The Gentleman's Daughter (8 page)

8 Standen Hall, Clitheroe, Yorkshire. The austerely elegant seat of Serjeant John Aspinall, a gentleman barrister on the northern circuit, who acted against the interests of the Parkers of Browsholme and the Listers of Gisburne Park in the disputed Clitheroe election of 1781. Elizabeth Shackleton suspected he had taken a bribe to ‘enable him to make a Portico or add a Venetian window to the Beauties of Standen’.

It has been customary to imagine the gentry, the professions and the upper trades as distinct strata of the social hierarchy. It makes more sense, however, to see each as a thread in the complicated texture of genteel society – a woven fabric or an intricate cobweb being more exact metaphors to conjure social structure and social relations in the provinces. In parochial terms, the lesser gentry, the genteel trades and the respectable old professional families constituted the local elite. In national terms, contemporaries thought of them as the polite, below the quality, but occupying a comfortable eminence from which to patronize the vulgar. These were the women who, in Eliza Haywood's understanding, were not ‘placed so high as to have their actions above the Reach of Scandal’, but those ‘who have Reputations to lose, and who are not altogether so independent, as not to have it their Interest to be thought well of by the World’. They belonged to ‘the Little Gentry’, who went ‘in such Crowds to all Places where their Superiors resort …’
⁶⁷
While these families were linked by a web of kinship to the great, it would be mistaken to see them as simply fawning junior
members of a monolithic upper class. Their relation to the greater gentry and nobility was ambivalent: fascinated admiration, deferential respect, scandalized horror, amused condescension and lofty disregard can all be illustrated from the manuscripts of the genteel.

The genteel read of the scandalous activities of London-based lords and ladies with an appalled and untiring fascination, but strongly defined themselves against such outrageous self-indulgence. Pamphlets such as
The Court of Adultery: A Vision
, which satirized ‘Tonish’ excesses and censured the likes of ‘Chats—H's sprightly dame’ (the Duchess of Devonshire), were read with general satisfaction. Dissertations on metropolitan immodesty were relished: ‘I recd a long and an entertaining letter from Mrs Ramsden of the present Indecent, Fashionable meetings of the conspicuous, Great Ladies of this Isle, fie for shame.’
⁶⁸
Even those on visiting terms with the great, tempered their deference with a little humour. Mrs Parker of Cuerdon gently satirized her titled guests even as she struggled to honour them: ‘tho’ I could not place Lady Egerton's Bum upon so rich a Sopha as she had at Home or Give Her so Elegant a dinner as she wou'd have had at Heaton House the best I coud procure for her was at her service.' She took every opportunity to point out arrogant perversity, such as that of Lady Jane Clifton, who refused an invitation to a Preston assembly with the excuse ‘Because the Ladies dress their Heads so High and she woud not dress hers so – Good Lord what a Reason – but she is a woman of quality’. With equal wry amusement, Miss Fanny Walker made fun of the ‘vastly formall’ London company at a Yorkshire house-party when she entertained ‘three of the longest chinned familys that ever was seen’.
⁶⁹
The old provincial families flattered themselves that they could see the real worth behind fine feathers, broad acres and smart connections. Most would have enjoyed the dry proverb Elizabeth Shackleton transcribed into her diary in 1768: ‘How wise was nature when she did dispence a large estate to cover want of sense’.
⁷⁰
Nor did the genteel automatically seek marital alliances with the fashionable: the mercantile Stanhope clan tried to talk their rich heir Watty Spencer Stanhope out of buying a London house as they feared he would surely end up marrying an expensive ‘Woman of quality’.
⁷¹
Snobbery did not lead the lesser gentry automatically to associate themselves with the values of the fashionable aristocracy. Provincial gentility had rewards of its own. As Ann Pellet counselled her niece on the superior fortunes of the Browsholme family, ‘tho their grandure at
present
may seem a little more conspicuous – yet … a constant uniform life generally produces more solid happiness to a family than all the Glorious fatigues of dress & equipage’.
⁷²
Genteel society has a distinct history. It is to women's role in this that the discussion now turns.

9 ‘The Assignation’, from the
Lady's Magazine
(1772), depicting the thrill of clandestine correspondence.

THE WALK TO THE ALTAR was the most decisive a lady was ever to take. For all but the most privileged, or the most desperate, there was, quite literally, no going back. As marriage was ‘a thing of the utmost consequence’, involving ‘so material a Change of Life’,
¹
the awful significance of a woman's choice loomed very large. As the wary Mary Warde put it on the occasion of her cousin's marriage in 1742, ‘No Woman of understanding can marry without infinite apprehensions, such a step inconsiderately taken discovers a Levity and Temper that is allways displeasing to a looker on … & if the woman has the good fortune to meet with a man that uses her well it is being happy so much by chance that she does not deserve it’. In short, the reckless bride risked bondage to misery. When the worldly Miss Warde herself resolved on ‘taking the most Material Step in Life’ three years later, her letters were replete with solemn reflections: ‘you cannot imagine how infinitely serious it makes me, a temper naturally thoughtful & diffident of itself cannot be otherwise on such an occasion, & the leaving my Father & Brother is more painfull then I will attempt to express, or perhaps a steadyer mind would feel …’
²
Of course, a match well made was a bed of contentment for the partners, the tap-root of stability in a household, a firm promise for the lineage and a secure bulwark in the defensive networks of the kindred. At best, marriage could offer a sustaining union of bodies and souls, as conventional blessings so often envisioned. After all, according to the Book of Common Prayer, one of the express purposes of marriage was to promote the mutual society, help and comfort of the partners. Well-wishers routinely testified that the union of man and woman offered the greatest happiness this side of the grave; that mutual love would bear couples up through all the trials of life. Needless to say, the keys to earthly paradise were not
given to all, and those without might endure thirty years or more in matrimonial purgatory. The petty irritations, inconveniences and denials to which the married women was heir were carefully noted by observant spinsters: ‘really there is so much Care in a Married State & fiddle faddle in most Men's Tempers that I Esteem myself vastly happier in having nothing to do with 'em …’ Spectacularly disastrous marriages were sufficiently publicized to lead even the decorous to liken wedlock to the ‘Dreadful noose’.
³
The vagaries and varieties of marital fortune were too conspicuous to be ignored.

