The Gentleman's Daughter

by Amanda Vickery

  56 LRO, DDB/72/210 (11 Nov. 1767), B. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

  57 The call to a male practitioner could be made in advance of the birth, at the onset of labour and in the event of emergency. The man-midwife might have seconded the efforts of a female midwife or replaced her altogether. Bookings could be made for all three calls: Wilson, ‘William Hunter’.

  58 LRO, DDB/72/144 (19 Feb. 1756), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats; LRO, DDB/72/445 (2 Jan. 1756), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.

  59 Wilson, Making of Man-Midwifery, p. 176.

  60 Refer to LRO, DDB/72/82, 85, 86, 105, 118 (1753–6), A. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.

  61 LRO, DDB/72/146 (15 May 1756), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats; LRO, DDB/72/176 (3 April 1764), B. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats. There are a few Stuart narratives of birth: Mendelson, ‘Stuart Women's Diaries’, pp. 196–7. More modern reports can be read in Pollock, Lasting Relationship, pp. 34–8.

  62 WYCRO, Leeds, TA 3/32, William Gossip's Memorandum Book, f. 113.

  63 LRO, DDGr C3 (30 June 1821), M. Greene, Bedford Square, London, to Mrs Bradley, Slyne.

  64 LRO, DDB/81/37 (1780), f. 33.

  65 On Bessy's month, see LRO, DDB/72/214 (12 April 1768), B. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats. The postponement of breast-feeding until three or four days after birth is discussed in Fildes, Breasts, Bottles and Babies, p. 91, and deplored in Nelson, Essay on the Government of Childen, p. 47. For an example of a post-natal remedy, see WYCRO, Bradford Sp St 6/1/50 (12 April 1745), C. Sellwood, Billam, to Mrs Stanhope: ‘[This] Recpt I am going to write I had from Lady Northampton, she had it from [Dr] Rattclif. I never knew it fail in a Looseness wheather in a Lying In or at any other time …’

  66 It is possible that the desire for a son an heir was so widely felt as to need no mention. Seventeenth-century gentlewomen expressed guilt when they failed to produce boys for the lineage, although girls could still be welcomed as proof of fertility: Crawford, ‘Construction and Experience of Maternity’, pp. 19–20, and Pollock, ‘Experience of Pregnancy’, pp. 39–40. However, a growing appreciation of daughters for their own sake amongst the eighteenth-century nobility is remarked by Lewis, In the Family Way, pp. 65–6.

  67 LRO, DDB/72/90 (16 May 1754), A. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.

  68 LRO, DDB/72/234 (28 April 1770), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

  69 For the traditional sequence, see Wilson, ‘Ceremony of Childbirth’, pp. 75–6. Highly ritualized confinements of four to six weeks were still common among the later eighteenth-century nobility: Lewis, In the Family Way, pp. 193–201. It therefore seems likely that genteel women observed at least a modified lying-in. Certainly, Mrs Betty Parker of Alkincoats was expected to spend a period of her recovery ‘upstairs’, see LRO, DDB Ac 7886/47 (n.d.), E. Shackleton, Pasture, to B. Parker, Newton. Interestingly, I have found only one specific reference to churching in the papers of the genteel. Perhaps the dinner parties given after the christening were the polite equivalent.

  70 LRO, DDB/72/62 (20 March 1756), A. Pellet, London, to R. Parker, Alkincoats; LRO, DDB/72/175 (26 Feb. 1763), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.

  71 See respectively, LRO, DDB/72/150 (16 Sept. 1756), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats; LRO, DDB/72/149 (30 Aug. 1756), same to same; LRO, DDB/72/176 (3 April 1764), B. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Parker, Alkincoats; WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St/6/1/75 (22 Oct. 1769), B. Downes, Manchester, to A. Stanhope, Derfield; LRO, DDWh/4/89 (22 Oct. 1816), B. Addison, Liverpool, to E. Whitaker, Roefield; Hall, Miss Weeton's Journal, II, p. 139; LRO, DDB/72/1196 (21 July 1822), E. Parker, Selby, to E. Moon, Colne.

