32. Starting married life: Manchester 1848

When Alice came back with John to Manchester on 5 October 1848, it was to the house of her new mother-in-law.  In fact, there were three Alice Hopkinsons at Number 1 York Place:  61 year old Alice, John's mother; 24 year old Alice, his new wife; and 20 year old Alice, his sister.

O.S. map 1848-50:  York Place, Manchester
National Library of Scotland

Weeks later the youngest Alice left Manchester to join her married sisters, who were thriving comfortably in Plymouth.  Elizabeth Rooker's husband Alfred was already an Alderman and they had a one year old – yet another Alice – while Mary Tubbs and Charles had little Charles and Mary.  The two families lived not far from each other in the old part of Plymouth near the Hoe.

Alice Dewhurst had written laughingly to John in July 1848 before their marriage that she knew very little of housekeeping.  If she wasn't simply joking, she will have learned as much as she could from her mother in the weeks before her wedding.  She had been the eldest daughter in the house for three years by then, so she must really have had a very good idea of how her home in Skipton was run.  Her younger sister Lizzie took over the running of the house when their mother's poor health got too much for her, but we don't know when this happened.  

We know of Mrs Dewhurst's character – Mary Hopkinson described her grandfather Dewhurst as  "quick tempered, impulsive and outspoken" and grandmother Dewhurst as "calm, equable and more reticent" [1].  Perhaps that gives us an idea of how she might run a house.  But we never hear her voice because there are no letters from her.  She seems to have left letter-writing to her husband and Lizzie – she probably felt she hadn't had good enough schooling, and writing was better left to her better-educated daughters – and Ellen Ewing comments  

So far as the material for this record is concerned, there are no letters either to or from her and very little about her. [2]  

In Manchester, Alice had to learn how to deal with the servant girls who had been hired by John's mother.  We catch a glimpse of this when she wrote to John on 14 September 1849 

Tell dear Mother I can manage to tell Anne of her omissions and commissions if she will only do the things she says she will [3]

and then she had to learn to hire and manage staff on her own.  We don't know whether she found that neighbours and servants in Manchester had different ideas and standards from the people she knew in Skipton, but she had her mother-in-law at hand for the first year and her sister Ellen Milne was nearby.  

Notes

[1]  John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. XXIII

[2]  ibid., p.42

[3]  ibid., p.17