Forging Connections Among Women: At Home with the Georgians & Crumble Hall

Amy Marston as Anne Dormer, a prisoner within a marriage

Hannah Boyle as Gertrude Saville, spinster

Dear friends,

What unites the above unhappy women was they had no space or place of their own they could have any liberty to live for real in. They are but two of the many real historical people, many men too, whom Amanda Vickery discussed and dramatizes in her excellent 3 part documentary, At Home with the Georgians. It has been much misunderstood in some of the public commentary: she’s been quoted as using outrageous language about males (testerone), but she’s talking tongue-in-cheek very often — and to me that was part of the surreptitious fun, her use of ironies undercut patriarchy without saying so. She made instructive comparisons with us today: we too live behind barred doors and seek partners, but we have our solitude and do not live under such strict hierarchical arrangements. I enjoyed her delivery of sparkling wit, dry descriptions, and how she suggested tragedies of several existences she described which now and then came into the edge of the focus.

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An enactment of George Gibbs, country physician, come back to his home, wife, family, servants (out of his diary, from Part 1 of Vickery, At Home)

Part One was about how men longed to marry to gain status as males, women for sex, homes to stabilize, to vote from, to participate in communities out of. Part Two about how women gave themselves an identity by how they decorated their houses, made their world. Part Three the intense importance of having space, guarding it fiercely, the nature of the crowded hierarchical and often hard lives the Georgians lived. I envied how many private correspondences she had been privileged to read.

It takes off from only one sub-set of themes in her powerful Behind Closed Doors, and I hope to watch it carefully and write a review here to do it justice.

I connect these women, watching them in the contexts I see in my mind prompted me to write a CFP I sent to the committee for next fall’s (!) EC/ASECS whose topic is networking. It’s been accepted. It’s an outgrowth of my thinking about the anomaly (women living alone, well if middle class except for their servants), years of reading women writers and about women whose lives were in potentiality like that of Saville and Anne Dormer. And just now Vickery who reached her subjects by reading the letters and documents they left. So I called it

Forging Connections Among Women

It is a truth once universally acknowledged that the way societies have organized themselves isolates the average woman; they may socialize within the space they find themselves in with their families and friends, but there are enormous pressures and social and economic constraints keeping them from reaching out to people beyond the family and milieu into which chance has thrown them. Thus the writing and publication of poetry, novels, plays, letters and memoirs and travel by women especially when addressing issues and experiences from a woman’s point of view become ways for the average woman to become part of a network and dialogue with other women. A trip to a spa or town where there was a public life such a woman could enter into, owning and managing a shop or a girls’ school, teaching in one, a profession like midwifery would be other places and provide shared experiences for women to forge connections with other women as women. I invite papers on topics like these where a woman could feel she was or indeed be connected to other women through gender experiences.

I’ve ideas for a paper for my panel too. It would be a paper on a group of women poets who also had different kinds of social connections not usual for the elite: Anne Home Hunter, great poet who wrote lyrics for Handel, who married and kept home for her genius-surgeon husband, John Hunter; Mary Chandler, who was disabled, so never married, and ran a shop in Bath, and wrote her poetry about her spinsterhood and life; and Mary Leapor, poet, servant, and cook and housekeeper (so Amanda Vickery’s books and documentary comes in here). It’s common for scholars who write about these earlier women have chosen to working and poor agricultural women when they seek out the non-elite; I’ll be looking for how non-elite (sort of on the fringe of the elite) inbetween-women lived, and forged connections.

A cat climbing down from a servant’s room in the attic (from Part 2)

I find I’ve never written a foremother poet blog for Mary Leapor, but there is an edition of her poetry, a book on her, and essays too. So I’ll end tonight on two poems by her around the same time. This is what she wrote when her play was returned to her:

Upon her Play being returned to her, stained with Claret.

Welcome , dear Wanderer, once more!
    Thrice welcome to thy native Cell!
Within this peaceful humble Door
    Let Thou and I contented dwell!

But say, O whither hast thou rang’d?
    Why dost thou blush a Crimson Hue?
Thy fair Complexion’s greatly chang’d:
    Why, I can scarce believe ’tis you.

Then tell, my Son, O tell me, Where
    Didst thou contract this sottish Dye?
You kept ill Company, I fear,
    When distant from your Parent’s Eye.