  72 Laurence, Women in England, p. 80.

  73 On the unfortunate Stanhope babies, see WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St/5/2/30 (10 Oct. 1749), W. Stanhope, Leeds, to W. Spencer, Cannon Hall; Sp St/6/1/64 (Feb.–April 1753), same to J. Spencer, Middle Temple, London. Betty Parker's labour difficulties are recounted in LRO, DDB/72/334 (4 Nov. 1783), Wm St Clare (the elder), to T. Parker, Alkincoats. Concern for Anne Robbins is relayed in LRO, DDWh/4/68 (2 June 1814), D. Bowyer, London, to E. Whitaker, Roefield, and LRO, DDWh/4/75 (16 Aug. 1814), S. Horrocks, London, to same.

  74 Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage, pp. 271–3; Trumbach, Rise of the Egalitarian Family, pp. 197–235.

  75 While the Duchess of Devonshire's promotion of breast-feeding amongst the fashionable in the 1780s is cited ad nauseam, seventeenth-century campaigns against wet-nursing are less familiar. For a brief discussion, see Crawford, ‘The Sucking Child’. For a sobering exploration of the gulf between what women were told to do, what they thought they were doing and what they actually did, see Mechling, ‘Advice to Historians on Advice to Mothers’. The general pattern is described in Fildes, Breasts, Bottles and Babies, pp. 98–134, 398–401.

  76 Lewis, In the Family Way, pp. 209–12.

  77 Ladies Dispensatory, vii.

  78 LRO, DDB/72/128 and 136 (n.d.), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.

  79 WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St/5/2/30 (20 Jan. 1749), A. Stanhope, Leeds, to W. Spencer, Cannon Hall; WYCRO, Leeds, TA 18/5 (25 April 1734), W. Gossip, Ware, to A. Gossip, Ogleforth, York.

  80 LRO, DDB/81/37 (1780), f. 28; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/47 (n.d.), E. Shackleton, Pasture, to B. Parker, Newton. Elizabeth Shackleton remained suspicious of artificial feeding on ‘pobs’, but was forced to acknowledge: ‘they say he do's well on it’. Her scepticism was well-founded. Although artificial feeding became the fashionable alternative to maternal breast-feeding, it was often a lethal practice. Inappropriate foods, a contaminated water supply and dirty utensils often spelt gastro-intestinal disaster. The calamitous results of an experiment with dry nursing at the London Foundling Hospital in the 1740s were well publicized: Fildes, Breasts, Bottles and Babies, pp. 304, 400.

  81 For Tom Scrimshire's babyhood, see LRO, DDB/72/124, 125, 128, 134, 135 (1753–4), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats. On Deborah Scrimshire, see LRO, DDB/72/156 (20 Jan. 1756), same to same.

  82 For the quotations, see respectively LRO, DDB/72/214 (12 April 1768), B. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats, and LRO, DDB/72/295 (21 Sept. n.y.), same to same. On the mild contraceptive properties of lactation, consult McLaren, ‘Nature's Contraceptive’. The desirability of limiting family size must have been a subject of discussion in the Ramsden household, given this quip of the Reverend's when his wife conceived: ‘I wo'd it were the fashion with Children as with Kittens, viz. to keep no more than one can afford and to drown all the Superfluity': LRO, DDB/72/217 (3 Oct. 1768), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats. The Ramsdens also debated taking to separate beds after the birth of their last child. A recent hypothesis offers abortion as a viable contraceptive method for women who sought to extend the interval between their labours, see Pollock, ‘Experience of Pregnancy’ (see n. 43 above), pp. 54–8. For a national account of contraceptive behaviour, consult McLaren, Reproductive Rituals, pp. 57–87. On the prohibition against sex, see Pollock, Lasting Relationship, pp. 53, 64.

  83 LRO, DDB/72/183 (16 Feb. 1765) B. and W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Parker, Alkincoats. Similarly, William Gossip was anxious about the weaning of his ‘poor babe’: ‘I hope your weaning of him has been attended with no ill consequences to either of you’: WYCRO, Leeds, TA Box 18/5 (25 April 1734), W. Gossip, Ware, to A. Gossip, Ogleforth, York; as were seventeenth-century parents: Macfarlane, Ralph Josselin, p. 88. Fildes explains that contemporaries saw weaning as arguably the most dangerous period of infancy, linked to specific ‘diseases’ and even death. Moreover, it not only signified a change of diet, but also a change of station, from suckling to small child: Fildes, Breasts, Bottles and Babies, p. 351.

