The Gentleman's Daughter (40 page)

Of course, Elizabeth Shackleton's perspective was a distinctive one. As she ailed and aged, she waxed pathetic, believing herself spurned and disregarded at every turn. Awareness of her social descent through marriage probably sharpened her insecurity and bred a defensiveness about her social reception. Painful illness no doubt increased her sensitivity: ‘the treatment I meet with from all sides as I grown into years almost breaks my Heart and my legs swelling more & more.’ Doubtless she was not an easy companion herself, nor necessarily a dispassionate commentator on the incivility of others: ‘When we went to bed I went into John's room & told him I wonder we did not hear from Roben. He snappd & was very rude. Said he had most probably his reasons for not writing. I am sure I have not offended. They are unkind & uncivil to me.’ After the gentle rebukes she ventured to offer her intimates for various small slights, she seemed genuinely astonished to find them suddenly ‘Humpy Grumpy’, ‘quere’ or ‘upon reserve’.
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Yet it is in this very hypersensitivity that the real value of the diary lies for historians. In her irritation and unhappiness Elizabeth Shackleton exploited a conventional language to the full. Her perspective demonstrates the broad range of discursive uses to which civility could be put, some uses altogether unanticipated by Addison and Steele.

Reliant on the rules of decorum, which decreed that inferiors should know their place, civility and politeness were hardly useful tools for everywoman, but for genteel ladies, civility offered an eminent vantage-point from which to patronize men and male sociability. When Elizabeth Shackleton complained ‘the friendships of the present times like those described by Addison are oft Confederacies in vice or Leagues of Pleasure’,
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she enlisted the essayist in support of her critique of
Shackleton's social selfishness. But this vocabulary could be extended even further to derogate the masculine world of local associations, for, in Mrs Shackleton's immortal words, gentlemen were ‘Hottentots, not men, when assembled together.’ In all likelihood, she here drew on Addison's cautionary tale of the unfortunate Hottentot who was brought to England and ‘polish'd out of his natural Barbarity: But upon being carry'd back to the Cape of
Good Hope
… he mix'd in a kind of Transport with his Country-men, brutalized with ‘em in their Habit and Manners, and wou'd never agen return to his foreign Acquaintance.’
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Lacking the temporizing effects of female company at their meetings in local taverns, Mrs Shackleton observed, men threw off the mantle of civilization and revealed themselves as primitive barbarians. She thus tied the progressive evolution of civilized society to the presence of female company. Similarly, when John Shackleton got lost on the moors in 1779 trying to follow the high sheriff's official cavalcade to Blackburn on a beribboned horse, and his wife scorned his ‘Inconsiderate, wild, extravagant doings’, by extension she disparaged the self-important ceremonies of county administration. While no radical, she was ambivalent about inflated masculine rituals: after an impressive description of the three hundred or more gentlemen riding two by two behind the high sheriff, she loftily concluded of ‘this Grand Parade … so much for worldly ambition’. Although gratified that her son had a seat in the high sheriff's coach, her patronizing comment, ‘it will make him esteem'd of Consequence’, indicates a certain personal superiority to such a pompous demonstration of status.
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While Addison and Steele had explicitly linked heterosexual conversation to the advance of human society, it is unlikely that they had envisaged politeness as a tool to undermine the dignity of local government.

Elizabeth Shackleton's story is one of valiant politeness all but overcome. Ultimately, therefore, it presents a poignant study in repeated failure. But, by default, her perspective suggests the practical benefits which might accrue to elite women from the consolidation of polite codes of behaviour. Civility and politeness validated mixed companies where elite women were valued and ‘made much of’. It allowed the possibility that old and ailing women be given social consideration and justified their indignation when respect was denied: ‘I neither can nor will bear this treatment. It is neither proper nor suitable to my Infirmities nor years.’
⁸²
In theory, at least, civility protected elite women from brutal oppression, for ‘when the pale of ceremony is once broken’, wrote another Lancashire diarist, Dolly Clayton, in 1783, ‘rudeness and insult soon enter the breach’. Samuel Johnson may have scoffed that
Chesterfield's Letters to His Son
, ‘teach the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master’,
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but
from the female perspective even a dancing master is a preferable companion to a disobliging bedfellow or an ill-mannered brute.

Elizabeth Shackleton did not see the domestic interior as a complete refuge from the social world. She held cherished ideals about the conduct of social relations which were not shrugged off once she entered the stillness of her own parlour. In the idiom of the conduct-book writers, genuine politeness was not a formal suit only to be worn when the circumstances of ceremony demanded it. Rather, it was a garment that should never be laid aside, and which ought to be worn lightly and gladly, as if it were no encumbrance. Inside and outside, Elizabeth Shackleton contrived to achieve decorum, protocol, elegant ease, polite conversation and, perhaps most important of all, an amiable consideration between men and women. Both in what they reveal about the use of space and the evaluation of behaviour, Elizabeth Shackleton's records give the lie to the notion that the walls of the house constituted the frontier between public and private worlds.

