gain the Applause and Approbation of her Proprietor.’
¹¹⁵
So whether a woman was content in marriage turned in large measure on her ability to resign herself to the traditional roles, responsibilities and relationship of husband and wife. As a philosophical Anna Larpent reminisced in 1800: ‘I have been married 18 years today I have had my roughs & smooths but the former chiefly arose from expecting too much.’
¹¹⁶
Not that an automatic desire to rebel against matrimonial convention should be assumed. Many women exhibited a craving to do their duty as ardent as any hunger for narrow, personal gratification. For, as Ann Pellet observed, ‘there is certainly a secret pleasure in doing what we ought, tho' perhaps one don't meet with a suitable return’. In fact, ‘the consciousness of doing right’ in the face of the most extreme provocation seems to have offered some women a near-mystical satisfaction in their matrimonial martyrdom.
¹¹⁷
Doubtless the highest conception of happiness for some was the knowledge that they had pleased their husbands: ‘To a slave's fetters add a slavish mind,’ requested one cynic, ‘that I may cheerfully your will obey.’
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Still, marriage was not all sacrifice and submission. The deferential utterance is not an unerring sign of a deferential spirit, as Georgian men were only too aware. Wives, like servants, might only offer ‘eye-service’ – a superficial deference which masked a contemptuous heart. As E.P. Thompson has reflected, ‘The same man who touches his forelock to the squire by day – and who goes down in history as an example of deference – may kill his sheep, snare his pheasant or poison his dogs at night.’
¹¹⁹
Lip-service to masculine dominion abounds in genteel correspondence, but some playfulness is also apparent. Wives made arch references to their formal subjection, as here, where Jane Scrimshire signs off a letter: ‘my Husband sends you His best wishes not forgetting your worthy
Master
’, and Bessy Ramsden mocks her schoolmaster husband: ‘then comes home my Lord and Master for his breakfast which must not be delay[ed] a
moment …’
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In fact, some brides seemed to exult in the fact that they had a husband to order them about in the first place. The self-possessed Anne Parker of Cuerdon, for one, liked to dramatize her matrimonial encounters, advertizing her gracious submission to the great, northern gentleman she sought to tame:

Anne Parker's complaints about ‘Mr Husband’ had the unmistakable air of self-congratulation: ‘To be sure I was born to be Contradicted (oh! foh! how I stink of Matrimony).’
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Perhaps she sought to exaggerate his bluff jurisdiction the better to spotlight her own civilizing mission, for the softening power of female influence was an article of eighteenth-century common sense and a point of covert female pride.

A clever woman managed to assert herself within the paradigm of male supremacy and female subjection, it was often suggested. Lord Halifax's thoughts on the bride's empire of tears were endlessly recycled in eighteenth-century print.
A Picture of true Conjugal Felicity
of 1765 offered the example of the mild, agreeable Amanda, who consecrated her life ‘to the full discharge of her relative duties’ and put her excellent husband Manley so at ease, that she was able ‘to enjoy the amiable female privileges of ruling by obeying, of commanding by submitting, and of being perfectly happy from consulting another's happiness’. Their harmonious marriage represented ‘strength and softness blended together’. While Manley ‘must soften to be happy’, Amanda ‘must subdue by obedience’. Presumably Amanda's fluffy charm settled on Manley's authority like a smothering blanket. Rousseau offered the same assurance that a woman could govern the governer: ‘Woman's empire is an empire of gentleness, skill and obligingness; her orders are caresses, her threats are tears. She ought to reign in the home as as a minister does in a state – by getting herself commanded to do what she wants to do.’ The stern law lord Hery Home reiterated
this creed: ‘A man indeed bears rule over his wife's conduct: his will is law. Providence however has provided her with means to bear rule over his will. He governs by law, she by persuasion. Nor can her influence ever fail, if supported by sweetness of temper and zeal to make him happy.’
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Of course, such advice was far from radical in its intentions, but it nevertheless identified a comfortable fiction that many women lived by: ‘I am glad [women] can find, in the imaginary Empire of Beauty, a consolation for being excluded every part of Government in the State’, despaired Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in 1737.
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If beauty alone failed to do its work, then a more drastic tactic was the exaggerated fulfilment of given orders, the parade of excessive obedience rather than open defiance, by which means a woman might expose the tyranny of an authority figure. Fanatically dutiful daughters threatened to sacrifice themselves on the altar of paternal dictate and good wives were not above the ostentatious exhibition of their bondage. Thus, when Mrs Elizabeth Montagu's husband refused her permission to visit a friend, she assented to his order, but proposed to decline the invitation citing his refusal as her specific reason. Her embarassed husband then relented and said she could go for three days. Not satisfied with this small concession, Montagu insisted that he frank the letter that contained her explanation:

Although Elizabeth Montagu shamed her husband into giving her the full permission she desired, that she was reduced to such schemes at all rankled painfully: ‘Do you not admire these lovers of liberty! … I am not sure that Cato did not kick his wife.’
¹²⁴
If Elizabeth Montagu was to wear her chains, then the world would hear them rattling.

