The Gentleman's Daughter (46 page)

This evidence for an early nineteenth-century institutionalization of female intellectual life is suggestive, in that it directly contradicts the chronology of increasing domestication so entrenched in nineteenth-century women's history. However, it must be observed that these societies formalized something long practised on an informal basis. Elizabeth Shackleton borrowed books from friends and lent her own books widely, noting the title and date of the transaction in her pocket book.
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Moreover, recommendations for and commentaries on reading-matter were a common currency of women's letters throughout the period. Mary Warde
found a ‘beautiful simplicity’ in the second volume of Richardson's
Pamela
(1740–41); Ann Pellet thought both his
Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady
(1748) and Fielding's
The History of Tom Jones
(1749) ‘vastly entertaining’; Jane Scrimshire subscribed to local publications and adopted phrases from
Sir Charles Grandison
(1754); William Ramsden affected the whimsical style of Laurence Sterne and coined the nickname ‘Tristram Shandy’ for his cousin Elizabeth; and an affronted Bessy Ramsden asked for an opinion on offensive passages in
Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son
(1774).
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Genteel female readers enjoyed unprecedented access to the public world of print. In the period 1640–1750, 81 per cent of women among gentry and professional families in the counties of Yorkshire, Cumberland, Westmorland and Northumberland are thought to have possessed basic literacy skills. Therefore the percentage of gentlewomen unable to engage at some level with print by the nineteenth century must have been negligible. No evidence exists of classical erudition in the letters studied here, and comparatively few of the ladies discussed were sent away to school,
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so no claim is made that women were equal participators in exalted intellectual debate. Yet the proliferation of periodicals which translated ancient concerns in amusing, and manageable essays can only have increased female access to the basic agenda of high culture and politics.
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Even little girls could reflect on the classical themes of stoicism and public virtue by reading Roman texts in translation – a thirteen-year-old Quaker was soul-stirred by her reading of Plutarch in 1779: ‘We are reading the Life of Cauis Marius. O what a noble general he is, how he bore up under so many troubles as he had to go through in that small island.’ An aristocratic schoolgirl revealed her admiration for the Spartan virtues to her patient mother in 1771: ‘I am very much entertained with reading the Account of the Ancient Britaines how luxury is increased since those times, for their diet was spare & mean being barks & roots of trees … [etc etc].’
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Whether the daughter of a Quaker merchant or an Anglican lord, girls, like boys, could be inspired by the austerities of history. Unquestionably, the rhetorical nuts and bolts of public debate were available to literate women in the period.

The analysis of one woman's engagement with print culture is instructive in the demonstration that even from a comparatively remote area in the Pennines, it was possible and desirable to keep abreast of national and local politics, fashion and cultural debate. Elizabeth Shackleton kept a long-standing account with a London cousin, for the regular despatch of London papers. After his death the account was taken over by the obliging William Ramsden, who promised ‘a Dish of Politicks every Post-Day’. By
this means Mrs Shackleton kept up with the business of parliament, receiving Saturday's news by Tuesday morning. Her taste in print journalism can be deduced from occasional remarks in her correspondence and letter books. From at least 1764 she read the
London Chronicle
, but in 1766 she was recommended the
Whitehall
over the
Chronicle
, ‘as a political or rather a party Paper’. After 1768 she took the
St James Chronicle
or the
British Evening Post
on a regular basis. On an
ad hoc
basis, she also received unnamed magazines from London friends and occasional travellers, and her pocket diaries all came equipped with thirty-odd printed pages of useful knowledge and fashionable comment. In addition, she possessed several volumes of
The Spectator
, which she lent out to friends and neighbours. From 1772 she also took a Leeds paper, but she did not specify whether it was the
Leeds Intelligencer
or the
Leeds Mercury
. Although she found the paper unsatisfying in terms of national news, it offered the closest approximation of local journalism and carried approving commentary on her efficacious Rabies medicine. Occasional diary entries reveal that she had access to other papers bearing Preston and Manchester society news, but these journals may have been borrowed rather than bought. Mrs Shackleton copied into her diary the contents of pamphlets on subjects such as the utility of labour-saving machinery or the qualifications of prospective local MPs (‘Mr Stanley [is] unacquainted not only with our Provincial manners, our internal Polity, Our Commercial Interests, our relative connections with our Trading Powers in the great Map of foreign & domestic Commerce, but he is even unaquainted with himself’) and declared the pleasure she derived from evenings spent discoursing upon literature, history and politics. She may not have gleaned her gossip from a coffee house, but she was certainly an attentive and discriminating member of that general public addressed by both the
Leeds Intelligencer
and the
St James Chronicle
. The reader who wept over the fate of Clarissa Harlowe was equally capable of fuming about the progress of the American war, or applauding the release of John Wilkes.
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Even a reader at some distance from a polite resort, could be an engaged member of that general public addressed through print.

