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The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England

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The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England Edited by Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar

THE CULTURE OF THE GIFT IN EIGHTEENTH- CENTURY ENGLAND

Copyright © Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60829–0 ISBN-10: 0–230–60829–9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The culture of the gift in eighteenth-century England / edited by Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0–230–60829–9 (alk. paper) 1. English literature—18th century—History and criticism. 2. Generosity in literature. 3. Politics and literature—Great Britain— History—18th century. 4. Great Britain—Intellectual life— 18th century. 5. Locke, John, 1632–1704—Influence. 6. Social classes—England—History—18th century. 7. English language— 18th century—Social aspects. I. Zionkowski, Linda. II. Klekar, Cynthia. PR448.G46C85 2009 820.9⬘005—dc22

2008024779

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: January 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

List of Contributors

ix

Introduction Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar

1

I Theories of Benevolence 1

2

3

Rights and Reciprocity in the Political and Philosophical Discourse of Eighteenth-Century England Anna Moltchanova and Susannah Ottaway

15

Charity Education and the Spectacle of “Christian Entertainment” Jad Smith

37

Debt without Redemption in a World of “Impossible Exchange”: Samuel Richardson and Philanthropy John A. Dussinger

55

II Conduct and the Gift 4

’Tis Better to Give: The Conduct Manual as Gift Marilyn Francus

5

The Gift of an Education: Sarah Trimmer’s Oeconomy of Charity and the Sunday School Movement Dorice Williams Elliott

79

107

III The Erotics of the Gift 6

Obligation, Coercion, and Economy: The Deed of Trust in Congreve’s The Way of the World Cynthia Klekar

125

Contents

vi 7

The Erotics of the Gift: Gender and Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century Novel Charles Haskell Hinnant

143

8

Fictions of the Gift in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall Jennie Batchelor

159

9

The Nation, the Gift, and the Market in The Wanderer Linda Zionkowski

177

IV

The Gift and Commerce

10

Josiah Wedgwood’s Goodwill Marketing Susan B. Egenolf

11

Anson at Canton, 1743: Obligation, Exchange, and Ritual in Edward Page’s “Secret History” Robert Markley

197

215

Bibliography

235

Index

253

Acknowledgments

It seems altogether appropriate that a collection of essays on the topic of gift relations should begin with a note of thanks. For the time and energy that they devoted to helping this book take shape, our contributors deserve our deepest gratitude; working with them has been a pleasure from beginning to end. Institutional support for our research and editorial labor has been generous as well. Joseph McLaughlin, chair of the English Department of Ohio University; Ohio University’s College of Arts and Sciences; and Western Michigan University’s College of Arts and Sciences have provided us with timely assistance in bringing our manuscript into print. Behind the scenes, our reader at Palgrave offered encouragement and insightful advice on individual essays and on the collection as a whole. We are especially grateful to our copyeditor, John Knapp, who brought to this project an admirable degree of expertise, professionalism, and patience. Thanks are also due to Rick Huard, who composed our index with precision and insight in record time. Our most profound debts, of course, are to our families and friends, whose innumerable gifts can never be returned.


Contributors

Jennie Batchelor is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Kent. She has published various essays on gender and material culture, and is the author of Dress, Distress and Desire: Clothing and the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature (2005), and coeditor of and contributor to British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, History, Politics (2005) and Women and Material Culture, 1660–1830 (2007). She is currently completing a monograph on literary representations of manual and intellectual labor in women’s writing between 1750 and 1830. John A. Dussinger is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Author of The Discourse of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (1974) and In the Pride of the Moment: Encounters in Jane Austen’s World (1990), and numerous articles and reviews on eighteenth-century subjects, he is currently editing the letters of Thomas Edwards, Sarah Wescomb, Laetitia Pilkington, and Frances Grainger for The Cambridge Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Samuel Richardson. His recent work includes articles in Studies in Bibliography, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and Papers for the Bibliographical Society of America on Richardson’s anonymous writings; a critical biography of Thomas Edwards (1699?–1757) is also in progress. Susan B. Egenolf is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University, where she teaches courses in eighteenth- and early-nineteenthcentury British and Irish literature and culture and Women’s Studies. Her publications, such as her forthcoming study The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson (2008), have focused primarily upon women writers and the intersections of literature and the visual arts. Her current book-length project is an exploration of Josiah Wedgwood and his influence upon Romantic aesthetics. Dorice Williams Elliott is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of Kansas. Her book, The Angel out of the

x

Contributors

House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England (2002), was published by the University Press of Virginia. She has published articles on Elizabeth Gaskell, Hannah More, Sarah Scott, and Jane Austen, and on servants, class, and Australian convicts. She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled “Transporting Class: Reinventing Social Relations in Australian Convict Fiction.” Marilyn Francus is Associate Professor of English at West Virginia University. She is editor of The Burney Journal and author of The Converting Imagination: Linguistic Theory and Swift’s Satiric Prose (1994), as well as multiple articles on eighteenth-century literature and culture. She is currently writing a book on monstrous motherhood in the eighteenth century. Charles Haskell Hinnant served as the Catherine Paine Middlebush Chair from 1996 to 1999 before retiring from the University of Missouri English Department in 2000. He is the author of seven books, most recently The Anne Finch Wellesley Manuscript Edition (1998), which he coedited with Barbara McGovern, and a number of articles, the latest of them on Defoe, Austen, Shaftesbury, Burke, and Wollstonecraft. His edition of the anonymous picaresque novel, The London Jilt (1683), was published by Broadview Press in 2008. A companion to his essay on “The Erotics of the Gift,” entitled “Gifts and Wages: The Structures of Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and Drama,” is forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Studies. Cynthia Klekar is Assistant Professor of English and Associate Editor of Comparative Drama at Western Michigan University. Her work has appeared in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and is forthcoming in Philological Quarterly and Eighteenth-Century Studies. She is currently completing a book entitled Fictions of the Gift: Generosity, Obligation, and Economy in Eighteenth-Century England. Robert Markley is Professor of English and Romano Professorial Scholar at the University of Illinois, and editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. His books include Two-Edg’d Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve (1998); Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 (1993); Virtual Realities and Their Discontents (an edited collection of essays); Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination (2005); and The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730 (2006). He is currently working on two books—one on climate and culture before and after the age of fossil fuels, the other a study of European– Asian relations between 1740 and 1850.

Contributors

xi

Anna Moltchanova is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Carleton College. She received her Ph.D. from McGill University in 2001. Her present research deals with issues in international law and global justice and with theories of group agency and group intentionality as they relate to social moral epistemology. Her article “Stateless National Groups, International Justice and Asymmetrical Warfare” appeared in The Journal of Political Philosophy 13. 2 (2005), and “Nationhood and Political Culture” appeared in Journal of Social Philosophy 38. 2 (2007). Susannah Ottaway is Associate Professor of History at Carleton College. She is the author of The Decline of Life: Old Age in Eighteenth-Century England (2004), and the coeditor of The History of Old Age in England, 1660–1800 (2008), an eight-volume set of primary sources on old age in early modern England, and Power and Poverty: Old Age in the Preindustrial Past (2002). She is currently working on a project on workhouses and poor relief reform movements in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jad Smith is Assistant Professor of British Literature and Cultural Studies at Eastern Illinois University. His work “Custom, Association, and the Mixed Mode: Locke’s Early Theory of Cultural Reproduction” appeared in ELH 73. 4 (2006), and “How Fanny Comes to Know: Sensation, Sexuality, and the Epistemology of the Closet in Cleland’s Memoirs” appeared in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 44. 2–3 (2002). His book manuscript, Childhood and Moral Reform in the Age of Locke, explores the relationship of childhood and culture in early eighteenth-century knowledge economies linked to projects of social reform. Linda Zionkowski is Professor of English at Ohio University and author of Men’s Work: Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Poetry, 1660–1784 (2001), as well as numerous articles on authorship and print culture. She served as editor for Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, volumes 37–38, and is currently finishing a book on women and gift economies in novels by Richardson, Burney, and Austen.


Introduction Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar

During the past several years, gift giving and the gratitude that the gift generates have gained remarkable attention in the popular media. In 2007, Bill Clinton’s Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World became a best seller: while this might have been due to the high public profile of the ex-president, Clinton’s advocacy of a democratic philanthropy—one that encourages people of all classes to assume the role of donor—met with widespread approval and excitement. As one reader enthused, “Even conservatives will like this book” since it is “not at all political”: for this reader—and for Clinton—the gift is understood as a pure effusion of goodwill entirely removed from the assertion of power and the exercise of social control, and thus not a transaction having political implications or resonances. Equally reassuring about the selflessness of donation are recent books instructing readers how to identify gifts and respond to them. From the recipient’s perspective, Robert Emmons’s Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier offers a biological rationale for a cultural imperative. With chapter headings such as “A Grateful Heart Is a Healthy Heart,” Emmons’s book asserts that expressions of thankfulness elevate rather than subordinate those who receive gifts, filling them with the serenity necessary for physical and emotional well-being. Like our modern perception of giving, receiving the gift is seemingly an apolitical act involving no acceptance of authority or dominance, and gratitude is a response beneficial to those lucky enough to feel it. Extending beyond the fairly limited audience for books on public policy and self-help— and yet cleverly having combined the two genres—Oprah Winfrey’s primetime series entitled The Big Give advertises itself as defying “television convention with the bold idea of people competing to give rather than get.” Over a five-day period, contestants were required to lay out

2

Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar

cash creatively to transform the lives of strangers, and their ability to “give big” determined whether or not they stayed in the game (the winner became a recipient in turn, taking home a $1,000,000 reward). Assuring us that “America will just love the heart of this show,” Oprah and ABC have transformed the gift into a mode of entertainment and source of profit, particularly for the show’s corporate “partners” or sponsors—Target, Ford, and Sprint.1 Despite their different rhetorical focuses and different media formats, what these texts offer is a contemporary conception of the gift that has left behind, buried, or forgotten the complicated history of the gift itself. To present-day sensibilities, the “pure” gift appears (and by definition, must be) completely divorced from the workings of the market and the exercise of power: as Jonathan Parry notes, gift relations, “in which persons and things, interest and disinterest are merged—have been fractured, leaving gifts opposed to exchange, persons opposed to things and interest to disinterest.”2 This dichotomy between the economy with its underlying profit motive and the gift with its philanthropic purpose is a constitutive feature of our current culture: it creates an ideology of exchange that ostensibly disallows, elides, and even forbids the mingling of two seemingly disparate forms of human interaction (for instance, through a tax code that rigorously polices the separation of profit-generating and not-for-profit entities). Enforcing this dichotomy may appear to protect and isolate the gift from market-based norms, keeping it relatively untainted by practices such as the exertion of influence on the part of donors and the obligation to make a return on the part of recipients. What is lost, however, is an understanding of the gift’s function at the very heart of a society, or its central role in distributing and aggrandizing power and creating and dismantling relationships in all aspects of social life. The purpose of this volume is to reconstruct the function of the gift at a crucial point in its history—the period from 1660 to 1800 in England—and to demonstrate how gift transactions both produced and responded to changes in traditional concepts of class, gender, national and personal identity, social authority, and property during this time. In his foundational study of gift relations, Marcel Mauss observes that in precommercial societies the gift system is a “ ‘total’ social phenomen[on]” that organizes legal, moral, religious, and economic relations and institutions; the act of gift exchange structures and permeates all aspects of this complex network, investing them with spiritual and emotional significance.3 Yet while eighteenth-century England was nothing if not aggressively and proudly engaged in

Introduction

3

commerce, the conception of the gift retained its centrality in the cultural imaginary of the period. The most obvious—and powerful— manifestation of gift relations occurred through the workings of patronage, identified by Harold Perkin as “the middle term between feudal homage and the capitalist cash nexus” that “was all-pervading, from the Court and Cabinet to the parish poor.”4 This top-down dispensation of property and status formed the bedrock upon which the entire social structure rested: an intricate system of “vertical friendship” linking patrons and clients, patronage functioned as a means of providing employment, fostering the arts, bestowing charity, and furthering the economic and political interests of heads of families and their trains of dependents. Existence outside of this network was difficult indeed: being without friends—having no identity as either donor or recipient—condemned one to a marginal state that attracted more suspicion than sympathy, because social identity developed from one’s place in these relationships; as Marilyn Strathern remarks, “[e]nchainment” rather than liberation of the self “is a condition of all relations based on the gift,” which defines people in terms of their obligations to others. 5 For Samuel Johnson, who prided himself on his independence from patrons, such connections and the structures of authority they supported were nonetheless necessary for the physical and psychological security of the nation at large: “I am a friend to subordination, as most conducive to the happiness of society. There is a reciprocal pleasure in governing and being governed.”6 The willingness of benefactors and clients to meet obligations— which Mauss identifies as the obligation to give, receive, and return the gift—is essential for the successful workings of the patronage system, and the paternalistic social relations it fosters, for the gift serves as a legitimizing strategy by which traditional elites maintain and defend their hold on authority. In what Harold Newby calls the “deferential dialectic,” the submission of those at the base of the social hierarchy is secured by the ubiquitous “pressures of personal dependency,” in particular the downward flow of benefits.7 Through the logic of gift exchange, assertions of power by the ruling orders thus become redefined as acts of service for which deference is the necessary return: as Pierre Bourdieu maintains, the gift economy, in contrast to the market, “is organized with a view to the accumulation of symbolic capital (a capital of recognition, honor, nobility, etc.),” which secures the “durable domination” of subordinate parties.8 The gift, however, must remain distinct from commodities and wages in order to effect such domination, and in the paternalist system, this required direct

4


involvement in the lives of dependants: the great “cannot appropriate the labour, services, goods, homage, and respect of others without ‘winning’ them personally, ‘tying’ them, in short, creating a bond between persons,” and in doing so, transforming economic and political domination—of rich over poor, men over women—into affective attachment.9 Recognizing this, a writer for Blackwood’s Magazine argued that institutionalized charity—on the rise throughout the eighteenth century—was no substitute for the personal performance of giving: “Societies, and subscriptions, and magnificent donations, and beneficent directions and regulations, are all excellent in their way—but the effect of all these is nothing upon the heart of one poor man, compared with a single affectionate visit to his cottage—one simple gift to his children.”10 Despite the hegemony that paternalism exercised as a model for social organization, its efficacy came under attack throughout the century, as economic and ideological challenges to the system of obligation focused on conceptions of the gift. Although the writers in Blackwood’s praised the social stability created by donation, and although contemporaries extolled their self-styled “Age of Benevolence,” the substitution of labor for the gift became the keystone of movements for reform. Reformers such as Thomas Robert Malthus, Sir Frederick Morton Eden, and Hannah More argued that subjection to the workings of the market economy rather than protection from its vicissitudes benefits the poor, for the only true philanthropy promotes a strong work ethic and self-reliance: “He, who statedly employs the poor in useful labour, is their only friend; he, who only feeds them is their greatest enemy. Their hopes and fears should centre in themselves: they should have no hope but from their own sobriety, diligence, [and] fidelity.”11 This “annulment of the gift in the name of work” vitiates traditional structures of patronage, allowing for donation to take on new significance and meanings apart from enacting paternalistic philosophies of social and religious obligation.12 Considered as part of an alternative economy—a form of exchange that mitigated the self-interested transactions of capitalism—gift relations served as a repository of values incompatible with the workings of an emergent market society. At the same time, the rhetoric of gift giving was employed to advance the objectives of this society, including the circulation of commodities (both inanimate and human) necessary for the growth and reproduction of an international commercial culture. The gift, then, served as a touch point in the transformation from the old society to the new.

Introduction

5

The aim of this collection is to focus attention on the long eighteenth century as a critical period for gift relations. Drawing on the rich legacy of cultural anthropologists, including the work of Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marshall Sahlins, Georges Bataille, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous, the chapters featured here investigate the extensive implications that gift transactions had on English society at this time. While numerous critics have explored persuasively the role of charity and the significance of the philosophies of benevolence, philanthropy, and generosity in eighteenth-century England, and while the new economic criticism has offered useful accounts of the intersections between early-modern financial and cultural practices, they do not interrogate fully the changing significance of gift relations in this period and do not explore how the rhetoric of the gift shaped contemporary discussions of capitalism, property regulations, gender identity, and national and international trade.13 The chapters in this collection demonstrate for the first time the wide-reaching effects of gift exchange during this period, as it was practiced in domestic arenas such as courtship, friendship, and family dynamics as well as in more public arenas, such as the organization of charity and the workings of the marketplace.

I Theories of Benevolence While charity had been a long-standing imperative of political and religious life in England, eighteenth-century theories of benevolence were characterized by competing conceptions of who was worthy of assistance and what charitable assistance meant to the larger health and wealth of the nation. The three essays that begin this collection discuss the complex class, gender, and ethically based criteria underwriting eighteenth-century discourses of gift exchange. The essays demonstrate that while this discourse centered on the plight and reformation of the poor, orphans, prostitutes, and incarcerated debtors, long-held notions of authority and privilege ultimately informed the rules of gift transactions, determining who had a moral right to subsistence and how and when the recipient should repay the gift. Anna Moltchanova and Susannah Ottaway begin the collection with their essay “Rights and Reciprocity in the Political and Philosophical Discourse of Eighteenth-Century England,” an analysis of John Locke’s writings in the context of eighteenth-century concerns about statutory poor relief and methods of charitable assistance. Examining Locke’s work within the broader context of contemporary discourse

6


concerning the poor, Moltchanova and Ottaway argue that Locke’s theory of natural rights conflicts with his attitude toward poor relief, placing him “in a mode of self-deception” regarding the two. Because assistance through workhouses and charity schools was distributed as a gift exchange, Locke determines the rights of the poor based on the dynamics of reciprocity: the right to subsistence is reciprocated through industrious contributions to the state and obedience to upperclass authority. Using the language of gift exchange, Locke and his contemporaries such as Thomas Cooke disguise the unequal exchange that informed discourses of natural rights in the eighteenth century: in order for the poor to reciprocate the gift of subsistence, they must sacrifice access to citizenship and self-determination. Jad Smith’s essay, “Charity Education and the Spectacle of ‘Christian Entertainment,’ ” argues that Anglican reformers endorsed Locke’s rationale of childhood education to promote a transmission of culture that “generously bestowed” on deserving individuals “the gift of an advantageous art of living.” The emphasis on the benefits of charity education was both visual and verbal: parish authorities made children the spectacle of Christian Entertainment by displaying them in processions and showcasing them in sermons. According to Smith, the logic of gift exchange endorses the “ritual display” of the children’s bodies and minds to reflect their obligation to repay the benefit bestowed upon them. Likewise, the spectacle of reform recalls patrons’ debt to God for the benefits they have received. These performances strengthened the power of the donors, and the children’s representation as “hope for a better future” enacted “a grand experiment in cultural production,” emphasizing the continuing importance of the church to the modern state. Investigating the power of donors is also the subject of John A. Dussinger’s “Debt Without Redemption in a World of ‘Impossible Exchange’: Samuel Richardson and Philanthropy,” which examines the connection between the ideological foundations of eighteenth-century charitable institutions and Richardson’s moral and socioeconomic discourse. The legal rhetoric of the statewide charity movement and Richardson’s fiction and publishing projects offer particular conceptions of class and gender as preconditions for determining the worthiness of recipients. Dussinger explains that Richardson’s case was unique, as he was an active supporter of the charitable movement but also a victim of the Charitable Corporation fraud—an experience that left him acutely aware of the “feminization” of debtors and of the importance of “distributing rewards equitably.” Richardson’s writings reflect the complexities

Introduction

7

of gift exchange as informed by his position as both donor and debtor: the difficulty of distinguishing “worthy objects of compassion” and the realities of incurring obligations that could not be repaid.

II

Conduct and the Gift

While creating a network of obligations seemed a plausible mode of securing the good of society, deploying the gift as an instrument for (re)constructing individual character generated substantial concern and anxiety, most of it focused on the problem of return: what could guarantee that feelings of obligation would reliably produce desired forms of behavior? Marilyn Francus’s “ ’Tis Better to Give: The Conduct Manual as Gift” reveals how the trope of the gift gave structure to these books in an attempt to secure the realization of the authors’—and the givers’—intent: by making a present of advice, fathers and mothers tried to obligate children to specific codes of behavior, fixing their will in the child’s consciousness so that internalization of control might substitute for the presence of the parents themselves. Publication of these conduct manuals allowed parents buying them for their own daughters to require the same kind of compliance as a grateful return for their investment of time, affection, and expense. Yet while the hierarchy of the relations between parents (usually fathers) and daughters makes the dynamics of gift exchange often blatantly transparent, it does not simplify this exchange or guarantee its effects. Rather, as Francus’s study shows, the impossibility of insuring a sense of obligation and reciprocity renders the gift an inherently risky transaction, liable to fail in its objectives and aims; resentful recipients, she reminds us, “[impose] their own agenda on the exchange and meaning of the gift.” In “The Gift of an Education: Sarah Trimmer’s Oeconomy of Charity and the Sunday School Movement,” Dorice Williams Elliott examines public misgivings over education presented as a gift to the poor in the later part of the eighteenth century. Trimmer’s support for Sunday Schools, and their advocacy of gratitude and obedience from the recipients of a charity education, has fallen under attack from modern historians, who consider these institutions oppressive and reactionary. Yet Elliott reminds us that Trimmer and her contemporaries recognized and feared the element of risk in their gift: instead of cementing paternalist social relations, the gift could undermine them, as the knowledge—particularly the literacy skills—bestowed upon the poor could enable them to disregard obligation and rebel against rather than serve the interests of the superior classes. For Trimmer, entering

8


into a gift cycle of exchange means accepting such risk. The concept of the gift as disinterested, or given without anticipation of a sure return, was central to Trimmer’s philosophy in the Oeconomy of Charity, which insisted that thankfulness could only be generated—and social stability could only be maintained—through charities that were voluntary rather than obligatory. But Trimmer’s text is also riddled with anxiety over the possible consequences if the poor do not accept the moral and intellectual guidance of their advocates and do not respond with a properly submissive spirit. As Elliott notes, with the gift “nothing is secure; everything has the potential of being its opposite.”

III

The Erotics of the Gift

The claim that “nothing is secure” in gift exchange becomes even more apparent in Part III of this collection when questions of agency, gender, and desire are brought to the fore. The first two essays in this section demonstrate the paradox of the amatory gift: sexual desire overshadows attempts at disinterestedness and interrupts an exchange apparently based on care and mutual affection. While the presumption is that amorous exchanges are free of coercion, self-interest ultimately informs these relations as it provides the structural rules and expectations for giving and receiving. In “Obligation, Coercion, and Economy: The Deed of Trust in Congreve’s The Way of the World,” Cynthia Klekar examines how gift transactions disguise the legal and capitalist exploitation of women and the lower classes as a “fantasy of equal exchange” so that the inability to negotiate over their persons and fortunes is transferred to the realm of affect. Because these exchanges are cast as “love for love,” exchange itself becomes an obligation masked as desire. According to Klekar, relations of obligation always are in flux, and despite the rising influence of capitalist relations in Congreve’s drama, the asymmetry of gift exchanges characterizes the play’s action: the implied rule of reciprocity recasts the commodification of Mrs. Fainall, Lady Wishfort, and Millamant in the language of generosity, complicity, and mutual affection. Relations of domination and submission overshadow the logic of gift transactions in this play, demonstrating that the very structure of gift giving repeatedly traps recipients in cycles of unending obligation. Charles Hinnant, in his essay “The Erotics of the Gift: Gender and Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” discusses the paradoxical nature of the amatory gift, and the ways in which it disrupts both the rhetoric of disinterested exchange and the imbalance of power

Introduction

9

relations that the gift ultimately seeks to disguise. Amatory gifts invite expressions of “affection, kindness, consideration, or acts of generosity or charity” but also are positioned within “a possible domain of libidinal desire.” While the exchanges are presented as disinterested gestures of affection, amatory gifts ultimately fail at disinterestedness because sexual desire obscures tenderness and concern. Furthermore, the shift in the dynamics of courtship rituals to emphasize exchanges of affection between men and women, rather than economic transactions between men, makes amatory gifts suspect: these gifts can invoke relations of coercion and obligation even when women become partners in, rather than objects of, the exchange. The erotics of the gift are no less complicated when transactions occur between women, who were increasingly considered the proper agents of philanthropic work. In “Fictions of the Gift in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall,” Jennie Batchelor argues that the gift is the model for the alternative economy that the novel presents: Scott’s portrayal of a female community sustained through disinterested, uncommodified exchange repudiates the exploitative economic systems—including paternalism—identified with patriarchal power and authority. Composed of women from virtually all social classes, the Millenium Hall “sisterhood” functions as a system in which all members are benefactors as well as beneficiaries, sharing reciprocal services whose value is not estimated and rewarded solely according to their worth in the market. This egalitarian potential of the gift falls short, however, in the novel’s endorsement of abject gratitude as the appropriate recompense for women who are too genteel to labor and possess no resources to share; their contribution to the gift economy is their enactment of indebtedness and dependency, and this performance exposes the pervasive influence of commercial ideologies that Scott’s utopian community attempts to evade. The displacement of such ideologies from the English to the French is the subject of Linda Zionkowski’s “The Nation, the Gift, and the Market in The Wanderer.” Set in the time of Robespierre, this final novel by Frances Burney initially echoes the anti-Jacobean’s contrast between Revolutionary France—the Burkean nightmare of a state populated by “oeconomists and calculators”—and England, characterized by a benevolent paternalism. Very quickly, however, Burney dismantles the idea that attitudes toward the gift are constitutive of distinct national identities, showing that the network of obligations constructed and maintained by gift relations in Britain is as alienating and predatory as any bald exchange of commodities in France, even

10


when ruling-class women—deputized by their male kin—supervise this network. Significantly, only disenfranchised subjects possessing no social power (underage men and women, and women of the poorer classes) manage to replace the dynamics of dominance and subordination with those of reciprocal gratitude and attachment; in doing so, they transform the gift from an ideological support for paternalist authority to a means of critiquing masculine structures of property and influence. Their inability to sustain an economy of affect attests to the strength of the institutions set against such reciprocity.

IV


Despite the continued attachment to a rhetoric of selfless reciprocity, narratives of market exchanges also proliferated in eighteenth-century England. Involving complex negotiations of value, these exchanges heralded the growth of individualism and bolstered England’s identity as a nation of wealth and imperial power. As the two final essays in this collection demonstrate and the previous ones have implied, gift economies also rely on an ongoing negotiation of value—the evaluation of both the original gift and the one given in return. What enables gift exchanges to foster relations of obligation is that estimates of the gift’s value remain private and unarticulated. By contrast, acknowledging the gift’s value potentially transforms the gift itself into a commodity and the exchange into a transaction driven by concerns for profit. The last two essays examine the anxieties and the creative possibilities that arise from the intersections of the gift and the market. In “Josiah Wedgwood’s Goodwill Marketing,” Susan B. Egenolf demonstrates how the internationally successful pottery manufacturer utilized the rhetoric and practices of gift exchange to bolster both the production and marketing of his wares. By cultivating goodwill, Egenolf argues, Wedgwood obligated customers and laborers to reciprocal exchange that ensured repeated consumption and loyalty. Wedgwood courted the public’s goodwill through acts of donation, such as putting his expertise and materials to use for the abolition movement, and through gifting his wares with the option for purchase. Incorporating traditionally charitable activities into the workings of his business, Wedgwood tied his laborers to his interests by providing benefits such as health care, housing, free schooling, and retirement that were “predicated on an expectation of a just return.” The expected return was disciplined workers engaged in value-producing behavior. Underlying his use of gift rhetoric and gift exchanges in both

Introduction

11

marketing and production was an appeal to nationalism. Drawing on the notion that the health of his workers and the health of commerce bolstered the nation, Wedgwood forged a link between profitable business relations and the practice of benevolence, as he was “always conscious of the material benefit or advantages of such practices.” The material benefits of benevolence also fueled larger enterprises in commerce. Robert Markley’s essay, “Anson at Canton, 1743: Obligation, Exchange, and Ritual in Edward Page’s ‘Secret History,’” examines the account of Commodore George Anson’s second stay in Canton harbor in the context of Edward Page’s “A Little Secret History” and Chinese poet Yuan Mei’s description of Anson’s visit. When read alongside each other, these three texts illuminate the complex asymmetrical practices of cross-cultural gift exchange that informed international trade negotiations. According to Markley, all three narratives invoke the language of gift, obligation, and deference, and in their different interpretations of events, “hinge . . . on the symbolically rich ceremonies of gift exchange that inaugurated foreign trading missions in Canton.” The British emissaries and merchants to China believed that gifts could obligate recipients to a market exchange, while the Chinese considered gifts as tributes owed to their Emperor. As the two nations attempted to iron out trading practices, the expectations of gift exchange and the acknowledgment of deference imbedded in those exchanges for each country repeatedly undermined the process of forming a trade treaty based on mutual benefit. The failure to enact a trade agreement, then, was predominately a failure of the gift. Despite donors’ inability to predict or control the outcome of the gift exchange, gifts performed significant cultural work in eighteenthcentury England, functioning as a touchstone at the center of political, religious, familial, erotic, and national and international relations. This collection recuperates the history of gift transactions in all of their contradictions and complexities, for these transactions are more often circuitous rather than straightforward, opaque rather than lucid, and disturbing rather than reassuring. Analyzing gift dynamics poses significant challenges, since the gift itself resists scrutiny: those who interrogate its workings and operations appear as unduly suspicious of selfless acts, or as ingrates incapable of appreciating gestures emanating from exalted emotional states or high ethical principles. The chapters in this collection grapple with the impetus toward transcendence and reveal the secret life of the gift, embedded as it is in networks of dominance and subordination. The insights gained through historicizing the gift also allow us to reinterpret the contemporary rhetoric of need and

12


obligation at the personal, national, and global levels. From the pages of self-help books, to reality shows like The Big Give, to the spectacle of former presidents Clinton and George H. W. Bush overcoming partisan politics for the sake of disaster relief, gifts remain a compelling image in the twenty-first century cultural imagination. The gift promises to unify individuals, nations, and ideologies. However, the process of giving and receiving gifts is far more vexed and uncertain than contemporary portrayals of it suggest. By drawing attention to gift exchange in the long eighteenth century in England, as well as to its rhetoric of benevolence and reciprocity, this collection reveals a more nuanced understanding of the gift as we know it today.

Notes 1. See Bill Clinton, Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World; reviewed by Julie Neal, September 4, 2007 http://www.amazon.com/review/ R276TPH13XHJYO/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt#R276TPH13XHJYO. Robert Emmons, Thanks!: How the Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier. Promotional advertising for The Big Give includes the site at http://abc. go.com/primetime/oprahsbiggive. 2. Jonathan Parry, “The Gift, the Indian Gift and the ‘Indian Gift,’ ” 458. 3. Marcel Mauss, The Gift, 3. 4. Harold Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society, 49, 50. 5. Marilyn Strathern, Gender of the Gift, 161. 6. James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, 1:408. 7. Harold Newby, “The Deferential Dialectic,” 156. 8. Pierre Bourdieu, “Marginalia,” 234, 239. 9. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 129. 10. Blackwood’s Magazine 7 (April 1820): 92–100. 11. Joseph Townsend, Dissertation on the Poor Laws, 26. 12. Scott Cutler Shershow, The Work & the Gift, 5. 13. Representative examples of scholarship on charity in the eighteenth century include Donna T. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police; Patricia Comitini, Vocational Philanthropy and British Women’s Writing; Hugh Cunningham and Joanna Innes, eds., Charity, Philanthropy, and Reform: From the 1690s to 1850; Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire; Lindsay Granshaw and Roy Porter, eds., The Hospital in History; W. K. Jordan, The Charities of London, 1480–1660; and Beth Fowkes Tobin, Superintending the Poor. Studies of how English literary culture responded to the sweeping economic changes in this period include Patrick Brantlinger, Fictions of State; Margot C. Finn, The Character of Credit; Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England; Laura Mandell, Misogynous Economies; Colin Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance; Sandra Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century; and James Thompson, Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel.

I

Theories of Benevolence


1 Rights and Reciprocity in the Political and Philosophical Discourse of Eighteenth-Century England Anna Moltchanova and Susannah Ottaway

Both historians and philosophers have long recognized the profound link between Lockean theories of rights and the policies and discourse surrounding English attempts to counter poverty through statutory poor relief and charity. From the historical side, many have agreed with Paul Slack that the generosity of English poor relief in the eighteenth century (which supported some 8 percent of the population of England and Wales in 1750) was unprecedented, and was closely connected to a particular English view of natural rights: “the notion that the poor had an entitlement to subsistence . . . rested as much on the Elizabethan statues as on the writings of John Locke. . . .”1 From the standpoint of political philosophy, James Tully explains, “Each man [in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries] possessed Locke’s claim right in a legal form. The parish authorities had a duty, not merely to provide the local poor with welfare, but to provide them with the means by which they could make bread and so on, and so preserve themselves and their families.”2 Comparing philosophical discussions of natural rights with attitudes toward the needs of the English poor in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, some scholars have highlighted the paradoxical nature of Locke’s exclusively bourgeois vision of society, set, as it is, in the context of work that explicitly adheres to universalist, egalitarian ideas.3 Here we seek to reconcile Locke’s philosophical essays and his economic and political writings on charity and poor

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Anna Moltchanova and Susannah Ottaway

relief, placing them in the context of debates and experiences of the care of the poor from the 1690s through the first quarter of the eighteenth century. In particular, we examine why workhouses, schools of industry, and charity schools seemed an ideal solution to society’s ills to Locke and his contemporaries while they appear to us to contradict the stated commitment of the educated in Locke’s time to the natural rights of all humans. Others have grappled with Locke’s apparent contradictions. One approach has been to emphasize the conformity of Locke’s proposals to others of his times, both in its specific propositions and in the primacy of his concern with the morality of the poor.4 Another approach explains Locke’s apparent refusal to treat the poor as fully rational citizens, in his writings on the poor laws, by refocusing our attention on his concern for education and depicting Locke as consistently utilitarian and socially conservative in his discussion of the shaping of the children of the poor.5 E. J. Hundert has explained Locke’s call for compulsory work for the poor by reference to the Lockean conception of labor as “a primary expression of one’s humanity”; thus, for Locke, those who lacked the will or the ability to work placed themselves outside of the bounds of regular Civil Society.6 This essay argues that theories of exchange developed to explain gift giving, or reciprocal social actions, provide helpful ways to achieve a deeper understanding of the relationship between Locke’s (and his contemporaries’) natural-rights theory and his ideas regarding the poor. The discourse and practice of gift giving mediated and bolstered the economic relations of Locke’s time and was an integral part of the “economy of obligation” in early modern England.7 Gift giving was an elaborate set of commonly accepted practices at each level of social and economic interaction, with systematic albeit uncodified rules of reciprocal exchange. The network of expected actions, and the corresponding beliefs shared by the participants of interactions, was based on reciprocity, in the absence of the secured and socially protected rights of the participants. We first argue that Locke’s views on natural rights contrast so markedly with his stated ideas on the care of the poor that, philosophically speaking, he can be understood to be in a mode of self-deception. When we situate the paradoxical relationship between Locke’s rights theory and his attitude to poor relief within the broader historical context of his contemporaries’ discussions of the poor, however, we can see that not only charity but also statutory relief was allocated according to the principles of gift giving and reciprocal exchanges. Thus our analysis adds historical perspective to recent insights that “Whether it likes it or

Rights and Reciprocity

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not . . . the state is in partnership with a gift system . . . almost every time it takes its services directly to its citizens.”8

Locke’s Memorandum on Poor Relief to the Board of Trade In 1697, when John Locke sat on the Board of Trade, he produced a memorandum on poor relief for that body in response to the government’s request that the Board seek to reform a poor-relief system believed to be costly and ineffectual. Locke’s proposal was read several times between September 1697 and February 1698, but no decisions were reached regarding reforms to the poor laws.9 For Locke, “the true and proper relief of the poor . . . consists in finding work for them, and taking care they do not live like drones upon the labour of others.” It is clear that Locke desired the curtailment rather than the extension of both charitable giving and statutory poor relief, especially through the “suppression of idle beggars.”10 The proposal seeks to alter the exchange between the poor and the nation by increasing the contribution of the poor person’s labor to society while limiting the parish’s reciprocal responsibility to supply assistance. Locke unequivocally supports the basic right of subsistence but insists that even the impotent should work for England’s benefit: Everyone must have meat, drink, clothing, and firing. So much goes out of the stock of the kingdom, whether they work or no. Supposing, then, there be 100,000 poor in England, that live upon the parish, that is, who are maintained by other people’s labour (for so is everyone who lives upon alms without working), if care were taken that every one of those, by some labour in the woolen or other manufacture, should earn but 1d per diem (which, one with another, they might well do, and more), this would gain to England £130,000 per annum, which, in eight years, would make England above a million pounds richer.11

One of the most striking aspects of Locke’s proposal is his call for children as young as three years old to be maintained in a house of industry.12 Locke engages in a careful calculus of cost and benefit of keeping the children in the school of industry: the children will not only reap the forementioned advantages with far less charge to the parish than what is now done for them, but they will be also thereby the more obliged to come to school and apply themselves to work, because otherwise they will have no victuals, and

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Anna Moltchanova and Susannah Ottaway also the benefit thereby both to themselves and to the parish will daily increase. . . . (191)

The focus on exchange is ubiquitous in discussions of poor relief in the early modern period, as we will see below, but Locke is unusually explicit in drawing the connection between the unpropertied individuals’ obligations to work and their rights as autonomous citizens. For Locke, once an individual’s ability to labor ceases, there is a parallel reduction in the liberty assured to them by the nation. Locke writes, That those who are not able to work at all, in corporations where there are no hospitals to receive them, be lodged three or four or more in one room, and yet more in one house, where one fire may serve, and one attendant may provide for many of them, with less charge than when they live at their own choice scatteringly. (197, our emphasis)

Here, we can see that an exchange occurs when the loss of independent work leads to loss of independent residence, a right and necessity otherwise insisted upon by statutory law as well as tradition among the poor.13 Locke’s report on the poor laws is centrally concerned with the balance of the exchange between the poor and the nation, experienced most directly as an exchange between the poor, whose labor is needed for the benefit of the commonwealth, and their local overseers who are obligated to supply the basic needs of their neighbors. It is because Locke firmly believes that the poor have not been giving adequately of themselves that he feels that the state (or local relieving officers) has only the most basic responsibility to protect the natural right to subsistence while frankly violating their broader rights to self-determination.14

The Nature of the Paradox and Locke’s Self-Deception The Second Treatise assumes that men are by nature all free, equal, and independent, and that no one can be subjected to the political power of another without his own consent. But this work already contains a tension between the idea of consent as it applies to the poor and Locke’s set of natural rights. This tension is fully exhibited in his proposal concerning the poor laws as it fails to fulfill the natural rights of the poor that they ought to have retained in a just civil society.15


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Locke argues that civil society is necessary to ensure a peaceful and prosperous existence. In the state of nature, men have the right to property (life, liberty, and estate) and the right to preserve it (which involves either the right to punish others or to seek reparation).16 Civil society establishes an impartial authority that ensures all persons are fair in the exercise of their right to punish. One enters this society through agreement with others concerning comfortable, safe enjoyment of property and protection against those who did not consent. This justification of political authority seems inapplicable to the poor. They are excluded from the public discourse and cannot be understood to have engaged in even a hypothetical social contract; they do not enjoy what Locke would consider a comfortable, safe life. As Thomas Horne points out, Locke solves the problem of consent with the consideration of the role of money.17 In the absence of money in the state of nature, one can acquire property rights through one’s labor, with the following limitations on acquisition. All humans are given the world to share and one can only acquire as much property as (1) he can take care of, (2) without preventing others from the enjoyment of property, and (3) with the obligation of charity: that is, those who cannot satisfy their basic needs have a right to others’ plenty.18 Property rights in real societies are based on transfers involving money and are legitimate even when one appropriates more than would be allowed in the state of nature: money does not spoil and can be accumulated without invading the right of others (for “the exceeding of the bounds of his just Property” is not in the “largeness of his Possession, but the perishing of any thing uselessly in it”).19 Labor, being one’s property, determines how much should be given in exchange for what one contracts to give away after having produced or enhanced it through his labor. Although a man has “a Right to all he could imploy his Labour upon” (“ST” par. 51), a wage laborer or a servant does not appropriate the products of his labor, because his relation to the object of labor is mediated by the master’s ownership of property, but he ought to be paid for the labor. The master’s sovereignty over the servant’s labor can be acquired only through the consent of the servant. While the poor (especially if they were born into poverty) did not consent to being in their state, the use of money could be understood as an ongoing process of giving consent to the existing allocation of property and the corresponding political arrangements. Thus, Locke can both state that the inequality that grew with the application of labor in a money economy is perfectly legitimate and

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that the charity claim is all that is needed (fairly) to counterbalance and continue to mitigate the negative effects of the system. There is an inherent tension exhibited by Locke’s approach to consent and individual rights. According to Locke, the rights individuals have in the state of nature still ought to be preserved after the formation of societies through the introduction and enforcement of the laws of the state. The poor are permanently excluded from the enjoyment of resources already appropriated by others and have no property except for their labor. Are their property rights preserved in the state of England? Locke considers it justifiable that the unemployed poor, vagrants, and beggars can be forced to take jobs at a reduced pay (Locke suggests that reduced wages be paid to the poor as an incentive for others to hire them). 20 The consent of wage laborers can be valid, according to him, even if it is given under the pressure of circumstances in the absence of choice. Locke considers that a servant freely agrees to be paid less than the amount that accords with the labor he spent on his services, even if the choice the servant has is between starving and selling his labor at a reduced rate, bordering the subsistence level. 21 Provided that for Locke the monetary value of labor underlies exchanges of property, and the receipt/payment of money signifies consent, the transactions in which the poor are involved provide only forced conditions of consent. The poor have no choice in the kind of work they do; their labor is undervalued, and in addition, the mobility of the poor is restricted: they are hampered by the laws of settlement from looking for alternative employment elsewhere within the commonwealth.22 This voids the idea of consent as the basis of legitimacy for Locke; moreover, the rate at which the poor are compensated makes the consent superfluous since the transaction is covered by the right to subsistence and thus charity. Providing the poor with subsistence does not satisfy their natural right to life and property if this right is to be based on freedom as self-determination, in Locke’s own terms. Locke understands the end of law as the preservation and enlargement of freedom (“ST” par. 57). To be subject to the laws is not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another but freely to follow one’s own. The poor law as it exists in statutes of the time and in Locke’s proposal hinders a truly free individual acting in accordance with one’s own will because the poor have no choice: they would lose the right to subsistence if they did not comply. Locke’s natural rights for all are limited to the rights of subsistence or self-preservation for the poor and the rights


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of self-determination for the rich, and thus are two different types of rights altogether. The poor laws are unjust in Locke’s own terms if freedom is understood as self-determination. In the state of nature described by Locke, individuals can defend themselves and form alliances. The poor relinquish, in the state of England, which is to advance their natural rights, the right to selfdefense. However, the poor who do not work do not consent to the existing order through their transactions of labor exchange. They did not inherit any real estate that can make them abide by the laws. We can ask if the enjoyment of the benefits of membership in the Commonwealth generates their obligation to comply with the rules of the state. The general benefit they should derive from being citizens is the ability to maintain the right of property. Their right of property in their labor is violated by forced and underpaid conditions of employment. The poor cannot move out; if they find some other means to subsist, like begging, they are to be coerced to comply with the rules. They are not really a part of the Commonwealth by consenting or accepting property; they have no choice to opt out and derive no benefit from their membership. It appears that they are not obligated to abide by the law and may prefer the state of nature, where each of them can exercise the right to self-defense, alone or in the company of others, to the state of England. As we will see below, the poor recognized and objected to the inequity in securing their rights under certain circumstances. Locke’s position as a great theorist on education makes his treatment of children in his economic and philosophical writings particularly significant. He asserts that “We are born free, as we are born rational”; “the freedom of man and liberty of acting according to his own will is grounded on his having reason” (“ST” par. 51, 63). The duty of parents is to instruct their children and provide for them until they become rational (“ST” par. 69). His theory on the role of education in developing human understanding would suggest that the plight of poor children might be different from that of their parents, and through proper education they can be elevated to the status of fully autonomous beings. In Locke’s scheme, the children would be removed from home, with the educational functions transferred to the schools of industry (just as they would be in the charity schools that we will examine below). The poor children are inured to hard labor in the textile manufacture for the advantage of the kingdom and attend church services each Sunday with their schoolmasters. 23 Certainly the poor children are better off somewhat educated than not at all,

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and having some skill rather than none. This, however, is an argument about the preference for a relatively better state over a relatively worse state of affairs. Both states of affairs, nevertheless, can be in violation of the natural rights of the children. For there seems to be no explanation of why they should not be educated into the full and subtle exercise of their own faculties. Locke would not agree that the offspring of a laborer is less intelligent by birth, and the children’s education proposed in his treatise on the poor law cannot be justified in light of his theory of education. Ultimately, Locke’s discussion of children’s upbringing at a very basic level as “useful” citizens is not justifiable from the natural-rights point of view. While the poor are the objects of compassion, they are also subjected to the arbitrary power of national policymakers and parish authorities who determine both the level of rationality they are to achieve through education and the level of freedom they are to have in the disposal of their labor. The poor are inescapably defined as moral recipients and not agents through their relationship with the rest of the society, making it questionable whether or not they can even qualify for natural rights, which require both rationality and freedom. This relationship is reciprocal and fair if the poor function in accordance with what is expected of them given their social conditioning, but this relationship is not just. Moreover, the requirements Locke imposes on the poor to exercise their rationality by becoming productive members of society in fact make the poor act irrationally, for example, when they accept work for reduced pay. If his goal is to restore them to the proper laboring capacity, it is not fulfilled by the punitive measures he proposes, which fail to extend natural rights to the poor. If Locke assumes that they can never achieve the full level of rationality, it is not clear on what grounds he justifies “contracts” based on their labor being sold; moreover, his justification of political order used in the Second Treatise does not apply. Why did Locke disregard these inconsistencies? He is most likely in self-deception concerning the fact that his scheme of poor relief does not fulfill the idea of natural rights. We will use Robert Audi’s definition of self-deception to explain this. To be in self-deception concerning a proposition, one has to sincerely avow that it is true but unconsciously know that the opposite is the case, and one has to have at least one want that explains the disposition to defend the proposition even when faced with evidence against it. 24 Locke’s want is to shape the ruled to make them more manageable to preserve the social order that benefits all. He ultimately justifies that


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different treatment be allocated to the poor and to the rich, with different levels of reason developed in the individuals from these two strata. He “unconsciously” knows that extending the rights in the state of nature to all makes his proposal for poor relief unjust. In order to cope with self-deception he considers the situation of the poor through the lens of reciprocity that first substitutes the idea of fairness for the idea of justice and then affirms the fairness of the existing order. 25 A genuinely equal society motivates the contract-based relationships of individuals by safeguarding their equal standing in personal transactions. The wronged party can affirm their entitlement by appealing to the standard of universal rights. In contrast, in Locke’s society the proper standing and entitlement are aligned with an individual’s circumstances within an elaborate system of exchange that accepts the state of inequality of the participants as a given and evaluates their individual contributions based on their ideal function within the system. In this case the de facto status is considered fair if each party holds its side of the bargain by complying with the roles assigned to them by the society and thus contributing to the wealth of the whole. The wronged party can appeal only by reference to a customary entitlement in accordance with the level of socialization considered appropriate for them, not the idea of the natural rights. In her study of informal support such as charity and personal networks in England up to the late seventeenth century, Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos argues that the relations of exchange are best conceived in terms of gift giving, or voluntary giving and exchange of goods in the context of reciprocal personal interactions. Such interactions are unimportant or undesired in a different mode of exchange, market transactions. 26 The culture of the gift, which, as we noted earlier, was widespread in the England of Locke’s time, 27 does not exclude relations of domination and subordination; the receipt of gifts can entail undesired obligations and a perpetual duty to return, and humiliate the recipient. Gift giving is based on individual and social bonds and not on the recipient’s and giver’s rights. As Ben-Amos points out, there is always a measure of uncertainty in the continuation of support offered by reciprocal exchanges (331–2). Due to the lack of guarantees based on the recipients’ rights, gift exchange does not eliminate the arbitrary control of the giver over the recipient, which undermines the recipient’s capacity for self-determination. Thus, reciprocal interactions can be fair without being based on equality promoted by natural rights, which does not make these interactions just but may give them

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a semblance of justice and allow Locke to substitute the language of exchange for the language of rights and duties.

Locke’s Context: Broader Discussions of Houses of Industry and Charity Schools In calling for the use of houses of industry rather than the continuation of parish pensions, Locke, like many of his contemporaries, supported the form of welfare that most blatantly restricted the freedoms of the poor. This was a period during which institutional methods, rather than poor relief and charity given in the home, came to be seen as a panacea for the problem of poverty.28 The culmination of this shift to institutional remedies for the problem of poor relief came with the passage of the 1723 workhouse “test” act, in which parishes were allowed to mandate entry into a workhouse for any parishioner needing poor relief. Even before this act passed Parliament, corporations of the poor had been established in fifteen cities between 1696 and 1715.29 At the same time, thanks in part to the efforts of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, there was a veritable explosion in the number of charity schools set up throughout the kingdom. Indeed, the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century witnessed the rise of a constellation of institutional remedies for society’s problems. Workhouses and charity schools were two aspects of the same essential impulse.30 A closer look at contemporary debates surrounding workhouses and charity schools deepens our understanding of the degree to which Locke’s seemingly paradoxical support of houses of industry was shared by his contemporaries. Supporters of workhouses took several approaches: some failed to mention the relationship of workhouses to the poor’s rights; others emphasized the degree to which workhouses most effectively supplied the rights of the poor to subsistence; and a few followed Locke in claiming that workhouses promoted the future autonomy of poor children, and so even served as protectors of that aspect of natural rights in a broader sense. Those who opposed the workhouse schemes in treatises and parliamentary debates seldom focused on the issue of the natural rights of the poor, instead highlighting broader economic and political concerns with the institutions. Perhaps most significantly, the literature on poor-relief reform was saturated with the language of reciprocity in much the same way as Locke’s writings. Just as this language clouded the clarity of Locke’s adherence to natural-rights theory, so too the foregrounding of issues


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of reciprocal relations and obligations between the poor and their society could serve to justify or condemn workhouses, depending on the weight that was given to various services, duties, and obligations. Universally, the absolute right to subsistence is acknowledged and protected by these authors.31 But the broader range of natural rights— the rights to liberty and property—was far more contested. These “rights” are viewed in this literature as a composite of privileges and reciprocal obligations that were differently articulated and defined by people on different sides of discussions over workhouses. Because Locke articulated his belief in the full slate of natural rights, we have seen that he is in self-deception over his failure to uphold these rights in his proposals for poor-law reform. With the broader body of work by Locke’s contemporaries, we cannot speak to the issue of selfdeception, but we can examine the ways in which they, too, generally conceived of the duties and obligations regarding the poor in terms of exchange or reciprocal responsibilities. Because the literature promoting both charity schools and workhouses exhibited a consistent assumption of the absolute right of the poor to subsistence, the right to life was unequivocally defended even in the most callous publications. Sermons preached in support of these institutions shared a general conviction of the essential duty to “let none be suffer’d to perish for need.”32 Legal treatises, too, made clear that even for the most recalcitrant of miscreants locked up in a house of correction, “they are not to be suffered to perish. . . . in their extream necessity there must be Allowance by the Town. . . .”33 It is clear that within the early-eighteenth-century discussions over the institutionalization of the poor, the right to self-preservation described by the natural law theorists of the seventeenth century was unequivocally accepted. 34 In contrast, defenders of charity schools and houses of industry rarely discussed the rights of liberty and property in explicit terms. Instead, in their debates over the broader needs and rights of the poor, such authors discussed the reciprocal duties and obligations of rich and poor, governors and governed, in language that was saturated with the notion of exchange. What philosophers such as Locke discussed as essential rights in philosophical treatises were treated in this broader literature—just as they had been treated in Locke’s essay on poor relief—as objects, to be exchanged.35 The prominent theme of the education of poor children provides a clear example of the importance of the language of reciprocity. In many cases, arguments in favor of charity schools and workhouses,

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as well as testimonials regarding their success, focused on the ways in which these institutions effectively fulfilled society’s obligation to ensure the education of children, one of the Lockean requirements we noted above. In Limehouse Hamlet, Stepney, Children of the Workhouse were “sent to a School in the Neighborhood, at the publick Charge, till they are 8 Years of Age.”36 And in Bedford, children sent to the Workhouse “Before they can do any Work . . . are sent to the Charity-School, and taught to read and learn their Catechism.”37 Many of these individual workhouses and charity schools, as well as the pamphlet literature and sermons that promoted such places, sought to emphasize their educational success with children. Indeed, on some occasions, the language of charity school and workhouse promoters echoed Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and his Treatise on Education, as well as his Second Treatise. In arguing for the need to take children out of their homes and provide them with a better education, Thomas Cooke argued: Education is the great improvement of our human Faculties, upon which the great Hinge of all human Affairs at this Day turns; and as Reason is the discriminating Mark from Beasts, so Education is that only Character by which we excel and differ from one another; it is that on which all the worth we boast of doth alone depend; without this a Man is little serviceable either to himself or to his Countrey: a meer Man prefers his Passion to his Reason, and is actuated by his Senses, more than his Understanding: The first thing that Nature teaches us, is its own great principle of self preservation, that is to be provided with the necessary supports of Life, as Food and Rayment, and truly where Education hath not instructed Children how to provide all these by an honest Industry, ‘tis too experimental a truth, that they learn to Steal them. 38

Here, we see workhouses defended, in explicitly “enlightened” terms, as promoting not only education and autonomy but also advanced understanding and capacity, in order to make man more “serviceable . . . to himself or to his Countrey.” At a charity girls’ school in Greenwich, the primary goal of the institution appears to have been to turn the children into autonomous and well prepared members of society: “to enable the Children to shift honestly by their own Industry, if it should be their lot to be cast into any Part of the Kingdome where they might be friendless.”39 This comes very close to at least a tacit acceptance of the right of poor children to self-determination.


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On the other hand, the stated purpose of most pauper education was to teach the children to be docile and uncomplaining servants and laborers. In such cases, the exchange that was being urged was not so much that involving the children’s gift of current labor for future autonomy, but rather one that described the contribution of the property resources of donors and rate payers in exchange for the future benefits to them of the labor of the inmates. The need to inculcate habits of industry molded the type of education supplied to poor children. Locke’s desire that children of the poor should be “inur’d to Labour” was a constant refrain in this literature. From charity sermons, Acts of Parliament, Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge propaganda, parish reports, and so forth we find variations on the theme articulated by a “Gentleman” of Bisciter, Oxfordshire, who threatened to withdraw his subscription to a charity school “unless the Children were employ’d in some Sort of Work, to accustom them to Labour” (A 106). From 1701, the Workhouse in Bishopsgate Street in London started “taking in poor Children, whose Necessities People are commonly most apt to pity, the good Fruit that was likely to be produc’d from the Education of such Children, and bringing them up to Labour, rais’d many Benefactors” (A 2–4). These benefactors gained the privilege of recommending the admittance of a set number of children according to the amount of their contribution. This was another form of exchange: the gift of charitable funds was reciprocated by the granting of favors, part of the elaborate web of exchange that held together the social world of the eighteenth century. Protests against workhouses were wide ranging, with the poor themselves attacking the institutions most directly as rights denying, as we will see below. One of the more typical of attacks by the middling sort and the elite was the “Protest against the Bill for erecting Work Houses at Bristol” in Parliament on March 17, 1718, which was motivated solely by concerns related to religion and party politics (in this case the failure to use a religious test in selecting workhouse governors).40 Daniel Defoe vehemently attacked workhouses in his 1704 pamphlet, Giving Alms No Charity. Defoe expressed a wide range of concerns, all of which pointed out the ways in which workhouses improperly limited or demarcated exchange. He saw workhouses as an unfair form of competition for existing industries, and defended the autonomy not only of employers and of the marketplace but also of workers, whom he believed should be allowed to determine the allocation of their own labor. Worse, workhouses would interfere with the development of national sentiment and perpetuate the

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parochialism so evident in the existing poor relief system. He wrote, “An Alms ill directed may be Charity to the particular Person, but becomes an Injury to the Publick, and no Charity to the Nation.”41 Workhouses would impede the flow of trade through England that made each region mutually dependent on others.42 Finally, Defoe attacked the whole notion that the poor should be supplied with work (the foundation for the justification of the workhouse, from Defoe’s perspective) rather than being expected to go out and find it.43 Once the proper form of labor exchange is violated, Defoe appears to argue, wider forms of exchange would also be deformed.44 Bernard Mandeville was as adamantly opposed to charity schools, as Defoe was to workhouses. The heart of his argument relates to the central hypocrisy he spies in these institutions. No benefactor really intended to elevate the poor above a state of subsistence labor, he contends. Mandeville insists that the Welfare and Felicity . . . of every State and Kingdom, require that the Knowledge of the Working Poor should be confin’d within the Verge of their Occupations, and never extended (as to things visible) beyond what relates to their Calling. . . . The time they spend at their Book can be spent better in some Business, for few make any progress in School and this time is lost to the Society. . . . By discouraging Idleness with Art and Steadiness you may compel the Poor to labour without Force, so by bringing them up in Ignorance you may inure them to real Hardships without being ever sensible themselves that they are such.45

As E. J. Hundert has noted, Mandeville revealed the fundamentally political and exploitative relationship between rich and poor that was reconfirmed in the charity school movement, but which was concealed by the rhetoric of charitable giving and moral reform.46 In essence, it is the very lack of true reciprocity between poor and benefactor that Mandeville attacks here. For him, the charity school is a site of perverted exchange—the poor receive that which is false and injurious to the nation as a whole, as well as to their own future well-being. Mandeville’s criticism of the motivation behind charity schools is illuminating when compared to the tension between Locke’s proposals concerning the poor and his ideal of natural rights. Locke’s self-deception as the representative of the prosperous is unmasked by Mandeville’s utilitarian analysis of the contemporary society. Locke, and promoters of charity schools and workhouses, wished to make the poor useful to the propertied, but not necessarily to satisfy the


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natural rights of the poor. Just as the discourse of natural rights seems to become a veneer that conceals the real goals pursued by Locke’s proposal, so the seemingly positive motives of organizations like the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (and others active in the charity school movement) appear in Mandeville’s analysis to be exploitative forms of gift exchange. While Defoe and Mandeville attacked workhouses and charity schools as misguided and harmful to the true utility of the poor and the nation, the poor attacked these institutions even more vehemently, and for reasons that were actually more resonant with Locke’s theories than those of their better educated countrymen. Although the poor, largely illiterate and politically disempowered, have not left us an extensive record of their thoughts on workhouses and charity schools, we can view their attitudes in the writings of the elite.47 The poor, quite simply, loathed the workhouse and mistrusted the charity school, and their dislike of both seems to have centered not so much around issues of rights to subsistence, as on the other rights of poor laborers: the right of liberty, and rights to their property in their labor. The chief sticking point for the poor was that these workhouses limited their freedom of movement and their residential autonomy. Workhouses, and to a lesser extent charity schools, not only actually sought to constrain the poor (many of them disallowed their residents from going outside of the institution’s walls) but also retained a taint of association with forced-labor institutions—houses of correction, Bridewells, Gaols. As a correspondent in Maidstone, Kent, asserted around 1724: A Work-House is a Name that carries along with it an Idea of Correction and Punishment; and many of our Poor have taken such an Aversion to living in it upon that Account, as all the Reason and Argument in the world can never overcome. . . . we have many here who would choose to starve, rather than be maintain’d in Plenty and Cleanliness in the Bridewell, or House of Correction. (A 35)

At Harborough, Leicestershire, the poor refused to enter the workhouse “because of the Confinement to which they must then be subject” (A 104). In Rumford, Essex: The Advantages of the Work-house to the Parish, does not arise from what the poor People can do towards their Subsistence, but from the Apprehensions the Poor have of it. These prompt them to exert and do their utmost to keep themselves off the Parish, and render them

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Anna Moltchanova and Susannah Ottaway exceedingly averse to submit to come into the House, till extream Necessity compels them. Pride, tho’ it does ill become poor Folks, won’t suffer some to wear the Badge; others cannot brook Confinement; and a third Sort deem the Work-house to be a mere State of Slavery. (A 53–5)

Over and again, early eighteenth-century evidence shows that the poor would choose to forego their pensions rather than enter the workhouse, because of their preference for liberty over subsistence when they were forced to choose between these rights. Critics and promoters alike saw workhouses and charity schools fundamentally as sites of exchange. Although economic exchange was part of the calculus of the workhouse (giving labor to attain the means of subsistence; exploiting labor to make the poor “pay for themselves”), in this context it is only natural that these exchanges be understood as equally about social and cultural exchange. These institutions were places where, promoters believed, the poor gave their labor (the only form of property they had) along with their freedom of movement (their liberty). While adult inmates received primarily subsistence and a renewed relationship with their governors, children could be seen to gain future autonomy. At the same time, it is clear that the poor did not perceive these workhouses as places of exchange at all. For them, they were simply sites of deprivation of their natural rights.

