The Gentleman's Daughter (50 page)

It is important to emphasize, however, that not all public venues were tarred with the same gloomy brush – exhibitions, museums and edifying spectacles, the benefit concert, the church service, the friendly society, the small subscription assembly and the tragic play were rarely presented as perilous to virtue – and even the more risqué arenas such as pleasure gardens had their salubrious corners. The public world was large enough to admit of a range of diversions befitting a variety of moral tastes. As Goldsmith said of Bath, ‘people of all ways of thinking, even from the libertine to the methodist, have it in their power to complete the day with employments suited to their inclinations’.
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Similarly, the reformed Eliza Haywood brought herself to reason that ‘Public diversions … may be enjoyed without prejudice, provided they are frequented in reasonable manner, and behaved at with Decency: – It is the immoderate Use, or rather the Abuse of anything, which renders the partaking of it a Fault.’ Lady Sarah Pennington conceded, ‘Diversions, properly regulated, are not only allowable, they are absolutely necessary to Youth, and are never criminal but when taken to excess’, and no less a conservative than Dr Gregory acknowledged ‘Every period of life has amusement which are
natural and proper to it. You may indulge the variety of your tastes in these, while you keep within the bounds of that propriety which is suitable to your sex.’ Even Richardson could be indulgent towards a women who loved to ‘go to the public places’, provided she was ‘an excellent manager in a family’ and ‘earns her pleasures by her early rising’.
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In effect, moral commentary acknowledged and accepted the female consumption of culture, but sought to minimize its worst excesses and to tutor women's cultural choices: improvement and business should come before pleasure, Fordyce's sermons should be read before Sheridan's plays, an assembly was preferable to a masquerade, the company of known friends should be favoured over the advances of complete strangers. Not that moralists singled out young women alone. It is important to recognize that such arguments were but an aspect of the pervasive contemporary anxiety about luxury which was seen to threaten both sexes. The immoderate cultural indulgence of both men and women was a cause for concern. Moralists certainly feared that women would be tempted from the path of domestic virtue by the tawdry delights of the town, but they also were apprehensive that men would be lured away from business, family responsibilities and rational endeavour,
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note the anxious authorization to pleasure William Gossip afforded his hosier son in 1754:

Indeed, the ability to resist the lure of the pleasure garden and the play in particular came to symbolize a Spartan superiority to fashionable indulgence. The young lawyer Thomas Greene, at pains to demonstrate his iron resolve and modest entertainments to his sister, protested he'd ‘Not been at Ranelagh since I was there with Mrs Wall, & but once since at Vauxhall. I go two or three times in a winter to see Garrick, & once or twice in a Summer to see Foote. I am generally in bed before twelve … From this you may judge of my Goings on & the Care I take of Myself.’
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Likewise, Robert Parker restored his mother's good opinion in 1780 through his sobriety and restraint: ‘Mr [Banastre] Parker says you are a downright Cit [citizen] Makes no doubt but you will be Ld Mayor. He co'd not prevail with you Nor tempt you to go with him to Ranelagh. We was all glad to hear it & told him so.’
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65 The untitled frontispiece to the
Lady's Magazine
(1780). The polite female consumer is deliberating between folly (in the form of gambling) and wisdom.

Over and above this long-standing fear about the commercial assault on Spartan virtue, lay a set of pragmatic calculations about the promiscuous sociability which ticketed venues promoted. How to enjoy the benefits of a widened marriage market while facing none of the inherent risks was the dilemma which exercised the propertied. For their daughters to be admired in public by a nobleman was one thing, to be ogled by a penniless adventurer was quite another, and the resorts were famously ‘crouded with Vulgars’. Even at Bath, Smollett's Matthew Bramble complained, ‘a very inconsiderable proportion of genteel people are lost in a mob of impudent plebeians…’
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Thus, warnings about the unsuitable mates lurking at commercial venues were the stock-in-trade of advice to young women entering the marriage market. Fanny Burney's
Evelina
famously reads like a handbook of the hazards of indiscriminate sociability for artless women. Virtually every time she ventured out to a pleasure garden, promenade, assembly or opera, the seventeen-year-old heroine found herself preyed on by uninvited, plausible or vulgar strangers, although, of
course, she was ultimately seen to advantage by the unimpeachable Lord Orville and ended her tour of urban resorts in matrimonial triumph. From the outset, a desire for the glittering possibilities of public congregation was balanced by fears of the encroaching hordes. Hence the continued attempt to demarcate exclusive space within arenas which could be penetrated by anyone who could afford a ticket. Hence the prevalence of devices which limited the access of the vulgar and preserved the gentility of culture: subscription, dedication, benefit and charity, as Jonathan Barry has pointed out.
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A clear preference for a select party over a commercial entertainment was a sure advertisement of a young woman's virtue. Being altogether a demure young woman, the teenage Anna Porter was aware of the distinction to be drawn between vulgar commercial leisure and selective polite culture and knew which the superior lady should prefer. At Ranelagh she remarked that she would have been more comfortably entertained at home with her friends ‘than I was in all that hurly burly’. At the Pantheon she mused ‘there is an emptiness, a lightness in all publick places’, which she dreaded liking since it warped the soul and drew it from nobler pursuits. At the opera she exclaimed ‘Surely the trouble and crowd of publick places is horrid!’ And the day after an extremely agreeable dance at Lady Macclesfield's she found upon further reflection that she ‘was fatigued & stupid & cried out on ye horrid effects of dissipation!’ At fifteen years of age, Porter made the lofty observation that ‘no pleasure equaled that of spending an Eveng in rational instructing conversation with sensible friends’.
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By far the most overworked dualism drawn on in discussion of leisure and culture was that of fashionable worldliness versus philosophical retirement, a ‘hurry’ versus peace, the gaudy town versus the rural glade. Urban ennui found expression in a self-conscious cult of rural retreat:

