The Gentleman's Daughter (52 page)

By contrast, private families lived out of the world, lacking the means to enjoy cosmopolitan, social success. Some gentlemen and ladies of means deliberately elected to live a life of retirement, consciously chosing groves and books over metropolitan prestige.
¹⁴
Many more were the men who acknowledged that because of their modest backgrounds and ambitions, they lived in private life. When a schoolmaster John Hodgkinson was offered a post of estate steward in 1791 he balked at his promotion to a higher sphere:

Clearly it was possible for men to draw moral self-importance from a life lived outside the glare of high society and political intrigue. When Alexander Carlyle, a leading moderate minister, began writing in 1800 aged seventy-nine, he too disclaimed any part in a public sphere, describing ‘the Humble and Private Sphere of Life, in comparison with that of many others, in which I have always acted …’
¹⁵
Now it may be that both of these men were primarily concerned to dissociate themselves from worldliness and corruption, yet it is still striking and significant that a schoolmaster and a minister, precisely the men nineteenth-century historians would expect to invest in the concept of a male public sphere, should so defiantly cling to a vision of the private character of their own lives. While noblewomen might glitter in the public sphere, the majority of men were relegated to, or rejoiced in the private shade.

Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that in genteel society a gentleman's life had dimensions that his wife's did not; a fact which is given a rare canvassing in a letter written by Mrs Beatrix Lister to her son Thomas Lister MP in 1773. She was urging the taking of dancing lessons: ‘I don't wish you to dance in publick, except it was quite agriable to you, but I think learning gives an ease to Carige & helps ye walking. Mr Spectator you know recomends it vastly tho' he realy values no man but for his publick Spirit, Justice & Integrity.’
¹⁶
Two kinds of public masculine performance are invoked here, the social commerce of the landed gentleman and the disinterested public service of the office-holder. Of the latter, provincial ladies could claim little share. From the exalted member of parliament or lord lieutenant for the county, to the worthy magistrate and respectable member of the grand jury, feckless was the gentlemen who had not found a platform from which to demonstrate his public spirit.
¹⁷
It was in the holding of office that the ideal of genteel adult masculinity inhered.

There were, nevertheless, ways in which women might lay claim to a certain public spirit through disinterested service to their local community, the county or the nation; Elizabeth Shackleton of Alkincoats, for instance, perpetuated her dead husband's ‘publick spirit’ by selling his celebrated rabies medicine at an affordable price.
¹⁸
Countless others promoted the common good through acts of charity. Furthermore, since political influence was largely a matter of property, the peeress and the heiress might simply assume certain rights and responsibilities irrespective of her sex, as Elaine Chalus, Linda Colley and Judith Lewis have pointed out.
¹⁹
Aristocrats were quite capable of pulling rank over gender if the need arose. When the Duchess of Queensberry led a squadron of ladies to storm the gallery of the House of Lords in 1739, she reportedly ‘pished at the ill-breeding of a mere lawyer’.
²⁰
Even if the dominant discourses of
femininity were belittling, the reverence for rank, wealth and position remained overwhelming.

Not that female aristocratic power went uncontested. George Canning, for instance, deplored his aunt's tendency to take issue with him over matters of state and clutched at any hope of abatement:

Thus he invoked the notion of the softly feminine foray into politics which was reiterated
ad nauseam
in Georgian and Victorian discourse; but, as some historians have pointed out, this patronizing concession offered a wonderful rhetorical opportunity which activists deployed to their advantage. When the Manchester Abolitionists appealed in 1787 for female aid in the
Manchester Mercury
, they promised that benevolent public action would be the ultimate expression of sensitive femininity, not its negation:

Similarly, Linda Colley's female patriots used the rhetoric of feminine virtue to legitimize their actions: ‘Posing as the pure-minded Women of Britain was, in practice, a way of insisting on the right to public spirit.’
²³
Equally, female philanthropists mustered the rhetoric of domesticity to justify their non-domestic activities. In arguing that organized charity represented an altogether natural extension of female domestic duties, a form of ‘social housekeeping’, activists defeated the opposition with its own weapons. Sentimentalists like Ruskin handed rhetorical success on a plate when they mused, ‘a woman has a personal work or duty, relating to her own home, and a public work and duty which is also the expansion of that’, and ‘wherever a true wife comes, [home] is always around her’.
²⁴
In so far as the language of domesticity became more powerful and pervasive in the period covered by this book, then genteel women became increasingly adept at manipulating it to pursue a range of activities and assume a
set of responsibilities outside the home. Indeed, the well-documented struggles of privileged Victorian women to participate more fully in institutional public life represented less a reaction against irksome restrictions, recently imposed, than a drive to extend yet further the gains made by their Georgian predecessors. Propriety might have made a tight-fitting suit, but it could worn in a far wider range of situations than we have been apt to think.

