British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, Politics and History

British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century Authorship, Politics and History Edited by Jennie Batchelor and ...

Author: Cora Kaplan | Jennie Batchelor

87 downloads 841 Views 2MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century Authorship, Politics and History Edited by

Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-09

British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century

10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan

By the same editors Jennie Batchelor

Cora Kaplan FORMATIONS OF FANTASY (editor, with Victor Burgin and James Donald ) GENDERS (with David Glover) SALT AND BITTER AND GOOD: Three Centuries of English and American Women Poets SEA CHANGES: Essays on Culture and Feminism TRANSITIONS, ENVIRONMENTS, TRANSLATIONS: Feminisms in International Politics (editor, with Joan W. Scott and Debra Keates)



DRESS, DISTRESS AND DESIRE

Authorship, Politics and History Edited by

Jennie Batchelor School of English, University of Kent

and

Cora Kaplan Department of English, School of Humanities, University of Southampton



British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan 2005 All chapters © individual contributors 2005

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–4931–8 ISBN-10: 1–4039–4931–X This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data British women’s writing in the long eighteenth century : authorship, politics, and history / edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–4931–X 1. English literature – Women authors – History and criticism. 2. Women and literature – Great Britain – History – 18th century. 3. Politics and literature – Great Britain – History – 18th century. 4. Literature and history – Great Britain – History – 18th century. 5. English literature – 18th century – History and criticism. 6. Authorship – Sex differences – History – 18th century. I. Batchelor, Jennie, 1976– II. Kaplan, Cora. PR448.W65B75 2005 820.9928709033—dc22

2005043362

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgements

viii

Notes on the Contributors

ix

Introduction Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan

1

Part I Authorship and Print Culture

17

1. Woman’s Work: Labour, Gender and Authorship in the Novels of Sarah Scott Jennie Batchelor

19

2. Anna Seward: Swan, Duckling or Goose? Norma Clarke

34

3. Spectral Texts in Mansfield Park Katie Halsey

48

4. Romantic Patronage: Mary Robinson and Coleridge Revisited Judith Hawley 5. Ivory Miniatures and the Art of Jane Austen Janet Todd 6. Mansfield Park – What did Jane Austen Really Write? The Texts of 1814 and 1816 Brian Southam

62 76

88

Part II History and Politics

105

7. ‘Thou monarch of my Panting Soul’: Hobbesian Obligation and the Durability of Romance in Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters Helen Thompson

107

v 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


Contents

Contents

8. British Women Write the East after 1750: Revisiting a ‘Feminine’ Orient Felicity A. Nussbaum

121

9. ‘Tied To Their Species By The Strongest Of All Relations’: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rewriting of Race as Sensibility Moi Rickman

140

10. Hannah More and Conservative Feminism Harriet Guest

158

11. Chawton House: Gathering Old Books for a New Library Isobel Grundy

171

Index

187



vi

Figure 1 Frontispiece to Mrs [ Jemima] Kindersley, Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil, The Cape of Good Hope, and the East Indies (London, 1777)

131

Figure 2 An engraving of a portrait of Eliza Fay by Arthur William Devis

134

vii 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


List of Figures

This book evolved from an international conference, ‘Women’s Writing in Britain 1660–1830’, that took place over three days in July 2003 to mark the opening of the Chawton House Library, in Chawton, Hampshire. We would like to thank the University of Southampton and the Trustees and staff of Chawton House Library who co-organised the conference and supported it in every way, and the British Academy for their generous sponsorship of the event. Our thanks to Emily Rosser with whom this project was initially discussed and to our editor at Palgrave, Paula Kennedy: we have profited from her excellent advice at every stage of the process. Finally, we would like to thank Sandy White, the Chawton secretary, for all her hard work in compiling the typescript. The essays by Brian Southam and Janet Todd have been published in slightly different forms in Beatrice Battaglia and Diego Saglia, eds., Redrawing Austen: Picturesque Travels in Austenland (Liguori: Napoli, 2004). Thanks to them for permission to print the essays here.

viii 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


Acknowledgements

Jennie Batchelor is a Lecturer in English at the University of Kent. She has written articles on gender, fashion, prostitution and women’s writing and is an Associate Editor of the e-journal CW3. While working as the Chawton Postdoctoral Fellow, she completed a monograph on clothing and the female body, Dress, Distress and Desire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Norma Clarke teaches at Kingston University. Her books include Dr Johnson’s Women (2000) and The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (2004). Isobel Grundy, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is Professor Emerita (recently Henry Marshall Tory Professor) in the Department of English, University of Alberta. She holds a D.Phil. from Oxford University (St Anne’s College). She taught at Queen Mary College (now Queen Mary and Westfield College), London University, from 1971 to 1990. She is author of Samuel Johnson and the Scale of Greatness (1986), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Comet of the Enlightenment (1999) and (with Virginia Blain and Patricia Clements) The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (1990), and editor of a number of texts by Montagu. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Trustee of Chawton House Library, and a co-investigator on the Orlando Project (Director Patricia Clements), an interdisciplinary group producing both an electronic text base and printed volumes on the history of women’s writing in the British Isles. Harriet Guest is Professor at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies and the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. She is the author of Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism 1750–1810 (2000), and has recently completed a book provisionally titled Second Sight: William Hodges, James Cook and Johann Forster in the South Pacific, 1772–1775. Katie Halsey has recently completed a PhD entitled ‘Jane Austen and Reading Women’ at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests include Jane Austen, nineteenth-century women writers and eighteenth-century conduct literature. ix 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan




Judith Hawley is Senior Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published articles on eighteenth-century women writers and edited a number of texts, including Jane Collier’s The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1994) and works by Elizabeth Carter in the Pickering & Chatto series Bluestocking Feminism: Writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 1738–1785 (1999). She is General Editor of the Pickering & Chatto series Literature and Science 1660–1832. Cora Kaplan is Professor of English at Southampton University. She has written widely on women’s writing from the late eighteenth century forward. Her books include Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism (1986) and Genders (with David Glover, 2001). With Jennie Batchelor she is a General Editor of a new Palgrave series, the ten-volume The History of British Women’s Writing. Felicity A. Nussbaum, Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, has also taught at Syracuse University. She is the author most recently of The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (2003), and editor of The Global Eighteenth Century (2003). Among her other publications are The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (1989), co-winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize; and Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire (1995). She co-edited The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (with Laura Brown 1987); and ‘Defects’: Engendering the Modern Body (with Helen Deutsch 2000). Her current project centres on women, theatre and material culture in the eighteenth century. Moi Rickman is a PhD research student in the English Department, University of Southampton. Her current research examines racial thought in relation to understandings of sensibility in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Brian Southam is a former university teacher and publisher. His recent publications include the second edition of Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts (1964, 2001) and Jane Austen and the Navy (2001) and he is currently editing the Literary Manuscripts volume in the new Cambridge edition of Jane Austen and co-editing the Jane Austen volume in the European Reception of British Authors series. Helen Thompson is Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern University. Her book Ingenuous Subjection: Feminine Compliance and Political Agency in the Eighteenth-Century English Domestic Novel will be published in 2005. 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


x

xi

Janet Todd is Herbert J. C. Grierson Professor of English Literature at the University of Aberdeen. Her most recent publications are Mary Wollstonecraft: a Revolutionary Life (2000), Rebel Daughters: Ireland in Conflict 1798 (2003) and an edition of the Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (2004). She is the General Editor of the new Cambridge edition of the works of Jane Austen (forthcoming 2006) and is working on a study of Shelley and his circle in 1816.






This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

In July 2003 over 200 scholars of women’s writing in the long eighteenth century attended a conference marking the opening of Chawton House Library and Study Centre in the house and grounds of the restored manor house that once belonged to Jane Austen’s brother, Edward. Isobel Grundy, in the last essay in this volume, ‘Chawton House: Gathering Old Books for a New Library’, explains the genesis and development of the Library, which owes its existence to the literary enthusiasm, creative imagination, practical wisdom and economic generosity of an American benefactor, Sandy Lerner. On that summer day Chawton House, its imposing façade flanked by two large, festive-looking marquees, seemed to celebrate not only the lives and work of the writers housed within it, but the focused intellectual dedication and labours of the several generations of scholars and teachers gathered there.1 A testament to the rise in the visibility and status of women writers of this period and to the distinction of the field, the Library is a further affirmation of the acknowledgement that the writers and their critics and chroniclers have received in recent years. Research on early women’s writing in English has been for some time a highly respected, lively and expanding field of study, extending the range of authors read and studied in universities beyond the most utopian expectations of feminist critics a quarter of a century ago, as well as finding audiences for their writing and their lives beyond the academy. This successful act of retrieval, republication and interpretation – the ongoing work of many hands – has had a profound impact on eighteenth-century studies itself, so that the issues raised by women’s cultural production, and by gender, have been crucial to its own transformation and revitalisation. The essays in this volume are indicative of the range of current scholarship and the variety of its objects. They deal with famous and 1 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan




obscure figures, with both men and women, with fiction, poetry, letters, journalism, travel narrative, political polemic and drama from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. The book focuses on the interrelated topoi of authorship, politics and history, key themes which have undergone seismic shifts as a result of our ever-deepening knowledge about women’s participation in public life, and as a response to the increasing integration of contemporary theory into eighteenth-century studies heralded, for example, by Felicity Nussbaum’s and Laura Brown’s The New Eighteenth Century (1987). This new work, in its turn, has been driven by changes in the political climate of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, changes so profound that they have crucially challenged the ways in which feminist scholars, among others working on women’s writing in the long eighteenth century, initially defined their own scholarly investments in the period. Something of that shift can be understood through the oscillating standing of those better known fin-de-siècle figures, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen and Hannah More. Wollstonecraft’s work and life, which had won her such an uncertain reputation for the century and a half following her early death, took on a new and positive significance from the early 1970s onwards. She resurfaces in the 1970s as the leading thinker of Anglo-feminism prior to 1900, with the majority of critics and biographers beginning to embrace rather than apologise for her identification with radical politics and sexual liberty. But as editions of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and her unfinished novel The Wrongs of Woman or Maria (1798) proliferated, must-reads on every women’s studies and women’s writing book list, a new set of debates about her and in her name arose, paralleling critical differences within late twentieth-century feminist agendas. From the 1970s through the mid-1980s, new attention to Wollstonecraft sought both to contextualise her in terms of late eighteenth-century gender hierarchies and within the radical, dissenting circles in which she moved. Nevertheless, rereading the work of this period, one can also see that Wollstonecraft as an historical icon had become deeply – too deeply perhaps – articulated with the hopes and fears of the second wave of the women’s movement. Thus Wollstonecraft was simultaneously reinvented as the foremother of a radical brand of liberalism, a precursor of utopian socialism, a bold forerunner of the sexual revolution and a more bounded and conservative proponent of bourgeois femininity.2 Similarly, we might say that Jane Austen in this period was caught between two poles – from one point of view a proto-feminist, from another an arch-traditionalist – while Hannah More simply languished for a long time in a kind of political



2

3

purgatory, her anti-Jacobin and anti-feminist views ensuring her critical neglect. Feminism in the 1970s through to the early 1980s often characterised its own divisions through defined political ‘tendencies’ – liberal, socialist, radical, bourgeois. Each strand, in search of origins and lineage, found past heroines and anti-heroines in what sometimes seem in retrospect too parti pris and presentist readings of women writers in Britain in the thirty-year period between the sacking of the Bastille and Peterloo. By the late 1980s, however, the level of optimism about social change, a spirit of hopefulness that had fuelled the twinned energies of both the activist and academic elements of western postwar feminism, had waned, giving way to a much less utopian social and political imaginary. The eighteenth century became less interesting as the gateway to enlightenment and revolution, phenomena questioned from every end of the political spectrum, and ever more significant as the buoyant century inaugurating a robust, if messy, capitalist modernity, a world of indefatigable production and consumption – and rising literacy – in which women writers could and did thrive in spite of the constraints of gender. The expanding research on print culture and the history of the book responds to this new focus on the material as well as the intellectual effects of a widening cultural market. At the same time, new fields of work have developed out of both social movements and wider political concerns: the history of sexuality, colonial and postcolonial studies have deeply inflected research on women writers. Perversely perhaps, the setbacks and uncertainties about the fate and future of progressive agendas in the West since the late 1980s, including that of feminism, has inspired a more upbeat and an exploratory scholarship on women and on gender in the eighteenth century, encouraging, perhaps, a less tendentious search for origins and identifications, and a more patient, historically attentive approach to the complexity of women’s involvement in cultural production than that which characterised the groundbreaking work of prior decades. Recent world events have destroyed the last vestiges of Whig or Enlightenment versions of history – those sustaining illusions of constant progress – which so often underpin even the most sophisticated and historically literate radical agenda. A bleaker vision of our own late modernity has generated a new interest in ethics and rights. It has also supported a deeper curiosity about and a more nuanced and less moralising approach to the politics of earlier historical periods; its effect has been to revise our understanding of what constitutes a radical intervention. As Barbara Taylor’s Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (2003) argues so eloquently, we



Introduction


must rediscover the critical energies in eighteenth-century discourses that have fallen out of favour with our own modernity, such as virtue or religion. This collection, which includes the work of several inter-generations of scholars, both reflects and, we hope, reflects on, the new preoccupations of twenty-first-century scholarly engagement with the eighteenth century.

Public and private spheres Where women’s writing was once seen to occupy the margins of literary culture, it now takes centre stage. It has become more difficult (and surely less desirable) to trace a history of the novel without acknowledging the work of Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood and Penelope Aubin, or to study Wordsworth’s poetry without reference to that of Charlotte Smith. As we become more aware of the complex ways in which women writers responded to and influenced their contemporaries, the once dominant ideology of separate spheres becomes more difficult to uphold. Simultaneously, the interrogation of the categories of public and private by feminist scholars has urged a more expansive and inclusive approach to print culture, able to accommodate the multiple and sophisticated ways in which women participated in politics and in the consumption and production of texts, ideas and commodities. The critical debate about the validity of the public/private model – perhaps the single most important development in the study of women’s writing of the period – was invigorated by the publication in English of Jürgen Harbermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (first published in Germany in 1962). Harbermas’s influential model famously characterised the public sphere as a discursive arena in which ‘private people’ came together as a group to engage in rational debate upon commerce, politics and affairs of state – for ‘private people’ read male, propertied members of the middling ranks. As many critics have demonstrated, Harbermas’s conceptualisation of the public sphere served to relegate women to the confines of the domestic household and denied them a role in the formation of public opinion. While periodicals such as The Tatler and Spectator – paradigmatic texts in Harbermas’s account – and countless conduct books attest to the currency of the languages of public and private in the eighteenth century, historians and literary critics have demonstrated that, in Lawrence Klein’s words, there is no single ‘ “public/private” distinction to which interpretation can confidently secure itself’ in the period. Instead, scholars such as Klein and Amanda Vickery have identified a series of publics (such as the salon and pleasure garden) which challenge the hegemony of Harbermas’s homocentric model.



4

5

The danger of such approaches, as the editors of Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1800 (2001) have suggested, is that we merely multiply ‘alternative counter-public spheres, which inevitably remain in a competitive relation to the overarching concept of the dominant bourgeois public sphere’.3 Instead, this important and convincing collection of essays on women’s encounters with publicity as intellectuals, celebrities, writers, consumers and producers urges us to question whether ‘what we have come to regard as the Enlightenment public sphere was in fact constituted and defined by women as well as men.’4 As the title of Harriet Guest’s Small Change (2000) suggests, however, women did not always enter the public sphere with the boldness of a Montagu, Macaulay or Wollstonecraft. According to Guest, ‘[s]mall changes in the network of meanings that constitute publicity’ enabled women to imagine themselves as political citizens even as they shopped or wrote letters.5 Small Change powerfully argues for a more flexible approach to the public/ private model by locating domesticity and publicity as a continuum, rather than as distinct and mutually exclusive categories. Anne Mellor’s reassessment of the ideology of separate spheres in Mothers of the Nation (also 2000) offers an alternative to the more cautious and complex model offered by Guest. Hannah More, the subject of Harriet Guest’s essay in this volume, is an exemplary figure for Mellor, a woman who actively participated in the public sphere in her efforts to ameliorate the condition of women and the labouring classes through appropriately feminine and domestic acts of philanthropy and reform.6 This compelling body of work suggests new models for understanding women’s writing in this period. We can no longer assume, as Paula McDowell has argued, that the public sphere was ‘always already masculine or bourgeois’.7 But as Guest and Nussbaum warn in their contributions to this volume, we must be alert to the ways in which newly emergent paradigms may provide frameworks for reading women’s cultural production no less distorted than the rigid public/private binary they supersede. Responding to recent reappraisals of More by Anne Mellor, Anne Stott and others, Guest argues that the rehabilitation of Hannah More as a feminist must still take account of the complex and ambivalent nature of her personal and prescriptive notion of women’s public role. Many of the essays in this volume respond to the problem Guest outlines by making their arguments from a position beyond the restrictive binaries of public and private: thus Jennie Batchelor argues that women’s labour provides a positive not a negative thematic for Sarah Scott, while Katie Halsey reads Mansfield Park as playing out a very distinctive political argument between country Toryism and radical



Introduction

6


Authorship and print culture The repositioning of women writers within the cultural mainstream has shed new light on the richness and diversity of literary production in the period. In the past two decades, studies of eighteenth-century women’s writing have moved away from the novel to illuminate the many other genres in which women wrote. However, much of this body of work is indebted to revisionist histories of the rise of the novel such as Ros Ballaster’s Seductive Forms (1989) and Paula Backscheider and John Richetti’s Popular Fiction by Women, 1660–1730 (1996), which signalled the formative role that writers such as Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Delarivier Manley and the still lesser-known Mary Davys and Penelope Aubin played in the formation and development of this popular literary mode. (Since these women wrote plays, poetry, conduct manuals and translations too, these works also belie efforts to approach women’s writing through the study of a single genre.) These studies – which represent only a small fraction of the ever-growing body of material on women’s fiction in the period – coupled with the explosion of reprints of female-authored texts by Broadview, Penguin and Oxford’s World’s Classics series, have made such writers visible once more. But there is still much work to be done. The indispensable two-volume Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction, edited by Forster, Garside, Raven and Schöwerling, contains details of almost 4,000 fictional works in the period between 1770 and 1829 alone, a considerable number of which were penned by women who remain in relative obscurity today. Happily, as Isobel Grundy points out in the closing essay of this volume, just as the development of new methods of printing and distributing texts enabled women’s entrance into the world of print in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so new technologies are enabling scholars to reassess the contribution of women writers of the past. The 145-reel microfilm archive of the Royal Literary Fund – a charitable institution established in 1790 to aid writers in financial distress – provides a fascinating and still largely untapped resource for studying the material conditions of authorship for women writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as Charlotte Lennox, Eliza Parsons and Felicia Hemans. More recent



Jacobin values. But they also move beyond the public/private debate to contest the validity of other distinctions (popular versus polite, body versus mind, radical versus conservative) that have grown up in its wake.

7

innovations such as the full-text electronic databases compiled by the contributors to the Brown Women Writers Project and Chawton House Library’s Novels Online initiative are playing an equally vital role in the development of eighteenth-century studies in their efforts to make the works of women writers more widely accessible. At the same time, Sheffield Hallam’s Corvey Women Writers on the Web and the forthcoming Orlando Project provide invaluable new research on the lives, careers and critical reputations of some of the many hundred female authors who wrote in this period. Many of these initiatives would not have been possible without the development of The English Short Title Catalogue. The ESTC has dramatically re-mapped our understanding of eighteenth-century literary production in its ongoing effort to catalogue printed works to 1800. This valuable resource signals the narrowness of eighteenth-century studies which focus too rigidly on the novel by demonstrating ‘how what might be perceived as “literary” production represents only the tip of the iceberg’ of textual output in this period.8 The database speaks to some of the myriad ways in which women might enter the literary marketplace: not only as novelists, but as writers of plays, poetry, translations, children’s books, travel narratives, memoirs, conduct manuals and political works; not only as writers, but as printers, publishers and patrons. But even this expansive database fails to tell the full story of women’s participation in eighteenth-century print culture. Women’s contribution to journals and magazines, for instance, remain unacknowledged by the ESTC. However, as Judith Hawley’s essay on Mary Robinson’s work for The Morning Post, Moi Rickman’s article on Wollstonecraft’s review of Samuel Stanhope’s Smith’s Essay for the Analytical Review and Norma Clarke’s discussion of Anna Seward’s war of words with Boswell in the columns of the Gentleman’s Magazine suggest, periodicals provided an important platform from which women could shape public opinion on matters ranging from literature to politics. Catalogues and surveys of printed works also fail to accommodate the considerable body of manuscript and unpublished writing by women in the period. As Margaret Ezell has argued, conventional accounts of the history of the book have constructed a misleadingly one-sided narrative of print’s triumphant rise from the ashes of amateurish and outmoded practices such as manuscript circulation. In Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (1999) Ezell urges a more fluid model for understanding literary culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one which views manuscript as a competing and equally valid mode of textual production, rather than as a poor relation to the emergent technology of



Introduction


print. The distribution of manuscripts enabled women writers such as Katherine Phillips and Anne Bradstreet, Ezell suggests, to distance themselves from the emergent literary marketplace, to maintain control over their textual production and its circulation, and to establish intimate social bonds with their readers who participated equally in the production of textual meaning. Ezell’s account offers a salutary reminder of the failure of grand narratives – the decline of patronage, the rise of the professional author, the disappearance of manuscript culture and the institution of copyright – to accommodate the multiple forms of textual production authors embraced in the period and the diverse trajectories that women’s writing careers might follow. To this end, Sarah Prescott has recently suggested that we adopt a ‘pluralist’ approach to eighteenth-century women’s writing. Taking her lead from Ezell, Prescott argues that critics have consistently downplayed the sociable and collaborative aspects of women’s writing in this period in favour of a model of the professional female author as isolated and commercially driven. The implicitly hierarchical professional/amateur binary that emerges from these critical accounts is, as Prescott observes, erroneous at best and profoundly misleading at worst. Not only does this model artificially privilege the Behns and Haywoods who wallowed in the grime of Grub Street, but it equally runs the risk of misrepresenting the supposedly more decorous Rowes, Aubins and Barkers as commercially disinterested or naïve. Prescott’s work elaborates the range of networks which guided women’s writing careers in the first half of the eighteenth century, from coterie-style literary circles (a model which Norma Clarke’s Dr Johnson’s Women and her essay in this volume elaborate for the mid- to late century), systems of patronage and subscription publication, to the harsh realities of the Grub Street book trade.9 Like Prescott’s work, the essays in this book offer fresh models for understanding authorship across the long eighteenth century and the various networks that governed women’s literary production. In her essay ‘Romantic Patronage’, for example, Judith Hawley explores the reluctance of critics of Romantic literature to figure authors in creative partnerships with other writers, particularly when these relationships were configured in accordance with supposedly outmoded systems of patronage. This failure, she demonstrates, has had marked implications for the reputation and legacies of Mary Robinson, a woman whose infamous sexual liaisons once obscured her diverse and fascinating career as a poet, polemicist and novelist. While Jacqueline Labbe, Judith Pascoe and others have successfully deflected attention from these high-profile



8

9

relationships to examine Robinson’s works afresh, Hawley demonstrates that Robinson’s professional relationship with Coleridge still threatens to cast a long shadow over her literary reputation. The rubric of ‘Romantic patronage’ – an expression which alludes not only to the practice of patronage in the Romantic period, but also to the romantic and sexual dimensions of male–female literary partnerships – is offered by Hawley as an alternative framework within which to understand patron–client relations in the period, which reveals the multiple ways in which this longstanding practice worked against and for women writers. Brian Southam’s discussion of the 1814 and 1816 versions of Mansfield Park figures Jane Austen within a very different network of relationships with a series of male interlocuters. In ‘What did Jane Austen Really Write?’, Southam draws attention to textual variations – variations in spelling, punctuation and factual detail – within the two editions of Austen’s novel, asking us to consider whether the interventions of her brothers, printers, twentieth-century editors, and indeed those of the author herself, constitute ‘improvements’ to the text or interpolations which obscure its original and authentic meaning. Through an illuminating analysis of early nineteenth-century printing and editorial practice, this essay reveals the difficulties that belie efforts to recuperate textual authenticity in a period in which compositors and printers might greatly alter spelling, punctuation and nuance. Instead, Southam posits a more complex methodology for appreciating the role that authors, printers and editors played in producing textual meaning. Norma Clarke’s essay, ‘Anna Seward: Swan, Duckling or Goose?’, explores a final form of literary grouping. In Lichfield, Seward thrived in a coterie-style circle of intellectuals and writers, which, like Elizabeth Montagu’s London bluestocking salons, prized female learning as a valuable asset and civilising influence. At a time when the discipline of literary criticism was still in formation, and before the august critical journals of the nineteenth century had succeeded in their bid to gender critical authority as male, Seward was able to fashion herself for the present and futurity as a critic of note in her letters, poetry and in the columns of The Gentleman’s Magazine. Clarke’s essay reflects an important shift in recent work on women’s writing in the long eighteenth century. Where earlier scholarship celebrated the ways in which women writers challenged the hegemony of literary culture from its margins, more recent accounts have stressed their centrality to print culture in the period. Like her recent Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (2004), Clarke’s article presents the eighteenth century (and particularly the mid-eighteenth century) as a period which uniquely celebrated women’s learning and



Introduction

literary achievement. By the early nineteenth century, however, changing definitions of femininity and the increasing professionalisation of the marketplace – a trend explored in Clifford Siskin’s The Work of Writing (1998) – made authorship an ever more precarious and uninviting occupation for women. This is not to say, however, that authorship was always already an unequivocally appealing career for women writers in this period. As Jennie Batchelor’s essay on Sarah Scott’s fiction argues, many satirists and commentators writing in the mid-century responded to the growth of the literary marketplace by trying to police literary production according to a familiarly gendered and class-based economy of writing. According to Goldsmith’s Enquiry into the Present State of Learning in Europe (1759), tradesmen who published by subscription displayed their ‘want [of] skill in conducting their own business’, mechanics, their ‘want [of] money’, women, only their lack of ‘shame’.10 Scott, who published all of her works anonymously, was acutely aware that the woman who wrote for money walked a precarious path. Her letters and the deferential prefaces and advertisements that frame her novels cast Scott as modest and apologetic for her intrusions into the literary marketplace. The picture Scott paints is, of course, a familiar one, which can be traced back to the pious protestations of Elizabeth Rowe and which extends into the nineteenth century in the novels of Jane Austen. As Katie Halsey and Janet Todd reveal, Austen was as concerned as Scott to temper her literary commitment as an author with an appropriately feminine adherence to ideals of propriety. Halsey’s essay finds a particularly resonant example of this dual commitment in her exploration of spectral texts in Mansfield Park. While critical discussions of intertextuality in Austen’s novel have tended to focus on Inchbald’s adaptation of the Jacobin Lovers’ Vows (1798), Halsey points to the novel’s allusion to conservative intertexts such as Cowper’s Task and Crabbe’s 1812 Tales which reinforce the moral code by which the novel’s heroine lives. Janet Todd’s essay ‘Ivory Miniatures and the Art of Jane Austen’ identifies another manifestation of this conflict in her deployment of the trope of the miniature – a trope which, on one level, seems to naturalise the practice of authorship as appropriate and appropriately feminine. Yet, as all three of these essays demonstrate, these strategies and tropes are not as clearcut as they might, at first, appear. Scott’s novels, for example, present a very different model of female authorship from that indicated in her convention bound prefaces. Typically charting a women’s fall into and successful negotiation of the labour market, Scott’s novels ask us to read the heroine’s labours as metaphoric valorisations of authorial endeavour



10 Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan

11

which underscore the valuable – if labour-intensive – work of writing. Halsey’s chapter similarly asks us to question our assumptions about Austen’s deployment of conservative intertexts by demonstrating how Mansfield Park deliberately plays off different systems of morality in order to forestall ‘the reader’s desire to come to simple political or moral conclusions’, while Todd suggests that Austen’s use of the trope of the miniature in her work was not the mark of modesty or gender we might assume it to be, but rather a powerful aesthetic credo. Collectively, the essays in this part of the book point to the multiple ways in which women responded to innovations in the eighteenth-century literary marketplace with extraordinary pragmatism and imagination in order to write themselves into a literary history whose rich texture we are still trying to reconstruct.

History and politics The recasting of the history of the novel discussed earlier not only offers a more central place to women novelists as innovators of the form, but complicates both men’s and women’s engagement with sexual and national politics and with the political philosophies that informed them. The history of the novel articulated in the second half of the twentieth century, long dominated by Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) as well as by Michael McKeon’s influential Marxist revision, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (1987), has been undergoing a dynamic reinterpretation through the inclusion of women writers, not merely as subordinate figures to an all-male pantheon, but as key creators of the genre, their contributions not confined to critique or to modifications of sexual politics. Moving away from alternative genealogies of women’s fiction and the rise of individualism, such as that provided by Nancy Armstrong’s original and provocative study, Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), feminist critics are emphasising instead the imbrication of women authors in the philosophical debates of the period. So, in her essay for this volume, ‘ “Thou monarch of my Panting Soul”: Hobbesian Obligation and the Durability of Romance in Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister’, Helen Thompson places Behn in virtual conversation with Thomas Hobbes’s model of political obligation, emphasising the role of the physiological immanence of sovereign power, including the subject’s own fear of that power. Exploring the epistemological and formal interest of Behn’s text as a function of a particular political moment, the Exclusion Crisis and related events represented in her narrative, Thompson argues that ‘romance’ in the novel



Introduction

acquires both Tory and Whig significance, as the phenomenological ground of linguistic, political and romantic truth and, conversely, as flagrantly seditious flattery. Thompson invites us to consider Behn’s Love Letters as a key early text for rethinking the novel’s trajectory, as well as a fiction which exposes the ambivalence that can undermine a fixed understanding of obligation as it became applied to politics and love. Obligation, like subjection, has a more ambiguous and contested discursive history when women’s contribution is understood as constitutive of its logic rather than merely resistant or responsive to it. The more the power of women’s writing is acknowledged, the less it becomes exempt from wider political and social critiques. Indeed, novels and travel narratives which highlight the representation of cultural and racial others have been part of an extended critical and historical discussion about the forms of authorial subjectivity that such texts construct. Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters, exemplary texts in this genre, have each come under the scrutiny of feminist colonial and postcolonial critics who circle round such vexed questions. Put simply, these debates often turn on whether Western women writers successfully disavow their own subaltern status at home by constructing literary agency through exoticising and orientalising others. Felicity Nussbaum’s essay for this volume, ‘British Women Write the East after 1750: Revisiting a “Feminine” Orient’, asks for a new look at how the East, and its female subjects in particular, are constructed in women’s narratives: she argues that a whole set of recently articulated positions about the gendering of the East and the self-construction of Western observers require re-examination. Against the background of an ongoing debate about the sexual and imperial politics of West – East representation Nussbaum explores the complex encounters of three exemplary but little known women travellers to the East, Elizabeth Marsh, Jemima Kindersley and Eliza Fay. All three, in different ways, negotiated a ‘modern’ female subjectivity for themselves through their various encounters with Eastern women and their societies. However, as Nussbaum suggests, their writing reveals an unusual level of transcultural experimentation with hybrid and malleable female identities, discursive forays that may contain, but by no means may be reduced to, the rote terms of racial prejudice. Racial theory and the racial imagination in the eighteenth century have become resonant topics for the period, freshly explored in Roxann Wheeler’s The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in EighteenthCentury British Culture (2000) and Nussbaum’s own The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (2003)




13

which reveals how enmeshed the categories of race and gender are in both men and women’s fiction. Since Moira Ferguson’s watershed study, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery 1670–1834 (1992), ever more attention has been paid to women’s anti-slavery writing in prose and poetry as work by Markman Ellis, Marcus Wood and Brycchan Carey attest.11 Narrative, poetry and travel writing are not the only genres in which women writers addressed issues of empire and race. In her career as a journalist, Mary Wollstonecraft favourably reviewed not only Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789), but also Samuel Stanhope Smith’s influential An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1788). In these brief, astute responses to the writing of contemporaries, as in her longer work, Wollstonecraft’s talents as a female philosopher are on display. Setting Smith and Wollstonecraft in conversation via this review, Moi Rickman, in ‘ “Tied To Their Species By The Strongest Of All Relations”: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rewriting of Race as Sensibility’, draws out the important differences of emphasis between them. Rickman’s fine-tuned piece of intellectual history highlights the disjunction between the American-born natural philosopher’s materialist defence of monogenism, with its considerable debt to Johann Caspar Lavater’s physiognomy, and Wollstonecraft’s sympathetic but selective negotiation of his work via the language of sensibility. The sensationalist and affective rationales behind Wollstonecraft’s egalitarian and environmentalist ideas of race, and their appropriation to her theories of gender, gives racial theory a new and interesting salience in her thought. Rather than reducing the importance of canonical figures such as Wollstonecraft, Austen or Burney, the extensive work – completed and ongoing – on prolific but underrated authors, and more obscure women writers and thinkers, together with the altered perspectives in eighteenthcentury studies, has refreshed our engagement with them. A new enthusiasm for research on the ‘conservative feminism’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has rehabilitated not only Hannah More but has made women who start out as social radicals and become more conservative by the century’s turn, such as Amelia Opie, more interesting to us. In the penultimate essay in this volume, Harriet Guest considers More’s contradictory relationship to public life, caught between her advocacy and commitment to ‘home scenes and local details’ and the seductive attractions of political intervention. In comparing the metaphors through which More and her more radical contemporaries, Anna Barbauld and Mary Wollstonecraft, describe the public–private continuum and



Introduction

women’s passage through it, Guest offers a more detailed and sophisticated mapping of women’s relationship to public life, one which redraws old binaries without disavowing or downplaying the very real political differences between women writers in this period. It is characteristic of the essays in this volume that they are largely qualifying, revising and extending quite recently established historical, critical and political views, suggesting the liveliness of the field as well as mirroring the intellectual restlessness and political volatility of public life more generally. More than a simple restaging of women’s dramatic participation in eighteenth-century culture, this shift has involved giving bit-players speaking parts, recasting established protagonists and adding new characters. Alterations in the script have been accompanied by a striking change in production values. The romance of 1970s feminism, with its larger-than-life heroines and its sharply drawn social and political binaries which gave a Manichean and melodramatic edge to public/private, left/right distinctions between women, is being merged with, and in some cases supplanted by, a less ideologically clear-cut and narratively neat ‘true history’, a form perhaps more in sync with, and instructive for, the aesthetics and politics of the early twenty-first century. But these are, as any gender-sensitive history of genre shows, inextricably mixed forms, their dominance in any one time wholly contingent. Isobel Grundy’s final essay in this volume reminds us that the ‘protomodern’ practice of literary history which develops a genealogy of women’s writing, had its beginnings in the eighteenth century, in, for example, Clara Reeve’s The Progress of Romance (1785). Happily for us, literary history and criticism are necessarily unfinished projects whose next interpretative move can always surprise, and can never quite be predicted. Of course, the past does make choices that cannot be amended. Seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century libraries excluded women, even if they now walk freely and confidently through their doors, yet major library collections, as Grundy notes, still suffer from the historic prejudices against women and the modes they chose to work in, as their failure to preserve much writing by women in popular genres suggests. Chawton House Library, Grundy tells us, does ‘not in any way propose a separatist model of study, because women have always done their writing both in and about a two-sex world’, but because within its walls, and, we would argue, outside them in the field at large if not the world, ‘women are the centre not the margin’. A very different kind of history of culture, of aesthetics and of politics in the long eighteenth century is now being written.




Introduction

15

1. All of the authors included in this volume were presenters at ‘Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1830’, 13–15 July 2003, and all but three of the essays in this book (those by Clarke, Todd and Thompson who have written new pieces) were delivered there in earlier form. 2. For a more extended account of Wollstonecraft’s twentieth-century reinvention, see Cora Kaplan, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s reception and legacies’, in Claudia L. Johnson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 246–70. 3. Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Cliona O Gallchoir and Penny Warburton, eds, Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 9. 4. Eger et al., Women Writing and the Public Sphere, p. 15. 5. Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 13. 6. Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 13–38. 7. Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678–1730 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 9. 8. E. J. Clery, Caroline Franklin and Peter Garside, eds., ‘Introduction’ to Authorship, Commerce and the Public (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 3. 9. Sarah Prescott, Women, Authorship and Literary Culture, 1690–1740 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 10. Oliver Goldsmith, Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1759), p. 127. 11. Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis and Sara Salih eds., Discourses of Slavery and Abolition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).



Notes




Part I Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-09

Authorship and Print Culture





Woman’s Work: Labour, Gender and Authorship in the Novels of Sarah Scott Jennie Batchelor

Writing to Samuel Crisp as she made final revisions to the ill-fated Witlings (1778–80), Frances Burney strikingly aligned her literary labours with the commonly degraded employments undertaken by labouringclass women. Angered by Crisp’s suggestions that her newfound literary fame had plunged her into an unproductive round of ‘incessant and uncommon engagements’, Burney asserted the labour-intensity of both her domestic and professional employments: Caps, hats, and ribbons make, indeed no venerable appearance upon paper; – no more do eating and drinking; – yet the one can no more be worn without being made, than the other can be swallowed without being cooked; and those who can neither pay milliners, nor keep scullions, must either toil for themselves, or go capless and dinnerless.1 Burney’s letter has been read as an attack on the time-consuming and non-remunerative tasks that punctuated the lives of middle-class women at the expense of more economically empowering activities such as writing.2 Certainly, she displays palpable indignation here that she should expend so much effort in undertaking domestic tasks for which labouring-class women would receive financial return. However, closer scrutiny of the letter’s tone and context suggests that it offers a more complex account of the relationship between authorial endeavour and manual labour than at first appears. Indeed, in a significant, if treacherous gambit, Burney identifies with other working women in order to underscore the valuable work of authorship. 19 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


1

Burney’s vexed efforts to reconcile ideals of feminine propriety with the potentially unladylike occupation of writing have been the subject of much critical attention.3 Though she would characterise the author in the draft introduction to Cecilia as a passive ‘genius’ on whose mind novels are mystically written, Burney elsewhere emphasised the hours and effort exhausted in the writing of novels and plays.4 When she was first forced to put down The Witlings, she wrote to her father lamenting the ‘Time’ lost and ‘buried in the mere trouble of writing’.5 Burney’s fictional and dramatic work was equally invested in reconciling notions of female delicacy to the work that women had to perform to escape a world of ‘Female Difficulties’. Not coincidentally, The Witlings itself follows its genteel heroine in her efforts to secure a living – even though she can barely ‘make a Cap’ – after her fortune is lost.6 Like The Witlings itself, Burney’s letter explores a range of anxieties about labour and woman’s economic dependence, but significantly anchors this discussion in a defence of the female writer. Far from trivialising her literary activities, the reference to ‘Caps, hats and ribbons’ reveals that, as a working female writer, Burney could, momentarily at least, align herself with milliners and maids exploited by those who failed to understand the true cost of the labour invested in the services they provided and goods they produced.7 This moment of cross-class identification constitutes an important counterexample to dominant accounts of eighteenth-century constructions of gender and authorship, which emphasise the extent to which the domestic woman (and woman writer) was created (and created herself) in opposition to aristocratic licence and labouring-class moral impoverishment.8 Yet Burney’s strategy was not without risk. In highlighting how the discourses of labour, class and propriety were inextricably yoked to notions of authorship, she maps out the familiarly treacherous terrain that stretched out before the woman writer. According to contemporary critics and satirists, the growth of the open literary market and the decline of the patronage system presented ever-growing openings for opportunist and potentially talentless scribblers of either sex who determined to write for bread. As Burney was so acutely aware, however, the female writer who sought to live by her pen was doubly vulnerable to criticism. To quote Oliver Goldsmith’s Enquiry into the Present State of Learning in Europe (1759), within the familiarly gendered economy of writing, tradesmen who published by subscription displayed their ‘want [of] skill in conducting their own business’, mechanics, their ‘want [of] money’, women, only their lack of ‘shame’.9 While the inferior productions of male hacks tainted the literary market in their collective ‘insult upon genius’, the female writer was personally tainted by her professional activity. 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


20 Jennie Batchelor

Women writers deflected such accusations through various strategies that recast labour and authorship in complex ways. For example, Sarah Scott, in a letter to Elizabeth Montagu, attempted to divorce writing from labour (and its associated sexual taint) by condemning those who wrote for ‘profit’. Only those ‘rich in purse & parts’, she wrote, could lay claim to true literary ‘Genius’.10 Others, notably Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson, emphasised their need to labour for bread in a canny ‘marketing’ strategy to cultivate a sympathetic readership.11 These contrasting positions resounded widely in women’s fiction of the mid- to late century, which, as Edward Copeland suggests, variously ‘avert[ed] its face from employment’ or created a ‘mini-religion of it’.12 However, if this binary taxonomy cannot fully account for the ‘fictions of employment’ produced in the period with which Copeland is concerned (1790–1820), it fails also to accommodate a considerable body of work produced by women writers in the mid- to late eighteenth century.13 Recognising, as Burney did, that the identification of literary and manual labour could underscore as well as devalue authorial credibility, these novels offer a more subtle and complex account of the relationship between labour, gender and authorship. Typically charting a woman’s fall into, and successful negotiation of, the labour market, these novels ask us to read the heroine’s work as a metaphoric valorisation of authorial endeavour. Ironically, given her letter to Montagu, Sarah Scott was perhaps the most prominent figure in the subgenre this essay will explore.14 Edward Copeland has suggested that women authors of the late eighteenth century were both ‘resistant to turning their heroines into wage earners’ and displayed an understandable ‘reluctance … to turn their heroines into authors’.15 Scott’s novels challenge both of these widely held critical commonplaces. Here I will briefly sketch centrality of work to Scott’s novels – a fact often obscured by critical interest in the bluestockings as critics of courtly hegemony – before turning to the question of how Scott’s labouring heroines are cast as pseudo-authorial figures in a bid to dramatise, and provide fictional evidence for, the novel’s ameliorative purpose. In The History of Cornelia (1750), ‘The History of Leonora and Louisa’, the first and longest narrative in A Journey Through Every Stage of Life (1754), and Millenium Hall (1762) genteel heroines enter the labour market to avoid patriarchal oppression or abuse. The orphaned Cornelia becomes a milliner, companion and tutor to avoid her uncle’s incestuous advances; Leonora avoids an undesirable marriage by masquerading as a man and working as a preacher, painter, tutor and schoolmaster; while Louisa Mancel stands for many women in Millenium Hall when she is forced into a spiral of downward mobility – taking in plainwork, working as a servant and companion – before becoming 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


Labour, Gender and Authorship in the Novels of Sarah Scott 21

the overseer of various manufacturing and pedagogical projects in the utopian community. These women more than make virtue of necessity, successfully gaining financial independence and becoming providers for dependent relations and the local poor.16 Given the novel-reading public’s mistrust of working women, amply demonstrated by the backlash against Pamela (1740) and the general hostility that inflects textual representations of servants, milliners, mantuamakers and businesswomen in this period, we might ask why Scott’s fiction so persistently returns to the figure of the working woman, especially if she sought to link her manual labours with the intellectual labours of the female author.17 In no small part, Scott deflected possible hostility to her labouring heroines by focusing almost exclusively on women who are obliged, rather than born, to work. (Leonora’s servant, Sabrina, is the only central female figure in these novels to belong to this latter category, but even she works for a royal household.) Nevertheless, Scott’s adherence to the novel’s conventional middle-class bias should not obscure the absolute centrality of her heroines’ economic fall into the labour market to her novels’ exposé of the personal and social costs of woman’s economic dependency. In an inversion of Pamela’s story, Scott reveals gentility to be profoundly debilitating for women, where labour (since it affords independence) empowers them to move and to act. Though the orphaned Cornelia, for instance, has a considerable fortune, she finds, like Burney’s Cecilia, that wealth merely augments her sense of obligation to the unfairly ‘defraud[ed]’ poor. In fulfilling her duty to the poor, however, Cornelia accrues a debt to her uncle, whose decision to put the heroine in ‘immediate possession of her whole fortune’ makes her many philanthropic acts possible.18 Octavio demands sexual recompense for his kindness and Cornelia is forced to relinquish her identity and fortune to become a milliner. Anonymity, a necessary precondition of labour in Scott’s work, is something of a double-edged sword for her heroines: for example, while it immunises Cornelia against Octavio’s advances, it obscures her status and therefore prevents her from marrying the man she loves (p. 31). Leonora pays an even greater price than Cornelia. When she leaves home to secure her independence, she forsakes not only her name but her gendered identity: in order to immunise herself against the sexual threat that besets the lives of later working heroines such as Wollstonecraft’s Jemima, Leonora adopts male dress. It is tempting to read the heroines’ concealment of their identities in light of Scott’s decision to publish all of her novels anonymously; a strategy that Gary Kelly suggests is paradigmatic of the Bluestockings’ refusal to allow their



22 Jennie Batchelor

critique of society to transgress ‘the gendered boundaries of discourse’.19 But anonymity is no simple defensive strategy for heroine or author; rather, it allows women to challenge and critique more effectively the status quo. As a milliner, Cornelia still has it ‘in her power’ to make others happy, by giving them small sums of money or teaching them the skills necessary to enable them to ‘provide for [their own] support (pp. 50, 117). In fact, as a financially independent labouring woman, she is better able to fulfil her duties to the poor and labouring classes, since she can do so without accruing debts (like that to Octavio) that she is unwilling and unable to repay. Leonora’s capacity for action similarly increases with her economic fall. Where, as a child, Leonora has to produce ‘Argument[s] in Defence’ of her efforts to help the distressed, once she leaves her family home she is free to act without obligation. Among the many philanthropic endeavours funded by her employment, Leonora assumes the responsibilities of a male head of household by aiding the family of a debtor.20 Work allows the dependent heroine to become a truly independent benefactor. Her successful negotiation of the labour market offers proof that it is ‘Custom, not Nature, [that] inflicts that Dependence in which [women] live, obliged to the Industry of Man for [their] Support, as well as to his Courage for [their] Defence’ (A Journey, p. 7). If the work of Scott’s heroines allows the author to assert the personal and social rewards of woman’s economic independence, it also allows her to make claims for the ameliorative function of the novel. Betty A. Schellenberg has recently suggested that Scott’s career was characterised by a marked reluctance to embrace the identity of author – a reluctance that denied her a ‘coherent position as a citizen of the republic of letters’.21 While acknowledging this reluctance, I want to emphasise here the extent to which Scott nevertheless used her fiction as a forum for prolonged meditations on the novel and the role of the author. In fact, by embracing the ‘disembodiment afforded by print’,22 she was better able to undertake such ‘ “extrarepresentational” acts’,23 since she could do so without fear of personal reproach. Women rarely reflected openly on their careers as authors in the fiction of this period outside the conventionbound medium of the preface. When they did, as in the case of Frances Brooke’s Excursion (1777), they faced condemnation from reviewers who deemed such self-reflexivity ‘prejudicial both to morals and letters’.24 Scott’s fiction explores the subject of authorship more covertly than that of Brooke or Mary Robinson through an imaginative linking of manual and authorial labour.25 Her novels persistently present their labouring heroines as pseudo-authorial figures: storytellers whose narrative prowess




constitutes what April London has described as a form of ‘intellectual property’, and which proves as significant an asset to them as the skills they bring to the marketplace.26 The plots of A Journey and Millenium Hall in particular are driven by a series of encounters between labouring storytellers and idle listeners, which dramatise the novelist’s moral project.27 Of all Scott’s novels, A Journey draws most attention to its textuality. Like Millenium Hall, A Journey is structured as a frame-narrative consisting of a series of dialogues between Sabrina and her imprisoned royal mistress, Carinthia. The princess has been exiled by a scheming male cousin and envies those more ‘humble’ individuals whose lives are blissfully free from court plotting and scheming (p. 4). In an inversion of Scheherezade’s story, the servant offers her narcissistic mistress salvation by relating eight narratives (the first of which follows the story of Leonora, mentioned earlier) designed to illustrate that every station from that of the ‘lowest Peasant to the highest Sovereign, has its Sorrows and Disappointments’ (p. 5). Sabrina thus serves her mistress doubly, providing physical comfort through her manual labours and consolation through her narrative mastery. In this intricately layered text, the labours of the storytelling servant, the author for whom she acts as proxy and the cross-dressing heroine Leonora are suggestively placed on a single ideological continuum. The metaphoric equivalence of the three women’s work is rendered explicit by the metaphors of artistry that permeate Scott’s novel. Though, according to the novel’s subtitle, the text relates the lives of ‘real characters’, Sabrina belies this statement by drawing attention to the various ‘innocent Art[s]’ she must deploy to amuse and arouse Carinthia’s ‘Curiosity’ and thereby serve her ‘Moral’ project to reform her mistress (p. 105). These allusions to artistry links Sabrina’s storytelling to Leonora’s work as a painter – whose ‘flattering’ pencil works to ‘purify [the sitter’s] Mind’ – and links both women’s work to that of the author herself, whose novel strives to ‘paint’ ‘Vice and Folly … in their natural Deformity’ (p. 1). All three women, in different ways and in different social contexts, are working towards a single reformist purpose – the amelioration of the age through a benign feminine influence. If A Journey overtly metaphorises the moral project of novel-writing in the dialogue between the labouring storyteller Sabrina and the recalcitrant Carinthia, Millenium Hall offers a more subtle (though no less palpable) dramatisation of the relationship between writer and reader. Valuing ‘Example’ over ‘Argument’, the industrious activities of the ladies of Millenium Hall speak more powerfully than any dialogue they



24 Jennie Batchelor

might engage in with their critics.28 Their efforts are, none the less, brought under scrutiny with the intervention of two reader-figures, George Ellison and Lamont, who respectively approve of and resist their example. Lamont, a ‘pert’, though ‘good-natured’, ‘coxcomb’, resembles Carinthia in his narrow and prejudicial reaction to the society of Millenium Hall. Characterised by Mrs Mancel as a Hobbesian, Lamont initially misreads the community’s basis in a system of ‘mutual confidence, reciprocal services, and correspondent affections’ as a perversion of the social contract in which all are made ‘slaves to each other’ (pp. 111, 112). However, Lamont finds himself slowly won over by the non-coercive strategies and indefatigable labours of the Hall’s founders, who, fearing they may be suspected of a ‘design to dictate’, gently bring all to a life of ‘industry’ through their ‘example’ and the recital of their personal narratives (p. 118). At the novel’s close, the reformed Lamont is significantly figured as a reformed reader. Inspired by the women’s manual and narrative labours, he turns to the New Testament to ‘study precepts, which could … exalt human nature almost to divine’ (p. 248) thus realising the author’s hopes that her novel might ‘excite in the READER proper Sentiments of Humanity, and lead the Mind to the Love of VIRTUE’ (title-page, Millenium Hall). By presenting labour as a fulfilling and viable alternative to marriage, and by drawing analogies between the labours of the heroine and the reformative project of the novel, Scott’s fiction counters Nancy Armstrong’s claims that work was an anathema to emergent constructions of femininity and female authorship in this period.29 Nevertheless, labour is mediated in these texts in order that it may serve, rather than devalue, Scott’s argument. If heroine and author are linked by their labours, they are more profoundly connected by their efforts to improve the lot of others and galvanise them into emulation of their ‘example and suggestions’ (Millenium Hall, p. 118). Leonora’s view of her position as head of a school for paying and charity pupils could describe that of many other figures in Scott’s novels, and indeed, that of the author herself: ‘she did not act like a Person who embraced that way of Life only for a Support, but as if she had chosen it for moral Considerations’ (p. 120). Unlike Burney’s letter, which locates the value of literature in the labour invested in the creative process, Scott’s fiction values work (whether manual or literary) only as the means to a greater end: philanthropy. Her characters view their wages in much the same way that Scott considered the small profits from her novels: as funds for charitable projects that would resemble those undertaken at Millenium Hall.30 This is not to say that charity devalues the novels’ more positive take on woman’s work.