Conclusion: John Locke, Natural Rights, and Institutions as Sites of Exchange How does this brief survey help us to understand the seeming contradictions of Locke’s views on the poor? The right of the poor to subsistence had been acknowledged in English law long before Locke put forward his proposals, but his definition of labor and liberty as parts of one’s right to property makes the mere right to subsistence appear insufficient to satisfy natural rights that belong to all according to Locke’s own philosophical understanding of these terms. How the theoretical and practical dimensions of Locke’s thought clash is instructive: the clash shows that the social fabric of the time is simply not woven so as to support the natural rights of the poor. Treating the poor as moral recipients, not agents, denies their exercise of natural rights in the very terms Locke wants to use to justify the inequality of distribution: they are not in a position to give any consent—tacit or explicit.


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Our survey enables us to see the large degree to which Locke’s views were reflected by his contemporaries. If Locke were in self-deception, then it is a deceit that was shared by many of his countrymen, who, like Thomas Cooke, saw absolutely no hypocrisy in citing natural law as justification for the implementation of houses of industry. Although all agreed that those who were in absolute necessity had an irrefutable claim on their parish to shelter, food, and health care, the degree to which this right to subsistence implied the protection of other natural rights was contested. Once the right to subsistence “kicked in,” did a person have to sacrifice rights to liberty and property? Those who advocated institutional methods of charitable and poor-relief assistance seemed to answer this question in the affirmative.

Notes 1. Paul Slack, From Reformation to Improvement, 163–4. As Richard Ashcraft has stated, “Locke’s position is that the natural right to subsistence is a legally enforceable right within any post-subsistence form of society, and within seventeenth-century England in particular” (“Lockean Ideas, Poverty, and the Development of Liberal Political Theory” 43–4). 2. James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 116. 3. As E. J. Hundert observes, political theorists such as C. B. Macpherson have noted that “Locke’s discussion in The Second Treatise upholds opposed positions as regards rights and rationality, laying the ideological foundation for bourgeois society” (“Making of Homo Faber” 14). See also Thomas Horne, Property Rights. 4. A. L. Beier has pointed out the depth of Locke’s concern with the morality of the poor; see Beier, “ ‘Utter Strangers.’ ” 5. “The focus on the representative nature of Locke’s thought might also help to clarify some of the issues that burden the historiography of the [charity school] movement” (Michael Sheasgreen, “John Locke and the Charity School Movement” 78–9). See also M. G. Jones, The Charity School Movement. 6. Hundert, “Making of Homo Faber,” 8. Hundert continues, “In his understanding of work Locke helped fuse and develop the positions of seventeenth-century economic writers and Puritan social thinkers” (9). Hundert deals with the problem of paradox directly: “In view of The Second Treatise how could Locke assume, as he did in the economic writings, that those who labor are an inferior order of men? And, equally significant, it is difficult to resolve the apparent contradiction between Locke’s assumption of different orders of rationality [in his economic writings] and his claim that ‘we are born Free, as we are born Rational. . . . [We are born into] a State of Equality, wherein all the Power and Jurisdiction is reciprocal. . . .’ ” (11–2). In contrast, as Hundert points out, Macpherson’s argument in The Political

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7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16 17. 18.

Anna Moltchanova and Susannah Ottaway Theory of Possessive Individualism sees Locke as principally concerned to justify unlimited accumulation and the appropriation of labor, “providing a positive moral basis to capitalist society” (13). Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation. Jacques T. Godbout, The World of the Gift, 57. See also Avner Offer, “Between the Gift and the Market Place”; James G. Carrier, Gifts and Commodities; and Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, “Gifts and Favors.” Beier writes: “We know that Locke’s [proposal] was among those put aside, because he wrote to a confidant on 25 February that the Board had ‘thought not fit to make use of it’ ” (“ ‘Utter Strangers,’ ” 30 n.10). Beier’s sources are M. G. Mason, “John Locke’s Proposals on Work-House Schools,” and Locke’s Correspondence, 6:329. As Beier notes, John Cary and John Bellers, prominent poor-law reformers, also had proposals read by the Board of Trade. John Locke, “An Essay on the Poor Law,” 189–90. The quotation is from Locke’s memorandum to the Board of Trade, which is reprinted in Mark Goldie’s introduction to Locke’s “An Essay on the Poor Law;” hereafter cited in text. A note to the Essay elaborates: “The draft adds: ‘Tis therefore worth everybody’s care that the poor should have employment, for I may confidently say that of those who are now maintained by parish rates and begging there is not one of ten, I might I think make the number a great deal less, who could not well earn above 2d. a day. Nay, take them all together one with another they might earn 3d. a day, which would be above £400,000 a year got to England’ ” (189). Locke specifies that giving sustenance to the children is more efficient than giving their parents money for them; doing so, a parish gains control over the children’s health. Although their food costs the parish money, they will be stronger and healthier workers for the nation in the future; “Essay on the Poor Law,” 189. For a compelling analysis of this, see Steve Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in England. Locke’s notion of labor as the property of the worker is especially relevant here. The basis for poor relief in Locke’s time had been erected by the 1601 Elizabethan Poor Law, which supplied parish-based taxes that were redistributed to the impotent poor as cash allowances, in addition to supplying make-work schemes for the unemployed and apprenticeships to poor children. John Locke, “Second Treatise of Government,” par. 11, 13; hereafter cited as “ST” by paragraph number. Horne, Property Rights, 58–9. “As Justice gives every Man a Title to the product of his honest industry, and the fair Acquisitions of his Ancestors descended to him; so Charity gives every man a Title to so much out of another’s Plenty, as will keep him from extream want, where he has no means to subsist otherwise; and a Man can no more justly make use of another’s necessity, to force him to become his Vassal, by with-holding that Relief, God requires him to afford to the wants of his Brother, than he that has more strength can seize upon a weaker,


19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

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master him to his Obedience, and with a Dagger at his Throat offer him Death or Slavery” (Locke, “First Treatise” par. 42). “ST” par. 46, 50. Locke writes: “Men have agreed to disproportionate and unequal Possession of the Earth, they having by a tacit and voluntary consent found out a way, how a man can fairly possess more land than he himself can use the product of, by receiving in exchange for the overplus, Gold and Silver, which may be hoarded up without injury to anyone, these metals not spoileing or decaying in the hands of the possessor” (par. 50). Locke, “Draft of a Representation,” 451. This injustice is mitigated for Locke through consent: “the Authority of the Rich Proprietor, and the Subjection of the Needy Beggar began . . . from . . . the Consent of the poor Man, who preferr’d being his Subject to starving” (Locke, “First Treatise of Government” par. 43). If they wanted to retain their right to poor relief, the poor could not leave the country or even their parish (which would be an option for a rich citizen): the Settlement Act of 1662 included the provision that to gain the right to relief a poor person ought to be either born in the parish or have held a one-year contract in the parish. Locke, “Draft of a Representation,” 454–5. Audi’s own formulation is as follows: “S . . . is in self-deception with respect to a proposition, p, if and only if S (1) unconsciously knows that not-p (or has reason to believe, and unconsciously and truly believes, that not-p); (2) sincerely avows, or is disposed to avow sincerely, that p; and (3) has at least one want which explains, in part, both why S’s belief that not-p is unconscious and why S is disposed to avow that p, even when presented with what he sees is evidence against p” (Moral Knowledge 132). In order to avoid self-deception, Locke would need to acknowledge that what he proposes is an inadequate and temporary solution that ultimately does not satisfy the natural rights of the poor but is the best that can be done under the circumstances to improve the wealth of the country and, by implication, the lives of the poor. Ben-Amos, “Gifts and Favors,” 297–9; hereafter cited in text. There were numerous foundations for poor relief, and one-third of testators in London and other places around the country from the late sixteenth through the late seventeenth centuries left donations to the parish poor in their wills; see Ben-Amos, “Gifts and Favors,” 321. The essential study remains Tim Hitchcock, “The English Workhouse.” Goldie, introduction, 182–3. Goldie notes that these corporations were often political devices of the Whig party, and “similar schemes to Locke’s were mooted in Firmin’s Some Proposals for the Imploying of the Poor (1678), Sir Matthew Hale’s Discourse Touching Provision for the Poor (1683), and John Bellers’s Proposals for Raising a Colledge of Industry (1695).” This is another example of how productive it can be to examine together formal and informal, state and charitable provisions for the poor, as Joanna Innes (“The ‘Mixed Economy of Weldare’ in Early Modern England”) and others have asserted. On the role of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, see Tim Hitchcock, “Paupers and Preachers.”

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31. It is also clear that the poor’s right to subsistence was affirmed by the Bible, and the responsibility for assuring this right lay in the hands of the state. One sermon asserted, in explicating Psalm 72 (“He shall judge the Poor of the People, he shall defend the Children of the Needy”) that “We have here all that is great and good, all that is valuable or desirable in Government, Impartial Justice in the Administration at Home; the generous Defence of such as are destitute of the Means of preserving themselves. . . .” See Gilbert Burnet, A Sermon Preach’d Before the Queen, 2. Locke himself clearly wrote of the right of necessity in his memorandum. 32. “For it is certain, that no Man was sent into this World to be Starv’d”; Offspring Blackall, The Rules and Measures of Alms-Giving, 9, 15. See also Burnet, Sermon Preach’d Before the Queen, 2. Even the Reverend Thomas Cooke, whose published sermon of 1702 stressed that “if any will not work, neither shall he eat,” reminds his audience that “the first thing that Nature teaches us, is its own great principle of self preservation”; see Cooke, Workhouses the Best Charity, 5, 22. 33. Henry Care, English Liberties, Or, The Free-born Subject’s Inheritance, 218. See also Michael Dalton, The Country Justice, 148. 34. On the right of necessity as understood by Grotius, Pufendorf, Hobbes, Locke, and others, see Horne, Property Rights, 15–51. 35. See Ben-Amos, “Gifts and Favors.” 36. An Account of Several Work-Houses for Employing and Maintaining the Poor, 14; hereafter cited in text as A. 37. An Account of Several Work-Houses, 81. This was also the case at Lutterworth, Leicestershire (102). 38. Cooke, Workhouses the Best Charity, 21–2. 39. An Account of Several Work-Houses, 25. An echo of this is seen in the Grey Coats Hospital in London, where “the Poor Children of this Parish are not only instructed in the Principles and Duties of Christianity, but also in the Means of getting a Livelihood by their own Labour” (20). 40. William Cobbett, Parliamentary History of England, 7:555. The considerable debate and concern regarding gaol conditions, considered in Parliament especially in 1696 and the 1730s, contains interesting parallels: it, too, displayed a clear concern with the subsistence rights of the poor without ever going beyond consideration of this most basic right; see Cobbett, 8:680, 706–18, 730–53, 803–12. 41. Daniel Defoe, Giving Alms No Charity, 14. 42. Defoe, Giving Alms No Charity, 16–22. Defoe explains here that if local workhouses are set up to manufacture goods generally made in other parts of the kingdom, trade will increasingly center on the locality, not on regional intercourse. If one sets up a workhouse in London that causes trade in another part of the country to decline, for example, the result is “giving to one what you take away from another, enriching one poor Man to starve another, putting a Vagabond into an honest Man’s Employment” (16–17). This is clearly a perverted form of exchange indeed!


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43. This interfered with the sole proper form of labor exchange—work for wages—according to Defoe, and this is why he sought to dissuade people from starting workhouses by including an extended discussion of the relationship among population, wages, and labor in his treatise. His view on the importance of national sentiment is captured in his statement: “the thing now in debate [in Parliament] is not the Poor of this or that particular Town. The House of Commons are acting like themselves, as they are the Representatives of all the Commons of England, ‘tis the Care of all the Poor of England which lies before them, not of this or that particular Body of the Poor” (Giving Alms No Charity 15). 44. Defoe sums it up: “Work-houses, Corporations, Parish-stocks, and the like, to set them to Work, as they are Pernicious to Trade, Injurious and Impoverishing to those already employ’d, so they are needless, and will come short of the End propos’d” (Giving Alms No Charity 25). 45. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 1:288, 317. 46. See the discussion in E. G. Hundert, The Enlightenment Fable, 22. 47. Many more surviving sources, especially pauper letters, periodicals, and settlement examinations, reveal the attitude of the poor by the end of the eighteenth century. See, for instance, Thomas Sokoll, ed., Essex Pauper Letters, 1731–1837; and Alysa Levene, ed., Narratives of the Poor in EighteenthCentury Britain.


2 Charity Education and the Spectacle of “Christian Entertainment” Jad Smith If one reduces the relation of pedagogic communication to a pure and simple relation of communication, one is unable to understand the social conditions of its specifically symbolic and specifically pedagogic efficacy which lie precisely in concealment of the fact that it is not a simple relation of communication. —Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction

During the early 1690s, with the publication of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Some Thoughts Concerning Education, John Locke challenged the traditional philosophical view of custom as a wellspring of error and unthinking habit, and founded a novel epistemology on the idea of making custom’s inherent educative power the object of social strategy, of disciplinary and moral cultures. Locke reimagined custom not only as a site for the strategic rather than chance reproduction of human understanding but also as a possible leverage point for cultivating improvement on a national scale—for reproducing culture actively and selectively, especially in children.1 No group of intellectuals seized upon his theory of cultural reproduction as quickly or translated it into an experimental educational practice as successfully as Anglican reformers involved in establishing the charity school movement as a civic force in the British Isles. The Church of England of the late 1690s—still reeling from the religious shake-up following the Glorious Revolution, increasingly split along party lines, and in

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effect demoted from the national to simply the official church by the Toleration Act—faced a quandary: how to reinvent itself politically and realign itself with the wider national interest.2 Co-opting Locke’s prototypical theory of cultural reproduction and parlaying it into a popular discourse of improvement proved central to the church’s consequent attempts at self-renewal and self-legitimation. From the turn of the century until the 1720s, Anglican reformers noisily echoed Locke’s call for a pedagogical intervention in matters of cultural reproduction, and his claim about early childhood education’s power to transform society for the better, in particular, achieved the status of an informal creed among them, surfacing time and again in their rhetorical gambits. However, if Locke remained deeply skeptical of active culture’s ultimate ability to overcome the accidents and contingencies besetting the development of the human understanding, these reformers approached the pedagogic content of culture as a relatively “pure and simple relation of communication.”3 In their hands, in other words, Locke’s emphasis on strategy gave way to an optimistic view of culture as a solemnized rite of induction into the social order. From their pulpits and in print, clerics touted charity education as a more or less fail-safe instrument of cultural transmission—but also as a way of generously bestowing sober and orderly habits on deserving innocents and thereby of extending to them the gift of an advantageous art of living.4 This displacement of culture as an overtly pedagogic relation through the logic of the gift also underwrote the increasingly visual rhetoric of charity. The poor scholars themselves—neatly dressed and well behaved at official occasions such as the theatrically charged anniversary meetings of the charity schools, or so depicted in visual representations circulated in charity print culture—were put on ritual display as compelling examples of pedagogic success, of charity education’s easy victory over the suppleness of childhood and the necessary dependence of poverty. While this visual culture sought to establish the pedagogical relation between the benevolent Christian educator and tractable child as the symbolic relation defining the charity school movement in the social imaginary, it also portrayed this relation as a crucial nexus in a gift economy. Reformers characterized the improvement of poor children as a “Gift” to God in exchange for blessings received and charitable giving as the benefactor’s wise investment in a national religious culture with the potential for inestimable social “Returns.”5 The official church offered up the charity child as an emblem of its public service to the nation, of its contribution to

Education and “Christian Entertainment”

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righteousness, stability, wealth, and progress. In this narrative of good faith, religious culture acted as a stand-in for society at large and as an agent of good works enabled by charity benefactors great and small. The gift of charity, of course, came with strings attached—and not only for charity children. Certainly, these and less public “rites of institution” crisscrossed the charity children’s bodies and minds with pedagogic relations, consecrated their status difference as natural within the social order, and entailed future obligations; but the “symbolic efficacy” of charity education required a wider reordering of social relations and a greater measure of symbolic violence.6 If Locke, who recommended workhouse schools to the Board of Trade in 1697, had envisioned the possibility of basing a moral culture on the education of poor children, proponents of the charity school movement instituted a broadly social pedagogy truly tantamount to one. The spectacle of charity education taught the public a form of spectatorship that placed the charity child—and the official church—at the center of a hopeful yet anxiety-ridden narrative of modern nationhood. It promoted a way of giving that promised social kinship, the end of religious conflict, and the advent of a universally beneficial consumer society.7 Sermons and accounts of the charity schools described at length which kinds of pedagogy were to occur—when, where, how, between whom, and to what effect—and laid out a plan to administer culture to poor and working families through their children, the newly minted agents of culture. Taken as a whole, the charity school movement comprised a moral culture, although not perhaps in the more open Lockean sense. It institutionalized a cultural regime of pedagogical duties and ethical guidelines for all parties involved in it, ranging from trustees, benefactors, and clerics, to schoolmasters and mistresses, to the children themselves and their families.8

Locke and the Cultural Turn in Charity Rhetoric Optimistic clerics almost entirely recuperated the concept of association and, by extension, pedagogy from the skepticism with which Locke imbued them. The negative sense of the association of ideas as an x-factor within culture and a contingency within education no longer complicated cultural reproduction in their rhetoric. The problem of wrong associations—persistent in Locke’s epistemology because of his phenomenal conception of social reality—received little or no continued attention, conveniently receding into more manageable moral categories such as “wickedness,” “vice,” and “sin.” If Locke

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suggested children lacked reason and discipline, clerics contended that they possessed innocence. Whether rationalized as inherently moral or as wholly amoral, the state of innocence stood in their rhetoric in natural opposition to the depravity of the world, and they imagined religious education as straightforwardly preserving and prolonging innocence—as religion’s preemptive strike against original sin and the corrupting influences that would taint the native purity of childhood. For them, childhood represented a window of opportunity for establishing in children, especially poor ones, a primacy of religious associations, a binding moral disposition. Martin Strong’s The Great Duty and Necessity of a Vertuous and Religious Education of Youth (1709), for instance, parlays Locke’s notion of the suppleness of childhood into an optimistic rhetoric of innocence. Strong echoes Locke’s language in the Education, describing children’s minds as “Tender and Pliable” and “fitly . . . compared to Blank Paper, or to soft Wax, in which you may write what Letters, or make what Impressions you please.”9 However, his sermon elides the problem of random association, flatly presuming the ability of religion to take ready possession of the youthful mind. He pays no heed to the possibility of the sudden, accidental, or traumatic association of ideas, characterizing recalcitrant “Prejudices,” “Habits,” and “Customs” as flaws that come only with age or “long continuance” (GD 4). Whereas Locke thinks of childhood as a site of opportunity, Strong presents it as a site of religious culture’s certain victory. He speaks of children’s minds idealistically, as “Untainted, tender and free from all Vicious Preingagements” and as utterly ignorant of what constitutes “Sin” (GD 4–5). Such an amoral state of “Virgin Innocence” means that children possess a singular competence in receiving and retaining “Vertuous Impressions” and that bringing children into the fold of religious culture is a trivial matter (GD 4). Parents or other role models need only explain to “Children what their Duty is, in such plain and familiar words, as they may be capable to Understand, and to press them to the Practice of it by some Easy, popular Arguments” (GD 4), and a lifetime of assent will likely follow. If preserved from worldly corruption by the least bit of cultivation, “Innocent Nature cannot but recoil at the very first appearance of an Action greatly criminal, nor can it ever venture upon the Commission of a known Wilful Sin, without a great deal of Violence and uneasy Regret” (GD 7). In Strong’s view, religious education hardens innocence into incorruptibility, disposing the individual toward virtue ever after. On the whole, Strong advocates simple dualism, opposing the supposed


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inherent innocence of childhood to the depraved world of sensory experience. “Innocence,” a priori, legitimates charity education. Although more sophisticated than Strong in his appropriation of Locke’s theories, Richard Willis similarly glosses over the problem of random association and sets childhood religious training in binary opposition to worldly temptations. Also obviously borrowing from Locke’s Education, he contends that children “ought from their very Cradles to be trained up in the Ways of GOD” because early religious principling makes a “strong” and durable “Impression” that will “bear up against all the Temptations they are like to meet with.”10 However, unlike Locke, who concerns himself with the worldly relation between father and child, he addresses the ostensibly more enduring spiritual relation between heavenly father and child. In its universal transferability across the contingencies of time and space, Willis suggests, this relation can compel adherence to moral principles through all the stages and circumstances of life. Locke’s pedagogy charts a child’s trajectory toward self-determination within culture and posits an eventual degree of autonomy, but Willis presents this spiritual relation as unchanging, even after a child is “sent abroad into the World” (5). Its establishment depends on a child’s early knowledge of human mortality and of the hereafter, so that “this World” appears as a mere “Place of Trial” (5); and it operates by putting the child “in Mind of the All-seeing Eye of God, that we live always in his Presence, and that he as much sees us in all we do, or speak, or think, as Men can see what we do most openly” (6). This panoptic conception of God, when imprinted on the young mind, produces a lasting sense of fear and deference, what Willis calls “religious Awe”—certainly nothing so grand as the autonomy of Locke’s gentleman (6). Willis does admit a degree of contingency into religious education. The early exposure of children to religious principles, he admits, hardly guarantees virtue in adulthood. Even those with the “best Educations afterwards fall off to vicious Courses” (5). Nevertheless, the religious associations at the core of their understanding ensure the sustainability of religious culture. In his sunny view of the association of ideas, “good Principles . . . will be like good Seed sown, which may lie buried in the Earth for some Time, but will very likely rise again, and bring forth the desired Fruit” (18). Religious culture—for instance, the “Admonition of Friends, or Advice of Ministers”—can reclaim the backsliding adult by reactivating religious associations buried deep within childhood memory (18). For Willis, early religious training creates extremely durable associations that authorize

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religious culture at the most fundamental levels of understanding and keep the individual ever within reach of its exhortations and reforming power. Strong’s and Willis’s sermons exemplify strategies Anglican reformers used to popularize Locke’s theory of cultural reform, including conceptually realigning it toward innocence and “religious Awe,” but also hint at the emergence of a wider religious culture with shared pedagogical objectives. These broader objectives include granting religion the “first Possession” of a child’s mind and establishing a durable foundation for the future efficacy of religious culture.11 Significantly, Strong and Willis imagine their social pedagogy as a means of consecration, of forming a habitus in the individual that, in the best cases, functions automatically and, in the worst, makes even moral failure a temporary setback.

The Spectacle of Reform: “O What A Christian Entertainment” In the wake of this cultural turn in charity rhetoric, there emerged a highly theatrical visual culture of charity that recast the chancel as a stage, and divine and charity child as its stars. The tremendously popular Holy Thursday anniversaries of the London charity schools, in particular, mark the arrival of the charity child as a visual icon of public improvement. During these overcrowded, gala events, the neatly uniformed children marched in orderly rows through the streets to the church, sat courteously during the service, and sang gracious hymns on cue, showing all outward signs of modesty and deference.12 The children themselves, without necessarily occupying center stage, obviously stole the show. Sermons preached for their benefit tended, again and again, to direct the eyes of spectators toward them, ascribing specific meanings to their improved appearance and conduct. Indeed, clerics gestured toward this spectacle of preserved innocence with the purpose of transforming the audience’s presumed natural affection for children into a more general sense of investment in charity education—both as a strategy of widespread cultural reform and as a basis of shared cross-class feeling and national pride. No cleric of the period offers as elaborate an insight into this visual culture as White Kennet. His theoretically charged sermon for the 1706 anniversary meeting of the London schools models a practice of spectatorship in which the children represent, in the most


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theatrical sense of the term, charity education’s power to improve. As Kennet describes it, this transformative power works not only upon the children, as a religious pedagogy shaping their minds and manners, but also through them, in the very spectacle of their improvement, which he memorably dubs “Christian Entertainment.”13 Spectatorship, of course, consists not in a necessarily stable and authoritative act of looking, but in the unstable relation between the spectator and the spectacle.14 Kennet’s rhetoric attempts to harness this unstable relation, to mediate between spectator and spectacle by teaching the former how to interpret and be affected by the latter. The model of spectatorship he promotes takes as its epistemological foundation a God-granted appreciation of childhood and innocence. In his view, “the Wisdom of GOD has so adapted our Eyes to visible Things; that the youngest Creatures seem to have the most winning Beauty in them” (“SS” 50). Kennet—cleverly sidestepping Locke’s rejection of innate ideas and consequent particularism and trying desperately to get God’s authorizing agency back into the picture—relocates a God-granted, universal idea outside of the human mind, as an object of perception. According to him, God has fitted perception to experience in such a manner that at least one phenomenon, youth, operates upon human understanding with a robust and relatively uniform effect. Moreover, the radical potential for development and improvement within unfinished “Things”— whether they be young “Creatures,” “Plants,” “Works of Art,” or “rising Structure[s]”—fires the human “Imagination,” filling it with “Pleasure” and with “Hopes” for the future (“SS” 50–1). The universal returns as a point of identity between the subject and object worlds in the aesthetic pleasure that the spectator should naturally feel while gazing upon youth and imagining the great possibility inherent within it. Conversely, the sight of youth thwarted should evoke equally intense feelings of discontent in the spectator. In fact, Kennet represents the rescue of impoverished children as a religious duty because divine providence marks them out as objects of special concern, imbuing them with an “innate Force” that universally urges attention to their plight (“SS” 53). Charitable feeling works by design, prompted by the incongruity of childhood with bleak prospects and suffering; and conveniently, the irresistibly attractive quality within these children—that is, their innocence—banishes the usual moral dilemmas of charity. The poor child, incapable of imposture and easily disposed to improvement, plainly differs from the canting grifter plying “Want” as a trade on the street and is thus

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a morally unambiguous object of charity, in which generosity will find its true match (“SS” 54). If the spectator’s charitable feeling toward poor children acknowledges God’s plan, acting on such feeling helps fulfill that plan and constitutes—for the benefactor, in particular—participation in the glory of the divine creation. In a passage laden with visual language, Kennet likens the power to imagine and realize moral possibilities to divine agency: IN this World, the Theatre of GOD, there is a strange Variety of delightful Objects, that strike our Eyes with agreeable and even amazing Joy and Pleasure. And well may we Creatures behold and wonder, when these Things pleas’d the Creator’s own Review: He saw his new born Works, and they all were good. But now among all the delectable Sights that can fill the Eyes of Men; I believe none is more entertaining, more ravishing, than what we have now before us and around us. A dear and pretious Sight! Some Thousands of poor Children, arm’d with their own Innocence, adorn’d with your Charity, and above all, illustrated with the first Rudiments of Learning, Virtue and Religion! What Spectacle upon Earth can come nearer to that of a Multitude of the Heavenly Host? (“SS” 49–50)

Kennet describes the spectators by analogy to God gazing on his “new born Works,” with several implications: first, although on a different scale, the spectators have, like God, wrought the sight before them; second, because God took pleasure in his creation, they may reasonably take pleasure in theirs; third, just as a “Host” of angels exalts God, these children, “adorn’d with . . . Charity,” glorify their benefactors, teachers, and nation. However, this analogy does not function by a simple one-to-one correlation of God and the spectators: the children mediate the relation of the spectators to the divine. The “Theatre of God,” or the entire phenomenal “World,” dwarfs the theater of humankind, or moral culture. It is the angelic children, with their armor-like “Innocence” shielding them from the corrupting influences of the world, that stand a step closer to God than the rest of his “Creatures.” The preservation of their innocence and promotion of their improvement, though an earthly affair, echoes the spirit of benevolence informing God’s promise of salvation to deserving Christians. The children thus link God and humanity. Looking upon charity children “illustrated with the first Rudiments of Learning, Virtue and Religion,” spectators should see a material image of their own spiritual good faith, of the pact of redemption fulfilled.15


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According to Kennet, the “Sight” of the children and their betterment should also mediate the relation of one onlooker to another. The spectators should find it not only “entertaining” but also wholly “ravishing.” It should transport them, consolidating individual pleasures into universal affect or, at the very least, universal acknowledgment that blameless youth bears a natural right to relief and care: “A Congregation of these innocent ones is a goodly Sight to look, to feed, to dwell upon! A Sight that is enough to open the Eyes of Prejudice, and to strike Envy dumb! A Sight so endearing, at least so inoffensive, that disdain and ill Nature cannot blame it, can at worst but overlook it!” (“SS” 50). Kennet encourages spectators to “feed” and “dwell upon” the spectacle of charity, subtly indicating the pedagogic aims of the event at hand and encouraging lingering, visual consumption. For him, the arresting “Sight” of childhood innocence readily undoes “Prejudice” and silences “Envy.” It emanates powerful sensations, suppressing these maladies of the understanding as quickly as a sudden plunge in cold water was once believed to cure certain forms of madness. Even “disdain” and “ill Nature” fail to bring about sincere opposition, and those bearing these hateful qualities simply turn away with a revealingly callous disregard. For Kennet, the spectacle of innocence and improvement re-forms culture. Properly consumed—that is, as his sermon directs—it rouses shared sentiment among the majority and neutralizes bitterness among the reputedly misanthropic remainder, opening a space of consensus for a national religious culture. Of course, sharing a sentiment about poor children hardly amounts to sharing a common culture with them, at least not in the sense of a culture held in common by equals, and Kennet’s model of spectatorship works on the assumption that while those capable of benefaction stand in natural prepossession of culture, the children receive it secondarily, as a hand-me-down. Kennet points to the children as living, breathing evidence of charity education’s ability to introduce improvement among the poor and to mediate this status-group’s relation to the rest of society: I cannot but commend the Prudence of the Governours and Trustees of this Charity; that they keep up an Anniversary Meeting of these Poor Children, to come from every Quarter of our two Cities, . . . to walk in decent Couples thro’ the Streets, led by the Ministers, the Pastors, as the Lambs of their Flock . . . To see them cloath’d with Neatness, and set off with good Manners, and by Humility and Piety made all glorious within; to hear them reading the Psalms distinctly, making the Responses audibly, turning readily to their Chapters, reciting most

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Jad Smith perfectly their Catechism and some useful Exposition of it; and singing forth the Psalms and Hymns in a melodious Manner. O what a Christian Entertainment is this! A Spectacle far beyond the Vanities of the Stage or Musick House, or any worldly Pomp whatever! (“SS” 51)

In contrast to his treatment of innocence as “innate,” Kennet here emphasizes the production of cultural literacy in the children. Under the auspices of charity education, the children come to exemplify regularity and order—in their dress, “Manners,” and religious competence. As evidenced by Kennet’s own excited exclamations, this “Spectacle” or command performance of culture should form a central part of the spectator’s sensible pleasure. Kennet is sure to indicate that extending these humble forms of cultural literary to poor children poses no threat to the social order. During the orderly procession, the children are “led” through the streets like “Lambs” by clerics. Charity education brings “Humility and Piety” to dwell “within” them; it yields a deferential disposition, teaching the children, as Kennet adds at the end of an almost identical passage in his manual The Christian Scholar, “on all Occasions [to] behave themselves with Modesty and Respect to their Betters.”16 The inculcation of such deference not only maintains status distinctions but also supports the nation: “All Government must subsist by Unity, Order, and Peace. Now if Children, by timely Discipline, are made tractable and obedient to the Advice and Authority of their Parents and Teachers, they are then fitted to the Hands of other lawful Rulers; and the Church and State will be as quiet as were the Family and the School” (“SS” 62). Kennet even encourages the children to acknowledge the limitations of their enfranchisement. Elsewhere in his sermon, Kennet informs the children of their indebtedness to God and society, urging them to “rejoice . . . that GOD provides [them] Friends better than [their] Parents.” Without divine providence and the kindness of betters, he tells the children, they would have been “Left to play in the Streets” and to become “the lowest Servants, and hardest Labourers”—or even worse, “Beggars” and “Thieves” (“SS” 57). Even before starting in life, the children owe an enduring debt of faith and social gratitude. Kennet’s sermon allays anxieties related to cultural literacy as a marker of status difference, underscoring the children’s compliant behavior and their knowledge of their dependent location within culture. In his model of spectatorship, the improvement of the children is a sign of the spectator’s benevolence and creative moral power, and his rhetoric makes it clear that this spectacle of “Christian


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Entertainment” does not belong to the children but to the spectator— just as the moral culture that the children reproduce is not wholly theirs but requires them to become its ready objects and willing agents. An illustrated hymn from 1714 reproduces Kennet’s model of spectatorship almost exactly (figure 2.1). In the image, a pair of stern, watchful eyes hovers in the sky.17 These rather panoptic eyes, the allseeing gaze of God, observe the good works of generous Christians. However, they also look intently out and over the children, both meeting and mirroring the eyes of the implied spectator, who glances downward at the children because of this slightly forced perspective. The clean, plainly dressed children tote books, symbolizing their literacy and betterment through education, and the inset heart, which depicts charity sitting on a throne above hope and faith, acts as an emblem of national improvement through shared moral sentiment. Of course, the image also calls to mind a choir gathered around a pulpit or altar, holding hymnals and preparing to sing, and as such, it reenacts the visual rhetoric of Holy Thursday and tries to stir the

Figure 2.1 Detail from Hymn to be sung by the charity children of St. George the Martyr . . . (1714). Source: © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved 11602.i.12.(18).

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emotions it held for the spectator, including excited anticipation to watch the children perform and pride in their society’s achievement. Significantly, the image not only teaches the spectator that the gift of charity is a way to capture the notice of God and thus ensure one’s salvation, it also presents a double-image of church and state in the very figure of charity.18 God’s all-seeing eyes, moreover, consecrate an uneven status relation between the spectator and the children. On a level with the spectator’s, God’s commanding gaze places the spectator in a position of authority, the children in a position of extreme visual “scrutiny.”19 By contrast, the children’s somewhat scattered gazes create a softer, less direct line of vision: some of them make direct eye contact with the spectator, while others look toward the figure of charity in the center foreground. Overall, their gazes hint at expressions of reverence and gratitude. While the children and the spectator superficially share a culture of feeling and improvement, they in fact stare at each other across a gaping class divide. The spectator enjoys the privilege of invisible authority, like the disembodied, consuming eyes of God in the sky, while the charity children become tangible objects of consumption. The spectator owns culture, while the charity child’s art of living is acquired second hand, as a gift from above.

Charity Education and Poor Reform If feel-good Christian entertainment aimed to authorize the church as the moral agent of the state and to manage status anxieties through a concept of hand-me-down culture, the administrative rhetoric of the charity school movement repurposed the family as a mode of governance. Reformers naturalized religious pedagogy as a commonsense extension of parental authority yet simultaneously represented the family itself as a subcategory of religious culture. Strong, for instance, advises his audience: “Let all Parents (and by Analogy of Reason) all others, to whom the Care of Children is committed, (such as Masters, Tutors, Governours) be very Industrious to possess the Minds of the Children under their Several Charges, with a very early Knowledge of their Duty, with a timely Love of God and True Goodness” (GD 3). Strong treats parenting not as a private “family matter” but as the concern of a wider culture of social kinship and responsibility. Closely defining this culture’s affective and regulatory dimensions in religious terms, he asks parents and educators to set their sights on the communal production of piety, on fostering an integrated sense of moral


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and religious obligation within the “family of man,” to use a common eighteenth-century phrase.20 This larger network of child-centered relations constitutes a moral culture mediated, in Strong’s account, by religious belief. With regard to charity education, this notion of religious governance through moral culture typically functioned by the logic of in loco parentis. As references to “Heathenish” ways and “profane Parents” suggest, reformers presumed the poor family a wholly deficient pedagogical unit. 21 They framed charity education as a method of poor reform that could make up for its inadequacy, instilling virtue and industry among the lower ranks, much to the benefit of the nation. However, their goals went well beyond the mere reform of pauper children: they hoped to reshape everyday life in poor and working households. An illustration accompanying the 1708 Orders Read and Given to the Parents on the Admittance of their Children into the CharitySchools best demonstrates this conception of charity education as a mode of governance (figure 2.2). 22 Its visual rhetoric, which positions the parents and siblings of charity children as secondary objects of charity education, suggests that granting a humble literacy to the charity child serves as a way, in turn, of reforming entire poor families. Charity education turns the child into a conduit for the flow of religious culture and its educative power into the poor household; the family’s built-in affective capability, which facilitates learning as a

Figure 2.2

Detail from Orders Read and Given to the Parents . . . (1708).

Source: © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 4° P/ 87 (7) Th.

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pleasure rather than as a duty or task, does the rest. 23 Child becomes pedagogue, quietly imbued with the agency and authority of the divine—as demonstrated by one family’s pious, supplicatory prayers in the left frame. However, parents experience this pedagogy only as a natural affection for their children and as an uplifting source of Christian entertainment—as indicated by another family’s intimate, attentive posture and the father’s obvious expression of pleasure in the right frame. Despite each family’s poverty, evidenced by crumbling walls and scarcity of furniture, both households are clean and well ordered—pleasing spectacles of reform on par with other Christian entertainments. Charity sermons usefully lay bare the social “alchemy” involved in this art of governance—in this transformation of the charity child into an agent of administered culture.24 Kennet, for instance, describes how this method of poor reform turns a “poor Cottage into a Sort of Temple” in which the parents “receive Angels unawares” (“SS” 58, 59). According to him, some Parents have been regenerated and born a-new by the Influence of their own Flesh and Blood. To see their Children between the SchoolHours, delighting in their Books and Lessons at home; This by Degrees has turn’d the Hearts of the Parents the same Way; They have recovered their lost Reading, and have been restor’d to the Knowledge and Practice of Morality and Religion. (“SS” 59)

Kennet portrays charity children as covert and unwitting agents of literacy and morality who revive old associations in their parents’ minds and put the poor household back within the reach of religious culture. In his sermon Publick Education, particularly in the Charity Schools, Thomas Bisse echoes this line of argument but explicitly frames poor reform as a matter of cultural reproduction, referring to charity schools as “nurseries” from which “Religion is by degrees transplanted into every house, and is, if I may so speak, propagated by these little off-sets.”25 Bisse also, more so than Kennet, emphasizes stealth—the reproduction of culture through misrecognition. For him, the beauty of charity education as a mode of governance is that it “insensibly conveys Religion into the families of the poor” (23). It turns charity children into “teachers” and the “house of a poor man into a school,” but it does so without imposition. Through their instinctive curiosity and playful, imitative banter, siblings “with


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impatience draw and catch” knowledge from one another, and “greyheaded” parents look on with “natural delight” (23). Moral knowledge moves along familial relations that appear effortless and affective rather than pedagogic, and thus, in a reversal of roles, the old learn from the young—but “without a blush” of embarrassment, only pride and “comfort” in witnessing such a Christian entertainment (23). Charity children, those “little off-sets,” compensate for the deficiency of the poor family, their newly minted moral agency supplementing its otherwise inferior power to regulate and improve. They serve as vehicles for the reproduction of knowledge relations necessary to sustain, even expand, religious culture.

Moral Culture without End, Amen Reformers touted religious culture—charity education, in particular—as the lynchpin of national polity and progress. Nothing lent itself to the “Peace” and prosperity of the nation as much as the “Maintenance and Propagation” of a “National Piety and Religion,” they argued, and nothing served this end as well as the “publick Schools of Charity,” which brought the most “ungovernable and dissolute Part of the Nation” under the church’s purview. 26 As part of a public relations campaign meant to yoke together church and state as one “inseparable interest,” Anglican divines promised not only to oversee the poor but also to eliminate the social ills popularly, though perhaps not accurately, associated with them.27 Through charity education, the church would prevent “Schismatical Sects and Parties” prevalent among “the lowest” sort and thereby enlarge “the best and purest of all Christian Churches” the “Church of England.”28 It would bolster the economy by converting the “idle, vagrant” poor into “working Hands,” thereby increasing the labor force and stimulating a growth economy. 29 As the children grew up and “spread themselves in several Places and Stations in the World,” a rippling effect of moral reform would move across the nation, even into its distant future (“SPS” 217). Given the “solid, fix’d, and durable” legacy of religious education, the benefits of improvement could “hardly fail of propagating themselves, even to the very End of the World . . . transmitted down, from Father to Son, even to all Generations” (“SPS” 218–9). Promoting charity as the gift that keeps on giving, the church offered up the poor to the state as useful citizens who carried within them the possibility of greater things to come—of more civil order, more labor power, more wealth, and more progress. However,

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these speculations about charity education’s possible long-term effects on the nation nearly always characterized this new class of reverent poor as “Assistants” to their betters. 30 Perhaps the church’s most seductive promise was that the culture of charity offered the nation an effective “officialization strategy.”31 Charity education could mask structuring economic and pedagogic power relations in the guise of reputedly natural affective relations: familial intimacy, cross-status sympathy for disadvantaged children, pious desire for the moral betterment of the nation, and gift giving— all manner of Christian entertainments. By reproducing the socioeconomic order as a developmental cultural order in which the lower classes lagged behind, this cultural practice could produce a “misrecognition of the limits of the knowledge” economy being put in place.32 Such social alchemy invested objective social relations with subjective meanings, including the idea of culture as gift. However, if the charity child served as the focal point of this culture of reform, the prismatic pedagogical and moral relations multiplied through the charity child aimed to organize a much broader social group through the consecration of shared feelings, values, and language. In this respect, the charity school movement comprised a larger art of governance. Its logic required more than the differentiation and regulation of a field of educational activity; it linked the religious education of poor children to national polity, presenting cultural reform as both the modus operandi and legitimating myth of governance. 33 Put simply, the idea that children represent the hope for a better future, often facile and commonplace in our age, at this earlier moment in history underwrote a grand experiment in cultural production, one intended to accentuate the importance of church to state.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

See Jad Smith, “Custom, Association, and the Mixed Mode.” See John Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 104. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction, 23. See Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 107. Gilbert Burnet, Of Charity to the Houshold of Faith, 1, 17. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 118, 119. See Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 126. Important work on the regulatory aspect of charity education includes Richard A. Barney, Plots of Enlightenment, 174–185; David Fairer, “Experience Reading Innocence”; and Mary Gwladys Jones, Charity School Movement, 35–65.


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9. Martin Strong, The Great Duty and Necessity of a Vertuous and Religious Education of Youth, 4; hereafter cited in text as GD. 10. Richard Willis, “A Sermon Preach’d in the Parish-Church of St. Andrew’s Holborn, June 8, 1704,” 4–5; hereafter cited in text. 11. Daniel Waterland, “A Sermon Preach’d in the Parish Church of St. Sepulchre, June 6, 1723,” 443. 12. For a stronger sense of the visual culture of these events, see the images in Fairer’s “Experience Reading Innocence,” 541–2. 13. White Kennet, “A Sermon Preach’d in the Parish-Church of St. Sepulchre, May 16. 1706,” 51; hereafter cited in text as “SS.” 14. Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects, 19. 15. A hymn Sung by the children at a 1712 anniversary meeting of the London schools sums up this analogy nicely: “With what resembling Care and Love / Both Worlds for us appear; / Our Blessed GUARDIANS, those above, Our BENEFACTORS here!” (“Hymn Which was Sung by the Children at the Anniversary Meeting . . . 1712”). 16. Kennet, Christian Scholar, 41. 17. An Hymn to be sung by the Charity Children of St. George the Martyr at the Parish Church of St. Clement, Eastcheap . . . (1714), n.p. Kind thanks to the British Library for permission to use the image. Also see Fairer’s description of the eyes, in “Experience Reading Innocence,” 552. 18. The charity children on each side of the word “hymn” reinforce the idea of the spectator capturing God’s notice through charity. The words they speak allude to Matthew 25:31–6: [31] When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: [32] And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: [33] And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. [34] Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: [35] For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: [36] Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. (KJV). From the King James Bible, King James Bible, http://www.hti.umich.edu/k/kjv/index.html (accessed October 7, 2006). These verses place the spectator in the position of the sheep that has fed the hungry and clothed the naked, bringing glory to God and the nation. Thus, the spectator is also the “blessed” of the “Father” who will “inherit the kingdom” of Heaven. 19. Fairer, “Experience Reading Innocence,” 552. 20. In his famous study Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800, Lawrence Stone defines “family” as “members of the same kin who live

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21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

Jad Smith together under one roof” (21). However, recent historians acknowledge that a more expansive sense of the term existed during the eighteenth century. Naomi Tadmor, for instance, suggests that “historical family forms” existed “within rich webs of kinship, friendship, patronage, economic ties, neighbourhood ties, and, not least, political ties” (Family and Friends 11). See also Tim Meldrum, “Domestic Service.” Kennet, “A Sermon Preach’d in the Parish-Church of St. Sepulchre,” 59. Discussion of the family as a pedagogical unit is also scattered throughout the literature on service and apprenticeship. See Kristina Straub, “In the Posture of Children.” Orders Read and Given to the Parents on the Admittance of their Children into the Charity-Schools. To be set up in their Houses (London: Joseph Downing, 1708), n.p. Kind thanks to the Bodleian Library for permission to use the image. The visual rhetoric of this image builds on Locke’s conception of education as play; see Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 134–6, especially the observation, “None of the Things they are to learn should ever be made a Burthen to them, or imposed on them as a Task” (134). Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 106. Thomas Bisse, Publick Education, 23; hereafter cited in text. Edmund Gibson, “A Sermon Preach’d in the Parish-Church of St. Sepulchre, May 24, 1716,” 296–7. Bisse, Publick Education, 34. This fact complicates all too common critical statements such as: “The modern discourse of religion . . . presupposes a refashioning of Christendom as a generic religion separate from and inessential to the rational and secular nation-state”; Robert J. Baird, “Late Secularism,” 126. Certainly, in this instance, religion aids in the very construction of the “nation-state” by providing the basis for a national culture. William Dawes, “A Sermon Preach’d in the Parish-Church of St. Sepulchre, May 28, 1713,” 224; hereafter cited in text as “SPS.” Willis, “A Sermon Preach’d . . . June 8, 1704,” 20. Gibson, “A Sermon Preach’d . . . May 24, 1716,” 297. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 109. Bourdieu, “Genesis and the Structure of the Religious Field,” 14. See James Tully, Approach to Political Philosophy, 179–83.

3 Debt without Redemption in a World of “Impossible Exchange”: Samuel Richardson and Philanthropy John A. Dussinger Any system invents for itself a principle, exchange and value, causality and purpose, which plays on fixed oppositions: good and evil, true and false, sign and referent, subject and object. This is the whole space of difference and which, as long as it functions, ensures the stability and dialectical movement of the whole. Up to this point, all is well. It is when this bipolar relationship breaks down, when the system shortcircuits itself, that it generates its own critical mass, and veers off exponentially. —Jean Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange

Perhaps no better example of a binary system of values “shortcircuiting” need be cited than the various financial scandals that traumatized England during the first decades of the eighteenth century, beginning with the South Sea Bubble of 1720 and continuing in the 1730s with a number of other related financial meltdowns. None of the latter attracted more public attention than the collapse in 1731 of the ironically named Charitable Corporation.1 In contrast to this fiasco, such mid-eighteenth-century philanthropies as the Foundling Hospital and the Magdalen House for Penitent Prostitutes were well managed and prospered into the twentieth century. As an eminent London tradesman and social reformer, Samuel Richardson was active in supporting the hospital movement. But until recently, it was not known that he suffered a bitter experience from the Charitable

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Corporation fraud. This essay will interpret the apparent connection between these altruistic institutions and Richardson’s moral and socioeconomic discourse. Chartered in Queen Anne’s reign to have a stock of no less than £20,000 and no more than £30,000, the Charitable Corporation was purportedly intended for “the relieving the Necessitous; the redeeming them out of the Hands of Pawn-brokers, and Bargain buyers; and the seasonable supplying even the Gentry, as well as the extensive Dealer, and advent’rous Merchant with Sums, upon Terms more easy and equitable than could elsewhere be found.”2 By 1727, however, after George II ascended the throne and Robert Walpole was recognized as the leader of parliament, the stock was greatly enlarged, and with this development the bureaucracy also became more complex. All the time touting itself as a charitable organization under royal charter, this moneylending company turned into a colossal disaster with a loss of nearly a half million pounds for the proprietors and creditors of the company. By October 1731, the top administrators, George Robinson and John Thomson, saw that their day of reckoning was coming and fled the country to the Continent, taking with them large amounts of funds as well as important books of the company’s financial transactions over the years. This withholding of the company’s records proved to be a king’s ransom for Thomson, who managed to negotiate his own terms of indemnity before agreeing to return to England from his asylum in Rome with the Jacobite Pretender (James “III”) and at last providing the parliamentary committee with all the details about this corporate knavery.3 In June 1732 the Free Briton wrote: “The Management of the Charitable Corporation is agreed to be the most unheard-of Villainy ever projected, even worse in Proportion than the fatal South Sea Scheme, whose Stock, when sunk, bore some Price; but here most of the Sufferers are absolutely undone, being stript at once by the Flight of the Plunderers; and not only so, but their Stock of no value, and their real Losses enhanced by a vast Debt of Notes and Bonds coined upon and subsisting against them.”4 In a seminal article, Thomas Keymer has recounted how Samuel Richardson found himself involved with this fraud, and the archival research provided helps to refine with factual evidence previous interpretations of the economic metaphors in Richardson’s novels. 5 To summarize the main events briefly: in September 1731, only a month before the bubble burst, Richardson received from a lawyer, James McCulloh, a Charitable Corporation bond for £100 as partial payment of debts incurred by a bankrupt lawyer, William Martin.

Debt without Redemption

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At this time there can be little doubt that McCulloh knew very well that the Charitable Corporation was on the brink of ruin. After this bond proved to be worthless, Richardson went before a parliamentary committee formed to determine which of the “Unhappy Sufferers” of the Charitable Corporation were to be considered “Objects of Compassion.” Following a heated debate in the House of Commons over the ethics of gambling as a method of supporting a charity, a national lottery was held and Richardson received less than half of the £100 loss sustained.6 After this humiliating experience, Richardson understandably tended to distrust lawyers—and thus, not surprisingly, Clarissa chose to endure suffering and death without ever seeking justice in a court of law. Yet, despite this bitter experience of fraud, near the end of his life Richardson was again bilked by an unscrupulous attorney, Eusebius Sylvester, and he carefully preserved their correspondence to serve as a warning to other unsuspecting benefactors toward scam artists.7 During the years 1732–34, the press was full of accounts describing the events relating to the Charitable Corporation, and being sole printer of the Daily Journal from January 1721 to April 1737, Richardson doubtless followed his paper’s detailed coverage of the news concerning the Charitable Corporation scandal.8 As a victim of this corporate chicanery, Richardson himself may have contributed some of the anonymous essays written in the form of letters to the editor in the Daily Journal, in particular issue number 3857 (May 9, 1733), printed at the time when the parliamentary committee was trying to determine a method for compensating the “Sufferers” who seemed to be the most eligible “Objects of Compassion.” Given that Richardson’s own name was listed in the public report concerning the “Objects of Compassion,” together with the £100 that he had lost from that worthless Charitable Corporation bond, as a businessman and very private person he must have felt deeply embarrassed by this exposure: “The Publication of each Person’s Loss made much worse thereby” probably reflects Richardson’s own humiliation as well as that of “the Traders” mentioned by the anonymous writer.9 In this letter to the Daily Journal the anonymous author focuses on the plight of the various investors in the Charitable Corporation who “had been robbed of their Capital, and a Debt left on them of near 150,000 l. and but 70,000 l. at most to discharge it.” Under these drastic conditions, the writer sympathizes with their petition to the government for redress: “who the particular Persons were that were the principal Authors and Contrivers of their Destruction, they were

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not able to find out but by the Aid of Parliament, and if they had, who but a Parliament could have inflicted a Punishment adequate to the Crime? nor would that alone have alleviated their Loss without Relief.” What especially troubles this writer is that these proprietors among the other sufferers are excluded as “Objects of Compassion” because it was decided not to regard the wealthiest creditors but to limit the relief to those with assets of fewer than five thousand pounds. Presumably the managers, who were newly appointed by the proprietors after the crisis “have been labouring with indefatigable Pains and Industry for near two Years together, in Hopes of serving themselves and Fellow-Sufferers” are to be denied their proper reward and thus “put on the same Foot with those Directors whose Negligence contributed to their Misfortunes.” The anonymous author expresses sincere gratitude toward these innocent and conscientious managers whose tireless efforts brought about at least a modicum of relief to the less affluent sufferers. This concern with distributing rewards equitably is a prominent theme in Richardson’s novels, most notably in Pamela, where the heroine even echoes the very terminology used in the discourse surrounding the Charitable Corporation crisis: Indeed I know nothing so God-like in human Nature as this Disposition to do Good to our Fellow-Creatures; for is it not following immediately the Example of that gracious Providence, which every Minute is conferring Blessings upon us all, and by giving Power to the Rich, makes them but the Dispensers of its Benefits to those that want them? But yet, as there are but too many Objects of Compassion, and as the most beneficent Mind in the World cannot, like Omnipotence, do Good to all, how much are they oblig’d, who are distinguish’d from others? And this, kept in Mind, will always contribute to make the Benefited receive as they ought the Favours of the Obliger.10

In this scene, Pamela seems to be contemplating the situation addressed in this Daily Journal article on the predicament of those “Objects of Compassion” toward whom not even “the most beneficent Mind” (read “beneficent Parliament”!) can assume godly omnipotence in distributing rewards for merit in an absolute manner. Instead, the rich need to discriminate carefully among the “many Objects of Compassion,” and the lucky ones who receive these selective benefits ought to be mindful of those other sufferers who were not so fortunate. Could this be Richardson expressing his coded thanks to parliament for the relief that he received as an “Object of Compassion” in 1734?


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Even before turning novelist, however, Richardson’s anonymous work of compiling pamphlets and manuals for his press already reflects some of his hard-earned lessons about the economic determinants of human behavior. In his manual for young tradesmen, The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum (1734), Richardson cautions against making hasty friendships and risking one’s welfare from an ill-advised involvement with another’s financial difficulties.11 As if referring to his own tribulations at the hands of those lawyers who had given him a worthless bond in payment of their debt, Richardson explicitly emphasizes sureties as a dangerous form of trust. Then, to account for his gullibility in this financial transaction, he observes that it is the price paid by those who “are always govern’d by kind, by human, by generous Principles, which lay ’em open too often to the Designs and Intrigues of artful and overreaching Knaves” (AVM 44). Nevertheless, as Richardson admits at the outset of this caution against rash friendships, young apprentices, not having any property to lose at their age, are less likely to be targets of such fraud than middle-aged businessmen. Perhaps even more traumatic for Richardson than the Charitable Corporation episode, however, were the two major instances in later years when he was robbed of his literary property—the first time in 1741, when a bookseller exploited the market success of Pamela by bringing out a sequel that rivaled the original, and the second time, in 1753, when Irish booksellers connived to steal sheets of Sir Charles Grandison from his printing shop and to publish the first volumes in Dublin before the original edition was out in London. When the first volume of the hack writer John Kelly’s Pamela’s Conduct in High Life appeared at the end of May 1741, Richardson was enraged and wrote at length to the Bath bookseller James Leake, his brother-in-law, about plans to produce his own sequel. In their recent book, Pamela in the Marketplace, Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor reproduced for the first time Richardson’s original letter to Leake and insightfully remark the peculiar overtones in Richardson’s anger over a bookseller’s tampering with his novel: Most striking about Richardson’s account of events, with its angrily disrupted prose, is his sheer outrage. There is a furious eloquence to his images of ravishment, debasement and engraftment, which swarm with lurid connotations: sexual despoliation; pecuniary corruption; monstrous, invasive propagation.12

Richardson’s “deep inward identification with his embattled heroine,” I would add, may owe something to undergoing his own

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“feminization” as an “Object of Compassion” before a parliamentary committee years earlier. During the heated debate in May 1733 in the House of Commons over how to identify the “Sufferers” from the Charitable Corporation’s bankruptcy most eligible as “Objects of Compassion,” one MP stood up to argue that the only ones worthy of compensation were the hapless women who had lost their money in this fraud: I doubt much if any of the Men who became adventurers in that Corporation deserve much compassion; I am afraid most of them purchased, either with a View of making an unjust profit by the advanced price of the shares, or with a View to have a higher Interest for their money than they were by law entitled to; in either case they are almost as fraudulent as the Managers. . . . Indeed, as to the Ladies, a great many of them may have been innocently drawn in, and their case is really to be pitied; they only are the proper Objects of Compassion, and therefore I hope whatever relief is to be given, will be confined to the Fair Sex only.13 (my emphasis)

One can well imagine Richardson reading this speech in the parliamentary records or later in the Gentleman’s Magazine and sensing the breach of trust that he had suffered from that unscrupulous attorney, William Martin, as the equivalent to the woman’s horrific experience of rape.14 When describing to Leake the bookseller Richard Chandler’s attempt to solicit his cooperation in producing a continuation of Pamela, Richardson angrily expressed his sense of powerlessness while having his personal property seized from his artistic control altogether: “my Plan should be basely Ravished out of my hands, and, probably, my Characters depreciated and debased, by those who knew nothing of the Story, nor the Delicacy required in the Continuation of the Piece.”15 *

*

*

If undergoing the humiliating experience of being robbed both of his money and his literary property enabled him to identify with the feminine character, contrariwise Richardson exalted the masculine role as mastery over others through the agency of imposing obligations that ultimately cannot be repaid. Just as his manual for young apprentices cautions against making dangerous acquaintances that might result in financial losses, so it also lauds the spiritual freedom that comes with enjoying adequate means: “One of the most delightful Situations


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in this Life, is, To be in a Condition rather to confer a Benefit, than to receive one. None but a generous Mind can be truly sensible of the Pleasure resulting from this happy Circumstance. . . .” By contrast, the lack of money as a result of imprudence “places you in a State of vile Dependency, puts it out of your Power to do a generous Action, and sinks you to the sad Necessity of being oblig’d!” (AVM 40–1). Again, in Pamela’s words, as quoted above, “I know nothing so God-like in human Nature as this Disposition to do Good to our Fellow-Creatures.” But as Marcel Mauss has observed, “Charity is still wounding for him who has accepted it, and the whole tendency of our morality is to strive to do away with the unconscious and injurious patronage of the rich almsgiver.”16 As his advice to apprentices noted above demonstrates, Richardson is fully aware of the wounds given by imposing obligations, but, nevertheless, whenever assuming the male role he extolls the superior position of the donor. One of the most touching, being most naively honest, moments in Richardson’s fiction is the scene in Pamela in which the heroine’s father is embarrassed about his shabby clothes while trying to take part in his newly elevated daughter’s company. The narrative description exudes the whole world of the Charitable Corporation’s mercantile abundance, evident in many lushly detailed Daily Journal advertisements for auctions of all the clothing left behind17 by those poor borrowers who had forfeited their goods because of nonpayment of loans.18 As revealed in his dealings with Laetitia Pilkington during her troubled stay in London in the 1740s, Richardson, at least when the debtor was a woman, could occasionally take an almost perverse delight in bestowing favors while knowing the unlikelihood of ever being repaid. Since he apparently contributed nothing substantial to advance Pilkington’s career as a professional writer during her years in London, it may be that his gift of small sums of money, bed linen for her unmarried daughter’s lying-in, a suit of clothes for her son, gilt stationery, and other writing materials, was mainly owing to his friendship with Patrick Delany. Yet Pilkington, much to Richardson’s visceral dismay, could not praise his generosity enough in her memoirs.19 But one motive for his good offices toward Pilkington was surely compassion toward a talented woman in distress. It is his wayward friend’s extraordinary compassion that Samuel Johnson admired most in Richard Savage, whose biography appeared in 1744. When, after his murder trial and acquittal, Savage encountered the same woman who had brought false testimony against him and

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now was begging him for money, rather than being revengeful, he “reproved her gently for her Perjury” and then gave her half of the only guinea that he had. Johnson’s elaborate praise of this beneficence implies a range of associations scarcely to be comprehended at this distance: This is an Action which in some Ages would have made a Saint, and perhaps in others a Hero, and which, without any hyperbolical Encomiums, must be allowed to be an Instance of uncommon Generosity, an Act of complicated Virtue; by which he at once relieved the Poor, corrected the Vicious, and forgave an Enemy; by which he at once remitted the strongest Provocations, and exercised the most ardent Charity. 20

In a society where debts unpaid often resulted in a prison sentence, such gratuitous expenditure as Savage’s was not to be taken for granted. In 1756 Johnson himself narrowly escaped incarceration by calling upon Richardson’s generosity, but fully repaid him three days later.21 Johnson’s own benevolence toward a poor woman of the town is well recorded. 22 Underlying this “complicated Virtue” is the biblical paradigm of Adam and Eve’s disobedience to God and the necessity of a divine intercessor to relieve mankind of its Original Sin as a result of the Fall. St. Anselm (c.1033–1109), the first bishop of Canterbury, presented the “Satisfaction” theory of Christ’s Atonement: “No man except this one [Christ] ever gave to God what he was not obliged to lose, or paid a debt he did not owe. But he freely offered to the Father what there was no need of his ever losing, and paid for sinners what he owed not for himself.”23 Unlike Anselm’s compassionate theory of the atonement, Calvinistic interpretations tended to stress a wrathful God that demanded payment in commercial terms: “For, according to the Law, we, the Transgressors, were bound over to Punishment for our Crimes; but God, of his infinite Mercy, freed us from that Obligation, by admitting Christ to be our Surety. . . .”24 In this banking model, God is seen as the creditor and man as the debtor. Furthermore, Christ’s sacrifice is only a “Satisfaction”: “no Demand will, or can be made upon us, because God agreed to accept of the Payment of our Debt by Jesus Christ, and he hath discharged it, or made good his Engagement in our Behalf.”25 By this reasoning, man is compelled to believe in the Son of God for salvation: “The mediation of Christ, as a vicarious sacrifice, is therefore so necessary,


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that without it we could not be saved, nor God in his wrath remember mercy; and that man, who will not plead this gracious payment of his debt in and by Christ, must be thrown into prison till he pays the uttermost farthing. . . .”26 By analogy with Christ’s redemption of man, Savage’s disinterested act of giving alms to the woman in the street exemplified to Johnson “ardent Charity,” a far more intense act than today’s urban scene of casually rewarding a panhandler with a remittance. By imitating Christ’s satisfaction of mankind’s debt to God, the philanthropist reveals a “God-like” disposition to extend credit to the poor without demanding reimbursement. Aware of this deeply religious basis of imitating Christ’s mediation of mankind’s indebtedness, throughout his career as printer Richardson shared the progressive interests of his London compeers in organized charity in the form of the various “hospital” initiatives in this period. As early as 1738, Richardson assisted Ralph Allen with printing the advertisements of the new General Hospital at Bath, of which Allen was a manager (SR 193). In 1739, Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital was chartered, and not only did Richardson contribute to it but in 1754 he was named one of its governors (SR 531). But it was the Magdalen House for Penitent Prostitutes, founded in 1758 by the merchant Robert Dingley, that seems to owe much from Richardson’s three novels. As H. F. B. Compston observed, despite the shortcomings of the Anglican church during the Walpole era, with its grim record of pluralities, nonresidence, and political posturing, such missionary activities as the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (1698), the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (1701), and later reforming societies in the period were the result of the entrepreneurs who lacked the landed-class privileges and university connections, many of whom were enriched by maritime trade and determined to exert their newfound wealth for the moral improvement of their society. 27 In view of Richardson’s explicit pronouncements about the need of the press coming to the assistance of the pulpit, it is understandable that he was on intimate terms with Dingley and was a close observer of the activities at the Magdalen House. 28 By contrast to the fraudulent Charitable Corporation, here at last was an institution he could wholeheartedly support. From his early years as printer, Richardson held an interest in the social problems arising from prostitution. He begins his handbook for apprentices with a commandment prohibiting fornication and warns against the “sad Train of Mischiefs from the Company of lewd Women, who have been the Bane and Ruin of many an hopeful young Man.”