  84 Hall, Miss Weeton's Journal, 11, p. 141.

  85 LRO, DDWh/4/124 and 40 (c.1813–1814), B. Addison, Liverpool, to E. Whi
taker, Roefield.

  86 Nelson, Essay on the Government of Childen, p. 52. A similar impression is gained of the aristocratic experience: Lewis, In the Family Way, pp. 209–12.

  87 LRO, DDB/72/264 (14 Oct. 1773), B. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

  88 LRO, DDB/81/1506 (22 Dec. 1817), E. Parker, Selby, to E. Reynolds, Colne. Difficulties with her nursemaids are related in LRO, DDB/72/1196, 1208–9 (1822–5), same to E. Moon, Colne.

  89 LRO, DDB/72/252, 269, 273, 281 (1770–75), B. and W. Ramsden, Islington and Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

  90 On the teaching of John and George Larpent, see HL, HM 31201, Mrs Larpent's Diary, 1, 1790–95, fos. 19, 22. For expressions of educational philosophy, see HL, HM 31201, Mrs Larpent's Diary, III, 1799–1800, fos. 195–facing f. 196, 200, 207.

  91 LRO, DDWh/4/88 (24 Aug. 1816), A. Robbins, Gloucester, to E. Whitaker, Roefield.

  92 LRO, DDB/72/58 (25 Feb. 1754), E. Parker, London, to R. Parker, Alkincoats.

  93 Browsholme Letters, uncatalogued (16 May 1752), J. Scrimshire to ‘Mrs Parker, at Browsholme’; LRO, DDB/72/147 (24 June n.y.), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats; LRO, DDB/72/161(a) (17 Nov. c.1757), same to same.

  94 LRO, DDB/72/178, 201 and 264 (1765–73), B. and W. Ramsden, Charterhouse and Highgate, to E. Parker, later Shackleton, Alkincoats.

  95 LRO, DDB Ac 7886/10 (23 Sept. 1779), P. Goulbourne, Manchester, to B. Parker, Alkincoats; WYCRO, Bradford Sp St 6/1/50 (n.d.), M. Warde, to M. Stanhope.

  96 Balderston, Thraliana, 1, p. 158.

  97 See LRO, DDB/72/134 and 445 (c.1755), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats; LRO, DDB/72/75, 222, 214 (1765–9), B. and W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

  98 See LRO, DDB/72/70 (2 Sept. 1756), Nurse Seedall, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, and LRO, DDB/72/69 (n.d.), T. Parker/Nurse Seedall, Alkincoats, to E. Parker; LRO, DDB/72/218 (29 Oct. 1768), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats; LRO, DDB/72/174 (16 Sept. 1762), B. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.

  99 LRO, DDWh/4/88 (24 Sept. 1816), A. Robbins, Gloucester, to E. Whitaker.

  100 LRO, DDWh/4/89 (29 Oct. 1816), B. Addison, Liverpool, to E. Whitaker.

  101 LRO, DDB/72/1508 and 1506 (1817–23), E. Parker, Selby to E. Reynolds, Colne; LRO, DDB/72/1528 (14 July 1817), E. Parker, Selby, to M. Barcroft, Colne.

  102 See LRO, DDB/72/180, 181, 189, 195, 201 and 209–10 (1764–7), B. and W. Ramsden, Charterhouse and Highgate to E. Parker, later E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

  103 See LRO, DDB/72/216, 222, 237–9, 259, 258, 261, 269, 279 (1768–75), B. and W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats. On provincial deaths, see Carr, Annals and Stories of Colne, p. 86.

  104 WYCRO, Leeds, TA 13/1 (23 Oct.) S. Thorp, Cowick, to Mrs Gossip (the elder), York.

  105 WYCRO, Leeds, TA 18/5 (3 Oct. 1746), W. Gossip, Stamford, to A. Gossip, Skelton; TA 18/5 (16 June 1746), W. Gossip, Buxton, to A. Gossip, Skelton; TA 11/4 (8 Aug.? 1750), A. Gossip, York, to W. Gossip, Thorp Arch.

