The Gentleman's Daughter (24 page)

For their part, gentlemen bestirred themselves to ensure that a kinswoman presided over their housekeeping. Thus, when Robert Parker lost his last close female relative in April 1748, among many letters of condolence, he received advice of a downright sort: ‘There's nothing for you now but marrying,’ wrote his friend and business partner, ‘don't think of keeping house with servants, in my opinion there's few to be trusted.’ But of his pressing domestic needs Robert Parker required no reminding. He had to cry off both entertainments and administrative duties for want of a housekeeper, because his grandmother's death ‘has left me a family to manage, which I am not ye least fit for & what to do with them and myself God knows.’ Within a month he had had enough: ‘I am already tired of Housekeeping, but don't know how to help it.’ Similarly, in 1742 the Lancastrian William Stout was heartily relieved to have his niece undertake the management of his household. His brother Josias Stout was served by their mother in this capacity, until she grew too infirm, when she ‘was urgent upon him to marry, he not being willing to keepe house with a servant’. The Yorkshire widower Thomas Birkenshaw made no bones of the fact that he needed a wife to run his household in the late 1770s as his servants were ruining him:

Male desire to have a relative as housekeeper appears unabated in the later period, and indeed the Victorian widower's recourse to the services of his dead wife's sister was proverbial.
⁴

Demonstrably, when gentlemen dabbled in the marriage market they hoped to procure a bride as prudent and economical as she was charming and genteel. The manufacturer Edward Parker had second thoughts about his favoured damsel, a Miss Holt, whom he had visited three times at home and gallanted to a play, when he discovered her extravagance. By contrast, the self-made William Gossip found in his bride an unpaid housekeeper as dutiful and continent as any paragon of Protestant prescription: ‘for sure no woman of your fortune was ever less expensive.’
⁵
A clear appreciation of female management skills is apparent in a host of masculine manuscripts. When John Parker pleaded with his unmarried daughter to return from one of her jaunts in 1749, his increasing reliance on her superior administrative powers was made explicit:

Similarly, when Anne Stanhope was away at her sister's, her husband Walter Stanhope grew impatient for her return, pleading his helplessness: ‘ye house does not look right without you & I am no way qualified for housekeeping.’ In fact, a strict division of authority was eagerly embraced by most genteel husbands. Witness William Ramsden in 1770, complaining of overwork during his wife's lying in: ‘I wish the next Week over that I may resign the
Keys
of my
Office
, for indeed most heartily am I tired of being both
Mistress & Master
.’ Indeed, cuckolded husbands who brought the common law action ‘criminal conversation’ against their wives' lovers, often claimed additional financial compensation for the loss of their house manager.
⁶

As the mistress of a household, the genteel bride tasted of administrative power and exuded quasi-professional pride. While betrothed in the summer of 1751, Miss Elizabeth Parker of Browsholme anticipated her household responsibilities with officious excitement. Her letters were peppered with questions about Alkincoats, her future marital home, and she commissioned her friends and servants to bring her further information. She was particularly concerned with Robert Parker's rebuilding scheme and offered frequent opinions on the renovations. She asked to be informed of his design, and made specific suggestions: ‘Pray let no conveniency be lost that you can make by way of Cupboards & Closets, for they are usefull in a family …’ Throughout, she was opposed to false
economies: ‘for I know by experience if repairs in old houses are not done effectually they are a continual expense.’ Miss Parker could not resist chivvying her betrothed about the pace of improvement, encouraging him to stick to his plans and avoid the distractions of company. ‘I am very angry with you to jaunt about at this rate. I imagine you have laid aside all thoughts of yr house. Tho' you neglect it, its much my care, which I esteem a pleasure.’ She grew proprietorial about Alkincoats, praying that God would grant prosperity to both the present owner and ‘the owner elect’, as she styled herself. In fact, her promptitude laid her open to mockery. When Miss Parker pointedly inquired of a Lancashire gentleman how he could think of inflicting his company on Robert Parker, hard at work at Alkincoats, the friend ‘made answer that I was a saucy Miss and wonder'd what business I had to give myself airs, for that my share at present in [Robert Parker's] house was no more than a Goose co'd sit in.’
⁷
Impatience to wield authority over a household is palpable.

The status and satisfaction to be drawn from genteel housekeeping is clear from the praise paid the mistress by observant women, as here in an approving sketch of the young charmer who had induced her clerical lover to renounce a college fellowship to marry her: ‘Certainly his looks do her great credit – and her good sense knows how to become the prudent domestic Wife in which character she shines as much as when in her Boudoir surrounded by her various collection of shells, feathers, and paintings of her own performance.’
⁸
The credit gained through housekeeping can also be judged by the regret at its passing. Resigning the post of mistress could be traumatic, as William Stout's mother found at Lancaster at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Though she herself had urged Josias Stout to marry, actually handing over the reigns of power proved unpleasant: ‘But when the young wife came to housekeeping, my mother thought to have some direction in that, more than the young wife (who had been her father's housekeeper) would allow; which made their mother uneasy.’
⁹
Similarly, when Mrs Shackleton surrendered the management of Alkincoats to her daughter-in-law in 1779, she could not hide her pique and sense of rejection, as here when ostensibly disavowing any interest in possible mismanagement: ‘God knows what all their great big Maids are doing at Alkincoats in their absence. That is nothing to me.’ She could not refrain from belittling Betty Parker's efforts ‘in the housekeeping way’. Mrs Shackleton noted in May 1779 that Alkincoats was under poor stewardship, ‘all in sad Confusion’, and she held her daughter-in-law directly responsible: ‘I think Mrs P. should not molest [Tom's] things & Mrs P. to blame.’ Later the same month Betty Parker further alienated her mother-in-law, by offering her a damp bed with dirty linen on an overnight visit.
Within a year, however, the new Mrs Parker began to redeem herself with conspicuously dutiful and dignified housekeeping. ‘My good Daughter is a most exceedingly Good Wife, she ruffled her Husband a shirt & always is Industrious and manages with prudent Oeconomy.’
¹⁰
Like Elizabeth Shackleton, Betty Parker learned how to nourish her reputation through good housekeeping. Even letters from the missish Eliza Whitaker bespeak a gentlewoman's investment in, and protection of, her housekeeping role. Here she fishes for compliments from her young husband, hoping her invaluable contribution to the household and the happiness of its master will be missed:

