The Gentleman's Daughter (47 page)

Despite the greater distribution of commercial entertainment, access to urban delight was not uniform. A comparison of Elizabeth Shackleton's social calendar with that of her most diligent correspondents reveals the cultural impoverishment of life in north-east Lancashire relative to other parts of the county, or nearby Yorkshire. Colne, Burnley and Clitheroe could not boast of a town walk, a pleasure garden, a concert hall or a theatre. An analysis of the decade 1770–80 reveals a smattering of public events, but the area could support nothing approaching a season of assemblies and music meetings. A ‘dancing ball’ was held at Colne in February 1773; Clayton and Cunliffe hosted a dance at the Red Lion Inn in January 1777; in September 1778 there was a dancing-master's ball in Colne; in October 1779 an assembly in Burnley; and, finally, in the spring of 1780 a children's ball was given by the Colne dancing master.
⁹⁹
Easily the highlight of the decade was the opening of the Colne Piece Hall in August 1776 with its accompanying oratorios and balls. Dresses were made long in advance, handbills advertising the programme were kept as souvenirs, flowers and ribbons specially purchased. Of the oratorio, Mrs Shackleton reported, ‘We all was most agreably entertained. Had fine singing, Good Musick, Gentele Company, good Regularity and order. Mr Johnson a fine singer, Miss Radcliffe a good singer. The Choruses Noble.’ The festivities drew ‘a number of well dress'd people from Burnley, Halifax, Leeds, Keighley, Manchester and all the neighbourhood’, and happily ‘these Entertainments was Conducted with the greatest Regularity, Peace & quiet. Several Soldiers kept Guard at the bottom of the steps not the least Riot nor no accident happen'd.’ Of course, the ink spilt on this ‘Grand Jubilee’ testifies to its rarity: ‘such
Doings
at such distance from London, but seldom happen and must therefore be the more
Marvellous
.’
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And while nearby towns mounted comparable events and festivities, these were not annual celebrations but individual events, such as the jubilee which accompanied the opening of the canal locks at Bingley in 1774 or the inauguration of the Halifax Piece Hall in 1779. For regular events, it was crucial to make the journey to a northern provincial capital or resort, for the countryside in winter could be cheerless with just a pack of cards for diversion.

The attractions of an urban winter season were a determining influence on the movements of the wealthy. Like the nobility, the greater gentry flocked to London with the frosts.
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Prominent county families like the Listers of Gisburn Park and the Parkers of Browsholme, who aspired to glitter on a national stage, spent several seasons in London. For a family with sufficient means, motivation might be simple boredom with country life, as a casual letter from Edward Parker to his nephew Tom indicates:
‘The weather of late has been so Stormy and the neighbourhood of Browsholme so destitute of society that I think this may be as good a reason for [a] trip to the South perhaps as any other.’
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Northern families with means might rent or even own a town house in York, Manchester, Pontefract or Preston, but modest families exploited what property or family connections they had or found themselves left behind to the society of ‘squires, parsons' wives, visiting tenants or farmers’.
¹⁰³
There is no evidence that Elizabeth Shackleton ever rented a house in town, but she and her first husband occasionally exploited the hospitality of relatives within striking distance of the brilliant assemblies of York. Thomas Parker's unmarried daughter Eliza managed to taste the sweets of the season by staying with friends and relatives in Preston, Liverpool and Selby throughout the 1800s. Having been brought up to urban bustle and company, Eliza Whitaker of Roefield was not prepared to forego it, returning with her husband to Lark Hill, Preston, for family gatherings and winter music meetings.
¹⁰⁴
However, not all genteel families were destined to enjoy even an intermittent public life. The unfortunate Mrs Ridsdale saw all hopes of fashionable urbanity evaporate when her husband's Leeds business went bankrupt. They had little choice but to accept the tenancy of a small farm from a kinsman and to embrace the joys of rural seclusion in Wensleydale. Gallantly, Mrs Ridsdale told her friends that she was ‘perhaps as happy in the
Shade
as many
lustring
in the
Sunshine
’, and tried not to dwell on the amenities she had given up: ‘were I to live in the World again it might only produce regrets that perhaps it is as wise to forget the recollection of.’
¹⁰⁵
The Ridsdales' hard lesson was that below a certain financial threshold it was simply not possible to pursue a public life in the polite sense of the word. Similarly, Barbara Wiglesworth knew that her prospective groom could not keep her in style. He ‘lamented that prudence forbade his keeping a carriage & c. As splendour was never a part of my gratification or much gaiety we shall live in a quiet domestic manner & not see much company.’ Many were the brides who had to reconcile themselves ‘to a retired, rather than parading life’, for want of means.
¹⁰⁶

