The Gentleman's Daughter (59 page)

100
LRO, DDWh/4/89 (29 Oct. 1816), B. Addison, Liverpool, to E. Whitaker.

101
LRO, DDB/72/1508 and 1506 (1817–23), E. Parker, Selby to E. Reynolds, Colne; LRO, DDB/72/1528 (14 July 1817), E. Parker, Selby, to M. Barcroft, Colne.

102
See LRO, DDB/72/180, 181, 189, 195, 201 and 209–10 (1764–7), B. and W. Ramsden, Charterhouse and Highgate to E. Parker, later E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

103
See LRO, DDB/72/216, 222, 237–9, 259, 258, 261, 269, 279 (1768–75), B. and W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats. On provincial deaths, see Carr,
Annals and Stories of Colne
, p. 86.

104
WYCRO, Leeds, TA 13/1 (23 Oct.) S. Thorp, Cowick, to Mrs Gossip (the elder), York.

105
WYCRO, Leeds, TA 18/5 (3 Oct. 1746), W. Gossip, Stamford, to A. Gossip, Skelton; TA 18/5 (16 June 1746), W. Gossip, Buxton, to A. Gossip, Skelton; TA 11/4 (8 Aug.? 1750), A. Gossip, York, to W. Gossip, Thorp Arch.

106
WYCRO, Leeds, TA 18/5 (1746), W. Gossip, Skelton, to A. Gossip, at Mr Thompson's, Ripon; TA 18/5 (8 Aug. 1746), W. Gossip, Skelton, to Master Gossip, Ripon; TA 18/5 (23 Oct. 1746), W. Gossip, London, to A. Gossip, Skelton.

107
WYCRO, Leeds, TA 18/5 (3 June 1765), W. Gossip, Thorp Arch, to Mrs Gossip, Leicester; TA 18/5 (9 July 1765), same to same.

108
On epidemics of fever, whooping cough and measles, see LRO, DDB/72/142, 150, 161 (1756–7), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats. On the perceived risks of infection, see LRO, DDB/72/158, 136, 149 (1756–7), same to same.

109
WYCRO, Bradford Sp St/6/1/57 (26 June 1757), A. Stanhope, Leeds, to W. Stanhope, Bath.

110
HL, HM 31201, Mrs Larpent's Dairy, 1, 1790–95, fos. 4, facing f. 5 and 6.

111
LRO, DDB/72/1598 (3 April 1823), E. Parker, Selby, to E. Reynolds, Colne; LRO, DDB/72/1198 and 1203–7 (l823–5), E. and E. Parker, Selby, to E. Moon, Colne.

112
LRO, DDGr C3 (23 Nov. 1821), M. Greene to Mrs Bradley, Slyne.

113
For example, the dates and circumstances of Tom Parker's life-threatening bout of smallpox were etched in his mother's memory. In 1777, at least twenty years after the fact, Elizabeth Shackleton recalled the crisis in her diary: LRO, DDB/81/30 (1777), f. 40: ‘God make my own dear Tom ever thankful for the … mercies he received on this great day from almighty God … he came to the height of the small pox. My dear John was livid of it before and both did as well as my own dear Robert.’

114
LRO, DDB/72/132 (16 May 1754), J. Scrimshire, Pontefract, to E. Parker, Alkincoats; DDB/72/263 (14 Oct. 1773), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

115
LRO, DDWh/4/78 (1 May 1816), A. Ainsworth, Bolton, to E. Whitaker, Roefield. Similar expressions are widespread in the papers of the genteel. When the Miss Barcrofts of Colne informally adopted their orphaned niece Ellen in 1797, a friend assured the inexperienced sisters, ‘she will be nice company for you and will beguile many an hour by her infantine tricks’: DDB/72/1493 (26 Aug. 1797), B. Wiglesworth, Townhead, to E. Barcroft, Otley. When Ellen had children of her own, she regaled her aunts with fond progress reports, ‘he talks of
Mamma
and Bab-ba, but I am not quite sure that he understands the
application
of the words’: DDB/72/1505 (14 June 1817), E. Parker, Selby, to E. Reynolds, Colne.

