Women Writers and the Edinburgh Enlightenment 9789042031388, 9042031387

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Women Writers and the Edinburgh Enlightenment

Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature Volume 15 Series Editors Rhona Brown University of Glasgow John Corbett University of Glasgow Sarah Dunnigan University of Edinburgh James McGonigal University of Glasgow Production Editor Ronnie Young University of Glasgow

SCROLL The Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature publishes new work in Scottish Studies, with a focus on analysis and reinterpretation of the literature and languages of Scotland, and the cultural contexts that have shaped them. Further information on our editorial and production procedures can be found at www.rodopi.nl

Women Writers and the Edinburgh Enlightenment

Pam Perkins

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010

Cover Image: with respect to 1980.305, Sir Henry Raeburn (Scottish, 17561823), Mrs. Richard Alexander Oswald (Louise Johnston, ?born about 1760, died 1797), ca. 1794, Oil on canvas, 48 1/2 x 40 7/8 in. (123.3 x 103.8 cm): The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Paul Moore, 1980 (1980.305) Image © The Metropolitan Museum Cover Design: Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3137-1 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3138-8 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010 Printed in The Netherlands

For Edward Perkins, 1966–2008

Contents Acknowledgements Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

“Excellent Women, and not too Blue”: Women Writers in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh

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Enlightening the Female Mind: Education, Sociability, and the Literary Woman in the Work of Elizabeth Hamilton

55

“Incongruous Things”: Primitivism and Professionalism in the Work of Anne Grant

135

Chapter Three “Scarcely Known to Fame”: The Literary Identities of Christian Isobel Johnstone Conclusion

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Modesty, Money, and Nostalgia: Narratives of Women’s Writing in Edinburgh’s “Age of Greatness”

207

281

Bibliography

297

Index

315

Acknowledgements The number of intellectual debts accumulated in any long-term project is formidable, but it is a pleasure to be able to thank the people who have helped me in so many ways while I have been working on this book. First of all, I want to gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which allowed me to do the necessary research in Scotland; I also received supplementary funding for research assistance from the Department of English, Film, and Theatre at the University of Manitoba. I would also like to thank the staff in the manuscript reading room in the National Library of Scotland and in Special Collections at the University of Edinburgh Library, where much of the research was carried out. On a more practical level, my work in Edinburgh has also been helped by Louise Dickins, who, over five years, has arranged consistently lovely accommodation for me. The book has been seen into print by Rhona Brown of the University of Glasgow, one of the series editors for Rodopi’s Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature, and I am very grateful for her feedback, her support, and her patience. I could not have hoped for a better editor to help me through the process of moving from manuscript to print. Many other people have also helped me over the last few years with advice and information. Andrew Monnickendam and Alexis Easley generously shared their expertise on Christian Johnstone when I contacted them for information; Dr. Easley’s suggestion that I look at the Oliver and Boyd archives for information on Johnstone has been particularly important in shaping the direction of my research. Likewise, I have benefitted not only from Jane Rendall’s published work on Elizabeth Hamilton but also from her directing my attention towards Eliza Fletcher’s correspondence with Matilda Tone. I have learned a great deal about Edinburgh in the early nineteenth century from Ina Ferris, who also provided me with the reference to the Anderson poem about Tait’s Magazine. In addition, Dr. Ferris gave me the opportunity to present preliminary versions of some of the arguments in this book at conference sessions she has organised for the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism and for the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English. I have presented other sections in conference sessions or panels organised by Ian Duncan, Claire

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Grogan, and Miriam Jones, and I am very grateful to them for giving me the chance to do so. Some of the arguments underlying sections of this book appear, although in rather different forms, in articles published in Clio, European Romantic Review, and in Authorship, Commerce, and the Novel, a collection of essays edited for Palgrave Press by Peter Garside, Emma Clery, and Carolyn Franklin. One of the major benefits of having SSHRC funding is that the agency’s emphasis on graduate student training means that grant holders have the opportunity of bringing students into their own research, and I have been fortunate in having three outstanding student researchers work with me on this project. Alyson Brickey helped me in the final stages of the work, proofreading and copy-editing the manuscript before it went off to press, while Erin Hershberg gathered information on Francis Jeffrey and The Edinburgh Review for both the chapter on Elizabeth Hamilton and for what turned into a separate project on Jeffrey. Ryan McBride not only helped me with my preliminary bibliographic research when I first started the book but read also and commented on the chapters on a voluntary basis even after he graduated. I have benefitted tremendously from his generous continued interest in my work. Several other people have also commented on all or part of the manuscript. Deborah Kennedy read and offered very helpful criticism on the Anne Grant chapter and then added to her kindness by giving me an engraving of a portrait of Grant. Vanessa Warne, who read the entire book before it went off to press, and parts of it more than once, saved me from a number of embarrassing errors and oversights. Cliff Eyland, who has heard more versions of this book than anybody else, has also been extraordinarily patient in reading and re-reading various sections of it. I am also very grateful to my colleagues at the University of Manitoba. In particular, Judith Owens has been both accommodating in her role as department head and supportive and encouraging as a fellow researcher. George Toles, as always, has inspired through his passion and enthusiasm for literature, while Alison Calder, Dana Medoro, and Vanessa Warne have been not just exemplary colleagues but also very supportive friends. My most general and wide-ranging debt is to Kirsteen McCue. This project has benefitted throughout from her expertise in Scottish literature of this period, and my research has also been made much more pleasurable by the hospitality that she – along with David, Dora,

Acknowledgements

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and Gregor – have offered me during my time in Scotland. It might be something of a cliché to say that without Kirsteen this project could never have been carried out, but in this case, the cliché is also a simple statement of fact.

Introduction “Excellent Women, and not too Blue”: Women Writers in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh At some point in the mid-1760s, Jean Marishall, a young Scottish woman then living in London, sent an excited letter home to her family in Edinburgh announcing the publication of her first novel. “I do [not] believe”, Marishall later wrote, that “at that time [my mother] had ever heard of a female author in her life. On reading my letter she burst into tears [and] concluded I had lost my senses” (Marishall 1789: 2: 172–73). Fortunately, Mrs. Marishall was not left to doubt her daughter’s sanity for too long; a lady who happened to call was able, according to Marishall, to “corroborate a circumstance which my brother and sister had in vain endeavoured to make my mother believe, viz. that there was nothing more common in England than ladies writing novels” (Marishall 1789: 2: 173). This idea that breeding lady novelists – or indeed, women writers in general – was something of an English national peculiarity is one that readers of memoirs and histories of Scottish literature of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century might be tempted to share. Henry Grey Graham, who produced a massive survey of eighteenth-century Scottish literature at the beginning of the twentieth century, concluded his discussion of women writers – a brief chapter on women’s lyric poetry – with the observation that “[w]hen Englishwomen were writing dramas and histories and treatises, their Scottish sisters were quietly writing songs” (Graham 1908: 354), a state of affairs that he seemed to find highly commendable. His idea that Scottish women writers demurely avoided attention and disavowed literary ambition is a version of literary history that already had a long pedigree. In 1871, Sarah Tytler and Jean L. Watson wrote a two-volume study of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scottish “songstresses” in which they opened by explaining, rather defensively, that despite the familiarity of the songs, the writers still tended not to be recognised as practitioners of “a delightful branch of art” (Tytler and Watson 1871: 1: vii). A quarter century earlier still, when the judge Henry Cockburn sat down to write his memoirs of Edinburgh cultural life from the time of his

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Introduction

childhood in the 1780s, he praised his native city by reporting that “[f]or a small place, where literature sticks out, Edinburgh has never been much encumbered by professed literary ladies; and most of those we have had have been exotics”. While not entirely denying that there was a native group of literary women, he quickly notes that most, presumably unlike their English counterparts, were “excellent women, and not too blue” (Cockburn [1856] 1988: 268). At this stage in literary studies, after some four decades of work on the historical recovery of women writers, nobody should be surprised to hear that there were, in fact, quite a lot of women writing in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Edinburgh and, Graham notwithstanding, that they were by no means all “quietly writing songs”. Yet despite the literary range and ambition displayed by many women writers of the generation discussed by Cockburn and Graham, most of them did fade very quickly into the sort of modest invisibility tacitly upheld as a feminine ideal by both writers. Indeed, some of the women who were writing during Cockburn’s childhood and when he was a young man are probably now more visible in literary history and critical discourse than they would have been when he was at work on his memoirs. Novelists such as Susan Ferrier and Mary Brunton, who both achieved major successes in the second decade of the nineteenth century, might not be household names today, but they are increasingly recognised as important figures in the history of Romantic-era fiction, and Ferrier, at least, has the distinction of having remained in print since her first appearance in paperback in the mid-1980s. The “excellent women” whom Cockburn singled out by name, Anne Grant and Elizabeth Hamilton, have until very recently, made even less of an impact on literary history than their contemporaries Brunton and Ferrier, but as Cockburn and many others make clear, they had much more of a presence on the Edinburgh literary scene in the early years of the nineteenth century. Sir Walter Scott mentions both of them at the end of Waverley, paying a polite tribute to their work on the Highlands. His doing so was neither an eccentric nor a surprising move, as they were, by any standards, “professed literary ladies”: by 1814, when Waverley first appeared, they had published a total of thirteen books in an array of genres, almost all of which had appeared with the author’s name on the title page and all of which had by then been publically acknowledged by the writer. In marked contrast to what we still tend to see as the more usual practice among late

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eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women writers, they neither limited themselves to the “feminine” modes of fiction and lyric or occasional verse nor took much – if any – trouble to conceal their names from their readers. There is perhaps some irony in the fact that the name of Susan Ferrier – who made what appear to be genuine attempts to quiet the entirely accurate rumours circulating about her authorship of the 1818 novel Marriage (Perkins 2005: 303–5) – is probably still rather better known than that of Elizabeth Hamilton, who had little hesitation about letting her contemporaries know her authorship of everything from satiric fiction through educational theory to classical history. Yet along with this very public literary success, they continued to attract admiring commentary for their exemplary feminine decorum, making it clear that modest invisibility was not the only socially acceptable option for a woman writer. If the trajectory of women’s literary history in Edinburgh from Marishall to Ferrier sounds all too familiar – from the horrified dismay of Marishall’s mother at the prospect of a literary daughter to the demurely modest reserve of Susan Ferrier – the careers of writers such as Grant and Hamilton make clear that there is also another story to be told. In the larger context of eighteenth-century British women’s literature, that story is already becoming more familiar. Important studies of conservative English women writers such as Jane West and Hannah More (see, for example, Ty 1998 and Mellor 2000) have demonstrated that, whatever the cultural imperatives against women’s participation in the literary world, there were at least some women, even in the increasingly conservative years at the beginning of the nineteenth century, who were able to establish what were de facto professional writing careers while continuing to endorse their culture’s ideas of femininity and loudly proclaiming their own modest horror at the idea of intruding upon the public sphere. Moreover, as critics such as Harriet Guest and Devoney Looser have established, there were a number of women writers throughout the century making significant contributions to such supposedly “male” discourses as history and politics, and not necessarily in any way that implies (in Looser’s words) “a characteristic women’s relationship” to the genres in question (Looser 2005: 7; cf. Guest 2000). Taking a somewhat different direction, George Justice has used case studies of the publication histories of individual books to demonstrate, among other things, the

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Introduction

difficulty of making any unnuanced claims about the ways that ideas of authorship were inflected by the era’s concepts of gender and propriety. In an analysis of Frances Burney’s 1796 novel Camilla, for example, Justice presents a convincing argument that Burney’s “acceptance of certain gender stereotypes” in fact helped her to maintain her “status” as a writer (Justice 2002: 199). Even if, as Betty Schellenberg has argued, Burney “chooses to lend authority to her writer’s voice by invoking an all-male novelistic and aesthetic tradition in her novel prefaces” (Schellenberg 2005: 171), thereby reinforcing the idea of literature as a masculine world, her success in making a place for herself in that world inflects the heavily male tradition that she constructs. Schellenberg’s discussion of Burney forms part of the conclusion of a wide-ranging study of the professional careers of a number of mid- and late eighteenth-century women writers, in which Schellenberg simultaneously queries some aspects of and rounds out Clifford Siskin’s influential argument (in The Work of Writing [1998]) that the nineteenth century witnessed a “great forgetting” of earlier women’s writing, a phrase that Schellenberg uses for the title of her final chapter. As Schellenberg argues, “the erasure trope” used by Siskin “has become so conventional as to be almost itself invisible”, making it all the more important “to remember how invested and various were the acts of naming and forgetting, and obliteration of 1780 to 1820, and how many of them were carried out by women” (Schellenberg 2005: 164, 180). Her study is, Schellenberg notes, “above all a plea for more detailed scrutiny, for closer attention paid to everything we can possibly discover about these eighteenth-century women and their literary and social culture” (Schellenberg 2005: 181). The sort of finegrained investigation for which Schellenberg is calling invites particular attention to the Edinburgh women working in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth, and for several important reasons. Interest in literary Edinburgh in the decades on either side of 1800 has, like interest in women’s literary historiography, increased dramatically since the late 1980s or early 1990s. In part, this can be explained by a renewed attention to Scottish writing in general that has arisen in tandem with the late twentieth-century fascination with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concepts of national identity. Major work by critics such as Leith Davis (1998), Robert Crawford

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(1992), and Susan Manning (2002) has demonstrated the centrality of Enlightenment and Romantic Scottish literature to the wider British literary canon as well as to important movements in intellectual history, inevitably bringing new attention to Edinburgh writers. The self-proclaimed “Athens of the North” and “hotbed of genius” might not have been able to rival London in matters of size – either of its publishing industry or its readership – but what both locals and outsiders tended to see as the disproportionate level of literary and intellectual achievement in relation to its population meant that by the end of the eighteenth century, the city was already established as a real cultural powerhouse. The founding of The Edinburgh Review in 1802 and Blackwood’s in 1817 continued and amplified this influence, as both attempted, in their swaggeringly exuberant plunges into cultural warfare, to set the terms of literary debate throughout Britain. Then, of course, there was the impact of Walter Scott and Waverley. In John Henry Raleigh’s much-quoted observation, “To be alive and literate in the nineteenth century was to have been affected in some way by the Waverley novels” (Shaw 1996: 49), and it is hardly too much to say that by the second decade of the nineteenth century, Edinburgh had become, especially in the eyes of many of its own citizens, the centre of British intellectual life. The author of an 1818 Edinburgh guidebook, for one, argues matter-of-factly that not only has it “always been admitted that Scotland contains a greater number of intelligent people than England in proportion to its extent” but also that one of the defining characteristics of Edinburgh is that its people are marked by “an inherent love of learning” (New Picture 1818: 217). It is easy enough to treat such comments as nothing more than naïve boosterism, especially as Edinburgh’s self-proclaimed intellectual pre-eminence attracted as much mockery as agreement. Byron’s swipe at the cultural pretensions of the Edinburgh periodicals in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers is well known, but he was far from the only writer to raise an eyebrow at the celebration of Edinburgh as a pinnacle of culture. The French traveller Amédée Pichot, who spent time in Edinburgh during a tour of Britain in the early 1820s, was prepared to offer a more-or-less straight-faced mapping of Edinburgh geography onto that of Athens (Leith is the equivalent of Pireus, Calton Hill is Edinburgh’s Parthenon and the Castle its Acropolis), but he could not restrain himself from indulging in a gently ironic tone in his account of this “somewhat pedantic” city in

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Introduction

which “every body […] occupies himself more or less with literature” (Pichot 1825: 2: 290–91). Likewise, the narrator of an anonymous novel published in Edinburgh around the same time mocks what he implies is Edinburgh’s vainglorious attempt to dictate British literary taste. A search of every Edinburgh bookseller for the poetry of Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge proves to be in vain, and he reports that he has been informed that no libraries stock those authors either, so great is the city’s deference to the opinions of a “briefless lawyer, a brainless attorney, or a stickit minister” – that is, to the Edinburgh reviewers (Marianne 1823: 87). Yet even this novel, sardonic as it is about Edinburgh’s claims to pre-eminence in literary taste, emphasises the degree to which it was accepted that early nineteenth-century Edinburgh was a centre of literary activity. A minor character, attempting to talk the narrator out of his disenchantment with the Edinburgh that he is seeing through the lens of The Edinburgh Review, refers to the city not just as the “Athens of the North” but also as “the ‘Birmingham of Literature’” (Marianne 1823: 88). That might be a rather less exalted cultural link, but it is one that both implies the centrality of literary work to the city and offers a quiet suggestion that Edinburgh is transforming the entire practice of literary production. Even if the slide from Athens to Birmingham might seem decidedly bathetic, the connotations of energy and innovation that were still associated with the Birmingham manufactories at the time complicate attempts to read this passage as a simple joke at Edinburgh’s expense. Even more interestingly, the linkage of Birmingham and Edinburgh in their modes of “manufacture” suggests that, obscure as this passage is, there were at least some writers at the time who were prepared to see Edinburgh as transforming the concept of authorship. This is a point that has been made at much greater length and with much more sophistication by several late twentieth-century readers – most notably, perhaps, Clifford Siskin and Martha Woodmansee – in arguments that underscore the importance of Edinburgh to women’s literary history. According to this view, the new periodical culture that developed in Edinburgh in the first two decades of the nineteenth century was central to literary history not so much in its impact on taste and readership as in its contribution to later nineteenth-century ideas of what it meant to be a professional writer. As Siskin, in particular, argues, the opening years of the nineteenth century saw a

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widening gulf between what was understood as the literary and intellectual seriousness of the public “man of letters” – a gentleman of classical education and often with a career in the traditional learned professions – and the presumed frivolity or vainglorious pretension of “lady novelists”. Siskin makes a subtle and convincing case for seeing this development as owing a great deal to the literary world of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Edinburgh, as the cultural power of the new periodicals helped to reinforce a vision of literary achievement built upon gender-based oppositions, leaving women’s writing stranded outside “the newly valorized professional criterion of earned expertise” (Siskin 1998: 222). Siskin’s work has attracted debate; Schellenberg, for one, offers a briskly sceptical summary of his argument, in which she points out that Siskin’s sophisticated explanations “for the disappearance of women writers from the tradition” – which range “from a nonvolitional ‘psychological lapse’, through the depersonalised mechanisms of the print market and a fragmenting readership” – still tend to slip back into “the favored model of female victims and male perpetrators”, with Siskin placing ultimate blame on “the ‘old-boys network’ of The Edinburgh Review” (Schellenberg 2005: 165). Yet that said, and even if one hesitates to make The Edinburgh Review single-handedly responsible for driving women writers out of the mainstream of literary history, one can find other reasons for seeing the Edinburgh of this era as being central not just to the emergence of the modern idea of literary professionalism but also to a supposed “remasculinisation” of literary culture following the flamboyantly tear-soaked excesses of eighteenth-century sentimentalism. Versions of this latter idea started appearing almost immediately, particularly in what became the enduring critical commonplace that it was Walter Scott who more or less single-handedly rescued the novel from the scribbling hordes of sentimental women who had seized control of the genre following the days of Smollett (see Ferris 1991 for a full exploration of the role played by gender in the reception of Scott). Yet however insistent late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers might have been that serious intellectual work was the purview of men, and however influential (as Siskin and Ferris demonstrate) this cultural narrative became, the simple fact remains that in the years between Marishall and Ferrier, there were at least some Edinburgh women publishing ambitious work on subjects that were well outside

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the stereotypically feminine domain of the sentimental love stories. Understanding the ways in which they were able to make careers for themselves does not require one to repudiate larger arguments about the general direction of Edinburgh society, but it does help us to resist the sort of monolithic narrative of women’s literary history that positions women as either lonely, marginalised protesters against or misguided collaborators with patriarchal social structures. In both of these cases, women writers become interesting mainly as willing or unwilling embodiments of the warping effects of a discourse that they have no hand in shaping, rather than being recognised as having literary agency in their own right. My intention in this study is to use a detailed analysis of the careers of three women writers in early nineteenth-century Edinburgh to complicate both the standard narratives of women’s literary history around the turn of the nineteenth century and our picture of Edinburgh as the epicentre of the post-eighteenth-century “remasculinisation” of literature. Two of those women – Anne Grant and Elizabeth Hamilton – are obvious choices, and not just because of Cockburn’s decision to single them out as acceptably feminine literary women. More importantly, they both chose, explicitly and deliberately, to position themselves as contributors to the intellectual debates of their day, rather than as modestly ladylike entertainers, amusing themselves by dabbling in circulating library fiction. Hamilton and Grant were also professionals in a very basic sense that their novel-writing contemporaries Brunton and Ferrier were not, however successful and popular the latter were. They earned their livings (and in Grant’s case, that of her daughters as well) through both their published writing and other opportunities – mainly teaching – that were opened up to them because of the public profiles they built for themselves. The third of the writers on whom I will be focusing, Christian Johnstone, has many points in common with Grant and Hamilton, although she is a generation younger: like them, she wrote in a variety of genres and supported herself through her literary work. She was also, if anything, even more inclined than they were to engage in polemical debate with her contemporaries. Yet she attracted even less comment than they did in her own day and has continued to remain almost invisible in literary history (despite significant recent work on her by Andrew Monnickendam [1998, 2003], Alexis Easley [2004], and Ian Duncan [2007]), perhaps because, unlike Grant and Hamilton, she chose to

“Excellent Women, and not too Blue”

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publish anonymously, and it is still difficult to know the full range and scope of her work in journalism. Each of these writers is interesting in their own right, but the stories of their overlapping Edinburgh careers, taken together, form a narrative about women’s literary work that is very different from the patterns with which we have become familiar. Although there has been a considerable amount of critical work done on British women’s writing from the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth, the perspective can look rather different from Edinburgh than from London, and not simply because of any decorously feminine Scottish preference for dainty ballads over bulky treatises. Indeed, there were a number of writers at the time who were prepared to argue that the Scottish literary scene as a whole, independent of any question of gender, was markedly distinct from the one south of the border. In 1769, for example, Henry Mackenzie – whose Man of Feeling, published two years later, was to become one of the most successful novels of its era – commented to his literary-minded cousin Elizabeth Rose that Scots in general, not just women, seemed “remarkably deficient” in a “Genius” for fiction. “Except Smollet, & one female Author”, he adds, “I remember none of our Country who have made Attempts in that Way” (Drescher 1967: 18). The woman that Mackenzie had in mind was Jean Marishall, although he was not an admirer, clarifying in a later letter that he had not meant “that any Scotch female Author had excell’d in Novel writing, but only that She had attempted it” (Drescher 1967: 21). Yet Mackenzie’s complaints were clearly not based on gender (he joked about how far Marishall’s 1767 novel Alicia Montague fell short of a near-namesake published two years later, Frances Brooke’s Emily Montague); his interest is more in the impact of nation on literary “Genius”. One cannot, of course, build any argument about national literary practice on casual observations in friendly correspondence, but the perceptions of such a shrewd literary insider as Mackenzie are still of interest, especially as they tend both to reinforce and be reinforced by more recent criticism. Whether or not Mackenzie (and Marishall herself) were literally correct in asserting that Marishall was the only Scotswoman publishing fiction in the 1760s, it is unquestionably true that there was no outpouring of fiction by Scottish women in the second half of the century comparable to that by Englishwomen such as Frances Brooke, Frances Burney, Sarah Scott, or Charlotte Lennox, to name just a few. At a time, in

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other words, that the genre of the novel was becoming increasingly “feminised” in England, very few Scottish women were choosing to work in it. What this means is not that Scotswomen weren’t writing, but rather that – especially given the importance of the novel as a genre in women’s literary history – they remain less visible. This is a problem that becomes even more marked later in the century, as one turns from Enlightenment fiction to Romantic politics and polemics. Much of the most exciting critical work on Romantic women’s writing in the last two or three decades has focused on the contributions of women to the radical debates of the 1790s. Yet the ferment in London (or even in provincial centres such as Bristol or Norwich) does not seem to have been mirrored in Edinburgh. Indeed, a quick survey of the Scotswomen whom I’ve already mentioned might leave the 1790s, loud and vibrant as they were in England, sounding distinctly quiet north of the border. By that time, Jean Marishall had stopped writing, while neither Brunton, Ferrier nor Johnstone had started. Anne Grant was still living in the Highlands and had not yet expanded her literary ambitions beyond the circulation of letters and manuscript poems to her friends. Elizabeth Hamilton was unquestionably a major participant in the debates of the 1790s that drove so many of her English contemporaries into print, but the two novels that were her major contributions to them were a product of her relatively brief time in London. There were, of course, literary women in and around Edinburgh in the 1790s, but the most prominent ones – Agnes Maclehose, Lady Anne Barnard or Alison Cockburn for example – tended not to be especially polemical in their work. The point here is not that Edinburgh women were less politically engaged than those in London – an argument that would be impossible to sustain after the briefest glance at Hamilton or Johnstone – but, again, that because their patterns of publication do not fit entirely neatly with those of women in England, they are less visible in literary history. (Or in Hamilton’s case, less visible in their indebtedness to a Scottish tradition as well as to English debates.) Indeed, even the conventional period breaks – Enlightenment versus Romantic – do not work very well for these women. Although all three of the authors on whom I am focusing were writing in the early nineteenth century, and can be considered Romantic in at least some of their approaches and subjects, they were also grounded in older literary and cultural traditions. In particular,

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Grant and Hamilton, both of whom were born in the mid-1750s and developed their literary tastes and interests in the 1770s and 80s, look back to major eighteenth-century intellectual traditions. While Grant was publishing in an Edinburgh in which Scott’s poetry was all the rage, she creates a version of Highland culture that looks back to Ossian as much as it does forward to Waverley. Hamilton, meanwhile, was writing educational theory that owed something to such contemporaries as Mary Wollstonecraft and Maria Edgeworth but arguably even more to such Scottish Enlightenment thinkers as Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart. No less importantly, Grant and Hamilton, along with their younger contemporary Johnstone, were able to ground their work in an Enlightenment tradition of intellectual sociability, as they established themselves in a metropolitan culture that was self-consciously built around literary debate and discussion. There has been some critical argument about the degree to which early nineteenth-century Edinburgh was a site of “Romantic” literary work, with Scott the main evidence in favour of such arguments and The Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s, which between them managed to offer vituperatively negative reviews of every major Romantic poet, as the main evidence against. What seems relatively clear, however, is that strands of Enlightenment thought lasted in Edinburgh culture into the first decades of the nineteenth century, even as Romantic tastes were becoming established. (This is a point made more specifically in reference to Francis Jeffrey and The Edinburgh Review by both Demata and Wu [2002] and Woodmansee [1996].) Even if, as Siskin has argued, Edinburgh was at the forefront of some of the developments that made the early nineteenth century less receptive to women’s literary work than the previous decades had been, it was also a place where older values continued to have an impact. This cultural complexity should not be surprising: as critics have demonstrated repeatedly, there is no such thing as a pure expression of a literary movement or school, and the more closely one scrutinises any such movement, the more complicated it becomes, something particularly true when one reads back through standard literary histories with gender in mind. Joan Kelly famously wondered whether women had a Renaissance, a question that led many critics to ask if they had had an Enlightenment either; taking a different but related tack, Anne Mellor has demonstrated that Romanticism means something rather different

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when the Wordsworth one reads is named Dorothy, not William, or the Shelley in question is Mary rather than Percy (see for example Mellor 1993). What is of interest here is not, of course, any debate over whether these Scottish women are closer to one literary school than another but rather an argument that they were able to position themselves in a way that allowed them to develop professional literary careers at a time and in a place that was increasingly seeing that as a strictly masculine option, in part by continuing to draw upon what Siskin sees as the less constrictive ideas about literary women circulating during the later Enlightenment. What I hope to establish through my examination of these three writers is thus not just the simple fact that a few individual Scottish women were able to publish despite social pressures and prejudices. Rather, what I am suggesting is that far from being anomalous holdouts against a cultural narrative that saw literature as a masculine endeavour and that started taking hold in early nineteenth-century Edinburgh, these women were able to construct literary identities that were in fact grounded in some of their society’s dominant values. As Schellenberg suggests, simply by accepting a master narrative of the “forgetting” or “erasure” of women’s writing produced by wider social changes, we risk colluding with that erasure by overlooking the inevitable complications and contradictions that made it possible for some women to go on writing and publishing anyway. In the case of these writers, those complications and contradictions are at least in part related to their place in the complicated intellectual and social world of late Enlightenment Edinburgh. Women in Eighteenth-Century Edinburgh: Intellectual Contexts When Anne Grant settled in Edinburgh in the first decade of the nineteenth century – after having lived the previous thirty years in the Highlands and then in Stirling – she was apparently much struck by the intellectual tone of the social gatherings to which she was invited, a tone about which she had somewhat mixed feelings: Conversation in this Northern Athens is easy, animated, and indeed full of spirit and intelligence. Yet, though the feast of reason abounds, there is not so much flow of the soul […] There are syllogisms and epigrams, and now and then, pointed and brilliant sentences, and observations, and reflections both acute and profound, but neither the

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heart nor the imagination are much concerned. In those enlightened circles, there is much intelligence, and a degree of metaphysical subtilty in argument and disquisition, but little playfulness and less heart. (J.P. Grant 1845: 1: 240–41)

This vision of evenings spent swapping syllogisms and parsing “metaphysical subtilt[ies]” might fit all the cultural clichés about arid Scottish intellectualism, but it is very much at odds with any received idea of late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century female sociability. Indeed, Grant’s account of Edinburgh social life meshes very well with the supposedly “masculinising” impact of the early nineteenthcentury Edinburgh literary scene, as it portrays a society drained of both positive and negative stereotypes of femininity – warmth and playfulness on the one hand, frivolity and scandal on the other. There is one large and obvious stumbling block to reading Grant’s version of Edinburgh society in this gendered manner, however, which is that it is a social world in which she herself is participating, without any overt sense that there is anything odd or out of place in her being there. On the contrary, as Grant also makes very clear, this is a society in which women play a very active role, both as participants and hostesses. In her posthumously published letters, she repeatedly alludes not just to her own social gatherings and those of other women writers, notably Elizabeth Hamilton, but also emphasises the central role of women such as Eliza Fletcher, whose “house has been for many years the centre of everything that is elegant or enlightened” (J.P. Grant 1845: 1: 240). The travel writer and novelist Elizabeth Isabella Spence bears out Grant’s comments on Fletcher, referring to her as “the Mrs. Montague of Edinburgh, her house being the centre of all that is literary, amiable, and distinguished, and is herself no less characterised by intellect, than by virtue” (Spence 1817: 36–37). While Fletcher chose not to pursue a literary career herself – her only publication during her lifetime was a privately printed verse drama – she was, as Grant, Spence, and others establish, just one of a number of Edinburgh women who was able to pursue serious intellectual interests through her social interactions. Grant’s descriptions of her social world point us towards a version of female sociability that, while in no way uniquely Scottish, is of particular importance to a study of eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury Edinburgh society. While much of the later twentieth-century scholarship on eighteenth-century women was shaped, implicitly or explicitly, by what has become almost a default binary opposition

26

Introduction

drawn between public / private, male / female spheres, there is a wide array of sources – Scottish and English, approving and disapproving – that presents Edinburgh women as engaging in a form of sociable exchange that lies somewhere between the worlds of public entertainment and of strict domesticity. Again, there is nothing surprising or especially Scottish about this point; as Lawrence E. Klein has argued vigorously and convincingly, any assumption that there was ever a simple, stable divide between public and private drawn according to gender lines drastically oversimplifies eighteenthcentury cultural practice. Not only, as he points out, did some women unquestionably have “extensive public lives in the eighteenth century”, but also, and more directly relevant to my argument here, they were able to understand the term “public” in a way that involves considerably more than “the magesterial public sphere – the State and its related agencies” (Klein 1995: 100, 103). In particular, Klein points to the importance of what he calls the “associative public sphere, a sphere of social, discursive, and cultural production”, and one that becomes particularly important in light of the very basic fact that “[w]hat people in the eighteenth century most often meant by ‘public’ was sociable as opposed to solitary” (Klein 1995: 104). In making this argument Klein is, as he points out, drawing on Habermas’ familiar distinction between two publics, that of the “world of letters” and the political sphere. Where he differs from Habermas is in his insistence that the inherent complexity and instability in concepts of the “public” might help us understand ways in which even as eighteenth-century women “engag[ed] in public practices”, they were able to configure their own actions in such a way “that their behavior implied its own sanction” (Klein 1995: 102). While this point might seem to have more to do with refining terminology than with any larger interpretative case about women’s place in intellectual society – after all, nobody has ever disputed that British women of the leisured classes participated in a quasi-public social world – it does suggest at least a potential conceptual fuzziness in distinctions between the public worlds of literary work and those of literary or intellectual society. The differences between offering private critiques of manuscripts (as Eliza Fletcher did, for example, at the request of the biographer Robert Anderson, one of her many literary friends; see Fletcher 1801), publishing anonymous reviews (as Anne Grant did on at least one occasion), and serving as a publisher’s

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reader (as did Christian Johnstone) are obvious and important. Even so, in a society in which Fletcher was able to frame her decidedly critical opinion of an anonymous manuscript as little more than a modest acknowledgement of the compliment that Anderson and the unnamed author had paid her in seeking her opinion, it becomes more difficult to represent Johnstone’s formal literary work as an unambiguously unfeminine move into a public sphere. This is an important point, since, as already suggested, there was a tendency, especially in and after the last decades of the eighteenth century, to stress Scottish women’s modest reserve and what was supposedly their instinctive dislike of the more formal modes of public life and sociability. Indeed, in some contexts – perhaps English even more than Scottish – Scottishness came to be a type of shorthand signifying conventionally domestic femininity. For example, from the late eighteenth century until well into the nineteenth, one of the standard literary shortcuts used to illustrate the virtues of a heroine of a sentimental novel is that whenever she is asked to sing, she blushingly chooses what is almost invariably described as a simple “Scotch melody”, while her corruptly sophisticated rival performs some complicated Italian aria. Even the Scottish accent, while generally thought unattractively rustic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Elizabeth Isabella Spence, for example, regrets what she sees as the loss of feminine “softness” in even refined Scottish accents [Spence 1811: 1: 159]), was presented in at least some very influential novels as being an acceptable, even charming, mark of quiet, feminine simplicity. In Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, Jery Melford decides that “in the mouth of a pretty woman”, Scots is “a sort of Doric dialect, which gives an idea of amiable simplicity” (Smollett [1771] 1984: 221). Nearly half a century later, at the end of Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian, the Duke of Argyle finds that one of the main charms of the beautiful, fashionable Lady Stantoun – formerly the peasant Effie Deans – is her “pure court Scotch” accent, “which drops out so prettily that it is quite Doric” (Scott [1818] 1982: 459). Even granted that Effie Deans, a suspected child-murderer turned London socialite, is perhaps not the best example one could choose to illustrate idealised femininity, the point remains that into the 1820s, readers of fiction could accept the idea that a Scottish inflexion in a woman’s voice was all that even a sophisticated aristocrat needed to ensure himself of her modest virtues. Praise for feminine simplicity is predictable enough in

28

Introduction

eighteenth-century and Romantic writing, of course; what is interesting is the way in which this very familiar social construction of British femininity becomes reconcilable, in at least some Scottish writing, with female literary ambitions and interests. Of course, it might not seem immediately obvious that there was any such reconciliation between literary work and eighteenth-century modes of Scottish female sociability, especially given that much of the critical work done on the subject points in the opposite direction. John Dwyer, for one, has argued that Scottish Enlightenment theories of social structure and development encouraged a vision of women as “perpetual adolescents” who subordinated themselves to the controlling discourse of “elite adult males” (Dwyer 1998: 198); his contention is that the sort of sociability that was being advocated in early- to mid-eighteenth-century Edinburgh (his main examples are drawn from the work of Allan Ramsay) is in fact so far from being receptive to women’s intellectual interests that it reinforced female subordination through an insistence upon women’s reading and writing as being little more than preparation for a retreat into virtuous marital domesticity. Dwyer makes a convincing case, not least because even as he admits the existence of some evidence that, contrary to his central argument, there might have been a slight feminist resistance to this smothering ideology of domesticity, the evidence that he presents appears at second glance to reinforce his main point. While stressing that “the overwhelming majority of poems and letters by women sent to the eighteenth-century Scottish newspapers and periodicals joined in the harmonious chorus to virtuous love and marriage” Dwyer admits the existence of and quotes two strongly anti-marriage poems that appeared anonymously in The Scots Magazine in the mid-1740s (Dwyer 1998: 131). Interestingly, however, neither of the two poems he cites is by a Scot and only one (Mary, Lady Chudleigh’s 1703 “To the Ladies”) is by a woman. The other, “The Maid’s Complaint” by Stephen Clay, was first published in 1709, also in England (Suarez 1997: 1: 134). Given the actual authorship of these poems, one might be tempted to go even further than Dwyer and suggest that Scotswomen had been too thoroughly inculcated into domestic ideology to write even anonymous poems protesting it. Still, the point is more complicated than it might initially appear. For one thing, even if not writing such poems, Edinburgh women were apparently quite happily reading them, since The Scots Magazine

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was aimed at a mixed metropolitan audience. Moreover, despite Dwyer’s argument that the relative lack of poems questioning the ideology of domestic femininity might be taken as evidence of possible censorship “by male publishers and editors” (Dwyer 1998: 131), the publishing history of Clay’s poem, in particular – it was sufficiently well-known and sufficiently popular to appear at least twice in colonial American newspapers (Zagarri 2007: 21) – in fact implies that such editors had no particular objections either to printing or reading the poem’s elegantly phrased call for “equal laws” that “neither sex oppress”. That might be because the utter lack of impact that the poem had on political debate in England, Scotland, or America, even while appearing in various popular media on three countries over four decades, makes clear that its appeal was literary, not political. The Scots Magazine’s decision to reprint it thus suggests not so much a lonely, last-ditch flicker of resistance to a smotheringly limited idea of female virtue as a sort of literary and cultural play – even if in a decidedly stylised and formulaic mode – with ideas about women’s social roles. None of this is to dispute Dwyer’s central point about the power of domestic ideology; indeed, the fact that it was, clearly enough, male editors who were choosing to represent Scottish “feminist” protest in the conventional form of fairly standard English anthology verse reinforces in some ways his argument about the absorption of women into a masculine discourse of love and virtue. Yet even if these anti-marriage poems cannot be read as offering unambiguous evidence of mid-century Scottish feminist voices – as clearly they cannot – the very fact that they have a place in the “polite” literature of 1740s Edinburgh hints, no less interestingly, at a sophisticated taste for quasi-public literary play with divergent “women’s” voices. One can find other examples of this sort of play in other relatively unfamiliar byways of eighteenth-century Edinburgh writing on (and possibly by) women. A particularly striking case appears in an odd 1720 pamphlet that is ostensibly written in the voices of young Edinburgh women who have chosen to form a “Fair IntellectualClub”, the goal of which is to ensure that they remain “as industrious to cultivate our Minds, as we are to adorn our Bodies” (An Account 1720: 3). As with the anti-marriage poems cited by Dwyer, this is a work that evades easy classification as either feminist or anti-feminist by twenty-first century standards. Whatever their ostensible interest in

30

Introduction

self-improvement, the writers insist that they had modestly intended to keep their society a dark secret and have chosen to write about it only because one member carelessly revealed its existence to her lover. In that respect, the pamphlet fits in comfortably enough with ideas that women’s tastes for intellectual improvement are and should be more a matter of shame than celebration. Just as disappointingly, the reading that the Fair Intellectuals pursue – Halifax’s Advice to a Daughter, Tillotson’s Sermons, The Tatler, The Spectator and so forth – is utterly unexceptionable conduct-book material, while the warnings they give each other against “soft and wanton” poetry that “warm[s] and corrupt[s] the Imagination” (An Account 1720: 22) could hardly be bettered by the sternest of male moralists. The purpose of such reading – to encourage young women awaiting marriage to content themselves with modest domestic life – is further suggested by the information that the club is not only to be strictly private but also that its members are to be single women between the ages of fifteen and twenty. Yet the pamphlet itself is a public document that is framed as a quasi-public document – its addressees are the members of the Athenian club, a male club for intellectual exchange – and it presents the decorous reading that the women are doing not as a strictly private endeavour but rather as a form of public sociable exchange that is serious enough to require regulation by the mock parliamentary structures that they put into place to assist their discussions. The Fair Intellectuals might or might not have been an actual group of young Edinburgh women, but in this context the source and authorship of the pamphlet hardly matters. What it records is a vision of women’s reading that merges impeccably modest domestic femininity with the structure of public debate and intellectual display. This blurring of women’s literary and domestic worlds in Edinburgh society becomes even more sophisticated and complex slightly later in the century. Within a generation of the demure literary games of Fair Intellectual-Club, whoever or whatever they were, a number of observers had decided that Edinburgh had developed something of a homegrown version of French salon society, in which women both provided graceful backdrops for and were quietly judicious participants in enlightened social conversation. When David Hume wrote in 1741 that “women of sense and education” were necessary to society because they were “better judges of polite writing of men of the same degree of education” (3), he obviously had French salons in mind as a

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model for the British society he was addressing, but he was also arguably paying a subtle tribute to such Edinburgh women as the poet Alison Cockburn, a good friend of his. As Sir Walter Scott noted of Cockburn some years later, She maintained the rank in the society of Edinburgh which French women of talents usually do in that of Paris; and her little parlour used to assemble a very distinguished and accomplished circle, among them David Hume, John Home, Lord Monboddo, and many other men of name were frequently to be found. Her evening parties were very frequent, and included society distinguished both for condition and talents. […] My recollection is that her conversation brought her much nearer to a Frenchwoman than to a native of England; and, as I have the same impression with respect to ladies of the same period and the same rank in society, I am apt to think that the vielle cour of Edinburgh rather resembled that of Paris than of St. James’s. (quoted in Craig-Brown 1900: xxvi–xxvii)

Nor was Scott by any means the only writer to suggest that – for better or worse – late eighteenth-century Edinburgh had a version of salon society, and that literary-minded women were a characteristic feature of the city’s social life. When, for example, Major Edward Topham, an English soldier, arrived in Edinburgh in 1774, he praised Scotswomen for preferring “the accomplishments of the mind” to what he implies is an Englishwoman’s characteristic and misguided devotion to “the oeconomy of a Tambour-frame”. The result, he claims, is that Edinburgh women “seldom entertain large sets of company, or have routs, as in London: They give the preference to private parties and conversaziones” (Topham [1776] 2003: 37–38). Granted, one might wonder how exciting Topham actually found these parties, as he goes on to describe women’s conversation in terms that one might be tempted to read as damning with faint praise. “They talk very grammatically”, he informs his correspondent, “are peculiarly attentive to the conformity of their words to their ideas, and are great critics in the English tongue” (Topham [1776] 2003: 39). A later letter is distinctly more enthusiastic, with Topham describing women in Edinburgh as being “much more entertaining than their neighbours in England” because of their “fondness for repartee” (Topham [1776] 2003: 52). While it might sound a little backhanded to praise a woman’s party conversation by making a comment on her abilities as a critic, Topham does provide some more or less contemporary support for Scott’s nostalgic vision of an Edinburgh golden age of rational sociability as well as providing some hints that the sort of parties

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described by Anne Grant a generation later might have deep roots in the culture. Indeed, this idea that Scotswomen were more intellectual in their social pleasures than their English counterparts persisted for at least a generation; Elizabeth Isabella Spence reported after an 1810 tour of Scotland not just that “the public taste […] of both sexes” was markedly more “fastidious and intellectual” than in England but also that the women she met generally had “more intellectual knowledge” than Englishwomen and “seldom speak or act without reflection”, ensuring that public conversation “is seldom frivolous” (Spence 1811: 1: xx; 2: 221). Six years later, on returning for a second visit, she reiterated this impression, praising the mixed literary gatherings of Edinburgh for their “refinement of mind, ease of manners, and general infusion of intelligence” (Spence 1817: 37). Of course, not all accounts of mid- and later-eighteenth-century Edinburgh society present the women as the sort of elegantly sophisticated salonières that one associates with ancien régime Paris. On the contrary: one can find in a range of literature from across the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth a strongly-expressed conviction that Scotswomen were rougher in manner and even more uncouth in appearance than their English counterparts (never mind Parisiennes), a stereotype that Scots were as fully prepared to reinforce as English. Susan Ferrier, for one, presented the germ of her novel Marriage as a comic vision of the confrontation between a “high-bred English beauty, who thinks she can sacrifice all for love” and the “tall red-haired sisters and grim-faced aunts” of her Scottish lover (Doyle 1898: 76). Likewise, echoing Cockburn in his picture of the “excellent Scotch old ladies” of his childhood – fiery-tempered, independent-minded women who were “strong-headed, warm-hearted, and high spirited” (Cockburn [1856] 1988: 58), Ferrier includes a sketch of a tough-minded Edinburgh woman, Mrs. Macshake, who unnerves her more refined great-niece Mary with her broad Scots outspokenness. As Mary’s uncle explains, Mrs. Macshake was born at a time when Scots paid little attention to “[f]emale education […] even in families of the highest rank; consequently, the ladies of those days possess a raciness in their manners and ideas that we should vainly seek in this age of cultivation and refinement” (Ferrier [1818] 1997: 221). While insisting that the “contemporary” Edinburgh of the novel offers as “much good society […] superior, perhaps, to what is to be found any where else, as far as mental cultivation is concerned”

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(Ferrier [1818] 1997: 221), Mary’s uncle makes plain that that is a fairly recent development and that the older generation of Scotswomen lack the sort of delicacy of taste or refinement of character that marks his niece. Yet however much Ferrier links refinement and education with modernity, there are also suggestions by other observers that the “racy” old women of the Mrs. Macshake type did not necessarily lack intellectual interests. Cockburn, for example, includes an account of one Sophia Johnstone of Hilton, whom he remembered from his boyhood at the end of the eighteenth century when she was a woman in her sixties. Although she was, he claims, so ill-educated that she had to teach herself to read and write as an adult, she “read incessantly” once she learned how to do so, and her “talk” was “intelligent and racy, rich both in old anecdote, and in shrewd modern observation […] her understanding powerful; all her opinions free, and very freely expressed” (Cockburn [1856] 1988: 60–61). Cockburn presents Sophia Johnstone as both unique and representative – the product of an unusually eccentric education, but also a figure who was the quintessence of the freedom from social constraint that he sees as the mark of Edinburgh women of that day. What makes Johnstone (at least as she appears in Cockburn’s memoirs) so interesting is that he presents her as a figure whose intellectual life (aside from the time spent reading) appears more or less continuous with her social life, as it is her “talk” and her manner of expressing herself that makes her memorable. This idea that women’s social lives could be more or less synonymous with intellectual engagement, even in the absence of formal education, is expressed more clearly in the account of an older contemporary of Sophia Johnstone’s, Elizabeth Mure of Caldwell. Born in 1714, Mure provided, around 1790, a chatty overview of the changes that had taken place in women’s lives during her lifetime. Although far from idealising the period of her own youth in the 1720s and 30s (she mentions in passing that, perhaps owing to the continuing influence of modes of French education on the aristocracy, the 30s were when “Scotch Ladys went farthest wrong” [Mure 1854: 1: 267]), she does write approvingly of the lively discussions that were, according to her, the basic currency of mixed Edinburgh society at the time: The regular teatables which comenced about the 20 was the meeting of all the young and gay every evening. […] [E]very thing was matter of conversation; Religion,

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Morals, Love, Friendship, Good manners, dress. This tended more to our refinement than any thing ellse. The subjects were all new and entertaining. The bookseller’s shopes were not stuffed as they are now with Novels and Magazines. The wemen’s knowledge was gain’d only by conversing with the men not by reading themselves, as they had few books to read that they could understand. Whoever had read Pope Addison & Swift, with some ill wrot history, was then thought a lairnd Lady, which Character was by no means agreeable. The men thought justly on this point, that what knowledge the wemen had out of their own sphere should be given by themselves, and not picked up at their own hand in ill choicen books of amusement, tho many of them not without a morral, yet more fitted to reclame the desolate then to improve a young untented mind. (Mure 1854: 1: 269)

Mure’s casual indifference to spelling and some of the finer points of grammar might appear to bear out her conventionally anti-feminist suspicion of well-educated women, but what is rather more interesting here is her insistence on the vital socialising impact of mixed conversation. This importance is not confined to women, as she makes clear when, lamenting what she sees as the growing and unfortunate impact of fashionable English manners in the later part of the century, she singles out for particular criticism the increasing segregation of social amusements along gendered lines. As she explains, the English fashion for later dinners meant that what company you had should be at dinner. These dinners lasted long, the wemen sat for half an hour after them and retired to tea; but the men took their bottle and often remained till eight at night. The wemen were all the evening by themselves, which pute a stope to the general intercourss so necessary for the improvement of both sexes. This naturally makes a run on the Public places; as the woman has little ammusement at home. Cut off from the company of the men, and no familie friends to occupie this void, they must tire of their mothers and elderly society, and flee to the public for reliefe. They find the men there, tho leat in the evening, when they have left their bottle, and too often unfitted for every thing but their bed. […] Cut off in a great measure from the Society of the men, its necessary the women should have some constant ammusement […] the Parents provides for the void as much as possible in giving them compleat Education […] Reading, writing, musick, drawing, Franch, Italian, Geografie, History, with all kinds of nedle work are now carefully taught the girles, that time may not lye heavie on their hand without proper society. (Mure 1854: 1: 271–72)

The idea that elite female education is nothing more than a stopgap to fill the yawningly empty hours that women were left to face in the aftermath of an English-inspired fashion for masculine social segregation is an unusual one. (That said, Mure was not the only observer to point to a late-century move by Edinburgh men to abandon “the

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society and conversation of women” in favour of late dinners and drinking; see Creech 1793: 33.) Whether or not one chooses to trust Mure’s sociological and cultural analysis, her point that the intellectual world of Scottish women had been fundamentally shaped, unlike that of their English counterparts, by social interaction with men invites attention. Neither Mure nor Creech is imagining any sort of feminist paradise of social equality in their nostalgic glances back to the past, but their comments do point to a fundamentally different type of alignment between the domestic and the public worlds than we tend to be familiar with today. Mure’s predictable disdain for “public” amusements is contrasted not with a celebration of strict domesticity, but rather with her memories of lively social exchanges in which young men and women mingled together freely in quasi-familial settings. This might appear, in important respects, to be a long way from the sort of gatherings described by Grant, in which metaphysics and intellectual play was the order of the evening, but what it implies is a version of sociability in which women were expected to listen to and participate in serious conversation. It is, as well, a long way from this sort of sociability to women’s literary work: as Elizabeth Mure’s charming but idiosyncratic literary style makes clear, tea-table conversation does not necessarily make one a polished writer. What is important, however, is that in the accounts of writers such as Grant and Mure, one can find a model for women’s public or quasi-public intellectual engagement that approvingly aligns such conversation with feminine domesticity rather than disapprovingly representing it as an inappropriate intrusion of masculine interests and concerns into the “private” world of a lady’s drawing room. While this might seem little more than a minor shift of emphasis, it does invite at least some attention given that it offers a model for reading intellectual sociability that differs slightly from the more familiar eighteenth-century patterns. In particular, it is difficult to map the sort of tea-table conversation fondly remembered by Mure or the private but highly formalised literary discussions of the Fair Intellectuals onto the model of bluestocking sociability which is by far the most familiar structure through which eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British writers represent a domesticised version of women’s intellectual interests. On the one hand, this point might appear a little troubling, as Mure’s vision of tea-time chit-chat lacks the seriousness or rigour associated

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with bluestocking conversation, and thus might appear to reclaim mixed sociability only at the cost of completely trivialising it. On the other, the rhetorical flexibility given by such attempts to expand the concept of female “domesticity” is potentially very useful indeed, since even while the term “bluestocking” could be used in neutral or even positive contexts, the negative associations clustering around it were becoming increasingly strong by the end of the century. As Mure, Creech, Grant and others attempt to find a way of representing female intellectual sociability that remains distinct from bluestocking society, they thus highlight the ways in which the insistence by Cockburn and others that Edinburgh remained, in happy contrast with England, more or less “[un]encumbered” by bluestockings might be much less straightforward than it appears. Bluestockings, English and Scottish The reference to Edinburgh as the Birmingham of literature is not the only point that makes the obscure and otherwise forgettable novel Marianne worth a few moments of twenty-first century critical attention. In addition to presenting Edinburgh as a site of literary manufactory, the anonymous author also suggests, no less backhandedly, the complexity of the place of women writers in its society. After reeling off a list of Edinburgh’s living authors – Henry Mackenzie, Anne Grant, Robert Anderson, John Galt, and Sir Walter Scott – Miss Gibson, the character who makes the comment about Birmingham, then turns to the narrator’s eponymous daughter and proclaims that after her stay in the city, Marianne will return to her father “quite a blue-stocking, and become as exquisite a sonnetteer as Charlotte Smith” (Marianne 1823: 88). Readers today will hardly be surprised to hear that – like Mrs. Marishall a generation before – the narrator recoils in horror at the idea that his daughter might “be an author” (Marianne 1823: 89), but unlike his predecessor, he apparently finds nothing surprising in the idea that life in Edinburgh might turn a woman of literary tastes into a writer, and unlike Cockburn, he apparently sees nothing to quibble at in the idea that Edinburgh is a city of bluestockings. The point here is not, of course, that there are slightly contradictory accounts of Edinburgh literary women – there are in fact massive inconsistencies in accounts from

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throughout the period and from much of the previous century – but is rather the author’s slightly jarring decision, after mentioning one of Edinburgh’s best-known women writers, to turn to an English author as an example of the sort of writer that Marianne might become after residence in the city. Part of the reason for that might be a simple matter of courtesy: given that the narrator is rejecting what the novel implies is an unattractively “bluestocking” model of female authorship, it is unsurprising that the writer would choose to associate it with a dead Englishwoman rather than a living, and local, Scotswoman. Grant is incorporated, without any comment on gender, into a national model of authorship, while female writing is implicitly associated with England. Even if, as critics including Justice and Schellenberg have noted, dissociating themselves from other women was a technique that a number of Grant’s female contemporaries employed to establish their own literary credibility, what is happening here is slightly different, as the concept of bluestockingism is used, even if only implicitly in this case, as a means to differentiate English women writers from what commentators such as Cockburn and Graham seem to presume are their more modest and unassuming Scottish counterparts. That writers praising the Edinburgh literary scene would choose to make such a move is predictable enough. The term “bluestocking” was not always used in a negative manner, of course; on the contrary, central figures of the first-generation London bluestocking scene – Catherine Talbot, Elizabeth Carter, Hester Chapone, and Elizabeth Montagu – were (in the words of Harriet Guest) “widely read and celebrated” during the second half of the eighteenth century, in part because of “their reputation for conventional feminine skills” and what was seen as their embodiment of “traditional notions of feminine virtue” (Guest 2002: 60–61). Their reception, that is, anticipates almost exactly that of the Edinburgh women of a generation later. Yet by the end of the eighteenth century, the intellectual sociability of the bluestockings was a matter for satire and criticism while the word itself was becoming a form of shorthand for all the supposedly more unattractive qualities of literary women. Charlotte Smith herself provides a representative example of satiric dismissals of the type in her unsubtly named Mrs. Manby, a bluestocking hostess who appears in both The Old Manor House (1793) and The Wanderings of Warwick (1794). Smith presents literary women, in these books, as falling into one of two categories: the woman is either a pathetic victim of

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circumstance – a mother forced to have “recourse to her pen to supply bread to her family for whom she had no other resource”, for example, or “a daughter endeavouring to assist in the support of a helpless superannuated parent” (Smith 1794: 275–76) – or, like Mrs. Manby, she uses her literary pretensions in a vain and deluded pursuit of the sort of admiration she fails to win through any more conventionally feminine means. A “little, ill-made woman […] pitted with the smallpox” who “[t]hough no longer young […] believed herself still an object of affection and admiration” (Smith 1793: 4: 29 –92), Mrs. Manby is scornful of and hostile towards other women writers, even as she fawns over the young men who flatter her and exploit her social position to advance their own position in the literary world. Women’s writing thus becomes in Smith’s world either a virtuous, selfsacrificing response to overwhelming domestic duties (the way in which, notoriously, she represented her own career) or a sterile, misguided attempt to exercise inappropriate social power. Literary sociability, for women, appears in this account to be something of an impossibility, as Smith presents female literary work as acceptable only when circumscribed within and used strictly as an extension of family duties. Of course, there is nothing uniquely English about this disdain for literary women; despite Cockburn’s and Graham’s approving comments about the absence of bluestockings in Edinburgh, it is in fact easy enough to find early nineteenth-century Scottish versions of Mrs. Manby. An American visitor, for example, expressed considerable dismay at the intellectual pretensions of his Edinburgh hostesses. “Instead of talking on those subjects which it is so becoming and graceful in a woman to know”, he complains, They prose away on mineralogy, politics, borough reform and the corn-bill […] Mrs. Kyndear is at the head of the Femmes Savantes of this order: she bores me to death with learned harangues about geology, pebbles, and the botanical names of plants, which she ecorche’s in the most ridiculous manner. She knows more about Dr. Hope’s laboratory, than what is going on in her own family, and can analyze a fossil, although she cannot tell the component parts of a pudding! (Didier 1822: 1: 31–32)

Granted, if one removes the reference to Dr. Hope, there is nothing that ties this commentary to a peculiarly Edinburgh context: Didier’s satire of women who neglect pudding-making could, if books are substituted for fossils, have been written about any learned woman,

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anywhere in Britain, and at any time in the previous century. (It echoes, most famously, Samuel Johnson’s praise of Elizabeth Carter for being able to translate Epictetus and make a pudding.) The fictional Welsh traveller of John Gibson Lockhart’s 1819 Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk – Didier’s obvious model and inspiration – is rather more attentive to cultural specificity. He not only takes a passing swipe at the influence of the Edinburgh booksellers by mocking the “haughty blue-stocking[s]” who gather to display their literary pretensions in the “perfumed atmosphere” of the Manners and Miller bookshop (Lockhart 1820: 284) but also provides an extended satiric picture of a bluestocking “converzatione” with a very specifically Scottish flavour. While “Peter” notes approvingly that the “men of high literary character” who are his main acquaintance in Edinburgh are “as everywhere, the greatest, that is to say, the most contemptuous enemies the Blue-stocking tribe has to encounter” (Lockhart 1820: 167), Lockhart then goes on to imply that his main rivals in the Edinburgh literary world are in fact losing or ceding the war, as (for example) he portrays Francis Jeffrey being waylaid and overcome by literary women. After Jeffrey has been so “unfortunate as to fall into an ambush laid to entrap him by a skilful party of blue-stocking tiralleures”, Peter reports finding him pinioned up against the wall, and listening, with a greater expression of misery than I should have supposed compatible with his Pococurante disposition, to the hints of one, the remarks of another, the suggestions of a third, the rebuke of a fourth, the dissertation of a fifth, and last, not least, in this cruel catalogue of inflictions, to the questions of a sixth. “Well now, Mr. J—, don’t you agree with me, in being decidedly of the opinion, that Mr. S— is the true author of the Tales of my Landlord?” […] [S]upper was announced, and I descended close behind Mr. J—, who had a lady upon each arm, one all the way down discussing the Bank Restriction Bill, and the other displaying equal eloquence in praise of “that delightful – that luminous article in the last number upon the Corn Laws”. (Lockhart 1820: 171–72)

Of course, Jeffrey himself is almost as much of a target in this episode as the “bluestocking” women besieging him, a point that becomes all the more obvious given the delicate malice of Lockhart’s earlier explanation of women’s centrality in Edinburgh’s literary society: the great men of that society, he writes, think the pinnacle of their accomplishments is the ability “to talk with fluency about Politics and Belles Lettres” – precisely the subjects, that is, that were the heart of The Edinburgh Review. As the ladies, he continues, “would require more

40

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modesty than is either natural or proper to suppose themselves incapable of acquiring” such knowledge, they inevitably step out of what Lockhart implies is their rightful social place (Lockhart 1820: 152). What Lockhart is doing here, in other words, is taking an easy, predictable target – “bluestocking” women – and then using it as the basis of an attack on Edinburgh society in general and the literary hegemony of The Edinburgh Review in particular. In doing so, he is reinforcing even as he attacks a version of Edinburgh culture that sees women as being central to its intellectual circles. Of course, Lockhart’s satire does not mean that the Edinburgh reviewers were that much more sympathetic than Lockhart himself to “blue-stockings”. On the contrary: Eliza Fletcher recalled late in life that she had been intimidated in her youth by her slightly younger contemporary Jeffrey, as “[h]e delighted in checking aspiring or ambitious women, as he used to call Mrs. Millar and me – ‘women that would plague him with rational conversation’” (Richardson 1875: 279). Fletcher’s memories are reinforced by Henry Cockburn’s observations about Jeffrey’s attitudes towards intellectual women; Cockburn reports, for example, Jeffrey’s comment, apropos of Elizabeth Hamilton, that he had “no objection to the blue stocking, provided the petticoat came low enough down” to hide it (Cockburn [1856] 1988: 168). (A similar line in the 1814 novel The Saxon and the Gael – the anti-hero admits that “it is pleasant enough when Ladies can make us play bo-peep with the blue-stocking” but thinks that when “they display it to the very garter […] they ought to put on breeches at once” [Johnstone? 1814: 1: 181] – suggests that this might have been a relatively commonplace sentiment in Edinburgh at this time.) As if in illustration of this mild witticism, Jeffrey provided Jane Carlyle with something of a running series of evaluations of the degree of “blueness” of mutual acquaintances. A Mrs Beaton, for example, “looks amiable and is, I do not doubt – but she is decidedly blue – and talks too much of books and the arts – to be thoroughly agreeable to me”; in contrast, he pronounces himself “very good friends” with a Mrs. Montague, whom he finds “thoughtful and amiable” and “only a little bluer than the blue sky of heaven” (Jeffrey 1830–33: 5 June 1830, 20 Feb. 1831). Yet there are some interesting complications here: the friendship with Jane Carlyle might be taken in itself as indicating at least some predilection for the company of intellectual women (although Carlyle was, admittedly, infuriated by

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what she saw as Jeffrey’s tendency to tease and flirt rather than to treat her with appropriate seriousness), while Fletcher followed up on her comments about her early fear of Jeffrey by noting that it had gradually been replaced by “a perfectly friendly feeling” based on mutual “esteem and respect” (Richardson 1875: 279). Most interesting, however, the comment about Hamilton implies that being a “bluestocking” is not incompatible at all with being an exemplar of proper femininity. As Cockburn praises Hamilton for having the “good taste” not “to lose the feminine in the literary character” even while establishing her place as a “professed literary lad[y]” noted for her “literary conversational gatherings” (Cockburn [1856] 1988: 168–69), he also unsettles some of the negative connotations that he – like so many others – associates with blue-stockings. Indeed, the slipperiness of the term “bluestocking” in the context of early nineteenth-century Edinburgh can be striking. The comments of a Professor Garscombe of New York, who was in Edinburgh around the same time as his compatriot Franklin James Didier, make this point very neatly, as Garscombe, unlike many others, takes the time actually to define his terms. The word “bluestocking”, he explains, can be applied only to those women who attempt to “go beyond their depth, or to pass current for more than they are worth in substantial literary stock. To those who possess real talents and acquirements, the term does not apply”. The comment illuminates and reinforces his earlier praise of Anne Grant, of whom he wrote that “[s]he has none of the flimsy wisdom about her, which is said to distinguish the blue stockings of this city […] She has a strong and enlightened mind, cultivated by study and observation” (The Contrast 1825: 222, 200). Garscombe is here making explicit the implication underlying Cockburn’s comments: that is, that there is a mode of public literary sociability for women for which the term “bluestocking” is not applicable. Again, it might not seem a particularly feminist move to make an argument that there are acceptable and unacceptable, feminine and unfeminine modes, in which women can participate in the literary world, but the point here is not to search for clear anticipations of twenty-first century feminism in early nineteenth-century Edinburgh literature. Rather, it is to explain how these women were able to establish public careers as writers even while remaining, according to their contemporaries, models of feminine decorum, as opposed to unsettling embodiments of “bluestocking” ambition.

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Money and Professionalism The ability of these women to establish public literary and intellectual personas is one important aspect of their careers; another, more pragmatic, but hardly less important, is their ability to earn their living by what they were doing. The relationship that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century middle-class women had to money is notoriously vexed; as Edward Copeland’s important book on the subject has demonstrated, economic concerns are central to women’s writing of this era, with matters of cost, expenditure, and income becoming almost omnipresent in women’s fiction, in particular. Yet as Copeland also notes, women’s “vulnerab[ility] as economic beings”, which made economic threat a standard device in sentimental fiction, was complicated by what was presumed to be a ladylike “distaste” for dealing with the hard practicalities of finance (Copeland: 2004: 16– 17). Being a lady, in the early nineteenth century, apparently meant never having to acknowledge that one’s existence was underwritten by money. This attitude is both satirised and highlighted in Frances Burney’s massive 1814 novel The Wanderer, as the penniless heroine Juliet struggles to find a way to support herself without sacrificing either her class standing or her self-respect. Juliet is very clear on the point that there is nothing degrading about having to earn money: she reproves an acquaintance who complains about a seamstress who is always demanding payment (“And for what else”, Juliet asks, “can you imagine she gives you her work?” [Burney [1814] 1991: 369]). Yet Juliet herself finds it difficult to take money for her own skills – musical performance, acting and other ladylike accomplishments – and thereby mark them as public mercantile commodities rather than as signifiers of her genteelly leisured class status. What Juliet is doing, in other words, is differentiating on the basis of class between types of women’s “art”. Needlework and millinery are trades, making the sale of their products appropriate, but skilled musical performance – or, by extension literary work – is an expression of refined talents and abilities that manifest class status. Taking money for them is thus to risk confounding those talents with the saleable commodities produced by trades people, so that issues of class become just as important as questions of gender and femininity for the numerous late eighteenth-century women – fictional and actual – who attempted to earn money through their literary skills.

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Yet it is important to emphasise that this question of how to write for money, without having one’s literary talents implicitly re-imagined as being, in a very real sense, tools of a trade rather than marks of cultivated sensibilities, was not a problem just for delicately refined ladies. The ideological divide between the refined, sophisticated gentleman of poetic tastes and the grasping, scrambling Grub Street hack was already well entrenched by the opening years of the eighteenth century and famously reinforced by Pope; it continued to cause anxiety for writers throughout the century, especially those working in newer or more marketable genres such as the novel or the periodical essay. Work by critics such as Frank Donaghue on the economic and cultural shifts in publishing that were getting underway around the middle of the eighteenth century has made very clear that weighing class status against cash was not just a problem for women. In particular, Donaghue argues that writers for the periodical press, a new medium that offered its writers little of the cultural prestige available at least in theory to the poet or to the author of philosophical or moral works in prose, were particularly vulnerable to such concerns. Over the course of the eighteenth century, according to Donaghue’s succinct account of these developments, critics and other writers for the popular media “sought to redefine their practice as a profession rather than a trade” (Donaghue 1996: 17) and did so in part through the careful deployment of a rhetoric of moral, social, and humanitarian worth as opposed to advancing claims of immediate, practical usefulness. To quote Donaghue once again, one finds in the mid-eighteenthcentury controversies around the Critical and Monthly reviews “an exaggerated version of the professional rhetoric of our own day, one more zealous in severing connections between social function and material reward, more sanctimonious in mystifying both by means of an anachronistic, at times chivalric, vocabulary” (Donaghue 1996: 31). As writers attempted to establish that their work was culturally and socially aligned with that of the established learned professions – law, the church, the military, medicine – they were, in effect, attempting to distinguish their own literary production from that of scribbling amateurs in much the same way that, half a century later, Burney has her Juliet attempt to maintain a meaningful rhetorical divide between her own artistic “expertise” and the work of the seamstresses with whom she sympathises.

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Yet the rhetoric of professionalism was not the only way that men working in literary “trades” attempted to establish themselves as professionals rather than tradesmen. Money – as long as the sums were sufficiently large – could also be used as a means of marking class status, something that is made particularly clear a generation after Donaghue’s period by the debates among the founders of The Edinburgh Review about whether it would be better to have a policy of not paying their contributors, which would be an uncompromising mark of their status as leisured gentlemen, or to pay them very well indeed, thereby emphasising that their work was in no way to be confounded with cheap hack journalism. Pragmatically and probably wisely, the publisher Archibald Constable and Francis Jeffrey, the founding editor, chose the latter course. Contributors to the early numbers of the magazine earned ten guineas a sheet, a rate that soon went up to a minimum of sixteen guineas and was often even higher; Jeffrey later estimated that by the time the Review was well established, the payment over a single number averaged between twenty and twenty-five guineas a sheet (Cockburn 1852: 1: 136). Around the same time, Jane Austen famously accepted ten pounds for the copyright of an early version of Northanger Abbey, a price differential that emphasises the Edinburgh’s attempt to use money as a way of emphasising that the literary and cultural value of its contributors’ work was entirely distinct from that of writing for a circulating library market. Yet Jeffrey himself was far from immune to worries about the propriety of accepting money for editorial duties, precisely because of his fear that he would be thought to have slipped from a professional to tradesman status. Even though he later admitted that he had at that point never earned more than a hundred pounds a year in his undoubtedly professional career as a lawyer, he agonised over whether or not to accept a paid editorship at £300 a year. As he wrote in an anxious May 1803 letter to Francis Horner, while the £300 was “a monstrous bribe to a man in my situation”, he was worried about what he saw as “a real risk of general degradation”. It was only the reflection that the other co-founders were taking their fees for writing articles that encouraged him to “think I may take my editor’s salary also without being supposed to have suffered any degradation […] I would undoubtedly prefer making the same sum by my profession; but I really want the money, and think that I may take it this way, without compromising either my honour or my future interest” (Cockburn

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1852: 2: 71–72). The matter evidently continued to worry him for months. In July 1803 he made a point of assuring his brother that the Review “is in the highest degree respectable as yet, as there are none but gentlemen connected with it. If it ever sink into the state of an ordinary bookseller’s journal, I have done with it” (Cockburn 1852: 2: 74). By September, he was writing Horner again to say, rather sharply, that he should “not imagine that I have made a trade of this editorship, or that I have, upon the whole, any interest in the publication that is essentially different from yours or [Sydney] Smith’s”. He then goes on to clarify his reasons for insisting that, even as editor, he had no fundamentally deeper stake in the magazine than did its contributors: I do not know, my dear Horner, why I should write all this, or why I should feel myself growing angry and indignant as I advance farther into this subject. I have a right, I hope, to ask you to write for us; and you have a right, no doubt, to excuse yourself, and to make your own apologies; but do not, if you please, announce to me so formally what “you wish to be understood” on the subject of your contributions, nor fancy that I am to take your orders as if I were a shopman of Constable’s. Forgive me for this want of temper. (Cockburn 1852: 2: 83–84)

The “want of temper” might be explained in part because, as the rest of the letter makes clear, Horner’s reason for turning down a request for an article was the demands made upon him by his legal studies. Jeffrey might be earning far more as editor of The Edinburgh Review than he could by practicing law, but in his evident fears that by adding editorial responsibilities to his legal work (which he never abandoned) he would lose status with even such a close friend as Horner, he marks the still-contingent professional status of some types of literary work, even for men. In considering the ways that these anxieties about literary professionalism, money, and status play out for the women among Jeffrey’s Edinburgh contemporaries, it might be helpful to turn back to Jean Marishall, whose writing career did not, despite her mother’s fears, relegate her to a madhouse or even to exile in England. Nor, apparently, did it earn her any great amount of either money or status, but notwithstanding her relative lack of success, Marishall had a very clear sense of her literary work as a professional endeavour, in all senses of the word. As she makes clear in a striking passage that explicitly links her work as a novelist and playwright with the contributions made by those in the traditional learned professions, she sees

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her work as both a source of income and a form of specialised, rarefied service to society. In the process, she offers a bitterly sardonic critique of those who have no difficulty in linking economic and cultural value in the professions open only to men but attempt to sever the two concepts of “worth” in literary work, the only profession more or less accessible to women: Mankind have taken it into their heads, that authors who are worth countenance are those only who write without hopes of reward, whose independent spirit soars above the paltry profits obtained by divinity, law, physic, or war. Authors should write by inspiration and live on air. I confess myself in this respect to have been always ill qualified for an author; my ambition from the first being to present the public with such fruit as Hope flattered me they would not grudge to pay a price for: at the same time, no lawyer was ever more anxious to gain the cause of his client; no physician to prolong the life of his best patient; no clergyman to lead his flock to Heaven; nor general to send thousands to another world – than I am to please and improve the minds of my readers. If I have failed, it is no more than many of these gentlemen have done before me, who yet have made a fortune as if they had succeeded in every attempt… (Marishall 1789: 2: 198–99)

As she implicitly links the “fruit” of her literary work with a lawyer’s pleas for a client, she anticipates by a decade and a half Jeffrey’s attempt to establish his own continuing professional status even as his focus shifted from law to literature. Of course, professional status means something rather different for Marishall than for Jeffrey, but there is no question that her attitude to the money that she was able to earn by writing was at least as complicated and sophisticated as was his in the inaugural months of his work for The Edinburgh Review. Indeed, the account that Marishall gives of her own experiences as a writer in her 1789 Series of Letters is one of the most extraordinary surviving accounts of attempts to shape a literary career by any Scottish writer of the period, male or female. That said, Marishall herself remains almost entirely obscure, with even her name open to some question. (In most older sources – and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online – she is indexed under the name Jane Marshall, although she signs herself “Jean Marishall” in the preface to her Series of Letters, the only book on which her name appears.) She was apparently born sometime in the 1730s or (more likely) the early to mid-1740s; she speaks of herself as being very young at the time of the 1765 publication of The History of Miss Clarinda Cathcart and Miss Fanny Renton, her first novel, and she is

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still being described as a “young lady” during her attempts in the early 1770s to stage her play Sir Harry Gaylove. The few background details that she provides of her family hint that she came from a wellconnected but not especially well-to-do Edinburgh family of the professional middle classes. She had at least one brother serving in India, and she was able to use family friends and connections to wrangle permission to dedicate her novels to Queen Charlotte, but money troubles constantly hover in the background. (Her second novel, The History of Alicia Montague, features two scenes in which characters lament the inability of educated middle-class women to earn money in a way that enables them to keep their place in society in the event of family difficulties [see Marishall 1767: 2: 7, 40]). She lived in London for at least a brief period in the 1760s but was back in Edinburgh around 1770, first attempting to make a way for herself in the world of the theatre, and then boarding boys who were attending the Edinburgh High School. After the publication of A Series of Letters, she vanishes again from literary history, although the existence of the will of a woman named Jean Marishall, who died in Edinburgh in 1817, suggests that she might have survived the end of her publishing career by some decades.1 More to the point here, Marishall’s autobiographical narrative makes clear that she had a clear sense of her own writing as a means of making money and earning a living, rather than as being simply a genteel way to amuse herself or fill her extra hours. As she explains, she started her first novel, Clarinda Cathcart, in a fit of irritation with a “more than commonly stupid” novel that she had happened to pick up, but she continued with her writing only after checking with a publisher to find out what sort of money she could expect to earn for her work. Things do not turn out quite the way she expects – she naïvely 1

Wills survive for four women named Jean Marshall or Marishall who died in Scotland between 1807 and 1825 (no wills for other women of that name appear for the period between 1789 and 1850). Two were widows and so could not be the writer, who was apparently still unmarried in 1789; the third, who died in Edinburgh on 11 November 1808, was almost certainly the Jean Marshall born to a Francis Marshall in Edinburgh in 1753 (the name of the father and a surviving brother Francis, given in the will, match with birth records), making her implausibly young to have published a novel by 1765. There is no definite information in the will of the Jean Marishall who died in 1817 – aside from the suggestive point of her being the only one of the four to spell her name with an “i” – either to confirm or to rule out the possibility that she was the novelist.

