The Gentleman's Daughter (39 page)

In his boorish disregard (‘Mr S … Despises me as if a washer woman.’),
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Shackleton set an appalling example for his three stepsons, something Elizabeth Shackleton frequently bemoaned, and he encouraged none of that cheerful heterosexual sociability she craved: ‘He is very unmanerly, not much calculated for a Matrimonial Life.’ Sadly, her unmarried sons followed Shackleton's lead and indulged their homosocial pursuits to the hilt: ‘Kind usage from Sons to a mother & a Husband to a wife. Each following their own Diversion.’
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Although excessive alcohol consumption was a fact of life, it behoved a gentleman to confine its effects to appropriate settings, something John Shackleton manifestly failed to do. Consequently, his behaviour was seen to jeopardize attempts to run an efficient, creditable household. Indeed, he periodically got servants and workmen so drunk in the daytime that they could not continue their work. He was often unfit for business himself in the morning and was ignominiously led home and put to bed by his dependants on numerous occasions: ‘Not a regular house. The Master so much given to Drunkenness.’
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Of course, controlled drinking with inferiors under suitably hierarchical conditions could be approved as proper hospitality, if the host retained his self-possession, but control was hardly Shackleton's watch-word. He behaved with an unpardonable licence towards his social inferiors, getting outrageously drunk on a persistent basis with his tenants, sheepshearers, masons and servants at taverns in Colne and in the servants’ hall at Alkincoats and Pasture House. Not infrequently, he inappropriately allowed such ‘vulgar company’ into the parlour, thereby invading Elizabeth Shackleton's polite sanctum. After the sheepshearing in 1780, the diary records, ‘all drunk in the servants Hall and most Beastly so in the parlour. Great noise & reeking. tho' free from riots.’ The next day the diary recapped: ‘Atkinson wo'd come into the parlour last night & sit with Mr S: all the shearers with the piper John Riley were most horridly drunk. A quantity they did drink. They all went about four this morning. What a nasty, drunken, beastly house for a stranger to clean …’
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This over-familiarity with social inferiors was a very serious failing, for by his actions John Shackleton undermined his claims to proper respect and brought the gentility of his household into question. It was not for nothing that the conduct writers warned
employers, ‘Familiarity breeds contempt’.
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Conversely, John Shackleton could prove ungracious when called upon to offer proper patronage, slighting a boy who came to toss a pancake on Shrove Tuesday ‘Never down stairs all day. Sad Housekeeping. Mr S. quite rude, no charity, he knows nothing of it.’
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In his base familiarities, he obliterated both polite exclusivity and condescending hospitality.

Quite apart from this lack of decorum, which undermined Elizabeth Shackleton's social standing in the world, he also inflicted physical and verbal violence on his ailing and unhappy wife as we have seen: ‘never saw him so rude, vulgar, nor so drunk. He took his horse Whip to me.’
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On occasion, he sabotaged his wife's ceremonies, smashing wine bottles and china, turning over the card table and disrupting all play. He also interfered with the exchange of customary courtesies: ‘Mr & Mrs Walton were so kind as to send Harrison to enquire after my heath. Thinks myself greatly obliged to them. I wo'd have sent today to have enquired after them, but Mr S: wo'd not let me. He Cursed & D—d swore no servant of his sho'd run about the country with such foolish messages …’, and once threatened that she should be denied the use of his horses.
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By no stretch of the imagination could the behaviour of this surly drunkard be described in terms of Addisonian consideration or Chesterfieldian fastidiousness. John Shackleton utterly disgusted his wife on several occasions: ‘he shits in bed with drinking so continualy’; ‘The gentleman came home near 12 at noon & Sans Ceremony went snoring to clean bed – where he farted and stunk like a Pole Cat’; ‘Most exceedingly Beastly so to a degree never saw him worse – he had made water into the fire.’ In the full glare of humiliating publicity he made plain his complete want of physical restraint: ‘Mr S was very sick & spew'd Abundantly. Sat in Tom Brindle's House upon the Long Settle before the fire & exposed himself as Publickly as he co'd … a very nasty, dirty, stinking creature.’ No wonder that his wife once concluded ‘Mr S. like a Brute. No Man.’
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The descriptions of John Shackleton's inconsiderate, unmannerly, wild, beastly, barbarous, brutish, nasty, dirty, odious, hideous, stinking, horrid, rude, surly, cross and vulgar behaviour seem to have exhausted all the adjectives in his wife's overworked stock. His assault on Elizabeth Shackleton's world of dignity and distinction could not have been more complete.

