The Gentleman's Daughter (67 page)

122
See, for example, HL, HM 31201, Anna Larpent's Diary,
VIII
, 8, 1810–13, facing f. 19, facing f. 33, f. 36, f. 39, facing f. 46, facing f. 51, facing f. 52, facing f.63; and
XI
, 1820–21, f. 2, facing f. 3, f. 58, facing f. 122.

123
Goldsmith,
Richard Nash
, p. 33; F. C. Laird,
The Beauties of England and Wales
,
XII
, pt.
I
(1812), Nottinghamshire, p. 149, quoted in Henstock, ‘Diary of Abigail Gawthern,’ p. 20.

124
Henstock, ‘Diary of Abigail Gawthern’, pp. 98, 93 and 49. See also pp. 94, 95, 97, 103, 105, 109, 113, 135, 145.

125
See respectively, LRO, DDB Ac 7886/84 (Jan. 1745/6), A. Pellet, Browsholme, to J. Pellet, Preston; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/286 (18 July 1749), A. Pellet, to E. Parker, Browsholme; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/267 (28 Feb. 1748/9), A. Pellet, London, to same; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/304 (16 Oct. 1749), A. Pellet, Ealing, to same.

126
Elizabeth Parker did not accompany her first husband to meetings of the Colne vestry, the Blue Bell turnpike, the Slaidburn court, or the Clitheroe land tax assessment. Similarly, she remained at home when her second husband John Shackleton sat on the grand jury at Lancaster assizes or rode into the West Riding in fulfilment of his duties as a commissioner on the Blue Bell turnpike. Letters written in the same period by Jane Scrimshire of Pontefract, reveal her solitude during the frequent absences of her solicitor husband on the northern assize circuit. To her dismay, he was even obliged to be at York assize at the time of her third confinement in 1756. A similar pattern of male movement emerges from the later manuscripts. John Barcroft of Noyna and Foulridge, father to the Miss Barcrofts, was steward of Clitheroe Castle, and keeper of the manorial court in the 1770s. Ellen Barcroft's husband Edward Parker was not only a practising solicitor in Selby, but also a deputy lieutenant for the county and a Justice of the Peace for both Lancaster and York. Consequently, their family holidays in the 1820s had to be engineered to fit with his attendance at the quarter sessions. A corresponding picture emerges from the records of the Whitaker network. Eliza Whitaker's father Samuel Horrocks was an MP, and her husband Charles Whitaker
was a Justice of the Peace for the county of Lancaster, although he turned down the office of high sheriff in 1816.

127
Cohen, ‘The Grand Tour’.

128
The grouse moors above Colne were famed across Lancashire and Yorkshire. ‘Moorgame Day’ (12 August) and ‘Partridge Day’ (1/2 September) were sufficiently significant to be designated in Elizabeth Shackleton's diary. The Stanhope brothers, who rubbed shoulders with Robert Parker on the grouse moor in the 1750s were both considered hot shots. Michael and Jane Scrimshire attempted to lure the newly married Parkers to Bradford by offering tantalizing descriptions of the woodland shooting opportunities: ‘here is Hares, Partridges and Woodcocks in Plenty. They want nothing but shot to bring them to the table …’: LRO, DDB/72/153 (21 Oct. 1756), J. Scrimshire, Tong, Bradford, to E. Parker, Alkincoats. Robert Parker's alacrity was matched by that of his successor John Shackleton and his eldest son's ‘levelling skill among the partridges’ drew comment in the 1790s: LRO, DDB/72/842 (13 Oct. 1794), E. Parker, Browsholme, to T. Parker, Alkincoats. Enthusiasm for shooting burned bright in the early nineteenth century. Charles Whitaker's blood-thirst was proverbial knowledge across the county: LRO, DDWh/4/112 (n.d.), W. St Clare, Preston, to E. Whitaker, Roefield: ‘I suppose he will be busily engaged dealing death and destruction amongst the moor game.’

129
N. Scarfe (ed.), ‘A Frenchman's Year in Suffolk’,
Suffolk Records Society
, 30 (1988), p. 41.

130
Halsband,
Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
,
I
, p. 110; WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St 6/1/50 (26 Sept. 1742, 22 Oct. 1739, 16 Sept. 1741, 4 Dec. 1740), M. Warde, Great Cressingham, to M. Warde, Hooton Pagnell.

131
Lady's Magazine
, 14, p. 114; Wollstonecraft,
Vindication
, p. 80.

132
LRO, DDB/81/22 (1774), f. 109. See also LRO, DDB/74/5 (n.d.), Hunting Poem made by the Gentlemen belonging to the Colne Hunt; LRO, DDB/74/3 (n.d.), Hunting Poem of Pendle, Colne, Marsden and Trawden; and LRO, DDB/74/4 (n.d.), Hunting Poem of Pendle, Downham, Wiswell and Bolton.

133
LRO, DDB/81/26 (1775), f. 18; LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 82.

134
WRO, D/D St C5/3 (17 Nov. 1727), R. Standish Howard, London, to R. Standish, Standish Hall.

135
LRO, DDB Ac 7886/324 (1 Jan. 1775–1 March 1776), f. 4.

136
Thus complained Sophia Curzon in 1778: Elwin (ed.),
The Noels and the Milbankes
, p. 103.

137
Haywood,
Betsy Thoughtless
, p. 37.

138
Macky,
Journey Through England and Scotland
,
II
, p. 41; A. Allardyce (ed.),
Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century
(Edinburgh, 1888),
II
, pp. 60–61, quoted in Langford,
Polite and Commercial People
, p. 109.

139
Heal and Holmes,
Gentry in England and Wales
, pp. 289–318, note that the elite relieved the tedium of life in their country manors with long-stay visits, hunting and hawking. Indoor diversions included music, drama and gaming. The provincial towns offered the society of the inn, the bowling green, the racecourse and the cockpit.

140
LRO, DDB/72/687 (16 July 1807), E. Parker, Preston, to T. Parker, Alkincoats.

141
LRO, DDWh/4/78 (1 May 1816), A. Ainsworth, Bolton, to E. Whitaker, Roefield; E. C. Gaskell,
The Life of Charlotte Bronte
(New York, 1857), p. 51.

142
C. Midgley,
Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870
(1992), pp. 73–4. Furthermore, Midgley finds that there were at least seventy-three ladies' anti-slavery associations founded between 1825 and 1833 (p. 47).

143
Summers, ‘A Home from Home’, pp. 42 and 33.

144
Marylebone Gardens closed to the public in 1776. Ranelagh House and the Rotunda were demolished in 1805. Bagnigge Wells became known as a lower-class resort from about 1810. Vauxhall had numerous fashionable galas and firework displays in the
1800s and 1810s, but went downhill rapidly from the 1840s and closed in 1859: Wroth,
London Pleasure Gardens
(see n. 54 above), pp. 21–2, 64, 324. See also HL, HM 31201, Anna Larpent's Diary,
III
, 1799–1800, f. 247: ‘Thursday at past 9 went with Seymour and John to Vauxhall where I had not been some years the evening was very delightful – but it was very thin. home about one.’ And Henstock, ‘Diary of Abigail Gawthern, p. 95: ‘To Ranelagh [in June 1802]; very few people there; much disappointed, having seen crowds of nobility and well dressed people there, the fireworks the best I ever saw … Ranelagh is now quite forsaken and talked of being taken down or converted into some manufactory.’ On the ‘carriage airing’ and social parade at the nineteenth-century seaside, see A. Dale,
Fashionable Brighton, 1820–1860
(1947), pp. 16–17.

145
Girouard,
English Town
, p. 144.

146
Wilkinson complained that a Mr Gawood of the Low Church, Hull, had pronounced in January 1792 that anyone who entered a playhouse would be damned along with actors for all eternity. Another preacher, a Mr Lambert, claimed that the late seventeenth-century plague was God's punishment on the people for their excessive love of the playhouse. In 1794–5, a Mr Dykes banished from his chapel all those who had been to plays. With some exasperation, Wilkinson declared ‘It would be easier I believe to make a convert of a violent democrat to an aristocrat, than to make a methodist like the playhouse’. See Wilkinson,
Wandering Patentee
,
I
, p. 111,
II
, p. 122,
IV
, pp. 97–9, 201. For Larpent's reactions, see HL, H.M., 31201, Mrs Larpent's Diary,
III
, 1799–1800, facing f. 4.

147
M. Nava, ‘Modernity's Disavowal: Women, the City and the Department Store’, in M. Nava and A. O'Shea (eds.),
Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity
(1996), p. 43; Walkowitz,
Dreadful Delight
(see n. 8 above), pp. 68–9; K. Dejardin, ‘Etiquette and Marriage at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Advice on Choosing One's Partner’, in J. Carré,
The Crisis of Courtesy: Studies in the Conduct Book in Britain, 1600–1900
(Leiden, 1994), p. 175. On commercial spectacles, see R. Altick,
The Shows of London
(Cambridge, Mass., 1978), esp. pp. 141–210, and T. Richards,
The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914
(Stanford, Ca., 1990). On the space for female consumption, see Rappaport, ‘Halls of Temptation’ (see n. 66 above); G. R. Dyer, ‘The ‘Vanity Fair’ of Nineteenth-Century England: Commerce, Women and the East in the Ladies Bazaar',
Nineteenth-Century Literature
, 46 (1991), pp. 196–222.

148
Hall, ‘Refashioning of Fashionable Society’ (Ph.D. thesis), pp. 93–51.

149
With blatant didacticism, Burney's Evelina was drawn down one of the dark walks at Vauxhall, possibly the notorious Lovers' Walk, where she importuned by parties of lewd, impertinent men. Even worse, at a mismanaged fireworks display at the unimpressive Marylebone Gardens, she got lost in a crowd and to her inexpressible horror found she had taken refuge in the company of prostitutes: Burney,
Evelina
, pp. 193, 195–6, 232–3. Pleasure gardens became emblematic of fashionable dissipation and the capricious lifestyle of metropolitan youth. The worldly Mary Warde confessed that she deserved the ‘excessive bad Cold’ she caught in May 1743, having ‘contrived to make the whole tour of Ranelagh and Vauxhall by Water …’ in a bitter north-easter: WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St 6/1/50 (22 May 1743), M. Warde, Squerries, Kent, to Mrs Stanhope, Horsforth. Ranelagh and Vauxhall were also blamed when the apprentice Robert Parker contracted a dangerous fever in 1773: ‘and Considering how most of the young folks of London live, I wonder they are ever well. The Misses when at home muffled up warm as if was winter and perhaps in the very same Evening you meet 'em at Ranelagh and Vauxhall half naked. The young men are violent in their Exercises and heedless when over. Mr Plestow seem'd to think R's fever was got in this Manner: but this I hope will be a warning to him’: LRO, DDB/72/260 (15 Jan. 1773), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

150
Samuel Richardson, for his part, consistently criticized the masquerade ball, having his
ingénue
Harriet Byron abducted outside one in her glaring costume: ‘But surely, I was past all shame, when I gave my consent to make such an appearance as I made, among a thousand strangers, at a Masquerade!’ and his exemplary gentleman Sir Charles Grandison pronounce ‘Masquerades … are not creditable places for young ladies to be known to be
insulted
at them’. Consult Richardson,
Sir Charles Grandison
, pp. 183 and 143. While a crude warning to parents was issued by Eliza Haywood when she described an innocent brother and sister at a London masquerade, who ‘no sooner enter'd than both were bewilder'd amidst the promiscuous Assembly – the strange Habits – the Hurry’. Inevitably, the pair were separated in the confusion and the sister was abducted and raped: Haywood,
Female Spectator
(1745),
I
, bk 1, p. 49.

151
Goldsmith,
Richard Nash
, p. 48.

152
Haywood,
Female Spectator
,
I
, bk 5, pp. 299–300; Pennington,
Unfortunate Mother's Advice
, pp. 20–21; J. Gregory, A
Father's Legacy to his Daughters
(1774; Edinburgh, 1788), p. 21; Richardson,
Sir Charles Grandison
, p. 180. Haywood also reiterated this point in
Betsy Thoughtless
, p. 438: ‘I would not have you deprive yourself of those pleasures of life which are becoming your sex, your age, and character; – there is no necessity that because you are a wife you should become a mope: – I only recommend a proper medium in these things.’

153
Barry, ‘Cultural Life of Bristol’ (D.Phil, thesis), p. 195, Sekora,
Luxury, passim
.

154
Harrison, ‘Gossip Family’ (unpub. paper), pp. 7–8.

155
LRO, DDGr C3 (8 July 1776), T. Greene, Grays Inn, to Miss Greene, Slyne. Similarly, Jane Pellet archly wrote ‘Let [your father] know I have not been at either play or Ridotto since I left Browsholm and he very well knows I was not at any whilst there. The inference I wo'd have you
draw is that I am very prudent
’: Browsholme Letters, Browsholme Hall, Clitheroe, Lancs, uncat. (1745/6), J. Pellet to E. Parker.

156
LRO, DDB/72/308 (9 May 1780), E. Shackleton, Pasture House, to R. Parker, London.

157
The first quotation is drawn from Sophia Curzon's complaint about Ranelagh, see Elwin,
The Noels and the Milbankes
, p. 103. For the second, see Smollett,
Humphry Clinker
, p. 37.

158
Barry, ‘Cultural Life in Bristol’ (D.Phil. thesis), p. 211.

159
HL, HM 31201,
XVII
, Methodized Journal of Anna Margaretta Larpent, facing f. 10, facing f. 23, f. 24, f. 38 and f. 30. Similarly, Miss Betsy Thoughtless had ‘her head turned with the promiscuous enjoyment, [of plays, balls etc] and the very power of reflection lost amidst the giddy whirl’, and almost an entire novel passed ‘before she could recover it to see the little true felicity of such a course of life’. Consult Haywood,
Betsy Thoughtless
, p. 18.

160
WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St 6/1/50 (25 July 1740), M. Warde, Squerries, Kent, to M. Warde, Hooton Pagnell.

161
LRO, DDGr C1 (27 Sept. 1762), B. Wiglesworth, Townhead, to Mr Greene; LRO, DDB/72/141 (2 Nov. 1754), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats; WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St 6/1/50 (12 Sept. 1740), M. Warde, Great Cressmgham, to M. Warde, Hooten Pagnall; CRO, D/Lons/L1/1/67, I. Carr, London, to Sir J. Lowther. Similarly, note LRO, DDB Ac 7886/186 (18 May 1747), A. Lister, Broughton, to E. Parker, Browsholme: ‘I can tell you the Country looks charmingly pleasant, and realy you can Scarce imagine how comfortable a little retirement seems after so much hurry as we have been in lately …’; LRO, DDWh/4/77 (28 April 1816), S. Whalley, Rocke Court, Fareham, Hants, to E. Whitaker, Roefield: ‘Bath certainly was very pleasant but I cannot regret its dissipated amusements in the contemplation of my more rational system and the prospect of revisiting our own best country in the course of this month.’; LRO, DDB/72/1188 (4 June 1805), E. Reynolds, to E. Moon, Colne: ‘She has I think spent a very gay time and I dare say has nearly [tasted] of all
the amusements that town affords but she says she would not live in London for all the world.’