Aristocrats (66 page)

Alphabetical list of the library at Castletown, c.1780.

West Suffolk Record Office

Bunbury Papers

Bunbury letter books: 36 volumes, in copy books, of letters from Lady Louisa Conolly to Lady Sarah Lennox, 1761–1821, together with misc. other papers relating to Louisa’s life, all in the hands of Emily Bunbury (née Napier).

Catalogue of the library at Holland House, 1775. Inventory of Furniture and Effects at Holland House, 1775.

Papers of Sir Charles Bunbury, relating to the affairs of Henry Fox, first Lord Holland at his death, including 1771 rent book for Holland House, letter book with details of money owed to Fox as Paymaster of the Forces, other papers related to Fox’s tenure at the Pay Office.

West Sussex Record Office

Goodwood Papers

Correspondence of the second Duke of Richmond and his wife, mainly from the late 1730s.

Letters from the Earl of Kildare about his marriage to Lady Emily Lennox, 1746–7.

Letters from Emily, Countess of Kildare, to her parents, 1748–50.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chapter One

Prologue and Part One

Ruth K. McClure’s
Coram’s Children. The London Foundling Hospital in the Eighteenth Century
, 1981, gives details (taken from the charity’s minute books) of the opening of the Foundling Hospital. Phillis Cunnington and Catherine Lewis,
Charity Costumes
, 1978, the same authors’
Costumes for Births, Marriages and Deaths
, 1972, and Anne Buck,
Dress in Eighteenth-Century England
, 1979, provide information on the clothes of foundling children, and details of the century’s costumes and fashions: I have used them throughout the book.
Images of London. Views by Travellers and Emigrés 1550–1920
, describes the second Duke of Richmond’s commission from Canaletto of the two views from Richmond House. Ronald Paulson,
Hogarth: his Life, Art and Times
, 1971, also contains information about the Foundling Hospital as well as a description and analysis of ‘The Indian Emperor’, his painting of amateur theatricals which shows Caroline Lennox, aged nine, on the stage, her parents in the audience and a bust of Newton surveying the proceedings. The Earl of March,
A Duke and His Friends. The Life and Letters of the Second Duke of Richmond
, 1911, contains information about the career of the second Duke of Richmond, together with excerpts from his letters. Robert Halsband’s,
Lord Hervey, an Eighteenth Century Courtier
, 1973, tells the story of Hervey’s friendship with Stephen and Henry Fox, describes the marriage of Stephen Fox to the thirteen-year-old Elizabeth Strangways-Horner and gives details of Hervey’s relations with the second Duke of Richmond at the Court of George II. The Earl of Ilchester’s
Henry Fox, First Lord Holland, his Family and Relations
, 2 vols., 1920, is a sympathetic account of Fox’s political career. Its account of Fox’s friendships and its use of the vast Holland House archive cut several corners for me.

Part Two
Peter Clark, ed.,
The Transformation of English Provincial Towns
, 1984, Sir John Summerson,
Architecture in Britain 1530–1830
, 1953, and R. S. Neale,
Bath 1680–1850: a Social History
, 1981, were all useful in constructing my picture of
Bath. John Brooke’s
The House of Commons
, 1968, together with the DNB have been invaluable in tracing the political fortunes of the male figures in my narrative. John B. Owen,
The Eighteenth Century 1714–1815
, 1974, Stanley Ayling,
The Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham
, 1976, Paul Langford,
A Polite and Commercial People
, 1989, have similarly helped my understanding of the ideological and political underpinnings of the Whig élite in the mid-eighteenth century.