Contemporaries were convinced of the determining role of ‘temper’ and ‘disposition’ in marriage; a belief in the significance of personality which novels only reinforced. Amiability, generosity and good sense recommended the pleasant husband. Yet these sterling qualities were hardly distributed equally amongst the male population, so a shrewd evaluation of a suitor's character was crucial. Friends and family drilled young women on the monumental importance of making their marital beds such that they could lie in them for a lifetime: ‘When you are of an age to think of settling,’ Elizabeth Kennedy urged her daughter in 1801, ‘let your affections be placed on a steady sober, religious man, who will be tender and careful of you at all times … Do not marry a very young man, you know not how he may turn out; it is a lottery at best but it is a very just remark that “it is better to be an old man's darling than a young man's scorn”.’ Altogether conventional in her advice, Kennedy did not neglect to mention the material underpinnings of connubial bliss, reminding her daughter ‘that when poverty comes in at the door love flies out at the window’.
⁴
A prudent and considered choice was of the essence if a girl was not to be architect of her own misfortune.

Not that young lovers were expected to decide alone, listening only to the promptings of their urgent hearts. We should be suspicious of the entrenched argument that the eighteenth century saw the substitution of the arranged marriage with the romantic betrothal, not least because the artificial dichotomy of cold-blooded arrangement versus idyllic freedom makes a mockery of the wide spectrum of courtship practices which have been identified in the early modern period. The seventeenth-century family was not so uniformly cold-blooded as Lawrence Stone has suggested, nor was the eighteenth-century one so universally romantic.
⁵
Among the seventeenth-century nobility, upper gentry and urban plutocracy, parental decisions usually governed choice, although formal consent was always sought. Less preoccupied with dynastic imperatives, the lesser gentry allowed their children more initiative and privacy in courtship. Among the propertied middling sorts, parental consent was useful, but not decisive
for sons, but across all social classes, early death robbed many parents of the opportunity to arrange their children's future. A good match satisfied a range of criteria, including family advancement, the ideal of parity, character and affection. Of course, the relative importance of these factors varied – piety might count for more with a Puritan gentleman than with an Anglican peer – but strategic considerations weighed heavily with most propertied parents, from the dynastic elite to the modestly prosperous, and often in the calculations of their more conformist children. Mutual affection which crowned an advantageous match was a welcome blessing, but immoderate passion leading couples to disregard other criteria was thought near-insane. Nevertheless, manuscript evidence of heady, romantic expectation among the wealthy abounds, surfacing in courtship correspondence as early as 1400. Wronged lovers complained of lovesickness in the Stuart church courts, and the torture of frustrated passion brought many patients to the consulting rooms of the celebrated early seventeenth-century physician Richard Napier.
⁶
The eighteenth-century romantic novel did not arrive upon the discursive scene wholly unanticipated.

However, this is not to deny the extraordinary eighteenth-century proliferation of literature which glamorized romantic experience. The early eighteenth century has been isolated as a key period of innovation in prescriptions for manners, a period when courtesy writers began to dwell at some length on the naturalness of female virtue, the benefits for men of female company and the positive pleasures of matrimony and domestic life.
⁷
The mid-eighteenth century saw the phenomenal success of the novels of sensibility, which glorified the supposedly female qualities of compassion, sympathy, intuition and ‘natural’ spontaneous feeling, while neglecting the cardinal virtues of reason, restraint and deference to established codes and institutions. But new idioms do not necessarily connote new behaviour. This literature may have exaggerated young people's expectations, but hope and experience are different creatures as parents and pamphleteers monotonously cautioned. It may be that the titled elite (on the basis of whose papers most arguments are made), developed more of a taste for the sugar-frosting of romance on their political and dynastic alliances, but love hardly carried all before it. Nobles who threw away All For Love remained the deluded exception, for as the wits put it ‘Love in a cottage? … Give me indifference and a coach and six.’
⁸
Noble endogamy was still emphatically the norm, only now parents sought to achieve by education and an exclusive marriage market that which had previously been enforced by fiat. After all, if young people met only suitable companions, they would assuredly make a suitable, free choice. So it was that when the seventeen-year-old Lady Catherine Cecil gave her hand to Viscount Perceval in 1737, she assured him that she would not have agreed to an arranged marriage: ‘She told him, among other things, that she would have refused the Earl of Berkeley and the Duke of Leeds if they offered.’
⁹
A little more romance in the aristocratic drawing-room was hardly a social revolution in the making. Nor did genteel matchmaking suddenly become a thrilling free-for-all either. The propertied did all they could to ensure that their children planted their affections in prudent soil. As Pollock has astutely observed ‘it is uncoerced consent which lies at the heart of our marital system not unconstrained choice’.
¹⁰