The Gentleman's Daughter (37 page)

Sending compliments, essentially brief messages, was the most basic form of polite notice, and required some acknowledgement in return. A large acquaintance could be maintained with occasional visits and the regular exchange of compliments via servants or tradespeople. Compliments were sent by way of introduction and welcome, to inquire after health and journeys, to take leave, to decline invitations, to offer congratulation and condolence, and to express gratitude for hospitality, gifts or compliments. It behoved the elite to broadcast these messages across the county: ‘Mr Lister sent his own servant from there with a letter from him and compliments to the whole family at Cuerdon. Civil, Polite, Well judged & shewd Mr Lister, what he is – the Gentleman.’ And protocol demanded reciprocity: ‘Ralph Wilson the fish man from Coln Brought neither letter nor message after our enquiries of Mrs Parker of Browsholme. Very surprizing and extremely disrespectfull as Tom from
his fall required the same.’
²⁴
Few elite families escaped this ceaseless traffic. The newly married Mrs Mary Clayton complained in 1745 of ‘the infinity of Compliments & Civilitys one is on such an occasion necessitated to pay & receive’, while Anna Larpent observed in 1790 that ‘writing notes on business, civility &c’ was one of ‘the Taxes of London society’.
²⁵
Although a pointed failure to return compliments was one way to allow acquaintance to cool, conversely, association could be warmed into friendship through the exchange of visits, gifts and parties. Intimates and favourites might stay overnight or make lengthy sojourns.

Mrs Shackleton did not differentiate between ceremonious and friendly visits, although the distinction was certainly available in the period. Beau Nash expected ‘ladies of quality and fashion’ to make ‘a visit of ceremony’ on arrival or departure from Bath, and this formal means of honoring acquaintances was soon to be a common device of nineteenth-century etiquette.
²⁶
Duty visits were hard to evade. Both family and friends were expected to keep up a decent level of social exchange and could be rebuked for their inattentiveness. Jane Scrimshire complained that the young Elizabeth Parker had not eaten mutton, drunk tea or even left a bit of card at her door in Pontefract since she married. Ann Pellet protested that her nephew Edward Parker of Browsholme ‘has not behaved polite enough to keep within the bounds of common civility for he has never stay'd an hour … but once
at first
, since they have be'n in town, tho' the ladies have be'n several times’. Even a common civility demanded a high level of social exchange within the network.
²⁷

Contemplating her impending departure to Pasture House in 1777, Elizabeth Shackleton declared ‘when I leave Alkincoats, I feel I must have no Connections with the world’.
²⁸
Because of Elizabeth Shackleton's advancing age, illness and her relegation to what was in effect a dower house, one might expect a decline in formal sociability in her later years. Yet, in fact, a quantitative analysis of her social encounters in 1773 and 1780 reveals the opposite trend. Encounters with individuals other than co-resident kin and servants jumped from a total of 150 a year in 1773, to 226 in 1780. This increase in recorded activity may be a function of better data, since Elizabeth used an additional large journal each year from 1777 to her death, yet internal evidence suggests a real increase in social events. With Elizabeth Shackleton's physical separation from her eldest son Thomas Parker and his household, unrecorded family meals were translated into formal sociability. Thus, in 1780 37 per cent of social events involved kin, while in 1773 a family member had participated in only 9 per cent of such occasions. Evidently, the two miles between Pasture House and Alkincoats were but a short step to an old woman determined to
maintain her hold on her son and to establish relationships with her two infant grandchildren. As should already be evident, the most abiding figures in Mrs Shackleton's social life were her close kin; a finding consistent with those of similar network studies from previous centuries.
²⁹

