Elite Women and Polite Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland 1843836815, 9781843836810

Citation preview

spine: 21mm E 17 May 2011

at the University of Edinburgh, where she held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. Cover: Jeremiah Davison, ‘James Douglas, 14th Earl of Morton, and his Family’, 1740 (detail). © Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

St Andrews Studies in Scottish History

BOYDELL & BREWER LTD PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 www.boydellandbrewer.com

Elite Women and Polite Society

Elite Women and Polite Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

KATHARINE GLOVER has taught history at the University of St Andrews and

Glover

Fashionable eighteenth-century Scottish polite society emphasised mixedgender sociability and encouraged the visible participation of elite women in a series of urban, often public, settings. Using a variety of sources (men’s and women’s correspondence, accounts, bills, memoirs and other family papers), this book investigates the ways in which polite social practices and expectations influenced the Scottish experience of elite femininity. The book explores women’s education and upbringing, their reading practices, the meanings of the social spaces and activities in which they engaged and how they related to politics, and the fashion for tourism at home and abroad. It explores the ways in which elite women used polite social spaces and practices to extend their mental horizons and to form a sense of belonging to a public at a time when Scotland was among the most intellectually vibrant societies in Europe.

Final adjs to rh edge when spine width decided

in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

Katharine Glover

Elite Women and Polite Society in EighteenthCentury Scotland

St Andrews Studies in Scottish History Series Editor Professor Roger Mason (Institute of Scottish Historical Research, University of St Andrews) Editorial Board Dr David Allan (Institute of Scottish Historical Research, University of St Andrews) Professor Dauvit Broun (University of Glasgow) Dr Michael Brown (Institute of Scottish Historical Research, University of St Andrews) Professor Catriona MacDonald (Glasgow Caledonian University) Sponsored by the Institute of Scottish Historical Research at the University of St Andrews, St Andrews Studies in Scottish History provide an important forum for the publication of research on any aspect of Scottish history, from the early middle ages to the present day, focusing on the historical experience of Scots at home and abroad, and Scotland’s place in wider British, European and global contexts. Both monographs and essay collections are welcomed. Proposal forms can be obtained from the Institute of Scottish Historical Research website: www.st-andrews.ac.uk/ishr/studies.htm. They should be sent in the first instance to the chair of the editorial board at the address below. Professor Roger Mason Institute of Scottish Historical Research St Andrews University St Andrews Fife KY16 9AL UK

Elite Women and Polite Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

Katharine Glover

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Katharine Glover 2011 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Katharine Glover to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2011 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge

ISBN 978 1 84383 681 0

The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mount Hope Ave, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Papers used by Boydell & Brewer Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests

Printed in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Preface 1. Elite Women and Eighteenth-Century Scottish Society 2. Education and Upbringing 3. Reading and Print Culture 4. Polite Sociability: Space and Social Practices 5. Politics and Influence 6. Travel, Tourism and Place Conclusion Appendix: Biographical Backgrounds Bibliography Index

v

vii ix 1 3 24 50 79 110 139 166 173 183 205

To the memory of all the women whose scribbled notes and carefully crafted correspondence made this research possible.

vi

Acknowledgements First thanks must go to Alex Murdoch, who in 1999 first alerted me to the existence of some interesting female correspondence in the National Library of Scotland Saltoun Papers which he had come across some twenty years before. This proved to be the spark that led to the decade of fascinating research into the lives of elite women in eighteenth-century Scotland which has culminated in this book. I am enormously grateful to him for this, and for the time and enthusiasm which he and Stana Nenadic brought to this project as it developed. Both have read this work in various stages, and I am very appreciative of their comments, which influenced earlier drafts in particular. I would like to thank David Allan, Adam Fox and Amanda Vickery for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this text, and Jane Rendall for the interest she has taken in this work. Errors of fact and interpretation, however, remain naturally my own. More generally, I would like to thank former colleagues in Scottish History and Economic and Social History at the University of Edinburgh, and (briefly) in Scottish History at the University of St Andrews. In particular, I wish to acknowledge the companionship and collegiality of my fellow Scottish historians at Edinburgh for the stimulating academic environment in which I was fortunate enough to conduct the early stages of this research. Special thanks are due to Sharon Adams, Helen Brown, Gayle Davis, Alasdair Raffe, Christina Strauch and Laura Stewart; and most of all to Annie Tindley. Their historical interests vary far and wide, but in their indirect and individual ways they have all assisted with the writing of this book, and I am very grateful to them for that. I would also like to thank my genuinely inspirational history teachers at school in Falkirk: Lorna MacDougall, Anne Shearer and Richard Mackintosh. Publication of this book was made possible by a grant from the Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research. The research was funded by scholarships from the Arts and Humanities Research Board and the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, and an Early Career Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust which was held in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. I am extremely grateful for the support received from all of these funding bodies. I am also thankful for the generous assistance of the staff of all the libraries and archives I have consulted, most importantly those of the historical search room at the National Archives of Scotland; the manuscripts and rare books rooms at the National Library of Scotland; and Jane Anderson, archivist at Blair Castle, whose enthusiasm, alongside the warm hospitality of Colin and vii

Lena Robertson, helped to make my research trips to Blair Atholl one of the highlights of this project. I am grateful to Sir Robert Clerk of Penicuik for permission to quote from the papers of the Clerk of Penicuik family deposited in the National Archives of Scotland (NAS GD18); to Jane Anderson for permission to publish material from the collection at Blair Castle, Perthshire (NRAS234); and to the Hopetoun Foundation for permission to cite the papers of the Hope family, Marquesses of Linlithgow (NRAS888). I would like to thank Associated University Presses and the editors of the Journal of Scottish Historical Studies and the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies for permission to publish sections of this book which I published previously in similar, although not identical, form. Rosi Carr and Mark Towsey kindly permitted me to read and cite their unpublished work, whilst Sharon Adams, Sonia Baker, Gayle Davis, Alison Duncan and Annie Tindley generously responded to pleas from afar for help with references and other small but vital tasks related to publication. I am also grateful to Roger Mason and Caroline Palmer for their assistance in the publication process. Finally, my most heartfelt thanks are to my parents, Christine and Dave, who always encouraged me to follow my interests and instincts; and to Julian, who has lived with this project for the best part of a decade. Were it not for his willingness to move literally to the ends of the earth, not to mention his good humour and sense of perspective, it would never have been written. For this, and for his shared enthusiasm for exploring the walking trails of the Alps and the Mediterranean at every opportunity, I am immensely grateful.

viii

List of Abbreviations AHR American Historical Review BJECS British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies BOEC Book of the Old Edinburgh Club ECL Eighteenth-Century Life ECS Eighteenth-Century Studies EUL Edinburgh University Library Fasti Hew Scott, Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae: The Succession of Ministers in the Church of Scotland from the Reformation (2nd edn) GUL Glasgow University Library HJ The Historical Journal HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly HWJ History Workshop Journal JECS Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies JSHS Journal of Scottish Historical Studies NAS National Archives of Scotland NLS National Library of Scotland NRAS National Register of Archive (Scotland) ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edn, 2004) OED Oxford English Dictionary (online edn) OPR Church of Scotland Old Parish Registers P&P Past and Present SECC Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture SHR Scottish History Society STS Scottish Text Society TNA The National Archives Trans DGNHS Transactions of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History Society Trans RHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Original spelling, punctuation and capitalisation have been retained in quotations throughout.

ix

Preface In July 1746, Betty Fletcher, the fourteen-year-old daughter of a prominent Edinburgh judge, wrote a letter to her brother in which she described the supposedly quiet social life of Edinburgh during the summer social season: the town is very empty at present Colonel Leese regiment keeps it alive it helps assemblys & plays thers two plays every week & the last assembly is to be on thursday Lady Ancrim [sic] has a drawing room every Wednesday so the twon [sic] is tolerable gay tho few company in it … the Meadow is vastly frequented in fine weather1

Despite describing the town as ‘very empty’, suggesting a lack of ‘good’ company, she acknowledged the entertainment provided by two plays a week and a dancing assembly, as well as a private gathering organised in an aristocratic townhouse. She noted that, in good weather, the gentry and nobility would escape the cramped and smoky confines of their Old Town apartments to ‘take an airing’ in the Meadows, the open ground lying just to the south of Edinburgh’s urban boundaries. These social gatherings afforded men and women the opportunity to meet and gossip with friends and acquaintances, to show off their good taste in dress, manners and deportment, and to observe that of their counterparts. In assemblies, plays, outdoor promenades and a ready supply of men in military uniform, Betty Fletcher was outlining the essential ingredients necessary to maintain a lively social atmosphere for young women like herself and her sisters. This book, however, will demonstrate that the social activities which she was describing held a meaning far beyond the entertainment of teenage girls. Pleasurable as they may have been, these activities were not merely frivolous pastimes. Rather, they created new opportunities for elite Scotswomen to engage with the world beyond their immediate social circles, which had far-reaching repercussions for both individuals and for Scottish society more broadly. Whilst their foremothers’ lives were not, of course, bereft of sociability or enjoyment, and whilst girls like Betty Fletcher were still expected to grow up to take on important practical roles in estate and household management, the ideological prominence given to women’s participation in social, often public activities such as those outlined above belonged to a culture that was selfconsciously progressive and new to the eighteenth century. This book explores the impact of these new social developments on the lives of elite women in Scotland, ca.1720–ca.1770. It asks how women were able to use these develop-

1

National Library of Scotland, MS16513 f.193, 15 July 1746.

1

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

ments to extend their mental horizons, and to form a sense of belonging to a public. It considers the ways in which this affected the experience of elite femininity in that society. It takes as its source material the correspondence, accounts, bills, memoirs and other papers of gentry families like that of Betty Fletcher; of the sisters of the socially ambitious architect Robert Adam; and of aristocrats like the daughters of the second Duke of Atholl and of his brother, the Jacobite General Lord George Murray. The chapters of this book progress in widening arcs through elite women’s social experience, from the earliest education of young girls at their mothers’ knees to, at the end of the final chapter, the opportunities for self-expression opened up by Continental travel. The book considers the impact on elite women’s lives of new fashions in education and schooling; of the increasing availability of books and other printed texts; and of the fashionable social activities outlined above. It investigates the ways in which women were able to use these activities as a means of participation in other aspects of public life, in particular in the world of politics which, until recently, was considered to have been off-limits to women at this time. The first chapter begins by introducing the historical background to the society in which these women lived.

2

1

Elite Women and Eighteenth-Century Scottish Society ‘Growing polit with the rest of the World’ When a weekly dancing assembly was set up in Edinburgh in the winter of 1723, it prompted Margaret, Countess of Panmure to comment in a letter to her husband that ‘att last … Old Reeky [i.e., Edinburgh] will grow polit with the rest of the World’.1 Dancing assembly rooms had begun to develop in English resort towns from the late seventeenth century, and their popularity quickly spread, so that by the time the Countess was writing, assemblies were one of the defining social spaces of what had become known as polite society.2 The concept of politeness lay at the heart of eighteenth-century elite society, particularly during the period to about 1770 with which this book is concerned. In this period to be polite meant far more than just the ability to demonstrate good etiquette or considerate behaviour; indeed, for Paul Langford, ‘politeness’ can be seen as a ‘key-word’ which opens up the mentality of the period.3 Politeness was in its broadest sense an all-embracing concept: the social elite were known as ‘the polite’; the society in which they moved was ‘polite society’. But as the Countess of Panmure’s comment suggests, it retained a strong aspirational quality, and the simple fact of aristocratic or genteel birth was not necessarily to be regarded by one’s peers as genuinely polite. An amorphous concept, open to multiple interpretations by contemporaries as well as historians,4 eighteenth-century politeness is probably best NAS, GD45/14/220/145, 24 January 1723, Edinburgh. Dancing assemblies in Edinburgh would appear to date back to ca.1710, although little is known about these earlier ventures. James H. Jamieson, ‘Social Assemblies of the Eighteenth Century’, BOEC 19 (1933), pp.36–8. 2 Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989), pp.150–62. 3 Paul Langford, ‘The Uses of Eighteenth-Century Politeness’, TransRHS, 6th series, 12 (2002), p.311. 4 R. H. Sweet, ‘Topographies of Politeness’, TransRHS, 6th series, 12 (2002), p.357. Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660–1800 (Harlow, 2001), p.18, notes the problems involved in defining eighteenth-century notions of ‘polite society’. For a survey of the multifarious uses of the term by both contemporaries and historians, see Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century’, HJ, 45:4 (2002). 1

3

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

understood as an ideal to which those of genteel and aristocratic birth were raised to conform, and as a continuous programme of social improvement to which it was generally expected that they would aspire throughout their lives. Polite behaviour emphasised, in the words of Peter Borsay, ‘triple constituents of civility, sociability and improvement’,5 or, in those of Philip Carter, ‘propriety or decorum’, good manners, and ‘the display of generosity and accommodation to one’s companions’.6 Polite society emphasised ‘ease and informality’ as opposed to ‘constraint and ceremony’.7 The polite made fashionable the pursuit of not just good manners, but of reason, tolerance and improvement of the mind gained and spread through social interaction, particularly conversation. Most significantly for this study, this meant that men and women were encouraged to socialise together in an urban context, specifically in a series of social spaces like theatres, assembly rooms, concert halls, and around the tea-tables which were the centrepiece of every drawing room. These social spaces and the activities with which they were associated prioritised the leisure, sociability and status that were the core tenets of polite society.8 They privileged a form of mixed-gender (or heterosocial) public leisure in which substantial female involvement was assumed. This first chapter provides an introduction to polite society in eighteenth-century Scotland. It commences with a brief examination of the notion of improvement, an imperative never far from the minds of the eighteenth-century Scottish elite and central to the developments considered here. It then considers eighteenth-century ideas about women and sociability in some more detail, and introduces the intellectual and social context of what has become known as the Scottish Enlightenment. This is followed by an overview of the historiography of the eighteenth-century Scotswoman, and of recent developments in the history of women in eighteenth-century Britain. The next section presents a brief background to the families whose papers have formed the source material for this book, and considers some relevant issues around the use of correspondence as a source. The chapter ends with an overview of the life-course of elite women in eighteenth-century Scotland. Eighteenth-Century Scottish Society and the Idea of Improvement The notion of the eighteenth century as the century of progressive, ameliorative and liberalising change in Scottish history was for a long time representative of mainstream attitudes towards eighteenth-century Scottish society, and has Peter Borsay, ‘Politeness and Elegance: The Cultural Re-Fashioning of Eighteenth-century York’, in Mark Hallett and Jane Rendall (eds), Eighteenth-Century York: Culture, Space and Society (York, 2003), p.8. 6 Carter, Emergence of Polite Society, p.21. 7 Langford, ‘Uses of Eighteenth-Century Politeness’, p.315. 8 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, England 1727–1783 (Oxford 1989), p.102. 5

4

elite women and eighteenth-century society

retained an influence on popular histories to the present day.9 Yet most historians now stress the continuities between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scotland, emphasising that the cultural developments of the mid-eighteenth century were not at odds with the Scottish past.10 So, for instance, whilst T. M. Devine has argued that ‘To move from [the] Scotland of the 1690s to that of the middle decades of the eighteenth century is to enter a different world’, he emphasised the ways in which that mid-eighteenth-century world emerged as the natural product of its predecessor.11 In the past, historians may have been misled by the over-arching obsession of the early to mid-eighteenth-century Scottish elite with the idea of the new as progressive, influenced by a contemporary agenda that set store by political stability and economic progress as signifiers of civilisation. These notions presented significant hurdles for Scots concerned with their nation’s progress in the first half of the eighteenth century. As late as the 1740s, according to Devine, the ‘predicted economic miracle’ that was to have resulted from the 1707 Union remained ‘still an illusion’.12 Scots had seen little improvement in living standards, agricultural yields remained low, and twice in the first four post-Union decades the country was thrown into internecine conflict by the failed Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745–6 and the violent repercussions of the latter in particular. In an age which put so much emphasis on the idea of progress, such (to contemporary eyes) ‘backwardness’ and factionalism, both characteristically impolite values, could appear seriously threatening to the status of Scotland as a modern, civilised nation. It is in this context, acknowledging the presence of the challenges against which the promoters of polite values and behaviour believed themselves to be operating, that the power of the polite ideal can best be comprehended. Described by John Dwyer as ‘a cultural imperative rather than a strictly factual observation’,13 the ‘age of improvement’ was about far more than E.g., Henry Gray Graham, The Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1900; first published 1899), 2 vols; Marjorie Plant, The Domestic Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1952). More recently, James Buchan, Capital of the Mind: How Edinburgh Changed the World (London, 2003) made strikingly similar claims, and the notion also underpins Arthur Herman, The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots’ Invention of the Modern World (London, 2002). 10 Influenced in particular by the work of David Allan, especially Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment: Ideas of Scholarship in Early Modern History (Edinburgh, 1993). For immediately pre-Union culture, see Hugh Ouston, ‘Cultural Life from the Restoration to the Union’, in Andrew Hook (ed.), The History of Scottish Literature, vol.2, 1660–1800 (Aberdeen, 1987); also Hugh Ouston, ‘York in Edinburgh: James VII and the Patronage of Learning in Scotland, 1679–1688’, in John Dwyer, Roger A. Mason and Alexander Murdoch (eds), New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh, 1982). 11 T. M. Devine, The Scottish Nation: 1700–2000 (London, 1999), pp.65, 67–70. 12 T. M. Devine, ‘The Modern Economy: Scotland and the Act of Union’, in T. M. Devine, C. H. Lee and G. C. Peden (eds), The Transformation of Scotland: The Economy Since 1700 (Edinburgh, 2005), p.27. 13 John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1987), p.2. 9

5

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

draining ditches, encouraging industries, or building roads. For the men who sat on the Board of Trustees for the Encouragement of Fisheries and Manufactures or the Annexed Estates Commission, promoting these more practical manifestations of improvement was only one aspect of a wider social project.14 In 1752, Sir Gilbert Elliot, second baronet (later Lord) Minto, put forward some Proposals for carrying on certain Public Works In the City of Edinburgh, to deal with the problems caused by overcrowding in this densely populated, precariously high-rise conglomeration. He believed that ‘a capital should naturally become the centre of trade and commerce, of learning and the arts, of politeness and refinement of every kind’, but that Edinburgh lagged far behind London because ‘so many local prejudices, and narrow notions, inconsistent with polished manners and growing wealth, are still so obstinately retained’.15 In keeping with contemporary thinking, Minto linked economic progress with social refinement. Edinburgh needed to develop physically, commercially and culturally, he argued, for the good of all Scotland as a modern, commercial and civilised nation.16 For much of the century, the practical aspects of such improving agendas were often yet to travel from the realms of aspiration to those of reality. By the time of his death in 1767, Lord Minto could have seen only the very beginnings of the New Town’s construction, and the Edinburgh with which this book is concerned was still largely that of the medieval Old Town, with its high-rise ‘lands’ and narrow wynds and closes in which all ranks of society were crowded together.17 Yet Minto’s plans neatly exemplify in an aspirational mode the ways in which by the 1750s the Scottish attempt to achieve the ideals of civilisation and progress was believed to be vested in a concern for broad-spectrum social and cultural improvement that connected commerce with refinement and dismissed the impolite as the provincial. Such writings effectively requested the support of the elite through all their activities and behaviour, cultural as well as economic, and from women as well as men. This returns us to the Countess of Panmure’s letter to her husband on the subject of the Edinburgh assembly rooms in 1723. Despite portraying the assembly rooms to her husband as a sign of polite progress, she added, slightly sniffily, that she would probably not attend very frequently. Yet the Countess was no mere observer of the Edinburgh assembly rooms; rather, she was, with some female friends, the motivating force behind the enterprise. Her reluctance to admit this to her husband may have stemmed from a 14 For the Board of Trustees, see John Stuart Shaw, The Management of Scottish Society: Power, Nobles, Lawyers, Edinburgh Agents and English Influences (Edinburgh, 1983), ch.6; and for the Annexed Estates Commission, Alexander Murdoch, The People Above: Politics and Administration in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1980), pp.73–84. 15 [Gilbert Elliot, Lord Minto] Proposals for carrying on certain Public Works In the City of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1752), p.8. 16 Ibid., p.5. 17 For the development of the Edinburgh New Town, see A. J. Youngson, The Making of Classical Edinburgh, 1750–1840 (Edinburgh, 1966).

6

elite women and eighteenth-century society

sense of guilt that she was rebuilding her life in Scotland whilst he lay dying in France, exiled as a result of his involvement in the 1715 Jacobite rising. But it is also an important reminder that whilst the Countess herself may have seen the assembly as a source of social improvement, the introduction of polite social spaces and activities, and women’s involvement in them, was not without controversy in early eighteenth-century Scotland. The Countess informed her husband that the assembly was railed against by the Presbyterian ministers,18 and it was soon condemned in print in a lengthy pamphlet which summarised assemblies as ‘dishonourable to GOD, scandalous to Religion, and of dangerous Consequence to Human Society’. As the author explained, the debate was between those who believed the assembly was ‘only designed to cultivate polite Conversation, and genteel Behaviour among the better Sort of Folks, and to give young People an Opportunity of accomplishing themselves in both’, and those who believed that it would ‘vitiate and deprave the Minds and Inclinations of the younger Sort’. For some, the regulated opportunity for mixed-gender socialising that the assembly afforded was a morally and socially improving force, ensuring the Scottish elite developed the best polite manners. But for others, it was a corrosive influence which distracted them from the religious duties on which their minds should be fixed. Quickly to the defence came Allan Ramsay, Scotland’s foremost poet at that time, and a consistent campaigner for the polite cause. In June 1723 he published The Fair Assembly, A Poem, which he dedicated to the assembly’s Lady Managers whom he believed to be engaged in a truly patriotic, progressive endeavour. ‘Right Honourable Ladies’, he asked, ‘How much is our whole Nation indebted to Your Ladyships for Your reasonable and laudable Undertaking to introduce Politeness amongst us’? If polite society emphasised easy, natural manners, they had to be learnt somewhere, and Scots who had not been brought up to understand the specific manners and behaviours associated with such spaces would be at risk of coming across as awkward when called upon to frequent them in future – for instance, when visiting London. So, by providing the nation’s youth with a platform on which to learn and practise the ‘easy, disingaged and genteel Manner’ which defined the polite, the Countess and her friends, Ramsay argued, were carrying out a patriotic act of benevolence to the governing classes of post-Union Scotland. No more would Scots suffer the accusation of a ‘barbarous Rusticity’ as a result of their ignorance of how to converse and behave.19 Instead, through their confident demonstration of polite, civilised behaviour, they would show Scotland to be a modern, civilised country. And absolutely vital to the success of this project was the regulatory role played by the Countess of Panmure and her female friends.20 Participa-

NAS, GD45/14/220/145, 24 January 1723, Edinburgh. Allan Ramsay, The Fair Assembly: A Poem (Edinburgh, 1723), preface. 20 By 1727, one supporter of the assembly published a pamphlet praising them for achieving these aims. James Freebairn, L’Eloge d’Ecosse et des Dames Ecossoises (Edinburgh, 1727). 18

19

7

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

tion in the new world of polite sociability was a means of promoting national improvement in which women, as well as men, could engage.21 The notion that in (the right kind of) pleasure lay progress and patriotism had obvious attractions for the Scottish elite, so that by the late 1750s a pamphleteer could declare satirically that: ‘Of all the many improvements our country has of late received, none ought to strike the breast of a North British patriot with so sensible a pleasure, as the amazing progress we have made in cultivating a taste for amusements and diversions.’22 He may have mocked, but others were serious. By the end of the century, it had become commonplace amongst memoirists to view the effects of these new leisure activities as amongst the most important social improvements to have taken place over the course of the century. For John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, for example, there had been a ‘wonderful change upon female manners’ ‘in consequence of playhouses, assemblies, and concerts’.23 These institutions of urban public sociability, he believed, ‘gave a new turn to the sentiments and behaviour of the ladies … served to polish manners, and to promote ease and elegance of behaviour’.24 For eighteenth-century Scots, these new social entertainments were a vital part of the culture of improvement. The Scottish Enlightenment Recently described as ‘one of the greatest moments in the history of European culture’,25 the Scottish Enlightenment is the term applied to the ‘extraordinary outburst of intellectual ability’26 which took place over the mid-to-late eighteenth century. As a posthumously applied term, the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ has been, and remains, subject to wide-ranging interpretations,27 but 21 For a recent summary of politeness with regards to women, see Ingrid H. Tague, Women of Quality: Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690–1760 (Woodbridge, 2002), pp.165–6. 22 The Usefulness of the Edinburgh Theatre Seriously Considered. With a Proposal for Rendering it More Beneficial (Edinburgh, 1757), p.1. 23 John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Alexander Allardyce (Edinburgh, 1888), vol.2, pp.60–1. 24 Ibid., p.62. 25 Alexander Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation (Edinburgh, 2001), p.5. 26 David Daiches, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, in David Daiches, Peter Jones and Jean Jones (eds), The Scottish Enlightenment 1730–1790: A Hotbed of Genius (Edinburgh, 1986, rev.1996), p.1. 27 See Paul Wood (ed.), The Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Reinterpretation (Rochester, NY, 2000), especially the essays by Wood, Robertson and Sher. For a summary of conflicting arguments, see Alexander Broadie, Introduction to Alexander Broadie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2003). John Robertson argued for the importance of the intellectual perspective in The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005), esp. pp.21, 28.

8

elite women and eighteenth-century society

what is most important here is the degree of consciousness amongst contemporaries that Scotland was home to some of the European Enlightenment’s most influential intellectual developments, and in particular, to new ways of thinking about society and the respective social roles of men and women. One thing on which historians have tended to agree is the influence on the Scottish Enlightenment of the universities and exclusively male clubs and societies. However, although it was in such masculine environments as the Select and Speculative societies that Scottish thinkers honed their ideas and debating skills, far from the company of women, issues of women’s social roles surfaced repeatedly in their discussions. Questions debated by the Select Society in the 1750s and 1760s, for instance, included ‘Whether ought we to prefer ancient or modern manners, with regard to the Condition and treatment of Women?’, and ‘Whether it would be of advantage that the Women held Places of Trust and Profit in the State?’28 In the absence of detailed records of debate, it remains to be asked how seriously these issues were taken: a member of another club, the Poker, was reportedly ‘laughed at and run down’ for ‘enlarging on his favourite topic, the superiority of the female sex’.29 But this was Dr John Gregory, whose posthumous international best-seller A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774) urged the cultivation of a nationally beneficial sensibility through a predominantly domestic role for women, and who may well have been seen by contemporaries as elevating women to an unrealistically high pedestal.30 This concern with femininity reached its most celebrated manifestation in the third quarter of the century, in what became known as stadial history. Characteristically a product of post-Union Scotland in its relocation of the development of modern civilisation away from the political institutions of the state to the realm of manners, stadial history charted the progress of society from hunter-gatherer to modern commercial society. Alongside other factors, later-eighteenth-century historians used ‘the rank and condition of women in different ages’31 as a means of plotting the coordinates of this societal development. Thus William Robertson argued in his History of America (1777) that ‘To despise and degrade the female sex, is the characteristic of the savage state in every part of the globe’,32 whilst a society in which women were afforded some respect, and their supposed virtues valued, was a truly civilised one. Although the society into which these ideas were to feed lies beyond the chronological NLS, MS.Adv.23.1.1, ‘Minutes of the Select Society’, pp.32–3, 79, 81, 157. The Autobiography of Dr. Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk, 1722–1805, ed. John Hill Burton with a new Introduction by Richard B. Sher (Bristol, 1990; reprint of 1910 edn), p.484. 30 John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (Edinburgh, 1821; first published 1774). For Gregory’s popularity see Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven and London, 1995), p.391; Mary Catherine Moran, ‘From Rudeness to Refinement: Gender, Genre and Scottish Enlightenment Discourse’ (Johns Hopkins University PhD thesis, 1999), pp.123–31. 31 The title of a chapter of John Millar, Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society (London, 1771). 32 William Robertson, The History of America (London, 1777), vol.1, p.319. 28 29

9

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

confines of this book, their roots were grounded in theories about the socially improving role of female company which were characteristic of earlier eighteenth-century views about gender. The concept of the sociable woman as a source of social improvement for the men around her was a cornerstone of polite culture, popularised in Scotland through Addison and Steele’s early eighteenth-century periodical The Spectator, and debated in the public consciousness from at least as early as the 1720s, as the arguments over the Edinburgh assembly rooms demonstrate. In a Scottish context, these ideas received their most articulate expression in the philosopher David Hume’s popular Essays.33 ‘Among the ancients, the character of the fair-sex was considered as altogether domestic; nor were they regarded as part of the polite world or of good company. This, perhaps, is why the ancients have not left us one piece of pleasantry that is excellent’, wrote Hume in his essay on ‘The Rise of Arts and Sciences’. He went on to ask: what better school for manners, than the company of virtuous women; where the mutual endeavour to please must insensibly polish the mind, where the example of the female softness and modesty must communicate itself to their admirers, and where the delicacy of that sex puts every one on his guard, lest he give offence by any breach of decency?34

By the time he was writing in the early 1740s, he implied, women were not considered to be ‘altogether domestic’, but on the contrary had been accepted as integral to polite society, where their company helped to improve the manners of the men with whom they socialised. The qualification that the women in question were of good character (modest and virtuous) was vital: it was only the right sort of woman, able to demonstrate the appropriate social rank and breeding through cultivated manners and an understanding of the priorities of polite society, who could impart this societal good. Despite the somewhat patronising tone which Hume often adopted when referring to the fair sex,35 he would write in his memoir ‘On My Own Life’ (composed not long before his death in 1776) that he ‘took a particular pleasure in the company of modest women’.36 From the famous Comtesse de Boufflers to the less celebrated Scots33 See also James Forrester, The Polite Philosopher: Or, an Essay on that Art which Makes a Man Happy in Himself, and Agreeable to Others (Edinburgh, 1734), pp.45–53.

David Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1995; first published 1741–77), p.134. 35 See, for instance, Moran, ‘Rudeness to Refinement’, pp.92–3; Donald T. Siebert, ‘Chivalry and Romance in the Age of Hume’, ECL, 21:1 (1997), pp.64–5; Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York, 2003), p.111. 36 ‘My Own Life’, in Hume, Essays, pp.xl–xli. For an argument that Hume viewed women positively, see Annette C. Baier, ‘Hume on Women’s Complexion’, in Peter Jones (ed.), The ‘Science of Man’ in the Scottish Enlightenment: Hume, Reid and their Contemporaries (Edinburgh, 1989), esp. p.50. 34

10

elite women and eighteenth-century society

women under consideration here, many of Hume’s female friends were, as this book will show, by any standards intelligent, forthright women. So, in the realm of ideas, women occupied a significant, if not uncomplicated, place in eighteenth-century Scottish thought. But the concern of this book lies with the experiences of the women who lived in this society. Over the last few decades it has become more commonplace amongst Enlightenment scholars to move away from what Roy Porter called the ‘“great man, great minds, great books” bias’.37 As David Allan has recently reminded us, the Enlightenment was ‘actually conceived to address the concerns and questions which troubled or intrigued other eighteenth-century people in all their many locations, circumstances and guises’.38 Ideas were not abstract, but rather rooted in the culture from whence they sprung and into which they then fed. This grounding of Enlightenment in a particular cultural setting emphasises the role of reception as well as production, or, to quote Richard Sher, encompasses those ‘who read [the literati’s] writings, attended their lectures, heard their sermons, and discussed or adopted their ideas and beliefs’.39 As Jane Rendall has pointed out, women’s and gender historians have been prominent in promoting this re-conception of Enlightenment culture which affords ‘opportunities for reassessing women’s relationship to enlightened sociability and practice, and the significance of the Enlightenment in reshaping concepts of femininity and desired forms of gender relations’.40 It is in this light, as a phenomenon which in its wider reception saturated all aspects of polite society, influencing and influenced by women as well as men, that the culture of the Scottish Enlightenment creates a context for this book. Scotland’s important contribution to the late eighteenth-century ‘feminization debate’ and thus to the inception of modern ideas of gender identity has ensured that few works on femininity in the eighteenth-century Englishspeaking world fail to make some mention of the Scottish attitudes towards women and gender outlined above.41 This is to no small degree the result of Roy Porter, The Enlightenment (Basingstoke, 1990), p.44. David Allan, Making British Culture: English Readers and the Scottish Enlightenment, 1740– 1830 (London, 2008), p. 7. 39 Richard B. Sher, ‘Science and Medicine in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Wood (ed.), The Scottish Enlightenment, p.110. 40 Jane Rendall, ‘Women and the Enlightenment in Britain c.1690–1800’, in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds), Women’s History: Britain, 1700–1850. An Introduction (London and New York, 2005), p.9. For an international perspective, see Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor, ‘General Introduction’, to Knott and Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment (Basingstoke, 2005), p.xvi. In a Scottish context, Katie Barclay and Rosalind Carr contest this in their unpublished paper, ‘Was the Scottish Enlightenment Good for Women?’ I am grateful to the authors for permission to cite their manuscript. 41 E.g., Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge 2009), esp. ch.2. E. J. Clery, The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury (Basingstoke and New York, 2004), ‘Introduction’; Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago and London, 2000), p.17; 37

38

11

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

the work of Jane Rendall, who has demonstrated the wider importance of Scottish ideas about gender in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to both the European Enlightenment and Scottish identity in that period.42 More specifically, in an influential PhD thesis, Mary Catherine Moran investigated the significance of Scottish Enlightenment ideas on the ‘construction of femininity’ in eighteenth-century Britain.43 Yet far less scholarly attention has been paid to the lived experience of women in eighteenth-century Scotland, at least until very recently. In an edited volume on Gender in Scottish History since 1700, Lynn Abrams noted that ‘the “right of women to exist historically” in the Scottish narrative … is still a battle to be fought’.44 New offensives continue to be launched, most notably the Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women, which the volume was written to accompany.45 As the Dictionary’s editors pointed out, women have not been ignored by Scottish historians, but ‘they do not often emerge from recent historical writing as complex individuals’.46 This lack of scholarship, the editors lamented, has resulted in a situation which has at times forced historians ‘to make bricks without straw’.47 They noted the need ‘to re-people the Scottish landscape with more women than the few famous figures of whom everyone has heard’, in order to create the basic blocks from which to construct a more representative Scottish history.48 In an eighteenthcentury context, these ‘few famous figures’ were often given their place in the historical narrative by the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century

Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘The Enlightenment Debate on Women’, HWJ 20 (1985), pp.101–24; Vivien Jones, ‘Introduction’ to Vivien Jones (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, 1700– 1800 (Cambridge, 2000), p.5. 42 E.g., Jane Rendall, ‘Virtue and Commerce: Women in the Making of Adam Smith’s Political Economy’, in Ellen Kennedy and Susan Mendus (eds), Women in Western Political Philosophy: Kant to Nietzsche (Brighton, 1987); Jane Rendall, ‘Tacitus Engendered: “Gothic Feminism” and British Histories, c. 1750–1800’, in Geoffrey Cubitt (ed.), Imagining Nations (Manchester, 1998); Jane Rendall, ‘Writing History for British Women: Elizabeth Hamilton and the Memoirs of Agrippina’, in Clarissa Campbell Orr (ed.), Wollstonecraft’s Daughters: Womanhood in England and France, 1780–1920 (Manchester 1996); Jane Rendall, ‘Clio, Mars and Minerva: The Scottish Enlightenment and the Writing of Women’s History’, in T. M. Devine and J. R. Young (eds), Eighteenth Century Scotland: New Perspectives (East Linton, 1999). 43 Moran, ‘Rudeness to Refinement’, esp. p.xii. See also Mary Catherine Moran, ‘“The Commerce of the Sexes” – Gender and the Social Sphere in Scottish Enlightenment Accounts of Civil Society’, in Frank Trentman (ed.), Paradoxes of Civil Society: New Perspectives on Modern German and British History (New York and Oxford, 2000). 44 Lynn Abrams, ‘Introduction: Gendering the Agenda’, in Lynn Abrams, Eleanor Gordon, Deborah Simonton and Eileen Janes Yeo (eds), Gender in Scottish History since 1700 (Edinburgh, 2006), p.3. 45 Elizabeth Ewan, Sue Innes and Siân Reynolds (eds), co-ordinating editor, Rose Pipes, The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women: From the Earliest Times to 2004 (Edinburgh, 2006). 46 ‘Introduction’, to Ewan et al. (eds), Biographical Dictionary, p.xxvii. 47 Ibid., p.xxvii. 48 Ibid., p.xxvii.

12

elite women and eighteenth-century society

biographers, memoirists and popular historians, who were fascinated by their impression that the women of preceding generations enjoyed a liberty, individuality and a no-nonsense practicality apparently at odds with the conformity of their own age.49 Seeking the exceptional and the eccentric, they focused on the individuals who stood out from the norm, presenting a somewhat skewed vision of the eighteenth-century Scotswoman that remained for a long time unchallenged. The scholarly tide appears finally to be turning, however. To the pioneering archival scholarship of Rosalind Marshall,50 which remains the only published research on many aspects of eighteenth-century Scotswomen’s experience, was added first Elizabeth Sanderson’s survey of Women and Work in EighteenthCentury Edinburgh,51 and then Leah Leneman’s work on sexuality and marital relations, which provided invaluable insights into some of the most private aspects of women’s lives whilst demonstrating the potential of the archives to bring to life the personalities of individual women across the social spectrum.52 This focus on less fortunate women continues to be pursed in the work of Anne-Marie Kilday on women and violent crime.53 In recent years, research into eighteenth-century women’s history has been opened up further by Katie Barclay’s work on marriage, and Rosalind Carr’s research into gender and national identity.54 Although not always expressly concerned with gender, the E.g., the memories of Alison Cockburn held by Sir Walter Scott, Letters and Memoir of her Own Life, by Mrs Alison Rutherford or Cockburn, with notes by T. Craig-Brown (Edinburgh, 1900), p.xxvii; Louisa Stuart, Some Account of John Duke of Argyll and his Family (London, 1863; orig. comp. 1827); Grisell Baillie Murray, Memoirs and Lives of the Right Honourable George Baillie of Jerviswood and of Lady Grisell Baillie, by their daughter Lady Murray of Stanhope (Edinburgh, 1822); Sarah Tytler and J. L. Watson, The Songstresses of Scotland (London, 1871); Henry Gray Graham, A Group of Scottish Women (London, 1908); Henry Cockburn, Memorials of His Time by Lord Cockburn, ed. and abridged by W. Forbes Gray (Edinburgh, 1945; first published 1856), p.48; Ramsay, Scotland and Scotsmen, vol.2, ch.9. Elizabeth Mure, ‘Change of Manners’ was published by the Maitland Club in 1854: ‘Some Remarks on the Change of Manners in my Own Time. 1700–1790’, in Selections from the Family Papers Preserved at Caldwell, ed. W. Mure, Maitland Club, 71 (Glasgow, 1854), vol.1. 50 Rosalind K. Marshall, Women in Scotland 1660–1780 (Edinburgh, 1979); Rosalind K. Marshall, Virgins and Viragos: A History of Women in Scotland from 1080 to 1980 (London, 1983); Rosalind K. Marshall, The Days of Duchess Anne: Life in the Household of the Duchess of Hamilton 1656–1716 (London, 1973; reissued East Linton, 2000). Marshall also authored over a dozen entries on eighteenth-century Scotswomen in the ODNB. 51 Elizabeth C. Sanderson, Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century Edinburgh (Basingstoke, 1996) 52 Most relevant here is Leah Leneman, Alienated Affections: The Scottish Experience of Divorce and Separation, 1684–1830 (Edinburgh, 1998). See also Leah Leneman and Rosalind Mitchison, Sin in the City: Sexuality and Social Control in Urban Scotland, 1660–1780 (Edinburgh, 1998); Rosalind Mitchison and Leah Leneman, Girls in Trouble: Sexuality and Social Control in Rural Scotland, 1660–1780 (Edinburgh, 1998). 53 Anne-Marie Kilday, Women and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland (Woodbridge, 2007). 54 Katie Barclay, ‘“I Rest Your Loving Obedient Wife”: Marital Relationships in Scotland, 49

13

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

work of Stana Nenadic on the Highland gentry has produced detailed and vivid insights into the lives of elite women more remote from polite social centres than those with whom this book is concerned.55 It also demonstrates the value of research into personal sources in family archives to historians who seek to gain insights into the lived experience of individual men and women. Such personal sources have formed the basis of the most influential recent scholarship on elite women in eighteenth-century England, such as Amanda Vickery’s analysis of the lives of the provincial gentlewomen of Yorkshire and Lancashire.56 Vickery’s most significant achievement has been to question the theoretical assumptions which for too long constrained seventeenth- to nineteenth-century women’s history, arguing against the often chronologically conflicting trajectories from a ‘golden age’ of practical economic fulfilment towards idle domesticity, and questioning the usefulness of attempts to squeeze women’s lives into artificially constructed gendered public and private spheres.57 Supported by the work of scholars like Lawrence Klein, who has argued for the complexity of eighteenth-century interpretations of the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’,58 the removal of this conceptual framework has enabled women’s lives to be examined from new and less constricted perspectives. Most importantly, it emphasises an approach which is not anachronistic. Elaine Chalus and Hannah Barker, for instance, argued that the essays in their volume on Gender in Eighteenth-Century England showed that ‘exploring gender through contemporaries’ understandings of themselves’ revealed ‘the complexity and multiplicity of gender roles in a society where the boundaries between “public” and “private”, or “social” and “political”, were blurred and permeable’.59 Another hallmark of recent British women’s history has been a renewed interest in ‘what women were able to do, not what they were prevented 1650–1850’ (University of Glasgow PhD thesis, 2007); Rosalind Carr, ‘“I will now think of discharging this to my Lady Duchess”: Female Correspondence and Scottish Political History: A Case Study of the 1707 Union’. Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques (forthcoming). Carr’s published work to date focuses on masculinity. 55 Stana Nenadic, Lairds and Luxury: The Highland Gentry in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 2007); Stana Nenadic, ‘Experience and Expectations in the Transformation of the Highland Gentlewoman, 1680–1820’, SHR 80:2 (2001). 56 Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London, 1998). 57 Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, HJ 36:2 (1993), esp. pp.412–14. 58 Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Gender, Conversation and the Public Sphere in Early Eighteenthcentury England’, in Judith Still and Michael Worton (eds), Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices (Manchester, 1993), pp.100–15. Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century: Some Questions about Evidence and Analytic Procedure’, ECS 29:1 (1995), pp.97–109; John Brewer, ‘This, that and the other: Public, Social and Private in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Dario Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe (eds), Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter, 1995). 59 Introduction to Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds), Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities (London and New York, 1997), p.3. For

14

elite women and eighteenth-century society

from doing’.60 Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in Chalus’s own work on elite women’s participation in the world of politics, which has been instrumental in demonstrating the way in which previously well-used archives can offer up new perspectives to even such a thoroughly researched area of scholarship as political history, showing that women’s habitual presence in what was once supposed to be an exclusively masculine arena had only to be sought in order to be found.61 Family Backgrounds, Social Contexts and Sources62 This book is based on research into the personal papers of families who spanned the elite spectrum from the aristocracy to the lesser gentry and whose shared experiences were framed by the social and cultural imperatives outlined earlier in this chapter. Its focus is largely, although not exclusively, on the gentry, particularly the minor landowning families, often with legal connections, who were at the heart of the management of post-Union Scottish society. The Fletchers of Saltoun, for instance, were an East Lothian gentry family whose exceptional prominence in Scottish public life came through the position of Andrew Fletcher, Lord Milton, as chief sub-minister to the Londonbased third Duke of Argyll during the latter’s period of almost vice-regal status in Scotland in the middle decades of the century. Described as ‘by far the most effective politician left in Scotland in the half century or so after the Union’,63 Milton was at the heart of Scottish management throughout that time, actively involved in many of Scotland’s most ambitious plans for improvement, and wielding an exceptional degree of influence that made his company – and that of his wife and daughters – highly sought after. Similar in their landed and legal background, and their pro-British Hanoverian politics, were the Elliots of Minto, a genteel Borders family. Like Lord Milton, Lord Minto sat on the bench in Scotland, but his son, Sir Gilbert Elliot, third baronet, sought wider horizons: specifically, those of London and the British political stage. He moved his family south in the 1750s, and over the following decades they successfully integrated into London society, Sir Gilbert becoming a noted parliamentary orator. The family continued, however, to retain strong connections with Scotland, and with their friends amongst the Enlightenment literati. The Elliots, Fletchers and the Clerks of Penicuik, another landed genteel

masculinity, see Carter, Emergence of Polite Society; Michèle Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York, 1996). 60 Anne Laurence, Women in England, 1560–1760: A Social History (London, 1994), p.273. 61 Elaine Chalus, Elite Women in English Political Life, c.1754–1790 (Oxford, 2005). Chalus has also published numerous articles and essays on this subject. 62 For biographical backgrounds of the women who feature in this book, see Appendix. 63 Shaw, Management of Scottish Society, p.186.

15

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

Lothian family, belonged to the group of Whiggish legal dynasties who were at the forefront of pushing forward the new ideological agendas aimed towards the remodelling and improvement of Scotland in this post-Union period. Their concerns were parliamentary interest and agricultural and industrial improvement; their desire was to create a modern Scotland as part of a Hanoverian British state. The tea-tables at which their wives and daughters entertained company were the haunt of men like the philosopher and historian David Hume, the clergyman and brilliantly successful historian William Robertson, and the moral philosopher Adam Ferguson, all of whose names would become synonymous with the Scottish Enlightenment. The same illustrious intellectual company could be found supping with the Adam family of architects. Yet although Robert and James Adam are remembered today as amongst the most influential architects and designers to shape the neo-classical tastes of the eighteenth-century British elite, they were painfully aware that they occupied a much lower rung on the social ladder than even the more modest families (like the Fletchers) whose houses they helped to remould. Not without genteel blood and connections, such families, who could not take for granted the wealth and status enjoyed by the landed elites on whose patronage they depended, can at times provide far greater insights into the possibilities afforded by polite culture, as it was they who had the most to gain by embracing it. At the highest end of the social hierarchy were the aristocracy, represented here by the Murray family, Dukes of Atholl, who owned large estates in Highland Perthshire centred around their ancestral seat at Blair Atholl (although in this period their main Highland residence was at Dunkeld). But in spending much of their time in London they illustrate the trend towards the increasing integration of the post-Union Scottish aristocracy into a London social sphere. They also provide a high-profile example of the propensity for political loyalties to cut across family bonds, splitting families into Jacobite and Hanoverian factions. In 1745, Lord George Murray was one of the commanders of the Jacobite army, whilst his brother, the second Duke of Atholl, supported the Hanoverians. The division between gentry and aristocracy was understood and acknowledged as a vital part of the system of rank. In terms of practical experience and expectations, however, it is more useful to think of a spectrum of privilege. The women of aristocratic families like the Murrays did not inhabit a distinctly different social world from their counterparts amongst the influential political gentry like the Fletchers: in Edinburgh, unlike in London, there was no separate aloof or risqué beau monde.64 Gentry and aristocracy were multiply intermarried, many gentry enjoying close aristocratic connections, though these could serve to reinforce as much as diminish a sense of difference. At an individual level, distinctions tended to be of degree (the amount of money spent For London, see Hannah Greig, ‘Leading the Fashion: The Material Culture of London’s Beau Monde’, in John Styles and Amanda Vickery (eds), Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830 (New Haven and London, 2006), pp.293–313. 64

16

elite women and eighteenth-century society

on education or travel, for instance) rather than substance. Important differences remained nevertheless: in particular, the aristocracy had a far greater sense of security in the privileges they enjoyed and of social importance at national levels. The aristocracy were also considerably less likely to have led lives that were predominantly coloured by a Scottish (as opposed to British) experience, although as the example of the Elliots of Minto cited above demonstrates, this was not exclusive to the aristocracy. By the end of the century, the world to which the Elliots of Minto belonged was far more that of London and empire than it was Scottish.65 But this book is concerned with the decades from 1720 to 1770. Although factors affecting the individual families concerned here (early deaths; the birth of fewer daughters in later generations; the lack of surviving correspondence) played a part in this choice of timeframe, it also reflects more general trends. During this period, despite the southward drift that was the inevitable consequence of parliament sitting in Westminster, there remained a distinct Scottish gentry, a social group centred on the Scottish capital and regional centres whose concerns were distinctively Scottish. For most of the families concerned here, Edinburgh (at mid-eighteenth century, more than twice as populous as its nearest rival, Glasgow66) was the focal point of their social life. Those young women who were sent to Edinburgh to be educated in their early teens, and later on to find a marriage partner in the Scottish capital’s spaces of polite sociability, can be seen at least that far to have been participating in an elite culture that was specifically Scottish in terms of its setting and those who populated it, if not in the specificity of the experience. The decades leading up to the American and later the French revolutions were also, in Scotland as across Europe and the Atlantic world, the last of the comfort years for the Ancien Regime, in which the concept of elite rule as part of a divinely ordained system of rank was effectively unquestioned. By and large, the women with whom this book is concerned lived in a society of absolutes of rank and gender as yet untouched by the radicalism which would undermine these certainties in the closing decades of the century. The main source material for this book is personal correspondence, augmented by memoirs, accounts, bills and receipts. Studies of letter-writing, with an emphasis on eighteenth-century women’s correspondence, have lately become rather fashionable.67 The eighteenth century was in many ways the As demonstrated in the Elliot family correspondence in the BL Auckland MSS. Richard B. Sher and Andrew Hook, ‘Introduction: Glasgow and the Enlightenment’, in Andrew Hook and Richard B. Sher (eds), The Glasgow Enlightenment (East Linton, 1995), p.2. Aberdeen was half as small again. 67 Caroline Bland and Máire Cross (eds), Gender and Politics in the Age of Letter-Writing, 1750–2000 (Aldershot, 2004); Rebecca Earle (ed.), Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600–1945 (Aldershot, 1999). This interest was originally manifested amongst literary scholars, e.g. Janet Gurkman Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus, OH, 1982); Elizabeth C. Goldsmith (ed.), Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature (London, 1989). For an earlier period, see James Daybell (ed.), Early Modern Women’s Letter 65 66

17

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

heyday of the letter, as both art form and day-to-day means of communication. From the early 1740s, the epistolary novels of Samuel Richardson were helping to reinforce the fashion for a self-conscious, stylised yet ‘familiar’ female epistolary culture, originally promoted by the published translations of the letters of the seventeenth-century Frenchwoman Madame de Sevigné.68 But at its most fundamental level, written correspondence was absolutely vital to the workings of eighteenth-century society. As a result, although some individuals clearly were influenced by this cult of epistolarity, and although these individuals became more numerous as the century wore on, the vast majority of letters written by eighteenth-century Scots men and women deal with the practicalities of their daily existence. Daughters told mothers the price of barley at market; husbands informed wives of their daughters’ progress at singing lessons; sisters passed on to brothers the local political gossip; friends sent invitations to visit; and tradespeople urged their creditors for the repayment of bills. In comparison with the earliest decades of the century when women’s letters, often laboriously crafted, were more likely to be concerned with the practicalities of estate management, from the middle decades of the century onwards far more letters remain in which women wrote about their social activities, and did so with form and flourish. Yet broadly indicative of social change as this may be, to make too direct a correlation between the priorities implied in women’s letters and the actual priorities of those who wrote them has the potential to be misleading. Like any source, correspondence poses a specific set of issues for the historian. Firstly, letters were constructed to influence or persuade, to put across an impression or a point of view to a specific recipient in a defined temporal and spatial context. They are an artefact crafted by the author, yet as the editors of a recent volume on gender and letter-writing argued, ‘The letter articulates more than the voice of its author. The recipient is also present.’69 This is complicated somewhat by the fact that letters could be read aloud to an assembled group of family and friends, or passed around between disparate individuals. They were not private, and writers indicated where they wished them to be so: ‘Look you Megg this Letter is not intend’d for common Eyes it is entre nous of the upper house of Adam’, Robert Adam informed his sister.70 Most importantly for this present work, the desire to cater for the interests of the recipient meant that insights can be gained into the lives of those recipients whose own extant Writing, 1450–1700 (Basingstoke, 2001). As Susan Whyman noted, epistolary sources have until recently been marginalised by historians, Susan E. Whyman, Sociability and Power in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural Worlds of the Verneys 1660–1720 (Oxford, 1999), p.9. 68 Earle, ‘Introduction: Letters, Writers and the Historian’, in Earle (ed.), Epistolary Selves, p.6; Janet Gurkman Altman, ‘Women’s Letters in the Public Sphere’, in Elizabeth C. Goldsmith and Dena Goodman (eds), Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France (Ithaca and London, 1995), p.99. 69 Màire Cross and Caroline Bland, ‘Gender Politics: Breathing New Life into Old Letters’, in Bland and Cross (eds), Gender and Politics, pp.3–14, here p.4. 70 NAS, GD18/4796, 10 January 1756, Rome.

18

elite women and eighteenth-century society

correspondence is almost or totally non-existent. For instance, from the letters of Robert and James Adam to their sisters and mother emerge vivid representations of the women’s characters and interests, and even something of the way they spoke.71 Then there is the issue of survival. In October 1755, Robert Adam settled down to write his regular epistle from Rome to his family back home in Scotland. He started off with the standard compliments and the all-important note of letters received, from whom and when, then moved on to the following: During the Course of my Last expedition, I have re read all Your Letters from Scotland in the Chaise, & tore in pieces all Such as containd nothing of Business or importance, which for your Honours be it Spoken were very few in Number, So that many Miles were Strew’d with the Fragments.72

Whilst Robert’s own letters were preserved, if more for reasons of business than of sentiment, the other side of the correspondence, written by the women of the family, ended up in pieces in the dirt at the Italian roadside. A more exotic resting place, perhaps, than that of the majority of letters written by Scotswomen in this period (which, it can be assumed, went onto the fire and up the chimney), it is nevertheless indicative of their fate in being destroyed as ‘irrelevant’. The privileging of ‘business’ as a criterion for the preservation of correspondence is probably the single most important reason why proportionately fewer women’s letters than men’s remain in the Scottish archives today. Other letters were destroyed through a desire for privacy: many letters, either intimate or sometimes simply ill-written, begged the recipient to ‘please burn this’. In some instances, perhaps, a device to exaggerate the intimacy of the correspondence, it is also a reminder of the lack of privacy in elite lives, and specifically the omnipresence of servants. One woman implored her husband to burn her letters ‘for if not when your Coat is Bruckd they are read in ye Kitchen that I know to be true’.73 Yet this was in response to his comment that he always kept her latest letter, to ‘read over and over’, giving him ‘all the joy imaginable’.74 In this case, emotional attachment ensured the letter’s immediate survival. Robert Adam’s correspondence, however, makes clear that although a letter from his mother or sisters was an object of high value and meaning when first received, this value was soon lost, and that letters were often only considered worth preserving for practical reasons. Finally, as this book will demonstrate, historians of women should not overlook correspondence from one man to another. Sandwiching the ‘meat’ of many men’s ‘business’ letters was more personal news on health, family, births, deaths, children and, occasionally, social activities. For instance, in a E.g., See Chapter 4, p.107. NAS, GD18/4788, to Jenny Adam, 14 October 1755, Rome. 73 NAS, GD110/970/18, Margaret Sainthill to Sir Hew Dalrymple [at North Berwick House], 31 August 1744, Wandsworth. 74 NAS, GD110/1084/8, 9 August 1744, Newbyth. 71

72

19

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

run of correspondence primarily concerned with the collection of Scotland’s Land Tax is a series of friendly and informal letters in which, over a period of two years in the mid-1740s, Thomas Fordyce of Aytoun included advice from his wife (or ‘Master’, as he called her) to his correspondent George Innes’s less experienced wife Marion on breast-feeding, an activity then enjoying a renewed popularity amongst elite mothers.75 ‘My Wife says Mrs Innes is right to Nurse if She has abundance of milk, but if there is a Scarcity, it will doe harm to the Child & her self’, wrote Fordyce to Innes. Through her husband, Mrs Fordyce also advised on weaning and the dangers of breastfeeding when the mother had a cold, Fordyce’s letters not only articulating a hidden dialogue between two women otherwise almost or entirely voiceless in the archives, but demonstrating the involvement these husbands and fathers felt in these areas.76 As very little remains of Marion Lauder’s own correspondence for this period, these few references provide vivid, if brief, glimpses into an otherwise closed experience. Elite Women and the Life-Course in Eighteenth-Century Scotland ‘[W]hat a chequered life we live births and Deaths and births again O then let me not be to much Cast down nor to much lifted up.’77 Thus Janet Clerk of Penicuik philosophised on the ups and downs of human existence, and the entries and exits of the people who formed the dramatis personae of her own long life. The patterns and rhythms of women’s lives differed considerably from those of their male counterparts; yet whilst elite men’s experiences tended to vary widely once they completed their education, women’s lives tended to follow one of two broad trajectories depending on whether or not they married (there remained, of course, many variations on this general rule).78 The need for families to produce an heir meant that early on in a marriage it was for sons rather than daughters that expectant parents hoped. After George Innes of Stow had fathered three daughters (two outside of marriage), a friend joked that he was ‘a Bad workman’, recommending he ‘should take a Cup of Claret more liberaly, for there lyes the masculine Gender’.79 For some, the birth of a daughter may have been regarded as an unfortunate occurrence, but on the 75 Valerie A. Fildes, Breasts, Bottles and Babies: A History of Infant Feeding (Edinburgh, 1986), pp.116, 121–2. Some might choose to interpret this as evidence of men’s assumption of an authoritative role in their children’s feeding. See Toni Bowers, ‘“A Point of Conscience”: Breastfeeding and Maternal Authority in Pamela 2’, in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 7:3 (1995). 76 NAS, GD113/3/220/8, 25 March 1745, Ayton; GD113/3/227/18, 1 July 1745, Ayton; GD113/3/236/12, 10 February 1746, Ayton; GD113/3/252/20, 6 April 1747, Ayton. Fordyce married Elizabeth Whitefoord in 1729. See OPR index to marriages, Midlothian. 77 NAS, GD18/2098/472, 19 August 1754, Penicuik. 78 For the ascents and descents of the ‘ladder of life’, see Olwen Hufton, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe Vol.1, 1500–1800 (London, 1995), pp.57–8. 79 NAS, GD113/3/249/1, 15 November 1746, Ayr.

20

elite women and eighteenth-century society

whole, once the family had produced the requisite ‘heir and a spare’, the arrival of a daughter could be welcomed: Margaret Macdonald’s husband seemed quite happy when, after two boys, his wife ‘produced a Nymph’.80 Although a drain on financial resources, daughters could be welcomed as companions for their mothers, both in childhood and later on in life.81 Infancy and childhood were precarious times for even the most privileged daughters. All faced an uncertain future from the ever-present threat of small-pox and other deadly diseases, but despite the fragility of their existence, most seem to have been loved and appreciated, and money was spent on sweets, toys and other presents.82 As the next chapter will demonstrate, most elite girls received some kind of education, first at home and later with masters, which at times represented a substantial financial investment. This education would include the accomplishments necessary for their entrance into polite society and the quest for a ‘good’ marriage – that is to say, one that would bring status and sufficient wealth to enjoy a lifestyle befitting their rank. Not all women married, nor did their parents want them to, most families keeping at least one daughter at home where she could be useful both socially and practically.83 Those who did not marry were often younger daughters, as dowry rates declined with birth-order, making them a less attractive proposition in what could be a highly unromantic business. Marriage in this period was rarely the product of parental negotiations alone: George Innes and John Dalrymple proposed arranged marriages between their infant children in an entirely jocular manner that mocked the practice.84 Yet despite a certain degree of freedom given to young people in choosing their partners, the situation varied across and within families and social groups, and factors of familial expediency continued to play a role.85 Unlike the Innes and Dalrymple children, Lady Jean Murray was

Sir Alexander Macdonald to Forbes of Culloden, 3 November 1745, Mugstot, in Duncan Warrand (ed.), More Culloden Papers (Inverness, 1923–30), vol.4, p.154. 81 Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, p.289. 82 E.g., the various entries under George Innes’s Pocket Expenses, NAS, GD113/3–4. Craig Beveridge identified new attitudes towards children in the decades after 1750, Craig Beveridge, ‘Childhood and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, in Dwyer et al. (eds), New Perspectives, p.280. 83 For instance, rising dowry rates meant that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one third of Scottish aristocratic daughters remained unmarried. Hufton, Prospect Before Her, p.64. For unmarried women, see Bridget Hill, Women Alone: Spinsters in England 1660– 1850 (New Haven and London, 2001); Amy M. Froide, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2005). 84 NAS, GD113/3/315/11, John Dalrymple to George Innes, 14 February 1750, Ayr; GD113/3/341/11, John Dalrymple to George Innes, 18 April 1751, Ayr; GD113/3/1058/36, Copy George Innes to John Dalrymple, 4 April 1750, Edinburgh. 85 Barclay found individual women’s control over their choice of marriage partner to be dependent upon their ‘place in the family, age and marital status’. ‘Marital Relationships’, p.136. See also Tanya Evans, ‘Women, Marriage and the Family’, in Barker and Chalus (eds), Women’s History, p.63, for elements of patriarchal and companionate marriage co-existing. 80

21

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

very seriously intended by her father, the second Duke of Atholl, to marry her cousin and help ensure his succession to the dukedom.86 Whilst most elite marriages may not have been forced on the participants, they retained an element of the economic and political. Marriage generally brought with it a household to run, often with substantial numbers of servants to oversee, and sometimes major responsibilities over estates and people. A source of agency and autonomy for some, marriage could be a restrictive and at times lonely experience for those whose married homes were country houses far from their family or other female company. Repeated pregnancies were for most married women an unavoidable part of life, and although most women survived the hazards of pregnancy and childbirth, their ‘lying in’ was nevertheless anticipated with fear, particularly amongst the more nervously inclined or those with previous bad experiences.87 Despite the medical advances being made in this period, even those with access to the best doctors could die from the complications of childbirth. Betty Fletcher, who was attended by Drs Monro, Home and Young, some of Scotland’s foremost medical experts, died of what was known as milk fever four days after the birth of her only daughter.88 For most women, however, the onset of motherhood marked the commencement of a busy period in their lives. As Amelie Murray remarked, ‘where their is young folks one has no idle time on hand’.89 The practical ramifications of bringing up a large family, even with servants, should not be ignored, but women almost always wrote fondly of their children, and saw them as a source of entertainment as well as concern. Wintering at Dunkeld in 1733, the Duchess of Atholl wrote that her daughter Jean was ‘vastly diverting wch helps to pass ye time yt wou’d be very tedious were it not for her amusing me’.90 Ideally, women would hope that this good relationship would continue into old age. Lady Minto wrote fondly of enjoying ‘the Comfort of the Companey & Dutyfull attendance of sencible Daughters … att the closs of a long spent hapy Life as ever Woman injoye’d’.91 Most women could expect to see some, if not several, of their children and grandchildren die before them, but it was an unlucky woman indeed who was unable to draw on the support of any of her children in later life. This support was particularly necessary for widows. Women’s experience of widowhood was dependent upon a number of factors, including the age at which they lost their husband, their financial resources and their relationSee Chapter 4, pp.93–4. For the debate on maternal mortality and fears thereof, see Adrian Wilson, ‘The Perils of Early Modern Procreation: Childbirth with or without Fear?’, BJECS 16 (1993), pp.1–19; Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, pp.97–8. 88 NLS, MS16707 f.52, Mary Nisbet to Milton. Frances Home was the brother-in-law of Betty’s mother, and Alexander Monro was a professor of medicine at Edinburgh University, the first of a prominent medical dynasty. 89 NRAS234/49/1/333, to Lady Charlotte Murray, 20 November 1762, Invercauld. 90 NRAS234/JacA/C/1/4/62, to Lady George Murray, 5 February 1733. 91 NLS, MS11010, f.93, to Gilbert Elliot, 7 December 1769. 86 87

22

elite women and eighteenth-century society

ship with their children. Janet Clerk, whose relationship with her children was generally good, and who had unmarried daughters with whom to retire to a townhouse upon her son’s accession to the Clerk of Penicuik estates, was largely complacent about her status, despite confiding some feelings of agerelated redundancy to her spiritual diary even before she was widowed.92 Lady Margaret Macdonald, on the other hand, had been widowed for twenty years when, devastated by the death of her eldest son Sir James, she was propelled by the ill-treatment she received at the hands of his successor, her second son Sir Alexander, to commence repeatedly bemoaning the fate of the widow. Their deteriorating relationship meant that not only was she not paid her portion, but her influence over the management of much of the Macdonald lands on Skye and Uist suddenly ceased, and she found herself, as she put it, ‘for the first Time of my Life indigent, & dependent without the Means of purchasing the necessary’s of life’.93 Subjected in early widowhood to unusual political interference,94 she had nevertheless been able to enjoy elements of the ‘maximum female autonomy’95 which widowhood could bring for those with money, companionship and ideally a townhouse. The support of family members was perhaps more important in old age than at any other time of women’s lives. The next chapter, however, returns us to the beginning of elite women’s lives, to consider the early years in which their polite identity was moulded.