66 ‘The Patriotic Parting’, from the
Lady's Magazine
(1782).

1
HL, HM 31201, Mrs Larpent's Diary,
XI
, 1810–21, facing f. 5.

2
Clark,
Working Life of Women
, pp. 14, 41, 296. Interestingly, Clark included the aristocracy and
nouveau-riche
businessmen in her category of ‘capitalists’ since the two groups approximated to each other in manners, see pp. 14–41.

3
Consider Amussen,
An Ordered Society
, p. 187; C. Hall, ‘The History of the Housewife’, in Hall,
White, Male and Middle Class
, pp. 43–71; George,
Women in the First Capitalist Society
, pp. 1–10; Hill,
Women, Work and Sexual Politics
, pp. 49–51, 78–80, 126–9, 245–9. On ‘the restriction of women's professional and business activities at the end of the eighteenth century’, see Pinchbeck,
Women Workers
, pp. 303–5. And on the ambition of the wealthier farmer's wife ‘to achieve gentility’ by having ‘nothing to do’, see pp. 33–40.

4
Stone,
The Family, Sex and Marriage
, p. 396. All citations refer to the 1977 edition.

5
M. George, ‘From Goodwife to Mistress: The Transformation of the Female in Bourgeois Culture’,
Science and Society
, 37 (1973), p. 6.

6
Shevelow,
Women and Print Culture
, pp. 5 and 1.

7
See W. E. Houghton,
The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870
(New Haven, 1957), pp. 341–93; M. Jaeger,
Before Victoria: Changing Standards and Behaviour, 1787–1837
(1956), pp. 113–30; M. Quinlan,
Victorian Prelude: A History of English Manners, 1700–1830
(New York, 1941), pp. 139–59. The classic work on vulnerable and cloistered femininity is M. Vicinus (ed.),
Suffer and be Still: Women in the Victorian Age
(Bloomington, Ind., 1971). The socialization of trainee domesticates is the theme of D. Gorham,
The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal
(Bloomington, Ind., 1983) and F. Hunt (ed.),
Lessons for Life: The Schooling of Girls and Women, 1850–1950
(Oxford, 1987). On the inhibition of female sexuality and physical activity, read E. Trudgill,
Madonnas and Magdalens: The Origins and Development of Victorian Sexual Attitudes
(1976), pp. 65–78, L. Duffin, ‘The Conspicuous Consumptive: Woman as Invalid’, in S. Delamont and L. Duffin (eds.),
The Nineteenth-Century Woman: Her Cultural and Physical World
(1978), pp. 26–56, and H. E. Roberts, ‘The Exquisite Slave: The Role of Clothes in the Making of the Victorian Woman’,
Signs
, 2 (1977), pp. 554–69. On the rigid demarcation of public and private physical space, see A. Clark,
Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770–1845
(1987). That an emergent middle class built itself on the assumption of separate gender spheres is the argument of Hall, ‘Victorian Domestic Ideology’, and ‘Gender
Divisions and Class Formation’, both reprinted in id.,
White, Male and Middle Class
, pp. 75–93 and 94–107. The most substantial restatement of the separate spheres thesis remains Davidoff and Hall,
Family Fortunes.

8
See Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres’.

9
Compare Amussen,
Ordered Society
, pp. 69 and 187, and Davidoff and Hall,
Family Fortunes
, pp. 272–5.

10
D. C. Coleman, ‘Proto-industrialization: A Concept too Many’,
Economic History Review
, 2nd ser., 36 (1983), pp. 435–48. See also R. Samuel, ‘Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand Technology in mid-Victorian Britain’,
HWJ
, 3 (1977), pp. 6–72.

11
See P. Earle, ‘The Female Labour Market’, and Goldberg,
Women, Work and the Life Cycle
. On the generation of income, see Earle,
The Making of the English Middle Class
, pp. 158–74, and Holderness, ‘Credit in a Rural Community’. The constraints on female enterprise are richly elaborated in Hunt,
The Middling Sort
, and suggested by Simonton, ‘Apprenticeship’.