The Widow

Widows received a bad press in early modern England.

Think of Isaac Cruikshank’s MY GRANDMOTHER: alias the Jersey Jig: alias the RIVAL WIDOWS (26 August 1794), a satire on the sexual triumvirate of George Prince of Wales, Lady Jersey (who was in fact married) and Maria Fitzherbert (there is also a parody in here of Elizabeth Cooper’s 1735 work The Rival Widows). Or of George Cruikshank’s bizarre THE WIDOW WADDLE OF CHICHABIDDY LANE (12 October 1807), after a song by Joseph Grimaldi, which plays on the stereotype of the remarried widow as a masculine husband beater.

More common were droll satires such as Isaac Cruikshank’s, The Disagreeable Intrusion, or Irish Fortune Hunter Detected (4 September 1795). Here a widow, seduced by an attractive Irish fortune hunter, consents to their marriage only to have her wishes thwarted by the arrest, presumably for polygamy, of her lover. Contrasted with a classical nude portrait, Cruikshank satirises her willing ignorance towards this calculated, charming and affectatious male exploiting the foibles of English elite institutions. He is a criminal and a bigamist, yet 'The Disagreeable Intrusion' will only briefly rob him of his liberty and delay his enrichment. He is thus not the fool. That honour is taken by the widow, who, shocked by the 'intrusion' rather than appalled at her deception, would willingly marry a rogue rather than not marry at all.

Allowances for satiric exaggeration aside this is the classic early modern view of the widow - she is desperate, violent, and scheming. Yet if we replace a negative (scheming) with a positive (clever) we might be able to start breaking away from this caricature. For once again, my work on the account books of the Rochester Bridge Trust, has rendered such gender constructions problematic (see my previous post here).

In 1594 at the RBT managed property of East Tilbury, Essex, Alice Gestlyng took on with her son Isaac the estate of her late husband Richard, which they held jointly until 1601. In 1660 Ann Aynsworth, a ‘widow’, took the same property, now replete ‘with barn, buildings, demeasne lands, meadows, pastures, marshes except timber rights’, before it passed to her son Rowland in 1676. One Elizabeth Unton held this lease from 1752 until 1765, and in 1795 Mary Benson took charge of what is by now described as the ‘Manor of Tilbury’. Mary held the lease until 1814 when it passed into the hands of her son, Samuel Benson, who himself continued at the property until 1823.

These names, dates, and descriptions found in the RBT records tell us little beyond what was formally required to be on such official documents (leases et al). Nonetheless the patterns present are of interest. As was the case for High Halstow (Kent) it is notable how female possession of a property was in the early modern period a means by which families could retain ownership of that property. It is also of note how, once again, female ownership at this Essex estate ceases from sometime in the early-nineteenth century.

Perhaps the increased frequency of businesses, as opposed to individuals, taking ownership as leases can explain this trend. Land in both Essex and Kent, as the City and Region project explores, came across the period 1577 to 1914 under increasing pressure from the (masculine) industrialising march of London. Men and leases then could quite possibly have started seeming more natural partners. However these fragmentary insights might also suggest that part of the rationale for virulent anti-widow satires can be located in the power widows of the eighteenth and early-ninteenth centuries could exert over property and hence, as was remarkably clear in the case of Maria Fitzherbert, over men.

I’d be pleased to hear if any recent work on the early modern widow has explored such territory.

Tradition

Though decided on the AV debate - #Yes2AV - following the political mudslinging over the recent weeks has proven curiously captivating.

This morning I stumbled across this interview of Baroness Warsi conducted by the ever pugnacious Adam Boulton. Surprisingly, and not merely because he was on 'my side', Boulton came across rather well, particularly during his dissection of what Warsi classified as 'tradition' (She did not actually use the word, but statements such as 'fundamental principles' and 'generations have fought for' suggest what she is getting at. Well at least it did for me).

Two semantic problems arise from this which probably should trouble us more than they do.

