One area in which the men legitimised their authority within their marital relationships was the management of household expenses.294 Evidence of the management of day-to-day domestic expenses can be difficult to trace, as they were often too mundane to
294 Harvey, The Little Republic, 24-63.
record in diaries and letters. Likewise, account books can often disguise how gendered relationships functioned behind the scenes.295 However, circumstances such as periods of conflict or change, created an opportunity for expenses to be discussed and therefore recorded in correspondence, as conflicts needed resolution and change needed readjustment. In such circumstances, it is possible to reconstruct the expectations of both parties and the practicalities of the relational dynamic involved. Their stated or implied expectations of domestic life can be used to construct what they considered to be normal and acceptable within their relationship. Likewise this can help us consider wider cultural expectations of normal and acceptable domestic management by considering the social pressures felt by either party of the presumptions they made about domestic marital life based on their own culturally based preconceived notions.
Thomas Dundas married 18 year-old Charlotte in 1764 at the age of 23. In 1780, sixteen years into their marriage, Charlotte and Thomas had a turbulent period adjusting to the management of family household expenses when Thomas lived separately from his wife and children. He was staying with his father in London while she remained in their home Aske Hall in Yorkshire. A difficult exchange of letters provides a significant insight into how the couple divided the control of the family’s expenses. Only letters written by Charlotte Dundas to her husband survive, however we can gain some insight into his reaction from her comments.
The couple’s initial expectations of how the family expenses would be managed in Thomas’s absence is evident in the early letters. Charlotte wrote to Thomas about specific payments which she believed to be his responsibility. ‘I shall enclose Wrights bill, & Smith the taylors; I thought I had sent Wrights among those I
295 Vickery, Behind Closed Doors, 108.
gave Gardener, of which I have since sent you the Abstract, but I have since found my mistake’.296 It appears that Charlotte collected the bills and managed the payments acquired in Yorkshire, however she sent individual requests to her husband for payment. Therefore her husband acted as overseer of all payments despite living away from the family unit. This set-up follows the pattern that Harvey argues was the norm for eighteenth-century middling-sort men. They maintained overall control of family finances, while delegating some household matters to their wives.297 But what was different for this elite couple was that this negotiation took place over a distance, between the family's multiple households. The Dundas letters also reveal the limits of oeconomy in practice, showing that some men at least were reluctant to engage in it.
Charlotte’s letters show that the couple found it difficult to adjust to the process of establishing how to manage the family expenses in Thomas’s absence.
After a period of repeatedly asking her husband about financial matters and enquiring, seemingly with no response, about how to pay debts, Charlotte became frustrated with her husband’s style of financial management. She told her husband, ‘I have not been able to pay the Wages of Christmas last having been obliged to pay Coals, Malt &
House keeping bill – I wish you would send me more Money or let me know how to…’298 The oeconomic management of the family fell to Thomas even if he was absent. However, his absence necessitated a degree of cooperation and communication between the couple to work effectively. The dynamic of cooperation was in the process of being established throughout the series of letters. This makes this particular episode
296 NYCRO, ZNK.X.2.1.89, Charlotte Dundas to Thomas Dundas, Upleatham, 15th February 1780.
297 Harvey, The Little Republic.
298 NYCRO, ZNK.X.2.1.100, Charlotte Dundas to Thomas Dundas, 14th March 1780.
revealing for an examination into the expectations and practicalities of household management between husband and wife.
Eventually, Charlotte felt that her level of debt and poverty at home with the children in Yorkshire was unacceptable. She believed that her husband was neither taking the situation seriously nor cutting down on his own superfluous spending with his father in London.
I am affraid you don’t think much of your own affairs for you gave me no answer to any of my queries, nor do you take any notice of my poverty for the £100 I got from Mr Chaloner it was all oweing before I got it.299
Her concerns were embedded in a cultural assumption that his masculine role meant that despite his absence the family finances were his duty. For instance, referring to her poverty she wrote ‘your own affairs’, rather than ‘our’ joint affairs. On a number of occasions, she hinted about his failure as a husband and father in his inability to fulfil his masculine role. She continually referred to the children and family when she lamented his irresponsible attitude to their expenses.
As our expenses must encrease as the Children encrease, not only in size but number too, in my opinion there is no time to be lost in making some regulation not only without but within Doors too to lessen our expenses
& tho’ we must cut off some little gratiations we shall procure ourselves comforts in proportion, for it is impossible to have a light Heart & a
299 NYCRO, ZNK.X.2.1.89, Charlotte Dundas to Thomas Dundas, Upleatham, 15th February 1780.
light Purse & a load of debts all at the same time, and the light Heart is so desirable a thing, that vanishes of all kinds I would sacrifice without hesitation_ but I am writing a Sermon not a letter. 300
Charlotte appealed to her husband’s sense of masculine authority by reminding him of his oeconomic and patriarchal duties as husband, father and head of household.
