Read The Gentleman's Daughter Online
Authors: Amanda Vickery
The Gentleman's Daughter (7 page)
Individual variations notwithstanding, some concluding generalizations can be made. All these women were members of the lesser gentry (at least by marriage), all were intimate with the same Lancashire families and all were enmeshed in a tissue of friendships which embraced the upper trades and professionals. Too often the manuscripts of Georgian commercial families have been studied without reference to the surviving records of their landed neighbours. By reading the personal papers of commercial families in conjunction with those of the landed gentry, a neglected aspect of the pyramid of local society is revealed. In social and administrative terms, east Lancashire was dominated by landed gentry, polite professional and greater commercial families – a local elite who exhibited considerable cohesion. Their incomes, whether in rents, fees or profits, were broadly comparable. The menfolk of these families tended to be educated at northern grammar schools, not southern public schools, particularly so in the early to mid-eighteenth century.
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They served together on local turnpike commissions and were listed side by side on the Commissions of the Peace for Lancashire and Yorkshire. In addition to their shared role in administration, landed gentlemen, professional gentlemen and gentlemen merchants stood shoulder to shoulder on the grouse moor and riverbank. They combined for hearty, exclusively male meals, notably pre-expeditionary breakfasts and formal dinners at local inns. Meanwhile, their wives exchanged information on print and politics, local news, servants, prices and fashions, recipes and remedies, child-bearing and child-rearing. Whole families encountered each other at dinner-parties and ate off similar mahogany dining-tables – most of them bespoke from the same rising firm of craftsmen, Gillows of Lancaster.
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These families employed a bevy of female servants, yet most of their households were sufficiently unassuming to escape the tax on male servants levied in 1780. All were mobile on horseback, by one- or two-horse chaise, or by hired post-chaise, for to have one's movements dependent upon the whim of others was anathema to respectable independence, or, as one anxious mother put it in 1731, ‘may look low in the eye of the world’. Nevertheless, few genteel
families could afford the great status symbol of a crested coach and six horses – the possession of which was a universal shorthand for worldly wealth and social prestige.
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Nor did genteel families expect to decamp to London for the Season.
Intellectual sympathy across the elite was pronounced. Establishment prejudice, Whig and Tory, and unenthusiastic Anglicanism is everywhere apparent. Nevertheless, both polite Dissenters, such as the gay Quakers and genteel Methodists could be absorbed into the elite, since the most significant religious faultline in the county ran between Protestants and Catholics, not between the different brands of Protestantism. Mrs Shackleton, for instance, saw a smattering of her circle embrace Methodism in the 1770s, and although she was far from impressed with the growth of the ‘methodistical tribe’ and thought it imprudent for her son John to marry the Methodist Miss Dawson, she did not cut off social contact. Moreover, she regularly entertained the Ecroyds of Edge End, a prominent Quaker family involved in the textile trade. By contrast, two local gentry families with whom Elizabeth Shackleton had virtually no contact were the Tempests of nearby Broughton and the Townleys of Townley, both of whom were Catholic. Indeed, of the latter she sniped in 1779, ‘Mr Townley of Townley raising 500 men to fight the combined fleets. Will a Roman Catholick fight for England or France?’
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Faced with a common enemy, Anglicans and wealthy Dissenters could unite in the name of Protestant gentility.
Of course this local elite did not exist in a vacuum. Gentry and professionals were often linked by blood and friendship to the supreme county families; many commercial and gentry families had relatives struggling in lesser trades. All of these factors led to minute discrimination within the local elite itself – by their associations were they known – but snobbery was not a powerful enough solvent to separate into distinct landed, professional and commercial fractions families who had so much else in common. However, was the social cohesion of landed, professional and commercial families peculiar to north-east Lancashire? After all, the parish of Whalley is not England. Different social relations may have prevailed in areas without a large lesser gentry presence, a long history of manufacturing, or with a different religious history. Yet because few historians have concerned themselves with the lesser gentry, the case studies which would settle the issue are scarce. This is not to suggest, on the other hand, that north-east Lancashire was aberrational. Far from it. One of the distinctive characteristics of English social structure according to eighteenth-century foreign travellers was the extraordinary interpenetration of land and trade. De Saussure noted in 1727, ‘in England commerce
is not looked down upon as being derogatory, as it is in France and Germany. Here men of good family and even of rank may become merchants without losing caste. I have heard of younger sons of peers, whose families have been reduced to poverty through the habits of extravagance and dissipation of an elder son, retrieve the fallen fortunes of their house by becoming merchants …’
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Moreover, cultural homogeneity has been stressed by many eighteenth-century historians, notably those unhampered by a prior commitment to a tale of Victorian middle-class emergence.
From the Restoration, finds R. G. Wilson, the merchant oligarchy in Leeds had more in common in terms of social life with Yorkshire gentry than with humbler Leeds clothiers. Merchants enjoyed a similar income to the lesser gentry, and had a comparable taste for luxury goods and fashions:
There was a uniformity of upper-class taste and design in Georgian England, which saved the rich from the censures of vulgarity that were later levelled against the leaders of the new industrial society. There was no division between north and south, no clash between the gentility of the aristocracy and the barbarity of urban society … Before 1780 there was one pattern of living, that manifested by the aristocracy.
This style of living set the gentlemen merchants apart from the self-made in the town, since ‘the barrier was not one of wealth but of social form’.
