The Gentleman's Daughter (43 page)
Read The Gentleman's Daughter Online
Authors: Amanda Vickery
47 ‘A Perspective View of the Inside of the Grand Assembly Room in Blake Street’, 1759. Burlington's magnificent new assembly rooms at York (opened in 1732) were said to outshine those of Bath.
Through print, letters and hearsay the polite could take a horrid pleasure in the sensational details, even if they had not witnessed the cross-examination first hand. Scandalous trials and notorious or glamorous criminals added spice to polite conversation throughout the period.
The supreme arena of polite leisure was the assembly – an evening gathering accommodating dancing, cards, tea and, perhaps above all, talk. While the precise origins of the assembly remain obscure, their popularity in the early eighteenth century is manifest in bricks and mortar. London and the spas led the way in the building of assembly rooms, but the
provincial towns of the north were not slow to follow. Assemblies were mounted in custom-built or customized public rooms in Leeds and Liverpool from at least 1726, in Preston from 1728, in Sheffield and Scarborough from 1733, in Whitehaven from 1736, in Beverley from 1745, and in Manchester and Hull well before mid-century, while Burlington's magnificent new assembly rooms at York (opened in 1732) were thought to outshine those of Bath. When the new assembly rooms were opened in Leeds in 1777 a ‘most brilliant appearance of Genteel company’ attended the first ball, and ‘upwards of 200 gentlemen and ladies present, who all appeared to be competitors for politeness of behaviour, gentility and complaisance’ were congratulated by the
Leeds Intelligencer
. From the first, assemblies were synonymous with female diversion. A definition of the assembly in 1751 stressed both its social exclusivity and its mixed-sex constituency: ‘A stated and general meeting of the polite persons of both sexes, for the sake of conversation, gallantry, news and play.’
39
Orchestrated heterosexual sociability was the
raison d'être
of the assembly.
The power and prominence of women at eighteenth-century assemblies were remarked upon again and again. Although some resorts boasted an official master of ceremonies, in many towns a band of gentlewomen and noblewomen were styled the ‘Governors’ of the assembly and often one of their number was singled out as reigning ‘Queen’ of the assembly. From the 1720s a committee of titled ladies, including Lady Panmure and Susanna, Countess of Eglinton, oversaw the conduct of the Edinburgh assembly rooms and ‘agreed upon certain rules’ of conduct and ceremony. At mid-century Miss Nicky Murray wore a gold medal as badge of her position as ‘Lady Directress’. Only in the 1780s was the management of protocol handed over to a male steward. Female management was equally to the fore in Derby, where a succession of lady patrons demonstrated their command of book-keeping and social discrimination, as an entry in the account book for 4 August 1752 indicates: ‘Delivered up the Assembly room to the right Honourable the Countess of Ferrers, who did me the great honour of accepting it. I told her that trade never mixed with us ladies.’ Strikingly, not only were the assembly rooms at Almacks run by a female committee, but the new Almacks gambling club set up in 1770 allowed female members the right of nomination and veto of prospective male members. Mrs Boscawen recorded that ‘Lord March and Brook Boothby were blackballed by the ladies to their great astonishment’. Women's prestige at ‘the exclusive temple of the
beau monde
’ was routinely remarked upon. As late as 1821, men about town still complained about the necessity of being on their best polite behaviour at Almacks
before ‘the
fastidious
PATRONESSES
, that parade up and down here, as the arbitresses of fame and fortune.’
40
Of course, the assembly was not the sole possession of the nobility and their intimates. Some gatherings were more exclusive than others, subscription balls were more select than all-inclusive public balls, but generally the stalwarts of the provincial assembly were the lesser gentry, the professions and the genteel trades. And nationwide, dancing masters acted as impresarios, mounting countless small assemblies for their pupils to which a wide spectrum of respectable parents was drawn.
