Dress, Distress and Desire: Clothing and the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Dress, Distress and Desire Clothing and the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature Jennie Batchelor Dress, Dist...

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Dress, Distress and Desire Clothing and the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Jennie Batchelor

Dress, Distress and Desire

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Dress, Distress and Desire Clothing and the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature Jennie Batchelor School of English University of Kent

© Jennie Batchelor 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–4847–2 hardback ISBN-10: 1–4039–4847–X hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Batchelor, Jennie, 1976Dress, distress and desire : clothing and the female body in eighteenthcentury literature / Jennie Batchelor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1–4039–4847–X (cloth) 1. English literature–18th century–History and criticism. 2. Clothing and dress in literature. 3. Women and literature–Great Britain–History–18th century. 4. Distress (Psychology) in literature. 5. Body, Human, in literature. 6. Desire in literature. 7. Women in literature. I. Title. PR448.C58B38 2005 820.9′3559–dc22

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To David


Contents List of Figures

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

1 Seeing Through Pamela’s Clothes

19

2 ‘The Spoils of Virtue’: Mantua-makers, Milliners and their Shops

52

3 Re-clothing the Female Reader: Dress and the EighteenthCentury Magazine

83

4 The Sentimental Fashion System: Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women and the Magdalen House for Penitent Prostitutes

120

5 ‘The cambrick handkerchief sensibility’: Re-figuring Sentiment in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda

151

Notes

178

Bibliography

201

Index

213

vii

List of Figures 1 Frontispiece illustration to the 1780 Lady’s Magazine, by permission of the British Library P.P. 5141

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2 Frontispiece illustration to the 1776 Lady’s Magazine, by permission of the British Library P.P. 5141

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3 Frontispiece engravings to The Ladies Compleat Pocket-Book for 1762, by permission of the British Library C 136.66.30

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4 Memorandum Table from The Ladies Compleat Pocket-Book for 1753, by permission of the British Library C 136.66.30

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5 Frontispiece to Jonas Hanway’s Reflections, Essays and Meditations on Life and Religion (1761), by permission of the British Library 44.04.h.34

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Acknowledgements I began thinking about the ideas that shape this book as an MA student studying for a module on ‘Sensibility’ at Queen Mary College, University of London, under the guidance of Markman Ellis. The list of debts I have accumulated since then has grown long indeed, but without Markman’s generous and unfailing support it would never have been written. The Arts and Humanities Research Board provided a research grant which enabled me to work on my doctoral dissertation, while Queen Mary provided a lively and stimulating environment in which to study. I would like to thank Megan Hiatt, Anne Janowitz, Chris Reid and members of the Queen Mary Eighteenth-Century Reading Group for their advice. Claire Brock and Kate Williams have been wonderfully incisive readers of parts of this book at various stages of its development. Any errors are, of course, my own. My examiners Vivien Jones and John Mullan gave me plenty of food for thought and I can only hope I have risen to the challenge they set me. I completed this book while working as the Chawton Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s Writing at the University of Southampton and Chawton House Library. I owe the Trustees of Chawton House an enormous debt of gratitude for providing me with invaluable research time. During this period I had the great fortune to work with Cora Kaplan, who has made me a better scholar and an even more passionate champion of women’s writing. I hope something of Cora’s influence is evident in this book. Special thanks are also owed to Paula Kennedy at Palgrave Macmillan and to my reader at Palgrave Macmillan for her searching and helpful comments on the typescript. Finally, I would like to thank David Motton who has lived with this project as long as I have, and for whose unquestioning faith and enthusiasm I will always be grateful. This book is dedicated to him. * A section of Chapter 3 appeared in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (2003) vol. 32 and is reprinted with the permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. Another section from this chapter appeared in the Spring 2005 issue of Women’s History Magazine and is reprinted with permission. ix


Introduction Sweet Sensibility! thou keen delight! Thou hasty moral! sudden sense of right! Thou untaught goodness! Virtue’s precious seed! Thou sweet precursor of the gen’rous deed! Beauty’s quick relish! Reason’s radiant morn, Which dawns soft light before Reflexion’s born! To those who know thee not, no words can paint, And those who know thee, know all words are faint. (Hannah More, ‘Sensibility’, 1782)1 Sentiment and sensibility connote various social and cultural phenomena that emerged in the mid-eighteenth century, associated primarily with the privileging of feeling and the bourgeois domestic household. In recent decades, critics have sought to pin down these elusive terms through linguistic archaeology and by analysing their origins in contemporary medical discourse on the nervous system as well as in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century philosophical writings on the self and sensory perception.2 The instability of these terms concerned contemporaries as much as it has modern critics. Hannah More’s ‘Sensibility’, a poetic epistle written for Frances Boscawen following her husband’s death, attempts a definition of this abstract quality through a combination of personal examples – including those of the bluestockings Elizabeth Carter and Elizabeth Montagu, David Garrick, Samuel Johnson and Boscawen herself – and impassioned argument. Troubling More’s encomium, however, is her acute sense of the elusiveness of this most prized virtue: ‘Thy subtile essence still eludes the chains / Of Definition, and defeats her pains’ (p. 282). The term’s resistance to definition lies, in More’s reading, in its double connotations of both natural impulse (‘untaught goodness’) and active improvement (a ‘taste refin’d’). For More, sensibility’s elusiveness is a virtue in itself, attributing it with a degree of exclusiveness within a hierarchy of feeling. Though disingenuous sentiment is a natural impulse, it is only those who actively seek to divert feeling ‘to its proper course’ who can truly be said to possess this ‘finely-fashion’d’ virtue. More’s work is not meant for the eyes of the ‘vulgar’, whose ‘jests [its] tender anguish wou’d profane’ and ‘[w]hose low enjoyments never reach’d the mind’ (p. 277). 1

2 Dress, Distress and Desire

The poem’s argument that sensibility is both an innate virtue and an attainable, refined moral sense that can be cultivated by emulation, selfreflection or appropriate reading raises questions that the text is unable and unwilling to answer. If sensibility can be cultivated, then by whom? Might not poems such as More’s, rather than affirming sensibility’s exclusiveness, pierce the ‘insulated souls’ of ‘vulgar’ readers by extolling the virtues and benefits of the ‘kindred [sentimental] mind’? On a more troubling note, might the poem’s efforts to articulate and define this most prized and elusive of human qualities make the sentimental disposition accessible to a wide literate public, allowing its characteristics, as defined by More, to be affected where they are not truly felt? In response to these difficulties, the poem goes to great lengths to distinguish between those who possess and those who merely affect this virtue. True sensibility can be felt only by those like the widowed Boscawen, who have experienced genuine emotional distress. It is not felt by she who ‘mourn[s] because a sparrow dies’ or those who ‘rave in artificial extasies’ (p. 282). Rather, sensibility’s virtue lies in its power to bind people emotionally within a society whose affective links enable it to heal its wrongs more effectively. For More, authentic sensibility can be demonstrated only through active and pragmatic gestures rather than by the self-indulgent imaginative exchanges experienced by the reader of sentimental literature in the face of its heroines’ fictional distress: she whose ‘ready eye o’erflows / At Clementina’s or Clarissa’s woes’ (p. 283). In order to distinguish genuine from feigned virtue further, More proceeds to rework Clarissa’s famous epithet, ‘what are words but the body and dress of thought’: As words are but th’ external marks, to tell The fair ideas in the mind that dwell And only are of things the outward sign, And not the things themselves, they but define; So exclamations, tender tones, fond tears, And all the graceful drap’ry Pity wears; These are not Pity’s self, they but express Her inward sufferings by their pictur’d dress; And these fair marks, reluctant I relate, These lovely symbols may be counterfeit. (pp. 283–4) Just as words are extrinsic to that which they define, imperfect and arbitrary verbal signs, so the language of sensibility (‘exclamations,

Introduction 3

tender tones, fond tears’, ‘graceful drap’ry’) is merely the outward and potentially unreliable expression of inner moral essence. Dress’s contradictory status as both a means of self-expression and a potential facilitator of false self-creation makes clothing a resonant metaphor for More’s argument. Dress metaphorises sensibility’s paradoxical status as both a genuine moral response externally expressed (‘graceful drap’ry’), and a cultivated, possibly fictitious, mode of display (‘pictur’d dress’) worn by the covetous and the immoral. If dress symbolises the false and quite literally ‘put on’ sensibility the poem condemns, it functions also as a powerful diagnostic tool with which to distinguish authentic from feigned sentiment. Visually, the poem suggests, the man or woman of feeling can differentiate between the ‘untaught goodness’ that is sensibility and the counterfeit gestural and physical symbols of affected virtue, just as the trained eye of the sentimental observer can see through the surface of a woman’s dress to the moral depth (or shallowness) beneath.3 This book investigates the intersection of the discourses of dress and female virtue highlighted by More’s poem – the extent to which dress, as many contemporary writers sensed, not only exposed but embodied the fundamental paradox of sensibility. Although most obviously inspired by Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–8), the poem’s interweaving of the languages of expression, text and dress evokes an enduring strain in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century literary and aesthetic theory, closely associated with Alexander Pope.4 In his Essay on Criticism (1711), Pope also deployed the sartorial metaphor as a diagnostic tool, in this instance to distinguish good poetry from ‘False Eloquence’: Poets, like Painters, thus, unskill’d to trace The naked Nature and the living Grace, With Gold and Jewels cover ev’ry Part, And hide with Ornaments their Want of Art. True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest, What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest, Something, whose Truth convinc’d at Sight we find, That gives us back the Image of our Mind. (ll. 293–300)5 Pope’s ‘drest / exprest’ couplet formulates a literary ideal in which the garb of poetic language and form exists as the most appropriate expression of the thought each seeks to convey. However, under closer scrutiny the fallacy of this ideal marriage of thought, wit, nature and


expression is soon apparent. Laura Brown, in her evocative reading of Pope’s Essay on Criticism and the Rape of the Lock, argues that these lines are ‘systematically uninformative’.6 At the very least, they present a deceptively confident expression of the power of poetic language and its relationship to the thoughts and originary objects it articulates – a deception created in no small part by the unity of the rhyming couplet itself.7 In Pope’s formulation, ‘Wit’ raises deeply problematic and unresolved issues. As Brown argues, ‘Whether “Wit” fundamentally alters or merely embellishes this “Nature”, to what extent “Nature” maintains its significance apart from “Wit,” and how the inconclusive “Advantage” operates to arbitrate their connection, these questions are raised and kept open, rather than laid to rest’.8 Such interpretive difficulties are rendered all the more complex by the description of ‘Wit’ as a form of verbal apparel. Here, as in ‘Sensibility’, dress serves as an expression of an originary essence (‘Nature’ or, as in More’s poem, moral refinement), and as the metaphor for the power of language to conceal, falsely embellish and fundamentally obscure that essence. Rather than denying the possibility of poetic corruption implied in the ‘drest / exprest’ couplet, Pope’s Essay actively develops this theme, if only to suggest the futility of such attempts to substitute rhetorical flourish for genuine wit: Expression is the Dress of Thought, and still Appears more decent as more suitable; A vile Conceit in pompous Words exprest, Is like a Clown in regal Purple drest; For diff’rent Styles with diff’rent Subjects sort, As several Garbs with Country, Town, and Court. (ll. 318–23) Like ‘Sensibility’, Pope’s Essay betrays a conviction in the ability of dress to communicate the worth of the individual (be that worth social, as in the Essay, or moral, as in More’s poem). Just as clothes should be fitted to the rank of the wearer and the social circle he inhabits, so there exists, the poem argues, a fit language and style for different forms of poetry. A failure to match the dress to the circumstance or the substance to the form will be unconvincing and vulnerable to ridicule. While the dress of poetic language may be deployed to compensate for a text’s literary or philosophical impoverishment, such affectation will appear so obvious to the trained eye of the literary

Introduction 5

critic, Pope argues, that it will appear as incongruous as a ‘Clown in regal Purple drest’. The poem’s reliance on the motif of dress ultimately damages rather than supports its argument, however. Pope’s couplet, as Brown argues, evokes a plethora of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century misogynist texts which focus on the surface and depths of the adorned woman, who is in turn marked out as both the product of and scapegoat for mercantile capitalism.9 The inevitable disjunction between surface sartorial beauty and an underlying moral and corporeal corruption persistently recapitulated in the satires of Rochester and Jonathan Swift, and intimated in Pope’s Essay, fatally undermines the harmony of the ‘drest/exprest’ ideal.10 In light of the inextricable association of dress with deceit created, in part, by such works, Aaron Hill later characterised Pope’s description of ‘Expression’ as ‘the dress of thought’ as a ‘very lively imagination’ rather than an incontrovertible truth. While sharing with his friend a sense of the abuse of expression among modern writers who disregard the ‘distinct and particular tendency’ of words in favour of a more generalised ‘representation of the idea, as it strikes in the whole’, Hill found dress an inappropriate metaphor for the desired marriage of text and idea: ‘I CALL it your [Pope’s] imagination, because, I believe, the idea must have been shape (not dress) of thought; dress, however, an ornament, being a concealment, or covering; whereas expression is manifestation and exposure.’ Hill proceeds to rewrite Pope’s couplet to suggest more effectively the inseparability of thought and expression: ‘Expression is the birth of thought – grows round, / Limbs the loose soul, and shapes it into sound.’11 Hill’s letter is of interest not only because of its antagonistic reading of Pope’s influential work, but also because of its absolute contrast to the critical discourse Hill would enthusiastically embrace only two years later, following the publication of Richardson’s Pamela (1740). In a letter that would subsequently be prefixed to the second edition of the novel, Hill, one of the text’s most notable and vocal champions, praised the work in terms that strikingly rehearse the ‘drest/exprest’ model of literary perfection. Responding to Richardson’s fears that the novel’s ‘Style want[ed] Polishing’, and fending off criticism that targeted the heroine’s lapses into linguistic vulgarity, Hill highlighted the text’s ‘natural Air … Simplicity, and measur’d Fulness’. His spirited and subtle defence of the novel is worth quoting at length: [The author] has reconciled the Pleasing to the Proper. The Thought is every-where exactly cloath’d by the Expression; and becomes its Dress


as roundly and as close, as Pamela in her Country Habit. Remember, though she put it on with humble Prospect, of descending to the Level of her Purpose, it adorn’d her, with such unpresum’d Increase of Lovliness; sat with such neat Propriety of Elegant Neglect about her, that it threw out All her Charms, with tenfold, and resistless Influence – And so, dear Sir, it will always be found – When modest Beauty seeks to hide itself by casting off the Pride of Ornament, it but displays itself without a Covering: And so, becoming more distinguished by its Want of Drapery, grows stronger, from its purpos’d Weakness.12 Evoking Pope’s couplet where he had previously condemned it, Hill marks Richardson’s achievement as the unification of thought and expression through the dress of language. In order to underscore this harmony, Hill draws evocative connections between Pope’s ‘drest/ exprest’ model, the text’s language, style, thematic interest in dress and, most intriguingly of all, between this literary model and the character of the novel’s heroine. In Hill’s reading Pamela is both the product of and metaphor for the seamless marriage of text and moral design. Just as the simple language of the novel’s epistolary exchanges allows its didactic overtones to shine all the more brilliantly, so Pamela’s decision to wear clothes appropriate to her servile status elevates her in the mind of the reader and attests to her moral superiority. By disregarding the false ‘Pride of Ornament’, symbolised by the suit of clothes she acquires after her mistress’s death, Pamela appears more, rather than less, lovely, since her dress is a more appropriate articulation of her sentimental character.13 Hill’s assessment of Pamela (the character’s) dress and Pamela (the novel’s) rhetorical dress mediates the tensions laid bare by Pope’s ‘drest / exprest’ couplet by suggesting that the kind of dressing the novel engages in is a dressing-down as opposed to a more suspect dressing-up. Rather than seeking to embellish and transform, the dressing-down of the heroine and the language of the novel into a ‘native Simplicity’ renders it transparent, rather than vulnerable to accusations of affectation. While the novel may humbly seek to conceal its moral and literary excellence, as Pamela apparently seeks to hide her beauty from her master, these attempts merely render both the text and character’s virtue more apparent for their humble garb. Where in Pope’s Essay the body of the adorned woman is merely implied as a spectral shadow that undermines its poetic ideal, Richardson’s novel brings her to the fore as a literal embodiment of the unity of the ‘drest/exprest’ motif – Pamela,

Introduction 7

remember, even stitches her letters to her underskirts. In the process, he formulates what would become one of the most fundamental yet problematic ideals of sentimental literature: the legible body.

Body, sentiment and the consumer revolution Sentimental writers’ search for virtue’s most appropriate dress keyed into contemporary debates on luxury, the burgeoning consumer revolution and the collapse of sumptuary legislation. The contentious rise of commerce in the eighteenth century – fuelled by the expansion of trade routes and the development of new marketing strategies – has been well documented by historians and literary critics.14 As an everexpanding array of goods became available to an apparently everexpanding group of consumers, writers, philosophers and political economists heatedly debated luxury and commerce. More enthusiastic proponents of the consumer revolution, such as Bernard Mandeville, pointed to ways in which the acquisition of goods stimulated economic growth: private vices generated public benefits since the desire to emulate others stimulated the economy and provided labour for the poor.15 As the century progressed, critics would increasingly point to the civilising potential of commerce. David Hume, for instance, argued that commerce was a progressive force, spurring the labouring classes to industry and facilitating new forms of sociability and politeness among society’s middling and upper ranks.16 Alongside such endorsements of commerce, however, more suspicious commentators pointed to the deleterious effects of consumption and emulation, particularly on women and the labouring classes, for whom consumption was supposed to stimulate other libidinous appetites.17 For both proponents and critics of commerce, dress and fashion were central preoccupations. Mandeville, for example, explained luxury’s beneficial effects through a description of the ways in which sartorial emulation invigorated the fashion market by acting as a spur to industry. At the bottom rung of the social ladder, the ‘poorest labourer’s wife’ ‘half-starve[s] her self and her husband’ to purchase a ‘secondhand gown and petticoat’, while tradesmen and their wives seek to set themselves off as men and women of substance. ‘[W]omen of quality’, ‘frightened to see merchants’ wives and daughters dressed like themselves’, contrive new ‘modes’ to distinguish themselves, thereby starting the fashion cycle again.18 Adam Smith would similarly locate fashion at the centre of his account of the civilising effects of commerce and the division of labour by focusing on the manufacture of a


pair of diamond buckles.19 Other writers were appalled by fashion’s effect on the nation’s mores and manners. The demise of forms of sumptuary legislation through which the social hierarchy could be preserved and visually articulated was a recurrent theme in eighteenthcentury attacks on fashion in countless novels, periodicals, essays, pamphlets and travel writing. Defoe’s argument in Every-body’s Business, is No-body’s Business (1725) that ‘It is a hard Matter now to know the Mistress from the Maid by their Dress’ became a rarely questioned commonplace in counter-fashion argument and satire of the period.20 Pitting contemporary society against a (mythical) Golden Age in which an individual’s social character was instantly intelligible, many writers argued that society had become encrypted by the very tool that had traditionally enabled it to be read. In the February 1785 edition of The Lady’s Magazine, for example, a concerned contributor began a serial on ‘One of the leading Causes of Prostitution, The Dress of Servant Girls above their Station’ with a nostalgic view of a past in which ‘some distinction was observed, and it was possible to judge of people’s rank by their exterior’. By the 1780s, the author lamented, ‘all propriety [had been] banished, and one is momentarily in danger of mistaking a modern mop-squeezer for a capital tradesman’s wife’.21 The implications of the supposed blurring of the distinction between ranks extended beyond the merely embarrassing faux pas of perceiving a maid as her mistress, however; rather, they struck deep at the social and moral heart of eighteenth-century culture. As Neil McKendrick has influentially argued, the eighteenth century witnessed an unprecedented growth in the marketing of fashionable clothes as commercial entrepreneurs exploited new technologies (including a widely expanding print culture) and sites (such as the shop window) to advertise and promote their goods to a mass consumer market.22 Such technological innovations, coupled with the practice of bequeathing items of clothing to servants in wills, and the growth of popular secondhand clothing markets in urban centres,23 alarmed many writers. The commercialisation of fashion, as Beverly Lemire has commented, made clothing a commodity, ‘access to which was determined through objective criteria’ – the ability to pay – rather than the subjective criteria of rank. As a result, ‘the tide of commerce engulfed the margins of a once-exclusive domain and swept the rights to fashion from this select circle to the wider world. Dress was for sale, and fashionable dress was for sale also’, generating fears that the supposedly natural distinctions of rank and gender might be eroded.24 As Terry Castle argues in her study of the masquerade in eighteenthcentury literature and culture, dress was perceived in this period as a

Introduction 9

powerful signifier of self – a visual indication of gender, social position and occupation.25 Anticipating the work of fashion theorists such as Roland Barthes, many eighteenth-century commentators argued that dress constituted a form of language through which meaning was generated by the wearer and read by the observer.26 Critics of fashion frequently inverted Pope’s ‘drest/exprest’ paradigm, by suggesting that just as dress provided a metaphor for the appropriate form of fit poetic expression, so language was an appropriate metaphor for the way in which dress should properly function within society. As an article in the London Magazine for March 1737 argued, ‘Dress should be properly adapted to the Person, as in Writing, the Style must be suited to the Subject’.27 But as the masquerade celebrated, the language of clothes is often arbitrary, its meanings vulnerable to manipulation and misinterpretation. In the world turned upside-down of the masquerade, individuals subverted the supposedly incontrovertible distinctions of rank and gender as aristocrats dressed as shepherdesses and chimney sweeps, men as women and women as men.28 But the power of dress to subvert and encrypt the sartorial code could be more subtle than the sweeping inversions enacted and celebrated in the masquerade. If, as Fred Davis and John Harvey have argued, dress is a language, it is one whose meanings are negotiable and open to endless reinterpretation.29 Dependent on a variety of complex, context-specific circumstances – from the wearer’s gender, social status and environment to the moral predilections of the observer – the meanings of dress can never be controlled completely.30 Maintaining an appropriate form of sartorial display was thus a tricky balancing act for women, who were wise to take into account these multiple and often conflicting considerations. As the July 1775 instalment of The Lady’s Magazine’s serial ‘Mrs. T—SS’s Advice to her Daughter’ advised: IN matters of dress, never be the first in the fashion, and when you do conform to it, let it be in the most moderate degree: and, even in this, much depends; first, on the situation a person is placed in; secondly, their fortune; and thirdly, their own persons are to be considered: for a beautiful woman will not be so much condemned for entering into the extravagancy of fashion, as a plain or deformed woman would be. But the essential point in dress is to consider what is really and truly becoming.31 As innumerable periodical articles, conduct books and novels proclaimed, the consequences of failing to negotiate these considerations


appropriately were potentially damning. Even with the best of intentions, a woman’s dress could speak against her. For, if dress is a language, then it can be read against the grain and between the lines – a fact vividly evidenced in the multiple readings of Pamela’s servant dress in the critical backlash following the publication of Richardson’s novel.32 The implications of such misreadings provided fertile ground for novelists, who used such encounters for dramatic, tragic or comic effect. While prostitutes could be mistaken for respectable women in such works as Clarissa (1747–8) and Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela (1741), respectable women such as Betsy Thoughtless and Evelina could be mistaken for prostitutes when their appearance, situation and behaviour conspired against them. These examples, which will be discussed in more detail in the following chapters, bear witness to the extent to which the fine line between a respectably fashionable and ostentatiously disreputable appearance placed women in an apparently irresolvable double bind. Though fashionable display could be interpreted by the observer as a symbol of moral impoverishment, the rejection of fashion offered no immunity from hostile readings either. Women who dressed modestly were both commercially and sexually suspect. The persistent appeals made to women throughout the period to dress simply ultimately served to eroticise the modestly dressed woman, whose ‘simple adornment’, like that of Rousseau’s Sophie, was ‘put on’ only ‘to be removed bit by bit by the imagination’.33 In response to the seemingly vertiginous powers of dress to encrypt the social hierarchy and generate false or multiple meanings, many writers suggested the return to some form of sumptuary legislation. A contributor to the Universal Magazine of 1772, for example, commented with disgust that ‘the master is not to be discerned from the servant, and Joan, with her flaunting dress and flags of pride, not only passes for a Lady in the dark, but also in the light’. In response to this travesty, the author demanded the reinstatement of ‘a sumptuary law’ to ensure that all persons ‘live and dress according to their station in life’. The Universal Magazine article is of interest not only for the vitriol of its attack on the accessibility of fashionable dress to the lower orders – the butcher who wipes his ‘greasy paws’ over a waistcoat of lace and the kitchen wench with ‘double ruffs’ – but for gendered nature of this attack.34 Women may all be the same in the dark, the author misogynistically argues, but in the light, some visual distinction between rank should be maintained. While sartorial emulation is viciously condemned across the board, here, the apparently ruinous consequences of the socially transgressive behaviour of female servants is deemed

Introduction 11

more sinister due to the apparently inextricable connection between these women, their dress and sexual transgression. As a symbol that can variously connote wealth, social status, sexuality and moral probity, dress is, as it always has been and probably always will be, a site on which multiple and often competing anxieties are simultaneously focused. Thus, while the blurring of social distinction was undeniably a genuine and prevalent eighteenthcentury concern, arguments in favour of a return to some form of sumptuary legislation often thinly veil other motives, more closely aligned with sexual regulation than with social control. The role of sartorial legislation in effecting such forms of control had been evident since the earliest efforts to regulate women’s dress. While the recurrent attempts to legislate the dress of prostitutes from Roman times to the early modern period constitute the most obvious examples of such modes of regulation, sumptuary law had restricted female sexuality in more subtle ways throughout history too.35 As Nancy Armstrong has argued, aristocratic dress in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries served to designate the female body, ‘like that of the male, [as] an ornamental body representing the family’s place in an intricately precise set of kinship relations determined by the metaphysics of blood’.36 But where such forms of female adornment had once stood as a supposed symbol of female sexual restriction by connoting a woman’s social, moral and marital status, they had become distasteful by the early eighteenth century.37 This period bore witness, as Armstrong argues, to an important paradigm shift away from such forms of ornamentation, which had become tainted by associations with aristocratic excess and financial and sexual licence, in favour of a form of ‘inconspicuous consumption’ centred on the bourgeois domestic household.38 In Armstrong’s reading of this shift, her conception of ‘inconspicuous consumption’ remains an abstraction, associated with the intangible moral and economic virtues championed by the conduct manual. One of this book’s concerns is to examine how inconspicuous consumption is envisaged in eighteenth-century sentimental writing on dress. For while Armstrong’s reading of this ideological movement away from ostentatious to more modest forms of display is rooted in her discussion of the eighteenth-century conduct manual, her argument has ramifications which extend beyond this specific genre. The application of Nancy Armstrong’s and Mary Poovey’s arguments concerning the domestic woman to literary genres beyond the eighteenthcentury conduct book and novel has recently been criticised by Harriet


Guest, whose study of periodicals in the period detects little trace of the ‘parsimonious domesticity’ evidenced in these critics’ readings. Instead, Guest highlights the extent to which this ideal was satirised in attacks on women, whose failure to consume enough and whose withdrawal from commercial exchange were deemed symptomatic of a ‘hard-hearted lack of sensibility’.39 As Guest’s work makes clear, the domestic model of economic frugality and restraint identified by Armstrong and Poovey was only one of several models of femininity in the period. This book contends, however, that the domestic woman pervasively inflects and qualifies all models of ideal femininity in the period – even those to which this model may appear superficially antithetical. It views the domestic woman as an ideal, yet highly unstable and much contested, figure, who was supposed to negotiate the fine line between an appropriate display of familial wealth and fashionable politeness and a financial excess that had become inextricably linked with moral dissipation. The paradigm shift from aristocratic ostentation to modest displays of wealth, taste and probity gained a particular currency in sentimental literature, which, as several critics have noted, frequently substituted the traditional social hierarchy based on worth as connoted by birth with the mutedly revolutionary alternative of a hierarchy of feeling.40 If sentimental literature suggested the possibility of a meritocracy, in which worth was not merely characterised by social but moral character, then the fashionable, urban world represented its antithesis. Dress, as both the most immediate signifier of this world and most vivid symbol of its corruption, thus accrued a potent symbolism in sentimental discourse in which dress variously functioned as a rebuttal of the moral and financial excesses attributed to society’s fashionable upper reaches, and was reclaimed as a symbol of bourgeois sentimental virtue. While much literature of the period is deeply concerned with the ways in which dress could encrypt the social and moral order, many other writers offered an alternative sartorial paradigm, in which modest adornment restored that order by acting as a kind of diaphanous veil through which, to borrow Tristram Shandy’s phrase, the soul could be viewed ‘stark naked’.41 Such accounts posit an ideal in which dress is both morally responsible and morally communicative. As Thomas Marriott wrote in Female Conduct (first published 1759): Let your Apparel manifest your Mind, Not ostentatious, simple, yet refin’d; The Neatness of a Female wakes Desire,

Introduction 13

Alluring, as her Smile, is clean Attire; Simplicity of Dress a Maid becomes, Beyond the Pride of Persia’s costly Looms.42 Rather than a threat, Marriott presents dress as a cohesive and valuable social tool. The consumption of the fashionable products of British manufacture supports the national economy and repairs society’s moral fabric, he argues, by providing a legible sartorial index through which individual worth is given external form. While anxieties surrounding dress were by no means new or exclusive to the eighteenth century, these concerns took on a specific character in the literature of sensibility – a character distinct even from anxieties surrounding dress earlier in the century or in other literary modes. The near-fetishistic emphasis placed on the body in sentimental literature is well documented by recent critics. In one of the most notable of these studies, John Mullan describes sensibility as a kind of speechless language, communicated via the (usually female) body ‘in a repertoire of conventionally involuntary signs – tears, sighs, palpitations [–]’ that are registered and read by the sentimental observer.43 The period’s preoccupation with reading the signs of appearance, and its shaky conviction that appearance spoke truths in light or in spite of itself, resounded widely in eighteenth-century literature, from discussions of cosmetics, race and skin colour, to emergent physiognomic conceptions of beauty.44 This book is indebted to and builds on recent work in these fields to read dress as an extension of and litmus test for arguments that the female body could be read as an index of the mind. In Marriott’s idealised image of the adorned female body, in Hill’s reading of Pamela’s character and in the examples I explore in subsequent chapters, clothing serves as an extension of the sentimental body’s speechless communication of feeling as outlined by Mullan and others. Dress functions as a kind of meta-language, succeeding and transcending verbal forms of communication, in which clean, modest attire can function as a smile, and the simplicity of a gown corresponds to the wearer’s simplicity of heart and mind. But as More warned in ‘Sensibility’, these ‘lovely Symbols may be counterfeit’. If the sentimental ideal of moral legibility rested on a belief in the female body as an involuntary index of feeling, then dress acted as a potential barrier to that index. Moreover, as writers sought to articulate the sentimental body’s most appropriate dress, they increasingly had to face the alarming prospect that sensibility was being reduced to a set of codified gestures, actions and surfaces, which


effectively rendered virtue as easy to put on as a gown and petticoat. Dress’s function as a form of self-expression or false self-creation ensured that attempts to read dress as an extension of the legible sentimental body frequently collapsed, and offered proof, to some of sentimental literature’s most hostile critics, of the mode’s specious and affected character. In short, dress became, as More implies, paradigmatic of the paradox of sensibility, as both an innate quality and one that could be artificially nurtured. Ultimately the sentimental ideal of moral legibility – the presumption of what John Mullan terms ‘the indubitable correspondences between internal and external’45 – proved no less problematic than the supposedly inexorable correspondences between wit and nature asserted by Pope in the Essay on Criticism.

The fashion for sentiment The fine line between genuine and socially beneficial forms of sentimental exchange and solipsistic, affected displays of emotion calculated to disguise or promote motives of self-interest, outlined by More, continued to haunt the critical reputation of sentimentalism well into the twentieth century. Through its deployment of sartorial metaphors, More’s poem implies, if obliquely, a further and damning indictment of sensibility: that sensibility was little more than a fashion, with all its attendant connotations of ephemerality and insubstantiality. As Lady Bradshaigh famously wrote in a letter to Richardson, the increasing synonymy of fashion and sentiment succeeded in eroding the meaning of the term ‘sentimental’ to such an extent that it ceased to have any meaningful signifying power at all: what in your opinion is the meaning of the word sentimental, so much in vogue amongst the polite, both in the town and country? … Every thing clever and agreeable is comprehended in that word, but I am convinced a wrong interpretation is given, because it is impossible every thing clever and agreeable can be so common as this word. I am frequently astonished to hear such a one is a sentimental man; we were a sentimental party; I have been on a sentimental walk. And that I might be reckoned a little in fashion, and, as I thought, show them the proper use of the word, about six weeks ago, I declared had just received a sentimental letter.46 Fashion, the apparently inexplicable force that rendered sentimental literature so popular so quickly, Lady Bradshaigh suggests, stifled the

Introduction 15

very thing it had given life to. Hannah More would make a similar argument in her later Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799): ‘Fashion then, by one of sudden and rapid turns, instantaneously struck out real sensibility and the affectation of it from the standing list of female perfections.’47 Collapsing under the semantic and behavioural confusion caused by the increasing inextricability of sentiment and fashion, More argued, fashion was responsible for the death of true sensibility. In recent decades apologists for and critics of sentimental literature have sought to erode the pejorative association of fashion and sensibility, while still acknowledging the mode’s enormous contemporary popularity. Taking their lead from Jean Hagstrum’s Sex and Sensibility, many scholars have pointed to sentimental literature’s importance as a literary and aesthetic discourse which served as the expression of and testing-ground for a new emotional, intellectual and philosophical consciousness.48 While sensibility is often associated with a private sphere of feminine or feminised emotion, the inadequacy of the absolute categories of public and private has become apparent. Over the last ten years critics have proved this inadequacy by noting the influence of sensibility in an ever-widening range of issues, thoughts and practices. Sensibility’s privileging of affective ties within the private realm of the household made it a particularly resonant discourse through which to analyse the body politic, against whose values the man or woman of feeling sought to define him or herself. Markman Ellis, for instance, characterises sensibility as an influential tool through which debates on political, economic and moral issues from slavery, prostitution, canal-building to the French Revolution found expression.49 Gillian Skinner has similarly demonstrated the sentimental novel’s active participation in debates on commerce economic policy, while Harriet Guest has explored how sensibility became implicated in a wider discourse of patriotism which allowed women to imagine themselves as public, patriotic citizens.50 Like these studies, this book is concerned with the intersection of superficially oppositional discourses: in this instance sentiment, fashion and commerce.51 More particularly, it is concerned with the ways in which sensibility sought to appropriate and reform commercial culture, against which sentimentalism defined itself, by appropriating its most resonant and pertinent symbol for the female consumer: dress. But where the sentimental novel’s engagement with issues such as prostitution, slavery and economic policy outlined by Ellis and Skinner enabled it to gain a certain cultural and political


significance, sentimentalism’s engagement with consumer culture in the texts explored in the following chapters weakened rather than consolidated its status as an influential social tool. Sentimental literature’s frequent attempts to write dress into its formulation of a feminine ideal which married moral, physical and economic desirability fatally undermined sensibility’s efficacy by associating it with a series of values (or rather a lack of values) that had always threatened to push sentimentalism to the margins of literary and cultural significance: fashionableness, speciousness and impermanence. In the chapters that follow I explore the complex ways in which dress, the body and female morality were yoked together in the literary, popular and political imagination in the mid- to late eighteenth century. Chapters 1 and 2 explore the antagonism between dress, virtue and the legible body as it was played out in a range of sentimental novels, plays and non-fictional works. Taking its lead from this introductory discussion, Chapter 1 reads Pamela as a personification of the drest/exprest ideal formulated by Pope and rehearsed throughout the mid- to late century. Richardson’s failure to convince his readers of Pamela’s integrity – a failure born of the novel’s reliance on sartorial language and material signs, and evidenced by the sequels, spin-offs and parodies this chapter also discusses – signalled for many the failure of the literary project to which he aspired and left a legacy that would trouble many of the next generation of sentimental writers. Chapter 2 on representations of dressmakers and milliners – ubiquitous yet oddly neglected figures in the literature and art of the period – reveals how the sentimental notion of the body as a moral index, so influentially articulated by Richardson, was troublingly inflected by a series of interrelated concerns about consumption, luxury, gender, labour and the body. The second half of the book focuses on the ways in which individual writers, institutions and genres attempted to resolve the tensions outlined in the first two chapters, to conjure ideals of femininity in which the adorned female body became a synecdoche for sentimental virtue. Chapter 3 explores the strategies deployed by popular periodicals, pocket books and magazines to map dress within their vision of virtuous femininity in the face of increasing reader demand for information on fashion, while Chapter 4 examines eighteenth-century dress reform within the context of the conduct book, religious sects and the mid-century philanthropic movement. The concluding chapter returns to the problematic literary ideal with which the book begins by exploring its re-imagination in the work of late eighteenth-century women

Introduction 17

writers. By the 1790s, it was increasingly impossible to maintain the distinction between affect and sentiment Richardson, the young Hannah More and others had attempted to uphold. Sentimental virtue and fashion had become virtual synonyms, each signalling the vacuity of the other. Nevertheless, writers such as Maria Edgeworth, whose bitingly counter-sentimental ‘moral tale’ Belinda (1801) is the main focus of this chapter, Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft were deeply invested in the sentimental ideology they critiqued. Like Richardson, they idealised an authentic female subjectivity created outside the stifling embrace of affect and fashion; but in order to transform this ideal into a reality they had to dismantle the connection between fashion and sentiment Richardson’s novels had, ironically, done so much to endorse. In choosing to read texts as sites in which writers sought discursively to construct and prescribe attitudes to dress and fashion, rather than as barometers of taste and cultural opinion, this work differs from costume history both methodologically and ideologically. Unlike fashion theory, which provides a useful critical apparatus for some of the arguments that follow, it attempts no explanation of the phenomenon of fashion itself, believing that fashion’s meanings are diffuse, diverse and resist conclusive interpretation. Rather, I focus on the dialectical relationship between meaning and unintelligibility, communication and encryption that inflects, intrigues and troubles virtually all writing on fashion to the present day. In examining the discursive construction of the body and dress in eighteenth-century literature, this book aims to provide a more complex picture of clothing’s power to repress and transgress and, more particularly, of dress’s resistance to literary control and mediation than has been evident in studies which understandably focus on dress’s power to transgress sociocultural norms: the extent to which efforts to prescribe female conduct and appearance in novels, essays, conduct books and magazines afforded women the opportunity to resist sentimentalism’s dictates. As such, the concerns of this book lie at the heart of current feminist debates on sensibility’s superficial reification of the feminine. It is somewhat ironic, though utterly symptomatic of the discourse’s inherent instability, that sensibility’s reification of the feminine – one of the most important factors in the literature’s emergence from the critical abyss in the 1980s and 1990s – is one of the most contentious issues in feminist studies of this body of literature today. While critics such as G. J. Barker-Benfield and Terry Eagleton have celebrated the


feminisation of eighteenth-century culture, a phenomenon that seemingly empowered women by privileging those characteristics – the capacity to feel and a heightened emotional sensitivity – which had traditionally precluded them from various forms of homosocial and heterosocial exchange, other critics point to sensibility’s more sinister attempt to oppress or colonise the feminine.52 Taking their lead from Mary Wollstonecraft – still one of the mode’s most incisive analysts – critics such as Mary Poovey, Mitzi Myers, Claudia L. Johnson and Syndy McMillen Conger have demonstrated how sensibility gave with one hand what it took with the other.53 If sentimental discourse told ‘girls … that they resemble angels’, it was only that it might more effectively ‘sink them below women’, marginalising and fetishising the female mind and body at the expense of reason, intellect and true emotional integrity.54 When Wollstonecraft called for a ‘revolution in female manners’ she was, in part at least, calling for a reaction against sensibility’s gendered transformation of manners, identified and applauded by critics such as Eagleton and Barker-Benfield. The fine line between empowerment and oppression, power and subjugation, reification and restriction highlighted in current feminist criticism of sentimental literature is both the context of this book and, in many ways, its subject. In their representation of dress, the texts studied here formulated an ideal which fails to sit easily with this either side of this critical divide. For once made discursively available, the ideal of morally adorned femininity became a model which women might reject, accept or deploy as a device through which to gain approval and conceal moral transgression. The ‘distress’ referred to in this book’s title alludes not only to the torments of the sentimental heroine, as in R. F. Brissenden’s Virtue in Distress, but also to the distress of writers at the failure of their work to unequivocally pin down and contain the heroine’s or female reader’s sexual and moral character through their formulation of the ideal of the adorned female body.55

1 Seeing through Pamela’s Clothes

Dress and sartorial metaphors saturate Pamela (1740) and the appropriately named Pamela vogue.1 Not only is the heroine’s progress signalled by her changing garb, but Richardson’s work also transformed sentiment and the sentimental novel into fashionable commodities. Contestations of the novel’s meaning were and are frequently located in the variously perceived analogy or disjunction between the heroine’s physical gentility and her inner self. In these competing narratives, Pamela’s appearance, first in the garb of her deceased mistress and subsequently in her homespun gown and petticoat, is symbolic either of her nobility of sentiment or of her desire to manipulate others. The heroine’s body and her analogous body of letters are read as powerful signifiers of selfhood of which B. must divest Pamela before he can fully possess her. Readers of the novel have persistently repeated B.’s trials of the heroine by engaging in what James Grantham Turner has described as an apparently ‘endless circle of enclosing and displaying, divesting and investing, an imaginary body’.2 The art of reading Pamela and judging the efficacy of its moral project, it seems, lies in correctly reading Pamela’s clothes and their relationship to her inner character. Several critics have noted the importance of dress to the novel’s gender politics. In the most notable of these studies, Tassie Gwilliam reads dress as one of the many surfaces through which femininity is constructed and deconstructed within the novel. As Gwilliam suggests, Pamela fails to transcend the surface/depth binary through which femininity had been traditionally understood. Residual images of feminine duplicity – of the kind deployed in earlier misogynist satire – thus persistently re-emerge within the novel, with the result that Pamela seems to promote ‘the attributes of femininity it explicitly repudiates’.3 In addition to informing Richardson’s gender politics, dress is also central 19


to Pamela’s class politics. Throughout the novel a conflict between aristocratic licence and a moral integrity that transcends class hierarchies is played out in a series of clashes between competing modes of selfand class production. Most obviously, this battle is waged on a linguistic level, in which, for instance, the integrity of Pamela’s letters is pitted against the vacuity of B.’s words. But self-production is also constituted materially in Richardson’s novel. Indeed, material expressions of self – through such forms as dress and her correspondence – are central to the text’s moral argument. The imaginative connections the novel draws between virtuous femininity, bourgeois morality and the material world locate Richardson’s work within the context of a broader ideological shift which Robert Jones has dubbed the feminisation of taste. Taking his lead from the work of Nancy Armstrong and Harriet Guest, Jones has demonstrated that the formation of bourgeois identity in the eighteenth century was in large part secured by a defence of middle-class cultural aspirations through the imaginative connection of female virtue and the acquisition of goods. This feminisation of taste enabled writers to distinguish modes of consumption that were informed, appropriate and moderate from the fashionable excesses of unthinking acquisition.4 Since aristocratic privilege was traditionally connoted and upheld through such material signifiers as dress and ornamentation, society’s middling ranks could powerfully define themselves in opposition to courtly excess through forms of self-display that realigned consumption, virtue and taste. Jones’s work on the relationship between the world of goods, the body and the novel’s role as a vehicle for middle-class self-legitimation provides a useful framework in which to rethink the role of dress in Richardson’s work. All too often, discussions of the object world in Richardson’s text, and indeed in the eighteenth-century novel more generally, divorce this world from the political and literary aspirations of its author, rather than read it as central to these broader concerns. This trend in Richardson studies has recently been underscored by repeated calls to rename the Pamela vogue. William B. Warner has suggested that the phrase is too trivial to encapsulate either Richardson’s attempt to reform the novel or the serious reverberations caused by its publication, preferring to label the phenomenon a ‘media event’.5 More recently, Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor have asserted that ‘“controversy” … more clearly registers the extent to which critics have seen writers on Pamela as playing, with different degrees of knowingness, for serious ideological stakes’.6 Suggestions that an emphasis on

Seeing through Pamela’s Clothes 21

the material detracts from the text’s literary and cultural significance are misleading, however, since they obscure the significant extent to which the material world is implicated in the literary, class and moral projects to which Richardson’s novel laid claim. Moreover, it obscures the extent to which the novel’s contemporary critics understood dress as central to these wider projects. As this chapter suggests, this fact is amply demonstrated by the ubiquity, yet largely unnoticed deployment, of sartorial language and metaphor within anti-Pamelist texts. As Hill suggests in the quotation with which this chapter began, Richardson presented Pamela as a literal embodiment of the drest/ exprest ideal elucidated in Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711). Clothing and letters are symbolically linked throughout the novel in a strategy which allowed Richardson simultaneously to recall Pope’s literary ideal and look forward to a new model of sentimental subjectivity. Within this imagined paradigm, Pamela’s narrative and the novelist’s professed moral project are intimately bound. If the truth of Pamela’s unclothed character can be exposed, so too will the (im)purity of the novel’s moral; likewise, if Pamela is revealed to be a sham romance disguised as a didactic novel, so too is the pretence of the heroine’s virtue. If the reader is to buy in to either the heroine’s story or the author’s claims for his fiction, dress and body, form and content must be in complete harmony. Rather than a suspect ‘Covering’ designed to conceal an underlying duplicity, therefore, Pamela’s dress is marked out in the novel as a diaphanous veil, a symbolic ‘Want of Drapery’, which analogises body, soul and mind by rendering the heroine’s and novel’s virtue unequivocally transparent.7 In this context, neither Pamela’s inherited aristocratic garb nor her homespun gown and petticoat are inconsistent with the virtue the novel seeks to reward. Both guises, to borrow a phrase used by Michael McKeon, constitute ‘enabling identit[ies]’ that reveal, through their respective grandeur and humility, the social position which Pamela’s virtue and education merit.8 The desirability and indeed the necessity of manifesting Pamela’s virtue in such external forms as dress are alluded to in the novel’s Preface. In order to ‘Improve the Minds of the YOUTH of both Sexes’, Pamela promised to ‘paint VICE in its proper Colours, to make it deservedly Odious; and to set VIRTUE in its own amiable Light, to make it truly Lovely’.9 In a double-think that characterises the novel more generally, the Preface articulates a belief that virtue and vice have their own unequivocal character, while displaying awareness that the reader can misconstrue these moral characteristics. The task of the ‘editor’ of


the Pamela letters is thus to ensure that vice is demonstrably painted and virtue actively and unequivocally lit in order that the reader is in no doubt of their true colours. That these moral qualities are both unequivocal, yet in need of improvement and elucidation, mirrors the paradox of sensibility as an innate moral quality that must be cultivated and refined. The metaphors of artistry deployed in the Preface (scarcely less problematic than the sartorial metaphors Pamela’s critics would seize on) foreshadow those deployed in Hannah More’s equally fraught ‘Sensibility’ (1782). More’s descriptions of sentimental virtue as a ‘taste refin’d’, a quality ‘finely-fashion’d’ and ‘fine-wrought’, like a work of art, precariously leave the poem’s conception of sensibility vulnerable to accusations of potential duplicity, symbolised by the image of virtue’s ‘Pictur’d dress’. As in More’s poem, dress figures in Richardson’s novel and the criticism it produced as both a diagnostic tool through which to distinguish feigned from genuine virtue, and as a symbol of moral encryption. Richardson’s personification of the ‘drest/exprest’ ideal in the form of his young servant heroine ran the risk of being deconstructed by the very language through which it was articulated. To formulate a sentimental ideal of communicable and transparent virtue, therefore, Richardson had to contain the implicitly unstable language of dress (dress as expression, dress as false-creation) that Hill noted in his correspondence with Pope, and do away with the spectre of corrupt and duplicitous femininity which haunted Pope’s Essay. This process entailed what William B. Warner has described in his study of Pamela’s relationship to the romance tradition as an ‘overwriting’ of alternative critical paradigms within which the novel might be understood. In order to ‘overwrite’ these modes of reading, Richardson had first to evoke them. Only then could these (mis)readings of the narrative be challenged by Richardson who acts as a ‘guide’ to steer the reader through the new fictional terrain Pamela mapped out.10 The first half of this chapter examines some of the historical and literary contexts in which the heroine’s dress could be understood (from debates on servant dress to the fairy-tale tradition), before exploring how these contexts threatened to destabilise the ‘drest/exprest’ formulation on which the novel’s literary and moral success seemed to depend.