NAS, GD18/2098/301, 22 March 1745, Penicuik. NLS, MS1309 ff.174–5, to John Mackenzie, 24 July 1767, London. 94 See Chapter 5, pp.132-4. 95 Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720 (Oxford, 1998), p.180. 92 93

23

2

Education and Upbringing In June 1745, Amelie Murray, a thirteen-year-old Edinburgh schoolgirl, took up her pen and wrote out the following letter: Dear Madam I received a letter this day, with the accounts of your being recoverd, from the small Pox: I don’t know how any trivial mind, would bear the loss you have had, by them; I mean that of so much beauty, as before you enjoy’d; but you possess the beauties of the Mind, & have so many good Qualities, to make you esteemd by all, who are so happy as to know you. Its true, the Croud who Loved you only for your beauty, will forsake you: but I think you reap an advantage from that, for you will be able to distinguish, who were, your true, & who your feign’d Admirers; your real ones, will Love you the more, so see with what Patience, you bear this misfortune; which would be an infinite one to those, who have nothing to recommend them but a pretty face. I hope you will pardon this freedom, & forgive the faults of this scrall and believe it is all from Dear Madam your sincere friend and well-wisher, Amelia Murray.1

Amelie sent this letter not to the ‘former beauty’ to whom it was addressed, but to her mother, Lady George Murray. As an accompanying note explained, writing this letter was part of the training in the skills and accomplishments deemed necessary to become a polite young lady, which was the reason for her residence in Edinburgh at this time. Each Friday, she explained to her mother, her writing master, Mr Demainbray, set his pupils a subject on which to write a letter for the following Friday.2 On this occasion he had asked his pupils to compose a letter ‘to a Lady who has lately had the small pox, & was a beauty before but is now much spoilt by them’. Other weeks the set topics ranged from subjects like ‘Sincerity and Compliments dont agree’ to ‘wishing a Gentleman joy who had lately Come to a great fortune & fine Equipage’, on which subject, she told her mother with pride, Mr Demainbray had particularly praised her effort.3 Sudden wealth, irreversible disfiguring illness, juggling the formulaic polite demands of compliments with the expression of genuine emotion and sympathy: 1

NRAS234/JacA/III/1/48. NRAS234/JacA/III/1/44, to Lady George Murray, 7 June 1745, Edinburgh. It is likely she received some help with these compositions, even if they were not copied from a writing book. 3 NRAS234/JacC/I/11/8; NRAS234/JacA/III/1/42, 44. 2

24

education and upbringing

these were the concerns and priorities of the society in which Amelie Murray was growing up, and about which she had to become skilled in expressing herself in a neatly crafted, well-mannered letter. In drafting these letters, she was learning the formulae of polite expression, and providing a vivid vignette of one of the processes through which girls learned to become the polite young lady. Over the course of the eighteenth century, gentility became increasingly dependent on behaviour as opposed to merely birth;4 although wealth and status remained vital, girls like Amelie had to be taught how to negotiate the behaviours and sentiments expected of the polite. Yet, as Michele Cohen has recently remarked, ‘Despite the expanding scholarship on the centrality of politeness, sociability and conversation to eighteenth-century culture, there has been little systematic attempt to examine how children were trained to acquire and develop those skills.’5 Aspects of young women’s experience are considered throughout this book, but this chapter examines specifically the deliberate processes through which the polite ‘young lady’ was constructed in childhood and youth. It also investigates the ways in which young women were able to exploit these opportunities in order to widen their own mental horizons. The education of women enjoyed, periodically at least, a prominent position in eighteenth-century pedagogical debate. The arguments promoted by Mary Astell in the later seventeenth century towards the recognition of women’s serious academic capabilities almost certainly had less of an impact on the upbringing of young women in the early eighteenth century than Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s belief in the need to educate girls in a gentle, natural domesticity did on their descendants from the 1760s onwards.6 Yet whilst these and other published writings on female education have tended to attract the most scholarly attention,7 when it comes to lived experience, the historiography of women’s education in eighteenth-century Britain is surprisingly thin (‘a virtual desert’,

Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century’, HJ 45:4 (2002), pp.876–7. 5 Michèle Cohen, ‘“Familiar Conversation”: The Role of the “Familiar Format” in Education in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England’, in Mary Hilton and Jill Shefrin (eds), Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices (Farnham, 2009), p.100. 6 For Mary Astell, see Ruth Perry, ‘Mary Astell and Enlightenment’, in Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment (Basingstoke, 2005). 7 For largely later eighteenth-century text-based scholarship, see Michèle Cohen, ‘“To Think, to Compare, to Combine, to Methodise”: Girls’ Education in Enlightenment Britain’, in Knott and Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment. See also Michèle Cohen, ‘French Conversation or “Glittering Gibberish”? Learning French in EighteenthCentury England’, in Natasha Glaisyer and Sara Pennell (eds), Didactic Literature in England, 1500–1800: Expertise Constructed (Aldershot, 2003); Michèle Cohen, ‘Gender and the Private/Public Debate on Education in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Richard Aldrich (ed.), Public or Private Education? Lessons from History (London and Portland, OR, 2004). 4

25

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

to quote one recent commentator),8 and the Scottish situation even worse.9 Partly a product of the elusiveness of sources on girls’ education in family archives,10 it also reflects the traditionally institutional concerns of historians of education. But recent years have witnessed a remarkable surge of interest in the history of eighteenth-century childhood more generally, part of the success of which has been to reintegrate the experience of young people, including, although not limited to, their education, back into the historical mainstream.11 Contemporaries used the word ‘education’ to encompass all aspects of a child’s upbringing: Johnson’s Dictionary defined ‘to educate’ as ‘to breed; to bring up; to instruct youth’, whilst ‘education’ was the ‘formation of manners in youth; the manner of breeding youth; nurture’.12 This chapter follows those who have focused on education as ‘life-role’ socialisation, with education as the learning of skills necessary to ‘accomplish [a] social task’.13 It starts with an introducDeborah Simonton, ‘Women and Education’, in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds), Women’s History: Britain, 1700–1850. An Introduction (London and New York, 2005), p.33. Simonton provides a good overview of recent scholarship. For the polite education of girls, see Ingrid H. Tague, Women of Quality: Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690–1760 (Woodbridge, 2002), pp.167–74. A number of older, more general works shed some light on women’s education in this period, e.g., Josephine Kamm, Hope Deferred: Girls’ Education in English History (London, 1965); Mary Cathcart Borer, Willingly to School: A History of Women’s Education (Guildford and London, 1976); Rosemary O’ Day, Education and Society 1500–1800: The Social Foundations of Education in Early Modern Britain (London and New York, 1982); Margaret E. Bryant, The London Experience of Secondary Education (London and New Jersey, 1986); Dorothy Gardiner, English Girlhood at School: A Study of Women’s Education through Twelve Centuries (London, 1929); Nicholas Hans, New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1951), ch.10. 9 Lindy Moore, ‘Education and Learning’, in Lynn Abrams, Eleanor Gordon, Deborah Simonton and Eileen Janes Yeo (eds), Gender in Scottish History since 1700 (Edinburgh, 2006), p.111. An exception is the material relating to education in Stana Nenadic, Lairds and Luxury: The Highland Gentry in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 2007), pp.54–64. Alexander Law, Education in Edinburgh in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1965), esp. ch.5, ‘Private schools and private teachers’, and Rosalind K. Marshall, Virgins and Viragos: A History of Women in Scotland from 1080 to 1980 (London, 1983), ch.10, remain useful. 10 Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London, 1998), pp.343–4, n.86. In the family archives studied here, far less evidence remains to document the education of daughters than of sons. This was even more pronounced in the preceding centuries. See Keith M. Brown, Noble Society in Scotland: Wealth, Family and Culture, from Reformation to Revolution (Edinburgh, 2000), p.187. 11 E.g., Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore (eds), Children and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550–1800 (London, 2006); Mary Hilton and Jill Shefrin (eds), Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices (Farnham, 2009); Anja Müller (ed.), Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century (Aldershot, 2006); Mary-Jo Maynes, Birgitte Søland and Christina Benninghaus (eds), Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills: Placing Girls in European History, 1750–1960 (Bloomington, IN, 2005). 12 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1755), vol.1. 13 Barbara J. Whitehead (ed.), Women’s Education in Early Modern Europe: A History, 1500– 1800 (New York and London, 1999), p.xv, also p.xii. See also Linda Pollock, ‘“Teach her to live under obedience”: The Making of Women in the Upper Ranks of Early Modern England’, Continuity and Change 4:2 (1989), esp. pp.235, 248. 8

26

education and upbringing

tion to what girls were taught, and why, before moving on to consider the practice of sending girls to spend a year or so in town, examining a case-study of London boarding-school education as a form of prestige. It ends by investigating women’s access to aspects of education beyond the conventions of what was deemed socially necessary, and asks what purpose this could serve. ‘The Different Parts of a Girls Education’ In 1739, in a series of letters to be copied by his daughter Margaret, Professor Alexander Monro Primus set out a programme of education for a young gentlewoman, offering his opinions on that which such girls usually received. ‘Girls of your Station’, he wrote, ‘are generally taught Reading, Writing, Arithmetick, Dancing, Musick, Sowing with all the other Parts of what is called Women’s work, Dressing, Repetitions of some pious Performances’.14 Monro’s summary of ‘the different Parts of a Girls Education’ stressed basic literacy and numeracy; needlework and domestic economy skills; the polite accomplishments; and an emphasis on piety. These basics, in varying degrees and generally with some additional elements which Monro himself recommended,15 remained at the core of girls’ education throughout the century. This section introduces these ‘different Parts of a Girls Education’, and their role in preparing girls to take their place in polite society. Girls’ earliest education took place in the home, at the hands of their mothers or other female relatives, who ensured that skills in needlework, cookery and household management continued to be handed down from mother to daughter by example, experience and word of mouth.16 By around five years old, girls were stitching their samplers and learning plain sewing, the notion that a woman’s fingers should never be idle early introduced into girls’ experience.17 By this time, they would also be learning to read: Alison Cockburn (born 1713) was unable to remember having had a formal lesson as Alexander Monro (Primus), ‘The Professor’s Daughter: An Essay on Female Conduct’, ed. P. A. G. Monro, Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 26:1, supplement no.2 (January 1996), p.9. 15 Ibid., p.9. 16 John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Alexander Allardyce (Edinburgh, 1888), vol.2, p.59, highlighted the centrality of family management to early eighteenth-century girls’ education. For an example, see NAS, GD331/5/11, Janet Dick to Sir Alexander Dick, 8 March 1760, Prestonfield. 17 Some time in the 1770s, Beatrix Maxwell reported of her nieces aged seven and five, ‘the girls are taught at home yet, Fanny can read very well & has Sowed her Sampler & can Sow Some plain Work, Barbara is learning her Sampler & can read tolerably for her years’. NAS, GD113/4/66D, to Mrs Innes in Edr, 22 July [n.y. (prob. 1770s)], Pollock. See also George Turnbull, The Principles of Moral Philosophy. An Enquiry into the Wise and Good Government of the Moral World (London, 1740), vol.1, p.450; O’Day, Education and Society, p.52; Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720 (Oxford, 1998), p.90. 14

27

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

she ‘was begun so early and so easily’.18 Reading also enabled girls to receive moral instruction from the Bible, and to learn their catechism.19 Rote learning of the catechism and psalms was, according to Elizabeth Mure, ‘The chief thing required’ of girls’ education in the early eighteenth century,20 and it remained at the heart of their education throughout the period in question.21 It was believed girls had to be well-versed in the beliefs of their society’s moral code, not only to mould their own characters, but to ensure the continuation of this code in subsequent generations. Much of this early education was directed at girls’ future roles in household management and as mothers who would pass on their skills to their own children. Writing, however, was only taught much later, and usually, at some stage, by professional masters. Jean Innes was showing a ‘disposition for learning to write’ aged eight,22 and girls were rarely taught to write much younger. In February 1743 the eleven-year-old Betty Fletcher proudly ended a laboriously crafted short note to her father with the postscript, ‘This is misses own hand’.23 Writing masters also taught the arithmetic and accounting that women would require to make business transactions, deal with weights and measures, and generally to keep household accounts.24 As well as the practicalities of ensuring the financial well-being of the household, correct book-keeping, like neat, attractive writing, enabled women to show a degree of organisation and regulation.25 The marked inability to form characters and lack of grammatical knowledge which characterises many of the extant letters of the grandmothers and even mothers of girls like Betty Fletcher, who learnt to write in the 1740s, lends at least some credibility to Elizabeth Mure’s claim that ‘Reading and writing well or even spelling was never thought off’ in these earlier generations.26 But as Amelie Murray’s practice letters discussed at the start of this chapter show, an 18 ‘A Short Account of a Long Life’, in Letters and Memoir of her Own Life, by Mrs Alison Rutherford or Cockburn, with notes by T. Craig-Brown (Edinburgh, 1900), pp.1–2. Her father taught her arithmetic the same way. 19 Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, p.90. 20 Elizabeth Mure, ‘Some Remarks on the Change of Manners in my Own Time. 1700– 1790’, in Selections from the Family Papers Preserved at Caldwell, ed. W. Mure, Maitland Club, 71 (Glasgow, 1854), vol.1, p.262. 21 E.g, NAS, GD113/3/466/8, 6 September 1756; GD113/3/409/13, 9 January 1757, Ratho. 22 NAS, GD113/3/466/8, Hary Spens to George Innes, 6 September 1756. 23 NLS, MS16512 f.83, 14 February 1743 [London]. In The Christian School-Master (1707), the Rev. James Talbott ascertained writing was only to be begun ‘when children could read “competantly well”’. Quoted in Victor E. Neuberg, Popular Education in Eighteenth Century England (London, 1971), p.57. 24 Accounting formed part of the expensive London education of Lady Betty Hope, daughter of the second Earl of Hopetoun. Papers of the Hope family, Marquesses of Linlithgow, NRAS888 Box 59/1,‘School expenses for Lady Betty Hope, 1749’. 25 Rebecca Elizabeth Connor, Women, Accounting, and Narrative: Keeping Books in EighteenthCentury England (London and New York, 2004), pp.43–4 for financial well-being; ch.1 for a general discussion of these ideas. 26 Mure, ‘Change of Manners’, p.262. See also Nenadic, Lairds and Luxury, p.56.

28

education and upbringing

ability to write not just legibly and grammatically27 but in a fine cursive style and with articulate expression was by the middle of the century becoming a prerequisite amongst elite women. A year prior to Amelie’s lessons with Demainbray in Edinburgh, her father Lord George Murray was already praising her letters, in particular her ‘easy & unconstreand way of expressing her thoughts, which is the greatest Beuty in writeing’.28 To write well was to present a polite persona (that is to say, one that was ‘easy’ and ‘unconstrained’) on paper, but even more important was the young women’s ability to present this in person. Children also practised their writing by copying out ‘improving’ texts or memoranda. In March 1739, Amelie’s cousin Jane Murray (then aged eight or nine) wrote out a memorandum thanking one of her parents (the Duke and Duchess of Atholl) for her ‘prudent Education’. She highlighted the attention paid to her conversation, which was to be ‘equally acceptable to the knowing & the virtuous of both Sexes. So that her Good Sense is as much admir’d as her oyr Accomplishments are Envied’.29 Polite conversation required presenting in person that easy and unconstrained expression that Lord George Murray had admired in his daughter’s letters. But beyond this apparently cosmetic concern, the polite ideal which privileged mixed-gender conversation created a context in which young women might be educated to demonstrate what Jane Murray called their ‘good sense’, or an ability to make reasonably knowledgeable conversation with both men and women that, without being too heavy, required some understanding of history, geography and current affairs.30 It was because ‘it affords good Subject of Conversation’, for instance, that Alexander Monro recommended his daughter study history.31 Whilst instruction in areas like history and geography does not necessarily appear in accounts and bills,32 this tended to form part of a more general plan of education to be gained from reading books, which helped to provide girls with access to a broader range of

Linda C. Mitchell, Grammar Wars: Language as Cultural Battlefield in 17th and 18th Century England (Aldershot, 2001), pp.141–53, examines girls’ grammar books. Ninety-four ‘Female Scholars’, including Jean Innes, are appended to GUL, Y4–h.27, List of Scholars educated by the late Mr James Mundell, Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1789), pp.23–6. Whilst in Education in Edinburgh, p.162, Law cited Mundell as a classics teacher, in ‘Teachers in Edinburgh in the Eighteenth Century’, BOEC 32 (1966), p.145, he listed him as ‘Teacher of a private grammar school’. It is far more likely that these girls were being taught grammar than classics. 28 NRAS234/JacC/I/9/28, to Lady George Murray, 15 March 1743, London. 29 NRAS234/JacD/I/4, writing exercise, Jean Murray, 10 March 1739, Dunkeld. 30 For reading history, see Chapter 3, pp.55, 67–73. For geographical conversation as sociability, see Charles W. J. Withers, Geography, Science and National Identity: Scotland since 1520 (Cambridge, 2001), p.123. 31 Monro, ‘Essay’, p.19. 32 An early exception is Grisie, daughter of Grisel Baillie, who was taught geography in 1710. The Household Book of Lady Grisel Baillie, 1692–1733, ed. Robert Scott-Moncrieff, SHS 2nd series, vol.1 (Edinburgh, 1911), p.21. It also featured in the expensive London education of Lady Betty Hope, NRAS888 Box 59/1, ‘School expenses for Lady Betty Hope, 1749’. 27

29

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

knowledge and, it was hoped, entertainment than had been available to their foremothers.33 In no way radical or threatening, this notion that girls should be able to provide intelligent company (particularly within the family) was probably the most effective factor extending young women’s access to knowledge over the course of the century. For instance, in The British Grammar (1761) the Scots educationalist James Buchanan lamented that ‘unthinking’ men so often treated girls ‘rather as Dolls, than as intelligent social Beings … though in Point of Genius they are not inferior to the other Sex’. Tellingly, he believed his point that girls ought to be educated with ‘solid Principles’, and ‘useful Knowledge’ was best promoted through the argument that men ‘derive much social Happiness from the right Education of Females’.34 In a slightly different vein, the memoirist Thomas Somerville argued against the late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century belief that ‘refined taste and the possession of high accomplishments’ distracted women from their duties as wives and mothers. Seeing no evidence for this distraction himself, he believed instead that women’s refinement had helped to elevate ‘the general tone of society’.35 As a result of such beliefs, women’s education remained throughout the century often directed towards the benefit of the men around them, its benefits for the women themselves frequently incidental, if not always insignificant. Polite conversation demanded the expression of ‘taste’, an amorphous but socially differentiating quality which, for the educational writer James Barclay, was demonstrated in ‘a certain graceful ease, beyond the power of art, which is informed by the soul, and directed by the natural sentiments of a noble mind’.36 Taste could also be expressed through the possession of a set of social skills known as accomplishments. Long a feature of aristocratic education,37 it was during the eighteenth century that the ability to sing, play, dance, draw or speak French became expected of a much wider constituency of elite women, and even, by the last few decades of the century, of the middling ranks. Entrance into polite society was essentially contingent upon proficiency in these ‘polite qualifications’, as the young aspiring architect Robert Adam termed them in a letter to his sister Nelly in 1753,38 and there can be few more explicit examples of the hopes piled upon the polite education of female family members than those expressed by Adam himself. By 1755, Adam was in Rome, having taken a huge financial gamble in order to acquire the knowledge, taste and social E.g., NAS, GD113/3/475/1, to George Innes, 13 December 1756, Wemyss. Quoted in Mitchell, Grammar Wars, p.149. 35 Thomas Somerville, My Own Life and Times 1741–1814, with an Introduction by Richard B. Sher (Bristol, 1996; first published 1861), pp.349–50. 36 James Barclay, A Treatise on Education: Or, An Easy Method of Acquiring Language, and Introducing Children to the Knowledge of History, Geography, Mythology, Antiquities, &c (Edinburgh, 1743), p.155. 37 Brown, Noble Society, p.218. 38 He referred to singing and dancing as his two ‘polite qualifications’, NAS, GD18/4739, 11 May 1753, Fort George. 33 34

30

education and upbringing

connections to establish himself as an architect in London. But he was aware of the importance of his whole family to his enterprise, and encouraged his sisters to take advantage of any opportunities affording similar potential for social elevation.39 The Adams had genteel blood and connections, but their own claim to gentility was at best insecure, not least because of the uncertain territory between craftsman and professional that architects like Robert’s father William occupied. Far more than William, however, Robert was determined to claim the gentility he believed he deserved, so he began to instruct his sisters back home to get the polite education expected of ladies. For instance, he encouraged his sister Nelly to enhance her natural enthusiasm for music by taking lessons from the esteemed Italian musician Niccolo Pasquali, urging her to spare no expense in this.40 As one contemporary observed, music was ‘most to be esteemed in women, and in women of fortune and polite education; for others can hardly find time to apply to it’.41 Elite parents invested considerable energy in their daughters’ progress in music: Betty Fletcher received lessons on the spinet during her years at a London boarding school, and family and friends reported home to her parents as her singing brought her to the notice of the opinion-makers of polite London society.42 Keyboard instruments were the most popular for women, their ownership denoting wealth and status in a very physical sense.43 In a similar way, when Nelly Adam performed the Italian airs taught by her expensive Italian music teacher, she was demonstrating both a skill and, more significantly, access to a culture that only the polite had time or money to acquire. Adam also encouraged his sisters to learn French. ‘I rejoice’, he wrote, ‘at Your firm resolution in becoming French Ladys & think you judge right, in employing the best Master Edinr affords for Your instruction. I shall be glad to hear of your progress & insist on having a Scrape of each letter in that See also Chapter 6, pp.153–5. E.g. NAS, GD18/4746, to Nelly Adam in Canongate, [London]; GD18/4773, to Nelly Adam, 24 May 1755, Rome; GD18/4780, to Betty Adam, 19 July 1755, Rome. ‘An Impartial and Genuine List of the Ladys on the Whig or Jacobite Partie’, NLS, MS293, f.3, lists her as ‘a good singer’. Pasquali was brought to Scotland by the Edinburgh Musical Society in 1753, Jennifer Macleod, ‘The Edinburgh Musical Society: Its Membership and Repertoire 1728–1797’ (Edinburgh University PhD thesis, 2001), p.142. He died in 1757. 41 Jonas Hanway, Thoughts on the Use and Advantages of Music, and Other Amusements Most in Esteem in the Polite World (London, 1765), quoted in Richard Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1988), p.45. 42 NLS, MS16723 f.31 (Expenses for Miss Fletcher from January to April 1745) includes bills for singing lessons and tuning the spinet. MS16592 f.7, Sir James Carnegie to Milton, 22 November 1743, London, ‘Tell my Lady that Bess … Sings and plays, to admiration, So I was told yesterday by Miss Coutts who is a very good Judge and performs.’; MS16595 f.189, Somerville to Milton, 20 December 1743:‘Miss Fletcher … Sung ye other night to a Lady that was here _ and the best judge in England’; MS16595 f.190, Somerville to Milton, 22 December 1743. 43 Leppert, Music and Image, p.154. 39 40

31

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

Language & will give you two in Return.’44 A far from universal accomplishment amongst the women of the early eighteenth-century Scottish elite, French grew in popularity as a signifier of politeness.45 Teaching tended to focus on pronunciation and accent, ensuring girls could correctly pronounce the occasional French word or phrase when reading aloud or conversing.46 Like other Scots, Adam saw French as particularly important for those wishing to enter London society; and it was ‘Nells Love for the Polite world who about London Speak nothing else’ that would inspire her to persevere at her studies.47 By this time, the Adam girls were past the first flush of youth. Evidently, French had not been thought necessary for the daughters of an Edinburgh architect growing up in the 1730s and ’40s, but by mid-century the language was an essential part of the education of their more securely polite counterparts, and to be without even the basics would, Adam believed, hamper his sisters’ entrance into London society. The most universal accomplishment was dancing. Essential to the courtship ritual which was played out at balls and assemblies, dancing provided a context for young women to exhibit their elegance of posture and control of carriage. The performative element of dancing was stressed from an early age, with children taking part in regular ‘publics’ in which they showed off their skills to their parents and other onlookers.48 Dances had to be learnt and order maintained, demonstrating dancers’ awareness of the latest fashions and creating a ‘visual affirmation of social position’ reinforced through the prestige of the dancing-master attended. Frenchmen were the most highly regarded.49 As Adam’s references to the ‘best’ masters and financial outlay suggest, the eighteenth century witnessed a considerable formalisation of girls’ education in terms of the growing number of professional, specialist masters whom girls visited two or three times a week to be taught these accomplishments. The politely educated girl was not by any means particularly well versed in any aspect of what she had been taught; what was important was that she had some

NAS, GD18/4793, to Nelly Adam, 13 December 1755, Rome. Alison Cockburn wrote of learning ‘Dancing, French, etc., in the common course’, Cockburn, ‘Short Account of a Long Life’, p.2, but the travel memoirs of both Margaret Steuart Calderwood and Frances Steuart Denham make it clear that they were unable to speak French at the time they went abroad. Margaret Steuart Calderwood, ‘A Journey in England, Holland, and the Low Countries’ (1756), in Coltness Collections, 1608–1840, Maitland Club (Edinburgh, 1842), p.154. EUL, MS E2002.28, ‘Frances Steuart – Widow – Melencholy Title’ (unpublished memoir, Coltness, 1881). 46 Cohen, ‘French Conversation or “Glittering Gibberish”?’, p.116. 47 NAS, GD18/4792, to Peggy Adam, 15 November 1755, Rome. Notably, it was only in London in 1715 that Rachel Baillie began French lessons. Household Book of Lady Grisel Baillie, pp.31–3. See also NRAS234/JacC/I/2/80, John Murray to Lord George Murray, 14 October 1727, London. 48 E.g., NRAS234/Box49/2/356, Charlotte Murray to Lady George Murray, 6 December 1763; NRAS234/Box49/3/112, as above, 6 March 1764, Queen Square. 49 Leppert, Music and Image, p.71; ch.5 in general. 44 45

32

education and upbringing

superficial understanding of the various fields of knowledge which, taken as a whole, were deemed essential to the polite individual. ‘Being a little more in Company’: Society, Schooling and Sophistication Sometime around the mid-1740s, Beatrix Maxwell wrote to her cousin Marion Innes asking whether her sister Annabelle could spend the winter in Edinburgh with Marion, as ‘all the education She wants is only to be a little more in Company’.50 It was not unusual for parents to send their children, daughters as well as sons, to board with distant family or friends for part of their education.51 Ostensibly strengthening and perpetuating bonds between allied families, this enabled children to learn social and practical skills through integration into a new household. For instance, Alexander Monro advised his daughter to observe the housekeeping arrangements of all the families she spent time in, in order to learn from them.52 Throughout the eighteenth century, some children continued to be sent to the country, like Marion’s own daughter Jean, who went, aged eight, to stay with Hary Spens, a schoolmaster and classical scholar in Fife.53 But increasingly, girls were sent to town. A sense of what even very small urban centres could bestow is evident in the upbringing of the daughters of the Highland gentry,54 but most families of rank would aim to send their daughters to Edinburgh, where, according to Elizabeth Mure, they would in the early eighteenth century ‘lairn to dress themselves and to dance and to see a little of the world’.55 In 1728 one father felt it necessary to stipulate in a memorial that any of his daughters who had not ‘been educated at Edinburgh’ before his death were to be sent there for two years ‘to learn what is thought proper for them by there friends’.56 As these examples, and that of Annabelle Maxwell who was required to be ‘a little more in Company’ suggest, it was the introduction to polite urban society, its manners and practices, that was the main aim of this experience. The practice was consolidated by the increasing formalisation of education at the hands of specialist masters who tended to be based in towns, the ‘best’ of them to NAS, GD113/5/56/66C/3, to Mrs Innes at her house in Parliament Close, Edinburgh, 16 October [n.y.], Pollock. Annabella was born in 1728; Beatrix in 1716. William Fraser, Memoirs of the Maxwells of Pollock, vol.1 (Edinburgh, 1863), pp.99–100. 50

51

Nenadic, Lairds and Luxury, p.57.

Monro, ‘Essay’, p.18. 53 NAS, GD113/3, correspondence between George Innes and Hary Spens. Spens was the first to translate Plato’s Republic into English. Richard B. Sher, ‘Spens, Henry (1714–1787)’, ODNB. 54 Stana Nenadic, ‘Experience and Expectations in the Transformation of the Highland Gentlewoman, 1680–1820’, SHR 80:2 (2001), pp.206, 212–13. 55 Mure, ‘Change of Manners’, p.263. 56 Sir Alexander Maxwell of Monreith, brother-in-law of Margaret Macdonald. William Fraser, Memorials of the Montgomeries, Earls of Eglinton (Edinburgh, 1859), vol.2, p.345. 52

33

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

be found in Edinburgh. To quote Ingrid Tague, ‘Behaving naturally in polite society showed that one deserved a place in that society, but it took many years to learn that “natural behavior”.’57 And like most forms of eighteenth-century education, it was generally agreed that these skills were best learnt in situ and through practice.58 The letters and diaries written by Amelie Murray during the period she spent in Edinburgh aged eleven to thirteen in 1744–5 provide a vivid insight into this period in girls’ lives. Amelie’s earliest letters after her arrival in Edinburgh in January 1744 reported she had had her hair cut and was being measured for stays, the right hair and clothes being essential steps in the transformative process from child in the country to young lady in town.59 ‘[L]earning to Dance &c’ was how her father rather dismissively summarised his daughter’s time in Edinburgh,60 but dancing was just one of several polite accomplishments in which she was expected to achieve proficiency during this busy time. In June 1745, for instance, she described her schedule to her mother as follows: I am closs employ’d with my schools for from 9 a clock till eleven at Mr Demembrais [the writing master] then to the Dancing, imediately after dinner I go to the French, where I stay till five, & then Mr La Motte [dancing master]; I cant get much sowd at the School, neither does any thats at it for what with getting the Lessons by heart & writing there is no time for it.61

As this suggests, a lot was packed in to the winter or two that girls spent in town, making it a genuinely busy, probably stressful time for young girls expected to make the most of this brief period to improve in manners, accomplishments, social connections and understanding. Amelie’s letters, written in the breezy style that characterises the correspondence of those who had much to do, explicitly stressed the hurry of her life in town on several occasions. A socially acceptable way of excusing a short or roughly written letter, it also permitted Amelie to employ precisely the kind of harassed tone to describe her hectic schedule of schooling and visits that was used by older women whose letters from town were filled with business, social meetings and gossip. In between the lines of phrases like ‘indeed Mama you cant imagine how much I’m hurried just now’62 lies an assertion of worldly maturity. Such phrases also, perhaps, indicate something of a sense that, in her eyes at least, it was now she who was the lady in town whilst her mother lived the life of retirement of an older lady in the country. Young girls’ and boys’ progress or ‘improvement’ in politeness was judged Tague, Women of Quality, p.169. For an emphasis on imitation, or ‘early accustomance’, and habit forming, see Turnbull, Principles of Moral Philosophy, pp.99, 101. 59 NRAS234/Jac/I/10/4, to Lady George Murray. 60 NRAS234/JacA/III/1/7, 18 February 1745, Tullibardine. 61 NRAS234/JacA/III/1/44, to Lady George Murray. 62 NRAS234/JacC/I/11/4, to Lady George Murray. 57

58

34

education and upbringing

not just by their written descriptions of the activities in which they engaged, but through the very words and phrases they employed to write about them. Amelie’s regular letters home to her mother, like those of her young aristocratic English counterparts studied by Ingrid Tague, mirror to a remarkable degree those of polite adults both in form and language.63 Her letters followed the standard polite formula, first reporting on her own health and enquiring after that of the recipient; then reporting her activities, and the social news; and finally sending her compliments to all those she expected to see or hear her letter. In describing a ball as ‘vastly entertaining’, or the play as ‘very throng’, Amelie was showing her ability to report events in the same way that her fashionable seniors would have done.64 She was signalling through both words and deeds her preparedness to enter an adult world of sociability. What differentiated her from her younger siblings (or indeed her younger self) was not only that she had a lot of things to do; more importantly, these activities were, by and large, associated with her transition to adult status. The most basic social activity of the polite was the forging and cementing of social contacts through the paying and receiving of visits. This was a vital part of her experience, and the names of those with whom she exchanged visits or who donated gifts such as jewellery or theatre tickets were recorded meticulously in her letters and journals.65 She wrote of her friendships amongst her own age-group in the standard adult terminology, informing her mother shortly after her arrival, ‘For Companions I cant say I have many not any intimate ones I am acquaint with severals & Likes Lady Katie Steuart very well.’ Taking her time to form close bonds, she hinted, suggested a responsibility and maturity far removed from the impetuosity of childhood friendships. She continued, ‘I dont incline to draw up with them younger than me for they’r not right Companions for me.’66 ‘Right companions’ were those from whom she could learn the manners and practices of her polished, polite seniors. In being sent to town, she had outgrown the nursery for good; she showed her distance from her younger siblings by remarking on their own progress in the more basic elements of education and by sending them presents like books. She also offered to buy her mother anything she needed from town. These ‘commissions’, as they were known, were one of the main routes through which landed families such as hers purchased consumer goods, and, for young women, an opportunity to demonstrate they had acquired the taste, financial responsibility and understanding of the world of goods that signalled the well-trained polite lady.67 Many girls stayed with relatives whilst in town; Amelie lodged with a family Tague, Women of Quality, pp.173–4 NRAS234/JacC/I/11/10. For the fashionable popularity of ‘vastly’ at mid-century, see Patricia Howell Michaelson, Speaking Volumes: Women, Reading and Speech in the Age of Austen (Stanford, CA, 2002), pp.39–41. 65 Eg., NRAS234/JacC/I/11, passim. 66 NRAS324/JacC/I/11/1, to Lady George Murray. 67 Nenadic, Lairds and Luxury, p.148. 63

64

35

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

servant in the same close as the Countess of Dundonald, a trusted family friend. Such arrangements enabled parents to hope that their children would be introduced to good society by individuals trusted to guard over their moral well-being.68 Another option was to send girls to boarding school. Girls’ boarding schools had existed in Edinburgh since at least the mid-seventeenth century,69 although prior to the eighteenth century most elite women’s education had taken place in the home.70 By 1766, however, the Scots Magazine was complaining of the trend amongst parents, even ‘down to the lowest tradesman or mechanic’, who sent their daughters to boarding schools following the habits of their social superiors, and where ‘they learn principally to dress, to dance, to speak bad French, to prattle much nonsense, to practice I know not how many pert, conceited airs and in consequence of all, to conclude themselves accomplished women’.71 Although widely mocked in terms of educational provision, such establishments had other purposes, as those parents satirised in the Scots Magazine were well aware. Alison Cockburn, who recalled boarding with ‘the politest Lady of the age’, remarked that she ‘was early connected with the best families through intimacy at school’72 and formed life-long bonds of friendship there.73 Most schools in Edinburgh were family-sized enterprises, permitting a good level of supervision. However, not least because of their growing popularity, boarding schools remained controversial, particularly amongst the highest ranks, who tended to prefer the careful supervision and social exclusivity of a private education.74 When Lady Charlotte Murray, daughter of the second Duke of Atholl, and her husband (his nephew and eventual heir) decided to send their daughter Charlotte to a boarding school in 1762, she went to some lengths to justify her decision (which was made only with the Duke’s approval), explaining that the one they chose was ‘quite off the common road’, kept by ladies of very good family and situated in fashionable Queens Square, Bloomsbury.75 Choosing one of London’s most exclusive schools enabled Lady Charlotte to hope that her daughter’s lack of application might be improved by emulating her harderworking companions at the same time as remaining in the ‘best’ company.76 It

Mary Joe Hughes, ‘Child-Rearing and Social Expectations in Eighteenth-Century England: the Case of the Colliers of Hastings’, SECC 13 (1984). 69 Marshall, Virgins and Viragos, p.133. 70 Brown, Noble Society, p.181. 71 Quoted in Marshall, Virgins and Viragos, p.208. 72 Cockburn, ‘Short Account of a Long Life’, p.2. 73 To Ladies Anne and Margaret Lindsay, [February 1768], in Cockburn, Letters, 69–70. 74 For the debate on girls’ public versus private schooling, see Cohen, ‘“To Think, to Compare”’, pp.225–31. 75 NRAS234/49/1/347, Charlotte Murray to Lady George Murray, 7 December 1762, London. Her husband mentioned in another letter that ‘I was formerly no Friend to Boarding Schools’: NRAS234/49/1/360, to Lady George Murray, 20 December 1762, London. 76 Ibid. 68

36

education and upbringing

is important not to forget that in a society which put such an emphasis on the social, perhaps the single most important asset a girl could have was a good temperament.77 A few months later, young Charlotte was joined at the school by her aunt, also Charlotte, the spoilt youngest daughter of Lord George Murray and his wife Amelia. In the words of her eldest brother, Charlotte had ‘been Used to have her own way, and gott quite the Better of her Mother’.78 Over the following months, reports that Charlotte had ‘improven much in politeness’79 were interspersed with others less positive,80 and it is quite clear that for her family, what she learnt at the school was secondary to the hope that it would reform the bad habits (‘sourness … quarrels with her Companions & other bad tricks’) that were believed to be the most substantial hurdles to her improvement.81 It also provided some respite for her ageing mother. A series of family illnesses had distracted Lady George from Charlotte’s education,82 a reminder of just how much responsibility mothers were expected to take for their daughters’ education (both academic and moral) during the long periods such families spent in the country, and of how badly it could be disrupted by the other demands on these women’s time. Like so many apparently frivolous polite practices, sending girls to board in schools could have very practical repercussions.83 ‘Polite London Chilldren’: Place and Prestige When Lady Charlotte Murray chose a school for her daughter, London was an obvious choice. She and her husband spent much of their time there to enable her husband to carry out his duties as MP from 1761–4, and then as Duke of Atholl in the House of Lords. She herself had been taken to

Harry Spens wrote of Jean Innes that ‘what is preferable to all her studies she discovers a most engaging sweetness of temper’. NAS, GD113/3/469/4, to George Innes, 12 October 1756, Wemyss. 78 NRAS234/49/2/245, John Murray to brother, 29 September 1763, Dunkeld. 79 NRAS234/49/2/396, Amelie Murray to Lady George Murray, 29 December 1763, Marlee. 80 E.g., ‘Mrs. Dennis has not Yet Entirely Got the Better of Sisters Tricks & Taught her Sincerity but I hope soon will’, NRAS234/49/3/217, Atholl to George Murray, 14 July 1764, Dunkeld. 81 NRAS234/Box49/3/294, Amelie Murray to Lady George Murray, 14 November 1764, London. 82 NRAS234/49/2/8, Lady George Murray to James Murray, 12 January 1763, Invercauld. The only mention of more formal education at this time is that she was taught writing by the parish minister. NRAS234/49/1/115, Lady George Murray to Capt. Murray, 1 May 1762, Invercauld. 83 However, the argument of Kamm, Hope Deferred, p.135, that ‘it must be presumed that many girls were sent to school simply in order to get them out of their parents’ way’ is probably taking this point too far. 77

37

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

London by her English mother in 1739,84 so that she and her sister could both attend the ‘best’ masters and learn the ways of polite London society,85 whilst a generation earlier, her father’s sister had been sent to London with her brothers, to be immersed in a French-language school and to attend ‘one of the Best Dancing & Writing Masters in London’.86 Aristocratic fashions and Anglo-Scottish marriages meant that many children of the highest ranks had a bi-cultural upbringing. Other families educated their sons at English schools and colleges as a preparation for operating in what was essentially an alien language and culture in the post-Union parliament.87 An acquaintance with London society and manners became a status symbol, desirable, if not essential, to those who wished to consider themselves polite, women as well as men. Edinburgh may have been home to the ‘best’ company in Scotland, but girls were usually sent for their education as far away, or to as fashionable a location, as family connections and finances allowed. For ambitious parents, London beckoned as the most prestigious location in which eighteenth-century Scottish girls could be schooled. In March 1757, Agnes Murray Kynynmound and her children headed south to London to join her husband, Gilbert Elliot, later third baronet, as he pursued his political career. Six months later, Gilbert’s mother, Lady Minto, wrote of how she often thought of her granddaughter Isobel, and longed to hear her and her brothers ‘speak English & behave like polite London Chilldren’.88 Although initially reluctant to see the youngest generation of her family removed en masse from Scotland, she implied a clear understanding of the sorts of ‘improvements’ which this geographical move could be expected to have on her grandchildren’s language and manners. A more detailed insight into what families hoped to gain from educating a daughter in London can be gained from the experience of Betty Fletcher, the youngest daughter of Lord and Lady Milton, who travelled south in November 1741, just before her tenth birthday. Betty was taken to London by Lord and Lady Somerville, who supervised her schooling and upbringing there for the next three-and-a-half years.89 NRAS234/JacC/I/6/85, Duchess of Atholl to Lady George Murray, 23 October 1738, Dunkeld. She stressed that the trip was ‘for their Education’, though her deteriorating relationship with her husband was probably also a factor. 85 NRAS234/JacC/I/6/98, Duchess of Atholl to Lady George Murray, 8 May 1739, London. 86 NRAS234/JacC/I/2/80, John Murray to Lord George Murray, 14 October 1727, London. 87 E.g., Memoirs of the Life of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, 1676–1755, ed. John M. Gray, SHS series 1, vol.13 (Edinburgh 1892), pp.87, 99; Rosalind K. Marshall, The Days of Duchess Anne: Life in the Household of the Duchess of Hamilton 1656–1716 (London, 1973; reissued East Linton, 2000), pp.230–1. This was also, to varying degrees, the case with the sons of the families concerned here. 88 NLS, MS11009 f.51, to Gilbert Elliot, 8 September 1757, Minto. 89 NLS, MS16511 f.136, Martha Fletcher to Milton, 31 October 1741, Saltoun, notes Betty’s departure. The final London account is MS16723 ff.30–3, for January–April 1745. 84

38

education and upbringing

Although Betty was sent with the explicit purpose that she be put to school, neither the Fletchers nor the Somervilles had a particular institution in mind, and once they arrived Lord Somerville began consultations, noting that ‘the dearest, was not alway’s the best’. He promised to send ‘reports of the different characters and prices’ of the schools,90 ‘the Scheme of the School that we have the best accounts of’ being duly sent to Lady Milton.91 Somerville noted that ‘the few Ladys that have been with my wife Seem to fix on Chelsea’,92 and by early February Lady Somerville was reporting to Lady Milton that she had taken Betty to Mrs Aylesworth’s school in Chelsea, where they parted ‘not with-out Wet Ey’s’.93 Then a green suburb outside of London, Chelsea had emerged as one of the most fashionable locations for girls’ boarding schools.94 Mid-way between town and country, it was an ideal setting for the upbringing of young girls, morally as well as environmentally unpolluted: something mideighteenth-century London itself could never claim to be. The Duchess of Atholl similarly believed her house at Hammersmith ‘much properer for [her daughters’] Residence than a Close town as they have always bin used to a free Air’.95 Lady Somerville took pains to reassure Betty’s parents of her surroundings, remarking that ‘The air she is in is fine & Clear, The place chearfull & neat to a degree, the Mistress carefull & well bred’,96 whilst another visitor described the school as ‘a very agreeable place … reckoned exceeding wholsome and they are very discreet people who have the charge of her’.97 The attention the Fletchers’ correspondents paid to these physical and moral concerns suggests they expected Betty’s parents to be genuinely anxious about all aspects of her well-being. Such correspondence, of course, had its role to play in the maintenance of her parents’ political and social networks. But as Mary Joe Hughes found with the daughters of the Colliers family of Hastings, ‘it was determination to ensure their happiness away from home which prompted the principal attentions of [girls’] family and friends’.98 Scots, particularly familiar faces from home, tended to dominate the social world of Scottish children in London, responsible for their supervision and well-being Somerville, who resided at The Drum near Edinburgh, was travelling south to take his seat in the House of Lords as a representative peer. Lady Frances Somerville was his second wife, originally from Kent, and they were accompanied by Somerville’s daughter from his first marriage. 90 NLS, MS16586 f.144, Somerville to Milton, 14 November 1741. 91 NLS, MS16586 f.148, to Milton, 24 November 1741. 92 NLS, MS16586 f.144, to Milton, 14 November 1741. 93 NLS, MS16590 ff.45–6, to Milton, 4 February 1742, London. 94 Bryant, London Experience of Secondary Education, p.146. 95 NRAS234/JacC/I/6/85, Duchess of Atholl to Lady George Murray, 23 October 1738, Dunkeld. 96 NLS, MS16590 f.45, to Milton, 4 February 1742, London. Her husband later praised ‘the neatness of the place, & the great order we saw 60 girls in’: MS16595 f.88, to Milton, 5 April 1743. 97 NLS, MS16589 f.48, Lord Newark to [?Lady Somerville], 5 June 1742, London. 98 Hughes, ‘Child-Rearing and Social Expectations’, p.88.

39

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

outside of school.99 Mrs Aylesworth appears to have had over sixty girls, quite different from the quasi-familial set-up of some schools,100 but their protection was given high priority. In 1744, a friend of the Fletchers remarked of a visit: ‘I had as much Ceremony to go thro’, before I coud gain admittance as if it had been a Cloyster, being question’d, who I was, what I was, & from whom I came, to which questions having given Satisfactory answers, the young Lady, att last was call’d down but in the presence of two old Duennas.’101 Although joking, he was providing vital reassurance about Betty’s safety and reputation. Of the three Fletcher daughters only the youngest and apparently the favourite appears to have been given this exclusive schooling. London education was expensive, as Susanna, Countess of Eglinton discovered when taking her daughter Margaret (Betty Fletcher’s second cousin, later Lady Margaret Macdonald) to be educated there from 1729–30.102 The Fletchers paid around £40 a year to Mrs Aylesworth for ‘Board, Education & Disbursments’, and Somerville reckoned that ‘the whole Expences for Miss Fletcher will amount to about Sixty pound p annum’, a considerable sum.103 In comparison, boarding fees in Edinburgh were only about £20 per annum in the late 1740s,104 although the aristocratic Lady Betty Hope, daughter of the second Earl of Hopetoun, who was sent to London aged thirteen for twenty months from November 1748, incurred even larger bills. In addition to the £2 a week required to board with a relative, the total payment to masters in one six-month period (for teaching drawing, harpsichord, spinet, violin, writing, accounting, geography and Italian) came to the vast sum of £92 5s 7d.105 Parents had evidently come to regard the education of their daughters as worthy of substantial financial investment. For families less wealthy than the Hopes, like the Fletchers who educated only one daughter in London, it appears this was an investment to be made in the girl deliberately singled out as most likely to benefit from that investment. Religion may perhaps have played a role in this, particularly in Presbyterian families, although parents rarely made an issue of religious differences when sending their children to school in England as opposed to Catholic France, e.g., Hume’s reassurances that the Elliots’ sons need not attend mass at the École Militaire in Paris, see The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, vol.1 (Oxford, 1932), pp.473, 482. 100 The fashionable Misses Stephenson’s school, however, had 220 girls in the 1780s. Susan Skedd, ‘Women Teachers and the Expansion of Girls’ Schooling in England, c.1760–1820’, in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds), Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities (London and New York, 1997), p.114. 101 NLS, MS16595 f.221, John Guerin to Lady Milton, 23 July 1744, London. 102 Fraser, Memorials of the Montgomeries, vol.1, pp.348–9. 103 NLS, MS16871 ff.130–1 (Money paid for Miss Fletcher, 1741–3); MS16871 f.132 (Money paid for Miss Fletcher, 7 June 1744). 104 Law, Education in Edinburgh, p.183. 105 NRAS888 Box 59/1, ‘School expenses for Lady Betty Hope, 1749’. For more on Betty Hope, see Katharine Glover, ‘“Polite London Chilldren”: Educating the Daughters of the Scottish Elite in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London’, in Stana Nenadic (ed.), Scots in London in the Eighteenth Century (Lewisburg, PA, 2010), pp.256–8. 99

40

education and upbringing

Evident in the letters of both the Fletchers and the Somervilles is a consciousness that Betty’s time in London was aimed towards a specific agenda with a desirable outcome. On several occasions Lady Somerville and her husband asserted to the Fletchers the expectation that their not inconsiderable expense would be repaid, and early on in her Betty’s Lady Somerville enthused to Milton that ‘She has more life, Spirit, Wit, & Humour than Ever I saw in one of her age, accompanyed with Strong Sense, & reason, these are ground Works that can’t fail, & I make no doubts but She will answer her friends best hopes, & expectations.’106 This begs the question of what were these mutually understood hopes and expectations. Although Betty Fletcher’s intelligence was often commented on – and the racing-mad Earl of Portmore found her ‘so quick and sharp as so to even a match in many things for a Newmarket Jockey’107 – mental agility, as Lady Somerville’s quotation above demonstrates, was admired primarily as a social skill. Undoubtedly useful in conversation, it may have helped to raise her value on the marriage market. A couple of weeks later Portmore wrote to her father, ‘Indeed Miss Fletcher is an exceeding clever girl, and likely to be a perfect Beauty, w:ch is no bad thing my Dr Lord as it helps at a proper Season to pack ’em off w:th out parting w:th too much of ye Readys.’108 Hopes that a London education would boost girls’ prospects of making a ‘good’ marriage are likely to have been a key motivating factor behind such an education. A London education was not universally regarded in this respect, however, the marriage of Lady Margaret Montgomerie to Sir Alexander Macdonald of Sleat provoking the comment that ‘her London educatione will not be thought ane equivalent for any [drawbacks on her portion] in the Isle of Sky[e]’.109 Lady Minto’s remark about ‘polite London Chilldren’ quoted near the beginning of this section suggests that the polite accent and vocabulary a child could hope to acquire in London would act as a badge of membership of polite London society. Later in the century, the blue-stocking Elizabeth Montagu declared of London boarding schools, ‘What girls learn at these schools is trifling, but they unlearn what would be of great disservice – a provincial dialect, which is extremely ungenteel.’110 When Amelie Murray was in Bath in 1764, she sent her daughters to a school nearby for a couple of hours a day, not, she confirmed, ‘that I believe they will learn them much, but thinking they will get good Language which I could not teach them & against they come up that will be quite the fashion’.111 English, as Alexander Carlyle was at pains to point NLS, MS16590 f.45, 4 February 1742, London. NLS, MS16592 f.86, to Milton, 19 June 1743. Charles Colyear, 2nd Earl of Portmore, was of partially Scottish descent, but lived in London and Surrey. He was married to Juliana, widow of Peregrine, Duke of Leeds. 108 NLS, MS16592 f.90, 30 June 1743, Weybridge. 109 NLS, MS16577 f.144, Quentin Crawfurd to Milton, Irvine, 7 April 1739. Margaret was the daughter of the 9th Earl of Eglinton. 110 John Dolan, A Lady of the Last Century (Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu): Illustrated in her Unpublished Letters (London, 1873), p.181 [1773]. 111 NRAS234/Box49/3/240, to Lady George Murray, 7 August 1764, Bath. 106 107

41

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

out, was ‘in some respects a foreign tongue’ to eighteenth-century Scots,112 and the necessity for boys who would need to operate in British public life to be able to communicate effectively with their English colleagues was often cited as amongst the most pressing reasons for educating them in London.113 The Elliot family, who took up permanent habitation in the capital, fulfilled Lady Minto’s hopes and became known for their ability to speak English ‘properly’.114 Yet whilst Betty Fletcher’s brother Andrew noted upon his arrival at Winchester School that ‘I find the little english that I learned at London is of great use to me here’,115 the only mention of his sister’s progress in this field is that, after only a few days in London, she had got ‘All the cryes of the town’ to perfection, by listening out of the Somerville’s parlour window.116 Mimicking the advertising ditties of London’s street vendors may not, perhaps, have been her parents’ intention, but it demonstrated nonetheless her linguistic adaptability and her potential ability to pick up the words and intonations which would act as signifiers of her expensive London education at home, or facilitate her moves in metropolitan society itself. The main feature of Betty Fletcher’s London bills is the amount spent on hairdressing and clothing.117 The immediate concern of new arrivals in the British capital was to be fitted out in London clothes, without which no social mixing was possible in a culture which put such an emphasis on fashion and luxury in dress. Within days of Betty’s arrival, pink damask had been purchased and a coat made up.118 Once her London things were ready, she was invited to visit her young aristocratic compatriots Charlotte and Jane Murray, daughters of the second Duke of Atholl.119 The girls had probably been acquainted in Edinburgh, but amongst the most important outcomes of any time spent in London was the cultivation of acquaintance amongst the circles of the rich and influential, and the ability to be at ease with their social practices. In January 1742, Somerville wrote to her father that she was ‘just now going with us in The Autobiography of Dr. Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk, 1722–1805, ed. John Hill Burton, with a new Introduction by Richard B. Sher (Bristol, 1990; reprint of 1910 edn), p.543. For more on language, see Chapter 4, pp.101–8. 113 Memoirs of the Life of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, pp.87, 99; Marshall, Days of Duchess Anne, p.231. 114 Ramsay, Scotland and Scotsmen, vol.2, p.543, n.1. 115 NLS, MS16510 f.116, Andrew Fletcher to Milton, 1 February 1737. 116 NLS, MS16586 f.144, Somerville to Milton, 14 November 1741, London. In the Spectator, Addison wrote, ‘Vocal cries are of a much larger Extent, and indeed so full of incongruities and Barbarisms, that we appear a distracted City, to Foreigners, who do not comprehend the meaning of such Enormous Outcries.’ Quoted in Peter M. Briggs, ‘“News from the little World”: A Critical Glance at Eighteenth-Century British Advertising’, SECC 23 (1994), p.31. 117 NLS, MS16871 ff.130–1, 132. 118 NLS, MS16871 ff.130–1. Frances Burney referred to the process as ‘Londonizing’ in her novel Evelina, Or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (Harmondsworth, 1994; first published 1778), p.28. 119 NLS, MS16586 f.150, Somerville to Milton, 28 November 1741. 112

42

education and upbringing

high dress to Dinner, at Lady Abercorns, where she is particularly invited’.120 Later on, Betty spent a holiday with the Duchess of Leeds and her husband, the Earl of Portmore. Even after a year-and-a-half in London, her first moves into the Portmores’ society required preparation, indeed initiation: ‘My wife has been at Chelsea’, wrote Lord Somerville, ‘to see Miss Betty fitte’d out and to give her advice as to her behaviour while She is at Ld Portmores where She goes in a day or two.’121 Yet she became a favourite there too, treated, as Portmore informed her father, like one of the couple’s own children, and striking up a friendship and correspondence with their daughter Caroline.122 Later on, Somerville reported that his daughters ‘sent her a Card invitation in the fashionable way’.123 This was not just childish mimicry of adult practices, but rehearsal in the rites and rituals of fashionable polite society. Early in Betty Fletcher’s stay a friend reported home to the Fletchers, ‘I hear Bess is well and in love with London and the Trade thereof, and is soon to see both Plays and Operas.’124 Motivated by fashion, social ambition and perhaps by politics, Betty Fletcher’s time in London was designed by her family to initiate her into the social world of the metropolitan fashionable classes, able to operate with ease in the fashionable locations of mixed-gender public socialising which acted as crucibles for the display of conspicuous consumption and the demonstration of taste. She became the pet of high-ranking members of the British aristocracy, accustomed to their habits in socialising and all aspects of fashion. She sang in their drawing rooms, ate at their tables, gasped at their masquerade dresses125 and, occasionally, amused them with her childish outbursts, including the incident in which, aged eleven, she snapped at Colonel Lescelles, who had been in Edinburgh during the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion: ‘You old fusty Soldier mind your own business.’126 The social circles in which she moved included Scots, English and the Welshman Gwynn Vaughan, thus initiating her into the notion of a society which was genuinely British in its composition, with London as the communal, if never neutral, meeting-point of these sometimes conflicting cultures. Ladies Charlotte and Jean Murray were brought up to expect to move in this sort of society, their London experience a vital preparation for the life of the post-Union Scottish aristocracy. But the experience of Betty Fletcher, born into a gentry family which had elevated itself to unusual prominence through politics, suggests that the London education of a promising daughter, and her introduction at 120 121

NLS, MS16590 f.60, 31 January 1742, London.

NLS, MS16595 f.107, to Milton, 14 May 1743.

NLS, MS16592 f.84, 24 May 1743; f.88, June 1743. None of this correspondence remains in the Saltoun Papers. 123 NLS, MS16595 f.186, to Milton, 13 December 1743. 124 NLS, MS16586 f.155, Somerville to Milton, 16 December 1741, London. 125 E.g., NLS, MS16592 f.7, Sir James Carnegie to Milton, 22 November 1743, London; MS16592 f.84, Portmore to Milton, 24 May 1743, Weybridge; MS16595 f.186, Somerville to Milton, 13 December 1743. 126 NLS MS16595 f.74, Somerville to Milton, [?23 February] 1743. 122

43

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

an early age to not just Scottish, but British aristocratic circles, had its role to play as part of a wider family agenda of political and cultural integration into the post-Union British state. Two-and-a-half years after her arrival in London, Somerville reported to Milton that ‘Miss Fletcher is without flattery much Improved – She Says She will not Come to Brunston [Brunstane, the Fletchers’ house near Edinburgh] to be the youngest Sister, that she will live with Lady Somerville.’127 Although she did return home in spring 1745,128 her experience had, not surprisingly, given her a sense of status above that which might have been expected of the youngest daughter of a minor gentry family. The parents of boys educated in England worried that those who spent their formative years there would become accustomed to luxuries and patterns of conspicuous consumption beyond their means, and never settle to living in Scotland.129 Clearly, this was more important where issues of estate inheritance were involved; girls, if they married, became the financial responsibility of another family. Ideally, their experience would give them a veneer of sophistication which could help them to acquire a wealthy, high-ranking husband, with whom they could continue to live in the style to which their upbringing had accustomed them. Perhaps the London experience of Scottish elite girls may best be understood, like the Grand Tour, as an ‘invisible academy’. An essential part of the education of young noblemen, and increasingly gentlemen too, the ideology of the Grand Tour demonstrated the centrality of experiencing other cultures to eighteenth-century pedagogical beliefs. Whilst essentially educational, both practices nevertheless had a primarily social focus, that of gaining membership of a socially polished cultural elite with access to certain types of knowledge and experience that imparted the status and prestige which were the defining markers of the polite. ‘A real and lasting pleasure’? The Value of Learning So far, this chapter has examined the more performative elements of girls’ social education. This final section examines what opportunities existed for the young women of the Scottish elite to engage with more academic learning, and how this might provide the intellectual stimulation and the development of an inner mental world often lacking in the kinds of education hitherto outlined. The word ‘learning’ in the eighteenth century tended to refer to the classical education that since the Renaissance had become something of a rite of passage for the boys of the higher social ranks, a mark of differentiation for the governing male elite. In a society in which the maintenance of order was paramount, education was a key instrument of social segregation, 127 128 129

NLS, MS16602 f. 236, 14 May 1744, [London]. NLS, MS16604 f.11, David Anderson to Milton, 16 May 1745, London. Nenadic, Lairds and Luxury, pp.53–4; Memoirs of the Life of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, p.99.

44

education and upbringing

reinforcing both rank and gender, and nothing symbolised this more than the fortress of masculine learning into which the classical languages had been built, any breach of which by women was a breach of gender norms potentially to be perceived as an attack on society itself.130 Hary Spens, the classicist who educated Jean Innes, implied a typical assumption of the unsuitability of classical learning for girls when he noted his charge wanted ‘to be at every thing she sees going on; Latin itself hardly excepted’.131 Yet unlike the provincial English gentlewomen studied by Amanda Vickery,132 there is limited, but not insignificant, evidence of classical learning amongst the women of the families under consideration here.133 Betty Fletcher’s cousin Margaret Hepburn, for instance, was encouraged to learn Latin by Dr William King, Principal of St Mary Hall, Oxford. In 1754 he wrote to her, ‘You are so complete a mistress of the English language and seem so desirous of further improving your self, that I cannot help repeating, what I so often recommended to you, I mean, to acquire a competent skill in ye Latin tongue.’ King continued that he believed her aptitude for learning was such that in six months she would be able ‘to read with pleasure the works of ye Roman poets, & to distinguish their beauties’. He noted she must be prepared to encounter some resistance; in particular, the ‘jeers and reproaches of silly women or ignorant men, who look upon all accomplishments, which they cannot attain themselves, to be pedantrys’.134 Against the grain of stereotype, however, King argued that Latin was ideally suited to the specific, gendered problems faced by women who had been brought up to be valued for superficial qualities and to perform roles as wife and mother which they could long outlive. Margaret, he believed, should

For Bridget Hill, ‘The learned lady becomes a pervasive metaphor for the unnatural woman who refuses to perform the natural functions of her sex and who actively usurps the functions of the male sex’, Women Alone: Spinsters in England 1660–1850 (New Haven and London, 2001), p.83. 131 NAS, GD113/3/479/5, to George Innes, 15 February 1756, Wemyss. 132 Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, p.259. Michèle Cohen maintained that girls could and did learn Latin, but in a less methodical manner than men, ‘“To Think, to Compare”’, p.327. 133 This includes Jean Innes’s illegitimate half-sister, whose maternal grandfather was a schoolteacher, but who was herself destined to be a seamstress. E.g., NAS, GD113/388/13, to George Innes, 22 March 1753, Ratho. On 9 January 1754 he mentioned, ‘I … keep her up in what Latin she has got’, GD113/3/409/13, Ratho. 134 NLS, MS16688 f.78, 19 January 1754, London. Addressed only to ‘Madam’, it is almost certainly to Margaret. MS16712 f.153, to Margaret from Eleanor Wallace dated 12 March 1759, Bath, makes reference not only to their shared friendship with King, but his encouragement that Margaret learn Latin. David Greenwood, William King, Tory and Jacobite (Oxford 1969), makes no reference to his ever having travelled to Scotland; instead he spent most of his life in Oxford with occasional trips to London and Bath. It was probably on one of these that he met Margaret during her visit to England in 1752. See NLS, MS16516 f.93, Mary Hepburn to Milton, 26 April 1752, Beltonfoord, and MS16516 f.95, Mary Hepburn to Milton, 24 September 1752, Bath. 130

45

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

learn the language so that ‘when your youth and beauty are gone, you will have a real and lasting pleasure left’.135 It appears Margaret followed King’s advice, as five years later a friend, Eleanor Wallace, wrote from Bath on King’s instructions, hoping that Margaret would reply to him ‘in his favourite languish’ and wishing that she could be in Oxford to hear King’s Latin oration at the instalment of Westmorland as Chancellor, ‘to hear fine Musick, [and] what you’d value more, ye Doctor’s Oration’ which would be delivered in Latin. Eleanor added her regret that she herself would be unable to understand it, as unlike Margaret she had not had King to advise her education.136 Around the same time that King wrote to Margaret, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu gave comparable advice to her granddaughter, for the similar but more immediate reason that it would ‘not only … make solitude tolerable, but agreeable’.137 King and Wortley Montagu were not alone in their belief that polite femininity and classical learning were not necessarily mutually exclusive, and it is probably no coincidence that these examples date from a period in which educated men’s ability to recognise that learning could be ‘a properly feminine accomplishment’ was being promoted in intellectual circles as a patriotic means of demonstrating taste.138 Such ideas failed to gain currency amongst the polite more broadly, however, and there remained in King’s comments a very standard acknowledgement that any such learning should best be kept private. This was very clearly stressed by Professor Alexander Monro around 1740, when he engaged a tutor to teach his daughter Margaret ‘the Latin Rudiments’. This, he claimed, was to help her with reading aloud in English, rather than to ‘have any Pretensions to be a Critick in Languages, that might give you too much a Taste for Books and make you neglect the necessary female Offices’. Despite presenting Latin as effectively ornamental, he echoed convention in hoping she had ‘good Sense enough’ not to display this knowledge, her punishment, if she did, being to leave her ‘as ignorant as I can of everything beyond what relates to the plainest domestick Life’.139 Whilst his threat was the withdrawal of not just Latin but other areas of instruction too, it indicates he understood his daughter to derive entertainment and intellectual fulfilment from the activity of learning and application to study. It also acts as a reminder that evidence for this aspect of girls’ education may be even more hidden in the archives than for others.140Despite King’s recommendaNLS, MS16712 f.153, as above. Ibid. King’s oration was in Latin, see Greenwood, William King, p.289. 137 Quoted in Kamm, Hope Deferred, p.103. 138 Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago and London, 2000), ch.2, esp. pp.50, 59. 139 Monro, ‘Essay’, p.17. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu famously advised that her granddaughter should ‘conceal whatever learning she attains, with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness or lameness’, Elizabeth A. Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 (Cambridge, 1995), p.2. 140 Evidence can, of course, demonstrate some women’s unfamiliarity with the language. For instance, the laboured handwriting employed by Martha Fletcher in copying the Latin 135 136

46

education and upbringing

tion that Margaret Hepburn learn Latin, he maintained that getting ‘a good husband’ would be ‘the most important affair’ of her life.141 Whether this was genuinely felt or a nod towards convention, he did not see marriage and classical learning (particularly when directed towards the appreciation of literature) as mutually exclusive, and perhaps his definition of a ‘good’ husband was one who would encourage her studies.142 Combining intellectual interests with feminine virtue could shield women from some of the worst attacks against ‘learned ladies’.143 Elizabeth Halkett appears to have understood this when, in a passage redolent with the fashionable sentimentality of the 1780s and with that of a daughter whose mother died only days after her birth, she detailed her mother Betty Fletcher’s intellectual qualities. Describing her ‘Acquisitions in Science’ in which ‘she was equall’d by few among the Ladies, surpass’d by still fewer among the gentlemen’, her supposed ‘Strength of Understanding, Force of Imagination & perspicuity of descernment, equalld by few of either sex, her Curiosity & Avidity in philosophic researches’, and ‘her thirst for Knowledge & Patience in the Investigation of truth’, Halkett made sure to note that ‘These Mental accomplishments’ were ‘connected with all that is elegant & amiable Mild gentle and modest in female Characters’.144 Despite the hyperbole, and in the absence of a fuller contemporary account, it suggests that Betty Fletcher’s mental resources went much further than those her expensive London schooling had provided. Sadly, the talents of both cousins were cut short by their tragically early deaths, but it is surely no coincidence that as following chapters will show, they were the respected companions of some of the most esteemed literary and intellectual minds of their day in Scotland. The notion seems to have been present, at least in circles surrounding men with university connections like Monro and King (which, in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and St Andrews, formed a not insignificant part of polite society), that women’s lives could indeed be enriched through intellectual activity. A titles of books, NLS, MS17802, f.1; MS110087 f.198, a letter in French from Gilbert Elliot (later first Earl of Minto) to his sister Isabella, 17 October 1765, Paris, in which he quoted Virgil, then asked pardon that he had ‘écri[t] du Latin à une jeune Demoiselle’, going on to translate the Latin into French, which he considered a more appropriate language for a young lady. 141 NLS, MS16688 f.78. 142 One of the reasons why it was sometimes deemed better to leave a girl relatively uneducated was that it would make aspects of her role as a wife seem less pointless to her. The ‘double bind’ which Myers has perceived as dogging Hester Thrale meant that after having been encouraged to use her mind since childhood, she suddenly found herself upon marriage circumscribed in all respects. Sylvia Harcstark Myers, The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1990), p.254. 143 Ibid., p.2. 144 EUL, MS La III 364, Elizabeth Halkett, ‘Memoir of the Fletchers of Saltoun’, (written some time before 1782), pp.103–4. Pocock points out that contemporary usage of ‘philosophy’ could denote a temper of mind which ‘promoted the socialisation and secularisation of thinking and debate as an activity appropriate to civil society’, John Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Volume 2: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge, 1999), p.21.

47

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

nineteenth-century memoir informs the reader that Agnes, Lady Buchan, sister of Margaret Calderwood, was a woman of extraordinary intellect who studied mathematics under Colin MacLaurin, yet elaborates no further,145 whilst a letter from Beatrix Maxwell to her cousin Marion Lauder casually mentioned, ‘I have no news, only I have been throng attending lessons of Phylosophy.’146 Philosophy was a fashionable concern amongst the polite, and public lectures on the subject are probably best viewed as an arena of public sociability rather than serious learning. In England, professional lecturers toured the fashionable resort towns, speaking on subjects like science in a style intended ‘as much to amuse as instruct’.147 But in 1745, Colin MacLaurin only reluctantly agreed to admit ladies to the ‘College of Experiments’ he gave as a benefit for the daughter of his predecessor as professor of mathematics at Edinburgh. Even then, he claimed he took ‘no Notice of their being there’.148 In doing so, however, he may have permitted a greater equality of access to knowledge to the ‘many Ladies’ who attended than those popular lecturers in English resort towns who may well have talked down to their audience. Moreover, access to ideas did not necessarily depend on physical presence. As a student, Robert Adam was reportedly mesmerised by MacLaurin’s astronomy lectures and ‘took pleasure in repeating & explaining [them] daily to his sisters’.149 University education, like most aspects of serious learning, remained off-limits to women, but those who lived in its proximity, and enjoyed the encouragement or enthusiasm of men who appreciated the benefits the development of intellectual interests could bring, could access the learned world through indirect routes. From their earliest years, the daughters of the Scottish elite shared a number of experiences which distinguished their upbringing and confirmed their polite status. The acquisition of skills needed to run a household continued to be an essential part of elite girlhood, but to the practical skills and instruction in piety and religious knowledge that had formed the basis of girls’ education in previous centuries was added a much greater and more widespread emphasis on the social skills that would enable girls to take their place in polite society. This created a prominent role for the town as the place where girls could be socialised into the world of polite society, learning the manners, language and social mores which would enable them to move with ease in this society as they grew up. It also provided the opportunity to forge useful social connecAlexander Fergusson, The Honourable Henry Erskine, Lord Advocate for Scotland, with Notices of Certain of his Kinsfolk and of his Time (Edinburgh, 1882), pp.48–9. 146 NAS, GD113/5/66A/12, 12 February [pre-1743], Glasgow. 147 Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989), p.137. 148 MacLaurin to Archibald Campbell of Knockbuy, 21 February 1745, in The Collected Letters of Colin MacLaurin, ed. Stella Mills (Nantwich, 1982). 149 NAS, GD18/4982, ‘Life of Robert Adam’, by John Clerk of Eldin, p.2. For MacLaurin, see Erik Lars Sageng, ‘MacLaurin, Colin (1698–1746)’, ODNB. 145

48

education and upbringing

tions. For those who could afford it, a London education was the most desirable in imparting social prestige, but these practices meant that most young women from the ranks of the gentry and above would experience some form of urban education around the time of adolescence. Elements of education which had previously been the preserve of the wealthiest elites were, by the later eighteenth century, becoming an essential part of the upbringing of all young women of rank. The first two decades of a woman’s life were without a doubt the most instrumental in the formation of polite identity. It was through the formal and informal experiences of childhood and girlhood that social practices were observed and copied, that the skills were learnt and the habits internalised which would come to symbolise polite femininity. But education was not just confined to childhood. This social focus of girls’ education could, given the right circumstances, provide the basis for a broadening of girls’ experience into elements of academic education generally regarded as exclusively male. As much as the lot of some elite women throughout the century was the most minimal of academic education, for others, particularly those with connections to men supportive of the idea of female learning, the opportunity could exist to make education a life-long interest. Those who promoted classical learning, for instance, expressed a belief that this could help to give women inner mental resources which would remain with them throughout their lives. The next chapter will investigate the ways in which the growing availability of print facilitated and enhanced the opportunities open to elite women to furnish their inner mental world.

49

3

Reading and Print Culture From the vantage point of her old age in the 1790s, Elizabeth Mure wrote of early eighteenth-century Scotland that ‘The weman’s knowlege was gain’d only by conversing with the men not by reading themselves, and not picked up at their own hand, as they had few books to read that they could understand. Whoever had read Pope, Addison & Swift, with some ill wrot history, was then thought a lairnd Lady, which Character was by no means agreeable.’1 Women, she suggested, had been both practically and prescriptively unable to access information through print, and even a slight acquaintance with the world of letters was enough to label a woman as excessively learned. Mure’s dismissal of the literary opportunities open to women in the early years of the century is significant less as an accurate reflection of that period than as an expression of the prevalent belief by the time she was writing that this situation had changed dramatically and with significant repercussions for elite women’s experience. By the mid-eighteenth century, the association of elite women with literary culture had become a commonplace which, according to Vivien Jones, has been ‘rediscovered and confirmed by twentieth-century feminist literary scholarship’.2 From an historical perspective, Amanda Vickery similarly concluded that the mid-to-late eighteenth-century gentlewoman ‘enjoyed unprecedented access to the public world of print’,3 whilst women’s growing involvement in literary culture as both writers and readers has been described by a historian of reading as ‘one of the most striking phenomena of the eighteenth century’.4 Although it must be cautioned that access to reading was not automatically liberating,5 and that women’s access to print remained subject to Elizabeth Mure, ‘Some Remarks on the Change of Manners in my Own Time. 1700– 1790’, in Selections from the Family Papers Preserved at Caldwell, ed. W. Mure, Maitland Club, 71 (Glasgow, 1854), vol.1, p.269. 2 Vivien Jones, ‘Introduction’, to Jones (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, 1700–1800 (Cambridge, 2000), p.1. Roger Chartier described the iconography of reading in the eighteenth century as ‘exclusively female and secular’. ‘The Practical Impact of Writing’, in Chartier (ed.), A History of Private Life, vol.3, Passions of the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1989), p.147. 3 Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London, 1998), p.259. 4 Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge, 1999), p.22. 5 ‘The history of reading is not self-evidently a history of improvement and enlightenment, of progress from lesser to greater literacy, from ignorance and barbarism to democracy, 1

50

reading and print culture

far more limitations than that of their male counterparts, the important place of reading and literary culture in the lives of the women under consideration in this study is unmistakeable. Reading was an activity fundamental to the pursuit of politeness. In terms of engaging with ideas, exercising reason and the potential for improvement in taste and knowledge that it posed, reading – at least the ‘right’ kind of reading – was an intrinsically polite activity. It was through texts such as Addison and Steele’s Spectator that men and women learned the customs and behaviours that would define polite society, but access to books and periodicals and the ability to discuss the ideas they propagated were essential to the pursuit of improvement and sociability in a much more general sense. In recent years, the relationship between reader and text has come under scrutiny as historians have sought to understand the ‘deceptively simple’6 act of reading through more sophisticated analyses of the social and cultural context in which it was carried out.7 A more holistic approach to the study of reading has emerged, which views readers as an integral part of the process of writing and dissemination, bringing them into a realm not just of experience but of influence, and helping to blur the distinction, once perceived as rigid, between writing that is ‘public’ printed text and that which is handwritten and ‘private’.8 This chapter considers women’s relationship with print culture and writing in this wider sense. It asks how this polite activity helped to incorporate elite women into an Enlightenment world of letters in which their experiences were shared with other readers, unknown and potentially distant. It also examines the role played by text in cementing women’s relationships within their own social circles. It starts off by investigating women’s access to print, then asks why and how women read, before examining women’s relationship with some of the different genres which they read. It considers the ways in which women humanitarianism and virtue. Reading is not necessarily liberating and can be an imprisoning experience. We must ask what reading inspired and what it constrained.’ James Raven, ‘New Reading Histories, Print Culture and the Identification of Change: The Case of EighteenthCentury England’, Social History 23:3 (1998), p.286. For a specifically gendered version of this argument, see Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (London and New York, 1989). 6 Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago and London, 1998), p.384. 7 Ian Jackson, ‘Approaches to the History of Readers and Reading in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, HJ 47:4 (2004); Robert Darnton, ‘First Steps Towards a History of Reading’, in Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (London and Boston, 1990); Johns, Nature of the Book; Bernadette Cunningham, ‘Introduction: The Experience of Reading’, in Bernadette Cunningham and Máire Kennedy (eds), The Experience of Reading: Irish Historical Perspectives (Dublin, 1999). 8 Robert Darnton, ‘What Is the History of Books?’, Daedalus 111:3 (1982), esp. p.67, Fig.1, p.68; Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore and London, 1999), esp. p.2; Johns, Nature of the Book; George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker (eds), Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800 (Cambridge, 2002).

51

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

participated in print culture, not only as consumers but, in a more personal way, also in its production, ending with a section on women’s own use of the written word as a form of sociability. Access to Books and Print Historians once believed the history of reading in the eighteenth century to have been characterised by the move from an ‘intensive’ style of reading, in which a few, mainly religious texts, were read repeatedly, their contents privileged by this process as an affirmation of belief, to an ‘extensive’ style of reading. This emphasised the consumption of ‘new and varied’ texts ‘for information, and for private entertainment in particular’, encouraging the challenging of accepted values.9 Although generally agreeing that an increase in the variety of reading did take place, most scholars now propose a more gradual process of change in which ‘old’ and ‘new’ reading practices were practised simultaneously.10 The mother of the mathematician Mary Somerville, for instance, who lived well into the nineteenth century, was described by her daughter as seldom reading anything but the Bible, sermons and newspapers.11 For those who experienced it, however, this move from a primarily reverential relationship with text to one that was largely or at least partly consumer-driven was a significant one. Books remained expensive and family wealth was probably the most important determinant in women’s access to reading material, followed closely by the existence of a familial literary culture. John Clerk of Penicuik was the patron of no less a figure than Allan Ramsay senior, whilst Gilbert Elliot of Minto corresponded with Hume and Smith, amongst others, on the subject of their writings. Lord Milton bought large numbers of books on a wide range of subjects and was the guardian of an equally eclectic library compiled by his uncle, Andrew Fletcher ‘the patriot’.12 Yet whether the Fletcher women had access to This thesis was originally proposed by Rolf Engelsing in 1974. See also Reinhard Wittman, ‘Was there a Reading Revolution at the End of the Eighteenth Century?’, in Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (eds), A History of Reading in the West, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Oxford, 1999; first published 1995), pp.254–5. Steven R. Fischer, A History of Reading (London, 2003), p.255, argues the roots of the aspect of this ‘revolution’ discussed above can be found in the late seventeenth century. 10 Darnton, ‘First Steps Towards a History of Reading’, pp.165–6, argued that the Engelsing thesis was built upon only slim evidence, but noted that a study of New England produced similar results. For Darnton, the late eighteenth century was a turning point in the availability of reading matter, but this increase in variety was not accompanied by decreased intensity of reading. John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997), pp.170–1; Robert DeMaria, jr, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading (Baltimore and London, 1997), p.18. 11 Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville, with Selections from her Correspondence, by her daughter, Martha Somerville (London, 1873), p.8. 12 NLS, MS17866, a list of books at Brunstane in 1760, running to twenty-four pages. 9

52

reading and print culture

their family’s substantial libraries is unknown. Around this time, the libraries of some English country houses were in use as family rooms, and Robert Adam commemorated Lady Grisell Baillie and her daughter Lady Murray in busts in the library of their Borders home at Mellerstain,13 suggesting the acceptance of a female presence in what had traditionally been viewed as a ‘male’ space.14 Yet when Milton left his library to his younger children, they returned it to their eldest brother in an action which provoked the philosopher Adam Ferguson to write approvingly of Mally Fletcher’s renunciation of her claim as ‘a piece of proper Respect to [her] Ancestors’.15 Younger sons and daughters were, in his view, no more the proper recipients of the family’s collected and inherited print culture than property or a title. Women had their own lines of inheritance, however: Milton’s paternal grandmother left an ‘inventer of my Bookes’ listing around 150 mainly religious titles. These she left to her daughter-in-law Margaret Carnegie who passed them to her own daughter Martha.16 ‘Female’ books, or those specified as belonging to women, rarely occur in archival bibliographic lists, probably because they were kept separate from the mainstream of family libraries, and rarely deemed worth recording. Moreover, the unbound texts most likely to have been owned and read by women are the least likely to have survived. Yet women did not need to own texts in order to read them. Circulating libraries did not feature significantly in Scotwomen’s experience until the later eighteenth century,17 but the booksellers which Mure depicted as enabling women to choose their own reading matter could be patronised by women,18 if at times through the mediation of men. In 1741, George Innes received a letter from a friend intimating that his wife ‘Sayes if you’d get the Dutches of Marlborows Memoirs from [the bookseller] W[illia]m Kincaid & send them her by the Carrier wt the Magasins [the Scots Magazines he sent regularly] She’ll be oblig’d to you, if She liks them, She’ll keep them, if not She’ll return them Carefully Soon.’19 The line between bookshop and library was indistinct at Colin Cunningham, ‘“An Italian house is my lady”: Some Aspects of the Definition of Women’s Role in the Architecture of Robert Adam’, in Gill Perry and Michael Rossington (eds), Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture (Manchester, 1994), p.65; Mellerstain, Gordon, Berwickshire: Home of the Earl and Countess of Haddington (Derby, 1994), p.3. 14 Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House (Harmondsworth, 1980), pp.179–80. 15 NLS, MS16735 f.24, to John Fletcher, 25 January 1767, Edinburgh. He worried that it would be sold and split up. 16 NLS, MS17861 ff.39–42; MS17607 f.4, dictation by Margaret Carnegie, 5 December 1744. 17 For one which was active earlier, see Vivienne S. Dunstan, ‘Glimpses into a Town’s Reading Habits in Enlightenment Scotland: Analysing the Borrowings of Gray Library, Haddington, 1732–1816’, JSHS 26:1+2 (2006). More generally, see David Allan, A Nation of Readers: The Lending Library in Georgian England (London, 2008). 18 Mure, ‘Change of Manners’, p.269. 19 NAS, GD113/3/168/15, from Thomas Fordyce of Ayton , 17 May 1742, Ayton. For Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, see Ophelia Field, The Favourite: Sarah, Duchess of Marlbor13

53

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

this point. That in 1755 the Marchioness of Tweeddale was offered the loan of a book from the Library of the Faculty of Advocates shows that through indirect means even the collection of such a bastion of male professionalism was not necessarily closed to women of rank – though such an offer is far less likely to have been made to her counterparts of less elevated social status.20 Much more commonly, books were shared amongst friends, Beatrix Maxwell sending Marion Lauder ‘a great many thans for the lone’ of the latter’s copy of Gil Blas,21 whilst Alexander Monro felt the need to caution his daughter against the indiscriminate lending of books (and their subsequent damage and loss) that he believed to be the custom of young girls.22 In the 1720s, according to the Earl of Ilay (later third Duke of Argyll), Lady Milton was opening his letters to her husband and circulating any ‘ludicrous papers’ (i.e., humorous pamphlets) they contained around the town before Milton could see them himself.23 Women’s social networks may still have controlled the level of access they enjoyed to print, but such instances demonstrate the opportunities they were able to grasp to engage with an ‘imagined community’ of those who shared texts, ideas and imaginary landscapes.24 The impact of this was not confined to text. When the Duke of Argyll sent the Fletcher girls song-books from London,25 he was perpetuating a shared aural culture in a manner far more precise than repetition by ear or by manuscript copying, whilst when their cousin Margaret Hepburn framed prints of his portrait and of the celebrated Gunning sisters,26 she was indicating her conformity to a standardised national taste in politics and in beauty.27 From London, Lady Charlotte Murray could respond to her young sister-in-law’s ‘questions about the Queen’ by sending a copy of Hogarth’s famous ‘Five Orders of Periwigs’ print which lampooned the wigs worn at the Coronation.28 ough (London, 2002). Kincaid was an Edinburgh bookseller and printer. Richard B. Sher, ‘Kincaid, Alexander (1710–1777)’, ODNB. 20 NLS, MS14422 f.142, John Spottiswoode to Tweeddale, 11 December 1755, Edr. This was a French conchology text to help with her shell grotto. 21 NAS, GD113/5/66A/4, 25 May [pre-1743], Pollock. For Alain-René Lesage’s romance, Gil Blas, see p.65. 22 P. A. G. Monro (ed.), ‘The Professor’s Daughter: An Essay on Female Conduct, by Alexander Monro (Primus)’, Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 26:1, supplement no.2 (January 1996), p.22. 23 NLS, MS16533 f.70, Ilay to Milton, 25 April 1726. 24 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Modern Nationalism (London, 1983, rev. 1991). 25 NLS, MS16595 f.175, Argyll to Milton, 27 October 1744, London. 26 NLS, MS17607 f.39, Account 26 May 1753, Gavin Hamilton [bookseller] to Miss Peggy Hepburn. 27 Stana Nenadic, ‘Print Collecting and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, History 82 (1997), pp.213–14; Stana Nenadic, ‘The Enlightenment in Scotland and the Popular Passion for Portraits’, BJECS 21 (1998), pp.179–81. 28 NRAS234/47/14/166, to Lady George Murray, 7 November 1761, London. She acknowledged this was a ‘small likeness’ and promised to send any better prints that were published.

54

reading and print culture

But Margaret Hepburn’s correspondence suggests that as well as being up-todate with the latest fashionable prints, she enjoyed relatively unrestricted access to a wider range of books than the ‘Poems Plays Novels and Romances’ which Alexander Monro believed girls studied ‘without being desired’.29 In 1755, the poet Edward Young, celebrated author of the highly popular Night Thoughts (1742–6), replied to her request for recommended reading. As, he noted, ‘all the Shades, & all the Heroes & Sages of antiquity … are your old acquaintance & … very good friends’, he advised her to curb the rural loneliness which she was then experiencing with the works of Duncan Forbes, ‘Dr Hill on God & Nature in answer to the Lord Bolingbroke’ and ‘Doctor Newton’s Discourses on the Completion of Prophecy’. Young believed the latter two to be ‘the best productions of the Winter, & excellent in their kind’.30 As well as implying the breadth and depth of her reading, Young’s letter assumed she would have little difficulty in gaining access to the latest religious and philosophical tomes, and suggested he had no notion that these were ‘unsuitable’ reading for a young woman. Young emphasised reading as a means of distraction from the periods of rural isolation and loneliness which punctuated women’s lives. A similar note was struck by the historian William Robertson, who lamented to Margaret in 1759 following the death of her cousin and their mutual friend, Betty Fletcher, ‘It is very unlucky that the inactivity of the female life, does not present you with any business, which is the great amusement & resource of men under distress.’ After admitting that he knew not how to supply this defect, he asked, ‘is there no History which is new to you, & which you would wish to read?’, describing the comfort which reading Davila had been to him during his own greatest sorrow.31 Although acknowledging the role of reading (particularly history) as a panacea for both men and women, he suggested that this was heightened for women, for whom fewer alternative means of distraction were available. Likewise, when Lord George Murray had left his family to join the Jacobite army in 1745, his advice to his wife on how to cope with his distressed teenage daughter was to ‘Bid Amie read History, use exercise, & indeavour a Contented mind’.32 Yet whilst reading could act as a comfort in times of distress or a substitute for company, to consider it solely as a silent, solitary pastime would be anachronistic.

Monro, ‘Essay’, p.9. NLS, MS16693 f.222, 13 January 1755, [postmarked Welwyn]. He recommended John Hill, Thoughts concerning God and Nature: In answer to Lord Bolingbroke’s Philosophy (London, 1755) and Thomas Newton, Dissertations on the Prophesies, which have Remarkably been Fulfilled, and at this Time are Fulfilling in the World, vol.1 (London, 1754). 31 NLS, MS16711 f.231, 12 January 1759, Edinburgh. Enrico Davila wrote an account of the late sixteenth-century French Civil Wars, in which he fought. 32 NRAS234/JacA/III/2/82, Lord George Murray to Lady George, 1 November 1745. 29 30

55

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

Reading as a Social Practice Sometime in the 1750s, Andrew Fletcher jotted down in his notebook, amongst poems about social activities and romantic intrigues, the following ditty on his youngest sister ‘that B.[etty] F[letcher]’ who was ‘always a reading’, her cousin Peggy Hepburn and their friend Jean Campbell of Carrick: The Misses should study domestic affairs, Instead of dull Authors, to give ymselves airs. Her bosom Companions, what strange sort of Elves, How they Cuddle & huddle so close by ym selves. With Pegie & Jeanie, she keeps such a pother, Well! what can they find to say to each other. Refining forsooth on Virtue & merit, They frighten the Lairds, have you patience to bear it. Your prudent, good Huswives, have often declared That Women should ne’er presume to be learned. For what does yr Wisdom & learning avail, If they cannot distinguish a Tub from a pail. Thrice happy the Maids, who imploy all yr Care In sweeping & cleaning & nice bills of fare. But few of our Misses such Counsel will take, Well, as they do brew, ev’n so let ym bake.33

This poem highlights a number of issues surrounding the unchaperoned venturings of young, unmarried women into the unknown, public world of text: the fear that it would not only distract young women from the domestic education needed to run a household, but would discourage potential husbands; a condescending belief that women were reading primarily for fashion as opposed to the seriousness of male learning; and a patronising dismissal of literaryinfluenced female-only conversation. Whilst its tone is affectionate and good natured, to be taken as a light-hearted joke as opposed to serious censure, it exemplifies the ambivalence of the way in which women often became participants in the world of letters less through a recognition of their intellectual abilities than through a culture which on the whole humoured rather than condemned such activity. The poem suggests a marked difference in attitudes towards male and female reading habits, male reading being associated with the silent and solitary atmosphere of the study, whilst female reading is presented as a social activity, NLS, MS17895 pp.77–8. Undated, probably post-1750. Jean Campbell of Carrick was the daughter of Captain John Campbell of Carrick, a brother of the fourth Duke of Argyll, and his wife Jean, who found herself at the centre of a high-profile court case when after the Captain’s death it transpired he had also been secretly married to the woman assumed to be his mistress. See Leah Leneman, ‘The Scottish Case That Led to Hardwicke’s Marriage Act’, Law and History Review 17:1 (1999). 33

56

reading and print culture

carried out in a group, albeit one which is small, exclusive and intimate.34 But whilst a shared interest in reading and discussing texts may have helped to define this all-female friendship group, the exclusivity of the ‘huddle’ is key to this gendered interpretation of reading. Whilst the solitary male reader could be expected to leave his study and venture into the social realm to discuss his ideas as part of a larger reading public, the readership community presented here extends no further than this close circle of intimates, and, in an age which put such an emphasis on the social, this rendered it less valid. Fletcher conflates this by his suggestion of the inappropriateness of their ‘wisdom and learning’. Yet the seriousness of some of Peggy Hepburn’s reading has already been mentioned, and, as shall be seen, these women did discuss the intellectually demanding works which they read, not just outside their closed ‘huddle’, but with some of the leading thinkers of their day in Scotland and beyond. Andrew Fletcher presented reading as incompatible with the sorts of ‘useful’ things that girls should be doing in preparation for their future role as wives. Indeed, only recently have historians begun to question the assumption that reading took elite women away from their domestic duties and instead to pay more attention to the voices of those like Jackie Clerk, daughter of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, who remarked during a visit to a relative’s country house in 1751 that ‘the Seams and Reading goes on by turns’.35 As Naomi Tadmor has shown, reading was suited to a female lifestyle, not because women had nothing else to do, but rather because it was a pastime and a form of intellectual improvement which could be integrated into the busiest of lifestyles, more often social than solitary.36 Unlike the huddle of the Fletcher girls, reading aloud to the family circle was regarded as morally improving for the familial, therefore public, good, encouraging ‘improving’ interaction between text, reader and listeners. Alexander Monro advised proficiency in the practice so his daughter could ‘entertain her Companions’ and later ‘amuse and instruct her Husband’,37 whilst to have a young relative read aloud would also have been a boon for those who, like Lady George Murray, developed problems with their eyesight in later life.38 When the young Jean Innes was boarding with the Reverend Hary Spens in 1757, Spens reported to her father that Jean had read to his family from the ‘Book of Job’, ‘& entertained us highly w. her Chartier, often accused of over-emphasising the individuality and introspectiveness of the silent reader, also acknowledged reading’s frequent depiction as a group activity in eighteenth-century paintings. ‘Practical Impact of Writing’, p.151. 35 NAS, GD18/5474/2, to John Clerk of Penicuik, 12 March 1751. 36 Naomi Tadmor, ‘“In the even my wife read to me”: Women, Reading and Household Life in the Eighteenth Century’, in James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (eds), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge, 1996), pp.162–70. See also Patricia Howell Michaelson, ‘Women in the Reading Circle’, ECL 13:3 (1989). 37 Monro, ‘Essay’, p.9. 38 NRAS234/49/2/346, Lady George Murray to son, 28 November 1763, Arnhall. She asked him to send her a magnifying glass for reading with, ‘for I now find that when I read any time with the Spectacles am sure of a headeack day after’. 34

57

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

remarks’ on a Sunday evening;39 whether prompted or voluntarily, the child was engaging with and responding to the text. As with the Fletcher girls, it was the sharing of not just the text itself but of its interpretation and discussion which formed the social bonds of the reading community. Unlike most other genres, religious reading was essentially private, shared with children and possibly intimates, but rarely discussed in general conversation.40 Janet Clerk, wife of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, often recorded in her spiritual diary her reactions to the religious texts she had read,41 yet discussion of such texts in correspondence is rare.42 When women put pen to paper to express their own thoughts, this sharing of reading matter could transcend the boundaries of physical space. During a period of separation, Betty Fletcher wrote to Margaret Hepburn, ‘in obedience to you, my Dear, I must tell you I am all most done reading Warburton’s critic on Pope, for which, I assure you, I thank heaven’. In teasing her cousin, whom she knew to have read and presumably recommended the work, with her opinions on the book and its author, she used their mutual experience of the text and its contexts to maintain the intimacy of their relationship.43 Similarly, a letter from Agnes Elliot in Edinburgh, excusing her failure to write the previous post by citing her absorption in the latest volumes of Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, prompted her husband Gilbert to send for the fifth volume of the novel, which he read ‘right thro’ in a morning at home in London. Despite the distance separating them, they could share not just the text and their taste in polite literature, but the sense of being absorbed together in a common activity.44 Polite reading practices encouraged the sharing of text; merely reading a text did not necessarily imply comprehension or intellectual gain. Hester Chapone, writing on the reading of history in 1773, emphasised that to be committed to memory it should be read not once but twice, and, if possible, shared with a friend.45 Another common NAS, GD113/3/485/7, to George Innes, 10 May 1757. This situation of domestic reading aloud after the day’s work was done represented the ideal engagement of the female reader with text. Katherine Binhammer, ‘The Persistence of Reading: Governing Female Novel Reading in Memoirs of Emma Courtney and Memoirs of Modern Philosophers’, ECL 27:2 (2003), p.16. 40 For instance, Hannah More only discussed her religious reading with her children. John Brewer, ‘Reconstructing the reader: prescriptions, texts and strategies in Anna Larpent’s reading’ in Raven et al. (eds), Practice and Representation of Reading, p.239. 41 NAS, GD18/2098. 42 On one occasion, she recorded that, ‘On the 21st was kept from church the Duke and Dutches Queensberie being here but [they] made up my staying at home by reading most devotely one hour and three quarters on bishop Leightons comentarie by which I was edified.’ NAS, GD18/2098/470, 23 July 1754, Penicuik. For the Duchess of Queensberry (Janet’s first cousin), see Rosalind K. Marshall, ‘Douglas, Catherine , duchess of Queensberry and Dover (1701–1777)’, OBNB. 43 NLS, MS16746 f.135, [1751]. 44 NLS, MS16006 f.36, 5 January 1754, London. 45 Hester Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773; Edinburgh edn, 1821), pp.123–4, 128. 39

58

reading and print culture

technique was note-taking, an activity pursued at length by Betty Fletcher’s aunt Martha Fletcher, who left dozens of pages of extracts and notes.46 She collected the salutary characters of public figures from whom she could hope to learn, took down biblical quotes towards her spiritual development, and copied out lengthy passages from histories.47 The longer extracts may have been taken down from borrowed works to keep as her own copy, or, alternatively, she may have been involved in the education of one or more of her nieces, and copied or took digests of works to help them learn.48 But such uses seem unlikely, as there remain some very obvious errors which remain uncorrected, suggesting Martha never looked back at her writings.49 Note-taking was a common practice amongst men (including Martha’s father) as well as women; probably, it was simply part of the reading and learning process, helping her to remember and feel involved in her reading. Most importantly, Martha’s notes suggest a woman whose reading was not passive, but a process in which she was actively involved, and which would appear to have been targeted towards a conscious construction of self. As David Allan has recently argued, ‘Of all the functions it performed, the commonplace book may have been most important for its Georgian exponents as a tool in the construction of the polite and cultivated individual.’50 Martha may have spent much of her life alone with her mother, managing a rural estate, but her claim to a polite identity came at least partly through her appropriation of the ideas and values which she copied with her pen.

Most of Martha’s notes are undated and could have been made at any time between her early years and her death in the 1770s. However, publication dates suggest most of her extant copyings were made in the 1740s and ’50s. The collection contains a report on the death and funeral of the third Duke of Argyll (published in the Edinburgh Evening Courant and Scots Magazine in May 1761), written by her brother Lord Milton. NLS, MS17774 f.270. For the identification of authorship, see Alexander Murdoch, The People Above: Politics and Administration in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1980), pp.101–2. In her transcriptions of works concerning the religious wars of the seventeenth century, the date 1642 is erroneously written on a number of occasions as 1742, pointing perhaps towards the year when this was copied, e.g. MS17802 ff.5–6, 75–6 (twice on each page). For other examples of readers’ responses, see D. R. Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000), ch.3 (mostly slightly earlier); Stephen Colclough, ‘Recovering the Reader: Commonplace Books and Diaries as Sources of Reading Experience’, Publishing History 44 (1998) (largely nineteenth-century). For eighteenth-century commonplace books, see David Allan, Making British Culture: English Readers and the Scottish Enlightenment, 1740–1830 (London, 2008), ch.7; ch.8 for copying. 47 NLS, MS17774 ff.256–71, ‘characters of various persons’; MS17778, ff.123–43 ‘commonplaces and extracts from books’; MS17802 ff.1–167 ‘historical notes’ (poss. also ff.170–3). 48 Anna Larpent (b.1758) did this when educating her children and stepchildren. Brewer, ‘Reconstructing the Reader’, pp.230, 240. 49 See n.46. 50 Allan, Making British Culture, pp.142–3. 46

59

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

Genre, Improvement and the Polite Female Reader These reading practices and the anxieties they provoked beg the question of the relationship between genre and the polite female reader. This section considers the role of genre in the construction of polite femininity at a time of expansion in the variety of printed material readily available to elite women. One of the key developments of the supposed ‘reading revolution’ was a broadening of women’s experience of print away from an early modern focus on religious literature towards a broader range of genres. Yet despite the claims of Elizabeth Mure quoted at the beginning of this chapter, this must be tempered.51 The books bought in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries by Anne, Duchess of Hamilton may have been mainly religious in subject,52 as were those owned by the grandmothers of both Lord Milton53 and James Boswell, the latter of whom had ‘many books of Divinity’ in English, French and Dutch.54 But spiritual beliefs were not located in a vacuum, and this reading should not be seen simply as devotional. In an era in which faith was highly politicised, many of these texts would have been read as political.55 Moreover, women may have had increased options to add new genres to their reading over the course of the eighteenth century, but this does not mean that they simply replaced these more ‘serious’ texts with frivolous ephemera. Evident in the biblical extracts taken down by Martha Fletcher or the spiritual diaries of Janet Clerk, wife of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, second baronet,56 is the fact that women’s devotional practices continued to demand interaction with text, and Mark Towsey found that religious and devotional texts predominated in Elizabeth Rose’s reading accounts which date from the 1770s to early 1800s.57 As the private nature of these sources (diaries and notesElizabeth Mure believed ‘long Romances’ and ‘books of devotion’ constituted the mainstay of women’s reading by the early eighteenth century, ‘Change of Manners’, p.263. For a discussion of the various genres of text read by women in early modern England, see Edith Snook, Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England (Aldershot, 2005), esp. Introduction. 52 Rosalind K. Marshall, The Days of Duchess Anne: Life in the Household of the Duchess of Hamilton 1656–1716 (London, 1973; reissued East Linton, 2000), p.118. See also Rosalind K. Marshall, Virgins and Viragos: A History of Women in Scotland from 1080 to 1980 (London, 1983), pp.137–8. 53 NLS, MS17861 ff.39–42, Lady Katherine Bruce, ‘inventer of my Bookes’. 54 My Very Dearest Sweet Heart, or, Boswell Before Boswell. Letters of the Lady Elizabeth Boswell (1704 to 1711, and 1733), Life before the Biographer, ed. David R. Boswell (Bath, 2003), pp.68–70. 55 I would like to thank Dr Alasdair Raffe, University of Northumbria, for his comments on this subject. 56 NLS, MS17778 ff.133–4, 137; NAS, GD18/2098, Religious Diaries of Janet Clerk of Penicuik, 1710–1759. 57 Mark R. M. Towsey, ‘“Observe her Heedfully:” Elizabeth Rose on Women Writers’, Women Writers 18.1 (2011). I am grateful to the author for sharing this with me pre-publica51

60

reading and print culture

to-self) suggests, this type of reading was not necessarily the sort that would be discussed with acquaintances in chatty letters. Moreover, whilst devotional reading may have aided the improvement of the soul, the factionalism and ‘enthusiasm’ that intensive reading of devotional texts implied was the very opposite of ‘improving’ in the social sense that the polite understood it. For the improvement in manners and the maintenance of a degree of awareness about the world around them that were the markers of politeness, women had to look elsewhere. Conduct and advice literature, genres that were far from new,58 gained a new lease of life in the eighteenth century, although beyond occasional references like Amelie Murray’s recommendation that her mother follow Fénelon’s advice in showing ‘great gentleness & patience’ with her wayward younger sister,59 there is scant evidence that the women with whom we are concerned here engaged with or even remarked on such texts. But this does not necessarily mean that such texts were not owned or read,60 and it certainly does not mean that women did not look to books for advice on many aspects of their lives. Paramount amongst secular forms of ‘improving’ literature was the ‘moral weekly’. Addison and Steele’s Spectator (1711–12, 1714) was the bible of politeness, reissued in multiple editions (‘several score’ in Edinburgh and ‘at least a dozen’ in Glasgow) throughout the century.61 The Spectator asserted an influence on the shaping of polite priorities unrivalled for decades after its brief period of original publication.62 Read avidly by both men and women, and consistently recommended to children including the eightyear-old Jean Innes in the 1750s,63 the moral, rather than political content of such periodicals and their role in creating a sense of a new, urban code of manners gave them a particular relevance to women. In a quite different way, it was the very immediacy of publications like The Gentleman’s Magazine or The Scots Magazine, or newspapers like The Caledonian Mercury or Edinburgh Evening Courant that gave these periodicals the central place they enjoyed in elite priorities. Taking the waters at Harrogate in 1763, Lady Minto, the elderly mother of Sir Gilbert Elliot, third baronet, was horrified to find herself isolated from the world of newspapers: ‘one word of News or Polliticks is never spok in this House & excep Mr Meller[the booktion. The evangelicalism of the later decades of the century witnessed a renaissance in the more emotional types of devotional text in particular. 58 E.g., Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998). 59 NRAS234/JacC/II/4/21, 25 May [1758], Invercauld. She recommended a translation of Fénelon’s Traité de l’Éducation des Filles (1687), which she believed her mother had at Arnhall. 60 For one woman who did take notes from them see Towsey, ‘“Observe her Heedfully”’. 61 David Allan, Scotland in the Eighteenth Century: Union and Enlightenment (Harlow, 2002), p.131. 62 For its popularity at mid-century, see Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (Harmondsworth, 2000), pp.196–7. 63 NAS, GD113/3/475/1, Hary Spens to George Innes, 13 December 1756, Wemyss.

61

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

seller, Andrew Millar]s Newspaper ther is not ane other amongst one hundred folks the Gentellmen in our Country would have ten tims more news,’ she despaired. The solution to this, she decided, was to ‘keep mighty will’ with Millar, with the result that he showed her ‘all the papers’.64 From 1712 to 1757, England’s newspaper circulation increased eight-fold,65 and the polite emphasis on conversation meant that women as well as men were expected to be well informed about the world of current affairs.66 This degree of lack of information was hardly what Lady Minto seems to have anticipated from the polite resort of Harrogate, and its result, she hinted, was a detrimental effect on the quality of conversation available there. Not surprisingly, given her family’s degree of political engagement, her interest seems to have been in keeping up-to-date with news and politics, but periodicals served to relay and reinforce the interests and agendas of polite society much more generally. By the time she was writing, periodicals combined international and domestic news, advertisements, literary reviews, poetry and other writing. They advertised rewards for lost lap-dogs, and informed their readers of forthcoming charity balls and where to buy freshly imported lemons. In doing so, they helped to create a sense of belonging to a community at both local and national levels. The popularity of newspapers has been imputed to their adaptability to different reading practices, ‘either alone or in company, and from start to finish or in part’, alongside their ‘sense of immediacy and reader interaction’.67 On the most basic level, they provided entertainment for otherwise isolated women; in 1735, Martha Fletcher asked her brother to send the English papers to ‘devert’ their ageing mother, whilst thirty years later Lady George Murray was asking her son to forward any spare papers from London as she had seen none since arriving at her country house not far from Stirling.68 For such women, ageing and remote from the town, the ability to read about young acquaintances as ‘Queen of the Ball’ or recently engaged to be married helped to reaffirm their sense of connection with the world of polite urban society to which newspapers belonged, and ensure their separation from this remained a mere practicality. Access to periodicals tended to be assumed, and correspondents frequently reported ‘No news other than in the papers’,69 unconsciously underlining the indivisibility of personal and public news amongst the polite. NLS, MS11009 f.175, to Lord Minto; f.176 as above, [n.d.]. Alexander Carlyle was at Harrogate at the same time (which he described as ‘critical’ ) and recorded the popularity which Millar’s two papers sent by each post conferred upon him, The Autobiography of Dr. Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk, 1722–1805, ed. John Hill Burton, with a new Introduction by Richard B. Sher (Bristol, 1990; reprint of 1910 edn), p.456. 65 Fischer, History of Reading, p.258. 66 Allan, Nation of Readers, p.12. 67 Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics, and English Society, 1695–1855 (Harlow, 2000), p.64. 68 NRAS234/49/2/346, 28 November 1763, Arnhall. 69 E.g., NLS, MS16534 f.89, Andrew Fletcher to Mally Fletcher, 16 January 1762, London: ‘no sort of news here, but what you would have in the Chronicle’. 64

62

reading and print culture

Frequently, it was first through the press that women learned about events taking place within their own extended families, although they were well aware of the potential of the newspapers to be inaccurate,70 and it is unlikely that it was only the Jacobite Miss Craig who ‘laugh[ed] at the London Gazette [the official government news publication] as all lias’[sic].71 Newspapers helped to confirm individuals’ sense of their – and their family’s – place in British polite society. Belonging, even distantly, to families who did not just read but featured in the periodical press was one of the most important ways in which women could assert their inclusion on what Kathleen Wilson has termed ‘the right side of the vast social and cultural chasms between those who profited from the processes of imperial expansion and those who did not’.72 This was particularly evident in wartime, when it was to the newspapers, particularly the Gazette, that the women of families like the Fletchers, Murrays, Clerks and Elliots looked for news of naval and military developments and simultaneously of the role of their sons or brothers therein.73 Periodical print culture, Benedict Anderson argued, was a defining influence on the development of national identity, creating what he termed an ‘imagined community’ of those who read the same news, in the same papers, at roughly the same time.74 But for those who could read about the actions of members of their own family as part of issues of national importance – whether political, military or social – a sense of belonging to a British elite may have grown alongside their sense of family interest as a double helix of identity. The literary genre most closely associated with the eighteenth-century female reader has been the novel. The notion of the young female reader as a ‘consumer’ of novels was a commonplace of satire,75 and novels were blamed for their capacity to ‘turn the Head and corrupt the Heart’ of young women.76 When the niece of a prominent Scottish lawyer died in 1768 leaving E.g. NLS, MS16514 f.133, Mary Hepburn to Milton, 18 May 1748: ‘If we may belive the newes papers your to have an ease of this troble, for the future.’ 71 NLS, MS293, ‘An Impartial and Genuine List of the Ladys on the Whig or Jacobite Partie’, f.3. For the Gazette, see Bob Harris, Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2002), p.109. Digests were reproduced in the Edinburgh papers. 72 Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York, 2003), p.33. 73 E.g., after the reduction of Martinique, Andrew Fletcher sent his father the ‘Gazette Extraordinary’ mentioning the actions of his brother Henry, NLS, MS16523 f.115, 23 March 1762, London. Henry assumed his sister Margaret would have read the published account of the battle prior to the arrival of his letter, MS16523 f.172, 28 February 1762, Martinique, Camp at St Piere. The army was ‘the first major British institution to be colonized by ambitious Scots’: Colin Kidd, ‘Integration: Patriotism and Nationalism’, in H.T. Dickinson (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2002), pp.371–2. 74 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p.35. 75 E.g., Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, or, The Adventures of Arabella (London, 1752). 76 Monro, ‘Essay’, p.16. According to the OED, novels were distinguished from romances in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by being shorter and less detached from reality, 70

63

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

two teenage children, he advised his nephew, who had taken them into his household, ‘Let your wife discourage Self Conceit & Reading Romances in the Girle Least they Leave Such Improper Impressions as I have Seen happen.’77 However, references to novel-reading in the sources on which this book is based are relatively scarce, reflecting research on women readers in England which has suggested the association of women with the novel indicates contemporary fears about the effects of imaginative writing on women’s minds (and thus wider social stability), rather than representing actual practice.78 Possibly a manifestation of earlier worries about readers being distracted from spiritual concerns,79 fears surrounding the novel may have been a product of the seriousness with which reading had hitherto been regarded. Novels were believed to encourage girls in developing unrealistic expectations (or ‘improper impressions’, as the concerned uncle quoted above put it) of the degree of romance they might expect to experience in their own lives. As one eighteenth-century Scotswoman put it, ‘I’m clear for burning [Samuel Richardson’s novel] Sir Charles Grandison by the hands of the hangman. the girls are all set agog seeking an ideal man, and will have none of God’s corrupted creatures.’80 Novels could be condemned on more specific grounds. In 1751 Jackie Clerk wrote sniffily to her father, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, of Tobias Smollett’s latest novel: ‘We have Peregrine Pickle here. but I Don’t think either Lady Glencairn [her relative with whom she was then staying] or me will be at the trouble of reading it.’81 Writing to her father, Jackie was aware (most likely through reading reviews in magazines) that this particular novel was not best suited to the polite identity she sought to portray in her letters to her father around this time. She may have wished to impress her father by presenting herself as serious rather than frivolous in her literary tastes, criticism of romances

although Monro seems to have used the terms indiscriminately. This culturally enduring division has been dated to the early seventeenth century, when elite authors, concerned about the proliferation of cheaper, more easily accessible texts, sought to denigrate these works in their own writings. Lori H. Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York, 2002), p.78. 77 NLS, MS1136, John Mackenzie to Robertson of Faskally, 6 January 1768. 78 Jan Fergus, ‘Women Readers: A Case Study’, in Jones (ed.), Women and Literature, examined the papers of two Midlands booksellers, concluding that women were neither more likely to borrow or buy novels than men, nor more likely to read novels than other forms of fiction. 79 James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge, 2001), p.111. 80 Alison Cockburn to Mr Chalmers, Ravelston [?1767], in Letters and Memoir of her Own Life, by Mrs Alison Rutherford or Cockburn, with notes by T. Craig-Brown (Edinburgh, 1900), p.62. For the novel’s popularity, and the character of Sir Charles, see Jocelyn Harris, Introduction to Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison, edited with an Introduction by Jocelyn Harris (London, 1972; first published 1753). 81 NAS, GD18/5474/5, 4 April 1751, Finlaystone. James Smollett of Bonhill, the author’s cousin, married Jackie’s sister Jean in 1740, Memoirs of the Life of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, 1676–1755, ed. John M. Gray, SHS series 1, 13 (Edinburgh 1892), p.155.

64

reading and print culture

implying connoisseurship and superiority of understanding.82 But more specifically, Smollett’s latest romp made few concessions to the propriety of a young, unmarried woman, particularly in its inclusion of the scandalous ‘Memoirs of a Lady of Quality’.83 As her brother-in-law James Smollett (the author’s cousin) pointed out to Jackie’s father the very same day, ‘We have been very much Diverted with my Cousins Book of which he sent me a present … at the same time I wish my friend had spared the Ladys some blushes for it is really hard upon them to read some parts of his book.’84 Jackie Clerk’s dismissal of Peregrine Pickle was distinct to that particular novel (indeed, although she did not specify as such, quite probably to its less fictional sections) and to the image which she wished to present to her father. Historians of reading continue to debate the degree to which novels were seriously censured over the course of the century, but these very specific responses to this particular work support the arguments of William B. Warner, who proposed the mideighteenth century as a watershed in the British debate on the novel. Prior to the works of Richardson and Fielding, he suggested, ‘those who attacked novels attacked all novels’ on the sort of theological basis outlined above. Thereafter, however, the debate moved away from the acceptability of novels as a genre towards the suitability of different kinds of novels.85 Not all fiction was tarred with the same brush. From an early age, children were encouraged to read works of fiction or, as Alexander Monro put it, ‘entertaining Books that instill reasonable good Principles’86 as part of their education. Hary Spens, for instance, believed that he ‘must not omit Cyrus Travels, Telemaque, Gil Blas, & the incomparable D. Quixote’ (all of which were also recommended for children by Alexander Monro) from the education of his young pupil Jean Innes.87 Don Quixote (‘a pretty ridicule on Romances’)88 and Gil Blas belonged to the popular picaresque genre, carrying a moral on an entertaining story. Fénelon’s Telemachus (like Cyrus Travels, a ‘mirror for princes’ work) was extremely popular.89 Recommending it for Jean, Hary Spens believed ‘it woud be instructive & Snook, Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England, p.15. James L. Clifford, Introduction to Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (Oxford, 1983; first published 1751), esp. pp xv–xviii. 84 NAS, GD18/4526/1, 4 April 1751, Bonhill. 85 William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1998), p.8. For the conventional view that novelreading was viewed with disapproval throughout the century, see John Tinnon Taylor, Early Opposition to the English Novel: The Popular Reaction from 1760–1830 (New York, 1943). 86 Monro, ‘Essay’, p.130. 87 NAS, GD113/3/475/1, to George Innes, 13 December 1756, Wemyss; Monro, ‘Essay’, pp.16–17. The young Agnes Murray Kynynmound bought a copy of Les Aventures de Gil Blas. NLS, MS12950 f.169, Accounts of Sir David Dalrymple. 88 Monro, ‘Essay’, p.17. 89 François de Fénelon, Telemachus, Son of Ulysses, edited and translated by Patrick Riley (Cambridge, 1994; composed 1693–4). Significantly, this most recent edition is part of the political theory series ‘Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought’. 82 83

65

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

amuseing reading for her, & in a profitable & useful way acquaint her with the most material parts of ancient History, of Mythology & the Heathen Gods a Kind of Knowlege necessary to all who get polite Education’.90 Its popularity is supported by Spens’s belief that Jean’s father need not send a copy from Edinburgh as it should be available in Fife. Whilst these were self-consciously ‘improving’ works, Monro also recommended to his young daughter Samuel Richardson’s then recently published and highly fashionable Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), the story of a servant girl who by the ‘virtue’ of fending off her employer’s repeated rape attempts is ‘rewarded’ by marriage to him.91 Monro was apparently amongst those who regarded the novel (published to immediate controversy if not for the reasons that would disturb later readers) as the lesson its subtitle proposed.92 As with other genres of writing, girls were taught to think about their reading of novels and what they could learn from them,93 the ‘right kind’ of novels acting as instruments for the acquisition, in an ‘accessible’ way, of the core values of polite education. Reading such novels and doing so in moderation did no damage to women’s polite status. Indeed, novels like Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (so avidly read by Agnes Elliot and her husband)94 or Rousseau’s Nouvelle Heloïse (recommended to Lady Charlotte Murray and her husband ‘for an amusement’)95 could act as conduits of polite ideas. Novels could also provide a window on, or a means of access to, a particular culture. Margaret Calderwood recognised the potential cultural specificity of novels, informing her daughter from the Low Countries that ‘All Richison’s books are translated, and much admired abroad; but for Feilding’s, the forreigners have no notion of them, and do not understand them, as the manners are so intirely English.’96 Whilst some novels (like those of Samuel Richardson) transcended national boundaries, other, more idiosyncratic novels (like those of Henry Fielding) could act as identifiers of social and cultural belonging – in this instance, to those who understood the manners and morals of a polite British elite. Margaret may 90 NAS, GD113/3/485/7, to George Innes, 10 May 1757. Telemachus and Aesop’s Fables were also recommended in James Barclay, A Treatise on Education: Or, An Easy Method of Acquiring Language, and Introducing Children to the Knowledge of History, Geography, Mythology, Antiquities, &c (Edinburgh, 1743), p.223. 91 Monro, ‘Essay’, pp.16–17. 92 Early critics were concerned with the novel’s apparent levelling of the social hierarchy, and with the reduction of ‘virtue’ to equate to mere sexual chastity. Thomas Keymer, Introduction to Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, edited by Douglas Brooks-Davies and Martin C. Battestin (Oxford, 1999). See also Margaret A. Doody, Introduction to Samuel Richardson, Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded, edited by Peter Sabor (London, 1985). 93 For an Irish example, see Toby Barnard, ‘Reading in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Public and Private Pleasures’, in Cunningham and Kennedy (eds), Experience of Reading, pp.63–4. 94 NLS, MS11006 f.36, Gilbert to Agnes Elliot, 5 January 1754, London. 95 NRAS234/49/1/319, Sir Patrick Murray to Captain Murray [fourth Duke], 10 November 1762, Ochtertyre. 96 Margaret Steuart Calderwood, ‘A Journey in England, Holland, and the Low Countries’ (1756), in Coltness Collections, 1608–1840, Maitland Club (Edinburgh, 1842), p.205.

66

reading and print culture

have been rampantly Anglophobic at times,97 but she was acknowledging that, by the 1750s, the Scottish novel-reading public shared with their English counterparts a common cultural language which enabled them to understand what she considered to be idiosyncratically English novels in a way that other Europeans did not. The Study of History: ‘An occupation … best suited … to their sex’ Turning up her nose at Peregrine Pickle, Jackie Clerk continued that ‘any time for reading I have I wou’d incline it to be disposed on Such Books as may improve my Mind’. These she considered to be ‘History &c &c’.98 In the sources on which this book is based history dominates women’s reading. In his essay On the Study of History David Hume wrote that: There is nothing which I would recommend more earnestly to my female readers than the study of history, as an occupation, of all others, the best suited both to their sex and education, much more instructive than their ordinary books of amusement, and more entertaining than those serious compositions, which are usually to be found in their closets.99

The importance of women to Hume’s conception of contemporary historical readership is striking, as is his belief (if not untouched by irony) in the suitability of history to the female life. Traditionally history had been regarded as an exemplar from which to train men for public life, but from the mid-seventeenth century historical authors had become aware of the importance of a female readership.100 The new focus on manners and character which emerged in historical writing in the mid-eighteenth century meant history became increasingly perceived as a genre particularly suited to women readers.101 In 1754, Hume wrote to his friend William Mure of Caldwell soliciting opinions Ibid., esp. pp.105–21. NAS, GD18/5474/5, to John Clerk of Penicuik, 4 April 1751, Finlaystone. She specified Pliny’s Letters and Letters on Several Subjects by the late Sir Thomas Fitzosborne (London, 1748). Fitzosborne was the fictional creation of William Melmoth, who also published the translations of Pliny’s letters; see Penelope Wilson, ‘Melmoth, William, the younger (bap. 1710, d. 1799)’, ODNB. 99 David Hume, ‘Of the Study of History’, in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1995; first published 1741–77), p.563. 100 D. R. Woolf, ‘A Feminine Past? Gender, Genre and Historical Knowledge in England, 1500–1800’, AHR 102:3 (1997), esp. pp.657–8. 101 Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740– 1820 (Princeton, 2000), esp. ch.4; Mark Salber Phillips, ‘“If Mrs Mure be not sorry for poor King Charles”: History, the Novel, and the Sentimental Reader’, HWJ 43 (1997); Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge, 1997); Karen O’Brien, ‘The History Market in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Isobel Rivers (ed.), Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays (London and New York, 2001), p.109. 97

98

67

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

on his History of England. ‘The first Quality of an Historian is to be true and impartial; the next to be interesting,’ he wrote. ‘If you do not say, that I have done both Parties Justice, & if Mrs Mure be not sorry for poor King Charles, I shall burn all my Papers, & return to Philosophy.’102 Caldwell and his wife Katherine were longstanding and close friends of Hume, Katherine’s drawing room in Abbeyhill supposedly his ‘favourite evening haunt’ in Edinburgh.103 Hume hoped to use both his friends to test his history and the responses it was designed to provoke in men and women respectively. By ‘interesting’, Hume meant something along the lines of ‘empathetic’; he hoped to play on the sympathies which women’s supposedly more emotional temperaments were best suited to feeling. Hume’s comment is echoed by William Robertson, writing to Gilbert Elliot of Minto. Having informed Elliot that his publisher would be sending him a copy of his History of Scotland (1759), he sent his compliments to Elliot’s wife Agnes, adding that ‘though she will not approve of Mary’s conduct, I hope she will be touched with her misfortunes’.104 Both Hume and Robertson expected their female friends to read their histories in a primarily, if not exclusively, emotional way. Whilst both women and men were encouraged to read history for polite conversation,105 women were expected neither to write history themselves nor to put their reading into practice in public life.106 Having received no formal training, they had to read history and the classics in a specifically gendered way.107 The educationalist James Barclay believed history heightened ‘every tender passion’ and taught ‘a moving softness’, virtues to be directed towards women’s domestic and emotional roles. ‘Andromache’, he wrote, ‘increases the fondness of the kindest wife, wanton luxury is taught to blush at the examples of Lucretia and Octavia.’108 Whilst Jackie Clerk reported with assiduity to her father on her reading of Pliny’s letters, she did not attempt to respond to them as her classically trained brothers might have done, but rather related her reading to the domestic and familiar, describing how an episode in which Pliny wrote and fished at the same time reminder her of her father.109 Jackie’s reading of Pliny to emphasise the personal rather than the political was not just a gender issue, but was also typical of the change in the priorities of the The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y .T. Greig, vol.1, (Oxford, 1932), p.210. Mure (ed.), Family Papers preserved at Caldwell, vol.1, p.37. 104 NLS, MS11008 ff.80–81, 4 January 1759, Edinburgh. 105 Indeed, recent scholarship has argued this was the main use to which historical reading was put. Daniel Woolf, ‘Speaking of History: Conversations about the Past in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century England’, in Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf (eds), The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain, 1500–1850 (Manchester, 2002), p.133. 106 Woolf, ‘A Feminine Past?’, p.656. John Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Volume 2: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge, 1999), pp.181–2. 107 Pam Perkins, ‘“Too Classical for a Female Pen”? Late Eighteenth-Century Women Reading and Writing Classical History’, Clio 33:3 (spring 2004), p.242. 108 Barclay, Treatise on Education, p.237. 109 NAS, GD18/5474/5, to John Clerk of Penicuik, 4 April 1751, Finlaystone. 102 103

68

reading and print culture

historical readership away from constitutional history, which tended to ignore the relationship of the personality of the individual to their actions, towards works which put a greater emphasis on the role of character. As well as in the quotations from Hume and Robertson above, this interest is evident in Martha Fletcher’s copyings, which include short passages on the characters of historical figures from the ancients to the heroes of her own age like the Duke of Marlborough and Frederick the Great, who emerges ever so slightly the victor in a ‘Parallel twixt Julius Caesar and the King of Prussia’.110 Yet, implicit in many of these character sketches, and in her selections from histories like the more than thirty pages quarto she copied on the characters of early seventeenthcentury British courtiers,111 was an interest in the arts of government which transcended the male-imposed boundaries of what women were meant to take from their reading of history. If any one concern dominated Martha Fletcher’s note-taking, it was the history of Protestantism, be it in the twenty pages of notes she took ‘Out of John Calvin’112 or the many pages she copied on the seventeenth-century wars of religion in Britain and France.113 Many of the works she read fall very much into the category of the ‘real solemn history … the quarrels of popes and kings’ that Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland found so dull.114 Of the three factors Natalie Zemon Davis identified as contributing to early modern women’s desire to write history, she prioritised ‘a sense of connection, through some activity or deep concern of her own, with the areas of public life then considered suitable for historical writing – namely, the political and the religious’.115 The reasons why a woman like Martha, closely connected to the world of politics through her brother Lord Milton, chose to read this sort of material (and to do so with such close attention) may not have been so far removed from those which prompted men to seek in histories instruction in the arts of government. The memoirist Ramsay of Ochtertyre recounted an anecdote in which one lady claimed to another that, had she been a man during the 1689 revolution, she would have supported it. In response to the Vestrius Spurinna, from ‘3 Book Pliny’s Epistle 1’, NLS, MS17802 f.103; Duke of Marlborough MS17774 ff.256–7, ‘Parallel twixt Julius Caesar and the King of Prussia’, MS17774 f.267. 111 NLS, MS17802 ff.30–45. 112 NLS, MS17778 ff.123–32. 113 NLS, MS17802 ff.24–8, 46–80 (excl. 60–70), notes from Davila’s History of the Civill Wars of France, and a translation of Voltaire’s ‘History of France Age of Louis XIV’. 114 From Northanger Abbey, quoted in Jane Rendall, ‘Clio, Mars and Minerva: The Scottish Enlightenment and the Writing of Women’s History’, in T. M. Devine and J. R. Young (eds), Eighteenth Century Scotland: New Perspectives (East Linton, 1999), p.134. As well as the more modern history cited here, Martha copied at least 50 pages from the preface to An Universal History, from the Earliest Account of Time to the Present: Compiled from Original Authors and Illustrated with Maps, Cuts, Notes, Chronological and Other Tables, vol.1 (London, 1736). 115 Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Gender and Genre: Women as historical writers, 1400–1820’, in Patricia H. Labalme (ed.), Beyond their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past (New York and London, 1980), p.155. 110

69

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

latter’s reply that this marked a change of opinion, the former retorted that ‘in these days I had not read history’.116 Apocryphal or not, Ramsay’s anecdote demonstrates the contemporary belief in the connection between what women read and the formulation of their opinions. Women did not read history in a political vacuum, but used their reading to reaffirm or to challenge their own beliefs. Although encouraged to seek the personal or emotional in their reading, women’s responses to historical reading were not limited to those realms. Reading history was as much about becoming an educated individual, furnished with the knowledge and conversation necessary to engage in polite conversation, as it was about the ability to demonstrate feeling. Agnes Elliot and Katherine Mure’s responses to Hume’s and Robertson’s respective Histories are unrecorded, but Jean, second wife of the second Duke of Atholl, wrote enthusiastically and confidently of her opinion of the last volume of Hume’s History of England. ‘I am … more entertaind, and more Instructed (that is to say, I can form more Distinct notions, and retain them better in my memory, of what were the transactions, Laws, and Customs of the earlyest times of this Island) than I ever was by any History of England I have read formerly.’117 Writing with the authority of an experienced reader of history, she understood that a ‘good’ history would both entertain her and educate her with regards to her country’s past laws, customs and events. After buying Smollett’s history, the Duchess was disappointed to learn that it was ‘not reconed good for much’.118 Influenced, perhaps, by reviews and ‘puffs’ in periodicals like the Scots Magazine, women knew how readers were expected to respond to the histories they read. Of the passage in William Robertson’s History of Scotland concerning the feudal constitution, for instance, Margaret Hepburn wrote to the author of her aunt, Martha Fletcher: my aunt was so much struck with it, that she declared, that it might be pronounced of you, what was said of the great Condé as a general, that you was Born a Historian. Now as you know my aunt never speaks a degree higher than her meaning, so is seldom guilty of flights I don’t know But you Should be as much pleased with this as any applause you have yet received.119

This might be interpreted as the sort of negative jibe made against older, unmarried women who were widely read and dared to express an opinion. Yet this was one of the key passages in which Robertson sought to strike a chord

John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Alexander Allardyce (Edinburgh, 1888), vol.2, p.172, n.1. 117 NRAS234/49/1/56, to Captain Murray, 2 March 1762. See also NRAS234/49/1/32, to the Hon. John Murray, 5 February 1762, Dunkeld. For more on the Duchess’s and others’ responses to Hume’s History, see Mark R. M. Towsey, ‘“Patron of Infidelity”: Scottish Readers Respond to David Hume, c.1750–c.1820’, Book History 11 (2008). 118 NRAS234/47/10/33, to Captain Murray, 3 March 1758, London. 119 NLS, MS16521 f.190, from Margaret Hepburn, 12 March 1759, Monkrig. 116

70

reading and print culture

with his readership, and to distance eighteenth-century Scotland from what were seen as the more negative aspects of its past. Margaret’s comment suggests Martha understood what Robertson was trying to achieve with his history, and believed herself suitably qualified to judge his performance as an historian. Moreover, the seriousness with which Margaret took her own reading of Robertson’s history suggests she wrote this, to a man whose previous letter had contained news of the praise he had received from David Garrick, William Warburton and Horace Walpole, perhaps only half-jokingly.120 Margaret Hepburn and William Robertson’s History of Scotland Robertson’s History of Scotland during the Reigns of Queen Mary and of King James VI till his Accession to the Crown of England was published to enormous acclaim in February 1759, his first success in what was to be an illustrious (and lucrative) career in historical writing. The correspondence between Margaret Hepburn and William Robertson, written as he dealt with the book’s extraordinary reception and prepared for the second edition, provides an unusually detailed insight into one woman’s response to one of the most influential histories written in eighteenth-century Britain. Their discussion ranged over a number of topics dealing with the reading of history and its practical and emotional applications, many of them areas which historiographers would identify as central to early Scottish Enlightenment history. She demonstrated an awareness of the problems inherent in writing about this period of Scottish history for a British audience, and singled out the death of Queen Mary as one of her favourite passages, remarking also on Mary’s character and Robertson’s delicate treatment of that of the English Queen Elizabeth. She commentated negatively on the feudal constitution, less so on that of the ancients, and implied her admiration for modern civilisation and post-Reformation society. Margaret was either consciously aware of the ways in which current British fashion expected women to react to historical writing, or was doing so instinctively, led, perhaps, by the agendas within what she read. Her comments demonstrate not only an ability to read history in the appropriately gendered way, but a clear consciousness of the importance of Robertson’s History to contemporary Scotland, not least Scotland’s place in the Union in this post-Culloden period. Margaret congratulated Robertson on ‘Steering with Such propriety through the reformation. as that Subject was Delicate’,121 aware not just of the thorny role which religious differences had had in Scotland’s past, but of their continuing capacity to hinder the integration of the British nations. Commenting on Robertson’s treatment of Queen Elizabeth, she remarked approvingly, ‘you Blame her with the Severity, and Dignity, of

120 121

NLS, MS16711 f.234, to Margaret Hepburn, 20 February 1759, Edinburgh. NLS, MS16521 f.189, 12 March 1759, Monkrig.

71

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

a Historian; yet in such a manner as not to Shock John Bull. I daresay he is as much amazed that we were of Such Consequence, as that a Scotch man can write English.’122 Growing up in a prominent political family, she was in a better position than most both to identify herself with the national interest, and to note the need to tread with caution in Anglo-Scottish relations. Furthermore, in admitting her expectation that the English would be surprised at the past importance of Scotland, she tapped into another area which has become the focus of modern Robertson scholarship. Even at this early stage in Robertson’s career, Margaret seems to have been aware that part of what her friend was trying to do was to show that Scotland, currently regarded by many English as at best a provincial backwater and at worst an uncivilised hotbed of rebellion, had once been an important player on the European stage.123 Yet Margaret, imbued with the Whig notion that patriotism lay not in what Robertson termed ‘antiquated prejudices’,124 but in the commercial modernisation and ‘improvement’ of the nation through integration into the British state (in which her family was deeply involved), undoubtedly had a sense of the need for Scots to assert themselves patriotically, and believed that this was what Robertson was doing. Regretting the amount of ‘treachery and cruelty’ in the work, she admitted that she imagined ‘it was partly the effect of the Feudal Constitution where Courage was the Ruling Virtue in place of public spirit’;125 a rejection of feudalism, still topical in its contemporary association with Jacobitism, was inherent to the Whig project (promoted, in Margaret’s view, by ‘public spirit’) for Scotland’s ‘improvement’. Nevertheless, she admitted that ‘in more ancient times that Courage catched the imagination Vastly’,126 imagination being key to the sympathy Robertson and Hume expected their female readers to feel. Most notable on both sides of the correspondence is the importance given to character. When Margaret described the character and death of Queen Mary as her ‘favourite passages’ of the History127 she was identifying with one of the key aims of Robertson’s new approach to historical writing. This was the section of his History into which Robertson had put most effort to portray the Queen as a woman, hoping to incite sympathy from across the political or national divide on the grounds of her femininity and distress in an attempt to heal the wounds of the 1745 Jacobite rising. Margaret was here giving another typically gendered response to the work: Hume had expected Katherine Mure to ‘understand that history

Ibid. For eighteenth-century Scots’ use of John Bull to personify English ‘difference’, see Miles Taylor, ‘John Bull and the Iconography of Public Opinion in England c.1712–1929’, P&P 134 (1992), p.101. 122

123 124 125 126 127

O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, pp.100–101.

William Robertson, History of Scotland (London, 1759), vol.1, p.87. NLS, MS16521 f.190, 12 March 1759. Ibid. Ibid.

72

reading and print culture

is often most absorbing when the fate of an individual, not the clash of principles or parties, is at stake’.128 Through the sympathy felt by one human being for another, character-based history could, Robertson hoped, help to heal rifts between nations. Moreover, in demonstrating the ability (lacking amongst Mary’s contemporaries) to appreciate the queen’s refined femininity, Margaret could highlight the superiority of the eighteenth-century reader, liberated from the feuds and clashes of Mary’s own age.129 This was not the first time Margaret had read Robertson’s work on Mary, or discussed the ill-fated queen with him. After informing her that the copy of his history with which he was presenting her was ‘the only copy, except one to Lord Milton, which I shall give to any person in Scotland’, he went on to add: ‘Queen Mary has grown up to her present form under your eyes, you have seen her in many different shapes, & you have now a right to her.’130 Clearly, therefore, she had had some kind of involvement in the text prior to publication. Robertson prepared his History with a firm eye to its marketability. He showed parts of it to David Hume (‘that virtuous Heathen’, Robertson joked131) and David Dalrymple, later Lord Hailes,132 and since he aimed to take advantage of the new female readership, it made sense that he utilise his female friends as a test of its appropriateness.133 Ever mindful of the need to keep Margaret’s mind active in the wake of her cousin’s recent death, he invited any comments for the second edition on which he was already working, asking her to point out anything of which she did not approve in his book.134 Sadly, Margaret did not live to experience the full extent of her friend’s success, dying only three months after the History’s publication, but she understood the significance of her own contribution and of Robertson’s gratefulness to her. Replying to the letter which Robertson sent with her copy of the book, she declared that although she would not share his letter with others at present, she would ‘preserve it with your History for Succeeding ages, as the Romans did their medals, and their other claims to immortality’.135 Completing the Circle? Women and Writing Elite women engaged in the act of writing as part of their daily lives, whether compiling accounts, copying medical recipes, or corresponding with Quoted in Phillips, ‘“Mrs Mure”’, p.112. László Kontler, ‘Beauty or Beast, or Monstrous Regiments? Robertson and Burke on Women and the Public Scene’, Modern Intellectual History 1:3 (2004), pp.321–3. 130 NLS, MS16711 f.235, 20 February 1759, Edinburgh. 131 Ibid. 132 O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, p.96. 133 See Chapter 4, p.100 for John Home’s similar use of the Fletcher women prior to the performance of his play Douglas. 134 NLS, MS16711 f.236, 20 February 1759, Edinburgh. 135 NLS, MS16521 f.189, 12 March 1759, Monkrig 128 129

73

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

friends, family and merchants. This last section examines the ways in which the women of the eighteenth-century Scottish elite interacted with the social world through their own writing. As previous chapters have shown, there emerged in the first half of the century an expectation that the polite woman was able to compose elegantly written, conversational letters. Parents fretted over their daughters’ development in and attitudes towards this vital art. Agnes Elliot wrote of her daughter that: She excells at a French letter beyond all her Kindred & I must say her last English one was very explicit & intelligent but the young Woman is like other People would prefer reading her Book & working her work or even diverting herself with her own thought taking a Pinch of snuff & a chat at the fire Side to writing a letter136

Letter-writing was a social obligation which, as Agnes suggested, was not without its rivals for demands on young women’s time. Written correspondence was no less governed by rules and regulations, or social expectations, than any other aspect of sociability. It was deemed improper to correspond with someone with whom a formal relationship was not yet established, and it was an embarrassment not to respond to the letters of those with whom one existed. But letters were not the only form of written sociability in which women engaged. Separated by much of the European continent, the brothers and sisters of the Adam family exchanged poems on the subject of head-lice:137 ‘Lay your Orders on Meggy to send me a Coppy of her Lousy Poem, Corrected or not,’ wrote Robert Adam to his mother.138 Otherwise unable to share each other’s society, this family used the creatively written word to consolidate the emotional intimacy of their physically distant relationships through the repeated exploration of the most domestic and apparently trivial of subjects in an interactive, gamelike manner. Similarly, Andrew Fletcher’s poem about his sisters’ reading habits quoted above is one of several remaining such letters in which he communicated with female family members in doggerel form. Although no replies exist, such correspondence almost certainly anticipated a similarly composed response.139 Margaret Hepburn wrote poetry, none of which seems to have survived, but, like those of her cousin, her poems may well have centred on society gossip. In an undated letter, Elizabeth Fletcher wrote to Margaret that ‘every body is talking of a very ill Natured Poem laid in your name upon the Marquise NLS, MS11005 f.149, to Mainie Elliot, 12 April 1766. NAS, GD18/4827, Robert Adam to William Adam, 18 December 1756, Rome; GD18/4828, Robert Adam to Betty Adam, 25 December 1756, Rome; GD18/4830 Robert Adam to Peggy Adam, 14 January 1757, Rome. 138 NAS, GD18/4821, to Mary Adam, 9 October 1756, Rome. 139 Sir Alexander Dick and his wives exchanged poetic messages with the poet Allan Ramsay, NAS, GD331/5/1–5. 136 137

74

reading and print culture

of Clidsdale I contradicted most violently without letting you know of it but I heard last night that some body had sent it to Duke Hamilton without a name.’140 Whether or not Margaret wrote the poem in question, she had evidently gained a reputation which made it a possibility in the public mind. On the whole, however, the composition of poetry was regarded as a suitably feminine activity for young women, and in the sharing of topical social rather than literary poetry Isobel Grundy has identified the emergence of a kind of young women’s popular culture.141 In Rome, Robert Adam shared his sisters’ poems with the new female acquaintance he was cultivating in preparation for the family’s move to London. Although his sisters could not travel to Italy themselves, their introduction at the breakfast table, through their compositions on head-lice and, he hoped, more serious pastoral poetry, provided a succinct means of expressing his sisters’ accomplishments and gentility, and hence his family’s suitability to be introduced to the London friends of the ladies with whom he was socialising in Rome.142 Even such ‘private’ writing could help women gain entry to new social spaces, signalling the mutability of women’s writings to bend from a piece of personal reflection to pass the time, to something which was destined to represent their polite status amongst people with whom they were entirely unacquainted. Kathryn Shevelow argued that ‘from the legitimization of women as readers it is only a small historical step to the legitimization of women as writers, as the emergence of published female novelists (and poets and translators) later in the century so powerfully demonstrates’.143 Although a few eighteenth-century Scotswomen (sometimes reluctantly, sometimes less so) published poetry, this move was much less pronounced in Scotland than in England.144 The women NLS, MS16746 f.230, [n.d., n.p.] In another letter describing the marriage of Mary Hamilton and William Nisbet in 1747, Margaret wrote to her mother of how Mally Fletcher had shown some of her poems to another guest, who had pointed out some faults but on the whole admired them: MS16746 f.188, to Mary Hepburn at Saltoun. 141 Isobel Grundy, ‘Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her daughter: the changing use of manuscripts’, in Justice and Tinker (eds), Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas, esp. p.198. 142 NAS, GD18/4830, Robert Adam to Peggy Adam, 14 January 1757, Rome. 143 Kathryn Shevelow, ‘Fathers and Daughters: Women as Readers of the Tatler’, in Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart (eds), Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts (Baltimore and London, 1986), p.121. 144 Jean Adam, a Greenock schoolteacher, published a volume of poetry in 1734, but Alison Cockburn, whose ‘Flowers of the Forest’ was published in 1765, was reluctant to publish more of her poetry. Sarah Tytler and J. L. Watson, The Songstresses of Scotland, vol.1 (London, 1871), pp.34–5; Dorothy McMillan, ‘Cockburn, Alison, n. Rutherford’, in Elizabeth Ewan, Sue Innes and Siân Reynolds (eds), co-ordinating editor, Rose Pipes, The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women: From the Earliest Times to 2004 (Edinburgh, 2006), p.78. For the expansion of published female writing in eighteenth-century England, see Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago and London, 2000); Sylvia Harcstark Myers, Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1990); Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800 (London, 1989); Cheryl Turner, Living By the Pen: Women 140

75

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

with whom this book is concerned may not have published, but they did write. A nineteenth-century biographer recorded that Margaret Calderwood composed a manuscript novel, ‘The Adventures of Fanny Roberts, wrote to a friend, by herself’, describing it as ‘a dull novel, somewhat in the style of Richardson, partaking of the licence of Fielding’.145 Like the letters she sent home from England and the Low Countries in 1756, whose composition suggests they were not merely intended for her daughter to whom they were addressed, this was probably intended for private circulation amongst a contained readership.146 More typically, Margaret’s sister-in-law Frances Steuart composed a lengthy memoir of her married life, focusing on, but not confined to, the period she and her husband spent in exile.147 It was in family memoirs that women seem to have felt most at liberty to move from reading to writing; at once personal and precept, memoirs were the literary representation of women’s role in the family.148 Around 1780, Betty Fletcher’s daughter Elizabeth Halkett composed a ‘Memoir of the Fletchers of Saltoun’,149 whilst the comments which Agnes Murray Kynynmound made on the edges of her husband’s correspondence and some fragments of more extensive notes suggest that she may have been considering writing a memoir of her husband’s political career.150 Frances Steuart’s experiences as the wife of Sir James Steuart Denham had brought her into much closer contact with the world of print than most of her compatriots, particularly after his death when she corresponded at length with the publisher of the French translation of his Political Economy, a work she had ‘Copyed over and Red with Him’ as he wrote it.151 As a one-time acquaintance and correspondent of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, she had sustained contact with one of the most celebrated, if notorious, published women of her day,152 yet she chose to keep her own opinions confined to a more personal sphere. Recent scholarship, however, has emphasised that print did not replace manuscript in Writers in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York, 1992); Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catherine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford, 1992); Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1999). For the important role played by one woman in to the late seventeenth-/early eighteenth-century Scottish book trade, see Jane Rendall, ‘Campbell, Agnes (Lady Roseburn)’, in Ewan et al. (eds) Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women, pp.61–2. 145 ‘Family Notices’, in Coltness Collections, p.396. 146 Calderwood, ‘Journal’. See Chapter 6, pp.160–4. 147 EUL, MS E2002.28, ‘Frances Steuart – Widow – Melencholy Title’ (unpublished memoir, Coltness, 1881). See Chapter 6, p.162. 148 Davis, ‘Gender and Genre’, pp.161–2. 149 EUL, MS La III 364. 150 Her annotations are spread throughout his letters in NLS, MSS11006, 11007; for drafts of fragments of her memoir see MSS11036 ff.144–7 and 12822 ff.8–12. 151 EUL, MS2291/12; MS E2002.28, Steuart, ‘Memoir’. 152 Ibid. The correspondence suggests a warmer relationship between Lady Mary and Sir James than with his wife. Letters from the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 1709–1762, with an introduction by R. Brimley Johnson (London, 1906). See also Chapter 6, p.162.

76

reading and print culture

literary culture, the latter continuing to suit the requirements of many women writers as a form of publication not considered intrinsically inferior to that of print.153 Indeed, in circulating manuscripts, women were playing a role which occupied a similar position on the public/private spectrum to that which they performed in the arenas of polite sociability which shall be investigated in the next chapter. The prioritisation of reading as an improving activity from an early age was one of the most significant factors influencing the ways in which elite women engaged with the world around them. On an ideological level, the concept of the reader, herself improved by reading, as a sociable being who then spread that improvement through conversation was a cornerstone of polite femininity. On a practical level, it must be cautioned that access to books was contingent upon various factors and not always within women’s control. Nevertheless, the evidence examined here suggests that the women of the Scottish elite enjoyed a relatively unrestricted relationship with text, and were assumed to possess autonomous access to and choice of reading. For such women, fortunate enough to have access to books and other printed materials, the increase in the production and accessibility of print culture over the course of the eighteenth century provided a significant means of entrance to an expanding cultural arena in which they could engage with society beyond their immediate circles, even when physically isolated. Reading was a social activity: social in that it created and cemented bonds between individuals who may or may not have shared a physical space; active in that it encouraged an engagement, often a verbal or written response, on behalf of the reader. Even those who did not have the opportunity to discuss their reading in person or on paper were encouraged from an early age to think about and digest what they read. Contrary to the novel-consuming stereotypes of convention, but in line with findings elsewhere, the women under consideration here used their reading to gain access to a wide scope of opinion and experience. Whether reconfirming their religious beliefs or enabling them to keep up-to-date with the worlds of politics or literary fashion, reading and reacting to text helped to integrate individual women into the sense of belonging to an informed public which was a critical component of polite womanhood. Moreover, as scholars seek to redefine our understanding of Enlightenment in terms of the engagement of readers with text and ideas, women’s reading practices can be seen to have enabled their integration into the culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, particularly in the area of historical writing. Few may have had access to the levels of participation enjoyed by Margaret Hepburn, yet from her correspondence with William Robertson there emerges a more general sense of an active and critical reader who engaged with a specific historical text not in isolation, but in terms of its wider, contemporary social implications. In a

153

Justice and Tinker (eds), Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas.

77

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

near-perfect vignette of the enlightened reader, her correspondence on the text shows that reading and its discussion provided her with a platform from which to express her own understanding of ideas both historical and contemporary.

78

4

Polite Sociability: Space and Social Practices ‘Both useful & amusing’ Sociability, as previous chapters have demonstrated, was a key preoccupation of the polite. Chapter 1 introduced the ideological importance placed by the polite on elite women’s participation in heterosocial activities; Chapter 2 demonstrated the centrality of the preparation for this role in the upbringing of young girls; and Chapter 3 examined the potential for reading to cement social relationships. This chapter asks how polite sociability was acted out in practice by elite women in eighteenth-century Scotland, and how polite social practices and the spaces with which they were associated influenced the experience of elite femininity in that society. As the first chapter explained, participation in a series of social activities including dancing assemblies, balls, plays, concerts of music or visits for tea was about far more than merely entertainment for the eighteenth-century British elite. Rather, they believed that by socialising together in such spaces (often public, always to some degree regulated) men and women would lose any awkwardness or ungainly manners, and instead acquire through observation and imitation the easy, refined behaviour that defined the polite. So, when Robert Adam departed for Italy in 1754, he advised his sisters that ‘As diversions cannot [bu]t be both useful & amusing I insist you decline none of them.’1 Acknowledging the amusement that such activities might provide for his sisters, Adam, ambitious as he was, was well aware of their potential ‘usefulness’ in presenting his sisters with the opportunity to be seen in society, to show off their polite accomplishments, and to forge social connections which could be advantageous to him in his future career. As this example demonstrates, women’s participation in polite sociability was encouraged not necessarily because of any perceived benefits for the women themselves. But from ideas about the improving properties of the company and conversation of elite women, and about the companionable role enjoyed by women in the most civilised societies,2 there emerged a very real change in patterns of sociability, the impact of which had a transformative effect on the lives of elite women. The sociability of preceding generations of elite Scots had been located primarily in the rural context, centred on the country house and the provision 1 2

NAS, GD18/4746, to Nelly Adam in the Canongate, [October 1754, London]. See Chapter 1, pp.9–10.

79

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

of lavish hospitality to the regular streams of visitors they received.3 When women did go to town, their participation in public social activities was relatively rare;4 although balls were held at Holyrood when the Duke of York held court in the 1670s,5 the Edinburgh social life of even so eminent an aristocrat as the Duchess of Hamilton was based largely on domestic sociability in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.6 The late eighteenth-century memoirist John Ramsay of Ochtertyre’s oft-quoted remark that prior to the eighteenth century, ‘the Scottish ladies made their most brilliant appearance at burials’7 echoed that of Elizabeth Mure, who believed assemblies and private subscription balls ‘took place of marrages, baptisams, and burialls’.8 These, she added, ‘were the only public places where the Ladys went in full dress’. Polite sociability, however, privileged the urban context, with its purpose-built crucibles in which restricted public sociability enabled the formation and consolidation of polite social bonds and reputations. David Hume, in his essay ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, first published in 1754, explicitly linked refinement to a social, urban setting: men ‘flock into the cities; love to receive and communicate knowledge; to show their wit or their breeding; their taste in conversation or living, in clothes or furniture … Both sexes meet in an easy and sociable manner, and the tempers of men, as well as their behaviour, refine apace.’9 Towns offered not only the widest – and best – array of company, but access to the social spaces in which polite social practices were enacted: the assembly rooms, theatres and concert halls which were appearing in towns throughout Britain. Recent research on the English North-West and West Midlands by Jon Stobart and colleagues has emphasised the degree to which these developments 3 Keith M. Brown, Noble Society in Scotland: Wealth, Family and Culture, from Reformation to Revolution (Edinburgh, 2000), pp.205, 211–12. See also Rosalind K. Marshall, Virgins and Viragos: A History of Women in Scotland from 1080 to 1980 (London, 1983), p.128. 4 Marshall, Virgins and Viragos, p.167. 5 John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Alexander Allardyce (Edinburgh, 1888), vol.2, p.62. He lamented the ‘abundantly loose’ manners of this court, ‘a thing very offensive in a country which was then remarkable for seriousness and decorum’. 6 Rosalind K. Marshall, The Days of Duchess Anne: Life in the Household of the Duchess of Hamilton 1656–1716 (East Linton, 1973, 2000), ch.5. 7 E.g., Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, England 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989), p.109; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London, 1992), p.257; Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London, 1998), p.276. See Elizabeth Mure, ‘Some Remarks on the Change of Manners in my Own Time. 1700–1790’, in Selections from the Family Papers Preserved at Caldwell, ed. W. Mure, Maitland Club, 71 (Glasgow, 1854), vol.1, p.265, for a description of women’s preeighteenth-century funereal role. Thomas Somerville described women forming the rear of funeral processions as far as the kirkyard gate in his early lifetime, in My Own Life and Times 1741–1814, with an Introduction by Richard B. Sher (Bristol, 1996; first published 1861), pp.367–8. 8 Mure, ‘Change of Manners’, vol.1, p.267. 9 David Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1995; first published 1741–77), p.271.

80

Polite Sociability: space and social practices

were not limited to the few most fashionable towns.10 The spread of these social spaces across Scotland’s smaller towns remains the subject of ongoing investigation,11 though initial research suggested their presence was relatively minimal until the last few decades of the century.12 Larger centres fared better. By the mid-eighteenth century, visitors to Glasgow were enjoying plays, concerts and balls,13 though its reputation amongst the parents of college-aged boys was as a place providing relatively few distractions from study. But whilst the role that local centres provided to local populations should not be underestimated, the polite believed in a hierarchy of urban centres, which in Scotland was headed by Edinburgh. Home, until 1707, to the parliament and thereafter to the courts which in many ways took its place, the Scottish capital was the place to which the polite flocked during the social season, which ran from November to August, concurrent with the sitting of the Court of Session. Recently, it has been cautioned that ‘The sense of cultural transformation, of the new sociable importance of women, of new entertainments, of the secularisation of social life, is striking, acute – and exaggerated.’14 Yet whilst women were not isolated from the world of sociability prior to the eighteenth century, their involvement in social activities was not believed to hold the progressive and ‘improving’ cultural associations that it would by the mid-eighteenth century. And whilst many continued to spend much or at least part of their lives in rural seclusion throughout the period covered by this book, such seclusion, as this chapter will show, was increasingly perceived by women in negative terms, as removing them from the spaces and networks of urban sociability which they had come to see as their natural milieu. Irrespective of the degree to which any one woman participated in the new activities of polite sociability Jon Stobart, Andrew Hann and Victoria Morgan, Spaces of Consumption: Leisure and Shopping in the English Town, ca. 1680–1830 (London, 2007). 11 Bob Harris, ‘The Enlightenment Town in Scotland’. Project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board. 12 E.g., little evidence was found for the institutions of polite sociability in Dundee or Montrose prior to the last third of the eighteenth century. Bob Harris, ‘Towns, Improvement and Cultural Change in Georgian Scotland: The Evidence of the Angus Burghs, c.1760–1820’, Urban History 33:2 (2006), pp.202–3. 13 Alexander Carlyle reported fortnightly assemblies, but few dinners or concerts, in Glasgow in the winters of 1743/4 and 1744/5, The Autobiography of Dr. Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk, 1722–1805, ed. John Hill Burton, with a new Introduction by Richard B. Sher (Bristol, 1990; reprint of 1910 edn), pp.83–4. In 1753, General Wolfe found plays, concerts and balls, see Henry Gray Graham, The Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1900; first published 1899), vol.1, p.142. For brief descriptions of the development of aspects of polite society in Aberdeen, see E. Patricia Dennison, Anne T. Simpson and Grant G. Simpson, ‘The Growth of Two Towns’, in E. Patricia Dennison, David Ditchburn and Michael Lynch (eds), Aberdeen Before 1800: A New History (East Linton, 2002), p.40; Shona Vance, ‘Schooling the People’, in ibid., p.321; Murray G. H. Pittock, ‘Contrasting Cultures: Town and Country’, in ibid., pp.369–71. 14 Peter Clark and R. A. Houston, ‘Culture and Leisure 1700–1840’, in Peter Clark (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol.2, 1540–1840 (Cambridge, 2000), p.575. They emphasised that these changes were only part of a bigger picture. 10

81

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

in any one year, these activities had effectively redefined the meaning of elite femininity. This chapter begins by examining the significance for women of the practice of visiting for tea and conversation. It considers the ways in which polite social practices came to reconfigure the sense of what it meant to be a young girl on the cusp of adulthood, and how they helped elite women to form a sense of being part of a public. It ends by considering the significance of language and manners to the construction of polite feminine identities in specific contexts. Company and Conversation The foundation stone on which polite social practices rested was the visit. Paying and receiving short visits for tea ensured a constant round of sociability, affirming social bonds and networks. These were extended through the much longer visits of several days or even weeks which were particularly common amongst families in the country. The role of the lady of the house in presiding over the polite domestic social environment brought the female presence to the fore in this setting; other women performed a variety of social roles based on their age and status in the household. A friend of the Fletchers, anticipating a visit to the Duke of Argyll’s castle at Inveraray where Lady Milton acted as hostess in the absence of a more suitable candidate, wrote that he expected to ‘pas my time very agreeably, … in learning Wisdom from Miss Fletcher, Economy from her mother & in hearing Miss Mally Sing the Highland lady by way of desert [sic]’.15 He indicated the specialised roles performed by individual female family members: Lady Milton would show off her housewifely knowledge as befitted a middle-aged matron; her eldest daughter would make conversation; and her next daughter would provide the musical entertainment with which young women were so closely associated in domestic settings.16 The ability to act appropriately according to age and rank in such settings was a vital part of the successful performance of elite womanhood for both visitors and hostesses. The newly married wife of the Duke of Gordon wrote to her aunt-by-marriage and confidante Lady George Murray confessing her fear that she ‘did not beheave [her] self right’ to company at the Duke of Atholl’s house NLS, MS16668 f.123, Charles Stewart to Milton, 25 March 1749. Stewart was a physician and old friend of the third Duke, with whom he lodged in London. Ian G. Lindsay and Mary Cosh, Inveraray and the Dukes of Argyll (Edinburgh, 1973), p.12. Argyll had separated from his wife, who died in 1723, and Mrs Williams, the mother of his two children, was evidently deemed unsuitable to accompany him. Alexander Murdoch, ‘Campbell, Archibald, third duke of Argyll (1682–1761)’, ODNB. For more on the Fletcher women’s role at Inveraray, see Chapter 5, pp.119–21. 16 Richard Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-Cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1988). However, his positioning of all eighteenthcentury women’s music-making within the framework of a restrictive, male-imposed, uniform domesticity should be tempered somewhat. 15

82

Polite Sociability: space and social practices

at Dunkeld, where her wedding took place. Hoping the family would attribute her behaviour ‘to stupidity & not want of respect to them all’, she explained she was ‘quite confused with the hurry of com[p]anie & new state of life [she] was in’.17 Accustomed as she would have been to behave as befitted the daughter of the Earl of Aberdeen, this twenty-four-year-old was now expected to take on new roles as both a wife and a duchess. Women’s supremacy in the social sphere was symbolised by their dominance at the tea-tables, the setting around which much domestic sociability was staged.18 Tea-drinking grew enormously in popularity over the first half of the century, with tea imports into Britain increasing fivefold between 1720 and 1760,19 but the serving of high quality tea in delicate chinaware to ‘good’ company around dainty tea-tables remained throughout the century an archetypal polite activity, associated with civilised behaviour and patriotic consumption. The brewing and pouring of tea was considered so important that it was not left to servants (who merely provided the hot water), but was carried out by the lady of the house, or sometimes her eldest daughter.20 Staying with relatives, probably around 1747, Margaret Hepburn wrote to her mother of how ‘I keep the key of the Cupard where ye tea cups is & Miss Mal [her cousin, Mally Fletcher] maks the tea’.21 What she was describing was no mere routine task, but rather the initiation of these two young women on the cusp of adulthood into the rites in which they would be expected to participate as married women. For twenty-year-old Mally, making the tea would have been no great novelty, but as a role it symbolised the recognition of responsibility and polite womanhood in circles beyond her immediate family, clearly felt with some pride by her thirteen-year-old cousin in the mere possession of the key to the china cupboard. More than any other social space, tea-tables became associated with the polite prioritisation of women’s conversation. Scottish writers like James Forrester and David Hume were amongst the foremost in promoting mixed-gender sociaNRAS234/JacC/1/7/104, Katherine Gordon to Lady George Murray, 18 September 1741, Haddo House. 18 For the dominant position of women in portraits of family tea-drinking, see Philip Lawson, ‘Tea, Vice and the English State, 1660–1784’, in Lawson, A Taste for Empire and Glory: Studies in British Overseas Expansion, 1660–1800 (Aldershot, 1997), p.8. More generally, see Philip Lawson, ‘Women and the Empire of Tea: Image and Counter-Image in Hanoverian England’, in Lawson, A Taste for Empire and Glory: Studies in British Overseas Expansion, 1660–1800 (Aldershot, 1997). 19 Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1996), p.22. Mure believed ‘the regular teatables’ came into fashion around 1720, ‘Change of Manners’, p.269. Ramsay suggested a similar timescale, Scotland and Scotsmen, vol.2, p.72. 20 Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects, p.25; Jane Pettigrew, A Social History of Tea (London, 2001), pp.30, 56. 21 NLS, MS16746 f.188, Margaret Hepburn to Mrs Hepburn of Monkrige at Saltoun, [n.p., n.d., probably around the time of the marriage of Mally Fletcher’s cousin Mary Hamilton to William Nisbet of Dirleton in February 1747]. 17

83

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

bility, with an emphasis on polite conversation as a form of refinement in which women exerted an improving influence on the men around them.22 In describing the ‘Fair Sex’ as ‘Sovereigns of the Empire of Conversation’,23 Hume may have been issuing something of a double-edged compliment, but it nevertheless surrendered to women government of a territory which was fundamental to polite notions of sociability. As the educationalist David Fordyce put it in 1748, ‘Speech is one of the best Instruments of Female Power, by which they calm the Storms of Passion, and charm our rude Natures into a softer Kind of Humanity.’24 Forrester went so far as to argue that politeness could ‘be no other Way attained’ than through the conversation of women.25 Through the refined arts of conversation, women could act for the good of the nation in helping to mould the supposedly ‘rude’ male shape into the polite gentleman whose manners and courteous treatment of women signalled the civilised society. Yet whilst for some the tea-tables ‘contributed not a little to soften and polish manners’,26 their supposed advantages were not universally recognised. Mocking the practice of visiting as a vapid waste of time, Alexander Monro lamented the frequency of ladies’ visits to the most distant acquaintances, with whom their conversation would consist of ‘no more than a ceremonious Enquiry after a few of their nearest friends and relations, some Observations on the Weather, or at most a Rehearsal of some paragraphs of the public Newspapers, and the uncertain Hearsay of the Town’.27 Others fretted over the tea-tables’ potentially feminising influence on men, or, more practically, the possibility that they would distract men from business and encourage gossip.28 Letter-writers anxious for news would ask after the talk of the tea-tables, as it was there that scandal and news were discussed and spread: ‘G___e’s wife’s Story makes a devilish noise here, & they tell me ye whole tea tables in Edr are ringing about it,’ wrote John Maule, friend of the Fletcher family.29 The delicacy of women’s china tea-sets was designed to emphasise women’s daintiJames Forrester, The Polite Philosopher: Or, an Essay on that Art which Makes a Man Happy in Himself, and Agreeable to Others (Edinburgh, 1734), pp.45–53. 23 Hume, ‘Of Essay Writing’, Essays, p.535. He later withdrew this essay. 24 David Fordyce, Dialogues Concerning Education, vol.2 (London, 1748), p.111. See also ‘Lecture 2’, in Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J. C. Bryce (Indianapolis, 1985; as recorded by a student in 1762–3), p.4: ‘It is commonly said also that in France and England the conversation of the Ladies is the best standar[d] of Language, as ther is a certain delicacy and agreableness in their behaviour and adress.’ 25 Forrester, Polite Philosopher, p.49. 26 Ramsay, Scotland and Scotsmen, vol.2, p.73. 27 Alexander Monro (Primus), ‘The Professor’s Daughter: An Essay on Female Conduct’, ed. P. A. G. Monro, Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 26:1, supplement no.2 (January 1996), p.57. 28 Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, ‘Tea, Gender, and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century England’, SECC 23 (1994), esp. pp.140–1. 29 NLS, MS16585 f.239, Maule to Milton, 17 January 1741, London. See also Monro, ‘Essay’, p.70. 22

84

Polite Sociability: space and social practices

ness, but it could also act as a metaphor for the fragility of their reputations. Elizabeth Mure neatly summarised the ambiguity of the tea-tables when she commented that there ‘all the young and gay … pulled to pieces the manners of those that differd from them; every thing was matter of conversation; Religion, Morals, Love, Friendship, Good manners, dress. This tended more to our refinement than any thing ellse.’ ‘Refinement’, she suggested in a much more pragmatic take on this development, came not just from these ‘all new and all entertaining’ conversation topics which reflected the fashionable concerns of the polite, but from the pressure generated by gossip which stigmatised those who failed to conform.30 Evidence from the families under consideration here suggests that the practices of visiting and drinking tea helped to provide women with the opportunity to engage in more intelligent conversation than that mocked by Monro. Despite the absence in Scotland of the formal, female-headed salons that played such an important role in the intellectual life of France, or their equivalents amongst the English blue-stockings, the women of the Scottish elite were not denied access to the company and conversation of intelligent men. The Elliots of Minto counted many of the Scottish literati amongst their friends, one memoirist encountering David Hume, John Home, Elizabeth Montagu, John Gregory, Lord Kames and William Robertson at their estate at Minto in the Borders in the late 1760s.31 The author Lord Kames was ‘well-known’ to Amelie Murray,32 whilst the Adam household in Edinburgh was frequented by (amongst others) William Robertson, John Home, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, James Hutton and David Hume.33 There is evidence that women’s own intellectual accomplishments could attract intelligent company. For instance, the Gilmerton home of Lady Milton’s sister-in-law Harriet Kinloch was reputed by Alexander Carlyle to be ‘a great resort for John Home and his friends of the clergy’ not just because ‘the husband was shrewd and sensible’, but because his wife was ‘beautiful, lively, and agreeable, and was aspiring at some knowledge and taste in belles-lettres’.34 Harriet’s niece Betty Fletcher and her cousin Peggy Hepburn discussed John Home’s and William Robertson’s writings with their authors and were the friends of many of the Scottish literati of the 1740s and 1750s.35 Partly the result of the ‘small’ society that Scots so often lamented, and the close blood ties that existed within that society, the women of most of the families concerned here would have had reasonable expectations of access to educated conversation above and beyond the ‘good’ company that was the staple of polite society. Mure, ‘Change of Manners’, p.269. Thomas Somerville, My Own Life and Times 1741–1814, with an Introduction by Richard B. Sher (Bristol, 1996; first published 1861) 32 NRAS234/49/3/116, Deskfoord to Atholl, Cullen House, 10 March 1764. 33 NAS, GD18/4981; Carlyle, Autobiography, pp.285–6. 34 Carlyle, Autobiography, p.214. 35 See Chapter 3, pp.71–3; Chapter 5, pp.118–9; and p.102 below. 30 31

85

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

It is important to bear in mind what Kathryn Gleadle has called the ‘duality of female engagement’, the acknowledgement that ‘women could inhabit the same space as men and yet remain excluded from the civic meanings perpetuated therein’.36 Citing the later eighteenth-century conversation notebooks of Dorothy Alison (wife of the preacher Archibald and daughter of John Gregory), she noted that Dorothy conversed unrestrainedly with the anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Clarkson, but did so generally outside the ‘physical and temporal’ locations of formal sociability such as the drawing room, in which she normally presented herself as a ‘privileged spectator’ to the conversations between her male friends.37 Thus Robert Adam could describe Allan Ramsay’s wife Margaret Lindsay as ‘a Sweet, agreeable, Chatty body, tho’ Silent in Company’38 without any sense of contradiction. Although in this case possibly constrained by her unusual position as an artist’s wife in Italy (where artists were socially less well regarded than in Scotland), Margaret Lindsay is a reminder that beyond their most intimate circles, women were operating in a social climate which could potentially commend female passivity as part of a prioritisation of male conversation. Whilst it may not be possible to know precisely to what extent women were able to participate as equal partners in the conversation of eighteenthcentury Scottish drawing rooms, correspondence provides some insight into the ways in which women and men talked to one another, and the sort of things they discussed. For instance, in 1772 Agnes Elliot wrote to David Hume joking that she had explained to her husband Hume’s sudden curtailment of a visit to their house at Minto as the result of an argument in which ‘he and I had some little difference about his Byeuks, and I tried to persuade him to burn them all, and write the other way’, As a result of her advice that Hume would be ‘a shining light’ if he would only write books more palatable to Christian taste, she reported, ‘[H]e flew in a passion and went off in a huff.’39 This conversation never took place, but it is nevertheless significant that she could share such a joke with Hume. Although fictional and designed to raise a smile, it provides a glimpse into the sort of conversational banter about books and ideas that may have passed back and forth across the tea-tables or fire-sides of homes like Minto. In her fictional dialogue, Agnes deployed the rhetorical convention of dismissing herself as ‘but a simple woman’, a means of implying the very opposite whilst creating for herself the opportunity to express a vernacular wisdom also suggested here by her spelling of ‘byeuks’. Once these caveats were presented, she clearly felt no discomfort in offering forthright views on Hume’s scholarship. Like the very different epistolary exchange Kathryn Gleadle, ‘“Opinions Deliver’d in Conversation”: Conversation, Politics, and Gender in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in José Harris (ed.), Civil Society in British History: Ideas, Identities, Institutions (Oxford, 2003), p.72. For Gregory, see Chapter 1, p.9. 37 Gleadle, ‘“Opinions Deliver’d in Conversation”’, pp.67–70. 38 NAS, GD18/4768, to Nelly Adam, 22 March 1755, Rome. 39 NLS, MS11010 ff.160–1, 12 October 1772, Minto. 36

86

Polite Sociability: space and social practices

between Margaret Hepburn and William Robertson examined in the previous chapter,40 such letters make clear that women were not excluded entirely from discussing with their proponents the intellectual debates that framed the Scottish Enlightenment, albeit in informal contexts. The frequency of polite social intercourse and the prominent position this gave to women had the potential to open up for these women channels through which to engage with the realm of ideas, even if the nature of their participation, at least as it was represented on paper, was heavily coloured by gender. Elizabeth Mure argued that as a result of the small, enclosed social circles in which children grew up in the early decades of the century, ‘There was no enlargement of mind. … From this education proceeded pride of understanding, Bigotry of religion, and want of refinement in every useful art.’41 For Mure, the increased sociability of the household was a vital factor in the ‘change of manners’ towards what she saw as a more refined society, yet this issue was not merely one of chronology. Throughout the period in question, the degree of access to domestic sociability women enjoyed could differ enormously, mediated through factors like family culture and geographical location. For instance, Lord Auchinleck (James Boswell’s father) remembered that when his father was at home in the country, there was company almost every day, but that when he went away to Edinburgh, Auchinleck’s mother ‘draped herself in very plain clothes’ as ‘no company was expected’.42 This suggests a predominant form of domestic conviviality which, whilst not exclusively masculine, operated only when men were present. This could affect women at the highest social levels: in 1737, the daughter of the Earl of Aberdeen complained to Lady George Murray that ‘at least one half of the year my Papa is from home, & all the time he is away wee never see a mortal if it be not the Minister of the Parish & that but seldom’.43 A quarter of a century later, Lady George’s granddaughter was ‘very vain’ of the company that came to visit on her sixth birthday ‘when her Mama had no Company any other time in Papas absence’.44 As these examples demonstrate, it is important not to over-emphasise the frequency of company for women, particularly in the country. Margaret Fletcher, for instance, discovered that the continuous flow of domestic heterosociability with which she had grown up in a prominent Edinburgh legal and political family was not universal, particularly in parts of Scotland further removed from the capital. In 1750, shortly after her marriage to John Grant, she accompanied him to his father’s estate of Easter Elchies in Speyside, from

Chapter 3, pp.70–3. Mure, ‘Change of Manners’, p.262. 42 My Very Dearest Sweet Heart, or, Boswell Before Boswell. Letters of the Lady Elizabeth Boswell (1704 to 1711, and 1733), Life before the Biographer, ed. David R. Boswell (Bath, 2003), p.53. 43 NRAS234/45A/C/1/6/49, Lady Katherine Gordon to Lady George Murray, 17 September 1737. Her father was the Earl of Aberdeen. 44 NRAS234/49/2/382, Amelie Murray to George Murray, 24 December 1763, Marlee. 40 41

87

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

where Grant set out to perform his duties with the Circuit Court. There she found a very different kind of social life: As for Cumpany we have been so lucky as not to be trubled with maney since we cam & those wer people who neither require much Drunk nor attendance most of our Females in this nighbourhood are I understand not in a way of travelling & aney of the Gentlemen who have Business with Mr: Grant meets him once a week at Elgin; Provitions of all kinds are extreemly cheap here & wines at half price however the Captain generaly administers Punch & my Husband is at liberty to drink what he chuses45

Whilst presenting a brave face to her father, she evidently felt the lack of female company: even the social life which she had come to expect male business contacts to provide was removed from a domestic to a ‘public’ yet conversely exclusive, homosocial setting. Her reference to punch suggests that an exclusively male drinking culture prevailed, as opposed to that to which she had been accustomed in mixed company at home.46 Additionally, her marriage had confirmed her social status as a member of the provincial gentry, removed from the more influential circles in which she had been brought up. Two years later, she still had to resign herself to the fact that when the Earls of Hopetoun and Findlater and their wives passed through her neighbourhood they failed to visit her.47 This she blamed on ‘the bad roads’, but whereas such high ranking couples may well have gone out of their way to pay a visit to her father Lord Milton, this was a social anomaly resulting from his political seniority, and they would not have been expected to call on someone of her rank.48 On the other hand, she noted that ‘I have been so hurrayd with putting my house in order & receiving the welcome of our troublesam Nighbours that I have never had an moment to my Self tho we have been here almost a fourtnight.’ Preparing for and receiving company was a major part of elite women’s task, but it should not be forgotten that it was often a role of obligation rather than pleasure. Polite Performance and the Culture of Elite Girlhood If the polite social spaces of the town were the main stages on which polite society was acted out, it was young women – girls in their teens – who were the NLS, MS16516 f.269, 18 August 1750, Elchies. For the popularity of homosocial male punch-drinking, see Stana Nenadic, ‘MiddleRank Consumers and Domestic Culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow 1720–1840’, P&P 145 (1994), pp.147–50; Ramsay, Scotland and Scotsmen, vol.2, p.78. 47 NLS, MS16516 f.183, to Lady Milton, 29 August 1752. 48 This may have been political, the Earl of Findlater being a ‘well-known anti-Argyll’ figure. Alexander Murdoch, The People Above: Politics and Administration in Mid-EighteenthCentury Scotland (Edinburgh, 1980), p.38. 45 46

88

Polite Sociability: space and social practices

principal actors. Their mothers may have directed, but it was they who were on show in the theatres, assembly rooms and public walks, all of which had a pronounced performative element, drawing attention to women’s clothes, language, posture and manners.49 Amelie Murray’s letters home to her mother from her time in Edinburgh as a schoolgirl provide an insight into the ways in which balls and dancing assemblies ranked foremost amongst the pressurised public spaces which were now the milieu of elite youth. The first time girls performed in public the slow, precise steps of the minuet, judged by the collective ranks of polite society lining the room, could be a nerve-wracking experience. In March 1745 Amelie, aged twelve, informed her mother she had danced the less formal country dances at a charity ball in Edinburgh where there were a great many good company, ‘but would not venture to try my Minuet’.50 The degree to which Amelie had felt herself to be under scrutiny when she did dance her minuet comes through in a journal entry on a ball the previous month, in which she noted ‘Lady Charlotte Gordon begun the ball & invited me, told me I danc’d my minuet very well. I hope it was true.’51 In expressing this insecurity, Amelie let slip ever so slightly the adult mask which she so carefully assembled in her letters, to reveal something of the pressures which young girls must have felt when first forced to take their place on the dancing floor. Indeed, the occasions on which she did dance the minuet were deemed worthy of mention by both a family friend and her own father, whose praise for his daughter’s improvements when he visited her in April to May 1745 seems to have been the product of a genuine degree of pleasant surprise.52 For a slightly older girl, to this immediate pressure was joined the even greater one of making a ‘good marriage’, one of the most serious tasks of her life.53 At stake was not just her own future happiness, but that of her family, who might hope to benefit considerably from a ‘good’ marriage bringing financial security and advantageous connections. Historians now tend to be sceptical of the notion that the mid-eighteenth century witnessed a sudden onset of greater marital choice for young women, yet most women appear to have

Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660–1800 (Harlow, 2001), p.38. See also Peter Borsay, ‘The Rise of the Promenade: The Social and Cultural Use of Space in the English Provincial Town c.1660–1800’, BJECS 9 (1986), esp. pp.130–1. 50 NRAS234/JacA/III/8. 51 NRAS324/JacC/I/11/10, to Lady George Murray [15 February 1745, Edinburgh]. 52 NRAS234/JacA/III/10, Isobell Robertson to Lady George Murray, 7 March 1745, Edinburgh; NRAS234/JacA/III/25, Lord George to Lady George Murray, 8 April 1745, Edinburgh. 53 Edward Topham, Letters from Edinburgh, Written in the Years 1774 and 1775 (London, 1776), pp.256–7. The precise point at which any particular girl began to participate actively in polite society, rather than merely observe it, can be obscure. Peter Borsay, ‘Children, Adolescents and Fashionable Urban Society in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Anja Müller (ed.), Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century (Aldershot, 2006), pp.54–6. 49

89

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

played at least some role in choosing their marriage partners. 54 A recurrent theme of Andrew Fletcher’s poems was the role of institutions of the urban winter social season as expensive showcases for marriageable young women. He also dwelt on the painful financial outlay this necessitated: the need to take lodgings in town, to have daughters fitted out in the latest fashions in dress and hair, and to buy tickets for plays, balls and assemblies.55 His friend Lord Belhaven used martial metaphors to evoke the almost militaristic levels of preparation and precision which this task could require: As to what you call our Ed:r Campaign, the Assemblies here have hitherto been so very thin, that one may justly say (in your own Dialect) The fair sex have not as yett taken ye field in earnest, Butt seem still to be in closs quarters noe doubt preparing implements of war for some vigourous attack56

Once that winter’s ‘campaign’ had got underway, he provided an update that ‘Miss Mally F[letche]r danced with Mr Campbell younger of Calder, I don’t think that she points her artilery amiss.’57 Belhaven presented assembly rooms as spaces in which young women exercised authority, yet young women almost certainly enjoyed less autonomy in these matters than such metaphors suggest; the commanding officers, as Belhaven might have termed them, were their parents, whilst all activity was carried out under the strict supervision of the lady directresses. For instance, in 1753, the playwright Oliver Goldsmith, then an Edinburgh medical student, portrayed the assembly rooms as a site of dour gender apartheid: when a stranger enters the danceing-hall he sees one end of the room taken up by the Lady’s, who sit dismally in a Groupe by themselves. On the other end stand their pensive partners, that are to be, but no more intercourse between the sexes than there is between two Countrys at war. At length, to interrupt hostility’s the Lady directress or intendant, or what you will pitches on a Gentleman and Lady to walk the minuet, which they perform with a formality that aproaches despondence, after five or six couple have thus walked the Gauntlett, all stand up to country dance’s each gentleman furnished with a partner from the afforesaid Lady directress, so they dance much, say nothing, and thus concludes our assembly.58

Goldsmith’s depiction of the Edinburgh assembly suggests a truly dismal experience. In its taciturn stiffness and despondent formality it was the opposite of the ‘ease and informality’ which supposedly characterised polite society; Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, pp.40–4. More generally, see Katie Barclay, ‘“I Rest Your Loving Obedient Wife”: Marital Relationships in Scotland, 1650–1850’ (University of Glasgow PhD thesis, 2007). 55 E.g. MS17799 f.160; MS17890 f.9 from rear; MS17895, pp.67, 78. 56 NLS, MS16659 f.200, to Andrew Fletcher, 5 December 1748, Edinburgh. 57 NLS, MS16659 f.204, to Andrew Fletcher, 17 December 1748, Edinburgh. 58 The Collected Letters of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Katharine C. Balderston (Cambridge, 1928), pp.10–11. 54

90

Polite Sociability: space and social practices

the mixing between the sexes was far from spontaneous, and the conversation between men and women that enlightened thinkers so enthusiastically encouraged as a socially improving force was absolutely non-existent. In essence, it was the very opposite of the heterosocial ideal. Admittedly, Goldsmith was accustomed to the more glamorous setting of the assembly rooms in Dublin; he was also, it is fair to say, someone who enjoyed wielding his pen in a satirical manner, but he was not alone in portraying this supposedly archetypal space of polite sociability in this light. In the late 1720s, the poet William Hamilton of Bangour described Lady Panmure quite literally taking people by the hand to force them to dance together,59 whilst a generation or so later, Andrew Fletcher wrote a poem portraying Lady Orbistoun’s assembly rooms as a space of considerable anxiety, in which young men and women nervously displayed their looks, dress and dancing abilities under her stern supervision. ‘See Dread Orby High and Mighty’, he wrote, ‘Ruling with an iron Rod/Every Nymph and Swain so pretty/Bowing to her aweful nod’.60 However, despite mocking Lady Panmure’s officiousness, Hamilton of Bangour’s poems and correspondence also effervesce with the sexual tensions which this regulated space created as men watched their heart’s desire dance, and girls flitted and gossiped between pillars.61 Furthermore, it is surely not insignificant that the young Fletcher women employed remarkably similar military metaphors to those used by Belhaven when describing their own social exploits. Thus, a female friend joked to Betty Fletcher, ‘I wonder you did not go to the assembly, perhaps you Might have kill’d a peer’, and reported the safe delivery of Betty’s message to another ‘Who is glad to hear She has made a conquest’.62 Certainly, their language suggests they saw the assembly rooms as a space in which young women enjoyed agency, whilst their attitudes towards the balls and assemblies they attended does indicate that participation in these events, and the chance for mixing with the opposite sex that they afforded, had become integral to their sense of what it meant to be a young gentlewoman in that society. The Fletcher girls were growing up in a family that wholeheartedly embraced the role of women in polite society and generally spent the whole year in or around Edinburgh, at least when their daughters were of marriageable age. Not all young women enjoyed the Fletchers’ advantages of geography and family, but for those who did, these institutions of urban sociability boosted the opportunities for young women’s autonomous engagement with the society around them. From this new social climate, Isobel Grundy has argued, emerged a kind of teenage girl culture in which young women had ‘become a constituency with their own standards and attitudes’.63 The mid-teens to the mid-twenties were, argued Robert Shoemaker, ‘a signif59 60 61 62 63

Nelson S. Bushnell, William Hamilton: Poet and Jacobite (Aberdeen, 1957), pp.13–15. NLS, MS17895, Notebook of Poems by Andrew Fletcher, p.67. Bushnell, William Hamilton, p.31. NLS, MS16687 f.108, from Fanny Dunlop, 22 May 1754, Gogar. Isobel Grundy, ‘Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her Daughter: The Changing Use of

91

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

icant stage of development in this period in which a limited degree of independence was achieved’.64 This raised inevitable problems for parents, who acknowledged that polite social norms dictated that their daughters had to be part of this social world, but worried about the company in which their daughters were mixing and the propensity of gossip to endanger their reputations.65 There is evidence of a sense of unease about the prominence of vulnerable girls in polite society that transcends a more timeless parental concern for daughters’ well-being. For instance, a manuscript poem in the collection of Lady George Murray imagined the ‘frolicksome’ fifteen-year-old Agnes Murray Kynnynmound ‘gallantly’ leading up a dance with her sampler and doll, iconic symbols of female childhood suggesting the author’s scepticism about the prominence given to such young girls in public social spaces.66 Agnes’s sampler and doll may have been literary symbolism, but her ‘frolics’ and ‘gallantry’ were not: before her sixteenth birthday she would elope with Gilbert Elliot, younger of Minto. Parents were careful to stress chaperonage, Mary Adam, for instance, writing to her daughters whom she had left behind in Edinburgh in 1753, ‘I fore gote to tel al you three young folks before I left the towne not to go with any young gentelmen unless you had some married Lady to escort you, young folks carectour is verey soon hurt.’67 However, there is evidence to suggest that this culture of public sociability gave girls a new freedom to roam. The very fact that Mary Adam felt the need to remind her daughters not to go out without a chaperone indicates real fears that they would do just that, perhaps inspired by an illicit visit to a concert by Susy, Betty and Nelly Adam, recorded by a friend in a piece of doggerel.68 Meanwhile Margaret Calderwood’s near-contemporary observation that in Catholic countries ‘There is no such thing as girls running about giddy at their own hand, as they are never allowed to go to publick places, unless under their parents’ eye, or somebody that has the charge of them’69 suggests that somewhere – most likely at home – she had experienced the opposite. In short, even if incidents like the Adam girls’ concert visit were deemed worthy of comment precisely because of their departure from accepted

Manuscripts’, in George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker (eds), Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800 (Cambridge, 2002), p.186 64 Robert B. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society 1650–1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (Harlow, 1998), p.133. 65 NRAS234/JacA/III/3/80, Dowager Lady Nairne to Atholl, 11 November 1746, Nairn. ‘I hear from Edgh, the Young Ldys yr Daughters, are in good health, but Ar in very unproper Company for their Birth & Quality, I’m told they are to come to Dunkeld next Summer, I wish it may be Early, for I verily think young as they are, they had better be intirly left to them selves, then under such directors.’ 66 NRAS234/JacC/IV/5/2, untitled verse in hand similar to that of Lady George Murray. 67 E.g., NAS, GD18/4742/1, to Peggy Adam, 7 July 1753, Moffat. 68 NAS, GD18/4422, ‘To the Misses Adams Edinburgh’. 69 Margaret Steuart Calderwood, ‘A Journey in England, Holland, and the Low Countries’ (1756), in Coltness Collections, 1608–1840, Maitland Club (Edinburgh, 1842), p.179.

92

Polite Sociability: space and social practices

norms, there is relatively little evidence that girls endured too restrictive an experience of chaperonage in practice. By the middle of the century, at least some young elite women had come to see the town as their natural habitat. It would be nothing short of an act of cruelty, the sixteen-year-old Lady Jean Murray petulantly informed her father the Duke of Atholl in December 1746, to remove her and her sister from Edinburgh to the country. She complained of ‘Bad look of our sudden Departure Just as if we had stole something when your Grace promised we was to be in Edinbr Every winter’.70 Such an act would deprive her of the access to polite social activities that she had come to regard as a right; it would also, as she knew, put into question her reputation. In fact, Jean’s reputation was very much under question at this time. Initially feared to be flirting with a young man of lesser rank, in March 1747 she eloped with the Earl of Crawfurd, to her father’s outrage. Since childhood, she had been expected to marry her cousin John Murray, to help ensure his succession to the dukedom.71 In response to the girls’ pleadings, and advice that ‘the depriving them of the pleasures of this place poor as they are, will be lookt on as Tyranny’,72 the Duke at first decided to allow his daughters to stay in the Scottish capital provided they ‘leave off throwing away [their] time upon Diversions only’.73 Lady Milton’s response to the Duke’s enquiries about his daughters’ conduct had been that she did ‘not quite approve of their conduct’, but put it down to ‘Youth and an immoderate desire for diversions’.74 Such letters between the Duke (then in London) and his correspondents in Edinburgh demonstrate the concerns of a parent who had to reconcile his fears for his daughters’ reputations with the busy social lives they were expected to lead. Accustomed as Lady Jean was to the varieties of London entertainment she enjoyed with her English mother, she responded petulantly to her father: for Diversions I have frequented them much seldomer then other young Ladies of my age whose Caracters are unquestionable, your Grace says you allow me the Innnocent amusements of this town pray my Lord what others have I bin at, If your Grace knows of any its more then I Do, had my Dear papa Restricted me to so many Asemblys & so many plays (wch is all the Diversions we have) I should have bin sure to have Gone to no more but you left me at my Liberty and I’ve the vanity to say I have not abused that Goodness as I allways have those such companions whose behaviour might be a pattern to me75

The real reason she wanted to stay in Edinburgh may have been the oppor-

NRAS234/JacA/III/3/93, 23 December 1746, Edinburgh. The son of the Jacobite Lord George Murray, John had been educated at Eton at the Duke’s expense, the Duke’s own sons having died in infancy. 72 NRAS234/JacA/III/3/87, Captain Murray to Atholl, 9 December 1746, Edinburgh. 73 NRAS234/JacA/III/3/92, copy Atholl to Lady Jean, 16 December 1746. 74 NRAS234/JacA/III/3/84, Captain Murray to Atholl, 7 December1746, Brunstane. 75 NRAS234/JacA/III/3/93, 23 December 1746. 70 71

93

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

tunity it afforded to escape her father’s plans for her future. But whilst her depiction of the social activities Edinburgh offered was hardly glowing, the fact that she felt able to call upon this rhetoric and to do so in such assertively self-righteous language is very revealing about the sort of relationship this young woman expected to have with the places and spaces of polite urban sociability. Similarly, in 1760, Mally Fletcher wrote to her father pointing out that she had been ‘so much in the country these four years and there deprivd the society of all females’, noting that ‘the Envious and Malicious … Are Often employd in Giveing bad Reasons for those Who lifes in a Way of Life from others of thyr Age and Station’, and arguing that ‘the Desire of My being a Little More in the Gay World is Not proceeding from Love of Entertainment But it is in Justice to My Self. And the desire I have of being thought Worthy the Name I bear.’76 Like Jean Murray, she suggested that to remove her from town was to question her reputation, but Mally was thirty-four years old at the time of writing; she was her parents’ last unmarried daughter, and of use to them at home in the country. The main purpose of the financial investment that was required to maintain a daughter in town (that is to say, making a ‘good’ marriage) was of little relevance to her. Being initiated into urban society around adolescence provided girls with a set of skills necessary to enter fashionable urban society and an awareness of the delineation of their social rank. It helped to create the impression that the institutions of urban sociability were the natural habitat of young women, where they enjoyed a lifestyle directed towards leisure and pleasure in which they themselves were the centre of attention. Whilst theoretically preparing the young women of the Scottish elite to continue throughout their lives to demonstrate the polite manners which to memoirists like Mure and Ramsay symbolised the growing refinement of Scottish society, in reality it was towards the end of marriage that much of young women’s urban sociability was aimed. For those like Mally Fletcher who remained unmarried, it may have seemed unnecessary, even, perhaps, cruel, building expectations of a life more exciting than that they could realistically hope to lead once absorbed back into the parental household and its daily tasks. Urban Social Space, Agency and the Creation of a Public Throughout his manuscript poems, Mally’s brother Andrew Fletcher suggested that a continuing relationship with urban society ranked amongst the most desirable advantages a woman might hope to reap from a ‘good’ marriage. In one poem, he asked: ‘How Charming is a Coach and six,/How sweet a drawing Room,/Yea sweeter far in winter months./To have a house in Town’? He went on to depict new brides in their townhouses, surrounded

76

NLS, MS16522 f.134, 22 January 1760, [n.p.].

94

Polite Sociability: space and social practices

by the material trappings of their marital wealth, celebrating their success over their evening cups of tea.77 Not surprisingly, young married women could be reluctant to part with the habits they had acquired, not just in spending time in a sociable, urban environment, but in their behaviour there. ‘[’T]is pittie your husband was along for he would only be an interuption to the Galantray, which one natuerally imagens to be going on in Such a place,’ gossiped one woman to her sister-in-law of a sojourn in Edinburgh in the 1740s. Her own sister’s husband, she reported, had been ‘so Jealouse of his wife … when he heard of her gadding about to all the publick places’ that he removed her from town.78 Married women’s movements were not always at their own whim; rather, they were often dictated by their husbands, and their attendance at public places deemed unnecessary, even harmful.79 Replying to a letter from his young wife Agnes asking his permission to attend a race meeting in 1749, Gilbert Elliot responded, ‘I am sory you have put it upon me to determine, whether or no you shoud go to the race, for it seems you take it for granted there can be no Objection to your going to the Assembly, & yet possibly if I were to give my opinion sincerely I shoud rather inclind that you did not dance, at least nothing but an minuit.’80 Gilbert (whose mother was one of the lady directresses appointed in 1746) grudgingly acknowledged his wife’s right to attend the assembly without his permission (a right she had assumed was hers to take), but thought it improper that she participate in any dancing more vigorous than the slow, stately minuet. Age and marital status dictated not just women’s access to polite social spaces, but the activities in which they participated there. The first chapter explained how in 1723 the Countess of Panmure and her friends seized the opportunity to transpose their private, domestic role as hostesses into the public setting of the Edinburgh assembly rooms, where, as lady directresses, they presided over a company consisting of both women and men.81 This was the first time in Scotland that women had occupied such a formal, public social role. More than any other public social space, the assembly rooms symbolised the new centrality of elite women to the polite social agenda, prioritising not just heterosociability, but the regulated public socialising that defined the polite and of which women were deemed the natural superintendents. Even when the assembly was reconstituted in 1746 by an all-male committee who were to oversee most aspects of its management,82 the public face of authority remained female. The assembly’s minutes stated that ‘All NLS, MS17895, p.18. NAS, GD110/1082/3, Ann Dalrymple to Lady Dalrymple, 7 August 1744, Barginay. 79 Monro, ‘Essay’, p.69. 80 NLS, MS11006 f.28, 29 August 1749, Minto. 81 The notion of formal male management with informal female involvement was common in English provincial assemblies too, although stewardship roles tended to be performed by men. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society, pp.278–9. 82 This committee met in such archetypal masculine environments as ‘John Walker’s Vintner’. ‘Minutes of the Edinburgh Assembly 1746–1776’, Edinburgh Central Library, 77

78

95

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

Dancing in the Assembly Hall and every thing relating thereto Shall be under the Inspection and Management of Ladies Directresses’,83 who operated on a rota system and originally included Ladies Milton and Minto.84 In the 1740s, the Edinburgh assembly rooms were governed by a set of regulations displayed on the walls, ensuring appropriate dress and behaviour, but most importantly promoting the assembly as an institution of order and regulation.85 It had been on the basis of the ‘virtuous example’ of the lady directresses that the Countess of Panmure’s assembly was successfully defended by its promoters to become a mainstay of the polite social scene,86 and the lady directresses continued to act as gatekeepers, ensuring the exclusivity of both behaviour and rank that defined all public venues of polite sociability.87 The Countess of Panmure, for instance, purportedly barred her nephew the Earl of Cassills for being drunk and turned away a brewer’s daughter on the grounds that she was not ‘entitled to attend assemblies’.88 The agency granted by the role of lady directress was not confined to the spatial and temporal setting of the assembly rooms themselves, but opened up further channels through which these women could engage with the public. As manageresses of the assembly, the Countess of Panmure and later her friend Lady Orbistoun were able to raise funds for charitable causes of their choosing;89 to support British industry through promoting the wearing of British linen;90 and to thrive on the opportunities for competition with other entertainments such as strolling players. This latter group the Countess condemned for taking money out of Scotland – unlike her own venture, whose profits were reinvested in Scottish causes.91 After the assembly was reconstituted under male management in 1746, the lady directresses were each responsible for distribMS YML 28A, p.16. Lady directresses when invited to take up their posts or in the event of any issue concerning them were waited upon at home. 83 ‘Minutes of the Edinburgh Assembly’, p.5. 84 Ibid., p.10. NLS, MS16872 f.163, ‘Accompt of Moneys Received & paid out by Hugh Clerk Junior Merchant in Edinburgh, as Treasurer to the Edinburgh Assembly’ records six assemblies taking place from 23 May to 17 July 1746, two presided over by the Countess of Leven, two by Lady Milton, one by Lady Minto and one by Lady Ancram. 85 The rules are printed in James H. Jamieson, ‘Social Assemblies of the Eighteenth Century’, BOEC 19 (1933), p.51. 86 See Chapter 1, pp.7–8. 87 ‘None are admitted but such as have at least a just title to gentility, except strangers of good appearance. And if by chance any others intrude they are expelled upon the spot by order of the directrice or governess.’ Edmund Burt, quoted in Jamieson, ‘Social Assemblies’, p.44. 88 Ramsay, Scotland and Scotsmen, vol.2, p.62, n.1. 89 NRAS234/JacC/I/2/74, Countess of Panmure to Lord George Murray, 14 March 1727, Edinburgh, mentioned assemblies held in aid of the Edinburgh Infirmary and the reconstruction of Arbroath harbour. 90 NAS, GD45/24/79, printed advertisement promoting the wearing of British lace and linen at the Edinburgh assembly, 15 February 1728. 91 NRAS234/JacC/I/2/82, Countess of Panmure to Lord George Murray, 27 November 1727, Edinburgh.

96

Polite Sociability: space and social practices

uting their share of one third of the charitable profits.92 If founded partially on the premise of providing the younger generation with useful instruction, enjoyment and the hope of finding a marriage partner, assembly rooms could provide a platform on which older women could create a public role that brought status, agency and authority. Those who became lady directresses were clearly a small minority, but the assembly rooms came to act much more generally as a space in which women could gather and discuss with their friends the important issues of the day, whilst watching over their younger charges.93 Although many women affected distaste for the hurry of urban social life, it had become expected that they would add at least a smattering of social activities to the practical and financial affairs which beckoned them to the town: ‘Tho I know you do not like the noisy divertions, yet Agreable Sosiety is absolutely proper for you,’ protested Lord George Murray to his wife, encouraging her to spend the winter in Edinburgh.94 The emphasis which the polite put on sociability and on public sociability in particular triggered a fundamental shift in the understanding of elite womanhood which meant that, far more than ever before, elite women in Scotland had become part of a public of those who took part in the same kinds of activities in the same kinds of spaces, governed by similar expectations of manners and behaviour. A key distinguishing feature of polite social spaces and practices was their universality, though this was not an entirely uniform process. Local elites did not merely ape metropolitan fashion but rather adopted those elements which suited their own requirements and preferences. For example, Edinburgh did not have the operas to which the London elite flocked, and as late as the 1770s and 1780s attempts at instigating the more risqué masquerade were unsuccessful.95 Recent research on provincial politeness in England has shown that polite activities retained a strong local flavour,96 but those participating in polite social activities in towns across Scotland nevertheless shared enough with their counterparts across Britain to be absorbed into a sense of belonging to a national public. Perhaps nowhere was this more pronounced than in the theatre and the concert hall. The Edinburgh Musical Society held a number of ‘Ladys Consorts’ during the winter season, the programme usually consisting of one of Handel’s oratorios.97 Although the society’s regular concerts belonged to ‘Minutes of the Edinburgh Assembly’, p.6. E.g., NLS, MS1231 f.158, Alicia Baird to John Mackenzie, 3 March 1769, Edinburgh. 94 NRAS234/JacC/II/4/44, Lord George Murray to Lady George Murray, [n.d., found in 1758]. 95 Jamieson, ‘Social Assemblies’, pp.63–7. 96 E.g., Helen Berry, ‘Promoting Taste in the Provincial Press: National and Local Culture in Eighteenth-Century Newcastle upon Tyne’, BJECS 25 (2002); Helen Berry, ‘Creating Public Space: The Organisation and Social Function of the Newcastle Assembly Rooms’, in Helen Berry and Jeremy Gregory (eds), Creating and Consuming Culture in North-East England, 1660–1830 (Aldershot, 2004). 97 Jennifer Macleod, ‘The Edinburgh Musical Society: Its Membership and Repertoire 92 93

97

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

the realm of the private, male connoisseur, by attending performances of these most fashionably patriotic compositions combining the rousing music of Britain’s then favourite composer with the moral propriety of the religious text, women could confirm their membership of a culture of shared taste, experience and priorities that defined the polite in concert halls across Britain.98 Theatrical attendance similarly assumed a participation in a dialogue which in turn worked towards the creation of a sense of a public, as plays and the issues they highlighted were discussed.99 By helping to form an audience, women were becoming part of a shared public with those who had heard the same words spoken or sung, in the same theatre and elsewhere, and who understood the cultural significance of the debates these works could precipitate or feed into. The theatre as a space held several meanings for elite women. Andrew Fletcher’s poems described Cupid’s dart ricocheting around the auditorium as men and women eyed up both the opposite sex and their rivals.100 It could also act as a window to a slightly risqué world. Marion Maxwell wrote with relish to her cousin Marion Lauder that ‘we have got the famous Madam Violante to Glasgow who Certainly is a great Curiosity tho ane imodest Slut as ever was’;101 the appeal of Madame Violante, who performed acrobatics, high-wire and trapeze, was of course in the very fact of her transgression of polite norms. But for the theatre’s promoters, it was a venue for the dissemination of polite culture. On the most basic level, touring theatre companies were supposed to have spread ideas about ‘polite dress and manners’ from London.102 The belief that English touring companies would help Scots to learn the English accent was one of the grounds on which the theatre was promoted after it was closed in 1737,103 but their impact was probably more complex. Even if apocryphal, Ramsay of Ochtertyre’s anecdote about a young country girl who attended what a more sophisticated friend called ‘smutty’ plays, but was unconcerned as they spoke in ‘high English’ which she did not understand,104 serves as a 1728–1797,’ (University of Edinburgh PhD thesis, 2001), pp.70–1, 73, 81, 121, 125, 129. 98 For Handel, see Ruth Smith, Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge, 1995). For concerts in Edinburgh more generally, see Jenny Burchell, Polite or Commercial Concerts? Concert Management and Orchestral Repertoire in Edinburgh, Bath, Oxford, Manchester, and Newcastle, 1730–1799 (New York and London, 1996). 99 See Kathleen Wilson, ‘Pacific Modernity: Theater, Englishness and the Arts of Discovery, 1760–1800’, in Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman (eds), The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France, 1750–1820 (Berkeley, CA and London, 2002). 100 NLS, MS17895, p.68. 101 NAS, GD113/5/66B/4, [n.d.] (fragment). For Madame Violante, see Donald Campbell, Playing for Scotland: A History of the Scottish Stage, 1715–1965 (Edinburgh, 1996), p.2; Alasdair Cameron, ‘Theatre in Scotland 1660–1800’, in Andrew Hook (ed.), The History of Scottish Literature, Volume 2, 1660–1800 (Aberdeen, 1987), p.206. In 1737, Alexander Carlyle attended her dancing school in Edinburgh, Autobiography, p.54. 102 Mark Girouard, The English Town (London and New Haven, 1990), p.7. 103 Campbell, Playing for Scotland, pp.12, 16–17. 104 Ramsay, Scotland and Scotsmen, vol.2, p.63, n.1.

98

Polite Sociability: space and social practices

cautionary tale with respect to the notion of the theatre as an agent of homogenisation. The theatre could nevertheless serve its purposes in this respect. When travelling in Essex, Margaret Calderwood felt able to use the clichés of the theatre, with which she knew her daughter to be familiar, to describe the people she met: Miss Dondie was a girl about eighteen, not ill-lookt, quite a cockney, she has exactly the voice of the stage, and might be made a player, had she as much sense or feeling as to enter into the spirit of her part. Peter you have often seen acted by Stamper; … he’s just the figure of a young squire who would be married to a cast-mistress, if some good-natured person in the drama did not prevent it.105

Exposure to the accents and manners of actors from other parts of the country, and the conventions and stereotypes perpetuated in the plays they performed, created a common currency of understanding amongst audiences which included the culture of both the theatre itself and the culturally diverse nation in which these audiences lived.106 By the 1750s, when Margaret Calderwood was writing, the inhabitants of Edinburgh had the opportunity to see plays three times a week,107 with elite women able to influence the choice of plays performed.108 Until 1767, the Edinburgh theatre was officially banned under the Patent Act, which was circumvented by advertising plays as concerts of music. The disapproval of the Kirk, however, proved a more difficult challenge for those who believed the theatre represented a key channel for the spread of polite culture, as demonstrated in reactions to the Reverend John Home’s phenomenally successful tragedy Douglas, staged in Edinburgh in December 1756. Written partially in response to the inequality between Scotland and England in the militia law, and performed as the parliamentary debates on Scotland’s right to raise militias grew to a climax, the play became associated with support for the cause of Scotland’s right not just to bear arms against invasion, but more generally to be afforded the rights of a stable, mature polity that were enjoyed by other parts of Britain.109 Far more than any other play, Douglas also came to be associated with support for the very notion of the theatre as a polite Calderwood, ‘Journey’, p.126. For Stamper, see [James Boswell], A View of the Edinburgh Theatre during the Summer Season, 1759 (Los Angeles, 1976; first published 1760), passim. 106 For travelling theatre companies, see Sybil Rosenfeld, Strolling Players and Drama in the Provinces, 1660–1765 (Cambridge, 1939). 107 The Usefulness of the Edinburgh Theatre Seriously Considered. With a Proposal for Rendering it more Beneficial (Edinburgh, 1757), p.6. For reviews of one summer season, see [Boswell], View of the Edinburgh Theatre. 108 Marshall, Virgins and Viragos, p.171. 109 Carlyle, Autobiography, p.325. See also John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh, 1985); Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1985). Douglas was staged in London in March 1757. 105

99

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

social cause in Scotland. Charges were laid by the presbytery of Dalkeith against Home for writing the play, and against his fellow minister Alexander Carlyle for associating with actors, attending the rehearsal and ‘appearing openly’ in the theatre.110 This sparked a pamphlet war between those who regarded the theatre as an instrument of polite improvement and those who continued to worry about the negative impact of such amusements, dismissed by Home as ‘those Goths & Vandals, who think themselves oblidged to persecute an Ecclesiastical Bard’.111 Women may not have contributed to this published war of words, but this battle was taking place on what had come to be seen as their territory. Combining patriotism with fashionable sentiment, support for Douglas became a cause associated in particular with the ladies of the fashionable elite. For polite supporters of the theatre, the play provided the opportunity for the public expression of fashionable sentiment, denoting the taste and sensibility that defined the polite. Well aware of the advantages of appealing to fashionable female sentiment, Home had included Betty Fletcher and Peggy Hepburn (as possessed of ‘the most exquisite taste’) amongst those he asked to comment on an early draft of the play.112 Some years later, William Robertson would remind Peggy Hepburn of the tears she had shed at the play’s reading,113 a characteristic sign of fashionable sensibility which established her status as someone who understood the play’s emotional message and therefore, in essence, her polite connoisseurship. The close emotional relationship women enjoyed with the theatre was not an end in itself, but provided a channel through which they could engage with the more political aspects of the play’s message. Significantly, Alexander Carlyle recorded that alongside the author himself, it was ‘some female friends of his having heated me by their upbraidings’ which convinced him to attend his friend’s play.114 Through attending the play and encouraging their friends (including church ministers) to do so, they expressed in their own language (that of polite feminine social norms) their support for the various causes with which the play was associated. Not all women, however, subscribed to these norms. This is how Janet Clerk recorded the Douglas controversy in her spiritual diary: On the 10th we had a solemn humiliation day by order of the king throahout this kingdom … sure never were there more need for humiliation storms scarcitie of bread our great losses abroad cofusion amongst our great folks and to crown all our young ministers of the gospel one writing a play others going to Sher, Church and University, p.82. NLS, MS16695 f.71, to Milton, 1 March 1756, Athelstaneford. See also, NLS, H.1.a.15., ‘Home’s Douglas Pamphlets’. 110 111

112

Carlyle, Autobiography, p.244.

‘I dare say you will not shed so many tears at the action of the one [Home’s play Agis] as you did at the reading of the other [Douglas].’ NLS, MS16707 f.93, William Robertson to [Margaret Hepburn], 22 February 1758, London. 114 Carlyle, Autobiography, p.330. 113

100

Polite Sociability: space and social practices

see it which follies has occasion much uneasie debates and strife with contention and abusive writing amongst us O infinite wise powerful good god put a stope to these Events and Strengthen the hands of the other ministers who are endeavouring to hinder these abuses and give them and other young ministers that has not gone into these follies to be the more earnest and careful to discharge there dutie aright.115

Janet’s husband, John Clerk of Penicuik, was a liberal patron of the arts who had been active in the campaign for an Edinburgh theatre in 1730s.116 Such remarks serve as a reminder of the varying degrees to which aspects of polite culture could be rejected or at least deemed problematic even amongst those who belonged to families at the very heart of its promotion. As an individual, Janet retained a strong loyalty to the church of the covenanters; like many others, she was uneasy about some of the new practices of polite sociability, and in particular, the involvement of Moderate church ministers in its promotion. For her, at least as expressed in the most intimate and spiritual context of her religious diary, the notion of a church minister like Home turning playwright ranked above food shortages caused by high grain prices and the losses of and political crises caused by the Seven Years War as signs of society’s incipient decline.117 Manners and Language Just as the polite prioritised a series of social spaces and activities, they privileged a set of manners and behaviours designed to ensure the smooth running of their sociability. In the eighteenth century, ‘manners’ did not simply imply the rules of courtesy. Defined in Johnson’s Dictionary as ‘General way of life; morals; habits’,118 ‘manners’ was an all-embracing concept which encompassed, in the words of Paul Langford, ‘social customs as they reflected the character of distinct cultures’.119 Thus David Hume, in his essay ‘Of National Characters’, acknowledged ‘that each nation has a peculiar set of manners’.120 Through this role of definition, helping to demarcate not just national and temporal NAS, GD18/2098/530, 13 February 1757, Edinburgh. R. A. Houston, Social Change in the Age of Enlightenment: Edinburgh 1660–1760 (Oxford, 1994), p.208. 117 For high grain prices in 1756–7, see A. J. S. Gibson and T. C. Smout, Prices, Food and Wages in Scotland, 1550–1780 (Cambridge, 1995), pp.138–41, figs 4.1–4.4. I am grateful to Dr Philipp Roessner, University of Leipzig, for discussing this with me. For political resignations caused by war with France and the creation of an unstable ministry in late 1756, see Jeremy Black, Parliament and Foreign Policy in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2004), p.94. 118 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1755), vol.2. 119 Paul Langford, ‘British Politeness and the Progress of Western Manners: An EighteenthCentury Enigma’, TransRHS, 6th series, 7 (1997), p.55. 120 Hume, Essays, p.197. Similarly, Voltaire published his history of France under the title 115 116

101

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

social distinctions but those of rank, the concept of ‘manners’ achieved a totemic status. Eighteenth-century Scots liked to think that their manners combined the best of metropolitan politeness with an indigenous practicality against which they contrasted the supposed superficiality of London or French manners. James Boswell, whose passion for London politeness was at times second to none, occasionally lamented the ways in which the daughters of his compatriot the Earl of Kellie reproduced in London ‘the Edinburgh women’s roughness of manners’ or ‘the worst Edinburgh tea-drinking afternoons’ – worst of all, perhaps, ‘the Fife tongue’.121 But in a more compassionate mood even Boswell acknowledged that what Lord Elibank called the ‘plain hameliness’ of the Scots ladies, if inferior to the highest ideals of politeness, was preferable to the ‘kind of character perfectly disguised, a perfect made dish, which is often found, both male and female, in London’.122 That ‘perfect made dish’, Boswell suggested, had an element of dishonesty and falseness about it which was at odds with the more natural goals of the polite. In a similar vein, the historian William Robertson wrote to Peggy Hepburn explaining how the London premiere of their friend John Home’s Agis was delayed for ten days because of the despair into which the leading actress, the famous Mrs Cibber, fell upon treading on her canary. Robertson asked, tongue firmly in his cheek: ‘Are you not ashamed of yourself & your countrywomen who are unacquainted with all these artificial passions, & pretend to think & speak with reason’?123 In contrasting the actress’s over-reaction to the death of her pet bird with the ‘reason’ of Scotswomen like Peggy Hepburn, Robertson was echoing a popular notion that Scotswomen as a group possessed characters safely remote from the excesses of metropolitan manners, disapproval of which was a commonplace amongst visitors to London. Because of the rhetorical utility of such comments on national manners to the promotion of a sense of otherness, and their easy distortion by either fondness or antipathy, they ought not to be taken at face value. But treated cautiously, and alongside more tangible evidence, they can help to reveal something of both the ideals to which individuals aspired and the ways in which polite women behaved in practice. As an all-embracing concept, manners extended to include the ways in which men and women presented themselves through speech. Against enlightened concerns for classification, regulation and conformity, the lack of a standard English spelling and pronunciation was a source of genuine concern amongst sections of British society, and by the end of the period in question, speech was

Essai sur les Moeurs (1756). See Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998), p.6, n.4. 121 Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (first published 1950; reprinted New Haven and London, 1992), pp. 80, 70, 116. 122 Ibid., pp.176–7. 123 NLS, MS16707 f.92, William Robertson to [Margaret Hepburn], 22 February 1758, London. Mrs Cibber was a celebrated actress who belonged to a leading theatrical dynasty. Lesley Wade Soule, ‘Cibber , Susannah Maria (1714–1766)’, ODNB.

102

Polite Sociability: space and social practices

prescribed as never before.124 The self-consciousness with which Scots authors sought to rid their work of ‘Scottisicms’ around this time is well known.125 Most famously, in the summer of 1761, Thomas Sheridan lectured the men and later the ladies of Edinburgh on polite elocution, including, though not limited to, ‘correct’ English pronunciation.126 As he informed his audiences (Peggy Adam, Agnes Elliot’s sisters-in-law and Mally Fletcher possibly amongst them), all dialects other than that of the court had ‘some degree of disgrace annexed to them’. Since ‘court pronunciation’, on the other hand, could be ‘acquired only by conversing with people in polite life’, it acted as ‘a sort of proof that a person has kept good company’.127 Ironically, the very point of Sheridan’s lectures was to spread polite ways of speaking amongst those who had not necessarily enjoyed such ‘good’ company, but the popularity of his lectures attests to the contemporary belief in the importance of ideals of verbal expression. The Scottish elite were not simply trying to learn how to sound English as an act of empty or cynical imitation, but were expressing their interest in an ideal of standardised speech that was to them as much a form of enlightened improvement as any other means of promoting the improvement of manners. As satirised by one pamphleteer: Mr Sheridan, by directing to repeat with proper emphasis, that curious and interesting question, Shall I ride to town to-day? has taught Ireland, and North Britain, and South Britain, Yorkshire and Wales not excepted, the just pronunciation of the English language. And thereby he has done more to promote among all ranks, public spirits, and reformation of manners, than ever was done, shall be done, or can be done, by all the vigour of magistrates, by all the wisdom of legislators, by all the examples of the great, by all the moral philosophy of the schools, by all the doctrines and precepts of religion, or by

Five times as many works on elocution appeared between 1760 and 1800 as did prior to 1760. Lynda Mugglestone, ‘Talking Proper’: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol (Oxford, 1995), p.4. Richard J. Watts, ‘Mythical Strands in the Ideology of Prescriptivism’, in Laura Wright (ed.), The Development of Standard English, 1300–1800: Theories, Descriptions, Conflicts (Cambridge, 2000), p.30, agreed with Mugglestone that the eighteenth century was a particular age of prescriptivism, but emphasised the heritage of this idea. For the Scottish situation, see Charles Jones, A Language Suppressed: The Pronunciation of the Scots Language in the 18th Century (Edinburgh, 1995), ch.1. 125 For instance, Pat Rogers, ‘Boswell and the Scotticism’, in Greg Clingham (ed.), New Light on Boswell: Critical and Historical Essays on the Occasion of the Bicentenary of The Life of Johnson (Cambridge, 1991). 126 Jones, Language Suppressed, pp.7–9; Davis D. McElroy, Scotland’s Age of Improvement. A Survey of Eighteenth-Century Literary Clubs and Societies (Washington, 1969), p.57. Thomas Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution: Together with Two Dissertations on Language; and Some other Tracts Relative to those Subjects (London, 1762) contains a list of around two thirds of those who attended the lectures (the other names having been lost), including ‘Miss Margaret Adams’, ‘Miss Jane Elliot’, ‘Miss Mariame Elliot’ (perhaps a misreading for Marianne?), and ‘Miss ____ Fletcher’. 127 Sheridan, Lectures on Elocution, p.30. 124

103

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

any else, except Tristram Shandy’s six volumes, and the dramatic works of my dearly beloved brother Mr John Home.128

Conformity in vocal expression, he suggested, was viewed by some as every bit as important a criterion of politeness as an acquaintance with the latest literary successes, and was treated by the fashionable as a better tool for improvement in manners than the teachings of the churches and universities. Contemporaries often linked manners and language; Elizabeth Mure, for example, believed women had been ‘undelicat in their conversation and vulgar in their manners’ in the 1730s.129 Similarly, modern scholarship suggests that language mirrored a move towards a greater refinement in manners that occurred over the course of the century. Leah Leneman’s work on divorce cases demonstrated the gradual replacement by ‘standard, anodyne phrases’ of the ‘explicit descriptions of the sexual act’ which early eighteenth-century court witnesses tended to deploy.130 Women did occasionally criticise the behaviour of their contemporaries: in 1741, the young Lady Katherine Gordon was ‘quite plagued’ with her neighbour, who was ‘a great virtuosa & vastly learnd’, but whose wit had ‘a very smutty turn’.131 But for the historian reliant on written sources, speech – or rather, the ways in which women’s speech was represented by themselves and by others on paper – provides perhaps the most effective means of exploring the degree to which women embraced, adapted or rejected polite ideals of behaviour, both generally and in specific contexts. The speech of Lady Milton was represented repeatedly by friends as both strongly Scots and loud. In a short dramatisation of an imagined conversation between her and her husband in 1758, their friend Hary Barclay gave Lord Milton standard English dialogue but portrayed Lady Milton’s speech as strongly vernacular, peppering her sentences with Scots words and flagging up the horror with which she had noticed the changes visited on Barclay since he ‘gaed amang the englishes’.132 Thirteen years earlier, another friend wrote of Lady Milton to her husband, ‘wee both have the same failing of speaking Loud, but I declaire yt I would hear her most submissively for a hour without Contradiction, for she has seen and Kenns more than any of you, and I honour that old Rebeliouse Lesly Spirrit in

A Paper Dropt from Tristram Shandy’s Pocket-Book (Edinburgh, 1762), pp.19–20. Mure, ‘Change of Manners’, p.267. 130 Leah Leneman, Alienated Affections: The Scottish Experience of Divorce and Separation, 1684– 1830 (Edinburgh, 1998), esp. pp.4–5. See also, Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, HJ 36:2 (June 1993), p.399. 131 NRAS234/JacA/C/I/7/116, to Lady George Murray, 28 November [1741]. 132 NLS, MS16655 f.64, Hary Barclay to Milton, 29 November 1758, Heighington. This is cited in full in Chapter 5, p.117. Kames reported that when representatives of the Lords of Justiciary had to speak in the House of Lords concerning the Porteous affair, they were mostly, to varying degrees, unintelligible, but Milton, ‘though no elegant speaker, was well heard, and his meaning comprehended’. Ramsay, Scotland and Scotsmen, vol.2, p.543, n.1. 128 129

104

Polite Sociability: space and social practices

her’.133 Implying an admiration for her refutation of well-mannered or anglicised speech in favour of talking long and loud in Scots, he linked this to her ‘rebellious’ covenanting military heritage, to her worldly experience and her down-to-earth, if forceful, personality. Neither of these men was portraying Lady Milton’s language in this way merely because he wished to create a precise representation of how she spoke in relation to other people; rhyming pairs like ‘room/town’ in her son Andrew’s poetry suggest that despite his English education his pronunciation, too, was far from standard English.134 Rather, comments about Lady Milton indicate an awareness of the potential of vernacular words and impolite speech mechanisms (in this case, loudness) to be used to convey personal attributes like informality or rowdiness. Just as Allan Ramsay had written his more bawdy poems in Scots and his more ‘polite’ poems in English, a refusal to be bound by ‘mannered’ language was often accompanied by more raucous behaviour. Not only was Lady Milton ‘loud’ and talkative, but she was a favourite of colourful characters and the subject of a fair amount of gossip. A friend of her daughter Betty referred to a ‘weakness’ in her character that was certainly not a lack of strength of personality,135 and in 1746 the sixteen-year-old Jean Murray, complaining to her father the Duke of Atholl of Lady Milton’s alleged ill-usage, concluded that she ‘wish[ed] to God she would mend her own behaviour & her Daughter’s before she pretends to blast innocent people’s Reputations’.136 On one occasion a friend, lamenting Lady Milton’s absence, regretted that he could ‘have no riot wt the females of this place’, unlike, he implied, with Lady Milton and her daughters.137 Families, individuals and social groups employed their own social standards: decades earlier, Lady Milton’s mother Lady Forglen was singled out for her loudness in a poem in the collection of the Countess of Panmure.138 Yet Lady Milton was also a lady directress of the Edinburgh assembly and a renowned hostess capable of granting or denying access to some of the most powerful individuals in Scotland. In her language and behaviour, and the way in which others chose to represent them, Lady Milton symbolises the inherent complexity of the relationship between polite ideals and the ways in which they were put into practice. The ‘ease and informality’139 that the polite promoted meant that a degree of elasticity was an intrinsic part of the performance of polite behaviour. Moreover, those who NLS, MS16612 f.50, Gwyn Vaughan to Milton, 15 October 1745, London. Lady Milton’s maternal grandfather had fought for Cromwell in the 1640s, later commanding the covenanting army in favour of Charles II. T. F. Henderson, ‘Leslie, David, first Lord Newark (1601–1682)’, rev. Edward M. Furgol, ODNB. 134 NLS, MS17895, p.18. 135 Carlyle, Autobiography, p.273. 136 NRAS234/JacA/III/3/93, 23 December 1746, Edinburgh. 137 NLS, MS16650 f.162, Maule to Milton, 3 September 1747, Inveraray. 138 NAS, GD45/26/99/85, ‘A dream March 1709’. 139 Paul Langford, ‘The Uses of Eighteenth-Century Politeness’, TransRHS, 6th series, 12 (2002), p.315. 133

105

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

had achieved a certain degree of status were permitted to ignore (particularly in informal or intimate contexts) the conventions which those of lesser status struggled to achieve or maintain. Like her Irish contemporary Letitia Bushe who used words like ‘turdy’ and ‘shit’ to express her independent status as a wealthy single woman,140 Lady Milton was signalling that she had the status, acquired through the extraordinary achievements of her husband and her own practical or political skills, to behave in a more individualistic way than those whose social status rested on their ability to demonstrate refined behaviour at all times. To some extent, these examples are characteristic of the ways in which women’s language was mocked across Britain and throughout the century. Language was gendered, and the linguistic options open to women, Patricia Howell Michaelson has argued, were either ‘disruptive, ungrammatical and unedifying’ or associated with polite informality. Indiscipline in speech suggested wider social or moral indiscipline.141 However, women’s speech was not just represented in this way by third parties. The fact that some of Lady Milton’s contemporaries deliberately chose to represent themselves in a similar light indicates that women were themselves aware of the meanings that could be conveyed through such representation. Agnes Elliot, for instance, had lived outside of Scotland for nearly twenty years when in 1772 she wrote to her predominantly English-raised son describing the ‘language, manner, and address’ of Scots ladies as ‘at first striking’.142 But in another letter to David Hume the same year, she presented herself quite differently, as a ‘Scots wife’, whose ‘truth and sincerity’ Hume should learn to prefer to ‘the pernicious flattery of Les Dames Francais [sic]’.143 As a metropolitan lady, she could describe her native people with an almost anthropological sense of distance, but she was also consciously aware of when to reclaim her Scottish identity. In this instance, it gave her licence to speak her mind in the language of vernacular wisdom and, like the examples employed by Lady Milton’s correspondents cited above, to indicate the informality of a close personal relationship. This example also illustrates the degree to which polite women consciously varied their use of language, like their behaviour, according to context. Their ability to modulate between different types of language to suit the specific situation in which they found themselves and the results they wished to achieve from a particular social encounter is only the most tangible and lasting example of S. J. Connolly, ‘A Woman’s Life in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Case of Letitia Bushe’, HJ 43:2 (2000), pp.438–9. 141 Patricia Howell Michaelson, Speaking Volumes: Women, Reading and Speech in the Age of Austen (Stanford, CA, 2002), esp. p.38. 142 Agnes Murray Kynynmound to Hugh Elliot, Edinburgh, 1772, quoted in Countess of Minto, A Memoir of the Right Honourable Hugh Elliot (Edinburgh, 1868), p. 67. 143 NLS, MS11010 f.160, Agnes Elliot to [David Hume], 12 October 1772, Minto. See also NLS, MS14254 f.10, Isabella Strange to Dr Armstrong, 23 March 1762, ‘I had one toutch of [Sheridan’s lectures] altho it does not appear you know Send a fool to France &c Ald Sparrows are ill to tame.’ 140

106

Polite Sociability: space and social practices

the bi-culturalism that was an integral part of polite femininity in eighteenthcentury Scotland, as women negotiated the various expectations of polite and vernacular roles. This was to some extent dependent on opportunity: it is hardly surprising that a friend described Agnes Elliot as being ‘less a rake than Elsewhere’ at her husband’s Borders estate of Minto,144 where the social spaces and contexts in which she might have indulged in ‘rakish’ activities in London were conspicuously absent. But it was also a matter of understanding the importance of suiting behaviour to context. The vernacular language could also be used to denote a common-sense practicality altogether more subdued and serious. Mary Adam’s often unconsciously phonetic letters give a strong indication of how she may have sounded,145 and the Adams frequently slipped into the vernacular to gain effect when quoting each other. Having encouraged his sisters to learn French, for instance, Robert Adam jokingly suggested he might start them on Italian too, but rejected the idea: ‘besides I think I hear my Mother Say; Stupid Calland what does he filling his paper with these barbarous tongues, its right fair if he can write Sence in his Ain Mither tongue’.146 Here, the vernacular signified his mother’s down-to-earth common sense, as opposed to the frivolity of those obsessed with fashion and all things foreign. This use of language also symbolised intimacy, even across the geographical distance to which his family was subject, by mimicking personal and verbal as opposed to formal written (i.e., English) communication. Mary Adam’s portrait by Allan Ramsay depicted her as a solemn, black-clad widow, suggesting a serious, pious woman.147 But whilst her children frequently referred to her piety, they also openly used robust language in letters which would be sure to pass her eyes; in a rant against Betty Fletcher, Lady Milton was referred to as ‘the bitch her mother’,148 whilst a story about the Prince of Borghese’s daughter’s intrigue with the Maltese ambassador ended with the Prince pacing the room, ‘counting his beads and crying oh what a whore my Daughter is & indeed he might safely have joind his wife too’.149 In the mid-eighteenth century, using or being addressed by such language was in no way incompatible with a polite identity. Amongst the more secure elites it may not have raised a proverbial eyebrow, although a young woman on the cusp of polite society like Nelly Adam may have been ill-advised to follow her brother James’s instructions to ‘let Mr Fairholm understand when you see NLS Acc.12686/52, Lady Cathcart to Lady Mayne, 27 September 1767, Shaw Park. E.g., NAS, GD18/4742/1, Mary Adam to Peggy Adam, 7 July 1753, Moffat. For women’s letters as a source for changing speech modes in a slightly earlier period, see Anneli Meurman-Solin, ‘Change from Above or from Below? Mapping the Loci of Linguistic Change in the History of Scottish English’, in Laura Wright (ed.), The Development of Standard English, 1300–1800: Theories, Descriptions, Conflicts (Cambridge, 2000), esp. pp.164–5. 146 NAS, GD18/4799, to Betty Adam, 14 February 1756, Rome. 147 Alastair Smart, Allan Ramsay: 1713–1784 (Edinburgh, 1992), plate 19 and p.115. 148 NAS, GD18/4745, Robert Adam to Bess and Meg, 21 September 1754, Inveraray (quoted in full, Chapter 5, pp.120-1). 149 NAS, GD18/4902, James to Betty Adam, 11 July 1761, Rome. 144 145

107

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

him, that his friend Mr Dunlop … is a Cold mercantile son of a Bitch’.150 But such passages suggest that for the Adams, using such language was a means of relishing their private informality as a sign of intimacy in the context of their larger programme of socially ambitious refinement. The popularisation of polite social practices fundamentally changed the meaning of femininity for elite Scots in the eighteenth century. The belief that women’s conversation was a force of moral improvement may have belonged more to the realm of ideas than that of reality, but it nevertheless helped to create a context in which elite women’s presence was deemed essential to the workings of polite sociability. The first three quarters of the eighteenth century witnessed the remarkable development of a culture which encouraged mixed-gender socialising in public (if regulated) spaces. By the later eighteenth century, parents were more likely to limit their daughters’ participation in public social activities like assemblies and balls, and by the early nineteenth century the idea of public social spaces like assembly rooms had become somewhat tarnished, with private social gatherings in airy New Town drawing rooms instead the most desirable form of Edinburgh sociability. For the period with which this book is concerned, however, acquaintance with the series of social spaces which prioritised mixed-gender sociability in a public, if regulated, setting, and an understanding of how to behave appropriately in such contexts, became synonymous with polite femininity. As a result of the practice examined in Chapter 2 of sending girls to town for a year or two at adolescence and again some years later to find a marriage partner most women experienced something of the world of urban public sociability at a crucially transformative point in their lives. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that polite sociability, in Scotland as elsewhere, helped to create a new kind of young women’s culture, based around the shared experience of these activities and social spaces and the hopes and anxieties with which they were associated. For older women, these spaces created the possibility of a public role bringing formally recognised agency and authority. For a much wider population of women (many of whose participation in urban sociability may have been a fairly rare event for years at a time) the sense that these spaces created of being a part of a public and of being conversant in its unwritten codes of behaviour became absolutely vital to the construction of polite femininity. Moreover, through participating in these activities, elite women were partaking in a series of communal rituals experienced by others, unseen but subconsciously acknowledged, in other towns and cities across Britain. This enabled them to become part of a national public defined by its access to the places and spaces of polite sociability. As the example of Home’s Douglas demonstrates, women’s involvement in these activities could create channels through which they could participate in other realms of the

150

NAS, GD18/4743, 19 November 1754, Rotterdam.

108

Polite Sociability: space and social practices

public sphere. The next chapter will examine the intersection between polite sociability and the realm of the public in greater detail.

109

5

Politics and Influence ‘Troubled about the Publick’? In 1756, Margaret Steuart Calderwood wrote from Brussels of the distress felt over public affairs by a Jacobite acquaintance, 'Lord Bellow', an Irish peer. ‘I tell him I wish I may never have the toothack till I be troubled about the publick,’1 she reported. The previous two chapters investigated women’s engagement with the worlds of print culture and polite society. For Habermas, these formed the ‘literary’ public sphere, differentiated from the ‘political public sphere’ by the ‘factual and legal’ exclusion of women and dependants.2 Margaret Calderwood’s protestations of lack of interest in ‘the publick’ might appear to support this exclusion, but the rest of her journal, allied to other activities, suggests a more complex picture. She continued that she could nevertheless ‘speak as much jacobitism as ['Bellow'] pleases’, whilst her correspondence elsewhere exposes her determinedly attempting to manage a campaign for her husband’s election to parliament. As the next chapter will demonstrate, she travelled abroad with a conscious sense of national identity. She may have been less interested than her friend in the affairs of state and high politics, and she may, like her Irish contemporary Letitia Bushe, have viewed such issues as simply unworthy of her attention.3 Despite her claims, however, aspects of the ‘publick’ infused her existence. As Lawrence Klein has demonstrated, contemporaries used ‘public’ to mean much more than just ‘pertaining to the state’;4 indeed, it often referred to the arenas of sociability examined in the last chapter. Not surprisingly, Habermas’s statement has been the starting point for much debate and analysis which has 1 Margaret Steuart Calderwood, ‘A Journey in England, Holland, and the Low Countries’ (1756), in Coltness Collections, 1608–1840, Maitland Club (Edinburgh 1842), p.266. This was perhaps John Baron Bellew of Duleek, who died in Lille in 1770. George E. Cockayne, The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, Extant, Extinct or Dormant, vol.2 (London, 1912). 2 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA, 1989; first published Darmstadt and Neuwied, 1962), p.56. 3 S. J. Connolly, ‘A Woman’s Life in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Case of Letitia Bushe’, HJ, 43:2 (2000), p.451. 4 Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century: Some Questions about Evidence and Analytic Procedure’, ECS 29:1 (1995), p.104.

110

politics and influence

sought to demonstrate that women’s de facto exclusion from offices of state did not expand to exclude women from any involvement in public concerns,5 aspects of which permeated society.6 Amanda Vickery, citing women’s multiple uses of the word ‘publick’, has argued that although women ‘were obviously severely disabled when it came to institutional power, they did not lack access to the public sphere, as they understood it’.7 How, then, did elite women understand ‘the public sphere’ and their relation thereto? Hilda L. Smith, arguing for ‘a broader and more inclusive understanding’ of politics amongst seventeenthcentury women than exists today, suggested that ‘as with others of their era, they would have thought more about obligations, less about privileges, and little about rights when discussing politics’.8 Whilst the early modern period witnessed the increasing exclusion of women from rights to office or civic duties,9 Jane Rendall has pointed out that a focus on rights ‘has meant the obscuring of women’s broader political culture’.10 Recent scholarship has examined women’s involvement in various public arenas beyond those of literature and sociability examined in previous chapters. At the local level, urban historians have begun to investigate the ways in which middle-rank women were influencing aspects of urban government,11 whilst women’s relationship to the nation in later eighteenth-century Britain has been explored by Linda Colley and Kathleen Wilson.12 In recent years, important new research has begun to reintegrate Scotswomen into some of the most important and contested political episodes in Scottish history, including the controversies surrounding the 1707 Union.13 Most relevant to this book, however, is the work of Elaine See, for instance, Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Clíona Ó Gallchoir and Penny Warburton (eds), Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830 (Cambridge, 2001); Carole Pateman, ‘Conclusion: Women’s Writing, Women’s Standing’, in Hilda L. Smith (ed.), Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition (Cambridge, 1998), p.370. 6 Scholars of Thomas Turner’s diary have been struck by the absence of politics, but Naomi Tadmor argued that this was because the presence of politics was so all-permeating. Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship and Patronage (Cambridge, 2001), p.232. 7 Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, HJ 36:2 (1993), p.412. 8 ‘Introduction: Women, Intellect and Politics: Their Intersection in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Smith (ed.), Women Writers, p.2. 9 Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720 (Oxford, 1998), pp.49–58. 10 Quoted in Amanda Vickery, ‘Introduction’ to Vickery (ed.), Women, Privilege, and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present (Stanford, 2001), p.2. 11 E.g., Rosemary Sweet and Penelope Lane (eds), Women and Urban Life in EighteenthCentury England: On the Town (Aldershot, 2003). 12 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London, 1992); Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York, 2003). Wilson also covers aspects of women’s political involvement in Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995). 13 Most importantly, Rosalind Carr, ‘“I will now think of discharging this to my Lady 5

111

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

Chalus, who in emphasising the unexceptional nature of elite women’s involvement in electoral politics14 argued for the reintegration of women into the political life of the elite through a focus on ‘the personal, familial, and social aspects of politics’.15 It is with this connection between the world of polite sociability, personal or familial loyalties or obligations, and aspects of the ‘political’ in its broadest sense that this chapter is concerned.16 It starts off by investigating the ways in which family expectations and local obligations created a climate in which women’s involvement in patronage was expected. It considers the significance of women’s social networks to female influence in public life, and in electoral politics in particular. Next, it examines attitudes towards female involvement in the 1745–6 Jacobite rising as a counter-example highlighting the boundaries of ‘acceptable’ political activity amongst polite women. It ends by considering the potential of the church to act as another channel legitimising women’s involvement in the public.

Duchess”: Female Correspondence and Scottish Political History: A Case Study of the 1707 Union’. Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques (forthcoming) I am grateful to the author for permitting me to cite this unpublished paper. See also Karl von den Steinen, ‘In Search of the Antecedents of Women’s Political Activism in Early Eighteenth-Century Scotland: the Daughters of Anne, Duchess of Hamilton’, in Elizabeth Ewan and Maureen M. Meikle (eds), Women in Scotland c.1100–c.1750 (East Linton, 1999). For female Jacobites, see Maggie Craig, Damn’ Rebel Bitches: The Women of the ’45 (Edinburgh, 1997); Maggie Craig, ‘The Fair Sex Turns Ugly: Female Involvement in the Jacobite Rising of 1745’, in Yvonne Galloway Brown and Rona Ferguson (eds), Twisted Sisters: Women, Crime and Deviance in Scotland Since 1400 (East Linton, 2002). More generally, see Sue Innes and Jane Rendall, ‘Women, Gender and Politics’, in Lynn Abrams, Eleanor Gordon, Deborah Simonton and Eileen Janes Yeo (eds), Gender in Scottish History since 1700 (Edinburgh, 2006). 14 Elaine Chalus, Elite Women in English Political Life, c.1754–1790 (Oxford, 2005); Elaine Chalus, ‘“That Epidemical Madness”: Women and Electoral Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds), Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities (London and New York, 1997); Elaine Chalus, ‘“My Minerva at my Elbow”: The Political Roles of Women in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Stephen Taylor, Richard Connors and Clyve Jones (eds), Hanoverian Britain and Empire (Woodbridge, 1998); Elaine Chalus, ‘Elite Women, Social Politics, and the Political World of Late Eighteenth-Century England’, HJ 43:3 (2000); Elaine Chalus, ‘“To Serve My Friends”: Women and Political Patronage in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Vickery (ed.), Women, Privilege, and Power; Elaine Chalus and Fiona Montgomery, ‘Women and Politics’, in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds), Women’s History: Britain, 1700–1850. An Introduction (London and New York, 2005). For other recent relevant work on eighteenth-century women in politics, see Ingrid H. Tague, Women of Quality: Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690–1760 (Woodbridge, 2002), ch.7; Philip Hicks, ‘The Roman Matron in Britain: Female Political Influence and Republican Response, ca. 1750–1800’, Journal of Modern History 77 (March 2005). 15 Chalus, Elite Women, p.5. She emphasised the need to understand the social arena as political and not just focus on where women ‘made a difference’. Ibid, p.78. 16 This is touched upon in Margaret Sankey and Daniel Szechi, ‘Elite Culture and the Decline of Scottish Jacobitism 1716–1745’, P&P 173 (2001), pp.90–128.

112

politics and influence

‘Too weak for such a load of cares’? Family Responsibilities, Patronage and Petitioning At the time of Eleanor Elliot’s marriage in 1737, her brother Gilbert, later third baronet of Minto, presented her with a poem which set out a conventional narrative of the relationship between husband as patriot, wife as domestic comforter, and the outside world of ‘State’ and ‘business’: ’Tis Modesty alone your Sex endears, ’Tis Modesty alone mankind revers, Nature first plac’d you in a private sphere Womens grand business is domestick care; There exercise the virtuous talents givn And live contented wt the boon of Heavn, But chiefly meddle not wt State affairs Woman’s too weak for such a load of cares. That be your Husbands task – the female mind Was ne’er for business or for toil design’d ’Tis his the world tempestuous waves to prove ’Tis yours a softer humbler task – to love ’Tis his to act, ’tis yours alone to please And the firm Patriot from his cares release, Sooth every pain, & every toil allay Seldom advise, & never disobey.17

The poem suggested that the change of status Eleanor was undergoing was fraught with temptations and dangers against which she needed to be advised and her expected role defined. Its message is clear: as the wife of a Member of Parliament she was to leave the business of politics and patriotic endeavour to her husband, whilst providing a loving, domestic refuge from his worldly concerns. Subordinate to her husband’s orders, she was permitted occasional rights to advise him, but – vitally – not to ‘meddle’ (a term loaded with connotations of incompetence, intrusion and unsuitability) in high politics. In its restrictive prescription, the poem conformed to contemporary norms.18 But, supporting Hilda Smith’s proposition that although women’s political pres-

NLS, MS12816, ‘Poetry, Book No.1’, ff.9–10, ‘To Mis Helenor Elliot upon Her Marriage, wt. John Rutherford Esqr.’ (1737) (extract). She married John Rutherford of Edgerston, who was, according to a note on the MS, MP for Roxburghshire, 1734–41. George Francis Stewart Elliot, The Border Elliots and the Family of Minto (Edinburgh, 1897), p.350. 18 Inspired by female factionalism in 1711, Addision argued in The Spectator that female virtues were domestic, but if they desired, women could show ‘their Zeal for the Publick’ by healing internecine conflicts like the Sabine women. Quoted in Hicks, ‘Roman Matron’, p.43. 17

113

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

ence was ‘clear, widespread, and real’, it was the construction of language that denied ‘both the reality and the significance of their standing’, the picture presented here cannot but have been at variance with Gilbert’s own experience.19 The notion that women were not designed for business or toil ignores the many practical concerns in which women of all ranks were daily involved, from those working in the fields to those overseeing them, and from those running small businesses in the towns to those whose purchases from such outlets were part of a household management role which could demand highly developed organisational skills. Gilbert’s own mother was an efficient, practical woman, who, as has been seen, took an avid interest in the newspapers.20 This, ‘the conflict between the ideal and the real’, is for Elaine Chalus, ‘the essential paradox that besets eighteenth-century women’s political involvement’.21 Conduct manuals, as well as warning against interference in the public, reminded women of their duty to contribute towards their husband’s family’s interests.22 The concept of the family as private is, as Sylvana Tomaselli has pointed out, not only inaccurate, but distorts any attempt to understand the roles which women have played in a number of realms.23 Family and politics were intertwined in a society in which power and influence were mediated through a patronage system that sustained the social hierarchy through the maintenance of vertical social bonds, and to which family connections were of primary importance.24 This ensured that even the most domestic of environments was thoroughly infused with the issues of the wider world. Whether Gilbert was consciously aware of it, his sister was inextricably bound up in her family’s public role, at this time dominated by their father’s position on the Bench as Lord Minto. Nelly Rutherford left Scotland for America in 1744,25 but returned after the death of her husband at Ticonderoga in 1758, and by Smith, ‘Introduction: Women, Intellect and Politics’, p.9. See also Klein, ‘Gender and the Public/Private Distinction’, p.102. 20 See Chapter 3, pp.61–2. 21 Chalus, Elite Women, p.22. 22 Ibid., p.25. The conflicting arguments about women’s political roles could be used by women in different ways, Caroline Lennox using conventional rhetoric as an excuse to limit political involvement, whilst her sister Emily used arguments about wifely duty to promote her involvement. Ibid, p.12. 23 Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘The Most Public Sphere of All: The Family’, in Eger et al. (eds), Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, p.239. 24 Chalus noted that the study of patronage is currently out of vogue, ‘“To Serve My Friends”’, p.61. For an overview of its workings, see Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 (London, 1969), pp.44–51; with reference to eighteenth-century Scotland, Alexander Murdoch, The People Above: Politics and Administration in Mid-EighteenthCentury Scotland (Edinburgh, 1980); John Stuart Shaw, The Management of Scottish Society: Power, Nobles, Lawyers, Edinburgh Agents and English Influences (Edinburgh, 1983); Ronald M. Sunter, Patronage and Politics in Scotland, 1707–1832 (Edinburgh, 1986). For the suitability of women to patronage roles, see Chalus, Elite Women, pp.111–12. 25 NLS, MS11003 ff.11, 13, John Rutherford to Lord Minto, document their departure in September 1744. Rutherford had gone to Albany in 1742. Ibid., ff.5–6, to Lord Minto. In 1754, Nelly appears to have been in New York, MS11005 f.82, John Rutherford to Minto. 19

114

politics and influence

1760 was complaining of the petitions and solicitations which were an unavoidable part of life for the women of political families: ‘I never was in Scotland but I had Sume thing of this sort to Plague me and make me glad to live it and affraid to return.’26 No-one (not even the brother who had presented her with the above-quoted paean to female domesticity) would have thought it anything other than her duty to bear up to this family responsibility which was an essential part of the role of polite womanhood. The wives, sisters and daughters of men in powerful positions were the recipients of regular petitions and patronage requests, binding them into the web of patronage and thus into both the power and the responsibility which were integral to landed status. As Frances Steuart Denham noted of her attempts to petition the Earl of Bute through his wife, ‘she allwise told me that my lord never Allowd Her to Medle in busness, however it was natural for me to hope that some how or other she might influence Him in favour of me’.27 Whatever women claimed about their lack of involvement in their husbands’ public affairs, they were expected to use the influence which they ‘naturally’ held over the men around them to solicit for petitioners jobs, pensions, political favours, or mercy from persecution.28 Post-Union Scotland was governed by a system of management. The influence wielded by Lord Milton over so many areas of Scottish administration and government in the 1740s and ’50s meant the women of the Fletcher family were frequently petitioned as ‘brokers’ by individuals or their representatives seeking posts, interest, money or contacts in the many areas of Scottish life in which Milton had an influence, from burgh government, the church and universities to the customs service and linen industry.29 Sometimes petitions would appeal for help in other areas, in the hope that their status could carry weight. David Fletcher, distantly related to the Fletchers of Saltoun, travelled to Bengal as a merchant, was unable to find any business, and was forced to join the East India Company’s military service. In December 1763, he wrote to Mally Fletcher, begging her, in a letter tinged with real desperation, to get him a role in the Company’s civil service. He stressed her responsibility in trying to get this post for him in terms that could not be doubted: ‘as my only hope is in you, for heaven’s sake do not now draw in your hand, and let me perish, but still be a Fletcher and boldly conduct me through’.30 Despite her inability NLS, MS11008 f.109, to Gilbert Elliot, 23 October 1760, Edinburgh. EUL, MS E2002.28, ‘Frances Steuart – Widow – Melencholy Title’ (unpublished memoir, Coltness, 1881). 28 Chalus, Elite Women, p.134. She refers to the ‘5 p’s’: ‘place, pension, preferment, parliament, and peerage’. Ibid., p.113. 29 For Milton, see Murdoch, People Above, esp. p.12; Shaw, Management of Scottish Society. For the limitations even Milton’s influence experienced with getting appointments for Scottish posts through the system in London, see Murdoch, People Above, p.9. He quoted a letter from Andrew Fletcher to his father in 1754, lamenting ‘many of our countrymen imagine that it only costs their friends a word to provide for them’. For women as ‘brokers’ see, Chalus, Elite Women, pp.135–45. 30 NLS, MS16524 ff.118–19, from ‘the camp at Gopalpore in the Kingdom of Bengall’. 26 27

115

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

to serve her country in parliament or in trade or with arms, Mally could still ‘be a Fletcher’ and take an active part (for to ‘boldly conduct’ is active indeed) in the welfare of her kinsman, and by extension her country, through the influence she could wield in her own family. Communicating through correspondence, women had a relationship with the patronage system that defies the misguided categorisation of eighteenth-century women’s letters as ‘private’.31 Had Mally wished to act upon this letter, she would have had to use her status as Milton’s daughter to influence the individual she judged most likely to be able to grant her request. This demanded both an understanding of the workings of the patronage system and an up-to-date awareness of who held influence in which area.32 Except in very rare circumstances, it was almost always a man who determined the final outcome of any patronage request, yet whole chains of female networks could be employed in reaching that point. Status and ‘connexion’ were more important factors than gender in determining the success of a petition, and on the whole, women’s patronage requests were no different from men’s.33 Women’s supposedly ‘softer’ qualities, however, rendered them particularly adept at personal influence. Elizabeth Halkett wrote of her grandmother that: Such was Lady Miltons Address that success seldom failed to be the Effect of her Attempts, to gain points in which other means had been used in vain. Few could more Skillfully employ those talents which are best Calculated to win the assent. & tho Lady Milton seldom interferd in Political Manoeuvres her Address Often prevaild over Obstacles which others of sound judgement believed to be insurmountable34

Despite the necessary caveat proclaiming the infrequency of Lady Milton’s political ‘interference’, the passage suggests that Lady Milton’s personality was ideally suited to her position as a political wife, her ability to exert influence where other means had failed giving her a unique role in the family’s public life, of which Hary Barclay, a friend of the family and never one to write a dull letter, was clearly aware. When he wanted Milton’s help in clearing his This letter, and another to Mary Hepburn in which he refers to her as his ‘Aunt’, along with Milton’s letters of recommendation to the East India Company, MS16724 ff.102, 103 and 16726 f.88 (1762), suggest he was close to Milton’s family, despite their nearest common ancestor being Milton’s great-great-grandfather, who died in 1613 (MS17858 f.18, genealogical notes). 31 Sarah Richardson, ‘“Well-neighboured Houses”: the Political Networks of Elite Women, 1780–1860’, in Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (eds), Women in British Politics, 1760– 1860: The Power of the Petticoat (Basingstoke, 2000), p.58. Tague, Women of Quality, p.197: ‘Although influence was personal, it was not private.’ 32 Chalus, Elite Women, p.114. 33 Ibid., p.116. 34 EUL MS La III 364, Elizabeth Halkett, ‘Memoir of the Fletchers of Saltoun’ (written some time before 1785), p.51.

116

politics and influence

debts, he presented a dramatised scene of how he imagined his letter would be received at Brunstane, portraying first Milton’s reluctance to help Barclay and then Lady Milton’s intervention on behalf of her friend: Supposing my self accidentally at your Elbow when this comes to hand I think I overhear the following Soliloquy. _ What the Devil can possess this Hary Barclay, That he presents me at such a rate with letters. _ He will not [take] the Pett I find, At my giving him no answer, I must therefore try, what ane Illnatured One can do, _ But, as I never yet said any thing of that kind to him, He may not take it in earnest. _ John, _ Send Willie Jackson to me immediatly. _ Enter Willlie. Here Sir Take that letter, and write such ane answer to it as may at once Put ane end to a troublesome correspondence. Dear Toddie (Says Lady Milton from the Couch) What can ail you at poor Hary Barclay – He was aye so willing to do what you bade him, that I never thought He (by any body) coud have anger’d you.___It seems he must be muckle changed since he gade amang the Englishes, – Hegh Sirs, Wha wad a thought it, __But sit down, My Toddie, to your dinner, and fash your head nae mare about it. These broth are damnably Hot, _ I must try the fish till they cooll. _ O Toddie I winna suffer you to eat fish, I’le blaw the broth with my ain mouth. In the mean time, The Passion coolls was well as the Broth, and the letter is pulld out again, to be revised35

Milton, as the authority figure to whom the letter was addressed, was portrayed as initially unsympathetic towards Barclay’s pleas for help. But it was the intervention of Lady Milton, lounging on her couch yet not removed from the scene of action, cooling her husband’s resentment as she did his broth, which enabled her friend’s case to be reconsidered. Delivered not insignificantly in the vernacular, creating a kind of moral superiority through supposedly ‘natural’, unmannered common sense,36 her intervention used sympathetic language and deeds to influence her husband’s mood. Without actually telling him what to do, Lady Milton changed his mind through a mild-mannered agreement with his reactions, supporting her granddaughter’s claim that she ‘Allay’d with an Art & address peculiar to herself’ ‘The heat of temper peculiar to the family’.37 Barclay’s dramatisation emphasised the role of the conjugal relationship as the starting point for the wider world of interest networks and bonds of loyalty which formed the very basis of eighteenth-century society. Whilst the criticisms of ‘petticoat’ influence which intensified with the onset of radical politics from the 1760s tended to portray this kind of political influ-

NLS, MS16655 f.64, Hary Barclay to Milton, 29 November 1758, Heighington. Jackson was Secretary to the Post Office in Scotland. 36 See Chapter 4, pp.104–7. 37 Halkett, ‘Memoir’, p.50. 35

117

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

ence as scandalously sexualised, in reality those who played this role tended to be middle-aged wives like Lady Milton.38 ‘Friends behind the curtain’: Social Connections and Influence The townhouse of busy, political families like the Fletchers was an extension of the world of work, crammed with house guests and visitors, petitioners and business contacts, causing one of Milton’s sons to write to him regretting the disruptive influence of ‘those who are continually crowding about a person of your station’.39 Far from isolating women from the public, this conflation of business with the sociability in which their presence was expected encapsulated them within it. As Hary Barclay’s letter shows, women’s integration into networks of sociability meant that the women of political families were recognised as exercising a considerable degree of influence through their friendships and power to make introductions. Elizabeth Halkett went so far as to claim ‘that Drs Robertson Ferguson Smith Wilkie and John and David Humes owed their Connections with the Duke of Argyle & Lord Milton & their Introduction to fortune and fame’ to her mother Betty Fletcher.40 Halkett’s ‘Memoir’ abounds with hyperbole and inaccuracies, and it is unlikely that these men, part of a society in which interconnectedness was almost universal, would not have come across other means of gaining the attention of such high-profile political figures. Indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that Robertson at least was introduced to Milton through more standard procedures: in 1755 Robertson asked Gilbert Elliot to write to Milton recommending him as a minister in Edinburgh,41 since he had ‘very small connexion’ with Milton and Argyll, in whose hands the decision lay.42 Yet, like the letter recommending Lord Kames to the Duke of Atholl in 1764, which noted his acquaintance with Amelie Murray and her husband, it demonstrates a contemporary assumption that the cultivation of female acquaintance could be a valid route to preferment.43 Betty Fletcher also apparently played a conciliatory role between her father and some of the literati after Milton lost his patience with David Hume over Chalus, Elite Women, pp.136–8. NLS, MS16515 f.129, Francis Fletcher to Milton in Edinburgh, 4 January 1749, Pencaitland. He was at that time a student. 40 Halkett, ‘Memoir’, pp.104–5. Halkett never knew her mother, although as her uncles, who were her guardians, kept in touch with John Home and Adam Ferguson, she may well have been acquainted with the literati and heard tales about her mother from them. 41 NLS, MS16692 f.1, Gilbert Elliot to Milton in Inveraray, October 1755. 42 NLS, MS16693 f.95, William Robertson to Gilbert Elliot, 15 October 1755, Gladsmuir. 43 NRAS234/49/3/116, Deskfoord to Atholl, 10 March 1764, Cullen House. For instances of elite women making politically decisive introductions, see Chalus and Montgomery, ‘Women and Politics’, p.227. 38 39

118

politics and influence

the conflicts surrounding John Home’s play Douglas.44 Alexander Carlyle recorded that ‘Milton soon repented, and David would have returned, but Betty Fletcher opposed it, rather foregoing his company at their house than suffer him to degrade himself … Had it not been for Ferguson and her, John Home and I would have been expelled also.’45 Describing Betty as ‘a friend behind the curtain’, Carlyle suggested that through the social role granted women by polite society she had the power to make or break relationships between these ambitious young men and her influential father, who would take his daughter out in his coach with him to settle his mind when perturbed.46 As Elizabeth Halkett noted, the friendship of the Fletcher women could bring introductions not just to Milton, but to the third Duke of Argyll, the most influential individual in mid-eighteenth-century Scotland. Argyll had long since separated from his wife, and Mrs Williams, the mother of his children, was never deemed a suitable public consort.47 Instead, Lady Milton acted as hostess during his visit to his ducal seat at Inveraray each September, this organisational and social role meaning that she, more than her husband, was indispensable on these visits.48 Although this was an essentially private role, the company that gathered at Inveraray was formed of the highest ranks from Scotland, Britain and beyond. Her brisk and cheerful personality49 won over guests like Signor Gastaldi, the Genoese Minister to London, who described himself as ‘in love with Lady Milton … the politest finest Lady ever he met with’,50 whilst the Customs Secretary Corbyn Morris wrote in 1752 to thank her for her ‘obliging Manner of extending his Grace’s condescending Civilities to me at Inveraray’.51 Morris had been appointed by Argyll’s then adversary, Henry Pelham, and this See Chapter 4, p.100. The Autobiography of Dr. Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk, 1722–1805, ed. John Hill Burton, with a new Introduction by Richard B. Sher (Bristol, 1990; reprint of 1910 edn), p.346. 46 Ibid., p.345. 47 See Alexander Murdoch, ‘Campbell, Archibald, third duke of Argyll (1682–1761)’, ODNB. 48 After many months of planning and organisation, Argyll first arrived in Inveraray, with a small party including Lord and Lady Milton, in August 1744. Although the next year the Duke and Milton only got as far as Roseneath before turning back upon news of the Young Pretender’s landing at Moidart, Lady Milton stayed on, continuing arrangements for the new castle. These annual ‘campaigns,’ which by the 1750s included the younger Fletcher daughters, became something of an annual expedition from 1747 until the Duke’s death. Ian G. Lindsay and Mary Cosh, Inveraray and the Dukes of Argyll (Edinburgh, 1973), pp.4, 9–18, 48. For more on sociability at Inveraray, see Stana Nenadic, Lairds and Luxury: The Highland Gentry in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 2007), pp.188–90. 49 Her grand-daughter described her ability to diffuse cheerfulness, adding that ‘Almost on any Occasion her Gaity was Inviolable, & no one left the Company without being Satisfied with every Attention vanity itself coud expect,’ Halkett, ‘Memoir’, pp.51–2. 50 NLS, MS16679 f.167, Alexander Lind to Milton, 22 September 1752, Gorgie. 51 NLS, MS16679 f.239, Corbyn Morris to Lady Milton, 26 September 1752, Edinburgh. Morris, an Englishman, had been appointed secretary of the customs and salt duty in Scotland the previous year, and sent there ‘to inquire into the state of the customs and the practices of smugglers’. Alexander Murdoch, ‘Morris, Corbyn (1710–1779)’, ODNB. 44 45

119

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

was his first opportunity to win the favour of the Argathelian faction. From the tone of his letter sending Lady Milton the printed dispatch concerning the change of the calendar and the loss of eleven days in September that year, he appears to have succeeded, at least as far as the Fletcher women were concerned. In joking, ‘I imagine miss Betty Fletcher will observe, [this] is a misfortune to such Gentlemen, as myselfe, in hurrying me on in one night eleven days older’,52 he attempted to seal with informality what could be an important political relationship. The Fletcher women occupied a strategic position, able to grant or deny access to the Duke. Alexander Carlyle wrote tellingly that the playwright John Home was taken ‘by Lord Milton’s family to Inveraray, to be introduced to the Duke’ in 1756.53 Carlyle, who acknowledged that he had first entered the Fletchers’ circles through an acquaintance with Margaret, Milton’s eldest daughter, and who described Betty, the youngest, as a ‘much valued’ friend,54 first met the Duke at the Fletchers’ house at Brunstane in 1757. On this occasion, Mally Fletcher tried to persuade him that his ‘bread was baken’ by the Duke’s mistaking him for a favourite cousin, the Earl of Home.55 Mally was well aware of the importance of this connection for her friend, and Carlyle’s consciousness of the Fletcher women’s role in this is evident in his report of his visit to Inveraray the following year, during which, he recorded, ‘The ladies told me that I had pleased his Grace, which gratified me not a little, as without him no preferment could be obtained in Scotland.’56 Whilst other channels of influence were open to men, their route to success could be eased considerably by female friends who, through family connections and polite social practices, were able to introduce them to the right people, and who understood the importance of their role in the process. Such influence, however, could cause envy amongst those who failed to gain the favours they desired. In 1754, Robert Adam was at Inveraray, working on the Duke’s new castle and hoping in vain for patronage and introductions to help him on his way to Rome.57 He suggested the position that the Fletcher women enjoyed at Inveraray caused them to put on airs above their station: Miss Betty Fletcher told me to day that Her great Taste was for Painting, that she envy’d my Happiness and wish’d she cou’d accompany me. This from the Stinkingest of Mortals I look’d on as no small compliment till next disdainful look from her Nizzety Gabb, wipt entirely away all impression of it. Mally with as much pride as can dwell in one Carcasse, As much overbearing as, as plague

NLS MS16679 f.239, 26 September 1752, Edinburgh. Carlyle, Autobiography, p.325. 54 Ibid., p.271. 55 Ibid., pp.344–5. 56 Ibid., p.400. 57 John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle in Edinburgh and Rome (London, 1962), p.107. 52 53

120

politics and influence

on’t … as the Bitch her Mother, I nevertheless give the preference, on account of Her speaking what vice she utters, with greater virulence.58

Though he was often colourful in his language, this is one of Adam’s more virulent surviving outbursts. From the ending of his letter it may be that some romantic overtures to Betty Fletcher had been spurned, but the vehemence of his comments about her sister and mother suggest there to have been some underlying animosity, which may well have been widespread amongst those who were less than captivated by the Fletcher women. Alexander Carlyle did not expand on his hint that ‘there was much weakness and intrigue in the mother and some other parts of the family’,59 although Elizabeth Halkett’s apparent need to use her ‘Memoir’ to whitewash the reputation of her aunt Mally Fletcher, whose simplicity of heart, she argued, had ‘betrayed her into the Artifices of designing persons about her’,60 highlights the potential for the abuse of friendship. That Lady Milton was ‘So much taken up with Highnesses & Excellences’ may have been a matter for congratulatory teasing from an old friend,61 but for those who failed to gain from it, this kind of social elevation, and the powers of influence gathered en route, could throw into relief their own impotence. Family Political Interest In the 1770s, the Elliot family used a very simple cipher when they discussed politics in their correspondence, in which they supplanted the names of politicians with some of the most frequently used ladies’ names.62 This they could do because women did not hold offices of state, nor make the sorts of decisions which were being made by the fictional Peggy (the Duke of Cumberland) or Agnes (Lord North). Yet it was a real Agnes, the wife of Gilbert Elliot, third baronet, by this time a prominent Member of Parliament, who was using this code to communicate to her son news from the highest level of British politics. Despite being denied access to formal government posts, the lives of women in political families were not remote or disconnected from the world of party politics. Earlier on, when Gilbert had only recently arrived in London and his family remained at home in Scotland, he used another code, this time based on clothing (‘which’, he remarked ironically, ‘like a right woman you are anxious about’), to communicate with his wife on government affairs and his hopes of getting a post in the ministry.63 Whilst it is hardly surprising that

58 59 60 61 62 63

NAS, GD18/4745, to Bess and Meg Adam, 21 September 1754, Inveraray. Carlyle, Autobiography, p.273. Halkett, ‘Memoir’, pp.100–1. NLS, MS16637 f.279, Charles Stewart to Milton, 2 March 1745/6, London. NLS, MS12952 e.g., f.46, Agnes Elliot to Hugh Elliot, 12 June 1772, London. NLS, MS11007 ff.14–15, 4 November 1756, London.

121

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

she took an interest in her husband’s success in a career which would be decisive in determining her own future, Agnes would have needed at least some degree of comprehension of the high politics of government in order to make sense of his letter. Later in life, she demonstrated her interest in her husband’s political career by annotating his correspondence with explanatory notes, and started to write a memorandum which demonstrates an understanding of her husband’s use of the mechanisms of political interest networks to further his early London career.64 She may not have been ‘meddling’ in state affairs, but neither was she containing herself to the restrictive vision of women’s role outlined in the poem quoted earlier in the chapter. By the 1770s, an easy acquaintance with the high politics of state had become an intrinsic part of her day-to-day life, and although she could neither vote nor stand for parliament, political machinations held few mysteries for her. In the aftermath of the 1742 parliamentary elections, Lord George Murray wrote to his brother, the Duke of Atholl, stating, ‘The Changes that have leatly hapned made abundance of Noise in this place, perhaps more than any where else for the very ladys at Edr. are polititians.’65 As Elaine Chalus pointed out, ‘Eighteenth-century women were social beings and, at a time when politics permeated elite society and men as well as women used the social arena politically, this fusion of society and politics ensured politicization.’66 Polite social activities and political discussion were in no way subjected to spatial segregation, as illustrated in a note from Lady Ancram to Milton scrawled at ten o’clock one night, which she excused with the line, ‘I hope you will pardon this hurry’d letter writ in a room where some are singing & others talking Politicks.’67 Moreover, if to a lesser degree than in London, party spirit infused Scottish social life. This section is concerned primarily with the political activity considered normal amongst elite women in eighteenth-century Scotland. This politicisation of social life was particularly apparent in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite rising. In October 1746, Lady Buchan remarked to her recently exiled sister, Frances Steuart Denham: we are to have a very gay toun this winter by which you will see our Spirets are not much the lower by oure Missfortons on thursday first there is to be a great Asembly in honour of the kings birthday every body is to be there the Loyal folks from Love to the Day and the Jacobets for fear of being obnoctious

Her notes are spread throughout his letters in NLS, MSS11006, 11007; for drafts of fragments of her memoir see MSS11036 ff.144–7 and 12822 ff.8–12. London society was, unsurprisingly, far more politicised than elsewhere, see Chalus, ‘Elite Women, Social Politics’, pp.675–6. 65 NRAS234/JacC/I/8/15, Lord George Murray to Atholl, 2 March 1742, Edinburgh. 66 Chalus, Elite Women, p.77; ch.3 in general. See also Wilson, Sense of the People, p.53, ‘the discourses of politeness and the cult of sensibility could work to legitimize women’s participation in print culture and sociability in ways that washed over into politics’. 67 NLS, MS16627 f.262, 10 October 1746. Lady Ancrum was Lady Caroline D’Arcy, daughter of the third Earl of Holdernesse. 64

122

politics and influence

to them for whom they are not matches there is 4 generals in toun and vast Numbers of officers which can not faill to put the toun in the Spiret of gayety as they are looked on as preferable to all other gentelmen by the Ladys in this place on account of there Success in destrying the Rebels in the North the brags they make of this at all the Tea Tables in toun wold fill a volum tho sume of there best freinds think it wold be better they wold hold there toung.68

Lady Buchan portrayed women gossiping about military men at the assembly and the tea-tables, a conservative stereotype of gender roles. But the assembly for the King’s birthday was presented not as an opportunity for enjoyment merely cloaked in the royalist culture of the day, but a genuinely politicised event which all attending would perceive as such. Lady Buchan suggested that the world of sociability outlined in the previous chapter was infused not just with a sense of connection to the wider world of the public, but with party. General Humphrey Bland once recorded his hope that Lady Milton would ‘always shine at the Head of the Whig party’,69 but women’s political beliefs (not unlike those of men) can be difficult to disaggregate from family loyalties. In the lead-up to the 1754 election, the tenth Earl of Eglinton joked about his hostility to his second cousin ‘that divel betty’ Fletcher, whom he was ‘sure … wishes for Mure Campbell’,70 referring to her as ‘that little Loudonite’.71 Yet it would be impossible to attribute this with any certainty to an ideological political attachment, and in any case, to support the Duke of Argyll’s preferred candidate was hardly an exceptional move for a Fletcher. As in most societies, some women were very interested in the intrigues of the political world, some less so, and others not at all. Too long dominated by the activities of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and her aristocratic friends in Westminster in 1784,72 elite women’s political roles were generally far more mundane, their involvement in no sense considered unusual, but rather, as Elaine Chalus has found in England, ‘generally accepted, often expected, and sometimes demanded’73 as part of a family responsibility. As Susan Whyman put it, ‘Wives ran campaigns, aunts wrote

EUL, MS2291/15/6, 28 October 1746, Edinburgh. NLS, MS304 f.91, Letter-book of General Humphrey Bland, copy letter to Normal McLeod, Esq., (after 11 Aug 1748, Edinburgh). He had yet to meet Lady Milton. 70 NLS, MS16683 f.257, Eglinton to Milton, 10 August 1753, Edinburgh. Mure Campbell was the cousin of Lord Loudoun who stood against a coalition of Archibald Montgomerie (Eglinton’s brother) and Patrick Craufurd, who lost when the Duke of Argyll and the ministry gave their support to Mure Campbell. Andrew M. Lang, ‘Craufurd, Patrick, of Auchenames (c.1704–1778)’, ODNB. 71 NLS, MS16688 f.196, Eglinton to Milton, 6 June 1754, Eglinton. 72 Judith S. Lewis, ‘1784 and All That: Aristocratic Women and Electoral Politics’, in Vickery (ed.), Women, Privilege, and Power; Amanda Foreman, ‘A Politician’s Politician: Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and the Whig party’, in Barker and Chalus (eds), Gender in Eighteenth-Century England. 73 Chalus, ‘“That Epidemical Madness”’, p.153. 68 69

123

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

letters for votes, and daughters influenced husbands.’74 For Chalus, the Elliot correspondence is evidence that Agnes was a ‘confidante’, the most widespread of the four categories into which she has split women’s political activity.75 Whilst this was a mainly passive role, dependent largely upon gaining a husband’s or brother’s trust and taking an interest in their work, the next category of ‘adviser’ involved providing and relaying political information.76 The ‘agent’ extended this to encompass ‘increasingly public, direct, and autonomous political involvement’,77 whilst the ‘partner’, a rarer and often individualistic creature, had a greater degree of independent action.78 At the upper end of this scale, Margaret Steuart Calderwood apparently felt no qualms in proclaiming herself the active force in her husband’s unsuccessful campaign to be nominated for the Edinburghshire by-election of February 1751.79 Writing to John Clerk of Penicuik that it was a fear of Jacobitism (along with the offer of Clerk’s support, which he later denied) rather than ‘Vices of intresst’ which ‘Determind me to Desire him’ to stand for parliament,80 she saw, it seems, no inappropriateness in her admission that she was the motivating force in Calderwood family politics. Another correspondent on the topic presented the same impression: it was Mrs Calderwood who had Clerk of Penicuik ‘fast bound both by words and writing’, she who ‘found it expedient to send Robert Calderwood to him to encourage him to resist the attack of the Enemy’, she who was reported as discussing her husband’s chances with others, and so on throughout a lengthy letter in which Thomas Calderwood appears only as the tool of his wife’s machinations.81 Perhaps not surprisingly, given the force of personality which emerges from her travel journal,82 she appears to have assumed a dominant organisational role in electoral politics without any notion that this could be considered unbefitting her sex. Reconciling this with her proclaimed indifference towards the ‘publick’ with which this chapter began might appear problematic. Yet, despite her protestations to Clerk of Penicuik above (and her willingness five years later to ‘speak Jacobitism’ casts doubt on a fear of Jacobitism as a motivating factor), her campaign to get her husband elected need not have been influenced by the state politics which she may have

74 Susan E. Whyman, Sociability and Power in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural Worlds of the Verneys, 1660–1720 (Oxford, 1999), p.173. Chalus described politically active families as ‘working units’, Elite Women, p.173. 75 Ibid, pp.55–9. For the Elliots, see p.55. 76 Ibid, pp.59–67. 77 Ibid, pp.68–9. 78 Ibid, pp.70–4. 79 The election was uncontested. Romney Sedgwick (ed.), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1715–1754, vol.2 (London, 1970), p.385. 80 NAS, GD18/3274/2, Margaret Calderwood to John Clerk of Penicuik, 17 October 1750, Polton. This includes a copy of his reply of 25 January 1751 in which he apologised for his inability to assist Thomas Calderwood. 81 NLS, MS16676 ff.69–69a, William Ross to Milton, 3 January 1751, Melville. 82 See Chapter 6, pp.160–4.

124

politics and influence

understood the term to mean. Had her attempts been successful, the benefits of prestige and influence would have been immediate and personal. As Natalie Zemon Davies has found with women elsewhere, family connections were the most decisive factor in making women feel closely involved in the affairs of the nation.83 Mary Hepburn, for instance, commented to her brother Lord Milton in 1746: ‘I’m glad our publick affairs simes to be in a better way. I feel a more intimate concerin about them, as you have so much of the direcktion.’84 Her relationship with her brother not only enabled her to feel this concern in national affairs; it actively required her participation in the maintenance of the local political interest on which the power enjoyed by the men of her family ultimately rested. Consequently, she bore a large part of the responsibility for the maintenance of Fletcher family political interest in East Lothian.85 Frank O’Gorman has stressed the importance of ‘local relationships involving local élites with local ambitions and obligations’ to British electoral politics, arguing that, ‘The stability of the Hanoverian regime rested, in the last analysis, upon the smooth and successful functioning of local deference structures.’86 Yet deference alone was not enough; local interests had to be actively managed, and hopes for the success of potential future patronage requests maintained.87 Lord Milton’s position meant that a constant awareness of the need to maintain favour with the local political classes was part of the daily lives of the Fletcher women, but when Milton’s son Andrew first stood for parliament as a candidate for the Haddington burghs in 1747, the more precarious nature of electoral politics demanded an even keener involvement for his aunts.88 Two months before the election Mary announced she had ‘just now come from my travels’, before proceeding to list the results of the day’s researches which had shown one potential elector to be with a regiment in England, another dead, a third ‘not sold’ and a fourth present but to leave before the election.89 Sometimes, Mary would direct male family members to carry out the canvassing for her. Alexander Kinloch reported back that Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Gender and Genre: Women as Historical Writers, 1400–1820’, in Patricia H. Labalme (ed.), Beyond their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past (New York and London, 1980), p.155, with reference to what inspired women to write history. 84 NLS, MS16513 f.101, 12 January 1746, Saltoun. 85 Lady Milton’s involvement in this is much less clear; as she generally lived with her husband, there was little need for written communication. 86 Frank O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons, and Parties: The Unreformed Electoral System of Hanoverian England, 1743–1832 (Oxford, 1989), p.6. Similarly, Ronald Sunter stressed that ‘Elections in eighteenth-century Scotland were won or lost, not in London or Edinburgh, but in the constituencies, and the successful politician was the one who could best manage such difficult voters as burgh councillors and county freeholders.’ Sunter, Patronage and Politics, p.233. 87 Sunter, Patronage and Politics, p.193. 88 According to Sunter, a contested Scottish burgh election was ‘the least attractive’ means of entering parliament in the eighteenth century. Ibid., p.194. 89 NLS, MS16514 f.10, Mary Hepburn to Milton, May 1747. Margaret Calderwood kept a similar list. MS16676 f.69, William Ross to Milton, 3 January 1751, Melville. 83

125

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

‘According to your desire, I sent for Tho.s Croumbie, and told him that I wanted him to Vote for my Cousin Mr Andrew Fletcher, and that I would take no refusal, which favour he granted me after a good deal of Argument.’90 Her depth of involvement suggests she may be seen as an ‘agent’ in Chalus’s terminology. Mary’s house at Monkrig even seems to have acted as an election centre.91 That female family members appear to have been more involved in Andrew’s campaign in East Lothian than in Linlithgow where Andrew’s brother Henry was standing as an absentee candidate against Lawrence Dundas92 is a reminder of how women’s contribution to family political management was vested in their local knowledge and social contacts.93 The English wife of Sir Hew Dalrymple, MP for the neighbouring county seat, fretted over accusations that her nationality was hurting his interest.94 Yet whilst Sir Hew explained that this was merely propaganda,95 there is no doubt that a local wife would have been politically more expedient. Being closest to the locality, women could be the first to hear of an issue which could come to be potentially troublesome to their family, as was Mary Hepburn when Andrew Fletcher’s attitude towards proposals for turnpikes affecting his constituency risked damaging his popularity.96 Groundwork like this required patience and skills of persuasion which were suited not only to the aspects of character which were supposed to be idiosyncratically female, but also to the social networks which were an accepted part of a polite female lifestyle. Sometimes Mary talked directly to the male voters involved;97 sometimes she worked through standard female social visits.98 NLS, MS16649 f.10, Alexander Kinloch to Mary Hepburn, 20 June 1747, Gilmerton. NLS, MS17746, Andrew Fletcher’s notebook, 5 July 1747. After hearing that Pringle was setting up as delegate, he ‘went immediately to Monkrig, talk over the matter wt some of our Friends, and early in the morning went to Haddington’. 92 Sunter, Patronage and Politics, p.173. Milton had originally hoped this would be the best way to get Henry ‘out of his banishment in Gibraltar’, where he was serving with the army, but after considerable campaigning by the Fletchers, the Duke of Argyll came to oppose his candidacy for the Linlithgow burghs, favouring another candidate. Sunter concluded the Fletcher campaign machine had had a far better prospect of beating Dundas because of their financial outlay. Ibid., p.176. 93 Chalus, Elite Women, p.207; Chalus, ‘“That Epidemical Madness’”, p.153. 94 NAS, GD110/970/5, 28 August 1744, Wandsworth. 95 NAS, GD110/1084/17, to Lady Dalrymple, 26 August 1744, North Berwick House: ‘people who have a mind to do me harm in this country and with my friends, endeavour to perswade them that I am become an Inglish man, and have forgote the ties I have to my native countrey since I marryed out of it, and all my actions must show the contrary or yeald to their Calumny’. He later emphasised that his interest could be nothing but parliamentary, NAS, GD110/1084/27, to Lady Dalrymple, 22 September 1744, North Berwick House. 96 NLS, MS16671 f.61, Henry Hepburn to Mary Hepburn, 12 June 1750. 97 E.g., NLS, MS16514 f.17, Mary Hepburn to Milton in Edinburgh, 13 June 1747. 98 NLS, MS16514 f.23, Mary Hepburn to Milton, 23 June 1747, recorded having had a conversation with Mrs Newton who was afraid ‘the Marquis’ [of Tweeddale] would have an impression on Mr Newton. 90 91

126

politics and influence

Women’s political visiting was unexceptional, worthy of comment only when the unusual occurred, such as when ‘pretty Mrs Gordon in a tour of politicall visits for the Interest of a certain Marquess thought fit to drop a Son at Bellfield wt Mr Douglas to the Deversion of the good town’.99 As Elaine Chalus has pointed out, in the run-up to an election, ‘Mundane or intimate socializing over tea or cards, and even the classic social performance of visiting, could become openly politicized.’100 Thus on 25 June 1747, Mary Hepburn reported drinking tea with ‘Deacon Wood’s daughter Mrs Wright’ in Haddington,101 a visit no doubt heavy with political implications. Elite female social activities enabled women to form ‘semi-independent networks of sociability of their own’,102 their personal social connections opening up avenues of influence otherwise potentially closed to an interest. The popularising of female visits for tea created a pretext, less formal than dinner,103 under which women had the excuse to visit other women, to exchange political news or attempt to influence voting outcomes, which was entirely within the norms of polite female behaviour, yet could contribute considerably towards the workings of a family interest. If elections themselves were, in Janet Clerk’s opinion, imbued with an ‘abominable Air of Drunkness and … evill practicess’,104 redolent precisely of that image of the political public sphere which can appear inimical to the ideals of polite femininity, much of the preparatory electioneering was carried out fully within elite women’s domain. Nevertheless, the political underpinning of visiting networks could leave those without obvious political clout in an isolated position. Mary Campbell of Boquhan, first cousin to the third Duke of Argyll, took a keen interest in all sorts of public affairs,105 and when she complained about the rudeness of her relative and Member of Parliament Captain Campbell in ignoring polite convention by not paying her visits, she framed these grievances in an explicitly political way: Our Member Capt. Campbell last Week made a Tower of Visits to Some of his Voters to the West of this but I never have the Honour of a Visit from him or dos he so much as Send in a Servant when going throu the Parks and high Grounds of Boquhan Hunting his wife Mrs Campbell was to See me in an afternoon this week … but ye Capt did not favour me to Come with his Lady.106 99 NLS MS1136 f.98, John Mackenzie to Sir Alexander Macdonald, 17 October 1739, Edinburgh 100 Chalus, Elite Women, p.172. 101 NLS, MS16514 f.25, Mary Hepburn to Milton, 25 June 1747. 102 Sankey and Szechi, ‘Elite Culture and the Decline of Scottish Jacobitism’, p.103; also p.119. 103 Chalus, Elite Women, p.76. 104 NAS, GD18/2098/355, 26 June 1747. 105 Her father was the younger brother of the first Duke. See Shaw, Management of Scottish Society, p.64. 106 NLS, MS16714 f.67, to Milton, 17 May 1760, Boquhan. Her animosity may have been fuelled by the fact that Captain Campbell of Ardkinglass was at that time transferring his

127

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

Three years later, at the time of the next election, she made the same connection again: ‘they pass’d me last Summer to ye Highlands & returned but never Sent in a Servant to inquire for me or ever since has sent I never tak any Notice of their Neglecting a piece of Common Civility Did a Woman Vote I wou’d got a Send to attend ye 29th’.107 The Captain’s visiting schedule was linked directly to his political status, whilst her disposable status as a woman ineligible to vote was underlined by her treatment in being ignored. ‘Forfeiting the Regards which were due to them’? Women and Jacobitism in the ’45 In the summer of 1745, Charles Edward Stuart, son of the Old Pretender, landed on Eriskay, commencing the 1745 Jacobite rising. By mid-September, his army had marched on Edinburgh, sending prominent Hanoverians like Lord Milton into hiding, and throwing into turmoil the entente between Hanoverian and Jacobite. This inspired an anonymous individual to draw up ‘An Impartial and Genuine List of the Ladys on the Whig or Jacobite Partie’.108 The author explained this was ‘Taken in hand merely to show that the Common Acusation and Slander, Rashly Thrown on The Female Sex As to Their being all Jacobites is False and Groundless. As upon a Calculation the Whigs are Far Superior in Number and not inferior either in Rank, Beauty or Sollidity.’ Sadly incomplete, this exercise in the promotion of unrevolutionary femininity includes a column for the ladies of families with names beginning A to C, in which remarks were made on their ‘Characteristics and Graces’. Although the author acknowledged that, like their Whig counterparts, some Jacobite ladies were ‘genteel’ or ‘well lookt’, others were ‘masculine’, ‘crane necked’, ‘terribly bigotted’, ‘conceited’, ‘thrawn’ and ‘apostate’: hardly a panoply of polite virtues.109 On the contrary, in presenting Jacobite women as unfeminine, at best physically unattractive if not actually deformed, the author – whilst acknowledging women’s attachment to party – suggested that their support for a cause which was deemed socially destabilising was unwomanly, hence unnatural and disturbing. This section examines attitudes towards female involvement in an issue of major national significance, as a counter-example of women’s political activity outwith the socially sanctioned channels outlined above. It asks what can be learnt about attitudes towards women’s place in the public from the simultaneous condemnation and sentiallegiance from Argyll to Bute. Lewis Namier and John Brooke (eds), The House of Commons 1754–1790 (London, 1964), vol.2, p.185. 107 NLS, MS16727 f.99, to Milton, 26 December 1763, Boquhan. 108 NLS, MS293. It was written prior to Robert Craigie’s removal from the post of Lord Advocate in February 1746, see note on f.3, and John W. Cairns, ‘Craigie, Robert, of Glendoick (bap. 1688, d. 1760)’, ODNB. For another such list, see NRAS234/Box76/2/1/1. 109 NLS, MS293 ff.3–4.

128

politics and influence

mentalisation of their activities during this episode, ending with a case-study which details the seriousness with which genuinely politicised women with real influence could be treated. In March 1746, a friend of the Fletchers wrote from London, wryly advising Milton: when [Mally Fletcher] sings her Scots songs to our Generals to forget the highland lady or if she be rash enough to venture upon it, let her be sure not to doe it with that spirit bravura with which she used to sing it to me, least it shou’d savour of disaffection & give offence to the Edr volunteers, in which case it wou’d certainly be wrote up here, for every post brings us such important pieces of Intelligence.110

It is clear what Stewart thought of the rumours of such ‘disaffection’, yet whilst most intelligence reports focused on the actions of bands of armed men,111 women’s involvement in the rising provoked much alarmed comment. According to Duncan Forbes of Culloden, ‘all the fine ladies, except one or two, became passionately fond of the Young Pretender and used all their arts and industry for him in the most intemperate manner’,112 whilst General Campbell, then heading the manhunt for Charles, claimed that ‘The Women in most parts of the Country are under a sort of possession, they depart altogether from their Character, & really Forfeit the regards which are due to them.’113 Accusing not just women but ladies of being passionate, intemperate and manipulative, even ‘possessed’ against the government, highlighted the ‘unnaturalness’ of the Rebellion, which Campbell confirmed by emphasising that ‘in these horrid disorders’ the ladies had ‘too often had a much larger share than that of bare complyance’.114 ‘Bare compliance’ was perfectly acceptable in a theoretical context which legitimised female political involvement when subjugated to male agency. But as Campbell suggested, by acting in this ‘unfeminine’ way, women had broken the unspoken contract balancing the roles and responsibilities of gender and social rank on which social stability rested. The medical connotations of ‘Intemperance’ and ‘disorder’ imply a disease of the body politic in a nation highly conscious of the precariousness of the ledge on which all ‘civilised’ societies perched. Around the same time, Milton felt compelled to quash rumours of ‘outward misbehaviour amongst the Females at Edinburgh on the 10th of June’, adding that there was not ‘so much as a Single white Rose’. Yet he acknowledged that NLS, MS16637 f.279, Charles Stewart to Milton, 2 March 1746, London. Allan Ramsay’s Tea-table Miscellany contains a song entitled ‘The Highland Lassie’, which may be the one in question. The Works of Allan Ramsay, vol.3, ed. Alexander M. Kinghorn and Alexander Law (Edinburgh and London, 1961), pp.56–7. 111 Unlike the Saltoun papers, in the NLS Tweeddale papers there is almost no mention of women in this context. 112 Quoted in Craig, Damn’ Rebel Bitches, p.72. 113 NLS, MS16616 f.176, to Milton, 29 June 1746, Fort Augustus. 114 NLS, MS16616 f.178, General Campbell to Milton, 29 June 1746, Fort Augustus. 110

129

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

‘the violent Spirit that possesses the Jacobite Ladys so unbecoming their sex, no doubt has greatly contributed to blowe the Coal and foment the Rebellion’.115 Although the involvement of young, attractive women, bringing sex into politics, was archetypally destabilising,116 an emphasis on female support for the rising could effectively dismiss Jacobitism as an ideology, highlighting the significance of misguided emotion rather than political acumen in attracting followers to the cause.117 Moreover, depicting women’s political activities as based solely or largely on the supposed sexual magnetism of the Young Pretender was a mechanism for the trivialisation of women’s political beliefs, and the denigration of female opinion as sentimental or sexualised. Although for some women commitment to the Stuart cause entailed serious political and military engagement,118 decades of suppression had encouraged the development of a magnetic culture of codes and messages, intrigue and mystery.119 By 1745, many once-Jacobite families had superficially switched allegiance to the Hanoverians but retained cultural loyalties, and many young women must have grown up with Jacobite songs and stories.120 Whilst ‘Miss Fletcher’ had ‘her own faith … greatly at heart’,121 some Hanoverian ladies were less able to resist the glamour and excitement of a royal prince and attendant court.122 Magdalen Pringle described ladies hanging out of Edinburgh’s windows, throwing their handkerchiefs and clapping as James was proclaimed King from the mercat cross, but cautioned ‘Don’t imagine I was one of those Ladies. I assure you I was not.’123 A month later, however, she had visited Charles in camp and was rhapsodising over his person which ‘seems to be Cut out for enchanting his beholders and carrying People to consent to their own slavery in spite of themselves’, adding ‘I don’t believe Cesar was more engagingly form’d nor more dangerous to ye liberties of his country.’124 Attendance at Holyrood may have been as much a product of curiosity as it was a sign of deeper allegiance – a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to witness not just royalty He took several drafts to work out the precise wording of this passage. MS16621 ff.214–18, scrolls to Sir Everard Fawkener [secretary to the Duke of Cumberland], July 1746. Haydn Mason, ‘Fawkener, Sir Everard (1694–1758)’, ODNB. 116 Chalus, Elite Women, p.29. 117 The Female Rebels: Being Some Remarkable Incidents of the Lives, Characters, and Families of the Titular Duke and Dutchess of Perth, the Lord and Lady Ogilvie, and of Miss Florence M’Donald, containing Several Particulars of these Remarkable Persons not hitherto published (Edinburgh, 1747), esp. pp.5–6. 118 Craig, Damn’ Rebel Bitches; Craig, ‘Fair Sex Turns Ugly’. 119 Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford, 1998), p.22 120 Sankey and Szechi, ‘Elite Culture and the Decline of Scottish Jacobitism’. 121 NLS, MS16627 f.97, Colonel Sir G. Howard to Lady Milton, 19 July 1746, Stirling. 122 Gywn Vaughan lamented the reported presence at Holyrood of Ladies on the Exchequer’s charity roll. NLS, MS16638 ff.82–3, to Milton, 11 March 1745–6. 123 To Isabella Pringle, 18 September 1745, Edinburgh, in Henrietta Taylor (ed.), A Jacobite Miscellany: Eight Original Papers on the Rising of 1745–1746, Roxburghe Club (Oxford, 1948), p.39. 124 13 October 1745, Edinburgh. In Taylor (ed.), Jacobite Miscellany, p.40. 115

130

politics and influence

but the very incarnation of centuries of Scottish history. For those with a vested interest in the Hanoverian regime, however, the potency of Charles’s personal attraction appears to have been genuinely disturbing. Eighteenth-century Jacobitism has been described as ‘a mobile script’ which ‘was deployed in a variety of contexts and could generate multiple meanings’.125 The expression of Jacobite sentiments or muted admiration for the cause could be used as ‘an idiom of defiance’126 in ways that were not directly political. It is in this light that Margaret Calderwood’s above-quoted comments on ‘speaking jacobitism’127 ought perhaps to be seen, as expressing a general disaffection with the political status quo. But it is difficult to imagine such sentiments predominating during the rising itself, especially when the inhabitants of Edinburgh were caught up in a real military conflict in which lives were lost in the city streets. In October 1745, the teenage Lady Jean Murray informed her father James, Duke of Atholl of how ‘we saw daily cannon balls entering into the opposite houses, and killing people just at our Door’.128 If in a less lethal way, the conflict had struck at the heart of Lady Jean’s own family. Whilst her father continued to support the government, her uncle Lord George Murray was one of the commanders of the Jacobite army. Writing to inform the Duke of his decision to follow his lifelong Jacobite instincts, Lord George took pains to distance his wife (then pregnant and ill) from his decision: I must do her that justice to say that tho’ she is much against my rashness (as she calls it) yet when she found me determind she did not dispute with me upon it. For now that we have been togither above seventeen years I can say tho some times she might differ in oppinion with me, she ever has yielded to my resolutions. And the present prooff she has given me of her acquiessing to my will, makes so deep an impression upon me, that nothing but so strong an atachment as I have to the case I am to imbark in, could make me do what in all appearance must disturb her future quiet & Happyness.129

Acknowledging the impossibility of recommending his wife and children to the Duke’s protection, he nevertheless sought in these lines to limit any possible repercussions for his wife by portraying her as agreeing with his actions only insofar as befitted her role as a dutiful wife. Lady George provided dinner for the Prince in her home at Tullibardine, and kept her husband informed of troop movements,130 but did not take the autonomously active role in the rising that some of her counterparts did. During the rising, Lord George

125 126 127 128 129 130

Rogers, Crowds, Culture, and Politics, p.53. Ibid., p.50. Calderwood, ‘Journey’, p.266. NRAS234/JacA/III/2/66, [October 1745], La Mancha. NRAS234/JacA/III/2/19, 3 September 1745, Tullibardine. Katherine Tomasson, The Jacobite General (Edinburgh, 1958), pp.40, 47.

131

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

advised his daughter Amelie ‘not to be a Bigott to any Sect or party’.131 The comment Amelie had made not long after her arrival for schooling in Edinburgh that ‘The day after I came in to town … there was a manifesto put up on the principal Church door setting forth a certain persons right to a certain Island but the bedal took it down & gave it to the Minister’132 suggests she took some interest in such matters, and may also suggest that she had grown up accustomed to hearing ‘a certain person’ being discussed in such veiled terms. Wherever these women’s own loyalties lay, the remainder of both their lives was coloured by Lord George’s exile and the practical ramifications that had for his wife as a mother bringing up a young family. It rocked the foundations of Lady George’s place in society, it being some years before the Hanoverian Murrays could reconcile themselves to her visits to her husband and publicly accept her again as a member of the family. Lady George’s suffering was largely incidental, another reminder of the involuntary inescapability of the political in eighteenth-century women’s lives. When elite women were involved in Jacobite activity that was not considered to transgress polite feminine norms they tended to be ignored by the Hanoverian government. But where their involvement was understood to be more seriously political, and, more importantly, where the women in question held real influence and authority over land and people, repercussions could be serious. This is evidenced in the contrasting treatment of Jacobitism’s most famous heroine, Flora Macdonald, and her kinswoman Lady Margaret Macdonald.133 The former was sentimentalised even whilst imprisoned in London, her smuggling of the Young Pretender across Skye presented as leaving her ‘still the Character of a Woman, possessed of all that amiable Softness of Temper and Constitution that adorn the Fair’, her only fault being to carry ‘these social and endearing Virtues of Mercy and Compassion to an unreasonable Height’.134 However, the actions of Lady Margaret, who was suspected with much justification of aiding the Pretender in several ways including offering her house as a hiding place (an offer reneged upon when Flora arrived with him),135 were viewed sternly by the government as overtly political. Although Lady Margaret used her connections to high-ranking Hanoverian officials to escape immediate repercussions,136 government agents such NRAS234/JacA/III/2/82, to Lady George Murray, 1 November 1745, Edinburgh. NRAS234/JacC/I/10/5, to Lady George Murray, 17 January 1744, Edinburgh. 133 Brought up by an Episcopalian Jacobite mother, she married into a family which was Jacobite in 1715, and pro-government in little more than name in 1745. 134 The Female Rebels, p.54. 135 ‘Captain Donald Roy MacDonald’s narrative’, in The Lyon in Mourning or a Collection as Exactly Made as the Iniquity of the Times would Permit of Speeches Letters Journals etc. Relative to the Affairs of Prince Charles Edward Stuart by the Rev. Robert Forbes, A. M. Bishop of Ross & Caithness 1746–1775, ed. Henry Paton (Edinburgh, 1975; first published 1895), vol.2, pp.7–16, 26, 29, 33; ‘Hugh MacDonald of Balshar’s paper’, ibid., p.100. 136 Although she protested her innocence to Duncan Forbes of Culloden (24 July 1746, Skye in H. R. Duff (ed.), Culloden Papers (London, 1815), pp. 290–1) her cover was blown 131

132

132

politics and influence

as General Humphrey Bland were well aware of the political clout which this widowed mother of a young clan chief could hope to wield over large swathes of Skye and Uist, not just during her young son Sir James’s minority, but through her influence on him during his formative years. By 1754, she had moved away from the island, but returned that summer to inspect the management of her son’s lands. Bland informed the Earl of Holdernesse that her remaining there: is very improper at this Juncture, as it can only tend towards her keeping up the Spirit of Disaffection amongst the People there, and inspire her son with the high notions of Clanship, and the Arbitrary proceedings Exercised by his Ancestors towards their Tennants and followers, which we must by all Means prevent, and make him know that he is only a Subject, and not King of the Isles, as that Family Vainly imagined themselves, but shew him that he is as lyable to the Law as the meanest of his Tenants. I have given such Orders to the Captain who is now march’d into the Isle of Sky with a Detachment of General Skelton’s Regiment, as will make that Place too hot for her continuing there much longer; and make her think it more prudent for her to return to Edinburgh with her son.137

Lady Margaret’s influence over the people of Skye was deemed sufficiently damaging to Whig political interests for armed forces to be deployed. Although Bland acknowledged his impotence in calling her to account unless she ‘wore the Highland Dress and Carryed Arms contrary to Law, or committed Theft’, he knew he could hurt her through her tenants, and subsequent letters referred to the prosecutions he carried out amongst Macdonald’s people in Skye, acknowledging ‘I acquainted the Trustees that her behaviour brought these Prosecutions on her People, and that I would certainly carry them on, unless she consented to her Sons being Educated in England.’138 Bland knew that despite Lady Margaret’s popularity in Skye, her authority over the population there and in Uist was tenable only through her relationship with her son. His ultimate aim was that Lady Margaret should agree to hand over Sir James, who, it was rumoured, was being educated by a known non-juror,139 to be educated in Hanoverian principles in England. He eventually succeeded, Sir by her husband, Alexander Macdonald to Lord President Culloden, 29 July 1746, Fort Augustus, in Duff (ed.), Culloden Papers, p.291. Lord Milton had been her tutor since the death of her father, the ninth Earl of Eglinton, in 1729. As Sankey and Szechi have shown, personal and familial connections not only cut across the fault-lines of political party, but, they argued, seriously reduced the potential for the successful outcome of this rising. ‘Elite Culture and the Decline of Scottish Jacobitism’, esp. pp.127–8. 137 TNA State Papers, SP54/44/15A, 13 June 1754, Edinburgh. I would like to thank Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart for pointing me towards these references. For more on this, see Glasgow University Archive Services, UGD37 John Campbell, J. A. Campbell and J. L. Campbell & Lamond, /2, ‘Papers of MacDonald of MacDonald’. I am grateful to Alexander Murdoch for first acquainting me with the existence of this source. 138 TNA, SP54/44/34, to Earl of Holdernesse, 13 August 1754, Edinburgh. 139 TNA, SP54/44/15C, copy to Margaret Macdonald, 12 June 1754, Edinburgh.

133

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

James (who remained close to his mother until his early death) being educated at Eton and Oxford in what was essentially an acknowledgement of a mother’s ability to exert a political influence not just over her son, but over the people who lived under her authority.140 Lady Margaret’s experience is a reminder of the degree to which women’s lives could be politicised and, in an exceptional circumstance, of the seriousness with which women’s political activity could be regarded. Piety and Protestantism For many elite women, the one state institution which was regularly frequented and comfortably familiar was the church, attendance at which almost certainly figured as a more important event in the life of a woman who, perhaps, had few opportunities to leave her country house and meet with other people, than in the life of her husband for whom it was just one component of a busy week. However, Bridget Hill noted that feminist historians have on the whole tended to underplay the importance of religion to women,141 whilst historians of eighteenth-century Scotland have similarly tended to overlook the continuing significance of devotion, particularly amongst the elite.142 This section argues, however, that the intensely personal relationship between Chalus and Montgomery interpret this episode slightly differently, using Lady Margaret’s petitions in the British Library Newcastle Papers as evidence of ‘financial scheming’ to get the government to pay for Sir James’s education, and to secure the support of the administration in local power struggles, ‘Women and Politics’, pp.230–1. The education of the Highland gentry had been politicised since at least 1609, when James VI decreed in the Statutes of Iona that they should educate their sons in the Lowlands. See also Rosalind K. Marshall, ‘Gordon, Henrietta, duchess of Gordon (1681/2–1760)’, ODNB. Henrietta was paid a government pension to bring up her children as Protestants, but this was cancelled after she served Charles Edward Stuart a roadside breakfast in 1745. 141 Bridget Hill, Women Alone: Spinsters in England 1660–1850 (New Haven and London, 2001), p.143. In comparison, in an early modern context, Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford argued that religious devotion was one of the most important factors in shaping women’s experiences, Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720 (Oxford, 1998), p.255. In Wales, the primacy of women’s participation in early Methodism was one of the starting points for the study of eighteenth-century women’s history, Eryn M. White, ‘Women, Religion and Education in Eighteenth-Century Wales’, in Michael Roberts and Simone Clarke (eds), Women and Gender in Early Modern Wales (Cardiff, 2000). 142 E.g., this is noted in David Allan, ‘Protestantism, Presbyterianism and National Identity in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, in Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (eds), Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c.1650–c.1850 (Cambridge, 1998), esp. pp.193–6. Allan’s attempt to reinsert religion into the mainstream of eighteenth-century Scottish history is most obvious in its prominence in his survey Scotland in the Eighteenth Century: Union and Enlightenment (Harlow, 2002). John R. McIntosh, Church and Theology in Enlightenment Scotland: The Popular Party, 1740–1800 (East Linton, 1998), p.1, attributed this relative lack of attention to the importance of churchmen to the Scottish Enlightenment, leading scholars to focus on other areas of their lives, e.g., Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1985). 140

134

politics and influence

women and piety created an important channel for elite women’s participation in the public. In a recent work on Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern Scotland, David Mullan asked how women’s experience of religion compared with that of men: Was women’s religious experience somehow more intense, more internal, more unrelenting in its psychological significance? Were women subject to a greater tendency toward melancholy and depression? And if so, might this be related to many of them having fewer means of escape from an internal world dominated by Augustinian notions of the self, but lacking his, and contemporary man’s passage into an exterior world of activity and power and self-worth?143

This is not the place to answer such a question in full, but a tentative overall ‘yes’ may be posited. Women had fewer means of escaping their own mental world and finding distraction in the hurry of business, whilst the dangers of childbirth could bring death frequently and alarmingly close. Religious reading, as has been seen, dominated women’s literary experience at a time when print culture was one of the most meaningful ways in which many women could engage with the world beyond their homes.144 As Patricia Crawford has argued, although it suited the educated male mind to make a ‘natural’ link between women’s ‘less reasoned’ minds and religion because ‘it involved belief rather than reason’, female piety was in fact the product of a society which allowed women few means of self-expression.145 Yet as well as emphasising women’s submissive role, the Bible could legitimise women’s spiritual authority,146 and in Scotland, the religious struggles of the seventeenth century had witnessed autonomous female involvement in radical religion. The Calvinist soul was in charge of its own spiritual destiny, meaning that women regularly chose to follow different spiritual leaders from those selected by their husbands.147 This strife left as its legacy an intensely politicised religious public sphere, in which women’s participation was coloured by both spiritual and more worldly concerns.148 Attendance at church played a regular part in women’s lives. When speculating on how life would be if he had his family with him in Rome, Robert Adam noted that his mother would have no reason to stir from his apartment as ‘there is no Church which is her greatest temptation’.149 This may be inter‘Introduction’, to David Mullan (ed.), Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern Scotland: Writing the Evangelical Self, c.1670–c.1730 (Aldershot, 2003), p.19. 144 See Chapter 3, pp.52, 60. 145 Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500–1720 (London and New York, 1993), pp. 75, 185. Bridget Hill presents a similar argument in Women Alone, p.147. 146 Anne Stott, ‘Women and Religion’, in Barker and Chalus (eds), Women’s History, p.102. 147 ‘Introduction’, to Mullan (ed.), Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern Scotland, p.17. 148 As seen, for instance, in the anti-Union politics of Katherine, Duchess of Atholl, in 1707. Carr, ‘Female Correspondence’. 149 NAS, GD18/4803, to Jenny Adam, 25 March 1756, Rome. 143

135

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

preted as the preference of a particularly devout older woman; Janet Clerk attracted criticism for self-righteousness on the basis of attending weekday sermons in Edinburgh.150 But as much as the polite may have emphasised other aspects of their existence, these were bound up with their devotional practices so that for instance, one of the first priorities of Amelie Murray’s period of Edinburgh schooling and refinement in 1744 was her confirmation at the hands of Bishop Keith of Edinburgh.151 Women of all ranks were well known for their outspoken verbal, sometimes physical, attacks on ministers of whom they disapproved, a not insignificant issue in an era when church patronage and the right of landowners to appoint ministers were major political concerns.152 Yet whilst Janet Clerk discreetly used her spiritual diary to criticise her minister at Penicuik, Mr Brown,153 the controversy, zealousness and factionalism that had characterised much of Scotland’s recent religious history had become seen as symptomatic of a backwardness that was at odds with more modern values and the tolerance and moderation that supposedly characterised the polite. The differences between Presbyterian and Episcopalian, which had so scarred the seventeenth century, were increasingly, if not universally, eliding not just under the influence of the Moderate party in the church, but from the growing incidence of intermarriage between the Scots and English elite. In 1750 the fourth Marquis of Tweeddale, who married an Englishwoman and whose children grew up mainly in London, was given the approval of his father-in-law to have one of his daughters baptised in the Church of Scotland, since she happened to be born there.154 Similarly, John Gregory, whose daughters, like their mother, were brought up in the Church of England, wrote in his best-selling Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774) that the reason why he had brought them up in a different church to his own was that he ‘looked on the differences between our churches to be of no real NAS, GD18/2098/301, 22 March 1745, Penicuik. NRAS324 Box 45A/C/1/11/2, Amelie Murray to Lady George Murray. 152 E.g., NLS, MS1211 f.111, Mary Mackenzie to John Mackenzie, 30 November 1741, Delvine; NLS, MS16669 f.27, William Alston to Milton, 23 September 1750; NLS, MS16699 f.91, Mary Campbell to Milton, 30 July 1757, Boquhan. See also, My Very Dearest Sweet Heart, or, Boswell Before Boswell. Letters of the Lady Elizabeth Boswell (1704 to 1711, and 1733), Life before the Biographer, ed. David R. Boswell (Bath, 2003), esp. pp.74–5, 80–1. The 1712 Patronage Act reintroduced the right of landowners, rather than congregations, to appoint church ministers. Although part of a wider range of measures aimed at appeasing the Scottish landowning classes for the losses incurred by Union, it was deeply unpopular amongst most of the population who saw it as out of kilter with the Presbyterian church. 153 E.g., NAS, GD18/2098/501, 14 December 1755, Penicuik; GD18/2098/410, 1 July 1751, Penicuik. No controversy is noted in Brown (ordained 1746)’s entry in Hew Scott, Fasti, vol.1, Synod of Lothian and Tweeddale (Edinburgh, 1915; first published 1866), p.345. 154 NLS, MS14420 f.132, Granville to Tweeddale, 15 March 1749–50, Hannes. He wrote ‘I intirely agree with yr Lp, yt ye child shou’d be Baptized, according to ye Church of Scotland in ye bosom of wch, She has been born; & as I have reason to have an opinion of my Daughters good sense, I can’t Suppose but yt she will be sensible of ye decency, & propriety of such a proceeding.’ 150 151

136

politics and influence

importance, and that a preference of one to the other was a mere matter of taste’.155 The protestations of Jean Murray that no matter what other concessions she might make to her father, she would never attend the Presbyterian church in Edinburgh156 might be perceived in a more cynical light once it is taken into account that it was by ‘pretending to go to Lady Somervill’s, from whence she was to go to Chappell’, that she managed to elope with the Earl of Crawfurd.157 The degree to which religious differences remained should not be ignored, but it is nevertheless remarkable these differences had come down, in some if not all sections of elite society, to that most polite of eighteenth-century preoccupations, taste.158 The church held the potential to perform multiple social functions for elite women. For those isolated in the country, acquaintance with a minister may have afforded a rare opportunity for conversation with an educated man, whilst elite women’s social responsibilities towards the poor could entail collaboration with the local minister, as was the case for Agnes Elliot at Minto in the later 1760s.159 On a rather different level, churchgoing combined devotion with sociability and entertainment. In 1742, Beatrix Maxwell wrote to Marion Lauder of how she feared her minister’s head had been turned by disappointment in love, ‘for he raves at the Strangest rate ever you heard’, sometimes talking ‘of nothing but pretty women … at other times again he raills at the whole Sex and Calls them Coquetts and deceitfull and I dont know what’. Referring to his conversation as opposed to sermons, she nevertheless believed Marion would be able to tell from this what sort of preachings they received.160 At the opposite end of the spectrum, however, by the 1750s the pulpits of Moderate ministers like Hugh Blair, William Robertson and Alexander Carlyle were acting as organs for the spread of politeness, as churchgoers flocked from around Edinburgh to hear not just the politely tolerant values they preached, but the eloquent manner in which these were proclaimed.161 Whilst the formal aspects of public life remained off-limits to women, and the dictates of prescription demanded women refrain from ‘interfering’ in the public, an analysis of elite women’s activities demonstrates that they were not 155 John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (Edinburgh, 1821; first published 1774), p.160. 156 NRAS234/JacA/III/2/133, 19 December 1745, Edinburgh. 157 NRAS234/47/2/43, Captain Murray to Atholl, 3 March 1747, Edinburgh. 158 Thomas Somerville portrayed a decline in animosity towards Episcopacy during his lifetime, My Own Life and Times 1741–1814, with an Introduction by Richard B. Sher (Bristol, 1996; first published 1861), p.65. 159 Ibid., p.126. 160 NAS, GD113/5/66A/7, 7 January 1742. This was the Rev. Robert Wodrow, whose marriage in 1743 hopefully signalled a happy ending to these troubles. Hew Scott, Fasti, vol.3, Synod of Glasgow and Ayr (Edinburgh, 1920; first published 1868), p.136. 161 For the preaching styles of the Edinburgh ministers, see Somerville, My Own Life and Times, pp.57–62.

137

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

removed from political activity in eighteenth-century Scotland. Family responsibility required participation in the networks of patronage which held together eighteenth-century society, a task which demanded an understanding of the workings of the system and an up-to-date knowledge of who held the strings of power. The powers of persuasion that women were believed to hold over their politically powerful husbands, fathers and brothers coloured their own social relationships, potentially politicising women’s friendships, and giving some women a real degree of influence in deciding where favour should be directed. The workings of the patronage system contributed towards the maintenance of family interests in the locality, which, at election times, demanded even greater participation from women, whose relationship with the locality was often closer than that of their menfolk. Much of this was made possible by polite social practices emphasising mixed-gender sociability in spaces both public and private, over which women often presided. The social networks in which the women of political families moved were infused with the political, and women could use the spaces and practices of polite feminine sociability to open up otherwise closed avenues of political influence or information. Women’s inner spirituality provided another channel through which, in combination with their sense of connection with their locality, they could form a sense of responsibility to express opinion as part of a public. These modes of participation in the public were expected of elite women and regarded as entirely within the boundaries of polite social norms. However, when women appeared to be behaving in a destabilising, politicised way, such as during the 1745–6 Jacobite rising, their actions were liable to be condemned as symptomatic of wider social and political malaise. This revealed both the theoretical importance of appropriately feminine behaviour to the stability of the body politic, and the potency of female support as a rhetorical means of belittling a political cause. The actions taken against women who held real political influence are a reminder of the seriousness with which women’s autonomous political authority could be treated.

138

6

Travel, Tourism and Place ‘Removing from place to place’ ‘We propose to go for Mavisbank [the Clerks’ Midlothian country house] on the 7th’, wrote Janet Clerk of Penicuik in her devotional diary in June 1748. ‘O that my removing from place to place may not hinder me in my dutie but rather stir me up.’1 Writing, as was her habit, from the family house at Penicuik, she had only just arrived back from a visit to her daughter at Bonhill in the Vale of Leven, having also spent time at Luss on the shores of Loch Lomond. Later that summer, she travelled south-west to Dumcrieff near Moffat to visit her son George and his wife.2 What she was recording was by any standards a busy travel schedule, yet one that was by no means exceptional amongst the women of the eighteenth-century Scottish elite. As she noted, this ‘removing from place to place’ coloured other aspects of women’s lives, mental as well as practical, and may be seen as one of the defining influences that demarcated elite experience. For those families keen to engage in all aspects of fashionable sociability, what might be termed conspicuous mobility had become a way of life loaded with cultural meanings. As summarised by one scholar, ‘The “polite” were … defined, to some extent, … by their mobility. Improvements in transport – better carriages, turnpike roads – allowed them to move with relative ease from country house to country house, from spa to spa, to race meetings and assemblies.’3 Full participation in the polite world necessitated mobility for women. Scholars of eighteenth-century travel have been perhaps surprisingly reluctant to consider the multiple connotations of ‘travel’ beyond the very selfconscious act of tourism, tending to focus on the grand narratives of the masculinity and classicism of the Grand Tour,4 or the aesthetic pleasures of the NAS, GD18/2098/369, 5 June 1748, Penicuik. NAS, GD18/2098/373, 14 August 1748, Penicuik. 3 Tom Williamson, Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore, 1995), p.110. 4 E.g., Jeremy Black, The British and The Grand Tour (London, 1985); Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (New York and Stroud, 1992); Christopher Hibbert, The Grand Tour (London, 1987); Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography 1600–1830 (Manchester and New York, 1999). For earlier context, see John Stoye, English Travellers Abroad, 1604–1667: Their Influences in English Society and Politics (1952, rev. New Haven and London, 1989). 1 2

139

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

‘search for the picturesque’.5 However, recent work by Katherine Turner on the increasing numbers of middle-rank travellers, and particularly women, whose narratives began to emerge around the middle of the century, has shown that travel held other, more diverse meanings.6 This chapter argues that an examination of travel’s various meanings is necessary to any attempt to understand the ways in which elite women interacted with the society in which they lived. It therefore considers travel both as a simple means of getting from place to place, and as the loaded concept, with implications of a critical investigation of difference and otherness, which forms the basis of most scholarly works on the subject. The chapter begins by stripping the act of travel to its basics, introducing the normality of movement from place to place in the lives of elite women. It then examines the emerging preoccupations of leisured travel. First, it takes London and the spa resort as case-studies to investigate the role of geographical place in the construction of polite femininity, a theme which has been touched upon throughout this book. It next considers the influence of the fashionable discourses of domestic tourism in women’s experience of and reactions to the places they visited. It ends by examining the possibilities that overseas travel opened up to women as a means of expressing opinions about home and abroad, helping to form a sense of their identity as individuals and as members of a national community and a social group. ‘This so journeying way of life:’ A Peripatetic Existence Janet Clerk’s diary records a veritable merry-go-round of journeys between Edinburgh, Clerk estates at Penicuik and Mavisbank, and visits to her children, leading her on one occasion to plead, ‘O Lord help me in this so journeying way of life’.7 Although the fact that it was almost always at Penicuik that she wrote her spiritual diary suggests it was there that she felt most at home (or at least experienced fewest demands on her time), ‘home’ and ‘family’ were concepts that could be associated with a number of different locations. Broadly speaking, landed families spent the winter in town and the summer on their E.g., Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Aldershot, 1989); Alastair J. Durie, Scotland for the Holidays: A History of Tourism in Scotland, 1780–1939 (East Linton, 2003); Katherine Haldane Grenier, Tourism and Identity in Scotland, 1770–1914: Creating Caledonia (Aldershot, 2005). 6 Katherine Turner, British Travel Writers in Europe 1750–1800: Authorship, Gender and National Identity (Aldershot, 2001). For women’s travel, see Elizabeth A. Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 (Cambridge, 1995); Barbara Korte, English Travel Writing: From Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations, trans. Catherine Matthias (Basingstoke and New York, 2000; first published Darmstadt, 1996); Kristi Siegel (ed.), Gender, Genre and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing (New York, 2004). 7 NAS, GD18/2098/400, 10 September 1750, Penicuik. The next year she thanked God ‘that the pleasure I had in thee weekly sermons in some measure helped to make up the uneasiness the removing from place to place made’, GD18/2098/412, 2 August 1751. 5

140

travel, tourism and place

estates, but even on a day-to-day level (particularly in summer) the lives of the eighteenth-century landed elite were at times almost constantly peripatetic. If the Clerks’ manoeuvres were more complex than some, the sense of movement in perpetuum is palpable in the correspondence of many elite families, the act of moving from place to place an integral part of elite women’s lives, as families and parts thereof moved from house to house and paid visits to friends.8 Most landed families inhabited more than one property, so that even the Fletcher family, whose estate at Saltoun was not far from Edinburgh, still spent most of their time at Brunstane, a property situated about six miles east of the city which they rented from the Duke of Argyll.9 Prior to the completion of their Canongate townhouse, they rented a flat in town for the winter season.10 In early summer, at least some of the family would spend a few weeks at health resorts either in the southern Highlands or closer to home in Moffat, whilst later on in the summer they would accompany the Duke of Argyll to Inveraray.11 Individually tailored to each family’s circumstances and commitments, these cycles of movement formed a fairly regular pattern for the Clerk and Fletcher women over the years, and were relatively contained in geographical terms. In families headed by a Member of Parliament, women could experience a wider circle of movement, encompassing London and possibly excursions to resorts like Bath and Tunbridge Wells. These annual cycles were played out within the larger orbit of women’s lifecourse. Far more than those of men, women’s lives were subject to external forces, and how and where they lived were seldom products of their own agency when viewed over the course of a lifetime as they were over any one year. Eldest sons could expect to die in the same house in which they were born, younger brothers perhaps on another family property, but women, brought up to enter a new family upon marriage, could expect to spend their adult lives somewhere quite alien to where they grew up. As has been seen, experience of different places and ways of doing things was an important part of girls’ education, and young women travelled to stay with other households and attend school.12 Most elite women could expect their lives to follow a general pattern, and despite

For a postillion boy’s-, later a footman’s-eye view of this in the household of the sister of Lady Frances Steuart, see John Macdonald, Memoirs of an Eighteenth-Century Footman, with an introduction by John Beresford (London, 1927; first published 1790), esp. pp.30–68. 9 Ian G. Lindsay and Mary Cosh, Inveraray and the Dukes of Argyll (Edinburgh, 1973), p.17. Lord Milton and his family seem never to have used Saltoun as a regular residence, his mother and unmarried sister residing there until the death of the former in 1746, after which it passed to his son Andrew. 10 E.g., in December 1748, they were busy moving furniture to their new house, rented from Lord March, whilst Lord and Lady Cassilis took their former lodging. NLS, MS16659 ff.200–1, Belhaven to Andrew Fletcher, 5 December 1748, Edinburgh. Plans for their Canongate house were underway by February 1755, NLS MS16690 f.35, Hary Barclay to Milton, 22 February 1755, Allantoun. 11 For Moffat, see pp.153–5 below. For Inveraray, see Chapter 5, pp.119–21. 12 See Chapter 2, pp.33–44. 8

141

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

the unusually politicised factors influencing them, Lady Margaret Macdonald’s movements demonstrate some of the ways in which stages of women’s life-course were associated with specific types of location and lifestyle.13 As a young girl she had experienced a spell in Bath with schooling in London,14 and later on she and her sisters were admired as beauties as they were carried in their sedan chairs to the Edinburgh assembly.15 Girlhood ended in 1739 with her marriage to a prominent Highland landowner, Sir Alexander Macdonald, seventh baronet of Sleat, soon after which the couple left Edinburgh for his estates in Skye. The sense of cultural dislocation felt by her second cousin Margaret Fletcher, brought up in and around Edinburgh, and taken briefly to Speyside on her marriage to John Grant of Easter Elchies, was noted in Chapter 4,16 but this sense of cultural distance was amplified for Margaret Macdonald, who found herself in a Gaelic-speaking island situation, remote from the societies in which she had grown up. On first arriving, she shrugged off the effects of the West Highland summer weather in keeping her indoors,17 and seems initially to have thrown herself into the duties of the Highland lady with some gusto. In 1742, her first child was born, but it is unlikely that she was able to travel to town in order to lie in, as most women desired.18 In the summer of 1743, she travelled south, presumably as far as Edinburgh.19 On her return, however, citing the effects of a growing family on dwindling finances, and the need to live frugally which was to afflict her for the rest of her life, she noted to her friend and lawyer John Mackenzie of Delvine, ‘We talk’d pretty positively of Staying all nixt year in the Isle of Sky, which, for the Sake of your friends, you’ll Lend your prayers to prevent.’20 The following summer, her ‘jant’ was a rent-collecting mission to Uist.21 By this time she was already embarked on a campaign to point out to Mackenzie that ‘our Retreate from the World has more the Shew of frugality than the Substance’ and that the couple ought to return south. 22 By August 1746, provoked by her husband’s projected See Chapter 5, pp.132–4. For similar cycles, see Stana Nenadic, ‘Experience and Expectations in the Transformation of the Highland Gentlewoman, 1680–1820’, SHR 80:2 (2001), pp.205–8; Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London, 1998), pp.265–72. 14 Rosalind K. Marshall, Virgins and Viragos: A History of Women in Scotland from 1080 to 1980 (London, 1983), p.205. 15 Henry Gray Graham, A Group of Scottish Women (London, 1908), p.165. 16 See Chapter 4, pp.87–8. 17 NLS MS1309 f.2, Margaret Macdonald to John Mackenzie, 8 July 1739, [Skye]. 18 Certainly, her three younger children were born in Skye. For Alexander: NLS, MS1308 f.185, Alexander Macdonald to Mackenzie, 11 March 1744, Mugstot; for Susan: Duncan Warrand (ed.), More Culloden Papers (Inverness, 1923–30), vol.4, p.154; for Archibald: NLS, MS1309 f.72, 19 July 1747, Mugstot. 19 NLS, MS1309 f.5, Lady Margaret Macdonald to John Mackenzie, 1 June 1743, Falkirk. 20 NLS, MS1309 f.9, 29 October 1743, Skye. 21 NLS, MS1309 f.14, Lady Margaret Macdonald to John Mackenzie, 1 July 1744, Skye. 22 NLS, MS1309 f.17, 4 July 1744, Skye. 13

142

travel, tourism and place

solitary trip to London, she was becoming increasingly resentful about her isolation, declaring that her husband’s company was ‘the only bribe I have Ever had to make this Remote Corner tolerable’, grudgingly adding, ‘I Shall never be So blind to Reason, or fond off my Self, as not to make a greater Sacrifice iff necessarry, than adding one winter to the manay I have pass[ed] in this Solitary Habitation.’23 Whilst her husband had political reasons for his projected visit, which he could have expected nonetheless to combine with pleasure, there was simply no practical reason why the wife of a debt-bound family, mother to three small children, should be afforded the opportunity she desired to spend a winter in Edinburgh. Although in her case exacerbated by geography and culture, some degree of isolation and withdrawal from ‘the world’ was not uncommon for women with growing families and shrinking purses.24 If a man travelled to town alone, he could live relatively cheaply in an inn or basic lodgings, but if accompanied by his wife, he would be expected to set up a household and entertain at home, a much more expensive prospect: James Boswell, who was able to rent fairly cheap lodgings in London on the grounds that few would visit to see them, pitied his friend Lady Betty Macfarlane’s husband for having ‘house and footmen and coach and dress and entertainment of all kinds to pay’.25 Lady Margaret was angered by the subordination to family finances of what she saw as her right to see her friends, eventually comparing her situation unfavourably to that of a prisoner in Edinburgh castle, but she knew that even though her husband vowed he would never live in Edinburgh, the educational needs of her eldest son might provide an excuse for her to spend some time there.26 Even when her husband died unexpectedly in 1746, she was constrained by a combination of pregnancy, estate business and the seasonal restrictions of travel with a young family, and it was nearly two years before she left the island. Eventually, Lady Margaret moved south to the Scottish Lowlands, and later to London where she embraced the world of public sociability and moved in the social circles surrounding her fashionable brother the tenth Earl of Eglinton and, on occasion at least, the Bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu.27 The town, with its easy access to provisions, company and amusements, could be a desirable location for widows. Lady Margaret Macdonald continued to manage her concerns in Skye and Uist from her distant London NLS, MS1309 f.30, to John Mackenzie, 27 August 1746. Nenadic, ‘Highland Gentlewoman’. 25 Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (first published 1950; reprinted New Haven and London, 1992), pp.58, 64. 26 NLS, MS1309 f.33, to John Mackenzie, 29 September 1746, Skye. Women could hope to spend time in town whilst their children were being educated there. 27 Boswell’s London Journal, p.70; NLS, MS1127 f.84, Elizabeth Mackenzie (née Chambers) to John Mackenzie, 7 June 1768, Kensington. James Beattie’s London Diary, 1773, edited, with an Introduction, by Ralph S. Walker (Aberdeen, 1946), p.53. Initially, she kept a house in Edinburgh, and spent some time there, NLS, MS16696 f.150, Margaret Macdonald to Lady Milton, April 1756. 23 24

143

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

townhouse, if not quite conflating the contrasting roles of polite femininity in London and in the Highlands, then at least showing that they could coexist in the mind, even if differentiated by much more than mere geographical distance.28 Over the course of her lifetime, a woman could spend long periods in very different abodes and locations, associated with contrasting expectations of female duties and behaviour, and yet this provoked remarkably little comment amongst contemporaries. It was simply taken for granted that this mobility, and the capacity to perform a variety of roles dependent on the cultural setting, was an integral part of the polite female role. Widows, at least those with adequate financial resources, were unusual in their ability to dictate their own movements, and the decision of when and where to travel was rarely in practice in the hands of women. Writing from Fort George, Robert Adam recorded the intense bitterness of a Mrs Fern, who had ‘arriv’d at Such a point of discontent’ at being left at home when her husband travelled to England ‘that She even begrudges his looking well, his Eating heartily, & being fat’.29 Four months later, she had, it appears, come no closer to forgiveness, ‘envying Mr Fern every happy Moment he enjoy’d all the while he was in England, as she had no Share in it, Nay She wish’d he had been miserable, that he might have known what she felt, in his Abscence’.30 Without knowing more about Mrs Fern (whether, for instance, a journey might have enabled contact with a distant family) it is hard to quantify the extent to which her resentment was justified. However, whilst clearly embittered, and perhaps embroidered somewhat by Adam, her comments exemplify the frustration of many women who were denied agency in their movements, and forced to wave goodbye to their husbands as they set off to places that they may themselves have had good reason to wish to visit.31 Both financial and practical reasons dictated the prioritisation of family resources towards male, business-related travel needs. Unlike later generations, elite women in this period still travelled short distances on horseback: discussing her return to Edinburgh from Moffat in 1763, Mally Fletcher informed her father that she would hire a chaise in the event of bad weather; otherwise, her horse would do perfectly well.32 However, as she suggested, women’s plans were For the interconnectivity of women’s work, domesticity and public leisure, see Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, HJ 36:2 (June 1993), p.411. 29 NAS, GD18/4739, to Jenny Adam, 11 May 1753. 30 NAS, GD18/4741, to Susy Adam, 14 September 1753, Fort George. 31 Elizabeth Foyster noted that by this time wives were denouncing their husbands in legal cruelty suits for domestic confinement on the grounds that they were unable to participate in polite society, although acknowledges this was at least partly due to the protection they might hope to be afforded by the proximity of neighbours in town. Elizabeth Foyster, ‘Creating a Veil of Silence? Politeness and Marital Violence in the English Household’, TransRHS, 6th series,12 (2002), pp.404–5. 32 NLS, MS16524 f.114, 5 July 1763, Moffat. John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Alexander Allardyce (Edinburgh, 1888), vol.2, p.89. 28

144

travel, tourism and place

more liable to disruption by bad weather, and their endurance for this mode of transport was viewed as less than that of men.33 Mobility was dictated by both age and location: in Skye, Lady Margaret Macdonald travelled on horseback over rough, stony roads,34 but as an older woman in London, her movements were more constrained. Women’s access to the more convenient and prestigious forms of private transport was usually secondary to that of their male owners, leaving the teenage Fletcher daughters to press their father to borrow his chaise,35 and the ageing Lady Margaret Macdonald to arrange her London visits around the availability of her brother Lord Eglinton’s coach. In 1767 she visited Elizabeth Chambers, who informed her brother-in-law John Mackenzie that Lady Margaret: told me she would have seen me long before had she an Equipage of her own, & as Ld E_ _ _n was now in the Country, she had taken that opportunity of coming in his, she said, she had Once attempted to walk, but a Violent Rain stop’d her in the Park, that she could proceed no farther, … but that now it is Summer she will walk out & see us.36

Although tinged with scepticism about the difficulties Lady Margaret was claiming to have encountered, this account is a reminder that, particularly in urban settings, infringements on mobility were not merely practical, but limited by fashion and polite protocol. In London, the idea of visiting in a state of weather-beaten dishevelment was incompatible with the expectations of polite femininity, whilst drawing up in a monogrammed coach, on the other hand, was a means of announcing status before the visit had even commenced. Over longer distances, travel entailed not just discomfort, but real dangers, with overturning a fairly common occurrence.37 Sir Alexander Macdonald commended Lady Margaret for being ‘so blyth all the Road’38 on her first journey north, a necessary quality in a wife who could expect to make long journeys on rough roads between distant destinations. In many circumstances, Coaches and chaises, he wrote, were not widespread amongst the gentry until after 1745. Ibid., p.90. For genteel women’s modes of transport, see also Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, pp.304–5, n.54. 33 As late as the 1750s, men travelled to London on horseback, Henry Gray Graham, The Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1900; first published 1899), vol.1, p.44. Concern was expressed over women riding much shorter distances, NLS, MS1212 f.10, Mary Mackenzie to John Mackenzie, 18 August 1746, Delvine. 34 James Boswell, The Journal of A Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LLD, edited and with an introduction by Peter Levi (reprint of 3rd edn, Harmondsworth, 1984; first published 1785), pp.316–17. 35 NLS, MS16673 f.75, 31 October 1751, Petersham. 36 NLS, MS1127 ff.70–1, Elizabeth Mackenzie (née Chambers) to John Mackenzie, 13 June 1767, Kensington. Another visit on foot is recorded the following April. Ibid. f.81, as above, 16 April 1768. 37 E.g., NAS, GD18/2098/388, 12 December 1749, Penicuik; NLS, MS16677 f.223, Donald Campbell of Airds to Milton, 30 November 1752, Airds. 38 NLS, MS1308 f.168, to John Mackenzie, 12 June 1739, Berneray.

145

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

travelling entailed significant practical responsibilities for women. For instance, Lady Milton’s role as hostess to the third Duke of Argyll at Inveraray was vital, yet this social role was only the tip of an iceberg of more practical responsibilities. Inveraray castle remained unfinished at the Duke’s death in 1761, and that at Roseneath, where visitors often broke their journey, was initially almost a ruin.39 So in addition to the months of provisioning that preceded each visit, she was responsible for ensuring the smooth-running of a busy, prestigious and ever-changing household in difficult material circumstances. She had made her reputation as an efficient chief of camp as early as 1746 when, as the Hanoverian army marched north, a friend joked that the Duke of Cumberland had ‘certainly commited a great oversight in not carrying My Lady Milton into ye highlands with him; how often will he wish for her, when he wants a dinner or a bed, a supper or a fire? … She wou’d have been, in my opinion, impayable.’40 Lady Milton’s situation at Inveraray was undeniably unusual, but most journeys, particularly those undertaken by large parties, demanded substantial organisational commitment from women. The ability to demonstrate efficiency and practicality in the adverse circumstances that such travel presented was in some ways as much a part of performing the social role expected of polite women as any other accomplishment. Politeness and Place 1: London The role of London as a place to which young girls were taken to gain a veneer of sophistication and an acquaintance with the manners of polite society was examined in Chapter 2; it remained a desirable destination for Scotswomen throughout the life-course. For James Boswell’s travelling companion in 1762, London may have been ‘just … a place where he was to receive orders from the East India Company’,41 but for the many Scots who, like Boswell, were entranced and enticed by the British capital, it was a magnetic and culturally significant destination whose fashions and polite entertainments remained unchallenged in their supremacy throughout the century.42 In an age which put a premium on the modern, London was seen as the archetypal modern city;43 as the editor of the London Guide declared, ‘This city … is now what ancient Rome once was; the seat of Liberty; the encourager of arts, and the admiration Lindsay and Cosh, Inveraray and the Dukes of Argyll, p.181; p.18 for Roseneath (completed 1757), p.92. 40 NLS, MS16637 f.279, Charles Stewart to Milton, 2 March 1746, London. 41 Boswell’s London Journal, p.44. This was the eldest son of Stewart of Ardsheal, who had been forfeited after the ’45. Ibid., p.41 42 For Boswell and London, see James J. Caudle, ‘James Boswell (H. Scotus Londoniensis)’, in Stana Nenadic (ed.), Scots in London in the Eighteenth Century (Lewisburg, PA, 2010). 43 For travellers’ accounts, see Roy Porter, ‘Visitors’ Visions: Travellers’ Tales of Georgian London’, in Chloe Chard and Helen Langdon (eds), Transports: Travel, Pleasure, and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830 (New Haven and London, 1996). 39

146

travel, tourism and place

of the whole world.’44 Yet whilst Rome was associated by eighteenth-century tourists with a masculine culture of antiquarianism and classical learning, London, as a centre of heterosociability, constituted the ideal setting in which elite women could demonstrate cultivation in matters of taste, manners and the polite arts. The growth of the print media fostered the capital’s reputation, which was perpetuated through travel itself: ‘we will Communicate to the female part of the family, the present modes of London, which we are fully instructed in, & will be Silent to every body else on that head till we see them’, promised visitors to the Fletcher family newly arrived on the coach from London in 1755.45 Nowhere was more closely associated with the modern, the civilised and the commercial; nowhere was more capable of imparting prestige and a sense of fashionable politeness upon those who could boast of a visit, or more guaranteed to provoke envy amongst those who could not. Prior to the eighteenth century, few Scotswomen travelled to London, and those who did, did so seldom.46 Over the course of the eighteenth century, however, the British capital took on an increasingly important role in the construction of polite femininity amongst the families of the Scottish aristocracy and gentry. For the women of the aristocratic Atholl family, London was home for long periods of time, from early in the century. Entrance into court circles at St James’s was effectively automatic, and attendance at royal events like coronations expected. Charlotte, daughter of the second Duke, spent much of her childhood there under the auspices of her English mother, who in 1742 took the eleven-year-old to the first ridotto of the season, alongside 1700 others who ‘Crouded her little person’.47 Such preparation was no doubt useful when Charlotte returned in adulthood to live in London as the wife of the third Duke. When she was not too heavily pregnant, her time was taken up ‘showing away with all the rest of the fine People’ at court;48 ‘Attending the Great Peoples Levies’;49 at fashionable diversions like plays and the opera (an entertainment for which she had little affection and was ‘very glad when it was over’);50 or viewing novelty attractions like the Queen’s zebra.51 A result of her mixed Quoted in John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997), p.52. 45 NLS, MS16683 f.25, James Campbell and Graham of Dougalstone to Milton, 30 April [1753], Edinburgh. From 1754, the stagecoach went fortnightly, taking ten days in summer and twelve in winter. Graham, Social Life, vol.1, p.44. 46 Marshall, Virgins and Viragos, p.128. 47 NRAS234/JacC/I/8/28, Duchess of Atholl to Lord George Murray, 4 April 1742, [London]. For her sister’s presentation at court, NRAS234/JacC/I/8/34, as above to Lady George, 28 May 1742. 48 NRAS234/Box49/1/10, Duchess of Atholl to Captain Murray [third Duke], [17 January 1762]. 49 NRAS234/Box49/1/179, John Murray to Lady George Murray [as PS to letter from Lady Charlotte], 8 July 1762, East Molesey [Surrey]. 50 NRAS234/47/14/166, Lady Charlotte Murray to Lady George Murray, 7 November 1761, London; NRAS234/47/14/171, to Lady George Murray, 15 November 1761, London. 51 NRAS234/Box49/1/213, Lady Charlotte Murray to Lady George Murray, 5 August 44

147

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

Anglo-Scottish aristocratic upbringing, Charlotte was not ill-at-ease in the ‘best’ London society. She and her husband could afford to take houses in the ‘best’ streets, and eventually built a townhouse in Grosvenor Place in the fashionable suburb of Belgravia.52 Taking a house almost opposite that of the Earl of Bute at the height of his unpopularity as Prime Minister in March 1763, she may have remarked mockingly to her mother-in-law that ‘to be sure we must be in the fashion’,53 but few of her compatriots could have hoped to afford to rent a house in such an area. It was to this kind of easy, familiar relationship with polite London society that others of less privileged birth aspired. Yet the sense of London as a place of glamorous potential is much more apparent in the correspondence of families like the Adams, who inhabited the more uncertain boundaries of polite society. For Robert Adam, the move to London was calculated to provide grander architectural opportunities for the men of the family. However, he understood the attractions of the metropolis for his most fashionably inclined sister Nelly. When, in June 1753, he described to her his plans for his future, he worked her projected desires into his own hopes: I often think what a pity it is that Such a genius Shou’d be thrown away upon Scotland, where Scarce will ever happen an opportunity of putting one Noble thought in execution. It would be a more extensive Scheme to Settle a family also in England & Let the Adams’s be the Sovereign Architects of the united Kingdoms, woud you have any objections to a London Life Nell, To your Coach & Livery Servants to the best of Company, & the most exquisite diversions[?]54

Adam was careful to combine fantasies about his own future architectural dominance with an exalted existence for his sister as a metropolitan lady. As has been seen, Nelly had been encouraged in the polite accomplishments, suggesting that originally Robert may have genuinely intended his sisters to enter London society. Yet whilst his predictions about his own life proved surprisingly accurate (at least in the short-term), those of his sisters who did eventually move to London ‘avoided fashionable society’, as one biographer rather euphemistically put it.55 Nelly’s presence in London eventually seems to have been required primarily as a housekeeper,56 although she nevertheless 1762, East Molesey. 52 See Viccy Coltman, ‘Scottish Architects in Eighteenth-Century London: George Steuart, the Competition for Patronage, and the Representation of Scotland’, in Nenadic (ed.), Scots in London, p.94. 53 NRAS234/Box49/2/96, 22 March 1763, London. 54 NAS, GD18/4779, 12 July 1753, Rome.

Margaret H. B. Sanderson, Robert Adam and Scotland: Portrait of an Architect (Edinburgh, 1992), p.34. I would also like to thank Alison Duncan (PhD candidate, University of Edinburgh) for her remarks on this subject. 55

‘I can think of no other way of removing the Plague of it than by calling to my aid Some of our Females, Two of whom transporting themselves to London by the time I arrive, will with Judgement & Aeconomy aid me in Domestick determinations, & leave me more time 56

148

travel, tourism and place

appears to have been able to use her contacts within the world of London Scots to help procure her brothers one of their most important commissions, at Kedleston house in Derbyshire.57 In December 1758, Robert reported to his brother that ‘Nelly Says she just hinted my introduction to Sr Nathaniel Curzon by Ld Charles Hay [the younger brother of the fourth Marquis of Tweeddale, a Scottish aristocrat], I went to his House, & in two hours after Sir Nat. came to mine to See my Drawings & was Struck all of a heap with wonder & Amaze.’58 The following Saturday afternoon Robert went back and spent two hours with Sir Nathaniel and his wife Lady Caroline, irrespective of the fact that they had already commissioned another architect to work on the house. Unfortunately, the context in which Nelly made this introduction is unspecified, but even if the Adam women ventured little into public society, the society they entertained at home, where their cousin the historian William Robertson occasionally stayed, may well have been as attractive to expatriate Scots as their Edinburgh home had been.59 Scots, like other minorities in London, were aware of themselves as a distinct group, socialising together and working through their own interest networks to provide for each other in a way that became the subject of quite invidious satire under Bute’s premiership.60 Nelly Adam’s involvement in this commission suggests that even those women who may not have moved regularly in fashionable London society were still participating in social networks of practical use to their families. Those like Agnes Elliot who did enter London society required significant preparation. Having settled on London as the best place to pursue a political career, Gilbert Elliot initially left his young wife and growing family at home in Scotland, whilst taking careful measures to prepare the ground for his wife’s acceptance into the Whig social circles he wished her to enter. In 1753, Elliot informed Agnes, then still in Scotland, that he had been choosing his company carefully on her account: If you come up here you woud wish to be in good company, which for men is easie, but for Ladys most excessively difficult: there are some here, who have live’d for years at a great expence & of good rank too, who I find have have to transact my Worldly Interests.’ NAS, GD18/4811, Robert Adam to James Adam, 24 July 1756, Rome. 57 Kedleston was ‘perhaps the most consistently praised country house’ in mid-to-late eighteenth-century England, Adrian Tinniswood, A History of Country House Visiting: Five Centuries of Tourism and Taste (Oxford, 1989), p.102. 58 NAS, GD18/4854, to James Adam, 11 December 1758, Grosvenor St. 59 John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle in Edinburgh and Rome (London, 1962), p.81; also NAS, GD18/4873, James Adam to Peggy Adam, 24 September 1760, Venice. For Edinburgh, see Chapter 4, p.85. 60 E.g., Boswell’s London Journal; Alexander Carlyle, The Autobiography of Dr. Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk, 1722–1805, ed. John Hill Burton, with a new Introduction by Richard B. Sher (Bristol, 1990; reprint of 1910 edn); also various family papers, notably NLS, Saltoun papers, for the letters of Andrew Fletcher MP, who lived with the third Duke of Argyll. See also Stana Nenadic, ‘Introduction’ to Scots in London, esp. pp.26–30.

149

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

[sic] not at all succeeding in this point. If one sets out in a wrong channel, it is almost irreperable: I am now establishd perfectly with all that family of Ladys, whom you know I meant chiefly to cultivate.61

Women’s social progress in the capital was a matter of some consequence, to be managed through the cultivation of the correct people; something which this couple had evidently discussed prior to Elliot’s removal from Scotland. As well as cultivating desirable female company, Gilbert urged his wife to practise playing cribbage, and commended her ‘amusing’ herself with French, both of which would aid her entrance into that society.62 Once Agnes arrived in London, Gilbert also oversaw her negotiation of the dictates of epistolary sociability amongst the ladies of the Whig elite: ‘you may write one Letter more to Lady Hester [Pitt], & one to Lady Bute … add that afterwards youll trust to my giving accounts of them, & will not trouble them wt more letters: they are both very sincerely your friends’.63 Acquaintance needed to be made, but carefully and according to the unwritten rules of rank and the political hierarchy. The sheer volume of people meant that London was in theory the ideal place to benefit from the supposedly improving qualities of socialising for the consequent improvement of both sexes, a concept echoed by Gilbert, who wrote to his wife, ‘I wish with all my heart you had the same opportunity I have had, for I think with reguard to women as well as men, seeing the world in its largest scenes must improve them.’64 Yet from the Elliots’ correspondence prior to Agnes’s arrival in London there emerges a sense of Gilbert’s mounting anxieties about metropolitan society, simultaneously (as he, like many others, saw it) the pinnacle of politeness and the pit of depravity. Gilbert cautioned his wife that the city could be improving to women ‘if they have only sense & resolution to think a little for themselves without being hurried away either with the dissipation of it, or blinded by the fashion, & yet this requires much more firmness than you can well imagine’.65 Closer acquaintance with London society could, he suggested, be an illusion-shattering experience, alluding to a story which he could barely bring himself to believe about a ‘Heroine’ of his wife’s.66 In general, he hinted at the outrageous and unattractive behaviour of fashionable women in what was supposed to be the apex of polite society: ‘Variety here is without end _ & dissipation prevails almost universally.’67 Such criticisms of the metropolis were commonplace amongst Scots and provincial English alike; for both groups, London fulfilled a vital role as the most easily accessible place of ‘otherness’ against which they could define themselves. NLS, MS11006 f.24, to Agnes Elliot, 14 April 1753, London. NLS, MS11006 f.36, to Agnes Elliot, 5 January 1754, London; MS11007 f.64, 16 Dec 1756, London. 63 NLS, MS11007 f.22, to Agnes Elliot in Kinghorn, 18 November 1756, London. 64 NLS, MS11006 f.42, Gilbert Elliot to Agnes Elliot, 7 April 1753, London. 65 NLS, MS11006 f.42, 7 April 1753, London. 66 NLS, MS11006 f.97, Gilbert Elliot to Agnes Elliot, 12 December 1754, London. 67 NLS, MS11006 f.45, to Agnes Elliot, 14 April 1753, [London]. 61

62

150

travel, tourism and place

Their own status as an ‘other’ in London could be made clear to them from an early age: in 1739 the Duchess of Atholl (herself English) remarked that a friend sometimes teased her young daughters about Scotland, ‘& makes them very angry especialy [seven-year-old] Charlot who fires att him so as diverts the whole Company’.68 For most Scotswomen, London provided the most promising setting they would encounter for commenting with disdain on the frivolities and excesses of another culture, in the way that their menfolk would do in Rome or Venice. It gave them an opportunity to ponder the meaning of true politeness as opposed to that which prevailed in the social spaces of metropolitan fashion. Margaret Steuart Calderwood, for instance, dismissed the celebrated but sometimes risqué Vauxhall Gardens as ‘but a vulgar sort of entertainment’ where she ‘could not think myself in genteel company, whiles I heard a man calling, “Take care of your watches and pockets.”’69 Politeness and Place 2: The Resort The only serious challenge to London’s status as the home of polite culture was posed by the spa resort. Spa resorts developed across Britain over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, providing a series of locations purpose-built for the distillation of the most important concerns of polite society.70 Belief in the health-giving properties of mineral waters should not be underestimated, particularly when viewed alongside the potentially ameliorative effects of a change of society and situation. But alongside the seriously ill, spa resorts received flocks of perfectly healthy family and friends accompanying invalids or those feeling a little under the weather, as part of the annual migration patterns identified earlier in this chapter. It was at such resorts that, as Paul Langford put it, ‘three of the great motive quests of middleclass life, marriage, health, and diversion, came together’.71 In prioritising these concerns, spas became associated with polite sociability and with female interests in particular. In Britain, the hierarchy of desirability amongst spa resorts was topped by Bath, a veritable microcosm of polite society in terms of both space and company. Many elite Scots travelled there, upon their arrival usually finding plenty of compatriots as well as high-ranking English aristocrats.72 Like London, NRAS234/JacC/1/6/127, Duchess of Atholl to Lord George Murray, 29 September 1739, Hammersmith. 69 Margaret Steuart Calderwood, ‘A Journey in England, Holland, and the Low Countries’ (1756), in Coltness Collections, 1608–1840, Maitland Club (Edinburgh, 1842), p.117. 70 Peter Borsay, ‘Health and Leisure Resorts 1700–1840’, in Peter Clark (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol.2, 1540–1840 (Cambridge, 2000); Phyllis Hembry, The English Spa 1560–1815: A Social History (London, 1990). 71 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, England 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989), p.102. 72 E.g., NRAS234/Box49/3/149, Amelie Murray to Lady George Murray, 16 April 1764, Bath. 68

151

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

Bath provided the opportunity to participate in the most polite diversions surrounded by the most polite society. And, also like London, it provided the opportunity for the expression of a more practical, down-to-earth identity through reporting with a certain aloofness on frivolous social excess. Although Amelie Murray, at the resort in 1764, enjoyed people-watching in the pump room of a morning, and attended at least one play with her daughters (though she was disparaging of the quality of both house and actors),73 she tended to dismiss the diversions at Bath, telling her mother that she seldom went to any ‘for [the company] delight only in cards’.74 Similarly, in 1749, Betty Pringle informed her father Sir John Clerk of Penicuik that ‘to the rooms one Must go some-times but As gameing is all the deversion I very soon tire’.75 Although she was related to high-ranking members of the aristocracy (her letter also debated whether or not to travel to visit her mother’s cousin the Duchess of Queensbery) she hinted that money spoke louder than breeding, at the expense of respectable gentry like herself: ‘the Chief diversion seems to be playing at Cards and accordingly a Man or Woman is thought of As they can play well, & high, so in this respect Babie [her sister] & I are in no hazard of cuting a figure’.76 The expression of such sentiments, along with disapproving comments on the riches and expensive fashions on display, enabled visitors to distance themselves from the dangers of luxury and indulgence associated with such resorts, and to reassure those at home that they retained the level-headedness and common sense on which polite Scots tended to pride themselves. Amelie Murray, however, claimed to prefer Bath to Bristol, not just because she found the former less expensive, but because at Bath she felt under less pressure to keep company and felt less observed.77 Spa-goers lived together in close quarters, participating in the same events (both health-focused and social) with the same people, and experiencing what Borsay termed ‘an intensely corporate lifestyle … encouraged by the existence of a set of mores and norms that stigmatized privacy and aloofness, and of a rigid daily cycle of activities requiring the company to be in the same place, doing the same thing, at the same time’.78 It was these variables of company and observation that made resort society such a unique distillation of polite priorities – and which acted as such a valuable asset to those on the cusp of politeness. These ‘corporate’ and ritual qualities of spa society may have been tiresome at times, but they were ideal

NRAS234/Box49/3/174, to Lady George Murray, 13 May 1764, Bath. NRAS234/Box49/3/165, to Lady George Murray, 1 May 1764, Bath; NRAS234/ Box49/3/174, 13 May 1764; NRAS234/Box49/3/188, to George Murray onboard HMS The Tartar. 75 NAS, GD18/5423/43, 19 September 1749, Bath. For the intensity of gaming at Bath, see Borsay, Urban Renaissance, pp.249–50. 76 NAS, GD18/5423/43, as above. 77 NRAS234/Box49/3/219, to Lady George Murray, 15 July 1764, Bath. 78 Peter Borsay, ‘Urban Life and Culture’, in H. T. Dickinson (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2002), pp.203–4. 73 74

152

travel, tourism and place

for the breaking-down of otherwise rigid social barriers.79 Resorts were where, in the words of Robert Adam, ‘Strange Events & marvelous conquests’ might occur.80 Most commonly linked to their capacity to act as marriage markets or the setting for clandestine affairs, resorts also offered possibilities for more mundane forms of social connection, in particular, as Peter Borsay put it, the integration of ‘new recruits’ into the social elite.81 When Adam left for Italy, he urged his sisters to make the most of a season at Moffat, where they often drank the waters for a few weeks in summer.82 For those without the wealth or inclination to travel to Bath, this small Dumfriesshire spa, no more than a day’s journey from the urban centres of Edinburgh and Glasgow, occupied a conspicuous place in the annual leisure cycle.83 Robert commented to his sisters during their visit to Moffat in 1755 that the ‘intention & design of most of the frequenters of Mineral Waters’ was ‘visits, Dances Bowls & Scandal’.84 His distillation of resort society and its activities into visits and gossip, balls and bowling greens, suggests that he viewed Moffat as a place of characteristically resort-style sociability, formed above all by the privileging of polite social behaviours. It may be that the family hoped to make use of the advantageous marriage of Robert’s sister Susannah to John Clerk of Eldin, a local landowner, in 1752. The son of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, celebrated in the realms of culture and politics and a regular visitor to the spa who campaigned for its improvement, and closely related on his mother’s side to the Duke of Queensberry, a major local landowner, Eldin would have been in an ideal position to make introductions for the Adam family at Moffat. The benefits of this specific connection are not apparent in the Adams’ correspondence over the summer of 1755, but their letters do provide a rare insight into the more general potential of this small resort in the minds of the socially ambitious. Adam’s family, he believed, had ‘nursed up a foolish Shyness & Modesty’ which impeded them from the social achievements which might be gained by cultivating ‘a little Spirit with an enticing manner’ enhanced by a ‘grain of Selfconceit’. Worst afflicted by this malaise, he believed, was his sister Margaret, or Peggy. Despite spending most of her time in the Scottish capital, it was at Moffat, Robert believed, that Peggy Adam could hope to gain access to the sort Borsay, ‘Health and Leisure Resorts’, pp.792–3. NAS, GD18/4778, Robert Adam to Jenny Adam, 5 July 1755, Rome. 81 Borsay, ‘Health and Leisure Resorts’, p.793. 82 For more on Moffat spa, see Katharine Glover, ‘Polite Society and the Rural Resort: The Meanings of Moffat Spa in the Eighteenth Century’, JECS 34:1 (2011). 83 Alastair Durie, ‘Medicine, Health and Economic Development: Promoting Spa and Seaside Resorts in Scotland c. 1750–1830’, Medical History 47 (2003); W. A. J. Prevost, ‘Moffat Spa in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, TransDGNHAS, 3rd series, vol.43 (1966); John T. Johnstone, ‘Moffat and Upper Annandale in the Middle of the Eighteenth Century’, TransDGNHAS, 3rd series, vol.1 (1912–13). 84 NAS, GD18/4778, Robert Adam to Jenny Adam, 5 July 1755, Rome. Adam visited the spa in 1752, NAS, GD18/4737, John Adam to Maggie Adam at Merchiston, 7 July 1752, Fort George. 79 80

153

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

of society that would help to rub off the edges of what he saw as her awkwardness, a quality quite opposed to the polite ideals of ease and informality.85 After the presence of scientifically proven waters, the next most important factor in determining a resort’s reputation was the ‘quality’ of the company, that is to say, the presence of aristocracy or the more fashionable gentry. Always conscious of the composition of the company in which they moved, the eighteenth-century gentry and nobility took a particularly pronounced interest in those with whom they found themselves isolated in such small resorts. Spas were associated with a loosening of the social hierarchy that permitted hopes of enviable new social contacts amongst the ranks of the gentry and aristocracy who frequented them.86 So as soon as Robert Adam expected his mother and sisters to have arrived at Moffat in 1755, he asked for information on their ‘Situation with all Ranks of People’,87 a question not merely of curiosity, but of vital importance to his plans for his family’s future. By the end of the summer, Adam was commending his sisters on their success, writing approvingly that ‘Your Situation at Moffat & Your intimacy & familiarity with genteel & as you tell me good Company makes me mighty happy.’88 Adam’s hope was that this new acquaintance would be of use not only in itself, but in intimidating his family’s former – and in his mind less suitable – friends to the point where they would cease to treat the Adam women as their equals and commence a more deferential relationship. ‘Your other friends’, he continued, ‘will be every day less & less troublesome as they perceive an increase of better Company frequenting You they will insensibly decrease the number of their Visits, till at last they drop all intercourse & only look on you as Patrons, not friends, ask & court your protection, not desire or hope for Your conversation.’ Adam may have been particularly ruthless in his expression of his desires, but it appears nonetheless that the small, isolated and, it seems, less stratified society of Moffat had permitted his sisters the close and regular contact with the ‘good’ company that he hoped would help to socially reposition his family on a more permanent basis. Just like the similarly condensed, isolated and palpably impermanent expatriate communities with whom Adam socialised in Italy,89 the spa society of Moffat could act as a crucible for the formation of meaningful social bonds. Yet Adam knew that the bonds formed in a resort were notoriously short-lived, and that it was most important that his sisters’ efforts would continue to reap rewards when they returned home to Edinburgh. He added anxiously, ‘I hope you have not, nor will not find them change in behaviour from their changing their abode, a continuance of Intimacy & constant visiting is not to be expected, NAS, GD18/4784, Robert Adam to Nelly Adam, 16 August 1755, Rome. Prevost, ‘Moffat Spa’, pp.140–1. See also Carlyle, Autobiography, p.215. 87 NAS, GD18/4778, Robert Adam to Jenny Adam, 5 July 1755, Rome. 88 NAS, GD18/4787, Robert Adam to Peggy Adam, 13 September 1755, Rome. 89 For Adam’s notebook detailing the acquaintances he made abroad, see NAS, GD18/4753. 85 86

154

travel, tourism and place

but complaisance, Ceremonious Visits & politesse is to be hoped for, & I am convinced will be show’d You.’ Resort society could be more fluid precisely because it was understood that the more rigid hierarchies which characterised polite social relations would take over once spa-goers returned to their normal place of residence. It was important to form bonds as close as possible; whilst mere acquaintance with those of a higher social rank might easily be forgotten, it was much less likely that the ‘intimacies’ Adam mentioned would be ignored entirely in future. Even if these new social relationships were acted out on a more distant basis in Edinburgh than they had been in the resort, they do appear to have endured, for in October, Adam was again congratulating his sisters on their success, not only in the way they acquitted themselves at Moffat, but, more importantly, ‘In retaining familiarity & friendship with the good & Great’ after their return home.90 This ambitious young man had considerable hopes for the impact on his sisters’ polite status of a visit to the resort, and, at least in the short term, he appears to have believed they were fulfilled. The Domestic Tourist: Impressions of Improvement Being a tourist was not just about where one went, or what one did, but how one understood and recorded this experience. From around the mideighteenth century improvements in transport, aided by the restriction of Continental travel during the Seven Years War, contributed towards the emergence of the concept of domestic tourism as a fashionable activity amongst the propertied classes – a fashion in which a much larger proportion of the landed population could hope to participate than in Continental tourism. This was not just for practical reasons, but because the ways in which the tourist was expected to observe Britain did not require the classical education necessary for a learned understanding of Mediterranean antiquities. This opened up practices of tourism (of relating to and interpreting the places through which one travelled) far more accessible to elite women than those which had prevailed hitherto. The dominant discourse of domestic tourism concentrated on improvement,91 privileging regions on the boundaries of wilderness and of cultivation. This enabled tourists to see in action the ‘progress’ of society from the pastoral to the modern and, by witnessing and writing about it, to implicate themselves in this patriotic process. Women travellers may not have fitted the categories of ‘heroic explorer, scientist, or authoritative cultural interpreter’ under which men travelled,92 but if men understood the places through NAS, GD18/4788, Robert Adam to Jenny Adam, 14 October 1755, Rome. See, for instance, ‘Memorial of a Goat Whey Campaign at Lawers’, in Memoirs of the Life of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, 1676–1755, ed. John M. Gray, SHS, series 1, vol.13 (Edinburgh 1892), p.257. Also, Alexander Carlyle, Journal of a Tour to the North of Scotland, ed. Richard B. Sher (Aberdeen, 1982), esp. pp.12, 14. 92 Bohls, Women Travel Writers, p.17. 90 91

155

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

which they travelled along a number of well-worn channels related to their own personal and professional interests, so, too, did elite women. Women were well versed in the practicalities of running a household and estate, of not just the acquisition of fashionable furnishings but the profitability of land and crops, and travel and the act of reflection in letters home provided them with an unrivalled opportunity to demonstrate that they understood the patriotic concerns and responsibilities of their rank. The letters in which Amelie Murray described to her mother her journey to Bath through the English Midlands in 1764 are replete with the received attitudes of the polite tourist, phrased in the standard tourist language, all paying due attention to improvements in the urban landscape and in the developments in manufactures that symbolised Britain’s economic progress.93 In Birmingham, for instance, the party were given a tour of the enamel works and button-making factory, leaving Amelie to conclude that ‘This is a place very well worth seeing a large populous well built Town very industrious ingenious people every body employ’d.’94 Through such comments, she demonstrated her awareness that, for the polite tourist, a place worth seeing was one with vibrant, progressive industries and a busy working population – in other words, a place that provided an example to the elite of the practical implementation of modern ideals of commercial and industrial development. The priorities of domestic tourism were those of patriotic improvement and, in particular, of a willingness to view and to reflect on what was seen as national improvement through agriculture and industry. Through tourism, and through writing about it, women, like men, implictly aligned themselves with such improving agendas. As well as industries, agriculture and landscape, polite tourists pioneered a fashion for country house visiting. They visited not as guests of the family, but as tourists come to admire the architecture, the paintings and antiquities on display inside a series of celebrated, usually aristocratic, homes and the grounds in which the house was set. In an era when expenditure on estates was seen as an act of patriotism, visitors were effectively paying homage to these monuments to the supposed greatness of Britain and the security and prominence of her landed elite; in other words, they were reconfirming the power and authority of the landed wealth that underpinned the aristocracy and gentry. This sense of self-confirmation as members of a landed elite could be reinforced by visitors’ consciousness of their personal connections to the houses they visited; when Amelie Murray visited Cliveden House, she remarked that she felt ‘an affection’ for it on the grounds of if having been ‘done’ by her great-uncle, the first Earl of Orkney.95 But of most significance to female ‘Mercantile and economic good sense’ were, according to Turner, probably the ‘most respectable’ discourses available to eighteenth-century tourists. British Travel Writers, p.49. 94 NRAS234/Box49/3/149, Amelie Murray to Lady George Murray, 16 April 1764, Bath. 95 NRAS234/Box49/3/285, Amelie Murray to Lady George Murray, 20 October 1764, London. See also NLS, MS11009 f.50, Lady Minto to Gilbert Elliot, 8 September 1757, Minto. 93

156

travel, tourism and place

tourists was the emphasis in early country house guide books on decorations and furnishings. This created a touristic frame of reference that would have felt very familiar to them. In 1759, Mally Fletcher was one of a party touring Highland Perthshire. Her reactions to the Duke of Atholl’s castle at Blair Atholl as reported by Lucy Scott of Thirdpart, another member of her party, demonstrate the highly personal way in which she responded to this house as a tourist. Lucy wrote to Lord Milton: the House indeed is fitted up with the utmost Elegance & made so deep an impression on Miss Fletcher that I was on the very point of letting her off with her visit to Thirdpart & began to pity you on her return Home till coming into a room furnished with sewings which Lady Amelia [Halkett] pronounced the greatest in the whole House Miss Fletcher with great Spirit declared that there was a much handsomer bed at Salton only with this difference you may tell my Lady that the Dukes is on white cloth instead of green sattin the garrets next afforded some consolation she being of opinion that yours in Edinr were preferable & the comparison of the Dairy with that at Brunstane brought her away in perfect good humour however that this may be permanent I think that you cannot too Early set about compleating your Edinr habitation[.]96

Although clearly designed to entertain, this report suggests Mally viewed her visit to Blair primarily as a means of comparing her own family homes, their heirlooms and recent improvements with this aristocratic castle. In 1759, Blair castle was a resolutely modern building. The Murray family, known personally to Mally (certainly in her youth), tended to base themselves at Dunkeld when in Perthshire. But after the castle was garrisoned by troops during the ’45 Jacobite rising the Duke had decided to transform it into a home so that it could never again be used in such a way. This, according to one tourist who visited in 1758, he was ‘fitting up and furnishing in a most elegant manner’.97 Like Celia Fiennes, who toured England in the 1680s and ’90s, these women were most inspired by the (relatively) new.98 Their classically trained brothers might have been expected to respond most readily to the relics of antiquity with which the elite furnished their homes, or to the neo-classical decor they inspired. However, the reactions of these women as tourists were

NLS, MS16712 ff.20–1, 29 July 1759, Kincraigie. The bed was described by Sir William Burrell as ‘said to be worked by the Dutchess de la Tremoulle, daughter to the Prince of Orange and Lady Derby, her daughter, set on white cloth, the bed posts Gothic pillars’. William Burrell, Sir William Burrell’s Northern Tour, 1758, ed. John G. Dunbar (East Linton, 1997), p.69. 97 Ibid., p.69. 98 Tinniswood, Country House Visiting, p.63; Christopher Morris, ‘Introduction’ to The Illustrated Journeys of Celia Fiennes, 1685–c.1712, ed. Christopher Morris (London, 1982), pp.14–15. For her antiquarian interests, see D. R. Woolf, ‘A Feminine Past? Gender, Genre and Historical Knowledge in England, 1500–1800’, American Historical Review 102:3 (June 1997), p.647. 96

157

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

rooted in their responsibilities as housekeepers and their own consciousness of the effort required to combine functionality with tasteful furnishings in houses that were also designed for public display, if in a less formal manner. Lucy concluded by passing on some advice to the Fletchers on the decoration of their new house in the Canongate, regretting Lady Milton’s absence from the party on the grounds that ‘she might have been animate to equal them in her house as much as she excels them at table’.99 When the party moved on to the Earl of Breadalbane’s property at Taymouth, Lucy similarly informed Milton that (although she preferred it to Blair), ‘The House is remarkable for nothing but its extraordinary cleanness wch as you injoy in the utmost perfection at Home think I have no message atall for My Lady.’100 In the realm of domestic furnishings, tourism presented the opportunity not just for comparison, but for competition. Their personal frame of reference meant that these women could not, unlike Thomas Pennant, remark on the resemblance of the lands around Taymouth to ‘the great slope opposite the grande Chartreuse in Dauphine’.101 But when it came to landscape, Lucy Scott combined her priorities as a prudent, frugal housekeeper with an understanding of the picturesque. She compared negatively the policies at Blair Atholl, where ‘every thing seems done at great expence & more artificial than natural beauties’,102 with those at Taymouth which were ‘of longer standing & come to greater perfection & thou I believe done at equal expence have more the appearance of nature’.103 The fashionable popularity of the picturesque emphasised the combination of the best of both art and nature, a sort of nature perfected. Just as the polite emphasised supposedly ‘natural’ behaviour, even if it was achieved through hard effort, the polite tourist, schooled in the priorities of the picturesque, would automatically give preference to the more natural appearance of the grounds around Taymouth in comparison to those at Blair Atholl which less successfully concealed the work put into them. Perhaps most significantly, Lucy Scott believed that Blair Atholl had failed to answer her ‘expectations’.104 To travel with expectations was to lay claim to possession of the taste and knowledge that helped to define the discerning tourist who was able to weigh up what she saw and to pass judgement based on experience. Another means by which women might portray NLS, MS16712 f.21, 29 July 1759. NLS, MS16712 ff.22–3, to Milton, 5 August 1759, Kincraigie. 101 Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Scotland, 1769, with an introduction by Brian D. Osborne (Edinburgh, 2000), p.58. He had travelled widely in Continental Europe in 1765, ‘Introduction’, p.x. 102 NLS, MS16712 f.20, to Milton, 29 July 1759, Kincraigie. This would have referred to the then-new Hercules Garden. 103 NLS, MS16712 ff.23, to Milton, 5 August 1759, Kincraigie. In 1770, Elizabeth Montagu supposed ‘there is hardly a spot in Europe where the sublime & beautiful are so happily united’. Quoted in Ian Ross, ‘A Bluestocking Over the Border: Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu’s Aesthetic Adventures in Scotland, 1766’, HLQ 23:3 (1965), p.214. 104 NLS, MS16712 f.20, to Milton, 29 July 1759. 99

100

158

travel, tourism and place

themselves as experienced and knowledgeable tourists was through making comparisons. So, in Amelie Murray’s descriptions to her mother, the waters at Bath were not nearly as hot as those at Swalbach;105 the colleges and churches of Oxford were reminiscent of Cologne;106 and the silk manufactory at Derby was compared with one she and her mother had visited together in Utrecht.107 An effective means of description, and an epistolary convention which helped to draw her mother (with whom she had travelled on the Continent) into the narrative of her current journey, these comparisons also worked to affirm her status as a worldly and experienced international traveller – a status that was relatively unusual, even amongst the polite. Continental Travel Narratives and the Representation of Self Writing from Lyons en route for Italy in 1754, Robert Adam advised his sisters: ‘As you are become Geographers Look at your Map, & follow my Route.’108 For Robert, ahead lay the excitements of Italy and the Grand Tour, whilst for his sisters, the European continent could only be experienced through a map at home in Edinburgh. On the whole, it was through such indirect means that most of the women with whom this book is concerned experienced overseas travel, receiving letters from brothers and sons travelling with the military or for their education. Their descriptions tended to focus on the drama of combat or politics of strategy, rather than touristic impressions. But the effect of this increase in male travel, and of the efficiency of the international postal system in broadening the mental horizons of even those women who could have no hopes of venturing overseas, should not be underestimated. Travellers’ letters home carried more than just descriptions of where their authors were and what they saw; they created a sense of engagement with the concerns affecting loved ones in Continental Europe or the Americas. Without leaving their own homes, the Adam women became conversant with the goings-on of Italian high society and the etiquette of negotiating the social hierarchy of a country they were almost certain never to visit. Through mechanisms such as describing his sisters’ Moffat visits as ‘villagiatura’, Adam extended to his sisters the new culture he was experiencing as much as he did through his promises to send the latest Italian arias to his musical sister Nelly.109 In their performance, even if only to a small audience, she was broad-

NRAS234/Box49/3/174, Amelie Murray to Lady George Murray, 13 May 1764, Bath. NRAS234/Box49/3/285, Amelie Murray to Lady George Murray, 20 October 1764, London. 107 NRAS234/Box49/3/147, Amelie Murray to Lady George Murray, 10 April 1764, Derby. 108 NAS, GD18/4751, to Bess Adam, 5 December 1754, Lyons. 109 E.g., NAS, GD18/4773, to Nelly Adam, 24 May 1755, Rome; GD18/4780, to Betty Adam, 19 July 1755, Rome. 105 106

159

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

casting a reminder of her brother’s highly modish social progress. As travellers told friends and family of their experiences, Scotswomen became comfortable with a much wider frame of cultural reference, Lady Milton once confidently declaring of a journey to Inveraray that ‘the heat we sufferd in Glencro was beyond Mt Etna’.110 She may have travelled no farther south than London, but the Grand Tour had infiltrated her vocabulary – and as a tourist, she felt she had the right to use such references. The study of overseas travel in the eighteenth century has tended to overemphasise the Grand Tour, strictly speaking, the two to four years during which young aristocratic men toured the cultural and antiquarian highlights of Europe, particularly Italy. This has not only perpetuated a highly specific image of Continental travel as the preserve of this male elite, but distorted that of women travellers. Yet whilst debauched aristocratic ladies may have travelled to ease their melancholy, to perpetuate affairs or hide their unfortunate results, and a small group of intellectuals followed in the footsteps of male grand tourists,111 women did cross the waters of the North Sea or the English Channel for a variety of purposes, even if foreign travel remained more unusual for women than it was for men. Amelie Murray travelled to the Low Countries with her mother to visit her father Lord George Murray, in exile as one of the leaders of the 1745–6 Jacobite Rising. However, perhaps because of the political cloud under which the women travelled, little correspondence remains to give much of a sense of how they responded to the countries which they experience.112 Margaret Steuart Calderwood, on the other hand, provided a vivid account of her travels to visit her exiled brother, in a journal written as a series of letters to her daughter in 1756. This has been described as ‘more sophisticated than many published eighteenth-century travel writings in its fluent interleaving of descriptive minuteness, social anecdote, and cultural analysis’.113 As her use of the personal anecdote (for instance, describing a fellow passenger on a Dutch post-wagon as ‘a youngish sort of lad, with a wigg as big as Lord Milton’s’114) suggests, she was not writing with the direct intention of publication, although she may have expected her journal to be circulated quite widely amongst friends and family. This may be one reason why she felt no need to indulge in the custom, almost universal amongst later eighteenth-century women travel writers, of justifying her journey by stressing that it was undertaken with her husband and hence essentially domestic;115 intentionally or not, Mr Calderwood first appears on the twenty-third page of NLS, MS16516 f.104, to Milton in Edinburgh, 9 August 1752, Inveraray. Brian Dolan, Ladies of the Grand Tour (London, 2001). 112 NRAS234/JacC/II. 113 Turner, British Travel Writers, p.134. 114 Calderwood, ‘Journey’, p.167. 115 Kristi Siegel, ‘Intersections: Women’s Travel and Theory’, in Siegel (ed.), Gender, Genre and Identity, pp.2–3; Turner, British Travel Writers, pp.144, 156. Turner argues that this aided publication, and that only aristocrats and radicals failed to comply: ibid., p.53. However, Calderwood did make frequent reference to the fact that the ultimate aim of her journey 110 111

160

travel, tourism and place

the published narrative, suffering from sea-sickness.116 Margaret Calderwood seems quite happily to have assumed the mantle of travel writer, feeling no need to excuse herself for doing so as a woman, and supporting those recent scholars who have cautioned against assumptions of an unbridgeable gender divide in travel writing.117 Early on in her journal, she set out her position vis-à-vis the priorities of her narrative, in characteristically blunt style: Many authors and correspondents take up much time and pains to little purpose in descriptions. I never could understand any body’s description, and I suppose no body will understand mine; neither do I intend to say any things which have ever been thought worthy to be put in print, so will only say London is a very large and extensive city.118

As far as she was concerned, the role of her journal was not simply to repeat what had been said before; besides, what she had to say was more important than mere description. In asserting the need to counter stereotype, she did so with reference to a tradition of travel writing. Of a journey in the Netherlands she wrote: ‘All the afternoon we travelled through the same barren country, with neither house nor town: if that happens to any body in Scotland, it is sure to be recorded as an instance of the barrenness of the country, so I shall record it of a country famous for its fertility and populousness.’119 Her purpose was to be original, and to justify her travels in terms of the wider public good. ‘Travelling may be an advantage to wise men’, she wrote, ‘and a loss to fools, and the weight of anybody’s brain is well known, when they are seen out of their own country. The proper use of it is to learn to set a just value upon every country, or the things they possess.’120 Irrespective of gender, she saw herself as not only able, but obliged to pass moral and intellectual judgement upon the societies through which she passed. As her statement suggests, she believed in the wider societal value of what she wrote about her travels as a woman observing, learning and judging on her own initiative. Overseas travel gave a woman like Margaret Calderwood – secure in her position and highly self-confident, above all a short-term leisure tourist free from any requirement to conform – a sense of liberty in self-expression, enabling her to observe critically. But for women who were abroad for a longer period, removal from the closely woven net of family and interest from which women

was to meet her brother, Sir James Steuart Denham, whom she had not seen for eleven years. 116 Calderwood, ‘Journey’, p.128. 117 Korte, English Travel Writing, p.109; Siegel, ‘Intersections’, p.5. 118 Calderwood, ‘Journey’, p.114. 119 Ibid., p.169. 120 Ibid., p.238. For eighteenth-century travel writers’ perception of themselves as researchers, see Charles L. Batten, Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth-century Travel Literature (Berkeley, CA and London, 1978), p.7.

161

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

rarely ventured far at home was not an uncomplicatedly liberating process. From Rome, Robert Adam reported that the portraitist Allan Ramsay’s wife was unable to enter into society because of her husband’s status as an artist, commenting that ‘there can be nothing more Mortifying than for a Lady who is respected in her own Country, to be utterly debarrd the Company of Genteel people in others’.121 Fortunately for her, she could at least enjoy the domestic company of other British expatriates, something which could not be taken for granted by those who travelled under the cloud of exile. Frances Steuart Denham, who spent seventeen years with her exiled Jacobite husband in France, Germany and the Low Countries, remembered episodes of rejection from British communities abroad with some bitterness, despite the lapse of time between the events which she described and the writing of her memoir in 1781.122 More typically, however, the experience of being abroad merely produced a sense of difference which highlighted women’s attachment to the manners and society of their home country. Although Frances Steuart described her memoir as a ‘small Memorandum Book of Privet History’, explicitly stating that she did ‘not intend to inlarge in mentioning any Account of Countrys and their Inhabitants or Customs’, she was unable to refrain entirely from comparing the habits of the different societies through which she travelled with those of her own. Of the time she and her husband spent remote from other foreign company in Angoulême, she commented that ‘the French (everyone knows) are a joyous People … constantly in Company, Balls, _ Assemblys Parties of all kinds, to the Britesh who have Less Levity _ the constant Company _ & never an hour of the day to spend Allone in ones own Family _ becomes rather a fatigue’.123 Pointing to commonly observed differences in national character, she aligned herself on this occasion with a British (as opposed to Scottish) identity. Yet recent work by Katherine Turner has suggested Continental travel was less influential than might have been expected in the creation of a sense of Britishness. Instead, she argued, it delineated the various ways in which British identity was fragmented through ‘gender, class, profession, religion and region’, rather than as one united nation against an ‘other’.124 Several of these strands are evident in the writings of Margaret Calderwood, the heroes of whose tale were her own common-sense practicality and patriotic Scottishness. At times taking xenophobia to and beyond the verge of absurdity (as, for instance, in her belief that the flat English landscape was responsible for what she believed to be the intellectual inferiority of their cattle),125 her narraNAS, GD18/4801, to Mary Adam, 28 February 1756. EUL, MS E2002.28, ‘Frances Steuart – Widow – Melencholy Title’ (unpublished memoir, Coltness, 1881). Her years in exile were punctuated by visits to London to petition for her husband’s pardon. 123 Steuart, ‘Memoir’. 124 Turner, British Travel Writers, esp. Introduction, here p.7. 125 Calderwood, ‘Journey’, esp. pp.105–21. 121

122

162

travel, tourism and place

tive overall transcends this xenophobia, and demonstrates an awareness of the issues affecting the Scottish drive towards improvement that is far more nuanced in its patriotism. She commented regularly on methods of improvement of relevance to Scots, at one point recommending how a Dutch method of river crossing might be adopted in Scotland,126 and at another digressing onto the supposed ‘secret’ of Dutch linen bleaching.127 When she asked ‘How often have I heard us blamed for the Dutch excelling us so much in both whiteness and cheapness in their bleaching?’ she was, by her use of the first person plural, identifying herself with the Scottish linen industry. Similarly, she unselfconsciously referred to issues of trade as something to which she had given thought, not just impulsively as she travelled, but over a period of time: ‘I once thought that Scotland might carry on a greater trade than it does, from its advantageous situation for the sea.’128 With no sense of inappropriateness, she travelled as a citizen of her country, and implicit within the notion that she, as well as her country, could be improved by her travels is a sense that she saw self and nation as intertwined. In this sense, she was the characteristic polite tourist, using her exposure to other societies to identify new ways of thinking and doing, and to consider the improving uses to which these might be put. Like most travellers writing for a private readership, Margaret Calderwood largely restricted her ideological comment to religion,129 on which she focused as a primary indicator of difference. One of her first comments on England was a predictable attack on the Anglican church,130 but her worst criticisms were reserved for Catholics, to the extent that her nineteenth-century editor felt obliged to censor her ‘coarse satire upon the doctrine of transubstantiation’.131 Frances Steuart noted that her son’s maid’s parents ‘woud not on any Acc.t Allow her to go with me to a Papest Country’,132 but whilst a real fear of Catholicism may have remained amongst lower social groups, Margaret Calderwood tended to ridicule Catholicism rather than portraying it as fearful. She excused the Catholicism of those she liked: Father Daniel was ‘just a Scots pedantick scholar’ who had ‘found a life of study and idleness could be had without an estate, or so much as a farthing’.133 On another occasion she challenged a baron from Ghent over why he would be saved and she go to hell: ‘“You do not obey the pope,” says he. “Why, the pope and I are perfectly agreed.” said I.’134 If superficially conciliatory, in this brief statement she sought to convey a sense of Protestant superiority in the casual assumption that her own spiritual authority equalled that of the Pope. Yet however infuriating her comments 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134

Ibid., p.137. Ibid., p.143. Ibid., p.144. Black, British Abroad, p.215. Calderwood, ‘Journey’, p.105. Ibid., p.174n. Steuart, ‘Memoir’. Calderwood, ‘Journey’, p.188. Ibid., p.203.

163

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

may have been to the baron, they were infused with the characteristically polite notion that religious difference belonged to the realm of rational (and even, possibly, light-hearted) discussion, as opposed to that of fear or hatred. Moreover, she was prepared to give credit where she believed it was due, and despite cautioning against sending sons to be educated in Catholic countries, she was willing to admit that both boys’ and girls’ education in all Catholic countries was ‘on a much better footing’ than at home.135 Like most eighteenth-century Britons who travelled, Margaret Calderwood went abroad only once in her lifetime,136 which provided her with one, unparalleled opportunity to observe and opine, and to gain experiences and insights into the politics and culture of other nations. She ended her narrative by commenting on what she herself had learned on her travels, presenting a conclusion which, given the tone of her journal at times, is perhaps surprisingly broad-minded: I beleive, when accompts are ballanced, the favours of Providence are more equally distributed than we rashly imagine; what one country wants another can supply, which links men into one common society … The people on the continent have their minds more at large with regard to the rest of the world than those in an island; they have opportunity of converse with all nations, which takes off prejudice, except when it is politicall, and even then it does not extend to individuals. Their behaviour is politer, because they are often amongst strangers.137

Her recommendation of travel is essentially an application of ideas about the benefits of sociability discussed throughout this book. Isolation was bad; sociable interaction was good for both individuals and national communities, and its ultimate result was that most desirable preoccupation of the eighteenthcentury elite: politeness. Women’s integration into polite society was dependent, at the most basic level, on their ability to travel. Whether for education, for participation in the polite social activities which were located mostly in towns, or simply to move between the country houses and estates of family and friends, travel was woven into elite women’s experience in such a way that to be deprived of the capacity to travel often meant being deprived of access to polite society itself. Access to travel signalled wealth and leisure, and, more subtly, a familial culture that was open to the notion of expanding mental and physical horizons. But polite prestige was gained in a more direct fashion through familiarity with certain identifiably polite places like London or Bath, and from the ability to react to such places and other favoured destinations and landscapes in the language of the polite tourist. 135 136 137

Ibid., pp.179, 181. Black, British Abroad, p.4. Calderwood, ‘Journey’, pp.237–8.

164

travel, tourism and place

That politeness and place were inextricably linked has been apparent throughout this book. For the socially ambitious, destinations like London and Bath (and, for those less privileged, Edinburgh) held the potential to confer prestige upon those who visited and were able to enter society there. Familiarity with their social spaces, with the society that frequented them, and with the activities in which that society engaged, was one of the foundation stones upon which membership of polite society rested. Such places not only provided the potential to become acquainted with ‘good’ company, but armed those who visited them with the lasting ability to relate to others through their shared experience of these polite places. At the same time, such places could act as an ‘other’ against which Scotswomen could define themselves. As tourism became a fashionably polite activity, it provided women with new opportunities for self-expression and comparison, and for assertions of identity and otherness. In terms that denoted their understanding of the received discourses of tourism, women used their travel narratives to form and express opinions relating to the most pressing practical concerns facing the society in which they lived. In doing so, they demonstrated the extent to which they were not only aware of these concerns, but considered them part of their own responsibilities as members of a landed elite. Through travel and, more importantly, through writing about travel, women experienced in their most physical manifestation the new opportunities open to them to be a visible and vocal part of the society in which they lived.

165

Conclusion In recent years, British historians have sought to reach beyond the instruments of state and those who wielded them, beyond the metropolis and its dominant culture, and into a much more varied hinterland of historical experience populated by individuals, women as well as men, whose personal life experiences might be deemed uneventful and unremarkable. Through such personal sources, this book has explored the impact of polite social practices on the women of the Scottish gentry and aristocracy, ca. 1720–70. It is through such sources as the schoolgirl letters and journals of Amelie Murray, through the page upon page of Martha Fletcher’s dense copyings from historical texts, through the gossipy exchanges of her nieces and the scrawled political communications of her sister Mary Hepburn, or through the opinionated cultural and economic comments which the experience of travelling encouraged Margaret Steuart Calderwood to record for posterity that the day-to-day social workings of those eighteenth-century Scotswomen who would have considered themselves ‘polite’ are most vividly revealed. Whilst as individuals they may have made little impact on the grand historical narratives that have tended to dominate historical scholarship, taken collectively their experiences constitute the essence of the societies in which they lived. Women like Betty Fletcher and Amelie Murray deserve to take their place alongside their more well-known fathers as actors and commentators in the Scottish historical narrative. Like Amanda Vickery’s study of Georgian gentlewomen in northern England, this work has not, on the whole, been concerned with ‘nonconformity or rebellion’.1 Most of the women under consideration here performed no particularly unusual or remarkable deeds. In the personal sources on which this book has been based they offered few, if any, criticisms of the society in which they lived. Instead, this study has focused on the possibilities presented to or left open for women by the prevailing cultural norms of polite society. Following those who have urged the importance of scholarship which considers women’s history not in terms of exclusions but in terms of access, it has asked what opportunities these polite social practices presented to women.2 It has asked how women used these opportunities, and considered the degree to which access to these opportunities was constrained or restricted by factors Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London, 1998), p.285. 2 Anne Laurence, Women in England, 1560–1760: A Social History (London, 1994), p.273; Elizabeth Ewan, Sue Innes and Siân Reynolds (eds), co-ordinating editor, Rose Pipes, The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women: From the Earliest Times to 2004 (Edinburgh, 2006), p.xxvii. 1

166

conclusion

like geography, birth-order or the life-course. It has argued that although many forums for the exchange of ideas remained formally off-limits to women in the eighteenth century, the experiences of the individuals with whom this book has been concerned demonstrate that channels were available to women to circumvent at least some of these exclusions, and, more importantly, that these acts of circumvention were entirely woven into the fabric of received polite feminine behaviour and activities. At the core of the impact of polite social discourses on eighteenth-century Scottish society was the emphasis on sociability – and in particular mixedgender sociability. The idea that social refinement was achieved by men and women mixing together in regulated groups under the aegis of a set of mutually understood social mores was not unchallenged in the eighteenth century, and practices of male homosociability remained central to Scottish culture throughout the century. Nevertheless, it is clear from the sources on which this book is based that the polite concept that women were social beings had a significant, transformative experience on elite women’s lives. Second only, perhaps, to that of motherhood, this was the role for which girls were raised from their earliest years. Young girls like Betty Fletcher were sent to expensive London boarding schools to learn the manners and social practices which would enable them to mix in the ‘best’ society. Those whose education took them no further than Edinburgh were more typical, but the focus of their education was no less social and performative. In the parlance of her day, the eighteenth-century Scotswoman who had received a ‘good’ education had been introduced to polite company and its social practices, and had learned how to dance, sing or play music, to write a neat and engaging letter, and to speak a little French. She had learned how to cultivate the best acquaintance, and how to pay visits and relate the news and information gained there in the accepted way. Apparently trivial as much of girls’ formal education may have been, the importance of preparing girls for the social role that polite society demanded, and in particular its focus on conversation, meant that most sensible parents ensured their daughters had at least some general knowledge. Usually, it was from books and periodicals, rather than their formal education, that girls had the opportunity to receive the sort of knowledge that, whilst ostensibly preparing them to participate in polite conversation, would help to furnish their inner mental world. Whilst the impact and significance for individual women of the substantial growth in the number and variety of texts available to readers during the eighteenth century varied considerably, the correspondence of all the families under consideration here makes clear that women had, and expected to have, access to print in a variety of genres. More significantly, it demonstrates the vital role that reading played in their construction of a sense of self and in their relationships with friends of both sexes. For Margaret Hepburn, books provided the theme around which she was able to maintain correspondences with leading literary men as a thinking individual. In a more intimate, informal way, the shared enjoyment of reading and discussing texts 167

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

helped to maintain her close friendship with her cousin Betty Fletcher, whose own correspondence demonstrates that a fashionable education did not necessarily hinder girls from growing up into thoughtful, intelligent young women. Although print culture permitted a remote engagement with polite priorities which should not be underestimated, it was the new emphasis on elite female participation in sociability that above all else served to distinguish the experience of eighteenth-century elite Scotswomen from that of their predecessors. It may have been men, rather than women, who were intended primarily to benefit from this mixed-gender sociability, but, as this book has shown, its impact reconfigured the meaning of elite femininity in eighteenth-century Scotland in a very practical sense. Not all polite social spaces privileged women’s involvement to an equal degree, and the clubs and coffeehouses which played such an important role in the development of Scottish Enlightenment thought remained effectively off-limits to polite women throughout this period. But ideas about the improving qualities of women’s conversation and society ensured women took centre stage around the tea-tables and in fashionable social activities like balls, dancing assemblies and promenades, and that their presence was expected as audience at concerts and plays. Although few women enjoyed the prominence of those like the Countess of Panmure and later Lady Milton who ruled supreme over dancing assembly rooms, a familiarity with these spaces and the activities with which they were associated became an essential ingredient of elite womanhood. The degree to which women participated in these activities was mediated by geographical location and by their place in the life-course. But by the middle decades of the century, women had become accustomed from early girlhood to the idea that public social spaces were their natural milieu, and that participating in polite social activities, however seldom, was essential to the performance of polite femininity. The impact of this was most pronounced on young women. Whilst creating a context for the anxieties of observation and performance that Andrew Fletcher’s poems and Amelie Murray’s letters so vividly portrayed, it is clear from the gossipy letters which Andrew’s sisters exchanged with their friends that even for those marriageable young women who had the most to gain or lose from their performance in these spaces they provided a source of amusement and entertainment which had become intrinsic to their sense of what it meant to be a young woman in that society. Important as they may have been in themselves, polite social practices exerted a much broader impact on elite women’s experience through their capacity to extend women’s participation in other aspects of public life. As Elaine Chalus found in England,3 this book has demonstrated elite Scotswomen to have been active participants in a variety of political activities, with no apparent sense of unsuitability. Thus, it has shown Mary Hepburn actively managing her nephew Andrew Fletcher’s parliamentary election campaign of

3

Elaine Chalus, Elite Women in English Political Life, c.1754–1790 (Oxford, 2005).

168

conclusion

1747, whilst Andrew’s mother and sisters were in the influential position of being able to make introductions to his father Lord Milton and to the third Duke of Argyll, the single most powerful individual in mid-eighteenth-century Scotland. From their own correspondence and the recollections of their friends, it is clear that informal though these roles may have been, they were widely acknowledged by contemporaries who understood very well that one of the most successful routes to preferment amongst the Whig elite was through cultivating the friendship of Lady Milton or her daughters. In turn, as Mally Fletcher’s whispered comments to the Reverend Alexander Carlyle that his ‘bread was baken’ demonstrate, these women were fully conscious of the power they wielded. The elevated level at which the Fletcher family was operating may have been unusual. However, their use of polite female social practices and spaces to further the political interests of family and friends reveals the political importance of women’s social networks much more generally, and the strategically important role that women could wield through them. These social practices also worked to integrate women into the culture of the Scottish Enlightenment. Women may have been denied access to some of the more formal (and more influential) spaces in which Enlightenment ideas were worked out, but this study has shown that women in Scotland were not isolated from the cultural processes of Enlightenment more broadly. The women of the Fletcher, Elliot, Clerk, Adam and Murray families watched as their friends, cousins and tea-table companions in the small society that constituted the Scottish elite became renowned across Europe for their writings and their new ways of envisaging the world around them. Of course, it is important to acknowledge that the extent to which women were able on a regular basis to participate actively in enlightened conversation (as opposed to merely being present) remains unknown. However, examples such the correspondence between Peggy Hepburn and William Robertson on the subject of the latter’s History of Scotland make clear that women understood the aims and objectives of their learned friends, and were valued by them for doing so. If Enlightenment is considered to encompass reception as well as production,4 the involvement of Betty Fletcher and Peggy Hepburn in representing a wider female audience or readership towards which writers like William Robertson and John Home were consciously addressing their works is indicative of far more than just the interests and personal friendships of these two young women, but of the new cultural importance of women as members of a critical public. Moreover, in the light of Margaret Monro’s clandestine Latin tuition or the Adam sisters’ second-hand astronomy lectures, the prominent role of formal institutions like universities in the Scottish Enlightenment need not necessarily be viewed as entirely detrimental to women; rather, the central position of the universities E.g., Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (Harmondsworth, 2000), p.xxii; Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor, ‘General Introduction’, to Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment (Basingstoke, 2005), esp. p.xv. 4

169

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

in Scotland’s principal burghs may have created social climates more amenable to women’s acquisition of learning than existed elsewhere. The commitment to sociability that polite society demanded ensured a high degree of mobility was woven into elite women’s experience. This in itself was not new – women had always travelled between the homes of friends and family and, at times, to town. But on to these pre-existing patterns was laid the high degree of consciousness which the polite gave to the idea of place and the increasingly accessible fashion of tourism. The eighteenth-century elite subscribed to the notion of a hierarchy of place, topped, in Britain, by London and descending through the most fashionable resorts and provincial centres to the smallest towns which played host to a smattering of polite entertainments. The most fashionable towns like London and Bath, and to a lesser extent Edinburgh, imparted prestige through association; to be able to claim familiarity with the company who socialised there and the activities in which they engaged was a badge of membership of polite status. Providing access to ‘good’ company and a variety of social activities, the most fashionable towns represented the eighteenth-century ideal of the town as a place of refinement, dark as their undersides may have been. Home to so many of the social spaces which acted as crucibles for the formation of polite femininity, the town came to be considered the natural habitat of elite women. Elite femininity, meanwhile, was reconfigured as an urban phenomenon. The practice of sending girls to town around adolescence meant that learning the practices of polite femininity was about learning how to operate in urban society; by the 1740s, as Amelie Murray’s correspondence vividly illustrates, the experiences which differentiated girlhood from childhood were firmly located in the urban context. Women’s relationship with the town varied throughout the lifecourse, but as the lively correspondence of the Fletcher girls and the petulant demands of Jean Murray demonstrate, it was most significant for young girls in their teens. In later life, the town continued to be viewed by many women as a desirable location, although the amount of time that women spent there was dependent on factors which were often beyond their own control. Yet whilst spending time in the country may not have held the cultural meanings of a winter in town, it did not necessarily entail isolation from polite society, and the women of landed families would expect to spend at least part of the year there at any point in the life-course. A degree of engagement with estate management remained expected of the women of the elite throughout the period in question, even if this was becoming a less prominent part of their experience. An ability to appreciate the visual attractions of the cultivated rural environment, however, was growing in importance as a fashionable indicator of politeness. Whilst older practices of Continental tourism had been dependent upon the classical learning that was rarely accessible to women, the new fashion for domestic tourism repositioned the activity as ideally suited to the construction of a polite feminine self. With its focus on patriotic achievement in terms of country houses, agricultural improvement and industrial development, and the implicit understanding that the role of the tourist was 170

conclusion

not just to observe but to comment, tourism perhaps more than any other activity opened up to women the opportunity for the explicit expression of opinions that located them firmly as articulate individuals within a public. As Margaret Calderwood’s letters from the Low Countries strikingly demonstrate, women could use the writing that was an integral part of touristic activity as a means of presenting themselves as intelligent, articulate individuals, interested in the patriotic development of their country. Finally, it remains to consider the implications of this research for Scottish society more widely in this period. These shifts in female social practices were not divorced from the wider social and economic concerns of eighteenthcentury Scots. Unlike the ‘gentlemen’s daughters’ of Vickery’s study, the elites with whom this study is concerned were not unproblematically provincial. Their menfolk held political power at national levels in both Scotland and London, whilst their tea-table companions included men whose published works were read and discussed across Britain, and sometimes beyond. Until 1707, Edinburgh had been home to a national parliament, and elements amongst the Scottish gentry and aristocracy retained a strong sense of being a national elite throughout the century. It was not just the presence of the law courts which helped to give those who flocked to Edinburgh for the winter season the sense that they were in a town from which the affairs of a nation were still at least partially governed. Enterprises which controlled much of the country’s affairs, like the Board of Trustees for the Encouragement of Fisheries and Manufactures and later the Annexed Estates Commission, were administered by prominent inhabitants – lawyers and judges like Lord Milton. These enterprises represented Scotland’s attempts to modernise within the framework of a British state in the first half of the century. This concern with improvement and progress was not uniquely Scottish; rather, it was a concern of societies across Europe and the Atlantic world in what was to become known as the Age of Enlightenment. But it was heightened in Scotland, not just by the sheer intensity of intellectual creativity, but by the uncertainties of the political and cultural situation in which post-Union Scots found themselves. Recent scholarship has emphasised that the Scottish Enlightenment ought not to be seen as an abstract entity, but rather as a practical response to the challenges of eighteenth-century Scottish society.5 For decades after the Union, Scotland’s hoped-for economic transformation remained elusive, and proposals for agricultural change, even when put into effect, often yielded little in the way of results in the short-term at least. Physical change in the material transformation of Scotland’s urban environment was also slow to manifest itself. But if practical progress was slow to bring about, what could be achieved was a change of manners, a change in the ways in which not only

E.g., David Allan, Making British Culture: English Readers and the Scottish Enlightenment, 1740–1830 (London, 2008), p. 7.

5

171

elite women and polite society in eighteenth-century scotland

men but women, too, behaved in society. Scots like the Countess of Panmure were acutely conscious of the patriotic, improving potential of the ability to demonstrate civilised behaviour through the adoption of polite manners and the forms of sociability with which they were associated. Eighteenth-century Scots did not simply adopt polite social practices from a slavish desire to follow fashion. To the undeniable attraction of a varied social life was added a serious belief that embracing polite culture and the social practices with which it was associated was part of a broader programme of social improvement. In an age which placed such hope in progress and the potential of the new to better that which had gone before these social changes deserve to be viewed alongside developments in industry, agriculture, commerce and the built environment as fundamental tools of improvement. This book has focused on the period ca. 1720–70, a period in which the concepts of both public sociability and women’s role therein were promoted as part of the polite cultural ideal. Older concepts of rank and privilege co-existed, largely unquestioned, with a culture that self-consciously promoted the new in social practices as much as in agriculture, industry or the urban built environment. This permitted the high levels of participation in public social life that were by and large encouraged amongst all but the oldest women in the families with whom this book is concerned. Later in the century, when the social and economic effects of industrialisation and urbanisation began to be felt, the anxieties this aroused would be expressed through texts which demonstrated a concern that women’s public social visibility was unfeminine and symptomatic of greater social instability.6 For Linda Colley, this was symbolised in the changing gender-dominance of Edinburgh’s assembly rooms between the 1750s and 1780s, by which time the most fashionable were presided over by a man.7 This book suggests that in this earlier period few of the anxieties which were to beset later thinkers were apparent, and instead that families like the Fletchers and the Elliots who were most closely associated with the promotion of ideas of improvement and modernisation in other areas of society were amongst those in which women’s public social activities were most encouraged. Moreover, women’s involvement in these activities was accepted not just for themselves, but for the opportunities they created for women’s participation in other areas of life. Often, it was the corollary, rather than the intended result, of polite social practices that had the greatest effect on elite women’s ability to engage with the wider world in which they lived. But this should not in itself diminish the significance of these developments in broadening the mental and social horizons of elite women.

6 7

See Chapter 1, pp.9–10. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London, 1992), p.257.

172

Appendix: Biographical Backgrounds

Mary Adam (1699–1761) and daughters Mary Robertson,1 daughter of William Robertson of Gladney, minister of Greyfriars Church in Edinburgh, married the architect William Adam, one of early eighteenth-century Scotland’s premier architects.2 They had several children, of whom the most famous was Robert, who after four years studying classical style and cultivating influential acquaintance in Rome set up business in London, eventually fulfilling his dream of becoming one of the most fashionable architects in eighteenth-century Britain.3 Mary is perhaps best known as the subject, as a widow, of a portrait by her son Robert’s sometime friend Allan Ramsay. She was the aunt of the historian William Robertson, who spent much time with the Adam family after the death of his parents, later frequenting their London townhouse. Her daughters included Jenny, Betty, Nelly, Peggy and Susannah, who in 1753 married John Clerk of Eldin (eldest son of Janet Clerk, below).4 Although relatively few of these women’s own letters remain from the period covered by this book, their interests and personalities come across in the detailed and often gossipy letters written to them by their brothers Robert and James: Nelly was musical and fashionable; Peggy similarly fond of amusements although prone to melancholy; Betty a capable manager. By 1760, Mary and some of her daughters had moved south to London, where they helped with the management of the household and family architectural practice. Janet Clerk, née Inglis (ca. 1686–1760) Daughter of Sir John Inglis of Cramond and Anne Cockburn, in 1709 she became the second wife of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, second baronet (1676– 1755). One of the Commissioners for the 1707 Union, Clerk of Penicuik later

See Stana Nenadic, ‘Adam, Mary n. Robertson’, in Elizabeth Ewan, Sue Innes and Siân Reynolds (eds), co-ordinating editor, Rose Pipes, The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women: From the Earliest Times to 2004 (Edinburgh, 2006). 2 James Macaulay, ‘Adam, William (bap. 1689, d. 1748)’, ODNB. 3 A. A. Tait, ‘Adam, Robert (1728–1792)’, ODNB. 4 Michel Depeyre, ‘Clerk, John, of Eldin (1728–1812)’, ODNB. 1

173

appendix: Biographical Backgrounds

served briefly as a member of the British parliament.5 An active improver, antiquarian and musician, he has been described as ‘the leading Scottish patron of arts and sciences’.6 They had sixteen children together (the last born when Janet was fifty-one years old), including Johanna (Jackie) whose letters to her father as a young woman covered topics from books to travel to landscape gardening. The Clerk homes at Penicuik and Mavisbank were the haunt of many literati, in particular the poet Allan Ramsay, who in 1730 celebrated the couple in his poem ‘The Happy Man’. William Aikman painted Janet as a young woman. From 1710 to 1759, Janet kept a spiritual diary which suggests immersion in a mental world of intense Calvinism that might seem slightly at odds with that inhabited by her husband. He described her, however, as ‘a most religious verteous woman, and one who in all respects might suit my humure and circumstances to rub through the world in a sober and privat state of Life’.7 Agnes Elliot, née Dalrymple Murray Kynynmound (1731–78) Agnes was the only daughter of Hugh Dalrymple Murray Kynynmound (d. 1741), the second son of David Dalrymple, first baronet of Hailes. She was brought up after Murray’s death by her mother and the latter’s second husband, Charles Murray, partially at Newhailes House near Musselburgh where Allan Ramsay’s portrait of her aged nine hangs today.8 In 1746, aged fifteen, she eloped with Gilbert Elliot, later third baronet of Minto,9 spending the first few years of her married life with her parents-in-law while her husband pursued a legal career in Edinburgh and started out on what was to become a successful parliamentary career in London. In 1757, Agnes joined her husband there. The Elliots successfully integrated into London society and the British capital was to remain their primary residence, interspersed with visits to their Borders estate. The couple had two daughters, Isobel (Tibby) (1749–1803), who suffered from serious bouts of depression, and Eleanor (1758–1818), who married William Eden, later Lord Auckland. Their four sons included Gilbert, first Earl of Minto (1751–1814) whose parliamentary and diplomatic career culminated in the role of Governor-General of Bengal.10 Later family memoirs Rosalind Mitchison, ‘Clerk, Sir John, of Penicuik, second baronet (1676–1755)’, ODNB. See also Memoirs of the Life of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, 1676–1755, ed. John M. Gray, Scottish History Society series1, vol.13 (Edinburgh, 1892). 6 Ian Gordon Brown, ‘Modern Rome and Ancient Caledonia: the Union and the Politics of Scottish Culture’, in Andrew Hook (ed.), The History of Scottish Literature, vol.2, 1660–1800 (Aberdeen, 1987), p.34. 7 Memoirs of the Life of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, p.75. 8 Reproduced in Alastair Smart, Allan Ramsay: 1713–1784 (Edinburgh, 1992), plate 4, and p.101. 9 Philip Carter, ‘Elliot, Sir Gilbert, of Minto, third baronet (1722–1777)’, ODNB. 10 Michael Duffy, ‘Kynynmound, Gilbert Elliot Murray, first earl of Minto (1751–1814)’, ODNB. 5

174

appendix: Biographical backgrounds

portray Agnes as an emotionally complicated woman, an image reinforced by her correspondence with her husband.11 Helen Elliot, née Stewart, Lady Minto (bap. 1696, d. 1774) Daughter of Sir Robert Stewart of Allanbank, she married Gilbert Elliot Lord Minto (bap.1663, d.1766).12 Lady Minto was a Lady Directress of the Edinburgh Assembly from 1746; her husband was MP for Roxburghshire from 1722–6, and thereafter a judge, succeeding Lord Milton as Lord Justice Clerk in 1763. He combined this with musical, antiquarian and literary interests. Their children included: Gilbert (see Agnes Elliot, above); Jean (1727–1805), later renowned as the author of the ballad ‘The Flowers of the Forest’;13 Andrew (1728–97) who became Governor of New York; and John, a celebrated naval captain. Elizabeth Fletcher, née Kinloch, Lady Milton (d. 1782) Daughter of Sir Francis Kinloch of Gilmerton, she married Andrew Fletcher (it seems clandestinely) in the summer of 1718.14 A few years later, he was elevated to the Court of Session as Lord Milton, and rose to become Lord Justice Clerk.15 He was the most prominent ‘sub minister’ managing the Argathelian interest in Scotland for much of the mid-eighteenth century. Lady Milton had a brisk, lively, capable character well-suited to the wife of a prominent politician. In 1746 she was made one of the Lady Directresses of the Edinburgh Assembly, and in succeeding years she acted as hostess during the third Duke of Argyll’s annual visits to his ducal castle at Inveraray. The Fletchers spent most of their married life at Brunstane, a house near Musselburgh rented from the Duke of Argyll, also taking rooms in Edinburgh during the winter, and eventually building a townhouse in the Canongate. Lady Milton had eight children who survived infancy, the eldest, Andrew, serving as a Member of Parliament and political secretary to the third Duke of Argyll. Henry and John joined the army.

Countess of Minto, A Memoir of the Right Honourable Hugh Elliot (Edinburgh, 1868), esp. pp.2–3. See also NLS, MSS11006–7. 12 Jane Blackie, ‘Elliot, Sir Gilbert, second baronet, Lord Minto (bap. 1693, d. 1766)’, ODNB. 13 Murray G. H. Pittock, ‘Elliot, Jean (1727–1805)’, ODNB. 14 NLS, MS16504. 15 Michael Fry, ‘Fletcher, Andrew, Lord Milton (1691/2–1766)’, ODNB. 11

175

appendix: Biographical Backgrounds

Elizabeth (Betty) Fletcher (1731–58) Lord and Lady Milton’s youngest daughter Elizabeth, or Betty, was born in 1731 and sent to school in Chelsea, where she stayed for four and a half years, at nine years old. Her friend Alexander Carlyle, who had originally been introduced into the family through her eldest sister, described her as ‘one of the first females in point of understanding as well as heart that ever fell in my way to be acquainted with’,16 and she was the friend of the philosopher David Hume, the historian William Robertson and the playwright John Home. In February 1758 she married Captain John Wedderburn of Gosford (East Lothian) in what was widely regarded as a marriage based on affection. She died of a ‘milk fever’ ten months later following the birth of her daughter Elizabeth. Wedderburn (later Sir John Halkett of Pitfirrane) was then serving in Guadeloupe, only returning to Britain and the news of his wife’s death the following summer.17 Young Elizabeth Wedderburn was brought up by her mother’s family at Brunstane, and later composed a manuscript history of the Fletcher of Saltoun family.18 Margaret (Peg) Fletcher (1723–76) Margaret was the eldest Fletcher daughter, educated in Edinburgh, and married in 1750 to John Grant of Easter Elchies, the son of Lord Patrick Grant of Elchies, a colleague of Milton as a Senator of the College of Justice and a figure of considerable influence in Scottish public life.19 Soon afterwards, Grant was appointed a Baron of Exchequer in Scotland. They had no surviving children and lived mainly at Castlesteads near Dalkeith, where Grant had been given a post as chief commissioner to the Buccleuch Estates.20 Later they owned properties in London, where Margaret died in 1776. Her husband died in Grenada, where he had purchased property, not long thereafter.21

Alexander Carlyle, The Autobiography of Dr. Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk, 1722–1805, ed. John Hill Burton, with a new Introduction by Richard B. Sher (Bristol, 1990; reprint of 1910 edn), p.273. 17 NLS, MS16521 f.118, Andrew Fletcher to Milton, 7 August 1759, London. 18 EUL, MS La III 364, Elizabeth Halkett, ‘Memoir of the Fletchers of Saltoun’ (unpublished MS, written some time before 1782). 19 See The Letters of Patrick Grant, Lord Elchies, with Memoir, etc., ed. H. D. MacWilliam (Aberdeen, 1947). 20 Carlyle, Autobiography, p.271. 21 NLS, MS17860 f.2, Genealogical notes. 16

176

appendix: Biographical backgrounds

Martha Fletcher (dates unknown) Daughter of Margaret Carnegie and Henry Fletcher (the younger brother of the celebrated patriot and political author Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun), and sister of Lord Milton, she was active in the running of Fletcher family estates, which subject dominates her surviving correspondence. The many pages of notes she left on her reading – from dozens of pages copied from histories, to collections of characters ancient and modern, to lists of dictionary definitions – give a glimpse into the activities of an avid reader. After her mother’s death in 1746, she appears to have lived principally with her sister Mary. Mary Fletcher, later Hepburn (bap. 169822) Sister of Lord Milton and Martha Fletcher, she was found by her parents in the summer of 1718 to be pregnant and secretly married to George Hepburn of Monkrig (near Haddington). Initially cast out of the family home, she was later reconciled to the family, although the child’s fate is unknown. Hepburn died in 1739,23 by which time the couple had one daughter, Margaret (see below). Mary was active in the maintenance of the Fletcher family electoral interest in East Lothian. In later life she left Monkrig and took a townhouse in the Castlehill in Edinburgh. Mary (Mally) Fletcher (1725–78) The middle daughter of Lord and Lady Milton, supposedly ‘the darling of her father’ in his later years,24 she was educated with her elder sister in Edinburgh. Her niece emphasised the vivacious aspects of her character, and hinted that she may have been more easily influenced than was ideal for the daughter of a political family. Never marrying, she died in 1778, after a ‘long and painful illness’.25

OPR Index to Baptisms, East Lothian. NLS, MS17607 ff.20, 35, 36. Also MS16510 f.237, Peggy Fletcher to ?Andrew Fletcher, 20 February 1739, Brunstane. He was a member of a local gentry family which was prominent in the medical profession. James Alexander Duncan, The Descent of the Hepburns of Monkrig (Edinburgh, 1911), p.80. 24 Halkett, ‘Memoir’, p.99. 25 Halkett, ‘Memoir’, p.102. 22 23

177

appendix: Biographical Backgrounds

Margaret Hepburn (bap. 1734,26 d. 1759) She was the only surviving child of Mary Hepburn, née Fletcher. A scrap from a bill of 1744 from Lauchlan Campbell, writing master in Edinburgh, is all that remains as evidence for the schooling of this intelligent and well-read woman.27 Like her close friend and cousin Elizabeth Fletcher (above), she was the friend of William Robertson, corresponding with him about his History of Scotland shortly before her early death. Never married, she lived with her widowed mother and maiden aunt Martha Fletcher at her father’s estate of Monkrig in East Lothian. Marion Innes, née Lauder (b. 1711) Daughter of Sir John Lauder of Fountainhall, she married George Innes of Stow, Deputy Receiver of the Land Tax in Scotland, who bought the estate of Stow in Peebleshire in 1759. Residing mostly in Edinburgh, she corresponded with her cousins, the Maxwells of Pollock, who lived near Glasgow.28 Jean Innes (1748–1839) The second daughter of Marion Lauder (above), in September 1756 she was sent to board for ten months with the Reverend Hary Spens (the first translator into English of Plato’s Republic) and his family at Wemyss in Fife. Spens’ correspondence with her father provides a vivid insight into this period of Jean’s education, although there remains little other information on her life during this period with which to contextualise this. Her financial status as a younger sister rendered impossible her desired marriage to her second cousin John Row and she died unmarried in 1839.29 Lady Margaret Macdonald (ca. 1716–99) One of several daughters of the celebrated society beauty Susanna Kennedy, Countess of Eglinton, a first cousin of Lady Milton,30 after the death of her OPR index to baptisms, East Lothian. NLS, MS17607 f.39. 28 For the Maxwells, see William Fraser, Memoirs of the Maxwells of Pollock (Edinburgh, 1863), vol.1. 29 See Alison Duncan, ‘Patronage and Presentations of the Self: A Late Eighteenth-Century Correspondence’ (University of Edinburgh MSc thesis, 2007). 30 Henry Gray Graham, A Group of Scottish Women (London, 1908), p.165. 26 27

178

appendix: Biographical backgrounds

father in 1729 she was under the legal tutelage of Lord Milton. As a child, Margaret was taken to Bath and from 1729–30 sent to schools in London. In 1739 she married Sir Alexander Macdonald of Sleat, eighth baronet, and moved with him to Skye where she gave birth to four children between 1742 and 1747. Her husband died in 1746, shortly after Lady Margaret’s inauspicious involvement in the plot to smuggle Charles Edward Stuart to safety after his defeat at Culloden. In 1748 she left Skye for the Lowlands, where William Mossman painted the well-known portrait of her tartan-clad two eldest sons in 1752.31 In 1754 she moved to London so her son James could be brought up with Hanoverian loyalties as desired by his legal tutors and curators. London was to remain her primary residence. Sir James died in Rome in 1766, regretted by many, not least David Hume and Adam Smith, and causing profound distress to his mother. Her relationship with her second son, his heir, disintegrated, and she was left embittered, with neither political influence nor the income to which she had become accustomed. Amelia Murray (Lady George Murray) (1710–66) Daughter of James Murray of Strowan and Glencarse, in 1728 she married Lord George Murray (1694–1760), a brother of the second Duke of Atholl.32 In 1745 Lord George joined the Jacobite army under Charles Edward Stuart and became one of the commanders of the Prince’s army, styled LieutenantGeneral. After the failure of the rising, he spent the remainder of his life in exile in the Low Countries, whilst Lady George and her children were forced to leave the family home at Tullibardine. She travelled back and forth to visit him in exile. She had five children who survived infancy, including Amelie (see below), Charlotte (b. 1751), and her eldest son John who became third Duke of Atholl in 1764. Amelia (Amelie) Murray, later Sinclair, then Farquharson (17 May 1732–24 April 1777) She was the daughter of Lord George Murray and his wife Amelia, Lady George. Educated in Edinburgh, Amelie travelled with her mother to visit her exiled father in the Low Countries in the late 1740s. She married John Sinclair, Master of Sinclair in 1750 and then after his death, James Farquharson of Invercauld in 1754. In 1764 the couple travelled to Bath and London, along with some of their children. Stana Nenadic, ‘Macdonald, Margaret, of Sleat, n. Montgomerie’, in Ewen et al. (eds), Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women, p.221. The portrait now hangs in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. 32 Murray G. H. Pittock, ‘Murray, Lord George (1694–1760)’, ODNB. 31

179

appendix: Biographical Backgrounds

Lady Charlotte Murray (13 October 1731–1805) and Lady Jean Murray (1730–47) Daughters of the second Duke of Atholl and his English wife Jane Frederick (d. 1748), they spent their childhood at the Duke of Atholl’s house at Dunkeld and in London with their mother, who became estranged from their father. In 1747 Jean eloped with the Earl of Crawfurd, fleeing to the Low Countries where she died of a fever within a year of her marriage. Charlotte married her cousin, John Murray (brother of Amelie, above), who became third Duke of Atholl after a House of Lords ruling following his uncle’s death in 1764. Charlotte also inherited the title of Baroness Strange. The couple divided their time between their Highland estates and their London townhouses. A joint portrait of the sisters as children hangs on public display in Blair Castle. Lady Frances Steuart Denham, née Wemyss (1722–89) Daughter of the Earl of Wemyss and sister of the Jacobite General Lord Elcho, in 1743 she married Sir James Steuart Denham, who would become a celebrated political economist, author of An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy (1767).33 They had one son, James (b. 1744), later a colonel in the army. Sent into exile for his role in the 1745 Jacobite rising, Sir James spent seventeen years in France, Germany and the Low Countries. Lady Frances (and later their son) joined him in exile, during which time she returned twice to London to appeal for his clemency, which was granted in 1762. After her husband’s death she composed a memoir of her married life, an emotionally charged description of their life together in several countries.34 Margaret Steuart Calderwood (1715–74) Sister of Sir James Steuart Denham and the daughter of Sir James Steuart of Goodtrees and Coltness, in 1735 she married Thomas Calderwood of Polton, shortly prior to which she sat for her portrait to Allan Ramsay. In 1751 she appears to have been the principal motivator in her husband’s unsuccessful attempts at a political career. In 1756 she and her husband embarked on a journey through England and the Low Countries, which she documented in a series of articulate and opinionated letters to her daughter.35 She also Andrew S. Skinner, ‘Steuart, Sir James, of Coltness and Westshield, third baronet (1713–1780)’, ODNB. 34 EUL, MS E2002.28, ‘Frances Steuart – Widow – Melencholy Title’ (unpublished memoir, Coltness, 1881). Her correspondence is deposited in the same archive. 35 Margaret Steuart Calderwood, ‘A Journey in England, Holland, and the Low Countries’ 33

180

appendix: Biographical backgrounds

composed a manuscript novel, and was well known for her commitment to the improvement and the efficient management of her husband’s estates.36

(1756), in Coltness Collections, 1608–1840, Maitland Club (Edinbirgh, 1842). 36 Stuart W. McDonald, ‘Calderwood, Margaret (1715–1774)’, ODNB.

181

Bibliography

Blair Castle Archives (Perthshire) NRAS234, Papers of the Murray Family, Dukes of Atholl British Library Auckland Papers Newcastle Papers Edinburgh Central Library YML 28A, Minutes of the Edinburgh Assembly 1746–1776 Edinburgh University Library La III 364, Elizabeth Halkett, ‘Memoir of the Fletchers of Saltoun’ (unpublished MS, written some time before 1782) E2002.28, ‘Frances Steuart – Widow – Melencholy Title’ (unpublished memoir, Coltness, 1881) Coltness Papers Glasgow University Archive Services UGD37 John Campbell, J. A. Campbell and J. L. Campbell & Lamond, /2/1 Papers of MacDonald of MacDonald, Slate, in the Isles of Skye and North Uist Hopetoun Palace Archives (West Lothian) NRAS888, Marquesses of Linlithgow The National Archives (Kew) State Papers, SP54/44 (Correspondence relating to Lady Margaret Macdonald, 1754) National Archives of Scotland CC8/126/603, Testament of Elizabeth Kinloch GD1, Miscellaneous MSS GD18, Papers of the Clerk Family of Penicuik, Midlothian GD45, Papers of the Maule Family, Earls of Dalhousie GD110, Papers of the Hamilton-Dalrymple Family of North Berwick GD113, Papers of the Innes Family of Stow, Peebleshire GD331, Papers of the Dick Cunyngham Family of Prestonfield National Library of Scotland MS.Adv.23.1.1, Minutes of the Select Society

183

bibliography

MS293, ‘An Impartial and Genuine List of the Ladys on the Whig or Jacobite Partie’ MS304, Gen: Humphrey Bland – letter book 1747–1749; 1753–1754 Papers of the Family of Cathcart of Cathcart Elliot of Minto Papers Fletcher of Saltoun Papers Hay of Yester Papers Lauriston Castle Collection: Mackenzie of Delvine Papers Lumisden and Strange Papers Mure of Caldwell Papers

Printed Primary Sources [Anon.], An Universal History, from the Earliest Account of Time to the Present: Compiled from Original Authors and Illustrated with Maps, Cuts, Notes, Chronological and Other Tables, vol.1 (London, 1736) [Anon.], The Female Rebels: Being Some Remarkable Incidents of the Lives, Characters, and Families of the Titular Duke and Dutchess of Perth, the Lord and Lady Ogilvie, and of Miss Florence M’Donald, containing Several Particulars of these Remarkable Persons not hitherto published (Edinburgh, 1747) [Anon.], The Usefulness of the Edinburgh Theatre Seriously Considered. With a Proposal for Rendering it More Beneficial (Edinburgh, 1757) [Anon.], A Paper Dropt from Tristram Shandy’s Pocket-book, bound in Jack and his Whistle (Edinburgh, 1762) [Anon.], List of Scholars educated by the late Mr James Mundell, Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1789) Baillie, Grisel, The Household Book of Lady Grisel Baillie, 1692–1733, ed. Robert Scott-Moncrieff, Scottish History Society 2nd series, vol.1 (Edinburgh, 1911) Barclay, James, A Treatise on Education: Or, An Easy Method of Acquiring Language, and Introducing Children to the Knowledge of History, Geography, Mythology, Antiquities, &c (Edinburgh, 1743) Beattie, James, James Beattie’s London Diary, 1773, edited, with an Introduction, by Ralph S. Walker (Aberdeen, 1946) Birdwood, Vere (ed.), So Dearly Loved, So Much Admired: Letters to Hester Pitt, Lady Chatham, from her Relations and Friends 1744–1801 (London, 1994) Boswell, Elizabeth, My Very Dearest Sweet Heart, or, Boswell Before Boswell. Letters of the Lady Elizabeth Boswell (1704 to 1711, and 1733), Life before the Biographer, ed. David R. Boswell (Bath, 2003) [Boswell, James], A View of the Edinburgh Theatre during the Summer Season, 1759 (Los Angeles, 1976; first published 1760) Boswell, James, The Journal of A Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LLD, edited and with an introduction by Peter Levi (reprint of 3rd edn, Harmondsworth, 1984; first published 1785) Boswell, James, Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (reprinted New Haven and London, 1992; first published 1950)

184

bibliography

Burney, Frances, Evelina, Or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (Harmondsworth, 1994; first published 1778) Burrell, William, Sir William Burrell’s Northern Tour, 1758, ed. John G. Dunbar (East Linton, 1997) Calderwood, Margaret Steuart, Letters and Journals of Mrs Calderwood of Polton from England Holland and the Low Countries in 1756, ed. Alexander Fergusson (Edinburgh, 1884) Calderwood, Margaret Steuart, ‘A Journey in England, Holland, and the Low Countries’ (1756), in Coltness Collections, 1608–1840, Maitland Club (Edinburgh, 1842) Carlyle, Alexander, The Autobiography of Dr. Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk, 1722–1805, ed. John Hill Burton, with a new Introduction by Richard B. Sher (Bristol, 1990; reprint of 1910 edn) Carlyle, Alexander, Journal of a Tour to the North of Scotland, ed. Richard B. Sher (Aberdeen, 1982) Chapone, Hester, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (Edinburgh, 1821; first published 1773) Clerk, John, Memoirs of the Life of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, 1676–1755, ed. John M. Gray, Scottish History Society series 1, vol.13 (Edinburgh, 1892) Cockburn, Alison, Letters and Memoir of her Own Life, by Mrs Alison Rutherford or Cockburn, with notes by T. Craig-Brown (Edinburgh, 1900) Cockburn, Henry, Memorials of His Time by Lord Cockburn, ed. and abridged by W. Forbes Gray (Edinburgh, 1945; first published 1856) Duff, H. R. (ed.), Culloden Papers (London, 1815) [Elliot, Gilbert, Lord Minto], Proposals for carrying on certain Public Works In the City of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1752) Elliot, Gilbert, The Life and Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, First Earl of Minto, from 1751 to 1806, edited by his great-niece the Countess of Minto, vol.1 (London, 1874) Fénelon, François de, Telemachus, Son of Ulysses, edited and translated by Patrick Riley (Cambridge, 1994; first published 1699) Fielding, Henry, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, edited by Douglas Brooks-Davies and Martin C. Battestin and with an Introduction by Thomas Keymer (Oxford, 1999) Fiennes, Celia, The Illustrated Journeys of Celia Fiennes, 1685–c.1712, ed. Christopher Morris (London, 1982) Forbes, Robert, The Lyon in Mourning or a Collection as Exactly made as the Iniquity of the Times would Permit of Speeches Letters Journals etc. Relative to the Affairs of Prince Charles Edward Stuart by the Rev. Robert Forbes, A. M. Bishop of Ross & Caithness 1746–1775, ed. Henry Paton (Edinburgh, 1975; first published 1895) Fordyce, David, Dialogues Concerning Education, 2 vols (London, 1745 and 1748) Forrester, James, The Polite Philosopher: Or, an Essay on that Art which Makes a Man Happy in Himself, and Agreeable to Others (Edinburgh, 1734) Fraser, William, The Chiefs of Grant, vols 1 and 2 (Edinburgh, 1883) Fraser, William, Memorials of the Montgomeries, Earls of Eglinton, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1859) Fraser, William, Memoirs of the Maxwells of Pollock, vol.1 (Edinburgh, 1863) Fraser, William, The Chiefs of Grant, vols 1 and 2 (Edinburgh, 1883) Freebairn, James, L’Eloge d’Ecosse et des Dames Ecossoises (Edinburgh, 1727) 185

bibliography

Goldsmith, Oliver, The Collected Letters of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Katharine C. Balderston (Cambridge, 1928) Grant, Patrick, The Letters of Patrick Grant, Lord Elchies, with Memoir, etc., ed. H. D. MacWilliam (Aberdeen, 1947) Gregory, John, A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (Edinburgh, 1821; first published 1774) Hume, David, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1995; first published 1741–77) Hume, David, The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, vol.1 (Oxford, 1932) Johnson, Samuel, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols (London, 1755) Lennox, Charlotte, The Female Quixote, or, The Adventures of Arabella, ed. Sandra Shulman (London, 1986; first published 1752) Macdonald, John, Memoirs of an Eighteenth-Century Footman, with an introduction by John Beresford (London, 1927; first published 1790) MacLaurin, Colin, The Collected Letters of Colin MacLaurin, ed. Stella Mills (Nantwich, 1982) Millar, John, Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society (London, 1771) Minto, Countess of, A Memoir of the Right Honourable Hugh Elliot (Edinburgh, 1868) Mitchell, L. G. (ed.), The Purefoy Letters 1735–1753 (London, 1973) Monro, Alexander, (Primus), ‘The Professor’s Daughter: An Essay on Female Conduct’, ed. P. A. G. Monro, Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 26:1, supplement no.2 (January 1996) Mure, Elizabeth, ‘Some Remarks on the Change of Manners in my Own Time. 1700–1790’, in Selections from the Family Papers Preserved at Caldwell, ed. W. Mure, Maitland Club, 71 (Glasgow, 1854), vol.1 Mure, W. (ed.), Selections from the Family Papers preserved at Caldwell, Maitland Club, 71 (Glasgow, 1854) Murray, Grisell Baillie, Memoirs and Lives of the Right Honourable George Baillie of Jerviswood and of Lady Grisell Baillie, by their daughter Lady Murray of Stanhope (Edinburgh, 1822) Murray, John, Chronicles of the Atholl and Tullibardine Families, collected and arranged by John, Seventh Duke of Atholl, K.T. (Edinburgh, 1908), vols 2 and 3 Pennant, Thomas, A Tour in Scotland, 1769, with an introduction by Brian D. Osborne (Edinburgh, 2000) Ramsay, Allan, The Fair Assembly: A Poem (Edinburgh, 1723) Ramsay, Allan, The Works of Allan Ramsay, vol.3 (poems miscellaneous and uncollected), ed. Alexander M. Kinghorn and Alexander Law, Scottish Text Society, 3rd series, no.29 (Edinburgh, 1961) Ramsay, John, of Ochtertyre, Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Alexander Allardyce, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1888) Richardson, Samuel, Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded, edited by Peter Sabor with an Introduction by Margaret A. Doody (London, 1985; first published 1740) Richardson, Samuel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison, edited with an Introduction by Jocelyn Harris (London, 1972; first published 1753) Robertson, William, History of Scotland during the Reigns of Queen Mary and of King James VI till his Accession to the Crown of England (London, 1759) Robertson, William, The History of America (London, 1771) 186

bibliography

Sheridan, Thomas, A Course of Lectures on Elocution: Together with Two Dissertations on Language; and Some other Tracts Relative to those Subjects (London, 1762) Smith, Adam, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J. C. Bryce (Indianapolis, 1985; as recorded by a student in 1762–3) Smollett, Tobias, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, with an Introduction by James L. Clifford (Oxford, 1983; first published 1751) Somerville, Martha, Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville, with Selections from her Correspondence (London, 1873) Somerville, Thomas, My Own Life and Times 1741–1814, with an Introduction by Richard B. Sher (Bristol, 1996; first published 1861) Stuart, Louisa, Some Account of John Duke of Argyll and his Family (London, 1863; orig. comp. 1827) Taylor, Henrietta (ed.), A Jacobite Miscellany: Eight Original Papers on the Rising of 1745–1746, Roxburghe Club (Oxford, 1948) Topham, Edward, Letters from Edinburgh, Written in the Years 1774 and 1775 (London, 1776) Turnbull, George, The Principles of Moral Philosophy. An Enquiry into the Wise and Good Government of the Moral World, 2 vols (London, 1740) Warrand, Duncan (ed.), More Culloden Papers (Inverness, 1923–30), vol.4 Wortley Montagu, Mary, Letters from the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 1709–1762, with an introduction by R. Brimley Johnson (London, 1906)

Printed Secondary Sources [Anon.], Mellerstain, Gordon, Berwickshire: Home of the Earl and Countess of Haddington (Derby, 1994) Abrams, Lynn, Eleanor Gordon, Deborah Simonton and Eileen Janes Yeo (eds), Gender in Scottish History since 1700 (Edinburgh, 2006) Abrams, Lynn, ‘Introduction: Gendering the Agenda’, in Lynn Abrams, Eleanor Gordon, Deborah Simonton and Eileen Janes Yeo (eds), Gender in Scottish History since 1700 (Edinburgh, 2006), pp.1–16 Allan, David, Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment: Ideas of Scholarship in Early Modern History (Edinburgh, 1993) Allan, David, ‘Protestantism, Presbyterianism and National Identity in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, in Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (eds), Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c.1650–c.1850 (Cambridge, 1998), pp.182–205 Allan, David, Scotland in the Eighteenth Century: Union and Enlightenment (Harlow, 2002) Allan, David, Making British Culture: English Readers and the Scottish Enlightenment, 1740–1830 (London, 2008) Allan, David, A Nation of Readers: The Lending Library in Georgian England (London, 2008) Altman, Janet Gurkman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus, OH, 1982) Altman, Janet Gurkman, ‘Women’s Letters in the Public Sphere’, in Elizabeth C. Goldsmith and Dena Goodman (eds), Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France (Ithaca and London, 1995) 187

bibliography

Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Modern Nationalism (London 1983, rev. 1991) Andrews, Malcolm, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Aldershot, 1989) Baier, Annette C., ‘Hume on Women’s Complexion’, in Peter Jones (ed.), The ‘Science of Man’ in the Scottish Enlightenment: Hume, Reid and their Contemporaries (Edinburgh, 1989), pp.33–53 Barker, Hannah, Newspapers, Politics, and English Society, 1695–1855 (Harlow, 2000) Barker, Hannah, and Elaine Chalus (eds), Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities (London and New York, 1997) Barker, Hannah, and Elaine Chalus (eds), Women’s History: Britain, 1700–1850. An Introduction (London and New York, 2005) Barker, Hannah, and Elaine Chalus, Introduction, to Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds), Women’s History: Britain, 1700–1850. An Introduction (London and New York, 2005), pp.1–8 Barnard, Toby, ‘Reading in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Public and Private Pleasures’, in Bernadette Cunningham and Máire Kennedy (eds), The Experience of Reading: Irish Historical Perspectives (Dublin, 1999), pp.60–77 Batten, Charles L., Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth-century Travel Literature (Berkeley, CA and London, 1978) Berry, Helen, ‘Promoting Taste in the Provincial Press: National and Local Culture in Eighteenth-Century Newcastle upon Tyne’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 25 (2002), pp.1–17 Berry, Helen, ‘Creating Public Space: The Organisation and Social Function of the Newcastle Assembly Rooms’, in Helen Berry and Jeremy Gregory (eds), Creating and Consuming Culture in North-East England, 1660–1830 (Aldershot, 2004), pp.120–40 Beveridge, Craig, ‘Childhood and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, in John Dwyer, Roger Mason and Alexander Murdoch (eds), New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh, 1982), pp.256–90 Binhammer, Katherine, ‘The Persistence of Reading: Governing Female Novel Reading in Memoirs of Emma Courtney and Memoirs of Modern Philosophers’, Eighteenth-Century Life 27:2 (spring 2003), pp.1–22 Black, Jeremy, The British and The Grand Tour (London, 1985) Black, Jeremy, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (New York and Stroud, 1992) Black, Jeremy, Parliament and Foreign Policy in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2004) Blackie, Jane, ‘Elliot, Sir Gilbert, second baronet, Lord Minto (bap. 1693, d. 1766)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford, 2004) [www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/8659] Bland, Caroline, and Máire Cross (eds), Gender and Politics in the Age of LetterWriting, 1750–2000 (Aldershot, 2004) Bohls, Elizabeth A., Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 (Cambridge, 1995) Borer, Mary Cathcart, Willingly to School: A History of Women’s Education (Guildford and London, 1976) Borsay, Peter, ‘The Rise of the Promenade: The Social and Cultural Use of Space 188

bibliography

in the English Provincial Town c.1660–1800’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 9 (1986), pp.125–40 Borsay, Peter, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989) Borsay, Peter, ‘Health and Leisure Resorts 1700–1840’, in Peter Clark (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol.2, 1540–1840 (Cambridge, 2000), pp.775–803 Borsay, Peter, ‘Urban Life and Culture’, in H. T. Dickinson (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2002), pp.196–208 Borsay, Peter, ‘Politeness and Elegance: The Cultural Re-Fashioning of Eighteenthcentury York’, in Mark Hallett and Jane Rendall (eds), Eighteenth-Century York: Culture, Space and Society (York, 2003), pp.1–12 Borsay, Peter, ‘Children, Adolescents and Fashionable Urban Society in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Anja Müller (ed.), Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century (Aldershot, 2006), pp.53–62 Bowers, Toni, ‘“A Point of Conscience”: Breastfeeding and Maternal Authority in Pamela 2’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 7:3 (1995), pp.259–78