Wealth apart, consumption of urban culture and fashionable leisure among genteel women was patterned on the life-cycle. Children were expected to be innocent of urban dissipation, those ripe for marriage cautiously at the centre of it and those with family responsibilities well above it. The assemblies, plays and pleasure gardens of Georgian England were first and foremost stalls in the marriage market. If a young woman's romantic ambitions outstripped the confines of the parish, then she had to be seen ‘in public’ at the nearest town offering reputable entertainment. If her family were ambitious for a handsome match, then braving a season
in York, Bath or, better still, London was the surest strategy. Once the genteel young woman was suitably married and had a house, servants and children to manage, the traditional assumption prevailed that she would retire gracefully to her domestic duties and recontent herself with the local horizon. (By contrast, the nobility and greater gentry were seen as public families born to live in the great world, so their wives were not allowed the liberty of retiring from the beau monde.) Of course, in fact, the polite did not so easily abandon their cultural pretensions, but the impetus behind their cultural consumption was considerably diminished. Young matrons were inevitably hampered in their journeyings by the never-ending needs of the nursery, but as women aged and parental responsibilities lightened, many re-emerged in the dignified role of chaperon. However, illness and frailty eclipsed the public lives of others.

Take the varying cultural engagement of Elizabeth Shackleton between the ages of nineteen and fifty-six. The letters she wrote as the unmarried Miss Parker in the 1740s effervesce with youthful cultural confidence. She enjoyed a reputation for wit and taste, and as ‘Parkerissa’ exchanged fashionable literary anecdotes and town talk with ‘Pelletiana’, her friend and kinswoman Jane Pellet. In 1746 Parker's long-awaited plan ‘to Launch into the
Grande Monde
& make such an Eclat as will dazzle all Beholders …’ came to fruition. Together the teenagers toured the metropolitan arenas of display (‘this part of the world is the Quintessence of Politeness’) and sampled race meetings, assemblies and card-assemblies in Preston, Pontefract and Wakefield, teased about being ‘such excessive Gadders abroad’ as they did so.
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However, as a decorous young mother in the 1750s, Mrs Parker resolved to stir abroad with her babies as little as possible, despite her aunt being in ‘Hopes you'll go often abroad than formerly when the turnpike roads are finish'd which the Yorkshire gentleman boast much of lately’. Once married, she never made another trip to London and hardly ever went to Preston, Lancaster or York; she certainly gave up all pretence of pursuing an urban season. But as widow Parker, with her children away at boarding school, she purchased a chaise in 1762, marking a new era as her friends acknowledged: ‘now you can have no excuse for staying at home as your little family are absent and a carriage to convey you in all weathers’. It was this more active local social life which led to her second marriage in 1765 (itself achieved by an exciting dash to Gretna Green). Galvanized by her second attachment, Elizabeth Shackleton occasionally accompanied her young husband on wool-buying trips in the first years of their marriage, thereby enjoying diversions such as luxury shopping in the Chester Rows and a charity concert in the cathedral. By the 1770s her health and infirmity began to get the better of
her; with the exception of an excursion to York in 1781 in a friend's coach, Mrs Shackleton confined herself to very infrequent day trips within a fifteen-mile radius of home. In 1777 she refused for months to leave the house at all, because ‘the smallpox was so general’.
¹⁰⁸