Charity is not simply, to borrow Nancy Armstrong’s words, a kind of ‘labour that is not labour’.31 Work is, after all, the precondition of many of the ameliorative schemes and reformative projects initiated by Cornelia, Leonora and Sabrina. Even in Millenium Hall, in which the utopian community is founded on the inheritances of its founders, labour and charity are intricately connected – a connection reinforced by the way in which the novel uses the term ‘work’ to describe both the activities of the labourers within the community and the philanthropic Christian work of its founders. When Louisa Mancel inherits 40,000 pounds from her mother, her financial gains seems less the reward of her birth than of the moral worth she has demonstrated in her ‘stoic’ determination to labour by whatever means she can to secure a living. Indeed, it is as a ‘waiting woman’ that Louisa first ‘char[m]s’ the woman later revealed to be her estranged mother (pp. 145–6). Labour is further vital to the ongoing success of the Millenium Hall community. While its founders have no desire ‘to drive a trade’, they none the less find that their various manufacturing projects generate enough profit to establish other philanthropic activities, including the establishment of ‘a fund for the sick and disabled’ (p. 247). If labour supports charitable activity, then charity in turn legitimises labour (and its analogue authorship) by straddling the faultline between the ‘masculine world of business’ and the ‘feminized world of domesticity’, which threatened to undermine the integrity of both the working woman and female author.32 Authorship emerges in Scott’s fiction as an arduous, though properly feminine, contribution to the nation’s moral economy. Charity has figured more prominently in Scott criticism than its precondition, labour, often in discussions which emphasise the true cost of giving for women. Dorice Williams Elliott, for example, has demonstrated that while charity acts as a salve for various socio-economic problems in Millenium Hall, including the problem of unmarried and fallen women, it does so only at the expense of woman’s sexuality: in order to deal with sexualised women, the novel, she argues, desexualises them.33 Scott’s earlier works may be read along similar lines. Her heroines’ economic and philanthropic activities are invariably predicated on the suppression of heterosexual desire. As a working woman, Cornelia cannot marry the man she loves. Leonora similarly forsakes love when she dons her breeches to enter the labour market, eventually becoming tormented by her friendship with a man she loves: what if he did not ‘like her as well, as a Woman, as he did a male Friend’ (p. 140)? However, to suggest that the pleasures these independent women take in the philanthropic projects their labour funds are inferior to those of



26 Jennie Batchelor

sexual passion is, to some extent, to miss the point of Scott’s fiction and to undermine the value it accords labour as a solution to the social problem of unmarried women and the degradation of female dependency. For much of these novels, work, and the charitable enterprises that arise from and license that work, offers consolation for Scott’s heroines. Leonora enjoys the ‘Fruits of her humane Labours’ (p. 67) and finds that she has ‘not much Leisure to indulge Reflections’ on her would-be lover (p. 77). Cornelia similarly finds consolation in her efforts to turn around the ailing business of a milliner and her family: her work not only busies ‘her hands’, but ‘gratif[ies] her mind’. Using her wages to help others, Cornelia enjoys ‘great joy’ and ‘power’ (p. 50). Later in the novel, she even takes pleasure in secretly financially providing for her lover Bernardo when his personal income is withdrawn by his conniving stepmother (p. 176). If charity reveals the benefits of woman’s work to society at large, it also licenses novel-writing. Unlike Charlotte Smith, who strategically, if problematically, emphasised the labour intensity of writing in order to establish herself as a worthy object of the reader’s charitable sympathy, Scott presented herself as her readers’ moral benefactor. In the ‘Advertisement’ to Cornelia, for example, Scott declares that she has forsaken personal gains in order to benefit the reader. Turning her back on more ‘profitable’ kinds of writing in order to best ‘inculcate, illustrate, [and] exemplify morality’, Scott suggests that the reader will be the sole beneficiary of the novel’s publication. Rather than financial recompense, she seeks only ‘approbation’ (n.p.). Scott was not the only writer to assert her fiction’s moral value, of course. Even before the rise of the sentimental novel, after which such assertions became ubiquitous, writers such as Penelope Aubin, Elizabeth Rowe and Samuel Richardson had argued for the contribution that their work might make to the improvement of the age. Where Scott differs from Aubin and Rowe, however, is in her development of these arguments into a sustained theory of the writer–reader relationship and the moral function of the novel. Much more than a rhetoric,34 or simple desire to ‘inculcate Religion and Morality’ in her readers’ minds,35 Scott’s writing aspired to ‘animate’ readers actively ‘in the practice of … virtue’ (‘Advertisement’ to Cornelia [n.p.]). It was not enough that they should ‘approve and commend what they observe [to be] virtuous and laudable’. Rather, the author’s labours were designed to encourage readers to ‘imitate what they thus approve’ (Preface to A Journey, p. 1). Scott’s metatextual claim for the novel’s ability to animate readers’ mental and moral faculties for the benefit of the age is both dramatised and fantastically




proven by the labours of Scott’s heroines, which, as we have seen, are implicitly connected with authorial endeavour. Few characters in Scott’s fiction, from the lowest labourer to the highest aristocrat, the most libertine rake to the most sentimental man of feeling, remain untouched by her heroines’ labours. The milliner, Madame Miteau, is only the first of Cornelia’s beneficiaries. Like Cornelia, Miteau is a victim of ‘the reverses of fortune’, but unlike the heroine, allows her misfortune to plunge her into ‘a dejection of spirits’ that renders ‘her incapable of taking … necessary care’ of her children and business (p. 46). In the five hours of the day in which Cornelia does not work in the shop, she turns around Madame Miteau’s business through the example of her ‘industry’ and by educating her children in the skills of book-keeping and œconomy necessary for their business success. Collectively, she and the children ‘extend’ the business’s ‘trade’ and pay off their debts (p. 49). No longer of use to the now self-sufficient Miteau, Cornelia subsequently takes up a position as companion to her aristocratic customer, Madame Du Maine. Here, too, Cornelia’s work enables her to undertake the greater work of reform. Having earned her mistress’s trust and regard, she succeeds in reactivating the dormant ‘taste’ of the aristocratic Madame Du Maine and channels her newly awakened virtue into ‘good actions’ that benefit the local poor and precipitate the reconciliation of Madame Du Maine and her estranged family (p. 57). The pattern is repeated when the amorous, though essentially merit-worthy Mr De Rhone is ‘animated by [Cornelia’s] example’ and aids the heroine in her plans to use her modest means to establish a new ‘manufacture’ in a small impoverished village (p. 188). But it is not simply the idle worker or dissipated aristocrat who can benefit from ‘practical philanthropy’. Of all Scott’s characters, George Ellison is perhaps least in need of improvement – he is precisely the kind of ideal reader envisaged in Scott’s prefaces and advertisements – yet he too is affected by the work of Millenium Hall and the exemplary stories of the women who inhabit it. While many critics of the novel have suggested that the radicalism of this utopian community is circumscribed by its seclusion from society, its sequel, The History of Sir George Ellison, suggests that Scott had higher hopes for her earlier work.36 In the sequel, the wealthy and influential Ellison spends much of the novel ‘imitating, as far as his fortune would reach it, the benevolent system he saw exercised at Millenium-hall’. Starting with his own household, he acknowledges his indebtedness to the exemplary community by asking Mrs Maynard to recommend a housekeeper. Ellison’s model household – in which ‘his servants enjoy soberly all the comforts of life’ – becomes



28 Jennie Batchelor

the prototype for a number of schemes to house and care for the poor, including the renovation of cottages to house the aging and infirm.37 If Ellison resembles the reformed Lamont as a model reader marked by the stories of the women of Millenium Hall, he also exceeds this model. George Ellison realises what Millenium Hall intimates in its final vision of Lamont reading the Bible: that the true litmus test of the effectiveness of woman’s (and the woman author’s) labours is her ability to galvanise others into imitation of her example. Contemporary reviewers greeted Scott’s argument for the reformative potential of her fiction with marked scepticism. A review of George Ellison in the Critical Review, for instance (a review which assumes that the novel’s author was male), argued that few would have had the moral or economic capital to ‘lay the ground-work’ for imitating Ellison’s example, no matter how much ‘good’ ‘advice’ the novel as a whole offered.38 Millenium Hall had been given similarly short shrift in the Critical three years earlier. The reviewer described the women of the community as ‘monsters of excellence’ and the author’s ‘system of ethics … cold and tasteless’.39 While such readings suggest that the authority conferred on Scott’s narrators by their labours and storytelling prowess might not extend beyond the discursive sphere within which that authority is constructed, others endorsed their example and the author’s claims for her fiction. The Monthly Review was entirely won over by the claims made in the ‘Advertisement to Millenium Hall’, determining the work ‘well calculated, as the title justly professes, to inspire the Reader with proper sentiments of humanity, and the love of virtue’.40 Though she failed to convince all readers, Scott made bold claims for the ameliorative function of the novel, fascinatingly endorsed in the texts explored here by the labour plots around which they centre. In her creative deployment of labour as both theme and metaphor, Scott’s fictional efforts to legitimise professional literary activity intriguingly challenge Clifford Siskin’s argument that the increasing professionalisation of the ‘work of writing’ as a realm of masculine ‘expertise’ in the late eighteenth century sounded the death knell for women’s literary activity.41 Within the novels discussed here, fiction, labour and authorship are mutually constitutive. Mediated by the discourse of charity, the association of literary and manual labours confers status on woman’s work as personally and socially rewarding, while the heroines’ ‘humane Labours’ provide fictional evidence for the author’s ability to right various social wrongs. If the novels’ lessons encourage the reader to labour towards moral self-improvement and the amelioration of the lives of others, the author’s work would not be in vain.




30 Jennie Batchelor

1. Frances Burney to Samuel Crisp, 22 January 1780, Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay, ed. Charlotte Barrett, 7 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1842–46), I, pp. 300–1. 2. Kristina Straub, Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy (Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1987), p. 191. 3. See, for example, Straub, Divided Fictions; Julia Epstein, The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women’s Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); and Betty A. Schellenberg, ‘From Propensity to Profession: Female Authorship and the Early Career of Frances Burney’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 14 (2002), 345–70. 4. Burney’s conceptualisation of authorship as genius is elaborated in her draft introduction to Cecilia, reprinted in Cecilia (1783), ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 943–6. 5. Letter to Charles Burney, 13 August 1779. Frances Burney, Journals and Letters, ed. Peter Sabor, Lars E. Troide, Stewart Cooke and Victoria Kortes-Papp (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), p. 128. Between writing this letter and the letter to Crisp quoted above, Burney extensively revised the play. Sadly, it would not be performed in her lifetime, although several characters from The Witlings were resurrected for the later Woman-Hater (1800–1802). 6. Frances Burney, The Witlings (1778–80), ed. Clayton J. Delery (East Lansing, MI: East Lansing Colleagues Press, 1995), p. 66. 7. Burney’s alignment of literary and manual labour offers a very different account of her self-construction as author from that outlined in Betty A. Schellenberg’s recent article, which focuses on Burney’s attempts to insert her fiction into a masculine literary tradition and to distance her work strategically from that produced by other women writers. 8. See, for example, Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); and Edward Copeland, Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 9. Oliver Goldsmith, Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1759), p. 127. 10. Sarah Scott to Elizabeth Montagu, 28 November 1761, quoted in Sylvia Harcstark Myers, The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 188. 11. Jacqueline M. Labbe, ‘Selling One’s Sorrows: Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and the Marketing of Poetry’, The Wordsworth Circle, 21 (1994), 68. 12. Copeland, Women Writing About Money, p. 166. 13. Copeland further suggests a third fiction of employment epitomised by the Minerva Press novel. Often written by women who ‘skirt[ed] the lower edges of the middle class’ (p. 165), Copeland suggests that the novels produced by the press often witnessed their heroines self-referentially ‘swallow[ing]’ the ‘bitter pill’ of the hostile labour market (Women Writing About Money, p. 166). 14. Other writers whose work might be profitably read alongside that of Scott include Jane Barker, Charlotte Smith and Clara Reeve. As Kathryn King has explored, both Barker’s Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723) and Charlotte Smith’s Old Manor House (1794) suggestively link needlework and authorial



Notes

15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

labour to ‘reduce the distance between texts and textiles, audience and author, authorial and female identity’. ‘Of Needles and Pens and Women’s Work’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 14 (1995), 87. Clara Reeve’s School for Widows (1791) more nearly resembles Scott’s fiction in its suggestive alignment of manual work, authorial labour and philanthropy. Like Scott, Reeve identifies the labours of the impoverished widow Frances Darnford with those of the author. The ‘School’ mentioned in the title of Reeve’s novel both refers to the institution Frances establishes to provide for herself and to fund various charitable projects, including establishing a labouringclass widow and her family in business, and to the pedagogical aims to which Reeve’s novel aspires. The success of Frances’s school anticipates the novel’s success in enabling its readers ‘to overcome all difficulties’ through living a life of ‘active’ virtue. School for Widows, ed. Jeanine M. Casler (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2003), p. 66. Copeland, Women Writing About Money, pp. 162–3, 193. As such, these novels are typical of what Eve Tavor Bannet has dubbed ‘matriarchal’ feminist literature, a group of works in which exemplary heroines prove their ascendancy over man by emerging ‘triumphant’ from the trials of life. Eve Tavor Bannet, The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 83. For a survey of this hostility, see Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 111–43. Sarah Scott, The History of Cornelia (1750), with an introduction by Caroline Franklin (London: Routledge and Thoemmes Press, 1992), p. 5. Subsequent references will be given in the main body of the text. Gary Kelly, ‘Bluestocking Feminism’, in Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830, ed. Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Clíona Ó Gallchoir and Penny Warburton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 171. Sarah Scott, A Journey Through Every Stage of Life (1754), ed. Gary Kelly, in Bluestocking Feminism: Writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 1738–1785, ed. Gary Kelly, 6 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), V, pp. 72–3. Subsequent references will be given in the main body of the text. Sarah Fielding’s The History of the Countess of Dellwyn, 2 vols (London: A. Millar, 1759) contains a similar subplot to that of Scott’s novel. In Fielding’s work, the benefactor is herself the wronged wife. Facing financial ruin after her philandering husband accrues debts the family cannot repay, Mrs Bilson becomes a milliner. Through her industry she finds herself able to support not only her own children, but also her husband’s illegitimate child and various other individuals in need. Betty A. Schellenberg, ‘Making Good Use of History: Sarah Robinson Scott in the Republic of Letters’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 32 (2003), 47. Schellenberg, ‘Making Good Use of History’, p. 50. This phrase is borrowed from Susan Sniader Lanser’s Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992). Lanser uses the phrase to describe an authorial voice that draws attention to itself through, amongst other things, self-reflection and allusions to the narrative process itself (pp. 16–17).




24. Monthly Review 57 (1777), p. 141. The heroine of Brooke’s novel, who arrives in London with a portmanteau containing ‘a novel, an epic poem, and a tragedy’, has theatrical aspirations which are shattered by a grotesquely satirised Garrick. As the author of the Monthly Review article notes, Brooke and Garrick had crossed swords earlier in her career. 25. In her novel The Natural Daughter 2 vols (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1799), Robinson’s heroine determines ‘on making the modern experiment, both for the attainment of fame and profit, by writing a Novel’, only to find her efforts thwarted in a capricious and unfeeling and overpopulated literary market. II, p. 32. 26. April London, Women and Property in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 113. 27. A case could also be made for Cornelia’s status as a proxy author figure. Cornelia’s faith in the power of the written word is demonstrated early in the novel, when she writes a long letter to Octavio which she hopes will surmount his prejudice and persuade him to support her dependents once she is forced to leave her home and fortune (p. 20). 28. Sarah Scott, A Description of Millenium Hall (1762), ed. Gary Kelly (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1995), p. 113. Subsequent references will be given in the main body of the text. 29. Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, p. 78. 30. For a discussion of Sarah Scott’s efforts to establish a Millenium Hall community, see Betty Rizzo, Companions Without Vows: Relationship Among Eighteenth-Century British Women (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), esp. pp. 295–319. 31. Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, p. 75. 32. Dorice Williams Elliott, The Angel out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2002), p. 35. 33. Williams Elliott, The Angel out of the House, p. 42. Mary Peace has similarly suggested that the economic contribution Millenium Hall makes to the local community must be weighed against the price the women must pay for their philanthropic pursuits. Mary Peace, ‘ “Epicures in Rural Pleasures”: Revolution, Desire and Sentimental Economy in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall’, Women’s Writing, 9:2 (2002), 305–16. 34. Chris Mounsey, for example, has questioned readings of Aubin’s fiction which judge her work by the moralised account of its motivation. Questioning the ‘odour of sanctity’ that pervades Aubin’s writing and that of her critics, Mounsey reveals her novels’ more ‘subversive messages’. Chris Mounsey, ‘ “… bring her naked from her Bed, that I may ravish her before the Dotard’s face, and then send his Soul to Hell” ’: Penelope Aubin, ‘Impious Pietist, Humourist or Purveyor of Juvenile Fantasy?’, British Journal of EighteenthCentury Studies, 26:1 (2003), 55–75. 35. Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), ed. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 3. 36. These criticisms, which continue to play a significant role in discussions of Scott’s novel today, are anticipated in the novel itself, in the comments of Lamont. Millenium Hall (pp. 110–11).



32 Jennie Batchelor

37. Sarah Scott, The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), ed. Betty Rizzo (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), p. 47. 38. Critical Review, 21 (1766), 281. 39. Critical Review, 14 (1763), 463. 40. Monthly Review, 27 (1762), 390. 41. Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700 –1830 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 210–27.




Anna Seward: Swan, Duckling or Goose? Norma Clarke

Anna Seward was widely known in her lifetime and after as ‘the Swan of Lichfield’, a sobriquet we might consider belittling, but which she thought apt and appropriate: it placed her in the tradition of Pope, the ‘sweet swan of Twickenham’, and Shakespeare, ‘the swan of Avon’. It acknowledged her lifelong identification with Lichfield, her prominent place within it, and her eminence in a literary and cultural world beyond. As a woman of letters, a poet and a critic, Anna Seward felt she put Lichfield on the map. (Samuel Johnson’s fame was associated with London.) She had no difficulty seeing herself as a swan, full of elegant distinction and a serene conviction of her own grandeur. When she died in 1809, she left instructions in her long and detailed will that a monument should be raised to herself and her family and placed ‘in a proper part of Lichfield Cathedral’. She set aside £500 for this and wanted ‘one of the most approved sculptors’ to be commissioned for the job.1 Seward could also see herself as an ugly duckling, a woman who, for all her charm and obvious gifts, lacked something. Though handsome, she was big – ‘tall and portly’ was her own description. She and Erasmus Darwin together, two poets walking along, looked, she said, like the butcher and the fat cook maid. And while she insisted on the importance of passion in a woman’s life – admitting that she often couldn’t govern hers, especially the passion of anger – her own passionate love tended to be directed, ugly duckling-like, towards unattainable objects: married men, especially the love of her life, John Saville; or her quasisister, Honora Sneyd, who married Richard Edgeworth in 1773 (thereby becoming the stepmother of Maria Edgeworth), removed to Ireland, and died in 1780. Honora was ever after lamented by Seward, who wrote many sonnets to her, though how much that was because she could not be reconciled to the loss of Honora, and how much because loss of the 34 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


2

loved one offered the poetic subject of unattainability, is debatable. Petrarch wrote sonnets to Laura, who may never have existed. Petrarch’s influence on the sonnet in the English literary tradition is pervasive, and there was a renewal of interest in him in the later eighteenth century which Seward herself, as a sonnet writer, helped maintain. The third possibility is that she was a goose, in the sense of a fool or a dolt. That Anna Seward was a goose has been, in a sense, the judgement of posterity. The nineteenth century found her eccentric and risible, a provincial poetess with an inflated idea of her own talents, who thought she had secured a permanent place in the pantheon of fame. The twentieth century was barely interested in her at all. Yet during her lifetime Seward held a position as a woman of letters that was unparalleled. On the basis of a modest achievement as a poet in the 1770s and early 1780s, she set herself up as an arbiter of taste, a critic. By the early 1790s she could be referred to by a contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine, matter of factly, as ‘a female writer of uncommon celebrity’.2 (This at a time when there was no shortage of female celebrities: Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, Catherine Macaulay, Fanny Burney, Hannah More, Hester Thrale Piozzi, among others.) Her pronouncements were lofty and absolute. She liked mixing it in literary wars. There was nothing shy or retiring or self-subduing about her; rather, she had a domineering nature and all the instincts of a pugilist. She took herself very seriously. Even before she had published anything of any significance, in her early twenties, Seward was acknowledged to be a poet. Her father read Milton and Shakespeare to her when she was three and she had memorised whole books of Paradise Lost by the age of nine. A precocious child, she grew up with a strength of belief in her own genius that never wavered. She would recite her own verses with ‘a fiery vivacity’. Her speaking and reading voice was particularly good; at social gatherings she was in demand for reading aloud and declaiming verse. Her stature and general presence, as well as her powers in this activity, led people to compare her to the actress Sarah Siddons (a comparison she took as her due). Although she remained single all her life, she was nevertheless a ‘reigning personage’ in the Lichfield society of her day.3 Erasmus Darwin credited her with the invention of a new form, the epic elegy, for her Monody on Major Andre; and William Hayley, admiring her 1784 Louisa, identified that, too, as a new form: [I]f your friend Darwin adored you as the inventress of the epic elegy, he ought to renew his adorations to the inventress of the poetical novel. Indeed, if Lichfield were a part of ancient Attica instead of



Anna Seward: Swan, Duckling or Goose? 35

36 Norma Clarke

And then, as often happened with Hayley, he burst into a few rounds of extempore light verse, complimenting her: Yet in the place of Grecian lays Of grateful rapture full Pray be contented with the praise Of your good friend John Bull. Tis true this genius of our land Has not the Attic spirit With ardent bounty’s open hand To crown poetic merit; Yet in the arts of war and peace If I may speak a free word Old England triumphs over Greece And Sappho yields to Seward. Her comment on this ‘sprightly hyperbole’ was that it was ‘sportive’ but ‘happily humorous’ in the sense that it was ‘without sneer or covert satire’.4 She made no pretence to modesty; Louisa was an original form and she did deserve to have her poetic merits crowned. Highly attuned to the workings of envy, however, she was always ready for the sneer and the covertly or overtly satirical. Literary London feted her when she visited in 1784, but Lichfield, full of the ‘owl-eyed gentry’, could sometimes fall short.5 It did not always take poetry seriously enough. Anna Seward saw herself as one of the ruling classes of English culture, laying down the rules in matters of supreme importance – and to her there was almost nothing that was more important than English poetry – establishing the bases for future generations. It was in this spirit that in 1784 Seward decided to begin keeping copies of her letters so that the correspondence could be published after her death. This correspondence soon became her main literary activity. She frequently lamented that it was too demanding. Often it precluded other writing – or she said it did. The manuscript copies were edited, rewritten, often more than once, and towards the end of her life she prepared them for the press, leaving meticulous instructions to her publisher, Constable, as to how they were to be presented. Similarly, she arranged for the posthumous publication of her complete poetical



modern England, we should soon behold your statue surrounded by fervent admirers in the midst of your native city.

works, editing and arranging them and bequeathing the finished manuscript to Walter Scott, who told his friend Joanna Baillie that he thought the poetry was ‘execrable’.6 Anna Seward didn’t rate herself as a major poet, though she believed she was better than most. What she rated herself as was a reader and critic of poetry and this is why the letters are so important. The originals do not survive, and the six volumes which appeared in 1811 have never been reprinted. They attracted considerable hostile attention at the time for a number of reasons, one at least of which – her orotund and overembellished prose (in her view, a properly elevated literary language) – continues to be a problem. (‘As to her prose style, I know not what to call it’, the author Jane West wrote to Bishop Percy. ‘I agree with you it is not English.’)7 Other reasons included her attacks on Samuel Johnson, her ‘improper attachment’ to John Saville, the married vicar-choral of Lichfield Cathedral who was the love of her life and whom she refused to give up, her strongly expressed literary and political opinions which some considered malignant as well as vain and egotistical, and her ‘disrespect for parsons and the hierarchy’.8 Anna Seward’s letters were conceived of as polished productions, written for publication and with an audience beyond the individual recipient in mind. They were addressed to posterity, designed as a monument to her genius. From 1784 until 1807 she not only wrote and rewrote them, but also selected, arranged and occasionally footnoted passages. If we think of letters (especially those by a woman) as spontaneous effusions, and collections of an author’s correspondence as a gathering up after death of whatever managed to survive, then Seward’s practices may seem a kind of mendaciousness. But this would be to misunderstand what she was doing. The finished product with its eye on the future was no less of a formal invention than her epic elegy or poetical novel, the originality of which Darwin and Hayley praised. In these letters, Seward was writing cultural history, literary criticism and autobiography – the autobiography of a bluestocking. The categories overlap. If the letters deserve our attention for their passionate engagement with the English literary tradition at a time when literary criticism, as a discipline, was in formation, they are also a witness to the profound cultural shift that took place in the early decades of the nineteenth century in the course of which critical authority became gendered as male. Opinion, once the province of mixed gatherings of the like-minded (often presided over by an exceptionally brilliant woman, such as Elizabeth Montagu, the ‘queen’ of the bluestockings in London, or Seward in Lichfield) became professionalised and in the




process women were effectively squeezed out. The heavyweight critical journals that were founded in the early nineteenth century – Blackwood’s, the Quarterly, the Edinburgh Review – were staffed by men. These were the early institutions of criticism. Unlike the Gentleman’s Magazine of the eighteenth century, they were not friendly to female and amateur contributions. Women continued to read, write and think about poetry, but on the whole did not adopt the authoritative voice of the critic which had been available to Elizabeth Montagu when she published her Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare (1769) and to Clara Reeve in The Progress of Romance (1784).9 The process was well under way in the last decade of Seward’s life, and while the coming men paid homage to her – Walter Scott was honoured to be her literary executor, Robert Southey regretted she had left him nothing in her will – they saw her as a relic of a bygone era. The voice that rose from her pages – opinionated, self-assured, independent, aggressive, full of a sense of entitlement and female – had become outdated. It was too loud, too full of itself. It was the voice of the bluestocking era and for some reason our historical and literary scholarship has paid little attention to it. This may be because the pejorative stereotype of the bluestocking took hold early. Jane Austen makes use of it in her depiction of Mary, the pedantic bookworm in Pride and Prejudice (1813) who, full of precepts and pushy self-assurance, is actually dull and dim. According to this stereotype, femininity and intellectuality were incompatible; still more, the desire to be authoritative, to draw attention to oneself by articulating well-considered views, signalled not superior abilities but the reverse, a failure of real understanding. Growing up in the 1740s and 1750s, Seward was a characteristic product of the bluestocking era. Her own father, a progressive, liberalminded cleric, published a poem when she was a child which expressed the values his daughter was to hold dear all her life. In The Female Right to Literature (1748), Thomas Seward made use of a crusading rhetoric to ask why ‘custom’ should ‘bind / In chains of ignorance the female mind’. Presenting himself in heroic mode as a standard-bearer writing lines which ‘dare against a world decide / And stem the rage of custom’s rapid tide’, he exhorted a child named Athenia, symbolising wisdom, to let thy growing mind Take every knowledge in of every kind; Still on perfection fix thy steady eye, Be ever rising, rise thou ne’er so high.10



38 Norma Clarke

Girls could aspire to reach the topmost heights. They could fix their eyes on perfection and, by hard work and self-discipline, attain the laurels that were the traditional reward of successful literary life: homage that extended beyond the family, a reputation and fame in the nation at large. In the mid-eighteenth century, learned women had high reputations; their opinions were sought and treated with respect. The leading male writers – Samuel Richardson, Samuel Johnson, Henry Fielding – moved among coteries of women. Intelligent women were able to benefit from a rhetoric that had been growing in strength since the 1690s which argued that women’s ‘follies’ and ‘weakness’ could be corrected by education. As Lady Mary Chudleigh put it, women had been ‘bred fools’ by being ‘banished from the schools’.11 They were blamed for their faults and yet not given the means to change. As ignorance and vice were coupled, so too were knowledge and virtue. With knowledge, women would become virtuous. Virtuous knowledgeable women, having improved themselves, could then set about the task of improving – ‘raising’ – other women, all of whom, as a sex, were supposedly in need of all the help they could get. The private project of self-improvement had a public dimension. Women were urged to change society by changing themselves. The display of accomplishments such as the writing of a fine poem or the expression of a profound thought served to encourage others to use their time in equally productive ways. Indignation at how women had been failed by their own weaker natures and a social system that had refused them opportunities for knowledge – ‘Debarred from knowledge, banished from the schools, / And with the utmost industry bred fools’ – was widespread in educated circles. It was one of the drives behind the enthusiasm for celebratory biographies of learned women which produced a crop of publications in the 1750s.12 Such women served as an example to others. ‘Surely, the truly wise, the virtuous, persons eminent for great and good qualities, for their extraordinary accomplishments, and the use they made of them, to the honour of the supreme Being and the benefit of mankind,’ as the 1739 biographer of Elizabeth Rowe put it, ‘ought not to be swept away into forgetfulness with the common rubbish of the species.’13 Oblivion might be acceptable for ‘the common rubbish of the species’ but the lives and achievements of the ‘eminent’ should be preserved for posterity. Anna Seward absorbed this message on her own behalf (her father had the works of Elizabeth Rowe in his excellent library and she read them repeatedly during her teens) and applied it in her mature critical practice.14 What distinguished her from others, she claimed, was




her recognition of the value of her own time, by which she meant the poetry produced from the mid-century – Collins, Gray, Mason, Thomson; her capacity to recognise and give credit to contemporary genius; and her determination that neither they nor she should be swept away into forgetfulness by what she considered the false and meretricious, debased critical standards of the day. Criticism of English literature was in its infancy. There were no universities supporting departments of English Literature. Professional literary criticism was practised by anonymous reviewers in the Monthly Review and the Critical Review (founded respectively in 1749 and 1758), some of whom were sensitive and serious in their critical writing, many of whom were hacks. Seward characterised them all as the enemies of originality – ‘ingenious composition’ – and, because anonymous, as inclined to be motivated by ‘spleen’. The history of the reception of English poetry demonstrated, she argued, that the public needed proper guidance: even the ‘immortal’ Milton’s early poems, including Lycidas and the sonnets, had ‘remained in oblivion full twenty years after Paradise Lost had emerged’. This proved ‘the absolute incompetence of the public to discern and estimate the claims of genius, till, by the slow accumulation of the suffrage of kindred talents, it is taught their value’.15 For the task of teaching the public she considered herself well qualified. This involved more than polite exchanges about the merits of Milton’s juvenilia. Cultural activity carried a responsibility. The forming of taste, arbitrating between this manifestation or that (this poem, that play) the shaping of the imaginary and its expression, was a job of work. It was forming a national literature. It was forming national types, constructing selves around particular values, hence the importance of the vernacular tradition. The circle of amateur enthusiasts with whom she corresponded and visited were doing more than merely pleasing themselves when they debated the relative merits of Pope and Dryden, or enthused over William Cowper (Seward later changed her mind about Cowper); they were developing and performing the relatively new skills of literary scholarship. Like the many gentleman-scholars who produced editions of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and Pope throughout the eighteenth century, they were serving posterity.16 Being female could be considered a positive asset. It was because she was a woman, Seward said, that she had been enabled to spend her time on vernacular English poetry rather than having her head filled with the Classics. She wrote: Many excel me in the power of writing verse; perhaps scarcely one in the vivid and strong sensibility of its excellence, or in the ability to 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


40 Norma Clarke

estimate its claims – ability arising from a fifty years sedulous and discriminating study of the best English poets, and of the best translations from the Greek, Roman, and Italian. A masculine education cannot spare from professional study, and the necessary acquisition of languages, the time and attention which I have bestowed on the compositions of my countrymen.17 Seward was a born literary academic, never happier than when doing close reading, textual criticism of the most precise and laboured kind. She could spend pages arguing the merits of the dropped e in words ending ‘-ed’, citing example after example to prove her point. Anything which sent her scurrying through her volumes of poetry was a joy to her. Her argument with Dr Johnson was, among other things, that he was not a close reader and that his judgements were therefore unjust. He was prejudiced and envious in her view, but what she called his ‘arrogant idleness’ was even worse: ‘He had not patience to examine and compare; yet, on all subjects, had the temerity to decide, without scruple, against the opinions of persons of great ability, who had examined and compared. I believe he seldom looked into the poetry he was criticizing, but pronounced judgement from the recollection of his juvenile impressions.’18 There is still in England a division in the literary world between the Academy and what used to be called Grub Street. Seward highlighted a difference in reading; we might now point to a difference in styles of writing: precise academic criticism which only other academics are likely to read on the one hand, and literary journalism intended for general readers on the other. It’s a well-established distinction now, but it was in its beginnings then. Seward took a resolute stand for scholarship and impartiality. Her opinions were not for sale; they were the considered views of a gentlewoman sedulously studying her books and comparing notes with other readers as disinterested as herself. The model was that of private, gentlemanly conversation. In early books of literary criticism, such as Joseph Warton’s Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (1756), literary judgements were presented as the product of polite conversation. It was customary to put before the reader an image of men of letters sharing opinions with each other. Warton described his book, a critical assessment of Pope’s achievement, in casual terms as ‘a few reflections’, and introduced it as a conversation between himself and the poet Edward Young. It began as a letter: Dear Sir, Permit me to break into your retirement, the residence of virtue and literature, and to trouble you with a few reflections on the 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan



42 Norma Clarke

The letter-form made the Essay seem less of a public statement and more like private remarks; not so much a book for the general public as an extension of a familiar conversation of importance to the ‘kindred talents’ whose lives were passed in the retirement of their libraries. There were many reflections on the merits and real characters of admired authors in Seward’s letters, most famously on the man whose engagement with literary history and the English language had done most to raise the status of literary activity in general, and especially of literary criticism: Samuel Johnson. As a young writer she had studied him closely, compared him with Addison, whose Spectator essays were required reading for all young women, and rated him far above the earlier writer. In this opinion she deliberately confounded stereotypical expectations: supposedly, ‘the delicacy of female taste’ preferred Addison. She showed by an analytic comparison of the two men that Johnson’s style was superior; at the same time demonstrating her own superiority to what she identified as ‘prejudices’ about female taste.20 Modelling herself on Johnson, Seward became increasingly critical of his methods. What she admired in Johnson was the ‘truth and daylight’ of his reasoning; what she disliked were the passages where ‘passion and prejudice’ warped his judgement. This she considered most evident in his Lives of the Poets (1779–81) which infuriated her because of the slighting treatment of some of her favourites, especially Thomas Gray, ‘the greatest lyric poet the world ever produced’, whose Elegy was ‘one of the most perfect poems ever written’. Johnson died in 1784 and the press was full of anecdotes about him. Boswell’s Tour of the Hebrides (1786), which Seward admired, lent strength to the growing mythic Johnson whose style of literary criticism was inevitably being emulated. Boswell’s account of travelling through Scotland with Johnson was the immediate provocation for a campaign which Seward waged from February 1786 until December 1793, mostly via letters to the Gentleman’s Magazine, the columns of which she already considered her home base. The first of these was sent from Wellesbourne, the country home of new, high-ranking friends the Granvilles, who, along with Court Dewes, another literary correspondent (‘a refined gentleman and an excellent scholar’) were related to Mary Delaney, the celebrated first-generation bluestocking. Thus protected, Seward went public with views she had already made known in her own circles.21



merits and real character of an admired author and on other collateral subjects of criticism that will naturally arise in the course of such an inquiry.19

Signing herself ‘Benvolio’, Seward praised Boswell for an ‘infinitelyentertaining work’, which faithfully reproduced the Johnson she had known, a man full of ‘malice and irascibility’. The Tour of the Hebrides displayed Johnson’s religious intolerance, his bad manners towards the Scots, his meanness to friends like David Garrick, whose role in popularising Shakespeare Johnson refused to credit, and his contemptuous dismissal of rival contemporaries such as Elizabeth Montagu whose Essay on Shakespeare he abused. She questioned Boswell’s decision to include such matters (‘Ought Mr Boswell to have recorded Dr Johnson’s unjust contempt of Mrs Montagu’s able and beautiful Treatise on Shakespeare in the lifetime of that lady …? An assault upon a reputation so established must startle the public’) but her letter was not an attack on Boswell. Nor was her second letter, which followed a few months later and which addressed ‘the historians of Dr Johnson’s life and conversation’, an attack on Mrs Piozzi, whose Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson had also appeared. Seward’s point was simple. These ‘historians’ gave accurate accounts of Johnson: he was ‘the late stupendous but frail Dr Johnson’, a mixture of ‘genius and absurdity, wisdom and folly, penetration and prejudice, devotion and superstition, compassion and malevolence, friendship and envy, truth and sophistry’. And yet they were setting him up as an idol to be worshipped. Johnson had been part of Mrs Piozzi’s household for many years, but her intimate memoirs revealed him as, in Seward’s words, a ‘human hornet’. Still, Mrs Piozzi had judged him ‘great beyond human comprehension, and good beyond the imitation of perishable beings’. At the heart of the matter was the question of truth, not the truth of the biographers – both of whom, as Seward observed, followed the precepts laid down by Johnson in his 1750 Rambler essay on biography and showed their subject with all his faults – but the truthfulness of the subject. If he was not truthful, could he be good? And if he was not good should he be emulated? The test of his truthfulness was, among other things, those literary opinions which were driven by envy: ‘the praise of another was ever a caustic on the mind of Dr Johnson, beneath the smart of which truth and justice were too generally disregarded’. Seward found in the writings of Boswell and Piozzi a Johnson she recognised, but she drew different conclusions from the stories they told. She was not prepared to put him on ‘a noble pedestal’. She castigated Johnson on Piozzi’s behalf for his treatment of her. She argued that a man who ‘delighted to destroy the self esteem of almost all who approached him by the wounding force of witty and bitter sarcasm’




could not be good. His ‘inhumanity’ made him not only a bad model, but a dangerous one. The ‘deep stain of malignity’ in Johnson revealed by anecdotal evidence and in his Lives of the Poets, his ‘reviling and tyrannous spirit’, the ‘internal bitterness’ and lack of generosity to the feelings and writings of others, set an alarming precedent for the future of literary criticism and literary biography. It was her ‘zeal for the honour of my century, and the reputation of those whose talents are its glory’ that animated Seward’s campaign. It was in the defence of Milton (‘calumniated’ by Johnson), Prior, Gray and others that she addressed the reading public and found herself doing battle with Johnson’s ‘worshippers’ and ‘enemies’ alike.22 More than other women writers, perhaps, the female right to literature was Seward’s patrimony, the air she breathed. It was a bond between herself and her father all their lives and it helps explain the passion invested in this rivalry with her father’s famous contemporary. As a superior woman, more intelligent, more gifted than others, Seward carried a sense that she was entitled to make her own judgements, and even that she had a responsibility to do so. She prided herself on her objectivity, on her ability to use reason in the pursuit of truth. Since the honour of her century included its endorsement of female talent, it was perhaps no accident that she began the systematic copying of her letters in the year that Johnson died. The throne of criticism was vacant. Her ‘sedulous and discriminating study of the best English poets, and of the best translations from the Greek, Roman, and Italian’ clearly, in her view, entitled her to occupy it. Anna Seward believed that by preserving her letters she would secure a permanent place in the pantheon of fame and, in this respect, she was a goose. She thought ‘truth’ would triumph over partiality, that opinion enshrined in bound volumes could be fixed in perpetuity. In pitching for the future over the present, she showed her instinctive understanding of the shift that was already beginning to take place. The values that had shaped her, the vision of elevated womanhood that could produce a poem like ‘The Female Right to Literature’, were losing their hold. What had been an uncontroversial and shared genteel vocabulary in the 1740s, built on a proto-feminist rhetoric that all enlightened thinkers subscribed to, had begun to seem fusty and old-fashioned. The new rhetoric insisted on the ‘natural’ differences between men and women: men belonged in public life, women in the home. What the Victorians were to elevate into an ideology of ‘separate spheres’ was already at work as the institutions of literary criticism began to be professionalised.



44 Norma Clarke

The swan of Lichfield was not a goose to believe she could occupy the critic’s chair. But she was a goose, perhaps, to do battle with Boswell after he published his monumental Life of Samuel Johnson in 1791. It was Boswell who delivered the blow that destroyed her credibility with posterity. Irritated by her use of the press to snipe at him and criticise Johnson, he responded to a new charge, published by Seward in the Gentleman’s Magazine in October 1793, that he had dealt with her unjustly and without ‘common politeness’. Boswell’s letter the following month covered two pages in double columns. It was a brilliant demolition job. Boswell insinuated that Seward had mounted a campaign against Johnson because she knew that ‘her venerable townsman’ despised her. The ghost of Johnson, the man that public opinion had placed upon a ‘noble pedestal’ especially since the publication of Boswell’s Life, was invoked to render Seward ignoble. He was great, she was ‘little’. Boswell apologised for taking up so much room in the Gentleman’s Magazine for the unpleasant task of ‘exposing the little arts which have been employed by a cabal of minor poets and poetesses, who are sadly mortified that Dr Johnson, by his powerful sentence, assigned their proper station to writers of this description’. It was meant to be a death blow and perhaps not surprisingly Seward retaliated by trying to have the last word. She, too, apologised in a long letter in December for her ‘intrusion’ upon the pages of the Gentleman’s Magazine with what she hoped would be the last salvo of the paper war with the man now designated her ‘foe’. But the bravado of her ‘Benvolio’ letters of the late 1780s, when she boasted about her authorship to friends while relishing the freedom of her ‘doublet and hose’, was gone. When she accused Boswell of doing his best to ‘injure a defenceless female’, she handed him a weapon he was quick to make use of. In January 1794, Boswell had the last word. In a brilliantly offensive letter in which he referred to her as ‘the fair lady’, ‘our poetess’, and ‘my fair antagonist’, he responded as a long-suffering superior man forced into a quarrel with an inferior. Her age, her ignorance of classical languages, her friendship with Hayley, the relationship with John Saville (Boswell observing that ‘poetesses … have too often been not of the most exemplary lives’), her sobriquet, the ‘Swan of Lichfield’, her status as a minor versifier, were all introduced in pseudo-gallant fashion. The object was to belittle her and in this Boswell succeeded. His condescending courtesy conveyed all too clearly that the realm of print was no place for ‘a defenceless female’. In the broadest sense, Boswell’s version prevailed. The rhetorical brilliance of this letter, combined with the impact of The Life of Samuel




Johnson, ensured that Boswell’s representation entered literary history as a reflection of the nature of things. Females did not belong in the realm of print; those who assumed a place therein were eccentrics. That this was not the view of the eighteenth century is only now beginning to be properly understood. Any judgement about whether Anna Seward should be considered a swan or a goose needs to take into account the eighteenth century context which formed her as well as (or in preference to) the nineteenth century context which reacted against her.

Notes 1. Anna Seward’s will is in the Lichfield Record Office. All biographical details from Margaret Ashmun, The Singing Swan (New York: Greenwood Press, 1931), unless otherwise indicated. 2. Gentleman’s Magazine, November 1793, p. 1009. 3. Ashmun, The Singing Swan, p. 40. 4. Johnson Birthplace Museum, Lichfield. The poem from Hayley is copied out with Seward’s comments on it in a letter to Miss Powys, MS no. 38/14. Much of the extensive correspondence between Seward and Hayley is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Hayley’s rhyme of ‘free word’ with ‘Seward’ is a reminder of how Seward always said her name should be pronounced. 5. Johnson Birthplace Museum, MS no. 45/8. 6. Ashmun, The Singing Swan, p. 270. 7. Ashnum, The Singing Swan, p. 276. 8. Ashmun, The Singing Swan, pp. 237–77. 9. An exception is Joanna Baillie, whose lengthy and theoretically sophisticated prefaces to her Plays on the Passions, the first volume of which appeared in 1798, were conveyed in the authoritative tones of an earlier era. Baillie’s aunt, the poet Anne Hunter, was a bluestocking. 10. English Poetry Database, CD-Rom (Cambridge: Chadwyck Healey, 1995–), disk 3. 11. Lady Mary Chudleigh, The Ladies Defence (1701). An extract from The Ladies Defence is in Roger Lonsdale, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 12. George Ballard’s Memoirs of British Ladies who have been celebrated for their writings or skill in the learned languages, arts and sciences (1752) and John Duncombe’s verse eulogy to female genius, The Feminiad (1754) are characteristic. Norma Clarke, The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (London: Pimlico, 2004) explores this history in greater detail. 13. Theophilus Rowe, The Life of Mrs Elizabeth Rowe (London: R. Hett and R. Dodsley, 1739), p. 2. 14. ‘From twelve years old to twenty, not a year elapsed in which I did not rush to a reperusal of her letters, nor have they yet ceased to thrill my imagination and to soothe my heart.’ Letters of Anna Seward, ed. A. Constable, 6 vols (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., 1811), II, p. 229. Seward wrote this in 1789 to Mrs Taylor who, as Mary Scott, published The Female Advocate (1774), a poem intended as a supplement to John Duncombe’s The Feminiad. Taylor was then living in Rowe’s house in Frome, Somerset.



46 Norma Clarke

15. Seward, Letters, I, p. 64. 16. See Isabel Rivers, ed., Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 2001). 17. Anna Seward, Poetical Works of Anna Seward, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Ballantyne, 1810), quoted from a letter in the ‘Biographical Preface’ by Walter Scott, I, p. xiii. 18. Seward, Letters, I, p. 191. 19. Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (London: M. Cooper, 1756), p. 1. 20. Seward, Poetical Works, I, pp. lxxxviii–xcv. 21. Ashmun, The Singing Swan, pp. 135–44. 22. The letters between Seward and Boswell appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine in February 1786, April 1786, January 1787, August 1787, November 1793, January 1794 and December 1794.