Part Three
Four books provided sumptuous accounts of Dublin’s architecture and of the building of Irish country houses, Carton and Castletown prominent among them: Desmond Guinness,
Georgian Dublin
, 1979; Dan Cruickshank,
Georgian Buildings in Great Britain and Ireland
, 1985; Maurice Craig,
Architecture of Ireland from the Earliest Times to 1800
, 1982; and Jacqueline O’Brien and Desmond Guinness,
Great Irish Houses and Castles
, 1992. Without the work of Roy Foster, Marianne Elliott and other Irish historians I could have provided no account of the waves of colonisation in Ireland and the heterogeneous society they created. Roy Foster’s
Modern Ireland 1600–1972
, 1988, and J. C. Beckett’s,
A Short History of Ireland
, 1952, were both invaluable. A. P. W. Malcolmson described the marriage settlement of Emily Lennox and James, Earl of Kildare and put it into the context of other Anglo-Irish marriages in
The Pursuit of the Heiress. Aristocratic Marriage in Ireland 1750–1820
,1982. Brian Fitzgerald’s
Emily, Duchess of Leinster 1731–1814. A Study of her Life and Times
, 1949, is an early, impressionistic but loving life of Emily which concentrates on her first marriage and life at Carton. Emily’s description of the English landscape she admired has a parallel in contemporary landscape painting which has been admirably explored by John Barrell in
The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Paintings 1730–1840
, 1980. The implications of the poses of Reynolds’s portraits of Emily and Kildare have been discussed in Michael Fried’s classic,
Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot
, 1980.

Two books helped me reconstruct Fox’s career at the War Office and in Parliament in the late 1740s: A. J. Guy,
Oeconomy
and Discipline, Officership and Administration in the British Army 1714–63
, 1985, and
The Political Journal of George Bubb Dodington
, ed. John Carswell and C. A. Duelle, 1965. The Earl of Ilchester’s
Home of the Hollands 1605–1820
, 1937, Leslie Mitchell’s
Holland House
, 1980, and
Holland House
, 1875, by Princess Marie Liechtenstein, all contained useful information about the Foxes’ acquisition of and improvements to Holland House. Details of the first Duke of Richmond’s fireworks are found in Horace Walpole’s correspondence and Christopher Hogwood,
Handel
, 1984.

Chapter Two

Part One
For the life and career of the third Duke of Richmond (whose personal papers all appear to have been burned after his death), see Alison Gilbert Olson,
The Radical Duke. Career and Correspondence of Charles Lennox, third Duke of Richmond
, 1961, and M. M. Reese,
Goodwood’s Oak. The Life and Times of the third Duke of Richmond, Lennox and Aubigny
, 1987. Hardwicke’s Marriage Act is described in J. H. Baker,
An Introduction to English Legal History
, 1979, and changing attitudes to marriage in Lawrence Stone,
The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800
, 1977. The most accessible edition of Madame de Sévigné’s letters is edited by Leonard Tancock, 1982. There is an extensive literature about letter writing, which includes Bruce Redford,
The Converse of the Pen. Acts of Intimacy in the Eighteenth Century Familiar Letter
, 1986, Janet Gurkin Altman,
Epistolarity. Approaches to a Form
, 1982, and Elizabeth C. Goldsmith ed.,
Writing in the Female Voice. Essays on Epistolary Literature
, 1989.

Part Two
Brief histories of the Conolly family are found in Lena Boylan,
The Conollys of Castletown. Bulletin of the Irish Georgian Society
, 1968, and Brian Fitzgerald,
Lady Louisa Conolly 1743–1821. An Anglo-Irish Biography
, 1950.

Part Three
Biographies of George III include Stanley Ayling,
George the Third
, 1972, and John Brooke,
King George III
, 1972. Nesta Pain,
George III at Home
, 1975, gives details of the monarch’s obsessive domesticity after his marriage and
The Diaries of Colonel the Hon. Robert Fulke Greville
, 1930, describe his madness. The
Correspondence
of George III
contains his letters to Lord Bute. Sir Lewis Namier’s
Crossroads of Power. Essays on Eighteenth Century England
, 1962, discusses the political turmoil in the years after George’s accession, as does J. Brewer, ‘The Misfortunes of Lord Bute’,
Historical Journal
, 1973. The 1662 version of the
Book of Common Prayer
contains the service of matrimony in use when Sarah married Bunbury.