In both Alkincoats and Pasture House, sociability revolved around meals and hot drinks and therefore was concentrated in certain rooms. Shreds of commentary confirm that some spaces were deemed more appropriate to polite guests than others. The kitchen was the place of first resort for common visitors. At her grand-daughter's christening dinner, Mrs Shackleton noted that there was both a raft of elite guests and a large ‘kitchen company’ of attendants.
³⁰
John Shackleton's male visitors were sometimes given dinner in the kitchen, and his drinking with his workers seems to have taken place there and in the servant's hall. On those occasions when drunken festivity spilled into the parlour, Mrs Shackleton recorded her disapproval. Toasts were raised and impromptu drinks were taken in the kitchen by gentry visitors on occasion, but the most well-used social space at both Alkincoats and Pasture House was the dining-room. From the late seventeenth century the most expensive and ostentatious goods in genteel houses were no longer to be found in the bedroom, but in the dining-room. The dining-rooms of both Alkincoats and Pasture House glowed with Gillows mahogany in the 1770s: ‘The new Dining Room looked very handsome. Good, Gentele, warm & Comfortable.’ After dinner, polite guests withdrew to the parlour where they eventually took tea and supper. Favoured female guests were sometimes invited into the bedroom to examine new clothes and fabrics – a distinct mark of familiarity. Not that rooms like the dining-room or the parlour were simply and always public and formal. Elizabeth Shackleton consciously increased or lessened the level of formality, by using different accoutrements; the diaries show her varying the use of tableware according to occasion and company. Hence her disappointment when she made fuss and fanfare to little effect: ‘the only Company that did come to dinner here was my own Dear Tom, Messrs Turner & Swinglehurst. Our nice table & cloth spread for a very little to do.’
³¹
Interior spaces, could be more or less public, more or less formal, according to the arrangement of furniture and tableware, the level of ceremony and the status and number of the guests. Thus, Mrs Shackleton noted the arrangement of a public table, and her surprise to find her kitchen was ‘very publick’ with a stream of unexpected visitors.

Home-based sociability comprehended a variety of different encounters and transactions: some of these social exchanges mingled the sexes, some did not, some of these encounters presupposed conviviality among equals, others were built around the gracious dispensation of condescending hospitality.
Returning again to the quantitative analysis of the hospitality Elizabeth Shackleton extended in 1773 at Alkincoats and 1780 at Pasture House, it emerges that each meal had a slightly different character (see Table 3, p. 396). As a social event, breakfast was a manly meal. Breakfast guests were predominantly male and near social equals, usually sharing an early meal with the gentlemen of the house as a precursor to a joint sporting or business expedition. (However, hearty breakfasts of cold meat and ale were served as late as eleven o'clock on occasion.) Dinner was an elaborate meal served mid- to late afternoon.
³²
It was the encounter most likely to integrate guests of both sexes, although at over half the dinners the guests were exclusively male. It was also the meal most associated with the extended family (particularly Sunday dinner) and with celebration and festival. The Shackletons catered for their yeomen neighbours and trades-people, and even labourers and servants on occasion, gatherings Elizabeth routinely described as ‘a mixed multitude’. But usually the dinner was a forum for her polite acquaintance drawn from land, trade and the professions. Most often a select company sat around the substantial mahogany dinner table and admired the damask tablecloths, the silver candelabra and the genteel blue and white dinner service ordered specially from London. On those occasions when ladies were present, it is unclear whether they withdrew after dinner, leaving the men to their toasts. Probably the practice of allowing elite men a little licence for three quarters of an hour or so was simply taken for granted. Certainly, most remarks on the subject have been gleaned from the notes of foreign visitors.
³³
Yet if there was a female withdrawal, there had to be a subsequent reunion, as tea, coffee and often supper were served to remaining guests later in the evening. By contrast, supper parties were much less exclusive, usually involving local men, often social inferiors, unencumbered by wives and daughters; which suggests that supper was an informal affair, stripped of the ceremonies of dinner. It may also be that women were not expected to host supper parties: ‘My friend [William] of Roughlee came & chatted at supper time. A late hour of visiting to such an old woman.’
³⁴