3 Katie Halsey

‘I will not allow books to prove anything’,1 says Anne Elliot to Captain Harville in Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818). In the teeth of this statement, I will argue here that the appearance of a book in Austen’s novels is, in fact, always important. Examining Austen’s use of books and literary references in Mansfield Park within the context of late eighteenth-century conduct-book assumptions about reading (represented here by the works of Hannah More) I argue throughout that Austen’s use of other texts and authors is never ideologically neutral or artistically unimportant. Of particular interest are ‘spectral texts’ – literary works that hover in the margins of the novel, not always directly acknowledged, but always reflecting or refracting some of Mansfield Park’s central concerns about ethics and morality – and the ways in which those texts enrich and complicate the relationship between narrative voice, heroine and reader. Under consideration throughout is reading matter, but more importantly, how Jane Austen makes reading matter. Most critical discussions of intertextuality in Mansfield Park have focused on Elizabeth Inchbald’s Lovers’ Vows (1798) to the exclusion of all other texts.2 Critics from Lionel Trilling to Claudia Johnson divide over the function of Inchbald’s adaptation of August von Kotzebue’s controversial, radical, sentimental German Jacobin play in the structural centre of Mansfield Park, arguing for its purpose in the novel as political, moral, structural or thematic; enlisting it as evidence of Austen’s conservatism, radicalism or feminism, her Platonic, Evangelical or Anglican beliefs, her approval or disapproval of the theatre, even her coded homoerotic desires.3 The extent of critical attention to Lovers’ Vows pays tribute to its unsettling presence in the moral and political framework of Mansfield Park, the nature and consequences of which I examine later in this essay, but such critical discourses also tend to ignore the importance 48 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


Spectral Texts in Mansfield Park

of alternative intertexts in the novel: most notably William Cowper’s The Task (1785) and Crabbe’s Tales (1812) which bear the weight of my discussion in this essay.4 A close interrogation of the presence of these more politically conservative texts exposes the subtle ways in which Austen’s readers are manipulated, and reveals the artistic strategy behind some of the more problematic moments in Mansfield Park. The presence of Cowper and Crabbe indirectly inculcates a particular brand of conservative morality and undercuts it with ironic distance; by recognising and identifying the kind of intertextual conversation that is occurring in the pages of Mansfield Park, we should come to a clearer understanding of what is at stake, morally and intellectually, in the action of the novel. In Hannah More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), More suggests that a woman should ‘read the best books, not so much to enable her to talk of them, as to bring the improvement she derives from them to the rectification of her principles’,5 and claims that ‘well-informed persons will easily be discovered to have read the best books, though they are not always detailing lists of authors’.6 In her later work, the conduct-book-as-novel Coelebs in Search of a Wife, the exemplary heroine, Lucilla Stanley, is praised for her speaking silence on the books she has read; Lucilla does not overtly display her learning, but for her suitor, ‘it was easy to trace her knowledge of the best authors, though she quoted none’.7 When the subject of young ladies learning Latin comes up, she blushes deeply and leaves the room as she has been learning Latin with her father, but cannot bear to be seen to be showing off her knowledge. Lucilla’s blushes betray her, but only to display her to greater advantage, simultaneously demonstrating her modesty and her knowledge of literature. Her qualities can be recognised only by the discerning eye that interprets her blushes as those of modesty rather than ignorance. When Jane Austen, writing to James Stanier Clarke, suggested that she was ‘the most unlearned & uninformed Female who ever dared to be an Authoress’,8 she was undoubtedly mocking both herself and the convention that demanded young ladies should be modest about their learning. Although the tone of Austen’s letter is playful, the issue of female pedantry was a serious one for an ‘Authoress’. Unlike Henry Fielding’s ‘sagacious readers’, who could revel and delight in his classical allusions, Austen’s hypothetical reader has to find a quieter pleasure in more deeply embedded references. In Mansfield Park, Austen negotiates between a conduct-book sense of propriety and her literary commitment through the use of the spectral texts resonating through the novel. These texts are often not directly acknowledged (showing off what one has read



Spectral Texts in Mansfield Park 49

is, after all, unladylike), or alluded to so briefly as to seem unimportant, but they are nonetheless a part of the fabric of Mansfield Park. Jocelyn Harris suggests, in Jane Austen’s Art of Memory (1989), that ‘literary references are to Jane Austen’s prose as metaphors are to poetry. They invite us to link disparate things; they thicken the possibilities of what we read’.9 They are both an invitation, as Harris says, and a habit of mind. It is evident from Jane Austen’s letters to different members of her family that literary references were, for the Austen family, an habitual way of expressing emotions and describing events and people; a means of sharing thoughts in a shorthand that other family members could immediately and effortlessly understand. This tendency is carried over into Austen’s novels, in which books, poems and plays are evoked with the tacit assumption that the reader will understand the implications of the references. As Mary Lascelles puts it in Jane Austen and her Art (1939), Austen’s writing is ‘as elliptical and indirect as talk among friends, where intuitive understanding can be counted on’.10 Sometimes, of course, this assumption is mistaken. Lovers’ Vows, for example, no longer resonates with the louche allure that made it so appealing to Mr Yates, and Home’s Douglas (quoted by Tom Bertram as evidence that his father had no objection to acting), no longer speaks to a modern reader, despite its tremendous popularity in the latter half of the eighteenth century.11 Austen uses literary references both to make her characters understand each other and as broad hints to her readers to help us understand them better. When Maria Bertram, flirting with Henry Crawford at Sotherton, quotes the starling in Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), for example, she suggests that she feels trapped in a cage, and thus allows him to offer himself as the way out of it. Furthermore, she demonstrates her knowledge of a text that wholeheartedly endorses the passion of love and frequently excuses lapses of decorum on the grounds that feeling is more important than propriety. Readers of Sterne’s ‘corrupt, but too popular lesser work’, according to Hannah More, catch the ‘infection’ of sentimentality, characterised as a ‘disease’ that must be ‘expelled’.12 Maria’s reading thus reveals her as a woman with whom Henry can flirt with impunity, and hints to a reader that her passions may be stronger than her sense of propriety. Similarly, when Mary Crawford wittily parodies Hawkins Browne’s ‘Address to Tobacco’ in imitation of Pope,13 she reveals herself as the imitator of an imitator, and thus as insincere and shallow. Her reading, like Maria’s, betrays and exposes her. These literary references resonate with more information than the characters that quote them can hear or understand, thus creating a complicated form of structural irony; a link between narrator and reader based on the assumption



50 Katie Halsey

of shared attitudes to the texts quoted. Once such a link has been established, it may be exploited either by confirming or refuting the reader’s assumption. According to her brother Henry, Jane Austen’s favourite moral writers were ‘Johnson in prose, and Cowper in verse’.14 Austen refers to or quotes Cowper in Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey and Emma, and it is surely no coincidence that Fanny Price quotes Cowper twice (The Task and ‘Tirocinium’) and paraphrases Johnson (Rasselas) in Mansfield Park. Books are Fanny’s primary way of understanding the world and, for Fanny, as for her creator, quotations are a habit of mind; a way of expressing how she feels, indeed on occasion the only way in which she can speak the language of the heart. Edmund early recognises that her ‘fondness for reading’ will, if ‘properly directed’, be ‘an education in itself’ (p. 19), and Fanny habitually retreats from the pains and uncertainties of her life at Mansfield to the East room and her books and comforts. Fanny’s choice of reading is important, as reading forms her mind, and it is clear from the selection that Edmund casually picks up – Lord Macartney’s Journal of his Embassy to China, Johnson’s Idler and Crabbe’s Tales – that Fanny reads the sorts of books that moralists like Hannah More approve for young ladies. Austen tells us a great deal about Fanny through her choice of reading matter. The books that Fanny reads are an accurate reflection of her character, consistent with the various aspects of her personality. Macartney’s Journal, with its careful descriptions of Chinese customs and the author’s sympathetic and sensitive curiosity about the habits of the citizens of other nations, is paralleled by Fanny’s desire to know more about her uncle’s affairs in the West Indies; Johnson’s Idler reflects and represents her moral code, while Crabbe’s Tales show Fanny’s poetic sensibilities, demonstrated elsewhere by her sensitivity to nature and beauty and her love of Cowper. Her choice of Crabbe also shows her thoroughly unexceptionable literary taste. As James Kinsley suggests, Fanny’s choice of Crabbe is significant because ‘Jane Austen obviously wants us to know that Fanny keeps up with the best writing of her day’.15 Crabbe’s status as a poet whom everyone could admire is well illustrated by Mary Russell Mitford’s comment on the subject to her correspondent Mrs Hofland: ‘Do you like Crabbe? But that is a silly question. Everybody likes Mr. Crabbe to a certain point. He is the only poet going of whom everybody thinks alike.’16 James Edward Austen-Leigh suggested that Austen enjoyed Crabbe, ‘perhaps on account of a certain resemblance to herself in minute and highly finished detail’ and relates his aunt’s long-running jest on the




subject: ‘if she ever married at all, she could fancy being Mrs Crabbe’.17 Isobel Grundy reminds us that Austen more than once used the pose of husband-hunting to signal her specifically literary admiration of a man;18 if this strategy is turned neatly on its head, the literary tastes that Fanny shares with Edmund signal (invisibly to Fanny, but obviously to a reader) her desire for Edmund as a husband. Crabbe is the signifier of a private joke in Austen’s letters and it may be that his role is somewhat similar in Mansfield Park: in the preface to his Tales, Crabbe writes of his intention that ‘nothing will be found that militates against the rules of propriety and good manners, nothing that offends against the more important precepts of morality and religion’,19 a description that immediately marks the work as suitable reading for a young lady, particularly one like Fanny who finds the characters in Lovers’ Vows ‘so totally improper for home representation’ (p. 124). His poetry is, though, also characterised by a robustly cynical world-view. Cynicism had no place in the female-authored novel (at least according to those critics who both attacked and defended Austen on charges of cynicism); perhaps the presence of Crabbe in Mansfield Park helps Austen to amalgamate conservative moral views with the scepticism natural to her. Crabbe’s The Parish Register provided the name of Austen’s heroine and the contents of his Tales supplied subject matter with which she could work. The tale of most relevance to Mansfield Park, and to Fanny’s situation in particular, is ‘The Confidant’ (Tale XVI). In this tale, the lovely Anna is a dependent relation, who has the ‘painful office’ of attending ‘on a lady, as an humble friend’. Her ‘station’, like Fanny’s, ‘frequent terrors wrought’, and the description of her duties is strongly reminiscent of Fanny’s attendance on Lady Bertram: Her duties here were of the usual kind – And some the body harass’d, some the mind: Billets she wrote, and tender stories read … We witness Fanny’s ‘body harass’d’ as she rests on the sofa with a headache after cutting roses in the hot sun and the trials to her ‘mind’ from Mrs Norris’s importunities; we see her getting through the difficulties of Lady Bertram’s needlework for her and reading to her (although Fanny reads Shakespeare, rather than ‘tender stories’). When Anna is described as playing music ‘At a request that no request convey’d’, we are reminded of Sir Thomas’s advice to Fanny at the end of the Mansfield Ball: ‘ “advise” was his word, but it was the advice of absolute power’ (p. 254). Anna ‘veil’d her troubles in a mask of ease / And showed her pleasure



52 Katie Halsey

was a power to please’.20 For Fanny, too, veiling her troubles is second nature, and ‘pleasure’ is the ‘power to please’. Failing to please makes her miserable, and her happiest moments are when she earns her aunt and uncle Bertram’s praise. Although Anna’s story differs from Fanny’s in that the main part of the tale takes place after she has been removed from her dependent situation by marriage, before her marriage, she is ‘shamed and frighten’d’ by proposals from men who gaze on her face ‘with careless freedom’, and who ‘spoke their purpose with an easy air’,21 a situation similar to Henry Crawford’s importunities to Fanny. There is enough of Anna in Fanny to make the fact that we see her reading the book in which her tale is found suggestive. Crabbe’s tone when discussing Anna is gently satirical – although he is broadly sympathetic to his heroine, he none the less remains at a distance from her – rather as Austen’s narrative voice, albeit in a novel where the majority of the action is represented by Fanny’s perceptions of it, maintains a space between them. There are places in Mansfield Park where the reader is encouraged to see through Fanny, as when, for example, waiting for Edmund and Miss Crawford to finish riding, she translates her own jealousy and feelings of exclusion into concern for Edmund and the horse, and displaces her irritation with Edmund onto Mr Crawford: She must not wonder at all this; what could be more natural than that Edmund should be making himself useful, and proving his goodnature by any one? She could not but think indeed that Mr. Crawford might as well have saved him the trouble; that it would have been particularly proper and becoming in a brother to have done it himself; but Mr. Crawford, with all his boasted good-nature, and all his coachmanship, probably knew nothing of the matter, and had not active kindness in comparison of Edmund. She began to think it rather hard upon the mare to have such double duty; if she were forgotten the poor mare should be remembered. (p. 61) The syntax gives Fanny away. In ‘she must not wonder’, Austen represents Fanny wrenching her thoughts away from the fact that she does wonder why Edmund should be so involved in teaching Mary Crawford and the rhetorical question, ‘what could be more natural?’, gestures to the fact that Fanny does not think it ‘natural’ that Edmund should help anyone but her. The ‘she could not but think’ is a beautiful example of Fanny’s capacity for self-delusion; the previous sentence has demonstrated precisely that Fanny can stop herself from thinking certain things. Her willingness to blame Mr Crawford rather than Edmund is thus




revealed as the displacement strategy it really is. Similarly, when she begins to think about the mare, the phrase ‘if she were forgotten’ undercuts her sympathy for the mare; Austen does not even need to italicise the ‘she’ for a reader to hear its self-pitying tone. A reader may see through Fanny’s eyes, but the same reader also perceives her self-delusions. Crabbe’s robust scepticism thus makes an appearance in Mansfield Park, toned down and translated into a quieter sort of ironic distance. More vividly even than Crabbe, William Cowper’s The Task is always in the background of Fanny Price’s thoughts. Because her consciousness is the filter through which a reader sees and understands the majority of the action of Mansfield Park, Cowper is thus frequently present in the narrative too, as a sort of contrapuntal accompaniment to the narrative voice. In Mansfield Park, as in Cowper, the reader feels clearly that ‘God made the country, and man made the town’.22 Although the suggestion that country life is preferable to the dissipations of a town is in no way confined to Austen and Cowper, the singular congruence between the attitudes expressed in The Task and Mansfield Park seems significant. The Task’s approbation of the pleasures of the country and a retired domestic life and its disapproval of the joys of the town is reflected in the contrast between Fanny’s quiet steadiness and longing for peace and the noise and bustle of the rest of the characters. Cowper writes: Possess ye therefore, ye who borne about In chariots and sedans, know no fatigue But that of idleness, and taste no scenes But such as art contrives, possess ye still, Your element; there only, ye can shine There only minds like yours can do no harm. (I, 755–9) Mary Crawford, who, looking at Nature’s beauty in the Parsonage shrubbery, can ‘see no wonder in this shrubbery equal to seeing myself in it’ (p. 189), is clearly one of these. ‘In cities foul example on most minds / Begets its likeness’ (I, 685–6), says Cowper, in lines that explain Edmund and Fanny’s conversation about the influence of example on Mary’s ‘tainted’ mind.23 In London, among her own set, a mind like hers can do no harm;24 at Mansfield, out of her artificial element, Mary Crawford’s mind can and does cause harm. The town is an evident evil in Mansfield Park – Maria’s longing for a town house tempts her into her disastrous marriage with Rushworth, while Mary’s delight in the gaieties of London reveals her as an unsuitable mate for Edmund. Henry’s choice of London



54 Katie Halsey

over Everingham causes his elopement with Maria, and Tom’s town dissipations lead him to the brink of death. Put crudely, the narrative voice and deserving characters in Mansfield Park seem to share Cowper’s tastes and views, while the less deserving do not. Cowper’s description of ‘the sedentary [who] stretch their lazy length / When custom bids, but no refreshment find / For none they need’ (I, 389–91) finds its embodiment in Lady Bertram, snoozing on the sofa, and his disapproval of those who indulge too much in ‘the repose the SOFA yields’ (I, 102) is reflected in the fact that Fanny, as Julia does her the justice to point out, is ‘as little upon the sofa as any body in the house’ (p. 64). Lady Bertram playing cards is the quintessence of Cowper’s lines about those card players who cannot play, as, with Henry Crawford at her elbow, she ‘sits / Spectatress both and spectacle, a sad / And silent cipher, while her proxy plays’ (I, 475–7). The choice of the noun ‘cipher’ is telling – earlier in the novel Mrs Grant describes Lady Bertram as ‘more of a cipher now than when he [Sir Thomas] is at home’ (p. 145). Crawford and Rushworth’s enthusiasm for improvement forms a contrast to Cowper’s view that ‘improvement … the idol of the age, / Is fed with many a victim’ (III, 764–5), and Henry’s indifference to his estate, Everingham, bears out Cowper’s disappointment that ‘estates are landscapes, gazed upon awhile, / Then advertised, and auctioneer’d away’ (III, 755–6). Sir Thomas’s view that Maria should not be allowed to return to Mansfield, because she ‘had destroyed her own character, and he would not by a vain attempt to restore what never could be restored, be affording his sanction to vice, or in seeking to lessen its disgrace, be anywise accessory to introducing such misery in another man’s family as he had known himself’ (p. 424), is exactly paralleled by Cowper’s wistful evocation of ‘old time’, when ‘she that had renounced / Her sex’s honour, was renounced herself / By all that priz’d it; not for prud’ry’s sake, / But dignity’s, resentful of the wrong’ (III, 75–9). Sir Thomas, we might remember, is the embodiment of ‘Dignity’ in Mansfield Park. Similarly, Cowper’s description of the proper behaviour of a clergyman (II, 395–544) is exactly congruent with Edmund’s conception of his own role and behaviour, and his account of the same to Mary Crawford. Cowper contrasts the sincere preacher, ‘[i]n doctrine incorrupt; in language plain; / And plain in manner’ (II, 400–1), with the theatrical one, who ‘seek[s] to dazzle me with tropes / … and play his brilliant parts before my eyes’ (II, 423–5). In Mansfield Park, Edmund, who cannot say a bon-mot, who is ‘a very matter of fact, plain spoken being’ (pp. 83–4) is contrasted to Henry Crawford who claims that he would enjoy the performative aspect of being a clergyman, imagining himself before a




sophisticated London audience who could appreciate his rhetorical powers. Fanny Price’s thoughts frequently run along the same lines as Cowper’s, a fact pointed up by the similarities between Cowper’s description of himself as a ‘stricken deer’ outside the herd of mankind (III, 108), and Fanny’s position as a lonely and wounded outsider at Mansfield. When Fanny, hearing of Rushworth’s plans for Sotherton, thinks of Cowper’s avenues: ‘Does it not make you think of Cowper? “Ye fallen avenues, once more I mourn your fate unmerited” ’ (p. 50),25 it is merely the most obvious of the places where Cowper is directing her thoughts on nature. Sitting in the shrubbery with Miss Crawford, she rhapsodises over the evergreen: ‘How beautiful, how welcome, how wonderful the evergreen! When one thinks of it, how astonishing a variety of nature! In some countries we know the tree that sheds its leaf is the variety, but that does not make it less amazing, that the same soil and the same sun should nurture plants differing in the first rule and law of their existence’ (p. 188). Cowper, too, muses on the many varieties of trees and differences of their properties, while looking out over trees in Task I, 300–20. Earlier in the novel, in the drawing room, gazing out into the night, Fanny again speaks like Cowper: ‘Fanny spoke her feelings. “Here’s harmony”, said she, “Here’s repose!” Here’s what may leave all painting and all music behind, and what poetry only can attempt to describe. Here’s what may tranquillize every care and lift the heart to rapture!’ (p. 102). Cowper’s poetry, in which ‘my descriptions are all from nature: not one of them second-handed’, and whose ‘delineations of the heart are from my own experience’,26 does ‘attempt to describe’ the harmony and repose of a night in the country: Come evening once again, season of peace, Return sweet evening, and continue long! Methinks I see thee in the streaky west, With matron-step slow-moving while the night Treads on thy sweeping train … Not sumptuously adorn’d, nor needing aid … Of clust’ring gems, A star or two just twinkling on thy brow. (IV, 243–53)27 Fanny’s ‘rapture’ comes from ‘harmony’, ‘repose’ and tranquillity; Cowper finds ‘composure’ in the ‘gentle hours’ (IV, 260–1) of the ‘Winter Evening’. Speaking from the heart, then, Fanny’s most sincere feelings are conflated with the ideals of the poet. 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


56 Katie Halsey

Mansfield Park is thus saturated with Cowper’s poem, but because many of the allusions outlined above are extremely subtle, while reading Mansfield Park, we get acquainted with Cowper, as Henry Crawford says of Shakespeare, ‘without knowing how’. ‘He is part of an Englishman’s constitution’, continues Crawford. ‘His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where, one is intimate with him by instinct’ (p. 306). Cowper is one of the few writers consistently recommended by the authors of late eighteenth-century conduct literature for women, and Hannah More quotes Cowper’s address to domestic happiness28 as the epigraph to her Strictures on Female Education. According to such writers as More and Jane West, Cowper ought to be part of an Englishwoman’s constitution; his style and subject matter are particularly suited to the ideal of female domesticity that they advocate. Fanny Price’s love of Cowper is in keeping with her modesty, her timidity, her self-abnegation and struggles with envy and independence of spirit. She is the embodiment of the qualities celebrated in conduct literature, which is why her references to Cowper chime so harmoniously. The books that Fanny loves have created her mindset and ideals, and reinforce them to the reader. It is also entirely appropriate that Cowper’s presence in the text is very rarely directly mentioned, and largely no more than indirectly felt – as an undercurrent to both Austen’s prose and Fanny’s thoughts, it is proper that he should be perceived only as a subtle echo of ladylike reading. Like Lucilla Stanley’s blushes, Austen’s allusions to Cowper and to Crabbe might be seen as the external evidence of the morality and taste beneath the surface of the skin or the text. Austen’s use of spectral texts is not, however, limited to texts as comforting to Fanny Price as Cowper’s, Crabbe’s or Johnson’s, and Mansfield Park is not a novel that offers unqualified approval to the values Fanny acquires from her reading, although it is tempting, with such a mass of evidence, to believe it does. The presence of Kotzebue’s Lovers’ Vows complicates any suggestion that Austen’s literary allusions simply reinforce a conservative moral ideology. The play is more intrusive than other ‘spectral texts’ because it is less ideologically congenial to the dominant narrative consciousness (Fanny’s). Where Cowper, Johnson, Macartney, Shakespeare and Crabbe positively reinforce Fanny’s ideals, Lovers’ Vows presents her with an entirely different version of her pupil–mentor bond with Edmund in the shape of the relationship between Amelia and Anhalt, and with shocking alternative modes of thinking about love. Lovers’ Vows thus creates dissonance rather than resonance in Mansfield Park, and in a novel where the narrative voice and the heroine’s consciousness are so often one, Lovers’ Vows creates an uncomfortable distance between Austen’s artistic achievement and Fanny’s disapproving 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan



conscience. This partly explains the weight of critical reference to the play, and the multiple attempts to explicate the relationship between the two texts, summarised briefly below. A. Walton Litz and others propose that Austen’s use of Lovers’ Vows is primarily political – by rejecting the play she rejects the author’s antiauthoritarian and revolutionary views.29 Critics who wish to claim more radical sympathies for Austen suggest that the use of Lovers’ Vows may be a coded way to express these sympathies, pointing to Fanny’s similarities to the sincere young heroine of the play, Amelia. Following Lionel Trilling, some suggest that Austen’s choice of play is politically unimportant: what is signified in the rehearsal scenes is a Platonic resistance to impersonation or playacting of any sort.30 However, as Margaret Kirkham, Paula Byrne and Penny Gay have recently made clear in their works on Jane Austen and the theatre, Austen was not opposed to the theatre in principle; indeed, she was an avid theatregoer and had seen Lovers’ Vows more than once. Marilyn Butler reminds us that the real problem with the theatricals is that the actors are not acting at all: Lovers’ Vows is pernicious in Mansfield Park because it allows the young Bertrams and Crawfords the freedom to express their real emotions under cover of the rehearsals.31 E. M. Butler claimed in 1933 that Lovers’ Vows plays a crucial structural part in Mansfield Park, analysing the similarities in plotting and character development in the two works and contending that Mansfield Park translates Lovers’ Vows into the life of an English country family and reasserts the moral standards subverted by Kotzebue.32 Dvora Zelicovici extends Butler’s argument to suggest that ‘Austen chose Lovers’ Vows for her actors precisely because the play shares the same moral premises and poses the same moral problems as her book’.33 According to Zelicovici, the failure of the Bertrams is that, unlike the characters in Lovers’ Vows, they do not learn the right moral lessons. In contrast to E. M. Butler, Zelicovici thus sees Lovers’ Vows as epitomising the values that Mansfield Park should teach its occupants, and Mansfield Park its readers. I cannot agree with Zelicovici’s reading of Mansfield Park, but her view that the intertextual structure of the novel is extremely suggestive. If it is the case that Lovers’ Vows poses moral questions and demands the learning of moral lessons, it is equally true that The Task requires similar attention. The lessons to be drawn from each text are, however, politically and morally opposed. Brian Wilkie suggests that Mansfield Park’s status as a ‘problem novel’ is rooted in its structure, claiming that the action of the novel takes place in two structural realms: a probing of morality set against Fanny’s personal growth ‘that takes place in a dimension of personality wholly



58 Katie Halsey

independent of morality, in studied irrelevance to it’.34 We could, however, conceptualise Mansfield Park’s structure as an intertextual conversation between two systems of morality, represented by Kotzebue on the one hand, and Cowper, Johnson, Crabbe, etc. on the other. The ‘problem’ of the novel could thus be explained by the dissonance created by such a dialogue. However, we could also interpret the ‘problem’ of the novel as its disturbing strength: the jostling presence of alternative systems of morality within the same novel forestalls a reader’s desire to come to simplistic political or moral conclusions. It is for this reason that critical accounts of Mansfield Park that read the novel only in relation either to Lovers’ Vows or to conservative morality fall short; Mansfield Park is a not a showcase for an ideology, but a battleground of value systems, and the battle is over the complex and messy question of how an individual should live. Mansfield Park is a novel in which readers are usually kept close to Fanny Price’s thoughts and feelings, and her ethical judgements influence our way of seeing. In this way, the moral guides that Fanny reads become in a sense moral guides that we have read, comfortable and comforting guides to future conduct. However, the writers she rejects also haunt Mansfield Park’s readers, reminding us of a code of values quite other than Fanny’s. Austen’s use of Cowper and Crabbe is thus not just a way of demonstrating her reading or knowledge in a ladylike manner, and her use of Lovers’ Vows cannot be purely understood as a matter of thematic or structural convenience. Although the artistic strategy of spectral texts is, I have argued, grounded in conservative notions of feminine propriety, in Mansfield Park, their interplay subversively undermines the very notions of propriety that the novel ostensibly approves. Spectral texts covertly interact with the plot of the novel, allowing alternative modes of thinking into the enclosed world of Mansfield Park, providing a sometimes harmonious, sometimes discordant counterpoint to the main moral melody, and resisting the too easy conclusion of the last chapters of the novel. Like an objectionable point made by a clever barrister, struck from the record but lodged in the minds of the jurors, Mansfield Park’s spectral texts remain with Austen’s readers: ghostly and unsettling visitors in our memories. If ‘books’ do ‘prove anything’ in Mansfield Park, it is that we should have no faith in easy moral or narrative closure.

Notes 1. Jane Austen, Persuasion (1818), ed. John Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 221.




2. Notable exceptions include Jonathan Bate’s ‘Culture and Environment: from Austen to Hardy’, New Literary History, 30 (1999), 541–60; Jocelyn Harris’s analysis of the links between Sir Charles Grandison and Mansfield Park in Jane Austen’s Art of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Bharat Tandon’s discussion of Austen’s ‘conversations’ with literary figures in Jane Austen and the Art of Conversation (London: Anthem, 2003). 3. Close considerations of the role of Lovers’ Vows in Mansfield Park can be found in Lionel Trilling’s ‘Mansfield Park’, in The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism (London: Secker and Warburg, 1955), pp. 206–30; Avrom Fleishman’s A Reading of Mansfield Park: An Essay of Critical Synthesis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967); A. Walton Litz’s Jane Austen: A Study of her Artistic Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); Douglas Bush’s Jane Austen (New York: Macmillan, 1975); Mary Poovey’s The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Marilyn Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Claudia L. Johnson’s Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 4. Such diverse texts as Home’s Douglas (1757), Johnson’s Rasselas (1759) and Macartney’s Journal of the Embassy to China (1807) are also significant, although they lie outside the scope of this paper. 5. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, 2 vols (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1974), II, p. 2. 6. More, Strictures, II, p. 65. 7. Hannah More, Coelebs in Search of a Wife, ed. Mary Waldron (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995), p. 218. 8. Jane Austen to James Stanier Clarke, Monday, 11 December 1815, in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 306. 9. Harris, Jane Austen’s Art of Memory, p. 216. 10. Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and her Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 43. 11. After its first performance in 1756, it enjoyed a reputation as a play to rival, or even outclass, any of Shakespeare’s. It also provoked a lively post-production debate over its merits, of which David Hume’s comment that it had ‘the true theatric genius of Shakespeare and Otway, refined from the unhappy barbarism of the one and licentiousness of the other’ is representative of the most significant body of opinion. 12. More, Coelebs, p. 143. 13. The original: ‘Blest leaf! Whose aromatic gales dispense / To Templars modesty, to Parsons sense’, becomes ‘Blest Knight! Whose dictatorial looks dispense / To children affluence, to Rushworth sense’ ( Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. James Kinsley [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990], p. 145). Subsequent references will be given in the main body of the text. 14. Henry Austen, ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’ in Persuasion, p. 5. 15. Note to Mansfield Park, p. 141. 16. Mary Russell Mitford to Mrs Hofland (undated, but between February 1819 and October 1820), in Letters of Mary Russell Mitford, ed. Henry Chorley, 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1872), I, p. 73. 17. James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen (London: Folio Society, 1989), p. 79. 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


60 Katie Halsey

18. Isobel Grundy, ‘Jane Austen and Literary Traditions’, in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 191. 19. George Crabbe, Preface to Tales (London: J. Hatchard, 1813). 20. George Crabbe, ‘The Confidant’ (Tale XVI) in Tales (London: J. Harchard, 1813), pp. 285–6. 21. Crabbe, ‘Confidant’, p. 286. 22. William Cowper, The Task in The Task and Selected Other Poems, ed. James Sambrook (London and New York: Longman, 1994), Book I, line 749. Subsequent references will be given in the main body of the text. 23. The relevant conversation runs as follows: Edmund says to Fanny, ‘ “She does not think evil, but she speaks it – speaks it in playfulness – and though I know it to be playfulness, it grieves me to the soul.” “The effect of education,” said Fanny gently. Edmund could not but agree to it. “Yes, that uncle and aunt! They have injured the finest mind! – for sometimes, Fanny, I own to you, it does appear more than manner; it appears as if the mind itself was tainted” (pp. 243–4). 24. Although it is the case that Fanny, in a rare moment of irritation, thinks to herself that Mary is ‘quite as likely to have led them [Mrs Frazer and Lady Stornoway] astray. They have all, perhaps, been corrupting one another’ (p. 386). 25. The reference is to Task, I, 338–9. 26. William Cowper, The Correspondence of William Cowper, ed. Thomas Wright, 4 vols (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1904), II, p. 252. 27. Jane Austen knew this book of The Task particularly well; she quotes a later phrase from the same section (‘Myself creating what I saw’) in Emma. 28. ‘Domestic happiness, thou only bliss / Of Paradise that has survived the fall!’ Task, III, 41–2. 29. Walton Litz, Jane Austen. 30. Trilling, ‘Mansfield Park’, pp. 206–30. 31. Butler, Jane Austen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 232–6. 32. E.M. Butler, ‘Mansfield Park and Kotzebue’s Lovers’ Vows’, MLR, 28 (1933), 326–37. 33. Dvora Zelicovici, ‘The Inefficacy of Lovers’ Vows’, ELH, 50 (1983), 532. 34. Brian Wilkie, ‘Structural Layering in Jane Austen’s Problem Novels’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 46 (1992), 519.




Romantic Patronage: Mary Robinson and Coleridge Revisited Judith Hawley

In a frequently quoted letter written to Mary Elizabeth Robinson in 1802, Coleridge describes himself as ‘the Defender, Apologist, and Encomiast’ of her mother, Mary Robinson.1 The impression given by this phrase, and by much of this letter, is that he was the senior partner in the relationship and, in some sense, Mary Robinson’s patron. Until the 1990s, most critics and biographers assumed this to be the case. Robinson has usually figured as a footnote to the career of the great Romantic, a minor poet less important for her achievement as a poet, novelist, playwright or feminist pamphleteer than for her scandalous life as the serially discarded mistress of the Prince of Wales, Charles James Fox and Barnastre Tarleton. Thus, in Richard Holmes’ biography of Coleridge, she first appears in a list of ‘various literary ladies who admired his poetry’. Holmes’ note to this passage identifies her as ‘Mary “Perdita” Robinson, fashionable beauty and Shakespearean actress, [who] had once been mistress to the Prince Regent, before turning her charms upon poetry and the gothick novel’.2 This identificatory note also records the much repeated information that ‘Coleridge urged Southey to include her work in the Annual Anthology’. So it appears as if Coleridge helped her into print, while she was just one of many female admirers who circled around him. This view is unfortunately sustained by the subtitle to Susan Luther’s groundbreaking 1994 article, ‘A Stranger Minstrel: Coleridge’s Mrs Robinson’.3 The subtitle echoes an earlier essay, ‘Gainsborough’s Mrs Robinson’.4 While the suggestion that Coleridge was the dominant partner is at odds with the substance of Luther’s subtle argument, it is in keeping with the idea that, as Dustin Griffin explains in his detailed 62 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


4

study, Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800, patrons considered themselves as in some sense proprietors of their clients as well as owners of the works dedicated to them.5 In fact, Luther argues that Robinson, the ‘Stranger Minstrel’ of Coleridge’s poem to her, is to some extent Coleridge’s imaginative construction. Like ‘The Poet Wordsworth’, the ‘Stranger Minstrel’ was half created and half perceived: Just as in Coleridge’s poem to him Wordsworth becomes the figure of masculine Orphic achievement and competition … so in his poems to her do Robinson and her words shade into a feminine Muse of the midground and borders who embodies Coleridge’s vexed relations with Fancy. (p. 399) Tim Fulford employs Luther’s material but uses it to argue, in two 1999 publications, that Coleridge made of Mary Robinson what he needed: a less threatening replacement for Wordsworth, whose recent rejection of his ‘Christabel’ was a sign of Wordsworth’s more masculine selfconfidence in his poetic abilities.6 Luther does in fact figure the relationship as more of a creative collaboration which benefited them both, but the impression remains that she was in some sense ‘his’. Despite the work that has been put into recovering the life and work of women writers of the Romantic period, it has been unusual for critics to figure them in creative partnerships with men – or with other women. There has been a tendency either to treat one as the dominant partner, or to divorce them entirely. I want briefly to treat Robinson and Coleridge together and to do so under the rubric of ‘Romantic Patronage’. In doing so, I hope to question the appropriateness of both terms. By ‘romantic’ I have in mind love and romance more than the vexed concept of ‘Romanticism’. The romantic–sexual dimension is perhaps inevitable in the case of male–female patronage (whether the man or the woman is the patron): the relationship is conventionally couched in the rhetoric of chivalry and courtship which might or might not express any deep desires. Dustin Griffin writes convincingly about how the essentially aristocratic system of patronage, deriving from traditional ideas of mutual obligation and condescension, survived into the eighteenth century. He argues that the conventional rhetoric of dedications – playing on such terms as ‘favour’, ‘protection’, ‘honour’ and ‘fame’ – ‘represented values almost tangible, and convertible into substantial form’ (p. 18). However, he does, I think, exaggerate how far the system was still dominant at the end of the eighteenth century, the period which interests me here. He also



Mary Robinson and Coleridge Revisited 63

does not sufficiently attend to the sexual dynamics of the relationship, especially when there is a difference of gender between patron and client. The client has to pay court to the patron and ask for favours. This can shade into chivalrous courtship and allusion to sexual favours. I think, for example, of the fawning letters Edmund Burke wrote to Elizabeth Montagu in the 1750s in which he depicts himself as the lowly suitor of a chaste goddess.7 What I want to do here is to open up two questions: How far was the relationship between Coleridge and Robinson a patron–client one? And how far was it a ‘romantic’ one, that is, how do gender and sexuality figure in this relationship? I want to work backwards from the letter I quoted earlier. Coleridge wrote it after Robinson’s death to her daughter when she tried to solicit a poem from him for The Wild Wreath, a memorial and money-spinning volume. I will do so because I think the relationship was constantly open to reinvention, as I hint in my account of changing critical perceptions of it, and as Judith Pascoe and Jacqueline Labbe very convincingly demonstrate in their work on Mary Robinson’s theatrical self-fashioning.8 The most obvious aspect of the relationship is the series of poems which forms a kind of intimate but public conversation between them. Robinson’s ‘Ode to the Snow-drop’ was answered by Coleridge’s ‘The Apotheosis, or the Snow-Drop’; in ‘To the Poet Coleridge’, she replied to his ‘Kubla Kahn’ which he sent her in manuscript and was not to publish for another 16 years. Coleridge responded to her ‘Ode inscribed to the Infant Son of S. T. Coleridge, Esq.’ in his ‘A Stranger Minstrel’. Their relationship goes beyond the confines of the exchanges mentioned above; it hinges on their contributions to the Morning Post in the late 1790s. Under the editorship of Daniel Stuart, the Morning Post was an anti-Ministerial daily, sympathetic to liberal causes – thus it suited the politics of both Robinson and Coleridge. As well as publishing thoughtful reporting and ‘Original Poetry’, the ‘West End Sheet’, as it was sometimes called, retailed fashionable and sometimes scandalous gossip, which made it particularly interested in and thus of interest to ‘Perdita’ Robinson.9 On 17 April 1798 the editor announced that ‘The Poetry of the Morning Post will in future be more critically select. None but first rate compositions will be admitted to our columns; and we are promised the aid of several of the most distinguished writers of the present day.’10 According to Judith Pascoe, these writers were employed not only to supply ‘select’ poems (either by writing them themselves, or getting them from acquaintances and correspondents) for a mass audience, but by



64 Judith Hawley

means of critical introductory notes to educate the tastes of the heterogeneous audience and make it more selective (p. 256). Moreover, curiosity about the contributors was piqued by the inclusion of gossip and puffery about them. The most important of these ‘most distinguished writers’ in the period 1798–1800 were (in alphabetical order) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Robinson, Robert Southey and William Wordsworth. But how should we rank their relative importance at the time, and in the annals of literary history? Richard Holmes, in his biography of Coleridge, understandably ranks his poet highest. But Stuart Curran argues (p. 19) that when she died in 1800, Robinson was ‘by far the best known of these poets’, and that she was the first poetic correspondent to be hired by Stuart in November 1797 because of her established reputation as a poet. Norma Clarke’s book, Dr Johnson’s Women, provides a useful comparison: instead of seeing Johnson as the hub around which female satellites revolved, Clarke not only gives centre stage to a number of women writers, but argues that when he first started contributing to the Gentleman’s Magazine in the 1730s, he was the minor figure and Elizabeth Carter was the established poet.11 In the Morning Post, in 1797, Coleridge was to Robinson as Johnson was to Carter. The evaluation of their contribution is difficult because the practice of anonymous, pseudonymous and collaborative submission makes it hard even to identify what they produced. Moreover, the dates and the nature of their employment are hard to determine. The various sources I have consulted paint a confusing picture of who did what on the paper in the period 1797–1800. To simplify: it appears as if, in late 1797, Robinson, Coleridge and Southey, in that order, were recruited by Stuart and paid a retainer to supply poetry for the Post. Southey was the principal contributor from 1798 to December 1799, and may have been officially what we would now call the editor of the poetry department until he departed, at Coleridge’s suggestion, for Portugal. Coleridge, from December 1799 to April 1800, was contracted to supply occasional verses and political journalism, including substantial essays. Robinson contributed around 20 poems in 1798 rising to 25 in 1799, but in 1800, when she can probably be considered ‘poetry editor’, she composed around 90 poems. Rather than considering ‘poetry editor’ as an exclusive job, it is probably more accurate to think of all three writers contributing in overlapping ways, and perhaps on a different financial basis.12 I labour this point for several reasons. The first is that there does not seem to me a clear sense of priority: it is not the case that, say, Coleridge kindly included a few poems by the minor poet Robinson, or that Southey




gave a boost to her career by nominating her as his successor as poetry editor. Rather, I would argue, there is a much more modern model of the operation of the Metropolitan literary scene in which fellow poets, struggling writers and hacks give their friends and acquaintances a legup in whatever limited way they can. The newspaper-poetry world is expedited by back-slapping and log-rolling. Thus, this pattern resembles the picture of ‘sociable’ creative and political relationships so interestingly sketched in the essays on Romantic Sociability, edited by Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite.13 Coleridge, as his letters from this date show, busied himself organising all of his friends’ careers and trying to forge cooperative groups. However, just as his initial desire for an inclusive Pantisocracy metamorphosed into a much more exclusive clerisy, Coleridge’s readiness to ‘socialise’ with Robinson became, shortly after her death, a desire to police the poetical company that both he and she kept. This process emerges in an analysis of a cluster of texts concerning the reputation of ‘Perdita’ Robinson. In the letter to Maria Elizabeth Robinson I quoted at the start, Coleridge’s attitude to Mary Robinson seems both more romantic – in the sense of chivalrous and idealising – and more patronising than it was when she was alive. It is a long, complex letter, which has been discussed in part by others. If I had the space to present a fuller analysis, I would want to draw your attention to Coleridge’s belief that his future was not as a poet: I have almost wholly weaned myself from the habit of making Verses, and for the last three years uninterruptedly devoted myself to studies not only not quite incompatible with poetic composition – Poetic composition has become laborious and painful to me – (Griggs, p. 93) His refusal to supply a poem for The Wild Wreath is consistent with his anxiety about the waning of his talents. When he dismisses the commendatory poem published in her Memoirs – ‘A Stranger Minstrel’ – as ‘an exceedingly silly copy of Verses’ and a ‘very silly poem’ does not necessarily represent revulsion against her, but against his own poetry. He says: Her memoirs I have not seen – I understood that an exceedingly silly copy of Verses, which I had absolutely forgotten the very writing of, disgraced one of the volumes – This publication of a private letter (an act so wholly unjustifiable, and in its nature subversive of all Social Confidence) I attributed altogether to the man, at whose shop the



66 Judith Hawley


He used precisely the same term when he wrote to Daniel Stuart on 7 October 1800, bitterly complaining that he thought all of his poetry ‘silly’ immediately after he had written it.14 Rather than intending the modern meaning, ‘foolish’, Coleridge might have had in mind the older senses of the word: deserving of pity; feeble, insignificant; or simple, rustic, homely.15 The various roles Coleridge plays are also significant and not unlike the theatrical nature of Robinson’s own self-fashioning. Writing in the guise of the respectable husband and father, he rebukes Robinson’s daughter for her undutiful behaviour: But, my dear Miss Robinson! (I pray you, do not be wounded – rather consider what I am about to say as a pledge of my Esteem, and confidence in your honour and prudence, a confidence beyond the dictates of worldly caution) – but I have a wife, I have sons, I have an infant Daughter – what excuse could I offer to my conscience if by suffering my own name to be connected with those of Mr. Lewis, or Mr. Moore, I was the occasion of their reading the Monk, or the wanton poems of Thomas Little Esqre? Should I not be an infamous Pander to the Devil in the Seduction of my own offspring? My head turns giddy, my heart sickens, at the very thought of seeing such books in the hands of a child of mine – (Griggs, p. 94) Robinson had appealed to his paternal role in her ‘Ode inscribed to the Infant Son of S. T. Coleridge, Esq.’ and ‘A Stranger Minstrel’ echoed phrases in that poem. But, only two years older than Mary Elizabeth Robinson, this paternalistic tone is all the more inappropriate when we consider that he was not discharging the roles of husband and father so well in life, having transferred his affections to Sara Hutchinson. I do not wish to deride him for hypocrisy, but rather to point out the complicated nature of his feelings for and about Mary Robinson. Stopping short of declaring love, he none the less figured himself as the sentimental man of feeling weeping over the lost one in remarkably stereotypical terms. Fondly remembering reading – ‘in a strange mixture of anguish and consolation’ – a poem she wrote in sickness, he declares in language groaning from overuse: ‘In this Feeling I cultivated your



volumes were published – I was sorry, no doubt, that so very silly a Poem had been published – for your Mother’s sake still more than for my own – yet I was not displeased to see my name joined to your Mother’s. (Griggs, p. 94)

Mother’s acquaintance, thrice happy if I could have soothed her sorrows, or if the feeble Lamp of my friendship could have yielded her one ray of Hope or Guidance.’ This romantic hope of providing guidance and protection is also expressed in an earlier letter he wrote to Thomas Poole shortly after her death: ‘O Poole! [if] that Woman had but been married to a noble Being, what a noble Being she herself would have been. Latterly, she felt this poignant anguish. – Well! –’16 Did Coleridge imagine himself as that potential ‘noble Being’? The possibility that she was entangled in his romantic yearnings is suggested by echoes of ‘The Eolian Harp’ in his ‘The Apotheosis, or the Snow-Drop’. Fulford remarks that ‘Coleridge, as the Lake District man and poet to whom Robinson appeals in her dying weakness, becomes in his own eyes, the poetic husband who restores her lost nobility and respectability’ (p. 10). Perhaps Robinson played Dulcinella to Coleridge’s Quixotic patron who hoped to make her a better person. The distance between the ideal and the actual is hinted at in a letter to William Godwin in which he literally tries to make her better. Enquiring after her health, he reveals that he has been discussing her complaint with Humphry Davy and they want to see if Davy’s ‘perfectly new acid’ will alleviate her condition.17 It seems as if when she was alive, Coleridge attempted to restore her health and her reputation, to make her better and to make her a better person, but when she died without having been sublimed, he tried to protect himself against the consequences of his earlier enthusiasm. The 28-year-old Coleridge expresses a romantically double sense of idealisation and disappointment: it was my Hope, my heartfelt wish, my Prayer, my Faith, that the latter age of your Mother would be illustrious and redemptory – that to the Genius and generous Virtues of her youth she would add Judgment and Thought – whatever was correct and dignified as a Poetess, and all that was matronly as a Woman. – Such, you best know, were her own aspirations (Griggs, pp. 93–4) aspirations which were not achieved before her premature death at the age of 42. He attributes to her his own desire to separate her from her past life of sexual scandal. Moreover, he is shocked that her daughter wants to cash in on that notoriety with The Wild Wreath. It should also be noted that, despite his refusal to allow a poem of his to be included in The Wild Wreath, ‘The Mad Monk’ appeared over his name – and 14 pages after ‘Excess’ by Matthew Lewis. Like his other complimentary and complementary poems, it is shot through with allusions to her works. Did he relent, or



68 Judith Hawley

did Maria Robinson unscrupulously appropriate it as she and/or her mother seem to have done with ‘A Stranger Minstrel’? Coleridge blames the bookseller for its expropriation, but this seems to be a polite cover for a stinging rebuke of the Robinsons. Despite her glamour, Robinson was far from being a romantic heroine. The final thing I want to observe is a name in his litany of Panders to the devil which I have not seen anyone else remark: Peter Pindar ( John Wolcot). Coleridge accords this savage satirist no fewer than seven exclamation marks: As to Peter Pindar! By all the Love and Honour I bear to your dear Parent’s memory, by the anguish and the indignation at the inmost heart, I swear to you that my flesh creeps at his name!! You have forgotten, dear Miss Robinson! Yes, you had altogether forgotten that in a published Poem he called an infamous & mercenary strumpet ‘The Mrs. Robinson of Greece’. Will you permit the world to say – her own Daughter does not resent it – her own Daughter connects the fame of her Mother with that of the man who assassinated her reputation! No! No! (p. 95) Focusing on Pindar allows us to shift attention from Coleridge’s failed attempt to idealise Robinson to her own management of her career and public persona. The poem alluded to – written before Pindar would have known Robinson personally – is Ode VI, from More Lyric Odes To The Royal Academicians (1782–85).18 In it, Pindar attacks members of the Royal Academy for being so obsessed with celebrity that they blow their own trumpets (ll. 9–10, 15–20). He accuses Richard Cosway of running whoring after praise (l. 44) but warns him that the nymph is too coy: In this thy wounded pride may refuge find – Think of the sage who wanted a fine piece: Who went, in vain, five hundred miles at least, On Laïs, a sweet fille de joie, to feast – The Mrs. Robinson of Greece. (ll. 48–52) There were three Greek courtesans called Lais: one ‘counted among her lovers the Cyrenaic philosopher Aristippus’; another was mistress of the disgraced military commander, Alcibiades; the third was mistress of the painter Apelles.19 Each one of these has a resonance here. Although Pindar refers to the sage ‘who wanted a fine piece’ (Aristippus), he encourages




the reader to have in mind both the painter Apelles (i.e. Cosway) and the disgraced leader Alcibiades (i.e. Tarleton or Fox). None of these comparisons is flattering to either party. Moreover, I assume that none of these men chased their Lais ‘in vain’. The reference to Mrs Robinson suggests, then, that, unlike Lais, she is a nymph who is ready to give up her favours and prostitute herself for the sake of publicity. The allusion to Alcibiades is particularly resonant as it echoes a comment made in a private letter that reflects public gossip. In July 1782 Fox resigned his office during a political crisis and seems to have taken up with Robinson. Lady Sarah Lennox wrote to Lady Sarah O’Brien: I hear Charles saunters about the streets, & brags that he has not taken pen in hand since he was out of Place … he lives with Mrs Robinson … I long to tell him that he does not show he is superior to Alcibiades for his Courtesan forsook him when he was unfortunate, and Mrs Robinson takes him up.20 Robinson was already involved with Tarleton; she possibly gave him over for a while, but was rumoured to have conducted affairs with Fox and Captain Craddock in tandem. Murky in its motives and messy in its connections, the affair was costly to Fox and useful to Robinson. It was the subject of a bet with Mrs Benwell: Fox had to pay her £500 ‘if ever Mrs Robinson lives with me, or I with her’. He also negotiated a royal pension in exchange for her giving up her claim to the £20,000 the Prince of Wales is supposed to have promised her. Fox soon gave Robinson over and ended up living with and secretly marrying Elizabeth Armistead, Mary Robinson’s former maid, and the woman for whom the Prince of Wales abandoned her. The ins and outs of Robinson’s ‘private’ life had been very public: these affairs were the subject of scandalous reports and pornographic pamphlets for many years. This economy of the circulation of women and money and public report is very far from the gallantry of Coleridge’s dealings with Robinson. He wanted to exclude Pindar from her charming circle and to isolate both Robinson and himself from her past. However, not only was this past not very distant – her affair with Tarleton ended only in 1798 – but Robinson readily associated herself with Pindar and happily blew her own trumpet. Coleridge was mistaken if he thought that Robinson appeared in the pages of the Morning Post because she wanted her poetry to be ‘illustrious and redemptory’. A single day’s issue of the Post reveals how far she courted fame and exploited her notoriety. On 15 May 1799 we find in the West End gossip section an allusion to



70 Judith Hawley

the Duchess of Devonshire: ‘The Duchess of Devonshire, by becoming an authoress, will probably wear a wreath far more dignifying than the decorations of heraldry.’ The Duchess had acted as Robinson’s patron in a traditional sense, helping to launch her career on the stage in 1776, and figuring prominently in her subscription lists. (Coleridge also sought her attention in an Ode published in the Morning Post, 24 December 1799, in response to her poem ‘Passage over Mount Gothard’, published in the Post a few days earlier.) Then comes a continuous series of entries which all allude to Robinson: Mrs ROBINSON shortly closes the subscription to her Poems; they will be forthcoming early next winter, in three octavo volumes, including her Tragedy, which ought to have been presented to the public from other quarters. A certain General would be entirely forgotten, but that a false friend will ever be remembered. The first item is news about her forthcoming publication, Lyrical Tales, which came out the following year, a little over a month before her death. The next item is a coded reference to another of her publications: her novel The False Friend, published in 1799. It is a veiled attack on her former lover, General Barnastre Tarleton, who, as Pascoe points out, was frequently the target of innuendo and mockery after he ditched Robinson.21 These titbits function as adverts, and also pique the curiosity of readers whose skills at decoding references to celebrities are being flexed at the same time. It would be revealing to know exactly who was responsible for the poetry department at this time. Immediately after these teasers, an unnamed correspondent introduces a pair of poems which showcase Robinson as an erotic object as well as a talented writer: ‘Impromptu By Peter Pindar to Mrs Robinson, on Borrowing her Lap-Dog to Paint his Likeness’, and ‘Mrs Robinson’s Impromptu Answer to Peter Pindar’.22 Coleridge might hope that the Matron over whom he shed tears would resent Pindar’s crude impromptu, the second stanza of which reads: O, tell thy mistress, if she chuse Her idle moments to amuse With my shock poll – instead of thine, She’s welcome, up or in her bed, To smooth my ears, or pat my head And bid me on her breast recline.