  106 WYCRO, Leeds, TA 18/5 (1746), W. Gossip, Skelton, to A. Gossip, at Mr Thompson's, Ripon; TA 18/5 (8 Aug. 1746), W. Gossip, Skelton, to Master Gossip, Ripon; TA 18/5 (23 Oct. 1746), W. Gossip, London, to A. Gossip, Skelton.

  107 WYCRO, Leeds, TA 18/5 (3 June 1765), W. Gossip, Thorp Arch, to Mrs Gossip, Leicester; TA 18/5 (9 July 1765), same to same.

  108 On epidemics of fever, whooping cough and measles, see LRO, DDB/72/142, 150, 161 (1756–7), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats. On the perceived risks of infection, see LRO, DDB/72/158, 136, 149 (1756–7), same to same.

  109 WYCRO, Bradford Sp St/6/1/57 (26 June 1757), A. Stanhope, Leeds, to W. Stanhope, Bath.

  110 HL, HM 31201, Mrs Larpent's Dairy, 1, 1790–95, fos. 4, facing f. 5 and 6.

  111 LRO, DDB/72/1598 (3 April 1823), E. Parker, Selby, to E. Reynolds, Colne; LRO, DDB/72/1198 and 1203–7 (l823–5), E. and E. Parker, Selby, to E. Moon, Colne.

  112 LRO, DDGr C3 (23 Nov. 1821), M. Greene to Mrs Bradley, Slyne.

  113 For example, the dates and circumstances of Tom Parker's life-threatening bout of smallpox were etched in his mother's memory. In 1777, at least twenty years after the fact, Elizabeth Shackleton recalled the crisis in her diary: LRO, DDB/81/30 (1777), f. 40: ‘God make my own dear Tom ever thankful for the … mercies he received on this great day from almighty God … he came to the height of the small pox. My dear John was livid of it before and both did as well as my own dear Robert.’

  114 LRO, DDB/72/132 (16 May 1754), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats; DDB/72/263 (14 Oct. 1773), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

  115 LRO, DDWh/4/78 (1 May 1816), A. Ainsworth, Bolton, to E. Whitaker, Roefield. Similar expressions are widespread in the papers of the genteel. When the Miss Barcrofts of Colne informally adopted their orphaned niece Ellen in 1797, a friend assured the inexperienced sisters, ‘she will be nice company for you and will beguile many an hour by her infantine tricks’: DDB/72/1493 (26 Aug. 1797), B. Wiglesworth, Townhead, to E. Barcroft, Otley. When Ellen had children of her own, she regaled her aunts with fond progress reports, ‘he talks of Mamma and Bab-ba, but I am not quite sure that he understands the application of the words’: DDB/72/1505 (14 June 1817), E. Parker, Selby, to E. Reynolds, Colne.

  116 LRO, DDGr C3 c.1821), M. Greene to Mrs Bradley, Slyne.

  117 Hall, Miss Weeton's Journal, II, p. 152; see also pp. 143–4, 169.

  118 Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage, p. 264; LRO, DDB/72/258 (17 Oct. 1772), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats; Johnson, Dictionary, ‘Love’.

  119 LRO, DDB/72/175 (26 Feb. 1763), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.

  120 WYCRO, Leeds, TA, Box 18/5 (4 Nov. 1746), W. Gossip, London, to A. Gossip, Skelton; TA 18/5 (8 Aug. 1746), W. Gossip, Skelton, to Master Willy Gossip, Ripon; TA 18/5 (3 June 1765), W. Gossip, Thorp Arch, to Mrs Gossip, Leicester; TA 12/3 (1768), G. Gossip to W. Gossip, Skelton.

  121 LRO, DDB/72/75 (30 July 1765), B. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.

  122 WYCRO, Leeds, TA 18/5 (1746), W. Gossip, York, to A. Gossip, Ripon.

  123 St Clare announced the birth in LRO, DDB/72/492 (13 Feb. 1780), W. St Clare (the elder) to T. Parker, Newton, and the death in LRO, DDB/72/499 (22 Dec. 1802), same to same; William Stanhope's encouragement is in WYCRO, Sp St/6/1/68 (5 Feb. 1756), W. Stanhope, Leeds, to Ann Stanhope, Cannon Hall.

