The Gentleman's Daughter (15 page)
Read The Gentleman's Daughter Online
Authors: Amanda Vickery
Ellen Stock struggled from the outset to establish her authority in the household, but was thwarted by her stepdaughters and disloyal servants. In 1816 Mrs Stock described her husband's earlier behaviour in terms of ‘wayward humours,’ ‘ill-treatment’ and ‘tyranny’. In the same year reported strife led an old friend Bessy Price to wonder aloud if lengthy spinsterhood had rendered Ellen Stock incapable of that wifely servitude which guaranteed harmony. On the contrary, Mrs Stock insisted in June 1816, it was ‘
firm, judicious
opposition’ not ‘abject submission’ which elicited better treatment. By this method, Ellen Stock achieved ten months of uneasy equilibrium. By November 1816, however, relations had deteriorated to the extent that Ellen Stock was contemplating leaving her husband and taking up teaching again: ‘My husband is my terror my misery! and I have little doubt, will be my death,’ she confided to Bessy Price.
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For a brief period in the summer and autumn of 1817 Ellen Stock recorded enjoying a ‘degree of domestic comfort’: her baby daughter provided much diversion, her stepdaughters were cordial, the servants respectful and Aaron Stock prepared to be peaceable. However, amity gave way to strife by Christmas 1817. Events took a public turn in the new year, when Ellen Stock was physically turned out into the street and had to seek
shelter from her brother in nearby Leigh. After two nights in Leigh, brother and sister returned to Wigan to effect either a reconciliation or a negotiated separation. Neither was satisfactorily achieved since Ellen Stock would not agree to Aaron Stock's terms:
Mr Stock wants me either to remain at home pennyless, as an underling to his own daughter, or to be kept by anyone that will take me. I cannot agree to such a reconciliation, or such a separation, whilst he has plenty of money. I am obliged totally to withdraw myself from any domestic affairs, in obedience to my husband's orders; to live in an apartment alone; not to sit at table with the family, but to have my meat sent to me; and amuse myself as I can.
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Later the same month Ellen applied to her lawyer brother again cataloguing her grievances: Stock rebuffed all attempts at affectionate contact, kept her totally without money, made her eat the servant's fare or go without, informed servants of household affairs long before their mistress, encouraged his daughters to conduct the house as they saw fit, periodically ordered her out of room and house, and ridiculed her face and figure.
Tom Weeton's intervention two days later brought only temporary respite. Subsequent letters of recrimination indicate that on at least four occasions between the summer of 1818 and February 1822, Ellen Stock was forced to flee the house with Mary, taking refuge with neighbours in Wigan and friends across the north-west. Each flight ended in ignominy; financial pressure forcing her miserably back to Aaron Stock. In 1819 Stock demoralized his wife still further by relegating her to the back quarters of the Chapel Lane factory and sending Mary to boarding school. Thereafter, he rericted Ellen's access to her daughter and intercepted her letters. Between 1820 and 1822 Ellen Stock was assaulted by her husband, threatened with the lunatic asylum and twice arrested at her husband's instigation. Fearing she would be murdered or transported if she stayed and finding it increasingly difficult to procure clothes and even food in exile, Ellen Stock eventually agreed to an unjust deed of separation signed in early 1822.
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Not unnaturally, Ellen Stock's manuscripts offer the case for her own defence. Autobiography represented a self-proclaimed effort to win her daughter's sympathy: ‘it is surely proper that my daughter should be acquainted with the truth … It is for my little Mary principally I write this.’ To acknowledge such partisanship, however, is not to suggest that Ellen's account had no foundation in events (the assaults and arrests have been checked against local court records and found to be accurate), rather it alerts us to the inevitable partiality of her narrative. In her letters and autobiography, she represented herself as a blameless wife, beset by the
unwarranted abuses of a tyrant. As proof of proper conjugality on her own part, Ellen Stock cited the dedicated mending of Stock's oldest clothes, a chore she hated, and the cheerful relinquishing of all her property save a lump sum of twenty-three pounds pocket money. Ellen maintained throughout that the attempt to please was my ‘daily and hourly study’.