It is clearly in the tradition of the sexualising of lapdogs, the most famous example of which is Belinda’s Shock in Pope’s Rape of the Lock. However, Robinson does something more interesting than react in alarm: she converts Pindar’s dubious innuendo into a defence of independence and an attack on the patronage system: But thou! the Muses watch-dog PETER, Who scar’st the highest with thy metre Thou never wou’dst a servile state survive; Thou wou’dst not wear a puppy’s chain, But, treating bondage with disdain Wou’dst hope to lead where I wou’dst wish to drive. (ll. 7–12) Moreover, she sees Pindar as a guardian of liberty: not a tempter to libertinism, but the scourge of the aristocracy and the political establishment. In this vein, two months later, she published another poem in the Morning Post which gives both prominence to herself in the guise of Laura Maria and celebrates his refusal to be silenced with a government pension (‘Laura Maria, to Peter Pindar, Esq.’, Morning Post, 29 July 1799). They shared an opposition to the political establishment and a symbiotic relationship with the press. We should not, though, be under any illusions about Pindar’s highmindedness: Richard Polwhele – admittedly no friend to Pindar or his politics (or for that matter to Robinson) – attacks the ‘prostituted muse of Peter Pindar, whose language and whose sentiments are those of the lowest street-walker in the purlieus of Parnassus’.23 It is also worth pointing out that Peter Pindar accompanied Robinson’s coffin to the grave. Most critics note that Godwin attended her at her funeral and forget that Pindar did too; indeed, the only people who attended her funeral were Godwin, Pindar and Mary Elizabeth Robinson.24 Pindar also supplied a very sweet pastoral elegy (‘Farewell to the nymph of my heart’), which was printed in the 1806 edition of her Poetical Works. It has also been suggested that he may have been the ‘friend’ who completed her memoirs.25 In some senses, then, Pindar could also be considered as Robinson’s advocate. Robinson was not the woman Coleridge would have her be. She did not want an exclusive relationship with a Romantic ‘Defender, Apologist, and Encomiast’; her literary relations were much more inclusive, not to say promiscuous. I would conclude that, while the hierarchical model of the patron–client relationship might still operate in certain respects at the end of the eighteenth century, both Coleridge and Robinson could



72 Judith Hawley

not and would not survive by this means alone. Despite the support of both royalty and the aristocracy, Robinson’s subscription editions did not generate enough income for her to live on. Perhaps it is more accurate to think of them – by choice and by necessity – participating in overlapping networks with power dispersed along its lines, rather than as locked in a hierarchical patron–client dependency. On the other hand, Tom Wedgwood’s support for Coleridge in his early years was a more traditional patron–client relationship: Wedgwood provided an annuity which gave Coleridge some freedom to write (it rescued him from the Unitarian ministry); he also provided hospitality and introductions: he was the means of bringing Coleridge and Daniel Stuart together. Coleridge felt obliged by the kindnesses Wedgwood had shown him to concentrate on his German studies and have something to show for his time abroad at Wedgwood’s expense. (These are all features of the patron–client relationship as Griffin describes it.) Coleridge’s ‘patronage’ of Robinson is not the same; he did not provide these services for her, but there are signs that he thinks that his ‘defence’ of her entailed some kind of obligation on her and on her daughter. Because he defended her reputation, he expected her to live up to the good name he was creating for her, to become the better woman and better poet that he hoped she would become. She rewrote her past in the form of her Memoirs and went some way to transforming herself as a writer, but she was unwilling to be bound by exclusive obligations, and unwilling to relinquish her sexual character.

Notes 1. Letter from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Maria Elizabeth Robinson, 27 December 1802, reprinted in Earl Leslie Griggs, ‘Coleridge and Mrs Mary Robinson’, MLN, 45 (1930), 90–5. Subsequent references will be given in the main body of the text. 2. Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989), p. 257, n. 3. Susan Luther, ‘A Stranger Minstrel: Coleridge’s Mrs Robinson’, SiR, 33 (1994), 391–409. 4. Martin J. Levy, ‘Gainsborough’s Mrs. Robinson: A Portrait and its Context’, Apollo, ns 136 (1992), 152–5. Here the possessive is justified by the fact that ‘Mrs. Robinson’ is the title of the work as well as the name of the subject. 5. Dustin Griffin, Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 6. Tim Fulford, ‘Mary Robinson and the Abyssinian Maid’, Coleridge Bulletin, 13 (1999), and Romanticism and Masculinity (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), esp. pp. 112–24. Subsequent references will be given in the main body of the text.




7. There are numerous letters of supplication in the Montagu collection at the Huntingdon Library. The largest published selection of her letters is still to be found in Elizabeth Montagu, The Queen of the Blue-Stockings: Her Correspondence from 1720 to 1761, ed. Emily J. Climenson, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1906), and Mrs Montagu, ‘Queen of the Blues’: Her Letters and Friendships from 1762 to 1800, ed. Reginald Blunt, 2 vols (London: Constable, n.d.). 8. Judith Pascoe, ‘Mary Robinson and the Literary Marketplace’, in Romantic Women Writers, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Theresa Kelley (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995), pp. 252–68; Judith Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997); Jacqueline M. Labbe, ‘Selling One’s Sorrows: Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and the Marketing of Poetry’, The Wordsworth Circle, 25 (1994), 68–71; see also the special issue of Women’s Writing, ed. Jacqueline M. Labbe, 9:1 (2002). 9. See Wilfred Hindle, The Morning Post, 1772–1937: Portrait of a Newspaper (London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd., 1937); Pascoe, ‘Mary Robinson and the Literary Marketplace’; Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions; and Stuart Curran, ‘Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales in Context’, in Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 17–35. Subsequent references to Curran will appear in the main body of the text. 10. Quoted in Pascoe, ‘Mary Robinson and the Literary Marketplace’, p. 254. Subsequent references to Pascoe’s ‘Mary Robinson’ will appear in the main body of the text. 11. Norma Clarke, Dr Johnson’s Women (London: Hambledon and London, 2000). 12. I am grateful to Sarah Gristwood for this suggestion. Pascoe suggests that ‘Although no evidence exists of the sum Robinson received for her involvement with the Post, she was almost certainly as grateful as Southey, who recalled his poetry tenure fondly: “I never think of that Laureateship without satisfaction. The guinea a week while I held it came every quarter very seasonably in aid of slender means” ’ (Daniel Stuart, Letters from the Lake Poets [London: West, Newman, and Co., 1889], p. 434, quoted in Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality, pp. 175–6). 13. Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, eds., Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 14. To Daniel Stuart, 7 October 1800, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966–71), I, p. 629. 15. Nicholas Royle directed my attention to the ‘silly buckets’ of ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ (1798), l. 289. 16. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966–71), II, p. 669; quoted in Fulford, ‘Mary Robinson and the Abyssinian Maid’, p. 9. 17. C. Kegan Paul, ed., William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, 2 vols (London: Henry S. Knight Co., 1876), II, p. 4. 18. I quote from the version on Chadwyck Healy, Literature Online. 19. See John Warrington, Everyman’s Classical Dictionary (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1961), p. 309.



74 Judith Hawley

20. Quoted in L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 56. Mitchell reads ‘Countrymen’ rather than ‘Courtesan’, but the latter seems more appropriate. I am grateful to Sarah Gristwood for this reference. 21. Pascoe, ‘Mary Robinson and the Marketplace’, p. 259. For a discussion of her use of puffs and trailers, see Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality, p. 172. 22. The poems are introduced with the following letter ‘TO THE EDITOR. / SIR, / I am much surprised the following pieces have not appeared in any of the London prints, particularly in THE MORNING POST, so justly celebrated for its Poetical Productions. They have been handed about here some days, and I think you will be happy to receive a copy of them, as they pay a just compliment to an admired female Writer./ Grove, Bath, May 13.’ 23. Richard Polwhele, ‘A Sketch of Peter Pindar’ included in the American edition of The Unsex’d Females (1800), Appendix I (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ britpo/unsex/unsex-app1.html). 24. Pascoe fails to mention Pindar’s presence in her account of the funeral in Mary Robinson: Selected Poems, ed. Judith Pascoe (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2000), p. 36. 25. See Martin Ray Adams, The Literary Backgrounds of English Radicalism, Franklin and Marshall College Studies, 5 (Lancaster, Pa., 1947), 105, 107. I am grateful to Amy Garnai for this suggestion. Adams does not present any evidence for his claim. More work needs to be done to unlock the puzzles presented by Robinson’s Memoirs (1801).




Ivory Miniatures and the Art of Jane Austen Janet Todd

In 1816 on the last birthday before her death, Jane Austen wrote to her nephew, James Edward Austen, who had lost two and half chapters of his never published novel, that she could not have been suspected of purloining it since she was not at Steventon when the loss occurred. She continued, I do not think however that any theft of that sort would be really very useful to me. What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of Variety & Glow? – How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour?1 I would like to revisit this famous and evocative metaphor used by a successful author well aware of art and artistic traditions, and treat it not simply as a trope of modesty or gender but as an aesthetic credo. The Austen household was well aware of art in practice and theory and as consumer items. Jane was praised by her brother Henry for her ‘excellent taste for drawing’ and for her own skill; however, few traces remain beyond mention in a letter to Cassandra of drawings done for a little nephew, in which she also remarked, ‘an artist cannot do anything slovenly’.2 When she was in London Jane Austen visited exhibitions, noting her habit of attending ‘more to the company than the sight’, and playfully looking for likenesses of her characters, not in the portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds but among those of miniaturists who were showing their work at the exhibition of the Society of Painters in Oil and Water Colours; there she was pleased ‘particularly … with a small portrait of Mrs. Bingley, excessively like her’. This comic remark buttresses the notion that her comparison of her art to that of the miniaturist is not an expression of 76 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


5

humility or artistic insecurity but rather a reference to the specific technique of painting on ivory. The point is underlined by a comment she made in 1811 when visiting a collector of paintings; these included a number of miniatures, which, she wrote, ‘exactly suited my capacity’.3 Miniature painting is a technique of painting in small size, and the word derives not from minimum as one might think, but from minium, the red lead pigment used in illustrations. Early miniaturists made jewellike works, relating their art to the goldsmith’s or watchmaker’s as well as the painter’s. They worked mainly on vellum, which allowed paint to dry on its surface to a velvety finish, but the image faded more quickly than on other surfaces. Another method used more durable enamel, putting colour on to metal and firing it. While the result lasted longer and displayed brilliant colours, the laborious process allowed less subtlety and involved as much manual work as artistic skill. The enamel miniature, still a novelty in the early seventeenth century, became the leading fashion by the first half of the eighteenth. Simultaneously a new fashion was emerging: ivory. Where enamel shone with strong colours, ivory was delicate and, more than enamel and vellum, working on its surface needed quick, deft skill, for the colour ran into puddles and later strokes had to pick up earlier ones. In 1707 Bernard Lens (1682–1740), miniaturist to George I and George II, painted the first English miniature on ivory. He and his successors addressed the difficulties of the medium and, by 1750, had learnt how to make the surface more receptive, cutting it thinly, abrading it and removing the grease. The result was a greater transparency. The art became even more thoroughly virtuoso, since no alterations or corrections were possible. In the mid-century a group of miniaturists called ‘The Modest School’ chose small pieces of ivory for their restrained creations. From the second half of the eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth the ivory portrait dominated the miniature market, made possible of course by increased trade with West Africa, the major commodities of which were, first, slaves, then gold, then ivory – though, as Jon Mee has noted, by Austen’s time ivory had been so thoroughly domesticated that the exoticism of its provenance was quite masked by its household use.4 In the early years miniaturists worked alone without formal apprenticeships and showrooms. But some had grander aims, and, when the Royal Academy was established, the miniaturist Nathaniel Hone (1718–84), painter of ivory and enamel miniatures, was a founding member – although it was probably his work on big canvases that recommended him. The St James’s Chronicle criticised an Academy exhibition that included miniatures: ‘I do not like to see the Human Shape so much



Ivory Miniatures and the Art of Jane Austen 77

diminished, and to be obliged to pull a magnifying Glass to view, what I can see every moment of my Life, with my naked Eye.’5 Others felt similar discomfort, and miniaturists at exhibitions often complained that their works were placed high on walls where they could not possibly be seen. By the 1790s they were not even in the Great Room but banished downstairs. Miniaturists continued to lose ground and, in 1791, Ozias Humphrey was the last one to be made an academician; by the 1808 exhibition none of the 140 miniatures listed was by a member of the Academy and in 1806 Walter Henry Watts declared it derogatory to the ‘character of the institution to admit miniature painters to a share in its honours’.6 Yet the late eighteenth century was, according to Patrick Noon, the period of the ‘great flourishing’ of English miniatures, ‘one of the outstanding accomplishments in the history of English painting’.7 By then there was a split in style. The French and Napoleonic wars in the early nineteenth century demanded many young men of romantic age, so there grew up a huge market for miniatures as aides mémoires of their beloveds. Usually the face or face and shoulders were wanted but occasionally it was a part, especially the secretive eye, made into a kind of spy on the host body and guarding the identity of its owner from unfamiliar onlookers. A naughty American client wooed her American MP with a depiction of her ‘perfect’ bosom, while a miniature said to be of Lady Hamilton has see-through muslin, revealing one breast. The sentimental vogue associated artifact and body when the miniature held enclosed on the back the hair of the person portrayed; in mourning miniatures after the 1760s, the hair was actually dissolved in the paint or sprinkled over it when wet, then worked into decorative designs.8 Towards the end of the eighteenth century, whatever the Royal Academy thought of the art, there were several very skilled miniaturists. One of the best was John Smart Senior (1742/3–1811), who worked for a decade in India and exhibited at the Royal Academy after 1797. Smart’s aim was to produce accurate direct likenesses. He portrayed his middle-class merchants, entrepreneurs, gentleman makers of empire and professionals, their wives and relatives – including Jane Austen’s aunt Philadelphia Hancock – without elaborate backgrounds, draperies and the mythical paraphernalia frequent in larger portraits influenced by Joshua Reynolds’ grand Italianate habits. Smart was famed for accuracy, for definite lines and clarity, for catching the individuality of sitters with few strokes instead of creating them as noble exemplars, and for making each eyelash clear – in Pride and Prejudice Darcy especially admired Elizabeth Bennet’s fine ‘eye-lashes’, which he believed might be painted. In the



78 Janet Todd

beginning of his career Smart painted small ivories (112 inches), but from about 1775 he used ivory of 2 inches, of the sort Austen mentioned, before following the fashion to 3 inches in the 1790s – so that ladies’ coiffures and large beribboned and plumed hats, it was said, could be accommodated – but he did not change his style. A less skilled but more popular and fashionable miniature painter on ivory was Richard Cosway, miniature painter to the Prince of Wales and assorted aristocrats. He made light, delicate portraits with a minimum of soft, swift strokes. He favoured white and blue – female fashion was for white dresses with blue sashes, while the men complemented them by wearing blue jackets. Cosway used watercolour for flesh tones so as to bring out the ivory’s translucency. Opposing the popular Cosway and his light, deft mode as well as Smart and his accuracy were miniaturists who aspired to the Academy style for large canvases. Andrew Robertson from Edinburgh tried to make miniatures grand, painting with stronger oil colours and making big rectangular rather than oval works. When he displayed at the Academy he insisted on having large individual and sometimes ornate gold frames despite the tradition of using only one inch wood frames or putting several works together in one frame.9 His work was laborious and expensive and he was annoyed when he found patrons approving Cosway’s more delicate ovals, which he dismissed as ‘toys’ not pictures. ‘[W]e all know how easy it is to paint pretty things … ,’ he remarked. But he had to admit commercial defeat: in 1807 he wrote that ‘Pictures of that large size take so much time to paint, that I should starve, were my employment altogether in these. They are what have gained me my reputation, but small miniatures are what one must live by.’10 Others were more aggressive. In 1805 Martin Archer Shee, future president at the Academy, viciously mocked miniaturists in his Rhymes on Art, or the Remonstrance of a Painter: Alas, how many cast of a meaner mould, Life’s common clods, we every day behold, In evil moment to the Muse aspire. … Blockheads pursu’d through every nobler shape, In miniature take refuge, and escape. To the last couplet he appended a further insult: miniatures will always be ‘the refuge of imbecility; a receptacle for the poor and disappointed in art; where all who want vigour that impels to higher game, or the means to support a larger pursuit, will sit down with humbled expectations,




consoled by the reflection, that if their fame be more confined, their profit is less precarious’.11 It sounds rather like an unpopular Romantic poet castigating the novel, the dominant but not the most prestigious form at the time. Beside it could be put a sentence from G. H. Lewes’s appreciation of Austen: ‘It is a great mistake, as has been wittily said, “to fancy yourself a great painter because you paint with a big brush;” and there are unhappily too many big brushes in the hands of incompetence.’12 Certainly miniature painting was a refuge for the disabled – there are a surprising number of deaf-mutes among the ranks – and of course for women. Levina Teerline, a Flemish miniaturist, worked at the Tudor court; she was so popular that at one point she was paid more than Hans Holbein and her probable pupil Nicholas Hilliard, who came to epitomise the Elizabethan age. The mode of working on ivory was largely an innovation of a woman: the Venetian artist Rosalba Carriera who decorated ivory snuff boxes and made sophisticated miniatures painted in traditional watercolours. Travellers from England on the Grand Tour saw this sort of work and liked its delicacy, probably Bernard Lens, who pioneered the art in England, among them. While a few major women painters like Susannah Penelope Rosse were important practitioners, the art of the miniature also became an appropriate amateur accomplishment for ladies. As early as the 1660s the diarist Samuel Pepys said his wife was taking lessons in miniature painting. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the market became so crowded that several women artists such as Diana Hill (née Dietz) abandoned England and set out for India where miniatures were much in demand from lonely, hopeful and newly rich expatriates. Jane Austen employs miniatures as part of the plots of her novels. In Persuasion (1818) Captain Harville uses the miniature to point out the faithlessness of Captain Benwick, who had a small miniature painting done by a clever German artist at the Cape for Harville’s sister. Harville is now commissioned to have it newly set for Louisa Musgrove. The miniature suggests the inconsequentiality of grief, which had already been called into question by the grieving of the fat Mrs Musgrove for her unpleasant son. But Mrs Musgrave is authentic, however absurd her response, while the more elegant Captain Benwick, whose grief is literary, now fails through his insensitivity to the significance of his miniature. But Anne has grieved long and authentically and this representation of male inconstancy lets her make her celebrated and overheard avowal of continual love. Captain Wentworth, who had had to stifle laughter at Mrs Musgrove’s grief, is enthralled by this more aesthetic example. In Austen’s unfinished novel, Sanditon, the use is more



80 Janet Todd

broadly satiric: the first rich husband of the formidable Lady Denham is displayed in one of many miniatures beside the whole-length portrait over the mantelpiece of his successor, Sir Harry Denham. Mr Hollis, though in miniature, is the source of Lady Denham’s main wealth and, it is implied, of the subsequent courtship of the full-length Sir Harry, who provided her title. The most telling use of miniatures, however, occurs in Austen’s first novel, Sense and Sensibility (1811), the most secretive of her works. Marianne, it appears, has recently worn a miniature round her neck, which, after much speculation from her sisters, turns out to be of her great uncle. It is an odd detail. Since Margaret has only just remarked it, Marianne must have taken to wearing it after the old uncle died leaving them nothing. The main reason why a person would wear a miniature of an old relative is in hope of inheriting or in gratitude for having done so; the detail suggests Marianne’s refusal to enter the system of money relationships in which her worldly lover Willoughby is enmeshed. Elinor, her cannier sister, knows this use of personal items: when faced with Willoughby owning a miniature she immediately construes it may belong to ‘some great uncle of his’.13 The more significant use of a portrait occurs in one of the most painful moments of the novel, when Lucy Steele takes a ‘small miniature from her pocket’ to ‘prevent the possibility of mistake’. She shows it to Elinor, who realises that it is indeed Edward’s. Elinor is the most artistic of Austen’s heroines, her painted screens being so skilled that even her ghastly sister-in-law cannot fail to admire them, but it is not the art that strikes her but the likeness. Lucy says it does not do Edward justice, so that Elinor will look closely, and soon, indeed, Elinor has no doubts of ‘its being Edward’s face’ although the portrait shows him three years younger.14 Here the miniature is a public consumer item and private possession, a simulacrum of a person possessed by someone else. It allows two women to gaze on the same man in a way that would be improper if the real man were present. Yet it guards its meaning since neither Lucy nor Elinor really knows what Lucy’s possession signifies in the present. It is quite otherwise with the full-length portrait of Darcy in Pemberley, which displays its noble meaning squarely and to all comers. The quotation I started with associated Austen’s art itself with the miniature on ivory, a slippery enigmatic living-dead material.15 She too writes on a slippery surface curiously related to ‘real life’, one to which ideas do not simply stick. In the light of the eighteenth-century miniature tradition her metaphor suggests the best miniatures’ coolness and immense skill, as well as their smallness of scale. Both miniatures and




Austen’s novels contrast with the enormous canvasses and hot techniques of those who displayed swathes of history and cultures. These hoped to amaze and express their imaginative visions instead of aiming at recognition, at imitative realism and exactness through fine strokes. As an early reader, the Dowager Lady Vernon, commented on Mansfield Park in 1814: ‘Not much of a novel, more the history of a family party in the country, very natural.’16 Although Austen never underrated the appeal of grandiloquent or sensational fiction, she was aware of her contrast – it is clear from many comments in her letters, including the mockery of Sydney Owenson and her hot prose about a lost heroic Ireland in The Wild Irish Girl. In Northanger Abbey Austen praised the more ‘domestic’ among the works of Maria Edgeworth and Frances Burney, those books least likely to take their heroines to revolutionary France or let them be captured by brigands: as she wrote to Anna Lefroy: ‘I would not seriously recommend anything Improbable.’17 When it was made by Austen the analogy with the miniature was therefore not limiting. Inadvertently, however, Walter Scott began the process of diminishing her through art analogies. He was the first to make what would become a common connection of the novels with Flemish or Dutch painting. Hers was a Flemish school of writing with sharp detail, a style equivalent to the genre painting little prized at the time: ‘The subjects are not often elegant’, he wrote, ‘and certainly never grand; but they are finished up to nature, and with a precision which delights the reader.’ Austen could reveal the ‘involvement and feelings and characters of ordinary life’; she had ‘the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment’. Unlike miniature painting itself, the domestic fictional style was gendered feminine: ‘women do this better’, added Scott, knowing that he also added hierarchy.18 Austen’s own art analogy was echoed by the Edinburgh Magazine of 1818, which called the novels ‘familiar cabinet pictures’, that is, miniatures, and compared them favourably with the ‘great historical pieces of our more eminent modern masters’. But, when George Henry Lewes praised Austen’s ‘ease of nature, which looks so like the ordinary life of everyday’, he established the limiting use of the miniature metaphor: ‘beside [Scott’s] frescoes [Austen’s] works are but miniatures; exquisite as miniatures’. Austen was without ‘literary or philosophic culture’: ‘Miss Austen’s two-inch bit of ivory is worth a gallery of canvass by eminent R.A.’s, but it is only a bit of ivory after all.’ Her novels were ‘incapable of ever filling that space in the public eye which was filled by [Scott’s] massive and masterly pictures’.19 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


82 Janet Todd

Here the miniature analogy is clearly used to deprecate. It is even more damning in Charlotte Brontë, who found in Austen ‘a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy in the painting’. The image continues up to the 1920s when Austen’s most famous editor R. W. Chapman sometimes praises her by making her sound in her results if not technique like a verbal John Smart: ‘She polished and polished, till the finished surface of her fiction has a brilliance which delights her admirers, but also an apparent hardness which has concealed from many readers the flow of imagination which lies beneath it.’20 But at other moments he lets the miniature analogy again denote inferiority, delivering Austen’s works as merely graceful portraits of country life. In response to such belittling, many critics wanted Jane Austen to be more of a ‘big’ painter, to have more of the variety and glow she playfully declared she had not, and insist on trying to find the grand historical and political narratives in her works that Scott missed. When realism came into critical focus in the late nineteenth century and Austen was to be lauded, emphasis therefore had to shift from her identity as miniaturist. In a note in Scribner’s Magazine of 1891 she moved into the company of the ‘big’ writers as heir of Richardson and Fielding and ‘the mother of the nineteenth-century novel’.21 By the centenary of her death in 1917 Reginald Farrer found her allusion to her ivory miniatures ‘misleadingly modest’ and sixty years later Robert Donovan believed he was paying her a compliment when he declared: ‘The fact is that Jane Austen’s is not a miniaturist’s art at all, however small the surfaces on which she chooses to work.’22 From the political 1970s, Austen’s books were found to be deeply implicated in historical controversies while she herself was inserted into every possible intellectual tradition; her knowledge had to be expanded and she had to become an epic as well as a dramatic writer.23 In John Wiltshire’s words, she became the ‘warrior of ideas: the pupil of Locke and of Bishop Butler, Samuel Johnson’s daughter, the antagonist of Godwin, the peer of Burke’, as well of course as becoming Mary Wollstonecraft’s rival or sister.24 She was turned into a history painter in the novel. I believe there is a way of recuperating the value of the miniature analogy rather than jettisoning it. James Thompson argues that Austen typically validates emotional depth by using linguistic restraint – much as a miniaturist may do on ivory. She suggests a presence beyond the limits of language by indicating what cannot be directly described. So she gives form to ‘an imaginative world of inner experience’ through restraint and confinement.25 Perhaps one might extend the analogy to the novel heroines. Elinor and, in the end, Marianne and Fanny in Mansfield Park (1814) conform and live life surrounded by a social frame 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan



rather like the miniature’s oval one, but, within boundaries, are skilled and bold in ways the anarchic or, in literary terms, the self-indulgently epic, are not. To take the analogy further, the ironic narrative voice ensures that the reader is outside the frame witnessing the quiet subjectivity of the protagonist. It is scale that in part makes Austen’s work ‘realer’ than the works of writers with more sweeping subjects: Elizabeth Bennet’s refusal of Mr Collins convinces more than Laura Montreveille’s refusal of Hargrave in the expansive Self Control (1810) or indeed Clarissa of Soames. Austen’s practice deflates the pompous and lengthy novel, whether written by men or women. In her play Sir Charles Grandison, she reduced Richardson’s huge seven volumes to five short acts, without actually destroying the plot. In her famous advice to her niece on novel-writing she suggested avoiding the large scale: ‘we think you had better not leave England. Let the Portmans go to Ireland, but as you know nothing of the Manners there, you had better not go with them. … Stick to Bath. … There you will be quite at home.’26 What I am arguing is that in her miniaturising technique Austen is consciously not writing a kind of novel that seeks to ‘leave’ commonplace England. Instead, she wants to embed her work in the quotidian, in new books, miniatures and hair rings. Her own ivory miniatures were never uncontaminated by life or larger than they need be. She accepted the intermingling of art and artifacts and saw the artist and craftsperson together, unlike the Romantic artist, the hack writer or the didactic reformer. She avoided surface excess and extreme style; constantly her burlesque mocks the stylistically inappropriate. The effect is apparent realism which embeds mockery of other styles as unrealistic and artificial. As she also told her niece, ‘You are now collecting your People delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life; – 3 or 4 Families in a Country village is the very thing to work on – & I hope you will write a great deal more, & make full use of them while they are so very favourably arranged.’27 Here is the art of the miniature that includes, but is not embraced by, minutiae. This, I think, ties in with Austen’s mockery of Enlightenment writing with its grand narratives. Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, who generalised about nations and human nature, assumed that all development was transnational and on a similar trajectory. In her two Vindications she argued that past cultural differences resulted from different levels of development within a stadial history and were not to be nurtured but eradicated in the march of progress, a view that amalgamated the Scottish Enlightenment progressives and the millenarian Dissenters. In her



84 Janet Todd

Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794) she insisted on judging historical characters and eras according to universal reason, much as she judged women in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Each country, like each person, was an uninflected individual. Nationality for her, as well as the early Maria Edgeworth, was almost metaphysical, demanding erasure of difference whether of gender, class, sect or group. Wollstonecraft pulled away from any notion of national intrinsic identity and insisted with her friend Helen Maria Williams that one should be a ‘citizen of the world’. In opposition to this was the nationalism of Walter Scott, Owenson and the later Edgeworth. The last was writing about the politics of Ireland, the Ascendancy and the union of Ireland and Britain in novel after novel or, in Scott’s term, ‘embodying and illustrating national character’. Jane Porter too wrote about her heroic nation, about William Wallace and Bannockburn, in The Scottish Chiefs (1810). Even Frances Burney was describing revolutions and national systems in The Wanderer (1814). In contrast Austen neither eschews nor inflates the national narrative. In Emma the sight of Martin’s farm provokes the heroine’s appreciation: ‘It was a sweet view – sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive.’28 The ‘view’ is generalised to the nation but remains rooted in the farm in the curve of the river situated on Donwell land. Austen describes a national identity of small places different from Enlightenment internationalism but also from the growing nationalism of the great historical novels, especially of the Anglo-Irish and Scottish schools. This emphasis on the miniature also connects with Austen’s famous interchange with James Stanier Clarke, who suggested she write an ‘Historical Romance, founded on the House of Saxe Cobourg’. To which she replied, You are very kind in your hints as to the sort of composition which might recommend me at present, and I am fully sensible that an historical romance, founded on the House of Saxe-Cobourg, might be much more to the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in. But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or at other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter.29




Jane Porter was more gracious and obliging and delivered Duke Christian of Luneburg in 1824. Meanwhile Austen’s memoirist and nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, glossed the interchange with his aunt as an absurd request to a famous miniaturist to paint a battle scene. Meaning to defend here, the nephew probably still regarded the image as limiting. For he was writing in 1870, when, after nearly four centuries of flourishing in England, the miniature was being pushed aside by photography; from then onwards it could no longer lay claim to the unique power of providing intimate portraits and of making each fine eye lash clear.

Notes 1. Jane Austen, Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre le Faye, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 323. A shorter version of this paper has appeared in Re-drawing Austen: Picturesque Travels in Austenland (Ligouri: Napoli, 2004). 2. Austen, Letters, p. 20 3. Austen, Letters, p. 185. 4. Jon Mee, ‘Austen’s Treacherous Ivory. Female Patriotism, Domestic Ideology, and Empire’, in The Postcolonial Jane Austen, ed. You-me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 74–91. 5. Quoted in Sarah Coffin and Bodo Hofstetter, The Gilbert Collection: Portrait Miniatures in Enamel (London: Philip Wilson, 2000), p. 40. 6. David H. Solkin, Art on the Line The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House, 1780–1836 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 193. 7. John Murdoch, Jim Murrell, Patrick J. Noon and Roy Strong, The English Miniature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 192, 180. 8. Shirley Bury, An Introduction to Sentimental Jewellery. Victoria and Albert Museum Introductions to the Decorative Arts (Owings Mills, MD: Stemmer House, 1985), p. 40. 9. Murdoch et al., The English Miniature, p. 223. 10. Andrew Robertson, Letters and Papers of Andrew Robertson, 2nd edn (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1897), pp. 61–2, 151. 11. Martin Archer Shee RA, Rhymes on Art; or, the Remonstrance of a Painter, 2nd edn (London: H. Ebers, 1805), pp. 31–3. 12. George Henry Lewes, ‘The Novels of Jane Austen’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 125 ( July 1859), p. 103. 13. Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811), ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927), p. 60. In a talk (12 November 2002) to the Cambridge Jane Austen Society Marilyn Butler suggested that this use in Sense and Sensibility was an allusion to Austen’s great-uncle Francis who, despite his being her godfather, would leave her and her family nothing on his death just before her own. 14. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, pp. 131–2. 15. Many have associated Austen with artists in watercolours or pastels, often using the analogy to render her ladylike, e.g. A. Barbeau in Life and Letters in Bath in the Eighteenth Century (London: Heinemann, 1904): ‘how different place and people appear in Smollett’s violent lithographs and Jane Austen’s delicate pastels!’ (p. 202). 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


86 Janet Todd

16. Letter to Mrs Phyllis Franklin, between 15 and 20 June 1814. The Journal of Mary Frampton, ed. Harriot Georgiana Munday, 2nd edn (London: Sampson Low, 1885), p. 226. 17. Austen, Letters, p. 279. 18. Review of Jane Austen’s Emma, Quarterly Review, 14 (March 1816), pp. 188–201; The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, ed. W. E. K. Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 121. 19. G. H. Lewes, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 87 (March 1860), p. 335; ‘The Novels of Jane Austen’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 86 ( July 1859), pp. 99–113. 20. R. W. Chapman, Jane Austen: Facts and Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), p. 124. 21. William Branford Shubrick Clymer, ‘A Note on J. A.’, in Scribner’s Magazine, (February 1891), quoted in B. C. Southam, Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 1870–1940 (London: Routledge, 1987) II, pp. 198–202; George Saintsbury, A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780–1895) (London: Macmillan and Co, 1896), p. 683. 22. Reginald Farrer, Quarterly Review, 228 ( July 1817), pp. 1–30; Robert Alan Donovan, ‘The Mind of Jane Austen’, in Jane Austen Today, ed. Joel Weinsheimer (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975), p. 119. 23. See Donald Greene, ‘The Myth of Limitation’, in Jane Austen Today, ed. Joel Weinsheimer (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975), pp. 142–75 for a good expression of this distinction. 24. John Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 3. 25. James Thompson, Between Self and World: the Novels of Jane Austen (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), p. 101. 26. Austen, Letters, p. 269. 27. Austen, Letters, p. 275. 28. Jane Austen, Emma, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 360. 29. Austen, Letters, p. 312.




Mansfield Park – What did Jane Austen Really Write? The Texts of 1814 and 1816 Brian Southam

Questions of textual transmission and textual authority have not hitherto arisen with Austen partly because the published texts are relatively problem-free and partly because the evidence is so thin. Apart from a single fragment, the two so-called ‘cancelled’ chapters of Persuasion, an earlier version of the novel’s ending, nothing of the manuscripts of the six novels has survived. However, the publication of the Penguin and Norton editions of Mansfield Park directs our attention to an area of uncertainty between the published texts and what Austen actually wrote. Mansfield Park has an important place in this enquiry as one of the only two novels – the other is Sense and Sensibility – that was revised and corrected by Austen for a second edition; and it is in their differing choice of copy-text that Kathryn Sutherland and Claudia Johnson have raised the question posed in the title of this essay; and, alongside it, and equally important, the question of textual authority as between the first edition, published by Thomas Egerton in 1814, and the second edition, published by John Murray in 1816. In choosing the second edition of 1816, Johnson has followed established practice, that is to say the practice established by R. W. Chapman, Austen’s first real editor, who created the Oxford University Press edition of 1923. Chapman’s decision to use 1816 was made on the principle that the last edition published in an author’s lifetime can be treated as the authoritative edition, as long as there is evidence of the author’s involvement in its preparation; and in the case of Mansfield Park such evidence does exist. It comes in a letter Austen sent to Murray, dated 11 December 1815. Murray had lent her some books and she now returns them, together with a copy of the first edition carrying her corrections and 88 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


6

revisions, with this comment: ‘I return also, Mansfield Park, as ready for a 2d Edit: I beleive, as I can make it. –’1 In Chapman’s view, the question of authority was anyway decided by what he regarded as the markedly inferior state of the first edition. According to his Introductory Note, dated 1923, ‘Of all the editions of the novels, the first edition of Mansfield Park is by far the worst printed. It is very ill punctuated, and there are a good many verbal errors. The second edition, which has been followed in all reprints, is very much better.’ This decision, however, was at some cost since he thought that the spelling of 1814 was ‘more likely to reflect the author’s practice’; and he added the proviso that on occasion he had ‘preferred the reading’ of 1814.2 Chapman’s choice of the second edition over the first, so firmly expressed, was not questioned at the time or subsequently; nor did it arise, other than as a matter of confirmation, in his Clark Lectures at Cambridge in 1948, published in the same year as Jane Austen: Facts and Problems, where he remarked on the ‘careful changes’ made to the second editions of Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park.3 So it is no surprise to find that the successive editions of later scholars have been based on Chapman’s Oxford text, with virtually no change. These include Mary Lascelles, Dent Everyman (1963); Tony Tanner, Penguin English Library (1966); and James Kinsley, Oxford English Novels (1970). For the Norton edition, however, Johnson takes a different route from all previous editors, not only in sidestepping the Oxford text, but in returning directly to the text of 1816 and challenging Chapman, opening what amounts to a critical dialogue with his editorial decisions. While paying tribute to his ‘good judgement and good example’ in editorial matters, and pointing out that ‘at its best’ his practice is ‘so measured and careful’, Johnson none the less finds his decisions ‘sometimes capricious’. Her aim has been ‘to produce a conservative edition’, remaining faithful to the 1816 text ‘more regularly than Chapman does’, avoiding the introduction of ‘new variants in punctuation’ (one aspect of Chapman’s editing) and ‘taking a different stand on several cruxes’.4 In the Textual Notes she sets out the detail of her disagreement with Chapman on specific points: on several occasions, for example, where Chapman emends the text, she has seen no call for intervention. In addition, as Johnson explains, she has tried ‘to make editorial intervention explicit’, something that Chapman does not always do, ‘and to allow those inconsistencies that cannot be adjudicated on the basis of known information about the text to stand’ (p. 323) – a very welcome measure of negative capability. So it can be said that the Norton text is the most faithful we have to the second edition of 1816. Equally important is the fact that Johnson



Mansfield Park – What did Jane Austen Really Write? 89

presents the rationale for choosing 1816 as her copy-text. This explanation is given at length and in detail, and her consideration of the issues that stand behind this choice is clear and extremely thorough. Turning now to the Penguin edition. The policy regarding the text is set out by Claire Lamont, the Textual Adviser for all six novels: the texts ‘have been edited afresh’ and are based on the first editions.5 This is a bold decision and makes the Penguin Mansfield Park the first edition ever to take the original edition of 1814 as copy-text. Sutherland claims that since Chapman’s day editorial theory has changed and that nowadays ‘editorial preference has shifted towards the earliest articulated form of a work’. As there is no manuscript of Mansfield Park, ‘the earliest articulated form’ is the first edition of 1814. Sutherland finds further support in the ‘high valuation’ placed in the Romantic period upon ‘primary utterances’ (p. xlii); and I quote from a letter which Professor Sutherland has kindly allowed me to use, in which she enlarges on the particular meaning of this term: ‘Primary’ implies both original and chief; and I do think a case can be made for suggesting that the earliest printed version (despite errors it may and will contain) represents a union of form and content, expression and intention (whatever we decide to call it) that is special and which will be strained by subsequent revision even if those revisions render local detail more accurate.6 In the 1814 text, Sutherland finds ‘a freshness and freedom … which is lost in the regularizations and “corrections”, begun in’ 1816 ‘and continued by Chapman’ (p. xliii). Specifically, these are changes made to the punctuation, spelling and grammar – changes in this last category include corrections of the indicative ‘was’ to the subjunctive ‘were’. According to Sutherland, some of the punctuation changes have a pronounced effect on the style or manner of 1814, its ‘rhythmical punctuation’, ‘apparently looser and less logical than modern punctuation’, was employed ‘to mark emphasis or balance which often runs counter to grammatical sense’ (p. 416). Overall, the effect of these changes in 1816 is to remove ‘characteristics of the author’s writing style which a modern reader would wish to recover’ (p. xliii). Sutherland also claims that the text of 1814 ‘contains some significantly better readings than’ 1816 – ‘better’ in the sense that the text is ‘stripped of the “improvements” of subsequent editions’, and these editions include 1816. And in ‘making a claim for the textual authority’ of 1814, Sutherland draws our attention, in particular, to ‘those substantive



90 Brian Southam

textual variants’ in 1816 ‘which have been traditionally regarded as the improvements of Austen’s sailor brothers’ (p. xliii). These ‘variants’ come in volume III, chapter 7, the passage in which Mr Price describes the departure of William’s ship, the ‘Thrush’, when it leaves the inner harbour at Portsmouth on its way out to the fleet anchorage at Spithead. In 1814, Austen got things wrong. She made mistakes in the nautical terminology and in the geography of the harbour setting. Someone knowledgeable, as Sutherland suggests, almost certainly one of the sailor brothers, Francis or Charles, both of whom were very familiar with Portsmouth, must have warned her about these mistakes; and in 1816 we find the passage revised and corrected. Sutherland follows her copytext, preserving the uncorrected reading of 1814, with the corrections of 1816 recorded in the Notes. Sutherland explains her decision, at this point, as ‘a preference … for Austen’s “uncorrected” personal authority’ (p. 410) – a principle maintained throughout the Penguin text. By this, we are to understand that so-called ‘improvements’ to 1814 fall into a suspect category, most of all the ‘improvements’ that came from outside, notwithstanding that they were entered by the author herself; and they remain subordinate to the original uncorrected text, even when the original text is factually wrong. This fully accords with Sutherland’s earlier gloss on ‘primary utterances’. This example highlights the absolute difference in Johnson’s position. Her argument is that the area of correction around the ‘Thrush’ is only one example of Austen’s abiding concern with ‘authenticity of details’; and she refers to the other well-known examples of Austen’s scrupulous confirming of facts during the writing of Mansfield Park. In the case of the ‘Thrush’, ‘The last thing Austen wanted was to be faulted for failing to render nautical terms precisely when the wielding of this specialized speech was the whole point’ (p. xix). (I would add that the user of these ‘nautical terms’, Mr Price, is himself a naval man. A lieutenant in the Marines, a townsman of Portsmouth and a habitué of the dockyard and waterfront, he is the last person we would expect to misuse nautical language or – an error that also exists in 1814 – to be mistaken about the visibility of vessels leaving the harbour.) Differing as they do in their copy-texts, the Penguin and the Norton editions none the less share an identity as scholarly texts of the first order. Equally importantly, both are critiques, direct or implied, of the authority of Chapman’s Oxford edition. In ‘Speaking Commas/Reading Commas: Punctuating Mansfield Park’, an article first published in 1999,7 Sutherland scrutinises the problematic nature of this authority and examines the background of social and cultural forces which played




a part in its formation. As the title suggests, Sutherland’s central argument is that ‘punctuation holds the key to Mansfield Park’,8 and she discusses in detail what she identifies as Chapman’s corrective attitude towards Austen as a woman author, especially in matters of punctuation and ‘faulty grammar or infelicitous phraseology’ which Chapman was prompt ‘to regularize and adjust’ with ‘ “expert” interventions’.9 The argument is striking. It throws a highly critical light on the male style of patriarchal editing to which Chapman subjected Austen’s feminine text, a not untypical manifestation of scholarly and critical attitudes in the mid-twentieth century. However, the fascination of Sutherland’s analysis should not distract our attention from the question at issue: not the priority of 1814 over Chapman’s edition, with all its now evident shortcomings, but the matters at stake between the divergent editorial principles expressed in the choice of copy-text for the Penguin and Norton editions. Some of these matters could be resolved if only we had a copy of the manuscript, that is to say the fair copy that went to the publisher Egerton at the end of 1813 or early in 1814 and which Egerton, in turn, passed on to his printers; or the copy Austen retained; or even the author’s corrected proofs. And for 1816, the copy of 1814, revised and corrected by Austen, from which we suppose the second edition was set. (We have to allow for the possibility that Austen was returning the final proofs of 1816, rather than a marked-up copy of 1814. But the timetable makes this highly unlikely, since it would mean that she would have been involved in correcting the proofs of Emma and Mansfield Park simultaneously, something that the publisher, printers and Austen herself would seek to avoid.) Any one of the missing links would go a long way to clearing up the disputed readings and uncertainties that face us in both editions. But to the best of our knowledge nothing of this material has survived, either for Mansfield Park or for any of the novels, save the cancelled chapters of Persuasion. Nor can we expect anything more to turn up, given Chapman’s determined pursuit, over many years, of Austen materials of all kinds that might remain in the possession of the family or survive elsewhere. There must be some significance to the fact that while all the manuscript material that remained unpublished during Austen’s lifetime – including the three volumes of juvenilia, Lady Susan, The Watsons and Sanditon – has come down to us intact, no manuscript of anything published the author’s lifetime has survived. The explanation for this may lie with the custodianship assumed by her sister Cassandra, Jane’s literary executor. After Jane’s death, Cassandra also took upon herself the guardianship of her sister’s private life, censoring her letters with scissors and putting others on a bonfire; and, in line with



92 Brian Southam

this, she may have destroyed Austen’s own copies of the manuscripts of the published novels as belonging to that same private realm. Outside the family, the most likely location would be with John Murray who brought out the first editions of Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, as well as the second edition of Mansfield Park. The company records, held in the John Murray Archive, are remarkably complete and well kept. But all they contain in Austen’s hand is two letters written to Murray plus one copy: the letter of 11 December 1815, already referred to at the beginning of this essay; and two letters regarding Emma: one dated 23 November 1815, a letter of complaint saying that she is ‘so very much disappointed & vexed by the delays of the Printers’ and wondering if there is any ‘hope of’ the proofs ‘being quickened’; and a letter of thanks, dated 1 April 1816, returning the copy of the Quarterly Review in which appeared Scott’s famous review of Emma.10 Other than this, the archive holds account books recording payments to Austen, to the printers and paper merchants for the production of the four novels, and orders from the booksellers. As nothing more has been found, we can only conclude that when there was no further use for Austen’s marked-up text of 1814 and the fair copies of the three later manuscripts they went out with the rubbish. So for any further progress we have to make do with indirect resources. First, there is our knowledge of printing and publishing practice in the early nineteenth century. This enables us to outline the path taken by a manuscript from the time it left an author’s hands until its eventual appearance in print; and, within this sequence, we can identify the stages at which the manuscript was liable to alteration. For a novel, copy-editing, as we know it today, was non-existent. Normally, the publisher was only concerned to agree with his printer or printers the details of production: that the books would be produced to the standard duodecimo size (c.185 110 mm) employed for novels and in the standard threevolume form. Exceptionally, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both of them somewhat shorter than the earlier novels, were published together, after Austen’s death, as a four-volume set. Publisher and printer would also agree on the typeface and type size, the paper to be used, and any other basic matters of production and design. But in the normal way the publisher would not make any changes to the text. Whatever changes were made went on in the printing house. In the course of setting the text in print the compositors were expected to correct the spelling and punctuation, the indication of dialogue, initial capitalisation, paragraphing, and so on, normalising these features of the manuscript according to ‘the rule of the house’. In addition, a ‘corrector’ or ‘reader’ (in effect,




a proofreader-cum-editor), employed to check the sheets as they came off the press, shared in this work. This was not regarded as interference but standard practice. The 1787 edition of the trade handbook, The Printer’s Grammar, makes it clear where these responsibilities were seen to lie, by author, printer and publisher alike: … most Authors expect the Printer to spell, point [punctuate], and digest their copy, that it may be intelligible and significant to the Reader; which is what a Compositor and the Corrector jointly have regard to. … Pointing, therefore … being now become part of a Compositor’s business.11 But there remained the problem that there was no common agreement on punctuation: whether it should be ‘heavy’ or ‘light’; logical or rhythmical; whether there should be a comma between the subject and the predicate; whether question marks were to be used after exclamatory statements; whether, to indicate a special tone or emphasis one, two or even three words together should be italicised; and so on ad infinitum. Every printing house had its own favoured method, its own ‘rule of the house’. This left the compositors with a continuing problem. In 1805, their London Society – by far the most vocal and influential group amongst the craftsmen – was driven to address a formal letter of complaint, protesting to their employers, the Master Printers: Scarcely any two persons agree in their modes of punctuation, – and most houses in town have their peculiar method, not only in this, but in spelling, dividing [hyphenating or otherwise separating compounds at line-ends], &c. &c. all which becomes a heavy burden on those who have to support it.12 There is no sign that the Master Printers acted on this complaint; it remained a live issue in the trade. However, in the next edition of The Printer’s Grammar, published in 1808, the editor, Caleb Stower, himself a Master Printer, set out to address this problem, declaring that ‘the duty of punctuation’, ‘disregarded as a matter of little consequence by the author, becomes an important part of the corrector’s business’.13According to Stower, the shift of responsibility, then, was away from the compositor and on to the ‘corrector’ in his dual capacity as proofreader and editor. But Stower’s statement, precise as it is, seems to have had little effect. Only a year later, the Compositors’ Committee was raising the complaint again, drawing attention to the responsibility that was left to the



94 Brian Southam

individual craftsman: ‘the Compositor has generally to point what he composes, and often to correct the orthography’; and the Committee linked this issue with a demand for higher wages.14 And across the period in which Austen’s novels were printed, between 1811 and 1817, there is no evidence of any move to introduce a standard ‘rule of the house’ among the London printers. What remained was a bewildering variety of ‘rules’; and, as far as punctuation was concerned, this confusion prevailed far into the future. As McKerrow was to comment in his classic Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students, published in 1927, variation among the ‘rules’ continued to that very day.15 The implications of this are inescapable – that with the Austen novels we can have no assurance that any given passage of printed text follows the punctuation and spelling of her manuscript. As Johnson comments, this has serious consequences for the close reading of Austen: that these ‘matters from which we squeeze a lot of nuance’ may owe more to the compositors ‘than has been acknowledged’ (p. xix) – a warning that takes on a special resonance with Mansfield Park, remembering that the three volumes of the first edition were set by two different printers and the second edition by three.16 With so many fingers in the pie, how much of the punctuation and spelling is Austen’s and how much is down to the compositors and correctors? This is a question that attaches itself as much to 1814 as to 1816. Our second indirect resource is Austen’s correspondence, although pitifully little has come down to us, fewer than 170 letters, possibly only 5 per cent of what she actually wrote. Given that so many have disappeared, it is quite understandable that we have so little about her dealings with printers and publishers. But at least we do know that when Austen was staying in London with her brother Henry in November 1815, the ‘Printer’s boys’ brought the proof sheets of Emma to her at Hans Place, on one occasion bringing three sheets together (a sheet was 24 pages). Sometimes she returned the proofs to Murray, sometimes directly to the printers, the proofs of volumes I and II to Roworth, of volume III to Moyes. And in another letter to Cassandra, she reported having reached ‘my arra-root’ (in volume III, chapter 9), ‘upon which peculiar style of spelling, there is a modest qu:ry? in the Margin’.17 Perhaps of most value to us, the letters provide evidence of Austen’s brisk and business-like attitude to publishers and printers, suggesting that on details that really mattered to her she took a determined stand.18 Finally, and of all the evidence the most revealing, are the surviving literary manuscripts.19All of these show us Austen’s personal idiosyncrasies and mannerisms of punctuation, capitalisation and spelling.