Pamela and the debates on servant dress The practice of giving or bequeathing secondhand clothes to servants during life or on death was commonplace by 1740, although it was


expected that such clothes would be subsequently and suitably altered.11 Clarissa Harlowe, for example, determines to leave a ‘brown lustring gown’ to her servant Mabel after her death, when it ‘would be of no use to anybody she valued’ any longer. Characteristically, however, Clarissa’s benevolence is circumscribed by a strong sense of propriety, which leads her to instruct Mabel to make the clothes ‘more suitable to her degree’ before allowing them even to form part of her ‘Sunday wear’.12 Practical as well as social concerns lay behind mistresses’ instructions that their cast-off clothes should be altered. The designs of many fashionable items of costume, particularly the cumbersome and fabric-wearing hoop, as well as the flimsiness of many popular fabrics such as silk, rendered the majority of upper- and middle-class garments unsuitable for domestic duties. Indeed, as various fashion theorists and costume historians have pointed out, the symbolic function of many eighteenth-century styles was precisely to ‘discriminate between the idle rich and the labouring classes’ through the relative impracticality of garments to the conditions of manual work.13 According to a concerned Daniel Defoe, however, the widely held belief that servants should alter and dress down inherited costume in order to be morally and practically suitable for their work had little impact on actual servant dress. Voicing what would become the most prevalent anti-fashion argument of the period, Defoe suggested in his essay Every-Body’s Business, is No-Body’s Business (1725) that distinctions of rank were being eroded to the nation’s moral and financial detriment. The blame for this disturbing phenomenon is laid firmly at the door of the coquettish female servant: [O]ur Servant Wenches are so puff’d up with Pride, now a Days, that they never think they go fine enough: It is a hard Matter to know the Mistress from the Maid by their Dress, nay very often the Maid shall be the finer of the two. Our woollen Manufacture suffers much by this, for nothing but Silks and Sattins will go down with our Kitchen Wenches: to support which intollerablle [sic] Pride, they have insensibly raised their Wages to such a Heighth, as was ever known in any Age or Nation but this.14 According to Defoe, female servants’ desire for sartorial display damaged the economy on every level from the minor encumbrances of ‘add[ing] more to House-keeping’ costs by requiring more soap to wash their garments15 to the more serious economic and political consequences


attendant on wearing imported ‘Silks and Sattins’ rather than the homespun products of British woollen manufacture.16 The unrestrainedly emulative society that Defoe envisages here would have been familiar to a contemporary readership following the publication of Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1723). Yet whereas in Mandeville’s Fable the ‘continual striving to outdo one another’ through sartorial display sets ‘the poor to work, [and] adds spurs to industry’, in Defoe’s account the socioeconomic consequences of such forms of emulation are irreparably damaging.17 Anticipating the work of twentieth-century fashion theorists Georg Simmel and J. C. Flügel, Defoe suggested that fashion was driven by (wo)man’s paradoxical desire to be both ‘like and to be unlike’ others. Rather than a pyramid model, in which style filters down through the class system before being superseded, fashion, he argued, was produced through a two-way process of emulation and differentiation:18 By their Extravagance in Dress, they [servants] put our Wives and Daughters on yet greater Excesses, because they will (as indeed they ought) go finer than the Maid: Thus the Maid striving to out-do the Mistress, the Tradesman’s Wife to out-do the Gentleman’s Wife, the Gentleman’s Wife emulating the Lady, and the Ladies one another; it seems as if the whole Business of the female Sex were nothing but Excess of Pride, and Extravagance in Dress.19 As women of lower social rank strove to appear like their betters they fuelled a cycle of emulation and dissociation that necessitated that those of higher social status adopt new fashions to maintain their relative distinction. In the earlier Great Law of Subordination Consider’d (1724), Defoe had also targeted dress as a dangerous encryptor of rank. Here the inappropriate dress of female servants is placed in the broader context of the ‘abuses of Liberty among the servant classes’, both male and female, and the moral degeneration of the nation: the miserable Circumstance of this Country is now such, that, in short, if it goes on, the Poor will be Rulers over the Rich, and the Servants be Governours of their Masters; the Plebeij have almost mobb’d the Patricij; and … so the Cannaille of this Nation impose Laws on their Superiours, and begin not only to be troublesome, but in time, may be dangerous; in a word, Order is inverted, Subordination ceases, and the World seems to stand with the Bottom upward.20


In order to prevent the disintegration of the social hierarchy anticipated here and in the less overtly propagandist Every-Body’s Business Defoe demanded the regulation of servants’ dress. Since ‘Charity Children’, he argued, were ‘distinguish’d by their Dress, why then may not our Women-Servants[?]’. Disappointingly, but in a characteristic strategy of anti-fashion argument of the period, Every-Body’s Business stops short of describing the composition of his projected dress code, only insisting vaguely that women servants should not wear ‘Silks, Laces, and other superfluous Finery’.21 In The Great Law of Subordination, however, Defoe went further by looking back to Athenian, Spartan and Roman models of service, recalling a classical republican ideal in which ‘the Masters [fed] their Servants sufficiently, that their strength might be supported for their Labour’ and ‘the Servants [wore] a particular Badge of their Servitude, that they might be known, on all Occasions [as] Servants’.22 Defoe invests dress (here in the form of a badge) with the power to codify society sartorially. The badge constitutes a dual form of social recognition: in order to avoid embarrassment, members of the middle and upper social ranks will be able to discern servants on sight, and servants, by wearing the badge, will acknowledge their social inferiority and their respective duties to their masters and society as a whole. Dress, in other words, is set up as the best antidote to its own transgressive potential. Pamela is both written out of and implicitly questions the moral, political, economic and social issues raised by such debates on servant dress. To borrow Warner’s model of ‘overwriting’, debates on servant dress are evoked by Richardson in order to anticipate a hostile critical response so that he may subsequently demonstrate the heroine’s exceptionality and, therefore, the irrelevance of such debates to his novel. This strategy, if indeed it is intentional, is somewhat risky. Richardson’s novel – culminating in a cross-class marriage – could be read as the realisation of Defoe’s worst fears and, indeed, Richardson’s own contribution to the debates on servant dress suggests that he had more than a little sympathy with Defoe’s stance. In his advice manual The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum (1734), Richardson sought ‘to prevent or reform [depravities] in the Servant, who when he comes to be Master, in his Turn, may contribute to amend the Age’.23 One of the depravities Richardson singles out for particular condemnation is ‘Pride in Dress’: ‘one of the epidemick Evils of the present Age, immers’d from the Highest to the Lowest in Luxury and Sensuality’. Richardson’s incendiary vision of a society in which fashion ‘has inverted all Order, and destroy’d all Distinction’ is more reminiscent of Defoe’s pamphlets


than the later Pamela, in which social inversion becomes the reward for exceptional merit.24 Letters six and seven of Pamela are dominated by lists of the heroine’s newly acquired ‘Silks, Laces and other superfluous Finery’ of the kind Defoe and Richardson had so vociferously condemned. The exhaustive detail with which Pamela details her newly acquired clothes has proved so central to readings of her character that these lists are worth quoting at length: MY Master has been very kind … for he has given me a Suit of my old Lady’s Cloaths, and half a Dozen of her Shifts, and Six fine Handkerchiefs, and Three of her Cambrick Aprons, and Four Holland ones: The Cloaths are fine Silks, and too rich and too good for me, to be sure. I wish it was no Affront to him to make Money of them, and send it to you: it would do me more good. (p. 18) SINCE my last, my Master gave me more fine Things. He call’d me up to my old Lady’s Closet, and pulling out her Drawers, he gave me Two Suits of fine Flanders lac’d Headcloths, Three Pair of fine Silk Shoes, two hardly the worse, and just fit for me; for my old Lady had a very little Foot; and several Ribbands and Topknots of all Colours, and Four Pair of fine white Cotton Stockens, and Three Pair of fine Silk ones; and Two Pair of rich Stays, and a Pair of rich Silver Buckles in one Pair of the Shoes. I was quite astonish’d, and unable to speak for a while; but yet I was inwardly asham’d to take the Stockens; for Mrs Jervis was not there: If she had, it would have been nothing. I believe I receiv’d them very awkwardly; for he smil’d at my Awkwardness; and said, Don’t blush, Pamela: Dost think I don’t know pretty Maids wear Shoes and Stockens? (p. 19) Although Pamela’s ‘Awkwardness’ makes clear that her new clothes are not appropriate to her station, it is easy to forget that each of the fabrics she alludes to in her letters had specific social connotations to which the novel’s readers would have been attuned. The aprons Pamela receives, for example, reveal her dual status within the B. household. Aprons were a characteristic feature of both workingand middle-class women’s clothing in the first half of the eighteenth century, as well as of labouring men’s attire. For the labouring classes, the apron was, according to Phillis Cunnington, a ‘symbol of menial rank’: ‘Everyone needs protection from the cold, therefore it is not infra dig to wear an overcoat, but protection from dirt is


another matter. It suggests undignified activity … it was demeaning to need protection from the dirt of manual work.’ 25 Though their protective function was important, aprons were also used in middleclass attire as an attractive feature of dress in their own right. As with many contemporary items of clothing, the purpose and social significance of a particular apron were delineated by the fabric from which it was made. Pamela receives both aprons that are suitable for her employment, and others which suggest her dubiously privileged position within the B. household. While holland linen was appropriate for a working apron, the superior quality French cambric aprons that she receives are much more suitable for the decorative dress of her social superiors. The mere fact that Pamela receives such fine clothes is perhaps less damaging, however, than her ambiguous response to them, coupled with the fact that they are given to her by her master. The servant’s suggestion in letter six that she would sell the clothes to help her family if it were not inappropriate to do so is transformed into a more opaque form of moral confusion when she later receives the ‘Stockens’ from B. The source of Pamela’s embarrassment is unclear and at risk of the kind of diametrically opposed readings that characterise the literary critical debate that followed the novel’s publication. Much of this interpretive difficulty stems from the ambiguity surrounding the extent to which Pamela feels that she is entitled to the array of fashionable items she receives. In The Great Law of Subordination, Defoe warned that the customary practice of giving clothes to servants led to misplaced notions of entitlement based on (potentially false) merit. He argued that when presented with fine clothes, the servant (here a male servant) would be led to believe that ‘his own Merit has procur’d him all that; this exalts him in his own Opinion, and in a Word ruins him; for Pride and a good Servant are as inconsistent, as Darkness with Light’.26 Read through the lens of Defoe’s account, Pamela’s shame in receiving the stockings is both merited and meritworthy, particularly since she is given the stockings by B. But following such a lengthy and detailed list of the other items in her fine wardrobe, Pamela’s lack of shame in receiving so many other garments from her master, including other undergarments (‘Two Pair of rich Stays’), is conspicuous. To a reader versed in contemporary debates on servant dress, the heroine’s alleged virtue seems already to have been prematurely rewarded by this point in the novel. To Pamela, apparently unaware of the debates she implicitly questions, there is little impropriety in accepting the bequest. It is only when this system of


reward seems to demand something in return, as suggested by the erotic symbolism of the stockings, that Pamela becomes perturbed. Critics have pointed out that Pamela’s acceptance of the clothes is not the kind of socially transgressive act we might anachronistically imagine, since such practices were simply customary.27 But, as Defoe’s interventions on the topic indicate, while such practices may have been customary, they were by no means unchallenged. Fear of social transgression was the most commonly cited reason for opposing the bequest of cast-off clothes. As is so often the case in eighteenth-century anti-fashion writing, however, the fear of social transgression expressed in debates on servant dress is closely allied to fears surrounding unrestrained female sexuality. Throughout the century, the efforts of female servants to emulate their betters were frequently cited as leading causes of prostitution. Richardson’s novel questions such longstanding assumptions by inverting the sexual dynamic of the masterservant relationship – Pamela is prey rather than predator – as Eliza Haywood realised in her Anti-Pamela: or, Feign’d Innocence Detected (1741).28 When Syrena Tricksy meets her lover Vardine in a haberdasher’s shop, he purchases a pair of stockings for her; but, unlike Pamela, Syrena refuses to accept them. Syrena’s motives are, of course, more openly questionable than those of Richardson’s heroine. Her refusal is not motivated by the kind of shame that forces Pamela’s embarrassed acceptance; rather, it is motivated by a fear that her ready acceptance might compromise her efforts to conquer Vardine by revealing her corruptibility and desire for social ambition all too clearly. Though less nobly motivated than Pamela’s acceptance, Syrena’s initial refusal casts a typically unfavourable anti-Pamelist gloss on Richardson’s original by suggesting that Pamela could have declined the items she was given. However, Haywood’s novel is, I would suggest, the most sympathetic of the many anti-Pamelas to follow the original publication and the most sensitive to the interpretive complexity of Richardson’s work. Unwilling to countenance the singleminded pro- or anti-Pamela interpretations to which many critics had sought to reduce the novel, and to which her own interpretation of the stocking scene had seemed to subscribe, Haywood rewrites this scene a final time in the novel, this time to highlight the untenability of the servant’s position. Shortly after the initial episode, Syrena realises that she has been ‘deceiv’d’ by Vardine’s fine clothes into imagining that his fortune is greater than in fact it is. Since this means he is no longer of use to


her, she becomes ‘vex’d’ that she hadn’t taken the stockings, for they would have been ‘clear Gains’ (p. 27). When Vardine tries again to give the stockings to Syrena, the servant accepts, but only when it is clear that more is at stake if she refuses. In a grotesque perversion of the Cinderella story, Vardine tries to discover if Syrena is the woman he believes she is by seeing if the stockings fit her: I can tell in a Moment, by grasping your pretty Leg: – Here he made an offer of doing as he said, but she resisted with all her Strength, crying out at the same time – hold! hold! I will have them – they will fit; and glad enough she was to take them, tho’ in reality a little frightend [sic] at the manner in which he forced them on her. (p. 37) This comic altercation primarily draws attention to Syrena’s vanity and weakness for fashionable dress. But in a novel that highlights, even while it attempts to subvert, the complex financial and sexual restrictions society exerts on women, the scene also highlights the untenability of Syrena’s and, by implication, Pamela’s position. Though Anti-Pamela is a damning parody of Richardson’s original, its unwillingness to align itself with either side of the Pamela/Anti-Pamela divide allowed Haywood to produce perhaps the most nuanced response to the novel. Though Syrena seeks to conquer Vardine, the tables have been turned here. As a female servant she must accept the stockings if she is to rebuff his sexual advances and maintain the control over her financial and sexual affairs she so ardently desires. Haywood’s novel thus offers a critique of Pamela’s acceptance of the stockings that is far more sympathetic than many other anti-Pamelas in its emphasis on the unenviable position of the female servant in a world of male sexual threat. Haywood would return to this theme only two years later in her advice manual A Present for a Servant-Maid (1743). While advocating that female servants should counter their masters’ advances with ‘vigorous Resistance’, Haywood acknowledged that female servants laboured under a constant threat of abuse from their masters, which rendered them ultimately powerless: ‘Being so much under his Command, and obliged to attend him at any Hour, and at any place he is pleased to call you, will lay you under Difficulties to avoid his Importunities, which it must be confessed are not easy to surmount.’29 In her revisions of the stockings scene, Haywood recapitulates the ‘overwriting’ strategy Richardson adopted in order to shed new light on the original text. Haywood first provokes a hostile reading of the


heroine’s character by suggesting that Pamela could, in fact, have refused B.’s gifts, before revealing that she ultimately had no choice but to do so. As the reception of Pamela would so clearly underscore, however, Haywood’s strategy ran the risk of multiplying rather than restricting reader interpretation. Though both stockings episodes in Haywood’s novel suggest different versions of Pamela’s story – Pamela as seducer, Pamela as victim – the cumulative effect of the two episodes is to suggest that neither version adequately reflects her position. The novel’s insight into the untenability of the female servant’s situation is qualified by the fantasy of female empowerment and sexual manipulation which Anti-Pamela broadly celebrates. Since Syrena succeeds in acquiring the stockings that she desired all along, the novel’s plot, like that of Pamela, supports the kind of unsympathetic readings that individual episodes within the novel seem to counter. Haywood’s AntiPamela thus ultimately privileges Defoe’s conception of the ambitious, morally bankrupt female servant rather than Richardson’s passively ashamed and reluctant beneficiary. As Haywood’s novel recognised, Pamela both reflects and questions the moral and socioeconomic issues raised by contemporary debates on servant dress. However, the novel is so deeply implicated in the arguments it seeks to counter through the heroine’s exemplarity that its contribution to the debates on servant dress pre-empts the hostility it seeks to counter. If, as Warner has suggested, Richardson anticipates (mis)readings of his novel in order to guide his reader through his text, it is easy to feel that the author is simply taking us round and round in circles.30 Pamela tantalises the reader with an elaborate game of hideand-seek, its simple marriage plot and professed moral purpose at odds with the texts and debates it challenges. It is unsurprising that criticisms of the novel have located these tensions most persistently in the body of Pamela, rather than in the structure of the book that bears her name. Her adorned body offers clues to her moral gentility and servile status and stands as the novel’s most significant red herring, proving to determined anti-Pamelists that her modesty is simply an act to secure B.’s affections. The novel’s participation in contemporary debates on servant dress is another such moment of interpretive rupture. Character and plot conflict with each other as the text anticipates the hostile readings of the servant’s character and body it seeks elsewhere to rebuff. Character and plot further conflict with the author’s moralised account of the novel’s intent. In A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflections Contained in the Histories of PAMELA, CLARISSA,


AND Sir CHARLES GRANDISON (1755), Richardson attempted to contain the frustratingly diverse readings of his novels by reducing their plots to a series of didactic nuggets, alphabetically linked by theme and text. There are only three remarks on the morality of dress in Pamela, a scantiness thrown into greater relief by the two pages devoted to the moral issues of fashion in Clarissa (1747–8). The only maxim on dress relating to the first two volumes of Pamela, however, lends support to the view Richardson had earlier expressed in the Vade Mecum. Defensively and tersely, Richardson asserts that ‘DRESS suited to Degree, or station, gives a high instance of prudence’.31

The ‘tricking scene’ and its contexts The maxim quoted above is extracted from one of the novel’s most divergently interpreted episodes: Pamela’s appearance in her homespun gown and petticoat. The scene in which she dons this contentious garb has been subtitled variously by critics and, for the purposes of convenience, I shall subsequently refer to it as the ‘tricking scene’. In particular, this phrase is intended to counter Warner’s characterisation of this episode as the ‘disguise scene’.32 By emphasising ‘tricking’, rather than disguise, I hope to remove the insinuation of wilful sartorial deception made by B. and countless anti-Pamelists and implicitly endorsed by Warner’s term. Rather, I am concerned to maintain the ambiguity and inextricable duality of Pamela’s appearance and its significance through the use of her own term, ‘trick[ing]’ (p. 55).33 Much early criticism of Richardson’s novel suggests that its moral imperative could be proved exclusively by this scene. But in seeking to read Pamela through the external and notoriously cryptic signifier of dress, these critics merely exposed the extent to which the scene reveals the novel’s unwillingness to resolve the Pamela/Shamela debate. These contestations over sartorial and, concomitantly, moral meaning originate in and rehearse B. and Pamela’s disputes over the import of her dress in the ‘tricking scene’. While Pamela struggles to assert her right to self-possession and self-expression through her letters and physical appearance, here, B.’s (mis)readings of his servant reveal Pamela’s lack of control over these forms of self-representation. Pamela’s ‘Project’ to make clothes ‘that would become [her] Condition’ (pp. 44, 45) occurs at a crucial moment of potential narrative closure: the moment when she is expecting to return to her parents. Rather than the impudent gesture of defiance B. would later believe it to be, Pamela claims that she purchases the flannels, ‘Scots Cloth’ and ‘sad-colour’d Stuff’ (p. 45) to make a new


suit of clothes out of concern for the embarrassingly ‘tawdry Figure’ she will appear to her parents’ neighbours in the garb of her late mistress (p. 44). (Ironically, her efforts were not enough to ward off the accusations directed against this ‘Lady’s Fav’rite, in a taudry Gown’ made in the anti-Pamelist poem Pamela: or, the Fair Imposter [1743].)34 The only remnant of the heroine’s former grand attire evident in her new homespun costume is the ‘pretty Bit of printed Calicoe’ with which she trims her gown. While Pamela’s dressmaking is preparing her for her return home, however, she is engaged in another act of needlework which prolongs her stay in her master’s household and which suggests a potential narrative progression that resists closure. Pamela has been asked to embroider a waistcoat for B., which although not inconsistent with the duties of service, ambiguously serves to relocate Pamela within a higher social sphere. In the hierarchy of eighteenth-century needlework, the predominantly middle-class pursuit of embroidery was ranked far above the menial tasks of dressmaking.35 As such, Pamela’s embroidery anticipates the more genteel pursuits she will enjoy as B.’s wife rather than the less elevated needlework tasks she would undertake should she return to her parents. Sheila C. Conboy has developed this argument further to argue that the flowering of the waistcoat ‘adumbrates the method’ with which Pamela will break down the social barriers between B. and herself by ‘tailoring his internal life’ and anticipating his reformation.36 But it is important to note that Pamela’s servile status is soon reinforced when B. criticises the length of time she has spent on the waistcoat, blaming her letter-writing for the neglect of her duties: ‘you mind your Pen more than your Needle’ (p. 48). In fact Pamela’s extended stay in her master’s house in order to complete the waistcoat has afforded her the opportunity not merely to write but also to engage in analogous acts of self-expression and construction through her new suit of clothes that will anger and intrigue B. as much as her letters do. Casting off the ‘disguise’ she has had to wear since she acquired her mistress’s clothes, Pamela claims that in her homespun gown she can now appear to B. as her true self and regain possession of that ‘Self’: I went, and lock’d myself into my little Room. There I trick’d myself up as well as I could in my new Garb, and put on my round-ear’d ordinary Cap; but with a green Knot however, and my homespun Gown and Petticoat, and plain-leather Shoes; but yet they are what they call Spanish Leather, and my ordinary Hose, ordinary I mean to


what I have been lately used to; tho’ I shall think good Yarn may do well for every Day, when I come home. A plain Muslin Tucker I put on, and my black Silk Necklace, instead of the French Necklace my Lady gave me, and put the Ear-rings out of my Ears; and when I was quite ‘quip’d, I took my Straw Hat in my Hand, with its two blue Strings, and look’d about me in the Glass, as proud as any thing. – To say Truth, I never lik’d myself so well in my Life. (p. 55) The obvious ‘Pride’ Pamela takes in her new gown proved more damning to many of her critics than the implied pride she takes in her fine clothes (p. 54). The anonymously published Pamela: or, the Fair Imposter, for example, a five-canto anti-Pamelist poem, revelled in the ill-fated stratagems of the proud Pamela and B.’s hapless reincarnation, Blunder. The chameleon-like Pamela of The Fair Imposter is both condemned and curiously celebrated for the pride, persistence and ingenuity with which she seeks to obtain Blunder. When the couple’s respective stratagems ‘To win, and to betray’ each others’ hearts reach a temporary stalemate, Pamela settles ‘for a Master-piece of Female Art’: T’alarm his Love, and yet secure his Heart: Last Night has furnish’d me with just Pretence, I’ll change my Dress, and seem to go from hence; What Habit best will do? a Quaker’s Stuff Will shew my Shape, and is genteel enough.37 The Fair Imposter leaves little doubt of Pamela’s misplaced and thoroughly immoral pride where Richardson’s novel merely implies it. The reference to the heroine’s homespun garments as a ‘Quaker’s stuff’ resonantly links the ‘tricking scene’ to masquerade scene in volume 4 of Richardson’s continuation of the novel, in which an embarrassed, pregnant Pamela appears in Quaker dress.38 The reference to Quaker dress serves further to emphasise the disjunction between Pamela’s virtuous appearance and her possibly immoral motives. Unlike Quakers, who, with varying degrees of commitment, wore plain dress as part of their testimony to simplicity,39 the ‘fair Imposter’ sports ‘this Disguise, / To fire Sir BLUNDER’S Heart with new Surprize’.40 Still more important to contestations of the ‘tricking scene’ in the original novel than the particulars of Pamela’s dress, or the ambiguity of her response to her new appearance, however, is the novel’s insistence that Pamela’s clothes have a meaning that can and indeed must be interpreted and divulged. In a scene that reinvents many contemporary novelistic


accounts of masquerades, Mrs Jervis, Rachel, and B. fail to recognise – or at least refuse to admit they recognise – the newly self-fashioned servant. When Pamela eventually divulges her identity, she is surprised with questions over the meaning of her appearance. Mrs Jervis asks, ‘What can all this mean?’ (p. 55), while B. begs ‘What … do you mean then by this Dress?’ (p. 57). These quests in search of the meaning of Pamela’s dress seem to invite the meta-textual interrogations that would energise the Pamela vogue. As each of the numerous pro- and anti-Pamela writers sought to answer the questions voiced by Jervis and B. in the original novel, they construct a subtly different version of the Pamela narrative. In Pamela: A Comedy (1742), the dramatic and comic potential of Pamela’s dress, here in her fine clothes as the wife of B. (renamed Tom Belvile), is realised in a prolonged series of reflections on the meaning of Pamela’s clothes: LADY DAVERS … thy Understanding, Child, as well as thy Person, is in Masquerade. SMATTER Dear Lady Davers, you never were more out in your Life – the Design of Masquerades is to conceal Persons, you know – Now Pammy’s Dress is quite the contrary; for it very plainly discovers who she is, and what she is – Ha, ha, ha! PAMELA Why, Sir, what am I? SMATTER As fine a Woman as e’er my Eyes beheld; by all that’s exquisite, Tom Belvile’s a most happy Mortal, or may I suffer Annihilation … I never saw Cloaths more Alamode in my Life; the Colour, the Silk, and Trimmings, quite genteel – white, white, you know, is quite apropos for Pammy, and emblematical–ha, ha, ha. LADY DAVERS Ay, ay, the Virgin Colour – I always thought Pamela would die a Vestal – she’s a very Martyr to Virtue, and the very Picture of Purity.41 Such efforts to draw out the true import of Pamela’s costume are stopped only when Andrews arrives to confront his daughter, fearing that she has become Belvile’s mistress after hearing stories in the local community of Pamela’s changed appearance and newly acquired fine clothes. Like B. and Jervis in the original novel, Andrews demands that his daughter ‘View thy own sumptuous Dress – and tell thyself thy meaning’. Unlike her Richardsonian ancestor, however, and uniquely among Pamela literature, the play’s heroine can account for the meaning of her dress unequivocally here, since she has the incontestability of the law behind her: ‘Oh! my lov’d Father, banish you Fears,


nor think your Daughter’s Innocence the hateful Barter for this costly Habit; ‘tis made the Purchase, not the Exchange … I am his Wife.’42 The insistence that dress can convey moral, social and sexual meanings that can be divined by the observer is a concern that Pamelists, antiPamelists and many earlier and subsequent novels, conduct books and sermons vacillated over and deliberated upon. Though Pamela’s dress was debated with a seemingly unprecedented fervour in the critical backlash following the novel’s publication, several prior literary contexts had been established in which dress took on particular and usually damning meanings. In addition to the debates on servant dress, the most troubling of these contexts was the ubiquitous disguise scene popularised in romance novels such as Defoe’s Roxana (1724) and Haywood’s Fantomina (1725). As William Warner has suggested, Pamela’s appearance in homespun clothes renders her ‘ambiguously complicit with the codes of love, disguise, and manipulation fundamental to the novels of amorous intrigue’, in which dressing up or dressing down has an erotic charge.43 Certainly many readers, including B. himself, were unable to see beyond the limited scope of the romance novel to read the heroine’s clothes as anything other than an act of female sartorial deception, designed simply to allure. As the indignant B. expounds: ‘Who is it you put your Tricks on? I was resolved never to honour your Unworthiness, said he, with so much Notice again; and so you must disguise yourself, to attract me, and yet pretend, like an Hypocrite’ (p. 57). The anonymous writer of Pamela Censured developed B.’s outburst into a sustained critique of the novel as a whole. He too read the heroine as the descendant of a Roxana or a Fantomina. In trying to ascertain the moral of the ‘tricking scene’, the author of Pamela Censured determined that it served only to instruct ‘the Ladies, that by altering their Appearance they are more likely to catch their Lover’s Affections than by being always the same; and that … with a Straw Hat in her Hand [she] may allure, when perhaps a pale faced Court Lady might be despised’. Realising that ‘artful Simplicity’ is more alluring than ‘affected Finery’, Pamela adopted her rustic garb, only to arouse B.’s desires to remove it: ‘no young Gentleman who reads this, but wishes himself in Mrs Jervis’s Place to turn Pamela about and examine all her Dress to her under Petticoat.’44 In a common anti-Pamelist argument, which is at its most familiar and damaging in Fielding’s Shamela (1741), dress is read by the author of Pamela Censured as part of the heroine’s artillery, strategically deployed to win over her master. Similarly, Fielding’s parody linked Pamela’s duplicity with the duplicity of dress in his double pun on ‘sham’ as both a travesty of the novel’s pretensions and an allusion to an item of clothing: a sham,


which along with a few other items of costume and Delarivier Manley’s New Atalantis are amongst Shamela’s few possessions,45 was a ‘set of false sleeves to put on over a dirty shirt, or false sleeves with ruffles to put over a plain one’.46

The struggle to reconcile self and body Given the prior, and almost uniformly damning, contexts in which Pamela’s dress could be read, the novel’s construction of a mode of sartorial self-expression that transcends class distinctions in order to articulate the moral seems doomed to failure. Aaron Hill was one of only a handful of published voices to extol Richardson’s ability to unify Pamela’s (and Pamela’s) dress with her (and its) underlying virtue. For Hill, the heroine’s ‘Pleasing’ yet ‘Proper’ ‘Country-Habit’ emblematised the heroine’s sentimental virtue and functioned as an analogue to the text’s seamless marriage of literary expression and moral design. His recognition that the novel attempted to construct a form of dress that could be aesthetically and morally pleasing, yet socially proper, reveals how the politics of sensibility and class are inexorably bound in Pamela. The novel’s attempt to analogise the adorned and sentimental body in the image of Pamela in her country habit is a mechanism of the text’s social critique. Her appearance inverts the premise of sumptuary legislation to suggest that moral, as opposed to social, worth could, and indeed should, be externally manifest in sartorial display. Calls for a return to some form of sumptuary legislation were, as we have seen, common in anti-fashion diatribes of the mid- to late century. However, Richardson’s response to these debates failed to address the concerns of many of his contemporaries and successors. His privileging of virtue above rank failed to convince readers, who felt that an observance of class distinction was the only possible guarantor of social order. As Robert Markley has argued, this attempt to assert the moral above the social is at the heart of the novel’s failure to convince its readers: though Pamela ‘is a “natural” aristocrat raised to her “rightful” place as a lady of demonstrated virtue’, without ‘advocating an explicit form of socioeconomic validation (worth equals birth) he has no other way of assuring the Fieldings among his readers that his heroine is what she seems’.47 That virtue was demonstrated largely through the heroine’s dress threatened further to reduce moral worth to a set of external signs that could be ‘put on’ for personal gain. The novel’s assertion that commodities can demonstrate virtue ran the risk of commodifying virtue. As Ann Louise Kibbie has argued,


Pamela exposes a tension between ‘two ideas of female character, represented by two versions of property’: an economic conception of character as a commodity of exchange, and a sentimental ideal in which character is fixed and virtuous.48 Though Pamela’s references to her ‘Virtue’ lay claim to ‘the inviolable property [she possesses] in herself’, her claim is compromised by the encroachment of the economic languages of currency and the marketplace into the novel, which leave both heroine and author liable to charges of ‘hypocrisy and class materialism’.49 Kibbie locates the problematic commodification of Pamela’s self in Andrews’s reference to his daughter’s virtue as a ‘jewel’, but this commodification is more concretely realised in the heroine’s dress. When Pamela appears before B. in her homespun clothes she proudly asserts that she is appearing for the first time as ‘her own self’ (p. 56). Her attempt to articulate selfhood through her new attire has been read as a potent attempt to block B.’s designs. As Tassie Gwilliam has suggested, if Pamela ‘can choose to represent herself in her “roundear’d cap”, she can define her clothing’s use rather than being defined by it’.50 More recently, Patricia Brückmann has argued that Pamela’s self-fashioning directly facilitates her marriage to B. since it demonstrates that she is ‘formed in the essentials of choice and taste’ and ‘educated in the critical materials and signs of costume’.51 While Pamela’s tricking clothes certainly constitute the kind of symbolic rebuttal identified by Gwilliam and Brückmann, the readings imposed on the heroine’s dress by B. and other critics expose the fantasy of Pamela’s – and by extension any woman’s – attempt to manipulate ‘the critical materials and signs of costume’. Indeed, these readings implicitly question the very existence of costume’s unequivocal signs and inviolable meanings. When Pamela appears as ‘her own self’, she is alarmed to find that B. misreads her appearance by identifying her as her sister. While he could not be so free with Pamela herself, the dress of Pamela’s ‘sister’ signals her sexual availability, and he kisses Pamela ‘for all [she] could do’ (p. 57). Though Pamela has purchased the fabrics for her gown herself and stitched the garments with her own hand, her dress reveals the fallacy that belies her attempt at self-ownership through costume. As the anonymous author of the ten-line mock-lament ‘To the Author of Shamela’, published in the June 1741 issue of the London Magazine, wrote, Pamela only ever appears to the reader in ‘borrow’d light’: But now, the idol we no more adore Jervice a bawd, and our chaste nymph a w—


Each buxom lass may read poor Booby’s case, And charm a Williams to supply his place; Our thoughtless sons for round-ear’d caps may burn, And curse Pamela, when they’ve serv’d a turn.52 Pamela’s symbolic reduction to a ‘round ear’d cap’ reveals that her attempts at self-definition through dress conversely leave her at risk of being defined solely by these forms of external display. It further suggests the extent to which Pamela’s decision to articulate her ‘self’ in the external, material object of dress renders that ‘self’ a commodity to be traded, used and abused by others. The tricking scene, which draws so much attention in the Pamela debates, offers, in other words, a microcosm of the phenomenon itself. The meanings of dress have become so encrypted by this point that the heroine’s appearance in clothes suitable to her class and occupation has become a suspect act. Anticipating the work of modern-day fashion theorists such as Fred Davis, Pamela reveals that dress does not operate as a language, but functions rather as a ‘quasi-code’, whose key terms ‘fabric, texture, colour, pattern, volume, silhouette, and occasion’ are ‘forever shifting or “in process”’, determined by various context-specific circumstances.53 Keenly attuned to the symbolic meanings encoded by Pamela’s dress, B. seeks to counter this defiant act of self-representation in a performative demonstration of his own social status. Since Pamela is ‘so neat and so nice in [her] own Dress’, B. asks her to comment on his courtly ‘Birth-day Suit’. When he asks her to assess the suit’s tailoring and fit, Pamela responds that she is ‘no Judge’, but nevertheless can see that it ‘look[s] very fine’. Her response to the quality of B.’s suit, though perhaps simply a remark born of deference, played into the hands of critics who stressed the heroine’s love of finery. But it is her final comment in this exchange that is most significant in light of the critical backlash the text produced. When B. subsequently asks Pamela why she persists in wearing her homespun gown rather than her mistress’s fine clothes, she is incredulous at B.’s interest in her attire and protests that ‘it is no Matter what such a one as I wears’ (p. 68). Ironically, of course, when read in the context of debates on servant dress, the romance disguise scene, and, most importantly of all, in light of the text’s sentimental argument, the question of what the heroine wears is of crucial importance. But Pamela’s assertion is none the less true in as much as she relinquishes any vestige of command over her self-representation once she discards her mistress’s clothes. No matter what she wears, her critics read into her clothes only what they want to see.


This prophetic recognition, at odds with Richardson’s attempts to analogise the adorned and sentimental body, is underscored in the text’s allusions to a final literary tradition: the fairy tale. Patricia Brückmann has recently cast doubt on the fairy-tale qualities of Richardson’s narrative, emphasising instead that the heroine’s rise is the product of her astute ability to recognise the possibilities presented by the consumer revolution and make herself.54 Yet the heroine’s possession of qualities necessary to fulfil the station to which she ascends has always been a vital element of the fairy tale and an important component of its essential conservatism. Indeed Pamela’s ascent from young rustic to aristocratic wife through a series of near inhuman trials closely follows the tradition of fairy tale. In particular it seems to reimagine the fairy tale-like rise of Griselda, the heroine of Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, which was, in turn, based on Petrarch’s adaptation of the last book of Boccacio’s Decameron.55 A ‘modernised’ version of The Clerk’s Tale by George Ogle appeared a year before the publication of Pamela in 1739 under the title Gualtherus and Griselda. However, even the briefest acquaintance with the Griselda story suggests that she is powerful archetype in whose image Pamela is made. Both women are of humble birth, possess a beauty and dignity that exceed the station into which they are born and are pursued by aristocrats who raise them to a status that reflects their moral superiority. If Pamela is created in Griselda’s image, then B. similarly finds a nearprecedent in Gualtherus, who determines that ‘Woman is at best a pleasing Cheat; / Her look is Counterfeit. Her Heart Deceit’. Anticipating the later text, and foreshadowing the sentiments of many of its critics, woman’s deceit is metaphorised in Gualtherus and Griselda in terms of sartorial duplicity: ‘All She affects, to catch our Ears and Eyes, / Is meer Delusion, Virtue in Disguise’.56 When Gualtherus goes in search of a wife, he is unconcerned whether she should be ‘Of Rich or Poor, of High or Low Degree’ as long as she is the exception that proves the rule of woman’s inconstancy (p. 12). In Griselda, Gualtherus finds the virtue he seeks, but, as in Richardson’s novel, accusations of duplicity, aggravated by the heroine’s low birth, persistently surface in Gualtherus’s mind. Evidence of the heroine’s virtue is sought in every aspect of Griselda’s looks and demeanour: she is married only on the condition that her ‘Soul be painted on [her] Face’ and that ‘no Pretences [are] sought, / To swerve in Deed or Word, in Look or Thought’ (p. 32). Knowing that ‘Dress improves the Face’, Gualtherus rewards Griselda’s compliance with a new suit of clothes ‘beset with costly jewels’, divesting the heroine of every ‘Remnant of her old Attire’ (p. 34). Gualtherus seeks to


find a dress that offers indelible testimony to both the social and moral character of his new bride. Like Pamela in her fine clothes, Griselda is ‘Not transform’d but known!’ in her courtly garb. If Gualtherus and Griselda foreshadows the sentimental ideal Richardson’s novel would elucidate, it also anticipates the disintegration of this ideal. Though her virtue is now outwardly displayed for all to see, Gualtherus cannot trust Griselda and he struggles to believe that her worth is anything more than mere show. Consequently, he repeatedly tries his wife’s ever-patient virtue, even plotting to convince her that her children are dead. Only when Griselda has fully proved her virtue to her husband can she be united with her children and the analogy between her beautiful outward appearance and inner virtuous self be realigned in Gualtherus’s mind. No longer determined by the meanings her husband has unjustly placed on her, Griselda now adorns the palace and the position she holds within it: She gave (not borrow’d) Lustre from the Throne. So form’d her Speech, so fashion’d was her Mien; So just but Mild! So aweful [sic] but Serene! Not Envy in her Look or Soul cou’d trace, Her low Condition or ignoble Race … No Daughter of a Cottage humbly born, But sprung a Princely Palace to adorn; Not only to adorn, but to support, Not only fill, but dignify a Court. (pp. 38–9) As this extract indicates, the similarities between Gualtherus and Griselda and Richardson’s novel are reinforced by some suggestive parallels in the language of Pamela, the innumerable texts it spawned and Ogle’s work. Pamela, for example, appears to her readers in her own ‘amiable Light’ (p. 3), Griselda in ‘the fairest Light’. Griselda’s ‘Lustre’, like Pamela’s ‘too strong … Lustre’57 embellishes the position she acquires. Griselda ‘adorns’ and dignifies the Court and her position within it; the sympathetic, fairy tale-like dramatic revision of Richardson’s novel The Maid of the Mill (1765) similarly moralises on the appropriateness of raising a ‘deserving woman’ like Pamela ‘to a station she is capable of adorning, let her birth be what it will’. 58 If Pamela evoked debates on servant dress and the tropes of the romance tradition in order to revise them, then Griselda’s story is evoked in order to be literally rewritten in a modern setting. Yet what is of interest here is that, despite the close contiguities of language


and plot, these texts produce two of the most divergently interpreted heroines in literary history: the much-maligned Pamela and nearuniversally pitied Griselda. The explanation for these different readings lies in the relative degrees of agency enjoyed by both heroines. Where Gualtherus and Griselda foreshadows the sentimental ideal and its deconstruction, its conclusion satisfyingly realigns appearance, worth and reward in a manner that eludes Pamela. But the conditions that enable this resolution in the earlier work would have been unacceptable to Richardson. Griselda is pitiable because she is passive and accepts her husband’s attempts to refashion her character and test her virtue with patience and chilling silence. Pamela, on the other hand, refuses to be passively represented by the clothes given to her by B. or passively to accept the trials made on her virtue. Instead, she seeks to counteract these attempts with active demonstrations of agency in her epistolary and sartorial self-representation. Indeed, B. can marry Pamela only once she has relinquished this agency and become a near reincarnation of the patient Griselda. His determination to know Pamela culminates in a scene that symbolically links her adorned body with her body of letters. Fearing that B. may intercept her writings, she recognises the potential of dress (even, as here, in its most honest manifestation as ‘homespun gown and petticoat’) to encrypt and conceal. In the novel’s most literal articulation of the ‘drest/exprest’ motif, Pamela’s letters are sewn into her petticoat. In order to possess the heroine fully, B. must physically and metaphorically undress Pamela, divesting her of the two signifiers of her social and moral self: I will now begin to strip my pretty Pamela … I will see these Papers. But may-be, said he, they are ty’d about your Knees with your Garters … I fell on my Knees, and said, What can I do? what can I do? If you’ll let me go up, I’ll fetch them you … So I took off my Under-Coat, and, with great Trouble of Mind, unsew’d them from it. (pp. 235–6) Having once attempted to stitch her identity and resilient virtue into her homespun clothes, Pamela is now forced to ‘unsew’ in a symbolic act of self-dissemination. The effect, however, is not to dissolve the link between these forms of expression, but to consolidate it. Though dress is potentially a less reliable indicator of worth, B. ultimately finds that the loveliness of Pamela’s appearance is entirely congruent with her superiority of mind: ‘I do assure you, my Pamela’s Person, all lovely


as you see it, is far short of her Mind; That first impress’d me in her Favour; but that only made me her Lover’ (p. 404). In relinquishing her letters, Pamela concomitantly relinquishes her right to the kind of self-fashioning that formerly placed her under suspicion. Like Gualtherus, B. spends much of the novel’s final pages clothing Pamela and her relatives in order to render them suitable examples of their newly acquired status. Pamela is given gowns and extravagant jewellery on the condition that she will obey her husband’s ‘Rule’ that she should not, ‘like so many other married women’, grow ‘careless in her Dress’. According to B., most women look as if they ‘take no Pains to secure the Affection [they] had gained’ after their marriages and, to prove her loyalty, Pamela must always be dressed for company whether she is ‘to go abroad, or stay at home’ (pp. 367–8). In what would later become a familiar conduct book argument, B. seeks to deny his wife’s subjectivity by rendering her a permanently public figure.59 As B.’s wife, Pamela will be passively ‘dress’d out’ by her husband, ‘only to be admir’d’ (p. 497). However, Pamela’s re-clothing as B.’s wife, like Griselda’s at the hand of Gualtherus, is insufficient to ward off accusations of duplicity and immorality. Indeed, as numerous Syrena Tricksys and Shamelas demonstrate, such forms of material reward gave further ammunition to critics of the novel who determined that these aristocratic spoils had been her goal since her mistress’s death. The difficulty of containing Pamela’s ambiguous former self lies in the fact that her dress itself constitutes a plot within the novel that gathers a momentum of its own and accrues meanings which diverge from the moral intentions proclaimed in the Preface. This narrative within a narrative is recognised by B., who requests that his future wife should appear to some guests in her homespun costume: pray be only dress’d as you are; for, as they know your Condition, and I have told them the Story of your present Dress, and how you came by it, one of the young Ladies begs it as a Favour, that they may see you just as you are: And I am the rather pleas’d it should be so, because they will perceive you owe nothing to Dress, and make a much better Figure with your own native Stock of Loveliness, than the greatest Ladies do in the most splendid Attire, and stuck out with the most glittering Jewels. (p. 272) Here, B. attributes Pamela’s dress and its ‘Story’ with a far less ambiguous reading than that with which he inscribed it in the earlier ‘tricking


scene’. Where once he invoked the masquerade plot to describe Pamela’s appearance, now B. presents her the story of her dress as a properly sentimental tale of prudence, humility and modesty that he feels will educate and improve his guests. But Pamela is a novel in which narratives have a profoundly ambiguous status. And as B.’s persistent debunking of Pamela’s ‘plot’ as a fictional romance reveals, no one in the novel is completely in control of his or her own narrative. In this context, to refer to Pamela’s dress as a ‘Story’ is to suggest the lack of control that Pamela, B., and even Richardson himself, have over the meanings of the heroine’s appearance. As a story, an item in a marketplace, self-consciously in dialogue with traditions and debates that threatened to unwrite it, the meanings of Pamela’s dress could never be unequivocally pinned down or understood, but would endlessly be refashioned and circulated in the currency of critical exchange that is so ironically yet appropriately labelled the ‘Pamela vogue’.

Refashioning Pamela: Kelly’s Pamela’s Conduct in High Life (1741) and Haywood’s Anti-Pamela (1741) Soon after the publication of Pamela it became clear that the novel, which had encouraged so many debates about social and sartorial emulation, was becoming a fashionable, emulated commodity in its own right. Anna Laetitia Barbauld remarked in her edition of Richardson’s letters that all who read were ‘his readers’ and ‘at Ranelagh … it was usual for ladies to hold up the volumes of Pamela [sic] to one another, to shew they had got the book everyone was talking of’.60 The Pamela vogue even infiltrated the Church when Dr Slocock famously recommended Richardson’s work from his pulpit. The novel’s fashionable status was condemned by many anti-Pamelists. Fielding, for instance, writing as Parson Oliver, cited the ‘epidemical Phrenzy’ that raged following Pamela’s publication as the motivation for setting the record straight in Shamela. According to Fielding’s parody, Richardson’s novel displayed sentiments of ‘the worst and most fashionable Hearts in the World’,61 instructing servants to ‘look out for their masters as sharp as they can’ and to use ‘all Manner of Means to come at Ornaments to their Persons’.62 Richardson’s novel emerges in Shamela as little more than a fashion manual, teaching girls how to get a good husband by manipulating their appearance. Reaffirming Shamela’s argument, the heroine of another Pamela spin-off, the novella ‘Jenny, or the Female Fortune Hunter’ (1759), reads Richardson’s novel as she does the farming


manuals that line her father’s bookcases: as a set of instructions to be learnt and applied. In an effort to emulate Pamela’s example, as she sees it, Jenny twice goes to London in search of a husband, narrowly avoiding prostitution before returning home to marry a local farmer.63 The increasingly fashionable status of the novel was no less a concern for Richardson than it was for his critics. As the ‘Story’ of Pamela’s dress was refashioned in the commentary that followed, Richardson increasingly felt that he was losing his grip on his creation. He therefore sought to regain control of the ‘Story’ of Pamela’s dress by rewriting it in illustrations, revisions to the text and the two-volume continuation of the novel that appeared in 1741. But these revisions did little to restrict the range of meanings ascribed to the heroine’s dress. The 1801 edition, for example, posthumously compiled by Richardson’s daughters, included the following telling rebuttal of B.’s proposals to make her his mistress: When I come to be proud and vain of gaudy apparel, and outside finery, then (which I hope will never be) may I rest my principal good in such trifles, and despise for them the more solid ornaments of a good fame and a chastity inviolate.64 The revision, which constitutes a conscious piece of defensive dialogue with critics who emphasised Pamela’s love of finery, merely recapitulates the heroine’s compelling elusiveness in its conditional phrases ‘which I hope’ and ‘may I’. Hubert and Gravelot’s illustrations for the octavo sixth edition of the novel did little to strengthen Richardson’s case either, as much recent work on the engravings and other visual representations of Pamela has demonstrated.65 Interestingly, the ‘tricking scene’ is not represented in the engravings, perhaps to underplay the episode’s damning theatrical and performative qualities. Yet in other engravings, Pamela’s dress frequently seems to blend seamlessly into the drapery of the B. household, thereby highlighting the reader’s sense that Pamela’s self is endlessly performative. In the novel’s continuation (sometimes known as Pamela II) Richardson likewise failed to fulfil its ‘covert ideological project’ to, in Terry Castle’s words, ‘decarnivalise’ Pamela by proving that rank is ‘more than just a matter of fine clothes’.66 When the pregnant and deeply embarrassed Pamela is challenged at the masquerade that she reluctantly attends as a Quaker, she defends her presence by claiming that she attends ‘merely out of Curiosity to look into the Minds of both Sexes; which I read in their Dresses’.67 Pamela’s faith in the legibility of the adorned body is at best


unconvincing in the light of the debates on dress raised by the first two volumes and, at worst, utterly ridiculous when voiced by the grotesque masquerading body of a pregnant Quaker. These were not the only attempts made to contain the meanings of dress in Richardson’s novel, however. Given the centrality of dress to Pamela’s character and Richardson’s self-professed moral agenda, many alternative and anti-Pamela writers were forced to engage with the debates about clothing provoked by the text. John Kelly’s Pamela’s Conduct in High Life (1741), a ‘sequel’ published before Richardson had time to complete and publish his own, anticipates some of the defensive dialogue that Richardson engaged in in his continuation and revisions of Pamela.68 Kelly’s most overt defence of Pamela is his most perverse: in a manoeuvre that refuses to engage with some of the most controversial issues raised by the original, Pamela is revealed to be of noble descent, and possessed of a genealogy that can be dated back to the Norman Conquest. The family’s loss of fortune and position is explained away as a result of some unfortunate business decisions on the part of Pamela’s father and the debts accrued by her dissipated elder brothers. Yet Pamela’s now incontrovertible nobility is still, it seems, insufficient to ward off anti-Pamelist readings, and, as a result, Kelly’s heroine is persistently engaged in active demonstrations of her virtue. Much of the self-conscious dialogue with Pamela’s critics in Kelly’s sequel is veiled – albeit thinly – in ruminations on various subjects that seem, on first reading, to have little bearing on Pamela’s virtue. One such instance of a defence in masquerade occurs when B. and Pamela discuss the art of preaching. B. tells Pamela that she will be ‘agreeably entertained at Church, for our young Curate is admired by all who hear him’. Although B. is talking of the curate’s celebrated method of sermon delivery, the reader is immediately reminded of Pamela’s much besmirched relationship with Parson Williams in the original, and on which Fielding pounced with such delight in Shamela. Such implicit anti-Pamelist insinuations are quickly countered by the heroine, who retorts that she is swayed only by doctrine, not by the manner of delivery or the man who delivers it. The ensuing exchange between the couple rehearses the debates on the relationship between dress, expression and text in early eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and self-consciously deployed by Hill to champion the text’s marriage of text and moral design: But, my dear Critick, won’t you allow that sound Doctrine deserves to be deck’d with all the Flowers of Rhetorick: Is a fine and a virtuous


Lady less engaging if richly dress’d? In Answer, Sir, I must say, sound Doctrine does not want these Ornaments, these Flowers of Rhetorick. It’s [sic] Sublimity sets it far above all Embellishments, as Truth is most beautiful when naked. There is a majestic Loftiness in the plain Diction of the holy Scriptures, which none of your florid Orators can come up to: Your Simile I think a very good one; for as the Glare of Jewels and rich Cloaths will attract the Eyes of such as are suprized by their Lustre, in Prejudice to native Charms; so the Jingle of Words will draw the Attention of the Ignorant, who regarding the Smoothness of Stile, overlook the Instructions of the Doctrine convey’d in it. You have turn’d the Simile against me; I find you are for a plain Discourse. (IV, pp. 47–8) B.’s decision to articulate his argument through sartorial imagery plays into the hands of Pamela – that notorious manipulator of dress – and his ‘Similie’ is truly turned against him. In a canny rebuttal of some of the criticisms the original novel provoked, Pamela argues that a ‘fine and virtuous Lady’ is no less virtuous simply because she is ‘richly dress’d’. However, fine dress is no more a guarantee of virtue than humble dress is of vice. Without the substance to give it form, a finely dress’d woman is but an empty shell and no amount of finery can compensate for this inner lack. Pamela then proceeds with a rebuttal of the anti-Pamelist case of which even Richardson himself would have been proud. Kelly’s Pamela suggests that if people interpret, misinterpret or simply fail even to discern the truth because their eyes are prejudiced by outward finery and superficial ‘Lustre’, then the lack of virtue is theirs and not that of the object of their interpretation. The bedazzled fools whom Kelly’s Pamela condemns for overlooking the ‘Doctrine’ because they cannot take their eyes away from the ‘Glare’ of such trivial effects as ‘Jewels and rich Cloaths’ become the vehicle for a broader condemnation of anti-Pamelist critics who failed to see the heroine’s exemplary morality because they were too concerned with what she was wearing. Although Kelly’s Pamela defends the sentimental ideal here, when the novel later returns to these issues, the difficulty of sustaining this ideal soon becomes apparent. As a text that is no less elusive than its namesake, the anti-Pamelist case is implicitly embedded in Pamela’s Conduct in High Life, manifest in recurrent moments of amnesia and contradiction. Pamela’s disdain for ornamentation and her faith in the transparency of ‘Doctrine’ is problematised towards the end of the novel when she looks at herself in a mirror and reflects on her character. Pamela looks in the


mirror to confirm the truth of the sentiments she expressed earlier in the novel, but finds only an ambiguous perversion of them: Here’s an Inanimate will show What, possibly, few care to know: For, void of Flattery it tells, What mortifies our Beaux and Belles. Tho’ dumb it is, and motionless, It speaks Defects in Face or Dress And every Motion does express. Tells you your Features, shews your Shape. And each affected Grace will ape: Seems what-e’er you do, to do, Frown you at this? Why, that frowns too. But shou’d you laugh at what you see, That seems to laugh as heartily. If you put on an Air of State, That stately Air will imitate. (IV, pp. 307–8) Like letters and dress, the mirror is as an inanimate object that ‘speaks Defects’ and reflects character without bias or prejudice. Yet the mirror can only reflect what is placed before it and therefore mimics falsity too. As such it becomes part of the lie, an unquestioning reflection of an image that may not exist other than in feigned gestures and appearances. Dress, Kelly’s Pamela goes on to suggest, plays a vital part in such deceit: ‘our Minds [a]re as much disguised by our Words and Actions, as our Bodies are by our Cloaths: People very seldom appear what they really are’ (IV, p. 309). Pamela’s conception of dress here is very different from that expressed in the conversation on rhetoric. In the earlier implicit snub to anti-Pamelists, the meaning of dress appeared to be created solely by the observer. But here, as if to confirm the anti-Pamelist case, Kelly’s heroine assigns the meaning of dress to the wearer, who can manipulate sartorial/textual meaning to the extent that even a mirror is powerless to expose the underlying truth. If Kelly’s novel attempted to recuperate the ideal of the morally communicative body, it also exposed the ease with which the language of dress devolved into a language of disguise which compromised the author’s efforts to analogise self and appearance. Haywood’s AntiPamela, on the other hand, found no difficulty in drawing a metaphoric equivalence between dress, body and moral worth. Anti-Pamela is often read as a text written to cash in on the success of the Pamela vogue


as opposed to a detailed critical engagement with, or parody of, Richardson’s novel.69 But this is to do Haywood’s complex and fascinating novel a disservice. In fact, as already suggested in the discussion of the stocking episode, Haywood offers a systematic (and at times highly subtle and sympathetic) re-imagining of Richardson’s novel. The terms through which Anti-Pamela engages with the original are evident in the very name of Haywood’s heroine: Syrena Tricksy. As already noted, Syrena’s surname alluded to the inherent doubleness of Richardson’s heroine, and implicitly links this doubleness to the doubleness of dress itself. Anti-Pamela responds to, echoes and subsequently counters the central problem of Richardson’s novel: the extent to which the text uses clothing to create an analogue between the adorned and sentimental body, and yet cannot contain dress to maintain a reassuring equivalence between character and appearance. For even while Haywood’s work propagates and celebrates moments of sartorial duplicity, AntiPamela offers a much more reassuring and intelligible relationship between inner and outer self than that created in Richardson’s novel or Kelly’s ‘sequel’. Anti-Pamela begins by openly confronting the central issue in contestations of Richardson’s novel: the potential disjunction between Pamela’s outer self (as expressed in her dress and letters) and her virtue. This disjunction is figured in the first instance, not in terms of sartorial duplicity, but in terms of the ‘duplicitous body of femininity’ identified by Tassie Gwilliam: what was most to be admired in her [Syrena] was, that the Innocence which is inseparable from Infancy, and which is so charming, even in the plainest Children, never forsook her Countenance; but continued to dwell in every little Turn and Gesture long after she came to Maturity, and had been guilty of Things, which one would think should have given her the boldest and most audacious Air. (pp. 5–6) Haywood’s opening debunks the sentimental ideal that ‘the soul’ could be viewed ‘stark naked’ in gestures, deportment and appearance.70 Syrena’s supposedly natural innocence is fashioned and moulded by her socially ambitious mother into a show of innocence, deployed for personal gain. It seems entirely appropriate, in this context, that Syrena should become a seamstress: a manufacturer of appearances. Reinventing Pamela as a needlewoman firmly associates Syrena, and by implication Richardson’s heroine, with the accusations of ruthless


social ambition which abounded in representations of dressmakers throughout the eighteenth century and which will be further scrutinised in Chapter 2.71 Syrena’s relatives want her to become a mantuamaker because they feel it is a ‘proper’ occupation for a young girl and, moreover, because it requires no ‘Stock’. Furthermore, as a seamstress, Syrena will have to ‘deal only with Persons of her own Sex’, making her ‘exempt from those Temptations, her Youth and Beauty might expose her to in the Millinary Way’ (p. 8). In fact, Syrena attains a position as a seamstress in a private household, a role which, not accidentally, exposes her to ‘Temptations’ which she and her mother hope will further her social advancement. Syrena uses dress as she does ‘turns and gestures’, to attract and deceive. She uses her trips to buy linens and lace for her work as opportunities for sexual liaison. Her mother uses the pretext of sending fabrics to her daughter, supposedly to ‘run up [a dress] at a leisure Time’, to conceal a correspondence between them that, were it to be found out, would reveal their plans. Where it is only implied in Richardson’s novel, there is no doubt in Anti-Pamela that dress always conceals something else, be it letters or immoral motives. Even the act of dressing itself becomes, here, an opportunity for sexual conquest, as Syrena carefully positions herself so that she can be seen by the gentleman of the house whilst secretly observing him watching her: ‘I put the Window-Shutters a-jar, so that I could see him through the Crack, without his distinguishing me’ (p. 17). Syrena’s life is a persistent struggle to attain what Pamela does in her marriage to B.: money, fine clothes and position. But, unlike Pamela, Syrena’s character is repeatedly exposed for the sham it is. Her dress is not a barrier to an understanding of her character, but the means through which knowledge can be ascertained. The serial identities that Syrena is forced to assume as each of her stratagems is exposed as counterfeit turn her life into a permanent masquerade. Her sexual conquests begin to take on a familiar pattern that starts with the creation of an air of wealth and virtue through her appearance. This is, in turn, rewarded in the form of money and clothes offered by temporarily conquered lovers. Subsequently, as her wealth and virtue are exposed as fictions, Syrena is forced to relinquish her assets and devise new stratagems to regain the tools necessary to facilitate her next scheme. After one episode in the series of mortifications that constitute her life, Syrena finds her fortunes are ‘almost exhausted in Cloaths, luxurious Eating, and Chair-hire’ purchased to attract another victim. The tawdry, grotesque figure to which Syrena


has been reduced can only now be at ease in the false world of the masquerade: ‘The Masquerade was the only place where she could go to without fear of being exposed, and even there was in Danger of being accosted’ by a disgruntled ex-lover (p. 149). The staging of Syrena’s life as a masquerade is key to understanding the text. For while Anti-Pamela offers a damning indictment of the ambiguous significations of dress and its propensity to deceive, it simultaneously celebrates, like the masquerade itself, the power of dress to trick, and the comic propensity of men to be tricked by it. But the novel ultimately privileges a competing view of Syrena’s clothing in which the meanings of her dress are less ambiguous than in Richardson’s original. Though the novel’s plot is sustained by Syrena’s exploitation of dress to ensnare her hapless victims, Anti-Pamela also insists, in what would become a common device of the sentimental novel, that, to the initiated reader, her dress indexes her moral progress and regress.72 The moral legibility Anti-Pamela seems to debunk at the beginning of the novel is reaffirmed as the narrative unfolds, and the heroine’s clothes and general physical appearance increasingly expose her true character. Syrena’s life embodies the world turned upsidedown spirit of the masquerade by turning the tables of sexual conquest to make men her victims. But while they are hoodwinked by her, the reader is never left in doubt that Syrena is not what she appears. As she walks through Covent Garden ‘disguised … in Lace and Embroidery’, the reader can clearly see what her targets cannot until too late: Syrena is a ‘Hussy’ (p. 149). Eventually, her appearance fails even to convince her male victims. Syrena’s comparatively lengthy and financially successful relationship with a married mercer ends because of her clothes. Syrena, who is exhorting sums of money from the mercer that he cannot afford, is also having an affair with the friend who is lending the mercer money to support his mistress. The mercer finds Syrena at his friend’s house, and though she ‘pluck’d her Hood pretty much over her Face’, she is ‘discover’d Syrena too plainly’ by the clothes that she is wearing and ‘which had come from his own Shop’ (pp. 171–2). Syrena’s moral impoverishment increasingly becomes legible in the impoverishment of her dress and body. In a common device of prostitution narratives, the heroine’s appearance is systematically ravaged by her misconduct. When she contracts a venereal disease, Syrena is forced to sell many of her clothes to pay for her medical expenses: ‘she had scarce a change of Garments to appear in … she grew very much mortify’d, and began to fear she had lost the Power of pleasing, tho’ not yet seventeen’ (p. 184).