116
LRO, DDGr C3
c.
1821), M. Greene to Mrs Bradley, Slyne.

117
Hall,
Miss Weeton's Journal
,
II
, p. 152; see also pp. 143–4, 169.

118
Stone,
Family, Sex and Marriage
, p. 264; LRO, DDB/72/258 (17 Oct. 1772), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats; Johnson,
Dictionary
, ‘Love’.

119
LRO, DDB/72/175 (26 Feb. 1763), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.

120
WYCRO, Leeds, TA, Box 18/5 (4 Nov. 1746), W. Gossip, London, to A. Gossip, Skelton; TA 18/5 (8 Aug. 1746), W. Gossip, Skelton, to Master Willy Gossip, Ripon; TA 18/5 (3 June 1765), W. Gossip, Thorp Arch, to Mrs Gossip, Leicester; TA 12/3 (1768), G. Gossip to W. Gossip, Skelton.

121
LRO, DDB/72/75 (30 July 1765), B. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Parker, Alkincoats.

122
WYCRO, Leeds, TA 18/5 (1746), W. Gossip, York, to A. Gossip, Ripon.

123
St Clare announced the birth in LRO, DDB/72/492 (13 Feb. 1780), W. St Clare (the elder) to T. Parker, Newton, and the death in LRO, DDB/72/499 (22 Dec. 1802), same to same; William Stanhope's encouragement is in WYCRO, Sp St/6/1/68 (5 Feb. 1756), W. Stanhope, Leeds, to Ann Stanhope, Cannon Hall.

124
LRO, DDGr C1 (21 Dec. 1762), T. Greene, Inner Temple, London, to his mother. Phrases which abound in the correspondence of the bereaved and their commiserators include: ‘we must endeavour to submit to the will of providence’, ‘joy and afflictions are both dispensed by the same divine providence, your own good sense will teach you to submit to the one as well as the other’, ‘who the lord loveth, he chastitheth and scourgeth’, ‘whatever is, is right’. An identical vocabulary is wheeled out in Richardson,
Sir Charles Grandison
, pp. 400–1: ‘Yet even
this
Love must submit to the awful dispensations of Providence, whether of death or other disappointment; and such trials ought to be met with chearful resignation, and not to be the means of embittering our lives, or of rendering them useless.’ A reliance on the language of resignation is also to the fore in the strategies used to cope with illness: R. and D. Porter,
In Sickness and in Health: The British Experience, 1650–1850
(1988), pp. 234–40.

125
Henstock, ‘The Diary of Abigail Gawthern’, pp. 52, 76.

126
This was Elizabeth Holland's description, cited in Porter,
In Sickness and in Health
(see n. 124 above), p. 80. Both the searing grief of seventeenth-century parents and the widespread fear that it might overmaster the sufferer if given full reign is noted in P. Seaver,
Wallington's World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London
(Stanford, Ca., 1985), pp. 229–30, and Crawford, ‘Construction and Experience of Maternity’, p. 23. Of 134 cases of disturbing grief treated by the seventeenth-century physician Richard Napier, 58 were attributed to the death of child; 51 of these patients were mothers: MacDonald,
Mystical Bedlam
, p. 82. The elite of eighteenth-century Tyneside still found it a struggle ‘to submit to what Povidence shall order’, judging by Levine and Wrightson,
Making of an Industrial Society
, pp. 328–9. The ‘paroxysms of panic’ brought on by children's illnesses and the deep mourning of parents from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth is illustrated in Pollock,
Forgotten Children
, pp. 128–42.

1
Pennington,
Unfortunate Mother's Advice
, p. 27.

2
Complete Letter Writer
, pp. 164–5.

3
J. Gregory, A
Father's Legacy to His Daughter
(1774; Edinburgh, 1788), p. 22.

4
LRO, DDB/72/475 (29 April 1748), W. Hill, Ormskirk, to R. Parker, Alkincoats; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/211 (March 1747), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to Edward Parker, London; LRO, DDB Ac 7886/216 (‘Saturday Morn’), R. Parker, Alkincoats, to E. Parker, London; Marshall,
William Stout
, pp. 159, 233; Wright,
Thomas Birkenshaw
, p. 146.

5
LRO, DDB/72/490 (n.d.), Edward Parker, London, to R. Parker, Colne; WYCRO, Leeds TA 18/5 (23 Oct. 1746), W. Gossip, London, to A. Gossip, Skelton.