This is clearly only one narrative – the assault of bestiality upon refinement – in a shared story. Nothing survives of John Shackleton's view, nor of any independent criticism of his behaviour. How might John Shackleton have interpreted the struggle? Perhaps he saw himself simply protecting his manly pleasures? Perhaps he saw Elizabeth Shackleton's polite rules as so many artificial constraints on nature. After one offensive
episode, he did report that his father thought Elizabeth ‘a great hypocrite’, so he may have cherished a belief in the sturdy authenticity of masculine excess. From his perspective, perhaps politeness was made up of so many insincere conventions: hypocrisy glorified into virtue, for it was certainly a continuing concern of the writers of courtesy literature that without inner goodwill, a polite performance could so easily become a sham, a veneer of polish concealing cynical self-interest.
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However, this is not to imply that men represent honest and unselfconscious pleasure while women are bent upon its repression, for John Shackleton's excess was undoubtedly as constructed as Elizabeth Shackleton's control – a point made by a notorious pundit of politeness, Lord Chesterfield:

Nevertheless, one does wonder what John Shackleton stood to gain from such debauched conduct. Perhaps it reinforced his masculinity amongst his male peers and dependents? As a code, politeness was always in danger of collapsing into effeminacy. While mixed company guaranteed civilization, too much time spent in the company of women alone was seen as effeminizing. Real men had somehow to strike a mean between an ill-bred vulgarity on the one hand and simpering affectedness on the other. In his boorishness, John Shackleton could never be accused of continental foppery – a proof which may have been important to the merchants he caroused with. It is also worth noting that men enjoyed much more licence than did women to create solidarities through excess, as moralists like Jeremy Collier made clear: ‘Obscenity in any Company is a rustick uncreditable Talent; but among Women 'tis particularly rude. Such talk would be very affrontive in Conversation, and not endur'd by any Lady of Reputation.’
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However, given the high value put on status and self-control in eighteenth-century discourses on elite masculinity, John Shackleton had much more to lose through his humiliating lapses in dignity. If, as E. P. Thompson has suggested, the display of dignified manners was part of the studied performance of cultural hegemony, then Shackleton substantially jeopardized his social and political authority by his lack of restraint,
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– and unlike a roistering lord he could claim no intrinsic noble worth through blood. If anything, mercantile and
manufacturing elites stood in greater need of the genteel social graces to sustain the connections crucial to the quality trade. For instance, Richard Greene, a merchant-adventurer, put down his failure in the tea business precisely to his inability to cut a dash in Calcutta: ‘Indeed my [dear] sister I am so unpolished a shrubb that I am ashamed of my awkward appearance when I am in Gentele company and I woud Actually give 100£ sterling could I even make a bow, but as I never had any expence thrown away on me for that purpose, I therefore must walk in a path below that which by birth I am intitled to in short I look upon it that the want of a little adress has been some thousands of pounds out of my pocket.’ Politeness, not vulgarity, was crucial to commerce. So, in fact, Shackleton's conduct achieved nothing for him but the sour triumph of sharing out that misery he experienced in a marriage with an ailing, ail-but toothless woman, seventeen years his senior. Possibly then his vulgarity was simply a destructive expression of impotent rage.
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An unresolved problem is the extent to which the struggle here between restraint and excess was distinctive to this one unhappy couple. After all, civility and vulgarity may have been banners behind which two unusually unhappy spouses fought their matrimonial battles. Happier couples doubtless effected a better reconciliation between the rugged and the refined. Still, the argument that home-based, mixed-sex sociability nourished marriages and respectability while all-male, ale-house sociability reduced them certainly had a long-standing currency among moralists.
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The notion that men were rough diamonds in need of refinement was widespread. Even the young Lancaster Quaker Mary Chorley used the secular vocabulary of civility to criticize a graceless kinsman: ‘Today my cousin Ford behaved in a very manner [sic] to me. He flatly contradicted me thrice. I think he wants a great deal of polishing.’
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Variants of the same struggle over polite ceremony can be found amongst unhappy couples. The early eighteenth-century diary of a Hertfordshire baronet's wife, Sarah Cowper, offers a useful comparison. Sir William Cowper, for instance, rebuked his wife ‘before servants for giving my neighbour a few flowers without his allowance’, retained custody over tablecloths and sheets, thus humiliating Lady Cowper before guests, and made dinner parties so agonizing for onlookers that the county gave them a wide berth:

The consequence of this humiliation, Lady Cowper complained was to make the household ‘the epitome of hell’. Where the authority of genteel femininity was scorned amongst the servants ‘the sins of men as cursing, swearing, whoring, cheating … the devil of envy, wrath, hatred, malice, lying reigns here without due control’.
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Elizabeth Shackleton's use of the language of civility was profoundly derivative. Polite ideals had extensive currency in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
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Even the journals of the unfortunate Lancashire governess Ellen Weeton are revealing in their manipulation of the discourse of civility. Weeton openly accused her sister-in-law of deploying a forbidding formality that left her socially paralysed, ‘apprehensive of forgetting some little ceremony, or transgressing some rule of etiquette’, a strategy inimical to true politeness. Yet Miss Weeton demanded if not kindness, than at least a ‘common civility’ from her employers, for ‘unless I were degraded something below human, I never would submit to haughtiness, tyranny and ill-temper’, and was gratified when she was ‘very politely received’ and made to feel ‘at home, and quite comfortable’.
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Interestingly, Weeton's journals impart a greater preoccupation with the minute rules of etiquette than is apparent in Shackleton's diaries, an anxiety about externals which could be function of the acute vulnerability of her social position, or a comment on the nineteenth-century codification of politeness, yet she still found in civility a comparable justification for resistance.

Nor was an investment in civility and the derogation of vulgarity confined to northern women. In the 1760s the lawyer Thomas Greene was enraged by the undignified conduct of his uncle, and particularly appalled by the want of consideration shown his mother. If it continues, Greene warned his mother, ‘we shall be under the necessity of discarding him in his old age … I will hear no Death-Bed repentences … So if he do continue to prefer drinking, and being a
great Man
, amongst a Parcel of Taylors & Coblers, to living soberly with you and me, let him follow his Inclination & take the Consequences for his wages.’
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Parson Woodforde disapproved of his brother's cockfighting precisely because it brought him into contact with vulgar company: ‘quite lowlife sort of people, much beneath Jack.’ Similarly, Parson George Woodward despaired of his
gauche and churlish younger brothers: brother Jack had no polite conversation whatsoever, despite his travels, ‘for his curiosity seems to be little more than that of a stage coachman’ who interested himself only in roads, food, drink and landlords; while, in 1755 brother Tom ate the household out of meat, heedless of all the niceties of polite convention – ‘I asked him once, how he managed about suppers, as he never eat cheese or apple pie; he said if he did not happen to be where there was meat, he often eat no supper at all, but smoked his pipe instead of it’. Given this heroic lack of refinement, Woodward contrived to get his brother out of the way when the Warden of All Souls and his wife came to visit ‘(to speak the truth) I did not much care to show them such an uncouth relation of mine’. In the event, Tom invited himself to dinner with a local farmer and his mother and happily smoked all night.
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No suave urbanity for those who shirked the responsibilities of patriarchy.