By comparing these manuscript features with the printed texts of the novels, we can go some way towards reconstructing the kinds of change that were made by the compositors and correctors. In this exercise, the cancelled chapter 11 of volume II of Persuasion is of particular value, since this became chapter 12 of the printed text, virtually unchanged in sense and wording, but considerably changed in capitalisation, punctuation and spelling. We can see, for example, that Austen’s abbreviations and ampersands were expanded, that her spelling was normalised, that words in italics were modernised to roman and that her prolific use of initial capitals, by now regarded as old-fashioned, was trimmed to modern taste. Similarly, the compositors usually, though not invariably, did away with the dash she habitually put after full stops (.–) at the end of sentences, a common mannerism among writers at this time. All these features are illustrated in this passage, the last page of the Persuasion manuscript, which eventually became the final paragraph of the published novel: Mrs Smith’s enjoyments were not spoiled by this improvement of Income, with some improvement of health, & the acquisition of such friends to be often with, for her chearfulness & mental Activity did not fail her & while those prime supplies of Good remained, she might have bid defiance even to greater accessions of worldly Prosperity. She might have been absolutely rich & perfectly healthy, & yet be happy.– Her spring of Felicity was in the glow of her Spirits – as her friend Anne’s was in the warmth of her Heart.– Anne was Tenderness itself;– and she had the full worth of it in Captn Wentworth’s affection. His Profession was all that could ever make her friends wish that Tenderness less; the dread of a future War, all that could dim her Sunshine.– She gloried in being a Sailor’s wife, but she must pay the tax of quick alarm, for belonging to that Profession which is – if possible – more distinguished in it’s Domestic Virtues, than in it’s National Importance.– Finis July 18.–1816.20 Apart from the normalisation carried out by the compositors, this manuscript version differs from the printed text in two further details: ‘Activity’, line 3, was changed to ‘alacrity’, meaning liveliness; ‘those’, in line 4, was changed to ‘these’. These changes could have been made by Austen herself when she was making the fair copy for the publisher. Or were they changes made by someone else? Our uncertainty on this point



96 Brian Southam

arises from the fact that as Persuasion was published six months after her death, the correction of the proofs lay with others, most probably with her brother Henry, the businessman of the family, to whom Austen entrusted her publishing affairs – possibly with the help of Cassandra. Other than these two changes, we have no reason to suppose that the final manuscript of Persuasion that went to the printers differed essentially from what is in front of us here. The compositors were used to deciphering writing far less legible than the well-formed and regular copperplate Austen employed in making fair copies; this is the careful hand we see in the manuscripts of the juvenilia and Lady Susan. So while Austen’s wording is likely to have been reproduced faithfully, the other elements, including – as we can see in these few lines – the punctuation and spelling, were subject to all the routine normalising changes regarded as part and parcel of transferring the written form to the printed page. And when we take into account that two different printers were involved in the Mansfield Park 1814 text and three in the 1816, the complications, vagaries even, of textual transmission are obvious enough. Not only did house rules differ from printer to printer, so did the individual compositors within each house differ in their application of the rules. They might have served their apprenticeship with one printer with one set of rules and qualified as journeymen elsewhere with another. So it is not surprising to find that individual compositors introduced their own variations – and indeed their own levels of carelessness. Chapman remarks on this in a footnote immediately before the opening of his 1816 text: The spelling of the second edition shows that the compositor followed the ‘rule of the house’ rather than his copy. Each volume was given to a different printer; and we find that the printer of Vol. I preferred choose, the printer of II and III chuse; I and II have entreat, III intreat, &c.21 So it comes as no surprise to find a wide range of inconsistencies, not simply between the two editions, but also independently among all three volumes of each edition – inconsistencies of hyphenation, apostrophes inserted or omitted or differently placed, variant spellings of the same word, compounds separated, hyphenated or unhyphenated, or run together and so on. Some of these errors and variants got through in 1814, some in 1816, and some in both editions. That this happened, and to such an extent, suggests that the proofreading stages were unduly hurried or skimped, something that could




have been avoided if the standard procedures, which were very thorough, had been followed. As the sheets came off the press, they were quickly looked over by the pressman for any glaring errors; these would be corrected before the sheets went on to the corrector. The corrector would then go through the sheets, marking any errors, attending to the ‘reading-boy’ who was reading to him out loud from the original manuscript. Any errors spotted at this stage were immediately corrected on the press and what the author eventually received were batches of the proof-sheets already corrected in-house. He then carried out his own checking against his own copy of the manuscript. Finally, a set of revised proof-sheets went to the author together with the previous set of proof-sheets carrying the earlier corrections – this procedure, as Stower puts it, ‘to see that all errata are properly corrected’. Throughout this process, authors were urged to return their proofs ‘as quickly as possible’; this was to avoid both the expense of standing type and the risk of it being damaged in the printing-house.22 Whatever went wrong, the incidence of error in the Mansfield Parks of 1814 and 1816 tells us that this procedure was not working effectively. It also tells us that Austen did not regard her manuscripts as sacrosanct, to be followed to the very last detail. In short, she was certainly not someone of the Shelley stamp, whose poetry, so we are told, went to the ‘printer with strict instructions to “follow copy”, that is to print it verbatim, literatim, and point for point, and to leave revision to the author’.23 Clearly, Austen allowed some latitude to the vagaries of the printers; and across the Christmas and New Year period 1815–16 seems have been less than eagle-eyed when it came to the reading of her proofs. This may reflect her impatience to see the revised Mansfield Park published – if it was a corrected copy of 1814 (rather than a set of proofs) that she returned to Murray on 11 December, the production of 1816 occupied only just over ten weeks, from mid-December to mid-February. Moreover, she was faced with considerable distractions during this time. Into December, she was pressing Murray to finish the printing of Emma, with the added fuss over protocol in its dedication to the Prince Regent. In the second half of October, she had to nurse Henry through a grave illness; and when that was over, Henry had to be supported in coping with the failure of his banking business. These distractions and preoccupations could very well explain the tentativeness of her wording to Murray when she sent him the corrected copy of 1814 ‘as ready for a 2d Edit: I beleive, as I can make it’. Austen’s final words may carry an apologetic admission that she was not able to attend to the correction of the 1814 text as thoroughly as she would have liked.24



98 Brian Southam

So Johnson’s crucial question remains to be answered – how much weight should we attach to the fine detail of Austen’s punctuation and spelling, or, rather, to the punctuation and spelling that faces us on the printed page? I am sure, for example, that both Chapman and Sutherland are right to judge that the word ‘tease’, spelt ‘teize’ in 1814, a slightly archaic form, was Austen’s own spelling, rather than the upto-date ‘tease’ of 1816.25 This finds support in the manuscript of Lady Susan (a fair copy made c.1805) where there are two examples of ‘teizing’ spelt in the old-fashioned way.26 Sutherland is also right to draw attention to what she calls ‘a rash’ of initial capitals that occurs in 1814, in chapters 11, 12 and 13 of volume I (p. 418). Such capitalisation is a feature of the surviving manuscripts. So it is very likely that at this point the compositor was following the manuscript of Mansfield Park to the very letter, whereas the compositor in 1816 chose to update the style, dropping these capitals. According to Stower in 1808, they had long been regarded as ‘antiquated’, a hangover from the past, to be tidied up according to modern practice.27 Another ‘rash’ in 1814 is a ‘rash’ of italics in chapter 18, the final chapter of volume I. However, in this case, the 1816 compositor left the italics of 1814 unchanged. Why would this be? Stower held that the ‘frequent use’ of italic ‘is useless, and generally absurd’. They were resisted by compositors as being unaesthetic (inimical to ‘the beauty of printing’ as he puts it).28 They were also seen as antiquated. And, worst of all, they were time-consuming, since to take the italic typeface the compositor had to go across to another case, a movement which slowed down his rate of setting. This was a serious drawback as compositors were paid by piecework and italics hit their earnings. In the face of these objections, it is surprising to find that not only were the existing italics retained from 1814, but in addition four words printed roman in 1814 were re-set in italics in 1816,29 a change that runs quite counter to contemporary printing practice and to the voice of authority as represented by Stower. That these are not compositors’ mistakes we can see from the context. In each case, the word in question is made to bear a particularising and dramatic emphasis, an indicative tone of voice and shade of meaning. These are not printing-house alterations but alterations that the author alone would make, having marked them for the printer by underlining the word in question and writing ‘Ital.’ in the margin. Although, to take up Sutherland’s point, these italicisings are unquestionably second thoughts on Austen’s part and not ‘primary utterances’, at the same time, they meet the test of conscious intention: they are second thoughts that Austen introduced as improvements to sharpen the text.




As far we can judge, they meet Sutherland’s requirement in carrying the author’s ‘personal authority’ (p. 410) and there is nothing to suggest that the changes were made at anyone else’s prompting. None the less, in obedience to the Penguin editorial principle, these revisions are off the page and are to be found among the Textual Variants. In reviewing these matters, I have made no attempt to arbitrate between the claims and procedures of the two editors. The evidence they present is detailed and needs to be studied in detail and in situ. But if I can attempt to summarise the issue, it seems to boil down to this: Sutherland judges that 1814 has a particular value in its proximity to Austen’s original manuscript and to have suffered less from the intervention of the compositors; and not at all from the second kind of intervention, that of outside correction or advice as exemplified in the changes made to the ‘Thrush’ passage. And Sutherland finds a strong and intrinsic value to the textual priority of 1814 in its character as ‘primary utterance’. Johnson does not refer, either directly or indirectly, to the concepts of intervention or ‘primary utterance’; nor, indeed, does she make any reference at all to the Penguin edition. What she does attach weight to is the work of the compositors, each one of them according to his application of the ‘rules’, in normalising the original spelling and punctuation of the 1814 manuscript and, in the case of 1816, the marked-up text. By 1816, this normalisation, in all its consequences, would have come as no surprise to Austen since it was a fact of publication that she had already encountered in the printing of the three novels already published; and, in all, these come to five editions, counting in the first and second editions of Sense and Sensibility (1811, 1813), the two editions of Pride and Prejudice, both 1813 and the first edition of Mansfield Park.30 Whether the changes Austen made for the second edition were on her own initiative, or were put to her, palpably as suggestions from outside, both categories are regarded by Johnson as having equal standing, since Austen herself put them into effect. In the Introduction to the Penguin edition, Sutherland refers to Mansfield Park as Austen’s ‘most designed … novel’ (p. vii). If we take this idea into the textual discussion, it poses this question for us – are Austen’s corrections and improvements to 1814, as we find them in 1816, intrinsic to that design, as Johnson maintains, or are they, in Sutherland’s terms, interventions extraneous to the first edition, add-ons, as it were, straining the ‘union of form and content’ that is intrinsic to 1814’s identity as a ‘primary utterance’? How this question is answered, and what weight is accorded to the arguments of the two editors, are for



100 Brian Southam

readers to decide for themselves. Nevertheless, if one thing emerges clearly from both the Penguin and Norton editions, it is that the choice of copy-text and the whole business of textual criticism which leads up to this choice, are not to be put to one side as specialist concerns, remote from the business of literary history, criticism and interpretation. Textual approaches have their rightful and necessary place alongside other routes of enquiry. Readers who are yet to be convinced of this will find it worthwhile to consider what Sutherland and Johnson have to say on these matters as they relate to Mansfield Park. Their conclusions are different, but en route we are able to glimpse the essential connection between textual study and the understanding of individual works of literature, their authors and the processes, material and historical, which join them. Finally, as to the choice of copy-text, there is the course recommended by Philip Gaskell: that an ‘editor should base his decisions, not on rules, but on his bibliographical and critical judgement of the circumstances of each case’.31 This is straightforward, practical and pragmatic, an approach which seems right for Mansfield Park.

Afterword A further possibility, which neither Sutherland nor Johnson discusses, since it lies beyond their brief, is that alterations may have been made to the texts of Mansfield Park before they went to the printers, while they were still in the hands of the publishers. In the case of 1814, that alterations took place is highly unlikely since Egerton did not employ an editor, nor is it on record that he offered any comment or advice on the three Austen novels he brought out. Murray, on the other hand, did employ a trusted and expert editor, the famously interventionist William Gifford, appointed by Murray to be the founding editor of the Quarterly Review; and in a future essay I hope to show the likelihood that his hand, alongside that of the compositors, also played its part in muddying the textual waters around the second edition of Mansfield Park.

Notes 1. Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, 3rd edn, 1997), p. 305. 2. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. R. W. Chapman, reprinted in The Novels of Jane Austen, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923, etc.), III, pp. xi–xii. 3. R. W. Chapman, Jane Austen: Facts and Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), p. 155.




4. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 1998), pp. xx–xxi. Subsequent references will be given in the main body of the text. 5. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (London: Penguin, 1996), p. xxxiv. Subsequent references will be given in the main body of the text. 6. Letter, Kathryn Sutherland to Brian Southam, 6 June 2003. 7. Kathryn Sutherland, ‘Speaking Commas/Reading Commas: Punctuating Mansfield Park’, Text, 12 (1999), 101–22; reprinted in Ma®king the Text: The Presentation of Meaning on the Literary Page, ed. Joe Bray, Miriam Handley and Anne C. Henry (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 217–34. 8. Sutherland, ‘Speaking Commas’, p. 105. 9. Sutherland, ‘Speaking Commas’, p. 111. 10. Jane Austen’s Letters, Nos. 126, 130, 131(C) (copy, the original having been lost). The archive once held three more letters from Austen to John Murray: Nos. 124, 131(C) and 139. Scott’s unsigned review of Emma was published in the Quarterly Review, XIV (October 1815, issued March 1816), pp. 188–201. 11. [ John Smith], The Printer’s Grammar (London: for T. Evans, 1787), p. 60. No author or editor is given. But this edition describes itself as ‘Chiefly collected from Smith’s Edition [London] 1755’. The Grammar is a manual addressed to those learning the trade. With regard to the correction of proofs, the terminology can be clarified. Although the ‘reader’s’ principal function was as a proofreader, by tradition he was an educated man, capable of an editorial function in correcting factual errors, including mistakes in other languages, and able to improve a careless text. In respect of his learning, the reader stood apart from the common run of printing-house workers. Before James Moyes, the printer for the 1816 volume I, set up in business on his own, he had worked as a reader; and it may have been for this reason that as a printer he had a reputation for ‘extreme carefulness and accuracy’ (T. F. Dibdin, The Bibliographical Decameron, London, 1817, ii, p. 406). However, it was during the very period of Austen’s publication that this role became increasingly filled by experienced compositors, for whom the term ‘corrector’ is probably more appropriate, given their craft bias, lower educational base and more limited scope. This practice is recommended in the 1808 edition of The Printer’s Grammar (see n. 13) in which Stower writes that ‘It is always desirable that a reader should have previously been brought up to the business of a compositor’ (p. 388). 12. Letter dated 9 February 1805, in The London Compositor: Documents relating to Wages, Working Conditions and Customs of the London Printing Trade 1785–1900, ed. Ellic Howe (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 86. 13. Charles Stower, The Printer’s Grammar (London: B. Crosby, 1808), p. 391. Stower, a leading London Master Printer, was the editor or author of several such works. One of these, a pamphlet addressed to authors, set out the Typographical Marks, Employed in Correcting Proofs, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1806). 14. Howe, The London Compositor, pp. 141–2. 15. Ronald B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927, 1928), p. 250.



102 Brian Southam

16. 1814: volumes I and III were printed by George Sidney; volume II by Charles Roworth. 1816: volume I was set by James Moyes, volume II by Roworth, volume III by Thomas Davison. All of these were London Master Printers regularly employed by Murray. Roworth was the most experienced with Austen texts, having already set all six volumes of the first and second editions of Sense and Sensibility and volume I of the first and second editions of Pride and Prejudice. Sidney had set volumes II and III of the first and second editions of Pride and Prejudice. However, previous experience with Austen manuscripts did not improve the quality of setting provided by Sidney and Roworth for the 1814 text, possibly because new compositors were involved. 17. Jane Austen’s Letters, letters to Cassandra Austen , 24 and 26 November 1815, pp. 298–300. 18. This aspect is well covered by Jan Fergus, Jane Austen: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), ch. 5. 19. Especially Lady Susan (composed c.1793–94, transcribed c.1805); the two abandoned novels: The Watsons (dating from about 1805) and Sanditon (begun in January 1817); and the cancelled chapters of Persuasion (dated July 1816). A mere scrap also survives, a piece of what may have been the title-page of an early version of Northanger Abbey: ‘Susan. A Novel in Two Volumes’ (see Brian Southam, Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964; London: Continuum, 2nd edn, 2001, p. 45]). 20. The text given by R. W. Chapman, Two Chapters of Persuasion (Oxford, 1926), pp. 38–9, and followed by all subsequent editors, is not entirely accurate and I have used the manuscript, British Library (Egerton MS.3038). This is the final manuscript text and I have not indicated the few corrections. Unfortunately, Chapman’s editions of the manuscript works are misleading inasmuch as many of the sentence-end dashes are omitted, whereas Austen’s abundant use of this device can be seen fully in Deirdre Le Faye’s edition of Jane Austen’s Letters. 21. Mansfield Park (1923), p. xii. 22. Caleb Stower, The Printer’s Price-Book (London: C. Cradock, 1814), pp. 8, 11. 23. H. B. Forman, The Shelley Library, quoted in Donald H. Reiman, Romantic Texts and Contexts (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), p. 37. 24. Jane Austen’s Letters, p. 305. What exactly Austen meant by these words is suggestively questioned by Johnson (Norton, p. xviii). We might wonder why Murray was not put on his guard by the warning implicit in Austen’s comment. That he was concerned about presenting error-free texts we can judge from Emma. In volume III, p. 261, there was a trivial mistake, the first line reading ‘perserverance and weariness and health’. After the book was printed and bound, the error was spotted and a cancel leaf was printed with the correct wording – ‘perserverance and weariness, health and’. David Gilson comments: ‘John Murray clearly insisted that the printer of this volume ( J. Moyes) should correct it’ (‘A Cancel in Jane Austen’s Emma 1816’, The Book Collector, 40:4 (1991)). 25. Mansfield Park (1923), p. xii; Mansfield Park (Penguin), p. xliii. 26. Jane Austen, Lady Susan. ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), p. 64, p. 124. 27. Stower, The Printer’s Grammar, p. 60. 28. Stower, The Printer’s Grammar, p. 39.




29. Mansfield Park (Penguin): ‘If they were at home’, p. 209; ‘It was long’, p. 374; ‘she had certainly been more attached to him’, p. 379; ‘In her usefulness’, p. 398. 30. Austen had also experienced what errors could be inflicted on her texts. Having just received her author’s copies of Pride and Prejudice, she wrote to tell her sister of ‘a few Typical [typographical] errors – & a “said he” or a “said she” would sometimes make the Dialogue more immediately clear – but “I do not write for such dull Elves” “As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves” ’ (a play on Scott’s Marmion, vi. 380). A few days later, Austen wrote to Cassandra that ‘The greatest blunder in the Printing that I have met with is in Page 220 – Vol. 3. [on the final page of ch. 12] where two speeches are made into one’ (letters of 29 January and 4 February 1813, Letters, pp. 201–2, 203). 31. Philip Gaskell, From Writer to Reader: Studies in Editorial Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978, reprinted 1999), p. 6. Sutherland refers to this work; see the Penguin edition of Mansfield Park, n. 1, p. 417.



104 Brian Southam

Part II Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-09

History and Politics





‘Thou monarch of my Panting Soul’: Hobbesian Obligation and the Durability of Romance in Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters Helen Thompson

Aphra Behn’s novel Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1685–87) imagines the conditions of political obligation during Monmouth’s Rebellion, when James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, tried and failed to unseat his Catholic uncle, James II, after the death of Charles II in 1685. Because Love-Letters speaks to both the history of genre and to the history of social contract theory, I suggest in this essay that it must be read as a novel and as political philosophy at once. Behn’s text coordinates the possibility of narrative truth with the possibility of Tory loyalty by representing the partial breakdown of Thomas Hobbes’s vision of political consensus, a consensus Hobbes predicates upon the uniformity of the passion that moves every person to become a subject. Love-Letters’ representation of a political crisis that culminates in 1688 with the forced ‘abdication’ of James II links the failure of Hobbesian political theory, I will suggest, to the voice of the novel’s narrator; this narrator enters Love-Letters locally to determine when its actors might still incarnate passion’s truth. In naming a political philosophy to characterise Love-Letters’ male protagonist Philander, a Whig who represents the Duke of Monmouth’s confederate Ford Lord Grey, Janet Todd suggests that ‘Philander inhabits a Hobbesian world of individual desire and power’.1 Donald R. Wehrs also concludes that Philander’s violation of political and conjugal duty ‘leads in public life to Hobbes’s “state of nature” ’.2 Indeed, Behn’s alignment of Philander’s regicidal treachery and Philander’s seduction of his wife’s sister Silvia would seem to define ‘libertine’3 desire as also a 107 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


7

Hobbesian species of ‘private appetite’;4 Philander’s failure to regulate his passion robs both his romantic and political vows of substance. And yet Philander’s perjury fits him to only one half of a genealogy of civil power whose analogue Hobbes locates in the figure, according to Leviathan: or the Matter, Form, & Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651), of an ‘artificial man’. This artificial body incarnates sovereign authority as the result of Leviathan’s opening claim for the ‘similitude of the thoughts and passions of one man to the thoughts and passions of another’ (p. 10). The ‘similitude’ of their passions affirms the equality of the persons populating Hobbes’s hypothetical state of nature, persons whose indifference even to sex Hobbes asserts when he invites his reader to imagine them all as ‘mushrooms’.5 Mushrooms forcefully convey Hobbes’s refusal to naturalise even domestic power by means of sexed anatomy; inversely, the radical equality of these extrafamilial and extra-civil persons lends weight to their simultaneous, unanimous assent to become subjects. Because the ‘similitude’ of Hobbesian passions engenders a commonwealth in which all persons legitimise the power that protects them from each other, their equal susceptibility to fear defines ‘every particular man’ as ‘author of all the sovereign doth’ (p. 133). In this capacity, Carol Kay’s stress on the positive role of redirected appetite in the Hobbesian commonwealth – which does, indeed, make up the bulk of his political philosophy – crucially underscores his contribution to social contract theory.6 Leviathan’s famous title-page, which represents an artificial man composed from the compressed bodies of subjects who quite literally authorise his power, shows how these particular persons’ properly materialised – that is, identically materialised – passions ensure the longevity of civil power. Hobbes defends this promise by asking his interlocutor to ‘read thyself … he shall thereby read and know what are the thoughts and passions of all other men’ (p. 10). Yet the task of reading other men’s thoughts and passions is mediated by language. Faced with the prospect of the representation of feelings by words, or with the fact that ‘all passions may be expressed indicatively; as, I love, I fear, I joy’, Hobbes does more than express ambivalence about the likelihood of indicative passion’s truth. Repeating the move that founds a commonwealth from which dematerialised signification has been banished, Leviathan asserts the potential discrepancy between words and a physiology for which having feelings is the same thing as embodying them: [C]ertain signs [words] be not, because they may be used arbitrarily, whether they that use them have such passions or not. The best signs 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


108 Helen Thompson

The Durability of Romance in Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters 109

The political instrumentality of the materialist body most famously theorised by René Descartes resides in a countenance whose semiotics cannot be ‘arbitrarily’ manifest: Descartes’s treatise on the emotions, Passions of the Soul (1649), includes a taxonomy of facial signs whose self-evidence proves the superfluity of words. As both the start- and end-point of a commonwealth realised by the simultaneity of every contracting body’s fear, Hobbes’s collapse of passion and unimpeachable signification anticipates the political inevitability imagined by Leviathan’s title-page. Of what urgency is the indicative proposition ‘I fear’ compared to the power of the same ‘passion present’ to drive men in a state of nature unanimously to sanction – or what is for Hobbes the same thing, unanimously to materialise as – sovereign authority? Hobbes’s commonwealth relies upon his stipulation of ‘the constant signification of words’ (p. 292) as an inextricably temporal and mechanical event. The passion of fear extends the efficacy of the verb ‘to obey’ forward in time, as Hobbes remarks of a doctrine of separated essences that threatens the inverse spectre of immaterial political assent: ‘For who will endeavour to obey the laws, if he expect obedience to be poured or blown into him?’(p. 502). Behn’s initially epistolary Love-Letters suggests that political obedience is not the only signifier whose constancy would be enabled by Hobbesian physics; love is another. Published between 1684 and 1687 to represent the Duke of Monmouth’s failure to overthrow James II and the ambivalent Whig Ford Lord Grey’s seduction of his sister-in-law Lady Henrietta Berkeley, Behn’s novel promises to transpose into amorous terms the phenomenology of a sovereign power ‘revered’, Hobbes writes in On the Citizen (1647), ‘as a kind of visible divinity’.7 When Love-Letters’ soon-to-be ruined heroine Silvia evokes the mechanical impact of the royal ‘Presence’,8 Behn appears to reiterate a standard of political obligation secured by the similitude of every materialist body’s response to: the sacred Person of the King! … one [upon] whose awful face ’tis impossible to look without that reverence wherewith one wou’d behold a God! … I never approach His Sacred Person, but my Heart beats, my Blood runs cold about me, and my Eyes o’erflow with Tears of joy … I am certain shou’d the most harden’d of your Bloody Rebels look him in the face, the devilish instrument of Death wou’d drop from his sacrilegious hand, and leave him confounded at the feet of the Royal forgiving Sufferer. (p. 40) 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


of passions present are either in the countenance, motions of the body, [or] actions. (pp. 48–9)

By locating a rebel’s will to disobey in the preternaturally ‘harden’d’ senses of a subject whose ‘Blood’ fails to ‘[run] cold’, Silvia’s exhortation to her Whiggish brother-in-law Philander transposes into the terms of Hobbesian physiology Behn’s dedication to Love-Letters, which declares Silvia a ‘true Tory in every part’ (p. 6). Initially, Silvia locates her impulse to preserve her chastity in the king’s power mechanically to ennoble her own ‘every part’: [C]oming from the Presence, being offer’d some officious hand to lead me to my Coach, I have shrunk back with aversion to your Sex, and have conceal’d my hands in my Pockets to prevent their being touch’d – a kiss wou’d turn my stomach, and amorous looks (though they wou’d make me vain) gave me a hate to him that sent ’em. (p. 88) Remarkably, Behn transposes into the terms of a specifically feminine modality of ‘honour’ – ‘[t]hus I was armed with resolution, pride and scorn, against all Mankind’ (p. 88) – the unsexed mechanics of a body that, as Hobbes imagines, would ‘drop’ its suddenly flimsy regicidal intention at the sight of the sovereign whose power it reflexively authorises. According to Behn’s logic of feminine ‘aversion’, Silvia’s own honour would be preserved by the power of the king’s presence to make disgusting the ‘touch’ of any other man. Here Behn accommodates the mechanics of Hobbesian political obligation to the specifics of sexed chastity. It is not essential femininity, but a king whose presence inspires unimpeachable loyalty in all Hobbesian persons, which compels Silvia to resist masculine flattery. (Hobbes’s and Behn’s attribution of political faction to the seductive powers of flattery is anticipated by Eikon Basilike’s equation of regicidal political eloquence and romance.) By offering an approximation of Hobbesian materialism which reclaims amorous pleasure as a lapse that ‘wou’d turn my stomach’, Behn incorporates in her projected mechanics of feminine honour not just the repellant effects of ‘some officious hand’ but also the resistibility of romantic tropes. But because the novel animates Hobbes’s materialist schematics of ‘reverence’, Love-Letters’ indictment of the dishonouring effect not only of Philander’s touch but also of his use of impassioned signifiers is not reducible simply to anti-romance. Todd states that ‘LoveLetters reveals the systematic dismantling of the genre of romance’;9 she makes the crucial point that, far from offering the ‘transcripts of authentic subjectivity’ ascribed by ‘critic after critic’ to Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel Pamela (1741), the documents of which Love-Letters is composed are ‘ambiguous, manipulative, and opportunistic’.10 The



110 Helen Thompson

historical vicissitudes of insubstantial words are indeed produced, for Hobbes, by genre: ‘the fiction of the mind’ that is regicidal political ambition transpires ‘when a man imagines himself a Hercules or an Alexander (which happeneth often to them that are much taken with reading of romances)’ (p. 17). And yet a physiology of political loyalty that trumps what Hobbes calls the ‘inconstancy’ (p. 33) of language might lend romance an epistemological guarantee drawn, ironically, from Leviathan’s anti-romantic reconstitution of passion. Philander reiterates the epistemological pretenses of Hobbesian materialism when he assures the object of his adulterous and incestuous desire that: course vulgar words are dull: The Rhetorick of Love is half-breath’d, interrupted words, languishing Eyes, flattering Speeches, broken Sighs, pressing the hand, and falling Tears. (p. 33) By opposing amorous gestures to ‘course vulgar words’, Philander appeals to the gap between passionate reflex and what Leviathan calls its indicative expression, the very gap which, to recall Hobbes’s word, renders romance arbitrary. Yet Philander, of course, does not consistently replicate the metaphysical conceit that underwrites his claim to truth, because he includes ‘flattering Speeches’ among the mechanical motion that would be words’ antidote. Philander’s inclusion of flattery in a roster of otherwise embodied signs flags the confusion induced by his own departure from Hobbesian political theory. Whether Whig or Tory, Behn’s reader would hardly fail to recognise in flattery the primary agent, according to royalist historiography, of a seducible and susceptible people’s strictly ephemeral will to regicide. Flattery that would pass as authentically mechanical motion is more than the first of the increasingly heavy-handed portents that disqualify in advance Philander’s ‘Rhetorick of Love’, a rhetoric that draws its power to seduce from, as Hobbes puts it, ‘fiction’. Reciprocally, as we have seen, Silvia’s account of sovereignty’s perceptual impact includes a parenthetical concession to the capacity of flatterers to ‘make me vain’ which crucially weakens the king’s power to induce her entire ‘aversion to your Sex’. By inserting flattery among the signs that assure the truth of Hobbesian passion, Behn asserts as the inextricably political and epistemological condition of her narrative a confusion of romance and anti-romance so impacted that it divides each of the terms which, in Hobbes’s projected civil society, clearly structure that generic opposition. The persistence of Hobbes’s post-Civil War commonwealth would, Leviathan argues, be




secured by the antipathy of passionate mechanism to a seditious volition that can never compete with the durably materialised body of political consensus. The key turn of Hobbes’s logic is his insistence that all of the sovereign’s subjects cannot authorise an arbitrary, romantic, and immaterial intention – the very intention, however, whose historical agency was proven only years before. Hobbes’s sovereign draws its enhanced durability from the integrity of the difference between compliant passion and a far flimsier will to regicide; by weighting terms whose pacifying antipathy has not been borne out by recent history, Hobbes asserts the impossibility of history’s repetition. Writing up to the moment of the Exclusion Crisis, Behn does not entirely respect the opposition that promises to ensure the longevity of Hobbes’s sovereign. Flattery that would pass as reflex anticipates the failure, not only of language, but also of bodies, to stabilise the difference between anti-romantic truth and romantic fiction. First, Philander fails to incarnate love. In what surely must qualify as the most bracingly antiHobbesian bedroom scene in the early novel, Philander, after a typically protracted effort to possess his wavering sister-in-law Silvia, manages ‘by an over transport, to fall just fainting before the surrendering Gates, unable to receive the yielding treasure! Oh Silvia, what Demon, malicious at my Glory, seiz’d my vigour? … Snacht my (till then) never failing power’ (pp. 56–7). This episode brilliantly coordinates an anatomical and epistemological collapse from which Philander’s text, if not Philander himself, will never recover. Philander’s embodiment of the passion of love, previously opposed to the flimsiness of coarse, vulgar words, now spectacularly demonstrates the fallibility of mechanical ‘vigour’. It is not simply the unreliability of Philander’s own ‘power’, but the unreliable power of matter itself, that installs the opposition of mechanical necessity and romantic contingency within a once-impervious part of Philander’s body. This exemplary scene serves to illuminate the strikingly divergent range of claims that have been made for Love-Letters’ representation of the mechanical urgency of desire. On the one hand, Wehrs suggests that Behn’s text figures ‘love as a god who acts as a usurping tyrant’, a love which, detached from the political instrumentality of Hobbesian passion, unilaterally effects the ‘usurpation and abrogation of hierarchy in psychic and ethical life’.11 On the other, Ellen Pollak argues for the ‘performative’ status of all of Love-Letters’ characters’ motion, offering the claim that ‘Philander is only feigning impotence’ as further testimony to the acts of simulated mechanism making up his ‘strategies of seduction’.12 On the one hand, Philander’s and, by the novel’s second volume, Silvia’s wholly unregulated desire would indict the irresistibility of passion that



112 Helen Thompson

Love-Letters, according to Wehrs, refuses to reclaim as the substance of political obligation. On the other, Pollak states, Silvia ‘tak[es] performative control of her enactment of desire’,13 a turn ensuring, Todd affirms, that ‘[t]he body will not be an absolute sign of anything’.14 And yet Behn’s text charts a more equivocal relation to the materiality of the body than either of these claims admits. Love-Letters represents passion which claims neither the mechanical infallibility of Hobbesian assent – and Hobbesian signification – nor the wholly ‘performative’ consistency of poststructuralist gender (here it is worth noting that the poststructuralist term ‘gender’ operates only against an articulation of essential sex which historically did not yet exist). Rather, Behn’s novel splits both Hobbesian matter and romantic eloquence into modalities of obliging and seditious agency. Neither a representation of the indomitable force of bodily desire, nor a wholesale dismantling of the inextricably political and amorous mechanism of Hobbesian passion, Love-Letters requires ‘Behn’s’ own narrative intervention to affirm or to debunk, in each strictly local case, the truth of passions whose epistolary urgency is felt by its readers only at this novel’s beginning. If Philander’s impotence transmits Behn’s brilliantly compressed refutation of the integrity of the Hobbesian mechanism that would instantiate masculine political loyalty, then romantic language in Love-Letters is, inversely, less consistently insubstantial than Hobbes would have it. The following scene takes place well after Philander’s perfidy has been exposed and Silvia has, in response, redirected her attentions to the worthier adorer Octavio. Octavio begs her to disclose the truth of her clandestine marriage to the servant Brilliard, arranged to shield Philander from the charge of abducting her: Oh! tell me Truth, and let me know how much my Heart can bear before it break with Love; and yet perhaps to hear thee speak to me, with that insinuating dear Voice of thine, may save me from the Terror of thy Words; and tho’ each make a Wound, their very Accents have a Balm to heal! Oh, quickly pour it then into my listening Soul. (p. 275; italics in original) Here, of course, the language that tells the truth of Silvia’s own perjury (because she has not informed her noble suitor that she is already married) none the less retains a certain aural appeal. ‘[T]hat insinuating dear Voice of thine’ locates in the very resonance of Silvia’s voice the power of romantic reflex to override the anti-romantic referent of her words. The ‘Balm’ that resides in Silvia’s ‘Accents’ accommodates the split between signifier and signified to the persistently romantic appeal of pure sound over




the deflationary meaning that it would convey. This materialisation of indicatively expressed passion locates the antipathy of romantic pleasure to anti-romantic truth inside the very words whose lack of sensory immediacy would secure the competing power of mechanism to communicate truth. Now, mechanism serves to ‘heal’ the epistemological duress entailed by the signified, but not by the signifiers, of Silvia’s dishonour.15 Yet the still romantic pleasure that supersedes words’ ‘truth’, and the suddenly inconstant mechanics of love, do not easily qualify as instances of the ‘dialectical framework’, evoked by Michael McKeon in Origins of the English Novel, which locates the rise of the novel in ‘the complex development of the romance genre, its resolution into ‘romance’ and ‘historical’ elements, each of which is subjected to internal critique’.16 For the lynchpin of Hobbes’s corrective political and epistemological fantasy, as I suggest above, is the fact that its terms are not dialectical: it is, again, the promised similitude of every man’s passions that, as Leviathan’s titlepage so resonantly promises, renders a state impervious to the regicidal ambition communicated only in the weaker medium of inconstant signification. To read Behn’s Love-Letters as one representation of the breakdown of that promise, then, is to suggest that Love-Letters articulates as the literary-historical conditions of its representation of Monmouth’s rebellion the becoming-dialectical of the very terms – infallibly mechanised matter and possibly arbitrary signification – that structure Leviathan’s claim for its commonwealth’s permanence. And yet to evoke Love-Letters as the representation of the imminently dialectical relation between terms that have manifestly failed to deliver Hobbes’s promise is perhaps too neatly to explain the novel’s collision of opposites. Their epistemological repugnance is not tempered by the even-handedness of an ‘internal critique’ in which the genre of the novel will come to implicate them; rather, they exist in simple proximity. How, for example, are we to determine the truth of Philander’s quintessentially mechanistic response to ‘the dear sight’ of his new object Calista – ‘I had not power to stir or speak, or to remove my eyes, but languisht on the window where I leant half dead with Joy and transport’ (p. 232) – when, pages later, he evokes his address to the ‘Conqueress of my Soul’ as ‘such Cant and stuff, as this, which Lovers serve themselves with, on occasion’ (pp. 235–6)? Philander’s disclaimer is still required by a text which does not entirely relinquish his body’s power to mechanise obligation, for he evokes the earlier truth of his languishing not to flatter Calista, but in the epistemologically more secure context of a letter to Octavio. Even Philander’s references to his passions cannot preemptively be rejected, as Wehrs states, for their ‘emptiness’.17



114 Helen Thompson

It is difficult, I am suggesting, to characterise the oscillation between romantic physiology and anti-romantic retraction as dialectical when both of these moments preserve intact their antithetical epistemological pretenses. Behn, for example, evokes the state of the betrayed Silvia in a deeply cynical anti-romantic shorthand that would seem clearly to code her assessment of Silvia’s amorous resilience: [T]here is some Hope of Recovery, when a Woman in that Extremity will but think of listening to Love from any new Adorer; and having once resolv’d to pursue the Fugitive no more with the natural Artillery of their Sighs and Tears … they have Recourse to every thing that may soonest chase from the Heart those Thoughts that oppress it: For Nature is not inclin’d to hurt it self, and there are but very few who find it necessary to die of the Disease of Love. Of this sort was our Silvia, tho’ to give her her due, never any Person who did not indeed die, ever languished under the Torments of Love, as did that charming afflicted Maid. (pp. 258–9) Here, Behn would seem abruptly to have her cake and eat it – to spoof the crux of Cartesian romance as the absurdity of dying of love but, then, to ‘give her her due’. For if Silvia does not sanction that last extravagance of romantic necessity, then she does, Behn stipulates, almost die. Behn recombines a mode of anti-romantic irony that easily strips mechanism of its pretense to dictate narrative with a recognisably romantic assurance of Silvia’s residual fidelity. To negotiate the epistemological incompatibility of these two idioms, Behn’s narrator asserts the only local referential urgency of Silvia’s torment. In this capacity, the narrator, who surfaces to permit her text to have it both (romantic and antiromantic) ways might herself figure the incoherence of mechanism’s claim to secure political obligation at the historical juncture that these characters animate. Coded either as the irreversibly obliging imperative of fear and awe or as the Whiggish pleasure of flattery, mechanism marks the site of an epistemological impasse that, once settled inside matter itself, sometimes renders Hobbesian political theory not only physically but generically anachronistic. Behn’s juxtaposition of romantic and anti-romantic claims to truth (the latter compressed into such withering indictments of amorous signification as ‘there is great eloquence in a pair of Bracelets of five thousand Crowns’, p. 161; the former maintained in the undegraded agony of Philander’s betrayal communicated to Silvia when ‘as she read she many times fainted over the Paper’, p. 214) produces a remarkable




formal effect. Over the course of its three volumes, Love-Letters stops being an epistolary novel wholly composed of present passion – ‘I dy with that thought, my guilty pen slackens in my trembling hand, and I Languish and fall over the unimploy’d Paper’ (p. 32) – whose imminence would overcome the liabilities of indicative representation. By its final volume, Behn herself distils such letters’ amorous content, relaying in the third person ‘indearing Conversation’ (p. 293) whose romantic impact is, as a result, comically adulterated: ‘He complains of his Fate that sets ’em at that distance, and she pities him. He makes a Thousand Doubts, and she undeceives ’em all. He Fears, and she convinces his [sic] Error, and is impatient at his Suspicions’ (p. 293). If the tone of this gloss is, at best, epistemologically ecumenical, then at about Love-Letters’ half-way point Behn also actively referees her characters’ speech acts. Unannounced, ‘Behn’ enters her own text to regulate the truth of the prototypically romantic vows uttered by Octavio, whose singularly constant honesty can now be enforced no other way: ‘all he spoke was honourable Truth’ (p. 280). Likewise, in the case of the finally depraved Silvia, Behn directly interpellates her reader: ‘How much … ought we to believe that Interest was the greatest Motive of all her after Passions?’ (p. 384). Engendered by the insoluble discrepancy of her novel’s competing truth-claims, ‘Behn’ speaks in some other idiom whose own transparency would, perhaps, go unnoticed. But ‘Behn’ is, of course, hardly transparent. Her most striking narrative testimony, penned when she enters the novel to witness the betrayed Octavio’s induction into a monastery in Flanders, affirms the power of institutional church spectacle to inspire obligation: I thought myself no longer on Earth; and sure there is nothing gives us an Idea of real Heaven, like a Church all adorn’d with rare Pictures, and the other Ornaments of it, with what ever can Charm the Eyes; and Musick, and Voices to Ravish the Ear; both of which inspire the Soul with unresistible Devotion. (p. 381) In an interlude whose ambition would seem decisively to proceed from the materialist integrity of, at least, Behn’s eyes, ears, and nose – the church is ‘perfum’d … with the richest and most agreeable Smells’ (p. 381) – Behn recuperates the origins of the ‘Idea’ of heaven itself. The ‘unresistible’ obligation that ensues cannot be read either as dialectically leavened with intimations of anti-romance or as performatively simulated. Instead, Behn’s ‘I’ itself deploys the epistemological immediacy of writing to the moment to transmit the imperviousness of this portion of her



116 Helen Thompson

narrative to its intermittently anti-romantic reversals of the mechanics of ‘Devotion’. In so far, therefore, as her intervention preserves the truth of the ‘supernatural Influence’ (p. 382) whose irresistible effects she feels, Love-Letters frames her entrance into narrative as the necessary effect of a crisis attending the political workings of post-Hobbesian matter. Behn’s determination of the truth of a narrative whose opposing tendencies cannot otherwise be resolved might be compared to the dedication of Love-Letters’ second volume, which was published after Monmouth’s execution. The dedicatee, Lemuel Kingdon, who stood as MP in James’s first Parliament, is claimed by Behn as an ‘untainted Supporter of the Royal cause’; she states of his practice of loyalty: [Y]ou do all things with a perfect good grace, and even business, that toyle of Life, you render soft and easie … you discover only the best and noblest part of business, the effects of it, the rest, the Gentleman so handsomly [sic] conceals, we perceive no more than Fairy Huswifry, which is still acted in the shades and silence of the night, when Mortals are a sleep, and who find all fair and clean in the morning, but cannot guess at the invisible hand that did it. I am so good a subject that I wish all his Majesties work done by such hands … For my part I have only escap’d fleaing by the Rebels to starve more securely in my own native Province of Poetry. (p. 119)18 Perhaps the most obvious point to be made about ‘Fairy Huswifry’ is that it does not resemble Hobbesian power. An ‘invisible hand’ that sublimates state ‘business’ into its ‘noblest part’ is not cut from the same cloth as a palpably ‘God-like Master’ (p. 254) who continues to propel only some of his subjects’ awe. With Love-Letters’ invisible hand, we can appreciate the confusion that defines Behn’s representation of even royal matter. An imperceptible ‘part’ which none the less belongs to the monarch locates the origin of Behn’s novel in the failure of post-Hobbesian persons reliably to incarnate both obligation and passion. This failure propels the apparent anomaly not only of an invisible Tory hand but also of a narrative voice that locally assumes the consistency of truth, a voice that ties the future of the novel to the ambivalent fate of Hobbesian materialism.

Notes 1. Janet Todd, ‘Who is Silvia? What is She? Feminine Identity in Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister’, in Aphra Behn Studies, ed. Janet Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 203.




2. Donald R. Wehrs, ‘Eros, Ethics, Identity: Royalist Feminism and the Politics of Desire in Aphra Behn’s Love Letters’, Studies in English Literature, 32 (1992), 474. Wehrs evokes ‘the world demarcated by Hobbes’ as ‘the world of enslavement of the will to desire’ (p. 471), a gloss weirdly inattentive to the bulk of Hobbes’s political philosophy, which devotes itself to reconstituting desire in civil society as the newly deliberative medium of political assent. 3. Ellen Pollak uses this term to evoke the seventeenth-century ‘libertine stage heroes’ who ‘captured the popular imagination through their bold allegiance to a nature defined not in accordance with, but in opposition to, religion, law, custom, and conventional morality’. She states that, as a result of Philander’s importunity, ‘Silvia too comes to embrace such a libertine philosophy’ (p. 173). Pollak importantly argues that in the context of late seventeenthcentury argument, Philander’s wife’s sister would constitute a blood relation. ‘Beyond Incest: Gender and the Politics of Transgression in Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister’, in New Casebooks: Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 159. 4. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. A. P. Martinich (Ontario: Broadview Literary Texts, 2002), p. 119. Subsequent references will be given in the main body of the text. 5. See Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 102; Hobbes proposes to ‘return once again to the natural state and to look at men as if they had just emerged from the earth like mushrooms’. As his refusal to naturalise masculine conjugal power makes clear, Hobbes’s ‘men’ include women. 6. See Carol Kay’s Political Constructions: Defoe, Richardon, & Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume, & Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), which remarks that ‘feminist theory has paid little attention to constructing a positive theory of the state’, p. 17. Kay’s careful attention to the mechanics of Hobbes’s civil state importantly stresses his effect upon eighteenth-century moral philosophy’s ‘reimagin[ing] of the realm of opinion as one of selfregulating stability, rather than competitive anarchy’ (p. 131). 7. Hobbes, On the Citizen, p. 9. 8. Aphra Behn, Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, 7 vols (Columbus Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1993), II, 88. Subsequent references will be given in the main body of the text. 9. Todd, ‘Who is Silvia? What is She?’, p. 200. 10. Janet Todd, ‘Love-Letters and Critical History’, in Aphra Behn (1640–1689): Identity, Alterity, Ambiguity, ed. Mary Ann O’Donnell, Bernard Dhuicq and Guyonne Leduc (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), pp. 197–8. 11. Wehrs, ‘Eros, Ethics, Identity’, p. 469. 12. Pollak, ‘Beyond Incest’, pp. 165, 168. Pollak’s poststructural claims for performativity cause a certain methodological incoherence, insofar as she ascribes that practice to the deliberate intention of novelistic characters: Pollak states, for example, that Philander’s romantic affect, ‘if we refuse to assume the hero’s authenticity, [can] be understood as a form of strategic self-dramatization whereby Philander acquires power by performing impotence’ (p. 171). Yet in citing Philander’s intentional ‘self-dramatization’, Pollak does not debunk his ‘authenticity’; she just drives it further inward. Her diagnosis of the



118 Helen Thompson

13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

intentions of his ‘self’ is directly contrary to Judith Butler’s claim for the ontological contingency of the performative subject. Pollak, ‘Beyond Incest’, p. 165. Todd, ‘Who is Silvia? What is She?’, p. 203. Todd clearly aligns the duplicity of the post-royalist letter with the advent of ‘Whiggish’ flattery: ‘The erotic letter associated with the libertine royalist is transformed into the compromised whiggish document of disloyal politics’; ‘The fate of letters resembles the fate of truth in the novel’ (p. 206). Inversely, Silvia can read her own love-letters to defuse the guilt obviously transmitted by their contents. See Alison Conway’s ‘The Protestant Cause and a Protestant Whore’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 25 (2001), 1–19 for her discussion of Silvia’s capacity to ‘Burlesque Love’ (Love-Letters, 53) by reading aloud an intercepted letter to Philander which she claims has been written by her servant Melinda. Conway reads this scene to remark ‘Melinda’s power as an actor in the scene as it unfolds’ in so far as this might ‘translate readerly curiosity into a larger social and financial program, one that is not governed by male aristocratic privilege’ (p. 12). The scene also portends the novel’s capacity abruptly to evacuate – and to reinvest – the romantic signifiers which are here only strategically drained of content. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 55, 63. Wehrs, ‘Eros, Ethics, and Identity’, p. 466. Wehrs remarks on Philander’s reference to ‘Cant and stuff’ to suggest that ‘Philander colonises Calista by getting her to accept the “subject position” his generation of a symbolic order through language constructs’ (p. 466); later, Wehrs invokes Luce Irigaray to suggest that Philander secures Calista’s incorporation into ‘the production of the same discourse’ (p. 467), a ‘discourse’ exhaustively qualified by Irigaray as Western philosophy’s enforcement of a metaphysical mind/body split, which both relegates women to the latter pole and, in so doing, engenders a supplemental ‘feminine’ term whose own repressed philosophical necessity Irigaray more or less literally figures as maternal. Space does not permit me fully to elaborate the suggestion that Irigaray’s indictment of a Western metaphysics of mind and body fails to account for a late seventeenth- to eighteenth-century philosophical and political elaboration of Cartesian mechanism that does not preemptively sex – or, pre-emptively abstract – either men’s or women’s bodies. Mary Astell is quick to exploit the radical feminist potential of this not essentially sexed body, which I discuss in my forthcoming book Ingenuous Subjection: Feminine Compliance and Political Agency in the Eighteenth-Century English Domestic Novel. In so far as Behn also does not represent Philander’s and Silvia’s difference as the difference between mind and body, her text solicits a feminist hermeneutic that does not presume the efficacy of a ‘symbolic’ which entrenches the metaphysics of feminine political difference in anatomy. Alison Conway reads the dedication to Volume II to stress the lack of ‘confidence’ in its claim for Kingdon’s equanimity and constancy: instead, according to Conway, ‘history inhabits the repetitive and episodic rhythms of a courtesan narrative … its resolutions are only temporary, and … political action takes place not only on the battlefield but in the bedroom’. ‘Behn’s Protestant Whore’, pp. 9–10. Conway claims the figure of the whore (Silvia)




as an exploration of ‘the possibilities, as well as the limits, of Protestant individualism’ (p. 16): to me, this claim implicates not only the literal specificity of Behn’s religious convictions (which, Conway points out, are by no means simply Catholic) but perhaps more urgently the historical and political valences which one can assign to the term ‘individualism’ as it might signify in this text and beyond. I find it difficult to locate in Behn’s representation of the intermittent failure of Hobbesian obligation an inversely positive or wholesale schematics of ‘individualism’.