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He is especially hostile to the playhouses where such women frequent, on stage and off (AVM 4, 17). In the Daily Gazetteer, a newspaper that Richardson printed, a letter signed “A. B.” laments the Multitude of common wretched Prostitutes, who, like so many Beasts of Prey, wait at every Corner to attack the Unwary Stripling, the simple Rustick, and the Besotted Citizen. From this horrible Source of Vice flows the Destruction of many a lovely Youth:—Disgrace with their Friends, Rottenness in their Bones, Frauds in their Trust, and Outrages on their Neighbours; which necessarily end in a shameful Death, and a hazardous Eternity. 29

As if reiterating the Apprentice’s Vade Mecum, the writer observes: “I speak this for the Sake of Parents of Children, and Masters of Apprentices; who have severely experience’d the dreadful Consequences of this Evil.” What is seemingly uncharacteristic of Richardson, however, is this writer’s recommendation of using public funds for “the Punishment of Bad Women” as well as for the care of “the Poor Infant Fruits of Shame, Sin, and Extreme Poverty.” As a victim himself of the corrupt banking system, Richardson was alarmed by what he perceived to be a catastrophic failure of orthodox religion to safeguard the public morality. Hence, A. B. lumps together the whole complex threat to his beloved City: “Sneerers at Religion, Free-Thinkers, FreeLivers, Scoundrels in Principle, and Bankrupts in Fortune!” “Bad Women” in expository writing may gain a more sympathetic gaze in imaginative fiction: as a novelist Richardson usually depicts the fallen woman as a victim of seduction and circumstances. 30 The conclusion to the original story of Pamela stresses the didactic lesson provided not only by the heroine’s deliverance from Babylonian bondage31 but also her fallen counterpart’s exemplary redemption through penitence: “The poor deluded Female, who, like the once unhappy Miss Godfrey, has given up her Honour, and yielded to the Allurements of her designing Lover, may learn from her Story, to stop at the first Fault; and, by resolving to repent and amend, see the Pardon and Blessing which await her Penitence, and a kind Providence ready to extend the Arms of its Mercy to receive and reward her returning Duty” (P 2:394). A clause that was omitted in the sixth, illustrated octavo edition (1742) and the later reprints of the novel strikes the direly vindictive tone of A. B. in the January 9, 1750 Daily Gazetteer: “While the abandon’d Prostitute, pursuing the wicked Courses, into which, perhaps, she was at first inadvertently drawn, hurries herself


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into filthy Diseases, and an untimely Death; and, too probably, into everlasting Perdition afterwards.” Even though it was actually Sally’s mother who had initially contrived to blackmail Mr. B. into marriage by encouraging her daughter’s intimacy with him and then exposing them—a fact, of course, that partly mitigates his guilt in the affair,—to the end of the novel Sally must bear the blame for having succumbed to sexual allurement and is never allowed to be free of guilt. 32 From the beginning of her new life abroad, Sally has to lie about her past and pretend to be a widow whose daughter from the first marriage is being cared for by her deceased husband’s friends. When concluding his narrative, Mr. B. comments evasively about Sally’s marriage: “the Truth is as much preserv’d as possible” (P 2:368). In contrast to his glib account and Pamela’s preening about her own superior situation, Sally Wrightson (as opposed to Wrongson?) continues to the end to agonize over having to conceal her past transgression from her husband: Judge, my good Lady, how that very Generosity, which, had I been guiltless, would have added to my Joys, must wound me deeper, than even ungenerous or unkind Usage from him could do! And how heavy that Crime must lie upon me, which turns my very Pleasures to Misery, and fixes all the Joy I can know, in Repentance for my past Misdeeds! (P 4:290–1)

Sally’s predicament is thus the typological quandary of irredeemable debt that is all the more exacerbated by her husband’s tenderness, and given the patriarchal arrangement of marriage, it is unthinkable for her simply to tell him the whole truth! But as an English settler in Jamaica, not even Mr. Wrightson may be completely in the clear. Since he is “rich, as well as generous,” it is not unlikely that his wealth is connected with the slave trade, and the avoidance of such information anticipates Jane Austen’s similar reticence about divulging the nature of Sir Thomas Bertram’s business in Antigua in Mansfield Park. In appreciation of her kindly treatment toward Miss Goodwin, Mr. Wrightson sends Pamela “a little Negro Boy, of about ten Years old, as a Present, to wait upon her. But he was taken ill of the Small-pox, and died in a Month after he was landed.”33 This ill-fated gift seems ominous, though the narrative is free of any hints. Like most of his orthodox Christian contemporaries, Richardson tends to associate severe disease with God’s punishment of lapsarian mankind and a warning to repent. 34 We may also infer

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that Richardson would have disapproved of having his exemplary heroine being pampered by an African boy, no matter how fashionable it was among the aristocracy in eighteenth-century Europe!35 That Sally Godfrey came from a “good family” implies the class ideology underlying the Magdalen House from the outset. If only to answer the skeptics over establishing such a refuge for sinners, it was never designed to accommodate hardened streetwalkers. Similarly, in his fiction Richardson was mainly concerned about fallen women who stemmed from families in the middling classes and had become victims of a freethinking, pleasure-seeking society. In Clarissa, no matter how despicable the two prostitutes in Mrs. Sinclair’s establishment, they were not really from the dregs of society: Two creatures [Polly Horton and Sally Martin] who wanted not sense, and had had (what is deemed to be) a good Modern Education; their parents having lived reputably; and once having much better hopes of them: But who were in a great measure answerable for their miscarriages, by indulging them in the fashionable follies and luxury of an age given up to those amusements and pleasures which are so apt to set people of but Middle Fortunes above all the useful employments of life; and to make young women an easy prey to Rakes and Libertines. 36

Both of these unrepentant prostitutes were consequently punished by fatal diseases contracted from their vices. Similarly, as the price to be paid for her careless life, Miss Farnborough, Sir Thomas Grandison’s mistress in town, is carried off by smallpox, contracted from a female friend while attending the opera. 37 In contrast to such recalcitrant women, Mrs. Oldham, the governess in Sir Thomas Grandison’s household who falls prey to his “gratitude” for her exemplary services, loses her reputation but not her soul. 38 She has two children with her master and lives “in a kind of wife-like state in one of the family-seats.” Although ashamed of this “guilty commerce,” Sir Thomas nevertheless feels indebted to her: “she had made too great a sacrifice to him, to be unhandsomely used; and he thought he ought to provide for his children by her” (SCG 2:188). Immediately after his death, however, Sir Thomas’s daughters and their cousin Everard throw her out of the house and threaten worse punishment upon the arrival of Sir Charles. “Their brother would do her strict justice, they doubted not: But a man of his virtue, they were sure, would abhor her” (SCG 2:197). But contrary to their expectations, the philanthropic hero is compassionate and


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bestows an annuity for Mrs. Oldham to provide for her children (who were, after all, his half-brothers!). Such beneficence, nevertheless, not only paralyzes this helpless woman with gratitude but also inspires the heroine to attest to his godlike power: “if it be not goodness in him to do thus, it is greatness; and this, if it be not praise-worthy, is the first instance that I have known goodness and greatness of soul separable”(SCG 2:225). Again, as in the story of Sarah Godfrey, it is Mrs. Oldham’s proven virtues as a governess and sincere repentance for her sexual transgressions that are a necessary condition for being worthy of this patronage.39 Having witnessed this individual case of successful rehabilitation, we are to understand, Sir Charles eventually conceived of the enlightened institution that became largely associated with the name of Robert Dingley.40 Although the concept of a “hospital” is not yet mentioned in Pamela, clearly the very detailed account of Sally Godfrey shows that Richardson was already contemplating such a plan as early as 1740, some eighteen years before the opening of the institution in Goodman’s Fields. After returning almost breathless with excitement from her first visit to the Magdalen House, Lady Bradshaigh, Richardson’s closest woman correspondent, complimented her friend ecstatically: “I must think it an Institution of your own, (pardon me Mr Dingley) but you were the first I ever heard mention it, & I believe that is twelve years since, and I value my self upon approving the thing from the first.”41 Lady Bradshaigh’s emotional reaction after her visit to this charity was not unusual. As Ann Jessie Van Sant remarks: “Magdalen Chapel—with its singing and sobbing penitents— was no less than a theater of pathos.”42 But not everyone had the stamina to take in the performance, and thus Lady Bradshaigh was genuinely worried about her friend’s indisposition: “glad I was, that you and your delicate nerves were at home.”43 In reply Richardson admitted that he was not fit to bear the sight of the penitents, especially those poor souls who would be denied admission.44 At this time Richardson was suffering from a nervous disorder that made it difficult to hold a pen, and consequently he had to depend on family members to answer some of the many correspondents. In other words, he was not really affecting the part of a Man of Feeling here. Unlike the many upperclass visitors who found entertainment in the whole theater of the penitents on display in their tidy uniforms and with their beautiful hymn-singing, Richardson could identify much too closely with those “miserable Objects” in their unrelieved suffering to derive any pleasure from the spectacle.45

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Back safely at his press, however, Richardson could assume the Grandisonian aura of imposing obligations on the needy. Maybe the last literary project of Richardson’s long printing career concerned an anonymous novel written by an impecunious woman friend and neighbor of Lady Barbara Montagu: The History of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House as Supposed to be related by Themselves, which appeared in 1760.46 Although subsequently used to advertise the Magdalen House, the title of this “pious fraud” was originally intended rather to take advantage of the publicity surrounding this charity as a means of getting her book through the press.47 While immediately judging the author of the History to be “an admirable Writer” and eager to publish it, Richardson worried about not having enough text for a two-volume edition and tactfully suggested that she include a preface to the first volume to add more pages.48 By early October the preface was in the mail, and Richardson was again deeply impressed by the writer’s ability and offered only minor alterations, like changing “Magdalen Hospital” to “Magdalen House.”49 After publication, Richardson reported happily: “The Preface is universally admired.”50 Lady Echlin, it is true, attributed this preface to Richardson; but except for a few minor changes of diction it seems to be entirely the work of the unknown author. 51 When sending a set of this novel to Lady Bradshaigh, Richardson observed that the preface was “far more to the Purpose than the Sermon of Mr. Dod [sic], which you have seen, tho’ warm from the Heart of that Gentleman.”52 Why “far more to the Purpose,” we may ask? The answer is that probably Richardson disapproved of William Dodd’s sentimental gushing over the plight of the “wretched female,” and especially his patronizing eulogy of the Christlike virtues of the hospital’s founders.53 Far more to the purpose was the anonymous woman’s succinct emphasis on the conditions that ensnared the woman in the first place: Tho’ the profession of a prostitute is the most despicable and hateful that imagination can form; yet the individuals are frequently worthy objects of compassion; and I am willing to believe, that if people did but reflect on the various stratagems used at first to corrupt them, while poverty often, and still oftener vanity, is on the side of the corruptor, they would smooth the stern brow of rigid virtue, and turn the contemptuous frown into tears of pity. 54

Such a passage may have made Lady Echlin believe that Richardson wrote this preface, and as we have seen from his personal history, he was in an unusual position to discern the “worthy objects of


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compassion.” It may be far from William Blake’s prescient insight into the “youthful Harlot’s curse” against her victimizer, but no more than exhorting pity for the entrapped woman in the “charter’d street”—or for other “Unhappy Sufferers” of fraudulent systems—was an innovation in the organized philanthropy of Richardson’s time.55

Notes 1. As a defender of the Charitable Corporation pointed out, “The Appellation of Charitable might probably be borrow’d from the Monte Piéta (or Pious Bank) founded at Rome, and many Places of Italy, Germany, Holland, & c. where however, Money is by no means lent out for nothing; but still it is thought a good Action, and of great Relief to the Necessitous, if a Supply be open’d to them at a cheaper Rate by far, than from Extortioners, private Pawn-brokers, and the like”; Mr. Innes, The Charitable Corporation Vindicated, 5 2. Innes, Charitable Corporation Vindicated, 2. 3. For a detailed account of the Charitable Corporation’s activities, see The Historical Register 17 (1732): 108–26, 220–32, 255–81. 4. Quoted in The Gentleman’s Magazine 2 (June 1732): 782. 5. Thomas Keymer, “Parliamentary Printing, Paper Credit, and Corporate Fraud.” For a more speculative and sweeping assessment of Richardson’s economic motifs in his novels, see Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender, esp. 151–65. 6. Richardson was officially recorded as being “intitled to a Bond of 100 l.” in The Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Examine, State, and Report, Who of the Sufferers in the Charitable Corporation Are Objects of Compassion (London, 1734), 62. After the national lottery, Richardson was granted 48 l. 15 s.; see The Gentleman’s Magazine 4 (May 1734): 236. 7. Keymer, “Parliamentary Printing, Paper Credit, and Corporate Fraud,” 183–4. 8. Keith Maslen, Samuel Richardson of London, Printer, 28–9. 9. An anonymous pamphlet published at the time stresses that after having to go before a Chancery Court to swear under oath their reasons for applying as “objects of compassion,” the “poor undone Proprietors [were] in a worse State than they were before, by having their Losses made publickly known”; Present State of the Unhappy Sufferers of the Charitable Corporation, 23. 10. Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded, 3:50–1; hereafter cited as P. First editions of Richardson’s three novels, Pamela; Clarissa; and Sir Charles Grandison are readily available electronically, in both the Chadwyck-Healey Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Thomson-Gale Eighteenth-Century Collections Online databases. 11. “This Advice may be thought most suitable to Persons of more Years, and of a more independent Circumstance, than those to whom I principally chuse to address these Pages; but I could not think it impertinent, when I consider

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12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

John A. Dussinger and have seen, how early some Persons commence Intimacies; how generally mistaken young People are in the Romantick Construction they give to the sacred Name of Friendship; and of what pernicious Consequence, Suretiship, and other Engagements flowing often from such Intimacies, have been to many hopeful and honest Minds. . . .” Richardson, Apprentice’s Vade Mecum, 43–4; hereafter cited in text as AVM. Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace, 57–8. The Gentleman’s Magazine 3 (May 1733): 680; Keymer, “Parliamentary Printing, Paper Credit, and Corporate Fraud,” 191–8. Keymer and Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace, 56. Marcel Mauss, The Gift, 65. For example, this advertisement in the Daily Journal, August 30, 1732: To be Sold by Auction, By the Charitable Corporation, Beginning on Wednesday the 13th of September next, at their House upon St. Lawrence Pountney-Hill, London, Several Sorts of Goods pledged to the said Corporation, and forfeited for want of Redemption, viz. Superfine Scarlet and Medley Broad Cloths, Druggets, Duroys, Segathies, Callimancoes, Stuffs, Hats, Silk, Worsted, and Thread Stockings, Hollands, Cambricks, Lawns, Muslin, Dowlasses, Garlicks, Damask Table Linen, Diaper Ditto, several Sorts of Manchester Goods, English and Italian Mantuas, Florence and English Sattins, Genoa and Dutch Velvets, Brocades, Turkey Silks, Shagreens, Thread Sattins, and several other Sorts of Drapery and Mercery Wares, Raw and Dy’d Silks Leather Breeches, Snuff, Indigo, Coals, &c. The Goods be seen five Days before the Sale, and Catalogues to be delivered at the said House, and at the House of the said Corporation in Spring-Garden. Samuel Procter, Broker. “My dear Father was a little uneasy about his Habit, for appearing at Chapel next Day, because of Miss Darnfords, and the Servants, for fear, poor Man, he should disgrace my Master; and he told me, when he was mentioning this, of my Master’s kind Present of Twenty Guineas for Cloaths, for you both; which made my Heart truly joyful. But Oh! to be sure, I never can deserve the hundredth Part of his Goodness! —It is almost a hard thing to lie under the Weight of such deep Obligations on one side, and such a Sense of one’s own Unworthiness on the other!— O! what a Godlike Power is that of doing Good!—I envy the Rich and the Great for nothing else!” (P 2:130). On Richardson and Pilkington, see Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Pilkington, Laetitia”; and T. C. Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography 175–9; hereafter cited as SR. Samuel Johnson, Life of Savage, 40. For an interpretation of Johnson’s attitude toward disinterested giving see John A. Dussinger, “Style and Intention in Johnson’s Life of Savage,” and “Dr. Johnson’s Solemn Response,” esp. 57–69, 171–3.


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21. Johnson to Richardson, March 16, 1756 and March 19, 1756, Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Redford, 1:132–3. 22. “Coming home late one night, he found a poor woman lying in the street, so much exhausted that she could not walk; he took her upon his back, and carried her to his house, where he discovered that she was one of those wretched females who had fallen into the lowest state of vice, poverty, and disease. Instead of harshly upbraiding her, he had her taken care of with all tenderness for a long time, at considerable expence, till she was restored to health, and endeavoured to put her into a virtuous way of living.” Boswell, Life of Johnson, 4:321–2. 23. St. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, in Proslogium, 280. 24. John Brine, True Sense, 3. With the commercial model of Christ’s atonement in mind, Jean Baudrillard explains how “God-like Power” increases mankind’s debt in an eternal spiral: “In redeeming man’s debt by the sacrifice of His son, God, the great Creditor, created a situation where the debt could never be redeemed by the debtor, since it has already been redeemed by the creditor. In this way, He created the possibility of an endless circulation of that debt, which man will bear as his perpetual sin. This is the ruse of God. But it is also the ruse of capital, which, at the same time as it plunges the world into ever greater debt, works simultaneously to redeem that debt, thus creating a situation in which it will never be able to be cancelled or exchanged for anything. And this is true also of the Real and the Virtual: the endless circulation of the Virtual will create a situation where the Real will never be able to be exchanged for anything” (Impossible Exchange 7). 25. Brine, True Sense, 3. 26. Henry Lee, Scripture-Doctrine of Atonement, 167. 27. “The clergy displayed little or no initiative in such work. They were too often in a state of sleepiness and subservience. But their shortcomings brought into activity the devoted layman. The Magdalen Hospital was founded entirely by laymen. There was no clergyman on the original committee; and, indeed, a certain Bishop, consulted by Jonas Hanway as to the advisability of Robert Dingley’s project, ‘started many difficulties.’ The Hospital was, however, definitely a Church of England institution from the very first, and it immediately won the respect and the support of the Church.” H. F. B. Compston, Magdalen Hospital, 17. 28. SR 465. Although Eaves and Kimpel note that Richardson was personally acquainted with Dingley, they underestimate the significance of how much Richardson followed the daily management of the hospital. 29. Daily Gazetteer, January 9, 1740. For a summary of Richardson’s printing of newspapers, see Maslen, Samuel Richardson of London, 30–1. All quotations from the newspapers are from microfilmed copies in the Burney Collection, now available in the 17th–18th Burney Collection Newspapers by the Thomson Gale Group. 30. Markman Ellis observes that early in the eighteenth century Richard Steele and William Hogarth in their different media depicted the prostitute as victim of seduction but did not offer any solution to the problem; see Ellis, Politics of Sensibility, 162.

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31. For a cogent reading of the biblical parallels in this novel, see Michael Austin, “Lincolnshire Babylon.” 32. “That this Lady was of a good Family, and the Flower of it: But that her Mother was a Person of great Art and Address, and not altogether so nice in the Particular between himself and Miss, as she ought to have been. That, particularly, when she had Reason to find him unsettled and wild, and her Daughter in more Danger from him, than he was from her; yet she encouraged their Privacies; and even, at last, when she had Reason to apprehend, from their being surpriz’d together, in a way not so creditable to the Lady, that she was far from forbidding their private Meetings; on the contrary, that on a certain Time, she had set one, that had formerly been her Footman, and a Half-pay Officer, her Relation, to watch an Opportunity, and to frighten him into a Marriage with the Lady” (P 2:365–6). After fighting off these two ruffians, Mr. B. suspected Sally to have been in on the plot and shunned further correspondence with her. But ironically when she insisted on meeting him to defend her innocence, their affair commenced on that occasion. 33. P 2:373. Richardson may possibly hint that this poor boy came to grief simply by coming into contact with the upper-class English society. Even when the disease was not fatal, Richardson could still welcome smallpox as a means of repressing the pleasure seekers of his time. His shocking remark about the young socialite Miss Gunnings reveals a darker side to Richardson’s moral reform: “I have wished them, and that in Charity to them, the Small Pox, if they have not had it; and that their Faces might be seamed with it;” Richardson to Sarah Wescomb, August 6, 1750 (Victoria and Albert Museum, Forster Manuscripts Collection, vol. 14, part 3, ff. 53–4; hereafter cited in notes as FM by volume and folio number). 34. In a prayer handbook that Richardson compiled and printed, an “Office for sick Persons” begs God’s mercy toward “thy servant, who is grieved with sickness. Sanctify, we beseech thee, this thy fatherly correction to him; that the sense of his weakness may add strength to his faith, and seriousness to his repentance”; Select Manual for Sick Persons, 12. 35. See, for instance, plate 4 of Hogarth’s Marriage-a-la-Mode, which depicts an African servant amidst aristocrats having their hair done while being entertained by musicians in preparation for the masked ball; Ronald Paulson, Hogarth, 2, illustr. 95. For an informative study of the vogue of “court Moors,” see Wilhelm A. Bauer, Angelo Soliman. 36. From Richardson’s epilogue, Clarissa, 7:419. 37. Richardson, Sir Charles Grandison, 2:146; hereafter cited as SCG. 38. With an ironic tone worthy of Henry Fielding’s comic narrators, Harriet Byron treads lightly over the affair: “Sir Thomas was grateful to this lady in a way that cost her her reputation. She was obliged, in short, in little more than a twelvemonth, to quit the country, and to come up to town. She had an indisposition, which kept her from going abroad for a month or two”; SCG 2:142. Ellis comments on the significance of Mrs. Oldham’s story but overlooks its precedent in the extensive treatment of Sally Godfrey’s fall; Politics of Sensibility, 166–7.


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39. “A recovery, where a person is not totally abandoned, is more to be hoped for, than the reformation of one who never was well-principled. All that is wished for, in the latter, is, that she may be made unhurtful: Her highest good was never more than harmlessness. She that was once good, cannot be easy, when she is in a true state of penitence, till she is restored to that from which she was induced to depart”; SCG 3:60. By the same logic, public confidence in the viability of the Magdalen House penitents depended on some transparent proof of their sincere repentance. Ann Jessie Van Sant remarks: “But the Magdalens—even during this process of creating pity—were more than instruments of pathos: they were also the means by which the institution could demonstrate that its method worked”; Eighteenth-Century Sensibility, 33. 40. “An Hospital for Female Penitents; for such unhappy women, as having been once drawn in, and betrayed by the perfidy of men, find themselves, by the cruelty of the world, and principally by that of their own Sex, unable to recover the path of virtue, when perhaps (convinced of the wickedness of the men in whose honour they confided) they would willingly make their first departure from it the last”; SCG 4:142. 41. Lady Bradshaigh to Richardson, May 22, 1759 (FM 11, ff. 257–8). In reply, though delighted with her compliment, Richardson underscored that it was nevertheless Mr. Dingley who deserved the honor of being called the founder of this charity; Richardson to Lady Bradshaigh, June 5, 1759 (FM 11, ff. 259–60). Richardson’s self-effacement here is typical of his whole demeanor in public, beginning with his little fiction of being merely the “editor” of his novels! 42. Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility, 33. 43. Lady Bradshaigh to Richardson, May 22, 1759 (FM 11, ff. 257–8). 44. “I knew that so beneficent and tender a Heart as Yours, would be greatly affected with the Visit you made to the Magdalen House. I could not have stood it, I am sure . . . Mr. Dingley sent me on the [8]th of May, a very kind Letter, inviting me to an Admission. But I could not accept of it in Tenderness to such of the miserable Objects, as might be rejected for want of Room &c.”; Richardson to Lady Bradshaigh, June 5, 1759 (FM 11, ff. 259–60). 45. While asking Richardson to prepare her friend's novel for the press, Lady Barbara Montagu apologized for troubling him at the time: “if writing is in the least troublesome I beg you will employ your Nephew, and I entreat your forgiveness for this trouble. . . .” (January 31, 1759). Months later (September 2, 1759), Richardson wrote to her: “too often I am unable to hold a Pen, and have been very much indisposed since I did myself the Honour of writing last to your Ladiship.” These MSS are located at the Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, collection 4600, boxes 42, 48. 46. Richardson printed this novel, sometimes attributed to Sarah Scott, Lady Barbara Montagu's friend and cohabitant; see Maslen, Samuel Richardson of London, 459–60. Gary Kelly, author of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Scott, however, does not mention this possibility. In a letter to Lady Bradshaigh, Richardson emphatically denies having any

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47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

54. 55.

John A. Dussinger professional reasons for keeping the author’s name secret: “No Injunction of Secresy should, my dear Lady, have induced me to say the Thing that was not. To this Hour I know not who was the Writer. It was sent to me from a Lady of Quality, as a Piece written by a Lady whom she patronized, with a Desire I would get it into the World in as advantageous a Manner, as I could"; June 20, 1760 (FM 11, ff. 268–9). Jennie Batchelor flatly asserts that this novel was “written as a fundraiser for the charity” (“ ‘Industry in Distress,’ ” 9). For the factual context of Richardson’s transactions with Lady Barbara concerning this novel, see SR 463–5. Richardson to Lady Barbara Montagu, September 2, 1759 (Carl A. Koch Library, Cornell University). Richardson to Lady Barbara Montagu, October 15, 1759 (Carl A. Koch Library, Cornell University). Richardson to Lady Barbara Montagu, December 12, 1759 (Carl A. Koch Library, Cornell University). “Your preface is a most excellent fine discourse, one need not be a conjurer to discover the writer. Who but the author of Clarissa could so sensibly affect and touch a reader with the penitent’s lamentable story, and with a benevolent Grandison spirit, help forward a charitable work. . . .”; Lady Echlin to Richardson, December 13, 1759, in Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, ed. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, 5:95–6. See also Ellis, Politics of Sensibility, 181. Richardson to Lady Bradshaigh, October 18, 1759 (FM 11, f. 261). “Permit me sincerely to congratulate you on this success, which hath thus far crown’d your commendable undertaking. If they who turn one soul to light and to righteousness cause joy in heaven, and shall shine as the stars for ever and ever; what may they reasonably expect, who, mov’d by the justest motives, actuated by a sincere love to Christ, and a true compassion to their fellow-creatures, are happily instrumental in saving numbers from that death eternal, which, without their kindly assistance, they could never, humanly speaking, have avoided?” (William Dodd, Sermon on St. Matthew, 14). Later in his flamboyant career, Dodd was satirized in the Town and Country Magazine as the “Macaroni Preacher” and in the end arrested for forging the signature of his former pupil, the Earl of Chesterfield. Despite Samuel Johnson’s efforts on his behalf, Dodd was found guilty and hanged. See Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Dodd and S. B. P. Pearce, An Ideal in the Working, 35–40. Apparently the first Anglican minister to suffer capital punishment, Dodd is all too starkly an example of debt without redemption! Preface to The History of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House, iii. William Blake’s “London” (1794) witnesses the determinism of prostitution that such earlier moralists as Richardson and this anonymous author only partially recognized: I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,

Debt without Redemption And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every Infant’s cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear. How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry Every black’ning Church appalls; And the hapless Soldier’s sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls. But most thro’ midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlot’s curse Blasts the new-born Infant’s tear, And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse. (Blake, Complete Writings 216)

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II

Conduct and the Gift


4 ’Tis Better to Give: The Conduct Manual as Gift Marilyn Francus

Authors of the long eighteenth century often called their texts gifts, signaling authorial largesse (for the text is within the author’s gift, to invoke the manorial metaphor) and intent (by positioning the recipient to acknowledge the text as a gift).1 Such compelled recognition attempted to trigger obligation to the author and generate a textual response. Among gift texts, none defined the desired recipient response as clearly as conduct manuals, for through the advocacy of specific behaviors they made the dynamics of gift exchange transparent. Some conduct manuals invoked the gift in their titles: most famously the Marquis of Halifax’s The Lady’s New Year’s Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), and also lesser, anonymous works like The Brother’s Gift; or, the Naughty Girl Reformed (1775) and The Father’s Gift: or the Way to be Wise and Happy (1794). Although many conduct manuals did not state their status as gifts, their production and circulation suggests that they functioned as gifts nonetheless. By evaluating the women’s conduct manual as a gift, I will pursue two parallel arguments in this essay. First, the narratives of the conductmanual gift reveal that gift exchange was a highly variable phenomenon, despite the expectations articulated by the gift. Second, while the ideology of women’s conduct manuals tends to be consistent, there are significant distinctions amongst these works, which reflect the conditions of production, textual transmission, and the anticipated response. By pursuing these lines of inquiry, I hope to revise the scholarly consensus regarding form and function of gift exchange, and the status of the eighteenth-century women’s conduct manuals.

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Women’s conduct literature saturated the market in the period, and the genre’s success can be measured by the multitude of authors and the multiple editions of their works. Dr. John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters appeared in no less than six editions from its first publication in April 1774 until October 1775; eight London editions appeared between 1776 and 1796, as well as editions published in Edinburgh and Dublin, and in Italian and French. 2 These spectacular figures are not atypical: there were fifteen editions of Halifax’s The Lady’s New Year’s Gift by 1765, and fourteen editions of James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women (first edition 1766) by 1813.3 Female authors were also popular: Sarah Pennington’s An Unfortunate Mother’s Advice to her Absent Daughters (1761) went through three editions in its first year, and Mrs. Chapone’s Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773) was in its seventh edition by 1778.4 The publishers exploited the market for conduct books by printing Pennington, Chapone, and Gregory together, and in anthologies like The Lady’s Pocket Library and The Young Lady’s Parental Monitor.5 The public eagerly purchased conduct literature, as consumers sought to indoctrinate themselves or others in ideologies of gender and class, or simply fulfill social expectations by the ownership of such books. This conduct literature analyzed the position of women in society, defined proper behavior, and inculcated morality.6 Since Nancy Armstrong and Mary Poovey drew attention to conduct manuals in their groundbreaking work on domestic ideology and culture, eighteenth-century conduct manuals have been invoked frequently in scholarship, particularly to illuminate cultural history and the rise of the novel.7 Most scholars assert ideological continuity among women’s conduct books, and generally they are correct. Toni Bowers writes, “Any reader of Augustan conduct books will be immediately struck by how alike they sound,” and she posits that most conduct texts published between 1680 and 1760 were versions (often unattributed) of Richard Allestree’s The Ladies Calling and Halifax’s The Lady’s New Year’s Gift. 8 Nancy Armstrong also discerns consistency among the conduct manuals, in which she sees a single vision of womanhood: “one does see a figure emerge from the categories that organize these manuals. A figure of female subjectivity, a grammar really. . . .”9 (my emphasis). For modern scholars, that female subjectivity is characterized as modest and passive, regulated and regulating—complicit in and subject to patriarchal systems that replicate female oppression.10

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However, this single female figure becomes problematic once the distinctions among conduct manuals—the relationship between the author and the intended reader, the conditions of authorship, textual transmission, and the desired (and actual) reader response— are accounted for.11 Friends, siblings, and clergymen wrote conduct books, but here I will focus on conduct manuals written by parents for their daughters. The parent–child relationship is arguably the most commonplace and the most complicated, reliant upon ongoing recognition, obligation, and reciprocity to a degree that less proximate relationships are not. The parents who wrote conduct manuals tried to fulfill their obligations by responding to specific, personal situations in an effort to elicit particular behaviors from their children. The Marquis of Halifax, Dr. John Gregory, and Sarah Pennington express love, regret, and anxiety, and their tone differs markedly from the works of Richard Allestree and James Fordyce, childless clergymen writing for the public. The works of Halifax, Gregory, and Pennington capture the parental character, as their writings substitute for parental presence and mentoring. While it is possible to discern aspects of Allestree and Fordyce in their work, the preservation of personality was not part of their agenda—arguably, it would detract from their authorial goals.12 Furthermore, the parental works recognize the individuality and agency of their daughters. Their goal is to enable their children to succeed in life, rather than developing universal, comprehensive systems of behavior. Yet Halifax, Gregory, and Pennington engaged in different narratives of composition, transmission, and obligation, which highlight the dynamics of gift culture, behavioral codes, and family politics. These variations not only call into question the generalization that conduct manuals for eighteenth-century women are the same, but argue for the interrogation of the conduct manual as a gift. *

*

*

When George Savile, the Marquis of Halifax, was writing The Lady’s New Year’s Gift at the end of 1687, he had been out of office for two years, having been dismissed from the King’s Privy Council in October 1685. Halifax was prolific during this time, corresponding with William of Orange, and producing A Letter to a Dissenter (1687) and The Anatomy of an Equivalent (1688).13 Sorrow, joy, and change marked his family life: his brother Henry died in October 1687, as did Halifax’s eldest son, Henry; his second son, William, the

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new heir, married in November 1687; Anne, Halifax’s elder daughter, had been married to Lord Vaughan since 1682; Halifax’s third son, George, was in Paris attending his dying uncle; and Elizabeth, aged twelve, Halifax’s youngest and only child from his second marriage, was at home.14 Halifax intimates that Elizabeth, the recipient of his text, was cherished and a bit spoiled: “I will conclude this Article with my Advice, That you would, as much as Nature will give you Leave, endeavour to forget the great Indulgence you have found at home. After such a gentle discipline as you have been under, every thing you dislike will seem the harsher to you.”15 Elizabeth was the beloved child of Halifax’s old age (he was nearly forty-two years older than his daughter), and he describes himself as “a kind Father” who “reckoneth your [Elizabeth’s] happiness to be the greatest part of his own” (LG 2, 46). These affectionate sentiments are genuine, but also calculated—for it was Halifax’s parenting philosophy to elicit obedience from children through love (LG 22–3). With the deaths of Anne and George in 1689, Elizabeth was probably doted upon even more.16 This familial context modifies the current scholarly response to Halifax’s work and leads to a different understanding of the text.17 Certainly The Lady’s New Year’s Gift argues for female deference to patriarchy, but Halifax presumably advocated this position because he understood his daughter’s character and the gender politics of the day. Men had power that women lacked, and if he did not acknowledge such inequities, Halifax could not provide his daughter with strategies to respond to them. One could anticipate the difficulties that a pampered child would have during courtship and marriage, precisely because Halifax had not been an overbearing patriarch. In 1688 Elizabeth was a bit young to be considering marriage, but Halifax was engaging in anticipatory parenting (by envisioning the future and providing advice) and belated parenting (by advocating deference and self-control, which she should have acquired as a child). In other words, Halifax’s gift was too late, and too early. Halifax assumes that Elizabeth will not comprehend his advice: “A Great Part of what is said in the following Discourse may be above the present growth of your Understanding” (LG 2). (He might not want her to understand—after all, Halifax was writing to a twelve-yearold about tyrannical, alcoholic, profligate, and miserly husbands.) But Halifax anticipates that she will learn with time and repetition: “Few things are well learnt, but by early Precepts: Those well infus’d, make them Natural; and we are never sure of retaining what is valuable, till by a continued Habit we have made it a piece of us” (LG 2).


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Halifax positions his text as an ongoing reference, and every reading is an enactment of his gift—or rather, an enactment of Halifax trying to fulfill his obligation to raise his daughter. If his gift succeeds, Elizabeth will embody his text and become his gift to the world: “That you may live so as to be an Ornament to Your Family, and a Pattern to your Sex. . . . May you so raise your character, that you may help to make your Age a better thing, and leave Posterity in your Debt for the advantage it shall receive by your Example” (LG 46). As others become indebted to Elizabeth, the donor–recipient relationship no longer remains an enclosed circle but expands and reverberates like ripples across a pond. As Halifax’s Lady’s New Year’s Gift reveals his ambitions for his daughter, so too it documents his anxieties as a parent. Halifax seems over-obligated to his daughter; he worries that he cannot fulfill his obligations, that he will always be obligated, and that he will never be able to ensure her happiness. Halifax writes: at present [you are] the chief Object of my Care, as well as of my Kindness, which sometimes throweth me into Visions of your being happy in the World, that are better suited to my partial Wishes, than to my reasonable hopes for you. At other times, when my fears prevail, I shrink as if I was struck, at the prospect of Danger, to which a young woman must be exposed. (LG 1)

As a responsible parent, Halifax attempts to prepare Elizabeth for frustration and disappointment, even as he hopes that she will find contentment and joy. Yet he feels inadequate to the task, as he concedes, “Whether my skill can draw the Picture of a fine Woman, may be a Question” (LG 2). (One wonders what Halifax’s wife Gertrude thought of this statement.) However, Halifax had relevant experience from another venue: politics. Duty, obligation, and deference marked Halifax’s political career as much as they would shape his daughter’s domestic one. From situations of tenuous power—both experienced and observed—Halifax discerned strategies of accommodation and survival, and tactics to maintain and acquire power. The lessons of politics were the best gift Halifax could give his daughter.18 The Lady’s New Year’s Gift aligns personal politics with the politics of the gift through the discourse of obligation, manipulation, and exchange. Halifax’s Gift presents a hierarchy of obligation: first to God, then family, and finally to one’s self in society, and he organizes his text accordingly.19 This structure departs from conduct manuals like Allestree’s, which advise women based on their social roles (virgin,

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wife, widow), or desirable traits (modesty, chastity, charity). The longest section of the Lady’s New Year’s Gift discusses the “Husband,” and features the rhetoric of obligation (“duty,” “obedience,” “power,” and “dominion”) and its opposite (“freedom” and “liberty”). Halifax admits that “Obey is an ungenteel word” and that marriage is the realm of “Masculine Dominion,” but he argues that women can modify, if not overturn, their spousal duty: “You have it in your power not only to free yourselves, but to subdue your Masters, and without violence throw both their Natural and Legal Authority at your Feet” (LG 9, 8). When Halifax describes undesirable husbands (the tyrant, the drunkard, the choleric, the sullen, the covetous, the miserly, and the incompetent), he implies that such husbands fail in their obligation to their wives by defining the terms of marriage inappropriately. 20 A wife’s obligation to her husband is mediated then proportionately; some gifts elicit stronger degrees of obligation than others, after all. Accordingly, Halifax advocates observation and accommodation, particularly of undesirable husbands—not as deference, but as strategies to manipulate and improve the conditions of obligation. 21 As husbands elicit obligation from wives, so women elicit obligation from their children and their servants. Halifax refers to a woman’s “Title to the Government” (LG 20) over her home, and here too the politics of obligation dominates as women wield power. Seemingly one cannot elicit obligation without manifesting obligation, and for Halifax, ensuring obedience and obligation depends on responsible, consistent, reserved behavior. A woman loses her authority by avoiding or distorting her domestic obligations: through indifference, insufficient surveillance of household tasks, erratic behavior, overfamiliarity with the children or servants, haughtiness, and extravagance. 22 Halifax acknowledges some challenges, like the tendency of children to “mutiny,” as they “make wrong inferences, to take Encouragement from half Words, and misapply what you may say or do, so as either to lessen their Duty, or extend their Liberty farther than is Convenient” (LG 23). Yet Halifax advocates love to ensure obedience: “You must begin early to make them love you, that they may obey you” (LG 22). If love can be compelled, surely duty and obligation can. Halifax never states that Elizabeth is an undutiful child. But The Lady’s New Year’s Gift implicitly questions her inclination to fulfill her duty. While delineating her obligations to God, family, and society, Halifax removes himself from the discourse and masks Elizabeth’s obligations to him. Halifax claims that his advice will make her duty a pleasure and secure her contentment, if not her happiness (LG 6).


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But in so far as Elizabeth’s happiness constitutes his own—and as her behavior reflects upon him socially and politically—Halifax attempts to obligate Elizabeth’s behavior for his benefit as much as hers. Halifax did not intend to publish The Lady’s New Year’s Gift. 23 Nevertheless, the text “was licensed on January 9 and entered in the Stationers’ Register on January 12.”24 That Halifax engaged in an older, more aristocratic form of manuscript circulation, or that Halifax could not prevent the publication of the text, is not surprising. Presumably the title was derived from Halifax’s closing remarks: “But I must restrain my Thoughts, which are full of my Dear Child, and would overflow into a Volume, which would not be fit for a NewYears-Gift” (LG 46). Halifax’s Gift was very popular with the public, and evidently, Elizabeth kept a copy on her table.25 But did Elizabeth understand the meaning of her father’s gift? Did the text elicit the response that Halifax hoped for? The answers lie in Elizabeth’s behavior, but there is little information regarding Elizabeth as an adult. In March 1691/92, Elizabeth married Lord Stanhope, “a youth some three years her senior, son and heir of her father’s old friend, Lord Chesterfield.”26 During the sixteen years of her marriage, Elizabeth Savile Stanhope gave birth to six children who survived infancy.27 She died on September 6, 1708 at the age of thirty-three. In November 1693, Stanhope wrote to Halifax about Elizabeth’s behavior.28 Stanhope complained: “when informed that reasons of health and economy must compel her husband to winter in the country, despite her father’s expressed wishes, had retorted, that if he stayed all winter she should repent that she ever married him; intimating, moreover, that if he persisted she should herself remain in town without him” (LL 2:149). Even accounting for her youth (Elizabeth was eighteen), her manners left something to be desired. Certainly winter in London was more exciting than living in the country with a sickly spouse; yet threatening her husband rather than obliging or negotiating with him was not only inappropriate, but unwise. Presumably Elizabeth read her Gift, but she seemingly disregarded her father’s advice, for the traits that Halifax hoped to instill in his daughter—a sense of duty and obligation, a receptive awareness of her husband and his needs, the temperament to tolerate disappointment—are signally absent here. But if Elizabeth seems selfish and imperious, Stanhope seems petulant in his indignation (why won’t she behave?). As Stanhope invokes Halifax’s authority (for Elizabeth is challenging her father’s “expressed wishes” as well as his own) and pleads for assistance, he reveals his inability to elicit her compliance, and his tenuous position as a husband.

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Ever the diplomat, Halifax’s response was reassuring and conciliatory. After expressing surprise, Halifax conceded his daughter’s misbehavior and urged his son-in-law to be patient: I love you equally as my own children, I should not have been partiall to your wife, in any dispute where she was in the wrong. If there is nothing more than that which you mention, that giveth you offence, It will not I hope, upon your second thoughts produce such a resolution as you seem to expresse. If a young Woman, my dear Ld sayeth a foolish thing, in heat, and as shee alleadgeth, in ieast [jest] too, a husband is not to leave her for it, especially when shee is ready, as it becometh her, to live where ever you think it necessary for your selfe to bee in relation to your health. For as to wanting money to live in town, it is an argt [argument] that loseth its force by the means you may have of being supplyed, which you might make use of without any scruple; . . . I am convinced your wife loveth you, and if shee should not, I promise you I will not love her; for my selfe and my wife, I will onely say wee will not yield to the nearest of your relations in our reall kindnesse to you, and how wee must bee afflicted to bee so disappointed in our hopes to see you live happily and kindly with your wife you may easily imagine; Therefore let mee earnestly ingage you to make no resolution till wee see you. . . . (LL 2:149–50)

Stanhope should have read The Lady’s New Year’s Gift, for Halifax offered his son-in-law the same advice he gave his daughter regarding difficult spouses. By asserting that Elizabeth did love him and would obey, Halifax provided Stanhope with a preferred reading of the situation, to forestall the rush toward marital separation. That Halifax aligned himself with his son-in-law rather than his daughter is expected, given his comments on the natural authority of patriarchy in the Gift (LG 8). Yet the justification of masculine authority based on reason and nature is subsumed here. Even as Halifax reassured Stanhope that proper behavior was more important to him than defending wrongheaded family members (a rational response), Halifax was manipulating his son-in-law. He enacted his advice regarding angry spouses: “Your Gentleness well timed, will, like a Charm, dispel his Anger ill placed; a kind Smile will reclaim, when a shrill pettish Answer would provoke him; rather than fail upon such occasions, when other Remedies are too weak, a little Flattery may be admitted, which by being necessary, will cease to be Criminal” (LG 14). Through professions of love and devotion, the soothing suggestion of future resolution, and the hint of financial assistance, Halifax


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demonstrated the power of his gift—which Elizabeth seemingly failed to acquire, or use. 29 The reception of Halifax’s The Lady’s New Year’s Gift signals some of the complications surrounding gift exchange. Defining duty was not enough to elicit obligation; the politics of the gift were not sufficiently persuasive unto themselves. The modes of manipulation evident in the text—the expressions of affection for the recipient, the sympathetic understanding of the difficulties of obligation, the compensatory strategies to manage unpleasant obligations—were not sufficient to guarantee compliance either. As Halifax was all too aware, he could not ensure the desired response from his daughter. As a result, the power of the gift is ultimately limited, even when the gift exchange is consensual. Elizabeth accepted her father’s gift, but she resisted it in so far as she did not enact its principles. The resisting reader, like the resentful recipient, imposes their agenda on the exchange and the meaning of the gift.30 Parents wrote and children read conduct manuals, but the dictates of the conduct manuals were not necessarily obeyed. While this seems obvious, there is a tendency to assume female compliance with the conduct manual codes—and that their gender ideology was challenged only by singular or celebrated women. But perhaps the repetition of gender codes in conduct manuals demonstrates that the proffered advice was not being complied with after all. Although Jacques Derrida argues that it is impossible to give a gift because some degree of reciprocity is always expected, Halifax may have given a true gift—for he could not elicit the obligation that he desired, and he knew it.31 *

*

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Dr. John Gregory’s circumstances differed radically from Halifax’s when he wrote A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters. Neither a diplomat nor an aristocrat, Gregory was a physician who had not yet achieved eminence in the medical and philosophical communities. Unlike Halifax, Gregory’s authorship was precipitated by a specific event: the death of his wife Elizabeth in September 1761.32 The ailing Gregory wrote to ease his grief and to allay his concerns about the fate of his daughters should he die before they reached adulthood. (His eldest daughter, Dorothea, was seven years old at the time). Gregory was thirty-seven in 1761; Halifax, who was fifty-four when he wrote his text, expressed no concerns about his mortality, and his wife Gertrude was alive—she died in 1727, long after her husband and

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daughter. Halifax knew his daughter would receive his work and that he would be able to gauge her response, unlike Gregory, who assumed that his daughters would receive his text posthumously: “Before this comes to your hands, you will like have lost your father.”33 Gregory had hopes for the transmission of his text but no guarantee, and no means to assess his daughters’ reactions. Gregory’s concerns—death, illness, uncertainty—shape A Father’s Legacy and strongly differentiate it from Halifax’s work. For Gregory’s text is haunted by his dead wife, as he invokes her ideas and taste, confesses his limitations to advise women, comments on marriage and patriarchy—and is haunted by the notion of legacy itself. There are similarities between these conduct works, of course, but they are largely those of genre.34 Both parents assume that their texts will provide guidance, and both seek to elicit specific behaviors from their daughters and inculcate a sense of duty. Both express their love, concerns and hopes, and manifest a sense of over-obligation to their children; like Halifax, Gregory writes of the “anxiety I have for your happiness” (FL 4). Neither intended to publish—Halifax lost control of his manuscript, while Gregory’s son James published the text after his father’s death. Both men wrote with specific children in mind, for Gregory was not writing to his sons. Evidently parental conduct manuals had changed little in the seventy-four years between the composition of The Lady’s New Year’s Gift from A Father’s Legacy—or in the marketplace during the eighty-six years that separated their publication. Which makes the differences between these works all the more striking. Gertrude Savile is never mentioned in Halifax’s Gift, but Elizabeth Gregory appears in the first sentence of A Father’s Legacy: “You had the misfortune to be deprived of your mother, at a time of life when you were insensible of your loss, and could receive little benefit, either from her instruction, or her example” (1–2). Gregory tries to compensate for maternal loss by capturing the character of his dead wife, and the process of writing is therapeutic, as he reconciles himself to her death (FL 2–5, 131). In this sense, Gregory is not only fulfilling his parental obligations by writing, but gifting himself. He writes, “I draw but a very faint and imperfect picture of what your mother was, while I endeavour to point out what you should be” (FL 25). What the daughters “should be” is like their mother, the missing example that Gregory attempts to provide in his less-than-perfect portrait. Gregory admits that he deferred to his wife’s judgment, which reinforces her status as a model: “my sentiments on the most interesting points that


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regard life and manners, were entirely correspondent to your mother’s, whose judgment and taste I trusted much more than my own” (FL 5). (Halifax conceded the power of female influence, but he never displaced patriarchal authority like this.) Gregory’s statement was not mere politeness. Elizabeth was a devoted Anglican, and Gregory decided to raise their children in her church rather than his own, even as Elizabeth expressed concerns about the effect of his decision on his career (FL 24–5). To defer to Elizabeth on religion carries weight far beyond “affection and veneration for her memory” (FL 25), and her sensibility on the subject reaffirms her worth and wisdom, as well as the propriety of Gregory’s deference. This invocation of Elizabeth—present yet absent, alluded to but not fully discussed—reflects Gregory’s psychological state and his awareness of the limitations of his gift. Thinking about Elizabeth forces Gregory to relive his past, which leads to cycles of depression: “but I must check myself, and not indulge in descriptions [of marital happiness] that may mislead you, and that too sensibly awake the remembrance of my happier days, which, perhaps, it were better for me to forget for ever” (FL 130). Yet he is constantly reminded of Elizabeth, for her loss has led to his present dilemma: raising their daughters in the absence of a mother. Gregory cannot embody the female model for his daughters, nor can his gift replace Elizabeth. Far from the authoritative voice of Halifax, Gregory concedes that there is female experience beyond his ken: “You must expect that the advices which I shall give you will be very imperfect, as there are many nameless delicacies, in female manners, of which none but a woman can judge” (FL 5). Gregory cannot escape his perspective as a father and a man, and in this regard he is aware that his gift is inevitably inadequate. So Gregory reframes the situation: “You will have one advantage by attending to what I am going to leave with you; you will hear, at least for once in your lives, the genuine sentiments of a man who has no interest in flattering or deceiving you” (FL 5–6). (Curiously, Gregory does not rely on his sons to be honest with their sisters.) Halifax would have agreed that men lie and manipulate women, and he would have approved of Gregory’s protective paternalism. But Gregory makes himself complicit in the gender relations he describes by speaking for his entire sex, while Halifax does not. The inclusive masculine “we” resonates throughout A Father’s Legacy: “For this reason, be particularly tender of the reputation of your own sex, especially when they happen to rival you in our regards. We look on this as the strongest proof of dignity and true greatness of mind”; “You will not easily

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believe how much we consider your dress as expressive of your characters”; and “this art of keeping one in suspense, is the great secret of coquetry in both sexes. It is the more cruel in us, because we can carry it what length we please, and continue it as long as we please, without your being so much as at liberty to complain or expostulate’’ (33–4, 57, 101, my emphasis).35 By revealing what “we” men really think about “you” women, Gregory gives his daughters the knowledge to “render you most respectable and most amiable in the eyes of my own sex” and to avoid flattery and deceit (FL 8). The Legacy overflows with generalizations about men and their contradictory responses to women. Men claim to dislike reserved women, but actually respect such women more than women who are open and frank (FL 36, 41–2). Men prefer religious women, even men who are “unbelievers” (FL 22). Men feel threatened by intelligent women, and while rare men do not stoop to such “meanness,” it is best to hide a woman’s intelligence and accomplishments (FL 31–2). Gregory depicts a social landscape defined by the complexities of the male psyche, in which women are subject to constant, unforgiving masculine assessment. Gregory advocates self-regulation, propriety, and modesty, for this demeanor protects women by masking their characters and talents from commentary and criticism. Only an attentive man will notice an unassuming virtuous woman, and only an upright man will take the time to know and value her. But despite his discourse on pleasing men, Gregory does not insist upon marriage. (Here the difference with Halifax, who sees marriage as a natural, inevitable state, is striking.) Gregory assures his daughters that they will not be obligated to marry: “I leave you in such independent circumstances as may lay you under no temptation to do from necessity what you would never do from choice” (FL 110). Gregory does not deride marriage as an institution, only the ways in which it is enacted. He dreads marriage “for the good of the public,” or falsely idealized as the only source of happiness, or based on financial need (FL 109, 104, 110). And he dreads marriage to the wrong partner. His catalogue of bad husbands rivals Halifax’s—the ill (or worse, mad) husband, the fool, the rake, the irreligious, and the weak man—but unlike Halifax, Gregory proffers no strategies to manage such men (FL 123–6). Instead, Gregory attempts to forestall such marriages by analyzing courtship behavior, and the ways to recognize esteem, affection, and compatibility (FL 79–88, 92–104). The obstacles to successful courtship are numerous: an appropriate man may never appear, and even if he does, he may not elicit esteem and affection, or reciprocate it. He may be a friend,


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rather than a lover. The good marriage is rare, but not impossible, and largely a matter of luck, self-awareness, and judgment. The right spousal choice can lead one to “a superior degree of happiness,” and for Gregory, that is the only reason to marry: “to make yourselves happier” (FL 105, 109). The comparative is important: marriage can make one happier—but presumably one can be happy without marriage. In the absence of a compatible spouse, however, exercising the right not to marry is preferred.36 This freedom of marital choice is a gift, and at first glance it seemingly acknowledges the inevitable: Gregory did not know if he would live to see his daughters reach marriageable age, much less influence their spousal choice. But more importantly, this gift is consonant with Gregory’s mediated patriarchalism: “I do not want to make you any thing: I want to know what Nature had made you, and to perfect you on her plan” (FL 54–5). He disavows parental authority as he envisions his children as adults: If I live till you arrive at that age when you shall be capable to judge for yourselves, and do not strangely alter my sentiments, I shall act towards you in a very different manner from what most parents do. My opinion has always been, that when that period arrives, the parental authority ceases. I hope I shall always treat you with that affection and easy confidence which may dispose you to look on me as your friend. In that capacity alone I shall think myself intitled to give you my opinion. . . . (FL 111)

Gregory was “very different” from most parents, because he admitted that ultimately he could not control his daughters, nor should he. Perhaps Gregory’s stance can be attributed to his wife’s death, or his illness, or his profession, which underscored the limits of knowledge, skill, and power. But if he succeeded as a parent, Gregory would not need to exercise patriarchal authority, for his daughters would be autonomous women of virtue and sense. Parents wielded power over their children in the 1760s, yet the rhetoric of hierarchy, dominion, and politics that marks Halifax’s work is absent from Gregory’s, and the discourse of duty and obligation shifts correspondingly. Halifax focuses on duty and responsibility in a hierarchy—God, husband, home, and society—and while Gregory acknowledges public and religious duties, he discusses duty primarily in terms of personal ethics and morality. Gregory spends proportionately less time discussing domestic authority, family finances, and the treatment of servants—and unlike Halifax, Gregory does not

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mention raising children at all.37 (Nor does Gregory offer strategies to make marital duties more pleasant and manageable, presumably since his discourse presents choices that Halifax’s text lacks.) Even the organization of Gregory’s work is less hierarchical: A Father’s Legacy is comprised of four overlapping sections (religion; conduct and behavior; amusements; friendship, love, and marriage) and lacks a sequencing principle comparable to Halifax’s text. Often Gregory appears to be musing, weighing conditions and contexts, knowing that he cannot anticipate every situation for his daughters. And to some degree, Gregory is aware that his project contradicts itself: he wants his daughters to be naturally good, sensitive, and kind, but the process of defining and inculcating proper behavior runs the risk of making them affected. After Gregory wrote his Legacy, he lived to raise his children, develop his medical practice, and become famous with the publication of A Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man, with those of the Animal World (1765). In 1766 Gregory visited the Montagus at their Denton estate; when Elizabeth Montagu subsequently traveled to Edinburgh, she was enchanted by Gregory’s daughters. As Betty Rizzo writes, “The idea of selecting and rearing a child to become a suitable companion must have occurred to her [Elizabeth Montagu] when she encountered the motherless Gregory girls. With pools of orphaned and unprovisioned children available everywhere, it was a popular idea of the time, like estate improvement.”38 After many meetings and discussions, the childless Montagus offered to take in Gregory’s eldest daughter, Dorothea. Gregory could not dispute the advantages for Dorothea (who would essentially become the Montagus’ ward), but the position of companion was complex and socially delicate (C 114–5). By May 1772, seventeen-year-old Dorothea was living with the Montagus. In February 1773, Dr. Gregory died, which “must have sealed the relationship; now there was no one else to whom [Dorothea] Gregory could turn except her brother James, who was struggling to rise in the medical profession” (C 115). Gregory’s Legacy was published in 1774 by James, who claimed that he was continuing his father’s habit of publishing texts to help mankind (FL viii–x), but it seems likely that James was looking to burnish the family reputation, advance his career, or add to his sisters’ fortunes.39 It is not clear who chose to call the work A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters—for the word does not appear in the text—but “legacy” resonates with the law, patriarchal will, and death. A legacy is a gift, as it seeks to provide for and obligate the recipient according


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to the will of the deceased—yet the donor must rely upon others for the transmission of the gift. The uncertainty of the receipt of the legacy heightens the conditional nature of the gift exchange, and alters the elicited obligation. The recipient of a legacy may feel more compelled by the loss of and sentiment toward the deceased donor—or significantly less, for the recipient is often freed from obligation by the lack of surveillance and enforcement of the gift. As an indefinite means to compel behavior, a legacy underscores the desire to obligate and the knowledge of the inability to do so. The transmission of the Legacy to Gregory’s daughters is ambiguous: the Gregory girls may have read their father’s work before publication, but presumably they would have done so afterward. Dorothea’s life suggests that Gregory raised her according to the precepts of his text, and that she followed her father’s advice.40 The gift may not be bound by the physical text after all. As “an agent in domestic business, a sympathetic confidante, and a vivacious social companion” for Elizabeth Montagu, Dorothea embodied the traits of responsibility, discernment, and sensitivity that her father prescribed.41 Dorothea fulfilled her father’s injunctions regarding intellectual pursuits and display: “she had made up her mind to emulate Montagu neither in scholarship nor in wit. She found Montagu’s delight in the limelight unattractive” (C 116). Perhaps this was for the best, for Dorothea could never be accused of rivaling her bluestocking benefactress. Dorothea and Elizabeth lived happily together for ten years, running the Montagu estates, mines, and projects.42 Their contentment was disturbed twice: briefly in 1777, when Dorothea fell in love with a man that Elizabeth deemed unsuitable, and permanently in 1782, when Elizabeth attempted to arrange a marriage between Dorothea and her nephew and heir, Matthew Robinson (C 117, 130–9). For Elizabeth, the marriage would ensure her personal, financial, and legal interests and fulfill her obligation to the woman she had all but legally adopted. While twenty-yearold Matthew Robinson was willing to pursue the match, twentyeight-year-old Dorothea was not. Awkwardness and separations soon followed; during a visit to Edinburgh, Dorothea fell in love with a clergyman, Archibald Alison, who was a friend of her brother. Alison was not affluent, but he was a gentleman and an appropriate suitor for Dorothea. Elizabeth Montagu actively opposed the match— withholding information of the engagement from Matthew, forbidding the couple from seeing each other or corresponding, delaying the marriage—while working upon Dorothea’s sense of obligation