While representing opposite sides of the Pamela/Anti-Pamela divide, both Richardson’s and Haywood’s novels share a fantasy in which character is legible to the observer. But where Anti-Pamela is ultimately reassuring in its assertion that vice is externally manifest and therefore ultimately punishable, Richardson failed to convince all his readers that moral goodness could shine through appearance. Reading Haywood’s work against Richardson’s presents a somewhat depressing picture of representations of dress and female sexuality in eighteenthcentury literature. Clothing, it seems, can be read as a signifier of character, so long as it only communicates female immorality. The literary and moral ideal Richardson attempted to articulate through his literalisation of the ‘drest/exprest’ motif is thus deconstructed through the very language in which it is articulated. The attempt to write the material world into the novel’s moral schema plunges the text into a series of various, but interrelated, debates on gender, sexuality, consumption and class which it cannot overwrite. At another time, in another household, in another novel, Pamela’s homespun clothes may have gone unnoticed. But in the atmosphere of sexual threat the novel creates, in light of contemporary concerns about the morality of servants and the literary precedents the novel evokes, the significations of Pamela’s clothes multiply beyond her (and her author’s) control. Richardson’s novel and the spin-offs, sequels and parodies it spawned presented dress as a diagnostic tool through which the efficacy of the sentimental project could be determined. In so doing, Pamela marked out the parameters of a debate which would persist for many decades to come.

2 ‘The Spoils of Virtue’: Mantua-makers, Milliners and their Shops

The moral, sexual and social debates provoked by the ‘Story’ of Pamela’s dress were not confined to writing on servants. In many ways, mantua-makers and milliners constituted much more alarming figures than servants, though all three groups of labouring women were commonly attributed with similar characteristics – pride, social ambition and a lack of moral refinement – by writers and artists. As active agents in the burgeoning consumer economy, rather than its mere beneficiaries, women who worked in the dressmaking trades became vehicles through which critics could debate the changes in social and cultural production wrought by the commercialisation of fashion.1 Fashioning much more than cloth and trimmings, these women controversially reformulated notions of gender itself. By the end of the eighteenth century, as Clare Haru Crowston has demonstrated, women in the clothing trades had helped to redefine the sexual division of labour and had effectively consolidated the supposedly innate connection between femininity and fashion.2 Their progress did not go uncontested, however. Many critics vociferously opposed the rise of mantua-makers on the grounds that they had unfairly encroached upon the trade of tailors, who had traditionally made both female and male costume.3 Others expressed concern that women’s access to these trades, the success of which depended on the cultivation of close relationships with consumers of the middling and upper ranks, might lead to an erosion of social distinction. An exhaustive analysis of the historical concerns provoked by the mantua-maker and milliner is beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead, I focus here on the most suggestive manifestation of these concerns in literary representations of women workers in the clothing trades: the persistence with which writers conflated these women and 52

Mantua-makers, Milliners and their Shops 53

the goods they produced. Unlike Pamela, who sought to define herself through her clothing, mantua-makers and milliners were frequently presented as metaphoric equivalents of dress and fashion. Satirists and playwrights – whose works are the focus of the first section of this chapter – frequently punned on the connection between costume’s vulnerability to staining and decay and the corruptibility of the women who made it. Beyond the low world of satire and theatrical comedy, milliners and mantua-makers embodied fashion in more complex and sophisticated ways. Within the sentimental novel, women in the clothing trades were targeted as both the cause and effect of the some of the most pernicious effects of the commercialisation of fashion. Not only were they accused of creating a market for endless sartorial innovation that threatened to undermine the social order, but their privileged access to the bodies and boudoirs of their fashionable clients seemed also to blur the distinctions on which the sexual and social order was supposed to rest.4 Accordingly, the bodies of mantua-makers and milliners were frequently figured as grotesque parodies of the ideal of virtuously adorned femininity Pamela was supposed to represent: their carefully cultivated sartorial displays reveal all too clearly the lack their dress was designed to conceal. Literary incarnations of the milliner and mantua-maker thus speak to the difficulty of assimilating dress within a sentimentalised model of female virtue. However, as the final sections of the chapter will demonstrate, dressmakers and milliners could also serve as an expedient device of sentimental argument. Where Richardson’s efforts to analogise body and self in Pamela were undermined by the spectre of corrupt femininity his novel implicitly evoked, other writers neutralised this threat by bringing this spectral femininity to the fore of their works in the form of the dressmaker, milliner or her apprentice. As the sentimental woman’s other, such women became the targets of a series of antifashion and anti-feminist attacks, which might otherwise have been directed at the sentimental heroine herself.

Campbell’s London Tradesman If the historic mantua-maker and milliner helped to reformulate notions of gender, many satirical writers sought to proscribe the influence of their textual counterparts by characterising them, like the goods they produced, as corruptible and insubstantial. Robert Campbell’s London Tradesman (1747) perhaps best exemplifies this representational tradition. Itself a product of the consumer revolution and the diversification of urban


employments, the London Tradesman collectively identified the clothing trades as a powerful force in the production of social identity, albeit with a deft, satiric touch. The power of the men and women who worked in these trades is none the less strictly hierarchised and demarcated throughout Campbell’s text along gender lines. Within this rigid hierarchy the tailor reigns supreme. Attributed with near-’Promethean powers’ by the ‘fanciful Persons’ whose characters he is employed to fashion in cloth, the tailor is cast by Campbell as a god-like puppet-master: No Man is ignorant that a Taylor is the Person that makes our Cloaths; to some he not only makes their Dress, but, in some measure, may be said to make themselves. There are Numbers of Beings in and about this Metropolis who have no other identical Existence that what the Taylor, Milliner and Perriwig-Maker bestow on them: Strip them of these Distinctions, and they are quite a different Species of Beings … and are as insignificant in Society as Punch, deprived of his moving Wires, and hung up on a Peg.5 The process of making men is not without personal cost, however. In creating ‘identical Existence[s]’ for his clients, the tailor gradually effaces his own. Though he need not have a ‘robust Body’, the physical contortions of ‘sitting cross-legged, always in one Posture, bending [his] Body, makes [him] liable to Coughs and Consumptions’. Tailors, Campbell conclude, rarely ‘live to a great Age’ (p. 193). The ambivalently deployed, though none the less sentimental, rhetoric colouring Campbell’s description of the tailor suggestively anticipates nineteenth-century reformist writing on the figure of the distressed needlewoman,6 yet his sympathy does not extend to the tailor’s eighteenth-century female counterparts. Campbell’s manual offers many valuable insights into the organisation of the female clothing trades. Mantua-makers, as the Tradesman outlines, were dressmakers – their name referring to an outmoded style of dress that had originated in Italy – who ran up garments made from fabrics purchased elsewhere by their customers. They often worked from their own household, sometimes employing a journeywoman apprentice. Milliners, who were predominantly (though not exclusively) female, undertook a more varied role than the term connotes today.7 They sold linens and trimmings (including laces and ribbons) for male and female garments, an area of their business that was to become increasingly important in the second half of the eighteenth century, when female consumers sought to compensate for the


increased simplicity of fashionable dress with elaborate decorations. In addition, milliners sold accessories made up on the premises, often by their apprentices, including handkerchiefs, caps and hats.8 When The London Tradesman goes beyond these bare facts, it offers a series of moralising and misogynist judgements on the women who work within the clothing trades. An anonymous trade manual published in the same year as the Tradesman, A General Description of All Trades, Digested in Alphabetical Order (1747), throws the palpable misogyny of Campbell’s account into stark relief. Where the author of A General Description describes mantua-making and millinery as genteel and potentially profitable trades for women,9 Campbell characterises dressmaking as a business of ‘small Reputation’ and warns parents not to ‘bind their Daughters’ to mantua-makers if they have any care for their characters or virtue (pp. 227, 228). Where Campbell construes the tailor’s creation of (fictional) sartorial identities as a harmless activity that serves only the clownish pretensions of his clients, he concludes that the mantua-maker’s and milliner’s power and influence over their fashionable clientele is more extensive and damaging. The mantua-maker, who must quickly learn ‘to flatter all Complexions [and] praise all Shapes’, is characterised by the Tradesman as a ‘compleat Mistress of the Art of Dissimulation’ (p. 227). Milliners are likewise damned for manipulating women’s bodies into ‘as many different Shapes in one Month as there are different Appearances of the Moon in that Space’, but they sink even below the mantua-maker in Campbell’s eyes in their efforts to exploit their female workers financially and sexually (p. 207). Milliners’ apprentices, the Tradesman warns, are exposed by their socially ambitious mistresses ‘to many Temptations’, with the result that their morals are ‘insensibly debauche[d]’ before they ‘are capable of Vice’ (p. 208). In the apprentice’s ruin lies the milliner’s gain: encouraging her wealthy male clients in their advances towards her workers excites business and thus greater profits. Campbell concludes: the Title of Milliner [is] a more polite Name for a Bawd, a Procuress, a Wretch who lives on the Spoils of Virtue, and supports her Pride by robbing the Innocent of Health, Fame, and Reputation: They are the Ruin of private Families, Enemies to conjugal Affection, promote nothing but Vice, and live by Lust. (p. 209) While Campbell stops short of ‘charging all Milliners with the Crime of Connivance at the Ruin of their Apprentices’, ‘fatal Experience’


convinces, he suggests, ‘that nine out of ten of the young Creatures that are obliged to serve in these Shops, are ruined and undone’ (p. 209). Campbell offers no explanation for his assumption that prostitution was rife within the clothing trades: whether ‘it is owing to the Milliners, or to the Nature of the Business, or to whatever Cause it is owing’ it is simply ‘the last Shift a young Creature is driven into’ (p. 209). However, the pun on ‘Shift’, here, offers some recompense for Campbell’s failure to offer a fully satisfying model of cause and effect. As both a reference to the apprentice’s occupation – ‘Shift’ could simply mean employment (OED) – and an item of underclothing10 that symbolises the moral, physical and financial dressingdown she will inevitably endure under the employment of her designing mistress, the reference to the ‘Shift’ implies that Campbell’s account of the dressmaking trades is coloured by a widespread tendency to associate a love of fashion with sexual ruin evident in the popular literature of the period. Like Rousseau’s Sophie whose simple adornment is put on only to be removed in the observer’s imagination, sartorial images in the London Tradesman simultaneously conjure a vicarious undressing of the female body that intimates sexual ruin. Even Campbell’s short description of petticoat quilters, though he spares them the invectives levelled against milliners and mantuamakers, is tainted by the author’s salacious misogyny and anti-fashion prejudice: ‘I must just peep under the Quilted-Petticoat [sic]. Every one knows the Materials they are made of’ (p. 213). As Tony Henderson has suggested, the extent to which the connection between the eighteenth-century clothing trades and prostitution was causal, coincidental or epistemic cannot be determined with certainty, although low pay for dressmaking work, unfavourable and increasingly seasonal working conditions, and contemporary court testimonies lend credence to the association.11 A comedy entitled The Intriguing Milliners and Attornies Clerks (1738) evidently saw little reason to doubt such widely held suspicions. The play, which follows the sexual misadventures of three milliners, one of whom exchanges millinery services for sexual favours, concludes with a rather self-negating epilogue, which acknowledges that the play merely confirms what the audience ‘knew before, / A Clerk’s a Rogue, A Milliner’s a Whore’.12 Fictional accounts supported the views of the early satires by revealing the peculiar ease with which the milliner’s shop might conceal less respectable business transactions. Mrs Cole’s brothel in Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748-9), for instance, flourishes under the cover of the ‘outward


decency’ of a millinery establishment and the ‘mask of mock-modesty’ adopted by her neatly and respectably dressed workers.13 As late as 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft, in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, confirmed such assumptions by describing ‘milliners and mantuamakers’ as the ‘next class’ to ‘those poor abandoned creatures who live by prostitution’.14 Such accounts have been used to suggest that the equivalence frequently drawn between dressmaking, millinery and prostitution in eighteenth-century literature was not simply metaphoric. However, textual representations of women within the clothing trades go beyond historical fact, supported by and sustaining anti-fashion and anti-feminist arguments and reinforcing the perceived incompatibility of an inappropriate attachment to dress and contemporary ideals of femininity. 15 A growing body of work on consumption in the period has already pointed to the myriad ways in which new patterns of consumption inflected constructions of femininity in eighteenth-century literature. However, while the female consumer looms large in these studies, the retailer or female worker has not been prominent. 16 Instead, critics have emphasised the extent to which the shopping woman ambivalently emerges as both a product of and scapegoat for mercantile capitalism. On the one hand, the female consumer could be portrayed as a disruptive and empowered agent ‘capable of subverting the retail scene’ by refusing to yield to its seductive charms, 17 or by engaging in the sphere of commercial exchange as a means of self-fashioning. On the other hand, the shopper she was endlessly commodified as a spectacle to be consumed by the predatory gaze of the retailer, other shoppers and the reader. In Consuming Subjects, Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace exemplifies this process of metonymic displacement whereby the female shopper became a site on which society projected anxieties regarding consumerism, in a chapter on china. In the texts explored by Kowaleski-Wallace women become living, breathing synonyms for that which they consume: like china, women are perceived to be designed for display, potentially flawed, delicate, attractive and, in raw form, malleable. While these studies recognise the extent to which the female shopper was constructed in relation to the goods she purchased, the retailer’s relationship to the goods she traded in, by contrast, has been seen to be less commodity-specific, characterised by a discourse that rendered prostitution paradigmatic of all forms of female labour. (Not incidentally, ‘Commodities’ were a cant euphemism for female genitalia.)18 However, closer scrutiny of


textual representations of mantua-makers and milliners suggests a much more commodity-specific relationship between dressmakers and milliners and the goods in which they traded.

Like their ‘Cambrick, hem’d’: inverting the sentimental ideal When Campbell published the London Tradesman in 1747, the association of the clothing trades and prostitution was already deeply etched into the popular imagination. The milliner’s shop in particular, as a site that opened its doors to male as well as female customers, was vulnerable to accusations of sexual impropriety. Moreover, it proved an enticing setting for playwrights who exploited the resemblance of the milliner’s prop-laden workplace to the stage itself. Robert Drury’s The Rival Milliners (1737), a play that follows three’s women’s efforts to win the affections of the same man, presumes and relies heavily on stereotypical perceptions of milliners as promiscuous for comic effect.19 Sukey, one of the women of the title, laments the conditions of her employment which keep her and her fellow worker, Polly Wheedle, ‘Behind a Counter, like our Cambrick, hem’d’, under the watchful eye of their ‘haughty angry Mistress’ and love-rival, Mrs Plainstitch. Rather than eliciting sympathy, Sukey’s objections to her work merely confirm her shallowness: SUKEY Could I my sad, my curst Condition change With any Seamstress of the New-Exchange; For they can unsuspected, cast an Eye On young spruce Gentlemen – with, what d’ye buy?20 What is so striking about Drury’s otherwise conventional depiction of milliners is his willingness to signal the misogynist logic which underpins contemporary writing on women in the clothing trades. As the play makes clear, the two apprentices are not only ‘curst’ by their mistress’s vigilance, they are also the victims of men’s failure to see them as anything more substantial than the ephemera they sell or the easily soiled fabrics in which they trade. As Plainstitch protests, men initially treat a pretty young apprentice as ‘a new Piece of Holland 21 fine and white, / Just newly bleach’d, attractive to the Sight’, but soon find her ‘the worse for being wore’. Once cheapened, like second-hand goods, the apprentice can no longer interest her lover: ‘Then when [their] Rage and all [their] Passion’s gone, /


She and [their] Shirts are both bestow’d on John’.22 This uncharacteristic insight into the misogyny which inflects representations of milliners in the period is soon passed over, however, as the milliners go about their legitimate and amatory business. Regrettably, nothing in the women’s conduct suggests that they deserve to be treated as anything better than the cheapened commodities to which Plainstitch claims they are unjustly reduced. After a series of amorous misadventures all three women are married off, much to the relief of the original object of their affections. Marriage, he suggests, though their husbands are not the social catches they had hoped for, will rid the milliners of the moral pitfalls and financial hardships of millinery: ‘Marry at once and be, / From Scandal, Mistress, and Indentures free’. 23 The audience feels that the women will find themselves more hemmed in by their marriages than they were in millinery, but this is all that they deserve. Any threat that Drury’s ambitious milliners might have posed to the social and moral order is contained by the playwright’s decision to keep them firmly rooted within their labouring-class circle. When milliners and dressmakers formed relationships outside their social circle, the consequences appeared much more alarming. Laetitia Pilkington’s Memoirs (1748) is a text that, as Lynda M. Thompson has pointed out, is centrally preoccupied with the disjunction between public façade and inner character.24 A description of a Fleet Street milliner with whom the writer briefly lodged reveals the characteristic repugnance and relish with which Pilkington sought to dismantle social and moral façades in a manner clearly indebted to Swift’s poetry. Initially, Pilkington is ‘pleased with the Change’ of lodgings and the company of her ‘jolly’ landlady. Within a few days, however, the milliner is exposed as a ‘mercenary Town Jilt’, devoid of even a single ‘good Quality’, and for whom millinery provides an expedient shield against the public wrath knowledge of her true profession would provoke.25 Pilkington’s subsequent deconstruction of the milliner’s body betrays a Swiftian conviction in woman’s essential baseness: To give my Reader a Taste of her Cleanliness: She told me herself she had not combed her Head for three Years, which, I believe, was true, because she was not Mistress of a Comb, except when she made free with mine, than which nothing could be more offensive to me, so that her Hair, though naturally fine, being quite matted on a filthy Hair-Cap, seemed to be a Composition of raw Silk and


Moss … Shifts she had two as yellow as Canvas, but they were sleeveless, no Matter for that, she sold ready made Cambrick Sleeves, and could easily pin on a Pair, for she never took any farther Trouble about them.26 The milliner’s skill in manipulating items of dress, a talent on which the successfulness of her legitimate trade rests, allows her to evade moral scrutiny. Though her dress and appearance indicate her physical and moral degradation, they also conceal these unpalatable truths. Her false sleeves, like Shamela’s, both signal the milliner’s deceitfulness and conceal her duplicity from less astute observers, Pilkington included. For all the author’s protestations that the milliner’s moral depravity is palpable in her grotesquely adorned body, she too was initially duped by the milliner’s ‘jolly’, ‘gay’ appearance, even lending her money that was apparently not returned. Dress’s dual function here, as a symbol of deceit and a key through which that deceit might be decoded, was to become a recurrent motif in representations of milliners and mantua-makers. In a lubricious prostitution narrative, thinly disguised as a homiletic advice manual entitled The Cherub (1792), this dual potential is exploited for various tragic and comic narrative plot strands. Moreover, the interplay between disguise and revelation provides a key to The Cherub itself, since it allows its reader to decode its specious efforts to mask its salacious content under the guise of a moral guide. 27 Echoing Campbell, the Cherub’s author pronounces that while ‘there are many very respectable and amiable females who make [millinery] the medium of independence’, they are, in general, liable to a worrying ‘lightness and frivolity’ of mind (p. 47). The terms lightness and frivolity neatly (but with no more subtlety than Drury’s allusion to the soiled ‘piece of Holland’) equate the insubstantiality of the milliner’s character with the light, frivolous and perishable laces and ribbons in which she trades. In more sinister vein, and like the Fleet Street milliner’s false sleeves, these accoutrements, which were designed to embellish and transfigure women’s dress, metaphorise the more dubiously motivated ‘millinery deception[s]’ practised by those ‘cast off, and superannuated punks, who make little more of the profession than finesse, and a gloss for the trade of seduction’ (p. 47). The subsequent narrative relates the story of two sisters, whose doting father, Mr Firman, seeks to apprentice them to some ‘reputable seminary of industry’. After seeing a ‘flourishing’ advertisement in a newspaper for two milliners’ apprenticeships, Firman


instructs a friend to inquire into the business, presumably because he is familiar with the widely assumed connection between millinery and prostitution. The friend is satisfied with what he observes of the business: ‘He saw a large house, in a grand neighbourhood, and was received by a smart woman; and to his shallow capacity, that appeared sufficient’ (p. 49). Hoodwinked by this show of propriety, Firman’s friend recommends the business and the girls are apprenticed. The sisters also become taken in by the fashionable goods they have been employed to make up and sell, writing to their father only ‘when they drew on him for money to purchase fine cloaths, and that they did oftener than his circumstances conveniently admitted of’ (pp. 49–50). The sisters’ insatiable desire to keep up with the latest fashions is initially excused by the Cherub as a prudent business strategy, necessary to forward their careers. Though milliners deployed new technologies to market their goods, including the shop window and trade card, their bodies, like those of prostitutes, were perhaps their best form of advertisement. 28 The possibility that the sisters might make legitimate careers for themselves as milliners is soon debunked, however, when the sexual history of their employer, Mrs Tiffany, is revealed. As an apprentice, Tiffany had been prostituted by her employer before becoming the mistress of a West Indian merchant, who gave her the capital to ‘affect’ the ‘business of a Milliner, that she might the more unsuspectedly carry on that of Baud and Seducer’ (p. 52). The Pamela-esque rise of the virtuous and industrious female to genteel marriage becomes a grim parody here. Instead, millinery fuels a fatal cycle which transforms seduction into capital. This pattern continues with the Firman sisters, who are both prostituted at the age of fourteen. Their secret is revealed only when their brother unexpectedly pays them a visit. Reading the business’s smart appearance rather differently, the brother is dismayed by the sight of apprentices ‘painted like toyshop dolls’ (p. 50). The Cherub reveals that the distinction between humbly respectable and ostentatiously disreputable business is nothing more than a matter of perception. The fact that the milliner trades in appearances makes her all the more astute in concealing her activities. The clothes her ‘young ladies’ wear both encrypt and expose Mrs Tiffany’s true business; capable of being construed as an appropriate form of product advertisement, or, more accurately, as a sign that the true commodities on sale here are not fashionable accessories and effects, but those who wear them.


The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless The representative analogies drawn between fashion and moral lack in The Rival Milliners, Pilkington’s Memoirs and The Cherub were iterated with greater complexity in the sentimental novel. As embodiments of a series of characteristics against which sentimental literature sought to define itself – including shallowness, insubstantiality and, above all, affect – milliners and dressmakers were convenient foils for many a sentimental heroine. From the opening pages of Eliza Haywood’s History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), for example, the reader is introduced to the mantua-maker’s house and milliner’s shop as sites of seduction. As a young girl, Betsy tries to secure the fashionable Miss Forward’s confidence by covering up her friend’s assignations with Sparkish, under the pretence ‘of going to the milliner [or] mantuamaker’.29 Miss Forward’s assignations with the ‘boyish insipid’ Sparkish accelerate her inevitable moral decline, which culminates in her seduction (or possible rape) by Mr Wildly and eventual prostitution (p. 81).30 From the outset then, Haywood’s novel conceptually links dress, dressmaking and millinery with sexual transgression. However, it is Betsy’s narrative, rather than Miss Forward’s, which most fully realises the threat that fashion and the dressmaker pose to female virtue. Following her father’s death, Betsy is placed under the care of her guardian, Sir Goodman, and is catapulted into the world of London Society. Soon ‘dress … engrossed [her] whole conversation’ as she abandons her academic pursuits for the more fashionable ‘study [of learning to] set off, to the best advantage, the charms she had received from nature’ (p. 39). Despite her coquettish airs, Betsy is an innocent abroad and therefore unversed in the city’s deceptively dangerous rituals of shopping and courtship. Soon after her arrival in the city, Betsy is taken to a mercer’s shop where Lady Mellasin chooses a ‘rich [though] not well fancied’ silk for her young companion and a ‘genteel new-fashioned pattern’ for her own daughter, Flora. Betsy is evidently piqued by the episode but quietened by the repeated assurances of her elders: Lady Mellasin said so much in praise of it, and the mercer, either to please her, or because he was desirous of getting it sold, assured Miss Betsy that it was admired by every body, that it was the newest thing he had in his shop, and had already sold several pieces to ladies of the first quality. (p. 39)


Though still reluctant to purchase the material, Betsy is ‘overperswaded’ by the mercer’s sales patter and buys the silk (p. 39). When she returns home to review the fabric, she realises her dissatisfaction: ‘the more she looked on it, the worse it appeared to her’ (pp. 39–40). Betsy’s experience of silk buying anticipates a similar episode in Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (1760). Intending to buy silk for a night-cap, the Chinese citizen Lien Chi Altangi leaves the mercer’s shop with a silk he knows to be of inferior quality to that of his own country, as well as silks for a morning gown and waistcoat he does not need. Leaving the circus-like bustle of the shop, Altangi realises that he has been duped: I knew he [the mercer] was only answering his own purposes, even while he attempted to appear solicitous of mine; yet by a voluntary infatuation, a sort of passion compounded with my good nature, I walked into a snare with my eyes open, and put myself to future pain in order to give him immediate pleasure.31 The sexual language in which commercial exchange is clothed here parodies the mock-courtship rituals that characterise representations of shopping in the literature of the period and identifies Altangi as the feminised, seduced victim of commercial exchange. Shopping is familiarly cast here as an unreasonable and unmanly activity, leaving the consumer vulnerable to the predatory instincts of the shopkeeper. Like Altangi, Haywood’s heroine has been foiled by shopping’s seductive rituals. Betsy realises that in allowing herself to be flattered into purchasing something she does not like, she has relinquished the power of self-fashioning, allowing others to ‘direct [her] in what [she] shall wear’ (p. 40). But unlike Goldsmith’s Citizen, Betsy realises that she can redress the exchange in the mercer’s shop. She obtains a further 20 guineas from her guardian and returns to the mercer’s to purchase an alternative fabric. Betsy finds the retailer ‘unwilling to take [the original silk] again; but on her telling him, she would always make use of him, for every thing she wanted in his way, and would then buy two suits of him, he at last consented’ (p. 41). The description of Betsy’s choice of material is particularly, and characteristically, detailed: As she was extremely curious in every thing relating to her shape, she made choice of a pink coloured French lustring,32 to the end, that the plaits lying flat, would shew the beauty of her waiste to more


advantage; and to atone for the slightness of the silk, purchased as much of it as would flounce the sleeves, and the petticoat from top to bottom: she made the mercer also cut off a sufficient quantity of a rich green Venetian sattin [sic], to make her a riding habit; … all which, with the silk she disliked in exchange, did not amount to the money she had received from Mr Goodman. (pp. 41–2) The novel’s attention to the particularities of Betsy’s dress damagingly feminised the novel in the eyes of an anonymous critic for the Monthly Review: The Insipid chiefly marks the character of this work … Indeed, the minute detail of particulars, and circumstantial descriptions of every thing relating to dress and equipage, and other little exteriors that but too much attract the eye and heart of a woman, sufficiently confirm the voice of the public, as to the sex of our author.33 For the Monthly’s critic, Betsy’s weakness for fashionable self-display symbolised the insipidity and hypocrisy of the female-authored novel. (The text’s lingering descriptions of ‘dress and equipage’ are targeted for arousing desires in the reader for which Betsy will eventually be punished.) However, the Monthly’s reviewer misses the point of the episode in the mercer’s shop. The lengthy description of the ‘Venetian sattin’ to which he alludes has little to do with dress at all; rather, the scene in the mercer’s shop serves to emphasise the heroine’s subversive command over both the commercial and sexual marketplace. Betsy proves that she is more than capable of subverting the traditional, gender-marked positions of masculine, controlling retailer and vulnerable, feminised shopper, outlined by Kowaleski-Wallace, by making a financially seductive offer of her own.34 Her mastery of the shop floor is short-lived, however. Like Altangi, Betsy too is a vulnerable mixture of passion compounded with an essentially good nature, which nearly leads to her ruin in the house of her dressmaker, Mrs Modely. Modely’s name signals her by now familiar function as an embodiment of a host of values for which fashion stands. Like Betsy (Thoughtless), Miss Forward, Mr Goodman and Mr Trueworth, Modely’s name alludes to the moral characteristics that define her personality; but uniquely among the novel’s cast of characters, these characteristics (of changeability and deceit) are inextricably linked to her profession. Modely’s first appearance within the novel confirms the reader’s suspicions by revealing the mantua-maker to be


unabashed, socially ambitious, and more interested in her client’s amorous affairs than her wardrobe. Arriving unannounced in Betsy’s dressing room one morning, Modely breathlessly relates the effect of the heroine’s recent visit to her house on her lodger, Sir Frederick Fineer: ‘Heyday, Mrs Modely’, cried [Betsy], ‘what brings you here thus early?’ – ’Indeed, madam’, answered she, ‘I could not well come out; – I have eight or nine gowns in the house now, which should all have been finished, and sent home to-day: – the ladies will tear me to pieces about them, but I left all my business, and run away to acquaint you with a thing you little dream of … [Y]ou were yesterday at my house, – Sir Frederick Fineer, who lodges in my first floor, – the sweetest and most generous gentleman that ever lived, to be sure; – but that is nothing to the purpose, – he saw you from his dining-room window … and, would you believe it, was so struck, that he immediately fell down in a swoon … “Oh! Mrs Modely”, said he to me, “what angel have you got below? – Tell me who she is?” … I was so much amazed, that I had not the power of speaking; and he, I suppose, interpreting my silence as a refusal of answering his demands, fell into such distractions, – such ravings, as frighted me almost out of my wits … I told him, – I hope you will forgive me, – your name, and where you lived, and that you were not married.’ (pp. 277–8) Modely embodies the threat of social disintegration the dressmaking trades were commonly perceived to facilitate by making fashionable costume a desirable and affordable prospect to an ever-growing base of consumers. As her rather unceremonious visit Betsy’s private rooms suggest, the dressmaker is uniquely privileged to move within different social spheres. The disturbing possibility that such a movement between different social spheres might presage an ascent through social spheres is developed in a subplot in which Betsy takes responsibility for the upbringing of the orphaned daughter of her former seamstress. The nurse of the child – the child is also called Betsy – proudly boasts to Trueworth that her charge is destined to ‘write, and read, and work’ with a view to becoming ‘prentice to a mantua-maker, or a milliner’, in which employment ‘some great gentleman or other may fall in love with my little Betsy, and I may live to see her ride in her coach’ (pp. 244–5). While Trueworth’s incredulous response that ‘[t]here are many strange


things happen in the world’ (p. 245) seems to mute the threat of social transgression at the moment it is uttered, Modely’s exploits reaffirm the threat that such women might pose to the social and moral order. In her earlier Anti-Pamela (1741) Haywood had explicitly outlined the precarious social advantages that the clothing trades could open up to women. Like Modely’s, Syrena Tricksy’s name suggestively links her character with fashion’s inherent duplicity and an ability to manufacture of appearance. Syrena’s seamstressing duties in the house to which she is apprenticed afford her ample opportunities to conceal illicit correspondence in measures of cloth, and to use her shopping trips for trimmings and fabrics as opportunities for sexual liaisons with socially superior men. By the time Frances Burney penned Camilla in 1796, the socially ambitious dressmaker and milliner had become familiar literary figures. Like Syrena Tricksy, Burney’s Mrs Mittin achieves a level of social advancement through her trade. As a young woman, the milliner works as an ‘apprentice to a small country gentlewoman’ in whose employ she ingratiates herself with a wealthy lodger. The legacy left by this ‘elderly gentlewoman’ enables Mittin to ‘quit her business, and set up, in her own conception, for a gentlewoman’. When her inheritance proves insufficient to support her lifestyle, Mittin has recourse to the tools of her millinery trade, including her submission to ‘drudgery’ and devotion to ‘flattery’, to ingratiate herself with fashionable members of society.35 Paradoxically, work affords Syrena Tricksy, Mrs Mittin and Mrs Modely a freedom of movement commonly denied the sentimental heroine. Modely’s unsolicited arrival in Betsy’s dressing room, for example, provides a direct contrast to the heroine’s visit to her dressmaker’s house, in which the young coquette’s movement is characteristically subject to the surveillance of an intrusive male onlooker. As Beth Fowkes Tobin notes, ‘Betsy is repeatedly denied mobility’ in Haywood’s novel: ‘That she cannot go just anywhere is symptomatic of the repressive regime of bourgeois respectability.’36 Once on display in the mantua-maker’s house, Betsy is transformed from the traditional ‘gender-marked position’ of ‘yielding and compliant’ consumer into an available commodity herself. Like the dresses and trimmings she purchases, Betsy seduces the vulnerable window-shopper. Watching from his private rooms as Betsy goes about her business ‘to consult on some matters of her dress’ (p. 277), Fineer appears as the feminised victim of the scene, swooning on the sight of Betsy and, in a parodic post-seduction sentimental trope, ranting and raving on her departure. Betsy’s subversive command over this scene is, however, undercut by the voyeuristic presence of Fineer and his sub-


sequent plot against the heroine, engineered with Modely’s probable help. Throughout the novel, Betsy is subject to the libertine gaze of men. The fact that Modely’s house-turned-shop is a public site does not lessen the sense of violation or repression that pervades the description of the scene. Rather, the reader is forced to realise that in a society in which neither private nor public sites offer protection from male intrusion, women have little room for manoeuvre. Basking in what she mistakenly believes to be another sexual triumph, Betsy fails to heed periodical and conduct-book warnings that women who sought to secure admiration through the artifice of dress were engaged in a ‘kind of conspiracy against themselves’.37 The coquettish manipulator of fashion falls prey to the deception fashion practises over the young, virtuous and naive. After meeting the suspiciously pompous Fineer, Betsy asks the mantua-maker to terminate her acquaintance with him and ‘confine your conversation to such matters as befits your vocation, for as to others I find you are but little skilled’ (p. 361). Like the predatory milliners of the London Tradesman and Cherub, however, Modely is more highly skilled in these amatory affairs than in her legitimate business. In fact, the precise nature of her business is increasingly unclear. Soon after the heroine’s rejection of Fineer, Modely returns to Betsy’s rooms to inform her that her would-be lover has attempted suicide and is dying of a self-inflicted dagger wound. The heroine buys Modely’s story as readily as she purchases her gowns, allowing all the signs that Fineer was ‘no other than an imposter’ to be eclipsed by the ‘dependence she had on the good faith of Mrs Modely’ (p. 357). Betsy goes with Modely to Fineer, who is lying with the sword in his breast, consoled by a clergyman and surgeon. When the dying man proposes to Betsy, Modely interjects that she could ‘not be so mad to refuse: – what two thousand pounds a year, and a ladyship, with liberty to marry who you will’ (p. 373). The mantua-maker’s interruption reveals the ruthless commercial logic she brings to her trade. Without ‘knowing what she said or did’ Betsy is ‘married’ by the parson, on which Fineer, ‘jumping off the bed, and throwing away the sword’ demands that the evidently fake marriage be consummated. Betsy calls for Modely throughout her ordeal, but is rescued only when Trueworth fortuitously arrives on the scene (p. 374). While Modely’s appearance in the novel is comparatively brief and her character and precise role in the plot against Betsy never fully elaborated, the dressmaker is nevertheless central to the heroine’s reformation and the novel’s sentimental plot. Betsy’s marriage to the cruel and adulterous Munden is often perceived as the crux of the novel’s


‘reformed heroine’ narrative, identified by critics such as Jane Spencer and Janet Todd.38 Nevertheless the heroine’s transformation from thoughtless coquette to woman of true worth, signalled by her maiden and second married names, is a direct result of the events that take place in Modely’s house. Recognising that true worth cannot be ascertained or measured by the visual signifiers of fashionable dress and appearance Betsy reflects: her pride, – her gaiety, – her vanity of attracting admiration; – in fine, all that had composed her former character, seemed now to be lost and swallowed up in the sense of that bitter shame and contempt, in which she imagined herself involved, and she wished for nothing but to be unseen, unregarded, and utterly forgotten, by all that had ever known her. (p. 390) Where earlier in the novel Betsy deployed dress to ‘enhance her desirability as a type of commodity’,39 she now comes to terms with the true cost of personal commodification. She vows to reject such trivial matters as ‘how to ornament her dress, or place the patches of her face with the most graceful art’ in favour of new stratagems to gain possession of Trueworth in the form of a miniature likeness of him (p. 394). From this point in the novel, the woman once ‘dazzled by the tinsel glitter [and] fallacy of shew’ is systematically stripped of the sartorial trappings that emblematise her coquettishness. She resignedly accepts an annual allowance of one hundred and fifty pounds pin money from Munden with an acknowledgement that ‘I have had better’ (p. 392), but subsequently finds that even this allowance is not totally within her control when her husband demands that she use the allowance to supplement their household expenditure (p. 442). In relinquishing her pin money, her sole form of financial independence as a married woman, Betsy once again loses the power of self-fashioning as she had done earlier at the hands of Lady Mellasin and the mercer.40 But here there is no simple redress, for the stakes are much higher. Betsy’s command over her wardrobe has been transformed from a desire to wear what she likes and feels will make her most attractive, to a symbol of her right to act as an autonomous human being. The only action Betsy can now take is to leave her husband. When she eventually leaves Munden, Trueworth finds her a totally different creature from the coquette he had previously known. Where once Betsy’s ‘handsome – well-shaped, – genteel’ figure had ‘disfigured the native innocence of her mind’ (p. 189), Trueworth now envisages a


different woman, whose informal, ‘genteel’ external appearance is in keeping with her more modest, sentimental character. Trueworth finds Betsy sitting under an arbour lost in reflections on her former indiscretions and unhappy marriage: the extreme pensiveness of her mind had hindered her from perceiving, that any one was near; but the little covert under which she was placed being open on both sides, he had a full view of every thing she did: – though she was in the most negligent nightdress that could be, she seemed as lovely to him as ever; all his first flames rekindled in his heart, while gazing on her in this uninterrupted freedom … till observing she had something in her hand, which she seemed to look on with great attention, and sometimes betrayed agitations he had never seen in her before, he was impatient to discover if possible the motive. (p. 543) The episode recalls scenes from earlier sentimental novels, particularly Pamela and Clarissa, in which libidinous male protagonists view their heroines in states of undress. Like the earlier scene in Modely’s shop, Betsy is observed here without knowing that she is being watched. But where her apparent empowerment in the shopping scene was subsequently exposed as a sham, conjured to give her a false sense of advantage whilst Modely and Fineer plotted the fake marriage, Betsy is now unwittingly in control of her self-representation. Where her appearance in Modely’s house effectively rendered her a commodity to be cheapened by Fineer’s schemes, here she is in possession of a commodity that will secure Trueworth’s affection and lead to their eventual marriage: the miniature. Her attachment to the trinket signals Betsy’s moral refinement in the narcissistic eyes of Trueworth, a refinement that is mirrored by her evident sensibility. At first, Trueworth cannot make out the physical features of the figure he sees under the arbour, but is determined to know ‘what sort of face belonged to so genteel a form’ (p. 543). As the observer telescopically draws in closer and closer to the figure he now realises is Betsy, he first notices her ‘night-dress’, hears ‘her sighs’ and subsequently observes ‘her lovely hand frequently put up to wipe away the tears’ (p. 543). Rather than an outward signifier of coquettishness, Betsy’s dress and physical appearance encourage Trueworth to seek her affection and ultimately reveal that she is ‘wholly worthy of receiving it’ (p. 568). Modely’s role in shaping the heroine’s moral growth has been underplayed by critics of the novel, who privilege Betsy’s role as a consumer


struggling to negotiate ‘a culture defined by material and symbolic economies’.41 Yet, as the catalyst for the heroine’s movement from away the economy of fashionable consumption towards that of the domestic household, the mantua-maker is central to the novel. Moreover, she proves a convenient scapegoat for the heroine’s vices. Despite the Monthly Review’s accusations of the novel’s insipidity, many readers approved of Haywood’s reformed coquette narrative. Critics viewed the penitent Betsy with little of the suspicion that they directed against the much-maligned Pamela. Like Clara Reeve, who famously viewed Haywood’s sentimental fiction as an appropriate reparation for the immoral romances she had penned earlier in her career, readers readily accepted Betsy’s moral growth.42 In no small part, this acceptance was secured by Haywood’s deft deflection of the reader’s moral indignation away from Betsy’s fashionable, coquettish airs towards the more insidious activities of her ‘little mantua-maker’ (p. 379) who effectively purges the heroine of some of her more distasteful characteristics. Modely’s presence within the novel thus allows Haywood to indulge in the kinds of lingering sartorial descriptions the Monthly reviewer suggests female readers found so enticing, while maintaining an acceptable sentimental, anti-fashion stance.

A shift in sensibility: Burney and the feminist argument Reading Betsy Thoughtless alongside satirical writing on the dressmaking trades suggests that there was little resistance to the enduring association of dressmaking, millinery and prostitution. However, an important and nuanced counter-tradition emerged in opposition to this account, which reworked the mantua-maker and milliner’s metaphoric potential in order to deflect attention away from her character to the conditions that produced her. William Hogarth gestured towards this sentimentalised reevaluation of women in the clothing trades as early as 1735 in The Rake’s Progress. In the later engravings of the series, Hogarth, whose own sisters sold textiles and children’s clothes, images Sarah Young as a reputable milliner.43 Rather than sinking into ignominy or prostitution when she is abandoned by the hapless rake, Young secures a living to support herself and her child. An apparently respectable labouring woman, the milliner is something of a startling exception in Hogarth’s work. Though it is true that her virtue is partially qualified by Hogarth’s refusal to clarify whether Tom Rakewell and Sarah were married when she conceived their child, this broadly sympathetic depiction of the young milliner nevertheless suggests new ways in which the working woman might be imagined.44


This nascent counter-narrative would be developed by late eighteenthcentury feminist writers whose powerful critiques of the female labour market questioned the longstanding association of the dressmaker or milliner and fashion, and challenged the logic which underpinned traditional representations of women in the clothing trades. Before exploring this development it is necessary to outline the cultural and historical conditions that made this revised account possible. While this chapter has sought to complicate claims that literary representations of dressmakers and milliners were simply coloured by a discourse that rendered prostitution paradigmatic of all female labour in the period, it is none the less true that the movement towards a more sympathetic identification with such women in the latter half of the century was, in large part, attendant on the sentimental re-imagining of the prostitute in the mid-eighteenth century. Writers of sentimentalised prostitution narratives – a genre which will be explored in much more detail in Chapter 4 – sought to recuperate the harlot by emphasising the socioeconomic conditions that precipitated her fall. Feminist writers and polemicists of the 1790s built on the work of this previous generation of writers by making prostitution the cornerstone of their critiques of the gendered division of labour. Writers such as Mary Hays, Mary Anne Radcliffe, Priscilla Wakefield and Mary Wollstonecraft rewrote the mid-century prostitution narrative, in which ‘the blame for female ruin is attributed to [female] innocence’ and male libertinism, in order to expose the economic injustice which made the prostitute’s fall inexorable.45 The growth in the number of female milliners and mantua-makers in the late seventeenth century had augured a new gendered division of labour. Throughout the century that followed, however, women’s position within these trades came under serious threat as men began to win back the occupational territory they had lost.46 In Evelina (1778), Frances Burney could view this ironic development with humour. Any threat that male milliners and shopkeepers might have posed to women in the clothing trades is downplayed in Burney’s first novel by the heroine’s witty mocking of their ‘finical’, ‘affected’ and effeminate manner: they seemed to understand every part of a woman’s dress better than we do ourselves; and they recommended caps and ribbands with an air of so much importance, that I wished to ask them how long they had left off wearing them!47 By the 1790s, men’s encroachment on these trades was a matter of more profound concern. Radcliffe, Wakefield and Wollstonecraft all vented


their spleen against men who not only usurped ‘female’ employments, but who were paid more for the privilege. Where women in the clothing trades had been lampooned for contravening gender norms that would exclude women from the masculine world of business, now man-milliners and male dressmakers were targeted as dangerous aberrations of sexual and cultural norms.48 Priscilla Wakefield accordingly beseeched society to rid itself of this ‘brood of effeminate beings in the garb of men’, and enjoined her female readers to let ‘fashion … be guided by reason’ and ‘wear no clothes that are not made by [women]’.49 Texts such as Wakefield’s Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex (1798) – despite its often viciously classbound characterisations of working women – helped to recast the mantua-maker and milliner in the popular imagination by placing them at the vanguard of economic and labour reform. In the final sections of this chapter, I want to explore Burney’s neglected contribution to this important conceptual shift. Burney’s works shunned the direct appeals characteristic of feminist polemic. Nevertheless, in both the Witlings (1778–80) and her final novel, The Wanderer (1814), she sought to recast the labouring woman through a rewriting of the literary tradition which had condemned her. In attempting to divorce these women from the fashionable objects they made, Burney’s writing thus speaks to both the desirability and difficulty of assimilating dress within sentimental concepts of virtuous femininity. Burney’s early fiction, like that of many genteel women writers, firmly placed the world of labour at arm’s length from the social world inhabited by her heroines. Evelina, Cecilia and Camilla encounter work only as consumers or as benefactors to honest, but impoverished, labouring women. Indeed, labour seems closer to home in the author’s private writings than in her fiction. Throughout her journals and correspondence, Burney repeatedly evokes the language of work either to underscore the labour-intensity of writing or to distance her literary labours from the menial employments of labouring-class women. These contradictory strategies are played out in a letter Burney wrote to Samuel Crisp while revising her ill-fated play, The Witlings. In a previous letter, Crisp had suggested to the young author that her newfound fame had plunged her into an unproductive round of ‘incessant and uncommon engagements’ that would leave her little time to pursue her literary career with the necessary diligence. An evidently and understandably piqued Burney replied thus: ‘Fact! fact!’ I assure you – however paltry, ridiculous, or inconceivable it may sound. Caps, hats and ribbons make, indeed, no venerable


appearance on paper; – no more do eating and drinking; – yet the one can no more be worn without being made, than the other can be swallowed without being cooked; and those who can neither pay milliners, nor keep scullions, must either toil for themselves, or go capless and dinnerless.50 Kristina Straub has read Burney’s letter as an attack on the timeconsuming and non-remunerative tasks that occupied the lives of conventional, middle-class women at the expense of more economically empowering activities such as writing. 51 Read within the immediate context of her composition of The Witlings, however, the distinction Burney draws between mechanical and intellectual labour seems less clear-cut than Straub suggests. Burney’s letter was written during a period in which she found both domestic and literary labours equally time-consuming and unrewarding. When, for example, her father and Crisp suggested that she extensively revise The Witlings before even considering staging the play, Burney lamented the ‘Time’ lost and ‘buried in the mere trouble of writing’. 52 Revising a play that would be neither produced nor appreciated in her lifetime seemed as much a waste of time to Burney as that expended in the domestic chores listed in her subsequent letter to Crisp. The imaginative connection she draws between household duties and writing is underlined in Burney’s letter by the reference to ‘Caps, hats and ribbons’, which, at this time, were the stuff of the author’s domestic and professional lives. Work quite literally takes centre stage in The Witlings, which opens in a milliner’s shop strewn with the kinds of ‘Caps, hats and ribbons’ Burney alludes to in the letter: ‘Scene, A Milliner’s Shop. A Counter is Spread with Caps, Ribbons, Fans & Band Boxes. Miss Jenny & Several Young Women at Work’.53 As a hard-working, though undervalued playwright, finding little pleasure or reward in either her professional or private life, Burney startlingly appears to align herself here with milliners and maids, exploited by those who failed to understand the true cost of the labour invested in the services they provided and goods they produced.54 In a nod – perhaps accidental, perhaps intentional – to Drury’s Rival Milliners, The Witlings opens in Mrs Wheedle’s milliner’s shop.55 However, in the hands of this new generation of Mrs Wheedle, the shopfloor is no longer a backdrop for sexual intrigue. Indeed, as if to labour the point, the lovers’ tryst promised in the first act fails to take place. Cecilia, who has arranged to meet her would-be lover, Beaufort, in the milliner’s shop, stands him up in a dramatic gesture of propriety


when she finds that she has no chaperone. Just as the play frustrates expectations of sexual impropriety, it refuses to conform to traditional representations of the milliner as a corrupt foil for the sentimental heroine. Wheedle emerges uniquely unscathed from Burney’s searing satire. As Barbara Darby has noted, all the women in The Witlings are ‘confined in various ways’: the play’s sentimental heroine, Cecilia, by her imminent poverty, for example; the literary hostess, Lady Smatter, by her vanity and ignorance.56 Though the milliner’s shop – disdainfully labelled by the pompous Censor as a ‘Region of Foppery, Extravagance & Folly’ – symbolises this enforced or self-imposed confinement, its owner lives free from the forms of restraint that blight the lives of other women in the play (p. 35). From the comedy’s opening lines we are encouraged to see the shop floor as a microcosm for society at large: a society rife with snobbery, affectation and pretension, in which personal value is reduced to a matter of economic means. When Wheedle asks her apprentices if anyone has ‘been in yet’, her seamstress Jenny replies, ‘No, Ma’am, nobody to Signify; – only some people a foot’ (p. 31). The shop reflects, as Darby suggests, a world in which ‘everyone has something for sale, the price varies with availability, and the ability to pay monopolises others’ attention’.57 Wheedle’s financial exploitation of her vain and easily flattered customers does not condemn her in the way that Modely’s exploitation of Betsy vilifies her, however. Indeed, her refusal to be constrained by her sex or her class singles her out as the exception that proves the rule of women’s degradation. Wheedle’s ability to make a virtue of necessity is thrown into stark relief by Cecilia’s attitude to the mere notion of a life of labour. When it is revealed that the heroine’s fortune has been lost, and with it her hopes of marrying Beaufort, Cecilia is forced to try to secure a living. Her sententious and exaggerated responses to her straitened financial circumstances seem all the more ridiculous given Wheedle’s wit and pragmatism. When Cecilia explains her situation to the milliner, Wheedle suggests that her former customer accept a position with a family of her acquaintance, in which she could look after their children and perform ‘a little [Needle]work’. Cecilia’s reply is more tactless than tragic: Oh heavy Hour! – down, down, proud Heart! … I must submit to my fate, not chuse it; & should servility & dependance be my lot, I trust, at least, that I shall not only find them new, – not only find them Heart-breaking & cruel–but short & expeditious. (p. 133)