Was it for This, O graceless Child!
    Was it for This, you learn’d to spell?
Thy Face and Credit both are spoil’d:
    Go drown thyself in yonder Well.

I wonder how thy Time was spent:
    No News (alas!) hadst thou to bring.
Hast thou not climb’d the Monument ?
    Nor seen the Lions, nor the King?

But now I’ll keep you here secure:
    No more you view the smoaky Sky:
The Court was never made (I’m sure)
    For Idiots, like Thee and I.

This she wrote as Ursula (they used these pastoral-classical-romance pseudonyms in the 18th century); it’s a burlesque on the house she served in (and doubtless had limited space in), which she called Crumble Hall. Presumably it could’ve needed fixing.

From Crumble Hall:

We sing once more, obedient to her Call,
Once more we sing; and ’tis of Crumble-Hall;
That Crumble-Hall , whose hospitable Door
Has fed the Stranger, and reliev’d the Poor;
Whose Gothic Towers, and whose rusty Spires,
Were known of old to Knights, and hungry Squires …
Of this rude Palace might a Poet sing
From cold December to returning Spring …
Tell how the Building spreads on either Hand,
And two grim Giants o’er the Portals stand;
Whose grisled Beards are neither comb’d nor shorn,
But look severe, and horribly adorn …

    Then step within—there stands a goodly Row
Of oaken Pillars—where a gallant Show
Of mimic Pears and carv’d Pomgranates twine,
With the plump Clusters of the spreading Vine …
From hence we turn to more familiar Rooms;
Whose Hangings ne’er were wrought in Grecian Looms:
Yet the soft Stools, and eke the lazy Chair,
To Sleep invite the Weary, and the Fair.

    Shall we proceed?—Yes, if you’ll break the Wall:
If not, return, and tread once more the Hall.
Up ten Stone Steps now please to drag your Toes,
And a brick Passage will succeed to those.
Here the strong Doors were aptly fram’d to hold
Sir Wary ‘s Person, and Sir Wary ‘s Gold.
Here Biron sleeps, with Books encircled round;
And him you’d guess a Student most profound.
Not so—in Form the dusty Volumes stand:
There’s few that wear the Mark of Biron ‘s Hand …

    Would you go farther?—Stay a little then:
Back thro’ the Passage—down the Steps again;
Thro’ yon dark Room—Be careful how you tread
Up these steep Stairs—or you may break your Head.
These Rooms are furnish’d amiably, and full:
Old Shoes, and Sheep-ticks bred in Stacks of Wool;
Grey Dobbin ‘s Gears, and Drenching-Horns enow;
Wheel-spokes—the Irons of a tatter’d Plough.

    No farther—Yes, a little higher, pray:
At yon small Door you’ll find the Beams of Day,
While the hot Leads return the scorching Ray.
Here a gay Prospect meets the ravish’d Eye:
Meads, Fields, and Groves, in beauteous Order lie.
From hence the Muse precipitant is hurl’d,
And drags down Mira to the nether World.

    Thus far the Palace—Yet there still remain
Unsung the Gardens, and the menial Train.

[In “her” kitchen]

    O’er-stuff’d with Beef, with Cabbage much too full,
And Dumpling too (fit Emblem of his Skull!)
With Mouth wide open, but with closing Eyes
Unwieldy Roger on the Table lies.
His able Lungs discharge a rattling Sound:
Prince barks, Spot howls, and the tall Roofs rebound.
Him Urs’la views; and, with dejected Eyes,
“Ah! Roger , Ah!” the mournful Maiden cries:
“Is wretched Urs’la then your Care no more,
That, while I sigh, thus you can sleep and snore?
Ingrateful Roger ! wilt thou leave me now?
I baste the Mutton with a chearful Heart,
Because I know my Roger will have Part.”

    Thus she—But now her Dish-kettle began
To boil and blubber with the foaming Bran.
The greasy Apron round her Hips she ties …

Strange Sounds and Forms shall teaze the gloomy Green;
And Fairy-Elves by Urs’la shall be seen:
Their new-built Parlour shall with Echoes ring:
And in their Hall shall doleful Crickets sing.

The first of many 18th century homes photographed in At Home with the Georgians

Ellen