  124 LRO, DDGr C1 (21 Dec. 1762), T. Greene, Inner Temple, London, to his mother. Phrases which abound in the correspondence of the bereaved and their commiserators include: ‘we must endeavour to submit to the will of providence’, ‘joy and afflictions are both dispensed by the same divine providence, your own good sense will teach you to submit to the one as well as the other’, ‘who the lord loveth, he chastitheth and scourgeth’, ‘whatever is, is right’. An identical vocabulary is wheeled out in Richardson, Sir Charles Grandison, pp. 400–1: ‘Yet even this Love must submit to the awful dispensations of Providence, whether of death or other disappointment; and such trials ought to be met with chearful resignation, and not to be the means of embittering our lives, or of rendering them useless.’ A reliance on the language of resignation is also to the fore in the strategies used to cope with illness: R. and D. Porter, In Sickness and in Health: The British Experience, 1650–1850 (1988), pp. 234–40.

  125 Henstock, ‘The Diary of Abigail Gawthern’, pp. 52, 76.

  126 This was Elizabeth Holland's description, cited in Porter, In Sickness and in Health (see n. 124 above), p. 80. Both the searing grief of seventeenth-century parents and the widespread fear that it might overmaster the sufferer if given full reign is noted in P. Seaver, Wallington's World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (Stanford, Ca., 1985), pp. 229–30, and Crawford, ‘Construction and Experience of Maternity’, p. 23. Of 134 cases of disturbing grief treated by the seventeenth-century physician Richard Napier, 58 were attri
buted to the death of child; 51 of these patients were mothers: MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, p. 82. The elite of eighteenth-century Tyneside still found it a struggle ‘to submit to what Povidence shall order’, judging by Levine and Wrightson, Making of an Industrial Society, pp. 328–9. The ‘paroxysms of panic’ brought on by children's illnesses and the deep mourning of parents from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth is illustrated in Pollock, Forgotten Children, pp. 128–42.

  4 Prudent Economy

  1 Pennington, Unfortunate Mother's Advice, p. 27.

  2 Complete Letter Writer, pp. 164–5.

  3 J. Gregory, A Father's Legacy to His Daughter (1774; Edinburgh, 1788), p. 22.

  4 LRO, DDB/72/475 (29 April 1748), W. Hill, Ormskirk, to R. Parker, Alkincoats; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/211 (March 1747), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to Edward Parker, London; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/216 (‘Saturday Morn’), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, London; Marshall, William Stout, pp. 159, 233; Wright, Thomas Birkenshaw, p. 146.

  5 LRO, DDB/72/490 (n.d.), Edward Parker, London, to R. Parker, Colne; WYCRO, Leeds TA 18/5 (23 Oct. 1746), W. Gossip, London, to A. Gossip, Skelton.

  6 LRO, DDB Ac 7886/306 (9 Oct. 1749), J. Parker, Browsholme, to E. Parker, Birthwaite; WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St/6/1/75 (20 Aug. 1757), W. Stanhope, Leeds, to A. Stanhope, Sewerby; LRO, DDB/72/234 (28 Apr. 1770), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats; Stone, Road to Divorce, p. 293.

  7 LRO, DDB/72/12, 7, 8, 15, 17, 14 (1751), E. Parker, Browsholme, to R. Parker, Alkincoats.

  8 LRO, DDGr C3 (21 July 1819), S. Tatham, Southall, to Mr and Mrs Bradley, Slyne.

  9 Marshall, William Stout, p. 159.

  10 LRO, DDB/72/306 (n.d.), E. Shackleton, Pasture House, to J. and R. Parker, London; LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), fos. 225, 229; LRO, DDB/81/37 (1780), f. 70.

  11 LRO, DDWh/4/29 (17 Aug. 1813), E. Whitaker, Edgeworth, to C. Whitaker, Roefield.

  12 H. Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind Addressed To A Lady (1773; 1835), p. 92.

  13 Quoted in Brophy, Women's Lives, p. 120.