The exchange between the two women reveals a conflict between the world of business and the world of sentiment reminiscent of that staged in the exchange between Modely and Betsy in the fake marriage scene in Haywood’s novel. The effect here is quite different, however: rather than highlighting the milliner’s ruthlessness, the scene exposes how sensibility incapacitates women. Though Wheedle’s offer of help is not an entirely disinterested act – she does, after all, want to recover monies Cecilia owes her – the milliner’s practical outlook nevertheless exposes Cecilia’s sensibility as excessive and self-indulgent. When Censor fortuitously presents the heroine with a sum of money that prevents her having to secure a living, her outpourings seem all the more comic. Burney’s depiction of Mrs Wheedle and the comings and goings of her shop marks an important shift in the literary representation of women in the clothing trades. Millinery is still a vehicle for satire in The Witlings, however, the butt of this satire is now the consumer rather than the producer. Though the goods in which Mrs Wheedle trades are, as Censor suggests, the products of ‘Foppery’ and ‘Extravagance’, the audience is clear that these vices belong only to Wheedle’s customers and not to her. As such, the play dismantles the until now inextricable association of the milliner and the products of her labour. Burney refuses to make the milliner a foil for her heroine in the way that Haywood had done. Instead, Wheedle’s wit and unrivalled ability to make a virtue of necessity serve as powerful critique of the paralysing sensibility to which the play’s heroine comically clings. Nearly thirty years later, Burney would again turn to the dressmaking trades as vehicles for social critique. Her dark, final novel, The Wanderer: or, Female Difficulties, is an oddly hybrid text. Though it was originally conceived in the late 1790s, and is accordingly set against the backdrop of the ‘dire reign of the terrific Robespierre’, the novel was not published until 1814.58 This long period of gestation accounts for the variety of literary influences to which Burney’s novel bears witness, from antiJacobin writing of the 1790s (represented by the Wollstonecraftian antiheroine, Elinor Joddrel) to the Romantic novel. Like all Burney’s fiction, The Wanderer is also a sentimental novel in which the heroine is subjected to a series of trials before her virtue is justly rewarded and she is restored to her rightful place within society. Juliet’s progress, from her anonymous arrival in England in the guise of a ‘creole’ to Lord Granville’s eventual recognition of her as his daughter, first takes the heroine on a journey of relentless downward mobility indicated by the various and progressively less respectable employments she is forced to


undertake. Though she initially rejoices ‘in the blessing bestowed on her, by that part of her education, which gave her the useful and appropriate female accomplishment of needle-work’ (p. 78), Juliet soon finds her talent insufficient to provide stability in a world of female difficulties. After sewing and singing in Mrs Maple’s house, the Incognita becomes a music teacher, takes in embroidery and works in a milliner’s shop, before subsequently working for a mantua-maker, dishearteningly employed to make one dress. The Wanderer’s unprecedented examination of the female labour market has led Margaret Anne Doody to read the novel as a prototype for the social protest novels of the 1830s and 1840s. Earlier writers such as Charlotte Lennox and Mary Hays, Doody points out, tried to encourage sympathy for their labouring heroines by forcing them to undertake work that was beneath them. Burney, by contrast, set out to question ‘whether the work as at present organised is something which is right to ask of other human beings’.59 Both Juliet’s economic hardships and the verbal outbursts of her sympathetic friend, Giles Arbe, expose how the production of luxury commodities is predicated on the degradation of the workers who manufacture them. When Arbe fails to exact the monies owed to Juliet (then working as a music teacher) by her fashionable clients he cries, ‘… you should neither eat your meat, nor drink your beer, nor sit on your chairs, nor wear your clothes, till you have rewarded the industrious people who provide them. Till then, in my mind, every body should bear to be hungry, and dry, and tired and ragged! For what right have we to be fed and covered, and seated, at other folks’ cost? … We ought all of us to be ashamed of being warmed, and dizened in silks and satins, if the poor weavers, who fabricate them, and all their wives and babies, are shivering in tatters’. (p. 324) As Arbe suggests, the value of commodities is subjective, relative and rigidly demarcated along consumer/producer lines. Where dress is valued by ladies of fashion only to indulge their ‘love of dissipation [and to] lounge in [the] box at operas’ (p. 325) it is a necessity for its manufacturers, providing warmth and subsistence. Recognising that luxury and abject dependence are mutually constitutive, Arbe acknowledges the unsustainability of his argument for the proper remuneration of the labouring classes. To those whose consciences he is trying to prick, allowing labourers to live beyond the level of mere subsistence would lessen the economic imperatives which


drive them to work and on which the financial comfort of fashionable society is dependent. As the ironically named Mr Scope retorts: ‘the morals of a state require, that a proper distinction should be kept up, between the instruments of subsistence, and those of amusement’ (p. 324). Though Arbe cannot persuade Scope, his outburst emphatically reveals to the reader how deeply fashionable society is invested in degrading the labouring classes in order to safeguard its own social and economic position. Arbe’s speech is not only remarkable for its powerful critique of social inequality, but also for its striking resemblance to Burney’s letter to Crisp quoted above. As Burney had done, Arbe reveals how society refuses to value the labour of others, an argument underscored by Juliet’s degrading experience of the labour market. But unlike Burney, who suggests that she shares a bond with labouring women in her literary labours, Juliet finds little kinship with the labouring women of The Wanderer – one of the few marketable skills that she possesses as a genteel woman. Cecilia Macheski has suggested that needlework was a ‘common denominator’ of female experience in the eighteenth century, creating a bond of shared experience between women of all social ranks, from the genteel aristocrat to the Spitalfields weaver.60 In practice, however, needlework did more to distinguish these women than it did to align them. As Rozsika Parker has demonstrated, different forms of needlework were rigidly hierarchised in this period in ways designed to mirror and maintain the social order. Embroidery, the prime focus of Parker’s study, connoted gentility, femininity and leisure, and thus represented the opposite end of the spectrum to seamstressing, weaving and plainwork.61 Juliet’s experience confirms Parker’s argument. The heroine is devastated when she is forced to transform her genteel accomplishment into a marketable asset. Unlike her fellow workers she is deeply uncomfortable with the thought of performing her work in public and begs an incredulous Miss Matson that she might ‘return with [her work] to her chamber’: ‘[S]he was stared at as if she had made a demand the most preposterous, and told that, if she meant to enter into business, she must be at hand to receive directions, and to learn how it should be done’ (pp. 425–6). Juliet is acutely aware that by working in public she puts both her skill and her body on display. Though Miss Matson’s shop is far more salubrious than many of its literary counterparts, the very nature of her business ensures that it is, as Doody points out and Juliet realises, ‘tainted with a flavour of prostitution’ as the workers sit in shop windows to entice customers inside.62 Like other less scrupulous


milliners and seamstresses, Juliet too is elided here with the objects of her creation. Able to arrange items in the fashionable style of her French homeland, she becomes a valuable asset to the milliner: Miss Matson markets Juliet’s works as ‘specimen[s] of the very last new fashion, just brought her over by one of her young ladies from Paris’ (p. 429). Soon customers become less interested in the heroine’s creations than her own character, as she finds herself the object of a painfully embarrassing ‘inquisitive examination’ (p. 430). Like Modely and Plainstitch before her, Juliet is tainted by the business in which she works. Crucially, however, this taint is not physical, but unfairly imagined by the fashionable women who frequent Miss Matson’s shop. Where Haywood used Modely as a scapegoat for some of Betsy’s fashionable vices, Burney uses Juliet’s work within the dressmaking trades to underscore the vices of fashionable society at large. The trivial and superficial goods which Juliet manufactures reveal less about her character than about the characters of those who buy them: The good of a nation, the interest of society, the welfare of a family, could with difficulty have appeared of higher importance than the choice of a ribbon, or the set of a cap; and scarcely any calamity under heaven could excite looks of deeper horrour or despair, than any mistake committed in the arrangement of a feather or a flower. (p. 426) If the insignificance of the milliner’s goods is used to attack society’s misplaced values, it is also deployed to attack the misplaced prejudices of the fashionable reading public. Burney’s description of the milliner’s shop, like her letter to Crisp before it, rewrites the analogies drawn between the morally impoverished milliner or mantuamaker and her shop-soiled goods within a sentimental discourse that exposes the inhumanity with which women in these professions are portrayed. Like Plainstitch’s apprentices, Juliet is treated no better than the goods she makes; goods that were ‘taken down merely to be put up again; cheapened but to be rejected; admired but to be looked at, and left; and only bought when, to all appearance, they were undervalued and despised’ (p. 426). It is precisely the insubstantiality of these goods she produces – their fragility, vulnerability to dirt, decay, damage and the vagaries of fashion – that renders the mantuamaker and milliner such resonant symbols for Burney’s argument. The trivial fruits of the dressmaker’s labour have been transformed


from a crude stick with which to beat the profession as a whole into a sophisticated and politicised rhetoric which draws the comparison to challenge the commodification of the female labourer. The novel’s critique of the female labour market is far from unproblematic, however. Margaret Doody’s argument that The Wanderer underplays the heroine’s gentility in order to make a case for the dehumanising effects of labour on all women does not stand up to close scrutiny. As Edward Copeland has recently suggested, the working heroine turned ‘the ideology of the genteel novel upside down’. Burney cannot make Juliet a successful or even an exemplary working woman without impugning the gentility the novel will ultimately reward. 63 Throughout the novel, therefore, Juliet is presented as the virtuous exception that proves the rule of widespread self-interest and dissipation among female labourers. In the tradition of the sentimental novel, this moral exemplarity is both evidenced in the heroine’s body and seems to transcend this potentially unreliable index of worth. When she arrives in England in the guise of a creole woman, for example, Juliet’s ‘fine eyes’ and genteel manner shine through her ‘dusky’ hue and ‘tattered’ clothing to captivate her fellow travellers (pp. 19–20). Where Juliet’s body unwittingly manifests her gentility, the heroine strategically deploys dress at various points in the novel to demonstrate her moral and social refinement. When Miss Arbe gives the Incognita a deliberately ostentatious and expensive pink sarcenet (fine silk) gown in which to perform at a music concert, in contrast to the white dresses worn by the other ‘lady-artists’, Juliet is embarrassed that she will be so vividly singled out before the audience: ‘The gown was a sarcenet of a bright rose-colour; but its hue, though the most vivid, was pale to the cheeks of Ellis’ (p. 313). In allowing Miss Arbe to dress her, Juliet realises that she will lose any vestige of autonomy she still possesses, becoming little more than a kind of ‘wax-doll, when she’s all so pinky winky’ (p. 314). Valuing her anonymity and integrity more than the dresses and fashionable pursuits that command the attention of other women within the novel, Juliet secretly rejects the sarcenet in favour of a ‘plain white satin [dress], with ornaments of which the simplicity shewed as much taste as modesty’ (p. 358). The dress arouses the audience’s ‘interest’ because it both suits ‘the style of [Juliet’s] beauty’ and because it ‘assimilate[s] with the character of her mind’, gender and class (p. 358). This ideal conjunction of clothing, rank and moral status is contrasted against the fantastical and duplicitous male costume adopted by Elinor Joddrel, who interrupts the entertainment


wearing a ‘large wrapping coat, [a] half mask, [a] slouched hat, and embroidered waistcoat’ and attempts suicide (p. 359). Elinor’s public and dramatic performance emphasises the ideological conflict between the two women and the moral singularity of the novel’s heroine. More particularly, however, Juliet’s appearance at the concert signals her singularity within the hostile and decidedly unsentimental world she is forced to inhabit.64 Throughout The Wanderer the reader pities Juliet precisely because of, rather than in spite of, the pitiable situation into which she has been forced. Burney’s heroine endures the employments she is forced to undertake with a hope, determination and integrity that The Witling’s Cecilia cannot sustain in face of even the notional threat of having to work for a living. As someone whose social position had previously safeguarded her from the harsh realities of the labour market, Juliet is uniquely privileged to expose the monotony and drudgery of work in the clothing trades. Yet this gentility, repeatedly staged throughout the novel, ensures that the reader can only ever perceive Juliet’s work as beneath her. Nothing in the conduct of her fellow workers – who share a ‘spirit for secret cabal, and [a] passion for frolic and disguise’ (p. 454) – suggests that they deserve the reader’s sympathy. Though Juliet is appalled by ‘the total absence of feeling and of equity, in the dissipated and the idle, for the indigent and laborious’, she finds that her companions’ notions of ‘probity were as lax as those of their customers were of justice’ (p. 427): ‘it soon became difficult to decide, which was least congenial to the upright mind and pure morality of Juliet, the insolent, vain, unfeeling buyer, or the subtle, plausible, over-reaching seller’ (p. 428). Though The Wanderer seeks to rewrite traditional representations of milliners and mantua-makers in order to excite pity for these women, the very nature of this millinery work prevents Burney from bestowing her pity more liberally. The moral and social chasm separating Juliet from her fellow workers is emphasised by the novel’s lack of interest in the characters of these women. Like Modely, they remain functions of plot rather than subjects in their own right. In ‘the midst of [the] various distastes and discomforts’ she endures in the milliner’s shop, Juliet (and therefore the novel which is told largely from her perspective) is only concerned with ‘one of her young fellow-work-women’, Flora (p. 430). Like the younger Betsy Thoughtless, Flora is naive and coquettish, though ‘innocent and inoffensive, and, as far as she was able to think, well meaning, and ready to be at every body’s command’ (p. 430). Her ambition to look ‘well’ and attract the attention of


officers is facilitated by her employment in the shop of Miss Matson, who requires her girls to be suitable advertisements for her business. When Flora is later forced to leave the milliner’s shop she is distressed by the effects on her physical appearance: ‘I’m obliged to wear all my worst things, now, to save my others, mamma says, for fear of the expence. And it makes me not look half as well by half, as I did at Miss Matson’s. I looked well enough there … But I go such a dowd, here, that it’s enough to frighten you.’ (p. 464) Flora’s vanity for fashionable display renders her an undeserving sentimental object and an unsuitable companion for the novel’s heroine. Juliet’s concern for Flora is ‘not, indeed, that warm interest which is the precursor of friendship; its object had no qualities that could rise to such a height’ (p. 430). Indeed, Juliet’s compassion for Flora is felt in spite of, rather than as a result of, her companion’s condition. Their friendship thus serves merely to emphasise Juliet’s probity and Flora’s unworthiness as an object of compassion. Finding both fashionable and labouring women morally bankrupt, The Wanderer ultimately confirms the ideologies of gender and labour Juliet’s experience and Arbe’s comments might otherwise appear to question. The function of the clothing trades and their workers in The Wanderer is problematic. The novel’s insight into the drudgery of these labourintensive employments is compromised by its underlying anti-luxury argument, which demands that fashionable commodities taint everyone who comes into contact with them, from manufacturer to consumer. This insight is further problematised by an enduring association of these trades with moral lack, which the novel cannot completely overwrite. Burney’s reliance on the trope of the sentimental body to signal its heroine’s exemplary gentility creates further interpretive difficulties. Juliet’s moral refinement is always revealed through contrast. Her gentility appears in spite of her blackened skin, stands out amongst the group of women performing at the music concert, and, most persuasively, is evidenced in its contrast to the dissipated characters of the fashionably dressed workers and aristocratic women she is forced to work with and for. This sentimental strategy persistently threatens to reduce the women workers of The Wanderer to the kinds of two-dimensional figures witnessed in the texts discussed in the first half of this chapter. Yet if, as Terry Castle argues, ‘clothing has always been a primary trope for the


deceitfulness of the material world’, writers such as Frances Burney, like Mary Lamb and Elizabeth Gaskell after her, deflected the mantuamaker and milliner’s synonymy with dress and fashion to condemn material inequality.65 In a similar strategy to that deployed in her letter to Crisp, Burney’s final novel uses millinery and dressmaking to signal society’s devaluing of female labour. Women, like novels and plays, are not as insignificant as ‘[c]aps, hats and ribbons’, and fashionable society’s ignorance ‘of the dearness of materials, or the just price of labour’ is but a poor excuse for the condition of labouring women who ‘starve in rendering them more brilliant’ (p. 427). As Burney realised, their unique place within the developing commercial marketplace rendered milliners and mantua-makers particularly resonant figures through which to debate a range of concerns from issues surrounding gender inequalities, class and commerce, to sentiment and fashion. Finally, though, it was only through divorcing these women from the fruits of their labour – establishing their substance at the expence of fashion’s lack – that they could be distanced from long-standing accusations of moral impoverishment. Reconciling an appropriate attachment to dress to conceptions of virtuous femininity was to prove one of eighteenth-century literature’s most difficult tasks.

3 Re-clothing the Female Reader: Dress and the Eighteenth-Century Magazine

The Fashionable Magazine made its first appearance in the lively yet precarious periodical market in June 1786. Despite its abrupt disappearance after only seven issues in the December of the same year, the magazine is of interest as one of the first serial publications in which fashion plays a central role. Identifying dress as a ‘leading trait in the national character’, the Fashionable Magazine marketed itself to readers as an innovative project that would fill a void in the periodical marketplace. Since the ‘dominion of Fashion’ had ‘been long universally established’, the editor expressed his astonishment that ‘in an age of literary adventure, this eligible plan should have been hitherto overlooked’. This startling oversight is attributed to his fellow publishers’ lack of imagination in the face of such challenging subject matter as fashion and dress. The difficulty, the editor suggests, is not so much in writing about fashion – many successful publications, including the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832), had included fashion reports after all – but in writing about such sartorial matters appropriately: ‘The task, indeed, is arduous; and the extreme difficulty of executing it with any sort of propriety might well have deterred the less aspiring from making any attempt, even had the idea occurred to them.’1 The magazine’s claims for originality are typically overstated. In fact, the Fashionable Magazine strikingly resembles another short-lived periodical, the Magazine à la Mode: or, Fashionable Miscellany, which was published monthly throughout 1777 and was probably the first English magazine to prioritise fashion. The earlier publication’s brief history seems to support the Fashionable Magazine’s claims for the difficulties involved in writing and reporting on dress. The Magazine à la Mode increasingly found itself unable to live up to its promise to be a purveyor of the latest styles, replacing its distinctive fashion plates and accompanying commentary with engravings of historical figures such 83


as Elizabeth I, Anne Boleyn and Mary Queen of Scots. Following Neil McKendrick’s lead, Minna Thornton attributes the magazine’s withdrawal of the plates to a ‘moral panic’ directed against unregulated consumption and fuelled by the proliferation of fashionable images through new technologies, including the fashion plate.2 The magazine itself betrays little sense of such anxiety, however, suggesting more mundane reasons for its failure to meet its readers’ expectations. Engravings were expensive to produce and depended on reliable engravers who could produce plates to strict monthly deadlines. The April 1777 issue of the Magazine, for example, was forced to include a plate of ‘A Country Woman’ and ‘Citizen’s Wife of Wotiac’ (a province in Siberia) instead of the promised plates of ‘spring dresses as worn at Ranelagh’ due to an artist’s illness and subsequent failure to meet the publication deadline.3 Equally problematic was fashion’s sporadic failure to live up to the magazine’s expectation of monthly sartorial innovation. The July issue included no plate or commentary on men’s fashions because it claimed that ‘[n]o alteration worth notice [had] taken place in the gentlemen’s dress’ in that month.4 The short and troubled history of the Magazine à la Mode illuminates the Fashionable Magazine’s introductory comments. Despite the preface’s self-promotional bravado, the editor clearly shared the anxieties he attributed to other, less imaginative, magazine editors and publishers, concerned that they might not be able to write about dress with ‘propriety’. In a bid to ward off accusations of impropriety, therefore, the Fashionable Magazine contained its keen interest in current fashions within a more traditional magazine format, consisting of letters, moral discussions and domestic and foreign news reports. Though the magazine suggested the clear desirability of a publication devoted solely to fashion – desirable to both female readers and to publishers who might corner this potentially lucrative market – it clearly was not prepared to take the risk. An exclusively fashionable magazine, the editor suggested, would, like fashion itself, enjoy a limited lifespan unless it attempted to ‘command [its readers’] esteem’ through morally improving and elegant literature.5 The magazine’s solution was to place ‘gay descriptions of dress, fashion and amusements’ alongside ‘literature of every species’ in an effort to create a publication that would have truly ‘universal’ appeal. As the editor proudly proclaimed, the Fashionable Magazine would be of interest to ‘the manufacturer and the artist; the man of pleasure, and the man of business; the old, and the young; the serious, and the gay’. Rather spuriously, he added that it would ‘perhaps be even more [acceptable] to the LADIES’.6

Re-clothing the Female Reader 85

The magazine’s use of literature to compensate for the title’s interest in fashion is only one of many devices – some subtle, some flagrant – that magazine editors would adopt in order to mediate fashion reports and plates. However, as the frontispiece engraving in the 1780 Lady’s Magazine (figure 1) suggests, these strategies of

Figure 1 Frontispiece illustration to the 1780 Lady’s Magazine, by permission of the British Library P.P. 5141


containment could be effective only if the reader willingly bought into the magazine’s self-professed agenda. The engraving of the young, modishly dressed woman, torn between a life of fashionable folly and virtuous wisdom, marked a significant departure from many of the annual frontispieces that had adorned and would adorn the publication throughout its almost 80-year history.7 The reconfiguration of the Minerva figure – the personification of the virtues the magazine sought to inculcate – is particularly revealing. Traditionally, the goddess was imaged in the frontispiece engravings imparting wisdom, frequently in the material form of the magazine itself, to young, well-dressed women who are entering, or have entered, a temple of knowledge or virtue (see, for example, figure 2). The 1780 frontispiece re-figures these elements to construct a disturbing and less confident vision of female virtue and the magazine’s efficacy as moral guide. The attainment of moral wisdom is no longer a fait accompli here; rather, it is precariously dependent on the young woman’s ability to reject the more alluring, though superficial, temptations of folly. That the magazine felt less than confident in its ability to turn its readers’ away from such fashionable trifles is signalled by the engraving’s iconography. The woman at the engraving’s centre partly obscures the usually prominent figure of Minerva, drawing the observer’s attention instead towards the elaborately dressed Folly, at whom the young woman is also, emphatically, looking. The battle the illustration stages seems already to have been won. The girl’s ardent gaze on Folly anticipates her rejection of the magazine’s wisdom for a life of fashionable dissipation. Recent work on the Lady’s Magazine has suggested that the ideological fault-lines evident within the magazine’s pages allowed for various and potentially contradictory readings. Jacqueline Pearson has suggested that the magazine’s mixed messages should be understood as the result of a deliberate editorial strategy to secure a wide readership of compliant and resistant readers. 8 By contrast, Edward Copeland has suggested that the magazine’s doublethink was an accidental – if inevitable – product of the miscellany format. Copeland describes a typical Lady’s Magazine reader as a window-shopper, who ‘glance[s] at the illustration of the month’s story, skips to the end [to] see if there is perhaps an illustration of a Paris Dress or some sheet music or a pattern for an apron’. Between this initial, and predominantly visual, consumption of the magazine and her reading of the rest of the publication exists a ‘wide arena’, Copeland argues, ‘for


Figure 2 Frontispiece illustration to the 1776 Lady’s Magazine, by permission of the British Library P.P. 5141

negotiating the contemporary social discourse inevitably embedded in the magazine’s style and presentation’.9 These models of negotiable reading illuminate the 1780 frontispiece. At first glance, the engraving seems to support the Lady’s Magazine’s


claims that moral wisdom can be achieved only by eschewing folly in all its fashionable guises. Closer scrutiny, however, suggests alternative readings that belie the publication’s efforts to ‘improve the Understanding in useful Knowledge, to cherish in the Mind a Love of Virtue, and to adorn the female Character with elegant Accomplishments’ (16, Supplement to 1785, n.p.). The engraving leaves the observer in little doubt that the sartorial adornment displayed and admired by the pictured young woman is not in keeping with the elegant adornments of intellectual accomplishment envisaged by the magazine’s editor. Though Folly holds some playing cards, suggesting both the unsuitability of this particular fashionable pursuit and the gamble a young lady takes with her reputation and character by following such diversions, her attractiveness to the young woman, and potentially to the magazine’s readers, is the engraving’s most problematic feature. Perhaps her attractiveness is a deliberate strategy to force the reader to recognise her own weakness in that of the young woman of the engraving, thereby making her more responsive to the magazine’s lessons. But this manoeuvre, if it is intentional, represents a gamble in itself. A choice between sartorial splendour and virtuous austerity may have represented no choice at all in the minds of many readers. Further interpretive difficulties are raised when the illustration is read against the Lady’s Magazine itself, which partially elides the binary either/or oppositions of folly versus wisdom, fashion versus virtue the engraving seeks to affirm. While dress and fashion were frequent sources of derision and debate throughout the publication’s history, the magazine openly recognised the desirability of fashion to its female readers and, more importantly, the necessity of cultivating an appropriate dress sense if a woman was to be physically and morally desirable. If the sentimental novel struggled to reconcile dress to conceptions of virtuous femininity in this period, then the task was doubly onerous for the magazine. Its increasingly specialised role as a disseminator of practical advice for women ensured that dress became an unavoidable subject for a print medium that had traditionally marketed itself as a moral guide. However, the magazine’s dual role as a disseminator of practical advice and moral guidance uniquely privileged the genre as a forum in which women’s role as consumers in the expanding commercial marketplace could be debated. Indeed, dress became a central weapon in the magazine’s arsenal against female immorality – a subject that allowed magazine editors and contributors to address broader concerns about class, consumption and female sexuality. Yet, in using dress – that notoriously slippery signifier – as the means by which to


outline its blueprint of virtuous femininity, the magazine anticipated the unravelling of its moral project. In line with recent discussions of negotiable reading practices this chapter signals the range of responses the magazine’s fashion coverage might have provoked, and thereby introduces what will be the focus of the remainder of this book: woman’s (and dress’s) resistance to literary control and mediation.

The legacy of the early periodicals Descriptions of the latest fashions and discussions of the moral issues surrounding dress enlivened periodicals from their inception. As Erin Mackie has demonstrated, fashion, as a term signifying not simply clothing but various socioeconomic trends, was central to the Tatler and Spectator. Perceiving fashion (irrational, feminine and unrestrained) as antithetical to the bourgeois critical sphere these publications championed, the Tatler and Spectator recognised an opportunity to reform their readers through a reformation of fashion in the periodicals’ pages. As such, the essays persistently pitted external modes of self-representation against authentic subjectivity. Ironically, however, Addison and Steele did not seek to regulate fashion ‘by retreating to a realm that transcends the superficial ephemera of the mode but by entering – if in a mystified way – the mode, the fashion market itself’. The periodicals not only indulged in scenes of fashionable life and celebrated the growth of commerce, but also recognised themselves as the progeny of the now fashionable periodical market.10 This curious blend of immersion in and condemnation of fashionable pursuits and commodities left a legacy that continued to inform periodicals and magazines throughout the eighteenth century. The innovations wrought by subsequent publications, each attempting to find its niche in the burgeoning and often overpopulated periodical market, had a marked effect on the representation and management of dress in the serial publication. Kathryn Shevelow cites the emergence of the gender-specialised periodical as one of the key transitional processes through which the early eighteenth-century essay-periodical evolved into the decentralised miscellany magazine format preferred in the latter half of the century.11 The emergence of serial publications by and for women was further vital in establishing new modes through which dress and fashion could be represented, contested and reformed. Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator (1744–6), for example, adopted an authorial persona keen to moralise through anecdote and narrative on female immorality, and


frequently alluded to the ‘dangerous Diversions in Fashion … which have been the ruin of so many’.12 But unlike Mr Spectator, whose engagement with society was predicated on a critical disinterestedness, the authority of Haywood’s Female Spectator was built on the foundation of prior transgression. The periodical’s strategy of establishing expertise on the grounds of past misdemeanour was certainly unconventional in the realm of the periodical.13 Rather, the Female Spectator anticipated a novelistic strategy – one that Haywood would herself adopt in Betsy Thoughtless – in which female transgression is exemplified and subsequently resolved through the narrative of the reformed coquette. Though she had never been a ‘Beauty’, the Female Spectator could speak to her readers as ‘the greatest Coquet [sic] of them all’ – as a woman for whom ‘Dress, Equipage, and Flattery, were the idols of [her] Heart’. As someone whose life of ‘promiscuous Diversions’ had brought her a great deal of ‘Pleasure’ and even more ‘Inconveniences’, the Female Spectator appeared uniquely privileged to warn against the temptations that faced her female readers.14 Speaking from personal experience and to other women, the Female Spectator could warn her readers against the temptations of fashion in a tone distinct from that adopted by contributors to many maleauthored periodicals. Publications such as the London, Universal, Town and Country and Edinburgh Magazine had included and would include articles on dress.15 Typically, their authors assumed an air of mockgallantry in order to flatter their female readers into rejecting current fashions for a more moderate and sexually attractive garb. The author of an article on ‘the Influence of external Ornaments’ in the London Magazine for July 1766 is typical in his adoption of a tone of chivalric condescension designed to appease his fashionable female readers. The writer introduces himself as a ‘friend to the ladies’, who possesses so deep a regard for the fair sex that he feels compelled to write in order to prevent them from ‘run[ning] into errors which may lessen them in the esteem of the most valuable part of the male world … men of sense and probity’.16 Fearing that readers might suspect the author of the article to be a ‘formal old batchelor’ [sic] – and therefore the last person their fashionable appearance was intended to attract – the writer is quick to establish himself as a commentator of note.17 The author presents himself as a marriageable prospect and therefore a pertinent critic: he is 35 years old, of modest ‘fortune and expectations’, but possessed of sufficient education and powers of observation to only consider a woman of ‘good-nature, good-sense, and purity of manners’ as a wife. Perceiving a woman’s attention to dress as a strategy to ensnare


future husbands, the contributor suggests that men might regulate this form of commercial and moral excess if they could only persuade women that probity constituted a more attractive marital proposition. The Female Spectator abandoned the mock courtship rituals deployed in male-authored and male-oriented periodicals and developed alternative strategies to warn against the dangers of fashion. Haywood’s journal espoused virtue and wisdom above fashion, not simply as a means to an end – getting a husband – but as an end in itself. In an essay on the misguided education of young women, for example, Haywood argues that [it] is not enough, that we are cautious in training up Youth in the Principles of Virtue and Morality, and that we entirely debar them from those dangerous Diversions in Fashion, which have been the Ruin of so many, in order to make them remember that Education we have given them, and to conduct themselves according to it when they come to be their own Managers; we should endeavour to make them wise, and also to render Virtue so pleasing to them, that they could not deviate from it in the least Degree without the utmost Repugnance.18 A woman cannot be educated against the ‘dangerous Diversions in Fashion’, Haywood suggests, by being removed from temptation, for once of age and living in the world she has been guarded from, she will be ill-equipped to deny its force. Immunity to such seductive pleasures can be achieved only through the wisdom gained by ‘Reading and Philosophy’. Perceiving the potentially fatal connection between innocence and ignorance reinforced by contemporary pedagogical theory and practice, the Female Spectator educated its readers by vicariously bringing them into contact with the dissipated, scandalous world of rakes, masquerades and pleasure gardens through the periodical itself. These potentially scandalous narratives are superficially contained, however, within the text’s essentially moral and moralising framework, and ultimately mediated by a reformed coquette whose past allows her to claim a unique insight into the predicaments faced by young women. From the mid-century onwards, women’s periodicals increasingly turned to reading and philosophy as antidotes to the temptations of vice and fashion. But as the opening of Charlotte Lennox’s Lady’s Museum (1760–1) suggests, a magazine first had to persuade its readers of the value of the virtues it sought to promote if it were to be well


received. The Lady’s Museum presented its readers with what Kathryn Shevelow terms a ‘feminine curriculum’ designed ‘explicitly or implicitly [to establish] the boundaries of feminine thought and behaviour’.19 Its design could be effected only with a participating and responsive readership, however, and unlike Haywood, Lennox was not satisfied simply to extol the virtues of wisdom and learning as ends in themselves. Rather, the Lady’s Museum sought to make these mental accomplishments more attractive to its readers by painting them as analogues, rather than counterpoints, to physical accomplishment. Though the magazine was clear that intellectual accomplishment was ‘never to be acquired in the closet’, it promised that the knowledge offered in its pages would allow the reader to place these physical ‘graces … in a more conspicuous point of view’. 20 Like the author of the London Magazine article, Lennox sought to devalue the false and artificial virtues of the closet in favour of the more permanent charms of mental accomplishment by appealing to woman’s desire to please and attract men: ‘[t]he delightful art of saying the most ingenious things with a graceful simplicity is peculiar to them: it is they who call forth the powers of wit in men, and communicate to them that easy elegance which is never to be acquired in the closet’ (p. 15). Throughout its short run, the Lady’s Museum repeatedly sought to channel women’s supposedly natural desire to please away from the world of fashion to the realm of knowledge. Nowhere is this endeavour more imaginatively reinforced than in Lennox’s serialised fiction, ‘The History of Harriot and Sophia’. The Lady’s Museum included articles on such diverse subjects as geography, history, philosophy, education, and etiquette, but ‘Harriot and Sophia’ is, in many ways, the publication’s core. Whether by design or coincidence, the magazine opens with the first instalment of the fiction and closes with its last. The narrative, as Patricia Meyer Spacks has noted, deployed a plot device common to the work of eighteenthcentury women novelists: the ‘absolute separation of virtue and vice by evoking a pair of sisters, one good in every respect; the other utterly reprehensible’.21 Harriot, the older sister, is beautiful yet dissipated, while the younger, Sophia, is less conventionally attractive in the eyes of ‘common judges’. Harriot has received the dubious ‘improvement of a polite education’ under the guidance of her equally dissipated mother; Sophia, by contrast, has been left to educate ‘herself as well as she could’ (p. 18). While the elder sister wastes her day in ‘dress, company, and gay amusements’, Sophia devotes hours to reading, and running the family household (p. 19).


The ‘History of Harriot and Sophia’ is a little-known work. Where the text has been read, it is usually in the revised form of the work, published as the novel Sophia in 1762.22 On the rare occasions that the magazine serial has been read, it has been perceived as a failure. Robert Mayo has argued that ‘though in its day, as a magazine story, it was nearly as surprising as “Sir Launcelot Greaves”’, no effort was made by Lennox to ‘adapt her work to the special conditions of serial publication’. In Mayo’s reading, Lennox simply published in serial form a novel without chapter divisions.23 Mary Anne Schofield’s short reading of the novelised version of the text also perceives Lennox’s work as flawed, its crude ‘black-or-white’ characterisation failing to capture the critical imagination. Neither a novel nor a romance, Sophia represents ‘an allegory in eighteenth-century form’.24 Yet, if we are to follow Schofield’s lead and read Lennox’s fiction as an allegory in which the text’s protagonists function not merely as characters but as moral exempla, then we should read the narrative in its original context to unlock its full range of meaning. ‘Harriot and Sophia’ explores questions of female conduct, morality, taste, affectation and beauty. While these concerns were undoubtedly the focus of the sentimental novel, the narrative’s publication as a magazine serial necessarily affects the way in which we read the text’s moral plot by contextualising that plot within a specific set of discussions debated elsewhere in the magazine. Though they originate in the same text, the magazine serial ‘Harriot and Sophia’ and the novel Sophia, read as two rather distinct works. Mary Anne Schofield, for example, has argued that Sophia presents a simplistic binary ‘picture of the eighteenth-century world and its inhabitants’, in which society is divided into those who dissemble and those that do not ‘need to hide or disguise true feelings under the cover of a masquerade’.25 Though Lennox’s serial fiction enacts such oppositions, it is difficult to read ‘Harriot and Sophia’ as such a crudely drawn narrative, given the complexity with which the Lady’s Museum painted the moral world its readers were supposed to inhabit. Lennox’s magazine sought partly to conflate the crude oppositions Schofield detects in the novelised version of the serial, and presented a moral world that was far from black and white. In the first instalment of a serial entitled ‘The Trifler’, for instance, Lennox asserts that a single passion forms a common bond between the poet, patriot, courtier, orator, coquette and periodical editor: the desire to please. The ‘desire of fame, or the desire of pleasing’, which the ‘Trifler’ deems ‘synonymous terms’, are the force behind the statesman’s ‘application’, the general’s


‘courage’, the ‘poet’s inspiration, the patriot’s zeal, the courtier’s loyalty, the orator’s ‘eloquence’ and the woman of fashion’s sartorial splendour. Both the ‘thunder of eloquence’ and ‘the glitter of dress in the drawingroom’ are equally the ‘products of a desire to please others’, and both the patriot and woman of fashion go to great lengths (legitimate or otherwise) in order to realise their ambition (pp. 2–3). But where a desire for fame or to please others may earn the statesman respect, it leaves women vulnerable to accusations of ‘coquetry’ (p. 3). Within this complex moral world, in which even the most moral are driven by a self-interested desire to earn the admiration of others, the patriot and the woman of fashion are distinguished only by their relative ability to transform their ‘predominant passion’ to please into a means to earn the respect of others. Those who do not channel their ambition into socially and morally acceptable forms of behaviour must learn when ‘negligence … is most becoming’ and silence more eloquent than a thousand words (p. 3). The Trifler implicitly promises to provide precisely this education in self-management through the magazine’s pages. ‘Harriot and Sophia’ would not disappoint. Both sisters are driven by a desire to please, but they articulate this desire in different ways: Harriot to please men and herself, Sophia to please her father (Mr Darnley) and her undeserving mother by being a dutiful daughter. Sophia is an avid reader and accomplished in the arts of drawing, writing and the skills of œconomy. Her ‘habit of constant reflection’ guides the family through the personal and financial trials that follow Mr Darnley’s death, but even so skilled an œconomist cannot prevent the family’s financial ruin. Harriot and Mrs Darnley squander the family’s remaining funds and finally force Sophia to relinquish an independent income of 100 pounds, given to her by a young woman she had cared for until her death, in order that the elder daughter can ‘make as shewy an appearance as her mourning would permit’ to secure a husband. Harriot’s beauty, combined with the poverty her elaborate dress cannot quite conceal, encourages ‘the most licentious hopes’ among ‘a great number of lovers’, among them the rakish and wealthy Sir Charles Stanley (p. 26). Like his predecessor Lovelace, however, Sir Charles soon turns his attention away from the elder to the younger sister and begins to simulate ‘a behaviour so respectful and delicate, as removed all [Sophia’s] apprehensions’ (p. 111). His unwanted attention forces Sophia to seek retirement in the country and rekindles Harriot’s hopes that ‘her charms would regain all their former influence over the heart of Sir Charles’ in her sister’s absence (p. 247).


Harriot’s hopes are dashed, however, as Charles begins to see through her showy shallowness in favour of Sophia’s genuine ‘virtue and wit’. As Robert Jones has suggested, Lennox’s narrative is driven forward by Sir Charles’s gradual recognition that true beauty is not solely the province of the conventionally attractive. Learning to prize matter over manner, Sir Charles gradually falls in love with a moral and intellectual beauty that is private and concealed, yet, in its own way, conspicuous. Jones argues that Charles’s transformation from rake to man of feeling is charted in a series of scenes in which Sophia is symbolically placed in a distinctly domestic setting.26 Yet I would suggest that this transformation is signalled most clearly in a domestic setting in which the heroine is conspicuously absent. The turning point in Charles’s reformation is his visit to the heroine’s closet following her retirement to the country. Sophia’s room appears exactly as she has left it, untouched by Harriot who resents the ‘many monuments of her sister’s taste and industry’ it contains. It comprises a ‘fire screen’ of Sophia’s own workmanship, ‘several drawings, neatly framed and glassed’, a ‘little library’ evidencing ‘many proofs of her piety as well as of her excellence of taste’ and written compositions of her own, as well as a miniature watercolour of Charles, produced by her own hand. In the face of so conspicuous, yet so unostentatious, a demonstration of her ‘sweet sensibility’, Charles is sickened by ‘those depraved principles’ which had guided him in his pursuit of Sophia and he begins to wonder ‘at the hardness of his own heart, that could so long resist the influence of her gentle virtues’ (p. 582). Though Charles’s rather pivotal reformation jars – and indeed the couple must face many more trials before they can marry – this scene is a crucial turning point in Lennox’s serial. However, the scene’s importance extends beyond its local significance by serving as a metaphor for the project of the Lady’s Museum itself. Sophia’s room serves as an analogue to the publication in which her story appears. Like the magazine, the heroine’s room serves as a compartmentalised repository of female diligence and wisdom that offers lessons to the reader/observer. Displayed within its walls is a variety of accomplishments that emblematise the ‘natural graces of … wit’ the magazine champions above the artificial ‘virtues’ of the closet. Realising the Trifler’s promise, ‘Harriot and Sophia’ offers proof that an application to the study of virtue through the magazine’s pages makes women more, rather then less, attractive. Where Sophia’s virtue calls forth the ‘powers of wit’ in Charles, Harriot’s shallow


closet virtues communicate only her dissipation. In learning to value substance over appearance, Charles realises he has had a lucky escape: had my passion for my Sophia been founded only on the charms of her person, I might probably e’er now have become a mere fashionable husband; but her virtue and wit supply her with graces ever varied, and ever new. Thus the steadiness of my affection for her is but a constant inconstancy, which attaches me successively to one or other of those shining qualities, of which her charming mind is an inexhaustible source. (p. 826) In continuing to attempt to live by her looks, Harriot cannot escape the consequences of her former dissipation as Charles does. Towards the close of the narrative, she embarks on a short-lived affair with an aristocrat, only for him to marry someone else, leaving her with a ‘distemper very fatal to beauty’: ‘All her anxious hours were now employed in repairing her complexion’ (p. 824). Harriot’s efforts to restore her lost beauty are rewarded by marriage to a former perukemaker turned ensign who secures a commission and leaves London with his new wife, much to her utter disgust. The ‘History of Harriot and Sophia’ attests to the potentially reformative role of literature in a serial publication. On one level, ‘Harriot and Sophia’ is a straightforwardly didactic narrative in which moral goodness is rewarded and fashionable dissipation punished. As Haywood did in the Female Spectator, Lennox does not deny her reader’s access to the ‘dangerous Diversions of fashion’, but rather mediates this access through a fictional, allegorical framework. The narrative’s pedagogical project operates both to exemplify Sophia as a model to be emulated and to educate readers (as Sophia’s example educates Charles) in the art of discerning true virtue in the face of fashionably dressed artifices. The narrative is thus an education in itself, like the many articles and essays contained within the magazine’s pages, as well as fictionalised proof of the magazine’s promise to render its readers more charming. Although we do not see Sophia reading magazines within the narrative, her life internalises and exemplifies the periodical’s curriculum of virtue and knowledge through which she reforms her rakish lover. ‘Harriot and Sophia’ is thus an intriguing, even self-promotional, allegory for the power of the magazine to educate women against the shallow adornments of beauty, dress and fashion.


Fashion and frugality: pocket books for women Beyond the emergence of the gender-specialised periodical, the single most significant factor in the changing representation of dress and fashion in serial publications for women was the genre’s increasing prioritisation of information that had a direct bearing on women’s dayto-day lives over the more abstract concerns of philosophy and learning.27 Dress, as one of the primary signifiers of gender, became an ever more unavoidable subject for magazines and periodicals that targeted female readers. Just as dress delineated gender, so a keen interest in fashion became one of the hallmarks of the women’s periodical. Pocket books (first published in the 1750s) mark a crucial step in the development from the mid-century curriculum-based periodical to the late century magazine, which sought to disseminate a model of virtuous femininity through the provision of practical advice and example. As a generic hybrid, however, the pocket book is difficult to map into the familiar terrain of eighteenth-century print culture, and as such it is rarely documented in studies of the literature of the period.28 Though the costume historians Anne Buck and Harry Matthews have pointed to the ways in which the plates that graced the opening pages of pocket books are evidence of fashion’s gradual evolution through the late eighteenth century, their value as texts has still to be established. 29 Ladies’ pocket books appeared under numerous and bewilderingly similar titles throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These duodecimo books (approximately 12 × 8 centimetres) were published annually and generally comprised one or two fashion engravings, information on the rates of hackney coachmen and watermen, marketing tables, dates of public holidays, royal birthdays and instructions on the latest dances. These sources of information prefixed a short literary miscellany commonly consisting of poetry, enigmas, songs and essays on subjects such as manners, child-rearing and domestic management. The bulk of the publications, however, was devoted to a combined diary and account book (the ‘memorandum table’), a structure that mirrors the pocket book’s double aspect. For the woman the pocket book implicitly constructed in its pages is a sufficiently modish individual to take an interest in the lavish fashions it displays, yet who possessed sufficient sense and virtue to manage her finances with care and consideration. As Harris’s Complete Ladies Pocket Book for 1792 declared, the pocket book editor’s not inconsiderable task was ‘all of fashion and dress, / With œconomy’s dictates … to express’.30


The memorandum table typically comprised four columns designated by terms such as ‘Money receiv’d’, ‘Money paid’, ‘Appointments’ and ‘Memorandum’, designed to encourage women to be daily accountable for their social and financial selves. As the preface to the memorandum table in John Newbery’s 1753 Ladies Compleat Pocket-Book suggests, the ideal woman the pocket book envisaged combined self-discipline with self-regulation and was asked to be constantly aware of her accountability to her husband and to God. Rather than allow the headings of the memorandum table speak for themselves, the editor insists on the pocket book’s indispensability and the disastrous consequences attendant on failing to follow its dictates: [T]here is nothing more necessary to make Life easy and comfortable than to keep an exact, plain, and explicit Account of our daily Expences, that we may be able to regulate them in Time, and not run blindfold into Errors which are not to be retriev’d, but with the utmost Danger and Difficulty. To prevent this fatal Precipitancy, you have here a Column appropriated to every Day in the Year for setting down your casual Disbursements … As there cannot be a greater Affront given to a Friend or Neighbour … than to fail in our Promises, or neglect Meeting them at certain Places previously agreed on; you are furnish’d with a Column for Appointments and Promises, and another for Memorandums … [B]y only looking into this little Book, you will be capable of transacting Business punctually, of preventing the irksome Expectations of your Acquaintance … and of keeping your Credit with Mankind.31 The editor’s warning borrows the economic language of accountability adopted by gentlemen’s and tradesmen’s pocket books of the period. For example, The New Memorandum-Book Improv’d: or, the Gentleman and Tradesman’s Daily Pocket Journal, also of 1753, refers to ‘the mortifying Consideration’ a gentleman might be forced into when perusing his journal and witnessing his ‘own uselessness and insignificance to the Public for the Year past’.32 The Ladies Compleat Pocket Book transposes this notion of public credit away from the wider business and social world to the feminine, private world of the household. But while the Gentleman and Tradesman’s Daily Pocket Journal seemed confident that it might inspire its less than public-spirited reader to recuperate his reputation and become ‘more worthy’ than he appeared in the pages before him,33 ladies’ pocket books declared a woman’s failure to conduct her financial and social duties appropriately a ‘fatal Precipitancy’ that would


irrevocably negate her ‘Credit with Mankind’. As such, pocket books for women fashioned themselves as preventative safeguards of female reputation rather than curatives, since a woman’s credit, once weakened, was irrecoverable. Maintaining one’s ‘Credit with Mankind’ appears to have been a double burden for pocket book readers: a prudent attention to social engagements to preserve personal reputation and a duty to preserve one’s creditworthiness through a judicious management of personal and household allowances. In preserving a woman’s financial and social transactions, the pocket book, like Sophia’s closet, stood as a permanent testimony to her social, moral and economic character. The editor of the 1762 Ladies Compleat Pocket Book recommended ‘the careful preserving of these Books’, since they were designed to ‘be of Use even Years after’ they had been published. In completed form, they would ‘enable any Lady to tell what Monies she has Receiv’d and Paid; what Appointments, or Visits, she has made and had return’d, during any Period of her Life’.34 This economic language of credit, accountability and œconomy locates the pocket book within a wider civic humanist discourse which gained particular currency in the sentimental novel, in which a woman’s fall was frequently charted as an economic crisis.35 But if the pocket book fashioned itself as a defence against the financial misfortunes met by characters such as Cecilia and Camilla, it was blind to its complicity with the pressure to be fashionable that precipitated the ruin of even the most virtuous sentimental heroines. The Ladies Compleat Pocket-Book displayed no explicit awareness of the potential tension between its annual fashion plates and the memorandum table, which so virulently emphasised financial control.36 Rather, the pocket book seemed confident in its ability to satisfy its readers’ sartorial desires, whilst teaching them how to manage these disruptive appetites. Concerned with women’s day-to-day lives, the pocket book was too practical to ignore dress, which would have been one of its readers’ most pressing financial considerations. The 1762 Ladies Compleat Pocket-Book, for example, offers an example of how the accounting columns of the memorandum table should be completed, which highlights its recognition of dress as a significant financial consideration for its readers. Of the £10 10s. received by an imaginary woman on an imaginary day, by far the greatest proportion is devoted to dress: £1 13s. 6d. to Mrs Muslin the milliner, and £4 5s. for fabrics from Mr Spruce the mercer. Significantly smaller sums are paid ‘in market for provisions’ (19s. 7d.), ‘to the cook’ (£l 5s. 0d.) and for ‘sundry articles’ (3s. 4d.).37


But it is not simply as its readers’ primary financial consideration that a woman’s dress is placed firmly at the heart of the pocket book’s conception of virtuous femininity. A woman’s clothing, as was commonly lamented, reflected not merely on her own character, but on that of her husband. As the author of an essay ‘On Female Œconomy’ wrote in the 1789 Ladies Miscellany, there are many ‘professions, in which a man’s success greatly depends on his making some figure, where the bare suspicion of poverty would bring on the reality’. Should a reader marry such a man, the writer advises that it is her ‘duty to exert all [her] skill in the management of [her] income’ to render her body and household as outwardly respectable as is financially prudent.38 As Harriet Guest has recently argued, the second half of the eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of a counter-image to the satirical figure of the fashionable woman who consumed to excess. Equally undesirable, Guest argues, was the woman who failed to consume enough and whose withdrawal from commercial exchange indicated her ‘hard-hearted lack of sensibility’.39 The animus directed at women who turned their backs on the consumer revolution is exemplified by Paul Jodrell’s play A Widow and No Widow (1780).40 The entrance of Peg Pennyworth, a female moneylender, is pre-empted by a grotesque characterisation of her miserliness: ‘she keeps the door of her coach in her parlour, lest the coachman should let it out as a hackney … she always goes to market herself, and carries her fish in her pocket – she is always slip-shod – and her cloaths hang about her like a weeping willow’.41 Significantly, when Pennyworth eventually appears on the stage, her miserly self-interest is dramatised by her recital of the moneylending transactions documented in her pocket book: PEG (untying a pocket-book, and reading) ‘Lent to Hap Hazard, Esq; five hundred pounds, from his advertisement to Y.Z. age doubtful.’ That was the worst bargain we ever made … ‘Lent to the Reverend Mr. Saygrace, my cousin, five hundred pounds, on his living in the Fens.’ – ’Tis a bad security, and I don’t like it – besides too, he has got nine children, and the Fens are unwholesome.42 Pennyworth’s extortionist tactics render her the very ‘abstract of avarice’, a woman estranged by her miserliness from the sphere of commercial exchange, her femininity and humanity. Joddrel’s play offers a fascinating misreading of the pocket book’s pleas for economic restraint which were designed to encourage women


to steer a middle course between the polarities of unrestrained consumption and a failure to consume at all. Neither encouraging nor dissuading women to consume, the pocket book sought to encourage women to regulate their consumption in order that they might be better equipped to fulfil the ‘duties of a wife and mother’. As the essay ‘On Female Œconomy’ suggested, though rank might demand a certain ‘elegance’, to ‘go beyond [one’s] sphere, either in dress or in appearance of [one’s] table, indicate[d] a greater fault … than to be too much within it’. Rather than superfluity or austerity, women should aspire to ‘propriety’, a social, moral and economic golden mean which balanced the need for an appropriate display of familial wealth and fashionable politeness against the ever-present dangers of ‘poverty’ and ‘unhappiness’.43 The pocket book’s emphasis on œconomy, propriety and display places it on the same ideological continuum as the conduct book, in which, as Nancy Armstrong has argued, the domestic household was placed ‘in opposition to the excesses of aristocratic behaviour … in order to insist on a discrete and frugal household with a woman educated in the practices of inconspicuous consumption’.44 In demanding that readers keep daily records of their accounts, and demonstrate their economic prudence in their dress and home, however, the pocket book’s brand of ‘inconspicuous consumption’ is curiously paradoxical – a kind of conspicuously inconspicuous consumption, through which women declare their financial transactions and, in so doing, their restraint and prudence as consumers. Pocket book owners, like conduct book readers, were bombarded with warnings against the dangers of overspending and avowals of the contentment frugality provides in the form of essays, poems and moral maxims. Women were urged to see through the ‘gilt chariot, the gaudy liveries, the supernumerary train of attendants, the great house, and the sumptuous table, the services of plate, the embroidered cloaths, the rich brocades, the profusion of jewels’, and all the trappings of aristocratic wealth that tempted women to marry, or live, above their station, in favour of matrimonial stability based on judicious frugality.45 Just as conduct books and educational treatises suggested that ‘without the domestic woman the entire domestic framework would collapse’, so the pocket book identified her as the fulcrum on which the success or failure of marriage, the household and, by extension, society rested. Indeed, the pocket book suggested that a woman’s virtue and the stability of her marriage could be determined by the degree of financial control she had over the familial expenses.


Anticipating arguments that ‘the setting [of] the general scheme of expenses is seldom the wife’s province’, the author of the essay ‘On Female Œconomy’ asserted that it is ‘a very ill sign for one or both parties, where there is such a want of openness in what equally concerns them’. In such a situation, a woman could be ‘answerable to no more than is entrusted to her’, the writer argues, and only through ‘exact calculation’ in her limited financial transactions might she hope to earn the trust of her husband and therefore more control over the household in future.46 The feminine ideal constructed by the pocket book is empowered with a double-edged responsibility for the moral and financial wellbeing of the family household. The middle ranking, socially content and selfsufficient character of this woman is affirmed in a (presumably unironic) poem in the 1787 The Ladies’ Miscellany entitled ‘Contentment’: FEW are my wants, clean wholesome food, And raiment’s all I claim; Nor mourn for robes I can’t afford, That clothes [sic] the courtly dame … Four floors above the street I sit, Contented, read or sing; And can in this exalted state, Look down on court and King.47 The sartorial vestiges of superfluous wealth are dismissed here as a legitimate form of social stratification, albeit with no suggestion that the existing social hierarchy should be overturned. In its stead, the contributor envisages a meritocracy based on the more valuable stock of feeling, which empowers the middle ranks. Other pocket books were more explicit about the class of reader they assumed and targeted. The 1786 Ladies’ Daily Companion, for example, included ‘Extracts from several Acts of Parliament passed last Session, relative to the Duties on Gloves, Male and Female Servants, and Retail Shops’. The extracts note the annual licence fee and stamp duties payable by manufacturers for various types of gloves at various prices, thereby implying a readership of skilled working women.48 By contrast, The Ladies’ Most Elegant and Convenient Pocket Book, as its name suggests, had marked aristocratic, whiggish aspirations. Its title-pages proudly announced that the book was ‘Compiled at the Request of Several Ladies of Quality’, and the pocket book displayed a keen interest in


society’s upper reaches as evidenced by a fold-out engraving in the 1784 edition of a ‘View of the Prince of Wales’s Fete at Carshalton House Garden in honour of Mr Fox’s Election’ opposite its plate of ‘Ladies in the Dress of the Year’. The Ladies’ Most Elegant and Convenient Pocket Book rigidly reinforced the social hierarchy with a carefully delineated ‘Table of Precedency among Ladies’ and in the publication’s literary miscellany. An essay ‘On Female Education’ in the same annual proclaimed that the most valuable lesson a woman could learn was to know her place: ‘Whilst we are in this world … some by birth and others by fortune, will have the superiority over the rest of mankind, but let us be great or let us be little, decency requires we should play the part allotted.’49 The essentially conservative social and domestic values espoused by the pocket book are, however, necessarily problematised by the presence of fashion plates. These engravings compromise the pocket book’s opposition to the artificial consumer value systems symbolised by ‘embroidered cloaths’, ‘rich brocades’, a ‘profusion of jewels’ and the ‘fatal Precipitancy’ of unregulated consumption. Recognising an interest in and an attention to dress as integral to its readers’ lives, yet fashioning itself as a moral and economic guide, the pocket book anticipated a conflict of interest that would inflect so many periodical publications for women from the short-lived Fashionable Magazine to the popular Lady’s Magazine. As the Lady’s Magazine would, pocket books implicitly defended their interest in fashion by apparently subordinating this interest to a dominant moral and economic framework. Fashion was disseminated, yet contained, within the isolated plate or two appended to the front of the publications. The memorandum table subsequently re-compartmentalised dress by encouraging women to document their purchases and thereby subordinate their consumption of fashionable commodities to an overriding principle of financial management. While the ever-increasing numbers of fashion plates may have fuelled anxiety that fashion was becoming less exclusive, more accessible to wider social groups and ultimately beyond control, the impact of pocket book plates was considerably weakened.50 Not only were they published annually, and therefore immune from criticisms that targeted fashion’s wasteful and endless cycles of renewal and revision, pocket books were outdated by the time they were sold. Issues were compiled in the autumn prior to the year for which they were designed. Thus the Ladies Compleat Pocket-Book’s 1762 fashion plate (figure 3) displays a gown fashionable in the previous year. The pocket


Figure 3 Frontispiece engravings to The Ladies Compleat Pocket-Book for 1762, by permission of the British Library C 136.66.30

book’s attendant inadequacy as a purveyor of fashion left it vulnerable to ridicule. The Magazine à la Mode eagerly distinguished its own project from that of its nearest ‘Precedent’, the pocket book. The ‘futility of [the pocket book’s] pretensions’ were, it claimed, ‘obvious to every one, who gives himself time to reflect, that … any one mode of dress is so far from being likely to continue a whole year, that, very probably, it may not last a month’.51 So divorced from the reality of fashion, pocket books were ‘deficient in point of information, or in point of taste’, and their plates ‘the very reverse of what they should be’. The pocket book’s failure to keep up with fashion was more famously satirised in She Stoops to Conquer (1773), in which Mrs Hardcastle’s pretensions to fashionable London life are ridiculed as the product of unreliable gossip magazines and even more unreliable reports from unfashionable women and outdated pocket books: MRS HARDCASTLE I take care to know every tête à tête from the Scandalous Magazine, and have all the fashions, as they come out,


in a letter from the two Miss Rickets of Crooked-lane. Pray how do you like this head, Mr Hastings. HASTINGS Extremely elegant and degagée on my word Madam. Your friseur is Frenchman, I suppose? MRS HARDCASTLE I protest, I dressed it myself from a print in the Ladies Memorandum Book for the last year. HASTINGS Indeed! Such a head in a side-box at the Playhouse would draw as many gazers as my Lady May’ress at a City Ball.52 Rather than modelling her appearance on the engravings in an annual pocket book displaying fashions of the previous year, Mrs Hardcastle displays her rustic ignorance still further by referring to a pocket book already a year old, and therefore aspires to fashions potentially two years out of date. While the fashion plate may not have posed an overwhelming threat to the moral authority of pocket books, these texts are far from unproblematic in their efforts to assimilate fashion into publications concerned with restraint and frugality. The potentially mixed messages presented to pocket book readers were not lost on contemporaries. The Christian-Lady’s Pocket Book for 1792, for example, vehemently dissociated itself from other titles bearing similar names. In a letter to the editor, a contributor expressed his hopes that this pocket book would prove more morally responsible than the many other titles that saturated the market. The reader of The Christian-Lady’s Pocket Book, he hoped, would not fill the engagements column with ‘visits of a trifling (not to say culpable) kind’, or the expenses column with ‘sums laid out in masquerade-tickets, subscription concerts, wax-lights for routs, birth-day suits [or] losses at the card table’. Her memoranda would not consist of ‘the lye of the day, topics of scandal, names and abodes of milliners, descriptions of the new fashions, and a hundred other circumstances of equal importance’, but with an account of ‘those blessed seasons, when the writer was privileged with some sweet visits from a gracious GOD’.53 Given the success of ladies’ pocket books, signalled by the sheer number of titles available, The Christian Lady’s outrage was hardly representative. Nevertheless, its attack exposes the perceived threat that fashionable images posed to pocket books and the extent to which these texts might have encouraged readings against the grain. The models of negotiable reading highlighted by Edward Copeland and Jacqueline Pearson’s work on the Lady’s Magazine provide a useful framework within which to read pocket books too. Indeed, pocket books provide concrete evidence for the multiple ways in which


readers could respond to their more prescriptive advice, of a kind that can often only be inferred from reading contemporary magazines. Not only did these texts present their readers with two potentially divergent value systems (the fashionable and the frugal), they further provided a literal space in which their readers could choose to embrace or reject these systems: the memorandum table. Few memorandum tables exist in pocket books held within library collections, and still fewer are completed. Those that have been represent a wealth of responses to the books’ encouragements and dictates. A 1774 edition of William Lane’s Ladies Museum, for example, held by the British Library, possesses a complete memorandum table documenting the day-to-day life of an unknown woman. Not only does she use the table to note appointments and memoranda documenting her travels on land and around the British coast, but she also responds to the pocket book’s pleas for accountability by listing clothes and haberdashery purchased by and for her, as well as details of coach and dinner expenses incurred on her travels.54 Many more pocket books apparently failed to have the desired effect on their readers. A copy of the Ladies Most Elegant and Convenient Pocket Book for 1785, held by the Corporation of London Guildhall Library, has been completed by a man who uses the accounting columns solely to document his small losses and even smaller gains at cards.55 The incongruity of his memoranda, listing his comings and goings around Pall Mall, St Paul’s and Mansion House, is comically startling. More significant, however, are the inappropriate responses of some women to the pocket books they owned. The 1753 Ladies Compleat Pocket-Book, held by the British Library, is complete with notes written by an unknown woman. Apart from the intrinsic interest of her brief but meticulously completed daily entries, detailing people she dined, danced and drank tea with, the manuscript is of interest for what it omits. The only column completed is the memorandum column (figure 4). Whatever her reasons, the owner has not heeded the text’s warnings of the dire consequences attendant on not rigorously accounting for her personal expenditure in the book, preferring instead to use it as a diary.56 Such anecdotal information does not, of course, substantiate claims that pocket books universally failed to instil the desired financial and domestic values in their readers, but it does suggest that rather than allow the pocket book to fashion her character, its reader could tailor it to her own concerns. That the pocket book might not have had the desired effect on its readers is the subtext of an essay in Harris’s Original Memorandum Book


Figure 4 Memorandum Table from The Ladies Compleat Pocket-Book for 1753, by permission of the British Library C 136.66.30

for 1782. A few pages after the pocket book’s plates an ‘Essay on Dress’ appears, which condemns those who ‘pay a blind obedience to fashion’. The essay laments that without an attention to fashion ‘there [is] no admittance to places of polite resort’, since other personal characteristics, ‘not being so visible, none can distinguish a person’s abilities at first sight’. It is a regrettable fact, the author suggests, that fashion is deemed a necessary indicator of politeness, since a pursuit of fashion can so often lead women into improper behaviour. Damned if they do and damned if they don’t follow fashion, the author can only beseech his readers to consider their social position, age and physique when dressing in order to avoid accusations of impropriety. Ultimately, however, he is forced to admit that it ‘would be endless to lay down rules for dress’. The writer is satisfied, however, that the pocket book has noted the ‘prevalent fashions … in their proper place’ and that women will be able to make use of fashion accordingly.57 In its insistence that dress can be contained and managed by being kept in its ‘proper place’ (plates and short, written descriptions), the essay offers an implicit defence of the inclusion of fashion information


in texts self-professedly concerned with a woman’s moral well-being, including pocket books and ladies’ magazines. The conclusion to the essay is far less assured than this justification suggests, however. Finally, the writer surrenders, ‘it is to her own judgement that [a woman] must at last be indebted for the ELEGANCE of her appearance’. A reader’s judgement is, however, an unknown quantity, and despite its efforts to contain dress within an ideological framework that subordinated fashion and fashionable life to an overriding principle of domestic management, there could be no assurance that the pocket book’s readers would espouse the same principles. The very structure of the pocket book, demanding reader participation more than any publication of its day, ensured that ‘Œconomy’s dictates’ could never be absolute.

The Lady’s Magazine In its role as a disseminator of both fashion and domestic morality, the pocket book represents an important context for the Lady’s Magazine.58 As the preface to the first issue of this popular and enduring title suggests, the Lady’s Magazine sought to cultivate a female reader who possessed moral, personal and physical refinement in equal measure: The subjects we shall treat of are those that may tend to render your minds not less amiable than your persons. But as external appearance is the first inlet to the treasures of the heart, and the advantages of dress, though they cannot communicate beauty, may at least make it more conspicuous, it is intended to present the Sex with most elegant patterns for the tambour, embroidery, or every kind of needlework; and, as the fluctuations retard their progress in the country, we shall by engravings inform our distant readers with every innovation that is made in the female dress. As this is a branch of information entirely new, we shall endeavour to render it more worthy of female attention, by an assiduity which shall admit of no abatement … In this we consult not only the embellishment but likewise the profit of our patronesses. They will find in this Magazine, price only sixpence, among variety of other copper-plates a pattern that would cost them double the money at the haberdasher. (1, p. 3) Through a series of subtle twists and turns, the preface attempts to map dress onto the periodical’s moral framework. Having established that


the adornment of the body is of secondary importance to that of the mind, the author subsequently acknowledges dress’s significance in a society that sets so much store on appearance. In such a society, the magazine advocates, women must cultivate a sufficiently appealing exterior, but only in order that they may subsequently divert the observer’s attention to ‘the treasures of the heart’. The lack of an identifiable subject in the sentence on ‘external appearance’ as the ‘first inlet to the treasures of the heart’ – the ‘heart’ could, presumably, signal the heart of woman or that of the publication itself – suggestively attributes dress with a double meaning here. On the one hand, dress is presented as bait, deployed by women in order to captivate onlookers that they may subsequently demonstrate the more permanent allures of virtuous femininity. On the other, fashion (in the form of reports, plates and patterns) appears as bait through which the magazine lures readers in order that it may divert their attention to the pearls of wisdom at the heart of the publication itself. Denying any possible antagonism between its moral and fashionable content, the preface suggests that female virtue and dress could be mutually constitutive: women could make their virtue more conspicuous by learning how to dress appropriately, while dress, by virtue of its inclusion in a morally improving periodical, would become a more ‘worthy’ subject for female attention. As the 1780 frontispiece engraving implies, however, fashion content may have diverted readers from, rather than attracted them to, the moral treasures at the publication’s core. The very structure of the magazine as a compartmentalised repository of articles and fiction, helpfully indexed to guide readers to items of particular interest, potentially allowed women to prioritise articles and topics the publication deemed to be of lesser importance. Close scrutiny of the Lady’s Magazine’s content and format suggests that the magazine was no less aware of the divergent reader responses it might have provoked than are contemporary critics. The decision to present its fashion coverage in the form of editorial, rather than in the form of the engravings and reports promised in the magazine’s first issue, is the clearest signal of the magazine’s mistrust of unmediated fashion coverage. Although embroidery patterns were published in the unbound monthly issues of the magazine, fashion plates were scarce and fashion reports at best sporadic. As early as November 1770, the magazine was forced to explain that it had ‘not lost sight of [its] promise to the Fair Sex, of giving them the most early intelligence of the revolutions that shall be made in fashions’ (1, p. 170). Increasingly, however, it became apparent that


this was a promise the magazine could not or would not keep. In part, the magazine’s failure was symptomatic of its reliance on unpaid (and therefore understandably unreliable) fashion reporters. But the failure may have had as much to do with the publication’s concern over its lack of control over fashion reports and the messages they might be imagined to send to its readers. The magazine’s decision to present fashion information in more generalised articles has led some critics to argue that the magazine did not give dress the prominence it promised in its first issue. Jean Hunter, for example, has suggested in her critical survey of the Lady’s Magazine that the topics of morals and manners dominated the content of the sampled issues, whereas beauty and fashion rarely exceeded 5 per cent of the magazine’s pages.59 Hunter’s otherwise invaluable study is somewhat misleading, however. Though the percentage of articles devoted to fashion is comparatively small, dress is so deeply implicated in the magazine’s conception of virtuous femininity that it is an implicit, or often explicit, subtext of countless articles, letters and fictions on various subjects throughout the magazine’s history. Discussions of dress feature in serials such as ‘The Rambler’, ‘The Female Reformer’ and the long-running agony aunt column, ‘The Matron’, in letters, poems and short moral maxims, as well as in essays on such diverse subjects as modesty, education, taste, ‘œconomy’, beauty and prostitution.60 Indeed, dress lies at the very core of the Lady’s Magazine’s ideology, symbolising a host of values (including vanity, foolishness, selfishness and luxuriousness) against which the magazine sought to define itself and its readers. Almost all the annual Addresses prefacing the January issues of the magazine alluded to this opposition. The January 1777 issue refers to the editor’s ‘arduous’ endeavours to ‘turn away the female eye from the glitter of external parade, to fix it on [the] more permanent and more brilliant objects of mental acquisitions’. Some ten years later the annual address promised to ‘improve the Understanding in useful Knowledge … and to adorn the Female Character with elegant Accomplishments’. Likewise, in 1788 the magazine expressed its hope to emulate the periodical precedents of Addison and Steele by making ‘Polite Learning’, rather than physical beauty, one of ‘the most fashionable Ornaments’ a woman could wear. The use of sartorial imagery in these ‘Addresses’ enacts a semantic displacement familiar to readers of contemporary conduct books. Dress is initially identified as the antithesis of the virtues and accomplishments for which the publication stands. Subsequently, sartorial metaphors are assimilated


within the publication’s moral framework by suggesting that accomplishment, learning and virtue are the only truly desirable fashionable ornaments. The project of the Lady’s Magazine is thus a dual process of re-clothing: re-clothing women in a garb of probity and learning to make them more attractive and appealing wives, mothers and friends, and re-clothing probity and learning to render these virtues more attractive propositions to the magazine’s readers. The status of dress in the magazine is thus always precarious. On the one hand, dress is a trivial subject, whose inclusion must always be justified. On the other, and as a commodity which emblematises so many of the magazines concerns, it appears to be the very crux on which virtue, various social institutions and the social structure itself rest. The social institution the Lady’s Magazine deemed most vulnerable to an injudicious deployment of dress was marriage. The importance of an appropriate dress sense before and during marriage was a recurrent theme in the magazine, dubiously privileging women, as the pocket book had done, by empowering them with a double-edged responsibility for maintaining the stability of the household. In an argument that rehearses the techniques deployed in many male-authored periodicals that attempted to reform female clothing, many of the Lady’s Magazine contributions on this subject seem unable to perceive dress as anything other than a bait to attract lovers or future husbands. The first instalment of ‘The Female Rambler’ in May 1771, for example, opens with the author’s typically chivalrous claim that he is ‘far from wishing to deprive the youth of its seasonable gaiety, or to deny beauty the tribute of admiration’. The article then attempts to wrong-foot its fashionable reader with warnings against the specious ‘delights in finery’, before questioning whether ‘women would delight so much in finery, if it did not heighten their own charms, and attract the notice of men’. Unmarried women are partly exempted from the charges the Female Rambler levels against women of fashion, provided their interest in their appearance has marriage as its goal. Married women, however, are encouraged to be more circumspect and subdued in their dress: since it is no longer necessary for a married woman to dress ‘to please her husband’, the Female Rambler argues, ‘it will be unnecessary for her to dress to please any one else’ (2, pp. 169–70). If a woman’s fashionable appearance after marriage left her open to suspicion, negligence in dress offered no guarantee that she would live free from unfavourable conjecture either. As pocket books reminded readers, a married woman’s dress offered testimony to both her character, that of her husband, as well as to the state of their marriage. As an


anonymous writer opined in a ‘Letter to the Editor’ in April 1773, that ‘ladies are apt after marriage to grow careless and negligent with regard to their dress … has been the cause of much misunderstanding between married couples’. Rehearsing a disturbingly prevalent contemporary argument, sartorial neglect is viewed as a licence to commit adultery here: a ‘slighted’ husband understandably seeks ‘pleasure … abroad’ where he can no longer find it at home (4, p. 203). A 1775 conduct book serial entitled ‘Mrs T—SS’s Advice to her Daughter’ developed these arguments further by advocating a fashion system which would differentiate ‘between the dress of married and single women’. In the November instalment on ‘Dancing in Public and Dress’, Mrs T—SS argues that history proves the effectiveness of fashion systems in which ‘young unmarried women [were allowed] every liberty, in respect to dress’, but married women ‘were not allowed to shew the least part of their neck or arms, and their face always was veiled’ (6, p. 604). Mrs T—SS rehearses the sartorial double standard articulated in aforementioned contributions on this subject. Though dress is an acceptable means through which unmarried woman can ‘allure and captivate’ a future husband, married women who dress fashionably, the writer concludes, may justly be suspected of ‘committing adultery’. The association of dress with sexual transgression is, of course, one of the most enduring critiques of clothing, but what is of interest here is that men, rather than women, are depicted as the seduced victims of fashion. If a woman throws such sartorial ‘allurements before the eyes of men’ she may force them to ‘become bold enough to take unbecoming liberties’, the possibly ‘criminal’ effects of which will be of her own making. Giving with one hand what she takes with the other, Mrs T—SS bestows her female readers with a certain power acquired and exercised through the deployment of dress, only to argue that if women want to maintain this power fully, they must regulate their dress in order to preserve them from the dangers of male ‘liberties’. Such mediated and highly moralised articles on fashion could easily be assimilated within the magazine’s self-professed agenda. Indeed, Mrs T—SS’s method of empowering her female readers only to argue that true power must be regulated in order to remain effective is a frequently deployed trope in contributions to the Lady’s Magazine which partly disguised its projected reformation of women through the promise that a reformation in female manners would rehabilitate male libertines. Nevertheless, these extended commentaries on dress often anticipated alternative readings and misreadings that suggest that the


magazine’s efforts to reform its readers may have fallen on deaf ears. Throughout the magazine’s history, the Lady’s Magazine appeared to maintain a steadfast faith in female rationality as the antidote to vice and folly. As the aptly named columnist, ‘The Reasoner’, argued in the January 1775 issue: ‘Consideration alone is necessary to convince us how amiable goodness is … Consideration alone is necessary to convince you of the ugliness of vice’ (6, p. 40). But where it may have been possible to reason with women on the evils of various female vices, fashion, as an inexplicable and characteristically irrational social dynamic, posed particular problems to those who sought to warn against it. In April 1773 an article on ‘The Education of the Fair-Sex’ gave the following description of fashion’s irrational and contagious: CAPRICE and fantasticalness are the parents of fashion, which is a great prejudice in its disfavour. … If a lady of elevated rank, or of a remarkable fantasticalness, should take it into her head to dress herself in a particular manner, all the rest of the sex would adopt her ton of dress, however ridiculous, or uneasy it should appear. The contagion commences from those who are familiar with the person who introduces a new mode; after which it communicates itself to their acquaintance, or those who behold them in the theatre, or the public walks. The city adopts it after the court; from the city it spreads into the country, and foreign parts. (4, p. 199) Like other social and moral evils, fashion is cast as a disease: a biological organism that affects those biologically determined by their gender to be vulnerable to contagion. Though its progress may be predictable – from individual to community, to city, to country, to the fashionable world – containment of the epidemic seems impossible. As the offspring of ‘Caprice and fantasticalness’, fashion is fickle, inconstant and irrational and, therefore, immune to the inoculating power of rational reflection. As the contributor resignedly argues, ‘women of this age pique themselves on account of their reason and judgement more than ever they did; but they shew very little of either in their conduct with respect to fashions, with which they are more infatuated than ever’ (4, p. 199). To attempt to reason women out of a love of fashion, the magazine recognised, is to reason against something that is, by nature, unreasonable. And as the 1780 frontispiece uneasily explores, merely juxtaposing folly and wisdom may have sufficient weight to persuade its readers to take the right metaphorical path.


As such, the magazine developed a range of strategies that allowed it to satisfy reader desire for fashion information without seeming to compromise its moral agenda. From the magazine’s first issues, fashion reports and plates were apparently popular with readers. In the November 1770 issue, the editor remarked on the great ‘satisfaction’ the first edition’s fashion plate had given its readers, so much so that he found ‘it imitated by most of the annual pocket-books for the use of the ladies’.61 But the magazine’s emphasis on reader contributions hindered as much as it encouraged its coverage of fashion, leaving it vulnerable to the whims and inclinations of readers and unpaid amateur contributors.62 Just as readers were, from time to time, disappointed by fictional serials that were simply left unfinished by their contributors, so they were frustrated by the unreliability of the magazine’s volunteer fashion reporters. The ‘To Our Correspondents’ column of the May 1779 issue, for example, cites the complaint of a reader who signs herself a ‘humble servant of the Wou’d-be-Fashionable’ and who laments the ‘want of articles on dress’. Her criticism spurs the editor to ‘request some of our correspondents, residing in the metropolis, to assume the task’ of fashion reporter, promising other dissatisfied readers that ‘so important a department in etiquette’ will not remain ‘unnoticed’ (10, n.p.). The problem did not go away. In 1777, 1783 and 1784 the magazine was forced to entreat fashion reviewers to produce reports more regularly, and in 1780 the magazine evidently experienced difficulty in finding anyone at all to report on fashion.63 The inability to provide regular accounts of fashion was a recurrent source of embarrassment for the magazine, yet when fashion was reported, the publication was reluctant simply to let fashion speak for itself. Rather, through editorial comment and the judicious placement of articles, the magazine persistently arbitrated and policed the sartorial information it provided. Part of the difficulty in representing fashion seems to have been the lack of an established language – of the kind Roland Barthes analysed in his Fashion System – through which it could be disseminated. ‘A Description of the Newest Dress’ submitted under the pseudonym ‘Patronessa R.’ to the May 1775 issue, for example, expresses anxiety about the ability of the written word to truly accommodate fashion. Fearing that her description might not be ‘intelligible’, Patronessa accompanied her description with a drawing she hoped would more clearly ‘illustrate [her] meaning’ (6, p. 233). The editor evidently shared the contributor’s fears, referring to the article as ‘somewhat obscure’, forcing him to commission the accompanying engraving despite considerable expense. But


the editor does not dismiss written reports on fashion out of hand, perhaps because the expense of engravings dictated that written descriptions were the only viable option for regular features on dress, certainly during the publication’s early years. After slighting the obscurity of the Patronessa’s description, the editor proudly announces a subsequent article inserted to convey ‘a more general description of the fashions, from a fair hand, who has for some time reigned unrivalled in [t]his department’ (6, p. 235). Even so ‘unrivalled’ a writer on fashion does not escape editorial invective, however. Following the very matter-of-fact description of ‘Ladies’ Dress for May’, the editor chivalrously thanks the correspondent ‘for resuming her pen’, while declaring his hopes that she will not ‘torture’ her readers again by taking so long to submit her report (6, p. 235). Such sugar-coated criticism was to be directed at fashion reporters throughout the magazine’s history. The soon familiar mixture of flattery and invective that accompanied fashion reports characterised the magazine’s attitude to fashion more generally: at once yielding to its attractions and attacking its unreliability and inconstancy; praising its charms yet presenting itself as sufficiently discriminating to avoid becoming fashion’s victim. Thus even while the magazine reported on the latest styles of dress, it implicitly criticised, and through criticism regulated, the information it gave readers. In the absence of editorial comment, editorial decisions may have affected how fashion reports were read. A report on ‘Fashionable Dresses for April 1783’, for example, immediately followed an instalment of ‘The Female Reformer’ entitled ‘Fashion’s The Word’, which criticised the ‘great absurdity, for ladies to follow the fashions’. The next month’s report, which commented that ‘riding habits [are] much worn in the morning’, is likewise preceded by ‘The Matron’, which includes a reader’s condemnation of the fashion for wearing riding habits, a trend which the reader argues masculinises women. In a publication so invested in promoting a bourgeois feminine ideal characterised by economic prudence, moral rectitude, maternal affection and wifely devotion, it is hard to see such juxtapositions as accidental. Though the Lady’s Magazine is often perceived as a unique literary forum which created a community of female reader/writers, it is important to note that this community was inevitably regulated by editorial decisions, interpolations and juxtapositions. If the magazine presented itself as a discursive arena for issues concerning female morality and education, then, to a significant extent, it was one in which the conclusions were inevitable and already known.


This argument is perhaps best illustrated by a 1789 two-part article entitled ‘On Dress, A Conversation Piece’. The article is presented as an overheard conversation between the fashionable Clarinda, ‘an elderly philosopher, with a portion of the cynic in him’ called Darnley, and the rational Charles. The discussion rehearses many of the pro- and anti-fashion arguments that had appeared in the publication’s pages since its first issue. The most hostile condemnations are voiced by Darnley, who perceives fashion as a danger to health, ‘a trespass on the symmetry of nature’, and fashionable women as ‘the slaves of mantuamakers and milliners, who impose any thing on you as new, that tends to the consumption of an article they may have on hand too long’ (20, p. 372). The pomposity of Darnley’s comments makes him seem ridiculous. As Charles points out, the logical conclusion of Darnley’s arguments would be the eradication of all articles of clothing which are not ‘absolutely necessary’, and with this the eradication of luxury, a necessary social evil that acts as a spur to industry. By contrast, Clarinda’s arguments against fashion’s critics seem altogether more reasonable than the counter-arguments of the elderly cynic. Fashion may be irrational, she suggests, but very few of its critics have countered it with the kind of ‘rational method … that is applied to other subjects’. Writers caution against ‘excess in dress’, yet fail ‘to lay down rules for dress … rather telling us what we ought not, than what we ought to do’. Dresses may at times appear ‘fantastic’, but given that fashions are continually changing, it is not possible they ‘should always change for the better’. Inevitably ‘disproportions’ occur, she argues, but fashion repairs itself: the fickleness which so many of its critics condemn also ensures that fashion swiftly replaces its errors. To Charles’s comments that fashion should not simply be adopted ‘because it is new’ but rather because it accords with ‘true taste’, Clarinda points out that ‘true taste’ is as ‘variable, uncertain [and] inconstant’ as fashion itself. True taste also presumes, she argues, some ‘supreme judges of taste’ whose opinion represents the true standard. But to whom can society look for a universal standard in dress when critics often condemn the styles of ‘People of rank’ and the interested views of ‘milliners and mantua-makers alike’ (20, p. 272). Clarinda’s arguments in favour of fashion win through in the first article. Charles concludes that without variations in taste there would be no variations in female appearance, effectively forcing women into an undesirable uniformity. But the concluding part of ‘Dress: A Conversation Piece’ tempers the positive account of fashion voiced in the first. The ‘Conversation’ ends with the rational, arbitrating voice of


Charles, who, having addressed the individual pro- and anti-fashion arguments, draws them together to pronounce conservatively that while ‘the ornamenting of a person is no crime, it ought to be done with that eye to simplicity which is the chief ornament of all the works of nature and art’. Charles concludes that although ‘beauty is not a permanent possession’, and ‘age and ugliness will come on is spite of all our art’, moral beauty never dies. Though it ‘may be necessary to comply with the fashions, as not to discover the pride of singularity’, to ‘consider it as the great duty of life … is unworthy of a rational creature’ (20, pp. 406–7). The article in many ways mirrors the magazine’s approach to fashion: shrewdly indulging women’s interest in dress, while containing this potentially transgressive subject within an ideological framework which privileged the mind above the body and attempted to promote morality as the new fashion. Rather than attempting to effect its reformative project through prescription per se, the magazine attempted to encourage women to reform themselves through a process of self-reflection spurred by the magazine’s content and evidenced in their own contributions to the magazine. The publication’s faith in their readers was not always well placed, however. An article entitled ‘Fashion’, a purportedly true account written by a grocer attacking the ridiculous and financially devastating consequences of his family’s efforts to follow fashion, attracted a vehement response from a female reader. A ‘Reply to Artichoke Pulse’, the pseudonymous author of ‘Fashion’, was published one month after the original article in September 1782 with a view to ‘repelling the number of attacks made on different parts of our dress’: It appears a subject of sufficient consequence, for every mortal that can hold a pen. I have often heard the haughty masters of the creation declare, ‘it is a matter the most trifling, for the ladies to have a knowledge of writing.’ – And pray Madam, had we ever so glorious an opportunity of retorting on them; when alas! their eloquence, – their abilities, can be applied to no nobler purpose, than ridiculing those they ought to protect from it? (13, pp. 475–6) The anonymous writer perceptively identifies many of the contradictions that characterise anti-fashion writing. Male writers on dress frequently ridicule fashion’s inconsequentiality, yet the vehemence of their arguments and the sheer number of articles on fashion attest to its perceived significance. The reader also sees through the mock-chivalric


strategies through which many male writers on fashion (from the Tatler and Spectator to countless other male-authored, male-oriented periodicals) claimed to educate women against a misplaced love of fashion. Such criticisms insult the intelligence of women readers, the writer of the ‘Reply’ argues, particularly ‘when the wits’ assume the ‘characters of Green Grocers’ to ‘insult us’. If men decry fashion, like female writing, as ‘trifling’, then women must counter these insinuations by using the magazine as a forum in which to express written justifications of their ‘partiality’ to dress. The ‘Reply’ constitutes a radical attempt to play men at their own game, revealing the specious mock-chivalric tactics deployed by male writers, including male contributors to the Lady’s Magazine itself, to persuade them to give up their love of finery in order to attract and reform lovers. Predictably, this radical argument is downplayed later in the article when the contributor reveals a class bias entirely in keeping with the magazine’s bourgeois temperament. Though she champions women’s right to the ‘attainment of dress’, she confines this privilege ‘to those whose fortune and connections have a right to assume it’, concluding that she hopes ‘never to see them [hooped petticoats] arrive at such a pitch, as when servants in the country used to attend the tea-tables in as large ones as ever graced the heroine of a tragedy’ (13, p. 476). While this article evidences the ultimate conservatism of even the most outspoken of the magazine’s readers, it nevertheless reveals faultlines in the magazine’s project that it virulently sought to deny. A ‘Letter to the Editor’ in the same issue is more explicit about the problems the Lady’s Magazine faces in rationalising with its female readers on the folly of fashion. Since compliance ‘with the fashions of the age … is a maxim so universally received’, the author doubts that even ‘the most rational arguments would lessen its influence’, no matter how logically or laudably motivated. On a more hopeful note, the contributor proceeds that for those ‘determined not to give up their darling follies, there may be others, whose prejudices are not so strong, who only want to be made sensible of their errors, in order to renounce them’ (4, p. 207). Some readers, the letter argues, have too strong a predilection for vice and folly to listen to the lessons of the magazine, no matter how rational and forceful the arguments it makes. Others may be more yielding readers. The magazine’s ideal reader, it implies, lies somewhere between the two: a woman who is neither wholly prejudiced nor entirely perfect, and therefore will be open to the selfreflection and reformation prompted by the publication’s articles, letters and fictions.


The Lady’s Magazine can fruitfully be understood as both a product of and an agent in the sentimental feminisation of culture in the late eighteenth century. The virtues of restraint, frugality, modesty and prudence the magazine championed placed women at the centre of the nation’s moral and financial economy while attempting, like the conduct book, to police female virtue and sexuality through the promotion of a ideal of self-regulation. Unlike the conduct book, however, the pocket book and magazine afforded the reader a physical space within which she could engage with and contest the values they promoted. In a period in which excavating reader responses to texts is notoriously difficult, magazines provide a rare test-case for examining the ways in which women internalised and contested sentimental ideology. This is not to say that the reader responses documented in the magazine’s pages are unmediated. Editorial decisions on content, the juxtaposition of articles and essays and editorial comment did much to arbitrate readers’ views, while maintaining the fiction that the magazine was an open forum in which women could freely write to, about and for other women. Nevertheless, editorial strategy anticipates and reader contributions demonstrate resistance to the magazine’s moral project. As an anonymous contributor wrote in a ‘Letter to the Editor’ in the April 1773 issue, the Lady’s Magazine had to accept resignedly that for each reader whose ‘prejudices [we]re not so strong’, there was another whose ‘ears [we]re shut against conviction’ (4, p. 207). If the magazine offered its readers a choice between folly and wisdom, like the woman of the 1780 frontispiece, there was no guarantee that she might be persuaded to make the right choice.

4 The Sentimental Fashion System: Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women and the Magdalen House for Penitent Prostitutes

On this article [of your dress] your judgment will be seen in joining frugality and simplicity together; in being never fond of finery; in carefully distinguishing between what is glaring, and what is genteel; in preserving elegance with the plainest habit; in wearing costly array but seldom, and always with ease … Were a system of this kind to prevail, I cannot help thinking, that the effects would be beneficial and happy. (James Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women, 1765)1 Dr Fordyce’s sermons have long made a part of a young woman’s library; nay, girls at school are allowed to read them; but I should instantly dismiss them from my pupil’s if I wished to strengthen her understanding … In declamatory periods Dr Fordyce spins out Rousseau’s eloquence; and in most sentimental rant, details his opinions respecting the female character, and the behaviour which woman ought to assume to render her lovely. (Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792)2 With its blend of the rhetoric of the pulpit and the paternalist prose of the conduct manual, James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women (1765) was an avowed success. Apparently inspired by an ‘unfeigned regard for the Female Sex; [and] a fervent zeal for the best interests of society’ (p. iv), the Sermons outlines, at considerable length, a feminine ideal which, in established conduct book tradition, promises to improve the 120

Sermons to Young Women and the Magdalen 121

female character and thereby repair the nation’s moral fabric. Unlike other conduct manual writers, however, Fordyce disregarded the form of the familiar letter and instead turned to the heart-felt sentiments and grand rhetorical flourishes characteristic of the eighteenth-century sermon. In addition to its more noble aspirations, the Sermons constituted an intriguing generic and literary experiment designed to satisfy the author’s ‘secret desire … of trying whether that style of preaching, which to him appears, on the whole, adapted to an auditory above the vulgar rank, might succeed on a subject of this nature’ (p. iv). Fordyce’s Sermons was immediately popular. It received lengthy and ecstatic appraisals in both the Monthly and Critical Review of 1766 and ran to 14 editions by 1813.3 But the text, like its author, was not without its detractors and is known to many modern readers through the filter of some its fiercest critics. 4 An anonymous riposte entitled Fordyce Delineated: A Satire, probably published in the same year as the first edition of the Sermons, followed swiftly on the original publication’s heels in order to object to the ‘love sick priest[‘s]’ ‘flimsy long epistle’.5 Less virulent yet no less pointed criticism was expressed by Lydia Bennet (in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice), who suffers just three pages of the work from its sanctimonious mouthpiece, Mr Collins, before desperately interjecting with some Meryton gossip.6 The most vehement and sustained critique of the Sermons, however, appears in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Significantly, Wollstonecraft’s various objections to the Sermons fall under the single umbrella term ‘sentimental’.7 The text is characterised as a pernicious ‘sentimental rant’, full of ‘mellifluous precepts’ written in an ‘affected style’ (p. 194). Like Rousseau, whose flawed sensibility led him to become ‘impassioned’ in Emile (1762) ‘when he should have reasoned’ (p. 192), Fordyce is condemned in the Vindication for his ‘love-like phrases of pumped up passion’ calculated to cajole women ‘into virtue by artful flattery and sexual compliments’ (p. 196). Appealing to its readers’ feelings, ‘as if they had only feelings’ (p. 196), the Sermons, Wollstonecraft feared, would become a self-fulfilling prophecy, encouraging women to aspire to a feminine ideal that privileged feeling and denied reason in order to make women ‘lovely’ in men’s eyes. As Syndy McMillen Conger has argued, Fordyce’s ideal woman appears the very antithesis to the female citizen imagined in the Vindication. Where Fordyce emphasised physical grace, Wollstonecraft extolled mental grace; where he encouraged women to aspire to a uniform feminine ideal, she stressed female individuality; where he


perceived an ‘angel’, she saw an ‘ass’ (p. 198).8 Nevertheless, the work of both authors is underpinned by a shared belief that women can only ever command esteem by demonstrating virtues that come from within. Though ‘beauty, gentleness, etc., etc., may gain a heart’, Wollstonecraft writes, ‘esteem, the only lasting affection, can only be obtained by virtue supported by reason’ (p. 199). Similarly, in his second sermon ‘On Modesty of Apparel’, Fordyce argues, though without Wollstonecraft’s faith in female reason, that mere ‘splendor will strike [men] at first; but on reflexion they will soon discover, that splendor of itself, like every other idol, is nothing. On the other hand, where Simplicity, the sister of Truth, appears, the attraction is eternal’ (p. 70). ‘Simplicity’ is a key term in Wollstonecraft’s argument, too: This mental grace, not noticed by vulgar eyes, often flashes across a rough countenance, and irradiating every feature, shows simplicity and independence of mind. It is then we read characters of immortality in the eye, and see the soul in every gesture, though when at rest, neither the face nor limbs may have much beauty to recommend them: or the behaviour, anything peculiar to attract universal attention. (p. 195) Here the Vindication is closest to the language and sentiment of the text it critiques, only for Wollstonecraft to emphasise the ideological divide between the works in the following sentence: ‘The mass of mankind, however, look for more tangible beauty … But, to have done with remarks that are in some measure desultory, though naturally excited by the subject’ (p. 195). Given Wollstonecraft’s dismissal of her comment on man’s search for tangible beauty as a ‘desultory’ digression in what is a notoriously digressive text, it is easy to underplay the relevance of her argument here to the critique of Fordyce’s work. Far from deviating from the matter at hand, however, this sentence epitomises Wollstonecraft’s objection to the Sermons and identifies the crux of its specious sentimentalism. Despite his apparent championing of inner virtue over external charm, Fordyce, like the ‘mass of mankind’, Wollstonecraft suggests, looks on women with ‘vulgar eyes’, searching for ‘tangible beauty’. Inspired by St Paul’s demand that women should ‘adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety’ (I Timothy 2: 9–10), Fordyce’s Sermons privileges dress in a way in which no other contemporary conduct manual did. In his persistent demands that women should dress in such a manner as to join ‘frugality and simplicity together’ and


to preserve ‘elegance with the plainest habit’, Fordyce attempted to prescribe a fashion system in which dress and outward appearance could tangibly communicate moral character. Fordyce’s emphasis on the legibility of the body (and more particularly the adorned body) firmly locates his work, as Wollstonecraft recognised, within the tradition of sentimentalism and its proponents’ attempts to find virtue’s most appropriate dress. Yet in both its systematic prescription of femininity and its efforts to educate readers in order that they could discern a woman’s character in light, or in spite, of her dress, the Sermons constitutes perhaps the most explicit attempt to reconcile the sartorial and sentimental body in the literature of the period. According to Wollstonecraft, Fordyce’s work achieved the opposite of its professed intentions. In seeking to analogise physical appearance and moral essence, Fordyce, like Rousseau and Gregory, further divorced the two, reducing women to mere outward show and denying them a rational, virtuous soul. Rather than reforming women from the inside out, as Wollstonecraft would, Fordyce’s emphasis on the external manifestation of virtue futilely attempted, she argued, a reformation from the outside in. Taking its lead from Wollstonecraft’s critique, this chapter explores Fordyce’s sentimental fashion system in light of the literary, ideological and theological contexts from which it emerged, before turning to the question of how the text’s assertion of a tangible system of legible femininity rendered it vulnerable to the kinds of corruption Fordyce sought to eradicate.9 Following a discussion of how the sentimental fashion system operates in the rhetorical sphere of the Sermons, the chapter explores how such efforts to reconcile inner and outer character were tangibly realised in the charitable institution, the Magdalen House for Penitent Prostitutes.

’I will that women adorn themselves in modest apparel’: Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women Recalling the fevered rhetoric of the pamphlets that circulated during the Reformation of Manners campaigns at the beginning of the century, Fordyce introduces Sermons to Young Women as a response to the ‘fashionable’ ‘contagion of vice and folly’ infecting the ‘characters and manners [of] the Young and the Gay of this metropolis’ (p. vii). Though the problem of immorality is widespread, however, Fordyce’s solution is localised in the figure of the female reader. In order to satisfy ‘the best interests of society’, the Sermons looks to the ‘Female Sex’, whose ‘dispositions and deportment will ever have a mighty


influence’ on the social fabric (p. iv). The thirteen sermons that follow outline a detailed blueprint of virtuous femininity, which promises to make its readers more attractive wives and better mothers. In its emphasis on the domestic woman as the locus of moral and societal reform there is little to distinguish Fordyce’s Sermons from other conduct books and advice manuals for women published from the late seventeenth century onwards. What does distinguish the work, however, is its programmatic and pragmatic prescription of female character inspired by the Pauline ideal of the morally adorned woman: ‘I will – that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broidered hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array, but (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works’ (p. 3). Apparently fearing that St Paul’s condemnation of elaborate apparel might alienate female readers all too attached to the fripperies of fashion, Fordyce is at pains to point out that ‘the passage of St Paul which I have selected for my text is not to be understood strictly and absolutely, where it seems to condemn female ornament in general’ (p. 6). Instead, he offers his own paraphrase of the Pauline epistle: I would exhort, and even enjoin christian women, always to dress with decency and moderation; never to go beyond their circumstances, nor aspire above their station, so as to preclude or hinder works of mercy; not to value themselves on their dress, or despise others more meanly habited; in short, never to spend too much time or thought on the embellishment of the body, but always to prefer the graces of the mind, modesty, meekness, prudence, piety, with all virtuous and charitable occupations, all beautiful and useful accomplishments suited to their rank and condition. (p. 7) Fordyce’s elaboration of the Pauline doctrine expands significantly beyond the parameters of the original. Modesty is understood not merely as moral ‘decency’, but as a social responsibility to live within one’s economic and social sphere. Shamefacedness and sobriety encompass a catalogue of mental graces here, including prudence, piety and, most objectionable of all in Wollstonecraft’s reading, ‘meekness’. Perhaps the single greatest departure from the original doctrine, however, is Fordyce’s attempt to demystify the Pauline ideal. Though he advocates that women dress in accordance with their sense of modesty and decency, Fordyce appears to read St Paul’s epistle metaphorically rather than literally: it is better for women to seek to


adorn their character with ‘beautiful and useful accomplishments’ than to adorn their bodies with beautiful yet ornamental trivialities. Despite this attempt to underplay the metaphysical analogies between dress and virtue implied by the original – that a woman’s virtue might actually inhabit her clothing – Fordyce goes on to re-inscribe these mystic correspondences between sartorial appearance and moral character in his effort to find virtue’s ‘most alluring aspect’: ‘Were Virtue’, said an ancient philosopher, ‘to appear amongst men in visible shape, what vehement desires would she enkindle!’ Virtue exhibited without affectation by a lovely young person, of improved understanding and gentle manners, may be said to appear with the most alluring aspect, surrounded by the Graces; and that breast must be cold indeed which does not take fire at the sight. (p. 21) The conviction that dress, as perhaps the most immediate signifier of self, might be the most suitable device through which women might articulate their virtue places the Sermons in something of an ideological cul-de-sac, however. In a typical conduct book paradox, the text’s repeated warnings that women who seek to ‘captivate [men] by an outside only’ can only ever attract base and unreliable lovers sits uneasily with the emphasis it places on physical appearance, and most particularly on clothing. If conduct manuals taught women, as Vivien Jones has argued, to ‘create themselves as objects of male desire’,10 then clothing was always a double-edged sword. To be marriageable, a woman had to be desirable; but to seek admiration through the artifice of dress was to risk contempt. Fordyce’s response to this double bind is to develop a fashion – or rather an anti-fashion – which arouses desire yet simultaneously contains that desire. In order to persuade his readers to adopt such fashions, he first has to persuade women that virtue is the ‘most alluring aspect’ they can wear. This strategy of regulating appearance by appealing to a woman’s desire to cultivate ‘Honourable Love’ and a happy marriage is largely rhetorical, however. Elsewhere, the text seems far less concerned with safeguarding the happiness of its female readers than in securing that of potential suitors, who might be duped by the surface veneer of physical and sartorial beauty. The Sermons is unclear whether society’s moral decline is to blame for the lack of sartorial distinction between the moral and the immoral, or if clothing’s power to level the good and the bad is responsible for this moral decline. What is certain, however, is that dress plays a


particularly pernicious role in a vicious circle that perpetuates vice: in an age of moral degeneracy women dress in order to distort their true characters, while dress’s power to encrypt the wearer’s social and moral worth leads to widespread dissipation. In order to reverse the process of inevitable moral decline, Fordyce constructs an ideal vision of a sartorially codified society: according to every rule of duty and decorum, there ought ever to be a manifest difference between the attire of a Virtuous Woman, and that of one who has renounced every title to the honourable name. It were indelicate, it is unnecessary, to explain this difference. In some respects, it is sufficiently discerned by the eye of the public; though, I am sorry to say, not sufficiently attended to by the generality of women themselves. If, in other respects, it be not seen, or do not strike; the cause, I apprehend, must be that declension from the strictness of morals, which was hinted at a moment before; a declension that would have shocked pagans themselves, in the purest state of ancient manners, when prostitutes were compelled to wear a particular garb, by which they were distinguished from women of virtue. (pp. 46–7) In Fordyce’s imagined England dress would act not as cover for the female body but rather as a veil, diaphanously revealing the soul – a ‘comely habit … worn as the sober, yet transparent veil of a more comely mind’ (p. 76). In seeking thus to align the adorned and sentimental body, the Sermons effectively denies female subjectivity by rendering women’s bodies, and concomitantly their minds and hearts, perpetually available for interpretation. Unable to ‘express the contempt and disgust’ he feels when faced with the ‘squalid and nasty’ appearance of ‘young ladies … when no visitors are expected’, Fordyce enjoins his female readers to be ‘always ready to receive your friends, without seeming to be caught, or being at all disconcerted on account of your dress’ (pp. 76–7). The Sermons’ proposed fashion system thus transforms women into permanently public beings whose clothing acts as a conduit through which to penetrate the surface of the body to the soul that lies beneath. As such, though undoubtedly born of a desire to suppress and regulate female sexuality, Fordyce’s system is implicitly sexual. (Note the ‘fire’ kindled in the author’s heart at the notional sight of ‘Virtue … exhibited by a lovely young person’.) If the Sermons seeks to clothe women, it does so only that their bodies


may be stripped of duplicity and artifice. However, Fordyce is not primarily concerned with the squalid depths that lie beneath the appearance of duplicitous and immoral women – even while his text sporadically and pruriently lingers on such images – but with the squalid surfaces that deck the bodies of virtuous young women who follow fashion’s dictates. His aim is nothing less than to realign body and character in a world dazzled by appearances. This emphasis on the visible signs of morality locates Fordyce’s work within a long tradition of eighteenth-century reformist writing, which presented itself as an antidote to the all too visible symptoms of vice evident in the streets and public places of England’s larger towns and cities. Perhaps the most visible, and hence most pernicious, symbol of immorality in the period was the prostitute, who acted as a walking reminder of the corruptibility and corrupting influence of the female body. It was precisely the prostitute’s manifest availability, her willingness to bring the ‘private world of sexuality and domesticity’ into the ‘public world of commerce’, that made her, as Vivien Jones argues, such a disturbing figure.11 In ‘almost every street’, Saunders Welch sensationally wrote in 1758, visitors and residents of London were greeted with the sight of ‘women publickly exposing themselves at the windows and doors of bawdyhouses, like beasts in a market for publick sale, with language, dress, and gesture too offensive to mention’.12 When philanthropic attention turned to the figure of the prostitute during the mid-century, various reformers suggested that society should look beyond the surface of her degenerate body to the socioeconomic conditions that produced her. Fordyce’s allusion to the ancient practice of compelling prostitutes to wear a particular dress by which they could be known, evident in his plea that there should be ‘manifest difference between the attire of a Virtuous Woman, and that of one who has renounced every title to the honourable name’, recalls an earlier, less sympathetic view of the prostitute, best exemplified by Some Considerations Upon Street-Walkers (1726?) – a work often attributed to Defoe. 13 The author of Some Considerations suggests that prostitution is, as Bradford Mudge argues, a ‘necessary evil–an evil that must be controlled because it will never be eradicated’. 14 Like Fordyce, he looks back to attempts made to regulate prostitution by the Jews and Greeks, commending the ‘just and … political Care’ with which the Jews distinguished prostitutes by a ‘Foreign’ habit, so that ‘if ever any of their own Women fell into this infamous Way, it was under the Disguise of a Stranger’.15 With equal


approval, Some Considerations cites the example of ‘Grecian Harlots’, ‘distinguished by their Garments from the Modest’, and ordered, ‘in Contradistinction to their Virtuous Women, to wear Gaudy and Flower’d Apparel: So that … a Harlot was as easily known by her flower’d Garment, as a Slave by his Stigma’. 16 The symbolic connections drawn between the Harlot’s person and her clothes through such forms of state regulation were apparent for all to see. Jewish prostitutes, for example, wore the ‘Disguise of a Stranger’ to symbolise their estrangement from prescribed ideals of femininity and conventional morality, while the gaudiness of the Greek prostitute’s ‘Flower’d Apparel’ signalled the impurity of her soul.17 Though Some Considerations condemns prostitution, its author, like Fordyce, ultimately finds reassurance in the offensive appearance of the prostitute, whose manifest immorality ensures that she can be avoided by the virtuous. Since immodest women are lost to moral redress, and since their self-evidently slovenly appearance offers a reliable indication of their moral status, Fordyce’s Sermons, by contrast, channels its energies into reforming the dress of virtuous women. At various points in the text, a system of rigid sartorial codification seems unnecessary. The text sporadically reassures readers that a woman’s virtue or vice is unavoidably inscribed on her physical appearance. In a young lady ‘deeply possessed with a regard for “whatsoever things are pure, venerable, and of good report”’, Fordyce suggests, decorum will be ‘spontaneously’ manifest and ‘flow with unstudied propriety through every part of her attire and demeanour’ (p. 55). Here appearance and virtue appear to exist in complete symbiosis as virtue naturally effuses from the female body to inhabit a woman’s dress and demeanour. Elsewhere, however, the text offers a far less assured account of the relationship between body, character and appearance. Fordyce’s ideal formulation of the legible body is fraught with unresolved tensions. The text’s proposed system of sartorial legibility rests uneasily on a conditional ‘ought’. Though there ought to be a visible difference between virtuous and immoral women, ‘according to every rule of duty and decorum’, in the real world, where fashion stands as one of the delineators of social status, and where financial rather than moral assets are the stock in trade, such distinctions are eroded. As such, the task of the Sermons is to dissociate dress and fashion, or, more accurately, to develop a form of dress whose virtue lies in its rejection of the wastefulness, vanity and instability for which fashion stands.


The sentimental fashion system Fordyce’s Sermons was not alone in its effort to articulate virtue’s most appropriate dress. Other writers, including Richardson, Sarah Scott, Frances Burney and Goethe, sought to appropriate clothing as a medium through which sensibility might be articulated.18 Sarah Scott’s History of George Ellison (1766), since it was published only a year after the first edition of Fordyce’s work, offers a particularly intriguing counterpoint to the Sermons in its outline of a morally communicative dress code. Dress reform is one of many philanthropic projects undertaken by Lady Ellison after her marriage to Scott’s eponymous hero. She encourages pregnant women to ‘substitute waistcoats’ for the confinement of stays and ‘distribut[es] dresses for newborn infants that did not require one pin’ in order to prevent children’s bodies becoming their parents’ ‘pincushions’.19 Lady Ellison also uses dress as an incentive for good behaviour. Each girl ‘who at fifteen [is] sober, modest, industrious, and cleanly’ is given a scarlet ribbon by the benevolent matriarch to be worn on Sundays as a signal of her virtue. This reward system soon becomes a ‘badge of great honour’ to which all young women in the community aspire and proves an effective way of monitoring their behaviour. If one of the young women ‘appeared slatternly in her dress, was remiss of her business, or neglected going to church, if her friend asked her what was become of her ribbon, the recollection never failed producing amendment’.20 As in Fordyce’s Sermons, sartorial regulation is made more palatable for the young women by the assurance that their more modest appearance makes them more desirable wives. Lady Ellison’s dress code becomes so trusted and reliable an index of worth that if ‘a young man was inclined to marry, he was directed more by the top knot than by the face of his choice of wife, that being the first object of his attention’.21 While Sermons to Young Women advocates a system of sartorial codification comparable to that outlined in Some Considerations and Scott’s George Ellison, the complete absence of sartorial specificity in Fordyce’s work is conspicuous. The Sermons neither provides details of how such a system might have operated in the past, nor any concrete sense of how it might be realised in the present or future. Rather, its sartorial ideal is expressed through a series of abstract metonymies – of humble, plain, elegant and simple dress. Though, by the text’s admission, it might have been ‘indelicate’ and ‘unnecessary’ to explain the difference between a virtuous and dishonourable woman, it might well have been necessary, and at the very least prudent, to articulate


the manner in which these characteristics might be made visible in the materiality of dress if the system was to be as effective as Fordyce projected. This lack of material particularity appears symptomatic of what Nancy Armstrong has described as the conduct book’s ‘emptiness – a lack of what we today consider “real” information about the female subject and the object world that she is supposed to occupy’.22 When the conduct book focused on the relationship between the female subject and the world around her, one of the most prevalent symbols of that ‘object world’ was dress. Though writers such as Mary Astell, the Marquess of Halifax, Wetenhall Wilkes, Thomas Marriott, John Gregory, Sarah Pennington, Hester Chapone, Hannah More and JeanJacques Rousseau, to name but a few, included sections on dress in their advice to their readers, none offered a concrete sense of how virtue might be materialised in clothing. Part of the difficulty in conceiving of such a morally communicative garb, immune from fashion’s taint, lies, Fordyce suggests, in the stranglehold fashion had taken on social mores and manners: ‘I will – that women adorn themselves in Modest Apparel’ – in modest Apparel, as opposed to that which is Indecent, and to that which is Vain: distinctions, whereof the theory, I must confess, it is in many cases not easy, and in some perhaps not practicable, to settle with precision; such a powerful influence in those matters have custom and the opinion of the world. (p. 45) Terms such as modesty and sobriety, whose meanings were once solely prescribed within a Christian context, have, the Sermons argues, been refigured by the transient trends of fashion. So inverted has the moral system become that true modesty can be construed as mere affectation. Indeed, it is precisely because fashion dictates morals, prizing certain modes of behaviour one moment and others the next, that new conduct books are always needed to counter fashion’s effect. As Thomas Marriott wrote in Female Conduct (1775), ‘Changes of Times, and Fashions, still demand / New Lessons to instruct the Female Band’.23 The challenge faced by Fordyce is thus to divorce fashion from clothing in the minds of readers: to establish a mode of dressing which can withstand the pressures and temptations to be fashionable and can be admired simply for its utility, rather than because it is à la mode. The hallmark of this ideal model of dress is ‘simplicity’, a recurrent though often loosely defined term deployed in counter-fashion attacks


in the period. Simplicity, according to the Sermons, is ‘the inseparable companion both of genuine grace, and of real modesty’ (p. 55), the ‘sister of Truth’ and that ‘which above every thing else touches and delights’ (pp. 70, 69). In its attempts to extend this moral imperative to incorporate a visual aesthetic of beauty to which women might aspire, Fordyce rehearses arguments made by Wetenhall Wilkes in his earlier conduct manual A Letter of Genteel and Moral Advice to a Young Lady (1740). Adopting a more traditional conduct book format, Wilkes’s work is presented as a letter to his niece, intended to safeguard the young woman’s virtue during his travels abroad. Should his niece suspect that his concern for her future happiness stems from anxieties surrounding her ‘future Conduct’, Wilkes assures the young woman that his advice is intended only as ‘an affectionate Caution’.24 Should she doubt this any further, the content of the letter, he suggests, will dispel her fears, for when such ‘advice comes from the Heart, it is delivered in a certain Dress which cannot wear Disguise’ (pp. 14–15). The sartorial metaphor, which appears on only the second page of the Letter, resonates throughout the text. Repeatedly, images of appropriate and inappropriate dress are evoked metaphorically as symbols of desirable or unacceptable womanhood, or deployed on a more literal level in prescriptive advice on what women should and should not wear. Wilkes’s conception of female sexuality, like Fordyce’s, is firmly located within a Christian tradition of Original Sin. The work opens with a description of the material world as a ‘System of Bodies’, but it is specifically the female body, as both cause and symptom of social and moral corruption, with which the text is concerned: ‘That Girl, who endeavours, by the Artifice of Dress to attract the Admiration, to stir up languishing Desires, and to provoke the wanton Wishes of her gay Beholders, is as guilty of breaking the Seventh Commandment, as the Woman in the Gospel that was taken in the Fact’ (p. 78). Woman, born of Eve, is ‘Dust and Ashes; her Body is weak and infirm, subject to Diseases, Decays, Death and Corruption’ (p. 72), ‘to human Frailties … and Temptations’ (p. 110). Wilkes’s Letter attempts to reform this corrupt female body by re-clothing it in a garb of naturalised virtue. Just as Wilkes’s epistolary sentiments are dressed in a language so pure that their morality cannot escape notice, so a woman should dress her body in a manner which transparently articulates her moral character. As ‘Tenderness, Friendship and Constancy drest in a simplicity of Expression, recommend themselves by a more native Elegance’ (p. 110), so virtue is best displayed by a dress which ‘resemble[s] the Plainness and Simplicity of your Heart’ (p. 74). Expensive dress is not,


Wilkes suggests, in itself a ‘Crime’ since there is no inherent ‘Harm in good Apparel’. Rather, the error lies with the wearer who transforms the need to be warmly and decorously clothed into an ‘Extravagance, Pride and Folly’ (p. 74). As such, Wilkes concludes, a woman who cultivates a fashionable exterior ‘can never have an upright Mind … nor is it possible for a gawdy Outside to have any thing wise or sedate within (p. 74). Like Fordyce, Wilkes uses St Paul’s doctrine to authorise his attack on ‘vanity in dress’ and to justify his proposed fashion reform. Significantly, however, Wilkes rewrites St Paul’s doctrine by substituting ‘Simplicity’ for ‘Shamefacedness’: A just, reasonable Modesty and native Simplicity of Looks, triumphs over all artificial Beauties … Women, adorn yourselves (says St Paul) in modest Apparel, with Shame-facedness, &c. By this Word we are not to understand awkward Bashfulness; for that bespeaks the want of GoodBreeding and Politeness, but a conscious Modesty as with becoming Assurance may very well meet in the same Person. (pp. 78–9) If shamefacedness suggests awkward innocence, then simplicity indicates studied politeness. Like sensibility itself, simplicity seems to connote a virtue that is both instinctive yet refined: a modesty that is self-conscious rather than born of ignorance. The shift from unworldly shamefacedness to polite simplicity that Wilkes’s text enacts can be seen as part of a wider shift in mid-century notions of taste. As Robert Jones has suggested, the term ‘simplicity’ was significantly redefined in philosophical works on taste and beauty in the 1740s and 1750s. Traditionally, simplicity had signalled ‘austerity and abstinence’. By the mid-century, however – a period in which notions of taste and virtue were intimately bound up with notions of politeness and consumption – simplicity no longer seemed a sufficient guarantor of virtue: ‘austerity and abstinence’, Jones argues, no longer constituted virtue, ‘only going without’.25 Like many of the writers Jones discusses, Wilkes imagines a female reader who is virtuous, polite and economically active. However, though dress is the medium through which Wilkes suggests his readers should display these moral and economic virtues, his Letter, like Fordyce’s Sermons, fails to articulate how ‘simplicity’ might be realised in material form. Rather, his concept of a ‘native Simplicity of Looks’ is obliquely metaphorised as ‘the Shades in Painting’ which ‘make those Colours look beautiful which without them would be too glaring’ (p. 77).


Though ‘simplicity’ remains an elusive characteristic here as in the Sermons, its effects are none the less clear. Fordyce remarks that if his system of sartorial simplicity prevails then ‘the effects would be beneficial and happy’: What sums would be saved, where they ought to be saved for more valuable ends! What sums would be kept at home, that now go abroad to enrich our most dangerous rivals! French gewgaws would give place to British manufactures. The ladies of this island, inferior to none in beauty, would be the apes of none in dress. They would practise that species of patriotism, which is the most proper for their sex; they would serve their country in their own way. How many evils to the community, to private families, and to individuals, would be prevented! If in some of the most expensive parts of female decoration fewer hands were employed, a much greater number on the other side would find exercise in cultivating an elegant propriety, and a beautiful diversity, through all the rest. (pp. 74–5) In its attempt to reform female manners the Sermons assaults its readers on all rhetorical flanks. The rejection of fashion is presented here as a civic as well as a moral duty. Though as Harriet Guest has recently suggested, Fordyce’s text evidences the perceived incompatibility of models of classical patriotism and notions of feminine sensibility, the Sermons nevertheless constructs its readers as female patriots.26 Barring women from ancient, public forms of patriotic display, Fordyce proffers instead an image of patriotism which is properly feminine since it is enacted within the confines of the domestic household, though its effects would resonate more widely. By embracing the simple dress produced by British manufacture, rather than the elaborate ‘gewgaws’ produced across the Channel, women can serve ‘their own country in their own way’, through a kind of mercantile patriotism that consolidates the nation’s wealth. In addition, women will bolster the nation’s moral economy by accepting the forms of economic selfregulation Fordyce promoted. The socioeconomic consequences of unemployment among those no longer needed to create elaborate costume under this new system would be more than offset, Fordyce suggests, by the general improvement in female morality attendant on the adoption of simple, British attire. Modest, virtuous, patriotic and British, sartorial simplicity seems to correspond to Nancy Armstrong’s notion of ‘inconspicuous consumption’,


which she identifies as the moral touchstone of the eighteenth-century conduct book. ‘Inconspicuous consumption’, Armstrong argues, aligns itself with the bourgeois domestic values of the middling sort, but beyond these associations proves difficult to pin down in material terms. Like the conduct books she writes about, Armstrong’s work shies away from determining how inconspicuous consumption might have been articulated in the day-to-day lives of female readers, choosing instead to describe it in terms of abstract moral and economic qualities. If inconspicuous consumption, like ‘simplicity’, is difficult to define, it is perhaps easier to describe in terms of what it is not. Although the concept of conspicuous consumption, as formulated in Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), was very much a product of nineteenth-century culture, it none the less offers illuminating insights into the social functions of dress dating as far back as the Middle Ages. Economic and social status can be connoted in various forms of display, as Veblen argued, but none has, nor ever has had, the immediacy and efficacy of dress, since ‘apparel is always in evidence and affords an indication of our pecuniary standing to all observers at the first glance’.27 The significations of dress, however, range far beyond the mere evidence of wealth. Clothing can connote the taste and leisure of the wearer as well as her/his relationship to society’s prevailing aesthetic and political standards.28 If ‘conspicuous consumption’ is characterised by degrees of wastefulness that signify degrees of wealth, status and taste, then inconspicuous consumption, by contrast, is determined by moderation, utility and restraint. The fundamental paradox of inconspicuous consumption, however, is that in order to articulate the consumer’s social and moral status, the inconspicuousness of her/his consumption must be overtly apparent. This notion of a form of self-display that is both artless and calculated to convey its artlessness lies at the heart of the paradox of Fordyce’s sentimental fashion system and firmly aligns his work with the discourse of sensibility. These paradoxes were clearly felt by Fordyce and are evident in anxieties voiced sporadically throughout the Sermons to Young Women. Though, on the one hand, the text posits an ideal correspondence between the sentimental and sartorial body, elsewhere the Sermons offers a less optimistic view of the power of dress to connote character: Is the mode then in question to be considered as inconsistent with the character of a Virtuous Woman? By no means. May not dispositions the most unchaste often hide under the mask of an attire the most modest? Who can doubt it? But what follows? That such


attire is not the properest covering of Virtue, or what, if left to pursue undisturbed the dictates of delicacy and prudence, she would not readily fly to in a state of civilized society? (p. 51) In suggesting that virtuous women can be found under the most fashionable and potentially immodest guises, and that immoral women may hide under the mask of respectable attire, Fordyce reveals the fault-line on which his text stands. In articulating a model of female respectability that could be affected without, he potentially offers the unscrupulous the means to feign virtue. As such, his system played into the hands of critics of sensibility, who, as G. J. Barker-Benfield has argued, feared ‘[t]hat sensibility could be false, assumed like a dress or a masquerade costume’.29

’I will that women adorn themselves with good works’: Quaker and Methodist dress In their insistence on a distinctive form of dress tailored to convey the wearer’s spiritual purity, Quakerism and Methodism offer important and illuminating contexts for the systems of sartorial codification envisaged by Wilkes and Fordyce.30 For both Quakers and Methodists, simplicity – of mind, heart and body – was a key concept. The term had a particular resonance for Quakers, whose plain dress constituted the most immediate evidence of their testimony to simplicity.31 Methodists were similarly called on to embrace simplicity of dress, understood, in this instance, as a single purpose to please God. In his Advice to the People Called Methodists with Regard to Dress (1745), for example, Wesley argued that costly array was ‘utterly inconsistent with simplicity’: ‘Whoever acts with a single eye’, he preached, ‘does all things to be seen and approved of God; and can no more dress, than he can pray, or give alms, to be seen of men.’32 Quakerism and Methodism have a further bearing on Wilkes’s and Fordyce’s sentimental idealisation of the body as an index of feeling. In The Culture of Sensibility, Barker-Benfield draws some suggestive connections between eighteenth-century Methodism and the cult of sensibility: both, he argues, were characterised by the capacity to feel and demonstrated through the visible performance of emotion; both rejected excessive consumption and identified themselves with the interests of women; and both sensibility and Methodism were decried by their critics as affectatious. 33 Similar arguments could be made to reveal the suggestive parallels between Quaker and sentimental


conceptions of the body. Like sensibility, Quakerism focused intensely on, indeed revered, the body. As Marcia Pointon has argued, the Quaker belief that God inhabits each individual placed immense significance on the body and its powers of signification. For Quakers, gestures and actions were subject to close scrutiny. No longer ‘assumed as merely part of social practice (like curtesying the Queen) or part of a natural process’, Quakerism understood actions as ‘systematic and therefore semiotic’.34 Sartorial asceticism played a crucial role in the corporeal semiotics of Quakerism, as it would in Methodism also. In a sermon that remained influential throughout the eighteenth century entitled ‘To Such as Followed after ye Fashions of ye World’ (1654), George Fox lamented how ye devill garnish himselfe & how obedient are people to doe his will & mind that they are altogether carryed with fooleryes & vanityes both men & women that they have lost ye hidden man of ye heart. So vast had fashion’s empire become that men felt that ‘they [should] not be respected else, if they have not Gold & silver on their backes, or his heire bee not powdered’. Women in particular were condemned by Fox for their heathenish love of gold, plaited hair and fashionable costume, and their failure to aspire to the Pauline ideal of modestly adorned femininity. Embracing ‘the aray of the world’, rather than the sobriety advised in ‘Pauls exhortation’, women were every day falling victim to ‘ye lusts of ye eye, ye lusts of ye flesh & ye prid of life’. Such women, Fox asserted, could be ‘noe Quaker[s]’.35 Like Fox’s sermon, Wesley’s Advice cites the Pauline epistle (among other biblical precedents) as an authority for his argument for a proposed system of dress reform, imagined as ‘a visible body of people, who are a standing example of this wisdom; a pattern of doing all things, great and small, with an eye to God and eternity’ (p. 9). Concerned that the desire for earthly, material reward had fatally succeeded the desire for spiritual recompense, Wesley urged his followers to let ‘a single intention to please God prescribe, both what cloathing you shall buy, and the manner wherein it shall be made, and how you shall put on and wear it’ (p. 5). Unlike Fordyce, however, Wesley argued that his projected dress code should be embraced by both men and women: if women should adorn themselves in ‘modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety’, then ‘by parity of reason, men [should] too’ (p. 6).


Unsurprisingly the characteristics of Wesley’s prescribed dress code have much in common with those of Fox, Wilkes and Fordyce. In perhaps a prudent appeal, given the sensibilities of his notoriously lower-class congregation, Wesley argued that Methodist dress should be characterised by neatness, plainness and simplicity; it should not be ‘gay, glistering, showy’ or fashionable. Yet the dress code advocated in his Advice is much more explicit than the series of abstract metonymies which characterise the sartorial systems of the Sermons and Wilkes’s Letter. Wesley insisted that followers should ‘[b]uy no velvets, no silks, no fine linen, no superfluities, no mere ornaments’. Women were not to wear ‘rings, earrings, necklaces, lace (of whatever kind or colour), or ruffles’, while men were advised not to wear ‘coloured waistcoats, shining stockings, glittering or costly buckles or buttons, either on their coats, or on their sleeves, any more than gay, fashionable, or expensive perukes’ (p. 5). Wesley argued that fashionable attire was self-indulgent, gratifying personal pride and vanity at the expense of charitable feeling. Those who possessed costly clothes were urged to ‘sell them, and give the money to them that want’, enabling followers to ‘clothe the naked, relieve the sick, the prisoner, the stranger’. Unlike Fordyce’s female readers, promised a happy marriage and the satisfaction of knowing they had fulfilled their ‘patriotic duty’, Wesley promised those followers who divested themselves of their sartorial trappings eternal reward: ‘Then shall God clothe thee with glory and honour, in the presence of men and angels: and thou shalt “shine as the brightness of the firmament, yea as the stars for ever and ever”’ (p. 16). Despite their divergent theological positions and the period of more than 100 years that separates their works, the anti-fashion arguments and rhetoric deployed by Fox, Wesley and Fordyce are strikingly consistent. Nevertheless, both Wesley and Fordyce vehemently dissociated their proposals from that of Fox. Though Wesley admitted that his sermon had been influenced by the ‘practice among the people called Quakers’ (p. 3), he was keen to point out that he did not wish his followers to imitate Friends ‘in those little particularities of dress, which can answer no possible end, but to distinguish themselves from all other people. To be singular merely for singularity’s sake, is not the part of a christian’ (p. 4). Fordyce too was keen to distinguish his proposals for modest attire against those of religious sects: The neat appearance of many females belonging to a sect well known, has been frequently remarked, and greatly admired. It would be much


more agreeable, could it be disjoined from the stiffness that accompanies it; a defect utterly inconsistent with the rules of taste. But those people are taught to despise every thing of this kind, and to understand literally such passages of scripture as seem to prohibit sumptuous apparel. In short, they plead religious principle for the form of their attire. We should believe them, but for the richness of the materials, and the fineness of the texture. Many of that sect are very intelligent: can they persuade themselves, that through all their affectation of plainness the world does not perceive the utmost pride of expence. (pp. 72–3) It is the ‘simplicity’ of Quaker dress, a simplicity that was intended to signify a ‘prelapsarian, anti-metropolitan condition’, that Wesley and Fordyce found so objectionable.36 In contrast to their own conceptions of humble, modest attire, both writers determined Quaker simplicity a form of artfulness. According to Wesley, ‘simplicity’ masked a desire for singularity, while Fordyce perceived the superficial simplicity of Friends’ dress as a form of hypocrisy.37 Wesley’s and Fordyce’s objections should be understood as part of a wider opposition to Quaker dress, evidenced in the popular literature of the period. In a thinly veiled attack on Quakerism in the June 1760 issues of Goldsmith’s Lady’s Magazine, for example, an anonymous critic condemned ‘religious uniform[s]’ adopted by groups who ‘act as if they thought the wearing a button to be a great crime, and the putting on a ruffle to be a sin against the Holy-Ghost’. The anonymous contributor argued that since there was no inherent ‘virtue or vice in dress’, every man and woman should be free ‘to follow the customs of their native country’ with regard to fashion. He added further that Quaker dress singularly failed to communicate a Friend’s moral and spiritual virtue since it reduced all ‘ranks and stations in life’ into ‘a kind of uniformity’ behind which people might hide.38 As a contributor to the November 1739 London Magazine wrote: ‘what can be more ridiculous than to suppose a Man putting on Merit with one Coat, and Demerit with another; besides, while any Value is set on Forms of Dress, it will naturally afford a Mask for the Hypocrite to deceive by, and a Snare for the Judger by Dress to fall into’.39 The Lady’s Magazine article offers a useful context for Fordyce’s Sermons. Though the essay begins with a critique of the particularities of Quaker dress, it concludes with the revelation that the sartorial and the moral operate on distinct and completely incompatible value systems, a revelation that has more wide-reaching implications than the article’s


immediate focus suggests. Fordyce’s critique of Quaker dress – a critique much in accord with that voiced by the anonymous author of the Lady’s Magazine article – ultimately serves to illustrate the limitations of his own project. So powerful is fashion’s influence that to reject its allpervasive dictates, in the manner of Quakers and other religious groups, is as suspect as embracing them. Women who turned their eye away from fashion and adopted ‘any very singular severity in dress’, as Fordyce acknowledged, would ‘hardly … escape the charge of affectation’ (p. 46).40 Fordyce’s fashion system is thus vulnerable to precisely the kinds of corruption he seeks to eradicate. His acknowledgement that fashion cannot be rejected without suspicion, that even the most virtuous garb can hide the most immoral of women, coupled with his problematic condemnation of the duplicity masked by Quaker dress, suggests that the Sermons’ ideal of legible femininity is precisely that – an ideal that can exist only in the rhetorical sphere of the text itself. Wollstonecraft’s argument that the Sermons divorced rather than aligned physical appearance and moral essence by problematically reducing women to mere surface, perceptively identifies the limitations of Fordyce’s work and the sentimental ideal which underpins it. In a 1777 diatribe against sentiment – that ‘varnish of virtue’ – Hannah More complained that the meaning of sentiment had become so ‘diametrically opposite to [its] original signification’ that the term could be used to describe both genuine virtue and its affectation.41 Among ‘women of breeding’, she lamented, ‘the exterior of gentleness is so uniformly assumed, and the whole manner is so perfectly level and uni, that it is next to impossible for a stranger to know any thing of their true disposition by conversing with them’.42 More makes explicit what the Sermons can only imply in its paradoxes and omissions: in articulating a model of female respectability that can be affected without, the text offers the unscrupulous the means to contrive it. The conditional ‘ought’ on which Fordyce’s sentimental fashion system rests thinly veils his sense that the articulation of virtue’s most appropriate dress merely afforded women another (dis)guise in which to contain and encrypt their thoughts and desires.

’The signs and fruits of reformation’: re-fashioning the prostitute in the Magdalen House Though Fordyce’s Sermons implies that the sartorial system of moral legibility it imagines can work only in the rhetorical framework of the text itself, its effort to find virtue’s most appropriate dress was a


pressing and practical consideration for institutions which adopted dress codes as reformatory tools and signs. Proposals by leading proponents of the Magdalen House for Penitent Prostitutes, including Robert Dingley, Saunders Welch, Jonas Hanway and Joseph Massie, emphasised the importance of adopting a uniform dress code throughout the institution. On one level, their arguments were simply motivated by common sense: literary and visual representations of prostitutes throughout the eighteenth century frequently referred to and imaged their slovenly, offensive clothing. But the re-clothing of the prostitute’s body was also a symbolic process, intended to precipitate and subsequently enact the reformation of the magdalen’s character. These arguments can perhaps best be elucidated with reference to the frontispiece to Jonas Hanway’s 1761 Reflections, Essays and Meditations on Life and Religion (see figure 5). 43 The accuracy of the engraving is a matter of some debate. While Robin Evans views the frontispiece as an historically accurate depiction of the uniform the charity’s inmates were forced to wear, Miles Ogborn has cast doubt on the illustration’s veracity, determining it a further example of the mythologising of the Magdalen through pictoral representation. 44 Whether the depiction of the penitent’s attire is accurate or not – and it certainly bears a strong resemblance to Horace Walpole’s description of the Magdalens’ costume quoted below – Ogborn is right to suggest that the symbolic elements of the illustration are almost more significant than any actual evidence it may or may not provide. The engraving was designed to illustrate vividly the charity’s utility, revealing its ability to transform its idle and indigent inmates into useful and productive female citizens. In contrast to the unreformed and unrepentant prostitute, who lies slumped under a tree in the engraving’s background, the reformed Magdalen, stares directly at the spectator, a symbolic open book like that she holds in her hand. Her penitence is evident in her humble demeanour, her upright pose and, above all, in the simple, modest attire that covers all but the top of her neck and her blushing face. She stands before the observer not only as spectacular proof of the charity’s success, but also as a powerful visible symbol of the sentimental ideal of moral legibility. Recent critical work on prostitution in the eighteenth century has focused on the Magdalen House as an institution that embraced the emergent discourse and ideology of sentimentalism in order to refigure the prostitute as an object of pathos and to reformulate contemporary


Figure 5 Frontispiece to Jonas Hanway’s Reflections, Essays and Meditations on Life and Religion (1761), by permission of the British Library 44.04.h.34

constructions of femininity.45 In their bid to sentimentalise the prostitute, philanthropists and social reformers professed to look beyond her corrupted body to locate the economic and social sources of that corruption. In sharp contrast to the punitive measures of sartorial codification, whipping, workhouse labour and transportation proposed


by Some Considerations on Street-Walkers, the Magdalen House was established on the premise of a process of benevolent rehabilitation, designed to reclaim the prostitute’s corrupted body for a life of virtuous and productive industry. Above all, as Donna Andrew argues, the institution owed its ‘establishment to the recognition that young girls often faced insurmountable difficulties, and that good fortune as much as rectitude separated the innocent from the fallen’.46 Rather than a cause of social corruption, the prostitute was imagined within this emergent discourse as its symptom. Robert Dingley’s Proposals for Establishing a Public Place of Reception for Penitent Prostitutes (1758), one of several proposals considered in the competition that led to the building of the Magdalen House, charts this important conceptual shift. Dingley’s pamphlet initially describes prostitutes in the conventional language of dirt and disease – they are evocatively depicted as ‘the common dregs infesting our Streets’ – before subsequently questioning this hostile representational tradition by referring to their trade as a ‘fatal necessity’: Surrounded by snares, the most artfully and industriously laid, snares laid by those endowed with superior faculties, and all the advantages of Education and fortune, what virtue can be proof against such formidable Seducers, who offer too commonly, and too profusely promise, to transport the thoughtless Girls from Want, Confinement, and Restraint of Passions, to Luxury, Liberty, Gaiety and Joy?47 The avarice and ambition for which prostitutes were frequently condemned earlier in the century has been transformed, in Dingley’s account, into an understandable ambition to be freed from the shackles of poverty. Other writers, however, though still prepared to cast the prostitute as victim rather than instigator of social corruption, were less sympathetic to women’s desire to seek social advancement through prostitution. Saunders Welch’s Proposal to Render Effectual a Plan, To remove the Nuisance of Common Prostitutes from the Streets of this Metropolis (1758), for example, highlighted the misplaced conventions of the mistressservant relationship as one of the leading causes of prostitution, particularly the practice of giving cast-off clothes to servants. Ruined ‘by the false good-nature of their superiors’, lady’s women, Welch argued, were frequently ‘seen flaunting in [their] mistress’s left-off clothes, and ridiculously affecting the airs of a woman of quality’. As a result of their mistresses’ generosity, servants’ minds became ‘puffed up by


vanity’, fatally weakening the ‘respectful distance which should always subsist’ between a mistress and her servant (p. 5). The wearing of costly apparel, according to Welch, caused servants to falsely prize themselves and their labour and ‘induce[d] them to insist on high wages’. Having secured higher wages, ladies’ maids entered a vicious circle of fashionable dissipation as they spent ‘the whole of their wages … in cloaths’, only for them to require higher wages to purchase more clothing. Valuing their fashionable appearance more highly than their labour, these women were left with nothing to trade in but their appearance once they lost the positions they had secured: ‘if they are thrown out of place, what recourse have they for support, but first to pawn or sell their cloaths, and then to prostitute their persons?’ (p. 5). Once embarked on a life of prostitution, dress no longer acted as a form of temptation for the former servant, Welch suggests, but as a form of imprisonment. The prostitute became her bawd’s prisoner: her ‘cloaths [we]re taken from her’ in order that her bawd might ‘procure’ for her a ‘flimsey suit of either secondhand silk or linen’ more appealing to her victim’s future clients. In accepting the clothes, the prostitute effectively became the property of her mistress. Any attempt to leave the ‘wicked course of life’ she had adopted would be met with ‘a Marshalsea-Court writ for the cloaths and board’ and possible imprisonment (p. 12). Dress, once perceived as a means of evading and escaping economic and social confinement, became the manacle of an altogether more repressive and abhorrent form of servitude.48 The role of dress in Welch’s account of the harlot’s progress adds an additional dimension to the ‘seduction-into-prostitution’ narrative which Markman Ellis identifies in the fictionalised Magdalen texts published as fundraisers for the institution, and which closely resemble the ‘seduction-into-prostitution narratives typical of the sentimental novel’.49 According to the Proposals, women were seduced by the lure of fashion and its promise of social advancement, and were in turn seduced. The fine line separating seduction by fashion and physical seduction, and similarly between selling clothes and selling the body, is a recurrent theme in eighteenth-century prostitution narratives.50 As I argue in Chapter 1, much early eighteenth-century writing on servants expressed concern that the customary practice of giving or bequeathing secondhand clothing to maids would inevitably lead to a disintegration of the social and moral order. Indeed, so widespread were such assumptions, that Richardson’s Pamela could maintain narrative suspense by playing with, and ultimately subverting, its readers’ expectation that Pamela’s all too willing acceptance of her


deceased mistress’s clothes signalled her openness to seduction by Mr B. The fictional progresses depicted in sermons and novels inspired by and written for the Magdalen House alarmingly extended such seduction narratives to include not only servants, but also members of the middling sort. ‘The Real History of a Magdalen’, an essay in William Dodd’s collection The Visitor (1764), for example, relates the story of a tradesman’s daughter whose mother encourages her to live above her station: ‘With this view she always followed the fashion: her dress was ever in the mode’. The Magdalen explains that she means not to ‘dishonour [her] mother by repeating these things, which may appear trifling’, but rather because they ‘were in reality the inlets to [her] ruin’.51 Her mother dies, leaving the daughter ill-equipped to run the family household since she had ‘been initiated into all the fashionable diversions and amusements’ at the expense of an education in the skills of domestic management.52 The Magdalen’s seduction by the lure of fashionable life leaves her sexually vulnerable. She is subsequently seduced by a merchant before turning to prostitution. Magdalen House pamphleteers recognised that if dress was a catalyst for the Madgalen’s fall, it could spur her to reform. In order to reverse the harlot’s progress, women had first to be re-clothed in a modest garb that signified their return to a life of virtue and demonstrated their repentance for their life of sin. Although proponents of the House presented different accounts of the causes of prostitution, they were united in their calls for a uniform for the institution’s inhabitants. Jonas Hanway proposed that they ‘shall wear an uniform of light grey, of a durable, but soft and agreeable manufacture, and in all their whole dress, be as plain and neat as possible’.53 Dingley’s proposal mirrors Hanway’s almost word for word: ‘they [shall] wear an uniform of light grey, black, or sky blue; and in all their Dress, be as plain and neat as possible’ (p. 13). Such uniforms were intended to have a levelling effect, to convey the state to which the women had reduced themselves and to signal their uniform desire for rehabilitation. As Dingley proposed, ‘the Objects, in general, [should] be cloathed and fed meanly’; only those judged by their ‘Behaviour and Education’ to be worthy of preferable treatment could expect to be ‘clothed and fed accordingly’ (p. 13).54 Despite the charity’s emphasis on rehabilitation rather than punishment, the regulation of the Magdalen’s dress played a key role in the House’s disciplinary regime. Although Hanway argued that all penitents should be treated ‘with such regard and civility, as shall convince them that nothing more is meant than their own happiness’, he


emphasised the importance of not ‘showing any such indulgence as shall tempt the evil-minded to abuse the charity’ (p. 1). Unlike the Marine Society, a charity for which Hanway was also a leading proponent, and which treated uniforms as incentives to encourage boys and men to sign up for sea service, the Magdalen House made dress as austere as possible, in order to remove the temptations it posed to its weak and libidinous inmates.55 If clothing was deemed a necessity for the impoverished men and boys of the Marine Society, then to the women of the Magdalen House it could act as a fatal indulgence. Such forms of indulgence, Hanway felt, could ‘disqualify those who are really penitent, from procuring a maintenance by virtuous industry’ – the cornerstone of the institution’s process of rehabilitation – by encouraging women to value themselves on their appearance rather than on their labour.56 As Miles Ogborn argues, women’s ‘sexuality – and what they chose to do with it – was understood within [eighteenth-century] political arithmetic as the foundation of national and imperial strength and wealth. Their private activities had public consequences, and therefore had to be regulated’.57 Perhaps the most devastating of these consequences was the weakening of the nation’s labouring capacity as women turned to illegitimate forms of labour that were both non-productive and non-reproductive. The Magdalen House sought to rehabilitate its inmates by integrating them fully within the labour market. Joseph Massie’s Plan for the Establishment of a Charity-House for Exposed or Deserted Women and Girls, and for Penitent Prostitutes (1758), for example – a proposal which would have extended the charity’s remit to include women who were simply unable to find work – advocated the spinning of linen yarn as a form of female labour that would improve the women’s character as well as the national economy: as Linen Cloth is a common and very great Necessary of Life, there is a Certainty that it will always be in Fashion and very much wanted; so that if those Women and Girls should annually spin Linen Yarn as aforesaid, to the value of Four Thousand Pounds exclusive of the Materials, this Kingdom would probably gain £4000 a Year: because the Ballance [sic] of Trade between Great Britain and Russia, as well as some other Northern Countries from whence we have coarse Linen Cloth, is well known to be much against us.58 Like Massie, other Magdalen pamphleteers’ presented the textile and dressmaking trades as ideal employments for the reformed prostitutes.


The fact that many also saw these trades as the catalyst for the Magdalen’s fall is an unacknowledged paradox of much writing produced by and for the charity. Proponents of the charity such as John Fielding perceived badly managed female trades as a bedrock of prostitution, highlighting particularly those in which numbers of women worked together: ‘that those Manufactures, in which Women are employed and Numbers of them are collected together, are apt to promote Tea and Gin-drinking; this is very evident among the Lace-makers in Buckinghamshire’.59 Characteristically, Fielding characterises labour as both a cause and curative of female immorality. Only three pages before Fielding condemns the immorality of female lace-makers, he lists trades that the penitents should devote themselves to in the institution. The majority of these trades, which include mantua-making, stay-making, the making of cloaks, petticoats and children’s coats, fall under the categories of millinery or dressmaking.60 Fielding’s text fails to address the paradox it exposes or to provide a coherent sense of what distinguishes a dangerous employment from a virtuous occupation. What is certain, however, is that simply entering into a purportedly legitimate trade is insufficient to protect women from vice once they have re-entered society. Rather than facing the insurmountable task of reforming the female labour market, therefore, Fielding’s text works towards the reformation of the female labourer herself. However, like Fordyce’s readers, who could not simply be virtuous but had to demonstrate their virtue at all times, it was not enough for the charity’s inmates to repent: their penitence had to be in evidence at all times. The Magdalen House’s status as a charity, reliant on voluntary contributions and open to public scrutiny, necessitated that its success in rehabilitating fallen woman was apparent for all to see.61 Robert Dingley implicitly acknowledged the Magdalens’ function as spectacle in his persistent reference to prospective inmates as ‘Objects’ – a term that serves to divorce the women from their trade and signals the extent to which the charity needed to transform its inmates into worthy recipients of benevolence if it were to be economically viable. The modestly adorned, industrious penitents were regularly paraded at the Chapel’s services in order to solicit financial support. As William Dodd wrote, at a time when ‘Vice is, in some respects, become fashionable’ and immorality visible on the streets of the city, it was necessary to counter these signs with visible incarnations of rehabilitated virtue. Though ‘the gay [and] the grave … the thinking [and] the thoughtless’ had balked at the charity’s claims that it could rehabilitate prostitutes,


Dodd claimed that they need only look at the Magdalens’ bodies to find spectacular and incontravertible ‘proof, that the reformation of [these women] is nothing ideal, their behaviour, in the general, hath been excellent and exemplary; and all the signs and fruits of reformation, which could be fancied or formed, have and continue to shew themselves’.62 Dress was perhaps the most palpable sign and fruit of the Magdalen’s repentance. Giving up her clothes on entrance to the House was a symbolic rejection of the prostitute’s former self and signalled her acceptance of her new life. According to Dingley’s Proposals the process of admission was to begin with making the women ‘clean’; subsequently, they should ‘have their Names registered, and take on them some other name, by which Name only they shall be called and known, when entered into the House itself’. Finally, the women were forced to reject their own clothes and adopt the institution’s ‘uniform’ (pp. 12–13). The uniform was a logical endpoint of the sanitising process which began when the women were admitted to the House – a process that can be understood as part of a broader regulatory programme of ‘social hygiene’ identified by Peter Stallybrass and Allan White.63 But the progression Dingley outlines – from giving up one’s name to giving up one’s dress – suggests that the uniform served a more powerful symbolic function than Dodd implies. As Pamela makes clear when the heroine sews her letters to her family into the folds of her petticoat, self-narrative and costume were irrevocably intertwined in this period – both were understood as potent signifiers of self. In giving up their names, the women effectively rejected their former identity and with it their life story. They became generically known as ‘Magdalens’, a term which, as Van Sant suggests, overwrote the prostitute’s individual story. This overwriting of the prostitute’s identity was reinforced by the plaques that appeared in the charity’s wards reminding the women to ‘Tell your story to no one’.64 Not only were the women ordered to reveal nothing about their past life, but, as Jonas Hanway recommended, those overseeing the charity were also told that they should ‘not divulge anything relating to the persons or characters of the women who are admitted, nor any of their family, nor of the persons who debauched them’. To leave the reader in no doubt on this issue, Hanway added emphatically: ‘No enquiry shall be made into any such circumstances’ (p. 7). Hanway’s comments betray an anxiety about the power of narrative to propagate immorality. Though the charity would publish various supposedly ‘true’ histories of the House’s inmates, the Magdalens


themselves were not permitted to relate their own stories for fear, perhaps, that they might have insufficient control over the moral implications of their tales to ensure that they would function as reforming narratives. The highly sentimentalised narratives published as fundraisers for the charity were written by third parties, and there is no concrete evidence to suggest that they were based on the real lives and experiences of women within the House.65 While the charity was content to give the Magdalens individual identities in the fiction it produced, within the confines of the institution’s walls it sought to erase the identities of its inmates in order to render them blank canvases on which the observer could project his own version of her narrative. The readings produced by these observers were far from monolithic, however, as Horace Walpole much quoted description of his visit to the Magdalen Chapel in Goodman’s Fields suggests. In a letter to George Montagu written in January 1760, Walpole recognised the extent to which spectacle and sentiment were inextricably, and fatally, entangled in the Magdalen House. According to Walpole, Dodd staged his sermon to brilliant effect. His ‘performance’ began as soon as its illustrious audience entered the chapel: ‘the organ played, and the Magdalens sung a hymn in parts; you cannot imagine how well’. The Magdalens’ austere and dull dress – ‘greyish brown stuffs, broad handkerchiefs, and flat straw hats, with a blue ribband, pulled quite over their faces’ – formed a dramatic contrast to the ‘orange and myrtle’ that decorated the chapel, and both elements combined to provide a suitably scenic backdrop for the flamboyant Reverend Dodd, who ‘apostrophized the lost sheep, who sobbed and cried for their souls – so did my Lady Hertford and Fanny Pelham, till I believe the City dames took them both for Jane Shores’. Where his female companions were transported by Dodd’s ‘eloquently and touchingly’ executed performance, Walpole refused to be taken in by the charity’s bid to excite public support through the cynical staging of sentimental virtue. Walpole never quite believes what he sees in the Magdalen House. Initially, he is ‘struck and pleased’ with the palpable modesty of two penitents who swoon away ‘with the confusion of being stared at’. The sight of the governors’ black and white tipped ‘wands’ soon disrupts Walpole’s sentimental reverie, however, and puts him ‘in mind of Jacob’s rods that he placed before the cattle to make them breed’.66 Within a few lines, the austere, desexualised penitents displayed in the Magdalen Chapel have been transformed into the sexually appetitive whores of traditional prostitution narratives.


While this reading of the Magdalens may reveal more about Walpole than it does about the women themselves, the letter to Montagu none the less exposes the potential pitfalls of the charity’s reliance on displays of virtue as evidence of the project’s success. Since, as Caroline Gonda has recently argued, ‘female virtue is coded as that which is private and silent’, a public display of virtue was ‘a contradiction in terms, something which cannot be proved as true’.67 Such contradictions were not lost on the charity. Magdalen governors were deeply concerned that they might be deceived by the signs of penitence enacted by women seeking admission to the House. Prospective inmates of the Hospital had to prove their desire to repent in a petition to the committee of the institution: ‘being thus examined, if approved, to be wrote on, “Found proper,” and so preserved, as a Proof of the Petitioner’s Sincerity’. Sincerity was not always easy to detect, however. Dingley acknowledged that ‘imposition[s]’ in the petitions might become evident only after inmates had been admitted to the charity. Dingley’s fear that prospective inmates might create false petitions in order to gain admission to the charity belies his faith in the penitents’ function as a visible testament of the efficacy of the Magdalen project. As I have suggested, autobiographical narrative and dress are intimately connected in Dingley’s pamphlet: both are manifestations of self of which the prostitute must be divested before the process of rehabilitation can begin. Just as the Magdalen might construct a narrative of regret in order to obtain a place within the House, so she could use the charity’s uniform to maintain the fiction of her penitence. Though the Magdalen House distinguished itself from institutions such as the Lock Hospital for venereal disease, on the grounds that it was concerned not merely with ‘the miseries that oppress [women’s] Bodies’, but those ‘far more afflicting’ maladies ‘which must oppress their unrepenting Souls’, the charity none the less placed considerable emphasis on the bodies of its inmates.68 The preoccupation with external appearance and behaviour in the pamphlets and sermons produced by the charity suggests that the inmates’ most important function was to enact penitence (and thereby prove the charity’s efficacy) just as Fordyce’s ideal woman was enjoined to live out the Pauline ideal of female virtue. In their reliance on dress as a signifier of virtuous femininity, however, both the Magdalen House and Fordyce’s Sermons reveal the untenability of their projects and the sentimental ideal that underpins them. Read within the context of the concerns raised by Magdalen pamphleteers, the penitent displayed in the frontispiece to Hanway’s Reflections no longer seems the unequivocally


modest and humbled woman she at first appeared. Rather, her blushing gaze unashamedly confronting the spectator suggests a possible air of defiance, a certain knowingness and refusal to be reduced to the reassuring symbol of penitence the charity desired. Even displayed in the sartorial ‘signs and fruits’ of her reformation the spectator must accept that we can never know precisely what she is thinking, and must acknowledge that she may be a far cry from the symbolic open book she carries in her hand.

5 ‘The cambrick handkerchief sensibility’: Re-figuring Sentiment and fashion in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda

During the 1780s and 1790s the literature of sensibility and the woman of feeling it reified increasingly came under attack from critics who argued that the fine line between virtue (affect) and its mere performance (affectation) had blurred to the point of obscurity. The assault on sentimental literature during these decades was the product of a complex conflagration of social, political and literary concerns which cohered in response to the French Revolution, but it was not without precedent. As the backlash against Pamela suggests, and this book has argued throughout, sentiment and sensibility had always been subject to intense scrutiny and debate.1 Nevertheless, the intensification and politicisation of these debates in the 1790s irrevocably tainted the literary mode in a way in which earlier criticism had not. Perhaps the most straightforward explanation for the mode’s critical demise is, as Chris Jones has suggested, that sentimental literature had simply come to the end of its natural life. Outdated and increasingly removed from the moral and philosophical concerns from which it emerged, sentimentalism simply became a parody of itself that irreversibly eroded the foundations on which it had once stood. Jones is quick to dismiss this argument as a fully viable explanation for the increasingly hostile critical backlash against sensibility, however, arguing that the critique of sentimental literature was informed predominantly by ‘political, social and moral’ considerations.2 Where advocates of sensibility celebrated ‘unconditioned natural feelings’ and the affective ties that bind humanity, its critics increasingly pointed to the extension of the sentimental argument to state politics, 151


in which the discourse of sensibility was deployed to translate ‘powerbased relationships into loyalties upheld by “natural” feelings’.3 In the politically volatile climate of the 1790s, the ‘naturalness’ of these power-based relationships, which rendered subjects loyal to their monarchs and women to their husbands, came under intense scrutiny, which the sentimental mode found difficult to withstand. Simultaneously, sentimental literature came under fire for its displacement of traditional gender roles. Whereas the works of Sterne, Goldsmith, Rousseau and Burke legitimised the feminised virtues of the man of feeling, as Claudia L. Johnson has argued, sentimentalism promised no ‘socially productive parity between the sexes’. In the century’s final decades, female sensibility was increasingly characterised as ‘inferior, unconscious, unruly or even criminal’.4 Sensibility’s double-handed reification of the feminine troubled eighteenth-century writers as much as it concerns Johnson. Belying more enthusiastic readings of sensibility’s feminisation of culture by critics such as Terry Eagleton and G. J. Barker-Benfield, Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft argued that sentimental literature prized woman’s supposedly natural susceptibility to feeling only in order to deny her the capacity for rational thought. Sensibility’s intense focus on feminine behavioural traits and emotional (as opposed to intellectual) response falsely championed affect above integrity and encouraged women to cultivate the semblance, not the substance, of virtue. Dress, as both a metaphor for affectation and a symbol of man’s fetishisation of woman, provided a peculiarly resonant language through which writers could attack the sentimental mode. Sartorial language is, for example, central to Wollstonecraft’s condemnation of the literature of sensibility in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Sentimental novelists are ‘dangerous’ figures: Dangerous, because they not only afford a plausible excuse to the voluptuary, who disguises sheer sensuality under a sentimental veil; but as they spread affectation, and take from the dignity of virtue. Virtue, as the very word imports, should have an appearance of seriousness, if not of austerity; and to endeavour to trick her out in the garb of pleasure, because the epithet has been used as another name for beauty, is to exalt her on a quicksand; a most insidious attempt to hasten her fall by apparent respect.5 The Vindication exposes sensibility as a false idol: a metaphoric fashion doll tricked up in a ‘garb of pleasure’ in order to dupe women into

Re-figuring Sentiment in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda 153

accepting modes of display and models of behaviour which ultimately lead to their degradation. This curious mingling of the languages of dress and sentiment during this period of intense critical debate intriguingly recalls the controversy produced by the publication of Pamela which fuelled the explosion of sentimental literature in the 1740s. Wollstonecraft’s efforts to divest sentiment of its artificial drapery recall the act of stripping Pamela’s adorned body to reveal her essential corruption in antiPamelist readings of the novel. The depiction of sentimental virtue as a disguise, the pun on the double meaning of ‘tricking’ as both dressing and deceiving, and the sense that virtue’s appropriate dress is not one of pleasure but of seriousness, echo the arguments of critics who objected to the heroine’s delight in wearing her deceased mistress’s clothes, her pleasure in ‘tricking’ up in modest attire, and Richardson’s attempts to dress a titillating narrative in the guise of a didactic novel. At the same time that Wollstonecraft recalls these earlier arguments, however, she also signals how far the debate about sensibility had progressed by the 1790s. Unlike more sober-faced anti-Pamelists such as Charles Povey, Wollstonecraft questions the misogynist, sentimental logic which would equate virtue and pleasure: ‘Virtue and pleasure are not’, she wrote, ‘so nearly allied in this life as some eloquent writers have laboured to prove’ (p. 170). In her Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), Hannah More would deploy sartorial vocabulary more prophetically to augur the death of sensibility. Writing seven years after Wollstonecraft, More could talk of sentiment in the past tense only: [A] class of contemporary authors turned all the force of their talents to excite emotions, to inspire sentiment, and to reduce all mental and moral excellence into sympathy and feeling. These softer qualities were elevated at the expence of principle; and young women were incessantly hearing unqualified sensibility extolled as the perfection of their nature; till those who really possessed this amiable quality, instead of directing, and chastising, and restraining it, were in danger of fostering it to their hurt, and began to consider themselves as deriving their excellence from its excess. 6 Rather than advocating that women refine their sensibility by ‘divert[ing] feeling to its proper course’, as More had herself once directed, sentimental novels encouraged women to allow their sensibility to override their moral principles and reason. This false reification


of feeling, she lamented, encouraged women to place excessive significance on their ‘nerves’ where sensibility could be ‘easily found or feigned’. By privileging an ‘excessive display of feeling’, sensibility brought into ‘question the actual existence of that true tenderness’, until the fatal moment when ‘Fashion … by one of her sudden and rapid turns, instantaneously struck out … real sensibility’ (I, p. 74). The increasing synonymy of sentiment and fashion, in other words, sounded the death knell for sensibility. It is tempting to read More’s usage of the term ‘fashion’ here as analogous to its function in her earlier ‘Sensibility’ (1782): not simply as an allusion to the sentimentalism’s damaging fashionableness, but to ‘the pictur’d dress’ of sensibility, those potentially contrived external gestures and sartorial displays problematically championed by some of the mode’s most ardent proponents. Read in this way, More’s Strictures thus realises the fears articulated in her poetic epistle and implied in the paradoxes and contradictions of Richardson’s Pamela and Fordyce’s Sermons: that the very articulation of the sentimental ideal potentially reduced it to a set of codified appearances and imitable gestures. The fatal synonymy of sentiment and fashion was also recognised by one of sentimental literature’s less obvious, yet no less incisive, critics, Maria Edgeworth. Many of Edgeworth’s educational works bear witness to her suspicion of sentimental literature. The Julia and Caroline exchange in Letters for Literary Ladies (1795), for instance, traces a correspondence between a woman of sense and a woman of sensibility, which tragically concludes with the death of the fashionably dissipated and sentimental Julia. Edgeworth’s Practical Education (1798), co-written with her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, similarly condemns ‘the extraordinary sensibility’ displayed in the novels of Rousseau and Sterne. While she acknowledged that a heightened emotional sensitivity and sympathy for those in distress might be considered desirable qualities, Edgeworth argued that literary sentimental exchanges offered a highly undesirable ‘model for imitation’, since those who took part in them were usually ‘persons of an abandoned character’.7 The dangers sentimental literature posed to children, and to young women in particular, was a recurrent theme in Edgeworth’s fiction too. Angelina, published in Moral Tales (1801), wittily satirised sentimental literature’s tendency to seduce readers and fill their vacant minds with romantic fictions and delusions. The tale follows the eponymous young heroine as she begins a correspondence with a professional


sentimental novelist writing under the pseudonym Araminta. Persuaded that Araminta is the only true friend she has, Angelina leaves her home and embarks on a long journey to meet her correspondent. When she finally locates her idol, her ideals are shattered: the mannish Araminta is vulgar, partial to alcohol and a young male Quaker.8 In the same year that Angelina was published, Edgeworth also produced Belinda, a three-volume ‘Moral Tale’, which follows the heroine’s progress from her induction into fashionable life to her eventual marriage.9 Although the novel is perhaps best known for its depiction of diseased motherhood, symbolised by Lady Delacour’s disfigured breast, Edgeworth’s moral tale is remarkable for its systematic appropriation and dismantling of the conventional tropes of sensibility in a bid to rewrite the sentimental novel from within. In the ‘Advertisement’ to Belinda, Edgeworth designated her work a ‘Moral Tale – the author not wishing to acknowledge a Novel’ since ‘so much folly, errour, and vice are disseminated in books classed under this denomination’.10 Her decision was not without precedent: Sarah Fielding was one of several novelists who used the term ‘moral tale’ to describe her fiction. Nevertheless, Mitzi Myers has argued that Edgeworth’s assertion that her writing constituted a different species of literary endeavour from that epitomised by the sentimental novel amounted to an ‘ambitious claim for her fiction’s philosophical and moral significance as opposed to what contemporary reviewers recurrently call ordinary novel manufactory – the commodification of unchallenging amusement’.11 By rejecting the term ‘novel’, Edgeworth sought to express her distaste for the propensity of fiction, and particularly of sentimental fiction, to produce romantically deluded and intellectually weakened readers. In its bid to counter the ‘folly, errour and vice’ of the contemporary novel, Belinda sought to expose the extent to which sensibility and fashion (supposedly two of the novel’s defining preoccupations) corrupted femininity by encouraging women to live outside the domestic household both imaginatively and in fact. These concerns are dramatised throughout Edgeworth’s text, but cohere most intensely in the figure, and the body, of the novel’s most compelling character, Lady Delacour. Lady Delacour’s decision to send her daughter Helena to be raised by the Percivals is a subject that commands the attention of many characters in the novel, as it does literary critics. Discussing the rejection of Helena, Margaret Delacour (Lord Delacour’s aunt) refers to her niecein-law as ‘a monster’ who ‘hates her daughter’ (p. 103). In the mother’s defence, Clarence Hervey remarks that ‘lady Delacour [is] a woman of


great sensibility’ (p. 103). Margaret Delacour’s swift riposte suggestively equates sensibility with fashion in a now familiar manner: ‘Sensibility!’ exclaimed the indignant old lady, ‘She has no sensibility, sir – none – none. She who lives in a constant round of dissipation; who performs no one duty; who exists only for herself … O, how I hate the cambrick-handkerchief sensibility, that is brought out only to weep at a tragedy! Yes; lady Delacour has sensibility enough, I grant ye, when sensibility is the fashion.’ (p. 103) Suggesting that Hervey has mistaken emotional self-indulgence for genuine maternal feeling, Margaret Delacour characterises sentiment as a fashionable prop to be displayed as the scene demands. The allusion to the handkerchief here is no less resonant than Wollstonecraft’s description of sentimentalism as a veil. While Wollstonecraft’s arguments evoke – intentionally or not – the literary debates on Pamela’s appearance in her homespun gown and petticoat, so Mrs Delacour’s comments might be read as an allusion to one of the best known scenes of sentimental literature. Although the handkerchief is perhaps the most resonant icon of sentimental exchange, nowhere is it more central than in Yorick’s meeting with the widowed Maria in Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1768). The narrative of Maria’s personal tragedy inspires a speechless exchange of emotion between the two protagonists, emblematised by the exchange of Yorick’s handkerchief, soon saturated after being ‘steep’d’ in the tears of hero and heroine. In recalling this earlier work, Mrs Delacour’s comments support Edgeworth’s critique of Sterne’s writing in Practical Education as an influential yet inappropriate behavioural model. For, no matter how noble the sentiments of the original scene, Lady Delacour’s imitation of this literary example proves how easily these metaphysical ‘combinations of matter and motion’ may be translated into meaningless posturing.12 Despite Margaret Delacour’s comments, however, it would be inaccurate to label Edgeworth as a straightforwardly anti-sentimental writer or Belinda as an anti-sentimental novel. For Edgeworth, as for More and Wollstonecraft, instinctive sensibility, where mediated by reason, is an essential characteristic of the domestic, maternal woman. Rather than seeking to denigrate sentiment, Edgeworth sought to strip it of the fashionable veneer of affect. Belinda dramatises this attempt to recover what More termed ‘real’ sensibility


through the narrative of Lady Delacour, who is made to live through the personal tragedy of a cancer she imagines is killing her, and is, in the process, divested of the sartorial and corporeal symbols that emblematise her pernicious sentimental character. In following this line of argument, this chapter seeks to challenge dominant accounts of the novel, which have commonly read Belinda within the critical framework provided by Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction.13 Within Armstrong’s model, Belinda is seen to enact the triumph (although not an unqualified triumph) of bourgeois domesticity, represented by the novel’s heroine, over the aristocratic dissipation of Lady Delacour. This conflict between competing class and gender ideologies is played out on several levels in Edgeworth’s novel. Susan Greenfield, for example, emphasises the way in which this battle is staged in terms of antithetical modes of self-production: Lady Delacour’s preoccupation with ‘material appearances’ is played off against the domestic ‘interiorised self’ of the novel’s heroine. 14 Heather MacFadyen, on the other hand, argues that this conflict is enacted as a struggle between two modes of reading: the ‘fashionable’ reading of Lady Delacour, of which her diseased breast is the synecdoche, and the ‘domestic’ reading of Belinda, which eventually effects the reformation of her aristocratic companion.15 The tendency to equate Belinda with the domestic or sentimental (while Lady Delacour is conflated with the fashionable or the antisentimental) has obscured the extent to which fashion and sentiment were, as we have seen, deeply and problematically entangled in this period. When placed within the context of 1790s debates on sensibility, Belinda appears a far less clear-cut (and straightforwardly sentimental) text than it has often appeared. Far from equating the sentimental and the domestic, Edgeworth’s novel reveals the extent to which sensibility had become estranged from the bourgeois moral values with which it had been traditionally aligned. This chapter suggests that Lady Delacour’s illness is not the symptom of her aristocratic dissipation, neither is it – as it is most commonly depicted – a symbol of her failure to embrace a model of feminine domestic sensibility. Rather, her disease is the very product of a pathologised sensibility that assumes that the body speaks truths about inner character. Only by deflecting attention away from the novel’s critique of an aristocratic dissipation which is commonly read as the antithesis of bourgeois sentimental virtue can the novel’s systematic critique of sensibility be unlocked.


Belinda: a counter-sentimental novel The apparently inextricable connection between fashion, sensibility and moral impoverishment explored throughout the preceding chapters – and emblematised in the image of the ‘cambrick handkerchief’ – is suggested by the title of Edgeworth’s work: Belinda, of course, alludes to the heroine of Pope’s Rape of the Lock (1714), the beautiful nymph whose lock of hair is responsible for ‘the Destruction of Mankind’.16 As Anne Mellor has argued, Edgeworth’s allusion to Pope’s heroine signals her intention to paint ‘the portrait of the new Belinda, the woman who will replace Pope’s “fairest of mortals” as the envy of her age’.17 Yet if, as Mellor implies, the novel’s title is expressive of Edgeworth’s hope for the future literary representation of women, it also signals how authors struggled to rewrite prior literary tradition and women struggled to unwrite the narratives inscribed on them by their names, gender and birth. Like Burney’s Evelina, Belinda has been ‘educated chiefly in the country [and] been inspired with a taste for domestic pleasures’. She is ‘disposed to conduct herself with prudence and integrity’ and possesses a character ‘yet to be developed by circumstances’ (p. 7). Despite the suggestion that Belinda’s character is a tabula rasa, and although she displays little in common with her Popian predecessor, Edgeworth’s heroine is none the less persistently forced to counter other characters’ efforts to inscribe on her the traits of her literary antecedent. When Lady Delacour summons Belinda to her dressing room, she compares her companion to Pope’s heroine even while she acknowledges Belinda’s absolute difference: ‘Let me see you in my dressing-room, dear Belinda, as soon as you have adored [quoting from Pope’s work] “With head uncover’d, the cosmetic powers”. But you don’t paint – no matter – you will – you must – every body must, sooner or later’ (p. 34). Lady Delacour’s belief that Belinda will become ever more like her namesake establishes a recurrent theme in Edgeworth’s novel: the difficulty women face in maintaining control over their public image and personal narrative. In order that Belinda may become a virtuous wife rather than a mere ‘puppet’ to be paraded in fashionable society (p. 10), she must first undergo a series of trials through which she demonstrates sufficient strength of character to avoid the fate prescribed by her name. As Belinda’s actions progressively dissociate her from her namesake, she becomes a more attractive marital prospect to Hervey. However, the couple cannot marry until another fictional identity is


exposed, and the truth of Virginia’s name (Rachel Hartley) and birth are revealed. Like Belinda, Virginia is a victim of a fictitious identity imposed from without. In the text’s Rousseauvian subplot, Clarence Hervey undertakes the education of an apparently orphaned girl and seeks to cultivate in her the characteristics he considers most desirable in a future wife. 18 Hervey’s decision to name the girl after the ‘natural’ heroine of St Pierre’s romance Paul et Virginie (1788) is central to this process of rewriting her identity, but it is a fiction that ultimately traps both creator and created. Binding both characters to a fiction from which they cannot extricate themselves, the Hervey/Virginia subplot hangs, for much of the text, in stasis. Indeed, this subplot can be reanimated only when the young woman’s true identity is revealed following her reconciliation with her father. The original title of Edgeworth’s moral tale signals the disjunction between public image and private self that characterises all of Belinda’s principal female protagonists. 19 The work was initially entitled ‘Abroad and at Home’, a phrase intended, as Greenfield has argued, to demarcate ‘an opposition between the public, or artificial, female self and the private or genuine one’. 20 Edgeworth had previously used this phrase in Letters for Literary Ladies to describe woman’s unachievable desire to dominate both the social and domestic spheres. In the Julia and Caroline exchange, the latter warns her sentimental friend against a possible marriage to the aristocratic Lord V. While V.’s ‘easiness of temper and fondness’ may cause him to give Julia ‘ascendancy over his pleasures [and] entire command at home and abroad’, Caroline warns that such tyranny comes at a price. This cautionary tale against fashionable excess closely prefigures Belinda. High life, Julia finds, places ‘restraints on your time, on the choice of your friends and to your company’. The pursuit of fashionable pleasures leads only to an intolerable ‘ennui’ at the expense of the more genuine and rewarding ‘pleasures of the heart and the imagination’.21 Lady Delacour is similarly affected by her pursuit of fashion, a quest that forces her to relinquish the genuine, heart-felt pleasures of family life. This loss of essential selfhood, precipitated by the abandonment of the nurturing characteristics that define femininity to Edgeworth, also entails a loss of control over personal narrative. Once abroad and living in the public sphere, an individual’s life becomes a commodity to be exchanged in the social marketplace. Ironically, it is Lady Delacour’s highly visible role in this marketplace that leads both Belinda and her


Aunt Stanhope to judge the aristocrat a fitting guide for the heroine’s entrance into the marriage market: The newspapers were full of lady Delacour’s parties, and lady Delacour’s dresses, and lady Delacour’s bon mots: every thing, that her ladyship wore, was imitated as fashionable. Female wit sometimes depends on the beauty of it’s [sic] possessor, for it’s reputation; and the reign of beauty is proverbially short. Fashion often capriciously deserts her favourites, even before nature withers their charms. Lady Delacour seemed to be a fortunate exception to these general rules. (p. 10) Initially, Belinda sees no reason to view Lady Delacour as anything other than the fashionable, carefree and compelling woman famed in newspapers and society. The older woman appears to Belinda the ‘most fascinating person she had ever beheld’ (p. 10). Soon, however, she realises that her friend’s public image is a far cry from the reality of her character and situation. Not long after arriving in the Delacour home, Belinda begins ‘to see through the thin veil, with which politeness covers domestic misery’ (p. 10). The choice of the word veil here is significant. Not only does it imply the extent to which society demands that people mask their true selves in order to immunise themselves against slander and reproach, it also suggests the extent to which fashionable effect is essential to Lady Delacour’s attempt to gain control of her self-presentation. Her desire to maintain the secret of the cancer she imagines is killing her (the cancer is later revealed to be a bruise caused by a pistol misfire) imprisons Lady Delacour, leaving her vulnerable to the tyranny of Marriott, Harriot Freke and Mrs Luttridge. 22 As much as she fears the imagined cancer, Lady Delacour is anxious that her story will become known within society. Reflecting on her impending mastectomy and possible recovery, Lady Delacour is concerned that her withdrawal from society will be perceived as a ‘forced retreat’. Anticipating that her rivals will believe she has set ‘up for being a prude, because she can no longer be a coquette’, the aristocrat expresses dread at the thought of losing control over her social reputation: ‘We should have Lord and lady D—, or The Domestic Tête à Tête, or The Reformed Amazon, stuck up in a print-shop window’. Fearing a loss of control over her self-presentation more than her possible death during the operation, Lady Delacour humorously remarks that such an abuse of her character would cause her to ‘die


with vexation, and of all deaths that is the death I should like the least’ (p. 293). Until this crucial moment in her narrative, Lady Delacour has assiduously sought to control her public self by moving from one identity to another as the situation demanded. As Heather MacFadyen argues, Lady Delacour ‘uses texts to provide her with a series of nondomestic identities’. 23 Not only is her speech liberally interspersed with literary quotations, but Lady Delacour also expresses her personal narrative through a variety of literary modes which indicate how she dramatises her life in an attempt hide from society’s watchful eye beneath the mask of fashionable levity. 24 During the confessional narrative of her past misdemeanour, Lady Delacour refers to herself as Scheherazade (p. 51), revealing perhaps the faintest hope that by telling her story her life may be spared. At other moments in the narrative she self-consciously speaks of herself ‘in the style in which the newspaper writers talk of me’ (p. 43) and describes her confessional outpouring as ‘The life and opinions of a Lady of Quality’ (p. 35). This literary self-fashioning is complemented by her literal self-fashioning through costume and cosmetics. As Greenfield has argued, although Edgeworth’s Belinda is named after the mock-heroine of The Rape of the Lock, Lady Delacour more nearly resembles Pope’s character in her elaborate ‘dressing ritual’ and her preoccupation with physical appearance.25 Her use of dress as a form of false self-projection is intimated early in the novel during the masquerade scene. As Terry Castle has noted, Belinda contains one of the last masquerade scenes in English literature. By the end of the eighteenth century, the masquerade had become an ‘emblem of the past’, displaced in an era of ‘intensified subjectivity’ and a largely redundant literary trope with the emergence of the realist novel.26 While the masquerade had certainly fallen out of literary fashion by the time Belinda was published, it is none the less central to Edgeworth’s argument, voiced here and in Letters for Literary Ladies, that women’s attempts to secure a fashionable public image lead to a potentially irrecoverable loss of essential selfhood. In a richly woven episode containing multiple narrative strands and layers of meaning, Marriott encourages her mistress to attend the masquerade in the guise of the ‘tragic muse’, following the logic that people ‘always succeed best when they take characters diametrically opposite to their own’ (p. 19). Of course, as the reader later learns and the spiteful Marriott already knows, tragedy is the most appropriate guise for Lady Delacour. Dressed as the tragic muse, she would no


longer be able to hide behind the fiction of a fashionable and attractive exterior. Aware that in donning this costume she will be effectively masquerading as herself, Lady Delacour becomes increasingly uneasy. She becomes ‘still more out of humour’ (p. 21) when she sees Belinda in the more becoming costume of the comic muse and determines to exchange outfits with her companion. This exchange of costumes has a dual effect. For Belinda, donning the guise of the tragic muse is a revelatory and distressing experience, during which she is exposed to other people’s true opinion of her. Subscribing to Marriott’s belief that people masquerade most successfully in clothing that is ‘diametrically opposite’ to their own characters, Hervey believes the tragic muse to be Lady Delacour rather than her young friend. Unaware to whom he is talking, and in an episode that strongly anticipates Darcy’s comments on the Bennet women in Elizabeth’s hearing in Pride and Prejudice (1813), Hervey expresses disdain for the matchmaking tactics of Mrs Stanhope and refers to the silent and embarrassed Belinda as a dangerous ‘composition of art and affectation’ (p. 26). While the masquerade reveals painful truths for Belinda, it affords Lady Delacour further opportunities for self-delusion. Dressed as the comic muse, she can underscore the fiction of her disregard for other people’s opinions. Her deployment of dress, here as a transgressive vehicle for personal liberation, was a familiar trope in literary masquerade scenes. Reading the episode in light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s model of the carnivalesque, Eleanor Ty has argued that Lady Delacour’s purposive use of costume here and elsewhere in the novel signals her ‘defiance of society’s rules of “ceremony and place”’. Though such ‘energising and festive’ moments provoke both ‘repugnance’ and ‘fear’, Ty suggests that they are, more importantly, moments of ‘desire and ultimately power’ for the aristocrat.27 In contrast to Ty’s reading, I want to emphasise how these moments are paralysing rather than enabling for Lady Delacour. That the exhilaration of such moments is only ever temporary is central to Edgeworth’s argument that the pleasures of fashion and sensibility are only ever illusory. The act of disguising self and body in masquerade costume serves only to make the truth more vivid in the mind. Following the masquerade, Lady Delacour contemplates the lie of fashionable sociability on which her public reputation is based: Now you know what a multitude of obedient humble servants, dear creatures, and very sincere and most affectionate friends, I have … do you think I’m fool enough to imagine that they would care the


hundreth part of a straw, if I were this minute thrown into the Red, or the Black sea! (p. 29) The world turned upside-down of the masquerade offers more genuine truths than the ‘real’ world of society. Lady Delacour points out that Belinda’s painful recognition of Hervey’s true feelings towards her offers a valuable lesson, by demonstrating to her young companion that life itself is a masquerade, in which every gesture, every comment and each and every appearance is calculated for effect. The only way to succeed in such a world, she tellingly asserts, is to ‘elbow your way through the crowd’ and play society at its own game by showing the world ‘you’ve no feeling’ (p. 29).

Lady Delacour’s boudoir Lady Delacour’s ‘mysterious boudoir’ lays bare the disjunction between self-representation and self-delusion which Edgeworth places at the heart of her counter-sentimental argument.28 When the fiction of her fashionable identity begins to unravel, the aristocrat invites Belinda to the scene of its construction. Within the privacy of the dressing room, she removes the ‘paint from her face’ with ‘a species of fury’ and reveals a ‘deathlike countenance, which formed a horrid contrast with her gay fantastic dress’ (p. 31). While her make-up hides the truth of her age and lost beauty, Lady Delacour’s clothes hide an even greater secret. In a characteristically theatrical gesture, she finally unveils her breast. Her true character still remains elusive, however, for the surface disfigurement of her body signals a more profound, yet invisible, mental disfigurement. Lady Delacour begs for Belinda’s pity, not for what she sees, but ‘a thousand times more, for that which you cannot see – my mind is eaten away like my body, by incurable disease – inveterate remorse – remorse for a life of folly – of folly which has brought on me all the punishments of guilt’ (p. 32). In her deployment of the dressing room as a site that exposes woman’s inherent duplicity, Edgeworth, perhaps surprisingly, locates her work within the tradition of misogynist satire. Dark, lit only by a candle, full of ‘a confusion of linen rags – vials, some empty, some full’, and filled with a ‘strong smell of medicines’ (p. 31), Lady Delacour’s dressing room recalls that of Celia in Swift’s ‘Lady’s Dressing Room’ (1732): ‘fill’d with Washes, some with Paste, / Some with Pomatum, Paints and Slops, / And Ointments good for scabby Chops’.29 This allusion to the earlier poetic tradition renders Edgeworth’s deployment of


the dressing room in Belinda important in light of the text’s moral project to create a new species of literature and in terms of the development of an eighteenth-century literary trope. As Felicity Nussbaum has explored, the dressing room scene, indebted in large part to Juvenal’s sixth Satire, was a powerful trope in Restoration and early eighteenthcentury misogynist poetry. Within the confines of the dressing room, writers could expose and contain woman’s corruptibility, her ‘pride, lust, and inconstancy’. As ‘the site of woman’s preparation for attacking and destroying men’ through the skilful use of cosmetics and dress, an exposé of the dressing room armed and empowered her otherwise hapless victims by allowing them to vicariously ‘penetrate the disguises of women in order to protect themselves’.30 If the dressing room dispelled the myth of ideal femininity before the eyes of the male onlooker, it also exposed, as Nussbaum suggests, the extent to which women were subject to culturally and socially inscribed myths of femininity, which placed women in an untenable double bind.31 As these poems suggest, to aspire to a beauty that could be achieved only through the deployment of cosmetics and dress was to tacitly admit that such beauty was merely an illusion that only ever signalled the essential superficiality of womankind. The only wonderment to be found in female beauty, as Strephon finds in the ‘Lady’s Dressing Room’, is that from ‘Washes, Slops and every Clout, / With which she makes so foul a Rout’ has ‘Such Order from Confusion sprung, / Such gaudy Tulips rais’d from Dung’.32 While dressing room satires exposed female sexuality as repugnant by divesting woman of her clothes and make-up, these satires none the less implicitly endow the dressing room with a compelling sense of mystery. As Nussbaum argues, the dressing room was ‘morbidly fascinating … a living metaphor for a woman’s mystery [since a] woman standing before her dressing table is engaged in exploring her sexual and psychic independence as she creates a separate, private and selfglorified identity’.33 Though this self-glorified identity was exposed as a travesty in the early satires, scenes of dressing and undressing would become important moments of female self-assertion in the sentimental novel. In contrast to the earlier misogynist tradition, Richardson, for instance, deployed scenes in which his heroines were viewed dressing or in a state of undress to dramatically stage their sensibility. Richardson’s rewriting of the early satires refuses to write out completely the misogyny which is their defining characteristic, however. Rather than a site in which women sought to tyrannise men through cosmetic and sartorial arts, Richardson recast the closet, dressing room


and bedchamber as sites in which men tyrannise over women.34 Like the earlier voyeurs in the verse of Rochester and Swift, B. and Lovelace seek to undress Pamela and Clarissa physically, by stripping away their costume and, metaphorically, by reading their correspondence. For both men, access to the rooms in which the heroines dress and write promises access to the women’s thoughts and bodies. As Simon Varey has argued in his study of the configuration of space in the eighteenth-century novel, rooms in Clarissa provide ‘a metonymic spatial vehicle that express[es] … Lovelace’s desires [and] Clarissa’s opposition, and her isolation’.35 Similarly, rooms serve in Pamela to re-inscribe the young servant’s vulnerability and confinement as B. persistently seeks to underline his position as master of the household by an unrelenting violation of the personal space of Pamela’s closet. Yet the ways in which Pamela and Clarissa inhabit the domestic household ultimately constitute powerful acts of defiance over their male aggressors. When Pamela separates her clothes into bundles in the green-room for her return to her parents’ home, only to find that she has been watched by B., Mrs Jervis remarks that her master was moved to ‘wipe his Eyes two or three times’ at the sight of Pamela’s humble refusal to take her deceased mistress’s fine clothes with her.36 Even the most extreme violation she suffers – having to untack her correspondence from her petticoat – constitutes a powerful gesture of moral self-assertion on Pamela’s part which proves the servant’s worth to B. and paves the way for the couple’s marriage. Despite Richardson’s efforts to reconfigure the early misogynist dressing room tradition through these scenes of dressing and undressing, the satirical tradition continued to be influential throughout the century and is a palpable subtext of virtually any anti-fashion argument made in the period. In the case of Pamela, Richardson failed to convince readers of his heroine’s moral purity. Unable to eradicate the taint of prurient voyeurism or the assumption of woman’s inherent rakishness that underpinned early dressing room satires, the scenes in which Pamela dresses and undresses became the focal point for some of the fiercest criticisms of the novel. Anti-Pamelists repeatedly lampooned the heroine’s performance of virtue, with rooms as her stage and dress as her prop, in a cynical bid to secure an aristocratic husband. As Charles Povey outrageously suggested in The Virgin in Eden (1741), if Pamela were truly virtuous she would never have ‘undress[ed] till every Avenue in [her] Room’ had been first searched.37 Even the novel’s engravings in the 1742 octavo sixth edition of the novel did little to help the heroine’s case. The scene in which Pamela ‘humbly’ separates her three


bundles of clothes is presented as a theatrical gesture designed to win over an audience of one, Mr B., who observes Pamela from behind what looks suspiciously like a stage curtain. In Belinda, Edgeworth re-imagines the dressing room in order to expose the misogyny of the early satires as well as to engage with and subsequently rewrite the sentimental ideal of moral legibility formulated by Richardson and his successors. Throughout the novel, Lady Delacour’s fetishised body is read by a range of observers who come to represent the various literary traditions the novel evokes. At first, Belinda is unable to see beyond the parameters of the misogynist dressing room satires and imagines that her companion’s odd behaviour arises from her dreading ‘the discovery of her cosmetic secrets’ (p. 20). She soon dismisses this notion when she considers that since ‘her ladyship’s rouge was so glaring and her pearl powder was so obvious … there must be some other cause for this toilette secresy’ (pp. 20–1). However, as in the early poems, Belinda finds that Lady Delacour’s cosmetics and clothing are symptomatic of a much deeper-seated physical and moral corruption than they at first appear to suggest. The ‘horrid business of [Lady Delacour’s] toilette’ conceals the ‘hideous spectacle’ of her breast, which is, in turn, symptomatic of her moral weakness and dysfunctional femininity. Lady Delacour takes great pride in her ability to use fashion to encrypt her emotions and disease. Throughout the novel she boasts of her impenetrability, even when she appears to be at her most open. During her lengthy confessional narrative, for example, Lady Delacour admits that Belinda can never truly know her: ‘You stare – you cannot enter into my feelings’ (p. 65). In the tradition of sentimental literature, Lady Delacour intimates here that feeling is beyond words and, as such, can be expressed only through involuntary gestures and physical signs – what John Mullan has referred to as a ‘repertoire of wordless meanings’.38 But whereas the bodies of sentimental heroines such as Clarissa and Maria unwittingly communicate via this idealised, speechless vocabulary, Lady Delacour’s life is driven by exhausting efforts to conceal these corporeal signs of feeling and, in so doing, she exposes the corruptibility of the sentimental ideal of virtuous femininity. If Belinda’s reading of her companion’s body serves to question both the satiric and the sentimental reading of the female body, other characters in the text read Lady Delacour’s appearance as evidence for the sentimental conviction in the correspondences between physical appearance and inner character. Try as she might to conceal her past transgressions, Lady Delacour’s breast offers indelible testimony to her moral character.39 The more desperately she seeks to demonstrate the


opacity of her feelings, the more accessible these feelings become to more discerning observers. Helena, for instance, instinctively recognises that her mother is not dying, despite her mother’s cruel taunts: ‘Dear mamma, I never was so happy in my life; for you never looked so very, very kindly at me before.’ ‘Do not judge always of the kindness people feel for you, child, by their looks; and remember that it is possible a person may have felt more than you could guess by their looks. Pray now, Helena, you who are such a good judge of physiognomy, should you guess that I was dying, by my looks?’ The little girl laughed, and repeated ‘Dying? O no, mamma.’ ‘O no! because I have such a fine colour in my cheeks – hey?’ ‘Not for that reason, mamma’, said Helena, withdrawing her eyes from her mother’s face. ‘What, then you know rouge already when you see it? You perceive some difference, between miss Portman’s colour and mine? On my word you are a nice observer. Such nice observers are sometimes dangerous to have near one’. (p. 289) Since Helena is able to see through her mother’s sartorial and cosmetic veneer, Lady Delacour fears that she will discover the supposed truth of her cancer. Rather than a danger to her mother, however, Helena’s observations offer her salvation. Her innocent and instinctive response to her mother’s appearance allows her to see through the layers of fiction in which she is shrouded. Lady Delacour’s efforts to mask the imagined cancer also betray her in the eyes of another ‘nice observer’, the rational Dr X—. In one of her more elaborate disguises, Lady Delacour entertains her guests by donning a masquerade outfit designed to imitate the character of ‘queen Elizabeth’ (p. 114). Her dramatic appearance enlivens the company and Clarence Hervey praises his hostess’s ‘charming spirits’ (p. 115). Hervey’s companion, however, sees through Lady Delacour’s disguise. Such ‘high spirits’, Dr X— remarks, ‘incline [him] more to melancholy than mirth’ since they ‘do not seem quite natural’. While the ‘vivacity of youth and of health’ displayed by Miss Portman ‘charms’ the physician, he determines that Lady Delacour’s ‘gayety’ belongs not to ‘a sound mind in a sound body’ (p. 115). Although the doctor cannot ascertain whether the fever from which Lady Delacour is suffering is of the ‘mind or body’, he is confident that this matter could be easily settled by ‘having her pulse felt’ (p. 115).


Ty has read this scene as an instance of the ‘disruptive effect of female energy’, but it is Edgeworth’s emphasis on the debilitating nature of Lady Delacour’s public self-representation that is most striking here.40 In contrast to her depiction of Harriot Freke, whose deployment of costume affords her a certain kind of power (albeit briefly exercised and harshly punished), Edgeworth draws attention to the extent to which Lady Delacour’s dress imprisons her within a delusional fantasy that prevents her from enjoying happy relationships with her husband, child and friends. Without any medical examination, and in spite of the exaggerated costume she wears, Lady Delacour’s body speaks loudly to the rational physician through her clothes, providing, to borrow John Mullan’s phrase, ‘an ever-visible corpus of signs given over to the practice of interpretation’.41 Through the competing narratives of Belinda, Helena and Dr X—, Edgeworth’s novel both ridicules and rehearses the sentimental notion of moral legibility, Ultimately, however, Belinda is concerned less with the rejection or validation of this ideal than with the revelation of women’s harmful internalisation of sentimental ideology as selffetishisation. Much has been written about Lady Delacour’s diseased breast as a symbol of her failure to live out ‘a specific image of [maternal] womanhood’.42 Rather than reading the breast as a symbol of lack, however, we could profitably see it as an embodiment of an alternative model of womanhood: the sentimental. More than a mere physical symbol of her moral disfigurement – what Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace terms ‘the appropriate synecdoche for her failed maternity’43 – Lady Delacour’s mutilated breast is an embodiment of a sensibility which she has pathologically fetishised and which in turn convinces her that she is dying. The real danger laid bare by the comments of Helena and Dr X— is not the possibility that they might discover Lady Delacour’s supposed cancer, but that her guilt and flawed sensibility have rendered her unable to see herself through the eyes of such ‘nice observer[s]’. Initially ignoring the ‘warning twinges’ she felt in her breast after the pistol misfires, Lady Delacour eventually, and inexplicably, becomes consumed by the belief that she must be dying. As the novel progresses and the truth surrounding her imagined cancer is revealed, it becomes clear that her diseased breast is not one of the ‘punishments of guilt’ (p. 32) meted out by a vengeful God. Neither is Lady Delacour, as Marriott believes, simply the victim of ‘a villainous quack’ (p. 313) who deceives his patient into believing she has cancer and encourages her reliance on laudanum in order to exact a high fee. Rather, Lady Delacour falls


victim to guilt and, more damagingly, to her faith in the truth of the sentimental body. After all, it is only long after she has convinced herself that ‘it was in vain to doubt of the nature of my complaint’ (p. 65) that she consults the quack physician who merely exploits his patient’s unshakable belief that she is terminally ill. Lady Delacour’s decision to accept a life of fashion over a life of domestic happiness by marrying Lord Delacour, who seemed ‘in love with [her] faults’, rather than Mr Percival, who clearly was not, is a crucial staging post in her decline. Having decided to live in the ‘fashionable world’ and ‘to be as be as extravagant as possible’ (p. 37), Lady Delacour sacrifices the ‘natural’ pleasures of domestic happiness and, in her own mind, seals her fate. In this light, her adoption of expensive and elaborate costumes renders her as unfeminine and ‘unnatural’ a figure as the cross-dressing Harriot Freke, since it symbolises Lady Delacour’s rejection of feminine, domestic duties. As she makes clear in her confessional narrative, her choice of a life of coquetry and fashionable dissipation left no room for the fulfilment of the duties of a wife and mother. Like Moll Flanders, Lady Delacour mentions her children in her confessional autobiography as an apparent afterthought: ‘I forgot to tell you, that I had three children during the first five years of my marriage’ (p. 42). Rather than indicating her lack of maternal feeling, however, the manner in which Lady Delacour strategically places her children in her narrative reveals how her attempts to mask her true sentiments make them all the more visible: The first was a boy; he was born dead; and my lord, and all his odious relations, laid the blame on me; because I would not be kept prisoner half a year by an old mother of his, a vile Cassandra, who was always prophesying that my child would not be born alive. My second was a girl, but a poor diminutive, sickly thing. It was the fashion at this time for fine mothers to suckle their own children – so much the worse for the poor brats … [A]t the end of about three months my poor child was sick too – I don’t much like to think of it – it died. If I had put it out to nurse, I should have been thought by my friends an unnatural mother – but I should have saved its life. (p. 42) Fashion, associated from the novel’s opening with performativity and affectation, accrues altogether more disturbing connotations here. Lord Delacour’s family appears in little doubt that his wife’s pursuit of fashion is to blame for the death of the couple’s children. Despite her protestations, Lady Delacour has also internalised the connection


between fashion and infanticide, blaming the death of her second child on her desire to follow fashionable society’s dictates to breastfeed. When her third child, Helena, is born, Lady Delacour no longer possessed ‘the barbarity to nurse it [her]self’ and puts the child out to nurse before sending her to live with the Percivals (p. 42). While Margaret Delacour deems the treatment of Helena proof of Lady Delacour’s fashionable sensibility (at the expense of maternal instinct), her behaviour must be read as symptomatic of a marked sensibility, masked by a fashionable appearance designed to conceal the depth of this feeling. After the death of her second child, Lady Delacour retreats into fashion to hide her personal pain, leaving her vulnerable to accusations of emotional sterility: ‘I couldn’t or wouldn’t shed a tear, and I left it to the old dowager to perform in public, as she wished, the part of chief mourner, and to comfort herself in private, by lifting up her hands and eyes, and railing at me as the most insensible of mothers’ (p. 42). While others condemn Lady Delacour for her public composure and levity following her child’s death, it is the dowager’s public performance of grief that she determines distasteful: ‘All this time I suffered more than she did; but that is what she will never have the satisfaction of knowing’ (p. 42). Sensibility constitutes raw vulnerability for Lady Delacour: in exposing her feelings she would expose herself to the tyranny of others. The irony is, of course, that in concealing her feelings beneath a veneer of affect, Lady Delacour becomes the victim of a disfiguring sensibility that convinces her that she must die to pay for her sins. That these fantasies are enacted in the dressing room and boudoir is central to Belinda’s critique of sensibility and to its anti-fashion argument. Unlike early eighteenthcentury misogynist satires in which the dressing room functions as a site in which women seek to tyrannise men, or the sentimental tradition in which (un)dressing scenes evidence men’s tyranny over woman, Belinda re-imagines this space as an emblem of the tyranny that women exercise over themselves by internalising the sentimental ideal. As an intimate, feminised and irrational space, the dressing-room is an apposite backdrop for this fetishistic self-delusion, since it graphically exposes, as the works of More and Wollstonecraft had done, how sensibility’s emphasis on women’s bodies corrupted their minds.

Lady Delacour’s reformation In what would become a key argument of the emergent feminist discourse of the late eighteenth century, Lady Delacour’s disguise


becomes her trap: ‘Ambitious of pleasing universally, I became the worst of slaves – a slave to the world. Not a moment of my time was at my own disposal – not one of my actions; I may say, not one of my thoughts, was my own’ (p. 41). Her characterisation of her life of fashion as one of slavery is resonant within the context of Belinda’s colonial subtext. Though an exploration of the novel’s depiction of the West Indian Creole, Mr Vincent, and his black servant is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is interesting to note that Lady Delacour identifies herself here with Juba. The fantasy-inducing sensibility of the former and the superstitious ethnic sensibility of the latter leave both aristocrat and black servant vulnerable to the plots of others who would abuse them.44 Lady Delacour’s identification with Juba serves to underscore the state of degradation to which she has been reduced. Moreover, the alignment of the woman of fashion and the slave projects Edgeworth’s novel into the wider feminist debate on sensibility glossed earlier in this chapter. Belinda’s indebtedness to Wollstonecraft’s Vindication has been noted by many critics. Harriot Freke, the cross-dressing champion of the rights of woman, is an obvious link between the works. While this grotesque parody of a Wollstonecraftian hyena in petticoats has been read as an explicit rejection on Edgeworth’s part of radical feminist politics, other critics have pointed to Belinda’s rehearsal of the arguments of 1790s feminist polemicists, including Wollstonecraft.45 Iain Topliss, for example, has highlighted three areas of common ground in the works of Wollstonecraft and Edgeworth: both are concerned by ‘the present degraded state of women’; both share an interest in the relationship between understanding and virtue; both devoted their works to analyses of marriage.46 Many other philosophical and thematic connections might be added to Topliss’s list. Most significant in light of the present discussion is Wollstonecraft’s and Edgeworth’s argument that culturally constructed notions of sensibility, fashion and reputation force women into a state of self-tyranny that threatens female virtue and the integrity of the domestic household. For Wollstonecraft, sensibility represented one of ‘men’s primary agent[s] in the oppression of women’.47 Slaves to ‘their sensations’ and educated only to ‘refine on sensual feelings’, women, she argued, were encouraged to ‘adopt metaphysical notions respecting that passion, which lead them to neglect the duties of life, and frequently in the midst of these sublime refinements they plump into actual vice’ (p. 313). Based on the misplaced notion that woman’s ‘sexual character’ was naturally passionate rather than reasonable, writers persistently appealed to


woman’s feelings, in a self-fulfilling prophecy which sought to deny that they were capable of anything more than feeling. The reification of a feminine ideal based on emotion rather than reason, according to both Wollstonecraft and Edgeworth, did little to guarantee virtue and promote domestic happiness, however. Rather, sentimental literature encouraged women to aspire to an unattainable romantic ideal of domesticity, which rendered them incapable of exercising their true duties as wives and mothers. For both writers, sensibility and dress were responsible for woman’s oppression. Writers like Rousseau, who wrote about women’s supposedly natural love of dress, reduced virtue to a matter of appearance and powerfully debarred women from the possession of ratio-critical faculties. As Wollstonecraft wrote: Outwardly ornamented with elaborate care, and so adorned to delight man, ‘that with honour he may love,’ the soul of woman is not allowed to have this distinction, and man, ever placed between her and reason, she is always represented as only created to see through a gross medium, and to take things on trust. (p. 143) Like the archetypal woman Wollstonecraft evokes here, Lady Delacour loses the capacity for rational thought when she marries and seeks to cultivate a public reputation for fashionable sensibility. For her, as for Wollstonecraft’s imagined woman, reputation – so ‘strenuously inculcated on the female world’ – proves to be one of those ‘specious poison[s] … that encrusting morality eat[s] away the substance’ (p. 245). Wollstonecraft’s description of reputation here suggestively foreshadows Belinda. Having encrusted her body with thick layers of cosmetics and clothing in order to preserve her social reputation, Lady Delacour becomes incapable of fulfilling her proper duty as a mother. Her recognition of this failure triggers the imagined cancer, which, like Wollstonecraft’s poison, feeds on the aristocrat’s body and mind. Lady Delacour’s seduction by fashion launches her into a life over which she feels she has lost control. Like the seduction narratives projected on the imagined inmates of the Magdalen House, Lady Delacour feels that her inability to resist fashion’s lure sparked a narrative of inevitable moral decline: my object … is to conceal from the world, what I cannot conceal from myself, that I am a dying woman. I am, and I see you think me, a strange, weak, inconsistent creature – I was intended for something


better – but now it is too late – a coquet I have lived, and a coquet I shall die. (p. 64) Like the Magdalen narratives, however, Belinda offers the possibility of reformation through a process of domestic rehabilitation. As such, Belinda marks a striking departure from Letters for Literary Ladies, which the later novel so nearly resembles and in which the woman of sensibility is condemned to death. A brief exploration of the similarities and differences between these two works demonstrates the greater subtlety of the later text’s critique of sensibility. Both Julia and Lady Delacour suffer from illnesses whose cause is both physical and psychosomatic. Caroline becomes increasingly alarmed when it becomes clear soon after Julia’s marriage that her friend is suffering from ‘a confusion of … ideas’: her ‘powers of reason’ begin to decline while ‘those of [her] imagination’ ‘rapidly’ increase.48 After separating from her husband, this confusion degenerates further, until ‘the remorse which had long preyed on her mind, at length brought her to the grave’.49 Edgeworth initially intended that Lady Delacour should suffer the same fate as her sentimental forebear. In reclaiming Belinda’s companion, however, Edgeworth seized the opportunity to wrest sentiment from its trappings and reclaim true sensibility. By rehabilitating Lady Delacour, as Kowaleski-Wallace has suggested, Edgeworth argued ‘that all women have an important place in the new domestic order and that every woman, no matter how conflicted her sense of herself, can find a meaningful role in the patriarchal family’.50 Belinda makes reintegration possible by divorcing fashion from sentiment, as More had enjoined, through the reformation and rehabilitation of Lady Delacour. The process of recovery begins when the aristocrat is faced with the impending trauma of a mastectomy: ‘If I survive this business’, said she, ‘it is my firm intention to appear in a new character, or rather to assert my real character. I will break through the spell of dissipation – I will at once cast off all the acquaintance that are unworthy of me – I will, in one word, go with you, my dear Belinda! to Mr Percival’s’. (p. 292) Here, Lady Delacour envisages a spiritual return to an essential selfhood as a return to the maternal; accompanying Belinda to the Percivals, she will symbolically unwrite the rejection of her former lover and her daughter. In Lady Delacour’s mind, the mastectomy will not only excise the cancer, but also remove the sentimental vices of


which she believes her illness is the effect. Tellingly, she figures her rehabilitation as ‘the recovery of my moral health’ rather than as a physical recuperation, a distinction that prefigures the reader’s understanding that her sickness is psychological rather than physiological (p. 292). In allowing her to recover from this illness, where Julia did not, Edgeworth can offer a more nuanced critique of sensibility than she achieved in the earlier work. The revelation that the cancer is imagined emphasises the text’s characterisation of sensibility as fetishisation, while Lady Delacour’s rehabilitation allows Edgeworth to recuperate a supposedly natural maternal sensibility. Reading the ‘cancer’ as the product of her sensibility enables the reader to solve the interpretive conundrum posed by the fictitious nature of this illness. Jordana Rosenberg is only one of the most recent critics to suggest that the novel’s argument – an argument which Rosenberg reads as an attempt to demystify aristocratic wit – is fatally disturbed by the revelation that Lady Delacour is in good health after all. If, as Rosenberg suggests, her diseased breast is a synecdoche for aristocrat ‘wit’, ultimately the novel signals ‘the needlessness … of banishing wit in the first place’ by proving that wit is incapable of producing the disease for which it appears culpable early in the novel.51 Identifying the illness as an embodiment of sensibility rather than an emblem of contradiction reveals how the imagined cancer underpins rather than undermines the novel’s argument, however. The fact that the illness is a fiction is precisely Edgeworth’s point, proving sentimentalism’s propensity to manifest itself in fantasy and fetish. In allowing her to break free from this fashionable delusion, Edgeworth is able to recuperate a genuine maternal sensibility stripped of affect. The attempt to divorce fashion from sentiment is not unproblematic, however. Lady Delacour’s complicity with the fictions forged by her sensibility leaves her unable to effect her own reformation, a crucial aspect of the text’s counter-sentimental argument. Unlike Betsy Thoughtless, Lady Delacour is incapable of self-rehabilitation.52 As Ruth Perry argues, Lady Delacour’s ‘body is never her own, as its health is beyond her capacity to understand or maintain’.53 In addition to lacking the privileged medical knowledge necessary to determine the true nature of her condition, Lady Delacour lacks the rational faculties which would enable her to see through the fictions she has created. Like Letters for Literary Ladies, therefore, Belinda argues for the redemptive power of reason over the fatal flaws of unbridled sentiment. However, while the earlier text convincingly championed reason over feeling, the relationship between sense and sensibility in Belinda is


complex and remains unresolved. Where Edgeworth succeeds in containing fashion and sentiment in the Letters by all but excluding Julia’s voice from the text, her generosity in giving so much of the early chapters of Belinda to Lady Delacour weakens the effect of her rehabilitation. Only one of Julia’s letters is printed in Letters for Literary Ladies; other letters are merely implied in and inevitably mediated by Caroline’s responses. By contrast, the highly vocal Lady Delacour has almost two whole chapters of virtually uninterrupted monologue within which to explain and justify her life and actions. Many have noted that the Lady Delacour of the early chapters of Belinda is a more seductive and satisfyingly complex character than she appears at its end. As a critic wrote in the 1802 Monthly Review: Lady Delacour, while she continues to appear as the votary of vanity and fashion, and heroic under excruciating corporeal suffering, is a Being who interests and even commands some respect: but Lady Delacour reformed, (however favourable to the moral effect of the work this reformation may be), and unexpectedly rescued from bodily pain, is a comparatively flat and vapid creature.54 This early response is typical in its assertion of Lady Delacour’s attractiveness at the expense of the novel’s heroine. If Lady Delacour possesses too much sensibility, then Belinda displays insufficient feeling for readers to warm to her. Anticipating Kowaleski-Wallace’s assertion that ‘Belinda is not about Belinda’,55 the 1802 Monthly Review critic argued that ‘the heroine herself creates so little interest, that she appears to have usurped the superior right of Lady Delacour to give the title to the work’.56 In similar vein, a writer for the Critical Review (1802) argued that Lady Delacour is ‘the prominent character in the work … she is the primary planet, and Belinda but a satellite’.57 In particular, the critic objects to Belinda’s stoicism and lack of passion in contrast to her older companion’s warm, if theatrical, sensibility: ‘[s]he can love without passion, and transfers her affections from Mr Hervey to Mr Vincent, and from Mr Vincent back again to Mr Hervey, with as much sang froid as she would unhang her cloak from one peg and hang it on another’.58 Such criticisms have proved enduring. Following the lead of earlier critics, Caroline Gonda has noted that for ‘a young lady making her entrance into the world, [Belinda] has too little to learn, learns it too quickly and thereafter is too level-headed and prudent for most readers’ tastes’.59 Alan Richardson has tried to reclaim Edgeworth’s


heroine from such charges of insipidity by suggesting that Belinda’s lack of evident feeling is symptomatic of the intensity of her true emotion. Rather than personal coldness, he argues, ‘Belinda’s silences and ellipses signify the vacancy at the heart of domestic ideology, its failure to comprehend female desire’.60 Indeed, Belinda’s common sense paralyses her as profoundly as Lady Delacour’s sensibility confines the aristocrat. Though Lady Delacour believes that ‘the prudent Belinda is more capable of feeling real permanent passion, than any of the dear sentimental young ladies, whose motto is “All for love, or the world well lost”’ (p. 472), Belinda is as incapable of translating that feeling into genuine domestic happiness as the youthful Lady Delacour was. Superficially at least, the prospect of seeing ‘Belinda in love’ is, Lady Delacour suggests, as improbable as seeing ‘Pamela married’ (p. 472). While Belinda lacks an appealing female model, the novel’s conclusion none the less implies such a model in its argument that sense and sensibility, possessed in moderation and qualified by one other, can produce domestic happiness. The plot of Belinda is driven by an alternating current of reason and sentiment. Lady Delacour, the woman of flawed sensibility, can be reunited with her husband only under the guidance of the rational Belinda, while Belinda, for all her reasoning, needs the intervention of her older, more passionate companion in order that she may marry Hervey. This reciprocal exchange between sense and sensibility does not fully resolve the tensions that surface throughout this complex text in its critique of fashionable sensibility. In large part, this lack of resolution stems from the rather implausible reformation of Lady Delacour. Despite Edgeworth’s attempt to reintegrate the woman of sensibility into the patriarchal family, Margaret Delacour’s accusation that her niece-in-law parades feeling like a cambric handkerchief resonates to the novel’s conclusion. The reader can never be sure that Lady Delacour, so practised in the art of sartorial and emotional disguise, is not merely ‘tricking’ up to create a desired effect on her unwitting audience. Her determination to revert to her ‘real character’ after her impending mastectomy is put in doubt by the reader’s uncertainty that she has an essential self that might be recovered. Though she suggests that by stripping away the outer layers of her fashionable façade her emotional purity will shine again, the text persistently emphasises that Lady’s Delacour’s body reveals no truths. Her dramatic unveiling before Belinda offers no moral or physical revelation, only further layers of fiction and self-deceit. Furthermore, her cure – the mastectomy – which Lady Delacour sees as


a prerequisite of the reformative process is of course unnecessary and never effected. Given Lady Delacour’s persistent deployment of dress throughout the text, the reader senses that her new character may have no more genuine moral substance than the masquerade dresses she dons or even a delicate cambric handkerchief. Belinda attempted to rewrite the sentimental novel from within. Like More and Wollstonecraft, Edgeworth recognised the ideological implications of sensibility, whose reification of female emotion came at the expense of reason and dignity. As in Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, Edgeworth transformed the male fantasy of the legible female body into a feminist argument that exposed this ideal as a fiction of pathological self-fetishisation. Deploying, yet subtly challenging, many of the tropes deployed in earlier sentimental novels, Edgeworth exposed the extent to which sentimentalism had become nothing more than a sham, threatening the sanctity of the domestic household by encouraging romantic delusions and the pursuit of artificial pleasures. Through the character of Lady Delacour, Edgeworth, like More and Wollstonecraft before her, reveals sensibility to be little more than a transient fashion, the latter proof of the former’s insubstantiality and vulnerability to corruption. By rehabilitating Lady Delacour, however, Edgeworth stalls sensibility’s fatal decline to recuperate a ‘real sensibility’ so long eclipsed by the ‘Pictur’d dress’ of affect. Once she is systematically stripped of the false layers of fashion and sentiment in which she has adorned herself, Lady Delacour’s virtue is recuperated and channelled in the role of wife and mother. Not all readers have been persuaded by the triumph of maternal sensibility at the novel’s close. But if the reformation of Lady Delacour is unconvincing, this failure need not signal the impotency of the novel’s counter-sentimental argument. Indeed, we might read Belinda’s resolute ambiguity as its most powerful critical strategy. Split between a false public image of gaiety and an equally fictitious private self forged by her excessive sensibility, Lady Delacour’s character is persistently abroad and at home. Each of the guises in which she appears within the novel is revealed as a lie: the socialite careless of the world’s opinions, the uncaring mother, the dying woman and the hateful wife. How then should we read her final incarnation as the penitent coquette? Keeping the reader guessing until the end, Belinda exposes the ultimate sentimental fiction that is the legible woman.

Notes Introduction 1 Hannah More, ‘Sensibility: A Poetic Epistle to the Honorable Mrs Boscawen’, in Sacred Dramas: Chiefly Intended for Young Persons: The Subjects Taken from the Bible. To Which is Added Sensibility, A Poem (London: T. Cadell, 1782), p. 282. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text. 2 See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976), pp. 235–8; John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in EighteenthCentury Britain (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 3 The privileging of sight in sentimental discourse has been amply demonstrated by recent critics. Robert Markley has argued that sentimentality amounts to ‘an aesthetics of moral sensitivity’, while Janet Todd has referred to sentimentalism as ‘a kind of pedagogy of seeing’. Robert Markley, ‘Sentimentality as Performance: Shaftesbury, Sterne, and the Theatrics of Virtue’, in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 211. See also Janet Todd, Sensibility, An Introduction (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 4. 4 This strain is, in turn, the legacy of debates on the relationship between language and ideas raised in Book III of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). 5 Alexander Pope, ‘An Essay on Criticism’, reprinted in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 143–68. 6 Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature (London: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 106. 7 For a discussion of the normalising effect of Pope’s rhyming couplet, see Hugh Kenner, ‘Pope’s Reasonable Rhymes’, ELH, 41 (1974), pp. 74–88. 8 Brown, Ends of Empire, p. 106. 9 Ibid., pp. 109–33. 10 The importance of this figure and its reworking in the sentimental novel is considered in more depth in the final chapter on Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801). See also Felicity A. Nussbaum, ‘The Brink of all we Hate’: English Satires on Women, 1660–1750 (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1984); and Ellen Pollak, The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1 985). 11 Letter to Alexander Pope, 11 May 1738. Aaron Hill, The Works of the Late Aaron Hill, Esq, 4 vols (London: Printed for the Benefit of the Family, 1753), I, pp. 251–2. 178

Notes 179 12 Prefixed to the second edition of the novel, reprinted in The Pamela Controversy: Criticisms and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, 1740–1750, ed. Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, 6 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001), I, pp. 22–3. 13 The important and much contested scene in which Pamela appears in her homespun gown and petticoat is central to this book, and is examined in greater depth in Chapter 1. 14 See, for example, Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, eds, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commericialisation of Eighteenth-Century England (London, Melbourne, Sydney, Auckland and Johnannesburg: Hutchinson: Europa, 1982). 15 Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings, ed. E. J. Hundert (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1997). 16 See, for example, David Hume’s ‘Of Commerce’ and ‘Of Luxury’ (later titled ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’), both in Political Discourses (1752). 17 For a useful survey of eighteenth-century debates on luxury, commerce and gender, see Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, eds, Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2003), pp. 7–27. 18 Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, pp. 76–7. 19 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book III, Chapter 4. 20 Daniel Defoe, Every-Body’s Business, is No-body’s Business (London: T. Warner, 1725), p. 4. 21 The Lady’s Magazine: or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, 16 (February 1785), p. 96. 22 Neil McKendrick, ‘The Commercialisation of Fashion’, in The Birth of a Consumer Society, pp. 34–99. 23 For an account of the growth and role of the secondhand clothing trade in pre-industrial England, see Beverly Lemire, Dress, Culture and Commerce: The English Clothing Trade Before the Factory, 1660–1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). 24 Beverly Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 161. 25 Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilisation: The Carnivalesque in EighteenthCentury English Culture and Fiction (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 55–7. 26 Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (London: Bedford Square, 1985). 27 London Magazine, 6 (March 1737), p. 129. 28 The eighteenth-century masquerade has attracted the interest of several critics and fashion historians. Among the best of these studies, see Castle, Masquerade and Civilisation; and Aileen Ribeiro, The Dress Worn at Masquerades in England, 1730–1790 and its Relation to Fancy Dress in Portraiture (London: Batsford, 1984). 29 Fred Davis, Fashion, Culture, and Identity (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and John Harvey, Men in Black (London: Reaktion, 1995). 30 Castle, Masquerade and Civilisation, pp. 55–7. 31 The Lady’s Magazine, 16 (July 1775), p. 350. 32 This theme is the subject of Chapter 1.

180 Notes 33 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or Education (1762), trans. Barbara Foxley (London: J. M. Dent, 1911), p. 357. 34 Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, 51 (October 1772), p. 210. 35 For a discussion of the attempts to regulate the dress of prostitutes, see Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 242–51. 36 Nancy Armstrong, ‘The Rise of the Domestic Woman’, The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (London: Routledge, 1987), p. 108. 37 The question of the extent to which sumptuary law was unfairly biased towards the restriction of women as opposed to men is a contentious issue among historians. Some feminist historians, such as Diane Hughes and Harianne Mills, have argued that sumptuary laws were implicitly gendered: for men, sumptuary regulation was an issue of class or pecuniary status, for women, a question of moral regulation. See Hughes, ‘Invisible Madonnas? The Italian Historiographical Tradition and the Women of Medieval Italy’, in Women in Medieval Society, ed. Susan M. Stuard (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976); and Mills, ‘Greek Clothing Regulations: Sacred or Profane?’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 55 (1984), 255–65. More recently, Alan Hunt has questioned these arguments by suggesting that both men and women were variously targeted by sumptuary law, as governing bodies responded to changes in fashionable dress, although he concedes that sumptuary laws ‘were a component of wider processes in which women were the targets of regulation and control’, pp. 214–54. 38 Armstrong, ‘The Rise of the Domestic Woman’, pp. 110–11. 39 Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning and Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 76–86. 40 The extent and limitations of the revolutionary implications of a sentimental meritocracy and the self-regulatory efforts of writers to guard against its more transgressive implications are explored by Markley in ‘Sentimentality as Performance’, pp. 210–30. 41 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767), ed. Ian Campbell Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 59. 42 Thomas Marriott, Being an Essay on the Art of Pleasing, 3rd edn (London: W. Owen, 1775), p. 202. 43 Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, p. 74. 44 On cosmetics as sign, see Tassie Gwilliam, ‘Cosmetic Poetics: Coloring Faces in the Eighteenth Century’, in Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Dorothea von Mücke and Veronica Kelly (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 144–59. The extent to which race and skin colour were seen as contingent or indelible signifiers of character see, among others, Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). On defect, see Helen Deutsch and Felicity A. Nussbaum, eds, ‘Defects’: Engendering the Modern Body (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2000); and on the relationship between defect, beauty and physiognomy, see Robert W. Jones, Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Analysis of Beauty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Notes 181 45 Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, p. 113. 46 Lady Bradshaigh, Letter to Richardson (n.d.), The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, ed. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, 6 vols (London: Richard Phillips, 1804), IV, pp. 282–3. 47 Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1799), I, p. 74. 48 Jean H. Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980). 49 Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 50 Gillian Skinner, Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 1740–1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999); and Guest, Small Change, pp. 155–75. 51 For a sustained account of sensibility’s relationship to consumer culture, see Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility. 52 Ibid. Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982). 53 See Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Mitzi Myers, ‘Sensibility and the “Walk of Reason”: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Literary Reviews as Cultural Critique’, in Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics, Essays in Honor of Jean H. Hagstrum, ed. Syndy McMillen Conger (Rutherford, Madison and Teaneck: Farleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1990), pp. 120–44; Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Syndy McMillen Conger, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language of Sensibility (Rutherford, Madison and Teaneck: Farleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994). 54 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), ed. Miriam Brody (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 197. 55 R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1974).

Chapter 1 1 Reference to the phenomenon as a ‘vogue’ has been common since Alan McKillop’s Samuel Richardson, Printer and Novelist (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936), p. 45, although this is only one of many terms used by McKillop to describe the events following the novel’s publication. 2 James Grantham Turner, ‘Novel Panic: Picture and Performance in the Reception of Richardson’s Pamela’, Representations, 48 (1994), p. 92. 3 Tassie Gwilliam, Samuel Richardson’s Fictions of Gender (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 15. Other studies which devote attention to dress in the novel include Carey McIntosh, ‘Pamela’s Clothes’, ELH, 35 (1968) 75–83; Caryn Chaden, ‘Pamela’s Identity Sewn in Clothes’, in EighteenthCentury Women and the Arts, ed. Frederick M. Keener and Susan E. Lorsch

182 Notes

4

5

6 7 8

9

10 11 12 13

14 15 16

17

(New York, West Point, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1988), pp. 110–18; and Patricia Brückmann, ‘Clothes of Pamela’s Own: Shopping at B-Hall’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 25: 2 (2001) 201–15. Robert W. Jones, Gender and The Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Analysis of Beauty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See particularly pp. 206–10. William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley, LA and London: University of California Press, 1998), p. 176. Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, General Introduction to The Pamela Controversy (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001), I, p. xvii. Letter prefixed to the second edition of the novel, reprinted in The Pamela Controversy, I, pp. 22–3. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1660–1740 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 224. McKeon uses the phrase in a discussion of the sixteenth-century text Jack of Newbery (1597) to describe a draper who has fallen on hard times, but who increases his wealth and eventually becomes sheriff after receiving the charitable gift of a suit of new clothes from the hero, Jack. Samuel Richardson, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 3. All quotations are taken from this edition (a reprint of the two-volume first edition) unless otherwise stated. Subsequent references will be given, parenthetically, in the text. Warner, Licensing Entertainment, p. 203. Aileen Ribeiro, Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe, 1715–1789 (London: B. T. Batsford, 1984), p. 61. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa or the History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 966. Diana De Marly, Working Dress: A History of Occupational Clothing (London: B. T. Batsford, 1986), p. 47. See also Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class [1899] (New York: Dover Publications, 1994), in which Veblen argues that the demonstration of conspicuous leisure, evident in the impracticability of garments to the rigours of labouring-class life, was an imperative in nineteenth-century fashion. Daniel Defoe, Every-Body’s Business, is No-body’s Business (London: W. Faden, 1758) p. 6. Ibid., p. 13. The importance of servants in potentially securing the future of the English textile industries in the face of the influx of comparatively cheap and fashionable imported cottons and silks was an important political issue in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In 1689 a Bill demanding that servants should wear felt hats of English manufacture was only narrowly defeated. For a full account of the hostility towards imported fabrics, see Beverly Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 3–42. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings, ed. E. J. Hundert (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1997), p. 77.

Notes 183 18 J. C. Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes, 2nd edn (London: Hogarth Press, 1940), see particularly pp. 15–24; and Georg Simmel, ‘Fashion, Adornment and Style’, Simmel on Culture, ed. David Firsby and Mike Featherstone (London and New Delhi: Sage, 1997). 19 Defoe, Every-Body’s Business, p. 15. 20 Daniel Defoe, The Great Law of Subordination Consider’d: or, the Insolence and Unsufferable Behaviour of Servants in England duly inquir’d into (London: H. Whittridge, 1724), p. 17. 21 Defoe, Every-Body’s Business, p. 18. 22 Defoe, The Great Law of Subordination, p. 291. 23 Samuel Richardson, The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum (California: University of California, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1975), p. v. 24 Ibid., p. 31. 25 Phillis Cunnington, Costume of Household Servants from the Middle Ages to 1900 (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1974), p. 148. 26 Defoe, The Great Law of Subordination, p. 138. 27 Brückmann, ‘Clothes of Pamela’s Own’, p. 202. 28 [Eliza Haywood], Anti-Pamela: or, Feign’d Innocence Detected, reprinted in The Pamela Controversy, III. Subsequent references will be given, parenthetically, in the text. 29 Eliza Haywood, A Present for a Servant-Maid, reprinted in Selected Works of Eliza Haywood, ed. Alexander Petit (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000), I, p. 241. 30 Warner, Licensing Entertainment, p. 203. 31 Samuel Richardson, A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflections Contained in the Histories of PAMELA, CLARISSA, AND Sir CHARLES GRANDISON (London: published for Samuel Richardson, 1755), p. 21. 32 Warner, Licensing Entertainment, pp. 192–9. 33 Though the term was seized on for its implications of deceit by countless anti-Pamelists, and most obviously in the creation of Haywood’s Syrena Tricksy, tricking could simply describe the act of dressing. In the eighteenth century, ‘tricksy’ could mean to be ‘artfully trimmed or decked, spruce, smart, fine’ or to be ‘full of tricks of deception’ (OED). 34 [Anon.], Pamela: or, the fair Imposter. A Poem in Five Cantos, By J–– W––, Esq., reprinted in The Pamela Controversy, I, p. 213. 35 For a discussion of the hierarchical implications of needlework, see Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: The Women’s Press, 1996). The social implications of needlework are discussed further in Chapter 2. 36 Sheila C. Conboy, ‘Fabric and Fabrication in Richardson’s Pamela’, ELH, 54: 1 (1987), p. 84. 37 [Anon.], Pamela: or, The Fair Imposter, p. 231. 38 Samuel Richardson, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, 4 vols (London: Printed for S. Richardson, 1742), IV, pp. 114–19. The ‘walking double entendre’ that is Pamela at the masquerade is explored by Terry Castle in ‘The Recarnivalisation of Pamela: Richardson’s “Pamela”, Part 2’, Masquerade and Civilisation, pp. 130–76. 39 For the history of Quaker dress, see Joan Kendall, ‘The Development of a Distinctive Form of Quaker Dress’, Costume, 19 (1985), pp. 58–74.

184 Notes 40 [Anon.], Pamela: or the Fair Imposter, p. 236. 41 Henry Giffard, Pamela. A Comedy, reprinted in The Pamela Controversy, VI, pp. 66–7. 42 Ibid., p. 73. 43 Warner, Licensing Entertainment, p. 193. Warner develops his argument further by suggesting, in true anti-Pamelist tradition, that Pamela’s appearance in her homespun gown is a metaphor for the novel itself: ‘disguise in fact epitomises the fundamental communicative posture of Richardson’s text. In this scene, the novels of amorous intrigue … circulate like parasitical foreign bodies within Pamela. Richardson’s “new species of writing” becomes their host’, pp. 196–7. 44 [Anon.], Pamela Censured, p. 50. 45 Henry Fielding, An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews, reprinted in The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr Abraham Adams, ed. Douglas Brooks (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 344. 46 Francis Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (London: S. Hooper, 1785). 47 Robert Markley, ‘Sentimentality as Performance: Shaftesbury, Sterne, and the Theatrics of Virtue’, in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 220. Chaden in ‘Pamela’s Identity Sewn in Clothes’, likewise argues that Pamela’s ‘complex … class affiliation’ (p. 110), as symbolised by her various garments, undermines the novel’s ‘moral resonance’ (p. 116). 48 Ann Louise Kibbie, ‘Sentimental Properties: Pamela and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure’, ELH, 58: 3 (1991), p. 561. 49 Ibid., p. 562. 50 Gwilliam, Samuel Richardson’s Fictions of Gender, pp. 32–3. 51 Brückmann, ‘Clothes of Pamela’s Own’, p. 201. 52 ‘To the Author of Shamela’, London Magazine, 10 (June 1741), reprinted in The Pamela Controversy, I, p. 183. 53 Fred Davis, Fashion, Culture and Identity (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 5. 54 Brückmann, ‘Clothes of Pamela’s Own’, pp. 201–15. 55 The possible connection between Pamela and Griselda is noted by Margaret Anne Doody in A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 64. 56 George Ogle, Gualtherus and Griselda: or, the Clerk of Oxford’s Tale from Boccace, Petrarch and Chaucer (London: R. Dodsley, 1739), p. 10. Subsequent references will be given, parenthetically, in the text. 57 Aaron Hill, Letter to Samuel Richardson, 29 June 1741. Hill, Works, II, p. 176. 58 [Isaac Bickerstaffe], The Maid of the Mill. A Comic Opera. As it is Perform’d at the Theatre-Royal in Covent Garden, 5th edn (London: J. Newberry, R. Baldwin, T. Caslon, W. Griffin, W. Nicall, T. Lowndes, T. Beckett, 1765), p. 72. 59 Richardson recapitulated B.’s rule in his Collection of Moral and Instructive Sentiments: ‘Women owe to themselves, and to their Sex, to be always neat, and never to be surprised, by accidental visitors, in such a dishabille as would pain them to be seen in.’ Richardson, Collection, p. 114.

Notes 185 60 Anna Laetitia Barbauld, The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, 6 vols (London: Richard Phillips, 1804), I, p. lviii. 61 Fielding, Shamela, p. 319. 62 Ibid., p. 324. 63 [Anon.], ‘Jenny: or, the Female Fortune Hunter’, in The Theatre of Love: A Collection of Novels (London: W. Reeve, 1759). 64 Samuel Richardson, Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded, ed. Peter Sabor (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 229. This edition is based on the 1801 edition. 65 Works focusing on the engravings and their troubling performativity include Marcia Allentuck, ‘Narration and Illustration: The Problem of Richardson’s Pamela’, Philological Quarterly, 51 (1972) 874–86; and, more recently, James Grantham Turner, ‘Novel Panic’ and Stephen Raynie, ‘Hayman and Gravelot’s Anti-Pamela Designs for Richardson’s Octavo Edition of Pamela’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 23:3 (1999) 77–93. 66 Castle, Masquerade and Civilisation, p. 137. 67 Samuel Richardson, Pamela, 4 vols (1741), IV, p. 118. 68 John Kelly, Pamela’s Conduct in High Life, 2 vols, reprinted in The Pamela Controversy, IV–V. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text. 69 Eaves and Kimpel have argued that Anti-Pamela was an effort to ‘capitalise on Pamela’s popularity [but] had little connection beyond the title’ (Samuel Richardson, p. 130). Mary Anne Schofield divorces Anti-Pamela from Richardson’s novel entirely, by placing it in a discussion of prostitution in Haywood’s romance fiction. Mary Anne Schofield, ‘“Descending Angels”: Salubrious Sluts and Pretty Prostitutes in Haywood’s Fiction’, in Fetter’d or Free?: British Women Novelists, 1670–1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens and London: Ohio University Press, 1987), pp. 186–200. A recent exception to this dominant account is given by Catherine Ingrassia, in Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early EighteenthCentury England: A Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), in which Ingrassia reclaims Haywood’s work as one which seeks to question the didactic and generic conventions Richardson’s novel established. See pp. 111–16. 70 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Ian Campbell Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 59. 71 The figure of the needlewoman, mantua-maker and milliner and her association with moral corruption and social ambition will be explored more fully in chapter 2. 72 This theme will be returned to in a discussion of Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) in Chapter 2.