41
The Doncaster assemblies of the 1740s were regrettably not noted for ‘grand appearances’. In the 1760s the Mrs Wilson who was Queen of the Lancaster assembly had taken lodgings in town rather than submit to the expense of refurbishing the family house in Kendal. A fine appearance she may have had, but broad acres and a considerable fortune were obviously lacking. In 1780 Mrs Owen Cunliffe, the daughter of a Manchester manufacturer, presided over a small Colne ball and, lacking noble consequence, was dismissed as ‘The Little
Queen
’ by the acid Elizabeth Shackleton. In the 1790s a mere Mrs Shaw presided over the Otley assemblies and saw ‘everything conducted with due decorum’. It was gentility, not nobility, which formed the backbone of these provincial congregations, as a no less delighted Eliza Parker reported of the July assemblies in early nineteenth-century Preston: ‘we have been very Gay a great deal of Genteel company is in Town … The first Assembly was a very good one and tonight is expected a brilliant meeting. I never saw so much dress required at Preston before.’ Meanwhile, London had its more modest assemblies, like the assemblies for the City of London and the Borough of Southwark patronized by Bessy Ramsden in the 1760s and 1770s.
42
Whether an assembly was ultra-fashionable or respectably genteel, commentators again and again drew attention to the high visibility of women and, unsurprisingly, the presence of young marriageable women by the score. Mary Warde noted of the assembly at Bury St Edmunds in 1740, ‘it has for a great many Years been famous for the number of pretty Women that the neighbouring Countys send to it … I fancy you have seen the Duke of Graftons & Lord Herveys daughters …’
43
To some observers not only did women seem prominent in the ritual performance of the assembly, they appeared positively bumptious with power. Certainly this was Eliza Haywood's horrified assessment of the ‘Air of Boldness’ with which some fine ladies stormed public Assemblies:
They do not walk but straddle; and sometimes run with a Kind of Frisk and Jump; – throw their enormous Hoops almost in the Faces of those who pass by them; – stretch out their Necks, and roll their Eyes from Side to Side, impatient to take the whole Company at one View; and if they happen to see anyone dress'd less exactly, according to the Mode, than themselves, presently cry out, –
Antiquity to Perfection! – A Picture of the Last Age!
– Then burst into a Laugh, loud enough to be heard at two or three furlongs distant.
44
48a (
above
) and b (
facing page
)
Cuerdon Masquerade
, 1822, two watercolours by Emily Brookes. This select fancy-dress ball was part of the 1822 Preston Guild celebrations, a famous civic festival which took place every twenty years, drawing visitors from across the north.
Whether enshrined in the rule book or not, the assembly was associated with collective female influence. It was not for nothing that the electioneering Walter Spencer Stanhope was warned before the by-election of 1784, ‘The Hull Assembly … is composed of a set of partial proud people … you must … be all things to
all
the women.’
45
The assembly spawned a host of variations, including the masquerade, the ridotto (a combined concert and assembly) and the ridotto al fresco staged in public rooms and gardens, and the musical party, the rout and the drum hosted in private households. Contemporary definitions of these myriad forms of social congregation routinely assumed female participation, indeed most saw heterosexual sociability as the very essence of the event, as here where Smollett defines the drum in 1746, ‘A riotous assembly of fashionable people, of both sexes, at a private house, consisting of some hundreds; not unaptly stiled a drum, from the noise and emptiness of the Entertainment.’
46
As with the assembly, the fashionable private party was associated with female performance and pleasure. As the fourteen-year-old Ellen Barcroft engagingly concluded after the sandwiches, jellies, tarts, procession and dancing of a London rout in 1808, ‘Mem[o]. Spent a most delightful evening indeed’.
47
The aforementioned ridottos and masquerades were a marked feature of London social life, drawing men and women in colossal numbers, but these gatherings enjoyed a scandalous reputation in some quarters and their voguishness was often cited as evidence that young men and women were on the road to debauchery. Concern lay with the sheer size and anonymity of these promiscuous gatherings. A ridotto at Vauxhall Gardens in May 1769, for instance, was attended by roughly ten thousand people. Similarly,
The Times
estimated that because of the mistakenly low price of admission a mixed bag of sixteen hundred people attended a masquerade at the Opera House in February 1798 and, unfortunately, ‘the freedom of conversation which is allowed in these motley meetings, became, on this occasion, indecent ribaldry and licentiousness.’ By the rules of the masquerade, absolute anonymity had to be respected and introductions were dispensed with. Addison in 1701 reported that ‘the women either come by themselves or are introduced by friends who are obliged to quit them upon their first entrance to the conversation of anybody that addresses them.’