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to her. Dorothea agonized over her relationship with Elizabeth, who as a surrogate parent was ironically far more patriarchal than her father. In the end, Dorothea did not sacrifice her happiness for money, social standing, or convenience. She was her father’s daughter, and in June 1784, she married Alison. Public sentiment was mixed; some perceived Elizabeth Montagu to be a tyrant, while others considered Dorothea Gregory ungrateful.43 Although Montagu could help the young couple, she did not—and the Alisons struggled until 1790, when Alison published his Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste and received a living in Shropshire.44 Despite Gregory’s concerns, he seemingly achieved a better result with his daughter than Halifax did, for Dorothea lived according to the precepts of her father’s Legacy. Perhaps Gregory succeeded because his vision of patriarchy was less absolute than Halifax’s. Perhaps by mediating the obligation, Gregory succeeded in eliciting it—masking the power of the gift may have eased its acceptance. Or, by living long enough to raise his children according to his principles, Gregory may have made his Legacy obsolete. For by the time Dorothea Gregory probably received the text, she no longer needed it.45 *

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Sarah Pennington lacked the advantages of reputation, profession, and gender that granted authority to Halifax and Gregory and their texts. Separated from her children by her husband in 1761, the year Gregory wrote his Legacy, Pennington published a conduct manual for her daughters in an attempt to fulfill her parental obligations. The title of her text, An Unfortunate Mother’s Advice to her Absent Daughters in a letter to Miss Pennington, significantly characterizes both mother and daughters. The mother is “unfortunate,” not only in her separation from her children but in her loss of reputation; Pennington admits that although she is not a model of female conduct, her goal is to teach her daughters so that they learn from her mistakes.46 Ironically, this displacement strongly aligns Pennington with Halifax and Gregory; like the men, Pennington does not embody the female ideal, and as she describes proper female behavior, she too fails to identify living role models. Furthermore, the title describes the daughters as absent, not their mother. Yet it is Pennington’s absence that justifies her authorship, through her daughters’ need for the text. Neither Halifax nor Gregory wrestled with parental absence, for they lived with their children while writing their texts. They envisioned


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their works as parental surrogates in the future, whereas Pennington constructed her text as her surrogate in the present. Accordingly, Pennington’s anxieties about the transmission and reception of her text are heightened in comparison to Halifax and Gregory, because she needed the Advice to serve immediately as her substitute. Pennington lacked a sure path of transmission; she could write the text, but not guarantee delivery to her children. (In this light, Gregory’s reliance on his executors to give his daughters the Legacy seems comparatively secure.) Of course, if a gift is not received, it cannot elicit response or obligation. Through publication, Pennington multiplied the number of copies of the text, and the probability of her daughters receiving it. Yet this strategy entailed risk, and Pennington recognized that she would be censured for exposing private concerns to the public: My dear JENNY, WAS there any probability that a letter from me would be permitted to reach your hand alone, I should not have chosen this least eligible method of writing to you.—The public is no way concerned in family affairs, and ought not to be made a party in them;—but my circumstances are such as lay me under a necessity of either communicating my sentiments to the world, or of concealing them from you;—the latter would, I think, be the breach of an indispensable duty, which obliges me to wave the impropriety of the former. (MA 5–6)

By acknowledging the social conventions regarding family politics, Pennington validated those conventions as she justified her departure from them: who could blame a mother who wanted to parent her children? By claiming that this unconventional situation warranted unconventional measures, Pennington attempted to elicit public sympathy as a mother—not as a woman writer. Tellingly, the tradition of anonymous female authorship was not available to her; Pennington was compelled to identify herself as an author to increase the likelihood of the children receiving her text. Pennington also worried that her children might acquire a text with her name that she had not written. This concern was legitimate, for as Halifax’s publications indicate, unlicensed and pirated editions flourished throughout the period. To prevent this occurrence, Pennington signed every copy of the early editions.47 The insistence upon authenticity seems to be coupled with concerns about self-representation (since the text serves as a surrogate for Pennington, no one else should

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attempt to parent her children) and deception (for Pennington admitted that she had been deceived, and was accused of deceit herself).48 As nonpublishing authors, neither Halifax nor Gregory worried about the perception of their authorship, or that the authenticity of their texts might be suspect. But for Pennington, the authority of The Advice would be validated if the transmission were secure. Even if her children received her Advice, Pennington could not be as confident as Halifax or Gregory about its reception. It is possible but unlikely that Pennington knew what the children had been told about her absence; it is possible and likely that Pennington’s husband (and others) had been speaking against her. Such variables complicated Pennington’s sense of audience, and imply that her public gift might not be welcomed by her children. Presumably, family members did not desire her publication, for Pennington implicated them in her domestic exile and rewrote the family narrative with herself in the role of dutiful parent. As Jenny, the eldest, was “too young to enter into things of this kind, or to judge properly of them,” Pennington could only hope that the children would suspend their judgment “of all that may have reached your ears with regard to me” (MA 17; see also 6). To merit the benefit of the doubt, Pennington attempted to recuperate her authority as a parent and reestablish her reputation. For the latter, Pennington’s public audience was as important as her familial one. By first acknowledging the difficulty of her task and the awkwardness of the situation, Pennington’s poignant circumstances, like Gregory’s, would strongly affect the reader. Pennington then confessed her faults: “To sum up the whole in a few words, my private conduct was what the severest prude could not condemn, my public, such as the most finish’d coquet alone would have ventur’d upon” (MA 10; see also 7–9, 13). There are elements of a defense in this confession, as Pennington claimed that even her husband admitted that she “was not only innocent of any criminal act, but of every vicious thought” (MA 10). He used Pennington’s reputation to control her: “he knows that many of those appearances, which have been urged against me, I was forc’d to submit to, not only from his direction, but by his absolute command—which, contrary to reason and to my own interest, I was, for more than twelve years, weak enough to implicitly obey” (MA 12–3). Pennington’s separation from her family required strength of character, much as her authorship and publication did. More importantly, this narrative provided Pennington with a powerful justification for her parenting, as she derived lessons from her history for her children. Reputation does matter: being virtuous


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without the appearance of virtue leads to disaster, and a bad reputation does not disappear easily or of its own accord. Discernment and agency are required for personal, social, and marital success—and one’s judgment should be guided by religious and social conventions, which have both merit and power. It was this last lesson—on the value of religious and social convention—that shaped the Advice, and allowed Pennington to write herself back into society by advocating traditional values and behavior. Much of Pennington’s Advice discusses the topics featured in Halifax and Gregory, and in similar ways. Pennington advocated devotion to God, religious duty, and religious practice, and she provided a list of religious texts for guidance (22–35). Like Halifax and Gregory, Pennington discussed the importance of domestic duties and domestic economy, and the proper treatment of servants (MA 46–57, 60–4). Pennington also commented on dress, and the negative ramifications of excessive attention to clothing and appearance (MA 57–60); she too wrote about amusements, such as reading, theatre, dancing, and social visits (MA 64–84). Pennington’s comments on friendship echoed Gregory’s (MA 141–7). Like Gregory, she discussed the importance of discerning the character of a potential spouse; she insisted upon good sense and good nature, without which marriage should be avoided. (Pennington avoided her marital history in this part of the commentary; in doing so, her strategy echoed that of Halifax, who did not refer to his marriage at all, and Gregory, who tended to focus on courtship rather than discuss his happy marriage.) She provided a list of undesirable husbands, along with the difficulties of such marriages, comparable to the discourse in Halifax and Gregory (MA 84–127). The substantive differences between Pennington, Halifax, and Gregory are few, but significant. Pennington was concerned about education, and she listed subjects and texts for her daughters to study in her absence (MA 40–6, 64–9). Pennington’s curriculum was typical for the period, focusing on the Bible, English, French, Italian, history, geography, mathematics, natural philosophy, music, and drawing. Some of these subjects were practical, but most signaled class status. Pennington conceded the limitations of this course of study: “a sensible woman will soon be convinc’d, that all the learning her utmost application can make her mistress of, will be, from the difference of education, in many points, inferior to that of a schoolboy” (MA 46). Nevertheless, Pennington conformed to societal expectations, which allowed her to appropriate the authority of social convention. Pennington recommended accepted texts, including sermons

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by Hoadly and Fordyce; classical literature by Seneca, Cicero, and Pliny; histories by Hooke, Hume, and Robertson; periodicals including The Spectator, The Female Spectator, and The Rambler; and poetry by Milton, Pope, Thomson, and Young.49 One conduct text cannot replace an absent parent, but by identifying appropriate texts, Pennington inserted her Advice into a network of culturally sanctioned texts for women. Finally, where Halifax and Gregory only glancingly comment on charity, Pennington provided detailed instructions, offering a template for gift giving (MA 130–9). She argued for regulating personal expenses so that one has the ability to give, and Pennington specified appropriate recipients of charity, such as the affluent who have fallen into poverty, failed tradesmen, and the aged or ill (MA 131–2). For Pennington, the random donation (to the beggar on the street) perpetuated poverty rather than alleviated it, and diminished the ability to give charity where it will do the most good. As with any gift, charity involves the donor’s judgment of the suitability of the gift, and giving produces benefits for the donor: “Upon earth you will partake that happiness you impart to others, and you will lay up for yourself Treasures in Heaven, where neither moth nor rust can corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal” (MA 139). Perhaps in an act of wishful thinking, Pennington did not consider that the recipient could reinscribe the value of the gift; for her, the act of giving was meritorious and stable. *

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It is unclear whether Jenny Pennington or her sisters ever received their mother’s Advice, so it is impossible to determine if Pennington’s gift elicited the desired response.50 Yet the narrative of Pennington’s Advice highlights the variables that effect gift exchange, and foregrounds the difficulties associated with the gift that are implicit in Halifax’s Gift and Gregory’s Legacy. Often the gift reveals more about the donor than the recipient, for each of these conduct manuals reflects the characters and ideology of their authors, their sense of parental obligation, and their understanding of their children. The gift does not reflect the children’s perspective, for they had no voice in its creation; the available evidence does not suggest that the children requested these gifts or instigated the gift exchange. If gift exchange is conceptualized as a symmetrical, circular narrative—in which a donor gives a gift to elicit (if not obligate) a desired response from the


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recipient to the donor—then these narratives of gift texts suggest that gift exchange is almost always asymmetrical. As the initiator of gift exchange, the donor is the primary actor, and arguably the primary beneficiary. Furthermore, the obligation to give may be more compelling than the obligation to receive: the act of giving alleviates obligation, whereas receiving a gift triggers obligation that may or may not be welcome. The desire to obligate children and to alleviate parental obligation are compelling, and parental gift giving satisfies both. Yet for children, who also seek to control obligations, receiving gifts (even desirable gifts) only leads to more obligation. Of course, recipients also determine the power of the gift through their response (or lack thereof). The gift itself does not inherently obligate—even when the gift is a conduct manual, which articulates the desired response. Not all recipients accede to the obligation being solicited; not all children behave as their parents wish. Since the donor cannot control the recipient’s response, gift exchange is unwieldy and highly variable. Yet even if the anticipated response does not occur, there is still partial satisfaction for the donor, whose obligation to give has been fulfilled. Admittedly, the evidence regarding the conduct manuals of Halifax, Gregory, and Pennington is skewed toward the parental perspective: their texts remain, their reputations are burnished by their works, and their stances dominate the reading of parent–child, and gift, relations. And, in the absence of written responses from their children, the analysis of these texts as gifts must remain open-ended. Yet as they illuminate the conditions in which gift exchange is embedded—the relationship between the donor and the recipient; the network of relations in which the donor–recipient dyad exists; the propriety of the gift; the timing of the gift; the successful transmission of the gift; public versus private giving; and the masking and (mis)recognition of the gift—Halifax, Gregory, and Pennington bring into focus the complex dynamics of the gift in family relations.

Notes 1. “New Year’s gift” texts were commonplace; see John Tillotson, A Seasonable New-Year’s gift; Joseph Henshaw, A New-Year’s Gift; William Richardson, God’s Portion or Man’s Duty, the Best New-Year’s gift; George Whitefield, A New Heart, the Best New Year’s Gift . . .; and John Clowes, The Pastor’s New-Year’s Gift. The “New Year’s gift” appeared as political literature; see A Merry New Year’s Gift; A New-Year’s Gift, for the New-Interest Freeholders; and Alexander Geddes, A New Year’s gift to the Good People

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Marilyn Francus of England. For comic “New Year’s Gift” texts, see The London Oracle; Being a New-Year’s Gift, for the Year 1707 and William Pinkethman’s Jests: or, Wit Refin’d. Being a New-Year’s Gift for Young Gentlemen and Ladies. For “New Year’s Gift” conduct manuals, see P.A., A New Year’s Gift, or Advice to a God-Son; D. Stephens, A New Year’s Gift, or the Youth’s Instructor; and The New Year’s Gift, or Advice to His Nephew about His Choice in Marriage. According to Sandra Naiman, the first six editions of Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy were composed of 1,000 copies each (“William Strahan” 275). For other editions of Gregory, see Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (hereafter ECCO): the London editions appeared in 1776, 1778, 1781, 1784, 1788, 1789, 1792, and 1796, as well as a French edition in 1774, an Edinburgh edition in 1788, Dublin editions in 1774 and1788, and an Italian edition in 1794. For Halifax’s editions, see ECCO, which lists a Berlin edition (1752), Paris editions (1756, 1757), and multiple London editions through 1765. For Fordyce, see Kathryn Kirkpatrick, “Sermons and Strictures,” 198. ECCO includes London editions of Fordyce in 1766, 1767, 1768, 1771, 1778, and 1800, as well as Dublin editions in 1766, 1767, and 1796. For the circulation of conduct manuals from 1690 to 1760, see F. A. Childs, “Prescriptions for Manners,” 29–42. According to the Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1660– 1800, ed. Janet Todd, Pennington’s Advice appeared in seven more editions by 1800, while the twenty-fifth edition of Chapone’s Letters appeared in 1844 (246, 82). According to the Online Computer Library Center’s Union Catalog (OCLC), Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy, Pennington’s Advice, and an excerpt from Chapone’s Letters appeared in The Lady’s Pocket Library; Gregory and Pennington were featured in The Young Lady’s Parental Monitor. All three were printed together in London editions in 1816, 1821, 1827, 1838, and 1839, as well as a Manchester edition in 1845; American collections of Gregory, Pennington, and Chapone were published in Boston (1822), New York (1826, 1827, and 1830), and Philadelphia (1830). As Joyce Hemlow observes, “If the extent to which a work is imitated or cited may be taken as an index to its popularity and influence, the Legacy must be according a very high place, for many of the doctor’s sentiments on religion, charity, coquetry, affectation, and courtship were quoted or paraphrased to the end of the century and beyond in such courtesy books as Charlotte Palmer’s Letters on Several Subjects from a Preceptress to her Pupils who have left School . . . Miss Mary Pilkington’s Mentorial Tales, and Lady Mary Walker’s Letters from the Duchess of Crui” (“Fanny Burney and the Courtesy Books,” 738–9). Nancy Armstrong argues that the production of conduct books for women surpassed that of the male aristocratic conduct book by mid century (Desire and Domestic Fiction 62). Hemlow, “Fanny Burney and the Courtesy Books,” 732–3. Armstrong modifies Hemlow’s argument by emphasizing the anticipatory aspect of the


7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

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conduct manual: “The conduct books always saw the domestic world as one that ought to be realized” (Desire and Domestic Fiction 135). See Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, especially chapter 2, “The Rise of the Domestic Woman”; and Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, especially chapter 1, “The Proper Lady.” Among the scholars who analyze eighteenth-century fiction in the context of conduct literature, see Toni Bowers, The Politics of Motherhood; Elizabeth Bergen Brophy, Women’s Lives and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel; Christopher Flint, Family Fictions; and Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty. See also Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex & Subordination, 384– 400, for a discussion of conduct manuals and the construction of femininity; Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England for an analysis of household and kinship relations through diaries, conduct texts, and novels; and Michael McKeon, Secret History of Domesticity, for multiple references to conduct authors. Bowers, The Politics of Motherhood, 156. Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 60. Jacqueline Pearson remarks, “Conduct books were popular although they offered a repressive, even ‘gloomy,’ picture of women’s ‘history’ as ‘trials and sorrows.’ Not only was their prognosis grim, but their specific injunctions demonstrate disconcerting aporias and contradictions” (Women’s Reading in Britain 47). Cf. Hemlow, “the most gloomy picture conceivable” (“Fanny Burney and the Courtesy Books,” 739–40); and Kirkpatrick, on Fordyce combating “the desire of women to be subjects” (“Sermons and Strictures,” 210). Kathryn Sutherland is less judgmental: “It is difficult for the modern reader to enter sympathetically the ideological boundaries of the conduct manual. The problem is twofold: writers whom we would now wish to distinguish on grounds of gender, known political sympathies, or opportunities, often share a common discursive construction (and containment) of femininity; and, alternatively, proposals for female education are subject to inflections of gender, rank (class), and religion that we now find uncomfortable to rearticulate” (Sutherland, “Writings on Education and Conduct,” 29). That conduct books should not be viewed as ideologically uniform, see Flint, Family Fictions, 61ff.; and Vivien Jones, “The Seductions of Conduct.” See Clare Brant’s argument that the scholarly discourse on conduct literature does not sufficiently take into account the varieties of genre, relationship (between author and recipient), gender, and publication venue in its analysis of these works; Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture, 60–3. The editor’s letter to the reader in Allestree’s The Ladies Calling attempts to mystify the origins of the text, claiming that he received the anonymous manuscript unexpectedly, as if it were “from the Clouds dropt into my hands” (not paginated). Halifax’s Character of a Trimmer, which had been circulating in manuscript since 1685, was pirated and published in 1688 as well. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Savile, George, first marquess of Halifax.” For the whereabouts of Halifax’s third son George in

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15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

Marilyn Francus autumn 1687, see H.C. Foxcroft, Life and Letters of Sir George Savile, 1:489; hereafter cited as LL by volume and page number. Halifax, George Savile, Marquis of, The Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift: or, Advice to a Daughter, 19; hereafter cited in text as LG. Evidently Gertrude Savile adored her daughter. On August 5, 1690, Halifax wrote to his son William, whom Elizabeth was visiting: “the truth is, her mother in plain English is not able to bear her absence, and there is no other mistery [sic] in it but downright fondness which she cannot resist” (LL 2:130–1). Elizabeth returned home soon, but Halifax suggests that Elizabeth did not feel the filial devotion expressed by her mother: “I Have yours by Betty who is return’d full of yours and your wifes kindness, so that I believe she was not in half so much hast to come up, as her mother was to receive her” (LL 2:132). See, for instance, Fletcher’s remarks on Halifax’s “adept and forceful argument in defence of patriarchy” (Gender, Sex & Subordination 388); Brophy on Halifax and masculine authority (Women’s Lives 42); Yeazell on Halifax’s cynical view of the experience of wives (Fictions of Modesty 52); or Bowers on Halifax’s advocacy of maternal duplicity (Politics of Motherhood 164–5). On Halifax’s politics in relation to the domestic sphere, Bowers observes: “Writing in the immediate context of the Glorious Revolution, Halifax renders the nursery a politically charged realm of female authority, and authority that he considers most successful when it proceeds with caution reminiscent of that practiced by the famous ‘trimmer’ [Halifax’s nickname] himself when negotiating the treacherous worlds of late seventeenth-century public politics” (Politics of Motherhood 165). The Lady’s New Year’s Gift is organized into the following sections: Religion; Husband; House, Family, and Children; Behaviour and Conversation; Friendships; Censure; Vanity and Affectation; Pride; and Diversions. By contrast, the wise husband, “whose Authority is so soften’d by his Kindness, that it giveth you ease without abridging your Liberty” (LG 17), obligates his wife appropriately, so that “as a rational Subjection to a Prince, great in himself, is to be preferr’d before the disquiet and uneasiness of Unlimited Liberty” (LG 18). When a husband abdicates authority, the wife may justly acquire it: “where the Man will give such frequent Intermissions of the Use of his Reason, the Wife insensibly getteth a Right of Governing in the Vacancy” (LG 13). With respect to weak, incompetent husbands: “His Unseasonable Weakness may no doubt sometimes grieve you, but then set against this, that it giveth you the Dominion, if you make the right use of it” (LG 17). LG 20–4. Halifax writes of “the art of laying out money wisely” (LG 25) and “bounded liberality” (LG 27) as measures of credit and reputation, but he focuses on the dangers of profligacy rather than on charity or gift giving. “Take great care no coppies be given off the advice to betty, for some would mak [sic] print it which the author will not hear off [of].” From a letter by “James Johnston, the Prince of Orange’s secret agent in London, [which


24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

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was] sent to Bentinck on January 4, 1688,” quoted in Mark N. Brown, “The Works of George Savile,” 154. That Johnston wrote this letter shows Halifax had no intention of publishing his text—Halifax did not want copies generally circulating, for fear that they would be pirated and published. Halifax’s “eight publications, five of which were first circulated in manuscript, were all anonymous. His literary reputation, for both content and style, was established by the publishers’ collected edition entitled Miscellanies (1700; reprinted 1704, 1717, and 1751) and Pope’s edition of unpublished pieces (1750)”; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Mark N. Brown, “The Works of George Savile,” 154. LL 2:379, citing Horace Walpole, Walpoliana 2:9 n. LL 2:148. The match was not as politically or socially fraught as her halfsister Anne’s, whose husband was “twenty-four years her senior” and had voted “against Halifax as an enemy to the king and kingdom.” On Anne Savile’s marriage, see Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Savile, George, first marquess of Halifax.” I have not found a conduct text by Halifax for Anne, either before or during her marriage. Philip was born in 1694, followed by Gertrude (1697), William (1702), Elizabeth (1703), John (1704), and Charles (1708); “There were also two miscarriages and a son who lived only a week. Lady Betty died following the birth of Charles in 1708” (Samuel Shellabarger, Lord Chesterfield, 19 n). Philip became the fourth Earl of Chesterfield and wrote conduct letters to his son. Boswell documented Johnson’s famous response: “And when his Letters to his natural son were published, he observed, that ‘they teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master’ ” (James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, 1:266). Shellabarger (Lord Chesterfield 18–9) reads the Savile–Stanhope marriage as a match of “fundamental antipathy”: Lord Stanhope was “an ill-tempered, defeated man, cut off at thirty by deafness and ill health from any active life,” while “Lady Betty was the spoiled and spirited daughter of a great man, was devoted to the city, but condemned, after her father’s death at least, to exile in Derbyshire, to isolation and childbearing, and to smolder out in domestic monotony.” Halifax’s letter elicited a sufficient, although not ideal, response: “The poor boy’s [Stanhope’s] answer is rather pathetic with its clumsy profession of love for his wife, and complaints of her living ‘as coldly and reservedly with mee (ever since we came to our house) as if she had not been marryed to mee’ ” (LL 2:150 n. 1). Unfortunately, I have not located a letter regarding this situation in Elizabeth Savile Stanhope’s correspondence. For a discussion of Cowper’s subversive reading of Halifax, which Cowper used to criticize her husband and matrimony and justify her own behavior, see Anne Kugler, Errant Plagiary, 53–4; see also 51–2, 55, 57–60. See Jacques Derrida, “Time of the King,” 144. For biographical information about Dr. John Gregory, see Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Gregory [Gregorie], John.” The Gregorys had six children, three boys and three girls, during their nine-year marriage. Five children were alive when Gregory died in 1773: Dorothea,

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33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

Marilyn Francus Anna Margaretta, James, William, and John. See Bennet Langton’s March 5, 1773 letter to James Boswell on the death of Dr. Gregory in Charles F. Fifer, ed., Correspondence of James Boswell, 21 n. 8; Anna Margaretta’s name appears in the index, 444. Dr. John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters, 1–2; hereafter cited as FL. “The work [Gregory’s Legacy] approached Lord Halifax’s The Lady’s New Year’s Gift; or Advice to a Daughter in its conciseness, its attention to propriety in conduct, and its plain and uncompromising assessment of the position of women in what is represented as something of a ‘wolfish’ age, as well as in the cautions imposed as a safeguard for honor and respectability” (Hemlow, “Fanny Burney and the Courtesy Books” 739). See also: “We so naturally associate the idea of female softness and delicacy with a correspondent delicacy of constitution, that when a woman speaks of her great strength, her extraordinary appetite, her ability to bear excessive fatigue, we recoil at the description in a way she is little aware of”; and “Besides, we are conscious of a natural title you have to our protection and good offices, and therefore we feel an additional obligation of honour to serve you” (FL 50–1, 75, my emphasis). Gregory’s remarks on the undesirable behaviors of unmarried women signal a general advocacy of marriage, but the overall tenor of his discussion suggests that he advocated marriage only in specific circumstances; see FL 105–7. See A Father’s Legacy on the requisite knowledge of domestic skills to assess others’ work (51), on domestic economy requiring time and attention, and as evidence of good sense and good taste (52–3), on the proper treatment of servants (71–2), and on charity (20) and charitable behaviors not involving money (21–2). Betty Rizzo, Companions Without Vows, 114; hereafter cited as C. Much of the following discussion is indebted to Rizzo’s work. Gregory’s Legacy “may have provided both girls with small annuities— Gregory had £. 50 a year of her own—and have thus proved a double legacy” (C 115). Gregory wrote, “If I live some years, you will receive them [i.e. his sentiments about conduct] with much greater advantage, suited to your different geniuses and dispositions. If I die sooner, you must receive them in this very imperfect manner,—the last proof of my affection” (FL 4). C 115–6. Frances Burney met Dorothea Gregory in 1778; in an April 29, 1780 letter, Burney wrote about her: “I begin to like her very much: she is frank, open, shrewd and sensible, & speaks her opinion both of matters & things with a plumpness of honesty & readiness that both pleases and diverts me. And though she now makes it a rule to be my Neighbour where ever we meet, she has never made me even a hint of a Compliment. And that is not nothing as Times go” (Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, 86–7). Elizabeth Montagu’s husband Edward died in 1775, which may have strengthened Elizabeth and Dorothea’s relationship as well.


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43. See Horace Walpole’s October 23, 1784 letter to Lady Ossory: “I am acquainted with Mrs. Allanson [that is, Alison], and have very great esteem for her, and could tell your Ladyship her history, were it not too long for a letter. Her conduct has been noble, and reasonable—her patroness’s, in my opinion, preposterous at least. The female disciples of that school, which is not that of Pythagoras, the mistress resembling him in nothing but in a thigh of solid gold, are loud in her defence. I hope Mr. Pulteney will protect Mrs. Allanson by the same substantial arguments” (Walpole’s Correspondence with the Countess of Upper Ossory, 446). See also Hester Thrale Piozzi’s July 15, 1784 letter to her daughter Queeney: “Poor Mrs. Montagu! Miss Gregory has married without her Consent, & professing to prefer Competence and the Company of an honest Man to Tonism, & Blueism, has oddly enough, as I think, got the World on her side” (The Queeney Letters, 166–7). 44. Nevertheless, the Alison marriage “appears to have been extremely happy” (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), s.v. “Gregory [married name Alison], Dorothea.” 45. It is worth noting that Gregory’s Legacy, like Halifax’s Gift, elicited resisting responses from readers, most famously from Mary Wollstonecraft in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (103, 111–3, 116–7, 196–201, 232). 46. Sarah Pennington, An Unfortunate Mother’s Advice to her Absent Daughters, in a Letter to Miss Pennington, 7–11; hereafter cited as MA. 47. At the conclusion of the fifth edition, Pennington wrote: “The former editions of this address to you, my dear, have always had MY MANUAL SIGN—but, so long a time having now pass’d, since its first publication, and, the number of copies which have been dispersed, proving, in a manner, its authenticity, that trouble to me, I think, may now be dispens’d with—To prevent however the imposition of any pretended copies of it, my publisher, Mr. Walter, will hereafter add his Manual Sign to every copy of this letter, which will serve for that of, Your affectionate Mother, S. Pennington” (MA 158). 48. “So many have been the instances of falshood and deceit which I have met with, where they were least expected, they may justify a precaution against my name being hereafter made use of, without my knowledge—especially as my promise of a future letter may lay a foundation for such an attempt.— That future letter must contain the relation of many events, which, for the sake of the persons concerned in them, I could wish—my heart being really void of all resentment—there was no necessity of making public:—If, therefore, I can find a certain means of conveying the narrative to your brothers, sisters, and yourself only, when you are all arrived at a proper age to receive and to understand it, that method will be prefer’d;—if not, I must again have recourse to this channel” (MA 156–7). My analysis is cognate with Bowers’s discussion of Pennington, particularly her defiance of convention by speaking publicly as a mother, and the issues of textual authority and authenticity in The Advice (Politics of Motherhood 225–33). 49. For the full listing of texts, see MA 65. See also Pennington’s recommendation of Hoadly’s Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament

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of the Lord’s Supper and Nelson’s Great Duty of frequenting the Christian Sacrifice (MA 33), and her disparaging appraisal of novels, with the recent exception of Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (MA 66–9). Neither Halifax nor Gregory recommends texts; Gregory declares, “I am at the greatest loss what to advise you in regard to books” (FL 53). For a discussion of appropriate reading for women in the period, see Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, chapter 2. 50. However, the benefits for Sarah Pennington seem clear, as she recuperated her social status with this text, and had a successful career as an author. For biographical information on Pennington, see Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Pennington, Sarah, Lady Pennington”; and Todd, ed., Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1660–1800, 245–6. Curiously, OCLC lists Jenny Pennington as the author of an 1804 Galway edition of The Advice.

5 The Gift of an Education: Sarah Trimmer’s Oeconomy of Charity and the Sunday School Movement Dorice Williams Elliott

When Sarah Trimmer published The Oeconomy of Charity; or, An Address to Ladies; Adapted to the Present State of Charitable Institutions in England, With a Particular View to the Cultivation of Religious Principles, among the Lower Orders of People in 1787 and again in 1801, she strove to convince her readers that contributing time and money to the establishment and management of free Sunday Schools to teach reading and religious principles to the children of the poor would pay off by ensuring social stability and national security during a period when there was serious anxiety about potential revolution and social upheaval. Trimmer’s book was based on her own experience setting up Sunday Schools at Old Brentford in Middlesex, and it included both a defense of such schools and practical tips for running them efficiently. The Sunday Schools that Trimmer and other philanthropists, including Robert Raikes and Hannah More, advocated spread throughout England and educated hundreds of thousands of working-class children and adults.1 The movement has been credited with increasing literacy rates in England and is regarded as the origin of the idea of universal education. 2 Early in the first volume, Trimmer urges her readers “to exert their endeavours towards producing that good understanding, between the poor and their superiors, which naturally springs from the interchange of benevolence and gratitude.”3 While Trimmer obviously draws a

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clear line between “the poor” and “their superiors,” she suggests that the two groups can achieve mutual “understanding” through an exchange of “benevolence” for “gratitude.” The exchange Trimmer imagines, however, is not a market exchange, where one thing is traded directly for something that is deemed equivalent. Rather, her “interchange” is a gift exchange where one side, more wealthy and advantaged, gives a benefit that the other has an obligation to reciprocate. The “poor,” however, cannot repay their “superiors” in kind, so they are expected to reciprocate with gratitude and deference. Unlike a market exchange, the one Trimmer describes is characterized by nonequivalence. Those who give do so voluntarily and, whatever obligations they may hope to generate, incur the risk that their gift will not produce the expected return. In Trimmer’s case the “gift” is not a tangible object, but a set of skills, ideas, and attitudes—an education.4 The expense and effort that she implores her readers to contribute to Sunday Schools, Trimmer reassures them, will be repaid with better servants and workers, increased social stability, and approval from God, while the recipients will be given the skills to succeed in the jobs appropriate to their class and, more importantly, to work out their salvation before God. This exchange of benefits would, Trimmer believed, reinforce the agrarian-paternalist economic and social system that seemed familiar and safe to her and most of her contemporaries. However, at the time that Trimmer was writing, the transition to a full-scale republican democracy and an industrial capitalist economy was well underway, and writers such as Trimmer were certainly aware of it. The gift of education she wanted to provide for the poor was her way of negotiating this crucial social transition. Paradoxically, although Trimmer’s gift was ostensibly a way to preserve a past era, in effect it paved the way for a new kind of social relations. Because the Sunday Schools were a “gift” to the poor, not a contractual bargain, the recipients were not bound to respond as the donors hoped they would. This created an opening for change, which the Sunday Schools aided even while they were trying to prevent it from occurring. Thus it is important that we see Trimmer’s view of social relations in The Oeconomy of Charity as part of a gift economy, rather than a market exchange, in order to understand the contradictory role she and her fellow Sunday School advocates played in late-eighteenth-century social, economic, and political relations in Britain. Because the writers who supported the Sunday School movement expected and seemed to promise that their schools would ensure

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subservience, gratitude, and dutiful service from the poor children taught in them, most recent scholars have characterized Trimmer and those like her as conservative and reactionary. Trimmer, Raikes, More, and the many others who supported the Sunday School movement advocated values that seem oppressive to modern eyes: shoring up hierarchical paternalist relations between classes; preventing revolution, working-class unrest, and class solidarity; and reinforcing the gender ideology of separate spheres. In particular, the Sunday School movement has been viewed by late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century scholars as a selfishly motivated mode of social control meant to augment its proponents’ own positions as members of a middle class that was growing significantly in power and influence. E. P. Thompson, for instance, accuses Sunday Schools of committing “psychological atrocities” on working-class children in order to counter conservative middle- and upper-class fears of revolution and instill “pressures towards discipline and order . . . into every aspect of life: leisure, personal relationships, speech, manners.” Thomas Walter Laqueur objects to Thompson’s characterization of the Sunday Schools as primarily agents of middle-class indoctrination and claims that the schools were “a central feature of working-class community life . . . a part of, and not an imposition on to, popular culture.” Yet he too calls Hannah More and Sarah Trimmer “condescending” and bestows the credit for what the Sunday Schools accomplished on the “working men and women” who turned the schools into “agencies of community self-help and self-improvement.” Deborah Wills argues that “Trimmer’s programme [became] a self-perpetuating system of social control through the institutionalization of class divisions and social ordering.” Similarly, Wilfried Keutsch notes that “the selfappointed champions of the education of the poor came mainly from the middle classes, feeling threatened by revolutionary stirrings from down below and therefore insisting on keeping the social structure unchanged,” though he defends Trimmer by suggesting that she may not have understood that she was promoting reactionary and oppressive values.5 The modern scholars who accuse Trimmer and her fellow Sunday School advocates of promoting reactionary values, however, have taken these late-eighteenth-century writers too much at their word. In effect, they read Trimmer’s “interchange” of “benevolence” and “gratitude” as a bargain rather than a gift. Conversely, reading Trimmer’s Oeconomy of Charity in the context of gift-exchange theory suggests that, although she hoped that Sunday Schools would prevent

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both working-class unrest and social mobility, she recognized that her “gift of education” might do just the opposite. This risk, which is always associated with gift exchanges, leaves room for an element of altruism in the gift. Thus, those scholars who view Trimmer’s plan for free schools for the poor as primarily self-serving and oppressive give a reductive and anachronistic account of both her motives and the historical effects of the schools on the working-class people who attended them, ignoring the fact of Trimmer’s “uneven development” in relation to conflicting ideologies such as traditional paternalism and emergent capitalism.6 Reading The Oeconomy of Charity as a gift exchange rather than a market exchange provides a more nuanced and historically sensitive view of her work and of the Sunday School movement in general. The issues of self-interest and social control versus altruism and risk are central to theorists of the gift. Marcel Mauss identified the basic elements of gift exchange as the obligation to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.7 The exchange of gifts, according to Mauss, was a way of creating and cementing social bonds, including the power and prestige of the clan or tribe, in the premodern societies he investigated. Mauss makes it clear, notes Alan D. Schrift, that “through such gifts a social and economic hierarchy is established.”8 However, the kind of gifts Mauss analyzed were not exactly self-interested because Mauss challenged “the tenacious faith in autonomous, freely choosing individuals” that characterizes today’s “Anglo-American social thought.”9 “Persons who live in these societies . . . represent themselves not as the self-interested individuals of neoclassical economics but as a nexus of social obligations” (“I” 4). Gifts may produce hierarchy, but they can also create social cohesion or affective bonds that are less directed at the self, depending on how and with what motives they are given. And, although the cycle of gift giving, receiving, and reciprocating entails obligations, participation as either a giver or receiver is still voluntary, thus leaving space for altruism. As Aafke E. Komter puts it, Mauss “considers gift exchange as a subtle mixture of altruism and selfishness.”10 Jacques Derrida looks at the exchange of gifts in a somewhat different way. He argues that “for there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt.”11 That, however, makes the gift impossible because “at the moment that one even conceives of a certain transaction as a gift, or even conceives of giving something, the thought itself presupposes some reward” (“I” 15). For other scholars, however, especially those trying to carve out a


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space for relationships defined by something other than market economics, it is important that a gift economy based on disinterested gifts still exist. This view acknowledges Derrida’s point about a “pure” gift, but nonetheless recognizes gift giving that approximates disinterestedness. From this perspective, a giver whose motive is obviously the desire for power or increased economic or symbolic capital falls on the wrong side of the continuum of self-interest versus disinterestedness, while someone whose goal is primarily affective bonds is at the other end of the scale.12 Most gifts, of course, fall somewhere in between. Trimmer’s gift of education, I would argue, comes from a mixture of self-interested and disinterested motives that puts her somewhere in the middle of this gift-giving continuum.13 Much of gift theory focuses on the exchange of tangible objects. However, the category of the gift can also include gifts of service or time, which makes it possible to include free Sunday Schools for the instruction of the poor as an instance of gift exchange.14 Of course, in the case of the Sunday School, the exchange of gifts is unequal because the recipients are by definition unable to reciprocate in kind. The “unilateral supply of benefits that meet important needs,” points out David Cheal, “makes others obligated to and dependent on those who furnish them and thus subject to their power.”15 Unable to give back a gift of equal value to those who provide them an education, the children remain indebted even after they have grown to adulthood, and they can only respond by demonstrating their gratitude. Gratitude, explains Komter, though “a response to a voluntary gift . . . is itself ‘imperative’: not showing gratitude when it is appropriate leads to social disapproval and exclusion.”16 It is this expectation of gratitude that leads middle-class philanthropists such as Trimmer to believe that their gift will prevent rebellion and provide them with dutiful servants and laborers. Because gratitude is a moral rather than a legal obligation, however, there is always the risk for the giver that the recipient will not recognize the obligations entailed in the gift. As I have suggested, it is this element of risk that distinguishes a gift exchange from a market exchange. Thus, although it is certainly true that Trimmer and the other promoters and organizers of Sunday Schools in the late eighteenth century were interested in social control and consciously aimed to prevent unrest or revolution among the working classes, my reading of The Oeconomy of Charity in the context of gift-exchange theory complicates that view of their intentions. While Trimmer carefully outlines the type of education that she believes will prevent sedition

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or class mobility, both the content and form of her rhetoric acknowledge that the poor may well use their education for precisely these purposes. But despite this recognition, she remains committed to her belief that the poor have the right to be able to read, however they choose to use that ability. Even though she knows that her gift might create the opposite results from those she intends, she insists that it must be given anyway. Thus her “gift” of education is in a sense a disinterested gift because it involves an element of risk and thus retains a measure of altruism as a motive. That Trimmer expected her gift of education to create binding obligations that would benefit her class by creating loyal, useful servants and laborers who would not be tempted by vice or sedition is obvious to anyone who reads The Oeconomy of Charity. Early in the first volume, Trimmer explains to readers the key reasons they should pay attention to what she has to say about Sunday Schools: It is certainly of great consequence to the welfare of families to have faithful and conscientious servants. But how frequent of late years have instances occurred of domestics being detected in league with house-breakers and thieves; of others who have set fire to their master’s houses; eloped with considerable sums of money, or betrayed important truths? Does not every mistress of a family complain that the expences of housekeeping are considerably increased by the wastefulness and dishonesty of servants; and is it not generally lamented that the frauds practiced by labourers and workmen, keep their employers in a constant state of suspicion and uneasiness; and that a spirit of insubordination prevails amongst the lower orders which sets them above all controul, and endangers the safety of the state. (OC 1:11–2)

Trimmer here plays upon fears of both economic loss and lack of personal and national security. Before the advent of Sunday Schools, she claims, working-class children, “both boys and girls . . . were so rude that there was scarcely a chance of passing through the streets without being insulted by them” (OC 1:74). Besides such personal affronts, it is the “younger members of the lower classes, who are usually made the tools of sedition, when a design is formed for raising civil commotions, as has been proved by recent events” (OC 1:13). Even prostitution, says Trimmer, is the result of a “neglected education” among the poor (OC 1:219). Trimmer’s antidote to the fears she has raised about the “manners” of the lower classes is to give the “youth of both sexes” a “proper sense of the duties of their station” through a well-conducted Sunday


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School education (OC 1:12). Building on her contention that educating youth “is a public concern,” Trimmer stresses the obligation that the middle classes have to “contribute their money, their leisure, or their talents, to the accomplishment of this object,” or, in other words, to give the gift of education (OC 1:12, 13). This is especially important to young ladies, Trimmer maintains, who may be the direct recipients of the debt of gratitude resulting from such a gift of time and attention, because they may actually employ as servants the very students they have educated. Trimmer also, however, expects that the debt of gratitude will be generalized to all mistresses or masters who may later employ servants or laborers who have received the gift of education from the Sunday Schools (OC 1:69). However, such a debt as gratitude, Trimmer recognizes, can only be expected when benefits are voluntarily given as gifts; the poor feel “no sense of obligation to their superiors for what they are compelled to pay toward their support”—that is, official parish relief under the poor laws (OC 2:47–8, my emphasis). If the middle classes are to create the kind of social bonds that will give them influence with the lower classes, they must rely on the principles of gift exchange, not on state-sponsored relief efforts. The purpose of a Sunday School education, Trimmer assures her readers, is “to prepare [the poor] by proper instructions, for the part they will have to perform in Society” (OC 1:18). Sunday School materials are “calculated to guard youth from the seductions of villainy, by setting before them in strong colours, the miseries they will bring upon themselves by becoming the confederates of thieves and housebreakers” (OC 1:122). Students in the schools should not be rewarded “for excelling in penmanship or reading, which are very inferior things in comparison with upright conduct, but for their diligence and respectful behavior (OC 1:122–3). Most importantly, for Trimmer, it is “highly requisite that the children of the poor should be taught the true doctrines of Christianity systematically, that they might be well guarded against other systems, which they would most likely be tempted to adopt” (OC 1:156). “The merely learning to read, is certainly a secondary consideration, in comparison with Religious Instruction,” and as for writing, Trimmer insists that “I am myself no advocate for teaching writing in Sunday Schools” (OC 1:159). Sunday School students are not even to be instructed to sing “in a superior style” (OC 1:108). Despite Trimmer’s constant reassurances that her only intent is to keep the poor in their place, teach them to be dutiful and religious,

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and prevent them from engaging in crime or sedition, there are nonetheless several indications that her gift of education is not meant only for social control. For one thing, as scholars such as Wills and Keutsch have pointed out, Trimmer’s treatise needs to be read in its rhetorical context.17 While twenty-first-century readers consider her views conservative, some of her contemporaries felt that she was dangerously progressive. Wills records that “the discouraging practices aimed at suppressing the Sunday School movement” included “Parliamentary denunciation” and “pelting the participants with ‘filth of all descriptions and dirty water.’ ”18 The fact that there was significant opposition to Sunday Schools is evident within the text of The Oeconomy of Charity when Trimmer states, “as I am conscious of having been amongst the first public advocates for the Institution of Sunday Schools, I feel it incumbent upon me to attempt a reply to such objections as have come to my knowledge” (OC 1:137). The principal objection, she notes, is that “these schools afford opportunities for the emissaries of Infidelity and Sedition, to sow the seeds of their pernicious principles in the minds of the rising generation, which may hereafter lead to the subversion of the government” (OC 1:137). The other criticism most often leveled at education for the poor is that it will “probably raise their ideas above the very lowest occupations of life” and “make them uncomfortable among their equals, and ambitious of associating with persons moving in a higher sphere” (OC 1:22–3). Anxious to refute both these claims, Trimmer spends much of her time in The Oeconomy of Charity stressing that the Sunday Schools will do just the opposite. In fact, the vehemence of her defense suggests that she may even be exaggerating for rhetorical effect. Besides the rhetorical context that required Trimmer to emphasize the reactionary political and social effects of Sunday Schools, there are subtle indications within her text that suggest she herself recognized that her gift of education might be used for other than the intended effects by the poor who received it. Even in the passage cited above, where she affirms that learning to read is secondary and writing not recommended at all, Trimmer undermines the force of her own statements by suggesting that the poor deserve to be taught to read. She makes this explicit when she says, “I trust, the number of persons who would shut the door of knowledge against the Poor is not great; for even in early youth reading may prove of great advantage to both sexes; in maturer years, it may become still more useful; and in decrepid old age, it may prove an unspeakable comfort” (OC 1:185). Although she hopes that children will be taught to “make a proper


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use of their talent of reading,” she qualifies this when she says, “Not that I can ever be brought to subscribe to the opinion, that it would be better that children should not learn to read, under any circumstances” (OC 1:185, my emphasis). Reading, Trimmer goes so far as to suggest, is a national right: “for I regard it as a part of the Birthright of the Poor as Britons, to read the Bible in their native language” (OC 1:185). She clearly recognizes that if they can read the Bible, they will be able to read other things as well. On the even more controversial subject of teaching writing, Trimmer’s only objection is that it may “divert the attention from higher objects,” and besides, “there will not be time for it” (OC 1:159). These are rather weak arguments for an issue so contentious as teaching writing to the poor was.19 Historically, of course, many of the poor who learned to read in the Sunday Schools did end up using their skills for precisely the kind of activities Trimmer claimed to be trying to prevent. E. P. Thompson famously argued that it was during the period Trimmer, More, and Raikes were promoting Sunday Schools (1780–1832) that the working class first developed “class consciousness.”20 The reading skills that working men learned enabled them to read the literature being produced by organizers and polemicists for working-class solidarity. As Harvey J. Graff has documented, politics had become increasingly tied to print culture; even when the poor were unable to read themselves, they were “ensnared in a system rooted in writing.”21 Knowing how to read allowed working-class men, and sometimes women, to become leaders in their communities and made it possible for them to imagine social relations and their own destinies in new ways. In addition, acquiring literacy skills could help workers in the workplace. Graff points out that “literacy was required for greater involvement in commercialized agriculture and the cash nexus of exchange.”22 Even if the skills children learned in the Sunday Schools were not usually sufficient to enable them to participate actively in such activities, the beginnings of literacy they acquired there could become a source of motivation for further schooling or self-education. Plus, according to Thompson, even the “Puritan character structure” inculcated by the Methodists and the Sunday Schools was not something which could be confiscated solely for the service of the Church and the employer. Once the transference was made, the same dedication which enabled men to serve in these roles, will be seen in the men who officered trade unions and Hampden Clubs, educated themselves far into the night, and had the responsibility to conduct working-class organizations. 23

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Both Laqueur and K. D. M. Snell have studied how the Sunday Schools soon took on their own character as a part of working-class culture, moving beyond the direct influence of the middle-class philanthropists who first organized the schools. Rather than uniting or defining themselves against the middle-class organizers of the Sunday Schools, these historians argue, the working classes adopted the values taught in the Sunday Schools and became the primary promoters of religion and respectability, but—and this is important—most often in the hope of achieving economic and social mobility. Literary critic Patricia Comitini points out that the texts published by middleclass writers did indeed have a particular way of imagining social relations that reflected their own class position, “but this does not mean that the texts were ‘coercive’ dogma, preaching obedience and submission; [the texts] were . . . a new way for the poor to imagine their reality, offering them the opportunity to ‘improve’ their lot, but only when they began to desire the middling-class values presented in these texts”—and in the Sunday Schools.24 These accounts suggest that the Sunday School education that Trimmer offered as an antidote to rebellion and social mobility had mixed results. Not only historians, but theorists of literacy have argued about the effects of teaching reading to the poor. Sunday Schools may have succeeded in inculcating values associated with the middle class because they rewarded “upright conduct” and pious habits, as Trimmer advocated, but the very fact that the working-class students were learning to read involved them in the spread of hegemonic ideologies because they were learning the language in which those ideologies were embedded. As Brian V. Street puts it, “what the particular practices and concepts of reading and writing are for a given society depends upon the context; . . . they are already embedded in an ideology and cannot be isolated or treated as ‘neutral’ or merely ‘technical.’ ”25 Certainly Trimmer’s careful instructions about how to teach reading, along with her strong emphasis on reading the Bible, support Street’s contention that literacy is strongly linked to its ideological context. Even so, other scholars of literacy have argued that those who learned to read had a choice about what use they would make of it, especially those who were, in a sense, at the crossroads of two cultures: the middle-class culture of the school and the workingclass culture in which they lived their lives. In a study of nineteenthcentury working-class autobiographies, Kelly J. Mays notes that the writers she studied “thought literacy led not to embourgeoisement but to politicized forms of working-class and feminist consciousness.” As


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readers, she notes, they “became adept at turning texts designed for others’ purposes into ones that suited [their] own.”26 Thus, someone like Trimmer might emphasize all the ways literacy could be used for social control, but she could not guarantee that her new readers would be so controlled. In fact, in The Oeconomy of Charity Trimmer recognizes that even the best-run Sunday Schools will not be able to completely control the effects of their own teaching. “It is a general complaint,” she says in another of her defenses of the Sunday School against its detractors, “that such of the common people as have been taught to read, are apt to misapply their talents in reading books of a trifling or dangerous nature. This would not be so frequently the case, if pains were taken in the course of their education to give them a proper taste for those which are really useful” (OC 1:115, my emphasis). Even Sunday Schools, she implies, cannot be expected to prevent all cases of “misapplied” reading. Similarly, Trimmer admits that not all the poor will feel gratitude for the gift of literacy: those who devote themselves to Sunday School work should “arm themselves with patience to endure even ingratitude from the parents, for the children’s sake” (OC 1:178). In a footnote, she also concedes “It is not to be expected that all children will feel the full force of the obligations conferred upon them” (OC 1:179). Thus Trimmer herself acknowledges that the benefactors who give the gift of education cannot fully control either the effect of the gift or the creation of the obligation of gratitude for it. In fact, the very copiousness of the instructions Trimmer gives in the pages of The Oeconomy of Charity about how to conduct Sunday Schools properly suggests that she is anxious about just how much social control the project will generate. On page after page Trimmer explains to her readers the methods they can use to prevent their students from misusing the gift they are giving them. If the effects of this education were obvious or automatic, however, there would be no need for Trimmer to even write this book. The Oeconomy of Charity is a complicated set of instructions for reducing the element of risk in the gift by ensuring that the benefactors give the right kind of education, but in doing so, Trimmer in fact acknowledges the extent of the risk involved in the gift. Trimmer’s anxiety about the possible misfiring of her gift is also discernable in the syntax and word choice she employs in her book of instructions. As we have seen, one of the purposes of her book is to answer the real or imagined objections of her detractors. As a result,

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much of the writing is crafted using negative statements. When she speaks about the education of “those children who are now growing up to maturity,” for example, she completes the sentence with “whose parents are not only incapable of giving them proper instruction, but are likely, it is to be feared, to lead them astray by their own bad example, if the hand of charity is not seasonably stretched out to guide them in the paths of religion and virtue” (OC 1:10, my emphasis). On another page, she writes, “there is no accounting for those unhappy prejudices in minds so well disposed, but from the ill management of some of these Schools, or the misrepresentations of evilminded persons” (OC 1:17, my emphasis). In discussing the effects on young ladies who work in the Sunday Schools, she writes, “Perhaps it may be thought improper, that Ladies, in whom polished manners and elegance of expression are expected, should intermix with vulgar, low-bred children: I do not apprehend that any ill consequences will arise from this intercourse” (OC 1:71, my emphasis). Such examples can be found on almost every page of The Oeconomy of Charity. In the list of rules for parents of Sunday School children, listed in the appendix, every rule is phrased in the negative; even the first line begins with a negative formulation: “As nothing is intended by these Rules but the good of the children . . .” (OC 1:316–7, my emphasis). This constant reiteration of the negative, of what will happen if something else does not happen or else Trimmer’s assurances that what is expected will not happen, is a continual reminder that for every positive effect of the gift, there is a negative underside. Nothing is secure; everything has the potential of becoming its opposite. Because even to Trimmer herself the gift of education involves a very real risk of subversion, the gift cannot be categorized as wholly self-motivated. The gift involves an element of altruism, for the giver is willing to give despite the possibility of the utter reversal of the gift’s intention. Despite its stated goal of creating social obligations, then, it is in some sense also a “free” gift, given voluntarily without a guarantee of reciprocity. That Trimmer was willing to sponsor free Sunday Schools for any children of the poor who chose to attend them while being fully aware that some of the pupils would misuse the education thus given them suggests that her motives were not exclusively to create social control and economic benefits for her own class. Although it is implicit more than explicit in The Oeconomy of Charity, Trimmer granted the working classes some right to autonomy, as well as to education.


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The extent of Trimmer’s altruism is more apparent if we consider that her model was a Christian one. In this view, the person who gives a charitable gift imitates God. God’s gift of life to humans, like the charity of the rich, cannot be repaid in kind, so it should create an enormous sense of obligation in the giver. However, it can also be totally subverted; far from feeling an obligation to repay God with gratitude and deference, the recipients may choose not even to believe in the giver. For those who do recognize the obligation to reciprocate, the only tangible way the gift can be repaid is by giving gifts to others—gifts such as Sunday Schools. Nonetheless, showing benevolence through Sunday Schools or other charitable activities does not nullify the original gift of life but instead involves both giver and receiver in a continuing cycle of gift exchange. For once a Christian gives a gift back to God by performing an act of charity, God rewards that gift with a new gift: [T]he benefit is reflected back on the bestower, not only by awakening those pleasing emotions which arise from the practice of benevolence; but the mother, who from motives of pity instructs the children of the poor, will assuredly bring down the blessing of Heaven. The Almighty Father often, with the most abundant interest, rewards his servants in kind for the duties they perform. She, therefore, who extends her maternal tenderness to poor destitute children, may humbly hope to receive an hundred fold return of happiness in the improvement of her own family. . . . (OC 1:64)

With these new gifts—enhanced with “interest”—given by God in response to the attempt at reciprocity for his first gift, the benevolent receiver is yet more obligated to show gratitude and to perform charitable acts, which God will again reward, and so on. Far from repaying God by performing acts of charity such as sponsoring or teaching in Sunday Schools, then, such philanthropic acts bring new obligations—not only to God, but, in a parallel cycle of gift exchange, also to the beneficiaries of the charity. Like God, the giver of an education must reward the receptive recipient with more gifts— charity and patronage. Trimmer gives an example in her description of the schools for girls at York. The students in the schools can expect to look to “their former patronesses as their future friends and benefactresses!” The Ladies to whose good offices they were indebted for so many comforts in their earlier days, resolved never to abandon them, whilst they

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continued to deserve their favour; and to encourage them to persevere in the paths of rectitude, they established the Female Friendly Society. (OC 1:210)

One charitable institution, the Sunday School, thus requires a second one, the Female Friendly Society; but the obligation goes even beyond that because the ladies resolve “never to abandon” those who are already “indebted” to them. This ongoing obligation includes the duty of the Sunday School benefactors to find employment for the children so educated, as Trimmer makes plain: “it would be crowning their good offices if Ladies would endeavour to find services and situations for these poor children where the good work so happily begun would be likely to be carried on” (OC 1:127). Once “begun,” the work must be “carried on,” or, in other words, once a gift is given, it requires another. 27 Thus, while it may bring one a kind of power, entering into the cycle of Christian gift exchange also involves a willingness to accept more responsibility to give. Voluntarily entering into a cycle that requires one to keep on giving indefinitely could be characterized as a type of altruism. For those educated in the Sunday Schools who do not “continue to deserve [the] favour” of their benefactors, of course, no further gifts can be expected, just as God is not expected to reward those who deny his existence. This dividing of the poor into the “deserving” and the “undeserving” has frequently been seen as one of the key methods of social control exercised by philanthropists such as the advocates of Sunday schools. Unquestionably, the Sunday Schools originated in a desire to convince the poor to share the values of their sponsors and advocates, and those who internalized these values were patronized and rewarded. But the values held by the middle-class promoters of Sunday Schools were themselves conflicted. On one hand, they preached paternalist ideas that encouraged the poor to accept their place in the social hierarchy and used the Bible to inculcate their responsibility to do their duty to their social (and economic) superiors. On the other hand, besides the gift of literacy, the schools instilled the principles of hard work, punctuality, thrift, social responsibility, attention to detail, and love of learning that propelled many of the poor into the middle class themselves—or enabled them to unite to improve their conditions. Thus the results of—and the intentions behind—the Sunday Schools were mixed and uneven. They aimed for social control, but they also gave the gift of literacy, a gift that was saturated with obligations on one hand and on the other was free and altruistic.


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Trimmer’s writings, then, demonstrate that the motives of the Sunday School educators were complex and the effects of the schools on their pupils were unpredictable, as Trimmer certainly recognized. The Oeconomy of Charity demonstrates not only Trimmer’s own mixed motives, however, but also the dialectic inherent in theories of gift giving. To give a gift is to be simultaneously self-interested and disinterested. Gifts create obligations, but built into them is a necessary escape hatch—because a gift is a gift, the obligations may be refused and the gift may be used for purposes entirely beyond the giver’s intent. The very unpredictability of the gift is what makes a gift exchange different from a market exchange. Reading Trimmer’s treatise in this way complicates our historical understanding of charity as a social phenomenon that aimed—but often failed—to exert control over the working classes and keep them “safely” in their place. Thus, in the gift of education, as in other forms of charity, social control and resistance to it are bound together in the same act and work to create each other.

Notes 1. See Thomas Walter Laqueur, Religion and Respectability, xi; and K. D. M. Snell, “The Sunday School Movement,” 125–7. Robert Raikes is usually credited with the introduction of Sunday Schools; see William Henry Watson, First Fifty Years of the Sunday School, 18–35; and John Ferguson, Christianity, Society, and Education, 1–67. Hannah More set up a number of schools in the Mendips starting in 1879 and, like Trimmer, wrote texts supporting the schools as well as materials to be used by the pupils; see Patricia Demers, World of Hannah More, 99–118. 2. See Harvey J. Graff, Legacies of Literacy, 231; and Snell, “The SundaySchool movement,” 124. 3. Sarah Trimmer, Oeconomy of Charity, 1:8; hereafter cited in text as OC by volume and page number. 4. Mitzi Myers also uses the term “gift of education” in her article on Maria Edgeworth, but to a somewhat different purpose; see Myers, “Erotics of Pedagogy.” 5. E. P. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 377, 401; Laqueur, Religion and Respectability, xi–xii, 23; Deborah Wills, “Sarah Trimmer’s ‘Oeconomy,’ ” 164; Wilfried Keutsch, “Teaching the Poor,” 47, 49. 6. A noted historian of the period, Asa Briggs, for example, is explicit in calling Hannah More conservative and would undoubtedly have included Trimmer in the same category had he thought to mention her at all (Age of Improvement 71). Though other scholars may not use the word “conservative,” their characterization of these figures clearly indicates that they

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Dorice Williams Elliott hold this opinion. I borrow the term “uneven development” from the title of Mary Poovey’s 1988 book. Marcel Mauss, The Gift, 16–8. Alan D. Schrift, Logic of the Gift, 5. Mark Osteen, “Introduction: Questions of the Gift,” 3; hereafter cited in text as “I.” Aafke E. Komter, Social Solidarity and the Gift, 109. Jacques Derrida, Given Time, 12. The relation between economic and symbolic capital in relation to disinterestedness is complicated by Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, 74–6. Myers also describes “pedagogic transactions as affective gifts with multiple cultural implications” (“Erotics of Pedagogy,” 5). Mauss uses the French word prestation to mean “any thing or series of things given freely or obligatorily as a gift or in exchange; and includes services, entertainments, etc., as well as material things” (Cunnison, Translator’s Note). David Cheal, Gift Economy, 112. Komter, Social Solidarity and the Gift, 72. See Wills, “Sarah Trimmer’s ‘Oeconomy,’ ” 157–8; and Keutsch, “Teaching the Poor,” 44, 50–1. Wills, “Sarah Trimmer’s ‘Oeconomy,’ ” 165. Hannah More was also famously embroiled in the controversy about teaching writing. For a summary of the debate, see Eric J. Evans, Forging of the Modern State, 58. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 11. Graff, Legacies of Literacy, 237. Graff, Legacies of Literacy, 235. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 380. Patricia Comitini, Vocational Philanthropy, 69. Brian V. Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice, 7. Kelly J. Mays, “When a ‘Speck’ Begins to Read,” 112, 115. Elsewhere I have argued that this never-ending cycle of exchange follows the logic of capitalism, which conflicts with the apparent goal of preserving agrarian paternalism; see Elliott, Angel out of the House, 64–5.