After reciting the excitements of a dizzy social round, countless correspondents felt compelled to launch into unconvincing renunciations of the urbane and cosmopolitan. At the Preston Guild celebrations of 1762, the gentlewoman Mrs Wiglesworth attended four balls, four assemblies, plays and a dinner at the Guildhall, but still protested, perhaps a little too strenuously, ‘I assure you I was quite Happy when I got home for my Family & [the] Country is my delight, for that kind of hurrying Life would be very disagreeable to me’. Still the pull of Preston was certainly strong: ‘it was called little London, indeed if you had but Money you might see or buy anything that was Pritty, but for all that I was very glad to see Townhead …’ Amidst the bubbling assemblies of polite Pontefract Jane Scrimshire sighed ‘I Long for a little retirement. I grow more & more tired of Company one ought always to be on guard before…’ Returning from an extremely diverting season of ‘crowded Balls & every amusement’ at Tunbridge Wells, Miss Warde mused on what she clearly believed to be (or thought she ought to believe to be) the higher life of rural reflection:

Even the desperate Isabel Carr, spurned mistress of Sir James Lowther, longed foolishly for a ‘little cottage’ on her lover's Westmoreland estate: ‘I will live in a wood, or the middle of a Lake, or anywhere in the world, let me be but near you’, although she later saw the error of her ways and likened rural banishment to colonial exile.
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However, it is worth emphasizing here that the avowed taste for a little rural seclusion (however unconvincing) was not necessarily an acknowledgement of the power of domestic precepts, rather it was a nod to ‘otium’ the Roman ideal of intellectual leisure. Originating in the rediscovery of Horace, a cult of ostentatious solitude reached fashionable heights in the grottoes and hermitages of the mid-eighteenth century and lived on in Romantic ruralism. To achieve perfect happiness a ‘man’ needed space for philosophical contemplation. Thus, a female prodigy who spoke several languages and attended scientific lectures was touted in 1742 as ‘quite a Phylosophycal wise lady quite above ye pleasures of publick diversions
and follies of this town; tho' a very pretty woman …’ In 1820 Lydia Boynton drew on the same conceptual armoury when she sought to reassure her future parents-in-law that she was no empty-headed socialite. She tried to banish their ‘apprehension that a
Country Life
may prove dull & produce sensations of disappointment to me, after being accustomed to a London life’, anxiously urging them ‘to dispense all fears on that account – for the little knowledge and experience of the world I
possess
have taught me the transient pleasure & insufficiency great wealth & gaiety produce in comparison with the substantial enjoyments to be reap'd from rational houses & society.’ She was appalled that they could think ‘that I could for a moment drop a sigh of regret for the fluttering delusions of a Ball &c.’
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In disavowing frivolity, women laid claim to rationality. In forswearing one public life they colonized another.

THIS HAS NOT BEEN A STUDY in nonconformity or rebellion. Propriety was the watchword of genteel women in Georgian England, and thus the majority were consciously resigned to the most enduring features of an elite woman's lot: the symbolic authority of fathers and husbands, the self-sacrifices of motherhood and the burdensome responsibility for domestic servants, housekeeping and family consumption. The fact that these elements were so abiding perhaps accounts for the extent of acquiescence – rebelling against roles that appeared both prehistoric and preordained would profit nothing. Resignation and accommodation were seen as the most sensible courses. That said, genteel women did not expect to live a life of grovelling subordination. Masculine authority was formally honoured, but practically managed; the dignity of genteel femininity demanded respect and courtesy; female stewardship of younger children, servants and housekeeping would brook little interference. Women were trained to allow a gentleman the rights of his place, but determined at the same time to maintain their own. At infringements of their jurisdiction, or humiliating instances of masculine tyranny, genteel women still boiled with indignation. After all, as members of the elite they partook, no less than their menfolk, of the haughty superiorities of wealth and rank.

In its essentials, this sketch of gender distinctions amongst the provincial elite could do service not only for the eighteenth century, but also for the seventeenth and perhaps even the sixteenth. But over these long-standing chords, newer themes sounded. The eighteenth century saw a sustained, secular celebration of romantic marriage and loving domesticity, alongside the institutionalization of a national marriage-market for increasing numbers of the elite through the London season and at the resorts; both developments heightened cultural preoccupation with the
possibilities and problems of romantic choice. Yet for all the raised hopes and anxieties, most ‘love matches’ were still made within very strict limits. Admittedly, the father who dragged his unwilling daughter to the altar became seen as a gothic anachronism, but parents could achieve the same matrimonial ends through careful shepherding in and out of the more exclusive stalls of the marriage market and by inculcating a proper respect for position in their offspring. Indeed, the romantic appeal of rank and wealth hardly vanished, and few young lovers elected to live ‘in a cell on love and bread and butter’.
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In the event, the genteel sought matches that were as prudent as they were affectionate and the happiness of the outcome for the bride lay in the balance between the two.