The tea party was one of the most socially inclusive events in Elizabeth Shackleton's social calendar, involving anyone from a Justice of the Peace to the mantua-maker. Tea parties were not in themselves an exclusively female affair. Any impromptu visitor, male or female, might benefit from the basic ceremony with kettle, teapot, china and silver. Although the Shackletons used ‘tea-time’ to designate the late afternoon, it appears that hot drinks were drunk at any time of day. However, it was tea that Elizabeth Shackleton was most likely to serve to exclusively female company. Male guests were more often entertained with dinner or supper.
Moreover, the special fascination teaware held for women betokens their particular investment in this social activity.
³⁵
In fact, it has been argued that the ritual performance of tea-drinking constituted one of the key expressions of ornamental femininity, and that the tea table was the ‘place where the upper-class female body was disciplined to participate in a narcissistic display of availability’.
³⁶
Undoubtedly, tea-drinking was a
sine qua non
of ladylike sociability, whereby gentlewomen showed off their manners and porcelain, but it was also the forum for business dealings in the widest possible sense. Elizabeth Shackleton produced her china in a spirit of patronage for the benefit of ex-servants, the mothers of her servants and her tenantry: ‘all the Tenant's Wives Invited to drink tea. They were civilly Entertain'd. Had wine, coffee, tea, muffins, toast, Punch and great pieces of Iced rich Plumb cake.’
³⁷
Hot drinks fuelled a gentlewoman's dealings with tradeswomen. Tea was routinely served at the haberdashers and mantua-makers. In fact, Betty Hartley Shopkeeper's hospitality was so widely recognized that in 1775 she was given the affectionate title of the ‘Queen of Boston' by her customers. Moreover, when mantua-makers, seamstresses and shopkeepers came to call at Alkincoats and Pasture House, dresses were fitted, orders and instructions given, finished work received, and trinkets purchased all to the accompaniment of tea.

Ladies offered tea in the parlour to social inferiors in much the same way as gentlemen bought ale in the tavern, to lubricate the process of giving orders and doing business. Tea facilitated the process of exchange.

The other social engagement in the home which was particularly associated with women, although not always confined to them, was the card party. By far the commonest form of home entertainment was cards; a recreation which enjoyed a massive vogue in the mid-eighteenth century. Elizabeth Shackleton played at whist, commerce, quadrille and sometimes backgammon with both guests and family. From Pontefract, the unlikely Metropolis of Politeness, Jane Scrimshire professed in the 1750s ‘the Days are so short there is little to be done but Eat, Sleep & play at Cards’ and the winter weather so atrocious that the company in town could only
manage to travel ‘from one Card Table to another, wch nothing but a Sick Bed prevents’. Bessy Ramsden nursed a similar addiction throughout the 1760s and 1770s, being out some nights from six till ten in the evening, leading her husband to report that ‘wicked Housekeeping and vile Card playing murders all ones Time’. Meanwhile, even in semi-retirement Ann Pellet could be tempted to join small gatherings for ‘a little snug party at Whist’ or ‘her little innocent parties of Quadrille’.
³⁹

Card-parties, tea-parties and visiting in general were widely associated with women in the satirical imagination. Building on an ancient critique of gadding women, moralists waxed monotonous on the unfortunate trade of female visiting. Visiting drew women from their duties and encouraged idle chat or worse scandal. ‘The D. take the fellow as first invented card playing,’ William Ramsden memorably concluded, ‘visiting and visited is the whole of a Woman's Life in London.’
⁴⁰
Doubtless this feminine sociability had considerable vigour and visibility. Fascinatingly, Mary Chorley's diaries demonstrate that for little girls visiting was a treasured performance of female adulthood. She learned the rituals of sociability first as a form of play, but graduated within two years from make-believe ceremonies to the real thing. At ten years of age, in 1776, Mary Chorley noted ‘Nell & Maria came & we played at visiting’, but by the age of twelve she recorded, ‘It being my birthday I had many young ladies to drink tea with me’, and at thirteen, ‘Went to Elhill to drink tea. We danced three hours in the evening, we spent a delightful afternoon.’
⁴¹
However, the conventional scenario of tinkling tea cups and female tittle-tattle, should not be allowed to obscure the frequency of male visiting or the range of genteel interactions. The exchange of compliments, gifts, visits and meals between elite families sustained the horizontal ties of polite friendship. Vertical relationships within the community were fostered through gracious hospitality dispensed on designated days, or confined to the common parts of the house. Male association was reinforced over pre-expeditionary breakfasts, while dinner fed polite, conversable couples. Genteel families were linked to the world in a multiplicity of ways, as kinsfolk, landowners, patrons, employers and as members of the elite. All these social roles were expressed through a variety of encounters which took place in the home.