Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland 9780748646432

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GENDER AND ENLIGHTENMENT CULTURE IN EIGHTEENTH-­­CENTURY SCOTLAND

SCOTTISH HISTORICAL REVIEW MONOGRAPHS SERIES No. 22

Scottish Historical Review Monographs are major works of scholarly research covering all aspects of Scottish history. They are selected and sponsored by the Scottish Historical Review Trust Editorial Board. The Trustees of the SHR Trust are: Dr Alex Woolf (Convenor); Dr Alison Cathcart (Secretary); Dr E. V. Macleod (Minutes Secretary); Dr Catriona M. M. Macdonald; Dr David Ditchburn; Mrs Patricia Whatley; Dr Karly Kehoe; Dr Jackson Armstrong; Dr Martin Macgregor; Mr Brian Smith; Dr James E. Fraser; Dr Andrew Mackillop. CURRENT AND FORTHCOMING VOLUMES   1  Helen M. Dingwall   2  Ewen A. Cameron  3 Richard Anthony   4  R. Andrew McDonald   5  John R. McIntosh  6 Graeme Morton   7  Catriona M. M. Macdonald   8  James L. MacLeod  9 John Finlay 10  William Kenefick 11  J. J. Smyth 12  Roland Tanner 13  Ginny Gardner 14  Allan W. MacColl 15  Andrew G. Newby 16  Karen J. Cullen 17  Annemarie Hughes 18  Annie Tindley 19  Tanja Bueltmann 20  Edda Frankot 21  Kyle Hughes 22  Rosalind Carr

Physicians, Surgeons and Apothecaries: Medicine in Seventeenth-­Century Edinburgh Land for the People? The British Government and the Scottish Highlands, c. 1880–1923 Herds and Hinds: Farm Labour in Lowland Scotland, 1900–1939 The Kingdom of the Isles: Scotland’s Western Seaboard, c. 1100–1336 Church and Theology in Enlightenment Scotland: The Evangelical Party, 1740–1800 Unionist-­Nationalism: Governing Urban Scotland, 1830–1860 The Radical Thread: Political Change in Scotland. Paisley Politics, 1885–1924 The Second Disruption: The Free Church in Victorian Scotland and the Origins of the Free Presbyterian Church Men of Law in Pre-­Reformation Scotland ‘Rebellious and Contrary’: The Glasgow Dockers, c. 1853–1932 Labour in Glasgow, 1896–1936, Socialism, Suffrage, Sectarianism The Late Medieval Scottish Parliament: Politics and the Three Estates, 1424–1488 ‘Shaken Together in the Bag of Affliction’: Scottish Exiles in the Netherlands, 1660–1690 Land, Faith and the Crofting Community: Christianity and Social Criticism in the Highlands of Scotland, 1843–1893 Ireland, Radicalism and the Scottish Highlands, c. 1870–1912 Famine in Scotland: The ‘Ill Years’ of the 1690s Gender and Political Identities in Scotland, 1919–1939 The Sutherland Estate, 1850–1920: Aristocratic Decline, Estate Management and Land Reform Scottish Ethnicity and the Making of New Zealand Society, 1850–1930 ‘Of Laws of Ships and Shipmen’: Medieval Maritime Law and its Practice in Urban Northern Europe The Scots in Victorian and Edwardian Belfast: A Study in Elite Migration Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-­Century Scotland

www.euppublishing.com/series/shrm

GENDER AND ENLIGHTENMENT CULTURE IN EIGHTEENTH-­ CENTURY SCOTLAND

ROSALIND CARR

© Rosalind Carr, 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10/12 ITC New Baskerville by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP Record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4642 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 4643 2 (webready PDF) The right of Rosalind Carr to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents Acknowledgementsvi List of Abbreviationsviii Introduction: Gender and Scottish Enlightenment Culture 1 Masculinity, Homosociality and Intellectual Culture 2 Women and Intellectual Culture 3 Urbane and Urban Sociability in Enlightenment Edinburgh 4 Enlightened Violence? Elite Manhood and the Duel Conclusion

1 36 73 102 142 175

Bibliography180 Index197

Acknowledgements This book began life as part of a PhD thesis on gender and national identity, supported by scholarships from the University of Glasgow and the Overseas Research Students Awards Agency. As important as financial support was the productive scholarly environment at the University of Glasgow. Particular thanks go to Colin Kidd who helped supervise the thesis, and Thomas Munck who examined it. Both provided valuable feedback and direction to my work on the Scottish Enlightenment. Members of the Centre for Gender History at Glasgow also provided advice and support. I am also thankful to members of Sheffield University’s History Department where I spent a short time. My current colleagues at the University of East London deserve thanks for their support too. I owe special thanks to Karen Harvey and Matthew McCormack who both read drafts of chapters of this book, and to the anonymous reviewers who gave useful feedback on the initial book proposal. My series editor, Andrew Mackillop also provided valuable guidance. The most thanks must go to Lynn Abrams, Jane Rendall and Katie Barclay. As my PhD supervisor at Glasgow, Lynn fostered and directed this research. She helped me clarify and develop my initial ideas, and her support and advice has continued long after the viva was passed. My external PhD examiner, Jane Rendall has also supported the project throughout. I am particularly grateful for Jane’s insightful and productive comments on the draft of this book. Also reading the draft in its entirety was Katie Barclay, who, as a scholarly colleague and friend, has provided unquantifiable support to this project. Special thanks also go to my partner Kate Worland, who has been a source of constant encouragement and a great research assistant. Likewise, my parents, Angela Mander-­Jones and Stephen Carr have always encouraged and supported me. Like a lot of eighteenth-­century Scots, my career has taken me from Glasgow to London, and the research for this book was conducted at the National Records of Scotland, the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh City Archives, Edinburgh Central Library, Glasgow University Library, Edinburgh University Library, the British Library and Senate House Library. I would like to thank the staff at all institutions for their assistance, as well as the staff at Edinburgh University Press who have been extremely helpful during the book’s production. I am also grateful for Sir Robert Clerk of Penicuik’s permission to quote from the papers of the Penicuik family, held by the National Records of Scotland.

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Acknowledgements vii Thanks are due also to the Strathmartine Trust, Scouloudi Foundation and University of East London, who all provided research funding towards this project. The research also benefited from a postdoctoral fellowship with Edinburgh University’s Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, and I would like to thank the other scholars at the Institute for their stimulating conversation, particularly the late Susan Manning. Comments from conference participants on my research papers covering themes explored in this book have made a significant contribution to the following chapters. There are many others, too numerous to name, whose conversations have influenced my thinking on Scottish history, feminism and other topics. As with the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, this book has been forged in a collective, sociable intellectual culture. Any errors of fact or judgement, however, are entirely my own.

Abbreviations ECA ECL EUL GUL NLS NRS

Edinburgh City Archives Edinburgh Central Library Edinburgh University Library Glasgow University Library National Library of Scotland National Records of Scotland

Introduction: Gender and Scottish Enlightenment Culture If we limit our view of Enlightenment to a published canon and disregard its social contexts, we ignore the conditions in which ideas were formed and disseminated. We also forfeit the possibility of recognising and understanding the full scope of women’s contribution. In this book the Scottish Enlightenment is understood as an often disparate ideological and cultural movement unified by a discourse of improvement. Improvement should be understood as an imperative to achieve and maintain social progress. This imperative underpinned Scottish Enlightenment thought, not least the philosophy of two of its most influential protagonists, Adam Smith and David Hume. More than a philosophical movement, the epistemological changes wrought by Enlightenment cannot be separated from the economic and social developments that occurred in eighteenth-­ century Scotland, from the establishment of a theatre in Edinburgh to the building of planned villages in the Highlands.1 During the eighteenth century, Scotland experienced massive economic and demographic change. Agricultural modernisation and post-­ Union access to the markets of the British Empire increased urban commercial wealth and funded early industrialisation. This in turn encouraged urbanisation. In 1750, only one in eight people lived in towns with populations of 10,000 or more, but during the next century Scotland underwent urbanisation at one of the fastest rates in Europe, so that by 1850 one-­third of the population lived in towns. These emerging urban centres were key sites for the enactment of a Scottish politics aimed at the economic and moral improvement of Scotland in the context of the country’s membership in the British state.2 Yet there were continuities too, and political culture in 1

Christopher J. Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997); Anad C. Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History (London: Croom Helm, 1976); Bruce P. Lenman, Enlightenment and Change: Scotland 1746–1832 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). 2 Bob Harris, ‘The Scots, the Westminster Parliament and the British State in the eighteenth century’, in Julian Hoppit (ed.), Parliaments, Nations and Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1660–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 124; Thomas M. Devine, The Scottish Nation 1700–2000 (London: Penguin, 1999), 106–8; Christopher A. Whatley, Scottish Society 1707–1830: Beyond Jacobitism, Towards Industrialisation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).

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Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

Scotland remained an elite culture. The landed aristocracy and gentry were keen participants in agricultural and urban improvement, and there were typically strong family connections between these groups and the ­professionals who achieved dominance in city political life. The chapters that follow will examine the social impact of this emerging urban culture, and investigate its cyclical connections with Enlightenment thought. To do this, I focus on the performance of gender identities in the spaces most readily associated with the Scottish Enlightenment, namely, intellectual societies and convivial clubs, public debating societies, the theatre, and assemblies. With the aim of understanding the Scottish Enlightenment’s place in broader urban culture, I also examine drunkenness and prostitution. Rejecting the idea of a monolithic Enlightenment that produced hegemonic gender identities, the final chapter will explore the relationship between Enlightenment thought and elite male violence, particularly the duel. Taking my lead from Joan Scott’s seminal essay on the practice of gender history, I am interested in women and femininity, and men and masculinity. I also adopt her poststructuralist approach, moving from ‘ideas about appropriate roles for women and men’, to an analysis of ‘why these relationships [between the sexes] are constructed as they are, how they work, or how they change’.3 Rather than using gender only to understand the construction of sexual difference and inequality, Scott implores historians to employ gender as an analytical category, as key to the signifying systems by which societies ‘articulate the rules of social relationships or construct the meaning of experience’.4 Scott bases her definition of gender as an analytical category upon two integrally connected propositions: that ‘gender is a constitutive element of social relations based upon perceived differences between the sexes and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power’.5 This definition of gender and its application as an analytical category allows for an analysis of the articulation of power. This analysis concerns not only explicit ideologies of gender, but also the implicit use of gender as one of a number of discursive means by which power is signified. In this book I interrogate the processes by which ideas of masculine and feminine identity signified improvement and civility in Scotland. I am also influenced by Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. Butler defines performativity as ‘the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names’.6 By reiterative Butler is referring to a cyclical, self-­referential process by which gender is articulated 3

Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 32–3. 4 Ibid., 38. 5 Ibid., 42. 6 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London: Routledge, 1993), 2.

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Introduction 3

through its bodily performance; we are woman or man not because of a pre-­existing sexual difference, but because this is signified through our performance of gender. As Butler states: ‘That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality.’7 Performativity enables gender signification, and presents gender as naturalised (as originating in the body) via the repetitive and communal performance of gender identities. Gender therefore becomes culturally intelligible through performativity, which itself is understood ‘as that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains’.8 Gender was (and is) a crucial component of people’s individual and communal identities, and therefore an examination of the performance of gender provides a means to address the impact of Scottish Enlightenment discourse on the lived experience of the eighteenth century. A focus on performativity also draws attention to the various ways in which people negotiated the discourses that defined appropriate male and female roles. Although influenced by R. W. Connell’s pioneering work on the history of masculinity, like other historians of the eighteenth century I am uncomfortable with his notion of hegemonic masculinity.9 Most work on eighteenth-­century masculinity has focused on the refined gentleman, presenting different takes on a well-­founded argument that the interaction of economic, social, cultural, and epistemological changes during the eighteenth century, contained within the development of commercialism, Enlightenment ideology and polite society, led to the development of a masculine ideal of a man of sensibility, a refined gentleman.10 This process did occur in Scotland, yet we should be wary of viewing this ideal of masculinity as hegemonic. Connell argues that hegemonic masculinity’s power is achieved via its definition against not only its dichotomous ­opposite – ­femininity – but also subordinated and marginalised masculinities, for example, homosexuals within twentieth-­century heteronormative culture.11 The caricature of the effeminate Fop provides an eighteenth-­century masculine identity that fits Connell’s model of subordinate m ­ asculinities, existing as an oppositional and dangerous identity, and serving to define virtuous male refinement as the desirable norm. Yet other masculinities 7

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999), 173. 8 Butler, Bodies that Matter, 2. 9 R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005). 10 John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late Eighteenth Century Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987); G. J Barker-­Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Michèle Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1996); Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660–1800 (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001). 11 Connell, Masculinities, 77–81.

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Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

performed by men should not necessarily be understood as subordinate; more than anything, the Fop was a stereotype. A significant problem with Connell’s model is that, in Matthew McCormack’s words, it is ‘difficult to characterise masculinity at any point in British history as a single dominant norm’.12 Rather than viewing one model of masculinity as hegemonic at various stages of history, McCormack contends that historically masculinity was not ‘monolithic or stable’, and we need to understand alternative masculinities to the dominant model on their own terms.13 The problematic nature of focusing on male refinement in representations of eighteenth-­ century British masculinity was raised in 2005 by Karen Harvey. She argued for the cultural and geographical specificity of the culture of male politeness, asserting that it excluded certain groups of men (for example, the labouring poor), and ignored the relationship between masculinity and war.14 As work on the masculinity of middling artisans has shown, masculine identity was class specific.15 It was also space specific, and in the following chapters I will explore the changing characteristics of elite men’s performance of manhood in different contexts, including tavern-­based homosociality that will be explored in Chapter 3, and the ritual of the duel that is the focus on Chapter 4. These performances of elite masculinity stand in contrast to, but were not entirely separate from, the masculine ideal of the refined gentleman, whose crucial place in intellectual culture will be examined in Chapter 1. Overall, I will show that whilst Scottish Enlightenment ideology acted to construct new gender identities for men and women suited to a commercial ‘civilised’ age, there was far more fluidity in acceptable notions of masculinity than there were with regard to femininity. Women’s femininity symbolised improvement, yet this gender identity was formulated by male writers, who tended to share and develop their ideas in homosocial intellectual spaces. As I will discuss in Chapter 2, women did participate in Scottish Enlightenment intellectual culture, but their participation was restricted by the requirements of femininity. Developing on this, Chapter 3 will investigate the means by which urban culture facilitated female publicity in the form of attendance at the theatre and the governing of assemblies. As I will explain below, women’s limited role in Scottish intellectual culture compared with other sites of Enlightenment, such as London and Paris, was produced by, and serves to signify, Scotland’s distinctiveness in the European Enlightenment. 12

Matthew McCormack, ‘Men, “the public” and political history’, in Matthew McCormack (ed.), Public Men: Masculinity and Politics in Modern Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 16. 13 McCormack, ‘Men, “the public” and political history’, 16. 14 Karen Harvey, ‘The history of masculinity, circa 1650–1800’, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005) 269–311. 15 Hannah Barker, ‘A grocer’s tale: class, gender and family in early nineteenth-­century Manchester’, Gender & History 21(2) (2009) 340–57.

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Introduction 5 Chronologically this book focuses on the period when the cultural impact of the Enlightenment became most manifest, namely, the 1750s through to the 1790s. In the 1750s, key Enlightenment institutions such as the Select Society were formed, and in the following decades they were joined by other intellectual societies, both elite and popular. Simultaneously, during these decades assemblies and the theatre became regular and morally acceptable features of the cultural landscape (at least in Edinburgh). Yet a narrow focus on these decades might provide a false notion of sudden change with a clear start and end point. The first half of the eighteenth century, and the seventeenth century before it, laid the foundations for the growing epistemological power of Enlightenment, and in the decades after 1790 the Enlightenment remained relevant, changing form whilst embedding its intellectual dominance. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, women had begun to claim a place in the public printed culture of Enlightenment. This presence makes their prior absence particularly stark. Although initially understood by feminist historians as the foundation of White men’s power in the modern period, within the historiography of gender and the eighteenth century there is now a tendency to emphasise the means by which Enlightenment discourse challenged female subordination, and to assert women’s cultural, intellectual, and political agency.16 Refuting Joan Landes’s thesis regarding the masculinisation of the French public sphere during the pre-­revolutionary period, Margaret Jacob cites examples of women’s public participation in Enlightenment in France, the Dutch Republic, England, Germany, and Scotland. Significantly, despite its inclusion, no evidence is provided for Scotland. This means that there is a weakness in Jacob’s conclusion that ‘in neither Edinburgh nor Paris should the burgeoning of the public sphere be construed as a defeat for women’.17 Jacob’s desire to rescue the Enlightenment for women is shared by Karen Offen, who writes that ‘we can – and must – reclaim the Enlightenment for feminism’, emphasising Enlightenment discourse that ‘openly critiqued the subordinate status of women’.18 Offen also looks to the development of a notion of patriotic motherhood as an important means by which Enlightenment ideas regarding female domesticity were deployed to claim a female citizenship.19 This line of argument is followed by Karen O’Brien, 16

See, for example, Carla Hesse (ed.), ‘Section 5: women in the enlightened republic of letters’, in Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 259–347; Margaret C. Jacob, ‘The mental landscape of the public sphere: a European perspective’, Eighteenth-­Century Studies 28(1) (1994) 95–113; Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-­ Century Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 27–49. 17 Jacob, ‘Mental landscape’, 108; Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). 18 Offen, European Feminisms, 27–9. 19 Ibid., 46–7.

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Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

who argues that Enlightenment discourse made nineteenth-­century feminism possible. It did not do this by advancing a feminist ideology itself, but instead through creating a ‘framework and language for understanding the gendered structures of society’.20 O’Brien demonstrates how the importance of the feminine to Enlightenment (especially Scottish Enlightenment) conceptions of progress created a space for women’s intellectual influence and enabled female writers, most notably Catherine Macaulay, to imagine a civic role for women.21 Yet, significantly, it was the English women of the British Enlightenment who obtained a public ­intellectual role through writing. The different character of women’s involvement in the Scottish Enlightenment compared with France, England and elsewhere indicates this Enlightenment’s specific national character. For decades debates have raged as to whether Scotland’s Enlightenment was an off-­shoot of an intellectual movement for which Paris formed the nucleus, if it formed a component of a British-­wide phenomenon, or if it was distinctly Scottish.22 In agreement with scholars such as Richard Sher, in this book I treat the Scottish Enlightenment as a specific geographical manifestation of a wider European movement that was a ‘grand symphony with multiple variants’.23 An emphasis on social-­and self-­improvement through knowledge acquisition and reason unified this disparate European Enlightenment, and the imperative of improvement also illustrates Scotland’s close relationship with the rest of Britain. Although not culturally colonised by England, the development of Enlightenment thought, particularly moral philosophy, was informed by English cultural developments, especially politeness. The  discourse of politeness was expressed and disseminated through English periodicals such as the Tatler (1709–11) and the Spectator (1711–12, 1714), which were reproduced in Edinburgh soon after their publication in London.24 Politeness was demonstrated by individual and social improvement, and it was manifested in new urban centres with paved streets, uniform neo-­classical architecture, assembly and concert halls, and shops selling luxury goods.25 A fluid concept, politeness encompassed much of 20

Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-­ Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 2. 21 O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment. 22 For a summary of this debate see Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and their Publishers in Eighteenth-­ Century Britain, Ireland and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 11–24. 23 Sher, Enlightenment and the Book, 15. 24 Nicholas Phillipson, ‘Politics, politeness, and the Anglicisation of early eighteenth-­century Scottish culture’, in R. A. Mason. (ed.), Scotland and England, 1286–1815 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), 235; Alexander Murdoch, ‘Scotland and the idea of Britain in the eighteenth century’, in Tom Devine and John R. Young (eds), Eighteenth-­Century Scotland: New Perspectives (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1999), 116; Berry, Scottish Enlightenment, 18. 25 Rosemary H. Sweet, ‘Topographies of politeness’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

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Introduction 7 eighteenth-­century culture. Yet, as Lawrence Klein contends, this fluidity increases rather than diminishes the usefulness of politeness in understanding eighteenth-­century Britain. It was the language that many people used to explain their world, and it illuminates the cyclical relationship between discourse and culture.26 Importantly, polite social interaction, consumption, and leisure activities in urban spaces such as coffeehouses and assemblies were principal conduits of self-­improvement. The emphasis on social and self-­improvement within Scottish Enlightenment thought was influenced by the ideology of politeness, and merged to create a discourse on sensibility and civility. This imperative to politeness and improvement in Scotland was manifested in the building of Edinburgh’s New Town. Designed in 1768 by James Craig, Edinburgh’s New Town incorporated neo-­classical architecture with orderly streets and promenades. It not only provided the spaces for the emerging urban culture, but was also forged by the discourses emanating from this culture. As R. A. Houston explains: ‘The New Town was a monument to prosperity and to changing ideas about architecture, environment and social values.’27 In this regard, the New Town was a physical manifestation of the Scottish Enlightenment. Proposing the building of a New Town in 1752, Gilbert Elliot, Lord Minto declared: ‘Among the several causes to which the prosperity of a nation may be ascribed, the situation, conveniency, and beauty of its capital are surely not the least considerable.’28 Elliot cites London as the example to which they should aspire, and writes: The meanness of edinburgh has been too long an obstruction to our improvement, and a reproach to scotland. The increase of our people, the extension of our commerce, and the honour of the nation, are all concerned in the success of this project.29

Reflecting a desire for Edinburgh to be equal to London, Elliot’s plans indicate a continuation of a Scottish identity within Britishness; an idea described by T. C. Smout as ‘concentric loyalties’.30 It also illustrates the connections between Scottish Enlightenment discourse and concrete political and social aims; moral and material improvement were inseparable. Yet, as will be discussed in Chapter 3, we should be wary of defining polite 12 (2002) 355–74; Helen Berry, ‘Polite consumption: shopping in eighteenth-­century England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 12 (2002) 375–94. 26 Lawrence Klein, ‘Politeness and the interpretation of the British eighteenth century’, Historical Journal 45(4) (2002) 869–98. 27 R. A. Houston, Social Change in the Age of Enlightenment, Edinburgh, 1660–1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 8. 28 Gilbert Elliot, Proposals for Carrying on certain Public Works in the City of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1752), 5. 29 Ibid., 24. 30 T. C. Smout, ‘Problems of nationalism, identity and improvement in later Enlightenment Scotland’, in Thomas M. Devine (ed.), Improvement and Enlightenment (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1989), 1–21.

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Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

culture in opposition to other aspects of urban culture, and the building of the New Town did not signal an abandonment of the Old.31 The imperative to improvement was not limited to Britain, and the Scottish Enlightenment operated in a broader European context with many literati participating in a Republic of Letters, which also spread across the Atlantic.32 The philosophy formulated in eighteenth-­century Scotland dealt therefore with ideas originating in Britain, and with those emanating from France and elsewhere. Yet the Scottish Enlightenment had certain distinctive characteristics, and it was in the Scottish institutions that survived Union, namely, the universities, the Church, and the law that most of the literati forged their careers. Although part of a broader European Enlightenment, the social and political context of the Scottish Enlightenment was different from that of other nations, especially the French. In comparison with France’s monarchical system of government, Scotland had limited constitutional democracy, and Scots (along with other Britons) enjoyed greater intellectual freedom than the French, particularly with regard to publication.33 Yet when examined in the context of women’s access to public intellectual culture, Scotland was more restrictive and its intellectual scene looks distinctively homosocial in comparison with France. In Paris, women, normally of noble rank, took a leading role in hosting the intellectual salons of the philosophes and developing these spaces as principal institutions in the Republic of Letters.34 The salon culture of Paris is perhaps atypical of the wider European Enlightenment, but elsewhere too there was more inclusion of women in formal and informal associational culture: for example, in London female intellectuals formed the Bluestocking circle, and in Madrid women convened the Junta de Damas, a relatively autonomous subgroup of the Royal Madrid Economic Society.35 By contrast, Scottish women were totally excluded from the intellectual societies of the literati. This greater exclusion was not because Scotland was necessarily any more patriarchal than other European nations; rather, it was a consequence of manifold other factors that made the Scottish situation distinctive, including the links between intellectual culture and pre-­existing male institutions 31

Charles McKean, ‘Improvement and modernisation in everyday Enlightenment Scotland’, in Elizabeth Foyster and Christopher A. Whatley (eds), A History of Everyday Life in Scotland, 1600 to 1800 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 65. 32 Richard B. Sher and Jeffrey Smitten (eds), Scotland and America in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Sher, Enlightenment and the Book, esp. chs 8 and 9. 33 Thomas Munck, The Enlightenment: A Comparative Social History 1721–1794 (London: Arnold, 2000), 111–28. 34 Dena Goodman, ‘Enlightenment salons: the convergence of female and philosophic ambitions’, Eighteenth-­Century Studies 22(3) (1989) 329–50. 35 Elizabeth Eger, Bluestockings: Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010); Teresa A. Smith, The Emerging Female Citizen: Gender and Enlightenment in Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

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Introduction 9 (particularly the universities and the Church). Of crucial significance was the importance placed on refined masculinity and modest femininity as symbols of Scottish improvement. Much of Scotland’s political and cultural context was shared with England, but the Scottish Enlightenment remained distinctive from the English. This is apparent in the important role played by the universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen in the Enlightenment compared with the relatively peripheral participation of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The gendered composition of enlightened intellectual culture was also different in the two countries. Women were not equal participants with men in England’s Enlightenment, but it is notable that two English women, Mary Wollstonecraft and Catherine Macaulay, could now vie for places in its published canon. No eighteenth-­century Scotswoman holds this distinction. A commitment to progress and the deployment of ideals of gendered behaviour as symbols of this progress was a common feature of Scottish Enlightenment writing, and the following sections of this Introduction will examine the development of gender ideals in this discourse. I begin with an analysis of discourses of progress and luxury, followed by a discussion of the relationship between civility and female domesticity. I then examine the concept of liberty and argue that an idea of manly liberty, combined with fears of male effeminacy, provided the ideological foundation for the formation of an exclusively male associational intellectual culture in Scotland. Progress and luxury The political and social developments of the eighteenth century, including urbanisation, the mechanisation of agriculture, the first stages of the Industrial Revolution, and a rise in the number and power of the professions, encouraged a re-­conceptualisation of the world, which in Scotland was expressed within Enlightenment discourse. The moral philosophy of the Enlightenment centred upon debates concerning humans’ innate moral sense, and discourses of progress typically asserted that this moral sense reached its greatest expression with commercial, self-­ proclaimed ‘civilised’ society. In contrast to the philosophes of the French Enlightenment, the Scottish literati emphasised the passions (feelings) and social customs over reason as the factors that shape individual behaviour and social norms.36 Rejecting the argument put forward by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651), Scottish Enlightenment discourse emphasised people’s propensity to form social bonds over self-­ interest and brutish competition. Often referred to as Common Sense philosophy, the emphasis on humans’ innate moral sense 36

Berry, Scottish Enlightenment, 7.