First, how old is 'tradition'? Warsi was appealing (erroneously of course) to a tradition beginning around 1945, thus disregarding from tradition a long history of parliamentary adaptation. In a similar vein the Old Price rioters at Covent Garden theatre during the Autumn of 1809 classified the rights of Englishmen to public entertainments as existing since 'time immemorial'. In the same way that Milton's Areopagitica claimed press freedoms to be inalienable, the OP rioters had a dislocated and distorted sense of what terms such as 'tradition' and 'ancient' meant. Equally during a period of acute food shortages in the early-nineteenth century, Justice Kenyon prosecuted against forestallers and regrators. These practices, which inflated food prices artificially, were perfectly legal. However common law and custom stated that they were not, and thus many ignored the 1771 legislation repealing prohibitions on these practices. Kenyon, under the Cruikshankian gaze, became a popular hero, a defender of natural rights. Yet, there is more, the legislation making forestalling and regrating illegal was neither ancient nor natural but had clear sixteenth century legislative origins.

Tradition then is a complex beast. And depends on the perspective of those who claim something or other to be traditional. Indeed as environmental historians are keen to tell us, there is nothing ancient or traditional about any of this. Human existence, Bill McKibben notes, is to the lifespan of the Earth but a blink of the eye.

Second, whose tradition is tradition? This may seem a very obvious point, but if 'tradition' has chronological problems it is also impacted upon by gender, class, nationality, faith et al. This is exemplified by returning to our forestallers and regrators - for 'the people' (I use that word begrudgingly, with an awareness of the huge problems it entails...) treating food as a special case, as outside of market forces, was customary; for the acolytes of Adam Smith on the other hand food was just another product, another unit to be monetised (and so followed land, labour and, in the present day, carbon - see Doreen Massey's beautiful essay on such matters here).

For Warsi and many in the #No2AV camp, 'tradition' is associated with post-war frugality (both intellectually and financially), settling and stoicism. For many in the #Yes2AV camp, like myself, 'tradition' is something more theoretical, something more timeless (at least in theory, it can, I guess, never be so in reality) - that being a simple belief in individual agency and in a rejection of clannish traditions based upon words enshrined upon paper which one may not question.

Tradition then is the very rejection of tradition. And I suspect this definition (if we swap over the two traditions) nicely encapsulates where Warsi stands on the issue too.

Cruikshank in public

Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking at The Cartoon Museum on the topics explored during my doctoral research. Reflecting on the experience, it strikes me how enchanted members of the public are towards the satirical prints produced in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries; the supposed 'Golden Age'. Even when I had to explain the joke - which as Gombrich regularly reaffirmed only serves to kill it - chortles and chuckles filled the room. More importantly however, it intrigues me how willing the public are to accept ideas scholars might be more skeptical of.

The work of Isaac Cruikshank has formed the crux of my intellectual life for nearly four years (one of his most lively and detailed prints adorns the background of this very blog - see the record at the British Museum collections). As a result my talk focused on why I see Isaac as an important figure in the history of satirical printing - namely because, unlike James Gillray (whose work tends to be held up as representative of the trade at the time), Isaac rushed his etchings, made mistakes, lacked consistency in style, couldn't draw likenesses, and was generally a bit (to use my favoured antipodean term of slander) 'average'. Perhaps I'm being a little harsh on Isaac. He did after all teach a young George Cruikshank all he knew (well, maybe I'm exaggerating now...). But my point nonetheless is and was that artists such as Isaac Cruikshank are representative of the trade, not supreme masters such as Gillray.

Perhaps I underestimated my audience. But to be frank I expected a backlash. I expected the idea that artistic quality would not 'win out' to be dismissed, decried, and pooh-poohed. Instead the audience were very accepting of my remarks, and saw it as perfectly logical that we have to (to paraphrase the work of Adrian Johns on books) forget what we know about cartoons in the present when studying the same medium in the past, because, in sum, the two are actually not the same medium at all.

It has troubled me for a number of years that historians seem unable to make this leap of faith. And it surprised and delighted me in equal measure to find that those members of the public who made their way to The Cartoon Museum that night had indeed, it seems, made that leap. Or had they? Are we as historians taught to tie our sources together too neatly? Are we, despite Butterfield's warnings of eight decades ago, inclined towards Whiggish narratives of the past? Or, more controversially perhaps, has the influence of art-historians on the field of Golden Age satirical printing inculcated this Whiggishness?

My attempts to explore these problems, and much more, will be explored here.