120 Helen Thompson

British Women Write the East after 1750: Revisiting a ‘Feminine’ Orient Felicity A. Nussbaum

Though European interest in the Orient derives from biblical, classical and medieval times, its most celebrated eighteenth-century manifestation, Galland’s Thousand and One Nights in English translation beginning in 1704 (published in four editions before 1712 and serialised by the London News in 455 instalments over three years), constitutes a significant cultural event. The collection of stories marks the beginning of the Oriental tale in English and presents a coherent, compelling way of imagining the Muslim East. This ‘Moorish fantasy’, as Shaftesbury termed England’s intoxication with alterity, was modulated after the Seven Years’ War had significantly widened the scope of British imperial power when ‘for the first time … in conquering Bengal, Britain achieved decisive land victories and subsequent authority over Islamic powers’.1 British interest in the East continued to proliferate into literature, travel accounts, and Oriental goods after 1750, but not without public alarm. Popular Oriental tales, as Clara Reeve’s Hortensius warned, presented ‘dangerous books for youths, – [because] they create and encourage the wildest excursions of imagination which it is, or ought to be, the care of parents and preceptors to restrain’; but Reeve’s attaching her own version of the Orient, The History of Charoba, Queen of Aegypt (1785),2 as an appendix to The Progress of Romance gave the lie to Hortensius’s sentiment. Reeve acknowledges that the Arabian Nights is a ‘work of Originality and Authenticity, and let me add of amusement. The great demand for this work, raised a swarm of imitations.’ Things Oriental persistently became a locus for tantalising fantasies of sexuality, luxury and violence, and the cluster of increasingly conventional images are readily taken up, and perhaps most fully animated, by women. 121 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


8

The list of the first women who write the East – or, more accurately, the Easts – after 1750 and before, say, the 1790s, is surprisingly long, spanning travel narratives, novels, plays and, of course, Oriental tales.3 These include most spectacularly the Ur-Eastern text, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Letters (1716–18, published 1763), which initiated and authorised women’s writing about the East and on which many later writers draw. In addition, the group includes Frances Sheridan’s History of Nourjahad (1767); Elizabeth Inchbald’s five plays boasting Oriental themes, including The Mogul Tale, or The Descent of the Balloon (1784, published 1788) and Such Things Are (1787, published 1788); Phebe Gibbes’ Hartly House, Calcutta (1789); Mariana Starke’s Sword of Peace (1788) and The Widow of Malabar (1791); and Hannah Cowley’s A Day in Turkey, or The Russian Slaves (1791). Of course, many others appear shortly after this period, including Ellis Cornelia Knight’s Dinarbas, a continuation of Rasselas (1792), Elizabeth Hamilton’s Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), Jane Porter’s Two Princes of Persia (1800) and Maria Edgeworth’s Murad the Unlucky (1804), to name only a few. Some of the accounts of the women’s East are based not simply on romantic fantasy or literary antecedents but rather, for the first time, on actual travels. In this essay I will question several critical assumptions governing writing about the East by examining three women’s historical accounts of their journeys: Elizabeth Marsh’s Barbary captivity narrative (written in 1756 and a revised version published in 1769); Jemima Kindersley’s Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope, and the East Indies (1777); and Eliza Fay’s Original Letters from India (1779–1815). These travel accounts offer documentary materials for the more fictionalised plays and novels, though the line between fact and fiction is as flimsy as the Eastern veils they describe. Montagu herself owned the ten-volume Les Mille et une Nuits, and Fay, in another example of intertextual influence, associates the exotic tales with the temples of Madras. The images that they inspire rather resemble ‘the images that float on the imagination after reading fairy tales, or the Arabian nights entertainment, than any thing in real life’.4 In addition, Jemima Kindersley’s Letters, with their enchanting details of palanquins and bungalows, seem to provide a veritable archival resource for Phebe Gibbes’ later novel about India, Hartly House, Calcutta. Eighteenth-century women adventurers are, by definition, defying expectations of the European feminine merely by travelling to North Africa or the East Indies, and the new availability of travel freed the imagination of these women. They often exercise a political voice, critiquing



122 Felicity A. Nussbaum

England or patriarchy, and sometimes speaking from the perspective of the exotic imposter. These women expose the malleability of gender constructions even as they take pains to emphasise their feminine credentials. In discussing Marsh’s Narrative and the letters of Kindersley and Fay, I will focus especially on moments of contact that put English femininity and cultural identity at risk. These texts begin to confront the modernising effects of intermixture between Britain and the East, and they speculate about potential absorption. Instead of reflecting only the opposites of identification or differentiation, the women travellers describe colonialism’s unfixed aspects as they play out on women’s bodies.5 I concentrate here on signs of hybridity – of intermarriage, conversion and transculturation – rather than on the more conventional markers of the authentic primitive such as the secluded woman, the harem and sati. These European women on the cusp of modernity produce a modern female subjectivity through visiting other women elsewhere. In addition, they evoke instabilities between the modern moment and the coeval past, between the civilised and the primitive, at this early stage in Britain’s interactions with the East.6 My argument is informed by the insights of various postcolonial critics, including Dipesh Chakrabarty, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, and others, who seek to ‘provincialize Western modernity’ – that is, to elaborate on the ways that the West’s allegedly universalist thought is itself limited by its being situated within particular times and places: ‘To think through and against [these norms] means to think with a difference … that would destabilize the universalist idioms, historicize the contexts, and pluralize the experiences of modernity.’7 The concept of ‘woman’ in the Enlightenment has, of course, been subject to this universalising tendency, for European woman, in a familiar concept voiced by Scottish Enlightenment historians and moral philosophers, was regarded as a moral compass to evaluate a civilisation’s modernity or barbarity, or as a mediating force to distinguish between cultivation and its absence. How then, we might ask, do these travelling Englishwomen titivate their femininities when they encounter, instead of signs of stasis, intimations of cultural transition in the various Easts? Discussions of the later eighteenth-century Orient are governed by several gendered assumptions: among them, first, that England characteristically depicts the East as feminine, though effeminacy and femininity are often rather casually collapsed to unify the entire East into one passive and easily penetrated gender.8 Arguably, alterity is frequently feminised as a means of gathering power over the alien; but because the East is also regarded as despotic and patriarchal, such a formulation is



British Women Write the East after 1750 123

too simple. Feminising the East also assumes that the colonial relationship is a heterosexual one between a conquering male and a feminised population, rather than considering the possibility of a feminine or homosexual observer.9 Second, the argument is made that romance and its realisation in Oriental tales (especially those written by women) contest a realist male tradition to challenge the novel’s more steadfastly masculine form;10 and third, that representations of the East domesticate the exotic Other woman by transforming her into a bourgeois English equivalent or, conversely, distancing her through defamiliarisation. For example, Billie Melman believes that Oriental women, rather than being the ‘absolute alien, the ultimate “other” ’, were transformed into ‘the feminine West’s recognizable image in the mirror. The haremlik was … a place comparable to the bourgeois home’.11 (Other recent examples of this recurrent theme include chapters by Balachandra Rajan on ‘Feminizing the Feminine’, Saree Makdisi on ‘Domesticating Exoticism’ and Nigel Leask on ‘Domesticating Distance’.)12 Though certain factors such as a privileged access to interior spaces and an interest in female liberty are characteristic of women’s writing in this period, these factors do not by any means exhaust the possibilities for engaging with the East, nor is domesticating the Orient confined to women’s fictions and letters.13 Mita Choudhury has rightly shown that this manner of thinking results in a seductive but inaccurate female Orientalism, a ‘gendered mode of stereotyping the other’.14 Scholars of later periods have argued that the nineteenth century empties out the Orient, making it ‘a blank screen’, in order to allow the European imagination to substitute its own ‘colonization and inscription’.15 Whether or not this is the case, the East in the eighteenth century, I suggest, is not yet so much an empty canvas to be sketched in as a set of heady texts, a crowded conglomeration of views, chaotically and intoxicatingly rich with meanings that are not fully organised into a coherent narrative. If the East is sometimes feminised in imagining the Orient, British femininity is also negotiated in text and practice as Englishwomen reshape contiguous and coeval femininities through cultural encounter. Though it is true, according to Ziauddin Sardar, that ‘a new sense of history was developing in the West … that required the stasis [and, I would add, the time-lag] of the Orient to provide its explanatory power’, it is not clear that eighteenth-century women travellers consistently participated in this process of reclaiming an older, less advanced and unchanging East in contrast to the West’s progress.16 Rather than simply replicating women’s domestic roles abroad, travel affords these women the opportunity to articulate alternative versions




of modernity that fracture the inevitability of progress, or the native woman’s certain trajectory towards European modernity.17 In the examples of Marsh, Kindersley and Fay, it is not so much the stasis, or even the crude barbarity, of the women they encounter that is remarkable, but rather their novelty, their edgy undecidability, their movement and flux. As readers of Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Letters know, Eastern women are often portrayed as less historically advanced, but they also sometimes appear to be contemporaneous and sometimes more modern than Western women.18 In spite of claims that England is the home of greatest freedom, travelling British women experiment with being most ‘modern’ elsewhere, thus encountering the primitive passé (both past and outmoded) to advance feminine modernity. The female subject, Betty Joseph has helpfully suggested, never embodies ‘a unilinear movement towards a European norm but [is] a result of many different configurations and linkages that weave together a subject’.19 Their travels and captivity made imperative their intermingling with many Mediterranean as well as Eastern nationalities. Elizabeth Marsh, a 21-year-old woman living with her parents in Minorca, recounts her capture by Moors whom she styles to be infidels, barbarians and monsters, while returning from Gibraltar to England on board a Sallee Rover.20 In both the 1756 manuscript and the published version of 1769, Marsh portrays herself as a terrified and much maligned victim, though she is consistently given favoured treatment over the male captives (the best apartment, a specially altered saddle, appealing foods such as couscous, almonds, raisins, eggs, milk, watermelon and grapes). Landing at a sandy beach ‘covered with Thousands of Moors, Shouting and Hallooing’, Marsh presents herself as a fragile, feminine isolate surrounded by the intruding rabble of commingling English, French, Spanish and Moor. The press of the crowd, she recounts, heightens her sense of feminine vulnerability when surrounded by the sea of Islamic men. At first tenting with the ‘wild’ and ‘dangerous’ Arabs on the way to Marrakech, she complains incessantly about the assaults to her delicacy – the camels’ braying, the flies, the heat, the foul canteen water and the roughness of the trip across the desert to his Imperial Highness, the Moroccan Prince. On entering the capital city, she lets slip her ambivalence about being made a public exhibition as the only woman among the captives, and notes that ‘every one [was] striving to get a sight of me’. This Englishwoman’s encounter with the East is clearly a gendered one but not in fully expected ways. It is remarkable that Marsh’s fear in the autobiographical narrative centres on resisting absorption by the culture more than penetration by the despotic sultan.




Though evidence is scarce, it seems likely that most female captives during this period were well treated. Readily adopting an identity as a ‘female captive’, Marsh describes herself as being more confined than the women in the harem, but it is then difficult for her to reconcile her independent spirit to that selfcharacterisation. Unlike the women of the harem, she is on public display; but distinguishing herself from them in another way, she assumes considerable agency by bribing her captors and seeking her own release. Her portrayal wavers between powerless sentimental victim and plucky modern woman. In Marsh’s narrative, harem women appear unappealing and even disgusting (unlike the aesthetically satisfying subjects of Montagu’s Turkish Letters), though the Moroccan Prince who rules them attracts her. Elizabeth Marsh distances herself from the Moorish women who whoop with glee on learning of her capture, emitting ‘a great Noise of Women’s Voices from the Tops of the Houses, which … was a Testimony of Joy on the arrival of a Female Captive’. She disdainfully describes them as unattractive ‘blacks’ who lacked femininity and dressed like clerics. Upon first being captured she remarks, One of them drew my attention – She was very tall and stout, with a broad flat Face, very dark Complexion, and long black Hair; she wore a dress resembling a Clergyman’s Gown, made of Muslin and buttoned on the Neck like the Collar of a Shirt, which reached her Feet – She had Bracelets on her Arms, and Legs, and was extremely inquisitive and Curious in examining my dress. Marsh fervently resists sartorial transculturation, refusing to put on their lighter Moroccan clothing in spite of the heat. Seeming to echo Wortley Montagu, she writes, ‘The Ladies made many remarks on my Dress, greatly recommended their own, and importuned me to put it on, but I declined –.’ She appears most to fear the kind of religious, linguistic, and gendered amalgamation and the absorption into the seraglio that these women urge on her. The women also threaten her feigned status as a woman of quality by seeming to draw her into the anonymity of the harem. Faced with these alien women, Marsh affects to dissolve into a clichéd femininity, waffling over whether to pretend to be married to James Crisp, a family friend. She blames her decision to masquerade as his wife on a friendly fellow captive, John Arvona: I could only answer with my Tears, my Heart was too deeply oppressed to give my opinion for, or against it, indeed I was unable to 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan




Yet, in addition, Marsh quickly empowers herself by bribing the prison guard to allow her to see her fellow travellers. She also constructs a story in which she is the agent of the Prince’s softening. In short, Marsh vacillates between being a hardened and ingenious adventurer, an attractive spectacle for a curious mob, and a fragile victim who fears assimilation. She twists femininity into a ploy to engage the reader’s sympathetic response. In this way as well, femininity is reserved for the Englishwoman whose narrative testifies to the incompatibility of religions and cultures. We learn very little from Marsh about her ‘husband’, James Crisp, except that he is kind, malleable and relatively ineffectual; but she is slyly explicit about the charms of the exotic Prince, of eligible age and demeanour, who courts her with ‘rarities’ and ‘curiosities’. Though she claims that she would have refused tea with the ladies, she and the Prince share a cup of tea served in Dutch china ‘Jappn’d with Green and Gold’. She writes admiringly, He was dressed in a loose Robe of Muslin with a Train of at least two yards on the floor, and under that was a pink Sattin Vest, buttoned with Diamonds: He had a small Cap of the same Sattin as his Vest, with a Diamond button – wore Bracelets on his Legs, and Slippers wrought with Gold – His Figure, altogether not disagreeable, and his address Civil and easy – Tall, and of a tolerable good complexion, and appeared to be about five & twenty. Revealing her feminine vanity and her wish to allure, she at first worries that her riding habit and sunburnt skin will prejudice him against her. In contrast to the ‘black’ women, Marsh characterises the fair-skinned cosmopolitan Prince as occupying a liminal modernity; he is a willing participant in the world of expanding markets who recognises the value of its commodities, including captives. The Prince summons a beautifully attired but large, sallow, thick-lipped, painted half-English, half-Moroccan woman to convert Marsh to Islam through trickery: ‘One of the most agreeable of them, and who shewed me the greatest Civility, was the Daughter of an Englishman, who became a Renegado, and had married a Moorish Woman, she took her Bracelets off her Arms, and put them on mine, desiring I would wear them.’ This creolised woman most exemplifies Marsh’s fears of becoming 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


determine; but as the arguments of the Slave were very reasonable, I thought it most prudent to submit to their judgment, in fixing on what they thought most Expedient in the present extremity –.


found, when too late, that I had renounced the Christian Religion, (though innocently) by saying, There is but [‘one’ is inserted above the line] God, and Mahomet is his Prophet – The Palace was immediately in the utmost confusion, and there was every Sign of Joy in all Faces; I was surprised, and affrighted, (though I knew not the cause thereof ) which the Prince perceiving … spoke to the Ladies, who instantly left the Room, taking me with them to an Apartment, remote from that wherein we had been.21 Beating the protective James Crisp away from his wife, shouting black women terrify Marsh: ‘No Christian, but a Moor, [she] tore all the plaits out of my clothes, and my hair hung down about my Ears.’ When the resplendent Prince later presses her again to ‘become a Moor’, she resumes an attitude of innocent submission: ‘it was my fate to be reduced to passive obedience, and non-resistance’. Throwing off ‘the mask he has hitherto worn’, the Prince threatens to burn her to death for renouncing Islam, and she faints with shock. She persists in using femininity and naiveté as a ploy, and her resulting illness transforms him into her supplicant rather than a sovereign. The Prince offers to show the captives ‘an example of moderation as well as justice, by permitting us to quit his Dominions’. In the manuscript and the published text Marsh has some difficulty fitting her experience into a genre that did not allow for princely clemency or for her inexplicable attraction to a supposed despot. Unlike the Muslim tyrant of fantasy, Marsh’s Moroccan Prince is a despot manqué who protects her health, courts her, accepts her ruse of being married, excuses her false conversion and allows her safe return to Sallee. At the end of the narrative, Marsh concludes by reclaiming her virtue and withdrawing into apology for having pretended to be married to Crisp: if he should by any unguarded event, discover the deceit I had made use of, I must undoubtedly be confined to the Seraglio, and so lost to my family, I therefore flatter myself that great allowances will be made for my present Character, which tho’ fictitious, gave me the greatest uneasiness, as it rendered me apprehensive that the ill disposed part of the World would censure my Conduct.



one of them, and she finds that women have been enlisted to convert her to Islam. After mimicking unfamiliar Morisco words Marsh writes that she

Exemplifying an uneasy femininity that the East jeopardises even while admiring, protecting and succumbing to it, Marsh paints the contours of a feminine modernity at greater risk from the dark-complexioned mixed-race trickster harem woman than from the Eastern monarch. In short, Marsh bonds with the prince, though not with the gaggle of Moorish women whose teeming pressure offends her European sensibility; and she reasserts her delicate femininity against the vexing agency of the secluded women. The printed version published over a decade later varies slightly from the manuscript version.22 In both texts Marsh evidences a consistent fear of being made a Moor, strengthened by her fear that she will be dragged back to Barbary even as she approaches the man-of-war that will carry her back to England. The few changes in the later version may arise from the fact that Marsh, now Mrs Crisp, wished to explain her apparent cohabitation with James Crisp in Morocco. At the conclusion of the published version she adds a congratulatory letter that refers to her being engaged at the time of capture to Captain T—, ‘whose Behaviour, during my Absence, had occasioned my Father’s taking the Resolution of never consenting to this Alliance’.23 No mention of the fiancé appeared in the earlier manuscript version, a cautionary fact to which James Crisp was apparently privy and which contributed to his alleged restraint in pursuing her. In the published version she tearfully brushes aside her initial disappointment over her fiancé’s supposed misbehaviour and, with her father’s blessing, agrees to marry Mr Crisp and rejoin him in Bengal. In contrast to Marsh, Jemima Wicksted Kindersley (1741?–1809), is married to Nathaniel Kindersley, an artillery officer, whom she accompanied to India by way of Teneriffe, Brazil and the Cape of Good Hope, though she never mentions him nor her infant son.24 Kindersley’s Letters, filled with rich detail regarding women and Eastern habits, may indeed have launched the novel about India. Demonstrating her continuing interest in women in various societies, on her return to England she translates a French work, An Essay on the Character, the Manners, and the Understanding of Women, in Different Ages, to which she adds two essays.25 There Kindersley follows conventional Enlightenment thought in identifying national traits, but she ingeniously chooses to contrast Dutch and Islamic women to explain the severity of laws in Muslim countries versus European leniency. She maintains that across time and space ‘women have ever been restrained, confined, and subjected to severe laws, in proportion to the greatness of their natural power; and that they are, by the laws and usages, encouraged and supported in




proportion to their want of it’ (p. 220). The great ‘natural’ power they possess in despotic countries reveals itself to be sexual power, a kind of authority that men in Holland eschew because they purportedly prefer to attend to business and profit. Dutch merchants seek in their wives ‘an assistant, a steward, a partner in cares’ (p. 224). In these essays and in her Letters, Kindersley describes a belief in an essential national character exacerbated by unchanging deference to authority that principally works itself out on women. In Kindersley’s remarkable travel narrative she filters her experiences through this lens of differential power between the sexes. In her view, the oppression of women by the Catholic Church bears considerable resemblance to the oppression of Islam, and she reminds us of the fuzziness of the contact zones between Spain and Moor, North and South, in the mid-eighteenth century. Kindersley generalises alterity to include secluded women of all sorts, and her fascination with their evening intrigues parallels Wortley Montagu’s (Figure 1). She reports that the dark and unpleasing veiled Spanish women of Teneriffe are confined behind latticed windows that ‘give the ladies an opportunity of looking out without being seen’.26 Finding herself subject to a similar restraint in Brazil, she is unable to move freely between rooms without being accompanied by an officer and a soldier. In St Salvador, Bahia, on the coast of Brazil, for example, she marvels that the governor of the territory must grant her permission to visit a friend: ‘Good heavens! What a government is this to live under! These things astonish us [modern Englishwomen], who are not satisfied even with liberty.’ Kindersley believes that such restrictions were designed ‘to prevent my going to the nunneries, of which they are exceedingly jealous, or becoming acquainted with any of their women; what danger they apprehend from it, is beyond my comprehension’ (p. 26). Having at first romanticised the nunneries, she comes away advocating that no woman should take the veil before age 25. Acclimation to the climate and culture in her view may, however, change even fixed European characteristics. In Madras she comments on Englishwomen’s potential to be significantly altered by circumstances, including the yellowing of their complexions: ‘The mode of living, from the religion of their servants, the heat of the climate, and other circumstances, is so extraordinary, that I can scarcely believe myself amongst English people’ (p. 80). National identity is, then, less predictable and more chimerical than might first be imagined. Most significantly, it troubles her that women are sometimes identified as English simply because their husbands are English. She distances herself from ‘country-born





131

Figure 1 Frontispiece to Mrs [ Jemima] Kindersley, Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil, The Cape of Good Hope, and the East Indies (London, 1777). The women represented are busily engaged in smoking the hookah, drinking tea and playing musical instruments. Courtesy of University of Southern California, on behalf of Specialized Libraries and Archival Collections.


women’, the hybrid daughters of European fathers and black Portuguese mothers who are in actuality Malay or East Indian but, by virtue of turning Christian, earn the honorific appellation ‘Portuguese’. The girls born of such unions are conduits of race and agents of whitening, carriers of civilisation or its lack, since it is commonly, if erroneously, presumed that children take complexion from their mothers. The mixed offspring are ‘sometimes born in wedlock, and sometimes not, as they are fairer than their mothers, are fond of being called English, French, &c.’, Kindersley writes; ‘and, if pretty, often marry to Europeans, who sometimes arise to be people of consequence; their children, being another remove from black, do not like to have their descent remembered; and nothing is so great an affront as to class them amongst the Portuguese’ (p. 272). Kindersley finds these women who affect to dress in European fashions surprisingly devious in seeking assimilation for their children. In her rendering, these mixed-race women with lightened skin are the critical agents of change yet, Kindersley is quick to point out, they manifest the genetic and cultural residue of a degraded East: they ‘retain the indolence and cunning peculiar to the natives’ of India (p. 272). Like Elizabeth Marsh and Jemima Kindersley, Eliza Fay recognises and resists cultural assimilation, though her amused attitude towards being Orientalised suggests less anxiety and a greater willingness to experiment. Fay, who wrote Original Letters from India (1779–1815), is known only by the name of her Irish husband, Anthony Fay, who became an Advocate at the Supreme Court of Calcutta. Her first hazardous voyage to Calcutta through France, across the Alps, through Egypt and the desert from Aleppo to Basra took place from 10 April 1779 to 7 February 1783; her second stay in 1784–94 led her, like Pekuah in Johnson’s Rasselas, to consider starting a women’s seminary, and it was followed by a third voyage in 1796. The entrepreneurial Fay, the illegitimate daughter of a scullery maid, became a textile merchant and eventually purchased her own ship.27 Imprisoned by Hyder Ali in Calicut, the capital of Malibar, during the first voyage from 5 November 1779 to 17 February 1780, she returned to England after her philandering husband fathered an illegitimate child whom she supported, perhaps remembering her own difficulties as a child born out of wedlock. Fay’s book is a compilation of autobiographical texts, including 23 letters to her family from about 1783 to 1797. The difficult trip affords Fay, a good-humoured and astute observer, an opportunity to exercise her ingenuity and will. Fay boasts of her own strength in the




face of discomfort and on hearing tales of overt hostilities against Europeans, dismissing them with an assumption that Arabs can simply be bribed. She prides herself on holding her seat when mounted on a feisty mare, Zemire: ‘the guides gave me great praise for my self-command; a praise I never desire to purchase again by a similar trial’. While trying to escape from Calicut she dons a sailor suit with a jauntiness reminiscent of the cross-dressing actress Charlotte Charke. Fay wears a nankeen jacket – a pair of long striped trowsers – a man’s night cap, and over that a mighty smart hat, – with a pair of Mr. F—’s shoes tied on my feet, and a stick in my hand. In this dress Mr. F— declared that I was the very image of my dear father, which highly gratified me. I had tied the clothes we took off, in a handkerchief; with that in one hand and brandishing my stick in the other, I boldly sallied forth. (p. 153) Thanking God that she has a mind to entertain herself, she learns shorthand and languages, travelling with ‘her piano-forte, and a pair of globes and a good collection of books’ (p. 269). Travelling enabled all sorts of loose sexual and social relationships – Fay having dumped a husband in India and engaged in a shipboard romance with the captain; yet she chastises her ‘perfectly depraved’ (p. 108) fellow female passenger for having been taken from the streets of London and absconding with a pretended husband. Fay seems less agitated about being mistaken for the Other than Marsh or Kindersley: her form of masquerading does not really allow her to blend into the Indian scene or to compliment her hosts by adopting their dress, but rather to indulge in transcultural whimsy. She wears a cloak and a veil through the heat of desert travel, and in India dresses in an Egyptian costume that she acquired during her trip to Grand Cairo: I had, in the first place, a pair of trowsers, with yellow leather halfboots and slippers over them; a long satin gown, with wide sleeves, open to the elbows; and a girdle round my waist, with large silver clasps; over that another robe with short sleeves: round my head a fine, coloured, muslin handkerchief, closely bound, but so arranged that one corner hung down three quarters of a yard behind. (p. 82) Adding a black silk veil, she finds it difficult to breathe and ‘thought I must have died by the way’ (Figure 2). Masquerade is attractive to Fay because it does not require any religious or cultural commitment.




Figure 2 Frontispiece to Mrs Eliza Fay. Original Letters from India 1779–1815: Containing a Narrative of a Journey through Egypt, and the Author’s Imprisonment at Calicut by HyderAlly. To which is Added, An Abstract of Three Subsequent Voyages to India. Fay is shown wearing her Egyptian costume and assisted by a female servant. Reproduced from the edition by E. M. Forster (1925).



134

Fay remains a patriot, apostrophising England as the home of liberty and safety, but one who critiques her fellow countrypersons for turning savage, ‘two or three of us perhaps fighting for a bone’ (p. 111) when provisions on ship ran short. The highlight of her trip is, however, captivity in a black hole of Hyder Ally, where ‘crouded together in a horrid dark place scarcely twenty feet square, swarming with rats, and almost suffocating for want of air’ (p. 133), she copes with centipedes, scorpions and bats. In the hole she becomes most thoroughly English, as distinct from the mob of Calicut, ‘who seemed to take pleasure in beholding the distress of white people, those constant objects of their envy and detestation’ (p. 125). Rather than sentimentalising her plight, she interprets confinement in the Black Hole as a comic occasion to observe social class levelling among posturing fellow Englishmen. Fay does not consistently gender India feminine, though she finds ‘something in the mild countenances and gentle manners of the Hindoos that interests me exceedingly’ (p. 211). When she uses the term ‘effeminate’, it refers only to an East India Company officer acting as Belvidera in a performance of Otway’s Venice Preserv’d. On another occasion she finds an unexpected modernity among the women. Englishwomen in India are so surprisingly fashionable that Fay discovers new trends: ‘I had no idea that fashions travelled so fast’ (p. 172), she remarks. The temporal distancing that she had assumed would pertain to a distant country does not jibe with her experience since these AngloIndian women are more fully à-la-mode than those she had left in England. Fay also acknowledges that her standards are culturally relative and different from those she would apply to her sex in England: [The Palanquins with four bearers] are often beautifully ornamented, and appear in character with the country, and with the languid air of those who use them, which, though very different from any thing I have been accustomed to admire in a woman as you well know, yet it is not unpleasing in a country the charms of which are heightened by exhibiting a view of society entirely new to me. (p. 172) Adopting a principle for these Englishwomen in India that is unacceptable for herself, Fay determines that they are justified in assuming the ornamental, languid character of the country and exhibiting themselves in public. The aesthetic appropriate to India conjoins ornamental surface and spectacle with these women’s enervated behaviour. But it is the novelty of these women that strikes Fay as unusual. The benign but alien transculturated Englishwoman – with whom Fay resists identifying – is




fully engrossed in the East: the incompatibility of England and India, spatially and temporally, is reconciled in them through ornament, fashion, indolence and luxury. Rather than being repulsed and frightened, Fay delights in the ‘intermixture of inhabitants’ combining ‘Asiatick splendour’ with European taste ‘under the forms of flowing drapery, stately palanquins, elegant carriages, innumerable servants, and all the pomp and circumstance of luxurious ease, and unbounded wealth’. But she finally rejects it for herself. In this limited survey, I have suggested that while the East is often depicted as effeminate or feminine, domesticated to make it familiar, or distanced to create exoticism, such perspectives provide only a partial tale of Eastern encounter, and one that is not fully portable to every site. Marsh, Kindersley and Fay reveal that British women, partially freed from the constraints of a particular femininity through change of venue, flex their gender to exercise female licence and ingenuity, though the attraction of stretching female limits is countered by resistance to being fully incorporated into an Eastern transculturated version of the feminine. This negotiation serves the purposes of the female narrators, of course, in maintaining their asymmetrical power, but it also exposes that their attitudes are not simply static or conventional in relation to the Orient and its women. For Marsh as for Kindersley, half-Eastern women pose a substantial threat to the integrity of their religion or complexion (well-recognised signs of Englishness and of femininity), while Fay finds that AngloIndian women’s willing adoption of a seductive luxuriousness reflects an understandable (but personally unacceptable) redefinition of virtue in India. All three maintain varying degrees of social and cultural distance in the face of potential hybridity and its pollution of feminine identity. The women reflect contiguous femininities in which the sign of alterity is not confined solely to the belatedness of the other woman, on the one hand, or to her superior liberty on the other; but rather it becomes an occasion to align female subjectivity and English identity. These texts among others give evidence that eighteenth-century women travellers, mobile markers of temporal and spatial incompatibilities, waft from one time and space to another. These halfcaste, countryborn, intermarried and genderbending women – English, Moroccan, Indian and Anglo-Indian – appear here for the first time in firsthand accounts by women. The Englishwomen serve as agents and objects of incorporation, absorption, and resistance when confronted with the influences of Islam and Catholicism; with seclusion, polygamy and the harem; and with national and racial impurity. The alternative femininities that they




encounter seep under their skins to highlight the discontinuities in empire’s ability to transform its imperial agents. Rather than exposing simply the signs of stasis alone, these contiguous femininities reveal fleeting traces of transition and change that complicate the unstable nature of female identity and its emergence into modernity at the end of the eighteenth century.

Notes 1. Linda Colley, Captives (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002), p. 146. 2. Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance (1785), in Bluestocking Feminism: Writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 1738–1785, ed. Gary Kelly, 6 vols (London and New York: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), VI. 3. A number of critics, including Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), have recently demonstrated that, although Edward Said’s Orientalism is foundational, analysing writings about the East in terms of an imperialism that became hegemonic only in the nineteenth century does not do justice to the complexity of eighteenthcentury representations of Persia, the Levant, North Africa, India and China. 4. Mrs Eliza Fay, Original Letters from India (1779–1815): Containing a Narrative of a Journey through Egypt, and the Author’s Imprisonment at Calicut by HyderAlly. To which is added, An Abstract of Three Subsequent Voyages to India, intro. by E. M. Forster (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925), p. 170. Subsequent references will be given in the main body of the text. 5. Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991) demonstrates Montagu’s use of analogue and contrast in her Turkish Letters. I am also very grateful to Wendy Belcher for conversations concerning the penetrability of European bodies. 6. Harriet Guest, ‘The Great Distinction: Figures of the Exotic in William Hodges’ Work’, in New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts, ed. Isobel Armstrong (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 296–334, helpfully discusses these issues in regard to South Pacific women. She proposes that Hodges articulates Oceanic cultural difference as a gendered one that appears to be effeminate, superficial, and lacking history. 7. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ed., ‘On Alternative Modernities’, in Alternative Modernities (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 51. 8. Balachandra Rajan, ‘Feminizing the Feminine: Early Women Writers on India’, in Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1999) argues that India is the stage on which the feminine is enacted: ‘India is endearing or dangerous, reticent or treacherously secretive, [and it remains a] consistently feminine India’. She adds, ‘The novel about India … was made to collaborate in the masculine domination of a feminine Orient’, p. 122. For a contrasting view in regard to the Barbary coast, see Colley, Captives, ‘The claim sometimes made that the West eroticized the Islamic world in order to feminize and dominate it, is therefore suspect, as far as Barbary and the Ottoman empires before 1750 are concerned’ because the West feared its power until the later eighteenth century, p. 145.




9. See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (London: Routledge, 1995); and Lee Wallace, Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 10. Robert Mack, for example, in the introduction to Oriental Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), contends that ‘The Arabian Nights and its progeny can be seen throughout the eighteenth century as forming a counterpart of sorts to the great male tradition’ (p. xix). See also Srinivas Aravamudan, ‘In the Wake of the Novel: The Oriental Tale as National Allegory’, Novel 33 (1999), 5–31. 11. Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918: Sexuality, Religion and Work (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), p. 316. 12. See Rajan, Under Western Eye; Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); and Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing 1770–1840: ‘From an Antique Land’ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). In Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Narratives (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), I show that women writing about the East incorporated the foreign into the domestic to present an exoticized reflection of the emergent domestic ideology of the period. 13. Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism, finds the domestication of the other to be ‘a specifically modern phenomenon’, p. 118. 14. Mita Choudhury, Interculturalism and Resistance in the London Theater, 1660–1800: Identity, Performance, Empire (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000), pp. 109–31. 15. John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 8; and Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism, p. 121 (quoted in Clare Brant, ‘Climates of Gender’, in Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel, 1775–1844, pp. 129–49). 16. Ziauddin Sardar, Orientalism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999), p. 35. See especially Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 17. See Betty Joseph, ‘Gendering Time in Globalization: The Belatedness of the Other Woman and Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 21 (2002), 67–84, to which I am indebted. These explorations of women’s position vis-à-vis ‘Eastern time’ extend to women’s fiction. According to Margaret Doody, ‘Frances Sheridan: Morality and Annihilated Time’, in Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670–1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), pp. 350–56, Sheridan ‘collapses narrative temporality in daring new ways in Nourjahad’ so that ‘past and present lapse into one another’. 18. The most familiar example is Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for whom the native woman became the sign of difference that was both premodern (like the biblical Eve and the classical figure) and antimodern in idealising the harem. See Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Selected Letters, ed. Isobel Grundy (London: Penguin, 1997). 19. Betty Joseph, Reading the East India Company 1720–1840: Colonial Currencies in Gender (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) argues convincingly




20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

that ‘the unevenness of European implementation of the ground [of Enlightenment] produces “woman” in the colonial encounter as a complex site of many negotiations’. By ‘modern’ I mean to suggest the nature of social and economic relations at a particular moment in history rather than a progressive metanarrative, following Laura Brown’s formulation in Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 6. All citations are from the unpaginated manuscript, almost certainly transcribed by a copyist, in the Special Collection, Charles Young Research Library, UCLA, unless otherwise indicated. The manuscript is bound up with a second fascinating Marsh manuscript: Mem.a 20th September 1791. The following Journal of a Voyage by Sea from Calcutta to Madras, and of a Journey from thence back to Dacca; was written by my deceased Sister Elizabeth Crisp, and given to me by her Daughter Elizabeth Maria Shee, on her arrival in England from Bengal in the Year 1788. Khalid Bekkaoui has edited the British Library version, The Female Captive (Casablanca: Moroccan Cultural Studies Centre, 2003). Later in the narrative a Christian merchant belatedly delivers a letter urging Marsh to avoid repeating a single word in the language of the country. The Female Captive: A Narrative of Facts, Which happened in Barbary in the Year 1756. 2 vols. Written by Herself (London: C. Bathurst, 1769). Colley states that in the later version Marsh omits references to religious conflict, diminishes attention to Moroccan culture, lessens the ‘terror, danger, and the alarming shadow of the Crescent that had dominated the early narrative’ (Captives, p. 127), but heightens the sexual danger. My own comparison of manuscript and published version suggests somewhat different changes. For the historical context of Marsh’s situation, see Linda Colley, ‘The Narrative of Elizabeth Marsh: Barbary, Sex, and Power’, in The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). Marsh continues in The Female Captive, ‘My Friend’s general good Character, the Gratitude I owed him, and my Father’s Desire over-balanced every other consideration; and, after adjusting some Family affairs’ (I, p. 154). After Kindersley’s return to England in 1769, she was attacked by the Rev. Henry Hodgson for her supposed sympathies for popery and Catholic pageantry. Her son later became the first to translate Tamil into English. See Ketaki Kushari Dyson, A Various Universe: A Study of the Journals and Memoirs of British Men and Women in the Indian Subcontinent, 1765–1856 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978). An Essay on the Character, the Manners, and the Understanding of Women, in Different Ages: Trans. From the French of Mons. Thomas. By Mrs. Kindersley with Two Original Essays (London: J. Dodsley, 1781). Subsequent references will be given in the main body of the text. Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope, and the East Indies. By Mrs. Kindersley (London: J. Nourse, 1777), p. 3. Subsequent references will be given in the main body of the text. Melman, Women’s Orients, p. 37.




‘Tied To Their Species By The Strongest Of All Relations’: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rewriting of Race as Sensibility Moi Rickman

In December 1788 the Analytical Review published a review of the work of the American-born moral philosopher Samuel Stanhope Smith, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species. To Which Are Added, Strictures on Lord Kames’s Discourse on the Original Diversity of Mankind (1787).1 Although the reviewer’s identity is marked merely with the initial ‘M’, its authorship can be attributed to the radical and feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft.2 The review is significant because it provides an example of a woman writing in the capacity of a critic, whose anonymity allows her to divert public censure from her employment while simultaneously permitting her knowingly to subvert the public/private dichotomy of eighteenth-century gender codes. For Wollstonecraft, the act of writing enables her to penetrate the public realm, to participate in the creation of standards of taste and influence the formation of public opinion. It also allows her, in this particular instance, to engage directly with Smith’s Essay and a philosophical enquiry into the sensitive issue of race or ‘human variety’. Race is a subject that Wollstonecraft’s writings frequently touch on through the lexicon of slavery – her desire to ‘abolish this abominable mischief’3 – or, as Moira Ferguson has suggested, through her feminist polemic which adapts and utilises an anti-slavery discourse in order to address the condition and the rights of women.4 More recently, however, an interest in the question of race and the various ways this can be approached has occupied scholars of eighteenth-century studies who have subtly developed this field of enquiry.5 Many of Wollstonecraft’s 140 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


9

contributions to the Analytical Review are important in this respect because they clearly indicate her participation in discussions of race. More specifically, as Mitzi Myers observes, the reviews ‘testify to the breadth of Wollstonecraft’s reading’ and ‘are a valuable resource for and index to her opinions’,6 revealing – to use Wollstonecraft’s terms – her consideration of race as ‘a very interesting subject’.7 Her review of Smith in particular presents important insights into the nature and complexity of racial thought in the late eighteenth century and also provides a poignant counterpart, the response of a woman, to a professional, scientific discourse that was dominated by men.8 This essay examines the manner in which the difficult terrain of race and ‘human variety’ is traversed by theorists such as Smith and cultural commentators like Wollstonecraft. It pays specific attention to Wollstonecraft’s representation of Smith’s work and her response to it. The review reveals, in this respect, an intriguing illustration of the dialectic between theorist and commentator, suggesting how their personal and competing approaches to racial thought are managed and mediated within a wider public context. Of particular importance to this transition is Wollstonecraft’s tactful filtration of Smith’s account of physiognomy.9 Physiognomy has a long history and has been variously defined by theorists including Aristotle, Charles Le Brun in the seventeenth century, Johan Caspar Lavater in the eighteenth century, as well as Charles Bell and Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century.10 It reflects a basic human desire to define human nature and derive an understanding of the nature of the individual through the observation of the form of the countenance. As Johann Caspar Lavater explained in his Essays on Physiognomy (1789), ‘Physiognomy is the science of knowledge of the correspondence between the external and internal man’.11 Lavater describes here the relations between mind and body underpinning physiognomic thought, and also the assumption that what is internal to the mind is transferred into external expression through the character of the countenance. In other words, the face was thought to function as an index to the mind and revealed, in visual form, the underlying character of the individual. Yet implicit to accounts of physiognomy was the inherent problem of ascertaining which particular features of the face could be read and what, specifically, they signified. Lavater, for instance, suggested that aspects of animal, moral and intellectual life were discernible in the countenance, corresponding respectively with the areas occupied by the mouth and chin, nose and cheeks, forehead and eyebrows, and in his analysis these formed the basis of a classificatory hierarchy of human types.12 Samuel Stanhope Smith’s account of physiognomy, on the other



Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rewriting of Race as Sensibility 141

hand, was derived through a natural historical consideration of the human species and drew on a developmental model of mind and body. He made no attempt to classify the human variation he described but, none the less, racial physiognomy, as he presented it, could be read as a sign of difference and a measure of developmental difference. This essay examines how the inherent tensions presented by Smith’s thesis are negotiated through Wollstonecraft’s use of the language of sensibility. My argument is that amidst the plurality of approaches to understanding the varieties, or races, of mankind, the language of sensibility becomes a common cultural denominator, inflecting ideas about diversity, development and difference with its unifying emphasis on the relationship of mind and body. Smith’s Essay was initially addressed to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia in 1787, and published at their request the same year.13 A further edition was published in London in 1789, but a new version containing amendments and additional notes (the one reviewed by Wollstonecraft) was published in Edinburgh in 1788. A ‘greatly enlarged edition’ was later published in 1810.14 In every sense, Smith’s work was a reflection of his education and the moral and religious principles guiding his life. He graduated from the College of New Jersey, Princeton, in 1769, but had studied at Edinburgh University for a few years and was acquainted with Scottish Enlightenment philosophy.15 He also served as a Presbyterian minister but returned to Princeton in 1779 where he was appointed professor of moral philosophy.16 Yet despite these formative influences and the fact that the publication of Smith’s Essay in 1788 coincided with humanitarian efforts in Britain to abolish the slave trade – the Abolition Committee was formed on 22 May 1787 – his work did not attempt to redress the unequal treatment of humans or confront the issue of slavery. As Robert Bernasconi remarks, the Essay is devoid of any form of ‘judgement on the legitimacy of the chattel enslavement of Africans’ and it was not until 1812 that Smith finally spoke out against it.17 Smith’s Essay was primarily a defence of religion and was further motivated, as the ‘Strictures’ in the title of the work indicate, by the desire to refute the polygenist thesis proposed by Henry Home, Lord Kaimes. On this contentious issue Smith and Wollstonecraft were united in a common cause to defend Christian monogenism, the objective of which was necessarily to create a sense of the unity of human diversity. Monogenism and polygenism represented competing understandings of the origins of the human species, and although both departed from, and expanded upon, a biblical paradigm, they offered opposing explanations of human variety. The former, combining the discourses of science, religion and 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


142 Moi Rickman

liberal politics, maintained that all of humanity was descended from a single, or monogenistic, source and explained human variation as the result of exposure to specific environments over prolonged periods of time. Polygenist accounts, by contrast, insisted that human varieties were fixed or immutable, and that differences between varieties could not be traced back to a common source, but reflected instead a diversity of origins or multiple acts of creation.18 In his ‘Preliminary Discourse’ to his Sketches of the History of Man (1774), Lord Kaimes, the Scottish judge, landowner and philosopher, had cast doubt on the authority and validity of the Bible. The physical and moral variations to be found between different ‘kinds’ of humans, he suggested, were not shaped by the climate or environment and were, therefore, not reconcilable with the idea of monogenism but more explicable as multiple creations, or polygenism.19 ‘Were all men of one species’, he argued, ‘there never could have existed … different kinds, such as exist at present.’20 As an ardent Christian, Smith held a firm belief in the biblical account of human origins and took exception to the unorthodox views of a fellow philosopher. In fact, his ‘ingenious essay’, as Wollstonecraft claimed, was a ‘masterly and philosophic answer to Lord K’s discourse on the original diversity of mankind’.21 His objective was to corroborate the Bible, and his strategy, like that of many of his contemporaries, was to confirm the unity of the human species by explaining the causes of its variety. He achieves this through a reconciliation of secular interpretation and orthodox belief, by explaining how differences of ‘complexion’ and ‘figure’ derive from the same source, but can be attributed to the effects of ‘climate’ and the ‘state of society’. Religion, as Barbara Taylor argues, also played a central part in Wollstonecraft’s thought: it underpins her egalitarian approach to humanity as a whole as well as the predominantly progressive account of human nature that underwrites the radical-democratic politics that marks her later writings.22 Smith’s Essay can be seen as serving as an important catalyst for these ideas, in as much as he provides a philosophical framework that is potentially supportive of democratic ideals in its stress on human development. Given their mutual appreciation of the importance of religion and human progress, it is not surprising to find that Wollstonecraft offers a favourable review of Smith’s work. But she qualifies her own position by commencing with an address to her readership that offers an indication of the position she assumes when contemplating the human species. An acquaintance with the human heart has ever been thought important and interesting; those who feel lively emotions wish to 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan



144 Moi Rickman

Wollstonecraft emphasises here the importance of the body and its inner states which allow her to ‘know’ fellow humans, and also prompt, as Scott Juengel has suggested, ‘a visceral need to identify with the other’.23 Her response is expressed rather elegantly through the language and sentiments of sensibility; reference to the heart and vibrating strings suggest the fusion of the mental and emotional, mind and sensation in a unified model of the body.24 The language of the passage also gestures towards the idea of social sympathy, in so far as Wollstonecraft is not so much concerned with factors that differentiate humans but those that draw them together. She places emphasis on the relations that unite and tie the human species and this is articulated most concisely in her reference to ‘fellow-feeling’. The term designates a form of social instinct, simultaneously suggesting what is public, communicable and privately felt; the distinctly moral and expressive language of the passions doing much to convey, indeed induce, social affinities and encourage those bonds of sympathy. Deployed in the context of a discussion of race, however, the idea of fellow-feeling also indicates a form of intuition that resembles, in many respects, the proposition made by the ethnologist, James Cowles Prichard, in the 1813 edition of his Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, that all humans possessed an innate capacity to recognise fellow humans. Similarly, ‘fellow-feeling’ invokes a form of recognition, a means of knowing fellow humans that transcends all reference to the physical body, the visible site of racial difference. Given Wollstonecraft’s warm commendation of Smith’s ‘investigation’, which naturally classes the ‘faculties of the mind and the passions which swell the heart’, a reader might be forgiven for believing that he too was writing within a similar ‘compassionating’ tradition.25 In fact, Smith’s references to the mind and passions are functional rather than compassionate, figuring them in a more generalised, secondary sense than Wollstonecraft implies. None the less, she deduces from his work: These classes [the passions], it is true, admit of innumerable modifications; yet there is a degree of uniformity in their variety which silently affirms that they proceed from the same source. The untutored savage and the cultivated sage are found to be men of like passions with ourselves. (p. 50)



know if the same string vibrates in another bosom – if they are indeed tied to their species by the strongest of all relations, fellow feeling – in short, if the world without resembles that within. (p. 50)

Smith’s work affirms for Wollstonecraft the fact that the human species shares a common monogenistic source, which can be evidenced in their possession of ‘like passions’. There might be ‘innumerable modifications’ in the expression of these passions, but Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on their ‘uniform variety’ has the effect of cohering difference. Moreover, since similar passions are possessed by the untutored savage and the cultivated sage, these can be considered as qualities that are not learned or acquired, they are innate.26 For Wollstonecraft, therefore, the passions serve to define, or classify, humanity, but their universality also functions in this context as a powerful tool that counters the polygenist thesis forwarded by Lord Kaimes and his insistence on the ‘original diversity of mankind’. In order to uphold his argument for ‘equivocal generation’, Kaimes had claimed that some African peoples were ‘void of natural affection’.27 This assertion is all the more surprising given the ‘vocabulary of benevolism’ that Kaimes fostered in his Elements of Criticism (1762). In this work he proposed that physiognomy ‘may not improperly be considered as a natural language, expressing to all beholders the several emotions and passions as they arise in the heart. Hope, fear, joy, grief, are display’d externally: the character of a man may be read in his face’.28 Although Kaimes emphasised the importance of the ‘natural language’ of physiognomy as a guide to emotional feeling, his Sketches made it clear that he did not regard the passions as a universal or common attribute possessed by all of humanity. As Smith’s Strictures indicate, he was inclined to view ‘the variety of dispositions’ and ‘spirit’ existing ‘in different countries’, especially ‘the cowardice of the American Indian’, as further evidence of ‘original diversity’ (pp. 186–8). In effect, he was denying Wollstonecraft’s intuitive response to racial thought, her appeal to ‘fellow-feeling’. Taking exception to this, her review redeems the manhood and fellowship of ‘the Indian’ by reasserting the inclusiveness of the passions. By ‘observing the heart’, she retorts, ‘we may be said to work underground – though treating this subject we seldom express any doubt’ (p. 50). After all, she continues: the jealousy and ambition that actuates our antipodes is not supposed to differ from the passions which agitate us, – nor can the fortitude of an Indian, who dies singing his death song, be distinguished from the pride or virtue which made many heroes endure grievous calamities and smile on the grim king of terrors. (p. 50) Kaimes also supported his polygenist thesis by emphasising the visual, physical differences to be found between ‘different kinds of men’. This




too is countered by Wollstonecraft who, following Smith’s ‘reasoning’, affirms that ‘natural causes are sufficiently powerful to effect the changes observable in the human species’ (p. 50). But she also quite logically questions the validity of accounts of race that placed emphasis on form and colour whilst negating the significance of the human mind in the process: If there is a similarity of minds discernible in the whole human race, can dissimilitude of forms or the gradations of complexion prove that the earth is peopled by many different species of men? (p. 50) Here, as elsewhere, Wollstonecraft criticises the divisive nature of racial classification, the partial representations of humanity presented through selective descriptive criteria and the meaning attributed to them, as well as its pernicious utility in dividing humanity into seemingly distinct categories. Instead, she urges, the mind and passions are of far more significance; they provide evidence, as Smith’s Essay affirms, that counters ‘those histories which represent nations without natural affection; without ideas of religion; and without moral principle’.29 Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on inner qualities imparted by physical features is also important in a second respect. These affirm an idea implicit to Lavater’s physiognomy: that the face functioned as a mirror to the soul, whose moral qualities could be viewed as God-given.30 A similar avowal of the idea of God in nature is made by Wollstonecraft in the conclusion to her review when she suggests, ‘whatever tends to make visible the wisdom of the Supreme Being in the world we inhabit, is of the utmost importance to our happiness’ (p. 55). Like Lavater, she recognises the ‘image of God in man’, and holds the belief that visible, natural and God-given bodily signs are a more reliable index to the human condition than their translation, or interpretation, into language.31 She sees the body as a visual system of communication that supersedes that of human language.32 However, while Lavater’s essentialist account of physiognomy subdivided humans into different classes, Wollstonecraft more generously asserts the primacy of the mind and passions as a reliable index marking the definitive qualities that characterise all of humanity. Smith’s account of physiognomy departs somewhat from the principles stressed by Wollstonecraft and, being more philosophical and naturalistic in its approach, does not highlight a spiritual relation between God and nature. None the less, his explanation of physiognomy was