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When still a spinster Miss Weeton had disapproved of
Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son
(1774), because of the author's contempt for matrimony. She believed men and women should marry their social equals in order to achieve harmony and balance. From her criticisms of her then employer Edward Pedder, it is clear she believed the ideal husband was a dignified ‘senior partner’ who protected and esteemed his wife. The ideal wife was industrious and dutiful, yet more than a mere ‘shirt-and-pudding-maker’. Although appalled at Edward Pedder's despotic abuse of his young bride, the governess still counselled submission: ‘I say it is a disgrace to the dignity of the female character for any woman to strive to become master in her husband's house’, and could not condone Mary Pedder's flight to her father.
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But unequal partnership was no more palatable in her own case, partaking more of naked tyranny than benign paternalism: ‘He that should nourish, cherish and protect me … he is the man who makes it his sport to afflict me, to expose me to every hard-ship to every insult.’ In negotiating her husband's authority, Mrs Stock deployed all her persuasions, but quickly learned that Aaron Stock was not susceptible to influence: ‘no powers of rhetoric will work upon him…’ She began to feel that ‘a severity so everlasting’ justified some resistance. Drawing on her experience in the Pedder household, she developed a new strategy, outlined here in June 1816:
The man who rules by tyranny, can never be obeyed by affection; he is submitted to from fear, and delights in abject submission; it gratifies the pride of his heart to see everyone trembling around him. But mark! the tyrant in power, is ever the slave when humbled; he knows no medium, and the only way of living peaceably with him, is … not to be afraid of him; for tyrants are always cowards.
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Unfortunately, this ‘judicious opposition’ met with a modified success for ten months only. As Ellen Stock came to recognize her powerlessness (‘My late exertions have only been like the weak struggles of a drowning insect, and if I cannot be rescued I must inevitably sink!’) her written response to suffering wavered between stubborn indignation, a struggle to attain a state of Christian resignation and outright spiritual despair: ‘My life, my strength cannnot sustain me much more.’
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A traditional tactic open to the persecuted wife was to call on the intervention of kin and the censure of public opinion, but if Aaron Stock's four siblings sympathized with their benighted sister-in-law, then they lacked the spirit to intercede, as her plaint reveals:
if a few individuals would interest themselves for me, the fear of what the world may say, would induce Mr S. to treat me with more appearance of kindness. But he overawes all who come near him … Although many despise him, none dare shew any disrespect in his presence; and whilst they shew him so much outward attention, it is tacit encouragement to his tyranny at home.
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In sum, Ellen Stock's manuscripts conjure a public opinion critical of blatant marital oppression, but ambivalent about personal intervention. She was taken in and supported by a neighbouring doctor and his wife and found a late servant willing to testify to Aaron Stock's ‘cruel usage’, yet most observers seemed to think that active mediation fell to kin.
Ellen Stock threw herself on her brother's mercy and moderate success greeted her attempts to shame him into action. It was perhaps the threat of local scandal which motivated his initial efforts. ‘I would not, at this time, have applied to you’ wrote Ellen in January 1818, ‘had it not been frequently said to me “Why do you not apply to your brother? As he lives so near, it is his duty to protect an only sister from the ill-usage of an unkind unfeeling husband”.’
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However, Tom Weeton's half-hearted intercession did little to deter Aaron Stock. In all probability Weeton simply desired that the affair be kept quiet, while his sister had long been convinced that only the ‘arm of the law’ would ensure Stock kept to his promises. Although a solicitor himself, Tom Weeton refused to defend his sister's interests in negotiation of the deed of separation, pleading his fear of inordinate expenses and that supporting her case would lead Aaron Stock to give up the lease on his mother-in-law's premises. He refused to act as her bondsman. Astoundingly, he chose to act for his brother-in-law instead, apparently encouraging Stock to even harsher terms and advising him to insist that Ellen Stock sign the deed heard read but unseen. Thereby, Mrs Stock unknowingly limited herself to seeing her daughter just three times a year and agreed never to visit Wigan, or to live within a two-and-a-half-mile radius of the town, in return for a yearly income of seventy pounds. Ellen Stock never forgave such ‘unbrotherlike conduct’, relieving her feelings in a twelve-thousand-word narrative sent to Tom Weeton in 1822 (which provides much of the detail of this account) castigating him for his conduct throughout: ‘Your cruel neglect was the astonishment of great numbers in Wigan, who said you would even be quiet if I were in murdering.’