Chapter Three

Part One
Alec Clifton-Taylor’s
Six English Towns
, 1978, gives a picture of Bury St Edmunds in the eighteenth century. Caroline’s furnishings at Holland House are deduced from the inventory of 1775 printed for the sale of that year as
Catalogue of Furniture and Effects in Holland House
, 1775. For the Foxes’ patronage of Reynolds and Ramsay, see Nicholas Penny ed.,
Reynolds
, 1986, and Alistair Smart,
Ramsay
, 1992. Richard Wendorf discusses Reynolds’s portrait of Sarah in
The Elements of Life: Biography and Portrait Painting in Stuart and Georgian England
, 1990, as does Malcolm Warner in ‘The Sources and Meanings of Reynolds’s “Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces”’,
Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies
, vol. 15. The Foxes’ friends are almost all to be found in the DNB and in the four volumes of J. H. Jesse,
Selwyn and his Contemporaries
, 1843–44. Roger Lonsdale’s
Eighteenth Century Women Poets
, 1989, prints Mrs Greville’s poem on sensibility and a summary of her career. The very different world of blue stockings is described in Sylvia Myers’s
The Blue Stocking Circle: Women, Friendship and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth Century England
, 1990. Early feminist thought is discussed in Katharine Rodgers’s
Feminism in the Eighteenth Century
, 1982, while Vivien Jones’s anthology of writing about women,
Women in the Eighteenth Century. Constructions of Femininity
, 1990, sets feminism in the context of other writing about women.

Two books helped my understanding of women’s salons in Paris in the mid-century, La Duchesse d’Abrantès,
Une Soirée Chez Madame Geoffrin
, 1831, and Janet Aldis,
Madame Geoffrin, her Salon and her Times 1750–1777
, 1905. From a plethora of books on
London, I should mention two, Mary Cathcart Borer’s
An Illustrated Guide to London in 1800
, 1988, and W. Roth,
The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century
, 1896. Ronald Paulson discusses the literary use of metaphors of the stage in
Popular and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth and Fielding
, 1979. Highfill, Bunnin and Langhans’s
Biographical Dictionary of the London Stage 1660–1880
, 1987, describes playhouses, productions and actors’ careers, including that of William O’Brien.

A good discussion of theories of gambling in France is found in John Dunkley,
Gambling, A Social and Moral Problem in France 1685–1792
, 1985. John Ashton’s
The History of Gambling in England
, 1898, describes what games were played where, when and how. Sir George Otto Trevelyan’s leisurely and orotund
The Early History of Charles James Fox
, 1880, describes the Fox brothers’ gambling and Charles James Fox’s conduct in Parliament in the early 1770s, while C. W. and P. Cunnington’s
Handbook of English Costume in the Eighteenth Century
, 1972, gives details of his sartorial habits.

Part Two
Trevor Lummis and Jan Marsh’s
The Woman’s Domain. Women and the English Country House
, 1990, discusses women’s role in estate management over four hundred years.
The Guide to Castletown House
by Paul Caffrey, and Margaret Ann Keller’s
The Long Gallery of Castletown House, Bulletin of the Irish Georgian Society
, 1979, both describe Louisa’s work on the Castletown interior. Fiona Hunt, ‘The Print Room at Castletown House’ (BA Thesis, Trinity College, Dublin), has identified many of the prints in the print-room. The room is also described by Christopher Moore in Fenlon, Figgis and Marshall eds.,
New Perspectives; Studies in Art History in Honour of Anne Crookshank
, 1987.

Attitudes to childbirth are discussed in J. S. Lewis,
In the Family Way. Childbirth in the British Aristocracy 1760–1860
, 1988. Wet nursing is described in George D. Sussman,
Selling Mother’s Milk. The Wet Nursing Business in France, 1715–1914
, 1982. The
Catalogue of the Library of Holland House
, 1775, lists the different medical textbooks there. Children’s education in the
round is the subject of John Lawson and Harold Silver,
A Social History of Education in England
, 1973, while the education of aristocratic boys is described in George C. Brauer jr,
The Education of a Gentleman. Theories of Gentlemanly Education in England 1660–1775
, 1959. Rousseau’s
Émile or On Education
was published in 1762 while
Eloisa or a Series of Original Letters Collected and Published by J. J. Rousseau
appeared a year earlier. Rousseau’s attitudes towards women and his brief sojourn in England are described in Joel Swartz,
The Sexual Politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
, 1984, and Sir Gavin de Beer,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his World
, 1972, respectively. Changing attitudes towards marriage are discussed in Lawrence Stone
The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800
, 1977 and John R. Gillis,
For Better, For Worse. British Marriages 1600 to the Present
, 1985. The reciprocal relationships between love in life and literature is the subject of Joseph Boone’s
Tradition Counter Tradition. Love and the Form of Fiction
, 1987, while John Mullan considers fiction and theories of feeling and sensibility in
Sentiment and Sociability. The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century
, 1988.