At one stage, she threatened Thomas with separate accounts. Although she may never have intended to carry out this threat, her use of this as a tactic suggests that she believed it might have been a worrying enough proposal for him to reconsider his actions.
if he [Lawrence Dundas] insists on your being in London I will too or have a separate maintenance… when I say separate maintenance I don’t actually mean what I say but I mean that you should pay me a certain sum for myself and the children that I may calculate my expenses to it, that I may not be pinched for a guinies because Sir L is making you spend a hundred.301
From Charlotte’s perspective, we learn more about methods of legitimising masculine power within the home. Her reference to ‘separate maintenance’ was an indirect threat to Thomas. Stone argues that in the case of a marriage breakdown in this period,
300 NYCRO, ZNK.X.2.1.86, Charlotte Dundas to Thomas Dundas, Upleatham, 8th February 1780.
301 NYCRO, ZNK.X.2.1.88, Charlotte Dundas to Thomas Dundas, Upleatham, 13th February 1780.
propertied women had a 'separate maintenance' settled on them.302 If she were in receipt of a separate maintenance his place as overseer of expenses would be compromised and she would gain more control over how to provide for the family. As the role of organiser and manager of expenses legitimised his authority this would threaten his position as patriarch.
In another letter she wrote, ‘I now see that half the People here must instantly be starving if we don’t employ them, & if we do, we must starve ourself’.303 Charlotte hinted at her husband’s failure as head of household again. This time in relation to the wider patriarchal duty of managing the household servants. The marriage was in crisis because of Thomas’s perceived failure to manage their expenses in a way which Charlotte approved.
Regardless of Charlotte’s feelings about Thomas’s ability to fulfil his masculine role as head of household she had no authority to usurp him. The suggestion was a rhetorical device aimed at persuading him to act more satisfactorily. Charlotte had no recourse other than persuasion. This case can be considered in the context of Tadmor’s scholarship on the household family.304 She argues that ‘family’ in eighteenth-century middling-sorts households was a flexible term which referred to a unit living within one household, regardless of blood relationships. However, in this case, the male householder was not living within the household unit and this would have been the case fairly frequently in elite families. Despite this, Thomas was still
302 Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce: England 1530-1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
303 NYCRO, ZNK.X.2.1.89, Charlotte Dundas to Thomas Dundas, Upleatham, 15th February 1780.
304 Tadmor, Family and Friends, 27.
considered the head of that particular unit, and his wife continued to defer to his authority when dealing with ‘family’ expenses. Likewise, it is clear that his father continued to have his authority deferred to as a type of head of household, or patriarchal figure, despite not living within the household unit. This suggests that middling and elite families created different versions of the household family. The elite version was a household that was stretched over geographical distance rather than being concentrated into one particular dwelling. Elite families with multiple homes, who often lived separately, could not have viewed the family unit in the same terms that Tadmor identifies among middling-sorts.
The fact that Dundas ignored his wife’s pleas in favour of luxurious spending in London suggests that he felt his masculinity was not fully confirmed through the management of family expenses. In this case, falling into debt in the mundane day-to-day expenses with his family was less of a threat to his masculine identity than scaling back on his conspicuous consumption in town. To get his attention Charlotte focused her budgeting suggestions on the expenses which would affect him most. It is interesting therefore that the area which she targeted was their horses. She listed all of the expenses involved in owning horses.305 ‘I am sorry to say that I see no plan that can be follow’d with any good effect, but to give up Horses & different things in which we have hitherto had amusement, & form our minds to be content on smaller Scale’.306 To hit home, once she had established that he did not feel that successful oeconomy was important for the masculinity which he aspired to, Charlotte eventually attacked, or
305 NYCRO, ZNK.X.2.1.98, Charlotte Dundas to Thomas Dundas, Upleatham, 7th March 1780.
306 NYCRO, ZNK.X.2.1.86, Charlotte Dundas to Thomas Dundas, Upleatham, 8th February 1780.
threatened to attack the type of masculinity which he did hold dear - his conspicuous consumption.
Charlotte attempted to rouse a feeling of patriarchal responsibility in Thomas by referencing family and appealing to the expectation that he should practise oeconomy. This was an alternative method for legitimising his authority to the competitive expenditure he apparently preferred to engage in while being in London, amongst his peers. This suggests that while oeconomy was culturally considered to be an area in which men could legitimise their patriarchal authority and therefore confirm their masculine status, not all men felt the need to carry this out in practice. The episode also suggests that in practice there were multiple factors influencing masculinity and cultural expectations often conflicted with one another. In this case the demands of being a son were apparently in conflict with those of being a husband.