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Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

originated in the moral philosophy of Francis Hutcheson. Whilst the notion that human actions are informed by emotion (or the passions) rather than rationality alone was common to Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, there were significant disagreements concerning human nature. Whereas Hutcheson and later Thomas Reid emphasised people’s natural propensity to virtuous action based upon an inner moral sense, David Hume asserted that human emotions could encourage a person to act immorally or virtuously.37 Adam Smith, too, famously argued for the importance of self-­interest in motivating human action (most notably in economic exchange, as set out in Wealth of Nations, 1776), but his argument concerning humans’ need for social approbation of their actions in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) critiqued Hobbes’s notion of destructive individualism. Scholars of Smith now emphasise the need to understand Wealth of Nations in the context of his overall oeuvre, including Theory of Moral Sentiments and his Lectures on Jurisprudence (1976 [1762–3]). Read together, it is apparent that Smith considered self-­interest to be combined with an innate sympathy for others, and this underpinned an interdependency that encouraged social formation and motivated economic and social progress.38 In dominant Scottish Enlightenment discourse individual passions and behaviour, and community customs and habits, were deemed to be founded upon an innate moral sense, but their expression was dependent upon the mode of subsistence and the resulting political organisation and culture of different societies.39 Although not believed to be inevitable, the idea that progress was a linear process, moving from the ‘savage’ state towards ‘civilisation’, was a universal principle within Scottish Enlightenment discourse. This process was typically understood to operate according to the Four Stages model, a stadialist conception of history. This vision of history defined human progress as a process of development through four distinct stages: hunting, shepherding, agricultural, and commercial. As forms of subsistence changed through these stages, so did social institutions and manners. Commercial society was depicted as the final stage, with strong government and material wealth providing the social structures necessary for the growth of the sciences, the liberal arts, and a moral culture premised on cooperation, or sociability.40 Influenced by Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748), the stadialist approach to social and political progress was developed by Smith in his ‘Lectures on Jurisprudence’, delivered at the 37

Luigi Turco, ‘Moral sense and the foundation of morals’, in Alexander Broadie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 136–56. 38 Gavin Kennedy, Adam Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008); Knud Haakonssen (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (London: Penguin, 2011). 39 Berry, Scottish Enlightenment, 91–4. 40 Ibid., 94–113.

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Introduction 11

University of Glasgow and extrapolated in Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith’s ideas were further advanced by his student at Glasgow, John Millar in his The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771, revised 1779).41 Smith’s and Millar’s approach differed from that of Adam Ferguson, who interpreted progress in a three-­stage model, moving from ‘savage’, to ‘barbarous’, and then ‘polished’, his terminology emphasising social rather than economic determinants.42 Though differing in specific approach, all these theories of progress applied an empirical and conjectural methodology to the study of human society. It was empirical in a Eurocentric sense, examining human behaviour in different societies. For instance, European ideas about Native Americans as a ‘savage’ society were deployed in order to depict these people as a living example of the earliest stage of human existence. This method was conjectural in that it looked for principles, or laws, that governed behaviour in different societies and applied them to topics for which there was little empirical evidence.43 Gender provided a crucial category of analysis in this process; according to stadial history European women’s femininity signified civility, and women’s perceived lack of it in so-­called ‘savage’ societies illustrated barbarity.44 Commercial society was perceived to enable women’s achievement of the ultimate expression of their ‘natural’ femininity by creating a society in which women existed as men’s companions rather than as their slaves or idols.45 Rather than investing women with agency, this hypothesis ideologically subordinated them, because women’s status was dependent upon, and reflective of, the expressions of masculinity that represented man’s economic, social, and moral progression. As Millar stated: When men begin to disuse their ancient barbarous practices, when their attention is not wholly engrossed by the pursuit of military reputation, when they have made some progress in arts and have attained to a proportional degree of refinement they are necessarily led to set a value upon those female accomplishments and virtues which have so much influence upon every species of improvement 41

Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 99–127. 42 Lisa Hill, The Passionate Society: The Social, Political and Moral Thought of Adam Ferguson (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 68. 43 Harro M. Höpfl, ‘From savage to Scotsman: conjectural history in the Scottish Enlightenment’, Journal of British Studies 17(2) (1978) 24–34; Meek, Ignoble Savage. 44 Silvia Sebastiani, ‘“Race”, women and progress in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Knott and Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment, 75–96. 45 Jane Rendall, ‘Clio, Mars and Minerva: the Scottish Enlightenment and the writing of women’s history’, in Devine and Young (eds), Eighteenth-­Century Scotland, 135–41; see also Paul Bowles, ‘John Millar, the four stages theory and women’s position in society’, History of Political Economy 16(4) (1984) 619–38; Chris Nyland, ‘Adam Smith, stage theory and the status of women’, History of Political Economy 25(4) (1993) 617–40.

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Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

and which in so many different ways serve to multiply the comforts of life.46 Stadial historiography represented a departure from a classical historiography focused on public politics and powerful men. Instead, subsistence, manners, familial relations, religion, legal and political associations were conceived as the engines of historical change. It was assumed that this process liberated women from the drudgery of ‘savage’ society. Sylvana Tomaselli illustrates how this led to an epistemological association between women and culture, and contends that this attributed to women an agency in history and in contemporary commercial society.47 It is true that Scottish conjectural history included women within the historical narrative, but while men progressed from ‘savage’ to ‘civilised’, women were placed in an unchanging category of natural sensibility. Men’s social progress enabled the proper expression of women’s sensibility, and this sensibility then facilitated men’s further progress. Women’s agency was thus limited in Enlightenment conceptions of the civilising process; or as Mary Catherine Moran puts it, within Scottish Enlightenment historiography women are like commerce, they are ‘the passive agents’ of civilisation.48 Despite the passivity attributed to women when cast as symbolisers rather than as agents of progress, early English feminist writers such as Wollstonecraft drew upon conjectural history to formulate a theory that stressed the importance of women’s liberation from subjugation in order to further social progress.49 Wollstonecraft did this while refuting the social benefits of the twin signifiers of civility: feminine sensibility and male gallantry.50 In Scotland, the importance of femininity to ideas of progress and civility informed the creation of a culture of urbanity in which women’s performance of refined femininity was vital. There was no clear public– private division in this period, but, as I will demonstrate in Chapters 2 and 3, the performance of ‘civilised’ femininity placed significant restrictions on the character of women’s public presence. The conjectural history that was crucial in the development of the feminine ideal was popularised by the Scottish physician William Alexander in his History of Women, From the Earliest Antiquity to the Present Time (1779). Although Alexander’s work rejected misogynistic notions of men’s natural 46

John Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (Bristol: Thoemmes Antiquarian Books, [1779] 1990), 80. 47 Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘The Enlightenment debate on women’, History Workshop Journal 20(1) (1985) 101–24. 48 Mary Catherine Moran, ‘“The commerce of the sexes”: gender and the social sphere in Scottish Enlightenment accounts of civil society’, in Frank Trentman (ed.), Paradoxes of Civil Society: New Perspectives on Modern German and British History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 61–81. 49 O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment, 106. 50 Barbara Taylor, ‘Feminists versus gallants: manners and morals in Enlightenment Britain’, Representations 87 (2004) 125–48.

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Introduction 13

superiority, he (and other Enlightenment historians) did not present an argument for gender equality. Instead, a society’s achievement of commercial civilisation was proven by the existence of complementary gender identities, and this complementarity was dependent on women’s ability to enact their ‘natural’ feminine identity.51 Femininity in this context meant an emphasis on female emotional delicacy. In Sermons to Young Women (1766), the Presbyterian preacher James Fordyce wrote that: ‘Virtuous women are the sweetners, the charm of human life.’52 This virtue was displayed through women’s performance of inferiority; as he asserted, ‘any young woman of better rank, that throws off all the softness of her nature, and emulates the daring intrepid temper of man – how terrible!’53 Female difference was essential to the complementary characteristics of male and female relations in ‘civilised’ society; as Fordyce’s contemporary John Gregory wrote in A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774), women were ‘designed to soften our [men’s] hearts and polish our manners’.54 Feminine domesticity Within Enlightenment ideology, women were defined as having a greater capacity for sympathy, a willingness to show emotion, and a natural aversion to conflict. Combined with the centrality of conversation to the cultivation of politeness, male conversation with feminine women came to seen as essential to men’s achievement of refinement (an idea popularised in Joseph Addison’s Spectator journal). These intertwined discursive developments shifted the gendered nature of public social space, emphasising women’s important role in the development of civility, not in the same capacity as men, but as feminine, complementary beings.55 The implication of this belief on Scottish Enlightenment culture was an acceptance of the importance of heterosocial spaces, such as assemblies, music concerts, and the theatre, as sites of improvement, with Alexander warning that ‘rape, adultery, and every evil that follows them, are more common in countries where the sexes live separate’.56 The development of this heterosocial culture was a crucial indicator of improvement in urban Scotland. It symbolised the power of urbanity and rational religion over conservative, evangelical Presbyterianism, and the complementary roles of men and women within it were essential to this symbolic function. 51

William Alexander, The History of Women, From the Earliest Antiquity to the Present Time; giving some account of almost every interesting particular concerning that sex among all nations, ancient and modern, 2 vols, 3rd edn (London: C. Dilly and R. Christopher, [1779] 1781); Rendall, ‘Clio, Mars and Minerva’, 135–7. 52 James Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women, 2 vols (London: A. Millar & T. Caddell, 1766), i, 9. 53 Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women, i, 104. 54 John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (Dublin: John Colles, 1774), 3. 55 Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse, 117–18. 56 Alexander, History of Women, i, 494.

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Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

The discourse of complementary and dichotomous gender difference required men’s social exchange with women in order to instil the characteristics of sensibility in them; as Fordyce stated, men ‘possess greater strength of mind in science, in council, in action, and in danger; let them acknowledge, however, that in generosity of soul and nobleness of attachment, they have often been surpassed by women’.57 In the English context, Klein argues that the importance placed on gender complementarity and mixed-­sex conversation within polite culture endorsed ‘the female voice’, and in the world of refined sociability ‘women had an assured place’.58 As the following chapters will demonstrate, this argument is not wholly applicable to Scottish Enlightenment culture. In Scotland, heterosociality was deemed to be an essential feature of ‘civilised’ commercial society, but homosociality was also crucial to men’s maintenance of a polite, but not effeminate, masculinity. This homosociality lessened women’s ability to participate fully in the Scottish Enlightenment project. Significantly, it was feminine women rather than women in general, who were conceived as having a beneficial impact on moral and social progress. In Character and Conduct of the Female Sex (1776), Fordyce made a sharp distinction between ‘giddy girls and insignificant women’ and ‘reputable women’, and it was men’s interactions with the latter that were deemed to encourage ‘the decencies of life, the softness of love, the sweets of friendship, the nameless tender charities that pervade and unite the most virtuous form of cultivated society’.59 As Fordyce asserted, ‘the sons of Reason should converse only with the daughters of Virtue’.60 For Fordyce, women lacking virtue were those whose vanity had turned them into ‘Indelicate and despicable creatures!’, they were the woman ‘who talks loud, contradicts bluntly, looks sullen, contests pertinaciously, and instead of yielding challenges submission’.61 Contrasting this loud woman to the virtuous female, Fordyce writes: ‘How different a figure! How forbidding an object! Feminality is gone: Nature is transformed: whatever makes the male character most rough and turbulent, is taken up by a ­creature that was designed to tranquilize and smooth it.’62 Women themselves were not entirely to blame for their loss of virtue. Fordyce believed that they were encouraged in this behaviour by male ­libertinism and superficial polite society, writing:

57

James Fordyce, Addresses to Young Men, 2 vols (London: T. Caddell, 1777), i, 262. Lawrence Klein, ‘Gender, conversation and the public sphere in early eighteenth-­century England’, in Judith Still and Michael Worton (eds), Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 104, 111. 59 James Fordyce, The Character and Conduct of the Female Sex and the Advantages to be Derived by Young Men from the Society of Virtuous Women (London: T. Caddell, 1776), 8, 12. 60 Ibid., 19. 61 Ibid., 83. 62 Ibid. 58

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Introduction 15 Can it excite surprise, if passions constitutionally ardent, unrestrained by authority, unenlightened by instruction, encouraged by habitual idleness and fashionable amusements, inflamed and instigated by flatterers, companions, books, occasions of the most dangerous kind, are frequently carried to an excess destructive of all sober thought and internal serenity, even when reputation and decorum are preserved?63

Women’s weaker natures meant that men and improper social influences were largely responsible when they acted with impropriety. To combat this, female education that would turn women away from ‘habitual idleness and fashionable amusements’ was needed. As Fordyce asserted in response to criticisms of women, ‘we have found, in some ladies of fashion, not only much brilliancy of fancy, but equal solidity of judgement and acuteness of penetration’.64 This virtuous character, Fordyce argued, was primarily due to the liberal education obtained by these women. In Scottish Enlightenment conduct literature, women were deemed to possess intellect, but they were also represented as naturally modest. As Gregory declared in A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters, ‘one of the chief beauties in a female character is that modest reserve, that retiring delicacy, which avoids the public eye, and is disconcerted even at the gaze of admiration’.65 Moran points out that in Gregory’s Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man Compared with Those of the Animal World (1765) he proffered similar advice to men, writing that ‘Men of great abilities’ who prefer social life and friendship rather than admiration and vanity, ‘ought carefully to conceal their superiority’.66 This was in accordance with the precepts of polite social interaction, which required men to listen as well as to speak. Yet it was women who were effectively silenced by this discourse. Like Gregory, Fordyce asserted that feminine virtue existed in ‘those private scenes where show and noise are excluded, the flutter of fashion is forgotten in the silent discharge of domestic duties, and where females of real value are more solicitous to be amiable and accomplished, than a­ lluring and admired’.67 The importance of the feminine to the development of sensibility in men denied women’s equal participation in Scottish Enlightenment intellectual culture, and by the end of the century it had led to the positioning of female virtue within the domestic sphere, where complementary and companionate femininity was defended against the corrupting influence of competitive and fashionable society.68 Yet, as Pam Perkin’s has revealed, 63

Ibid., 47–8. Ibid., 80. 65 Gregory, Father’s Legacy, 13. 66 Quoted in Mary Catherine Moran, ‘Between the savage and the civil: Dr John Gregory’s natural history of femininity’, in Knott and Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment, 23 67 Fordyce, Character and Conduct, 19–20. 68 Jane Rendall, ‘Virtue and commerce in the making of Adam Smith’s political economy’, in Ellen Kennedy and Susan Mendus (eds), Women in Western Political Philosophy: Kant to Nietzsche (Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1987), 56–71 64

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Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

rather than further negate women’s public intellectual participation, this ideology of domesticity provided a framework for it.69 Providing an important Scottish-­specific context to historians’ debates on eighteenth-­century women’s negotiation of Enlightenment domesticity, Katie Barclay has recently demonstrated that elite Scotswomen adopted discourses of femininity and domesticity in order to negotiate patriarchal power hierarchies in marital relationships.70 Taking a European-­ wide perspective, in 1987 Elizabeth Fox-­ Genovese surveyed Enlightenment conceptions of female gender and their impact upon women, and argued that many women adopted a discourse of feminine domestic morality as a means to include women in the advances of Enlightenment, an idea that is apparent in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).71 Wollstonecraft deployed the theoretical framework of Scottish Enlightenment historiography in order to formulate a feminist argument for progress. She contended that sensibility and the norms of polite society threatened feminine virtue, asserting that progress would be stunted if women continued to be cast as inferior and denied a civil existence.72 Believing in the importance of common education to form women as well as men into rational people, Wollstonecraft sought both the breakdown of the gender dichotomy and the recognition of women’s important role as mothers in the domestic sphere, a role that, if it was to be properly fulfilled, required that women were educated into rational creatures.73 Domesticity was an important consideration in Scottish Enlightenment ideas of society, virtue, and progress. It gained increasing importance during the eighteenth century due to perceptions of the domestic sphere as being the primary source of moral strength in a commercial society where older social bonds, such as those held by tribes or clans, had disappeared. The home was a space where women were deemed to employ their feminine affection and inculcate children and husbands with the virtues of sensibility and sociability. For men, the domestic space was not only a space in which to develop refinement, but also a space to display self-­control through participation in harmonious, loving family life.74 In a debate held by the Pantheon Society in Edinburgh in June 1776 on 69

Pam Perkins, Women Writers and the Edinburgh Enlightenment (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010). Katie Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). 71 Elizabeth Fox-­Genovese, ‘Women and the Enlightenment’, in Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz and Susan Stuard (eds), Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 251–72. 72 O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment, 181–7. 73 For an analysis of some of the apparent paradoxes in Wollstonecraft’s thought, see Barbara Taylor, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the wild wish of early Feminism’, History Workshop Journal 33(1) (1992) 197–219. 74 Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse, 95–110. 70

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Introduction 17

the question, ‘Whether does the Happiness of the Marriage State depend most on the Husband or Wife?’, the men and women present voted in favour of the wife.75 This suggests a dominant conception of marriage and the domestic realm as a space of female influence, and the debate itself reflects the importance of marriage as a social institution, and its place as a topic of public discourse. As Gregory maintained: ‘The domestic oeconomy of a family is entirely a woman’s province, and furnishes a variety of subjects for the exertion of both good sense and good taste.’76 Gregory did not believe that all women must be married, but that they would be happier if they were, writing, ‘I am of the opinion, that a married state, if entered into from proper motives of esteem and affection, will be the happiest for yourselves, make you the most respectable in the eyes of the world, and the most useful members of society.’77 That the domestic sphere was considered to be a microcosm of civil society is reflected in Fordyce’s assertion that virtuous motherhood involved ‘diffusing virtue and happiness through the human race’.78 However, the importance of domesticity relied upon clearly defined notions of gender dichotomy, and women’s adherence to a specifically female moral code, primarily chastity. Despite their differing approaches to moral philosophy, Hutcheson and Hume both emphasised the importance of female chastity to the maintenance of morality and society. The argument for what was accepted as a double standard was centred upon the need for male parental assurance regarding the family’s children, for men to develop affection in the domestic sphere, and to commit financially to their family’s upkeep.79 For Hume, female sexuality posed risks to society which male sexuality did not. He accepted that male sexual infidelity might increase in polite, ­commercial society, but in defence of progress he asserted that by comparison drunkenness ‘is much less common. A vice more odious and more pernicious to both mind and body.’80 Like most of the literati, Hume reinforced rather than challenged hierarchical concepts of dichotomous gender identity. This represents a departure from Hutcheson’s philosophy of marriage, which he believed should be founded on equality and reciprocity, and this 75

Pantheon Debating Society Minutes, 20/6/1776, Glasgow University Library [GUL] Sp Coll MS Gen. 1283. 76 Gregory, Father’s Legacy, 24. 77 Ibid., 48–9. 78 Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women, i, 37; Mary Catherine Moran, ‘From Rudeness to Refinement: Gender, Genre and Scottish Enlightenment Discourse’, unpublished PhD thesis (Johns Hopkins University, 1999). 79 Moran, ‘Rudeness to refinement’, 6–14; Steven A. Macleod Burns, ‘The humean female’, in Lorenne M. G. Clark and Lynda Lange (eds), The Sexism of Social and Political Theory: Women and Reproduction from Plato to Nietzsche (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 55–7; Louise Marcil-­Lacoste, ‘Hume’s method in moral reasoning’, in Clark and Lange (eds), Social and Political Theory, 67. 80 David Hume, ‘Of refinement in the arts’ [1752], in David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, [1777] 1987), 272.

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Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

equality was to be underpinned by mutual sexual fidelity. Yet, as O’Brien points out, this was a theoretical ideal, and Hutcheson did not extend his analysis to include ‘the disparity between the equality which nature requires in marriage and the state of affairs in his own times’.81 Ideas of female modesty and domesticity did not negate women’s participation in the social spaces of polite improvement, such as assemblies and spa resorts. Katharine Glover has established that female participation in polite sociability was not an adjunct to the project of social and moral improvement; rather, it was a crucial component of it.82 As well as recognising the various public spaces in which women were present, it is important not to confuse the domestic with the private. The domestic sphere had a public function, whether that be the social function of dinners and tea parties held in domestic space, as a place to read the products of an expanding print culture, and particularly amongst the elites, as a space in which the politics of patronage could be enacted. As John Brewer explains, the public function of the eighteenth-­century home is evident in the design of Georgian houses, which were configured with large windows encouraging people to ‘look out and look in’.83 Rather than being separate, public and private coexisted, and the domestic sphere was a space in which the discourses of the public sphere were acted out. In turn, perceptions of domesticity informed the ideas formulated in civic society. This can be seen in the numerous discussions of marriage in Enlightenment discourse, which reflecting Scottish philosophy’s emphases on liberty and sympathy critiqued male tyranny in marriage.84 Domestic, civic, and social space was integrated, but remained demarcated according to gender (as well as social class). This is most apparent when we compare the importance placed on women’s domesticity in the home with the homosocial composition of the associational world of clubs and societies that formed a crucial component of Enlightenment culture, and which will be explored in the next chapter. This associational world emerged as exclusively male largely because it was interconnected with the male realm of the professions, and it developed in a largely patriarchal culture where women’s subordination was not only customary but set out in law.85 However, that Enlightenment culture did not challenge these norms 81

O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment, 73. Katharine Glover, Elite Women and Polite Society in Eighteenth-­Century Scotland (Woodbridge: Boydel, 2011). 83 John Brewer, ‘This, that and the other: public, social and private in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in Dario Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe (eds), Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1995), 16–17. 84 Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power, 59–62. 85 Jane Rendall and Sue Innes, ‘Women, gender, politics’, in Lynn Abrams, Eleanor Gordon, Debbi Simonton, and Eileen J. Yeo (eds), Gender in Scottish History since 1700 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 50 82

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Introduction 19 also needs to be understood as partly a result of fears of male effeminacy. Feminine influence was needed to civilise men’s manners, but too much exposure to women could cause the loss of manly liberty and a descent into a morally corrupting, selfish effeminacy. Manly liberty

Liberty of thought was a foundational characteristic of the Enlightenment. As Alexander Broadie argues, the Enlightenment should be thought of as an age of toleration where the ultimate authority was the ‘tribunal of human reason’.86 Authority was not rejected (the social stability necessary for the ‘enlightened’ thought of the elite relied upon authority), but authority, including religious doctrine, was declared to be subject to reason. Freedom in this context was, to quote Broadie, ‘the freedom of a man of letters to put his ideas into the public domain for public discussion’.87 Central to Immanuel Kant’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (1784) was the idea that Enlightenment was defined by people’s possession of reason and their ability to employ it, or in his words, to ‘dare to know’.88 Liberty was integral to this core Enlightenment practice of daring to know, and the development of a principle of liberty in men was deemed to be strengthened through exposure to the arts, a growth in scientific knowledge, and an individual’s sympathetic exchange with other individuals, which was itself enhanced through what can be defined as polite interaction, or sociability. In his study of virtue and morality in Scottish Enlightenment discourse, John Dwyer investigated the means by which three discursive models – civic humanism (or Classical Republicanism), stoicism, and sensibility – were interconnected within Enlightenment discourse. Civic humanist discourse sought to challenge the perceived corrupting influence of the wealthy and powerful imperial state through the maintenance of elite allegiance to the community (public spirit) and the maintenance of ‘independence’. Stoicism informed notions of ‘independence’, because to be stoic was to maintain the ability for independent moral decision-­making. Both civic humanism and stoicism were intertwined with notions of sensibility.89 Developed in its most complete form by Smith in Theory of Moral Sentiments, the ideology of sensibility redefined virtue. Rather than being forged through public acts of virtue, such as courage on the battlefield, virtue was determined to be located in sympathetic interactions between individuals. These interactions were performed in public and domestic settings, and they offered a defence against the corruption of luxury. The 86

Alexander Broadie, ‘Introduction: what was the Scottish Enlightenment?’, in Alexander Broadie (ed.), The Scottish Enlightenment: An Anthology (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2008), 8. 87 Broadie, ‘Scottish Enlightenment’, 4. 88 Immanuel Kant, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ [1784], available at: http://www.columbia. edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html, accessed 27 February 2013. 89 Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse, 38–51.