III



6 Obligation, Coercion, and Economy: The Deed of Trust in Congreve’s The Way of the World Cynthia Klekar

In the closing act of William Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700), Mirabell reveals that Mrs. Fainall has, before the start of the play’s action, conveyed to him a deed of trust to her entire estate, thus dramatizing an important transition within the rhetoric and ideology of gift giving—shifting the audience’s attention from an ethos of aristocratic patronage to a complex and ongoing negotiation of the socioeconomic values involved in gift exchange. This scene is emblematic of the continual and often problematic transformation of social values in the eighteenth century.1 In this climactic moment, Fainall, who represents an economy of honor and patronage (he has married both for money and to blackmail Lady Wishfort to hand over more), is displaced by Mirabell, who represents the new economy based on a utilitarian ethic of mutual exchange and contractual obligation. Thus, in the presentation of the deed, Congreve dramatizes the emerging legitimacy of contractual relations underpinning social authority and economic power, as well as Mirabell’s skill in using his emotional and gender-based power over Mrs. Fainall, his former mistress, to prosper in his efforts to marry Millamant. The hero’s ultimate control of interpersonal and legal relationships is cast in a language of gift, debt, and obligation that becomes increasingly important after 1700. The deed of trust that Mrs. Fainall signs over to Mirabell is indeed in the form of a “gift” that both invokes obligations and is the product of her obligation to her former lover. Congreve dramatizes the gift both

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as property that can be exchanged and as an embodiment of an ideal of reciprocity between giver and receiver. Rather than entailing obligations of honor and service, the gift of deed represents the enactment of capitalist relations in the form of gift exchange, thereby concealing the negotiation process and the power relations that are bolstered by the exchange. Significantly, Congreve leaves the audience in the dark about the existence of Mrs. Fainall’s gift of deed to her former lover until act 5. What seems to be a Machiavellian strategy on Fainall’s part to blackmail Lady Wishfort has been rendered irrelevant from before the start of the play because Mrs. Fainall’s “gift” both empowers Mirabell and effectively compels her to aid him in his designs on Millamant. In this sense, Fainall’s defeat emphasizes the fall of courtly obligation and the rise of capital relations. This scene, like the play as a whole, marks Congreve’s recognition of a shift in eighteenth-century social, political, and economic conceptions of debt and obligation. The legal contract triumphs in the final act because networks of gratitude and generosity have established the obligatory relations that enforce the deed’s legitimacy. Thus, the gift exchange permits Mirabell to redefine the terms of an old social order within the context of a new economy. As Richard Braverman has noted, Mirabell’s attitude “stresses the legalization of the prerogative will, the limitations of heroic and courtly conventions, and the triumph of the legal document and negotiated settlement.”2 Such negotiations, however, are always asymmetrical and always reassert unequal distributions of power and property. This hegemonic shift, especially in critical discussions of The Way of the World, is often characterized as an unproblematic transition in Restoration England, one that polarizes traditional aristocratic and emerging bourgeois ideologies and results in an entirely new “way of the world.”3 While this characterization accounts for the dominance of legitimized bourgeois representations on the early-eighteenth-century stage, it takes for granted the complexities of economic practice and attempts to distinguish capitalist relations as free from the obligation and coercion associated with aristocratic authority and patronage. Fainall’s fate suggests the patronage system in 1700 was beginning to succumb to a competitive, market-based economy. Braverman points out that Fainall relies on a traditional system that regulated the transmission of landed property—“property follows political legitimacy” (“CR” 137). His marriage to Mrs. Fainall is purely a union of convenience, and he expects to triumph in act 5 because he believes he can coerce both daughter and mother into surrendering a portion of the latter’s

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estate. Conversely, Mirabell represents a system of innovation and status mobility “consonant with the settlement of 1688 which recognizes the sovereignty of property” (“CR” 137). The scene in which the deed’s conveyance is revealed does not cement the antagonistic ideologies informed by Mirabell and Fainall but actually demonstrates the interrelatedness of conceptions of obligation in both aristocratic and capitalist ways of negotiating legal, social, and economic relations. Through the representation of gift exchange, The Way of the World problematizes the ostensible distinctions between opposing classes, and, in subtle ways, reveals the ways in which the practices of generosity and disinterested exchange are both coercive and central to courtly and capital relations. In distinguishing my argument from previous, Whiggish readings of the play, I will examine the underlying tension that defines the obligatory relations among male and female characters in The Way of the World.4 I argue that Congreve’s use of legal and capitalist discourse functions as a fantasy of equal exchange that attempts to alleviate residual ideological conceptions of obligation that wield significant power in an emerging capitalist economy. The language of capital, on one hand, is effective because it marks the dialectical relationship of the two economies: an economy of gift exchange that invokes obligations in order to achieve power, and an economy of the market that exploits labor, resources, and production in order to increase profits. The organizing principle of both systems depends on negotiating gains and minimizing losses to increase the accumulation of various forms of social and economic power, whether through money, commodities or material gifts, or honor and prestige. On the other hand, the language of capital is ineffective as a dominant discourse that can redefine interpersonal and power relationships outside of the cycle of reciprocal and seemingly benevolent exchanges. The language of capitalist exchange, I argue, always needs to invoke the very ideals of generosity and reciprocal obligation that it is historically in the process of replacing. In this sense, The Way of the World is less concerned with emerging capital relations and more with the malleability of economic language and the anxieties that accompany shifting notions of value, agency, and debt. Although critics have rightly identified an emerging legal rhetoric in the play, it is not the legal document that secures Mirabell’s ultimate triumph.5 The revelation of the deed does, in fact, result in his victory over Fainall and in security for Mrs. Fainall, but the relations of obligation, debt, and gratitude that underwrite the interpersonal relationships

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in the play ultimately are called upon to secure Millamant’s fortune for Mirabell. The hero’s successful manipulation of both female and property exchange finally leads to the play’s comic ending. In The Way of the World, the affective exchange—love for love— comes to represent a competitive, market-based economy that should benefit women and the middling, if not lower, classes by granting them some legal rights of negotiation over their persons and fortunes. The nature of the gift in Congreve’s play, though, subverts this possibility through a seemingly selfless exchange that creates new relations of obligation and reinforces traditional ones. What has been described as a representation of emerging capital relations in Congreve’s play, therefore, is in actuality the exchange of women cast in the language of the gift and obligation; an exchange between men with economic benefits for men—Mirabell receives the deed of trust and Fainall believes that when he marries Mrs. Fainall he has “a deed of Settlement of the best part of [his wife’s] estate.”6 The gift of deed will eventually empower Mirabell to invoke other networks of obligatory relations that ostensibly are negotiated rather than compelled, allowing him to manipulate both the language of gift, debt, and reciprocity to further his interest in marrying Millamant, and the exchange of all the women in the play. Thus, an asymmetry of gift exchange characterizes the play’s action: gift exchange and reciprocity disguises the exchange of women, and the commodification of Mrs. Fainall, Lady Wishfort, and Millamant is recast in the language of generosity, complicity, and love for love. *

*

*

To understand how gift economy underwrites both dramatic and ideological conflicts in The Way of the World, it is necessary to examine, briefly, the nature and function of the gift. Since the publication of Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, the intersections between disinterested giving and self-serving capitalist accumulation have become strikingly clear.7 Gift-exchange practices in so-called primitive cultures are certainly different from gift-exchange practices in early-modern Western culture. However, the underlying motivations for gift exchange and the social networks that the exchanges mediate can be described as calculated social practices, so that we now recognize gift economy as an inherently interested form of exchange that bolsters relations of domination within many forms of social and cultural organizations. Mauss’s central argument, which has both implicitly and explicitly


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informed our modern understanding of theories of the gift, is that gift economies are defined by a series of reciprocal exchanges that involve the giver and the receiver in networks of obligation that create an “unceasing circling of both goods and services, returned and to be returned” (G 29). These obligations necessitate reciprocity between individuals that in turn mediate social relationships developed and sustained independently of concerns for material gain: “clans, families, and individuals create bonds through perpetual services and counter-gifts of all kinds, usually in the form of a free gift” (G 28). The gift, however, always already is implicated in the principle of selfinterest precisely because the value of the gift can impose on a receiver a burden that in turn places him in debt to the giver. Consequently, the giver attains power over the indebted recipient, thus validating claims on the recipient’s property, rank, and honor. Mauss insists, however, that gift economies are not dependent on individual production or on profit; neither giver nor receiver acquires any material gain: “the object received as gift . . . engages, links magically, religiously, morally, juridically the giver and the receiver” (G 29). The gift supposedly informs and structures nonmaterial values only—alliance, diplomacy, friendship, kinship, sacrifice, and marriage. Pierre Bourdieu’s The Logic of Practice offers a particularly erudite analysis of the relationship between gift economies and social practice. According to Bourdieu, gift exchange is always a “misrecognized” form of power.8 Collapsing the dichotomy between gift economies and capitalism, Bourdieu locates gift exchange as the necessary, collective misrecognition that informs social practice. He examines the gift as a mode of social domination and argues that the fictions it promotes work as a “veil of enchanted relations” to cover up violence (LP 126). Thus, gift exchange is a practice of irreversible actions constructed in time—a sustained, collective misrecognition of the “objective” truth (LP 100). The logic of practice “proceeds through a series of irreversible choices, made under pressure and often involving heavy stakes . . . in response to other choices obeying the same logic” (LP 103). For Bourdieu, the “economical account” of the dynamics governing “an infinity of particular cases of exchanges” implicates both givers and receivers, who, once engaged in the process, either become trapped in the laws of the practice or risk disrupting social constructs and symbolic notions of honor, authority, and power (LP 100). Gifts, therefore, act as symbolic capital in the sense that they are capital misrecognized. Gift exchange is the conversion of economic capital into symbolic capital, an ongoing process that produces relations of

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dependence. These relations have an economic basis but are always disguised: The motor of the whole dialect of challenge and riposte, gift and counter-gift, is not an abstract axiomatics but the sense of honour, a disposition inculcated by all early education and constantly demanded and reinforced by the group, and inscribed in the postures and gestures of the body . . . as in the automatisms of language and thought. . . . (LP 103)

In this respect, the gift must be misrecognized because it is a form of symbolic violence. It enacts relationships of dominance and dependence, as Mirabell seems to recognize. According to Bourdieu, “the strategy of the gift will be destroyed if its true nature is revealed” (LP 126). Bourdieu’s critique ultimately implicates the gift not merely in a general sense of obligation but in specific systems of domination, including systems of patriarchy and patronage. *

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The strength of courtly obligation is demonstrated in act 5 of The Way of the World when Lady Wishfort attacks Foible for ingratitude. Lady Wishfort’s cracking makeup is a metaphor for the waning authority of the patrician class, “a gradual decay in her sexual and social authority that implies they will crumble along with her makeup” (“PA” 53). Clearly, as the audience sees by the end of the play, Lady Wishfort has outlasted her reign as a symbol of genteel authority. Yet, while we can locate in Lady Wishfort the decline of traditional modes of authority, we also can identify remnants of an aristocratic social order that remain functional, and which continue in The Way of the World to allow certain individuals to wield a disproportionate share of power. Consequently, Lady Wishfort invests in relations of obligation, a patrician political and socioeconomic tradition that retains the power of coercion in Congreve’s play, even as we recognize that the key to understanding late-seventeenth-century political, economic, and social structures is to understand them as being in tumultuous transition. As an aristocratic woman, Lady Wishfort is both a victim and an agent of reciprocal obligation. Having discovered Foible’s complicity in Mirabell’s plot, Lady Wishfort draws on a tradition of aristocratic charity to accuse her servant of one of the most serious transgressions


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of the lower classes—ingratitude for the opportunity to serve the upper classes. As she reminds Foible, her position derives from her mistress’s generosity, a generosity that saved Foible from abject poverty: “Out of my house . . . thou Serpent, that I have foster’d, thou bosome traytress, that I rais’d from nothing—that I took from Washing of old Gause and Weaving of dead Haire, with a bleak blew Nose, over a chafeing-dish of starv’d Embers and Dining behind a Traverse Rag, in a shop no bigger than a Bird-cage. . . .” (5.1.1–7). The vehemence of Lady Wishfort’s accusations reveals the strong hold that affective giving and obligation has on social relations in Restoration England. Foible’s position as servant is not secured by a legal or negotiated contract, the type of document that seems to benefit Mrs. Fainall and Millamant and in the end validates Mirabell’s authority. Instead, she is dependent upon the asymmetrical social relations that present themselves, in theory, as a kind of reciprocity—her job, which offers the most basic requirements for secure living, is an ongoing gift. Foible, therefore, is obligated to enact a continuous return. Her only means of honoring this obligation is to display an ongoing and open-ended sense of gratitude to Lady Wishfort. When this gratitude is not demonstrated, Foible risks being turned out, and her only recourse is to perform the ritual of deference demanded by her place. Foible’s claim to innocence enacts her recognition of her continual debt to Lady Wishfort. In an important sense, Foible’s debt to Lady Wishfort can never be paid because the power relations bolstered by such seemingly reciprocal obligation and the potential for violence visited upon the recipient are always in evidence. Despite Lady Wishfort’s generosity, she easily can turn Foible out, casting her into a precarious existence rather than continuing to provide for the woman. During her verbal harangue, Lady Wishfort’s accusations oscillate between references to the market and references to generosity in order to frighten Foible into loyalty. Furthermore, Lady Wishfort relies on the fantasy of disinterested exchange to separate the market from the affective realm of the gift, thus implying that Foible can retain security and protection by fulfilling her obligation to her mistress by unquestioned loyalty. The marketplace, according to Lady Wishfort, is a more dangerous world than domestic service, a world that represents the threats of an economy that emphasizes individual profit rather than mutual benefit. Lady Wishfort’s “gift” to Foible is protection from economic inequity and the perils that poverty and economic agency entail. This scene reifies the fantasy of the gift, as Lady Wishfort’s speech alludes to the gift’s ability to foster social links and bonds, significantly demonstrating

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both the giver’s (Lady Wishfort’s) and the receiver’s (Foible’s) investment in an affective exchange that seals interpersonal bonds. Lady Wishfort gives Foible a secure job free from negotiation and fluctuating gains and losses, and in turn Foible is indebted through her loyalty and deference. The invocation of the market by Lady Wishfort masks the obligatory servitude of the poor. Having rescued Foible from her previous forms of employment— “washing of old Gause and weaving of dead Hair” into wigs—Lady Wishfort tells Foible to drive a trade, reminding her what her “commodities” used to be “when I took you into my house, plac’d you next my self, and made you Government of my whole Family” (5.1.20–1). Lady Wishfort views her act as charitable, one that deserves gratitude and unending gestures of loyalty. However, she also identifies Foible’s gratitude as a commodity in an ongoing exchange, reminding her servant that she gave up another trade to take up an obligation that must be performed on a daily basis. Although Lady Wishfort claims that Foible’s gratitude is the product of a freely chosen obligation— work and loyalty in exchange for economic security—in reality, Lady Wishfort and other members of the upper classes see obligation as inherent in the socioeconomic system: the poor are always already indebted to the rich for the charity that sustains them day to day. Labor itself is defined in terms of traditional, even feudal, constructions of the relations between social classes. For Lady Wishfort, Foible’s betrayal is indicative not only of ingratitude, but of an attempt to usurp the natural order of gift and reciprocity. Lady Wishfort recognizes that Foible has entered into an exchange with Mirabell, and thus recognizes that the open-ended obligation to her mistress has been withdrawn because Mirabell offers her a better price for her duty. Her speech banishing Foible signals her recognition that loyalty itself has become a commodity, and that, despite her aristocratic status, Lady Wishfort is an economic object rather than an agent with legal and social powers. Her horror stems from the fact that Foible’s shift in obligation—the selling of her loyalty—exposes the ways in which the fiction of the gift obligates those of the lower classes to the self-aggrandizing aspects of aristocratic ideology rather than to the ideals of “generosity” that Lady Wishfort rather naively invokes. *

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Generosity in The Way of the World takes the form of obligations to repay debts, whether incurred willingly or not. While not


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immediately clear for the majority of the play’s action, the exchange of deed is a result of Mrs. Fainall’s obligation to Mirabell; her debt is both interpersonal and legal. Fearing that she is pregnant with his child, she is coerced by him into marrying “a false and designing lover” and conveys the deed to protect her land and her income from her future husband (2.1.263–4). The conveyance, however, disguises her obligation to masculine authority by ostensibly representing her as a negotiating agent who exchanges the deed for mutual benefit, namely the protection of her reputation with a husband. In act 5, when the conveyance is revealed, Mirabell describes Mrs. Fainall as “at her own disposal” when the exchange was made, implying that, as a widow, she had both the legal agency and economic acumen to enter into an agreement that empowers the hero (5.1.536). She is credited with considering the “wholesome advice of Friends and of Sages learned in the Laws of this Land” and for acting on her own to prevent Fainall from acquiring “the greatest part of her fortune” (5.1.544–5). Mrs. Fainall’s forethought, in this context, seemingly aligns her with an emerging economy based on individual consent that liberates subjects, specifically female subjects, from the crushing obligations of patrilineal prerogative. In actuality, however, the deed of gift to Mirabell marks Mrs. Fainall’s awareness of her lack of legal and economic rights, and enacts her obligation to the very system that demands her complicity by offering her only a fiction of economic and social agency. In this respect, the revelation of the conveyance in act 5 effectively disguises the problematic relations of obligation that force Mrs. Fainall into the exchange with Mirabell. Her trust takes the idealized form of a gift: it appears as an affective exchange, one that reinforces the mutual affection that Mirabell and Mrs. Fainall have for one another. Mrs. Fainall places her estate in the hands of a former love, thus acknowledging her trust and faith in his loyalty to her. But if the relationship between the two is read within the framework of Bourdieu’s analysis of the asymmetry of gift exchange, it becomes evident that their relationship is fraught—before the play begins— with issues of debt and obligation. Beneath the “veil of enchanted relations” that legitimizes Mirabell as a hero within a moral economy is a relationship dictated by patrilineal prerogative. As a male, Mirabell has the power to protect Mrs. Fainall’s estate, but, more significantly, because Mrs. Fainall has no father to safeguard the family’s financial interest in any marriage articles, he is the agent of her exchange in marriage. She is indebted to him to protect her

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reputation once their affair begins; when she fears she is pregnant, she incurs a further debt to Mirabell through his agency in her marriage, a marriage brokered to transfer the protection of her reputation to her future husband. Although aware of his former lover’s disdain for Fainall, Mirabell justifies his actions by claiming that he has sufficiently shielded her reputation. Mrs. Fainall. Why did you make me marry this Man? Mirabell. Why do we daily commit disagreeable and dangerous Actions? To save that idol Reputation. If the familiarities of our Loves had produc’d that Consequence, of which you were apprehensive, where could you have fix’d a Father’s name with Credit, but on a Husband? (2.1.263–9)

The “disagreeable and dangerous Actions” are all Mrs. Fainall’s, and her gift to Mirabell is a response to her legal obligation to her future husband. Poised to marry Fainall, a rake known for his “Inconstancy and Tyranny of temper,” Mrs. Fainall recognizes the threat he poses to her estate and to her security (5.1.542). Thus, she acts to circumvent the law that would allow him complete ownership of her estate upon marriage by conveying her deed of trust—essentially her entire estate—to Mirabell. Mirabell has ensured the protection of Mrs. Fainall’s estate at the expense, as this scene demonstrates, of her peace of mind and to his own advantage. While Mirabell’s language implies that he “relies on secret contracts, documents, papers, and deeds,” ultimately the obligations owed to him give him legal control over an estate that, by all rights, should belong to his mistress’s husband, Fainall (“PA” 57). The conveyance of Mrs. Fainall’s deed acknowledges both Mirabell’s de facto assumption of patriarchal authority and her debt to a culture that ensures women are always subjected to masculine law. This larger, ideological debt is manifested not only in Mrs. Fainall’s recognition of Mirabell’s masculine authority but also in other relations of obligation that demand female deference throughout the play. Although the deed of trust protects Mrs. Fainall from her husband’s greed, it simultaneously exposes her vulnerability to laws that regulate property for the protection of men. As a widow preparing to remarry, she does not have the legal authority to sign over her deed of trust. Restoration law, according to Susan Staves, interpreted a widow’s conveyance of her property in preparation for a


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second marriage as “fraud against the marital rights of the husband and [therefore] void.”9 Staves cites a 1672 case in which the courts deemed a widow’s deed of trust fraudulent because “the new husband had not been privy to the settlement” prior to the marriage (MW 50). Eventually, legal developments revised the law so that widows could protect their money to benefit their children who were not guaranteed protection by a new husband who was not their biological father. This exception “prevent[ed] the children from prior marriages from becoming public charges” (MW 51). However, “conveyances by a woman for her own benefit were less tolerated,” since upon marriage the wife would anticipate economic support from her husband, most of which would come from the property she brought to the marriage (MW 51). Because Mrs. Fainall is childless, had her transference of her estate been known it is likely that the money would have reverted to Fainall. As Staves notes, “Fainall would have gotten more sympathy from the equity judges in 1700 than he gets from Congreve” (MW 50). This legal tradition reinforces the necessity of the fiction of the gift because the gift allows Mrs. Fainall to enact an exchange that gives her a means at least to perform economic agency. Ironically, Mrs. Fainall’s complicity in Mirabell’s plot and her lack of options reifies her as a gift: she is presented in marriage to Fainall, and her dowry, as revealed in act 5, is the economic leverage both Mirabell and Fainall depend upon to broker property ownership. The misrecognized gift, both the deed and Mrs. Fainall herself, produces a symbolic violence that affords Mrs. Fainall only temporary respite from her husband’s greed; Mirabell returns the deed to her—and thus to Fainall, who as her husband has a legal right to it—in act 5, consequently reaffirming Fainall’s legal prerogative. The language of act 5—“trust,” “advice,” “friendship”— effectively dramatizes the exchange as disinterested only because the initial exchange—the actual signing of the deed—has occurred offstage. The absence of the exchange also disguises the obligations imposed by exchange in general, whether sexual or economic, upon Mrs. Fainall and by the social and legal constraints of the era. If the actual signing of the deed were shown on stage, the historical and social forces at work in Congreve’s play and the dynamics of gender relations in this period would be far more apparent—as they are, for example, in Frances Burney’s novel Cecilia when the heroine is compelled to go into debt to a Jewish moneylender in order to give a huge sum to her spendthrift guardian, Mr. Harrel. In an act of

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self-preservation, Mrs. Fainall is compelled to convey the entirety of her wealth to Mirabell; in an act of theatrical sleight of hand, Congreve keeps this element of the plot offstage until Mirabell’s revelation in act 5. Within the play, the deed of trust places Mrs. Fainall in a precarious position financially and legally. She doesn’t sign over ownership because she feels generous. She signs it over because she feels vulnerable and needs protection—protection from a man by a man. Rather than invoke an exchange that secures female agency—at least the agency of a widow with legal control over her estate—in a system based on the principle of contractual negotiation and obligation, the exchange exposes female agency in financial affairs as a fiction. But this exposure of her lack of agency occurs only as a means to secure Mirabell’s triumph over Fainall. The initial conveyance of the deed of trust before the play begins establishes a cycle of obligation that both dramatizes and mystifies the always asymmetrical relations between the hero and the various women he manipulates, Lady Wishfort and Millamant as well as Mrs. Fainall. By the end of the play, the cycle of recurring obligations trumps the power of the deed and legal rhetoric: the obligations due to Mirabell finally secure his marriage to Millamant. *

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The proviso scene is undermined by the dynamic of obligation and reciprocity that operates, although in a somewhat different fashion, in Mirabell’s dialogue with Mrs. Fainall. As a dramatization of the newly negotiable marriage contract, this scene most often is noted for its reliance on legal and contractual language, and Mirabell and Millamant are identified as signifiers of gendered authority. However, Mirabell and Millamant’s marriage contract looks forward to a capitalist ideology of individual and mutually beneficial negotiations that has yet to attain stability in 1700. The language of economic agency functions only as that—a language—rather than as an ideology that defines conceptions of bourgeois value. While Mirabell allows Millamant to define the conditions by which she will “dwindle into a wife” (4.1.225), his demands on her register far more significantly in terms of the ways equitable exchange actually works to ensure her submission to his authority. She insists on the freedom to negotiate for herself the aristocratic privileges supposedly afforded by marriage. She demands the liberty to “pay and receive visits to and from whom I please, to write and receive Letters, without Interrogatories or wry


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Faces on your part. To wear what I please; and Choose Conversation with regard only to my own taste” (4.1.212–6). Mirabell, however, through the metaphor of the legal document, dictates Millamant’s conception of self, asserts his masculine authority and the prerogative of gendered identity, and relegates Millamant to the role of obedient wife: Item, I Article, that you continue to like your own Face, as long as I shall. And while it passes Current with me, that you endeavour not to new Coin it. To which end, together with all Vizards for the day, I prohibit all Masks for the Night, made of oil’d skins and I know not what—Hog’s-bones, Hare’s-gall, Pig-water, and the marrow of a roasted Cat. In short, I forbid all Commerce with the Gentlewoman in what-de-call-it-Court. Item, I shut my doors against all Bauds with Baskets, and penny-worths of Muslin, China, Fans, Atlases, &c.Item when you shall be Breeding—(4.1.245–55).

Mirabell’s “odious provisos” (4.1.279) restrict what Millamant can consume (no exotic imports) and the friends she can entertain. Even this fiction of equitable negotiation is, as the heroine intuits, ultimately a performance that both discloses and conceals her role as a gendered object of exchange rather than an agent who can refuse the hero’s terms. Mirabell’s provisos invoke a relationship of obligation to which Millamant is incapable of adequately responding because she lacks access to experience and language that would embolden her to question her duty, a duty that Mirabell implies is owed, not freely given. Consequently, Millamant’s conditions for marriage, while acceptable to Mirabell, ultimately fail to legitimize her as a negotiating agent; instead, her requests mask an obligation to an aristocratic conception of female exchange and female value. As Robert Markley notes, “Millamant may be an elemental force—a whirlwind—but she is destined, if not to be controlled by Mirabell, at least to acknowledge his authority” (TW 244). Like her cousin, Mrs. Fainall, Millamant ultimately learns that her gift of herself is compelled. Congreve uses the forms of legal language to disguise Millamant’s obligations as a woman who must depend on marriage. Mirabell’s demand for control of her breeding identifies her value as gift: “I denounce against all strait-Laceing, Squeezing for Shape, till you mold my boy’s head like a Sugar-Loaf; and instead of a Man-child, make me the Father of a Cooked-billet” (5.1.260–3). As Luce Irigaray explains, “Women’s bodies—through their use, consumption, and

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circulation—provide for the condition of making social life possible, although they remain an unknown ‘infrastructure’ of the elaboration of that social life and culture.”10 If Mirabell is to represent the inscription of patriarchal power at a time when aristocratic authority is being called into question, he must be able to regulate his wife’s reproductive powers and thus preserve his name and his claim to property rights over her person. The audience recognizes only in act 5 the irony of Millamant’s insistence on indefatigable courtship and her power to keep Mirabell in the role of the humble suitor. Rhetoric and reality are at odds. She believes, or says she believes, wrongly, that Mirabell’s success has yet to be secured: “I hate a lover that can dare to think he draws a moment’s air independent on the bounty of his mistress” (4.1.175–6). Yet Millamant never refuses to comply with his “odious provisos,” not only because she genuinely loves Mirabell and wants to marry him, but because she implicitly recognizes that her threat of noncompliance is simply a performance. Men make provisos that can be witnessed and legally contracted; women make offers that even verbally are legally binding because women have few legal rights. Fortunately for Millamant, Congreve’s hero, as a foil to Fainall, embodies a form of masculinity that is attractive; Mirabell, with the deed of trust in hand that effectively allows him to compel Lady Wishfort to agree to his marriage to Millamant, is confident and willing to entertain “the charmingly unpredictable heiress” (TW 242). The legal and socioeconomic implications of the proviso scene, however, are rendered irrelevant in act 5, as is much of the plot that seems to carry so much significance through the first four acts: Millamant’s exchange in marriage ultimately is brokered not by the ostensible negotiations between her and Mirabell, but through Lady Wishfort’s obligation to Mirabell. Millamant may consent to Mirabell as her husband, but her exchange as wife with a dowry is dictated by the obligatory relationship instigated through seemingly disinterested gifts, notably the deed of trust that Mrs. Fainall signs before the play begins. Lady Wishfort’s gratitude is also an effect of Mirabell’s machinations. Just like Mrs. Fainall and Millamant, Lady Wishfort’s lack of legal agency compels her to give everything to Mirabell to escape Fainall: “I’ll forgive all that’s past; Nay I’ll consent to any thing to come, to be deliver’d from this Tyranny” (5.1. 454–6). Unable to invoke the law or patrician authority in order to extricate herself from Fainall’s demands, she must, like her daughter, turn to Mirabell for rescue. Her consent, however, is given under duress because she


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must rely on Mirabell to rescue her and her daughter from Fainall’s blackmail attempt: “I’ll break my Nephews Match, you shall have my Niece yet, and all her fortune; if you can but save me from this imminent danger” (5.1.463–5). Ironically, the gesture that prevents Lady Wishfort’s and Mrs. Fainall’s ruin is one that substitutes overt violence with symbolic violence. Lady Wishfort has spent the entire play outraged by Mirabell and plotting against him, frustrated by his denial of her sexual advances. In this respect, the marriage contract gains legitimacy only when Lady Wishfort finally recognizes her dependent status as a debtor and agrees to the match. Mirabell recognizes that he does not deserve “any Obligation,” but also understands that worth is largely irrelevant: obligations are determined by power and authority. As a desirable male who holds Mrs. Fainall’s estate and who can reproduce Lady Wishfort’s family line, he is indeed owed. *

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Although Mirabell controls the key legal document in The Way of the World, his ability to control the outcome of the action lies in the obligations he has stored up throughout the play. The legal contract becomes a tangible, transferable document that symbolizes and supercedes these obligations, rather than making the imposed obligations of aristocratic authority obsolete. By handing over her estate to Mirabell, Mrs. Fainall gives him a means to negotiate with Lady Wishfort for his desired marriage to Millamant. When the plot is revealed, it becomes apparent that Mirabell has used the deed to entangle Lady Wishfort in obligations from which only he can release her. Mirabell recognizes the power of obligation over negotiation. Significantly, Lady Wishfort’s deference to Mirabell also ensures that Millamant’s estate is not divided. The realities of an interested exchange are put into abeyance, or at least covered up at the end of the play, when Mirabell is able to use the deed to reconcile, to a point, Fainall and his wife. The hero triumphs through affective actions—concerns for civility between spouses, the preservation of Mrs. Fainall’s reputation, and the confirmation of mutual affection—to encourage Lady Wishfort’s consent to his marriage to Millamant. I want to conclude by remarking that it is the play’s villains who are most skeptical of the language of disinterested exchange. Fainall recognizes early in the play that loss is inherent in exchange, even in so-called disinterested exchanges: as he puts it, “ ‘tis better to trade at a little loss than to be eaten up with overstock” (1.1.67–9). His

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recognition of the loss inherent in affective as well as economic transactions informs his understanding of the interpersonal relationships in the play, and his willingness to risk outright loss in order to gain his ends pushes him to threaten mother and daughter. Unlike Mirabell, who depends upon the rhetoric of gift exchange to develop a network of obligatory relationships, Fainall tries to use force and blackmail to get Mrs. Fainall’s entire estate as well as Millamant’s fortune. Recognizing that disinterested exchange is, in actuality, a “veil of enchanted relations” (my emphasis), he does away with the rhetoric employed by Mirabell and perpetuates an overt violence: “You thing that was a Wife, will smart for this. I will not leave thee wherewithall to hide thy Shame; Your Body shall be Naked as your Reputation” (5.1.494–7). Mirabell triumphs over Fainall, however, because his invocation of gift exchange and generosity force Lady Wishfort to see his marriage to Millamant and his affair with Mrs. Fainall as based on mutual benefit, not coercion. Lady Wishfort has, in reality, been coerced because she cannot deny Mirabell her favor after he has proved “to be so generous at last” (5.1.462–3). Indeed, Lady Wishfort seems more willing to give to Mirabell precisely because his generosity appears to signal a type of reform. His own admission that he does not deserve a return registers as a type of deference to Lady Wishfort that she acknowledges by fulfilling the obligation anyway; an obligation that has been created through Mirabell’s manipulation of the deed. Once Mirabell convinces Lady Wishfort of his sincere generosity, he is able to rescue her from Fainall. What Fainall failed to secure through force, Mirabell convinces Lady Wishfort to give willingly. Mrs. Marwood similarly notes that generosity is unbecoming, a sign of her duty to Mirabell. While Mrs. Fainall is described as a pattern of generosity, this pattern stems from her obligation to Mirabell to protect her from Fainall. Marwood, who berates herself for her generosity, seems to recognize clearly what Mrs. Fainall, Millamant, and Lady Wishfort can only intuit: the dangers of generosity and obligation. She articulates the confusion between generosity and obligation when she finds herself obligated in Fainall’s scheme, for which she blames generous complicity on her part: “I shall not prove another pattern of generosity and stalk for him, till he takes his stand to aim at a fortune” (3.1.243–5). Being generous means that one engages in a cycle of reciprocal obligation, and, as Bourdieu explains, this cycle of reciprocity is also a cycle of symbolic violence. Marwood’s generosity ties her to Fainall, a man she does not love and who does not love her, and who has implicated her in a plan that will ruin her. Marwood has


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it right; she recognizes the coercion of cycles of obligation. However, because she does, she must be excluded from a comic conclusion that has to paper over such unpayable debts and sacrifices, such as Mrs. Fainall’s, as “good nature.”

Notes 1. This transformation is documented by a number of critics. For representative examples, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law and Politics, Language, and Time; Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution; Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman; and Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology. 2. Richard Braverman, “Capital Relations,” 138; hereafter cited in text as “CR.” 3. The complexities of social and economic transition dramatized in The Way of the World are discussed by Richard Braverman, “Capital Relations”; Robert Markley, Two-Edg’d Weapons; Kevin Gardner, “Patrician Authority and Instability”; Charles Hinnant, “Wit, Propriety, and Style”; and Richard W. F. Kroll, “Discourse and Power.” 4. Representative arguments include Maximillian E. Novak, “Margery Pinchwife’s ‘London Disease’ ”; Susan McCloskey, “Knowing One’s Relations”; Alan Roper, “Language and Action”; and Braverman, “The Rake’s Progress Revisited” and “Capital Relations.” 5. The role of Millamant’s fortune in the outcome of the play is discussed by Gardner, “Patrician Authority and Instability;” hereafter cited as “PA.” See also Markley, Two-Edg’d Weapons; hereafter cited as TW. The role of the legal document in the outcome of the play is discussed by Braverman, “Capital Relations” and “The Rake’s Progress”; Kroll, “Discourse and Power”; and Roper, “Language and Action.” 6. William Congreve, The Way of the World, 3.1.709–10; hereafter cited in text by act, scene, and line. 7. Marcel Mauss, The Gift; hereafter cited as G. 8. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice; hereafter cited as LP. 9. Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property, 50; hereafter cited as MW. 10. Luce Irigaray, “Women on the Market,” 171.


7 The Erotics of the Gift: Gender and Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century Novel Charles Haskell Hinnant

Introduction Few readers today would accept, without some qualification, Luce Irigaray’s view that “the society that we know, our own culture, is based upon the exchange of women. . . . Men make commerce of them, but they do not enter into any exchanges with them.”1 To many of us, Irigaray’s argument seems to deny agency to women, yet it does have the value of drawing attention to the fact that gift exchange has usually been defined in terms of transfers between men. Hence if we really wish to break away from the androcentric perspective that informs Irigaray’s point, we would have to examine how the meaning of the gift alters when we turn to exchanges that take place between men and women. It is because gifts can be linked to a variety of gendered relationships that it is possible for us to examine them in connection to exchanges not only between families and kinship groups but also between individuals who are bound by special ties of attraction and intimacy. The novels published during the long eighteenth century are particularly well suited for this kind of investigation, for they are situated at the broad transitional point between the parentally arranged and economically motivated alliance and the so-called companionate marriage.2 Within an economic universe based on an opposition between passion and interest, between the love-match and the marriage of convenience, gifts lose their traditional meaning as exchanges that

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necessarily invite a positive response. Thomas Hobbes’s fourth Law of Nature, often cited in commentaries on the gift, presupposes transactions between men: As Justice dependeth on Antecedent Covenant; so does GRATITUDE depend on Antecedent Grace, that is to say, Antecedent Free-Gift: and it is the fourth Law of Nature; which may be conceived in this forme, That a man which receiveth Benefit from another of meer Grace, Endeavour that he which giveth it, have no reasonable cause to repent him of his good will. For no one giveth, but with intention of Good to himself; because the Gift is Voluntary; and of all Voluntary Acts, the Object is to every man his own Good.3

We can see the lineaments of this formulation with particular clarity in the system of patronage that dominated social relations, especially relations between men of different ranks, during the eighteenth century.4 One way Englishmen represented this system to themselves was through an ideology that privileged the gift as voluntary, bountiful, and gratuitous. By elevating gratitude to a law of nature and characterizing any act of liberality as an “antecedent free gift,” Hobbes provides a philosophical justification for this ideology. He not only insists upon a prohibition against ingratitude but implicitly levels the full weight of that prohibition against the recipient. The donor/patron does not enter into the archetypal dynamics of the gift relation here, which only occurs after the donation of the “antecedent free gift.” Hence it is not the donor’s intention that counts— which, Hobbes concedes, will involve some “Good to himself”—but the response of the recipient. The possibility that the recipient might reject or look with disfavor on the gift is excluded from consideration. On the contrary, the recipient is expected to act out, to dramatize his gratitude before the donor, if not in fact before the entire community. Hobbes’s fourth Law of Nature may seem like a straightforward rationalization of the way the system of patronage was expected to work, but it was also a precarious system. In gendered exchanges between men and women, the law of gratitude might legitimately be suspended, the gift rejected, and the recipient indifferent to or even suspicious and resentful of the donor’s motives in offering the gift. Eighteenth-century novels reconstruct this problematic of gendered transfers, drawing attention to the uncertainties surrounding their outcomes. When we shift from a structure in which women are exchanged between men to one in which exchanges take place


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between men and women, the responses the latter exchanges invite cannot be predicated upon a single principle. It thus follows that the women portrayed in eighteenth-century fiction should not be viewed solely as passive objects of property exchange, the currency that cements the system of male dominance. They are perhaps better seen as at once passive and active, existing both inside and outside masculine sexual economies. There are still instances in which fathers seek to exchange their daughters as possessions to which husbands demand a clear title, but young women are much more likely to exercise a considerable freedom of choice in courtship while allowing their decisions to be subject to parental consent. The potential peril opened up by this compromise arouses public concern and introduces a radical asymmetry that unsettles any vision of gift exchange as automatic and balanced rather than uncertain and potentially agonistic. It reveals within the very fiction of total immediacy and reciprocity, invented to guarantee the smooth running of the system, an undermining of that fiction, which those committed to it must either disavow or ignore. In this essay, I propose to examine how this unsettling dynamic works in a survey of gift exchanges between men and women in a range of novels from Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1721) to Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814). In the process, I hope to take a fresh look at two important theoretical issues from an eighteenth-century perspective: Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of the necessary delay between gift and countergift, and Jacques Derrida’s enigma of the gift. By shifting the observational position from which these issues are viewed, one can also shift the perspective by which they can be understood. In eighteenth-century novels, gendered exchanges invariably introduce an erotic dimension to the gift. When an object becomes an amatory gift, it becomes positioned within a possible domain of libidinal desire, yet a domain that is also structured through sanctions and codes and governed by a prohibition against extramarital liaisons that is almost as severe as the prohibition against incest. In this sense, gifts, if accepted, work as erotically invested and investing performatives. These performatives range from gifts that carry obvious sexual connotations and signify a desire on the part of the donor, to what appear to be acts of pure generosity. Yet insofar as it is not so much the unreciprocated as the reciprocated gift that might debase the recipient, there is no rule of reciprocity. Gifts might be rejected or, if accepted, accepted without incurring the obligation to make a return gift. Distrust of the amatory gift is far from absolute, but in almost all of the novels the emphasis is on the dilemmas confronting the

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choice-making recipients. The clearest rule forbids any naïve, unquestioning acceptance of the gift.

The Amatory Gift One might question the importance of the gift in novels that dwell on a host of other issues and relations. Yet the anthropologist Edmund Leach has recently drawn attention to “a feature of British marital arrangements which now tends to be treated as secondary even though in the past it was of central importance.” He writes, “the beginning of a marriage is almost always the occasion for a transfer of valuables in the form of wedding presents, marriage settlements, token gifts.”5 These “gifts” were meant to soften, if not quite conceal, the play of economic interest and calculation that invariably attended marriages in the upper ranks of eighteenth-century British society. Taking place before the wedding ceremony, such transfers were often intended to secure the rights of the wife, who, without them, would be wholly dependent on her husband’s favor for an annual allowance or for financial support after his death. It is therefore not surprising that in novels devoted to courtship and marriage we hear a great deal about money; there are settlements, entails, portions, dowries, jointures, and pin money. However, the gifts that a suitor might make to a lady, or a gallant to a courtesan (our main subject), are not Leach’s concern. As a social anthropologist, he is interested in gifts that were socially and economically necessary for the production of enduring social relationships—marriages and the perpetuation of kin groups from one generation to the next. Yet his observation also suggests the importance of the gift to a spectrum of earlier, premarital relations involving individuals, a spectrum that ranges from honorable courtship, through seduction, to what in the eighteenth century would have been seen as thinly veiled forms of sexual solicitation. A survey of eighteenth-century novels provides an opportunity to examine this range of practices and also to take account of the enormous variation in what is being transferred, when it is being transferred, by whom, and for what purpose. Sometimes love-gifts come as close to the marriage settlement as possible without actually encroaching upon it. In Tobias Smollett’s picaresque romance, The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), the hero makes a present to Narcissa, the woman he loves, of “a valuable necklace, composed of diamonds and amethysts set alternately,” shortly before their wedding. The marriage settlement, such as it is, will have to await Roderick’s recovery, well after the novel


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closes, of his “wife’s fortune” in consequence of a “codicil” annexed to her father’s will.6 Many gifts are of symbolic rather than material value (for instance, the erotically suggestive presents—stockings, head cloths, and silk shoes—that Mr. B gives the heroine of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela [1740]).7 There is no question of any strict separation of calculation and spontaneity about these gifts; their donors are likely to expect, even demand, some form of reciprocation. In fact, the greater the social distance between the donor and recipient, the more likely the gift is to become part of a campaign of conquest and possession. Gifts are rarely prominent in novels in which the would-be recipient—a titled lady or wealthy heiress, for example—occupies a position socially and economically superior to the masculine donor. The status of amatory gifts can fairly be described as paradoxical. On the one hand, they might be construed as expressions of affection, kindness, consideration, or acts of generosity or charity, especially when they are part of a serious matrimonial courtship. When they are acknowledged or reciprocated, they are likely to establish or cement a desired relationship: in Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48), for example, Lovelace observes to his friend Belford that “there is nothing nobler, nothing more delightful, than for lovers to be conferring and receiving obligations from one another.” On the other hand, it is obviously improper for a woman to accept a present from a man whose motives are uncertain or that might lead to an unwanted obligation. Lovelace complains to Belford in the same letter that he has been unable to “prevail” upon Clarissa “to accept money and rainment” from him.8 In Frances Burney’s first novel (1778), Evelina Anville determines to pay a coachman rather than become “indebted” to Tom Branghton, a young shopkeeper whom she detests.9 Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) enacts a situation in which Lydia Melford is expected to return the gift of a small gold ornamental case to one Mr. Barton, after she reveals to her brother that Barton holds no matrimonial interest for her.10 In John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Coxcomb (1751), the mysterious heiress, Lydia, whom Sir William Delamore, the coxcomb of the novel, is pursuing, determines to refuse his offer of a rare edition of Fenelon’s Télémaque in French until her friend, Mrs. Bernard, presents an argument that leads her to change her mind. Mrs. Bernard suggests that while receiving presents from men was an encouragement she never should recommend to her; yet there were certain bagatelles, which by the courtesy of custom, were always excepted, especially in certain circumstances: And that there was really a greater dignity and indeed a

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justice owing to one’s assured superiority, in accepting things of so little importance; than treating them as matters of consequence by rejecting them.11

Mrs. Bernard’s solution to the dilemma posed by the gift brings out what Bourdieu aptly characterized in Outline of a Theory of Practice as an improvisational strategy.12 In contrast to Clarissa’s settled determination to reject any and all gifts from Lovelace, regardless of circumstances, Mrs. Bernard’s recommendation presupposes the spur-of-the-moment invention of a polite fiction and therefore a degree of ambiguity. The “assured superiority” Mrs. Bernard takes for granted stems from the assumption not only that Delamore is Lydia’s social inferior but also that the value of her virginal body is incommensurate with any possible gift. Mrs. Bernard’s fundamental principle implies that a woman who accepts a gift that suggests an obligation risks inserting herself into a masculine sexual economy. By accepting Delamore’s offer of Fenelon’s novel on his terms, Lydia exposes herself to a temptation that might lead her into either an undesired marriage or, even worse, the public disgrace that would attend a compromising encounter. Yet, what is most significant about Mrs. Bernard’s comment is that it assumes that gifts are constituted not through their intrinsic value but in terms of the often differing understandings of the giver and receiver. By reinterpreting Delamore’s present as “a bagatelle”—an object of modest value, halfway between a purely gratuitous gift given without expectation of recompense and a costly gift that would create a relation of dependence—she enables Lydia to accept it without becoming a captive participant in an undesired circuit of exchange. At the same time, the fact that Delamore purchased and owned the volume and intended for it to be circulated as an aesthetic object suggests something of the fragility of the nonpossessive cycle of donation and acceptance that Mrs. Bernard constructs. Mrs. Bernard’s advice to Lydia also illustrates the high stakes involved in the stance imposed upon women by their position as potential recipients of gifts from men. Only if one puts into parenthesis the question of sexual difference can one assume that a gift from a man to a woman, especially a woman of a lower rank in society, is a matter of disinterested charity. In Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), the first-person narrator, Yorick, describes his gift of a crown to a chambermaid in Paris as “a virtuous convention . . . made betwixt man and woman,” thus justifying their walking privately together along the Quai de Conti. Yet even if Yorick’s observation is taken at


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face value, the entire episode is steeped in an atmosphere of sentimental eroticism. Though Yorick declares that he sees “innocence” in her “face” and condemns “the man who ever lays a snare in its way,” it seems apparent that he experiences the same kind of sexual tension as the seducers of more overtly amatory fictions.13 What is meant by virtuous innocence in this instance cannot be imagined apart from the entire apparatus of erotic sensibility. The general principle, of which A Sentimental Journey is only one of a host of examples, is the absence of any absolute disjunction between liberality and libidinal desire. Erotic and sentimental intimacy are fused in the scenes that take place between Walsingham Ainsworth, the hero of Mary Robinson’s Walsingham (1797), and Amelia Woodforde, the young benefactress who bails him out of prison. There is no question of any separation of the two elements, even though his subsequent seduction and abandonment of Amelia exposes her to misery and ruin.14 In Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple (1744), the tears that the artless hero sheds when he rescues the beautiful Camilla and her brother Valentine from eviction by a hard-hearted landlady reflect a touching and guileless compassion that overlooks any grounds of suspicion. Yet David’s declaration in response to Camilla’s tale of woe that were he “to live a thousand Years, he could never meet with another pleasure equal to the Thought of having served her” is steeped in eroticism, even though seduction is far from David’s mind.15 The elderly Mr. W. confirms the close link between generosity and libidinal desire when he observes to Syrena Tricksy in Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela (1741), “that passion that makes us so liberal, makes us also desire something in return—we cannot content ourselves with rendering happy the Object of our Affection, but languish for something more than Gratitude.”16 When Roderick Random gallantly rescues Narcissa from an attempted rape by Sir Timothy Thicket, he finds it impossible himself to avoid “ravishing a kiss” from her (RR 229). Even when gifts seem most disinterested, as in the guineas that Harley, the impoverished aristocrat of Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), gives to an Ophelia-like madwoman and then to a prostitute, his agitated diffidence betrays the bivalent character of his feelings toward the beauteous objects of his charity.17 Liberality and libidinal desire appear to be inseparable, and if they were not, it would be hard to comprehend Harley’s haste in leaving the scene of his acts of beneficence. The special difficulty proper young ladies have in accepting gifts from men only becomes intensified when they consider the propriety

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of granting favors in return. In Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752), the quixotic heroine, Arabella, and her friend, Miss Glanville, debate whether “a Lover should expect a Gift of any Value from his mistress.” Miss Glanville defends the orthodox position, the position of the conduct books, when she insists that “it will never be my Fate to be so much obliged to a Lover, as to be under a necessity of granting him Favours in Requital.” Arabella justifies her defense of return gifts by pointing out that the favors to which she is referring are not material, such as kisses, but symbolic, “such as giving a Scarf, a Bracelet, or some such thing to a Lover.”18 Yet even if symbolic gifts, like the bagatelle that Mrs. Bernard advises Lydia to accept, are not compromising, they are likely to be freighted with a significance that is subject to divergent interpretations. The circumstances of a gift determine its meaning as well as its material value. For example, in Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), the hero Trueworth’s gift of a squirrel to Betsy undergoes a change of significance, first when it becomes domesticated as a favorite pet by Betsy, and again when it is destroyed by her jealous, sadistic husband, Mr. Munden.19 When Sophia Western leaves a muff for Tom Jones to find at the inn at Upton in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), her “gift” can be construed in various ways: it can be taken to symbolize or express a desired relationship, reveal a previously undeclared partiality, or constitute a challenge to Tom, who has become involved in a compromising liaison with Mrs. Waters. 20 Even if the meaning of the muff is unclear to us, it still represents what we must assume will become part of an understanding between the two characters involved. In a similar manner, the lock of hair that Marianne Dashwood gives to John Willoughby or the ring plaited with hair that Lucy Steele gives to Edward Ferrars in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) may be meant to serve as erotic tokens, symbolize secret engagements, and act as reminders of attachments during a prolonged absence. Yet the fact that the significance of the ring is misconstrued by Elinor Dashwood, who initially assumes that “the hair was her own,” is an indication of how variable the interpretation of such gifts can be. 21 Elinor only comes to accept Lucy’s explanation of her gift of the ring after Lucy demonstrates that it was closely linked to other kinds of symbolically weighted activity, the gift of a portrait miniature and an exchange of personal letters. In other words, the more highly charged the atmosphere surrounding sexualized encounters, the more likely it is that the radical ambiguity surrounding the offer of gifts will extend to other kinds of liberality, from offers of charitable assistance and


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protection, to the distinction, attention, and many offices of civility paid to one person in preference to others, to the testimony of regard evinced by the delivery of billet doux or serious letters that demand a reply. In Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu focuses his account of gifts in terms of the element of unpredictability implicit in such exchanges. He argues that the time lag between gift and return, the necessity of a delayed and different countergift, stands as an index of the inherent instability surrounding such transfers. Yet while Bourdieu’s model of generalized exchange is based on transfers between families and kinship groups, it can assist us in comprehending—with some important qualifications—the significance of gift exchanges initiated by individuals in eighteenth-century novels. The delay between donation and acceptance in these novels becomes crucial in distinguishing between a gift and payment for a service, between courtship and solicitation. In Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1721) and Roxana (1724), for example, the delays between acts of generosity, which Moll and Roxana receive in troubled circumstances from a variety of male benefactors, and their responses to those acts enable them to mitigate the harshness of the social code governing any and all acts of extramarital sexual reciprocation. If Roxana eventually yields to the landlord who rescues her from utter destitution, she is filled with qualms: This Gentleman had freely and voluntarily deliver’d me from Misery, from Poverty, and Rags; he had made me what I was, and put me into a Way to be even more than I ever was, namely, to live happy and pleas’d, and on his bounty I depended: What could I say to this Gentleman when he press’d me to yield to him, and argued the Lawfulness of it?

Even though Roxana confesses her “Conviction” that “from the Beginning” she “was a Whore, not a Wife,” her scruples and hesitation in responding are what distinguish her from a common prostitute. 22 The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise than as planned for either giver or receiver is sufficient to highlight the irreducible uncertainty inherent in gendered exchanges. Even a gentleman as experienced as Henry Crawford in Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) is unable, in his improbable quest to secure the affection of Fanny Price, to avoid the slips, mistakes, and moments of clumsiness that seem inevitable in the process of necessary improvisation that defines success in these campaigns. When Henry makes a present of a gold necklace for Fanny to wear at a ball, he carefully protects himself by

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arranging to have his sister Mary give Fanny the necklace on her own behalf. Mary tells Fanny: “You must think of Henry, for it is his choice in the first place. He gave it to me, and with the necklace I make over to you all the duty of remembering the original giver.” Yet in spite of his precautions, Henry’s gift turns out to be mistimed, for it coincides with the gift of a second necklace, given to Fanny by Edmund Bertram, the man upon whom she has secretly set her heart. A far more valuable gift is the naval promotion that Henry secretly arranges for Fanny’s beloved brother, William, yet he spoils its effect by disclosing to Fanny much too quickly both his agency and the motives behind it. Fanny’s reaction makes evident his miscalculation: When she . . . found herself expected to believe that she had created sensations which his heart had never known before, and that every thing he had done for William, was to be placed to the account of his excessive and unequalled attachment to her, she was exceedingly distressed and for some moments unable to speak. She considered it all nonsense, as mere trifling and gallantry, which meant only to deceive for the hour. 23

In a system in which gifts may not be reciprocated, the interval between the secret gift and its disclosure, much like the interval between gift and countergift in conventional transfers, is what enables the relation of exchange to appear serious and disinterested. In Pride and Prejudice (1813), Darcy does not initially tell Elizabeth Bennet of his heroic endeavors on behalf of her sister Lydia. It is only after she has learned of his efforts from others and has had the time to undergo a thorough change of heart toward him that Darcy discloses to her the true motive behind his actions. This focus on the necessary delay explains why the decision to make, or not make, a return is a prominent part of Bourdieu’s account of the gift. Cases in which gifts are actually refused or not reciprocated become as significant as cases in which gifts are accepted within this purview. To betray an unseemly haste in calling in an obligation, and to reveal too overtly the true motives behind it, is also to run the risk of having one’s endeavors dismissed altogether.

The Pure Gift The amatory gift, as we have seen, has a transgressive aspect, exemplified by bribes and gifts that turn out to imply an unwanted obligation on one hand or promote licentiousness on the other. Thus it should


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not be surprising that a shift in taste midway through the eighteenth century toward domestic courtship narratives and sentimentalism was accompanied by a shift in the conceptualization of the gift. As the novel kept pace with the rise of sentimentalism, it had to reinvent the amatory gift or jettison generosity entirely as a prescriptive notion; it had to determine how the gift could be rearticulated in terms of givers and receivers whose honesty and moral worth were above reproach. As a practical matter, for the gift to remain an index of genuine benevolence and good nature, it had to broaden its goals, pursuing one of two possible options: (1) it must discourage a libidinally inflected generosity that, much like the spontaneous, unreflective acts of charity performed by Tom Jones, is assumed to cover a multitude of (sexual) sins and preempt any kind of strict moral accounting; or (2) it must redefine the transfer in a way that deemphasized the moral agency of both donor and recipient. The best way to understand how these options might be pursued is to examine them in the context of Derrida’s controversial interpretation of the fundamental aporia or paradox of the gift in Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money. In Derrida’s aporia, the conditions of the possibility of the gift are also the conditions of its impossibility. Insofar as the meaning of the word gift must be understood in relation to “a common language or logic,” Derrida argues in Given Time that a pure gift, a generous gift, must be a gift without calculable benefit to the donor: “For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift or debt.” Such a gift—a gift worthy of the name gift—would not even appear as such to the donor and recipient without the risk of reconstituting, through phenomenality and thus through its phenomenology, a circle of economic reappropriation that would just as soon annul its event: “At the limit, the gift as gift ought not appear as gift: either to the donor or donee.”24 In such a context, generosity is calculation and the gift a commodity, instigating an open-ended circuit of exchange. Even the barest recognition of the gift equates with self-satisfaction and becomes a kind of payment. Reflecting on the basic thrust of this argument, Bourdieu complains that Derrida is asking the donor to perform “a kind of ‘examination of mind’ worthy of a Byzantine salos who feared that his most saintly actions might be inspired by the symbolic profits associated with saintliness.” In effect, “Derrida formulates in new terms the old Kantian question of duty and the possibility of detecting some ‘secret impulse of amour propre’ behind the greatest sacrifice, the one that is supposed to be performed out of pure duty.”25 Yet to

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reduce Derrida’s argument to a sterile philosophical exercise without acknowledging the validity of the issues he is raising is to reduce the gift to the status of an emblem of conventional social practices. What is fascinating about Derrida’s thesis is the way it can help us understand how novelists in the sentimental tradition sought to reinvent the pure gift in narrative terms. There is evidence, moreover, that many novelists were aware of the issues that Derrida was raising and were seeking to present concrete examples in which the gift, understood as a perfectly gracious and gratuitous act performed without obligation or expectation, might exist outside the sexual economy of desire and possession. In doing so, they construct situations in which exchanges between men and women necessarily involve risk and the possibility of misinterpretation. In a sentimental scene from Burney’s Evelina (1778), the heroine seeks to shun direct responsibility for the gift of money she leaves for the impoverished poet, Macartney: “I let fall my purse to the ground, not daring to present it to him, and ran upstairs with the utmost swiftness” (E 215). Such reticence before distress reveals a female donor who seeks to disavow her gift as a gift, to throw away her purse, permitting Macartney the opportunity to appropriate it, not as a present, but as an abandoned valuable.26 The anxiety that Evelina experiences would not be so intense if her gift did not permit the possibility of an erotically charged return. Acts of generosity are likely to be most convincing when they are initiated in improbable circumstances, for example, when the donor is almost as impoverished as the recipient and when they rule out the possibility of an equivalent response. In Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761), the heroine’s beneficence is tested only after she is widowed and destitute, and her long-lost cousin Ned Warner appears. Responding to Ned’s tale of woe, and moved to pity, Sidney gives him all she has, only to discover when he reveals his true identity that Ned’s gratitude for her generosity will make her a rich woman. Within its own limited terms, Sidney’s modest gesture is quite extravagant, but it exemplifies the biblically inspired maxim that the only truly inspired gift is a gift from one poor person to another.27 It is not surprising that Sidney never questions her own motives, because she never anticipates the irony of a wealthy man pretending to be poor. As a consequence, she does not share Evelina’s concern about the absence of any custom authorizing a clear distinction between charitable and libidinally motivated acts. When Ned insists that Sidney will “blaze” in subsequent good works, he acknowledges the intensity of her passion but implies


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that it will be transformed into acts that are charitable rather than amorously motivated, spontaneous rather than calculating.28 To imagine the pure gift in Derrida’s terms is to make the charitable act into an exercise in self-forgetfulness. Walsingham, like Harley, is unable to control his feelings when first contemplating the distress of Julie de Beaumont, whom he rescues from calamity; Walsingham recalls, “I almost lost the sense of my own situation” (W 206), and later, “I gazed around me for several minutes, without the power of uttering a syllable” (W 208). The mistrust of speech, associated here with a secondary process of reflection and self-avowal, motivates the recourse in sentimental fiction to such spontaneous means of expression as shock, stunned silence, tears, blushes, sighs, and even moments of epistemological opacity. 29 The pure gift is not the result of a carefully planned and verbally articulated intention-to-give but rather of an act that is unpremeditated, spontaneous, and forgetful of itself. The tendency of all truly generous souls—receivers as well as givers, men as well as women—to avoid self-avowal is tested in various ways in late-eighteenth-century fiction. In Thomas Day’s didactic novel, The History of Sandford and Merton (1783–89), Harry Sandford, occupying the position of recipient, initially refuses to accept a sum of money from his friend Miss Simmons in order participate with a group of young people in a game of cards called Commerce. He rejects her offer because his mentor, Mr. Barlow, has insisted that regardless of the terms in which one accepts assistance, one necessarily becomes prey to calculation and self-interest: “Mr. Barlow has always forbidden me to receive or borrow money of anybody for fear in the one case I should become mercenary or in the other dishonest.”30 Nothing therefore would have happened, nothing would have taken place, if Miss Simmons had not stipulated that he play on her “account.” But when the two are victorious over the others and Harry resigns from the game, declaring that “the whole undoubtedly belonged to her,” she refuses to accept the winnings, proposing instead that they divide it between them (HSM 295). Yet Harry remains true to his mentor’s principle. After angering the young people the following day by refusing to make a contribution to a joint present to be given to a “celebrated performer who at this time engaged the whole attention of the town,” Harry secretly donates the winnings, in Miss Simmons’s name, to “those who want it most”—the poor. In the braided logic of this episode, Harry challenges the commonsense assumption that one can give only what one has, only what one acknowledges as one’s own. The very paradox of giving what one does not possess, what

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properly belongs to another, is sufficient to disengage Harry from the structural positions of both donor and recipient. Honesty may be Harry’s reward, but he never acknowledges or recognizes the gift as his own. If he recognizes the gift as a gift, it is as Miss Simmons’s gift, not his. Nor would she ever have known of her “gift” to the poor, if she had not questioned Harry about it privately. On this basis, the episode seeks to depart from “the metaphysics of the gift” enunciated by Mr. Barlow. It also contests the premises of the young people who, in seeking to give a present to the performer, do so “in order to the show the taste and elegance of the giver” (HSM 295). The episode does not end with Harry’s secret donation of the winnings to the poor in Miss Simmons’s name. After learning what actually happened, Miss Simmons tells Harry, “I am only sorry you did not give it in your own name” (HSM 295). Harry’s reply, “I had not any right to do, it would have been attributing to myself what did not belong to me,” illustrates the lengths to which he is willing to go to avoid being caught up in what Derrida characterizes as a circuit of economic reappropriation (HSM 295). Ideally, a rigorous set of protocols must obtain. The donor should only give to the most worthy and when they least expect it, for the genuine gift should never be solicited. It follows that no benefit of any earthly kind should be countenanced, for even public approbation of the donor’s act is assumed to diminish the gift, which should therefore be made in secret and whenever possible on behalf of another. What is underscored in these attempts to reimagine the amatory gift and the pure gift is the difficulty in comprehending them through conventional categories of gift exchange. Under the influence of the traditional view of generosity, with its representative figures of the largely masculine donors and recipients, critics will be unequipped to deal with modes of exchange that link beneficence to libidinal desire and focus on transfers between men and women. The uncertainty, even anxiety, linked in eighteenth-century novels to the outcome of gifts would not be so strong if the relationships established, whether overtly erotic or wholly gratuitous, did not typically contain the possibility of exploitation and domination. The contrived character of many episodes in sentimental novels has led us to overlook their precarious and unstable nature. For while the pure gift might seem at first glance only to dramatize the generosity of the donor and passivity of the recipient, in reality it explores the uncertainty and ambiguity of the entire scenario. Exchanges that once depicted the transfer of a passive female object from one male or kinship group to another


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have become transformed into much more variable transfers between individuals. Even if the end result of such transfers is often conservative, promoting conventional gender roles and the patriarchal marriage, they should no longer be taken for granted.