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assumes that the publisher’s ideas of what will constitute a “very genteel” payment are as generous as her own – and, as the sardonically knowing voice of the older Marishall makes very clear, she leaves herself open to exploitation by her inability to make a case for the commercial as well as the aesthetic and moral value of her work (Marishall 1789: 2: 148, 151). When the publisher in question (one of the Noble brothers, whose identity Marishall makes only the sketchiest of gestures towards concealing under the name Mr. N–le) offers five guineas in place of the hundred or more that Marishall had been expecting, she presents it as a form of unprovoked character assault, with the insult of the low figure aggravated by the reflection that her “fair offspring” was in the hands of “this cheapener of merit, this degrader of worth” (Marishall 1789: 2: 158). The dry comedy of Marishall’s account is directed as much against herself and her own expectations as against Noble, but her point about the way that money becomes a measure of more intangible values – merit and moral worth – remains. At the same time, she remains acutely aware of the way in which payment for services can diminish as well as increase cultural value and complicate claims to professionalism. When the queen sends her ten guineas, twice the copyright price, as an acknowledgement of Marishall’s seeking permission to dedicate the novel to her, Marishall is almost as horrified as she was by Noble’s offer. “[T]en guineas from a Queen”, she tells herself, “appears so like a charitable donation to a poor creature, who had neither money, nor credit, nor friends to give her a dinner, that […] her Majesty has certainly injured you beyond reparation” (Marishall 1789: 2: 187). In dedicating her novel to the queen, Marishall is attempting to exploit the old literary model of patronage, but stripped of any sort of personal contact, it becomes a straight matter of exchanging praise for cash, something that Marishall makes clear she finds even more humiliating than having to use Noble’s offer of a few coins as a measure of the intangible “merit” and “worth” of her “fair offspring”. The serious question highlighted by the rueful comedy of Marishall’s account of the publication of her first novel is that of what exactly the professional writer is selling. Although no woman of the era could claim the sort of “earned expertise” that, according to Siskin, was becoming the mark of the professional writer in the Edinburgh of this time, Marishall makes a vigorous attempt to establish her claims to be offering something other than either cheap and disposable

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entertainment or some sort of glow of charitable good feeling. Both her second novel and a play that she never succeeded in getting performed were published by subscription and earned far more money than she managed to get either through traditional literary patronage or the open market. (She claimed that she managed to earn the hundred guineas that she had dreamed of getting for Clarinda Cathcart by turning to subscription publication for Alicia Montague.) Yet even if this method of publication proved more successful, she remained deeply ambivalent about it, just as her younger contemporary Anne Grant was to do (Grant’s use of subscriptions is discussed in Chapter 2), in large part because of the difficulty of maintaining the persona of professional independence while employing it. “[W]ith all the dignity of injured honour”, Marishall proclaims, with all the spirit of my country, and with all the indifference which an individual ought to have for self, I sincerely hope that no young lady may have subscribed that is not as willing as she would be to purchase the most beautiful feather in her headdress: That no beau may have subscribed that does not as cheerfully as he would for the essence of jessamy for his hair […] No lawyer, no physician, that does not subscribe with the same indifference as they pocket a fee… (Marishall 1789: 2: 199– 200)

As she moves from equating the payment of the subscription fees for her volume with the purchase of feathers or cosmetics to aligning it with the fees charged for professional services, Marishall again highlights the difficulties of measuring what is being bought and sold in the production of a piece of literature. The complexity of this problem is marked most strongly in Marishall’s attempt to bring her play Sir Harry Gaylove to the stage. In switching genres from the relatively easy, more predictably “feminine” option of the novel, Marishall is unambiguously demonstrating her interest in a professional career. A production of a play required far more risk and effort than the five guineas (plus printing costs) that Noble was willing to advance for Clarinda Cathcart, and Marishall made determined efforts to exploit every connection she had to convince theatre managers that her work was worth that risk. While it was by no means impossible for a woman to get a play staged in late eighteenth-century London (see Donkin 1995 for a detailed account of seven women playwrights of this period), Marishall was not one of the very few who managed to make their way through the considerable

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difficulties involved. Those difficulties find their way into the play itself, as Marishall’s sentimental hero Belmour, thwarted in his love by the conventional barriers of poverty and parental opposition, toys with the idea of improving his situation by writing a comedy based on his own situation. The literary satire rapidly gets lost in melodrama (Belmour wins permission to marry his beloved Ophelia by the moreor-less standard eighteenth-century tactic of rescuing her from an abductor); even so, Marishall manages to include a scene in which Belmour worries that he does not have enough influence to get his play staged but is reassured by his confidant, the eponymous Sir Harry. Getting the theatre manager’s ear, as Sir Harry explains, simply involves getting the recommendation of his uncle, Lord Evergreen, a self-proclaimed connoisseur of the theatre who in fact has no taste at all for drama but depends on Harry for guidance as entirely as the managers depend upon him. Marishall’s satire of aristocratic patrons of the theatre in the figure of Lord Evergreen (who is also Ophelia’s abductor) is striking, especially given that she had herself attempted to use aristocratic patronage while still in London, getting politely supportive letters but nothing more from Lords Lyttleton and Chesterfield. When the London theatres remained uninterested, she then launched a determined campaign for literary patronage in Edinburgh, winning the support of, among others, James Boswell (“the well known and friendly Mr B—”, in Marishall’s words [Marishall 1789: 2: 196]). Boswell’s own account makes clear that he gave Marishall more than just politeness and lip service; he was interested enough to speak in support of the play both to the London theatre manager Colman and, nearly three years later, to Lord Lyttleton. Strikingly, Boswell records that he was “hurt” by Lyttleton’s speaking “very lightly” of the play “notwithstanding his high letter to Miss Marshall [sic]” (Brody and Pottle 1957: 303, Wimsatt and Pottle 1960: 131). That Boswell’s efforts did not succeed in Edinburgh any more than they did in London is perhaps not surprising, as theatre had a hard time establishing itself in eighteenth-century Edinburgh; with the major exception of John Home’s massively successful Douglas (1756), there was very little homegrown drama, something that makes Marishall’s campaign to get Sir Harry Gaylove staged in her home city all the more remarkable. In addition to Boswell, Marishall persuaded a friend, a General Oughton, to lobby the manager of the Edinburgh theatre on her behalf, and the poet Thomas Blacklock

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provided one of the two prologues included with the printed version. She also appears to have orchestrated something of a publicity campaign on the play’s behalf, presenting the manager of the Edinburgh theatre – and the Edinburgh public – with “a brief account of her disappointments” through the medium of a newspaper article (Marishall 1772: vii). An advertisement announcing opening of the subscription list, which appeared in the Edinburgh Evening Courant on 7 March 1772, further emphasised the numbers of people who had “interested themselves” in the play, while yet another newspaper puff piece from around the same time (Marishall claimed in A Series of Letters to have no idea of the writer’s identity) lamented the folly or malignity of the theatre management which kept it from the public stage. This publicity did not get the play staged, of course, but it did apparently succeed in selling a lot of copies by subscription – around 1100, which was an entirely respectable, if by no means recordbreakingly large, number. The subscription list itself is also worth some attention, as it includes most of the famous names of the Edinburgh society of the day: James Boswell and Lord Elibank, who took ten copies each; James Beattie, Robert Blair, Adam Ferguson, David Hume, Lord Kames, Adam Smith, and so on. As scholars such as Adam Budd (2002) have demonstrated, it is impossible to take subscription lists as straightforward indications of readership, but the sheer number of subscribers from the overlapping worlds of legal and literary Edinburgh suggests that Marishall had friends in those circles who were willing to work hard on her behalf, pushing what must have been a difficult sell – a play that couldn’t get staged. Indeed, Marishall had made herself well enough known in Edinburgh literary circles by 1772 for Henry Mackenzie not only to be reading her play and commenting on her “frequent Disappointments” but also to be copying and passing along to Elizabeth Rose an acrostic on her name (Drescher 1967: 117–18). It is, in other words, clear that Marishall’s identity was an open secret in the Edinburgh literary world, even if Marishall herself insisted upon her feminine decorum and refrained from putting her name on any of her published work before A Series of Letters. All of her writing insists upon her status as a “lady” as well as a professional writer and, even as she was drawing upon every social and literary connection she could find in order to promote her writing, she maintains the decorous, if clearly no more than tactical,

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veneer of ladylike anonymity expected of the most demure of drawing-room amateurs. It is that final point that makes the publicity campaign for Sir Harry Gaylove more than just a curious historical footnote, as it underscores the fact that even while Marishall launched an extraordinary drive to promote her own literary career, she was careful to draw upon the ideology of feminine virtue while doing so and to stress that her friends did as well. According to her, General Oughton lobbied for the play by stressing both that it was a “national production” and that the sex of the author would be a guarantee of “the chastity of the piece”. There would, that is, be no need to fear that, like an English play, it would “disgust a Scots audience, the vices of the South not having taken deep root in this country” (Marishall 1789: 2: 231–32). The supposedly anonymous newspaper puff piece also insisted on the play’s virtues as “a native production”, one that merited Scotland’s “maternal patronage and protection” (Marishall 1789: 2: 236). The two prologues in the printed version of the play continue this pattern, with Blacklock’s emphasising the Scottishness of the play, even though it is set entirely in London (“A Scotch production! Heaven and earth! a play! / What mortal prov’d so hardy to atchieve it?” [Marishall 1772: xi]), while the other stresses femininity, praising the play as the work of an author who can engage the sympathy of the women in the audience because she “is fair – is virtuous – one of you”. Yet at the same time, and somewhat paradoxically, it asserts that her “rightful place” is in front of those other women on the stage (Marishall 1772: xii). Public display and private, virtuous femininity overlap here, and are able to do so, the prefaces imply, in part because Marishall’s intrinsic Scottish virtue guarantees that moving into the public world of the arts means something very different for her than it would for an Englishwoman. What that difference is never gets explained, but that hardly matters. To counterpoint the way in which, in A Series of Letters, Marishall dissects the complex web of professional value and feminine worth, this publicity material skilfully blurs them so that the act of publication becomes in itself, strangely but intriguingly, a demonstration of a specifically Scottish mode of feminine virtue. Ultimately, of course, this rhetoric didn’t work; Sir Harry Gaylove sunk from sight, as did, rather more unjustly, A Series of Letters’ witty autobiographical retrospective on a late eighteenth-

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century woman’s attempt to forge a professional literary life for herself. The result is that Marishall’s vivid and outspoken account of scrambling for attention and income even while attempting to maintain feminine respectability has never been used to round out the picture of Scottish women writers of this era as doing little more than decorously tossing off a few pretty or patriotic songs in the anonymous privacy of their sitting rooms. Yet even if Marishall’s career failed, the three women who are at the centre of this study make clear that she was not as unique or eccentric as she might initially appear. Rather, as they demonstrate in following the pattern that she set, Edinburgh society retained room, over the following decades, for women who sought to establish a public, professional literary identity without overtly challenging their society’s ideas of femininity.

Chapter One Enlightening the Female Mind: Education, Sociability, and the Literary Woman in the Work of Elizabeth Hamilton When Jane Austen died in July 1817, almost nobody outside her immediate family took much notice of the fact. In stark contrast, the death of her elder contemporary Elizabeth Hamilton, almost a year to the day earlier, received detailed and respectful coverage throughout the national press. A lengthy and sombrely respectful obituary by Maria Edgeworth, which appeared first in the Times of London and was reprinted in a number of major periodicals, offers a particularly vivid illustration of the cultural position Hamilton occupied during her lifetime, as Edgeworth takes for granted not just that Britain had lost one of its major writers, but also that Hamilton had “established a reputation that will strengthen and consolidate from the duration of time – that destroyer of all that is false and superficial” (Edgeworth 1816: 3). Edgeworth’s assessment of Hamilton’s literary achievement might seem almost painfully misguided today, given the speed with which Hamilton disappeared from the canon: her 1808 novel The Cottagers of Glenburnie continued to be published throughout the nineteenth century, but was increasingly seen as being appropriate mainly for children and the poor, while almost everything else she wrote more or less vanished from print and the critical discourse until the last decade of the twentieth century. (See Corman 2008 for a survey of Hamilton’s few nineteenth- and early twentieth-century appearances in critical literature.) Meanwhile, as Hamilton was fading from literary history, Jane Austen was becoming established as one of the best-loved English novelists. There are several ways of reading this posthumous reversal of fortunes: most obviously, it might be used as a simple demonstration of the difficulty of assessing the relative worth of contemporary literary productions. More subtly, Hamilton’s disappearance from the canon could be used in support of arguments about a “great forgetting” of pre-Victorian women’s literary history. As discussed in the introduction, Clifford Siskin has analysed the ways in which a hardening of the concept of distinct masculine and feminine literary spheres over the course of the nineteenth century

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tended to sideline the work of women who did not fit into a relatively constrictive vision of literary domesticity. Hamilton, whose books took up subjects ranging from imperial politics through classical history to moral philosophy, clearly had no interest in confining herself to Austen’s ostensibly modest territory of “3 or 4 Families in a Country Village” (LeFaye 1995: 275). While both the complex irony of this comment and the sophisticated artistry that Austen achieves despite – or through – this concentration of her literary vision have been explored at length by later critics, the fact remains that her decision to write domestic fiction made it easier for later nineteenthcentury readers to relegate her to a “respectably ladylike literary nook” (Auerbach 2006: 16). What is striking about Hamilton is that notwithstanding her unapologetically wide-ranging subject matter, she was still admired in her own lifetime for exemplifying domestic femininity and praised in terms not that different from those later applied to Austen herself. Even if, as Siskin so convincingly argues, the nineteenth-century concept of the “woman writer” could be dismayingly narrow, the career of Elizabeth Hamilton demonstrates that during the opening years of the century, it was possible for women to produce a remarkably varied and intellectually ambitious body of work without any overt challenge to their culture’s concept of feminine literary decorum. In beginning a discussion of Elizabeth Hamilton’s career with a snapshot of the relative cultural positions that she and Austen occupied in 1816–17, the point is not necessarily to launch an argument that Hamilton has been undervalued by literary history – and certainly not to query the steady rise in Austen’s reputation – but rather to point to ways in which Hamilton was able to build a successful career as a writer while working on subjects that were not conventionally “feminine”, something that she was able to achieve in part by exemplifying in her public life what Mary Poovey has called the “proper lady” (Poovey 1984). It has become something of a commonplace in late twentieth- and early twenty-first century literary criticism to note the ways in which Romantic-era women’s lives shaped the later nineteenth-century reception of their writing, a process that was exemplified not only most famously, but perhaps also most effectively, in the case of Austen. Both the solemn memorial notice by her brother Henry that prefaced her two posthumous novels (1818) and the unflaggingly prim 1870 Memoir by her nephew, James Austen-Leigh,

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make her fiction into a reflection of and testament to what they present as her unfailingly ladylike character. Later critics have of course vigorously challenged this construction of Austen and her art; as early as 1940, D. W. Harding had influentially re-imagined her as a sharpeyed and sharp-tongued cynic, while more recently, feminist critics have found in her work a wittily impassioned attack on the social limitations imposed upon the women she depicts. What matters here, however, is not whether or to what degree Austen accepted or attacked the social discourses of femininity that she was working within but rather that during the years in which her reputation was first being established, her admirers were able to point to what they saw as a seamless continuity between the decorously restrained life and no less polite and decorously restrained art. Assumptions that women’s art and women’s lives were intertwined could of course be used to damn as well as to praise, as is made clear by the case of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose reformist perspective on female education in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) became a target for conservative vilification in the wake of William Godwin’s unflinchingly frank memoir. As different as their reputations were, both Austen and Wollstonecraft can thus be read as exemplifying the tendency of early nineteenth-century criticism to read a woman’s art as a reflection or a continuity of her life. What makes Elizabeth Hamilton stand out from these two far more famous contemporaries is what might seem to be the dramatic gap between her uncompromisingly polemical writing and her public persona as an embodiment of unassuming, retiring femininity. While Wollstonecraft had become, by the opening years of the nineteenth century, a byword for unfeminine rage and dissatisfaction, Hamilton was absorbed, as Austen was later to be, into the discourse of quietly respectable feminine decorum. Yet as almost all of Hamilton’s published work makes clear, she had no particular interest in an Austenian exploration of quiet domestic life, and her interests in educational and political philosophy in fact align the content of her books far more immediately and obviously with those of Wollstonecraft, despite their somewhat differing political orientation. One needs only to give the titles of Hamilton’s first two novels – Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) and Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) – to suggest the chasm between Austen’s subject matter and Hamilton’s. Yet even if Hamilton in effect invited readers to evaluate her books against those of Wollstonecraft (whom

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she praises, by name, in Modern Philosophers and gently mocks in Elementary Principles of Education [1803]), her contemporaries seemed far more inclined to link her with Austen. Strikingly, and despite the stark differences between the two writers in both style and content, at least some readers at the time attributed Sense and Sensibility to Hamilton, an attribution that apparently gave Austen herself a degree of wry pleasure in being mistaken for “such a respectable Writer” (LeFaye 1995: 252). Whatever Hamilton’s “respectability” as a writer, anybody now reading Sense and Sensibility against The Cottagers of Glenburnie – the work that had ensured Hamilton was a household name among British readers when Austen made her literary debut in 1811 – would probably be hard pressed to see how the two authors could be confused. Although much loved and praised in its day, Glenburnie can now seem rather clumsily unstructured in a way that Sense and Sensibility is not. Although it is a short work, hardly more than a novella in length, Hamilton crams in three major plots: the first focuses on the vicissitudes of an aristocratic family, the second explores the conduct of two very different middle-class sisters – the only real link with Austen in terms of subject – and the third describes the lives of the well-meaning but slatternly Scottish peasants of the title. The three plots are linked by, but also subordinated to, Hamilton’s concern with education, particularly of women, and the narrative representation of successful or (more usually) failed educational practice is capped by a detailed evaluation by two of the characters of the monitorial system of education then being popularised by Joseph Lancaster and Andrew Bell as well as by Hamilton’s description of her characters’ supposedly very successful variation on that system in the Glenburnie village school. To complicate matters even further, Glenburnie is also a regionalist novel, substantial portions of which are written in Scots, in which Hamilton satirises Scottish rural life in something of the same manner that Maria Edgeworth mocks Irish foibles in Castle Rackrent (1800). As Austen’s famous depiction of herself as a painstakingly careful miniaturist makes clear, her approach to her material could hardly be more different than Hamilton’s broad-brush satire of what she presents as the self-limiting prejudices and predilections shaped by class and nation. Yet if contemporary misattributions of Sense and Sensibility to Hamilton thus become, on one level, an example of startlingly bad reading, on another they offer an illuminating glimpse

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of the assumptions made at the time about what it might mean to be a “respectable” woman writer. For one thing, by attributing Austen’s novel to Hamilton, readers were tacitly accepting the idea that the modest invisibility of the woman who sought also to remain a “proper lady” was to some degree just a polite cultural fiction. After all, in speculating that Sense and Sensibility is by Elizabeth Hamilton, by then indisputably a public figure, the reader is taking for granted that the writer is not in fact what the title page implies that she is. The coy modesty of the phrase “by a lady” is an implicit declaration that the author is too properly reserved to let her name go before the public, something that was patently not the case with Hamilton, whose name was by then on the title pages of three novels and four sophisticated works of non-fiction. In this respect, the assumption that she would choose to veil her identity on a new publication becomes a sort of backhanded recognition of her success in maintaining a public persona as an entirely retiring, domestic woman. This point is underscored by the fact that Sense and Sensibility was not the only successful novel by a then-unknown writer that was attributed to Hamilton around that time; she was also suspected, hardly less implausibly, of being the author of Self-Control (1811), the wildly successful melodrama of besieged and much-tried virtue by her Edinburgh contemporary Mary Brunton (Holland 1810–11: Letter 10). The conclusion to be drawn here is not that Romantic-era readers were so convinced of the rarity of female literary talent that they were ready to credit any successful book by “a lady” to any woman writer whose name they happened to know, although that might also be a factor at play in these cases. Rather more intriguingly, what these attributions suggest is that even while publishing under her own name and while writing books that could be outspokenly polemical, Hamilton had made herself, paradoxically enough, into a very famous and very public embodiment of the sort of retiring domestic femininity that Austen and Brunton were attempting to maintain through the decidedly more predictable path of writing romantic fiction while modestly concealing their names. Hamilton’s ability to create a public version of a strictly domestic woman is further illustrated by turning to the account left by one of her readers, the niece of a Yorkshire clergyman. Although the young woman in question, a Miss Ewbank, has left no mark on literary history other than the unpublished journal that she kept between 1803

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and 1805 – not even a given name has survived – the tone of her reaction to Hamilton is striking. She was, on the evidence of her journal, a serious young woman of cultured taste and strict religious principles, and she evidently took her reading very seriously indeed. She met Hamilton twice; on the first occasion, she was tipped off by a mutual friend that Hamilton and her sister were on their way to visit a waterfall in the neighbourhood of Ambleside, the Lake District village in which she was then living. “Impatient to meet this admired authoress with whom I already felt so well acquainted in her works”, Ewbank writes, she promptly set out for the waterfall and then “sauntered about” until the travellers arrived and she had a chance to introduce herself (Ewbank 1803–5: f.7v–8). When, two years later, they met again, Ewbank contrasted Hamilton with another literary acquaintance, Maria Edgeworth, and while she gave Edgeworth the edge for her “easy and ready flow of conversation”, she made a point of noting that could she “choose a friend between them, that friend should be Miss Hamilton”. The “esteem” and “veneration” that she feels for Hamilton’s books transfer so easily to Hamilton herself that by the end of their second and final meeting, Miss Ewbank implies that the writer and her books are interchangeable. As she writes, she parted from Miss H— with a feeling of regret which one does not usually experience for the acquaintance of a day, & which was increased by the reflection that most probably I should never meet her more. Yes I shall, I shall meet her in her works. And I may meet her in heaven. (Ewbank 1803–5: f.63–63v)

What Ewbank finds in Hamilton’s work, as she makes very clear, is not simply amusement or even instruction; the illusion that it gives her of a private connection, even friendship, with the author reinforces an argument that even as Hamilton was publishing intellectually ambitious and often overtly polemical books, she was able to maintain a public persona as an exemplar of conventionally domestic and feminine sociability. Her success in doing so is all the more striking if one considers the works through which Miss Ewbank had, in her view, come to “know” Elizabeth Hamilton. By the beginning of 1803, Hamilton had published only three of her eight books, two of which were satirical novels of ideas. Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, her debut novel, is a sharp, wide-ranging satire of contemporary British society, written in the voice of a naïvely anglophile Hindu traveller

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who finds himself subjected to repeated shocks and disillusionment as his idealistic expectations of England fray and fade during his encounters with the intellectual and aristocratic society of the 1790s. Rather more originally, the novel also features a detailed account of its narrator’s previous life in Northern India and a substantial introductory essay on Indian life, culture, and politics. In that respect, it differs dramatically from its most obvious models, the earlier “oriental spy” narratives such as Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (1721) and Oliver Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (760–61), as it becomes not just an elegantly framed critique of contemporary social excess, but also a direct and explicit contribution to the late eighteenth-century British debates about the East India company and its policies (see Kelly 1993: 132–33; Perkins and Russell 1999: 21– 29). Indeed, Hamilton’s willingness to wear her politics on her sleeve is signalled even before the novel begins, as it opens with a dedication to Warren Hastings, whose acquittal in the House of Lords the previous year after a nearly decade-long trial had not by any means settled questions about his actions as Governor-General of Bengal. Memoirs of Modern Philosophers is no less polemical, as while it is built around a conventional seduction plot, Hamilton uses that format not just to anchor her satire of the radical political philosophies of William Godwin and his circle, but also as the basis of her arguments about what she sees as proper methods of and approaches to education. The two works of non-fiction that Miss Ewbank might have read by her second meeting with Hamilton are hardly more cosily domestic. The 1804 Memoirs of the Life of Agrippina, Wife of Germanicus, is an ambitious attempt to illustrate the role of culture in shaping character through a study of classical history, and while the genre of the1803 Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education might initially seem calculated to foster a sense of a personal connection between reader and writer, the near ubiquity of the epistolary mode among late eighteenth-century women writers, especially when their subject was education, complicates any such claim. As Mary Favret has influentially argued, the familiar letter, more than any other genre, allowed eighteenth-century women the opportunity to “carry the private into the public realm” in their literary work (Favret 1993: 12), and in giving what are essentially essays on conduct and education the veneer of private sociable discourse, Hamilton was anticipated or followed by writers as varied in their political and social

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views as Hester Chapone, Laetitia Matilda Hawkins, Hannah More, and Jane West. There is no question that Elementary Principles is unusual in many respects, not least in its insistence that women should have a clear grasp of moral philosophy, but in neither content nor style is it the sort of deeply personal book that might seem to invite a strong emotional engagement with the author or her narrative persona. That said, there is no reason to consider Miss Ewbank an unusually naïve or idiosyncratic reader because of her conviction that reading Hamilton’s books is more or less equivalent to pursuing a friendship with Hamilton herself. Hamilton’s writing might not be deeply personal, but it is, in significant ways, conversational and social. On the most basic structural level, much of Hamilton’s work is underpinned by representations of intellectual debate (much of it parodic but some of it serious), a fact that perhaps illuminates the serious-minded Miss Ewbank’s conviction that what she found in those books was a form of engagement with Hamilton herself. In effect, the books blur the distinction between domestic conversation and the public exchange and promulgation of philosophical and political ideas. This way of reading Hamilton is also suggested, in a rather more sophisticated manner, in Maria Edgeworth’s obituary. Edgeworth is less interested in Hamilton as a novelist than as an intellectual, and she finds Hamilton’s main contribution to lie not in her more conventionally “feminine” work in fiction but rather in the philosophical letters and essays, in which, Edgeworth argues, she “opened a new field of investigation to women” by cutting “a clear, straight, and practicable road” through the “dark, intricate, and dangerous labyrinth” of metaphysics. The underlying metaphor of Hamilton as a trail-blazing intellectual explorer is striking, yet even as Edgeworth praises Hamilton’s intellectual ambition and originality in “throw[ing] open to all classes of readers those metaphysical discoveries or observations which had been confined chiefly to the learned” she muddies that argument later in the article. Going on to insist that Hamilton has “done higher and still more essential benefit” to women’s literature “by her life” than by her own literary work, she appears to pull her subject back from the world of exploration and adventure and into women’s conventional domestic space as she explains that Hamilton set the example, through the whole [of her life], of that uniform propriety of conduct, and of all those domestic virtues which ought to characterise her sex, which form the

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charm and happiness of domestic life, and in which in her united gracefully with that superiority of talents and knowledge that commanded the admiration of the publick. (Edgeworth 1816: 3)

One might recall here the Victorian appreciations of Austen and, in particular, James Austen-Leigh’s comically pompous praise of his aunt, one of the most important novelists in the English language, for her admirable “performance of home duties” and “cultivation of domestic affections” (Sutherland 2002: 130). Even so, Edgeworth’s version of Hamilton differs from Austen-Leigh’s representation of Austen in significant ways, the most important of which is Edgeworth’s implicit assumption that a woman’s ability to “command […] the admiration of the publick” is in no way incompatible with her enjoyment of the “happiness of domestic life”. In making this assumption, Edgeworth was also making a claim for Hamilton’s cultural importance not just on the grounds of her work but also, and more subtly, on the basis of what she implies was Hamilton’s graceful evasion of the supposed dichotomy between proper femininity and a desire for a public intellectual or literary life. The woman tormented by artistic genius, torn between her supposedly instinctive feminine longing for quiet domestic pleasures and the imperative demands of her gift, is a figure who appears repeatedly in Romantic-era literature, running the gamut from the grand, selfconscious mythologising of Madame de Staël’s Corinne (1804) to the sentimental pieties of Felicia Hemans’ poem “Woman and Fame” (1829). (Nor was this interest in the supposed dilemma of the literaryminded woman limited to the early nineteenth century; it retained its cultural power long enough to be mocked in Edith Wharton’s 1898 story “The Pelican”.) The assumption driving such work is that there is an inherent conflict between the intrinsically private matter of a literary woman’s life and the revelation, direct or indirect, of that life in a public medium. What Hamilton does, however, as Edgeworth hints in her obituary, is to suggest that a truly happy and useful “domestic life” necessarily impinges upon matters of public significance and that understanding the ways in which household matters shape the larger social world is in fact essential to the proper functioning of society. As Janice Thaddeus established in her important, punningly titled 1994 article “Elizabeth Hamilton’s Domestic Politics”, the domestic sphere and the wider political world are not

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just connected in Hamilton’s writing but are, in significant ways, completely inextricable from one another. Of course, Hamilton was far from unique among the writers of her generation in suggesting the malleability of the supposedly “private” sphere to which women were relegated. The immense amount of scholarship produced on public and private spaces in the eighteenth century and the Romantic era might have helped to revive interest in Hamilton’s work but it has also, and far more generally, long since undermined the idea that there was a consistent or stable division between “feminine” private space and the “masculine” public sphere that was drawn “at the threshold of an Englishman’s home” (Johnson 1990: xx; see also Klein 1996, Mellor 2000 and Guest 2000 for more detailed analyses of the subject). As Kevin Gilmartin has recently noted, even while some of the conservative novelists continued to show “a commitment to the household as […] a refuge for embattled virtue” others, more interestingly, represented it “as a dynamic social space in its own right”. In the latter case, he argues, the practice of “making interior scenes of domestic conversation available for public consumption” tended to “mobilise private life as an alternative form of publicity” (Gilmartin 2007: 176, 177). Although Modern Philosophers is one of the novels that Gilmartin cites as an example of this practice, what Hamilton is doing in her literary work as a whole is in fact somewhat different; she tends to represent private scenes of intellectual debate neither as a corrective nor as an alternative to the conduct of public affairs but rather as an essential component of them. This intersection of the public and the domestic in Hamilton’s work might be part of the reason why she has been so well-served in the re-examinations of late eighteenth-century political culture that have appeared over the last decade or so, with Thaddeus’ article both anticipated and followed by a number of other significant critical studies. Gary Kelly (1993), in a landmark revisionist reading, identified Hamilton as one of the key figures among the female political writers of the revolutionary era; Balachandra Rajan (1996), Susan B. Taylor (2000), Anne Mellor (2005), Claire Grogan (2006), Nigel Leask (2006) and Mona Narain (2006), among others, have demonstrated the intricacies of her participation in the raging controversy about empire in general and orientalism in particular; Jane Rendall (1996 and 1998) and Mark Phillips (2000) have analysed her contributions to romantic historiography; while Eleanor Ty (1991), Grogan

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(2000: 16–21), and Katherine Binhammer (2002) are among those who have explored her contributions to late eighteenth-century debates about women as readers and writers. In the range and scope of this content, Hamilton differentiates herself from the more strictly conservative voices in the 1790s war of ideas, reinforcing the claims that have been made by critics over the last decade or so that “trying to capture Hamilton as either liberal or conservative is in some ways a faulty exercise, for her writings involve a spectrum of political positions” (Taylor 2000: 560; see also Thaddeus 1994: 226). More generally, however, she also offers a model for feminine literary work that, even as it moves beyond Austen’s strict focus on women’s domestic lives, still avoids what was perceived as the alarming challenge to the established social order by more overtly radical women such as Mary Wollstonecraft. While Anne Mellor has argued convincingly that, from her first novel onwards, Hamilton took “a far more radical stance” on women’s issues than most critics have recognised” (Mellor 2005: 156), Hamilton’s most original contribution to the political debates of her day might in fact lie not so much in the specific content of her arguments as it does in her insistence that the private conduct of women necessarily both shapes and is shaped by wider social, political and intellectual debates. Hamilton and Ideas of the Female Intellect After having argued that the differences between Austen and Hamilton are far more important than the similarities, it might seem perverse to return to the few connections between them. Yet it is difficult to avoid doing so if one turns to the account of Hamilton presented by Elizabeth Benger, her first and so far only biographer. Benger, writing immediately after Hamilton’s death, presents a version of Hamilton that attempts to make her into a model of proper British – or perhaps even more properly English – feminine decorum, so that Hamilton, growing up in the 1770s and 80s in the Stirlingshire countryside, becomes more or less interchangeable with Austen, a Hampshire clergyman’s daughter nearly two decades her junior. There are of course some genuine and inevitable points of similarity. Most basically, like Austen – and so many of their female contemporaries – Hamilton began writing for her own amusement while still very

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young, but also like them, at least in Benger’s version of her life, she was far from confident about her intellectual interests. According to Benger, it was only “by stealth” that Hamilton read many of the books that interested her, a claim that Benger supports with an anecdote that has subsequently been quoted by almost everybody who has followed her in writing about Hamilton: that she “once hid a volume of Lord Kaims’s Elements of Criticism under the cushion of a chair, lest she should be detected in a study which prejudice and ignorance might pronounce unfeminine” (Benger 1818: 1: 50). Even while downplaying the supposed “unfemininity” of Hamilton’s tastes – since she notes that only “prejudice and ignorance” would object to them – Benger simultaneously makes Hamilton’s shame a mark of her instinctively feminine modesty. She then reinforces this interpretation of character by echoing, even on the level of diction, her description of Hamilton’s reading in the account of her subject’s earliest forays into writing. We are told, for example, that Hamilton “had recourse to the pen by stealth” and that her first work to appear in print, a journal of a Highland tour that she had kept to entertain her aunt, was sent to press without her knowledge and to her “unspeakable dismay” when she did find out (Benger 1818: 1: 52). (As Benger gives neither the date of publication nor the name of the “provincial magazine” in which the anonymous journal was published, it remains untraced.) Benger then rounds out this picture of Hamilton as a woman who was properly and decorously hesitant about the value of her writing and about moving into print by including excerpts from a historical novel about Lady Arabella Stuart that Hamilton began as a young woman. According to Benger, the novel was not the product of any literary or intellectual ambition but rather grew out of a sentimental interest in Stuart’s “hard fate”; she presents Hamilton’s decision to turn from reading about the subject to writing about it as arising merely from a desire “to extend her knowledge, or amuse her fancy” (Benger 1818: 1: 52) – that is, according to this account, whatever Hamilton’s literary tastes and talents, she modestly dismissed any notion of using her writing to instruct or amuse anybody else. Also worth noting, in this context, is that Benger makes a point of apologising for the “Scotticisms” in the excerpts of the novel that she prints, although it requires a careful eye for the twenty-first century reader to find them. Of course, given that many of Hamilton’s far more influential contemporaries – including Hugh

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Blair, James Boswell, and David Hume – were sensitive about Scottish constructions or idiomatic turns of phrase, Benger’s comments on this point might seem to have little to do with questions of femininity. Even so, when read as part of a larger argument that the writing of the novel is a mark of casually amateur, domestic tastes rather than of literary ambition, the traces that it allegedly bears of Hamilton’s private (Scottish) voice becomes yet another way to situate it outside the public (English) world of letters. Benger’s view of the novel’s significance might seem justified by the fact that Hamilton apparently never finished or ever attempted to publish it; on the other hand, the fact that she thought enough of it to preserve the manuscript for the remainder of her life might also suggest a certain degree of pride in her work. Finally, Benger also reprints some of Hamilton’s occasional verse (much of which was posthumously anthologised) but remains strikingly silent on the question of whether or not Hamilton herself ever made any attempt to collect her poems or to disseminate them to an audience outside her immediate circle. Clearly, Benger’s version of Hamilton, like James AustenLeigh’s much later version of Austen, invites us to see her as a woman who artlessly stumbled into a literary career from which all of her instincts made her shrink. Almost every sentence of Austen-Leigh’s memoir has been queried and deconstructed (see, for example, Sutherland 2002 and Auerbach 2006), but there are, if anything, even more grounds for questioning Benger’s version of Hamilton’s literary life, not least since the biography effectively deconstructs a number of its own key arguments. For one thing, Benger plays down, but can’t quite wish away, indications that Hamilton was displaying an interest in reaching a wider public audience with her writing as early as the mid-1780s, while she was still in her twenties. Her first identifiable published work, an essay for Henry Mackenzie’s periodical The Lounger, appeared anonymously in December 1785, and it was apparently around that time that Hamilton started work, with a group of unnamed friends, on producing a periodical of her own. The project went nowhere, and the essays remained unpublished until they appeared in Benger’s biography, but this attempt first to emulate and then to challenge Mackenzie – one of the most popular writers of his generation – on his own literary ground inevitably complicates the picture of the young Hamilton as being properly and admirably timid

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about authorship, contenting herself by scribbling away in stealth and secrecy. Even more significantly, Benger’s insistence upon Hamilton’s nervousness about intellectual interests in general, however much in line with contemporary ideas about properly feminine conduct is not fully borne out by other material, both in the biography itself and in Hamilton’s other published writing. Even the ubiquitous anecdote about hiding Kames’ Elements of Criticism is complicated by the context in which it appears in Benger’s source – a letter to the poet Hector Macneill, a close friend of Hamilton’s, that, rather awkwardly, Benger prints in the second volume of the biography. What emerges in this letter is less a picture of instinctively retiring feminine decorum than it is a sardonic retrospection on the effect of a conservative society on an intellectually curious adolescent. In the letter to Macneill, Hamilton makes clear both that her embarrassment was misguided and that she sees it as arising at least as much from her rural Scottish upbringing as from any inherently feminine timidity. “In Scotland,” she writes, people, in a great measure, (remember, I always make allowance for exceptions,) think and act en masse. There (in my time, at least,) few would have dared to venture upon experimental education. The dread of singularity is a consequence of the strength of those social ties which bind, not only the affections of the heart, but in some measure, confine the understanding. […] Do I not well remember hiding Kaimes’s Elements of Criticism under the cover of an easy chair whenever I heard the approach of a footstep, well knowing the ridicule to which I should have been exposed, had I been detected in the act of looking into such a book? (Benger 1818: 2: 29–31)

One might make a case that Hamilton is exaggerating the antiintellectualism of Scottish women of her generation1 (and of course, she does allow “for exceptions”, in any case) but the more important 1

It is possible to argue that Hamilton is either misrepresenting the anti-intellectualism of the society in which she was raised or overstating her own singularity, as Kames in fact seems to have been something approaching required reading for clever Scottish girls of that generation. An anecdote related by the Scottish traveller Janet Schaw suggests his ubiquity: caught in a storm while accompanying a niece (who would have been about Hamilton’s age) to North Carolina in 1774, Schaw attempted to calm herself by getting the girl to read aloud from the book that she had closest at hand. Distracted by her fears, Schaw did not notice till afterwards that the book in question was not in fact the Bible, as she had assumed, but rather The Elements of Criticism. “We were meeting death”, Schaw drily observes, “like philosophers” (Schaw 2005: 45).

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point here is that she is using her own account of reading Kames less as an illustration of her own instinctively feminine reluctance to engage in “any display of superior knowledge” (Benger 1818: 1: 50) than as an example of the damage caused by the culturally imposed “dread of singularity”. Hamilton’s conviction that letting oneself be shamed away from intellectual pursuits is a serious error of judgment, rather than a testament to feminine modesty, is reinforced by her published writing. In Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education, she regrets that, even though Kames’ arguments about educational philosophy and the metaphysics of the mind did not seem sufficiently convincing to her, she was for years deterred from pursuing the subject further by “look[ing] into Locke or Hartley, whom I considered philosophical writers, far too abstruse for my simple judgment to comprehend”. The sardonic bite of her phrasing, although directed most immediately against herself, is also an implicit indictment of a society that encourages women to doubt that they are capable of basic “reason and reflection” (Hamilton 1803a: 1: 20, 22). None of this is to say, of course, that Benger was entirely misguided in emphasising the importance of certain aspects of nineteenth-century concepts of domestic womanhood to Hamilton’s life and work. Not only had Edgeworth done the same in her obituary, but also, and perhaps even more to the point, Hamilton herself made clear in her Elementary Principles of Education that however literary and intellectual her own tastes, she did not believe that women should seek “an equality of employments and avocations” with men (Hamilton 1803 1: 252). That said, it is still essential not to miss a point that Benger tends to blur: that is, that in looking back on her young womanhood from her perspective as a published author, Hamilton insisted not on the naturalness of her doubts about pursuing a taste for intellectual matters but on the mistake that she made by allowing herself to be warped by established cultural narratives of femininity into nervousness about taking them further. Even as Benger, in other words, was doing her best to make Hamilton’s life fit the patterns of femininity that were later so influentially imposed upon Jane Austen’s literary career, Hamilton herself, in both her published and unpublished writing, was struggling with the complex problem of how a woman can shape an intellectually and morally independent existence within a culture that is deeply suspicious of female “singularity”.

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This is, of course, a subject that comes up in much of Hamilton’s published writing, but it is also an issue that she explores in more private biographical and autobiographical work, using both herself and members of her family as, in some degree, case histories in the formation of female character. Benger opens her biography with a fragmentary family history by Hamilton and also prints (although usually only in excerpts) a number of Hamilton’s letters about her own upbringing, many of which implicitly or explicitly raise questions about how women are able to develop a moral identity for themselves in a culture that defines a woman solely through her domestic roles and family connections. Hamilton both implicates herself in this cultural tendency, as she uses an account of her family background to launch her own story, and distances it from herself and her readers, identifying it as a past and peculiarly Scottish – as opposed to English or British – way of thinking about women. Even more to the point, perhaps, she implies, through her account of three generations of women in her own family, a gradually improving understanding of the place that women should occupy in society. Hamilton herself was Irish by birth but Scottish by upbringing; her father, Charles Hamilton, was a Scottish-born merchant from an Ulster family of Scottish descent, and her mother, Katherine Mackay, was the daughter and sister of Irish Protestant clergymen. 2 Charles Hamilton died in 1759, however, and when his widow eventually found bringing up her three children on her own to be too much of a struggle, she sent Elizabeth, the youngest, to be raised by her husband’s childless sister who lived just outside Stirling. This aunt is a shadowy figure in the account that Benger provides of Hamilton’s girlhood, figuring only as an occasional voice of prudent remonstrance hovering in the background, and is never identified except by her married name of Marshall. Mrs. 2

Hamilton’s date of birth is open to some question. Benger gives it as 25 July 1758, but on the same page she states that Hamilton was six when she was sent to Scotland in 1762 (Benger 1818: 1: 27). It is likely that Benger’s mistake is in the date of birth, not the age of the move to Scotland, since Hamilton herself seems to have believed that she was born in 1756, noting in an 1815 journal entry, written on her birthday and quoted by Benger, that in only “one year more […] the period of six tens of years will be completed” (Benger 1818: 1: 272). Even so, most subsequent sources give Hamilton’s year of birth as 1758, and while there was a discussion of this problem in the 1873 volume of Notes and Queries (Hamst 1873: 522–23), pointing out Benger’s inconsistencies and wondering if the date had ever been verified in Belfast records, the only response simply referred back to Benger.

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Marshall does, however, play a significant role in a fragmentary memoir written by Hamilton herself that Benger prints, apparently in its entirety and without editorial intervention, at the beginning of her biography. Mrs. Marshall’s life, at least as recounted by her niece, echoes concerns about femininity and domesticity that recur throughout Hamilton’s published writing. Most basically, Hamilton represents her aunt as being trapped, then rescued, and then possibly trapped again by characteristically Scottish concepts of virtue and morality that leave little, if any, room for an independent moral life for women. In superficial ways, admittedly, she presents her aunt’s story as a version of the sort of generically improving romance that was so popular in British fiction of the day, in which the slights and mortifications of a young woman left without the protection of family or money become a form of practical education. Like her fictional counterparts in novels by Frances Burney or Mary Brunton, the young Miss Hamilton is left orphaned and impoverished, with nothing to support her but her beauty and her solid principles, just as she reaches marriageable age. Male treachery contributes to her plight, since her fiancé, a baronet’s heir, deserts her the moment that her inheritance vanishes. More interestingly, however, the main source of her problems turns out to be her beautiful, spirited, but foolish mother, an heiress who squandered her own fortune in a vain attempt to live up to her own conception of the demands of her rank. Mother and daughter become exemplars of different models of femininity, with the mother embodying what Hamilton presents as a characteristically, even if not uniquely, Scottish tendency to link personal worth to social rank (a point that she makes again in the Hindoo Rajah, as she has a Hindu character report on what he interprets as the pleasantly familiar caste structure that he encounters in Scotland). The daughter proves to be very different from her flighty mother – she inherits “her mother’s beauty and her father’s understanding” (Benger 1818: 1: 18) – but her good sense notwithstanding, she is left without any option but relying on charity and making herself useful in the household of a distant relative. There, she learns the folly of the “family-pride” that she had always “considered a generous and dignified sentiment” as she watches a fifteen-year-old cousin marry, by choice, a man near sixty with a landed estate, a match that, Hamilton scathingly observes, “few young ladies in Scotland […] would then have dared to be so singular, or so romantic, as have condemned” (Benger 1818: 1: 17). The

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problem is that even if Miss Hamilton serves as corrective to her mother’s and cousin’s misguided worship of rank and status, she is still left with no options other than marriage. As Hamilton writes: With talents of a superior order, and with an education such as few Scotch ladies could at that time boast of, my aunt ought not to have experienced any difficulty in the attainment of independence. But for talents and accomplishments there was at that period no resource, – nothing upon which they could be employed to advantage. (Benger 1: 1818: 16)

The happy ending for Hamilton’s aunt is that once she is able to overcome the misguided family pride that she inherited from her spendthrift mother she decides to marry Mr. Marshall, who is a good and well-educated man of an appropriate age but also the son of a peasant. The reward of her chastened and hard-won good sense is the sort of contented sufficiency endorsed in much of the era’s writing: the Marshalls have a long and happy marriage, eventually settling (with their niece) in what Benger, in her summary of Hamilton’s childhood, describes as “a neat thatched cottage […] covered to the chimney top with woodbines and roses […] just peeping from the embowering shades of the orchards and other plantations” (Benger 1818: 1: 48). Especially given this sweetly sentimental love-in-a-cottage ending, Hamilton’s account of her aunt might seem a more or less generic eighteenth-century narrative of virtue rewarded. Yet as the story of Mrs. Marshall makes clear, even while economic vulnerability might be resolvable by a last-minute happily-ever-after marriage, the problem of finding a socially meaningful role in life is not. This point is emphasised by the fact that in Hamilton’s representation of her aunt’s marriage, the focus of the narrative shifts from gender to class, as the virtue that is most clearly rewarded is Mr. Marshall’s. He is, very explicitly, presented as an embodiment of the thoughtful, strongminded peasant celebrated by Burns, and his ability to win over his aristocratic if impoverished wife becomes a tribute to his moral worth, even as she disappears almost completely from her niece’s memoir. (The fact that Mr. Marshall’s sturdy Scottish independence wins him what Benger, if not Hamilton, represents in terms of the English middle-class pastoral fantasy of a rose-and-woodbine smothered cottage, is of course another complication in this narrative.) Even if Mrs. Marshall’s acceptance of tranquil domesticity is shown as being self-evidently more admirable than her mother’s life of unthinking,

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expensive dissipation and stubborn adherence to a misguided conception of human worth, there is still a quiet undercurrent of unease in Hamilton’s account of it. As Hamilton makes sardonically clear, her grandmother disastrously derives her sense of personal virtue from the status of the family into which she has married, but there is an uncomfortable, unacknowledged irony in the fact that Mrs. Marshall does almost precisely the same thing, with consequences that, at least on a narrative level, are hardly less severe. Tying one’s identity to class and family income, as does old Mrs. Hamilton, might be vain in all senses of the word, but when Mrs. Marshall is able to establish her own “independent mind” only by marrying a worthy man, she is left with literally no story of her own. It is telling that one of the few glimpses of individuality that we get in Mrs. Marshall’s post-marital appearances in her niece’s biography is in Hamilton’s comment that it was only after reading her aunt’s letters that she realised what a “struggle” it was for Mrs. Marshall to “conquer all worldly views and prejudices” and bring herself to marry into a lower social class (Benger 1818: 1: 42). Yet that struggle is, at least in the world of Hamilton’s memoir, not just the decisive but also the final moment of moral and intellectual independence in Mrs. Marshall’s story. Her triumph over prejudice is unquestionably a good thing in Hamilton’s mind – and almost certainly in the reader’s as well – but there is still something mildly unsettling in the fact that the vigorous independence of mind that produces this triumph receives as its reward the narrative blank of domesticity. This perception of the unnarratable emptiness of pure domesticity is reinforced by Hamilton’s accounts of her own move into her aunt’s household responsibilities following Mrs. Marshall’s death in 1780. Unsurprisingly, Benger presents Hamilton’s life at that time as being a model of quiet family happiness, an interpretation that can be supported at least in part by a 1781 letter that Hamilton wrote to her brother Charles, then in India, in which she presents her days as a succession of quiet mornings giving way to gently companionable afternoons and evenings with Mr. Marshall: From the time I get up in the morning, till my uncle makes his appearance at dinnertime, I have no more use of the faculty of speech than the Monks of La Trappe: then, indeed, I get a little conversation in the style of the country, of the badness of the weather, the deepness of the roads, the qualities of manure, or politics, which we discuss to admiration. Had my uncle been commander-in-chief of the sea or land

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forces, or I prime minister at home, Cornwallis would have been victorious, and Graves had sent the French home with disgrace. After settling these important matters, my reverend companion takes his nap, and I rattle at the harpsichord, till our reading-time begins, (which is usually from seven till eleven:) and then I hold forth on various subjects. History and travels are our chief favourites; but with them we intermix a variety of miscellaneous literature, with now and then a favourite novel, to relish our graver studies. This is a picture of the last three months, and may serve as one for many more to come […] (Benger 1818: 1: 86–87)

Yet even in this letter, Hamilton’s admission, after only a paragraph of narrative, that there is nothing else that she can tell her brother about the last three months of her life hints at elements of tedium in this cosy routine. These hints become louder over the following years. In 1782, writing again to Charles, she laments that she has just been through “one of the most solitary winters I have ever passed”, as the marriage of a friend has left her with “no companions to enliven any part of it”. While insisting that her affection for her uncle keeps her from pining for entertainment during “these long winter evenings”, she admits that it takes all of her “good flow of spirits” to keep her from feeling “the effects of continued dulness”, then adds that in some cross moments, I can’t help thinking it a little hard, that with all the good will imaginable towards the pleasures of society, I should be condemned to pass the best days of my youth in such a solitude, that I might, to all intents and purposes, be as well shut up in a monastery; for, though I am not forbid the use of my tongue, unless I were to utter my complaints to the groves and purling streams, I must be silent. (Benger 1818: 1: 87–88)

This idea of being “condemned” to monastic silence echoes her earlier reference to La Trappe in a way that darkens the mildly jocular air of the first passage, and even the quietly mocking evocation of pastoral fantasies of solitude underscores her sense of isolation. By 1783, she has nothing to say of her daily life; apparently writing in the autumn, she tells Charles that the receipt of his letters is the “most agreeable event that has […] befallen me” since she last wrote in the spring (Benger 1818: 1: 90). Even allowing for the hyperbole of affectionate family correspondence, the phrasing reinforces her earlier laments about the silent emptiness of her days. Yet what Hamilton is portraying, at least in the 1781 letter, is in many respects the idealised feminine domestic space for which the literary heroines of the day supposedly yearn and which, of course, was Mrs. Marshall’s reward for her independent-minded determination to live her life according to

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a rational system of values. Even if one concedes that an elderly uncle is no substitute for the dashing young lover of romantic fiction, what Hamilton has here is essentially what conduct books and novels assured young women readers was the happy ending awaiting them. Moreover, it is important to emphasise that Hamilton does not, in any way, present the individual elements of her life as being unpleasant or unsatisfactory. As she emphasises repeatedly in a number of contexts, she was devoted to her uncle, and the sort of political and literary talk in which they engage makes clear that intellectual companionship is central to the version of domestic life that she is living. Even so, and even as she shows herself as being in possession of what contemporary books on female conduct and duties presented as all the elements of satisfying domestic life – family responsibilities, a comfortable home, a congenial companion – she suggests that the absence of social exchange and the lack of opportunity for any exercise of independent choice in her intellectual pursuits is almost corrosively damaging. Of course, in emphasising the hints of discontent that run through Hamilton’s letters to Charles, it is important not to offer an unnuanced, against-the-grain reading of Benger’s biography and make Hamilton into an eighteenth-century Scottish version of Betty Friedan, railing against her culture’s version of the feminine mystique. Unsurprisingly for a woman of her era, Hamilton was also hostile to conventional models of public sociability, as she demonstrates from the very beginning of her literary career in her mockery of the feminine social or sentimental chatter of figures such as the Hindoo Rajah’s Lady Ardent or the unnamed, cheerily empty-headed novel-reading traveller in the same book. What she presents as her ideal is a situation in which private, domestic conversation becomes a medium for the exchange of ideas and the honing of the mind. She makes this point most explicitly, perhaps, in the contrast that she draws, some time after the fact, between her life in Stirling and her very different life in the later 1780s and early 1790s, when she settled with Charles in London during his leave to translate the Hedeya, the Islamic code of laws. In the letter to Macneill in which she relates the anecdote about Kames, Hamilton also provides a brief retrospective account of her intellectual development and defends herself against his assumption that her discontent during her young womanhood was the result of her “pride” being “piqued by reflecting on the little notice that was taken of [her] in Scotland”. What she in fact lacked in her earlier years, she

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explains, was not praise or flattery but rather “sympathy in taste, in opinion, in sentiment” with those around her, or what she calls, in a particularly significant phrase, a “commerce of intellect” (Benger 1818: 2: 34). The metaphor here suggests the complexities of Hamilton’s ideas of social interaction; despite the mercantile language, what she is describing is not in any way a straightforward market exchange, as she makes clear when she goes on in her next sentence to lament that of those few she met in Scotland “who understood the traffic” almost none “would deign to exchange their precious ore for my unpolished pebbles”. If she sees ideas as being traded in a market, it might appear, at first glance, that the market to which they are carried belongs in a Jack-and-the-Beanstalk world, as Hamilton depicts herself as offering something seemingly worthless and hoping to be showered with wealth in return. The key point here, however, is not the faintly comic self-deprecation implicit in the asymmetrical trade that she envisions but rather the more serious underlying implication that it is the exchange itself – the social process – that creates value. The raw materials of her intellect might be, to extend the metaphor, diamonds in the rough rather than ordinary pebbles, but without the polishing given by conversation and debate neither she nor anybody else will ever know the difference. She might read and study as much as she pleases, but her concept of intellect as a form of commerce or “traffic” implies that the ideas she gathers have value only as part of a network of exchange, rather than being a commodity that can be collected and hoarded in domestic isolation. Later in the letter, Hamilton carries this point still further as she suggests that the opportunity to participate in intellectual conversation doesn’t merely polish her ideas; it actually transforms her. When in London, she tells Macneill, she finds for the first time that Men of learning addressed themselves to me, as to a being who was actually capable of thinking. Men of wit seemed to imagine that I could understand them; and both men and women, very superior both in point of situation and abilities, to those with whom I had been accustomed to associate, conversed with me so much upon a footing of equality, that sometimes I was inclined to exclaim with the wee wife, “Surely, this is no me!” (Benger 1818: 2: 35)

Again, there is an element of comic self-deprecation in this comment: far from depicting herself as an intellectual Cinderella, Hamilton’s reference is to a song attributed to Alexander Geddes, in which a

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peasant woman falls into a drunken sleep on her way home from a fair, is robbed of both money and hair, and concludes each stanza of her ensuing lament with the indignant protest that “this is nae me” (Wilson 1876: 1: 270). Notwithstanding the homely jocularity of the allusion, what stands out in this passage is the continuing metaphor of transformation through sociable exchange: echoing the process by which the “unpolished pebbles” of Hamilton’s conversation are repaid by silver or gold, Hamilton here represents herself as being entirely remade through an immersion in a world of intellectual sociability that extends and enriches the limited possibilities of strict domestic life. Yet even if in retrospect Hamilton chose to depict her time in London as marking the start of her literary life, the Scotland of her youth was not entirely empty of intellectual sociability, and the cultural world of Edinburgh, to which she returned as a published author, was arguably even more central to her intellectual development than was 1790s London. In this respect, the move to London represents less of a total break from her girlhood than it does the opportunity for new modes of intellectual engagement. Indeed, taken together, the three main periods of Hamilton’s life – her young womanhood in rural Scotland, her move into the literary coteries of London, and, most importantly of all, her writing life in the Edinburgh of Walter Scott, Francis Jeffrey, and The Edinburgh Review – offer something of a sampler of late eighteenth-century and Romantic-era options for women’s intellectual and literary pursuits. In each case, Hamilton exemplifies the ways in which it was possible (for at least some women) to engage in the “commerce of the intellect” even while staying comfortably within the parameters of conventional notions of femininity and domesticity. Outsider Intellectuals and Popular Science Given the importance that Hamilton herself accords to a version of mixed sociability that blurs the boundaries between the public and the domestic, it is worth beginning a discussion of her intellectual life in her Stirlingshire with what might otherwise appear a very minor point: that is that for all of her very few years of formal education (which took place between the ages of eight and twelve), Hamilton was taught by a master, Mr. Manson, at a day school in Stirling. The significance

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of this point is underscored in a backhanded way by Benger’s uncomfortable conviction that “the fastidiousness of modern refinement” would recoil at such a practice (Benger 1818: 1: 36). Even though only a decade before, Hamilton had unselfconsciously depicted a mixed public day school as part of the solution to the problems besetting her fictional Glenburnie, Benger not only insists that mixed schools are a remnant of the regional past but also apparently feels obliged to play down any potential shock value in her account of Hamilton’s education by asserting, on no clear authority, that Mr. Manson either taught girls only or took in boys and girls in on alternate days. The reasons for Benger’s discomfort with this mode of schooling could perhaps owe something to questions of class; the mixed school in Glenburnie is, after all, designed for children of the peasantry, while middle-class girls, at least by that point in England, tended to be taught either at home or in female “seminaries”. Yet it might also have just as much to do with the fact that by travelling into Stirling, where she boarded by the week, to study with a man, Hamilton was being educated in a way that clashes in minor but undeniable ways with concepts of home-based, female-centred middle-class femininity. This clash is highlighted by Benger’s comment that, while her Saturday night with the Marshalls was “a festival”, Hamilton was probably “not unwilling” to leave home again on Monday after a Sunday spent attending church in the morning and afternoon and learning and repeating scripture by rote in the evening (Benger 1818: 1: 38–39). Being drilled in religion at the knee of her exemplary aunt serves, ironically enough, to make leaving the domestic household all the easier. There is no detailed information on what Hamilton studied at this school, although Benger mentions that she excelled in geography and regretted that she did not have the opportunity to study the classics with Mr. Manson. Yet if Hamilton was denied the opportunity for formal instruction in one subject not traditionally offered girls, Benger does provide an intriguing hint that she was able to pursue, at least to some degree, an interest in another, mentioning in passing that Hamilton was able to attend some of the lectures given by the chemist Henry Moyes (Benger spells the name “Moyse”) and “afterwards cultivated […] a literary correspondence, in which the lecturer liberally undertook to direct the studies of his youthful pupil” (Benger 1818: 1: 46). Although Benger has nothing more to say on the subject

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– she was not even sure whether Hamilton attended the lectures in Edinburgh or Glasgow (it was almost certainly Edinburgh) – Hamilton’s young admirer Miss Ewbank is a little more detailed, noting down in her journal several anecdotes that Hamilton related about Moyes and adding that she spoke of him as “the first Man of any talents who had taken any notice of her, he used to recommend her books, solve her difficulties, &c. […] in this manner they corresponded for about two years” (Ewbank1803–5: f. 50–50v). Although the letters that they exchanged have not survived, and so there is no way of determining the exact nature of Hamilton’s exchanges with Moyes, her contact with him in itself situates her in a late eighteenth-century intellectual milieu that attracted a considerable amount of attention and comment at the time precisely because it blurred the distinction between professional scholarship and middleclass female intellectual interests. The place of women in eighteenth-century scientific discourse and spectacle is a complex one, as both visual representations of the subject from the time and recent scholarship emphasise. A surprising number of late eighteenth-century paintings of scientific work feature women, in roles ranging from pained and passive bystanders (in, for example, Joseph Wright of Derby’s painting of a bird in an air pump) to supportive partners (in David’s striking double portrait of Lavoisier and his wife) or to swooningly transported enthusiasts (in Rowlandson’s caricatures of the audience for popular lecturers). Rowlandson is perhaps the most in tune with his era: as a number of recent scholars have pointed out, there was a tendency at the time to assume that women’s interest in scientific lectures arose from a superficial attraction to the dazzle and flash of both the lecturer and his material. Richard Holmes, in an account of the London lectures given by the future Sir Humphry Davy, one of the most distinguished chemists of the day, notes that Davy was accused of pandering to a sighing, adoring female fan-base by simplifying his material and giving showy, eye-catching demonstrations. Holmes’ comments about Davy’s popularity, at least, are borne out by contemporary accounts that make clear he was a major celebrity. His admirers included Maria Edgeworth, who heard him speak in Dublin and reported not only that tickets were so much in demand that some were willing to pay up to twenty guineas to hear him speak, but also that Davy “was courted & caressed by all the rank & fashion” of the town (Holmes 2008: 292;

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Holland 1810–11, letter 8). Even so, and as Holmes also stresses, Davy’s talks did present a solid overview of cutting-edge science, making it difficult to endorse the contemporary grumbles that his audience of fashionable women was entirely frivolous. This was also the case with the less famous scientists who preceded Davy in giving scientific lectures for a wide public audience, including both Moyes himself and Moyes’ acquaintance and imitator, Thomas Garnett. Moyes, who apparently made a particular effort to reach out to women, charging them half-price for admission during an American tour (admittedly, there is no record of his lowering prices in a similar way in Britain), was subjected to a certain degree of mockery for doing so. A comic poem titled “A Petition from the Ladies of Edinburgh to Dr. Moyes” opens with a brisk canter through some of the subjects that he covered: Dear Doctor let it not transpire, How much your lectures we admire; How at your eloquence we wonder, When you explain the cause of thunder, Of lightening and electricity, With so much plainness and simplicity: The origin of rocks and mountains, Of seas and rivers, lakes and fountains; Of rain and hail, and frost and snow, And all the winds and storms that blow: Besides an hundred wonders more, Of which we never heard before. (“A Petition” 1791: 230)

Predictably enough, the author then dismisses female intellectual interests, as the “petition” in question turns out to be a plea to Moyes to abandon his more abstruse topics and to provide a “natural history of love”. Garnett, who lectured in chemistry and physics at Anderson’s University in Glasgow (the forerunner of the present-day Strathclyde University) for a few years at the end of the 1790s, offers a slightly more complicated case of women’s engagement with contemporary science. In his account of his time at Anderson’s, Garnett reports as a matter of pride not just that this was “the first regular institution in which the fair sex have been admitted to the temple of knowledge on the same footing with men” but also that “nearly one half” of the people attending his lectures were women (Garnett 1800: 2: 201–2). That is a striking figure, since the lectures, as he describes them,

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offered a fairly rigorous introduction to contemporary scientific thought, going into far more detail than Davy’s appear to have done, in part simply because Garnett had considerably more time to develop his ideas. Beginning with “the mechanical properties of air”, Garnett then moved on to an analysis of its “chemical properties” and finally, “in about forty lectures”, he explored and illustrated by experiment the general “principles of chemistry” in all of its major branches (Garnett 1800: 2: 197). Garnett is presumably the lecturer about whom Anne Grant wrote dismissively in a 1797 letter to a friend, as she summed up what she perceived as the modern, fashionable follies of Glasgow, which in her opinion included the new female rage for attending talks on science. Her objections arise in part from the contemporary orthodoxy that women will rarely, if ever, gain more than a superficial and therefore pointless acquaintance with the sciences. Such lectures “might be a very harmless lounge for [Garnett’s] female auditory”, Grant sniffs, “if the idea of being greatly the wiser, for hearing a man talk an hour about carbon and chemistry, would not lead to conceit and affectation”. Her more serious complaint, however, is that attending such lectures is symptomatic of what she sees as a troubling cultural shift towards public modes of sociability. As she goes on to lament, “[t]he having an additional place of public resort, too, encourages that insatiable love of change, that restlessness, which is, I think, the great and growing evil of the age” (Grant 1807: 3: 224). Yet even if Grant were right that a female taste for hearing Garnett talk about “the mechanical principles of air” or “the principles of hydrostatics and hydraulics” was nothing more than a way of “lounging” away an empty hour or a symptom of “restlessness”, the significance of these lectures to women’s intellectual history remains. Precisely because they opened a public educational venue in which women could hear about and witness cutting-edge scientific experiments, they created a space for intellectual exchange that allowed women to participate in public intellectual discourse rather than to remain passive and isolated recipients of whatever instruction made its way into their domestic worlds. Moyes offers a particularly fascinating example of this blurring of intellectual realms, in part because he was almost as much of an intellectual outsider in the scientific world as the women who made up such an important part of his audience. Born in Fife to a relatively poor family – Miss Ewbank, on Hamilton’s authority, describes him

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as a farmer’s son – Moyes was blinded at the age of three by smallpox. Even so, he displayed precocious scientific and mechanical talents, which attracted the attention of Adam Smith, and he was sent first to Kirkcaldy grammar school and then, possibly, to the University of Glasgow. (Contemporary sources mention that he attended university, and Miss Ewbank specifies that it was Glasgow, but his DNB entry notes that no records of his attendance there, or at Edinburgh, have ever been traced [Morrison-Low 2004: 39: 607].) He began his career as a public lecturer in Edinburgh, where he lived until leaving for England in 1779; there, he gave courses of lectures in a number of cities, including London and Birmingham, where he met and befriended Joseph Priestley and other members of the Birmingham Lunar Society. These courses, which included between twenty-one and twenty-eight lectures on subjects ranging from atmospheric pressure through mineralogy to the digestive processes, were open to the general public at the rate of a guinea for a subscription to the entire series or a shilling for a single lecture. They were also very successful, so much so that during his 1785 American visit, he was treated as at least as much of a celebrity as Davy was in Ireland a quarter century later. According to a 1947 account of the American tour, by the time Moyes gave his third talk, which was an introduction to the subject of inorganic chemistry, he had a thousand listeners in attendance. As the authors note in some amusement, it would be surprising enough for a “present-day chemist” to attract such a large “paying audience”, but it would be even more startling for the chemist in question to find himself the subject of newspaper articles supplying “intimate details of his taste in food and drink, anecdotes of his early childhood […] and above all, laudatory poems addressed to him by ardent ladies and enthusiastic gentlemen” (Armstrong and Deischer 1947: 171–72). He also attracted attention in the popular press in Britain: a letter to The Gentleman’s Magazine praised Moyes’ London lectures for displaying “an almost unequalled fund of knowledge in chemistry, and in every branch of natural philosophy”. Yet that praise is subtly qualified by the description of him as “one of the literary phænomena of the present age” (“Dr. Moyes of Edinburgh” 1783: 325), language echoed by Priestley, who introduced Moyes to Sir Joseph Banks as “an excellent lecturer in philosophy […] a phenomenon” (cited in Harrison 1957: 109).

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This sense that Moyes, as a blind chemist risen from the peasantry, was a phenomenon, or, in other words, an astonishing spectacle in his own right, places him in a slightly different category than either Davy or Garnett, perhaps less a scientist and more a curiosity. It is true both that Moyes never made any significant contributions to science himself and that his work was not universally admired by his contemporaries; Harrison, for one, notes a rather sour comment on Moyes by James Watt (1957: 111). Likewise, Armstrong and Deischer concede that he was apparently not entirely up-to-date in his account of the known metals and refer rather dismissively to Part VII of the Philadelphia lectures as consisting of “what might be classified now as some stray facts in organic chemistry”. On the other hand, their brisk summary of the first six parts – “an abbreviated elementary course in physics” and “a comprehensive discussion of solutions, crystallisations, acids (both mineral and vegetable), the alkalies (fossil, vegetable, and volatile) and salts” (1947: 171) – make clear that the scientifically illiterate or faint-hearted might have found evenings listening to Dr. Moyes rather rough going, however engaging his lecture style. Yet precisely because he was an outsider, he also exemplified the porousness of the boundary between elite scientific work and the private, non-professional pursuit of knowledge. Moyes’ role in helping scientific ideas “further permeate the social spectrum” and in anticipating the work of the nineteenthcentury Mechanics Institutes has come increasingly to be recognised in recent years (Morrison-Low 2004: 39: 607), but what might still be less evident, especially given that women of all classes tend to be less visible even than working-class men in accounts of scientific education, is his role in providing women such as Hamilton a space for pursuing their own scientific interests. The key point in turning back from the general question of eighteenth-century women and science to the particular case of Elizabeth Hamilton is not to suggest that she was an ardent follower of the new scientific thought or even to speculate about how much she understood of what Moyes had to say (although her later writing suggests that she not only absorbed his lectures but also incorporated aspects of them into her own thought). More basically, what is made clear by even the little we know about the contact between Hamilton and Moyes is that even as a young woman, living in what both she and her biographer present as rural isolation, she was able to cultivate

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scientific interests without fuss or controversy and to use them as a venue for reaching beyond the limits of her domestic world. It is significant that Miss Ewbank’s account of the relationship with Moyes, which she heard first-hand from Hamilton, makes clear that Moyes not only advised Hamilton in her reading but also “solve[d] her difficulties”. That is, Hamilton was asking questions and thereby, to some degree, participating in an exchange of ideas, even if as a student rather than as an equal partner. On one level, at least, there was nothing unusual in her doing so; it was by then a commonplace that a woman should be able to participate in reasonably intelligent conversation with the men around her, and by asking questions and posing difficulties, Hamilton was clearly filling a role closer to that of the domestic angel than to the conservative nightmare of the hectoring bluestocking harridan. At the same time, however, precisely because Moyes was a public figure and (at least initially) a stranger, Hamilton’s exchanges with him empty this conventionally feminine trope of the conversable domestic woman of its familiar meanings. Hamilton’s epistolary “conversation” with Moyes is something that she is pursuing strictly for her own improvement and entertainment, rather than for the purpose of making herself a more agreeable companion for the men of her household. Even more importantly, as she uses her scientific interests to launch an acquaintance with a public figure, she inverts the conventionally feminine model of narrowing intellectual debate into domestic conversation. Miss Ewbank’s representation of the experience of reading Hamilton’s books as a form of imagined friendship and sociability forms a useful counterpoint to this practice: in a very conventional manner, literature, for Miss Ewbank, creates an illusion of sociable exchange, even as she remains strictly in her private world. In contrast, Hamilton uses Moyes’ lectures as a means of creating in fact the sort of public intellectual connections that Miss Ewbank uses as a metaphor to describe her own strictly domestic reading experience. Hamilton’s ability to blur the line between public intellectual work and private domesticity can be further emphasised by turning briefly to her relationship with another scientist who was arguably both more distinguished and far more important to her than Moyes, even though Benger never mentions him at all. The scientist in question, the physician and chemist Adair Crawford, is best known today for his role in the discovery of strontium, although he also

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continued and extended Lavoisier’s experiments in heat and respiration. Hamilton was his first cousin (their mothers were sisters) and may have met him while he was studying in Glasgow and Edinburgh, although the only indication of the degree or extent of their personal relationship is the rather vague statement by Crawford’s brother Alexander that there had been a “long intimacy” between them (Crawford 1816: ii). Of course, that intimacy could be read as a reference simply to cousinly affection, rather than to any shared intellectual interests, especially as there is no question that Hamilton had close personal ties to that branch of the family. She lived for a time in Bath with a Dr. Stewart Crawford, Adair Crawford’s nephew, and following Adair’s 1795 death, she took charge of the education of his two daughters, Eleanor and Mary Ann. (They are beneficiaries of Hamilton’s will and, presumably, the girls that she refers to as “our [meaning her and her sister] children, the C—s” in an 1815 letter quoted by Benger [1818: 2: 191].) Yet there is clear evidence that Hamilton had at least some interest in Crawford’s scientific work. She was sufficiently familiar with his book on calorimetry to quote it in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (Hamilton 1800 [2000]: 311–12), and she probably also knew his posthumously published book on medicinal tonics, which was dedicated to her by Alexander Crawford, the book’s editor. The dedication is of course no proof in itself that Hamilton had actually read the book, but it is notable that Alexander Crawford draws explicit parallels between the intellectual work of his cousin, whom he describes as being “eminently distinguished for literary talent and private virtue”, and his brother. “Had he survived,” Crawford writes, “he would have viewed [Hamilton’s] progress in life with exultation; his mind, congenial to [her] own, would have beheld […] with lively approbation” the way in which she put to public use “the rare qualities” with which she had “been endowed”. Both his cousin and his brother, Crawford implies, are exemplars of what can be achieved by “honourable exertion properly directed” (Crawford 1816: i, ii-iii). Even while it is entirely to be expected that a dedication will have flattering things to say about its subject, as Crawford merges what he presents as his brother’s exemplary moral virtues with his achievement as a scientist, he simultaneously blurs the division between Hamilton’s “feminine” literary tastes and Adair Crawford’s work in the hard sciences. In both cases, the public dissemination of intellectual work becomes a product and a reflection of the sort of

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private domestic virtues that produce the family affection praised in the dedication. London Life: Modern Philosophers and the Literary Woman Despite these traces of the impact of eighteenth-century popular science on Elizabeth Hamilton’s writing life, most twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers have tended to approach her through the context of the 1790s “war of ideas” and the debates on feminism and femininity raging at the time. Doing so is natural enough, since her first two novels, which are still the best known and most widely available of her works, are products of her time in London and, particularly the second, reflect the political debates raging in 1790s London society. Yet given both that critical focus and the fact that Hamilton was moving, at least for a brief period, on the outer edges of the Godwin circle, there are surprisingly few details known about her intellectual connections during the years that she lived in London, first with her brother Charles and then, following his death, with her widowed sister Katherine Blake. On both occasions, however, it appears that Hamilton was able to make a place for herself in intellectual circles without undue trouble or fuss. Her first literary acquaintances were apparently drawn from the orientalist friends of her brother, many of whom she cites in the lavish footnotes of her 1796 novel. Of more lasting importance was her friendship with George Gregory, a Tory-leaning clergyman who produced several belle lettristic volumes of letters and essays and edited The New Annual Register. As the letters reprinted by Benger make clear, Gregory (or Dr. G—, as he appears in the memoir) and his wife both encouraged Hamilton to publish, and while personal friendship might have influenced Benger’s glowing account of his intellectual influence on Hamilton (it was through their mutual connection with Gregory that Benger and Hamilton first met), it is clear that Gregory was an unequivocal supporter of Hamilton’s writing, even paying her a generous tribute in his last, posthumously published book. A volume of literary criticism in the form of letters ostensibly written to his son, the book uses its slightly disappointed commentary on the third book of Gulliver’s Travels, in which Gregory concludes that neither the subject nor the execution showed Swift at his best, as an occasion for

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praising Hamilton’s work. “What would Swift have done with the modern self-created philosopher?” Gregory asks rhetorically, then proclaims that “the task has been executed with scarcely less spirit, and in a more engaging style, by my excellent friend Miss Hamilton” (Gregory 1808: 2: 77). Nor was Gregory’s influence on Hamilton’s writing in general and Modern Philosophers in particular limited to admiring puffs of this sort; it was also through him, according to Mary Hays’ biographer Gina Luria Walker, that Hamilton met Hays and spent her brief but obviously stimulating period of contact with some of most important radical thinkers of the day. Walker offers intriguing glimpses of Hays “entertaining” Hamilton in company with Wollstonecraft and Godwin (Walker 2006: 173), and while Hamilton remained unconvinced, to put it mildly, by Godwin’s philosophical views, one might argue that the vigorously intellectual sociability of these London writers left its mark in the scenes of loud and passionate – if comically absurd – debate that characterise Hamilton’s first two novels. Even more importantly, as Walker also suggests in her brief but incisive commentary on Hamilton’s interactions with Hays, the time in London might well have contributed to Hamilton’s ability to move beyond the relatively passive role of a woman of intellectual tastes and interests and to create a place for herself as a public woman of letters. As Walker establishes, Hays grounded her literary career in part through her ability to manipulate more conventional forms of female sociability: she participated in epistolary exchanges and tea party conversation, but then used these quasi-public forums to explore and develop a highly charged political philosophy that she presented in the relatively safe, “feminine” modes of the novel and the unsigned review. This was a mode of female literary accomplishment that was still relatively unusual; indeed, Mary Wollstonecraft, who had established a far more successful career doing much the same thing in the later 1780s, considered herself at the time to be sui generis. Yet Hays’ success, however brief and curtailed, made clear that a woman could launch a literary career of her own from within a wider intellectual circle, and it was through both imitation and rejection of Hays and her version of the female intellectual that Hamilton established her own literary voice and authority. There were important connections between Hays and Hamilton; Walker notes that the two women shared a “mutual insecurity in the volatile and polarised

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republic of letters” as well as “the nagging consciousness that they lacked the rigorous training of their male contemporaries”. The differences were, however, both important and significant. Not only did Hamilton have “the advantages of birth, class, and social connections” but she also took the moral high ground by acting on the Enlightenment precept of daring to initiate controversy – a teaching Hays strove to practice, but with difficulty because of her thin-skinned reactions to being the subject of or participating in public debate. And Hamilton conducted her inquiry with sophisticated humour, an alien mode of communication to Hays […] Hamilton was witty, a quality Hays lacked. (Walker 2006: 175)

This emphasis on Hamilton’s wit and openness to debate is important, as it underscores yet again the ways in which modes of intellectual sociability underlie Hamilton’s published work. Granted, wit was not a quality that was valued in women at this time, a point made neatly in Jane Austen’s mocking sketch of an exemplary heroine, who, on being befriended by a talented young woman in her neighbourhood, “shrink[s] from the acquaintance” because, in a drawback outweighing all her charm and talents, the neighbour also possesses “a considerable degree of wit” (Austen 1993: 231). What Walker’s picture of Hamilton suggests, however, is that Hamilton’s greater public success owed something, at least, to her ability to frame her writing less as an uncompromising statement of her political and cultural views than as part of a sociable argument. Of course, any argument that Hamilton, in her public persona, embodied witty sociability while Hays fell back on humourless polemics has to account for the fact that there was nothing at all playful or sociable about Hamilton’s response when she and Hays fell out. Their differences have been well documented, both by Kelly (1993) and, far more fully, by Walker; they were ignited by Hays’ anonymous (and mainly negative) review of the Hindoo Rajah for the Analytical Review, of which she initially denied authorship and which she then claimed that she had written only at the “editor’s insistence” (Walker 2006: 174). Walker quotes at length Hamilton’s initial, furious, but private response to Hays, in a letter in which Hamilton accuses Hays of being, in effect, a secret assassin: The task was not put upon you. No. With the Ardour of an ancient champion did you volunteer your entrance into the lists, but not with the generosity of an ancient knight

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did you maintain the combat. Instead of fairly, and openly, pointing out the passages which displeased you, that betwixt you and the author the world might have it in their power to decide. You, in the dark, and with a muffled dagger aimed the blow which was to fix, as far as it is in the power of a review to fix, the fame and character of the person you saluted as a friend! (Walker 2006: 174)

Hamilton’s next response was more public and even more harsh: her creation of the contemptuously satiric portrait of Hays as the selfdeluded and self-obsessed Bridgetina Botherem of Modern Philosophers.3 (In view of her indignation at the anonymity of Hays’ attack, it might be worth noting that the first edition of Modern Philosophers was the only book by Hamilton to appear without her name on the title page, although her name was added to the second edition, published within the year, and all subsequent reprintings.) Both the impact and the vehemence of Hamilton’s satire have attracted more or less dismayed attention from her day to our own. Walker states unequivocally that the Memoirs “made Hays a laughingstock” and led to “the dismissal or denunciation of her later works because of her reputation as a clownish subversive”, while Kelly notes the “cruelly comic” elements of the picture, and Claire Grogan, the most recent editor of Memoirs, remarks on the contempt implicit in Hamilton’s “crude caricature” of Hays (Walker 2006: 159; Kelly 1993:143; Grogan 2000: 19). The cruelty and contempt are undeniable, but what is also striking is the way in which Bridgetina becomes a means of simultaneously embodying and dismissing all of the negative clichés about the female intellectual. The two most important aspects of Hamilton’s use of Bridgetina as a model of the wrong sort of literary woman are her humourlessness (there is not a single moment in the entire novel in which she comes close to recognising, much less making, a joke) and her apparently total inability to disentangle erotic and intellectual 3

Hays might not have been Hamilton’s only model for Bridgetina. At least one contemporary reader, a Miss Iremonger, commented, after praising the novel’s “humor & good strokes of every sort” that “I feel more than half angry with [Hamilton] for making Rose Isted so conspicuous in the person & dress of her Heroine, tho’ the professed Prototype of the character & conduct of Bridgettina [sic] is Mary Hays” (Bamford 1936: 199). Miss Iremonger apparently knew Hamilton personally, noting that she was living with her cousin “Dr. Crawford of Bath”, and so presumably Rose Isted was a mutual acquaintance. She might have been the Rose Isted of Ecton Hall who died unmarried in Bath in 1842 at the age of 86, but I have not found out anything more about her to link her to either Hamilton or Bridgetina.

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engagement. To some degree the latter characteristic is merely fodder for Hamilton’s mocking comedy, as she parodies Hays’ 1796 novel Emma Courtney by making the ugly, stupid, but unfailingly vain Bridgetina spend the novel pursuing its intellectually and socially fastidious hero, convinced that he is in love with her but too reserved to admit it. Yet at the same time, through Bridgetina, Hamilton both foregrounds and attempts to defuse the worries of a generation that, where women were concerned, still “heard the word ‘public’ in ‘publication’ very distinctly” (Gallagher 1994: 23) and so implicitly or explicitly linked women’s literary pursuits with the sexual display of the so-called “public woman”. This most familiar example of this tendency is perhaps the commonplace alignment made at the time between the female-authored text and the female body, in both positive and negative contexts. William Godwin’s sorrowful observation that Mary Wollstonecraft’s Short Residence in Sweden (1796) was “calculated to make a man in love with its author” (Holmes 1987: 249) might be very different in both intention and tone from John Wilson Croker’s notorious representation of Frances Burney’s final novel, The Wanderer (1814) as an aging, tawdry coquette (Croker 1814: 126), but both align body and text in an erotically charged manner. Walker’s sympathetic and compelling account of Hays’ intellectual development makes clear not just the originality of Hays’ attempt to embrace and consciously exploit this eroticised version of female intellectual work but also the degree to which her linking of “intellectual and erotic ambitions” made her particularly vulnerable to repudiation and mockery (Walker 2006: 146). Hamilton was, of course, at least as guilty of this as any of her contemporaries, but in presenting Bridgetina as a false version of female intellectual ambitions, she is also implying not just that there are other models available, but also and more subtly that those of her contemporaries who take for granted that, for women, the intellectual and the erotic realms are inextricable are exhibiting Bridgetina-level folly. It is striking that throughout her career Hamilton never risked blurring the lines between sociability and eroticised sensibility; her tendency, even in her novels, is to keep any love stories temperately in the background and her writing as a whole at a cool distance from anything approaching the more usual 1790s ideas of sensibility. Her model women are either unmarried and (presumably) happily single –

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like Charlotte Percy in the Hindoo Rajah, Mrs. Fielding in Modern Philosophers, or Mrs. Mason in Glenburnie – or, like Glenburnie’s exemplary Miss Osburne, are shown in contexts other than that of courtship. Even the one major exception to this rule, Modern Philosopher’s exemplary ingénue Harriet Orwell, who is the heroine of the novel’s main marriage plot, is presented as embodying, as a young, unmarried woman, all the virtues, and exactly the virtues, of an established matron. The first picture that we are given of her is, tellingly, as the calmly supervisory mistress of a household: Henry Stanley, her admirer and eventual husband, calls on her just after noon, at which point, Hamilton takes care to report, Harriet has already “performed every domestic task” and “completely regulated the family economy for the day”. When Henry comes in, she is “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”. Her “enlightened intellect, and calm and steady judgment”, as Hamilton explains, are revealed through her commitment to pursuing “the cultivation of her understanding” without neglecting her “social” and “domestic” duties (Hamilton [1800] 2000: 73). Harriet’s primly decorous multi-tasking, as she sews, reflects upon Hume’s version of history, and continues the education of the orphan girl, could hardly be more different from Bridgetina’s ardent pursuit of the intellectually outré. (Lady Caroline Lamb, whose literary tastes were famously unaccompanied by any of the more demurely feminine virtues, dismissed Harriet as “a blushing maid with a workbag” [Lamb 2006: 38]). The risk that Hamilton takes in creating this character is, of course, that Harriet and her quietly unexciting virtues will seem all the more pallid and dull by force of contrast with Bridgetina, whose comic excess, however misguided, at least makes her by far the most memorable figure in the book. Notably, the French translation uses her name for the title, and she transcended her original context so completely that a character in a novel published in 1814 is able to joke, without gloss or explanation, that he recognised somebody “[b]y the force of affection, like Bridgetina” ([Johnstone?] 1814: 1: 188). Indeed, Harriet fades into the background even in contrast with Julia, the book’s third heroine, who is every bit as conventional as Harriet herself. An exemplar of what the novel presents as a bewitchingly attractive if dangerously misguided version of feminine sensibility, Julia is like Bridgetina in

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mistaking emotion and wishful thinking for the products of rational judgment and as a result is thoroughly victimised by all around her, despite her conviction that her sentimental philosophy has given her an insight into the ways of the world. What Hamilton offers in her juxtaposition of the Godwinian Bridgetina, the Rousseauvian Julia, and the Hume-reading Harriet is a model of three different versions of feminine intellectual pursuits, and she suggests that it is the dispassionate intellectualism of Hume (at least in his role as an historian) that offers the best model for women of literary tastes. Of course, even if Hamilton presents Harriet herself as placidly immune to erotic ardour, her placement at the centre of the courtship plot requires her to be an object of desire, complicating any attempt to draw a clear line between erotic and intellectual sociability in her exchanges with Henry. Yet even taking that into account, and even while recognising that as a character Harriet is far less memorable than either Bridgetina or Julia, the important point remains that through Harriet, Hamilton suggests that intellectual interests are not just compatible with domestic virtues but are absolutely essential to them. In doing so, she creates a model for feminine sociability that uses the more overtly radical women of the Godwin circle not to attack female intellectual pretensions – the tactic of most conservative writers – but rather to imply the dangers of accepting, uncritically, a sexualised model of women’s intellectual interests. Elizabeth Hamilton and Edinburgh Life It may or may not be coincidental that the writer with whom Hamilton associates her exemplary Harriet is a Scot. Hamilton was not an uncritical admirer of Hume; however highly she thought of his historical writing, she very rarely cites his philosophical work, preferring that produced by his now lesser-known contemporaries, and detested his atheism. Yet in turning to Hume, Hamilton might also be invoking, even if only on a very minor and subterranean level, some of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century ideas about Scottish intellectual life, which were unsurprisingly different from those about the 1790s English radicals. If the women of the Godwin circle were mocked by Hamilton and others for giving way to supposedly overheated sensibility and gusty expressions of fine feeling, the clichés

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about Scottish culture ran almost entirely in the opposite direction. Particularly as Romantic tastes became established in England, the supposedly desiccated “Scotch feelosopher” became a target of mockery by figures of such varied intellectual and political perspectives as Byron, Coleridge, William Cobbett, and Thomas Love Peacock. Peacock’s Mr. Mac Quedy, “the Modern Athenian” who appears somewhat belatedly in the 1831 novel Crotchet Castle, exemplifies this figure both in his preening confidence in his own rationality and in his mystified inability to comprehend the language of sentiment. Assuming that claims that Loch Fyne salmon is the finest in the world or that The Gentle Shepherd is the pinnacle of comic achievement are a simple matter of logical demonstration, he is as politely impervious to arguments to the contrary based on taste or passion as he is to hints that national prejudices might be shading his judgement. According to the novel’s heroine, Mac Quedy (the name evokes the phrase “Mac Q.E.D.”, as Raymond Wright, editor of the Penguin edition of the novel, points out) “is the Spirit of the Frozen Ocean to every thing like romance and sentiment”, turning “their volume of steam into a drop of cold water in a moment” (Peacock 1986: 162). While the character is most directly a parodic version of the political scientists of the generation following Hamilton, the imagery of the warm, expansive rhetoric of sentiment collapsing into a dribble of cold water provides not only an irreverent sidelong glance back to James Watt and Scottish Enlightenment hard science but also a comic vision of what Peacock implies is the deflatingly asexual nature of Scottish thought as a whole. That said, if one disregards the mocking exaggerations of Peacock and others, the idea that the Edinburgh intellectual world was marked by a more or less dispassionate asceticism might give one reason to see it as offering an appropriate context for the sort of temperate feminine intellectualism that Hamilton endorses in her fiction. The problem with any such argument is that, especially in recent criticism, there has been a tendency to portray the intellectual world of romantic-era Edinburgh as being thoroughly masculine in its tone. As already noted, Clifford Siskin has argued that what he sees as the nineteenth-century “remasculinisation” of literary culture more or less originated in early nineteenth-century Scotland, mainly because of the impact of the new “professional” model of literary authority established by the Edinburgh Review under the editorship of Francis

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Jeffrey and, later, Blackwood’s (Siskin 1998: 218–24). His arguments are supported by the work of many other critics, including Marilyn Butler, who has provided a neat and helpful summary of the innovations made by the Edinburgh: The Edinburgh Review plainly set out to break the mould of existing journal culture. Its predecessors’ show of inclusiveness in fact tacitly favored writings in new fields that appealed to the enlarged reading public. The Edinburgh challenged this indiscriminateness and banished the general magazine’s crowded, miscellaneous appearance by an editorial policy that can be described as disciplined Whiggism. Its first fields for special “promotion” were academic, the specialisms for which Scottish universities were famous, especially the natural sciences, moral philosophy and political economy. Next came matters of national political importance, such as foreign relations, the conduct of the war, geographically informed travels in the distant empire and territories contingent. (Butler 1993: 131)

The implications in terms of gender are obvious. As Butler goes on to note, it would have been more or less assumed at the time that “these fields were more likely to interest men with access to power than women or the middle classes”; the contrast with the intellectual world implied in the pages of The Analytical Review, for which both Hays and Wollstonecraft wrote, is striking. Indeed, while the Analytical published work by women throughout its entire (relatively brief) run, it was not until 1833 that Priscilla Buxton and Lucy Aiken became the first women to have original articles printed in the magazine. (Sarah Austin’s translation of an essay by Ugo Foscolo had been published in 1827, making her the first woman to have anything at all published by the Edinburgh.) Stuart Curran, admittedly, has demonstrated through a reading of Jeffrey’s reviews of Edgeworth and de Staël that the Edinburgh made some important contributions to the Romantic-era reception of women writers, but even so, he comments that in the early years of the magazine, the majority of the content was “uniformly supercilious or virtually dismissive” in its treatment of women (Curran 2002: 195). The contrast between the Edinburgh and the more femalefriendly journals of the late eighteenth century is not just in content and tone but in style as well, with the Edinburgh reviewers ostentatiously rejecting “feminine” sentiment and embracing a more aggressive, dryly abrasive rhetoric. While negative reviews had always been a feature of the late eighteenth-century periodical (as the case of Hays and Hamilton makes clear), the combative elements of

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criticism were ratcheted up a notch or two by what Butler calls the “‘slashing’ criticism for which the Edinburgh became famous” – and which, she observes, was directed mainly against the sort of belle lettristic writing that would be more likely to appeal to non-elite readers, including women (Butler 1993: 131–32). Indeed, the early volumes of The Edinburgh Review tend to be remembered today mainly for their gleefully provocative baiting of some of the most influential of the Romantic poets, notably Wordsworth. Unsurprisingly, many of those poets fought back, both verbally and otherwise: Byron not only launched his own counter-assault against the Edinburgh in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers but also mused somewhat wistfully for years about the possibility of fighting a duel with Henry Brougham, author of the notoriously eviscerating review of his Hours of Idleness. Thomas Moore, surprisingly somewhat more successfully belligerent than Byron, got as far as meeting Jeffrey, pistols in hand, before the duel was stopped by police. It is thus something more than lazy use of a tired metaphor to say that The Edinburgh Review used its pages to fight a cultural war, and Jeffrey, at least, was ready to go even further and to defend the “slashing” rhetoric of his writers as having a vital impact on more directly political battles. As he wrote in an 1815 letter to Francis Horner, he considered it his “absolute duty” as editor “to forward the great ends of liberty” by permitting the use of every “lawful weapon” in an attempt to awaken “a general spirit of independence” (Cockburn 1852: 2: 151–52). The idea that the Edinburgh saw itself and was seen by others as an active participant in actual early nineteenth-century British wars, as well as being a cultural arbiter, is borne out by a couple of famous episodes from its early years. Most strikingly perhaps, as William Charvat demonstrated more than a generation ago, Jeffrey’s 1813 journey to the United States (in order to marry his second wife, Charlotte Wilkes) became something of a cause célèbre in the American political discourse of the day as the President, James Madison, attempted to win Jeffrey over to the American perspective on the War of 1812. The bare notion that it was important to the President to have the good opinion of the editor of a British literary magazine infuriated Madison’s enemies (Charvat 1941: 325–26), but it also reinforces the wider political significance of the Edinburgh Review. Rather more notoriously, an 1808 broadside against the conduct of the Peninsular war, written jointly by Jeffrey and

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Brougham (Schneider et al. 1945: 170–71) led not just to the furious exodus of the magazine’s more conservative contributors, including Scott, and to a flurry of cancelled subscriptions, but even to mutterings about treason. Anne Grant reported to the parliamentarian John Hatsell that an uncle of Jeffrey’s was so outraged by the article that he proclaimed that the entire Edinburgh set, his nephew presumably included, should be sent to Botany Bay, and while it is easy enough today to dismiss such rhetoric as self-evidently hyperbolic bluster, memories of the 1794 transportation of Thomas Muir and the other “Scottish martyrs” might have made it a little more unsettling at the time. Indeed, the historian Arthur Aspinall, writing in 1927, concluded that had such an article appeared at the time of the 1794 English treason trials, “little short of a miracle would have saved the author from the hands of the hangman” (Grant 1809c: f.151; Aspinall cited in Flynn 1978: 123). Even if the political climate was somewhat more temperate in 1808 than it had been fourteen years earlier, the point remains that The Edinburgh Review saw itself, and was seen by at least some of its readers, as fighting battles that involved rather more than simple armchair rhetoric. Its doing so makes all the more obvious the ways in which, as Butler and Siskin argue, it created a literary atmosphere that was hostile in both content and style to conventionally “feminine” literary tastes and interests. Yet Hamilton’s case implies that it was still possible for a woman to make a place for herself in its cultural milieu, if not in its pages. She was unquestionably prepared to adapt herself to the idea of literature as a metaphorical battlefield. In an 1812 letter to Macvey Napier, thanking him for his comments on a draft of her Series of Popular Essays, Hamilton pictures herself in all-out battle against the Edinburgh itself. As she tells Napier: I cannot better describe the effect of your letter than by comparing it to the Marseillaise Hymn, on the private soldiers, whose courage it animated to such a pitch, as to lead them instantly to storm the trenches that were deemed impregnable. Inspired by approbation so highly valued, my flagging courage is revived, and my spirits raised to such a pitch, that should Jeffrey open all his batteries against me, I shall stand the charge without dismay. (Hamilton 1812: f.21)

Of course, even as Hamilton playfully imagines herself mounting an assault on the citadel of The Edinburgh Review, both her decision to appropriate the Edinburgh’s characteristic metaphor of literary war-

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fare and the fact that her inspiration is Napier, who was not just a contributor to the magazine but also Jeffrey’s eventual successor as editor, makes clear the degree to which she is subtly positioning her work within the wider intellectual purview of the Edinburgh as she affects to attack it. Her doing so might seem misguided or quixotic, given the thoroughly masculine public face of the Edinburgh, but Hamilton’s place in Edinburgh’s intellectual society makes clear that the sort of cool domestic sociability that she imagines for her more exemplary female characters provides her with a model for inserting herself into a world that might, at first or even second glance, seem overtly hostile to her sort of feminine intellectual work. There are far more surviving glimpses of Hamilton in Edinburgh, where she settled in 1804, than in London, but most of them are brief and present her, conventionally enough, as a model of feminine decorum. There might have been a few eyebrows raised when in 1805 she took on, for six months, the task of setting up a programme of education for the daughters of the Earl of Lucan, as the Lucan marriage had originated in an adulterous affair and the scandal lingered. Miss Ewbank disapproved, and Agnes Porter, a governess with a strong interest in contemporary literature, reported rather unhappily to a friend that this seemed a risky move, even though, as she went on to note, Hamilton’s character in Edinburgh “is so highly estimated that every-one says it stands too high for calumny’s envenomed arrows ever to reach” (Martin 1988: 257). (Anne Grant also later complained – although in a letter than was never published – that in the book that resulted from the time in the Lucan household Hamilton seemed a little too pleased by her new aristocratic connections [Grant 1809c; the book is the 1806 Letters Addressed to the Daughter of a Nobleman].) Yet with that one minor exception, comments on Hamilton from that time present her as a more or less characterless embodiment of modest feminine reserve. As the position with Lucan testifies, Hamilton had by then built up a considerable public reputation – Porter reports that the earl had travelled all the way to Edinburgh to plead with Hamilton in person to reconsider when she initially turned him down – but precisely because, unlike Hays or Wollstonecraft, she avoided scandal and maintained a reputation for strict feminine decorum, the references to her that made it into print tend to remain politely uninformative. In her published letters, Anne Grant presents Hamilton as something of a Scottish salonnière, but has almost nothing specific

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to say about her role as a literary hostess other than that “at her house […] there really was little or no town gossip: the topics were literary or general” (J.P. Grant 1845: 2: 129–30). Henry Cockburn and Henry Holland are even more general in their memoirs, Cockburn merely citing Hamilton as an exemplar of female literary propriety (Cockburn [1856] 1988: 268), while Holland, writing late in his life, mentions her in passing, along with Grant and Jane Apreece (later Lady Davy), as one of the select Edinburgh hostesses at whose gatherings “the literary and scientific celebrities of the place were well blended with those of other kind [that is, political figures]” (Holland 1872: 87). Even the carefully edited letters in Benger’s biography conceal almost as much as they reveal about Hamilton’s social and intellectual life in Edinburgh, although they do make clear that she had, at least for a time, important intellectual connections with Dugald Stewart, who encouraged her move from fiction into historical biography, and emphasise the closeness of her friendships with literary men such as Hector Macneill. Yet when these decorously uninformative public accounts are rounded out by the very few of Hamilton’s letters that have survived in manuscript, it becomes clear that her range of acquaintance in Edinburgh would have read like a role-call of the city’s major cultural figures. She sent jokey Scots verses to Walter Scott, sought advice on finance from John Playfair, talked publishing and moral philosophy with Macvey Napier, mocked Maria Graham’s writing on India in letters to Harriet (or Henrietta) Liston, wife of the ambassador to the court at Constantinople, and sought the aid of Archibald Alison in resolving what was apparently a falling out with Dugald Stewart (Hamilton 1815; [1804?]; 1812; 1813: ff.82v–83; n.d.). Other sources, such as the manuscript letters that the young Henry Holland wrote his father from Edinburgh, reinforce this picture of Hamilton’s central place in the Edinburgh world; the glimpses that he offers of her range from what were apparently his own regular Sunday “fireside ev[enin]g[s]” at her house to the “very fashionable” large parties that she gave and to her frequent presence at dinners and parties hosted by Anne Grant, Jane Apreece, Eliza Fletcher and Francis Jeffrey, among others (Holland 1810–11: letters 1, 12). More importantly, Holland’s letters also make clear, in a couple of ways, how Hamilton’s Edinburgh social life shaded into literary work, both her own and that of others. First of all, Holland is unambiguous about the role that

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Hamilton played in shaping his first major publication, a long essay on Icelandic history and literature introducing the book that Sir George Mackenzie published in 1811 about his expedition to Iceland the previous summer. This preliminary “dissertation” is a substantial piece of literary scholarship, and according to Holland, Hamilton went through the manuscript first on her own and then again by reading it aloud with him, giving in both cases advice on both structure and style along with “liberal” praise. Holland was delighted: “I shall not allow a single line to go into the hands of the printer without her previous examination”, he proclaimed, then noted in passing the following July that Hamilton had also been reading and helping to correct proof sheets as they were sent back to him (Holland 1810–11: letters 8, 17). Clearly enough, the sort of intellectual exchange that Hamilton pursued by getting prominent figures such as Napier and Stewart to read her manuscripts was a reciprocal process, however inadequately such exchanges have been documented in published records. Although understandably Holland is most interested in Hamilton’s contribution to his own work, he also provides intriguing glimpses of Hamilton’s relationships with other literary figures, notably Francis Jeffrey. The references to Jeffrey invite particular attention, as outside of his enthusiastic 1808 review of The Cottagers of Glenburnie, there are very few traces of any direct intellectual connections between him and Hamilton. Anne Grant mentions an 1811 dinner party he hosted at which she, Hamilton and Henry Mackenzie were the only guests invited to meet a party of visiting Americans, including Jeffrey’s future wife, something that implies cordial social relations, if nothing else (J.P. Grant 1845: 2: 26). Rather more importantly, even if ambiguously, Henry Cockburn indicates that Jeffrey was aware of, if not necessarily reading, Hamilton’s books from the first years that she lived in Edinburgh. In his biography, he quotes Jeffrey as mentioning in passing in an 1804 letter to Francis Horner that “Betty’s book has not reached me yet. I mean to be merciful, if I touch her at all. To say the truth, I am sick of abusing” (Cockburn 1852: 1: 163). Cockburn’s identification of “Betty” as “Miss Hamilton” is necessary, as there is no indication that Hamilton was ever known by that version of her given name. On the contrary: the only diminutive that she appears to have used is “Eliza”, and even that appears in print only on the title page of the Hindoo Rajah and in Alexander Crawford’s dedication, suggesting that it was a name

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reserved for intimates and abandoned in more formal circumstances as she grew older. The somewhat discomfiting flippancy of this offhandedly informal reference to Hamilton, as well as the condescending word “merciful”, might therefore undercut the more flattering implication that Jeffrey took particular notice of her work, particularly since Agrippina – almost certainly the book in question, given the date – was never reviewed in the Edinburgh. Yet it would be wrong to read this as evidence that Hamilton’s work, with the limited exception of Glenburnie, was of no interest to Jeffrey and that she was almost entirely irrelevant to his professional life. For one thing, Jeffrey was notorious for his supposed disinclination to be fully pleased by anything: famously, his good friend Sydney Smith teased him by imagining the ways in which he would criticise the solar system, while Cockburn reports with some amusement his strictures on the Atlantic ocean (Holland and Austin 1855: 2: 22; Cockburn 1852: 1: 216). Moreover, while social contacts do not necessarily imply shared literary interests in the Edinburgh of this period – there is no question that Jeffrey was capable of maintaining polite social relationships with some of the writers whose work he publically mocked – there is also no reason to assume, the jarring reference to “Betty” notwithstanding, that he was particularly scornful of or hostile to Hamilton’s work. Even leaving aside the Glenburnie review, Holland makes it very clear that Hamilton was in fact more associated with the Edinburgh set than otherwise. In part, this was simply a matter of private friendship; for example, he states explicitly to his father that Hamilton and the more radical and openly political Eliza Fletcher were “very differently disposed towards” Jeffrey, Hamilton “favourably” and Fletcher “very much the reverse” (Holland 1810–11: letter 16). (It is worth noting in support of Holland’s shrewdness as an observer that Fletcher herself, in a letter written after Jeffrey’s death and after what had by then been a decades-long friendship, commented that “for many years of our early acquaintance I feared more than I liked him” [Richardson 1875: 280]). More

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suggestively, however, in January 1810,4 Holland called on Hamilton to pass along news from Maria Edgeworth, another of his literary friends, about her father’s indignation at Jeffrey’s review of his Essays on Professional Education. To his apparent mild embarrassment, he was forestalled by finding Jeffrey already with her, and “of course did not introduce the subject in his presence, though I rather conceive […] he would have been very anxious to have heard what Mr. E. thought of the Ed. Review” (Holland 1811: letter 7). Morning visits here shade into intellectual allegiances, with Jeffrey disrupting what Holland assumes will be the shared community of tastes between him, the Edgeworths, and Hamilton. Even more interesting than this thwarted attempt to enlist Hamilton’s sympathies against Jeffrey is a sidelong glimpse of the inextricability of social and professional elements in literary conversations between Hamilton and Jeffrey, as in 1811 Holland makes the Edinburgh’s harsh treatment of Lucy Aiken, still another of his friends, a running theme in his letters. Although he again refrains from raising the matter with Jeffrey himself, he reports to his father that in this case, Hamilton was “exceedingly indignant on the subject – and the more so as she had conceived that Jeffray [sic] had given her a sort of promise that Miss Aiken’s name should not be so introduced” (Holland 1810–11: letter 10). Slight and casual as this reference is, the implication that Jeffrey was discussing his reviews with Hamilton is worth attention, especially in the context of an earlier comment by Holland’s that Jeffrey had asked Jane Apreece to read the manuscript of his review of the letters of Madame du Deffand (Holland 1810–11: letter 3). Admittedly, giving the Deffand manuscript to Apreece can be read more as a move in a playfully baroque social game than as a demonstration of Jeffrey’s anxiety to hear her opinion: most directly, Jeffrey is paying a subtly flattering compliment to a woman who was one of Edinburgh’s foremost literary hostesses by inviting her opinion on his views of one of her most famous and influential French predecessors. The peculiar interest that the article might hold for Apreece 4

There is no postmark on the letter in question, which is dated Thursday January 25, with “1811” added in another hand. That, however, is clearly a mistake, as January 25 fell on a Thursday in 1810, not 1811. Internal evidence also establishes that the earlier year is correct: Holland not only refers to Thomas Brown’s taking over Dugald Stewart’s lectures, which happened in 1810, but the review that annoyed Edgeworth appeared in the October 1809 volume of The Edinburgh Review.

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does not stop there, however; as Holland also notes, Jeffrey uses it to pay a “striking elegant compliment” to John Playfair, whose close friendship with the much younger Apreece was the source of some gossipy comment at the time. (Little more than a month later, Holland was vehemently disputing reports that had reached his father that Apreece and Playfair were lovers.) There were also other ways in which the article potentially resonated in Jeffrey’s social world; it features a generally favourable contrast between Anne Grant’s letters and Madame du Deffand’s, something that might give an even more subtle, if less flattering, sense that he is using the review to clear several social debts simultaneously. The point here is not, however, whether Jeffrey took seriously the literary judgements of Jane Apreece or wanted to flatter or please either her or Anne Grant, but rather that one of his major reviews – he chose to include it in the volume of his collected essays published more than thirty years later – is inflected on a variety of levels by his social interactions with the literary women of Edinburgh. That might seem a limited claim, especially given the subject matter of the essay in question, but it does provide some grounds for accepting Holland’s apparent assumption that Hamilton believed – accurately or not – in the haziness or ambiguity of the divide between social and professional matters in Jeffrey’s literary life. What that point also suggests is that it was possible for Hamilton to see herself as a participant in the social and intellectual world of the Edinburgh reviewers. Indeed, given that her main subjects – education, moral theory and aesthetics – are also among those for which the Edinburgh became known, it would be surprising if she did not. Even if her work was neither published nor (with the significant exception of the MacClarty plot in Glenburnie) directly addressed in The Edinburgh Review, in taking up those subjects at all Hamilton is placing her work firmly in the context of the Edinburgh. This is a more significant point than it might initially appear, since Jeffrey and the Edinburgh were not merely reviewing philosophical works but actively participating in the wider public debate on those subjects. There is, quite simply, no way to differentiate clearly and cleanly between works by “professional” philosophers at work in Edinburgh in the first decade of the nineteenth century and the essays appearing around the same time in the Edinburgh Review. Indeed, Archibald Alison’s deeply influential essay on beauty was reprinted in the later

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nineteenth century with Jeffrey’s review article on it, in effect giving Jeffrey’s views on the subject the same intellectual weight as Alison’s. Even more significantly, Dugald Stewart addresses Jeffrey’s ideas directly in his Philosophical Essays, taking the objections that Jeffrey had made to moral philosophy as a discipline in his article on Stewart’s Life of Thomas Reid as the groundwork for the defence of his own ideas. What makes this point so important is that even as Stewart delicately mocks Jeffrey’s contentions – he professes himself pleased that his “friendly critic” has in his “very able article” enabled him to address objections without the appearance of merely setting up straw men for demolition (Stewart 1818: 27–28) – he engages with him more as a philosopher than as a reviewer. In doing so, he implicitly reinforces the point of critics such as Butler who see the Edinburgh as moving into the intellectual territory of the university. At the same time, in a point that is easy to overlook in arguments about the Edinburgh’s hostility to feminine literary culture, as it asserts the intellectual weight of the periodical press through its displacement and devaluation of the more conventionally feminine belles lettres, it also opens up supposedly “masculine” subjects to debate by those who had no access to the universities. Hamilton’s earlier willingness to seize the opportunity of attending lectures on scientific subjects when Moyes and others moved beyond the university into the public realm and opened their work to women anticipates her eagerness to engage in public as well as private conversation with the Edinburgh reviewers. Granted, there is no direct evidence that Jeffrey was reading Hamilton on moral or aesthetic theory. She, however, was clearly reading him, as she cites him directly (although not by name) in her own essay on Alison (Hamilton 1813: 1: 182). Significantly or not, Jeffrey also follows Hamilton’s earlier work on aesthetics (in Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education) in picking up on a striking image from Alison to argue that things become sublime through association rather than from their inherent qualities. All three compare the sound of thunder to that of a cart rolling over (or dumping) stones, and while that of course gives no solid grounds for arguing that Jeffrey had read Hamilton, it does make clear that they were at least reading Alison in the same way (Jeffrey and Alison 1879: 30, Hamilton 1803a: 324). Even without direct proof of the fact, however, Jeffrey’s social relations with Hamilton make it reasonable to assume

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that he was aware of her work on subjects of such strong interest to him, a point that is reinforced by Hamilton’s playful admission to Napier that she assumed Jeffrey would be not merely reading her but also advancing against her, guns blazing. At the very least, there is no question that they were reading the same things, commenting on them in a similar manner in both public and private venues, and thereby contributing to important debates in comparable ways. Hamilton never wrote for The Edinburgh Review, but there is no doubt that she was steeped in the cultural ideas that it explored in its pages. The links between Hamilton’s work and that of Jeffrey in the Edinburgh are perhaps most notable in their different but related responses to the moral philosophy of Dugald Stewart. Jeffrey, as already noted, was a sceptical reader of Stewart, but his main objection had nothing to do with any hair-splitting over content; rather, it was focused on questions of practical utility. Where he and Stewart agree is in the assumption that an informed and educated populace is necessary to the proper functioning of society, and where they differ is in the role that moral philosophy, as opposed to ethical instruction, has to play in achieving that goal. Jeffrey’s argument is that a metaphysics of the mind is irrelevant to social behaviour since an understanding of how the mind works can never be anything more than speculative and that such refined speculation contributes nothing in any case to the development of moral sentiments: we feel the same way whether or not we reason on the origins of those feelings. In effect, he is making a case for bringing philosophy out of the university classroom and into the wider public world. Of course, in calling for such a move, he was not differentiating himself from Stewart in any fundamental way, since the university teaching of moral philosophy, at least in the late eighteenth-century Scottish context, was very much about society and civil practice. As Dugald Stewart’s most recent biographer points out, “Stewart was perceived as being an effective and inspiring teacher of moral philosophy in large part because he was a good man”, something that at the time was not seen at all as an irrelevance in assessing his philosophical work, as “the principal aim of professors of philosophy and history in the eighteenth century was not to develop tools of impartial analysis but to make their students wiser and better men and so help to improve the social order” (Macintyre 2003: 155, 157). Indeed, Stewart himself made this point very clearly in the introduction to the handbook on moral philosophy that he produced in 1793

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for his undergraduate students: “The object of Moral Philosophy”, he declares, “is to ascertain the general rules of a wise and virtuous conduct in life, in so far as these rules may be discovered by the unassisted light of nature” (Stewart 1793: 12). Granted, Macintyre notes that this idea was changing by the early part of the nineteenth century, but the point remains that Stewart, no less than Jeffrey, saw philosophy as a practical discipline, even if Stewart was far more inclined to ground practice in theory. In his response to Jeffrey’s argument for jettisoning what he dismisses as airily unprofitable speculation, Stewart points out that a similar argument could be made against doing any work in the physical sciences, since we are acted upon by forces such as gravity or velocity, whether we understand them or not. If it is self-evidently ridiculous to use the fact that a phenomenon acts independently of whether we understand it or not as an argument for intellectual lassitude in the hard sciences, Stewart insists that it should be equally discounted as an excuse for avoiding an investigation of the mind. Second and far more importantly, he declares that it is simply untrue that we cannot use reason to shape feeling or emotion. As Stewart explains, the “anatomy of the mind” can be at least as useful as a study of the body: What has medicine yet effected in increasing the bodily powers of man, in remedying his diseases, or in lengthening life, which can bear a moment’s comparison with the prodigies effected by Education, in invigorating his intellectual capacities; in forming his moral habits; in developing his sensitive principles; and in unlocking all the hidden sources of internal enjoyment? […] So far as it is injudicious and hurtful, it [education] proceeds upon errors and prejudices, which juster views of the Philosophy of Mind can alone correct. Would it not necessarily be rendered more systematical and enlightened, if the powers and faculties on which it operated were more scientifically examined, and better understood? (Stewart 1818: 43–44)

Perhaps a little surprisingly from a twenty-first-century perspective, in this dispute between Stewart the university professor and Jeffrey the magazine editor, Stewart makes no attempt to outflank Jeffrey by a defence of “pure” research that is inaccessible to the wider, nonspecialist public but rather insists that his apparently rarefied knowledge is essential to practical lived experience. What Stewart is arguing for here is the centrality of moral philosophy to the establishment of a properly functioning social order, and it is in that respect that Elizabeth Hamilton aligns herself with him and makes a case, contrary to Jeffrey in specifics but very much in line with the common ground

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shared by Stewart and The Edinburgh Review in her larger, practical reformist agenda. The version of moral and educational philosophy underpinning Hamilton’s work is one that is thoroughly grounded in the Scottish intellectual tradition (see Price 2002: 181–86 and Russell 1986: 24–25 for excellent discussions of this point), but what is of most interest in this context is her situating her work precisely in the crux that differentiates Jeffrey from Stewart. While the intellectual territory that she claims for herself touches on the vexed and vexing issue of moral sense theory, Hamilton neatly sidesteps the more tangled elements of the debate and narrows her focus to the question of whether or not understanding the basis of morality can affect the way it is taught. Lord Kames, Hamilton’s first major influence, had answered with an emphatic no, praising providence for ensuring that women’s instinct was all that was necessary to jumpstart the moral sense in infants (Woodhouselee 1807: 1: 207). Stewart, as the dispute with Jeffrey indicates, differs strongly from Kames on this point; even as he concedes that “[t]he decisions of the understanding” with respect to “moral truth, differ from those which relate to a mathematical theorem, or to the result of a chemical experiment, inasmuch as they are always accompanied with some feeling or emotion of the heart”, he insists nonetheless “that it is the intellectual judgment which is the ground-work of the feeling, and not the feeling of the judgment” (Stewart 1818: 111).5 This is a point that Hamilton uses as the foundation of her arguments about education, as she sees the lack of "intellectual judgment" applied not just to one’s own moral feelings but, more importantly, to the attempt to inculcate those feelings in others, as a fatal flaw in contemporary educational systems. Where 5

The first edition of this work was published in 1810; obviously, it was not a direct influence on Hamilton’s earlier educational writing, but it is still worth quoting in this context as the ideas are continuous with Stewart’s earlier work. Indeed, Hamilton’s ideas chimed so closely with Stewart’s that after reading Philosophical Essays while working on her own Popular Essays (1813), she wrote her friend Dr. S– in some dismay that she found in several passages “the same thought […] expressed in very nearly the same word” as hers, obliging her to revise to avoid the appearance of plagiarism [Benger 1818: 2: 113–114; the letter is dated 1809, presumably an error on Benger’s part, as context makes it clear that the essays were in print and that Hamilton was not reading a manuscript copy]. On the other hand, Hamilton adds, she is proud of the fact that she is following the same intellectual track as Stewart, even if “at an immeasurable distance” (Benger 1818: 1: 114).

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Hamilton differed from both Jeffrey and Stewart – and indeed from almost every other thinker of her day – was that she insisted that such a transformation of society could be achieved only through the education of women, since if mothers did not know how the mind was formed, all children would be at risk of absorbing prejudices and false principles from the moment of their birth. Stewart was prepared to concede this point, but he tended to read it as grounds for social pessimism, writing gloomily in a passage quoted by Hamilton about the impossible task faced by those responsible for educating children: To watch over the associations which they [children] form in their tender years; to give them early habits of mental activity; to rouse their curiosity, and to direct it to proper objects; to exercise their ingenuity and invention; to cultivate in their minds a turn for speculation, and, at the same time preserve their attention alive to objects around them; to awaken their attention to the beauties of nature, and to inspire them with a relish for intellectual enjoyment; these form but a part of the business of education, and yet the execution of even this part requires an acquaintance with the general principles of our nature, which seldom falls to the share of those to whom the instruction of youth is commonly entrusted. (Stewart 1792–1827: 1: 24; Hamilton 1803a: 2: 8)

Hamilton’s response is both to insist that women can in fact be educated to be fit for this task and to warn, in very strong terms, of the negative consequences of failing to do so. All five of the major works that Hamilton produced after 1800 – Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education; Memoirs of the Life of Agrippina, Wife of Germanicus; The Cottagers of Glenburnie; Letters Addressed to the Daughter of a Nobleman and A Series of Popular Essays – can be read as attempts to build upon Stewart’s ideas to demonstrate the vital importance of an understanding of the philosophy of mind by women of all ages and classes and the dangers of assuming that conduct can be based upon precept or good instincts rather than properly reasoned action. Educating Women: Eighteenth-Century Debates Of course, in attempting to make a case for rethinking women’s education, Hamilton was not just taking on her Edinburgh contemporaries but was also entering a deeply complicated debate that had raged throughout the eighteenth century and that inevitably led her into

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questions of class, culture, and politics. While there had always been at least some learned women amongst the aristocracy (see Labalure 1980, Kelly 1984, and Ballard 1752), the question of what sort of training was needed for girls of the middle and upper classes – education of the working classes was, throughout the eighteenth century, a separate issue – was one that remained a constantly vexed point for eighteenth-century writers. By the end of the century, it was usual for even the most conservative writers to insist that the education of British middle-class women was an essential mark of an advanced, modern society, and men such as John Bennett, William Alexander, and Thomas Gisborne found in what they presented as their decorously and unthreateningly well-educated female compatriots a measure of their own cultural superiority (see Bennett 1787; Alexander 1779; Gisborne 1797). Such self-congratulatory rhetoric did not, however, prevent considerable and increasing confusion about what precisely constituted a good female education, confusion arising mainly from uncertainty about the purpose that instruction was supposed to serve. For boys, there was much less trouble: all the main educational theorists from Locke on agreed that the object of education was to shape the child into a reasoning, morally responsible individual able to act for himself in adult society. There was no reason, of course, that this goal could not apply to girls as well, and feminist readings of Locke established, at least a generation ago, that Locke himself was willing to accept this idea with just a few caveats (see for example Eisenstein 1981: 47–48; Butler 1978: 148–49). Even though Locke presupposes a male student in his educational theory, he readily admits, especially in his correspondence, that there is no reason that girls as well as boys could not be rationally educable subjects. The main difference that he insists upon, as he explains in the context of a detailed commentary on girls’ education in a letter to a Mrs. Clarke, is that because girls must care more for their appearance, they should not participate quite as readily in rough physical activity. In Locke’s words, “making a little allowance for beauty and some few other considerations […] the manner of breeding of boys and girls, especially in their younger years, I imagine should be the same” (Locke [1693] 1968: 344–46, 117n). Although relatively unusual in this openness to female education, he was not unique in making this point; at the other end of the century, the historian Catharine Macaulay went even further, stating unambiguously that

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“the same rules of education in all respects are to be observed to the female as well as to the male children” (Macaulay 1790: 142). Her flat insistence upon this point is all the more remarkable as it is made in the context of a dizzyingly strenuous programme of intellectual training. A child educated according to Macaulay’s system would begin her education in her pre-teens with Latin grammar, geography, French, and arithmetic; when she finished at twenty-one, she would be able to read and write four languages in addition to having a solid grounding in disciplines ranging from astronomy to history to metaphysics. As Mary Wollstonecraft notes drily in her review, “The man, indeed, who at thirty, has read with attention the books here recommended has made good use of his time” (Wollstonecraft 1790: 245), emphasising that even if Macaulay were innovative in her insistence upon girls’ intellectual abilities, the range and ambition of her programme implicitly limited it to the social and intellectual elite. Yet even among the leisured classes, few chose to follow Locke’s or Macaulay’s advice about training girls’ intellects in the same way as boys’. There are two main reasons for the failure to do so, the first and more obvious being the deeply engrained eighteenthcentury suspicion of learned women. A near-constant theme in eighteenth-century accounts of educated women, from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu at one end of the century to Mary Somerville at the other, is the neglect or active discouragement of talented girls’ intellectual tastes. Even when parents were more or less sympathetic to their daughters’ interest in learning, they still worried about the impact that such predilections might have on friends and – especially – potential suitors. Scottish and English educational practice, different in many respects, are similar here. Hamilton’s sardonic comments to Hector Macneill about Scottish fears of “singularity” chime closely not only with Mrs. Marshall’s warning to her “to avoid any display of superior knowledge, by which she might be subjected to the imputation of pedantry” (Benger 1818: 1: 50) but also with the ideas of some distinguished mid-century Scots who wrote educational advice to their daughters. Alexander Monro, for example, the first Professor of Anatomy at the University of Edinburgh, took the time in the late 1730s to write out letters of advice for his daughter Margaret, which he ensured that she studied by having her transcribe and correct them. Yet while he encourages her to read carefully and thoughtfully and notes that her studies in Latin and French should help her to do so, he

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warns her to have “Sense enough to know that you are not to display any of this sort of Knowledge, or to make use of any uncommon words, without resolving to be envied, criticised, and laughed at” (Monro 1739: 37–33). (Intriguingly, in Margaret Monro’s copy of the handbook, from which this pagination is taken, this passage is lightly crossed out in pencil.) A few decades later and far more famously, another Scottish physician, John Gregory, warned in A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters that when in public women should Be even cautious in displaying your good sense. It will be thought you assume a superiority over the rest of the company. – But if you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound secret, especially from the men, who generally look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts, and a cultivated understanding. A man of real genius and candour is far superior to this meanness. But such a one will seldom fall in your way; and if by accident he should, do not be anxious to shew the full extent of your knowledge. (Gregory 1774: 31–32)

Gregory here makes explicit the unspoken assumption underlying the advice of Monro and Mrs. Marshall: a woman’s education is not only useless but actively counterproductive if it makes her less attractive to potential suitors. This argument underscores the other reason that Macaulay’s ideas on education remained a minority view: unlike their brothers, girls were not expected to become the fully autonomous, responsible citizens that a careful training of the intellect was supposed to produce. On the contrary, the most important lesson that a woman had to learn, according to most of the influential conduct guides produced throughout the century, was how to be a dutiful daughter and, eventually and ideally, a properly deferential wife. In the notoriously misogynist terms of one of the earliest and most popular conduct books (it ran through at least fourteen editions in the eighteenth century and was also frequently excerpted and anthologised), the first Marquess of Halifax warns his twelve-year-old daughter Elizabeth that her entire education should prepare her to be dutifully submissive to whatever man she eventually marries: You must lay it down for a foundation in general, that there is inequality in the sexes, and that for the better economy of the world, the men, who were to be the lawgivers, had the larger share of reason bestowed upon them; by which means your sex is the better prepar’d for the compliance that is necessary for the better performance of those duties which seem to be more properly assigned to it […] your sex wanteth our reason

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for your conduct, and our strength for your protection: ours wanteth your gentleness to soften, and to entertain us. (Halifax 1969: 277–78)

There is a fundamental problem with this advice – beyond the obvious one of its casual indifference to women’s interests – in that it is, on a very basic level, logically inconsistent with assumptions made elsewhere in the book. What Halifax and his innumerable followers wanted were women willing to abandon any claims to judgment of their own even while having sufficient awareness of and interest in the larger social order to place a comparatively abstract good, such as their husbands’ public reputations, over the more pressing one of selfinterest. The bulk of Halifax’s short volume consists of advice on managing bad husbands, advice that usually requires the woman to exercise considerable self-restraint and rational, dispassionate judgment. There is considerable irony in the fact that the imagined husbands who fill the pages of Halifax’s book are gamblers, drunkards, or fools, and that it is the women, despite their lesser “share of reason,” who must prop up the egos and the public good names of the men who are supposed to provide them with reason and strength. Yet the theoretical problems with educating women to be good wives, rather than rational members of society, were no less serious for writers who were considerably more optimistic than Halifax about women’s chances of finding an ideal husband. That, at least, was the conclusion drawn by late eighteenth-century feminist critics of Rousseau’s Émile, quite probably the single most influential and controversial book on education to be published during the century (for a thoughtful twentieth-century critique of Rousseau’s ideology of female education, see Martin 1985: 38–69). Most of the volume is, of course, dedicated to the upbringing of Émile, the perfect man, perhaps in part because there is very little to be said about Sophie, the perfect woman. Her parents have quite deliberately left her mind a blank; as the reader is informed, her education is neither showy nor neglected; she has taste without deep study, talent without art, judgment without learning. Her mind knows little but it is trained to learn; it is welltilled soil ready for the sower. She has read no book but Barème and Telemachus […] What charming ignorance! Happy is he who is destined to be her tutor. She will not be her husband’s teacher but his scholar; far from seeking to control his tastes, she will share them. She will suit him far better than a blue-stocking and he will have the pleasure of teaching her everything. (Rousseau [1762] 1974: 360)

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Sophie’s mind, no less than her body, is to be groomed and prepared for her husband’s pleasure and possession; she is Locke’s tabula rasa not only in early childhood, but right up to the brink of adulthood, a condition that Locke himself would have insisted was impossible for any human being. According to him, the mind inevitably acquires habits and prejudices, and these prejudices are in fact all the more deeply rooted in the untrained mind since they are not combated by any rational thought, an argument that Hamilton was later to use as the basis for many of her conclusions on female education. It is true that Rousseau is willing to admit that Sophie has some acquired prejudices – her fastidious distaste for dirt or mess, for example, or above all, what he insists is her necessary and natural predilection for domestic life – but this concession only makes his assertion that she can reach adulthood without any strong tastes or prejudices that might inconvenience a future husband all the more disingenuous. A number of Hamilton’s female contemporaries objected strongly to Rousseau’s picture of Sophie; most famously, of course, Mary Wollstonecraft launched a witheringly flat-out attack on it in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Other writers were more oblique but hardly less devastating, with Frances Burney making a particularly sharp critique of the whole notion that women could be educated into blank willingness to become embodiments of their husbands’ tastes. Although she does not mention Rousseau directly, the troubled reflections of her heroine’s father in her third novel, Camilla, form a clear rebuttal to Rousseau’s fantasy of Sophie. “The proper education of a female”, Burney makes Mr. Tyrold lament, either for use or for happiness, is still to seek, still a problem beyond human solution; since its refinement, or its negligence, can only prove to her a good or an evil, according to the humour of the husband into whose hands she may fall. If fashioned to shine in the great world, he may deem the metropolis all turbulence; if endowed with every resource for retirement, he may think the country distasteful. And though her talents, her acquirements, may in either of these cases be set aside, with an only silent regret of wasted youth and application; the turn of mind which they have induced, the appreciation which they have taught of time, of pleasure, or of utility, will have nurtured inclinations and opinions not so ductile to new sentiments and employments, and either submission becomes a hardship, or resistance generates dissention. (Burney [1796] 1983: 357)

Mr. Tyrold’s tentative solution to this dilemma is to educate his daughters with “as much simplicity as is compatible with instruction,

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[and] as much docility for various life as may accord with invariable principles” (Burney [1796] 1983: 357), a programme that, as Jane Spencer observes, attempts “to reconcile opposites: to create women of judgment, with their personalities left blank for their unknown husbands to fill in later” (Spencer 1986: 164). The novel also emphasises the very real dangers of this educational plan for the women who receive it: Camilla is sweet, naïve and docile, ready to follow implicitly the advice of her lover, but unsurprisingly she is also ready to obey anyone else whose judgment that, rightly or wrongly, she respects. The result is near-tragedy rather than the smooth path to a happily-ever-after marriage that such an education was supposed to produce, making the novel as a whole a dramatic critique of the notion that a woman’s moral and intellectual life should (or even can) be an uncomplicated reflection of the tastes and views of her husband. Burney’s attack on Rousseau makes clear her (unsurprising) assumption that docile blankness is far from being a feminine ideal, but her book does not, in any way, challenge the idea that women needed to be educated into a taste for domestic life. On the contrary: Burney’s work is shaped by an ideology of domestic femininity that was becoming more and more deeply entrenched by the end of the eighteenth century, not least because it was deeply and centrally important to questions of class as well as gender. As Nancy Armstrong influentially argued in the 1980s, it was in fact “the new domestic woman”, rather than the middle-class man, “who first encroached upon aristocratic culture and seized authority from it” (Armstrong 1987: 59). According to Armstrong, the figure of the demure, retiring domestic angel functions in much of the writing of this era as a moral counterweight to aristocratic decadence and so gives ideas about femininity (if not the women themselves) a political charge. Yet these polemical arguments about class could also translate into an implicit case for individual women’s social importance, as the absorption of middle-class women into the domestic sphere made them both the antithesis of and the antidote for the corruptions of the wider public world. The most obvious way in which they could be represented as counteracting public corruption returns us to Kames, Stewart, and Hamilton: women were the primary early influence on their young sons, and their moral example thereby provided the groundwork for middle-class male character formation. (Rousseau, notoriously, dealt with this issue by insisting that Émile be removed from both mother

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and wet-nurse as quickly as biologically possible.) As even the more radical work on women’s education from the period demonstrates, the idea of maternal duty could provide a solid, relatively safe grounding to support arguments for the intellectual training of woman. Even Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, states unequivocally in her first book that “to prepare a woman to fulfil the important duties of wife and mother” is the main goal of education and then reiterates in the Rights of Woman that “when I treat of the peculiar duties of women […] I do not mean to insinuate that they should be taken out of their families”. Her twist on this point, however, is her accompanying insistence that “the regulation of a family, […] the education of children” requires “strength both of body and mind” (Wollstonecraft 1787: 58, 1994: 134). Not only would a woman trained into being an amiable blank have trouble as a wife, in other words; even worse, she would also be catastrophic as a mother, a point that Wollstonecraft makes concisely and effectively in her famously scathing picture of a helpless widow in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Wollstonecraft 1994: 116–17) and that Hamilton echoes in her own educational writing (Hamilton 1803a: 2: 371–75). Admittedly, the idea that women must be educated into rationality in order to be effective mothers might not seem that much of a concession. Even the conservative Hannah More, however little she was inclined to agree with Wollstonecraft on most points, took for granted that “she who has the best regulated mind will, other things being equal, have the best regulated family” (More 1799: 2: 5–6). In her insistence that domesticity and a trained, rational mind were not just compatible but in fact inextricable, Hamilton was thus not being particularly unusual, something that might explain in part why her work on educational theory has not yet attracted as much interest as that of her more flamboyant and famous contemporaries. Yet it is easy enough to make the case that she was no less innovative or ambitious in her ideas than Wollstonecraft and her followers. Indeed, Hamilton herself implies, perhaps with some deliberate provocation, that her ideas on female education were more radical than those of writers whom she describes as “champions for sexual equality” (who presumably include Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays, though she does not mention names). Such writers, she proclaims, are merely “acquiesc[ing] in the idea of man’s superiority in all wisdom and perfection” (Hamilton 1803a: 1: 252) and have absorbed a masculine tendency to

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undervalue the contributions of women. “I know not”, Hamilton writes, again with a delicately provocative edge, whether the generalisation of ideas be more requisite to a minister of the state than to the mistress of a family. How necessary to the former, has been displayed by the elegant and judicious author of the “Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind;” [Dugald Stewart] its use to the latter is a more becoming theme to the Author of this humble performance. (Hamilton 1803a: 2: 369)

Hamilton does not take what might seem to be the next logical step in this argument, that if the type of mind necessary to run a household effectively is identical to that required to run a political department, a woman might as well do one as the other. Even so, her arguments make clear not just that her idea of domestic management is both sophisticated and complex but also her belief that all human beings, women as well as men, must be able to take moral and intellectual responsibility for their own ideas and actions. The issue, for Hamilton, is not just that a woman will be a bad mother if she does not have a rational mind, but also, and far more generally, that society as a whole is damaging itself by not recognising that a rationally functioning mind is not a gendered quality but rather is essential to all human beings. From Rome to Glenburnie: Women and the Social Order In many ways, Hamilton’s most successful post-1800 writing fits in easily enough with the female canon of the day. Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education has obvious links to conduct books by Jane West, Hannah More, and many others, while The Cottagers of Glenburnie can be read either as a national tale or a didactic instruction manual for the working classes, along the lines of More’s Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–98) or Mary Leadbetter’s Cottage Dialogues (1811). The main point that differentiates Letters and Glenburnie from their competitors in these popular genres is Hamilton’s unapologetic immersion in the moral philosophy of Stewart and others, something that leads her to very different conclusions from any of her female contemporaries. As just argued, by the opening years of the nineteenth century the idea that women had an impact on the moral direction of society, both in their own behaviour

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and in the lessons that they gave to their children, was hardly new or radical, but Hamilton’s claim is not just that women need to learn and practice “proper” behaviour but, even more importantly, that they have to understand the principles underlying the rules that they absorb. Passive obedience is so far from being a virtue in Hamilton’s view that she dramatises, in all of her non-fiction, the supposedly devastating results caused by women who are incapable of understanding the reasons that they should act in a given way, even if they accept all that they have been taught. This argument is what links the 1804 Memoirs of Agrippina, Wife of Germanicus, which is in many ways Hamilton’s most ambitious book, to the novels and conduct writing that come before and after. As Hamilton makes clear in her preface, her decision to jettison temporarily the relatively safe “feminine” options of conduct and fiction for history and biography arises not so much from an interest in classical history for its own sake as from her desire to use history as a case study to test the claims that the moral philosophers make about the development of the mind and passions. Fiction, she insists, can never be used effectively to explore such questions since however artfully an author uses her imagined situations “to promote the reception of a favourite theory”, such writing “can never be considered as a confirmation” of the “truth” of the theory in question (Hamilton 1804: 1: ix). According to Hamilton, Agrippina is an ideal subject for such a task, despite necessarily dragging her biographer into the “masculine” world of the classics. First of all, her remoteness in time and place removes any of the delicacy that Hamilton takes for granted that writers will feel about exploring the shades of character and conduct of the more recently dead; second, and no less importantly, because her prominent social position – the first three Roman emperors were, respectively, her grandfather, her adoptive father-in-law, and her son – ensures that there is sufficient information about her to provide material for a book. Even more usefully, however, Agrippina’s life involves strikingly dramatic moral contrasts. Agrippina herself was famous for her virtuous if lonely refusal to accede to the moral decay of early imperial Rome and for her self-destructive resistance to the murderous politics of the reign of the emperor Tiberius; contemporaries praised her as a throwback to the days of austere Republican morality. This rather chilly virtue is thrown into relief not only by the decadence of her society but also by the flamboyantly inventive vices

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of her mother, siblings, and children. As Hamilton notes, possibly with some understatement, her subject is thus well calculated to provide the “amusement” expected by a reader who “sit[s] down to peruse the memoirs of a fellow being” as well as the sort of instruction that Hamilton hopes to provide (Hamilton 1804: 1: xiii). Moreover, even though the vast differences between Rome in the first century and early nineteenth-century Britain might seem to pose obvious difficulties in using Agrippina’s story as a model for a middle-class Scottish girl in 1804, Hamilton finds a way of addressing those issues that situates her even more firmly in the thought of Dugald Stewart and the world of the Edinburgh Enlightenment. “If human nature be our object”, she writes, “it is needless to confine ourselves to rank, or sex, or period of society, for we shall find it in every clime and situation invariably the same” (Hamilton 1804: 1: xxiv). Out of context, this is a claim that might read, at best, like naïve cultural relativism, but her argument is in fact grounded in Stewart’s ideas of conjectural history. He states flatly, in an article that first appeared in the 1815 Encyclopedia Britannica, that “the capacities of the human mind have been in all ages the same” and then goes on to argue that the application of this idea “to the natural or theoretical history of society […] is the peculiar glory of the latter half of the eighteenth century, and forms a characteristical feature in its philosophy” (Stewart 1854: 1: 69–70). Given this idea, it is hardly surprising that Stewart admired the sections of Agrippina that he read in draft and that, as Hamilton reports, he encouraged her not only to continue with the book but to produce a series of biographies, on subjects as diverse as John Locke, Seneca, and Elizabeth of Bohemia (Benger 1818: 2: 58–59). An argument that human nature trumps culture does not, however, imply that either Stewart or Hamilton see cultural difference as being in any way irrelevant or illusory. On the contrary, Hamilton readily acknowledges the cultural gap between Agrippina and her readers, but suggests that that gap is less a barrier to understanding than it is a measure of the ways that culturally determined concepts of femininity distort women’s “natural” character. Agrippina might share a common human nature with the nineteenth-century women reading about and learning from her, but she is also a product of a system of values that is, in the eyes of those nineteenth-century readers, both deeply foreign and obviously flawed. As such, she provides the grounds not (or not just) for a smug

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demonstration of the inadequacies of the past (an obvious risk in writing of this sort) but also, and rather more significantly, for an insight into what Hamilton insists are the ways in which women are inevitably damaged by an uncritical absorption of what their society says is right and wrong. Granted, Hamilton states unequivocally that Agrippina’s greatest disadvantage is not anything that Rome teaches her but rather what it doesn’t: she is not a Christian, and Hamilton insists that it is impossible for women to achieve their full potential outside of a Christian context. Her basis for that argument is a little unusual, however; she sets out her case in Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education as she argues that by “making the purification of the heart, and the subjugation of the passions alike the duty of all” Christianity shatters “the barrier which pride and prejudice had placed between the sexes”. By way of contrast, even though women of the Roman republic were able, through the public-spirited example of their male compatriots, to attain “high notions of honour and virtue” Hamilton argues that “the improvement was casual, the effect transient” as “the virtue that is merely the effect of imitation, cannot be expected to survive its model” (Hamilton 1803a: 1: 244, 243). She illustrates this point through her interpretation of the character of Agrippina, who achieves nothing, in Hamilton’s view, despite being in almost all respects a paragon. Hamilton’s Agrippina possesses not only the conventionally feminine virtues of chastity, modesty, and reserve but also the unwavering public spirit of a Roman republican, so much so that, as Hamilton reports without any particular censure, it is Agrippina’s “superior spirit” that rouses Germanicus from the practice of his “gentle virtues” to the “greater energy” needed to fight his country’s battles (Hamilton 1804: 1: 116). These public virtues have their limits, admittedly; when Agrippina urges Germanicus to overthrow Tiberius and restore Roman liberty, he (sounding rather like a disenchanted French aristocrat looking back on 1789 from the perspective of 1794 or 1799) refuses on the grounds that “the minds of his countrymen were too much debased to understand or to enjoy the blessings of civil liberty; and that if their chains were at that moment broken, the only use they would make of freedom would be to substitute the despotism of anarchy for that of an individual” (Hamilton 1804: 1: 228). The point is not, however, that Hamilton is slipping into political allegory rather than historical analysis or even

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that Germanicus possesses a degree of cautious statesmanship that his impetuous, politically naïve wife lacks. Overthrowing Tiberius might do no good, but not overthrowing him leads to Germanicus’ death, the destruction of his family, and to a social spiral into anarchy and terror. There is simply no good choice available, and what is interesting about that is what Hamilton implies is the reason for this hopeless situation. Private virtue, as practiced by Agrippina, has no wider public meaning or significance; precisely because her virtue is the mere effect of imitation, rather than the result of a “subjugation of the passions”, neither she nor anybody else in her world is able to establish a groundwork of moral principle to underpin the maintenance or restoration of social order. One might, of course, raise questions about Hamilton’s effectiveness in exploring the impact of culture on character and vice versa. Even though Jane Rendall, one of the few modern scholars to have written in any detail about Agrippina, demonstrates the sophistication of Hamilton’s use of her classical sources – mainly Tacitus – and her debt to eighteenth-century historiographical arguments about the Tacitean tradition (Rendall 1998: 69), the Rome that Hamilton describes can at times seem rather jarringly like the anti-jacobin version of Revolutionary-era Britain, as adherents of an older value system confront a new, alarmingly decadent, standard of behaviour. When we are told, for example, that the news of her mother’s banishment for adultery left Agrippina torn between her instinctive horror “at the idea of such impurity” and a strong sense of “filial piety” that made it painful to “be obliged to condemn the conduct of a parent” (Hamilton 1804: 1: 129), we might be reading about any domestic heroine of the later eighteenth century. In important respects, it is not surprising that that would be the case; as Gary Kelly has argued, Hamilton is following a practice used by a number of Enlightenment commentators on the political culture of the day, that of “defamiliarising the present through associations with the past” (Kelly 1993: 269). At the same time, however, Hamilton is quite prepared to risk inconsistency and to show Agrippina, in other contexts, as being thoroughly foreign in her ideas and attitudes. When, for example, Agrippina’s sister Julia follows her mother and namesake into exile and disgrace, Hamilton comments that Agrippina “considered not the errors of Julia with the horror excited by the idea of crimes”, then adds drily that “though she herself offered up her vows at the shrine of

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Minerva, she had no right to blame her sister for choosing a patroness in the Cyprian goddess. Both were objects of worship equally legitimate” (Hamilton 1814: 1: 199). The central point here is not that Hamilton is, with rather tiresome predictability, condemning the sexual mortality of ancient Rome and endorsing female chastity as an absolute, culturally transcendent virtue. Rather than showing Agrippina as a fully and unequivocally virtuous alternative to those Romans who embrace “the Cyprian goddess”, Hamilton presents her chastity as a merely personal, private choice, good in itself, perhaps, but irrelevant not just to wider society but even to her own family. If eighteenth-century celebrations of female virtue and chastity took for granted that women influenced their children by the shining force of their exemplary characters, Hamilton demurely holds up Agrippina as a glaring counter-example, as her famous chastity and maternal devotion did not, according to all the contemporary sources, have any notably improving effect on her own children. Of those who survived the murderous politics of Tiberius’ reign, Agrippina the younger – mother of the emperor Nero – managed to become notorious quite independently of her son’s exploits by marrying and very probably murdering her uncle, the emperor Claudius. Both she and her two sisters were also suspected of committing incest with their one surviving brother, the emperor Caligula, who of course became something of a byword for the range and inventiveness of his own vices. Hamilton’s answer to the apparent problem of this dramatic failure of the force of feminine example is not (or not only) the straightforward one of regretting that the children in question did not have the option of turning to Christianity. Hamilton might regret openly that her virtuous Romans had no opportunity to read the Bible (see for example Hamilton 1804: 2: 174), but she seems almost as much inclined to regret that Agrippina lacked the opportunity of studying Thomas Reid or Dugald Stewart, leaving her tragically if necessarily without any fully theorised understanding of the impact of prejudice and false association on the passions. Even so, Hamilton’s Agrippina is an instinctive if highly avant-garde disciple of the principles endorsed by Stewart; after returning from Germany to Rome and reuniting with her eldest sons, she coolly plans to “acquaint herself” with their “dispositions” and then “to lay down plans for the formation of their characters” (Hamilton 1804: 2: 94–95). Yet her sound educational instincts are as

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insufficient as her personal inclination towards chastity and both conjugal and maternal devotion. Accustomed to violence and horror from their earliest childhood, and with no counteracting principle of virtuous action other than family pride and a fixed sense of the glory of power, Agrippina’s children are, Hamilton implies, morally and mentally unable to gain anything from their mother’s instruction and example. Even if Agrippina resembles, at times, a heroine out of Burney or Radcliffe straying bemusedly through the blood, treachery, and licentious sexuality of Tiberius’ Rome, it is possible to argue that the reason is not so much any failure of Hamilton’s historiography as it is a reflection of the philosophical didacticism driving her narrative. Devoney Looser has demonstrated that early modern British women writers had “various and often competing relationships to historical discourse” (Looser 2000: 7), and in Hamilton’s case, that relationship is mediated through Stewart’s assumptions about the moral and psychological elements of the human character that transcend cultural or historical difference. What Agrippina dramatises for Hamilton’s early nineteenth-century readers is not so much the obvious and conventional message about the importance of female chastity to the proper functioning of society as it is the slightly more unsettling one that those qualities are completely inadequate unless the women in question have a clear understanding of why and how their moral choices are inflected by and in turn shape the culture as a whole. As a work of moral philosophy filtered through a study of ancient Rome, Agrippina is very much in line with the sort of conjectural history endorsed by Stewart and others. What makes it original is its focus on a strong, melodramatically suffering female character. In this attention to Agrippina, Hamilton is not quite following what Greg Kucich has argued was the more mainstream tendency of “Romantic feminist historiography”, that is, “mobiliz[ing] ‘sympathising tenderness’ for the historical plight of women” (Kucich 2002: 4); the difference lies in the way that sympathy for Agrippina is shaped less by her disadvantaged status as a woman than by her inability to find a way to make her private virtue culturally relevant. This domestic woman manqué is to be pitied not so much for the violent circumstances of her life as she is for her society’s failure to recognise that its assumption that “feminine” virtues are irrelevant to the management of the state is condemning it to an inevitable decline from individual moral disorder into political anarchy. “In enumerating

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the causes which contributed to the vigour and elevation of the Roman character”, Hamilton writes in her sketch of the social history of the Republican era, we must not omit to mention the influence of female manners as one of the most important. Had the minds of the Roman youth received their first impressions from ignorance and folly, we may with some confidence pronounce, that the republic would not have produced many examples of manly virtue. (Hamilton 1804: 1: 18)

Again, one can read this as a conventionally late eighteenth-century distinction between the virtuous domestic woman and either the frivolous pleasure seeker or (slightly less conventionally) the vain, self-absorbed and self-proclaimed intellectual woman. Yet reading Agrippina in the context of Stewart’s thought invites a more nuanced approach to this claim. The ignorance that Hamilton laments is not simply a matter of not knowing (or caring) how to behave; it is, just as importantly, a failure to understand why one should act in a given way. There are thus two central claims underlying Agrippina: first, in an argument directly indebted to Stewart, Hamilton insists that an understanding of how the Romans’ concepts of virtue proved inadequate to safeguard their society is directly relevant to contemporary problems. Second, and far more originally, Hamilton implies that the lesson offered by Agrippina is that women’s moral judgment is essential not just to their families but to the proper maintenance of the social fabric. This point can be underscored by turning briefly from Agrippina to “The Story of the Tame Pigeon” (1806), a didactic tale that appears in Letters Addressed to the Daughter of a Nobleman. The main “villain” of the story is a servant who terrorises the two aristocratic children in her charge and destroys the life of a hapless stable boy, but as Hamilton makes very clear, the true responsibility for the domestic calamities that beset the three children lies not with Mrs. Pegg, a reworking of the cruel nurse of folklore, but rather with Lady N—, the sweetly well-meaning widow who employs her. Lady N—, a docile daughter and a chaste, loving wife and mother, is a model of domestic feminine virtue: gentle, loving, and warm-hearted, she also has what one might assume would be, in a Hamiltonian world, the unequivocal advantage over Agrippina of a Christian education. Yet Hamilton adds a sardonic gloss on the phrase – “that is to say, she had learned […] to repeat her creed, and say her prayers, and to keep clear of all gross

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offenses” – that complicates matters (Hamilton 1806: 1: 128). Having created a character who embodies everything admired by proponents of domestic womanhood, Hamilton then shows her not merely warping her own children but also risking injustice and permanent harm to her dependents because, despite her superficially Christian principles, she is unable to reason out the long-term benefits of facing up to short-term anger or unpleasantness. The problem, as Hamilton explains, is that Lady N—’s so-called virtue is nothing more than a matter of prejudice and habit; having always done as she is told by authorities she trusts – parents, husband, the church – she has allowed her own moral sense to atrophy. Moving a step beyond Mary Wollstonecraft, whose imagined helpless widow is bereft of the strength of mind to provide materially for her children, Hamilton shows a woman who, with no material or social worries, still manages to destroy her family as passive virtues learned by rote become a source of disorder and moral disruption. Tom the stable boy is left adrift, both morally and physically, as he is turned away from his job and his faith in truth and justice is irrevocably shattered. Meanwhile, the two N— children are cowed into silent acquiescence in what they know to be an injustice as much by their mother’s indifference as by their nurse’s threats. What Hamilton suggests in both Agrippina and, far more schematically, in “The Story of the Tame Pigeon”, is that women’s contribution in the proper functioning of society involves far more than the provision of unmurmuringly loving maternal and domestic companionship. One might act properly for a time through habit or by instinct, but female virtue that is not grounded in a reasoned moral ideology is, Hamilton insists, dangerously inadequate not just to the family unit but to society as a whole. Nor did she see this as being the case simply for women of the upper classes who, like Agrippina or the widowed countess Lady N—, were training sons who would one day have public duties and responsibilities. In the most successful and popular of her books, the 1808 novel Cottagers of Glenburnie, Hamilton contrasts two well-meaning but very different women of the lower classes: Mrs. Mason, who rises from indigence to contented independence through a lifetime of selfless dedication to an aristocratic family and her cousin Mrs. MacClarty, who squanders the limited but sufficient goods available to her as the wife of a relatively well-to-do cottager and destroys herself and her family in the process.

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Admittedly, The Cottagers of Glenburnie might seem, in some ways, to sit rather uncomfortably with the intellectually ambitious Agrippina, or for that matter with the essays and letters in which Hamilton sets out in detail the theories driving her biographical narrative. Hamilton herself deprecatingly excused her failure to send a copy of the book to one of her correspondents, a Dr. S—, by explaining that it is intended for a very different order of readers, and was written solely with a view to shame my good country folks into a greater degree of nicety with regard to cleanliness, and to awaken their attention to the source of corruption in the lower orders. (Benger 1818: 2: 73)

The two goals that Hamilton sets out for the book sit rather oddly with each other, however. It might seem reasonable enough to assume that she is aiming for two readerships, hoping to awaken the middle classes to the moral dangers besetting the cottagers of her title while exhorting the “lower orders” themselves to better habits of cleanliness. That was, it seems, the way the book was read at the time, with the educated classes praising the humour and the morality of the tale, and the poor, it was assumed, letting themselves be improved by the practical advice. The novelist and travel writer Elizabeth Isabella Spence, for one, rather improbably credited Glenburnie with what she saw as the entire transformation of Scottish peasant cultural practice between her first visit in 1811 and her second in 1816 (Spence 1817: 49–50). Maria Edgeworth, a decidedly less naïve reader, found the book “extremely interesting” herself but noted that she also expected that it would do “a vast deal of good” for the Scottish peasantry (Hare 1895: 1: 169–70). Where Edgeworth finds intellectual amusement, in other words, she presumes that the cottager class will find a manual on hygiene and household management. Yet however tempting that way of dividing the readership might be, that is not quite what Hamilton says to Dr. S—, as the “good country folks” who fall lamentably short of her standards of cleanliness are, according to the grammar of the sentence, the same readers whom she hopes to respond to her intellectual exploration of the source of their problems. Unlike Hannah More, whose Cheap Repository Tracts are an obvious model and antecedent for Glenburnie, Hamilton is interested not merely in telling the poor what to do but also to get them to think about the reasons for acting in that way.

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The Cottagers of Glenburnie is, in obvious ways, the most Scottish of Hamilton’s work. Aside from an inset story of Mrs. Mason’s life as a servant in England, the action is set in Scotland, and the Glenburnie characters (though not Mrs. Mason and her employers) speak entirely in Scots. Hamilton’s literary innovation in this respect, in a novel published six years before Waverley made Scots a literary fashion, should not be underestimated. Francis Jeffrey, for one, proclaimed that it contained “the purest and most characteristic Scotch which we have lately met with in writing” and, while coolly uninterested in the sections of the novel unrelated to the MacClartys, he thought that the book as a whole would delight “our worthy countrymen abroad, by setting before them, in such clear and lively colours, those simple and peculiar manners with which their youth was familiar” (Jeffrey 1808: 402). It is Scottish in more subtle ways as well, not least in its attitude towards the lower classes. As Jeffrey also observes, rather less optimistically than Spence or Edgeworth, even while it is too much to expect that any book can, on its own, transform social behaviour, there is still some possibility of the novel doing practical good to readers at home, both because of the “strong current of improvement [that] runs at present through all Scotland” and because “our cottagers” – the stress implying a contrast with England – “are reading and reasoning animals; and are more likely perhaps to be moved from their old habits by hints and suggestions which they themselves may glean up from a book, than by the more officious and insulting interference of a living reformer” (Jeffrey 1808: 410). Although he does not emphasise the point, what Jeffrey is touching on here is arguably the central contention of Hamilton’s novel: that is, that reform must come from within, from reasoned conviction, rather than from command or exhortation. Just as Lady N— fails her children and her servants by being too perfect an embodiment of the docile domestic angel, Mrs. MacClarty is a model farmer’s wife in all external matters, but her collapse into squalor and misery demonstrates to the reader that her piety, her conjugal and maternal affection, and her virtuous industry are all as pointless as Lady N—’s domestic tastes and sweet good-nature if not properly grounded in rationality. In this respect, Hamilton goes in a somewhat different direction than Jeffrey; her point is not that Scottish peasants are more inclined than the English towards reasoned behaviour but is rather a more general one that unreasoning acquiescence to social norms is

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pointless at best, dangerous at worst. Again, the argument is indebted to Stewart’s contention about the need to understand the foundations of morality in order to be consistently and effectively virtuous, but in this case Hamilton is extending the argument in terms of class as well as gender. Given the carefully accessible didacticism of the novel, as well as Hamilton’s own deprecating comments about the book to Dr. S—, it might seem perverse to claim that Glenburnie offers a fictional counterpart to Agrippina’s historical and biographical exploration of Stewart’s metaphysics of the mind. It is, however, surprisingly easy to read the novel as an updated, somewhat down-market re-working of Agrippina’s exploration of the development of moral character. This interest in moral education is most evident in the story of Mrs. Mason, whose narrative of her own life offers a solidly improving, if somewhat tediously predictable, account of the triumph of good sense and good principle over adversity and injustice. The degree to which Glenburnie is intertwined with Hamilton’s earlier work in general – and not just Agrippina – is further suggested by the fact that a key episode in Mrs. Mason’s story is a reworking of that of Tom the stable boy in the Daughter of a Nobleman. Like Tom, the young Betty Mason (it may or may not be significant that she shares a given name with Hamilton, although she uses a different diminutive) is made the scapegoat for the wrongdoing of a more senior servant; also like him, she finds herself abandoned when she appeals for help to a child of the house, who knows the true story. The difference is that in Mason’s case Miss Osburne, the virtuous aristocratic woman to whom she turns as a final resort is prepared to listen, to be convinced, and to stand up for a servant against a family member. The point in Glenburnie, however, is not just that Miss Osburne is a superior version of Lady N—, but rather that Mrs. Mason is prepared, even as a barely literate child, to reason about her own actions and to insist that her sense of her own moral identity is more important to her even than her livelihood. That said, Hamilton does not pretend that virtue is surely and invariably its own reward. Tom’s dismissal is an obvious example to the contrary, while Mrs. Mason has more than her share of bad luck as well as good. Glenburnie opens with the middle-aged Mrs. Mason out of a job following the death of her employers, lamed by an accident in their service, and only a step or two away from indigence because the well-meaning earl for whom she worked had lazily

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neglected to write the legacy that he planned to leave her into his will. While she is rewarded with belated prosperity at the end of the novel, the central point is not that the reward of unflagging virtue is a lastchapter retirement to tranquil passivity in a picturesque cottage. Instead, Hamilton focuses on the contributions that Mrs. Mason is able to make to the society around her, even while lacking wealth, connections, or any access to the standard forms of social power. In contrast, Mrs. MacClarty loses her husband, her farmhouse, and the affections of her children in large part because her domestic industry – she churns, she cooks, she spins, and she weaves, with energy and skill even if with less than exemplary hygiene – is undone by her moral and intellectual laziness. There is, admittedly, a little awkwardness in any reading of Glenburnie that accepts unquestioningly the absolute superiority of the English-speaking (if Scottish-born) and entirely humourless Mrs. Mason to the flawed but sharp-tongued and far more fictionally compelling Mrs. MacClarty (see Kelly 1989: 90–92 for a convincingly critical reading of Mrs. Mason). Indeed, it can be difficult not to feel at least some sympathy for Mrs. MacClarty as she bristles at Mrs. Mason’s comments about the dirt in her house or as she snaps back, following some well-intentioned advice on the management of her children, that “maiden’s bairns are aye weel-bred” (Hamilton 1808: 167). Mrs. Mason functions in some ways as a voice for the right of the working class to basic comforts; when she looks around for a towel to wipe a cup, she is almost as shocked by Mrs. MacClarty’s scandalised assumption that having one would be a symptom of social ambition – “Towels! […] na, na, we manna pretend to towels” – as she is by the slovenly state of the dishes (Hamilton 1808: 144). The problem, of course, is that it is far easier to read Mrs. Mason’s shrinking disgust at the state of the house as a mark of her “conceity” absorption of middle-class notions (Mrs. MacClarty’s view) than as any form of working-class solidarity. Yet even while recognising that point, it is also important to note in making Mrs. Mason the voice of rationality and order, Hamilton does not limit her role to the conventionally feminine one of middle-class monitor of working-class household practice. For one thing, Mrs. Mason is more than happy to instruct anybody she sees going astray, undeterred by considerations of class or gender. What is more significant, however, is that in Mrs. Mason, Hamilton presents a woman whose cultivation of a rational

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intellect is important not just despite her class, but also despite her position as an unmarried woman. The concession that women needed to be educated in order to raise their children properly might be taken as extending to and justifying the conduct of Mrs. Mason, who, while childless herself, spends a considerable portion of her life raising her employers’ children, but as her activities in Glenburnie make clear, her educational role is not limited to the young. In addition to instructing (uselessly) both Mr. and Mrs. MacClarty, she also enters into spirited debates with both the church elders and the local minister about religious and educational matters and with the middle-class Stewarts about family conduct. More fully than in the far more overtly ambitious Agrippina, what Hamilton offers in Glenburnie is a quiet argument that once one accepts that mothers have an important social role to fill, one opens the way to a wider understanding of the influence that it was possible for all women, married or not, mothers or not, to have on society. “The Power to be Useful”: Hamilton and the Single Women in Society The social and conceptual divide between the married and unmarried woman was, in the minds of many late eighteenth-century writers, a very wide one indeed, a point that Hamilton herself sardonically underscores when her Hindoo Rajah writes to a correspondent about a strange new being that he is going to encounter in England, the old maid. This creature is, he writes, “a sort of venomous animal, so wicked in its temper, and so mischievous in its disposition, that one is surprised that its very existence should be tolerated in a civilised society” (Hamilton [1796] 1999: 192). Nor was this suspicion that a single life was socially useless and hence led to a dangerously soured temper limited to fiction: Dorothy, Lady Braidshaigh, writing in the mid-eighteenth century, observed matter-of-factly in a letter to a friend that she had “known two or three good natured old maids in my life and no more” (Bergen Brophy 1991: 208). The author of a letter to a popular woman’s magazine was even more vehement in his denunciation of spinsters, arguing that in addition to what he saw as their natural and inevitable jealousy of young girls with lovers, they also tended to “wage incessant war” on married women,

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insinuat[ing] themselves into the confidence of wives and mothers; they watch, like demons, for every opportunity of disturbing domestic peace; and if they can sow the seeds of discord between husband and wife, and see them mutually unhappy, they are fond of every opportunity of publishing it to the world, and affectedly congratulate themselves that they have escaped a yoke, which their artifices alone have made intolerable to bear […] the great majority, with the semblance of goodness, have lost all the essence, and only seem to live to be a nuisance and pest to society. Gratified by the sight of misery, they draw some consolation, under their forlorn circumstances, from reducing others to the same level of wretchedness and destitution. (“Misophilus” 1799: 302–3)

Not all writers were quite that harsh, of course, and at least some were prepared to assert that being stranded outside the traditional role of wife and mother did not mean that women were condemned to uselessness and emptiness. The conservative novelist Jane West, for one, attacks the “false and dangerous assertion that single women […] pass their lives in a dull mediocrity” and insists that “the whole world of benevolence affords a sphere for their actions, and the whole circle of science offers to adorn their minds” (West 1806: 3: 89–91). West does not, however, offer any specific details about the social duties of unmarried middle-class women, and her own recurring narrator Prudentia Homespun does little more than evoke a contentedly spinster version of Hamilton’s representations of her own domestic inertia during her Stirlingshire girlhood, as West has Prudentia boast about her quiet life in provincial isolation, with only her maid and her tabby cat for company and the spectacle of village life for intellectual stimulation (West 1796: 1–2). Moreover, West’s apparent inability to sustain the gently ironic detachment of this picture of independent femininity – Prudentia’s voice has become far more muted in the rather portentous preface of A Tale of the Times (1799) and decidedly sour in The Infidel Father (1802) – suggests that the character is entirely shaped by and reflective of the story that she is telling. That is, Prudentia is, in effect, little more than a tag on which to hang a narrative rather than a representation of the cultural authority of an unmarried woman. West’s optimistic assumption that the “whole circle of science” was open to single women also sidesteps the problems of education, since as long as girls were educated for marriage, intellectual training in science, or even the arts, tended to be dismissed as, at best, a more or less irrelevant frill. Of course, most writers did not insist directly that an educated literary taste was incompatible with domestic life, but

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anxieties about the point often hover just below the surface and occasionally even break through. The clergyman John Bennett, for example, warned in comically alarmist terms, that there were in fact very real and pressing dangers in encouraging literary tastes in women. “The wife, the mother, and the oeconomist of a family” could, he warns, “be lost in the literary pedant; the order of nature would be totally reversed, and the population of the globe preposterously sacrificed to the cold, forbidding pride of a studious virginity” (Bennett 1787: 124). A representative late-century conduct book, The Female Ægis, or the Duties of Women from Childhood to Old Age, is considerably less apocalyptic; it grudgingly concedes that there is “no reason to dread” that women who “are distinguished by a cultivated understanding, a polished taste, and a memory stored with useful and elegant information” will inevitably “neglect […] the duties of the mistress of a family” (Female Ægis 1798: 104). The phrasing itself, however, makes clear that the “cultivated understanding” is, at best, a frill and at worst a potential distraction from the supposedly more pressing feminine tasks. The problem is that the author of the book appears entirely unable to conceptualise any duties that might be expected of middle-class women who are not the mothers of growing children. (Servants are another matter and, inevitably, are treated separately; see Arneil 2001 for a discussion of class divisions within the “female” private sphere.) The best he or she can apparently imagine for older women whose families have grown up is that they will be able to spend their old age in the “grateful remembrance of former services”, while women who never marry have little to anticipate but an empty lifetime of slights and the grim fear of being left to “wear away the hours of sickness and of age” in solitary poverty (Female Ægis 1798: 171, 170). A book that ostensibly sets out to present the range of women’s social and domestic duties, in other words, turns into a bleak evocation of emptiness and uselessness. It is in this respect that Hamilton again stands out from many of her contemporaries. Unsurprisingly, given the fact that she never married, she is at least as interested in demonstrating it is just as socially vital to educate women without children to raise as it is to ensure that mothers are not entirely helpless and irrational. This is an issue she addresses from the very beginning of her publishing career, as she ends the Hindoo Rajah with an account of the plight of a minor character, Charlotte Percy, who has been emotionally devastated by

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the deaths of a beloved brother and of the uncle with whom she lived, and who, at that point in the story, finds herself with nothing much to do but to weep and write painfully lachrymose poetry. Although the book makes clear that she has relatively little money, Charlotte herself argues that her larger problem is that she now lacks any purpose in life: what, she cries, can she do as a woman “who has no longer any parent to attend on: no family to manage: no fortune to bestow in deeds of charity: and who has it little in her power to be useful” (Hamilton [1796] 1999: 302). The answer that she receives from an older male friend might be a little unexpected to twenty-first century readers; after telling her rather sharply to stop feeling so sorry for herself, he advises her to start a career as a writer. “Are the powers of mind to lie dormant, because, forsooth, you have not now the management of a family […]?” he asks rhetorically, then continues Why, (let me ask you farther) should your mind, cultivated as it has been by education, and improved by listening to the conversation of the enlightened and judicious; why should it not exert its powers, not only for your own entertainment, but for the instruction, or innocent amusement of others? (Hamilton [1796] 1999: 302)

When Charlotte protests on the grounds that women writers are mocked and disliked, his response is a contemptuous dismissal of the prejudices of the “mere mob” (Hamilton [1796] 1999: 303), and the reader is left to assume that she will eventually follow his advice and start publishing. One does not need to know that Charlotte Percy’s brother is an idealised portrait of Hamilton’s beloved brother Charles, who had died in 1792, or that Hamilton had kept house for many years for her widowed, childless uncle, to see the autobiographical elements in the picture of this character. The sharp satiric edge in Hamilton’s version of herself of course makes clear that the weepy, droopingly inert Charlotte has as many differences from as similarities to her creator, but as a self-educated woman with very little money and no immediate family responsibilities, Charlotte echoes the plight in which Hamilton found herself in the early 1790s, the point at which she began her own move from a private world of reading into a more public one of writing. What is striking about this little episode, however, is that Hamilton does not take the obvious route to evoking readers’ sympathy by suggesting that Charlotte turns to writing only as a result of sheer financial desperation (the tactic, at least in part, of English

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contemporaries such as Charlotte Smith.) If not rich, she is also not destitute, and so her writing becomes not simply a way to support herself but also, and more importantly, a way for her to contribute to society. In this formulation of the role of the woman writer, Charlotte is presented as giving way to the “meer subterfuges of indolence” (Hamilton [1796] 1999: 302) if she contents herself with remaining a “solitary thinker”, to borrow Benger’s description of the young Hamilton (Benger 1818: 1: 52), rather than seeking to become a participant in wider cultural debates. Although Charlotte’s story occupies only a few paragraphs in a long, intellectually ambitious novel, it is a key moment, both in its obvious move to justify the writing and publication of the book that the reader has in her hands and, more subtly, in its assumption that a woman has not just the right but the responsibility to educate not only herself or her children but to reach out to a wider public as well. This is a point that is reinforced in Hamilton’s second novel, in which she again features a single, well-educated woman who is left without any obvious family duties. Maria Fielding, like Charlotte, is a woman of literary talents, but she is presented as rather more strongminded than her predecessor in putting her abilities to use. Temporarily cast off by the wealthy cousin who had taken her in after the death of her family, Mrs. Fielding (as she is known by the time that she appears in the novel), boards with a farmer and starts “compos[ing] little treatises, chiefly intended for the benefit of her own sex, and calculated to restore that intellectual vigour which the whole course of their present mode of education tends so effectually to destroy”. “Thus”, concludes the former suitor who is describing Mrs. Fielding’s life, did she “continue to give dignity to herself by the employment of her faculties, while she promoted the virtue and the happiness of others” (Hamilton [1800] 2000: 252). Mrs. Fielding eventually inherits her cousin’s large fortune and turns her attention from literature to the more ambitious task of setting up a house of refuge for indigent women (as Hamilton herself was also later to do in Edinburgh; see Hamilton 1809 for an account of the Edinburgh House of Industry). Yet the novel quietly implies not just that her work as a writer is socially useful but also that it is, in important ways, no different in kind from the sort of conventionally ladylike charity – educating village children, visiting the poor, helping the destitute – that Mrs. Fielding undertakes both before and after inheriting her

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fortune. For Hamilton, reaching beyond a strictly private sphere is not just entirely compatible with being a “domestic” woman, but also, somewhat paradoxically, is the only way that a woman like the fictional Charlotte Percy is to adhere to conventional standards of properly feminine behaviour. As her friend Denbigh argues strongly, Charlotte is damaging not just herself but also others whom she could help through her writing by assuming that the lack of a family excuses her from making any contribution to her society. In the absence of any obvious family duties, Charlotte, like Mrs. Fielding (and like Hamilton herself), must reach out to a public readership in order to be properly feminine. Of course, Hamilton’s argument was not that every unmarried middle-class woman should launch a career as a novelist or poet, but rather that women needed to educate themselves – and each other – to understand the ways in which their culturally accepted role within the family both inescapably shaped larger political and social issues and required them, if necessary, to look for ways to carry out that role in the absence of immediate family duties. What sets the more intellectually mature Mrs. Fielding apart from Charlotte Percy is her understanding that care of a family is only one of many ways that women can fill a “domestic” role and, in doing so, ensure the smooth functioning of the wider society. Mrs. Mason, despite her very different class origins, is the third in this fictional triad of single women who create socially useful roles for themselves, even while maintaining conventional feminine decorum. Hamilton’s interest in the role of the single woman writer might be read as a reflection of her own intellectual anxieties, but a more stimulating approach to this recurrent figure is to see it as a measure of literary confidence. Charlotte, the slightest of the three, is mocked, however gently, for her tremulousness and tears about going public with her ideas, while neither Mrs. Fielding nor the far more thoroughly marginalised Mrs. Mason – she is not just working class, but also poor, elderly, single and disabled – has the slightest apparent hesitation about instructing others. Nor, for that manner, do they hesitate to learn from unconventional sources: in one particularly striking vignette in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, Mrs. Fielding lectures a young woman on the verge of prostituting herself for food. Instead of meekly accepting the lecture along with the proffered charity, the woman retorts, with impassioned bitterness, “I am starving. I have not one farthing to get either food or lodging […] I know

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[…] that I ought to die, rather than be wicked – but I am so hungry!” (Hamilton [1800] 2000: 300). Mrs. Fielding’s initial response is that the government ought to help women in such desperate need, “but alas!” as Hamilton has her reflect, in a sardonic nod to the cultural insistence that women have nothing to contribute to public debate, “I cannot dictate to the government. I have not the power to influence the makers of our laws” (Hamilton [1800] 2000: 301). Like Hamilton herself, Mrs. Fielding then turns to private charity, but, in a neat bit of self-reflexivity, Hamilton uses this representation of the private moral growth of a fictional character to make a very public attack on government inertia in the face of social problems. Mrs. Fielding might not be able to influence legislators, but Hamilton herself is very clearly prepared at least to try to do so. For Hamilton, in other words, public insistence upon the importance of women’s private domestic endeavours becomes a way not just to ensure recognition of the significance of women’s social contributions but also to make such contributions in the first place. Elizabeth Hamilton’s model of women’s literary work may not have survived much past Elizabeth Hamilton herself, but as a reading of her career demonstrates, it was possible for an early nineteenth-century woman to integrate sophisticated intellectual and sociable exchange into what was ostensibly a thoroughly domestic literary life.

Chapter Two “Incongruous Things”: Primitivism and Professionalism in the Work of Anne Grant When the eighteen-year-old Anne Macvicar made her first journey to the Highlands in 1773 – some six months before Samuel Johnson and James Boswell made their more famous journey across some of the same territory – she was visiting country that she had never seen before but to which she claimed a strong, imaginative affinity. In the poetry, letters, and essays on the subject that she published much later in her life, under her married name Anne Grant, she took pains to emphasise that, although born in Glasgow, she was the daughter of Highlanders, and she insisted that her earliest tastes had been shaped by life in the wilderness, although the wilds in question were those of colonial New York, not Scotland. Yet however much she aligned herself with the remote and the wild, she was also a product of mainstream British culture, and her views of the Highlands were shaped as much by literature as by personal experience. Like so many others of her generation, she was, for example, dazzled by James Macpherson’s “translations” of Ossian, and as her subsequently published letters of the early to mid-1770s make clear, she was quite willing to filter her direct experience of Highland landscape through the lens of his prose poems. Grant herself insisted that this doubleness of perspective shaped her work: neither entirely a Highlander nor a full participant in the metropolitan literary world, she was ideally positioned, as she argued, to mediate the two cultures. What she was offering her readers, she proclaimed, was “a pastoral written by a real shepherd” (J.P. Grant 1845: 1: 87), a mildly paradoxical comment that implies in itself the complexity of her subject position, using as it does an allusion to Samuel Johnson’s grounds for disliking pastoral as a genre in order to assert cultural artlessness. The version of the Highlands presented in the published and unpublished works of Anne Grant in fact reveals as much about late eighteenth-century ideas of cultural innocence and the aesthetic tastes of the period as they do about the history and ethnography of the region. As a result, what Grant offers readers today is not just a glimpse of a remote and supposedly vanishing culture that was

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increasingly fascinating her metropolitan British contemporaries but also, and no less interestingly, of the literary tactics of a writer who was able to shape an urban, professional literary career while claiming the voice of the artless, the primitive, and the remote. In an era that has become deeply attuned to the politics of writing about supposedly “primitive” or minority cultures, Grant’s literary evocation of Highland life raises obvious issues about voice and authority. The questions about her authorial self-construction as both an insider and an outsider begin on the most basic level: her claim to special insight because of her “half savage” upbringing (Grant 1811a: 1: 272) looks a little less like the assertion of a unique perspective and more like a thoroughly predictable move when put into the context of later, more familiar writers on culture and ethnography. As James Buzard has pointed out in a recent survey of the debates about the ethnographic gaze, writers as varied in their approaches and levels of professional training as Mary Kingsley and Bronislaw Malinowski have argued that their having minds that are, in Kingsley’s phrasing, “akin to that of the savage” give them a special insight into the nonwestern peoples they are observing that other Europeans lack (Buzard 2005: 33). Yet Grant’s claims to be speaking both as a Highlander and as someone who has maintained at least some cultural distance from the people among whom she lived for the first thirty years of her adult life raises not only large, transhistorical questions about the techniques and morality of ethnography of the sort that Buzard explores but also touches upon issues that are specific to late Enlightenment Scotland and to the careers of Romantic-era women writers. At a time and place in which, as Clifford Siskin has argued, the “professional criterion of earned expertise” was becoming more and more central to the establishment of a literary career (Siskin 1998: 222), Grant was able to manipulate her role as a domestic woman – who, as she repeatedly insisted, had no expertise that was not drawn from her lived experience of private daily life – in a way that enabled her to intervene in the vociferous contemporary debates about a region that was becoming centrally important not just to developing ideas of Scottishness and Britishness but also to arguments about progress and cultural modernity in general. It is, in other words, very important not to let Grant’s complicated positioning of herself as a Highlander in Edinburgh and a cultured lowlander in the Highlands make us overlook her most obvious outsider status: a self-proclaimed domestic woman establishing a

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place for herself in the debates raging among Edinburgh’s professional literary men. That said, the exact nature of the place that Grant made for herself might appear open to question. Christian Johnstone, reviewing Grant’s posthumously published letters about early nineteenth-century Edinburgh literary life, doubted that Grant had ever been what one might call a literary insider, and argues that her distance, literary and personal, from the more central figures in her society marks both the style and the content of her writing. “Mrs. Grant is […] a cautious writer, never personal, never satirical”, Johnstone observes, before going on to add coolly, “[i]n short, Mrs. Grant must, for a good while, if not always, in her literary intimacies, have belonged to the dowager division of Edinburgh society” (Johnstone 1844b: 174–75). In a slightly more familiar and even more dismissive assessment of Grant’s career, Scott noted in his journal that he had supported an application to the Prince of Wales for a pension for her more because of her brave endurance of serious domestic calamity than because of her literary merits. He was also annoyed by her initial sense of slighted pride that the pension in question was so small, complaining that Grant was “proud as a Highland woman, vain as a poetess and absurd as a Blue Stocking” (Scott 1998: 27). He was scarcely any more kind about her in the slightly more public venue of a letter to Maria Edgeworth, in which he denied vehemently that he had confessed to Grant that he was the author of Waverley: As for honest Mrs. Grant, I cannot conceive why the deuce I should have selected her for a mother-confessor; if it had been yourself or Joanna [Baillie], there might have been some probability in the report; but good Mrs. Grant is so very caerulean, and surrounded by so many fetch-and-carry mistresses and misses, and the maintainer of such an unmerciful correspondence, that though I would do her any kindness in my power, yet I should be afraid to be very intimate with a woman whose tongue and pen are rather overpowering. (Scott 1935: 8: 166)

The message is clear enough: Edgeworth is a serious literary colleague; Grant, despite her bluestocking airs and literary pretensions, is not. If such a thorough literary professional as Scott – or, in her very different way, Johnstone – was unprepared to recognise Grant as being fully an insider in the world of Edinburgh letters, that might be in part because Grant was so vehement in asserting her own genteel

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amateurism, presenting herself over and over again, in both published and unpublished writing, as a little more than a casual scribbler of occasional verse and familiar letters. As she explained in 1801 to the editor and anthologiser George Thomson, who was best known in Scottish cultural circles for his promotion of the poetry of Robert Burns and whose support was vitally important in launching Grant’s career, she was unsure about her ability to “writ[e] anything not produced by some internal impulse, some Occurrence or Sentiment by which my Mind was agitated or my Heart affected” (Grant 1801a: f. 43v). Presenting herself as writing from the heart rather than the head, unaffected by artistic (or, perhaps, artful) considerations, Grant here attempts to portray herself as a writer who is untouched by any sort of calculating vanity of authorship. This is a point that she further developed through her reiterated insistence, in print, that her writing was merely a private indulgence, little more than a safe outlet for occasional bursts of overpowering emotion. “Certainly a female writer is an incongruous thing!” she writes Thomson in 1802 (the recipient is obvious from context, even though the name isn’t given in the published version), then goes on to develop her ideas at greater length: Minerva and the Muses never married; and they were in the right of it. – When I tell you that I write almost extempore, it is not to boast of my blunders, but to make the truest, best apology for my writing at all; which would have been inexcusable, either in my past happy or sorrowful days. (Grant 1811a: 2: 291)

Letters from the Mountains (1806) includes, in the transcription of a letter dated 1779, a much earlier and, because of that, an even more interesting comment on Grant’s view of her own writing, as she offers a spirited rebuttal of an accusation that her literary tastes might be distracting her from what would have been seen as more important and properly feminine pursuits: I am neither surprised or chagrined at what you tell me of people’s notion, that my supposed attainments will disqualify me for ordinary duties […] As to what has been said of what I have written, I am far, far, from assuming the least merit upon it. But this I am very proud of, that, possessing from infancy that glow of imagination, and facility of expression, which the owners are so apt to mistake for genius, I have

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written so very little. That little too was thrown off in such a careless manner, as made it evident that I had not given much time or thought to it. (Grant 1807b: 2: 57–58)1

The original letter long predates Grant’s publishing career, a point that is noteworthy in itself, as the fears of an unpublished twenty-fouryear-old, living in a remote, rural community, that strangers might consider her unbecomingly proud of her literary “attainments” suggests, even if in a rather backhanded way, her conviction that even without publishing a word, she had already won attention and established a readership outside her private domestic circle. Admittedly, some caution might be advisable in reading this letter as a straightforward reflection of Grant’s beliefs and ideas in the 1770s, since her letters were, as Grant readily admits, revised before their 1806 publication, and there were more revisions for 1807. Even so, it is not unreasonable to read the letters as being at least somewhat accurate representations of Grant’s opinions and ideas from the supposed time of writing. While the manuscripts of the early letters have apparently been lost, the surviving manuscript version of some letters that appear in Memoir and Letters, which are held in the University of Edinburgh Library, suggests that the letters were cut but not rewritten for that collection, and while there is no guarantee that that was the case in the earlier collection, the American critic Andrews Norton, for one, read what he considered the greater stylistic sophistication of Memoir and Letters as evidence that there had been substantially more editorial work done on that collection than on Letters from the Mountains. The main point, here, however, remains that whatever Grant thought or wrote in 1779, the order of publication turns this 1779 comment on her literary practice into an implicit justification of the poems that appeared in print in 1803. By printing this letter in 1806, Grant is able to make a public statement about her continuing belief in the ideally self-effacing nature of female literary practice through what is, ostensibly, an entirely private reflection on her own character, written only for the eyes of a friend and without thought of publication.

1

Grant made substantial revisions – mainly cutting and reordering letters – to Letters from the Mountains between the first edition of 1806 and the second edition of 1807. As this was the basis for all subsequent editions, until it was substantially revised again in 1845 by her son, I am using the 1807 edition as my base text but will refer to 1806 and 1845 when quoting letters that are omitted from 1807.

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Grant’s readers, at least judging by the scattered surviving commentary, seemed happy enough to take her at her word and to treat her writing as little more than charmingly evanescent glimpses of a decorously retired life, casual jeux d’esprit rather than polished pieces of art. (The very strong reactions to her depictions of her private tragedies, discussed below, are a partial exception to this rule.) Agnes Porter, for example, an enthusiastic but discerning reader of contemporary literature, recommended Memoirs of an American Lady (1808) in an 1809 letter to her friend Lady Mary Talbot in terms that suggest both admiration and a degree of condescension: “though neither historical nor strictly speaking memoirs, [it] is yet pleasing. I think the French term souvenirs would have suited it exactly: easy, agreeable, and, as far as it goes, interesting” (Martin 1988: 280). Another reader, Maria Lady Stanley, was a little sceptical about some of Grant’s professions of her devotion to domesticity, writing in reference to Letters from the Mountains in 1807 that “I think I can discover that though she submitted to rear children, and even thought she took pleasure in them, that she looked upon it as a subordinate employment” (Adienne 1899: 291). Yet Stanley was still quite willing to take the work as being a more or less unsophisticated display of character, in which literary matters are secondary to the perceived truth of the writer’s unselfconscious work of self-portraiture. “I shall not be happy till I know something of the authoress”, Stanley writes, “and I shall be quite wretched if I can discern she has any unpleasant qualities” (Adeane 1899: 290). Stanley’s pleasure in the text, apparently, requires her to believe that she would take equal pleasure in the author’s company, reinforcing Grant’s insistence that her work is more an expression of personality than a finely crafted work of art. Even George Thomson, who was in general a very strong supporter of Grant and her work, saw her writing as being at its best when it offered an illusion, at least, of artlessly direct communication with the author, and he was prepared to remind her quite forcefully of what he saw as the limitations of her talents. When she asked for comments on the proofs of her 1811 Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders, he responded, with uncompromising frankness, that she had entirely mistaken her own abilities. “Your lively imagination, your happy flow of eloquent diction, and the rapid manner in which you pour out your ideas, do not always permit you to excercise [sic] the judging faculty”, he complained, then continued,

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I cannot help regretting extremely therefore that you ever forsook that form of writing, so well suited to display your powers, and to hide your defects. In epistolary writing you may be as excursive, and miscellaneous, as digressive as you please: – but in Essays of great length, the Public expect a more methodical arrangement, and clearer connection than is suited to your poetical genius and irregular habits of writing. – […] I venture to submit it to your serious consideration, whether it would not be for the advantage of the Work, and greatly conducive to your reputation, if you were yet to mould the Essays into Letters, making half a dozen out of an Essay, and addressing them to some one of your distinguished English friends, who may be supposed desirous of an acquaintance with [sic] the character and manner of the Highlanders. (Thomson 1811: f. 201v)

One might compare with this judgement the views of another acquaintance of Grant’s, the American scholar Andrews Norton, who summed up Grant’s career in a posthumous article on her work (the article is unsigned, but James Grant Wilson identifies the author in his 1901 edition of Memoirs of an American Lady). According to Norton, Grant’s talents, indeed, did not lie in writing for the public. For this she wanted literary training; she wanted the requisite habits of mind, and especially the power of regarding herself as an individual personally unknown, addressing readers unknown to herself. Her strong good sense, her correct taste, her warm and disinterested feelings, her imagination, and her power of describing clearly and truly scenes and characters, appear to advantage only when she is pouring out her mind to her private friends. (Norton 1845: 148)

Grant, of course, did not have a chance to see Norton’s comments. Nor did she listen to Thomson, choosing to publish in essay form despite his advice, yet such a vigorously critical assessment, especially coming from the man who had once flatteringly told her that her poems “put me so strongly in mind of my own Burnes [sic], as to make me think almost that he is restored to me” (Thomson 1804: f. 27v.), emphasises the degree to which she was encouraged by her admirers to cultivate (somewhat paradoxically) the appearance of complete literary unselfconsciousness. Other readers, while quite happy to agree that the published work was more noteworthy for its amateur flair than any sophisticated literary polish, were less certain that that was a virtue. No less authoritative a judge than Francis Jeffrey concluded, in an 1811 article in The Edinburgh Review, that the main appeal of Grant’s work was that it possessed a degree of pleasing artlessness seldom to be found in print

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and that it exhibited “that bright bloom of the mind, which so seldom endures till the age of authorship” – a mixed compliment at best (Jeffrey 1811: 418). Jeffrey’s comments are very much in line with what had already become commonplaces in Grant’s critical reception, even in notices that were more positive overall than his tended to be. As early as 1803, The Annual Review had been impressed by the “simple grace” of Grant’s first collection of poems, but still thought it necessary to stress that the poems “bespeak indulgence”, since they are “productions […] brought forth amid rocks and wilds, and at intervals snatched from the laborious duties of domestic life” (Review of Poems 1803: 559). Likewise, the author of The Eclectic Review’s 1808 notice of the second edition of the poems proclaimed that Grant had a poetic turn of mind, but seemed to find the poetry itself more striking in its promise than in its actual achievement. The work is “interesting” and “adapted to please”, the reviewer comments, in a rather temperate endorsement, before going on to give Grant the rather backhanded compliment that had domestic duties not prevented her “systematic application to study”, she might have reached “a high rank among the contemporary poets” (Review of The Highlanders 1808: 1034). Yet such tepid praise notwithstanding, Grant had what was to be one of the most successful literary careers, both critically and financially, among Scottish women of her generation. Her later work was the subject of substantial articles in some of the major periodicals of the day – The Edinburgh Review, The North American Review – and even at the beginning of her career, she was accorded a degree of critical respect that was somewhat unusual, as one can see simply by comparing the length of the reviews given to her 1803 volume to the more usual dismissive line or two that was the most an unknown writer could normally expect. The British Critic gave Grant a seven-page article to herself, rather than including the volume in its regular omnibus survey of new poetry; The Monthly Review covered the volume at similar length; while, most impressively, The AntiJacobin Review gave Grant a two-part article, spread over two issues. Grant’s reputation endured well into the century: in 1840, Mary Russell Mitford was writing to a friend that she had been advised to publish a collection of her letters, then added, perhaps only halfjokingly, that she had thought of “calling it ‘Letters from the Valley’ (you remember Mrs. Grant’s ‘Letters from the Mountains,’ and what a run they had)” (L’estrange 1870: 3: 106). Three years later, the critic

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and journalist Lady Eastlake was referring to Grant in her diary as “old Mrs. Grant, of estimable celebrity” (Smith 1895: 1: 101), while in journals kept between the mid-1840s and mid-1850s, Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus (no relation) was still referring to the “celebrated” Mrs. Grant (Grant 1988: 2: 189). More importantly, Grant’s poems continued to be reprinted in anthologies and she was written up in dictionaries of poets in the decades following her death, even if editors remained deprecating about her literary achievement. Her poetry was dismissed, for example, in a mid-century overview of Scottish literature as “displaying no high powers” (Rogers 1855: 1: 101), but the editor then, surprisingly enough given this coolness, went on to devote several pages of his collection to her. Perhaps even more strikingly, James Grant Wilson, the son of American friends of Grant (though he never met her) and the author of a massive 1876 history of Scottish poetry concluded that she was not really “poetical” and that “[h]er chief talent lay in conversation, in which she was unrivalled, and hence the fame she acquired among the literati of her day” (Wilson 1876: 1: 340). Nevertheless, he printed nine of her poems, more than he included by any other woman writer except Joanna Baillie (who got thirteen) and Lady Nairne (who got fifteen). The nineteenth-century critical reception of Grant is odd, in other words, not in its assumption that her work is light and frivolous, something that Grant herself proclaims, but rather in nonetheless giving that work the place that it did in the era’s serious critical discourse. Perhaps the most interesting and significant of these posthumous responses is the long article by Andrews Norton in The North American Review. He repeats entirely uncritically Grant’s deprecating self-assessment, writing that In her simplicity and true-heartedness, she was happy to be the wife of an obscure Highland clergyman, without the least thought of ever becoming famous; though pleased, without doubt, to gratify her friends by her talents in writing letters and making verses, and by the vivacity of her conversation. […] In truth, the fame of Mrs. Grant, if it may be so called, was in great part only an expression of esteem for those admirable qualities of character, exercised in domestic and private life, which her vicissitudes and sufferings were accidentally the means of bringing into public view. (Norton 1845: 134)

The shift to passive voice in the last line or two is striking: intentionally or not, the phrasing obscures the point that it was not, of course, Grant’s “vicissitudes and sufferings” that brought her virtues to public

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attention, but rather the literary works in which she described those “vicissitudes” and made them compelling. Norton’s odd willingness to ignore entirely the medium – Grant’s letters and poems – in the interest of highlighting his message about her feminine modesty emphasises the degree to which Grant managed the seemingly difficult task of building a literary career while resolutely disclaiming the authorial character. Indeed, she succeeded – if that is the word – so completely that Norton seemed to see Grant’s actual words not so much as an expression of her ideas as a distortion of them. When Norton does pay attention to the actual writing, he is cool, at best. He refers, matter-of-factly, to Grant’s “literary deficiencies”, and while he notes that the prose in the posthumously published letters might not “seem fully to justify the [negative] remarks” he has made, he takes for granted that the letters have undergone substantial revision (Norton 1845: 152, 149). Even when he presents himself as defending Grant against what he obviously feels is an invidious contrast that Francis Jeffrey draws between her and Madame du Deffand – a writer whose private letters make clear both her literary and her social sophistication – he attempts to do so by dividing words from thought. “[E]ven in those qualities of mind by which Madame du Deffand was distinguished”, he writes, “we doubt whether Mrs. Grant was naturally her inferior”. In fact, Jeffrey is much more sympathetic to Grant than Norton implies; he writes, after quoting a passage from Grant’s letters, “This, to be sure, is not exactly the style of Madame du Deffand; – and yet there are very many people who will like it quite as well: – And even those who would be most scandalised at the comparison, must confess, that it indicates a far loftier, far purer, and a far happier character, than that of the witty lady with whose it may be contrasted” (Jeffrey 1811: 510). Jeffrey is, in other words, entirely in agreement with Norton on the question of content, and on the question of Grant’s style, Norton can be even harsher than his predecessor. In giving an example of Grant expressing herself “as quaintly and wisely” as her elder French contemporary, Norton breezily and unapologetically rewrites Grant’s prose. Her apercu that “There is a melancholy truth, too, very little thought of during the triumph of youth and beauty; it is the consideration of young women’s being the sole material of which old women are made”, becomes, under what Norton confidently assumes to be his improving touch, “It is, too, a melancholy truth, very little thought of during the triumph of youth and beauty, that

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young women are the sole material of which old women are made” (Norton 1845: 153n, 153). Norton’s assumption that the somewhat more formal style that results from his revision would be more pleasing to his mid-century audience than Grant’s looser, more colloquial syntax may or may not have been correct; what matters here is his even more basic assumption that Grant’s letters are, at best, an imperfect vehicle for the revelation of her private character and not literary works in and of themselves. The problem that Norton creates through this assumption is, however, both obvious and large: despite Grant’s supposed indifference to and unawareness of a public audience, she managed not only to get several books into print – one of which went into several editions – but also to win a fair measure of both critical and commercial success in an intensely competitive literary environment by doing so. In repeating Grant’s self-assessment, and praising her solely on that basis, Norton succeeds not in explaining her success, but only in highlighting the tension between the narrative of authorship that underlines her writing and the actual facts of her literary career. Grant and Early Nineteenth-Century Publishing It is easy enough to see why Grant’s nineteenth-century readers were at least as fascinated by Grant herself as by her writing. In Poems, in the letters printed in Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders, in Memoirs of an American Lady, and, above all, in Letters from the Mountains, she turns repeatedly to her own responses, as a supposedly unspoilt and mainly self-educated young woman, to her encounters with sublime landscapes and “primitive” peoples, making her emotions an integral part of the literary spectacle that she is creating. This focus on her own responsiveness turns these works into books about the growth of an artist as well as accounts of the remote worlds that are their main subjects. It would be a slight exaggeration to call Letters from the Mountains a künstlerroman, but there is no question that in addition to being a tale of Highland life and travels, it also offers a narrative in which the central figure establishes her voice and identity as an artist, progressing from ardent but undisciplined adolescence to published authorship. Yet the emphasis remains more on the emotion than on the literary process; Grant’s writing, in effect,

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creates the illusion that she is doing nothing more than transcribing, without any thought of either art or bookmaking, the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling. Yet Grant is no straightforward Wordsworthian, and there are more complex attitudes at work in her treatment of female authorship, as one can begin to see by turning briefly from Grant herself to the truncated literary ambitions of her eldest daughter, Mary. In 1794, Mary Grant was a precocious fourteen-year-old, apparently attracting some attention in Glasgow, where Grant had sent her to be educated, by her budding abilities as a poet. Grant herself was less than happy about this, perhaps predictably, given her youthful insistence on her own immunity to literary ambition. In a letter to a friend who had apparently written to compliment her on Mary’s achievements, Grant writes rather coolly that “there is nothing more natural than for a parent to be vain of the real or imputed excellences of children”, but then adds, that even so, I am not sure whether I should not be sorry to discover those tendencies to genius that some imagine to exist. Distinguished abilities are attended, especially in the undistinguished sex, with much risk and much envy. Second rate talents, again, afford a pretence for imaginary superiority, which flatters and intoxicates the mind more than what is real. (Grant 1807b: 3: 17)

What makes this commentary more than just a reflexively conventional attack on feminine ambition is that in her hesitancy about encouraging Mary, Grant in fact (and presumably unknowingly) echoes the views of the young Francis Jeffrey, who – as an unknown twenty-year-old aspiring poet – had both flattered and discouraged Mary Grant’s literary ambitions by engaging in a playful exchange of verses with her during his own 1794 residence in Glasgow. In obvious ways, Jeffrey’s poem reflects the late eighteenth-century vogue for supposedly untutored simplicity, as it compares the adolescent freshness of Mary Grant’s verse to the budding flowers of spring or the “fragrant dews” of dawn. Yet the warning behind the praise is clear enough: even while lauding the “enchanting Strain” of Mary’s verse, Jeffrey warns that the “sweetness” of her “simple song” will be unsustainable, since her poems appeal mainly as an “artless” reflection of her “spotless heart” and “Soul Sincere”, and so their “perishable charm” will inevitably be lost as she grows older. So far, one might be tempted to read the poem as a rehearsal of the arguments that Jeffrey

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was to make nearly two decades later in his more mature assessment of Mary’s mother. Perhaps slightly less predictably, however, he also brings another factor in as a measure of Mary Grant’s accomplishment: he contrasts her work favourably with that of those who attempt to play “the muses [sic] holy lyre” with “hands impure” and sing their “lays” in “the vile accents of a venal tongue” (Jeffrey 1794).2 It is not just her youth, in other words, but also her lack of any commercial aims that gives her poetry value. Saleability, in a woman’s poetry, is an ironic mark of worthlessness, as two concepts of “value” clash. Like Grant herself in Letters from the Mountains, Jeffrey implies that female authorship is, ideally, an unmediated transcription of experience, something that is difficult, if not impossible, to sustain not just in the face of maturity but also, and more importantly, once one becomes self-consciously aware of a public readership and the demands of a commercial marketplace. Whatever the reason, whether discouraged by her mother, by Jeffrey (who did partially recant in his response to her playfully mournful reply to his first poem), or by other factors altogether, Mary Grant never published her poetry, although, as her mother’s poetry album demonstrates (Grant 1833: f. 12), she continued to write, and there do not seem to have been any hard feelings between Mary Grant and Jeffrey. In later letters, Anne Grant noted that her Edinburgh acquaintance with Jeffrey had in fact been developed through Mary, who was an “intimate” friend of a sister-in-law of Jeffrey’s, with whom Jeffrey also had a close friendship (Grant 1810: f. 176). Anne Grant herself was less unwilling to move into print, although the conflicts between femininity and commercialism that Jeffrey raises in his response to her daughter’s hesitant adolescent experiments with what Margaret J. M. Ezell calls social authorship mark her own work as well. (As I discuss more fully below, the concept of social authorship is not fully applicable, in the sense that Ezell uses it, to late eighteenth-century writing, but it is nonetheless a useful means of 2

Mary Grant wrote a response to this poem, to which Jeffrey replied in turn; all three works are in an album of poetry collected and transcribed by Jeffrey’s cousin Margaret Loudon (NLS MS. 23,226). Two copies of the first poem also survive in Jeffrey’s handwriting: the fair copy in an album compiled by Anne Grant, owned by the University of Edinburgh library (La.III.797) and a corrected draft in the National Library of Scotland (the manuscript cited here). It was also published posthumously in the appendix of James Grant Wilson’s Poets and Poetry of Scotland.

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distinguishing between genuinely private writing and writing that was intended to be circulated to an audience, as both Mary and Anne Grant’s poems of the 1790s clearly were.) Anne Grant’s first tentative moves towards publication came as she wrote verses on commission for Thomson’s collections of national song, and her correspondence with him on the subject, and on her later volume of poetry, suggests not just the sense of ambivalence about authorship proclaimed in the letters of the 1770s and 80s later collected for Letters from the Mountains but also, and much more significantly, a growing interest in the process of adapting her work for the book-buying public, as opposed to her immediate circle of friends, and awareness of the very different demands that would be made by a public audience. In some cases, this awareness is expressed through a more or less conventional expression of disdain for popular taste and for those who cater to it. In one of her letters to Thomson, she asks rhetorically: Who that admires Mrs. P. or Miss S. will ever tolerate me? I have read no modern authors but in extracts, that I have chanced upon here and there. But the only female writers of poetry I can recollect at present, who have kept their garments unspotted, are Carter, Barbauld, and Williams. All the rest have sat too long at their toilette, and are so bedisened, – they nod such spangled plumes, and trail such pompous trains, – that, like every other artificial and superficial thing, they are only calculated for the fashion of the day – to please and dazzle for a moment. (Grant 1811a: 2: 297)3

In order for her poems to reach a large readership, she argues, she would have to write with more superficial flash and dazzle – a clear enough boast about her own superiority to such artifice, but also, and just as importantly, an indication that she was thinking of what she would need to do to please such an audience. As she goes on to explain, she is fully convinced that she will in fact have serious problems with saleability – not because her poetry is too artless and feminine to survive exposure to the pressures of commercialism, but rather because, despite what she sees as the current literary fashion for “tinsel”, her own predilections lead her poetry towards “that severe and masculine truth of taste which rejects superfluous ornament” (Grant 1811a: 271). Once again, one might compare her views on the 3

This letter also appears in the 1845 edition of Letters from the Mountains (2: 196– 200) in which the names are written out in full as Mrs. Robinson and Miss Seward. The change in initial in the case of Robinson could be a printer’s error, or it could have been Grant’s attempt to avoid any identification of the author she was criticising.

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language of poetry with those more famously set out by Wordsworth in the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” – hardly an indication of a writer who was entirely out of step with the literary mood of her day. As Grant concludes, Arcadian images would please more; but verisimilitude will please longer. Misses will not put my book in their work-bag; but, as longevity is the portion of truth, it may work its way into light, and lie on the tables of their grandsons; and this not as a fine poem, but a correct drawing. (Grant 1811a: 2: 271–72)

The metaphors imply anything but uncertainty of the value of the work, at least in the non-monetary sense of the word. Her poetry might not sell to empty-headed, fashion-hungry “Misses”, but Grant hardly sees that as a mark of its failure as art: opposing femininity, frivolity, and casual amusement to masculine study, she firmly aligns herself with the latter. In making this observation, she is maintaining the divide between commercialism and literary “truth” that the young Jeffrey explored in his poem to Mary Grant, but in her letter, the quality that is supposedly corrupted by commercial pressures is not prettily artless girlishness but is rather the sort of uncompromising honesty with which she claims to be describing her world. Yet Grant was not content simply to appeal to posterity and to hope passively for eventual recognition of her talents and vindication of her taste. She demonstrates her awareness of the literary marketplace not just in deprecating or defensive comments about contemporary bad taste but also in her willingness to adapt and edit her work for saleability. She shows this willingness clearly enough in her response to the editorial advice that she got from Thomson and others, advice that seems mainly to have involved pruning and trimming. Notably, in a letter to John Hatsell, the clerk of the House of Commons, she laments what she calls her “redundancies” and expresses her gratitude for anybody who can help her to prune them away (J.P. Grant 1845: 1: 75). Thomson himself seems to have advised her on matters ranging from relatively small technical points of meter, something about which he was very fastidious, to the way she employed epigraphs, and to the content of her work. In particular, her long poem The Highlanders, the centrepiece of the book, seems to have undergone extensive revision on his advice, although there are no surviving manuscripts and Grant merely alludes in her letters to cuts, without providing specifics. Yet even if details have been lost, the surviving letters to

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Thomson, effusively grateful in tone, suggest that Grant herself believed that Thomson’s editing was sufficiently thorough to make a probable difference in the reception of the book. Despite her claims that her poems were mere extempores, in other words, Grant was prepared to take editorial advice and work hard at improving them. Nor did she invariably play down this work, even in her published comments on her own authorship. Revising “the book of books” had been preoccupying her so fully, Grant wrote one friend in 1802, in a letter published four years later in Letters from the Mountains, that the process “had almost turned the brain of brains before it was completed” (Grant 1807b: 3: 131). In context, this is of course a deprecating reflection on how ill-fitted her undisciplined literary habits make her for the demanding world of publishing, but at the same time, Grant is making clear the degree to which she is embracing the demands of literary professionalism. Grant’s correspondence with Thomson on literary matters suggests both a decidedly brisk, pragmatic and unfussy attitude towards her own writing and a sense that such editorial work was anything but a forbidding preserve of masculine professionalism. In an 1802 letter, for example, she thanks Thomson for his past advice and then asks if he will “look over the notes, all the rest you have seen before and Blot out redundancies & correct inaccuracies, to all which corrections I will humbly and thankfully Submit never Desiring to see their face again till I see it in Print” (Grant 1802c: f. 75v). Admittedly, on occasion she expressed more or less mock dismay about his editorial tinkering. “You are not aware what an impossible thing you ask, when you desire me to attend to the first & second of every line being peculiarly adjusted as I go along”, she wrote in December 1803, but she then continued When the fountain of fancy is unlock’d, there is no impeding its flow by petty attentions; such an attempt would [impede?] it in its course. The thing is to attire the Image in the mind in the careless ease of Simple drapery at first. – To tie the zone & adjust the folds is an after process in which you must assist me; you know how pliant I am. (Grant 1803b: f. 100v)

However much she might have objected, in other words, to the “bedisened” poetry of her female contemporaries, she had no particular complaint about Thomson’s re-attiring her work. She continued this metaphor of revision as feminine primping in a later letter, in

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which she playfully compared herself and Thomson to “two little fanciful girls dressing a doll”, adding “I well know however I dress my doll that you will redress it a little” (Grant 1809b: f. 68). Elsewhere, Grant used other “feminine” metaphors for her verse, comparing her poems to a piece of knitting or embroidery (she laments having to “ravel out the thread” of a poem and “twine” it up in a different way); to a pet songbird “flutter[ing] about thro the imagination”; or to “gaudy crocus’s” in a window box (Grant 1807c: f. 123v). Whether or not Thomson would have been amused to have his editorial work compared to playing with dolls or catching mistakes in needlework, these metaphors are telling, as they not only move Grant’s poetry back out of the masculine world of the study, but also suggest the complexity of Grant’s ideas of female authorship. Even as Grant lightly imagines her own work as a poet in terms of conventionally and stereotypically trivial feminine pursuits – millinery, needlework, playing with dolls – she simultaneously implies that there is, nonetheless, an acceptable public face for this female work. Her mock complaint to Thomson is not, after all, that her “fountain of fancy” is entirely unamenable to his professional demands for order and regularity, but merely that its outpourings require some work to be made fit for public display. The metaphorical slippage from private composition as force of nature to published poem as well-dressed woman undercuts any idea Grant was writing purely from the heart, unaware of or hostile to the sorts of compromises demanded to make her work suit contemporary taste; on the contrary, it implies that she fully understood that public appearances necessitated some dressing and preparation, for works of art as much as for women. Notwithstanding the later comments by Thomson and Norton on Grant’s apparent and charming lack of awareness of a wider public audience, in other words, her letters show her to have been thoroughly aware that sending her poems into the public marketplace meant changing and adapting them. One might, of course, argue that Grant’s willingness to accept editorial intervention from Thomson was not a mark of her comfort with the idea of adapting her work for public consumption but rather of a very basic uncertainty about her own taste and judgment. Clearly enough, her breezy, playful responses to Thomson’s editorial advice differ from those of a number of her more famous – and famously self-confident – contemporaries who were also published by him.

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Thomson was notorious at the time for his willingness to edit work by prominent writers and musicians; his letter books (now owned by the British Library) are filled with the responses of the various more or less well-known figures to whom he had sent criticism – teary dismay from Amelia Opie, unruffled certainty about her own judgement from Joanna Baillie, and angry incredulity from Beethoven and Leopold Kozeluk. His editing of Burns is what has attracted most attention, with a number of readers, from Christian Johnstone in the early nineteenth century to Carol McGuirk today, seeing his intervention as, at best, unnecessary and ill-advised. Yet whatever can be said for or against Thomson’s willingness to request revisions from Beethoven or Burns, or however much one might sympathise with Joanna Baillie’s cool refusal to agree with Thomson that “welcome every drowsy fly” was obviously superior poetically to her “welcome Moth & drowsy fly” (Baillie 1809: f. 304), there is no question that he was a knowledgeable and shrewd judge of contemporary tastes. In this respect, it makes more sense to read Grant’s willingness to accept his editorial comments as an indication that she was keenly interested in making her poems as saleable as possible rather than that she was indifferent to or uncertain about her own work. This reading of her responses to Thomson is further supported by her welcoming of other practical advice on editing her work for a public audience, such as when, in a posthumously published letter to the Bishop of London, she welcomes and even solicits his advice on revisions. While insisting that she hopes, in her changes to the first edition of Letters from the Mountains, to do all that she can to help the book “assume, at least, the appearance of a production […] calculated to produce some degree of moral effect”, she also notes that saleability is an issue, mentioning somewhat ruefully, as a major consideration, that it is “only judicious pruning that can give it any chance to ‘live a little longer;’ and securing this point may probably make me live a little longer myself” (J.P. Grant 1845: 1: 80, 75). This reference to finances is important: Grant’s willingness to pay attention to commercial and editorial advice from Thomson and others was, at least in part, a thoroughly pragmatic response to the fact that she needed to earn money and that she was publishing her books at least in part so that she could do so. Letters from the Mountains was to be by far the most successful of Grant’s books, going into four editions within two years, but it is the publication history of the 1803 edition of her Poems, her literary

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debut, that demonstrates most clearly the ways in which her published narrative of feminine amateurism was underwritten by careful professional advice and tactics. Although she had been writing poetry and letters since adolescence, she apparently did not consider publishing until she was she was in her mid-forties, and even then, she proclaimed herself hesitant to make the move from social to commercial authorship. “When I talked of [giving the poems] a Combination and a form, I did not by any Means resolve on Publishing, that is a Bold Measure”, Grant wrote Thomson in September 1801, but money was tight, and she decided, in the same letter, that it was her “duty to Sacrifice some Delicacies & even risque some ridicule” in order to earn enough to educate her children (Grant 1801b: ff. 45v, 46). The pressures to earn money by publication increased when she was widowed in December 1801 and found herself as a result moving from difficult to desperate financial straits. Her husband had been the clergyman of the remote Highland parish of Laggan, and his income of course died with him; worse, he had left debts but no property, so that Grant had to support herself and her eight surviving children (four other children had predeceased her husband), ranging in age from infancy to twenty-one, on little more than two tiny church pensions. Choosing to publish a volume of poetry as a last-ditch means of earning money might sound like an amusingly eccentric move today; cultural myths aside, it was hardly less so in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. There are of course a number of familiar stories of more or less accidental publication, in which writers wrote privately and for pleasure, published on a whim, and thereby won both fame and fortune. Evelina, scribbled in secrecy before taking the town by storm, or Waverley, lying forgotten for years before becoming the greatest publishing phenomenon of its era, are perhaps the most famous examples of books that supposedly turned an author’s private taste for writing into fame and major profits. Even though Scott, in particular, has been suspected of some disingenuity in his famous account of how he stumbled across the forgotten manuscript of Waverley – with John Sutherland, for one, providing an amusingly sceptical account of it (Sutherland 1995: 168–72) – the anecdotes remain popular. On the other end of the literary marketplace, one finds a number of stories like that of the Aberdeen maidservant Christian Milne, whose mistress supposedly found entirely by chance some poems that Milne had written secretly in her few spare moments. The

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mistress was sufficiently impressed to show them to her husband, a university professor, who in turn arranged for a subscription publication that eventually netted Milne the small fortune, for a woman of her class, of £200. Milne’s story is featured in a book of travels by Elizabeth Isabella Spence, suggesting the sentimental appeal of such tales of modest women of literary talents finding financial rewards despite their properly charming diffidence about promoting their own work (Spence 1817: 54). Yet none of these stories offers much hope that publication would provide a woman of literary tastes a safe refuge in the event of financial difficulties. Burney and Scott were both rare exceptions to any rule of literary production, which is precisely why their stories are so famous, and while Milne’s case was less unusual, the selling point for her poetry was almost entirely charitable interest in the troubles of what the introductory poem – not by Milne – called a “‘menial maid’ with no release from toil” (Milne 1805: 8). Indeed, the idea that women could earn a discreet and comfortable livelihood through their artistic talents was a frequent subject of both mockery and rueful debunking in the fiction of the day. Grant’s contemporary Isaac D’Israeli (1766–1848), for example, has the penniless but initially complacent heroine of his Vaurien reflect that she is spoilt for choice in how to earn a living: I am mistress of so many instruments, and Miss Davies, by only teaching young ladies to play on the harp, got a very genteel maintenance. My voice is good, and I love to declaim; Mr. Sheridan once told my father, that if I tried the stage I might become as rich as Mrs. Siddons, for that I was worth all the commentators on Shakespeare. But none of these employments will suit me; I should never be able to support a public exhibition. I love an occupation where I am quite alone; something that may be done in one’s own room quietly, without the observation of other eyes. I have some reputation for painting flowers on sattin; and my dear Edward [her brother] once told me, that he sold my paintings of midnight groves for five guineas a-piece. I can make lace too. So I have nothing more to do now than to prepare my performances and carry them to the first shop. (D’Israeli 1797: 1: 261–62)

Her hopes of riches are, of course, promptly dashed. Likewise, Mary Brunton’s Laura (in Self-Control [1811]) assumes that she can sell her paintings for a reasonable, if not substantial, sum when she is reduced to poverty but then is as horrified by the minimal payment that she is offered as Jean Marishall was by the five guineas Noble was willing to give her for Clarinda Cathcart. The fullest, and perhaps most familiar, example of this plot device occurs in Frances Burney’s final novel,

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The Wanderer (1814), which is a long, painfully and pessimistically detailed account of failure of any of the improbably multi-talented heroine’s artistic skills to earn her enough money to live. The Wanderer and Self-Control of course appeared after Grant’s attempt to support herself and her family through her art, but even so, as a thoughtful reader of the literature of the day, she would have had ample warnings of the difficulty of what she was attempting. What is remarkable about Grant’s case is not just that she was able to earn money but also that the process by which she made a success of her book is so well documented. Her ability to establish a literary career for herself, even while affecting to disdain the conventional narratives of female authorship was not just a matter of luck and of happening to hit the public taste – though obviously, both factors played a role – but also of considerable work and planning. A large part of this work was necessitated by her choice of subscription publication. This was, of course, a method that had some obvious advantages for a self-consciously “amateur” woman such as Grant, as publishing in that way could imply a certain degree of modest doubt about the work’s broad market appeal. It was, for example, advised by publishers who were not sufficiently convinced of the saleability of material to risk their own money, and of course it cut out the step of having to persuade a reluctant publisher to take her on in what was, according to contemporary observers, a difficult literary market, especially for poets (see Erickson 1996). Scott and Byron might have been making fantastic sums for their poetry, but they were rare exceptions, and Scott’s publisher, Archibald Constable, was deeply pessimistic about poetry as a literary investment, despite the profits brought in by his star author. Rejecting an unsolicited manuscript in 1818, for example, he explained that as a sensible businessman, he had to be “extremely diffident about publishing poetry” (Constable 1818: f. 185). A few years earlier, he had regretfully told an acquaintance that he would not consider publishing a volume of poems unless the author paid expenses. “Regarding the publication of a Volume of Poems I hardly know what to say”, he lamented, then went on, “there are too many Volumes of Poetry already, & to say the truth, all unsaleable excepting Campbell, Scott Byron & Crabbe. Southey publishes a Volume once a year sometimes two, but they will not sell”. He was even more negative in his reply to the anonymous author of an unsolicited manuscript, stating bluntly that “there is no

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class of writing of more doubtful success” than poetry, “and no time more unpropitious than the present for first productions” (Constable 1814: f. 57; 1816: f. 486). There is no particular reason to think that 1803 was that much more “propitious” for first-time, unknown women poets than 1816, making Grant’s achievement in earning a respectable income from her volume all the more striking and noteworthy. The critical attention she received is hardly less surprising than the money that she made, perhaps especially given her choice to publish by subscription. Subscription volumes, such as the one by Christian Milne, were often used as a simple occasion of charity, barely impinging on the consciousness of the wider literary public and perhaps implying a certain degree of literary abjection. As Lady Louisa Stuart remarked to the Duchess of Buccleuch, in languid reference to the Duchess’s appearance on Grant’s subscription list, “as one naturally has a prejudice against a subscription-book, I went no farther than the title-page” (Clark 1898: 3: 171). Even though this comment appears in a letter to the duchess (dated 3 October 1806) in which Stuart mentions as well that she has already read – and admired – Letters from the Mountains, Stuart’s casual disdain for the volume of poetry makes clear the cultural prejudices that Grant was facing by publishing in this way. Even more strikingly, Henry Cockburn – despite his later, public praise of Grant – complained in jocular but remarkably harsh terms that the friend who had persuaded him to subscribe to Grant’s Poems was guilty of a form of robbery or fraud. “You owe me eight shillings”, he wrote in July 1803, for having made me subscribe a long while ago to some written by a Mrs Grant which she calls poems – and which you assured me it would not be infamy, as I now perceive it to be, to have my name affixed to. [Next] time Apollo chuses to impregnate this Lady with a Highlander, may I not be brought in for a share of the expence of delivering her monster and taking him from the filthy sheets of his mother. (Bell 2005: 10)

Even when the author of a subscription volume did achieve a measure of literary success, that recognition could arise as much from an idea of the writer’s being a cultural curiosity as from any sense of the inherent literary value of her work. The well-known disputes between Ann Yearsley, a working-class poet like Milne, and her patron Hannah More illustrate the problems that could arise when poets who published in this manner sought to move beyond their role as objects of middle-class charity. Spence, contrasting Milne with “Lactilla”

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(Yearsley), in fact suggests that Yearsley’s writing, “ardent” though it might have been, was insufficiently powerful to make its way independent of charitable interest; she describes Yearsley, in rather slighting terms, as a “Bristol milk-woman, whose short sunshine of patronage, only gave place to deeper clouds of adversity, and plunged her in more hopeless misery” (Spence 1817: 55). Spence apparently had no doubt that it was only patronage that brought “Lactilla’s” work to notice; when that is withdrawn, she finds it unremarkable, if regrettable, that Yearsley vanishes entirely from attention. Nor was Spence alone in this reading of Yearsley’s career. Eliza Fletcher, who, as a young woman, responded indignantly to what she thought was More’s callous mistreatment of her protégée, decided to help Yearsley by stepping in to replace More as patron, in what she later described as an act of “vanity and self-love”, a way of marking her own class status, rather than a disinterested testament to the value of the poetry itself. Moreover, as involved as Fletcher became with Yearsley and her work – she reports corresponding with her “for several years” – she notes without any apparent surprise that she “could not trace any vestige” of the poet while visiting Bristol some years later (Richardson 1875: 29–31). Again, it is the patronage, not the poetry, that is the focus of attention in these more or less contemporary accounts of a writer who achieved at least some success through subscription publication. Even if more recent scholarship, most notably by Donna Landry (1990), has demonstrated that Yearsley’s career involved much more than unhappy battles over the control of her profits, the perception that this form of publication was a politely disguised version of charity might well have made it less than entirely attractive to a middle-class writer such as Anne Grant. (On the other hand, despite the controversy over More’s previous acts of patronage, Grant was delighted when More, having heard about her situation, wrote to “offer […] me all the assistance in her power which is not a little” [Grant 1803c: f. 89v].) Of course not all books published by subscription depended upon the charitable impulses of readers; on the contrary, a well-known writer, or a writer with a popular subject, could use subscriptions to increase his or her profits. Burney again provides an example here, as she chose to sell her third novel, Camilla, in part by subscription, thereby earning more than booksellers were willing to advance for a straight purchase of the copyright. Yet Grant, an unknown author with a

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collection of mainly occasional poems – and the name, Poems on Various Subjects, could hardly have been less calculated to make the work stand out, given that the British Library catalogue lists over a hundred works with that title or subtitle in the second half of the eighteenth century – could not count on attracting the sort of interest that an author such as Burney would. It is therefore an impressive measure of her success that she managed to sell almost twice as many subscriptions as Burney did for Camilla (Justice 2002: 257, n. 38). Inevitably, in order to do so, she had to spark some charitable interest in her plight, but she later made clear that she intensely disliked doing so. She commented bitterly, a few years after the publication of the poems, on the “sense of humiliation” she felt in reflecting that she owed any part of their success to readers’ compassion (J.P. Grant 1845: 1: 17). Still later, in a letter to a friend discussing sales of Letters from the Mountains, which she published with Longman, she explicitly refused to authorise a mutual acquaintance to take a hundred copies “to dispose of”: “[I]t will sell better by taking its own way”, she writes, adding sharply, “This would be too like asking a subscription, which would be shameless” (Grant 1808b: f. 143v). Shameless or not, she did however have to “ask[ ] a subscription” for the volume of poems, another drawback of this method of publication, since that was a process that was by no means easy. Indeed, the actual mechanics of gathering subscribers and promoting the material, outlined in Grant’s letters to Thomson and others, suggests that however appealing late eighteenth-century readers might have found the idea of the unworldly, amateur woman poet, modestly printing her work only for a select or charitable group of friends, the process of getting into print and attracting public attention demanded that any aspiring poet think almost as much of the marketplace as of her art. As a number of historians of publishing have pointed out, subscription publication was in fact a method of continuing and diffusing the aristocratic patronage system that had begun to die out in the middle of the eighteenth century (see, for example, Griffin 1996: 267–68). In place of a single aristocratic patron, the author could turn to a group of mainly middle-class readers, a practice that offered, at least in theory, a way to avoid dependence upon the whims and convenience of a single admirer while probably reaching a more dispersed audience and even, by force of numbers, bringing in more money. In practice, of course, matters were less ideal. Especially in the case of working-class

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writers such as Milne and Yearsley, the middle-class sponsor of an unknown author could act very much like the old aristocratic patrons, while rising costs of paper and printing meant very narrow profit margins without sizable numbers of subscribers. Grant’s own surviving accounts for 1807 illustrate the latter point (Grant 1807a: ff. 11–17). An edition of her poems printed that year by Longman’s publishing house in London brought Grant, who received 75% of the profits, only £21/12/6; the costs for printing, paper and advertising came to £115/3/1, more than five times her earnings. Longman’s share of profits came only to £7/4/2, hardly enough to encourage much speculation in poetry. Nor was this a result of particularly poor sales, as 630 of the print run of 750 had been sold – and a subscriber list of over six hundred was more than most writers could hope for. Of course, a subscription volume would have been more highly priced than the relatively inexpensive 1807 printing of Grant’s poems (it sold for 4/7, whereas subscriptions for the 1803 volume cost eight shillings [Grant 1802a], but even so, printing costs could eat up a substantial portion of a writer’s potential income. If high sales – or substantial donations over the cover price, which some subscribers did offer – were necessary to ensure a good income, the result was obvious pressure on the writer to build a wide network of influential and sympathetic readers. Grant had such support: a number of her subscribers paid a guinea or more, bringing in an extra seventy-six guineas, while one particularly generous reader offered a five-pound donation over the cover price. This money, though pure profit, emphasised both the charitable nature of the publication and the necessity of interesting readers not just in the book but, just as importantly, in the author. However much doing so might seem incompatible with the vision of modestly self-effacing female authorship idealised in Letters from the Mountains, that was precisely what Grant achieved. She managed to gather nearly 2300 subscribers for her poems, an extraordinary number under any circumstances, and all the more noteworthy given that she had at that time spent most of her adult life in the tiny Highland village of Laggan and had no direct experience of the literary markets of Edinburgh, let alone London. The printed subscription list in the volume features 2251 subscribers who bought a total of 2808 copies, and Grant claimed that even that was incomplete. The remarkable achievement that this represents is emphasised by P.J.

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Wallis’ study of subscription lists, which includes an appendix listing a selection of eighteenth-century books with over a thousand subscribers, only three of which attracted more subscribers than Grant’s poems: George Sales’ 1748 Universal History (2891); Edward Jones’ 1796 English System of Bookkeeping (3247, buying 3995 copies), and John Conybeare’s 1757 Sermons (4590, buying 5564 copies) (Wallis 1974: 275–76). A work more comparable to Grant’s – Burns’ Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect – sold 2883 copies to 1536 subscribers (Wallis 1974: 275–78). Grant’s list was as impressive in quality as quantity: the reviewer for The Anti-Jacobin commented not just on the “uncommonly numerous” list of subscribers but also noted that the names listed include “Many of the most distinguished in the united Kingdom, both for talents and for rank”, a “circumstance” that “created in us rather high expectations of the merit of a work which came to us with so commending a recommendation” (Review of Poems Oct. 1803: 115). This impressive list of readers was not created from scratch in 1802; one factor that might have contributed to Grant’s success was that she was able to begin her publishing career with the rudiments of such a network already in place. She had, after all, been sending manuscript poems to her friends for a quarter of a century by the time she finally decided to publish, and at least some of that writing had made its way beyond her immediate circle. There has been a lot of scholarly work done on the manuscript circulation of poetry in the aristocratic coteries of the late seventeenth century; in particular, Margaret Ezell has argued that manuscript circulation was a method of disseminating writing that offered a number of advantages to late seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury women writers, especially those based outside London, and that print was not necessarily the most desirable medium for such writers. As Ezell comments in reference to one of her subjects, “script authorship permitted a middle-class woman living in a small village […] to have a cultivated audience” (Ezell 1999: 40). The literary world had of course changed dramatically by Grant’s day, but Ezell’s careful analysis of earlier exchanges of manuscript work might make us hesitate to see such exchanges in the later eighteenth century as being necessarily an indication of a simple failure to get into print or nervousness about doing so. Grant’s case, at least, suggests that for a woman who did eventually decide to publish, informal manuscript

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circulation could be invaluable in building the sort of contacts necessary to break into a competitive publishing market. There were also rhetorical as well as practical benefits to be gained from this situation, as the poems sent to friends existed in a hazy state between the private domestic world and the public world of print, a state in which Grant maintained her stance of modestly feminine amateurism but was still able to claim a degree of public authorial responsibility. One of the longer poems in the published volume, a verse journal addressed to a friend, illustrates the ways in which this situation could be exploited in a demurely modest form of self-promotion. In her head-note Grant explains that she feels obliged to print it despite worries about its ephemerality because the original reader, instead of keeping it private, let copies circulate “in which errors and absurdities were multiplied” (Grant 1803a: 160). This excuse for publication implies of course that the poem has already awakened the interest of readers other than the friend to whom it is specifically addressed, a discreetly modest way of undercutting the author’s polite doubts about whether or not it could possibly appeal to a wider public. More generally, the responses that Grant got from her friends – and indirectly, from their friends – gave her some idea of what sort of writing was likely to please an audience that was, after all, an extension of the literary-minded middle-class women for whom her manuscript poems were written. Friends were, of course, a more sympathetic audience than the general public, as Grant was very well aware, but as those friends showed her work to others in their Glasgow and Edinburgh circles, they did her the vital service of bringing it to the attention of people of influence. The volume was, for example, dedicated by permission to the Duchess of Gordon, who was approached by a friend, rather than by Grant herself. “I have been told”, Grant writes Thomson in 1802, “but this is in confidence that I should dedicate the Book to the Dutchess & that it will be expected. I wou’d like as well to pay this Compliment to a Person of inferiour Rank – but have been told that this is proper” (Grant 1802: f. 75v). The Duchess notwithstanding, however, the most important connection that Grant made through friends’ circulation of her manuscripts was undoubtedly Thomson himself. His help went well beyond his editorial contributions and extended to professional advice – for example, getting her to send review copies of the volume to journal editors – and perhaps even to

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the less tangible matter of bolstering her literary credibility. Given his reputation as “the friend of Burns”, Thomson might well have helped spark interest in Grant’s volume; even though his name was not used anywhere on its title page, and the extent of his editorial contributions was not even hinted at in any of Grant’s published letters, his activity in collecting and soliciting subscriptions would have ensured that his involvement was, at the very least, an open secret. Grant unquestionably used him as an intermediary in the delicate task of enlisting friends to raise subscriptions. Thomson writes, for example, in a letter to Harriet (Henrietta) Liston, the wife of a prominent diplomat and a long-time friend of Grant’s, that he is approaching her at Grant’s request to ask for help with the subscription list. The fact that Grant chose to approach even a close friend through Thomson might suggest either her eagerness to have someone of his literary reputation promoting her book or the difficulty of taking direct steps herself, or both. No less importantly, by having a professional literary man, rather than herself, promote her book in this way, Grant was able to maintain the persona of a modest amateur, too uncertain about the value of her own work to make any direct attempt to bring it to wider notice. It is important to reiterate, of course, that there is no reason to think that Grant was being insincere in representing herself in this way; the apparent loss of a long poem on “Canadian Manners” that Grant considered to be the work with “the Greatest chance of generally Pleasing” (Grant 1801a: f. 45v–46) provides some evidence that she was being, at most, only slightly disingenuous when she proclaimed her indifference to the fate of her manuscript poetry. Yet Charlotte Smith’s almost identical comments about her own manuscript poetry suggest that this was also culturally useful rhetoric for a middle-class woman trying to maintain a stance of decorously modest femininity without entirely undercutting her own work. As Smith writes in the preface to the first and second editions of her poems: “Some of my friends, with partial indiscretion, have multiplied the copies they procured of several of these attempts, till they found their way into the prints of the day in a mutilated state; which, concurring with other circumstances, determined me to put them into their present form” (Curran 1993: 3). Moreover, Grant’s discussion of her Canadian poem could also be read, conversely, as an indication that she was not quite as indifferent to the fate of her work as she claimed. She had at least some idea of how to try to track it down, and

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she remembered it well enough to quote a passage to Thomson. If buying the book was to be anything other than an act of charity, Grant had to assert that the poems had some value, and one way of doing so was by tacitly pointing out that friends thought enough of them to go beyond polite, friendly praise and to keep them, copy them, and pass them on to other readers. That said, Grant was by no means willing to let the publication process slip entirely from her hands. Letters to Thomson and others also show that she kept a close eye on the details of gathering subscriptions, paying particular attention to friends whose location or influence might enable her to open lists in far-flung areas of the country, thereby ensuring a geographical distribution that few booksellers could have matched. A joking comment that, for all Grant knew, one devoted friend “will send proposals to Abyssinia” is hardly hyperbolic: a number of her subscribers were military men stationed in Ceylon (Grant 1802b: f. 59v). Nor did diffidence bar her entirely from enlisting friends’ aid herself, although the tact required in doing so is suggested by a letter to her friend Mr. Anderson, which closes with Grant reporting her astonishment at news from her eldest daughter that “in Edinburgh, they have Opend a Subscription which is filling rapidly … this was very premature, tho very good & kind” (Grant 1802d: f. 60v). As this letter was written only the day before Thomson’s report to Harriet Liston that Grant was “earnest for publication” and for Mrs. Liston’s help (Thomson 1802: f. 15), there is reason to suspect a little disingenuity in Grant’s astonishment. If she was indeed attempting an indirect request, it worked; her next surviving letter to Anderson contains profuse thanks for his interest in the book, copies of the prospectus (which presumably were distributed, since they are no longer in the collection of correspondence) and detailed instructions on who to approach with them. Examples from Grant’s letters of the pains she took to promote her book could easily be multiplied, but the basic point is clear enough: writing the poems in the first place was the least of the tasks confronting her once she set out to use her literary talents to earn some much-needed money. Nor did Grant limit her interest in publishing to attaining immediate sales: she insists upon her immersion in the cares of authorship in terms of reception as well as production, and, as she makes clear decorously but unmistakably, notwithstanding her narrative of feminine amateurism, she expected from the first to be taken

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seriously as a writer and was deeply concerned about what would be said about her work by “those rough nurses, the critics, whose hands do not spare, nor their eyes pity” (Grant 1807b: 3: 176). As she continues – the letter in question is a later one to the friend to whom she had complained, in mock-serious style, about the difficulties of revising the “book of books” – Bitterness may be borne, “But what high heart could ever yet sustain The public blast of insolence and scorn?” and who [among the critics] believes, or cares for that want of leisure, and numberless other wants which you know of? among which I wish, for the sake of my repose, want of feeling could be included in the present instance. The Edinburgh Review is (woe is me!) a work of ability, from which there lies no appeal. These young censors, however, seem to have studied Shakespeare well; and to be emulous of the character of Cesario, of whom Olivia says, “O what a deal of scorn looks beautiful, In the contempt and anger of his lip!” They seem to expect the public will regard their beautiful scorn with the same partiality. For my part, I am rather inclined, like Orsino, to dread what they may prove “When time has sow’d a grizzle on their case”, as they are already so apt to be scornful. (Grant 1807b: 3: 176)

This passage is worth quoting at some length, combining as it does predictable self-deprecation with a careful display of Grant’s cultured literary tastes and what one might, at least initially, be tempted to call a surprisingly inflated sense of the interest that would be generated by her own work. Grant’s ostensible nervousness here about The Edinburgh Review was something that she expressed in many other contexts (Perkins 2002: 29–43), and would be in no way unjustified, given the way that the magazine had so quickly established a reputation for extreme critical severity. Yet that severity was limited in its targets, since The Edinburgh Review had explicitly and selfconsciously positioned itself from its inception as a venue for discussing only the most significant new work being published. As an unknown, previously unpublished writer with a nondescriptly-titled collection of ladylike poems, Grant would in fact have been far more likely to find her “book of books” sinking from view entirely unnoticed than to face the “contempt and anger” of the Review’s “young censors”. (The Review did not, in fact, review Grant’s volume; to her increasing annoyance, she had to wait until 1811, and the publication of Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders, for a

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notice from it.) Even taking into account that The Edinburgh Review was something of a local production, that it had obviously not yet in its debut year of 1802 established a solid claim to its own lofty cultural aspirations, and that Francis Jeffrey was already an acquaintance of Grant’s family, her expectation of such immediate and intense critical interest implies a degree of artistic confidence in her work starkly at odds with her careful narrative of amateurism. In part, of course, this concern with her critical reception is entirely natural. As Grant insisted repeatedly, nobody who chooses to publish could or should be indifferent to what people think of the work in question; indeed, she implied at times that achieving critical success was merely an extension of maintaining one’s good name as a woman. As she wrote a friend in 1803, using language that sounds very much like that used in contemporary fiction to insist upon the importance of female sexual reputation: “it betrays hardihood, insolence, and indeed some hypocrisy, to affect indifference about public opinion, when one has once left the safe and peaceful shades of privacy” (Grant 1807b: 3: 224). Yet she also saw a respectable literary reputation as being something of a commodity in itself. In an 1811 letter to her son Duncan, then in India, she is frank about her reasons for publishing less frequently than she might, despite her continued need for money: were I to devote myself to writing I could I know very well support them [her daughters] without any other resource. But this would depend merely on my life my health & my continu’d popularity. If any of these fail’d your sisters after having been us’d to move in a very elegant circle would be merely thrown upon you & the very little that I could leave them. […] As long as I keep up a certain dignity in my writings and do not descend to tales & novels which if not very excellent are mere catchpenny works, the multiplied editions of my writings are more profitable to my family than new works of a lower character which might sink the reputation of the former. (Grant 1811b: f. 208v.)

Significantly, while a version of this letter appears in the posthumous Memoir and Correspondence (it is letter 147 in the 1844 edition and 110 in 1845), this passage has been edited out, suggesting a certain unease on the part of her editor – her youngest and only surviving child, John Peter – not just with Grant’s cool assumption about the practical, pecuniary benefits of writing serious literature as opposed to more immediately profitable but ultimately trivial “catchpenny” works, but also with her matter-of-fact assumption that her work was

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unquestionably in the former category. While she was willing enough, in other words, to make clear in print her concern with literary reputation – even if in terms that made it an extension of feminine propriety – her son was apparently not comfortable with making public his mother’s pride in the literary quality of her writing and in what she saw as the increased earning potential generated by that quality. The implication of this omission is, perhaps, that while it was acceptable enough for a woman to consider her reputation – literary or otherwise – it might still be a little indelicate for her to express interest in the financial value that might be accrued by her maintaining a good name for herself. One returns, again, to the idea that, in women’s writing, literary and commercial values are rhetorically incompatible. Grant chose to publish her writing in order to earn money, and she succeeded in doing so. The point might seem obvious, but it is worth emphasising not just because professional authorship was, at the time, seen as being increasingly at odds with ladylike decorum, but also, and even more basically, because earning a living through authorship was a very difficult thing to do – and stumbling artlessly and unselfconsciously into earning a livelihood by writing was probably simply not possible, whatever contemporary audiences wanted to believe about sweetly artless feminine amateurism. Yet in emphasising the hard work Grant had to do in order to establish a foothold for herself in the literary marketplace, even as she insistently denied any “unfeminine” literary ambition, it is important not to downplay her sense that her work was valuable in a less fiscal sense as well. The “dignity” that Grant tells her son that she wants to maintain in her writing is, clearly, something that matters to her independently of the income that it might represent; it is plain enough from this letter that despite her deprecating references to her poems as dolls or flowers, Grant was prepared at least at times to take her writing quite seriously. This seriousness seems to have as much to do with her subject as with style or execution. After all, however flippant Grant might have been in her letters to Thomson about the songs that she was composing for his collection, she was still prepared to boast, even to him, about the “correct drawing” in her more ambitious poems about Highland life. In her prose and in her long poem The Highlanders, which was the centrepiece of her 1803 volume and gave the title to the revised 1808 edition of the poems, Grant was very self-consciously and deliberately attempting to preserve an historical record of what

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she saw as a dying culture, one that, as she repeatedly insisted, she herself was particularly well-placed to write about. Yet in her treatment of the Highlands and Highlanders, Grant continues to touch on issues that are related to those raised in her attempt to establish herself as a commercially successful author, even while maintaining her narrative of amateurism. In both cases, Grant is entangled by the contradictions of the literary expectations that help to make her successful in the first place. Both as a demure, domestic lady who creates a public voice for herself and as a writer who attempts to provide a sophisticated analysis of the “primitive” people with whom she identifies, she is using or exploring ideas of artlessness and innocence in a manner that is anything but artless. This is not, at all, the same as saying that she is inconsistent or hypocritical; rather, it is a reflection of the difficulty of what she is attempting. Her writing on the Highlands is, almost invariably, explicitly shaped by her own subject position, and, just as she attempts to blur the categories of the professional and the amateur while writing about her own literary career, she attempts to merge the “primitive” and the modern in her analysis of the Highlands. The problem is that doing so at times involves her, deliberately or not, in an attempt to rework the contemporary tendency to relegate the Highlands to a sort of conceptual past, isolated from and in some measure defining by contrast the “modern” Scottish and British worlds. While Grant on occasion straightforwardly endorses and repeats the elegiac mode of writing about the Highlands employed by so many of her predecessors and contemporaries, she also necessarily insists that it is possible for a “primitive” – as she repeatedly calls herself – to interpret and comment upon modernity, and not just the other way around. The result is a picture of the Highlands that draws upon many of the concerns and preoccupations of Grant’s Edinburgh contemporaries but does so in a manner that is inflected by some of the difficulties and complications that mark Grant’s selfrepresentation as a woman writer in a masculine professional world. In trying to speak both as a Lowlander in the Highlands and as Highlander among the literati and bluestockings of Edinburgh, Grant creates for herself an unstable but ambitious and challenging perspective on one of the most popular topics in the literature of the day.

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The Highlands in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Literature Choosing to write about the Highlands was, in one way, an obvious and easy decision for Grant; it was, after all, the place where she lived during the thirty years – from her late adolescence to her late forties – that she drafted the poems and letters that she finally published in 1803 and 1806. It was, however, also her very good luck that during the years that she lived in the region, the Highlands had become a glamorously appealing tourist destination and the subject of a large body of popular literature. Not everybody was pleased by this development. As the novelist Mary Brunton noted with some unease in 1814, as she was busily working on her Highland novel Discipline and worrying about having her subject pre-empted by Waverley, “the Highlands […] are quite the rage” among all of the “novel-reading Misses” who imagine them as a landscape touched permanently by the “verdure and sunshine of July” (Brunton [1819] 1992: lxxvii). Likewise, Christian Johnstone took time in her own 1815 novel on the subject, Clan-Albin, to sneer at those ladies who, as soon as the Highlands became fashionable, “were smitten with a taste for the picturesque, the sublime, and the dreary” (Johnstone [1815] 2003: 132). She might also have provided the mocking view of Highland tourism featured in the 1814 novel The Saxon and the Gael, in which an empty-headed young lady comments breathlessly, after a visit to the Trossachs, that while “it’s the horridest place ever you saw in your life”, it is “monstrous fashionable […] every one said it was enchanting! and delightful! and charming! and beautiful! and picturesque! and sublime! and some of the ladies put a number of these words together” ([Johnstone?] 1814: 2: 170–72). Brunton and Johnstone were not alone in this perception that the taste for Scottish landscape resulted from an unfortunate collision of superficial fashions in literature and tourism; as late as 1824, Sarah Green was still mocking what she saw as the implausible, ill-informed and novel-fuelled rage for all things Scottish in her book Scotch Novel Reading. Anne Grant herself, meanwhile, credited Scott with almost single-handedly sparking the tourist boom in the Trossachs. Visiting Callander in 1810, she was told that more than five hundred chaises had come through the village that season, as hordes of eager readers of The Lady of the Lake made their ways to Loch Katrine, “disturb[ing] the wood nymphs and emulat[ing]

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Walter Scott”, as she rather drily informed her correspondent (J.P. Grant 1845: 1: 24). Elizabeth Isabella Spence, who arrived in Callander a few weeks before Grant, also reported that “the number of carriages which have stopped at this place during the present season already exceeds five hundred” (Spence 1811: 1: 199). There were tourists in the area before, of course – it is featured in Sarah Murray’s 1799 guidebook to Scotland – but the suddenness of its rise to mass popularity of the Trossachs as a tourist destination in the wake of The Lady of the Lake is emphasised by contrasting Dorothy Wordsworth’s account of her visit to the area in 1803, in which she stresses its isolation and solitude (Wordsworth [1894] 1981: 96–101). This fascination with the Highlands was in no way limited to Regency-era adolescents indulging in some fashionable swooning over Scott. By the time that Scott launched his career, the Highlanders themselves had in fact been the centre of metropolitan debates about primitivism, modernity, and cultural politics for over half a century. The region and its inhabitants occupied a troubled and deeply contested place in the British literary imagination throughout much of the eighteenth century, with the period spanned by Grant’s writing life seeing a particularly dramatic shift in attitudes towards them. The history of the Highlands during that period is, of course, a subject that has attracted an immense and sophisticated body of literature, much of it centred around the devastating effects of the second Jacobite uprising and the later phenomena of both mass emigration and the Clearances. The continuing debates sparked about even the most basic understanding of these historical events on Highland life are emphasised by the polemical nature of recent works on the subject by historians with such dramatically opposing views as Michael Fry (2005) and T.M. Devine (2006). As Peter Womack has influentially demonstrated in his study Improvement and Romance, however, ideas about the region were radically reconceptualised in the aftermath of Culloden, ensuring that what outsiders “knew” about it was increasingly a matter of myth and imagination (Womack 1989: 2–4). The basic trajectory of opinion sparked outside the region by this turbulent history – moving from somewhat nervous disdain in the 1740s to the romanticised celebration of the early nineteenth century – does not mean that anti-Highland attitudes ever disappeared entirely. This distaste for and distrust of the Highlands and Highlanders in the early decades of the eighteenth century was encouraged by a sense of

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an absolute cultural and geographical divide between them and the rest of Britain, including lowland and urban Scotland. The English soldier Edmund Burt, justifying his decision to write and publish a series of letters about his experiences in the Highlands in the 1720s and 30s, wrote that they are but little known even to the inhabitants of the low country of Scotland, for they have ever dreaded the difficulties and dangers of travelling among the mountains; and when some extraordinary occasion has obliged any one of them to such a progress, he has, generally speaking, made his testament before he set out, as though he were entering upon a long and dangerous sea voyage, wherein it was very doubtful if he should ever return. (Burt [1754] 1998: 3)

Burt (whose letters remained unpublished until 1754) then gives a picture of the Highlands that makes such forebodings seem justified: he complains repeatedly and in vivid detail about the cooking, the accommodations, the weather, the bleakness of the landscape, and the surliness and laziness of the people. Writing by Lowland Scots about the Highlands in the first decades of the century also supports Burt’s observations about the sense among Lowlanders that the Highlands were more or less foreign territory, and unsurprisingly, such rhetoric became increasingly shrill during and in the immediate aftermath of the 1745 uprising. One allegedly Scottish pamphleteer at the time, for example, describes the Highlanders as “a People […] with whom [other Britons] had less Connection than with the Muscovites, Turks, or Tartars” (Young Chevalier n.d.: 96). The passage in fact differentiates the Highlanders from “the English nation”, but as the author expressing the foreignness of the Highlands is announced in the prefatory material to be a Scot whose Northern idiom has been brushed up into standard English, the sense of Highland alterity is explicitly located within Scotland. Whether or not one believes these claims of Scottish authorship, the pamphlet deliberately reinforces the concept of a cultural divide within the Scottish borders. Around the same time, a writer for the Edinburgh-based Scots Magazine was matter-of-factly dismissing his Highland compatriots as “banditti” raised in a “nursery of rapine and violence” (Scots Magazine 1746: 313), while another writer for the same magazine argued that Highland culture simply had to be eradicated and proposed, as the best way of controlling the region, the wholesale transportation of adults and adolescents, followed by the careful education of the children by the

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English, in English, and in an English manner. Working, apparently, on the assumption that all partial evil is universal good and with a quite remarkable immunity to self-doubt or irony, “Justus” as the writer signs himself, sunnily concludes that the slaughter at Culloden might in fact “be of great service […] to the good design of civilising the rest of [Scotland]”, just as, he is sure, the Battle of Aughrim succeeded in turning the wild, feckless Irish into happy workers on English estates (“Justus” 1746: 475–76). If the intensity of the antiHighlands rhetoric reached its peak in the immediate post-Culloden years, however, this suspicion of and disdain for Highland culture didn’t fade easily or quickly. As late as 1804, a reviewer of the second volume of Transactions of the Highland Society was still insisting that the Highlands had yet to be seen as “a dependent and connected part” of the Empire and that, as a necessary step in remedying that situation, “[e]very method […] ought to be taken to identify the Highlanders, in language and manners” with other British subjects (Rev. of Transactions 1804: 65). Even if suspicion of Highland culture lingered, there was nonetheless, in the decades after 1745, a growing sense that the Highlanders and their culture were rather more intriguing than was implied by Burt’s picture of a cluster of savages huddling in xenophobic squalor on the barren edges of the island. This shift in perspective was shaped both by the increasing ease of travel in the region and by a growing sense of the ways in which the Highlands could be made to fit new literary fashions for the romantic and the primitive, a fit exemplified most influentially in Macpherson’s wildly popular “translations” of Ossian. These poems, allegedly the scraps and remnants of a vanishing oral culture, evoked a mood of dignified, romanticised melancholia and turned the Highlands into a sublimely stark site of ghosts, memory, and mourning rather than of unpleasantly retrograde barbarism. The dangerous “banditti” of The Scots Magazine are replaced by noble savages whose nobility is in fact far more marked than any savagery, despite their warrior culture and their temporal location in a period when, according to Macpherson’s more sceptical contemporaries, Scotland in fact consisted of little more than “cold and lonely heaths over which the deer of the forest were chased by a troop of naked barbarians” (Gibbon [1776–88] 1994: 1: 34).

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Granted, these new cultural fashions for “primitive” simplicity in art and literature did not necessarily lead to a more accurate knowledge of Highland culture. As David Daiches has observed, in spite of well-meant efforts to investigate and help Highland culture and economy on the part of some of the literati, in spite of inquiries into the background of Macpherson’s Ossian conducted by critics and scholars of Edinburgh and elsewhere, there was little fruitful inter-relation between Gaelic and non-Gaelic culture in eighteenth-century Scotland. (Daiches 1964: 97)

Likewise, T.C. Smout has commented on the irony that Gaelic literature reached one of its peaks in the eighteenth century, but that Lowland and English readers, enraptured by more comfortably familiar Celtic world presented in Ossian, almost completely failed to notice the achievements of their Gaelic-speaking contemporaries (Smout 1972: 65). On the contrary, the fad for Macpherson tended to lead either to attempts to shoehorn contemporary Highlanders into a template of primitive Ossianic virtue or to disappointed comments on their degeneracy from their original cultural purity. The result is a body of late eighteenth-century writing that, even when disinclined to see “primitivism” as being in any way desirable for contemporary Briton as a whole, reinforced on some levels the desire to see the Highlands as a more or less accessible, more or less fascinating, site of cultural alterity. This was the case with what was perhaps the single most famous eighteenth-century account of the Highlands, the journey made and then so influentially written about by Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. As their journals make clear, even a vehemently antiOssianic voice such as Samuel Johnson’s could be seduced by a vision of the Highlands that dovetailed with Macpherson’s representation of them as the wild “other” of contemporary Britain. Johnson had formed that idea (according to Boswell) when he first read the work of the seventeenth-century Highland traveller Martin Martin, whose work “impressed [Johnson] with a notion” that he might there “find simplicity and wildness, and all the circumstances of remote time and place” in relatively close proximity to modern, urban Britain (Boswell [1786] 1984: 161). (Even though the quoted phases are Boswell’s, not Johnson’s, there is no reason to doubt Boswell’s account of Johnson’s motivation – however much the actual experience of Highland life might have failed to live up to Johnson’s expectations.) Nor, despite the outrage provoked by Johnson’s critical account of the poverty and

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backwardness that he eventually found in the Highlands, was he altogether disappointed in his expectation. At Col, for example, Boswell reports that they “were entertained […] with a primitive heartiness. Whisky was served round in a shell, according to the ancient Highland custom”, and Johnson, though he would not touch alcohol, was sufficiently “desirous to do honour to the modes ‘of other times’” to drink some water from the shell (Boswell [1786] 1984: 336). This “ancient […] custom” was, of course, familiar to non-Highlanders entirely through the Ossian poems and their representation of the supposed tradition of the “feast of shells”. By way of contrast, when the very modern Sir Alexander Macdonald raised practical objections to Johnson’s more or less playful suggestions for reanimating the feudal spirit of the clans, both Johnson and Boswell were reduced to grumbling about the failures of “the English-bred chieftain” to display what they saw as the proper “feudal and patriarchal feelings” of a Highlander (Boswell [1786] 1984: 242). The point to be made here is not that Johnson’s tour, which quickly became notorious for its supposed hostility to Scottish culture and landscape, was in some way more sympathetic to Highlanders than has been traditionally recognised, though that argument has been made (Glendening 1997), but rather that the myth of the Highlands as the repository of a form of virtuous, pastoral innocence, long since lost to more urban, and supposedly more culturally advanced, Britons was so pervasive as to influence even a writer as resolutely sceptical and as famously scotophobic as Johnson. Much of the writing about Highland society during this period is in fact steeped in the theories of conjectural history developed by a number of the most important philosophers of the Scottish enlightenment, and even if Grant does not explicitly cite this work, it provides the theoretical framework underlying both Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders and her long poem on the subject. (It also shapes her account of both Aboriginal and colonial Americans in her Memoirs of an American Lady.) Assuming that human society progresses in a more or less predictable line from nomadic huntergatherers through pastoralism and then on to agricultural and modern commercial society, such influential thinkers as Adam Ferguson and Dugald Stewart suggested that the prehistoric past can be reconstructed, in some measure, by a study of surviving “primitive” peoples. (For an overview of this theory of history, see Phillips 2000:

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171–89; Pittock 2003: 258–79; and Wheeler 2000: 181–88). This is, of course, a theory that has come under serious criticism by late twentieth- and twenty-first century scholars; the anthropologist Johannes Fabian, for one, has analysed the troubling socio-political implications of this “denial of coevalness” (Fabian 1983). More recently, Roxann Wheeler has explored in detail the ways in which this concept of “temporal asymmetry” developed by Fabian shapes eighteenth-century ideas of cultural alterity. According to Wheeler, work on this subject by the conjectural historians helps to produce an eighteenth-century concept of racialised difference tied to culture, not (as in most twentieth- and twenty-first century discussions of race) to skin colour. “The combined force of the speculations of natural and civil historians”, Wheeler writes, “led to some alarming suppositions […] The sense that bodily, intellectual, and cultural differences might be somehow connected was broached anew”, and “actual economic and political subordination found expression and, occasionally, justification in racial terms” (Wheeler 2000: 188). Those living in more “primitive” cultures are, in other words, imagined as being, in a very real sense, in a state of culturally engrained and more or less permanent childhood, a state of inferiority measured not (or not only) by varying skin colour but rather by cultural practice. Such metaphorical links between cultural and individual human development, according to which the Highlanders are the childlike remnants of the cultural past of an implicitly adult British society can at times be very explicitly drawn and were in fact a recurring motif in much of the later eighteenth-century travellers’ commentary on the Highlands. One A.L., for example, who was not much impressed by the Highlands as a whole (given the discomforts of travel then, he grumbled, the trip “is hardly to be recommended to one’s Friends”) had nonetheless been overwhelmed, in 1785, to find a glimpse of Arcadia within striking distance of Glasgow as he set out north via Loch Lomond and spent the afternoon with a peasant family whose “Tranquility […] lulled to rest my perturbed Thought and as it were lost us to the present Hour by carrying us back in Mind to the Days of primitive Innocence” (A.L. 1785: ff. 6v, 4). Similarly, Mary Ann Hanway, travelling a year after Johnson, represents herself being moved, by the picturesque virtues of some cottagers she visited, to recall and recite some lines from Goldsmith’s Traveller about primitive idylls (Hanway 1776[?]: 80–81). Even Grant, sympathetic as

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she was to Highland society, did not shy away from such ideas. “We contemplate nations in this state”, she writes of the Highlands in one of her essays, with a feeling like that which every unspoilt mind derives from the innocent prattle of such children as are not confined in artificial trammels […] We feel all the comparative consciousness, that we can think deeper and express ourselves better; yet, making the due allowance, we wonder they think so soundly, and speak so well. To this wonder is added the never failing charm of simplicity, and the delight we take in detecting the first motions as they arise in the less-tutored breast; and asserting the retrograde view, we love to indulge of our own feelings and opinions, during that guileless period. (Grant 1811a: 1: 1–6)

Nor are Highlanders distanced from the contemporary Britons observing them just by being associated with childhood memories; in addition, they are also simultaneously assimilated to numerous other groups of people separated from eighteenth-century Britons by skin colour and geographical as well as by presumed temporal or developmental distance. Examples of links drawn by observers between Highlanders and other cultures are as easy to find as comments on the Highlanders’ supposed Arcadian, childlike primitivism. According to a nineteenth-century German linguist, Macpherson’s Celts were interchangeable with the knights of chivalric romance; Sir Walter Scott, going through the Culloden papers, decided that the Highlanders he read about there resembled contemporary Afghan tribesmen. Christian Johnstone, meanwhile, suggests that the Highlanders of Scotland are all but interchangeable with the peasants of Biscay and Catalonia, while Anne Grant’s Celts would apparently have been more or less equally at home with the Incas, the classical Greeks (“I thought myself in Ithaca”, Grant writes from a peasant cottage near Glencoe), or, in a comparison which recurs constantly in writing about the Highlands, the Mohawks whom she had known during her childhood (Scott 1816: 288, 290; Johnstone [1815] 2003: 467; Grant 1807b: 1: 19, 107). Of course, she was far from being alone in making this final connection: Boswell and Scott are probably the most famous among the many writers to compare the Highlanders to Native Americans. In his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, Boswell comments that one of his boatmen reminds him as much of “a wild Indian” as of “an English tar” (Boswell [1786] 1984: 251). Likewise, in his introduction to Rob Roy, Scott writes that his eponymous hero blended “the wild virtues, the subtle policy, and the unrestrained licence of an American Indian”,

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(Scott [1817] 2008: 5) while the Judge whose comments sum up the tragic action of “The Two Drovers” again links Highlanders and Mohawks. More recently, Kenneth Simpson has observed that “only the American Indians have been subjected to more immediate and more intense mythologising” than the eighteenth-century Highlanders (Simpson 1988: 46), while Roxann Wheeler has paid renewed attention to Johnson’s linking of “the lower ranks of the Highlanders and Native Americans” (Wheeler 2000: 194). By linking the Highlanders with these more obviously “exotic” cultures, British writers might seem to be very carefully differentiating and distancing themselves from the Celtic world at the fringes of their nation. Yet the main point of interest here is not the obvious one – that is, that the concepts of Britishness developed in such work are based on exclusion and cultural bifurcation – but is rather, a more or less submerged anxiety that such distinction is ultimately unsustainable, as the supposedly “childlike” or “primitive” Highlanders constantly threaten to escape their relegation to a more or less unthreatening cultural past or exotic “otherness”. One can illustrate this point by looking more closely at the implications of the comparison between the Highlanders and the Native Americans, as in both cases, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers were fascinated with the insights to be gained into their own culture by real or imagined “crossings” into the supposedly more primitive society. The white “Indian” who lives a purer, simpler life than his (the pronoun is correct)4 European compatriots – such as Voltaire’s Ingénu, Chateaubriand’s René, Robert Bage’s Hermsprong, or James Fenimore Cooper’s Hawkeye – is a familiar figure in the literature of this period. This was a character type that could be used in a number of contexts, from political and philosophical didacticism, as was the case with Voltaire and Bage, to straightforward romance, such as one finds in Charlotte Lennox’s 1790 novel Euphemia, and to Scottinflected historical romance, such as John Richardson’s Wacousta 4

There are of course numerous captivity narratives of white women taken by American Indians, a number of whom chose to adopt the Aboriginal culture of their captors. These narratives seem to have provoked considerable cultural anxiety, not entirely unrelated to the points that I’m making here about the fictional cross-cultural men, for reasons that John Demos (1994) explores at length in The Unredeemed Captive, a study of Eunice Williams, one of the most famous of these “captivated” women. On this subject, see also James Axtell (1985), Michelle Burnham (1997), and Linda Colley (2002).

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(1832) and, more famously, Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans. Susan Manning and others have called attention to Cooper’s debt to Scott (Manning 1982: 51; see also Hook 1972: 25]), further emphasising the continuities between the Highlander and the Native American in the literary imagination of the time. Yet there are important limitations to this alignment as well, as one can see by contrasting the figure of the white “Indian” with another literary stereotype that might initially seem more or less interchangeable with him. That is the figure of the Lowland or English would-be “Celt” that one finds in so much of the fiction about the Scottish Highlands, in characters such as Scott’s heroes or (much later, and in a very different style) Robert Louis Stevenson’s David Balfour. Both types of character are used to suggest, on some level, the limitations of cosmopolitan European society as sophisticated “moderns” choose to step backwards into a more “savage” but also more “pure” world. The “white Indian” is, however, a figure who ultimately tends to dramatise, whether satirically or tragically, the impassable gap between cultures, while the figures who move between Lowlands and Highlands frequently highlight issues of liminality and integration. Hermsprong, the Ingénu and Hawkeye all remain, even if for very different reasons, unable to integrate fully into either the Aboriginal cultures to which they have so many ties or to the European cultures of their parents. Their two cultures are, on a very basic level, irreconcilable, and even when (as with Bage and Voltaire) the book is comic or satiric in tone, the ultimate message is that the gulf between the “modern” and the “primitive” is both real and ultimately unbridgeable. This is not quite the case, however, in works featuring characters who choose the Highlands, rather than America, for the site of their experiments with willed primitivism. In general, such characters are not just able to return to their own worlds after their experiences in the Highlands but are, as a result of their excursions into the “primitive”, wiser and better fitted to define their own cultural identity against that of a homogenising metropolis. As James Buzard has argued, the role of the Highlands in the Waverley novels is to “supply the elements of a new and intransigent Scottish cultural difference” in which “the Lowlander’s cultural translation of ‘Scotland’ strives for a double goal, an intelligible foreignness” (Buzard 2005: 75). The rhetorical complications of this way of representing the Highlands, using them as a mode by which non-Highlanders can assume the role of cultural

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“translators” embracing two apparently opposed sets of values, would of course have been clear enough a generation before, when conflation of Scotland with the Highlands tended to be the basis of negative English propaganda, as writers and artists used representations of Highland Scots to associate Scotland as a whole with barbarity, squalor, and poverty. A 1763 cartoon, for example, shows a skeletal plaid-wrapped Highlander against a background of barren mountains and starving sheep; Linda Colley, who reprints the cartoon, uses it to illustrate the ways in which, in such propaganda, “Highlanders and Lowlanders, cultivated patricians […] and the poorest, most illiterate clansmen were all conflated” in a generalised vision of Scotland (Colley 1992: 114). Yet by Scott’s day, the problem was rather different, as is suggested by Malcolm Chapman’s acid observation that Since the eighteenth century […] the Scottish people have increasingly looked to the Highlands to provide a location for an autonomy in which they could lodge their own political, literary and historical aspirations. They have thereby been allowed to reap all the benefits of the Union, while at the same time retaining a location for all the virtues of sturdy independence. (cited in Simpson 1988: 45)

In Chapman’s eyes, this sort of cultural blurring becomes a hypocritical refusal to recognise the very real gaps dramatised in the fictions of “white Indians.” Yet whether Lowland writers are hypocritical or not in their literary uses of the Highlands, the region does function differently as an escape from modernity than do the North American wilds. There is, of course, a very simple and obvious reason for that. Despite the repeated linking of American aboriginal culture with that of the Highlands, and despite Wheeler’s convincing arguments about the ways in which Johnson and other influential eighteenth-century writers use the discourse of race to differentiate between themselves and Highlanders, the societies were never as distant from one another as those of the Europeans and the Native Americans, either literally or rhetorically. On the literal level, this is obviously in part the result of proximity – even in the eighteenth century, after all, getting to the Highlands from the lowlands or England was a matter of at most a few days’ travel rather than the weeks needed to cross the Atlantic – and partly, no doubt, connected to the difficult issue of skin colour. As V.G. Kiernan has argued, the Highlanders might have been as culturally alien to the urban European as the Tahitians, but “a Highlander taught English and

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the minuet was at once European” – something that would not be as true of the Tahitian or the American Indian (Kiernan 1972: 16). This point might explain why, even as writers insist on the strange “otherness” of the Highlanders, one finds in much of the writing on the subject a more or less subterranean acknowledgement of and, often, anxiety about the cultural continuities running beneath the insistence on difference and otherness, something that is not so much the case with the more obvious alterity of the Native American. The idea of the racialised “otherness” of the Highlands is, in other words, complicated by the ways in which representations of the primitive purity and simplicity of the culture are, somewhat paradoxically, inflected by a more or less anxious awareness of the interconnection of Highland and Lowland rather than their separateness. Brunton, Ferrier, and Scott: The Highlands in Fiction This sense of interconnection between Highlands and Lowlands is worked out perhaps most fully in the fiction of Grant’s contemporaries: Scott, most importantly, but also the now lesser-known women writers of that generation, including Mary Brunton and Susan Ferrier. Especially in the case of the women, Highland alterity tends to be represented not so much through the imagined relegation of the inhabitants to a remote cultural past but rather through imagining the Highlands as a more or less atemporal world, one that exists more as a parallel and alternative to modernity than a doomed precursor of it. Indeed, despite the ongoing association between Highlanders and the “masculine” worlds of violence and war, in some cases the region tends to function rhetorically in much the same way as a more predictable alternative to public, commercial modernity: that is, the private realm of feminine domesticity. One can make this point in brief by turning to a book that still tends to be rather surprisingly overlooked in Scottish literary history, Mary Brunton’s second novel Discipline (1815). Brunton locates her action very precisely in the then-recent past, with the main events taking place between 1792 and 1795, dates that are easy to fix since the novel follows the life of its heroine Ellen Percy (born in 1775, as we learn midway through the novel) between the ages of seventeen and twenty. Other markers reinforce the very late eighteenth-century mood of the plot: Ellen launches her social

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career in a London that is teetering just on the edge between high fashion and decadence; meanwhile, the hero Maitland / Graham makes his name in Parliament as an abolitionist, and his elder brother dies bravely while serving in the West Indies. Yet during the climactic Highland episodes, as Brunton rewards her much-tried heroine by allowing her to escape into a Highland idyll, the novel shifts abruptly into a sort of temporal haziness. Ellen’s retreat is a self-contained pastoral glen that houses a contentedly feudalistic clan whose members are almost completely untroubled by such things as emigration or the post-1745 breaking of the traditional clan system. Still more strikingly, when, in a brief coda to the novel, Ellen looks back contentedly from the perspective of post-Napoleonic Britain on her many happy years as the chieftain’s wife, she appears to be reflecting on a society that even then differs from the pre-1745 Highlands that Scott portrayed in Waverley mainly in the cosily family-centred domesticity that anchors it. Fleeing the corruption of London and Edinburgh, what Ellen finds in the Highlands is not so much a primitive world untouched by modernity as a feminine domestic retreat from the dangers and temptations of financial speculation, public entertainments, and (very importantly to Brunton’s novel) seduction and adultery. Nor was Brunton alone in seeing the Highlands less as a remnant of the primitive than as a more-or-less feminised retreat from decadent, commercial modernity; in Susan Ferrier’s last novel (Destiny, 1831), one finds an even more marked slippage between the distant past and the lived present. The book’s action is never dated, but it is set in a world that is obviously both nineteenth-century and postNapoleonic (characters own Thomas Lawrence paintings and travel freely on the continent) – presumably, the 1820s. Nevertheless, it opens with an evocation of a traditional Highland world that writers since Macpherson had been insisting was already gone: All the world knows there is nothing on earth to be compared to a Highland chief. He has his loch and his islands, his mountains and his castle, his piper and his tartan, his forests and his deer, his thousands of acres of untrodden heath, and his tens of thousands of black-faced sheep, and his bands of bonneted clansmen, with claymores, and Gaelic, and hot blood, and dirks. All these and more, had the Chief of Glenroy… (Ferrier [1831] 1852: 1)

The one detail that indicates unambiguously that this description is of the lives of chiefs after 1745 – the “tens of thousands of black-faced

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sheep” – also underlines that what Ferrier is describing is an imagined vision of a place that never quite existed, except, perhaps, as a form of nostalgic cultural performance. Even if there is a touch of amused irony in this rehearsal of what “all the world knows” about the Highlands, the irony slips away in the insistence upon this as a literal picture of life in the contemporary Highlands, which it quite clearly is not. Again, the sheep are the key: as was noted more or less glumly in much of the literature on emigration from the mid-eighteenth century onward, all those romantic “bands of bonneted clansmen” were being uprooted and resettled overseas precisely in order to make room for the sheep that were displacing them. This was a point that nobody in the 1820s with the slightest interest in Scottish matters could have missed. Other novelists had taken up the subject, including Christian Johnstone, whose Clan-Albin is, among many other things, a vigorous attack on the economics driving emigration, and her Napoleonic-era Highlands have been ravaged by sixty years of economic and cultural disaster. Writers for periodicals had also explored the issue, with no less distinguished an observer than Sir Walter Scott presenting the ongoing mass emigration as both an inescapable fact of Highland life and as a potential national catastrophe: if the hour of need should come – and it may not, perhaps, be far distant – the pibroch may sound through the deserted region, but the summons will remain unanswered. The children who had left her will re-echo from a distant shore the sounds with which they took leave of their own – Ha til, ha til, mi tulidh ! – “We return – we return – we return – no more!” (Scott 1816: 333)

In her idyllic sketch of these more or less untouched 1820s Highlands, in other words, Ferrier is creating something that is rather closer to Victoria’s Balmoral fantasia than to anything described by the travellers and political writers of the generations before and contemporary with her. What she insists is something that “[a]ll the world knows” about the region is willed nostalgic fantasy, leaving Destiny’s Edith Malcolm, like Discipline’s Ellen Percy, in a world immune to history. Yet however much a fantasy, this vision of an atemporal world of virtuous clan life was obviously strongly appealing, so much so that even the radical Christian Johnstone couldn’t resist concluding her bleak portrayal of the contemporary Highlands in Clan-Albin with a vision of a renovated, multicultural (English, Irish, Lowland, and Highland) clan contentedly settling into an idyllic glen and turning its

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back on the modern world. This is also a vision that appeals strongly to the heroes of a number of Scott’s most familiar novels, even though the novels themselves imply a deep scepticism about the construction of the Highlands as either a surviving remnant of the primitive or as an atemporal refuge – temporary or permanent – from the corruptions of modernity. In this respect that Grant’s work has at least as much in common with Scott’s as it does with that of her women contemporaries (even though all of his fiction post-dates her most important writing), but it is also Scott’s work that emphasises perhaps most strongly the complexity of the subject position that Grant was creating for herself by writing about the Highlands as – at least partly – a Highlander. Even as Scott’s fiction offers a version of Highland culture that is not straightforwardly primitive and “other”, the Highlanders in his novels are often faintly troubling, especially when they cross cultures, which is of course exactly what Grant presents herself as doing. Far from being either innocents doomed to destruction by the touch of modern life, or the fortunate inhabitants of an ahistorical Arcadia, hermetically sealed off by their mountains from the taint of modernity, some of Scott’s most memorable and intriguing Highlanders owe their glamour precisely to their absorption of aspects of the “modern” British or European world, something that makes them all the more compelling and dangerous, rather than simply more comprehensible or familiar, to the naïve young Englishmen who become fascinated by them. One can illustrate in a number of ways this claim that Scott presents his Highlanders as being more culturally sophisticated than his heroes initially can – or perhaps want to – recognise them as being. Most basically, perhaps, the very language that the Highlanders speak in his novels reflects their absorption of at least some aspects of a culture that is not their own. In Rob Roy, for example, Scott gives us, in a move that might initially seem conventional enough, Highlanders who are described as “serious and impassioned” people, expressing themselves in a “wild, elevated, and poetical” language that is “pure as well as vehement” (Scott [1817] 2008: 412). Yet there is a significant caveat to be made about this familiar celebration of the “primitive” and the “pure”, since the language in the passage just cited is, very pointedly, not Gaelic, and the speaker in question, Rob Roy’s Helen MacGregor, is addressing the English hero Frank Osbaldistone in English, even if in a version of it that is strongly inflected by the

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rhythms and idioms of her native language. Frank attributes the power of her rhetoric partly to the strength of her passions, but also, and more interestingly, to the fact that she is using a foreign language – in effect, violating any sense that she embodies a sort of untouched “primitivism”. She had learned English, Scott writes, “as we do learned tongues” and so she “had probably never heard [it] applied to the mean purposes of ordinary life” (Scott [1817] 2008: 411). The “purity” of expression that impresses Frank so strongly is thus, somewhat paradoxically, attributed precisely to the fact that Helen is mixing cultures, using the language of one to express the ideas of the other, and doing so far more readily than Frank himself could – a point that obviously complicates the idea of the Highlander as an iconic embodiment of untouched primitivism. Helen MacGregor, strange and exotic as she appears to be, nonetheless quite literally speaks the language of staid Frank Osbaldistone and is able to communicate her “otherness” to him precisely because aspects of his culture have seeped into hers. As Kenneth McNeil has noted, although in an argument built around Rob Roy himself, not Helen, the exemplary Highlander here becomes a remarkably “double-voiced” figure, not an embodiment of absolute alterity (McNeil 2007: 65). The differences between Scott’s Helen MacGregor and the Anne Grant of Letters from the Mountains are so extreme that it becomes almost comic to write about them both in the same sentence, but given the importance that McNeil accords to the “double-voicedness” of Highlanders, the fact that Grant and Helen share that quality implies the potential difficulties of Grant’s insider / outsider position if one reads it back through ideas of Highlanders derived from Scott’s overwhelmingly influential fiction. Even given that Grant was learning Gaelic, not English, “as we do learned tongues”, her selfproclaimed ability to move between the two cultures still places her, in significant ways, closer to Helen than to Frank. Nor does Scott present such linkages between Highland and larger British culture as simply a matter of language, as even the most cursory reading of the Waverley novels indicates. Rob Roy himself, the embodiment of primitive Highland romance in the dazzled eyes of Frank Osbaldistone, still claims cousinship with the utterly proper Glasgow merchant Nichol Jarvie. More notably, perhaps, the MacIvors, those dazzlingly exotic Highland figures who begin Edward Waverley’s seduction away from solid British loyalties, are attractive

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to him at least in part because their version of Celtic culture has sufficient affinities with Waverley’s mainstream British and European cultural tastes to be charming rather than merely frighteningly or disorientatingly foreign. Fergus Mac-Ivor (whom Colonel Talbot tellingly dismisses as “a Frenchified Scotchman”) is careful to strike a balance between European sophistication and traditional Highland display when he first entertains Waverley and makes a point of mocking the Baron’s immersion in obsolete Scottish tradition. Despite being rooted in his Highland culture, Fergus implies (admittedly misleadingly, as it turns out) that he is in fact more closely aligned in his tastes and values with the modern Englishman Waverley than is the rustic lowland Baron. (See McNeil 2007: 90–99 for a far more detailed discussion of Fergus as a cosmopolitan figure.) Likewise, when Flora dazzles Waverley by accompanying herself on a Scottish harp in a wildly beautiful Highland setting, she reminds him of a figure from “the landscapes of Poussin” or “a fair enchantress of Boiardo or Ariosto” (Scott [1814] 1986: 106). While she claims to be providing Waverley with an exemplarily Celtic experience, in other words – listening to a Highland song “in the mist of the secret and solitary hill […and] the murmur of the mountain stream” (Scott [1814] 1986: 106–7) – she is doing so in a way that assimilates it into high European culture and makes it painlessly accessible to him. In effect, what Flora is providing is not the thrilling glimpse of cultural otherness that Waverley seeks (and believes himself to have found) but rather a high-end tourist experience (see Buzard 1995: 31–59); one might compare Grant’s attempt to mediate the Highland landscape for her readers by presenting it through the medium of popular eighteenth-century verse (a point discussed more fully below). Flora’s ability to enthral Waverley by a careful reworking of Gaelic culture to suit his “modern” British tastes also underscores, obviously enough, the degree to which this ability of Scott’s Highlanders to blend the familiar and the exotic functions, in the novels, as a form of seduction. This is not an argument that Scott is simply repeating the familiar move of feminising a colonised or subordinated people;5 indeed, on one level, at least, the complete 5

There is a large literature on the “feminisation” of India, in particular; see for example Rajan 1996 and 1999 and Suleri 1992. Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature (1866) is a classic and influential presentation of the concept of the “feminised” Celt.

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reverse seems more true, since it has become a commonplace of Scott criticism that the heroes who come to embody modernising British values are more or less insistently feminised (see, for example, Whyte 2004; Ferns 1996; Wilt 1985). There might be some debate about the significance of that point, with Susan Morgan, for one, arguing that the result is that Scott reinvents the concept of heroism, aligning it with “flexibility and forgiveness” and “what are traditionally thought to be feminine values” (Morgan 1989: 80), but there is no doubt that in Scott’s Jacobite novels, traditional “masculine” values are strongly aligned with the Highlands. It is at least in part the romantic militarism of the Jacobite Highlanders that attracts characters such as Edward Waverley and Frank Osbaldistone to them. Yet the type of power embodied by the Highlanders is not limited to that embodied in the violent, stereotypically “macho” heroes. Dreamy, romantic Edward Waverley is, after all, seduced to the Highland cause as much by the aesthetically sophisticated performances of Flora Mac-Ivor and by the courtly glamour of the smoothly cosmopolitan Prince Charles Edward as he is by Fergus’ masculine prowess. The gruff, proudly mono-cultural Colonel Talbot makes precisely this point, scoffing that it needed only “a few civil speeches” by a man he dismisses as “Italian knight-errant” to win Waverley’s allegiance (Scott [1814] 1986: 241). Even more importantly, as most of Scott’s critics have also pointed out, the heroes of these novels also eventually turn away from the romantic version of Highland culture that dazzles them at the beginning of the books in which they appear. Frank Osbaldistone might protest against working in a counting house at the beginning of Rob Roy, but when he engages in derring do it is not in the name of Romance in general or even of Diana Vernon in particular, but rather to protect his father’s mercantile interests. By the end of the novel, when he inherits Osbaldistone Hall and weds the Jacobite heroine Diana, he reclaims both for good English whiggery. Rob Roy, meanwhile, unable to inhabit a world in which commercialism rules, fades into obsolescence, becoming a mere colourful legend. Edward Waverley might initially long for the romanticised version of the Highland past that is embodied by Flora, but settles instead for a future with his all-but-English Rose. Likewise, to extend the argument to another novel that raises somewhat similar issues, Redgauntlet’s Darsie Latimer creates new family allegiances for himself not just

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through his renunciation of his uncle Redgauntlet, who attempts to live in what the novel presents as a romantic but inevitably doomed Jacobite past, but also through the marriage of his sister to the practical, forward-looking Edinburgh lawyer Alan Fairford. That said, Darsie Latimer might seem to present a slightly different case from the other two characters, although he is even more insistently feminised than Waverley, beginning his adventures by being swept up on his uncle’s horse as Redgauntlet gallops to his rescue ahead of the treacherous tides of the Solway and ending them by tripping over the entirely gratuitous skirts in which he has been forced to disguise himself and tumbling into Alan Fairford’s chivalric embrace. The difference is that the strange, forbidden country on which Darsie trespasses is not the Highlands, but rather the Solway Firth and the English borders, and his frightening but fascinating uncle is a lowland Jacobite, not a Highlander. It is significant, however, that the plot dynamics are the same: Darsie’s uneasy fascination with the Jacobite Redgauntlet has many obvious points in common with Waverley’s uneasy admiration of Fergus Mac-Ivor. These affinities between Darsie and Waverley are also echoed in heroes who are even more remote from Highland causes, such as Old Mortality’s Harry Morton, who finds himself ensnared by a backward-looking enthusiast who happens to be a Covenanter, not a Jacobite at all. Such links between the torn allegiances of Harry and Darsie, Waverley and Frank emphasise the ways in which Scott links the cultural meanings assigned to his Highlanders with those associated, in his other books, with other regions or social movements. In doing so, he quietly undercuts the sense one finds in so much other writing of the period, that Highland society represents a unique, self-contained, and vanishing remnant of primitivism on the fringes of the modern British nation. Lowland Jacobites, Covenanters, and Highlanders (Jacobite or not) all merge together in Scott’s fiction as exemplars of a type of glamour that the heroes have to set aside, even if with regret, in their move towards adulthood in a world that has no room for such seductively sophisticated romance. The Highland culture that we see in Scott’s fiction thus functions not – or rather, not only – as a remnant of a more primitive past, but is, even more importantly, the site in which his heroes are forced into a recognition that the romance for which they long is both more complex and more dangerous than they can initially perceive. This movement away from romance can be

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seen simply as a form of maturation: as Susan Morgan, for one, has convincingly argued, the charismatic “dark” heroes of Scott’s fiction (to borrow Alexander Welsh’s influential formulation) are adolescent fantasies of the glamour of power and as such, must inevitably be discarded, however regretfully, by heroes who are able to mature and develop in a way that those dark heroes cannot. More to the point here, however, the rejection of romance is also, in some ways, a rejection of attempts to merge or move between cultures. Notably, and the book implies properly, it is the uncomplicated, matter-of-fact Talbot who seduces Waverley more finally and more firmly than the cultural hybrids Charles Stuart and Fergus, with his vision of a simple culture in which duties are plain and clear, if not necessarily always easy to follow. The significance of this point to a reading of Grant’s treatment of the Highlands is not just that, in aligning his Highlanders with other figures of glamorous but doomed romance, Scott further distances them from the “modern” world of his heroes, but also that he implies that the price of that “modernity” lies precisely in his heroes’ willingness and ability to cut themselves loose from the sort of “double-voiced” figures that Grant is attempting to evoke in her own narrative persona. One way to read this process in Scott’s fiction is, as Morgan suggests, to see it as a reluctant relinquishment of childhood, but it is also possible to present the endings of these novels in a slightly different way, one that highlights, by contrast, Grant’s attempts to create a literary, artistic version of the Highlands that incorporates the “primitive” and the “modern”. Scott’s heroes are not merely abandoning, in the name of either maturation or modernity, the worlds that attracted them so much, but are also to some degree transforming the cultures they leave behind into a sentimentalised, uncomplicated version of themselves. This latter process is illustrated most famously and concisely near the end of Waverley, when, in a much-discussed moment, the newly ex-Jacobite Edward Waverley reveals a painting of himself and Fergus MacIvor, his recently and horribly executed companion-in-arms, in Highland garb. It is an odd moment in which, as James Buzard has noted, Fergus is “translated from time into space, from deliberative historical agent into static symbol” (Buzard 1995: 48). The result is not simply glaring anachronism, as we are required to believe that Waverley, having narrowly escaped an alarmingly well-grounded charge of treason, would choose

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to celebrate that escape by commissioning a painting of himself in enemy guise; more intriguingly, it shows Waverley himself reinventing his own recent past as romance rather than history. However implausible the painting might be as a decorating choice in a politically unstable time, it evokes in brief the massive cultural shift between 1746 and 1814 in its flattening out of the complex, imperfect, and culturally sophisticated Fergus into a painted figure of aestheticised sentiment. The kilt becomes costume and the painting an apolitical artefact of what is implicitly reconfigured by Waverley himself – as opposed to Scott – as a mere youthful jaunt in the Highlands. In the fairly unsubtle symbolism of the ending, English Waverley marries his (lowland) Scottish Rose, with the Highlands safely consigned to the realm of decoration, memory, and the past, as the grim political theatre of Fergus being slowly tortured to death (Scott refuses to depict the execution but is careful to note, without comment, that it takes an hour and a half) is effaced by the painting. This carefully designed image fixes Fergus in what the novel emphasises is an imagined place and time – the dramatic landscape and pose are, as we are pointedly informed, fictions confected by “an eminent London artist” (Scott [1814] 1986: 338) – that embodies not what Waverley has known of the Highlands, but rather the way he chooses to remember them and incorporate them into the British union that ends the novel. This removal of Fergus from the messy political and historical specificities of the 1740s and transposition of him into a geographically and historically hazy tableau of “Highland” life could thus perhaps be read as mirroring in some ways the tendency of Brunton and Ferrier to imagine an Arcadian Highlands immune to history. The difference, of course, is that Scott suggests the process by which the region is moved from the realm of history into that of art, he simultaneously implies that doing so is a willed – if necessary – falsification, rather than an attempt to create or imagine a golden age. What one finds in the novels of Scott and his female contemporaries, in other words, is not any sort of straightforwardly sentimental celebration or rejection of the Highlands as an embodiment of the primitive or the remote. The cultural meanings that the Highlands assumed in some of the most popular fiction of this time were at least as complicated as the ones assigned them in the political and philosophical writing of the day. Whether the region was used to represent values that had to be set aside – however regretfully – in

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what was assumed to be the inevitable march of historical progress, or whether it was imagined as a site in which characters could find refuge from urban corruption and decadence, it was closely implicated in the ways in which urban Scots represented their own sense of cultural modernity. Indeed, one of the key factors linking Scott and the lesser-known women novelists who were writing about the Highlands in Edinburgh around the same time – and differentiating them all from Grant – is that none of them were Highlanders themselves: Ferrier was an Edinburgh native, Johnstone lived as a young woman in Edinburgh and Fife and apparently spent little if any time in the Highlands until she moved to Inverness two years after the publication of Clan-Albin, and Brunton was an Orcadian who settled in Edinburgh as a young woman. (Though remote and very different from lowland Scotland, the Orkney Islands were and are culturally and linguistically distinct from the Gaelic Highlands.) This is not just to make the obvious point that their fictional representations of the Highlands are fictional, but rather to emphasise that representations of the Highlands were an integral part of the discourse of the Edinburgh literary world, and that the era’s fascination with the region casts as much light on urban intellectual and artistic preoccupations as it does on Highland life and culture. Obviously, Highlanders were writing about and for themselves during the decades on either side of the year 1800, but what one finds in much of the literature that has entered the British – or even the Scottish – canon are views of the Highlands from the outside and from a perspective that, directly or indirectly, turns the region into a way of reflecting upon Lowland and metropolitan culture. Anne Grant on the Highlands Given the importance of representations of the Highlands to early nineteenth-century Scottish and British debates about concepts such as modernity and national identity, Anne Grant’s choice of the region as her major subject inevitably draws her into the intellectual world of her more famous literary contemporaries. In her work, however, the Highlands are not so much a static or deliberately aestheticised “other” against which the successes (or failures) of contemporary metropolitan life can be measured as they are the direct source of her

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own literary and cultural authority. Unlike Scott, Brunton, Ferrier, or Johnstone, Grant explicitly positions herself as writing not just about but as a Highlander. The literary authority that she builds for herself over the course of Letters from the Mountains is based upon her being a participant in the community that she describes, as well as a moreor-less disinterested observer of it. This is a point that has been explored by most of Grant’s critics (see McNeil 2007: 150–62 for a very full discussion of it; it is also discussed in Haglund 2004), and it of course places Grant’s work squarely within the auto-ethnographic mode analysed by Buzard, as Grant habitually blurs the boundaries between herself and the culture about which she is writing. The selfconsciously superior, quasi-anthropological editorial voice that, for example, frames the Irish peasant’s voice in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent appears only very occasionally in Letters from the Mountains. Even if Edgeworth is mocking that “editorial” perspective, as a number of recent critics have argued, the result is still an emphasis, however satirically developed, on the gap between cultures and classes. In contrast, even as Grant insists upon the foreignness of the Highlands to her urban and English readers, she is quietly establishing herself as a successful embodiment of the sort of cultural blending that one finds in Scott’s glamorous but doomed Jacobite heroes. That blending is not, however, simply a matter of Grant’s being able to write about a fashionable subject from the flexible insider / outsider position that she claims. More importantly, as she grounds her literary practice in her lived, domestic life, Grant suggests that the subterranean links between Highland and Lowland, “primitive” and modern, are worth preserving and emphasising, rather than being (as at the end of Waverley) something to be willed away through art or (as at the end of Discipline and Clan-Albin or the beginning of Destiny) the foundation of a rather wistful fantasy of happily-ever-after escapism. By presenting herself, however demurely and modestly, as an embodiment of an oxymoron, the sophisticated primitive, Grant implies a version of Scottish identity in which the Highlands play a very different role than they do in the work of many of her contemporaries. This is not to argue, of course, that Grant is entirely different from her contemporaries in all of her treatments of Highland culture. On the contrary, at times she does attempt the neutral, disinterested stance of observer, and it is at these points that she also seems to

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accept more or less unquestioningly the idea that the Highlands are temporally “other”, separated from modern Britain more by a form of temporal asymmetry than by geography. The voice that she creates for herself in her ambitious long poem The Highlanders, for example, is generally that of cool Augustan detachment; its influences are the canonical poets of the British landscape, such as Thomson, Goldsmith, or the Pope of Windsor Forest, but the result is anything but a sense of geographical or cultural contiguity with the modern British world. The tone of Grant’s poem veers somewhat uneasily between sunny pastoral, with descriptions of scenery that, however much intended to convey the specifics of the Highland landscape, could be mistaken easily enough for the generic, golden-age fantasias of Augustan descriptive verse, and an antique, Ossianic world of ghosts and lost battles, somewhat incongruously recreated in politely formal heroic couplets. In both cases, the particularities of the contemporary Highland world that Grant is supposedly describing are lost. Even when the contemporary world intrudes on Grant’s Highlands, it does so in ways that suggest she sees its influence as being, at least for the purposes of this poem, distant and muffled. She imagines, for example, a widow mourning a son “stretch’d on Hindostan’s plain”, or a peasant’s ghostly vision of a brother lost at “Quebec’s gates” (Grant 1808a: 2: 301, 170). Yet it hardly matters in this context where or why the soldiers in question have died: the focus is instead on the mourners and on the resulting sense of Highland culture being inexorably marked and haunted by violent death, just as it was in the Ossian poems. If, unlike Brunton, Grant does not ignore entirely the eighteenth-century imperial politics that were breaking the clans and shattering traditional Highland social structure, in this poem she nonetheless uses her references to these events to provide tableaux of mourning that fit more or less seamlessly into what she presents as traditional Highland culture, rather than as a means of exploring the changes within that society. This is the case even when historical events impinge directly, rather than at a distance; the longest section of the poem is a romanticised and sympathetic account of Charles Stuart’s flight across the Highlands in the aftermath of Culloden. Yet any sense of this as a commentary on relatively contemporary events is damped down from the beginning by Grant’s decision to incorporate a version of Ossian’s “Hymn to the Sun” in a long speech that Charles makes as dawn

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breaks over the ocean. “The pathos and dignity” of the hymn, Grant explains in a note, “make it […] suitable to fallen Majesty” (Grant 1808a: 76n), and so Charles becomes absorbed into a more or less standard narrative of romantic loss and suffering. Grant was by no means alone in romanticising Charles’ escape, of course; breathless, supposedly insider accounts of his hair’s-breadth escapes and of the noble dedication of his followers started appearing almost as soon as he was on the boat to France. What is more noteworthy about this merging of Ossianic melancholy with the collapse of the last Jacobite uprising is the way in which it contributes to a sense of the Highland world as being simultaneously trapped by and impervious to history. Grant was no Jacobite, although she had all the nineteenth-century sentimental interest in the subject, and her son proudly claimed famous Jacobite connections for her, citing among her maternal relatives both James of the Glen, the Jacobite scapegoat executed for the murder that Stevenson was later to make the centrepiece of Kidnapped, as well as one Alexander Stewart, a supposed model for Scott’s Baron Bradwardine (J.P. Grant 1845: 1: 2n). Even so, the political implications of Charles’ claims to “majesty” are less important here than is Grant’s use of the Jacobite uprising to reinforce her picture of the Highlands as a site of mourning and loss. Ossian and Charles are more or less interchangeable figures embodying a noble resignation to catastrophe; the historic gap between the epic tale of the Fingalians and the very real mid-eighteenth-century experience of war and dislocation is collapsed into a single, iconographically staged, moment of lamentation. This focus on mourning and on the sense of the Highlands as existing in some vaguely unspecified past is repeated in some of the shorter poems that Grant chose to translate from Gaelic. It is probably not accidental that the poem on which she did her most detailed work – offering both a literal and a metrical translation, as well as a line-byline commentary on it – is a lament. The poem in question, “Macgregor na Ruara”, appears in one of the letters collected in Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders and is written, as Grant explains, in the voice of a loyal clansman mourning the death of his foster brother. Her detailed annotations flesh out a vision of a picturesque but harsh world in which intense family loyalties are juxtaposed with more or less constant internecine violence and treachery. “I do not know”, she writes,

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of any composition which, in the same bounds, exhibits a picture so correct and lively, both of the manners of the age, and of the miseries resulting from a state of society so licentious and unsettled as that must needs be, where the power of the laws, as it were, are suspended, or made subservient to the fury of partizans. (Grant 1811a: 2: 192–93)

Yet even as, in this comment, she emphasises the cultural particularity of the ballad, she avoids giving any markers that would enable the reader to locate the song in a historically specific past. The closest she comes is in drawing a comparison between the world evoked in the poem and that of Elizabethan England, but her point in doing so is not that the song is an historical curiosity, but rather that a way of life that was long in the past for her English readers was still part of the Highlanders’ living culture. Grant’s work of translation is not, she makes clear, an act of antiquarian recovery (as it is, for example, in the collections of border ballads made by Percy or Scott), but rather is an attempt to preserve for non-Highlanders a glimpse of a rapidly fading but, crucially, still-existing culture. This argument might seem at odds with late twentieth- and early twenty-first century readings of the late eighteenth-century fascination with the ballad as a way of creating, retrospectively, an oral “folk” culture in a written medium (see, for example Stewart 1991). Such readings provide a way to link Grant’s work with that of the more explicitly antiquarian collectors, but even so, she frames her poems in a manner very different from that of the antiquarians. Even as she states that the poems depict “ancient manners”, Grant insists that those “manners” are still both intelligible and emotionally meaningful to the contemporary Highlanders who still sing the song, though not to “modern” Britons. She claims that its repetitive chorus would be “tedious” to outsiders “for ever hurried along […] on the short, quick surges of incessant variety”; unsophisticated pathos and “minute accuracy” of observation are not, she implies, the virtues of the literature of her urban contemporaries. Yet she argues that these qualities nonetheless continue to possess considerable “pathos” for Gaelic speakers, who still inhabit a world that requires them to “attend to [their] own sensations” and who are not distracted, like “moderns”, by the more immediate and obvious literary pleasures of novelty and polish (Grant 1811a: 2: 193, 222, 224). Grant’s argument about the impossibility of moving a contemporary English audience by the stark simplicities that please the “unpractised ear” of the Highlander might be marred a little for twenty-first century readers when, in an attempt to convey “an

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impression on the English reader, more resembling that produced on the imagination of a highlander”, she transforms her sombre free verse of her literal translation into incongruously bouncy anapests. (For example, the lines “My sadness, great sadness, / Deep sadness, lies on me, / I am oppress’d with sadness deep and dark, / Which I shall never conquer” become “My sorrow, deep sorrow, incessant returning, / Time still as it flies, adds increase to my mourning” (Grant 1811a: 2: 222, 195, 196, 220). Yet the central assumption behind her double translation is both striking and important: the culture of the contemporary Highlander is inaccessible to his or her fellow Britons not just because of the difference in language, but more importantly, because their mental worlds are incompatible. So far, Grant’s treatment of the Highlands might seem more or less interchangeable with that of many of her contemporaries and, if anything, rather less sophisticated than what one finds in Scott’s presentation of his complex, troubled and troubling Jacobites. Matters change considerably, however, when one turns from Grant’s attempts to write more or less detached accounts of Highland life and manners and begins to look at the ways in which, especially in Letters from the Mountains, she creates a version of Highland culture in which she herself is able to live and play an active role, even as she moves readily between it and the supposedly more sophisticated, less romantic, world of contemporary British culture. The character that she constructs for herself in the early sections of Letters from the Mountains is almost ostentatiously literary-minded and cultivated: the young Anne Macvicar immerses herself in poetry and novels (and quotes from them copiously); she reads biography on the advice of an older male relative (and reports in detail on her opinions of the characters of figures such as Cromwell, Wallace, and Charles X of Sweden). Yet she simultaneously insists that she is by both instinct and upbringing something of a wild child, untouched by any sort of worldly or sophisticated tastes or values. “I am too rustic, too simple at least, for people of the world”, she writes, although she is then careful to add that her rusticity does not imply any lack of “refinement” or “delicacy” (Grant 1807b: 1: 172). In this retrospectively assembled epistolary portrait of her own adolescence, she is, in effect, developing a picture of herself that anticipates and in some respects overlaps with Sydney Morgan’s fictional but influential “wild Irish girl” Glorvina (1806), who, like Grant, is both the embodiment and the interpreter of

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her antique culture. “[M]y out of the world education, and primitive notions, and almost savage simplicity of taste, made yours seem to me to border on false refinement”, Grant writes in a 1775 letter to Anne (or Nancy) Ourry (Grant 1807b: 1: 188), a young woman with whom she had formed an intense romantic friendship, presenting herself in the process as being quite able, at the age of twenty and despite her self-proclaimed unworldliness, to take careful measure of the gap between her cultural values and those of even her closest friends. In Letters from the Mountains, it is the “primitive” who measures the value of the culture of the “moderns”, picking and choosing what she wants from it, rather than the other way around. One can debate, of course, about whether or not to read the letters straightforwardly as autobiography, especially given the lack of certainty about how much the correspondence in Letters from the Mountains was edited for publication. Grant played around with the ordering of her letters, changing them about most dramatically after the first edition of 1806 in which the letters were mainly (though not exclusively) grouped by correspondent. In the 1807 second edition, she rearranged them so that they were mainly (though again, not exclusively) chronological, with the first volume covering (roughly speaking) her life in Fort Augustus from her move there at seventeen up to just before her marriage, in 1779. (It ends with a letter dated 1 July 1778.) The second volume prints a few letters from 1777 and 1778, but it and the third volume mainly cover Grant’s married life in Laggan and the first years of her widowhood, reinforcing an autobiographical narrative line, even as the letters ostensibly represent her as she actually was, not as she retrospectively remembers herself. The significant point here is not, however, whether or not we believe Grant to be giving an unmediated and unvarnished transcription of what she thought and felt in 1775, but rather that she chooses to present herself, accurately or not, in the first volume of Letters from the Mountains not just as a wild Highland girl, but, just as importantly, as one who is fully capable of telling her own story as she lives it. The link with Morgan – and perhaps with other practitioners of the genre of the national tale – might be rather more to the point than the metaphor that Grant herself chose for her work, that of a pastoral written by a shepherd. One of the central points about Glorvina, after all, is that she is ontologically distinct from most of the characters who inhabit the modern world that Horatio, the rational, “modern”

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narrator also comes to reject. For her, accommodation with that world would be a form of corruption, and so her story has to be mediated through the observations of a character who can step beyond her sort of “pure” nationalistic primitivism. The only voice that mediates Grant’s “primitivism”, however, is that of her older self, a point that downplays any sense of absolute alterity in the character of the “halfsavage” adolescent. Grant herself makes this point about the continuities between her “wild” and her rational selves in a letter to her adolescent friend Miss Ourry when, in 1791, they reopen correspondence after more than a decade of silence. Grant has, she writes, had “the wings of romantic elevation somewhat clipt by increasing years and cares; and the fervor of enthusiasm a little abated, with that matronly cast of manners, which the constant exercise of authority, mingled with affection, naturally produces”. Yet notwithstanding these changes, she insists that her tastes are, if “possible, more primitive than ever; and that all my pastoral, popular, and American prejudices, have ‘grown with my growth, and strengthened with my strength’” (Grant 1807b: 2: 182). The “American prejudices” that she mentions here are not connected with American politics – which she hated – but rather with what she saw as the pre-Revolutionary wilderness idyll that had shaped her in childhood. If the language in which Grant insists upon her entirely “pastoral” tastes again undercuts that claim to some degree – quoting The Seasons, like alluding to Johnson, would hardly be the most efficient method for an eighteenth-century reader to demonstrate her immunity to mainstream literary fashion – the more important point in this context is her insistence that such self-conscious primitivism is not only possible in the first place but also is fully compatible with adult duties and responsibilities. Indeed, she implies in other contexts that a taste for primitive simplicity might in fact be something that one grows into, more or less inverting the arguments of the conjectural historians. In the letters describing her first sight of the Highlands, at eighteen, she is full of conventional (and fashionable, though she doesn’t then acknowledge that point) raptures: on 28 April, 1773, for example, she is exclaiming over “the melancholy grandeur of the lofty dark mountains”; two days later, she proclaims herself “exhilarated” by a “green pastoral vale sheltered by an overhanging mountain” (Grant 1807b: 1: 11, 28). The account that she gave George Thomson

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some thirty years later, however, is very different. (Thomson is not identified as the recipient of the letter in the printed version of it, which is the only one that survives, but the context makes the addressee clear.) When she left America as a child, Grant explains to Thomson, Ossian had “obtained a complete ascendant over my imagination” and “determined [her] to like the Highlands”. Yet even so, when she eventually travelled to Fort Augustus, it is not easy to say how much I was repelled and disappointed. In vain I tried to raise my mind to the tone of sublimity. The rocky divisions that rose with so much majesty in description, seemed like enormous prison walls, confining caitiffs in the narrow glens. These, too, seemed the dreary abodes of solitude and silence. These feelings, however, I did not even whisper to the rushes, but in the mean while was busied in all the little arts of self-deception […] and thought myself in duty bound to talk rapturously of Alpine scenery…. (Grant 1811a: 2: 335–37)

On one level, the tone here is more or less explicitly Gothic, as the sense of the soaring mountains as both imprisoning and sublime recalls the nightmare journeys of Ann Radcliffe’s Emily St. Aubert in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Yet at the same time, the sense that Grant’s inability to lose herself in appreciation of the mountains is a guilty secret – like that of Midas’ wife, duty-bound to conceal her husband’s deformity – stresses the artificiality of these Gothic thrills. Far from being natural, a love of this landscape requires a willed suspension of disbelief. It was not, Grant explains, until after she had spent years in the Highlands and been required by the “necessary avocations” of marriage and motherhood to share the “language, customs, and traditions” (Grant 1811a: 338) of a remote and isolated people, that she was able to develop an unaffected love of the surrounding landscape, one based not on literary fashion but rather on lived experienced. Grant also aligns her adult self with Highland culture in more subtle ways than in her account of a developing emotional involvement with the landscape. If there is a single factor in Grant’s critical reception that stands out, it is the intensity of the curious if sympathetic interest aroused by her narratives of maternal loss. The second and third volumes of Letters from the Mountains, while by no means uniformly funerary are, in part, a chronicle of bereavement, in which, by the end of the book, Grant had lost four of her twelve children, a much-loved niece who had been raised in her household,

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and her husband. From the very beginning, the reception of the book seems to have owed a great deal to the writer’s powerful evocation of loss and suffering. As early as August 1806, the historian George Chalmers tracked down Anne Grant (the book had been published anonymously, but identifying Mrs. G—, wife of the minister of Laggan, was by no means a difficult task) at the request of some women friends of his “who have been captivated by your Mountain Letters which certainly possess the power of touching the heart” and who are, he reports, particularly interested in hearing more about her children (Chalmers 1806: f. 116v). Similarly, Grant reported, overwhelmed, in an 1809 letter to her friend Alexander Tod, that she had just received £100, entirely out of the blue, from a woman in Boston who had been moved by her plight to organise an American reprinting and sale of three hundred copies of Letters from the Mountains (Grant 1809a: f. 18–18v). Nor was it only those who, like the woman in Boston, were moved to make financial contributions who found Grant’s misfortunes fascinating. An admirer who sought Grant out on a Scottish tour in 1824 reported in her diary that she had met Grant’s “most interesting Daughter who with a son are the last left to her of 10 children & the D[aughte]r tho’ very charming appears to me to be in a very precarious situation” – then carefully added “since dead” in a note on the bottom of the page (Beecroft 1824: f. 57v).6 Another admirer, Melesina Trench, proclaimed herself “charmed” by Grant’s letters, but found them difficult reading, “wounded” as both women were “in the same vital part” (Trench 1862: 224). The memoirs of Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus suggest that Anne Grant’s misfortunes acquired an almost folkloric quality: Elizabeth Grant (who had no personal acquaintance with the family of her namesake) not only misrecalled John Peter as being the only survivor of nineteen children, but mistakenly believed him to have narrowly escaped death as well in a notorious 1825 shipwreck off the west coast of Scotland (Grant 1988: 2: 189). (In fact, it was Anne Grant herself 6

The “10 children” is the diarist Beecroft’s error: Grant’s children were Mary (1780– 1827), Catherine (1781–1807), Isabella (1782–1823), John Lauchlan (c. 1784–1799), Peter (c.1785–1789), Duncan (1786; died in infancy), Duncan (1788–1814), Petrina (1790–1792), Charlotte (1790–1807), Anne (1792–1814), Moore (1795–1821), and John Peter (1799–1870). John Peter was the only one to marry; his first wife, whom the Grants had known since her childhood, also predeceased Anne Grant, dying in April 1837, after four years of marriage and two years of invalidism.

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who had been booked on the steamer, although she had changed her mind about travelling at the last moment, and she was reported among the dead in initial newspaper accounts.) Pitying comments about Grant’s losses also appear frequently in letters in which friends exchange news about her. In 1825, for example, Lady John Campbell, who had been raised in Grant’s household, was informed by a friend that Mary Grant, the only surviving daughter, had suffered a mental breakdown so severe that there was speculation she might have to be sent to an asylum, “the climax of all Mrs Grants misfortunes” (Mure 1825). Such news travelled quickly beyond Grant’s family circle; a few months later Scott noted in his journal that Mary Grant, “deep and far gone in a decline, has been seised with alienation of mind” (Scott 1998: 27). Even some years after Grant herself had died, Grant’s longtime friend Eliza Fletcher was still lamenting the thought that following her daughters’ death, Grant “was left alone”, since even though John Peter “was not in the ordinary sense of the word an unkind Son their characters had so little in common that he never understood the simplicity and unworldliness of her heart” (Fletcher 1845). (The comment is made in reference to John Peter’s recently published edition of his mother’s letters; Fletcher goes on to comment rather sharply that “He was proud of her talents, and vain of the place that was given her in society, but he never loved her as some of her daughters did”.) Nor were these misfortunes simply a matter of private gossip; when in 1825 a group of literary men, including Scott and Jeffrey, petitioned the king to award Grant a pension they stressed the “misfortune and privation” of her early life and “her long train of family misfortunes” as much as they did her literary accomplishments (Scott et al. 1825: f. 12). Some twenty years later, Andrews Norton opened his article in The North American Review with the by-then predictable reference to Grant’s “peculiar series of domestic sorrows”. Admittedly, he then goes on to insist that despite her suffering, Grant remained “cheerful and animated”, but he stresses that under such circumstances, cheerfulness marks her as an “extraordinary woman, a woman of uncommon strength”, a point that continues to focus attention on the extremity of the suffering that makes ordinary social cheeriness a mark of “extraordinary” character (Norton 1845: 126– 27). On one level, of course, the interest that Grant’s readers took in her narrative of loss is exactly what one would expect from audiences

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in a sentimental age, who delighted in literary and theatrical spectacles of the noble endurance of tragedy and who wanted to be moved to sympathetic tears themselves. As James Elkins has noted, an ideally sensitive eighteenth-century viewer would attempt to engage with an artwork “not [as] an object” but as “a new friendship, a new affection” (Elkins 2001: 121). In that respect, Grant’s work fits in comfortably enough with much of the then-popular sentimental fiction, in which readers thrilled to pictures of much-tried and long-suffering feminine virtue. Yet Grant’s autobiographical account of the sufferings of a bereft mother, watching her children fade away around her, also resonates strongly with other literature of the period – including, as already mentioned, writing by Grant herself – in which the Highlands are represented as the site of melancholy and mourning and Highlanders are marked by a tragic awareness of having outlived their time, a theme that is emphasised by the numerous emblematic images of parents mourning the premature loss of children. Figures from Ossian through John Home’s Lady Randolph to Scott’s Highland widow (who, in a story apparently borrowed from Sir John Carr, is left with nothing to do but mourn after inadvertently causing the death of her only son [Carr 1809: 260–61; Lamont 2003: 321–23]) evoke the shattering of Highland culture through the premature loss of the younger generation. Such loss could be the result of emigration as well as death, as one can see by turning to Christian Johnstone’s ClanAlbin and its childless, abandoned matriarch Lady Augusta, who, until the implausible reversal of history in its concluding vision of a renovated, contemporary clan society, is able only to act as witness to and chief mourner of the slow extinction of her world. Again, it is true that the literary fascination with “the last of the race” was not a preoccupation uniquely focused on the Highlands (see Stafford 1994, Trumpener 1997); on the contrary, Grant herself turned to a Biblical reference when, late in her life, she summed up her past in a letter to Elizabeth (Schuyler) Hamilton, the widow of Alexander Hamilton and a childhood friend. Her dead children, she writes, were “all that a mother could hope or pray for, [but] they were prematurely ripened for the tomb. Yet do not call me Mara” (Grant 1901: 2: 264; the allusion is to Ruth 1: 20: “Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me”). Even so, the trope of the bereft parent, lamenting the loss of the future in the loss of children, recurs so frequently on both the literal and metaphorical levels in

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writing about the Highlands from this period of emigration and rural depopulation that it is not difficult to see Grant’s absorption into the figure of the mourning parent as a means of merging author and subject in much the same way as she does when she represents her younger self as an unspoilt child of the natural world that she is describing. None of this is to suggest, of course, that Grant was merely inventing a persona to fit with cultural fashion; on the contrary, the very real suffering and loss expressed in her letters remains deeply moving, and even the bare fact of her loss of eleven children retains its power to shock. The point is rather that her letters – both in Letters from the Mountains and in the later collections – emphasise the continuities rather than the gaps between her lives as a wild or romantic Highlander and as a modern literary “bluestocking”. The artlessly wild girl quotes the most fashionable literary figures of the day to demonstrate her artlessness; the suffering, bereft mother participates in the public construction of herself as a fascinatingly tragic spectacle. Even as, in other words, Grant insists upon her own alterity, she makes clear that she is not prepared to accept unquestioningly the rhetorical alignment of Highland culture with the childlike, the primitive, and the artlessly unsophisticated. She implicitly resists the metropolitan assumption that the Highlands and Highlanders must be spoken for and mediated through the literary work of metropolitan observers by insisting upon the importance, in her writing, of selfrepresentation. If on occasion she does give way to the more conventional rhetorical move of treating the Highlanders as objects to be reflected upon rather than fully conscious, sophisticated subjects (as in the passage previously cited in which she compares the emotions evoked by Highlanders to what we feel for children), her more usual practice is to attempt to complicate the equation between primitivism and unselfconsciousness. One finds this tendency most strikingly illustrated in the relatively few points in Letters from the Mountains in which Grant presents herself as an outside observer – a Horatio, perhaps, rather than a Glorvina – commenting with detached amusement on what she presents as quaint peasant beliefs. In an account to a childhood friend in Glasgow of a dairy maid’s encounter with a prophesying cow, for example, Grant notes that she “was forced to hear [the story] with a face of belief, for fear of being thought an infidel”; the story is also distanced from Grant by her

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straight-faced account of her naïve informant’s evidence for its truth. “I am sure it is very true”, Grant has her maid protest, “for I saw a man with these eyes that saw the dairy-maid” in question. Yet when Grant comments on the story, she deliberately blurs her intellectual allegiances, and after first inviting amused, more or less sociological, judgements of the “primitive” people among whom she lives, she then turns around and proclaims her own imaginative and sympathetic engagement with them: Now this fine story gains ample credit, and it would be thought impiety to doubt it. Could you have believed, that there existed manners and opinions so primitive as those which are still preserved in the parish of Laggan? Will you condemn or laugh at my singularity, when I tell you, that I am so wearied and disgusted with seeing ignorant, conceited, and irreligious coxcombs, form absurd pretensions to reason and philosophy (by affecting to despise all that Newton, Boyle, Locke, and other lights and ornaments of their species believed, and all that inspiration and piety have taught), that I begin to think my poor Anne’s credulity more tolerable than such cold hearted scepticism? I would, at any rate, sooner listen to the sad predictions of either Achilles’ horse, or the minister of Mouline’s cow, than to many “dreamers of gay dreams”, who imagine themselves “wit’s oracles”. No doubt the true line lies between credulity and scepticism; but if I quit that line, let me go where I am led by the imagination and the heart. (Grant 1807b: 2: 265–66)

Her division between “reason and philosophy” on the one hand and “imagination and the heart” on the other might seem, at first, to presume a conventionally “modern” and rational dismissal of simple rural superstition, but at the same time, by stressing that her allegiance with the imaginative world of the Highlanders is the result of an intellectually and rationally willed choice, Grant blurs the familiar divide even as she evokes it. The significance of that point can be emphasised by returning for a moment to the genre of the national tale, which, in the symbolism of the concluding marriage, also attempts to bring together the modern, rational world and the more romantically evocative site of folkways and feeling. The marriage plot, however, implies difference as well as union: the newly united couple remains, after all, two individuals, with the romantically primitive way of life embodied by the woman (it is, almost invariably, the woman who represents the traditional national culture) neatly cordoned off and implicitly subordinated in the realms of the feminine and the private. Even if the writer of these tales is often a woman, in other words, the stereotypically “feminine”

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side of the cultural divide tends to be contained within a selfconsciously “masculine” voice. Glorvina’s voice is contained within Horatio’s, and even if it can be argued that Horatio himself is increasing feminised over the course of the novel, as he throws himself into Glorvina’s romance world, his narrative is itself contained by the self-consciously academic voice of the scholarly antiquarian notes (Leersen 1997: 60). Or, to take a rather different type of narrative as a further example, in Edgeworth’s Ennui the effeminate, decadent Earl is “cured” by the very different aspects of Ireland embodied by Geraldine and Ellinor, but the women themselves are silenced or banished as the “new” Ireland finds its voice in the renovated narrator, now a middle-class professional man (Butler 1992: 43–47). Grant, in contrast, destabilises the framing “rational” voice by her insistence that, finally, “imagination and the heart” offer the higher good. The result is complex, especially since the explicit point being made by Grant in this passage is a straightforwardly and predictably conservative one. The letter in question is dated July 1793, and both in her vehement rejection of “scepticism” and her conventionally feminine preference of imagination to reason, Grant is aligning herself with the anti-jacobin side of the revolution debate. Nonetheless, by placing herself in the position of the superior, “rational” observer, she is simultaneously asserting her position as interpreter and as the “controlling” voice that, in the national tale, tends so often to be troped as masculine, regardless of the actual sex of the writer. As a result, this no-nonsense, anti-jacobin perspective blurs into a critique of the masculine / feminine literary divide that so many of the anti-revolutionary writers were trying to reinforce. In this respect, Grant’s writing fits in very well with that of other conservative women among her contemporaries who were challenging the assumption that the feminine, domestic sphere was entirely incompatible with public life (see Mellor 2000). Yet in a society that took more or less for granted the idea that the subaltern would have some difficulty, at least, in speaking, it is clear that Grant was making a risky move in blurring the rhetorical divide between herself and her subject. Positioning herself as a sophisticated and urbane woman was as important to her work as was the emphasis on her “primitivism” and “savagery”, and Grant took considerable pains to imply that the persona of the impassioned Highlander was something that she consciously adopted and could just

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as easily step out of. Indeed, her gestures towards Highland tradition in at least some of her later work are self-conscious role-playing. A poem that she writes, for example, to celebrate the birth of the future Duke of Argyll (the child of her one-time boarder, Joan Glassell, then Lady John Campbell), plays in a knowing, amused manner with the gap between the worlds of the wealthy, sophisticated nineteenthcentury British aristocrat and the primitive glamour of the stereotypical Highland chieftain. “Let his first accents, lisp his native tongue”, Grant writes, “in words ‘that Fingal spoke, and Ossian sung’” (Grant 1823). The quiet joke here is not just that the “native tongue” of this future Duke of Argyll would be – like that of his Edinburgh heiress mother – most definitely English, not Gaelic, but also that this advice to absorb Gaelic culture is given in the words of an English poet, Samuel Rogers (in his poem “Written in the Highlands of Scotland, September 1, 1812”). Even more strikingly, Grant uses a well-known couplet by Pope about one of the infant’s distinguished forbears– “Argyle the States whole Thunder born to wield / And shake alike the Senate and the field” – to underpin her arguments about the dignity of his role as a strictly local Highland chief. (The original couplet from Pope appears in the epilogue of his versification of two satires by Donne; I have used Grant’s punctuation and capitalisation.) This play with the doubleness of the cultural roles of the child extends to Grant’s representation of herself both as traditional Bard, tottering forward to welcome, “though with failing voice”, the new clan chieftain, and as a knowing voice of English high culture, addressing a “Highland” reader who is thoroughly familiar with the English literary tradition. Yet, as Grant herself seemed to worry, this adoption of the Highland voice was not something that she could entirely control, a point emphasised in an unpublished letter that she wrote to Walter Scott late in her life. He was collecting information on Highland beliefs, particularly second sight, and Grant, whose admiration for Scott was unbounded, if not entirely reciprocated, offered him the best sort of assistance she could provide, writing to him with an account of her own experience of the phenomenon. (She had, she reported, seen her daughter Mary and a friend on the walk outside her house at a point when, as she later discovered, they were both calling on friends elsewhere.) As low-key and undramatic as this experience is, Grant is nonetheless almost excessively anxious not to have it associated

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publicly, in any way, with her. “I owe you much & confide in you much. Therefore I will tell you what shall [sic] never tell another”, she writes before describing her experience; afterwards, she entreats Scott not to repeat any specific details of what she has said while she is alive, instructing him to “Keep it till I die & then use it as you think proper”. During her lifetime, she requests that he refer to the story only in the most general of terms: when others tell of unearthly sights & sounds you may safely tell you knew one who is neither fool nor coward, neither nervous nor whimsical who fears God & fears Him only, who in broad daylight on a public Street saw the sight I have most faithfully describ’d to you. (Grant 1828[?]: f. 352)

In part, Grant explains her anxiety about not being identified as a believer in the supernatural as arising from concerns for her children, who “would have been wretched in knowing that the Parent who they greatly overvalued was a subject of ridicule even to the shallow & heartless”. Yet she also admits to concerns about her “repute” for “veracity” and about the perception that belief in second sight tends to be the province of “the ignorant weak & credulous” (Grant 1828[?]: f. 350v). She argues vigorously that that is not the case, but recognises nonetheless that educated opinion in general is against her. Nor was she being unduly timorous in fearing that any public declaration of her views would be a source of amusement and would invite mockery or condescension. Even the generally sympathetic author of The Saxon and the Gael allows herself a quiet smile at Grant’s expense when she suggests that Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders might better be called “An Apology for the Second Sight”. Grant “writes like a philosopher” Johnstone – or whoever the author is – observes, “and seemingly treats superstition as such; but her imagination has painted her native prejudices in colours so delightfully warm, that it is difficult to say whether her philosophy or her first faith be strongest” ([Johnstone?] 1814: 4: 62). The idea that Highland “superstitions” are in fact the “first faith” and “native prejudices” of the Glasgow-born, American-raised Grant, and as such would naturally outweigh all her “philosophy”, underscores the precariousness of the line she had to walk. As much as Grant insisted throughout her career on her status as a “primitive” outsider in literary Edinburgh, she remained, as this letter suggests, thoroughly attentive to and aware of the rhetorical difficulties she would create for herself if she were seen as being

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assimilated too completely into the Highland culture about which she was writing. Even as Grant was insisting that she was able to live between cultures, in other words, she risked having the critical discourse around her work push her back into the subject position of more or less unreflective “primitivism”. According to this view, she would not be cultivating a sophisticated autoethnographic voice of the sort described by James Buzard and that she loudly claimed for herself, but would instead merely be pouring out raw material that others could use for their more carefully refined intellectual analysis. This is, in fact, precisely the role that George Thomson advises her to pretend to take on as he urges her to rewrite her formal essays as unstructured, and fictional, correspondence with English students of the Highlands. It is not surprising that he would do so, as the role that Grant cultivated as a woman writer – the artless amateur – would be more or less continuous with that of the unreflective Highlander. The problem that Grant creates for herself in her writing is that she embraces the former but both uses and resists the latter. In the process, she becomes entangled by the contradictions of the literary expectations that help to make her successful in the first place. Both as a demure, domestic lady who creates a public voice for herself and as a writer who attempts to provide a sophisticated analysis of the “primitive” people with whom she identifies, she is using or exploring ideas of artlessness and innocence in a manner that is anything but artless. This is not, at all, the same as saying that she is inconsistent or hypocritical; rather, it is a reflection of the degree to which her work is shaped by the difficulty of her attempt to bridge the feminine and the “primitive” worlds that were her basic subject matter and the sophisticated literary world of Enlightenment Edinburgh that she needed to attract in order to achieve any critical or popular success.

Chapter Three “Scarcely Known to Fame”: The Literary Identities of Christian Isobel Johnstone In the summer and autumn of 1829, the journalist and novelist Christian Isobel Johnstone was apparently hard at work on a biography of the Scottish-American privateer John Paul Jones, commissioned by Oliver and Boyd, an Edinburgh publishing house specialising in children’s literature, educational material and such vaguely belle-lettristic work as memoirs, collections of letters, and anthologies of poetry. It was, judging by the correspondence on the subject surviving in the Oliver and Boyd archives, a deeply frustrating experience. The main source for the biography was private papers held by Jones’ niece, a Miss Taylor, who not only refused to grant full access to the materials that she held but also insisted that the biography focus on the heroic public achievements of her uncle, ignoring what were apparently some of his less savory private affairs. The difficult relations with Miss Taylor, whom Johnstone suspected of deliberately concealing any potentially embarrassing material, seem to have been worsened by an unbridgeable difference in their understanding of the project, as Johnstone was unwilling to write a book that concentrated only on the public persona. “To separate a man’s public from his private life is a sad thing”, she wrote in a letter presumably directed to George Boyd, “for the latter is surely that which chiefly marks the man – and is what readers care for” (Johnstone 1829b). This was evidently an idea in which she believed strongly, as seven years later she took the point even further, celebrating the potential literary power and human appeal of studies of the private lives of public figures. As she wrote in an 1836 article on Coleridge: When the confessions and letters of great men shall be written with singlemindedness, and in the spirit of unreserved and searching truth, then may the fictionists and dramatists tremble for their supremacy in interesting mankind […] This must hold of every eminent man, whether in public life or in letters, who carries a human heart in his bosom. (Johnstone 1836a: 113)

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This fascination with biography and vexed insistence that there could not and should not be a complete rupture between public and private lives resonates ironically in any attempt to write about Johnstone’s publishing career. Even though she was a passionately engaged participant in the Edinburgh literary world of the 1820s through the 1840s, she seems, during her lifetime, to have been more or less invisible to anyone except literary insiders and then to have disappeared almost entirely for most of the century and a half following her death. What makes this self-effacement – or vanishing act, to borrow Catherine Gallagher’s phrasing – all the more remarkable is that the public voice Johnstone developed for herself was forthright, assertive, and, on many occasions, acerbic. She never shied away from difficult or controversial matters of public, political debate; in her fiction, she takes up subjects as varied as the misuse of physical punishment in the British army and the radical implications of Adam Smith’s economic theories. Her journalism, which is even more varied, ranges from more or less demure evaluations of silver-fork fiction to graphically hard-hitting pamphlets on the condition of the Irish peasantry. The voice that Johnstone developed in her fiction and journalism was, in other words, often surprisingly far removed from the demurely retiring tones associated with late Georgian concepts of domestic femininity. Separating the public from the private man might indeed be a sad thing, but in Johnstone’s case at least, differentiating between the public and the private woman seems to have been part of the process by which she was able to establish, in the first place, her own public literary voice. Elusive as Johnstone remains as an individual, enough of her writing survives to suggest that she was among the most extraordinarily active women of letters of the first decades of the nineteenth century. A glance through The Wellesley Index entry for Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, which Johnstone edited from 1834 to 1846, indicates the formidable body of literary criticism and political and cultural commentary that she contributed to that magazine alone. She also wrote for several other magazines, including two journals (The Schoolmaster and Johnstone’s Edinburgh Magazine) that she edited in the early 1830s, before the latter was folded into Tait’s. There is no definite evidence of how much of the material in those magazines she wrote herself, but the probability, given her later practice at Tait’s, is that she contributed a good proportion of it. This

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journalism would, on its own, add up to an impressive body of work, but Johnstone also wrote more than half a dozen novels and novellas (several of which were serialised in Tait’s) as well as a large number of children’s books – on subjects ranging from natural history to Greek philosophy – and one of the best-selling cookbooks of the century. Yet however much of Johnstone’s writing went into print, she managed to separate that work almost entirely from her life, about which almost nothing is known. If any of her private papers survive, they remain untraced; in the introduction to his edition of Clan-Albin, the first post nineteenth-century printing of any of Johnstone’s work, Andrew Monnickendam holds out only a very faint hope that such papers may yet be discovered (Monnickendam 2003: v), while the editors of The Wellesley Index note, even more gloomily, that “an exhaustive search” for Johnstone’s “personal papers […] has proved futile” (Wellesley Index 1966–1989: 4: 485). The legal records of her marriage and divorce from her first husband provide almost the only glimpses of her life before she launched her career as a novelist: according to the parish records of St. Cuthbert’s, Edinburgh, sixteenyear-old Christian Tod, apparently the daughter of a grocer,1 had been married in 1797 to a printer named Thomas McCliesh (the divorce proceedings incorrectly give the year of marriage as 1796). She left him in 1805, after which, according to the testimony of an Elisabeth McCliesh (possibly a sister-in-law), she never saw him again (“Divorce” 1814: f. 1415). There is no detailed evidence of what prompted Johnstone to abandon her first marriage, although a bitter comment in a review that she wrote some three decades later, in which she attacked sentimental fiction for “disguis[ing] the necessity which, in the present condition of women, makes it expedient for almost every wife to patch up a truce with the most profligate husband under 1

In the parish records, which list the marriage on 4 November 1797, Christian is identified as the daughter of James Tod of Simon’s Square. An Edinburgh directory for 1795 lists a James Tod on Simon’s Square and identifies him as a grocer (Aitchison 1795: 179). He seems to have come down in the world, however, as in Christian Tod’s registry of baptism (also in St. Cuthbert’s, which gives her date of birth as 12 June 1781), the father, here James Todd, is listed as a student of medicine. He had married, also in St. Cuthbert’s, a Jean Campbell on 26 May 1781, and the sudden accumulation of responsibility, as he gained a wife and a daughter within two and a half weeks, might invite speculation about whether or not he ever finished his medical studies.

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the specious name of heroic virtue”, might be read as a tantalising hint (Johnstone 1835a: 825). The divorce did not, however, take place until many years after the breakdown of the marriage; the case was opened in August, 1814 and the final decree granted the following November. Johnstone won her case on grounds of McCliesh’s adultery, although, according to the evidence offered in court, his several affairs did not begin until two years after his wife’s departure, and the timing in fact suggests that Christian pursued the matter because of a new relationship of her own, as her second marriage, to John Johnstone, followed her divorce by only seven months. Nor is there any solid information about how she met and became involved with Johnstone, then a schoolmaster in Dunfermline, although there is at least one contemporary account claiming that he had been her teacher before they married (Bertram 1893: 31). That statement does seem open to at least some question, however, as Johnstone, who was only two years Christian’s senior, would have been very young to have been at work in a classroom before her first marriage, and it would have been unusual for the newly-separated Christian Tod, as a young woman of ambiguous marital status, to go back to the schoolroom in her mid or late 20s. Even so, the claim, whether accurate or not, is interesting for what it suggests about contemporaries’ understanding of the Johnstones’ professional relationship. If there was a standard eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century model of scholarly partnership in love or marriage, it was that of husband or lover as tutor, shaping his beloved in his intellectual image. Rousseau’s Julie and St. Preux are perhaps the most influential eighteenth-century exemplars of this pattern, which (as Rousseau’s title indicates) goes at least as far back as Abelard and Héloïse. The need to assert that Christian had been, at some point, John’s pupil, thus seems an attempt to fit their rather unusual marriage into some sort of familiar pattern. Yet there is no indication that this model of literary partnership would have fit the Johnstones. When they married on 24 June 1815, Christian was, after all, no blushing ingénue fresh from the schoolroom, but rather a thirty-four-year-old woman who had had the courage a decade before to walk out on what was obviously, for whatever reason, an unsatisfactory marriage, and then to pursue a divorce when doing so became necessary to her interests. Doing so would not have been an easy task, even though, as Leah Leneman makes clear, a middle-class woman’s obtaining a divorce was not quite as rare in

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Scotland at this time as it would have been in England. According to Leneman, there were 786 Scottish divorces between 1771 and 1830, of which 370 were sought by women and 569 by couples from below the ranks of the gentry and aristocracy (Leneman 1998: 16, 17). Yet as these figures make clear, even if Johnstone’s action was by no means outrageously unprecedented, it still would not have been particularly usual. Nor was the divorce the only indication of Johnstone’s determined character. She was also a published writer with at least one and possibly two novels to her credit, the second of which, Clan-Albin, had already sold out its first edition (the Advertisement to the second edition is dated May 1815). As with so much else in her career, one can only guess about what led Johnstone to start writing fiction, although the slightly earlier example of Charlotte Smith might invite speculation about the role of marital breakdown and the resulting financial instabilities in sparking an interest in publication. Critics such as James Van Horn Melton have pointed to the role of “economic hardship” in eighteenth-century women’s literary work (Melton 2001: 152), and there is nothing in what is known of Johnstone’s early life to suggest that she would have had easy access to family money to support herself independently. Such guesswork aside, however, there is no question that Johnstone was both serious and ambitious from the very beginning of her publishing career. The Saxon and the Gael (1814), an intermittently lively but uneven satire of Edinburgh society, might or might not have been her first novel; it was published anonymously and was not subsequently claimed by Johnstone although its general subject matter – Highland versus Lowland culture – makes her authorship plausible, and a few small details recall her later work. As in Clan-Albin, there is a family dog named Luath (although it is quite possible that two authors were borrowing separately from Burns, Ossian, or both); as in Elizabeth de Bruce, there is a comic Lowland Scot who is an ardent admirer of Jenny Geddes, famously supposed to have thrown a stool at a bishop in St. Giles Cathedral. As mentioned in the previous chapter, both Clan-Albin and The Saxon and the Gael also feature mocking accounts of empty-headed Highland tourist. More generally, the picture of the Edinburgh literary scene in The Saxon and the Gael indicates a writer who, like Johnstone, had a sharp, amused eye for literary gamesmanship and cultural fashion. When one character weighs the merits of Campbell and Scott more or

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less even-handedly, for example, another protests indignantly that Scott is “the nicest poet, and quite fashionable […] Ma’ buys all his large books; we have them bound in turkey, and you have no notion how handsome they look; far the prettiest books in the library” ([Johnstone?] 1814: 1: 186–87). Later in the book, a Mr. Jobson, obviously based on George Thomson, boasts to some ladies about the work that he has done in collecting lyrics by “Mrs. Laggan” (Anne Grant), “Miss De Mountford” (Joanna Baillie) and “the Minstrel” (Scott). “Your ladyship will easily see a little pruning is requisite in all of them”, he comments, then goes on to boast that I spare no trouble for my friends[;] the scissors of taste to lop the luxuriancies of fancy, as I used to say to our poor Robin [Burns]. The plate and symphonies are now in great forwardness; all the talent of the country embarked. I give our poets no rest till they favour me with a few staves… ([Johnstone?] 2: 178).

At other points in the novel, however, the writer shows herself as ready to applaud as to mock contemporary Scottish talent; when characters visit the studio of Henry Raeburn (“the Scottish Reynolds”), one exclaims, while looking at the portraits, How high the situation of poor Scotland […] in arts, in arms, and in literature – her universities every year more crowded – her philosophers advancing with so proud a career in the field of science – her little junta of accomplished men in the first literary journal that ever appeared in any country, giving law to the republic of letters – her moralists improving – her poets delighting the world. ([Johnstone?] 2: 165)

This movement back and forth between satiric amusement at cultural fashion and a very real national pride is characteristic of Johnstone’s later work, yet the fact that Johnstone never claimed the book later in life remains a stumbling-block, and other critics, most notably Monnickendam, have doubted the attribution on stylistic grounds as well (Monnickendam 2003: xviii). The most one can say with certainty is that if Johnstone did write it, the novel indicates that from the very beginning of her career she took a sophisticated interest in some of the era’s main literary and political debates, and that those are interests that she maintained in much of her later published work. She demonstrates them even more clearly in Clan-Albin, which is a remarkably confident and ambitious novel; Johnstone’s prefatory declaration of her willingness to pit her book against Waverley, the biggest publishing sensation of the era, in an “equal combat of the

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Fingalians”, is a particularly eye-catching move (Johnstone [1815] 2003: 2). While the challenge is playful in tone, and follows on a denial that the novel aims to do anything more than amuse and entertain, its audaciousness still implies an author with a considerable measure of literary confidence. In contrast, the only record of any literary interests on John’s part before the Johnstones’ departure from Dunfermline in 1817 is two obscure schoolbooks, one intended for lessons in English grammar and elocution and the other a basic introduction to French (J. Johnstone, 1812, 1816). It was almost certainly Christian’s literary reputation, minor as it was at that time, that led John away from his Dunfermline school and into a new career in journalism, in which his wife took a very active part. In 1817 the Johnstones went to Inverness to take up the editorship of a new paper, The Inverness Courier, a position that, according to a history published to mark the paper’s hundred and fiftieth anniversary, the Johnstones owed to William Blackwood, who recommended them to the board because of his admiration of ClanAlbin. The history is not entirely accurate, since it incorrectly identifies Blackwood as the publisher of Clan-Albin, which in fact appeared with the much less famous Edinburgh firm of Macredie, Skelly, and Muckersby, but there is no reason to doubt the main facts of the story, or to assume that Blackwood would have known about Johnstone’s authorship of the novel only if he were her publisher. By 1816, the identity of the author of Clan-Albin was an open secret in at least some literary circles, as the minor novelist and travel writer Elizabeth Isabella Spence, an admirer of the book, made a point of seeking an introduction to Johnstone during a visit to Dunfermline and then praised her lavishly (although without revealing her name) in a subsequent volume of travels. “I date this letter from the abode of genius, of no ordinary class”, Spence writes, “for I write from the dwelling of the author of ‘Clan-Albin’” (Spence 1817: 303). Moreover, even though Blackwood wasn’t Christian Johnstone’s original publisher, the claim that he took an interest in her career because of Clan-Albin is plausible given that within a few years, before she had published any other major work, he unquestionably had close literary dealings with both her and her husband. He expressed some initial interest in publishing Christian’s Cook and Housewife’s Manual, and he did take her 1826 novel Elizabeth de Bruce, in effect outbidding Oliver and Boyd for the copyright. Even

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earlier, in 1824, John was seeking Blackwood’s advice on a Gloucestershire newspaper that he was thinking of purchasing, and Blackwood was subsequently one of the financial backers of the Johnstones’ attempt to print and edit The Edinburgh Chronicle, an experience that ended unhappily as both financial concerns and political differences led, by early 1831, to an acrimonious breakdown in the relationship. (“It has been my original error to imagine that in party politics and party literature […] there can be any neutral ground”, John Johnstone wrote Blackwood, adding sadly, “[w]hat I more regret to: night [sic] is that the first serious misunderstanding I ever had with any friend should be with you” [J. Johnstone c.1831: ff. 69v, 70]). Yet however the Johnstones got the position in Inverness, and whatever the state of their relationship with William Blackwood in 1817, the historian of the Inverness Courier is firm on the point that Christian was the more active of the two in running the paper; as he explains, citing the comments on the subject by Robert Carruthers, a younger contemporary of the Johnstones who took over the paper, “Mr Johnstone was nominal editor, but Mrs Johnstone was evidently the leading writer, and by the survivors of that day was generally spoken of as Editor” (Highland Newspaper 1969: 9). The years that Johnstone spent in Inverness have almost vanished from literary history, but there is every reason to think that while she was there she both honed her skills as a professional writer and continued to develop her interest in and to refine her knowledge of contemporary literature and politics. It is impossible to know exactly what Johnstone’s contributions to the Courier were, but in its intellectual liveliness and its literary and political range, the newspaper offers a clear anticipation of her later journalistic work. The opening number provides a vigorous declaration of the paper’s political commitments, attacking the rival Inverness Journal for spreading rumours that “it had been set up as an engine for knocking on the head all projects of reform and amendment”. On the contrary, the writer insists, “to Reform in the abstract no reasonable being can object”, and while admitting that “some opposite ideas are entertained by the persons engaged in the Courier” about the specifics of such reform (an early hint, perhaps, of looming differences with Blackwood), the paper as a whole is to be dedicated to promoting the public welfare by making space for “unfettered” inquiry (Untitled editorial 1817: 3). The paper also demonstrates the interest of its proprietors in contemporary

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literature, as it features substantial and sympathetic reviews of works as varied as William Godwin’s Mandeville, Benger’s biography of Elizabeth Hamilton, Byron’s Childe Harold, Charles Robert Maturin’s Women, or Pour et Contre, Susan Ferrier’s The Inheritance and, inevitably, Scott’s Rob Roy. Literary matters also find their way into what might be slightly less expected contexts, perhaps suggesting the pervasiveness of Christian Johnstone’s interests and influence on the paper. An agricultural report on the use of salt in cattle farming, for example (12 February 1817), comments in passing that many readers, on hearing about that practice “will recollect the picturesque description of the town of Albany, given by Mrs. Grant”, in which cattle return from pasture in the evening and come “lowing up the semi-rural streets for the allotted portion of salt”. Likewise, an article on 25 June 1817 that indignantly sets out to rebut ideas of the uncleanliness of Scottish peasants notes that “even with the ‘Cottagers of Glenburnie’ in our hands, and the recollection of the Author’s virtues fresh in our memory, we find it impossible to assent to the half that has been said or written on this subject”. The article in question, is, admittedly, credited to the Dumfries Courier, and so the chances of Johnstone being the author are very slight (unless she was sharing her work with the other paper), but even the decision to reprint it suggests both her continuing interest in the intersections between politics and literature and her engagement with the wider world of contemporary Scottish letters. Those interests may have contributed in part to her ability to establish herself fairly easily in the Edinburgh literary world when she left Inverness at some point in the mid-1820s to take up, again with John, the editorship of the Edinburgh Chronicle. A Highland Newspaper states that she did so late in 1824 (Highland Newspaper 1969: 9), a date supported by the fact that John Johnstone’s letters to Blackwood from Inverness end in October, 1824 (there are no letters from him in 1825, and by 1826 he is dating his letters from Edinburgh). There are indications, however, that the Johnstones had some business interests, at least, in Edinburgh even while they were in Inverness. The earliest letter from Christian Johnstone in the Oliver and Boyd archives is dated 1 July 1823 from 19 St. James’s Square, the address of the Edinburgh printing business that John Johnstone maintained for the rest of his working life. In addition, by the mid1820s they had established what turned out to be a lasting and

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complicated relationship with George Boyd, who, like Blackwell and (later) William Tait, worked with both Christian and John Johnstone on a variety of literary projects over a number of years. In addition to publishing several books by Christian, Boyd employed John as the printer for a number of Oliver and Boyd titles, including several by Christian, and both Johnstones served as publishers’ readers. At the same time, they were also continuing with their own projects, following up the collapse of their efforts with the Chronicle by establishing two short-lived journals, The Schoolmaster and Johnstone’s Edinburgh Magazine, the latter of which was at first actively supported by the publisher William Tait, and then, in 1834, folded into his own magazine, with Christian taking over the editorship. As Robert Carruthers suggests was the case with Inverness Courier, Christian seems to have been more active than John in the literary and editorial side of the couple’s partnership during their years in Edinburgh. In his puff for Johnstone’s Magazine, William Tait makes clear that John is to be the printer and co-proprietor of the magazine, but he has almost nothing to say about John’s literary work, which he dismisses in half a sentence, with a polite comment about his “correct, clear” style. Even James Glass Bertram, the source for the claim that John had been Christian’s teacher, admits that the perception at the time was that Christian was the writer in the family. As he noted years afterwards, in reference to Johnstone’s years at Tait’s, “Mr. Johnstone, it was good-naturedly said, helped his wife [in her editorial work] – by handing her books of reference, and mending her pens” (Bertram 1893: 30). While Bertram, who began his publishing career at Tait’s when it was under Christian Johnstone’s editorship, considered the comment somewhat unfair, he nonetheless also thought it reflected contemporary opinion sufficiently well to be worth repeating. This is not to say that John had nothing to do with the writing; he unquestionably made more or less lengthy contributions both to Johnstone’s Magazine and to some of their other ventures, but the scraps of evidence available suggest that he was far more active in financial than literary affairs. The correspondence in the Oliver and Boyd archives indicates that he negotiated most or all the business connected with his wife’s writing, sometimes amicably – in April 1828, for example, John wrote George Boyd to clarify the financial arrangements that he and Boyd had made the previous night for the printing of Nights of the Round Table, probably the most successful of

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Christian Johnstone’s books for children, as he feared that they might have been misconstrued “from [our] having dipped too deeply in the Glenlivat before we came to an understanding on the subject” (J. Johnstone 1828) – and sometimes not. When Boyd died, Johnstone flatly refused to accept his successor’s offer of £130 to buy full rights to The Cook and Housewife’s Manual. That sum, he complained, “would do little more than pay Mrs Johnstone for the labour of a thorough revisal”, and so unless the offer was raised to £230 “we may consider the negotiations are at an end” (J. Johnstone 1846). In the ensuing dispute, Johnstone quickly escalated to a threat to go to law to establish his right to pull The Cook and Housewife’s Manual from Oliver and Boyd entirely, arguing that his agreement to share ownership had been a personal contract with Boyd – and hence was voided by his death – rather than a business arrangement with the company. There had also been also strains with Boyd himself; Johnstone seemed to work on the margins of profitability, and his business correspondence with Boyd is sprinkled with requests for loans or advances, something that could cause friction. On one occasion in 1832, Boyd was apparently sufficiently exasperated to complain about John’s demands to Christian, who replied coldly, “It is a subject of which I know nothing, save that for my part, I spend no money I can possibly avoid, and never mis-spend” (Johnstone 1832c). Christian Johnstone’s claim to take no interest in the business side of her career is borne out to some degree by her own correspondence with both Blackwood and Boyd, in which, on the rare occasions she touches on practical matters, financial or otherwise, she explains that her husband is absent and the business can’t wait. Notably, the one piece of correspondence from Christian Johnstone in the Blackwood’s archives (dated 5 October 1824, from Inverness) is a formal business letter in which she apologises for failing to send some poems that she has misplaced and makes arrangements for Blackwood to forward responses to an advertisement, explaining in the third person that “Mr J—’s absence from home devolves the task of making this troublesome request on Mrs J—” (Johnstone 1824: f. 210). Likewise, in a letter from Dalkeith to George Boyd about troubles with sources for the John Paul Jones biography and about last-minute preparations on her own Diversions of Hollycot, she mentions that she is writing because her husband, then in Edinburgh, has not kept her fully apprised of events in his “hurried note[s]” to her and she is

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“anxious” to settle the question of whether Hollycot will come out in Edinburgh or London. That said, Johnstone does not show any particular discomfort in her dealings with these publishers. She informs Boyd that “I have just sent in a Miss Taylorish note to 18 St. James Square” – presumably a town residence adjoining Johnstone’s printing house – to say that “if I don’t hear by Friday I must come in and manage with you myself, for my business is always neglected I find” (Johnstone 1828). The (teasing?) threat to come into the city and deal with matters herself suggests a pleasantly informal business relationship with Boyd; Duncan likewise points out “a mischievously flirtatious tone” in the ostensibly formal third-person apology to Blackwood for the missing poems [Duncan 2007: 298]). Even so, and however comfortable she was in her dealings with individual publishers, it is clear that Johnstone was willing to leave most of the practical matters of literary business in her husband’s hands. One might speculate that some comments in one of Johnstone’s later novels, Blanche Delamere (originally published in Tait’s in 1839), reflect something of her attitude on this subject; the heroine, while an ardent supporter of training women for professions, hopes that they might “acquire and exercise some branch of skilled industry without becoming public traders, plunged into the keen competition of selfish interests, and jostling and elbowing their way in the market” (Johnstone 1845: 3: 237). Yet even if Christian Johnstone was, thanks to her husband, in large part able to avoid jostling in the marketplace, that does not mean that either she or he saw her work as anything other than a marketable commodity, the product of “skilled industry” rather than of a more or less desultory interest in the leisure arts. For one thing, any distaste for financial “jostling” did not mean that Johnstone was at all ambivalent about women having careers; just a few years later, in a review of Mrs. Hugo Reid’s Plea for Women, she insisted that [a] revolution of opinion which should make female labour as profitable and honourable as that of men; the exercise of female talents, ingenuity, and mechanical skill, commercial enterprise, or professional ability, a source of emolument and credit, and a recognised part of the social system contains the only true principle of female emancipation. (Johnstone 1844c: 424–25)

One can see this attitude towards her writing expressed as well throughout John Johnstone’s correspondence with Boyd. For example,

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in a rather testy letter about some biographical studies Christian Johnstone had written on commission for Boyd’s Cabinet Library series, John, negotiating on his wife’s behalf, refuses to accept £80 for the copyright, insisting that it is precisely because Christian undertook the work “with great reluctance” and “at your special request” that it should be valued at £100. As he makes very clear, he sees the commission itself as a mark that Christian is not someone who writes merely “of her own accord” and on speculation but rather has her services commanded as a professional and therefore deserves remuneration at a higher rate than would be given to a mere amateur (J. Johnstone 1831). Despite the fact that few of the reading public would, in 1831, have known Christian Johnstone’s name, John Johnstone had some very clear grounds for this irritated insistence upon Christian’s status as a literary professional and on Boyd’s reliance upon her professional skills and judgment, as other letters in the Oliver and Boyd archives indicate. Boyd in fact drew on her literary expertise in a variety of ways; for example, she served on occasion as a publisher’s reader, apparently specialising in manuscripts of poetry and children’s writing. Her detailed comments on two books that the firm subsequently published (Lucy Finlay’s Faith’s Telescope – a title Johnstone hated – and Elizabeth Strutt’s Mary Harland) survive in the archives, as do some more dismissive observations about a collection of children’s stories that was apparently turned down. Notably, despite her unwillingness to engage in business discussions on her own behalf, Johnstone demonstrates deep attentiveness to both literary and commercial matters in all of her comments on other writers’ work. In her report on the manuscript of Faith’s Telescope, for example, she is coolly measured about the poetry itself – which “can be no discredit to either writer or publisher” – but then adds that given its evangelical bent, it might, if promoted by “active friends” interest “a numerous and powerful party” and hence turn out to be a profitable venture (Johnstone 1829a). She was also sceptical about what was apparently Finlay’s humbly apologetic preface, “strongly advis[ing]” that it be omitted or rewritten. “In its extreme humility it becomes almost pitful”, she complains, adding that if the writer really has such a low opinion of the work “he should lock it up or burn it” as readers are generally happy “to take a man at his own estimate when he depreciates himself” (Johnstone 1829a). (Her assumption that the

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writer is a man also makes clear that what Johnstone contemptuously calls “[t]hese prefaces ‘for Mercy’s sake’” were not limited to women’s writing.) Boyd obviously took her literary judgments seriously enough to pass them on to the authors; the printed version of Faith’s Telescope not only omits any apology for the quality of the verse, merely explaining an apparent anachronism by saying that the poems had been written some years before, but also includes a note defending the inclusion of lines on Lord Byron to which Johnstone had taken exception in her report (Finlay 1830: 41). Perhaps somewhat less expectedly, Boyd also seems on some occasions to have deferred to her judgment on more practical matters of the literary market. As late as 1836, when Johnstone was preoccupied with her work on Tait’s, he requested her opinion on the salability of some stories by a young friend of his; she responded by urging the young man to reconsider writing fiction for magazines (“a most vexatious trade to make bread by” [Johnstone 1836c]) and instead to try his hand at writing accounts of famous trials, a subject for which she thought there would be a far better market. Yet evidence that Boyd trusted and relied on Johnstone’s literary judgment is not at all the same as evidence that she was herself a significant figure in Edinburgh literary circles, and her husband’s claims about her professional reputation and status might initially seem to sit rather oddly with the obscurity of her name, both then and now. What John Johnstone argued, however, was that one did not in fact have to be known by name to be a presence in the literary world. He makes this point as forcefully as he can in his negotiations with Oliver and Boyd for the sale of Elizabeth de Bruce, Christian’s second (or possibly third) novel, arguing that her work has serious commercial value because of her previous publishing record, even if that publication was anonymous. In the letter in which he first offers Boyd the manuscript, he claims that they can reasonably expect up to £1200 in profits on an edition of 2000 copies and asks for a two thirds share of the income, writing confidently that Were this novel of a doubtful character and the first work of an obscure and friendless author it would be different – and one might then speak about an even division of profits as the publishers would in that case incur considerable risk; but here he actually runs no risk at all – for if only a thousand copies of the work were sold there would be a profit [for the publisher] on the transaction of about £300 –. (J. Johnstone 1826b)

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A few weeks later, his tone was a little more vexed but no less assured about the value of the work: You yourself know – none better – that there is literally no risk whatever. – Clan Albin was published at the very worst possible time – only two weeks before Guy Mannering! – It was neither advertised, pushed, nor puffed – yet about 1400 copies were sold in the course of a few months. (J. Johnstone 1826c)

Johnstone’s arguments were unsuccessful, perhaps because of their optimism: it is striking that he requested only £500 pounds (on an edition of 1600) in his negotiations with Blackwood, the book’s eventual publisher (J. Johnstone 1826d: f. 170). Still, the point remains that even if Christian Johnstone’s name was not a familiar one in the literary world, she was by no means “obscure” as an author, as she had built a reputation through her previous books and in doing so had added significantly to the value of her future publications. Nor should we assume that in promoting his wife’s work in this way, John Johnstone would inevitably have needed to override or ignore any shivering reluctance or modest scruples on her part about putting her writing before the public. Despite Christian’s apparent unwillingness to print any of her works under her own name prior to the 1840s, there is not in fact any particular reason to think that she was indifferent either to her literary reputation or to the financial benefits to be gained through it. While at times she was quite prepared to use the era’s familiar rhetoric about the impropriety of women’s having any serious interest in literary fame – her 1824 letter to William Blackwood opens with a conventional disclaimer about her “fine aversion to every species and degree of authorship” (Johnstone 1824: f. 210) – there are clear indications that she was at least as attuned as her husband to the practicalities of building a public career as a writer. For one thing, there is evidence that, despite her usual practice of publishing anonymously or under a pseudonym, she was not, under the right circumstances, in any way averse to using her name for professional benefit. For example, in an 1842 letter in which John was negotiating terms for a new Oliver and Boyd edition of Nights of the Round Table, he writes that his wife “bids me farther say that to ensure the better sale of a work of which she feels no reason to be ashamed, she would advise that you changed the title to Mrs Johnstone’s Juvenile Tales” (J. Johnstone 1842). Even if the publishers decided that, in the event, it was better to retain the

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original, familiar title, the suggestion implies a clear sense on her part that her name had an established – and marketable – literary value. An argument that Johnstone saw her name as something of a professional asset is further supported by the fact that there is no record of her objecting to other uses of it to puff new projects. On the contrary: when Johnstone’s Magazine was launched in 1833, William Tait helped the new journal along with lavish praise of Johnstone’s books and her abilities. As he explains to his readers, even if “[a]s Mrs. Johnstone, she is scarcely known to fame”, nobody who “has read Clan-Albin, in which she made her literary debut, can be insensible to the merits of this lady as a novelist, even in the first development of her powers”. Who, he asks, that has perused her more matured and elaborate production, entitled Elizabeth de Bruce, can withhold his admiration of her inventive genius and natural eloquence – her subdued but effective humour – her rich style, teeming with redundant beauties – her fine tact, and nice discrimination of character; together with the faculty which she possesses of unfolding the most complicated incidents with easy grace, vivid distinctness, and never-failing propriety? (Tait 1833a: 783)

The article then proceeds to similarly effusive remarks on the Cook and Housewife’s Manual and Nights of the Round Table and concludes with a relatively lengthy excerpt from the latter work. Evidently, Tait saw nothing incongruous in attempting to give Johnstone’s a boost in the intensely competitive world of the cheap periodical press by pointing to the established literary reputation of a woman who had never put her name on the title page of a book. No less significantly, his decision to do so hints that Christian Johnstone might have had a decidedly pragmatic attitude towards the public use of her name despite her practice of not using it on her own publications. It is, quite simply, unthinkable that William Tait, with whom she had already worked and was soon to work with so much more closely, would have praised her by name and identified her most popular works in his journal if she had been shrinkingly opposed to all publicity. Yet even if Johnstone were willing to let her name be known, it is important not to disregard Tait’s admission that as of the early 1830s, more than fifteen years after the publication of Clan-Albin, that name was still “scarcely known to fame”. Indeed, anybody reading through the Oliver and Boyd publishing lists for the 1820s might have

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noted the work of a John Johnstone but would have had no idea that he had wife who was also a writer. By 1830, three books had appeared with Oliver and Boyd under John Johnstone’s name – two anthologies of poetry and the biography of John Paul Jones – but none under Christian’s (although she had published both anonymously and pseudonymously with them by then). As the surviving letters in the archive make clear, however, John Johnstone’s name on a title page is by no means a sure indication that he was the sole, or even the main, author. A few of John Johnstone’s letters about the first of the poetry anthologies refer, matter-of-factly, to the work that “we” are doing: “we would be the better of seeing more books than might be made use of”, he writes on 1 March 1826, prefacing a request for a long list of titles that Boyd will need to acquire for them, then concludes “when once we have got these we will be able to make some calculation how much the volumes will contain” (J. Johnstone 1826a). If there is no direct reference to collaboration in these letters, the implication remains clear that Christian was reading and selecting the poetry with John; she merely refrained from drawing attention to that fact on the title page. The Jones biography, precisely because it caused so much trouble and sparked so many angry or complaining letters, offers an even clearer record of the sort of work that Christian Johnstone was prepared to do on a book nominally by her husband. As early as April 1828, Christian, then in Dalkeith, was writing Boyd about the lack of progress in getting the papers from Miss Taylor, something that she was clearly managing on her own, as John was then in Edinburgh. A flurry of letters dating from the summer and autumn of 1829 indicates that it was also Christian who worked with Jones’ manuscript letters; her increasing certainty that Miss Taylor had been deliberately withholding potentially embarrassing details about Jones’ life demonstrates not just that she was reading the letters but also that she was working with them as a biographer, trying to make sense of scattered and incomplete sources, and finding the process of doing so deeply frustrating. Angrily convinced, for example, that Miss Taylor had been trying to conceal the fact the “Delia” with whom Jones had been carrying on a passionate epistolary exchange was a married woman, Christian Johnstone wrote crossly to George Boyd that “I am most anxious never to hear another word about ‘Paul Jones’ – but as I am no longer in ignorance (no thanks to Miss Taylor) I half feel it

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necessary in point of honour to make some change […] Miss Taylor may soon learn that the imposition or suppression of facts is not so easy as is supposed” (Johnstone 1829c). This dislike of both her subject and his niece increased in intensity as the project wound down: “I heartily desire never to set my eyes on the handwriting of Paul Jones again”, Christian wrote on 23 October 1829 as she returned the papers to Oliver and Boyd (Johnstone 1829d). Perhaps even more tellingly, when at the very end of the process a letter was discovered to have gone missing, it was Christian Johnstone who was reported to have been searching all her books for the missing document, even though it was John who was writing the half-apologetic, halfdefensive reports on the search for it (he thought that the blame might lie with a careless courier) (J. Johnstone 1829). The implication, clearly enough, is that John handled the practical arrangements, while Christian read and made sense of the biographical material. Thus, while it is John Johnstone’s name that is on both the original note of agreement with Miss Taylor and on a long, angry letter detailing the reasons that he held her solely responsible for the delays in publication, there is every reason to think that Christian was at the very least a co-author and, quite probably, the main writer of the work. Readers today, of course, might find it barely worth comment that an early nineteenth-century woman writer chose to conceal her identity under a man’s name and take for granted the idea that Christian Johnstone would have found it easier to print and sell work with her husband’s name, rather than her own, on the title page. In some cases, that might have been true enough; with John Johnstone’s professional background as a schoolteacher, it is plausible, at least, to think that the publishers might have assumed that his name would be more impressive than hers on the title page of improving anthologies of verse. Likewise, a biography of the public exploits of a naval hero might well have been perceived as carrying more weight if the nominal author was a man rather than an unknown woman. The idea that the author’s name assigned to works that Johnstone wrote or cowrote was chosen at least partly according to the content of the book is supported by the fact that works with more conventionally “feminine” subject matter, such as children’s stories or a cookbook, appeared with a woman’s name – even if not Johnstone’s own – on the title page. Moreover, an argument that Johnstone’s concealment of her name might be connected as much to pragmatic considerations of

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marketing as it is to issues of feminine modesty is also supported by other evidence that Johnstone was deeply attentive to the question of how best to pitch her books to a given literary market. In 1828, for example, she asked Boyd to accept or decline the manuscript for a children’s book as soon as possible, so that if she had to turn to her London publisher, she could shape the content for an English readership (Johnstone 1828). Despite these indications that Christian Johnstone had a keen professional sense of how to sell and promote her own work, the fact remains that she has left little trace on the literary history of the Edinburgh literary world in which she played such an active role. The Editors of the Wellesley Index speculate that this near-invisibility is the result of the divorce, following which Johnstone “preferred to offset her ‘sins’ by as much respectability and privacy as possible” (Wellesley Index 1966–1989: 4: 480). This is a reasonable conjecture, yet it is surprisingly difficult to support it with any contemporary evidence. There is in fact no indication that Johnstone’s contemporaries were particularly shocked by or disapproving of her unconventional marital history; on the contrary, one of the few commentators to allude to the subject of her first marriage says nothing about it other than that, in his sympathetic and carefully discreet phrase, she had been “compelled to devorce [sic]” her husband (Conolly 1866: 244). Elizabeth Isabella Spence, who met her less than two years after the divorce and a little more than a year after her remarriage, remains completely silent about this supposedly controversial past, but it is difficult to read this omission merely as a tactful refusal to call attention to Johnstone’s “sins”. Far from avoiding questions of personal reputation, Spence goes out of her way to praise Johnstone as much for her exemplary femininity as for her literary work. ClanAlbin, according to Spence, encapsulates the “pure and virtuous feeling[s]” of its author and is “the genuine emanation of a warm and good heart”; in particular, Spence finds in the “gentle and modest virtues” of Johnstone’s female characters” an illustration of their creator’s “elegant and pure” mind (Spence 1817: 303–4). Nor, perhaps even more to the point, was Johnstone invisible to her contemporaries in her professional role, however few traces she has left for later generations of readers; she in fact attracted the attention of some of Edinburgh’s major literary figures, and their responses, scattered though they are, seem more or less uniformly warm and admiring. If

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there was adverse comment on her career in the world of the Edinburgh literary magazines – a world in which adverse comment was the basic currency – little if any of it seems to have been committed to writing. James Glass Bertram’s report of the supposedly jocular comment about John Johnstone’s abilities as a pen-mender seems to be as close as anybody got to mocking Christian Johnstone for a potentially unfeminine immersion in literary business, while writers such as John Wilson, Thomas Carlyle, and Thomas DeQuincey, none of whom were ever noted for any particular tendency to polite forbearance in their responses to other authors, were apparently quite as ready as Spence to interest themselves in Johnstone and her literary work. Carlyle, for example, took the trouble to answer a letter in which John Johnstone apparently sought his advice on whether or not Christian should involve herself with something called The British Authors Society. After scornfully dismissing the society, Carlyle concludes that he “will not recommend my brave Mrs Johnstone” – whom he politely says that he recalls “with the liveliest distinction, with the utmost good will” – “to disturb herself with this affair” (Carlyle 1843: f. 63). DeQuincey, who makes his comments about Johnstone in the context of a lament about Dorothy Wordsworth’s collapse into depression, is somewhat more expansive; he suggests that Wordsworth might have escaped her unhappy fate had she cultivated a professional approach to writing and cites, as an example of what she might have done with her life, “Mrs Johnstone of Edinburgh”, who “pursued the profession of literature […] as a daily occupation; and, I have every reason to believe, with as much benefit to her own happiness, as to the instruction and amusement of her readers” (DeQuincey 2003: 19: 401). She appears to have been a subject of interest to at least some more casual literary visitors as well: the poet Mary Howitt noted that on her 1836 Edinburgh tour, William Tait welcomed her with an invitation “to a tripe supper” and with an introduction “to Mrs. Johnstone” (Howitt 1889: 1: 255). It is also noteworthy that such willingness among Johnstone’s contemporaries to recognise her professional achievements did not interfere, at all, with their sense that she remained a model of perfect femininity. This point is illustrated by Spence’s brief sketch of her; it is also emphasised even more strongly in comments that appeared after her death, in which she is presented as an unfailingly demure, domestic-minded, and retiring woman, whose properly feminine

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instincts prevented her from seeking any public recognition for her work. George Troup, the writer of her obituary in Tait’s Magazine, provides the most compact summary of contemporary opinion on her career in his comment that “[h]er manner of life was that of a perfect gentlewoman. She might have easily obtained a greater name in the world if she had sought it. She sought it not” (Troup 1857: 574). Similarly, a younger contemporary, summing up her career for a biographical dictionary, writes that “she shrank from anything like publicity or conspicuousness” and adds that “[i]t was always with difficulty that her mingled modesty and pride – both conspicuous elements of her character – would allow her name to appear on her writings”. Still more interestingly, he then goes on to lament that as “a professional writer, she was undoubtedly wrong” to be so reserved, because her literary reputation, to some extent, suffered by her oversensitive feelings in this respect. More knowing authors, who live by their pen, generally court every opportunity of having their names before the public, and bringing the accumulated fame of all their previous works to bear upon their latest. (Conolly 1866: 245)

This mid-Victorian writer’s matter-of-fact assumption that professional interests should trump culturally sanctioned ideas of retiring femininity is striking; indeed, it anticipates in brief some of the more detailed and closely-argued conclusions about Christian Johnstone’s disappearance from the canon reached more than a century and a half later by Alexis Easley. Offering the first major assessment of Christian Johnstone’s career as a journalist, Easley makes a strong case that the combination of anonymity or pseudonymity and the discourses of Victorian femininity effectively made Johnstone’s varied and provocative body of work invisible to a later generation of readers (Easley 2004: 61–63; see also Caine 2001: 99–118 for a more general argument on nineteenth-century women journalists and anonymity). In terms of reception history, it would be very difficult indeed to argue with Easley’s conclusions; reading Johnstone’s career through the ideologies of domestic femininity offers a solidly convincing way of explaining her reticence to claim her work, which led in turn to her disappearance from literary history. What it does not provide is an explanation of how she came to establish that career in the first place. After all, as the praise of figures such as Carlyle and DeQuincey indicates, Johnstone did manage to make herself known as a writer to

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a number of central figures of her era, despite this supposedly demure and modest shrinking from public notice and, somewhat oddly, these contemporaries were apparently quite happy to accept that a model of domestic femininity could also be the editor of several vociferously political magazines and the author of a number of more or less aggressively polemical works. The irony in the fact that a writer as prolific – and apparently as thoroughly professional – as Christian Johnstone should be seen as a particularly impressive exemplar of the private domestic woman becomes all the more clear as soon as one pays any attention to the content of her work. What is ultimately most interesting about Johnstone’s career is not the fact that her usual practice of concealing her name enabled her to publish widely during her life but then contributed to her posthumous disappearance from literary history, but rather that she was able to insert herself, with minimal controversy, into an intensely polemical and political literary world. In part, at least, she was able to do so because of the various meanings that anonymity and pseudonymity took on in the Edinburgh literary scene during the first third of the nineteenth century. Reading her career in the context of the era’s other literature and literary journalism, as well as in that of domestic femininity, might thus help one to see her use of anonymity not just as a mode of feminine accommodation to the public world of authorship, which her contemporaries were admittedly quite happy to see it as being, but also as part of the complex games of authority and identity being played by so many of the male writers in the lively, competitive world of early nineteenthcentury Edinburgh publishing. Shaping Authorial Identities Christian Johnstone’s ability to pull off this difficult balancing act between shaping a literary career in the combative world of the Edinburgh press and maintaining her reputation as an impeccably feminine woman might, paradoxically enough, have in fact owed something to the separation of the public from the private life that she decried in the case of John Paul Jones and to her resultant ability to create a series of public authorial identities built around her previous and ongoing work in the literary marketplace, rather than around a version of private domestic womanhood. As the letters to George

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Boyd imply, Johnstone understood clearly enough that what might, in Foucault’s terms, be called the “author-function” shaped the reception of a book. In assessing a manuscript for Boyd, for example, Johnstone wrote dismissively at one point that there were already so many “stories of Scottish character and manners” that “without the name of the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’ or ‘John Galt’ at them they won’t go down at all” (Johnstone 1830). Of course, Foucault’s concept of the author function applies specifically to named authors, but as Robert J. Griffin has argued, anything that “describe[s] and classif[ies]” the origins of a given “body of texts” – such as the pseudonym “the Ettrick Shepherd” – can serve precisely the same function (Griffin 1999: 882). That Johnstone is thinking about such “recognizable sign[s] that the cultural commodity will be of a certain kind and quality” (Griffin 1999, quoting Mark Rose: 879) and not merely, in a rather carelessly phrased manner, saying that Galt’s and Hogg’s stories are inherently superior to those of their competitors is clear from her subsequent comment that one of the stories in the manuscript collection is “worthy of Galt” but that, even so, the work wouldn’t be worth a publisher’s risk. Nor did she mean only that a famous name was necessary to sell work, as other letters show her to be attuned to the potential publishing value of anonymous or pseudonymous authorship. In a March 1826 letter evaluating a manuscript collection of poetry, for example, John Johnstone writes that “We have both studied” it, and while they are unable “to see what better claim to sale this has than Mr Malcolm’s book, or Delta’s”, it at least “has a ladylike title and no author’s name – both favourable circumstances” (J. Johnstone 1826a). The implication, clearly enough, is that in the case of the “ladylike” poetry, anonymous publication, which permits guesswork about authorship, might arouse more interest than would the appearance of a name that would, presumably, block the pleasures of certain types of tantalising speculation. Even anonymous publications, in other words, invited readers to draw conclusions – whether accurate or not – about the author of a given book, and Christian Johnstone was very well aware of that fact. This is a point that has also attracted renewed interest in recent criticism of the construction of literary identities by women, with Catherine Gallagher’s influential study of the ways in which eighteenth-century women writers played with concepts of literary authority helping to spark a re-evaluation of women’s decisions about

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what name, if any, they put on the title pages of books that they wrote. Of particular interest in any discussion of Christian Johnstone is Gallagher’s rethinking of the assumption that, for eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women, anonymous publication was necessarily and invariably an attempt to circumvent an unsettling move from the private into the public sphere and to remain safely private. Indeed, as Gallagher argues, publishing one’s work for a large, anonymous readership could in fact be rhetorically interchangeable with strictly private writing: “paradoxically,” in Gallagher’s words, “the larger and more impersonal the audience became, the more writing for it could be conceived in the same innocent terms as writing only for oneself” (Gallagher 1994: 210). Nor was this the only way in which, intentionally or not, women writers tended to blur the boundaries between public and private in their literary work. Just as important is the conventional insistence that their published writing is merely a reflection of their private, domestic world and their reluctance – genuine or performed – to assume a public voice and identity. As Norma Clarke has observed in connection with the early eighteenthcentury writer Elizabeth Singer Rowe, “the aspiration to privacy by women with public reputations […] did not so much claim privacy or silence but was a bid to be allowed to be virtuous” (Clarke 2004: 88). The revelation of the private self, in effect, becomes a guarantee of the writer’s virtuous rejection of a public literary identity. One of the resulting ironies of women’s literary history is that we know far more biographical details about some of the women – such as Rowe and Katherine Phillips – who established themselves as exemplars of modest, retiring femininity than we do about someone such as Aphra Behn, who built a flamboyantly public career for herself. Needless to say, Johnstone established an entirely different sort of public career than did Aphra Behn, but there are some parallels in their refusal to thematise their private experience in their published literary works. Doing so would have been a familiar enough move for a literary woman of Johnstone’s class and era, since, by the opening years of the nineteenth century, there was a well-established rhetoric which presented certain types of fiction and poetry as the products of a private, leisured, and implicitly feminised world. Women of the middle classes or gentry wrote, supposedly, because it was a harmless way of filling time not occupied by household duties or (as with Anne Grant and her letters and poems) because it was a way of maintaining social bonds.

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All the familiar stories of Jane Austen shuffling her manuscripts out of the sight of visitors or – going back to an even earlier generation – of the young Frances Burney making a bonfire of her juvenilia might make us forget that a number of clever, talented women of that era were in fact encouraged to amuse themselves, their family, and their friends through their writing. Austen, after all, carefully transcribed her juvenilia for her family; her contemporary Mary Brunton originally wrote her best-selling novel Self-Control to fill empty hours, and the book’s first audience was her husband and her close friend Mrs Izett (see McKerrow 2001: 83–84). Around the same time, the young Emily Eden (who entertained herself some years later by writing a novel that she then left unpublished for almost three decades) reported with dry amusement the coy games that the aristocratic ladies of her acquaintance played in showing, collecting, and trading album verses that they and their friends had composed. Such private anthologies of verse had, she adds in a demurely snobbish dismissal, become so very much the rage that “Lady Elizabeth’s maid is also making a collection” (Dickinson 1919: 6; the letter quoted is dated 23 December 1814). Examples of women who presented their published writing as the offshoot of their private taste for such safely feminine literary pursuits could easily be multiplied: as already noted, Anne Grant insisted that most of her poems were the result of a moment’s impulse to capture her experiences for the amusement of absent friends, Elizabeth Hamilton began writing to console herself after her brother’s death, and Jean Marishall claimed to have begun her literary career after she and a friend had been disappointed one too many times by badly-plotted novels. In this context of all these constructions of female authorship as the product of self-proclaimed genteel amateurism, what is perhaps most remarkable about Christian Johnstone is that, aside from the few scattered business letters, we don’t have any indication that a single word of her identifiable surviving writing – which would run into many volumes – was written with any intention except that of publication for financial gain. The private lady of literary tastes, forced by circumstance or persuaded by friends into publication more or less against her better judgment, is thus something of a cliché in the years around the beginning of the nineteenth century. The fact that it became a cliché doesn’t mean that it was entirely inaccurate; there is no reason to

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doubt, for example, the detailed accounts that writers such as Burney and Brunton have left of their anxieties about venturing into print. Likewise, Susan Ferrier’s attempts to preserve the secret of her authorship of Marriage seem to have been sincere if a little excessive. (In her history of Blackwood’s publishing house, Margaret Oliphant noted with considerable amusement the “horrified femininity” with which Ferrier “shrank” from publicity, adding that “[h]er packets of proof” were even “directed on one occasion under cover to a friend, as if they had been clandestine love-letters” [Oliphant 1897: 1: 43]). That said, Burney, Brunton and Ferrier were all sufficiently interested in publication and, whatever their doubts and anxieties, confident enough about their work to send it out to a publishing house in the first place. More to the point here, however, than any arguments about the degree of shrinking horror these famous writers might or might not have felt about venturing into print, is the basic fact that the figure of the timid, retiring female novelist offered a culturally acceptable model of female authorship, one that therefore became an easy trope for women writers to deploy, even if it was not entirely reflective of their private tastes or views. Indeed, given its pervasiveness, it might have been difficult for women to shape other narratives of authorship for themselves, particularly if they wrote in more acceptably feminine genres, such as the novel or charmingly ladylike verse. The acceptability of women’s writing in these forms at that time is emphasised by the fact that, as Paula Feldman has observed, early nineteenth-century women poets were remarkably comfortable about publishing under their own names or easily recognizable pseudonyms (Feldman 2002: 44–53). (Notably, perhaps, Anne Grant put her name on the title page of her poems but not her letters.) Likewise, the argument that women who published novels in the opening years of the nineteenth century were not seen as doing anything entirely at odds with the ideology of domestic femininity is supported by Ian Duncan’s observation that what is now the more familiar nineteenthcentury practice of women publishing novels under male pseudonyms “can be dated with some precision from the time of Scott’s death” (Duncan 1992: 17) – that is, to the time that fiction again started to be taken as something more than trivial entertainment that bored and more or less frivolous women dashed off and read in their quiet domestic isolation. Yet even when such women writers did publish under their own names, the author function being constructed was

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often very much the same as that implied in anonymous publication: a woman whose literary sensibilities did not interfere with her taste for a retiring, domestic life and whose writing was both grounded in and entirely reflective of that private world. Clearly, however, neither anonymity nor pseudonymity necessarily had to involve an assumption that the author was too timid to venture openly into the public sphere, and by the third decade of the nineteenth century, Christian Johnstone would have had seen numerous examples in Edinburgh of men who published anonymously or under an assumed name for reasons other than nervousness or a shrinking desire to preserve domestic privacy and who thereby offered an implied version of anonymous authorship that attached meanings other than feminine modesty to the concealment of one’s name. Scott’s famously flimsy mask as “the Author of Waverley” is only the most familiar of the games played with literary authority by Edinburgh writers in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, and while it is of course impossible to draw any sort of general conclusions about anonymity as a literary practice from the entirely individual case of Scott, his play with authorship and identity indicates, if nothing else, that anonymous publication should not necessarily be read as a straightforward or unproblematic indication of a writer’s timid desire for complete secrecy. In Karl Miller’s words, “the secret of who had written what was apt to leak” in the small Edinburgh literary circles of this period, something that was not necessarily to be deplored, since as Miller drily notes, “[t]he pleasures of anonymity would have been sadly diminished if it had spoilt the chance of building a reputation” (Miller 1985: 112). Miller’s assumption that anonymous authorship was not necessarily incompatible with a thirst for literary fame is supported by Elizabeth Hamilton’s response to the early numbers of The Edinburgh Review. Within months of the Review’s launch, Hamilton was recommending it to the attention of an English friend as “a striking specimen of the abilities of a party of young gentleman, who promise to do much credit to the literary character of Scotland”; she singles out for special attention the articles by “two young advocates”, presumably Jeffrey and Brougham, neither of whom of course ever signed anything that

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they published in the Review (Benger 1818: 2: 55).2 Perhaps even more intriguingly, Hamilton was worried about the Review’s prospects for long-term survival, despite her admiration of its content, since “fame” is not, as she notes, as “uniform a stimulus” to endeavour as money. Even granted that Hamilton was an insider in the small literary world of Edinburgh –and an acquaintance of Jeffrey – there is still something striking in her confident assumption not just that she could identify the authors of individual articles but also that writers who were not attaching their names to anything that they were publishing were driven by the pursuit of fame rather than fortune. Nor were the Edinburgh reviewers alone in building reputations while concealing their names. A number of notorious works of the eighteen-teens and twenties were published without the author’s name on the title page, and several of them did help to launch or redirect the writers’ careers. For example, the scandalous Chaldee Manuscript, which inaugurated Blackwood’s Magazine by satirising Edinburgh literary society in quasi-Biblical style, represented itself as a “found” document, and so its anonymity was at least as much a part of the joke as it was a sensible way of distancing its young authors, John Gibson Lockhart and John Wilson, from the ensuing uproar. Yet the veil of anonymity was so slight that Lockhart and Wilson quickly established themselves as dangerous new satirical voices, in large part due to the strength of their “anonymous” work. Likewise, though with rather less success in capitalising on the work’s notoriety, Lockhart’s fellow Blackwood’s writer James Hogg also refused to put his name – either his own or his established pseudonym of the Ettrick Shepherd – on the title page of his 1824 Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, a novel that plays elaborate games with textual authority. In that book, the unnamed Editor, worried that a Blackwood’s letter by 2 In the printed text of her letter, the writers Hamilton praises are referred to only by initials, as Mr. T— and Mr. B—, but the “T” might well be an error or mistranscription. According to the Wellesley Index, the only contributor to the first two numbers – the ones that Hamilton is discussing – with a surname beginning with “T” is John Thomson, who wrote three relatively brief articles on medical topics. Jeffrey and Brougham between them, by contrast, contributed 18 or 19 articles of the 52 in those numbers. Nor, in any case, are the initials used in the printed transcriptions of Hamilton’s letters always to be trusted. In an l801 letter to H[ector] M[acneill], which survives in manuscript, Hamilton refers to a Mrs. John Campbell (Hamilton 1801: f. 4) who appears in the printed transcription as Mrs. I. B. (Benger 1818: 2: 24). Unfortunately, the manuscript of the letter about The Edinburgh Review is untraced.

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the Ettrick Shepherd might be sending him on a wild goose chase, seeks out both Lockhart and Hogg – who proves to be grumpily uncommunicative – in his attempt to trace the facts behind a strangely mummified body, the exhumation of which is described in Hogg’s original letter. This anonymity didn’t seem to fool anybody; the reviews were almost uniform in both their distaste for the novel and their unhesitating attribution of it to Hogg. What it does is emphasise Hogg’s interest not just in authorship but also in self-conscious play with what he found at times to be his frustrating or limiting quasifictional authorial identity as the “Ettrick Shepherd”. The Ettrick Shepherd, like Wilson’s literary alter ego Christopher North, is a literary invention that overlaps with but is distinct from the private individual James Hogg, and it offers a good example of the ways in which pseudonymous publication can be used not so much to conceal as to shape an author’s persona. The distinction between the author and the persona in this case is amusingly pointed out in Sarah Green’s 1824 novel Scotch Novel Reading, in which a misguidedly devoted fan of all things Scottish falls in love with the works of the Ettrick Shepherd, whom she pictures as a “rosy cheek[ed]” lad with “sunny ringlets”, clad in the “graceful drapery” of pastoral romance. When she later reads a description of him and then, worst of all, learns that his name is Hogg, “her grief was beyond all bounds; she cried a whole day” (Green 1824: 1: 10–11). Her reading of the fiction is shaped by the fantasy she builds around the author function constructed by Hogg (and Blackwood’s), and as Ian Duncan has pointed out, Green is attacking “the dissolution of the author function into a generic, quasi-mechanised Scotch Novel industry” (Duncan 2007: 32). Yet the point is rather more double-edged than it might initially appear. The heroine’s fantasies about the Ettrick Shepherd are revealed in a conversation between her father and one of his friends, both of whom are decidedly scornful of what they see as her naïve reading practices, yet their discussion suggests that they are themselves no less inclined to let their version of the author function shape their reading of individual works of literature. Their “knowledge” that “poor Hogg” is merely a “hard-faced Scotchman”, rather than a figure of romance, enables them to form what the novel implies is a more accurate judgment of the value of his work, which they dismiss as “mere book-making”, so garbled up with “very unpleasant” Scots phraseology that it is impossible “to make out half a

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page of it” (Green 1824: 1: 7, 9–11). In their eyes, the “hard” Scottish features of the author are reflected in the hard, supposedly uncouth language of his books, and the result is a confusion of author and text that inverts and mirrors, rather than corrects, the supposedly naïve reading practices of the misguided Alice. Christian Johnstone admittedly never created a single, coherent authorial identity such as “the Ettrick Shepherd” or (to use another Blackwood’s example) “Christopher North”, the bibulous, sociable editorial persona developed by John Wilson. Nonetheless, the literary work that she did in the years before moving to Tait’s was built around a series of more or less transparent authorial disguises. First, and most obviously, there is “the Author of Clan-Albin”. While this is, clearly enough, a fairly limited form of authorial self-creation, it is also the case, as Griffin has argued, that even if “the phrase ‘by the author of’ refers us not so much to a situated person as to a previous performance” it still “acts as a kind of advertisement” (Griffin 1999: 880) and thus as a form of author function. This element of advertising was amplified as Johnstone widened her repertoire: her first children’s book, The Diversions of Hollycot (1832) is “by the author of Clan-Albin and Elizabeth de Bruce”, and Diversions of Hollycot is then added in turn to the string of titles on the title page of Nights of the Round Table. Yet Johnstone did not choose to sell all of her new writing by reference to the old; The Cook and Housewife’s Manual was published under the pseudonym Meg Dods, an advertising feature in itself, while her magazine fiction and journalism – not always easily attributable to her – is inflected by the tone and other content of the journal in which it appears, making the magazines themselves part of the authorial character that Johnstone was constructing. Of course, it is not possible to differentiate clearly or cleanly between these authorial personas, especially after William Tait’s 1833 article made plain that “the author of Clan-Albin” was also Meg Dods and Mrs. Johnstone. Yet in looking at the ways in which these public authorial identities both differ from and overlap with each other, one can get a more detailed sense of the ways in which Christian Johnstone succeeded in creating a very public career as a serious and polemical author even while remaining more or less invisible as a private individual.

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The Author of Clan-Albin, Meg Dods, and Sir Walter Scott Whether or not she wrote The Saxon and the Gael, it was as the author of Clan-Albin that Christian Johnstone chose to be identified when she restarted her career as a novelist, after a hiatus of more than a decade, with the publication of Elizabeth de Bruce. As Griffin points out, the advertisement of a new work by reference to an author’s previous books is a practice that dates back at least as far as the seventeenth century (Griffin 1999: 880), but there is also no doubt that anybody using that formula in 1820s Edinburgh would have been very likely to have thought, at least on some level, of Sir Walter Scott and “the Author of Waverley”. Given that Johnstone opens Clan-Albin with an explicit invitation to readers to measure her novel against Waverley – and that in his sales pitches for Elizabeth de Bruce, John Johnstone emphasises how well Clan-Albin sold even though it had been in direct competition with Guy Mannering – there is all the more reason to think that in deciding to identify herself in this manner, Johnstone was doing something more interesting than merely calling the attention of Clan-Albin’s readers to her new novel. In turning to Scott’s version of authorial self-creation, Johnstone would have found a model of unsigned authorship as something more than a blank absence of information; as Jerome McGann has noted, “[i]n Scott, ‘the Author of Waverley’ is a character of conscious make-believe” and a “determining focus” for some of the playfully self-referential aspects of his fiction (McGann 2004: 115). There is thus good reason to argue, given the numerous links that Johnstone draws between her authorial practice and his, that she was aware of the sorts of games that could be played with literary authority even in unsigned work. Nor were others slow to draw connections between Johnstone’s body of work and Scott’s; in a puff in Blackwood’s Noctes Ambrosianae column, the Ettrick Shepherd proclaims that he is looking forward to Elizabeth de Bruce because Clan-Albin put him so much in mind of Scott’s work, a comment that draws Johnstone – or at least her authorial persona – into the complex range of cultural meanings that had, by the late 1820s, clustered around the Waverley novels. Not least importantly, Scott (whose authorship was undoubted by most well before his official admission of the fact) was extravagantly admired both for bringing a masculine vigour to fiction and for using his novels to illuminate the cultural and social history of Scotland (see, in particular

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Ferris 1991: 79–94 and Rigney 2001: 53–56). By inviting, even if only by implication, comparison between what contemporaries saw as the underlying cultural gravitas of the Waverley novels and her own historical works on Scottish and British culture, Johnstone was implicitly asking that both Clan-Albin and Elizabeth de Bruce be read not just as disposable entertainment, but also as part of a more or less coherent meditation on major social issues. Even read in isolation from Johnstone’s other work, Clan-Albin has a strong political edge, as is made clear by its recent critical rediscovery as an important contribution to the genre of the national tale by critics including Ina Ferris (1997), Katie Trumpener (1997) and Andrew Monnickendam (1998), and it actively invites one to read it as offering a Waverley-like myth of national identity. This connection is strengthened by linking Elizabeth de Bruce back to it, as the later book not only fits within the genre of the national tale but is also, in some ways, even more like a Waverley novel than was Clan-Albin. Ian Duncan, the only recent critic to pay any attention to the novel, notes that the German translator in fact attributed it to Scott; Duncan himself sees it as moving beyond the Waverley novels, commenting that Elizabeth de Bruce, which he considers Johnstone’s best novel, “revisits Clan-Albin as the marker of a path not taken, exploring the relations between Ireland and Scotland as historical and symbolic sites of literary Romanticism” (Duncan 2007: 290). Yet even as Duncan makes a very strong case for seeing the novel as distinct from other Scottish fiction of the day, Scott himself seemed to feel that Johnstone was coming a little too close to trespassing on his territory, grumbling in his journal that although authors have “no right of monopoly” on some particular class of characters”, one is still “too apt to feel on such occasions the pettied resentment that you might entertain against one who had poached on your manor” (Scott 1998: 306). Scott perhaps had some reason for annoyance, as a list of Johnstone’s characters would read like a mish-mash of popular figures from an assortment of his own fiction. There is a mysterious vagrant – nicknamed Rougemantle – a gruff but kindly country squire, longing for the old days of chivalry and stately order, a saintly cottar who lives a life of simple virtue, and an ardent hero, who is more or less inadvertently swept up in a rebellion against the crown and is threatened by court-martial for his actions. Yet these Scott-like elements add up to a whole that is very different from anything that Scott would have

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written, as along with its extravagantly romantic plot, the book contains a surprising amount of direct political polemic, much of which has a clear contemporary relevance that becomes all the more obvious when the novel is read as part of a coherent body of work with ClanAlbin. Elizabeth de Bruce’s angry portrait of late eighteenth-century Ireland is not merely history; it amplifies and to some extent explains the unhappy state of the country as portrayed in Clan-Albin, written more than a decade earlier, but set a decade and a half later. The world that Johnstone creates in Clan-Albin is one in which, despite a sunnily implausible happy ending, Britain remains riven by the strains of empire. The exiled Highlanders who have settled in America refuse to return to their native land when given an opportunity to do so, and, on a less practical, literal level, the horribly contrasting fates of the virtuous Scottish hero and his rebellious, outlawed Irish cousin – who are, in effect, doubles of each other – embody a split at the imperial centre. It is, of course, precisely this sort of cultural split that Scott returns to again and again in his novels, exploring the ways in which the variously nightmarish or romantic divisions of the past give way to a more rational and unified, if less impassioned, present. Unlike Waverley and its successors, however, Clan-Albin ends with a potentially troubled sense that the best way to heal these divides is, in effect, to move backwards – in this case, to a sort of artificially reconstituted Highland clan. Elizabeth de Bruce is similarly suspicious of the idea of a modern British culture that flattens out national and regional differences, and, if anything, is even bleaker in its assessment of an imperial centre that is inattentive or hostile to the cultures on its own margins. Much of the novel’s action takes place in the immediate aftermath of the Irish uprising of 1798, and its Scottish hero – whose given name Wolfe recalls not only James Wolfe, the hero of empire, but also and far more obviously, given the novel’s setting, Wolfe Tone (on this point, see also Duncan 2007: 291–92) – becomes both participant in and victim of the attempt to crush Ireland’s rebellion. If, as Scott playfully if disingenuously asserts in the opening chapter of Waverley, Edward Waverley’s name was chosen because of its blank imperviousness to any sort of preexisting cultural associations (see Trumpener 1997: 139–40 on the literary and political echoes evoked by the name), “Wolfe” is a flamboyantly double-edged reminder of the complicated politics of empire underlying the novel and a tacit reminder of why the Irish of

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Clan-Albin remain impossible to assimilate fully into the novel’s happy ending. Johnstone’s narrative sympathies throughout Elizabeth de Bruce are clearly with the Irish, whose rebellion is shown not as any sort of desperate or short-sighted clinging to the values of a past that is rapidly being superseded but rather as the only possible response to a practice of constant cultural harassment that falls just short of open brutality. She represents Ireland as a country in which a casually brandished sword and a tasteless joke are equally part of a pattern of oppression that soaks into the textures of daily life even more completely than open violence would: The rude taunts of the dragoons, the occasional side plunge of a horse on some unwary and shrinking traveller, the random stroke of a sabre flourished in air, the brutal jests and senseless insults offered by the soldiers to the religion and national feelings of the people, spoke volumes of the state of this unhappy country; yet nothing like actual violence was offered; and, though there was that which was deep, and even mortal offence to the irritated spirits of the natives, nothing took place on which a formal complaint of the conduct of the military could have been grounded. (Johnstone 1827: 2: 327)

Such direct political commentary admittedly sits uneasily with the much more formalised action and language of the romance plot, and the book jumps rather awkwardly between grim or ironic narrative commentary and high melodrama. The tragic anti-hero, for example, explains the reasons for his rebellion in a set of extravagant, neatly balanced antitheses that seem to belong more to the world of stage melodrama than that of political analysis. His revolt against the government was, he proclaims, “as holy and as just as right and wrong could make it! – right shamefully withheld – wrong cruelly inflicted […] I were a beast not to have felt – a coward not to have resisted!” (Johnstone 1827: 1: 232–33). Yet however hedged about by melodrama, the book’s pro-Irish politics are raw and angry: what Johnstone offers her readers is a world in which the horrors of rebellion and oppression are not left behind with the romantic past, and even as Johnstone’s Wolfe settles down to his Waverley-like life as a landed gentleman in Scotland, the author ensures that her readers can’t forget entirely that other rebellious Wolfe whose fate was so very different. One of the major characters, a young Irish peasant who had both tricked and misled Wolfe and become, in some ways, his protector and guide in the disorienting world of Irish culture and politics, flees

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into the hills after murdering an old family enemy, and so is neither assimilated nor eliminated as part of the happy ending. Even if the aristocratic Irish anti-hero dies offstage, fighting in exile in Germany, the peasants, who are the more complex figures, remain alive, dangerously angry, and unassimilated into the concluding vision of tranquil landed gentility. This presents a somewhat different conclusion than Clan-Albin, in which the hero’s rebellious Irish double dies on the scaffold. Andrew Monnickendam has argued convincingly against reading too many parallels between the death of Bourke in Clan-Albin and the execution of Fergus MacIvor at the end of Waverley, not least since Johnstone’s anti-hero maintains agency by stabbing himself to death and forestalling the executioner (Monnickendam 2003: xiii). Even so, it seems worth stressing that in Elizabeth de Bruce, unlike the earlier and more popular Clan-Albin, Johnstone rejects entirely Scott’s tactic of using the tragic and symbolic death of a troubling outsider, who serves as both a foil and a double of the main character, to secure a tidy conclusion. “The Author of Clan-Albin” has thus, by the end of Elizabeth de Bruce, established herself as a writer who is quite prepared to challenge Scott on his own literary historical ground. (It was not, of course, obvious from the title pages of either novel that the author in question was a woman, but that fact would have been available to interested readers at least since Spence’s 1816 Letters.) In doing so, she raises serious questions about the comforting visions of cultural healing and synthesis with which he ends. She both emphasises and playfully mocks this challenge by featuring in the later novel a character who labours tremendously to rescue the seventeenth-century anti-prelactic heroine Jenny Geddes from Scott’s supposedly slanderous misrepresentation of her character in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Cheerily ignoring any anachronistic clash between the political plot and these literary games, Johnstone is obviously poking fun at her character’s doggedly literal-minded political reading of Scott’s poetry. Yet at the same time, her own games with Scott’s work, which are underlined by this subplot, model for her readers a form of engaged, active reading that resists any idea that such recovery of romantic tales from the past can be politically disengaged from present concerns. Johnstone’s Gideon, however comically misguided in his approach, is a figure who insists that if one is to understand the present, it is vitally important to debate and challenge interpretations

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of the past, rejecting comfortable assumptions or certainties about it. Although he eventually abandons his conviction that his own book can settle the debate about Jenny Geddes, he does not back down on his belief that her case needs to be argued, a stance that perhaps hints, in a small, subtle way, that the Waverley novels themselves should not be taken as a last, unambiguous word on the meanings of Scottish history. Even if the author function that Johnstone builds for herself as “the Author of Clan-Albin” is a deliberate nod to Scott, the books themselves suggest that such authorial self-construction involves a challenge to as well as an imitation of his body of work. The extent of this challenge becomes even more clear a few years later, in an obituary for Scott that appeared in The Schoolmaster, the first of the magazines edited by the Johnstones. This article, almost certainly by Christian Johnstone (its arguments mirror those in a later piece by her that insists Scott was a less conservative novelist than Edgeworth), has left modern readers bemused or intrigued by its attempts to claim Scott for the radical party (see Murphy 1994: 78–79; Duncan 2007: 304). More to the point at hand, the obituary implies an active style of reading that, like that of the fictional Gideon, remains deeply attentive to the political implications at work beneath the romance plots. In defense of a decidedly counter-intuitive argument about Scott’s anti-monarchical views, for example, Johnstone exhorts readers to survey the novels and then ask themselves how has Sir WALTER dealt with kings? He has prudently steered clear of all contemporary portraiture; but from what he has sketched, are we not warranted to believe, that a hundred years hence his picture of the luxurious, effeminate, cold, selfish unloving and unloved George the Fourth, would have been as faithful to the true character of the man, as that which he has traced, in Quentin Durward, of that laughing hyena – the cruel, rapacious, superstitious, and basely deceitful Louis XI.; or, in Ivanhoe, of the weak, cowardly, perfidious, profligate, and despicable royal poltroon, Prince John […] Has the railing of the most violent Radical, or the strongest arguments of Paine, struck a more fatal blow against monarchy than the popular narratives of SCOTT? (Johnstone 1832–33: 1: 130–41)

The idea that Scott and Paine were some sort of intellectual secret sharers might seem distinctly far-fetched, and the assumption that unflattering portraits of two long-dead monarchs should translate into a general distaste for monarchy is logically shaky, but what is of interest here is not the specifics of the criticism but rather the underlying assumption that Scott is valuable more for what he can

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teach about contemporary political life than for the historical content of his novels. As Johnstone sketches out her version of Scott’s literary world – made up of evil kings, corrupt aristocrats, noble-minded peasants, and “high-souled” women who adhere to the opposition or minority cause – she is implicitly attempting to recreate the cultural meanings associated with “the Author of Waverley”, reinventing his work so that it becomes more or less politically continuous with, rather than opposed to, that of “the Author of Clan-Albin”. Johnstone’s attempts to build an authorial identity that both builds upon and “corrects” Scott become even more complicated if one turns from the implicit and explicit allusions to him in the title pages and content of her novels to look at the ways in which she packaged and promoted what was to become her most successful book, The Cook and Housewife’s Manual, which appeared the year before Elizabeth de Bruce. The connection to Scott is, in this case, far more obvious and unsubtle than it is in the conventional phraseology used on the title page of Elizabeth de Bruce: the putative author of the book, Meg Dods, is one of Scott’s characters (from the novel St. Ronan’s Well) as are several of the figures who appear in the book’s paratextual material. In this case, Johnstone was doing something more closely aligned to Hogg’s and Wilson’s play with literary alter egos than to any straightforward use of a pseudonym to mask identity, as the use of the very recognizable name calls attention to the fictionality of the authorial persona and allows the writer to derive authority through this persona on two very different levels. Meg Dods the character is a shrewd Scottish peasant, the embodiment of solid, old fashioned values, and her name on the title page alerts readers not only to the homely, down-to-earth practicality of the basic subject matter but also, and just as importantly, to the sophisticated literary play of the framing material. Scott himself let it be known that he was prepared to take the joke in good part, and in the preface of a later edition of St. Ronan’s Well, he publicly thanked “Meg Dods” for sending him a bottle of sauce for cold meat. Yet in using the pseudonym Meg Dods, Johnstone was doing rather more than paying a graceful tribute to Scott while modestly concealing her own identity. Presenting the book under this supposed authorship is in fact a fairly direct attempt to place her work at the centre of the Edinburgh literary world. Indeed, under its original title – “The Scottish Housekeepers Oracle – By Mrs Margaret Dods of the

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Cleikum Inn St. Ronans — Enriched by many original and valuable receipts from Mrs M’Candlish of the — Inn, Kippletringan, Mr Pleydell the late Cook of Christopher North Esqr and Mr Ambrose— The Curries and Soups by Mr Touchwood” (J. Johnstone 1824: f. 218) – Johnstone would have smoothly inserted herself not only into the world of Scott’s fiction, but also that of the Noctes Ambrosianae and Blackwood’s Magazine. One should not underestimate the audacity of this move: while Blackwood’s was more amenable to the contributions of women writers than was its great rival The Edinburgh Review, Wilson and Lockhart – whom Anne Grant described as young men who might “fear God, but certainly do not regard man” (J.P. Grant 1845: 2: 209) – could be ruthless in the creative control they exercised over their quasi-fictional world of literary exchange in Ambrose’s Tavern. Their mixed condescension towards and patronage of James Hogg in his role of the Ettrick Shepherd has been well-documented (recently and perhaps most fully by Miller 2005), and Johnstone was not only at least as much of a literary outsider as Hogg, but she was also entering their world uninvited. In the event, perhaps because Blackwood chose not to publish the Manual, Johnstone dropped any specific allusion to the Blackwood’s circle until the second edition, in which she included an appendix in which Meg Dods defends Christopher North – who contributes a note to what was presumably John Wilson’s favourable Blackwood’s review of the book – against the strictures of a visiting English critic. Even without any specific links on the title page, however, and even though it was published by Oliver and Boyd, the original Cook and Housewife’s Manual still manages to situate itself firmly in the sophisticated Blackwood’s world of literary in-jokes and metatextual play. (Nor is that the only link that Johnstone develops with Blackwood’s publishing house, as one of the other major figures she borrows for her cookbook is a comic gourmand from Susan Ferrier’s Marriage, a novel published by William Blackwood.) Bringing the cookbook into the literary world of Blackwood’s and the Waverley novels was obviously a shrewd move in terms of literary marketing, and it also complicates any assumptions that one might be tempted to make about the audience for whom Johnstone was aiming, in a manner that carries even further the unsettling of conventionally modest, “feminine” styles of authorship and readership implicit in the novels’ challenges to Scott. Of course, a book that announces itself as

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being by a woman and written for housewives is self-evidently directed towards a female readership, and Johnstone further emphasises the assumptions that might be made about the presumed lack of sophistication of her target audience in prefatory comments explaining that she has provided the framing material to “conciliate the lovers of what is called ‘light reading,’ and to gain their attention to what they may consider a vulgar and unimportant art” (Johnstone 1826: 9). This attempted “conciliation” of course fits in comfortably with what were already tired cultural stereotypes about the frivolity of women of self-proclaimed literary interests, who were supposedly more inclined to waste their time reading novels and poems than to engage in properly domestic activities. Yet by aligning her book in terms of method, if not content, with the more conventionally “masculine” world of Blackwood’s, Johnstone was also implying that she expected her audience not to embody those stereotypes but rather to be consciously aware of and amused by her play with them. What she offers is a work that both appeals to a female readership and quietly mocks assumptions about the sort of work that might be expected to do so. The Blackwood’s style of humour that runs through The Cook and Housewife’s Manual also reinforces the distinct political edge that Johnstone brings to this book, as well as to her fiction. As her characters repeatedly insist, the way that one eats is a reflection of political allegiance. The Tory Dr. Redgill, for example, is worried by the young dandy Jekyll’s preference for roasting turkeys with their heads off; as Redgill protests, he “had seen, since the beginning of the French Revolution, but too much of this ‘off with his head’ spirit abroad. ‘There was no knowing,’ he said, ‘where its devastations were to stop; it began with annointed kings’” (Johnstone 1826: 35). Jekyll’s interest in “French theory” (Johnstone 1826: 35) also marks, for Redgill, a modish and fundamentally unsound attitude towards gastronomy. Yet food can also lead to a reduction of political differences, Johnstone implies, as Redgill is forced to modify his “loyal and laudable hatred of COBBETT” after learning about “that demagogue’s” valuable advice on the preparation of pork (Johnstone 1826: 25). Admittedly, such jocular references to recent and current political issues are double-edged; the intensely Burkean conservatism that leads Redgill to read latent Republican leanings in a decapitated roast turkey is neither more nor less ridiculous than Jekyll’s assumption that

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his taste in sauces is a measure of his political progressivism. Those moved to panic by Cobbett might be laughed at, but Cobbett himself is implicitly depoliticised by being turned into a source of household tips, rather than a domestic menace. The result is a form of political humour that, whatever its content, is essentially conservative in the most general sense in its impact, which might of course explain in part the book’s favourable reception in Blackwood’s. Even so, while Johnstone’s guide ultimately accepts women’s domestic roles, it also implicitly reinvents them. The Blackwood’s world of wit and gruffly masculine companionship is in effect transported from Ambrose’s tavern to Meg Dods’ kitchen; if the resulting implication that such play can be quite safely contained within the domestic world does nothing to invite a wider rethinking of women’s roles, it might, nonetheless, challenge some clichés about the frivolity of feminine literature and the gulf between conventionally “masculine” and “feminine” literary concerns. That “Meg Dods” and “the Author of Clan-Albin” were the same writer might not have been immediately apparent in the later 1820s, but particularly shrewd or attentive readers might have noted a link, as Johnstone was using the names in a similar manner. In both cases, she is linking her writing back to a culturally influential body of work, but, while drawing on the appeal and popularity of Scott, in particular, she simultaneously invites readers to rethink the premises of the more popular and familiar work to which she is alluding. Nor is the persona that she builds in any way conventionally “feminine”: the authorial voice of her novels is that of an intensely engaged, politically-minded reader of Sir Walter Scott, and if, as Ina Ferris has argued, the ideal reader of Scott was constructed at the time as being the opposite of the stereotypically frivolous, feminine novel reader, Johnstone is thereby distancing her early fiction from the strictly domestic world that was usually seen as the preserve of the female novelist. This distancing act is all the more deftly flamboyant in The Cook and Housewife’s Manual, given its subject matter, as the female figure whose name on the title page ostensibly guarantees the book’s authority in the realm of domestic management is immediately recognizable as the fictional creation of a particularly “masculine” novelist. Even as, in other words, Christian Johnstone launched her literary career by working in two of the most conventionally feminine and domestic of genres – fiction and food writing – she grounded her literary authority not in

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her own private role as a domestic woman but in the entirely public, literary voice of a reader steeped in the supposedly masculine worlds of Scott and the Blackwood’s writers. Journalism, Anonymity, and Editorial Authority It is, of course, impossible to separate entirely Johnstone’s career as a journalist from her career as a novelist; she republished some of her early fiction in The Schoolmaster, and much of her later fiction was serialised in Tait’s before being published separately in her 1845 collection Edinburgh Tales. Yet the journalistic and editorial voices that she established for herself enabled her to engage in even more complex play with authorship and authority in her later magazine writing than she was able to do as a relative literary outsider in the eighteen-teens and twenties, despite the fact that her journalism might seem, in important ways, less anchored by any given authorial personality. If, in her novels and the Cook and Housewife’s Manual, Johnstone was able to build an authorial identity both by linking her new books back to her older ones and by implicitly and explicitly poising her books against that of better known authors and bodies of writing, in her work as a journalist she might well seem to sink back into more impenetrable anonymity, her own writing diffused among and at times inextricable from that of the other contributors to the magazines in question. There are, inevitably, some very real difficulties in writing about a body of anonymous journalism; most obviously, identification of authors can at times be dangerously speculative, even in a magazine such as Tait’s, whose contributors included essayists such as Thomas DeQuincey, Leigh Hunt, and Thomas Carlyle, all of whom are noted for their highly individual, even idiosyncratic, styles. To take just one case to illustrate some of these problems and the complicated issues of literary authority arising from them, one can look at an 1832 article on female letter writers that appeared in the first volume of Tait’s. The Wellesley Index suggests, rather tentatively, that it is by Leigh Hunt, basing the attribution partly on the subject matter and partly on the style. Internal evidence, however, suggests that the article is almost certainly by Johnstone. Comments on Anne Grant anticipate very closely those in Johnstone’s later review of Grant’s posthumous letters

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(Johnstone 1844b); more strikingly, the writer uses, as an example of the literary and aesthetic power of letters not intended for a wider audience, his or her experience in reading a bundle of old love-letters, by a French lady, probably a pupil of Jean Jacques, written in all the abandonment of despair, and the ardour of romantic passion, to a man esteemed a hero in his own day – “le brave Corsair,” Paul Jones, from whom fortune was for ever tearing her. Those vehement exclamations – those endless repetitions – articulate groans – for her raving words were little else – and cries scarcely intelligible, yet felt to arise from the agonised depths of the heart, were affecting enough in their way; but the tear-blots that half effaced the faint characters were irresistible. (Johnstone 1832a: 205)

The reference is clearly to the letters of “Delia”, the mysterious Frenchwoman whose identity caused Johnstone so much vexation while she was working on the Jones biography, and as those manuscripts seem to have passed from Miss Taylor to the Johnstones and then back again (after which Miss Taylor went to America to continue her pursuit of a more sympathetic biographer), Johnstone is the only plausible candidate for authorship of the article if we take at face value the writer’s claim to have seen the manuscripts of the letters in question. Yet without such information on Johnstone’s reading, there would be no particular reason to think that the article wasn’t by Hunt. On the contrary, features such as its somewhat luxuriantly phrased delight in the literary spectacle of the suffering, abandoned woman, as well as its rather prim distaste for “the few deep blue” women such as Anna Seward and Elizabeth Montagu who used their letters to “build[ ] up a literary reputation” (Johnstone 1832a: 197–98) might well, at least on first glance, have suggested male authorship to contemporary readers. The content and the underlying argument of the article are not necessarily “feminine” either, despite its focus on women’s experience and the lighter, belle lettristic realms of literature. One might compare the celebration of “Delia’s” misery with Francis Jeffrey’s earlier Edinburgh Review article on the letters of Madame du Deffand and Julie de Lespinasse, which, in somewhat less flamboyant style, reaches strikingly similar conclusions about the importance of passion and affect in women’s letters (Jeffrey 1810). Nor is such validation of epistolary passion – even unhappy or misdirected passion – the only point of contact between Jeffrey’s work and the Tait’s article, as both Jeffrey and the author of this article see unselfconscious artlessness as

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the major charm of women’s letters. According to the Tait’s article, women’s letters are delightful mainly because they are written “as if the art of printing had still been undiscovered” and, as a corollary to this lack of interest in a wider public audience, they “unconsciously” display “the varied tints and delicate shadings of the individual mind” (Johnstone 1832a: 198). Jeffrey singled out for praise similar aspects of women’s epistolarity not only in his article on Deffand and Lespinasse but also in his review of Anne Grant, in which he professed his admiration for letters that she had written as a teenager and that he saw as displaying “that bright bloom of the mind, which so seldom endures till the age of authorship” (Jeffrey 1811: 481). The point here is not that Johnstone is merely recycling Jeffrey’s ideas or that she was deliberately disguising her voice by adopting a style that could be mistaken for that of one of her more famous male contemporaries, but rather that, presuming the article is indeed by her, it offers a striking demonstration of her facility in deploying the more or less formulaic tones and style of the era’s magazine prose. Even more interestingly, the author of the article is exploring what the early nineteenth century assumed to be the characteristic marks of a female literary style in prose that demonstrates in itself the difficulties of assigning a gendered voice to anonymous writing. If one accepts the internal evidence that the article is in fact by Johnstone and not Hunt, it is hard to avoid poising the artless selfrevelation that the author prizes as the main charm of women’s letters against the coolly evaluative stance that the article – notwithstanding its own somewhat overwrought style – takes towards aestheticised emotion. One inevitably brings very different readerly expectations to private letters than to a magazine article, but that is part of the point here: Johnstone’s anonymous “magazine” voice, if not quite cut free from gendered expectations, is able to set itself apart from both stereotypically “masculine” and “feminine” literary styles. If “feminine” writing is artlessly individual, this article is anything but, recalling as it does Leigh Hunt in style and Francis Jeffrey in content. Yet at the same time as it slips into a fairly generic style and argument, more or less interchangeable with the more famous work of male writers, it insistently validates, in its own content, precisely the sort of individual, irreproducible experience that it insists is the mark of “feminine” writing. What makes “Delia’s” letters so central to the argument of the article is not, after all, so much their content as it is

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the eyewitness ability of the article’s writer to attest to us that the manuscripts are marked by tear stains, a tangible, physical remnant of the intangible emotion being expressed. Without the writer’s testimony to these physical marks of emotion, the letters might in fact be misread as a mere literary exercise by “a pupil of Jean Jacques”. The familiar letter tended to be gendered feminine at the time because of its expression of individual personality and emotional responsiveness (see Favret 1993, Watson 1994, Altman, 1995, and Alliston 1996 on eighteenth-century epistolarity and gender), while the anonymous, corporate voice of the magazine writer is presumed to be masculine. Yet these two voices begin to slide together here, as the individual who read and responded to “Delia’s” blotted manuscripts shifts our focus from the individuality of the letter writer to that of the reviewer. What matters, at least in the “Delia” passage, is not the self-expression of the unselfconscious letter writer, whose wild declarations of love are merely “good enough in [their] way”, but rather the emotion produced in the reviewer by the almost unreadable words blotted by the irreproducible but “irresistible” tear stains. A printed, clearly readable reproduction of the letters would only blur their aesthetic impact, and so it is the reviewer’s words, not the letter writer’s, that offer the most direct access to the emotional impact of the epistolary love affair. In other words, the review implicitly offers the sort of pleasure that it claims is accessible only through women’s private letters and, in doing so, quietly pushes against the idea of the corporate, anonymous voice of the magazine writer even as Johnstone – if she was in fact the author – makes her style and argument more or less continuous with those of her male contemporaries working elsewhere in the periodical press. This discussion of a brief passage in an obscure article might seem disproportionate to its importance, but considering the ways in which it might complicate our understanding of the conventionally “masculine” voice of early nineteenth-century magazine prose can help to illustrate in miniature some of the issues raised by Christian Johnstone’s more ambitious – and more easily identifiable – magazine writing. The authority given by magazines themselves, as various recent critics have noted (see especially Easley 2004), enabled at least some nineteenth-century women journalists to write on subjects far outside conventional female areas of expertise, and “to assume an authoritative tone that a gendered signature would undermine”

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(Mermin 1993: 48). The ambiguously gendered voice of the anonymous journalistic “we” subsumed the writer’s individual voice and authority to that of the periodical in which it appeared, but at the same time allowed writers the freedom to express individual views that might have been less convincing if attributed to a named, female individual. In Christian Johnstone’s case, however, this tension between the individual voice and the corporate magazine identity works rather differently than it did for any other woman of her generation, simply because, as an editor or co-editor of, as well as a contributor to, three periodicals, she was able to help shape the presiding voice of the magazines in question, rather than merely having to make a place for her work in a relatively heterogeneous mass of other anonymous writing. If, in the comments about Delia, part of the writerly authority comes from the ways in which the argument fits in smoothly with other periodical writing on the subject – albeit in a different periodical – in much of her other journalistic work, Johnstone had an opportunity to shape, not just react to, the context in which her articles were read. In The Schoolmaster, Johnstone’s Magazine, and, later, Tait’s, Christian Johnstone was given an opportunity, in the editorial control she exercised over the content, to craft what readers of the time would have expected to be a relatively coherent voice from the heterogeneous contributions to a magazine. As one mid-Victorian commentator, M.F. Conolly, noted, Johnstone was to Tait’s what Wilson was to Blackwood’s (Conolly 1866: 244), and even if the immediate point of the comparison is that Johnstone, like Wilson, served as nominal editor of a magazine in which the titular proprietor maintained real control, the extent to which Wilson’s boisterously outspoken editorial persona in fact shaped Blackwood’s inevitably suggests the potential power that Johnstone could exercise in her editorial capacity. Admittedly, it is not easy to determine the precise position that Johnstone occupied at any of these three periodicals, although the comments about her dominant influence at The Inverness Courier might encourage one to speculate that she took a similarly active role in the two magazines that she later co-edited with her husband. Her role at Tait’s is even more open to question, given the somewhat conflicting evidence of her contemporaries. Conolly’s insistence that Tait was “the ostensible, always, and, indeed, the real editor” of his own magazine (Conolly 1866: 244) doesn’t fit entirely smoothly with James Glass Bertram’s claim that “[i]t was Mrs.

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Johnstone […] who generally passed judgment on the articles offered” to Tait’s in addition to being a major contributor “both in fiction and criticism; many of the long and admirable reviews of important new books, for which the magazine was famous, coming from her pen” (Bertram 1893: 31). The one thing that can be said with some confidence is that, whatever her nominal position at these three magazines, Christian Johnstone had real control over their content, both through her own contributions and through her choice of the work published by other writers. Ultimately, then, even if Johnstone was able to disappear into anonymity behind the façade of the magazines for which she worked, that did not necessarily mean that her voice was lost in the diffused or group identity of the journals in question. It is all the more important to recognise Johnstone’s ability to exercise control over the content of these magazines as there is reason to think that readers of the early nineteenth-century Edinburgh periodicals tended to see them as being, ideally at least, not so much the production of diverse groups of individuals but rather as collections built around a reasonably coherent intellectual perspective. Admittedly, it is difficult to make such a claim without significant reservations and qualifications; Mark Parker, for one, points out in his excellent discussion of the subject the problems of treating any of the literary magazines of this period as either a coherent body of work or as an assemblage of disparate voices (Parker 2000: 6–12). Nor is this to say that there was anything new or unique to the Edinburgh of this period in reading the periodical press in this way. As Frank Donaghue has pointed out in his analysis of the two most influential literary reviews of the eighteenth century, the London-based Critical and Monthly, “much of [their] influence […] derives from their policy of anonymity, from the fact that their judgments did not issue from individuals, but rather came directly and impersonally from the journals themselves” (Donaghue 1996: 19). Even granted that both the impersonality and – in many cases – the anonymity were, at best, a convenient fiction, as Donaghue stresses, a forceful editorial voice, which maintained a definite element of individuality despite the pretense of neutral, corporate authorship, might well have been part of the periodicals’ appeal. Clifford Siskin has suggested that “[a]lthough today we tend to think of periodical work as less author-centered than so-and-so’s latest book, that work, in fact, first prospered by

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highlighting the writer rather than […] the tale or subject matter” (Siskin 1998: 161–62); he points as far back as the days of “Isaac Bickerstaff” to illustrate his claim. Of course, as critics such as Donaghue and Parker have emphasised, no magazine can be read as a univocal expression of values or opinions, but that heterogeneity was in fact seen as a flaw by at least some contemporary observers. A Frenchman of literary tastes travelling in Scotland in the 1820s disliked, for example, what he saw as the lack of stylistic harmony in The Edinburgh Review and complained that there was no “unity discoverable in the style of this encyclopedia of criticism, redundant at once with the logic of Mackintosh, the invectives of Brougham, the pretending emphasis of Hazzlit [sic], the elegant epigrams and the irony of Jeffrey, &c” (Pichot 1825: 2: 17). As this complaint implies, the sense that a magazine necessarily offered a range of voices could be construed as a stylistic flaw, and readers well into the nineteenth century indeed seemed happy enough to treat the individual who edited a magazine as the voice and physical embodiment of its multiauthored words and values. When Byron attacked Jeffrey by name in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers for a review that was in fact written by Brougham, the mistake about authorship merely points to the contemporary assumption that the flamboyantly personal attacks for which the Review was known were a reflection of Jeffrey’s editorial persona, no matter who the actual author might have been. Editors could become, all too literally, the embodiment of their magazines when, as happened in a couple of notorious cases, they were called out because of something said anonymously in print. (Thomas Christie fought a duel over one of John Gibson Lockhart’s quarrels, in which the challenger, John Scott, was killed [see Parker 2000: 21–27, for a discussion of the cultural and literary implications of the Lockhart / Christie / Scott duel]; Francis Jeffrey got as far as meeting Thomas Moore, pistols in hand, before their duel was stopped by the police.) Johnstone herself was later to refer to Jeffrey, in a review of his collected essays, as “the incarnate WE of the once allpowerful Edinburgh Review”, and the first issue of The Schoolmaster, after summing up the fates of earlier cheap periodicals, concludes that “[t]he cause of failure, generally speaking, has been the want of some presiding mind to give the little work tone and consistency of purpose” (Johnstone 1844a: 12; Johnstone 1832–33: 3).

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If one were to imagine an “incarnate WE” whose interests linked the material in the three magazines with which Johnstone was associated and gave them “tone and consistency of purpose”, the dominant feature of that figure would be his fascination with the political implications of educational practice – and, despite Christian Johnstone’s responsibility for the content, the masculine pronoun is appropriate. The Schoolmaster of course implies a male editorial persona in its title – not to mention in the title page’s announcement that it is “Conducted by John Johnstone” – while the titles and title-pages of both Johnstone’s Magazine and Tait’s advertise a male proprietor. (Johnstone’s Magazine lists “Mrs. Johnstone, Authoress of ‘ClanAlbin,’ ‘Elizabeth de Bruce,’ ‘Nights of the Round Table,’ etc, etc.” as one of the “conductors”, but John Johnstone’s name comes first. Nor, perhaps, would readers have overlooked the point that despite the coproprietorship, the title consists of a singular possessive.) The political content would have also been taken as indicative of a masculine editorial persona, and perhaps the single most intriguing point about Johnstone’s editorship is that, despite the straightforwardly political content of The Schoolmaster and Tait’s, in particular, and despite her known editorial role at the latter, she was apparently perceived as being almost entirely literary in her journalistic interests. This was the conclusion that James Glass Bertram drew in his account of the early years of Tait’s (Bertram 1893: 30); more recently, the 1960s historian of The Inverness Chronicle, commented that “Mrs Johnstone gave a literary flavour to the paper which it has never lost” (Highland Newspaper 1969: 9), while even the Wellesley Index surprisingly, and despite the evidence of its own lists of articles, asserts that under Johnstone’s editorship, Tait’s “became primarily a literary magazine” (Wellesley Index, 1966–1989: 4: 478). The result is that Johnstone, as a private individual with what are presented as genteelly literary interests, remains more or less entirely separable from the editorial persona of the very political magazines that she edited. Even if responsibility for the political content of these magazines isn’t explicitly displaced onto John Johnstone or William Tait, it becomes very easy for readers to presume that that was the case. At least, it is easy to do so as long as one doesn’t look too closely at the magazines themselves. Despite this apparently easy gendered breakdown of editorial responsibilities, the question of literary content versus political content in the magazines with which Johnstone was

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associated is a fairly complicated one, and many writers at the time seemed more or less uneasily uncertain about how or even whether these two aspects of their content could be separated. Shortly before merging with Johnstone’s Magazine, for example, Tait’s proclaimed its raison d’être to be naked and uncompromising political warfare and insisted that its only concern was “[h]ow we shall be able most efficiently to serve the great cause of Civil and Religious Liberty” (Tait 1833b: i). Only after boasting of all the “eminent political writers” who “make our pages the monthly vehicle of their thoughts on all the great questions that interest the nation” does the article also call attention to the work of “[t]hose who enliven our pages with literature, tale, and poetry” (Tait 1833b: ii-iii), suggesting not only that such work was distinct from the political writing but also of strictly secondary interest. This sense that Tait’s, even in its early days, was a political magazine with a slight literary flavouring is not, however, borne out by other commentary. Another article, published just a few years later, concluded its summary of the state of the periodical press in Scotland in the mid-1830s by arguing that even while “most of these quarterly and monthly periodicals, have very marked political features […] there is scarcely one of them that is not more read on account of its literature than its politics” (Tait 1836: 197; see also Johnstone 1834: 495–96.) Yet, somewhat inconsistently, the writer immediately afterwards prints sales figures demonstrating that the liberal magazines have notably larger sales in the new manufacturing towns than among the established, and presumably more conservative, provincial gentry. What his comments imply is that the politics of the magazines in question, far from being irrelevant to their literary content, in fact shape the type of readers the magazines attract and hence, presumably, the way their literary content is both framed and read. This is a point made explicitly by another, slightly later, commentator, who, in a piece of light verse addressed to William Blackwood, writes When Lockhart, and Wilson, and far-famed Maginn, Burked rivals by dozens – thought mercy a sin; Broke radical poets, by scores on the wheel, And tortured the small deer with engines of steel, When your Theodore Hooks, and your Crokers and Barrows, Made hapless Whig-authors pass under the harrows, Alas! you ne’er thought of such champions I ween, As Althorpe, and Brougham, and Tait’s Magazine! (Anderson 1850: 421)

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Nonetheless, and with no apparent sense of inconsistency, this writer later praises Christian Johnstone for her demurely feminine mode of taking “charge of the literary department of this periodical [Tait’s], and, by her tact and judgment, rais[ing] and maintain[ing] its literary character” (Anderson 1856: 422). In a context in which literary criticism can be represented cheerily as a form of politically-driven torture, the idea that Johnstone could remain primly cordoned off in a polite literary retreat from the nasty political cut-and-thrust of the magazines for which she was working is distinctly strange. What this strangeness points to is both the complexity of and the inconsistencies in the editorial personas that Johnstone developed, and the ways in which the idea, however false, that the literary and political content of her magazines were easily separable enabled her to maintain the radical political agenda of the magazines she edited – even while maintaining an appearance of politely feminine immersion in a strictly literary milieu. The Schoolmaster The magazines with which Johnstone was associated in fact work very strongly against any sort of easy assumption that there is a clear and unambiguous divide between the political and the literary aspects of their editorial voices. At first glance, admittedly, The Schoolmaster might seem to be attempting to create precisely such a division, as the one department of the magazine that is regularly signed is “The StoryTeller”, a collection of novels and tales, usually by women, and either condensed or in some cases written by Christian Johnstone. (The author is always identified.) In other words, while there is little evidence to indicate who was contributing most of the political material in the magazine, it is nonetheless made very clear that the literary sections – supposedly the lighter departments – are contributed by the female member of the editorial team. Yet even here, Johnstone juxtaposed conventionally “masculine” and “feminine” styles of writing in a way that inflects her own signed contributions in such more or less conventionally feminine genres as fiction and basic natural history with what is often the highly-charged political arguments that surround them. A very obvious example of this practice occurs in the first issues of The Schoolmaster, as the magazine took

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up, as one of its first causes, the physical mistreatment of British soldiers. As the journal explained, in the prospectus signed by John Johnstone, the state of the laws at the time prevented them from reporting directly on parliamentary debates on the subject (on the system of “taxes on knowledge” that Johnstone is protesting, and the publication constraints on early nineteenth-century newspapers in general, see Feather 1988: 162–64 and Altick 1957: 318–47). On the other hand, as Johnstone argues: What must not be attempted by a relation of facts, may be accomplished by illustrations; and we have high authority for shadowing forth in parable that which a Pharisaical jealousy of the freedom of discussion does not permit to appear in the direct form of naked truth. As an exemplification of the principle, I refer to the Tale, and the Observations given in the present week on a subject which at present occupies much of the public attention – Military Flogging. (Johnstone 1832–33: 1: 1)

He then includes, later in that number, an unsigned article called “Flogging in the Army”, following it with an episode from ClanAlbin, attributed by name to Christian Johnstone, in which the hero’s Irish double and cousin is flogged for a relatively minor military offense, an episode that the narrator condemns both explicitly and implicitly as, over the rest of the novel, she presents the flogging as the cause of the character’s desertion, rebellion, and eventual tragic death. This reappearance of an episode from what would have been, by 1832, a relatively old novel is noteworthy for several reasons. Most basically and obviously, it is a none-too-subtle way to bring ClanAlbin back into notice, demonstrating yet again the ways in which Christian Johnstone was careful to promote her books whenever she could. Yet, according to John Johnstone, the inclusion of the excerpt from the novel is far more than a simple piece of literary opportunism: reading Clan-Albin as a parable might be a bit of a stretch, whatever he says in his angry denunciation of ministerial restrictions on political language, but the large claims that he makes for his wife’s fiction are an explicit attempt to break down the generic divisions between the political commentary in his editorial letter and her literary dramatisation of the evils of flogging. The language of fiction and the language of political argument are, John Johnstone implies, if not quite interchangeable, at least continuous with one another. The old argument for the political novel, developed most famously, perhaps,

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by William Godwin in his preface to Caleb Williams – that it is a way for getting those who do not think deeply on serious subjects to consider political and philosophical ideas – is here turned on its head. Bringing fiction to bear on political debates, Johnstone argues, offers readers a wider ranging, more flexible language for discussing the ideas that authorities are trying to keep from them. It is also noteworthy that Clan-Albin, which as a national tale is part of a genre that tended to be both “female-authored” (Ferris 2002: 11) and strongly associated at the time with a middle-class, female readership, is here used as a way to bring political ideology to the male workingclass readership targeted in John Johnstone’s editorial letter. As Johnstone proclaims, the magazine is intended to offer “fitting nourishment of masculine intellects” (Johnstone 1832–33: 1: 2); the episode from Clan-Albin, removed from its narrative context, is clearly presented as forming part of that “nourishment” rather than as frivolous or escapist entertainment for leisured ladies or other readers who might be presumed to be more or less indifferent to the magazine’s more serious political content. Granted, the idea that fiction should be treated as instruction rather than amusement is something that Christian Johnstone had protested against nearly twenty years before when, in her preface to Clan-Albin, she mocked the supposed discovery of “this clever and aspiring age”, that it is possible to use novels to “trick[ ] grown ladies and gentlemen into knowledge and goodness” (Johnstone [1815] 2003: 1). The difference here is not just that The Schoolmaster is addressing the working classes, rather than “ladies and gentlemen”, but also that fiction has been juxtaposed with other sorts of educational material in a way that affects the sort of instruction that is being offered. It is precisely not the sort of moral education supposedly offered by genteel fiction that Johnstone is attempting to inculcate by linking her fiction with her journalism. What one finds in The Schoolmaster is something rather more complex than a case of fiction being used to supplement or reinforce the information contained in more unadorned or stereotypically “masculine” reading material. By bringing together fact and fiction as more or less parallel and overlapping modes of education, the magazine invites one to consider not just the facts that are being taught but also larger questions of how one is supposed to learn and what sorts of information are important.

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These might seem rather large claims, but the title of the magazine in itself helps to bear some of them out. Even though calling the magazine The Schoolmaster – in what could be read as an obvious reference to John Johnstone’s original profession – might seem to connote a fairly conventional, didactic form of instruction, the title glances well beyond John Johnstone’s early career. It is also a deliberate tip of the hat to the politician and educational reformer (and early contributor to The Edinburgh Review) Henry Brougham, alluding as it does to a famous tag from one of Brougham’s speeches – “The schoolmaster is abroad” – which is used as a motto on the magazine’s masthead. Brougham’s educational reforms of the 1820s and 30s, which focused on attempts to spread education “abroad” to the working classes, were of course highly controversial, and were not unambiguously supported even by the radical press. It is thus not surprising that the goal of The Schoolmaster is by no means simply to support Brougham in his efforts at educating the working classes through his Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (on Brougham’s involvement with the Society see Altick 1957: 188–91 and New 1961: 347–58). As is repeatedly made clear by editorial commentary, the sort of schoolmaster envisioned by the Johnstones is very different from that associated with Brougham. As John Johnstone insists in his introductory editorial, even though “this small Miscellany is intended for the Many – for the great mass of the People”, the editors will “address ourselves at once as if to the best order of capacities”. If, he continues, “this plan shall be less immediately popular than pitching our tone in a lower key, we shall still deem it more wise, as well as more respectful” not to talk down to their readers (Johnstone 1832–33: 1: 2). One can see some of the practical results of this rather idealistic plan, as well as the differences with Brougham to which it immediately leads the editors, through the juxtaposition of two ostensibly very different articles in the second number. There, readers are given an article on the political principles of the British constitution, signed “J.J.”, followed by a “Column for Youth”, signed “C.I.J”, which includes descriptions of the giraffe, gazelle, and springbok. (After the first numbers of the magazine, few articles are initialed.) What makes this juxtaposition so intriguing is a passage in the editorial prospectus in the first number in which John Johnstone writes, in disdainful reference to the Society for the

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Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, that, in the opinion of the present political leadership, It is evidently thought better that they [the working classes] should read of the growth of the tea-plant, than watch the progress of legislation, or inquire into rights of industry; and learn of the ostrich and the giraffe, than jealously scrutinise the conduct of their riders. Both kinds of reading are good; but the Knowledge which teaches more how they may increase the comforts of their home and hearth is immeasurably the most important. (Johnstone 1832–33: 1: 1)

The assumptions in this passage about the hierarchical ordering of knowledge are clear enough – notwithstanding the slightly puzzling reference to the importance of scrutinising the conduct of riders of ostriches and giraffes – and provide what might seem to be a clear template for ranking the relative importance of the contributions provided by John and Christian in the next issue. He instructs their readers in their political rights and duties; she, Brougham-like, provides entertainingly irrelevant snippets of information about the natural history of the giraffe. Yet the division of labour is not quite as obvious as it initially seems. The mild oddity of writing dismissively about instructive tales of giraffes in one week and then, the very next week, providing readers with a cheery introduction to the subject, might well give one pause, not least since the behaviour of the giraffe was not a subject that attracted any sort of regular attention in the early nineteenthcentury Scottish press. Especially given the juxtaposition of the two articles and the clear ranking of subject matter provided the previous week, it is tempting to read the two pieces as a single contribution that dramatises the point being made in the prospectus about the flaws in Brougham’s ideas for educational improvement. If such an argument seems a little overstrained, given that the journal was deliberately addressing itself to an audience of unpracticed readers, it is clear that both Johnstones believed very strongly in the capacity of the audience for whom they were writing. Nor, after all, is there anything lost if one reads the two articles independently of each other and of the prospectus, since, as John Johnstone insists, there is nothing inherently wrong with such desultory accounts of natural history. What the articles offer might thus be both straightforward embodiments of different sorts of education and an implicit metacritical commentary on the sorts of information their readers were being offered.

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This argument is reinforced by the fact that there is no doubt that The Schoolmaster was quite prepared to give their readers at least some indirect exercises in critical reading along with its more didactic articles. In one of its later numbers (published 4 May 1833), The Schoolmaster includes an anonymous article called “Journal of a Scientific Lady, Addressed to a Friend in Edinburgh”. The article is a fairly predictable piece of heavy-handed humour, in which a young woman demonstrates her vanity and folly in an attempt to appear educated. The “learned lady” whose smattering of education leads her to abuse the few bits of information that she has by her misuse of scholarly language and her vain (in both senses) displays of esoteric interests had been a stock figure of fun for decades by that time, and the article is as conventional in technique as target. An unsatisfactory dinner at a friend’s house, for example, is reported by the narrator to have consisted of “two birds of the gallinaceous tribe, served with sysimbriam, or water-cresses, and the customary vegetables, brassica, lactura, and spinacia, through none of which the aqueous fluid had been sufficiently allowed to percolate” (Johnstone 1832–33: 2: 277). Her interests of course lead her to make a fool of herself; she annoys her mother by studying phosphorescence through putrefying mackerel that she hides in her closet, and, while examining light through a prism, she walks into a door, “which drove the sharp edge of the glass against the cartilaginous projection of the nose, occasioning much stenutation and a considerable discharge of blood from the nasal emanatories” (Johnstone 1832–33: 2: 278). Predictable as it is, however, the facile satiric tone of the piece is distinctly jarring when set in the context of the other articles in The Schoolmaster, and its oddity is highlighted by the fact that it is the only article in that number to be annotated. In a note at the bottom of the page, the Editor comments: The above is, we presume, written in ridicule of the attempts lately made to give women a better and more useful education. It is “silly sooth,” and so perfectly harmless, that we re-publish it without the least apprehension of mischief. It will scarce even create a laugh.

One inevitably wonders, after reading the note, why the journal would choose to reprint a piece that it loudly proclaims to be harmless at best, silly at worst, and not even particularly funny. The most obvious answer is that the note and the article together provide an implicit lesson in how to read conservative satires of

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women’s education. The note affects to assume that there can be only one attitude taken towards the article and, through that assumption, instructs its presumably unpracticed readers in how they should respond to it, offering them both tacit instruction and subtle flattery, implying as it does that they are sophisticated enough to join in the editorial bewilderment that such tired satire could still have an audience. That such satires were outdated to the point of being incomprehensible was, of course, anything but the case (see Fara 2004: 220– 23 on nineteenth-century mockery of women with scientific interests); indeed, just a few months later, readers could have found a more sophisticated version of the arguments underlying the satire in an article on Hannah More by Thomas DeQuincey published in Tait’s (before the merger with Johnstone’s). DeQuincey writes, No woman ever was, or will be a Polyhistor, like Salmasius, for example, […] nor a philosopher; nor in fact any thing whatsoever, called by what name which like, which demands either […] 1.) Great powers of combination, that is, of massing or grouping under large comprehensive principles; or, 2.) Severe logic. (DeQuincey 1833: 318)

Curiously enough, this article also, uncharacteristically for Tait’s, has a note that provides tacit instruction in how to read it: while the author’s name is given nowhere in the article, the note, signed E.T.M. (according to the Wellesley Index, the initials stand for the Editor of Tait’s Magazine), explains that the writer is “a Tory of the purest strain”, making his criticism of More important as an attack on her from the right, but also turning his “strictures” into “what in modern slang is called ‘a psychological curiosity’” (DeQuincey 1833: 304). The middle-class Tait’s and the working-class Schoolmaster thus use very similar techniques in guiding readers’ approaches to articles at odds with the journals’ political underpinnings: rather than mounting direct arguments and providing didactic guides for right thinking, they encourage their audiences to read with a sceptical eye and thereby hone their political views by developing literary and aesthetic sophistication. The point here is not that either The Schoolmaster or Tait’s is anticipating the techniques or assumptions of twentieth- and twentyfirst-century literary criticism; on the contrary, both were very much of their time and place. Rather, as the link with the more sophisticated material in Tait’s indicates, The Schoolmaster is offering a form of instruction that differs in fairly significant ways from what it claims to

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be the fact-based, more or less irrelevant books of working-class instruction propagated by Brougham and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is, in large part, in its rejection of straightforward didacticism that it represents itself as parting company with Brougham on the goal that it insists it shares with him, that of educating the lower classes. Brougham’s version of the schoolmaster has of course gotten fairly bad press in the wake of Dickens’ later treatment of the new schools that trained bright members of the working class to reproduce themselves through learning a rigid syllabus in which they could then drill younger pupils. From the Gradgrindian syllabus of hard facts painfully ground into the bewildered or ambitious pupils in Hard Times, to Charley Hexam’s and Bradley Headstone’s desperate use of education as a ladder to precarious social advancement in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens pours scorn on this sort of rote drilling in facts. Such satires might of course have been unfair; according to Alan Rauch, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge – even though it “may not have been aware of the problematic nature of such terms as useful” – was “more radical than contemporary perceptions would have it” (Rauch 2001: 41). Yet the Johnstones’ reasons for scepticism about Brougham’s principles of education are very different from those of Dickens. As the title of their magazine implies, the Johnstones are quite happy to see some use in schoolmasters, and they demonstrate that Brougham could be challenged on very different grounds from those so powerfully framed by Dickens or from within the intellectual framework that he was working. Rather than operating on the model of the schoolmaster as a source of facts pouring information into the empty vessels that are his pupils, the eponymous, disembodied schoolmaster created by the Johnstones in the editorial voice of their magazine invites readers to learn by using what they have already read in order to help them understand both how to read and rank the importance of new material – such as information on the habits of the giraffe – and to evaluate the content of less obviously didactic material, such as satires on women’s education. What results is not any sort of Dickensian celebration of imagination over cold fact. On the contrary, an editorial praising Brougham in the fifteenth number of The Schoolmaster insists upon its entire agreement with one of the basic assumptions underlying his educational reforms, namely that (in the words of Adam Smith) the

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state derives considerable benefit from educating its workers to the point that they are no longer “liable […] to the delusions of enthusiasm and superstition” (Johnstone 1832–33: 1: 226). It is, of course, possible to hear dim foreshadowings of a nightmare Foucauldian vision of education as social regulation underneath this Enlightenment celebration of education and rationality as a means of vanquishing “superstition”; the problem with such superstition is, after all, apparently not that it interferes with the free exercise of an individual’s mental powers but rather that it interferes with the most efficacious administration of the state. Yet what the Johnstones seem to be insisting upon here, as the basic point at which they can meet Brougham on common ground, is a vision of education as a means of lifting the working classes beyond a view of the social order in which they see “blind obedience to their civil and spiritual directors” as their “sole duty” (Johnstone 1832–33: 1: 225). (Despite my use of the plural, there is reason to attribute this editorial mainly or solely to Christian, as the scorn directed at the reading habits of the upper classes in an earlier section of the article anticipates comments in her 1833 Tait’s article “High Living and Mean Thinking” [Johnstone 1833: 442–44].) Obedience is good; blindness, unsurprisingly, is not. If this offers a rather limited and chastened view of what education can accomplish, it is, nonetheless, one that is very much in line with a number of eighteenth-century ideas about educating those who were not given an opportunity to gain traditional educations – women in particular. Ultimately, what the Johnstones are offering is not so much a proto-Dickensian resistance to Brougham’s programme of rote learning as an attempt to look backwards and import some of the ideas that had shaped earlier educational reforms into their attempt to effect radical political change through their writing. Indeed, the “schoolmaster” envisioned by the Johnstones might sound in some important respects rather like the schoolmistress imagined a generation earlier by writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Hamilton. An article in Tait’s praising The Schoolmaster in fact rather archly hints that “schoolmistress” might be the more appropriate noun, and while inside knowledge might be the main basis of that hint, the type of instruction described sounds very much like the sort of education that Johnstone’s older contemporaries had argued women were particularly well-suited to supply. “[I]f delicate moral tact, rich powers of illustration, and a rarely equaled flow of

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humour be any guarantee”, William Tait writes, “the domestic duties of ‘The Schoolmaster’ (Schoolmistress?) will be admirably performed” (Tait 1832: 724). Hamilton and her educational theories were, in particular, a clear influence on the magazine; she is cited by name in two separate installations of a series of letters on education and quoted approvingly in both (Johnstone 1832–33: 2: 61, 209). (The article, “On the Moral Training of Children”, is signed by “A Friend to Early Education”; the use of a name to distinguish the contributor from the authors of the unsigned contents probably indicates that it was by someone other than the Johnstones.) The sort of instruction envisioned in the journal is far closer to that of the idealised teacher who lets children learn by investigation and experience rather than by straight question-and-answer. The point is worth stressing, as this sort of education, which of course looks back at least as much to Locke and Rousseau as to Hamilton, was very much a prerogative of the leisured middle classes. Hamilton’s and Wollstonecraft’s innovation was in insisting that such intensive attempts to develop intellectual skills were as desirable for girls as boys (a point that Locke assumed but never developed and that Rousseau emphatically denied); what The Schoolmaster does is to write as if it were addressing an audience of working-class readers already formed along a similar model. The article written in the voice of the badly educated “scientific” lady becomes all the more interesting in this context, as the assumption underlying that sort of satire is precisely that the woman in question (and perhaps, by implication, women in general) is incapable of any sort of learning that transcends a mere rote memorisation of terms, which she of course then misapplies. It is, in effect, a much broader, far less sophisticated version of Jane Austen’s satire of Julia and Maria Bertram’s miseducation, described in the opening pages of Mansfield Park: they might know the major rivers of the world and the names of the Roman emperors, but they are incapable of learning self-government and moral discernment. What The Schoolmaster is doing, a generation later, is implicitly transferring the terms of the debates about the educations of women of the upper middle class and the gentry to the working classes. If the journal doesn’t go quite as far as to imply that Brougham and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge risk leading the working classes to the sort of superficial education that Austen shows as being so damaging to the Bertram sisters, it is clear that it sees itself as offering a very different take

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from Brougham on what education should ideally mean, even while remaining strongly supportive of his basic principles. Fictions of Education and Educational Fiction: Johnstone at Tait’s An understanding of the ways in which the Johnstones present their role as schoolmaster (or schoolmistress) in the first of their magazines is useful when one turns to Christian Johnstone’s work in her late fiction and her contemporaneous editorial work at Tait’s. An article in an early number of Johnstone’s Magazine (almost certainly by Christian Johnstone, as it anticipates her review of Jeffrey’s collected essays in Tait’s) suggests that the idea of an editor as a schoolmaster was not something she abandoned with the collapse of the previous journal; in the article, she describes the magazine editor’s role in a series of vivid images: The abdication of Mr. Jeffrey from the long undisputed sovereignty of the Edinburgh Review has, according to etiquette and the regular order of procedure, left Mr. Lockhart, by right of seniority, the nominal head of that divided and turbulent commonwealth which owns no real head; and the sole possessor of the idle sceptre which, in the hands of his predecessor, was alternately seen as a faggot of blood-besmeared birch to whip boys offending against syntax – or a beadler’s staff to drive parish culprits and naughty women to the stocks. (Johnstone 1833–34: 73)

The schoolmaster imagined here seems more like the sort of public and grammar school instructors who were notorious for their supposed taste for beating classical languages into their pupils than he does like either Brougham’s pupil-teachers or the gently encouraging figures who seem to lie behind the Johnstones’ conception of their own roles. This vision of the critic as a figure who berates his audience into terrified submission and then, beadle-like, drives off the women and poor who try to step out of their place, simultaneously emphasises the middle-class orientation of The Edinburgh and The Quarterly and mocks the critics’ assumption of lofty, patrician disinterest. Yet even if this figure is at a considerable remove from the gently encouraging voice of The Schoolmaster, it does reinforce the idea that Christian Johnstone saw the role of the periodical editor as being fundamentally educational. The problem, apparently, with Jeffrey and Lockhart is not that they step down from some regally detached cultural position to

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teach, but that they choose the wrong model of instruction, a model that produces what Johnstone, later in the same article, dismissively calls “the Dominie School of Criticism” (Johnstone 1833–34: 79). Johnstone’s own model of instruction through her role as critic and editor was very different, as is suggested by The Schoolmaster’s gentle mixture of support and satire in its treatment of Brougham and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. This was a tactic that Johnstone maintained, at least to a degree, in her later editorial work, as one can see by comparing and contrasting the way that Brougham is treated in the two later magazines. It is in fact in Johnstone’s, supposedly the least political of the three, that his political views are most overtly and directly criticised. Although one of the ways that Tait’s distinguished itself from Johnstone’s Magazine just before the two merged was to insist that its rival has “no politics” (Tait 1834: 496), any supporter of Brougham’s might have found that statement rather hard to swallow after reading a long-two part profile of him in Johnstone’s. The first article opens by conceding, in a deprecating, roundabout way, that Brougham might, with considerable reservations and hedging, be considered “great”: “[i]f the race of great men in public life be not extinct in England”, the writer begins, “we are entitled, with all his short-comings, to pronounce the present Lord Chancellor a GREAT MAN, as great men go”. Then, just in case even that might seem to be conceding too much, she coolly adds in the next sentence that it would “not be difficult to conceive of a loftier public virtue – to imagine a purer and more exalted patriot and philosopher” (Johnstone 1833–34: 341). Of course, there is no direct proof that Christian and not John was in fact the author of this article, but the demurely back-handed praise seems more characteristic of her critical work than of his generally more straightforward political advocacy. At the very least, the tone of the article seems to reflect her long-standing editorial tastes and practices, since a similarly ambivalent irony about Brougham appears as far back as the piece from the Dumfries Courier that Johnstone included in the 25 June 1818 issue of the Inverness Courier. The author of that article begins his or her attack on slurs against Scottish peasants with some tenuously relevant praise of Brougham for his work on public education and them moves on to add an almost entirely gratuitous slap at him for attempting to “excite the risibility of the Squire Westerns, Sir Hildebrand Osbaldistones, and

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the other yawning or snoring” Parliamentary backbenchers by mocking “the national character” of his countrymen. The main objection to seeing Christian Johnstone as the author of the Johnstone’s piece might initially appear to be that, according to the Wellesley Index, she “probably” wrote three long articles on Brougham that appeared in Tait’s only a few years later. By way of contrast with the amused ambivalence about Brougham in Johnstone’s (and in The Inverness Courier), Tait’s seems unable to find terms high enough in which to praise him: Since the anticipated appearance of a new Waverley novel, in the pristine and palmy days of the Waverley novels, there has been nothing known in these northern regions to equal the buzz and flutter of expectation, which have harbingered the appearance of the collected speeches of Lord Brougham […] The collected speeches of the most eminent living orator and statesman, who has, for thirty years, exercised no ordinary influence over the growth and direction of public opinion and the prospects of mankind, could not, indeed fail to excite the liveliest interest. They embody the history of the age, as it has been influenced by one of its highest intellects. (Johnstone [?] 1838: 475)

Of course, it is possible, especially given the Wellesley’s unwillingness to assign definite authorship, to wonder if Tait himself, who was always an admirer and devoted supporter of Brougham, didn’t have at least some hand in these articles. James Glass Bertram, for one, gives at least some reason to think so; in his comments on Tait’s dealings with Brougham, Bertram notes that Mr. Tait was an ardent admirer of Lord Brougham, and took advantage of every occasion that offered to do him honour before the world. Many letters passed between them. Mr. Tait possessed the happy knack of eliciting from Lord Brougham important statements of opinion – statements that at the time attracted public attention in no mean degree. Some people of those days used to put it in another way – declaring that when the statesman had something special to say, Mr. Tait received a hint to provide the machinery for the utterance. (Bertram 1893: 57)

If Brougham was using Tait as a mouthpiece, as Bertram suggests, it is hardly surprising that the articles on him in Tait’s are more fulsome than those in Johnstone’s. An argument that Tait wrote these articles, whether at Brougham’s dictation or not, might explain the seemingly drastic shift in attitude in the few years that separate them from the articles that Johnstone quite probably wrote – or, at the very least, editorially

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approved – while running Johnstone’s. The catch is that that would also seem to be an argument for Johnstone’s lack of editorial agency at Tait’s, especially if one speculates that the more sardonic and critical tone of the Johnstone’s profile reflects her actual views. Yet it is just as possible to argue either that Wellesley got the attribution right (or, at the very least, that Tait was considerably less skilled in his partisan puffing of Brougham than Bertram indicates). Despite the shamelessly adulatory tone these articles take towards Brougham, there is also a certain bite in them that recalls the sharp tone of the Johnstone’s profile, as well as a hint that the readership they are addressing is not quite as sophisticated as it might like to think itself. Most immediately and most obviously, the equation of Brougham’s parliamentary speeches and the Waverley novels isn’t a link that works entirely happily for either Brougham or his putative readers. However high Scott’s cultural stock still remained in the late 1830s, most critics would have unhesitatingly ranked great political oratory as literature of a much higher order than imaginative fiction. Furthermore, as successful as Scott was with critics and readers, there had always been questions about the intellectual dangers of the popularity of the Waverley novels, which were seen as “rapidly expanding [the] cultural powers of a dubious genre” (Ferris 1991: 144). At best, according to this view, Scott offered an intellectually superior alternative to ordinary circulating library fare, while at worst, he “weaken[ed…] the cultural force” of what might be considered “proper” historical writing (Ferris 1991: 145). In some respects, this comment about Brougham might be read as a fulfillment of all these worries about the expanded “cultural powers” of fiction, as not only the understanding of the past but also reception of current events is supposedly filtered through and directed to tastes shaped by Scott’s novels. In the context of such anxieties, far from being an unequivocal celebration of Brougham, the passage can be read as offering a quietly satiric comment on both the readers who awaited Brougham’s work as if it were a sort of a belated Waverley novel and Brougham himself, whose speeches are so thoroughly attuned to popular literary tastes. Nor is this the only case in which one might read questions about Brougham into an ostensible celebration of him in a Tait’s piece (probably) by Johnstone. Her scathing 1832 review of The Private Correspondence of a Woman of Fashion is called “Publications of the Society for the Effusion of Useless Knowledge” (Johnstone 1832b:

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658–60), a title that satirically contrasts the frivolous society gossip retailed in this book with the sort of “useful” information provided by Brougham’s pamphlets. Yet at the same time the article title, read on its own or even in conjunction with the more or less contemporaneous mockery in The Schoolmaster, offers an implicit, quietly parodic destablisation of Brougham’s organisation. The Tait’s version of Brougham, if less openly critical than that of Johnstone’s Magazine, thus nonetheless brings a sceptical undertone to its treatment of him. Even more interestingly, in drawing parallels between the reception of Brougham’s parliamentary speeches and Scott’s fiction, the article links political and literary discourse in a manner that invites closer consideration not only of Tait’s attitude towards the instruction offered by Brougham himself but also of its general literary content. Given the nineteenth-century perception that in taking over the editorship of Tait’s, Christian Johnstone helped shift the direction of the magazine from politics to a more general literary focus, this point is particularly worth emphasising: as the commentary about Brougham indicates, literature and political discourse were no easier to disentangle in Tait’s than they had been in The Schoolmaster. Yet Tait’s was also designed to appeal to a wider readership than Johnstone’s earlier magazines, which were aimed at the working classes, or, for that matter, than was something like The Edinburgh Review, with its lofty and self-proclaimed goals of reaching out to the educated and the serious-minded. Tait’s explicitly aimed itself towards an audience whose interests spanned serious politics and the more stereotypically frivolous world of fashion and entertainment. This is an important point, since what one finds in Johnstone’s fiction in Tait’s is a clear attempt to bridge any gap that might be presumed to exist between these two audiences. Her aim is more or less the reverse of the attitude that one finds in the article comparing the reception of Brougham’s speeches to that of the Waverley novels, in which the writer hints at the fundamental lack of seriousness in an audience that treats speeches on the fate of a nation in the same manner as they do romantic entertainment. (And Brougham, who fought for Emancipation, for the first Reform Bill, and – unsuccessfully – for universal education, was speaking on the most vital issues of his generation.) What Johnstone assumes in her magazine novels, by way of contrast, is a readership that has no particular objection to having its fiction interrupted by serious reflections on political and social matters. This

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is, in one way, of course, no different from the assumptions that Johnstone had been making about the audiences for the two novels that she published on their own; both Clan-Albin and Elizabeth de Bruce, as already mentioned, contain liberal doses of political content. The difference between them and the fiction that appear in Tait’s is that the Tait’s novels are explicitly reinforced in their instructive or polemical content by the other material published alongside them. One can see this point demonstrated, in a fairly straightforward manner, in a relatively early and unsophisticated piece of Johnstone’s magazine fiction, West Country Exclusives. This began appearing in October 1834, in the first volume of the magazine that appeared under Johnstone’s editorship, and even though Johnstone was already an experienced novelist by then, she seems even less concerned with plot or characterisation in it than she had been in the fiction that was published independently. Like both Clan-Albin and Elizabeth de Bruce, West Country Exclusives is episodic, and the looseness of format encouraged by serial publication perhaps led Johnstone to an even greater than usual focus on individual vignettes at the cost of the overall coherence of the plot. Yet that structural weakness makes the novel’s contextual play with the content of the magazine all the more obvious. The story opens with a reflection on the use of fiction as a vehicle to explore questions of social order, one that would not have seemed out of place in any of the magazine’s non-fictional articles on literary and cultural criticism. Why is it, the narrator wonders, that the daughter of the poor professional man or military officer, starving in gentility, looks with scorn, not only upon the child of the wealthy tradesman, but upon every young woman of her own rank, who, in similar circumstances with herself, ventures to turn her acquirements to any useful purpose [?] (Johnstone 1833–34: 1: 599)

These are views that Johnstone expressed repeatedly in critical articles, mocking, for example, Fanny Kemble’s “most edifying” contempt for (other) actresses in one review (Johnstone 1835b: 466) and insisting upon the dignity of women’s labour in another (Johnstone 1844c), but she makes her points no less directly and explicitly in the novel, and in doing so suggests that political discourse has a significant place in fiction. These “gradations of rank” in the middle classes are, she argues, in West Country Exclusives, a “fertile” and “novel” object of study for the writer of fiction (Johnstone 1833 – 34: 1: 598). While she does not say so directly, the implication is

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clearly that she believes such fiction, at its best, will illuminate and undermine the sorts of prejudices that ensured that it was a cause of reproach to Southey and Coleridge […] that their wives were milliners, – young women who, instead of remaining idle, useless, and helpless creatures, burdens upon their relatives and society, actually exercised their organs of constructiveness upon gauze and ribbons, to maintain their personal independence and dignity

or that the biographers of Sarah Siddons think it necessary to vindicate her memory from the alarming charge of her having been, for a short time, a servant in a quiet gentleman’s family. (Johnstone 1833–34: 1: 600)

What one finds here in the novel is precisely the sort of proto-feminist case being argued in the non-fictional articles published alongside Johnstone’s work, on subjects ranging from emigration to popular culture. No less interestingly, Johnstone also uses her novel as a vehicle for the sort of practical and political literary criticism that one finds in her earlier, more explicitly radical, journalism. Just as earlier articles in The Schoolmaster had invited readers to practice a type of active reading, West Country Exclusives instructs its audience in how to read other novels of its sort. Singling out Susan Ferrier, Basil Hamilton, and Theodore Hook as “secondary novelists” (Johnstone 1833–34: 1: 609) who fall short of true excellence in their inability to create an unromanticised picture of the social world in which their characters move, Johnstone criticises them for the inaccuracy of their satire, as they mock the inability of the wealthy middle classes to imitate the gentry. In contrast, she argues, Maria Edgeworth, a more subtle artist and observer, shows that such imitations of fashionable manners are often more polished than the supposed “real thing”. Edgeworth, Johnstone argues, is aware, that while Maria Louisa, the daughter of an Emperor, and the descendant of a line of princes, born to the manner, if such may be, was simple to awkwardness, Josephine, the poor Creole, possessed all the refinement and elegance of manners which accomplishes an Exclusive petite maitresse. (Johnstone 1833–34: 1: 609)

What is at stake here is not just literary criticism, of course; there is a clear social and political edge to this insistence upon the “correct”

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way to represent the aspiring middle classes. What Johnstone is showing in West Country Exclusives is, conventionally enough, a world driven by foolish social aspiration, but at the same time, she attempts to instruct her readers in the deeper political implications of the literary pleasure that they derive from such satire. What Johnstone presents as the political failure of the “secondary novelists” is, just as importantly, an aesthetic and artistic failure, as they weaken their own satire by presenting a superficially biting but actually sweetly deceptive vision of a world in which manners are all that matter in differentiating class and in which characters who fail socially do so simply because they are blithely ignorant of their own lack of cultural polish. The inverse of this message is, of course, that anyone with a sufficient mastery of social niceties will be able to make a place for him or herself in that genteel world. This, Johnstone insists, is perniciously false, because the world being portrayed is constructed precisely through the exclusion of the wealthy, aspiring middle classes, and writers who attempt to represent their society without acknowledging that point are spinning fantasies rather than saying anything true or valuable about the mechanisms of contemporary social practice. This sort of criticism of social patterns and behaviour demonstrates the continuities that Johnstone sees between her literary and political work, and further, given the direct pitch to the sort of middle-class readership that would have been attracted by the work of Ferrier or Edgeworth, it makes clear that Johnstone saw what might now be called middle-brow fiction as a vehicle for practical political instruction as well as light entertainment. She was, of course, not alone in making such an assumption; there was something of a minor vogue in the 1830s and 40s for novels that combined elements of the “silver fork” school of social fiction with evangelical exhortations. Caroline Lucy Scott (later singled out by George Eliot for mockery in “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”) provided moral uplift in her pictures of long-suffering evangelical wives confronting and reforming the frivolous aristocracy, while Harriette Campbell’s brief career was built around tales of morally upright young women suffering nobly in the interests of duty and being upheld by faith. What differentiates Johnstone’s work from such fiction is not only the obvious point that her primary interest is in political, rather than religious or moral, instruction, but also, and more interestingly, that

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her work assumes that the sort of – presumably female – readership who would be attracted to gentle comedies of middle-class manners would also be interested in the political discussions of class that were being carried on elsewhere in Tait’s. In establishing these continuities between the magazine’s fiction and its political articles and literary reviews, Johnstone makes possible an argument that in moving the magazine towards a greater focus on literature, she was diffusing rather than diminishing the political content of the work. In particular, by bringing politics so thoroughly into her fiction, Johnstone breaks down the boundaries between the stereotypically “feminine” and “masculine” content of her journal. What one finds in Tait’s under Johnstone’s editorship is thus not so much a backing away from the overtly political aims of The Schoolmaster as a shift of the targets of its educational aims, from the (presumptively) male working class to middle-class women. One can see even more clearly the ways in which Johnstone uses the political contexts in which she is publishing her magazine fiction if one turns to one of her slightly later serial novels, Blanche Delamere (published between January and September 1839). It would be possible, of course, to analyse any one of Johnstone’s magazine novels and find a similar interdependence between the fictional and non-fictional content of the magazine, but Blanche Delamere is of particular interest because the subject of the novel mirrors directly the didactic impulse behind all of Johnstone’s later fiction: it is about the political and social education of a young, leisure-class woman. As Blanche learns her lessons, the reader is implicitly encouraged to do so as well. Granted, there is a strong edge of silver-fork fantasy in the novel: Blanche becomes, during the course of the novel, a countess in her own right, living in the world of upper-class privilege so typical of the popular fiction of the era. Yet Blanche is an aristocrat with a difference; rather than, like the heroine of a Caroline Lucy Scott or Harriette Campbell novel, embodying the quiet domestic virtues and thus making herself into a living reproach to the frivolous aristocrats around her, she takes an active role in the political world. The breezily far-reaching privileges of rank that Johnstone grants her heroine enable her to turn her education to such practical effect that by the end of the novel she has transformed the lives of groups of former West Indian slaves, whom she liberates and encourages in the development of their own small holdings; of Irish peasants, whom she frees from an

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oppressive and unjust overseer; and of English manufacturers, whom she sets up in a model village that evidently owes its inspiration to Robert Owen’s New Lanark. Yet however much of a fantasy figure Blanche might be, the novel itself encourages its readers to treat education as an active engagement with books and ideas, rather than as a passive absorption of facts. The result, in the case of the middleclass reader, might not be groups of freed slaves and contented manufacturers, but by exaggerating Blanche’s power in this way, Johnstone vigorously underlines the message that women’s education can and should have an impact on society. One can get an idea of Johnstone’s method in this book in an important early scene in which her eponymous heroine discusses the economic system of Adam Smith with her horrified greatgrandmother, who is overseeing her education. Having decided that given her prospective inheritance in lands, manufacturing, and mining interests, Blanche should have some knowledge of “the economical resources of the country and of the British constitution” (Johnstone 1845: 177), the old countess sets her heiress reading Smith and Blackstone, whom she vaguely understands to be the “legitimate authorities” on those subjects. Blanche, infuriated by her greatgrandmother’s instructions to her tutor that no modern politics are to be included in her studies, avenges herself by a lecture to the countess in which she contrives, by judicious choice of passages, to make clear that The Wealth of Nations does not make comfortable reading for the conservative landed interests of the day. (Her horrified tutor, who has never bothered himself with a close reading of Smith, hastily explains to the offended countess that all of the radical-sounding passages Blanche has quoted must have “been interpolated […] by some seditious Scotch editor” [Johnstone 1845: 3: 180.) What is interesting here is not just the comedy involved in this clash between old and young, conservative and progressive, but also Johnstone’s merging of politics and literature. The chapter is effectively a primer on an aspect of Smith’s economic thought, one that argues for seeing him as very much in line with the version of political economy for which Johnstone was arguing in her articles on – for example – Irish political issues published in other numbers of Tait’s around the same time. Blanche does not want to learn political economy as an intellectual exercise that is irrelevant to her life; instead, she insists on finding a way to make it a vital part of how she lives in her world. She is

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scornful of the idea of “safe” education for women; in an attack on the rote learning of history, she scoffs at the implication that the turbulent, saucy, scolding, quarrelsome minx Politics becomes, in forty or fewer years, that grave, staid, and dignified matron History, whose deeds it is the province of women to study, until they have at their finger-ends, how Elizabeth was the lionhearted Protestant princess; how Charles I. suffered martyrdom on the 30th of January, 1649; and how his gracious son was blessedly restored upon the 29th of May, 1660; and such like important events, never once all the while venturing to inquire or to reason about the causes which sent one to the block and the other upon his travels. (Johnstone 1845: 177)

Likewise, as she drags what her great-grandmother assumes to be the safely dead and unthreatening thought of Adam Smith into the turbulent world of reform bills and corn laws, she implies that mastery of any body of thought means seeing the living importance of those ideas. What Johnstone is doing in this section of the book is not simply introducing her readers to what she might have considered a neglected aspect of Adam Smith’s thought; she is also, and more importantly, modelling a method of education. In doing so, she is offering, in fictional form, a version of the sort of education that she had sketched out just a few years earlier in one of her most aggressively polemical pamphlets, True Tales of the Irish Peasantry. “While the science of Political Economy is directed only to what concerns the mere wealth,” Johnstone writes there, and not the social well-being of nations – to the accumulation, and not to the distribution of the stores – it must remain to the bulk of mankind – or, at all events, to all womankind – as indifferent as the obsolete science of astrology, or the search for the philosopher’s stone. (Johnstone 1836b: 1)

Reading Smith in the safely conservative way that the countess and the tutor try to read him, in other words, is turning his work into something as irrelevant as alchemy. The argument in True Tales about the importance of the uses to which women put their reading emphasises that what Blanche Delamere is offering its readers is not the sort of practical model of feminine virtue for them to absorb and imitate that was more typically celebrated in early nineteenth-century didactic fiction by women. Mary Brunton, for example, insisted in the dedicatory epistle to her popular and influential Self-Control (1811), that her “fervent wish”

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was “that these pages may assist” her readers “to furnish proof that the character” of her impeccably virtuous heroine “is yet not unattainable” (Brunton [1811] 1986: vi). Given that Brunton’s Laura has to demonstrate that virtue through enduring a lengthy series of trials that arise in large part because of her brief attraction to a man of questionable morals and that culminate in her being swept down a remote Canadian river in a leaky canoe, one might, however, wonder about how practical a role model she was. Susan Ferrier’s The Inheritance, a novel that might seem to have more in common with Blanche Delamere than with Self-Control – Ferrier also writes about a young woman who becomes a countess in her own right and sets out to do good – makes an even more interesting comparison with Johnstone’s work, because if the plot anticipates Johnstone (and, as The Inverness Courier demonstrates, Johnstone almost certainly read it), the moral echoes Brunton. Ferrier’s Gertrude soon realises the difficulty of carrying through her charity in any way that has lasting benefits; more strikingly, her ultimate virtue is shown to lie in renunciation of direct public power, as she discovers that she is not in fact the true countess and steps down from her position. Ferrier was not the only novelist to use this plot, implausible as it might seem; Maria Edgeworth had employed another variation of it in Ennui (1809) in which the inadvertent usurper of an earldom is a man. Edgeworth’s twist is that her protagonist is able to do lasting good only after he renounces his Earldom and educates himself to take an active part in society; while she thereby implies that aristocratic beneficence is no substitute for the trained, critical intelligence of the middle-class professional, able to see the larger social picture thanks to his reading of Adam Smith and others, she also limits this practical power of reform to men. Ferrier might initially seem to be extending this exploration of charity and reform to women, but by the end of the novel she falls back into literary and political conventionality, as she shows her one-time countess gracefully accepting her subordinate social role and falling into the feminine / aristocratic mode of benevolence, as opposed to reform, and relinquishing to her husband the public responsibilities of administering property. By the end of the novel, Gertrude’s ambitious plans of public reform have dwindled into a form of charity that is a strictly private virtue; Ferrier implies that for women, all the political economy in the world is irrelevant to the immediate, practical duty of relieving and comforting the poor who

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happen to be near at hand. The contrast with Johnstone’s work is obvious. In showing how Blanche transforms history and political economy into a form of practical education, Johnstone suggest that what matters in women’s education is not the cultivation of private sensibility in order to relieve individual suffering but rather the creation of a social conscience through an understanding of the individual’s – whether male or female – role in contributing to the general public welfare. Blanche might be a fantasy figure, but through her, Johnstone offers her middle-class readers a vision of a world in which women’s charity can involve a transformation of social structures, rather than merely a simple, temporary alleviation of individual suffering. Of course, creating a piece of fiction that shows the value of a woman’s knowledge of political economy proves, in itself, nothing about the value of such knowledge. What Blanche Delamere achieves is not a logical demonstration that a correct understanding of Adam Smith will transform both women’s lives and society; instead, it implies that what matters in gaining an understanding of political economy is that one can become an active participant in the debate about prosperity and social change rather than the mere beneficiary – or victim – of others’ reading. What is most noteworthy about Edgeworth’s version of the transformations wrought by a proper understanding of political economy is not that the educable individual is male, rather than female, but that the people who are most affected by Adam Smith are presumed incapable of reading or at least of understanding him. Edgeworth presents a world in which, unsurprisingly enough, the poor are always acted upon. While her sensible middle-class reformer, the Scottish steward M’Leod, wants nothing more than to educate the poor, there is never any question of giving them the tools to decide and evaluate for themselves: they are to be taught to prefer what is unquestioningly assumed to be the right, even at temporary inconvenience, much as are the cottars in Elizabeth Hamilton’s fictional community of Glenburnie. They are, in other words, presumed incapable of the sort of abstract reasoning that leads Hamilton’s Mrs. Mason, Edgeworth’s M’Leod, and other such middle-class reformers to find in the MacClartys’ hairy butter or Elinor’s smoke-filled cottage not merely indications of individual slovenliness but a symptom of wider social disarray. (Mrs. Mason is of course working class by origin, but she is presented as very much

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an exception to her class.) Johnstone’s innovation on this plot is that she is less interested in the specifics of reform than she is in the theory. It matters less that Blanche builds her village than that we see, through her, the reasoning that convinces her that it is in the national interest that individuals be happy. This was, of course, anything but a point that was original to this novel; Elizabeth Hamilton had stated bluntly in the preface of Cottagers of Glenburnie that “National happiness” should be “consider[ed] as the aggregate of the sum of individual happiness” (Hamilton 1808: 1: x), while Johnstone had previously made her wise Lady Augusta reflect sadly on the issue in Clan-Albin. (In Lady Augusta’s words, “I should be sorry to believe that in any country there could exist a difference between political prosperity, and individual welfare,” or that “the accumulation of wealth [could] be an object of greater importance to the welfare of the state than a numerous, and above all, a happy population” [Johnstone [1815] 2003: 84].) What is different here is that Blanche is less a practical reformer, like M’Leod, or a sad and lonely voice of reason, like Lady Augusta, than she is an exemplar of a particular type of active reading practice. In effect, Blanche provides a model, for those of literary tastes who happened to pick up Tait’s, of how to read the other material in the magazine, and articles such as angry reports on the condition of Ireland and the impact of the Irish poor law are entirely continuous with the sorts of lessons that she receives on the political economy of her fictional estates. Tait’s, like The Schoolmaster, thus makes it impossible for readers to disentangle entirely political from literary content, but, in doing so, it gives Johnstone the opportunity for rather more complex effects than were possible in the earlier magazine, as she is able to publish full-length novels geared to reinforcing precisely the sorts of political concerns raised elsewhere in the same or other numbers of the magazine. If, as her contemporaries all seemed to agree, Johnstone gave a literary tone to Tait’s, it was a form of literature that enabled both her and the magazine to pursue the same sort of political battles as it had in the early years before she took over. Precisely by letting her novelist’s voice merge with and become more or less indistinguishable from that of the magazine as a whole, Johnstone was able to develop and amplify the sorts of political concerns that she explores under all the literary identities that she created for herself.

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Christian Johnstone’s career was so unusual for a woman of her day that it is impossible to generalise from it and draw any wider conclusions about the role of women in journalism in the first decades of the nineteenth century. However, reading her career against that of other writers in her era and milieu who also used anonymity suggests that her discreet avoidance of the use of her own name might not be simply an indication that she was driven into obscurity and disguise by gender. The fact that her anonymity could be read as deference to contemporary standards of proper feminine behaviour undoubtedly contributed to her posthumous erasure from literary history, but there is no reason to think that she was entirely averse to the cultivation of a public writerly persona. The sad irony is that precisely because she exists only as a public character, she is all the more difficult to write about, a difficulty that she understood very well indeed from her own biographical research on John Paul Jones. Yet the fact that Christian Johnstone, the individual, succeeded so entirely in effacing herself from public notice should not obscure our recognition of the varied and complicated career of “the Author of Clan-Albin”, “Meg Dods”, “the Schoolmaster”, and the Editor of Tait’s. As Griffin has argued, it is not entirely unusual for an author’s “aesthetic identity” to be “split into multiple entities in the course of individual publications, whose nominal authors may have different names”, entities that are then “collected together under the name of the empirical writer only after the fact” (Griffin 1999: 890). A century and a half after her death, it is long past time to begin that act of collection for Christian Johnstone.

Conclusion Modesty, Money, and Nostalgia: Narratives of Women’s Writing in Edinburgh’s “Age of Greatness” One can make an argument for the historical and cultural importance of Elizabeth Hamilton, Anne Grant, and Christian Johnstone, however neglected they have been by literary history; doing so for Agnes Millar would be more difficult. An unmarried invalid who apparently lived quietly on her own in Dundee, Millar published one book, Letters from a Lady to her Niece, which went into three editions with the Edinburgh publishing company Oliver and Boyd between 1822 and 1827. It does not appear to have attracted any critical attention or much of a readership even at the time of its publication, despite presumably having sold out the 2000 copies of the first two editions. Nor would anybody reading the book today be able to make much of a case that Millar was unjustly overlooked, then or now. Letters from a Lady is entirely conventional in its advice: aside from a slightly stronger-than-usual tendency towards evangelical principles in its moral exhortations, there is nothing much to mark it out from the sort of educational letters that had been a standard in British publishing at least since the days of John Gregory or Hester Chapone. The titular niece is advised to cultivate patience and resignation, to forgo novel reading, to be wary of cultivating too great a delight in poetry, and generally to make herself into a model of modestly self-effacing femininity. This was a standard of conduct that Millar herself appeared to embrace, at least if one judges by her original letters of inquiry in the Oliver and Boyd archives. For one thing, she approached George Boyd anonymously, forwarding her letter via a mutual acquaintance, James Chalmers; he enclosed it, with her name and address carefully blotted out, in a covering letter of introduction from himself, explaining both her situation and her desire that he negotiate publishing arrangements for her. In Chalmers’ words, A Lady […] who has no family to occupy her attention & who is rather in a delicate state of health has employed herself in writing a series of letters addressed to a niece & which she is particularly anxious to see in print more I believe for the pleasure of distributing a few copies among her relations than from motives of vanity or gain […]

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The letters I have read, & think very well of them altho’ perhaps there is little originality in them, still in your hands & among so many Juvenile works there is every chance of tolerable sale (Chalmers 1821: f. 1)

It is a letter that makes Millar herself sound as timidly conventional as her book, and the narrative that it implies – a lonely woman whiling away the empty hours with her pen, but shrinking with feminine horror from publicity and with genteel indifference from the messy question of profit – will be familiar to any student of early nineteenthcentury women’s publishing. Other material about and from Millar in the Oliver and Boyd archives complicates this story, however, making clear that Millar was as anxious to get published as any of her more successful contemporaries. It is because of these complications in her narrative of modest femininity that a writer such as Agnes Millar deserves a few moments of twenty-first-century critical attention. Her ardent desire to get her work into print makes clear that, whatever the growing cultural disincentives to female literary professionalism in 1820s Edinburgh, the desire to be published was not the province of only a few brave individuals driven to resist social norms by unusual talents or need. Grant, Hamilton, and Johnstone were of course exceptional in important ways – no writer, male or female, who wrote a novel with the contemporary impact of Glenburnie or who edited a periodical as successful as Tait’s could be considered anything but unusually successful – but they were by no means unique in their ambitions. In looking at Millar’s correspondence, one can see her attempting to develop the same modestly feminine persona that Grant creates by reprinting letters expressing horror at the idea of public display in Letters from the Mountains, her second wildly popular book, or that Johnstone, with the most delicate irony, plays with as she proclaims her “fine aversion to every species or degree of authorship” in her demurely third-person business letter to William Blackwood. Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, given that Millar was a less versatile or skilled writer than either Grant or Johnstone, she is far less successful in managing the implicit contradictions of maintaining a persona of feminine amateurism while engaging in professional negotiations about the status of her work. There is no question, notwithstanding Chalmers’ politely formulaic comments about Millar’s lack of “vanity” or interest in “gain”, that Millar herself was very keen to publish; indications of this

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creep even into Chalmers’ cover letter to Boyd. There is, for one thing, a rather curious undertone of urgency – perhaps an indication of pressure that Millar was putting on her intermediary – as Chalmers finishes his account of the book by telling Boyd that he hopes “soon to hear from you with an offer such as will induce the author to allow her offspring to appear in public”. He then adds a brief closing paragraph explaining that while he knows the book “can be no object to you […] it is a mighty concern I find with the writer” and repeats his underscored request that Boyd will reply with a decision as “soon as possible” (Chalmers 1821: f. 1v). Millar herself is remarkably brisk about her expectations, stating in the letter forwarded to Boyd that she intends the publisher to cover all costs and take complete charge of distribution (she cannot take a role, she explains, given her wish “to remain concealed as the author”), and while she states that she will be content with a “moderate” payment, she adds that she is “mak[ing] it a condition, that I should receive some farther emolument if the work sells well” (Millar 1821). More interestingly, the letter also reveals that the modestly indirect approach through Chalmers was not her first attempt at publication. “It is not impossible”, she writes, but that Mr Boyd’s house may have seen the MS last spring, in which case they may not trouble themselves to examine it now. It would therefore be better to inform them that it has been since written carefully over again, and considerably changed and improved – that every letter has been more or less altered; and that it is now in a better state for the press. (Millar 1821)

In addition to making plain that using Chalmers as an intermediary was more a tactical move – after her first efforts to publish had failed – than it was a mark of instinctively shrinking femininity, this passage also casually dismisses the pretence that the letters are strictly private family documents. They might indeed have been the product of quiet domestic retirement, but given the extensive revisions to suit them for publication, they have become something more in the nature of essays than familiar, informal letters. Once the volume was accepted for publication, Millar became even more concerned with having a say in what happened to it: as early as April 1822 – having dropped any attempt to conceal her identity from her publisher – she was writing Boyd to let him know that her “patience [was] now nearly exhausted” because of his delays in sending the “promised printed copies of her book”, and when it

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finally appeared, she expressed her unhappiness with it strongly enough for Boyd to respond in obvious exasperation that given all the trouble it had caused, he “regret[ted] having agreed to publish it” (Boyd 1822: 73). Even when Millar was informed in 1823 of the forthcoming second edition, her pleasure was dampened by her annoyance that she had not been notified in time to forward extra letters for inclusion (Millar 1822, 1823: f. 1).1 Her annoyance was not strong enough, however, to keep her from sounding out Boyd about the prospect of his publishing a volume of her poems; sending a sample poem, she modestly apologises for its defects, then adds coyly, “I have sometimes thought, a too flattering suggestion which may amuse you […] Could these verses be brought before the public?” (Millar 1823: f. 1v). Perhaps to reinforce this suggestion, she concludes the letter by making clear that she in fact has a public: despite her modesty about authorship, she reports with some complacency that “[t]here is no keeping a secret […] it is gone abroad […] that I am the author of the Letters; this has probably circulated a few copies” (Millar 1823: f. 2). Notwithstanding these hints about her popularity, Boyd was reluctant to take the poems, and by February 1824, Millar was suggesting that they might be “corrected” to make them more saleable (but not by “the Gentleman that corrected my prose; he is too cold a genius for me” [Millar 1824a: f. 2v]); in June, after he had finally turned down the manuscript, she accepted reluctantly that the poems could not appear on their own but suggested instead that Boyd bring out a new combined edition of the letters and poems, as “the eclat of the former might dispose many people to purchase the latter” (Millar 1824b: f. 1). Even as Millar continued loudly to proclaim her impeccably feminine modesty, her letter makes clear that she was confident about the value – financial and otherwise – of her own literary work. As a result, her unpublished correspondence offers a glimpse of the ways in which proclamations of feminine timorousness and reserve can in fact, at this time and in this place, be part of an attempt to make a place in a professional world of letters. Nor was Millar the only woman writer of this time to demonstrate that sort of confidence (however misplaced) in her negotiations with publishers. A Mrs. G.M. Stevens wrote to 1

The second letter is endorsed on the back “19 Dec. 1825”, and it is included in a file of 1825 correspondence, but the date on the letter itself appears to be “19 Septr 1823”, which fits with the publication date of the second edition.

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George Boyd in February 1824 to try to get him to rethink his decision on a novel that he had apparently declined on the politely noncommittal grounds that he had too much business in hand; given what she insisted was the timeliness of her portrayal of contemporary manners, she warned that the novel risked being anticipated in its subject if he delayed. In October, she was writing again with news that John Murray had thought it “a very good novel” (even while declining it as “not in the range of his publications”) and urging Boyd to give it another look (Stevens 1824) – a tactic that, not surprisingly, failed to work. A Miss A. Gillespie of Dublin Street – a teacher or governess, since she refers to her young “charges” – was apparently a little more successful, in that she managed to interest Boyd in a collection of prayers, despite her modestly unbusinesslike declaration that while she “hope[d] that [he] would not be a loser” by it financially, “I dare not assure you that you would not” (Gillespie 1821: f. 1v). Yet her deprecation about the marketability of her writing is undercut somewhat when, in the same letter, she assures him not only that a book “of the kind is required” but also that what appears to have been his suggestion of enlarging it would be a fiscally irresponsible move, as doing so would “almost preclude its usefulness” and thereby reduce its sales. Perhaps even more startlingly, she makes clear that she is not prepared to provide the revisions he has requested. “I cannot agree”, she writes “to the preparing prayers exactly suited to the capacity of a child” (Gillespie 1821: f. 1–1v), then goes on to dispute his ideas about what constitutes appropriate religious reading for children. The project appears, unsurprisingly, to have foundered, but four years later she approached Boyd again to publish a collection of religious poems that, as she explained, she did not have time to publish herself even though she was confident of “a ready sale” if she could do so. When he turned her down, she wrote back regretting his decision, but reiterating her confidence that it was a book with sufficient appeal to ensure that she could “get it off rapidly” if she chose to print at her own risk, more or less explicitly questioning his business acumen as she did so (Gillespie 1825). In most respects, of course, these forgotten and unpublished women writers do nothing to change the perception that publishing in Edinburgh in the early decades of the nineteenth century was very much a man’s game. Even Agnes Millar, who at least saw one of her books appear in print, earned exactly half as much for writing it as one

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Peter Smith did for “correcting & enlarging” it – five guineas to his ten – and despite her stipulation that she should get some extra “emolument” in the event of good sales, the balance sheets for the second and third editions do not record anything more paid to her (Oliver and Boyd 1823: 280–83). Yet even if the main impression left by reading these letters to and from George Boyd is a somewhat sad one of thwarted or misguided ambition, the existence of that ambition in the first place is both striking and noteworthy. It is, if nothing else, a suggestive indication of a shift in women’s attitudes towards publishing that, only a little more than half a century after Jean Marishall’s mother was worrying about the sanity of a woman who would chose to have her work appear in print, an obscure Edinburgh teacher could be sufficiently confident in her own literary abilities and judgment to dispute the opinions of one of the city’s most successful publishers. One can admit readily enough that her confidence in her judgment was misplaced without affecting the more basic point that Miss Gillespie, Mrs. Stevens and Agnes Millar saw themselves not just as scribbling amateurs but rather as writers with a public and a potential market. More generally, their attempts to get published suggest that the far better-known stories of their women contemporaries’ modest hesitation about moving into print should not be read as straightforward evidence of an increasing and inescapably feminine reluctance to move into a literary marketplace. The tactics that Agnes Millar and Miss Gillespie employ in their correspondence with George Boyd suggest, precisely because they are relatively clumsy, the degree to which displays of modestly shrinking femininity could be part of the conventional niceties of an exchange with a publisher, rather than a heartfelt conviction of inadequacy. That said, Agnes Millar, with her apparent lifetime earnings of five guineas from her writing (or for that matter, Miss Gillespie, who presumably earned nothing) is anything but an illustration of the receptiveness of the Edinburgh publishing industry to women, however much the women themselves were willing to try to find a place in it. Indeed, given Jean Marishall’s indignation at the five guineas that she was offered for Clarinda Cathcart in 1765 (an indignation that was apparently still resonating strongly when she wrote about the incident a quarter of a century later), one might read Millar’s polite vagueness on the question of payment as evidence that women’s position in the literary marketplace had in fact slipped

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during that time. Yet even if the number of women earning significant money from their writing was far smaller than the number of women who attempted to get or succeeded in getting published, there were a few who did earn, at least temporarily, professional-level incomes from their writing and related activities, and those few appear to include all of the women discussed in any detail in this study. The Johnstones might have had cash flow problems, but when John Johnstone died on 3 November 1857, a little more than two months after his wife, he left an estate valued at £962, plus some odd shillings and pence. Even if that is not a huge sum to result from a lifetime of work, it is respectable, and while it is impossible to know how much of that money came from Christian Johnstone’s writing, it is striking that one of the items in the inventory was still – after all the squabbles with publishers in the previous decade – a £20 interest in the copyright of The Cook and Housewife’s Manual. Anne Grant appears not to have done quite so well, at least if one goes by the inventory of her effects filed in 1842 (oddly, four years after her death). Her estate in Scotland was worth only a few shillings over £254, although she also held a mortgage worth £1000 in American land. It is unclear how much money Elizabeth Hamilton left since her will, written on her deathbed in England, does not include an inventory, but it was apparently enough to justify setting up a trust for her sister and the daughters of her cousin Adair Crawford. Even assuming that some of this was family money (she and her sister were presumably their brother’s heirs), it is highly unlikely that the success of Glenburnie would not have ensured Hamilton at least a reasonable capital sum, especially since correspondence about her earlier books show her to have been briskly no-nonsense in her dealings with her publishers. In offering Agrippina to George Robinson, for example, Hamilton provides a summary of her previous successes and of the encouragement and aid that she has received from “several eminent classical scholars” while working on Agrippina. She then concludes by stating, in coolly professional terms, that the copy right shall be at your service on the following terms. Viz: Two hundred pounds a volume – and one hundred more [inserted: ie. fifty on each volume] on the work’s going to a third edition. Of this I shall beg 100 pounds on the publication of the work, and the remainder as the sale of the work shall authorise before at the end of one year from the time it is published. (Hamilton 1803b: f. 49)

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Presumably, some version of this arrangement was accepted, as the book did appear with Robinson, although in three volumes rather than two. Even so, and however much Hamilton was able to negotiate for her copyrights, it might well have been the Jean Marishall who died in Edinburgh on 26 December 1817 who did the best of all, and her will is definitely the most intriguing. She died with total assets worth over £1300, including £530 invested in naval funds at five percent interest, and £500 “in the hands” of a niece. 2 If this Mrs. Marishall (the parish record of her burial lists her as “Miss Marshall”, the “Daughter of the Late Mr. Marshall Writer”, making clear that the “Mrs.” was a courtesy title) was the novelist and playwright, than she had managed to make a reasonably comfortable life for herself, one way or another. While a capital sum of only a little over £1100 does leave her teetering on the precarious edges of what Edward Copeland calls the “blessed competence” that is the supreme good in women’s fiction of the day (Copeland 2004: 22), there is an air of solid if slightly straitened middle-class comfort in a flurry of small personal bequests: a silver tea service, a black satin and a grey sarsnet gown, a gold watch, a lace veil, an “India plaid shawl”, a pair of bracelets, some “India neclaces and drops”, a set of “coat of arms china”, and, rather charmingly, a pair of “India china jars with two carved cocoa nuts”. We might never know with complete certainty whether or not the ambitious and sharp-tongued author of Sir Harry Gaylove was in fact the woman who treasured a set of carved coconuts, and even if she was, details about the accoutrements of middle-class life that she was able to leave in her will might seem far removed from anything to do with her literary life. Yet the bare fact that a single woman might have been able to build a life of quiet respectability in part through literary work is of historical interest. The historian R.J. Morris has used early nineteenth-century wills of childless women in the north of England (the mean value of which were comparable to Marishall’s) to argue that such “women had considerable status and authority which cut across the dominant authority structure of patriarchy” (Morris 2005: 246). While he does not focus on the source of these women’s money, his comments do add another dimension to a study of women writers’ 2

Hamilton’s will was accessed through the website of the English Public Record Office; Grant’s, Johnstone’s, and Jean Marishall’s are all available through Scotland’s People (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk)

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professional lives. The familiar accounts of middle-class women’s anxieties about losing status as “ladies” if they have to earn or accept payment for their work (discussed in the introduction) are only one side of the story, at least if one reads them against Morris’ arguments about the class status and family power granted by such women’s independent control over money. In relation to these four writers, however, this point about the sorts of family and social power granted by having control of money is supported most fully not by Jean Marishall’s will, but rather by an unusually frank letter of 1811 in which Anne Grant set out her financial situation for her son Duncan, then in India, who was the only other independent wage earner in the family. It is an intriguing document, since far from writing to the one adult male in the family in order to seek support, Grant is letting him know that she will be fully capable of providing for his four surviving, and unmarried, sisters through her own professional endeavours. As she tells him, not only has she had a particularly good year financially, earning “little short of seven hundred pounds” for supervising the education of “three young Ladies” and the two children of some American friends, she has also been able to use her past earnings to make some substantial investments for her daughters’ future benefit. “I believe”, she writes, it is since I wrote to you last that I have bought my house. It is a good airy & spacious one & has cost me Twelve hundred pounds which I have already paid. The furniture of a large Drawing room, dining room, & parlour with six bed rooms & a kitchen with the great quantity of bed & table linen china &c necessary for such an establishment have cost nearly as much more. But if I were gone tomorrow this is of itself a little fortune to the Girls. (Grant 1811b: f. 208, 209v.)

Yet the “little fortune” contained in her house and furnishings, as she goes on to explain, is not so much the capital sum that can be realised by their sale, as it is a form of professional investment in an educational business that her daughters will eventually be able to take over. Her writing thus becomes doubly valuable to her: the cash that she earns buys the house and accoutrements that make it possible for her to board young ladies, while the fame that it brings her makes her attractive to wealthy parents who want their daughters to gain social polish in Edinburgh, and whose patronage will in turn burnish further Grant’s professional reputation. (Joan Glassell, who lived in Grant’s household for nearly eight years, married a future Duke of Argyll –

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she was never a duchess, but only because she died before her husband inherited the title – a point that underscores Grant’s success in attracting pupils from the wealthiest echelons of society.) As she makes very clear to Duncan, she sees her literary work as the source of both the financial and the social capital requisite to establish a business that her daughters can then inherit and use to support themselves. Of course, Grant’s plans for her daughters proved tragically unnecessary, and her need, a decade and a half later, to accept a royal pension implies in the bleakest possible way that her writing was not able to sustain her in the comfortable life she sketches out here. The £2400 investment in house and furniture that she was able to make in 1811 might not have vanished entirely by 1825, when Scott, Jeffrey and others petitioned to the king on her behalf, but whatever had happened to her capital, there does not appear to have been enough income left for her to live comfortably. The point, however, is not that Grant was unable to sustain the sort of life that she built for herself at the years of her greatest fame, but rather that she had, however temporarily, managed to use her writing such in a way that it became feasible for her to imagine providing for her children through her profession in exactly the way that a man of her class would. Given arguments about the masculinisation of concepts of literary professionalism as the century went on, it may be significant that all of these financial details were omitted from the published version of this letter (in J.P. Grant 1845: 2: 290–93), as were Grant’s sharp comments about the moral irresponsibility of women who let brothers and sons in India maintain them at home in idleness. (How, she wonders, can the men in question have either respect or affection for relatives who choose to live on their “blood”.) Instead, the printed letter dwindles into little more than a conventionally affectionate collection of maternal advice on marriage, and Grant’s detailed summary of what she makes plain she sees as being her professional career vanishes from literary history.3

3

Grant’s editor, her surviving son John Peter, does, however, choose to retain his mother’s earnest advice to Duncan to marry, regardless of any “difference of nation”, rather than keep a mistress if he falls in love with a “modest and well-principled” Indian woman (J.P. Grant 1845: 2: 293)

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Margaret Oliphant I will finish this study by glancing very briefly ahead to Margaret Oliphant, a woman who was far more directly, openly, and successfully professional, in the sense that she earned a living for herself and her family, than any of the writers I have so far discussed. She also knew, very well indeed, the culture in which those writers were working, but as she looked back at it, she seemed unwilling or unable to see predecessors in figures such as Anne Grant or Elizabeth Hamilton, even though she knew at least some of their work. As one of the most important – and beyond any question, one of the most prolific and versatile – Scottish women writers of the second half of the nineteenth century looks back on the era proceeding her own, what she sees might thus appear, at first glance, to be a world in which her female predecessors have as slight a role as the quiet songwriters who are the only women to make even a brief appearance in the history by Oliphant’s younger contemporary Henry Grey Graham. Even so, in turning back to Oliphant for an account of Edinburgh during these years, one is not merely adding yet another item to the list of Victorian works that shape the “great forgetting” of women writers. Rather, what one sees is Oliphant constructing her own ambivalent sense of literary professionalism in part through an idealised version of an Edinburgh society in which women writers are simultaneously both essential and marginal. Born just outside Edinburgh in 1828, Oliphant of course had no firsthand knowledge of the city during the age of Sir Walter Scott and The Edinburgh Review. She was separated from it by geography as well as generation; while still a child, she moved with her parents to England, where she spent most of the rest of her life. Even so, her own writing life touched in a number of ways on what she was later to call those “brilliant years” (Oliphant 1882: 2: 201). As she notes proudly, she was able to publish her first novel just in time for Jeffrey, then “only a few weeks” away from his own death but still “a prince in literature”, to be able to read it and take the time to send a “letter full of the most delicate criticism and fatherly commendation” to bid “the newcomer welcome” (Oliphant 1882: 2: 67–68). Two years later, in 1851, she began what was to be her life-long connection with the Blackwood family and Blackwood’s Magazine: she was writing a history of their publishing house when she died in 1897. Her work

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also demonstrates just how deeply she was steeped in the literary history of her home city. She writes evocatively of the opening years of Edinburgh’s “glory” in her book about the Blackwoods, celebrating a world in which booksellers could summon the “great men” of the day to their shops and “triumph over their social superiority” by “the power of being able to communicate a novel sensation, to read a manuscript which was a mystery, and to set a fine scene of fiction, or a masterpiece of poetry, before their guests’ dazzled and delighted eyes” (Oliphant 1897: 1: 7–8). A few years before, she had written elegiacally of the city as it was around the time of her own birth, just as its “age of greatness” was drawing to a close. That “greatness” had, she writes, lasted through many brilliant years. Even after Scott’s withdrawal to Abbotsford, he was still to be seen about the familiar streets and in the Parliament House – on the whole the greatest of living writers; and there was Jeffrey, the acknowledged chief of criticism, though the excitement of the Edinburgh Review had by this time calmed down. […] The Blackwood circle, too, with all its wild wit and daring discussion of everything in heaven and earth, was in fullest force; and life was overflowing in the old, lofty streets, outside the noise of which, yet not entirely withdrawn from its echoes, the patriarchs of the former generation were “wearing away”. (Oliphant 1882: 2: 201–2)

This world of “eloquence and mirth and pathos”, of “great romances” and “precise yet lively” criticism” (Oliphant 1882: 2: 204), is one that Oliphant places firmly at the centre – literally: Edinburgh is the main subject of the central chapters of the second of three volumes – of what she presents as the great transitional literary period of 1790 to 1825. This is also the era in which Oliphant grounds her own claims to literary authority, implying throughout her history that the “modern” literary tastes and values shaping the most valuable work of her own day were born at this time. Given this attempt to ground herself in an imagined world that was already dying during her earliest childhood, it becomes of particular interest that, as many readers of Oliphant’s Blackwood’s criticism have pointed out, the critical voice and critical space that Oliphant constructs for herself is masculine. Echoing Christian Johnstone’s tactics in The Cook and Housewife’s Manual, Oliphant inserts herself into the Blackwood’s world of wit and camaraderie, but unlike Johnstone’s quietly audacious substitution of Meg Dods’ kitchen for Ambrose’s Tavern, Oliphant leaves Blackwood’s an

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entirely masculine space. In an incisive reading of her establishment of a critical persona, Solveig C. Robinson notes that in “The Old Saloon”, a series of reviews that Oliphant originated in Blackwood’s, she was explicitly placing herself not just in “a masculine precinct” but also among her “masculine critical forbears” from the world of the Noctes Ambrosianae (Robinson 2005: 201). Although her article is mainly a defense of Oliphant’s critical ethics and professionalism, Robinson also offers suggestive comments about gender, particularly as she cites a passage from the opening column in the series in which Oliphant, in her anonymous, ambiguously gendered voice, writes that even though Blackwood’s now “has her ladies too” among its critics, she suspects that the magazine still “perhaps loves them less”. But, she continues, it was of our fathers we had meant to speak, and not of their successors, as it is with the memories of Wilson and Lockhart and their brethren that this room, once an important centre of their intellectual and social life, is most closely associated. Let us proceed with our task in humility, fondly imagining a little succour from those noble shades. (Oliphant 1887: 127)

The relatively unloved ladies of the late-Victorian Blackwood’s disappear as the writer attempts to make a place for herself – or rather himself, as the article implies – in the spectral company of the “wild wit[s]” of the 1820s. It is difficult not to recall, in reading this passage, the central situation of “The Library Window” (1896), the last great story that Oliphant wrote, in which the narrator recalls the destructive longing with which she, as a young woman, had watched the ghostly figure of a long-dead man writing obsessively away in a world to which she can never gain access. The most she achieves, when at the climax of the story he finally appears to see her, is a “kind of rapture” as “my look went with his look, following it as if I were in his shadow” (Oliphant 1988: 324). In this introductory segment of “The Old Saloon”, Oliphant presents herself as attempting, much like the nameless heroine of “The Library Window”, to will herself into the world of the dead writers of 1820s Edinburgh by whom she is so fascinated, and to follow, as it were, in their shadows. Reading “The Library Window” as an allegory of Oliphant’s relationships with her literary predecessors drastically oversimplifies a complex and evocative short story about youth, longing, and visionary intensity (for a lovely reading of it along those lines, see Calder 2003:

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289–91), but the haunting desire to enter a closed or inaccessible masculine space that runs through both “The Old Saloon” and “The Library Window” can illuminate the sense of nostalgia and belatedness that also runs through Oliphant’s presentations of Edinburgh in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. The problem is not that, like Henry Grey Graham, she relegates women strictly to a quiet and decorative background. While women are definitely secondary in her account of Edinburgh, they are present; indeed, in the elegiac passage quoted above about the world of Scott, Jeffrey, and Blackwood’s, the section that I omitted focuses entirely on them. “[O]ther figures had risen to diversify the scene”, Oliphant writes after noting the subsidence of the furor over The Edinburgh Review: Miss Ferrier, the author of Marriage and The Inheritance, books which secured Scott’s warm admiration and have continued their hold upon the succeeding generations – a Scotch Miss Austen, with a broader perception of the ludicrous and a less delicate touch, but much of the same minute and graphic power; Mrs. Grant of Laggan, a woman to whose recollections we are indebted for many particulars of the cheerful breadth of Edinburgh society at this its most brilliant period, and whose Letters from the Mountains helped to make the Highlands known in their homelier modern aspect; and many more secondary singers and gentle essayists. (Oliphant 1882: 2: 201–2).

Elsewhere in the book, she devotes more detailed attention to Ferrier and notes that Ferrier’s fiction, which she admires a great deal, “had a predecessor” in The Cottagers of Glenburnie. Even while being somewhat deprecating about Hamilton’s achievement – “she produced little” (her publications in fact outnumber Ferrier’s three to one), and the Cottagers is “too distinctly a story written with a purpose, and that a very homely one, to take a high place in art” – Oliphant praises her “insight into Scottish character” and her “humorous treatment of its characteristic shortcomings” (Oliphant 1882: 3: 207). Two of the three figures at the centre of this study thus make at least a tangential appearance in Oliphant’s history, and even if it is disappointing that Oliphant pays no attention to Johnstone – unquestionably the most important woman in the world of the British periodical press in the decades before Oliphant began her work for Blackwood’s – the anonymity of much of Johnstone’s work makes her omission unsurprising. Yet their appearance remains very much a tangent, not just to the men of that world, but even to Susan Ferrier, the one woman to whom Oliphant pays detailed attention. Hamilton (whose

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ambitious non-fiction and satire Oliphant appears not to know) is presented as a mere forerunner of Ferrier, while Grant is a lesser and background chronicler of the society that Ferrier elevates to art in her fiction. Meanwhile, the nameless “secondary singers and gentle essayists” – the adjectives and the decision to mention them immediately after Grant and Ferrier imply that Oliphant had at least some women in mind – fade entirely into the background, lost in the “wit”, the “daring”, and the “noise” of their male contemporaries. That might be in part because while Oliphant sees the sociability of the Edinburgh of that time as a key factor in shaping the distinctive quality of its literature, she imagines that sociability, very literally, in terms of a men’s club – a saloon, rather than a salon, as Robinson notes, quoting Elisabeth Jay (Robinson 2005: 201). To state the obvious, it is a metaphor that leaves no place for women except as observers, looking on in bemusement or amusement at a world that is defined precisely by the fact that they can never be full participants. The value that Oliphant finds in that world lies in the sort of noisy energy produced by the joyous us-against-the-world camaraderie that she sees in the Edinburgh and Blackwood’s wits and in the sense of exclusivity that is produced through that self-enclosed fellowship. Whether the excluded are the aristocrats panting for a glimpse of a bookseller’s manuscript or the belated admirers longing for a place among the ghosts in the library, it is through her representation of its appeal to outsiders that Oliphant suggests most strongly the power of that literary world. And women, of course, are the easiest and most obvious group to represent as being excluded. Even Ferrier, the one woman who is an undoubted insider in Oliphant’s version of Edinburgh literary society, participates uneasily and only temporarily. As Oliphant stresses in both Annals of a Publishing House and The Literary History of England, Ferrier not only took real pains to conceal her authorship at the time of publication but, late in life, regretted that she had published at all. The point becomes even more striking if one moves from biography back to metaphor, as Oliphant’s anecdote about Ferrier receiving her proofs as if they were “clandestine loveletters” firmly, if only implicitly, takes her writing out of the sociable world of Ambrose’s Tavern, or even of “Maga’s” Library, and sends it back to the ultimate feminine privacy of the boudoir. Oliphant’s various narratives about Edinburgh literary life thus offer a richly metaphorical account of the society, one that is different

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in many respects from those offered by late twentieth-century readings of the growth of literary professionalism. Indeed, her vision comes much closer to being one that celebrates gentlemanly amateurism. She is, admittedly, gently amused by Jeffrey’s “bewildering” idea that he would be “doing something beneath his dignity” by “accepting pay for his literary services” (Oliphant 1882: 2: 72–73), and given the fact that Oliphant wrote herself into exhaustion in order to support herself and various family members, it is unsurprising that she would be inclined to mock any writer, male or female, who was daintily fastidious about accepting reasonable payment for work. That said, her placement of the Blackwood’s and Edinburgh wits in the world of the library and the tavern, rather than that of the office or the printing house, implicitly aligns her vision of their literary work with the model of leisurely debate and discussion that Jeffrey is so reluctant to abandon, even for a desperately needed salary. While speculating about a writer’s literary choices is ultimately pointless, one might suggest that Oliphant’s hard-driven professionalism could in part explain why she found the vision of the supposed leisured literary sociability of an earlier generation of male periodical writers both so appealing and so inaccessible. All speculation aside, however, what remains clear in her narratives of literary Edinburgh is that Oliphant had no interest in placing herself in the tradition of the women whom she relegates to the necessary, but secondary, role of admiring audience and curious observers. Instead, as she places herself among the “noble shades” in the library, she aligns her own literary work with that of the leisured men, rather than with that of the passively watchful women. Yet however much her narrative might seem, in doing so, to contribute to the all-too familiar “great forgetting” of women, it also suggests, in its differences from those of both her contemporaries and our own, how many ways of reconstructing the literary world the Edinburgh of that period are possible, and how varied and nuanced the tactics by which nineteenth-century women might construct a place for themselves in the literary world. Margaret Oliphant might not have found much room in her literary history for Grant or Hamilton, or any at all for Johnstone, but as they made their own ways into the metaphorical literary men’s clubs that she so lovingly evokes, they anticipate her in far more ways than she was willing to recognise.

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Index Addison, Joseph, 34 Agrippina, 116–23 Aiken, Lucy, 94, 101 Alexander, William, 108 Alison, Archibald, 98, 102–3 Anderson, Robert, 26, 27, 36 Apreece, Jane (Lady Davy), 98, 101– 2 Armstrong, Eva V., 83 Armstrong, Nancy, 113 Aspinall, Arthur, 96 Austen, Henry, 56 Austen, Jane, 44, 55–59, 63, 65, 67, 69, 88, 231, 265, 294 Austen-Leigh, James, 56, 63, 67 Austin, Sarah, 94 Axtell, James, 176 Bage, Robert, 176 Baillie, Joanna, 137, 143, 152, 212 Banks, Joseph, Sir, 82 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 148 Barnard, Anne, Lady, 22 Beattie, James, 51 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 152 Behn, Aphra, 230 Bell, Andrew, 58 Benger, Elizabeth, 65–76, 78, 84–86, 98, 106, 132, 215 Bennett, John, 108, 130 Bertram, James Glass, 216, 226, 251, 254, 265, 268–69 Binhammer, Katherine, 65 Blacklock, Thomas, 50, 52 Blackwood, William, 213–15, 217– 18, 221, 232, 244, 255, 282 Blair, Hugh, 67 Blair, Robert, 51 Blake, Katherine, 86 Boswell, James, 50–51, 67, 135, 172– 73, 175 Boyd, George, 207, 216–20, 223, 225, 229, 281, 283–86 Boyle, Robert, 202 Braidshaigh, Dorothy, Lady, 128 Brooke, Frances, 21

Brougham, Henry, 95–96, 233–34, 253, 255, 259–60, 263–70 Brown, Thomas, 101 Brunton, Mary, 14, 20, 22, 59, 71, 154, 168, 179, 180, 188–89, 190– 91, 231–32, 276–77 Budd, Adam, 51 Burney, Frances, 16, 21, 42–43, 71, 90, 112–13, 121, 154, 157, 158, 231–32 Burnham, Michelle, 176 Burns, Robert, 72, 138, 141, 152, 160, 162, 211–12 Burt, Edmund, 170–71 Butler, Marilyn, 94–96, 103 Buxton, Priscilla, 94 Buzard, James, 136, 177, 187, 190, 206 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 17, 93, 95, 155, 215, 220, 253 Campbell, Harriette, 273–74 Campbell, Jean, 209 Campbell, Thomas, 155 Carlyle, Jane, 40 Carlyle, Thomas, 226–27, 247 Carr, John, Sir, 200 Carruthers, Robert, 214, 216 Carter, Elizabeth, 37, 39, 148 Chalmers, George, 198 Chalmers, James, 281–83 Chapman, Malcolm, 178 Chapone, Hester, 37, 62, 281 Charvat, William, 95 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 176 Chesterfield, Philip Stanhope, Lord, 50 Christie, Thomas, 253 Chudleigh, Mary, Lady, 28 Clarke, Norma, 230 Clay, Stephen, 28–29 Cobbett, William, 93, 245–46 Cockburn, Alison, 22, 31 Cockburn, Henry, 13–14, 20, 32–33, 36–38, 40–41, 98–100, 156

316 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 18, 93, 207, 272 Colley, Linda, 176–78 Conolly, M.F., 251 Constable, Archibald, 44–45, 155 Conybeare, John, 160 Cooper, James Fenimore, 176–77 Copeland, Edward, 42, 288 Crabbe, George, 155 Crawford, Adair, 84–85, 287 Crawford, Alexander, 85, 99 Crawford, Eleanor, 85 Crawford, George, 89 Crawford, Mary Ann, 85 Crawford, Robert, 16 Crawford, Stewart, Dr., 85 Creech, William, 35–36 Croker, John Wilson, 90 Curran, Stuart, 94 D’Israeli, Isaac, 154 Daiches, David, 172 Davis, Leith, 16 Davy, Humphry, Sir, 79–83 Deffand, Madame du, 101–2, 144, 248–49 Deischer, Claude K., 83 Demos, John, 176 DeQuincey, Thomas, 226–27, 247, 262 Devine, T.M., 169 Dickens, Charles, 263 Didier, Franklin James, 38–39, 41 Donaghue, Frank, 43, 44, 252, 253 Donne, John, 204 Duncan, Ian, 20, 218, 232, 235, 238– 39 Dwyer, John, 28–29 Easley, Alexis, 20, 227 Eastlake, Elizabeth, Lady, 143 Eden, Emily, 231 Edgeworth, Maria, 23, 55, 58, 60, 62– 63, 69, 79, 94, 101, 124–25, 137, 190, 203, 242, 272–73, 277–78 Elibank, Lord (Alexander Murray), 51 Elizabeth of Bohemia, 117 Elkins, James, 200

Index Ewbank, Miss, 59–62, 79, 81–82, 84, 97 Ezell, Margaret J.M., 147, 160 Fabian, Johannes, 174 Favret, Mary, 61 Feldman, Paula, 232 Ferguson, Adam, 51, 173 Ferrier, Susan Edmonstone, 14–15, 19–20, 22, 32–33, 179–81, 188– 90, 215, 232, 244, 272–73, 277, 294–95 Ferris, Ina, 238, 246 Finlay, Lucy, 219 Fletcher, Eliza, 25–27, 40–41, 98– 100, 157, 199 Foscolo, Ugo, 94 Foucault, Michel, 229 Friedan, Betty, 75 Fry, Michael, 169 Gallagher, Catherine, 208, 229–30 Galt, John, 36, 229 Garnett, Thomas, 80–81, 83 Geddes, Alexander, 76 Geddes, Jenny, 211, 241–42 Gillespie, A., Miss, 285–86 Gilmartin, Kevin, 64 Gisborne, Thomas, 108 Glassell, Joan (Lady John Campbell), 199, 204, 289 Godwin, William, 57, 61, 86–87, 90, 92, 215, 258 Goldsmith, Oliver, 61, 174, 191 Gordon, Jane (Duchess of Gordon), 161 Graham, Henry Grey, 13–14, 37–38, 180, 291, 294 Graham, Maria, 98 Grant of Rothiemurchus, Elizabeth, 143, 198 Grant, Anne, 14–15, 20, 22–26, 32, 35–37, 41, 49, 81, 96–99, 102, 135–206 passim, 212, 215, 230– 32, 244, 247, 249, 281–82, 287– 91, 294–96 Grant, Duncan, 165, 289, 290 Grant, John Peter, 165, 198–99, 290 Grant, Mary, 146–49, 199 Green, Sarah, 168, 235

Index Gregory, George, 86–87 Gregory, John, 110, 281 Griffin, Robert J., 229, 236–37, 280 Grogan, Claire, 64, 89 Guest, Harriet, 15, 37 Habermas, Jürgen, 26 Halifax, George Savile, First Marquess of, 30, 110, 111 Hamilton, Alexander, 200 Hamilton, Basil, 272 Hamilton, Charles, 70 Hamilton, Charles (brother), 73–75, 86, 131 Hamilton, Elizabeth, 14–15, 20, 22– 23, 25, 40–41, 55–134 passim, 215, 231, 233, 234, 264–65, 278– 79, 281–82, 287–88, 291, 294, 296 Hamilton, Elizabeth (Schuyler), 200 Hanway, Mary Ann, 174 Harding, D.W., 57 Hartley, David, 69 Hastings, Warren, 61 Hatsell, John, 96, 149 Hawkins, Laetitia Matilda, 62 Hays, Mary, 87–90, 94, 97, 114 Hazlitt, William, 253 Hemans, Felicia, 63 Hogg, James, 229, 234–35, 243–44 Holland, Henry, 98–102 Holmes, Richard, 79–80 Home, John, 31, 50, 200 Hook, Theodore, 255, 272 Horner, Francis, 44–45, 95, 99 Howitt, Mary, 226 Hume, David, 30, 31, 51, 67, 91–92 Hunt, Leigh, 247–249 Isted, Rose, 89 Izett, Eliza, 231 James of the Glen, 192 Jay, Elisabeth, 295 Jeffrey, Francis, 23, 39–41, 44–46, 77, 94–107, 125, 141, 142, 144, 146–47, 149, 165, 199, 233–34, 248–49, 253, 266, 290–91, 292, 294, 296 Johnson, Samuel, 39, 135, 172–74, 176, 178, 196, 211

317 Johnstone, Christian, 20, 22–23, 27, 40, 137, 152, 168, 175, 181, 189– 90, 200, 205, 207–80 passim, 282, 287–88, 292, 294, 296 Johnstone, John, 210, 213–16, 218– 21, 223–24, 226, 229, 237, 254, 257–60, 287 Johnstone, Sophia, 33 Jones, Edward, 160 Jones, John Paul, 207, 217, 223–24, 228, 248, 280 Justice, George, 15, 37 Kames, Henry Home, Lord, 51, 66, 68–69, 75, 106, 113 Kelly, Gary, 64, 88–89, 119 Kelly, Joan, 23 Kiernan, V.G., 178 Kingsley, Mary, 136 Klein, Lawrence E., 26 Kucich, Greg, 121 Lamb, Caroline, Lady, 91 Lancaster, Joseph, 58 Landry, Donna, 157 Lavoisier, Antoine, 79, 85 Leadbetter, Mary, 115 Leask, Nigel, 64 Leneman, Leah, 210–11 Lennox, Charlotte, 21, 176 Lespinasse, Julie de, 248, 249 Liston, Harriet (Henrietta), 98, 162, 163 Locke, John, 69, 108–109, 112, 117, 202, 265 Lockhart, John Gibson, 39–40, 234– 35, 244, 253, 255, 266, 293 Looser, Devoney, 15, 121 Loudon, Margaret, 147 Lucan, Earl of, 97 Lyttleton, William, Lord, 50 Macaulay, Catharine, 108–10 Macdonald, Alexander, Sir, 173 Mackay, Katherine, 70 Mackenzie, George, Sir, 99 Mackenzie, Henry, 21, 36, 51, 67, 99 Mackintosh, James, 253 Maclehose, Agnes, 22 Macneill, Hector, 68, 75–76, 98, 109, 234

318 Macpherson, James, 135, 171–72, 175, 180 Madison, James, 95 Maginn, William, 255 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 136 Manning, Susan, 17, 177 Manson, Mr., 77–78 Marishall, Jean, 13, 15, 19, 21–22, 36, 45–53, 154, 231, 286, 288–89 Marshall, Francis, 47 Marshall, Mr., 72–73 Marshall, Mrs, 70–74, 109, 110 Martin, Martin, 172 Maturin, Charles Robert, 215 McCliesh, Elisabeth, 209 McCliesh, Thomas, 209–10 McGann, Jerome, 237 McGuirk, Carol, 152 McNeil, Kenneth, 183 Mellor, Anne, 23, 64–65 Melton, James Van Hom, 211 Millar, Agnes, 281–86 Millar, Robina, 40 Miller, Karl, 233 Milne, Christian, 153–54, 156, 159 Mitford, Mary Russell, 142 Monboddo, James Burnett, Lord, 31 Monnickendam, Andrew, 20, 209, 212, 238, 241 Monro, Alexander, 109 Monro, Margaret, 109–10 Montagu, Elizabeth, 37, 248 Montagu, Elizabeth, Lady (Duchess of Buccleuch), 156 Montagu, Mary Wortley, Lady, 109 Montesquieu, Baron de, 61 Moore, Thomas, 95, 253 More, Hannah, 15, 62, 114–15, 124, 156–57, 262 Morgan, Susan, 185, 187 Morgan, Sydney, 194–95 Morris, R.J., 288, 289 Moyes, Henry, 78–84, 103 Muir, Thomas, 96 Mure of Caldwell, Elizabeth (1714– 95), 33–36 Murray, John, 285 Murray, Sarah, 169

Index Nairne, Lady (Carolina Oliphant), 143 Napier, Macvey, 96–99, 104 Narain, Mona, 64 Newton, Isaac, Sir, 202 North, Christopher (John Wilson), 226, 234–36, 244, 251, 255, 293 Norton, Andrews, 139, 141, 143–45, 151, 199 Oliphant, Margaret, 232, 291–96 Opie, Amelia, 152 Oughton, General, 50, 52 Ourry, Anne (Nancy), 195–96 Owen, Robert, 275 Parker, Mark, 252–53 Peacock, Thomas Love, 93 Phillips, Katherine, 230 Phillips, Mark, 64 Pichot, Amédée, 17 Playfair, John, 98, 102 Poovey, Mary, 56 Pope, Alexander, 34, 43, 191, 204 Porter, Agnes, 97, 140 Priestley, Joseph, 82 Queen Charlotte Sophia, 47 Radcliffe, Ann, 121, 197 Raeburn, Henry, Sir, 212 Rajan, Balachandra, 64 Raleigh, John Henry, 17 Ramsay, Allan (poet), 28 Rauch, Alan, 263 Reid, Hugo, Mrs, 218 Reid, Thomas, 23, 103, 120 Rendall, Jane, 64, 119 Richardson, John, 176 Robinson, George, 287–88 Robinson, Mary, 148 Robinson, Solveig C., 293, 295 Rogers, Samuel, 204 Rose, Elizabeth, 21, 51 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 111–12, 113, 210, 248, 250, 265 Rowe, Elizabeth Singer, 230 Rowlandson, Thomas, 79 Sales, George, 160 Schaw, Janet, 68 Schellenberg, Betty, 16, 19, 24, 37 Scott, Caroline Lucy, 273–74

Index Scott, John, 253 Scott, Sarah, 21 Scott, Walter, Sir, 14, 17, 19, 23, 27, 31, 36, 77, 96, 98, 137, 153–55, 168–69, 175–90, 192–94, 199– 200, 204–5, 211–12, 215, 232–33, 237–39, 241–43, 244, 246–47, 253, 269–70, 290–92, 294 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 117 Seward, Anna, 148, 248 Shelley, Mary, 24 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 24 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 154 Siddons, Sarah, 154, 272 Simpson, Kenneth, 176 Siskin, Clifford, 16, 18–19, 23–24, 48, 55–56, 93, 96, 136, 252–53 Smith, Adam, 51, 82, 208, 263, 275– 78 Smith, Charlotte, 36–38, 132, 162, 211 Smith, Peter, 286 Smith, Sydney, 45, 100 Smollett, Tobias, 19, 27 Smout, T.C., 172 Somerville, Mary, 109 Southey, Robert, 18, 155, 272 Spence, Elizabeth Isabella, 25, 27, 32, 124–25, 154, 156–57, 169, 213, 225–26, 241 Spencer, Jane, 113 Staël, Madame de, 63, 94 Stanley, Maria, Lady, 140 Stevens, G.M., Mrs, 284 Stevens, Mrs., 286 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 177, 192 Stewart, Alexander, 192 Stewart, Dugald, 23, 98–99, 101, 103–107, 113, 115, 117, 120–122, 126, 173 Strutt, Elizabeth, 219 Stuart, Arabella, Lady, 66 Stuart, Louisa, Lady, 156 Sutherland, John, 153 Swift, Jonathan, 34, 86–87 Tacitus, Publius Cornelius, 119

319 Tait, William, 216, 222, 226, 236, 251, 254, 265, 268–69 Talbot, Catherine, 37 Talbot, Mary, Lady, 140 Taylor, Susan B., 64 Thaddeus, Janice, 63–64 Thomson, George, 138, 140–41, 148– 53, 158, 161–63, 166, 191, 196– 97, 206, 212 Thomson, John, 234 Tillotson, John, Bishop, 30 Tod, Alexander, 198 Tod, James, 209 Topham, Edward, Major, 31 Trench, Melesina, 198 Troup, George, 227 Trumpener, Katie, 238 Ty, Eleanor, 64 Tytler, Sarah, 13 Voltaire, 176, 177 Walker, Gina Luria, 87–90 Wallis, P.J., 160 Watson, Jean L., 13 Watt, James, 83, 93 Welsh, Alexander, 187 West, Jane, 15, 62, 115, 129 Wharton, Edith, 63 Wheeler, Roxann, 174, 176, 178 Wilkes, Charlotte, 95 Williams, Eunice, 176 Williams, Helen Maria, 148 Wilson, James Grant, 141, 143 Wilson, John. See Christopher North Wolfe, James, 239 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 23, 57, 65, 87, 90, 94, 97, 109, 112, 114, 123, 264, 265 Womack, Peter, 169 Woodmansee, Martha, 18, 23 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 24, 169, 226 Wordsworth, William, 18, 24, 95, 149 Wright, Joseph, 79 Wright, Raymond, 93 Yearsley, Ann, 156–57, 159

The Cottagers

of Glenburnie and other educational writings by

ELIZABETH HAMILT £9.95

Paperback

978-0-948877-86-5

2010

Edited by Pam Perkins The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808), with its vivid depictions – and biting satires – of Scottish peasant life, is a lively and entertaining tale that skilfully discusses and dissects class issues, British imperialism, and war. Edited by Pam Perkins, this edition comes with a glossary and notes for scholars and students. Also included here are three examples of Hamilton’s non-fiction: Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education (1801); Memoirs of the Life of Agrippina, Wife of Germanicus (1804); and Letters Addressed to the Daughter of a Nobleman (1806). All three present different aspects of Hamilton’s educational theories. Taken together, these works show how, despite its ostensibly simple plot and style, Glenburnie brings together the political and social concerns of the day with the Scottish Enlightenment interest in theories of the mind and of moral education on which Hamilton drew throughout her career. THE ASSOCIATION FOR SCOTTISH LITERARY STUDIES

www.asls.org.uk