6
LRO, DDB Ac 7886/306 (9 Oct. 1749), J. Parker, Browsholme, to E. Parker, Birthwaite; WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St/6/1/75 (20 Aug. 1757), W. Stanhope, Leeds, to A. Stanhope, Sewerby; LRO, DDB/72/234 (28 Apr. 1770), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse, to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats; Stone,
Road to Divorce
, p. 293.

7
LRO, DDB/72/12, 7, 8, 15, 17, 14 (1751), E. Parker, Browsholme, to R. Parker, Alkincoats.

8
LRO, DDGr C3 (21 July 1819), S. Tatham, Southall, to Mr and Mrs Bradley, Slyne.

9
Marshall,
William Stout
, p. 159.

10
LRO, DDB/72/306 (n.d.), E. Shackleton, Pasture House, to J. and R. Parker, London; LRO, DDB/81/35 (1779), fos. 225, 229; LRO, DDB/81/37 (1780), f. 70.

11
LRO, DDWh/4/29 (17 Aug. 1813), E. Whitaker, Edgeworth, to C. Whitaker, Roefield.

12
H. Chapone,
Letters on the Improvement of the Mind Addressed To A Lady
(1773; 1835), p. 92.

13
Quoted in Brophy,
Women's Lives
, p. 120.

14
Clark,
Working Life of Women
, pp. 15, 39, 41. For other positive accounts of the housekeeper's domain, see Hole,
English Housewife
; id.,
English Home Life
; and Bayne-Powell,
Housekeeping in the Eighteenth Century
.

15
Arguments about a decay of productive housekeeping between 1600 and 1850 are consistent with the decline and fall model of women's work which I have criticized elsewhere: Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres’, pp. 383–414. However, I am not arguing that housework was in any sense light work at any historical period. The grind of keeping a household supplied with water, heat, light, food and a measure of domestic comfort is demonstrated in Davidson,
Woman's Work is Never Done
. Sustaining a household with one or two maids of all work was still a slog for the Victorian housewife, see Branca, ‘Image and Reality’ and id.,
Silent Sisterhood
. There is also a feminist interpretation of technological innovation in the household, contending that inventions did not liberate women, since men elevated standards of cleanliness and gentility still further, see Cowan,
More Work for Mother
.

16
L. T. Ulrich,
Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750
(Oxford, 1983), p. 34.

17
Chapone,
Improvement of the Mind
, p. 66.

18
Hecht,
Domestic Servant in Eighteenth-Century England
(1980), pp. 35–70. Before this there existed a unique article on the subject, Marshall, ‘Domestic Servants of the Eighteenth Century’. Agricultural service has been better researched, A. Kussmaul,
Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England
(1981). However, more broadly based researches are now beginning to appear: Holmes, ‘Domestic Service in Yorkshire’ (D.Phil. thesis); Meldrum, ‘Domestic Service in London’ (Ph.D. thesis); Seleski, ‘Women, Work and Cultural Change’; Hill,
English Domestics
.

19
Savile,
Advice to a Daughter
, p. 72.

20
Cited in Holmes, ‘Domestic Service in Yorkshire’ (D.Phil. thesis), p. 48. Peter Earle argues that the employment of servants was virtually universal amongst the metropolitan middling sort and extended down even to lowly artisans: Earle,
Making of the English Middle Class
, pp. 218–19: His analysis of 176 households in two London, parishes (St Mary-le-Bow and St Michael Bassishaw) reveals that 56.8 per cent of households employed a single servant, 21 per cent had two, 11.4 per cent had three, 4 per cent had four, 4 per cent had five and 2.8 per cent had six or more.

21
See respectively Hecht,
Domestic Servant
, p. 7; Harrison, ‘Servants of William Gossip’, p. 135; and LRO, DDB/72/861 (30 March 1800), H. O. Cunliffe, Wycoller, to T. Parker, Alkincoats.

22
LRO, DDB/72/176 (3 April 1764), B. Ramsden to E. Parker, Alkincoats. Lancashire servants came from Padiham, Fence, Slaidburn, Grindleton and even Rochdale. Yorkshire women came from Keighley, Bracewell and Skipton. However, the preponderance of local surnames among her workforce (Blakeys, Crookes, Foulds, Hartleys, Hargreaves, Nutters, Sagers, Varleys) and, indeed, the absence of any comment as to their origins suggest that the majority of her servants were drawn from the nearby townships. Of course, some of these very local servants offered their labour unsolicited, coming to show themselves at Elizabeth Shackleton's back door or sending their parents to negotiate.