Notes 1. Irigaray, “Women on the Market,” 170, 172. 2. There has been a debate as to when this transition actually occurred. In his seminal study, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500–1880, Lawrence Stone located the shift from a patriarchal alliance to a companionate marriage during the eighteenth century. Because of the scope and importance of Stone’s subject, his findings have been widely reviewed and often disputed. In his Marriage and Love in England, 1300–1800, for example, Alan Macfarlane pushes the change back to the thirteenth century. For a recent study of the subject in relation to the eighteenth-century novel, see Ruth Perry, Novel Relations. 3. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 209 (pt. 1, chap. 15). On Hobbes’s importance for the idea of the gift, see Marshall Sahlins, “The Spirit of the Gift.” 4. For the importance of patronage in the literary tradition of the eighteenth century, see Dustin Griffin, Literary Patronage. 5. Edmund Leach, Social Anthropology, 183. 6. Tobias Smollett, Adventures of Roderick Random, 425, 435; hereafter cited as RR. 7. Samuel Richardson, Pamela, ed. Keymer, 19. 8. Richardson, Clarissa, ed. Ross, 449. 9. Frances Burney, Evelina, 89; hereafter cited as E. 10. Smollett, Humphry Clinker, 154, 161, 166. 11. John Cleland, Memoirs of a Coxcomb, 53. 12. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 3–9. 13. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey, 94, 95; hereafter cited as SJ. 14. Mary Robinson, Walsingham, 248, 293, 296; hereafter cited as W. 15. Sarah Fielding, Adventures of David Simple, 155. 16. Eliza Haywood, Anti-Pamela, 177. 17. Henry Mackenzie, Man of Feeling, 71, 82. 18. Charlotte Lennox, Female Quixote, 89. 19. Haywood, Betsy Thoughtless, 109, 470. 20. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, 472, 475. 21. Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 98. 22. Daniel Defoe, Roxana, 35, 45. 23. Austen, Mansfield Park, 259, 301. 24. Jacques Derrida, Given Time, 11, 12, 14; hereafter cited as GT. 25. Bourdieu, “Marginalia,” 233, 254n. 26. Such strategies of disavowal are not uncommon in mid- and late-eighteenthcentury fiction. In Tom Jones, for example, the hero, as the beneficiary of a

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27.

28. 29.

30.

Charles Haskell Hinnant gift of fifty guineas from Lady Bellaston, authorizes Mrs. Miller to decide how much, if any, of the gift to offer to a family in dire need. Hence it is Mrs. Miller, not Jones, who makes the decision to give the family ten guineas out of the fifty rather than the entire amount. In Pride and Prejudice, if Elizabeth Bennet had not learned from others about Darcy’s intervention on behalf of Lydia, it would have represented a pure gift, in the sense that it would never have been known as a gift to its real recipient. Once Elizabeth learns of the motives behind his efforts, however, Darcy’s gift is annulled as a gift in the Derridean sense. Mark 12:41–4; Luke 21:1–4. In an early-nineteenth-century satirical essay on novel writing, published in The Artist (June 13, 1807), Elizabeth Inchbald directs the would-be author to “observe, that your hero and heroine be neither of them too bountiful. The prodigious sums of money which are given away every year in novels, ought, in justification, to be subject to the property tax; by which regulation, the national treasury, for every such book, would be highly benefited” (Inchbald, Nature and Art, 161). Frances Sheridan, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, 357–62. These responses seem to approach what Derrida has in mind when he holds that “for there to be a gift,” there must be “a forgetting of the gift” (GT 16, 17). In his famous sermon, “Philanthropy Recommended” (pub. 1760), Sterne confirms this tendency to self-forgetfulness when he states that “in benevolent natures the impulse to pity is so sudden, that like instruments of music which obey the touch—the objects which are fitted to excite such impression work so instantaneous an effect, that you would think the will was scarce concerned, that the mind was altogether passive in the sympathy which her own goodness has excited. The truth is,—the soul is generally in such cases so busily taken up and wholly engrossed by the object of pity, that she does not attend to her own operations, or take leisure to examine the principles upon which she acts” (SJ 235). Thomas Day, The History of Sandford and Merton, 244; cited as HSM in text.

8 Fictions of the Gift in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall Jennie Batchelor What I understand by society is a state of mutual confidence, reciprocal services, and correspondent affections; where numbers are thus united, there will be a free communication of sentiments, and we shall then find speech, that peculiar blessing given to man, a valuable gift indeed; but when we see it restrained by suspicion, or contaminated by detraction, we rather wonder that so dangerous a power was trusted with a race of beings, who seldom make a proper use of it. —Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall

In this familiar passage, Sarah Scott outlines a socioeconomic and a literary vision that had been many years in the making.1 Although A Description of Millenium Hall and the Country Adjacent (1762) offers the best-known articulation of Scott’s utopian hopes for women, society, and the novel, her earlier The History of Cornelia (1750) and A Journey through Every Stage of Life (1754) had imagined philanthropic schemes and ideal societies that foreshadow those elaborated in her more famous work. The novel’s sequel, The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), would similarly take up the themes of charitable activism and societal remodeling explored in these earlier texts by tracing its hero’s efforts to emulate Millenium Hall’s example in a series of projects, which prove, through fictional dramatization of authorial intent, the power of exemplary narrative to produce social and political change. However, Millenium Hall remains the

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most utopian of Scott’s novels in its vision of a self-sustaining economy ideologically and geographically distanced from the labor and marriage markets in which heroines commonly suffer. Here, women’s work—from philanthropy, domestic oeconomy, and teaching, to spinning and carpet making—is the currency of everyday life. Carried out for the “confidence” it inspires and the “affections” it produces, rather than for material gain, the women’s labor finds its reward in the exchange of “free” and transformative “speech,” bestowed by God but ordinarily “contaminated” by the self-interested desires of commercial society. “[S]peech,” in turn, links the activities of Scott’s heroines—it is the end to which their labors are the means—and the literary work of their author, whose disinterested, but “valuable,” “sentiments” are gifted to the reader in the form of the novel itself. In recent years a considerable body of scholarship has emerged in response to Scott’s utopian imagination, identifying its indebtedness to theories of the social contract and sentimental community, and analyzing the extent to which it is compromised by the author’s conservative class- and gender politics. 2 Questions surrounding the radicalism, or otherwise, of Millenium Hall’s economic outlook have been central to these studies but have failed to produce critical consensus. This essay aims to contribute to this ongoing debate by examining the moral and textual economies outlined in Millenium Hall within the interpretive framework Scott offers in my epigraph: that of the economics of the gift. To recognize the gift’s centrality to the novel is to question those accounts that have identified in it a capitalist, if also reformist, agenda. In particular, it qualifies Gary Kelly’s influential reading of Millenium Hall as the most fully realized articulation of the Bluestocking ideology of “gentry capitalism,” which sought to feminize and ameliorate—but not to undermine—“the socially and economically disruptive effects of capitalism and modernization,”3 for Millenium Hall does not easily accommodate itself to the logic of capitalism. As Ruth Perry claims, the novel reads more convincingly as an effort “to undo,” rather than to endorse, “market values.”4 Perry’s reading has been further elaborated by Judith Still. Still’s short but suggestive reading of Millenium Hall as a reflection upon, and partial corrective to, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie (1761)—in which the utopian aspirations of the Clarens community are undercut by its dependence upon waged labor—is compelling. So, too, is her argument that the novel’s “economics of beneficence” anticipates twentieth-century feminist arguments for the gift’s role as an alternative to patriarchal economic systems.5 Curiously, Still’s arguments have

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failed to have much impact upon studies of Scott’s work.6 However, as my epigraph suggests, the gift is central to Millenium Hall’s argument that a community structured according to the logic of disinterested, uncommodified exchange can best satisfy women’s emotional and intellectual needs. Indeed, the gift economy, I suggest, structures not only the community within the novel but also the metatextual community Scott imagines to exist between author and reader, both of whom are obliged to work for the common good through the production, consumption, and exchange of the gift of fiction itself. In making these arguments, this essay aims to develop and complicate Still’s account of Millenium Hall. It seeks to illustrate the scope and limits of the novel’s utopianism, and to contest the utopianism of Still’s account of the novel’s community as one in which “beneficiaries . . . learn to be benefactors in their turn” by learning “the pleasures of equality and reciprocity” (FE 114, 116). To read the text as a realization of the gift’s radical potential is, I argue, to represent the novel’s aspirations, not its achievements. For Scott’s project in Millenium Hall is much like Still’s in her Feminine Economies (1997): an effort to appropriate an idealized notion of the gift to empower those— that is, women and the laboring classes—traditionally exploited by the misapplication of its logic and language. However, closer scrutiny of the gift economy, as imagined and realized by Scott, gives the lie to, rather than justifies, faith in its transformative possibilities, particularly for those middle-ranking dependent women with whom the novel is primarily concerned. Indeed, Millenium Hall’s failure to achieve the model of equitable, disinterested exchange to which it aspires suggests that its construction of the gift is little more than a utopian fantasy, unworkable outside the economy of fiction itself.

“The Reciprocal Communication of Benefits” Gift economy, understood as a series of reciprocal exchanges between individuals, families, or tribes in pre- or anticapitalist cultures, suggests that society can be described by “a catalogue of transfers that map all the obligations between its members.”7 According to Marcel Mauss, these obligations can be divided into three related categories: the obligation to give, the obligation to receive, and the obligation to reciprocate. The exchange of gifts encodes these obligations and, in the process, forges relationships between individuals and kinship or tribal groups that stand outside the logic of the market. Within such societies, gifts are exchanged not for economic gain, although they

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may generate wealth indirectly, but in recognition of the “contractual morality” that binds the gift economy.8 If, as Phebe Lowell Bowditch has argued, a market economy “allows for the liquidation of the relationship between the contracting parties,” because it can establish relationships only between the objects of exchange, then that of the gift “(ideally) serves to create social bonds” between giving subjects. Within the gift society, exchange exists outside the commodity form elucidated by Marx.9 Bowditch’s parenthetical “ideally” is significant, gesturing as it does to the skepticism with which the gift has been viewed by commentators including Georges Bataille, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, and Luce Irigaray.10 Particularly difficult to sustain, for these theorists, is the notion of disinterestedness that inflects more utopian accounts of the gift as an alternative to capitalism.11 Even Still, who eloquently argues for retaining faith in the gift’s radical possibilities, acknowledges that “the more strictly the gift is understood (as outside the economic), the harder it is to imagine a giving subject” (FE 13). For behind the giver’s disinterested benevolence may lie compelling incentives to power and gain. The heightened “symbolic capital,” as Bourdieu terms it, generated by the giving of gifts approximates, even while it appears to define itself in opposition to, economic capital because it too confers authority and status upon the giver.12 And as Cynthia Klekar points out, “a gift already is a commodity prior to its recognition as a gift, always. Gift economy can only disguise the calculation and negotiation that informs all economic practices. . . . Rather than enacting a reciprocal and balanced exchange, gift giving provokes an ongoing negotiation of values.”13 Millenium Hall stands in a complex relationship to these debates about the gift’s status. While the novel aspires to an idealized notion of equitable exchange, it is all too aware that the discourse of the gift is susceptible to corruption by those who would appropriate its logic to serve repressive political and economic ideologies.14 Scott’s fiction as a whole is acutely aware of the deceptions practiced upon marginalized groups—particularly women and the laboring class—in the name of misplaced ideals of obligation and beneficence. As Linda Zionkowski points out, the eighteenth-century ethos of the gift was most apparent in paternalist and philanthropic discourses, which emphasized the moral and financial obligations the propertied owed the propertyless.15 That these same discourses naturalized the poor’s and laboring classes’ subjugation—their deference functioning as the return for benefactions received—is a problematic with which Scott’s


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fiction is much concerned. The principle of reciprocal exchange, her novels reveal, is only as disinterested as the ideology it is called upon to uphold. Where George Ellison, Millenium Hall’s narrator and the hero of its sequel, will appeal to the notion of “reciprocal services” to argue for social and economic reform, his cousin, Sir William, will deploy the same terms to justify material inequality: “without subordination and distinctions society must be destroyed.”16 If Scott’s novels reveal how concepts of obligation could be exploited to mask injustice as paternalism, they signal also the ease with which such notions could be misappropriated to naturalize women’s subjugation. In “The History of Miss Mancel, and Mrs. Morgan,” the first of Millenium Hall’s inset narratives, Scott elucidates the difference between such willful misunderstandings of the gift and genuine and mutually beneficial acts of giving. Mr. Hintman’s “lavish” showering of books and money upon Louisa Mancel, a young girl whom he “receive[s] . . . as his child” following her aunt’s death, seems initially to be motivated only by kindness (MH 90, 82). Childless himself, it seems natural that he should make better use of his “ample fortune” by aiding Louisa and enjoying, in return, the “pleasure” of her “affectation and gratitude” (MH 82, 91). It is clear to the reader, however, that the pleasures Hintman seeks are, in fact, selfish, and that the obligation he forces upon her will lead to her destruction if acceded to. Louisa narrowly escapes destruction by the gift; her friend, Miss Melvyn, is less fortunate. Miss Melvyn stands for many of Scott’s heroines when she is torn between her desire to “labour for a subsistence” and her stepmother’s demand that she “sacrifice her peace” by giving “the gift of her hand” to a man she does not love. Lacking agency within the domestic economy, Miss Melvyn determines to fulfill her “duty” to “society” and her “station” by marrying Mr. Morgan (MH 127). But the “gift” bestowed—not just her body, but her self—carries too high a price, its value exceeding the debt owed to her position. Her husband “forbid[s]” her to see Louisa, to whom she is connected as the “soul” is to the “body” (MH 130–1). Only when Mr. Morgan dies are the women reunited and his wife’s “constitution” restored (MH 157–8). If, as Scott demonstrates here, the construction of women as gifts accords them status only as objects of exchange—or as Irigaray would put it, as “commodities”—then their role as giving subjects within commercial society fails to grant them agency either. As feminist critiques from Scott to Irigaray remind us, women are perceived as “natural” givers, whose services as mothers, daughters, caregivers, or, in a common eighteenth-century formulation, as agents of charity, have

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traditionally been undervalued because they have been understood not as work but as gifts.17 Society’s exploitation of women’s domestic labor is explored throughout Scott’s fiction, but nowhere more vividly than in the story of George Ellison’s Mrs. Alton, an inhabitant of Millenium Hall whom the hero encounters when revisiting the institution in the 1766 sequel. A victim of a patrilineal inheritance system, which leaves her destitute following her father’s death, Mrs. Alton is forced to work as a housekeeper, nurse, and cook for her brother and his ever pregnant wife, who exploit her skills despite their embarrassment at their reliance upon her servitude. Deeply invested, like the patriarchal economy itself, in rendering women’s work invisible, the couple expects Mrs. Alton to dine with them despite having prepared their meal, and forces her to “huddle on [her] cloaths in the little intervals the office of cook would allow” when company is present (GE 103). Mrs. Alton is all too painfully aware that her situation represents no “balance between obligations conferred and repaid.” Treated as a “slave, and yet reproached as a burden,” she demands “payment” for her “services” (GE 105), but receives only nominal monetary “presents” from her brother, given in secret (GE 107). While these gifts tacitly acknowledge her work’s value, they are worthless in real terms: “the utmost [she] could save would not have amounted to a sum sufficient to maintain [her], even if [she] lived there to old age” (GE 107). Mrs. Alton may live in relative “affluence” in servitude, but outside this oppressive economy she faces only “poverty,” until she is “enfranchis[ed]” by her admission into Millenium Hall (GE 107–8). The ease with which the language of the gift is exploited to secure Mrs. Alton’s dependency confirms Klekar’s assertion that “in capitalist society the gift acts as a means to deny and conceal economic injustices that lie at the heart of the system.”18 Where such a society deploys the language of gifts, presents, duties, and obligations to secure and mask women’s “bondage” (GE 107), Millenium Hall attempts to articulate a language and practice of unfettered gift exchange that will ensure their liberation. Ironically, it is Hintman’s manipulative bestowal of presents that first alerts the community’s founders to the benefits that the gift economy might confer upon women. As a child, Louisa learns that the receipt of gifts obliges her to pass them on to others, and, thus, she attempts to “treat” Miss Melvyn “with masters for music and drawing, and such other things as she knew she had an inclination to learn” (MH 92). The latter refuses Louisa’s generosity, for fear of taking “advantage” of her friend’s “youth” (MH 93) and in recognition of the fact—confirmed by Hintman’s subsequent attempts to seduce


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Louisa—that the dispensation of gifts produces imbalances of power when given between parties of unequal age, status, or sex. However, when gifts are exchanged between equals and friends, the women learn, they break down “boundaries and barriers” (MH 93). Miss Melvyn grows to accept that “the greatest proof of a noble mind is to feel a joy in gratitude” and to “share the gratification of a benefactor.” Thus the receiver of a favor from a truly generous person, “by owing owes not, and is at once indebted and discharged” (MH 93–4). This model of equitable exchange, in which the beneficiary is simultaneously a benefactor, characterizes the women’s utopian understanding of the gift and structures the community they later found. In Millenium Hall, all live in a state of “mutual confidence, reciprocal services, and correspondent affections”; gifts are given freely and their value is appreciated. The lame Susan spins for Rachel, who, in turn, “does such things for her as she cannot do for herself” (MH 66); the “monsters” cultivate the finest flowers to adorn the Hall in exchange for their mistress’s benefactions (MH 75); the “sisterhood” of Millenium Hall visits and instructs the laborers in the satellite communities in return for their liberation from dependency (MH 118). Unlike Mrs. Alton’s exploited domestic labors, such voluntary services are gifts in the purest sense since they are not “undertaken on a pure cost-benefit basis,” and “because their products are not commodities, not things we can easily price or willingly alienate.”19 By laying bare the difference between authentic and exploitative economic systems, Millenium Hall reveals that the gift serves women only when the cultural and economic value of the work they perform is recognized by the society that benefits from it. The Millenium Hall community accords such recognition in various ways, notably in the community’s carpet factory, where workers enjoy “great wages” paid in accordance with need rather than productivity. All of the factory laborers live “in a condition of proper plenty,” but the young and old earn more than their stronger brethren “as a proper encouragement, and reward for industry in those seasons of life in which it is so uncommon” (MH 243–4). The moral economy governing the factory’s labor practices proves not only just but financially viable. However, the novel is clear that the profits generated are secondary to the “higher” work the factory makes possible: the establishment of “a fund for the sick and disabled” from which laborers can draw in “perpetuity” (MH 247). Such anticapitalist practices are, initially, beyond the grasp of the “mercantile” Ellison (MH 54). Although he acknowledges that the management of the estate by its previous owners—two squires

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who grew rich while their laborers struggled to “keep life and soul together” (MH 65)—was unjust and inefficient, he views the system the women introduce with incredulity. Hearing that the community’s spinners interrupt their work to teach the children of the local poor to knit and spin, for example, he responds that this must “lessen their profits” (MH 67). Defining profit and loss solely in economic terms (MH 54), Ellison is forced to reassess these indicators of value within the context of the moral economy of the gift. The volume of wool the women spin is secondary, he learns, to their teaching the children the means of earning a subsistence; their manual labor is simply a service performed in exchange for the “meat, drink, and firing” they receive from the community’s founders. Should they fail to produce sufficient wool to employ the “poor old weaver” who works it up for the spinners’ clothing, the founders simply “put more to it,” for they recognize that true profit is generated when the gift of benevolence they bestow is passed on, as the logic of the gift dictates it must be (MH 67). Challenging those political economists who argued that necessity was a vital spur to industry, the community ensures that its members are “set above bodily wants”; the women work for “mental enjoyments” rather than for corporeal comfort (MH 110, 111). 20 Millenium Hall’s almost puritanical denial of bodily pleasure has commonly, and understandably, been read as too high a price to pay for women’s emancipation from market economics. 21 However, the potential leveling effect of the novel’s situating of happiness, and selfhood, in the mind is key to its claims for the gift’s utopian possibilities. Although the society members’ activities differ according to their rank, the common status of their services as gifts suggests that the community values them as equivalents. Where the Hall’s founders undertake philanthropic and pedagogical schemes, those who lack their financial and intellectual resources find an alternative to philanthropy in “labour,” through which they can dispense “God’s . . . bounty” (MH 244). Moreover, whatever the worker’s rank, the gifts she receives in return for the services she performs—the “free communication of sentiments,” “benevolence,” and “friendship” (MH 110)—are equal to those enjoyed by all other community members. That the community believes these noble “sentiments” can be experienced by even the most deracinated of women is evident in the story of the “monsters” whose “inclosure” arouses the travelers’ curiosity. Ellison and Lamont discover that, upon entering Millenium Hall, the group avoided contact with other community members and “confine[d] themselves within so narrow a compass” that they “enjoyed but


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precarious health.” Gradually, however, the founders encourage the group to think of themselves not as “slaves” but as autonomous subjects who consolidate community through the exchange of gifts (MH 72–5). They are persuaded to visit other society members, whom they “entertain” with “fruit and wine,” and learn to “assist” their “neighbours in plain work, thus to endear them, and procure more frequent visits.” Through such interactions, they avoid the objectification they endured in a market economy that cast them as “public spectacles” because their “deformity” rendered them otherwise “redundan[t]” as domestic and economic subjects (MH 75). Thus “enfranchised” (MH 73), the women become socialized to the extent that their “conversation”— community’s ultimate gift—becomes “much courted” (MH 75). The labors of the “monsters,” like those of the spinners and community’s founders, find their reward in a form of utopian sociability that allows for the cultivation of modes of subjectivity and agency unattainable in a world governed by commercial interest.

The Fiction of the Gift Where the Hall’s founders cast their society as a site of liberty, its critics, following the original critic in the text, Lamont, have detected tyranny by another name. Far from enfranchising its members, the rake argues, the community simply makes individuals “slaves to one another” (MH 112). This (mis)reading of the society’s economic structure serves, like Ellison’s (mis)understanding of its labor practices, to indicate the extent of the society’s opposition to the market values he and his fellow traveler espouse. Confusing gifts and goods, Lamont argues that “reciprocal communication is impossible,” since those without means (the “poor” and presumably the deformed) cannot provide service for those of status, and are therefore unable “to return the obligation” owed to their benefactors and betters. However, Lamont’s apparent misunderstanding of the gift is far more incisive than the novel can allow, for he realizes, as Klekar observes, that “a gift already is a commodity prior to its recognition,” and therefore equitable, disinterested exchange is a fallacy. Mrs. Mancel’s account of the benefits conferred by the community’s members fails to counter the rake’s suspicion that the gift is a convenient fiction crafted to mask various cultural, social, and economic ideologies. In the balance sheet of life, she insists, the dependent classes possess greater credit and giving potential, since they have the power to gift their “poverty” to those who can relieve them. Pushing the language of gift exchange

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to its limits, she argues that in giving those with means the “opportunity of relieving [them],” the dependent are “much obliged . . . to that poverty, which enables [them] to obtain so great a gratification” from their indebted superiors (MH 113). Still reads this passage as evidence that the community “lay[s] aside pretensions of superiority” in favor of “the pleasures of equality and reciprocity” (FE 114–6). To do so, however, she has to omit the rather uncomfortable sentences that follow the quotation cited above: “The greatest pleasure this world can give us is that of being beloved. . . . Did you ever see any one that was not fond of a dog that fondled him?” (MH 113). Foreshadowing Lewis Hyde’s notion of the “tyranny of the gift”—exerted in societies where the bonding power of generosity is exploited to enforce social obligation (TG 137)—Mrs. Mancel’s comments suggest that Millenium Hall owes more to the logic of contractualism, with its emphasis upon mutual, but inequitable, rights and responsibilities, than to the notion of reciprocal exchange. Her insistence upon community members’ gratitude conveniently elides moral and economic motives. The society’s founders may argue that the volume of work produced by its members is less important than the fact that they labor, but their workers’ gratitude guarantees their productivity nonetheless: it is “gratitude” that “makes [them] exert [them]selves to the utmost” (MH 169). But even if gratitude did not ensure the women’s productivity, the community’s founders would, nonetheless, be amply repaid. In an argument that counters the novel’s claims for the necessity and value of women’s work, Mrs. Mancel implies that community members can return the obligations owed to their deliverers without active service: their thankfulness is gift enough. At this key moment in the text, the logic of the gift falters, becoming indistinguishable from the exploitative logic of obligation the novel seeks to overwrite. Mrs. Mancel’s comments are consistent with readings of the novel that emphasize Scott’s adoption of, in Kelly’s words, a “version of Whig paternalism in the senatorial republican tradition, designed to sustain a beneficent hierarchical order that would ensure social stability.”22 However, they are fundamentally at odds with the ethos of equitable exchange that the founders claim underpins the gift economy. It is important to note, also, that they are not wholly consistent with the workings of the community itself, which serves, and is served by, its laboring women in more profound ways than Mrs. Mancel allows. The novel is clear that gratitude is only one of many benefits conferred by the community’s laboring women and is, in isolation,


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insufficient to guarantee their place within it. The Hall’s founders demand not, in fact, that these women be grateful—although they take pleasure in the women’s thankfulness—but that they give service to the community through labor: “if [they] are not idle that is all that they desire” (MH 67). Here, laboring-class women receive not charity—which, as Hyde indicates, is antithetical to the ethos of the gift—but justice. 23 The description of the harsh conditions in which the spinners live before entering the Hall—without “rags to cover us, or a morsel of bread to eat” (MH 65)—makes clear that the comforts they enjoy are not the fruits of unwarranted generosity, and therefore deserving of blind gratitude, but an appropriate return for work undertaken. As a consequence, and in spite of the strategies the founders deploy to regulate their conduct, these formerly deracinated women become autonomous subjects as surrogate “mothers” to the girls they teach, “friends” to their “relations,” and “sisters” to their fellow-workers (MH 66–7). Millenium Hall’s emphasis on labor is typical of the utopian tradition, which, as Still suggests, posits “that all members of society should be, and feel themselves to be, productive members of the economy” (FE 94). But the novel’s recuperation of female labor as gift also limits its utopian potential by denying those middle-ranking women, ill equipped to give service, meaningful roles. Female laborers can be accommodated more easily by the society because they already possess the gifts—the capacity to work in diverse roles—that the community calls upon. By contrast, the dependents housed near the Hall achieve a more circumscribed agency. If these “in some measure voluntary slaves” are “unqualified to gain a maintenance” in society, they are also unable to participate in the community’s “reciprocal communication of benefits” because they have little to offer beyond the “discontent, malignity, [and] ill humour” produced by “scantiness of fortune,” “pride of family,” and an “idle mind” (MH 115–6). That middle-ranking dependent women are as much a problem in the utopia as they are in the market economy they have fled is made clear in George Ellison, when the hero returns to the Hall and visits “those ladies” the community “had removed from a state of mortifying dependence.” Here an inmate explains: We are indeed dependent, but . . . here dependence exists without those chains and fetters which render it more galling than the oppressions of the most indigent, but free, poverty. When we see our benefactresses feel such true joy in bestowing, it would be ingratitude even to wish not to receive at their hands; in accepting their bounty, we seem to confer an

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obligation, and do in reality confer a benefit, by being the cause of so much refined pleasure to them. (GE 101)

The speaker is Mrs. Alton, and these comments precede the account of her life discussed above. Read together, these reflections establish the scope and bounds of Scott’s utopian economics. Her novels attempt to redefine the terms of women’s oppression—dependence, obligation, and so forth—within the context of a gift economy that interprets these behavioral codes as pleasurable and reciprocal responsibilities. However, the fiction of the gift, as revealed by Mrs. Alton, is that the impoverished middle-ranking women she represents—like the grateful dogs they resemble, more nearly than their laboring counterparts— enjoy any more freedom here than in society at large. In the Hall, as in her brother’s house, Mrs. Alton’s gift is to perform the cultural work of dependence. Reading Mrs. Alton’s story in terms of gift theory raises similar questions to those provoked by efforts to read Scott’s work in terms of other economic paradigms: to what extent does the imagined utopia offer a viable alternative to the problems women face in the labor and marriage markets, and if so, for whom and at what cost? An analysis of the text in terms of the economics of the gift produces rather different conclusions, however. Most insistently, it indicates that Millenium Hall’s failure, within the terms in which it presents itself, lies not in its treatment of laboring-class women—although much more might be said of the novel’s coercive class agenda than is possible here—but in its inability to imagine dependent middle-ranking women as agents within the utopia. In part, this failure is one of language. The proximity of the vocabulary that inscribes the gift economy to that of obligation presents Scott with a problem from which her novels cannot extricate themselves. The “gift” of “speech” enjoyed by community members proves to be as “contaminated” as it is in the competitive, Hobbesian world the community rejects, because it too is already polluted by patriarchal and commercial ideologies. Characters such as Mrs. Alton have internalized notions of gift, duty, and service as constructed by the market to such an extent that they cannot articulate themselves as anything other than indebted objects, destined to receive more than they can give. But this problematic is one of logic as well as language. Too genteel to give service and too poor to bestow gifts, the community’s middle-ranking dependents, unlike their laboring counterparts, participate in the utopian economy only by recognizing their deliverance as a gift, and, thus, by affording their


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benefactors “pleasure.” Such recognition, as Derrida suggests, annihilates the gift’s liberating power, leaving only debt and obligation. 24 Having exchanged one form of “mortifying dependence” for another (GE 101), these women experience the gift as an enticing fiction, rather than a lived reality.

The Gift of Fiction Millenium Hall’s betrayal of the gift’s fictionality has important implications for its political argument and for its metatextual claims for the novel’s status as gift. That gift exchange can provide a useful model for understanding the production and circulation of literary texts has been noted by several critics, including Bowditch, Hyde, and Angela Keane, and has more far-reaching implications than can be fully investigated here.25 For Hyde, for example, the gift paradigm provides a vital corrective to scholarship that emphasizes the power of a market that threatens always to commodify literary artifacts. Although Hyde recognizes that artworks may exist simultaneously in the market and the gift economy, he contends that only the latter is essential: “where there is no gift, there is no art” (TG xi). Hyde’s defense of the undervalued cultural work of the imagination is expressed in familiar eighteenth-century terms. In a passage that is as reminiscent of Frances Burney’s abandoned introduction to Cecilia (1782)—in which the “Gift” of “Genius” writes itself upon the novelist’s mind—as it is of P. B. Shelley’s description of the poet as Aeolian harp in A Defence of Poetry (1821), Hyde suggests that hard graft cannot make a great artwork, which is “bestowed upon” a creator whose intellectual labors merely perfect it.26 Artworks are therefore gifts in two senses, according to Hyde’s formulation: a gift received from a mysterious creative force, which activates the artist’s imagination, and a gift given by the artist to the public in material form.27 Thus passed on, “the spirit of [the] artist’s gifts” can awaken the recipients’ own by encouraging them to emulate the artist’s genius and, through emulation, to pass on this priceless gift to others (TG xii). The textual economy imagined in Millenium Hall—structured as it is according to the same antimarket principles that organize the utopian community itself—foreshadows that outlined by Hyde. The account of the narrative’s generation provided in its advertisement, title page, and opening paragraphs carefully labors to distance the novel from the conventional economics of literary production. Written without financial motive, and with an eye to “general use,” the text

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is presented as a letter by a gentleman to a publisher-friend, in whose hands the narrative’s “fate” lies (MH 54). Indeed, Ellison disclaims any right to approbation or profit from the work on the grounds that he is the tale’s “spectator and auditor,” not its progenitor (MH 54). That this elaborate conceit is an attempt to situate Millenium Hall within the moral sphere of the gift rather than the mercenary world of the literary marketplace becomes clearer in the novel’s opening paragraphs. Drawing heavily upon the language of the gift, Ellison offers the text, which was “promised” even before it was conceived, in acknowledgement of the obligation “due” to a friend who has endeavored “to inculcate the best principles into youthful minds” (MH 53). Ellison’s narrative strives for more than simply a consolidation of the gentlemen’s relationship, however. Aspiring to the “great end of benefiting the world,” his text will encourage receptive readers— upon whose minds “any characters may be engraven”—to emulate the community’s example (MH 54). Ellison’s traditional representation of the reader’s mind as tabula rasa belies a complex dynamic that is central to Millenium Hall: the power of narrative to produce readers in its own image. 28 Scott’s utopian vision for the novel sees it operating within a textual economy that imitates the circular logic of the gift: if the work of writing, like the labors undertaken by the Millenium Hall community, is understood as a gift, then its value lies in its urging of those who receive its benefactions to respond in kind by imitating its example. This metatextual claim for the novel’s self-replicating power is fantastically realized within the text by both Lamont’s and Ellison’s reactions to the community. In the novel’s closing pages, Lamont is figured as an ideal reader upon whose mind the community’s ethos is writ large. Won over by the women’s “conduct,” he turns to the New Testament to “study precepts, which could . . . exalt human nature almost to divine” (MH 248), thus fulfilling the author’s hopes that her text might “excite in the READER proper Sentiments of Humanity, and lead the Mind to the Love of VIRTUE” (MH title page). Ellison, though less in need of improvement, benefits similarly from his encounter with the community. Now in possession of the gift of a narrative untainted by “mercantile” competition, Ellison considers himself “fortunate” to be able to communicate his description to others who might “imitate” the community’s projects, albeit on a smaller “scale” (MH 249). Scott presents Lamont and Ellison as proof that the proliferation of benefits Millenium Hall imagines is achievable if readers acknowledge their obligation to offer some return for the narrative gift they


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receive. But outside the idealized and classless textual economy the novel constructs—the text is explicitly exchanged between friends and equals—the logic of the gift falters again. For Millenium Hall’s author, life failed to imitate art. Where George Ellison would see the hero emulating the utopian community through a series of philanthropic projects aimed at the laboring classes, the aged, the young, and the infirm, Scott failed to fulfill her ambition to establish real-life communities along the lines of those imagined in her fiction. The money made from Millenium Hall and George Ellison proved insufficient to maintain communities at Batheaston, from which she was forced to move in 1762, the year of Millenium Hall’s publication, and Hitcham, in Buckinghamshire, which was abandoned in late 1768. Unable to escape the fetters of obligation, Scott remained precariously dependent upon the generosity of relatives, friends, and her writing career for financial support until her death in 1795.29 Her biography confirms what her novel implies in its myriad contradictions: in a society tainted by commerce, and predicated upon distinctions of rank and gender, the gift is an impossibility. That the gift of Millenium Hall’s example can be passed on only within the realm of the novel, is, I have suggested, one indicator among many that the utopian model of the gift the text constructs is itself a fiction. The novel’s reconceptualization of women’s work according to the gift paradigm clearly confers benefits upon the community’s monstrous and laboring women, particularly by breaking down the insidious link between (re)productivity and worth established by the market. Yet it does little to help those middle-ranking women whose sense of self remains obstinately conceived in terms of obligations that are different in kind, but not in degree, from those they are expected to fulfill outside the institution. The historic and exploitative connection between women and the gift proves resistant to the ambitious reevaluation Scott attempts, further evidence that, as Irigaray suggested, the “economy of exchange” serves only to exploit women. If the utopian hopes of Millenium Hall are “limited,” as the title of Vincent Carretta’s 1992 article states, then it is important to recognize that those limits are marked off not only by Scott’s political conservatism, but by the intractable logic of the gift itself, overburdened as it is by centuries of misapplication. Reading Millenium Hall in terms of the economics of the gift urges a reassessment of the scope and bounds of Scott’s vision; it also demands a rethinking of what, if anything, the gift has to offer women.

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Notes The author thanks Megan Hiatt, Donna Landry, and Sarah Moss for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay. 1. Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall, 111; hereafter cited as MH. 2. On Scott and contractualism, see Alessa Johns, Women’s Utopias. On sentimental notions of community, see Mary Peace, “Epicures in Rural Pleasures.” On the limits of the novel’s utopianism, see Ruth Perry, “Bluestockings in Utopia,” and Vincent Carretta’s “Utopia Limited.” 3. Gary Kelly, “Bluestocking Feminism,” 167. 4. Perry, “Bluestockings in Utopia,” 162, 175. 5. Judith Still, Feminine Economies, 108–21; hereafter cited as FE. 6. Johns briefly addresses the relationship between Scott’s fiction and gift theory, arguing that her account of the gift as a “polite fiction” (Women’s Utopias 106) anticipates that of Marcel Mauss. Here, however, I want to emphasize Scott’s (misplaced) belief that the gift might be divested of such fictions to fulfill its utopian potential. 7. Mary Douglas, foreword to Marcel Mauss, The Gift, xi. 8. Mauss, The Gift, 4. 9. Phebe Lowell Bowditch, Horace and the Gift Economy, 48–9. The question of whether uncommodified exchange can exist in a capitalist or postcapitalist society is discussed below. 10. See Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure”; Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Pratice; Jacques Derrida, Given Time; and Luce Irigaray, “Women on the Market.” 11. Mauss does not deny self-interest’s role within the gift economy, noting that the voluntary giving of gifts invariably masks “constrained and selfinterested” motives. However, since Mauss is concerned with societies that existed “before the invention of traders” and “money proper,” the nature of this interest is different in kind from that pursued by commercial peoples (The Gift 5). 12. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 112–34. 13. Cynthia Klekar, “Her Gift Was Compelled,” 114. 14. The novel’s blindness to its complicity with such ideologies is explored below. 15. See Linda Zionkowski’s essay in this volume, “The Nation, the Gift, and the Market in The Wanderer.” 16. Scott, The History of Sir George Ellison, 16, 78; hereafter cited as GE. 17. On women and charity, see Klekar, “Her Gift Was Compelled.” For feminist critiques of the gift, see, for example, Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One; and Hélène Cixous, “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays.” 18. Klekar, “Her Gift Was Compelled,” 122. 19. Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, 106; hereafter cited as TG. 20. On political economists’ understanding of the relationship of necessity and labor, see Donna T. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police, 141.


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21. See, for example, Peace, “Epicures in Rural Pleasures,” and Dorice Williams Elliott, The Angel out of the House, 33–53. 22. Kelly, “Bluestocking Feminism,” 169. 23. Charity has no place in the gift economy, Hyde suggests, because if it fails genuinely to raise a beneficiary, “then it’s just a decoy” that reinforces the class boundaries the gift economy should efface (TG 137–8). 24. Derrida, Given Time, 12. 25. See Angela Keane, “The Market, the Public and the Female Author.” 26. Frances Burney, Cecilia, 944. 27. The creative force Hyde identifies, here, is equivalent to Mauss’s hau—the gift’s inherent power to force reciprocation (The Gift 11–12). 28. See Jennie Batchelor, “Woman’s Work.” 29. See Betty Rizzo, Companions Without Vows, 295–319.


9 The Nation, the Gift, and the Market in The Wanderer Linda Zionkowski But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. —Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Set in the year 1794 at the height of the Reign of Terror, Frances Burney’s The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties appears to replicate Burke’s dichotomy between the English and French nations: the novel’s plot centers on two divergent, even antagonistic types of exchange that oppose the gift—a manifestation of Burke’s “unbought grace of life” that beautifies social relations—to the market, which serves as the prime arena for economists and calculators.1 In the first transaction, Lady Juliet Granville, an orphaned English aristocrat raised and educated in France, unwillingly marries a French commissary so that her guardian, a bishop, may escape execution by the Revolutionary tribunal. Her self-sacrifice is presented as a gift expressing bonding value, defined by Jacques Godbout as “what an object, a service, a particular act, is worth in the world of ties and their reinforcement.”2 Juliet’s action in the “world of ties” fundamentally contrasts with her self-interest: by marrying the commissary, she not only places herself

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in bondage to a brutal husband but also forgoes the opportunity to claim recognition as her father’s heir—and with it the whole extent of her dowry, which amounts to 30,000 pounds. Instead, the exchange brings her nothing in return except the bishop’s anguished praise for the generosity of his “more than daughter.”3 The gift economy evoked by Juliet’s action entails a refusal “of the spirit of calculation and the exclusive pursuit of material (as opposed to symbolic) interest”; her behavior is understandable principally in terms of what Pierre Bourdieu calls symbolic capital—“a capital of recognition, honor, nobility”—which accrues only for those agents possessing a subjectivity “adjusted to the logic of ‘disinterestedness’ ” and thus capable of sacrificing themselves for others.4 Juliet’s actions testify to her status as an Englishwoman and an aristocrat, for she preserves the affective, chivalric sensibility supposedly abandoned by Frenchmen imbued with the “mechanic philosophy” of self-interested reason.5 The second transaction in the novel bears the hallmarks of a different economy altogether. Mocking Juliet’s filial attachment to the bishop, the commissary “swore that he would marry her, and her six thousand pounds” (W 740), which is the inheritance that her grandfather, Earl Melbury—infuriated at his son’s mésalliance—allowed to her from her deceased father’s estate. Clearly more interested in the money than in the wife, the commissary bullies Juliet into marriage by showing her the executions taking place on the scaffold, with the bishop awaiting his turn. Juliet’s exchange from father to husband—traditionally viewed as a gift transaction establishing new bonds between families—is refashioned by the revolutionaries as a wholly mercenary act, void of any significance save the transfer of Earl Melbury’s promissory note to the commissary: the civil ceremony “mockingly” replaces the sacred exchange of vows, the couple never consummate the union, and Juliet’s own family members label as “chimerical” the validity of the marriage (W 856, 852). In the context of the revolutionaries’ new commercial order, Juliet herself visibly becomes a commodity whose value is determined by her grandfather’s signature on the note, and even assumes the properties of a commodity: the presence of her husband robs her of agency, activity, and consciousness as she falls silent and grows “nearly lifeless” (W 731) on the occasions when he claims her as his wife.6 Dispensing with affective attachment, the revolutionaries turn a gift relation into a blatantly commercial act, transforming women into objects of exchange while erasing their subjectivity. For the commissary, Juliet is equivalent to no more than the dowry that she brings; by contrast, while it leads to

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her exile and persecution, Juliet’s role in the gift economy allows her a measure of agency and authority. With the dichotomy it portrays between the (English) gift and the (French) commodity, The Wanderer participates in the debate governing late-eighteenth-century discourse on political economy. Defined as a valorized system of transactions that fosters social ties between the propertied classes and the lower ranks, the moral (or gift) economy of Burney’s time was most obviously embodied in paternalism, whose structure of dominance and subordination, entitlement and deference was enacted through rituals of mutual obligation that united classes and individuals.7 The principal challenge to this system arose from liberal economic theory and its declaration of the necessity for unregulated, unrestricted exchanges of commodities (including labor power) in order to insure economic growth, defined as the most efficient and productive investment of capital. In describing the opposition between moral and market economies in terms of the national characteristics of warring nations, The Wanderer articulates a fundamental disjunction between a system that defines individuals as agents “with no obligations other than those which are self-imposed,” and one in which selfhood develops as individuals enact their roles within a circuit of obligation.8 Yet at the same time, the novel repeatedly erodes the distinction it draws between the “English” model of paternalism and the “French” model of nascent capitalism, along with the preference it apparently gives to the former. While the individualistic pursuit of profit and advancement inspires Juliet’s French husband, a lesser degree of self-reliance, or “self exertion,” becomes the motto for Juliet’s own conduct as well; escaping her enforced marriage by journeying incognito across the Channel requires her to think, act, and provide for her own welfare, since few of her English hosts are inclined to do so. And although The Wanderer endorses the paternalistic ideal of mutual dependence while criticizing the market’s disruption of customary social ties, the narrative also reveals the failure of the English elite to make good on its promises of support for the dependent and the powerless. Finally, as a woman and a dispossessed aristocrat with ties both to England and France, Juliet is incompletely inscribed within the systems of the gift and the commodity alike: her sex compromises her status as an agent with labor power to sell, her class position undermines her ability to perform the role of client, and her hybrid identity complicates her allegiance to a single set of national customs.

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(English)Men and the Problem of the Gift Taking the view of the elite classes, Samuel Johnson confidently asserted that “order cannot be had but by subordination,” for “[t]here is a reciprocal pleasure in governing and being governed.”9 Yet pleasure alone could not sustain this system. As late as 1829, a contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine and Tory proponent of class hierarchy admitted that “[those in authority] hold their power and their possessions upon the understanding that they administer both more for the good of the people at large, than the people would do, if they had the administration of both themselves.”10 According to Bourdieu, these rituals of protection embody the “central operation” of dominance: the conversion of “economic capital into symbolic capital, economic domination (of the rich over the poor, master over servant, man over woman, adults over children, etc.) into personal dependence (paternalism, etc.), even devotion, filial piety or love” (“M” 238). Economic dependency thus evolves into a “sympathy of feeling” between patron and client: the symbolic capital created through services and gifts bestowed, charity, liberal and gratuitous acts of assistance, and expressions of kindness and concern produces recognition of debt, which transforms into “internalized gratitude . . . inscribed in the body itself in the form of passion, love, submission, [and] respect” (“M” 237). Howard Newby notes that in precapitalist economies, gift-giving served as a means of “tension management” that deflected potential antagonism between classes with conflicting interests; since gifts have the power to reaffirm the status and superiority of the giver, the charitable or liberal gift, “often given, significantly, on a personal localized basis . . . celebrated, symbolized, and reaffirmed the deferential dialectic.”11 Recognizing this, another writer for Blackwood’s argued that institutionalized charity was no substitute for the personal performance of giving: “He that is effectually to be obliged, must see the kind face, and touch the open hand of his benefactor.”12 The mere act of receiving bounty, however, might not have led the lower classes to internalize and sentimentalize feelings of subordination; rather, as E. P. Thompson observes, “the poor might be willing to award their deference to the gentry, but only for a price” that might include substantial economic and social benefits to themselves.13 Yet even if paternalism rested upon calculated bargaining rather than sympathetic feeling, the gestures enacted by patrons and clients served as an effective form of communication understood by both, and thus worked to palliate, if not legitimize, the imbalance of power between them.


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When The Wanderer appeared in print, the system of obligation and subordination that Johnson had championed was an ideal under stress, and the pervasiveness of this ideal made its fissures all the more apparent. The weakness of reciprocal bonds became especially obvious during the hard times of the 1790s, when bad harvests, depleted reserves from years of exportation, and the difficulty of importing foodstuffs during the war with France caused catastrophic increases in food prices. During this crisis, the ideological principles and the actual practices of moral economy—and the gift system—came under assault. Reformers such as Sir Frederick Morton Eden in The State of the Poor (1797) and Thomas Robert Malthus in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) argued that forms of charity for the indigent, and particularly the relief institutionalized in the Poor Laws, impeded the free flow of capital and labor, placed a financial burden on landowners and manufactures, and discouraged industry among the poor. The solution they proposed was to abolish parish relief and allow the laws of supply and demand to operate at will.14 The hypostatization of the market promoted by the emerging discourse of political economy thus relegated moral economy to the unusable past, representing it as an archaic, misguided, and destructive set of social practices. In this manner, the supposedly objective operations of an unregulated market in capital and labor replaced more “symbolic forms of domination,” such as the continuous performance of paternalism’s gift rituals.15 Landowners themselves were implicated in the erosion of obligation, rejecting forms of prestation “repugnant to the sound principles of political economy,” and championing instead the doctrines of laissez-faire capitalism (while applying them selectively to suit their interests).16 In 1820, an anonymous contributor to Blackwood’s noted how this dismantling of the old society had changed the tone of relations between erstwhile neighbors: “The rich and the high have been indolently and slothfully allowing the barriers that separate them from their inferiors to increase and accumulate. . . . Men have come to deride and despise a thousand of those means of communication that in former days knit all orders of the people together.”17 The landowners’ denial of paternalism’s burdens and aggressive pursuit of their own economic welfare seemed tantamount to a demand for “power without responsibility” and alienated them from the lower orders whose well-being they were supposed to promote.18 Given this atmosphere, Tory writers championing English institutions made impassioned attempts to resurrect paternalism, arguing that while “some unwise assaults have been made upon its precious outworks,”

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the “old spirit may yet be said to be entire and untainted”—a spirit essential for preserving the country from the frightening “tumult and disaffection” that afflicted the French.19 The Wanderer’s ambivalence toward the efficacy of paternalism appears early in its narrative and echoes contemporary perceptions of that institution’s decline in England. From the onset, male characters of the dominant classes appear strikingly unable or unwilling to assist those beneath them in rank. 20 Arriving penniless and solitary on the English coast after her escape across the Channel, the unknown emigrée of Burney’s novel—later identified as Lady Juliet Granville—must rely, for lack of other protection, on the dubious kindness of strangers for conveyance to London and then to Brighthelmstone. She is alienated from her patrimony because her father, Lord Granville, has died without acknowledging her legitimacy or even her existence, for fear of offending his own father, Earl Melbury. Her only male guardian—the French bishop who befriended her father upon her mother’s death—is himself in flight from execution by the revolutionaries. Yet despite her initial desolation, almost immediately after coming ashore Juliet declares generosity to be the distinguishing national characteristic of the English, as two gentlemen offer to protect her. One of these—a retired admiral—ignores the disgust of his fellow passengers toward the ragged, seemingly injured, and apparently black young woman and extends to her his sympathy and his purse, justifying his actions in the language of Christian charity: seeing Juliet starve “would be a base ingratitude to our Creator, who, in dispensing the most to the upper class, grants us the pleasure of dispensing the overplus, ourselves, to the under class; which I take to be the true reason of Providence for ordering that difference between the rich and the poor” (W 35). Following seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Christian discourse on charity, the admiral sees God, Juliet, and himself as participants in a sacred circuit of exchange. Since everything humans possess is bestowed by God, the flow of gifts from him to his suppliants offers a model for gifts between humans themselves, and particularly for gifts directed to the needy and afflicted.21 The admiral maintains a conservative political stance for his time, which reveals itself in his insistence on the personal immediacy of charity: confirming the link between paternalism and English national identity, he proclaims he “should be ashamed to be an Englishman” (W 22) if he failed to perform the duties required of his rank and gender. But the admiral’s inability to categorize Juliet as an object of charity—“I don’t well know what class to put you in” (W 38)—reveals


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the challenge she poses to his idea of moral economy: Juliet’s constant, occasionally excessive commitment to propriety and her continual failure to find refuge suggest that times have changed, and the assurance of a stable place in the social order as a reward for fulfilling one’s duties is not guaranteed. The admiral himself inhabits two profoundly contradictory positions regarding the role of paternalism in economic life. While responding with suspicion to Juliet’s lack of supportive friends, he prides himself on rising through the ranks of sailors without having recourse to his alliance with a noble brotherin-law: “I was too proud to publish it of my own accord, . . . . for, if I had, the whole ship’s company, in those days, might have thought me little better than a puppy” (W 870). After a life at sea accumulating an independent fortune in the East Indies (and thus exhibiting a self-reliance that challenges the very structure of paternalism), the admiral does not perceive that his conventional notions of mutual dependency have been supplanted by more market-oriented frameworks regulating relations between rich and poor. As Donna Andrew notes, a segment of the old society’s foundational ideology—the idea that property ownership entailed obligations on the rich—gave way in the late eighteenth century to a conception of charity as “totally voluntary and entirely nonobligatory.”22 Yet the admiral’s outmoded adherence to the system of personalized charity is articulated in the language of Christianity and, despite its pointedly old-fashioned tone, has substantial appeal over the obvious selfishness and meanness of the other passengers. Lest the admiral’s quaintness lessen the force of his ideological stance, The Wanderer offers a less doctrinaire, more secular version of it through the character of Albert Harleigh, the other gentleman who secured Juliet’s passage from France to England. Although his moral economy is couched in more subtle, sentimental language than the admiral’s (his anonymous gift of 100 pounds to Juliet is never referred to as charity), Harleigh maintains the same belief in paternalism: like the admiral, he puzzles over Juliet’s “friendless” state— her nebulous location in the nation’s system of vertical hierarchy—yet declares that the conventions of this system will not allow him to desert her until he “is convinced that she does not merit to be protected” (W 33). Harleigh’s protection, though, comes at an obvious price to Juliet. While she acknowledges that she owes to him “the deepest obligation” (W 34), his present of banknotes makes her uneasy, for she fears it might be publicly viewed as a mercantile exchange—sex for money—instead of a gift transaction. Another difficulty Juliet

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faces in accepting Harleigh’s money lies in the relationship it forms between them: because his gift is not construed as an act of charity, it creates an intimate, erotic bond inappropriate to her circumstances. Understanding this, Juliet takes alarm at the “potent and dangerous inferences that enchanted [Harleigh’s] mind” (W 354) when he discovers that she has used some of the 100 pounds. As theorists of the gift have argued, “the acceptance of a present is in fact an acceptance of the giver’s ideas as to what one’s desires and needs are. . . . [T]o accept a gift is to accept (at least in part) an identity.”23 Harleigh’s “excess of rapture” (W 354) on finding that Juliet had accepted his aid reveals his hopes that she will eventually become his wife. The identity that Harleigh fashions for Juliet places her squarely within the gift economy. Hinting at his desire to marry her, he begs her not to support herself through public musical performances, which would commodify those talents that should be exercised in labors of love. Imagined as a gift, Juliet’s music is one of the “redundant transactions . . . used in the construction of small social worlds,” and in this revolutionary period Harleigh’s world is in danger of extinction. 24 The “long-beaten path of female timidity” (W 343) that Harleigh passionately advocates for Juliet does not simply constrain her actions but strengthens the bonds of community as well, protecting Harleigh’s circle of kin and friends from the disruptive influences of a commercial culture. He is especially emphatic in asserting the importance of customary obligations “which unite us with our friends; and . . . teach us what is due to our connections” (W 339). Conservatives such as Hannah More agreed with Harleigh on obligation’s role in bringing solidarity to the embattled English nation: “Those attachments which arise from, and are compacted by, a sense of mutual wants, mutual affection, mutual benefit, and mutual obligation, are the cement which secure the union of the family as well as of the state.”25 Harleigh’s agonized response to Juliet’s proposed scheme of self-dependence erupts because she threatens to make a transition from the moral to the commercial economy, with troubling implications for the stability of the English elite. Yet as Harleigh’s impassioned speech suggests, the labor of sustaining connections among networks of “friends” no longer belongs to men, for throughout The Wanderer male homosocial bonds existing either among or between classes are notably absent.26 It is apparent that “the quality”—represented by Juliet’s pathetically inept seducer, Sir Lyell Sycamore—have little to do with the farmers who rent their lands and supply them with commodities, as displayed in their


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gross ignorance of what agricultural products cost. While connections between men of different rank are slight, even acrimonious, ties between men of similar status prove just as weak. Even those gentlemen with the common objective of protecting Juliet rarely act in concert, and their individual gestures appear strikingly ineffectual. When Juliet is insulted for her dependency, the young Lord Melbury only bites his nails in wordless frustration while Harleigh blushes “indignantly” and silently (W 607). His actions licensed by his advanced age and his obvious physical debility, Sir Jaspar Herrington manages a heroic gesture in tearing Juliet from the clutches of her abusive husband, only to discover that he has no appropriate refuge to offer her and that his crippled figure makes his courtship of her a parody. Embodied in the impotent Sir Jaspar, the old society that he represents turns from energetic assertion of its virility to contemplation of its inevitable decline and mortality.