146 Moi Rickman

formulated within a paradigm that corroborated Christian monogenism and explained human diversity in terms of environmental factors, such as the ‘climate’ and ‘state of society’. For Smith, the interaction of the mind and passions with the outside world was crucial to an understanding of physiognomy and the processes by which physiognomic variations were produced. There is, therefore, a significant difference in Smith’s and Wollstonecraft’s approach to, and application of, physiognomy. Wollstonecraft reads the physiognomic passions for, or as, signs of human affinities while Smith tends to focus on the function of the mind and passions in the production of physiognomy. Whereas Wollstonecraft takes a somewhat abstract view of the individual’s possession of passions as a sure sign of their humanity, without reference to the actual features of the face, Smith takes the end product – physiognomy – as evidence of the process of mind and its relation to the environment from which it emerged. If, as we have seen, physiognomy operates as an explanation of human variety, then Smith characterises the body as a fundamentally unstable entity. Indeed, as Scott Juengel suggests, The protean body that Smith assumes represents a kind of evolutionary narrative of man’s historical migrations away from an originary moment that was … white and civilized, and it is this plasticity that subtly threatens to deconstruct familiar cultural binaries.33 Smith’s conception of the malleability of the body prompts Juengel to argue that his theory represents one of the last models for thinking through race symbolically before the ascendancy of nineteenth-century racial biology. It seems evident, however, that Smith’s thesis pulls in two directions simultaneously. On the one hand, the adaptive body counters the fixed nature of race stressed in polygenetic theory, while, as Juengal says, the ‘implicit gradualism’ of his ‘racial historiography’ posits the possibility of human change and progress. But this potential adaptability resides in the realms of futurity and the unverifiable. Smith’s explication of physiognomy, on the other hand, acquires all the import of a biological account of race because what is being documented and described is human variation in its present state. The fluidity of the ‘protean body’ might threaten ‘familiar cultural binaries’, but physiognomy as a gauge of development and difference can be seen to substantiate these too. All humans, Smith argues, possess a ‘pliancy of nature’; they are not only adaptable but also susceptible to the influence of climate, which




in turn influences complexion. Regarding the features of the face he suggests, ‘all the features of the human countenance are modified, and its entire expression radically formed, by the state of society’. In fact, society is rendered in rather human terms and the particular emotions, habits, and ideas governing various states of society actually give rise to ‘alteration’ (p. 92). The operation of these factors on the body is articulated in Smith’s suggestion that: Every object that impresses the senses, and every emotion that rises in the mind, affects the features of the face the index of our feelings, and contributes to form the infinitely various countenance of man. (p. 80) The references to impressions, senses, emotion and mind, used here to describe the process by which the countenance is formed, clearly indicate that Smith’s knowledge of physiognomy was based upon a sensationalist model of the body. A model of this kind was formulated by the physician David Hartley, in his Observations on Man (1749). Hartley’s work provided a detailed sensationalist account of mind and described, through his doctrines of ‘vibrations’ and ‘association’, the manner in which the mind processed sensory data, or impressions, and how it gradually developed through its acquisition of ideas. By stressing the formative effects of the environment, a sensationalist paradigm suggested that human character and human behaviour were products of socialisation. It is precisely these principles that inform Wollstonecraft’s critique of female character in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The simpering ‘nothings of politeness’ that constitute the infantilised female state, she argues, are not natural but determined by social conditions and the ‘cruel association of ideas’. ‘Everything that [women] see or hear serves to fix impressions, call forth emotions, and associate ideas, that give a sexual character to the mind.’34 Smith, by contrast, invokes a sensationalist paradigm in order to illustrate the mind’s reciprocity with the environment and to describe, in naturalistic terms, the physical processes by which racial characteristics and physiognomies have developed through time.35 According to Smith, the external world interacts with the body by ‘impressing’ the senses, or the nervous system, which then sends sensory data to the mind, where ideas, habits and emotions, via the musculature of the face, contribute to the formation and expression of the countenance. The long-continued actions of the same causes gradually become assimilated by the body and are then transmitted through familial descent. To Smith these



148 Moi Rickman


Paucity of ideas creates a vacant and unmeaning aspect. Agreeable and cultivated scenes compose the features, and render them regular and gay. Wild, and deformed, and solitary forests tend to impress on the countenance, an image of their own rudeness. … The delicacies of a refined life give a soft and elegant form to the features. Hard fare, and constant exposure to the injuries of the weather, render them coarse and uncouth. The infinite attentions of polished society give variety and expression to the face. The want of interesting emotions leaving its muscles lax and unexerted, they are suffered to distend themselves to a larger and grosser size, and acquire a soft unvarying swell that is not distinctly marked by any idea. (pp. 80–1) According to Smith’s sensationalist thesis, then, the individual is a sensitive and responsive organism whose physiognomy is shaped by the environment. The experience of the individual and what passes through the mind determines the characteristics of the outward form. Underlying Smith’s explanation, however, is a fundamental opposition between the refined life of polished society, or civilisation, and the ‘hard fare’ of nature, which leads him to reason: Savages will have all that uniformity [of appearance] that arise[s] from vacancy of mind, and want of emotion. Knowledge is various, but ignorance is ever the same. A vacant eye, a fixed and unmeaning countenance of idiotism, seem to reduce the savage in his aspect many grades nearer … to the brute creation. (p. 127) On the one hand, it is the want of mental and emotional stimulus and response that renders: The mental capacities of savages … weaker than the capacities of men in civilized society. The powers of their minds, through defect of objects to employ them, lie dormant, and even become extinct. (p. 121) The same factors – a want of mental and emotional stimulus – also explain why the face of the ‘savage’ is ‘unexerted’ and why the ‘muscles are relaxed, [and] consequently spread at the sides … render[ing] the



processes account for the emergence and the visibility of human varieties as well as social classes. The intimate relation between the environment and physiognomy is indicated in Smith’s claim that:

middle of the face broad’ (p. 129). In effect, by applying the principles of a sensationalist paradigm to the inhabitants of hostile and remote habitats, Smith is led to conclude that the most depraved individuals on earth are ‘the Hottentots [who] seem to be a race by themselves. In their manners the most beastly, and in their persons and the faculties of their minds approaching the nearest to brutes of any of the human species’ (p. 144). In other words, the sheer poverty of existence experienced by the Hottentots diminishes their humanity to the extent that they very nearly occupy, according to Smith, a liminal classificatory status between humans and brutes. Smith’s account of racial physiognomy aligns a savage state of society with similar visual physiognomic attributes because he offers an interpretation of physiognomy that is derived from a specific valorisation of what constitutes intelligence, refinement, civility, beauty and even desirable physiognomic expression. Specifically, his sensationalist account of body and mind gives priority and value to what he views as the favourable conditions of the stimulating cultures of Europe. It is notable that Wollstonecraft’s review tactfully avoids comment on Smith’s account of the Hottentots and also declines to elaborate on any form of physical or physiognomic description.36 She might provide copious quotations from his work to illustrate ‘the influence of the climate on the complexion’ and ‘the numerous effects of accidental circumstances’, the ‘reasons’ for ‘natural deformity’ of the features, but she glosses over the significance of human variation by summarising his thesis as follows: Various capricious national prejudices with respect to beauty are produced as concomitant causes, which all tend to prove that, generally speaking, similar modes of life and pursuits assimilate the human form and features. (p. 53) Equally significant is the way that Wollstonecraft carefully extracts, and thereby chooses to emphasise, Smith’s stress on humanity’s potential to improve morally and physically and the fact that ‘the state of society has a great effect’. Like his other propositions, this bears the authority of truth because, as Wollstonecraft notes, it is derived from empirical observation. ‘His residence in America facilitated his researches and gives weight to his conclusions, as he reasons from experience’ (p. 52). To illustrate ‘the power of society’ Smith had drawn attention to the visible differences to be found between domestic servants and field slaves who were ‘badly fed, clothed, and lodged’. He also maintained that the



150 Moi Rickman

acculturation of the ‘savage’ into civil society, especially if accompanied by the benefits of education, would bring improvements to the savage mind and also an improvement to the countenance. Wollstonecraft clearly found these ideas compelling and it is a line of thought that is briefly pursued by her in A Vindication, notably in her chapter ‘On National Education’ in which she considers physiognomic beauty. The ‘fair assemblage’ is not brought about by chance, as education and ‘moral’ causes, she suggests, necessarily enhance the countenance, ‘or beauty will be merely of that rustic kind which blooms on the innocent, wholesome, countenances of some country people, whose minds have not been exercised’.37 Wollstonecraft’s language, unlike that employed by Smith, remains relatively neutral and non-judgemental regarding physiognomic differences. She merely recapitulates the idea that the forces of the environment and the nature of mental exercise variously combine to produce the physical and moral beauty of the ‘fairest features’ as well as the rustic simplicity of country people. Smith’s arguments regarding education and ‘the power of society’ to effect improvements, however, were not always consistent or supported by the evidence he produced. That Wollstonecraft chose to ‘pass’ over this detail is not surprising, but her disconcertion at Smith’s apparent inconsistency is perhaps registered when she remarks: After observing that ‘the impressions of education, which singly taken are scarcely discernible, ultimately produce the greatest difference between men in society’, he proceeds to point out exceptions which seem to contradict the general principles which he had before endeavoured to give weight to. (p. 54) She alludes, perhaps, to a story Smith told in his Essay of a ‘young Indian’, brought to America ‘to receive an education’ in the College of New Jersey, whose ‘differences’, he had suggested, were ‘sensibly diminishing’. They seem the faster to diminish in proportion as he loses that vacancy of eye, and that lugubrious wildness of countenance peculiar to the savage state, and acquires the agreeable expression of civil life. The expression of the eye, and the softening of the features to civilized emotions and ideas, seems to have removed more than half the difference between him and us. (p. 96) The proposition of rapid human adaptation was greeted sceptically, to say the least, as is evident in the ridicule expressed by the critic in the




Monthly Review: ‘[Dr Smith] affirms, that the native blacks in America mend their colour, features, and hair, in every generation’. But it would be more correct, the reviewer insists, if ‘ “for mend, read degenerate:” – and, “for hair, read wool” ’.38 Despite Smith’s ‘conviction that the same state of society, united with the same climate, would make the Anglo-American and the Indian countenance nearly approximate’, he had to admit that the process was not entirely complete. Civilisation might remove ‘half the difference’ but, since the physiognomical argument was circular and the differences in outward form necessarily referred back to the quality of the mind that created them, the face as an index of mind and feeling still revealed, or rather betrayed, traces of a brutish state. As Smith stresses: The body and mind have such mutual influence, that whatever contributes to change the human constitution in its form or aspect, has an equal influence on its powers of reason and genius. And these have again a reciprocal effect in forming the countenance. (p. 118) In other words, the countenance reveals those constitutional differences. Smith’s theory, as well as confirming ‘the unity of the human race’ by ‘explaining the causes of its variety’, tends also to exemplify its constitutional divergences that are perpetuated through hereditary lineages of human varieties (p. 165). Moreover, his suggestion that it has taken ten centuries to polish the manners of Europe, and probably the same to form the countenance and figure of the body, has something of a compounding effect (p. 43). The component of time not only exacerbates the idea of a moral and physical extreme between ‘savage’ and civilised societies, it indicates the formation of differential developments that are marked by a seemingly unbridgeable void of one thousand years.39 In effect, although Smith upholds a Christian version of human history, his naturalistic theory of human development, his articulation of environmental determinism and the ensuing diversity of human constitution, tends to transform his argument of monogenism into one that was more compatible with the later Darwinian idea of subspecies, and easily transferable to a naturalistic version of polygenism. So, how plausible are Wollstonecraft’s allusions to ‘fellow-feeling’ and in what sense does a similarity of minds and like passions tie men to their species? Smith and Wollstonecraft, it could be argued, appear to be following diametrically opposed arguments, the mind and passions indicating on the one hand a unifying premise, and on the other, agents of organic change, as they were understood within a sensationalist



152 Moi Rickman

paradigm. In their varying responses to racial thought, however, these writers illustrate the diverse modes of explanation and the complexity of the spectrum of ideas being deployed by proponents of monogenism. By respectively drawing on common affinities and explaining the causes of variety they defend Christianity, maintain the unity of the species, and respond to the dire social implications of the fixed nature of human varieties proposed by polygenists. Smith’s ‘rational conclusion’ on this point is quoted quite extensively by Wollstonecraft: The science of morals would be absurd; the law of nature and nations would be annihilated; no general principles of human conduct, of religion, or of policy could be framed; for, human nature … could not be comprehended in any system.40 Given Smith’s rendition of the impoverished and subhuman nature of the ‘savage’, it is unclear quite how they might be comprehended within a system. None the less, monogenism functions to remove the chaos and discord that a polygenist thesis would introduce to understandings of religion, morality, law and social policy. More importantly, it renders human nature as something that is knowable through fellow-feeling, through similarities of mind, and the possession of ‘like passions’. It is in this respect that Smith’s Essay is reassuring to Wollstonecraft who optimistically concludes: If the arguments and facts stated in this volume are found conclusive, vague conjectures will, of course, melt before them, prove to be mere vapours of the brain that light quickly disperses – and harmony will again be apparent in the works of God. (p. 55) Throughout Wollstonecraft’s review, however, there is a certain tension in her complicity with Smith and a sensationalist paradigm that simultaneously verifies the unifying possession of ‘fellow-feeling’ but which, by viewing the body as an impersonal product of nature and circumstance, indicates the means by which it becomes differentiated. It is a tension that registers Wollstonecraft’s awareness of the problem of the gendered nature of sensibility for women and exemplifies what Nancy Stepan has described in ‘Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science’.41 The review illustrates, in this respect, a sensitivity to the way ideas of race can become adapted to gender and how the categories of race and gender are also mutually constructed, and mutually re-enforcing, within a sensationalist paradigm. Sensibility, in every sense, can be seen




as a site of conflict and contestation where competing interpretations of the body, of nature, of race and gender, vie for authority. Responding to this, Wollstonecraft’s review is revealing for the selective detail it extracts from Smith’s Essay and the manner of its presentation, the cautious and only fleeting acknowledgement of his claim that the vacant mind and countenance of the savage were related to the nature and variety of thought and emotion. Similarly, any engagement with the physical body and the legible detail inscribed on the human countenance is carefully avoided. The review is even more revealing in the textual emphasis it places on the unity of the species, the refutation of polygenism, the factors and processes that induce bodily changes, the human potential for improvement, and most importantly, its intensification of the mind and passions. The conflict and tensions of racial difference, and those of gender too, are inflected through the language of sensibility and Wollstonecraft’s humanitarian appeal to ‘fellow-feeling’, the ‘essentially democratic acknowledgement of a common nature’,42 that ties ‘humans to their species by the strongest of all relations’. Imaginatively and intuitively she responds to the eighteenth-century classificatory ethos by reconciling the ‘extremities of the social chain’ and re-asserting the universal relations between minds and bodies that affirm the essential bonds of kinship.43

Notes 1. The Analytical Review was a liberal publication, covering literature, politics, philosophy, religion and science, and aimed to review ‘foreign publications, insufficiently noted in other periodicals’. See Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler’s ‘Prefatory Note’, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1989), VII, p. 14. 2. With Todd and Butler, I would agree that the reviews initialled ‘M’, ‘W’ and ‘T’ are characteristic of Mary Wollstonecraft’s writing. Also, this particular review, like other contributions to the Analytical, illustrates ‘evidence of her stylistic characteristics and dominant opinions – echoes of phrases and images’ as well as ‘ideas’ that are deployed through the language of sensibility and typify her egalitarian politic. For further detail, see Todd and Butler’s ‘Prefatory Note’ to the Works, VII, p. 14. 3. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in Works, V, p. 51. 4. Moira Ferguson, Colonialism and Gender Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 9. 5. Of particular interest are the works of Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); and Felicity Nussbaum’s The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).



154 Moi Rickman

6. Mitzi Myers, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Literary Reviews’, in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 82. 7. Wollstonecraft’s opinions and responses in regard to racial thought emerge in her reviews of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative; Le Vaillant’s New Travels into the Interior Parts of Africa; and a revealing response to slavery is given in a review of Joseph Lavall’s The Negro Equalled by Few Europeans. More generally, however, Wollstonecraft’s comprehensive understanding and response to racial thought is articulated in many contexts where her reviews consider, for instance, travel writing – factual and fictional, accounts of morality, natural history, physiognomy, and also human nature, as in her review of Mammuth; or Human Nature Displayed. All of the above can be found in volume VII of Works. 8. Londa Schiebinger, ‘The Anatomy of Difference: Race and Sex in Eighteenth-Century Science’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 23 (1989), p. 388. 9. Scott Juengel has traced the influence of Smith’s explanation of physiognomy into Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. In the Letters she adopts Smith’s historical, environmental thesis and ‘attempts to understand racial and cultural difference in physiognomic terms’. Juengel rightly emphasises the advancing nature of Smith’s account human nature and perfectibility which is in accordance with Wollstonecraft’s progressive ethic. My reading of Smith, on the other hand, also indicates the considerable ambivalence of sensationalist, developmental theory, which Wollstonecraft tends to obscure in her review. See Scott Juengel, ‘Countenancing History: Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Enlightenment Racial Science’, ELH, 68 (2001), 897–929. 10. Lucy Hartley, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) p. 4. Hartley offers an excellent discussion of the development of physiognomic thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 11. Johann Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy; for the Promotion of the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind, trans. and ed. Thomas Holcroft, 3 vols (London: G. G. & J. Robinson, 1789), p. 19. 12. As Lucy Hartley observes, ‘the idea is that these classifications mark out a hierarchy of description whereby animality is linked above all to the function and structure of the whole human body and provides the lowest order of description, morality is found in the motions of the heart and is the middle order of description, and the intellect corresponds to the head and is the highest order of description’. Hartley, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression, p. 34. 13. Robert Bernasconi, ‘Editor’s Note’, Concepts of Race in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Robert Bernasconi, 8 vols (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001), VI, p. v. 14. Bernasconi, Concepts of Race, VI, p.vii. 15. Hannah Augstein, Race, The Origins of an Idea, 1760–1850 (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996), p. 56. 16. Bernasconi’s ‘Editor’s Note’, Concepts of Race, VI, p. v. 17. Bernasconi, Concepts of Race, VI, p. vii. 18. Although monogenism and polygenism were often framed within a religious paradigm, as single or multiple creations, naturalistic accounts of polygenism




19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

within medicine were being proposed in the first half of the eighteenth century. See Norris Saakwa-Mante, ‘Western Medicine and Racial Constitutions’, in Race, Science and Medicine, 1700–1960, ed. Waltraud Ernst and Bernard Harris (London: Routledge, 1999). Kaimes’s refutation of climatic and environmental factors in regard to human variety was, as Robert Wokler has suggested, also a response to Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle and Sketches, in this respect, points to the inconsistencies of Buffon’s argument – the fact that environmental influences did not produce consistent moral or physical variation and was, therefore, not its cause. See Wokler’s ‘Apes and Races in the Scottish Enlightenment: Monboddo and Kames on the Nature of Man’, in Philosophy and Science in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Peter Jones (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988), p. 153. Henry Home, Lord Kaimes, quoted by Samuel Stanhope Smith, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species. To Which are Added, Strictures on Lord Kames’s Discourse on the Original Diversity of Mankind (1787), reprinted in Concepts of Race, VI, p. 195. Subsequent references will be given in the main body of the text. Mary Wollstonecraft, Analytical Review, 2 (1788), in Works, VII, p. 50. Subsequent references will be given in the main body of the text. Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 3. Scott Juengel, ‘Countenancing History’, p. 907. Ann Jessie Van Sant has suggested how writers used an ambivalent language and often conflated old and new models of the body in their writings. Wollstonecraft does this through her reference to the sensationalist language of a vibrating sensory nervous system and an older association of the heart with emotion and feeling. Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 14. ‘Compassionating’ is a term Wollstonecraft uses in a review of Mammuth; or Human Nature Displayed on a Grand Scale, by ‘the Man in the Moon’. Writers considering human nature, she argues, should adopt a ‘compassionating’ position rather than evoke the ‘painful sensation of disgust’ found in ‘Swift’s caricature pictures’. See Works, VII, p. 104. Wollstonecraft’s stress on the significance of the passions is a common feature in reviews where she engages with racial thought. The passage, quoted above, is also echoed in her review of Mammuth, ‘a trite, but just remark, ought never to be lost sight of, that there is a uniform variety in the numerous modifications of human passions’. See Works, VII, p. 105. Samuel Stanhope Smith recapitulating the argument presented by Kaimes, Essay, p. 141. Henry Home, Lord Kaimes, Elements of Criticism (1762), quoted in F. Price, ‘Imagining Faces: The Later Eighteenth-Century Sentimental Heroine and the Legible, Universal Language of Physiognomy’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 6 (1983), 7. Stanhope Smith, Essay, p. 141. Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘The Art and Science of Seeing in Medicine: Physiognomy 1780–1820’, Medicine and the Five Senses, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 124. Christopher Rivers, Face Value (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), p. 79.



156 Moi Rickman

32. Rivers, Face Value, p. 82. 33. Juengel, ‘Countenancing History’, p. 906. 34. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), ed. Carol H. Poston (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1988), p. 117. 35. Although Smith makes many references to a sensationalist model of the body, he does not reveal the source of the theory he was utilising. 36. Smith’s account of the Hottentots was hardly sympathetic and Wollstonecraft’s lack of redress in her review is surprising given the views she expresses elsewhere. In her review of Le Vaillant’s New Travels into the Interior Parts of Africa, in particular, Wollstonecraft commends the author’s ‘humane plan’ and his endeavour to avoid ‘hear-say’ and present ‘what he saw with his own eyes’. Through faithful representation the work ‘wipe[s] off part of the odium thrown on the character of the Hottentots’ and presents its subject ‘with the distinctive characteristics of man’. Again, Wollstonecraft’s references to the passions, – the ‘just and affectionate’ nature of the Hottentots, ‘affectionate inhabitants’, the possession of ‘moral sensibility’, the ‘moral character of the inhabitants’, – are abundant in the review and function to underline the humanity of a population commonly considered as ‘part of the brute creation’. See Works, VII, p. 479. 37. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 171. 38. Monthly Review, 80 (1789), 185. 39. Wollstonecraft also invokes the idea of differential developments when contemplating the impact of the social disadvantages faced by women who are denied the benefits of education: ‘who can tell, how many generations may be necessary to give vigour to the virtue and talents of the freed posterity of abject slaves?’ Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘Animadversions on Some Writers’, Vindication, p. 77. 40. Samuel Stanhope Smith, quoted by Wollstonecraft in Works, VII, p. 54. See also Smith’s Essay, p. 54. 41. Nancy Leys Stepan, ‘Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science’, in Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 42. Chris Jones, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindications and their Political Tradition’, in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, p. 45. 43. Mary Wollstonecraft, from a review of Mammuth; or Human Nature displayed on a grand Scale, in Works, VII, p. 105.




Hannah More and Conservative Feminism Harriet Guest

The life and work of Hannah More have been the focus of extensive and energetic debate in the last fifteen years or so, culminating most recently in Anne Stott’s fine biography, Hannah More: The First Victorian (2003). As Stott points out, More is a complex and contradictory figure, who has attracted both harsh condemnation for her political conservatism and anti-feminism and qualified celebration for her ‘counter-revolutionary feminism’, argued for most subtly and persuasively by Kathryn Sutherland and Mitzi Myers,1 and most militantly, most explicitly as an opportunity to counteract what she identifies as ‘a theoretical tradition grounded on Marxist or left-wing socialist ideologies’, by Anne Mellor.2 Stott’s scholarly biography builds on the work of Myers and Sutherland to develop a portrait of More that acknowledges the restrictive implications and effects of her conservatism, but emphasises the extent to which she encouraged middle-class women to ‘dip their toes into public life, to campaign, to organize, to develop expertise’.3 Stott ably explores the complexity of More’s position, in enabling labouring men and women carefully controlled access to education and the means of social advancement, and in promoting socially marginalised women to positions of local influence and authority, while affirming the value of a rigidly differentiated social order which resisted mobility and depended on the social and educational privation of women and the working class. What emerges powerfully from these re-examinations and rehabilitations of More is the sense that a kind of conservatism could work to empower women, to improve their social conditions and open up, through ameliorative strategies of moral reform and philanthropy, what Stott characterises as ‘a different type of public activity’, a progress marked by More’s ‘innovatory excursion[s] into the public sphere’.4 More becomes the figurehead for a feminism that promotes the interests 158 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


10

of women within and not as a threat to the existing social order, a feminism that may even see the consolidation of existing social inequalities as a price worth paying, an acceptable entrance fee. This provides a context within which, Sutherland argues, it is possible to recognise that More works ‘to sever the masculinist rhetoric of late eighteenth-century popular democracy from its revolutionary roots and to appropriate it, through acts of female domestic management, to the purposes of middleclass liberal reform’.5 This is an argument which builds on the tension running through More’s Tracts. On the one hand, they suggest More’s eye for detail and pleasure in the quotidian, her thorough and ambiguously pleasurable immersion in cheap literature, and they imply the centrality of women and domestic life to the project of national reform. On the other, they articulate a conservative politics that confines those they address to participation in private or domestic life as a result of their gender and/or class; a politics that prohibits them from conceiving of themselves as political citizens who might have a voice in determining the direction of reform.6 The rehabilitated image of More brings into sharp focus a problem central to the development of feminism in the 1790s. For while most women writers more or less explicitly represent the condition of women as the key to the moral and political condition of the national culture, More’s emphasis on the value of feminine containment to the local and particular is controversial. Charlotte Smith’s novels of the 1790s, for example, are bitingly satirical about the narrow conceptual and emotional focus of women deprived of the means to liberal education or political self-conception. In The Banished Man (1794), the character of the hero’s mother is a satire on the feminine ideal which More was to celebrate in her Strictures of 1799 in the figure of the good housewife. Smith writes that Lady Ellesmere is ‘indifferent … to what passed at a distance’, but ‘in the scene immediately near her she took the liveliest interest’. Her son is dismayed by ‘her attachment to insignificant things and insignificant people’, her interest in local gossip, which is compared to the situation of ‘prisoners long accustomed to darkness’, who learn to ‘distinguish objects around them’ without light, ‘and feel an interest in the habits of the animals or reptiles that inhabit their dungeon’. She weeps when he leaves for France, but he comments that ‘She has not a mind capable of figuring what she never saw’; if she did, ‘the most terrific drawings would soon be erased by the home scenes around her; and she would think more of what had happened at the next market town. Such is the effect of living always in a narrow circle, without any change of ideas’.7 She epitomises, then, that notion of femininity as characterised



Hannah More and Conservative Feminism 159

by a myopic focal range and a capacity to sympathise only with suffering that can be seen and felt, rather than merely imagined, or conceived of in the explicitly political discourses available to her son. She is curious about her neighbours, and subjects them to intense and detailed scrutiny, but her situation has made her incapable of surveying the world beyond. What in Lady Ellesmere are represented as passive inadequacies become positive evils in the characters of the malevolently conservative elderly women who haunt Smith’s novels, and oppress more liberal characters through bigotry and prejudice diffused in networks of gossip and rumour. In The Young Philosopher (1798), for example, the older woman who is the malicious cause of many of the misfortunes that overwhelm the principal characters is represented, perhaps with a glance at the reputation of More herself, as reinforced in her fear and loathing of liberal opinion by the support of a sycophantic methodistical minister as narrowminded as herself.8 More also expressed disquiet at some implications of the limitations of femininity, such as the restricted scope of women’s charity, but on the whole she endorses feminine pragmatism, and values the capacity to ‘excel in [the] details’ of domestic management and local business, which underpins her reformist programme.9 She celebrates the conventions of gender difference that determine that ‘A woman sees the world, as it were, from a little elevation in her own garden, whence she makes an exact survey of home scenes, but takes not in that wider range of distant prospects, which he who stands on a loftier eminence commands.’10 It is this positive assessment of feminine immersion in home scenes that some critics have seen as empowering, because it was in a local context that More was able and willing to help some women, such as those appointed to teach in the Mendip schools, to achieve a degree of social mobility that might not otherwise have been available to them. Stott concludes, for example, that the teacher Sarah Baber ‘was consistently described throughout her short but momentous association with the Mores in terms that undermined existing hierarchies of class, gender, and clerical status, and make nonsense of assertions that Hannah More was a blinkered and dogmatic supporter of patriarchy’.11 The patronage More exercised through schools is an example of the kind of practical work in the local community she saw as appropriate to feminine philanthropy, and which, along with innovatory excursions into the public sphere, has led to her reassessment as a major contributor to the progress of feminism within middle-class liberal reform. I have argued elsewhere that, particularly in her Strictures of 1799, More understands the extent of women’s influence on public life to depend on their



160 Harriet Guest

acceptance of confinement to ‘home scenes’ and local detail.12 In this essay I want to explore the implications of this restriction in the personal reflections of her letters of the late 1780s and early 1790s, and to consider the relation between the discomfort More expresses there, and the politics of her essay, Remarks on the Speech of M. Dupont (1793). More writes to John Newton in a letter of November 1787 about the pleasure she takes in the ‘picturesque scenery’ of her seclusion in the ‘perfect little hermitage’ of Cowslip Green: The care of my garden gives me employment, health, and spirits. I want to know, dear Sir, if it is peculiar to myself to form ideal plans of perfect virtue, and to dream of all manner of imaginary goodness in untried circumstances, while one neglects the immediate duties of one’s actual situation? Do I make myself understood? I have always fancied that if I could secure to myself such a quiet retreat as I have now really accomplished, that I should be wonderfully good; that I should have leisure to store my mind with such and such maxims of wisdom; that I should be safe from such and such temptations; that in short my whole summers would be smooth periods of peace and goodness. Now the misfortune is, I have actually found a great deal of the comfort I expected, but without any of the concomitant virtues.13 In his reply Newton confesses, in a rather ambiguous gesture of consolation, that he might dream of a life of rural seclusion like More’s if God had not chosen ‘public services’ in London for him, and then reminds her that divine providence makes ‘all places and circumstances … nearly equal’ (Memoirs, II, pp. 90–1). As Stott points out, in her thoughtful treatment of More’s choice of a ‘new direction’ in these years, Newton’s advice and influence were important in shaping More’s evangelical faith, and in directing her towards the impressively active philanthropic role she undertook.14 But More’s sense of dissatisfaction, I think, exceeds the guidelines he provides for its containment. More’s unusual hesitation and uncertainty – ‘do I make myself understood?’ – and the opposition she perceives between enjoying her ‘perfect little hermitage’ and forming ‘ideal plans of perfect virtue’, suggest a degree of ambition and of dissatisfaction with the limited prospects afforded by ‘a little elevation in her own garden’, which approximates surprisingly to the chafing against narrow and occluded circumstances that informs the political energy of Smith, Hays or Wollstonecraft. More suggests that her garden should provide a context in which she can be ‘wonderfully good’, but she comes to the conclusion,




within a few sentences, that gardening is a hindrance to virtue, and stands ‘in the room of a vice’ because of the ‘entire dominion it has over my mind’; she identifies it as a potential source of impiety. For a moment, More sounds a little like Mr Fantom, the ‘New fashioned Philosopher’ satirised in her moral tract, who despises the ‘narrow field’ of local and practical philanthropy in favour of ideal schemes of ‘universal benevolence’ which will ‘make all mankind good and happy’.15 More’s evangelicism leads her to aspire to a thorough and transforming experience of conversion – something she never felt she achieved – which will result in a commitment to good works, and at the same time her faith demands a confident dependence in the dispensations of providence.16 The expression of ambition, and yet the distrust of her own neediness, her restlessness, might be read in the context of these dual characteristics of her faith. But the language of piety intersects with discourses on gender and politics, and the implications of those may pull her in directions which diverge from the clear imperatives of faith. After the publication of her Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World in 1791, More corresponds with Newton again on the conflict between ambition and modest self-abnegation that its success prompts. When Newton has inadvertently identified her as the author of the anonymous text, she explains that ‘Though almost every body knows who wrote that pert little book’, she had not wanted to talk of it in public, because ‘Neither my sex, my abilities, nor my conduct are such as fully to justify me in my own eyes for the things which I attempt, merely because others better qualified will not do it’ (Memoirs, II, p. 257).17 She takes pride in her publications, but it is a pride complicated by feminine modesty and self-abjection. Later that summer she complains to him that: ‘I feel I do nothing, and the motives of my best actions (I use that epithet only comparatively) are not pure; some human mixtures, some debasing alloys enter into those things which appear to others the most right. I am anxious about events which yet I know and acknowledge to be in higher hands; I do not bend my own to the divine will, and feel an impatience under such dispensations as are against my liking’ (Memoirs, II, p. 277). Her sense of restless dissatisfaction with herself, the sense that she needs to do something, may endorse her ambition to participate in public life in print, but is at odds with the acquiescence demanded by the dispensations of providence; and that tension, that sense that her duty pulls her in incompatible directions, is frequently focused in her notions of the characteristics of her gender. Her gendered identity requires acceptance of the limitations of her situation, but is also expressed in what she represents both as a kind of restless impatience or ambition, and pious aspiration.



162 Harriet Guest

On her refusal to read Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of 1792, More writes to Horace Walpole that she finds the notion of women’s rights ‘fantastic and absurd’, and she explains that ‘so many women are fond of government, I suppose, because they are not fit for it … [T]here is perhaps no animal so much indebted to subordination for its good behaviour, as woman.’ But her belief in this need to be kept down – expressed in her assertion that ‘I am sure I have as much liberty as I can make use of, now I am an old maid, and when I was a young one, I had, I dare say, more than was good for me’ – emerges as a form of impatience or aggression. She acknowledges, perhaps boasts, that ‘I used horridly to provoke some of my female friends, maitresses femmes’, by advocating the subordination of women, especially such heroic spirits as poor Mrs. Walsingham. I believe they used to suspect me of art in it, as if I wanted to court the approbation of the other sex, who, it must be confessed, politically encourage this submissive temper in us; but I really maintained the opinion in sincerity and simplicity, both from what I felt at home, and have seen abroad. She relishes the memory of provoking other women, which she justifies by the strangely indirect tactic of denying that her opinion was intended to gain male approval. This tactic provides her with an opportunity to provoke Walpole himself, who probably would not have agreed that the suppression of women was merely a matter of policy (Memoirs, II, 371–2). In a more serious vein, she represents her restlessness in a letter of 1794 to Wilberforce as an indication of her inadequate confidence in divine mercy, acknowledging that ‘here I suspect my natural temper comes in; doubt and fear being my governing principles in common life. My very desire after that perfection, for which I trust I am labouring, proceeds too much from impatience and self-love’ (Memoirs, II, p. 409). Her impatience, the irritability of her ambition, is reminiscent of the gendered tendency to be ‘unstable and capricious’ which she disparages as ‘but too characteristic of our sex’ in the letter on Wollstonecraft, and while she represents these as qualities that need to be checked, and that account for the shortcomings of her work, her letters also suggest that they animate her aspirations and ambitions (Memoirs, II, p. 371). The limited ‘home scenes’ of the garden offer modest contentment and freedom from the wayward desires and restlessness More distrusts, but ambition also produces the sense of doing something, even if it is only provoking her friends.




In More’s letters the tension between acceptance of the providential lot and restless ambition or dissatisfaction is represented as a matter of her ‘natural temper’, of personal unease which finds appropriately private and confessional expression. I have suggested that this unease coincides with the tension central to More’s conception of feminine identity, which involves the difficult alliance of immersion in the local and detailed, the limited landscape of the garden, and ambitions of greater scope, desires which make the garden look like the setting for the blinkered and complacent apathy that characterised Smith’s Lady Ellesmere. In More’s interventions in political debate in the early 1790s, however, that tension becomes polarised, and much more obviously problematic, as I think emerges most clearly in a comparison of the way More and other more liberal women writers represent the relation of the private individual to the nation-state. Anna Barbauld, for example, in her Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation, published as a Discourse for the fast appointed on April 19, 1793, argued that though private individuals are usually ‘bound to acquiesce’ in national decisions, it can also be ‘incumbent on us to remonstrate’ because Every good man owes it to his country and to his own character, to lift his voice against a ruinous war, an unequal tax, or an edict of persecution: and to oppose them, temperately, but firmly, by all the means in his power; and indeed this is the only way reformations can ever be brought about, or that government can enjoy the advantage of general opinion.18 More advanced a similar claim for the intervention of private individuals in public debate in her Remarks on the Speech of M. Dupont, published on 1 April 1793. She introduced her ‘Prefatory Address to the Ladies of Great Britain’ with a brief justification of her ‘hardiness’ in publishing in her own name and as a ‘private individual’, arguing that the ‘present emergency’ is ‘so extraordinary, that all lesser motives of delicacy ought to vanish’ before it. She seems about to encourage ladies to engage in political debate and activity, but the form of participation she encourages is supportive rather than critical. She concludes that it is the responsibility of private individuals to ‘pray for the success’ of their country, and conjures ‘the meanest among us who remain at home’ to ‘contribute to the internal safety of his country, by the integrity of his private life’.19 For Barbauld, in her polemical writing of the 1790s, the relation between the private individual and public politics is defined by what Anne Janowitz represents as the ‘continuum of the domestic and the 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


164 Harriet Guest

public’ following the ‘two pathways of print culture and the quasi-public sociality of congregational worship’.20 In the second of her Civic Sermons of 1792, Barbauld represents this continuum both as a progress from childhood to adulthood, and as a journey from the familial home, through the local neighbourhood, and on to ‘the great Ocean’ that borders the country in every direction. The familial home is the most spatially limited of these stages, but it is temporally linked by affection and obligation ‘through all generations in a lengthening and perpetual chain’. The neighbourhood is familiarised by experience, but also by the customs generations share, as the growing child joins the ‘old men of the parish’ in walking the bounds. The state is first conceived of through a possible physical progress in which the maturing child might ‘travel … East and West, and North and South’, and then as a possession which ‘you must stretch your imagination to conceive properly’, though it continues to depend on ‘a most intimate and binding connection, like a limb to a body’.21 The idea of the country, Barbauld suggests, is affectively powerful because it is rooted in ‘early pleasures, and tender recollections’; but that affect is superseded by an impassioned sense of identification with its ideal unity which guarantees that though ‘in yourselves you are obscure … in your Country you are celebrated’.22 Barbauld’s sermon develops Burke’s account, in his Reflections on the Revolution (1790), of the relation between domestic and national feeling as a journey: ‘We begin our public affections in our families. No cold relation is a zealous citizen. We pass on to our neighbourhoods, and our habitual provincial connections. These are our inns and resting-places.’ For Barbauld, imaginative love of country supersedes local attachment, whereas for Burke affection for what is familiar extends to the nation through a process of synecdoche or representation, as the local provides ‘so many little images of the great country in which the heart found something which it could fill’. Barbauld’s account suggests that imaginative identification with the idea of the nation is a characteristic of maturity, whereas in Burke’s argument the attractions of ‘little images’ suggest a more implicit or indirect relation to the idea of the country, but both emphasise that national attachment is rooted in the affective power of local detail. More’s pamphlet also uses the idea of the journey as an analogy for the process by which private individuals may come to understand themselves in relation to their country. She writes of those in power in France (and perhaps also their British sympathisers): In the crude speculations of these rash reformists, few obstructions occur. It is like taking a journey, not on a road, but on a map. Difficulties are unseen, or are kept in the back-ground. Impossibilities 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan



are smothered, or rather they are not suffered to be born. Nothing is felt but the ardour of enterprize, nothing is seen but the certainty of success. Whereas if difficulties grow out of sober experiment, the disappointments attending them generate humility; the failures inseparable from the best concerted human undertakings, serve at once to multiply resources, and to excite self-distrust. (Remarks, pp. 288–9) More appeals to the familiar opposition between the supposed revolutionary faith in abstractions, and the empirical realities favoured by conservatives – to Burke’s argument that ‘citizens are interested from old prejudices and unreasoned habits’ in their province and thus their nation. Her image of the map alludes to Burke’s criticisms of the arbitrary departements in which he claimed the revolutionaries believed ‘all local ideas should be sunk’, though, he argued, ‘No man ever was attached by a sense of pride, partiality, or real affection, to a description of square measurement’.23 In More’s argument, however, the opposition between reformers dedicated to abstraction, and conservatives concerned with experimental difficulties, does not appeal directly to Burkean affective patriotism. It is perhaps more obviously a gendered opposition. More’s map-readers are reminiscent of Wollstonecraft’s professional man, who ‘has his eye steadily fixed on some future advantage (and the mind gains great strength by having all its efforts directed to one point)’. This man, ‘when he undertakes a journey, has, in general, the end in view’, whereas More’s conservatives resemble Wollstonecraft’s female traveller, who ‘thinks more of the incidental occurrences, the strange things that may possibly occur on the road’. More’s feminised road-user is not anxious, like Wollstonecraft’s woman, to ‘produce a sensation’ at the end of her journey, but she is similar in her self-absorption, her concern with the self-distrust generated by the difficulties and failures incidental to the journey, which lead Wollstonecraft to conclude, ‘Can dignity of mind exist with such trivial cares?’24 More’s argument, however, complicates the contrast between the conservative or feminine preoccupation with detail, and the abstract speculations of revolutionaries. For her, reformers are characterised by a pathological feminine sensibility which leads them off the road, despite their maps. They are ‘wild and infatuated wanderers … pursuing to their destruction’ ideals which are dismissed as a ‘meteor raised by the vapours of vanity’ leading them ‘over dreary wilds and sinking bogs’ (Remarks, p. 284). More also adopts the familiar image of the constitution as a building, which reformers attempt to demolish – work for which she argues ‘the most ignorant labourer is



166 Harriet Guest

competent’, though its construction requires ‘the patient industry of the workman’ who builds by carrying out the plans formulated by ‘the skill of the architect’ (Remarks, p. 289). In contrast to the feminine docility of the road user, More characterises ‘rash reformists’ in terms of the feminised restlessness and insatiable desire of the appetitive modern subject. Developing Burke’s claim that ‘A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views’,25 she identifies in reformers ‘A mind continually driven out in quest of presumptuous novelties, [which] is commonly a mind void of real resources within, and incapable of profiting from observation without’ (Remarks, p. 288). She argues that the revolution was undertaken ‘not upon the broad basis of a wise and well-digested scheme, of which all the parts should contribute to the perfection of one consistent whole … but with the most extravagant lust of power, with the most inordinate vanity which perhaps ever instigated human measures’ (Remarks, pp. 286–7). The wise scheme, however, is not available to More’s patient road users, struggling with ‘disappointments’ which ‘generate humility’ and ‘self-distrust’ (Remarks, p. 288). They are not embarking on a journey which will lead to the kind of imaginative conception and love of their country enjoyed by Barbauld’s children, but are enmired in details which leave them entirely dependent on the wise directions of the architect, of the men who can conceive of them as parts of ‘one consistent whole’. Wollstonecraft, in her Vindication of 1792, suggested that the eminence from which society could be comprehended as a consistent whole was available to educated women, but that the clarity it offered was illusory: ‘the world cannot be seen by an unmoved spectator, we must mix in the throng, and feel as men feel before we can judge of their feelings’. Barbauld emphasised the value of the oppositional, critical view available from the marginal position of the private individual as a result of an effort of the imagination. For both, this involves qualified acceptance of the unsettling demands of modernity, as Wollstonecraft implies when she writes of descending from her height to feel myself hurried along the common stream; ambition, love, hope and fear exert their wonted power, though we be convinced by reason that their present and most attractive promises are only lying dreams; but had the cold hand of circumspection damped each generous feeling before it had left any permanent character, or fixed some habit, what could be expected, but selfish prudence and reason just rising above instinct?




This is a world of contingency and risk, where the desire to achieve some partial understanding involves pursuing an uncertain future, however fantastic or illusory the projection of it must be.26 More’s Remarks on the Speech of M. Dupont make what is for her an unusually extensive use of the tropes of landscape and journey, and it is a use which confirms that private individuals can grasp little beyond their immediate material circumstances, and must defer to wiser authorities whose perspective they cannot share. Their circumstances ‘excite self-distrust’ and ‘generate humility’; they promote the kind of cautious circumspection which Wollstonecraft dismisses with contempt. More’s sense of her own position in her letters is, I have suggested, more complex, for the wistful desire to pursue ‘ideal plans of perfect virtue’ which the letters repeatedly refer to does seem to find some expression in More’s prodigious publications, in situations which repeatedly allow her to claim that ‘all lesser motives of delicacy ought to vanish’. Recent critical reappraisals of conservative women have produced valuable results. We have become more ready to appreciate that these women made significant contributions to the development of feminism, even though they may not have advocated the rights of women, and their political agendas may be a good deal less appealing to many feminists than those of Mary Wollstonecraft and her associates and followers. It is much more possible, in the context of these reassessments, to recognise that Hannah More encouraged middle-class women to extend their activities and interests beyond the home as a result of her evangelical advocacy of practical piety and educational philanthropy. The More sisters created opportunities for working men and women to learn to read, and gave them access to a politicising print culture as well as to sacred texts and repository tracts, though they did so inadvertently and in the teeth of their own opposition. But the open-mindedness and careful neutrality of these reappraisals have, almost despite themselves, allowed More’s contribution to the emancipation of middle-class women to overshadow her repressive class politics, and to minimise her insistence on the subordination of women. The attempt to complicate our understanding of the development of feminism through an even-handed assessment of writers as different as More, Barbauld and Wollstonecraft should not elide the political differences between them, and should not conceal from us that our judgements of them are politically informed, and that we learn political lessons from them.

Notes 1. Kathryn Sutherland, ‘Hannah More’s Counter-Revolutionary Feminism’, in Revolution in Writing: British Literary Responses to the French Revolution, 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


168 Harriet Guest

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

ed. Kelvin Everest (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), I cite the title. See Myers’s pioneering essay, ‘Hannah More’s Tracts for the Times: Social Fiction and Female Ideology’, in Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670–1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), pp. 264–84. Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 15. Anne Stott, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), Preface, p. x. Stott, Hannah More, p. 260. Sutherland, ‘Hannah More’s Counter-Revolutionary Feminism’, p. 33. For an excellent discussion of the tracts, see the Introduction to Hannah More, Tales for the Common People and other Cheap Repository Tracts, ed. Clare MacDonald Shaw (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2002). Charlotte Smith, The Banished Man. A Novel, 4 vols (London: Cadell and Davies, 1794), II, pp. 111, 134, 132–3; III, pp. 46–7. See Elizabeth Kraft, ed., The Young Philosopher (Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 1999), IV, chapter 1. Nicola Watson writes of The Young Philosopher as ‘a novel which betrays the hopelessly beleaguered state of sentimental discourse at the end of the decade by systematically subjecting it to a simulacrum of conservative plotting’. See her Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 58–9. For further discussion, see Harriet Guest, ‘Suspicious Minds: Spies and Surveillance in Charlotte Smith’s Novels of the 1790s’, in Land, Nation, Culture, 1740–1840: Thinking the Republic of Taste, ed. Peter De Bolla, Nigel Leask and David Simpson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 169–87. More argues against this kind of limited charity, in, for example, her Thoughts on the Manners of the Great to General Society, in The Works of Hannah More, in Eight Volumes (London: Cadell and Davies, 1801), p. 56. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, 3rd edn, 2 vols (London: Cadell and Davies, 1799), II, p. 27. Stott, Hannah More, p. 163. See Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), chapter 11, ‘The Dream of a Common Language’, esp. p. 288. William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, 4 vols, 2nd edn (London: Seeley, 1834), II, pp. 87–8. Subsequent references to the Memoirs will be given in the main body of the text. Stott, Hannah More, p. 91, see chapter 4, ‘Zion’s City, 1780–1789’, passim. The History of Mr. Fantom, the New fashioned Philosopher, and his man William, Cheap Repository (London: Bath and Edinburgh, [1797?]), p. 8. On the belief that conversion results in good works, see Charles Daubeny, A Letter to Mrs Hannah More, on some part of her late publication, entitled ‘Strictures on Female Education’ (London: Hatchard, 1799). See Stott, Hannah More, p. 132. [Anna Barbauld], Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation: Or, A Discourse for the fast, appointed on April 19, 1793. By a Volunteer, 4th edn (London: J. Johnson, 1793), pp. 36–7.




19. Hannah More, Remarks on the Speech of M. Dupont, made in the National Convention of France, on the subjects of Religion and Public Education, with ‘A Prefatory Address to the Ladies, &c. of Great Britain, in behalf of the French Emigrant Clergy’ (1793), in The Works of Hannah More, in Eight Volumes, VI, pp. 265, 323. Subsequent references will be given in the main body of the text. See also Anne Stott, Hannah More, p. 148. Compare Frances Burney’s Brief Reflections Relative to the Emigrant French Clergy (London: T. Cadell, 1793). 20. Anne Janowitz, ‘Amiable and Radical Sociability: Anna Barbauld’s “free familiar conversation” ’, in Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 75. 21. Anna Barbauld, Civic Sermons to the People. Number II (London: J. Johnson, 1792), pp. 7–8. 22. Barbauld, Civic Sermons. Number II, p. 21. 23. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 315. 24. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston, 2nd edn (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1988), p. 60. 25. Burke, Reflections, p. 119. 26. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 112. On contingency and modernity, see T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 7–8.