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Many achieved ‘a country life in business’ on the northern fringes of the town, and a healthy proportion sank their profits in a country estate and set about founding a landed dynasty, that being the peak of merchant ambition, according to Wilson. Many factors, therefore, eased the integration of lesser gentry and mercantile society: common business ventures (transport and mining), the exchange of financial services, a shared role in county administration and economic ties that were consolidated by intermarriage. This social and cultural integration can be found elsewhere if the search is made. Even John Smail concedes (rather at odds with his overall thesis) that ‘the evidence from Halifax amply confirms that the boundary between the commercial and professional elites and landed society was not very clear’. At least some members of the Halifax commercial elite supped, rode and intermarried with leading county families.
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A similar story could be told further afield. The potentially lively social intercourse of commercial, professional and landed elites in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Nottingham is demonstrated by the diary of Abigail Frost Gawthern (1757–1822), the daughter of a grocer and the wife of Nottingham white-lead manufacturer. After her husband's death in
1791, Gawthern managed the works until 1808, when it was sold off, and administered considerable property in the town and surrounding countryside. Her daughter married a captain in the 100th Regiment of Foot in 1812. Of Gawthern's social position, Adrian Henstock concludes,
Her circle of relatives and friends embraced members of all classes from the titled families, the county gentry, the clergy and visiting army officers, to the attorneys and respectable tradesmen, all of whom constituted Nottingham Society in this period and whose boundaries were often fluid. In her later life, Abigail Gawthern was both a Nottingham manufacturer and a county landowner.
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The comparative inclusiveness of polite society in the provincial south is revealed by the diaries of James Oakes, one of the wealthiest manufacturers and bankers in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. Through his mother, Oakes was related to the Suffolk gentry and, through his father, to wealthy cotton merchants and dyers, whose sons went on to become barristers in London. Oakes's sisters married prosperous Liverpool merchants and when he visited Liverpool and Manchester, he was entertained by both mercantile elites and northern gentry. Like other prominent men in Bury, Oakes could claim a common cultural background with the gentry; he belonged to the same clubs and libraries, pursued a similar interest in agriculture and inventions, painting and architecture, entertained as liberally and enjoyed the same public assemblies and private parties. Oakes and his ilk also shared the burden and prestige of local administration with the neighbouring gentry and aristocracy: he served as County Treasurer, Receiver-General of the Land Tax, Deputy-Lieutenant, Justice of the Peace and as a regular member of the Grand Jury. All of which leads his editor Jane Fiske to conclude, ‘Bury society was comparatively open. There was no discernible line between urban and country gentry.’ On the other hand, ‘it was a finely graded society in which men were very conscious of status. … [and] Oakes always made a distinction between gentlemen in which he included himself, and the middling or trading sort and the lower orders.’
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Thus, again, the crucial social divide was seen to run between genteel commerce and retail trade, between the polite and the vulgar, not between land and trade as such.
Nor is it likely that Bury was an oasis of social mingling in an otherwise snobbish south-eastern waste, given R. G. Wilson's recent research on the uniformity of polite taste in commercial Norwich and gentry Norfolk.
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By 1700 in Northamptonshire, Alan Everitt tells us, the majority of younger sons from gentry families turned to the Church or to trade in the metropolis, while daughters were more likely to marry a London merchant than a local
gentleman.
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On finally reaching London, confirming evidence can be found amongst the papers of the patriciate. Nicholas Rogers's account of the ‘big bourgeoisie’ in Hanoverian London, stresses their social confidence and the polite culture they complacently shared with the gentry. They should not be seen as desperately emulative of the landed aristocracy he suggests, rather as secure possessors of urban gentility: ‘Refinement was not the exclusive preserve of landed culture. Merchants employed fashionable architects, portrait artists and statuaries; rubbed shoulders with the gentry at the local assembly rooms and spas; joined them at the races and the hunt; and invited them to share in the annual round of civic convivialities.’
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The social cohesion of landed, professional and gentry families was not necessarily the universal experience, but it was nevertheless widespread in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Of course, this engagement was not without its tensions. Satires disparaging the aspirations and pretensions of trading families circulated widely, and a political language that characterized land and commerce as enemies was certainly available, although its popularity fluctuated.
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There were obviously instances when political conflicts were aligned along a land/trade divide, but these were relatively few in the mid-eighteenth century, when social commentators often emphasized the shared interests of the comfortably off. As Bob Harris reports in a slightly different context, ‘In 1753, the essay-paper the
Protester
defined the “middle ranks” as the “Gentry, the Liberal Professions and the whole mercantile Interest”. William Beckford's often-quoted definition of the “middling people of England” it is worth recalling, included country gentlemen and yeomen, as well as manufacturers and merchants.’
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Undoubtedly the political tensions between land and commerce increased towards the end of the eighteenth century, and it is possible that manufacturers, unlike rentiers and financiers, became progressively frozen out of land-based polite society as the nineteenth century advanced. Indeed, it is Wilson's contention that while the Yorkshire elite could easily absorb greater merchants in the eighteenth century, it drew the line at manufacturers in the nineteenth. Certainly, a literary distinction between genteel merchants and vulgar manufacturers had popular currency throughout the period. The commentator and cleric Josiah Tucker, for example, distinguished in 1757 between ‘farmers, freeholders, tradesmen and manufacturers in middling life and … wholesale dealers, merchants and all persons of landed estates … in genteel life’. Meanwhile, novelists sympathetic to trade made heroes of merchants at the expense of new manufacturers. Nevertheless, the experience of the Preston cotton manufacturers John and Samuel Horrocks, whose children married into clerical and Domesday families, suggests the continued inclusiveness of Lancashire high society in the 1810s and 1820s and beyond, a feature which has been remarked by other studies of the county.
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