The Female Economy of Kin-Keeping Courtly but inept, Melbury, Harleigh, and Sir Jaspar express contemporary anxieties about the inability of male aristocrats to perform their paternalistic roles. For Burney, “the leisured gentleman, the ideal citizen of the old [English] society” exists in a state of paralysis, completely incapable of insuring the stability and reproduction of the social order over which he presides. 27 In light of this, The Wanderer shifts its focus to the role of women as “kinkeepers,” or the guardians and regulators of social relationships. Their subordinate status in the patriarchal division of labor between market and moral economies endows women with the “responsibility for keeping social contacts alive,” particularly those cemented by rituals of reciprocity: women, in fact, “can barely escape their gift-giving duties, whether they like them or not.”28 Distressed at his own failure to secure Juliet into a network of obligation—his transactions with her being suspiciously viewed as an exchange of sexual favors for support—Harleigh transfers this responsibility to women, reminding the upper-class social set (Mrs. Maple and her niece Elinor Joddrel, Lady Aurora Granville and her chaperone Mrs. Howel) that a willingness to protect the “worthy” of their sex is an essential attribute of femininity itself: “who is the female—what is her age, what her rank, that ought not to assist and try to preserve so distressed a young person from evil?” (W 128). The duty that Harleigh endorses here removes “pater” from paternalism, and thus elides that system’s political valence as well. When women of

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all ranks replace ruling-class men as the guarantors of obligation and subordination, their role is naturalized as an effusion of their innate sensibility rather than a carefully orchestrated participation in the public performance of their class superiority. 29 The Wanderer, however, challenges this feminization of rulingclass structures of dominance by displaying women’s distribution of gifts as an exercise of power rather than sympathy. Juliet encounters the complex workings of a female economy of obligation in her relations with a series of women who assume the role of patrons. Although represented as an alternative to the commercial exchanges of goods and services—and thus meeting with Harleigh’s approval— this economy is no less fueled by subtle negotiations of value, most of which are to Juliet’s detriment. A dependent’s obligation to receive as well as repay a gift “makes it possible for largess to become a source of superordination over others, that is, for the distribution of gifts and services to others to be a means of establishing superiority over them.”30 Moreover, Juliet cannot be selective in her choice of obligations, and her experience shows how gratitude, even if undeserved, promotes the identification of dependants with their benefactors, and thus confers legitimacy and authority upon those who manage the system of paternalism. 31 And in The Wanderer, these managers are the upper-class women into whose hands Harleigh has dropped the reins: women made to assume the obligations that men, absorbed willingly or by default into the ethos of the market, have relinquished. One of these obligations is cultural patronage. After being denied the protection that Harleigh begs for her—fearing that Juliet is a “frenchified swindler” (W 57), Mrs. Howel and Mrs. Maple both begrudge her presence in their homes—Juliet establishes herself in lodgings at Brighthelmstone, intending to support herself by giving lessons on the harp. Her hopes for self-dependence, however, are thwarted immediately as Juliet discovers that for women the economy of obligation supersedes the commercial value of their skills. In order to gather pupils for her enterprise, she must solicit the “powerful aid” of Miss Arbe, Brighthelmstone’s leading dilettante.32 Living in straightened circumstances herself, Miss Arbe cannot repay the money she owes to her masters of music and painting, but instead adopts the alternative currency of patronage, exchanging compliments and social influence for instructions and dedications. Her connections within the upper class and her reputation as a connoisseur help Juliet gain access to pupils, but the cost of her “humane parade of patronage” (W 230) is high, entailing the complete regulation of


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Juliet’s style of living; “long, almost daily instructions . . . although never under the appellation of lessons” (W 240); and the right to cancel her “musical debts” (W 316) to Juliet with the currency of her own choice (in this case, introductions to fashionable pupils). Although Juliet grows indignant at her treatment by this “unprotecting patroness” (W 319) whose accomplishments come at the expense of Juliet’s time and labor, her perception of the obligations she owes to Miss Arbe compels her to endure this abuse without complaint. Juliet’s painful but determined silence implies that this economy of obligation will operate smoothly only if internalized gratitude enables her to overlook its gross and inherent inequities. A degree of obfuscation seems essential in paternalistic exchanges because if the dynamics of power underlying obligation are exposed, the gift relationship would cease to function. The players in this social game must “contribute, with their efforts, their marks of care and attention, and their time, to the production of collective misrecognition” (LP 105–6). The Wanderer’s narration of Juliet’s dilemma threatens to call this misrecognition to consciousness. Repeatedly, the bonds of gratitude that guarantee the efficacy and power of paternalism require Juliet to perform acts of deference that her reason cannot justify. While paternalistic authority is so strongly hegemonic in this culture that it “defines the prevailing ‘rate of exchange’ as legitimate,” the violence that upholds this exchange is exposed in the scenes of Juliet’s service as a companion to Mrs. Ireton.33 At the start of her employment, Juliet witnesses the humiliation of an orphan girl whom Mrs. Ireton sent to a charity school “as her particular protegée” and who attends her to solicit the tuition owed the school (W 479). Although Mrs. Ireton apparently participates in the direct dispensation of charity to the needy that the admiral endorses, she clearly expects the girl to function only as a witness to her wealth and largesse; her economic power glares through the rents in her generosity, as her dependents are kept in line with psychological torment instead of the feelings of attachment that gratitude generates. Juliet’s disgust at such tyranny brings forth the novel’s critique of self-aggrandizing gifts: “Where superiour wealth falls into liberal hands . . . ‘it blesses those that give, and those that take’—But Oh! where it is misused for the purposes of bowing down the indigent, of oppressing the helpless, of triumphing over the dependent,—then, how baneful then is inequality of fortune!” (W 494). Here Juliet articulates one of the unspoken tenets of a paternalistic society: the “great” have to justify their status “with exemplary conformity to the values of the group”—values that include condescension

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to inferiors—and “cannot appropriate the labour, services, goods, homage and respect of others without . . . creating a bond between persons” (LP 129). Tired of submitting to displays of authority untempered by displays of care and concern, Juliet transforms herself into an employee and publicly quits Mrs. Ireton’s service. By this act Juliet radically alters the rate of exchange and “leave[s] the obligation all on the side of Mrs. Ireton” by refusing that woman’s offer of twenty guineas, “which she paradingly flung upon the table” (W 610). Through Mrs. Ireton’s tyranny and Juliet’s response to it, the novel not only depicts the abuses of paternalism by the very women entrusted with its enactment, but also suggests the fissures that such abuse produces in the hegemonic web of obligation and deference. Here the class hierarchy secured by gift relations comes dangerously close to losing the palliating features that both redeem and justify it. Yet in contrast to The Wanderer’s cynicism toward the performance of the gift economy is its recuperation of the gift’s utopian potential, or its creation of an idyllic “atmosphere of obligation” between Juliet and other disenfranchised characters.34 This first appears in Juliet’s exchanges with her aristocratic, teenaged siblings, who remain unaware of their kinship to Juliet until near the end of the novel; their instant attraction to each other is grounded in Juliet’s artistic “gifts,” and their appreciative response to her sharing of them. Enchanted with her performance as Lady Townly in The Provok’d Husband—an amateur theatrical enacted at Mrs. Maple’s residence—Lady Aurora Granville and Lord Melbury respond with “the uncontrollable ebullition of ingenuous gratitude” for the gift of pleasure she has provided (W 96). Mutual obligation further cements their ties when Juliet pays an extended visit to her siblings at Mrs. Howel’s. Fascinated with Juliet’s singing and harp playing, Lady Aurora “felt a gratitude for the delight which she received, that was hardly inferior to that which her approbation bestowed,” while Juliet “seemed impressed with a gratitude [for even the smallest attentions] that struggled for words” (W 116, 117). The apex of the gift relationship appears in Lady Aurora’s wish to take Juliet into her home; although her companion is impoverished with seemingly nothing to offer, Lady Aurora dismisses any suggestion of subordination, declaring, “let us share between us all that we possess; to read together, study our music together, and never, never to part!” (W 136). Lady Aurora’s words perfectly articulate what Lewis Hyde calls the “spirit of the gift”: in its ideal form, the gift relation “shuns exactness” and dispenses with the “adversary roles of creditor and debtor,” roles that the systems of paternalism and commerce alike rigorously enforce


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in Burney’s novel.35 The complete equality of affection the two sisters share during their interlude of companionship is rare in The Wanderer, since Juliet’s deracinated life—“consigned to disguise, to debt, to indigence, and to flight” (W 816)—requires her to endure constant assessment and adjustment of her status and identity (gentlewoman/swindler, benefactor/dependent, creditor/debtor, heiress/beggar). By contrast, her exchanges with Lady Aurora, which are mirrored in her relations with her girlhood friend and fellow-emigée Gabriella, serve as utopian moments in the narrative where a sharing of experience, emotion, and activity replaces the isolation and indignity that Juliet suffers in a society regulated by privilege and profit. Juliet and Gabriella, for instance, imagine a “peaceful interval” of reciprocity at Brighthelmstone that will give them respite from their continual flight: “they settled that they would live together, work together, share their little profits, and endure their failures, in common” (W 394). In their resistance to employing the gift as an assertion of power, Juliet, Lady Aurora, Gabriella, and the young Lord Melbury participate in a version of Hélène Cixous’s “economy of femininity,” “that relationship to the other in which the gift doesn’t calculate its influence” and the giver does not try to “recover her expenses” by requiring some kind of profit or benefit in return.36 Significantly, these communities of affection are repeatedly disbanded by patriarchal configurations of law and duty common to both the English and the French nations. Gabriella reluctantly leaves the household she shares with Juliet to care for her sick husband (a French aristocrat who takes her gifts of beauty and virtue for granted), and Lord Denmeath orders Juliet, upon pain of persecution, to stay away from her siblings. Lady Aurora’s forced separation from Juliet reveals most clearly the disruptive nature of gift relations, particularly to systems of property regulated and controlled by men. Her love for Juliet is profoundly unsettling to her guardian uncle Lord Denmeath, primarily because it does not flow in legally established channels of affiliation: he believes Juliet is at best a bastard deserving no recognition by the lawful heirs of her father’s estate. Lady Aurora’s vehement outburst—“I should blush to be of the number of those who want documents . . . to love and honour you” (W 554)—insists upon the opposition between attachments based on affection and “felt cohesiveness,” and legal contracts, which encourage the “separation of thing and spirit.”37 The reciprocal gratitude and obligation that underlie feminized gift transactions in The Wanderer thus challenge the idea that “documents”—legal proofs of marriage and kinship that establish the patriarchal family—generate affection and thus

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determine social stability. By upsetting conventions of ownership the gift becomes a form of anarchist property, for “both anarchism and gift exchange share the assumption that it is not when a part of the self is inhibited and restrained, but when a part of the self is given away, that community appears.”38 In The Wanderer, Burney’s reconsideration of the gift, and the cycle of gratitude that it generates, transforms obligation from an ideological support for the workings of paternalist authority to something very different: in her idyllic pairings of women (and an adolescent youth) joined by shared feelings and resources, we find a critique of the very structures of property and social power that paternalism aims to defend.

The King’s Visit and the Patriarch’s Return Despite their abuses of it as patrons or defiance of it as wage earners, women in The Wanderer remain the principal preservers and defenders of moral economy in the face of its erosion by the commercial order. Yet the alternative system of gift exchange celebrated by Juliet, Gabriella, Lady Aurora, and Lord Melbury—all of whom remain marginal to structures of social and political power—bears little resemblance to the dominance and deference that characterize paternalism, and instead functions as a feminized, affective network of transactions that cannot be assimilated to the purposes of the patriarchal family and nation. The Wanderer’s final and perhaps most radical representation of such a network occurs during Juliet’s escape into the New Forest, a preserve of wilderness that, paradoxically, offers her the refuge denied to her in more cultivated surroundings. While trying to evade her husband by moving through the environs of the Forest, Juliet saves two siblings from harm, the boy from drowning in a stream and the girl from injury by a thorn in her foot. In return, their mother, Margery Fairchild, secures Juliet shelter at the home of her friend, Dame Goss, and both cottagers fulfill this “claim upon hospitality” without hesitation or suspicion: “To have manifested good nature, was sufficient to procure credit for good character; and to have done kind offices, was to secure their return” (W 660–1). The primitive gift economy of Margery and her neighbors, in which hospitality toward traveling strangers is a customary obligation rather than a commercial deal, exists apart from the dominant mode of exchange and provides a viable alternative to it. For instance, women in the New Forest determine Juliet’s character not through estimates of her financial stability, but through her acts of care and concern for others;


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despite her ignorance of Juliet’s true situation, Margery declares her implicit faith in her new friend’s merit, because “a person who could be so kind to her children could not have so black a heart” (W 721). The bonds created by services offered as gifts actually prove firmer than the laws and conventions regulating social life and stronger than the class barriers meant to divide the women: “surrounded by the clinging affection of instinctive partiality, [Juliet] felt a sense of security, more potent in its simplicity, than she could have owed to any engagement, even of honour, even of law, even of duty” (W 711). Despite her relative poverty and low status, Margery remains the lynchpin keeping the system of obligation intact, even in the unregulated regions of the New Forest. Refusing to betray the rites of hospitality—“now you be under my own poor roof, ’twould be like unto a false heart to give you up to your enemies” (W 722)—Margery helps Juliet escape. Moreover, she finds her husband’s participation in the illegal economy of smuggling especially heinous since the king, the proprietor of the Forest, is graciously (and harmlessly) paternalistic: “And a do deserve well of us all; for a be as good a gentlemon as ever broke bread! which we did all see . . . as well as his good lady, the Queen, who had a smile for the lowest of us, God bless un! and all their pretty ones! for they were made up of good nature and charity; and had no more pride than the new-born baby” (W 717). Margery refers to George III’s tour of the New Forest in June 1789. Accompanied by the queen, three of their daughters, and a retinue that included Burney herself, the king resided at Lyndhurst for a week, attempting to recover his health and mental stability after his first attack of porphyria. This visit was highly publicized in the popular press, with the sovereign being represented “not as the feudal hunting-king” (like the crown forest’s original owner, William the Conqueror), “but as a benevolently paternalistic landlord” exuding charity and “gentrified domesticity.”39 Margery’s exuberant praise of the English royal family—and defense of their property rights—validates the benign image that George III attempted to convey. In upholding the king’s authority despite the “power of money” that smuggling generates, Margery preserves the dynamic of obligation when it is most threatened; for Burney, women are the last defense of the gift system, fending off the effects of a rampant and pervasive commercial ethos that motivates the activities of even the lowest classes. Yet the feminized economy of reciprocity between Margery and Juliet, like the ones existing between Juliet and Lady Aurora and Juliet and Gabriella, is tightly circumscribed. Founded on transactions

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that generate affect rather than hierarchy, these ties among women are occluded by the novel’s reinstatement of a male-controlled paternalism that establishes itself almost literally over the bodies of those who resist it. At the end of The Wanderer, Juliet finds her identity as the daughter of Lord Granville verified by documents in the hands of her uncle, Admiral Powel, who had unwittingly accompanied her as a passenger in the boat during her escape from France. Moreover, after learning of the commissary’s death, Admiral Powel, Lord Melbury, and the bishop—who escapes to safety in Britain—give their immediate approval to Harleigh’s “munificent” (W 864) proposal of marriage to their niece/sister/ward. English paternalism is restored through more violent means as well, for usurpers of aristocratic male privilege are killed off with dispatch: the French commissary dies at the hands of his fellow revolutionaries, while the “thoroughly worthless” smugglers who stole the deer of their monarch are caught, convicted of theft, and hanged (W 871). (The three female “furies” who mismanaged patronage—Mrs. Maple, Mrs. Ireton, and Mrs. Howel—face the milder punishment of permanent exile from Harleigh Hall.) Finally, after marrying Juliet, Harleigh resumes his masculine authority as patron, visiting, “with gifts and praise, every cottage in which the Wanderer had been harboured” (W 872) and rewarding subordinates for their services to him and his bride. These scenes of restoration, though, belie the contradictions that inform The Wanderer throughout. The novel ends with Harleigh’s vigorous assumption of the duties of upper-class Englishmen, and the “world of ties” appears firmly under male control: Lady Aurora is married to an unnamed “amiable partner” (W 871); Margery and her children find a protector in the bishop’s loyal servant, Ambroise; and the birth of an heir to Harleigh and Juliet ensures an end to “foreign excursions” beyond their English estate. Yet while ultimately asserting the validity of paternalism, the narrative also relentlessly portrays its decay, instead idealizing a moral economy that eschews profit and loss, interest and advantage. While men’s gifts are mostly returned or accepted with well-warranted suspicion and reluctance, the “bosom of security” (W 707) upon which Juliet finds respite and repose is definitely female. In her exchanges with Lady Aurora, Gabriella, and Margery, the gift is not a debt, nor an exertion of class power, nor an articulation of national character, but rather a form of attachment independent of the regulations imposed by law or the obligations imposed by English patriarchal custom. If The Wanderer ostensibly celebrates a return to paternalistic order, its skeptical view of this order is nowhere


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more apparent or more powerful than in its portrayal of the alternative economy of affect: those moments of perfect reciprocity between women that are as idyllic as they are unsustainable.

Notes 1. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 127. 2. Jacques Godbout, World of the Gift, 173. 3. Frances Burney, The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties, 741; hereafter cited as W. 4. Pierre Bourdieu, “Marginalia,” 234–5; hereafter cited as “M.” 5. Burke, Reflections, 129. 6. Luce Irigaray maintains that in all systems of patriarchal power, women function as mute objects of exchange: “Putting men in touch with each other, in relations among themselves, women only fulfill this role by relinquishing their right to speech and even to animality” (“Women on the Market,” 188). Yet Charles Haskell Hinnant’s examination of amatory gifts suggests a more active role for women in their individual transactions with men; see “The Erotics of the Gift: Gender and Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” in this volume. 7. David Cheal, Gift Economy, 15. 8. Godbout, World of the Gift, 74. 9. James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, 3:383, 1:408. 10. Blackwood’s Magazine 26 (November 1829): 768. 11. Harold Newby, “The Deferential Dialectic,” 163, 161–2. 12. Blackwood’s Magazine 7 (April 1820): 92–100. 13. E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common, 85. 14. Eden declared that the provision of parish relief promotes “a life of idleness”; State of the Poor, 1:449. Malthus agreed with Eden that systems of charity and patronage weaken “the strongest incentives to sobriety and industry”; Principle of Population, 87. 15. Pierre Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 133; hereafter cited as LP. 16. Eden, State of the Poor, 1:468. 17. Blackwood’s Magazine 7 (April 1820): 90–102. 18. Harold Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society, 192. 19. Blackwood’s Magazine 7 (April 1820): 101; 18 (September 1825): 335–51; 26 (November 1829): 768–9. 20. Claudia Johnson remarks that “the world nightmarishly imagined in The Wanderer is destitute of fathers as well as any authoritative males”; Equivocal Beings, 174. Margaret Anne Doody more optimistically claims that The Wanderer is “freer than most of Burney’s other works from the influential presence of the Father”; Frances Burney, 323. 21. Richard Allestree outlines this circuit of charity in The Gentleman’s Calling: “Every rich man is . . . Gods Steward, and particularly instructed to provide for the indigent parts of his family, such are the poor and the needy” (62). Thomas Gouge further argues that paternalistic charity is the best security

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22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

Linda Zionkowski for one’s own wealth: “By communicating of our riches to the Poor, we shall make of them our Friends, both to give evidence for us of the truth of our Faith and Charity, and to beg a plentiful return upon us”; Gouge, Surest and Safest Way, 50. Donna T. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police, 198. Following Marcel Mauss’s foundational study of obligation and reciprocity, The Gift (1950), Barry Schwartz articulates this point in “The Social Psychology of the Gift,” 71. Cheal, “Moral Economy,” 92. Hannah More, Strictures, 173–4. Andrea Austin argues that “male relationships appear to be of little consequence” in the novel; see Austin, “Between Women,” 256. Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society, 228. Perkin observes that representations of impotent aristocrats at this time informed bourgeois ideology in its struggle for dominance over the aristocratic ideal: “By the light of capital, property meant idleness” (226–7). Aafke E. Komter, “Women, Gifts, and Power,” 125. In conduct literature of the time, women were charged with the duties of charity to the extent that denial of them seemed a perversion of their nature. The Reverend Wetenhall Wilkes proclaimed that “Compassion (which is another Name for Charity) seems to be so natural an Ornament to your Sex, whose soft Breasts are made, and disposed, to entertain Tenderness and Pity”; Letter of Genteel and Moral Advice, 89–90. The Reverend John Bennett went further in viewing charity as an indispensable part of female sexual charm and the charitable woman as an erotic spectacle: “The soft bosom of a woman, throbbing with sympathy, or her eye glistening with crystal drops of pity, are some of the finest touches in nature’s pencil”; Letters to a Young Lady, 1:87–8. Peter Blau, Exchange and Power, 108. Newby, “Paternalism and Capitalism,” 70. As Andrea Henderson points out, Burney’s Brighthelmstone has not yet transformed “from a provincial to a modern commodity culture,” and hence its “economic transactions are inevitably complicated by considerations of rank, family connections, and other social relations,” one of which is surely gender; see “Burney’s The Wanderer and Early-Nineteenth-Century Commodity Fetishism,” 14. Newby, “Paternalism and Capitalism,” 70. George Simmel maintains that the atmosphere generated by countless claims of gratitude contributes to “a stable collective life;” see “Faithfulness and Gratitude,” 48. Lewis Hyde, The Gift, 88. Hélène Cixous, “Sorties: Out and Out,” 163, 159. Hyde, The Gift, 88. Cixous also notes the revolutionary nature of these attachments: “Wherever she loves, all the ideas of the old management are surpassed” (“Sorties: Out and Out,” 172). Hyde, The Gift, 92. Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, “Crown Forests and Female Georgic,” 204.

IV



10 Josiah Wedgwood’s Goodwill Marketing Susan B. Egenolf

In the eighteenth century, the most famous porcelain and ceramic manufacturers on the Continent owed their success and existence to extended systems of patronage. Karl Eugen, Duke of Württemburg, who had founded his own manufacture in Ludwigsburg, “declared that a porcelain factory was ‘an indispensable accompaniment of splendour and magnificence’ and that no prince of his rank should be without one.”1 Monarchs and noblemen throughout the Continent embraced the mania for porcelain or “white gold,” and they founded or heavily subsidized factories that could supply the popular demand for fine ceramic wares. The famous Sèvres (formerly Vincennes) factory, for example, enjoyed the exclusive patronage of Louis XV, via the influence of Madame de Pompadour. Such patronage included the benefits of large capital investment, protection from competition, both domestic and foreign, reduced taxation, and the imprimatur of the aristocracy upon wares for sale. British potteries enjoyed no such privileges and were viewed at the beginning of the eighteenth century as producing comparatively primitive wares in relation to the products of their Continental counterparts. As I intend to show, Josiah Wedgwood overcame the absence of a formal system of patronage by developing models of production and marketing that relied heavily on the reciprocal expectations of gift exchange. In January of 1770, Wedgwood wrote to his business partner Thomas Bentley regarding the vexing problem of the double billing of some of his prominent clients: “I have earnestly requested of him [Mr. Cox], in settling the accts. that collecting may go forward without the

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risque of ruining my Character. I have great need of the former, but am much more solicitous about the latter, as Cash may be procured on some terms, but a good name, when lost, is scarcely redeemable.”2 One of the first potters to mark his wares, Josiah Wedgwood intuitively understood that his name and the connections he so carefully cultivated with his upper-class clientele were worth much more than ready cash. He also understood that such intangible relations had real value in the world. Though many general definitions and usages of “goodwill” deal with personal character or attitude in relation to others, goodwill may also be understood as “acquiescence,” “consent,” or “permission to enjoy the use of.”3 These latter meanings take on a decidedly legal connotation, spawning a particular usage of “goodwill” that had currency in legal documents and business use as early as the sixteenth century. Though goodwill, commonly regarded as an intangible business asset, is an abstract term that may be formulated via different variables, it may be defined as the “differential ability of one business, in comparison with another or an assumed average firm, to make a profit.”4 Goodwill, as defined by modern accountants, is valued as that which “would produce something beyond” a purchaser’s “normal expectation of profit in that particular kind of business”; its value is assessed in addition to the value of the factory, the inventory, and the book-debts.5 The concept of goodwill developed only with the rise of early capitalism, where differential advantages between businesses began to be exploited for profit making. As the guild system began to deteriorate in the sixteenth century, the “individual was forced to work for his own benefit,” and “gain” rather than livelihood became the principal focus.6 Though goodwill was initially concerned most with the “matter of selling,” that is, the “question of securing custom” or the “kindly disposition and continued patronage of the customers,” with the advent of large-scale industrial manufactures, the question of “how to secure and maintain the solidarity and the efficiency of the employees” began to receive equal attention.7 Wedgwood repeatedly demonstrates his commitment to fostering both the internal goodwill and the consumer’s goodwill as he expands his pottery works from a cottage industry to a major industrial concern. Wedgwood cultivated the goodwill of his customers and workers through his sophisticated employment of the practices of gift exchange, exploiting the cultural underpinnings of gift economy to turn to his advantage the sense of reciprocal obligation in his patrons and laborers. He blurred the separation of the gift and the commodity

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by systematically employing the rhetoric of gift exchange even in clear business transactions. He and Bentley successfully coupled the rhetoric of gift exchange with that of nationalism. By evoking national pride and the good health of English manufacture, Wedgwood enforced a sense of loyalty and obligation, emphasizing that the benefits to be accrued were not personal but national. The normally pacifistic Wedgwood wrote to Bentley in September of 1769: “And do you really think that we may make a complete conquest of France? Conquer France in Burslem? My blood moves quicker, I feel my strength increase for the contest. Assist me, my friend, and the victorie is our own.”8 As Wedgwood and Bentley envisioned their wares infiltrating markets far and wide, they waged their battle through the unlikely weapon of the gift. Wedgwood invoked the gift both in his methods for marketing and in his humane concerns for the betterment of working and living conditions for his employees, but he was always conscious of the material benefit or advantage of such practices. In his influential The Gift (1923), Marcel Mauss concludes, based upon data collected from “so-called primitive societies,” that prestations that are in theory voluntary, “apparently free and disinterested,” are “nevertheless constrained and self-interested.” According to Mauss, “Almost always such services have taken the form of the gift, the present generously given even when, in the gesture accompanying the transaction, there is only a polite fiction, formalism, and social deceit, and when really there is obligation and economic self-interest.”9 C. A. Gregory distinguishes between commodity and gift exchange by focusing upon the relationships fostered by each: “Commodity exchange establishes objective quantitative relationships between the objects transacted, while gift exchange establishes personal qualitative relationships between the subjects transacting.”10 Carol Gilligan associates commodity exchange with an “ethic of rights based on abstract principles of reciprocity,” and gift exchange with an “ethic of care based on interpersonal needs and responsibilities.”11 As I will argue, Wedgwood’s gifting often partook of a care-based ethic that considered “interpersonal needs and responsibilities,” while it simultaneously promoted more quantitative “relationships between the objects transacted,” that is, pottery in exchange for money. As Wedgwood explicitly attempted to work out his goals as a potter in relation to other potters and the public, the exchange value of goodwill and the accruing of obligation began to consciously inform his business practices. On September 27, 1769, Wedgwood wrote to Bentley regarding the fact that their innovations were “instantly

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copied by the Artists our rivals” and suggested how they might stem such infringements (L 1:286): I say, if instead of money getting you substitute Fame & the good of the Manufacture at large for our principles of action, then we shod. do just the contrary of what I have been recommending—make all the Good, Fine & New things we can immediately, & so far from being afraid of other People getting our patterns, we should Glory in it, throw out all the hints we can & if possible have all the Artists in Europe working after our models. This wod. be noble, & wod. suit both our dispositions & sentiments much better than all the narrow, mercenary, selfish trammels. . . . Do you think when our principles were known the Nobility would not still more make it a point to patronise & incourage Men who acted upon such different principles to the rest of Mankind? . . . When they are witnesses to our bestowing so much pains & expence in the improvment of a capital Manufacture, . . . for the good of the community at large. This wod. certainly procure us the good will of our best customers, & place us in a very advantageous light to the Public eye. (L 1:290–1)

Though Wedgwood and Bentley did not implement the idealized plan of action proposed here (apparently the fruits of their labor and innovation proved too dear to be so freely given), Wedgwood did forge a rather complex link between benevolence and goodwill in his musings. His expectations of the return for “bestowing” such “pains & expence in the improvement of a capital Manufacture” involved a reciprocal obligation not from the other potters but from the “Nobility” and “our best customers.” The plan appealed to them both because it suited their personal “dispositions” and “principles” in serving the common good or the material health of the nation and because such differential business practices from the “rest of Mankind” must surely be recognized as worthy of reward. Wedgwood anticipated the twofold return of personal pleasure and increased goodwill. Wedgwood was also persuaded that “being released from these degrading slavish chains, these mean selfish fears of other people copying my works” would ultimately “do me much good in body, more in mind, & that my invention wod. . . increase greatly by such a generous exercise of the faculty” (L 1:291–2). He believed, at least in this moment, in the liberating and regenerative energy of benevolent actions and in the oppressive constraints of selfish ones. Such progressive thinking informed Wedgwood’s business and personal practices throughout his life, but he also never forgot that in a gift economy even the most generously given gifts precipitated a return obligation.


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Born into a family of potters in the town of Burslem in what was known as “the Potteries” district of North Staffordshire in 1730, the young Josiah Wedgwood determined to cultivate the “spacious” field of ceramic production through innovations in manufacturing and sales. Josiah’s father died when Josiah was nine years old, bequeathing each of his children £20 (money that was not paid until the 1770s).12 Wedgwood’s success in revitalizing the Staffordshire earthenware industry remains unsurpassed. When he died in 1795, he was worth an estimated £500,000 and owned “one of the finest industrial concerns in England.”13 He took a “trade universally complained of as being bad and in a declining condition” and led it to the position of national prominence.14 As his personal fortunes increased, Wedgwood did not forget his own humble beginnings, contributing to numerous causes that he deemed worthy, ranging from education to abolition to constitutional reform. Beginning as early as 1760 when he had just begun to be established as an independent potter, he gave £10 toward the establishment of a “second Free School in Burslem, a contribution equaling that of the richest potters”(SW 44). This contribution publicly demonstrated Wedgwood’s conviction in the transformative powers of education. In 1792, near the end of his life, Wedgwood pledged £250 for a general subscription “towards the succour of the People of Poland” (Poland had been invaded by Russia and Prussia), despite the fact that a heavy portion of Wedgwood’s export sales depended upon Russian patronage (SL 336). This pledge included £100 from Josiah, and, he wrote, “My 3 sons will be much obliged by your making them subscribers of £50 each.”15 Clearly, Wedgwood had inculcated in his sons the practice of charitable giving. “Alms,” Mauss posits, “are the results on the one hand of a moral idea about gifts and wealth and on the other of an idea about sacrifice. . . . It is the old gift morality raised to the position of a principle of justice.”16 Wedgwood’s sense of social justice led him to participate in giving, which must have been fueled by a sense that the wealthy were obligated to help the less fortunate. Though Wedgwood was usually quite free in lending his name and money to various subscriptions, his sympathies with the American prisoners of war held in Ireland and England led him to make a less than prudent (from a business standpoint) charitable donation. On December 22, 1777, he wrote to Bentley, “You may subscribe 10 or £20, or what you please for me towards alleviating the miseries of the poor captives, under the signature of A B C or what you please. Gratitude to their countrymen for their humanity to G. Burgoyne and his army is no small

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motive for my mite” (SL 215). Wedgwood’s decision to subscribe anonymously must have been unusual because, though Bentley’s response does not survive, Wedgwood resumes the discussion of the subscription in his following letter, dated December 29, 1777: “I have more reasons than one why my name should not appear in the list” (L 2:401–2). Wedgwood’s subscription toward the relief of the imprisoned Americans presents a clear instance of Wedgwood participating in charitable giving that was not likely to enhance his goodwill. Wedgwood’s sympathies for the American cause are well known.17 One quickly understands, as Bentley must have, that the “Potter to Her Majesty” should probably not be supporting the imprisoned enemy. Because of the anonymity of this gift, Wedgwood could have no expectation of reciprocal giving, nor could he expect to gain commercially (quite the opposite, in fact). Though this instance seems to approach the most pure or ideal sense of the gift, Wedgwood’s mention that he was motivated to help the American revolutionaries because of the humane treatment of Burgoyne and his troops by their “countrymen” indicates that he did not view himself as initiating the gift exchange but rather as reciprocating in “gratitude” for the original benevolence of humanity practiced in wartime. A more public example of Wedgwood’s benevolent works would be his extended commitment to the Society for the Suppression of the Slave Trade founded in 1787. A member of the society’s central committee, he worked for the cause on various fronts, writing personal letters to public figures such as Anna Seward, circulating petitions, and producing the famous jasperware cameo, or “Emancipation Badge,” of the kneeling slave with the inscription, “Am I not a man and a brother?” Wedgwood cast thousands of these cameos in various sizes and distributed them for free to promote the cause of abolition. In February of 1788, he wrote to Benjamin Franklin, I embrace the opportunity . . . to inclose for the use of your Excellency and friends, a few Cameos on a subject which I am happy to acquaint you is daily more and more taking possession of men’s minds on this side of the Atlantic as well as with you. It gives me great pleasure to be embarked on this occasion in the same great and good cause with you, Sir.18

Franklin replied on May 15, 1788: Sir, I received the letter you did me the honour of writing on the 29th February past, with your valuable present of Cameos, which I am


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distributing among my friends; in whose countenances I have seen such marks of being affected by contemplating the figure of the Suppliant . . . that I am persuaded it may have an effect equal to That [sic] of the best written pamphlet in procuring favour to these oppressed people. Please to accept my hearty thanks, and believe me to be, sir, your most obedient servant.19

As with his subscription for the relief of the American prisoners of war, Wedgwood seemingly initiates a cycle of giving, but then situates himself in the position of the recipient repaying an existing debt. His salutation to Franklin expresses “gratitude” for those “benefits” that Franklin has already “bestowed” on society (JW 287). The gift cycle and the implied obligation (with the root of the word coming from ligare, to bind) binds Wedgwood to Franklin in the cause of abolition. As Mauss suggests about gift customs among the Maori, “the legal tie, a tie occurring through things, is one between souls, because the thing itself possesses a soul, is of the soul.”20 Wedgwood’s bestowing of the cameos gives him “great pleasure” as they materially mark his connection with Franklin. Franklin signals his own debt to Wedgwood in declaring himself “your most obedient servant.” The cameos came with the particular obligation that they should be given in turn to others. Franklin reads in the “countenances” of the recipients the effect of the gift, venturing a prediction of an even more pronounced effect, that is, that the cameos will be instrumental in “procuring favour to these oppressed people.” Franklin proposes a reciprocity in which the obligation does not return to Wedgwood or himself as donors but to the slaves. Thomas Clarkson in his History of the Abolition of the SlaveTrade (1808) later wrote that Wedgwood’s “beautiful cameo,” based on the “seal of the committee,” was instrumental in turning the popular feeling in our favour. . . . Mr. Wedgwood made a liberal donation of these, when finished, among his friends. I received from him no less than five hundred of them myself. They, to whom they were sent, did not lay them up in their cabinets, but gave them away likewise. They were soon, like The Negro’s Complaint, in different parts of the kingdom. . . . At length, the taste for wearing them became general; and thus fashion, which usually confines itself to worthless things, was seen for once in the honourable office of promoting the cause of justice, humanity, and freedom. 21

Wedgwood’s gifts on behalf of abolition constituted a donation of expertise (he had the artist William Hackwood model the figure),

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materials, and labor, as well as the prominent use of his name in the circulating literature and in private letters in support of the cause. The gift of the cameos conferred several obligations upon the recipients. The gifts could only accomplish the goals of the giver (and the society) if they were regifted; as Clarkson notes, they could not be laid “up in their cabinets” but given “away likewise.” In accepting the gift of the cameo, the recipient acknowledged his or her support of abolition. Such support was most easily demonstrated through the display of the cameo, and this mass-produced and mass-distributed gift was transformed from alienable to inalienable as recipients modified the cameos as bracelet, pins, and buttons and displayed them on their persons. While some of the cameos were marked and some were not, they inherently carried the imprint of Wedgwood across the globe. Wedgwood as the producer of the “Emancipation Badge” surely gained intangibly by some of the same means that he had outlined to Bentley when he proposed that they share their knowledge with other potters: “This wod. certainly procure us the good will of our best customers, & place us in a very advantageous light to the Public eye.” While actively pursuing the public’s goodwill, Wedgwood simultaneously cultivated internal goodwill at his manufactory. He sought incentives to transform the “dilatory, drunken, Idle, worthless workmen,” who hampered his “proceeding” into productive and skilled artisans. 22 Because the training of a skilled potter or painter took several years and an outlay estimated by Wedgwood of about £40, he was most interested in keeping his skilled laborers from joining other firms. In 1769, Wedgwood moved his pottery works to Etruria, a vast factory that he designed that included brick cottages for its workers, “a Town for the men to live in.”23 Wedgwood’s commercial success enabled him to almost double laborers’ wages, but he found that there was a limit to the correspondence between increased wages and increased productivity and quality—better-paid laborers would simply work less and excess wages would go to the local pubs. To augment the worker’s earned income, he designed Etruria with a variety of benefits that formerly would have been considered elements of charitable giving. Productive workers were privy to the modern housing of Etruria, a Free School for their children, a library, a “sick club,” and retirement benefits (that is, permanent housing in one of the cottages). Such incentives bound many laborers to Wedgwood for life, thus increasing his internal or industrial goodwill. In a swell of paternalism and in the spirit of progress, many of the industrial giants, such as Matthew Boulton of the Soho metal works,


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had begun to provide housing for their workers. In some cases, housing was a logistical necessity because the factories were located at a considerable distance from the nearest town; this was particularly true for collieries and mills where the location was dependent upon a natural resource. The first cottages constructed in what was to become Etruria Village were modest; they had “earth floors, but they were a great improvement on the homes of the workers of that day. Judged by those standards, they were roomy and well lit, with quaint windows of small panes of green glass.”24 Wedgwood also constructed communal bakehouses and ovens that workers could use for a small fee, and he installed public water pumps to serve the needs of the villagers. Perhaps influenced again by Boulton, Wedgwood initiated an elementary health plan or “Sick Club” at Etruria. He contracted with the surgeon and apothecary James Bent and his younger brother William to see to the health of the workers at Etruria. 25 In later years, the Sick Club developed into one of the Friendly Societies that Wedgwood described as “the simplest things imaginable, a workman pays 2d or 3d per week, and receives 3 or 4 shillings per week when sick, and a less sum when superannuated” (SL 338). Like most manufacturers, the Wedgwoods supplemented the Friendly Society fund; in 1827, Wedgwood and Sons contributed £170 plus interest to the Society. 26 Clearly, in an occupation where lead poisoning from dipping or glazing and silicosis from the finely ground flint used in the clay were real dangers, health care was a welcome improvement in the lives of the potters.27 The benefits of health care to both the workers and the manufacturers are clear—the laborers had some guarantee of security in the event of illness, and a healthier workforce would enable greater productivity. Wedgwood explicitly emphasized such benefits to his laborers in an Address to the Workmen in the Pottery, on the Subject of Entering into the Service of Foreign Manufacturers (1783). To diminish the extravagant offers by foreign manufacturers of nearly six times the going wage, Wedgwood reminded his workers “that greater care is taken of the poor when sick or past labour, in England, than in other part of the world.”28 In September of 1769, Wedgwood wrote to Bentley that he believed that skilled laborers would be attracted to the modern working conditions and his workers’ “Village.” The social benefits of working at Etruria had already drawn several candidates to seek employment there: “The worker in metal I mention’d to you in my last has try’d various schemes but never could succeed as a Master,

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he is pretty well stricken in years & will now be content with a place that will procure him food and raiment for life.”29 Progressive entrepreneurs such as Wedgwood explicitly recognized their responsibilities to their workers in offering the benefits of housing and health care, but they also emphasized that the workers owed certain obligations in return. As Neil J. Smelser observes, “[G]reat though the outward difference was between the flogging masters and the model community builders, ‘from a standpoint of control of labour . . . both types of factory management display a concern with the enforcement of discipline.’ ”30 When Wedgwood’s workers first moved to the factory at Etruria, he had difficulty getting them to learn the new skills and division of labor he required for maximum production. With some dismay, he wrote to Bentley on February 6, 1773 , “They seem to have got a notion that as they are come to a new place with me they are to do what they please” (SL 143). Life at Etruria came with a series of expectations that “Wedgwood attempted to enforce—the punctuality, the constant attendance, the fixed hours, the scrupulous standards of care and cleanliness, the avoidance of waste, the ban on drinking.”31 Wedgwood’s “Potters’ Instructions” of 1780 included rules that governed “every aspect of factory discipline” (40). Wedgwood urged that “utmost cleanliness should be observed thro’out the whole slip & clay house” (43). He fined men for leaving a fire burning in their workrooms at night, for “conveying Ale or Licquor into the manufactory,” and for “writeing obseen or other writing upon the walls.” Serious offenses, such as “strikeing or otherwise abuseing an overlooker” would result in immediate dismissal (44). Likewise, the right to participate in the Sick Clubs and Friendly Societies depended upon the upstanding conduct of the workers. Wedgwood’s long list of rules governing the safety, efficiency, and morality of factory life were predicated on his expectation of a just return for the housing and care he offered his workers, but he also made clear that the cycle of gift and return could continue beyond this fundamental exchange. He advised his Clerk of the Manufactory “to encourage” exemplary workers by giving them “presents or other marks suitable to their age &c” (41). He cultivated his employees’ sense of gratitude, making sure that the young workers understood the connection between their improved standard of living and the continued success of the potteries in his Address to the Young Inhabitants of the Pottery (1783). Reminding the young workers of the extreme poverty and “miserable” living conditions of their


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parents’ generation, he invited a comparison with their modern standard of living: The workmen earning near double their former wages—their houses mostly new and comfortable, and the lands, roads, and every other circumstance bearing evident marks of the most pleasing and rapid improvements[.] From whence, and from what cause has this happy change taken place?—You will be beforehand with me in acknowledging a truth too evident to be denied by any one. Industry has been the parent of this happy change.32

Wedgwood promised his young workers and their children the stability of good wages and continued improvement in their quality of life. Industry, personified as parent here, becomes the one to whom reciprocity is owed. Wedgwood emphasized a reciprocal loyalty both to his particular factory and the community of potters and to the nation. In the preface to the Original Etruria Friendly Society Articles, written in 1796, one year after Wedgwood’s death, Wedgwood and his sons attempted to foster a sense of community among their employees by encouraging their “mutual assistance and support” as a result of those “humane and sympathetic affections which we always feel at the distress of our fellow creatures.”33 What Wedgwood and his sons endeavored to do was to extend the responsibility of the employer to the employee by suggesting that they were in turn responsible to each other. The example of benevolence was clearly hoped to inspire benevolence. This lesson in benevolence and responsibility also partook of the rhetoric of nationalism. In Wedgwood’s Address to the Workmen in the Pottery (1783), dissuading workers from joining foreign service, he projected a scenario in which the English laborer found himself in a position of need in a foreign country: They would not care for [you], because they must look upon you as unworthy members of the community you had before belonged to;—as having deserted its cause, endeavoured to ruin its manufactures, and to bring the greatest evil in your power upon the state and neighbourhood where you first drew your breath. 34

Here Wedgwood quite purposely conflates the health of the worker with the health of the potteries and of the nation. He successfully employs reciprocity, in terms delineated by Stephen Gudeman, as an “expression of community.”35 The obligation of the prosperity of the

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workers extends far beyond Wedgwood, but the return theoretically will benefit them all. With one notable exception, Wedgwood had great success in managing and retaining his workers. Because they seem to have worked within the cultural custom of gift economy, he was able to repeatedly quell strikes and restless workers by reminding them of the benefits of the industry. However, his method relied upon individuals who shared his economy of exchange. In perhaps his most inventive and blatant attempt to bind a worker to him through the gift, Wedgwood attempted to buy out the contract of one of his modelers. In 1769, Wedgwood decided to fire the talented but apparently “lazy” and “every thing that is bad” sculptor and modeler John Voyez. However, fearing that Voyez could lend his skills to rival potteries, Wedgwood proposed the following scheme in an April 9, 1769 letter to Bentley: “Suppose he had his wages for doing nothing at all, ‘tis only sinking six and thirty shillings Per week, to Prevent this competition. . . . The selling of a single Vase, say a Medallion, less Per week through such competition would be a greater loss to us than paying him his wages for nothing!” (SL 74). Though Wedgwood did not like the idea of paying Voyez for doing nothing, and he advised Bentley to “Pray burn this Scrawl” in order to prevent such a scheme from being made public, when Voyez was released from prison, Wedgwood and Bentley “paid his wages for another six months.”36 In one of the rare cases where Wedgwood’s gifting did not precipitate a positive return, Voyez took the gift of the salary and immediately began working with a rival potter in an attempt to copy Wedgwood’s Black Basalt (WC 45). Voyez represents the foil to theories of gift economy. Because he refused to recognize any obligation for the not inconsiderable gift of a half-year’s pay; Wedgwood and Bentley received no positive return for one of their most calculated gifts. With his internal goodwill for the most part secured, Wedgwood sought to inspire a similar loyalty among the aristocratic classes, both in England and abroad. Wedgwood and Bentley’s presentations of fine earthenware to Queen Charlotte resulted in her order of a “complete sett of tea things” in Wedgwood’s creamware (which he later designated Queen’s Ware in her honor) and his title of “Potter to Her Majesty.”37 They flaunted the royal appellation at every opportunity, printing it on the top of their sales slip, in catalogues, and in advertisements. Queen Charlotte’s patronage multiplied the social capital that Wedgwood and Bentley worked tirelessly to accrue. On September 7, 1771, Wedgwood wrote to Bentley,


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I give you joy upon your very gracious reception with their Majestys, and hope you have sown the seeds of a plentifull and rich harvest, which we shall reap in due time. . . . Their Majestys are very good indeed! I hope we shall not lose their favour, and may promise ourselves the greatest advantages from such Royal Patronage, and the very peculiar attention they are pleased to bestow upon our productions (SL 113–4).

As Wedgwood pondered the popularity of Queen’s Ware, he mused in a September 17, 1767 letter to Bentley about whether the “mode of its introduction” or “its real utility & beauty” had been most responsible for its vast success. He continued, “For instance, if a Royal, or Noble introduction be as necessary to the sale of an Article of Luxury, as real Elegance & beauty, then the Manufacturer, if he consults his own intert. will bestow as much pains, & expence too, if necessary, in gaining the former of these advantages, as he wod. in bestowing the latter.”38 What Wedgwood and Bentley already understood was that the “former of these advantages,” or noble patronage, was best gained through a gift. As Wedgwood suggested to Bentley in a letter dated February 9, 1778: I do not know what to advise concerning the price of the green hooped flower pots. I think they will have a great run if not put too high—But they want a name—A name has a wonderfull effect I assure you— Suppose you present the Duchess of Devonshire with a set & beg leave to call them Devonshire flowerpots. (L 2:403)

Wedgwood and Bentley repeatedly reaped the benefits of such presentations to nobility, frequently gaining the use of the name of their obliged recipients and producing “Bedford, Oxford, and Chetwynd vases” and the like for their less elite customers (“E” 415). As the British market became saturated with fine earthenware and porcelain, Wedgwood set his sights on international trade and once more found the gift custom to be a ready tool. Neil McKendrick credits Wedgwood’s successful global expansion to his calculated use of the “agency of ambassadors, envoys, consuls and plenipotentiaries,” who like “evangelizing agents” or “malaria-carrying mosquitos . . . carried Wedgwood’s name abroad” to the “courts of Russia, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Turkey, Naples, Turin and even into China” (“E” 426–7). Wedgwood’s gifts to foreign dignitaries in England and to British ambassadors living abroad were given clearly in hopes of a reciprocal

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benefit. Wedgwood and Bentley worked diligently to cultivate these potential patrons, as Wedgwood reveals in a letter to Bentley from March 24, 1768: “I have spent several hours with Lord Cathcart our ambassador to Russia & we are to do great things for each other” (WC 37). These “great things” began with the agreement that Wedgwood would “present to Lord and Lady Cathcart a gift of a dinnerware service and a set of vases. It was also agreed that the Ambassador and his wife would exhibit Josiah’s wares and accept orders for him, acting in effect as his unpaid agents” (WC 37). Lady Cathcart took the lead as agent and advised Wedgwood on everything from the forms of vases that would sell best to the amount of gilding the market would bear, reporting that the “Nobility of this Country express the highest approbation whenever they see any of the Queens ware at our House.”39 She procured for Wedgwood orders for four large tableware services, including the order for the first service for the Empress.40 Despite such seemingly frank business arrangements, Wedgwood understood the delicacy of this economy of exchange with the nobility, writing Bentley on September 20, 1769 regarding the “difficulty” of delivering some vases to Lady Cathcart: “They must not be presented, & we must not pretend to charge them, so that they must be neither given nor sold,—but we must borrow a pair of her Ladyships chimneypieces to shew them upon” (SL 80). Fortunately, Lady Cathcart shrewdly understood her role as unacknowledged agent in Russia of Wedgwood wares, and British wares generally, and she skillfully parlayed Wedgwood’s gifts into a thriving intercontinental trade. In cases where Wedgwood and Bentley had no direct access to British envoys who might promote their wares, they explored more risky ventures for “broadcast[ing] Wedgwood wares throughout the smaller states of Europe” (JW 219). On October 26, 1771, Wedgwood wrote Bentley regarding their “Good Friend” Mr. De Shoning’s “magnificent” proposal that Wedgwood and Bentley “Deluge” the gentry of the German states by shipping unsolicited packets of their wares to prestigious individuals (L 2:46). The wares were to be “accompanied by a circular letter advertising his products . . . and an invoice” requesting payment to be remitted if the families were pleased with the wares, or return of the items, at Wedgwood’s expense, if they were not (BN 32). According to Robin Reilly, “the cost was likely to be enormous,” as Josiah calculated—“ ‘say a thousand parcels @ £20 each Usefull & Ornamental is £20,000’—and the consequent risk intimidating” (JW 219). Nancy F. Koehn notes that Wedgwood’s marketing “strategy was one of the earliest recorded examples of


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‘inertia selling,’ that is, marketing to selected customers by shipping them unsolicited goods and offering them the opportunity either to purchase the items at set prices or return them to the manufacturer at no cost to themselves” (BN 32). I would posit that such a venture exploited the nature of gifting by sending a type of gift that required an immediate reciprocal action. Wedgwood and Bentley referred to these parcels as the “Voluntaries,” most likely because they had no leverage for collecting from the recipients. Whether or not the recipients paid for the pottery or returned it would be a completely voluntary act, but the arrival of the unsolicited packet of fine wares must have been accompanied by some of the obligation of the gift. The parcels conveyed the implicit compliments of Wedgwood and Bentley that the recipients might be of a class to appreciate the same vases and plates enjoyed by royalty throughout Europe. Most of the recipients returned the favor of the compliment, according to Wedgwood on July 29 of 1772: “If a few more should turn up with such letters as these & promises of farther commissions we may in the end have no great reason to repent what we have done.”41 The German gambit ultimately paid off; a final accounting showed that only three of the Voluntaries “debts remained outstanding,” and several of the packets had inspired additional commissions (JW 220). Wedgwood had correctly gauged the effect of gratitude and obligation that a package exchanged among strangers might accrue. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver observed about the Lilliputians: “Ingratitude is among them a capital Crime, as we read it to have been in some other Countries; for they reason thus, that whoever makes ill Returns to his Benefactor, must needs be a common Enemy to the rest of Mankind, from whom he hath received no Obligation, and therefore such a man is not fit to live.”42 Though this observation occurs immediately after Swift’s discussion of the Lilliputians’ “infamous Practice of acquiring Favour and Distinction by leaping over Sticks, and creeping under them,” we may understand even an ironic statement about gratitude to indicate the extent to which the gift indeed seemed impossible in the early eighteenth century. What Swift surely mocks in the Lilliputians’ institutionalized enforcement of the implicit etiquette of gift exchange is that benevolence and the reciprocating gratitude are not freely extended but mandated, that society is bonded together through such systems of “Obligation.” I believe Josiah Wedgwood adhered to a similar maxim, though less cynically and certainly less violently. He absolutely counted on the implicit custom (in both the economic and traditional senses) of gift

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exchange as he fostered the goodwill that insured his unprecedented rise as a potter of national and international prominence.

Notes 1. Robin Reilly, Josiah Wedgwood, 14; hereafter cited in text as JW. 2. Josiah Wedgwood to Thomas Bentley, January 2, 1770, Letters of Josiah Wedgwood, 1:325; hereafter cited in text as L by volume and page number. 3. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “goodwill.” 4. Hugh P. Hughes, Goodwill in Accounting, 7–8. 5. J. M. Yang, Goodwill and Other Intangibles, 23. 6. Hughes, Goodwill in Accounting, 14. 7. Yang, Goodwill and Other Intangibles, 27, 30. 8. Wedgwood to Bentley, September 13, 1769 (postmark), Selected Letters of Josiah Wedgwood, 77; hereafter cited as SL. 9. Marcel Mauss, The Gift, 3. While Mauss explicitly connects the gift to “economic self-interest,” Cynthia Klekar points out that “despite the obligatory nature of the gift, however, Mauss perceives of gift exchange as distinct from the principles of capitalism”; see Klekar, “Her Gift Was Compelled,” 113. 10. C. A. Gregory (Gifts and Commodities 41), quoted in Alan D. Schrift, “Introduction: Why Gift?” in The Logic of the Gift, 2. Both Klekar and Schrift note that Gregory’s delineation between commodity and gift exchange has been challenged. See Klekar, “Her Gift Was Compelled,”113; and Schrift, “Introduction: Why Gift?”, 21, n.7. 11. See Schrift, “Introduction: Why Gift?,” 2–3; see also Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice. 12. Alison Kelly, Story of Wedgwood, 10; hereafter cited in text as SW. 13. Neil McKendrick, “Josiah Wedgwood and the Commercialization of the Potteries,” 103. 14. SW 16. Kelly quotes this description of the potteries from Wedgwood’s “Experiment Book,” which he began in 1759 (SW 15). 15. SL 336. At a later meeting of subscribers to Polish relief, “fears were expressed concerning the vulnerability of Great Britain, and it was decided to return money to subscribers”; SL 336–7. 16. Mauss, The Gift, 15. Mauss suggests that this rationale for almsgiving arose in multiple civilizations, noting, “The Arab sadaka originally meant exclusively justice, as did the Hebrew zedaqa: it has come to mean alms” (18). 17. See Brian Dolan, Wedgwood: The First Tycoon, 251–4. 18. Wedgwood to Franklin, February 29, 1788, quoted in Reilly, Josiah Wedgwood, 287. Benjamin Franklin was president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery. 19. Smithsonian Institution, Wedgwood Portraits and the American Revolution, 116. This publication misdates the Franklin letter as May 15, 1787; the year should be 1788. 20. Mauss, The Gift, 12.


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21. Thomas Clarkson, History of the . . . Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, 2:191–2. 22. Josiah Wedgwood to John Wedgwood, August 7, 1765, quoted in Reilly, Josiah Wedgwood, 134. 23. November 19, 1769, quoted in Reilly, Josiah Wedgwood, 134. 24. E. J. D. Warrillow, History of Etruria, 23. 25. Bent “charged 5s.” for a house call, and a bleeding cost “only one shilling.” Accounts and receipts “submitted by Bent” indicate that the health plan cost Wedgwood about £100 to £120 annually, including various medicines such as liquorice powder and Buckthorne syrup; see E. Posner, “EighteenthCentury Health and Social Service,” 139. 26. Posner, “Eighteenth-Century Health and Social Service,” 142. 27. While Posner emphasizes that the Friendly Societies often excluded the workers most in need of care, such as glaze dippers and colliers, that most needed their assistance (“Eighteenth-Century Health and Social Service” 142), other documents indicate that Wedgwood worked very hard to protect his laborers from lead poisoning; see, for instance, Reilly, Josiah Wedgwood, 140. 28. Wedgwood, An Address to the Workmen in the Pottery, 3. 29. Wedgwood to Bentley, September 13, 1769, quoted in Dolan, Wedgwood: The First Tycoon, 205. 30. Neil J. Smelser (Social Change in the Industrial Revolution 105), quoted in Sidney Pollard, “The Factory Village in the Industrial Revolution,” 514. 31. McKendrick, “Josiah Wedgwood and Factory Discipline,” 38; hereafter cited in text as page numbers. 32. Wedgwood, Address to the Young Inhabitants of the Pottery, 21–2. 33. Wedgwood and Sons, preface to The Original Etruria Friendly Society Articles (1796), quoted in Posner, “Eighteenth-Century Health and Social Service,” figure 1. 34. Wedgwood, Address to the Workmen in the Pottery, 14. 35. Stephen Gudeman (“Postmodern Gifts” 467), quoted in Mark Osteen, “Introduction: Questions of the Gift,” 5. 36. Barbara and Hensleigh Wedgwood, The Wedgwood Circle, 44; hereafter cited as WC. 37. Nancy F. Koehn, Brand New, 34; hereafter cited in text as BN. 38. Wedgwood to Bentley, September 17, 1767, quoted in McKendrick, “Josiah Wedgwood: An Eighteenth-Century Entrepreneur,” 412; hereafter cited in text as “E.” 39. Jane, Lady Cathcart to Wedgwood, January 28 / February 8, 1770, quoted in Reilly, Josiah Wedgwood,103. 40. WC 46. This first order from the Empress is known as the Purple Husk or Husk service; its successful execution resulted in the second order for the famous Green Frog service. 41. Wedgwood to Bentley, July 29, 1772, quoted in Reilly, Josiah Wedgwood, 220. 42. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 58.