Sociability tied the individual to their many communities. Through the exchange of compliments, gifts, dinners and teas with other elite families, the genteel reaffirmed their gentility and maintained a wide polite acquaintance. Through condescending hospitality they asserted their position as masters and mistresses of servants, as patrons of local businesses and as responsible landowners, but the doors of country mansions were not to be left open to the multitude like the gates of Ranelagh and Vauxhall. Elizabeth Shackleton designated days for ‘publick’ entertainment, when Alkincoats and Pasture Houses were open and common to all, but by their very existence, these occasions bring to mind the rest of the year, when these mansions were open only to select company on invitation. Public festivals remained very distinct from polite dinner parties. Indeed, Mrs Shackleton once invited her polite neighbours the Waltons to one of her feast days, but alerted them in advance to the fact that they would have ‘to sit down with a mix'd Multitude’.
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They declined the invitation. Under ideal circumstances, sociability was engineered according to the rules of decorum. Dependants were to be entertained in the ‘common’ parts of the house, obviously the servants' hall and the kitchen. Casual callers and presentable traders received tea from the common tea set, with an appropriate level of formality in the dining-room or parlour. Elite guests could expect to see the same rooms decked out in the best linen, best china and silverware, and behaved accordingly. When, in practice, visitors forgot polite correctness and made too free with her hospitality, Mrs Shackleton complained of the fatigue of vulgar, intruding people, silently accusing them of treating the house as if it were a public one. But in
invoking the term public, the dichotomy implied here is that between vulgar publicity and polite selection, not between the archetypal male public sphere and a female cloister. Sociability was one of the means by which the public was regulated in the home. Ideally, it was regulated in ways that married with cheerful, domestic companionship and polite distinction, for Mrs Shackleton had a vision of matrimonial pleasure which involved ceremonies and civilities, not the abandonment of all social effort in an orgy of self.

42 (
facing page
) Detail from ‘Prospect of a Noble Terras Walk’, York,
c.
1756 (plate 55).

IN MARCH 1741 Miss Mary Warde rattled off a long list of her diversions for the information and, presumably, the envious admiration of a country cousin:

Despite her disclaiming self-mockery, Mary Warde was not, of course, lacking things to do in the mid-eighteenth-century city.

Much has been made of the eighteenth-century elaboration of commercialized leisure in London and subsequently the regions – what Ann Pellet called the ‘variety of new diversions which the town [devises] to gather the company to Publick Places’.
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However, there is still a surprising vagueness and confusion about the extent of female participation in the overtly commercial high culture which characterized Georgian England. Most recently, historians influenced by Jürgen Habermas have chosen to
characterize the new leisure culture as a component of the ‘public sphere’, ‘a forum in which the private people, come together to form a public, readied themselves to compel public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion’.
³
For this was a civil society which came to occupy the cultural space vacated by a weakened court and an indolent church, to which governments might be called to answer.
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However, some have read Habermas's concept of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’ quite literally, as the foundry wherein middle-class cultural identity was forged.
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One of the most recent surveys of eighteenth-century cultural history, by Ann Bermingham, invokes Habermas to reinstate the traditional view that the public sphere was a bourgeois creation, increasingly closed to women and constructed in opposition to the private domestic sphere: ‘The public represented in this discursive and commercial space … imagined itself to be polite, rational, moral and egalitarian. In universalizing this self-image of enlightened rationality as well as its discursive and institutional formations, the bourgeoisie empowered themselves and disempowered those whom the discourse excluded or opposed … (the rural, the illiterate, the poor, the non-European, the women and children.)’
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By contrast, Lawrence Klein appeals to Habermas in discussion of the same issues, but to legitimize the opposite conclusion – that the public sphere of rational critical discussion which mediated between state and family, offered and validated a public role for women.

Of course, the term ‘bourgeois public sphere’ echoes the vocabulary of public and private spheres long deployed in feminist rhetoric and women's history. The received wisdom of women's history holds that there was once a far distant time when middling and propertied women enjoyed higher public status, but this modest gleaming of female public life was soon snuffed out by capitalism and the forces of reaction. Thus, R. J. Morris reflects on the assemblies, debating societies and ladies' associations of the 1770s: ‘There was a brief glimpse of female public action in the public sphere before the flood tide of evangelicalism swept the gender frontier back into the private and domestic.’
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Moreover, it is a cliché of recent scholarship that any well-dressed woman out and about, ran the risk of being taken for the ultimate public woman, the sexual street-walker. The cultural street-walker had to wait, it is argued, till the 1880s and the department store to make her debut.
⁸

So were women excluded from the emergent commercialized high culture that characterized the eighteenth century, or ‘merely’ from its political expression? Were they culturally active at the beginning of the eighteenth-century and not at its close? Was a female public life seen as tantamount to prostitution? Certainly, an impression of female ascendancy
at eighteenth-century cultural congregations has long been conveyed by social historians. As Langford concludes, ‘women not only shared fully in the literary and recreational life of the day but seemed positively to dominate it’.
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Yet, for the most part, the extent of female engagement with this new culture has been either asserted or denied. Either way it has rarely been systematically researched by historians. Much more has been done by scholars of English literature to reconstruct the role of women as cultural producers and latterly as consumers of print, but, unfortunately, to date there is no comprehensive survey of the public venues to which women were drawn and institutions in which they participated. Hence, there remains an extraordinary mismatch between the precision of the conceptual claims made about women in public and the exceeding murkiness of historical knowledge. What follows is, therefore, a necessarily wide-ranging and schematic reconstruction of the potentialities of public life for polite women in Georgian England.