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Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

operation of sympathy, what Smith refers to as ‘fellow-­feeling’, was founded upon people’s inner moral sense. As Dwyer states, sensibility emphasised the emotional over the rational character of man, but self-­command was also vital.90 Critiquing his teacher, Francis Hutcheson’s belief in a God-­ given benevolent moral sense, Smith argued for the importance of laws and social interaction to control men’s passions. Demonstrating the influence of Classical Stoic philosophy on Smith’s thought, self-­command was deemed to be essential to the practice of virtue and the achievement of happiness.91 According to Smith, men’s natural sympathetic capability governed morality. Using self-­judgement by viewing themselves through the gaze of the ‘impartial spectator’, men were encouraged to avoid self-­ interest and instead act virtuously in favour of the common (or public) good.92 As Jane Rendall has argued, in Smith’s philosophy self-­command is represented as a male virtue, with women perceived to have a natural tendency towards the virtues of sensibility, kindness, and friendship, which were suited to domestic and social interaction.93 While Smith allows for various levels of self-­command, with children showing little and men’s violent passions sometimes undermining it, the moral ideal is the total adoption of self-­command, and this total adoption is explicitly defined as a characteristic of manhood: The man of real constancy and firmness, the wise and just man who has been thoroughly bred in the great school of self-­command, in the bustle and business of the world, exposed, perhaps, to the violence and injustice of faction, and to the hardships and hazards of war, maintains this control of his passive feelings upon all occasions; and whether in solitude or in society, wears nearly the same countenance, and is affected very nearly in the same manner. In success and in disappointment, in prosperity and in adversity, before friends and before enemies, he has often been under the necessity of supporting this manhood . . . He does not merely affect the sentiments of the ­impartial spectator. He really adopts them.94 Male sensibility (Smith’s ‘inward sentiments and feelings’95) that enabled the development of self-­command and unaffected virtue was deemed to be fostered by sociable interaction with virtuous women. This sensibility then encouraged a greater level of sociability and cooperation amongst men. Considered necessary in the maintenance of community, sensibility

90

Ibid., 51–65. Phillipson, Adam Smith, 19–23, 45–55. 92 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759, revised 1790), available at: http://www. econlib.org/library/Smith/smMS.html, accessed 5 January 2013. 93 Rendall, ‘Virtue and commerce’, 59–60. 94 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, III.II.67. 95 Ibid. 91

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Introduction 21

contributed to the overall stability of society and government.96 Sociability was therefore central to the maintenance of liberty in commercial society. In Wealth of Nations, Smith argued that commercial society encouraged liberty because it was based upon a system of interdependence and social stability through law. For Smith, commercial civilisation fully develops when ‘Every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant.’97 The development of the moral and social virtues encompassed by sensibility and sociability were necessary aspects of the development of commercial society. Merchants, Smith believed, often tended towards selfish actions, placing their private economic interests above the social interest.98 In order to recognise the interconnection between self-­interest and social-­interest and to combat selfishness, men’s economic interdependence needed to be matched by the development of their ‘natural’ sociability. As Christopher Berry suggests, Smith’s emphasis on the mercantile basis of liberty rejects narrow Classical Republican notions of independence and the practice of citizenship. Rather than social virtue being founded upon property ownership (a prerequisite of classical independence), and thus reliant upon another man’s dependence, within an ideal commercial society each man has the private liberty to participate in trade and improve his material condition. In this economic system all men can acquire independence because all men are dependent upon each other to keep the system functioning, and so their self-­interest informs the public interest.99 In his analysis of gender and citizenship during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, McCormack explores the means by which the idea of the ‘independent man’ came to represent the ‘epitome of manliness, citizenship and national character’.100 In this context, independence symbolised political virtue and stood as the criteria for electoral citizenship. Although the focus of McCormack’s study is England, many of his conclusions can be applied to Scotland. A fundamental feature of improvement in Scotland was a desire amongst the Scottish elite to distance their political culture from what they perceived to be Scotland’s corrupt feudal past. Although it did not challenge the political stranglehold of the landed elite, nor encourage the reformation of a politics run by systems of patronage, this desire did involve the adoption of a discourse of constitutional 96

John Dwyer, R. A. Mason and Alexander Murdoch, ‘Introduction’, in John Dwyer, R. A. Mason and Alexander Murdoch (eds), New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (John Donald: Edinburgh, 1982), 6. 97 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols, eds Roy H. Campbell and Andrew S. Skinner (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, [1776] 1981), i, 37. 98 Richard Sher, ‘Commerce, religion and Enlightenment in eighteenth-­century Glasgow’, in Thomas Devine and Gordon Jackson (eds), Glasgow, vol. 1: Beginnings to 1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 315–16. 99 Christopher Berry, The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 154–63. 100 Matthew McCormack, The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 1–2.

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Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

liberty and a belief in the progressive and democratic character of English institutions.101 These discourses of constitutional liberty informed gendered notions of independence and citizenship.102 The adoption of this discourse is apparent in the autobiography of the Reverend Dr Alexander Carlyle, a Church of Scotland minister and member of the literati. For Carlyle, independence was an important marker of manhood. Discussing his abhorrence at the idea of becoming a tutor to the son of a nobleman, Carlyle explains that he later changed his mind ‘for I knew many afterwards who had passed through that station yet retained a manly independency in both mind and manner’.103 Eighteenth-­century conceptions of independence were largely informed by interpretations of Classical Republican notions of liberty and virtue that emphasised the need for independence from influence and obligation in the practice of citizenship.104 In this discourse, the ‘independent man’ was embodied by the country gentleman. However, manly independence could be performed in urban society, and in the urban context independence was mainly performed within a culture of politeness. The polite gentleman symbolised the overall independence of this culture, which was manifested through its practice within the urban public sphere. In spaces such as coffeehouses and clubs, men could assert their manly independence as members of a ‘politicised public’.105 Chapter 1 will explore the role of urban intellectual societies in facilitating men’s performance of refinement and intellectual independence, yet, as I will explain in Chapters 3 and 4, the urban context also allowed for the performance of masculine independence that transgressed the ideological ideal of male refinement, including the free expression of the passions in taverns and the maintenance of honour and social credit via the ritual of the duel. To a degree these reflected the continued adoption of pre-­Enlightenment signifiers of manhood, but they did not represent an abandonment of politeness among gentlemen. The influential philosophy of both Smith and Hume asserted that ­participation in polite society, exposure to the liberal arts, and the sharing of knowledge promoted interpersonal refinement and enabled men to establish an ease of communication, or sociability, with others.106 Smith considered the increased wealth from commerce generally to have a 101

Colin Kidd, ‘North Britishness and the nature of eighteenth-­century British patriotisms’, Historical Journal 39(2) (1996) 374. 102 McCormack, Independent Man. 103 Alexander Carlyle, The Autobiography of the Rev Dr Alexander Carlyle Minister of Inveresk (Blackwood: Edinburgh, 1861), 63. 104 Carlyle, Autobiography, 4–6; Anna Clark, ‘The Chevalier d’Eon and Wilkes: masculinity and politics in the eighteenth century’, Eighteenth-­Century Studies 32(1) (1998) 20. 105 McCormack, Independent Man, 6, 57, 65. 106 Carter, Men and the Emergence, 27.

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Introduction 23

­ ositive impact, providing people with the necessaries and conveniences p of life, but he remained critical of those who squandered their wealth on the frivolous consumption of luxury items instead of investing it to provide further growth or disseminating it in the form of fair wages.107 To a greater extent than Smith, Hume argued that commercial progress and resultant luxury was a product of positive progress. For Hume, by encouraging refinement in tastes and manners luxury lent itself to an increase in human happiness. In his essay ‘Of refinement in the arts’ (1752), Hume implores his readers to realise the cultural relativity of luxury as a concept, stressing that luxury is a ‘word of uncertain s­ ignification . . . and any degree of it may be innocent or blameable, according to the age, or country, or condition of the person’.108 Despite considering ages of refinement to be the ‘happiest and most virtuous’, Hume accepted that luxury could have a negative impact upon society when it ‘ceases to be innocent’, for instance, when it is pursued at the expense of virtuous actions such as charitable benevolence, or when ‘for them a man ruins his fortune, and reduces himself to want and beggary’.109 Hume’s defence of luxury needs to be understood in the context of his argument that progress in the arts and refinement of manners were conducive to political liberty, asserting that: ‘a progress in the arts is rather favourable to liberty, and has a natural tendency to preserve, if not produce a free government’.110 This was linked to a critique of aristocratic corruption and an emphasis on the importance of the ‘independent’ manhood of the ­middling sorts. As Hume argued: where luxury nourishes commerce and industry, the peasants by a proper cultivation of the land become rich and independent: while the tradesmen and merchants acquire a share of the property, and draw authority and consideration to the middling rank of men, who are the best and firmest basis of liberty.111 Like Smith, Hume’s ideas employ an ideal of a masculinity as a bulwark against self-­interest, which is not entirely dependent upon noble status; instead of the nobility, it is the ‘middling rank of men’ who embody liberty in commercial society. However, as Dwyer has noted, we need to be wary of viewing the middling classes as a merchant-­dominated middle class. Smith was critical of mercantile wealth not connected to land, and when the Scottish literati wrote of the ‘middling sorts’ they were normally referring to the gentry and small proprietors, and the professional classes who often 107

Emma Rothschild and Amartya Sen, ‘Adam Smith’s economics’, in Haakonssen (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, 319–65. 108 Hume, ‘Of refinement’, 268. 109 Ibid., 269. 110 Ibid., 277. 111 Ibid.

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Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

shared bloodlines as well as a collective polite culture with the gentry.112 Also, any rejection of aristocratic values by Smith and Hume focused upon a critique of aristocratic manners rather than the social hierarchy itself. Aristocrats such as the Duke of Hamilton and the Duchess of Gordon were participants in Enlightenment culture. Yet this was not a court culture, and the aristocracy did not dominate the Scottish Enlightenment, instead they were integrated into this culture alongside the gentry and professional classes. Rather than a claiming of power by a middle class, what Smith and Hume wanted to see was an integration of the various levels of the social elite. This integration would allow for interdependency in place of relationships of dependence and control. There is also a sense that this would include a trickle-­ down mechanism. Within commercial society, Hume argued, all men had the opportunity to gain economic independence and thus develop the political moral virtues necessary for the enactment of citizenship, which would in turn increase liberty.113 The poorer classes occupy an ambiguous place in Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, and, as I will explore in Chapter 3, this was reflected in Enlightenment culture where, for instance, their participation in the improving cultural medium of the theatre could signify the possibility of disorder in that space. Excessive luxury, including the adoption of the accoutrements of polite society by the poorer classes, such as servants, could signify disorder, while aristocratic libertinism could undermine the moral community. These fears concerning the corrupting force of luxury draw attention to the different strands of thought present in Scottish Enlightenment discourse. Many writers did not share Hume’s positive outlook on luxury; for some, wealth and luxury encouraged individualistic, egotistical behaviour that threatened to undermine progress. This discourse is apparent in the moderate Presbyterian ideology that formed a significant component of Scottish Enlightenment thought. Although often facing opposition and condemnation from the evangelical wing of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, many members of the literati were Church of Scotland ministers, and they espoused a religious policy of toleration and rejection of superstition. Central to this enlightened Presbyterian discourse was the desire to preserve people’s morality within a wealthy, commercial society and to combat the selfishness that was perceived to be encouraged by luxury.114 This fear of luxury’s destructive impact is illustrated in the best-­selling sermons of the Reverend Hugh Blair. A leading member of the Moderate faction in the Church of Scotland, 112

John Dwyer, ‘Ethics and economics: bridging Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations’, Journal of British Studies 44(4) (2005) 669–72. 113 John Robertson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment at the limits of the civic tradition’, in Ivan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (eds), Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of the Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 138–59. 114 Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse, pp. 18–19.

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Introduction 25

Blair was minister of St Giles’, High Kirk of Edinburgh, an active member of the Select Society, and professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh University. In his sermon ‘On Luxury and Licentiousness’, Blair used the example of the Israelites to present an argument common to Scottish Enlightenment critiques of luxury, namely the idea of cyclical corruption.115 The people of Israel are depicted as ‘a sober and religious nation’, but ‘after they had enlarged their territories by conquest, and acquired wealth by commerce, they gradually contracted habits of luxury; and luxury soon introduced its usual train of attending evils’.116 For Blair, the Israelites are a synonym for current British society. To stop the cycle whereby wealth leads to luxury, which leads to licentiousness, which results in a loss of wealth, that then leads to virtue and industry and the acquirement of wealth, Blair implores men to enjoy opulence, but to avoid ‘intemperate enjoyment of it which wholly absorbs the time and attention of men’.117 To defend against licentiousness Blair argued, ‘all our pleasures ought to be tempered with a serious sense of God’, and this sense of God was presented as ‘the surest guard of innocence and virtue, amidst the allurements of pleasure’.118 Blair also exhorted his readers to remember that God will reward virtue and punish vice, stating that by God’s hand the ‘sober and industrious’ will ‘rise to reputation and influence’, whilst the ‘licentious and intemperate’ will be ‘checked by some dark reserve either in their health or their fortune’.119 Blair’s combination of Scottish Enlightenment moral discourse and Presbyterian theology earned him celebration in polite society and censure from evangelical Presbyterians.120 The destructive effect of luxury is also a significant theme in Lord Kames’s Sketches of the History of Man (1778). Discussing patriotism, Kames asserted that ‘where it is the ruling passion: it triumphs over every selfish motive, and is a firm support to every virtue’.121 Patriotism defended against luxury; as ‘the head of the social affections’, and as the ‘great bulwark of civil liberty’ it enabled a nation to flourish.122 However, in a cyclical fashion, the nation’s success brought increased wealth, and resultant luxury could destroy the patriotic public spirit and, by extension, the nation. Kames depicts the destructive impact of luxury in terms of bodily weakness and disease; the voluptuousness of luxury weakened men in mind and body, and this in turn weakened society. Although Kames cited France 115

Rev. Hugh Blair, ‘Sermon VI: on luxury and licentiousness’, in Sermons, by Hugh Blair . . . Volume the Fourth (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1794). 116 Blair, Sermons, 113–14. 117 Ibid., 115–16. 118 Ibid., 120. 119 Ibid., 128–9. 120 Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse, 18–19. 121 John Home, Lord Kames, ‘Sketch VII: rise and fall of patriotism’, in Sketches of the History of Man, 4 vols, ed. J. V. Price (London: Thoemmes Press, [1778] 1993), ii, 314. 122 Ibid., 317.

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Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

as more afflicted by the disease of luxury than Britain, he considered Britain to be at great risk due to its increased wealth, writing: ‘It grieves me that the epidemic distempers of luxury and selfishness are spreading wide in Britain.’123 The connection between male sensibility and sociability and the patriotic imperative was most strongly put by Fordyce. Unlike nations such as France, the Enlightenment in Scotland was integrated with, rather than antithetical to, the national church, and like Blair, Fordyce’s ideas on luxury, society, and patriotism represent a combination of Presbyterian religious morality and Scottish Enlightenment ideas. His arguments were founded upon a desire to maintain community morality, patriotic sentiment, and therefore British national power. The pursuit of luxury and pleasure, Fordyce argued, promoted pride and vanity, encouraging men to ‘sneer at the names of Chastity, Temperance and Religion’.124 Luxury negated the self-­ control and sobriety necessary to act in the interests of society rather than the self. Fordyce asked his readers: Does not such general and extraordinary corruption carry a portentous aspect with regard to the religious, moral and political community? Are these not intimately connected in every nation? And has it not been universally found that they advanced and prospered, or declined and perished together?125 Here, the correct expression of masculinity was inseparable from the national project. It is significant that Fordyce’s Addresses to Young Men was published in 1777, a year after the ‘Declaration of Independence’ was signed in the American colonies. Like the Seven Years War (1756–63), the American Revolutionary War (1775–83) led to widespread public debate in Britain over issues of wealth, liberty, and corruption.126 Fordyce’s text needs to be read in the context of this debate. The address in Fordyce’s Addresses to Young Men that most frequently invokes the cause of the nation is also the one most concerned with effeminacy. Entitled ‘On a Manly Spirit as Opposed to Effeminacy’, Fordyce writes at the beginning that Britain ‘is in imminent danger from the prodigality, profligacy, and unfeeling luxury of her inhabitants’.127 Later, he calls on young men to ‘oppose against effeminate manners as a masculine virtue’.128 In Scottish Enlightenment thought this masculine virtue was primarily defined by male refinement, which encompassed sensibility and sociability. Sensibility for the Scottish literati 123

Ibid., 333. Fordyce, Addresses to Young Men, ii, 154. 125 Ibid., 138. 126 Katherine Wilson, ‘Empire of virtue: the imperial project and Hanoverian culture c. 1720– 1785’, in Lawrence Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London: Routledge, 1994), 152–4. 127 Fordyce, Addresses to Young Men, ii, 137. 128 Ibid., 186. 124

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Introduction 27

represented a moral code, which, if adopted, could control behaviour and maintain community over individual selfishness within a system of political liberty and ‘civilised’ society.129 As Hume wrote on the subject of morality: ‘We fancy the peace of society to be at stake in every decision concerning it.’130 The emphasis within Enlightenment discourse upon men’s development of inner sensibility and engagement in true (non-­self-­interested) sociability and the performance of patriotic manhood was a response to the perceived threat posed by rapid increases in wealth. As Fordyce warned, a massive influx of wealth could cause men to prostitute the public good for luxury and pleasure, producing, ‘softness, idleness, sensuality, debauchery’ in men’s behaviour, and generating ‘an effeminate age’.131 On effeminate men, Fordyce asked: ‘Say, my Country, are these the young men whom thou hast destined to protect thy daughters, to educate thy posterity, to execute thy plans, to assert thy cause, and to perpetuate thy honour?’132 Within Scottish Enlightenment thought there was not a consensus concerning the risks posed by luxury to social morality, but there was an agreement that different performances of masculinity could be either destructive or conducive to social morality and progress. The debate within Enlightenment discourse concerning refinement and luxury is apparent in Henry Mackenzie’s novel The Man of Feeling (1771). In this novel the principal character, Mr Harley, embodies male sensibility; he acts according to his inner emotional responses and frequently engages in benevolent actions (such as giving charity to beggars). He also often cries openly in reaction to others’ suffering, a behaviour used by Mackenzie to indicate Harley’s virtue.133 As Philip Carter discusses, in representations of male refinement the expression of emotion in men, such as a shudder or a sympathetic tear was not only acceptable, but was an indication of inner sensibility.134 After Emily Atkins (a middling girl from the country who had been betrayed into a life of prostitution in London by Winbrooke, a man of false refinement) is saved by Harley, her father, an army captain, on hearing of the reasons for her loss of virtue, ‘looked on her [the daughter] for some time in silence; the pride of a soldier’s honour checked for a while the yearnings of his heart; but nature at last prevailed, he fell on her neck, and mingled his tears with hers’.135 In the context of a father’s sympathy for his daughter, male sensibility expressed through crying is represented by Mackenzie as natural. 129

Philip Flynn, Enlightened Scotland: A Study and Selection of Scottish Philosophical Prose from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1992), 116. 130 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature [1739], in Flynn, Enlightened Scotland, 140. 131 Fordyce, Addresses to Young Men, i, 140, ii, 292–3. 132 Ibid., ii, 157–8. 133 Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, [1771] 2005). 134 Carter, Men and the Emergence, 89 135 Mackenzie, Man of Feeling, 93–4.

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Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

The notion of artificial refinement, or outward politeness without inner virtue, is also a key theme in the text. Harley represents refinement, and his character serves to differentiate the practice of politeness founded upon inner sensibility to that of artificial politeness. In London, Harley (who is from the countryside) meets a man who on the basis of his appearance and behaviour is recognised by Harley as a ‘gentleman’. The ‘gentleman’ is first described as ‘coming out, dressed in a white frock, and a red laced waistcoat, with a small switch in his hand, which he seemed to manage with a particularly good grace’.136 Harley then engaged in a sociable exchange with this ‘gentleman’ that was firmly located in polite culture: The conversation as they walked was brilliant on the side of his companion. The playhouse, the opera, with every occurrence in high life, he seemed perfectly master of; and talked of some reigning beauties of quality, in a manner the most feeling in the world.137 Harley initially views this person as a man of sensibility, one who spoke with ‘feeling’, however, he is soon informed that this ‘gentleman’ was assuming this identity under false pretences in order to take advantage of Harley.138 Despite the prevalence of arguments for the naturalness of sensibility in the text (implicitly in agreement with the argument proposed by Smith in Theory of Moral Sentiments), Mackenzie also uses the character of Harley to question whether sensibility and refinement really are innate. On his way to London, Harley stops outside an inn, and sitting down to remove a pebble from his shoe he sees a barefoot beggar. Observing the beggar, Harley states to himself: Our delicacies are fantastic; they are not in nature! that beggar walks over the sharpest of these stones barefooted, whilst I have lost the most delightful dream in the world, from the smallest of them happening to get into my shoe.139 Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling is a sentimental novel that places ideas of male refinement in a literary context. Although the novel is set in England, Mackenzie was a lawyer in Edinburgh, and his novel was an important literary contribution to the Scottish Enlightenment. As Dwyer has shown, Mackenzie was a key figure of the late eighteenth-­century Enlightenment, and extracts from Man of Feeling (which achieved a cult following) were published in the Caledonian Mercury newspaper.140 Carter alerts us to certain problems in using the fictional character of Harley as ‘synonymous with expressions of idealised male conduct’, citing 136

Ibid., 62. Ibid., 63. 138 Ibid., 66. 139 Ibid., 59. 140 Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse, 12–24. 137

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Introduction 29

studies that consider Harley’s ‘marginalisation, weakness and ineffectiveness’ within the text and highlight these as characteristics that Mackenzie criticised in his journalistic writing in The Mirror (1779–80) and The Lounger (1785–7).141 However, when read as reflective of the debate over male refinement rather than as conduct literature in literary form, Man of Feeling offers a useful insight into Scottish Enlightenment debates on masculinity and virtue. The French, the Fop and female power The ideological connection between refinement and male virtue was enabled by the oppositional image of the effeminate, Frenchified Fop. Effeminate men’s perceived focus on wealth and fashion and their lack of inner virtues, such as sympathy and benevolence, was depicted as a source of corruption and societal degeneracy, while defining the Fop in terms of French influence allowed the transgression of dominant ideas of ­masculinity to be represented as a threat to Britain.142 On eighteenth-­century English fears of French influence and the undermining of national character, Michèle Cohen cites French fashions, luxury goods, manners, and language as the main ways in which French culture was seen to be undermining English culture. When the Earl of Chesterfield’s ‘Letters to his Son’ were published in 1774, they were accused of promoting artificial politeness, of focusing (as French polite society was perceived to) on the public display of politeness through conversation and bodily control. Centred upon self-­representation rather than on a refined politeness founded upon inner sensibility, Chesterfield’s advice was deemed by some to encourage effeminacy. By the end of the eighteenth century, these connections between effeminacy and politeness led to a rejection of conversation, particularly conversational French (the language of politeness), as the foundation of English polite society.143 Within some strands of Scottish Enlightenment discourse the French were presented as effeminate in opposition to refined manhood founded on liberty. Discussing the French language, Kames wrote that its tone was ‘well suited to the nature of its government: every man is politely submissive to those above him’. Political liberty formed the manners of the British people, and so ‘the English language is accordingly more manly’.144 In Scottish Enlightenment discourse, in addition to security of private property, material improvement, and the diffusion of knowledge, civil liberty was represented as essential to the development of a ‘civilised’, virtuous

141

Carter, Men and the Emergence, 101–4. Carter, Men and the Emergence, 156. 143 Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity, 3–7, 42–50. 144 Kames, ‘Sketch V: manners’, in Sketches, i, 333. 142

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Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

society.145 The idea that effeminacy was caused by men’s exposure to wealth without corresponding civil liberty enabled the representation of British masculinity as directly associated with liberty. It was also connected to the idea that luxury was a threat to British civilisation. In his argument that luxury weakened the mind and made it ‘so effeminate as to be subdued by every distress’, Kames claimed that, ‘The French are far gone in that disease.’146 The moral corruption and male effeminacy caused by the lack of liberty in France was highlighted by the perceived gender transgressions of French women. Politeness, with its emphasis on mixed-sex interaction, had, it was believed, been taken to an extreme degree in France, with men adopting feminine characteristics to the extent that they had lost their ‘natural’ authority over women.147 French men had become enslaved to the affections of women, and Alexander wrote of the French woman: ‘her sole joy is the number of her admirers . . . over the whole of them she exercises the most absolute power’.148 This weakening of men’s authority was not limited to social intercourse, but extended to all aspects of society. French women were represented as having undue political influence and as rejecting feminine propriety to engage in intellectual debates and licentious sexual activity. As Cohen discusses, the heterosociality of polite culture was represented as a primary cause of French gender failings and related artificial politeness, and it was on this issue that, as patriotic gendered identities were conceptualised and asserted, British polite culture gradually distanced itself from the French.149 Discourses of French artificial politeness (and consequent inferiority to British civility) appear to conflict with ideas of a European Gothic heritage that were also central to Scottish Enlightenment ideas of nationhood. However, Colin Kidd has argued that ideas of French inferiority and a shared ancestral heritage between them and Britons were not necessarily incompatible. French inferiority was not considered to be innate, it was figured in the same way as many Enlightenment ideas of race; just as Native Americans would one day progress to be like Europeans, their supposed savagery only a result of their current mode of subsistence, so too was French inferiority due to structural differences between France and Britain. The despotism of their government, their Catholic faith, and the corresponding servility of the French people, all evidence of their inferiority, were seen to be the result of historical circumstance. They were a corrupted version of the ‘libertarian Goth’, while, as Kidd contends, because of their perceived exceptional history in establishing constitutional democracy, the British 145

