Women of character and endurance
Jane Gardam
THE GENTLEMAN'S DAUGHTER: WOMEN'S LIVES IN GEORGIAN ENGLAND by Amanda Vickery Yale University Press, £19.95, pp. 436 Apart from one fascinating observa- tion that women in Georgian England cared more for their fathers' good opinion than for their husbands' and brothers', this brilliant book, which scholars are already saying is 'humblingly, amazingly good,' seems to have strayed from its title. 'I am a gentleman's daughter,' Elizabeth Bennet famously informed Lady Catherine de Burgh. 'But who was your mother?' the creature famously replied. Vickery has examined 100 families living in Georgian Lancashire and West Yorkshire from the time when women were upholstered like furniture, with their hair so high they had to sit on the floor of their coaches, to the slender shifts of the Regency. The end of the century was a time in the North West when industry, especially the textile indus- try, was supplying the new 'upper gentry' with 'glorious wealth'. Sons went away to school and to learn trades in London and some girls of the patriciate made the jour- ney to Lancashire armed with dowries and `connections', but the women of the fami- lies travelled very little, not even to a son's wedding. Boundaries were easily crossed between . trade and the professions but there was no mingling with the nobility, which anyway was thin on the ground in Lancashire. There was still hob-nobbing with shopkeepers and small tradesmen, who continued to 'oblige' in one way and another and were in return invited to the new, formal afternoon tea where the new damask was laid on the new mahogany table from Gillow of Lancaster (Vickery has found the account for it) and the best new china brought out to grace the splen- did dining room which had usurped the parlour as the heart of the house. Hus- bands still roistered now and then below stairs.
The portraits that emerge are of women so typical of that downright, confident county, so very 'Lancashire' or 'West Rid- ing', adjectives still used in the rest of the north (accompanied by meaningful looks), that they surely could not be representative of the country at large. They are still very much themselves. (In the 1970s I was asked by an old lady in Southport whether the autumn brocades had arrived in London.) One wonders whether a survey of gentle- men's daughters in Cornwall or Suffolk might have revealed different things?
But it could not reveal a more rewarding and robust set of women, nor women with a wider range of correspondents. Where better-educated women like the glittering set of sisters in Stella Tillyard's Aristocrats wrote voluminously but mostly to each other, these northern girls, wives, widows, dowagers and impoverished spinster aunts kept in touch with a huge straggling net- work of 'kin'. The writing of such letters was part of a conventional, middle-class (a term not yet used) woman's daily life, mak- ing lifelines for pent emotions, secret vengeance against cruel husbands or exas- perating servants. The most intimate mat- ters are recorded, badly spelled and punctuated — for few of the women had been to school — and written mostly alone in surroundings of apparent material par- adise. There are some terrible stories of women's subjugation. One wife was made to eat with the servants, another was horse- whipped by her husband. Horrocks, the cotton magnate, is said to have paid his sis- ters, who worked on the shop floor, with the promise of a new dress when they asked for a minimum wage. But there was also married love and the sharing of griefs especially over the frequent deaths of chil- dren. There are some horrible revelations of childbirth. These sensible women reveal that they are all for a male doctor with the forceps instead of Mrs Gamp.
None of them seems to have wanted to sweep into government or join a profes- sion. Feminism seems only to have amused them. They had no time for 'mannish Les- bians' or the adultery of London duchesses. Sex and spirituality are never mentioned. Their lives seem to have been filled with the 'deluge' of responsibility that met them at marriage in the running of a household and they even played at 'keeping house' in childhood. They worked to the sound of `hidden applause' that they were doing their duty. It sounds smug enough, but it made them self-possessed, self-controlled, self-sufficient and brave in tragedy and misfortune and they thought that 'female servility was for the kitchen-maid'.
And their female servants weren't far behind them in self-confidence. No-talk of starvation and leaving without a reference — they were always storming out of the house with a bundle of their mistress's pos- sessions tossed ahead of them through a window. Then they stormed back again. One, Nanny Nutter, seems to have obsessed her mistress Elizabeth Shackelton so that a whole volume of her diary is given up to her saucy ways. She was either lying with her mistress in bed (apparently quite usual) or lying to her. The poor daughter- less mistress writes at last, 'Nanny Nutter run away. May she remain for ever.'
The manuscripts of Elizabeth Shackelton dominate the book and she is a great sup- port to Dr Vickery's thesis that the tale of increasing female passivity in the Industrial Revolution is a mistaken one. The 'sweet domesticate', she says, is an invention. Cer- tainly there seem to have been no novel- reading idle women or Dickensian delicate angels around in Comm. Mrs Shackelton, who had shocked the world as a young widow by running off to Gretna Green with a man — the horse-whipper — 22 years her junior, is obviously in the same strong mould as Florence Nightingale or Mrs Gaskell or Mrs Beeton. But she was utterly under-used. Lancashire was all. She flung her energy into the cleanliness of her house. 'We scoured all day' she wrote and probably meant that she herself took part. The awful northern habit of polishing plate in anticipation of visitors lasted to her infirm old age at the mercy of her servants — as did her outrage at visitors arriving unannounced, even if they were 'kin'. She might be the heroine of a novel. Aunt Pullet from Mill on the Floss magnified ten times.
But she has not overpowered Dr Vick- ery. Narrative and its interpretation flow beautifully together in the book. A Lan- cashire woman herself, Vickery has the whole of her huge cast of characters well in control. She obviously likes them and finds their central preoccupations pretty com- mendable. Her chapter headings are `Love', 'Fortitude', 'Resignation', 'Prudent Economy', 'Propriety' (elastic) and 'Duty'. She has fun with 'Vulgarity' (which the women deplore) and 'Elegance' which they were hungry to hear about but slow to adopt. They did not approve of ladies of 90 in flounced negligées and thought 'Italian night-dresses unsuitable for the old'. They were slower and much less witty and quite from a different tribe from the well- connected Austens of the south. Jane Austen would never have written, whoever her mother was, that she had 'placed the bum of Lady Egerton on a rich sopha.'
This book is a treasury.
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