23
In the 1750s and 1760s Anne Gossip badgered her friends and kin across Yorkshire to inquire after servants for her. When John Spencer required a housekeeper in the 1760s it was his sister Anne Stanhope who pursued the necessary references for him. In the 1800s Betty Parker of Alkincoats asked her daughter Eliza Parker to investigate the availability of servants in Preston. In the 1810s Eliza Whitaker of Roefield broadcast inquiries across the county. Her sister Jane routinely interviewed the servants for her father's Preston establishment in the same decade. In the 1820s Ellen Parker of Selby asked her three Colne aunts Ellen Moon, Elizabeth Reynolds and Mary Barcroft if they could so assist her.

24
LRO, DDB/81/11 (1770), f. 85. For other examples, consult LRO, DDB/81/26 (1776), fos. 85,91,93.

25
These and the following calculations are based on daily entries in LRO, DDB/81/17 (1772),
passim
.

26
Chapone,
Improvement of the Mind
, pp. 94–5.

27
Chambermaids at Browsholme in the same period were paid £5 per annum, £1 more than at Alkincoats, see LRO, DDB/81/17 (1772), f. 46. At Burton Constable in the 1760s, the laundry and dairymaids were paid £6 and the cookmaid £5. However, the Gossips paid their cooks in the 1730s between £3 and 3 guineas, but by 1768 they paid a maid £4 1s.: WYCRO, Leeds, TA 12/3 (18 July 1768), L. Brown, York, to Mrs Gossip, Thorp; and Harrison, ‘Servants of William Gossip’, p. 135. The Heatons of Ponden Hall, a mere seven miles from Alkincoats, offered only 59s. a year. See WYCRO, Bradford, B 419, Account Book of Robert Heaton of Ponden, 1768–93 (I thank John Styles for this reference). The only published study of national wage rates can be found in Hecht,
Domestic Servant
, pp. 141–9. Hecht shows enormous variation in servants' wages, thus in the 1770s housemaids were paid anything from £4 10s. to 10 guineas; chambermaids between £6 and 10 guineas; dairymaids between 5 and 10 guineas; maids of all work between £4 and £10; cooks between £9 and 14 guineas; cook-housekeepers between 12 and 20 guineas. Back at Alkincoats, wage rates remained remarkably static from 1762 to the mid-1770s. The male servants (posts unspecified) whose contracts were mentioned received between 8 guineas and £9 a year, plus the supply of a frock waistcoat, breeches, hat and great-coat. Thus, they received at least twice as much as female servants. (In 1772, Mrs Shackleton considered the ‘great wages’ expected by the cook Molly Hargreaves of £8 10s. 12d. per annum to be unrealistic and excessive: LRO, DDB/81/17 (1772), f. 78.) From 1775 yearly wages crept up: maids being paid four and a half guineas and upper female servants 6 guineas. Unfortunately no male contracts were recorded for this later period, but a corresponding rise to £10 a year would be consistent. The few male employment contracts Elizabeth Shackleton recorded suggest that menservants received a livery in addition to their salary. By contrast, there is no evidence that maidservants were bought a specific wardrobe upon engagement. References to wage payments reveal that the cost of making garments for female staff was often deducted from their pay. However, extra services could be paid in kind. Nanny Nutter, for example, received a pair of black silk mittens in February 1773, in return for knitting a pair of claret silk and worsted stockings. Mrs Shackleton also lent her female servants money to purchase expensive investment items such as stays. From at least the early 1760s Mrs Shackleton launched an assault on the widespread practice among servants of taking tips from every household guest or ‘taking vails’. (A national campaign against vails had been in operation from the 1750s.) But from the late 1760s her concern died away, as presumably did the practice. Mrs Shackleton probably paid the wages herself. Certainly, her pocket diaries contained printed marketing tables and gave advice on calculating yearly wages by the day: LRO, DDB/81/26 (1775), fos. 155–6 and LRO, DDB/81/20 (1773), fos. 13–18. In accordance with contemporary
convention, Elizabeth Shackleton engaged her permanent servants on a yearly basis. Permanent servants were given bed and board. Women servants slept in the nursery, male servants slept two to a bed in the gallery.