Flynn, Enlightened Scotland, 271. Kames, ‘Sketch VII: progress and effects of luxury’, in Sketches, ii, 146. 147 Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity, 76–7. 148 Alexander, History of Women, i, 448. 149 Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity, 43–78. 146

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Introduction 31

were depicted as a purer product of Gothic heritage, and thus the epitome of civilisation.150 The idea of French corruption as a product of historical circumstance, caused by the resulting structures and norms of French society, can also be applied to ideas regarding French men’s effeminacy, and definitions of effeminacy in general. In his study of the emergence of a homosexual ‘Molly’ subculture, Randolph Trumbach argues that by the mid-­eighteenth century, foppish effeminacy was increasingly identified with the exclusive adult sodomite. For Trumbach, the rejection of the sexual identity of the libertine rake who had intercourse with boys and women represents the development of a masculine ideal that stressed men’s exclusive heterosexual desire.151 However, within eighteenth-­century discourses of masculinity, effeminacy was rarely used to refer to homosexuality. Effeminacy as it was invoked within the discourse of eighteenth-­century polite society should not be read in the terminology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.152 The eighteenth-­century effeminate Fop was often depicted as a failed heterosexual. In Fordyce’s address on love, he stressed to his young male audience that men who lack ‘a masculine virtue and firm deportment’, and instead contract an ‘effeminate turn and fantastic manners’, will never engage in an ‘honourable passion’.153 The dishonourable passion is not homosexual sex or love, but a relationship with a woman that is based on sexual gratification, one that seeks to possess her body rather than her soul. Fordyce calls the aims of this selfish love, fed by luxury and a desire for praise, ‘foppish’.154 Within this model the character of Winbrooke, who leads Emily Atkins into prostitution in Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, can be defined as a Fop.155 It was not on the basis of his sexual identity that the Fop embodied a failure of masculinity, instead, as Carter argues, he represented a social gender failing; he embodied the opposite of the new refined man, and highlighted the dangers inherent in the growth of commercial wealth and the luxury and fashions of polite society.156 A lack of political liberty in a nation whose politics were dominated by the institution of absolute monarchy and not a predilection for sodomy was perceived as the main cause of effeminacy among French men. It is important to note that not all members of the literati considered 150

Kidd, British Identities, 229–36 Randolph Trumbach, ‘The birth of the queen: sodomy and the emergence of gender equality in modern culture, 1660–1750’, in Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey Jr (eds), Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (London: Penguin, 1991), 129–40. 152 Carter, Men and the Emergence, 139–47. 153 Fordyce, Addresses to Young Men, i, 185–6. 154 Ibid., i, 244. 155 Mackenzie, Man of Feeling, 86–90. 156 Carter, Men and the Emergence, 137–9. 151

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French politeness to be a symbol of moral corruption. In his short autobiography, written shortly before his death in 1776, David Hume reflected on his time in France, that: The more I resiled [recoiled] from their excessive civilities, the more I was loaded with them. There is, however, a real satisfaction in living at Paris, from the great number of sensible, knowing and polite company with which that city abounds above all places in the universe.157 For Hume, the excessive politeness of the French was evidence of their sensibility not their artificiality. The fact that he made specific mention of his attitude to French politeness suggests that he was countering a popular viewpoint. Refinement and North Britishness The desire to avoid French-­influenced foppish effeminacy and instead embody refined manhood, and by extension assert a ‘civilised’ patriotic masculine identity, would have been important for the aristocrats, gentry, professionals, clergymen, and wealthy merchants who formed the Scottish elite. This desire to assert Scotland’s place within the Union and distance their culture from Jacobitism was keenly felt by the literati, and, as Sher has revealed, they were ‘engaged in a self-­conscious attempt to bring fame and glory to themselves and the Scottish nation by means of their intellectual accomplishments’.158 The 1745 Jacobite rebellion, which had seen Scottish (mainly Highland) Jacobite soldiers march as far as Derby in England, had encouraged Scottophobia in England. In Scottophobic discourse, ideas of Highland barbarity and a tendency among the landed elites towards despotism were applied to Scots as a whole, and patriotic acts in favour of the Hanoverian establishment during the 1745 rebellion (such as the forming of volunteer forces in Glasgow and Edinburgh) were largely ignored. Anti-­Scottish attitudes in England were further increased during the short and unpopular prime ministership of James Stuart, earl of Bute (a favourite of George III), following the end of the Seven Years War.159 Imperial expansion following British victory in the Seven Years War led to a critique of Empire and its impact on virtue. In History of Women, Alexander used the example of Rome to highlight the moral corruption that commercial wealth and imperial power could cause. He depicted Rome as a virtuous nation until it plundered Asia, after which the great wealth and the licentious manners of conquered countries corrupted the 157

Hume, The Life of David Hume, Esq. Written by Himself, in Essays, p. xxxix. Sher, Enlightenment and the Book, 44. 159 Bob Harris, Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-­Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 159–90. 158

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Introduction 33

Romans. This corruption, according to Alexander, resulted in the loss of patriotism in men in favour of venality, and the preference for fashion over chastity in women.160 Millar also expressed this idea, stating that ‘the excessive opulence of Rome, and after the establishment of the despotism, gave rise to a degree of debauchery of which we have no example in any other European nation’.161 It is unsurprising that there was a concern in Scottish Enlightenment thought about the impact of imperial wealth and power on society. Scots were deeply involved in Empire, fighting in regiments posted overseas, or for the upper classes, gaining overseas posts through patronage networks fostered and controlled by influential Scots in London, such as the Earl of Bute, the Duke of Argyll, and later Henry Dundas. Participation in Empire spurred economic growth in Scotland, cemented the Union, and, as Linda Colley has argued, encouraged the development of a British national identity.162 Asserting their equal place within Britain, and ­desiring to combat anti-­Scottish sentiment, the Scottish elite proclaimed their place within the Union via their urban enlightened culture, and commercial and agricultural improvement. In addition to sitting somewhat uncomfortably with the importance of the institution of slavery (particularly the trade in slave-­grown tobacco and sugar) to Scottish economic growth, this assertion of Scottish civility and also involved an erroneous contention that Scottish urbane civility was free from (or at least less tainted by) the moral corruption of wealth seemingly evident in London polite society.163 In the pamphlet A North Briton Extraordinary (1756) the author, ‘A citizen of Edinburgh’, expressed dismay that ‘our southern brethren rail at us for the lead we take in war and in commerce, in the arts and in the sciences’.164 Acknowledging that the English were superior in wealth, the author claimed that ‘their superiority in this, is the true cause of their inferiority in everything else’.165 The English are represented as possessing debauched principles and having private lives of ‘tasteless riot and indelicate gluttony mistaken for luxury’.166 Here luxury is not a problem, but wealth without refinement is, and this is what the English are deemed to possess. Illustrating this lack of refinement, the author cites the ‘filth,

160

Alexander, History of Women, i, 377–81. Millar, Origin of the Distinction, 125. 162 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 105–17. 163 John Dwyer and Alexander Murdoch, ‘Paradigms and politics: manners, morals and the  rise of Henry Dundas’, in Dywer, Mason and Murdoch (eds), New Perspectives, 216–18. 164 Anon., A North Briton Extraordinary. Published at Edinburgh (London: W. Nicoll, 1765), 6. 165 Ibid., 7. 166 Ibid., 6, 9. 161

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danger and inconveniency in every street’ in London.167 Although critical of the 1707 Union where in his view, Scotland had become England’s ‘most valuable colony’, the author did not seek Scottish independence. Rather, he aimed to assert Scotland’s equality within the Union.168 London as a place of civility and corruption is also apparent in Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling. It is in London that Harley confronts artificial politeness, is exposed to gambling and prostitution, and is made acutely aware of men’s selfishness.169 Published in the same year as Man of Feeling, Tobias Smollett’s novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) also offers a meditation on commerce, improvement, and luxury. Various perspectives are represented, but ultimately the virtue of the country, embodied by the gentleman following good oeconomy, is upheld as superior to the extravagances of fashionable society. In this text, in the words of the young male character James Melford, Edinburgh is depicted as having ‘all the diversions of London’, such as concerts, the theatre, assemblies, and races. Yet it is free from the profligacy of Bath and London, which is despised by Melford’s uncle, Matthew Bramble.170 In this text, Edinburgh’s superiority is attributed to the fact that its polite culture is closely conjoined with the beneficial public institutions of the College of Justice and the universities, and with so many leading intellectuals occupying its urban streets it is ‘a hot-­bed of genius’.171 Representations of Edinburgh as distinct from London and other English centres of politeness are important in understanding the gendering of the Enlightenment in Scotland. The idea that Edinburgh’s urbanity embodied civility and refinement suggests that the desire to avoid effeminacy and assert refined manhood was acutely felt in Scotland. That many of the distinctions used to portray Edinburgh as morally superior to London were only fiction will be illustrated in Chapter 3. Conclusion Concepts of appropriate masculinity and femininity were central features of Scottish Enlightenment discourses of luxury and refinement, and the dominant gender identities that emerged were the polite, refined gentleman motivated by an inner sensibility, and the emotional woman governed by modesty. These were not the only identities available to men and women of eighteenth-­century Scotland, but they determined the socially dominant public gender performance among the urban elite. Yet, as the following chapters will show, the exact boundaries of these identities (especially 167

Ibid., 9 Ibid., 14. 169 Mackenzie, Man of Feeling, 62–98. 170 Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1771] 2009). 171 Ibid., 233. 168

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Introduction 35 for men) were fluid. Improvement was the unifying thread that held the Enlightenment together, and that enables us to see it as a coherent epistemological and social development. However, in neither thought nor culture was it uniform.

1

Masculinity, Homosociality and Intellectual Culture During the eighteenth century, urbanisation and rapid commercial growth combined with emerging discourses of Enlightenment to inform the creation of public spaces in which men and women performed politeness, and engaged in the social processes of improvement. These public spaces included mixed-­sex spaces, such as theatres, concert and assembly halls, which were joined by homosocial male spaces, such as societies, clubs, and coffeehouses. Rather than replacing pre-­existing institutions, they operated within an integrated public sphere alongside public bodies including the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and the universities of Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and Glasgow. In Chapter 3, I will explore the relationship between gender, Enlightenment, and urban culture. This chapter examines the intellectual societies which were the epicentre of Enlightenment thought. Significantly, in Scotland they were male spaces, and this chapter will demonstrate that these homosocial spaces were integral to the performance of male refinement. I argue that although coexisting and integrated with a mixed-­sex public sphere, the homosocial associational public sphere was a prime location for intellectual and political participation, and thereby allowed men of elite and upper-­middling rank to claim an intellectual and political agency that was denied to women. In post-­ Union Scotland, where there was no longer a Scottish Parliament, but the institutions of the Kirk and the law had been retained, it was not parliamentary party politics, but theories of government and society, and questions of commerce and refinement, that dominated political thinking.1 Yet Scottish Enlightenment ideas were never espoused as mere rhetorical issues; the literati sought to transform their world, and they desired to enact the social, economic, and moral improvement about which they theorised. Perceiving themselves to be the cultural elite, the literati considered it their task to instil and maintain moral virtue within commercial society, and enable economic and social progress.2 1

Fania Oz-­Salzberger, ‘The political theory of the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Alexander Broadie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 157–60. 2 John Dwyer, Roger A. Mason, and Alexander Murdoch, ‘Introduction’, in John Dwyer, Roger A. Mason, and Alexander Murdoch (eds), New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), 6.

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Intellectual societies were a key forum for the literati’s performance of cultural leadership.3 Existing within a broader associational culture, including formal improvement societies such as the Board of Annexed Estates, professional bodies, the Church, and the universities, the Scottish associational public sphere provided a platform for the enactment of cultural and political agency in eighteenth-­century Scotland. At the same time, the landed elite continued to dominate post-­Union Scottish government, including Westminster electoral politics.4 Rather than being oppositional to this culture, Scotland’s literati were connected to it, and the refined masculinity performed in intellectual societies was an elite model of manhood that served to assert the social status of the performer. Significantly, there was much integration of the literati into patronage networks, helping to facilitate political management, such as that controlled by Archibald Campbell, earl of Islay (duke of Argyll from 1743) from 1725 to 1761.5 The integration of the associational public sphere and systems of political management was crucial to the development of the Scottish Enlightenment as an intellectual, cultural, and political phenomenon. Diverting from the lineage typically employed by intellectual historians who place the moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson as the father of the Enlightenment, Roger Emerson, emphasising the broader contexts of Enlightenment, styles the Duke of Argyll in this role. Very much a North Briton, Argyll sought to place Scotsmen in Scottish governmental offices and to increase Scottish benefit from the British imperial state. His particular contribution to the Enlightenment centred upon the appointment of literati to relevant offices; he helped Henry Home of Kames to become a law lord (becoming Lord Kames in 1752), supported the academic career of Adam Smith, and ensured that moderate Presbyterian literati, such as the Reverend William Robertson and Reverend Adam Ferguson, gained offices within the Church of Scotland.6 All literati who benefited from Argyll’s influence 3

Anad C. Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History (London: Croom Helm, 1976); Roger L. Emerson, ‘The social composition of Enlightened Scotland: the Select Society of Edinburgh, 1754–1764’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 114 (1973) 291–329; Mark Kingwell, ‘Politics and polite society in the Scottish Enlightenment’, Historical Reflections 1(3) (1993) 365–75. 4 Alexander Murdoch, ‘The People Above’: Politics and Administration in Mid-­Eighteenth-­Century Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1980); Ronald M. Sunter, Patronage and Politics in Scotland, 1707–1832 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986). 5 Bob Harris, ‘The Scots, the Westminster Parliament and the British state in the eighteenth century’, in Julian Hoppit (ed.), Parliaments, Nations and Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1660–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 132–6; Nicholas Phillipson, ‘Culture and society in the eighteenth-­century province: the case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Lawrence Stone (ed.), The University in Society, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), ii, 411–48. 6 Roger L. Emerson, ‘The context of the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Broadie (ed.) Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, 14–16.

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were active in organised urban sociability. Clubs and societies, like other institutions of the public sphere, were spaces in which the literati were able to network, and through which men could gain access to systems of patronage. The associational public sphere was therefore a primary space for the political participation of the Scottish urban and landed elite. The political function of the public sphere in urban Scotland was an important factor in the predominant exclusion of women from the intellectual associations of Scottish Enlightenment culture. Although partly forged by female influence in the social and domestic spheres, the m ­ asculinity of the refined gentleman required a homosocial world in which to perform refinement. The stadial history that emphasised women’s civilising influence also prompted anxieties concerning the impact on manhood of feminised civility. To defend against possible male effeminacy, limits on female influence in society were required.7 Exclusively male intellectual space restricted women’s cultural influence to social and domestic space, thereby controlling the influence of the feminine. As William Alexander explained in The History of Women (1779), although men required women’s influence to give an elegance to our manners, a relish to our pleasures, to sooth our afflictions and soften our cares. Of all the various causes which influence our conduct, our feelings, and our sentiments, none operate so powerfully as the society of women. If perpetually confined to their company, they infalliably [sic] stamp upon us effeminacy.8 This risk underlined the need for a demarcation of gender roles within polite society, both in theory and in practice. As Alexander concluded, men needed to socialise in both heterosocial and homosocial company; only then would men ‘imbibe the proper share of the softness of the female, and at the same time retain the firmness and constancy of the male’.9 The homosocial public sphere comprised a huge variety of clubs and societies, from merchant bodies, such as Cochrane’s Political Economy Club in Glasgow, to university societies, including the Belle Lettres Society at Edinburgh and predominantly scientific bodies such as the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, which later became the Royal Society of Edinburgh. These formal associations were joined by groups that were primarily convivial in function, such as Glasgow’s Friday Club founded by Robert Simson, professor of Mathematics at the University, to the convivial but also secretive and ritualised Cape Club, frequented by artists including 7

Silvia Sebastiani, ‘“Race”, women and progress in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 82–3. 8 William Alexander, The History of Women, From the Earliest Antiquity to the Present Time, 2 vols, 3rd edn (London: C. Dilly and R. Christopher, [1779] 1782), i, 475. 9 Ibid., i, 475–6.

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Henry Raeburn, and musicians, antiquarians, and printers.10 These clubs and societies were joined by pre-­existing formal institutions, including the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, the Convention of Royal Burghs, and the universities, and professional institutions, such as the Faculty of Advocates and the Royal College of Surgeons. Membership of these bodies, and of clubs and societies, often overlapped and, as Bob Harris argues, this integrated public sphere provided the Scottish elite with an ‘institutional form and support’ to achieve their political ambitions, including the economic prosperity of Scotland within the British state, and through this the promotion of loyalty to Britain.11 In order to provide an in-­depth analysis of the performance of masculinity in intellectual societies, in this chapter I focus on four bodies: the Select Society, Belles Lettres Society, Literary Society, and Aberdeen Philosophical Society. These four societies were similar associations. They included prominent members of the literati in their membership and were all sites for intellectual debate. The Literary Society was formed in 1752, the Select Society in 1754, the Aberdeen Philosophical Society in 1758, and the Belles Lettres Society in 1759. Considered together these associations indicate a unifying desire for sociable intellectual exchange, while also demonstrating the impact of different urban contexts and spaces on the gendering of the public sphere in Enlightenment Scotland. In this book I employ the terminology of the ‘public sphere’ to refer to that arena of social, intellectual, and political social interaction that developed in Europe from the late seventeenth century. The development of this sphere occurred as a result of urbanisation, the subsequent growth of an urban culture, and increases in literacy alongside print and book production. Jürgen Habermas, the most influential social theorist on the development of the public sphere, considered this sphere to be bourgeois. Considering the public sphere to be composed of private individuals formed within the private sphere of the family, and following a cultural Marxist methodology, Habermas argued that the emergence of a public corresponded with the emergence of a middle-­class identity. He also considered that the development of the public sphere consisted of two closely integrated but distinct manifestations: the literary public sphere and the political public sphere, with the latter developing out of the former. The literary public sphere or ‘world of letters’, according to Habermas, emerged out of noble-­courtly culture and preserved a level of continuity with it. He cites institutions such as coffeehouses in England, salons in France, and Tischgesellshaften (table societies) in Germany as key components of the early literary public sphere. In these spaces the authority of rational argument overrode social hierarchies of rank and economic dependence, at 10

For a survey see Davis D. McElroy, Scotland’s Age of Improvement: A Survey of Eighteenth Century Literary Clubs and Societies (Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, 1969). 11 Harris, ‘The Scots, the Westminster Parliament’, 128–34.

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least in theory. These spaces enabled the development of rational-­critical debate among the propertied and educated non-­ nobility, which then reached beyond the institutions via print and a reading public.12 The engagement of the bourgeoisie in rational-­ critical debate led, Habermas argues, to the articulation and demand by the bourgeois public for authority to be based on general and abstract laws. That is, law as based not upon the authority of absolute sovereignty of the monarch, but upon ‘rational rules of a certain universality and permanence’.13 The formulation of this demand resulted in the notion that the public sphere was the only legitimate source of this law, or sovereignty. For Habermas, this change is evidence of the development of the literary public sphere into a political public sphere, whose purpose was the regulation of civil society.14 Habermas’s definition of the public sphere is not easily applied to the Scottish context. Historians such as James Van Horn Melton have contested Habermas’s conception of the public sphere as bourgeois, highlighting the fact that nobles were often active participants in it. In this regard, rather than asserting a separate and oppositional middle-­class identity, the public sphere facilitated social interaction between the nobility, gentry, and the growing middle class, thereby assisting social integration.15 It is this sort of public sphere that developed in urban Scotland. Secondly, as Jane Rendall and Sue Innes assert, Habermas’s definition of the political is too narrow, and does not take into account the political nature of participation in the literary sphere, for example, the political agency expressed via authorship of novels.16 Nor does Habermas’s theory properly address the function of the family as a political space, particularly with regard to patronage, which in Scotland enveloped the landed elite and upper-­middling classes.17 In addition, in Scotland the chronology whereby a literary sphere matures into a political sphere does not fully apply. Certainly, the French Revolution encouraged the development of a radical associational sphere in Scotland, threatening enough that its development was quashed by a nervous government, yet the elite and relatively conservative intellectual societies that preceded the formation of a radical public sphere were also political. The political nature of these institutions was founded upon 12

Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 29–43. 13 Ibid., 53. 14 Ibid., 52–4. 15 James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 11–12. 16 Jane Rendall and Sue Innes, ‘Women, gender, politics’, in Lynn Abrams, Eleanor Gordon, Deborah Simonton, and Eileen Jane Yeo (eds), Gender in Scottish History since 1700 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 43. 17 Katharine Glover, Elite Women and Polite Society in Eighteenth-­Century Scotland (Boydell: Woodbridge, 2011), 110–38.

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the self-­perception that they were crucial participants in the project of improvement.18 The homosocial nature of these spaces and their place within systems of patronage provided the elite and upper-­middling men involved in them with an avenue for the enactment of political agency that was denied to women. I am not suggesting that women were fully excluded from the public sphere. As I will illustrate in later chapters, women were important participants in the social public sphere, and were not completely excluded from access to Enlightenment knowledge and intellectual debate.19 Yet the fact that they were excluded from the vast majority of intellectual associations during the period in which the Scottish Enlightenment was at its height and Edinburgh referred to as the ‘Athens of the North’ severely constrained women’s influence in Scottish Enlightenment culture. The homosocial arenas of the public sphere were not masculine simply by virtue of women’s exclusion, but were themselves discursively constructed within broader discourses of gender, progress, society, and the nation, and their role in the construction and performance of refined manhood was central. In this sense refined manhood in mid-­to late-­ eighteenth-­ century Scotland fits R. W. Connell’s theory of hegemonic masculinity: that masculinity is established as hegemonic through its association with cultural and institutional power, and that its performance both claims and reflects this power.20 Following this model, John Tosh argues that the association of a particular model of masculinity with the dominant expression of patriotic national identity enables the establishment of this model as hegemonic.21 The refined gentleman embodied politeness and improvement in eighteenth-­century Scotland, and displayed a patriotic imperative. However, he did not have a monopoly on elite manhood. As discussed in the Introduction, it is difficult to define any masculinity in this period as hegemonic. The associational public sphere The late seventeenth-­ century emergence of clubs and societies as key sites of public social interaction occurred primarily within urban cultural geographies, with the greatest number situated in London. In conjunction with other new public spaces such as coffeehouses, where men could access print media and engage in cultural and political discussion, clubs 18

Alexander Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2001), 25–8, 38–9. 19 For a variety of perspectives on this in a wide-­ranging European context, see chapters in Knott and Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment. 20 R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 75–7. 21 John Tosh, ‘Hegemonic masculinity and the history of gender’, in Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann, and John Tosh (eds), Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 49.

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and societies provided an alternative arena for the enactment of political influence and cultural power to spaces such as the court, aristocratic house, parliament, church, and guild. Their growth cannot be separated from the seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century development of a discourse of sociability, civility, and improvement.22 Within this discourse public spaces such as clubs and societies were represented as prime sites for the development and expression of polite urban sociability.23 The emphasis on sociability was a distinctive feature of Scottish Enlightenment thought, with the literati placing greater importance on the social formation of an individual’s moral character than their contemporaries in France and Germany.24 The sociable exchange facilitated by new urban spaces had a significant impact on the formation of Scottish Enlightenment ideology, and was crucial to its broader social and cultural impact.25 As Andrew Hook and Richard Sher discuss, the Scottish Enlightenment was concentrated in the three largest cities of Scotland: Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen, and the literati were ‘engaged metropolitan townsmen’.26 By the early decades of the nineteenth century, this culture of urbanity had spread from metropolitan centres to smaller towns such as Ayr, Paisley, and Perth.27 During the eighteenth century it also spread northwards into the Highlands, as gentry families there increased their connections with Edinburgh’s urbane culture and engaged in a conspicuous consumption indicating what Stana Nenadic refers to as a ‘new preoccupation with gentility and politeness’.28 Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen shared a similar culture of urbanity, but the specific contexts differed. Comparing his earlier studies at Edinburgh to his experience as a student at Glasgow, the Reverend Alexander Carlyle considered that Glasgow placed more importance on learning, but Edinburgh was superior ‘in knowledge of the world, and a certain manner and address that can only be attained in the capital’.29 In Edinburgh, university education occurred in a broader social context than it did in Glasgow. As well as the clubs and societies that will be discussed 22

Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 2–3, 20–5, 39; Markman Ellis, The Coffee House: A Cultural History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004), 185–6. 23 Ellis, Coffee House, 185. 24 Thomas Ahnert and Susan Manning (eds), ‘Introduction’, in Character, Self and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 6–8. 25 Alexander Broadie (ed.), ‘Introduction: what was the Scottish Enlightenment?’, in The Scottish Enlightenment: An Anthology (Edinburgh: Canongate Classics, 1997), 15. 26 Richard B. Sher and Andrew Hook (eds), ‘Introduction: Glasgow and the Enlightenment’, in The Glasgow Enlightenment (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1995), 1. 27 Bob Harris, ‘Cultural change in provincial Scottish towns, c. 1700–1820’, Historical Journal 54(1) (2011) 105–41. 28 Stana Nenadic, Lairds and Luxury: The Highland Gentry in Eighteenth-­ Century Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2007), 15. 29 Alexander Carlyle, The Autobiography of the Rev Dr Alexander Carlyle Minister of Inveresk (Blackwood: Edinburgh, 1861), 74.