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The confederacy of husband, brother and lawyer shows patriarchy at its most cruel and crushing.
The Shackleton and Stock relationships provide ample evidence of the negative potential of marriage for women in our period. Although John Shackleton only threatened what Aaron Stock carried through, the two cases bear interesting similarities. Both the Shackleton and Stock marriages represented a second attachment for one of the parties, and both households contained stepchildren, whose presence inevitably complicated the creation of trusting, domestic unions. Both Elizabeth Shackleton and Ellen Stock felt their role as mistress to be in jeopardy, fearing their authority over servants was being undermined and, at times, experiencing miserable isolation in their own households. Yet, whatever the cruelty they suffered, neither woman questioned the validity of marriage, nor the principle of patriarchal authority, rather they mourned the fact that their husbands bore so little resemblance to their masculine ideal. Both automatically looked to their male kin for relief, only to find them distant and ineffectual, or sadistically obstructive. Both cases reinforce the general conclusion that faced with determined oppression, a wife who lacked powerful, sympathetic kin or interested neighbours could expect little formal redress. Stylistically, Ellen Stock's account differs from that of Elizabeth Shackleton in the degree of cohesion the aspiring authoress imposed on her retrospective narrative and the extent to which she reflected on her own apparently spotless marital conduct. Obviously, Ellen Stock's degradation outstripped anything suffered by Elizabeth Shackleton, who was released by death not divorce from bed and board. Ellen Stock's accusations of the ‘cruelty’ she met with from ‘a monster of a husband’ may sound extreme or even crazed, but appear a standard feature of the rhetoric of matrimonial breakdown when judged against the records of the church courts. When Lancashire and Cheshire women filed for a separate maintenance in the Chester Church Court in the later eighteenth century they made familiar allegations of barbarous behaviour: accusing their husbands of denying them sufficient victuals, clothing and other necessaries of life; showing hatred, aversion and physical brutality; threatening to murder or maim; and keeping company with prostitutes and adulteresses. Indeed, when Margaret Hunt examined separation suits at the London Consistory Court in the years 1711 to 1713, she found that in half the cases, husbands had threatened to commit their wives to a house of correction or the madhouse. In fact, looking at in another way, an awareness of the acceptable grounds for a legal separation probably structured Ellen Weeton Stock's narrative, which unfolds like a deposition.
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Clearly, we should add the deposition to the novel and the letter-writing manual in any further consideration of the rhetorical models which informed the language of marriage in our period.
The perfect genteel alliance was both prudent and affectionate. Exactly how prudent a choice should be was open to interpretation, however. Possibly opinions on this matter differed most strongly from the contrary vantage-points of youth or age. Yet we would be naive to assume that young suitors themselves did not find their hearts beating faster at the prospect of ‘a most accomplished young lady, with a handsome fortune’, or even ‘an agreable young lady with a genteel fortune’,
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while money and magnificence were conducive to passion in many a female breast. Even one of literature's most ardent heroines, Austen's Marianne Dashwood, who claimed in 1811 that wealth and grandeur had nothing to do with happiness, could not conceive of marrying without a ‘competence’ of about two thousand pounds a year, to support ‘a proper establishment of servants, a carriage, perhaps two, and hunters’.
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The length of a man's rent-roll remained the ultimate aphrodisiac. Of course, families with fortunes to consider did not hand over their daughters to any old adventurer. Male suitors had to plan a romantic campaign with military precision; its skirmishes and reverses welcomed by the confident as a thrilling trial of their masculine audacity. No one expected courtship to be the work of a moment. Even for the perfectly matched, courtship always culminated in tedious financial negotiation, in which the interests of the parties were usually represented by their legal guardians; a device which at least meant that young lovers could project all mercenary motives on their elderly representatives. Courtship, settlement and marriage remained bywords for bargain and sale throughout this period.