In May 1785, Lady Louisa Stuart , Lord Bute’s youngest daughter, spent an evening in the company of Jane, Duchess of Gordon at a ball in London. The following day the twenty-seven-year-old spinster wrote to her friend, Lady Carlow describing the pleasures of the evening and noting that the Scottish duchess,
looks as fierce as a dragon, and contents herself with spending her breath upon politics, and ringing a daily peal in the ears of her poor husband, with whom […] she squabbles more than ever. 1
Lady Louisa’s brief but cutting observation presents a candid glimpse of how the 4th Duchess of Gordon (c. 1748–1812) was seen by one of her contemporaries. However, her rank and personality also made her highly visible to the public. In the Bombay Courier detailed Jane’s trespassing of gender boundaries , reporting that ‘the Dutchess [sic] of Gordon was on a late occasion, reluctantly obliged to quit the Gallery of the House of Commons’. 2 Her public involvement in politics as a Tory political hostess made her a worthy topic of gossip , and her reputed forceful nature would permeate the perception of her married life .
Beyond the gossip written in personal correspondence and in columns of newspapers, the public perception of an elite couple’s married life could be manifested in its representation in painted portraiture . As Shearer West has argued in her seminal article, ‘The Public Nature of Private Life’ (1995), portraiture , specifically in the marital and familial genre, was a meticulously constructed entity, crafted to communicate particular socioeconomic messages to viewers regarding the sitters’ legacies and values. 3 Visual depictions of marriage and family offer a complex selection of evidence which requires careful navigation. While Lawrence Stone first postulated the use of visual sources to document what he argued was a revolutionary shift in the way families operated, more recently art historians including West, Kate Retford , and Marcia Pointon have questioned the portrait within the terms of image creation as a method of mediating social values. 4 West asserts that we should view painted depictions of family life as ‘fictions generated by the realities of economic life and fantasies of the family’s place within a socially unequal and unbalanced world’. 5 Familial portraiture operates less as a straightforward means of documenting a family , and more as a declaration of the patriarch’s perception of his domestic image and its longevity. 6 Much like the expected roles in a marriage itself, a wife’s position within the familial image was simultaneously controlled by and catered to the social values of the time.
To date, studies of family imagery in the British Isles have been limited both geographically and materially. These investigations have been based largely on English rather than British case studies and neglect other modes of representation outside of the formal medium of painted portraiture in oil. Across Britain, the printed image flourished in the latter half of the eighteenth century, disseminating not only copies of painted portraiture , but also fostering the genre of the satirical print. As Cindy McCreery has asserted in her influential book The Satirical Gaze (2004), satirical prints offer a critical alternative to the narratives presented in the mainstream modes of representation like portraiture . 7
This chapter proposes to further the study of marital images by marrying an analysis of both portraits and satirical prints related to marriage and family , thereby offering a more holistic view of how the elite family in eighteenth-century Britain was constructed, operated, and perceived. Only through a balanced understanding of both media , which negotiates the dialogues and nuances connecting portraiture and prints, can one achieve a closer understanding of the complexities of image-making associated with the brokering and termination of elite eighteenth-century marital unions : the making and breaking of marriage . Both a sitter in familial portraiture and a target of satirical prints in the late eighteenth century, Jane, Duchess of Gordon remains a rather understudied figure, unlike her political ‘rival’, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire . Despite being a celebrated member of society who featured prominently in newspapers and memoirs in her lifetime, recent scholarship has been preoccupied with fashionable English Whigs, leaving the study of Tory and Scottish women sorely neglected. 8 However, Jane’s varied visual representations offer a rich case study of the marriage cycle. A chronological analysis of her representations can provide a lens through which to engage with Jane’s reputation and the perception of her marriage and her married life .
Pendant Perceptions
Jane has been described as ‘something of a problematic figure in London society’, a legacy due in part to her unconventional background. 9 Born around 1748 to Sir William Maxwell , 3rd Baronet of Monreith (c. 1715–1771) and his wife Magdalene Blair , and raised in a second-floor tenement in the Old Town of Edinburgh, Jane had a humble upbringing. As a child, she and her sisters were known to join the local children in riding pigs down the High Street. It was due to another reckless act of jumping between moving carts that Jane lost the forefinger on her right hand. 10 Her parents separated when she was young, leaving her mother to raise Jane and her sisters in Edinburgh while her father had a separate household in rural Galloway, where her elder brothers were brought up. 11 The gendered severance of the Maxwell household meant that Jane was raised in a home with a female head. Although this division of the nuclear family may appear non-traditional, mothers were commonly responsible for their daughters’ upbringing, and marital separation was not a wholly uncommon arrangement in eighteenth-century Scotland . Marriage laws differed considerably between England and Scotland , with divorce in England only being deliverable through an act of Parliament. Scottish couples seeking divorce could do so through Commissary Courts or, alternatively, seek a legal separation . In contrast to England where only men had legal rights to seek a divorce , Scottish law saw adultery as ...