The potentialities of female public life should by now be apparent; but it would be misleading to neglect the factors that shaped cultural access for individuals – wealth, sex, age and geography.

The ‘provincial urban renaissance’ notwithstanding, there were wide geographical variations in the availability of fashionable, commercialized
leisure. The public venues that the polite so complacently colonized were essentially urban, the most famous were metropolitan and the majority were only truly open or fashionably frequented in the season. The London season coincided with the royal family's residence at court and ran from November to May, or, as Ann Pellet put it, when ‘old winter will collect the whole within our Grand Metropolis where tis [said] will be various amusements to regale every new fancy for the present age’.
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Breezy bulletins from town catalogue the profusion of polite entertainments available every winter. However, by early summer the quality had moved on in search of rural refreshment, roosting on their country estates or in lodgings at a provincial resort. Those left behind in the depopulated city were to be pitied: ‘but surely the Town is a dreadfull place when Empty, & in the midst of summer when the Country is so very delightfull.’
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Of course, numerous provincial cities and county towns had their own winter season of assemblies, plays and oratorios. York, the radiant capital of northern gentility was specifically designed to rival the attractions of London, Bath and Tunbridge Wells. Susanna Gossip proudly boasted in 1730 that the new director of the Long Room, Lord Burlington, ‘proposes to make it ye most compleat place of entertainment in England’.
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Even lesser northern towns could be surprisingly lively. In Pontefract in the 1750s Jane Scrimshire reported with pleasure on flourishing assemblies, an election ball, a mayor's ball, a ball in honour of the king's birthday, a masquerade, a music meeting, plays such as Hoadley's
The Suspicious Husband
(1747) staged three times a week and an endless round of card parties taking place in ‘this Metropolis of Politeness’. In the severe winter of 1756 Jane Scrimshire found the Pontefract playhouse the warmest place in town because of the charcoal fires glowing in the pit.
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Moreover the shire towns enjoyed a mini-season, often accompanied by horse races, during the Assize Week or even the Quarter Sessions, and local festivals and national anniversaries invariably launched a flotilla of civic events and commercial entertainments in public-spirited towns. For example, two weeks of festivity crowned the Preston Guild held every twenty years. In 1742 a visitor reported that the ‘entertainments was quite handsome and Genteel, everything that the season cou'd afford, there was approx two setts of players, an assembly besides Private balls and two masquerades … I never so great a Crowd of good Company as there was at the assembly, the room is but small, and there was four Hundred and forty five Tickets taken out.’ Yet, even in ordinary years, Preston's Race Week was noted for its ‘very Genteel’ assemblies, ‘fill'd with Well Looking Men & Well Dress'd Women’.
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The spas typically had summer seasons: the earliest established one at Tunbridge Wells extended from May to October; the season at Bristol Hot Wells ran from late April to late September; while early eighteenth-century Bath had two seasons – in the spring and the autumn – but the resort became so popular as to have year-round appeal.
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The northern health resorts quickly came into their own. Buxton early boasted established social ceremonies and a constant flow of northern gentry, as the gouty William Gossip lugubriously reported to his wife in the summer of 1746. By the 1770s a ‘Genteel Post-Coach’ was laid on from Leeds to Harrogate, twice a week, for the June season.
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The development of the seaside resorts from the 1720s shadowed the growing popularity of sea bathing, and the tradition of taking an annual summer holiday was well established by the later eighteenth-century – a fashion which prompted the further growth of cultural institutions in those resorts favoured by the genteel. As early as July 1727 Barbara Stanhope noted a ‘great deal of company’ including a sprinkling of nobility gathered at Scarborough, and a visitor there in the summer of 1733 noted dancing every night.
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Throughout the period the spas maintained a reputation for accommodating a high-profile female public life. The Dean of Gloucester was appalled to find in 1783 that women at Bath were sufficiently emboldened to make advances to men. In sweeter vein, Elizabeth Reynolds testified ‘for ladies there cannot be another place so well calculated’.
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59 Moses Griffiths,
Harrowgate Wells
, 1772. From the 1750s to the 1820s and beyond the northern gentry and commercial elites drew benefit from the waters of Harrogate.

60 John Raphael Smith,
Chalybeate Well
, (Harrogate), 1796.

61 ‘A Trip To Scarborough
A.D.
1783’. From as early as the 1720s, genteel northern visitors collected at Scarborough for their health and for the love of society. By the 1820s, other northern seaside resorts such as Cleethorpes, Blackpool and Lytham had become popular also.