11 Anson at Canton, 1743: Obligation, Exchange, and Ritual in Edward Page’s “Secret History” Robert Markley

In her study of English trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Cynthia Klekar has called attention to the ways in which rituals of gift-giving sought to bind both East India Company merchants and the courts of Tokugawa Japan and Qing China into complex relationships of mutual obligation, deference, and duty.1 Between 1600 and 1800, as Klekar, James Hevia, John E. Wills, Jr., Annette Keogh, and Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace have shown, European emissaries performed these diplomatic rituals without being fully aware of—or willfully misinterpreting—the implications read into their actions by their Chinese and Japanese hosts: what the Europeans assumed were ceremonies of mutual obligation and equivalent exchange, their hosts perceived as unambiguous signs of deference.2 In this essay, I examine a significant but often misinterpreted episode in the history of Sino-European relations to explore what Klekar calls the “fantasy of reciprocal advantage that sutures over relations of domination and the potential for conflict”: the second stay of Commodore George Anson and his battered flagship Centurion in Canton harbor in 1743.3 Many accounts either argue or assume that Anson’s sojourn marks the beginning of a sea change in English perceptions of the Qing Empire that culminated in the widespread denigration of China and all things Chinese by the early nineteenth century. But as Glyndwr Williams has demonstrated, the unpublished manuscript, entitled “A Little Secret History,” by the East India Company merchant Edward Page, the supercargo or chief merchant of that year’s trading mission to Canton, offers a very different version of Anson’s tense standoff with Chinese officials than the

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one provided in the official account, written by Richard Walter and Benjamin Robins (apparently with Anson looking over their shoulders), that was published in 1748 as A Voyage Round the World, in the Years MDCCXL, I, II, III, IV. By George Anson.4 Anson’s behavior threatened the complex trade relations that depended on the symbolic exchange of gifts in eighteenth-century Canton, a dependence recognized by both Page and the Chinese poet Yuan Mei, who, in a brief report in his capacity as a magistrate, describes the outwitting of the English commodore by Chinese officials. Although all three accounts invoke the language of gift, obligation, and deference, they offer radically different interpretations of the actors’ beliefs, motivations, and responsibilities, and radically different perceptions of the diplomatic, political, and economic obligations that inform Anglo-Chinese relations. If the nature of gift exchange, as Klekar suggests, reveals the inevitable suspicions and misinterpretations that undermine the rhetoric of reciprocal obligation, the events at Canton in 1743 illuminate the asymmetrical practices of aggrandizement and submission that international trade both provokes and seeks to contain. In different ways, Anson’s, Yuan Mei’s, and Page’s narratives describe the inevitable cynicism engendered by trade: expressions of friendship and mutual benefit mask crass economic self-interest.5 Their interpretations of events hinge, in significant ways, on the symbolically rich ceremonies of gift exchange that inaugurate foreign trading missions in Canton. In the first section of this essay, I outline the events that led Anson to return to Canton in 1743 with a captured Spanish treasure ship in tow; I then examine his refusal to have his ship measured for a routine customs assessment or to participate in the ritual gift exchange that was a crucial part of the measuring ceremony. In the following sections, I explore Yuan Mei’s characterization of Anson as a cowering barbarian rather than a stalwart national hero, before ultimately turning to Page’s narrative that contests, at almost every point, the account in Walter and Robin’s Voyage. Page’s description of the disputes between Anson and the Chinese reveal the commodore’s distrust of the symbolic efficacy of the rituals that maintain relations between foreign merchants and Cantonese officials. In a different context, Peter Sloterdijk terms such self-aware complicity “cynical reason,” and Slavoj Žižek succinctly describes its dynamics: “even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.”6 Cynical reason, in this sense, describes the affective alienation that allows us simultaneously to engage in and disavow our recognition of the asymmetries of gift exchange. If the mere “identification of the gift seems to destroy it”

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by demanding an (impossible) equivalent return, as Jacques Derrida insists, then participating in gift exchange promotes both “an ironical distance”—the calculations of self-interest that assess the (monetary) value of the gift—and a straight-faced pretense that such cynicism can be countered, compensated for, or even overcome by the very performative semiotics that it mocks.7 The irony of Anson’s intemperate behavior, according to Page, is that the commodore takes too seriously the symbolic significance of gift exchange and mutual obligation that he otherwise vehemently rejects. His attitude marks an irruption of an idealized and inappropriate concept of honor into the complex marketplace of eighteenth-century Canton. In brief, the 1748 text rides roughshod over the diplomatic, social, ethnic, and economic tensions that marked his stay in Canton, and promotes a vision of British economic, political, and technomilitary superiority that is contested at every turn by Page’s eyewitness account.8 In its self-aggrandizing characterization of Anson’s behavior and the Chinese response, A Voyage Round the World appropriates the dialogically contested vocabularies of gift, obligation, civility, and equitable exchange in order to construct an Anglocentric history that ignores or misrepresents the practices, assumptions and values, that governed the conduct of Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Indian, Portuguese, French, Armenian, Parsee, and Spanish merchants and their Chinese partners. In contrast, Page’s manuscript testifies to the significance and complexities of the protocols for conducting business in the port of Canton.9 At stake in both Page’s “Secret History” and Anson’s Voyage are the contested means to define and defend British national identity: on the one hand, the East India Company favors a deferential and profitable trade that ensures profits for its investors and that defines its employees, including Page, not as servants of the Crown but as actors within complicated networks; and, on the other, Anson asserts that military might and his status as the commander of a British warship can enforce a deferential respect from the Chinese that will overcome their self-interest and mercantile calculation. To treat Anson’s account uncritically as a reflection of eighteenth-century “orientalism,” I argue, is to distort the complex situation in Canton and, however inadvertently, to reinforce the Eurocentric biases that still govern many accounts of European–Asian relations in the eighteenth century.10 *

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A Voyage Round the World is unsparing in its critiques of the Chinese, yet its views of cowering, malicious, and “double-dealing” officials are

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not legitimated by the prior “orientalist” views of Anson’s readers.11 In an important respect, the strident tone that Anson and his collaborators use to describe Canton must undo two centuries of European writing that depicted China as an incredibly wealthy, well-ordered, peaceful, and powerful empire. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as I have argued elsewhere, English writers and translators (with the notable exception of Daniel Defoe) followed a tradition of Jesuit writing on China that praised unreservedly the wealth, socioeconomic stability, orderly government, and techno-cultural sophistication of the Middle Kingdom.12 As David Porter, David Mungello, Jonathan Spence, and Rachel Ramsey (among others) have demonstrated, China functioned in many ways as an idealized embodiment of the principles of historical continuity and patriarchal lineage that underwrote most justifications of the socioeconomic, moral, and political systems of western Europe.13 A Voyage justifies its attacks on the Chinese by invoking the ultimate success of the commander’s voyage in dealing a telling blow to Spain—a success salvaged only by the capture of the treasure ship, the Manila Galleon.14 This retroactive process of heroicizing Anson’s three-year ordeal at sea turns the commodore into an embodiment of a stalwart nation triumphing over all obstacles and thereby bolstering its claims to imperial power. Paradoxically, however, the authors of A Voyage have to use Anson’s inaction in Canton as a compensatory narrative to transcend the implications of their own account that describes, earlier in the voyage, the infighting among the officers of the squadron, shipwreck, desertion, a mutiny, rampant disease, deprivation, and death. By treating the capture of the Manila Galleon as a measure of England’s national greatness, they foreordain the shape of their account of the commodore’s confrontation with the Chinese. Anson’s five-ship mission left England in 1741 at the outbreak of the war with Spain, bound for the west coast of South America. Anson was under orders to capture Spanish ships, disrupt the trade in gold and silver between Peru and Acapulco that fueled Spain’s war effort, and, if possible, make allies of either rebellious indigenous tribes or colonists disaffected with imperial rule.15 For two years, however, the expedition was a disaster, marred by scurvy, shipwreck, mutinies, and ultimately the death of more than two-thirds of the 2,000 men who had left England. In 1742, prior to capturing the Manila Galleon, Anson’s flagship Centurion, the last of the original war ships in the flotilla, had limped into Canton harbor after a harrowing voyage across the Pacific—leaking, short of food, short


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of water, and desperately in need of repairs. Weighing anchor off Macao, Anson prevailed on Portuguese officials and merchants from the four East India Company ships then in Canton to persuade the Hong merchants to intercede with the Chinese officials for supplies and permission to refit his ship. This process, however, was long and difficult, and it took a blunt letter from the commodore to the Chinese viceroy to secure the provisions he requested (P 153–8). Although the repairs and reprovisioning of the Centurion took longer than expected, Anson compounded a tense situation by his undiplomatic, preemptory dispatches to the Chinese and by overstaying his welcome: he delayed his departure until the shift in the monsoon winds allowed him to sail not to the southwest, the route he would take toward England, but southeasterly to intercept the Manila Galleon before it reached the Philippines. The Covadonga surrendered after a brief battle; although the Spanish galleon was larger and better armed than the Centurion, its crew was inexperienced and its officers disorganized. Not a single British sailor was killed in the action. Of the 400 Spaniards, 200 were transferred to the Centurion as prisoners, along with most of the galleon’s treasure. Loaded with silver and gold from Spanish colonies in the Americas, the Covadonga was among the richest prizes yet taken by the English: 1,313,843 pieces of eight and 35,682 pieces of silver and plate (P 167). With the galleon in tow and operating with only half his normal crew, Anson had little choice but to return to Canton, a month’s voyage away, and again seek much-needed supplies to complete his circumnavigation and return to England. On his return to Canton, Anson refused to pay measurage, the customs duties on the rich cargo that his ship now carried. He insisted that because the Centurion was a man-of-war, “he was prohibited from trading, and had nothing to do with customs or duties of any kind” (V 511), a view that neither the Chinese nor the East India Company merchants shared. To Page and his fellow merchants, Anson’s intransigence was both wrongheaded and potentially damaging to the lucrative trade maintained by the English in Canton. Measurage was charged not by the value of the cargo but by measurements of the ship taken by the Hoppo, the Chinese customs official in charge of assessing and collecting all customs and duties, in an elaborate ritual that had long been established for all European ships. At worst, Anson would be charged a tiny fraction of the value of the Spanish treasure. In Page’s view, the regular assessments of measurage and its attendant duties and fees were merely the cost of

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doing business. The percentage earmarked for Beijing was labeled specifically as the “emperor’s present,” a term that locates customs assessments and subsequent trade negotiations within the language of gift and obligation. For the Chinese authorities, “the emperor’s present” reinscribed international commerce within a value system that assuaged the concerns of an imperial court wary of unsupervised contacts between the Chinese and European merchants. Foreign traders were tolerated in Canton and required to pay homage to the Qing Emperor in exchange for the right to purchase his silks and teas. In this context, Anson’s intemperate language, as reported in both A Voyage and Page’s “Secret History,” violates the carefully crafted rhetoric and onboard ceremonies suggested by the label, “the emperor’s present”: the tributary deference on the part of European merchants. By the mid-eighteenth century, as Paul A. Van Dyke has demonstrated, the ad hoc procedures for foreign trading ventures to Canton had been regularized (CT 10–3). The ceremonies began with gun salutes from foreign ships in the harbor; the Hoppo’s junks answered by striking a ceremonial gong and occasionally “also fired cannon salutes” (CT 24). The Chinese brought sweetmeats and candied fruit as gifts for the ship’s captain; toasts with red wine followed, and formal speeches from the Hoppo or one of his lieutenants concluded what were often long and elaborate ceremonies. During these events, the Hoppo’s officers measured the dimensions of the ship at specified points to estimate its cargo capacity. After the measurements were taken, the Hoppo, “on behalf of the emperor, sent a present to each ship to show China’s concern for the well-being of their foreign guests”: the arrival gifts by 1740 consisted of “two cows, eight sacks of wheat flour, and eight crocks of Chinese wine” (CT 25). The shipboard ceremonies of gift exchange and measurement encoded the always imperfect ideal of reciprocal exchange—an ideal that paradoxically must be invoked to reassure each of the participants that all parties are acting in measured self-interest to maximize profits but not succumbing to greed or fraud. In one sense, the merchants fired cannons and the customs officials struck gongs to signal their willingness to participate in the reciprocally cynical, if often paradoxically good-natured, rituals of measurage. After this gift-giving ceremony, foreign supercargoes worked to establish or cement interpersonal as well as commercial relations with Chinese merchants authorized to trade with Europeans. Each ship or convoy of ships worked with a single Hong merchant (or cartel) who stood security for the behavior


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of the foreign barbarians and was responsible for the payment of port fees. In return, he and his trading house had exclusive privileges for buying and reselling the ship’s cargo. No provisions existed for foreign ships in Canton that were not there to trade. Anson’s return to Canton therefore threatened to disrupt relations between Page’s East India Company ships and the Hong merchant, Suqua (spelled “Seuqua” by Page) and endanger the Company’s substantial investment in that year’s trade. His refusal to pay measurage violated the ritual significance of ceremonies of gift exchange and created an economic and diplomatic standoff. Anchored below Canton harbor, the Centurion became the center of a high-stakes game of double bluffing. Anson wanted to depart on his terms but needed to refit his ship while disposing of his Spanish prisoners in a way that vindicated England’s honor; the Chinese authorities, during a difficult year of drought in north China and severe strains on the system of grain distribution, were intent on enforcing the protocols that reaffirmed tributary relations between foreigners and imperial representatives in Canton.16 Anson had no use for the 500 Spanish prisoners he had captured. Having a second ship under his command (manned by a skeleton English crew, guarding the sick and injured Spaniards who had not been imprisoned in the Centurion’s hold) put significant strains on his resources of manpower, food, and water during the month’s voyage across the China Sea to Canton; sailing the Covadonga back to England would be well-nigh impossible. For the Chinese, however, the Spanish prisoners served as a key to any negotiations: were Anson to surrender them, his compliance would acknowledge the authority of, and pledge his tributary fealty to, the Qing Emperor. As Page quickly recognized, the prisoners became a way to finesse the problem of Anson’s refusal to pay measurage, a means to reinscribe the tributary relations between the Empire and the European traders who were tolerated in Macao and Canton. In their account, Walter and Robins downplay the desperate circumstances of the Centurion and paint the eventual resolution of the crisis as a diplomatic victory for the commodore. A Voyage describes Canton as a nearly defenseless port under the rule of a sclerotic empire; its temporizing officials are motivated only by their awe and fear of the Centurion’s techno-military superiority. The cowering Chinese are “terrified” and “awed” by “the great superiority of [Anson’s] ships would have over the forts [guarding the entrance to the harbor], by the number and size of his guns” (V 512). The Hoppo’s repeated attempts to assess duties on the Centurion’s cargo are dismissed as examples

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of the “indefensible absurdities” (V 512) of the mercantile system of Canton. The Chinese, who “revered the Commodore’s power, [but] yet suspected his morals” (V 515), finally are won over when his Spanish prisoners, under examination by Cantonese officials, praise their treatment by the English. Having demonstrated both his humanity and British naval power, Anson forcefully demands his due as the king’s emissary, then patiently waits while the authorities, after more terrified temporizing, grant his reasonable requests. Yuan Mei’s version of events differs, to say the least. In this brief account, Anson is portrayed as a hotheaded barbarian whose empty threats endanger his ship and that year’s trade in the port: There was great alarm in Canton and the Governor-General, sending for the Provincial Treasurer T’o-yung, said to him, “When outside barbarians who are at war with one another conduct their hostilities on our very borders, ought we to allow it or ought we to annihilate them. Which course would best further our national interests?” “What we should do,” said T’o-yung, “is to make them hand over their five hundred prisoners under the specific title of Tribute. . . .” The GovernorGeneral smiled ruefully. “You can only be joking,” he said, “The Red Haired People are barbarians, but they are not fools. How can you suppose that, returning as complete victors after their enormous voyage, they will now submit to being ordered about?”17

Yuan Mei emphasizes the unpalatable options that confront the Chinese officials: they can “annihilate” the British, with potentially dire consequences for that year’s trade, or tolerate a barbarian’s blustering and threats. Either alternative might work against their selfinterest by endangering a system that supported the bureaucratic apparatus of the Hoppo and his officers, brought significant sums into the provincial treasury, and lined the pockets of the powerful Hong merchant community.18 Although the governor-general remains skeptical about Anson’s compliance, he assumes that he can destroy the Centurion whenever he wishes; in this respect, Yuan Mei offers a cost-benefit analysis of the economic consequences of taking military action against the British. The narrative structure of this episode is a familiar one in Qing tales that celebrate the acumen of local officials and the strategic advantages of the Empire in dealing with barbarians: these narratives typically portray a young hero outsmarting dim-witted foreigners, outlaws, or malcontents, overcoming them by guile rather than the kind of brute force that Anson threatens (YM 202–3). Yuan Mei adapts this


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generic form for his history. Long months of negotiation are collapsed into a single conversation that precedes Anson’s audience. T’o-yung reassures the governor-general that Anson is just another barbarian, then uses the same logic to convince the prefect, Yin Kuang-jen, that the commodore can be easily manipulated: “These Red Haired people had to cross several thousand leagues of ocean in order to attack [the Spanish]. It is certain that they are short of provisions, and as they have encountered heavy storms[;] it is equally certain that their ship must need repairs, without which they cannot embark on their homeward voyage” (YM 206). By ordering the Hong merchants in Canton to stall or “withhold all supplies,” Prefect Yin forces Anson to bend to his will. At his long-waited audience, the commodore is portrayed as a trembling barbarian who, before acceding to the prefect’s demands for prisoners in exchange for provisions, is reviled and threatened with annihilation by the prefect’s superior military force. At this treatment, according to Yuan Mei, “the Commander of the Red Haired people fell into complete despair. . . . [He] flung himself upon the ground, saying: ‘it is true indeed that we are at the end of our resources. But we had no intention of offending your Heavenly Court, and I implore you to forgive us and tell us what we should do’ ” (YM 207). Anson is both humiliated and maneuvered into surrendering his Spanish prisoners, demonstrating his submission to the “Heavenly Court” of the Qing Emperor by pleading for orders that he can follow. He is allowed to leave Canton with the supplies for which he has been forced to overpay: his tribute to the Chinese thus takes the form of both ritual subjection and economic victimization. Hong merchants and Chinese officials are the clear victors in Yuan Mei’s telescoped history, upholding the civilized values of deference and decorum that are embodied by the prefect and the shrewd Provincial Treasurer. A Voyage inverts this Chinese perspective. Even after releasing the Spanish prisoners, Anson stewed while the viceroy stalled, awaiting orders from Beijing about how to deal with the Centurion. The motives of the Chinese, a people given to “artifice, falshood, and an attachment to all kinds of lucre” (V 517), remain “mysterious,” but the narrative recounts at length episodes of an English officer being beaten on shore, a translator stealing a present from Anson to a local official, and various petty acts of mercantile chicanery. These actions are presented as characteristics of a nation given to perfidy and subterfuge, and the episodes treated as though they refute, once and for all, the praise afforded the Chinese “in the legendary accounts of the Roman

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Missionaries” (V 519). Anson assumes the role of heroic demystifier of Jesuit accounts by denigrating the morality, courage, and political acumen of his reluctant hosts. A Voyage disparages the military force that Yuan Mei’s governor-general takes for granted. The Boca Tigris, the “narrow passage” leading to Canton, is guarded by only twenty small “iron cannon” manned by a force “extremely defective in all military skill”: these fortifications “could have given no obstruction to Mr. Anson’s passage” had he decided to attack the port (V 511–2). Such hypothetical assertions about battles that never occurred run little risk of being countered in print because to question Anson as an embodiment of British techno-military superiority is to call into question the integrity of the nation that is forged in and by his epic voyage. *

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If Anson’s and Yuan Mei’s accounts were simply a matter of clashing perspectives, I could conclude this article with a paint-by-numbers analysis of the differences that inform their narratives and mirror competing national, religious, and ethnic values. But Page’s account offers a highly critical portrait of Anson’s conduct in Canton that confirms, to a significant extent, Yuan Mei’s interpretation of events. The seventy-eight-page manuscript of “A Little Secret History” provides a means to explore the assumptions and values that paradoxically both inform and threaten to disrupt international trade. In response to Anson’s performance in A Voyage of a hypermasculinized English national identity, Page registers his own multiple affiliations and the pressures under which he labored in striving to negotiate among competing interests: orders from the East India Company to maximize profits; concerns voiced by other English merchants; demands from the impolitic commodore; and responses from his Chinese hosts, who are portrayed as trading partners, embodiments of the transcultural values of civility, and, not least, friends. As supercargo for the two Company ships then in the harbor, Page was the closest thing to an official British representative in Canton; since no permanent foreign trading factories were allowed in China (with the exception of the Portuguese tributary port of Macao), the supercargo was treated as a guest of the Emperor and vested symbolically with the authority to present tributary gifts in the measurage ceremonies and on his visits to officials. Because Page arrived in China after the Centurion, he immediately found himself acting as a go-between, trying to help the


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commodore, through the intercession of other European and Chinese merchants, get his desired audience with the prefect. In effect, Anson’s request for an official audience and his refusal to pay measurage or participate in the Hoppo’s ceremonies was a demand to be accorded the status of a high-ranking emissary of the British Crown. The description of his interactions with Page and unnamed Chinese merchants in A Voyage is brief and dismissive; the delays occasioned, in part, by his intransigence are attributed to the “artifices” and “falshood,” of the Chinese, and Page (who also goes unnamed) is the dupe of “Chinese Merchants” who “had so far prepossessed the supercargoes of our ships with chimerical fears, that they (the supercargoes) were extremely apprehensive of being embroiled with the Government, and of suffering in their interest” (V 530). Page contests this interpretation of events at every turn. He begins his history by describing the tense standoff between the commodore and Qing officials. Anson’s refusal “to pay measurage, as all other Ships did,” according to the supercargo, “was a Case Extraordinary, and could not but Create some Disgust & aversion in the Chinese Government, who fancy themselves Superior to every Nation.”19 Significantly, Page describes himself siding implicitly or explicitly with the Chinese against Anson. The Cantonese officials and Hong merchants are granted a civilized interiority that A Voyage denies them: their motives, business acumen, cross-cultural understanding, and enlightened self-interest present a mature alternative to the demands, ignorance, and insensitivity that characterize the commodore’s behavior. In trying to mediate between Anson and the “Chinese Government,” Page turned to Suqua, the oldest and most experienced of the Hong merchants who traded with the East India Company. At various points during the 1730s, Suqua’s dominance of the trade in green teas, finished silks, and other commodities had led to bitter altercations with rival merchants in Canton, massive fines, and several breaks and reconciliations with the Company’s supercargoes. By 1743, his near-monopoly on the trade with the British had been broken, but he was still a significant presence in Canton, particularly during an unstable period when the office of Hoppo had recently changed hands and the Governor, Wang An-kuo, was awaiting the arrival of a new Viceroy, Ma-er-tai, amid suspicions in Beijing that monies from trade in Canton were being siphoned off by customs officials and underlings.20 With the Chinese officials preoccupied with internal difficulties, Suqua, “the Oldest & the Richest of our merchants,” as Page calls him, became a logical intermediary

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for the impatient Anson: the supercargo “very readily waited on the Commodore to Seuqua’s, and complain’d to Him of the difficultys made about the Com[m]odore’s Visit, assuring him the Com[m]dore was a Mandareen of very high Rank in England, and it was very ungenteel not to admit him, when their Nation boasted so much of their Politeness” (“SH” 3–4). Page’s introduction of Anson to Suqua invokes transcultural standards of upper-class civility by investing the commodore, the son of a minor country gentleman, with a social status that he did not possess.21 Page appeals to Chinese self-perceptions of their superiority, asking that they uphold the ideals of “Politeness” on which the mutual obligations of economic intercourse and social privilege depend. His description of the subsequent conversation between Suqua and Anson makes the Chinese merchant a crucial figure in the “Secret History” by allowing him to articulate what Page endorses as an accurate assessment of the complex diplomatic situation that the Centurion’s return had created. In this respect, the supercargo invokes an imagined space of negotiations characterized by the idealized equality of the participants—Anson transformed into “a Mandareen of very high Rank in England”—and the idealized reciprocity of mutual obligation promised by the fiction of the gift. Once Anson begins to speak “upon the Dignity & Importance of his com[m]and,” however, he violates the transcultural values of politeness, as well as the possibility of mutual understanding and mutual benefit, that supposedly are secured by the ceremonies of gift exchange and measurage. Suqua’s response to the commodore’s intransigence gives voice, within Page’s narrative, to a perspective akin to the one that Yuan Mei describes: ^When^ Seuqua had heard all the Com[m]dore had to say (and he understood and spoke English very well) he stroked his Beard & said “Com[m]dore, If I was to tell the Choncoon (which was then the Vice Roy’s Title) all you have been telling me, truly he would look upon you as a little man, and greatly his Inferiour. . . . He will have no notion of a Great Mandareen being two Years upon the Seas, & enduring the Fatigue that you have done: You give Mr. Page a great deal of trouble, who had Business enough upon his hands to dispatch his Ships in time, and He tiezes the merchants upon a foolish Business. That He (Seuqua) had sometimes attended at the Mandareens himself with the merchants upon this affair, But that they found it very difficult to obtain what he so much desired. That the Merchants for This, neglected their real Business at their Hongs, when all the European Factorys wanted to pack their Teas and Silks with them. Truly (says he) I think it is a very Foolish Business to set your Heart so much upon. You want to see a


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little of the China Customs. To You it is all one as to see a play, But to others it gives much Trouble and Vexation, and perhaps after all, when you have your Visit, you will not be pleased . . . and Resent it; and then much Trouble will be brought upon the Factory, and the Merchants must have their Share.” (“SH” 4–5)

In ventriloquizing Suqua’s response, Page allows the Hong merchant to emerge as a spokesperson for “modern,” capitalist values. He is portrayed as a temperate, rational businessman who, in good English, quickly puts Anson, and the martial values that he invokes, in his place as a blowhard, a “little man” trying to bluster his way into an audience with the viceroy. Precisely because the measurage charges are comparatively insignificant, Suqua can tell Anson to his face that the Englishman’s assertion of principle is merely “a very Foolish Business” that threatens to disrupt the East India Company’s “real Business.” Ironically, then, Anson is put in the position of naively contradicting himself by invoking the tradition of diplomatic reciprocity to justify seeking an audience with the viceroy even as he refuses to participate in the gift and measurage ceremonies that are the only available means to claim the status of an honored guest. In contrast, Suqua empties this yet-to-be-realized audience of any significance by calling attention to the performative nature of Anson’s posturing and his misreading of “the China customs.” The end of Anson’s insistence on an audience, according to Suqua, will be disappointment for the commodore and a possible disruption of that year’s trade. He lectures the commodore on the semiotics of the always self-interested, even cynical, economy of exchange and deference that enables teas and silks to be packed for consumers in England. In brief, Anson fails to recognize the asymmetries of power in Canton and the ritualized significance of measurage as a basis for subsequent economic and diplomatic transactions. Page and Suqua imply that it is not the value of the gifts exchanged during the measurage rituals that is important, but the willingness of Chinese officials and foreign merchants to recognize both the good intentions and the avowed self-interest of the other party. Each party must agree to the performative conditions necessary for trade—the gift exchange of cows, grain, and wine—even as each strives to cut the best deal possible. Suqua’s advice proved prophetic because Anson ultimately was not pleased with the treatment he received either from the Chinese or from the English merchants. The commodore’s demands strike the Hong merchant as “Trifles” (“SH” 5) precisely because there is no possibility that Qing officials will take seriously his self-presentation

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as a representative of British diplomatic and maritime power. As Page reminds his readers, Anson “had no Credentials to the Port at all” (“SH” 6). In mediating between Anson and the Chinese, Page “ran a risqué of [his] Employers displeasure by encreasing the Expences of the Factory, by [Anson’s], and his Officers and people, coming up” (“SH” 6) to Canton from their anchorage. From the supercargo’s point of view, Anson is a troublesome guest; from the commodore’s perspective, the English merchants are the hirelings of a private company who must defer to his authority as a representative of the Crown and treat him as a de facto ambassador. While the English merchants feverishly tried to load their cargoes and ready their ships to sail with the monsoons, Anson took up residence in Page’s rented lodgings, waiting for his audience in order to present his grievances to the viceroy about delays in procuring the supplies for which he already had paid. Even on an interpersonal level, the relationships between the naval officer and the merchant were marked by very different, even incommensurate, understandings of their roles, obligations, and allegiances. Page states that he and the commodore “had many little Altercations of an Evening, . . . upon his throwing out hints as if he would Resent the Mandareens refusing him, in a way that wod bring [the East India Company merchants] into Troubles” (“SH” 8). These disagreements strained the relationship between guest and host, even as Page details his efforts to keep Anson from acting impetuously enough to disrupt the East India Company’s commerce. When the commodore later felt that his lieutenant was snubbed by a Chinese official while on a mission to deliver a letter to the prefect (a severe breach of protocol), he threatened to “stop all the Junks ^Chineese Ships^ that came in or out [of Canton], till that Officer ^who^ received the letter from his Lieutenant, was deliver’d up to him” for punishment. This threat to blockade the port, Page sees as political and economic suicide. “I asked him,” Page writes, if he should take such a step what was to become of us & our Ships, for we were wholly in the power of the Chineese; and I hoped he would consider . . . how the Crown would be affected by the Loss of the China Trade which brought in a very great Revenue; . . . I reckoned the two Ships we had then there, brought the King ^near^ two hundred Thousand pounds. He said he did not mind That, the Nation might make that up some other way. (“SH” 12–3)

For Page, Anson’s blindness to the economic consequences of disrupting the lucrative China trade makes him seem a lot like the


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red-haired barbarian described in Yuan Mei’s account. The value of Anson’s loot from the Spanish galleon represented, at most, two years’ worth of custom duties on the Company’s imports of silk and tea into England. Page insistently challenges A Voyage’s version of events. In September, one of Anson’s officers refused to allow customs officials to search a small vessel that was being used to ferry eighteen of the Centurion’s crew into the city proper. According to Page, this blatant violation of protocol upset the East India Company merchants more than the Chinese. His colleagues were “frightened out of their Wits, [and] complain’d of this obstruction given to the Officers of the Government, which might be the Loss of all our priviledges” (“SH” 14). The merchants’ fear, derided in A Voyage, stems from their recognition that defying the authorities could sever the complex bonds of financial and personal trust that the English maintain with Hong merchants, landing their Chinese counterparts in “much Trouble,” and jeopardizing future trade. This episode is characterized by the authors of the Voyage as another in a series of delays, an encounter that ended when the Chinese customs officials backed down and allowed the barge to proceed, realizing that they risked “having the whole navigation of their port destroyed” (V 527). Characteristically, though Page offers a radically different view of this standoff. He insists that it was Anson, not the customs officers, who backed down, and ordered his lieutenant to allow the boat to be searched for contraband. The consequences, had the commodore persisted in this symbolic gesture of defiance, likely would have been disastrous: Had the ^Mandareen^ given orders to the people to Enter the Boat by Force, they would have been repell’d by the Com[m]odore’s people, who were eighteen in the Barge besides the Officer. But there were numbers ready at hand to aid the ^Hoppo’s^ Officers, and a hundred Boats & more within Call, to surround the Barge upon the ^shortest^ summons, as every body knows who has been in China. Many lives might have been lost, and the Com[m]odore himself was then a private man, in his apartment ^in our Factory^ and at their Mercy. (“SH” 16)

In this passage, Page strikes at the heart of Anson’s self-justification for his behavior: in Canton, the commodore is “a private man,” not a high-ranking representative of the British Crown. His men are outnumbered and outgunned: they cannot, as the official account claims, destroy “the whole navigation” of Canton; they can only disrupt what Suqua terms the “real Business” of English commerce, costing the

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Crown £200,000 by their show of belligerence. Page then pursues the implications of this argument by asking his readers to imagine sympathetically the dilemma that Anson’s behavior presents to the Chinese: And I ask, whether the Officers of Our Customhouse would not watch the Boats of Foreign Ships (although they might be a Man of War) or, if they would examine their Baggage if they were ordered to do so? And whether our Government would not protect their Officers in their Duty, & punish the Foreigners, if their Resistance to our Laws & Regulations should bring on any mischiefs. It would have given the Foreign Factorys great Joy to have seen the English involved in Broils with the Chineese Government &, lose their Trade, as they had ^before^ at Japan, For what was our Loss would have been their advantage. (“SH” 19–20)

Page invites his readers to imagine the situation reversed, with a foreign warship refusing to comply with English laws and rejecting England’s authority to assess merchandise and levy customs. Significantly, the Chinese are granted the same legitimacy and national authority that the English claim in enforcing their own “Laws & Regulations.” Rather than the double-dealing, self-interested caricatures depicted in A Voyage, the Chinese act consistently, rationally, and lawfully. Anson’s blustering works against England’s national interest by raising the specter of the Company’s losing its share of the lucrative trade in silks and tea to the French, Danish, and Swedish merchants who were also in the harbor at the time. For Page, Anson, Lord Admiral of the English navy for the last two decades of his life, is not the embodiment of England’s national strength or pride but a loutish country cousin who jeopardizes England’s standing as a commercial power. Ultimately, Page’s treatment of the Chinese borders on the kind of sympathetic identification that he asks his readers to entertain. The customs officials and Hong merchants, such as Suqua, who are lambasted by Anson, emerge in the “Secret History” as sympathetic figures who embody the transcultural values of civility that make palatable the cynical maneuverings and asymmetries of economic exchange. Page singles out their treatment of common British sailors for particular approval, particularly their tolerance for small-scale private trading that is excused from import duties. In contrast, he excoriates the rigidity of the British excise system, the chief source of revenue for the government. 22 “I never brought home a Bottle of Arrack for my own use, or a Tea Set for my wife,” Page reports, “that


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I was excused the Duty for, although the two Ships I had the Chief Direction of, the last Voyage ^only,^ paid about two hundred thousand pounds to the Crown in Customs & Excise” (“SH” 37). The pettiness of British officials insisting on Page’s paying duty on small items is set against the flexible and humane attitudes of the Hoppo’s officers who respect the difference between commercial merchandise and private gifts. Tea sets are invested with a domestic significance because they serve as a symbolic means for husbands and wives to reestablish emotional intimacy after the long separations necessitated by voyages to India and China. At the same time, these porcelain items remain embedded in a larger economics of reciprocity and mutual obligation underwritten on the macro-level by the ceremonies of measurage. At home in England as well as on board ship in Canton harbor, the gift becomes a crucial means for Page to distinguish between Chinese civility and the inflexible adherence to regulations that characterizes English customs officers. The duty collected on tea sets represents, in some measure, the intransigence that Anson embodies. Customs officials in England, like the commodore, reject the cultural work that gift exchange performs in a competitive and cynical economic system. In different ways, Anson and Page remind readers that history is never innocent; it always reinscribes complex ideological assumptions, values, and principles that, in turn, help to structure fundamentally different perceptions of trade, national identity, and, not least, China and the Chinese. A Voyage is shot through with inconsistencies and rhetorical sleights of hand, and to see it as representative of a wholesale shift in European attitudes toward the Chinese is to buy into the very kind of ideological principles—those that we now label “orientalism”—that the authors try to promote in order to justify the commodore’s actions. This is not to suggest that Page’s account is a “true” or more accurate history of the events in Canton, but that his narrative embeds the Centurion’s return to the port in a rhetoric of reciprocity, obligation, and deference that cannot be explained by simplistic models of eighteenth-century mercantilism or metanarratives of British colonialism. Page, Anson, and Yuan Mei ultimately hold different perceptions of what “reciprocity” and “obligation” mean. The ceremonies of gift exchange that lie at the center of Anson’s controversial stay in Canton are invariably always in the process of being misinterpreted and misappropriated, leading to suspicions, threats, and recriminations. Page’s “Secret History,” in this sense, registers the inevitable failure of the gift, the failure of Anson to acknowledge the measured cynicism that such ceremonies are designed not to

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overcome but to provoke. Not only does his account call into question the clichéd acceptance of Anson’s fiction of a corrupt empire bowing to the superior economic and military might of England’s leaking flagship; it reveals that the gift itself always marks the site of dialogic struggles between deference and obligation, trust and suspicion, and civility and cynicism.

Notes 1. See Cynthia Klekar, “Prisoners in Silken Bonds.” 2. See James Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar; John E. Wills, Jr., Pepper, Guns, and Parleys and Embassies and Illusions; Annette Keough, “Oriental Translations”; and Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, “The First Samurai.” 3. Klekar, 102. 4. Glyndwr Williams, “Anson at Canton, 1743: ‘A Little Secret History.’ ” The authorship of A Voyage Round the World . . . By George Anson is vexed; the title page attributes the text to the ship’s chaplain Richard Walter, but Walter left the Centurion in 1742 when it first docked in Canton and sailed to England on a merchant ship; he therefore was not present during the events in 1743 that Page discusses. In the standard work on Anson’s voyage, Williams suggests that much of the text was ghostwritten by Benjamin Robins, often ventriloquizing Anson’s views (The Prize of All the Oceans 237–41). See also Williams, The Great South Sea; and Philip Edwards, The Story of the Voyage. 5. See Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests. 6. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason; and Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 33. 7. Jacques Derrida, “Time of the King,” 130. 8. See Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men. 9. The standard account of European trade in Canton during the period is Paul A. Van Dyke’s The Canton Trade; hereafter cited as CT. For other important accounts, see Weng Eang Cheong, The Hong Merchants of Canton; Louis Dermigny, La Chine et l’Occident; Hosea B. Morse, Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China; and John Keay, The Honourable Company. 10. Scholars who have challenged the default Eurocentrism of much of the work on European–Asian relations in the early modern period include Kenneth Pomeranz, Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy; Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age; R. Bin Wong, China Transformed; Geoffrey Gunn, First Globalization; Frank Perlin, “The Other ‘Species’ World”; and Rajani Sudan, “Mud, Mortar, and Other Technologies of Empire.” 11. Richard Walter, A Voyage Round the World . . . By George Anson, 527; hereafter cited in text as V. 12. Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730.


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13. David Porter, Ideographia; David E. Mungello, Curious Land and The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800; Jonathan D. Spence, The Cham’s Great Continent; and Rachel Ramsey, “China and the Ideal of Order in John Webb’s An Historical Essay.” 14. The publishing history of A Voyage Round the World is complicated. The Eighteenth-Century Catalogue Online lists twenty-two separate editions by 1796, although title pages are often inaccurate: there were, for example, two “ninth” editions published in Dublin, in 1773 and 1790. 15. On Anson’s orders, see Williams, Prize of All the Oceans, 10–1; hereafter cited in text as P. 16. On the Qing treatment of foreigners, the complex relationships between tributary peoples and government policies, and the administrative structures of eighteenth-century China, see Susan Naquin and Evelyn S. Rawski, Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century; Pierre-Etienne Will, Bureaucracy and Famine in Eighteenth-Century China; Peter C. Perdue, “Comparing Empires: Manchu Colonialism”; Pamela Kyle Crossley, A Translucent Mirror; and Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise 17. The translation is from the standard biography of Yuan Mei by Arthur Waley, Yuan Mei: Eighteenth-Century Chinese Poet, 205–6; hereafter cited in text as YM. 18. On port fees and the system, see Van Dyke, CT 5–18. Ships, depending on size, paid between 2 and 7 percent of their cargo capacity in custom duties. 19. [Edward Page,] “A Little Secret History of Affairs at Canton in the Year 1743 when the Centurion, Commodore Anson was lying in the River,” dated November 18, 1765, MS 2894, Oregon Historical Society, Portland, Oregon, 1–2; hereafter cited in text as “SH.” 20. See Cheong, The Hong Merchants of Canton, 200–5; on Suqua’s career, see 134–44. 21. On the significance of notions of transcultural civility in European perceptions of and contacts with Ming and Qing China, see Markley, Far East and the English Imagination, 104–42. 22. On the complexities and enforcement of British import duties and excise taxes in the eighteeenth century, see John Brewer, The Sinews of Power, 64–88; and William J. Ashworth, Customs and Excise, 133–64.


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Index

Address to the Workmen in the Pottery (Wedgwood), 205, 207 Address to the Young Inhabitants of the Pottery (Wedgwood), 206–7 Adventures of David Simple, The (S. Fielding), 149 Adventures of Roderick Random, The (Smollett), 146–7, 149 Alison, Archibald, 93–4, 105nn43–4 Allen, Ralph, 63 Allestree, Richard, 80, 81, 83–4, 193n21 altruism, 55–6, 110, 112, 118–19, 120 See also disinterest amatory gifts, 8–9, 145, 146–52, 193n6 See also gift(s) Anatomy of an Equivalent, The (Halifax), 81 Andrew, Donna, 183 Anson, George, 11, 215–32 Anti-Pamela (Haywood), 149 apprentices and apprenticeship, 32n15, 54n21, 59, 60–1, 63 Apprentice’s Vade Mecum, The (Richardson), 59, 60–1, 63–4, 70n11 Armstrong, Nancy, 80, 100nn5–6 Austen, Jane, 65, 145, 150, 151

Bataille, Georges, 5, 162 Batchelor, Jennie, 9, 74n47 Baudrillard, Jean, 55, 71n24 Beijing, 220, 223, 225 See also China trade Ben-Amos, Ilana Krausman, 23 benevolence and abolition, 202 age of, 4 Christian, 38, 44–6 and commerce, 11, 207, 211 and gift exchange, 12 and goodwill, 200 and gratitude, 107–8, 109, 119 and Sunday Schools, 119 theories of, 5–7 See also generosity Bent, James, 205, 213n25 Bent, William, 205 Bentley, Thomas, 197–212 Bisse, Thomas, 50–1 Blackwood’s Magazine, 4, 180, 181 Blake, William, 69, 74n55 Board of Trade, 17–18, 39 Boulton, Matthew, 204–5 Bourdieu, Pierre, 3–4, 37, 129–30, 133, 140, 145, 148, 151, 152, 153, 162, 178, 180 Bowditch, Phebe Lowell, 162, 171 Bradshaigh, Lady, 67, 68, 73n41, 73n44, 74n46 Braverman, Richard, 126–7

254

Index

Brother’s Gift, The (anon.), 79 Burke, Edmund, 9, 177 Burney, Frances, 9, 104n41, 135, 147, 154, 171, 177–93 Burslem, 199, 201 Canton, 11, 215–32 capitalism capital relations, 126–8 exploitation by, 8 versus gift economy, 110, 127–8, 129, 160, 162, 212n9 and goodwill, 198 language of, 127, 136, 164 versus patronage, 3–4, 160, 179, 181 and Sunday Schools, 108, 110 symbolic, 3, 111, 122n12, 129–30, 162, 178, 180, 208 See also commerce; commodities; market economy; market exchange Cecilia (Burney), 135, 171 Centurion, 215–31 Chapone, Mrs. (Hester Mulso), 80, 100nn4–5 Charitable Corporation, 6, 55, 69n1, 69n3, 70n17 bankruptcy of, 56–7, 60 bonds of, 56–7 charter of, 56 charity. See benevolence; charity schools; gift economy; gift exchange; objects of compassion; philanthropists and philanthropy; reciprocity charity schools, 6, 16, 37, 38–9, 187 and gift exchange, 16–18, 19, 21, 23–4, 25, 27–9, 30–1, 38, 50–1 opposition to, 28–9 and reform, 48–51 support for, 24–6, 28–9, 39 See also houses of industry; Sunday Schools; workhouses

Cheal, David, 111 China trade, 11, 215–32 Wedgwood and, 209 See also Beijing; Canton; Qing dynasty Christian Scholar, The (Kennet), 46 Cixous, Hélène, 5, 189, 194n37 Clarissa (Richardson), 66, 69n10, 74n51, 147–8 Clarkson, Thomas, 203–4 Cleland, John, 147–8 commerce, 3, 10–12 benevolence and, 11, 207, 211 in China trade, 220, 228–9 versus gift exchange, 188 See also capitalism; commodities; market economy; market exchange commodities, 3, 4, 9–10, 127, 132, 153, 162, 163, 165, 167, 178–9, 198–9, 212n10 See also capitalism; commerce; market economy; market exchange Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man, A (Gregory), 92 conduct manuals, 7, 79–106, 150, 194n29 and behavior, 79–81, 82, 84–6, 88, 92, 93, 94, 97, 99, 104n36 and charity, 84, 98, 100n5, 102n22, 104n37 circulation of, 79, 85, 100n3, 103n23 and courtship, 82, 90–1, 97, 100n5 and domesticity, 80, 84, 91–2, 93, 97, 102n18, 104n37 as gift, 79–81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 89, 92–3, 95, 96, 98–9 and marriage, 82, 84, 85–6, 88, 90–1, 93–4, 97, 103n26, 103n28, 104n36

Index and obligation, 79, 81, 83–4, 85, 87, 88, 91, 92–3, 95, 98–9 parenting, 81–3, 87–8, 91, 94–6, 98–9 publication of, 80, 85, 88, 92, 94, 96, 100n5, 103n23, 105n47 See also Father’s Legacy to His Daughters, A (Gregory); Gregory, John; Halifax, Marquis of (George Savile); Lady’s New Year’s Gift, The (Halifax); Pennington, Sarah; Unfortunate Mother’s Advice to Her Absent Daughters, An (Pennington) Congreve, William, 8, 125–41 consent, 18–21, 30, 33n19, 33n21, 133 as goodwill, 198 to marriage, 138–9 contracts legal, 22–3, 125, 126, 127, 131, 134, 136–7, 138, 139, 189, 198 social, 19 contractual relations, 23, 108, 125, 136, 162, 168, 174n2 Cooke, Thomas, 6, 26, 31, 34n32 Coram, Thomas, 63 See also Foundling Hospital Covadonga. See Manila Galleon (Covadonga) creditors of Charitable Corporation, 56, 58 in gift exchange, 167–8, 188–9, 190 God as, 62–3, 71n24 See also debt; debtors custom in gift exchange, 147–8, 154, 179, 184, 190, 192, 208, 209, 211–12 Locke on, 37, 40–1

255

customs duties, 219–20, 225, 229, 230, 231, 233n18 See also import duties; measurage Daily Gazetteer, 64–5 Daily Journal, 57–8, 61 Day, Thomas, 155–6 debt of Charitable Corporation, 56–7, 59 and gift exchange, 7, 110, 125–6, 127–8, 129, 131, 133–4, 153, 171, 192 to God, 6, 62–3, 71n24 of gratitude, 113, 180, 203 debtors feminization of, 6, 59–60 and gift exchange, 7, 188–9 See also creditors deed of gift, 126, 128, 133, 139, 140 deed of trust, 8, 125, 128, 133, 134–5, 136, 138 Defence of Poetry, A (Shelly), 171 deference in China trade, 11, 41, 215, 216, 217, 220, 223, 227, 228, 231–2 to God, 41, 119 to paternalism, 3, 42, 82, 119, 139, 140, 179, 180, 187, 188, 190 to spouse, 82–3, 84, 88–9 of working class, 131–2, 162 Defoe, Daniel, 27–9, 34n42, 35n43, 145, 151, 218 dependency, 3–4 in China trade, 216, 226 debt and, 139 gift exchange and, 9, 111, 129–31, 140, 161, 164–5, 167–71, 184, 186, 188–9 poverty and, 38, 46, 61, 180, 185 of wives, 146 See also paternalism

256

Index

Derrida, Jacques, 5, 87, 110–11, 145, 153–5, 156, 158n29, 162, 171, 217 desire, 8–9, 101n10, 111, 139, 145, 147, 149, 150, 154, 156, 160, 163, 169, 184 Dingley, Robert, 63, 67, 71nn27–8, 73n41 See also Magdalen House for Penitent Prostitutes discipline of children, 39–40, 46, 82, 109 culture of, 37 of workers, 10, 206 disinterest, 2, 8, 63, 111–12, 121, 127, 128, 131, 135, 138, 139–40, 152, 160, 199 amatory gifts and, 8–9, 148–9 Bourdieu on, 122n12, 178 See also self-interest Dodd, William, 68, 74n53 donations. See gift(s) Dussinger, John A., 6–7, 70n20 East India Company, 215–32 Echlin, Lady, 68–9, 74n51 Eden, Frederick Morton, 4, 181, 193n14 education. See charity schools; literacy; Sunday Schools Egenolf, Susan B., 10 Elliott, Dorice Williams, 7–8 Emancipation Badge, 202–4 eroticism, 8–9, 11, 145, 147, 149, 154, 156, 184, 194n29 See also amatory gifts Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An (Locke), 26, 37 Essay on the Principle of Population, An (Malthus), 181 Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (Alison), 94 Evelina (Burney), 147, 154

exchange. See gift exchange; market exchange Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, The (Smollett), 147 Father’s Gift, The (anon.), 79 Father’s Legacy to His Daughters, A (Gregory), 80, 87–94, 98–9 See also conduct manuals; Gregory, John Female Friendly Society, 120 See also Friendly Societies Female Quixote, The (Lennox), 150 Feminine Economies (Still), 161, 162, 168, 169 Fenelon, François, 147–8 Fielding, Henry, 72n38, 150 Fielding, Sarah, 149 Fordyce, James, 80, 81, 98, 100n3, 101n10 Foundling Hospital, 55, 63 Francus, Marilyn, 7 Franklin, Benjamin, 121nn18–19, 202–3 Free Briton, 56 freedom abolition of slavery, 202–4 and marriage, 84, 91, 145 and the poor, 24, 29–30 as self-determination, 20–2 spiritual, 60 French Revolution, 9, 177–8, 182, 192 Friendly Societies, 205–6, 213n27 Female Friendly Society, 120 Original Etruria Friendly Society Articles (Wedgwood), 207 General Hospital (Bath), 63 generosity, 5, 8–9 amatory gifts and, 145, 147, 149, 151, 153–4, 156 toward children, 43–4, 47

Index gift exchange and, 126–7, 131–2, 140, 164, 168–9, 187 toward the poor, 61–2, 178, 182 See also benevolence Gentleman’s Magazine, 60 gift(s) amatory, 8–9, 145, 146–52, 193n6 clients, 3, 179, 180, 197 conduct manual as, 79–81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 89, 92–3, 95, 96, 98–9 donors and donations, 1, 4, 10, 33n27, 98 as fiction, 9, 129, 132, 159, 161, 170, 171–3 “pure”, 2, 111, 145, 152–6 Gift, The (Mauss), 2, 16, 110, 122n14, 128–9, 161–2, 174n11, 175n27, 194n23, 199, 201, 203, 212n9, 212n16 gift economy artworks in, 171 and dependency, 9, 164, 168, 170, 184 and labor relations, 199, 208 versus market economy, 2, 108, 110–11, 128–9, 161–2, 174n9, 174n11, 175n23, 178–9, 190, 198–9, 200 gift exchange asymmetry of, 8, 11, 99, 126, 128, 133, 145 charity schools as site of, 16–18, 19, 21, 23–4, 25, 27–9, 30–1, 38, 50–2 in China trade, 215–17, 220–1, 226, 227, 231 custom, role of, 147–8, 154, 179, 184, 190, 192, 208, 209, 211–12 disinterested, 110–11, 121 fantasy of equal exchange, 8, 127, 131, 215

257

between men and women, 143–4 and obligation, 8, 16 and reciprocity, 16, 23, 180, 185 rhetoric of, 4, 125 of women between men, 128, 143–4, 145, 146 See also amatory gifts; gift economy Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money (Derrida), 153, 158n29 Giving Alms No Charity (Defoe), 27 Glorious Revolution, 37–8, 102n18 Godbout, Jacques, 177 goodwill, 1, 10, 198, 199–200, 202, 204, 208, 212 Hobbes on, 144 See also Wedgwood, Josiah gratitude benevolence and, 67, 107–9, 111, 144, 154 debt of, 46, 48, 66, 113, 127, 180, 203 and dependency, 9, 131–2, 163, 168–9, 186–7 to God, 119 reciprocal, 10, 126, 144, 188–9, 190, 201–2, 203, 206, 211 Sunday Schools, advocacy in, 7, 117 Great Duty and Necessity of a Vertuous and Religious Education of Youth, The (Strong), 40–1, 48 Gregory, C. A., 199, 212n10 Gregory, Dorothea, 87, 92–4 Gregory, Elizabeth, 87–9 Gregory, James, 88, 92 Gregory, John, 80, 81, 87–94 See also conduct manuals; Father’s Legacy to His Daughters, A (Gregory) Gudeman, Stephen, 207 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 211

258

Index

Halifax, Marquis of (George Savile), 79, 80, 81–7, 88, 89 See also conduct manuals; Lady’s New Year’s Gift, The (Halifax) Haywood, Eliza, 149, 150 Hevia, James, 215 Hinnant, Charles, 8–9, 193n6 History of Cornelia, The (Scott), 159 History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, The (Haywood), 150 History of Sandford and Merton, The (Day), 155–6 History of Sir George Ellison, The (Scott), 159, 164, 169–70, 171, 173 History of Some Penitents in the Magdalen-House, The (B. Montagu), 68 History of the Abolition of the Slave-Trade, The (Clarkson), 203–4 Hobbes, Thomas, 144, 157n3, 170 Hong merchants, 219, 220–1, 222, 223, 225, 227, 229, 230 Hoppo, the, 219, 220, 221–2, 225, 229, 231 houses of industry, 16, 17–18, 21, 24, 25, 31 See also charity schools; workhouses Hundert, E. J., 16, 28, 31n3, 31n6 Hyde, Lewis, 168, 169, 171, 175n23, 175n27, 188 import duties, 229, 230, 233n22 See also customs duties; measurage Impossible Exchange (Baudrillard), 55, 71n24 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 158n27 ingratitude, 94, 117, 130, 131, 132, 144, 169, 182, 211

Irigaray, Luce, 5, 137–8, 143, 162, 163–4, 173, 193n6 Japan, 215, 230 Jesuits, 218, 224 Johnson, Samuel, 3, 61–3, 71n22, 103n27, 104n32, 180, 181 Journey through Every Stage of Life, A (Scott), 159 Julie (Rousseau), 160 justice charity and, 169, 201, 212n16 fairness and, 19, 22–3, 32n18 Hobbes on, 144 Keane, Angela, 171 Kelly, Gary, 73n46, 160, 168 Kelly, John, 59 Kennet, White, 42–7, 50 Keogh, Annette, 215 Keutsch, Wilfried, 109, 114 Keymer, Thomas, 56, 59 Klekar, Cynthia, 8, 162, 164, 167, 212nn9–10, 215–16 Koehn, Nancy F., 201 Komter, Aafke E., 110, 111 Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth, 215 laboring class. See working class Ladies Calling, The (Allestree), 80, 101n12 Lady’s New Year’s Gift, The (Halifax), 79, 80, 81–7, 88, 98–9 See also conduct manuals; Halifax, Marquis of (George Savile) Lady’s Pocket Library, 80, 100n5 Laqueur, Thomas Walter, 109, 116 Leach, Edmund, 146 Leake, James, 59–60 Lee, Henry, 62–3 legitimacy, Locke on, 19–20 Lennox, Charlotte, 150

Index Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (Chapone), 80, 100nn4–5 Letter to a Dissenter, A (Halifax), 81 Leviathan (Hobbes), 144 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 5 liberty. See freedom Life of Savage (Johnson), 61–3 literacy charity schools and, 26 cultural, 46 gift of, 117, 120 and reform, 49–50, 120 and risk, 7–8, 117 Sunday Schools and, 107, 112–17, 120 “Little Secret History, A” (Page), 11, 215–16, 217, 220, 224, 226, 230–1 Locke, John, 5–6, 54n23 on custom (cultural reproduction), 37–8, 39, 40–2 on innate ideas, 43 Logic of Practice, The (Bourdieu), 129–30 Logic of the Gift, The (Schrift), 110, 212n10 Macao, 219, 221, 224 Macaroni Preacher. See Dodd, William Mackenzie, Henry, 149 Ma-er-tai, 225 Magdalen Hospital. See Magdalen House for Penitent Prostitutes Magdalen House for Penitent Prostitutes, 55, 63, 66, 67–8, 71n27, 73n39, 73n44 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 4, 181, 191n14 Mandeville, Bernard, 28–9 Manila Galleon (Covadonga), 218–19, 221, 229

259

Man of Feeling, The (Mackenzie), 149 Mansfield Park (Austen), 65, 145, 151–2 Maori, 203 market economy, 2, 108, 110–11, 128–9, 161–2, 174n9, 174n11, 175n23, 178–9, 190, 198–9, 200 See also gift economy; moral economy; political economy market exchange, 2, 10, 11, 108, 110–11, 121 markets. See capitalism; commerce; commodities; gift exchange; market economy; market exchange Markley, Robert, 11, 137 Martin, William, 56, 60 Mauss, Marcel, 2–3, 5, 61, 110, 122n14, 128–9, 161–2, 174n11, 175n27, 194n23, 199, 201, 203, 212n9, 212n16 Mays, Kelly J., 116–17 McCulloh, James, 56–7 McKendrick, Neil, 209 measurage, 219–21, 224, 225, 226, 227, 231 See also customs duties; import duties Memoirs of a Coxcomb (Cleland), 147–8 Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (Sheridan), 154–5 memorandum on poor relief (Locke), 17–18, 32n11, 34n31 Millenium Hall (Scott), 9, 159–73 misrecognition, 50, 52, 129–30, 135, 187 Moll Flanders (Defoe), 145, 151 Moltchanova, Anna, 5–6 Montagu, Barbara, 68, 73nn45–6 Montagu, Elizabeth, 92–4, 104n42

260

Index

moral economy, 133, 165–6, 181, 183, 190, 192 See also gift economy; market economy; political economy More, Hannah, 4, 107, 109, 115, 121n1, 121n6, 122n19, 184 Mulso, Hester. See Chapone, Mrs. (Hester Mulso) Mungello, David, 218 national security, 3, 107, 112 See also sedition natural rights, 6, 15–16, 18, 20–1, 22–3, 24–5, 28–9, 30–1, 31n1, 33n25, 45 Nature and Art (Inchbald), 158n27 Newby, Harold, 3, 180 objects of compassion, 7, 22, 57–8, 60, 68 obligation. See reciprocity Oeconomy of Charity (Trimmer), 7–8, 107–21 Orders Read and Given to the Parents on the Admittance of Their Children into the Charity-Schools, 49 orientalism, 217, 218, 231 Original Etruria Friendly Society Articles (Wedgwood), 207 Ottaway, Susannah, 5–6 Outline of the Theory of Practice (Bourdieu), 148, 151 Page, Edward, 11, 215–32 Pamela (Richardson), 58, 59–61, 64–7, 69n10, 147 Pamela in the Marketplace (Keymer and Sabor), 59 Pamela’s Conduct in High Life (Kelly), 59 Parry, Jonathan, 2

paternalism benevolent, 9, 162–3, 168, 186, 191, 193n21, 204 and national identity, 179, 181–2, 185, 190, 192 and patriarchy, 9–10, 185, 187, 190, 192 and patronage, 3–4, 125–6, 130, 185, 187–8, 191 and social relations, 7, 108–9, 110, 122n27, 179, 180, 183, 187, 190 in Sunday Schools, 120 Pennington, Jenny, 95, 96, 98, 106n50 Pennington, Sarah, 80–1, 94–8, 99, 100nn4–5, 105nn47–8, 106n50 See also conduct manuals; Unfortunate Mother’s Advice to Her Absent Daughters, An (Pennington) Perkin, Harold, 3, 194n27 Perry, Ruth, 157n2, 160, 174n2 philanthropists and philanthropy, 4, 5, 6, 9, 55, 65–6, 69 Christlike aspect of, 63, 119 middle-class, 107, 111, 116, 120 in Millenium Hall, 159, 160, 162, 166, 173 Pilkington, Laetitia, 61 political economy, 179, 181 See also gift economy; market economy; moral economy Pompadour, Madame de, 197 Poor Laws, 16, 17, 18, 20–1, 22, 25, 32n11, 32n15, 113, 181 poor relief, 5–6, 15, 16, 24–5, 28, 31, 32n15, 33n27 Locke’s memorandum on, 17–24 Settlement Act of 1662, 33n22 Poovey, Mary, 80 Porter, David, 218 “Potters’ Instructions” (Wedgwood), 206 prestation, 122n14, 181, 199

Index Pride and Prejudice (Austen), 152, 158n26 property, right to, 19, 30 Publick Education, particularly in the Charity Schools (Bisse), 50–1 Qing dynasty, 215, 220, 221, 222, 223, 225, 227–8, 233n16, 233n21 Queen’s Ware, 208–9 Raikes, Robert, 107, 109, 115, 121n1 Ramsey, Rachel, 218 reading. See literacy reciprocity, 5–6 fairness and, 22–3, 24 gift exchange and, 7, 8, 9, 12, 16–17, 23, 27–8, 87, 108, 110–11, 118–19, 126, 129–32, 153, 159, 161–7, 168–9, 180, 185, 197–9, 207–9, 215–16 gratitude and, 10, 126, 144, 188–9, 190–1, 201–2, 203, 206, 211 market exchange and, 101, 126–7, 136, 145, 215 natural rights and, 24–5 in parent-child relationship, 81 rhetoric of, 12, 231 redemption, 44, 56, 63, 64, 65, 71n24 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke), 177 Reilly, Robin, 210 rejection of gifts, 144–5, 148, 155, 217, 231 Richardson, Samuel, 6–7, 147 Apprentice’s Vade Mecum, The, 59, 60–1, 63–4, 70n11 and Charitable Corporation, 56–7, 69n6

261

Clarissa, 66, 69n10, 74n51, 147–8 and Foundling Hospital, 63 and Johnson, 61–2 and Magdalen House, 63–9, 71n28 Pamela, 58, 59–61, 64–7, 69n10, 147 and Pilkington, 61 as printer, 57, 59, 63, 71n29, 72n34 risk, 7–8, 108, 110–12, 117, 118, 129, 140, 148, 153–4 Rizzo, Betty, 92 Robins, Benjamin, 216, 221, 232n4 Robinson, George, 56 Robinson, Mary, 149 Robinson, Matthew, 93 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 160 Roxana (Defoe), 151 Sabor, Peter, 59 Sahlins, Marshall, 5 Savage, Richard, 61–2, 63 Savile, Anne, 82 Savile, Elizabeth, 82–7, 88 Savile, George. See Halifax, Marquis of (George Savile) Savile, George (son of George), 82 Savile, Gertrude, 83, 87–8 Savile, Henry (brother of George), 81 Savile, Henry (son of George), 81 Savile, William, 81–2 Schrift, Alan D., 110, 212n10 Scott, Sarah, 9, 73n46, 159–64, 170 Scripture-Doctrine of Atonement (Lee), 62–3 Second Treatise on Government (Locke), 18–24, 26, 31n3, 31n6 sedition, 111–12, 114 See also national security Select Manual for Sick Persons (Richardson), 72

262

Index

self-deception, 6, 16, 18–24, 25, 28, 31, 33nn24–5 self-determination, 6, 18, 20–1, 23, 26, 41 self-interest, 4, 8, 110–11, 121, 155, 160, 174n11, 176, 178, 199, 212n9, 216–17, 220, 225, 227 See also disinterest self-preservation. See subsistence, natural right of Sense and Sensibility (Austen), 150–1 Sentimental Journey, A (Sterne), 148–9 Sermons to Young Women (Fordyce), 80 servants, 19–20, 27, 46, 84, 91, 97, 108, 111–13, 119, 130–2 Sèvres, 197 Seward, Anna, 202 Shelley, P. B., 171 Sheridan, Frances, 154–5 sick clubs, 205–6 silk, 70n17, 147, 220, 225, 226, 227, 229, 230 Simmel, George, 194n34 Sir Charles Grandison (Richardson), 59, 66–7, 69n10, 72n38, 73nn39–40 Slack, Paul, 15 slavery abolition, Wedgwood and, 202–4 slave trade, 65 “voluntary”, 167, 169 workhouse as, 29–30 Sloterdijk, Peter, 216 Smelser, Neil J., 206 Smith, Jad, 6 Smollett, Tobias, 146–7 Snell, K. D. M., 116 Social Anthropology (Leach), 146 social control, 1, 102, 109, 110, 111, 114, 117, 118

Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 24, 27, 29, 63 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 63 Society for the Suppression of the Slave Trade, 202 Society of Jesus. See Jesuits Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Locke), 37 South Sea Bubble, 55–6 Spain, 216, 218–19, 221–3, 229 spectacle of charity, 6, 39, 42–7, 50, 67 Spence, Jonathan, 218 Staffordshire pottery, 201 Stanhope, Lord, 85–6 state of nature, 19–20, 21, 23 State of the Poor, The (Eden), 181, 193n14 Staves, Susan, 134–5 Sterne, Laurence, 148–9, 158n29 Still, Judith, 160–1, 162, 168, 169 Strathern, Marilyn, 3 Street, Brian V., 116 Strong, Martin, 40–2, 48–9 subsistence, natural right of, 5–6, 15, 17, 18, 20, 24–5, 29, 30–1, 31n1, 32n18, 34n31, 34n40 Sunday Schools, 7, 107–21 and literacy, 107, 112–17, 120 See also charity schools supercargoes, 215, 220, 224–6, 228 See also Page, Edward Suqua, 221, 225–7, 229–30 Swift, Jonathan, 211 Sylvester, Eusabius, 57 symbolic capital, 3, 111, 122n12, 129–30, 162, 178, 180 symbolic violence, 39–40, 130–1, 135, 139–40, 187 tea, 208, 220, 225, 226, 227, 229, 230–1

Index Télémaque (Fenelon), 147–8 Thompson, E. P., 109, 115, 180 Thomson, John, 56 Toleration Act, 38 Tom Jones (H. Fielding), 150, 153, 157n26 T’o-yung, 222–3 trade with China, 215–34 Wedgwood and global market, 199, 209–11 Treatise on Education (Locke), 37 Trimmer, Sarah, 7–8, 107–21 Tully, James, 15 Unfortunate Mother’s Advice to Her Absent Daughters, An (Pennington), 80, 94–8 See also conduct manuals; Pennington, Sarah utopia and utopianism, 9, 159–61, 162, 165–7, 169–73, 174n2, 174n6, 188–9 Van Sant, Ann Jessie, 67, 73n39 Vincennes, 197 visual culture, 6, 38, 42–8, 47f Voyage Round the World, A (Robins and Walter), 216, 217–18, 220, 221, 223, 224, 225, 229, 230, 231, 232n4, 233n14 Voyez, John, 208 Walpole, Robert, 56, 63 Walsingham (M. Robinson), 149 Walter, Richard, 216, 221, 232n4 Wanderer, The (Burney), 9–10, 177–93 Wang An-kuo, 225

263

Way of the World, The (Congreve), 8, 125–41 Wedgwood, Josiah, 10, 197–212 and abolition movement, 201, 202–4 and charity, 201–4 and gift exchange, 197, 198–9, 200–2, 206, 208, 210, 211 and global market, 199, 209–11 and goodwill, customer, 198–9, 200, 204, 209–10 and goodwill, internal, 198–9, 204–8 and patronage, 197, 200, 208–9, 210–11 and reputation, 197–8, 200 Williams, Glyndwr, 215, 232n4 Willis, Richard, 41–2 Wills, Deborah, 109, 114 Wills, John E., 215 workhouses, 6, 16, 24–6 opposition to, 24, 27–30, 34n42, 35n43 support for, 24–6, 39 See also charity schools; houses of industry working class and class consciousness, 115–16, 121 education of, 107, 109–12, 118 empowerment of, 161, 162, 168–9, 170, 173 Yin Kuang-jen, 223 Young Lady’s Parental Monitor, 80, 100n5 Yuan Mei, 11, 216, 222–3, 224, 226, 229, 231 Zionkowski, Linda, 9–10, 162 Žižek, Slavoj, 216

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