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below, Edinburgh, a city with high levels of literacy among its inhabitants, was the centre of book, pamphlet, and newspaper publishing in Scotland.30 Here the chronological correlation between the growth of Enlightenment associational culture and the expansion of publishing cannot be ignored; the number of printing houses in Edinburgh and its outskirts increased from four in 1740 to approximately twenty-­seven by 1778.31 The culture of print and reading was connected to the verbal intellectual-­ political culture of clubs and societies, with ideas discussed and lectures given often forming the basis for published material (see below). In addition, associations like the Select Society advertised themselves in the press. In March 1755, ‘An Account of the Select Socieit [sic] of Edinburgh’ was published in The Scots Magazine, informing the public that: ‘The intention of the gentlemen was, by practice to improve themselves in reasoning and eloquence, and by the freedom of debate, to discover the most effectual methods of promoting the good of the country.’32 Noting the need to prevent disorder at the meetings, the article also summarised the laws of the Society. In addition to The Scots Magazine, the Society advertised its meetings in local newspapers such as the Caledonian Mercury.33 Although eclipsed by Edinburgh, Glasgow was an important site for printing and bookselling, largely due to the influence of Robert and Andrew Foulis, printers to the University and members of the Literary Society. Students of Francis Hutcheson, the Foulis brothers were vital in making the scholarship of Glasgow professors accessible beyond the University.34 These developments in printing occurred alongside significant economic growth and urbanisation in the latter half of the century as Glasgow’s merchant classes profited from imperial trade and early industrialisation. Although similar to Edinburgh in many ways, the cities differed in a number of respects. Whereas the aristocracy, gentry, and professionals dominated Edinburgh’s urban elite culture, Glasgow was dominated by a merchant elite. Glasgow was also more evangelical than Edinburgh in religious concerns, and resisted the move towards moderation that informed Church governance in Edinburgh in the second half of the century. Imperial trade played a significant role in Glasgow’s prosperity and growth, particularly the trades in slave-­grown North American tobacco and West Indian sugar. Between 1741 and 1771 imports of tobacco to Glasgow 30

Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and their Publishers in Eighteenth-­Century Britain, Ireland and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 31 R. A. Houston, ‘Literacy, education and the culture of print in Enlightenment Scotland’, History, 78(254) (1993) 373–83. 32 ‘An Account of the Select Society of Edinburgh. 1755’, The Scots Magazine, 1739–1803 17 (1755) 126. 33 See, for example, Caledonian Mercury, 28 June 1760. 34 Richard Sher, ‘Commerce, religion and enlightenment in eighteenth-­century Glasgow’, in Thomas M. Devine and Gordon Jackson (eds), Glasgow, vol. 1: Beginnings to 1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 326–8.

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grew from 8 million to 47 million pounds, and the wealth obtained from this trade was reflected in the grand mansions of tobacco merchants, the city’s paved streets, and commercial improvements such as the building of the Forth and Clyde Canal, and investment in textile manufacturing.35 Glasgow too had its share of societies and clubs, though they were fewer in number than those of Edinburgh. In Glasgow, the Literary Society were joined by other clubs, including the commercially orientated Political Economy Club, founded in 1743.36 Led by Andrew Cochrane, it was here that Adam Smith was exposed to merchants’ ideas and where he was able to examine their motivations. The Political Economy Club thus had a significant impact on the formation of the ideas contained in Wealth of Nations (1776), including his critiques of merchant self-­interest and monopolising tendencies. Existing in a sometimes uneasy relationship with the mercantile city, the University of Glasgow was a crucial site for the development of Scottish Enlightenment discourse, particularly moral philosophy. Often ideologically distant from the city’s urban merchant class, the University operated on the outskirts of city life rather than being integrated within it. This meant that whereas Edinburgh’s associational culture was integrated but dispersed among Edinburgh University and clerical, professional, and other associational bodies, Glasgow’s was largely centred upon the University.37 In Aberdeen, too, Enlightenment associational culture was intricately linked to the cities two colleges, King’s and Marischal. The formation of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society occurred in the context of educational reforms at these colleges as they moved towards a system of polite and useful learning, encompassing mathematics, natural philosophy, and classical and modern history as well as moral philosophy.38 As the editors of the published version of the Philosophical Society’s minutes emphasise, the history of the Society cannot be separated from that of the colleges, as it was from these institutions that it drew its membership.39 As with other associations and the various cultural manifestations of the Scottish Enlightenment considered here and in following chapters, the changing urban context of eighteenth-­ century Aberdeen provides an important social context. Although smaller in population than Glasgow and Edinburgh, as the 35

Sher and Hook, ‘Glasgow and the Enlightenment’, 3–4; Irene Maver, Glasgow (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 26–8; Thomas M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire 1660–1815 (London: Penguin, 2003), 332–4. 36 Chitnis, Scottish Enlightenment, 198. 37 Sher and Hook, ‘Glasgow and the Enlightenment’, 10–11; Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (London: Penguin, 2011), 39–40. 38 Paul B. Wood, The Aberdeen Enlightenment: The Arts Curriculum in the Eighteenth-­Century (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1993). 39 H. Lewis Ulman (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in The Minutes of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society 1758–1773 (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1990), 18–24.

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capital of northeast Scotland Aberdeen was an important and growing urban centre; while the population of Old Aberdeen remained steady during the century, New Aberdeen (a royal burgh since the reign of David I) grew from ca. 9,000 in the 1690s to ca. 17,600 by 1800. This urban growth was joined by a growth in trade, and improvements to the city, including an improved water supply and street lighting.40 Increasing their control of urban space, the Town Council laid out the plainstanes in 1752 ‘as a place of resort for the citizens both for transacting business and for recreation’.41 As with other urban centres in Georgian Britain, these architectural changes were joined by other developments, including the establishment of circulating libraries, a weekly newspaper, a musical society, and finally a theatre in 1795. The relative lateness of the establishment of the theatre, and Aberdeen’s lack of an assembly hall was not due to a dislike for these amusements, but because these activities often took place in pre-­existing public spaces such as taverns.42 What Aberdeen, Glasgow, and Edinburgh shared at mid-­century was a public intellectual culture of clubs and societies feeding from and contributing to the cities’ respective universities and print culture. In his study of Scottish associational culture, Davis D. McElroy emphasises the integral connection between discourses of improvement and the development and growth of societies and clubs as key cultural institutions.43 These formal and informal institutions symbolised Scotland’s place within British ‘civilisation’, and were intended to enable further social and moral progress. As Colin Kidd discusses, within the ideology of North Britishness English institutions were classified as the ‘vanguard of progress’; from a stadialist historiographical viewpoint English institutions represented the development of a civilisation based upon commerce and civil liberty.44 As evidence of the development of ‘civilised’ society based upon metropolitan English norms, societies and clubs symbolised the country’s membership of the British nation. Intellectual societies The Select Society met for ten years from 1754 to 1764, and it is the most well known of eighteenth-­century Scotland’s intellectual societies. Meeting weekly in Edinburgh on Wednesday evenings, it was chiefly a debating 40

E. Patricia Dennison, Anne T. Simpson, and Grant G. Simpson, ‘The growth of two towns’, in E. Patricia Dennison, David Ditchburn, and Michael Lynch (eds), Aberdeen Before 1800: A New History (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2002), 32–40. 41 Quoted in Dennison et al., ‘Growth of two towns’, 37. 42 Dennison et al., ‘Growth of two towns’, 32–40; Murray Pittock, ‘Contrasting cultures: town and country’, in Ditchburn and Lynch (eds), Aberdeen Before 1800, 365–73. 43 McElroy, Age of Improvement. 44 Colin Kidd, ‘North Britishness and the nature of eighteenth-­century British patriotisms’, Historical Journal 39(2) (1996) 374.

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society. Questions for debate could be proposed by any member and could cover ‘any subject of debate, except such as regard Revealed religion, or which may give occasion to vent any principles of Jacobitism’.45 As this rule suggests, the Select Society was not a radical organisation, but one that aimed to contribute to the progress of Britain and of Scotland. This desire for improvement is evident in the Select Society’s formation in 1755 of the largely autonomous suborganisation, the Edinburgh Society for Encouraging Arts, Sciences, Manufactures and Agriculture in Scotland.46 In the resolutions establishing this improvement society, the Select Society proclaimed, ‘that Arts and Manufactures may, by the proper distribution of premiums, be promoted, is a certain truth, founded in reason, and confirmed by experience.’47 This practical application of Enlightenment ideals of empirical knowledge, industry, and progress was again demonstrated in 1761 when the Select Society founded the Society for Promoting the Reading and Writing of the English Language. This subgroup in particular reflects the literati’s desire to affirm their intellectual and cultural equality with the English.48 The desire of the Select Society to further Scotland’s improvement was reflected in the topics debated at the meetings. These broadly covered issues of politics, economy, society, and the arts. Central to the discussions were questions of nationhood, British power, and gender. For instance, on 18 December 1759 five questions were proposed and entered into the question book. These were: ‘Whether the Union of all our Colonies on the Continent of America would be of advantage to Britain, & these Colonies?’; ‘Whether a Nation may subsist without a Public Spirit?’; ‘Whether the true Interest of Britain requires that we should always remain in amity with Holland?’; ‘Whether it would be of advantage to Society that the Women held Places of Trust and Profit in the State?’; and ‘Whether the Institution of Convents and Nunneries is prejudicial to the population of a Country?’49 That these issues were not rhetorical concerns, but were discussed within the intention of influencing local and national politics is apparent when we consider the composition of the Select Society. Alongside leading Enlightenment philosophers, including Adam Smith and David Hume, membership lists from 1754 to 1758 record the inclusion of scientists such as Alexander Monro and William Cullen; nobles including the Duke of Hamilton and Earl of Lauderdale; military officers including Major Archibald Montgomery and Captain James Stewart; and 45

‘Rules and Orders of the Select Society instituted on Wednesday the twenty second day of May 1754’, in ‘Minutes of the Select Society’, National Library of Scotland [NLS], MS Adv. 23.1.1, p. 2 46 McElroy, Age of Improvement, 48–60 47 Resolutions of the Select Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Sciences, Manufactures and Agriculture (13 March 1755) (Edinburgh, 1755). 48 Emerson, ‘Social composition’, 299. 49 ‘Minutes of the Select Society’, 148–9.

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politically powerful men such as George Drummond Esquire, Lord Provost of Edinburgh, and Robert Dundas, Lord Advocate.50 The Select Society not only provided a space in which to share and develop ideas, and refine oratory skills, but also to meet and interact with men whose influence might be of benefit in the furthering of a career, or for those men with, or aspiring to, political power to bring men under their influence. Ideology and institutions fulfilled a complementary function in the construction of associational culture in eighteenth-­ century Edinburgh. Nicholas Phillipson argues that from the 1750s, when the institutions of the literati came to replace the pre-­Union Parliament as key sites of political discourse and action, this society came to constitute political society. The landed classes, who to a great extent still dominated Edinburgh society, were assimilated into the institutions of the literati, providing them with a collective identity which had been diminished with the removal of the parliament to London.51 Elite intellectual associations such as the Select Society took on some of the functions of early modern political spaces such as the court and noble household. For example, William Robertson, Church of Scotland minister, historian, and active member of the Select Society, became the Principal of the University of Edinburgh in 1762. Robertson believed in the literati’s role as the cultural leaders of society and, from 1757, with ministers Hugh Blair, Adam Ferguson, and Alexander Carlyle, established the control of the Moderates in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Robertson’s ascendancy to political power in eighteenth-­century Edinburgh occurred in the context of his active engagement in the homosocial Scottish Enlightenment public sphere. In turn, this ascendancy increased the cultural and political influence of the literati.52 During its ten years as an active body, 164 men became members of the Select Society.53 Alongside Hume and Smith, and the painter Allan Ramsay, this membership included other celebrated Enlightenment figures such as Robertson, Blair, and Lord Kames, and as such it provides the clearest example of the role of intellectual societies in the development of the Scottish Enlightenment canon.54 As explored in the Introduction, gender 50

‘Lists of Members of the Select Society’, in ‘Minutes of the Select Society’, 7–10; ‘Roll of Members of the Select Society 20th October 1756’, NLS, MS 25435, fos. 34–3; ‘Roll of Members of the Select Society, 18th October 1758’, NLS, FB 1.177. 51 Phillipson, ‘Culture and society’, 411–48. 52 Jeffrey R. Smitten, ‘Robertson, William (1721–1793)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, September 2004; online edition, January 2008), available at: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/23817, accessed 26 May 2008. For a detailed analysis of the institutionalisation of moderate Presbyterian philosophy and the ascendancy of the moderate literati, see Richard Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985). 53 Appendix in Emerson, ‘Social composition’, 323–8. 54 Kingwell, ‘Politics and polite society’, 373; Emerson, ‘Social composition’, 291–6.

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was a crucial category of analysis in Scottish Enlightenment ideology, particularly within discourses of improvement. Therefore, the gendered environment in which these ideas were discussed is crucial to understanding the development of Enlightenment gender ideology. Importantly in this context, the Select Society was a male society. The manuscript minutes of the Society contain no reference to women being admitted as members or visitors. They also contain no record of women being explicitly excluded.55 This lack of specific reference to female exclusion indicates that women’s access to the associational public sphere in eighteenth-­century Scotland was culturally restricted. That an intellectual society would be exclusively male was assumed, and the Select Society’s homosocial composition reflects a general exclusion of women from intellectual associations in eighteenth-­century Scotland. Focused on the University and less integrated with the professions, Glasgow’s societies appear to have fulfilled a similar, but narrower, intellectual and political function to those in Edinburgh. Like Edinburgh societies, Glasgow’s were exclusively male, and they provided a crucial space for self-­ improvement via homosocial intellectual sociability. Describing two societies that he attended in Glasgow which concentrated on literary conversation, Carlyle noted that: ‘These societies tended much to our improvement; and as moderation and early hours were inviolable rules of both institutions, they served to open and enlarge our minds.’56 The key institution in Glasgow for the forging and expression of Scottish Enlightenment discourse was the Literary Society of Glasgow College. Although its records are patchy and only extant from 1764 (and even these are an 1830 transcription of the original documents), reasonable information exists relating to membership of the Society. Of the twelve constituent members in 1752, nine were professors at the University of Glasgow, including Adam Smith, then professor of Moral Philosophy, and the remaining three included two men for whom no profession is listed and the Reverend William Craig, Minster of Glasgow.57 Of the eventual one hundred known members of the Literary Society, thirty-­two were members of the clergy, including fifteen who were also professors at the University of Glasgow. In total, university professors and principals constituted the largest proportion of members, with fifty-­two represented. That there was an integration of Church, University, and intellectual association in Glasgow is indicated by the dominance of clergymen and professors within the Literary Society, and was matched by their authority over the University itself.58 The political managers of Scotland, 55

‘Minutes of the Select Society’. Carlyle, Autobiography, 74. 57 William J. Duncan (ed.), Notices and Documents Illustrative of the Literary History of Glasgow, during the later part of the last century (Glasgow: Hutchison & Brookman, 1831), 132. 58 Sher, ‘Commerce, religion and enlightenment’, 335–48. 56

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such as Argyll, were hugely influential in the appointment of Chairs at Scottish universities during the eighteenth century, and at the University of Edinburgh professional bodies such as the Faculty of Advocates and Royal College of Surgeons also influenced the appointment of Chairs in their respective fields. At the University of Glasgow, however, there was far less influence from professional bodies. Second to political managers, the Presbytery of Glasgow exercised significant power in the election of professors.59 As elsewhere, the homosociality of associational culture in Glasgow was assumed. In addition to members, the president of the Literary Society (a position held on a rotating basis) had the ‘power of bringing three Visitors to the Society’, provided he obtained the consent of the member giving the lecture at that meeting. The person giving the lecture was also allowed to bring three visitors. The only stated restriction regarding visitors was that it extended, ‘only to Members of this College, and to the Inhabitants of Glasgow’.60 Like the Select Society, women were not present as members or visitors, but were not officially excluded, and the situation was the same in Edinburgh’s Belles Lettres Society and Aberdeen’s Philosophical Society. In fact, with the exception of popular debating societies in the 1770s and a women-­only society possibly operating in the early decades of the century (both of which will be examined in the next chapter), women were excluded from associational public life in Scotland. As outlined in the Introduction, Scottish Enlightenment thought placed great emphasis on the civilising effects of female influence, particularly through conversation. However, this emphasis was dependent upon a specific notion of women’s femininity, and, by extension, intellectual inferiority. As with coffeehouses, the activity of intellectual debate that occurred in intellectual societies was assumed to be a masculine activity, thereby leading to an assumption and expectation of homosociality.61 An influential philosopher and founding member of the Select Society, Hume offers a good example of Scottish Enlightenment ideas regarding women’s feminine role in the creation of a refined civilised culture. In his 1742 essay ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’, Hume argued that male gallantry was the basis of politeness, and being based upon mutual affection between the sexes, it is a natural sentiment that is refined and polished in modern society to give it ‘a proper grace and expression’.62 59

Roger L. Emerson, ‘Politics and the Glasgow professors, 1690–1800’, in Hook and Sher (eds), Glasgow Enlightenment, 24–34. 60 ‘Laws of the Literary Society in Glasgow College’, in Duncan (ed.), Notices and Documents, 3. 61 Brian Cowan, ‘What was masculine about the public sphere? Gender and the coffeehouse milieu in post-­Restoration England’, History Workshop Journal 51 (2001) 127–57. 62 David Hume, ‘Of the rise and progress of the arts and sciences’ [1742], in Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, [1777] 1987), 131.

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For Hume, gallantry was the foundation of men’s generosity towards others, therefore providing the basis for good manners and a defence against personal vice. In this regard gallantry allowed men to raise women’s position in society to that of their companions rather than their slaves: As nature has given man the superiority above woman, by endowing him with greater strength both of mind and body; it is his part to alleviate that superiority, as much as possible, by the generosity of his behaviour, and by a studied deference and complaisance for all her inclinations and opinions.63 Men were physically and intellectually superior to women, but civility encouraged them to respect women as companions. This respect is important for the further development of civility. As Hume asserted: What better school for manners than the company of virtuous women; where the mutual endeavour to please must insensibly polish the mind, where the example of female softness and modesty must communicate itself to their admirers, and where the delicacy of that sex puts every one [sic] on his guard, lest he give offence by any breach of decency?64 In Hume’s philosophy, male politeness and gallantry towards women in mixed-­sex interaction demonstrated male superiority and was integral to male refinement. Adam Smith, also a founding member of the Select Society and an active participant in the Literary Society, likewise considered that women lacked certain mental abilities that were possessed by men. That the intellectual exchange of the literati occurred in exclusively male spaces indicates that social practice and Smith’s argument that women lacked the self-­command necessary for full participation in public life coalesced.65 The importance placed upon women’s complementary gender identity is a primary reason for women’s absence as members or visitors from the Select Society and Literary Society without their exclusion ever being explicitly asserted. Gendered spaces Clubs and societies met in spaces appropriate to their exclusively male composition. As discussed above, the Literary Society was closely associated with the University of Glasgow and it is often referred to as the Literary Society in Glasgow College, suggesting that they met on University grounds. In eighteenth-­century Scotland, universities were male institutions, however, 63

Ibid., 133 (original emphasis). Ibid., 134. 65 Jane Rendall, ‘Virtue and commerce in the making of Adam Smith’s political economy’, in Ellen Kennedy and Susan Mendus (eds), Women in Western Political Philosophy: Kant to Nietzsche (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1987), 59–60. 64

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most university students did not graduate, making universities relatively fluid spaces. This fluidity enabled a limited form of female inclusion; for example, women would attend midwifery and other lecture courses.66 Yet that women could neither become students nor professors, nor participate in adjunct intellectual societies, confirms that the activities conducted within universities were considered to be masculine pursuits. The predominantly masculine character of universities meant that the centrality of the University of Glasgow to the Scottish Enlightenment in that city can be considered as a key factor in the homosocial nature of the city’s intellectual associational culture. This is not to say that Edinburgh’s intellectual culture, closely integrated to the professions and professional bodies such as the Faculty of Advocates, as well as the University, was necessarily any more open to women. In fact, its existence in the context of a broader public sphere incorporating exclusively male institutions further facilitated women’s exclusion. The integrated nature of the homosocial public sphere is demonstrated by the meeting places of the Select Society. When the Select Society was first established it met at the Advocates Library. Formed by Faculty of Advocates in the 1680s, this library provided Scottish advocates and, via indirect borrowing, those connected to them an important means of access to published knowledge.67 At the time the Select Society was formed, Hume was the keeper of the Advocates Library, so there were probably practical motivations for meeting there. However, the choice of the Advocates Library, a centre for intellectual pursuit in Edinburgh, also demonstrates the Select Society’s position at the epicentre of the Scottish Enlightenment. The professions, such as law and medicine, were considered male occupations in eighteenth-­century Scotland, and were largely exclusive of women. The Advocates Library was firmly integrated in these masculine realms. The popularity of the Society, and the resulting increase in membership during its first year, quickly created a need for a new venue. Although they maintained their connection with the Advocates Library, with subcommittees occasionally meeting there, it was not large enough to accommodate the regular meetings. On 13 November 1754, it was agreed that they would move their meetings to a room above the Laigh Council House. Prior to requesting permission from the magistrates to meet there, a number of members ‘as a committee are to wait upon Mr Charles-­Gordon Master of a Lodge of Masons, who meet in a room above the Laigh Council-­House’.68 This room, St Giles Hall, which belonged to the Freemasons, was to be the one in which the subsequent regular meetings of the Select Society were held. 66

Lindy Moore, ‘Education and learning’, in Abrams et al. (eds), Gender in Scottish History, 111, 130; Sarah J. Smith, ‘Retaking the register: women’s higher education in Glasgow and beyond, c. 1796–1845’, Gender & History 12(2) (2007) 310–35. 67 J. St Clair and Roger Craik, The Advocates’ Library: 300 Years of a National Institution 1689– 1989 (Edinburgh: HMSO, 1989), 25, 39–42. 68 ‘Minutes of the Select Society’, 30.

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The fact that they shared a meeting place suggests at least an informal connection between the Select Society and the Freemasons. Sharing a space necessitated communication between the two groups, and on 25 December 1754 it was raised by some members ‘that the Masons to whom the Room which the Society now usually meet doth belong had taken umbrage on account of the Society’s meeting there’.69 At a meeting a month later, on 22 January 1755, the Duke of Hamilton moved ‘That as it had hitherto neglected to return Thanks in a proper manner to the Free Masons and Master of the Lodge in which the Society do now meet, that this should be done without further delay.’70 In addition to the Freemasons, the Select Society was integrated with other aspects of the homosocial public sphere, especially through its use of coffeehouses. Coffeehouses were public spaces theoretically open to anyone who could pay for a drink. They typically provided access to periodicals and other print media (either through reading or listening to others read), and were a forum for intellectual and social exchange. They were sites that reflected and aided the increasing commercialisation of society; in coffeehouses men could share and gather commercial information. Public roups (auctions) were held there, and newspapers often carried advertisements calling on creditors of deceased estates to meet in coffeehouses.71 Similarly to societies and clubs, British coffeehouses were typically male spaces, and they provided, in Melton’s words, ‘politicised spaces of public discussion’.72 With regard to the practice of polite intellectual sociability deemed fit for a commercial age, coffeehouses were considered by some to provide a civilised alternative to the sometimes violent atmosphere of the tavern.73 Yet, as I will argue in Chapter 3, we should be wary of drawing too sharp a distinction between associations, coffeehouses, and taverns. As with taverns, men who participated in intellectual associations also frequented coffeehouses. Subcommittees of the Select Society often used coffeehouses as meeting spaces. In the minute for 3 July 1754, it was stated that the committee ‘appointed to receive and consider proposals relating to the Lawes and Regulations of this Society doe meet at the Exchange Coffee house on Fryday next at seven o the clock’.74 When, in July 1755, the Select Society decided to consider how they could actively promote the encouragement of improvement, resulting in the Edinburgh Society for Encouraging Arts, Sciences, Manufactures and Agriculture in Scotland, they set up a subcommittee to choose the committees for different subjects, such as History and Politics, Belles Lettres and Criticism, and Natural History and Chemistry. This subcommittee was ‘appointed to meet 69

‘Minutes of the Select Society’, 39. Ibid., 44. 71 See Edinburgh Evening Courant; Caledonian Mercury; Glasgow Journal. 72 Melton, Rise of the Public, 243. 73 Ibid., 226, 243–8. 74 ‘Minutes of the Select Society’, 19. 70

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tomorrow in John’s Coffee-­house, for choosing the said Committees’.75 John’s Coffeehouse was a popular venue among Select Society members. On 11 January 1757, a committee formed to consider the laws of the Society and to submit a report as to ‘the proper methods for reviving the spirit of the Society’, decided ‘to meet tomorrow at one of the Clock at Johns Coffee house’.76 Within periodical literature, particularly the Tatler and Spectator, the coffeehouse was presented as a key site for the performance of civilised sociability, which itself was the basis of liberty and improvement.77 As Philip Carter discusses, perceptions of the coffeehouse changed during the long eighteenth century, initially being depicted as a threat to civic virtue and later seen as the embodiment of it.78 During the late seventeenth century, coffeehouses were considered by many to be a threat to society due to their ‘substitution of natural distinctions for an apparent republic of tongues’.79 In this discourse, coffeehouses were deemed to promote a social intercourse that did not pay due regard social rank. Linked to this was the idea that they promoted an artificial politeness, lacking inner virtue. As Brian Cowan explains, the coffeehouse during the Restoration period was regarded as the habitat of the Fop, because of the emphasis within coffeehouse culture on fashion and polite etiquette. However, its association with corruption did not lead to condemnation, instead many moralists sought to defend it as a space for the performance of masculinity centred upon learned and civil social intercourse. If misused the coffeehouse could promote effeminacy and corruption, but, alternatively, it could provide a space for political, commercial, and cultural discourse. In this regard the coffeehouse became a key site for the policing of the boundaries of male politeness.80 By the mid-­eighteenth century the coffeehouse was increasingly perceived as a bedrock of urban sociability, and, by extension, of national liberty and improvement. As discussed in the previous chapter, Smith’s concept of sociability was based upon men’s sympathetic exchange with other men and the resulting cultivation of a moral sense through this social negotiation.81 The records of the Select Society, in which Smith was an active member, suggest that it was this form of sociability, rather than foppish fashion and politeness, that was performed by the members in their engagement with coffeehouse culture. 75

