The Gentleman's Daughter (55 page)

51
Although convention has it that the Miss Horrockses were educated at home by governesses, Eliza Whitaker talked of ‘school fellows’, and used girlish nicknames with at least one of her pen friends, see LRO, DDWh/4/29 (17 Aug. 1813), E. Whitaker, Edgeworth, to C. Whitaker, Roefield; LRO, DDWh/4/73 (13 Aug. 1814), M. Nichols, Bewdley, to same.

52
The northern counties rejoiced in reputable grammar and boarding schools. While statistical samples are lacking, it has been noted that the greater and lesser gentry of early eighteenth-century Northumberland, County Durham, Cumberland and Westmorland sent their sons to Newcastle Royal Grammar, Sedburgh, Hawkshead, St Bees and so on, although the famous southern public schools gained ground as the century progressed. See Hughes,
North Country Life in the Eighteenth Century: The North East
, pp. 341–67 and id.,
North Country Life in the Eighteenth Century: Cumberland and Westmorland
, pp. 293–8. In the case of northern Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire, polite families were served by Sedburgh, Bradford Grammar School and numerous smaller schools, but a growing trend towards the southern schools would be plausible. Until the 1780s the gentlemen merchants of Leeds sent their sons in great numbers to the Leeds Free Grammar School, thereafter most boys were sent further afield to both Dissenting academies and Anglican private schools: Wilson,
Gentlemen Merchants
, pp. 208–11. Similarly, Robert Parker of Alkincoats was educated at the Clitheroe school in the 1730s, while in the 1760s all his sons attended Bradford Grammar School, but went on to Winchester and a commercial academy at Northfleet. Robert's brother-in-law Edward Parker of Browsholme was sent in the 1740s to be educated at Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, but he sent his own son to Eton. However, the published registers of Bradford and Sedburgh indicate that enduring loyalty to the northern schools should not be underestimated.

53
The shared material culture of gentility is particularly striking. Mahogany from Gillows was purchased by the John Shackleton of Pasture House, Thomas Parker of Alkincoats, Edward Parker of Browsholme, John Parker of Marshfield, John Aspinall of Standen, John Clayton of Carr, Miss Cromblehome of Preston, Robert Parker of Cuerdon, Banastre Walton of Marsden, William Barcroft of Clitheroe, Henry Owen Cunliffe of Wycoller, Thomas Lister of Gisburn Park, Le Gendre Starkie of Huntroid and Miss Moon, Richard Ecroyd and Oates Sagar of Colne. Refer to WPL, 334/51, Gillows Ledger 1769–75; 334/52, Gillows Ledger 1776–80; 334/53, Gillows Ledger 1781–90.

54
WYCRO, Leeds, TA Box 22/1 (17 May
c.
1731), S. Gossip, York, to W. Gossip, London. Elizabeth Parker purchased a chaise in the 1750s, but rode on horseback on occasion. She kept up the chaise as Mrs Shackleton, but was mortified when it was vandalized and by its increasingly dilapidated state ‘a most unsafe shabby affair’. The Ramsdens of Charterhouse made do with a hired post-chaise for holidays in the 1760s and 1770s; Tom Parker bespoke a new dark green chaise with a crest in 1778, but he and his new wife also rode together. Of Mrs Shackleton's rich gentry friends, the Listers had a landau in London in the 1740s, the Waltons maintained a coach and four in the 1770s, as did the Starkies of Huntroyde. The Claytons of Carr and the sophisticated Parkers of Newton each bought a fashionable new coach in 1779. The wealthy London merchants, the Wilkinsons of Maize Hill, kept ‘a handsome carriage’. A clear
signal about the significance of a carriage was sent by the Gossips of Thorp Arch – William Gossip purchased a post-chaise and hired a postilion-cum-groom when he was made Deputy Lieutenant for the West Riding in 1757. The unfortunate status of older single women is exemplified by the arrangements of a Miss Frith and Sarah Tatham in the Dawson–Greene network. In 1819 they kept a chaise at a local inn and borrowed a neighbour's pony to pull it when they wanted to go out; this being much a cheaper option than supporting a donkey, as they could afford neither the pasture nor the necessary manservant. Jane Austen, who kept a donkey carriage and two donkeys at Chawton, was attentive in her fiction to the inconveniences that the careful ranks faced. In Haywood,
Betsy Thoughtless
, p. 433, the heroine was chagrined that her Mr Munden claimed that his estate would not permit him to keep a carriage, and expostulated ‘can you imagine I will ever marry to trudge on foot?’ On the different types of carriage, see D. J. M. Smith, A
Dictionary of Horse-Drawn Vehicles
(1988), and on their use R. Strauss,
Carriages and Coaches: Their History and Their Evolution
(1912), pp. 147–75. For a case study demonstrating the potential social impact of carriage use, see Whayman, ‘Modes of Sociability’ (Ph.D. thesis), pp. 276–324.