Chapter 2 1 For a more detailed analysis of these changes, see Jennifer Jones, ‘Coquettes and Grisettes: Women Buying and Selling in the Old Regime’, in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. Victoria de Grazia with Ellen Furlough (Berkeley, LA and London: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 25–53.

186 Notes 2 Clare Haru Crowston, Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675–1791 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 12. 3 Schwarz has argued that the fears provoked by women’s usurpation of labour traditionally undertaken by tailors was an important impetus in the movement to establish tailors’ unions in the mid-century. L. D. Schwarz, London in the Age of Industrialisation: Entrepreneurs, Labour Force and Living Conditions, 1700–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 190. 4 On the threat labour posed to conceptions of domestic femininity, see Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 78–81. 5 Robert Campbell, The London Tradesman, being a Compendious View of all the Trades, Professions, Arts, both liberal and mechanic, now practised in the Cities of London and Westminster (London: T. Gardner, 1747), p. 191. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text. 6 See Christina Walkley, The Ghost in the Looking Glass (London: Peter Owen, 1981); and Lynn M. Alexander, ‘Creating a Symbol: The Seamstress in Victorian Fiction’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 18: 1 (1999) 29–38. 7 The increasingly contentious figure of the man-milliner is explored later in this chapter. 8 See Beverly Lemire, Dress, Culture and Commerce: The English Clothing Trade before the Factory, 1660–1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997); and Aileen Ribeiro, Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe, 1715–1789 (London: Batsford, 1984), pp. 43–65. 9 [Anon.], A General Description of All Trades, Digested in Alphabetical Order (London: T. Waller, 1747), pp. 134, 149. 10 Shifts were shirt-like garments worn underneath stays. 11 Tony Henderson, Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London: Prostitution Control in the Metropolis, 1730–1830 (London and New York: Longman, 1999), pp. 14–15. 12 [Anon.], The Intriguing Milliners and Attornies Clerks. A Mock-Tragedy in Two Acts (London: J. Hughs for W. Smith, 1738), p. 59. 13 John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, ed. Peter Sabor (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 93–4. 14 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miriam Brody (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 267. 15 Taking my lead from Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, I am reading these texts not as ‘the key to a historical understanding of the period, but to how an age discursively constructed its understanding of itself’. Elizabeth KowaleskiWallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 116. 16 Such studies include Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Erin Mackie, Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects; and Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), particularly pp. 165–206.

Notes 187 17 Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects, p. 87. 18 Francis Grose, Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (London: S. Hooper, 1785). Kowaleski-Wallace has recently suggested, for example, that the ‘actual kind of business [a woman] engages in [in this period] is less significant than the fact that she engages in business at all.’ Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects, p. 112. 19 This title was also adopted by John Collet for a 1770 engraving in which two leering milliners quite literally measure up a young, amorous customer, who gazes intently on one of the fashionable shopwomen. 20 Robert Drury, The Rival Milliners: or, the Humours of Covent-Garden. A TragiComi-Operatic-Pastoral Farce. As it is acted at the New Theatre in the Hay-Market (London: G. Spavan, 1737), p. 2. 21 Holland is a kind of linen. 22 Drury, Rival Milliners, p. 15. 23 Ibid., p. 46. 24 Lynda M. Thompson, The ‘Scandalous Memoirists’: Constantia Philips, Laetitia Pilkington and the Shame of ‘Publick Fame’ (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 81. 25 Laetitia Pilkington, Memoirs of Mrs Laetitia Pilkington, 2 vols (Dublin: Printed for the author, 1748), II, pp. 114–15. 26 Ibid., p. 115. 27 [Anon.], The Cherub: or, Guardian of Female Innocence (London: W. Locke: 1792). Subsequent references will be given, parenthetically, in the text. 28 Kimberly Chrisman Campbell, ‘The Face of Fashion: Milliners in Eighteenth-Century Visual Culture’, British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 25:2 (2002), p. 163. 29 Eliza Haywood, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, ed. Beth Fowkes Tobin (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 11. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text. 30 As Deborah J. Nestor points out, the novel refuses to resolve the seduction/ rape question. Though Miss Forward meets Wildly of her own free will, and is clearly attracted to him, the physical force he exerts over her in the seduction/rape scene is stressed in the account Miss Forward gives to Betsy. See Nestor, ‘Virtue Rarely Rewarded: Ideological Subversion and Narrative Form in Haywood’s Later Fiction’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 34: 3 (1994), p. 582. 31 Oliver Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, reprinted in Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), II, p. 320. 32 A particularly glossy silk. 33 The Monthly Review, 5 (1751), p. 394. 34 Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects, p. 87. 35 Frances Burney, Camilla: or, a Picture of Youth, ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 688. 36 Beth Fowkes Tobin, ‘Introduction’, Betsy Thoughtless, p. xxxii. 37 London Magazine, 35 (July 1766), p. 335. 38 See Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800 (London: Virago, 1989), p. 146; and Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 141.

188 Notes 39 Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce and Gender in Early EighteenthCentury England: A Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 129. 40 Pin-money offered women a modicum of financial independence after marriage in the form of an allowance for expenses, particularly for fabrics and dress, often secured in a pre-nuptial contract. See Susan Staves, ‘Pin Money’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 14 (1985) 47–77. 41 See, for example, Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce and Gender, pp. 128–37. 42 By embracing the sentimental novel, Haywood, like Betsy herself, was able to ‘recover a lost reputation, and …]atone for her errors’. Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, Through Times, Countires, and Manners, 2 vols. (Colchester: W. Keymer; London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1785), I, p. 121. 43 Hogarth designed the trade card for his sisters’ business. 44 For a discussion of Sarah Young, see Patricia Crown, ‘Hogarth’s Working Women: Commerce and Consumption’, in The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference, ed. Bernadette Fort and Angela Rosenthal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 224–39. 45 Vivien Jones, ‘Placing Jemima: Women Writers of the 1790s and the Eighteenth-Century Prostitution Narrative’, Women’s Writing, 4: 2 (1997) 201–20. 46 For historical accounts of the decline in employment opportunities for women in the eighteenth century, see Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (London: George Routledge and Sons Ltd., 1930); and Bridget Hill, Women, Work, and Sexual Politics in England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 47 Frances Burney, Evelina: or, the History of a Young Ladies Entrance into the World, ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 27. 48 In John O’ Keeffe’s play, The Man Milliner, for example, the title character is a grotesque, effeminate man. Like his female counterparts he sets himself up as a matchmaker for his clients (although, unlike his female counterparts, he is a very unsuccessful one) in the hopes of financial reward. The Man-Milliner, in Two Acts. Performed at the Theatre-Royal, Covent-Garden in 1787, in John O’Keeffe, The Dramatic Works of John O’Keeffe, Esq., IV (London: T. Woodfall, 1798). 49 Priscilla Wakefield, Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex; with Suggestions for its Improvement (London: J. Johnson, 1798), pp. 153–4. 50 Frances Burney, 22 January 1780, Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay, ed. Charlotte Barrett (London: Bickers and Son, 1876), p. 210. 51 Kristina Straub, Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1987), p. 191. 52 Letter to Charles Burney, 13 August 1779. Frances Burney (2001), Journals and Letters, ed. Peter Sabor, Lars E. Troide, Stewart Cooke and Victoria KortesPapp (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), p. 128. Between August 1779 and the beginning of 1780, Burney would extensively revise the play. Later in her career she resurrected some of the characters from her earlier play in The Woman-Hater, written between 1800 and 1802. On the suppression of The Witlings and its later revision as The Woman-Hater, see Peter Sabor and

Notes 189

53

54

55

56

57 58

59

60 61 62 63 64

65

Geoffrey Sill’s ‘Introduction’ to The Witlings and Woman-Hater (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1997), pp. x–xxxv. Frances Burney, The Witlings, ed. Clayton J. Delery (East Lansing, MI: Colleag ues Press, 1995), p. 31. Subsequent references will be given, parenthetically, in the text. This view would be uncomfortably confirmed by personal experience when Burney became the ‘Keeper of the Robes of Queen Charlotte’ in 1786. As someone who hated sewing, the weekly task of stitching caps and restoring petticoats for the full-court dress worn on Thursday afternoons as St. James’s Palace was a particularly trying experience for Burney. Kate Chisholm, Fanny Burney: Her Life (London: Vintage, 1999), p. 140. Polly Wheedle, as already mentioned, is one of the eponymous rival milliners of Drury’s play. Although The Rival Milliners was written some 40 years earlier than The Witlings it is possible that Burney was aware of the play. A one-off performance of the play was staged at the Haymarket on 27 December 1779, while Burney was writing The Witlings and living in London. Index to the London Stage. Barbara Darby, Frances Burney, Dramatist: Gender, Performance and the Late Eighteenth-Century Stage (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1997), p. 40. Ibid., p. 27. Frances Burney, The Wanderer: or, Female Difficulties, ed. Margaret Anne Doody, Robert Mack and Peter Sabor (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 11. Subsequent references will be given, parenthetically, in the text. Margaret Anne Doody, Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (Cambridge, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne and Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 355. Cecilia Macheski, ‘Penelope’s Daughters: Images of Needlework in Eighteenth-Century Literature’, in Fetter’d or Free, p. 86. Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: The Women’s Press, 1996), p. 11. Doody, Frances Burney, p. 354. Edward Copeland, Women Writing About Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 162–3. For a discussion reassessing the importance of the conflict between Elinor and Juliet to Burney’s novel and its politics see Andrea Austin, ‘Between Two Women: Frances Burney’s The Wanderer’, English Studies in Canada, 22:3 (1996) 253–66. Mary Lamb, who worked to support her family as a mantua-maker for eleven years, wrote an article for The British Lady’s Magazine in 1815 entitled ‘On Needlework’. Writing under the pseudonym Sempronia, Lamb reflects the new sensibility towards the dressmaking trades by divorcing its workers from the articles of their production and making the case for appropriate remuneration for this labour-intensive work. Lamb’s firsthand experience of this mentally and physically exhausting work was tragic. In 1796, she famously stabbed her mother to death while attempting to injure her journeywoman apprentice. See the Morning Chronicle, 26 September 1796.

190 Notes

Chapter 3 1 Fashionable Magazine, 1 (June 1786), p. iii. 2 Minna Thornton, ‘The Fashion Plate in London, 1759–1809’ (unpublished MA thesis, Victoria and Albert Museum and RCA, 1993), pp. 54–9. 3 Magazine à la Mode, 1 (April 1777), p. 196. 4 Magazine à la Mode, 1 (July 1777), p. 244. 5 Nicolaus von Heideloff’s Gallery of Fashion (1794) was the first serial publication devoted solely to fashion. 6 The Fashionable Magazine, 1 (June 1786), p. iii–iv. 7 The Lady’s Magazine ran from 1770 to 1832 before joining with the Ladies’ Museum to form The Lady’s Magazine and Museum of Belles Lettres. This title in turn ran until 1838 when the publication combined with the Court Magazine to form The Court Magazine and Monthly Critic and Lady’s Magazine and Museum of Belles Lettres. This title ran until 1847. Alison Adburgham, Women in Print: Writing Women and Women’s Magazines from the Restoration to Accession of Victoria (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972), p. 280. Subsequent references to the Lady’s Magazine will be given parenthetically in the text, by volume and page number. 8 Jacqueline Pearson, ‘“Books, my greatest joy” Constructing the Female Reader in The Lady’s Magazine’, Women’s Writing, 3: 1 (1996) 3–15. 9 Edward Copeland, Women Writing About Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 117. 10 Erin Mackie, Market à la Mode : Fashion, Commodity and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator (Baltimore and London : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 27. 11 Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 167. 12 The Female Spectator, 15 (1745), p. 177. 13 Shevelow, Women and Print Culture, p. 170. 14 The Female Spectator, 1 (1744), pp. 4–5. 15 F. W. Fairholt collected articles on fashion from these and other eighteenthcentury periodicals and magazines in a series of scrapbooks titled Collections on Costume which are held by the British Museum Prints and Drawings Department. BM 169*c.12–14. 16 London Magazine, 35 (July 1766), p. 334. 17 Ibid., p. 335. 18 Female Spectator, 15 (1745), p. 178. 19 Shevelow, Women and Print Culture, p. 142. 20 The Lady’s Museum (1760–1), p. 15. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text. 21 Patricia Meyer Spacks, ‘Sisters’, in Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists 1670–1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens and London: Ohio University Press, 1987), p. 137. 22 Other readings of Sophia include those of Robert W. Jones, Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England: The Analysis of Beauty (Cabridge: Cambridge University Pres, 1998), pp. 164–70; and Mary Anne Schofield in Masking and Unmasking the Female Mind: Disguising Romances in

Notes 191

23

24 25 26 27 28

29

30

31 32

33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41

Feminine Fiction, 1713–1799 (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1990), pp. 141–2. Robert D. Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740–1815 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 290. Schofield, Masking and Unmasking the Female Mind, p. 142. Ibid., p. 142. Jones, Gender and the Formation of Taste, pp. 168–9. Shevelow, Women and Print Culture, p. 188. Shevelow’s study of women’s periodicals does not refer to pocket books at all, and they are only briefly discussed in Alison Adburgham’s Women in Print. Adburgham’s interest in pocket books seems to derive less from their intrinsic value than as one of the various publishing activities of the Minerva Press’s William Lane (pp. 159–64). Anne Buck and Harry Matthews, ‘Pocket Guides to Fashion: Ladies’ Pocket Books Published in England, 1760–1830’, Costume, 18 (1984) 35–58. Buck and Matthews provide a useful appendix of pocket books and their locations based on their research. However, since the publication of this article more pocket books have emerged. Harris’s British Ladies Complete Pocket Memorandum Book For the Year 1792 (London: H. Goldney [1791]), p. 2. Pocket books were printed in the autumn prior to the year for which they were designed. The Ladies Compleat Pocket-Book for the Year of Our Lord 1753 (London: J. Newbery, [1752]) n.p. BL Catalogue number c.136.bb.30. The New Memorandum-Book Improv’d: or, the Gentleman and Tradesman’s Daily Pocket Journal for the Year 1753 (London: R. Dodsley [1752]), no page numbers. B.L. catalogue number P.P.2490.cc. New Memorandum Book, n. p. The Ladies Compleat Pocket-Book For the Year of Our Lord 1762 (London: J. Newbery, [1761]), n.p., B.L. catalogue number c. 136.bb.30. See Gillian Skinner, Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 1740–1800: The Price of a Tear (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). The 1753 Lady’s Compleat Pocket Book is the earliest pocket book I have located. It contains no fashion plate, although this may have been removed. Often plates were cut from pocket books to place in private collections and scrapbooks, the most famous example of which is Barbara Johnson’s ‘Album’ held by the Victoria and Albert Museum. A facsimile of the textile book has been published as Barbara Johnson’s Album of Fashions and Fabrics, ed. Natalie Rothstein (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987). The earliest plate in the ‘Album’ exhibits a dress for 1754, although its source is unknown. The Ladies Compleat Pocket-Book for 1762, p. iii. The Ladies Miscellany, or, New, Useful and Entertaining Companion for the Year 1789 (London: J. Brown, [1788]), p. 122. Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 76–82. I am grateful to Claire Brock for alerting me to this text. Paul Jodrell, A Widow and No Widow. A Dramatic Piece of Three Acts (Dublin: G. Bonham, 1780), p. 41.

192 Notes 42 Ibid., p. 44. 43 The Ladies Miscellany, or, New, Useful and Entertaining Companion, For the Year 1789, p. 124. 44 Nancy Armstrong, ‘The Rise of the Domestic Woman’, in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. Nany Armstong and Leonard Tennenhouse (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 110–11. 45 The Ladies Miscellany, or, New, Useful and Entertaining Companion For the Year 1787 (London: J. Brown [1786]), p. 10. 46 The Ladies Miscellany, or, New, Useful and Entertaining Companion for the Year 1789, pp. 121–3. 47 The Ladies Miscellany, or, New, Useful and Entertaining Companion For the Year 1787, p. 126. 48 The Ladies Daily Companion: or useful and entertaining Pocket Book for the Year of Our Lord 1786 (Rochester: T. Fisher [1785]), pp. 20–5. 49 The Ladies Most Elegant and Convenient Pocket Book for the Year 1784 (London: E. Newbery [1783]), p. 121. Corporation of London Guildhall Library. Store 1277, Almanacs 35. 50 For a more detailed discussion of changes in the dissemination of fashion and the concerns these shifts raised see McKendrick, ‘The Commercialisation of Fashion’. 51 Magazine à la Mode, 1 (January 1777), p. 3. 52 Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer: or, the Mistakes of a Night. A Comedy (London: E. Newbery, 1773), II, i, 39. 53 The Christian-Lady’s Pocket Book for the Year 1792 (London: J. S. Jordan and G. Terry [1791]), p. 4. 54 The Ladies Museum, or Complete Pocket Memorandum Book For the Year 1774 (London: William Lane [1773]), B.L Catalogue Number c.115.n.68. 55 The Ladies Most Elegant and Convenient Pocket Book, for the Year 1785 (London: E. Newbery [1784]). Corporation of London Guildhall Library Reference Store 1277, Almanacs 36. 56 BL Catalogue number c.136.bb.30 57 Harris’s Original British Ladies Memorandum Book For 1782 (London: J. Pasham [1781]), p. 5. 58 Indeed George Robinson, publisher of the Lady’s Magazine also published a successful pocket book entitled The Ladies Own Memorandum Book, or Daily Pocket Journal which ran from as early as 1769 well into the nineteenth century. 59 Jean E. Hunter, ‘The Lady’s Magazine and the Study of Englishwomen in the Eighteenth Century’, in Newsletters to Newspapers: Eighteenth-Century Journalism, ed. Donald F. Bond (Morgantown: West Virginia University, 1977), p. 112. 60 In February 1785 The Lady’s Magazine published an article on ‘One of the Leading Causes of Prostitution’, the ‘Dress of Servant Girls above their Station’. 61 Of course, pocket books had published fashion plates since the late 1750s, long before the first issue of The Lady’s Magazine. 62 See Hunter, ‘The Lady’s Magazine’, p. 106. 63 Ibid., p. 107.

Notes 193

Chapter 4 1 James Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women, 3rd edn, 2 vols (London: A. Millar and T. Cadell, J. Dodsley and J. Payne, 1766), I, pp. 73–4. All quotations are taken from the first volume. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text. 2 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miriam Brody (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), pp. 194–5. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text. 3 See Monthly Review, 34 (1766), pp. 452–67; 35 (1766), pp. 10–20; and Critical Review, 22 (1766), pp. 18–31. 4 Despite the popularity of his work, Fordyce’s personal popularity appears to have waned later in his career. The circumstances of his decline are obscure, but the ruinous financial speculations of his brother Alexander, which affected some of James’s acquaintance, as well as a quarrel with Thomas Toller who preached at the same chapel in Monkwell Street as Fordyce, and which effectively split the congregation, seem to have played significant roles. DNB. 5 [Anon.], Fordyce Delineated a Satire: A Satire Occasioned by His Sermons to Young Women, 2nd edn (London: J. Dixwell, [1765?]), p. 19. 6 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, reprinted in The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman, 3rd edn, 5 vols (London, Oxford and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1959), II, pp. 68–9. 7 More detailed accounts of Mary Wollstonecraft’s complex relationship to sentimentalism can be found in Syndy McMillen Conger, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language of Sensibility (Rutherford, Madison and Teaneck: Farleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994); and G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1992). See, in particular, pp. 281–5 and 362–4. 8 McMillen Conger, Mary Wollstonecraft, pp. 121–2. 9 My use of the term ‘fashion system’ is not accidental. It is intended to serve both literally, underscoring Fordyce’s telling description of his sartorial blueprint as a ‘system’, and to evoke Barthes’ theorisation of the fashion system and his model of fashion’s tripartite structure: the image, the written and the real. Fordyce’s system, I argue, hovers precariously between written articulation and the real; the failure of each structure to fully translate into the other anticipates the text’s failure. Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985). 10 Vivien Jones, ed., Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 78. 11 Vivien Jones, ‘Placing Jemima: Women Writers of the 1790s and the Eighteenth-Century Prostitute Narrative’, Women’s Writing 4: 2 (1997), p. 204. 12 Saunders Welch, A Proposal to render Effectual a Plan to remove the Nuisance of Common Prostitutes from the Streets of this Metropolis (London: C. Henderson, 1758), p. 19. Subsequent references will be given, parenthetically, in the text. 13 Furbanks and Owen have cast doubt on this attribution. Some Considerations is not cited, for example, in P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, The Canonisation of Defoe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).

194 Notes 14 Bradford K. Mudge, The Whore’s Story: Women, Pornography, and the British Novel, 1684–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 54. 15 [Daniel Defoe], Some Considerations Upon Street-Walkers (London: A. Moore, [1726(?)]), pp. 9–10. 16 Ibid., pp. 11–12. 17 While the proposal for a system of sartorially codifying prostitutes outlined in Some Considerations is intended to designate women of low moral status, the original systems of sartorial legislation in Greece and Rome may not have worked in this way. As Evans has argued, in the more permissive society of ancient Greece prostitutes were perceived as socially rather than morally inferior, and the regulation of their dress may have been driven by class rather than by moral considerations. See Hilary Evans, The Oldest Profession: An Illustrated History of Prostitution (London and Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1979), p. 35. 18 Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) inspired male fashion across Europe. The sentimental hero’s dark blue coat, yellow waistcoat, buff breeches and boots were widely imitated after the book’s publication. Aileen Ribeiro, Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe, 1715–1789 (London: Batsford, 1984), p. 144. 19 Sarah Scott, The History of Sir George Ellison, ed. Betty Rizzo (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), p. 197. 20 Ibid., p. 197. 21 Ibid., pp. 197–8. 22 Nancy Armstrong, ‘The Rise of the Domestic Woman’, in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literaure and thre History of Sexuality, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 97. 23 Thomas Marriott, Female Conduct: Being an Essay on the Art of Pleasing. To be Practised by the Fair Sex, Before, and After Marriage. A Poem, in Two Books, 3rd edn (London: W. Own, 1775), p. 79. 24 Wetenhall Wilkes, A Letter of Genteel and Moral Advice to a Young Lady (Dublin: E. Jones, 1740), p. 14. Subsequent references will be given, parenthetically, in the text. 25 Robert W. Jones, Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain The Analysis of Beauty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 76–7. 26 Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2000), pp. 243–6. 27 Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Dover Publications, 1994), p. 103. 28 Ibid., pp. 104–5. 29 Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, pp. 268–9. 30 While Quakerism and Methodism encouraged particular styles of dress, broadly condemned in contemporary novels, plays and periodical literature, the question of how widely such modes of dress were adopted remains a matter of conjecture. As Marcia Pointon argues, for example, there is considerable evidence from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century that many Quakers did not reject fashionable costume. Indeed, the persistence with which writers reiterate arguments against superfluity in dress suggests

Notes 195

31

32

33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40

41 42 43 44

45

46 47

that sartorial asceticism was not universally adhered to. Marcia Pointon, ‘Quakerism and Visual Culture, 1650–1800’, Art History, 20: 3 (1997), p. 412. For a discussion of the specific characteristics of Quaker dress and its evolution, see Joan Kendall, ‘The Development of a Distinctive Form of Quaker Dress’, Costume, 19 (1985) 58–74. John Wesley, Advice to the People Called Methodists with Regards to Dress (London: G. Paramore and G. Whitfield, 1795), p. 7. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, pp. 268–9. Pointon, ‘Quakerism’, pp. 400–1. George Fox, The Journal of George Fox, ed. Norman Penney, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), p. 175. Pointon, ‘Quakerism’, p. 412. This criticism of Quaker dress was widely held in the eighteenth century. As the traveller Archenholz remarked, Quaker women compensated for the fact that they could not ‘use fancy colours, nor wear powder, feathers, ribbands, nor jewels’ by wearing clothes made out of the ‘dearest stuffs’. M. D’Archenholz, A Picture of England, Containing a Description of the Customs and Manners of England, Interspersed with Curious and Interesting Anecdotes (Dublin: P. Byrne, 1791), p. 109. The Lady’s Magazine: or Polite Companion for the Fair Sex, 2 (June 1760), pp. 458–61. London Magazine 8 (November 1739), pp. 603–4. Quaker dress, it should be noted, was a popular masquerade costume throughout the eighteenth century, and satires directed against Friends frequently pointed to the hypocrisy masked by their simple, modest and supposedly virtuous costume. Hannah More, Essays on Various Subjects, Principally Designed for Young Ladies (London: J. Wilkie and T. Caddell, 1777), p. 78. Ibid., p. 111. Joseph Hanway, Reflections, Essays and Meditations on Life and Religion, 2 vols (London: John Rivington; R. and J. Dodsley and C. Henderson, 1761). See Robin Evans, The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture, 1750–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 71; and Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity, London’s Geographies 1680–1780 (London and New York: The Guildford Press, 1998), p. 68. See, for example, Donna T. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 119–26; Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 30–7; Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender an Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 160–89; Sarah Lloyd, ‘Pleasure’s Golden Bait’: Prostitution, Poverty and the Magdalen Hospital in Eighteenth-Century London’, History Workshop Journal, 41 (1996) 51–72; and Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity, pp. 39–74. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police, p. 120. Robert Dingley, Proposals for Establishing a Public Place of Reception for Penitent Prostitutes, &c. (London: W. Faden, 1758), p. 4. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text.

196 Notes 48 Ironically, the charity used dress, as bawds did, to lock the women into a form of contract from which they could not extricate themselves without difficulty. Hanway, for example, remarked that the penitents should ‘be informed, that if they shall find means to leave the house, in a clandestine manner, and carry away the cloaths, or any thing which is the property of the Treasurer or any other person, as the cloaths and furniture, &c. shall be deemed, they will be considered as robbers in any similar case’. Jonas Hanway, A Plan for Establishing a Charity-House, or Charity-Houses, for the Reception of Repenting Prostitutes. To be called the Magdalen Charity (London: [n. pub.], 1758), p. 22. 49 Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility, see particularly pp. 177–89. 50 This narrative has endured to the present day. Emma Donoghue’s Slammerkin is a fictionalised account of the life of Mary Saunders, based on a broadsheet that documents the servant’s vicious murder of her mistress, purportedly for the sake of a suit of ‘fine clothes’. Slammerkin traces the short life of Saunders, a seamstress’s daughter, from her seduction by a hawker for the sake of a single ribbon, through her pregnancy, to her life as a prostitute and her reluctant stay in the Magdalen House. Emma Donoghue, Slammerkin (London: Virago, 2000). 51 William Dodd, The Visitor, 2 vols (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1764), I, p. 60. 52 Ibid., I, p. 62. 53 Hanway, Plan, p. 22. 54 Massie’s Plan is unique in its advocation of a dress code that would reflect the social standing of its wearer rather than level the charity’s inmates. Joseph Massie, A Plan for the Establishment of Charity-Houses for Exposed or Deserted Women and Girls, and for Penitent Prostitutes (London: T. Payne, W. Shropshire, W. Owen and C. Henderson, 1758), p. 41. 55 In a letter to the Marine Society, ‘On Occasion of their Clothing and fitting out for Sea-SERVICE 3,097 Men, and 2,045 Boys’, Hanway argued that the ‘gift of clothings are a means of inducing many stout land-men to enter into the sea-service, who would not otherwise come’. Jonas Hanway, Three Letters on the Subject of the Marine Society (London: R. and J. Dodsley, P. Vaillant and J. Waugh, 1758), p. 3. 56 Hanway, Plan, p. 2. 57 Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity, p. 48. 58 Massie, Plan, p. 8. 59 John Fielding, A Plan for a Preservatory and Reformatory, for the Benefit of Deserted Girls and Penitent Prostitutes (London: R. Francklin, 1758), p. 22. 60 Ibid., pp. 20–1. 61 Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel, p. 21. 62 William Dodd, A Sermon on St Matthew, Chap. IX. Ver. 12, 13. Preach’d at the Parish Church of St Laurence, near Guild-Hall, April the 26th 1759 (London: W. Faden, 1759), p. ii. 63 Peter Stallybrass and Allan White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 83–97. 64 Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel, p. 36. 65 These narratives include [Anon.], The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House, As Supposed to be Related by Themselves, 2 vols

Notes 197 (London: J. Rivington and J. Dodsley, 1760); William Dodd, The Visitor, 2 vols (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1764); and Hugh Kelly, Memoirs of a Magdalen: or, the History of Louisa Mildmay, 2 vols (London: W. Griffin, 1767). 66 Horace Walpole, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, 48 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937–83), IX, pp. 273–4. 67 Caroline Gonda, ‘Misses, Murderesses, and Magdalens: Women in the Public Eye’, in Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830, ed. Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Clíona Ó Gallchoir and Penny Warburton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 66. 68 William Dodd, Advice to the Magdalens (London: W. Faden, [1759 or 1760(?)]), p. 1.

Chapter 5 1 Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 191–2. 2 Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 3. 3 Ibid., p. 7. 4 Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995). See, in particular, pp. 1–19. The unduly feminising influence of sentimentalism is also cited by Todd as one of the key factors in the mode’s decline. See Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 129–46. 5 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miria Brody (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 170. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text. 6 Hannah More, Stricture on the Modern Syste of Female Education. With a View of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent among Women of Rank and Fortune, 2nd edn, I (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1799), pp. 73–4. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text. 7 Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education, 2 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1798), I, p. 267. 8 Maria Edgeworth, ‘Angelina; or the Fair Inconnue’, in Moral Tales for Young People (London: Joseph Johnson, 1801). 9 Throughout this chapter I will be referring to the 1802 second ‘Corrected and Improved’ edition of the novel. More substantial revisions were later made when Edgeworth prepared the text for publication in Anna Barbauld’s British Novelists series in 1810. These revisions were maintained in the third edition of the text in 1811. 10 Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, ed. Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 3. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text. 11 Mitzi Myers, ‘Shot from the Canons: or, Maria Edgeworth and the Cultural Production and Consumption of the Late Eighteenth-century Woman Writer’, in The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 199.

198 Notes 12 Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey, reprinted in A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy By Mr Yorick with The Journal to Eliza and A Political Romance, ed. Ian Jack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 114. 13 Recently, such readings have been challenged by Jordana Rosenberg, who argues that the ‘struggle between the seductions of the social and the superiority of the domestic’ is problematised by the fact that ‘the seduction is proven to have been a sham all along’ and by Belinda’s complicity with the fictions she is supposed to debunk. The fact that Belinda is also taken in by Lady Delacour’s illness signals for Rosenberg the limits of the heroine’s rationality and the bourgeois ideology she is supposed to embody. Jordana Rosenberg, ‘The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth’s Belinda’, ELH, 70: 2 (2003), pp. 575–96. 14 Susan C. Greenfield, ‘“Abroad and at Home”: Sexual Ambiguity, Miscegenation and Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworth’s Belinda’, PMLA , 112: 2 (1995), p. 217. 15 Heather MacFadyen, in ‘Lady Delacour’s Library: Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda and Fashionable Reading’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 48:4 (1994), pp. 423–39. 16 Alexander Pope, ‘The Rape of the Lock’, Book II, l. 19, reprinted in Poems, p. 223. 17 Anne Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 41. 18 Several such experiments to educate young women as future wives were inspired by Rousseau’s Emile, including Romney’s ‘education’ of Emma Hamilton. Belinda’s subplot was inspired more specifically, however, by the experiment made by Thomas Day, a family friend of the Edgeworths, to create a real-life Sophie by educating Sabrina Sidney to become his wife. Sidney and Day did not marry, however. Eight years after being sent away from Day following an argument, Sidney married Day’s friend, John Bicknell. See Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: a Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 39. 19 In addition to Belinda and Virginia, Lady Delacour’s character is split between her spirited public self, and private, tragic identity, while Harriet Freke’s appearance in various disguises and dress signals an equally fluid identity. 20 Greenfield, ‘“Abroad and at Home”, p. 214. 21 Maria Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies to which is added An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification, ed. Claire Connolly (London: J. M. Dent; and Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle, 1993), p. 48. 22 Falls and bruises were deemed one of the possible causes of breast cancer in the eighteenth century. For a discussion of the medical understanding of the disease in the period, see Ruth Perry, ‘Colonising the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 16: 1 (1992), pp. 185–213. 23 MacFadyen, ‘Lady Delacour’s Library’, p. 426. 24 For a more detailed analysis of this theme, see ibid., pp. 423–39. 25 Greenfield, ‘“Abroad and at Home”’, p. 216. 26 Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilisation: The Carnivalesque in EighteenthCentury English Culture and Fiction (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 332–3.

Notes 199 27 See Eleanor Ty, ‘Freke in Men’s Clothes: Transgression and the Carnivalesque in Edgeworth’s Belinda’, in The Clothes that Wear Us: Essays on Dressing and Transgressing in Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. Jessica Munns and Penny Richards (Newark: University of Delaware Press; and London: Associated University Presses, 1999), p. 159. 28 Throughout the following section I use the terms dressing room and boudoir interchangeably. In fact, the boudoir and the dressing room were separate spaces. From the 1780s the traditional function of the dressing room as a lady’s toilette-cum-sitting room changed. Dressing rooms were no longer commonly used for entertaining. Such activities increasingly took place in the boudoir, which, like the dressing room, often adjoined a bedchamber. Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 231. Lady Delacour possesses both a dressing room and a boudoir, but uses both spaces as dressing rooms. Rather than the semi-public space it was intended to be, Lady Delacour keeps her boudoir locked, and it is in here that she goes about the fatal business of her toilette. Belinda, p. 20. 29 Jonathan Swift, The Lady’s Dressing Room To which is added a Poem on Cutting down the Old Thorn at Market Hill (London: J. Roberts, 1732), p. 5. 30 Felicity A. Nussbaum, ‘The Brink of all we Hate’: English Satires on Women, 1660–1750 (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1984), p. 105. See also, Ellen Pollak, The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 31 Nussbaum, ‘The Brink of all we Hate’, p. 113. 32 Swift, Lady’s Dressing Room, p. 12. 33 Nussbaum, ‘The Brink of all we Hate’, p. 105. 34 For the differences between the closet, bedchamber and dressing room, see Girouard, Life in the English Country House. 35 Simon Varey, Space and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 186. 36 Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1740), p. 81. 37 Charles Povey, The Virgin in Eden (1741), reprinted in The Pamela Cotroversy: Criticisms and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, 1740–1750, 6 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001) , II, p. 152. 38 John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 61. 39 The representation of physical deformity and disfigurement in eighteenth-century literature is necessarily beyond the scope of this study. While writers often made a connection between physical and moral deformity (such as Mrs Sinclair in Richardson’s Clarissa) many other writers, such as Sarah Scott and Burney, often used ‘ugliness’ or physical abnormalities as symbols of moral purity. For a detailed analysis of this theme, see Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum, eds, ‘Defects’: Engendering the Modern Body (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2000). 40 Ty, ‘Freke in Men’s Clothes’, p. 166. 41 Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, p. 221.

200 Notes 42 Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth and Patriarchal Complicity (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 110. 43 Ibid., p. 128. 44 For a detailed discussion of the novel’s colonialist discourse see Greenfield ‘“Abroad and At Home”’. 45 Other works on Edgeworthian feminism include Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1975; repr. 1987), pp. 124–57; Caroline Gonda, Reading Daughters’ Fictions, 1709–1834: Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 204–38; Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers’ Daughters, Mellor, Romanticism and Gender, pp. 40–8, 78–80; Alan Richardson, Literature, Education and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 189–94. 46 Iain Topliss, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and Maria Edgeworth’s Modern Ladies’, Études Irlandaises, 6 (1981), p. 15. 47 Syndy McMillen Conger, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language of Sensibility (Rutherford, Madison and Teaneck: Farleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Toronto: Associated Universities Press, 1994), pp. xii–xiii. 48 Maria Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies, to which is added, An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification (1795), ed. Claire Connolly (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), pp. 55–6. 49 Ibid., p. 62. 50 Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers Daughters, p. 104. 51 Rosenberg, ‘The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie’, p. 581. 52 For a more detailed discussion of the eighteenth-century female Bildungsroman, see Lorna Ellis, Appearing to Diminish: Female Development and the British Bildungsroman, 1750–1850 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Press, 1999). 53 Perry, ‘Colonising the Breast’, p. 206. 54 The Monthly Review, 37 (1802), pp. 368–9. 55 Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers Daughters, p. 110. 56 Monthly Review, 37 (1802), p. 368. 57 The Critical Review, 34 (1802), p. 236. 58 Ibid., p. 237. 59 Gonda, Reading Daughters Fictions, p. 211. 60 Richardson, Literature, Education and Romanticism, p. 193.

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202 Bibliography The London Magazine: or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer (London: C. Ackers; T. Cox; J. Clarke and T. Astley, 1732–83) The New Memorandum-Book Improv’d: or, the Gentleman and Tradesman’s Daily (London: R. Dodsley) The Norfolk Ladies Memorandum Book: or, Fashionable Pocket Repository (Bury St. Edmonds: J. Rackham) The Sentimental Magazine: or, General Assemblage of Science, Taste etc. (London: George Kearsley, 1773–7) The Town and Country Magazine (London: A. Hamilton, 1769–92) The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure (London: J. Hinton, 1747–1803)

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Bibliography 209 Ingrassia, Catherine, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early EighteenthCentury England: A Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Johnson, Claudia L., Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s. Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995) Jones, Chris, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) Jones, Jennifer, ‘Coquettes and Grisettes: Women Buying and Selling in the Old Regime’, in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective’, ed. Victoria de Grazia with Ellen Furlough (Berkeley, LA and London: University of California Press, 1996) 25–53. Jones, Robert W., Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Analysis of Beauty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Jones, Vivien, ed., Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990) —— ‘Placing Jemima: Women Writers of the 1790s and the Eighteenth-Century Prostitution Narrative’, Women’s Writing, 4: 2 (1997), 201–20 —— Women and Literature in Britain, 1700–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Kendall, Joan, ‘The Development of a Distinctive form of Quaker Dress’, Costume, 19 (1985) 58–74 Kenner, Hugh, ‘Pope’s Reasonable Rhymes’, ELH, 41 (1974) 74–88 Kibbie, Ann Louise, ‘Sentimental Properties: Pamela and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure’, ELH, 58: 3 (1991) 561–77 Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) —— Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) Kreissman, Bernard, Pamela-Shamela: A Study of the Criticisms, Burlesques, Parodies, and Adaptations of Richardson’s Pamela (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1960) Kunzle, David, Fashion and Fetishism, A Social History of the Corset, Tight-Lacing and other Forms of Body Sculpture in the West (Totowa: Rowan and Littlefield; London: George Prior Associated, 1982) Labbe, Jacqueline M., ‘Cultivating One’s Understanding: The Female Romantic Garden’, Women’s Writing, 4 (1997) 39–56 Lemire, Beverly, Dress, Culture and Commerce, the English Clothing Trade Before the Factory, 1660–1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997) —— Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) Lloyd, Sarah, ‘Pleasure’s Golden Bait’: Prostitution, Poverty and the Magdalen Hospital in Eighteenth-Century London’, History Workshop Journal, 41 (1996) 51–72 Lurie, Alison, The Language of Clothes (Feltham: Hamlyn, 1983) Lynch, Deidre Shauna, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998) MacFadyen, Heather, ‘Lady Delacour’s Library: Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda and Fashionable Reading’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 48: 4 (1994) 423–39

210 Bibliography Mackie, Erin, Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) Markley, Robert, ‘Sentimentality as Performance: Shaftesbury, Sterne, and the Theatrics of Virtue’, in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (London and New York: Methuen, 1987) 210–30 Mayo, Robert D., The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740–1815 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1962) McIntosh, Carey, ‘Pamela’s Clothes’, ELH, 35 (1968) 75–83 McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, eds, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialisation of Eighteenth-Century England (London, Melbourne, Sydney, Auckland and Johannesburg: Hutchinson, 1982) McKeon, Michael, The Origins of the English Novel, 1660–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) McKillop, Alan, Samuel Richardson, Printer and Novelist (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1936) Mellor, Anne K., Romanticism and Gender (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) Moore, D. L., Fashion Through Fashion Plates, 1771–1970 (London: Ward Lock, 1971) Mudge, Bradford K., The Whore’s Story: Women, Pornography, and the British Novel, 1684–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) Mullan, John, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) Munns, Jessica and Penny Richards, The Clothes that Wear Us: Essays on Dressing and Transgressing in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses, 1999) Myers, Mitzi, ‘“Reform or Ruin”: A Revolution in Female Manners’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 11 (1982) 199–216 ——’Shot from the Canons: or, Maria Edgeworth and the Cultural Production and Consumption of the Late eighteenth-century Woman Writer’, in The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (New York: Routledge, 1995) 193–214 Nestor, Deborah J., ‘Virtue Rarely Rewarded: Ideological Subversion and Narrative Form in Haywood’s Later Fiction’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 34: 3 (1994) 579–98 Nickel, Terri, ‘Pamela as Fetish: Masculine Anxiety in Henry Fielding’s Shamela and James Parry’s The True Anti-Pamela’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 22 (1992) 37–49 Nussbaum, Felicity A., ‘The Brink of all we Hate’: English Satires on Women, 1660–1750 (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1984) —— The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) Ogborn, Miles, Spaces of Modernity, London’s Geographies, 1680–1780 (London and New York: The Guildford Press, 1998) Parker, Rozsika, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: The Women’s Press, 1996) Pearson, Jacqueline, ‘“Books, my greatest joy”: Constructing the Female Reader in The Lady’s Magazine’, Women’s Writing, 3: 1 (1996) 3–15

Bibliography 211 Perry, Ruth, ‘Colonising the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in EighteenthCentury England’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 16: 1 (1992) 185–213 Pinchbeck, Ivy, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1930) Pointon, Marcia, ‘Quakerism and Visual Culture, 1650–1800’, Art History, 20: 3 (1997) 397–431 Pollak, Ellen, The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985) Poovey, Mary, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984) Porter, Roy, ‘Making Faces: Physiognomy and Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England’, Etudes Anglaises: Grand Bretagne, 38: 4 (1985) 385–96 Purdy, Daniel, The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) Raven, James, Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) Raynie, Stephen, ‘Hayman and Gravelot’s Anti-Pamela Designs for Richardson’s Octavo Edition of Pamela I and II’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 23 (1999) 77–93 Ribeiro, Aileen, The Art of Dress: Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England and France, 1750–1820 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995) —— Dress and Morality (London: Batsford, 1986) —— Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe, 1715–1789 (London: Batsford, 1984) —— The Dress Worn at Masquerades in England, 1730–1790 and its Relation to Fancy Dress in Portraiture (London: Batsford, 1984) —— A Visual History of Costume: The Eighteenth Century (London: Batsford, 1983) Richardson, Alan, Literature, Education and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) Roche, Daniel, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the ‘Ancien Régime’, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) Rosenberg, Jordana, ‘The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth’s Belinda’, ELH, 70: 2 (2003) 575–96 Schofield, Mary Anne and Cecilia Macheski, eds, Fetter’d or Free?: British Women Novelists, 1670–1815 (Athens, OH and London: Ohio University Press, 1987) Schofield, Mary Anne, Masking and Unmasking the Female Mind: Disguising Romances in Feminine Fiction, 1713–1799 (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1990) Schwarz, L. D., London in The Age of Industrialisation: Entrepreneurs, Labour Force and Living Conditions, 1700–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) Shevelow, Kathryn, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (London and New York: Routledge, 1989) Simmel, Georg, ‘Fashion, Adornment and Style’ (1904), in Simmel on Culture, ed. David Firsby and Mike Featherstone (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi: Sage, 1997) 187–207 Skinner, Gillian, Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 1740–1800: The Price of a Tear (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999) Spencer, Jane, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986)

212 Bibliography Staves, Susan, ‘Pin Money’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 14 (1985), 47–77 Straub, Kristina, Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1987) Thornton, Minna, ‘The Fashion Plate in London, 1759–1809’ (unpublished MA thesis, Victoria and Albert Museum and RCA, 1993) Todd, Janet, Sensibility: An Introduction (London and New York: Methuen, 1986) —— The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800 (London: Virago, 1989) Topliss, Iain, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and Maria Edgeworth’s Modern Ladies’, Études Irlandaises, 6 (1981), 13–31 Thompson, Lynda M., The ‘Scandalous Memoirists’: Constantia Philips, Laetitia Pilkington and the Shame of ‘Publick Fame’ (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000) Turner, James Grantham, ‘Novel Panic: Picture and Performance in the Reception of Richardson’s Pamela’, Representations, 48 (1994) 70–96 Valenze, Deborah, The First Industrial Woman (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) Van Sant, Ann Jessie, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) Varey, Simon, Space and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Dover Publications, 1994) Vickery, Amanda, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1998) Walkley, Christina, The Ghost in the Looking Glass (London: Peter Owen, 1981) Warner, William B., Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley, LA and London: University of California Press, 1998) Williams, Raymond, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976).

Index anti-Pamelist literature, 9, 19, 21, 28–30, 33–6, 153 Anti-Pamela see Haywood ‘Jenny, or the Female Fortune Hunter’ (Anon), 43–4 Pamela: A Comedy (Giffard), 34 Pamela Censured (Anon), 35–6 Pamela: or The Fair Imposter (Anon), 32, 33 ‘To the Author of Shamela’, 37–8 Virgin in Eden, The, 165 Armstrong, Nancy, 11–12, 20, 101, 130, 133–4, 157 Astell, Mary, 130 Austen, Jane Pride and Prejudice, 121, 162

Clerk’s Tale see Ogle Conboy, Sheila C., 32 conduct books, 11–12, 101 see also Fordyce; Marriott; Wilkes Conger, Syndy Mcmillen, 18, 121 consumer revolution, 7–14, 39 and Pamela, 37, 39 consumption, 5, 7–8, 57–8, 103 and the female consumer, 7, 57–8, 62–4, 66, 69–70, 78 see also consumer revolution Copeland, Edward, 86, 105 Crisp, Samuel, 72–3 Crowston, Clare Haru, 52 Cunnington, Phillis, 26

Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 43 Barker-Benfield, G.J., 17, 18, 135, 152 Barthes, Roland, 9, 114 body as index of feeling, 13, 166–8: in Pamela, 21–2, 36; in Sermons to Young Women, 123, 124–5; in The Wanderer, 78–9 dress as barrier to, 13 dress as extension of, 12–13, 31–6, 79, 109, 124–6 Boscawen, Frances, 1–2 Bradshaigh, Lady, 14–15 Brissenden, R.F., 18 Brown, Laura, 5 Brückmann, Patricia, 37, 39 Burney, Frances, 129 Camilla, 66 Evelina, 71 Wanderer, The, 72, 75–82 Witlings, The, 72, 73–5

Davis, Fred, 9, 38 Defoe, Daniel, 30, 35 Every-Body’s Business is No-Body’s Business, 8, 23–4 Great Law of Subordination Consider’d, 24–7 Roxana, 35 Some Considerations on Street-Walkers, 127–8, 129, 142 Dingley, Robert, 142, 144, 146–7 Dodd, William, 144, 146–7, 148 domestic woman, 12 Donoghue, Emma, 196n50 division of labour, 71–2 dress and the Bible, 122, 124–5, 130, 132 as cause of prostitution, 8, 28, 142–4 and destruction of social hierarchy, 7–8, 10, 23–7 as diagnostic tool, 22, 51, 60 as language, 4, 9–10, 38 of married women, 111–12 of Methodists, 135–9 of prostitutes, 11, 22, 127–8, 140 of Quakers, 33, 45, 133–9, 195n37 and sartorial metaphors, 5–6, 19, 21, 152–3 of servants, 8, 10, 22–31, 182n16 dressing room, 163–70, 199n28 satires, 163–5

Campbell, Robert London Tradesman, 53–6, 58, 67 Castle, Terry, 8, 44, 81, 161 Chapone, Hester, 130 Cherub, The (Anon), 60–1, 62, 67 Cleland, John Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, 56–7

213

214 Index dressmakers, 49, 52–82 and their shops, 62, 66–7, 73–4, 77–8 and social advancement, 48, 65–6 dressmaking trades, 48–9, 52–5, 146 feminist re-evaluation of, 71–2, 75–9, 81–2: Burney’s role in, 72–82 reputation of, 56–8, 61, 146 see also labour market Drury, Robert Rival Milliners, 58–9, 62 Eagleton, Terry, 17, 152 Edgeworth, Maria, 17 Belinda, 155–77: critique of sensibility in, 155–7, 168–9, 170, 173–4 Letters for Literary Ladies, 154, 159, 163 Moral Tales, 154–5 Practical Education, 154, 156 Ellis, Markman, 15, 143 emulation, 7–8, 10, 24–6, 28, 64, 117 Evans, Robin, 140 fashion commercialisation of, 8, 52 as disease, 113 reporters, 114–15 reports, 109–10 see also dress fashion plates, 83–4, 103–5, 107, 109–10 Fashionable Magazine, The, 83–4, 103 feminisation of culture, 17–18 of taste, 20 Fielding, Henry Shamela, 35–6, 43, 45, 60 Fielding, John, 146 Flügel, J.C., 24 Fordyce Delineated: A Satire (Anon), 121 Fordyce, James, 193n4 Sermons to Young Women, 120–8, 129–35, 137–9, 149–50, 154 Fox, George, 135–7 ‘To Such as Followed ye Fashions’, 136 General Description of All the Trades (Anon), 55 Goldsmith, Oliver Citizen of the World, 63 She Stoops to Conquer, 104–5

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 129, 194n18 Gonda, Caroline, 149, 175 Greenfield, Susan C., 157, 159, 161 Gregory, Dr John, 123, 130 Gualtherus and Griselda (Ogle), 39–43 Guest, Harriet, 11–12, 15, 20, 100 Gwilliam, Tassie, 19, 37, 48 Hagstrum, Jean, 15 Hanway, Jonas, 140, 144–5, 141, 147, 149 Hays, Mary, 71 Haywood, Eliza, 10, 89–90 Anti-Pamela, 10, 28–30, 47–51 Fantomina, 35 Female Spectator, The, 89–91 History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, The, 62–70 Present for a Servant Maid, 29 Henderson, Tony, 56 Hill, Aaron, 5–7, 21, 36, 45 Hogarth, William Rake’s Progress, 70–1 Hume, David, 7 inconspicuous consumption, 11, 133–5 Intriguing Milliners and Attornies Clerks (Anon), 56 Jodrell, Paul A Widow and No Widow, 100–1 Jones, Chris, 151–2 Jones, Robert W., 20 Jones, Vivien, 127 Johnson, Claudia L., 18, 152 Kelly, John Pamela’s Conduct in High Life, 45–8 Keymer, Thomas and Peter Sabor, 20 Kibbie, Ann Louise, 36–7 Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth, 57 labour market female, 52–6, 71–2, 79–82, 145–6 Lady’s Magazine (1759–63), 138–9 Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832), 8, 9, 85–8, 103, 108–19 Lady’s Museum, 91–6 Lamb, Mary, 82, 189n65 Lemire, Beverly, 8 Lennox, Charlotte ‘Harriot and Sophia’, 92–6

Index 215 letters as analogue to dress, 19–20, 41–3 Lock Hospital, 149 Locke, John, 178n4 luxury, 7–8, 76 MacFadyen, Heather, 157, 161 Macheski, Cecilia, 77 Magazine à la Mode, 83–4, 104 magazines, 83–96, 108–19 gentleman’s magazines, 90–1 see also individual titles; Haywood; Lennox Magdalen House, 139–50, 172 pamphlets, 140–1, 142–5 uniform, 140, 144–5, 147 Maid of the Mill (Bickerstaffe), 40 Mandeville, Bernard Fable of the Bees, 7, 24 mantua-makers see dressmakers Marine Society, 145 Markley, Robert, 36 Marriott, Thomas Female Conduct, 12–13, 130 masquerade, 9, 33, 45, 49–50, 79–80, 161–3 Massie, Joseph, 145 McKendrick, Neil, 8 McKeon, Michael, 21 memorandum books see pocket books milliners see dressmakers misogynist satire, 5, 19 see also Swift Montagu, George, 148 More, Hannah, 139 Essays on Various Subjects, 139 ‘Sensibility’, 1–3, 4, 5–7, 13, 22 Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, 15, 153–4 Mullan, John, 13, 14 Myers, Mitzi, 18, 155 needlework, 32, 77 Nussbaum, Felicity, 164 œconomy, 97–100, 101–3 Ogborn, Miles, 140, 145 ‘Pamela vogue’, 19, 20, 34, 43 see also Pamela Parker, Roszika, 77

Pearson, Jacqueline, 86, 105 periodicals see magazines Pilkington, Laetitia Memoirs of Mrs Laetitia Pilkington, 59–60, 62 pin money, 68 pocket books, 97–108 Poovey, Mary, 11 Pope, Alexander Essay on Criticism, 3–6, 21 Rape of the Lock, 158, 161 prostitution, 71, 126–8, 139–50 dress as cause of, 8, 22, 142–3, 144 sentimental re-evaluation of, 71, 127, 140–2 see also dress of prostitutes; Magdalen House public and private spheres, 15, 159 Radcliffe, Mary Anne, 71 Reeve, Clara, 70 Richardson, Alan, 175–6 Richardson, Samuel, 5, 129 Apprentice’s Vade Mecum, 25–6, 31 Clarissa, 2, 3, 10, 23, 31, 165, 169 Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, 30–1 Pamela, 5–7, 10, 16, 19–51, 69, 143–4, 151, 153, 154, 165–6: critical backlash against, 19, 33–4, 37–8, 43–51; and debates on servant dress, 26–7; dress and letters in, 19, 21, 41–2; 1801 edition, 44; heroine’s homespun gown, 5–3, 31–8; illustrations, 44; Pamela II (continuation of Pamela), 44–5; ‘tricking scene’, 31–43 see also anti-Pamelist literature Rosenberg, Jordana, 174 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 121, 123, 130, 154, 172 Sophie, 10, 56 Scott, Sarah History of Sir George Ellison, The, 129 sensibility, 1–3, 14–16, 17–18 passim as artifice, 13–14, 18, 139 and commerce, 15–16 critical debates about, 15–18 demise of, 14–15, 151–2, 153–4 as disease, 155, 157, 168–9, 170, 173–4

216 Index sensibility continued and fashion, 3–6, 14–15, 154, 174, 177 as fashion, 14–15, 19 and motherhood, 168–70, 172 paradox of, 3, 14, 22 and politics, 15 sentiment see sensibility servants see dress of servants shopping see consumption Simmel, Georg, 24 simplicity, 122–3, 130, 132–5, 138 Skinner, Gillian, 15 Slocock, Dr, 43 Smith Adam Wealth of Nations, 7–8 Spencer, Jane, 68 Sterne, Laurence, 12, 154, 156 sumptuary legislation, 7, 10, 11, 25, 36, 126–8, 180n37, 194–17 Swift, Jonathan, 5, 163–5 tailors, 54–5 Thompson, Lynda M., 59 Tobin, Beth Fowkes, 66

Todd, Janet, 68 Turner, James Grantham, 19 Ty, Eleanor, 162 uniforms see Magdalen House Universal Magazine, 10 Van Sant, Ann, 147 Varey, Simon, 165 Veblen, Thorstein, 134 Wakefield, Priscilla, 71, 72 Walpole, Horace, 140, 148–9 Warner, William B., 20, 22, 30, 31, 25 Welch, Saunders, 127, 142–3 Wesley, John Advice to the People Called Methodists 135–8 Wilkes, Wetenhall, 131 A Letter of Genteel and Moral Advice, 131–2, 137 Williams, Raymond, 178n Wollstonecraft, Mary, 17, 18, 71, 124, 177 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 57, 120–3, 152–3, 156, 171–2

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