Ibid., 63. Ibid., 93. 77 Ellis, Coffee House, 185–7. 78 Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660–1800 (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001), 37–8. 79 Ibid., 37. 80 Cowan, ‘What was masculine’, 138–42. 81 John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late Eighteenth-­Century Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), 54–5. 76

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Homosociality and the performance of male refinement It is tempting to argue that the development of the public sphere of societies and clubs in place of noble houses and the Parliament resulted in a clear change from political participation being determined largely by wealth and status to one in which gender was the primary determinant of political agency. However, societies such as the Select Society demonstrate that it was more complicated than this. Although gender was a primary determinant, with women excluded from participation, male participation remained dependent upon social status. Many men were able to participate in a public political sphere, such as professionals and wealthy merchants (highlighting their increasing power in an increasingly commercialised society), but the Scottish Enlightenment public sphere was not open to all men. In this regard it was similar in composition to the public sphere elsewhere in Europe, which, Melton states, was ‘inhabited by men and women with sufficient property and education to enjoy regular access to newspapers, novels and other products of eighteenth-­century print culture’.82 Many Scottish Enlightenment books were accessible to working people above the poorest labouring classes, as they were republished in cheaper octavo and duodecimo editions after initial publication in the more expensive, and distinguished, quarto format.83 The membership fees of intellectual societies were also relatively low and not necessarily beyond the means of artisans and other skilled urban workers. In order to join the Aberdeen Philosophical Society men had to pay half a crown and were subject to taxation of up to 11 shillings a year for ‘any Emergent Expence’.84 In 1754, the Select Society set the annual membership fee at 11 shillings a year.85 These fees were not unsubstantial; 11 shillings represented almost two days wages for an urban labourer in the 1750s, but they would have been affordable to successful merchants and skilled master tradesmen.86 More so than money, in order to participate in the associational public sphere in Scotland men needed to belong to a social rank that enabled them to perform a specific masculinity: that of the refined gentleman. A central feature of refined masculinity was men’s ability to display refinement through social, uncompetitive conversation. Men’s ability to speak without causing offence, and to listen as well as to talk, evidenced their ‘civilised’ self-­control.87 A philosophical expression of this can be found in the work of literati such as Blair and Hume, who considered rhetoric and 82

Melton, Rise of the Public, 3. Sher, Enlightenment and the Book, 82–93. 84 Ulman, Aberdeen Philosophical Society 1758–1773, 76. 85 ‘Rules and Orders’, in ‘Minutes of the Select Society’, 2. 86 A. J. S. Gibson and T. C. Smout, Prices, Food and Wages in Scotland 1550–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 261–336. 87 Carter, Men and the Emergence, 6, 63–4. 83

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conversation to be crucial to the formation of a polite, virtuous character.88 In this context, intellectual societies had an educational function beyond the topics discussed, because refined masculine attributes were forged by and demonstrated via participation in polite intellectual culture. The significance of polite conversation to improvement in a homosocial context is evidenced by the rules and regulations of intellectual societies. Rule XII of the Literary Society declared that after the discourse had been delivered, or a question explained and illustrated, each member would be invited to ‘give his observations’.89 These rules existed to ensure that intellectual debate adhered to the norms of social propriety as defined by polite society. The necessity of clearly stated rules regarding meeting procedure suggests that the literati were aware that the behavioural norms of polite society needed to be enforced. This recognition is demonstrated by the statement in Rule XII that the President’s business ‘Shall be to keep order, to excite the laws to the attention of Strangers, and to prevent every thing [sic] which may be hurtful to the good humour and decorum of the Society’.90 Men’s ability to engage in rigorous debate within the boundaries of politeness offered a means to perform male refinement in a way that was counter to the foppish politeness of luxury, subservience, and effeminacy. Participation in intellectual societies can thus be interpreted as a means for the men involved to display the self-­command necessary to protect against effeminacy in polite society. The centrality of self-­command to Enlightenment notions of manhood is illustrated by Adam Smith’s moral philosophy. Smith’s discussion of self-­ command in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) reflected and informed the ideals of male refinement and self-­control enforced by the explicit rules that governed participation in associational culture. Self-­command features prominently in Moral Sentiments as a virtue enabled by men’s consideration of the ‘impartial spectator’, or their self-­judgement based upon their perceptions of the opinions of others. This self-­command was deemed necessary in order to place the interests of others above self-­interest, a principle deemed within Scottish Enlightenment thought to be a basis of ‘civilised’ society. On this Smith wrote: that to feel much for others and little for ourselves, that to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature; and can alone produce among mankind that harmony of sentiments and passions in which consists their whole grace and propriety.91 88

Ahnert and Manning, ‘Introduction’, 16. ‘Laws of the Literary Society’, 4. 90 Ibid., 4. 91 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments [1790], 6th edn, ed. K. Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 30. 89

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Sensibility and self-­command were interlinked categories, with the feelings established by the former encouraging the self-­sacrifice demanded by the latter. For Smith, men’s control over their passions, their awareness of the ‘impartial spectator’, often required ‘the presence of the real spectator’.92 He posited that solitude brought self-­pity and self-­adulation. In order to avoid this, and the risks it posed to manly sensibility and self-­ command, social interaction with others was encouraged, asserting that: ‘The conversation of a friend brings us to a better, that of a stranger to a still better temper.’93 Smith’s ideas concerning self-­command, sensibility, and the ‘impartial spectator’, and the usefulness of sociability in the acquirement and maintenance of virtue informed, and were informed by, the practices of societies such as the Literary, Select, and Aberdeen Philosophical societies. It was in these societies that men could engage in the necessary social interaction to attain, perform, and maintain virtue. For Smith this had a broader social and economic function; reciprocal sympathetic social exchange served to direct men’s self-­interest to the benefit of the public good, and this underpinned his notions of beneficial economic exchange detailed in Wealth of Nations. That the members of these societies belonged primarily to the gentry and professional elites further enhanced that function; as Dwyer has argued, Smith’s notion of a virtuous and progressive capitalism rested upon an argument for the continued economic dominance of agrarian capital, with the gentry and associated elites acting as an improving force and a moral bulwark against the selfishness and ­corruption of merchants and manufacturers.94 The Literary, Select and Aberdeen Philosophical societies were very similar institutions. In addition to their respective memberships all being drawn from the social elite, there were stark similarities regarding the norms of behaviour expected of members. Despite the fact that, unlike the Literary or Select societies, the Aberdeen Philosophical Society met in tavern rooms (the Lemon Tree and the Red Lion), its character was that of a formal intellectual society rather than a convivial club. Unlike the relatively free conversation of the convivial clubs that will be explored in Chapter 3, the sociability of formal intellectual societies occurred within boundaries defined by stated rules of engagement. Intended to facilitate a friendly sociable exchange, Rule 16 of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society stated that: After the Discourse is read every member in his Order shall have access to make his Observations in a free but candid and friendly Manner. But Criticisms upon Style Pronounciation [sic] or Composition are to be avoided as Forreign [sic] to the Designs of the Society. The 92

Ibid., 178. Ibid. 94 John Dwyer, ‘Ethics and economics: bridging Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations’, Journal of British Studies 44(4) (2005) 662–87. 93

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Masculinity, Homosociality and Intellectual Culture 57 Member that Discoursed may answer to any Observations made but the Observer is to make no reply without Leave of the President.95

Similarly, on participation in debates, Rule X of the Select Society declared: ‘That every person may speak three times in a debate, and no oftener; the first time fifteen minutes and ten minutes each of the other times.’96 These explicit regulations governing behaviour at meetings of intellectual societies reveal an awareness of the performativity of male sociability and refinement. In order to become a refined gentleman one had to act like one. In associational culture the performance of masculinity was more ­self-­conscious than the twentieth-­century gender performativity described referential by Judith Butler.97 Whilst reiterative, in terms of being self-­ (in that through performing male refinement, it became the norm, thus encouraging its performance and making that performance appear natural), there appears to have been a level of awareness among men of the eighteenth-­century Scottish elite that the refined masculinity they performed was constructed; in other words, they were at least partly aware that they were performing gender. The Select Society provided a space for the articulation, adoption, and performance of gentlemanly refinement by the urban male elite, achieved not only through interaction and peer pressure, but by clearly stated and enforced rules of behaviour. An example of the conscious awareness of the need to enforce behavioural norms is the minute from 25 January 1757, when the President’s role in the Society was re-­stated. At this meeting it was emphasised that the President was required to keep the debate close to the question being discussed, ‘and in general to conduct the whole debate in the best manner he can’.98 As in the Literary Society, the role of the President of the Select Society was to ensure that the behavioural norms of polite intellectual debate were not flouted. At the same meeting it was declared: ‘That the Members shall observe a strict Silence during the debate and, no member shall leave the Room during the time that another is speaking.’99 This was in addition to an earlier rule that asserted: ‘That during the Time of the Debates, no gentleman shall stand before the Fire.’100 Similarly, the third rule of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society stated that: ‘Any member may take a Glass at a By table while the President is in the Chair, but no healths shall be drunk during that time.’101 As in 95

Aberdeen Philosophical Society, 77. ‘Rules and Orders’, in ‘Minutes of the Select Society’, 2. 97 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London: Routledge, 1993); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999). 98 ‘Minutes of the Select Society’, 97. 99 Ibid. 100 Select Society, Rules and Orders of the Select Society, Instituted on Wednesday the 23rd Day of May, 1754 (1754), 12. 101 Aberdeen Philosophical Society, 76. 96

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the Select Society, the position of president in the Aberdeen Philosophical Society was a rotating one, and he held ultimate power in the meetings, with the first rule asserting that: ‘it shall be his Province to Keep the Meeting to the Bussiness [sic] in Hand, to Execute the Rules of the Society, & maintain it’s [sic] Forms’.102 Members’ submission to these rules, including the president’s authority, was formally established by each member upon admission when he signed a promise ‘to observe and keep the Rules of the Society while he is a member’.103 Men could learn sociability and refinement through their adherence to these behavioural regulations. As with the Literary Society at Glasgow and Edinburgh’s Select Society, the Aberdeen Philosophical Society was composed primarily of men of the older generation, who had established their professional careers, and, like the Literary Society, its membership was dominated by professors of the city’s colleges, Kings and Marischal.104 The forms of governance employed by these institutions were not, however, limited to older men. Edinburgh’s Belles Lettres Society was composed mostly of teenage students of law and divinity at the University, and also functioned in adherence to the norms of polite social interaction. Yet here behaviour was largely governed by custom; the minute from 9 December 1761 records a conflict over the powers of the President, in fining members ad libitum for any Indecorum during the Meetings, it was found that there was no laws in the Book expressly granting such power, but it being at the same time acknowledged that it had been constantly the Custom ever since the Institution of the Society, it was put to the vote whether established Custom had the same power as written Laws, and it was determined it had.105 The use of fines to enforce behavioural norms was common among intellectual associations, and had been employed by the Belles Lettres Society since its establishment in 1759; on 19 January 1759 it was recorded that: ‘Mr Grant, Mr Campbell and Mr Robins being late were each of them for that Reason fined in two pence sterling.’106 That the Belles Lettres Society illustrates a shared associational culture between the generations is further demonstrated by the fact that established members of the literati, such as Hume, Blair, the Reverend Dr Fordyce, and Mr Robert Dick, professor of Civil Law, were elected honorary members, and most attended at least some Society meetings. Yet we should not assume identical characteristics between the Belles Lettres Society and those intellectual associations composed mainly of older men. For instance, the student society appears to 102

Ibid., 75. Ibid., 76. 104 Ulman, ‘Introduction’, 24. 105 ‘Belles Lettres Society of Edinburgh, 1761–1764’, NLS, MS Adv. 5.1.6, p. 2. 106 ‘Belles Lettres Society, 1759’, NLS, MS Adv. 22.3.8, 19 January 1759. 103

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have faced a greater level of individual resistance to the norms of polite behaviour, with indecorous behaviour a particular problem during the first year of the society. On 25 May 1759, Mr Andrew Smith was permanently expelled from the Society because his behaviour was ‘deemed inconsistent with the Decency and Decorum hitherto observed in this Society’.107 In another case of the same year, Mr Govane was declared to have behaved ‘in an ungenteel and uncivil manner’ towards Mr Grant during a debate, and was banned from being president for six months.108 That polite intellectual interaction had to be enforced and acquired is not surprising. One of the basic tenets of Scottish Enlightenment discourse was that man was a social being, and that his social interactions, informed by his society’s mode of subsistence and form of government, shaped his moral character.109 Men had the capacity for politeness and sensibility, but needed the right society, namely, commercialism and liberty, in order to develop this capacity fully.110 Within commercial society, these moral characteristics did not simply appear in men, but had to be forged within this society. Intellectual associational culture reflects this principle and was a prime agent in its application. Members were expected to be active participants in the societies to which they belonged. The Select Society asserted this at the meeting of 17 July 1754, where the minute states: That every member shall at least at three different meetings of the Society in the year, either argue in Debates on the Question before them, or shall give in writing his opinions . . . to be read to the Society, otherwise his place shall be vacated, and another shall be chosen.111 In the Literary Society, every member who lived ‘within a mile of the College’ was expected to ‘give a Discourse in the order of his Seniority’, and members were expected to regularly attend meetings.112 Local members would receive a written warning from the Secretary after an absence of three meetings, and if they were absent for a fourth meeting and a written apology was not received, ‘he shall thereby cease to be a member of the Society’. However, if he was ‘sick, out of town, or giving public Lectures’ then the absence would be excused.113 In the Belles Lettres Society members who were absent for four consecutive weekly meetings without a legitimate excuse were expelled.

107

Ibid., 25 March 1759. Ibid., 30 November 1759. 109 Ahnert and Manning (eds), Character, Self and Sociability. 110 Christopher J. Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 94–113. 111 ‘Minutes of the Select Society’, 23. 112 ‘Laws of the Literary Society’, 3. 113 Ibid., 1–3. 108

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Discourses of gender and improvement If engagement in polite and sociable intellectual debate was a means to individual improvement, the questions debated and discourses given defined how social improvement was to occur and the forms that it would take. The records of the Select Society do not contain any details of what was said during the debates, but if the questions are considered within the overall context of Scottish Enlightenment discourse they provide a useful insight into the means by which this discourse was articulated and propagated. The men who sat in the Select Society represented Scotland’s social and intellectual male elite, and consequently the questions they discussed cannot be viewed in isolation from the desire of the elite to mould Scottish society towards improvement and self-­defined ‘civilised’ society.114 Not surprisingly the questions debated in the meetings of the Select Society reflect the dominant concerns of Scottish Enlightenment discourse, including, but not limited to, querying progress and happiness, the social and political impacts of trade and manufacturing and agricultural improvement, the issue of militias versus a standing armies, the impact of the colonies on the British nation, and the relationship between literature and fine art and morality.115 Overall, these questions highlight the centrality and interconnectivity of issues of gender, progress, and the nation in Scottish Enlightenment discourse. With regard to discourses of gender within Scottish Enlightenment thought, it is important to include questions specifically about women’s and men’s gendered roles, such as ‘Whether the Succession of females be of Advantage to the Publick?’ (debated 24 December 1755, 31 January, 14 and 21 February 1758), and those questions that are about gender, but less obviously so. It is in the latter category that questions concerning masculinity generally fall, including ‘Whether the practice of duelling be advantageous?’ (debated 26 February 1760). Those questions that explicitly refer to women and those that are implicitly concerned with gender are ­interrelated. They all imply a concern with gender identity, relations between men and women, and the interaction between gender ideologies and broader social discourses. Similarly, questions concerning Britain are connected to those concerning the nation as a broader concept. Here there is a similar difference between those questions specifically referring to the British nation, such as ‘Whether a Union with Ireland would be advantageous to Great Britain?’ (debated 18 June 1755 and 15 February 1763), and those that relate to the nation as a general concept, for example, ‘Whether the Practice of the imitative arts be advantageous to a Nation?’ (debated 114

John Dwyer and Alexander Murdoch, ‘Paradigms and politics: manners, morals and the rise of Henry Dundas’, in Dwyer, Mason and Murdoch (eds), New Perspectives, 122; Broadie, Historical Age, 38–9. 115 ‘Minutes of the Select Society’.

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19 February 1755).116 In addition to theoretical discussions of the nation and considerations of British power, the Society also contemplated questions particular to Scotland, such as ‘Whether a foundling hospital erected at Edinburgh and supported chiefly by old Batchelors [sic] would tend to the prosperity of Scotland?’ (debated 16 July 1755).117 This inclusion of Scottish-­specific topics reflects the continuing importance and power of Scottish institutions such as the Church and legal system, and illustrates the continuance of a Scottish identity within a broader British national identity.118 Questions concerning national progress and nationhood, and those regarding women and gender should not be viewed in isolation from each other. That they were discussed in the same elite intellectual society means that they should be read as crucial to the formation of a broader discourse of progress and civility. Indeed, these interconnections between concerns of progress, gender, society, and the nation are sometimes evident within a single question. On 25 February 1756, the Select Society debated ‘Whether a nation once sunk in luxury and pleasure can be retrieved and brought back to any degree of worth or excellence?’119 Debated again on 25 December 1759, the above question is representative of that aspect of Scottish Enlightenment discourse that sought to defend and extend the moral and political gains enabled by parliamentary union and the development of a commercial economy against the morally corrupt selfishness encouraged by increased wealth. Luxury was considered to be a chief cause of moral corruption, encouraging self-­interest over public interest. As discussed in the Introduction, eighteenth-­century ­discussions of luxury were often connected to those concerning masculinity, creating a discourse whereby the refined gentleman was placed in opposition to the Fop, the former representing the ‘polish’ of commercialism integrated with patriotic virtue, and the latter, with his Frenchified fashions and effeminacy, embodying the social degradation caused by luxury.120 Lord Kames, who joined the Select Society in 1755 and who could easily have been present at the aforementioned debate on luxury, wrote about its potentially destructive impact in his Sketches of the History of Man (1778). Defining luxury as habitual excess, Kames rails against it as the ‘ruin of every state where it prevailed’.121 As discussed in the Introduction, Kames’s 116

Ibid., 47, 56–8, 73, 111, 113–14, 155, 173. Ibid., 59. 118 For an examination of the coexistence of Scottish and British identities in Scotland during the eighteenth century, see Kidd, ‘North Britishness’, 361–78; T. C. Smout, ‘Problems of nationalism, identity and improvement in later Enlightenment Scotland’, in Thomas M. Devine (ed.), Improvement and Enlightenment (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1989), 2–16. 119 ‘Minutes of the Select Society’, 84–5. 120 Carter, Men and the Emergence, 125–37. 121 Henry Home, Lord Kames, ‘Progress and effects of luxury’, in Sketches of the History of Man [1778], 4 vols, ed. J. V. Price (London: Thoemmes Press, 1993), ii, 149. 117

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writing on this topic expresses the fear of moral, social, and national decline dominant within Scottish Enlightenment discourse. The debates, such as the one above, in societies such as the Select Society provided opportunities to express, share, and refine ideas, and so must have had an impact on Kames’s ideas on luxury. As the Sketches were written over twenty years later, the impact on this specific work was not direct, but the debates should be considered as influential in the long-­term formation of Kames’s ideas on luxury, society, and the nation. This argument can be applied to Scottish Enlightenment discourse generally; when considered in terms of its membership and questions discussed, the Select Society must be considered as a primary space for the articulation and propagation of ideas of morality, society, the nation, and gender. The refined British gentleman was not simply present in associational culture, he was partly constructed there. For the Literary Society there is evidence of a direct correlation between discussions of luxury and masculinity and subsequent publications, including William Richardson’s 1778 publication Ambition and Luxury, A Poetical Epistle.122 In this poetic text, Richardson, a professor of Humanity at the University of Glasgow, presented the idea that man’s ambition leads to the acquirement of luxury. Here, luxury is depicted as a disease that destroys all that ambition has acquired; it is a force of destruction to the self, society, and the nation. On men’s desire for pleasure Richardson writes: ‘But Pleasure rules with unremitting sway. She reigns immortal, if she ever reign; And binds her slaves in a despotic chain.’123 Richardson encourages men to uphold their virtue and to reject luxury and the addictions of pleasure in order to defend themselves and society. This text is a typical example of ideas concerning the importance of the maintenance of male virtue against wealth’s corrupting impact. It was forged within the broad context of Scottish Enlightenment culture and the specific context of the Literary Society. On 2 March 1777, Richardson presented a lecture on the topic: ‘Has luxury been more pernicious to Mankind than Ambition?’ In relation to this, the abridged minutes state: ‘Note: this question was illustrated by reading a poem entitled “Luxury and ambition compared”.’124 The links between men’s character, society, and the nation within Scottish Enlightenment ideology, are illuminated by questions debated in the Select Society. These included: ‘Whether is a landed Interest or a Commercial Interest most favourable to publick Liberty?’ (debated 10 February 1760); ‘Whether a Commercial & military Spirit can subsist together in the same nation?’ (debated 6 February 1759 and 15 July 1760); and ‘Whether the World has received most advantage from those who have been engaged in 122

William Richardson, Ambition and Luxury, A Poetical Epistle (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1778). 123 Ibid., 22. 124 Reproduced in Duncan (ed.), Notices and Documents, 30.

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an active, or those who have lived a retired life?’ (debated 10 December 1755).125 These three questions provide an insight into the literati’s active philosophical engagement in the construction of a model of manliness deemed to be suitable for Scotland’s place in a modern, commercial, ‘­civilised’ Britain, and to encourage human progress on a global scale. Questions of national strength and manhood were also of concern to the Belles Lettres Society, whose predominantly student membership debated questions such as: ‘Whether a nation once sunk in Luxury & Effeminacy can ever arrive at its former power?’; ‘Whether the influence of Laws is above Manners, of the influence of Manners above laws?’; ‘Whether a person in a solitary or social life has the best opportunity of improving in virtue?’; and ‘Whether a Landed or Commercial Interest is most favourable to publick liberty?’. Like other intellectual societies, the philosophical concerns of the Belles Lettres Society were joined with current political and social issues, debating questions such as: ‘Whether a Foundling hospital be of advantage to a nation?’ and ‘Whether are entails advantageous or ­disadvantageous to this Country?’.126 The idea that masculine identity was constructed in a social context is shown by debates on questions that concern men’s acquisition of manhood. For example, on 12 February 1755, the Select Society debated the question: ‘Whether a University in a metropolis, or in a remote town be most proper for the education of youth?’; with the Belles Lettres Society debating very similar questions on 2 February 1759 and 21 January 1763.127 This question needs to be interpreted in the context of a broader discourse in which education was considered to have a lasting impact on men’s and women’s future identity and moral selves.128 Education provided a means to prevent individual moral corruption, but if carried out incorrectly could encourage it. As Michèle Cohen discusses in relation to the Grand Tour, the issue of the education of youth was a focus for anxieties over gender. Throughout the eighteenth century, the Grand Tour was perceived by many in the upper classes as being way to release boys from the feminine influence of their mothers, and so to develop manly independence. However, there were concerns that by exposing men to fashionable European society, the Grand Tour risked encouraging effeminacy in young Englishmen.129 In a similar manner, the city, with its metropolitan polite society such as balls and coffeehouses, could expose a youth to civility and turn him into a refined gentleman, or he could be corrupted by the influence of 125

‘Minutes of the Select Society’, 70, 133, 156, 161. ‘Belles Lettres Society of Edinburgh, 1761–1764’; ‘Belles Lettres Society, 1759’. 127 ‘Minutes of the Select Society’, 45; ‘Belles Lettres Society of Edinburgh’, 1761–1764, 2 February 1759 and 21 January 1763. 128 Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 297–321. 129 Michèle Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth-­ Century (London: Routledge, 1996), 56–60. 126

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fashion and libertinism that were also features of metropolitan society. As R. A. Houston discusses, the city held various meanings; for some, it was a place of dirt and debauchery, for others it was a place of opportunity and amusement.130 The popular expression of Enlightenment ideas regarding the education of male youth is apparent in the publisher and bookseller William Creech’s observations of social change in Edinburgh between 1763 and 1783, published in his Edinburgh Fugitive Pieces (1791). Among other things, Creech criticised the corrupting influence of urban culture on boys, claiming that young men were spending too much time at the theatre, having sex with prostitutes, and arriving drunk at assembly rooms.131 The question of the impact of the town on male virtue would have seemed particularly significant to scholars in Aberdeen, where there was discussion of the benefits of the regent compared with the professorial system of university education. Adopting the professorial system, Marischal College allowed students to live in the town, while King’s maintained the regent system and required them to live in college. This requirement under the regent system was considered to be more conducive to the maintenance of order and discipline among the student population than the professorial system.132 The issue of education was of concern to the professors, and during 1759 and 1760 the Philosophical Society wondered if enough time was being spent teaching Greek in Scottish universities, and ‘Whether education in public Schools or by Private tutors be preferable?’, and they questioned ‘How far the ancient method of Education in Public Seminaries from earliest Infancy was preferable or inferior to the Modern Practice?’133 As in the Select and Belles Lettres societies, these concerns existed alongside questions of society and masculinity, including: ‘Upon what the characters of Men chiefly Depend?’; ‘What is the best Method for training to the Practice of Virtue’; and ‘In what sense may Virtue be said to consist in acting ­agreeably to Nature, and vice in deviating from it?’134 Sometimes men were an explicitly gendered category, but they typically formed the non-­gendered subject. In contrast, women were almost always specifically gendered in society debates. In some societies, most notably the Select Society, women and gender relations were a significant intellectual concern, and were the subject of approximately one-­tenth of the questions debated.135 On 13 November, the Select Society debated ‘Whether the 130

R. A. Houston, Social Change in the Age of Enlightenment: Edinburgh 1660–1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 148–52. 131 [William Creech], Edinburgh Fugitive Pieces (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1791), 80–4. 132 Wood, Aberdeen Enlightenment, 68–9. 133 Aberdeen Philosophical Society, 191. 134 Ibid., 190–6. 135 Based upon a calculation of questions debated listed in Davis D. McElroy, ‘The Literary Clubs and Societies of Eighteenth-­Century Scotland’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Edinburgh, 1952), Appendix D, 594–601.