55
LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), f. 279. On Miss Dawson and the Methodists, see fos. 96, 177.

56
B. van Muyden (ed.),
Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George I and George II: The Letters of Monsieur Cesar De Saussure to his Family
(1902.), pp. 215–16.

57
Wilson,
Gentlemen Merchants
, pp. 213, 215.

58
Smail,
Origins of Middle-Class Culture
, p. 200.

59
Henstock, ‘Diary of Abigail Gawthern’, p. 1.

60
Fiske,
The Oakes Diaries
, 1, pp. 191–200.

61
Wilson, ‘Towards an Economic History of Country House Building’ (seminar paper).

62
A. Everitt, ‘Social Mobility in Early Modern England’,
P&P
, 33 (1966), pp. 67–8.

63
Rogers, ‘Big Bourgeoisie’, p. 453.

64
Raven, ‘Image of Business’ (Ph.D thesis); see esp. the case study of Mrs Gomershull of Leeds, pp. 281–317.

65
B. Harris, ‘American Idols: Empire, War and the Middling Ranks in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain’,
P&P
, 150 (1996), p. 140.

66
Tucker,
Instructions for Travellers
, p. 26; Joyce,
Work, Society and Politics
, pp. 1–50.

67
Haywood,
Female Spectator
(1745), 1, bk 5, pp. 298, 269–70.

68
Court of Adultery
, p. 24; LRO, DDB/81/36 (1780), unfol., see entry for 21 April 1780.

69
LRO, DDB Ac 7886/24 (n.d.), A. Parker, Royle, to Mrs Shackleton, Alkincoats, and LRO, DDB Ac 7886/280 (9 Jan. 1749), F. Walker, Whitley, to E. Parker, Browsholme.

70
LRO, DDB/81/7 (1768), f. 103.

71
WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St/5/2/5a (4 Oct. 1782), W. Stanhope, Brownberries, to W. Spencer Stanhope, Hull.

72
LRO, DDB/72/446 (13 Sept. 1755), A. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Alkincoats. Ann Pellet also affirmed ‘she wo'd not have a Great estate co'd it be purchased at so easie a rate as a wish since it is attended with nothing but vanity and vexation’: LRO, DDB/72/77 (7 Nov. 1753), A. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.

1
WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St/6/1/99 (29 Nov. 1766), B. Atkinson, Horsforth, to J. Stanhope Esq.; LRO, DDB/72/188 (30 Sept. 1765), B. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

2
WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St 6/1/50 (8 Nov. 1742), M. Warde, Great Cressingham, to M. Warde, Hooton Pagnell; WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St 6/1/50 (16 April 1745), M. Warde, Saville Street, to M. Stanhope.

3
LRO, DDB Ac 7886/314 (3 Dec. 1749), J. Pellet, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Browsholme; and LRO, DDB Ac 7886/313 (2 Dec. 1749), A. Pellet, Ealing, to E. Parker, Browsholme.

4
CRO, Carlisle, D/Ken. 3/56/1 (
c.
1801), Conduct letter written by E. Kennedy. Kennedy's husband Daniel was a substantial landowner, who owned property in Ayrshire. He became Deputy-Lieutenant for Cumberland in 1810 and JP for the county in 1816.

5
The classic statement on the triumph of romance is Stone,
Family, Sex and Marriage
. According to Stone's schema, the early modern period witnessed the establishment of three successive family types: the late medieval ‘open lineage family’; from 1530 the ‘restricted patriarchal nuclear family’; and from 1640 the closed, domesticated nuclear family', a progression apparently caused by the decline of patriarchy and the rise of affective individualism. A more focused, but similar case, is offered by Trumbach,
Rise of the Egalitarian Family
. For surging sentiment across the Atlantic, consult Blake Smith,
Inside the Great House
. While a storm of criticism greeted Stone's argument from the outset (see E. P. Thompson, ‘Happy Families’,
New Society
, 41 (1977), pp. 499–501, and A. Macfarlane, in
History and Theory
, 18 (1979), pp. 103–26), substantive debate has been taken up by scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on the creation and character of the so-called ‘patriarchal family’: Wrightson,
English Society
, pp. 66–88, and Houlbrooke,
English Family
, pp. 63–95. Nevertheless, Stone's case has had its supporters, notably Slater on the arranged mercenary marriages and chilly relations of the upper-gentry Verneys of Claydon House: Slater, ‘The Weightiest Business’, pp. 25–54; id.,
Verneys of Claydon House
. Yet this too has been questioned. See S. Mendelson, ‘Debate’,
P&P
, 85 (1979), pp. 126–35, and latterly V. Larminie,
Wealth, Kinship and Culture: The Seventeenth-Century Newdigates of Arbury and their World
(Woodbridge, 1995). However for all the seventeenth-century critiques, Stone's eighteenth-century story has rarely been contested. Indeed, Stone has recently reaffirmed the rise of affective individualism in his widely read
Uncertain Unions, Road to Divorce
, and
Broken Lives
.