Mist's Weekly Journal
may have claimed soothingly in 1718 that ‘there is absolute freedom of speech, without the least offence given thereby’, but in the eyes of many the abandoning of decorum combined with strict anonymity was a recipe for social and sexual chaos. The Bishop of London preached a sermon against masquerades in 1724 and George II made an ineffectual attempt to have masked balls suppressed.
48
Yet the dismay of the desiccated did little to dent the popularity of these fashionable social congregations. The Swiss businessman Johann Jacob Heidegger established the commercial success of the masquerade at the King's Theatre, Haymarket, in the 1730s and 1740s (between operas), admitting all-comers with twenty-seven shillings for the
ticket and the appropriate costume. Subsequently, Vauxhall, Ranelagh and the Dog and Duck gardens in St George's Fields, Southwark, became famous for their masked Venetian balls, as did the Pantheon in Oxford Street, opened in 1772 (‘all the world goes to see this new outlandish Place, Kings, Queens, Duchesses, Countesses & commoners …’
49
), and Carlisle House in Soho Square in the 1760s, under the auspices of Mrs Teresa Cornelys. Even this notorious diversion could be reconciled with polite exclusivity: Jane Pellet noted in 1748, that ‘all people of
taste
have Plays & Masquerades at Home. There was last Thursday the Grandest Subscription Masquerade that was ever know. It is said there was not a Jewel in Town but what was there …’
50
While the masquerade was a diversion associated with the metropolis, indeed it was one of the key emblems of cosmopolitan excess, fashion took it out to the provinces. Two masquerades were offered at the Preston Guild celebrations of 1742. (a civic festival held every twenty years), although a rather proper Miss Richardson, a Yorkshire gentlewoman, used them to advertize northern superiority to such a disreputable diversion: ‘I believe there was the least Company at them, indeed I had not the Curiosity to go …’ In fact, as early as 1722 a comedian at the Preston Guild had urged the bachelors in the audience to seek a virtuous local bride ‘averse to wanton serenades, To midnight Balls and
London Masquerades
’.
51
Nevertheless, a grand masquerade held in January 1779 by Edwin Lascelles at Harewood House near Leeds was enjoyed by ‘some of the nobility and a great number of the neighbouring gentry’ without any negative comment from the Leeds papers, but private masquerades, with their hand-picked guests and ritual unmaskings, never produced the same erotic
frisson
as the anonymous public gatherings. In Pontefract in 1755, when there was masquerading all over town, Jane Scrimshire could detail the costumes of a whole raft of guests in advance.
52
In a melée of sailors, harlequins, ballad singers, fools and columbines she would have no trouble identifying her friends; thus were the mysteries of the masquerade cleared away to meet the demands of provincial gentility. So much for social and sexual chaos.
The most public of the public places where women and men congregated was surely the pleasure garden, the most famous of which were in London: Vauxhall, Ranelagh, Marylebone and Kensington. Vauxhall Gardens on the south bank of the Thames in Lambeth was reopened to the public in 1732 by Mr Jonathan Tyers for ridottos al fresco on summer nights. A wooded twelve-acre grove, Vauxhall offered picturesque alleys and covered colonnades to stroll in and clearances dotted with classical columns, alcoves and temples in which to tarry. With glittering lights strung among the trees, it had an orchestra and an area for dancing. The evening's entertainment usually opened with a courtly promenade down the main walks, the ladies in full evening dress and the gentlemen carrying their hats. Then followed a concert and a chicken supper in one of the supper boxes decorated with the paintings of Francis Hayman and others. Vauxhall's chief rival was Ranelagh, in Chelsea, which opened in 1742 and rapidly became the more fashionable resort. As Jane Pellet reported in 1743, ‘Among the people of Tast le Delicatesse I think Ranelagh is now the darling pleasure for the sake of Mr Sullivan, who sings the Rising Sun & Stella & Flavia’.
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By reputation Ranelagh was more exclusive, but less exciting than Vauxhall. After paying half-a-crown for admission, a visitor was at liberty to wander about the garden admiring the Chinese buildings, the canal, the bridge and to take a circuit round the Rotunda, an enormous circular hall designed for a high-profile parade. By the 1770s it was considered fashionable to arrive at the Rotunda as late as eleven or twelve.
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