170 Harriet Guest

Chawton House: Gathering Old Books for a New Library Isobel Grundy

This essay was originally given as a paper on an historic occasion: the opening of Chawton House Library. In that house Jane Austen was a poor relation – no matter how much cherished and honoured, still a poor relation. On that day in July 2003 she presided there, and around her were gathered her students and scholars (the conference delegates) and her constituents, the early women writers who without her would have had an even harder time making their way to rediscovery than they have. My topic is the nature of Chawton House Library, its value, its purpose. It seems worth situating this library of women’s books in a timeline of libraries, drawn largely from commentary on the Bodleian’s quartercentenary celebrations in 2002. It is now 5,000 years since writing was invented by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia. It is 1,800 years since the great library at Alexandria, repository of the world’s learning, was destroyed by fire – an event which most educated people have heard of. It is 1,000 years since a long-vanished library was established at the University of Timbuktu, with 2,500 students. And by that time, out on the world’s rim, there were also libraries in England: monastic libraries, and the first, pre-Bodleian university library at Oxford. All these dated from the days when books were manuscripts, when the West had not yet discovered print. That history brings us, 500 years ago, to movable print, and a mere 400 years ago to Sir Thomas Bodley.1 Bodley, to whom thousands besides myself owe an immeasurable and very personal debt of gratitude, opened his library on 8 November 1602 with about 2,000 books (well under half the present total of early texts in Chawton House Library). He intended it ‘for the benefit of posteritie’, as ‘a notable Treasure for the multitude of the volumes: an excellent benefit for the use and ease of students’.2 171 10.1057/9780230595972 - British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan


11

Those initial 2,000 books (which, unlike those of the older libraries, are not dust scattered to the winds but materially safe and sound and electronically catalogued) probably resembled their Timbuktu and Oxford predecessors in containing very little writing by women – perhaps less than the lamented Alexandria, which is where we lost the works of Sappho. It is true that the present Bodleian has Ann Bacon’s Fouretene Sermons and her Certayne Sermons, both dated probably 1550, and her Apologie for the Church of England, 1564. It also has Margaret Tyler’s First Part of the Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood, 1578, and Isabella Whitney’s The copy of a letter, lately written in meeter, by a younge gentilwoman: to her vnconstant lover, ?1567; but I suspect (though I have not in fact checked the shelf-marks for certainty) that most of these works, especially Isabella Whitney’s first ever book of poems by a named Englishwoman, did not reach the library until after Sir Thomas Bodley’s own day. Bodley felt very strongly about keeping his library free from ‘idle bookes & riffe raffes’.3 And his idea of idle riff-raff included anything fictional, and also anything in English. This, sad to say, was while Shakespeare was actually writing and while women were taking up the pen in increasing numbers. Just before the building of the present Chawton House, these women and others like them got their words into print, thereby reaching more readers than any manuscript text. That means they assumed a public voice. Women today owe them a tribute, like the tribute, said Virginia Woolf, we owe to Aphra Behn, who actually made her public voice a paying proposition. Of course, the work of Bacon and Tyler, though not that of Whitney, consisted not of compositions in their own words but of translations of the words of men. But most writing women turned to translation at the end of the sixteenth century, in just the same way that they turned to novels at the end of the eighteenth century, because that was the accessible genre. It had certain advantages. While casting the translator as ancillary to the original author, it made her (since English was assumed to be inferior to certain other languages) a national benefactor, and gave her alliance with some powerful and prestigious names. By the act of raising their voices, the women I’ve mentioned and their contemporaries were contributing to broaden access to reading, writing, culture generally. But early seventeenth-century ideas about access were still highly conservative. When Sir Thomas Bodley said ‘for the use and ease of students’, he meant strictly matriculated members of the university (all male, of course) or members of parliament, or donors. Thomas James, the working librarian he appointed, sounds rather more hospitable: he wanted readers to include ‘the younger sort’, and he boasted of



172 Isobel Grundy

their multi-ethnic composition: ‘French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Danes, Bohemians, Polonians, Jewes, Ethiopians, and others’. A tribute from the poet Samuel Daniel presented the new Bodleian Library as a resource for everyone: ‘every childe / Borne unto Letters, may be bolde to stand / And claime his portion.’4 Yet I feel sure that the ‘others’ of James, the ‘every childe’ of Daniel are still assumed to be male. Gender exclusiveness was not their particular opinion, but was buried deep among their assumptions. What, therefore, of the authors mentioned above, of Bacon, Tyler, Whitney? One can hardly doubt that these women, little as they had in common otherwise, would all have wanted that library, all libraries, to be open to women and girls, both as authors and as readers. Every one of these writers touches on the issue of access when she touches on the matter of a hearing for women’s voices. And as it happens, Samuel Daniel and Thomas James each became connected (by links not yet fully forged when the Bodleian opened) with a remarkable writing woman. Daniel was engaged by Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, to tutor her daughter, Lady Anne Clifford; Anne went on to keep notebooks and diaries which, because they record her reading for pleasure, were to make her Virginia Woolf’s choice for earliest known example of the Common Reader.5 Thomas James the younger, son of Bodley’s librarian, became a publisher who was, said his colleague John Dunton, ‘something the better known for being husband to that She-State Politician Mrs. Elinor James’.6 With Elinor James, and with the old age of Lady Anne Clifford, we enter the period covered by Chawton House Library, beginning at the landmark of the Restoration, a little over a century before Austen was born. Mrs James became, indeed, a national figure who kept her name constantly before the public as a political commentator, who delivered copies of her printed works, in person, into the hands of successive monarchs whom she intended to pressurise, who was as much a publisher as her husband: as her own phrase has it, ‘in the Element of Printing above forty years’.7 Lady Anne Clifford, grande dame and tireless recorder of her family’s greatness, and Elinor James, middle-class London businesswoman and political activist, had even less in common than my first three women writers; but each was an author, a purveyor of texts, earmarked by nature and training as a client of scholarly libraries. Yet their contemporaries would not have accepted them as library users, or as claiming a portion as ‘Borne unto Letters’. Two points emerge here: for more than 200 years before Jane Austen’s birth, women were part of the writing and publishing scene in England,



Chawton House: Gathering Old Books for a New Library 173

as certainly as Chawton House was part of its architectural scene; yet despite their infiltration of specific enclaves, most institutions, like libraries, were closed to them. Those closed doors work to fold their work back into invisibility, to hide it from history. Ann Bacon’s Apologie for the Church of England is a, or the, foundational text of a national institution. Bishop John Jewel, author of the original Latin, called her version faultless. Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote of ‘the honor ye have done to the kinde [gender] of women and to the degree [class] of Ladies’.8 Yet I doubt that women were aware of this honour done them. The use of English, not Latin, was one of the defining features of the Church of England; the bulk of the words it used, both scriptural and liturgical, was translated. At the same time, however, the religious context intensified the translator’s handmaid status and functional invisibility. Ann Bacon is hardly remembered today – certainly not compared with her son Francis Bacon. There are two aspects to this kind of disappearance: injustice is done and historical understanding is impoverished. Isabella Whitney, who has become known only with the recent burgeoning of interest in women’s writing, supplies a viewpoint almost unheard of in the poetry of 1567. Her poem ‘The Manner of her Will, and what she left to London’ (surviving in a volume not owned by the Bodleian Library), celebrates London not as a centre of the court or the nobility or the army, but as a centre of industry and shopping: not an upper-class but a bourgeois London. Elinor James, who has reached public notice even more recently than Whitney, and whose list of identified publications is still rising (having gone from 50 to above 90), throws new light on many aspects of early eighteenth-century writing and circulation practices, political activism, and the print trade.9 Such examples suggest how imperfect is scholarly knowledge and how susceptible of improvement. Though the experience of these Renaissance women writers does not bear directly on that of Austen’s contemporaries, we are coming to perceive historical continuity between them – a continuity lying in the value of their writing, its extraordinary range, variety and power to offer a different angle, and its skimping and scanting by the scholarly record. Righteous indignation about the historical silencing of women can lead to overstating the case in a manner that occludes the achievements of Bacon or Whitney or James or a host of others. These women were only retrospectively silenced: forgotten after they had, in many cases, enjoyed early success. The constant thundering at women to be silent and obedient (in a flood of sermons and conduct-books, generation after generation) strongly suggests an awareness that women were anything



174 Isobel Grundy

but silent. Nor were many of them totally forgotten. One of the many proto-modern aspects of eighteenth-century intellectual life was its involvement in the practice of literary history; and with it the involvement of literary women in the idea of their own sex’s literary history. Clara Reeve’s Progress of Romance, 1785, is a work of women’s literary history as well as the earliest history of the novel. Reeve says she chose dialogue form from the example of Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis; her reading goes back to Homer and Virgil, but she also pays tribute to French and English women writers of several generations. Also protomodern was a movement, represented by such different figures as the ladies of Llangollen, the historian Catharine Macaulay, the miscellaneous writer Catherine Fanshawe, to preserve important manuscripts by women before them, and to get them into print. This movement went along with another Chawton precursor, a growth in book collecting by women. When modern scholars began to trace the half-obliterated tracks of the early women writers, they were in fact following in the footsteps of other, slightly less early women. This is not in any way to denigrate their work. Just as twentieth-century activists finally toppled the barriers that kept women out of academe, libraries and other institutions of British culture, so twentieth-century scholars moved towards understanding how the stream of writing by women has flowed constantly, now smoothly and now turbulently, beside and among the mainstream of writing by men. Some scholars have recently complained of being tired of all this rediscovery, arguing that the wrongs have been righted and enough has been said. There’s a suggestion of tedium about Joy Dunicliff’s subtitle for her 1992 study of Mary Howitt: Another Lost Victorian Writer.10 Yet in one sense the activity of rediscovery and recuperation can never cease to be needed. A writer who, for whatever reason, does not enter the communal literate consciousness, who fails to appear or remain on the radar screen, must forever continue to be missing from some parts of the critical discourse. Her reception history continues to preserve that gap or blank. And blanks are dangerous. No matter what the dominance of the very latest critical theory or attitude, older ideas lie beneath the soil like older varieties in the biological gene-pool, needed not for merely nostalgic reasons but for their potential for future new development. Scholars of the future will continue to refer back to the criticism of Dryden or Johnson and indeed of Eliot or Woolf, and there they will still find only gaps and blurs where some response to writing by women ought to have been. New development is hampered by such blanking-out of sections of the past. A moment’s thought suggests what has been lost to the practice of scholarship by such blanking-out. Samuel Johnson never wrote down a




response to (probably never read) Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. This powerful narrative poem on the passion of Christ, rich in psychological perceptiveness and human sympathy, might have had a better chance than Milton of causing Johnson to rethink his general disapproval of religious poetry. Several writers whom I regard as among the best we have (take Eliza Fenwick, author of Secresy, as an example) have managed to achieve a modern reputation, but not in time to be the subject of critical comment from Virginia Woolf, for example. Ignorance of them will remain for ever part of the record. Of course, there are men in the same boat too: Pepys’ diary or Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sonnets, unpublished until long after the writers’ deaths, never exerted an influence in the normal way on the stream of literature. But women in this boat, unlike Pepys or Hopkins, share a common reason for their temporary disappearance. The individual circumstances may differ, but the effect of gender as root cause is common to the whole group, and it is therefore in a broader sense for them than for Pepys that the record is rendered useless or misleading. Absence from the official record operates differently on different groups. One such group is that of women in general; popular women writers are a specific sub-group (to which in Austen’s day all novelists were in constant danger of being relegated). In dealing with literature as consumed by people who define themselves as educated or cultured, we must not lose sight of the fact that reputations for popular literature seem to be yet more vulnerable to gender prejudice. Here, as in so many places, gender and genre interact. While it is true that many intellectually brilliant women writers were dismissed and forgotten (especially those whose life circumstances kept their output small), popular women writers fared equally badly, at least in the long term. Often, indeed, they were not forgotten so quickly (Thomas Babington Macaulay said he knew the novels of Mary Meeke almost by heart), but they were remembered without respect, so that when first-hand knowledge receded, their names became a byword for intellectual pap. A generalised scorn for the popular infects and interbreeds with a generalised scorn based on gender. Readers going back today to the popular novelists of Austen’s lifetime – the circulatinglibrary stars – will often find them at least as intelligent, and skilled at their page-turning craft, as their modern equivalents; but critics of any literary status seem to have felt it de rigueur to distance themselves sharply from popular women writers. There is something sadly typical in a recent newspaper column where a journalist indulges herself with an amusing defence of her taste for Dick Francis, only to reassert her credentials by closing on a ringing condemnation of Catherine Cookson.11



176 Isobel Grundy

In the late eighteenth century women writers acquired a prominence in the novel which might be compared with their sex’s prominence in translation 200 years before. They also acquired in the circulatinglibrary a form of access that, though it catered to both sexes, became identified in the public mind overwhelmingly with women. Both trends brought access without status. But well before Jane Austen’s amazingly adept schoolgirl satires, the woman novelist had begun to hold her own. Bibliographer James Raven discerns a ‘female lead’ in the 1780s. A list of the most successful novel titles in the last third of the eighteenth century (those that went through five or more editions) comprises 33 texts by women to only 30 by men (ignoring the minor distraction of three by Anon, which might mean that the real scores by gender were exactly equal). In the years 1788–90 the pendulum swung even further: an astonishing 33 women put their names on novel title-pages as opposed to only eight men, which as Raven says, ‘might suggest that female authorship was being deliberately promoted’. Yet during the 1790s, the prime decade for both radicalism and reaction in England, the pendulum was swinging back and the former status quo was being restored.12 That status quo included an outpouring of novels by both men and women; but such respect as the novel form could muster was channelled away from its female practitioners. This popular, non-canonical genre had to fight for every atom of respect it could get, and the fight was not aided by association with women. Very few of the regular reviewers were female (Raven mentions Elizabeth Moody; of course Mary Wollstonecraft, too, reviewed many novels), and reviews of fiction included a steady sprinkling of the anti-feminist. Some reviewers gallantly declined to utter any criticism against a work by a woman (thereby implying that what they kept unspoken was highly damaging). Some inveighed bitterly against the alleged modern flood of trash, and almost invariably blamed women readers, women’s bad taste, for this situation. Only a few (like Wollstonecraft herself ) combined harshness to individual women novelists with a dogged insistence on the moral and intellectual potential both of women writers and of the novel form in principle. Critical exclusion often led to physical exclusion. The success of the circulating-libraries only confirmed librarians of municipal and university libraries, and even of the new national library, in endorsing Sir Thomas Bodley’s views on idle riff-raff, now represented not by Shakespeare or English-language texts but by the novel. Novels, conduct-books, how-to books and every kind of popular and informal literature, especially children’s literature, are particularly vulnerable in the survival stakes. Copies are passed from hand to hand, treated carelessly, read to pieces,




and are far more likely to be thrown on the scrapheap than a book of poetry or history or biography. If you want to consult Gulliver’s Travels, or indeed any novel by Jane Austen, you can access a dozen different texts of it, in bookshops, second-hand bookshops, your friends’ shelves, public or academic libraries, or the internet. But other works can be almost impossible to track down. And the disappeared include not only novels which, albeit arguably brilliant, are rare and therefore obscure (like Charlotte Nooth’s Eglantine, or The Family of Fortescue, 1816, or Margaret Croker’s The Question, Who is Anna?, 1817) but also many works that in Austen’s own day were in the popular category that every literate person had at least heard of. The gathering of the Chawton collection, begun in 1993, coincided with intensified interest in early books by women. Whether or not the acquisition of books for Chawton has materially contributed to this effect, prices demanded for late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novels have risen alarmingly. Price has been an escalatingly important factor in building up the CHL collection, and it is somewhat shocking to be paying thousands for a copy of a work which brought the author no more than five or ten guineas, or sometimes nothing more than an allowance of twenty free copies. Another factor has been that rare books appear only rarely on the market. Chawton is still far from owning everything it would like to own: for some key texts like Austen’s own first editions it is pinning its hopes on benefaction. A generation ago, if enquiries to librarians failed to locate a copy of a book in England, one would turn to the National Union Catalog to see if a copy was recorded in North America. Since the NUC came out in 1956 one also consulted a whole series of arm-breaking printed and bound supplements. Tracking down rare books has become far, far easier in the last ten years or so: the very period during which we have been building up the Chawton collection. A host of resources exist: the English Short Title Catalogue, OCLC First, The English Novel 1770 –1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, variously edited by Antonia Forster, James Raven, Peter Garside and Rainer Schöwerling, for instance. Here too one must remember that knowledge may be imperfect. Consulting The English Novel for Anna Maria Mackenzie’s Monmouth: A Tale, Founded on Historic Facts (one of the novels in the digitally available Chawton Novels Online series) reveals that although it is unlisted by the ESTC, a copy is recorded at Augsburg in Germany. So this particular rarity (considered by The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, 1990, to be perhaps Mackenzie’s best book) turns out to be not a unique copy, although it is unique in the English-speaking world.



178 Isobel Grundy

Actually unique copies are the proudest possession of libraries like Chawton. A secret challenge to them is provided by titles of which no single copy is known, and of which therefore dreams of resurfacing and rediscovery haunt us. The catalogues of antiquarian booksellers are now alert to recognise the reappearance of a work presumed missing, and to flag it accordingly. Chawton House Library boasts a number of unique or probably unique copies, and is of course always vigilant for the re-surfacing of women’s work presumed missing. Of the sixteen Novels On-line so far available on the CHL website no fewer than twelve are absent from the Bodleian’s present-day collection, though the British Library has all but three. Two of these Chawton novels (Mackenzie’s Monmouth and Maria Susanna Cooper’s The Wife; or Caroline Herbert) are not held by the Bodleian or the British Library, which for people in the British Isles is almost tantamount to not surviving. Besides unique copies, CHL holds works of which only one other copy exists in the world (like Mrs Mathews’ Simple Facts, or To the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, 1703, by Elinor James, mentioned above), or of which only two copies are known besides ours (the Purbeck sisters’ Honoria Sommerville, whose other copy is neither in Britain nor North America; and the very first novel by Mary Charlton,13 whose later titles survive in dozens of copies). James Raven, who urges librarians to take special care of unique copies, can rest easy about the unique and the very rare books now at Chawton. Books which have gone from hand to hand, almost read to pieces, or which conversely have been left to moulder on damp shelves in unused rooms, can equally rejoice to find themselves somewhere dry and cool and stable, where their every reader is guaranteed to be a book-lover. Alongside definitive modern editions like the Cambridge Austen, in progress, and electronic endeavours like Chawton’s novels on-line, the Women Writers’ Project at Brown University, and the Orlando Project history of women’s writing in the British Isles (2006), it is still important to make the case for the historic, material library such as Chawton magnificently represents, as distinct from the case for electronic access. This case can and must be made without casting aspersions on electronic texts. The electronic medium offers unprecedented textual access, and unparalleled opportunities for scholars to write a new and more flexible kind of literary history. But neither the scholarly edition nor the electronic text, important as they are, can replace the experience of reading a book in an edition from the author’s lifetime. Either reading with footnotes or reading digitally reinforces your sense of your own modernity, that is your distance from your author.




Reading in an original text erases distance and difference. In some sense it really does time-travel you back to that author’s own day, enforcing a salutary sense of inadequacy as an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century subject. Students boggle at first encounter with eighteenth-century print conventions: the long S, the running amuck of italics and capitals and inverted commas, the way the bottom of the page breaks out in gathering numbers and catch-words. They marvel at title-pages with as much letterpress as a short essay, at printers’ ornaments on poetry collections, at novels in multiple volumes. They miss the introduction and footnotes. At first sight old books look quaint. Getting over that means accepting the books on their own terms as defining their own norms, independent of what might be said in a scholarly introduction. After all, few books could be less academic than an eighteenth-century novel – except perhaps for those kinds of books that supply context in the CHL collection, like The Mirror of the Graces; or, The English Lady’s Costume, 1811 (not in the Bodleian), or The Present State of Matrimony; or, The Real Causes of Conjugal Infidelity, 1739 (not in the British Library). At the Bodleian celebrations Jon Snow spoke of browsing in its original, physical sense. ‘Browsing was about texture: feeling the book; investigating its shelf environment.’ This is not something that your normal research library facilitates. He also quoted Seamus Heaney saying, ‘Libraries are for dear life. Much that they house has been won at great cost’14 (a remark particularly applicable to books by women). Both these insights are immediate for users of Chawton. If you read an eighteenthcentury novel on line, you realise its kinship with all the other texts: it’s very like a modern novel on line, history on line, reference books on line. Read it in a scholarly edition, and you realise its kinship with other denizens of the world of academe. In a course on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel, your scholarly edition of Eliza Haywood will closely resemble your scholarly edition of Jane Austen or indeed of Olive Schreiner or Virginia Woolf. But early editions reveal how far the novel so-called was a different animal when Haywood first came close to cornering the market, from what it was when she returned to the fray after the appearance of Samuel Richardson and both the Fieldings, and how different that mideighteenth-century novel was again from the one of Jane Austen’s day. Haywood began with rather small page-blocks of rather few words per page, in rather large, very black type. Their typography is emphatic – to a reader unfamiliar with its conventions it feels like being buttonholed and addressed in a needlessly loud voice. But the overall visual impression is lithe and elegant. (Mary Pix’s plays, on the contrary, exemplify cheap



180 Isobel Grundy

printing from a few years earlier still: paper so thin and poor that the ink from the back of the page bleeds through, creating near-illegibility.) Turning from Haywood’s earlier to her later work makes the look of her early books seem over-elaborate by contrast, while their tone sounds fraught and over-emotional. The later ones present smaller type and more of it to the page, with lines more regular and typography less emphatic; the new novel looks calm, wise and more like other didactic genres. Moving on again to Austen, the visual effect is once again lightened, and the reader understands that Austen would have seen mid-eighteenth-century books as historical artifacts (rather like early Penguins to today’s reader). Type has further improved in regularity, and dialogue not only expanded its proportion of the whole, but acquired a different, special layout which makes it visually more dominant. The novel seems to have moved closer to conversation. All these effects are independent of critical judgement; they are ideas that books voice to readers through their visual appearance, their life in your hand and under your eyes. Now and again you meet with the traces of earlier readers: tiny blemishes inflicted in use, or a signature, a gift inscription, a note of purchase, a circulating-library bookplate. (Chawton holds the copy of Mary Leadbeater’s Cottage Dialogues among the Irish Peasantry that Maria Edgeworth presented to the Solicitor General – a nice piece of networking on behalf of a friend from a lower social rank.) You feel less exclusive in your relationship to this text than you would to an online, or a justbought, or even a modern library copy. The distance between you and the book’s first embodiment is not empty space; it is peopled with history. When I visited the Chawton books at their former home in the USA, before they moved here, I was struck by their appearance as objects of desire. The novels at the heart of the collection are modest little books, around the size of a classic or old-fashioned paperback, sporting a range of bindings both cloth and leather, but blending their variety with uniformity since almost all come in sets of two or three or five volumes, not individuals but groups. Each set is, of course, uniformly bound. They are lovely and seductive to look at – and most of us are unfamiliar with that effect, since even if we regularly use old books in research libraries, we tend to have them brought to a circulation desk in twos and threes, and never see a whole flock of them, as it were, at rest. Researchers at Chawton House will also enjoy a very different experience from that available in august institutions like the modern British Library or the nineteenth-century Library of Congress or the modernisedmedieval Bodleian. Those great libraries offer immense and intricate




floor-plans, huge expanses of desks, complex electronic systems for scanning the catalogue and ordering books, staff to dispense volumes over a counter, sometimes helpfully and sometimes aloofly but always as cogs in a massive machine. Reading there has very little in common with reading at home, for pleasure. Researchers at Chawton House find themselves in an early nineteenth-century setting of great antiquity, the home of Jane Austen’s rich brother. Its active life today remembers all the years it has stood there, all the people who have come and gone. Researchers at Chawton sit in nicely proportioned rooms of moderate size, with old books ranged on their shelves, ready for reading in the way that people read who love reading and are doing it for fun. The rarest volumes do indeed inhabit the secure book stacks which were formerly the wine cellars; but others make their home in the reading rooms. Hopefully, the entire stock of the house is planned to include not only the carefully garnered collection of works by Austen and her female contemporaries and predecessors, not only the secondary, critical-historical works which are gradually joining them, but also the Knight family collection (about another 2,000 titles additional to the count given above): the books which were resident here at a date when most novels were just passing through, on loan from friends or a circulating library. The Knight collection is not complete: books have been periodically removed for sale to raise money, so works that commanded high prices at moments of low funds are likely to be gone. This still leaves a slimmed-down version of a typical county family’s library, including works by women; these books, if the charity regulations allow it, will return to where they belong. Those of them printed before 1817 are likely to have been used by Austen herself. They have passed either through her hands or at least under her eyes – a fact that invites the imagination to wander, and may well offer specific topics for research that might not otherwise have occurred to anybody. Furthermore, the Knight collection illuminates the fact that what is often referred to as a ‘gentleman’s library’ was in fact very much a family artefact. It reflected the taste of the ladies and the daughters of the house, as well as its masters and its sons. No matter how masculine the decor, the contents were almost always gathered by readers of both sexes, as it is clear the Knight collection was. Part of CHL’s importance is its relationship to the historical past, its function for readers as a portal to that past. It is also, however, an institution almost without precedent for all our futures, as a serious library centred not on work by men but on work by women. It both records the story of past struggles for access and for respect, and provides early



182 Isobel Grundy

women’s writing with that access and that respect. It does not in any way propose a separatist model of study, because women have always done their writing both in and about a two-sex world. It does, however, propose a field for study in which the usual positions are reversed. Here, women are not the margins but the centre; men are not the centre but the margins. To focus on the women is to make visible those connections and relationships most likely to have been hitherto hidden. Women writers need to be considered in relation to other women writers and to issues of gender – in which, from well before 1660, they almost all took an urgent interest. Elizabeth Carter’s scholarly translation of Epictetus, for example (one of the handsomest books in the Chawton collection), has a place among the intellectual achievements of what is increasingly coming to be called the English Enlightenment. But it also relates to those translations made by women in the late sixteenth century; it exemplifies a means of exploiting the ancillary role in order to win respect and status, and of demonstrating a right of entry to the gender-restricted domain of classical learning. Again and again, the Chawton collection offers insights into the seldomvisible. I shall close with a single glimpse into the reciprocal exchange of interests and concerns between Jane Austen and the sister writers she never met. The example comes from a book which, alas, is not at Chawton (not yet!): Emma Parker’s Elfrida, Heiress of Belgrove. It was published (not that I believe this is relevant) by Crosby at a date when that firm was holding unpublished the manuscript of Austen’s ‘Susan’ (later Northanger Abbey). Elfrida’s narrator comments thus on her heroine’s fondness for novels: not that I mean to condemn the perusal of such productions; far from it! that would indeed be turning against myself; for nothing appears to me so ridiculous and injudicious as the habit not infrequent among us wanderers in the paths of fiction, of introducing in a Novel the most violent philippics against that way of writing, and commonly representing some demi-maniac, love-sick damsel, who owes her dereliction from propriety and common sense, to having been permitted to inebriate her faculties by swallowing too large a draught of that fountain of knowledge, eloquence, erudition, and profundity, which is continually flowing from the recesses of the Minerva Press, and many other presses equally prolific. Now, if such are the woeful consequences of Novel reading, why, in the name of common sense and prudence, my learned contemporaries! do you continue to write them? Let me entreat ye not to




be so blind to our common interest, as either by hint, allusion, or illustration, to cast a single reflection upon those valuable and respectable productions! but let us firmly enter into a league to support their rights with all the powers of our pens, and fight their cause to the very last drop of our ink. … It is absolutely out of the nature of things that such an innocent gratification can be productive of any evil whatsoever.15 Feel that peroration! There was space in the novel genre at this date for the blooming of a thousand flowers, in terms of varying style and tone. Parker is feisty, but she follows a hundred other writing women when she defends her work not as having value but as doing no harm. Austen in Northanger Abbey goes further than Parker, in claiming novels as works of genius: women’s genius. In her brother’s house she commanded wideranging and intricate prospects of books written before and all around her: both the ones on the shelves here and those others she probably carried in circulating-library copies as she walked up from her cottage in the village. She focused her eyes particularly on books by women, and in them she saw not merely the absence of harm but the presence of great value. She boldly stood and claimed her portion. The opening of Chawton House Library promises to scholars and students hours and days of reading which will be not only productive but also deeply enjoyable, not only enjoyable but also highly educative.

Notes 1. Jon Snow, opening address at A Celebration of Libraries, An International Conference, Oxford, September 2002 (Bodleian Library Record xvii: 6 October 2002), pp. 412–13. 2. David Vaisey, ‘The Legacy of Sir Thomas Bodley’ (Bodleian Library Record xvii: 6 October 2002), p. 423. 3. Vaisey, ‘Legacy’, p. 424. 4. Vaisey, ‘Legacy’, pp. 426–8. 5. Katherine O. Acheson, ed., The Diary of Anne Clifford, 1616–1619: A Critical Edition (New York and London: Garland, 1995), pp. 31–2. 6. Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678–1730 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), p. 131. 7. McDowell, Women of Grub Street, p. 33. 8. John Jewel (translated by Ann Bacon), An Apologie or Answere in Defence of the Churche of Englande … (2nd edn, 1564), prelims. 9. See volume ed. by McDowell (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005). 10. Joy Dunicliff, Mary Howitt: Another Lost Victorian Writer (London: Excalibur Press of London, 1992). 11. Rose George, Guardian, 10 July 2003, G2, p. 19.



184 Isobel Grundy

12. James Raven, ‘Historical Introduction: The Novel Comes of Age’, in Peter Garside, James Raven and Rainer Schowerling, eds, The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 40, 45, 48. 13. The Parisian; or, Genuine Anecdotes of Distinguished and Noble Characters (1794). 14. Snow, opening address, pp. 412–13. 15. Emma Parker, Elfrida, Heiress of Belgrove (Crosby, 1810), vol. I, pp. 22–3, 26.







Note: page references in italics indicate illustrations. Addison, Joseph, 42 American Philosophical Society, 142 Analytical Review, 140–1, 154n1 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 137n3 Armistead, Elizabeth, 70 Armstrong, Nancy, 11, 25 Astell, Mary, 199n17 Aubin, Penelope, 4, 6, 27 Austen, Cassandra, 92–3, 97 Austen, Henry, 51, 97, 98 Austen, Jane, 2, 13, 38, 48–59, 76–86, 88–101, 171, 181 and art, 76–7, 80–4 and authorship, 10, 49 correspondence, 49, 50, 52, 93, 95 and editing, 88–92, 100–1 Emma, 51, 85, 92, 93, 95 intertextuality, 48, 50, 51–8, 59 Lady Susan, 92, 97, 99 manuscripts, 95–6 and miniature analogy, 11, 80–1, 82–4 and miniature painting, 76–7, 81–2 Northanger Abbey, 51, 82, 93, 183, 184 Persuasion, 48, 80, 88, 92, 93, 95–7 Pride and Prejudice, 78 publication process, 93–9 Sanditon, 80–1, 92 Sense and Sensibility, 51, 81, 88, 89 Sir Charles Grandison, 84 The Watsons, 92 see also Mansfield Park Austen-Leigh, James Edward, 51–2, 86 authorship anonymous, 22–3 and domesticity, 19–20 labour market and, 2, 11, 19–26 manuscript, 7–8 patronage, 8, 62–4, 71, 73 republic of letters, 35

Baber, Sarah, 160 Backscheider, Paula, 6 Bacon, Ann, 172, 173, 174 Baillie, Joanna, 46n9 Ballaster, Ros, 6 Bannet, Eve Tavor, 31n16 Barbauld, Anna, 13, 164–5, 167 Barbeau, A, 86–7n15 Behn, Aphra, 4, 6, 172 and feminine honour, 109–11 and flattery, 110, 111, 112 Love–Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, 11, 107–8, 109–10, 112, 113–17 and obligation, 109–10, 114, 116, 117 Oroonoko, 12 and passion, 108, 112–14, 116, 117 Bell, Charles, 141 Bernasconi, Robert, 142 Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction, 6, 178 Blackwood’s Magazine, 38 Bluestockings, 37–9 Bodleian library, 171–3, 179, 180, 181–2 Bodley, Sir Thomas, 171 Boswell, James, 42, 45–6 in Gentleman’s Magazine, 45 and Seward, 43, 45 Bradstreet, Anne, 8 British Library, 179, 180, 181–2 Brontë, Charlotte, 83 Brooke, Frances, 23, 32n24 Brown, Laura, 2, 139n19 Brown Women Writers Project, 7, 179 Browne, Hawkins, 50 Burke, Edmund, 165, 166, 167 Burney, Frances, 13, 22, 25, 35, 170n19 The Wanderer, 85 The Witlings, 19–20 187



Index

Butler, E. M., 58 Butler, Marilyn, 58, 86n13 Byrne, Paula, 58 Carriera, Rosalba, 80 Carter, Elizabeth, 65, 183 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 123 Chapman, R. W., 83, 88–9, 92, 97, 99 charity, see philanthropy Charlton, Mary, 179 Chawton House Library, 1, 7, 14, 171, 173, 178–9, 180, 181–4 Choudhury, Mita, 124 Chudleigh, Lady Mary, 39 Clarke, James Stanier, 85 Clarke, Norma, 9–10, 65 Clifford, Lady Anne, 173 Clifford, Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, 173 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 62–5 ‘The Apotheosis, or the Snow–Drop’, 64, 68 ‘Kubla Kahn’, 64 letters, 62, 64, 66–8, 69 ‘The Mad Monk’, 68 in Morning Post, 64, 65, 71 patronage, 62, 73 Robinson and, 62–4, 66–9 ‘A Stranger Minstrel’, 63, 64, 66–7 Colley, Linda, 139n22 Compositors’ Committee, 94–5 conduct literature, 49, 57 conservatism, 49, 158 Conway, Alison, 119n15, 119–20n18 Cooper, Maria Susanna, 179 Copeland, Edward, 21, 30n10 Corvey Women Writers on the Web, 7 Cosway, Richard, 79 Cowley, Hannah, 122 Cowper, William, 10, 49 in Austen, 51, 54–7, 58, 59 The Task, 51, 54–7, 58, 59 ‘Tirocinium’, 51 Crabbe, George, 10, 49 in Austen, 51–4, 57, 59 The Parish Register, 52 Tales, 51, 52–4

Craddock, Captain, 70 Crawford, Henry, 57 Crisp, Samuel, 19 Critical Review, 29, 40 Crosby, publishers, 183 cross-dressing, 22–3, 26 see also dress Curran, Stuart, 65 Daniel, Samuel, 173 Darwin, Charles, 141 Darwin, Erasmus, 35 Davys, Mary, 6 Delaney, Mary, 42 Descartes, René, 109 Devis, Arthur William, 134 Devonshire, Duchess of, 71 Dewes, Court, 42 dress, 126–7, 133–5 cross-dressing, 22–3, 26 Donovan, Robert, 83 Doody, Margaret, 138n17 Dunicliff, Joy, 175 Dunton, John, 173 Edgeworth, Maria, 85, 181 Murad the Unlucky, 122 Edinburgh Magazine, 82 Edinburgh Review, 38 education, 158 More and, 49, 57, 159, 160–1 Egerton, Thomas, 88, 92, 101 Eikon Basilike, 110 Equiano, Olaudah, 13, 155n7 ESTC, 7, 178 Exclusion Crisis, 11, 112 Ezell, Margaret, 7–8 Farrer, Reginald, 83 Fay, Eliza, 12, 125 Original Letters from India, 122, 123, 132–6, 134 femininity, and intellectuality, 37–9 feminism, 2–4, 14, 158–9 see also individual writers Feminist Companion, 178 Ferguson, Moira, 13, 140 Fielding, Sarah, 31n20



188 Index

Fox, Charles James, 70 Fulford, Tim, 63, 68 Galland, Antoine, 121 Gaskell, Philip, 101 Gay, Penny, 58 Genlis, Stéphanie–Félicité de, 175 Gentleman’s Magazine, 38 Boswell in, 45 Carter and, 65 Johnson and, 65 on Seward, 35 Seward in, 42, 45 Gibbes, Phebe, 122 Gifford, William, 101 Goankar, Dilip Parameshwar, 123 Godwin, William, 68, 72 Goldsmith, Oliver, 10, 20 Griffin, Dustin, 62–4, 73 Grundy, Isobel, 52 Guest, Harriet, 137n6, 169n8, 169n12 Habermas, Jürgen, 4 Hamilton, Elizabeth, 122 Harris, Jocelyn, 50 Hartley, David, 148 Hartley, Lucy, 155n10, 155n12 Hayley, William, 35–6 Hays, Mary, 161 Haywood, Eliza, 4, 180–1 Heaney, Seamus, 180 Hemans, Felicia, 6 Hill, Diana, 80 Hobbes, Thomas, 107–8 commonwealth, 108–9, 111–12, 114 and flattery, 110, 112 Leviathan, 11, 108–9, 111–12, 114 On the Citizen, 109, 118n4 and passions, 108–9, 112, 113 Hodgson, Rev. Henry, 139n24 Holmes, Richard, 62, 65 Home, Henry, see Kaimes, Lord Home, John, 50 Hone, Nathaniel, 77 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 176 Hume, David, 60n11 Humphrey, Ozias, 78

189

Inchbald, Elizabeth Lovers’ Vows, 48, 50, 52, 57–8 The Mogul Tale, or The Descent of the Balloon, 122 Such Things Are, 122 intellect, women and, 37–9, 49–50 James, Elinor, 173, 174, 179 James, Thomas, 172–3 Janowitz, Anne, 164–5 Jewel, John, Bishop, 174 John Murray Archive, 93 Johnson, Claudia L., 88, 95 Mansfield Park, Norton edition, 88, 89–90, 91, 100–1 Johnson, Samuel, 34, 175–6 in Austen, 51, 57, 59 and Gentleman’s Magazine, 65 Idler, 51 Rasselas, 51 Seward on, 41, 42–4 Joseph, Betty, 125, 138–9n19 Juengel, Scott, 144, 147, 155n9 Kaimes, Lord (Henry Home), 142, 143, 145, 156n19 on physiognomy, 145 on polygenism, 145 Kay, Carol, 108, 118n6 Kelly, Gary, 22–3 Kindersley, Jemima, 12, 125 Letters from the Island of Teneriffe … , 122, 123, 129–32, 131 King, Kathryn, 31–2n14 Kinsley, James, 51 Kirkham, Margaret, 58 Klein, Lawrence, 4 Knight, Ellis Cornelia, 122 Kotzebue, August von: Lovers’ Vows, 48, 57–8, 59 Labbe, Jacqueline, 8, 64 labour market, authorship and, 2, 11, 19–26 Lamont, Claire, 88, 90 Lanser, Susan Snider, 31n23 Lanyer, Aemilia, 176 Lascelles, Mary, 50 Lavater, Johann Caspar, 13, 141, 146



Index

Leadbeater, Mary, 181 Lennox, Charlotte, 6 Lennox, Lady Sarah, 70 Lens, Bernard, 77, 80 Lerner, Sandy, 1 Le Vaillant, François, 155n7, 157n36 Lewes, George Henry, 80, 82 Lewis, Matthew, 68 libraries Bodleian, 171–3, 179, 180, 181–2 British Library, 179, 180, 181–2 Chawton House Library, 171, 173, 178–9, 180, 181–4 circulating libraries, 176–7 history of, 171–2 Knight collection, 182 Library of Congress, 181–2 women’s access to, 172–3 literary criticism, 37–42 Seward and, 37, 38, 39–44 Warton on, 41–2 Litz, A. Walton, 58 London, April, 23–4 London Society, 94 Lowe, Lisa, 137n5 Luther, Susan, 62–3 Macartney, Lord, 51, 57 Mack, Robert, 138n10 Mackenzie, Anna Maria, 178, 179 McDowell, Paula, 5 McKeon, Michael, 11, 114 McKerrow, Ronald B., 95 Makdisi, Saree, 138n12, 138n13 Mammuth; or, Human Nature Displayed, 155n7, 156n25, 156n26, 157n43 Manley, Delarivier, 6 Mansfield Park, 9, 82, 88, 89–92, 93, 95, 97, 98, 100–1 corrections to, 88–9, 90–2 first edition, 88–91, 92, 93, 95, 97, 98–9 intertextuality in, 48–59 and miniature analogy, 83–4 morality in, 59 Norton edition, 88, 89–90, 91, 92, 100–1 Penguin edition, 88, 90–2, 99–101 politics of, 48, 58–9

publication process, 93–9 second editions, 88–91, 92, 93, 95, 97, 98–9 Marsh, Elizabeth, 125, 139n20, 139n23 The Female Captive, 122, 123, 125–9 Master Printers, 94 Matthews, Mrs, 179 Mee, John, 77 Mellor, Anne, 5, 158 Melman, Billie, 124 Memoirs of the Life of Hannah More, 162–3, 169n13 miniature painting, 76–80, 86 Austen and, 76–7, 81–2 on ivory, 77, 78–9, 80 miniature analogy, 80–1, 82–4 Mitford, Mary Russell, 51 The Modest School, 77 monogenism, 142–3, 152, 153, 155n18 and physiognomy, 147 Montagu, Elizabeth, 21, 37, 38 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 12, 122, 138n18 Turkish Letters, 122, 125, 126 Monthly Review, 29, 40, 151–2 More, Hannah, 2–3, 5, 13, 35, 158–70 Coelebs in Search of a Wife, 49 conduct-book-as-novel, 49 and conservatism, 2–3, 158, 161–2, 164, 168 correspondence, 161, 162–4, 168 Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World, 162 and feminism, 158–9, 168 on reading, 49 Remarks on the Speech of M. Dupont, 161, 164, 165–7, 168 on Sterne, 50 Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, 49, 57, 159, 160–1 Tracts, 159 see also Memoirs of the Life of Hannah More Morning Post, 64–5 Coleridge in, 64, 65, 71 Robinson in, 64, 65–6, 70–1, 72 Southey in, 65–6



190 Index

Index

National Union Catalogue, 178 Newton, John, 161, 162 Noon, Patrick, 78 Nussbaum, Felicity A., 2, 138n12, 154n5 obligation, 11–12, 109–10, 114, 116, 117 Opie, Amelia, 13 Orient, 121–37 and female subjectivity, 12, 123, 136 transculturation, 123, 125, 126, 127–9, 130–2, 136–7 Orlando Project, 179 Parker, Emma, 183–4 Parker, Matthew, Archbishop of Canterbury, 174 Parsons, Eliza, 6 Pascoe, Judith, 8, 64–5, 71, 74n12 patronage, 62–4, 72–3 Peace, Mary, 32n33 pedantry, 49 Pepys, Samuel, 80, 176 philanthropy, 22–3, 25–7, 28–9 Phillips, Katherine, 8 physiognomy, 140, 141–2, 145–52 monogenism and, 147 Pindar, Peter (John Wolcot), 69–70, 71–2 Piozzi, Hester Thrale, 43 Pix, Mary, 180–1 Pollack, Ellen, 112, 113, 118n3, 118–19n12 Polwhele, Richard, 72 polygenism, 142, 143, 145, 152, 153, 155–6n18 Porter, Jane Duke Christian of Luneburg, 86 The Scottish Chiefs, 85 Two Princes of Persia, 122 Prescott, Sarah, 8 The Printer’s Grammar, 94, 102n11

public/private spheres, 4–6, 13–14, 44, 158–9, 164–6 publishing, 93–9 women in, 173–4 Purbeck sisters, 179 Quarterly Review, 38, 93, 101 race, 12–13, 140–1 and fellow–feeling, 144, 145, 153 polygenism and, 145–6 Rajan, Balachandra, 137n8, 138n12 Raven, James, 177, 179 reading, 48, 49–52 Reeve, Clara, 14, 38, 121 The History of Charoba, Queen of Aegypt, 121 The Progress of Romance, 121, 175 The School of Widows, 31n14 religion, 127, 129–30, 143, 146 reviewers (women), 177 see also Mary Wollstonecraft Richardson, Samuel, 22, 110 Richetti, John, 6 Robertson, Andrew, 79 Robinson, Maria Elizabeth, 64, 66, 68 Robinson, Mary, 7, 8, 21, 23, 62–5 Coleridge and, 62–4, 66–9 ‘The Eolian Harp’, 68 The False Friend, 71 Lyrical Tales, 71 Memoirs, 73 in Morning Post, 7, 64, 65–6, 70–1, 72 ‘Ode inscribed to the Infant Son of S. T. Coleridge, Esq.’, 64, 67 ‘Ode to the Snow–Drop’, 64 patronage, 8, 62–4, 71, 73 and Pindar, 71–2 Poetical Works, 72 ‘To the Poet Coleridge’, 64 Rosse, Susannah Penelope, 80 Rowe, Elizabeth, 27 Royal Academy, 77–8 Royal Literary Fund, 6–7 Russell, Gillian, 66 Said, Edward, 137n3 Sardar, Ziauddin, 124 Saville, John, 34, 37



Mounsey, Chris, 32n34 Murray, John, 88, 93, 101 Myers, Mitzi, 141, 158

191

Schellenberg, Betty A., 23, 30n7 Scott, Sarah, 5, 10–11, 21–3 History of Cornelia, 21, 22–3, 26, 27, 28 The History of Sir George Ellison, 28–9 A Journey Through Every Stage of Life, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27 Millenium Hall, 21–2, 24–5, 26, 28, 29 and novel, moral function of, 27–8 Scott, Walter, 37, 38, 82, 85, 93 Scribner’s Magazine, 83 Seward, Anna, 9–10 Boswell on, 45 on Boswell, 43 complete poetical works, 36–7 correspondence, 36, 37, 44 and epic elegy, 35 and fame, 34, 35, 39, 44 and Gentleman’s Magazine, 35, 42, 45 on Johnson, 41, 42–4 and literary criticism, 37, 38, 39–44 Louisa, 35–6 Monody on Major Andre, 35 and poetical novel, 35–6 sonnets, 34–5 Seward, Thomas, 38 sexuality, suppression of, 26 Shakespeare, William, 57 Shee, Martin Archer, 79–80 Sheridan, Frances, 122 Siddons, Sarah, 35 Siskin, Clifford, 10, 29 slavery, 140, 142 Smart, John, 78–9, 83 Smith, Charlotte, 21, 27, 159–60, 161 Smith, Samuel Stanhope, 13, 143, 144–5 on physiognomy, 140, 141–2, 146–52 on racial issues, 153 and religion, 143 Sneyd, Honora, 34–5 Snow, Jon, 180 Society of Painters in Oil and Water Colours, 76

Southey, Robert, 38 in Morning Post, 65–6 St James’s Chronicle, 77–8 Starke, Mariana, 122 Stepan, Nancy, 153 Sterne, Laurence, 50 Stott, Anne, 158, 160, 161 Stower, Caleb, 94, 98, 99 Stuart, Daniel, 64–5, 73 Sutherland, Kathryn, 99, 158, 159 Austen, Penguin edition, 88, 90–2, 99–101 Tarleton, Barnastre, 70, 71 Taylor, Barbara, 3–4, 143 Teerline, Levina, 80 Thompson, Helen, 11–12 Thompson, James, 83 Todd, Janet, 107, 110, 113, 119n14, 119–20n18 travel writing, see Fay, Eliza; Marsh, Elizabeth; Kindersley, Jemima Trilling, Lionel, 58 Tuite, Clara, 66 Tyler, Margaret, 172, 173 Van Sant, Ann Jessie, 156n24 Vernon, Dowager Lady, 82 Vickery, Amanda, 4 Walpole, Horace, 163 Warton, Joseph, 41–2 Watson, Nicola, 169n8 Watt, Ian, 11 Watts, Walter Henry, 78 Wedgwood, Tom, 73 Wehrs, Donald R., 107, 112–13, 114, 118n2, 119n17 West, Jane, 37 Wheeler, Roxann, 12 Whitney, Isabella, 172, 173, 174 Wilberforce, William, 163 Wilkie, Brian, 58 Williams Elliott, Dorice, 26 Williams, Helen Maria, 85 Wiltshire, John, 83 Wolcot, John, see Pindar, Peter



192 Index

Wollstonecraft, Mary, 2, 13–14, 84, 143–5, 161, 163, 166 in Analytical Review, 140–1, 154n1, 156n25, 156n26, 157n36, 157n43 and fellow-feeling, 143–4, 154 Letters Written During a Short Residence … , 155n9 Origins and Progress of the French Revolution, 85 and physiognomy, 13, 147, 151 and race, 146, 153, 155n7

193

and religion, 143, 146 review of Smith, 150, 153–4 and slavery, 140, 157n39 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 84, 85, 148, 151, 163, 167–8 Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria, 2 Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 5 Woolf, Virginia, 172, 173, 176 Wordsworth, William, 65 Zelicovici, Dvora, 58



Index

British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, Politics and History

Literary history womens writing britain

The Politics of Custom in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction

The British Navy and the State in the Eighteenth Century

Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe

Cultures of Power in Europe during the Long Eighteenth Century

Warfare in the Eighteenth Century

The Victorian Eighteenth Century: An Intellectual History

The Seventh Sense: Francis Hutcheson and Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics

The Writing Life of Hugh Kelly: Politics, Journalism, and Theatre in Late-Eighteenth-Century London

The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy

The Eighteenth Century

Disgraceful Matters: The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-Century China

The Politics of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought)

Women, Privacy and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Writing

Visualizing the Revolution: Politics and Pictorial Arts in Late Eighteenth-Century France (Reaktion Books - Picturing History)

Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Postcolonial Literary Studies)

Eighteenth-Century Literary History: An MLQ Reader

The African-British Long Eighteenth Century: An Analysis of African-British Treaties, Colonial Economics, and Anthropological Discourse

Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Postcolonial Literary Studies)

Warfare in the Eighteenth Century (History of Warfare)

Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Postcolonial Literary Studies)

Eighteenth-century authorship and the play of fiction: novels and the theater, Haywood to Austen

Down and out in eighteenth-century London

Communication in Eighteenth-Century Music

Communication in Eighteenth-Century Music

Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy

Richardson's 'Clarissa' and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought)

Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain

British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, Politics and History

Literary history womens writing britain

The Politics of Custom in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction

The British Navy and the State in the Eighteenth Century

Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe

Cultures of Power in Europe during the Long Eighteenth Century

Warfare in the Eighteenth Century

The Victorian Eighteenth Century: An Intellectual History

The Seventh Sense: Francis Hutcheson and Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics

The Writing Life of Hugh Kelly: Politics, Journalism, and Theatre in Late-Eighteenth-Century London

The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy

The Eighteenth Century

Disgraceful Matters: The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-Century China

The Politics of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought)

Women, Privacy and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Writing

Visualizing the Revolution: Politics and Pictorial Arts in Late Eighteenth-Century France (Reaktion Books - Picturing History)

Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Postcolonial Literary Studies)

Eighteenth-Century Literary History: An MLQ Reader

The African-British Long Eighteenth Century: An Analysis of African-British Treaties, Colonial Economics, and Anthropological Discourse

Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Postcolonial Literary Studies)

Warfare in the Eighteenth Century (History of Warfare)

Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Postcolonial Literary Studies)

Eighteenth-century authorship and the play of fiction: novels and the theater, Haywood to Austen

Down and out in eighteenth-century London

Communication in Eighteenth-Century Music

Communication in Eighteenth-Century Music

Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy

Richardson's 'Clarissa' and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought)

Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Recommend Documents