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Provisions in the late marriage Act are advantageous to a nation?’ Referring to Hardwicke’s 1753 Marriage Act, this debate continued for two consecutive meetings.136 The Marriage Act drastically changed English marriage law, making any marriage invalid if it did not take place within the physical and liturgical confines of the Church of England (with exemptions for Jews and Quakers only). The importance placed on this Act’s potential ramifications for Scotland is indicated by the fact that the Belles Lettres Society also debated ‘Whether it be for the advantage of Scotland to have the marriage act extended to this part of the Kingdome?’137 The Act was passed in England in response to concerns among politicians and others regarding people’s freedom to freely exchange vows and claim their marriage as valid (known as irregular marriages). The practice of irregular marriage led to secret marriages and a number of contestations of marriage on the death of a spouse. An influential Scottish case heard in the Edinburgh Commissary Court and then the House of Lords at Westminster involved two women, Jean Campbell and Magdalen Cochran, claiming marriage to, and the pension of, Captain John Campbell, who died at the battle of Fontenoy in 1745.138 Leah Leneman has written of the expectation that, following the Act’s adoption in England, a law against irregular marriages would be passed in Scotland, and a parliamentary bill to this effect was read in 1755. However, this attempt to reform Scottish marriage law was resisted and was not passed.139 That the Select and Belles Lettres societies debated this issue reveals ­associational culture’s engagement in contemporary politics. At the Select Society meeting immediately following that at which the Marriage Act was debated, the question discussed was ‘Whether we ought to prefer ancient or modern manners with regard to [the] Condition and treatment of Women?’140 This debate was repeated on 10 and 17 August 1757, and on 21 November 1758, suggesting that it was a topic that aroused a good deal of interest among members of the Society. The question concerns a vital element of Scottish Enlightenment discourse – that the position of women in society signified that society’s place within the stadial model of progress – and illustrates the collective context in which this ­discourse was developed.141 136

‘Minutes of the Select Society’, 29–31. ‘Belles Lettres Society of Edinburgh, 1761–1764’, 23 December 1763. 138 Jeremy Boulton, ‘Marriage Act’, in John Cannon (ed.), The Oxford Companion to British History (Oxford University Press, 1997), available at: Oxford Reference Online, http:// www.oxfordreferenceonline.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview+Main&Entry+t110.e2800, accessed 9 May 2007; Leah Leneman, ‘The Scottish case that led to Hardwicke’s Marriage Act’, Law and History Review 17(1) (1999) 161–9. 139 Leneman, ‘Hardwicke’s Marriage Act’, 168. 140 ‘Minutes of the Select Society’, 32. 141 Jane Rendall, ‘Clio, Mars, and Minerva: the Scottish Enlightenment and the writing of women’s history’, in Thomas M. Devine and John. R. Young (eds), Eighteenth-­Century Scotland: New Perspectives (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1999), 135–41. 137

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John Millar, an influential proponent of this view of history, was guided by Adam Smith. Millar attended Smith’s lectures on moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, and, like Smith, he used intellectual societies, primarily the Literary Society, as a forum in which to develop and test his ideas. For example, on 6 January 1769, Millar delivered a lecture to the Literary Society ‘On the origin of useful Arts and Manufactures in Society’.142 The relationship between the development of arts and manufactures and the refinement of people’s manners is a dominant theme Millar’s The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1779). Like other members of the Society, Millar’s lectures also evidence his wide-­ranging intellectual interests, and include economic topics such as the importation of grain and the maintenance of the poor, and religious issues including Catholic toleration.143 The spaces in which male refinement was performed were the same as those in which that masculine ideal was forged. Many of the ideas underpinning the ideal of male refinement were articulated in the publications of members of the literati. Sometimes this link is inferred, for example, in the connections between the Select Society debates and Kames’s ideas on luxury. In other contexts, the link is more direct, as in the case of Richardson and the Literary Society. Direct links are easier to ascertain for the Literary Society than they are for other societies; lectures given by members are recorded in the minutes, thereby allowing connections to be made between individual lectures and later publications. For example, Thomas Reid’s lectures to the Literary Society indicate his use of the Society to test his moral philosophy and other ideas prior to publication.144 This connection between lectures given to the Literary Society and published work illustrates the integrated nature of the eighteenth-­century public sphere not only in relation to its social and institutional manifestations, but also with regard to its other manifestations, namely print. Associations and the public sphere The printing and reading of books, pamphlets, periodicals, and other material was essential to the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas. It was largely through the culture of print that people not of the elite participated in Enlightenment culture.145 Houston cites the high levels of literacy and the growth in printing houses, libraries, and the establishment of Scottish periodicals, such as the Scots Magazine in 1739, as essential features of the 142

Reproduced in Duncan (ed.), Notices and Documents, 20. Ibid., 32. 144 Katherine Holcomb, ‘Thomas Reid in the Glasgow Literary Society’, in Hook and Sher (eds), Glasgow Enlightenment, 97. 145 Alexander Murdoch, ‘Scotland and the idea of Britain in the eighteenth century’, in Devine and Young (eds), Eighteenth-­Century Scotland, 114. 143

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particular cultural and intellectual environment that made Edinburgh the central location of the Scottish Enlightenment.146 Print culture also demonstrates Enlightenment culture’s inclusion within a broader public sphere. In the last decade there has been increasing scholarly awareness of the importance of print to the Enlightenment’s broader social influence. Sher’s study of the Enlightenment book trade illustrates the importance of publishing, and publishers, to the formation and dissemination of Scottish Enlightenment thought; while Mark Towsey’s examination of eighteenth-­century reading practices has demonstrated the means by which circulating and subscription libraries allowed people from a wide range of social backgrounds and geographical locales to access Enlightenment knowledge.147 Booksellers used newspapers to advertise the sale of books and periodicals, and these three print media formed an interconnected print culture. The newspaper and periodical press originated in the seventeenth century, with Edinburgh’s first newspaper, the Edinburgh Gazette, established in 1680. A product of urban culture, as towns grew in size and number during the eighteenth century, so too did the newspaper press.148 Most newspaper content concerned international news, particularly war, and London news, but local Scottish news was not neglected. Newspapers such as the Caledonian Mercury also included material more readily associated with periodicals such as opinion pieces, including a series in the Edinburgh Evening Courant in 1762 on the history of male fashions. Periodicals such as the Scots Magazine and the Edinburgh Review, established in 1755, are more obviously connected to the expansion of an Enlightenment culture of knowledge production and acquisition, but newspapers were also important to the spread of ideas.149 The Caledonian Mercury, for instance, reprinted Blair’s sermons, Robertson’s histories, extracts from Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, and played close attention to Hume’s career.150 Advertisements in the papers also demonstrate the role of newspapers in creating an enlightened public sphere, with regular advertisements for meetings of intellectual societies, public lectures, concerts, and plays. The readership of these papers came from the same sector of the population that participated most fully in Enlightenment urban culture, namely, the gentry, professionals, and merchants.151 146

Houston, ‘Literacy, education’, 373–83. Sher, Enlightenment and the Book; Mark Towsey, Reading the Scottish Enlightenment: Books and their Readers in Provincial Scotland, 1750–1820 (Leiden: Brill, 2010). 148 Bob Harris, Politics and the Rise of the Press: Britain and France, 1620–1800 (London: Routledge, 1996), 9–28. 149 Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse, 15–30. 150 John Dwyer, ‘The Caledonian Mercury and Scottish national culture, 1763–1801’, in Karl Schweizer and Jeremy Black (eds), Politics and the Press in Hanoverian Britain (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1989), 145–69. 151 Ibid., 15–22. 147

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The public sphere in which these men participated included town councils, trade guilds, associations of local gentry, and others, and the position of associations and professional institutions within this sphere required active engagement with broader public culture. This is indicated by criticisms levelled at the Faculty of Advocates in 1778 when they refused to support a voluntary subscription to raise an Edinburgh regiment to serve in the American War. The Caledonian Mercury noted that many inhabitants of the city had subscribed, as had the Incorporation of Hammermen, and in subsequent editions of the newspaper other associations advertised their financial support, including clubs such as the Knights Companion of the Cape, professional institutions including the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons, and trade guilds such as the Incorporation of Bakers and Society of Running Stationers. The Speculative Society composed mainly of law students at Edinburgh University also subscribed.152 The Faculty of Advocates’ refusal to give financial support for the regiment prompted a letter to the Caledonian Mercury in which an anonymous author, styling himself as ‘Censor’, critiqued the ‘boasted power of those deluded societies’, and asserted that being ‘as much a part of Edinburgh, as the various other societies and individuals of which it is composed’, the Faculty of Advocates were duty bound to support the raising of the Edinburgh Volunteers.153 Prior to this public attack, the Faculty had informed readers that a subscription from them would be a misuse of funds, but advocates were free to give their individual support to the regiment.154 However, a letter from ‘An Advocate’ printed in the Caledonian Mercury on 7 March 1778 in response to ‘Censor’, shows that this was not the only consideration. Answering the ‘Scribblers [who] attempted to rail against the Faculty of Advocates’, the writer argues that the war ‘against our fellow-­ subjects in America’ is ‘unconstitutional’, and for the Faculty to support the regiment would be to ‘prostitute the voice of so learned and respectable a society’.155 This dispute over how institutions should respond to the American War highlights more than the public debate on appropriate Scottish and British responses to this conflict. It also illustrates an absence of a monolithic culture producing a hegemonic discourse. However, whilst not homogeneous, this culture was unified in its ­commitment to ­improvement and its exclusively male character. Alternative spaces Analysing the gendered character of associational spaces, it is important to note that while they were predominantly spaces for the performance of 152

Caledonian Mercury, 7, 10, and 17 January 1778. Ibid., 19 January 1778. 154 Ibid., 12 January 1778. 155 Ibid., 7 March 1778. 153

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the ideal of male refinement, they could be spaces for the performance of alternative expressions of masculinity, including libertinism. The Beggar’s Benison club was established in the East Neuk of Fife in 1732 by men who believed that male sexuality was intended by nature for pleasure as well as procreation. As a libertine ‘sex club’ the rituals of the Beggar’s Benison celebrated male sexuality. According to David Stevenson, members of the Beggar’s Benison engaged in sociable masturbation and may have hired women to be ‘examined’ by the members and dance naked for them. However, Stevenson clarifies that, as the records were altered in the nineteenth century, some of the practices described may be the products of fantasy.156 The rituals of the Beggar’s Benison suggest that it provided a space for a particular expression of male sexuality that was likely to have been suppressed outwith the specific environment of club meetings. Sexual practice was central to libertinism as a masculine identity, and through the adoption of this identity men asserted their departure from dominant ideas of sexual morality. The Beggar’s Benison comprised a range of men from the middle and upper ranks of East Neuk society, including merchants, gentry, Church of Scotland elders, customs officers, and commissioners to the Convention of Royal Burghs. As Stevenson discusses, the geographical and social position of these men would have meant that libertinism in everyday life would have been almost impossible. The Beggar’s Benison provided what was possibly the only space in which these men could perform a libertine masculinity.157 In a 1996 study, Marie Mulvey Roberts asserted that homosociality in societies such as the Freemasons and spaces like Molly Houses allowed men to perform feminine characteristics of their identity, which they were precluded from doing outside the context of these homosocial spaces.158 Although Roberts’s argument has strength with regard to Molly Houses, it is weak when applied to other societies, including the Freemasons. To assume that male practices which diverted from ‘normal’ masculinity (that is, performed on the street, in the home, and in the workplace) were feminine is to assume a rigid dichotomy between femininity and masculinity that allows no room for a fluidity of masculine identities. I will explore this further in Chapter 3, where I use examples such as the journals of James Boswell to demonstrate how Edinburgh’s urban culture provided interconnected spaces that allowed for the performance of multiple masculinities, dependent on the social context, but all within the boundaries of elite manhood. 156

David Stevenson, The Beggars Benison: Sex Clubs of Enlightenment Scotland and their Rituals (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2001), 1–39. 157 Ibid., 81–3, 132–3. 158 Marie Mulvey Roberts, ‘Pleasures engendered by gender: homosociality and the club’, in Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts (eds), Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 48–76.

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The Freemasons and libertine sex clubs engaged in ritualistic practices which allowed their members’ behaviour to deviate from dominant social norms, but these clubs did not necessarily exist on the margins of society. Indicating their place within Scotland’s public sphere, in 1778 the Beggar’s Benison club placed an advertisement in the Caledonian Mercury offering bounties to men enlisting in the Earl of Seaforth’s regiment.159 The Freemasons in particular should not be considered as a secret or deviant society; despite the importance placed on their secret rituals, they were a prominent component of the public sphere. In April 1760, the Earl of Leven, the Grand Master Mason, joined the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, members of the brotherhood, and ‘gentlemen of distinction’ at the public founding of the poorhouse of Edinburgh.160 This sort of public engagement was typical, and had both local and national connotations, with the organisation’s patriotism expressed, for example, by the Dundee Lodge of St David’s offering one guinea to able-­bodied men who joined the corps of Light Cavalry in January 1760.161 Freemasons also sometimes publicly advertised their meetings, as in May 1762 when the Lodge of Canongate Kilwinning announced in the Edinburgh Courant newspaper that they had changed their monthly meeting from Tuesday to Wednesday.162 Freemasonry developed in Scotland during the late sixteenth century, but the Scottish Grand Lodge was not established until 1736. During the eighteenth century, particularly the 1760s and 1770s, there was an expansion of Freemasonry in Scotland, and by 1779 there were 326 lodges affiliated to the Scottish Grand Lodge.163 As Peter Clark has established, the Freemasons had secret rites and ceremonies, but they operated openly. Their aim was to foster social harmony by uniting different social, political, and religious groups. This was largely achieved through a lodge culture of male conviviality, primarily expressed through heavy drinking. However, philanthropy towards members and outsiders, a desire for public and personal improvement, and the personal advancement of members through social mixing within the lodges were all also important aspects of eighteenth-­century Freemasonry.164 In this regard, the Freemasons incorporate many aspects of eighteenth-­century club life, fulfilling the role of both the convivial club and the formal institutional society. The particular, or multiple, expressions of masculinity within societies and clubs was largely dependent upon the purpose of the society or club itself. Homosocial intellectual societies provided a space for the performance of male refinement separate from the feminising influence of 159

Caledonian Mercury, 2 February 1778. Glasgow Journal, 21–8 April 1760. 161 Ibid., 9 January 1760. 162 Edinburgh Courant, 10 May 1762. 163 Clark, Clubs and Societies, 310. 164 Ibid., 310–37. 160

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Masculinity, Homosociality and Intellectual Culture 71 women. Yet their formation as exclusively male spaces was also due to their connections with formal all-­male institutions and professions, such as the universities and legal profession. Conclusion

The integration of the institutional and associational spheres in eighteenth-­ century Scotland created a public urban intellectual and political culture from which women were largely excluded. In elite intellectual societies women were present as subjects of discourse, but not as participants in the debate. This position corresponds with women’s place in ideas of progress and the nation. As discussed in the introduction, Scottish Enlightenment conceptions of progress considered women to be recipients of a civilising society that allowed them to develop what was assumed to be their natural femininity. Thus civilised, women then acted to extend male refinement through the influence of their feminine conversation. However, this influence did not necessarily equate to increased female public participation or a rise in women’s status as some historians claim.165 The very femininity that women were required to perform in elite society was premised upon notions of women’s inherent inferiority, which had long pedigree. Despite dominant conceptions of women’s intellectual inferiority, the gender hierarchy was not necessarily considered to be innate. The question debated by the Select Society on 28 January 1756, ‘Whether can a Marriage be happy when the Wife is of an Understanding superior to that of the husband?’ demonstrates a certain acceptance that some women could possess a higher intelligence than some men.166 However, the focus of this question on whether a happy marriage was possible in this situation suggests an assumption of a fairly rigid gender hierarchy, which a wife with a superior intelligence to her husband would likely invert. The prevailing notion that women were intellectually inferior, their femininity making them unsuitable for public debate, is evidenced by their general exclusion from societies like the Select Society. Moreover, the inclusion of the subject of women within the debates of the Select Society suggests that the physical exclusion of women from associational culture was due to an assumption that women existed in society only in relation to men. Their vital role in refining men in the domestic and social spheres existed in order to construct a specific masculine identity deemed necessary for 165

Historians who suggest this include: Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse, 117–19; Carla Hesse, ‘Introduction: Section 5: Women in the Enlightened Republic of Letters’, in Women, Gender and Enlightenment, 259–63; Lawrence Klein, ‘Gender, conversation and the public sphere in early eighteenth-­century England’, in Judith Still and Michael Worton (eds), Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 100–15. 166 ‘Minutes of the Select Society’, 79.

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men’s participation in the public intellectual life. Ideas of women’s femininity propagated within Scottish Enlightenment discourse and the reality of women’s exclusion from associational culture, demonstrates that women were denied equal participation in Enlightenment culture. Yet, as the next chapter will show, they were not entirely denied access.

2

Women and Intellectual Culture

A partial presence Women were neither entirely absent nor fully present in Scottish Enlightenment culture. It would be ludicrous to suggest that women existed in a cloistered domestic sphere, but it is also incorrect to assume that women’s public presence equated to a sort of liberation. Women were never invisible in the Enlightenment, but their participation was constrained by gender. Significantly, their inclusion was dependent upon the performance of a femininity that acted to limit the extent of their participation. In Capital of the Mind (2003), a popular history of eighteenth-­ century Edinburgh, James Buchan asserts that ‘the eighteenth century was the women’s century in Scotland’, citing the decline in religious superstition, improvements in public health, increased economic prosperity, and the emergence of domesticity.1 It is undeniable that certain aspects of eighteenth-­ century improvement benefited women, but it is a massive leap to claim that it was ‘the women’s century’. As the previous chapter illustrated, Scottish Enlightenment intellectual culture was largely a male culture. Whatever the changes to a woman’s social position in eighteenth-­ century Scotland, these did not empower her to fully participate in the century’s epistemological revolution. Complex analyses of the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment on women have been developed by feminist historians, and this chapter follows the groundbreaking work of scholars such as Jane Rendall, who has written extensively on women in Scottish Enlightenment ideology and women’s place in intellectual and political life.2 In the last few years, 1

John Buchan, Capital of the Mind: How Edinburgh Changed the World (London: John Murray, 2003), 241. 2 See, for example, Jane Rendall, ‘Virtue and commerce in the making of Adam Smith’s political economy’, in Ellen Kennedy and Susan Mendus (eds), Women in Western Political Philosophy: Kant to Nietzsche (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1987), 53–71; Jane Rendall, ‘Clio, Mars and Minerva: the Scottish Enlightenment and the writing of women’s history’, in Tom Devine and John Young (eds), Eighteenth Century Scotland: New Perspectives (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1999), 134–51; Jane Rendall, ‘“Women that would plague me with rational conversation”: aspiring women and Scottish Whigs, c. 1790–1830’, in Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 326–42; Jane Rendall and Sue Innes, ‘Women, gender, politics’, in Lynn Abrams,

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Rendall’s work has been followed by a proliferation of scholarship on women, Enlightenment, and Scottish society, including studies of women’s reading practices, women’s writing, women’s position in Scottish polite society, and analysis of their negotiation of enlightened patriarchal domesticity.3 Building upon this scholarship, this chapter examines women’s limited participation in the public intellectual culture of Enlightenment; it will explore the obscurity surrounding women’s participation and address the distinctive character of gendered intellectual culture in Scotland, ­particularly in comparison with England. As discussed in the Introduction, many historians of women and the Enlightenment emphasise the ways in which this period created a space for female intellectual endeavour, and Sylvana Tomaselli and Karen O’Brien both make strong arguments for the British Enlightenment as a significant precursor to nineteenth-­century feminism.4 However, if we consider the Scottish experience as distinct from the English, a different and more complicated picture emerges. Tomaselli and O’Brien both convincingly argue that Scottish Enlightenment historiography attributed a cultural role to women by depicting them as symbols of social progress, and from this women were eventually able to claim cultural and political agency. However, the British women who obtained a voice in the Enlightenment, and especially those who forged a feminist voice, were English women. In this context, a key issue remains to be addressed in the historiography of gender and the British Enlightenment, namely, the impact of Scottish Enlightenment ideology on women’s access to intellectual culture in Scotland itself. This has been a long neglected topic, and has led to unwarranted similarities being drawn with experiences of women elsewhere in the European Enlightenment, with Margaret Jacob citing both Paris and Edinburgh as evidence of the Enlightenment’s long-­term positive impact on women, despite the very different political and religious contexts of the French and Scottish enlightenments, and their differently gendered compositions.5 To combat the predominant disregard in historiography of Scottish women’s experience of Enlightenment intellectual culture, this chapter will address the reasons as to why women’s presence in Scotland was a partial one. Eleanor Gordon, Debbi Simonton, and Eileen J. Yeo (eds), Gender in Scottish History since 1700 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 43–83. 3 Pam Perkins, Women Writers and the Scottish Enlightenment (Rodopi: Amsterdam, 2010); Katharine Glover, Elite Women and Polite Society in Eighteenth-­Century Scotland (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011); Mark Towsey, ‘“Observe her heedfully”: Elizabeth Rose on women writers’, Women Writers 18(1) (2011) 15–33; Katie Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). 4 Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘The Enlightenment debate on women’, History Workshop Journal 20(1) (1985) 101–24; Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-­ Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 5 Margaret C. Jacob, ‘The mental landscape of the public sphere: a European perspective’, Eighteenth Century Studies 28(1) (1994) 95–113.

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To begin, I will explore two manifestations of women’s involvement in public intellectual culture, examining changes and continuities between the Fair Intellectual Club, formed in 1717, and the Pantheon and Dundee public debating societies that operated during the 1770s. Placing these associations in the broader context of women’s access to knowledge, I then discuss women’s education and their participation in Enlightenment through reading and writing. This participation rarely extended to publishing, and the final section of this chapter will consider the importance of place as well as space with an examination of female authors Jean Marishall and Joanna Baillie. Chronologically this chapter encompasses the early eighteenth century through to the early nineteenth century. Between 1750 and 1790, decades commonly viewed as the era during which the Scottish Enlightenment was at its height, there is little evidence of public female intellectual engagement beyond women’s attendance at public debating societies and the notable but atypical example of Marishall’s published interventions. After 1800, there was a rapid expansion in women’s publishing, with this late Enlightenment development exemplified by the career of Baillie. In her illuminating study of women writers in Edinburgh during the late Enlightenment, Pam Perkins represents women’s publishing in the early nineteenth century as evidence of a continuation of an eighteenth-­ century public female role.6 I present an alternative chronology; rather than continuity, women’s publishing in the early nineteenth century indicates a significant transformation of Scottish intellectual culture. In the eighteenth century, and especially between 1750 and 1800, Scottish intellectual culture was manifestly male. Women were involved in informal, tea-­ party intellectual conversation, but they were excluded from intellectual clubs and their contribution to print culture was negligible. Women published work such as poetry during these decades, but as Perkins herself points out there was ‘no outpouring of fiction by Scottish women in the second half of the eighteenth century compared to that by Englishwomen’.7 Only in the early 1800s did female writers such as Elizabeth Hamilton orientate themselves towards the Scottish capital, and this orientation suggests a major cultural shift as Scotland entered the nineteenth century. The Enlightenment public sphere that is examined in this book was an urban public sphere comprising people from the upper and middling ranks of society. Women’s predominant exclusion from elite intellectual associational culture examined in the previous chapter, did not equate to their exclusion from the public sphere broadly defined. Women have always been active in some sort of public space, whether that was the Church, the royal court, the marketplace, or elsewhere. The clearest 6 7

Perkins, Women Writers, 22–36. Ibid., 21.