However, the universal efficacy of non-confrontational tactics was by no means guaranteed. Ellen Weeton was dubious from the outset: ‘I have often read of the experience of others, and have seen a few instances myself, where the accommodating spirit began and remained on one side, without having any softening influence on the other, but on the contrary,
increased
its
malignity
by indulgence …’
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Even the most pathetic petition will not melt a heart of stony indifference, so ultimately a wife was still dependent upon the warmth of her husband's goodwill. Obviously, some men were more liberal in outlook than others. The London school-master
William Ramsden refused to imitate ‘Adam a very shabby Fellow; who, to excuse Himself, was for laying the Blame on his wife’, and thought Lord Chesterfield's letters unsuitable reading for his sons because of the misogynistic images of women therein.
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On the other hand, the Leeds merchant Walter Stanhope, while a dutiful husband, advertised none of this effortless enlightenment. Philosophic beliefs apart, men varied in their susceptibility to female persuasion. ‘I know by Experience’, wrote Jane Scrimshire in 1756, that ‘when Old Men Marry Young Women there is no Bounds to the influence they have over them’.
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Since female influence was conditional on character and circumstance, its extent varied wildly. Elizabeth Parker managed an indulgent father and devoted first husband with relative ease. However her second husband was immune to polite persuasion and was beyond caring about losing her love and good opinion. Similarly all Ellen Stock's rhetoric could not moderate Aaron Stock's commands nor stay his fists. After all, a man's right to chastize his wife was enshrined in common law. Both women found to their cost that influence was no substitute for power.

Marriage carried the potential both for harmonious licence and for miserable servitude, as it long had done. The patriarchal and the companionate marriage were not successive stages in the development of the modern family, as Lawrence Stone has asserted, rather these were, as Keith Wrightson has sensibly argued, ‘poles of an enduring continuum in marital relations in a society which accepted both the primacy of male authority and the ideal of marriage as a practical and emotional partnership’. Feminine deference and sexual submission hardly vanished from a young man's wish list: it is striking how many dissatisfied Victorian husbands still directed their wives to the uncompromising words of the marriage service.
¹²⁸
Before Victoria, elite women sought prudent, affectionate matches, that they might share in the prestige and the pleasures of genteel family life. Emotional warmth was a reasonable guarantee of considerate treatment, while a pragmatic choice maintained or improved one's position in the world and secured the long-term support of family and friends, whose backing it was wise to preserve against the possibility of male authoritarianism. Thus, the key to a successful match lay in the balancing of these two elements. In a non-divorcing society, the Georgians fostered the prudent romance, for in Samuel Richardson's words, ‘Love authorized by reasonable prospects; Love guided and heightened by duty, is everything excellent that poets have said of it’.
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IN THE SPRING OF 1754 Elizabeth Parker's indulgent father John Parker lay dying at Browsholme of a ‘paralytick disorder’. Heavily pregnant with what would be her first surviving child, Elizabeth was not deemed fit to make the thirteen-mile journey to sit at his bedside. In consequence, her husband Robert went in her stead, leaving his agitated wife awaiting news and letters by messenger. Concerned for his wife and the fragility of life in the womb, Robert wrote back ‘I must own absence [with] the certainty of yr Condition & Fretfulness, gives me particular and great uneasiness’. ‘Pray my dear hoop up yr spirits’, he entreated from John Parker's deathbed.
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Perhaps he nursed a lurking fear that maternal shock would impress itself upon, and thereby deform, the foetus, but given his degree in medicine and Elizabeth's recent failure to carry a child to term, perhaps his fears were more straightforward. Whatever his misgivings, he prayed for her composure: ‘consider [the] Situation you are in, for by uneasiness you may not only endanger yourself but the little poor things, and as these shocks are only [what] happens in all Familys & Fulfilling the great Law of Nature am almost convinced you will be that Philosopher not overmuch to regard them.’
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Robert Parker was not alone in his fears and exhortations. Elizabeth's Aunt Ann Pellet wrote from London calling upon her to recognize that the obligations of a mother-to-be outweighed those of a grieving daughter. Mrs Pellet believed that in prudence Elizabeth should avoid the deathbed lest the confrontation leave too strong an impression on her mind. Instead, since ‘all your present trouble is from that Power which cannot err’, she begged Elizabeth to bear her sorrow ‘with that submission which is due from a [Chris]tian hero’: ‘consider the great injury you will do the dr Baby as well as [your]self & family if you should grieve immoderately especially
since … we are sure you know your duty much beyond the generality of our sex.’
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