Brewer, John, ‘This, That and the Other: Public, Social and Private in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Dario Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe (eds), Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter, 1995), pp.1–21 Brewer, John, ‘Reconstructing the Reader: Prescriptions, Texts and Strategies in Anna Larpent’s Reading’, in James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (eds), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge, 1996), pp.226–45 Brewer, John, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997) Briggs, Peter M., ‘“News from the little World”: A Critical Glance at EighteenthCentury British Advertising’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 23 (1994), pp.29–45 Broadie, Alexander, The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation (Edinburgh, 2001) Broadie, Alexander (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2003) Brown, Ian Gordon, ‘Modern Rome and Ancient Caledonia: the Union and the Politics of Scottish Culture’, in Andrew Hook (ed.), The History of Scottish Literature, vol.2, 1660–1800 (Aberdeen, 1987) Brown, Keith M., Noble Society in Scotland: Wealth, Family and Culture, from Reformation to Revolution (Edinburgh, 2000) Bryant, Margaret E., The London Experience of Secondary Education (London and New Jersey, 1986) Bryson, Anna, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998) Buchan, James, Capital of the Mind: How Edinburgh Changed the World (London, 2003) Burchell, Jenny, Polite or Commercial Concerts? Concert Management and Orchestral Repertoire in Edinburgh, Bath, Oxford, Manchester, and Newcastle, 1730–1799 (New York and London, 1996) 189

bibliography

Bushnell, Nelson S., William Hamilton: Poet and Jacobite (Aberdeen, 1957) Cairns, John W., ‘Craigie, Robert, of Glendoick (bap. 1688, d. 1760)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/6585 Cameron, Alasdair, ‘Theatre in Scotland 1660–1800’, in Andrew Hook (ed.), The History of Scottish Literature, vol.2, 1660–1800 (Aberdeen, 1987), pp.191–208 Campbell, Donald, Playing for Scotland: A History of the Scottish Stage, 1715–1965 (Edinburgh, 1996) Carr, Rosalind, ‘“I will now think of discharging this to my Lady Duchess”: Female Correspondence and Scottish Political History: A Case Study of the 1707 Union’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques (forthcoming) Carter, Philip, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660–1800 (Harlow, 2001) Carter, Philip, ‘Elliot, Sir Gilbert, of Minto, third baronet (1722–1777)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/8660] Caudle, James J., ‘James Boswell (H. Scotus Londoniensis)’, in Stana Nenadic (ed.), Scots in London in the Eighteenth Century (Lewisburg, PA, 2010), pp.109–38 Chalus, Elaine, ‘“That Epidemical Madness”: Women and Electoral Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds), Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities (London and New York, 1997), pp.151–78 Chalus, Elaine, ‘“My Minerva at my Elbow”: The Political Roles of Women in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Stephen Taylor, Richard Connors and Clyve Jones (eds), Hanoverian Britain and Empire: Essays in Memory of Philip Lawson (Woodbridge, 1998), pp.210–20 Chalus, Elaine, ‘Elite Women, Social Politics, and the Political World of Late Eighteenth-Century England’, The Historical Journal 43:3 (2000) pp.669–97 Chalus, Elaine, ‘“To Serve My Friends”: Women and Political Patronage in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Amanda Vickery (ed.), Women, Privilege, and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present (Stanford, 2001), pp.57–88 Chalus, Elaine, Elite Women in English Political Life, c.1754–1790 (Oxford, 2005) Chalus, Elaine, and Fiona Montgomery, ‘Women and Politics’, in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds), Women’s History: Britain, 1700–1850. An Introduction (London and New York, 2005), pp.217–59 Chard, Chloe, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography 1600–1830 (Manchester and New York, 1999) Chartier, Roger, ‘The Practical Impact of Writing’, in Roger Chartier (ed.), A History of Private Life, vol.3, Passions of the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1989), pp.111–59 Clark, Peter, and R. A. Houston, ‘Culture and Leisure 1700–1840’, in Peter Clark (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol.2, 1540–1840 (Cambridge, 2000), pp.575–614 Clery, E. J., The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury (Basingstoke and New York, 2004) Cockayne, George E., The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, Extant, Extinct or Dormant, 13 vols, (London, 1910–59) Cohen, Michèle, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York, 1996) 190

bibliography

Cohen, Michèle, ‘French Conversation or “Glittering Gibberish”? Learning French in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Natasha Glaisyer and Sara Pennell (eds), Didactic Literature in England, 1500–1800: Expertise Constructed (Aldershot, 2003), pp.99–117 Cohen, Michèle, ‘Gender and the Private/Public Debate on Education in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Richard Aldrich (ed.), Public or Private Education? Lessons from History (London and Portland, OR, 2004), pp.15–35 Cohen, Michèle, ‘“To Think, to Compare, to Combine, to Methodise”: Girls’ Education in Enlightenment Britain’, in Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment (Basingstoke, 2005), pp.224–42 Cohen, Michèle, ‘“Familiar Conversation”: The Role of the “Familiar Format” in Education in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England’, in Mary Hilton and Jill Shefrin (eds), Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices (Farnham, 2009), pp.99–116 Colclough, Stephen, ‘Recovering the Reader: Commonplace Books and Diaries as Sources of Reading Experience’, Publishing History 44 (1998), pp.5–37 Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London, 1992) Coltman, Viccy, ‘Scottish Architects in Eighteenth-Century London: George Steuart, the Competition for Patronage, and the Representation of Scotland’, in Stana Nenadic (ed.), Scots in London in the Eighteenth Century (Lewisburg, PA, 2010), pp.91–108 Connolly, S. J., ‘A Woman’s Life in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Case of Letitia Bushe’, The Historical Journal 43:2 (2000), pp.433–51 Connor, Rebecca Elizabeth, Women, Accounting, and Narrative: Keeping Books in Eighteenth-Century England (London and New York, 2004) Craig, Maggie, Damn’ Rebel Bitches: The Women of the ’45 (Edinburgh, 1997) Craig, Maggie, ‘The Fair Sex Turns Ugly: Female Involvement in the Jacobite Rising of 1745’, in Yvonne Galloway Brown and Rona Ferguson (eds), Twisted Sisters: Women, Crime and Deviance in Scotland Since 1400 (East Linton, 2002), pp.84–100 Crawford, Patricia, Women and Religion in England 1500–1720 (London and New York, 1993) Cross, Màire, and Caroline Bland, ‘Gender Politics: Breathing New Life into Old Letters’, in Caroline Bland and Máire Cross (eds), Gender and Politics in the Age of Letter-Writing, 1750–2000 (Aldershot, 2004), pp.3–14 Cunningham, Bernadette, ‘Introduction: The Experience of Reading’, in Bernadette Cunningham and Máire Kennedy (eds), The Experience of Reading: Irish Historical Perspectives (Dublin, 1999), pp.1–9 Cunningham, Bernadette, and Máire Kennedy (eds), The Experience of Reading: Irish Historical Perspectives (Dublin, 1999) Cunningham, Colin, ‘“An Italian house is my lady”’: Some Aspects of the Definition of Women’s Role in the Architecture of Robert Adam’, in Gill Perry and Michael Rossington (eds), Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture (Manchester, 1994), pp.63–78 Daiches, David, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, in David Daiches, Peter Jones and Jean Jones (eds), The Scottish Enlightenment 1730–1790: A Hotbed of Genius (Edinburgh, 1986, rev.1996), pp.1–42. Darnton, Robert, ‘What Is the History of Books?’, Daedalus 111:3 (1982), pp.65–83 191

bibliography

Darnton, Robert, ‘First Steps Towards a History of Reading’, in Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (London and Boston, 1990), pp.107–35 Davis, Natalie Zemon, ‘Gender and Genre: Women as Historical Writers, 1400– 1820’, in Patricia H. Labalme (ed.), Beyond their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past (New York and London, 1980), pp.152–74 Daybell, James (ed.), Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1450–1700 (Basingstoke, 2001) DeMaria, Robert, jr, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading (Baltimore and London, 1997) Dennison, E. Patricia, David Ditchburn and Michael Lynch (eds), Aberdeen Before 1800: A New History (East Linton, 2002) Dennison, E. Patricia, Anne T. Simpson and Grant G. Simpson, ‘The Growth of Two Towns’, in E. Particia Dennison, David Ditchburn and Michael Lynch (eds), Aberdeen Before 1800: A New History (East Linton, 2002), pp.13–43 Depeyre, Michel, ‘Clerk, John, of Eldin (1728–1812)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/5618] Devine, T. M., The Scottish Nation: 1700–2000 (London, 1999) Devine, T. M., ‘The Modern Economy: Scotland and the Act of Union’, in T. M. Devine, C. H. Lee and G. C. Peden (eds), The Transformation of Scotland: The Economy Since 1700 (Edinburgh, 2005), pp.13–33 Dickinson, H. T. (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2002) Dolan, Brian, Ladies of the Grand Tour (London, 2001) Doran, John, A Lady of the Last Century (Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu): Illustrated in her Unpublished Letters (London, 1873) Duncan, James Alexander, The Descent of the Hepburns of Monkrig (Edinburgh, 1911) Dunstan, Vivienne S., ‘Glimpses into a Town’s Reading Habits in Enlightenment Scotland: Analysing the Borrowings of Gray Library, Haddington, 1732–1816’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 26:1+2 (2006) Durie, Alastair J., Scotland for the Holidays: A History of Tourism in Scotland, 1780– 1939 (East Linton, 2003) Durie, Alastair, ‘Medicine, Health and Economic Development: Promoting Spa and Seaside Resorts in Scotland c. 1750–1830’, Medical History 47 (2003), pp.195–216 Dwyer, John, Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1987) Dwyer, John, Roger A. Mason and Alexander Murdoch (eds), New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh, 1982) Earle, Rebecca (ed.), Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600–1945 (Aldershot, 1999) Earle, Rebecca, ‘Introduction’, to Rebecca Earle (ed.), Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600–1945 (Aldershot, 1999), pp.1–14 Eger, Elizabeth, Charlotte Grant, Clíona Ó Gallchoir and Penny Warburton (eds), Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830 (Cambridge, 2001) Elliot, George Francis Stewart, The Border Elliots and the Family of Minto (Edinburgh, 1897) Evans, Tanya, ‘Women, Marriage and the Family’, in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds), Women’s History: Britain, 1700–1850. An Introduction (London and New York, 2005), pp.57–77 192

bibliography

Ewan, Elizabeth, and Maureen M. Meikle (eds), Women in Scotland c. 1100–c. 1750 (East Linton, 1999) Ewan, Elizabeth, Sue Innes and Siân Reynolds (eds), co-ordinating editor, Rose Pipes, The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women: From the Earliest Times to 2004 (Edinburgh, 2006) Fergus, Jan, ‘Women Readers: A Case Study’, in Vivien Jones (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, 1700–1800 (Cambridge, 2000), pp.155–78 Fergusson, Alexander, The Honourable Henry Erskine, Lord Advocate for Scotland, with Notices of Certain of his Kinsfolk and of his Time (Edinburgh, 1882) Field, Ophelia, The Favourite: Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (London, 2002) Fildes, Valerie A., Breasts, Bottles and Babies: A History of Infant Feeding (Edinburgh, 1986) Fischer, Steven R., A History of Reading (London, 2003) Fleming, John, Robert Adam and his Circle in Edinburgh and Rome (London, 1962) Fletcher, Anthony J., Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven and London, 1995) Foreman, Amanda, ‘A Politician’s Politician: Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and the Whig party’, in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds), Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities (London and New York, 1997) Foyster, Elizabeth, ‘Creating a Veil of Silence? Politeness and Marital Violence in the English Household’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 12 (2002), pp.395–415 Froide, Amy M., Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2005) Fry, Michael, ‘Fletcher, Andrew, Lord Milton (1691/2–1766)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004; online edn, Oct 2006) [www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/9721] Fry, Michael, ‘Mure, William, of Caldwell (1718–1776)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/19563] Gardiner, Dorothy, English Girlhood at School: A Study of Women’s Education through Twelve Centuries (London, 1929) Gibson, A. J. S., and T. C. Smout, Prices, Food and Wages in Scotland, 1550–1780 (Cambridge, 1995) Girouard, Mark, Life in the English Country House (Harmondsworth, 1980) Girouard, Mark, The English Town (London and New Haven, 1990) Gleadle, Kathryn, ‘“Opinions Deliver’d in Conversation”: Conversation, Politics, and Gender in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in José Harris (ed.), Civil Society in British History: Ideas, Identities, Institutions (Oxford, 2003), pp.61–78 Glover, Katharine, ‘“Polite London Chilldren”: Educating the Daughters of the Scottish Elite in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London’, in Stana Nenadic (ed.), Scots in London in the Eighteenth Century (Lewisburg, PA, 2010), pp.253–70 Glover, Katharine, ‘Polite Society and the Rural Resort: The Meanings of Moffat Spa in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 34:1 (2011), pp.65–80 Goldsmith, Elizabeth C. (ed.), Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature (London, 1989) Graham, Henry Gray, A Group of Scottish Women (London, 1908) 193

bibliography

Graham, Henry Gray, The Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1900; first published 1899), 2 vols Greenwood, David, William King, Tory and Jacobite (Oxford 1969) Greig, Hannah, ‘Leading the Fashion: The Material Culture of London’s Beau Monde’, in John Styles and Amanda Vickery (eds), Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830 (New Haven and London, 2006), pp.293–313 Grenier, Katherine Haldane, Tourism and Identity in Scotland, 1770–1914: Creating Caledonia (Aldershot, 2005) Grundy, Isobel, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1999) Grundy, Isobel, ‘Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her Daughter: The Changing Use of Manuscripts’, in George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker (eds), Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800 (Cambridge, 2002), pp.182–200 Guest, Harriet, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago and London, 2000) Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA, 1989; first published Darmstadt and Neuwied, 1962) Hans, Nicholas, New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1951) Hargraves, Neil, ‘Revelation of Character in Eighteenth-Century Historiography and William Robertson’s History of the Reign of Charles V’, Eighteenth-Century Life 27:2 (2003), pp.23–48 Harris, Bob, Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2002) Harris, Bob, ‘Towns, Improvement and Cultural Change in Georgian Scotland: The Evidence of the Angus Burghs, c.1760–1820’, Urban History 33:2 (2006), pp.195–212 Hembry, Phyllis, The English Spa 1560–1815: A Social History (London, 1990) Henderson, T. F., ‘Leslie, David, first Lord Newark (1601–1682)’, rev. Edward M. Furgol, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/16486] Herman, Arthur, The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots’ Invention of the Modern World (London, 2002) Hibbert, Christopher, The Grand Tour (London, 1987) Hicks, Philip, ‘The Roman Matron in Britain: Female Political Influence and Republican Response, ca. 1750–1800’, Journal of Modern History 77 (March 2005), pp.35–69 Hill, Bridget, The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catherine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford, 1992) Hill, Bridget, Women Alone: Spinsters in England 1660–1850 (New Haven and London, 2001) Hilton, Mary, and Jill Shefrin (eds), Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices (Farnham, 2009) Hook, Andrew (ed.), The History of Scottish Literature, vol.2, 1660–1800 (Aberdeen, 1987) Horn Melton, James Van, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge, 2001) 194

bibliography

Houston, R. A., Social Change in the Age of Enlightenment: Edinburgh 1660–1760 (Oxford, 1994) Hufton, Olwen, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe vol.1, 1500–1800 (London, 1995) Hughes, Mary Joe, ‘Child-Rearing and Social Expectations in Eighteenth-Century England: the Case of the Colliers of Hastings’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 13 (1984), pp.79–100 Immel, Andrea, and Michael Witmore (eds), Children and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550–1800 (London, 2006) Innes, Sue, and Jane Rendall, ‘Women, Gender and Politics’, in Lynn Abrams, Eleanor Gordon, Deborah Simonton and Eileen Janes Yeo (eds), Gender in Scottish History since 1700 (Edinburgh, 2006), pp.43–50 Jackson, Ian, ‘Approaches to the History of Readers and Reading in EighteenthCentury Britain’, Historical Journal 47:4 (2004), pp.1041–54 Jamieson, James H., ‘Social Assemblies of the Eighteenth Century’, Book of the Old Edinburgh Club 19 (1933), pp.31–91 Johns, Adrian, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago and London, 1998) Johnstone, John T., ‘Moffat and Upper Annandale in the Middle of the Eighteenth Century’, Transactions of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society, 3rd series, vol.1 (1912–13), pp.191–211 Jones, Charles, A Language Suppressed: The Pronunciation of the Scots Language in the 18th Century (Edinburgh, 1995) Jones, Vivien (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, 1700–1800 (Cambridge, 2000) Jones, Vivien, ‘Introduction’, to Vivien Jones (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain. 1700–1800 (Cambridge, 2000) Justice, George L., and Nathan Tinker (eds), Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800 (Cambridge, 2002) Kamm, Josephine, Hope Deferred: Girls’ Education in English History (London, 1965) Kidd, Colin, ‘Integration: Patriotism and Nationalism’, in H. T. Dickinson (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2002), pp.368–80 Kidd, Colin, ‘Eighteenth-Century Scotland and the Three Unions’, in T. C. Smout (ed.), Anglo-Scottish Relations from 1603 to 1900 (Oxford, 2005), pp.171–88 Kilday, Anne-Marie, Women and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland (Woodbridge, 2007) Klein, Lawrence E., ‘Gender, Conversation and the Public Sphere in Early Eighteenth-century England’, in Judith Still and Michael Worton (eds), Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices (Manchester, 1993), pp.100–15 Klein, Lawrence E., ‘Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century: Some Questions about Evidence and Analytic Procedure’, EighteenthCentury Studies 29:1 (1995), pp.97–109 Klein, Lawrence E., ‘Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century’, The Historical Journal, 45:4 (2002), pp.869–98 Knott, Sarah, and Barbara Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment (Basingstoke, 2005) Knott, Sarah, and Barbara Taylor, ‘General Introduction’, to Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment (Basingstoke, 2005), pp.xv–xxi 195

bibliography

Kontler, László, ‘Beauty or Beast, or Monstrous Regiments? Robertson and Burke on Women and the Public Scene’, Modern Intellectual History 1:3 (2004), pp.305–30 Korte, Barbara, English Travel Writing: From Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations, trans. Catherine Matthias (Basingstoke and New York, 2000; first published Darmstadt, 1996) Kowaleski-Wallace, Beth, ‘Tea, Gender, and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century England’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 23 (1994), pp.131–45 Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1996) Lang, Andrew M., ‘Craufurd, Patrick, of Auchenames (c.1704–1778)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/64092] Langford, Paul, A Polite and Commercial People, England 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989) Langford, Paul, ‘British Politeness and the Progress of Western Manners: An Eighteenth-Century Enigma’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 7 (1997), pp.53–72 Langford, Paul, ‘The Uses of Eighteenth-Century Politeness’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 12 (2002), pp.311–31 Laughton, J. K., ‘Elliot, John (1732–1808)’, rev. A. W. H. Pearsall, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/8667] Laurence, Anne, Women in England, 1560–1760: A Social History (London, 1994) Law, Alexander, Education in Edinburgh in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1965) Law, Alexander, ‘Teachers in Edinburgh in the Eighteenth Century’, Book of the Old Edinburgh Club 32 (1966), pp.108–57 Lawson, Philip, A Taste for Empire and Glory: Studies in British Overseas Expansion, 1660–1800 (Aldershot, 1997) Leneman, Leah, Alienated Affections: The Scottish Experience of Divorce and Separation, 1684–1830 (Edinburgh 1998) Leneman, Leah, ‘The Scottish Case That Led to Hardwicke’s Marriage Act,’ Law and History Review 17:1 (spring 1999), pp.161–70 Leneman, Leah, and Rosalind Mitchison, Sin in the City: Sexuality and Social Control in Urban Scotland, 1660–1780 (Edinburgh, 1998) Leppert, Richard, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-Cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1988) Lewis, Judith S., ‘1784 and All That: Aristocratic Women and Electoral Politics’, in Amanda Vickery (ed.), Women, Privilege, and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present (Stanford, CA, 2001), pp.152–67 Lindsay, Ian G., and Mary Cosh, Inveraray and the Dukes of Argyll (Edinburgh, 1973) Macaulay, James, ‘Adam, William (bap. 1689, d. 1748)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/107] Marshall, Rosalind K., The Days of Duchess Anne: Life in the Household of the Duchess of Hamilton 1656–1716 (London, 1973; reissued East Linton, 2000) Marshall, Rosalind K., Women in Scotland 1660–1780 (Edinburgh, 1979) Marshall, Rosalind K., Virgins and Viragos: A History of Women in Scotland from 1080 to 1980 (London, 1983) Marshall, Rosalind K., ‘Douglas, Catherine, duchess of Queensberry and Dover 196

bibliography

(1701–1777)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004; online edn, Oct 2006) [www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7876] Mason, Haydn, ‘Fawkener, Sir Everard (1694–1758)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/9228] Maynes, Mary-Jo, Birgitte Søland and Christina Benninghaus (eds), Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills: Placing Girls in European History, 1750–1960 (Bloomington, IN, 2005) McElroy, Davis D., Scotland’s Age of Improvement. A Survey of Eighteenth-Century Literary Clubs and Societies (Washington, 1969) McIntosh, John R., Church and Theology in Enlightenment Scotland: The Popular Party, 1740–1800 (East Linton, 1998) Mendelson, Sara, and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550– 1720 (Oxford, 1998) Meurman-Solin, Anneli, ‘Change from Above or from Below? Mapping the Loci of Linguistic Change in the History of Scottish English’, in Laura Wright (ed.), The Development of Standard English, 1300–1800: Theories, Descriptions, Conflicts (Cambridge, 2000), pp.155–70 Michaelson, Patricia Howell, ‘Women in the Reading Circle’, Eighteenth-Century Life 13:3 (1989), pp.59–69 Michaelson, Patricia Howell, Speaking Volumes: Women, Reading and Speech in the Age of Austen (Stanford, CA, 2002) Mitchell, Linda C., Grammar Wars: Language as Cultural Battlefield in 17th and 18th Century England (Aldershot, 2001) Mitchison, Rosalind, ‘Clerk, Sir John, of Penicuik, second baronet (1676–1755)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/5617] Mitchison, Rosalind, and Leah Leneman, Girls in Trouble: Sexuality and Social Control in Rural Scotland, 1660–1780 (Edinburgh, 1998) Moore, Lindy, ‘Education and Learning’, in Lynn Abrams, Eleanor Gordon, Deborah Simonton and Eileen Janes Yeo (eds), Gender in Scottish History since 1700 (Edinburgh, 2006), pp.111–39 Moran, Mary Catherine, ‘“The Commerce of the Sexes” – Gender and the Social Sphere in Scottish Enlightenment Accounts of Civil Society’, in Frank Trentman (ed.), Paradoxes of Civil Society: New Perspectives on Modern German and British History (New York and Oxford, 2000), pp.61–84 Mugglestone, Lynda, ‘Talking Proper’: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol (Oxford, 1995) Mullan, David (ed.), Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern Scotland: Writing the Evangelical Self, c.1670–c.1730 (Aldershot, 2003) Müller, Anja (ed.), Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century (Aldershot, 2006) Murdoch, Alexander, The People Above: Politics and Administration in Mid-EighteenthCentury Scotland (Edinburgh, 1980) Murdoch, Alexander, ‘Campbell, Archibald, third duke of Argyll (1682–1761)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/4477] Murdoch, Alexander, ‘Morris, Corbyn (1710–1779)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/19302] 197

bibliography

Myers, Sylvia Harcstark, The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1990) Namier, Lewis, and John Brooke (eds), The House of Commons 1754–1790, 3 vols (London, 1964) Nenadic, Stana, ‘Middle-rank Consumers and Domestic Culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow 1720–1840’, Past and Present 145 (1994), pp.122–56 Nenadic, Stana, ‘Print Collecting and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, History 82 (1997), pp.203–22 Nenadic, Stana, ‘The Enlightenment in Scotland and the Popular Passion for Portraits’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 21 (1998), pp.175–92 Nenadic, Stana, ‘Experience and Expectations in the Transformation of the Highland Gentlewoman, 1680–1820’, Scottish Historical Review 80:2 (2001), pp.201–20 Nenadic, Stana, ‘Adam, Mary n. Robertson’, in Elizabeth Ewan, Sue Innes and Siân Reynolds (eds), co-ordinating editor, Rose Pipes, The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women: From the Earliest Times to 2004 (Edinburgh, 2006) Nenadic, Stana, ‘Macdonald, Margaret, of Sleat, n. Montgomerie’, in Elizabeth Ewan, Sue Innes and Siân Reynolds (eds), co-ordinating editor, Rose Pipes, The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women: From the Earliest Times to 2004 (Edinburgh, 2006) Nenadic, Stana, Lairds and Luxury: The Highland Gentry in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 2007) Nenadic, Stana (ed.), Scots in London in the Eighteenth Century (Lewisburg, PA, 2010) Neuberg, Victor E., Popular Education in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1971) Newcomb, Lori H., Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York, 2002) O’Brien, Karen, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge, 1997) O’Brien, Karen, ‘The History Market in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Isobel Rivers (ed.), Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays (London and New York, 2001), pp.105–34 O’Brien, Karen, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge 2009) O’Day, Rosemary, Education and Society 1500–1800: The Social Foundations of Education in Early Modern Britain (London and New York, 1982) O’Gorman, Frank, Voters, Patrons, and Parties: The Unreformed Electoral System of Hanoverian England, 1743–1832 (Oxford, 1989) Ouston, Hugh, ‘York in Edinburgh: James VII and the Patronage of Learning in Scotland, 1679–1688’, in John Dwyer, Roger A. Mason and Alexander Murdoch (eds), New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh, 1982) Ouston, Hugh, ‘Cultural Life from the Restoration to the Union’, in Andrew Hook (ed.), The History of Scottish Literature, vol.2, 1660–1800 (Aberdeen, 1987), pp.11–32 Pateman, Carole, ‘Conclusion: Women’s Writing, Women’s Standing’, in Hilda L. Smith (ed.), Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition (Cambridge, 1998), pp.365–82 198

bibliography

Pearson, Jacqueline, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge, 1999) Perkin, Harold. The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 (London, 1969) Perkins, Pam, ‘“Too Classical for a Female Pen”? Late Eighteenth-Century Women Reading and Writing Classical History’, Clio 33:3 (spring 2004), pp.241–64 Perry, Ruth. ‘Mary Astell and Enlightenment’, in Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment (Basingstoke, 2005), pp.357–70 Pettigrew, Jane, A Social History of Tea (London, 2001) Phillips, Mark Salber, ‘“If Mrs Mure be not sorry for poor King Charles”: History, the Novel, and the Sentimental Reader’, History Workshop Journal 43 (1997), pp.111–31 Phillips, Mark Salber, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, 2000) Pittock, Murray G. H., ‘Contrasting Cultures: Town and Country’, in E. Patricia Dennison, David Ditchburn and Michael Lynch (eds), Aberdeen Before 1800: A New History (East Linton, 2002), pp.347–76 Pittock, Murray G. H., ‘Elliot, Jean (1727–1805)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/8665] Pittock, Murray G. H., ‘Murray, Lord George (1694–1760)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004; online edn, Oct 2006) [www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/19605] Plant, Marjorie, The Domestic Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1952) Pocock, John, Barbarism and Religion, vol.2: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge, 1999) Pollock, Linda, ‘“Teach her to live under obedience”: The Making of Women in the Upper Ranks of Early Modern England’, Continuity and Change 4:2 (1989), pp.231–58 Porter, Roy, The Enlightenment (Basingstoke, 1990) Porter, Roy, ‘Visitors’ Visions: Travellers’ Tales of Georgian London’, in Chloe Chard and Helen Langdon (eds), Transports: Travel, Pleasure, and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830 (New Haven and London, 1996), pp.31–48 Porter, Roy, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (Harmondsworth, 2000) Prevost, W. A. J., ‘Moffat Spa in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Transactions of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History Society, 3rd series, 43 (1966), pp.137–46 Raven, James, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (eds) The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge, 1996) Raven, James, ‘New Reading Histories, Print Culture and the Identification of Change: The Case of Eighteenth-Century England’, Social History 23:3 (1998), pp.268–87 Rendall, Jane, ‘Virtue and Commerce: Women in the Making of Adam Smith’s Political Economy’, in Ellen Kennedy and Susan Mendus (eds), Women in Western Political Philosophy: Kant to Nietzsche (Brighton, 1987), pp.44–77 Rendall, Jane, ‘Writing History for British Women: Elizabeth Hamilton and the Memoirs of Agrippina’, in Clarissa Campbell Orr (ed.), Wollstonecraft’s Daughters: Womanhood in England and France, 1780–1920 (Manchester 1996), pp.79–93 Rendall, Jane, ‘Tacitus Engendered: “Gothic feminism” and British Histories, 199

bibliography

c.1750–1800’, in Geoffrey Cubitt (ed.), Imagining Nations (Manchester, 1998), pp.57–74 Rendall, Jane, ‘Clio, Mars and Minerva: The Scottish Enlightenment and the Writing of Women’s History’, in T. M. Devine and J. R. Young (eds), EighteenthCentury Scotland: New Perspectives (East Linton, 1999), pp.131–54 Rendall, Jane, ‘Women and the Enlightenment in Britain c.1690–1800’, in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds), Women’s History: Britain, 1700–1850. An Introduction (London and New York, 2005), pp.9–32 Richardson, Sarah, ‘“Well-neighboured Houses”: The Political Networks of Elite Women, 1780–1860’, in Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (eds), Women in British Politics, 1760–1860: The Power of the Petticoat (Basingstoke, 2000), pp.56–73 Robertson, John, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh, 1985) Robertson, John, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005) Rogers, Nicholas, Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford, 1998) Rogers, Pat, ‘Boswell and the Scotticism’, in Greg Clingham (ed.), New Light on Boswell: Critical and Historical Essays on the Occasion of the Bicentenary of The Life of Johnson (Cambridge, 1991), pp.56–71 Rosenfeld, Sybil, Strolling Players and Drama in the Provinces, 1660–1765 (Cambridge, 1939) Ross, Ian, ‘A Bluestocking Over the Border: Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu’s Aesthetic Adventures in Scotland, 1766’, Huntington Library Quarterly 23:3 (1965), pp.213–33 Sageng, Erik Lars, ‘MacLaurin, Colin (1698–1746)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004; online edn, 2006) [www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/17643] Sanderson, Elizabeth C., Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century Edinburgh (Basingstoke, 1996) Sanderson, Margaret H. B., Robert Adam and Scotland: Portrait of an Architect (Edinburgh, 1992) Sankey, Margaret, and Daniel Szechi, ‘Elite Culture and the Decline of Scottish Jacobitism 1716–1745’, Past and Present 173 (2001), pp.90–128 Scott, Hew, Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae: The Succession of Ministers in the Church of Scotland from the Reformation, vol.1, Synod of Lothian and Tweeddale (Edinburgh, 1915; first edn 1866) Scott, Hew, Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae: The Succession of Ministers in the Church of Scotland from the Reformation, vol.3, Synod of Glasgow and Ayr (Edinburgh, 1920; first edn. 1868) Sedgwick, Romney (ed.), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1715– 1754, vol.2 (London, 1970) Shaw, John Stuart, The Management of Scottish Society: Power, Nobles, Lawyers, Edinburgh Agents and English Influences (Edinburgh, 1983) Sher, Richard B., Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1985) Sher, Richard B., ‘Science and Medicine in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Paul Wood (ed.), The Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Reinterpretation (Woodbridge, 2000), pp.99–156. 200

bibliography

Sher, Richard B., ‘Spens, Henry (1714–1787)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/65578] Sher, Richard B. ‘Kincaid, Alexander (1710–1777)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/65021] Sher, Richard B., and Andrew Hook, ‘Introduction: Glasgow and the Enlightenment’, in Andrew Hook and Richard B. Sher (eds), The Glasgow Enlightenment (East Linton, 1995), pp.1–20 Shevelow, Kathryn, ‘Fathers and Daughters: Women as Readers of the Tatler’, in Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart (eds), Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts (Baltimore and London, 1986), pp.107–23 Shevelow, Kathryn, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (London and New York, 1989) Shoemaker, Robert B., Gender in English Society 1650–1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (Harlow, 1998) Siebert, Donald T., ‘Chivalry and Romance in the Age of Hume’, Eighteenth-Century Life 21:1 (1997), pp.62–79 Siegel, Kristi (ed.), Gender, Genre and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing (New York, 2004) Siegel, Kristi, ‘Intersections: Women’s Travel and Theory’, in Kristi Siegel (ed.), Gender, Genre and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing (New York, 2004), pp.1–14 Simonton, Deborah, ‘Women and Education’, in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds), Women’s History: Britain, 1700–1850. An Introduction (London and New York, 2005), pp.33–56 Siskin, Clifford, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700– 1830 (Baltimore and London, 1999) Skedd, Susan, ‘Women Teachers and the Expansion of Girls’ Schooling in England, c.1760–1820’, in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds), Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities (London and New York, 1997), pp.101–25 Skinner, Andrew S., ‘Steuart, Sir James, of Coltness and Westshield, third baronet (1713–1780)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004; online edn, 2006) [www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7478] Smart, Alastair, Allan Ramsay: 1713–1784 (Edinburgh, 1992) Smith, Hilda L. (ed.), Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition (Cambridge, 1998) Smith, Hilda L., ‘Introduction: Women, Intellect and Politics: Their Intersection in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Hilda L. Smith (ed.), Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition (Cambridge, 1998), pp.1–21 Smith, Ruth, Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge, 1995) Snook, Edith, Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England (Aldershot, 2005) Soule, Lesley Wade, ‘Cibber, Susannah Maria (1714–1766)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/5417] Steinen, Karl von den, ‘In Search of the Antecedents of Women’s Political Activism in Early Eighteenth-Century Scotland: the Daughters of Anne, Duchess of Hamilton’, in Elizabeth Ewan and Maureen M. Meikle (eds), Women in Scotland c. 1100–c. 1750 (East Linton, 1999), pp.112–24 Stobart, Jon, Andrew Hann and Victoria Morgan, Spaces of Consumption: Leisure and Shopping in the English Town, ca. 1680–1830 (London, 2007) 201

bibliography

Stott, Anne, ‘Women and Religion’, in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds), Women’s History: Britain, 1700–1850. An Introduction (London and New York, 2005), pp.100–23 Stoye, John, English Travellers Abroad, 1604–1667: Their Influences in English Society and Politics (1952, rev. New Haven and London, 1989) Sunter, Ronald M., Patronage and Politics in Scotland, 1707–1832 (Edinburgh, 1986) Sweet, R. H., ‘Topographies of Politeness’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 12 (2002), pp.355–74 Sweet, Rosemary, and Penelope Lane (eds), Women and Urban Life in EighteenthCentury England: On the Town (Aldershot, 2003) Tadmor, Naomi, ‘“In the even my wife read to me’: Women, Reading and Household Life in the Eighteenth Century’, in James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (eds), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge, 1996), pp.162–74 Tadmor, Naomi, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship and Patronage (Cambridge, 2001) Tague, Ingrid H., Women of Quality: Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690–1760 (Woodbridge, 2002) Tait, A. A., The Landscape Garden in Scotland, 1735–1835 (Edinburgh, 1980) Tait, A. A., ‘Adam, Robert (1728–1792)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford, 2004) [www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/105] Taylor, John Tinnon, Early Opposition to the English Novel: The Popular Reaction from 1760–1830 (New York, 1943) Taylor, Miles, ‘John Bull and the Iconography of Public Opinion in England c.1712–1929’, Past and Present 134 (1992), pp.93–128 Tinniswood, Adrian, A History of Country House Visiting: Five Centuries of Tourism and Taste (Oxford, 1989) Todd, Janet, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800 (London, 1989) Tomaselli, Sylvana, ‘The Enlightenment Debate on Women’, History Workshop Journal 20 (1985) Tomaselli, Sylvana, ‘The Most Public Sphere of All: The Family’, in Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Clíona Ó Gallchoir and Penny Warburton (eds), Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830 (Cambridge, 2001), pp.239–56 Tomasson, Katherine, The Jacobite General (Edinburgh, 1958) Towsey, Mark R. M., ‘“Patron of Infidelity”: Scottish Readers Respond to David Hume, c.1750–c.1820’, Book History 11 (2008), pp.89–123 Towsey, Mark R. M., ‘“Observe her Heedfully:” Elizabeth Rose on Women Writers’, Women Writers 18:1 (2011), pp.1–13 Turner, Cheryl, Living By the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York, 1992) Turner, Katherine, British Travel Writers in Europe 1750–1800: Authorship, Gender and National Identity (Aldershot, 2001) Tytler, Sarah, and J. L. Watson, The Songstresses of Scotland, 2 vols (London, 1871) Vance, Shona, ‘Schooling the People’, in E. Patricia Dennison, David Ditchburn and Michael Lynch (eds), Aberdeen Before 1800: A New History (East Linton, 2002), pp.309–26 Vickery, Amanda, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Catego202

bibliography

ries and Chronology of English Women’s History’, The Historical Journal 36:2 (1993), pp.383–414 Vickery, Amanda, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London, 1998) Vickery, Amanda (ed.), Women, Privilege, and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present (Stanford, 2001) Warner, William B., Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1998) Watts, Richard J., ‘Mythical Strands in the Ideology of Prescriptivism’, in Laura Wright (ed.), The Development of Standard English, 1300–1800: Theories, Descriptions, Conflicts (Cambridge, 2000), pp.29–48 Whatley, Christopher A., Scottish Society 1707–1830: Beyond Jacobitism, towards Industrialisation (Manchester, 2000) White, Eryn M., ‘Women, Religion and Education in Eighteenth-Century Wales’, in Michael Roberts and Simone Clarke (eds), Women and Gender in Early Modern Wales (Cardiff, 2000) Whitehead, Barbara J. (ed.), Women’s Education in Early Modern Europe: A History, 1500–1800 (New York and London, 1999) Whyman, Susan E., Sociability and Power in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural Worlds of the Verneys, 1660–1720 (Oxford, 1999) Williamson, Tom, Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore, 1995) Wilson, Adrian, ‘The Perils of Early Modern Procreation: Childbirth with or without Fear?’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 16 (1993), pp.1–19 Wilson, Kathleen, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995) Wilson, Kathleen , ‘Pacific Modernity: Theater, Englishness and the Arts of Discovery, 1760–1800’, in Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman (eds), The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France, 1750–1820 (Berkeley, CA, and London, 2002), pp.62–93 Wilson, Kathleen, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York, 2003) Wilson, Penelope, ‘Melmoth, William, the younger (bap. 1710, d. 1799)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/18536] Withers, Charles W. J., Geography, Science and National Identity: Scotland since 1520 (Cambridge, 2001) Wittman, Reinhard, ‘Was there a Reading Revolution at the End of the Eighteenth Century?’, in Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (eds), A History of Reading in the West (1995, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane Oxford, 1999), pp.284–312 Wood, Paul (ed.), The Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Reinterpretation (Rochester, NY, 2000) Woolf, D. R., ‘A Feminine Past? Gender, Genre and Historical Knowledge in England, 1500–1800’, American Historical Review 102:3 (June 1997), pp.645–79 Woolf, D. R., Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000) Woolf, Daniel, ‘Speaking of History: Conversations about the Past in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century England’, in Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf (eds), 203

bibliography

The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain, 1500–1850 (Manchester, 2002), pp.119–37 Wright, Laura (ed.), The Development of Standard English, 1300–1800: Theories, Descriptions, Conflicts (Cambridge, 2000) Youngson, A. J., The Making of Classical Edinburgh, 1750–1840 (Edinburgh, 1966)

Unpublished Papers and Theses Barclay, Katie, ‘“I Rest Your Loving Obedient Wife”: Marital Relationships in Scotland, 1650–1850 (University of Glasgow PhD thesis, 2007) Barclay, Katie, and Rosalind Carr, ‘Was the Scottish Enlightenment Good for Women?’ (unpublished paper) Duncan, Alison, ‘Patronage and Presentations of the Self: A Late Eighteenth-Century Correspondence’ (University of Edinburgh MSc thesis, 2007) Macleod, Jennifer, ‘The Edinburgh Musical Society: Its Membership and Repertoire 1728–1797’ (University of Edinburgh PhD thesis, 2001) Moran, Mary Catherine, ‘From Rudeness to Refinement: Gender, Genre and Scottish Enlightenment Discourse’ (Johns Hopkins University PhD thesis, 1999)

204

Index Page numbers in bold type indicate a person's biographical entry in the appendix Abercorn, Lady  43 Aberdeen  47, 81 n.13 Aberdeen, Earl of  83, 87 Accent  see elocution, English language, Scots language accomplishments  21, 27, 29, 30-2, 34, 75 accounting  28, 40, 73 acquaintance, cultivation of  35, 36, 42-3, 48-9, 79, 154-5, 165, 167 actors  99, 100, 102, 153 Adam family  2, 16, 19, 31-2, 48, 74, 75, 79, 85, 92, 107-8, 148-9, 153-5, 159, 169 Adam, Eleanor  30, 31, 32, 92, 107-8, 148-9, 159-60 Adam, Elizabeth  92, 173 Adam, James  16, 19, 107-8 Adam, Margaret  18, 74, 103, 153-4, 173 Adam, Mary (née Robertson)  19, 74, 92, 107, 154, 173 Adam, Robert  2, 16, 53, 86, 144, 148-9, 162, 173 and family  18, 19, 30-2, 48, 74, 75, 79, 153-5, 159-60 on Fletcher women  120-1 Adam, Susannah  92, 153, 173 Adam, William  31, 32, 173 Addison, Thomas  50 see also Spectator, The Aikman, William  174 Alison, Dorothy  86 Americas, the  17, 114, 159, 175, 176 Ancram, Lady  1, 96 n.84, 122 anglophobia  66-7, 162 Argyll, Archibald Campbell, 3rd Duke of   15, 55, 59 n.46, 118, 119-20, 123,

141, 146, 169, 175 Argathelian faction  120, 175 aristocracy comparison with gentry  16-17, 147-8 education of  30, 43 English  43 assemblies  1, 3, 32, 79, 80, 108, 152, 162, 168 in Edinburgh  95-7, 122-3, 142, 172 debates over  6-8, 10 contemporary comment on  90-1 young women in  89-92, 93 lady directresses  6, 7, 8, 90, 91, 95-7, 105, 168, 175 regulations (1746)  95-6 in Glasgow  81 n.13 Astell, Mary  25 Atholl, Dukes of  see Murray Austen, Jane  69 Aylesworth (Mrs, schoolteacher in London)  39, 40 Baillie, Lady Grisell  53 and education of daughters  29 n.32, 32 n.47 balls  32, 62, 79, 80, 81, 89, 90 , 92, 108, 162, 168 Barclay, Hary  104, 116-7, 118 Barclay, James  68 Bath  41, 141, 142, 151-2, 153, 156, 159, 164, 165, 170, 179 Belgium  92, 110, 163-4, 171, 180 Belgravia  148 Belhaven, Lord  90, 91 Bible, The  28, 52, 57-8, 60, 135 Birmingham  156 birth order  21, 44

205

index

Blair Castle  16, 157, 158, 180 Blair, Hugh  137 Bland, Humphrey  123, 133 Bluestockings  85 see also Montagu, Elizabeth Bloomsbury  36 boarding schools  see under schools Bonhill  139 books access to  77, 167 borrowing   53-4, 59 cost of  52 foreign language  60, 65 n.87 ownership of  52-3 see also libraries, reading, songbooks booksellers  53-4, 61-2 Borders, The  15, 85, 107 Boswell, Alexander, Lord Auchinleck  87 Boswell, Elizabeth  60, 87 Boswell, James  102, 143, 146 Boufflers, Comtesse de  10 bowling  153 breast-feeding  20 Bristol  152 Britishness  43-4, 63, 66-7, 99, 162 see also patriotism Bruce, Lady Katherine  53 Brunstane  44, 120, 141, 157, 175 Brussells  110 Buchan, Agnes  see Erskine, Agnes Buchanan, James, British Grammar  30 Bushe, Letitia  106, 110 business female  28, 34, 97, 114 male  19, 84, 113, 118 Bute, Earl of  115, 148, 149 Bute, Lady  115, 150 Calderwood, Margaret  166, 180-1 and literary culture  66-7, 76, and politics  110, 124-5, 131 English travels  99,151, 161, 162 Continental travels  45 n.32, 92, 160-4, 171 Calderwood, Thomas  124, 160-1, 180 Caledonian Mercury  61 Calvin, John  69

Campbell, Archibald see Argyll 3rd Duke of Campbell, Capt. James, of Ardkinglass  127-8 Campbell, Jean (of Carrick)  56 Campbell, General John  129 Campbell, Mary (of Boquhan)  127-8 Canongate  141, 158, 175 cards  127, 150, 152 Carlyle, Alexander  41-2, 62n.61, 85, 100, 101 n.98, 105, 119, 120, 121, 137, 169 Cassills, Earl of  96 catechism  28 Catholicism  40 n.99, 163-4 Chaises  see transport Chambers, Elizabeth  145 chaperonage  92-3 Chapone, Hester  58 charity  62, 96-7 Charlotte, Queen of Great Britain  54, 147 Chelsea  39, 43, 176 childbirth  19, 20, 22, 127, 135, 142 see also under daughters, sons childhood see under education, girls and young women china  83, 84-5 church attendance at  134, 135-7, 140 n.7 confirmation in (episcopal)  136 patronage  136 as social space  137 see also Catholicism, Church of England, Church of Scotland, piety, sermons Church of England  136-7, 163 of Scotland  115, 118, 136-7 and polite social activities  7, 99-101 see also church, piety Cibber, Susannah  102 clanship  133 Clarkson, Thomas  86 classical learning  44-7, 68, 139, 147, 155, 169, 173 and women  45-7, 49, 169 clergy  7, 87, 99-101, 132, 136, 137 see also Blair, Hugh; Carlyle, Alexander;

206

index

Home, John; Robertson, William Clerk of Penicuik family  15, 63, 141, 169 Clerk, Barbara (daughter of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik)  152 Clerk, Elizabeth (daughter of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik)  152 Clerk, George of Dumcrieff (son of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik)  139 Clerk, Sir John of Penicuik (2nd bt.,)  52, 64-5, 68, 101, 124, 153, 173-4 Clerk, Sir John of Eldin (son of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik)  153, 173 Clerk, Johanna (daughter of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik)  57, 64-5, 67, 68, 174 Clerk, Janet (wife of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik)  20, 23, 58, 100-1, 127, 136, 139, 140, 173-4 spiritual diary of  23, 58, 60, 100-1, 139 Cliveden House  156 clothing see dress clubs and societies  9 Clydesdale, Marquis of  74-5 coaches see under transport Cockburn, Alison (née Rutherford)  27-8, 32 n.45, 36, 64, Cologne  159 common sense  29, 86, 104-5, 106, 107, 117, 152, 162 company  22, 149, 150, 152, 162 female, ideas about  7, 9-10 young women’s introduction to  33-44 ‘good’  32, 42, 43, 149-50, 154, 162, 165, 167, 169 improper  92 n.65 of family  22-3 lack of  22, 55, 62, 87-8, 142-3, 161-2 see also conversation, sociability, visits concerts  4, 8, 79, 80, 81, 92, 97-8, 99, 168 conduct literature  61, 114 consumption, practices of  35, 43, 44, 83 see also food and drink conversation and politeness  4, 7, 29, 32, 68, 80,

83-4, 103, 108, 167, 168 female-only  56 male-only  86 limitations of women’s participation in  85-7, 169 topics of  29, 61, 62, 68, 82, 84-5, 86, 122-3, 137 see also gossip, sociability, visits correspondence see letters, letter-writing country, the  34, 37, 55, 59, 81, 82, 87-8, 93, 94, 142-3, 170 country houses  22, 53, 57, 62, 79-80, 134, 139, 149, and tourism  156-8, 170 courts (royal)  80, 103, 147 Jacobite, see under Jacobites courts (legal)  15, 81, 88, 114, 171, 175, 176 Crawfurd, Earl of  93, 137, 180 cribbage  150 Cumberland, Duke of  121, 146 Curzon, Lady Caroline (née Colyear)  43, 149 Curzon, Sir Nathaniel  149 Dalkeith  100, 176 Dalrymple, David, Lord Hailes  73 Dalrymple, Sir Hew of North Berwick  19, 126 dancing  89, 90, 92, 95, 153 as education  30, 32, 33, 34, 36, 167 country dances  89, 90 minuets  89, 90, 95 see also assemblies, balls daughters birth of  20-1 see also education, girls and young women, motherhood Davila, Enrico  55 death  19, 20, 55, 73, 131 and childbirth  22, 135 Demainbray, Stephen   24, 29, 34 Derby  159 Devonshire, Duchess of  123 devotional and religious literature  58, 60-1, 69, 77, 135 see also Bible, the, piety, sermons diaries see journals and diaries

207

index

domestic furnishings domestic skills and housekeeping  1, 18, 22, 27, 33, 48, 56, 82, 88, 94, 113, 114, 146, 147, 156, 157-8 domesticity, celebration of  9, 56, 172, 113 Don Quixote by Cervantes  65 drawing  30, 40 dress  1, 33, 34, 36, 42, 43, 54, 80, 85, 87, 89, 90, 96, 98, 121, 133, 147 Dublin  91 Dundas, Lawrence  126 Dundee  81 n.12 Dundonald, Countess of  36 Dunkeld  16, 22, 83, 157, 180 Edinburgh  43, 44, 61, 66, 132, 133, 140, 141, 153, 154, 155, 157, 159, 174, 175, 177, 178, 179 as polite social centre  6, 17, 81, 137, 143, 170 as university town  47 assembly rooms see under assemblies Bishop of  136 education in  24, 29, 31, 32, 33, 40, 167 Meadows, The  1 New Town  6, 108 Old Town, living conditions in  1, 6, population of  17 social life in  1, 3, 6, 10, 38, 84, 85, 87, 89-94, 95-8, 99-101, 102, 108, 142, 165 women and politics in  122-3, 128, 129-131, 132 see also Canongate, Holyrood Edinburgh Evening Courant  61 Edinburgh Musical Society  31 n.40, 97-8 education eighteenth-century definition of  26 of girls costs of  31, 32, 38, 40 for motherhood  28 for benefit of men  30 formalisation of  32, 33 and life-role socialisation  21, 24-6, 33-4, 41-4, 89, 141, 167, 170 religious  27, 28

role of family members in  27, 37, 59 subjects taught  27-34, 40 of boys  38, 40 n.99, 42, 44-5, 81, 101 n.98, 105, 133-4, 139, 143, 159 see also classical learning, reading, girls and young women Eglinton, Alexander Montgomerie, 10th Earl of  123, 143, 145 Eglinton, Susannah Montgomerie, Countess of  40, 178 elections  112, 122, 123-8, 168-9 see also under political, politics Elgin  88 Elibank, Patrick, Lord  102 Elizabeth, Queen of England  71-2 Elliot family of Minto  16, 17, 42, 63, 85, 121, 169, 171 Elliot, Agnes, née Dalrymple Murray Kynynmound  74, 137, 174-5 and husband’s career  76, 121-2, 124 and London  38, 149-50 character and use of language  86, 106, 107 reading  58, 65 n. 87, 66, 68, 70, 86 social activities  92, 95 Elliot, Sir Gilbert of Minto, (2nd bt., Lord Minto)  15, 114, 174, 175 Proposals for carrying on certain Public Works  6 Elliot, Eleanor (later Rutherford; sister of Gilbert Elliot, 3rd bt.)  113, 114-5 Elliot, Sir Gilbert of Minto (3rd bt.)  174, 175 and family  47 n.140, 58, 66, 68, 86, 92, 95, 113, 114, 121-2 and public life  15, 52, 38, 118, 121-2 on London society  149-50 Elliot, Sir Gilbert of Minto (4th bt., later Earl of Minto)  47 n.140, 174 Elliot, Jean (sister of Gilbert Elliot, 3rd bt.)  103, 175 Elliot, Isabella (daughter of Gilbert Elliot, 3rd. bt.)  38, 47 n.140, 174 Elliot, Helen (Lady Minto; mother of Gilbert Elliot, 3rd bt.)  114, 175 as lady directress  95, 96 on children  22 on grandchildren  38, 41

208

index

on newspapers  61-2 Elliot, Marion  103 elocution  32, 41-2, 103-4, 137 see also English language, Scots language elopement  92, 93-4 empire  17, see also Americas, India England  76, 80-1, 84 n.24, 85, 95 n.81, 97, 99, 103, 104, 123, 133-4, 144, 156, 159, 162, 163, 166, 168 see also London the English  71-2, 126 English language and accent  38, 41-2, 72, 98-9, 102-5, see also elocution Enlightenment  11, 77, 102 and debate on femininity  11-12, 172 Scottish  8-9, 11, 16, 71, 77, 168, 169-70, 171 literati  15, 16, 85, 171 see also Ferguson, Adam; Home, Henry; Home, John; Hume, David; Robertson, William; Smith, Adam; Wilkie, William episcopalianism  136-7 see also Church of England Eriskay  128 Erskine, Agnes (née Steuart), Lady Buchan  48, 122-3 estate management  1, 18, 22, 59, 114, 133-4, 142, 143-4, 156, 158, 170, 181 see also domestic skills and housekeeping Essex  99 Eton College  93 n.71, 134 exercise  55 exile  7, 132, 160, 162 eyesight, problems with  57 family see education, fathers, girls and young women, motherhood, politics, wives fashion  32, 43, 56, 97, 147, 148, 150 see also dress, furnishings fathers, interest in children  19-20, 21, 29, 34, 55, 89, 119 see also under Monro, Alexander Fénelon, François de   61 Telemachus  65-6 Ferguson, Adam  16, 53, 85, 118, 119

Fern, Mrs  144 Fielding, Henry  65, 66, 76, Fiennes, Celia  157 Fife  33, 47, 66, 102, 178 Findlater, Earl and Countess of  88 Fletcher family of Saltoun  15, 16, 52-3, 63, 85, 87, 91, 115, 118-121, 130, 141, 147, 169, 170, 172 Fletcher, Sir Andrew of Saltoun (the patriot)  52, 177 Fletcher, Sir Andrew of Saltoun (Lord Milton)  1, 52, 104, 120, 160, 175, 176, 177, 179 and family  38, 39, 53, 54, 88, 94, 116-7, 118-9, 125, 145, 157, 158 and public life  15, 54, 59n.46, 69, 73, 88, 115, 116-7, 118-9, 125, 129-30, 166, 171, Fletcher, Sir Andrew of Saltoun (son of Lord Milton)  42, 53, 56-7, 90, 105, 115 n.29, 125-6, 168-9, 175 poems of  56, 74, 90, 94-5, 98, 105 Fletcher, David (merchant in Bengal)  115 Fletcher, Elizabeth (later Wedderburn; daughter of Lord Milton)  1, 2, 74-5, 91, 105, 145, 166, 168, 176 education   28, 31, 38-41, 42-43, 47, 167 character and attributes  41, 42, 47 friendship with literati  85, 100, 119, 120-1, 169 and politics  123 reading habits  56, 58 death   22, 47, 55 Fletcher, Elizabeth (née Kinloch; Lady Milton)  38, 39, 54, 82, 93, 123, 158, 160, 175, 176, 177, 178 as hostess at Inveraray castle  82, 119-21, 146 as lady directress  96, 168 and public influence  116-118, 169 personality  105-6, 107, 116-7, 119, 121 spoken language  104-6, 117 Fletcher, Francis of Saltoun (son of Lord Milton)  118 Fletcher, Sir Henry of Saltoun (father of Lord Milton)  59, 177

209

index

Fletcher, Henry of Saltoun (son of Lord Milton)  126, 175 Fletcher, Margaret (later Grant; daughter of Lord Milton)  82, 87-8, 120, 142, 176 Fletcher, Margaret (née Carnegie; mother of Lord Milton)  53, 177 Fletcher, Martha (sister of Lord Milton)  53, 69, 177, 178 reading and note-taking  46 n.140, 59, 60, 69, 70, 166 Fletcher, Mary (daughter of Lord Milton)  53, 103, 129, 177 and political introductions  115-6, 120-1, 169 sociability  82, 83, 90, 94, travel and tourism  144, 145, 157 Forbes, Duncan  55, 129 food and drink  20, 62, 88, 101, 117, 158 see also tea Fordyce of Aytoun, Thomas  20, 53, Fordyce, David  84 Forglen, Lady  see Ogilvy, Mary Forrester, James  83-4 France 40 n.99, 69, 84 n.24, 85, 162, 180 French dancing masters  32 language  30, 31-2, 34, 36, 38, 47 n.140, 107, 150, 167 books  60, 65 n.87 manners  102, 106, 162 Revolution  17 friendship  35, 36, 43, 56-7, 58, 85, 118-9, 120, 138, 155, 167-8 funerals  80 furnishings, domestic  80, 141 n.10, 157-8 gambling  152 Garrick, David  71 Gastaldi, signor  119 Gentleman’s Magazine  61 gentry comparison with aristocracy  16-17, 88 geography, study of  29-30, 40, Germany  159, 180 Gil Blas by Alain-René Lesage  54, 65

Gilmerton  85 girls and young women culture of  91-2, 108, 168 parents’ concern for  36, 39-40, 44, 81, 92 sociability  33, 34-6, 42-3, 48-9, 82-3, 88-94 see also education, infancy, reading, towns Glasgow  17, 47, 61, 81, 153 Goldsmith, Oliver  90, 91 Gordon, Lady Charlotte  89 Gordon, Henrietta, Duchess of  134 n.140 Gordon, Lady Katherine  82-3, 87, 104 gossip  18, 34, 74-5, 84-5, 91, 92, 105, 107, 150, 153, 166, 168 grammar  28-9 Grand Tour  44, 139, 160 see also Adam, Robert Grant of Easter Elchies, John  87-8, 142, 176 Gregory, John  9, 85, 86 Father’s Legacy to his Daughters  9, 136-7 Gunning sisters  54 Haddington  53 n.17, 125, 127, 177 hairdressing  34, 42, 90 Halkett, Lady Amelia  157 Halkett, Elizabeth (née Wedderburn; daughter of Elizabeth Fletcher)  88, 176 ‘Memoir of the Fletchers of Saltoun’  76, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121 Hamilton, Anne, Duchess of  60, 80 Hamilton, Duke of  75 Hamilton, Henrietta (née McGill), Lady Orbistoun   91, 96 Hamilton, William of Bangour  91 Hammersmith  39 Handel, George Frideric  97-8 Hanoverians  see Whigs harpsichords  40 see also keyboard instruments Harrogate  61-2 Hay, Lord Charles  149 Hepburn, Margaret  54, 74-5, 83, 85,

210

index

100, 102, 169, 178 learning Latin  45-7 reading and books  55, 56, 57, 58, 167-8 and William Robertson’s History of Scotland  70-3, 77-8, 87, 169 death of  47, 73 Hepburn, Mary (née Fletcher)  125-6, 127, 166, 168, 177, 178 heterosociability  see under sociability Highlands, the  33, 142-3, 144, 145, 146 Hill, John, Thoughts concerning God and Nature  55 history reading and study of  29-30, 50, 55, 59, 67-73, 77-8, 87, 166 modes of writing  9, 67-9, 72-3 Hogarth, William  54 Holdernesse, Earl of  133 Holland  see Netherlands Holyrood  80, 130 Home, Francis  22 Home, Henry, Lord Kames  85, 104 n.132, 118 Home, John  85, 99-101, 104, friendship with Fletcher women  85, 100, 118, 119, 120, 169, 176 Agis  102 Douglas  99-101, 108, 118-9 homosociability  see under sociability Hope, Lady Elizabeth  28 n.24, 29 n.32, 40 Hopetoun, Earl and Countess of  88 horses  see transport housekeeping  see domestic skills and housekeeping Hume, David  16, 40 n.99, 52, 67-8, 73, 179 friendship with Agnes Elliot  68, 85, 86 friendship with Elizabeth Fletcher  118-9, 176 Essays  10, 67, 80, 83-4, 101 History of England  68-9, 70 on female company  10-11 Hutton, James  85 illness  20, 21, 22, 37, 131, 151, 161

impolite characteristics  5, 6, 61, 87, 90, 102, 104-107, 128, 129, 136, 153-4 improvement  5-6 social  4, 7, 37, 38, 61, 77, 103-4, 108, 150, 164, 168, 171-2 economic  5, 6, 15, 16, 72, 155-6, 163, 170, 171, 172 see also under tourism India  115, 174 industry  6, 96, 115, 163 linen  96 tourist interest in  156, 159 infancy  21 Innes, George of Stow  20, 21, 53, 57 Innes, Jean (daughter of George Innes)  28, 33, 45, 57, 61, 65-6, 178 Innes, Marion (née Lauder; wife of George Innes)  20, 33, 48, 54, 98, 137, 178 intellectual interests  47-8, 49, 57, 85, 86-7, 169 interest  see under political introductions, power to make  105, 118-9, 120-1, 169 Inveraray  82, 119-21, 146, 160, 175 invitations  18, 43 Ireland  103, 106, 110 isolation, social  see company, lack of Italian language  40, 107, airs  31, 159 Italy  19, 75, 86, 120, 146-7, 154, 159, 160, 162, 173, 179 Jacobites  5, 16, 63, 72, 110, 124 Rising of 1715  7, 43 Rising of 1745-6  16, 55, 71, 119n.48, 128-134, 138, 157, 160, 162 female support for  122-3, 128-31, 132-4, 138 Johnson, Samuel, Dictionary  26, 101 journals and diaries  23, 58, 34, 60, 100-1, 136, 139, 140, 161, 162-4, 166 Kames, Lord see Home, Henry, Lord Kames Kedleston House  149

211

index

keyboard instruments  31, 40 Kincaid, William  53, King, William  45-7 Kinloch, Alexander  125-6 Kinloch, Harriet  85, Kirk  see Church of Scotland landscape see under tourism language  38, 41-2, 48, 72, 86, 89, 91, 98-9, 102-7, 117 as reflected in correspondence  19 fashionable  35 gendered  106 impolite  104-8, 121, and social setting  105-8 see also classical learning, elocution, French language, Italian language Latin  see classical learning lectures, public  48, 103 Leeds, Juliana Colyear, Duchess of  43 letters  2, 17-19, 31-2, 34, 58, 86-7, 107, 116, 124, 150, 166, 168, 171 readership and privacy   18, 19, 76 as objects of emotional attachment  19, 73 from one man to another  19 letter-writing  17-18, 73-4, 167-8 as part of education  24-5, 28-9, 34-5 as written sociability  74-5, 150 see also travel-writing, writing libraries  53-4 circulating  53 family  52-3 Library of the Faculty of Advocates  54 life-course  20-3 and social role  82-3, 88-97, 108, 168 and place  141-4 see also education, infancy, girls and young women, old age, and see under sociability, reading Lindsay, Margaret  86, 162 linen industry  96, 115, 163 Linlithgow  126 literacy  see reading, writing Loch Lomond  139 London  54, 132, 136, 160, 161, 173, 174, 176, 179, 180

as centre of politeness  7, 98, 102, 146-7, 148, 152, 164, 165, 170 as morally corrupted  39, 102, 150, 151 as ‘other’  102, 150-1, 165 as pan-British  43 as political and administrative centre  38, 121, 122, 123, codes of sociability  145, 149-50 manners  38, 44, 102 schooling and girls in  31, 36-44, 47, 49, 142, 167 Scots community in  17, 149 social life in  93, 97, 147, 149-50 travel to  141 social preparation for  32, 42, 75, 149-50 men travelling alone  143, 144 London Gazette  63 Macdonald, Sir Alexander of Sleat (8th bt.)  142-3, 145, 179 Macdonald, Sir Alexander of Sleat (10th bt.; son of 8th bt.)  23, 179 Macdonald, Flora, 132 Macdonald, Sir James of Sleat (9th bt.; son of 8th bt.)  23, 133-4, 179 Macdonald, Lady Margaret (née Montgomerie; wife of 8th bt.)  21, 145, 178-9 education  40, 41, 142 in Skye  132-4, 142-4, 145 and 1745-6 Jacobite rising  132-4 and sons  23, 133-4 Mackenzie, John, of Delvine  63-4, 142, 145 MacLaurin, Colin  48, magazines  see periodicals manners and national character  101-2 and social context  96, 105-7 and wider improvement  6, 94, 103-5, 164, 171-2 as conversation topic  85 awkward  7, 79, 163-4 English  38, 66, 98, 102 polite  1, 4, 7, 8, 34, 48, 108, 147 Scots  102, 106-7

212

index

see also impolite characteristics maps  159 marriage  21-2, 41, 44, 47, 66, 82-3, 87, 89, 94-5, 142, 151 parental influence in choice of partner  21-2, 89-90 see also elopement, marriage market, wives marriage market  41, 90 Mary, Queen of Scots  68, 71-3 masquerades  43, 97 masters  see teachers Mavisbank House  139, 140, 174 Maxwell of Pollock family  27n17 Maxwell, Annabelle (of Pollock)  33 Maxwell, Beatrix (of Pollock)  33, 48, 54, 137 Maxwell, Marion (of Pollock)  98 memoirs  2, 76, 122, 124, 162 see also under Halkett, Elizabeth; Steuart Denham, Frances merchants  74 middle ranks  30, 36, 96, 11, 140 military men  1, 123, 133, 159 militia, debates on  99 milk fever  22 Millar, Andrew  61-2 Milton, Lady  see Fletcher, Elizabeth née Kinloch Milton, Lord  see Fletcher, Andrew of Saltoun, Lord Milton Minto  85, 86, 106, 137, 174 Minto, Lord  see Elliot, Gilbert (2nd bt.) mobility seasonal  139, 140-1 and life-course  141-4 limitations on  142-3, 144-5 see also tourism, transport mobility, social  31, 43, 108, 121, 153-5 Moffat  139, 144, 153-5, 159 Monkrig  126 Monro, Alexander (Primus)  22 ‘Essay on Female Conduct’  27, 33, 46, 54, 55, 57, 65, 66, 84, 85, 169 Montagu, Elizabeth  41, 85, 143 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley  46, 76, 168 n.103 Morris, Corbyn  119-20 motherhood  20, 22, 45, 167

company of daughters  22 duties of  30, 37, 89 education of daughters  27, 37 relationship with children  22-3 Mure, Elizabeth ‘Some Remarks on the Change of Manners’  28, 33, 50, 53, 60, 80, 85, 87, 104 Mure of Caldwell, Katherine  67-8, 70 Mure of Caldwell, William  67-8 Murray family, Dukes of Atholl  16, 63, 169 Murray, Amelia (Lady George Murray), 55, 57, 82, 92, 131-2, 159, 160, 179 and children’s education  24, 37, 61 Murray, Amelie (later Sinclair, then Farquharson; daughter of Lord George Murray)  2, 55, 61, 85, 118, 131-2, 166, 179 education and youth of  24, 28-9, 34-5, 89, 166, 168, 170 on children  22, 41, 87 travels of  152, 156, 159, 160 Murray, Lady Charlotte (Duchess of Atholl & Baroness Strange; daughter of 2nd Duke of Atholl and wife of 3rd Duke)  2, 42, 43, 66, 180 childhood  37-8, 39, 147, 148, 151 and education of daughters  36 in London  37, 54, 146-8 Murray, Lady Charlotte (daughter of 3rd Duke of Atholl)  36 Murray, Charlotte (daughter of Lord George Murray)  37, 61, 179 Murray, Lady George  see Murray, Amelia Murray, Lord George  2, 37, 122, 166, 179 and daughter Amelie  29, 34, 55, 89 and 1745-6 Jacobite rising  16, 55, 131-2, 160 Murray, Lady Jane (later Countess of Crawfurd; daughter of 2nd Duke of Atholl)  2, 105, 131, 170, 180 education and childhood  22, 29, 37-8, 42, 43, 39, 151 elopement  21-2, 93-4, 137 Murray, James, 2nd Duke of Atholl  16, 29, 36, 93, 131, 157, 179, 180

213

index

Murray, Lady Jane, Duchess of Atholl (née Frederick; 1st wife of 2nd Duke)  22, 29, 37-8, 39, 93, 147, 151, 180 Murray, Lady Jean, Duchess of Atholl (née Drummond; 2nd wife of 2nd Duke)  70 Murray, John, 3rd Duke of Atholl  36n75, 37, 66, 118, 148, 179, 180 music as education  30-1, 167 see also concerts, keyboard instruments, operas, oratorios, singing, songbooks, songs needlework  27, 34, 57, 92 Netherlands, The  76, 159, 160-1, 163, 171, 179, 180 networks, social  33, 35, 39-40, 43-4, 82, 89, 114-6, 118, 120-1, 126-7, 138, 149, 169 Newhailes House  174 news  61-3, 84, 127, newspapers  52, 61-3, 84, 114 see also periodicals Newton, Thomas, Dissertations on the Prophesies  55 note-taking  58-9, 60, 69, 166 novels  55, 63-7, 76, 77 novelty attractions  98, 147 numeracy  27, 28, see also accounting Ogilvy, Mary, Lady Forglen  105 old age  22, 62, opera  43, 97, 147 oratorios  97-8 Orbistoun, Lady  see Hamilton, Henrietta Orkney, 1st Earl of  156 Oxford  45, 47, 159 University  134 pamphlets  54, 100 Panmure, Margaret Maule (née Hamilton), Countess of  3, 6-7, 91,

95, 96, 105, 168, 172 Pasquali, Niccolo  31 patriotism  7-8, 72, 96, 100, 111, 162, 163, 170, 172 patronage  114, 115-6, 138 pedagogical debate  25, 44 Pelham, Henry  119 Penicuik House  136, 139, 140, 174 Pennant, Thomas  158 periodicals  61, 64, 70, 167 see also Edinburgh Evening Courant, Gentleman’s Magazine, newspapers, Scots Magazine, Spectator petitioning  115-6, 118, 162 n.122 pets  62, 102 philosophy  47, 48, 55, 68, 103 picturesque  139-40, 158 piety  107, 134-6, 138 see also churchgoing, devotional and religious reading Pitt, Lady Hester  150 plays  1, 43, 55, 93, 99-101, 147, 152, 168, see also theatre Pliny the Younger  68 poetry and doggerel  55, 56, 74-5, 90, 92, 94-5, 98, 105, 113 Poker Club  9 politeness, introduction to idea of  3-4, 5 political campaigning  110, 123-8 code  122 influence  115-8, 124-8, 138 interest  122, 124-7, 169 skills  106 politics and polite social activities  122-3, 126-8, 138, 168, 169 as conversation topic  61 female interest in  69-70, 71-2, 77, 121-30, 131-4 and family responsibility,   112, 113-4, 125-6, 138, 169 and locality  125-7, 138 prescriptions on female involvement in  113-4 see also elections, introductions, Jacobites, patronage, petitioning, political Pope, Alexander  50, 58 Portmore, Charles Colyear, 2nd Earl

214

index

of  41, 43 portraits  54, 106, 173, 174, 179, 180 posture  1, 32 pregnancy  22, 131, 143, 147 Presbyterianism  135, 136-7, 174 see also Church of Scotland Pretender, Young  see Stuart, Charles Edward Pringle, Magdalen  130 prints  54 promenades  1, 89, 168 pronunciation and dialect  41-2 public contemporary understanding of  110-1, 124-5 creation of sense of  62-3, 69-70, 97-8, 99, 100, 108, 138, 165, 169, 170 public sociability see under sociability Queensberry, Catherine Douglas, Duchess of  58 n.42, 152 Queensberry, Charles Douglas, 3rd Duke of  58 n.42, 153 races  95 radicalism  17 Ramsay, Allan (poet)  53, 105, 174 The Fair Assembly  7 Ramsay, Allan (portraitist)  86, 106, 162, 173, 174, 180 Ramsay, John of Ochtertyre  8, 69-70, 80, 98 reading and children and young women  55, 57-8, 61, 64, 65-6 and conversation  29, 57-8, 68, 86 and gender  56-7 and politeness  51, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64-5, 66, 70, 77, 167 as social activity  56-8, 62, 77, 167-8 as substitute for company  55, 62 learning to read  27-8 reading practices intensive vs. extensive  52, 60 reading aloud  18, 32, 46, 57-8 see also devotional & religious reading, history, newspapers, note-taking, novels religion  28, 48, 85, 99-101, 103, 107, 134-8, 163-4 see also church, devotional

and religious literature, religious instruction, piety religious instruction  28, 48 reputation  84-5, 92, 93, 94 revolution of 1689  69 American  17 French  17 Richardson, Samuel  18, 65, 66, 76 Pamela  66 Sir Charles Grandison  58, 64, 66 ridottos  147 Robertson, William  9, 16, 68, 69, 77, 118, 137 and Adam family  149, 173 friendship with Margaret Hepburn  55, 70-3, 87, 100, 102, 169, 178 History of Scotland  68, 70-3, 77-8, 169 History of America  9 romances  see novels Rome  75, 120, 146-7, 162, 173, 179 Rose, Elizabeth (of Kilravock)  60, 61n.60 Roseneath  118 n.48, 146 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  25 Nouvelle Heloïse  66 St Andrews  47 Saltoun House  141 scandal see gossip schools  34, 36, 41 boarding schools  31, 36-7, 39, 40, 167 Scots language  86, 102, 104-7, 117 see also scotticisms Scots Magazine  36, 53, 61, 70 Scott, Lucy (of Thirdpart)  157-8 scotticisms  103 see also Scots language Scottish Enlightenment see under Enlightenment Select Society  9 sensibility  9, 68, 73, 100 sermons  52, 136, 137 servants  19, 22, 35-6, 83, 127, 128, 143, 148 Sevigné, Madame de  18, Sewing  see needlework Sheridan, Thomas  103

215

index

singing  30, 82, 122, 167 see also operas, oratorios, songbooks, songs Skye  23, 132-4, 142, 143, 179 small-pox  21, 24 Smith, Adam  52, 85, 118, 179 Smollett, James  65 Smollett, Tobias  64-5 History of England  70 Peregrine Pickle  64-5, 67 sociability domestic  79-80, 82-8, 95, 149 public ideology behind  1, 164, 168 young married women and  95 and agency  96-7, 108 and improvement  4, 79, 80, 81, 83-5, 168, 172 mixed-gender  7, 10, 79, 80, 82, 83-88, 100, 105, 108, 166, 168 male homosocial  88, 167, 168 and mobility  139, 170 see also assemblies, balls, company, concerts, conversation, girls and young women, tea, theatre societies  see clubs and societies Somerville, Lord James  37-8, 42-3, 44 Somerville, Lady Frances  37-8, 44, 137 Somerville, Mary  52 Somerville, Thomas  30 songbooks  54 songs  31, 82, 130, 159 see also singing sons birth of  20-1 parental concerns about  44 and politicisation of mothers  133-4 see also under education spa resorts  151-5 see also Bath, Bristol, Harrogate, Moffat Spectator, The  10, 51, 113n.18 Speculative Society   9 Spens, Harry  45, 57, 178 Speyside  87-8, 142 spinets  31, 40 spinsters  21, 70, 94 Steele, Richard, see Spectator, The Sterne, Laurence   104 Steuart Denham, Lady Frances (née Wemyss)  76, 115, 122, 180 and husband’s writings  76

travels overseas  32 n.45, 162, 163, Steuart Denham, Sir James  76, 162, 180 Stewart, Charles  82, 129, 146 Stuart, Charles Edward  128, 129, 130-1, 132, 179, see also Jacobite rising, 1745-6 Swalbach  159 Swift, Jonathan  50 taste  1, 30, 43, 51, 80, 85, 97, 100, 120, 136-7, 147, 158 Taymouth castle  158 tea drinking  79, 82, 83, 95, 102, 127 tables  4, 16, 8, 83-5, 123, 168 teachers  24, 31, 32, 33-4, 38, 40, 178 temperament  37 theatre  1, 4, 8, 89, 96, 97, 98-101, 152 see also plays tourism domestic  155-9, 170-1 Continental  110, 155, 158-164, 166, 170-1 and industry  156, 159 and improvement  155-6, 163 and landscape  139-40, 161, 162, 170 and religion  163-4 see also Grand Tour, spa resorts, travelwriting, and see under country house townhouses  23, 94-5, 118, 141, 143, 144, 148, 158 towns in girls’ education  33, 34-6, 38-44, 48-49, 167, 170 and polite sociability  1, 4, 80-1, 88-101, 108, 164, 170 and young women  88, 90-94 and widows  143 small  80-1 urban government  111, 115 see also Edinburgh, London, townhouses, spa resorts toys  21, 92, trade  116, 163 tradespeople  18 transport chaises  145

216

index

coaches  24, 94, 119, 143, 145, 148 horseback  144-5 sedan chairs  142 stagecoaches  147n.45 walking  145 see also promenades improvements in  155 travel  see under exile, mobility, tourism, transport, travel-writing Travels of Cyrus by Andrew Michael Ramsay  65 travel-writing  140, 160-1, 162-4 Tullibardine House  131 Tweeddale, Marchioness of  54 Tweeddale, Marquis of  136 Uist  23, 133, 142, 143 Union, 1707 Treaty of  5, 111, 173 impact of  38, 42, 43, 71, 136 n.152, 171 universities  9, 104, 115, 134 and impact on women  47-8, 169-70 urban society  see towns Utrecht  159 Vauxhall gardens  151 Violante, Madame  98 violin  40 visits  35, 42-3, 79, 82-88, 118, 126-8, 143, 145, 154, 155, 167 and politics  126-8

see also company, invitations Wales  43, 103, 134 n.141 walks  see promenades Wallace, Eleanor  46 war  63, 116 Seven Years War  100-1, 114, 148, 155 Walpole, Horace  71 Warburton, William  58, 71 weaning  20 Whigs  15, 16, 72, 128, 129-31, 132-3, 149, 169 widows  22-3, 106, 143 Wilkie, William  118 Winchester College  42 wives role and duties of  30, 45, 47 n.142, 83, 88, 95, 113, 117-8, 122, 123-4, 126, 142-3 English  126 writing  73-7 as educational activity  28-9, 40 for a wider readership  75-7, 160 see also poetry and doggerel, travel writing, letter-writing Young, Edward  55 Young, Thomas  22

217

spine: 21mm E 17 May 2011

at the University of Edinburgh, where she held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. Cover: Jeremiah Davison, ‘James Douglas, 14th Earl of Morton, and his Family’, 1740 (detail). © Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

St Andrews Studies in Scottish History

BOYDELL & BREWER LTD PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 www.boydellandbrewer.com

Elite Women and Polite Society

Elite Women and Polite Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

KATHARINE GLOVER has taught history at the University of St Andrews and

Glover

Fashionable eighteenth-century Scottish polite society emphasised mixedgender sociability and encouraged the visible participation of elite women in a series of urban, often public, settings. Using a variety of sources (men’s and women’s correspondence, accounts, bills, memoirs and other family papers), this book investigates the ways in which polite social practices and expectations influenced the Scottish experience of elite femininity. The book explores women’s education and upbringing, their reading practices, the meanings of the social spaces and activities in which they engaged and how they related to politics, and the fashion for tourism at home and abroad. It explores the ways in which elite women used polite social spaces and practices to extend their mental horizons and to form a sense of belonging to a public at a time when Scotland was among the most intellectually vibrant societies in Europe.

Final adjs to rh edge when spine width decided

in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

Katharine Glover