Countesses and Courtesans

Chalus's excellent book is one of several in the last ten years by mainly female historians and biographers which have enriched and corrected our understanding of eighteenth-century political culture by analysing the role of women, the nature of sociability, and the function of family. For decades it had been an historical cliché that eighteenth century Britain was a federation of country houses. But to most historians, especially political historians studying connections and factions at Westminster, these were houses inhabited mainly by men. The political work of their mothers, wives, daughters and daughters-in-law, sisters and other kin, was all but ignored. The notoriety of the occasional female with a political profile like Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was imperfectly contextualized.¹ Now in this new work Chalus links family dynamics to the social dimension of politics to illuminate the role of women. Some of this work has been introduced in articles, but the book enables Chalus to display the whole argument and evidence, and to clarify her historical approach.

Because her work is prosopographical and familial, some critics have interpreted it in the light of a Namierite approach which erases party political differences and demonstrates the imperatives of family connections. Chalus counters that her protagonists are divided by party feeling and political faction, sometimes sacrificing friendships to political allegiances, and that although the second half of the eighteenth century was not unduly divided by party, some women could be ‘implacably ideological’ (p. 12). She vividly illustrates this with her account of the 1788 Regency Crisis, when the Prince of Wales's supporters wore extravagant Regency caps at balls, while the Court supporters wore constitutional coats, and the facade of politeness between opposing camps was badly cracked (pp. 100–5).

Chalus prefers to situate her work as a form of social history congruent with Patrick Collinson's demand for ‘social history with the politics put back in’:

By focusing on politics and eighteenth-century governance through the inter-related political arenas of social politics, patronage and electoral politics, it aims to perform the dual historical tasks of recovering women as political figures and reintegrating them to form a more comprehensive picture of the political culture of the political elite. Doing so delineates the workings of a politically charged society, where the personal could be public; the political, social; and the social, political .

(p. 12)

She describes an era where oligarchic politics was amorphous, lacking in firm party structure, and operating as essentially the ‘politics of influence and interest’ which ‘throve in a climate that was distinguished by personal relationships, complex networks of connexions [sic], and extensive webs of obligation’ (p. 25).

When Chalus began her research it had almost become a historical orthodoxy, extrapolated largely from the experience and prescriptive literature of the middling sort, that men and women were allocated to ‘separate spheres’. Nineteenth-century feminism, especially for middle-class women, was read in part as a campaign to enter those spheres such as politics and the professions from which they were excluded. Chalus's work has been a major influence in, and congruent with, that of historians such as Amanda Vickery and Naomi Tadmor, who have questioned these categories and chronologies as applied to the eighteenth century and have shown how the home can be simultaneously a public and a private space, and how the term friend can also be part of the language of clientage and patronage.²

There has also been a willingness to re-examine the nature of political elites: Chalus has been included in anthologies edited by Vickery, and by Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson, while Judith Lewis has moved from examining elite attitudes to childbirth, to analysing elite behaviour in politics.³ Studies of the aristocracy like Hamish Scott's collection of essays or Jerzy Lukowski's survey have tried, albeit in a limited way, to include women alongside the men on whom they concentrate. This...