6
On decision-making, see Houlbrooke,
English Family
, pp. 73–8, and id.,
English Family Life
, pp. 15–51. On self-conscious romantic culture in Stuart London, see Mendelson, ‘Debate’ (see n. 5 above), pp. 128–33. The symptoms of languishing lovers are recounted in Gowing,
Domestic Dangers
, pp. 174–7 and MacDonald,
Mystical Bedlam
, pp. 88–98.

7
For a wide-ranging review, see Childs, ‘Prescriptions for Manners’ (D.Phil, thesis), pp. 283–7. A shift from explicit misogyny to apparent veneration is identified in a miscellaneous assemblage of conduct literature and novels by M. Legates, ‘Cult of Womanhood’. Margaret Hunt also argues that interest in women's moral influence was increasing over the eighteenth century, ‘English Urban Families in Trade’ (Ph.D thesis), pp. 240–55, but sees in this the triumph of Puritan-bourgeois expectations.

8
G. Colman and D. Garrick,
The Clandestine Marriage
(1766), I, ii.

9
Cited in Cannon,
Aristocratic Century
, p. 90. Nor did wealth and rank lose their allure. See Lewis,
In the Family Way
, pp. 17–56.

10
Pollock, ‘An Action Like Stratagem’, p. 492.

11
A tendency in modern social science to divorce the material from the emotional in the history of the family has been roundly criticized by H. Medick and D. Sabean (eds.),
Interest and Emotion: Essays on The Study of Family and Kinship
(Cambridge, 1984), pp. 1–27, and Thompson, ‘Happy Families’ (see n. 5 above), p. 501.

12
Andrew, ‘London Debating Societies’, p. 385.

13
J. Austen,
Pride and Prejudice
(1813; Oxford, 1970), p. 137.

14
Goldsmith,
Richard Nash
, pp. 74–5.

15
Recounted in Brophy,
Women's Lives
, p. 118.

16
Haywood,
Betsy Thoughtless
, pp. 104, 287.

17
LRO, DDB/72/485 and 480 (1748–9), Edward Parker, London, to R. Parker, Alkincoats.

18
In the 1720s the Lancastrian Catholic Ralph Standish came to London under orders to procure a wife, but he attended the requisite balls, operas and plays with little grace. When at last he built up an acquaintance with an obliging young lady, Miss Weston, he came to call and strolled in the garden with her and another lady. On finding himself at last alone with his object, he ‘used all the art I am muster of without an open declaration’, but was put off by ‘a forbidding looke’: WRO, D/D St C5/8 (2 March 1728), R. Standish Howard, London, to R. Standish, Standish Hall. In the 1740s the Essex manufacturer Ned Parker gallanted his sweetheart, a Miss Holt, to a play in the company of another unmarried woman and visited her two or three times at home before he considered pressing home his advantage: LRO, DDB/72/490 (
c.
1748), E. Parker, London, to R. Parker, Alkincoats. Almost forty years later, Walter Spencer Stanhope found the opportunity to propose to Mary Pulleine at Ranelagh: Stirling,
Annals of a Yorkshire House
,
II
, pp. 156–7. In the 1810s William Parker was regularly seen at the Preston balls, but when he proposed to Helen Aspinall he did so by secret letter. Unfortunately the contents were read by the bearer and broadcast across the county. The response ‘was a deathblow to any further hope’: LRO, DDWh/4/56 (8 May 1814), B. Addison, Liverpool, to E. Whitaker, London.

19
[HN],
Ladies Dictionary
, p. 498.

20
‘From a Respectful Letter to his Mistress’, in
Complete Letter Writer or Polite English Secretary
, p. 115. See also ‘To the Fair Silvia’ in
Ladies Miscellany
, p. 1.

21
LRO, DDB/72/1 (28 May 1751), R. Parker, Horrocksford, to E. Parker, Browsholme.

22
LRO, DDB/72/3 (1 June 1751), E. Parker, Browsholme, to R. Parker, Horrocksford.

23
LRO, DDB/72/4 (n.d.), R. Parker, Horrocksford, to E. Parker, Browsholme.

24
LRO, DDB/72/5 (n.d.), E. Parker, Browsholme, to R. Parker, Horrocksford. This must have been a significant admission, since Elizabeth retained a rough copy of her note.

25
LRO, DDB/72/82 (27 Dec. 1753), A. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.

26
LRO, DDB/72/6 (9 June 1751), R. Parker, Horrocksford, to E. Parker, Browsholme; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/93, 103 and 142 (1746/7), same to same.