As every reader of Jane Austen knows, proper young girls grew up in a certain social seclusion, before they ‘came out’ around the age of fifteen or sixteen. Precisely how much seclusion was good for genteel girls was subject to interpretation. Some exposure to good company and knowledge of the world between seven and fourteen, believed Mrs Delany, was crucial to the formation of a gracious manner and a discriminating approach to pleasure; punctilious parents often allowed their adolescents to attend only private balls and school balls, leaving public assemblies and the resorts till the first assault on the marriage market, yet others let their offspring join the romantic fray from as young as thirteen.
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Contemporaries relentlessly associated urban congregations with the making of matches. In the 1720s Defoe sneered that the daughters of the gentry ‘carry themselves to market’ at the newly established assemblies.
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Indeed, the teasing of the young implied that they went to town with no other view. The sly John Aspinall tried to lure the unmarried Elizabeth Parker to Preston in 1746 with the advertisement ‘we have a great many fine Gents in Lac'd Coats and Cockades, and surely if there was nothing else to induce you a Marquis and two Lords ought to be sufficient, the first of them intends to give a Ball …’ The unmarried John Spencer had to leave his packing to shrug off his sister-in-law's enquiries: ‘your surmises about matrimony are groundless I had no such motive for a London Journey.’
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In 1747, on the eve of the Chester races, Robert Parker was teased about his ‘very fancy’ new clothes: ‘Thus Equip'd you may likely make a Conquest of a Cheshire Lady.’ Yet such pleasantries were not so wide of the mark. The next year Robert Parker freely declared he was off to Wakefield races in deliberate pursuit of a wife. When Elizabeth Parker and Jane Pellet attended the same races in 1749, Ann Pellet happily procured the necessary silks for them, hoping that the silver gauze would aid their ‘conquests’ of ‘Southern beaus’, admitting her great matrimonial ‘expectations’.
¹¹²
That the urgency of alliance was the key motive for visiting a public resort could not have been raised more explicitly than in 1727, when the sheepish Sir Ralph Standish was forced to admit failure to his mother: ‘I am sorry to find [your ladyship] can't think of my coming down as I came up, single; its in vaine for me to think of getting a wife in towne for theres none to be seen there, and I cannot resolve to go to any of their houses.’
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The trip to town was synonymous with the pursuit of a spouse.

Public venues were notorious sites of sexual spectatorship, both male
and female. Newspaper advertisements appealed to young men and women spotted in public to allow or encourage further advances. In her cautionary
Letters Moral and Entertaining
(1728), Elizabeth Singer Rowe had a repentant swain recount his harassment of a young bride: ‘I took all handsome opportunities to follow and converse with the fair Cleora … I attended her coach, her chair, haunted her at publick places, ogled, star'd, sighed and practised all the modern fopperies of love.’ In the same spirit Lady Mary Wortley Montagu described Sir John Vanbrugh in quest of a wife at York in 1713: ‘Tis certain he keeps Mondays' and Thursdays' market (assembly days) constant … I believe last Monday there were 200 pieces of Woman's flesh (fat and lean) …’
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Comparatively unconstrained social intercourse between the unmarried was one of the tantalizing possibilities that public venues promised. When Walter Spencer Stanhope renewed his advances by letter to Miss Pulleine in 1783, he picked up where he had left off in a pleasure garden: ‘A whole fortnight has passed since I was so cruelly interrupted in attempting to speak it at Ranelagh.’ In urging his beloved to hear his suit, he laid out the romantic geography of London.

Even the sophisticated Mary Warde brought herself to suggest that young men were one of stellar attractions of the urban round, when she reflected on the inconveniences of the war of Austrian Succession: ‘I apprehend Men will be very Scarce in all Publick Places; many of the Idle ones will visit their friends in Flanders & the officers that are obliged to be there will be visibly missed …’ In 1743 Jane Pellet obviously linked the ‘lost bloom’ of St James's Park to the absence of eligible partners out of season: ‘no Body goes there now but old maids and half pay officers.’
¹¹⁶

Whether the moralists liked it or not, if a gentlewoman was to marry well then she had to be seen on the national marriage market, or at the very least on the regional circuit. It was precisely for this reason that the sensible Reverend George Woodward advised his stepsisters not to remove to what is now rural Oxfordshire: