The Gentleman's Daughter

by Amanda Vickery

  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.

  2 Love and Duty

  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.

  27 LRO, DDB/72/14 (3 Aug. 1751), E. Parker, Browsholme, to R. Parker, Alkincoats.

  28 LRO, DDB Ac 7886/119 (n.d.), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme.

  29 Lemmings, ‘Hardwicke's Marriage Act’, p. 358; and see generally pp. 339–60.

  30 Savile, Lady's New Year's Gift, p. 28. On the tradition of female petitioning, see Larmine, ‘Marriage and the Family’, p. 87.

  31 Accomplished Letter-Writer, p. 123. A similar technique is demonstrated in New Letter Writer, pp. 19, 97.

  32 Troide, Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, II, pp. 146–8; WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St/6/1/99 (29 Nov. 1766), B. Atkinson, Horsforth, to J. Stanhope Esq.

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

  34 LRO, DDB Ac 7886/121 (c.1746), R. Parker to E. Parker. For further gloomy ruminations on the ‘Misfortune of having a small Fortune’ see LRO, DDB Ac 7886/119, 112, 93 (1745–6), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme. The objections to Robert Parker on moral grounds are more obscure. He was reputedly involved in the second Jacobite rising, but given the Parkers' Tory sympathies this could even have counted in his favour.

  35 Wilkes, Genteel and Moral Advice to a Young Lady, pp. 81–2.

  36 K. Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1989), pp. 157–91; E. K. Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (New York, 1984), pp. 56–84.

  37 LRO, DDB/72/171 (28 Oct. 1779), A. Pellet, London, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

  38 The mean age of marriage for noblewomen in this period was twenty-four years and nine months: Hollingsworth, ‘Demography’, p. 11. Unfortunately, there are no demographic studies of the lesser gentry, but across the female population as a whole, the mean age at first marriage between 1750 and 1799 is also thought to be the same: Wrigley and Schofield, Population History of England, p. 255. Suffice it to say then that Elizabeth Parker must have been fully conscious of the passage of time.

  39 LRO, DDB/72/10 (24 June 1751), E. Parker, Browsholme, to R. Parker, Horrocksford.

  40 When financial negotiations surrounding the proposed marriage of Edward Parker to Barbara Fleming ground to a halt, the families were concerned because ‘an affair so publick’ unjustly tainted Barbara's reputation: LRO, DDB/72/82 (27 Dec. 1753), A. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.

  41 Kelly, History of Louisa Mildmay, p. 15.

  42 LRO, DDB/72/9 (n.d.), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme.

  43 LRO, DDB/72/8 (16 June 1751), E. Parker, Browsholme, to R. Parker, Horrocksford.

  44 LRO, DDB/72/6 (9 June 1751), R. Parker, to E. Parker, Browsholme.

  45 LRO, DDB/72/10 (24 June 1751), E. Parker, Browsholme, to R. Parker.

  46 LRO, DDB/72/11 (n.d.), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme.

  47 Ingrams, Church Courts, p. 136. On the long-standing and persistent importance of ‘friends’, see Tadmor, ‘Family and Friend’; Gowing, Domestic Dangers, pp. 148–59; and D. O'Hara, ‘ “Ruled by my Friends”: Aspects of Marriage in the Diocese of Canterbury, c.1540–c.1570’, Continuity and Change, 6 (1991), pp. 9–41.

  48 LRO, DDB/72/8 (16 June 1751), E. Parker, Browsholme, to R. Parker, Horrocksford; LRO, DDB/72/12 (3 July 1751), E. Parker, Browsholme, to R. Parker, Alkincoats; LRO, DDB/72/23 (n.d.), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme. On the weight attached to the opinions of relations, see LRO, DDB Ac 7886/115 (c.1746), E. Parker, Browsholme, to R. Parker, Alkincoats.

  49 LRO, DDB/72/17 (13 Aug. 1751), E. Parker, Browsholme, to R. Parker, Alkincoats.

  50 LRO, DDB/78/1 (1751), Parker Marriage Settlement.

  51 A. P. W. Malcolmson, The Pursuit of the Heiress: Aristocratic Marriage in Ireland, 1750–1820 (Belfast, 1982), p. 33.

  52 LRO, DDB Ac 7886/119 (n.d.), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme.

  53 Baronet's daughter Elizabeth Moseley tried to preserve her clandestine affair with an unsuitable lawyer, Arthur Collier, at Bath and elsewhere, doing all she could to stave off a decisive confrontation with her parents: Stone, Uncertain Unions (see n. 5 above), pp. 68–77. Secretive encouragement in the face of parental opposition was also conveyed by the heiress Elizabeth Jefferys in the 1740s and a Mary Martin in the 1760s: Brophy, Women's Lives, pp. 83–5.

  54 LRO, DDB Ac 7886/129 (18 Nov. 1746), R. Parker to E. Parker. The sense that courtship was essentially a game is also conveyed in LRO, DDB/72/476 (10 May 1748), E. Parker, London, to R. Parker, Alkincoats: ‘It is to be hoped [that] at last some Damsel will take Compassion on us, for [the] very week Miss Plumb was married I had denial at two houses …=” Haywood's suspicions are relayed in id., Betsy Thoughtless, p. 19.

  55 New Letter Writer, pp. 45–7.

  56 LRO, DDB/72/16 (n.d.), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/93 and 97 (1745), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme.

  57 Gibson's courtship correspondence is revealed in Hunt, ‘English Urban Families’ (Ph.D. thesis), pp. 256–9. However, Hunt attributes this language to a distinctively bourgeois taste for plain dealings, in contrast to upper-class linguistic excess. Non-bourgeois concern to live reasonable, affectionate, but self-possessed married lives is identified in Brown, ‘Domesticity, Feminism and Friendship’. Pratt's correspondence is relayed in Brophy, Women's Lives, pp. 129–37. Moderation and reliability are also to the fore in the one letter of courtship Stone reproduces in Road to Divorce, pp. 59–60, written in 1755 by a Nottinghamshire cleric to his sweetheart's guardian. Similarly, when the stranger Mr Jones bid for Betty Atkinson's hand in 1766, he too disdained ‘employing artifice, or covert address’ and stressed that his conduct had never deviated from that of ‘the man of honour’: WYCRO, Sp St/6/1/99 (c.1766), J. Jones, to J. Stanhope. Eliza Haywood also linked rhetorical restraint with masculine honour: ‘Believe me, there is more true felicity in the sincere and tender friendship of one man of honour, than in all the flattering professions of a thousand coxcombs.’ See id., Betsy Thoughtless, p. 174. For controlled language in the New World, consult Lewis, ‘Domestic Tranquillity’.

  58 D. F. Bond (ed.), Spectator (Oxford, 1965), pp. 197–8. For the love-letter, see G. A. Aitken, The Life of Richard Steele (1889), I, p. 174.

  59 Wilkes, Genteel and Moral Advice, p. 83.

  60 LRO, DDB Ac 7886/95 (20 April 1746), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/119 (n.d.), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/126 (c.1746), R. Parker, Preston, to E. Parker.

  61 LRO, DDB Ac 7886/129 (18 Nov. 1746), R. Parker to E. Parker; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/112 (2 Sept. 1746), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme. On the arranging of secret assignations, see LRO, DDB Ac 7886/97 (3 May 1745), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/122 (c.1746), R. Parker to E. Parker.

  62 LRO, DDB Ac 7886/101 (1 July 1746), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, Browsholme.

  63 Ladies Dictionary, p. 505; Myers, Bluestocking Circle, p. 92; Gentleman's Magazine (1738), VIII, p. 86.

  64 Savile, Advice to a Daughter, p. 26.

  65 On the reciprocal duties of man and wife, see Wrightson, English Society, pp. 90–92, and Houlbrooke, English Family, 1450–1700, pp. 96–8. Even Filmer, upon a wider reading, has proved much less ‘patriarchal’ than was previously thought: Ezell, Patriarch's Wife, pp. 129–44. According to Lawrence Stone, this prescriptive mutuality was novel and distinctively Puritan, giving rise to a new companionate ethos within marriage, discernible from 1660–1700. However, scholars of Christian prescription contend that Puritan conduct literature represents an amplification of
, not a break with, pre-Reformation advice to the laity: Todd, ‘Humanists, Puritans and the Spiritualized Household’; Davies, ‘Continuity and Change’, pp. 58–78. On the personal inexperience of the writers of Elizabethan prescriptive literature, see Wall, ‘Elizabethan Precept and Feminine Practice’.

  66 Larminie, ‘Marriage and the Family’.

  67 Wrightson, English Society, p. 92.

  68 D. Defoe, Conjugal Lewdness, &c (1727), p. 25.

  69 Harrison, ‘Thorp Arch Hall’.

  70 WYCRO, Leeds, TA 18/5 (30 Oct. 1746), W. Gossip, London, to A. Gossip, Skelton; TA 18/5 (16 Oct. 1746), same to same; TA 18/5 (25 April 1734), W. Gossip, Ware to A. Gossip, Ogleforth; TA 18/5 (8 Aug. 1746), W. Gossip, Skelton, to A. Gossip, Ripon; TA 18/5 (12 Dec. 1757), W. Gossip, Askam, to A. Gossip, Thorp Arch.

  71 See respectively WYCRO, Leeds, TA 13/2 (n.d.), A. Gossip to W. Gossip; TA 18/5 (14 Oct. 1746), W. Gossip, Braintree, to A. Gossip, Skelton; TA 13/2 (‘Tuesday’), A. Gossip to W. Gossip; TA 13/2 (2 Nov. n.y.), A. Gossip to W. Gossip; TA 18/5 (23 Oct. 1746), W. Gossip, London, to A. Gossip, Skelton; TA 18/5 (20 Oct. 1746), same to same.

  72 WYCRO, Leeds, TA 18/5 (n Aug. 1746), W. Gossip, Skelton, to A. Gossip, Ripon.

  73 WYCRO, Leeds, TA 15/11/9 (25 Sept. 1763), W. Gossip's Will.

  74 See H. Owen, Stanhope, Atkinson, Haddon and Shaw: Four North Country Families (1985), p. 70; R. G. Wilson, ‘Three Brothers: A Study of the Fortunes of a Landed Family in the Mid-Eighteenth Century’, Bradford Textile Society Journal (1964–5), pp. 111–21.

  75 WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St/6/1/68 (13 June 1757), W. Stanhope, Birmingham, to A. Stanhope, Leeds; Sp St/6/1/75 (20 Aug. 1757), W. Stanhope, Leeds, to A. Stanhope, Sewerby; Sp St/6/1/57 (26 July 1757), A. Stanhope, Leeds, to W. Stanhope, Bath.

  76 WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St/6/1/70 (11 June 1757), W. Stanhope, Derby, to A. Stanhope, Leeds; Sp St/6/1/69 (15 June 1757), A. Stanhope, Leeds, to W. Stanhope, Bath.