Female management was an established institution with recognized symbols and ceremonies endorsed by both sexes. Yet for all that, female administration has received scant attention from the historians, perhaps because its most skilful exponents self-consciously expunged any impression of laborious attention. As Hester Chapone put it, ‘the best sign of a home being well governed is that nobody's attention is called to the little affairs of it’. By the mistress's sleight of hand ‘all goes on so well of course that one is not led to make remarks upon anything, nor to observe any extraordinary effort that produces the general result of ease and elegance that prevails throughout’.
¹²
Were domestic details to obtrude, then the spell of regulation and refinement would be broken and those who advertised their pains were vulnerable to disdainful mockery. So it was that the Quaker Betty Fothergill, an opinionated journal keeper, derided in 1769 those women who made household management ‘their constant theme in all companies who are unfortunate to fall in their way’, and approved an acquaintance who, though a ‘a remarkable good manager of her family’, happily ‘does not make that parade with it others do whose whole knowledge is centred in domestic concerns.’
¹³
The genteel housekeeper never went about her work with fanfare and bustle, but used art to conceal her industry. The advertisements of successful female management were subtle, possibly too subtle for the proper acknowledgement of posterity.

To be fair, historians have long recognized the contribution of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century elite mistress, only her enterprise is
usually seen as another feature of the world we have lost. ‘At the beginning of the seventeenth century,’ observed Alice Clark, ‘it was usual for the women of the aristocracy to be very busy with affairs – affairs which concerned their household, their estates and even Government.’ The management of the country estate was often left to the mistress for months at a time, while the master was away at court, or at war. As a wedding sermon promised, a good mistress had much to offer. She is like a merchant's ship, for ‘she bringeth her food from far …’ This paragon is portrayed as energetic and enterprising: ‘thro her Wisdom and Diligence great things come by her; she brings in with her hands, for,
She putteth her hands to the wheel
… If she be too high to stain her Hands with bodily labour, yet she bringeth in with her Eye, for, She overseeth the
Ways of her Household
… and eateth not the Bread of
Idleness
.’ In consequence of the discipline of ‘productive’ and ‘creative’ work, these sturdy housekeepers were respected comrades, notable for their initiative, resourcefulness, bravery and wit. But not for long. By the Restoration, the spread of wealth meant that the ‘stern hand of economic necessity was withdrawn’ from elite housekeeping, so ladies could devote themselves ‘to spending money and the cultivation of ornamental qualities’. Creative housekeeping decayed, the mistress's skills atrophied, and the idle wife emerged in all her parasitic glory.
¹⁴
Housekeeping became redefined as housework – that time-consuming drudgery which is best left to servants. Thus, between 1600 and 1850, it is often assumed, traditional housekeeping fell into a decline, thereby transforming prosperous housewives into inconsequential decorations and poorer respected workers into degraded skivvies.
¹⁵

This account of the decay of housekeeping has done little to illuminate the responsibility, activity and prestige of the eighteenth-century housekeeper, largely because the extent of home production has been made the litmus test of the ‘creativity’ of housekeeping. If a woman did not make butter or cloth then her contribution is seen to be negligible or merely decorative. To recover the full content and meaning of the housekeeping over the
longue durée
, this over-emphasis on a single element of women's work, ‘production’, must be countered. As Laurel Ulrich has said with regard to eighteenth-century America, it is time historians abandoned the spinning wheel as the ultimate icon of women's work, and in pursuit of a more inclusive analysis of work in the house she suggests an alternative symbol – the pocket:

In a similar spirit, two different symbols for genteel housekeeping are proposed – the house keys and the ladies' memorandum book. The bundle of keys which jangled at a lady's waist was an obvious emblem of female domestic authority, subject, as an object, to its own fashions in the eighteenth century. Less familiar is the pocket memorandum book; yet this was both the means and the emblem of female mastery of information, without which the upper hand was lost and prudent economy obliterated. These pocket-sized memorandum books survive in virtually every English archive, packed with notes and accounts: from the number of bacon flitches hung in an attic, to the terms of a servant's contract. For they were everyday handbooks on the running of a house. They were the tool of the literate and the lasting record of the ‘business’ that tied the genteel housekeeper to her writing desk every morning. Mentors like Hester Chapone advised young girls to prepare just such a manual on huswifery: