Imagining women readers, 1789–1820: Well-regulated minds 9781526102133

Citation preview

WOMEN READERS,

1789–1820

Well-regulated minds

RICHARD DE RITTER

IMAGINING

Imagining women readers, 1789–1820

Imagining women readers, 1789–1820 Well-regulated minds

Richard De Ritter

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Richard De Ritter 2014 The right of Richard De Ritter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN

978 0 7190 9033 2

hardback

First published 2014 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any 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.

Typeset by Action Publishing Technology Ltd, Gloucester

Contents

Acknowledgements

page vii

Introduction 1 ‘Like a sheet of white paper’: books, bodies and the sensuous materials of the mind 2 ‘Wholesome labour’: the work of reading 3 ‘The enlightened energy of parental affection’: post-revolutionary schemes of education 4 ‘Leisure to be wise’: female education and the possibilities of domesticity 5 Making the novel-readers of a country: pleasure and the practised reader

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168

Bibliography Index

207 227

17 55 90 130

Acknowledgements

This book began its existence some time ago, in the School of English at the University of Leeds. As a postgraduate student, I was extremely fortunate to have two wonderfully supportive and inspiring supervisors: Vivien Jones and John Whale. I continue to benefit from their support: without it, I would never have commenced (let alone completed) this project. I am sincerely grateful to them both. I would also like to acknowledge the advice, encouragement and friendship I have received from many others. I would particularly like to thank the following people: Irene Addison-Child, Clare Connolly, Mary Fairclough, Katie Halsey, David Higgins, Robert Jones, Kaley Kramer, Bonnie Latimer, Alys Mostyn, Rose Pimentel, Laurence Publicover, Jennifer Sarha, Cassie Ulph, Hannah Wragg and Yvonne Wragg. In varying proportions, they have read drafts of this book, inspired me to find new ways of thinking about its subject, and patiently offered their support in times of doubt. Whether they know it or not, they have all made writing this book a more rewarding and pleasant experience. I would also like to express my gratitude to the anonymous readers at Manchester University Press, whose invaluable input helped shape the contents of this book. My thoughts were similarly honed during the ‘Women Readers / Educational Texts 1500– 1800’ conference held in Liverpool in 2010. Thanks are due to the conference’s organisers Katie Halsey and Mark Towsey, and to Harriet Foster, who put me up for a memorable weekend in Liverpool. The person I would most like to read this book is no longer here; this book is dedicated to the memory of my mother.

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Acknowledgements

Parts of this book have appeared elsewhere, in varying forms. Material from Chapter 1 was expanded into an article published as ‘“In Their Newest Gloss”: William Hazlitt on Reading, Gender, and the Problems of Print Culture’, in The Hazlitt Review, 3 (2010), 25–37 (published by the Hazlitt Society). Sections of Chapter 2 were reconfigured into an article entitled ‘Reading “Voyages and Travels”: Jane West, Patriotism and the Reformation of Female Sensibility’, published in Romanticism, 17:2 (2011), 240–50 (published by Edinburgh University Press). Much of Chapter 4 appeared as ‘“Leisure to be Wise”: Edgeworthian Education and the Possibilities of Domesticity’, in the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 33:3 (2010), 313–33 (published by Wiley-Blackwell). In each case, I am grateful to the editors and publishers for their permission to reproduce relevant material, and to the readers at those journals whose comments helped refine this work.

Introduction: women and the act of reading

This book investigates the place of the female reader in British culture between 1789 and 1820. It suggests that debates about women’s reading in this period were shaped by a range of social and cultural pressures, which saw the act of reading conceptualised though discourses associated with the public, as well as the private, sphere. In this respect, this book is informed by the notion that ‘the history of reading is also a history of the culture in which it takes place’.1 Moreover, this book suggests that debates about reading provide a perspective on historical forms of femininity. The belief that reading is constitutive of identity was widespread in this period: as Nancy Armstrong notes in Desire and Domestic Fiction, the idea that ‘literacy offer[s] the most efficient means for shaping individuals’ was ‘the raison d’etre of conduct books’.2 Taken predominantly from conduct books, educational treatises and novels, the readers discussed in this book are, for the most part, textual constructions. But if these texts suggest that the act of reading is crucial to forming a cohesive and coherent image of womanhood, the readers they depict are inevitably shaped, and sometimes unsettled, by traces of the social and historical context in which they are formed. In her influential study The Woman Reader, 1837–1914, Kate Flint suggests that feminist criticism which looks ‘at the construction of the woman reader primarily as a textual phenomenon’ has had ‘the effect of de-historicizing the concepts of “woman” and of “reading” alike’.3 While I am alert to the dangers that Flint describes, this book suggests that focusing on the textual construction of readers draws attention to their historicity, by illuminating

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the way in which acts of reading are conceptualised in relation to the discursive debates that shaped the period’s cultural landscape. Rather than ‘de-historicizing’ women readers, the approach pursued in this book emphasises the social and cultural specificity of those constructions, and demonstrates how acts of reading can be implicated within ‘such momentous processes as long-term social mobility, political and religious revolutions, changing gender relations, growing class identities, and the formation of public cultures’.4 While this book draws upon an eighteenth-century genealogy of writing about reading, it also focuses on a period dictated by political and literary history. It commences in 1789, at the outbreak of the French Revolution, and concludes in 1820, by which time the novel – a genre that looms large in accounts of women’s reading – had begun ‘to make itself felt decisively as a significant cultural form’.5 Primarily, this book is concerned with how women readers were imagined in the period’s ‘strictures about reading women and women’s reading’.6 It recognises that these strictures come in various guises: from the explicitly didactic – in the form of conduct books, educational texts and essays – to the more subtle lessons imparted by the presence of ‘intradiegetic’ readers within fictional narratives.7 While it focuses on theoretical representations of the act of reading, this book also draws upon the practices described in letters and diaries. In this respect, the present book is indebted to recent investigations of ‘actual readers’ and their reading habits. Since the turn of the millennium, critics such as David Allan, Jan Fergus, Matthew Grenby and Katie Halsey have offered detailed accounts of the practices of specific constituencies of readers.8 While Robert Darnton reminds us that the task of establishing a poetics of reading ‘may seem impossible because we cannot look over the shoulders of eighteenth-century readers’, the work of these critics has contributed to our understanding of the complexity of exactly what and how people read in historically remote periods.9 As Jacqueline Pearson notes in her comprehensive study Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835, in many respects ‘real life’ reading practices were ‘richer and stranger’ than the prescriptions of moralists allowed.10 Nevertheless, those prescriptive accounts can tell us much about the anxieties generated by the conjunction of reading and femininity within this period. What we must guard against, however, is mistaking their fears and preju-

Introduction

3

dices for historical facts: a point that has particular relevance to accounts of women readers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.11 As recent critics have demonstrated, contrary to the assertions of previous literary historians, women of the middle ranks were by no means the dominant consumers of literature within this period. Jan Fergus argues that studies which propagate the idea that ‘women “dominated” the fiction-reading public’ are factually inaccurate, and are informed by ‘the accusations of eighteenth-century reviewers and moralists’ rather than empirical evidence.12 What Fergus draws attention to is the way in which the woman reader is not only a ‘historical reality’ but a ‘sign, with a bewildering range of significations’.13 The multivalence of this sign perhaps lies in the fact that the act of reading ‘[points] inwards and outwards, to the psychological and the socio-cultural’.14 The following section of this introduction – and this book as a whole – pursues that idea, tracing the connections posited between the mind of the individual reader and the society in which she lived. ‘Pernicious’ practices and ‘well chosen books’ Contemporary commentaries on women’s reading remain compelling, if uneasy, documents; their vehemence provides a vivid image of the period’s cultural prejudices. An example of this tendency is provided by J. L. Chirol’s An Enquiry into the Best System of Female Education (1809). There, he denounces books of a ‘mischievous description’ which ‘by some means or other, find their way into boarding-schools’.15 Such texts, he writes, are calculated to irritate the senses, to inflame the imagination, to relax soul and body at once, and lead to such practices as are, in themselves, a sure, though slow suicide: for girls, not being apprised of the pernicious nature of these practices, indulge in them the more eagerly; and their secret thoughts are constantly engrossed with the subject.16

Chirol’s censorious, yet fascinated, description may say more about his own insecurities and ‘inflame[d] imagination’ than it does about the historical realities of women readers in the early nineteenth century. His anxiety focuses on the insidious mobility of ‘mischievous’ books, which first find their way into schools, before saturating the ‘imagination’, ‘soul’ and ‘bod[ies]’ of their young

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readers. However, it is important to remember that women’s reading was not exclusively considered a ‘dangerous’ activity: a point which is perhaps easy to overlook considering the impact that sensationalistic accounts such as Chirol’s still have today. For instance, within Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808) (a novel that Chirol approvingly describes as being ‘of inestimable worth’), Hannah More is concerned with the positive effects of ‘well chosen books’.17 There, the character of Mr Stanley, who occupies the moral centre of the novel, observes that A woman, whose whole education has been rehearsal, will always be dull, except she lives on the stage, constantly displaying what she has been sedulously acquiring. Books on the contrary, well chosen books, do not lead to exhibition. The knowledge a woman acquires in private, desires no witnesses; the possession is the pleasure. It improves herself, it embellishes her family society, it entertains her husband, it informs her children. The gratification is cheap, is safe, is always to be had at home.18

While books of a ‘mischievous description’ ‘irritate the senses’, making reading an act of the body as well as the mind, More describes reading as an essentially self-effacing activity. Eschewing forms of education that require an ‘exhibition’ to prove their value, she celebrates the fundamentally ‘private’ nature of reading. Indeed, what More describes accords with Barbara Benedict’s assertion that ‘a new kind of reader’ emerged in the mid-eighteenth century, who ‘engaged in the solitary and imaginative re-creation of culture through critical reading’. This, Benedict states, ‘is the modern reader’.19 As we shall see, the emphasis upon predominantly silent, internalising patterns of reading can be seen as both a mechanism of regulation and an enabling, even resistant, prospect. For Chirol, the very notion of privacy is profoundly disturbing. It suggests a realm of female interiority that exists beyond the limits of his knowledge, and leads him to speculate upon the subject of readers’ ‘secret thoughts’. More neatly avoids the problems that might arise from the acknowledgement of this unregulated, potentially resistant space. While Chirol’s readers are characterised by self-absorption, embodied by his allusions to the solitary pleasures of masturbation, More places acts of reading at the centre of domestic sociability. Instead of encouraging solipsistic fantasy, the reading of ‘well chosen books’ helps women to fulfil their duties as

Introduction

5

wives and mothers. It is a thoroughly domestic activity, safely located within the ‘home’. Ostensibly, More’s intention is to remove the reader from social circulation and to locate her within a strictly domestic context. This is not to say, however, that the woman reader is imagined to be an apolitical figure. As I suggested above, within Chirol’s Enquiry the perceived porosity of the female mind fuels a vaguely prurient paranoia; within More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799) it takes on an explicitly political resonance. The Strictures appeared at a ‘moment of alarm and peril’, when the shock-waves of the French Revolution were still palpably felt in British society.20 Attacking the malign influence of the ‘French press’ (i, 39), More establishes literature as both the channel through which the nation’s morals are jeopardised and the means by which the female population can resist such threats. Claiming that ‘the modern apostles of infidelity and immorality’ direct their attacks ‘against the female breast’, More describes how ‘the women of our country’ have been targeted by ‘novels and romances’ which ‘have been made the vehicles for vice and infidelity’ (i, 39, 41, 42). Within the Strictures, the way in which women read becomes instrumental to defending the nation from the threat posed by revolutionary France, presenting women with the opportunity to ‘come forward, and contribute their full and fair proportion towards the saving of their country . . . without blemishing the delicacy of their sex’ (i, 4). This is underlined when she asserts that ‘a mind so softened’ by ‘the indolent repose of light reading’ will find it ‘peculiarly hard’ to rescue itself from the domination of self-indulgence, to resume its powers, to call home its scattered strength, to shut out every foreign intrusion, to force back a spring so unnaturally bent, and to devote itself to religious reading, reflection, or self-examination: whereas to an intellect accustomed to think at all the difficulty of thinking seriously is obviously lessened. (i, 168)

More’s anti-invasion rhetoric is conspicuous here, with ‘foreign intrusions’ appearing to stand both for innocuous ‘light reading’ and the threat of pernicious French revolutionary ideology. Similarly, the senses of ‘home’ in this passage are manifold, suggesting both the domestic household and, in its opposition to ‘foreign intrusions’, the nation. As Miranda Burgess notes,

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national security was considered to rest upon ‘the character and order of British households’.21 Similarly, as Kathryn Sutherland points out, More views the ‘woman in her family’ as the source of a ‘practical politics of domestic reformation’ and national regeneration.22 In this respect, the Strictures provides a powerful illustration of ‘the enhanced moral status of the domestic sphere’ in the 1790s: an elevation in status intended to ‘[combat] public excesses of all kinds’.23 At the centre of this idealised vision of middle-class agency is the domestic woman. Much of this book will focus on the way in which this figure is constructed through the act of reading. One consequence of this is the relative absence of labouring-class women within this study. While this period witnessed ‘the extension of literacy to the labouring classes’, the mode in which authors such as More, in particular, addressed these readers constitutes a distinctive discourse.24 As Olivia Smith notes, in the collection of ballads and narratives that constitute her Cheap Repository Tracts, More appeals to ‘the appetites of her readers’: a strategy that ‘leaves her in the odd position of describing her relation to her audience as one of righteously seducing people who have no control over their passions’.25 Such an approach stands in contrast to the kind of selfregulation that More and her contemporaries encourage in readers of the middling ranks. These readers’ disciplined habits are, I will suggest, central to a broader process of ‘middle-class liberal reform’.26 By More’s reckoning, it is this class’s judicious reading of ‘well chosen books’ that enables women to exert a stabilising moral influence not only upon their family but upon the nation as a whole. Imaginative economies and ‘well-regulated minds’ The connection between the mind of the woman reader and the state of the nation is underpinned by what Angela Keane describes as an individual’s ‘imaginative economy’.27 It is a concept that provides a crucial perspective upon the social significance of women’s reading within this period. The word ‘economy’ derives from the Greek oikonomia, where it denotes the management of the household: a meaning that persisted throughout the eighteenth century.28 At the same time, the concept of ‘political economy’ began to achieve wider currency, specifically with the publication

Introduction

7

of James Steuart’s Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy (1767). Defined in the OED as ‘the art or practical science of managing the resources of a nation so as to increase its material prosperity’, political economy functions as an extension of domestic economy. As Steuart notes, ‘what oeconomy is in a family, political oeconomy is in a state’.29 James Thompson has described the publication of Steuart’s text as signalling ‘the gradual distinction or separation of household or domestic economy from political economy’.30 Yet, as Steuart’s comments indicate, the analogous relationship between these two models of economy remained intact, and was available to writers who wished to draw attention to its significance.31 Among those who did were female authors of diverse political and cultural backgrounds, such as Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Hamilton, Hannah More, Charlotte Smith, Jane West and Mary Wollstonecraft, all of whom are discussed in this book. The parallels between the regulation and maintenance of the household economy and that of the political economy allowed these authors to assert a claim for the public, and national, significance of women’s domestic duties. It meant that they could assume, in Anne K. Mellor’s words, the mantle of ‘mothers of the nation’: a role in which the domestic and familial mingles freely with the public and the political. For Mellor, the work of Hannah More exemplifies this theory, encapsulating ‘the argument that household management or domestic economy provides the best model for the management of the state or national economy’.32 Commenting on this idea, Keane makes the pertinent point that viewing the ‘domestic economy’ as the ‘best model’ for the ‘national economy’ risks undermining the material impact of the activities carried out within the home. With reference to the work of More, Keane usefully draws attention to the fact that, rather than being ‘simply analogous’ to one another, ‘domestic and national economy exist on a material continuum’. Additionally, and crucially, Keane identifies the existence of another, more fundamental, economic model embedded at the heart of More’s conception of national order: ‘the well-regulated mind’.33 It is the management or regulation of one’s ‘imaginative economy’ that forms the basis of national stability. As More puts it in the Strictures:

8

Imagining women readers Œconomy, such as a woman of fortune is called on to practise, is not merely the petty detail of small daily expenses, the shabby curtailments and stinted parsimony of a little mind, operating in little concerns; but it is the exercise of a sound judgement exerted in the comprehensive line of order, of arrangement, of distribution; of regulations by which alone well-governed societies, great and small, subsist. She who has the best regulated mind will, other things being equal, have the best regulated family. (ii, 5–6)

More forcefully argues that, far from being ‘petty’, ‘stinted’ or trivial, the principles of domestic economy exert a ‘line of order’ that supports states as well as households. Having made this point, she identifies the foundation upon which both of these enterprises are based: the ‘regulated [female] mind’. A brief survey of the conduct books, educational tracts and novels published between 1789 and 1820 reveals just how firmly embedded the concept of the ‘well-regulated mind’ was within the period’s culture.34 If many of these texts are to be believed, the prudent management of one’s imaginative economy was among the greatest attainments to which a young lady could aspire. Priscilla Wakefield outlines just why this attribute is so desirable in her Mental Improvement (1794): a well regulated mind is marked by the judicious disposal of time, converting even amusement into instruction. Nature and art present so many objects, calculated to amuse and interest, that none but the idle need want a succession of employment.35

In contrast to More, Wakefield does not, at this point, look beyond the local significance of the individuals she describes. Nevertheless, it is clear that her proposal is dictated by a broader, publicly orientated ethic of productivity. The ‘well-regulated mind’ is distinguished by its ability to extract the maximum benefit from the stimuli with which it is presented. Its exacting efficiency ensures that even ‘amusement’ is ‘[converted] . . . into instruction’. This relentless drive towards self-improvement is reflective of what Raymond Williams describes as capitalism’s ‘morality of improvement’: an ethic that infiltrated a variety of discourses, both public and private.36 The comprehensiveness of this sweeping urge to improvement is underlined by the parallels between ‘political economy’ and the management of one’s imaginative economy; while the former increases the nation’s ‘material prosperity’, the

Introduction

9

latter produces an increase in the moral prosperity of the individual. It has the effect of distinguishing the possessor from the ‘idle’ who, in a culture of self-improvement, are castigated for their social inutility. One aim of this book is to explore the impact that reading was thought to have upon the regulation of an individual’s imaginative economy. For some commentators, such as J. L. Chirol, the propensity of reading to ‘inflame the imagination’ reveals its ability to disrupt the efficient management of one’s mind and desires. But the emphasis placed upon the ideals of efficiency and productivity meant that even forms of reading that had no discernible effect were liable to be condemned. In 1789, the Lady’s Magazine’s ‘Hints on Reading’ reports: The most extraordinary of all readers are those who read to kill time. To such it makes no difference what they read, for they remember nothing. Ask them what they have been reading – they can’t tell. – Ask them what the subject was – they don’t know. – Ask them if the book is a good one – they don’t remember – Ask them where they left off – they refer you to the piece of paper they put between the leaves.37

Throughout this period, forms of reading which fail to have any palpable beneficial effect upon the reader are frequently presented as entirely devoid of value. Perhaps the most damning feature of this hypothetical interrogation is the way in which readers are exposed as having to refer back to their bookmark in order to ascertain where they ‘left off’. It functions as evidence that there has been no meaningful transaction between reader and book, as well as foregrounding the physical presence of the book itself. It also works as a reminder of the material dimensions of reading, something which the Lady’s Magazine is particularly alert to, especially when it comes to the buying of books: ‘A few of mankind have been ruined by buying books. This was for want of asking themselves before they went to purchase, Do I really want this book? Have I read and studied what I possess already?’38 The compulsion to self-examination provides an example of how seamlessly the regulation of one’s imaginative economy could become entwined with the management of a material, financial economy. Indeed, it highlights the fundamental tension that runs throughout the article’s account of the way in which reading constructs

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identity. For the most part, it is concerned with women’s intellectual development: it promotes an ideal of domestic femininity founded in ideas of privacy, interiority and inner depths. This notion of the private self is complicated, however, by the idea that reading is akin to a commercial transaction, out of which the maximum value must be extracted. The formation of ‘the domestic woman’ is, in this instance at least, revealed to be formed through metaphors drawn from the modern marketplace. My first chapter explores this tension in more detail, taking John Locke’s ideas about education, reading, and identityformation as a conceptual basis. Following a discussion of the ‘Hints on Reading’, I explore the way in which writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays and Hannah More view reading as offering a strategic resistance to commercial forms of identity. Concluding with a consideration of the impact of these writers’ polemics, I turn to Charles Frognall Dibdin’s paean to the printed word, Bibliomania (1809): a text in which expectations about reading and gender are inverted. There, the tensions provoked by a female self founded on metaphors of exchange are, to some extent, resolved, and replaced with an idealised, prudent female reader. Chapter 2 continues this discussion of the way in which ‘domestic’ femininity was defined in relation, rather than opposition, to the public discourses of work and productivity. Focusing predominantly upon examples of conduct literature by Hannah More and Jane West, it explores the ways in which reading was imagined to be a form of ‘wholesome labour’, allowing women to identify with a version of the middle-class work ethic without leaving the security of the domestic sphere (Strictures, ii, 58). At the same time, I show how, by utilising discourses of labour to depict the effort of reading, these writers risked violating the rigid codes of gender and propriety to which they otherwise subscribed. The virtuous readers that these authors imagine are thus revealed to bear a strain that they are incapable of supporting. While the first two chapters are concerned with market-based forms of identity, Chapter 3 turns to an event which dominated the cultural landscape of the 1790s: the French Revolution. In the work of authors such as Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Hamilton, William Godwin and Mary Hays, education offers the means through which ideas about social progress can be brought to fruition. But finding the most appropriate method of ensuring the

Introduction

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transmission of knowledge from one generation to another proves a sensitive affair, raising questions about the ethics of parental authority. This chapter is particularly concerned with the extent to which children and young women were granted what Godwin describes as ‘choice in reading’.39 While Godwin was attacked for advocating a ‘system of indiscriminate reading’, the prohibition of particular texts only serves to render them more attractive to readers: a problematic paradigm for the writers I discuss.40 One solution to this problem is the transformation of the domestic scene of education into an open forum, in which acts of reading prompt rational debate. Building upon this idea, my fourth chapter interrogates the validity of the separate spheres thesis. For Maria Edgeworth, women’s exclusion from professional labour frees them from the requirement to tailor their knowledge to the demands of a single specialisation: it provides them with ‘leisure to be wise’.41 This chapter questions the social utility of the intellectual capital that this formulation allows women to accrue. It compares accounts of female readers with their male counterparts, asking how the issue of gender helps to distinguish leisured wisdom from unproductive indolence. Using the example of Edgeworth’s Belinda, I revisit the idea of reading as symbolic labour, attending to both its positive agency and its limitations. If reading is indeed a form of symbolic labour, then one of its products is pleasure. My final chapter considers this important, but neglected, outcome in conjunction with the debates about novel-reading that took place in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Wakefield’s approving description of how a ‘well regulated mind’ converts ‘amusement into instruction’ is reflective of the way in which pleasure was all too frequently marginalised, and made subordinate to an agenda of self-improvement. Evidently, in the view of Wakefield, among many others, pleasure threatened to disrupt the efficient management of one’s imaginative economy. Nevertheless, writers including Anna Letitia Barbauld celebrate what Jane Austen describes as the ‘unaffected pleasure’ produced by novel-reading.42 But is pleasure really as simple and spontaneous a matter as Austen appears to imply? To what extent does it disrupt the regulatory function of reading? These questions are explored in relation to the work of Austen and Barbauld, as well as texts by Hannah More and John Aikin. While, as Katherine Halsey notes, ‘the cultural stereotype of the “habitual

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reader of fiction” remained a handy straw (wo)man for reviews and critics to berate’ well into the nineteenth century, the texts explored in this chapter imagine an alternative identity for novelreading women.43 Both Barbauld and Austen draw upon earlier debates about reading to suggest ways of reconciling the pursuit of pleasure with the exercise of independent, critical judgement. Notes 1 James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor, ‘Introduction: The Practice and Representation of Reading in England’, in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, ed. by James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1–21 (p. 21). 2 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 100. 3 Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 16. 4 David Allan, Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 4–5. 5 Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 8. 6 Katie Halsey, Jane Austen and Her Readers, 1786–1945 (London: Anthem, 2012), p. 3. 7 On the ‘intradiegetic reader’, see Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 10. 8 The studies by Allan and Halsey are cited above; see also Jan Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), and M. O. Grenby, The Child Reader, 1700–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Similarly, William St Clair’s comprehensive account of the ‘reading nation’ provides a history of the way in which publishing practices shape the reception of texts. See William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Beyond those studies, the essays collected by James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England have been influential. Of particular relevance to this book are the essays by John Brewer and Naomi Tadmor within that volume. Finally, the Reading Experience Database, which is maintained by the Open University, is of immense value to those seeking to recover the experiences of historical readers. See www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/.

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9 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 217. 10 Pearson, p. 43. However, while recognising their immense value it is important to note that the records of reading that survive are frequently both ‘partial’ and ‘self-selective’ (Halsey, p. 9). Similarly, both Kate Flint and M. O. Grenby note that memoirs and autobiographies frequently discuss reading in strategic terms, emphasising its role in ‘the construction of an autobiographical self’. See Flint, p. 15, and Grenby, pp. 12–13. 11 See Tadmor, p. 165, and Chapter 2, below. 12 Fergus, p. 12. An example of the kind of text to which Fergus refers is Ian Watt’s influential, if highly contested, The Rise of The Novel. There, Watt states that ‘[w]omen of the upper and middle classes . . . had a great deal of leisure, and this leisure was often occupied by omnivorous reading’. See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 44. Similarly, overlooking the many positive representations of reading throughout the period, Lee Erickson asserts that ‘[r]eading was generally felt to represent a withdrawal from a woman’s proper social concerns’. See Lee Erickson, ‘The Economy of Novel Reading: Jane Austen and the Circulating Library’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 30 (1990), 573–90 (p. 584). 13 Pearson, p. 1. 14 Flint, p. 330. 15 J. L. Chirol, An Enquiry into the Best System of Female Education; or, Boarding School and Home Education Attentively Considered (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1809), p. 38. 16 Ibid., pp. 38–9. 17 Ibid., p. 185. Chirol also describes More as an ‘elegant and moral Writer’. Such praise may be connected to the fact that the two writers shared a publisher. Ibid., p. 232. 18 Hannah More, Coelebs in Search of a Wife: Comprehending Observations on Domestic Habits and Manners, Religion and Morals, 5th edn, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1809), i, 348. Subsequent references are made parenthetically. 19 Barbara M. Benedict, Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 220. The figure that Benedict describes is, predominantly, a silent reader. Similarly, although I refer to the practice of reading aloud, throughout this book the readers discussed generally undertake the activity in silence. For an account of the enduring importance of reading aloud, see Patricia Howell Michaelson, Speaking Volumes: Women, Reading, and Speech in the

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27

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Imagining women readers Age of Austen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 333–71; and Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 230–78. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education. With a View of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent Among Women of Rank and Fortune, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies, 1799), i, 4. Subsequent references will be displayed parenthetically. Miranda J. Burgess, British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 103. Kathryn Sutherland, ‘Hannah More’s Counter-Revolutionary Feminism’, in Revolution in Writing: British Literary Responses to the French Revolution, ed. by Kelvin Everest (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), pp. 27–64 (p. 36). Kathryn Sutherland, ‘Writings on Education and Conduct: Arguments for Female Improvement’, in Women and Literature in Britain 1700– 1800, ed. by Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 25–45 (p. 35). Pearson, p. 178. See also St Clair, pp. 10–11. Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 94. Similarly, William St Clair describes how the Cheap Repository Tracts represent More’s ‘struggle to shape the mentalities of the people by controlling their access to print’, rather than instilling habits of self-regulation within them. See St Clair, p. 352. Sutherland, ‘Hannah More’s Counter-Revolutionary Feminism’, p. 33. Nevertheless, it should be noted that some valuable work has been carried out on the practices of labouring-class readers. See Jan Fergus’s Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England and, for an essay that focuses specifically on the reading undertaken by servants, see Fergus’s ‘Provincial Servants’ Reading in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in The Practice and Representation of Reading, pp. 202–25. Angela Keane, Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s: Romantic Belongings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 148. The primary definition in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary is ‘the management of a family; the government of a household’. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language: In Which the Words are Deduced from their Originals, and Illustrated in their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers. To Which are Prefixed, a History of the Language, and an English Grammar, 2nd

Introduction

29

30

31

32

33 34

35

36 37

15

edn, 2 vols (London: J. and P. Knapton; T. and T. Longman; C. Hitch and L. Hawes; A. Millar; R. and J. Dodsley, 1755–56). Kathryn Sutherland provides a useful overview of the history of the word in ‘Adam Smith’s Master Narrative: Women and the Wealth of Nations’, in Adam Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. by Stephen Copley and Kathryn Sutherland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 97–121 (pp. 107–8). See also Gillian Skinner, Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 1740–1800: The Price of a Tear (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 4–7. James Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy: Being an Essay on the Science of Domestic Policy in Free Nations, 2 vols (London: A. Millar and T. Cadell, 1767), i, 2. James Thompson, Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 41–2. For an account of the persistent relationship between household and political economy – and the related terms ‘oeconomy’ and ‘economy’ – see Karen Harvey, The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 57–61. Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 28. Keane, p. 143. As Alan Richardson notes, the ‘well-regulated mind’ is a ‘key phrase applied to the heroine in novels by West, More, Edgeworth and Susan Ferrier’. But it is not just the authors of domestic fiction who advocate the concept. The phrase also appears in non-fiction texts such as Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s progressive work of pedagogy Practical Education (1798); didactic works such as S. Hatfield’s Letters on the Importance of the Female Sex (1803) and Priscilla Wakefield’s Mental Improvement (1794); and Mary Wollstonecraft’s polemical A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). See Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 189. Priscilla Wakefield, Mental Improvement: or the Beauties and Wonders of Nature and Art, Conveyed in a Series of Instructive Conversations, 2 vols (London: Darton and Harvey, 1794), i, 27. See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), pp. 60–7. Anon., ‘Hints on Reading’, Lady’s Magazine, 20 (1789), 79–81; 177–8 (p. 178).

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38 Ibid., p. 178. 39 Godwin’s essay ‘Of Choice in Reading’ is included in his 1797 collection of essays, The Enquirer. See Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. by Mark Philp and others, 7 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1993), v: Educational and Literary Writings, ed. by Pamela Clemit, pp. 135–43. 40 The Critical Review; or, Annals of Literature Extended and Improved, 20 (May 1797), 58–64 (p. 62). 41 Maria Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies to Which is Added An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification (1795), ed. by Claire Connolly (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), p. 27. 42 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1817), in Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon, ed. by James Kinsley and John Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 23. 43 Halsey, p. 118.

1

‘Like a sheet of white paper’: books, bodies and the sensuous materials of the mind

Let us then suppose the Mind to be, as we say, white Paper, void of all Characters, without any Ideas; How comes it to be furnished? John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding1

John Locke’s formulation of the mind as a tabula rasa provides an enduring image of identity formation, influential during the eighteenth century and beyond.2 It is, as Alan Richardson astutely points out, a ‘contagious metaphor’ that spread throughout the eighteenth century and into Romantic representations of education.3 This chapter examines the lasting impression that Locke’s work left upon accounts of women’s reading, over a century after the publication of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). It suggests that Lockean theory and rhetoric established a foundation from which discussions of women’s reading could articulate ideas of identity, consumerism and self-possession. In particular, it focuses on how the materialist, and significantly bibliographic, image of the mind as ‘white paper’ implies that the reader and book are in some way interchangeable: a suggestion that gives rise to questions of intellectual property, social circulation and the possibilities of self-development. To begin, I offer a brief overview of the relationship between education and psychological development in Locke’s work. Aligning the process of cognition with the technology of print, the analogy of the tabula rasa depicts the acquisition of knowledge in strikingly materialist terms.4 Locke presents an essential similar-

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ity between individuals and books, with both moving from a state of blankness to one imprinted with character(s).5 As Deidre Lynch points out, the Lockean tabula rasa ‘links the getting of ideas, the techniques of typography, and the process of individuation – the process of developing a self that will be . . . separable and distinguishable from other selves’.6 Through the acquisition of knowledge, readers of Locke’s Essay are ‘invited to personalise the blank spaces of their consciousnesses in the same way that they might use transcribed quotations to personalize the blank pages of their commonplace books’.7 The formation of one’s personality is thus identifiable with the early eighteenth-century practice of assembling collections of objects and curios – an undertaking which, with its emphasis on ‘buying, selling, exchanging, or stealing’, is ‘congruent with the activity that was defining the modernizing marketplace’.8 In conjunction with this public metaphor, grounded in the circulation of knowledge as goods, we find the private, inward-looking image of recording one’s reading in a commonplace book.9 Reading thus functions as an underlying, organising metaphor of Locke’s theory of identity formation, mediating between public and private scenes of acquisition. However, conceptualising reading in this manner gives rise to the problematic idea that one moves towards subjecthood by inhabiting, and consuming, a world of objects. The relationship between identity-formation and acts of consumerism is underlined in Locke’s Of the Conduct of the Understanding (1706), when he states that ‘Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking makes what we read ours’.10 The self that Locke describes is at once an aggregation of objects and the product of the labour of their acquisition. Underlying the potentially alienating possibility of a mind merely ‘furnished’ with the ‘materials of knowledge’ is the seventeenth-century concept of what C. B. Macpherson labels ‘possessive individualism’. Macpherson notes that the central difficulty of this idea ‘lay in its possessive quality’, which ‘is found in its conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities . . . The individual, it was thought, is free inasmuch as he is proprietor of his person and capacities and of what they have acquired by their exercise.’11 As Macpherson suggests, such a model of identity is perpetually threatened by a division between the ‘proprietary’ self and the selfhood that it owns and appears to precede. The

‘Like a sheet of white paper’

19

implications of this problematic conception are played out in Locke’s account of reading. If readers actively engage with the text before them ‘examining the reach, force, and coherence of what is said’, it will become their ‘own’, an integrated element of one’s identity.12 Should no such ‘examination’ occur, that which is read fails to become assimilated and remains distinct – what Locke describes as ‘so much loose matter floating in our brain’.13 This alienated aspect of the self remains in a state of suspension, existing somewhere between the status of privately ‘owned’ property and a circulating, public commodity. This tension is evident in the work of many eighteenth-century theorists of reading who feared that female readers, in particular, would fail to undertake the labour of active thought as they read. This possibility was accompanied by a tendency to construe the tabula rasa as exhibiting a dangerous passivity: an image of the self as haphazardly formed by external impressions rather than regulated self-development. One subscriber to these opinions was Thomas Gisborne who, in his An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797), noted that the human mind has been compared, and in some respects justly compared, to a blank sheet of paper. In one material point, however, this comparison fails. The sheet of paper, deposited on a shelf, or locked up in a drawer, continues a blank; it acquires no impression or characters until they are purposefully imprinted by the hand of the writer. Is that the case with the youthful mind? If you forbear to impress it with ideas and sentiments, can you prevent it from receiving impressions from the persons and the objects with which it is daily conversant?14

As the possession of ‘the writer’, paper can be sequestered from the social sphere of persons and objects and is altered only by deliberate and methodical imprinting. The youthful mind, on the other hand, is subjected to the uncontrolled impressions of social circulation. Among the ‘objects’ with which one may be ‘daily conversant’ are novels and romances, some of which Gisborne deems ‘unfit’ even to be ‘presented to the reader’.15 Such statements demonstrate Gisborne’s lack of faith in readerly agency. Gone is the Lockean ideal of a self actively constructed, or personalised, in the way of a commonplace book. Instead, Gisborne denies ‘youthful minds’ the agency required to impel ‘purposeful’ self-

20

Imagining women readers

development. Dror Wahrman describes how the eighteenth-century notion of sympathy, which had its roots in a Lockean insistence on the primacy of external stimuli over innate ideas, operated through an ability to share in the sentiments and feelings of others. Based on ‘what people shared, not what distinguished them from each other’, the concept of sympathy thus emphasised ‘the generic – the similar and the contiguous – over the particular’.16 In the same way, for Gisborne the tabula rasa renders identity a mutable surface, which can be rewritten in an infinite variety of ways. Emphasising the generic over the individual, the tabula rasa comes to represent an undermining of the stability and permanence of character, far removed from the Lockean model which, as Deidre Lynch notes, focused upon the formation of a self ‘separable and distinguishable from other selves’.17 This impressionable self, formed through its interactions with persons and objects, proves powerfully resonant when considered in relation to the rise of the circulating library. By 1808, Edward Mangin could be found lamenting that ‘[t]here is scarcely a street of the metropolis, or a village in the country, in which a circulating library may not be found’.18 While the exact number of libraries in existence in this period remains a subject of debate, there is little doubt that they grew in number over the course of the eighteenth century.19 Such establishments provided their patrons with the opportunity to become ‘daily conversant’ with an increased range of objects and persons, both fictional and non-fictional. The contemporary attacks upon such institutions and their wares have been widely documented.20 Most commonly, these denunciations consisted of warnings against the ability of library novels to negatively influence their readers. Typically, one writer claimed, women will have their heads filled with ridiculous chimeras, with romantic schemes of gallantry, with an admiration of young rakes of spirit; with dreams of conquests, amorous interviews, and matrimonial excursions; with a detestation of all prudential advice, impatience of controul, love of imaginary liberty, and an abjuration of all parental authority.21

These visions of unregulated sexuality, romantic choice and disrespect for authority evoke a scene of social disorder, posited as the consequence of women’s indiscriminate access to the contents of the circulating library. But just as these books were thought to

‘Like a sheet of white paper’

21

leave their mark upon their readers, the inverse was believed to be equally true. Through their circulation, books came to bear the traces of their having been read, drawing attention to the physical dimension of reading. In her unfinished autobiography, the Victorian children’s writer Charlotte Yonge recalls the shabby condition of the books borrowed by her family in the early nineteenth century: not only were they ‘very dirty’ and ‘very smoky’, they bore ‘remarks plentifully pencilled on the margins’.22 Such reciprocal acts of inscription caused critics of circulating libraries to identify ‘the book, the library and the female body’ with one another.23 The circulating book, the (female) body and the mind imagined as a blank sheet were thus conflated by the potential legibility of their surfaces. As such, they were defined in opposition to an emerging ethic that placed value in depths, whether those of an individual or a work of literature.24 As a result, the market implications of the identity proposed by Locke came to be distorted – flattened out into what became an aberrant femininity, defined by its habits of consumption. It is within accounts of reading that we witness an attempt to reconcile such a model of identity with ideas of inner development and personal depth – qualities associated with the ‘domestic woman’. Surfaces, depths and forms of value: the Lady’s Magazine’s ‘Hints on Reading’ Almost a century after Locke’s Essay, the Lady’s Magazine published an article entitled ‘Hints on Reading’. While it does not explicitly refer to Locke, these ‘Hints’ share his concern with formulating a model of identity within a context of social circulation. Occupied with how, and in what circumstances, books are read, ‘Hints’ offers an insight into the metonymic ability of reading practices to stand for competing modes of femininity. It begins by celebrating the period of its publication as an ‘age of mental cultivation’ in which ‘all ladies are readers’.25 While labelling this apparent leap in female literacy a ‘happy revolution’, the article seeks to function as a guide to the more unwary of these readers, who must negotiate the ‘multitudes’ of books that are ‘heaped upon the world’ (p. 79). To the unadvised, this proliferation of print threatens to spiral into the unknowable excesses of the sublime, as the author acknowledges when he or she asserts that

22

Imagining women readers

‘the larger our libraries are the greater the impossibility of knowing what they consist of’ (p. 79).26 The article presents a crisis of value, caused by an inability to distinguish the worthy from the worthless. This anxiety might be seen as a manifestation of what Rolf Engelsing terms the ‘reading revolution’ (‘leserrevolution’) that he asserts took place in the mid-eighteenth century.27 According to Engelsing, before 1750 acts of reading were of an ‘intensive’ nature. With only a limited selection of (predominantly religious) books to choose from, individuals would read them over and over again, ‘meditating on them inwardly, or sharing them aloud with others in family and social gatherings’.28 From the midcentury onwards, with readers gaining access to an ever-increasing range of printed matter, these ‘intensive’ habits were displaced by ‘extensive’ modes of reading. ‘[E]ssentially private and silent’, ‘extensive’ reading consisted of individuals reading texts ‘only once, for amusement, then rac[ing] on to the next’.29 Engelsing’s insistence on the decline of ‘intensive’ reading habits has been disputed, most notably by Robert Darnton’s work on the reception of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writing in late eighteenthcentury France.30 Whether factually accurate or not, Engelsing’s theory is reflected in the concerns expressed by commentators towards the end of the eighteenth century and beyond. A little over a decade after the Lady’s Magazine’s ‘Hints’, Elizabeth Hamilton can be found nostalgically reflecting on the ‘intensive’ reading habits that circumstances imposed upon women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Another great advantage that these ladies enjoyed, in [sic] the very limited number of books they had in their power to read. This circumstance produced such frequent and attentive perusal of the few good authors they possessed, that they became mistresses of every subject which they treated. Instead of confused and imperfect notions of the author’s meaning, their conceptions were clear and accurate; and where there are clear and accurate conceptions, the judgement will be sound and vigorous.31

Hamilton’s concern that her contemporaries will form only ‘confused and imperfect notions of the author’s meaning’ is shared by the Lady’s Magazine’s ‘Hints on Reading’, with its emphasis on judicious discrimination. If undertaken in accordance with the advice offered, reading becomes conducive to the formation of a

‘Like a sheet of white paper’

23

‘rational’ female identity – one characterised by inner, intellectual development. In this respect, the ‘Hints on Reading’ appears to operate in conjunction with a version of bourgeois femininity which, as Nancy Armstrong notes, proposes ‘that the female body has depths far more valuable than her surface’.32 The ‘invention of depths in the self’ implies that personal identity resides beneath, and is dissociated from, the surface of the material body, which was consequently made to appear superficial.33 Similarly, Clifford Siskin has described how the work of Locke’s contemporary Mary Astell articulates the ‘valorization of developmental depth’, offering women an alternative to becoming the object of the male gaze. This valorisation is, Siskin asserts, maintained in the late eighteenth century and it is clear that, initially at least, the ‘Hints on Reading’ adheres to a similar agenda of self-improvement.34 The article begins by celebrating the ‘charms’ which ‘outlive those of mere beauty’, asserting that the corollary of women becoming ‘readers’ is that they become ‘thinkers’ (p. 79). The implicit hierarchy here is one in which intellectual depths are valued above the superficiality and transience of outward appearance. To cultivate these depths, and to conform to the demands for ‘development’ that Siskin highlights, women are advised to undertake those forms of reading which are ‘useful’. For this to be achieved, reading must be ‘regular – not jumping from history to novels – from novels to divinity – and from divinity to poetry’ (p. 80). The adoption of such ‘regularity’ offers a means of narrowing the overwhelming breadth of printed material available to readers, thus ensuring that their efforts prove beneficial to their personal development. However, the measures that the ‘Hints on Reading’ prescribe are less regulatory than one might expect. Indeed, the fragmentary form of reading derided here is otherwise encouraged by the structural organisation of the Lady’s Magazine itself, which ‘was not constructed to be read from beginning to end, but rather according to the reader’s interests and priorities, article by article’.35 The implicitly contradictory nature of the ‘Hints’ emerges as it progresses. Although the article quotes the advice of an ‘excellent author’ to ‘Read no bad books’ (p. 80), it nevertheless offers an appropriate reading strategy should such books be encountered: ‘Some books are to be read once, and some always to be read . . . Some books may be hurried over, for they contain nothing worth

24

Imagining women readers

retaining. They are useful, however, particularly when one is under the hands of the hair-dresser’ (p. 81). To establish which books are ‘always to be read’, the reader must also come into contact with those books which ‘are to be read once’. Always conscious of the proprieties of time-management, the article recommends a reading strategy which, in direct contradiction to ‘regular’ reading, merely ‘hurrie[s] over’ texts. Evidence of such a selective approach to reading is found in Sarah Harriet Burney’s letters. In 1814, she wrote to the publisher Henry Colburn to justify the length of time for which she has borrowed his copy of Maria Edgeworth’s novel Patronage (1814): I hope, that considering the thickness of the Volumes, and the impossibility of reading any work of Miss Edgeworth’s with the carelessness and haste a common Novel may be skimmed over with, I shall not be thought to have detained ‘Patronage’ a very unreasonable time. I thank you most cordially for the loan. 36

As in the Lady’s Magazine, Burney suggests that there is a correspondence between the quality of a book and the amount of time and effort worth investing in it. In contrast to ‘common Novel[s]’ that can be dispatched with ‘carelessness and haste’, a novel by Edgeworth – ‘the pride of English female writers’ – is deserving of a more intensive reading experience.37 Michel de Certeau has asserted that the ability to ‘hurry’ over books is enabled by the ‘modern experience’ of silent reading: the increased ‘mobility of the eye’ across the surface of the page offers the reader ‘independence’ from the text’s ‘geographical configuration’.38 In the case of a voracious reader like Burney, the experience of ‘skimming’ books is tied to a keen sense of critical independence, which provides her with the authority to distinguish between ‘common Novel[s]’ and works that deserve to be held in higher esteem. Indeed, while the ‘geographical configuration’ of a text may momentarily detain her – as when she expresses gratitude to Colburn for the gift of a ‘pretty bound copy’ of Elizabeth Hervey’s Amabel (1814), or when she notes that a new novel ‘reads most agreeably in its printed form’ – Burney proves herself a perceptive reader, who maintains a shrewd awareness of the literary marketplace.39 Similarly, the ‘hurried’ reading described in the Lady’s Magazine appears to verify de Certeau’s assertion regarding the ‘emancipation’ of the reader from the text. Never-

‘Like a sheet of white paper’

25

theless, Burney’s diverse reading practices sit uncomfortably within the didactic framework of the Lady’s Magazine. There, the suggestion that readers are free to skim the surface of the text stands in stark contrast to the article’s injunctions that reading be ‘useful’, ‘regular’ and ‘instructive’ (p. 80). Such practices also throw into doubt the article’s proposition that reading is a transformative, rather than a transitory, activity, which should effect a sense of development in the reader. Admonishing those who fail to absorb the content of their reading, at one point the author comments that ‘if you do not remember what you read, you are not better than if you had not read at all’ (p. 80). But the possible meaning of making one’s self ‘better’ is ironically expanded by the image of the ‘hurried’ reading indulged in when ‘under the hands of the hair-dresser’. 40 Rather than cultivating their minds, such readers focus upon cultivating their personal appearance. We are faced, then, with a reversal of priorities, in which the external ‘charms’ of ‘beauty’ compete with those of the mind. This attention to female beauty challenges the image of women as ‘rational’ individuals, defined by their intellectual ‘depths’. Instead, it refers to an identity based upon social display: a construct frequently associated with the kind of aristocratic woman that ‘new’ middle-class forms of femininity were intended to displace.41 However, in addition to seeing this as a throwback to an unreformed aristocratic class, social display should also be recognised as a symptom of middle-class success: one that manifests itself in acts of consumption within the modern marketplace. As Ballaster, Beetham, Frazer and Hebron note in their study of women’s magazines: Women, as the Lady’s Magazine insistently demonstrates, were perceived as the ornaments of a class, a class defined by its habits of consumption rather than production, and which sought to display its new affluence and influence as part of its struggle to achieve cultural and political hegemony.42

Superficial forms of reading thus come to be associated with a mode of ‘ornamental’ selfhood which, as in Locke’s work, has its origins in acts of consumption. In the case of the Lady’s Magazine, there lies the risk that the self formed in the public gaze will fail to detach itself from the marketplace. As John Brewer suggests, ‘[w]omen’s participation in the cultural sphere, even in the role of

26

Imagining women readers

consumer is . . . rendered problematic; they are translated from consumers into the objects of consumption’.43 This point is underlined by the implicit similarity between the surface of the text that is ‘hurried’ over by the reader, and the surface of the reader’s body, which is attended to by the hair-dresser. This parallel implies a collapse in the distinction between the reader and the book. The resulting erosion of difference is developed as the article continues to conflate the material substance of the book and the ‘ornamental’ female body: ‘Hair-dressing has been very serviceable to reading – Look at the popular books of a circulating library, and you will find the binding cracked by quantities of powder and pomatum between the leaves – The booksellers never complain of this – the book is certainly spoiled’ (p. 177). Underlying the invitation to scrutinise these volumes, to uncover the decrepit state of their ‘cracked bindings’ beneath ‘quantities of powder’, and to discover that what lies ‘between the leaves’ is merely pomatum, is a Swiftian mistrust of a femininity composed of cosmetic layers.44 Books and the female body become disturbingly aligned by virtue of their physical surfaces. Existing in a state of permanent circulation, the significance of library volumes comes to reside in the traces they carry of their previous readers. What is read is their history as material objects, just as cosmetic alteration draws attention to the surface of the female body rather than its underlying depths. The article’s initial celebration of the role of reading in fostering ‘rationality’ suggests that the cultivation of intellectual ‘depths’ is central to schemes of female education.45 But far from rigidly adhering to this idea, the article identifies ways in which acts of reading could distance women from the ideology of domesticity that such depths were intended to guarantee. Instead, reading is implicated within habits of leisure and fashion, invoking the kind of ‘economic activities’ that Lawrence E. Klein suggests were ‘orientated publicly’.46 In this respect, female development is situated not within the private sphere of the home but in outwardfacing acts of consumption and commerce, in which the female body is rendered an object of social display. This is reflected in the apparent stoicism of the booksellers who ‘never complain’ of the dishevelled condition of their books. A contemporary advertisement for Darley’s circulating library in Portsmouth indicates that, in addition to lending books, a range of cosmetic products could be purchased, including ‘Scented, coloured, and plain Hair Powders,

‘Like a sheet of white paper’

27

Foreign and English Pomatums . . . Tooth Powder and Powder Masks, French Carmine Rouge’.47 Similarly, The Use of Circulating Libraries Considered (1797) recommends that, in order to sustain their business, circulating libraries may, ‘with propriety’, engage in the selling of ‘Haberdashery, Hosiery, Hats, . . . or Perfumery’.48 Such evidence points to a lack of distinction between commodity consumption and the cultural consumption entailed by reading. In practice, the division between an identity based upon developmental depths and one based upon social display is far from a coherently formed reality. Rather than existing in binary opposition to one another, these subject positions – at least as they are described in the Lady’s Magazine – exist concurrently. The conjunction of women, books and reading thus highlights the persistent role that commodity consumption plays in the conceptualisation of the female subject, even one defined by her capacity for intellectual improvement. While the Lady’s Magazine offers an ambiguous endorsement of such reading practices, their commercial implications were deemed less palatable by other commentators. The consumption of material goods, particularly those whose function was selfadornment, was frequently imagined as detrimental to mental improvement. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft is unsparing of the ‘superficial’, ‘insipid’ women who spend their time and money in the pursuit of selfdisplay by engaging in ‘the whole mischief of trimmings, not to mention shopping, [and] bargain-hunting’.49 Wollstonecraft presents excessive attention to the surfaces of the body as the inevitable corollary of a defective intellectual education: ‘When the mind is not sufficiently opened to take pleasures in reflection, the body will be adorned with sedulous care; and ambition will appear in tattooing or painting it’.50 The function of reading, as Wollstonecraft describes it, is to remove women from such selfabsorption. Ideally, it should ‘exercise the understanding and regulate the imagination’.51 When it comes to specific genres, however, the issue becomes more ambiguous. Novels, in particular, prove a contentious point for Wollstonecraft, revealing an unwillingness to endorse the diversity of reading practices found in the Lady’s Magazine. Just as modern consumerism is impelled by ‘the desire to experience in reality the pleasurable dramas which [consumers] have already enjoyed in imagination’, Wollstonecraft

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Imagining women readers

sees novels as creating artificial desires and instincts in their readers.52 In reading ‘the reveries of stupid novelists’, women are ‘taught to look for happiness in love, refine on sensual feelings, and adopt metaphysical notions respecting that passion’.53 As Joe Bray notes, in the Vindication acts of ‘idle novel-reading’ are perceived to ‘hinder the growth of intellect and understanding’.54 Alongside these debates about women’s education, femininity and value, the close of the eighteenth century saw more general shifts in the conceptualisation of identity. Andrea K. Henderson has noted how, under the twin pressures of the French Revolution and capitalist development, ‘the traditional genealogy-based model of identity’ was challenged. In its place, Henderson asserts, there ascended ‘a commercial model of identity’, which ‘tended to polarize identity into an essential identity akin to use value, on the one hand, and a social identity akin to exchange value on the other’.55 This distinction sheds light upon the contrasting forms of identity found within the Lady’s Magazine’s ‘Hints on Reading’. The former of these models, which ‘appears to have an intrinsic and relatively stable character and to be the product of its own labour’, bears comparison with that proposed by Locke in Of the Conduct of the Understanding.56 It is this sense of identity that is suggested when Locke asserts that what we read must ‘be turned into knowledge . . . by our own meditation, and examining the reach, force, and coherence of what is said’.57 The Lady’s Magazine makes a similar case in its calls for reading to be ‘useful’, ‘regular’ and ‘instructive’ (p. 80). Indeed, it positively promotes what might be described as a ‘resistant’ mode of reading, appealing to an intrinsic stability of character: ‘In reading your deep, grave, and learned authors, it is necessary to make many a pause, and consider how far what he says concords with your own opinion and experience, for your grave, deep, authors are very apt to lead you astray, because you adopt their conclusion without examining their arguments’ (p. 81). Even here, however, we are faced with doubts as to the ability of women readers to make what they read their ‘own’. It is only as the result of their apparent capacity to be ‘led astray’ that such a stringent model of reading is proposed. This curious ambivalence reminds us of the presence, in the ‘Hints’, of that alternative concept of ‘commercial’ identity, which is defined by the instability of exchange value. This model is concerned with ‘extrinsic signs’ and ‘indeterminate value’:

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‘qualities associated with the feminine but also associated with an aspect of market relations (exchange value unconnected with utility) that the capitalist class has continually to repress’.58 In addition to encapsulating the propensity of readers to be swayed by what they read, this unstable model of identity incorporates the fetishisation of surfaces seen in the Lady’s Magazine. Books which accrue an extra-textual layer of inscription during their circulation and readers who undergo cosmetic transformation under the hands of the hair-dresser both emphasise the ‘form of appearance’ at the expense of their ‘contents’: a term that incorporates both the printed text of the book and the developmental depths of the female self. The negative stereotype of the superficial female reader was long-lived, and remained deeply entrenched within literary culture. In 1815, William Hazlitt can be found repeating the prejudices regarding female impressionability: Women . . . are the creatures of the circumstances in which they are placed, of sense, of sympathy and habit. They are exquisitely susceptible of the passive impressions of things: but to form an idea of pure understanding or imagination, to feel an interest in the true and the good beyond themselves, requires an effort of which they are incapable.59

While an identity based upon use-value is ‘the product of its own labour’, the contingent female identity Hazlitt presents is characterised as incapable of the ‘effort’ of forming ideas of ‘pure understanding’. When it comes to applying this accusation of superficiality to women’s reading, Hazlitt’s rhetoric treads similar ground to that of the Lady’s Magazine: ‘Women judge of books as they do of fashions or complexions, which are admired only “in their newest gloss.” That is not my way. I am not one of those who trouble the circulating libraries much, or pester the booksellers for mail-coach copies of standard periodical publications.’60 The charge is a familiar one: women readers focus upon the superficial, attracted to the outward forms of books ‘in their newest gloss’. The phrase is taken from Macbeth, but Hazlitt might also have in mind William Godwin’s use of it in his essay ‘Of Servants’, which appeared in The Enquirer (1797). There, Godwin derides the indulgent habits of the upper-classes, stating that ‘[t]hey are attired with everything that fashion or taste can prescribe and all in its

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finest texture and its newest gloss’.61 To Hazlitt, women readers are associated with an enervating and distinctly class-based passivity, which leaves them in thrall to the ‘prescriptions’ of fashion and luxury. Additionally, the judging of books as if they were ‘complexions’ reinstates the identification of the book and the body. In endowing the physiognomic surface with such significance, we see the ‘form of appearance’ superseding the ‘contents’; once again, exchange value floats free of use value. The association of women with the uncertain contingencies of a circulating economy is emphasised by Hazlitt’s description of the way in which their reading habits make a fetish not only of surfaces but of the new. Women readers are accused of valuing the momentary and transitory above the established order of literature to which Hazlitt subscribes. His is a dedication to ‘old books’, which shuns modern, market-based methods of book distribution such as the circulating libraries and newly produced periodicals delivered by mail-coach. For a writer of Hazlitt’s radical affiliations, it is something of a surprise that, when it comes to the politics of reading and canonicity, his attitudes are firmly of the ancien régime of genealogically based value. The mistrust of modernity that this passage betrays is intimately tied to his fondness for ‘old books’ which, he writes, ‘are to me far better than the wet sheets of the last new novel from the Ballantyne press, to say nothing of the Minerva press in Leadenhall-street’.62 The precariously wet ink that Hazlitt describes offers an image of his ambivalence towards the technological reproduction of literature. Like women, ‘exquisitely susceptible of the passive impressions of things’, such books advertise the contingency of their own construction, and with it their vulnerability to transformation, and to distortion. Their very existence appears conditional when held in contrast to the stability, and seeming permanence, of ‘old books.’63 The aberrant model of femininity imagined by Hazlitt is the inverse of that embodied by the figure of the ‘domestic woman’. Terry Lovell has drawn attention to this dichotomy, describing how, as the antithesis of ‘the culture of domesticity’, there exists the ‘other face of capitalist culture: the culture of modernity’. 64 Characterised by ‘flux and unpredictability’, it offers a space in which ‘constraining identities might be lost; the boundaries of the self might prove more fluid and changeable; moral certainties

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might be unfixed’.65 It is this fluidity that lies behind Hazlitt’s disturbing view of women as ‘creatures of circumstance’. Unlike the canonised ‘old books’ that he appeals to, modern novels have no traceable genealogical distinction to draw upon: ‘moral uncertainty’ is matched by canonical uncertainty. Lovell notes that some twentieth-century feminist critics have hailed this ‘culture of modernity’ as an emancipatory alternative to the ideology of domesticity. However, as we have seen in the Lady’s Magazine and the essays of Hazlitt, when aligned with the contingency of exchange value, this sense of a ‘fluid and interchangeable’ identity can be distorted in a detrimental way. Frequently, it becomes associated with superficiality, undermining the claims to ‘rationality’ that reading offers to women. The work of Mary Hays, to which I now turn, provides a refreshing contrast to this possibility. Hays proposes a version of Lockean associationism that, rather than implicating women within a system of fluctuating value, offers them the chance to foster a sense of radical agency. ‘This lady reads’: Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney With his comments on women’s susceptibility to passive impressions, and their inability ‘to feel an interest in the true and the good beyond themselves’, Hazlitt casts doubt upon the radical possibilities of sensibility. Rather than uniting individuals with one another in sympathetic communion, sensibility appears to atomise society, enveloping individuals within solipsistic self-absorption. Despite Hazlitt’s lasting revolutionary sympathies, such remarks are typical of attempts to discredit sensibility from the 1790s onwards. Chris Jones has noted that in that decade a ‘wave of anti-Jacobin novels and tales’ emptied the term ‘of any social idealism, emphasizing its individualism and the emotional self-indulgence . . . They especially attacked the efforts of feminists to claim rights based on reason and feeling.’66 Mary Hays’s work of the 1790s registers the impact of such attacks, while striving to maintain a revolutionary optimism that insists upon the radical agency of sensibility. Her first novel, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), describes ‘[t]he irresistible power of circumstances, modifying and controuling our characters, and introducing, mechanically, those associations and habits which make us what we are; for without outward impressions we should be nothing’.67 Drawing upon Lockean

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associationism, Hays suggests that identity is constructed through external impressions. ‘Character’ is rendered palimpsestic, capable of being endlessly rewritten according to circumstantial influences. Indeed, the idea of identity literally being rewritten is hinted at by one of the various senses of the term ‘character’ which, as we have already seen in the work of Deidre Lynch, is rich in etymological significance. Leading us back to the typographical implications of the Lockean tabula rasa, the OED defines a ‘character’ as a ‘graphic symbol . . . used in writing or in printing’. Additionally, moving away from this materialistic meaning, ‘character’ can also denote ‘[t]he face or features as betokening moral qualities; personal appearance’.68 From here, it is not difficult to see how the modification of one’s ‘character’, as Hays intends it, can be misconstrued, in order to locate identity in the surfaces of the body. It is in this way that the Lady’s Magazine’s injunction that women make themselves ‘better’ through reading hovers ambiguously between implying intellectual improvement, on the one hand, and cosmetic enhancement, on the other. Similarly, the conjunction of the textual and physiognomic surfaces embodied in the word ‘character’ gives licence to the prejudices that Hazlitt indulges in when he describes the propensity of women to align books and ‘complexions’. In the Memoirs of Emma Courtney, Hays engages directly with such interpretations, seeking to establish an interpretation of Locke that resists the potentially misogynistic association of women and superficiality. At one point in the novel, during a social gathering at her father’s house, Emma’s conversation reveals her reading of Plutarch, to the surprise and scorn of one member of the party: ‘This lady reads, then’ – said our accomplished coxcomb – ‘Heavens, Mr Courtney! you will spoil all her feminine graces; knowledge and learning, are insufferably masculine in a woman – born only for the soft solace of man! The mind of a young lady should be clear and unsullied, like a sheet of white paper, or her own fairer face: lines of thinking destroy the dimples of beauty; aping the reason of man, they lose the exquisite, fascinating charm, in which consists their true empire.’ (pp. 22–3)

Employing the Lockean metaphor of the mind as a ‘sheet of white paper’, Hays’s ‘coxcomb’ describes woman as a tabula rasa. Ideally

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for him, however, this tabula rasa should remain suspended in a state of permanent blankness, denied the impressions that are to be derived from reading and ‘thinking’. Hays is clearly aware of the way in which Locke’s image could be appropriated in order to subordinate women. Here, it serves to enact, and enforce, a gendered division of knowledge. What, for Locke, is merely a state of original blankness is, for the ‘coxcomb’ character, an ideal of femininity. Within this scheme of thought, women who read and employ themselves in ‘knowledge and learning’ are considered unsuitably ‘masculine’. This moment in Hays’s novel also draws upon the bibliographic and physiognomic implications of Locke’s work, in order to comment on the interplay of depth and surface. The libertine gaze of the ‘coxcomb’ insists that the beauty of a woman’s face is the most potent signifier of her femininity. Consequently, the transgression entailed by forays into the ‘masculine’ realm of ‘knowledge and learning’ is manifested as disfigurement, in which ‘lines of thinking’ are inscribed upon the face, destroying its beauty. This physiognomic fetish inverts the Lockean model: impressions are imprinted upon the blank page of the face, rather than the mind. This formulation leaves no room for the possibility of depths in the self and, in doing so, arrests the possibility of reflection and self-development. While we have seen how the denial of depths identifies women with books, in Hays’s work that materialism takes a different form, aligning women with the circulation of money. As James Thompson notes, in capitalist societies ‘the object that is produced by an individual’s labour’ becomes secondary to ‘the fetishized money form that effaces the labour and obscures the object into a universal equivalent of exchange’.69 In the view of Hays’s coxcomb, a woman’s value, like that of money, is legibly inscribed upon her outward appearance. ‘Clear and unsullied’, the labour that these surfaces obscure is that of selfdevelopment which, as we will see, is necessary to Hays’s view of the formation of a rational subjectivity. The materialistic, marketbased nature of the coxcomb’s metaphor is subsequently noted in the novel by Mr Courtney, who comments that ‘[i]f blank paper be your passion, you can be at no loss; the town will supply quires and reams’ (p. 23). In her earlier work, Hays had articulated the opposition between commercial activity and intellectual improvement in Woll-

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stonecraftian terms. In Letters and Essays, Moral, and Miscellaneous (1793), she makes it clear that the analogy of women and money achieves a disturbing clarity within the context of fashionable acts of consumption. Hays looks to reading as the key to forming a female subjectivity which breaks free of such marketbased models of identity, locating this act of emancipation within the wider discursive context of the French Revolution debate. In an essay entitled ‘On the Influence of Authority, and Custom of the Female Mind and Manners’, Hays’s demands that ‘degraded woman’ be restored ‘to the glory of rationality’ are inflected with a self-conscious radicalism.70 Drawing upon the vocabulary of prorevolutionary writers such as Thomas Paine and Wollstonecraft, she denounces the ‘absurd despotism’ that has, ‘with more than gothic barbarity, enslaved the female mind’.71 Strikingly, the most visible manifestation of the means of this suppression of women’s intellect is the system of fashionable consumption. Echoing Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, Hays asserts that by following the vagaries of fashion ‘the understandings of women have been chained down to frivolity and trifles’.72 Women’s absorption in the demands of fashion precludes their participation in ‘intellectual improvement’ and aligns them with the circulation, and fluctuating value, of money: To conform to the perpetual fluctuation of fashion . . . requires almost their whole time and attention, and leaves little leisure for intellectual improvement . . . It has been alleged, that this mode is serviceable to commerce, and promotes a brisk circulation of money; or with more propriety it might be said a quick succession of bankruptcies.73

As Hays’s allusion to bankruptcy implies, this concern with women’s fashionable consumption was played out against a backdrop of national economic crisis. The Letters and Essays were published in 1793, the year in which Britain entered war with France, triggering ‘one of the worst financial and commercial crises that England had experienced up to that time’.74 Within this context, Hays’s repudiation of a market-based subjectivity takes on a compelling resonance. Such an unstable economic climate foregrounds the fact that the ‘form of money does not refer to an originary point of value’, but that its value is arbitrary, dictated by external factors.75 Similarly, the surface-obsessed femininity

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described here derives its value from its objectification in the gaze of others, rather than from any intrinsic qualities. In the case of money, the instability of such relative value results in bankruptcies; for women, the consequence was a moral bankruptcy. Hays makes this clear elsewhere, when she compares ‘women of real sensibility’ who possess ‘unaffected, unassuming goodness’, with those ‘automatans [sic]’ who are characterised by the ‘the varnish of surface, not the cultivation of the mind’.76 Reading offers a means of disrupting this surface-based circulating economy. In the eyes of Emma Courtney’s coxcomb, reading ‘sull[ies]’ the blank sheet of female character with powerful impressions, creating depths in the self, and enabling forms of intellectual labour. Similarly, in the Letters and Essays, reading offers the possibility of breaking the self-absorption induced by the ‘fluctuation of fashion’. The ‘Letter to Mrs. —— on Reading Romances, &c.’ emphasises the importance of women receiving the ‘correct’ early impressions, and advises a mother to ‘be not too much alarmed’ by her daughter’s ‘predilection for novels and romances’.77 She goes on to claim that, contrary to popular prejudice, the reading of such texts will satisfy the ‘love of the marvellous, or of extraordinary, and unexpected coincidences, [which] is natural to young minds, that have any degree of energy and fancy’.78 While writers such as Joseph Robertson lamented the ‘ridiculous chimeras’ that novels would inspire in their female readers,79 Hays suggests that the disparity between fiction and lived experience inures women to disappointment and hardship, offering a character-forming experience based in fortitude and resilience: ‘We shall certainly be subjected to disappointment, by flushed and ardent expectations; and find perhaps a brake of thorns, where we expected a parterre of flowers. Yet, “the exertion of our own faculties (says a sensible writer) will be the blessed fruit of disappointed hope”.’80 The valorisation of individual acts of labour – the ‘exertion of our own faculties’ – positions reading in opposition to the encroachments of luxury. Indeed, Hays seeks to exorcise the possibility of excessive consumption, and to reassert in its place an ethic of individual labour. The subject position of the female reader thus shifts from that of consumer to that of producer – an idea that will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 2.81 The emphasis upon self-improvement through ‘exertion’ reflects what Raymond Williams describes as capitalism’s ‘morality of

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improvement’: an ethic that incorporates a range of discursive fields, including the ‘romantic psychology of individual growth or development’.82 According to Clifford Siskin, the effecting of individual, psychological development is achieved by a process of disciplining, which demands that fields of knowledge are narrowed, in order that they may be known more deeply.83 Something of this can be found in Hays’s description of the progress of those young women who first learn to read novels and romances. From these culturally ‘low’ genres, women will progress to increasingly edifying reading matter – to periodical essays and biographies, until they develop a ‘taste for historical reading’, at which point the mind expanded, and liberalized by tracing the fate of nations, and the rise and fall of empires, will proceed to studies more interesting; to philosophical, moral, and religious truth. The love of information will by innumerable associations, become at length almost disinterested, and every interval from active employment will be devoted to mental improvement.84

While Hays insists that ‘young minds’ will be spurred on to novelreading by a ‘love of the marvellous’, the passionate intensity that this phrase implies eventually falls away; a potentially indiscriminate ‘love of information’ is abandoned, and replaced with a ‘disinterested’ search for knowledge. If Hays appears to be sketching a somewhat idealised account of a young woman’s reading, the narrative she describes is echoed in historical accounts of reading in this period. In her autobiography, the Victorian philanthropist Frances Power Cobbe details the reading she undertook as a child in the early 1830s. Initially, this consists of an unsystematic enthusiasm for Oriental romances: by ‘[plunging] into the library at haphazard’, she fell ‘by chance on Kubla Khan’ and ‘gloated over Southey’s Curse of Kehama, and The Cid and Scott’s earlier works’. Such self-indulgent habits are, however, subsequently devalued and described as a passing phase, as Cobbe recounts how, ‘by degrees a genuine appetite for reading awoke in me, and I became a studious girl’.85 Cobbe describes these reading experiences as being free from parental supervision, recalling how her mother allowed her ‘to rove over the library shelves at [her] own will’.86 By contrast, the eponymous heroine of the Memoirs of Emma Courtney experiences a more strictly regulated parental

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library. Nevertheless, the resulting process of self-discipline is the same. Fearfully contemplating her first visit to the home of her imposing father, Emma finds solace in ‘the hope of reading new books, and of being suffered to range uncontrouled through an extensive and valuable library’ (p. 20). But when she arrives, her expectations are dashed: My heart bounded when, on entering a spacious room, I perceived on either side a large and elegant assortment of books, regularly arranged in glass cases, and I longed to be left alone, to expatiate freely in these treasures of entertainment. But I soon discovered, to my inexpressible mortification, that the cases were locked, and that in this intellectual feast I was not to be my own purveyor. (p. 21)

With its ‘large . . . assortment of books’, her father’s library appears to offer Emma the chance to ‘range uncontrouled’, in the manner described by Cobbe. Yet, while the books are tantalisingly visible within their glass cases, Emma is subjected to the disappointment of finding those cases locked: the ‘range’ of her desires must be narrowed. Initially, this is achieved through her father’s intervention, which takes the form of managing her education. He informs Emma that the control he asserts over her reading matter is intended as a ‘rein rather than a spur’ to her ‘fancy’, and demands that her studies are ‘of a soberer nature’ than her previous forays into ‘the fairy fields of fiction’ (p. 21). Eventually, as Emma’s education progresses, she comes to internalise the disciplinary mode of her father’s thought, learning to enjoy an increasingly refined choice of reading matter. From ‘theology’ and ‘ecclesiastical history’ Emma ‘enter[s] deeply into polemical divinity’ and, as she does so, an act of transformation occurs: My mind began to be emancipated . . . I reasoned freely, endeavoured to arrange and methodize my opinions, and to trace them fearlessly through all their consequences: while from exercising my thoughts with freedom, I seemed to acquire new strength and dignity of character. (p. 25)

The ‘emancipation’ of Emma’s mind is the result of a system of self-development, characterised by methodical, selective reading, far removed from the superficial practices endorsed by the Lady’s Magazine. Hays demonstrates how, through disciplined reading,

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women can achieve the status of free and rational subjects, divorced from the contingencies of the market-based model of identity that she bemoans in ‘On the Influence of Authority, and Custom of the Female Mind and Manners’. This ‘emancipation’ is tempered, however, by the knowledge that it is achieved only by Emma’s internalisation of her father’s authority: a point to which I will return in Chapter 3. Hays’s work represents a concerted effort to dissociate women from superficial methods of reading and from the market-based model of identity that stems from such practices. Her insistent repudiation of the association of women and luxurious consumption marks a clear change in tone from the levity of the Lady’s Magazine. Between the appearance of the ‘Hints on Reading’ in 1789 and the publication of the works by Wollstonecraft and Hays in the 1790s, a distinct shift in the nature of the demands for female ‘rationality’ appears to have occurred. Both Hays and Wollstonecraft reject the association of femininity and fashionable consumption in their attempts to articulate a ‘rational’ subject position. Similarly, by 1797 the Lady’s Magazine’s shows evidence of a desire to even out the contradictions in the range of reading strategies it had earlier endorsed. One anonymous contributor notes that while reading ‘seems to be the fashion of the present age’, it consists only of ‘books of mere amusement’. He or she bemoans the fact that during such fashionable reading ‘the benefiting page is disregarded, or hastily skimmed over . . . and the best design of the author rendered entirely abortive’.87 The process of ‘skimming’ over the page of a book is now to be abandoned, in favour of morally improving types of reading. These examples do not necessarily provide evidence of a totalising narrative that could account for the changing relationship between women and textuality in the turbulent years of the 1790s. However, the deep divisions between these texts are undoubtedly significant. They offer an insight into the possibility of representing women as ‘political and active subjects’ that appeared, and subsequently struggled to maintain momentum, in the aftermath of the French Revolution.88 The centrality of reading in these debates is affirmed in a further example of this shift, provided by the work of Hannah More.

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Hannah More and the seductions of bibliomania The suggestion that reading can provide an intervention in the formation of market-based models of femininity is not solely the property of radical authors such as Hays and Wollstonecraft. At the other end of the political spectrum (at least in her response to the French Revolution), Hannah More offers similar opinions.89 In part, the distinctive brand of ‘counter-revolutionary feminism’ that she cultivated in the 1790s is dependent upon establishing a self defined by its depths; in this respect, she is keen to deny the identification of women and books. However, earlier in her life, under the veil of private correspondence, More displays a willingness to engage with the physical aspects of reading. Indeed, her letters to Horace Walpole from 1789 share the relaxed attitude towards women and the material dimensions of reading found in the contemporary ‘Hints on Reading’. The correspondence centres on Walpole’s publication of More’s poem ‘Bishop Bonner’s Ghost’. Walpole had first proposed printing this work in June 1789 and, after initially protesting, More assented. Upon receiving copies of the newly printed text in July (including one specially printed on brown paper), she wrote to Walpole to express her gratitude: I am quite enchanted to see my poor base metal bear the stamp and impress of Strawberry Hill . . . And then your printing is so nice, and your paper is so magnificent, I did not think even you could have found out a way to make my verses look so pretty. I am delighted with the little brown Bonner. It is so new and so old, and so whimsical, and so unique! . . . Nay I am in imminent danger of falling in love with my own verses, for I look at them, and admire them as if they were any other body’s –90

More appears enraptured with the material form of her text: its print and paper. In The Pursuits of Literature (1798) T. J. Mathias would assault Walpole’s Strawberry Hill press for the extravagance of its publications, attacking those books which were ‘printed on a wire-wove paper and hot pressed, with cuts . . . as if the intention were, that they should be looked at and not read’.91 It is precisely this brand of scopohilic pleasure to which More succumbs upon beholding her poem. As in the Lady’s Magazine, the book’s contents become secondary, valued only for their looking ‘pretty’.

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The personification that this implies also reminds us of the identification of books and complexions to which Hazlitt refers. In this case, the association is distinguished by the hint of narcissism implicit in More’s being ‘in imminent danger of falling in love with [her] own verses’. This charge is circumvented only by what is perhaps a more unsettling possibility: that of reading as an act of indiscriminate seduction, as if the verses she loves ‘were any other body’s’. In this superficial form, the act of reading once more brings into view a form of femininity that deviates from the expectations generated by the image of the ‘domestic woman’: an ideal to which More’s later works strictly adhere. More’s letter also hints at a rift in subject/object relations that can be linked back to Lockean ideas of identity formation. Ina Ferris identifies in ‘bibliophilic writing’ (and More’s homage to the physical form of her book surely falls into this category) a ‘serious scrambling of subjects and objects . . . where books repeatedly turn into quasi-subjects and persons into quasi-objects’.92 In pursuing the shifts in More’s view of the relationship between femininity and textuality, it is necessary to turn to her Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799). While Chapter 2 explores this text in more detail, here I wish to dwell upon More’s comments regarding the influence of reading upon female subjectivity. Within the Strictures, More is particularly concerned with the eradication of ‘superficial’ modes of instruction. Like Hays and Wollstonecraft, she too operates within the binary logic that castigates superficiality and promotes instead a self predicated upon the presence of depths. The reading matter that exemplifies this superficiality, and attracts particular vehemence, chiefly consists of ‘[t]he swarms of Abridgements, Beauties, and Compendiums, which . . . may be considered in many instances as an infallible receipt for making a superficial mind’.93 More’s aversion to such texts is exacerbated by the way in which they encourage acts of social display, ‘inflam[ing] young readers with the vanity of reciting’ (i, 161). At the root of her dissatisfaction with these works is the fact that, like the methods of skim-reading described in the Lady’s Magazine, they divest reading of any sense of effort or exertion. Instead, they present readers with a ‘few fine passages from the poets’, eliding the work that they would undertake if they read the pieces in their original contexts (i, 161). The reading of ‘Abridgements, Beauties, and

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Compendiums’ thus offers a form of instant gratification, akin to the acquisitive pleasures of consumerism. The result of reading, and reciting from, these anthologies is reminiscent of the confusion inherent to Lockean possessive individualism: It is not difficult to trace back to their shallow sources the hackney’d quotations of certain accomplished young ladies, who will be frequently found not to have come legitimately by any thing they know: I mean, not to have drawn it from its true spring, the original works of the author from which some beauty-monger has severed it. (i, 161)

More presents this ‘shallow’ form of reading as resulting in a crisis of self-possession, where the individual remains alienated from the knowledge they have acquired. As we have seen, in the work of Locke readers are required to ‘examine’ texts in order to make them their ‘own’, or else run the risk that their knowledge would remain ‘so much loose matter floating on the brain’.94 Similarly, More is adamant that knowledge should not be purchased from the sordidly anonymous source evoked by what she caustically describes as ‘some beauty-monger’. As Leah Price notes, for More, anthology-readers are guilty of committing a crime against property: their ‘unwillingness to pay a “fair” or “legitimate” price made [them] receivers of pilfered goods’.95 The ‘legitimate’ price, however, is not one of economic value, but of self-investment. For, despite their overt political differences, More shares with Hays the view that the acquisition of knowledge must be accompanied by individual exertion. In a passage that recalls Hays’s concern that women may find ‘a brake of thorns, where we expected a parterre of flowers’, More removes women from a scene of pastoral indolence. She emphasises instead the importance of an educational programme that incorporates a sense of the capitalist work ethic: ‘May there not be a moral disadvantage in possessing [women] with the notion that learning may be acquired without diligence and labour? Sound education never can be made a “primrose path of dalliance”’ (i, 155). Processes of reading which incorporate ‘diligence and labour’ will transform women into the bearers of moral responsibility. Such acts of reading are depicted as examples of fair exchange, in contrast to the actions of the anthology-reading woman who gains knowledge by ‘illegitimate’ means. This latter, aberrant reader is rendered little more than a

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cipher – a conduit whose ‘recital’ can be traced back to its origin on the pages of an anthology. She is devoid of depths, emptied of subjectivity. It is at this point that a confusion arises between subject and object, as readers become transformed into little more than the collection of ‘hackney’d quotations’ that they draw upon in their conversation: in Ferris’s term, they become ‘quasi-objects’. Correspondingly, as readers take on the traits of the books they read, those books undergo their own shift in status, becoming ‘quasi-subjects’. The ‘scanty sketches’ of which abridgements are comprised are described in terms of malformed bodies, somewhere between life and death; they are ‘crippled mutilations’ and ‘disjointed skeleton[s]’ (ii, 57). Such texts assume a grotesque corporeality that masquerades as subjectivity, just as those ‘accomplished young ladies’ are revealed to be as ‘shallow’ as the anthologies and abridgements they read. The encroaching confusion of subject and object, of reader and book, is dispelled by reference to the physical properties of more appropriate reading matter. The possibility of women becoming ‘shallow thinkers’, More states, would be averted by the perusal of ‘books of more bulk’ (ii, 57). By conveying the intellectual and moral substantiality of a work in material terms, More foregrounds the way in which the ‘skeleton’ forms of abridgements and anthologies offer only a parody of ‘bulk’. In the Strictures, the materiality of books can be used to denote both a degraded corporeality and a sense of wholesome, intellectual content. This ambivalence towards the book as a physical object remains present in More’s later works. In her novel Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808) we find several of the characters engaged in a discussion of the effects of ‘luxury’ upon literature. The debate is lead by the virtuous Mr Stanley, father of the novel’s heroine, Lucilla: ‘In one way,’ said Mr. Stanley, smiling, ‘luxury has been favourable to literature. From the unparalleled splendor of our printing, paper, engraving, illuminating, and binding, luxury has caused more books to be purchased, while from the growth of time-absorbing dissipation, it causes fewer to be read. Even where books are not much considered as the vehicle of instruction they are become an indispensible appendage to elegance. But I believe, we were much more familiar with our native poets in their former plain garb, than since they have been attired in the gorgeous dress which now decorates our shelves.’96

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Despite the distance of twenty years, it is not difficult to hear in Mr Stanley’s praise of the ‘splendour’ and ‘gorgeous dress’ of modern books traces of More’s reaction to the copies of ‘Bishop Bonner’s Ghost’ sent to her by Walpole. Here, however, the attention lavished upon the luxurious composition of books is accompanied by a corresponding intellectual degradation. The content of books becomes secondary to their value as ‘appendage[s] to elegance’. Similarly, in their ‘gorgeous dress’ books are not read, but are used merely to ‘decorate our shelves’. However, the progressive commercial society that Mr Stanley charges with producing such luxury was also responsible for eroding the material splendour he describes. It is within this period that new industrial methods of book-production, such as the steam-press and stereotype printing, first appeared, ‘slash[ing] the costs of large-scale print runs’.97 One reaction to these mechanised methods of mass production was the emergence of a desire to preserve the idea of the book as a unique physical object, captured in the early nineteenth-century trend of ‘bibliomania’. It is this context that informs the apparent connoisseurship with which Mr Stanley describes ‘the unparalleled splendor of our printing, paper, engraving, illuminating, and binding’. Consisting of ‘a passion for the acquisition and display of books . . . that captivated some of the very wealthiest men of Romantic Britain’, bibliomania was a distinctly gender-based and class-based phenomenon.98 As such, it provided a counterpoint to the frequent depiction of women whose reading practices focused upon the sensual, surface appearances of books. This class and gender bias is summarised in the work of the best known of the bibliomaniacs, Thomas Frognall Dibdin, whose Bibliomania; or Book-Madness, a Bibliographical Romance was originally published in 1809, one year after More’s Coelebs. Dibdin describes bibliomania as a form of illness which ‘has almost uniformly confined attacks to the male sex, and, among these, to people in the higher and middling classes of society, while the artificer, labourer and peasant have escaped wholly uninjured’.99 Bibliomania is here associated with an aristocratic stance of disinterested connoisseurship, which seeks to dissociate itself from forms of professionalism and the world of work. In doing so, however, it licenses the accusation that it panders to an indolent self-indulgence. Indeed, the activities of book collectors were commonly associated with ‘luxurious, priva-

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tized forms of cultural consumption’, which consequently drew criticism for their ‘social inutility’.100 The stance towards books and reading adopted by aristocratic book-collectors appears far removed from the dictates of the capitalist work ethic which, in the work of More and Hays, is influential in forming the reading habits of young women. In Bibliomania, it is the male characters whose relationships with books are dictated by a loss of selfpossession and an overwhelming desire to consume. The bibliomaniac, Dibdin states, will visit the booksellers merely to view a book but, enraptured, will eventually succumb to his overwhelming desire to purchase: ‘When he views the morocco binding, silk water-tabby lining, blazing gilt edges – when he turns over the white and spotless leaves – gazes on the amplitude of margin – on a rare and lovely print introduced . . . he can no longer bear up against the temptation – and, confessing himself vanquished, purchases and retreats’ (p. 50). The sensual, scopophilic pleasure previously attributed to women readers has become one of the distinguishing traits of the bibliomaniac. It is now male readers who delight in the luxurious physical surfaces of the book, employing a sexually-charged ‘language of fetishism’ in order to depict their passion.101 This forms a stark contrast to prior characterisations of women as compulsive purchasers of texts based upon their outward form, such as the frivolous Miss Milner in Elizabeth Inchbald’s novel A Simple Story (1791). There, she purchases books of chemistry and Latin at an auction. Upon being admonished by the austere Sandford for spending money on books that she can neither read nor understand, Miss Milner offers the following defence: ‘“Can’t I, Mr Sandford? but I assure you, you will be vastly pleased with them when you see how elegantly they are bound.”’102 Her response perfectly encapsulates the image of the superficial female reader, obsessed with surface niceties at the expense of intellectual content. By the time of Dibdin’s Bibliomania, the gender roles that make this scene recognisable as a generic example of ‘irresponsible’ female reading have undergone a reversal. Further evidence for this turnaround in gender expectations is offered by the female characters that feature in Dibdin’s text, whose attitudes towards reading are recognisable from the work of Hays and More. Rather than impressionable readers, they play a regulatory role, urging that reading should be rational and that the

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content of books should take precedence over the form. The following dialogue takes place between the two principal female characters, Almansa and Belinda: ALMAN: . . . for utility and common-sense have always appeared to me a great desideratum among the libraries of your professed bibliomaniacs. BELIN. Yes: – You [men] pride yourselves upon your large paper, and clean, and matchless copies – but you do not dwell quite so satisfactorily upon your useful and profitable volumes – which, surely stand not in need of expensive embellishments. (p. 413)

These readers see through the physical properties of the books they read, employing a rhetoric of simplicity that derides ‘expensive embellishments’. The emphasis on the qualities of ‘utility and common-sense’ ensures that a book’s being ‘profitable’ has less to do with its ‘expensive embellishments’ and more with its intellectual value. Indeed, the comments of Almansa and Belinda recall More’s insistence that women shun the ‘illegitimate’ methods of reading in favour of practices that require a proportionate investment of time and labour. ‘So many pretty temptations’: reading and self-regulation The question this raises is whether Dibdin’s text can be taken as reflective of any meaningful shift in the way that the relationship between women readers and their books was conceptualised. The evidence of the examples I have explored in this chapter gestures towards a narrative of development in which women’s diverse, and sometimes unorthodox, reading practices undergo a disciplinary process. Acts of reading become propelled by the compulsion to internalise, contributing to the development of depths in the self: a prerequisite to the establishment of the ‘domestic woman’ as described by commentators such Nancy Armstrong. This process does not, however, necessarily equate to the formation of a distinctly ‘private’ self. It is driven by ‘diligence and labour’, and a sense of social utility which revolves around readers participating in a ‘legitimate’ transaction between reader and book, in which time and labour are rewarded with knowledge and self-improvement. If, as Andrea Henderson asserts, this period witnessed the ascendancy of commercial forms of identity, the labour-intensive reading

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practices found in the work of Hays and More offer a significant note of resistance. They stand in contrast to the kind of reading outlined in the Lady’s Magazine. By the same logic, they emphasise the intrinsic value of texts, disassociating women readers from the physical forms of books. This is evident in Hays’s engagement with the Lockean tabula rasa in the Memoirs of Emma Courtney. There, the materialist connotations that inform the metaphor of the mind as a blank sheet are taken to their misogynistic extreme by the character of the coxcomb. In her endorsement of a self-regulating subjectivity which is composed of more than the passive accumulation of its reading, Hays exposes, and subsequently discounts, the coxcomb’s views as a fallacious mis-reading of Locke. The contrast between More’s reaction to her copy of ‘Bishop Bonner’s Ghost’ and the ambivalence found in Mr Stanley’s discourse upon books in Coelebs might also be adduced in support of a gradual abatement of the identification of women and the material elements of reading. A concluding example from Jane Austen’s unfinished fragment Sanditon, written in 1817, emphasises this more responsible mode of reading. There, the circulating library, scene of confusion and crisis in the Lady’s Magazine, remains a site of potential peril – one that threatens to lead the novel’s heroine, Charlotte Heywood, astray. It also provides the crucible in which a self-regulating female subject is formed. Playfully described by Austen as offering ‘all the useless things in the World that could not be done without’, the circulating library at Sanditon functions as an economic centre, around which the town itself circulates.103 As such, it provides an opportunity for the kind of commodity consumption that, as the advertisement for Darley’s indicates, was a common feature of contemporary circulating libraries. Yet, amidst ‘so many pretty Temptations’, Charlotte is able to ‘check herself’. Picking up Frances Burney’s Camilla (1796), she reflects: ‘She had not Camilla’s Youth, and had no intention of having her Distress, – so, she turned from the Drawers of rings and Broches repressed farther solicitation and paid for what she bought’.104 As if in response to the Lady’s Magazine’s distress at ‘the impossibility of knowing what [circulating libraries] consist of’, Austen presents a moment of contrived serendipity, as Charlotte happens upon Burney’s Camilla. Rather than being led astray, Charlotte has read and understood the lessons of Burney’s socially responsible fiction. She rejects both the

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opportunity of self-adornment presented by the library’s goods, and the temptation to spend irresponsibly. The circulating library has been transformed into a site in which the female reader proves the benefits of regulated reading, distancing herself from passive impressionability in the process. My next chapter takes up the responsible, labour-intensive modes of reading proposed by some of the writers here. It explores the way in which readers came to be considered as producers, as much as consumers, focusing on the extent to which reading sheds its problematic status by offering women the means of participating in a middle-class work ethic. Notes 1 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), ed. by Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 104. 2 See Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 10–12, and Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 186. 3 Richardson, p. 12. 4 As Joe Bray notes, in the Essay Locke ‘explicitly forges a connection between the materiality of the text and the body’. See Joe Bray, The Female Reader in the English Novel: From Burney to Austen (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 4. 5 Deidre Lynch provides an insightful overview of the meanings of the word ‘character’, which extend from a sense of ‘personality’ to ‘the material and replicable elements from which language . . . was said to be composed’. See Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 30–1. 6 Lynch, p. 34. 7 Ibid., p. 34. For a detailed account of Locke’s interest in the relationship between the compiling of commonplace books and the forming of the self, see Lucia Dacome, ‘Noting the Mind: Commonplace Books and the Pursuit of the Self in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 65:4 (2004), 603–25. 8 Lynch, p. 34. 9 As David Allan notes, commonplace books occupy a space at the interface between privacy and publicity: a space in which ‘an individual’s unique relationship with the wider world helped construct an autonomous and interiorised self’. See David Allan, Commonplace

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10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19

20

21 22 23

24

Imagining women readers Books and Reading in Georgian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 136. John Locke, Of the Conduct of the Understanding (1706), ed. by Thomas Fowler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), p. 45. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 3. Locke, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, p. 45. Ibid., p. 45. Thomas Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (London: T. Cadell Jun. and W. Davies, 1797), pp. 44–5. Ibid., p. 215. Wahrman, p. 187. Lynch, p. 34. Edward Mangin, An Essay on Light Reading, as it may be Supposed to Influence the Moral Conduct and Literary Taste (London: James Carpenter, 1808), pp. 12–13. James Raven notes that ‘the twenty circulating libraries operating in London by 1760 had increased to more than 200 nationwide by 1800’. More recently, William St Clair has proposed that by 1801 there were more like a thousand such libraries in Great Britain – an assertion echoed by David Allan, who suggests that ‘even if there is no agreement as to the total number, there is every reason to think that, by the early nineteenth century, they ran into the thousands’. See James Raven, ‘From Promotion to Proscription: Arrangements for Reading and Eighteenth-Century Libraries’, in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, ed. by James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 175–201 (p. 175); William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 237; Allan, Commonplace Books, p. 14. A comprehensive overview is provided by John Tinnon Taylor, Early Opposition to the English Novel: The Popular Reaction from 1760 to 1830 (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1943). Joseph Robertson, An Essay on the Education of Young Ladies (London: T. Cadell, Junior, and W. Davies, 1798), p. 43. Christabel Coleridge, Charlotte Mary Yonge: Her Life and Letters (London: Macmillan, 1903), p. 111. Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 165. For the emergent value placed upon depths see Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), particularly pp. 125–47.

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25 Anon., ‘Hints on Reading’, Lady’s Magazine, 20 (1789), 79–81; 177–8 (p. 80). Subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text. The claim that ‘all ladies are readers’ is an obvious overstatement, but establishing a historically accurate account of female literacy in this period remains a notoriously difficult, and occasionally contentious, enterprise. J. Paul Hunter notes that ‘evidence about female literacy is hard to come by until the second half of the eighteenth century’, but even after this date figures are based upon the ability to sign one’s name on the marriage application, which became a legal requirement following Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753. See Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 69. For further details, see R. S. Schofield, ‘Dimensions of Illiteracy in England 1750–1850’, in Literacy and Social Development in the West: A Reader, ed. by Harvey J. Graff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 201–13. 26 Paul Keen provides an engaging account of the way in which ‘increasing numbers of books’ generated anxious attempts to organise the knowledge they contained. See Paul Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 86–91. 27 Rolf Engelsing, Der Bürger als Leser: Lesergeschichte in Deutschland 1500–1800 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1974). 28 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 249. 29 Stephen Colclough, ‘Recovering the Reader: Commonplace Books and Diaries as Sources of Reading Experience’, Publishing History, 44 (1998), 5–37 (p. 5); Darnton, p. 249. 30 See Darnton, pp. 249–52. 31 Elizabeth Hamilton, Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Bath: G. and J. Robinson, 1801–2), ii, 264–5. 32 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 76. 33 Ibid., p. 76. 34 Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 57. 35 Ros Ballaster, Margaret Beetham, Elizabeth Frazer and Sandra Hebron, Women’s Worlds: Ideology, Femininity and the Woman’s Magazine (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), p. 71. 36 The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, ed. by Lorna J. Clark (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1997), p. 179 (24 January 1814). 37 Ibid., p. 179.

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38 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 175. According to de Certeau, when reading in silence ‘the body withdraws itself from the text in order to come into contact with it only through the mobility of the eye . . . One index of this: the methods of speed reading’ (p. 176). 39 As Lorna J. Clark notes, Burney ‘often read a work within weeks or even days of publication’ and her ‘instinct for quality in novels is remarkable’. See The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, p. lxi. 40 John Brewer’s fascinating account of one late eighteenth-century reader, Anna Larpent, reveals the variety of reading practices outlined in the Lady’s Magazine to have some foundation in truth. Brewer writes that Larpent ‘did not treat all reading with the same degree of seriousness . . . She read while a servant was dressing her hair, or while she was out walking.’ See John Brewer, ‘Reconstructing the Reader: Prescriptions, Texts and Strategies in Anna Larpent’s Reading’, in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, pp. 226–45 (p. 240). 41 Armstrong, p. 75. 42 Ballaster et al., p. 74. 43 John Brewer, ‘“The Most Polite Age and the Most Vicious”: Attitudes towards Culture as a Commodity, 1660–1800’, in The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. by Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 341–61 (p. 356). 44 For instance, see ‘The Progress of Beauty’ on Diana’s ‘artificial face’ and ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed’ in Jonathan Swift: The Complete Poems, ed. by Pat Rogers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), pp. 192–5. 45 Armstrong, p. 76. 46 Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century: Some Questions about Evidence and Analytic Procedure’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29:1 (1996), 97–109 (p. 104). 47 Anon., Darley’s Circulating Library, Queen-Street, Town of Portsea ([Portsmouth]: W. Mowbray, [1790]). 48 Anon., The Use of Circulating Libraries Considered; With Instructions for Opening and Conducting a Library, Either Upon a Large or Small Plan (London: J. Hamilton; Bromley: T. Wilson, 1797), p. 35. 49 The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1989), v: A Vindication of the Rights of Men, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Hints, p. 144. 50 Ibid., v, 259.

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51 Ibid., v, 256. 52 Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), pp. 89–90. 53 The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, v, 256, 255. 54 Bray, p. 13. 55 Andrea K. Henderson, Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 7. 56 Ibid., p. 39. 57 Locke, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, p. 45. 58 Henderson, pp. 56–7. 59 William Hazlitt, ‘On the Education of Women’ (1815), in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. by P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1931), xx, 41. 60 Hazlitt, ‘On Reading Old Books’ (1821), in The Complete Works, xii, 220. 61 See William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. by A. R. Braunmuller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), I.7.34. William Godwin, ‘Of Servants’ (1797), in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. by Mark Philp and others, 7 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1993), v: Educational and Literary Writings, ed. by Pamela Clemit, p. 169. 62 Hazlitt, ‘On Reading Old Books’, in The Complete Works, xii, 222. 63 For an extended discussion of Hazlitt’s problematic relationship to female readers see Richard De Ritter, ‘“In Their Newest Gloss”: William Hazlitt on Reading, Gender, and the Problems of Print Culture’, The Hazlitt Review, 3 (2010), 25–37. 64 Terry Lovell, ‘Subjective Powers? Consumption, the Reading Public, and Domestic Woman in Early Eighteenth-Century England’, in The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800, pp. 23–41 (p. 31). 65 Ibid., p. 31. 66 Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London: Routledge, 1993), p. ix. 67 Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), ed. by Eleanor Ty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 10. Subsequent references are provided parenthetically in the text. 68 According to the OED, both of these definitions were in use during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 69 James Thompson, Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 46. 70 Mary Hays, ‘On the Influence of Authority, and Custom of the Female Mind and Manners’, in Letters and Essays, Moral, and Miscellaneous (London: T. Knott, 1793), p. 21

52 71 72 73 74

75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

83 84 85

86 87 88

89

Imagining women readers Ibid., pp. 19–20. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 20. Frank Whitson Fetter, Development of British Monetary Orthodoxy 1797–1875 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 12. Thompson, p. 45. Mary Hays, Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (London: J. Johnson and J. Bell, 1798), pp. 255–6. Hays, ‘Letter to Mrs. —— on Reading Romances, &c.’, in Letters and Essays, p. 86. Ibid., p. 90. Robertson, p. 43. Hays, ‘Letter to Mrs. ——’, in Letters and Essays, p. 88. This idea will be further discussed in my next chapter. Thompson, p. 146. On the ‘morality of improvement’ see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), pp. 60–7. See Siskin, The Work of Writing, pp. 56–7. Hays, ‘Letter to Mrs. ——’, in Letters and Essays, pp. 97–8. Frances Power Cobbe, cited in Valerie Sanders (ed.), Records of Girlhood: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Women’s Childhoods (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 189. Ibid., p. 189. Anon., ‘On Novel-Reading’, The Lady’s Magazine, 28 (1797), 253–4 (p. 253). Miriam L. Wallace, ‘Mary Hays’s “Female Philosopher”: Constructing Revolutionary Subjects’, in Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution, ed. by Adriana Craciun and Kari E. Lokke (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001), pp. 233–60 (p. 233). Kathryn Sutherland describes More as purveying a distinctive brand of ‘counter-revolutionary feminism’. See ‘Hannah More’s CounterRevolutionary Feminism’ in Revolution in Writing: British Literary Responses to the French Revolution, ed. by Kelvin Everest (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), pp. 27–64. Anne K. Mellor supports this view; in a ‘deliberately provocative’ gesture, she labels More a ‘revolutionary reformer’. See Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 14. Kevin Gilmartin offers an excellent account of the political complexity of More’s works, concluding that she remains both ‘a reformer’ and ‘a reactionary’. See Kevin Gilmartin, Writing Against Revolution: Literary Conservatism

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91

92

93

94 95 96

97

98

99

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in Britain, 1790–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 69. The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. by W. S. Lewis and others, 48 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1937– 83), xxxi: Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with Hannah More, Lady Browne, Lady George Lennox, Lady Mary Coke, Anne Pitt, Lady Hervey, Lady Sufolk, Mary Hamilton (Mrs John Dickenson), ed. by W. S. Lewis, Robert A. Smith and Charles H. Bennett (1961), p. 316 (27 July 1789). T. J. Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature. A Satirical Poem in Four Dialogues. With Notes, 5th edn, rev. and corr. (London: T. Becket, 1798), p. 35, n. x. Ina Ferris, ‘Bibliographic Romance: Bibliophilia and the BookObject’, Romantic Circles Praxis Series, www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/ libraries/ferris/ferris.html [accessed 1 September 2013] (para. 5 of 13). Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education. With a View of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent Among Women of Rank and Fortune, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies, 1799), i, 160. Subsequent references are given parenthetically within the text. For an account of the significance of the anthology genre in the late eighteenth century, following the end of perpetual copyright in 1774, see Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 67–104. Locke, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, p. 45. Price, p. 75. Hannah More, Coelebs in Search of a Wife: Comprehending Observations on Domestic Habits and Manners, Religion and Morals, 5th edn, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1809), ii, 154. Allan, p. 258. See also St Clair, pp. 182–5, Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1957), pp. 277–8; and James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 320–50. Philip Connell, ‘Bibliomania: Book Collecting, Cultural Politics, and the Rise of Literary Heritage in Romantic Britain’, Representations, 71 (2000), 24–47 (p. 25). A more recent account of bibliomania, which traces its eighteenth-century origins, is provided in Paul Keen’s Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, pp. 82–101. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Bibliomania; or Book-Madness, a Bibliographical Romance, 4th edn (London: Chatto & Windus, 1876), p. 11. The text I refer to is a reprint of the third edition, which

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100 101 102 103

104

Imagining women readers comprises the second edition from 1811, along with an introduction and supplements appended in 1842. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text. Connell, p. 25. Lynch, p. 149. Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story (1791), ed. by J. M. S. Tompkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1988), p. 146. Jane Austen, Sanditon, in Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon, ed. by James Kinsley and John Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 316. Ibid., p. 316.

2

‘Wholesome labour’: the work of reading

Wives of the middle and upper classes increasingly became idle drones. They turned household management over to stewards, reduced their reproductive responsibilities by contraceptive measures, and passed their time in such occupations as novel-reading, theatre-going, card-playing and formal visits. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–18001 It is an old, but a very true observation, that the human mind must ever be employed. A relish for reading, or any of the fine arts, should be cultivated very early in life; and those who reflect can tell, of what importance it is for the mind to have some resource in itself, and not to be entirely dependant [sic] on the senses for employment and amusement. If it unfortunately is so, it must submit to meanness, and often to vice, in order to gratify them. Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: with Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life2

In the first of the above quotations, Lawrence Stone retells what Amanda Vickery calls a ‘resonant tale of a female descent into indolence and luxury’.3 As John Sekora notes, ‘luxury’ has long been associated with women and the feminine, and its eighteenth-century manifestation as the debilitating consequence of commercial success proves no exception to this rule.4 According to Vickery, however, accounts of a female fall into luxury form an erroneous narrative that has been repeated by generations of historians and literary critics, who have failed to address the variety of ways in which work

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continued to feature in women’s lives.5 Mary Poovey, for instance, describes women’s exclusion from ‘the competitive spirit that was rapidly transforming every other sector of society’ as ‘one of the fundamental contradictions of bourgeois ideology’.6 For Vickery, this is less a contradiction and more a fallacy, which demands revision rather than repetition. Similarly, the connection that Stone makes between indolence and novel-reading has often been accepted as axiomatic. Naomi Tadmor describes how ‘the rebukes of eighteenth-century moralists have been elevated to the status of an historical fact’.7 For Tadmor, revising this historical narrative extends to a reconsideration of the association between novelreading and inactivity. With reference to the letters and diaries of two eighteenth-century families, she demonstrates that reading ‘was connected not to idleness, listlessness or frivolity but to a routine of work and of religious discipline’.8 The second of the above quotations is taken from Mary Wollstonecraft’s first published work, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: with Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life (1787). At first glance, it appears to endorse Tadmor’s thesis. Reading is represented as more than an adjunct to idleness, taking the guise of mental ‘employment’. However, Wollstonecraft gives the impression that such acts of reading are performed not within ‘a routine of work’ but against a backdrop of inactivity and dissipation. The more forcefully she argues against female indolence, and the ‘vice’ and ‘meanness’ to which it leads, the more she emphasises the extent to which it features in women’s lives. Consequently, Wollstonecraft does little to mute the ‘resonant tale’ that associates middle-class women with ‘luxurious corruption’.9 She does, however, propose that women can dissociate themselves from the degradations of fashionable society, through a version of Lockean possessive individualism. It is important, she states, ‘for the mind to have some resource in itself’. In the process, Wollstonecraft offers an example of Nancy Armstrong’s model of the ‘domestic woman’, who is valued not by ‘the accoutrements of title and status’ but by her ‘essential qualities of mind’.10 Harriet Guest has sought to rectify the idea that late eighteenthcentury femininity was founded against a backdrop of inactivity. She challenges the separation of labour and leisure into discrete, gendered categories:

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In the early [eighteenth] century, virtuous femininity is often identified in privacy, and in freedom from all but pious desires and ambitions, but by the end of the century virtue is identified more closely with industriousness, which can involve the demand that middle-class women should participate in or at least mimic the forms of productive labour.11

Guest’s comments reveal the way in which the values of civic virtue could be adapted by bourgeois society, so as to depict women leading the attack upon luxury, rather than enabling and perpetuating it.12 In place of all-out exclusion from the commercial public sphere, Guest proposes that women were engaged in a restaging of economic models through forms of labour situated within a domestic context. But what form should this participation in, or mimicking of, productive labour take? This chapter explores the extent to which the activity of reading facilitates a system of mental economy, enabling the restaging of labour that Guest identifies. Whereas Stone places reading within a procession of unproductive leisure activities, this chapter draws attention to the existence of a more complicated version of ‘domestic’ femininity in the conduct literature of the period: one defined in relation, rather than opposition, to the public discourses of work and productivity. A ‘work ethic of the mind’ In Desire and Domestic Fiction, Nancy Armstrong describes how authors of conduct books renounced ‘the idea of female labour’ while simultaneously warning their readers about ‘the dangers of leisure’.13 Similarly, she notes that ‘[i]t is a curious thing that even though conduct books represented aristocratic behaviour as the very antithesis of the domestic woman, they never once exalted labour’.14 On the face of it, Hannah More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799) appears to bear out Armstrong’s assertion. Yet, Armstrong’s statement fails to consider the influence that ‘the idea of female labour’, rather than labour itself, exerts upon the organising logic of texts such as the Strictures. In a suggestive phrase, Mitzi Myers describes More’s text as promulgating ‘a puritan work ethic of the mind’, and it is precisely by identifying with an ethic of industriousness that More is able to combat ‘the dangers of leisure’.15 Throughout the Strictures, More imagines the nation’s women in terms that anticipate Lawrence

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Stone’s ‘idle drones’. Their leisured lives are figured in terms of a debilitating illness: a ‘softness’ that is attributed to ‘that indolence of spirit which is fostered by indulging in seducing books’ and the ‘general habits of fashionable life’.16 Drawing an analogy between ‘the mental and bodily conformation of women’, More prescribes an appropriate cure for such maladies, based upon educational stimulation: The instructor should therefore imitate the physician. If the latter prescribe bracing medicines for a body of which delicacy is the disease, the former would do well to prohibit relaxing reading for a mind which is already of too soft a texture, and should strengthen its feeble tone by invigorating reading. (i, 163)

Both body and mind are susceptible to the same symptom of an excessive sensibility: a debilitating ‘delicacy’, the offspring of indolence. More’s account of the ‘feeble tone’ of the weakened mind derives from the medical discourse of authors such as George Cheyne who, writing against the ‘English Malady’, identifies ‘a firm fibre tone’ as ‘the optimal condition’ of the body.17 Applying Cheyne’s logic to the female mind, More proposes a cure which identifies ‘invigorating reading’ as a kind of tonic, capable of reenergising the enervated minds of the nation’s women. This restorative dynamic is also at work in Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), a text from which More quotes directly within the Strictures, and which offers a blueprint for her advocacy of ‘invigoration’.18 Like More, Burke proposes that indolence is disruptive to the health of individuals, resulting in the compulsion to undertake strenuous acts of exertion: Providence has so ordered it, that a state of rest and inaction . . . should be productive of many inconveniencies; that it should generate such disorders, as may force us to have recourse to some labour, as a thing absolutely requisite to make us pass our lives with tolerable satisfaction; for the nature of rest is to suffer all the parts of our bodies to fall into a relaxation, that not only disables the members from performing their functions, but takes away the vigorous tone of fibre which is requisite for carrying on the natural and necessary secretions.19

The remedy that he proposes will rouse individuals from their torpor is ‘exercise or labour, and labour is a surmounting of

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difficulties, an exerting of the contracting power of the muscles; and as such resembles pain, which exists in tension or contraction, in everything but degree’.20 The economy of intense feeling that Burke outlines is reflected in More’s account of the ‘feeble tone’ of a mind used to nothing more demanding than ‘relaxing reading’. Just as Burke recommends a bracing programme of physical exercise, More champions the mental labour of ‘invigorating reading’. Similarly, while disparaging the ‘pleasant but desultory’ experience of reading essays, she proclaims that ‘the mind’ should be ‘trained to severer exercise . . . stretching its powers in the wholesome labour of consecutive investigation’ (ii, 58). Reading, then, is depicted as an act of sublime effort for women. As such, it is an activity that challenges the separation of labour and leisure. Feminine virtue remains located within privacy and interiority, yet it is also able to transcend the boundaries that these terms imply, and to identify with an ideology that places value in acts of labour. By promoting a ‘work ethic of the mind’, More is able to recast a middle-class ethic of productive industry into a suitably feminine form. With her emphasis upon internalised, mental labour, More participates in what Roy Porter describes as a process of ‘psychological sublimation’, by which ‘mind was to be cordoned off from body’.21 But this strategy is inherently problematic. More’s Cheyne-esque diagnosis of minds ‘of too soft a texture’ takes physiological symptoms and applies them directly to the female mind. Nancy Armstrong usefully describes how conduct literature attacked forms of femininity which ‘located value in the material body’, and the Strictures offers abundant evidence in favour of this hypothesis.22 What is important, More states, is not ‘the material substance . . ., the body and limbs’, but ‘the immaterial and immortal mind’ and ‘the heart’ (i, 56). Yet, the analogy she draws between the mind and the body suggests the difficulty of maintaining this division: even acts of intellectual labour cannot avoid echoing more public, and more physical, forms of exertion. One of the principal difficulties that More must surmount is that of finding a discourse which can transcend the language of the body. Seemingly, at every point at which she extols the labour of the mind she encounters metaphors of materiality. For reading to be beneficial, she writes, not only must it be ‘invigorating’, it should also ‘exercise the reasoning faculties’ and ‘brace the intellectual stamina’ (i, 163, 164, 165). For both Burke and Cheyne, such

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language refers to physiology, rather than psychology. We have already seen More make the analogy between body and mind: the risk she faces is that of eroding the boundary between the two. To prevent this possibility, she locates the sense of effort within the mind, with the emphasis placed upon ‘the intellectual stamina’. Consequently, even as More brings the body into view, it is suppressed within the same gesture – an act of occlusion that is essential to maintaining feminine propriety. Elsewhere, More self-consciously appropriates the vocabulary of the sublime in order to emphasise exertion while devaluing the material body. In Coelebs in Search of a Wife, the character of Mr Stanley describes the ability of poetry to ‘raise and to purify the amusements of mankind’. It should, he comments, ‘exalt pleasures, which being purely intellectual, may help to exclude such as are gross, in beings so addicted to sensuality’.23 Although referring to both male and female readers, the impulse remains the same: the pleasures of reading are ‘purely intellectual’; the ‘gross . . . sensuality’ of the material body is firmly ‘excluded’. Such forms of reading promise the intense, purgative effect of the Burkean sublime. The ‘sensuality’ that they are intended to displace is explicitly described as the result of Britain’s status as a successful commercial society: ‘I believe,’ said Sir John, ‘that an overflowing commerce, and the excessive opulence it has introduced, though favourable to all the splendours of art, and mechanic ingenuity, yet have lowered the standard of taste, and debilitated the mental energies. They are advantageous to luxury, but fatal to intellect. It has . . . communicated a torpor to the imagination, and enervated our intellectual vigour.’24

In this light, the ideological significance of More’s appropriation of the sublime begins to take shape. It is both a sublimated version of middle-class industry and a warning against the potentially deleterious consequences of commercial excess. At the same time, it reflects a significant attempt to locate selfhood in the intellect rather than the material body. Tom Furniss has argued that, by valorising labour and exertion, Burke’s Enquiry articulates a similarly individualistic middle-class identity, which is dependent upon the repudiation of the vitiating effects of luxury.25 Following this line of argument, More’s theorisation of reading can be seen to

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participate in the consolidation of this identity, purging readers of the excesses of sensibility and commerce through acts of sublime effort.26 The specifically gendered slant of the Burkean sublime – which constituted a ‘masculine, upwardly-mobile ethos’ – is, however, passed over by More.27 The model of femininity that she proposes thus includes an unacknowledged trace of a more typically masculine identity, which is located in acts of physical exertion. Within the Strictures, More is faced with the challenge of recasting this middle-class ethic of productive industry into a suitably feminine form. Additionally, she must negotiate not only the burgeoning sexual division of labour, which categorised work as ‘a male preserve’, but also the categorisation of labour as either intellectual or manual.28 In order to gain an understanding of the ways in which these problems were played out, and to fully comprehend More’s consideration of the relationship between labour, the production of subjectivity, and the body of the reader, it is necessary to turn to Burke’s Enquiry. For Burke, the interaction between the mind and body remains a source of mystery: ‘the understanding . . . makes use of some fine corporeal instruments in its operation; though what they are, and where they are, may be somewhat hard to settle’.29 While the exact nature of this relationship is uncertain, Burke is less equivocal when describing its essentially antagonistic character. Exercising the mind, he states, ‘induces a remarkable lassitude of the whole body’; conversely, ‘great bodily labour, or pain, weakens, and sometimes actually destroys the mental faculties’.30 Clifford Siskin attributes this antagonism to ‘Burke’s quest to map out how humans work’, which ‘leads him to work itself, which he divides up and hierarchizes into what we would now call manual and intellectual labour’.31 While, for Burke, labour is conducive to the sublime, in the Strictures reading must take the form of a labour which is sublimating, in its substitution of the mind for the body. But achieving a seamless separation of the manual and the intellectual is evidently a difficult task: a point that is true of both the Strictures and the Enquiry. Burke’s attempts to mystify the workings of the mind, by locating it within ‘fine corporeal instruments’ whose substance and location are ‘somewhat hard to settle’, illustrates the difficulties of severing the mind from the body in such conceptualisations of identity. The air of obscurity that Burke lends to the ‘understanding’ cannot eradicate the fact that it is still

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ultimately ‘corporeal’. Similarly, More faces the challenge of finding a discourse that can transcend the language of the body: seemingly, at every point at which she extols the labour of the mind she encounters metaphors of materiality. For instance, one account of mental exertion describes how The mind, by always applying itself to objects below its level, contracts and shrinks itself to the size, and lowers itself to the level of the object about which it is conversant: while the mind which is active expands and raises itself, grows larger by exercise, abler by diffusion, and richer by communication. (ii, 53)

The possibility that the mind might ‘raise’ itself suggests a search for a suitably metaphysical image of thought, uninterrupted by the body. But, in striving to depict an act of intellectual transcendence, the mind itself becomes defined by its materiality: it ‘contracts’, ‘shrinks’, ‘expands’ and ‘grows larger by exercise’. The mind is revealed to operate in a manner analogous to the body, responding to exercise by variations in its corporeal form. Another instance sees More quite explicitly attempt to prevent the body from impinging upon her description of the mind, proposing a dichotomy between ‘intellect’ and ‘matter’: ‘Serious study serves to harden the mind for more trying conflicts; it lifts the reader from sensation to intellect; it abstracts her from the world and its vanities; it fixes a wandering spirit, and fortifies a weak one; it divorces her from matter’ (i, 165). Yet here too, the materiality of the mind stubbornly persists: attempts to ‘divorce [it] from matter’ serve only to make its physicality more tangible, as it becomes ‘harden[ed]’ by study. At the very moment that More seeks to assert the primacy of mind over matter, her rhetoric forces her to concede the interdependence of the language of the mind and that of the body. As Charles Rzepka has highlighted, attempts to conceive the ‘self as mind’ are always informed by a ‘corporeal bias’.32 Similarly, the work of Alan Richardson has helped to place this tendency in a historical and scientific context. The developments in medical science that he charts provide a physiological foundation for the assertion that ‘the mind is known only in and through the body’.33 Throughout the Strictures we see More grappling – not always successfully – with the process of ‘psychological sublimation’ that Roy Porter describes. If, as Nancy Armstrong asserts, middle-class femininity depends upon the

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subordination of ‘the body to a set of mental processes’, the Strictures allows us to glimpse this act of repression as it occurs.34 A similar dynamic is at play in the work of More’s contemporaries. Miss S. Hatfield’s Letters on the Importance of the Female Sex: With Observations on their Manners, and on Education (1803) is less well known than More’s Strictures, but it participates in a similar programme of educational reform. Little is known of Hatfield who, as the title-page of the Letters indicates, also published a novel entitled Caroline; or, She lives in Hope (1801). In her introduction to a modern reprint of the Letters, Pam Morris describes Hatfield as a cautious advocate of improvements in female education.35 Like Wollstonecraft, Hatfield suggests that women possess sufficient leisure time for the manner of its disposal to become a matter of serious consideration. With ironic overstatement, she proposes that books provide ‘an antidote to that prevailing malady – the tediousness of time’ (pp. 118–19). Like Wollstonecraft and More before her, she depicts the process of education as encompassing a narrative of personal struggle, founded upon a principle of industriousness. In one (rather convoluted) sentence, she writes: If in the various branches of Education, appointed by instructors for our study and practice, we not only enjoy their approbation, but ourselves also exquisite pleasure, in conquering those difficulties we find in the way, and become more enamoured, the more we acquire a knowledge of the object of our pursuit, how much greater delight must be produced by a progress in moral virtues, when the mind becomes ennobled, refined, and spiritualized. (p. 23)

In a manner reminiscent of More in the Strictures, Hatfield outlines a process of education that participates in a project of ‘psychological sublimation’. While More stumbles into metaphors of materiality when describing the mind, Hatfield appears to negotiate this difficulty with more success: the harder the mind works, the more ‘spiritualized’ it becomes. She also describes another product of this process: a sense of pleasure, a consequence of education discussed below. Nevertheless, when articulating the mind’s ‘progress’ in more detail, Hatfield encounters contradictions. In a passage that appears greatly indebted to the Strictures, she resorts to an analogy between the body and the mind:

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Imagining women readers As the body cannot acquire strength and vigor without regular and wholesome exercise, neither can the mind attain sufficient force, unless occupied in the pursuit of such studies as have the power to fortify it. When enervated by frivolity, and directed by caprice, it must remain deficient in solidity . . . Such minds are sensitive, without the power of resistance, yielding to every touch. They are without resolution to defend themselves, or force to combat opinions, however dangerous, when presented in the flowery garb of eloquence. (p. 44)

Clearly, Hatfield fears for minds that are deficient in ‘strength and vigor’. Lacking ‘the power of resistance’, their material composition is rendered starkly visible: they are ‘sensitive . . . yielding to every touch’. Therefore, the mind becomes indistinguishable from any other sensuous, even eroticised, organ of the body. And yet, the favourable alternative that Hatfield presents is characterised not by its ‘spiritualiz[ation]’ but by its ‘strength and vigor’: the quality of ‘solidity’ becomes the most desirable attribute of a woman’s mind. Like More, Hatfield discovers that even, in the writing of its subordination, the body is hard to escape. While acts of ‘psychological sublimation’ are necessary for women of the middle ranks, in order to distance themselves from both aristocratic excess and the spectre of manual labour, the Strictures is marked by a symbolic return of the repressed. At the point of its expulsion, when More would relocate meaningful acts of labour to the mind, the body resurfaces, imposing itself upon her text. Perhaps it is necessary for it to do so. The discourse of physical exercise offers the means of making mental exertion visible: it provides palpable proof of the benefits of reading, exculpating readers from the charge of indolence. As a result, the turn to an identity defined by its intellectual depths is rendered visible. The act of reading operates as a phantom-like form of labour, providing an antidote to aristocratic luxury while remaining troubled by the spectre of physical labour, from which it cannot entirely escape. The consequent ratification of middle-class female identity within the conduct-book writing of both More and Hatfield is continuously reminded of its own construction.

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‘Something more productive’: Priscilla Wakefield and Vicesimus Knox Published just a year before the Strictures, Priscilla Wakefield’s Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex; with Suggestions for its Improvement (1798) calls for a similar reformation of female manners. Like More, Wakefield requests that women divert their energies into activities beneficial to public welfare, asserting a link between the habits of the individual and those of the nation: There appears then no moral impediment to prevent women from the application of their talents to purposes of utility; on the contrary, an improvement in public manners must infallibly result from it; as their influence over the other sex is universally acknowledged, it may be boldly asserted, that a conversion of their time from trifling and unproductive employments, to those that are both useful and profitable, would operate as a check upon luxury, dissipation, and prodigality, and retard the progress of that general dissoluteness, the offspring of idleness, which is deprecated by all political writers as the sure fore-runner of national decay.36

Radically divergent from More’s aims, however, is Wakefield’s advocacy of women of all ranks of society undertaking forms of ‘lucrative employment’ (p. 123). While images of work appear throughout the Strictures in variously sublimated guises, their lack of financial remuneration means that such acts remain distinct from the kind of paid labour Wakefield has in mind. With the precision of a botanist (a subject on which she also published), Wakefield divides society into four distinct social classes, and outlines a corresponding set of curricula designed to expand female education. For women of the ‘first class’ of society – which includes ‘the nobility, and all those who . . . rival them in power’ – a wide range of reading materials are deemed suitable, including poetry, geography, chemistry, botany and gardening (pp. 63, 91–2). Wakefield’s only requirement is that any works read will ‘fill up a leisure opportunity with innocence and usefulness, and become a pleasing antidote to the indolent habit of loitering away time in an unprofitable manner, or what is worse in dissipation’ (p. 92). Despite the emphasis on ‘usefulness’, these acts of reading are unaccompanied by any sense of labour. Instead, they are effective only in their ability to nullify the

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prospect of indolence: no further exertion, or sense of productivity, is required. The significance of this becomes more apparent when compared with the more exacting demands Wakefield makes upon women of the ‘second class’ of society, which consists of those who, ‘by the application of their talents to learning, commerce, manufactures or agriculture, procure a respectable subsistence approaching to opulence’ (p. 63). Through this sense of ‘application’, Wakefield conveys an image of the self-made middle classes. The work ethic that defines this social group extends to its reading habits, which are characterised by a greater sense of agency than those of the ‘first class’. Wakefield states that ‘to those who love reading, a rational amusement is never wanting . . . Innumerable are the pursuits, to which a mind liberally instructed, may recur for the indulgence of fancy, or the more serious employment of the intellectual powers’ (p. 121). While Wakefield sees no harm in ‘the indulgence of fancy’, it is the more rigorous conception of reading as a ‘serious employment of the intellectual powers’ that she claims is of greater value. She continues: The choice of amusements is a test, which will always distinguish a solid from a superficial understanding; for those pleasures which have no other merit, than that of passing away time harmlessly, may please the unreflecting; but will not satisfy minds of a higher order, who seek something more productive, even in these hours devoted to relaxation. (p. 122)

This passage, with its insistence that acts of reading are ‘solid’ rather than ‘superficial’, anticipates the demands More makes a year later in the Strictures. It also encapsulates the work ethic that defines Wakefield’s conception of the upwardly mobile middle classes, who progress by virtue of their ‘application’. Forms of reading which merely ‘pass away time’, while acceptable in themselves, are diminished in value when compared with those which inspire individuals to acts of self-improving ‘reflection’. While Wakefield refers to a group that ranks second to the aristocracy in terms of the social hierarchy, she also implies the existence of a distinct, though closely related, hierarchy of moral and social virtue. With their greater propensity to engage in ‘productive’ forms of reading, Wakefield identifies such readers as the possessors of ‘minds of a higher order’. Like Hannah More’s in the

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Strictures and Mary Wollstonecraft’s in the Vindication, Wakefield’s depiction of reading celebrates the virtues of energetic labour, which confirm the moral superiority of the middling ranks. While More’s Strictures highlights the implicit tensions within Guest’s suggestion that women ‘mimic’ forms of labour, Wakefield’s Reflections offers a reconciliation of labour and leisure. Even in ‘hours devoted to relaxation’, ‘productive’ reading can take place. Similarly, ‘those who love reading’ are offered both a ‘rational amusement’ and the ‘serious employment of the intellectual powers’. In his Essays Moral and Literary (1778), Vicesimus Knox is similarly concerned with the relationship between reading, leisure and labour. In the essay ‘On Novel Reading’, Knox discourages the ‘youth’ of both sexes from reading novels, which, he claims, ‘fix attention so deeply, and afford so lively a pleasure, that the mind so accustomed to them, cannot submit to the painful task of serious study’.37 Elsewhere, Knox is keen to point out that some forms of reading can reconcile the opposition between reading for pleasure and the application of ‘serious study’. It is not women readers who achieve this state of equilibrium, but professional men, seeking to fill their leisure time: But what shall [men] read during the interval of half an hour, uninterrupted perhaps by the prattle of children, or the impertinence of visitors, or the avocations of business? not a long and tedious treatise, divided and subdivided, and requiring at least the unsuspended attention of half a day, to fully comprehend the work. They seek relaxation, but in this they find a task; irksome, because it requires close application; and unimproving, because their application can only be desultory. But hard indeed must be his lot, who, in the most active and most dissipated scenes of life, cannot bestow the small space of time required in the perusal of an Essay of a few pages.38

Like Wakefield, Knox suggests that periods of leisure, or ‘relaxation’, must not be squandered: some ‘application’ must be undertaken. Yet, should this too closely resemble the ‘avocations of business’, it becomes ‘irksome’. In a moment of self-promotion, Knox proposes that the solution to this dilemma can be found in the genre he employs: the essay. Despite Knox’s reservations about the demands of ‘long and tedious treatise[s]’, contemporary accounts of reading undertaken between the ‘avocations of business’ suggest that individuals were able to switch between labour and leisure with relative ease. When working as a tailor in

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the early nineteenth century, the radical reformer Francis Place ‘adhered steadily’ to his practice of reading ‘for two or three hours every night after the business of the day was closed’. Rather than this being ‘irksome’, Place writes that he had ‘obtained the power of abstraction to a considerable extent’, and was consequently able to ‘dismiss all thought of business when it was closed for the day, and could therefore go to my book quite unoccupied with any thing else’.39 Similarly, the Aberdeenshire shopkeeper Adam Mackie describes how ‘during the intervals of business’ he read historical works as well as a range of novels, particularly those of Walter Scott.40 While these individuals may not be representative, their accounts demonstrate none of the discomfort anticipated by Knox: both Place and Mackie display the ability to move fluidly between their work and their reading.41 Nevertheless, their reading performs the same function that Knox imagines essays fulfilling: by such reading, he notes, ‘idleness [is] rendered attentive, and the listless moments of leisure improved with the advantages of study, unmixed with the toil of formal application’.42 Although it falls short of the ‘toil’ of ‘business’, reading staves off indolence by converting leisure time into a period of productivity. For these authors, then, reading promises to nullify the perceived ‘dangers of leisure’.43 Both Knox and Wakefield imagine lives which alternate between one’s professional obligations and periods of ‘relaxation’. However, More is less amenable to such a routine. Indeed, the term ‘relaxation’ itself (which Knox and Wakefield both use) stands awkwardly within the physiologically based discourse employed by More. The deleterious effects of ‘relaxation’ are described by Burke, who states that it prevents ‘parts of our bodies . . . from performing their functions, [and] takes away the vigorous tone of fibre’.44 Unlike Knox and Wakefield, More does not envisage her readership engaging in the kind of professional work that makes intervals of ‘relaxation’ necessary. While Knox views the absence of labour as conducive to pleasure, More sees such moments as fostering a wasteful indolence. Accordingly, she finds happiness in the performance of work, rather than in periods of non-productivity. As we have seen in Coelebs, the mental exertion offered by poetry is accompanied by its ability to ‘exalt pleasures’. The intimate connection between labour and pleasure is more comprehensively theorised in the Strictures:

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The tree of knowledge, as a punishment perhaps, for its having been at first unfairly tasted, cannot now be climbed without difficulty; and this very circumstance serves afterwards not only to furnish literary pleasures, but moral advantages: for the knowledge which is acquired by unwearied assiduity is lasting in the possession, and sweet to the possessor; both perhaps in proportion to the cost and labour of the acquisition. (i, 156)

The ‘pleasure’ that More describes is produced by, and mediated through, the ‘application’ of ‘labour’. Indeed, its intensity, or ‘sweetness’, proves proportional to the level of labour undertaken. Similarly, Hatfield describes how individuals experience ‘exquisite pleasure, in conquering those difficulties [which] we find in the way’, noting that we ‘become more enamoured, the more we acquire a knowledge of the object of our pursuit’ (p. 23). As Gary Kelly notes, within this period an ‘emphasis on utility . . . is joined to an increasing concern that reading be practical and serve personal and social industriousness’. It is for this reason that the novel – as a form of reading that offered ‘mere entertainment’ – was treated with ‘suspicion . . . amongst the middle class’.45 Such views are apparent in the Strictures. However, More’s participation in this project of cultural reformation is distinguished by a subtle act of displacement. While she shares the suspicion of ‘mere entertainment’ that Kelly describes, she ensures that the pleasure associated with the novel is not eradicated, but relocated to those utilitarian acts of ‘industriousness’. Wakefield also explores the extent to which acts of mental labour both produce and regulate pleasure. In doing so, she reveals the distinctive middle-class bias which informs the ‘suspicion of mere entertainment’ that Kelly mentions. During her discussion of the amusements of women of the ‘third class of society’ (made up of those ‘whose honest and useful industry raises them above want’), Wakefield’s tone becomes increasingly prescriptive (p. 63). Acknowledging that some may consider her ideas ‘too liberal’, she is careful to ensure that her proposals for educational reform do not transgress the boundaries of social class (p. 147). Nowhere is this more evident than in her discussion of this ‘third’ class of society, where she addresses the reading of drama and fiction: Plays and novels, with every work tending to inflame the passions, and implant sentiments of the omnipotence of love and beauty,

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Curiously, this vehement outburst passes without further comment. Wakefield proceeds to recommend geography and English history as subjects that ‘might also be admitted as an occasional recreation from business’ (p. 144). It seems that the danger of ‘inflame[d] passions’, while an overtly sexual manifestation of disruptive energies, ultimately resides in their potential to distract lower-class women readers from their ‘business’. As we have seen, Wakefield defines social identity by occupation. Should women cease to undertake the very activity that defines them, Wakefield’s hierarchical vision of society, with its delicately balanced gradations of rank, risks tumbling into chaos. Despite the concern excited by the dangerous ‘allurements’ of fiction, Wakefield does not expend such energy warning the ‘higher’ ranks of society in the same way. While the Reflections can seem strikingly liberal in the breadth of its calls for educational reform, this sudden prescriptive turn is indicative of a general unease regarding the impressionability of women of the ‘lesser’ ranks. Indeed, the sexual implications of this passage make visible the way in which the discourse of physiological sensibility is inflected by social class. Ironically, those women who make their living from manual labour must also, as readers, exercise a sublimation of the body, of the kind recommended by Hannah More. Instead of their developing the mental fortitude to withstand such bombardments of vice, these texts must be ‘excluded from their sight’. In this case, reading becomes an impediment, rather than a complement, to labour. Ideally, readers will possess the correct combination of industriousness and disinterestedness: a pairing that only the second rank of society possesses in the requisite proportion. Both the Strictures and the Reflections are underwritten by a middle-class bias which seeks to eliminate aristocratic indolence by promoting an ethic of hard work. However, Wakefield’s insistence that women of all ranks actually undertake acts of remunerated labour is a significant deviation from More’s conservatism. This contrast is nowhere more evident than in their discussions of the relationship between the mind and the body. Whereas More subordinates those acts of labour that bring the body into view,

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Wakefield advocates the interconnection of both mental and physical exercise. Similarly, while Burke’s Enquiry proposes that ‘bodily labour’ can weaken – or even destroy – the ‘mental faculties’ and vice versa, Wakefield boldly states the opposite view: ‘It is an opinion, pretty well established, that the connexion between the mind and the body is of so close and reciprocal a nature, that the health of one materially depends upon the vigorous condition of the other’ (p. 12). Wakefield continues to coopt Burkean rhetoric in those instances when she asserts that both mind and body must be strengthened. In one example, she states that women must ‘rise above the enervating habits of indolent indulgence; let them strengthen their bodies by exercise and their minds by cultivation’ (pp. 79–80). While such rallying cries against the ‘enervating habits’ induced by commercial society would not seem out of place in the Strictures, Wakefield’s dismantling of the primacy of mental exercise over bodily exercise proves far more troubling. It is this hierarchy which, for More, solidifies into recognisably gendered characteristics; constructions of femininity in the Strictures require the subordination of ‘the material substance . . ., the body and limbs’ (my italics) (i, 56). By contrast, Wakefield’s refusal to differentiate between the importance of bodily and mental labour threatens to unsettle notions of gender difference. As if to qualify the radical nature of her proposal, and to reduce the androgynous possibilities it creates, Wakefield states that ‘no apprehensions need be entertained of women becoming too robust’ as their natural inferiority of strength, and the indispositions incident to child-bearing, will too often secure the feminine delicacy of their persons and constitutions, and prevent them from acquiring more vigour than is requisite to the performance of the active duties of the mother and mistress of a family. (p. 14)

Insisting on a set of natural, physiological limits that define gender identity, Wakefield touches upon the way in which, as Kathryn Sutherland puts it, conduct books conflate ‘assumptions of “natural” gender difference with definitions of “proper” or “suitable” behaviour’.46 A ‘natural inferiority of strength’ is the guarantee that ‘secure[s]’ femininity and prevents women from becoming ‘too robust’. It is this essentialist position, with its insistence that gender identity is not contingent upon any external

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factors, which allows Wakefield to safely advocate female labour. And yet, by acknowledging that ‘the connexion between the mind and the body’ is of a ‘close and reciprocal . . . nature’, the possibility that women may acquire ‘more vigour than is requisite’ to their domestic duties remains. The appearance of this slippage perhaps explains More’s decision to deprecate acts of physical labour and to excise the presence of the body from her text. For More, it is a fact of ‘nature’ that the mind can be exercised in isolation from the rest of the body. As a result, her programme of ‘psychological sublimation’ has its basis in a subtle compound of performed propriety and that which More proclaims is ‘natural’. As Sutherland implies, untangling one from the other becomes a difficult task. As we have seen, More is somewhat undermined by the persistent challenge she faces when it comes to conceptualising the mind without reference to the body. If reading allows women to virtuously, if problematically, ‘mimic the forms of productive labour’, the intrusion of the body threatens to blur the line between ‘mimicry’ and full-blown participation. Furthermore, this raises the question of what form the end-product of this phantom-labour might take: an issue that proves to be of considerable vexation. The products of reading Following Adam Smith’s statement that every member of society must ‘contribute his share of productive labour for the good of the whole’, Wakefield asserts that ‘since the female sex is included in the idea of the species’ they too should participate in ‘productive labour’ (pp. 2, 1). While we have seen how reading serves as a salutary form of symbolic labour, the question of its productivity is a more contentious issue. In the text that Wakefield appropriates, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith suggests that some forms of work do little more than serve the demands of luxury, in their failure to create an end-product: ‘[t]he labour of some of the most respectable orders in society is, like that of menial servants, unproductive of any value, and does not fix or realize itself in any permanent subject, or vendible commodity, which endures after that labour is past’.47 Continuing his discussion of servants, Smith writes that the acts they carry out ‘perish in the very instant of their performance, and

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seldom leave any trace or value behind them’.48 Identifying both ‘the most respectable orders in society’ and ‘menial servants’ as practitioners of unproductive labour, Smith makes conspicuous by their absence the members of the intermediary, or middle, classes. Implicitly, he promotes the productive labours of a group comparable to Wakefield’s ‘second class’, who ‘apply’ themselves in areas such as learning, commerce, manufacture and agriculture.49 Indeed, Wakefield’s desire that the reading habits of the nobility merely ‘fill up a leisure opportunity with innocence and usefulness’ lacks the emphasis on productivity found in her account of the reading habits of the ‘second class’. In the Strictures, More demonstrates a similar ambivalence towards reading which, in Smith’s words, ‘does not fix or realize itself in any permanent subject’. She suggests that reading for pleasure is ‘low’ and ‘selfish’, transitory and unproductive. Such reading takes the form of a labour that negates itself, constituting the wasteful idleness that it promises to abolish. In contrast, more vigorous forms of reading leave their ‘traces’ upon the mind: through work it becomes ‘invigorated’, it ‘expands and raises itself, grows larger by exercise, abler by diffusion, and richer by communication’ (ii, 53). Consequently, it might be asserted that women’s mental labour is a transformative act, the product of which is the enhanced mind. In this way, rather than ‘perishing’ in its execution, the work of reading can, in Smith’s words, ‘fix’ itself in a ‘permanent subject’. If this presents an acceptable outcome, Smith’s other favoured product of labour – a ‘vendible commodity’ – is more troubling. In a scathing critique of the marriage market, More is adamant in her disapproval of those who treat women as commodities. ‘Women’, she writes, ‘are not mere portraits’ whose value is ‘determinable by a glance of the eye’ (ii, 162–3). Should the labour women expend upon their minds serve no purpose other than to make them desirable within the marriage market, the autonomy of self-determination granted by education vanishes: woman as the prototype of the ‘modern individual’ is obscured by woman as ‘vendible commodity’.50 More’s disdain for the production of ‘vendible commodit[ies]’ extends even to the creation of anything resembling a saleable item. Should women externalise the product of their educational labours, in the form of writing, they endanger their femininity, by coming into an alarming proximity to a form of professionalism:

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‘[t]heir knowledge is not often like the learning of men, to be reproduced in some literary composition, nor ever in any learned profession . . . The great uses of study are to enable her to regulate her own mind, and to be useful to others’ (ii, 1–2). Despite her own incursions into the literary marketplace, More offers a pointed critique of the kinds of reading that she believes encourage readers to take up writing. The rigorous texts she recommends, including philosophical works by Locke and Bishop Butler, not only ‘brace’ the mind (i, 165) but prevent readers from becoming writers.51 As she notes, there is no ‘fear that this sort of reading will convert ladies into authors’ (i, 169). Unsurprisingly, the ‘sort of reading’ that might encourage this ‘conversion’ is subjected to vehement condemnation: Who are those ever multiplying authors, that with unparalleled fecundity are overstocking the world with their quick succeeding progeny? They are novel writers; the easiness of whose productions is at once the cause of their own fruitfulness, and of the almost infinitely numerous race of imitators to whom they give birth. Such is the frightful facility of this species of composition, that every raw girl while she reads, is tempted to fancy that she can also write. (i, 169–70)

Clifford Siskin has commented upon the ways in which the ‘proliferation’ of print in the eighteenth century impelled readers to become writers.52 He describes this as a mid-eighteenth-century phenomenon, connected with the rise of the periodical genre. More’s late-century reframing of this as a catastrophe specifically connected to the novel genre can perhaps be explained within the context of the period’s publication rates. The statistical analyses of James Raven provide evidence of an ‘upturn in publication in the final third of the century’: an increase marked by ‘unprecedented levels’ of novel publication in the 1780s.53 While this increase can, in part, be ascribed to reprints of popular titles, the 1790s bore witness to the publication of high quantities of new fiction.54 As Raven notes, ‘new novel titles are nearly three times more numerous in 1790 than in 1750’.55 Faced with this profusion of novel-publication, it is not difficult to comprehend More’s fears of the ‘frightful facility’ with which examples of the genre can be reproduced. The alarm this provokes in More is shaped by a Malthusian anxiety, in which the reader-as-writer is characterised in terms of

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an unregulated maternal body, ‘overstocking the world’ without check. This becomes increasingly clear as More describes how The glutted imagination soon overflows with the redundance of cheap sentiment and plentiful incident, and by a sort of arithmetical proportion, is enabled by the perusal of any three novels to produce a fourth; till every fresh production, like the progeny of Banquo, is followed by: Another, and another, and another! (i, 170–1)

In An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Thomas Malthus proposes that the growth of a nation’s population becomes detrimental only when it begins to outstrip the resources available to ensure its subsistence.56 For More, the resources depleted by the increased ‘population’ of novels are the mental and imaginary capital of the nation’s women; the ‘efforts’ of these readers-turned-writers, she comments, ‘grow more and more feeble, if the mind which is continually exhausting itself, be not also continuously replenished’.57 In seeking to restock this capital, women writers consume even more novels, thus sparking a selfperpetuating upward spiral in the production of novels: one marked by a drastic decline in the vigour and energy of the female mind. As a result, the combination of reading and writing proves far from productive for More, who ignores the possibility (presented by Wakefield) that writing might offer a form of serious employment for women. Instead, it obstructs the possibility of women’s participation in forms of mental exertion, for though it may seem a contradiction, yet it will generally be found true, that girls who take to scribbling are the least studious, the least reflecting and the least rational . . . [I]t becomes more gratifying to their natural vanity to be always pouring out their minds on paper, than to be drawing into them fresh ideas from richer sources. The original stock, small perhaps at first, is soon spent.58

Writing, it transpires, represents the inverse of productive labour: it is seen as mis-management of the mental economy, which soon spends its ‘original stock’. Similarly, it objectifies the female mind, flattening and fixing it in a material form on paper. While the language of mental exertion is conducive towards the formation of an identity located in depths, the transition from reading to writing threatens to disrupt this process. As Siskin notes, the conversion of

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readers into authors meant that imaginative labour had a material impact, ‘induc[ing] the flow of capital’.59 Women readers thus became visible participants within a network of economic exchange: a development that would compromise the paradigm of female identity that More hopes to uphold. Rather than directing imaginative labour inwards, in the cause of self-improvement, women’s mental capital is unproductively ‘spent’, while depth of character is reduced to a surface manifestation. If More’s vision of female propriety is to be maintained, it is of the utmost necessity that women should internalise the product of their labour. Even then, however, the idea of reading leaving ‘traces’ upon the mind is capable of taking on a more unsettling manifestation, which disrupts the vision of modern, self-regulating subjectivity outlined in the Strictures. Considering the ‘innocent and impressible young reader’ (i, 37), More describes the ‘lively period of youth, the soft and impressible season’ when ‘the seal cuts deep into the yielding wax, and the impression is more likely to be clear and strong’ (i, 221). The sense of agency, which impels the labour of forming the mind, is sacrificed here. In its place is an image of passivity: ‘yielding wax’, upon which ideas and identity can be stamped. This image of blankness, awaiting external impressions, recalls the Lockean tabula rasa, or even Pope’s description of women as having ‘no Characters at all’, formed of ‘Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear’.60 The appearance of such formulations in the Strictures appears anachronistic, and contrary to More’s view of a system of study that enables women to ‘regulate [their] own mind[s]’ (ii, 2). One consequence of these contrasting conceptualisations is to historicise the rhetoric of identity-formation deployed in the Strictures. They reveal the shift from a passive, ‘impressible’ subject to one that is self-regulating and which, through a form of sublimating labour, has internalised the desire for self-improvement. The ‘impressible’ reader, denied the chance to participate in self-fashioning labour, finds their identity located in surfaces rather than depths. Indeed, More notes that ‘softness and ductility’ of mind, while ‘favourable to the cultivation of a devotional spirit’, lays ‘[women] more open to the seductions and temptations and error’ (ii, 32–3), which can just as easily be ‘impressed’ upon them. Without exertion, then, women run the risk of being viewed as ductile, sexualised beings – of belonging to the misogynistic classificatory system of Pope’s

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‘Epistle’, in which women are ‘best distinguished by black, or brown, or fair’.61 Nancy Armstrong describes how self-regulation became ‘a form of labour that was superior to labour’ and, in doing so, she hints at the contradiction involved in More’s scheme.62 In the Strictures, the ethic of work is presented as superior to work itself. While women are denied the opportunity to participate in tangible acts of labour, More nevertheless insists that they identify with the sense of dynamism and exertion that impels such feats. If they fail to do so, women risk lapsing into the passive existence of ‘impressible’ readers. Bracing the mind: Jane West’s Letters to a Young Lady Another version of the difficulties of articulating this form of internalised, middle-class female identity is offered by Jane West’s Letters to a Young Lady (1806). Although detached from the radical ferment of the 1790s, West’s Letters emerges from a conservatism comparable to that which characterises the Strictures. One of West’s primary concerns is the deleterious effect of luxury upon the nation. Asserting a correspondence between the health of the individual and that of the nation, she expresses apprehension that ‘Britons’ have not ‘braced up their minds to repel the consequences which result from luxury, dissipation, and every varied form of pleasurable indulgence’.63 West also recognises the problems inherent in translating the masculine, aristocratic discourse of civic virtue into a form of female identity. Women, she writes in the Letters, are ‘excused from undergoing the labours and difficulties of statesmen and warriors’, yet they must still aspire to be more than ‘passive patriots’ (ii, 472, 479–80). In a strategy reminiscent of More, West proposes that the mind should form the locus of this disciplined self, requiring that it is ‘braced up’ to prevent the nation from lapsing into lassitude. Reading is once more called upon as a self-regulating form of female labour. In a discussion of ‘the passions’ (‘those bosom traitors which internally assault us’) West describes ‘a most acute sensibility, which sometimes proceeds from the susceptibility of our bodily organs’ (i, 86, 90). This sensibility leads women into the ‘languor of hypochondria’ and a ‘relaxed mind’ (i, 92). The afflictions that West describes are, in her opinion, symptomatic of a national

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malaise. As such, they are a manifestation of what George Cheyne had termed ‘the English Malady’, in which ‘success in socioeconomic achievement . . . sapped the nation’s health’.64 West suggests that these deleterious effects are also manifested in individuals, derisively describing the consequences of ‘luxury’ and ‘dissipation’ as ‘imaginary ills and evils’ (my italics) (i, 91). Among these disorders, West includes ‘spleen, ennui, chagrin, lassitude, and all the various train of miseries which extreme indulgence, dissipation, or romantic expectation are apt to engender’ (ii, 440–1).65 As John Mullan notes, it is difficult to accurately categorise and locate such disorders – to recover their exact nature from ‘the history of psychiatry’.66 But by looking back to The English Malady, it becomes clear that even at the time of their usage, such conditions were far from clearly delineated. There, ‘the Spleen’ is described as a word of a ‘general and loose . . . Signification’.67 West’s construction of femininity makes strategic capital of the ambiguity regarding the exact location of these ‘imaginary’ ailments. Her obfuscation as to whether they are merely a state of mind, or whether they manifest themselves upon the body, is indicative of a concern with propriety reminiscent of that expressed by More. Similarly, her remonstrations against excessive sensibility provoke her into a disquisition on the mind’s relation to the body, placing her text in familiar territory to Wakefield’s Reflections. Ultimately, however, her attempt to reform a degraded mode of female sensibility leads West to unsettle more deeplyseated beliefs regarding gender identity. In examining the ‘imaginary distresses’ of ‘spleen, ennui, chagrin, [and] lassitude’, West is already implicated within a complex historical discourse on the relation between body and mind. In The English Malady, Cheyne proposes that such nonspecific disorders are ‘nervous’ in nature and thus intimately connected to the body.68 However, as Roy Porter notes, by locating the ‘English Malady’ in the nerves, ‘hidden from the eye’, Cheyne ‘sidestepped’ the more physically tangible aspects of afflicted bodies that previous physicians had emphasised.69 West’s account takes this ‘polite’ staging of these ailments one step further: the afflicted body is superseded by the ‘imaginary distresses’ that haunt the ‘relaxed mind’. Indeed, elsewhere in the Letters, West acknowledges that the female propensity for an ‘acute sensibility . . . sometimes proceeds from the susceptibility of our bodily

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organs’, giving birth to ‘imaginary ills and evils’ (i, 90–1). By means of this rhetorical shift from the body to the mind, West establishes the conditions for another, specifically female, form of patriotism, which focuses on the imagination. Like More, West proposes that education can provide a means of strengthening the mind and staving off the debilitating effects of luxury. Specifically, she recommends the reading of travel narratives which, she suggests, are particularly effective in assisting readers to raise their depressed spirits: The adventures of travellers and sailors are often so extraordinary, and the vicissitudes and dangers to which they are exposed are so interesting, that I cannot help recommending this description of reading, to rouse the attention and correct the errors of those pitiable people, who are the victims of imaginary distresses. Spleen, ennui, chagrin, lassitude, and all the various train of miseries which extreme indulgence, dissipation, or romantic expectation are apt to engender, must surely feel their own insignificance, and the absurdity of their petty woes, when they accompany a Byron around the barren shores of Terra del Fuego . . . or sail with an Inglefield in an open boat, almost destitute of food, across the wide expanse of the Atlantic ocean. (ii, 440–1)

Such extreme scenarios suggest that West is referring to what Carl Thompson describes as the ‘shipwreck narrative’: a subgenre of travel literature which depicts a range of maritime disasters.70 The cure that such literature presents for ‘imaginary distresses’ is composed of imaginary excesses, whereby the reader’s raising of their mind to others’ fortitude and hardship entails a corresponding diminishment of the self. This account bears a close relation to the Burkean sublime. For West, travel narratives are intended to operate, in Burke’s words, ‘in a manner analogous to terror’, as readers ‘feel their own insignificance’ in the face of the ‘vicissitudes and dangers’ of travellers.71 As this ‘terror’ is not ‘conversant about the present destruction of the person’, according to Burke’s logic it will ‘clear the parts, whether fine, or gross, of a dangerous and troublesome incumbrance’.72 Something similar is at work in West’s account of how the ‘vicissitudes and dangers’ of travellers present a tonic to the ‘imaginary distresses’ of her female readers. Indeed, the openness of Burke’s theory, which allows for such sublime experiences to ‘clear the parts, whether fine, or gross’, provides a convenient obscurity correlative to West’s ambiguity as

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to whether ‘spleen, ennui, chagrin, [and] lassitude’ are mental or physiological disorders. The presence of Burke’s Enquiry, with its implicit codes of gender, forms a complex, and occasionally troubling, intertextual relationship with West’s Letters. The underlying issue of gender is made visible in another account of reading which is inflected by the sublime: that of Vicesimus Knox, in his Essays Moral and Literary. In an essay ‘On the Manner of Writing Voyages and Travels’, Knox suggests that the rigours of such reading contribute to the formation of a distinctly male subject: I know of no books of amusement whatever so well adapted to young people. They satisfy that eager thirst after knowledge, which is found very strong at a boyish age, and they contain nothing which can corrupt their imagination. They interest the mind as much as a novel; but, instead of rendering it effeminate and debauched, they make it usefully inquisitive, and furnish it with matter for reflection.73

While not drawing directly upon the discourse of the sublime, Knox’s assertion that narratives of ‘voyages and travels’ can safeguard the mind against becoming ‘effeminate and debauched’ echoes the purgative effect which West seeks. It is a solution, however, which imposes an explicitly gendered slant upon this therapeutic manifestation of the sublime. Knox goes on to suggest that such acts of reading are not only characteristic of but consolidate the subject’s male identity. Typically ‘boyish’, accounts of ‘voyages and travels’ ensure the mind does not succumb to effeminacy. That such reading might similarly masculinise female readers is a latent possibility in the Letters. Before I explore this further, it is necessary to consider in more detail the potential pitfalls of West’s use of travel writing. Such an examination will serve to establish how the genre might disrupt the expectations of ‘proper’ femininity and lead instead to more androgynous possibilities. With its far-flung locations and tales of individual heroism, travel literature is perhaps a surprisingly acceptable genre in schemes of women’s reading. As Jacqueline Pearson notes, it seems to facilitate and legitimise a form of ‘reading as escapism’.74 More surprising still is the suggestion that such literature might prove capable of cleansing the national body of its luxurious excesses. Its efficacy hangs upon the distinction between the imagination as a

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faculty of escapism and transgression, and as an instrument of selfdiscipline – separating these two competing modes is not always easily achieved. Present in West’s account is the spectre of what Peter de Bolla calls ‘the transported reader’ who ‘may be overmastered by a text’, leading to ‘a loss of person and a concomitant transportation to a place the reader may not wish to go’.75 Indeed, West’s aim is to remove women readers from the petty domestic trivialities produced by their luxurious life, demanding that they consider whether it is ‘really such a misery to be left out of a pleasant party, to have a dinner spoiled, or a gown ill-made?’ (ii, 441). Yet, in uprooting women readers from the domestic sphere, West relocates them in the masculine realm of travel and adventure. She places them in close proximity to danger and to a disruptive sexuality, as they imaginatively ‘accompany a Byron around the barren shores of Terra del Fuego’ and ‘sail with an Inglefield in an open boat’. One of the reasons for recommending travel literature, West states, is that it is ‘extremely well calculated to improve and inform the understanding of our sex’ as ‘[women] must generally be contented to know things by report, instead of actual observation’ (ii, 439). Yet the sense that a text can mediate between its reader and the ‘actual observation’ of reality is drastically undercut by the level of identification that West demands. The imagination, deployed here as cure, reverts to a symptom of itself as disease, engendering the ‘romantic expectation’ it hopes to dissipate, via its promises of ‘transport’. While Peter de Bolla draws attention to the techniques of ‘text management’ used to circumscribe such transgressive possibilities, West fails to legislate for the appearance of such imaginative excesses.76 Initially, her regenerative theory of reading is dependent upon an act of imaginative transcendence, which demands that readers forget their own corporeal existence. Yet the imagination proves itself to be an agent of sensuality, promiscuously returning to other, male bodies, highlighting the sexually charged nature of the reading scene. In turning away from the domestic affairs which emphasise the physicality of their lived experience – their spoiled dinners, their ill-made gowns – West’s readers must, she says, ‘[l]ook at Alexander Selkirk on his solitary island . . . employing his bodily agility in procuring his daily food. Contemplate the heroic associates of Cook . . . Behold the brave Ledyard, or the patient Park, naked, sick, and destitute in the wilds

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of Samojedia, or the morasses of Bambara’ (ii, 441–2). Ignoring the latent eroticism that accompanies the contemplation of these heroic male bodies, West seeks to shame her audience into overcoming their ‘imaginary distresses’. The spectacle of suffering is intended to inspire, rather than excite, her female readers – to jolt them into a realisation of the comparative ‘absurdity of their petty woes’. Even if the libidinous potential of this enterprise is disregarded, West’s strategy only succeeds by convincing women that they are creatures not of delicacy but of robust fortitude. For this to be achieved, the reader’s gaze must return to her own body. It is a shift in focus that results in the elision of difference, specifically the sexual difference, inscribed upon the subject: ‘Remember that they had bodies and minds framed of the same materials with your own; blush at disguising your fastidious selfishness under the name of sensibility, and lift up your eyes to Heaven in pious gratitude at your happier lot’ (ii, 442). West’s account of the reading of travels thus culminates in the transgressive realisation of an essential similarity between the ‘materials’ of male and female bodies. It is a position that closely resembles the masculinisation of the reader suggested in Knox’s essay. Indeed, this return to the body might cause us to see West’s account of travel literature as dissolving the binary oppositions by which ‘proper’ female identity is defined: delicacy rather than fortitude, mind rather than body, knowledge by report and knowledge through actual observation. Consequently, the patriotic act of refuting the debilitating effects of luxury certainly, in More’s terms, blemishes ‘the delicacy of [women’s] sex’ (i, 4), and results in the creation of an almost androgynous subject.77 A further irony is presented by the fact that a ‘blush’ is required as evidence that one’s mind has been sufficiently ‘roused’ into an acknowledgement of its own ‘insignificance’. Even as West rejects the discourse of physiological sensibility, relocating ‘spleen, ennui, chagrin, lassitude’ from the nervous system to the imagination, its most ambiguous sign must resurface upon the body of the reader as testament to their rejuvenation. As John Mullan notes, the distinction between the modest blush of virtue and a flush of ‘improper excitement’ is ‘a difficult and shifting one’.78 This point is all the more pertinent following the frisson provoked by the reader’s imaginative proximity to the masculine bodies of travellers. In attempting to counter the discourses of luxury and

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sensibility, West only emphasises her own entrapment within their signifying schemes. The ‘sensible’ body is required as validation that reading is, to apply More’s term, an act of ‘wholesome labour’. If reading ‘nurtured reflection’, prompting the habits of self-regulation that are central to modern subjectivity, it is also apparent that its representation can deconstruct identity, revealing the rhetoric by which it is formed.79 While the private, interior experience of reading could be considered complicit with an ideology of domesticity, its tendency to draw a range of discourses around itself whenever it is represented disrupts such a simplistic identification. Ostensibly, reading offers the potential to refigure virtuous labour into a feminised form: its product is modern subjectivity, the selfregulating mind. Yet such a simple, sanitised separation of women not only from the public sphere but from their own bodies consistently proves to be untenable. Used to validate women’s mental exertion as a means of improving the moral habits of society, depictions of reading ultimately prove a contradictory foundation upon which to base such an enterprise. In following Burke’s attempts to reconcile an aristocratic, civic humanism with a capitalist, bourgeois valorisation of labour, More’s depiction of education by exertion cannot help evoking the reader’s body, threatening her own constructions of proper female identity. In doing so, it implicitly questions the ‘naturalness’ of a gendered division of labour, a tension which is all the more evident when More’s words are juxtaposed with the more combative writings of Priscilla Wakefield. In Jane West’s Letters too, examinations of the mental labour of reading ultimately deconstruct the rhetoric by which identity is created. As a sublimated form of labour, reading is constantly haunted by the presence of the body, which inevitably imposes its presence upon the very texts that seek to repress it. While Wakefield openly questions this division of intellectual and manual labour, her adherence to a rigid hierarchy of social class emphasises the way in which recommendations regarding reading are almost always grounded in ideas of social order. The following chapter takes up this idea, with reference to the revolution debates of the 1790s.

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1 Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), p. 396. 2 The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1989), iv: Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, The Female Reader, Original Stories, Letters on the Management of Infants and Hints, p. 20. 3 Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, The Historical Journal, 36:2 (1993), 383–414 (p. 405). 4 Tracing the shifts of the meaning and significance of luxury throughout history, John Sekora identifies this association as a constant factor, stating that ‘almost all personifications of luxury are feminine’. See John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 44. 5 See Vickery, pp. 407–12 in particular. More recently, Jennie Batchelor has provided a valuable corrective account of ‘the assumption of labour’s antithetical relation to domesticity’. See Jennie Batchelor, Women’s Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), p. 13. 6 Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. xv–xvi. 7 Naomi Tadmor, ‘“In the Even my Wife Read to Me”: Women, Reading and Household Life in the Eighteenth Century’, in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, ed. by James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 162–74 (p. 165). 8 Ibid., p. 165. 9 Vickery, 407. 10 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 4. 11 Harriet Guest, ‘Eighteenth-Century Femininity: “A Supposed Sexual Character”’, in Women and Literature in Britain 1700–1800, ed. by Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 46–68 (p. 47). 12 For an account of civic virtue, luxury and commerce in the eighteenthcentury J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 147–8. 13 Armstrong, p. 99. 14 Ibid., p. 78. 15 Mitzi Myers, ‘Reform or Ruin: “A Revolution in Female Manners”’,

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Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 11 (1982), 199–216 (p. 205). 16 Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education. With a View of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent Among Women of Rank and Fortune, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies, 1799), i, 163. Subsequent references are made parenthetically. 17 See Roy Porter’s introduction to George Cheyne, The English Malady (1733), ed. by Roy Porter (London: Tavistock / Routledge, 1991), p. xxi. 18 More quotes Burke’s Enquiry when referring to obsequiousness as ‘the “soft green” on which the soul loves to repose itself’. See Strictures, ii, 104. 19 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), ed. by David Womersley (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 164. 20 Ibid., p. 164. 21 Roy Porter, ‘Barely Touching: A Social Perspective on Mind and Body’, in The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought, ed. by G. S. Rousseau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 45–80 (pp. 77, 78). 22 Armstrong, p. 76. 23 Hannah More, Coelebs in Search of a Wife: Comprehending Observations on Domestic Habits and Manners, Religion and Morals, 5th edn, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1809), ii, 32. 24 Ibid., ii, 153–4. 25 See Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 42–9. E. J. Clery also considers this idea in ‘The Pleasure of Terror: Paradox in Edmund Burke’s Theory of the Sublime’ in Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, ed. by Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 164–81 (pp. 174–5). 26 E. J. Clery has made a similar case for the sublime’s ability to ‘cleanse the reading subject . . . of the effects of a luxurious society’. With reference to Gothic fiction of the 1790s, she explores the interaction between tales of ‘supernatural terror’ and the social and economic ideas underpinning Burke’s Enquiry. See E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 105. 27 Furniss, p. 48. 28 Kathryn Sutherland, ‘Adam Smith’s Master Narrative: Women and the Wealth of Nations’, in Adam Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. by Stephen Copley and Kathryn Sutherland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 97–121 (p. 97).

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29 Burke, p. 164. 30 Ibid., p. 165. 31 Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 68. 32 Charles J. Rzepka, The Self as Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 13. 33 See in particular Richardson’s account of Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia. Published in two volumes, in 1794 and 1796, Darwin’s text asserted the existence of the ‘embodied mind’. Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 12–16. 34 Armstrong, p. 76. 35 See Pam Morris’s introduction in Conduct Literature for Women, Part IV, 1770–1830, ed. by Pam Morris, 6 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005), v: S. Hatfield, Letters on the Importance of the Female Sex: With Observations on Their Manners, and on Education (London: Printed for the author by J. Adlard, 1803). Subsequent references to Hatfield’s Letters are made parenthetically. Page numbers refer to the pagination of the original text, rather than Morris’s reprint. 36 Priscilla Wakefield, Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex; With Suggestions for its Improvement (London: J. Johnson, 1798), pp. 69–70. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text. 37 Vicesimus Knox, ‘On Novel Reading’, in Essays Moral and Literary, 5th edn, 2 vols (London: Charles Dilly, 1784), i, 70. Knox’s Essays were originally published in 1778, but new editions, containing new material, were frequently published in the subsequent years. 38 Knox, ‘On Essay Writing’, in Essays Moral and Literary, i, 4. 39 The Autobiography of Francis Place (1771–1854), ed. by Mary Thale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 218. 40 Adam Mackie, The Diary of a Canny Man 1818–1828: Adam Mackie, Farmer, Merchant, and Innkeeper in Fyvie, ed. by David Stevenson (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1991), p. 33. The full range of Mackie’s reading is compiled on the Reading Experience Database. See: www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/browse_reader_readings.php?s=Mac kie&f=Adam [accessed 1 September 2013]. 41 A slightly earlier account of the relationship between reading and business is provided by the diaries of Thomas Turner, a mercer and draper in Sussex. Naomi Tadmor discusses how, during the 1750s, Turner would read when trade was slow. See Tadmor, p. 167.

‘Wholesome labour’ 42 43 44 45

46

47

48 49

50 51

52 53

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55 56

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Knox, i, 5. Armstrong, p. 99. Burke, p. 164. Gary Kelly, ‘“This Pestiferous Reading”: The Social Basis of Reaction Against the Novel in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Man and Nature, 4 (1985), 183–94 (p. 187). Kathryn Sutherland, ‘Writings on Education and Conduct: Arguments for Female Improvement’, in Women and Literature in Britain 1700– 1800, ed. by Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 25–45 (p. 26). Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), ed. by R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner and W. B. Todd, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), i, 330. Ibid., i, 330. As Kathryn Sutherland notes, ‘[t]he obvious hero of Smith’s narrative of wealth accumulation is the capitalist – the merchant, the entrepreneur or master-manufacturer’. See ‘Adam Smith’s Master Narrative’, p. 110. Armstrong, p. 8. On such reading More comments: ‘Let not a timid young lady start if I should venture to recommend to her . . . Watts’s or Duncan’s little book of Logic, some parts of Mr. Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding, and Bishop Butler’s Analogy’ (i, 164). Siskin, pp. 167–8. James Raven, Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 32, 38. For instance, Raven states that almost half of the estimated total of novels published in 1780 were reprints of previously published works. See Judging New Wealth, p. 38. Ibid., p. 38. Of course, in Malthus’s view this outstripping was an inevitability. As he states, ‘the constant effort towards population . . . increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are increased’. See Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), ed. by Philip Appleman (New York: Norton, 1976), p. 24. These comments are taken from the fifth edition of the Strictures. See Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education. With a View of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent Among Women of Rank and Fortune, 5th edn, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell Jun. and W. Davies, 1799), ii, 10. See Strictures, 5th edn, ii, 10. Subsequent references resume parenthetically, and revert to the first edition of the Strictures.

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59 Siskin, p. 167. 60 Alexander Pope, ‘Epistle to a Lady: Of the Characters of Women’, in Pope: Poetical Works, ed. by Herbert Davies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 291. 61 Ibid., p. 291. 62 Armstrong, p. 81. 63 Female Education in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. by Janet Todd, 6 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1996), iv–vi: Jane West, Letters to a Young Lady; in which the Duties and Character of Women are Considered, Chiefly with Reference to Prevailing Opinions, 4th edn, 3 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1811), i, 19. Subsequent references are made parenthetically; volume numbers cited refer to those of West’s original publication. 64 Porter, introduction to The English Malady, p. xxvii. 65 For more on the ‘distinction between the real and the feigned in nervous illness’ see G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 28–31. 66 John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 201. 67 Cheyne, p. 194. 68 Ibid., p. 60. 69 See Porter’s introduction to Cheyne, p. xxxii. 70 As Thompson notes, the shipwreck narrative represents ‘a hugely popular branch of travel writing in the Romantic era’: something reflected by the popularity of multi-volume anthologies of such material within the first decades of the nineteenth century. See Carl Thompson, The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 61. 71 Burke, p. 86. 72 Ibid., p. 165. 73 Knox, ‘On the Manner of Writing Voyages and Travels’, in Essays Moral and Literary, i, 118. 74 Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 56. 75 Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 249. 76 The methods of ‘text management’ de Bolla describes commonly involve the disruptive placing of guidelines for readers within ‘the graphic organization of a text’. See The Discourse of the Sublime, pp. 246–51. 77 In this respect, West’s project in the Letters is reminiscent of the

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contemporary vogue for ‘female Crusoe’ narratives. As Carl Thompson notes, the ‘female Crusoe character’ was important ‘to the imagining of new forms of female heroism and agency’. See Carl Thompson, ‘The Grosvenor Shipwreck and the Figure of the Female Crusoe: Hannah Hewit, Mary Jane Meadows, and Romantic-Era Feminist and Anti-Feminist Debate’, English Studies in Africa, 51:2 (2008), 9–20 (pp. 9–10) 78 Mullan, p. 224. 79 Roy Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 93.

3

‘The enlightened energy of parental affection’: post-revolutionary schemes of education

Such parents will feel it to be their duty to look over every page of a book before it is trusted to their children; it is an arduous task, but none can be too arduous for the enlightened energy of parental affection. Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education1

Redolent of revolutionary optimism and dynamism, the ‘enlightened energy’ of this chapter’s title is taken from Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s Practical Education (1798), one of many educational texts published in the aftermath of the French Revolution. While events across the Channel had resulted in the language of social reform being treated with increasing mistrust, authors such as the Edgeworths, Mary Hays and William Godwin strove to maintain the possibility of raising a generation of rational, ‘enlightened’ citizens.2 While their works foregrounded the role of education as a generator of social progress, these authors remained wary of associating themselves with the more radical ideologies – and the subsequent excesses – of the Revolution. It was a historical moment in which, as Alan Richardson remarks, ‘education and indeed childhood were politicized as never before’.3 That politicisation is apparent in the comments of Sarah Trimmer, who, fearing that England was becoming infiltrated by revolutionary ideas, declares that ‘no less than the safety of the nation probably depends upon the education of those children who are now growing up to maturity’.4 While they recognised their political significance, the prospect of children gaining an equivalent set of

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political rights was enough to become a cause of consternation for some writers. In Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), Hannah More draws attention to the presence of a ‘revolutionary spirit in families’.5 With characteristic asperity, she voices her fears that democratic ideals will infiltrate the family unit: The rights of man have been discussed, till we are somewhat wearied with the discussion. To these have been opposed with more presumption than prudence the rights of woman. It follows according to the natural progression of human things, that the next stage of that irradiation which our enlighteners are pouring in upon us as will produce grave descants on the rights of children. (i, 135)

What might seem to be pre-emptive scorn for the ‘next stage of irradiation’ was, by 1799, already too late. Throughout the decade, more liberal-minded authors had urged the necessity of allowing children ‘liberty’.6 In the case of William Godwin, whose The Enquirer (1797) I discuss below, this ‘liberty’ is explicitly related to the issue of ‘choice in reading’, and to his aim to educate children as ‘rational’ citizens, capable of fulfilling his progressivist vision of future society. However, viewing education as a battleground for competing ideologies – in which More’s derision for politically radical ‘enlighteners’ is pitched against the Edgeworths’ sincere belief in the ‘enlightened energy of parental affection’ – risks simplifying the issue. Within the work of the authors discussed in this chapter, the scene of reading is presented as a highly charged encounter between instructor and pupil, encompassing an uneasy blend of benevolent tutelage and more forceful coercion and manipulation. Within this combustible atmosphere, rational authority figures can easily mutate into tyrants, as they impose their will upon their weaker subjects. Conversely, the pupil’s seemingly reasonable desire for liberty, when thwarted, risks developing into a more volatile demand, driven by violence and irrationality. The pedagogical relationship might, then, be viewed as a microcosmic exploration of the use and abuse of power, and of the reaction it provokes: a concern of obvious public relevance in the 1790s. Many of the authors discussed in this chapter can be found projecting their hopes for the future welfare of the nation on to their representations of teaching and instruction. For writers of varying

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political sympathies education is a means of securing, or at least attempting to secure, a vision of the kind of society that might prevail following the uncertainty of the French Revolution; as Mitzi Myers notes, children themselves were ‘the locus of a revolutionary generation’s hopes and fears’.7 This chapter begins by considering how John Locke’s writing on education was inflected with new significance in the postrevolutionary years. It is to the work of Locke that authors such as the Edgeworths and Elizabeth Hamilton turn when attempting to imagine a pupil who, ‘speak[ing] truth without effort, [and] without fear’ represents ‘the triumph of reason over the passions of surprise and fear’.8 Ostensibly, these texts demonstrate how education can produce a subject who embodies liberty over despotic irrationality. But the realisation of this ideal is complicated by the question of gender. In Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), Mary Hays tirelessly traces the possibilities for the formation of a radical female subjectivity, questioning the political currency of ‘reason’. To what extent, she asks, is it a feminine quality? And how might acts of reading aid, or obstruct, its cultivation in young women? Bearing these points of enquiry in mind, the final section of this chapter turns to the work of Godwin, Hamilton and the Edgeworths. Each of these authors explores the limits of parental authority and responsibility in the education of children, by questioning the implications of offering children what Godwin terms ‘choice in reading’. ‘Fear and awe’: the legacy of John Locke’s Thoughts Underpinning much of the educational writing of this period is the work of John Locke. Originally published in 1693, his Some Thoughts on Education enjoyed such popularity that, by 1800, it had gone through twenty-five editions.9 A brief examination of this text not only makes clear its lasting influence but highlights the sensitivity that the proper use and range of parental authority accrued in the turbulent political climate a century after its publication. In Some Thoughts on Education, Locke provides his reader with a prescriptive and detailed account of how best to ensure that children grow up to be ‘wise, good, and ingenuous Men’.10 He is particularly rigorous on the issue of parental authority: ‘[f]or, Liberty and Indulgence can do no Good to Children: Their Want of

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Judgement makes them stand in need of Restraint and Discipline . . . Fear and Awe ought to give you the first Power over their Minds, and Love and Friendship in riper Years to hold it.’11 The somewhat ominous tone of this advice stands in contrast with the view of Locke’s educational writings as hailing a ‘much more relaxed and affectionate approach to the problems of childrearing’.12 In place of physical punishments Locke advocates an internalisation of discipline, a ‘self-regulating moral conscience’ to be instilled by parents after seizing power through tactics of ‘fear and awe’.13 According to Locke, corporal punishments, such as beating and whipping, are effective only on a temporary basis: The Child submits, and dissembles Obedience, whilst the fear of the Rod hangs over him; but when that is removed, and by being out of sight, he can promise himself impunity, he gives the greater scope to his natural Inclination; which by this way is not at all altered, but on the contrary heightned and increased in him; and after such restraint, breaks out usually with the more violence.14

The shift from these external, but transient, methods of exercising authority to an internalised surveillance of the self can be seen in terms of Michel Foucault’s account of the rise of disciplinary power within this period. As Foucault describes it, ‘traditionally, power was what was seen, what was shown’: an external force, such as ‘the rod’ that Locke describes menacingly ‘hang[ing] over’ the child. By contrast, ‘disciplinary power . . . is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility’.15 No longer, then, can Locke’s child ‘promise himself impunity’ by ‘being out of sight’. Instead, his behaviour is subjected to the objectifying gaze not only of parents, but of servants too, all of whom must ‘[look] sowre on the Child’, making him aware of his ‘disgrace’. ‘If this were constantly observed’, notes Locke, ‘I guess there would be little need of Blows, or Chiding’.16 Anticipating Foucault’s hypothesis, Locke implies that self-regulating discipline renders external symbols of authority entirely unnecessary. Similarly, while physical punishment merely excites resistance, ensuring that the child’s ‘natural inclination’ is ‘heightened and increased’ by restraint, the pervasive and constant nature of internalised discipline promises to eradicate the cycle of repression and resistance. However, it is important to recognise that for Locke the estab-

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lishment of disciplinary power is the precursor to the formation of the autonomous subject. Thus, alongside his belief in the necessity of ‘discipline and restraint’, Locke proposes that children be treated ‘as Rational Creatures’.17 It is his emphasis upon children’s capacity for ‘rational’ thought that makes Locke’s text so important for those educational writers of the 1790s and early 1800s, who struggle to maintain the Enlightenment principles of the French Revolution in the face of conservative hostility. This chapter traces the efforts of parents to raise their children as ‘rational’ citizens, through the supervision of their reading habits. In relation to this, the lingering presence of the Lockean tenets of ‘fear and awe’ and ‘love and friendship’ become a central concern. The former of these modes of discipline had, throughout the second half of the century, acquired connotations of the Burkean sublime which, in turn, came to form a powerful aesthetic category in the representation of the French Revolution.18 Following Locke, a range of educational tracts at the end of the eighteenth century discussed the role of ‘fear and awe’, or ‘terror’, in the education of children, as a means of relating the issue to the exercise of authority within society. Two such works are Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s Practical Education and Elizabeth Hamilton’s Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education (1801–2).19 These texts engage with Locke’s belief that techniques of ‘fear and awe’ should give way to ‘love and friendship’. Explicitly basing the Letters upon the Lockean premise of associationism, Hamilton pays particular attention to the ‘painful kind’ of sensations, noting that those which ‘excite aversion’ are ‘much stronger than those which produce pleasure’ (i, 44). Yet, rather than assert the importance of ‘fear and awe’ in gaining ‘the first power over [children]’s minds’, Hamilton laments the introduction of such measures into the process of education: That the infant mind is at an early period susceptible of terror, is a discovery unhappily made by every ignorant nurse. This instinct, implanted by the wise Creator as a protection to the helpless state of infancy, is an instrument in the hands of senseless ignorance, – too frequently applied to the worst of purposes. (i, 45)

What Locke described as ‘fear and awe’ is reconfigured by Hamilton as ‘terror’, a term which brings with it connotations of the Burkean sublime. Yet, rather than inspiring a sense of self-

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preservation, as the Burkean paradigm would have it, ‘terror’ is used merely to subdue children, to the detriment of their intellectual capacities: ‘[i]t is the first, the constant, engine of tyranny. In proportion as it is made to operate, the mind will be debased and enfeebled; deprived of its power and energy, it will remain the willing slave of sensation’ (i, 45). The sense in which this ‘tyrannous’ form of education serves to vitiate children’s mental powers, rendering them the ‘slave[s] of sensation’, recalls Mary Wollstonecraft’s discussion of the effects of early associations in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). While not engaging directly with the use of educational ‘terror’, Wollstonecraft expresses hostility towards the ‘habitual slavery, to first impressions’ that results when ‘the intellectual powers are not employed to cool our sensations’.20 Like Wollstonecraft then, Hamilton is eager for young children – both male and female – to utilise their capacity for rational thought, rather than see those powers stymied. At one level, as I will discuss below, Hamilton appears eager to depoliticise the issue of children’s education and to maintain the ‘neutral’ character of the family home.21 Whereas More sees ‘filial disobedience’ as a consequence of radical politics, Hamilton states that it stems not from ‘the discussions of the rights of man’ but from ‘a more natural and obvious source’: the inclination of parents to indulge their children without restraint (i, 223–4). However, her assertion that terror forms an ‘engine of tyranny’ cannot avoid certain political implications in the aftermath of the French Revolution. These implications are made explicit in the Edgeworths’ Practical Education, a text Hamilton frequently refers to throughout the course of her Letters.22 There, the Edgeworths render the political significance of children’s education unavoidable, by illustrating their argument with references to the issue of slavery and Britain’s colonial activities in the West Indies and Ireland. The Edgeworths draw a parallel between African slaves and ‘that class of Irish people who, till very lately, actually, not metaphorically called themselves slaves’.23 Under the ‘levelling influence of slavery’, they comment, both groups learn ‘cowardice and falsehood’ (p. 125). The Edgeworths’ attention to the fine distinction between the metaphorical and the literal in their description of Irish ‘slaves’ continues as they go about transposing this argument to the issue of children’s education:

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The veneer separating the private from the public is all but dissolved, as the Edgeworths deploy the language of political polemic to delineate the scene of education. During the course of this discussion the figure of the ‘schoolboy’ almost disappears, becoming submerged by his manifestation as a ‘true born Briton under the government of a tyrannical pedagogue’. This explicitly politicised take on children’s education reveals how Lockean ‘fear and awe’ can mutate into a form of despotism – precisely the ‘slavish discipline’ that Locke himself deplores, and which thwarts, rather than encourages, the formation of ‘wise, good, and ingenuous men’.24 To underline their point, the Edgeworths provide an alternative vision, in which the schoolboy is free from ‘terror’: Look again; look at the same boy in the company of those who inspire no terror; in the company of his schoolfellows, of his friends, of his parents; would you know him to be the same being? his countenance is open, his attitude erect, his voice firm, his language free and fluent, his thoughts are upon his lips, he speaks truth without effort, without fear. (p. 125)

It is not only from public schools that ‘terror’ should be eradicated. As they proceed, the Edgeworths propose that such coercive modes of education have no place in the family, either: if preceptors or parents are unjust or tyrannical, their pupils will contrive to conceal from them their actions and their thoughts. On the contrary, in families where sincerity has been encouraged by the voice of praise and affection, a generous freedom of conversation and countenance appears, and the young people talk to each other, and to their parents, without distinction or reserve; without any distinction but such as superior esteem and respect dictate: these are feelings totally distinct from servile fear, these feelings inspire the love of truth, the ambition to acquire and to preserve character. (pp. 125–6)

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The family home, in which a ‘freedom of conversation . . . without distinction or reserve’ is possible, becomes the site of rational, liberal exchange. Initially stating that this exchange takes place ‘without distinction’, in the next clause of the sentence the Edgeworths qualify this statement, to include those distinctions which ‘superior esteem and respect dictate’. In that moment, their text wavers between depicting a scene of domestic democracy and a more Burkean belief in the stabilising influence of ‘respect’. Regardless of this note of caution, however, the lingering presence of the metaphor of the schoolboy as a ‘free born Briton’ ensures that the Edgeworths’ scene of domestic education – which excludes ‘unjust’ and ‘tyrannical’ rule in favour of rational discourse – carries a political weight that is hard to ignore. Hamilton’s dismissal of educative terror appears to incorporate a similarly veiled political dimension. Noting that ‘the frequent deployment of the engine of terror’ has ‘a tendency to debilitate the powers of the mind’, she proceeds: ‘[t]hat self-possession which seems the inheritance of great minds, is, in reality, but the triumph of reason over the passions of surprise and fear; which on no emergency can be promptly conquered by minds accustomed to the early dominion of terror’ (i, 47). On one level, then, Hamilton appears to offer a critique of hereditary rights of ownership – in this case the quality of ‘self-possession’. It is, of course, upon the notion of heredity that Burke founds his notion of national stability in the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).25 Here, however, it is supplanted by what is potentially a far more meritocratic system of value, founded upon the exercise of an individual’s reason: an attribute that appears to be the property of all who are not educated under a ‘dominion of terror’. Seen alongside Burke, Hamilton’s argument begins to take on politically democratic undertones. In both Hamilton’s and the Edgeworths’ educational tracts an initial instilling of fear is seen as redundant – an anachronistic gesture of a (colonial) power which makes slaves, rather than reasonable citizens, of those it governs. I will return towards the end of this chapter to these authors’ suggestions that acts of reading undertaken within a sociable domestic environment provides the basis of a liberal, politicised subjectivity. Before then, it is worth considering how arguments regarding the parental control of reading impact upon the education of older children – specifically female children on

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the verge of adulthood, such as the heroine of Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney. Paternal education in Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney Chapter 1 began to describe how Emma’s reading practices are ambiguously disciplined by her father, in a manner that confers upon her the status of a ‘free’ and ‘rational’ subject. Hays’s novel persists in questioning the nature of this ‘freedom’, raising doubts as to the ethics of Emma’s internalisation of patriarchal authority. Prior to her father’s intervention, Emma’s reading is characterised by its facilitation of escapist fantasy, promising to fulfil her desire for immersion in ‘a romance that would never end’: Every day I became more attached to my books; yet, not less fond of active play; stories were still my passions . . . In my sports with my companions, I acted over what I had read: I was alternately the valiant knight – the gentle damsel – the adventurous mariner – the daring robber – the courteous lover – and the airy coquet.26

As Jacqueline Pearson notes, ‘women were deemed vulnerable to excessively identificatory reading practices’ – a tendency which became the subject of alarm to contemporary moralists.27 For young children, however, the case was rather different. Hays suggests that Emma Courtney’s re-enactments are androgynous in their multiplicity, as she alternates between the roles of ‘valiant knight’ and ‘gentle damsel’. This playful inclination to identification is mirrored in life-writing that looks back to this period. In her posthumously published Retrospections (1929–30), Dorothea Herbert (c. 1767–1829) describes the kind of immersive reading that features in Hays’s novel, recalling how she and her siblings ‘fancied ourselves thrown on a Desart Island till a fight who should be Crusoe and who Fryday ended our play – Another time we were a set of sailors thrown on the Delightful Island of Juan Fernandez.’28 M. O. Grenby has described how such accounts supported ‘Romantic-era notions of childhood naivety and playfulness and the liberating effects of reading’.29 This sense of liberation is continued in Hays’s account of Emma’s decision to subscribe to a circulating library, from which she ‘frequently read, or rather devoured – little careful in the selection – from ten to fourteen novels in a week’ (p. 18). Despite hinting at Emma’s unregulated

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appetite, Hays refuses to impose the kind of moral judgement that such indiscriminate acts of reading generally attract in this period. It is only when Emma’s father appears in the novel that a disciplinary dimension is introduced. It is at this moment that Emma’s willingness to re-enact her reading is challenged. Indeed, the presence of her father also marks Emma’s exile from the androgynous region of ‘romance’, as her education leads her to assume ‘a sexual character’ (p. 117): a metamorphosis which is not so much regulated as produced by Mr Courtney’s influence. As Mr Courtney himself comments, the control he asserts over Emma’s studies is intended as a ‘rein rather than a spur’ to her ‘fancy’ (p. 21): a statement reminiscent of Locke’s belief in the necessity of ‘restraint and discipline’. He informs Emma that her studies must be ‘of a soberer nature’ than her previous forays into ‘the fairy fields of fiction’, in order to prevent her from mistaking ‘my valet for a prince in disguise, my house for a haunted castle, and my rational care for your future welfare for barbarous tyranny’ (p. 21). His intention is to re-establish the distance between text and world that had been eroded by Emma’s early fiction-reading – to convince her that the ‘romance’ plot is incompatible with lived experience. Mr Courtney’s plan for the execution of this project reveals the binary logic through which his authority operates. In her introduction to the novel, Eleanor Ty suggests that Hays writes within an Enlightenment tradition in which ‘rationality’ – when placed in opposition to concepts such as ‘passion’, ‘feeling’ and ‘fancy’ – comes to signify ‘restraint and authority . . . the markers of masculinity and order’ (p. xxix). Although the stability of this opposition is open to question, Mr Courtney’s regime of ‘rational’ education does appear to prioritise masculine order at the expense of those terms on the feminine side of the binary. Consequently, in his attempts to assert control over Emma’s youthful imagination, Mr Courtney inadvertently risks identifying himself with the kind of ‘barbarous tyranny’ that he wishes his daughter to disregard as a figment of romance. In pursuing this possibility, the motivation for Mr Courtney’s strict supervision of Emma’s reading matter proves illuminating. Reflecting on the ill state of his health, he reveals to Emma that ‘he had enjoyed life too freely to be able to make much provision’ for her (p. 19). Emma considers how, in order to prepare her for a life of poverty and hardship after his death, Mr Courtney conceives it

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would be ‘judicious to prepare and strengthen my mind to encounter, with fortitude, some hardships and rude shocks, to which I might be exposed than to foster a sensibility, which he already perceived, with regret, was but too acute’ (p. 19). It is for this reason that Mr Courtney requests that Emma spends ‘one day in every week at his house in Berkley-square, when he should put such books into my hands . . . as he judged would be useful to me’ (pp. 19–20). Considering the disciplinary rigour of his educational aims, one might question whether – having so obviously eschewed the necessity of ‘love and friendship’ – Mr Courtney should be identified with the other side of the Lockean coin: namely, ‘fear and awe’. While he certainly exhibits these tendencies, Mr Courtney’s behaviour does not necessarily translate into the vitiating sense of ‘terror’ that both the Edgeworths and Hamilton reject. Neither is he a ‘negative illustration of the Burkean ideal of the benevolent patriarch’, as Eleanor Ty suggests.30 Indeed, as tempting as it is to read Mr Courtney as a figure of oppression, this view is never whole-heartedly endorsed by Hays’s novel. In his educational aims, Mr Courtney represents the model of masculinity that Claudia Johnson has identified in the early work of Mary Wollstonecraft: a ‘republican masculinity – as distinct from chivalric masculinity’.31 This becomes apparent when Mr Courtney chides a guest at his house for his view that women are ‘born only for the soft solace of man’. His objection is made in distinctly antiBurkean terms: ‘Pshaw!’ replied Mr Courtney, a little peevishly – ‘you will persuade Emma, that the age of chivalry is not yet over; and that giants and ravishers are as common now, as in the time of Charlemagne: a young woman of sense and spirit needs no other protection; do not flatter the girl into affection and imbecility.’ (p. 23)

Far from being a Burkean patriarch, Mr Courtney implicitly celebrates the passing of the ‘age of chivalry’ which Burke famously laments in the Reflections.32 Indeed, along with Burke, Mr Courtney’s comments evoke Wollstonecraft’s critique of female dependence in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. More specifically, his derision for the idea that women require chivalric ‘protection’ from men recalls Wollstonecraft’s disdain for those women whose ‘amiable weakness’ renders them ‘entirely dependent . . . on man’.33 This is not to suggest, however, that Mr

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Courtney can be redeemed as a positive father figure. In the instant that he asserts his daughter’s independence from men, he denies her the opportunity to speak for herself. Just as his previous conduct verges on the ‘tyranny’ he disregards, his actions here are tainted by the ‘chivalry’ he wishes to eradicate. The unsettling imbalance of power that this announces also undermines one of the essential aims of Mr Courtney’s educational programme. In the process of eradicating the androgynous identification that Emma experiences through her romance reading, he only asserts in its place an alternative form of androgyny by educating his daughter according to the dictates of masculine reason. A similar gender-defying logic can, according to Cora Kaplan, be found in Wollstonecraft’s Vindication. There, Kaplan asserts, Wollstonecraft posits that the identity women should aspire to is that of ‘an idealized bourgeois male’.34 Similarly, through the figure of Mr Courtney, Hays engages with those forms of rational education which, to quote Kaplan again, see ‘feeling’ as ‘reactionary and regressive, almost counter-revolutionary’.35 In contrast to Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, Hays’s novel is concerned with validating feeling and passion, and in asserting their compatibility with more ‘rational’ forms of behaviour. Indeed, perhaps the most positive instance of Emma’s education occurs when, at her father’s insistence, she reads Plutarch’s Lives. It is an experience which is heightened, rather than hindered, by a sentimental response to the text: ‘My mind [was] pervaded with republican ardour, my sentiments elevated by a high-toned philosophy, and my bosom glowing with the virtues of patriotism’ (p. 22). However, even this seemingly harmonious union of masculine republicanism and feminine sensibility is threatened with disruption. In depicting Emma’s reading of Plutarch, Hays is surely influenced by a similar scene in Madame Roland’s Appel à l’Impartiale Postérité (1795), published the year before Memoirs of Emma Courtney.36 The English translation frames Madame Roland’s early encounters with Plutarch in rhetoric recognisable from Hays’s insistence upon the formative power of childhood impressions: Plutarch seemed to be exactly the food that suited my mind. I shall never forget the Lent of 1763, at which time I was nine years of age, when I carried it to church instead of my prayer-book. From that

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period I may date the impressions and ideas that rendered me a republican, without dreaming at the time that I should ever become a member of a republic.37

As in Emma Courtney, the encounter with Plutarch implants a nascent political consciousness in its young reader. However, the idealistic visions it nurtures are not sustainable. In Practical Education, the Edgeworths seize upon the fate of Madame Roland in order to illustrate the dangers of such reading and the necessity of parental intervention. Keeping faith with the associationist premise evident in both Hays’s and Roland’s work, the Edgeworths urge parents to keep a record of the books their children read, in order to ‘discover . . . the circumstances on which the formation of the character and taste depend’ (p. 221). They continue: Madame Roland has left a history of her education, and in the books she read in her early years we see the formation of her character. Plutarch’s Lives, she tells us, first kindled republican enthusiasm in her mind; and she regrets that, in forming her ideas of universal liberty, she had only a partial view of affairs. She corrected these enthusiastic ideas during the last moments of her life in prison. Had the impression which her study of the Roman history made upon her mind been known to an able preceptor, it might have been corrected in her early education. (p. 221)

The Edgeworths argue that Madame Roland’s ‘republican enthusiasm’ (which echoes Emma Courtney’s ‘republican ardour’) is ultimately excessive given her ‘partial view of affairs’. From this perspective, women’s capacity for political thought is potentially hindered as a result of their ‘enthusiasm’ and the limited perspective afforded to them by their position in society. Consequently, the feelings stirred by such reading require some form of ‘correction’ by a preceptor or parent. The Edgeworths imply that only the presence of an authority figure to direct and ‘correct’ a reader’s opinions can ensure that socially progressive impulses do not lead to revolutionary zeal. For the Edgeworths, such intervention would have circumvented the excesses that led to Madame Roland’s fate at the guillotine. Yet, in Hays’s novel, such corrective impulses prove equally harmful. Nowhere is the confused and contradictory nature of Mr Courtney’s rationalistic project more clearly realised than in the sections of the novel which deal with Emma’s interrupted reading

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of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761). Upon discovering Emma exercising her sensibility as she ‘weep[s] over the sorrows of the tender St Preux’, Mr Courtney asserts his authority and confiscates the text: He hastily snatched the book from my hand, and, carefully collecting the remaining volumes, carried them in silence to his chamber; but the impression made upon my mind was never to be effaced – it was even productive of a long chain of consequences, that will continue to operate until the day of my death. (p. 25)

In her Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (1798), Hays writes that loving fathers ‘leave impressions on their [daughters’] hearts more tender and more lasting – more dear a thousand times to minds of sensibility – than all the wealth the mines of Potosi could bestow’.38 These sentiments of parental benevolence are ironically reworked in the scene of prohibition depicted in Memoirs of Emma Courtney. In their place, Emma receives ‘lasting’ impressions (operating ‘until the day of [her] death’) from her erotically charged reading of Rousseau’s novel. It is an experience which, in its interrupted brevity, is retrospectively imbued with the additional frisson of the forbidden. Mr Courtney’s attempts to restrain Emma’s passionate sensibility only serve to heighten and intensify it. Indeed, the status of Rousseau’s novel undoubtedly enhances Emma’s pleasure in the text: she is evidently thrilled to read such a ‘dangerous, enchanting work’ (p. 25). In a similar manner, the nineteenth-century writer Anna Jameson recalls how, as a child, she had ‘a great taste . . . for forbidden books; yet it was not the forbidden books that did the mischief, except in their being read furtively’.39 As with Mr Courtney’s attempt to render his daughter a ‘rational’ subject, the policing of reading habits ultimately proves harmful, serving only to libidinise the forbidden. The system of rational self-governance, capable of subordinating sensibility and its attendant ‘passions’, is represented in the novel not just by Mr Courtney but by Emma’s philosopher-mentor, Mr Francis: a character modelled on William Godwin, whom Hays had known since 1794. Describing Emma’s passion for Harley as a kind of ‘insanity’, or ‘moon-struck madness’ (pp. 138, 139), Mr Francis proposes that the excesses of sensibility can be tamed by the exercise of reason: ‘[i]t is a mistake to suppose, that the heart is not to be

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compelled. There is no topic, in fact, that may not be subjected to the laws of investigation and reasoning’ (p. 139). For Emma, however, the proposition that rational investigation can be harnessed into a pervasive, all-conquering power remains untenable. Instead, ‘reason’ and ‘passion’ must co-exist and generate a dynamic, sustaining force: ‘my reason was the auxiliary of my passion, or rather my passion the generative principle of my reason . . . these contradictions, these oppositions, roused the energy of my mind’ (p. 142). As Vivien Jones notes, Emma’s reconciliation of these apparently diametrically opposed concepts is reflected in the structure of the novel, which ‘make[s] sentimental fiction out of rational argument’ and, in doing so, succeeds in enacting ‘the inextricable relationship’ between reason and passion.40 In this way, Hays’s novel once more registers its unease with the post-revolutionary rationalism that refuses to accommodate ‘feeling’, as represented by the Godwinian figure of Mr Francis. This struggle comes to a crisis at the novel’s conclusion where, having outlived all of the principal male characters in the novel, Emma addresses her adopted son. In her reading of the Memoirs, Eleanor Ty finds in this moment a feminist statement of optimism, and proposes that ‘Hays resorts to the maternal and places her hopes on the youth of the next generation’.41 Yet, on closer inspection, the optimism Ty identifies here appears misplaced. The future Emma depicts is one in which ‘men begin to think and reason; reformation dawns, though the advance is tardy’ (p. 195). Although Hays’s pronoun may not be intended to be genderspecific, it raises the question, what role will women play in this reformation? And, more pertinently considering the emotional conflict that has propelled the plot of the novel, what form will the expression of ‘passion’ take in this future society? It seems that the presence of optimism here is based upon the renunciation of the emotional intensity Emma has previously endorsed, as she expresses her desire to see her adopted son ‘escaped from the tyranny of the passions, [and] restored to reason’ (p. 196). It is now the ‘passions’, rather than the ‘rational care’ of Mr Courtney, which represent a form of ‘tyranny’. Founded upon the denial of sensibility, the progressivist future Emma imagines is thus facilitated only by the reassertion of the masculine order of her father. The destructive effects that his suppression of passion wrought upon Emma’s life are discounted.

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As we have seen, Emma’s early reading does not necessitate the assumption of a fixed gender identity; she is as comfortable playing ‘the valiant knight’ as she is ‘the gentle damsel’. Mr Courtney’s fear, as I have already hinted, is of Emma becoming sexually aware, and of this process becoming distorted by her reading: she will ‘mistake [his] valet for a prince in disguise’, or, fearing ‘giants and ravishers’, will be seduced into becoming the chivalric object of dependence. Ironically, however, Mr Courtney’s prohibition of Emma’s reading functions in a manner akin to Foucault’s repressive hypothesis, in that what appears a ‘struggle against sexuality’ in fact results in ‘the very production of sexuality’.42 The ‘romance’ of Emma’s childhood, which she hopes will ‘never end’, is one of fluidity, of unfixed gender positions. Under Mr Courtney’s disciplinary logic, romance becomes the only channel through which Emma’s ‘passion’ can be expressed.43 Despite his attempts to ensure that Emma constructs her identity according to reason rather than through the lens of sexualised romance, Mr Courtney’s educational agenda fails. Ironically, he succeeds only in distorting Emma’s subjectivity, forcing it to find its form and coherence through the romance genre he deplores. In this respect, Hays’s novel is concerned with depicting the journey into – and the production of – a desiring subject, and exploring the forms through which this desire might find expression within patriarchal society. William Godwin and the erotics of prohibition In ‘Of Choice in Reading’, from his collection of essays entitled The Enquirer, William Godwin engages with similar subjects to those raised by Hays’s novel, discussing the parental supervision of reading, the role of education in the progress of society and the relationship between power, pleasure and sexuality. He begins by advocating what appears to be an unconventional view: children, he suggests, should be permitted ‘to wander in the wilds of literature’, and to enjoy a free choice concerning what, when and how they read.44 M. O. Grenby notes that ‘children’s role in the selection of their books was not as circumscribed as we might think’, and cites various instances in which children are granted ‘selectorial power’.45 For Godwin, the right to exercise this choice is primarily a political matter. Independent acts of reading which

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are led by an individual’s will are, he claims, far superior to those entered into under coercion, having ‘infinitely more of a sound health and vigour in them, than the actions to which [one] is prompted by a will foreign to his own’ (p. 143). Similarly, hailing ‘liberty’ as ‘the most desirable of all sublunary advantages’, Godwin proposes elsewhere in The Enquirer that the ‘communication of knowledge’ should be achieved ‘without infringing, or with as little as possible violence to, the volition and individual judgement of the person to be instructed’ (p. 114). It is within this libertarian context that the implicitly anti-authoritarian nature of Godwin’s argument takes shape. In a passage that appears to allude to the Memoirs of Emma Courtney, Godwin offers a commentary on the kind of parental control undertaken by Mr Courtney: It frequently happens that there are books read by the parent, which are conceived improper for the child. A collection of books, it may be, is viewed through glass doors, their outsides and labels are visible to the child; but the key is carefully kept, and a single book only at a time, selected by the parent, is put into his hands. A daughter is prohibited from the reading of novels; and in this prohibition will often commence a trial of skill, of quick conveyance on the part of the child, and of suspicious vigilance on the part of the parent. (p. 135)

This depiction of parental control of reading matter, with its inclusion of ‘glass doors’ through which books can be seen but not touched, describes the situation in which Emma Courtney finds herself when first admitted to her father’s library at Berkleysquare. Similarly, Godwin’s reference to those books which are ‘read by the parent’ but ‘conceived improper for the child’ recalls Emma’s discovery of her father’s copy of the ‘Heloise of Rousseau’. Godwin entertains no doubts as to the ‘tyranny’ of this mode of prohibitive education. Through such restrictions ‘a wall of separation is . . . erected between children and adults. They are made prisoners, and subjected to certain arbitrary regulations; and we are constituted their jailors’ (p. 136). The Gothic terminology derided by Mr Courtney is reintroduced by Godwin, invested with a radical desire for liberty over ‘arbitrary regulations’. As in More’s Strictures, parent–child relations achieve a political resonance. Indeed, Godwin is unequivocal about the public significance of

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education: along with ‘government’, he claims, it is one of the ‘principal objects of human power’.46 Yet, the cat-and-mouse game – the ‘trial of skill’ – that Godwin describes commencing between the vigilant parent and the evasive child also signals the emergence, alongside disciplinary power, of a corresponding pleasure. Foucault describes the conjunction of ‘power and pleasure’ in the relations between ‘parents and children, adults and adolescents, educator and students’ in similar terms: The pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and on the other hand, the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it. The power that lets itself be invaded by the pleasure it is pursuing; and opposite it, power asserting itself in the pleasure of showing off, scandalizing, or resisting.47

It is the pleasure of resistance, that which ‘kindles at having to evade’, that we find in Godwin’s essay. Deriding the ‘despotism’ that parents exercise by restricting their children’s reading, Godwin notes that as ‘curiosity is one of the strongest impulses of the human heart’, repressing it merely acts as a stimulant, fetishising the forbidden object, thereby magnifying its powers of attraction: To curiosity it is particularly incident, to grow and expand itself under difficulties and opposition. The greater are the obstacles to its being gratified, the more it seems to swell, and labour to burst the mounds [sic] that confine it. Many an object is passed by with indifference, till it is rendered a subject of prohibition, and then it starts up into a source of inextinguishable passion. (p. 136)

Ostensibly, then, Godwin is scathing of restriction of any kind, promoting instead absolute candour as the foundation of social sympathy: ‘[f]riendship’, he states, ‘is essentially hostile to all mystery’ (p. 136). It is precisely the destructive effects of zealous curiosity that Godwin illustrates through the fate of the eponymous hero of his first novel, Caleb Williams (1794). Even there, however, Caleb openly acknowledges the allure of the prohibited, commenting that ‘[t]o do what is forbidden always has its charms’.48 In ‘Of Choice in Reading’, Godwin’s enthusiasm for free and open communication is similarly undermined by the

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feelings of excitement stirred by the taboo. His account of ‘curiosity’ is suffused with admiration for the revolutionary energy of the individual labour it inspires, as it ‘swell[s]’ to ‘burst the mounds that confine it’.49 As we have seen, a similar effect is found in the Memoirs of Emma Courtney where, struggling to submit her passion to her reason, Emma finds that ‘these oppositions, roused the energy of my mind’ (p. 142). There, it is the inextricable ties between passion and reason, and power and pleasure, which serve to disrupt Hays’s claim that her novel operates as a ‘warning’ (p. 4). As Eleanor Ty notes, the novel’s ‘didactic lessons seem pale and lifeless in comparison to the narration of the potency and frenzy of forbidden and “contemned love”’.50 A similarly disruptive effect can be found in Godwin’s work. In the preface to The Enquirer, Godwin claims to have abandoned the ‘state of exaltation and ferment’ that was felt by radicals in the early stages of the French Revolution (p. 78). Referring to himself in the third person, Godwin outlines his reflective post-revolutionary stance: ‘With as ardent a passion for innovation as ever, he feels himself more patient and tranquil. He is desirous of assisting others, if possible, in perfecting the melioration of their temper’ (p. 79). Yet something of the ‘impetuous’ ‘contagion’, from which Godwin seeks to distance himself, is very much alive in the feelings of resistance and pleasure stimulated by prohibition. Thus, when Godwin’s essay, like Hays’s novel, concludes with a vision of a rational future society, the absence of ‘inextinguishable passion’ renders it somewhat hollow. In this conclusion, Godwin imagines a scene of education in which ‘the pupil is to lead, and the master to follow’. In keeping with the meditative tone of the Preface, it is a progressivist future vision, devoid of the violent disturbances that had come to characterise the French Revolution. According to Godwin, a pupil who is permitted ‘choice in reading’ will not become ‘the mere copy of his preceptor’; instead they will indulge in ‘new trains of thinking’ and experience ‘an improvement which was out of the limits of his lessons, and raise him to heights the preceptor never knew’ (p. 143). In a distinctly anti-Burkean take upon the sanctity of accumulated knowledge, the authority of the older generation is pushed aside to make way for the ‘improvement’ of the new. On reaching this benign, apparently optimistic conclusion, however, the ‘daughter’ who ‘is prohibited from the reading of

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novels’ has slipped out of view. As in Hays’s Emma Courtney, Godwin’s depiction of a progressivist future is one in which masculine reason has prevailed over passionate resistance. There is no trace of the ambiguous pleasure Godwin appears to find in the evasion of power, which confirms ‘the fiery grandeur of the soul . . . that will not be controled, and cannot be moulded by the frigid dictates of another’s will’ (p. 136). Godwin’s attachment to the energetic resistance excited by prohibition thus undermines the meditative stance he outlines in the Preface. And yet the radical agency wielded by ‘inextinguishable passion’ remains open to interrogation: is the pleasure children take in reading forbidden texts a form of resistance to authority, or the product of a willing collusion with it? Vivien Jones has observed that the requirement for ‘tyranny’ to be ‘recuperated as a necessary precursor to enlightened rationalism’ marks a ‘fundamental tension in radical accounts of historical development’.51 Considering this point of ambiguity, both Hays’s and Godwin’s texts appear to illustrate the emergence of a cycle of oppression and resistance, where the thrill children experience by indulging in ‘forbidden’ reading is produced only in conjunction with the authority that imposes restriction in the first place. Yet the breaking of this cycle, in the form of the future visions of masculine rationality both writers present, is facilitated only by the marginalisation of the ‘passionate’ female reader. While Godwin’s ostensible detachment from the ‘ferment’ of revolutionary politics in favour of ‘tranquillity’ won the approbation of reviewers, his liberal views of education were nevertheless the object of controversy. The May 1797 edition of the Critical Review makes a point of stating that they ‘do not . . . agree in opinion with our author respecting that system of indiscriminate reading, in which he seems to think young persons may be indulged’.52 The Monthly Review echoed this view, finding itself compelled to ‘object in toto to the latitude which [Godwin] gives to children in the choice of books, without allowing parents to interpose their authority’. Both reviews appear to deliberately misrepresent the nature of Godwin’s proposal. For them, allowing children ‘choice of reading’ is less a matter of personal liberty, and more to do with parental ‘indulgence’. Rather than ‘new trains of thinking’, such educational methods represent an abject ‘system of indiscriminate reading’. Referring more generally to Godwin’s unorthodox opposition to coercive forms of education, the

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Monthly goes on to comment that ‘the customary order of things is to be inverted, the pupil is to lead, and the master to follow: young people are to enjoy perfect liberty, and to be led to knowledge, not by authority, but by inclination . . . This plan may seem promising, but is, we fear, impracticable.’53 The concern expressed over the breakdown in forms of authority and the inversion of the ‘customary order of things’ clearly taps into wider anxieties regarding social stability in a period of unrest. It evokes the spectre of what More calls the ‘revolutionary spirit in families’, maintaining the parallel existence of the family and the state. As these reviews illustrate, the combination of education and politics remained a contentious issue: a fact that is borne out further by the tentative strategies adopted by both Hamilton and the Edgeworths. Hamilton and the Edgeworths: ‘the endearing restraints of parental authority’ Introducing her Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education, Elizabeth Hamilton comments that it is addressed to parents who are ‘in danger of being bewildered amid the variety of systems that offer themselves as unerring guides in the important path of education’ (i, pp. xiv–xv). In the post-revolutionary years, announcing disenchantment with ‘system’ in this way constitutes something of a conservative statement. As David Simpson notes, after 1793 anyone ‘with any tolerance for system or theory’ risked being ‘branded a Jacobin’.54 Hamilton’s caution is understandable given that, as Gary Kelly highlights, the Letters are ‘organised like a philosophical treatise’.55 Indeed, perhaps conscious that radicals, including Hays and Godwin, were adherents of the associationist premises upon which her own educational theories were based, Hamilton distances herself from the suggestion that her own work is affiliated with any formal ‘system’ or ‘theory’: The law of associations have been made use of by some writers to explain all the phenomena of the human mind; they have been made the basis of systems which have met with opposition, and of theories which are now nearly exploded. With the object of our present enquiry these are totally unconnected. (i, 18–19)

Hamilton’s mistrust of associationist theories that purport to ‘explain all the phenomena of the human mind’ is directed at indi-

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viduals such as Hays, who assert that ‘impressions’ can ‘form the mind, and determine the future character’ (p. 8). In her second novel, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), Hamilton offers a satirical rewriting of Emma Courtney that takes as its protagonist Bridgetina Botherim, a self-declared female philosopher and grotesque parody of Hays.56 Like the reviewers of The Enquirer, Hamilton understands Godwinian ‘liberty’ to denote parental indulgence, and she uses her novel to explore the consequences of such forms of education. However, in doing so she appears to confirm Hays’s assertion that ‘we are all the creatures of education’ (p. 8). In the Letters, Hamilton asserts that early impressions are vital to the establishment of habits of self-discipline and urges parents to employ a strictly methodised programme of instruction. Without a ‘regular plan’ of education, she states, pupils will ‘acquire no regular associations in [their] ideas, no accurate arrangement, no habit of mental application’ (i, 3). This line of thought is evident in the Memoirs’ account of Bridgetina’s childhood, where Hamilton satirises the extravagant philosophical discourse her protagonist uses to describe the ‘associations which formed the texture of [her] character’.57 Bridgetina describes how her passion for literature was first formed when she was still an infant, through the influence of her wet-nurse, Jenny. Having been taught to read by the parish clerk, Jenny ‘soon became so enamoured of literature, that from one of those associations so natural to the human mind, she conceived a tender passion for her instructor’, and eventually had a child with him (p. 175). Bridgetina continues: ‘[w]ith her milk I greedily absorbed the delicious poison which circulated through every vein; and love of literature, and importunate sensibility, became from thenceforth the predominant features of my character’ (p. 175). Bridgetina’s formative introduction to reading and literature comes to her through a skewed perspective, in which pedagogy and education are dangerously libidinised. Within this short account of Bridgetina as an infant, Hamilton manages to include a range of references to the corrupt reading practices by which her protagonist is characterised. Rather than the habits of ‘mental application’ recommended in the Letters, Bridgetina passively ‘absorbs’ her taste for literature, along with her nurse’s milk. The description of fiction as ‘poison’ was commonplace in accounts of women’s

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reading, and was often associated with the novels borrowed from circulating libraries. To this effect, the ‘circulation’ of this ‘poison’ suggests that Bridgetina’s body itself becomes analogous to a circulating library, with her sense of self founded upon little more than a repository of worthless knowledge. By rendering Bridgetina an archetypal shallow reader, Hamilton surely intends to satirise the titular heroine’s early education in Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney. There, Emma recalls how, aged six, she ‘read aloud, before company, with great applause, [her] uncle’s favourite authors, Pope’s Homer and Thomson’s Seasons, little comprehending either’, conceding that her ‘vanity [was] fostered’ in the process (p. 14). While Hays avoids making any direct comment upon this part of Emma’s upbringing, for Hamilton such pride in one’s own achievements, and the parental indulgence which nurtures it, become the subject of ridicule. Brimming with wonder at her own capacities, Bridgetina recounts how she ‘could actually, at the age of five years, repeat the whole history of the Glass Slipper, without missing a single word!’ (p. 175). Such moments see Hamilton inviting her readers to draw a parallel between her protagonist and Emma Courtney. A crucial difference, however, is found in Hamilton’s depiction of Bridgetina’s father. Rather than the menacing, disciplinary presence of Mr Courtney, Mr Botherim is a minor figure in the Memoirs, appearing only to offer an example of indulgent parenting. He was ‘so delighted with [Bridgetina’s] premature eloquence, that he always kept [her] up to supper, and rewarded the exertion of [her] energies by a nice morsel of high seasoned-ragout or savoury pasty’ (p. 175). By means of this reward, Bridgetina’s reading is again figured as an act of the body, rather than the mind – one geared towards sensual gratification rather than intellectual expansion. In the Letters, Hamilton draws attention to the mistaken notion that ‘the pampering of the appetite’ is ‘the surest mark of affection’ (i, 270). Pursuing this belief will, she suggests, only encourage children to associate the ‘idea of pleasure’ with ‘the gratification of the sensual appetites’ (i, 270). While Emma Courtney studies under the watchful eye of her father, discovering Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse only to have it confiscated, Bridgetina is subjected to no such surveillance. Hamilton offers a parallel with Hays’s novel when her protagonist has a similarly life-altering literary encounter with Godwin’s

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Political Justice (1793), from which she imbibes her crude understanding of human perfectibility. While Emma’s joy at reading Rousseau is curtailed by her father’s intervention, Bridgetina’s reading of Godwin is comically facilitated by her mother: My mother got a packet of brown snuff from London by the mailcoach; it was wrapped in two proof sheets of the quarto edition of Political Justice. I eagerly snatched up the paper, and notwithstanding the frequent fits of sneezing it occasioned, from the quantity of snuff contained in every fold, I greedily devoured its contents. I read and sneezed, and sneezed and read, till the germ of philosophy began to fructify my soul. From that moment I became a philosopher and need not inform you of the important consequences. (p. 176)

Once more, Bridgetina’s reading is intimately related with her bodily economy, which comically intrudes upon the metaphysical speculations one might expect from a ‘philosopher’. In conjunction with Bridgetina’s sneezing, Hamilton’s pun on the ‘germ of philosophy’ introduces the metaphor of radical thought as a kind of disease. We have already seen Godwin discussing the ‘contagion’ of revolutionary zeal; as Stephen Blakemore notes, this metaphor also took on connotations of venereal disease and, as a consequence, contributed towards a ‘popular identification of illicit politics and sex’.58 Despite the anti-Jacobin tendencies of the Memoirs, Hamilton’s political views retain a progressive edge. Gary Kelly describes her as moving ‘closer to Revolutionary feminism after 1800’ but, even within the Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, Hamilton can be seen to inhabit a moderately liberal position, offering a persuasive – and often Wollstonecraftian – critique of Burkean chivalry.59 Alongside the aberrant figure of Bridgetina, the Memoirs depicts the fate of another female reader, Julia Delmond. To provide an insight into Julia’s character, Hamilton breaks off mid-chapter to introduce a history of her father, Captain Delmond. Through her account of the Captain’s reading experiences, Hamilton offers a critique of chivalric masculinity that ironically recalls Hays’s Emma Courtney. Yet, as if to remind us of the difficulty of identifying Hamilton with revolutionary feminism, it is not just ancien régime romance, but post-revolutionary radicalism and atheism that come under attack. As with Bridgetina’s ‘accidental’ discovery of Godwin’s Political Justice, Captain Delmond’s encounter with

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the texts that come to form his character is accidental. Stationed in a lonely outpost in the north of England, he employs reading as a means of ‘killing time’, following the discovery of unwanted books in the house in which he resides (p. 77). Delmond’s place of residence, Hamilton informs us, was an old manor-house, now occupied by the farmer who rented the adjoining lands. The family to whom the estate devolved, had on the death of the late possessor removed from the house all the valuable pieces of furniture, leaving to the present tenant such articles of lumber as they did not deem worthy of removal: of this description was an old book-case and its contents. (p. 78)

The ‘old manor-house’, abandoned by its hereditary owners, marks the passing of the old feudal order, introducing a post-Burkean vision of England.60 Having plundered the house for all items of value, leaving only certain ‘articles of lumber’, the rightful owners of the property have abandoned their responsibilities to the local community. Hamilton’s description of the house is a far cry from those eighteenth-century writings in which ‘the predominant image of social life was the country estate, its inhabitants dependent upon the owner for their welfare’.61 In what is almost a parody of the Burkean ‘principle of transmission’, all that is passed on to the house’s current residents is the old bookcase, the contents of which not only corrupt the Captain’s judgement but lead indirectly to the seduction of his daughter at the hands of the novel’s Francophile ‘philosopher’, Alphonso Vallaton. The contents of the bookcase consist of ‘ponderous volumes of romances’ and the works of ‘freethinking philosophers’ (p. 78). It is the presence of the latter that alerts us to the fact that Hamilton is offering a critique of more than just Burkean romance. The inclusion of these works of philosophy also looks forward to the novel’s main plot strands: Bridgetina’s misguided involvement with radical politics and Julia Delmond’s seduction. For now, however, I wish to focus upon Delmond’s romance reading. These texts, ‘doomed to dust and obscurity’, appear as the remnants of an archaic past, although they had ‘afforded ample amusement to the fair readers of former times’ (p. 78). As this reference to ‘fair readers’ implies, Delmond’s reading practices cut across expectations of gender, subtly feminising him in a way that becomes more apparent by reference to A Vindication of the Rights

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of Woman. There, Mary Wollstonecraft offers a comparison of the education and behaviour of two seemingly disparate groups: middle-class women and ‘military men’.62 Both, she asserts, have much in common when it comes to their education. Like women, military men are ‘sent into the world before their minds have been stored with knowledge or fortified by principles’, resulting in them acquiring nothing but ‘a little superficial knowledge’ and ‘what is termed a knowledge of the world’.63 Evidently Hamilton shared Wollstonecraft’s view of this subject, ironically commenting that Delmond finds the romances agreeable as ‘happily his taste had not as yet been sufficiently formed to the more perspicacious stile of modern writers to render him fastidious’ (p. 78). The subject position he inhabits is that of the indiscriminate reader: a role stereotypically occupied by women. The pleasure Delmond takes in these texts also bears close comparison with Wollstonecraft’s account, in which she derides the ‘feminine’ habits of gallantry that military men adopt, noting that ‘[l]ike the fair sex, the business of their lives is gallantry. – They were taught to please, and they only live to please.’64 This archaic spirit of gallantry is also present in Hamilton’s Captain Delmond, where it provokes an excessively sentimental response to his reading: ‘[t]he stories were of a nature calculated to excite an interest in his breast. The sentiments of honour were congenial to those he had been early taught to entertain’ (p. 78).65 For Wollstonecraft, such ‘gallant’ sentimentality serves only to vitiate masculinity, disqualifying men from assuming the title of ‘moral beings’.66 While Hamilton stops short of making the same assertion, it is clear that it is Delmond’s susceptibility to romance reading that leads to his inability to govern his own family. Indeed, his intervention in his daughter’s education contrives to undermine the beneficial early instruction she had received from his friends the Hurfords, who had raised Julia while he was stationed abroad. Hamilton’s description of Julia’s early education anticipates the mistrust of ‘theory’ she would later exhibit in the Letters. The Hurfords, she notes, were ‘confessedly strangers to all systems of education’, yet possessed in abundance ‘sound common sense’ (p. 82). On his return, Captain Delmond clumsily intervenes in this idealised, unsophisticated instruction. His attempts at education centre on a parody of liberal, Godwinian ideals. Eschewing restraint in favour of absolute freedom of choice, he encourages Julia’s

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insatiable appetite for knowledge with a free command of all the books which either the private collections of his friends or the circulating library could furnish. He laid no restraint upon her choice, for from the pains he took to form her taste, and from the opinion he entertained of the amazing maturity of her judgement, he was convinced she would of her own accord choose only what was proper. (p. 85)

As the Letters demonstrate, Hamilton deplores the capacity of parental terror to ‘debase’ and ‘enfeeble’ the minds of the young. Here, however, Hamilton implies that some mode of parental authority is required to direct the female ‘appetite’ for reading (although the ‘pains’ Delmond takes to ‘form’ Julia’s taste are not discussed). The absence of any such guidance is presented as a failing on Captain Delmond’s part: Had a due allowance for the power of imagination in young minds entered into Capt. Delmond’s calculation, he would perhaps have been less sanguine. In fact, though Julia read with pleasure books of philosophy, history, and travels to her father, she found a pleasure still more poignant in devouring the pages of a novel or romance in her own apartment. (pp. 85–6)

As in Godwin’s ‘Of Choice in Reading’, we are presented with a contrast between openness and secrecy – between the external and the internal. It results in the production of two seemingly distinct modes of pleasure. One is domestic and sociable, derived from Julia’s dutiful reading aloud to her father. The other, ‘more poignant’, pleasure that Julia experiences recalls that of Godwin’s novel-reading ‘daughter’. It is located in privacy, and produced through the evasion of the paternal gaze. In the private space of ‘her own apartment’ Julia ‘devours’ novels and romance, as if enjoying an illicit pleasure of the body, one of unregulated appetite. The disruptive, libidinal pleasures of reading come to the fore as Hamilton progresses: Imagination, wild and ungoverned imagination reigned paramount in her breast. The investigation of truth had no longer any charm. Sentiment usurped the place of judgement, and the mind, instead of deducing inferences from facts, was now solely occupied in the invention of extravagant and chimerical situations. (p. 86)

Like her father before her, Julia succumbs to an excessive sensibility, which appeals to the ‘breast’. It is her susceptibility to fiction –

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to the temptation of ‘extravagant and chimerical situations’ – that eventually leads to her downfall. Bridgetina suggests that the novel’s philosopher-villain, Alphonso Vallaton, is actually the longlost son of a local nobleman; Julia, ‘call[ing] to her remembrance all the similar events in her most favourite novels’, becomes convinced that this is indeed the truth (p. 75). The consequence of her willingness to conflate reality and fiction ultimately shatters her ‘dream of fancy’. She is seduced by Vallaton, and subsequently dies, but not before offering repentance for her misdemeanours: Independence I considered as essential to virtue. But what was the independence to which I had resort? – Alas! to throw off the gentle, the endearing restraints of parental authority for the yoke of a domineering passion, which bowed my soul in subjection to a man who has since proved the most barbarous and unworthy of the human race! (p. 372)

In one sense, this repentance is somewhat hollow. Like Emma Courtney, Julia testifies to the necessity of female self-control. Hays’s description of the ‘tyranny of the passions’ is recalled here by Julia’s recognition of the ‘domineering passion’ that led her astray. While Emma’s renunciation of ‘passion’ strikes a discordant note following the novel’s attempts to validate that very quality, here Julia’s fond recollection of ‘parental authority’ stretches credulity. Given that Hamilton has amply illustrated Captain Delmond’s failings as a father, Julia’s recollection of ‘the gentle, the endearing restraints of parental authority’ fails to ring true. Yet, within this moment of artifice, Hamilton’s notion of ideal parental governance is allowed to crystallise. More commanding than the parody of Godwinian liberalism employed by Captain Delmond, yet significantly less extreme than the deleterious ‘terror’ described in the Letters, ‘parental authority’ should manifest itself in ‘gentle . . . endearing restraints’. There are echoes of both Locke and Burke here, in the insistence that ‘restraint’ somehow promotes filial bonds by proving ‘endearing’. But both ‘fear and awe’ and ‘terror’ have been dismissed – or at least veiled – by a sense of ‘gentleness’: a quality which emphasises the second stage of Locke’s equation of ‘love and friendship’. Acts of ‘restraint’ thus manifest themselves as paternal care, rather than punitive discipline. In effect, Hamilton is working towards the articulation of the family unit as a site of enlightened benevolence, as in her Letters on the Elementary

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Principles of Education. Key to this notion of domestic concord is the sense of a familial community, to which reading is central. As we have already seen, the ‘pleasure’ Julia should have been satisfied with is that of reading aloud to her father; her turn towards the ‘more poignant’ pleasure of reading in the privacy of her apartment precedes the disintegration of the Delmond family unit. In addition to Julia and Bridgetina, Hamilton offers a third female character, Harriet Orwell, whose exemplary morality signifies her role as the novel’s true heroine. Significantly, Harriet’s acts of reading are firmly embedded within notions of domestic duty. We see her, for instance, reading the New Testament to her dying aunt, Mrs Martha (p. 184). Elsewhere, ‘having completely regulated the family economy for the day’, we find Harriet ‘quietly seated at her work with her aunt and sister, listening to Hume’s History of England, as it was read to them by a little orphan girl she had herself instructed’ (p. 73). Exemplifying Harriet’s sense of duty and charitable benevolence, the domestic scene of reading is also positioned at the centre of a discourse of patriotism, evinced by the reading of Hume’s History.67 To emphasise the flawless nature of Harriet’s character, Hamilton turns once more to Hays’s Emma Courtney. Following her death, Mrs Martha’s legacy to her niece is a letter which, in the manner of a conduct book, outlines the ideal of femininity to which Harriet should aspire. In the letter, Mrs Martha is keen to emphasise the importance of ‘judgement’ over ‘imagination’, writing approvingly to Harriet that ‘[y]our mind has not been suffered to run wild in the fairy field of fiction; it has been turned to objects of real and permanent utility’ (p. 188). The ‘fairy fields of fiction’ are, of course, what Mr Courtney accuses Emma of inhabiting, following her unregulated early reading.68 Through Mrs Martha’s epistolary interjection, Hamilton thus resurrects a more benign form of the binary system that governs Mr Courtney’s educational logic, emphasising the subjugation of the imagination, and asserting in its place the practical virtues of ‘utility’ and ‘judgement’. While Harriet is undoubtedly designed to occupy the moral centre of Hamilton’s novel she is, as critics have noted, a rather vapid heroine, who is overshadowed by the larger-than-life presence of Bridgetina.69 Her avoidance of the imaginative excesses of Bridgetina and Julia contributes to her possession of that

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sought-after quality in conduct discourse of the period: a ‘wellregulated mind’ (p. 151). However, Hamilton indirectly illustrates how Harriet’s ability to subordinate her more ‘irregular’ feelings is not necessarily for the best. Before her elopement, Julia lies to her father in order to spend the day with Vallaton. Upon their return, their carriage is overturned and Julia is detained with a broken leg for several days at a farmhouse. Harriet is among Julia’s visitors while she is recuperating. ‘[F]rom some hints dropped by Julia’, Harriet gathers that ‘all was not just as it should be’ and that Julia suffered from ‘the secret consciousness of some act of indiscretion’ (p. 151). Yet so little had Harriet of the prying spirit of curiosity, so easily could she controul the feelings of her well-regulated mind, that so far from diving into the sources of Julia’s disquiet, she had been at much pains to turn her thoughts from the subject of uneasiness. The same spirit of animated benevolence made her now use all her endeavours to persuade Mrs. Delmond, that Julia would be fully able to vindicate herself, and to give such an explanation of the circumstances that had incurred her father’s displeasure, as would prove entirely satisfactory. (p. 151)

Had Harriet more of a tendency towards enquiry, a little more of ‘the prying spirit of curiosity’, then she might have been able to warn Julia’s parents of the depth of Julia’s attachment to Vallaton. Instead, she is only able to see one possibility: Julia’s innocence. And yet, as is already obvious to the reader of the novel, this faith is misguided. The alluring, yet ultimately destructive, effects of curiosity are apparent in the work of Hays and Godwin. Given that these authors associate it with revolutionary transgression, it becomes possible to see Hamilton’s negative view of curiosity as confirmation of her anti-Jacobinism. Once more, however, the Letters complicates this view. There, curiosity is depicted as a natural trait of children, which must be carefully managed rather than banished, as it appears to have been in Harriet Orwell’s case. In her engagement with the issue of parental supervision of reading, Hamilton alludes once more to the Edgeworths’ Practical Education. There, the Edgeworths refuse to condone those prohibitions which they see as the result of arbitrary power, and instead positively endorse children’s spirit of curiosity: ‘[a]n infant should

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never be interrupted in its operations’, they write, for to do so would prevent them ‘from acquiring knowledge by their own experience’ (p. 15). Such impositions of authority risk rendering children ‘indolent’ – causing them to ‘desist from exertion’ – or ‘cunning’, by stimulating their desire for ‘forbidden objects, when the watchful eye that guards them is withdrawn’ (p. 16). The Edgeworths draw upon Locke’s suggestion that the external gaze of authority (‘the watchful eye’) is an ineffective tool of authority, which only serves to excite desire. Yet, this logic is not sustained when the Edgeworths turn to children’s reading. There, they find ‘the enlightened energy of parental affection’ exemplified in the actions of a mother with whom they are acquainted: We have several books before us marked by her pencil, and volumes which, having undergone some necessary operations by her scissars, would in their mutilated state shock the sensibility of a nice librarian. But shall the education of a family be sacrificed to the beauty of a page, or even to the binding of a book? Few books can safely be given to children without the previous use of the pen, the pencil, and the scissars. In the books which we have before us, in their corrected state, we see sometimes a few words blotted out, sometimes half a page, sometimes many pages are cut out. (pp. 185–6)

This account of textual editing appears untroubled by the sense of violence it exudes.70 By imbuing the ‘education of a family’ with such value, at the expense of ‘the sensibility of a nice librarian’, the Edgeworths display an entirely unsentimental utilitarianism. Indeed, their ‘enlightened’ disregard for ‘the beauty of a page’ recalls what Burke derisively describes as the ‘new conquering empire of light and reason’, which disregards those ‘sentiments which beautify and soften private society’.71 Ironically, then, the Edgeworths’ act of censorship results in a moment of revelation and exposure. It is as if, by advocating the mutilation of the page, they momentarily tear off the Burkean ‘decent drapery of life’, rendering ‘naked’ the displacement of the potentially violent radicalism that underwrites their reformist programme of education.72 Mitzi Myers describes how, in her works of education, Maria Edgeworth seeks to rewrite the commonly held contemporary view that ‘the guillotine and the Terror were the legacy of French Enlightenment, the inevitable result of rationalist philosophy, not an interruption of it’.73 In the above passage, however, we glimpse

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a moment of potential rupture in this revisionary process, in which the violence of revolution – in a sublimated form – reappears in the supervision of children’s reading. As in the work of Godwin and Hays, the spectre of revolutionary violence threatens to impose itself upon the scene of ‘enlightened’ education. Elizabeth Hamilton’s treatment of children’s curiosity however, seeks to defuse this possibility. She does so, initially, by rejecting the Edgeworths’ enthusiasm for such extreme textual intervention: ‘We may obliterate lines, and cut out whole pages of the books we put into our children’s hands, in the manner recommended by Miss Edgeworth,’ she writes (i, 412). Yet, it will still be found ‘impossible to prevent the misconceptions of infant inexperience, for these will often attach false ideas to a word or sentence which appears to us clear or intelligible’ (i, 412). Hamilton recognises that such acts of textual censorship merely perpetuate the cycle of prohibition and resistance that the Edgeworths elsewhere seek to avoid. For pupils may gather ‘false opinions’ of ‘the tutor’s motive for obliterating the reprobated line’, giving birth to ‘pride and suspicion’ (i, 411). The interventions that Hamilton recommends are far milder, and lead to a conclusion that promises to break this cycle. When parents ‘observe words or sentences liable to misconstruction’, Hamilton asks her reader whether it would ‘not be better to mark them with a pencil, so as afterwards to examine the child upon them, in order to correct any erroneous opinion they may have conveyed, than to lead them to fill the chasm by conjecture?’ (i, 413). In following this course of action, the parent can promote a ‘teachableness of disposition’ (i, 413). This apparent inculcation of a docility of mind, combined with Hamilton’s notion of ‘correct[ing]’ children’s ‘erroneous opinion’, might be interpreted as leading towards the Foucauldian model of disciplinary power, which makes the child’s reading the object of knowledge and insists upon ‘compulsory visibility’.74 Such a critique ought to be considered carefully. Mitzi Myers has argued that we must divest ourselves of current (Foucauldian) prejudices, in order to re-imagine the social significance that promises of rationality and ‘Enlightenment’ carried in the late eighteenth century.75 This perspective allows us to appreciate the enabling, rather than the disciplinary, qualities of Hamilton’s educational agenda. Whereas the Edgeworths uncharacteristically shut down the possibility of enquiry, narrowing the

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child’s reading of a text, Hamilton encourages engagement with young readers. Rather than ‘fill[ing] the chasm’ of their ignorance with ‘conjecture’, children are offered the chance to participate in a form of rational dialogue, to exercise their curiosity, and thus to transform the home into a site of enlightened exchange, reminiscent of the ‘freedom of conversation . . . without distinction or reserve’ that the Edgeworths outline in Practical Education (p. 125). While elements of Foucault’s ‘compulsory visibility’ remain in this formulation of the domestic sphere as a regulated space, it also promises to be an enabling configuration, particularly for women. A scene from the Memoirs offers an illustration of this in action. There, we witness an assembly of the novel’s principal characters, in which Bridgetina’s enthusiasm for Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse leads to a discussion of female education. Despite her devotion to the ‘sublime virtue of Eloisa’, Bridgetina criticises Rousseau, considering him ‘a stranger to the rights of women’ (pp. 100–1). Henry Sydney replies: ‘The inconstancy and folly of his system . . . was, perhaps, never better exposed that in the very ingenious publication which takes the Rights of Women for its title. Pity that the very sensible authoress has sometimes permitted her zeal to hurry her into expressions which have raised a prejudice against the whole. To superficial readers it appears to be her intention to unsex women entirely. But –’ ‘And why should there be any distinction of sex?’ cried Bridgetina, interrupting him. (p. 101)

While Bridgetina’s interruption identifies her as a ‘superficial reader’ (by Henry Sydney’s logic, at least), Hamilton offers a glimpse of her idealised scene of domestic discussion. It is one in which the merits of a politically radical text, such as Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, could be debated. Although Bridgetina’s overly combative interjections halt the flow of the discussion, her forthright opinions also provide the material around which this discursive scene unfolds. The familial, domestic sphere thus provides a space in which the implications of women’s reading could be explored. The figures of authority in this scene, Dr Orwell and Mr Sydney, contribute to the discussion, but do not intervene or impose prohibitions. The entry of Wollstonecraft and Rousseau through this

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parentally sanctioned, regulated space stands in sharp contrast to the contingent circumstances that accompany the acts of misreading in Hamilton’s novel: Captain Delmond’s discovery of the contents of an ‘old book-case’; Bridgetina’s encounter with Godwin’s Political Justice. It also offers an implicit condemnation of the novel’s scenes of furtive reading: the ‘poignant’ pleasure Julia derives from novels in her ‘apartment’ and Bridgetina’s conveyance of both volumes of La Nouvelle Héloïse in her pocket (p. 179). Indeed, late eighteenth-century commentators such as Vicesimus Knox write scathingly of those publishers who make books ‘conveniently portable’. He laments that, as a result, ‘[e]very corner of the kingdom is abundantly supplied’ with novels, allowing the nation’s youth to ‘pollute [their] heart[s] in the recesses of the closet’.76 It is an image that neatly sums up the conjoined nature of the domestic and the national; a connection that Mitzi Myers emphasises in the work of Maria Edgeworth, but which is equally applicable to that of Elizabeth Hamilton. Myers notes how ‘the domestic idyll of participatory openness’ provides the basis of ‘a national political reality, a strikingly ambitious project in the climate of conservative reaction that the bloody French Revolutionary decades induced’.77 Throughout this chapter we have witnessed how the spectre of revolutionary violence haunts the site of education. For Hays and Godwin it proved something of an impasse, troubling their hopes for the establishment of a progressivist society; only in the more moderate works of the Edgeworths and Elizabeth Hamilton can such a vision be sustained. The conceptualisations of the private sphere that these writers offer are not, however, without their problems. In both the Memoirs and the Letters, Hamilton suggests that women remain in the domestic sphere: to depart from it is to become a grotesque spectacle in the mould of Bridgetina Botherim. It is also noteworthy that the texts explored in this chapter are – in their negotiation with forms of parental and political authority – all seemingly more concerned with the father’s role in education than that of the mother. Emma Courtney’s mother died in childbirth, Godwin’s preceptor/parent figure is implicitly male, and the mother figures in Hamilton’s novel are absent, or far less defined than the fathers. Indeed, one of the most eloquent older female figures, Mrs Martha, is allowed her fullest expression only after her death, in

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the conduct-letter she leaves to Harriet Orwell. Bearing these points in mind, the following chapter will address how women’s reading both facilitated, and delimited, forms of female agency within the domestic sphere. While the ‘participatory openness’ described by these writers was forged in a moment of post-revolutionary optimism, Chapter 4 explores what becomes of these radical origins, as the ‘domestic idyll’ grows increasingly central to a middle-class ideal of the home. Notes 1 The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth, ed. by Marilyn Butler and others, 12 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999–2003), xi: Practical Education (1798), ed. by Susan Manly, p. 185. 2 As Gary Kelly notes, ‘[i]n Britain, many were turning against reform of any kind, labelled “innovation” or “French principles”’. See Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 18. 3 Alan Richardson, Literature, Education and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 44. 4 Sarah Trimmer, The Œconomy of Charity, 2 vols (London: J. Johnson and F. and C. Rivington; G. G. and J. Robinson; Longman and Rees, 1801), i, 10, quoted in David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 6. 5 Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education. With a View of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent Among Women of Rank and Fortune, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies, 1799), i, 135. Subsequent references are made parenthetically. 6 Perhaps most noticeably, Thomas Spence’s The Rights of Infants had been published in 1797, two years prior to the Strictures. 7 Mitzi Myers, ‘Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Female Tradition in Georgian Children’s Books’, Children’s Literature, 14 (1986), 31–59 (p. 36). 8 Edgeworth, Practical Education, p. 125; Elizabeth Hamilton, Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Bath: G. and J. Robinson, 1801–2), i, 47. Subsequent references to Practical Education and the Letters will be made parenthetically. 9 Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500– 1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), p. 440. 10 John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), ed. by John W. and Jean S. Yolton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 113.

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Ibid., pp. 109–10. Stone, p. 407. Richardson, p. 48. Locke, p. 113. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 187. Locke, p. 117. Ibid., p. 142. On the sublime as an aesthetic category of revolution see Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789–1820) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 6–8. Although attributed to Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education was in fact primarily the undertaking of Maria, as Mitzi Myers notes in ‘“Anecdotes from the Nursery” in Maria Edgeworth’s Practical Education (1798) Learning from Children “Abroad and at Home”’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 60:2 (Winter 1999), 220–50 (p. 223). Nevertheless, I refer to Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth as joint authors of Practical Education throughout. Hamilton’s text was originally published in 1801 as Letters on Education. Hamilton subsequently made significant revisions, republishing it as a second edition entitled Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education in 1801–2. It is the revised second edition to which I refer throughout this chapter. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1989), v: A Vindication of the Rights of Men, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Hints, p. 186. On the ‘neutral situation of domesticity’, see Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 313–39. Hamilton voices her approval of Practical Education in the Letters: ‘I consider it, upon the whole, as an inestimable treasure of useful hints and sensible observations; and, therefore, earnestly recommend it to your attentive perusal’ (i, 46). The statement that the Irish had ‘till very lately’ been ‘slaves’ appears to refer to the recent relaxation of the legal restrictions imposed upon Irish Catholics. As Seamus Deane notes, ‘[o]ne consequence in Ireland of the French Revolution had been the easing of the penal restrictions on Catholics in an effort to deflect them from Jacobinism’. In carrying out these measures, however, the government acted ‘too slowly and too brutally’. Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 33.

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24 Locke, p. 113. 25 Burke writes that ‘[b]y a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives’. See Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event. In a Letter Intended to have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Paris (1790), ed. by Conor Cruise O’Brien (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 120. 26 Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), ed. by Eleanor Ty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 15. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically. 27 Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 83. 28 Dorothea Herbert, cited in Records of Girlhood: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Women’s Childhoods, ed. by Valerie Sanders (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 33. 29 M. O. Grenby, The Child Reader, 1700–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 270–1. 30 Eleanor Ty, Unsex’d Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), p. 49. 31 Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 15–16. 32 Burke, Reflections, p. 170. 33 The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, v, 131. 34 Cora Kaplan, Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986), p. 46. 35 Ibid., p. 35. 36 The Appel was translated into English in 1795 and published as An Appeal to Impartial Posterity by Joseph Johnson, with whom Hays was already acquainted, and who would go on to publish Hays’s own Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (1798). 37 Marie-Jeanne Roland de la Platière, An Appeal to Impartial Posterity (London: J. Johnson, 1795), Part III, p. 25. 38 Mary Hays, Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (London: J. Johnson and J. Bell, 1798), pp. 260–1. 39 Anna Jameson, cited in Sanders (ed.), Records of Girlhood, p. 84. The relationship between Jameson’s early reading and her ‘autobiographical self-construction’ are discussed in Judith Johnson, Anna Jameson: Victorian, Feminist, Woman of Letters (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), pp. 42–6.

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40 Vivien Jones, ‘“The Tyranny of the Passions”: Feminism and Heterosexuality in the Fiction of Wollstonecraft and Hays’, in Political Gender: Texts and Contexts, ed. by Sally Ledger, Josephine McDonagh and Jane Spencer (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), pp. 173–88 (p. 183). 41 Ty, Unsex’d Revolutionaries, p. 59. 42 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, An Introduction, trans. by Robert Hurley (London: Allen Lane, 1979), p. 105. 43 See Tilottama Rajan, ‘Autonarration and Genotext in Mary Hays’ “Memoirs of Emma Courtney”’, in Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-forming Literature 1789–1837, ed. by Tilottama Rajan and Julie M. Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 213–39 (p. 236, n. 6). 44 William Godwin, ‘Of Choice in Reading’, in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. by Mark Philp and others, 7 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1993), v: Educational and Literary Writings, ed. by Pamela Clemit, p. 142. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text. 45 Grenby, pp. 186, 184. 46 Godwin, An Account of the Seminary (1783), in Political and Philosophical Writings, v, 5. 47 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 45. 48 William Godwin, Caleb Williams (1794), ed. by David McCracken (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 107. 49 Indeed, Barbara M. Benedict has noted how, in the fiction of this period, the portrayal of ‘curiosity’ frequently represents ‘a challenge to the status quo’ and a ‘postrevolutionary rejection of political oppression’. See Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 233. 50 Ty, Unsex’d Revolutionaries, p. 56. 51 Vivien Jones, ‘Women Writing Revolution: Narratives of History and Sexuality in Wollstonecraft and Williams’, in Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts 1780–1832, ed. by Stephen Copley and John Whale (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 178–99 (p. 182). 52 The Critical Review; or, Annals of Literature Extended and Improved, 20 (May 1797), 58–64 (p. 62). 53 The Monthly Review; or Literary Journal, Enlarged, Second Series, 23 (July 1797), 291–302 (p. 294). 54 David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt Against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 55. 55 Kelly, p. 266. For more on the ‘philosophical’ context of Hamilton’s Letters, see Richard De Ritter, ‘Female Philosophers and the Compre-

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Imagining women readers hensive View: Elizabeth Hamilton’s Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education’, European Romantic Review, 23:6 (2012), 689–705. For accounts of Hamilton’s ‘rewriting’ of Memoirs of Emma Courtney, see Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 85–6, and Katherine Binhammer, ‘The Persistence of Reading: Governing Female NovelReading in Memoirs of Emma Courtney and Memoirs of Modern Philosophers’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 27:2 (Spring 2003), 1–22 (pp. 12–13). The title of Hamilton’s novel is perhaps also an allusion to Godwin’s account of Mary Wollstonecraft’s life, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798). As we will see, however, Hamilton’s response to Wollstonecraft’s work is far more benign than the sometimes vicious satire to which she subjects Hays in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers. Elizabeth Hamilton, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), ed. by Claire Grogan (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2000), p. 174. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically. Steven Blakemore, ‘Revolution and the French Disease: Laetitia Matilda Hawkins’s Letters to Helen Maria Williams’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 36:3 (1996), 673–91. Kelly, p. 265. Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell describe Burke as Hamilton’s ‘political arch-enemy’. While this assertion is made in relation to their divergent views of British intervention in India in the 1780s, traces of this antagonism can, I argue, still be registered in 1800, three years after Burke’s death. See the introduction to Elizabeth Hamilton, Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), ed. by Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1999), p. 32. As Ina Ferris notes, the trope of the ‘old manor house’ is used in Charlotte Smith’s 1793 novel of the same name ‘to explore the myth of the English nation’. In the case of Smith’s novel, the titular house is ‘the apparently solid but in fact ever-crumbling Rayland Hall’. See The Works of Charlotte Smith, ed. by Stuart Curran and others, 14 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005–7), xi: The Old Manor House, ed. by Ina Ferris (2006), pp. xii–xiii. Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 76. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, v, 92. Ibid., v, 92. Ibid., v, 93. Hamilton was not alone in ascribing a predilection for novels to

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68

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soldiers as well as women. Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, the fictional Spanish narrator of Robert Southey’s Letters From England (1807), notes that novels ‘are manufactured chiefly for women and soldier-officers. To the latter they can do no harm; to the former a great deal.’ See Robert Southey, Letters From England (1807), ed. by Jack Simmons (London: Cresset Press, 1951), pp. 348–9. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, v, 114. Jacqueline Pearson notes that ‘British history, to encourage patriotism, and classical history, to allow access to the foundations of Western culture, were specially recommended’ to women. See Pearson, pp. 49–50. The common source for these references is Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742–45) in which Lorenzo, the addressee of the poem, is warned against seeking solace in the ‘fairy Field of Fiction’. See Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742–45), ed. by Stephen Cornford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), v. 70. Eleanor Ty states of Bridgetina that ‘she acts rashly, but she is also full of energy and ambition compared to the other rather insipid, but obedient girls in the story’. See Unsex’d Revolutionaries, p. 28. Such practices meet similar approval in Priscilla Wakefield’s story, ‘The Cautious Mother’. There, the titular mother ‘was so particular with respect to the books she admitted among her children’ that ‘she never scrupled to sacrifice the beauty of a new purchase, by freely cutting out as many leaves as contained passages likely to give them false ideas, or to corrupt their innocence’. See Priscilla Wakefield, Juvenile Anecdotes, Founded on Facts. Collected for the Amusement of Children, 2 vols (London: Darton and Harvey, 1795–98), ii, 98. Burke, p. 171. Ibid., p. 171. Mitzi Myers, ‘The Erotics of Pedagogy: Historical Intervention, Literary Representation, the “Gift of Education,” and the Agency of Children’, Children’s Literature, 23 (1995), 1–30 (p. 9). Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 187. See Myers, ‘“Anecdotes from the Nursery”’, p. 239, n. 41. Vicesimus Knox, ‘On Novel Reading’, in Essays Moral and Literary, 5th edn, 2 vols (London: Charles Dilly, 1784), i, 70. Myers, ‘“Anecdotes from the Nursery”’, p. 237.

4

‘Leisure to be wise’: female education and the possibilities of domesticity

[Women] have no such constraint upon their understandings; neither the necessity of earning their bread, nor the ambition to shine in public affairs, hurry or prejudice their minds: in domestic life they have leisure to be wise. Maria Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies to Which is Added An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification1

In 1791, Maria Edgeworth wrote to her Uncle, John Ruxton, from Clifton in Bristol, where her family were temporarily residing. Edgeworth’s letter describes the events and occurrences experienced by her family, including details of their literary and leisure pursuits. In her letter, she provides a brief glimpse of her father’s visit to the Bristol Library: My father has got a transfer of a ticket for the Bristol library, which is an extremely fine one; and what makes it appear ten times finer is, that it is very difficult for strangers to get into. From thence he can get almost any book for us he pleases, except a few of the most scarce, which are by the laws of the library immoveable. No ladies go to the library, but Mr. Johns, the librarian, is very civil, and my mother went to his rooms and saw the beautiful prints in Boydell’s Shakespear.2

Established in 1773, the Bristol Library was founded by ‘leading merchants, medical men, clergy and other professional people’, and its membership reflected this social group, consisting predominantly of those of ‘middle to upper middle class social status’.3 The status of its members translated into an air of exclusivity: as

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Edgeworth notes, it was ‘very difficult for strangers to get into’. Indeed, the library’s aura of unattainability only magnifies its attraction, making it ‘appear ten times finer’ to her. Since she seemingly experienced a sense of pride in her father’s ability to gain entrance, it is perhaps strange that Edgeworth does not directly express any desire to visit the library herself. As she notes, with the apparent exception of her mother, ‘no ladies go to the library’. The ‘Rules of the Society’ from 1790 reveal several financial and professional exclusions, yet none based upon gender.4 However, even if the exclusion of women was not a formalised rule, it was, as the research of Paul Kaufman indicates, a historical reality. Of 137 members in 1782, four were women: ‘by 1798 the membership rose by one-third to 198 (of whom five were women)’.5 Several years later, Edgeworth did gain access to the Bristol Library, albeit in a somewhat mediated form. In 1800, the library published a list of recent acquisitions: among them, Edgeworth’s Letters for Literary Ladies (1795).6 Somewhat ironically, the Letters is a text concerned precisely with women’s access to public sites of knowledge: ‘[f]rom academies, colleges, public libraries, private associations of literary men, women are excluded, if not by law, at least by custom, which cannot easily be conquered’ (p. 2). Indeed, the power of ‘custom’ is pertinently underlined both by the small proportion of female subscribers to the Bristol Library and by Edgeworth’s observation that ‘no ladies go’ there. These brief examples from Edgeworth’s life and work foreground the subject of women’s access to public sites of culture and knowledge. It is a matter that has attracted considerable critical attention and scholarship in recent years. One volume of essays devoted to the subject takes issue with ‘the majority of theorists of the public sphere, who have tended to exclude women from their story’.7 In particular, their critique focuses upon Jürgen Habermas’s influential study, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. As Habermas defines it, the ‘bourgeois public sphere’ is an egalitarian space, in which ‘private people come together as a public’.8 Yet, in the precise moment that Habermas articulates the desired inclusivity of this formulation, he reveals the fundamental bias by which it is underwritten. He describes the public sphere as ‘consisting of private persons whose autonomy based on ownership of property wanted to see itself represented . . . as humanity’.9 The universality

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that Habermas depicts the bourgeois individual as striving towards was, in fact, based upon the exclusion of those without ‘property’, which ‘remained the condition for participation in the bourgeois public sphere’.10 Underlying such claims to equality are, Markman Ellis observes, a number of ‘exclusionary mechanisms’ that prevent ‘the participation of the greater mass of the population: the lowest stations of life and women’.11 Anne K. Mellor has provided a critique of this aspect of Habermas’s text, in particular his insistence that ‘women and unpropertied workers could gain entrance to the public sphere only as readers’.12 Mellor’s objection stems from the fact that Habermas allows women readers access only to the ‘literary public sphere’, rather than the ‘political public sphere’.13 Her corrective response is to illustrate the numerous examples of women ‘from the Romantic era’ who ‘participated fully in the public sphere as Habermas defined it’, and who ‘openly and frequently published their free and reasoned opinions on an enormous range of topics’.14 The danger of Mellor’s critique is that her celebration of those who act ‘publicly’ will, by implication, render the ‘private’ a neglected and ineffectual proposition. Moreover, the distinction between the public and the private goes unchallenged. As a result, Mellor’s comments risk leaving the figure of the female reader stranded. Unlike those women who published their opinions, women readers are, by contrast, devalued by their failure to participate ‘fully in the public sphere’. In relation to this issue, Margaret Anne Doody has asserted that the feminisation of the novel-reading public in the eighteenth century was little more than a reassuring pretence, as women readers ‘are theoretically disabled from bringing concepts into social currency’.15 While such comments underline Habermas’s failure to consider the issue of gender, they also neglect the potentially positive aspects of his thought. One feminist critic, Seyla Benhabib, describes Habermas as being concerned with a more inclusive formulation of the public sphere, which foregrounds the importance of ‘participation’. In Habermas’s framework, Benhabib states, ‘[p]articipation is not seen as an activity that is only and most truly possible in a narrowly defined political realm, but as an activity that can be realized in the social and cultural spheres as well’.16 Such a vision of participation, which elides the distinction between categories such as the ‘political’, the ‘social’ and the ‘cultural’, appears closer

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in spirit to the ideology that informs the writing of Edgeworth. Denied access to the Bristol Library and forbidden the professional opportunities available to the majority of its members, her response, as we will see, is to validate the domestic sphere, celebrating the way in which women’s private situation affords them ‘leisure to be wise’ (p. 27). This wisdom, fostered in domesticity, is paradoxically the form of property that promises women the opportunity to exert an influence that transcends the ‘private sphere’. For Edgeworth and the other writers discussed in this chapter, the act of reading is crucial to the conceptualisation of this wisdom. Pursuing this line of enquiry makes it necessary to address women’s lack of ‘property’ – the Habermasian prerequisite to participation in the public sphere. One approach to this issue is taken up by Harriet Guest in her study of female education, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810. There, Guest suggests that ‘part of the value of learning to women is that it gains them moral authority; it is perceived as a substantial property, analogous to landed estate in its ability to confirm the moral worth of its owner’.17 Guest’s argument attenuates the distinction between male property owners and women readers who, by virtue of their intellectual attainments, are their equals in moral authority. Her rhetoric suggests that this is not some consolatory substitute for ‘genuine’ property or power, but is ‘analogous’ to it, in its confirmation of ‘moral worth’. Indeed, this metaphor is rendered strikingly visible in what April London describes as Francis Bacon’s ‘commendation of genuinely purposive reading’,18 taken from his Of the Advancement of Learning (1605): ‘And surely, if the purpose be in good earnest, not to write at leisure that which men may read at leisure, but really to instruct and suborn action and active life, these Georgics of the mind, concerning the husbandry and tillage thereof, are no less worthy than the heroical descriptions of virtue, duty, and felicity’.19 By describing the ‘husbandry and tillage’ of the mind, Bacon renders it an object of labour, directly equivalent to the upkeep of a landed estate. The possibility that mental labour might constitute a form of civic duty is an appealing one, and is fundamental to Guest’s discussion. Within the Habermasian framework, this acknowledgement of an alternative version of ‘property’ offers to clear the way for women’s participation in the public sphere. In a culture in which

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even the possession of physical property did not entitle women to vote, the celebration of this abstract alternative appears wholly necessary. However, to comprehend it fully also requires an awareness of its limitations. The authority granted to women by this formulation, then, remains open to interrogation. Part of this chapter will look at some critiques of this Edgeworthian valuation of intellectual capital, by figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane West. These authors provide a sobering assessment of the value of such wisdom, as well as offering a reminder of its dependence upon actual material wealth. In their critiques, the ‘leisure to be wise’ is revealed to be a distinctly class-bound phenomenon. Such considerations relate to the links between reading and labour discussed in Chapter 2. While Guest proposes that women’s education goes some way to remedying the lack of the cultural privileges bestowed by the possession of landed estate, Clifford Siskin suggests that in the late eighteenth century a new form of property was gaining the ascendancy. ‘[P]rimogeniture as a system of excluding women from property’, he writes, was ‘replaced’ by women’s restricted access to ‘the new kind of property – the possession of professional skills’.20 As we will see, Edgeworthian leisured wisdom defines itself in opposition to the culture of professionalism. Part of this chapter, then, will be occupied with tracing the way in which the pursuit of knowledge might reconcile the Edgeworthian context of ‘leisure’ with the ethic of professionalism that Siskin outlines. It will explore the extent to which women’s internalisation of professional ethics legitimised their reading practices. At the same time, associating women’s reading with the discourses of landed and professional property means that divisions such as the public and the private begin to lose coherence: a loss of orientation which is in accordance with the assertions of historians such as Amanda Vickery. In her influential article on the idea of ‘separate spheres’, Vickery takes issue with the ‘dialectical polarity’ of ‘home and world’, questioning the validity of the separation of ‘public power and private domesticity’.21 Similarly, taking Vickery’s conclusions one step further, Lawrence Klein has asserted that ‘there is no one “public/private” distinction to which interpretation can confidently secure itself’.22 Guest’s work has also drawn upon this line of thought, leading her to assert that ‘domesticity is always a contested proposition’.23 While not deconstructing the

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public/private distinction as comprehensively as Klein suggests, in Small Change Guest seizes the opportunity to explore the permeability of such putative oppositions, by focusing on examples in which ‘domesticity gains in value as a result of its continuity with the social and the public’.24 Acknowledging that these ‘spheres’ are not separate but co-dependent offers feminist critics the chance to reconsider the role and agency of women in this period. In practice, however, the perception of continuity between the public and the private could be used towards more conservative ends. ‘Private virtues are public benefits’: gender and the ‘separate spheres’ The epistolary exchange that opens the Letters for Literary Ladies is based upon the correspondence of Thomas Day and Richard Lovell Edgeworth.25 The first correspondent represents the Rousseauvian figure of Day, who is writing to his friend upon the birth of his daughter. In his letter, he emphasises ‘how much in society depends upon the honour of women and how much it is in the interest of every individual, as well as of every state, to guard their virtue’ (p. 5). Recognising the porous boundaries between public and private provides this speaker with the justification for imposing increasingly rigorous standards of ‘virtue’ and ‘honour’ upon women, rendering them the dependent objects of chivalry. Rather than endow women with any sense of participation within public discourse, the correspondent casts them as passive symbols of virtue. Placing Day’s conservative ideas about female education against the liberal Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s desire that ‘women learn to reason’, the text makes educational polemic of their dialogue. In the arguments of the first correspondent, Maria Edgeworth represents many of the period’s entrenched views of female education and brings them under the scrutiny of the more progressive opinions of the second correspondent. The enforced separation of women and the activities of ‘the world’ is a prominent theme: ‘Women’, the first correspondent writes, ‘must always see things through a veil, or cease to be women’ (p. 3). Such statements recall the advice literature for women that was produced throughout the eighteenth century. In particular, it is possible to detect the influence of James Fordyce upon the first correspondent’s

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arguments for preserving the sanctity of the private sphere. In his Sermons to Young Women (1766), Fordyce proposes a rigorous division of domestic roles according to gender. A woman’s duty, he states, is to ‘lighten the load of domestic cares, and thereby leave [men] more at leisure for rougher labours, or severer studies’.26 This division of responsibilities extends beyond the limits of the household, and comes to shape the way in which ‘knowledge of the world’ is to be acquired: ‘By men the knowledge of the world is commonly gathered in it . . . A female that acts upon the same plan is lost: and she who would effectually escape dishonour and remorse, reproach and ridicule, must endeavour to know the world from books, to collect experience from those who bought it.’27 Just two years before the publication of Letters for Literary Ladies, Fordyce’s advice had been quoted by John Burton in his Lectures on Female Education and Manners (1793). Burton offers a similar warning to his readers, asserting the advantages of ‘domestic retirement’ over ‘public company’.28 In private, Burton writes, ‘[women], will probably have recourse to those Books which will teach them the duties of their Sex . . . . This will be the safest way of acquiring a knowledge of the World’.29 When the first correspondent of Letters for Literary Ladies asserts that women ‘must always see things through a veil’ he clearly draws upon such prior examples. The parallels are maintained when it comes to the privileged position available to men. While women must content themselves with the second-hand knowledge afforded to them by books, men are free to ‘mix with the world without restraint, we converse freely with all classes of people, with men of wit, of science, of learning, with the artist, the mechanic, the labourer; every scene of life is open to our view’ (p. 2). Faced with this argument, the second correspondent does not openly challenge the divisions imposed by the logic of separate spheres. Instead, he concerns himself with how these divisions may facilitate, rather than prevent, women’s attainment of a perspective from which ‘every scene of life is open to . . . view’. Like Fordyce, the second correspondent asserts that women must acquire knowledge through the medium of ‘books’. But, rather than imposing a restrictive ‘veil’, women’s reading is described as the basis of expansive knowledge, which provides them with the intellectual capital necessary to participate in rational discussion. The second correspondent’s reply is predicated upon the existence of a

