The Gentleman's Daughter

by Amanda Vickery

  43 LRO, DDB/72/207 and 172 (1767), B. and W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats. See also LRO, DDB/72/86 (21 March 1754), A. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.

  44 LRO, DDB/72/684, 686 and 689 (1806–12), E. Parker, Preston and Selby, to T. Parker, Alkincoats; LRO, DDWh/4/80 and 131 (1816), A. Robbins, London, to E. Whitaker, Roefield.

  45 LRO, DDB/81/26 (1775), f. 106; LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 187; LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 53; LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), f. 17.

  46 These generalizations are supported by LRO, DDB/81/37 (1780), f. 191; LRO, DDB/81/13 (1771), f. 8; and LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), fos. 14, 116, 123, 126, 213.

  47 The ritual packing up of ‘Bag and Baggage’ is illustrated in LRO, DDB/81/13 (1771), fos. 32, 33, and LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), f. 119. On the role of clothes as a bargaining tool, see LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), fos. 83–4.

  48 LRO, DDB/81/37 (1780), f. 308.

  49 The flourishing second-hand clothes business is reconstructed in Lemire, ‘Consumerism in Pre-Industrial and Early Industrial England’. Daniel Roche cites the Parisian trade in second-hand finery as evidence to support an emulation model of popular consumer behaviour. Predictably, covetous female servants are presented as the chief carriers of the emulation virus. See, The People of Paris: An Essay in Popular Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Leamington Spa, 1987). A more profitable approach to the issue of servants and clothes, considering the difficulties employers faced providing clothes that reflected both their own prestige and the dependent status of their employees, can be found in Buck, Dress in Eighteenth-Century England, pp. 103–19. For a tenacious servant, see LRO, DDB/81/29 (1776), f. 98: ‘Susan Harrison came here for her cloaths said if I shod not [let] her her wages wages 15s She wo'd have a Warrant for me by four this afternoon.’

  50 See respectively, LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 118; and LRO, DDB/72/310 (16 March 1777), E. Shackleton, Alkincoats, to R. Parker, London. See also LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), f. 148: ‘I am on this day 54 or 55 years old … I put on my new white long lawn Pocket Handchief mark'd E.2. red in Honour of this Good day.’

  51 LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), f. 73.

  52 LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 223. See also LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), f. 96, on the first use of ‘new Japan night Candlesticks’.

  53 LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), f. 221.

  54 LRO, DDB/81/37 (1780), fos. 154–5.

  55 LRO, DDB/81/17 (1772), f. 85.

  56 See LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 68; LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), fos. 87, 225, 235; LRO, DDB/81/10 (1770), f. 66.

  57 LRO, DDB/81/39 (1781), f. 16(6).

  58 LRO, DDB/81/17 (1772), f. 34. She could not resist mocking the ‘great talker’ Mrs Cunliffe for her elaborate coiffure and even her friend Mrs Walton ‘in high conceit with herself and long train’, see LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), fos. 179, 184.

  59 LRO, DDB/81/23 (1774), f. 72.

  60 LRO, DDB/81/39 (1781), fos. 31–2. Affected architectural features were a popular target for satire in this period, see Donald, ‘Mr Deputy Dumpling and Family’.

  61 LRO, DDB/81/30 (1777), fos. 8–9. See also fos. 32–3.

  62 LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), f. 77; LRO, DDB/81/25 (1775), f. 107; LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), f. 196; LRO, DDB/81/28 (1776), fos. 53–4.

  63 For example LRO, DDB/81/19 (1773), f. 71.

  64 LRO, DDB/81/27 (1776), fos. 47, 97–8.

  65 LRO, DDB/81/31 (1777), f. 102.

  66 LRO, DDB/81/13 (1771), f. 63. For the social significance of exchanges of game in landed society, see D. Hay, ‘Poaching and the Game Laws on Cannock Chase’, in D. Hay, P. Linebaugh, E. P. Thompson (eds.), Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (1975), pp. 244–53.

  67 LRO, DDB/81/39 (1781), f. 166. The painting officially belonged to Elizabeth Shackleton, given by John Parker in 1776: ‘A more valuable gift he co'd not have bestow'd’: LRO, DDB/81/27 (1776), f. 18.

  68 LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 40.

  69 LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), f. 202.

  70 LRO, DDB/81/37 (1780), f. 261.

  71 LRO, DDB/81/30 (1777), f. 40.

  72 See respectively LRO, DDB/81/30 (1777), f. 40; LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 15; and LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), f. 213.

  73 LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), f. 74.

  74 LRO, DDB/81/37 (1780), f. 78.

  75 LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), f. 209.

  76 Pennington, Unfortunate Mother's Advice, pp. 34–5.

  77 LRO, DDB/72/179 (15 June 1764), B. Ramsden, Farm Hill, to E. Parker, Alkincoats. Bessy Ramsden was sufficiently versed in the language of envy and emulation to joke about the social impact of the Duchess of Devonshire's wax fruit ‘was I in a Longing situation I should certainly mark the little one with a Bunce of currance which I saw at the Milliners’. See LRO, DDB/72/280 (18 Dec. 1775), same to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

  78 LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), f. 116.

  79 For example LRO, DDB/81/37 (1780), f. 263.

  80 LRO, DDB/72/132 (16 May 1754), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats; LRO, DDB/72/254 (4 May 1772), B. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to same; LRO, DDB/72/122 (c.1761), A. Pellet, London, to same. On the remembrance of ‘dead as well as living friends’ and Mrs Pellet's ambition to raise a monument on the grave of her father, see LRO, DDB/72/94 (1754), same to same.

  81 Jane Pedder of Lancaster minutely catalogued her son's possessions, enquired after the state of his shirts, promised him ‘some little present that you may say this come from London’, and charged him to preserve a book of pressed flowers exactly as his brother had left it, see LRO, DDPd/17/1 (29 Feb. 1786 and 16 April 1786), J. Pedder, Lancaster, to J. Pedder, Blackburn. An admirer of Miss Martha Barcroft's set a lock of her hair into a ring for remembrance and treasured the little box she had donated, see LRO, DDB/72/1407 (29 Sept. 1785), D. Lang, London, to M. Barcroft, Colne. Ellen Parker acknowleged the power of objects to plead remembrance in letters to her Colne aunts, see for example LRO, DDB/72/1194 (21 June 1817), E. Parker, Selby, to E. Moon, Colne, and LRO, DDB/72/1507 (29 May 1821), E. Parker, Selby, to E. Reynolds, Colne.

  82 Hall, Miss Weeton's Journal, II, pp. 353, 331, 325.

  83 Because of the lack of comparable case studies, it is as yet impossible to assess whether the attitudes here outlined are peculiar to the later eighteenth century. Similar research on the personal records of seventeenth- and nineteenth-century consumers might, after all, uncover similar findings. Gifts, for instance, were worn for the sake of the donor in the seventeenth century, see Crawford, ‘Katharine and Philip Henry’, pp. 52–3, and V. Sackville-West (ed.), Diary of Lady Anne Clifford, p. 44. Lady Anne Clifford also recorded re-threading a string of pearls given by her mother, the first day her daughter wore stays and later a coat, the associations of different rooms, and inviting a female visitor into her closet to look at her clothes, see pp. 42, 64, 66, 67, 82. Moreover, the evidence of wills suggests the sentimental associations of artefacts in the fifteenth century, see BIHR, Probate Register VI, fos. 227, 214; Register III, f. 523. I am grateful to Jenny Kermode for this reference.

  84 This emerges from a comparison of men and women's wills from Birmingham, Sheffield and South Lancashire, 1700–1800 (personal communication from Maxine Berg), and from East Anglia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (personal communication from Susan Amussen and Christopher Marsh). This pattern has also been remarked by historians of eighteenth-century America. Gloria Main notes that women's wills often contained loving descriptions of artefacts in contrast to the male focus on land. If men dwelt on their personalty at all, their comments were confined to a favourite animal or gun: G. Main, ‘Widows in Rural Massachusetts on the Eve of Revolution’, in Hoffman and Albert, Women in the Age of American Revolution, pp. 88–9. The possibility of a distinctively female attachment to household goods has also been raised by novelists, see H. James, The Spoils of Poynton (1897), passim, and G. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (Harmondsworth, 1986), pp. 280–95.

  85 This pattern of testamentary behaviour has been widely observed on either side of the Atlan
tic, see Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, pp. 276 and 511; S. Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860 (New York, 1984).

  86 See Norton, Liberty's Daughters (see n. 19 above), pp. 396–7. Norton compared the claims for compensation made by loyalist men and women exiled during the American War of Independence with useful results. Although the men consistently placed a precise valuation on their house and land, very few of the women were able to do so. By contrast, men submitted inadequate inventories of household goods, such as furniture, tableware and kitchen utensils, while the women could produce minute accounts. To Norton the contrasting lists submitted by men and women suggest not only discrete fields of knowledge, but different material priorities.

  6 Civility and Vulgarity

  1 LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 167.

  2 Quoted in Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England, p. 6. This offers the most sustained and rigorous study of hospitality as a trope and a social practice. On the public aspects of the elite family in a patronage society, see Pollock, ‘Living on the Stage of the World’. For an explicit statement about the family as a public institution, see Amussen, Ordered Society, p. 36.

  3 On the alleged walling-off of the nuclear family from kin, their withdrawal from the community, and the creation of architectural privacy, see Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage, pp. 149–80, 245–6. The rise of modern privacy is the framing premise of P. Ariès, A History of Private Life (1989).

  4 On eighteenth-century survivals, see Mingay, English Landed Society, pp. 205–32; Beckett, Aristocracy in England, pp. 324–73; Jenkins, Glamorgan Gentry, pp. 196–216; Howell, Gentry of South-West Wales, pp. 182–4; and, despite the contradictory assertions in his earlier book, see Stone, Open Elite?, pp. 307–10. A comparable study of the sociability of rich Virginia planters is D. B. Smith, Inside the Great House: Planter Family Life in the Eighteenth Century Chesapeake Society (Ithaca, 1980), esp. pp. 200, 217.

  5 L. Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party, 1714–60 (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 100, 129–30.

  6 B. J. Harris, ‘Women and Politics in Early Tudor England’, HJ, 33 (1990), pp. 259–81; L. Barroll, ‘The Court of the First Stuart Queen’, in L. Levy Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 191–208; L. Colley, ‘Things That Are Worth Naming', London Review of Books, 21 Nov. 1991; Jalland, Women, Marriage and Politics; M. Pugh, The Tories and the People, 1880–1935 (Oxford, 1985).

  7 Haltunnen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, pp. 92–123, and Kasson, Rudeness and Civility, pp. 173–81.

  8 Dallet Hemphill, ‘Men, Women and Visiting' (unpub.), pp. 2–3. She continues: ‘Rather than an aspect of a private female sphere we are talking about either a female public sphere, if one adopts a broad definition of “the public sphere”, or, at the least, a female social sphere, an intermediate sphere where both sexes could interact in a quasi-public, quasi-private fashion. Historians have long been aware of the ways in which northern white middle-class women stretched their domestic sphere into the public domain in the ante-bellum era through associational and reform activity. Perhaps we also need to recognize the ways in which they pulled public functions into their so-called private domain by acknowledging the existence of this intermediate social sphere.’ (p. 10). For similar doubts about the usefulness of the public/private model, see K. V. Hanson, A Very Social Time: Crafting Community in Ante-bellum New England (Berkeley, 1996).

  9 D. F. Bond (ed.), Spectator (Oxford, 1965), 1, p. 44.

  10 On the potential space for female debate, see Klein, ‘Gender, Conversation and the Public Sphere’, pp. 111–12, and the slightly less expansive Copley, ‘Commerce, Conversation and Politeness’. For contrasting assessments of Addison and Steele, see Hunt, ‘Wife Beating’; Shevelow, Women and Print Culture, passim, and Blanchard, ‘Richard Steele and the Status of Women’, pp. 325–55.

  11 D. Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, 1994), pp. 5–11, 53–89, 123–4; id., ‘Public Sphere and Private Life’.

  12 For an exceptionally lucid account of changing advice on manners, see Childs, ‘Prescriptions for Manners’ (D.Phil, thesis), pp. 45–130. But see also the informative J. E. Mason, Gentlefolk in the Making: Studies in the History of English Courtesy Literature and Related Topics, from 1531–1774 (Philadelphia, Pa., 1935). More specific is L. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994). For the reception and application of English conduct literature in America, see R. L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1993).

  13 Childs, ‘Prescriptions for Manners’ (D.Phil. thesis), pp. 143–287, and Mason, Gentlefolk (see n. 12 above), pp. 253–90.

  14 LRO, DDB Ac 7886/125 (c.1746), R. Parker, Alkincoats to E. Parker. On secrecy and the elite family, see Pollock, ‘Living on the Stage of the World’.

  15 See Gentleman's Magazine, 67 (1797), pt 2, p. 612: ‘[John Parker] from his education, rank, and habits of life, was well known and much respected in the circles of the polite and noble, on account of his great hilarity, benevolence and generosity, not to mention the hereditary characteristic of Browsholme – a boundless hospitality.’ Consider also Edward Parker's obituary in Gentleman's Magazine, 65 (1795), pt 1, p. 82.

  16 WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St 6/1/50 (n.d.), loose sheet, M. Warde to M. Warde.

  17 See, for example, LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), f. 275.

  18 See LRO, DDB/81/25 (1775), f. 10; LRO, DDB/81/29 (1776), fos. 33–4; and LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), fos. 75, 214.

  19 LRO, DDB/81/17 (1772), f. 73.

  20 LRO, DDB/72/321 (2 June 1773), J. Parker, London, to T. Parker, Alkincoats. In a similar manner, John Parker recommended a Mr Sheridan to his acquaintance in 1778: LRO, DDB/81/33B (1778), f. 57.

  21 LRO, DDB/81/20 (1773), f. 72.

  22 LRO, DDB/72/305 (10 June 1775), E. Shackleton, Alkincoats, to R. Parker, London.

  23 LRO, DDB/81/13 (1771), f. 77.

  24 LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), f. 47; LRO, DDB/81/32 (1777), f. 99.

  25 WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St 6/1/50 (16 Aug. 1745), M. Clayton to M. Stanhope; HL, HM 31201 Anna Larpent's Diary, 1, 1790–95, f. 20.

  26 See Nash's ‘Rules to be observed at Bath’, of 1742, in Goldsmith, Richard Nash, pp. 31–3. See also WYCRO, Bradford Sp St 6/1/50 (6 June 1742), M. Warde, Squerries, to M. Warde, Hooton Pagnell: ‘every day was employed in receiving or making visits, an Intrusion I was rather sorry for … as a ceremonious visit sometimes interrupted us in schemes we had rather pursued en famille, as confining us to the house and fixing the tea table in the drawing room, which we had rather proposed following into a wood …’

  27 See LRO, DDB/72/132 (16 May 1754), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats; LRO, DDB/72/101 (n.d.), A. Pellet, London, to E. Parker, Alkincoats. For a fascinating comparison with an earlier period, read Whayman's account of John Verney's laxity in making wedding visits in 1680 and the corresponding resentment of his relatives, in her ‘Sociability and Power’ (Ph.D. thesis), pp. 276–324. Parallel arguments for later eighteenth-century America about rituals of inclusion and exclusion can be found in Bushman, Refinement of America (see n. 12 above), pp. 49–52.

  28 LRO, DDB/72/310 (16 March 1777), E. Shackleton, Alkincoats, to R. Parker, London.

  29 Kin were predominant in the social life of Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, Norfolk, in the sixteenth century and very close kin in that of Ralph Josselin in the seventeenth century: Macfarlane, Ralph Josselin, pp. 153–60, and personal communication from A. Hassell Smith.

  30 LRO, DDB//81/39 (1781), f. 101.

  31 LRO, DDB/81/37 (1780), fos. 187, 263.

  32 It is widely recognized that mealtimes were in flux over the course of the eighteenth century. For a rather quaint, but well-illustrated discussion of eating habits, see Hole, English Home Life, pp. 108–13. A more socially specific account can be found in Cruikshank and Burton, L
ife in the Georgian City, pp. 27–45. All that can be said with confidence of gastronomic habits in the North, is that breakfast was taken early to mid-morning, dinner mid- to late afternoon and supper late evening. The advancement of the polite dinner hour was acknowledged by Elizabeth Shackleton when she talked of eating dinner ‘at the fashionable hour four o'clock’, and this was the time chosen by Thomas and Betty Parker for their celebration dinners, see LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 94.

  33 See Cruikshank and Burton, Georgian City, pp. 40–43.

  34 LRO, DDB/81/37 (1780), f. 35.

  35 See above, pp. 168–9; Shammas, ‘Domestic Environment’.

  36 B. Kowaleski-Wallace, ‘Women, China and Consumer Culture in Eighteenth-Century England’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29 (1995–6), p. 165. See also id., ‘Tea, Gender and Domesticity’.

  37 LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), f. 135.

  38 LRO, DDB/81/22 (1774), f. 29; LRO, DDB/81/31 (1777), f. 44; LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), f. 103.

  39 These phrases are taken in sequence from LRO, DDB/72/445 and 127 (1754–55), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats; LRO, DDB/72/220 (12 Jan. 1769), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats; LRO, DDB/72/115 and 167 (24 Jan. 1757), A. Pellet, London, to E. Parker later Shackleton, Alkincoats.

  40 LRO, DDB/72/225 (25 July 1769), W. Ramsden, London, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats. Criticisms of female visiting can be found in a letter ‘To a Very Young Lady on Her Marriage’ by Dr Swift, in New Letter Writer, p. 60; and Gentleman's Magazine, 6 (1736), p. 390. A bubbling account of a female gathering over a singing tea kettle and the morning paper is reproduced in R. Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (Oxford, 1990), pp. 425–6. John Brown linked tea drinking and defamation in 1708, see Ashton, Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne, 1, pp. 95–6. For a brief, but suggestive gloss on the complaint literature, see Childs, ‘Prescriptions for Manners’ (D.Phil, thesis), pp. 255–7.

  41 LPL, MS 8752 (1776), 7 July; LPL, MS 8753 (1778), 1 May; LPL, MS 8754 (1779), 2 June.

  42 LRO, DDB/81/33A (1778), fos. 250 and 208; LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), fos. 235a, 236, 239, 240, 277–9.