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female subject who is elevated by her learning to a position outside of the division of labour and the partial interests it brings into being. Indeed, this is the argument that Harriet Guest identifies in her compelling reading of the Letters, where she states that the second correspondent bases his argument upon the claim that ‘women are able to become learned precisely because they are not subjected to the distorting effects of occupational specialism’.30 Guest adduces the following extract from the second correspondent’s response in support of this theory: ‘Literary artisans,’ is the comprehensive term under which a celebrated philosopher classes all those who cultivate only particular talents or powers of the mind, and who suffer their other faculties to lose all strength and vigour for want of exercise. The other sex have no such constraint upon their understandings; neither the necessity of earning their bread, nor the ambition to shine in public affairs, hurry or prejudice their minds: in domestic life they have leisure to be wise. (p. 27)

My second chapter highlighted how the discourse of labour intersected with that of the sublime, resulting in accounts of middle-class women’s reading coming into uncomfortable proximity to the labouring body. While not wholly abandoning the metaphor of reading as a form of labour, the fact that women are not called upon to exert all of their energies in ‘particular talents, or powers of the mind’ ensures that the excesses of the sublime are bypassed. Indeed, the suggestion is that women’s ‘wisdom’ derives specifically from their exemption from the demands of specialised forms of labour. The roots of this theory can be found in the work of Dugald Stewart, the ‘celebrated philosopher’ to whom Edgeworth refers. Although Stewart’s Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792) is not explicitly concerned with the issue of gender, its comments on the division of labour serve as the theoretical basis of the expansive female education Edgeworth proposes. The Elements represents the way in which the occupational specialisation demanded by the division of labour resulted in the representation of every individual ‘as partial, as defined and constrained by the specialisation necessary to compete in the market’.31 John Barrell states that the ‘atomisation’ which results from the division of labour can be transcended only by the ‘invention of a knowing

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subject’, who can see beyond the fractures caused by occupational interest, and imagine instead a unified society.32 It is the formation of this ‘knowing subject’ with which Stewart is concerned: There is no possession or pursuit which has not habits peculiar to itself; and which does not leave some powers of the mind dormant, while it exercises and improves the rest. If we wish, therefore, to cultivate the mind to the extent of its capacity, we must not rest satisfied with that employment which its faculties receive from our particular station in life. It is not in the awkward and professional form of a mechanic, who has strengthened particular muscles of his body by the habits of his trade, that we are to look for the perfection of our animal nature: neither is it among men of confined pursuits, whether speculative or active, that we are to expect to find the human mind in its highest state of cultivation.33

Barrell describes this ‘knowing subject’ as a ‘disembodied observer’, occupying an ‘abstract viewing-position’.34 In part, the hypothetical nature of such a figure is evident in Stewart’s account: this individual must transcend ‘[their] particular station in life’, existing beyond the boundaries of class and occupational identity. They must forsake the ‘narrow but deep’ formulation of knowledge that Clifford Siskin asserts is characteristic of professional identity.35 Indeed, such a model of identity is described by Stewart as a form of ‘confinement’, and by Edgeworth as ‘constraint’: a barrier to accomplishing what Stewart describes as the ‘highest state of cultivation’. It is not difficult to see how Edgeworth might identify the ability to achieve this disinterested ‘highest state of cultivation’ with those women who are free from the ‘necessity of earning their bread’. Indeed, in the Letters for Literary Ladies, Edgeworth presents men as incapable of such feats. They must set about applying selfimposed limitations, as they channel their exertions to accommodate the demands of society: Business, the necessity of pursuing a profession, the ambition to shine in parliament, or to rise in public life, occupy a large portion of their lives. In many professions the understanding is but partially cultivated; and general literature must be neglected by those who are occupied in earning bread or amassing riches for their family:– men of genius are often heard to complain, that in the pursuit of a profession, they are obliged to contract their enquiries and concentrate their powers. (p. 27)

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In contrast, women’s exclusion from the world of professional specialism allows them to assume a stance of liberal disinterestedness and to acquire an evenly developed, comprehensive knowledge: ‘they have leisure to be wise’ (p. 27). However, such a theory is not without its problems. Indeed, Edgeworth presents a somewhat paradoxical state of affairs in which women’s ‘wisdom’ – the currency of their social utility – can only be acquired in terms of ‘leisure’: their exclusion from labour promises to be the source of their empowerment. Other authors were less receptive to Edgeworth’s optimistic pronouncements on women’s leisured wisdom. In the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft suggests that, rather than defining themselves in opposition to their professional male counterparts, women would benefit from adopting the vigour produced by the pursuit of ‘business’: In the middle rank of life, . . . men, in their youth, are prepared for professions, and marriage is not considered as the grand feature in their lives, whilst women, on the contrary, have no other scheme to sharpen their faculties. It is not business, extensive plans, or any of the excursive flights of ambition, that engross their attention; no, their thoughts are [not] employed in rearing such noble structures.36

Rather than the arena in which a noble disinterestedness can be fostered, women’s leisure-time is viewed by Wollstonecraft as detrimental to their ‘faculties’. ‘Ambition’, which Edgeworth presents as arresting the development of men’s understanding, is rewritten in a positive light by Wollstonecraft – it compels its possessor to rear ‘noble structures’. While acknowledging the narrowing of vision that this entails, Wollstonecraft sees the ‘concentration of powers’ that Edgeworth bemoans in terms of an invigorating focus: ‘[a] man when he enters any profession has his eye steadily fixed on some future advantage (and the mind gains great strength by having all its efforts directed to one point), and, full of his business, pleasure is considered as mere relaxation; whilst women seek for pleasure as the main purpose of existence’.37 For Wollstonecraft, Edgeworthian disinterest does not appear to be a possibility. Instead, by failing to ‘concentrate their powers’ in any one particular direction, women sacrifice themselves to an equally narrow but, in Wollstonecraft’s terms, far less positive occupation: the pursuit of ‘pleasure’, which

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dominates women’s lives when it should form a ‘mere relaxation’. The result, Wollstonecraft claims, degrades women. They spend their leisure time absorbed in ‘novels, music, poetry, and gallantry’, all of which ‘tend to make women the creatures of sensation’.38 This is the consequence, Wollstonecraft states, of women’s ‘station in society’.39 Her educational programme – with its insistence on the principles of activity and industry – represents an unequivocal rejection of Edgeworthian leisured wisdom. The model of professional behaviour that Wollstonecraft wishes women to adopt is more usually associated with middle-class men – something that is evident in Vicesimus Knox’s essay, ‘Hints to those who are Designed for a Mercantile Life’ (1784). There, Knox considers the responsibilities that rest upon those young men who are ‘intended for the commercial walk’ of life.40 Implicit in his directions, however, is a warning that anticipates the arguments of Edgeworth in Letters for Literary Ladies. Those bound for a commercial life are, he writes, ‘usually fixed at the desk and the counter at so early an age, as almost to exclude all instruction, but that which relates to the confined views of one particular occupation’ (i, 247). Although Knox’s aim is to celebrate the mercantile classes, he remains aware of the possibility that undertaking a profession necessitates the adoption of ‘confined views’ (i, 247). To alleviate this narrowness Knox, like Wollstonecraft, recommends that labour is interspersed with periods of ‘relaxation’, in which young merchants occupy their time with ‘good books’ (i, 251, 249). Cultivating a taste for reading will teach individuals ‘to set a just value on those things which ignorant avarice and ambition pursue with restless avidity’ (i, 249–50). Moreover, books ‘will enlarge your views, and give you a liberality of sentiment and manners. If you attend solely to the means of getting money, your mind will gradually become narrow’ (i, 250). While Knox admires the purposeful labour of professional life, he remains aware that its ‘narrowness’ needs to be balanced by the attainment of ‘enlarged views’ through reading. He shares Edgeworth’s concerns about the partiality of professional identity, and the danger that it may conclude in ‘ignorant avarice’. Indeed, rather than an ideology of professional specialism, Edgeworth’s leisured wisdom derives from a domesticated version of a gentlemanly, aristocratic ideal. It is governed by a logic that views the exemption from labour as enabling the development of a

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stance of disinterest. The substance of this logic becomes clear when the Letters are considered alongside Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s Essays on Professional Education, published over a decade later in 1809.41 As its title suggests, this text is concerned with formulating specific educational programmes for those destined to undertake particular professions. It offers a celebration of the ‘narrow but deep’ formulation of professional knowledge. Indeed, Edgeworth begins by quoting a passage from Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets (1779–81), which approvingly highlights the benefits of specialisation: ‘Those, who attain any excellence, commonly spend life in one pursuit; for excellence is not often obtained upon easier terms’.42 However, when addressing the non-professional class of ‘Country Gentlemen’ and ‘Men Intended for Private Life’, Edgeworth’s tone changes. In contrast to those ‘men of genius’ mentioned in Letters for Literary Ladies, who, ‘in the pursuit of a profession . . . are obliged to contract their enquiries and concentrate their powers’, Edgeworth describes the learning of a ‘Country Gentleman’ in terms of unfettered breadth: A youth . . . should not be discouraged from cultivating a taste for painting, poetry, or for any of the fine arts or liberal sciences; provided his tastes do not lead him into extravagance, and provided he possesses in theory, and apply in practice, the knowledge that is peculiarly requisite to a master of a family, a landlord, a magistrate, a grand juror, an elector, and in the most comprehensive sense of the word, a good subject. The range of knowledge requisite to fulfil these duties with propriety is much more extensive than can be conceived by men of contracted views.43

The ‘extensive’ education of this class of ‘gentlemen’ and the educational programme recommended in Letters for Literary Ladies appear to have much in common. The injunction that these ‘gentlemen’ may cultivate ‘a taste’ for ‘any of the fine arts or liberal sciences’, provided it does not jeopardise their ‘range of knowledge’, is reminiscent of the advice given to women in the Letters. There, the second correspondent states his aversion to an education that imposes limitations where it should be expansive: ‘I do not desire to make my daughter merely a musician, a painter, or a poet; I do not desire to make her merely a botanist, a mathematician, or a chemist’ (p. 20). As the possessors of abundant leisure, both middle-class ‘literary ladies’ and proper-

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tied ‘gentleman’ are defined in opposition to professional ‘men of contracted views’. However, these similarities threaten to terminate when the opportunity to ‘apply [their knowledge] in practice’ is considered. While the demands of a landed estate necessitated the fulfilment of some public roles (those of ‘a landlord, a magistrate, a grand juror, an elector’), Letters for Literary Ladies stops resolutely short of imagining roles that women could undertake outside of the home. Even the second correspondent, who represents the more progressive case for female education, cautions that female influence ‘must be private’ (p. 30). However, the sphere of action incorporated within the notion of the ‘private’ may not be as limited as it first appears. Sharon Murphy has observed how, in Professional Education, Richard Lovell Edgeworth reworks a ‘pre-revolutionary vision of the propertied gentleman and (re)presents him . . . as the effective guardian of the national and imperial order’.44 As Murphy notes, in this respect Edgeworth’s views are, by the early nineteenth century, anachronistic. In fact, by highlighting the parallels between educated, middle-class women and this class of gentlemen, it becomes possible to substantiate the idea that, in the post-revolutionary years, the middle-class family usurped the role of the propertied gentleman, coming to provide ‘the foundations of national morality’.45 In part, the Letters for Literary Ladies attributes this shift to the proliferation of printed works in the period. This enabled families to define themselves as informed citizens, able to participate in debates of national significance. Indeed, for Habermas ‘the published word’ became the ‘decisive mark’ of the public sphere.46 This line of thought is also evident in Stewart’s Elements, where he describes ‘the present age’ as a time ‘when the press has, to so wonderful a degree, emancipated human reason from the tyranny of ancient prejudices; and has roused a spirit of free discussion, unexampled in the history of former times’.47 However, Stewart’s apparent enthusiasm for the replacement of ‘ancient prejudices’ with ‘free discussion’ is prefaced by a note of caution. The ‘perfection of political wisdom’, he states, consists of ‘a gradual and prudent accommodation of established institutions to the varying opinions, manners, and circumstances of mankind’.48 This cautiously optimistic take on social progress (reminiscent of Godwin’s in The Enquirer) is placed under jeopardy by a press that

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facilitates increased participation in ‘free discussion’. With such a quantity of printed matter available, a neutral arbiter is required to regulate the ensuing ‘discussion’. Bearing this note of circumspection in mind, when turning to the Letters for Literary Ladies it becomes apparent that, in their possession of leisured wisdom, women are ideally suited to play this role. Like Stewart, the second correspondent of the Letters approaches the increased output of the press with a degree of concern: ‘the art of printing has totally changed [women’s] situation; their eyes are opened, the classic page is unrolled, they will read: – all we can do is to induce them to read with judgement – to enlarge their minds so that they may take a full view of their interests and of ours’ (p. 34). This statement of Enlightenment optimism is, however, complicated by a certain degree of ambiguity. The apparent inevitability of women reading threatens to diminish the sense of agency involved in the process – as if it were a compulsion, rather than a considered act of will. This lack of faith in female discernment is compounded by the suggestion that women must be ‘induce[d] to read with judgement’ by their male companions.49 From this inauspicious basis, however, Edgeworth makes a claim for the superior moral judgement of women. When they have been guided in their reading, they can ‘take a full view of their interests and of ours’. Once more, the idea of ‘a full view’ emphasises a breadth of vision and comprehensiveness of knowledge: it is this which endows women with a sense of moral authority, as they become monitors of their own ‘interests’ as well as those of men. This conclusion finds a parallel in Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s recommendation that young noblemen be assigned a ‘literary preceptor’ who will recommend books and monitor his charge’s reading. The intention of such a scheme is, he comments, ‘to induce him to think and reason for himself, not to make him get by rote the opinions or words of any author; that would be only to make him a talking copy of a book’.50 The repetition of the verb ‘to induce’ across these texts highlights the potentially invasive disciplinary power identified in the previous chapter of this study. Again, however, the manipulative possibilities of this brand of control are sufficiently meliorated to reveal its enabling possibilities. The exercise of power yields to self-governance, and eventually to the possession of greater moral authority, as well-educated women ‘take a full view of their interests and of

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[men’s]’. Indeed, it is the participation of such ‘privatised individuals’ in the promotion of the ‘common interest’ that Habermas identifies as possessing both a ‘public’ and a ‘political’ impact.51 To understand how this private form of public influence might manifest itself, we can turn towards the conclusion of the second correspondent’s reply, where a domestic scene populated by properly educated ‘literary ladies’ is imagined: The more men of literature and polish desire to spend their time in their own families, the more they must wish that their wives and daughters may have tastes and habits similar to their own. If they can meet with conversation suited to their taste at home, they will not be driven to clubs for companions; they will invite the men of wit and science of their acquaintance to their own houses, instead of appointing some place of meeting from which women are to be excluded. (pp. 36–7)

The male-dominated sites where public exchange typically takes place lose their appeal when properly educated women ensure that the home provides a space conducive to rational conversation. The physical location of the ‘literary public sphere’, as Habermas would term it, becomes the domestic home. Indeed, Andrew McCann has noted how, in this period, ‘public space was no longer essential to a public sphere that had become “an image to be consumed” rather than a place to frequent’.52 This understanding of the public sphere as a mobile, abstract proposition sheds light upon Edgeworth’s compliant acceptance of her inability to gain admission to the Bristol Library. Her father’s capacity to obtain for her ‘almost any book . . . he please[s]’ can be seen as enabling the conditions for rational debate to take place in the private home, rendering women’s exclusion from such public spaces of little consequence. Nevertheless, an imbalance of power remains. In making Richard Lovell Edgeworth solely responsible for the choice of books, this example also enacts the prescription of the second correspondent of the Letters, when he states that men must ‘induce [women] to read with judgement’. While these may seem compromised and uneasy terms on which to conduct female education, Maria Edgeworth remains clear that acts of intellectual exchange within the family home are of public importance. Adapting Mandeville’s famous formulation of ‘private vices’ as ‘public virtues’, the second correspondent of the Letters

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writes that ‘[t]his mixture of the talents and knowledge of both sexes must be advantageous to the interests of society, by increasing domestic happiness. – Private virtues are public benefits: if each bee were content in his cell, there would be no grumbling hive; and if each cell were complete, the whole fabric must be perfect’ (p. 37). Clíona Ó Gallchoir has described how Edgeworth’s debt to Scottish Enlightenment thinkers (including Dugald Stewart) manifests itself in the Letters ‘in order to prevent the domestic sphere being defined in terms of its lack of public meaning’.53 This is apparent in the above example, which sees Edgeworth place ‘domestic happiness’ at the centre of national cohesion. In doing so, she extends the suggestion that women’s lack of professional opportunities enables them to avoid the alienating effects of the division of labour. Whereas Mandeville’s dictum, in its original form, provides justification for capitalist consumerism, Edgeworth envisions a nation united not by the movement of material wealth but by the flow of moral and intellectual capital – a flow that originates in women’s leisured wisdom. Indeed, Angela Keane has usefully described how ‘[t]he Scottish Enlightenment imagined a republic in which conversation, friendship but, most importantly, exchange became public virtues’.54 It is this understanding of exchange which impels the course of education set out by the second correspondent of the Letters for Literary Ladies. In Belinda (1801), Edgeworth deploys the Percival family to enact the harmonious workings of the family home, most notably in a chapter tellingly entitled ‘Domestic Happiness’. There, the novel’s eponymous heroine visits the Percivals at their home in Oakley Park, and approvingly observes the interaction between the members of family: She perceived, that between Mr Percival and Lady Anne there was a union of interests, occupations, taste, and affection . . . [I]n conversation, every person expressed without constraint their wishes and opinions; and wherever these differed, reason and the general good were the standards to which they appealed . . . The children were treated neither as slaves nor as playthings, but as reasonable creatures.55

The candour and egalitarian values that govern the Percivals’ behaviour could be taken directly from Practical Education. As in that text, the influence of Locke is apparent here, in the treatment

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of children as ‘reasonable creatures’.56 The Scottish Enlightenment values of exchange and free rational debate are also in evidence: while the Letters describes a Habermasian version of educated women acting for the ‘common interest’, here the standard appealed to is that of ‘the general good’. Edgeworth represents the family home as a microcosmic democracy in action. It is, as Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace notes, ‘the polemic center of the novel’; and at its heart is the relationship between Mr Percival, and Lady Anne.57 Edgeworth’s account of Lady Anne’s knowledge and education derives from the prior example of the Letters for Literary Ladies. In Belinda, she is similarly concerned with articulating how such an education paves the way for rational debate to take place within the conjugal family, rather than in public scenes of action from which women are debarred: Lady Anne Percival had, without any pedantry or ostentation, much accurate knowledge, and a taste for literature, which made her the chosen companion of her husband’s understanding, as well as of his heart. He was not obliged to reserve his conversation for friends of his own sex, nor was he forced to seclude himself in the pursuit of any branch of knowledge; the partner of his warmest affections was also the partner of his most serious occupations; and her sympathy and approbation . . . inspired him with a degree of happy social energy, unknown to the selfish solitary votaries of avarice and ambition. (p. 216)

Unlike those ‘men of genius’ in Letters for Literary Ladies, who ‘are obliged to contract their enquiries and concentrate their powers’, Mr Percival is able to avoid the constraints imposed by the ‘pursuit of any branch of knowledge’ (p. 27). Lady Anne, with her ‘accurate knowledge’ and ‘taste for literature’, ensures that the domestic sphere remains a forum for rational debate in which the ‘general good’, rather than professional interest, and its malignant offspring ‘avarice and ambition’, governs the behaviour of individuals. Andrew McCann’s insightful analysis of Belinda explores this issue further, interrogating Edgeworth’s desire to establish the domestic sphere as the site in which an authentic subjectivity can be established and maintained. McCann describes how, in the novel, private spaces allow characters to ‘come together simply as human beings, as “ends” in themselves rather than as functions of the economic or instrumental imperatives that force them to play

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out specific roles in which the baneful effects of power, exploitation and inequality are realized’.58 In making this claim, McCann appears to echo Habermas’s comments that the bourgeoisie wished to represent themselves as independent of the vicissitudes of the marketplace. To do this, they appealed to a set of universal values, located in ‘the sphere of the bourgeois family and actualized inside the person as love, freedom, and cultivation – in a word, as humanity’.59 In Edgeworth’s view, the success of this project rested upon the cultivation of female disinterestedness via a broad, unspecialised programme of education. It is Lady Anne’s ‘accurate knowledge’ and ‘taste for literature’ that inspire her husband ‘with a degree of happy social energy, unknown to the selfish solitary votaries of avarice and ambition’ (p. 216). By nullifying these ‘economic . . . imperatives’, the integrity of the domestic sphere as a site of rational debate is ensured. John Brewer notes how it is the ‘capacity to pursue a public good adjudicated through the procedures of unconstrained reason that creates a public sphere’, regardless of location.60 In this instance, it is by rejecting one set of ‘public’ concerns (those of the marketplace) that the public significance of the domestic sphere can be realised. This denial of the values of the marketplace reminds us of the way in which Edgeworth aligns women with an aristocratic sense of public virtue. Yet, the extent to which this parallel is truly tenable remains unresolved. The exclusion of economic concerns from the domestic sphere is represented as a necessary prerequisite to rational debate. But it also reiterates the fact that, while dissociating themselves from the marketplace, women, unlike aristocratic gentlemen, do not possess any tangible form of alternative property to rely upon. Once more, the (in)adequacy of the possession of intellectual property is brought into focus. A final example from the Essays on Professional Education serves to frame this ambiguity, allowing us to gauge in more detail the extent to which leisured wisdom affords women a civic existence. Once again, Richard Lovell Edgeworth is addressing ‘Country Gentlemen’ and ‘Men Intended for Private Life’: His knowledge both of science and literature should in early life be rather various and extensive than deep or critical; he should have such a degree of information, as should make him wish for, and should enable him to acquire more: such a degree of information as should qualify him to bear a part in all general literary conversation,

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and should render him a fit and agreeable campanion [sic] for men of science and talents in all ranks of life.61

Beginning by reiterating the necessity of ‘extensive’ education, the passage concludes by emphasising the desirability of companionable relationships with ‘men of science and talents’. The suggestion that reading will equip gentlemen with the capacity to engage in rational conversation appears to reinforce the similarities between educated women and private gentlemen. But it also introduces a degree of dissonance. Richard Lovell Edgeworth makes it clear that this education and role are suitable specifically for a gentleman’s ‘early life’. The implication is that this feminised, companionable role is something of a stop-gap for youthful gentlemen, prior to their taking up more purposeful, overtly public roles – those of ‘a landlord, a magistrate, a grand juror, an elector’.62 Women, on the other hand, are destined to remain within this sphere of private, rational discourse, enjoying the limited form of public virtue it entails. Moreover, as Harriet Guest notes, the extent to which women actually participated in this dialogue remains unclear. At worst, their ‘leisured wisdom’ becomes ‘no more than the ability to facilitate men’s off-duty chat’.63 This is precisely the state of affairs that Habermas describes as threatening the integrity of ‘the public sphere in the world of letters’.64 Rather than ‘a public communication between private people’, Habermas identifies a shift in the conception of ‘leisure’ in the early nineteenth century, which sees it become ‘nothing but a complement to time spent on the job’.65 If leisure might be reduced to the unvalued other of social labour, the enabling possibilities it offers to women look increasingly impoverished. Some traces of the ambiguous opportunities afforded to women within this context emerge as the Letters for Literary Ladies draws to a close. The second correspondent highlights ‘the pleasures which men of science and literature enjoy in an union with women who can sympathize in all their thoughts and feelings; who can converse with them as equals, and live with them as friends’ (p. 37). That women may converse with men ‘as equals’ promises much. This claim is hindered, however, by the suspicion that the part women must play is that of sympathetic echoes who yield to, and reinforce, the ‘thoughts and feelings’ of ‘men of science and

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literature’, while sacrificing their own sense of self. The possibility that exclusion from professional life might constitute a loss of self is substantiated in Belinda. The character of Clarence Hervey – the brilliant but wayward young aristocrat who is finally reformed by the example of Belinda – highlights further divisions between the ‘leisured wisdom’ of women and the roles and responsibilities of ‘private gentlemen’. Hervey, we are told, ‘piqued himself upon being able always to suit his conversation to his companions’, and discourses upon a range of topics (p. 99). On one occasion, his conversation takes in subjects as diverse as ‘the Chinese fishingbird . . . to the various ingenious methods of fishing practised by the Russian Cossacks’. He then moves from ‘modern’ to ‘ancient fish’ and Roman practices of keeping them, before concluding with an account of the Indian elephant and the mammoth (pp. 99–100). Elsewhere, he captures the company’s attention with his substantial knowledge of chess, and he frequently proves his taste and expertise in literary matters: ‘[t]he ladies admired his taste as a poet, the gentleman his accuracy as a critic’ (p. 113). Despite such displays receiving the approbation of the company, Edgeworth is careful to let the reader know that such brilliance has its drawbacks. Hervey’s conversational versatility also denotes a dangerously contingent identity: he is in possession of a ‘chameleon character’, allowing him to ‘be all things to all men – and to all women’ (p. 14). As the virtuous character of Dr X. points out, such a mode of being risks collapsing into nothingness: ‘What a pity Mr Hervey, that a young man of your talents and acquirements, a man who might be any thing, should – pardon the expression – choose to be – nothing . . . Shall he, who might not only distinguish himself in any science or situation . . . who might be permanently useful to his fellow creatures, content himself with being the evanescent amusement of a drawing room?’ (p. 116)

Whereas Richard Lovell Edgeworth advises propertied gentlemen to enjoy a disinterested breadth of knowledge, Dr X. urges Hervey to adopt an ethic of professional specialisation: to narrow his knowledge in the pursuit of distinguishing himself in some ‘science or situation’. The alternative – of a ‘drawing room’ existence – is to dwindle into ‘nothing’. Clearly, this advice poses problems for the role that Maria Edgeworth advocates for women in the Letters. There, Edgeworth prescribes for women a role based upon the

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facilitation of conversation, converting the ‘drawing room’ into a Habermasian ‘training ground’ for ‘critical public reflection’.66 In the case of Clarence Hervey, however, such an existence is revealed to have no public utility: only by adhering to a professional ethic of knowledge which is ‘narrow but deep’ can he prove ‘useful to his fellow creatures’. Elsewhere in Edgeworth’s work, the eponymous hero of Vivian, a ‘tale of fashionable life’ from 1812, bears a striking resemblance to Clarence Hervey. His desires for ‘a private station, and . . . the joys of learned leisure, a competence, and domestic bliss’ are gently mocked by Edgeworth as ‘worthy of the most renowned of ancient or modern philosophers’.67 Catherine Gallagher argues that one of most frequent themes in Edgeworth’s fiction is ‘the “embourgeoisement” of the hero’, in which ‘a young man is educated out of his fashionable disdain for business, takes charge of his own affairs, and learns to accept economic reality’.68 While Edgeworth does not emphasise Hervey’s acceptance of ‘economic reality’, the process of ‘embourgeoisement’ is enacted by the subjection of his diffuse aristocratic discourse to Dr X.’s professional standards. The persistence of this plot in Edgeworth’s fiction mirrors its prevalence in the period more generally. While Edgeworth prescribes a life of leisured wisdom for those women who are financially secure enough to enjoy it, at this time men were increasingly discouraged from pursuing such an option. Clifford Siskin describes how ‘the concept of work’ was ‘rewritten from that which a true gentleman does not have to do, to the primary activity informing adult identity’.69 Indeed, we have already seen both Knox and Wollstonecraft venerate the purposeful energy of professional men. Elsewhere, we find no shortage of examples depicting both the perils of the leisured life for young men, and the urgency with which a professional identity was pursued. The protagonist of Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House (1793), Orlando Somerive, laments that he cannot remain in rural retreat with his lover Monimia: ‘But they tell me that a young man should not be idle! that he must be something, a lawyer or a soldier!’70 Orlando’s outburst foregrounds the extent to which male identity was increasingly articulated through professional status. To be ‘something’ – rather than the ‘nothing’ that Clarence Hervey risks deteriorating into – is to be ‘a lawyer or a soldier’. Nevertheless, there remains a fine distinction as to which profession would be

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acceptable for a man of Orlando’s social status. In order to appease the aristocratic Mrs Rayland, the owner of the eponymous manor house, Orlando explains that he ‘has no wish to enter into trade’. Instead, he would rather remain with Mrs Rayland, retaining ‘the use of your library; where I hope I am qualifying myself for one of the liberal professions against the time when my father can find an opportunity to place me in one’.71 The liberal professions, encompassing ‘divinity, physic, and law’, were some of the few acceptable means of employment for those who wished to retain the status of a ‘gentleman’.72 As a result of this appeal, Orlando is temporarily granted leave to remain at the manor house. However, rather than contributing to his professional development, his frequent visits to the library facilitate a clandestine courtship with a servant and allow him to indulge in ‘the sort of reading’ which only adds ‘to the romantic enthusiasm of his character’.73 Even at the conclusion of the novel, before he claims Rayland Hall as his rightful inheritance, Orlando remains ignorant of his professional direction: ‘into what way of life to enter, or where to seek the means of providing for [his family], he knew not’.74 Similarly, in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) Edward Ferrars languishes without employment: having rejected careers in the navy, the army and law, he describes himself as ‘an idle, helpless being’.75 While Mrs Dashwood advises him that he would be ‘a happier man if [he] had any profession to engage [his] time’, Edward reflects that ‘as there was no necessity for my having any profession at all . . . idleness was pronounced on the whole to be the most advantageous and honourable’.76 Indeed, it is not difficult to see how a lack of professionalism is equated with a sense of personal failing. In her Letters Addressed to a Young Man (1802), Jane West describes such indirection in pecuniary terms, viewing it as debilitating. By contrast, ‘[t]he independence which a young man should pursue, is the ability of honestly providing for his pecuniary wants, of ceasing to be a burthen to his friends, and of obtaining by his own exertions a respectable rank in society’.77 For young men, ‘independence’ is achieved not through the cultivation of disinterest but through remunerated acts of labour. The value of leisured wisdom is put under further pressure, as its worth is compared with the rewards of paid employment. However, these authors are careful not to endorse a single-minded pursuit of material wealth at the expense of mental cultivation. As Vicesimus

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Knox warns, ‘[i]f you attend solely to the means of getting money, your mind will gradually become narrow’ (i, 250). Similarly, as much as Smith criticises the character of Orlando for his ‘romantic enthusiasm’, she offers a distinctly negative portrayal of the nouveau riche character of Mr Woodford, who questions why Orlando ‘should be humoured in idleness’, and permitted to ‘lounge away’ his time.78 Nevertheless, the image of the leisured, listless male was a recognisable figure in the culture of the period. Chapter 1 of this book referred to Dibdin’s Bibliomania to suggest that aristocratic bibliomaniacs displaced women as irresponsible consumers of literature; a similar idea is evident in West’s Letters Addressed to a Young Man. While the ‘bad effects’ of reading fiction had formerly been confined to women, she suggests that lately a very genteel set of male students, wrapped in their dressing-gowns, by lolling on a sofa in red morocco slippers, with that formidable weapon against ennui, a modern novel, in their hands, contrive to kill that monster, Time. These dear creatures hate idleness, and are exceedingly well informed; so pray say nothing against lounging and ignorance . . . [W]e will leave them to their soft sorrows. (LYM, iii, 132–3)

Like Smith’s Mr Woodford, West suspects that young men who indulge in leisured reading are pursuing nothing more than a form of indolent ‘lounging’ that effeminises them, engendering ‘a vicious enfeebling sensibility’. ‘[L]olling on a sofa’, these ‘genteel’ young men appear to melt into their surroundings, their ‘softness’ becoming ineluctably linked with their domestic environment. Moreover, her pointed use of the adjective ‘soft’ recalls Wollstonecraft’s veiled allusion to male homosexuality, in her reference to men who, seeking ‘something more soft than woman . . . attend the levees of equivocal beings’.79 As Siskin notes, work became the ‘the primary activity informing adult identity’ – an identity, he could have added, which is specifically male.80 In the case of West, we see how, by eschewing the world of work and the pursuit of ‘solid information’ (LYM, i, p. xxix), gender and sexual identity unravel into indeterminacy. While West may present a wildly distorted version of leisured wisdom, her comments serve to underline another of the abject trajectories its pursuit might take.

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The representation of work as a fundamental element of male identity consolidates the account that McCann gives of the Habermasian desire to depict the domestic as the locus of an authentic subjectivity, free from ‘economic . . . imperatives’. It enforces a division of labour in which men who fail to adhere to this professional ethos are depicted as stagnating within domestic retirement, condemned to a feminised fate, as the sorry examples of Orlando Somerive and Edward Ferrars illustrate. However, this literalist interpretation of what constitutes labour fails to account for the acts of labour, both intellectual and otherwise, that are undertaken within the domestic sphere. In relation to this issue, it is useful to return to the influential writings of Jürgen Habermas. Nancy Fraser has described how Habermas makes a distinction between ‘material’ and ‘symbolic’ reproduction.81 The former encompasses ‘the activities and practices which make up the sphere of paid work’; these constitute a form of ‘social labour’. On the other hand, ‘symbolic reproduction’ consists of unpaid work performed in the domestic sphere.82 Having established this dualistic opposition, Fraser goes about deconstructing it. She illustrates both how the capitalist workplace has ‘a moral-cultural dimension’ and how the ‘modern, restricted nuclear family’ is by no means devoid of ‘strategic calculation’.83 Effectively, she illuminates the continuities between these apparently separate spheres of labour. ‘I read that I may think for myself’: Belinda’s symbolic labour The notion of ‘symbolic labour’ offers a potentially productive way of conceptualising women’s reading. Having reviewed the idea of leisured wisdom and the criticisms to which such a concept lays itself open, it is worth revisiting Edgeworth’s Belinda. The eponymous heroine of this novel is marked by her industriously cultivated sense of ethics rather than by her adherence to leisured wisdom. Obviously, acts of unpaid, intellectual labour within the domestic sphere might be viewed as bearing only a distant, metaphoric relation to ‘material labour’, in the same way that women’s learning stands only symbolically, and occasionally inadequately, for the possession of a landed estate. In both cases, women are offered an abstract substitute for a kind of property that guarantees men a civic existence: either the property of professional skills or the material property of land. In Belinda,

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Edgeworth addresses this problem, by emphasising the act of reading as a form of symbolic labour, which enables women to cultivate a Lockean sense of property in the self. Edgeworth’s initial account of her novel’s eponymous heroine draws attention to the way in which reading is associated with domestic virtues. Belinda, Edgeworth writes, ‘had early been inspired with a taste for domestic pleasures; she was fond of reading, and disposed to conduct herself with prudence and integrity’ (p. 7). Similarly, she is ill-suited to forms of social display, and resents her ‘match-making’ Aunt Stanhope’s ‘perpetual anxiety about her . . . appearance, manners, and establishment’ (p. 9). The contrast between the fashionable public world, underpinned by a system of relative value, and the articulation of an authentic self within the domestic sphere informs the oppositional character of the novel’s original title, Abroad and at Home.84 Belinda herself experiences the alienating commodification inflicted by the gaze of the public when, in disguise at a masquerade, she finds herself the subject of conversation. One ‘witty gentleman’ remarks: ‘[a]s for this Belinda Portman . . . when I was at Bath, she was hawked about every where . . . . Belinda Portman, and her accomplishments, I’ll swear, were as well advertised, as Packwood’s razor strops’ (p. 25). McCann describes how, ‘in order to interact freely and rationally’, both Belinda and Hervey must escape the ‘camera obscura of a public sphere in which women are treated as objects mediating and motivating the transference of status and wealth’.85 Emphasising the narrative of Belinda’s development in this way underlines the novel’s ideological similarity to Letters for Literary Ladies. In the latter, the contracted views of professional ambition must be circumvented by a broad programme of domestic education; in Belinda, this sense of rational self-possession is acquired by retreating from the contingencies of the public sphere, into the security of ‘domestic pleasures’, particularly that of reading.86 It is a narrative of internalisation, locating value in domestic spaces as well as a self-reflexive interiority. However, such an overview of this plot-line threatens to obscure the sense of labour that is required to make the developmental self cohere. Despite depicting the removal of individuals from public economies of exchange and circulation, in Belinda Edgeworth complicates her advocacy of leisured wisdom in order to attend to another form of ‘symbolic labour’: the fashioning of the self.

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After the Packwood’s incident, Belinda is frequently found alone in Lady Delacour’s library (pp. 74, 124–5). In contrast to Lady Delacour, who wishes to ‘outshine’ her rival, Mrs Luttridge, at the King’s birthday ball, Belinda is content to remain in the library alone. There, she discovers a surprising capacity for self-sufficiency, independent of the value she accrues in the ‘camera obscura of [the] public sphere’: Her time passed so agreeably . . . that she was surprised when she heard the clock strike twelve. ‘Is it possible,’ thought she, ‘that I have spent three hours by myself in a library, without being tired of my existence? How different are my feelings now, to what they would have been in the same circumstances six months ago!’ (pp. 125–6)

Temporarily losing sense of the external world, Belinda discovers an inner resourcefulness, which prevents her from becoming ‘tired of [her] existence’. It is a moment of uncanny self-alienation and subsequent self-realisation. It evokes both ‘disengagement’ and an intense ‘reflexivity and self-awareness’ – terms which Charles Taylor employs in his study of the ‘modern identity’.87 Belinda’s ability to measure objectively the alteration of her own consciousness (‘how different are my feelings now’) alerts us to the way in which the concept of the developmental self is crucial to Edgeworth’s novel. As we will see, it is through the cultivation of her own rationality that Belinda recognises that it is domesticity ‘which could alone make her really and permanently happy’ (p. 217). Furthermore, the labour of self-fashioning is presented as wholly ‘agreeable’, in terms of the hours Belinda spends reading in the library, and in her awareness of the developed consciousness that her adherence to domesticity has helped to produce. A strikingly similar scene of reading is described in the diary of Anna Larpent, in 1779. Having left the ‘dissipate scene’ of a party, Larpent returns home to the ‘deep reflection’ of reading Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). The ‘transition’, Larpent writes, was easier than I expected: how much more was I pleased with myself whilst thus exercising the faculties of a reasonable mind, in endeavouring to discover the sources of those faculties, to form them properly; to improve them, than when I was dipping a curtsey to one, forcing a smile for another, hearing nonsense from a 3rd or what is worse talking nonsense to a fourth.88

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Like the eponymous heroine of Edgeworth’s novel, Larpent eschews public sociability in favour of a privatised form of pleasure – one that arises from the experience of ‘exercising’, and examining the formation of, ‘the faculties of a reasonable mind’. Rather than existing as a spectacle for others, Larpent’s reading causes her gaze to turn inward, in a gesture of self-improvement. While Heather MacFadyen describes Belinda as abandoning the fashionable world before ‘retreat[ing] into a world of domestic reading’, we should guard against the passivity that this suggests, both in Edgeworth’s novel and in the scene from Anna Larpent’s diary: like Larpent, Edgeworth presents us with a vision of the happy worker, revelling in their (symbolic) labour.89 Later in the novel, Belinda is again engaged in solitary reading when she is interrupted by the novel’s caricature radical feminist, Harriet Freke. The chapter, entitled ‘Rights of Woman’, opens with Belinda ‘alone, and reading, when Mrs Freke dashed into the room’ (p. 225). In direct opposition to the values of interiority that Belinda cultivates through her reading, Harriet Freke is defined as an aberrant spectacle, who values others for their appearance. In another instance of the commodification of female beauty, she has placed a bet based on Belinda’s looks: ‘I’ve a bet of twenty guineas on your head – on your face I mean’ (p. 225). In Harriet Freke’s apparently minor self-correction of ‘head’ for ‘face’, Edgeworth manages to identify two radically divergent ways of conceptualising female value. Closely related, but not synonymous, the semantic proximity of ‘head’ and ‘face’ is ironically undercut by the chasm of signification they take on in relation to women’s value. The former stands for depth, interiority and intellectual capacity: the latter for superficiality, commodified beauty and surface value. Upon realising that Belinda is not to be swayed by flattery, Harriet Freke switches her attention from the ‘face’ to the ‘head’ and attempts to engage with her on an intellectual level. Alluding to John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), she declares that she ‘should like a strong devil, better than a weak angel’. Belinda proves her superiority in both literary and moral matters, by stating ‘that it is not Milton, but Satan, who says, “Fallen spirit, to be weak is to be miserable”’.90 Freke’s reaction to being bested by Belinda is reminiscent of that of the coxcomb in Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) who, on discovering

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Emma’s literary interests, exclaims ‘this lady reads, then’.91 Freke declares: ‘You read I see! I did not know you were a reading girl. So did I once! but I never read now. Books only spoil the originality of genius. Very well for those who can’t think for themselves – but when one has made up one’s opinions, there is no use in reading.’ ‘But to make them up,’ replied Belinda, ‘may it not be useful?’ ‘Of no use upon earth to minds of a certain class. You, who can think for yourself, should never read.’ ‘But I read that I may think for myself.’ (p. 227)

This exchange is helpful in isolating Edgeworth’s views on the way in which education, and reading in particular, forms identity. Once again, Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s Essays on Professional Education offers a useful context in which to consider Edgeworth’s prose. More specifically, it provides an insight into her critique of Harriet Freke’s conviction that reading spoils ‘the originality of genius’. In Professional Education, we find Richard Lovell Edgeworth attempting to demystify ‘original’ or ‘natural’ ‘genius’, asserting that its proponents obscure the important role of education in forming identity. Following Locke’s conviction that talents are not bestowed by nature but cultivated through ‘practice’ and ‘exercise’,92 Edgeworth offers his own rationalist account of the qualities that constitute ‘genius’: In fact, genius seems to be nothing more than invention; the power of combining ideas in a new manner; a power which must be proceeded [sic] by the habit of observation and attention; so that it is an abuse of terms to call that natural which is the result of cultivation, labour, precept, and the united experience of the individual and of past ages.93

Revealing ‘genius’ to be the product of persistent diligence rather than a natural given (as Harriet Freke would have it), this passage brings to light the means by which identity-formation is conceptualised in Belinda. By drawing attention to the way in which books, rather than ‘spoil[ing] the originality of genius’, help Belinda to ‘make’ her opinions and allow her to ‘think for [her]self’, Maria Edgeworth gestures towards an understanding of reading as part of the processes of ‘cultivation, labour, precept, and . . . experience’

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that form personal identity. In doing so, she reveals the flaws in her own representation of the domestic sphere as the site of unmediated subjectivity, in which individuals represent themselves, as Habermas reminds us, not as political subjects but as ‘human beings pure and simple’.94 We have seen how Letters for Literary Ladies defines domesticity in terms of a disinterested detachment from the division of labour: an ideal in which Belinda appears to participate. Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s comments in Professional Education, however, reveal that the cultivation of this disinterestedness is achieved only through the application of ‘labour’. Maria Edgeworth thus repeats the pattern that Chapter 2 identified in Hannah More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799). The disinterested self that Belinda posits as the consequence of reading – ‘I read that I may think for myself’ (p. 227) – is not the product of an exemption from the discourse of the division of labour. Rather, it is an effect of that division, which demands that women internalise their work. Doing so produces a domestic identity that obscures the labour from which it is formed, by representing itself as a disinterested observer of life. In this respect, Belinda complicates the ideas set forth in Letters for Literary Ladies which, as I have suggested, promotes a version of the educated woman as analogous to the private gentleman. Moreover, while both texts suggest that women’s existence is primarily domestic, in Belinda that domain is treated with preference only after a process of independent reasoning. Edgeworth notes: ‘Everyone must ultimately judge of what makes them happy, from the comparison of their own feelings in different situations. Belinda was convinced by this comparison, that domestic life was that which could alone make her really and permanently happy’ (p. 217). While the decision Belinda reaches is perhaps inevitable, Edgeworth insists that the opportunity to exercise one’s reason in this manner is fundamental to the development of a rational domestic identity. The results of denying women the chance to formulate their own reasoned choices is demonstrated in the novel’s treatment of Virginia St Pierre: a subplot that also stresses the importance of developing a model of domesticity defined in continuation with, rather than in opposition to, the public sphere. Orphaned as a child, and subsequently adopted by Sir Clarence Hervey with the aim of educating her as his wife, the character of Virginia has been described as

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Edgeworth’s parody of Rousseau-inspired theories of education.95 In Émile (1762), Rousseau writes: ‘I would not altogether blame those who would restrict a woman to the labours of her sex and would leave her in a profound ignorance of everything else; but that would require a standard of morality at once very simple and very healthy, or a life withdrawn from the world’.96 It is this scheme that Hervey adopts, by moving Virginia into a house and then extracting a promise from her to ‘neither receive nor pay any visits. Virginia was thus secluded from all intercourse with the world’ (p. 370). Despite this isolation, Virginia is permitted to read ‘romances’ which, Clarence Hervey believes, perform the role of inspiring ‘the respect for chastity . . . and admiration of honour, generosity, truth, and all the noble qualities which dignify human nature’ (p. 380). Allowing Virginia access to a mediated representation of the world thus recalls the advice of the first correspondent of Letters for Literary Ladies, who asserts that women ‘must always see things through a veil’ (p. 3). In Belinda, however, Edgeworth makes it clear that such educational strategies only arrest psychological development: without companions to interest her social affections, without real objects to occupy her senses and understanding, Virginia’s mind was either perfectly indolent, or exalted by romantic views and visionary ideas of happiness. As she had never seen anything of society, all her notions were drawn from books. (pp. 379–80)

Through the character of Virginia, Edgeworth responds to Fordyce’s advice that women ‘must endeavour to know the world from books, to collect experience from those who bought it’.97 Ostensibly, Fordyce places women in a safely mediated economy of intellectual exchange, whereby they become ‘collectors’ of knowledge, content to remain sequestered within the domestic sphere. But Hervey’s use of romance texts reveals the potentially disastrous trajectory of such schemes of education. The idea of ‘collect[ing]’ one’s knowledge recalls the vocabulary of Lockean psychology discussed in Chapter 1. However, unlike Locke, Fordyce nullifies the sense of labour required to develop the self. Instead, women readers are merely the receivers of second-hand knowledge, which itself has already been ‘bought’ by another. Edgeworth maintains the Lockean terminology in Virginia’s articulation of her own disorientation: ‘I have only confused ideas,

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floating in my imagination, from the books I have been reading. I do not distinctly know my own feelings’ (p. 381). The term ‘floating’ recurs in Locke’s work to denote knowledge that has not been properly assimilated by an individual. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he writes that ‘[t]he floating of other Mens [sic] Opinions in our brains make us not one jot the more knowing, though they happen to be true’.98 As Charles Taylor comments, ‘knowledge for Locke isn’t genuine unless you develop it yourself’.99 The implication of this for Virginia is self-alienation: she does not know her ‘own feelings’. A sense of ownership, of property in the self, has been lost. Clarence Hervey’s educational scheme inverts the expectation that women will gain authority analogous to landed estate, or undertake ‘Georgics of the mind’, through their reading. Instead, Virginia is effectively objectified by the books she reads. Even her sleep is permeated with visions of romance, leading her to wonder ‘how I come to dream of such things’ (p. 384). In failing to account for the origins of her dreams, Virginia confirms that her own sense of autonomy has been usurped by the power of the narratives she reads. Rather than producing a disciplined subjectivity, as in the case of Belinda, Virginia’s reading is a nebulous affair, which results only in selfestrangement. In Their Fathers’ Daughters, Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace reiterates the division between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘social’. Although discussing the work of Maria Edgeworth in particular, her observations possess ramifications for the other authors and issues discussed in this chapter: it is important to recognize the terms of female empowerment depicted in tales like Edgeworth’s. In the world represented by Maria Edgeworth, the power assigned to mothers depends on the simultaneous restriction of female activity to the domestic sphere; if women are accorded power at home over the education and development of their children, at the same time they are prohibited from participating directly in other aspects of social and political life.100

Kowaleski-Wallace’s dissatisfaction with the prohibitions which prevent women from acting ‘directly’ in ‘social and political life’ recall Anne K. Mellor’s objection to Habermas’s implication that women could not participate ‘fully’ in the public sphere. In this

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chapter, I have chosen not to contest such statements. Rather, it has been my intention to probe the ambiguity suggested by a form of participation that is neither ‘direct’ nor ‘fully’ realised. In this respect, Nancy Fraser’s discussion of the overlap between versions of ‘material’ and ‘symbolic’ labour has provided a useful perspective from which to explore the role of reading in schemes of female education. By considering reading as a form of symbolic labour, the continuities between the domestic and the social become apparent, destabilising the rigidity of the ‘separate spheres’ thesis. At the same time, it is important to recognise that, in some respects, the value and effects of reading remain purely symbolic. In attempting to represent the results of reading as equivalent to the possession of other, more tangible and socially recognisable forms of property, the barriers preventing women’s ‘full’ participation are made apparent. But a consideration of the complexities of the ‘leisure to be wise’ formulation prevents us from focusing solely upon such potentially negative conclusions. My exploration of the shifting representation of ‘leisure to be wise’ in Edgeworth’s work reveals it to be a concept underwritten by an ethic of intellectual labour. As a result, the acts of reading that it facilitates emerge as fundamental to the consolidation of the bourgeois identity that is realised most fully in Belinda. Chapter 5 continues the discussion of these utilitarian conceptions of reading, but does so alongside an alternative trajectory. We have seen how one by-product of Belinda’s virtuous reading is a sense of pleasure. In what follows, I consider the extent to which the pursuit of pleasure becomes fundamental to the conceptualisation of independent readers, whose active engagement with texts grants them forms of moral authority. Notes 1 Maria Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies to Which is Added An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification (1795), ed. by Claire Connolly (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), p. 27. Subsequent references will be indicated parenthetically within the text. 2 Maria Edgeworth: Chosen Letters, ed. by F. V. Barry (London: Jonathan Cape, 1931), p. 47 (29 December 1791). 3 Kathleen Hapgood, ‘Library Practice in the Bristol Library Society 1772–1830’, Library History, 5 (1981), 145–53 (p. 145); Paul

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Imagining women readers Kaufman, Borrowings From the Bristol Library 1773–1784: A Unique Record of Reading Vogues (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1960), p. 9. In 1790 the initial membership fee was four guineas, plus an annual subscription of one Guinea. Rule 17 forbids any ‘Person keeping a Lodging-House, Inn, Tavern, Coffee-house, or any Place of public Entertainment’ from subscribing. A Catalogue of the Books Belonging to the Bristol-Library Society; to Which are Prefixed the Rules of the Institution, and a List of Subscribers (Bristol: Bristol Library Society, 1790), pp. 5, 8. Kaufman, p. 9. A List of Books Brought into the Library Since March 25, 1799 (Bristol: Bristol Library Society, 1800) (unpaginated). Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Clíona Ó Gallchoir and Penny Warburton, ‘Introduction: Women, Writing and Representation’, in Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830, ed. by Elizabeth Eger et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 1–26 (p. 7). Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p. 27. Ibid., p. 55. Joan B. Landes, ‘The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration’, in Feminism, the Public and the Private, ed. by Joan B. Landes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 135–64 (p. 142). Markman Ellis, ‘Coffee-women, “The Spectator” and the Public Sphere in the Early Eighteenth Century’, in Women Writing and the Public Sphere, pp. 27–52 (p. 27). Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 2. These are the terms used by Habermas. See Structural Transformation, p. 56. Mellor, p. 2. Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (London: Fontana, 1998), p. 278. Seyla Benhabib, ‘Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas’, in Feminism, the Public and the Private, pp. 65–99 (p. 82). Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750– 1810 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 16.

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18 April London, Women and Property in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 33. 19 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis (1605) (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), pp. 177–8. 20 Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 142. 21 Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, The Historical Journal, 36:2 (1993), 383–414 (p. 383). 22 Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century: Some Questions about Evidence and Analytic Procedure’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29:1 (1996), 97–109 (p. 98). 23 Guest, p. 15. 24 Ibid., p. 15. 25 It is, Marilyn Butler writes, ‘an attempt to reconstruct the ten-yearold correspondence between Day and Edgeworth which had put a temporary stop to Maria’s public career’. See Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 173. 26 James Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women, 2 vols (London: A. Millar and T. Cadell, 1766), i, 208. 27 Ibid., ii, 61–2. 28 John Burton, Lectures on Female Education and Manners, 2 vols (Rochester: J. Burton, 1793), i, 182. 29 Ibid., i, 182–3. 30 Guest, p. 316. 31 John Barrell, The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), p. 90. 32 Ibid., pp. 90–1. 33 Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 3 vols (London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1792–1827), i, 21. 34 Barrell, p. 91. 35 See Siskin, The Work of Writing, p. 118. 36 The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1989), v: A Vindication of the Rights of Men, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Hints, p. 129. The text of Todd and Butler’s edition misprints the initial ‘not’ as ‘now’. 37 Ibid., v, 129. 38 Ibid., v, 130.

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39 Ibid., v, 130. 40 Vicesimus Knox, ‘Hints to those who are Designed for a Mercantile Life’, in Essays Moral and Literary, 5th edn, 2 vols (London: Charles Dilly, 1784), i, 247–8. Subsequent references are made parenthetically. 41 The name on the title page of Essays on Professional Education is that of Richard Lovell Edgeworth. However, as is often the case with the Edgeworths’ work, the precise authorship of this text is difficult to distinguish. Marilyn Butler describes Maria as undertaking the labours of composition, stating that Professional Education ‘cost her two or more years’ hard reading, and months of drudgery in the writing’ – a laborious process, compounded by the ‘anxiety that only her father’s name, not her own, was to appear on the title-page’. Despite this, Butler later attributes the views expressed in Professional Education to Richard Lovell Edgeworth, describing the text as ‘a statement of two fundamental principles, which are distilled from [his] personal experiences as well as his life’s work in education’. See Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography, pp. 210, 330. Throughout my discussion, I refer to Richard Lovell Edgeworth as the author of Professional Education. 42 Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Essays on Professional Education (London: J. Johnson, 1809), p. vii. 43 Ibid., pp. 260–1. 44 Sharon Murphy, Maria Edgeworth and Romance (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), p. 80. 45 Mitzi Myers, ‘Reform or Ruin: “A Revolution in Female Manners”’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 11 (1982), 199–216 (p. 211). Similarly, Gary Kelly describes ‘the embourgeoisement of domestic and rural life as the basis for a national moral and cultural reconstruction in the Revolutionary aftermath’. See Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 278. 46 Habermas, p. 16. 47 Stewart, i, 247. 48 Ibid., i, 247. 49 The ambiguity in Edgeworth’s text is foregrounded rather more aggressively in a similar passage from Mary Robinson’s Thoughts on the Condition of Women, and on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (1799). Rather than an act of benevolence, Robinson represents male education of women as an assertion of power: ‘Man says you may read, and you will think, but you shall not evince your knowledge, or employ your thoughts, beyond the boundaries which we have set up around you’. Mary Robinson, Thoughts on the

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Condition of Women, and on the Injustice of Mental Subordination, 2nd edn (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1799), pp. 83–4. Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Professional Education, p. 263. Habermas, p. 56. Andrew McCann, Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 12. Clíona Ó Gallchoir, Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenment and Nation (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005), p. 34. See also p. 26. Angela Keane, Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s: Romantic Belongings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 6. Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (1801), ed. by Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 215–16. Subsequent references will be displayed parenthetically in the text. Edgeworth echoes Locke’s recommendation that children be treated ‘as Rational Creatures’. See John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), ed. by John W. and Jean S. Yolton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 142. Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 121–2. McCann, p. 186. Habermas, p. 55. John Brewer, ‘This, That and the Other: Public, Social and Private in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century, ed. by Dario Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1995), pp. 1–21 (p. 5). Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Professional Education, pp. 275–6. Ibid., p. 261 Guest, p. 318. Habermas, p. 160. Ibid., pp. 160–1. Ibid., p. 29. The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth, ed. by Marilyn Butler and others, 12 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999– 2003), iv: Manœuvring and Vivian, ed. by Claire Connolly with Marilyn Butler (1999), p. 141. Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 258–9. Siskin, The Work of Writing, p. 107.

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70 Charlotte Smith, The Old Manor House (1793), ed. by Jacqueline M. Labbe (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2002), p. 182. 71 Ibid., p. 101. 72 W. J. Reader, Professional Men: The Rise of the Professional Classes in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), p. 9. 73 Smith, p. 56. 74 Ibid., p. 507. 75 Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811), ed. by James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 77. 76 Ibid., pp. 77, 78. 77 Jane West, Letters Addressed to a Young Man, on his First Entrance into Life, and Adapted to the Peculiar Circumstances of the Present Times, 2nd edn, 3 vols (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1802), i, 35. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as LYM. 78 Smith, p. 489. 79 The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, v, 208. 80 Siskin, The Work of Writing, p. 107. 81 Nancy Fraser, ‘What’s Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender’, in Feminism as Critique: Essays on the Politics of Gender in Late-Capitalist Societies, ed. by Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), pp. 31–56 (p. 32). 82 Ibid., p. 33. 83 Ibid., pp. 35, 36. 84 Butler, p. 317. 85 McCann, p. 185. 86 As Heather MacFadyen notes, ‘Belinda leaves behind the world of routs, drums, and masquerades and retreats into a world of domestic reading . . . She resists the indiscriminate circulation that is integral to the fashionable world and chooses instead to spend increasing amounts of time in Lady Delacour’s library.’ See Heather MacFadyen, ‘Lady Delacour’s Library: Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda and Fashionable Reading’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 48:4 (1994), 423–39 (p. 427). 87 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 162, 163, 3. Similarly, Deborah Weiss notes that it is ‘through the process of reflection’ that Belinda ‘educates herself and develops her understanding’. Deborah Weiss, ‘The Extraordinary Ordinary Belinda: Maria Edgeworth’s Female Philosopher’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 19:4 (Summer 2007), 441–61 (p. 460). 88 Anna Larpent, Diaries, Huntingdon Library, HM 31201, 19 February 1779, cited in the Reading Experience Database:

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www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/record_details.php?id=5960 [accessed 1 September 2013]. Clifford Siskin offers an illuminating account of taking joy in one’s work in relation to William Wordsworth’s The Prelude. In particular, his description of the poet engaging in his work for ‘the higher (and thus deeper) motivation of love instead of money’ bears comparison to the symbolic, rather than economic, benefits of Belinda’s acts of intellectual labour. See The Work of Writing, p. 114. The quotation under discussion is: ‘Fall’n Cherub, to be weak is miserable | Doing or Suffering’. John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), ed. by Christopher Ricks (London: Penguin, 1968), Book I, 156. Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), ed. by Eleanor Ty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 22. Locke writes: ‘As it is in the body, so it is in the mind; practice makes it what it is, and most even of those excellences which are looked on as natural endowments will be found, when examined into more narrowly, to be the product of exercise, and to be raised to that pitch only by repeated actions’. See Of the Conduct of the Understanding (1706), ed. by Thomas Fowler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), pp. 13–14. Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Professional Education, p. 8. Habermas, p. 56. The source for this sub-plot has its origins in the actions of Thomas Day who, inspired by Rousseau, conducted his own educational experiment. This involved taking two girls from foundling hospitals and educating them according to principles outlined by Rousseau in Émile. Inevitably, the scheme ended unsuccessfully. See the ‘Introductory Note’ in The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth; ii: Belinda, ed. by Siobhán Kilfeather, pp. x-xi. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile (1762), trans. by Barbara Foxley (London: Dent, 1955), pp. 345–6. Fordyce, ii, 62. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), ed. by Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 101. Similar phrases also appear throughout Of the Conduct of the Understanding. See pp. 39, 45. Taylor, p. 167. Kowaleski-Wallace, p. 118.

5

Making the novel-readers of a country: pleasure and the practised reader

A Collection of Novels has a better chance of giving pleasure than of commanding respect . . . For my own part, I scruple not to confess that, when I take up a novel, my end and object is entertainment; and as I suspect that to be the case with most readers, I hesitate not to say that entertainment is their legitimate end and object. Anna Letitia Barbauld, ‘On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing’1

The previous chapter drew attention to the scenes of reading in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda and Anna Larpent’s diary. Both instances highlighted the relationship between studious application and personal pleasure. While Edgeworth’s heroine reflects on how ‘agreeably’ her time passed in the library, Larpent finds that she was ‘much more . . . pleased’ with herself when reading Locke than when smiling and curtseying in public.2 While pleasure has frequently been devalued as a result of its association with immediate gratification, in these instances it is produced through the sustained effort of mental labour, and is embedded within, and regulated by, a broader narrative of personal development.3 Each of these experiences is based upon the reading of non-fictional material; by contrast, the pleasure produced by the reading of fiction has more typically been treated with mistrust.4 As Gary Kelly notes, the ‘suspicion of mere entertainment’ was a fundamental component in the anti-novel discourse of the period; pleasure for its own sake was frequently denounced, in favour of forms of reading which served a

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programme of ‘personal and social industriousness’.5 This approach to reading was also intimately related to conduct-book discourses of femininity which, ostensibly, articulate ‘a bourgeois programme of self-discipline and self-improvement which is anti-pleasure’.6 Considering this climate, it is striking to encounter Anna Letitia Barbauld’s essay ‘On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing’, which formed the preface to her fifty-volume edition of The British Novelists (1810). Within The British Novelists, Barbauld constructs ‘a diverse, politically self-conscious, and progressive canon’, which promotes both ‘pleasure-taking and critically active readership’.7 Her confident assertion that ‘entertainment’ might be a ‘legitimate’ product of reading marks a bold departure from the suggestion, exhibited in the examples from Edgeworth and Larpent, that the pleasure of reading must be subordinated to a narrative of self-improvement. Nevertheless, Barbauld is careful to balance her comments on the legitimacy of ‘entertainment’ with an account of the moral function of fiction. ‘[I]t is not necessary’, she states, ‘to rest the credit of these works on amusement alone, since it is certain they have had a very strong effect in infusing principles and moral feelings’ (BN, i, 45–6). Such an assertion indicates unease with employing pleasure as the sole basis on which to endorse novels: without the supporting claim of ‘infusing principles and moral feelings’, ‘amusement’ is a vulnerable and potentially frivolous ‘end’ of reading.8 In the absence of a disciplinary framework, Barbauld’s account of reading for ‘amusement’ risks evoking a form of privatised, inherently anti-social pleasure, based upon the ‘miasmic’ dangers of ‘solitary . . . delight’.9 As J. Paul Hunter notes, this prospect prompted anxieties ‘about idleness or, worse, stimulation of the mind and imagination toward improper longings’.10 But rather than the aberrant longing of an ‘anti-social’ reader, Barbauld confidently asserts that the desire for pleasure is the normative condition of ‘most readers’.11 In doing so, she places the prospect of solitary reading against a backdrop of a constituency of readers for whom entertainment is a ‘legitimate end and object’. Even as she articulates the self-enclosed, potentially indulgent, experience of reading, Barbauld gestures towards the way in which it could also lead an individual to feel ‘part of a broader community’.12 As this chapter will suggest, throughout The British Novelists Barbauld assumes a critically competent readership, capable of

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undertaking active textual interpretation. Such ‘practised’ readers are, Barbauld suggests, immune to the stereotypical images of the passive, impressionable reader. Barbauld actively participates in what David Allan describes as ‘a new kind of culture – one shared between comparably qualified individuals, each capable of autonomous judgement as well as properly literate and consequently willing and able to arrive at their own conclusions about what they had read’.13 The defence of female readers offered by Barbauld within The British Novelists is inseparable from the work’s primary aim: the legitimisation of the novel genre. Several critics have suggested that this was achieved in the second decade of the nineteenth century, as a result of the critical and commercial success of Walter Scott’s Waverley novels. In Ina Ferris’s words, Scott’s fiction ‘moved the novel out of the subliterary margins of the culture into the literary hierarchy’.14 Moreover, as Ferris notes in her influential account of Scott’s influence upon, and place within, literary history, the Waverley novels were celebrated in distinctly gendered terms. The ‘manly power’ attributed to them propelled Scott’s novels to literary respectability, and positioned them as a salutary response to ‘the disease . . . of female reading’ in the process.15 As this chapter will suggest, four years before the publication of the first Waverley novel, Barbauld’s The British Novelists suggested that the ‘domestic pleasure’ (BN, i, 44) of novel-reading could be just as rejuvenating as the ‘healthy masculinity of the Waverley mode’.16 Nevertheless, Barbauld remained cautious about those forms of pleasure that exist independently from an agenda of self-improvement and social utility. As the first section of this chapter illustrates, such forms of pleasure frequently lead to a sense of shame: a point echoed in the Quixote narrative of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817). Austen’s novel depicts the ways in which solitary acts of reading might be regulated by the presence of coercive models of pedagogy. But while Northanger Abbey hinges upon the inevitable enlightenment of its female protagonist, the self-reflexive presence of its ‘knowing narrator’ means that, like The British Novelists, it too investigates the implications of becoming a ‘practised’ reader – an identity in which the twin prospects of critical independence and personal pleasure are negotiated.17 Ultimately, both Austen and Barbauld forge a viable alternative to the identity of the indiscriminate novel-reader.

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Rather than drawing upon the ‘reinvigorating’ masculine mode instituted by the novels of Walter Scott, they explore the potential of the ‘domestic’ quality of fiction. In doing so, they outline a mode of reading that produces both personal pleasure and moral insight. By way of constructing a sense of Barbauld’s engagement with fictional narratives, I begin with her earlier work. ‘The charm is dissolved’: Barbauld, novels and shame Published in 1773, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose brought together a selection of short works by Anna Letitia Barbauld (or Aikin, as she was then) and her brother, John Aikin. The essays, imitations and allegories that make up this collection demonstrate the Aikins’ conversance with the literary and aesthetic ideas of the period, exhibiting a kind of ‘cultural cosmopolitanism’ in the process.18 In an example of the Aikins’ ‘collaborative mode’ of authorship, individual pieces remained unsigned, with the names ‘J. and A. L. Aikin’ appearing together on the title-page.19 The essay ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror; with Sir Bertrand, a Fragment’ has subsequently been attributed to John Aikin; nevertheless, it provides an intriguing glimpse of the aesthetic and philosophical debates with which Barbauld was to contend in The British Novelists.20 In the essay, we find Aikin discussing the complexities of aesthetic response. He begins by considering how, by encouraging ‘the exercise of our benevolent feelings’, a ‘scene of misery’ can become ‘a source of pleasure’.21 It has long been recognised that the ethical implications of sensibility were by no means unequivocal. Indeed, the above comments could be construed as revealing traces of self-indulgent pleasure in the suffering of others. For Aikin, however, the ‘exercise’ of virtuous feelings eliminates the possibility of self-indulgence. This celebration of activity can be related to Aikin’s reading of Francis Hutcheson, whose philosophy of benevolence formed part of his and Barbauld’s ‘theological inheritance’.22 In A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (1747), Hutcheson states that ‘mere kind affection without action, or slothful wishes, will never make us happy. Our chief joy consists in the exercise of our more honourable powers.’23 Therefore, the ‘pleasure’ to be derived from scenes of ‘misery’ remains legitimate, so long as it is connected to moral action. Yet when the issue of morality is removed – and a real ‘scene of misery’ is replaced by

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aesthetic ‘objects of pure terror’ – Aikin acknowledges that ‘the apparent delight’ we experience ‘is a paradox of the heart, much more difficult of solution’ (p. 120). Continuing, Aikin denies that such scenes offer any ‘real pleasure’ at all: I have often been led to imagine that there is a deception in these cases; and that the avidity with which we attend is not a proof of our receiving real pleasure. The pain of suspense, and the irresistible desire of satisfying curiosity, when once raised, will account for our eagerness to go quite through an adventure, though we suffer actual pain during the whole course of it. We rather chuse to suffer the smart pang of a violent emotion than the uneasy craving of an unsatisfied desire. (p. 123)

Even when they cause ‘actual pain’, ‘objects of pure terror’ retain an alluring appeal. Indeed, while Aikin writes that we ‘chuse to suffer . . . violent emotion’, he nevertheless acknowledges that the ‘desire of satisfying curiosity’ is ‘irresistible’. Such ‘objects’ thus throw individual agency into question, running the risk of transforming previously autonomous human beings into vicarious thrill-seekers who, in fact, have no choice but to satisfy their ‘irresistible’ curiosity. As Chapter 3 suggested, ‘curiosity’ is a dominant feature of the construction of women readers in the work of Hamilton, Edgeworth and Godwin. Aikin and Barbauld are similarly interested in how curiosity bears upon reading habits, with the former describing how it impels him to read, almost against his will: ‘I have frequently felt it with regard to our modern novels, which, if lying on my table, and taken up in an idle hour, have led me through the most tedious and disgusting pages, while, like Pistol eating his leek, I have swallowed and execrated to the end’ (p. 124). Aikin implies that narratives which appeal to readers by exciting their curiosity operate on the lowest of levels. Employing rhetoric familiar from anti-novel discourse, he describes such reading as an act of the body, to be ‘swallowed’ almost against one’s will.24 Perhaps Aikin protests too much – his derision seems designed to obscure the traces of guilty pleasure that prosper in these unregulated ‘idle hours’. In contrast to the effects of these ‘modern novels’, he describes ‘well-wrought scenes of artificial terror’ in which the ‘imagination, darting forth, explores with rapture the new world which is laid open to its view, and rejoices in

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the expansion of its powers’ (p. 125). Aikin remains unclear as to what differentiates such ‘well-wrought scenes’ from those in ‘modern novels’. Indeed, the distinction appears to be in the effect they have upon their readers. Far from being an act of a sluggishly ‘idle’ body, ‘well-wrought scenes’ encourage an active readerly response, in which the imagination revels ‘in the expansion of its powers’. There appears to exist, on Aikin’s part, an anxiety about the legitimacy of the texts before him. Homogenous, anonymous ‘modern novels’ – which encourage readers to indulge themselves in a state of indolence – are pitted against works more worthy, in his view, of critical approbation: Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Tobias Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753). Similar anxieties can be found over three decades later, throughout the pages of Barbauld’s The British Novelists. In addition to the prefatory essay, ‘On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing’, Barbauld provides brief introductory remarks upon almost all of the authors featured. Her comments on Ann Radcliffe, whose The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) are included in The British Novelists, offer a perspective on her conflicted response to literary entertainment, and are worth exploring in some detail. Barbauld’s anxieties here resurrect some of the themes discussed by Aikin in ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror’: In novels of this kind, where the strong charm of suspense and mystery is employed, we hurry through with suspended breath, and in a kind of agony of expectation; but when we are come to the end of the story, the charm is dissolved, we have no wish to read it again; we do not recur to it as we do to the characters of Western in Tom Jones, or the Harrels in Cecilia; the interest is painfully strong while we read, and when once we have read it, it is nothing; we are ashamed of our feelings, and do not wish to recall them. (BN, xliii, p. vii)

Barbauld’s account is captivating in its expression of the fascination and subsequent revulsion provoked by ‘novels of [Radcliffe’s] kind’. She describes the reader as entering a state in which their sense of self – like their breath – is temporarily ‘suspended’, as they ‘hurry through’ the novel, in pursuit of the moment of gratification. However, the fulfilment of this readerly desire remains

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forever deferred. The pleasurable ‘agony of expectation’ gives way to disappointment: at the conclusion of such narratives, the reader’s ‘interest’ becomes ‘nothing’. The object of Barbauld’s disappointment is Radcliffe’s use of the ‘explained supernatural’, in which ‘apparently supernatural occurrences are spine-chillingly evoked only to be explained away in the end as the product of natural causes’.25 E. J. Clery has discussed the positive contemporary reception of Radcliffe’s use of this device. She quotes one reviewer who enthusiastically describes the effects induced by The Mysteries of Udolpho: ‘The reader experiences in perfection the strange luxury of artificial terror, without being obliged for a moment to hoodwink his reason, or to yield to the weakness of superstitious credulity’.26 Evidently, however, the pleasure Barbauld takes in ‘novels of [Radcliffe’s] kind’ is dependent upon a temporary submission to the transporting power of the narrative, which is ‘voluntary and involuntary at once’.27 At the moment that the ‘explained supernatural’ resolves the plot, ‘the charm is dissolved’: the temporary loss of self brought about by the ‘hoodwink[ing]’ of one’s ‘reason’ is revealed. It is a moment of conservative containment, producing self-reproach within the reader for having, even momentarily, indulged in the transgressive pleasures of the irrational and supernatural. Another dimension can be added to Barbauld’s reaction by considering her expectations that novels will conform to certain narrative criteria. ‘Every such work’, she writes, ‘is a whole, in which the fates and fortunes of the personages are brought to a conclusion’ (BN, i, 52). Novels, then, are read in good faith that the author will adhere to a set of conventions. If this understanding is violated, Barbauld holds the author wholly accountable: ‘it is a fault in his composition if every circumstance does not answer the reasonable expectations of the reader’ (BN, i, 53). Presumably, Barbauld would apply this critique to Radcliffe. Novels of this kind are at fault because, having directed the reader towards the expectation of a supernatural climax, they fail to live up this promise by concluding with a rationalising explanation. This line of argument, however, places Barbauld in the uncomfortable position of incorporating the irrational and superstitious under her ‘reasonable expectations’. This, then, is part of the subversive power of the Radcliffean novel: it draws readers in, making them subservient to its system of logic, until one’s ‘reasonable expecta-

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tions’ mutate into wholly unreasonable ones. While Barbauld may attempt to present this as a failure of the novelist, it also represents a temporary failure of the reader. In a novel that demands a high level of investment in the plot, encountering such a disappointing resolution also means that rereading is implausible: ‘when once we have read it, it is nothing’. The reduction of a text to ‘nothing’ gestures towards the possibility that a literary work might become a disposable commodity, rather than an enduring cultural artefact. In this respect, Barbauld’s inclusion of Radcliffe as one of her ‘British Novelists’ may seem a curious choice. Deidre Lynch locates the origins of ‘[t]he familiar equation of canonicity and re-readability’ within the early nineteenth century.28 In making this connection, she highlights the regulatory function of rereading, describing how it was represented as ‘a means of coordinating the recursive rhythms of . . . interior life and those of daily life in the world’.29 For Barbauld, the ‘strong charm of suspense and mystery’ employed by the Radcliffean mode appears to unsettle these ‘rhythms’, culminating in an alienating sense of shameful self-reproach.30 Barbauld’s self-chastisement might be considered symptomatic of some of the more punitive approaches to women’s reading that appear in this period. Indeed, her conflicted response can be placed in the context of conduct and educational discourse. As this book has illustrated, within these genres women readers were frequently depicted as being impelled by an uncontrollable appetite. An example of this tendency can be found in Thomas Gisborne’s An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797), which discusses the reading of ‘romances’. Gisborne comments that a ‘story must be uncommonly barren’ and ‘wretchedly told’ if, after having heard the beginning, we desire not to know the end. To the pleasure of learning the ultimate fortunes of the heroes and heroines of the tale, the novel commonly adds . . . that which arises from animated description, from lively dialogue, or from interesting sentiment. Hence the perusal of one romance leads . . . to the speedy perusal of another. Thus a habit is formed, a habit at first, perhaps, of limited indulgence, but a habit that is continually found more formidable and more encroaching. The appetite becomes too keen to be denied; and in proportion as it is more urgent, grows less nice and select in its fare. What would formerly have given offence, now gives none.31

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Even Gisborne, in the midst of this reactionary response to the dangers of ‘romances’, acknowledges the ‘pleasure’ of pursuing a narrative to its conclusion. Within the space of a few sentences, however, the inclusive ‘we’ with which this passage begins has disappeared, and is replaced by ‘young women’, whose minds are in danger of being ‘secretly corrupted’ by their reading.32 The anxiety provoked by this ‘secret corruption’ alerts us to the association of literature – especially the ‘disposable’ literature of circulating libraries – with ‘a distinctly feminine interiority’.33 Such interiority threatens to escape Gisborne’s regulatory gaze, exciting his suspicion that, while shrouded in ‘secrecy’, readers revel in the addictive pleasures of narratives. But that is not to say that we should automatically conflate ‘pleasure and transgression with progression’.34 Indeed, this possibility is stymied by the terms set out by Gisborne, in which unregulated pleasures only confirm the misogynistic stereotypes he draws upon. Certainly, within the context of 1790s proto-feminism it is difficult to see how the association of women with appetite and the body, rather than the mind and rationality, could be redeemed and presented as ‘progressive’. In this context, we can consider both the equivocal status of ‘pleasure’ and the ambiguity surrounding Barbauld’s admission of shame. On the one hand, Barbauld’s gesture may seem to be one of capitulation, which forecloses the possibility of pleasure. On the other, it is only by renouncing her ‘feelings’ that she is able to resist the stereotype of the insatiable female reader, incapable of self-mastery. Barbauld’s turn from pleasure to shame finds a twentiethcentury parallel in the work of Roland Barthes: ‘No sooner has a word been said, somewhere, about the pleasure of the text, than two policemen are ready to jump upon you: the political policeman and the psychoanalytical policeman: futility and/or guilt, pleasure is either idle or vain, a class notion or an illusion’.35 Similarly, in the case of Barbauld, pleasure appears to invite self-chastisement. To use Barthes’s term, the ‘idleness’ of pleasure demands to be offset by the labour of self-regulation. The female reader, as Barbauld represented her in 1810, appears to have internalised the disciplinary logic espoused by Gisborne and others at the end of the eighteenth century. Conversely, then, the pleasurable entertainment offered by Radcliffean narratives becomes the ideal site in which to administer forms of corrective discipline: a paradigm that lies at the heart of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.

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Pedagogy, pleasure and resistance Like Barbauld’s account of reading Radcliffe, Northanger Abbey adopts a pattern of narrative pleasure abruptly curtailed by embarrassment and shame. It is a novel in which, according to William H. Galperin, ‘growth and capitulation are synonymous’.36 Judith Wilt also recognises this, describing Catherine Morland as experiencing ‘self-reproach, which generates self-examination, which finally generates self-forgiveness and growth’.37 If one accepts that the novel does indeed impose this disciplinary narrative of ‘growth’ upon Catherine, the following incident represents a pivotal moment. Having entertained Radcliffe-inspired theories of General Tilney’s tyrannous behaviour, Catherine Morland is rebuked by Henry Tilney, leading to the following reflection: The visions of romance were over. Catherine was completely awakened. Henry’s address, short as it had been, had more thoroughly opened her eyes to the extravagance of her late fancies than all their several disappointments had done. Most grievously was she humbled. Most bitterly did she cry . . . She hated herself more than she could express . . . [I]t seemed as if the whole might be traced to the influence of that sort of reading which she had there indulged.38

While Catherine appears to blame the ‘sort of reading’ that she had pursued for leading her astray, Austen’s use of the modal verb ‘might’ leaves room for an alternative explanation. As several critics have pointed out, Catherine could more accurately level the blame for her behaviour at Henry himself.39 It is Henry who nurtures Catherine’s Radcliffean vision of Northanger Abbey, asking if she is ‘prepared to encounter all the horrors that a building such as “what one reads about” may produce?’ (p. 114). The setting in which Henry enthrals Catherine with his Gothic narrative of Northanger also emphasises her relative innocence, while replaying the motif of self-reproach. It is General Tilney’s suggestion that Catherine accompany his son, unchaperoned, in Henry’s curricle. Remembering a previous comment on the propriety of ‘young men’s open carriages’, Catherine first blushes at the proposal, but subsequently defers to ‘General Tilney’s judgement’ (p. 113). The subsequent act of transport that occurs is twofold. Catherine overcomes her initial reserve about journeying with Henry, becoming ‘as happy a being as ever existed’ (p. 113).

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Suitably at ease, she then allows herself to be transported by Henry’s Gothic narrative.40 Just as Aikin writes that he has been ‘led’ through the pages of ‘modern novels’ by the pull of their narrative, so Catherine passively allows herself to be led – both literally and metaphorically – by Henry. Indeed, his driving is as sleekly seductive as his storytelling: his curricle moves ‘nimbly . . ., quietly – without making any disturbance’ (p. 113). His narrative operates in a similar way, leading Catherine to seamlessly slip from her present physical location into the Gothicised vision of Northanger he creates. It is only when Henry briefly pauses that the momentum his narrative has built up is exposed, provoking Catherine to urge him to continue, almost against her own judgement: ‘Oh! no, no – do not say so. Well, go on’ (p. 116). Such self-contradiction evokes what Barbauld describes as the ‘agony of expectation’ – a sensation at once painful and pleasurable, prompting a desire that will not admit suppression. The parallels with Barbauld’s account are maintained when Henry finally refuses to continue his narration. Emerging from a temporary loss of self-awareness, self-reproach replaces transport as the dominant sensation: ‘Catherine, recollecting herself, grew ashamed of her eagerness’ (p. 117). As Galperin and Wilt note, in Northanger Abbey such ‘capitulation’ is viewed as the necessary prelude to ‘growth’ and self-improvement. According to this logic, narratives that offer only pleasure are not conducive to education and the process of maturation it superintends. We should, however, be hesitant about taking Austen at face value when she appears to endorse shame and ‘capitulation’. Rather, narratives of suffering and redemption are treated by Austen with an ironic scepticism. As Northanger Abbey draws to a conclusion, its narrator reflects upon the happy occasion of Catherine’s marriage, noting that she knows ‘no one more entitled, by unpretending merit, or better prepared by habitual suffering, to receive and enjoy felicity’ (p. 185). While the main action of Northanger Abbey sees Catherine placed in various scenes of discomforting social embarrassment, her experiences fall short of constituting ‘habitual suffering’. It is an instant in which Austen’s humour undercuts the punitive narrative that Galperin and Wilt, among others, find in the novel.41 Austen’s celebration of literary pleasure is also confirmed by Northanger Abbey’s famous defence of novels and their readers. We have seen Barbauld compare Radcliffean narratives, which

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resolve into ‘nothing’, with novels to which we ‘recur’. Her suggestion is that the latter kind of novel offers a fullness of experience in which readers can repeatedly immerse themselves. Something similar is at work in Austen’s commentary: Let us leave it to the Reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. (p. 23)

The pleasure that Austen praises is ‘extensive’. It is not the novel but the language of critics that is without substance and at risk of collapsing into ‘nothingness’. The intellectual poverty of their ‘threadbare strains’ is underlined by Austen’s subtle mimicry of a typical denunciation of the novel genre: numerous sources could be found for her description of the ‘the trash with which the press now groans’.42 While Barbauld depicts the electrifying pleasures of Radcliffe’s novels only to rebuke herself for having done so, throughout much of Northanger Abbey Austen allows Catherine to savour the pleasures of Udolpho. Hence, the eighth chapter of the first volume concludes with Catherine being ‘left to the luxury of a raised, restless, and frightened imagination over the pages of Udolpho, lost from all worldly concerns of dressing and dinner’ (p. 35). Austen’s use of the term ‘luxury’ in this context recalls the Monthly Review’s account of ‘the strange luxury of artificial terror’ and the suggestion of a paradoxically knowing act of selfdeception. While, as Lynch argues, acts of rereading co-ordinate ‘the recursive rhythms of . . . interior life and those of daily life in the world’, reading Udolpho for the first time stimulates Catherine’s imagination, dislocating her from ‘worldly concerns’.43 Even more significantly, whereas Barbauld writes of her sense of ‘shame’ at the conclusion of Radcliffe’s novels, Catherine undergoes no such experience; indeed, Austen does not depict Catherine finishing Udolpho at all.44 This unwritten moment is displaced on to the ‘awaken[ing]’ Catherine experiences after having been reprimanded by Henry Tilney (p. 146). Yet the absence of such a scene is significant. In the example above, Catherine is ‘left to the luxury’ of Udolpho at the conclusion of the

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chapter, as if Austen allows Catherine’s reading of that text to continue to flourish in the silent spaces of her novel: the possibility of the reader’s pleasure is never foreclosed in Northanger Abbey. When it comes to concluding her own novel, Austen’s narrative voice offers her readers an alternative to Barbauld’s self-chastening realisation that the transport is over, and the ‘charm is dissolved’: The anxiety, which in this state of their attachment must be the portion of Henry and Catherine, and of all who loved either, as to its final event, can hardly extend, I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity. (p. 185)

Austen pre-empts the sense of anti-climax that Barbauld depicts upon reaching the conclusion of a Radcliffe novel. Any feelings of transport are removed when, in a moment of extreme defamiliarisation, readers are forced to shift their gaze to ‘the tell-tale compression of the pages before them’. Rather than invoking a disorientating act of expulsion from an enthralling narrative, Austen’s strategy is predicated upon a self-aware reader: one whose fluency in the conventions of plot allows them to take pleasure while avoiding imaginative over-investment in the fate of the characters they read about. And yet, even as Austen writes this knowing reader into her text, she playfully dramatises the way in which readers are drawn into the very texture of the novels they read. In depicting the inevitability of her narrative’s conclusion, Austen employs a lengthy, almost over-punctuated sentence, which demands that its readers maintain scrupulous attention to its twists and turns at the very moment that they refocus upon the physical appearance of the book before them. As we have seen, Aikin writes disparagingly of the ‘modern novels’ that have ‘led [him] through’ their pages: Austen admits the pleasure of this prospect, yet includes a defensive mechanism to ensure that her readers maintain self-possession. In Northanger Abbey, Austen signals the presence of a range of distinct forms of readerly pleasure, which vary from the ‘luxury’ of self-loss that Catherine finds in Udolpho to the attentive, but detached, meta-reader, aware of the artifice of literary conventions. In doing so, she offers a more sophisticated perspective on the issue than many of her contemporaries. The Reverend Edward Mangin, writing in 1814, refuses to admit the seeming contradiction of a

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literary pleasure that encompasses both self-nullification and selfawareness. While owning that novels possess the ‘power of pleasing’, he states that ‘their being fictitious destroys the effect’, before continuing: the reader of a well written novel has pleasure in the perusal, chiefly because during the process, the fact of its being a fiction is forgotten: the mind is for the time, deceived, and shadows are converted into substance: were a perpetual consciousness that the whole narrative is the work of invention, to attend the reader in his progress through the enticing pages of a master-artist in this species of composition . . . his delight would change into somewhat resembling contempt.45

Mangin perpetuates the view of fiction as an act of deception which, when discovered, elicits a negative response – in this case ‘contempt’ – from the reader. From this perspective, reading can be seen only as a ‘process’: a unique event that occurs in a specific moment in time, insulated from an awareness of a text’s fictionality. The reading of novels therefore entails an act of forgetting which, by its very nature, cannot be repeated. Mangin is unable, or unwilling, to accommodate the variations of readerly pleasure that Austen draws attention to in Northanger Abbey. Such inflexibility is perhaps characteristic of advice literature of the period; certainly, contemporary accounts of reading do not reflect such views. Upon reading the third series of Tales of My Landlord (1819) (comprising The Bride of Lammermoor and A Legend of Montrose), Lady Louisa Stuart wrote to its author, Walter Scott: ‘Do not suppose that I am at present reading the work for the first time. I have had it by heart these five weeks. It possesses the same power of captivating the attentions as its predecessors; one may find this or that fault, but who does not read on?’46 For Mangin, the immersive pleasure of ‘a well written novel’ consists of the work’s ability to obscure its own fictionality, and to temporarily ‘deceive’ the reader. By contrast, Stuart gestures towards a more self-conscious form of literary pleasure, describing a reading process which is punctuated by an awareness of the work’s ‘faults’ but which is, nevertheless, pleasurable. Having learnt the work ‘by heart’, Stuart’s reading is an acknowledged performance, during which she is able to reconcile the fictional nature of the text while simultaneously experiencing the ‘delight’ that Mangin suggests derives from forgetting the fact that the novel is a ‘work of invention’.

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The adaptability exhibited by Stuart is more akin to the modes of reading to which Austen refers within Northanger Abbey. Indeed, Austen’s assertion that enjoyment is a legitimate product of reading defies the authoritative logic of texts such as Mangin’s View. As a result, within Northanger Abbey we are led to question the extent to which Austen endorses Catherine’s chastening ‘awakening’ from her Radcliffe-fuelled reveries. As mentioned above, it is Henry Tilney who excites Catherine’s imagination only to humiliate her by highlighting ‘the extravagance of her late fancies’ (p. 146). Considering this, the distinction between ‘torment’ and ‘instruction’ is perhaps less secure than Henry Tilney would admit: a fact that draws attention to the disturbing currents of power that underlie Catherine’s ‘education’ (p. 80). Pursuing this theme, Claudia Johnson has observed that, in Northanger Abbey, Austen ‘considers the authority of men and books, women’s books in particular, and suggests how the latter can illuminate and even resist the former’.47 Indeed, it is through the character of Henry Tilney that Austen unsettles ideas about gendered reading habits. At first sight, Tilney’s recollection of reading Radcliffe replays the motifs that appear in The British Novelists: ‘I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; – I remember finishing it in two days – my hair standing on end the whole time’ (p. 77). Reading is figured here as imparting a physiological reaction; it is a pleasurable, compulsive activity, upon which sensations of guilt and self-reproach do not intrude. Indeed, Tilney revels in his consumption of novels, boasting that he has ‘read hundreds and hundreds’ (p. 78). For him, the pleasure of novels lies, in part, in their disposability. They are conflated with one another, characterised by their generic repetitiveness: ‘Do not imagine that you can cope with me in a knowledge of Julias and Louisas’, he warns Catherine (p. 78). The significance of such acts of reading remains ambiguous. On the one hand, Henry’s self-conscious reading habits represent the opposite of Catherine’s whole-hearted immersion within Udolpho. The pleasure he takes in reading is not ‘extensive and unaffected’, but knowing and self-aware – verging, in fact, upon the cynical. At the same time, the way in which Henry flaunts the superficiality of his reading reveals an obstinate pleasure in resisting the more pious tracts against novel-reading.

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His pride in having ‘read hundreds and hundreds’ of novels almost appears to be a direct rebuke to those authors who insist upon extreme discrimination and on the educational benefits of reading. For example, writing in 1809, J. L. Chirol stresses that The principal points is [sic] not how much, but what, and how, we read. It consists, therefore, in reading with choice, with order, with taste, that we may derive benefit from what we read . . . [W]ithout taste, or inclination for reading, nothing would remain impressed upon the understanding; . . . Both order and choice would be useless, and a person would read only to be able to say, – I have read such and such books.48

While ‘useless’ forms of reading inspire anxiety in Chirol, Henry Tilney revels in the non-utilitarian and resolutely unedifying contents of novels. He makes a mockery of those who venerate reading as a productive, improving pastime. Henry’s endorsement of superficiality is not the only way in which he undermines the gendered stereotypes of readers propagated by authors such as Chirol. Against Catherine’s expectations, he asserts that reading habits are not dictated by gender, noting that men ‘read nearly as many [novels] as women’ (p. 78). If this gendered distinction is eradicated, the figure of the female reader – who indiscriminately pursues her ‘appetite’ for fiction – can no longer be defined against masculine rationality and restraint. However, it would be misleading to view Henry Tilney as performing the function of redeeming women readers. His levelling of male and female readers is achieved not by endowing women with the positive characteristics of their male counterparts but by his adoption of a feminised pose, which allows him to participate in discourses more traditionally associated with women. During his first appearance in the novel, we see Henry’s ability to deviate from codes of traditional masculinity as he comments upon gowns and muslins – ‘men commonly take so little notice of those things’, Mrs Allen notes with approval (p. 16). As Catherine thinks, but prevents herself from saying aloud, Henry’s behaviour might be considered ‘strange’ (p. 17). His ability to talk authoritatively upon muslins and novels is part of a role he can perform and dispose of at will: one that allows him to exercise the power of his own knowledge over others.49 When discussing Radcliffe with Catherine, he does not allow the distinction between the reading

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habits of men and women to collapse entirely: men read ‘nearly as many’ novels as women do. This refusal to allow the dissolution of difference manifests itself in his rigorous precision of language. Catherine’s enquiry as to whether Udolpho is not ‘the nicest book in the world’ provokes his irritation: ‘The nicest, – by which I suppose you mean the neatest, that must depend upon the binding’ (p. 78). Henry remains ready and willing to chastise Catherine. In doing so, he not only utilises the stereotype of the superficial female reader but implies that women are incapable of understanding the implications of the language they use to discuss books. It is Henry’s ability to switch from empathy and identification to distance and chastisement that allows him to gain what Judith Wilt describes as a distinct ‘psychological advantage’ over Catherine.50 While ‘hesitant to call the gently manipulating Henry a Montoni’, Wilt persuasively argues that in Austen’s hands ‘the deliberate manipulation, almost terrorization of the lover-student by the lover-mentor’ is shaped into ‘the recognizable anxiety of common life’.51 Indeed, as the compound noun ‘lover-mentor’ implies, the ‘common’ concern of education itself is underwritten by currents of power and eroticism, hinting at the way in which pleasure and instruction are intertwined. Throughout Northanger Abbey, Austen comments upon the tendency of educational culture to present ignorance not just as in need of correction but as a sexually attractive character trait. One such example is prompted by Catherine’s ‘misplaced’ shame at being uneducated in the picturesque. For, as the narrator explains, ‘[w]here people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind, is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person should always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she is to have the misfortune of knowing any thing, should conceal it as well as she can’ (p. 81). Austen’s wry commentary is fuelled by texts such as John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774), in which young ladies who ‘happen to have any learning’ are advised to ‘keep it a profound secret, especially from the men’.52 In the light of Austen’s subtle irony, however, the precariousness of who really holds power in such formulations becomes apparent. For ‘ignorance’ not only facilitates the education of the unknowing subject but panders to the ‘vanity’ of the knowledgeable. The result is to present the (implicitly male) preceptor as indulging in an act

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of self-gratifying display: a form of superficiality usually attributed to ill-educated young women.53 On the other side of this equation there is the recipient of this education who, by ‘conceal[ing]’ her knowledge, is the less deceived: hers is the power of ‘administering to the vanity’ of her teacher. Effectively, Austen slyly inverts the stereotypical roles of educator and educated, while implying that the exercise of pedagogic power is saturated with pleasure. To use Foucault’s terms, in his vain display of knowledge the educator reveals ‘power assert[ing] itself in the pleasure of showing off’, while the pupil takes pleasure in ‘fool[ing]’ and ‘travesty[ing]’ that power, in the possession of the ‘profound secret’ of their knowledge.54 Austen draws attention to the complex dynamics of power that exist between authoritative male readers and their putatively tractable female counterparts: As Barbauld’s The British Novelists suggests, even when entertainment is imagined to be a ‘legitimate end and object’ of reading it is accompanied by a corresponding, and ultimately overbearing, punitive impulse. While for Barbauld this takes the form of a selfgenerated sense of shame, in Austen’s case it is expressed through the disciplinary presence of the pedagogic male – a figure whose appearance incites a number of conflicting reactions, from resistance to illicit pleasure, recalling the oppositional energies depicted in the post-revolutionary works of Godwin and Hays. Here, however, the conflict between instruction and amusement can be interpreted as a problem of literary genre: the anxieties discussed in this chapter have been the specific result of the reading of fiction. They stem from two primary causes: the perceived propensity of novels to cause readers to conflate fiction and reality, and the ‘agony of expectation’ that readers experience as they seek the resolution of the plot. The next section of this chapter returns to the work of Anna Letitia Barbauld. While her comments on Ann Radcliffe’s novels gestured towards the ways in which novelreading can provoke guilt and anxiety, Barbauld elsewhere suggests that the reading of poetry offers an altogether less problematic form of literary pleasure. In doing so, however, she begins to reinstate the kinds of hierarchical distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of reading to which she responds in The British Novelists. Towards the conclusion of this chapter, I suggest that Barbauld guards against this by articulating a set of specialised novel-reading skills, granting readers the kind of autonomous

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self-awareness that, in Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen suggests characterises the early nineteenth-century novel-reader. Making the readers of a country: Barbauld’s reading nation In his Letters to a Young Lady on a Course of English Poetry (1804), Barbauld’s brother, John Aikin, writes to the titular ‘young lady’ to advise her how to make ‘the most profitable use’ of ‘a set of the English poets’ which she has received as a gift.55 While he undertakes a disinterested survey of ‘all the principal departments of poetical composition’, at one point he risks ‘the imputation of partiality’ by recommending that readers of his Letters consult ‘Mrs. Barbauld’s critical essay’ on Mark Akenside’s poem The Pleasures of Imagination.56 Within this little-known essay, Barbauld addresses the apparent contradiction of combining pleasure and instruction. ‘Didactic, or preceptive poetry’, she writes, ‘seems to include a solecism, for the end of Poetry is to please, and of Didactic precept the object is instruction.’57 This impasse is overcome, however, by the demands Barbauld makes upon readers before they even attempt to read such poetry: ‘Whoever therefore reads a Didactic Poem ought to come to it with a previous knowledge of his subject’ (p. 4). When the reader comes thus prepared, ‘the art of the Poet becomes itself a source of pleasure, and sometimes in proportion to the remoteness of the subject from the more obvious province of Poetry’ (pp. 4–5). Barbauld implies that the deeper the specialism – the more esoteric the subject – the more pleasurable it will prove. This idea is maintained as she turns to Akenside’s poem: It must be acknowledged however, that engaging as his subject is to minds prepared to examine it, to the generality of readers it must appear dry and abstruse. It is a work which offers us entertainment, but not of that easy kind amidst which the mind remains passive, and has nothing to do but to receive impressions. Those who have studied the metaphysics of mind, and who are accustomed to investigate abstract ideas, will read it with a lively pleasure; but those who seek mere amusement in a Poem, will find many far inferior ones better suited to their purpose. (p. 6)

A pair of hierarchical oppositions emerges in this passage. Readers whose minds are ‘prepared’ are pitted against the ‘generality of

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readers’, while ‘lively pleasure’ is contrasted with ‘easy’ entertainment. Establishing these oppositions allows Barbauld to circumvent the ‘guilt’ that, according to Barthes, accompanies the prospect of ‘pleasure’. She disparages ‘passive’, ‘easy’ entertainment, favouring instead the ‘lively pleasure’ that can be taken by ‘those who have studied the metaphysics of mind’. Barbauld suggests that the intensive labour of specialisation severs the connection between pleasure and idleness that haunts her account of the Radcliffean Gothic and Aikin’s earlier commentary on ‘modern novels’.58 While Aikin writes uneasily of such novels having ‘led [him]’ through their pages, such passivity is conscientiously avoided here: the pleasure of specialisation does not involve a loss of self but, conversely, is based upon ‘the quality of selfmastery’.59 In her ‘Essay on Akenside’s Poem’, then, Barbauld articulates the way in which the pleasure of discipline leads to the disciplining of pleasure. Although Aikin recommends Barbauld’s essay to the female addressee of his Letters to a Young Lady, it is by no means clear that Barbauld intends such a specialised approach to poetry to be adopted by female readers. Indeed, the terms in which she discusses such poetry align it with the kind of knowledge that is elsewhere characterised as distinctly masculine. In an undated letter, published in 1826 as ‘On Female Studies’, she outlines a gendered division of labour (which has much in common with Edgeworth’s Letters for Literary Ladies). Here, the domestic sphere is described as a female space, sequestered from the division of labour: ‘[t]he line of separation between the studies of a young man and a young woman appears to me to be chiefly fixed by this, – that a woman is excused from all professional knowledge’.60 Barbauld’s definition of ‘professional knowledge’ includes ‘all that is necessary to fit a man for a peculiar profession or business’.61 Having established these gendered spheres of action, she details the occupational divisions to which men’s professional knowledge is subjected: ‘[t]hese [professions] all require a great deal of severe study and technical knowledge; much of which is nowise valuable in itself, but as a means to that particular profession’.62 Barbauld’s account of occupational specialism draws upon the same rhetoric as her description of the ideal reader of didactic poetry, who has pre-emptively gathered ‘a previous knowledge of his subject’.63 Indeed, for Barbauld, the poet should not resemble ‘a teacher’,

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charged with the education of their readers. For if a poet is ‘obliged to explain technical terms, to refer continually to critical notes, and to follow a system step by step with the patient exactness of a teacher, his Poem, however laboured, will be a bad Poem’.64 By implication, a ‘good’ didactic poem is predicated upon its reader having undertaken a process of systematic ‘preparation’, equivalent to the ‘great deal of severe study and technical knowledge’ professional men must accrue. The parallels that Barbauld draws between the specialised requirements of didactic poetry and professional occupations suggest that both lie beyond the limits of a woman’s sphere of action. This idea is substantiated in ‘On Female Studies’, when Barbauld writes that ‘as a woman can never be called to any of these professions, it is evident [they] have nothing to do with such studies’.65 But if didactic poetry is rhetorically aligned with the exclusivity of men’s professional knowledge, Barbauld’s celebration of novel-reading emphasises its accessibility to all. It is, she states in The British Novelists, a ‘domestic’ activity, which is exempt from the demands that other literary genres impose upon individuals: Reading is the cheapest of pleasures: it is a domestic pleasure. Dramatic exhibitions give a more poignant delight, but they are seldom enjoyed in perfection, and never without expense and trouble. Poetry requires in the reader a certain elevation of mind and a practised ear. It is seldom relished unless a taste be formed for it pretty early. But the humble novel is always ready to enliven the gloom of solitude, to soothe the languor of debility and disease, to win the attention from pain or vexatious occurrences, to take man from himself, (at many seasons the worst company he can be in) and, while the moving picture of life passes before him, to make him forget the subject of his own complaints. It is pleasant to the mind to sport in the boundless regions of possibility; to find relief from the sameness of everyday occurrences by expatiating amidst brighter skies and fairer fields. (BN, i, 44–5)

The division of writing into specific genres, with which Barbauld begins, produces a corresponding division among readers, generating certain requirements of them before they can truly appreciate their reading experience. Attending a ‘dramatic exhibition’ requires ‘expense and trouble’, while the enjoyment of poetry, as the ‘Essay on Akenside’s Poem’ intimates, necessitates an ‘elevation

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of mind and a practised ear’. Conversely, ‘the humble novel’ offers an easily attainable pleasure that is both ‘cheap’ and ‘domestic’. This latter quality can be connected to the minimal claims that novels exert upon their readers. While the specialised skills required to read didactic poetry are analogous to masculine, professional knowledge, novels, with their exemption from such demands, are associated with the non-professional domestic sphere as described in ‘On Female Studies’. Nevertheless, Barbauld’s account of the ‘cheap pleasure’ of novel-reading is not as simple as it seems. In the previous chapter, I discussed Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) and suggested that Edgeworth’s model of domestic identity is formed not by exclusion from the demands of labour but by the internalisation of an ethic of ‘cultivation, labour, [and] precept’.66 These are the elements that contribute to the formation of the eponymous heroine’s exemplary wisdom. In the absence of this ‘symbolic labour’, domestic identities fail to cohere, as is apparent in the abject figures of Sir Clarence Hervey and Virginia St Pierre. Similarly, despite Barbauld’s claim that the domestic situation of women does not require the attainment of professional forms of knowledge, her description of female duties reveals a paradoxical state of affairs. After highlighting the fact that ‘a woman can never be called’ to professions within the law, medicine or politics, she states that ‘[m]en have various departments in active life; women have but one . . . It is, to be a wife, a mother, a mistress of a family. The knowledge belonging to these duties is your professional knowledge, the want of which nothing will excuse.’67 Despite her defining women’s sphere of activity in opposition to the male world of work, it transpires that the fulfilment of their ‘duties’ does require a form of ‘professional knowledge’. The unified ‘department’ of domestic life is subjected to further subdivisions, resulting in the proliferation of specialised identities (those of ‘a wife, a mother, [and] a mistress of a family’). Far from presenting a diffuse alternative to the demands of disciplinarity, the domestic sphere is organised by the logic of professionalism. The question that this provokes is whether the ‘domestic’ quality of novels – and of the skills required to read them – is marked by a similar ambiguity. On the face of it, the praise that Barbauld lavishes on the novel genre suggests that this is not the case. Rather than the ‘self-mastery’ instilled by discipline, novels

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are conducive to experiences of self-loss, possessing the ability ‘to take man from himself’. The ‘domestic pleasure’ of novels appears to be characterised by dissolution and excess, enabling ‘the mind to sport in the boundless regions of possibility’. But, as Barbauld’s reaction to the ‘charm[s]’ of Radcliffe’s novels demonstrates, selfloss is not necessarily a positive sensation. Indeed, on closer inspection, Barbauld suggests that the adoption of a more disciplined, self-conscious approach to reading can allay the anxieties produced by the transporting pleasures of novel-reading. One way of exploring this idea is to investigate Barbauld’s claim that reading is ‘the cheapest of pleasures’. The idea of ‘cheap pleasures’ also occupies John Aikin, who dedicates a letter to the subject in his Letters from a Father to his Son (1793). There, Aikin states that a ‘love of pleasure’ is dictated by ‘the voice of nature’ and is therefore an unalterable part of the human condition.68 Working from this assumption, he argues that the idea that ‘the suppression of desire . . . leads to happiness’ is mistaken, as ‘there can be no enjoyments without desires, for in their gratification, all enjoyment, as well intellectual as sensual, consists’ (p. 287). Supposing desire to be inevitable, Aikin turns his attention to ensuring that its object remains attainable. To this end he proposes the establishment of a regulated economy of pleasure: ‘[t]he true art of happiness, then consists in proportioning desires to means, or in other words, in acquiring a relish for procurable pleasures’ (p. 288). While Aikin suggests that this advice is relevant to almost all ‘station[s] of life’, it is of particular pertinence to the middling sort, who must learn to limit their desires, in order to safeguard against ‘the perpetual torment of unattainable wishes’ (p. 289). ‘To be made happy’, Aikin comments, ‘it is requisite that you be made cheaply so’ (p. 289). Aikin’s middle-class ethos of prudence and integrity can be linked with his status as a Dissenter, and with his promotion of the ‘austere values’ associated with that brand of Christianity.69 For Dissenters such as Aikin and Barbauld, religious principles went hand in hand with a ‘middle-class commercialist ethos’.70 Aikin makes this point in An Address to the Dissidents of England (1790), in which he informs his Dissenting audience that they ‘belong to the most virtuous, the most enlightened, the most independent part of the community, the middle class. If this nation is ever to improve, or even if it is to retain, the freedom it possesses, to this class alone must it be indebted for the blessing.’71

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The relationship between an individual’s ethical outlook and the progress of the nation is similarly played out in Barbauld’s work; it informs her project in The British Novelists, and her interest in the act of reading more generally. For instance, in an essay entitled ‘Against Inconsistency in our Expectations’ Barbauld emphasises the equivalence of financial and imaginative investment: ‘We should consider this world as a great mart of commerce . . . Our time, our labour, our ingenuity, is so much ready money which we are to lay out to the best advantage.’72 While such passages see Barbauld employing the ‘free-market vocabulary typical of much nonconformist rhetoric’, Barbauld does not exclusively address a Dissenting readership.73 The inclusivity implied by her plural possessive pronouns universalises the message she wishes to impart: the progressive force of Dissent is merged with a more generalised emphasis on the relationship between the ‘wellregulated . . . exertion of our faculties’ and one’s personal development.74 Similarly, in The British Novelists Barbauld attempts to ensure that her readers understand themselves as disciplined, thrifty consumers, who are mindful of the ‘time’, ‘labour’ and ‘ingenuity’ they expend on novel-reading. Within this context, the conceptualisation of reading as a desirably ‘cheap’ pleasure begins to take on a publicly orientated character. Nevertheless, it remains a complex criterion by which to evaluate aesthetic pleasure, and one that retains a degree of ambiguity. While it can be accounted for by Barbauld’s adherence to a Dissenting, commercialist ethic of prudence, the notion of cheapness also implies the kind of accessibility which circumvents the necessity of the ‘well-regulated industry’ and the ‘vigorous exertion of our faculties’ praised in ‘Against Inconsistency in our Expectations’.75 Cheapness thus takes on a double character: while it can be linked to both private and public virtue, it also risks degrading into the undemanding self-indulgence of privatised pleasure. The anxiety that the latter scenario provokes is described by Pierre Bourdieu: The refusal of what is easy in the sense of simple, and therefore shallow and ‘cheap’, because it is easily decoded and culturally ‘undemanding’, naturally leads to the refusal of what is facile in the ethical or aesthetic sense, of everything which offers pleasures that are too immediately accessible and so discredited as ‘childish’ or ‘primitive’ (as opposed to the deferred pleasures of legitimate art).76

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This set of associations could, with little difficulty, be mapped on to the efforts of writers such as Gisborne and Chirol to disparage both the novel and its female readers. While Barbauld appears to write in opposition to such authors, she is not immune from adopting their prejudices. While she favourably contrasts the ‘humble novel’ with the more abstruse pleasures of poetry, which require a ‘practised ear’, her celebration gives way to doubts. At times in The British Novelists she fears that, in Bourdieu’s words, the novel is ‘too immediately accessible’, and consequently ‘shallow’, and even ‘facile’. This is evident when she attends to the ‘many elegant pieces of poetry interspersed through the volumes of Mrs. Radcliffe’: The true lovers of poetry are almost apt to regret its being brought in as an accompaniment to narrative, where it is generally neglected; for not one in a hundred, of those who read and can judge novels, are at all able to appreciate the merits of a copy of verses, and the common reader is always impatient to get on with the story. (BN, xliii, p. viii)

The accessibility of the novel is devalued here, appealing only to ‘common readers’ who are ‘impatient to get on with the story’. As a result, Barbauld risks reverting to the stereotypical idea that female novel-readers are slaves to their appetite for narrative. In contrast to the degraded pleasures of fiction, she suggests that the disciplinary demands of poetry function as a marker of the genre’s higher cultural status – unlike the ‘humble novel’, poetry is not ‘easily decoded’. Accordingly, the degree of readerly agency that it requires is rewarded by a refined – rather than a ‘common’ – pleasure, that is available to ‘not one in a hundred’. In a similar vein, Leah Price has described how the ‘descriptive set-pieces and lyric epitaphs’ interspersed in Radcliffe’s narratives can be seen as ‘a series of textual speed-bumps that obstruct the “rapidity” of readers’ progress through the narrative’.77 Price suggests that these interruptions function in a manner akin to the explained supernatural, by forcing the reader to withdraw from the mesmeric flow of the narrative. In both instances, ‘immediate gratification’ is replaced by ‘the discipline of delay’.78 Consequently, an inability – or unwillingness – to submit to this discipline might be viewed as a marker of superficial femininity. Indeed, in her juvenilia, Jane Austen suggests that those who seek

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the instant gratification of uncovering a novel’s plot are incapable of appreciating the more refined pleasures that such works offer. In Catharine or the Bower, the eponymous character and her companion, Camilla Stanley, discuss Charlotte Smith – an author who, like Ann Radcliffe, digresses from the narrative in order to introduce poetry and extended scenes of landscape description. Catharine begins the discussion: ‘“But did not you find the story of Ethelinde very interesting? And the Descriptions of Grasmere, are not the[y] very beautiful?” “Oh! I missed them all, because I was in such a hurry to know the end of it –”’.79 Camilla, it seems, embodies the worst aspects of what Barbauld refers to as the ‘common reader’; her ‘impatience to get on with the story’ causes her to skip over anything that does not directly contribute to the plot. However, if such aberrant practices linger on in Barbauld’s conception of the ‘common reader’, it is worth noting that elsewhere she is keen to valorise both the novel and its readers in terms which recall the ‘practised’ readers of poetry. As Claudia Johnson notes, Barbauld ‘imagines novel readers not to be idle, young, too impressionable, or wishful, but to be alert proto-narratologists altogether conscious that a novelist is executing fiction according to discernible designs and in relation to understood conventions’.80 Johnson’s comments can be supported by reference to Barbauld’s description of how ‘a sagacious reader’ (BN, i, 52) – of either sex – will be able to recognise the fictional nature of what they are reading. Of Alain-René Le Sage’s Gil Blas, she states: ‘[i]t was very probable, at some periods of his history, that Gil Blas, if a real character, would come to be hanged; but the practised novelreader knows well that no such event can await the hero of the tale’ (BN, i, 53). Barbauld’s strategy of addressing ‘sagacious’ and ‘practised’ readers is recognisable in much eighteenth-century writing. As J. Paul Hunter notes, such modes of address identify ‘a particular subgroup in the audience’, inviting readers to feel ‘initiated into some sort of undefined community’.81 In Barbauld’s case, these references even suggest that novel-reading is as much of a specialist discipline as poetry. In her ‘Essay on Akenside’s Poem’, Barbauld describes a (male) reader who comes to the poetry with prior knowledge of ‘technical terms’ (p. 4). This is paralleled here, with Barbauld expecting readers to be fully acquainted with the plots and structures employed by novelists. As a result, her earlier

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attempt to distinguish the accessible pleasures of novel-reading from the ‘practised ear’ required to appreciate poetry begins to look less secure. With their ability to recognise novelistic conventions, the ‘practised novel-reader’ more closely resembles the ‘[lover] of poetry’ than the ‘common reader’. Peter Brooks has suggested that ‘we can . . . conceive of the reading of plot as a form of desire that carries us forward, onward, through the text’.82 Working from this premise, Barbauld’s ‘practised reader’ can be seen as capable of regulating her desire, thus preventing her assimilation into the misogynistic category of the helplessly passive, uncontrollably insatiable female reader. While we have seen Thomas Gisborne claim that the reader’s judgement becomes ‘less nice and select’ in proportion to the number of novels they read, Barbauld asserts the opposite. For her, the more novels readers encounter, the more discrimination they will show and the more ‘practised’ they will become – and with this skill there comes a degree of independence. Ultimately, Barbauld writes, ‘the effect of novel-reading must depend, as in every other kind of reading, on the choice which is made’ (BN, i, 49). As my third chapter suggested, the issue of choice is contentious. Frequently, discussions of the subject revolve around coercive models of pedagogy, in which the choice of the educator is imposed upon the pupil. By contrast, even as Barbauld engages in an act of canon-formation, she recognises that the judgement of one individual can only ever be provisional. Discussing her own process of selecting works for inclusion in The British Novelists, Barbauld comments that, in the first place, she has chosen ‘the most approved novels’, while attending to ‘variety of matter’ (BN, i, 58). Also guiding her decisions are the conditions of copyright, and the requirements of the booksellers who commissioned her to carry out the project (BN, i, 59).83 However, these factors account only for a portion of her selection: ‘[a]s to the rest no two people probably would make the same choice, nor indeed the same person at any distance of time . . . the list was not completed without frequent hesitation’ (BN, i, 58). Not only does Barbauld refuse to grant that any one individual’s choice can be the final word on the matter, she even allows for the possibility of selfcontradiction over a period of time. This relativistic approach makes determining what is, and what is not, suitable reading matter a tentative affair – something confirmed by her ‘frequent

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hesitation’. Mistakes, she implies, may be made, opinions may change – acknowledging that no single individual’s judgement is infallible, Barbauld invites readers to trust in their own instincts, rather than bowing to the superior knowledge of an authoritative figure such as Henry Tilney. The prospect of resistance is evident in the remarks she makes in defence of novels at the beginning of the essay ‘On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing’: Books of this description are condemned by the grave, and despised by the fastidious; but their leaves are seldom found unopened, and they occupy the parlour and the dressing-room while productions of higher name are often gathering dust upon the shelf. It might not perhaps be difficult to show that this species of composition is entitled to a higher rank than has been generally assigned to it. (BN, i, 1)

Here, as in Austen’s defence of novels in Northanger Abbey, antinovel discourse is turned on its head. Rather than novels, it is ‘productions of a higher name’ that are made to look superficial, as if they have little more than their title and reputation to recommend them. Contrary to expectations, Barbauld suggests that the mass readership of novels is a sign of their literary value, entitling them to ‘a higher rank than has been generally assigned to [them]’. As we have seen, this readership consists not of irresponsible novel-addicts but of self-aware individuals, capable of making their own rational, independent choices about what, and how, they read. Barbauld’s celebration of the novel’s place within ‘the parlour and the dressing-room’ also represents a self-conscious echo of Joseph Addison’s claim, made a century earlier, that The Spectator had ‘brought Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee Houses’.84 Indeed, in the ‘Preliminary Essay’ to her Selections from the Spectator, Tatler, Guardian, and Freeholder (1804) Barbauld notes that, despite their venerable status, these publications have ‘[ceased] to be current coin’. Although a ‘work of the first excellence’, the writing of Addison and his associates no longer ‘[occupies] the minds of youth’ but is instead ‘withdrawn from the parlour-window, and laid upon the shelf in honourable repose’.85 Therefore, when Barbauld asserts that novels reside in the domestic spaces occupied by men and women on a daily basis,

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she implies that it is now fiction that ‘[takes] possession of the public mind’.86 This popularity underlines the necessity of training individuals in disciplined modes of reading – a point that Barbauld emphasises as the essay ‘On the Origin and Progress of NovelWriting’ concludes: Some perhaps may think that too much importance has been already given to a subject so frivolous, but a discriminating taste is no where more called for than with regard to a species of books which every body reads. It was said by Fletcher of Saltoun, ‘Let me make the ballads of a nation, and I care not who makes the laws.’ Might it not be said with as much propriety, Let me make the novels of a country, and let who will make the systems? (BN, i, 59)

As Claudia Johnson notes, Barbauld concludes her introductory essay ‘with a defence of the novelist’s labour and of her own’.87 In addition to this gesture of legitimisation, her reference to Fletcher of Saltoun emphasises the relationship between the reading of fiction and the maintenance of the social order. Her comment provides a fitting encapsulation of the shifting ways in which women readers were imagined in the period discussed in this book. By way of my own conclusion, I want to consider the broader significance of Barbauld’s reference to the Scottish political theorist Andrew Fletcher. The quotation is taken from Fletcher’s An Account of a Conversation Concerning a Right Regulation of Governments for the Common Good of Mankind (1704); rather than being uttered by Fletcher himself, as Barbauld suggests, the quotation is attributed to ‘a very wise man’ who ‘believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation’.88 Ann Wierda Rowland notes that Barbauld’s appropriation of the phrase is indicative of the fact that, by the early nineteenth century, the novel, rather than the ballad, had become ‘the literary form that most directly reflects and influences the manners of the current stage of society’.89 But rather than attending to the substitution of ‘novels’ for ‘ballads’, critical attention has focused more intently on Barbauld’s use of the term ‘system’, in place of the ‘laws’ of the original. Rather than a simple misquotation, this decision is indicative of Barbauld’s understanding of the public significance of the novel in the early nineteenth century.

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Critics such as David Kaufmann and Miranda J. Burgess have shed light on the significance of Barbauld’s use of this term. Kaufmann helpfully suggests that her conception of a ‘system’ refers to a ‘complete, self-contained, or totalizing [body] of thought’, before noting that ‘the novel and the system are neither necessarily nor easily compatible’.90 Burgess takes this sense of incompatibility one step further, stating that ‘for Barbauld . . . the writing and reading of fiction do not constitute a system’.91 Nevertheless, Barbauld does suggest that some novels propagate modes of systematic thought. Looking back to the 1790s, she notes that ‘[n]o small proportion of modern novels have been devoted to recommend, or to mark with reprobation, those systems of philosophy or politics which have raised so much ferment of late years’ (BN, i, 56). As Kaufmann notes, given that Barbauld’s essay concludes by separating the making of novels from the making of systems, this account of the role of fiction in the ‘war of systems’ seems incongruous (BN, i, 57).92 However, with reference to antiJacobin works by Jane West and Elizabeth Hamilton, Barbauld suggests that it is ‘perfectly allowable’ for novels to participate in such ideological disputes provided they remain ‘content with fair, general warfare, without taking aim at individuals’ (BN, i, 57). By avoiding particularity, novels of this kind are able to escape ‘the reductions’ to which ‘systematic thought must resort’, therefore retaining their typically ‘domestic’ character.93 By operating at the level of the ‘general’, rather than the ‘particular’, novels evade the limitations that ‘systems’ or specific political interests impose. It is this freedom that secures their ethical value and enables them to ‘infus[e] principles and moral feelings’ in their readers (BN, i, 45– 6). As Burgess puts it, fiction is ‘a matter for the general and practical concern of the public’, and it is in this sense that the formative power of ‘the novels of a country’ is realised.94 By the second decade of the nineteenth century, Barbauld was not alone in suggesting that the ethical agency of novels resides in their ostensibly apolitical aversion to the particularity of ‘systems’. In his review of Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814), William Hazlitt contrasts the labours of the novelist with those of the ‘moralist’ and the ‘philosopher’: The professed moralist almost unavoidably degenerates into the partisan of a system; and the philosopher warps the evidence to his

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own purpose. But the painter of manners gives the facts of human nature, and leaves us to draw the inference: If we are not able to do this, or do it ill, at least it is our own fault.95

For Hazlitt, the ethical imperative of such texts is displaced on to the reader, who must ‘draw the inference’: when we read such novels, he states, ‘our moral judgements [are] exercised’.96 As I suggested in Chapter 1, Hazlitt describes women as being illequipped to deal with such interpretative demands – a point he echoes here, when he asserts that women are comparatively ‘less disturbed by any general reasonings on causes or consequences’.97 Nevertheless, as in The British Novelists, it is clear that ‘systematic’ thought is derided as the partial alternative to the more comprehensive picture of ‘general nature’ that we encounter in novels, and that ‘[calls] out’ our ‘moral impressions’.98 A similar line of thought is pursued by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey, when she suggests that ‘the labour of the novelist’ provides ‘the most thorough knowledge of human nature, [and] the happiest delineations of its varieties’ (pp. 23–4). In the same vein, when reviewing Austen’s Emma in 1816, Walter Scott draws upon an almost identical vocabulary. Like Barbauld and Hazlitt, Scott disdains ‘works of a more grave and instructive character’ and praises instead novels like Emma, which ‘proclaim a knowledge of the human heart, with the power and resolution to bring that knowledge to the service of honour and virtue’.99 These accounts share a conviction that the novel possesses the ability to touch upon the ‘truth’ of human experience: a truth that would be obscured by the particularity of any one ‘system’ of ideological thought. By focusing instead on ‘the facts of human nature’, these writers align novels with what Michael McKeon describes as a process of ‘formal domestication’, which appeals to ‘that which is uniform in human nature, what is general and common to us all’.100 The role that novels play ‘in infusing principles and moral feelings’ enables them to articulate ‘the realm of the ethical . . . that we all inhabit in common’.101 According to McKeon, this ‘common’ ethical realm offers ‘access to a “public” dimension in the sense not of sociopolitical greatness but of ethico-epistemological generality’.102 In this respect, for writers such as Scott and Barbauld, novel-reading reiterates the possibility of an authoritative form of domesticity, akin to that which the previous chapter of

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this book identified in the work of Maria Edgeworth. Here too, it is the ‘domestic’ status of women’s reading that provides them with access to the ‘reason of the public sphere’.103 It is this configuration of the public sphere that allows Barbauld to assert the formative power of ‘making’ the novels of the country. To achieve this, Barbauld also remakes the readers of the country. Contrary to the secretive, indiscriminate consumers of print depicted by authors such as Gisborne and Chirol, Barbauld proposes a new model of reader: one whose rational judgement grants her access to a mode of moral authority. Barbauld’s suggestion that reading is ‘a domestic pleasure’ (BN, i, 44) had been anticipated by Hannah More, in Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808). As I mentioned in my introduction, within that novel the virtuous Mr Stanley suggests that reading is a suitable employment for women of the middle ranks as the ‘gratification’ it affords ‘is cheap, is safe, [and] is always to be had at home’.104 However, despite the perception that it is a fundamentally ‘domestic’ undertaking, accounts of women’s reading are frequently underwritten by principles at work within wider society. Much of this book has been informed by an understanding of reading as a form of symbolic labour: an activity that is conceptualised through the discourses of work and professional specialisation. Within the material I have discussed, the emphasis is upon the regulation of one’s imaginative economy: a feat that ensures reading functions as a profitable investment. Indeed, rather than a homely, domestic activity, reading is defined as an occupation that should be congruent with the values that shape the public sphere. This understanding of reading is accompanied by a range of discursive pressures. As the examples discussed in this book attest, textual constructions of female readers are fractured figures: representing them throws a range of binary oppositions into disarray. The boundaries between the private and the public, labour and leisure, and even male and female, are all destabilised by the way in which reading transcends its association with ‘the realm of selfenclosure . . . that we connect with privacy’; rather, acts of reading are persistently invested with cultural and symbolic significance.105 Constructions of women readers are, in turn, shaped by the debates impinging upon British public life: national security in the

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aftermath of the French Revolution, the vitiating effects of luxury upon the population and the atomising consequences of the division of labour. While Hannah More attempts to locate the ‘gratification’ offered by reading within the ‘home’, the female readers that she and her fellow authors imagine resist such stabilising categorisations. They are produced by, and implicated within, a range of social and cultural anxieties: their textual existence is a persistent reminder of the continuities that exist between imaginative and national economies. Notes 1 Anna Letitia Barbauld, ‘On the Origin and Progress of NovelWriting’, from The British Novelists; with an Essay and Prefaces Biographical and Critical, by Mrs. Barbauld, 2nd edn, 50 vols (London: F. C. & J. Rivington et al., 1820), i, 1, 44. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically within the text and referred to by the abbreviation BN. 2 Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (1801), ed. by Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 125; Anna Larpent, Diaries, Huntington Library, HM 31201, 19 February 1779, cited in the Reading Experience Database: www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/ UK/record_details.php?id=5960 [accessed 1 September 2013]. 3 Marie Mulvey Roberts, ‘Preface’ to Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, ed. by Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. ix–xv (p. x). 4 See Gary Kelly, ‘“This Pestiferous Reading”: The Social Basis of Reaction Against the Novel in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Man and Nature, 4 (1985), 183–94. 5 Ibid., p. 187. 6 Vivien Jones, ‘The Seductions of Conduct: Pleasure and Conduct Literature’, in Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, ed. by Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 108–32 (p. 108). 7 Claudia L. Johnson, ‘“Let Me Make the Novels of a Country”: Barbauld’s The British Novelists (1810/1820)’, Novel, 34:2 (2001), 163–79 (pp. 170, 171). 8 As Anne Toner notes, Barbauld demonstrates considerable ‘contradiction and ambivalence regarding the goals of reading’. See Anne Toner, ‘Anna Barbauld on Fictional Form in The British Novelists (1810)’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 24:2 (2011–12), 171–93 (p. 181). 9 Mulvey Roberts, p. xi.

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10 J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of EighteenthCentury English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 158. 11 Ibid., p. 42. 12 Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 42. 13 David Allan, Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 102. 14 Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 1. 15 Ibid., pp. 245–6, 242. 16 Ibid., p. 242. 17 Bharat Tandon, Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation (London: Anthem, 2003), p. 4. 18 William McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), p. 112. 19 Daniel E. White, ‘The “Joineriana”: Anna Barbauld, the Aikin Family Circle, and the Dissenting Public Sphere’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32:4 (1999), 511–33 (p. 512). 20 For the authorship of the individual works that comprise Miscellaneous Pieces see McCarthy, p. 111. 21 J. and A. L. Aikin, Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose (London: J. Johnson, 1773), pp. 119–20. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically. 22 McCarthy, p. 16. 23 Francis Hutcheson, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy, in Three Books; Containing the Elements of Ethicks and the Law of Nature (Glasgow: Robert Foulis, 1747), pp. 80–1. McCarthy and Kraft quote this passage in relation to a similar Barbauld essay, ‘An Enquiry into those Kinds of Distress which Excite Agreeable Sensations’. See Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. by William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2002), p. 206, n. 1. 24 The allusion is to Shakespeare’s Henry V, in which Pistol is forced to eat a leek by Fluellan: the difference is that Aikin is compelled not by another but by his own curiosity. 25 E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 106. 26 Monthly Review, n.s. 15 (November 1794), 280; quoted in Clery, p. 107. 27 Clery, p. 107. 28 Deidre Lynch, ‘On Going Steady With Novels’, The Eighteenth Century, 50:2–3 (2009), 207–19 (p. 215). 29 Ibid., p. 214.

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30 This formulation is later echoed by Walter Scott in his review of Jane Austen’s Emma (1816). Scott favourably contrasts the durability of Austen’s novel, which we might ‘willingly resume’, with ‘those narratives where the attention is strongly riveted, during the first perusal, by the powerful excitement of curiosity’. See Walter Scott, ‘Review of Emma’, The Quarterly Review, 14:27 (1815), 188–201 (p. 197). Although dated 1815, Scott’s review was published in 1816. 31 Thomas Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (London: T. Cadell Jun. and W. Davies, 1797), pp. 216–17. 32 Ibid., p. 217. 33 Sonia Hofkosh, Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 19. 34 Jones, p. 115. 35 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. by Richard Miller (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976), p. 57. 36 William H. Galperin, The Historical Austen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), p. 5. 37 Judith Wilt, Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 136. Similarly, Marilyn Butler describes Northanger Abbey as typical of Austen’s fictions, in its depiction of a ‘moment of éclaircissement . . . the moment when a key character abandons her error and humbly submits to objective reality’. See Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 176. 38 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1817), in Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon, ed. by James Kinsley and John Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 146. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text. 39 See Wilt, pp. 150–1, and Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 39. 40 Peter de Bolla engages with the idea of ‘transport’ in The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). See pp. 230–78. 41 A more ambiguous celebration of suffering is found in Mansfield Park (1814), where Sir Thomas Bertram comes to appreciate ‘the necessity of self-denial and humility’ and ‘the advantages of early hardship and discipline’. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814), ed. by James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 364, 372. Austen’s exploration of the relationship between suffering and ‘moral ordination’ is discussed in Peter Knox-Shaw, Jane Austen and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 176–7.

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42 One such example is offered in 1793 by John Burton, who states that ‘The Press daily teems with these publications [novels], which are the trash to circulating Libraries’. John Burton, Lectures on Female Education and Manners, 2 vols (Rochester: Printed for the Author, 1793), i, 188. Katie Halsey has also identified how Austen’s defence of the novel responds not only to ‘the Reviewers’ but to a specific passage of James Fordyce’s Sermons for Young Women (1765), in order to ‘[make] clear her position in her period’s debates about suitable reading for young women’. See Katie Halsey, Jane Austen and her Readers, 1786–1945 (London: Anthem, 2012), pp. 42–3. 43 Lynch, p. 214. 44 Curiously and, I would suggest, disappointingly, Andrew Davies’s television adaptation of Northanger Abbey includes a scene in which, having warned her siblings about the dangers of novels, a repentant Catherine throws her copy of Udolpho on to the fire. Northanger Abbey. Dir. Jon Jones. Granada Television. Released 25 March 2007. 45 Edward Mangin, A View of the Pleasures Arising From a Love of Books: In Letters to a Lady (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Browne, 1814), pp. 36, 36–7. 46 Louisa Stuart, Letters of Lady Louisa Stuart, ed. by R. Brimley Johnson (London: John Lane, 1926), p. 158 (11 August 1819). 47 Johnson, Jane Austen, p. 48. 48 J. L. Chirol, An Enquiry into the Best System of Female Education; or, Boarding School and Home Education Attentively Considered (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1809), pp. 224–5. 49 As Johnson notes, ‘Tilney simply believes that he knows women’s minds better than they do’. See Jane Austen, p. 37. 50 Wilt, p. 147. 51 Ibid., pp. 151, 147. 52 John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774) (Dublin: John Archer, 1790), p. 13. 53 Hannah More, for instance, criticises those forms of female instruction that educate women ‘for the world, and not for themselves . . . for show, and not for use’. See Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education. With a View of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent Among Women of Rank and Fortune, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies, 1799), i, 60. 54 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, An Introduction, trans. by Robert Hurley (London: Allen Lane, 1979), p. 45. 55 John Aikin, Letters to a Young Lady on a Course of English Poetry (London: J. Johnson, 1804), p. 1. 56 Ibid., pp. 247, 161. In what might be construed as an act of productplacement, Aikin advertises Barbauld’s essay as being ‘prefixed to an

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61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

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Imagining women readers ornamented edition of [Akenside’s poem] published by Cadell and Davies’. ‘You cannot meet’, he adds, ‘with a guide of more acknowledged taste and intelligence’. Ibid., p. 161. Anna Letitia Barbauld, ‘Essay on Akenside’s Poem on the Pleasures of Imagination’, in Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination by Mark Akenside M.D. to Which is Prefixed a Critical Essay on the Poem by Mrs. Barbauld (London: T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies, 1796), p. 1. Subsequent references are made parenthetically. See The British Novelists, xliii, p. vii and ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror; with Sir Bertrand, a Fragment’, p. 124, respectively. David R. Shumway and Ellen Messer-Davidow, ‘Disciplinarity: An Introduction’, Poetics Today, 12:2 (1991), 201–25 (p. 202). Barbauld, A Legacy for Young Ladies, Consisting of Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Verse by the late Mrs. Barbauld (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1826), p. 42. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., pp. 42–3. Barbauld, ‘Essay on Akenside’s Poem’, p. 4. Ibid., p. 4. Barbauld, Legacy, p. 43. Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Essays on Professional Education (London: J. Johnson, 1809), p. 8. Barbauld, Legacy, p. 43. John Aikin, Letters From a Father to his Son, on Various Topics, Relative to Literature and the Conduct of Life. Written in the Years 1792 and 1793 (London: J. Johnson, 1793), p. 286. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. As Daniel E. White notes, these values include ‘self-discipline, the vigorous exertion of reason and judgement, and control of the passions’. See White, p. 514. Ibid., p. 515. John Aikin, An Address to the Dissidents of England on Their Late Defeat (London: J. Johnson, 1790), p. 18. J. and A. L. Aikin, Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose, pp. 62–3. Lucy Aikin notes that ‘Against Inconsistency in our Expectations’ was the work of Barbauld, rather than John Aikin: an assertion that is echoed by McCarthy. See The Works of Anna Letitia Barbauld. With a Memoir by Lucy Aikin, 2 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1825), i, p. lxv, and McCarthy, p. 111. White, p. 523. J. and A. L. Aikin, Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose, p. 63. This strategy is reminiscent of what White describes as Barbauld’s concerted

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78 79 80 81 82 83

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attempt to ‘domesticate’ the ‘oppositional and rigorous identities of rational dissent’. Ibid., p. 515. It also provides an example of the ‘time-discipline’ that E. P. Thompson describes as transforming the world of work. The regulation of the working day meant that time was conceptualised in monetary terms, becoming a ‘currency’, which is ‘not passed but spent’. See E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 359. J. and A. L. Aikin, Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose, p. 63. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. by Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 1984), p. 486. Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 93, 96. Price, p. 98. The Works of Jane Austen, ed. by R. W. Chapman, 6 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1933–69), vi: Minor Works (1965), p. 199. Johnson, ‘“Let Me Make the Novels of a Country”’, p. 171. Hunter, p. 159. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 37. Claudia Johnson provides an account of the economic and material pressures under which Barbauld assembled The British Novelists. See Johnson, ‘“Let Me Make the Novels of a Country”’, pp. 168–9. For a detailed account of the genesis of The British Novelists, see McCarthy, pp. 423–30. For a more general overview of editorial policy in anthologies of this period, see Price, pp. 67–70. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, ed. by Donald F. Bond, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), i, 44. Anna Letitia Barbauld, ‘Preliminary Essay’ to Selections from the Spectator, Tatler, Guardian, and Freeholder, 3 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1804), i, p. iii. Ibid., i, p. i. Johnson, ‘“Let Me Make the Novels of a Country”’, p. 177. Andrew Fletcher, Political Works, ed. by John Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 179. As Fletcher’s modern editor, John Robertson, notes, this ‘aside . . . is perhaps Fletcher’s most-quoted observation’. See Political Works, p. 179, n. 5. There is no firm evidence that the conversation upon which this text is based actually took place; however, Robertson notes that it is likely to have been ‘representative’ of the kind of encounters that Fletcher experienced in London. Ibid., p. xxvi. Ann Wierda Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University

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Imagining women readers Press, 2012), p. 140. As Rowland notes, the phrase is also alluded to by Hugh Blair, in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Poetry (1762). David Kaufmann, The Business of Common Life: Novels and Classical Economics between Revolution and Reform (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 27. Miranda J. Burgess, British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 12. Kaufmann, p. 27. Ibid., p. 27. Burgess, p. 12. William Hazlitt, ‘Standard Novels and Romances’ (1815), in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. by P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1931), xvi, 6. Ibid., xvi, 5. Ibid., xvi, 22. Hazlitt accounts for the distinction between men and women’s intellectual abilities by speculating that ‘the surface of [women’s] minds, like that of their bodies, seems of a finer texture’ than those of men. Ibid., xvi, 22. Ibid., xvi, 5. Scott, pp. 188, 189. As noted above, Barbauld distinguishes herself from ‘the grave’ and ‘the fastidious’. Similarly, Hazlitt suggests that, in contrast to ‘the gravest treatises on history and morality’, novels provide a source of ‘profit’ and ‘delight’. See Hazlitt, p. 320. Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. 340. Ibid., p. 340. Ibid., p. 340. McKeon, p. 341. Hannah More, Coelebs in Search of a Wife: Comprehending Observations on Domestic Habits and Manners, Religion and Morals, 5th edn, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1809), i, 348. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 28.

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Index Note: ‘n.’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page. Literary works can be found under authors’ names.

Addison, Joseph 195 Aikin, J. and A. L. Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose 171–3, 187, 191, 204n.72 see also Aikin, John; Barbauld, Anna Letitia Aikin, John 11, 178, 180 Address to the Dissidents of England, An 190 Letters from a Father to his Son 190 Letters to a Young Lady on a Course of English Poetry 186–7, 203–4n.56 ‘On the Pleasure Received from Objects of Terror’ (Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose) 171–3, 187, 201n.24 see also Aikin, J. and A. L. Aikin, Lucy 204n.72 Akenside, Mark Pleasures of Imagination, The 186–7 Allan, David 2, 47–8n.9, 48n.19, 170 Armstrong, Nancy 1, 23, 45, 56, 57, 59, 62–3, 77 Austen, Jane 11–12, 198, 202n.30 Catharine or the Bower 192–3 Mansfield Park 202n.41 Northanger Abbey 170, 176, 177–86, 195, 198, 202n.37, 203n.42, 203n.44

Sanditon 46–7 Sense and Sensibility 151, 153 Bacon, Francis 133 Ballaster, Ros 25 Barbauld, Anna Letitia 11–12, 178–9, 180, 206n.99 ‘Against Inconsistency in our Expectations’ (Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose) 191, 204n.72, 204–5n.74 British Novelists, The 168–71, 173–7, 182, 185–6, 188–90, 191–9 ‘Essay on Akenside’s Poem on the Pleasures of Imagination’ 186–9, 193, 203–4n.56 ‘On Female Studies’ 187 Selections from the Spectator, Tatler, Guardian, and Freeholder 195–6 see also Aikin, J. and A. L. Barker-Benfield, G. J. 88n.65 Barrell, John 137–8 Barthes, Roland 176, 187 Batchelor, Jennie 84n.5 Beetham, Margaret 25 Benedict, Barbara M. 4, 13n.19, 127n.49 Benhabib, Seyla 132 bibliomania 43–4, 53n.98 Binhammer, Katherine 128n.56 Blair, Hugh 206n.89 Blakemore, Stephen 113

228

Index

books and the female body 21, 26, 29–30, 47n.4 as physical objects 9, 24–7, 33, 39–40, 42–6, 180, 184 violence towards 120–1, 129n.70, 203n.44 Bourdieu, Pierre 191–2 Bray, Joe 28, 47n.4 Brewer, John 25–6, 50n.40, 147 Brooks, Peter 194 Burgess, Miranda J. 5–6, 197 Burke, Edmund 94–5, 100, 108, 113–14, 117, 120, 128n.59 Philosophical Enquiry, A 58–62, 68, 71, 79–80, 85n.18 Reflections on the Revolution in France 97, 100, 126n.25 Burney, Frances 46, 173, 197 Burney, Sarah Harriet 24–5 Burton, John 136, 203n.42 Butler, Marilyn 163n.25, 164n.41, 202n.37 Catalogue of the Books Belonging to the Bristol-Library, A 131 Cheyne, George English Malady, The 58, 59–60, 78 children 4, 67, 119–20, 129n.70, 145–6, 165n.56 and parental authority 36–8, 90–124, 135 as readers 11, 36–8, 90–1, 98–103, 105–13, 115–16, 118, 120–2, 129n.70 Chirol, J. L. 3–4, 5, 9, 13n.17, 183, 192, 199 Clark, Lorna J. 50n.39 Clery, E. J. 85n.25, 85n.26, 174 Cobbe, Frances Power 36–7 Critical Review 109 curiosity 107–8, 119–22, 127n.49, 172–6, 178, 201n.24, 202n.30 Dacome, Lucia 47n.7 Darnton, Robert 2, 22

Darwin, Erasmus 86n.33 Davies, Andrew 203n.44 Day, Thomas 135, 163n.25, 167n.95 Deane, Seamus 125n.23 de Bolla, Peter 13–14n.19, 81, 88n.76, 202n.40 de Certeau, Michel de 24, 50n.38 Dibdin, Charles Frognall Bibliomania 10, 43–5, 152 domesticity 4–8, 10, 11, 30–1, 55–7, 83, 84n.5, 118, 125n.21, 132–7, 144–50, 153–61, 187–9, 198–200 domestic woman, the 6, 10, 21, 30, 40, 45, 56–8 and depths in the self 10, 21, 23, 25–31, 33, 35, 39–42, 45, 48n.24, 64, 75–6, 156 Doody, Margaret Anne 132 Edgeworth, Maria 10, 11, 24, 120, 121, 123, 130–1, 133–5, 161, 163n.25, 164n.49, 165n.56, 169, 172, 199 Belinda 11, 145–7, 149–50, 153–61, 166n.86, 166n.87, 167n.89, 168, 189 Letters for Literary Ladies 130–1, 135–46, 148–50, 154, 158–9, 187 Vivian 150 see also Edgeworth, Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Maria and Richard Lovell 100, 110, 123, 164n.41 Practical Education 90, 92, 94–7, 102, 119–22, 125n.19, 125n.22, 145 see also Edgeworth, Maria; Edgeworth, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Richard Lovell 136, 144, 149, 163n.25 Essays on Professional Education 141–2, 143, 147–8, 157–8, 164n.41 see also Edgeworth, Maria and Richard Lovell

Index Ellis, Markman 132 Engelsing, Rolf 22 Erickson, Lee 13n.12 Fergus, Jan 2, 3 Ferris, Ina 40, 42, 128n.60, 170 Fielding, Henry Tom Jones 173 Fletcher, Andrew 196, 205n.88 An Account of a Conversation 196 Flint, Kate 1, 13n.10 Fordyce, James 135–6, 159, 203n.42 Foucault, Michel 93, 105, 107, 121, 122, 185 Fraser, Nancy 153, 161 Frazer, Elizabeth 25 French Revolution 2, 5–6, 10–11, 28, 34, 38–9, 90–2, 94–7, 108, 120–1, 123, 124n.2, 125n.23, 199–200 Furniss, Tom 60 Gallagher, Catherine 150 Galperin, William H. 177, 178 Gilmartin, Kevin 52n.89 Gisborne, Thomas 19–20, 175–6, 192, 194, 199 Godwin, William 10–11, 90, 92, 103–4, 110, 113, 115, 121, 123, 172, 185 Caleb Williams 107 Enquirer, The 29–30, 91, 105–10, 111, 116, 142 Political Justice 112–13, 123 Gregory, John Father’s Legacy to his Daughters, A 184–5 Grenby, M. O. 2, 13n.10, 98, 105 Guest, Harriet 56–7, 67, 125n.21, 133, 134–5, 137, 148 Habermas, Jürgen 135, 142, 144, 146, 147, 148, 150, 153, 158, 160–1 Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The 131–4, 162n.13

229

Halsey, Katie 2, 11–12, 13n.10, 203n.42 Hamilton, Elizabeth 10, 22, 92, 100, 110, 128n.59, 128–9n.65, 172, 197 Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education 94–5, 110–11, 116, 117–18, 119, 121–2, 123, 125n.19, 125n.22 Memoirs of Modern Philosophers 111–19, 122–4, 128n.56, 129n.69 Hatfield, S. Letters on the Importance of the Female Sex 63–4, 69 Hays, Mary 10, 40, 44, 46, 90, 110–11, 119, 121, 123, 185 Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women 103 Letters and Essays, Moral, and Miscellaneous 34–6, 38 Memoirs of Emma Courtney 31–3, 35–8, 46, 92, 98–105, 106, 108, 109, 111, 112–13, 117, 118, 156–7 Hazlitt, William 29–31, 40, 51n.63, 197–8, 206n.97, 206n.99 Hebron, Sandra 25 Henderson, Andrea K. 28, 45–6 Herbert, Dorothea 98 Hunter, J. Paul 49n.25, 169, 193 Hutcheson, Francis 171–2 Inchbald, Elizabeth Simple Story, A 44 Jameson, Anna 103 Johnson, Claudia L. 100, 182, 193, 196, 203n.49, 205n.83 Johnson, Judith 126n.39 Johnson, Samuel 14–15n.28, 141 Jones, Chris 31 Jones, Vivien 104, 109 Kaplan, Cora 101 Kaufman, Paul 131

230

Index

Kaufmann, David 197 Keane, Angela 6–7, 145 Keen, Paul 49n.26 Kelly, Gary 69, 110, 113, 124n.2, 164n.45 Klein, Lawrence E. 134–5 Knox, Vicesimus 150, 151–2 Essays Moral and Literary 67–8, 80, 82, 86n.37, 123, 140 Knox-Shaw, Peter 202n.41 Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth 146, 160–1 Kraft, Elizabeth 201n.23 Lady’s Magazine 9–10, 21–9, 31, 37–8, 39–40, 46 Larpent, Anna 50n.40, 155–6, 168, 169 leisure 11, 13n.12, 55–9, 63, 65–8, 73, 133–4, 139–40, 141–2, 148–153, 199 as a source of wisdom 133–4, 137–48, 153–4, 161 Le Sage, Alain-René 193 libraries Bristol Library, the 130–1, 133, 144, 162n.4 circulating libraries 20–2, 26–7, 29–30, 46–7, 48n.19, 48n.20, 98–9, 112, 116, 176, 203n.42 private libraries 36–8, 106, 151, 155–6, 166n.86, 168 Locke, John 10, 21, 25, 32–3, 46, 47n.7, 76, 92, 94, 99, 100, 117, 120, 145–6, 154, 159, 168 Of the Conduct of the Understanding 18–19, 28, 41, 167n.92 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An 17–18, 155, 160 Some Thoughts on Education 92–6, 165n.56 London, April 133 Lovell, Terry 30–1 luxury 35, 42–3, 55–7, 60–1, 64, 65, 72–3, 77–9, 80–3, 84n.4,

84n.12, 85n.26, 200 Lynch, Deidre 18, 20, 47n.5, 175, 179 McCann, Andrew 144, 146–7, 153, 154 McCarthy, William 201n.20, 201n.23, 204n.72, 205n.83 MacFadyen, Heather 156, 166n.86 McKeon, Michael 198 Mackie, Adam 68 MacPherson, C. B. 18 Malthus, Thomas 74–5, 87n.56 Mandeville, Bernard 144, 145 Mangin, Edward 20, 180–1, 182 Mathias, T. J. 39 Mellor, Anne K. 7, 52n.89, 132, 160 Michaelson, Patricia Howell 13–14n.19 Milton, John Paradise Lost 156, 167n.90 Monthly Review 109–10 More, Hannah 6, 10, 11, 14n.25, 38–40, 44, 46, 52n.89, 63, 79, 83, 95, 110, 200 Coelebs in Search of a Wife 4–5, 42–3, 46, 60, 68, 199–200 Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education 5–6, 7–8, 10, 40–2, 57–64, 65, 66–9, 70–7, 85n.16, 87n.51, 91, 158, 203n.53 Morris, Pam 63 Mullan, John 78, 82 Murphy, Sharon 142 Myers, Mitzi 57, 92, 120, 121, 123, 125n.19 Newlyn, Lucy 13–14n.19 Ó Gallchoir, Clíona 145 Paine, Thomas 34 patriotism 5–6, 77–83, 101–2, 118, 129n.67 Paulson, Ronald 125n.18 Pearson, Jacqueline 2, 80, 98, 129n.67

Index Perkins, Pamela 128n.59 Place, Francis 68 Plutarch 32, 101–2 Pocock, J. G. A. 84n.12 Poovey, Mary 56 Pope, Alexander 76–7 Porter, Roy 59, 62, 78 Price, Leah 41, 53n.93, 192, 205n.83 professionalism 67–8, 134, 137–40, 148–52 as a constraint 137–9, 140–2, 146, 154 and occupational specialism 137–42, 187–9, 199 women’s exclusion from 11, 73–4, 132–3, 137–42, 145, 148, 187–9 Radcliffe, Ann 173–5, 176–7, 178–80, 182–4, 185, 187, 190, 192–3 explained supernatural 173–5, 178–9, 192 Raven, James 48n.19, 74, 87n.54 reading aloud 13–14n.19, 22, 40–2, 112, 116, 118 and appetite 6, 36, 98–9, 112, 115–16, 175–6, 183, 192, 194 as a domestic activity 4–6, 11, 116, 118, 136, 146, 154–6, 166n.86, 170, 188–90, 198–200 and the female body 3–4, 21, 23–7, 29–30, 32–3, 42, 50n.38, 58–64, 70–2, 74–5, 77–83, 111–13, 116, 137, 172–3, 176, 206n.97 see also sensibility intensive and extensive 22–3 as labour 10, 11, 35, 40–2, 44, 45–6, 47, 57–77, 79–80, 83, 133–4, 137, 153–6, 157–8, 161, 167n.89, 168, 186–9, 199–200

231

men’s 29–30, 43–5, 67–8, 80, 113–16, 128–9n.65, 140–1, 143, 147–8, 151–2, 182–4 of novels 3, 5, 11–12, 13n.12, 19–21, 23–4, 27–8, 30, 35–6, 38, 46–7, 55–6, 67–8, 69–70, 74–6, 87n.54, 98–9, 102–3, 106–7, 108–9, 111–12, 116–18, 123, 128–9n.65, 132, 140, 152, 168–99, 202n.30, 203n.42, 203n.44, 206n.99 compared to the reading of poetry 185–9, 192–4 and passivity 19–21, 28–33, 46, 55–8, 76–7, 111, 140, 152, 159–60, 169–70, 186–7, 194 and pleasure 4, 11–12, 27–8, 39, 41, 44, 60, 63, 66–70, 73, 98–9, 103, 107–9, 112, 115–18, 123, 139–40, 154–6, 161, 168–76, 178–94, 199, 206n.99 for plot 172–6, 178–85, 192–4, 201n.24, 202n.30 public resonance of 1–3, 5–11, 18, 26–7, 35–6, 47, 57–61, 73–9, 83, 101–2, 105–10, 119–21, 123, 132–5, 140–8, 153–4, 158, 160–1, 168–9, 187–9, 191, 195 of romances 5, 19–21, 35–6, 98–9, 101, 105, 113–17, 159–60, 175–6 and shame 81–2, 170, 173–8, 179, 185 and skimming 23–6, 38, 40–1, 193 of travel literature 79–83 Richardson, Alan 15n.34, 17, 62, 86n.33, 90 Robertson, John 205n.88 Robertson, Joseph 20, 35 Robinson, Mary Thoughts on the Condition of Women 164–5n.49 Roland de la Platière, Marie-Jeanne Appeal to Impartial Posterity, An

232

Index

(Appel à l’Impartiale Postérité) 101–2, 126n.36 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 22, 159 Émile 159, 167n.95 Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse 103, 106, 112–13, 122–3 Rowland, Ann Wierda 196, 205–6n.89 Russell, Shannon 128n.59 Ruxton, John 130 Rzepka, Charles J. 62

Thompson, Carl 79, 88n.70, 89n.77 Thompson, E. P. 205n.74 Thompson, James 7, 33 Toner, Anne 200n.8 Trimmer, Sarah 90 Turner, Thomas 86n.41 Ty, Eleanor 99, 100, 104, 108, 129n.69

St Clair, William 14n.25, 48n.19 Scott, Walter 68, 170, 181, 198, 202n.30 Sekora, John 55, 84n.4 sensibility 31–2, 58, 61, 70, 77–80, 82–3, 88n.65, 99–100, 101– 4, 111, 116–17, 140, 171 Shakespeare, William 29, 201n.24 Simpson, David 110 Siskin, Clifford 23, 36, 61, 74, 75–6, 134, 138, 150, 152, 167n.89 Smith, Adam 72–3, 87n.49 Smith, Charlotte 128n.60, 193 Old Manor House, The 128n.60, 150–1, 153 Smith, Olivia 6 Smollett, Tobias 173 Southey, Robert Letters From England 129n.65 Spence, Thomas 124n.6 Steuart, James 7 Stewart, Dugald 137, 145 Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind 137–8, 142–3 Stone, Lawrence 55–6, 57–8 Stuart, Louisa 181–2 sublime, the 58–61, 79–80, 85n.26, 94–5, 137 Sutherland, Kathryn 6, 52n.89, 71, 72, 87n.49 Swift, Jonathan 26, 50n.44

Vickery, Amanda 55–6, 134

tabula rasa 17–18, 19–21, 32–3, 35, 46, 76 Tadmor, Naomi 56, 86n.41 Taylor, Charles 155, 160

Use of Circulating Libraries Considered, The 27

Wahrman, Dror 20 Wakefield, Priscilla 83 Juvenile Anecdotes, Founded on Facts 129n.70 Mental Improvement 8, 11 Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex 65–73, 78 Walpole, Horace 39, 43, 173 Watson, Nicola J. 128n.56 Watt, Ian 13n.12 Weiss, Deborah 166n.87 West, Jane 10, 134, 197 Letters Addressed to a Young Man 151–2 Letters to a Young Lady 77–83, 88–9n.77 White, Daniel E. 204n.69, 204–5n.74 Williams, Raymond 8, 52n.82 Wilt, Judith 177, 178, 184 Wollstonecraft, Mary 10, 34, 40, 63, 113, 134, 150, 152 Thoughts on the Education of Daughters 55–6 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A 27–8, 95, 100–1, 114–15, 122, 128n.56, 139–40 Wordsworth, William 167n.89 Yonge, Charlotte 21 Young, Edward Night Thoughts 129n.6