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example of an historical continuity of women’s public participation in Scotland, at least from the sixteenth century, is women’s economic participation. They worked as shopkeepers, innkeepers, or traders; in the textile industry, in agriculture, and coal mining; as midwives, and as lodging-­house keepers, washerwomen, and brewers.8 In eighteenth-­century Edinburgh many houses and shops were joined, and so there was no clear demarcation between home and public life. In addition, many jobs brought women out of even this semi-­public space; for example, merchant women often traded at markets.9 For women of the social elite, urban improvement provided new spaces for participation in public culture. Indeed, time spent in Edinburgh or London participating in the social circuits of visiting, balls, and promenading was deemed to be an essential component of the education of elite young Scotswomen.10 In the next chapter I will investigate the gendering of urban sociability, including a study of assemblies and the theatre, two spaces in which women were prominent actors. In this chapter I consider why, if women were not ­closeted in a domestic sphere, they were not able to access most public intellectual space. In doing so, I address the impact of feminine gender identity in limiting women’s participation in intellectual culture, where throughout the century their presence remained largely rhetorical. Female associations In 1720, a pamphlet was published in Edinburgh entitled An Account of the Fair Intellectual Club in Edinburgh: In a Letter to a Honourable Member of the Athenian Society there. By a young Lady, the Secretary of the Club. This had been published after men belonging to the Athenian Society requested that the members of the Fair Intellectual Club give a public account of their club. In the resulting pamphlet the Fair Intellectual Club is represented as similar to many male clubs: their membership was secret; they had an initiation ritual (the requirement that new members, ‘shall entertain the club with a written Harangue’); they charged a membership fee of 10 shillings; and had a limited membership of nine.11 Men were excluded from the club and only unmarried women were welcome to join, with marriage m ­ entioned 8

Christopher A. Whatley, ‘Women and the economic transformation of Scotland c. 1740– 1830’, Scottish Economic and Social History 14 (1994) 25–31; R. A. Houston, ‘Women in the economy and society of Scotland 1500–1800’, in R. A. Houston and I. D. Whyte (eds), Scottish Society 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 122; Rosalind K. Marshall, Virgins and Viragos: A History of Women in Scotland from 1080–1980 (London: Collins, 1983), 148–54. 9 Elizabeth Sanderson, Women and Work in Eighteenth-­ Century Edinburgh (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 14, 40, 101. 10 Glover, Elite Women, 33–44. 11 Anon., An Account of the Fair Intellectual Club in Edinburgh: In a Letter to a Honourable Member of the Athenian Society there. By a young Lady, the Secretary of the Club (Edinburgh: J. McEuen, 1720), 8.

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alongside death as something that could act to ‘remove any member from our club’.12 In this pamphlet, the Fair Intellectual Club is represented as an organisation that recognised a clear gender division with regard to intellectual pursuits. The author herself (although it is anonymous I am assuming female authorship) is self-­deprecating on the basis of her gender, writing: ‘Without troubling you or my self with any other Apology for the Rudeness that must certainly appear in the Composure of a Woman, so little accustomed to write, I shall proceed directly to the purpose in hand.’13 That women may not be as skilled at writing as men is here claimed to be a result of their lack of experience, suggesting that gender inequalities, whilst accepted, were considered by the author to be socially constructed. It was women’s lack of knowledge and experience in intellectual matters that the Club hoped to address. The women’s motivation in forming the group is summed up in the statement: We thought it a great Pity, that Women, who excell a great many others in Birth and Fortune, should not also be more eminent in Virtue and good Sense, which we might attain unto, if we were as industrious to cultivate our Minds, as we are to adorn our Bodies.14 In this text, women’s lack of intellectual engagement is not blamed on men’s exclusion of women from the world of letters, but upon women’s focus on fashion and beauty instead of virtuous intellectual pursuits.15 In the pamphlet, the group is depicted not only through the author’s narration, but also through the reproduction of the initiation speeches of two members, Mrs M— H— and Mrs M— B—. Although listed as Mrs they would have been unmarried, as marriage would have barred them from membership. In the speech of Mrs M— H— the intellectual achievements of the members are celebrated, and linked to the practice of female virtue. The achievement of virtue through learning was obtained by the members of the Fair Intellectual Club via the study of religious literature, primarily the New Testament, and the reading of ‘proper books’, which included George Halifax’s Advice to a Daughter (1688), Richard Lucas’s An Enquiry After Happiness (1685–96) and Bishop John Tillotson’s Sermons (1682). They also read periodicals including the Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian.16 According to Mrs M— H—, the members’ sociable reading and other 12

Ibid., 9. Ibid., 2. 14 Ibid., 3. 15 This argument is similar to that expressed by Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). Catherine Macaulay in Letters on Education (1790) also emphasised that women’s vices were due to education and environment, and argued for equal moral education for men and women. See Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States, 1780–1860 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985). 16 Anon., Fair Intellectual Club, 16–18. 13

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intellectual pursuits resulted in them learning history, geography, and arithmetic.17 The members of the Fair Intellectual Club aimed to increase women’s knowledge, but they did not aim to usurp men or attain gender equality. As the author stated, ‘we neither go out of our Sphere, nor have acted inconsistently in what we have done’.18 By inconsistent she appears to be referring to actions that may have been considered as incompatible with the member’s feminine gender. In Mrs M— H—’s speech, when she refers to the members’ practice of reading ‘proper books’ she qualifies this with the statement: Tho’ the Circumstances of Life make these less our Study, than of the Male sex, yet the Propensity we find in our Natures to read, and the Improvements some of our kind have made by Study, may satisfy us that it is an Injustice to deprive us of those Means of Knowledge.19 This statement suggests an acceptance of the gendered division of social roles, while challenging the assumption that this division meant that women should not engage in rigorous intellectual activity. Instead, this activity is represented as necessary to their role in life as ‘Women and Christians’.20 In depicting womanhood in this way, Mrs M— H— negates the connection between femininity and irrationality. Although women’s femininity is assumed, women are also referred to as possessing the ‘Light of natural Reason’.21 In this text, femininity is inclusive of rationality. Despite her argument for women’s natural rational abilities and the necessity of female intellectual engagement, Mrs M— H— also employs the notion of a clear gender differentiation with regard to intellectual pursuits. As she states: ‘A great many Things may be studied by the Male Sex, which tho’ we may also be capable to pursue them, don’t properly concern us.’22 The gender differentiation accepted by Mrs M— H— is depicted as one based upon socially constructed roles, rather than on an innate difference in the intellectual abilities of men and women. Women have the ability to study the same subjects as men, but their role in life means that there is no need for them to pursue these subjects, thus rendering the subjects masculine. The women of ‘birth and fortune’ discussed in the Fair Intellectual Club pamphlet were of elite status and would have existed within the culture of politeness.23 That the pamphlet was written at the request of members 17

Ibid., 19. Ibid., 4. 19 Ibid., 17. 20 Ibid., 18. 21 Ibid., 13. 22 Ibid.,14. 23 Their social position was similar to that of women later in the century who partook of Enlightenment culture via polite society. See Katharine Glover, ‘The female mind: Scottish 18

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of the Athenian Society indicates that the women of the Fair Intellectual Club were involved in a shared culture with the male intellectual elite. The domestic and social performance expected of these women within the culture of politeness required them not only to have a basic level of education and skills in household management, but also to be able to converse at a certain intellectual level in a mixed-­sex social setting.24 Although the importance of femininity to men’s development of refinement resulted in women’s predominant exclusion from the intellectual-­political sphere, it also allowed limited access to Scottish Enlightenment intellectual culture to women of the social elite. The intellectual engagement of the women of the Fair Intellectual Club is represented in the pamphlet as allowing them to assert their role in the processes of improvement. Like the homosocial societies and clubs examined in the previous chapter, the members of the Fair Intellectual Club sought improvement through sociable intellectual interaction. According to the narrator, the club was established in 1717 by ‘three young ladies’ who proposed that ‘we should enter into a Society, for Improvement of one another in the Study and Practice of such Things, as might contribute most effectively to our Accomplishment’.25 This self-­improvement appears to have been the means by which the members both claimed and asserted their place within the culture of politeness. As it did for men, inclusion within this culture provided a means to assert their ‘civilised’ North Britishness. As Mrs M— H— asserted at the beginning of her speech, ‘I appear before a Club of the most polite Ladies in North Britain.’26 Women formed informal intellectual networks across the eighteenth century, but I have found no evidence of any club or society similar to the Fair Intellectual Club operating during the mid-­to late eighteenth century. In fact, there appears to be a chasm with regard to women’s organised intellectual engagement between the 1720s and 1800s. However, this idea of a gap may not be wholly accurate; it may be that women were excluded from the associational culture in eighteenth-­century Scotland from its early emergence. It is quite possible that the Fair Intellectual Club is a literary invention. It is unclear as to whether the pamphlet An Account of the Fair Intellectual Club is an account of what was in fact a real club, or is instead using the concept of a female club to present an argument for women’s inclusion in the emerging intellectual culture of urban Scotland. Davis D. McElroy includes the Fair Intellectual Club in his history of eighteenth-­century Enlightenment femininity and the world of letters. A case study of the Fletcher of Saltoun family in the mid-­eighteenth century’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 25(1) (2005) 1–20. 24 For Scottish moralists on this issue, see John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late Eighteenth Century Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), 119–24. 25 Anon., Fair Intellectual Club, 3. 26 Ibid., 12 (original emphasis).

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Scottish clubs, and cites an essay written in 1724 by Aaron Hill that refers to the club, and which was published Hill’s periodical The Plain Dealer.27 The 28 August 1724 edition of The Plain Dealer includes a letter sent to Hill by Fergus Bruce. This letter conveyed an image of Edinburgh’s polite intellectual society for Hill’s (mainly) English readers. In it Bruce discusses Edinburgh’s coffeehouse culture, writing that ‘Our Coffee-­Houses take in your Papers, and I observe, with Pleasure, the Welcome which our politest People receive them with. Not the men alone of all Ranks, but the Ladies also, make them their Entertainment.’28 Bruce’s letter presents an image of Edinburgh polite society in the 1720s as one where women of the elite were actively engaged in intellectual culture. That he is referring to elite women is suggested by the emphasis that men ‘of all Ranks’ are engaged in coffeehouse culture, whilst women are referred to only as ‘Ladies’. Whether he is suggesting that women were present in the coffeehouses, or only that they were reading the texts available in coffeehouses, is unclear. It does, however, suggest a climate in which a club such as the Fair Intellectual Club could exist. This is supported by Hill’s response to Bruce, in which he announced: Not the Gentlemen alone, but the very Ladies, of Edinburgh, form themselves into select, and voluntary, Societies, for the Improvement of their Knowledge, instead of the Entertainment of their Fancy: And go on, at the same Time, to refine their Conversation, inrich [sic] their Understanding, and polish and render amiable, their Personal Deportment.29 Hill’s observation of women’s participation in intellectual culture was based on Bruce’s letter and information he had received about the Fair Intellectual Club. On this club he writes that they are, ‘A Club of Ladies, at Edinburgh, who set a pattern to Female Excellence.’ He then announces that he has the rules and constitution of the club, with the ‘Address of Mistress Speaker, to the lovely Sisterhood; and the admissory Speech, of one of the Ladies.’30 This is almost certainly the pamphlet published in Edinburgh in 1720 and discussed above. Therefore, Hill’s comments cannot be used to verify the club’s existence. They do, however, depict a world in which women’s participation was notable, but not abnormal. Whether the Fair Intellectual Club existed or not, it remains evidence of women’s participation in the early stages of the eighteenth-­century printing revolution. This is not only due to an assumption of female authorship of the pamphlet, but also to the publication of poems by women in The 27

Davis D. McElroy, Scotland’s Age of Improvement: A Survey of Eighteenth Century Literary Clubs and Societies (Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, 1969), 21. 28 Aaron Hill, The Plain Dealer, Being Select Essays on Several Curious Subjects, . . ., Published Originally in the Year 1724, 2 vols (London: J. Osborn, 1724), i, 391. 29 Ibid., 393 (original emphasis). 30 Ibid., 396 (original emphasis).

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Edinburgh Miscellany published by the Athenian Society in 1720, one or more of whom identified themselves pseudonymously as a member of the Fair Intellectual Club.31 These poems could suggest that the club did in fact exist, or it may just be that they were written by the same author(s) who wrote An Account of the Fair Intellectual Club. The Edinburgh Miscellany, a publication of poetry and literary and other essays, contained seven poems by women, none of whom gave their name.32 Although a number of men publishing in the Miscellany also did so anonymously, the fact that none of the women gave their names suggests that access to print culture in the emerging public sphere was gendered. Women were obviously recognised by some men as having intellectual ability, and some of these men, including the members of the Athenian Society, believed that women’s writings should be published. However, the practice of publishing anonymously suggests a culture that was hostile to women’s public writing. Many eighteenth-­century Scottish women would write pieces, such as biographical memoirs that were intended as public pieces, but were not intended for publication, and manuscripts would often be passed between friends. The avoidance of printed publication of work by women extended to women such as Alison Cockburn, who was engaged in correspondence and social interaction with leading figures of the literati, and in addition had a close friendship with David Hume.33 Although Cockburn formed and expressed her opinions through c­ orrespondence, she only published a few of her songs and poems.34 Three of the seven works by women in the Miscellany were published by two women using the respective designations ‘a young Lady of the Fair Intellectual Club’ and ‘a Member of the Fair Intellectual Club’, and the use of this designation can be read as an attempt by these women to assert their intellectual credentials.35 Two of the poems were written by ‘a young Lady’, and are essentially romantic works, the first on the subject of a marriage between a lord and a lady.36 The poem by ‘a Member’ is also a romantic piece, being a lament for the loss of innocence and freedom of love, and an argument for people’s natural inclination to assert their freedom with regard to love and desire.37 Whether it existed in reality or only in text, the Fair Intellectual Club 31

McElroy, Age of Improvement, 20. W.C., The Edinburgh Miscellany: consisting of original poems, translations, &c., By various hands, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: J. McEuen & Co., 1720). 33 Dorothy McMillan, ‘Selves and others: non-­fiction writing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’, in Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan (eds), A History of Scottish Women’s Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 72, 78–81. 34 John Dwyer, ‘Cockburn, Alison (1712–1794)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, September 2004; online edition January 2008), available at: http://www.oxforddnb.com/index/101005766/Alison-­Cockburn, accessed 1 June 2012. 35 Edinburgh Miscellany, 158, 187 (original emphasis). 36 Ibid., 158–61. 37 Ibid., 187–8. 32

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suggests that during the early decades of the eighteenth century women were claiming a space within the emerging intellectual public sphere in Scotland. By the mid-­eighteenth century, when institutions such as the Select Society and the Literary Society were operating, women are almost entirely absent from intellectual associational culture. I can find no evidence of intellectual clubs or societies in Scotland that accepted women as members or participants in the decades between the 1720s and the 1770s. This absence must be recognised as a fundamental feature of the development of Scottish Enlightenment culture. In intellectual societies women were present as objects of discussion, but not as subjects in the debate. Yet women did not remain entirely excluded for long. In the 1770s, the formation of public debating societies provided an opportunity for female participation in public discussion of popular philosophical and political questions. Women did not speak in these debates, however. Public debating societies The formation of public debating societies in the 1770s represents a democratisation of intellectual culture in Scotland. They were democratic spaces because they were accessible to anyone who could afford to purchase a ticket of entry. This accessibility meant that they became a popular form of entertainment.38 Their democratic nature also made them more accessible to women. Female participation in this heterosocial intellectual culture is illuminated in a series of letters about the Dundee Speculative Society published in the Weekly Magazine.39 The first letter, published on 27 January 1774, consists of a glowing account of the Society, stating that: ‘Amongst the various entertainments of this place, the Speculative Society claims pre-­eminence.’40 Casting the Society as a benefit to the town of Dundee, the author states that ‘it hath become the resort of great numbers who feast on the knowledge and ingenuity of the speakers’.41 Representing the Society in this way, the author specifies distinct roles and benefits for female and male participants. On women’s attendance he writes: ‘Tribes of females, deserting the card table, flock thither, and acknowledge the ­superiority of philosophy.’42 Significantly, women are depicted as learning from men, but they are never described as participants who actively contribute to the debates. The positioning of women as able to understand and benefit from exposure to 38

McElroy, Age of Improvement, 87–9; Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 119. 39 The Weekly Magazine, or Edinburgh Amusement. Containing the Essence of all the Magazines, Reviews &c. With a Variety of Original Pieces (Edinburgh: Wal & Tho Ruddiman, 1774), vol. 23. 40 Ibid., 159. 41 Ibid.,159. 42 Ibid., 159.

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Women and Intellectual Culture 83 philosophy, but incapable of full participation is achieved by the author through his emphasis on the inferior nature of female sociability. Women who have been occupied with cards cannot hope to engage with men on the same intellectual level, but the fact that they are ‘deserting the card table’ holds open the possibility that they can improve their intellectual capabilities. In the author’s illustration, male participation in the Speculative Society is figured very differently to women’s. Men are depicted as taking an active role, and this role is, in turn, represented as bringing them a benefit directly related to their expected public role in society at large. As the author declared: ‘Here the young men are trained up in oratory and graceful deliverance, and afterwards become an ornament to the great council of the nation.’43 Young men’s participation in the debates of the Society is portrayed as a means by which they can learn the art of public speaking, a skill necessary for many of the professions in Scotland, such as law or the Church. It also enabled them to perform gentility. A crucial aspect of men’s development of public-­speaking skills was their adoption of a manly ‘graceful deliverance’. This development of refinement is also represented as a patriotic act. By developing skills in public speaking, the men of the Dundee Speculative Society could become useful members of the nation. That women’s and men’s participation in mixed-­sex debating societies was highly gendered is illustrated by the specific social norms enforced within these societies. The meetings of the Speculative Society were self-­consciously respectable events. As the author of the letter describes: ‘Drinking entereth not the walls of this society, and Harmony and Good Order keep the porch.’44 Homosocial institutions such as the Select Society also enforced similar strict rules of behaviour, intended to encourage the performance of male refinement. However, the emphasis on decorum and rules regarding things such as alcohol consumption in mixed-­ sex societies also needs to be read in the context of a general social discourse of politeness in which men’s performance of refinement was considered necessary to uphold feminine virtue. Perceptions of female delicacy, and ideas regarding the homosocial nature of drinking and combative intellectual interaction, meant that heterosocial intellectual institutions in urban Scotland were self-­consciously spaces for polite interaction, which may have more closely resembled assemblies than they did homosocial institutions. The Weekly Magazine letter discussed above drew an excessively positive picture of the Dundee Speculative Society, and it elicited a condescending response from a man writing as B.C., who accused the members of the Society of authoring the previous letter (which was probably true) and then attacked the intellectual abilities of the Society’s members, writing:

43 44

Ibid. Ibid., 159 (original emphasis).

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this speculative body consists of men without education, and even without that natural vigour of understanding that might make their want of education a subject of regret – whose reading has been confined to the perusal of an invoice – and whose compositions have not extended beyond the drawing out of an account.45 This attack on the credentials of the members of the Dundee Speculative Society was founded upon the idea that they were all merchants, and as such they did not have the appropriate educational background to properly engage in intellectual debate. The democratisation of intellectual culture through public debating societies challenged the ownership of this culture by the highly educated metropolitan elite. In the case of the Dundee Speculative Society, in addition to class, their peripheral geographical location was a factor in their unequal place in Scottish Enlightenment culture. The membership of the Society, listed in the 1783 Dundee Register, is less illustrious than that of more exclusive intellectual societies in Edinburgh, but does include two esquires and the city’s provost, John Pitcairn. Three reverends of the Church are also listed as members. The social and occupational background of these men makes it likely that they had obtained a university education, and thus cannot be easily cast as operating outwith B.C.’s narrowly defined learned world.46 All the other members are designated only as ‘Mr’, making it difficult to ascribe them to a specific social class or profession. That B.C. chose to depict the members as merchants highlights a discourse that excluded the merchant class from intellectual culture. Until an earlier membership list is found, it is difficult to ascertain whether landed gentleman and clergymen were always included as members, or whether their inclusion was a response to criticisms such as those levelled by B.C. Rather than forming an alternative intellectual sphere, the questions debated in Dundee’s Speculative Society illustrate a desire to claim a space in the same culture as that occupied by organisations such as the Select Society of Edinburgh. This is just one example of the process of emulation of the metropolis by peripheral urban centres towards the end of the eighteenth century.47 Yet B.C.’s letter suggests that this was not always a welcome development. B.C. depicts the men of the Speculative Society as having knowledge of money only, while he identifies himself as a man of status, possibly of the gentry or the learned professions. This is made explicit at the end of the letter when B.C. addresses them in Latin, and assuming that they will not understand it, apologises for doing so.48 B.C.’s letter demonstrates that the boundaries of public intellectual culture were 45

Ibid., 223. Dundee Register (1783), pp. 41-­42. 47 Bob Harris, ‘Cultural change in provincial Scottish towns, c. 1700–1820’, Historical Journal 54(1) (2011) 105–41. 48 The Weekly Magazine, 223. 46

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Women and Intellectual Culture 85 determined not only by gender, but by status also. B.C. denied that the Speculative Society members had a legitimate place in Scottish intellectual culture because they were merchants who lacked the classical education of gentlemen. This class-­based argument was deeply intertwined with B.C.’s gender prejudice, and he claimed: The disputes of such untutored rhetoricians may afford entertainment to the tribes of females who have honoured them with their presence, but can scarcely be regarded as a model for those whose eloquence has a more important destination.49

The debate in The Weekly Magazine did not end with B.C.’s letter. On 24 February 1774, a man calling himself D.M. issued a reply defending the popular nature of the Dundee Speculative Society. D.M. claimed that B.C.’s letter was: ‘An ungenteel, an [sic] malicious and virulent attack on a body of men in this place, equally destitute of truth or wit.’50 This debate was not only a contestation of the social boundaries of public intellectual culture, but also the boundaries of gentility. Rather than based on socioeconomic status, gentility is to be proven by knowledge and conversation; D.M. thus adopts B.C.’s emphasis on learning as a marker of status and turns it against him. Gentility becomes not so much a matter of socioeconomic status, but of wit. By accusing B.C. of launching an ‘ungenteel attack’, D.M. is claiming gentility on behalf of the Speculative Society. Considered in this context, it is likely that the presence of women at the debates was intended as a marker of civility, rather than as a signal of intellectual insignificance, as depicted by B.C. As in England, women’s participation in public debating societies was assisted by the discourse of women’s civilising influence, which in turn led to an increased acceptance of women in public spaces.51 Yet this access to public debating societies for women was not automatic. In Edinburgh, women gained access to the Pantheon Society only after they demanded it. McElroy writes that the Pantheon was the first society in Scotland to hold debates as a form of public entertainment, and audiences often numbered between 100 and 300.52 The first meeting was held on 23 December 1773, and the Society met fortnightly at St Giles Lodge.53 In the ‘Laws of the Pantheon’ it was stated that each member ‘may introduce to the Meeting of the Society for public Debate four Gentlemen’.54 This law implied that women were excluded from attending the debates. Although more publicly 49

Ibid. (original emphasis) Ibid., 278 (original emphasis). 51 Anna Clark, ‘Women in eighteenth-­century British politics’, in Knott and Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment, 573; Mary Thale, ‘Women in London debating societies in the 1780s’, Gender & History 7 (1995) 7–9. 52 McElroy, Age of Improvement, 87–94. 53 ‘Pantheon Debating Society Minutes’, GUL Sp Coll MS Gen. 1283. 54 Ibid., 1. 50

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accessible than formal and elite institutions such as the Select Society, the Pantheon Society’s initial exclusion of women casts them as a similar type to the homosocial societies discussed in previous chapter. However, unlike those elite societies, women demanded admittance to the Pantheon Society. This demand occurred publicly in The Weekly Magazine in the form of a poem by a woman calling herself Miss J.S., and entitled On hearing the Members of the pantheon had resolved to admit no Ladies into their Society: The eastern prophet did exclude All women from his heaven; And in our time a dread concord By Pantheonites is given, “That now no fair shall entrance find “Into the learned hall” As Sallique law precludes the sex From ruling over Gaul But, gods! beware, perhaps ere long You sorely will repent; We can debar you access too; ’Tis time then to relent.55 By referencing Salic law, J.S. places the Pantheon Society’s exclusion of women in the context of an historical denial of women’s access to power. She warns the Society’s ‘gods’ (an obvious reference to the members’ use of the word Pantheon) that if they do not repent and allow female access, women will cease to engage with them.56 Probably referencing Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (411 bc), this appears to be a thinly veiled threat that women will cease to have sexual relations with men if they continue to exclude them from public intellectual culture. Also, the publication of the poem indicates some fluidity in the gendered boundaries of Enlightenment culture, demonstrating female incursion into the printed public sphere. This printed incursion led to physical female access. J.S.’s demand for women’s attendance at the debates of the Pantheon Society was heeded by the Society’s members, and at a General Meeting of the Society on 3 January 1775 it was ‘Unanimously agreed to admit Ladies to hear the debates of the Society.’57 At the following meeting 200 people were present, including an unspecified number of women. The question of debate was ‘Whether is the Prodigal or the Miser the most pernicious to Society?’ Women’s presence was considered to be an occasion of importance; prior to the debate’s start, ‘Mr Tait rose up and delivered an address to the Ladies in Verse.’58 55

Weekly Magazine, vol. 23, 306. Ibid., 306. 57 ‘Pantheon Debating Society Minutes’, 3 January 1775. 58 Ibid., 12 January 1775. 56

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The manuscript minutes show that from 1775 onwards, women were always present at the fortnightly public meetings of the Society, their numbers varying from less than a third to almost half the audience. At each of these meetings women voted alongside men on the night’s question.59 Membership of the Pantheon Society gave a person the right to distribute tickets, to attend the members’ meetings following the debates, and to propose and vote on motions relating to the Society. Membership in the society was exclusively male, and this both created and maintained the dominance of the male voice in the Society. The ‘Laws of the Pantheon’ ruled that to become a member a man needed to have ‘delivered his Sentiments publicly in the Society on three Questions which have been debated’. Once admitted to membership of the Society, the member was required to ‘at least once a month deliver his Sentiments Publickly upon the Questions in Debate’.60 Women did not speak publicly in the debates of the Pantheon. There was no rule against women speaking, but their silence demonstrates the power of gendered discourse over women’s participation in public space; women did not speak because the performance of femininity precluded it. The successful demand for female access to the intellectual-­political public sphere in the context of female inclusion in the Pantheon Society supports arguments regarding the positive impact of Enlightenment discourse and culture on women’s status in society.61 Yet the cultural and institutional restrictions placed on women’s participation should not be downplayed. Here it is important to interpret women’s limited participation in the intellectual culture of the Scottish Enlightenment in the context of a longer history of women’s political participation. Women of wealth and status could participate in the debates over the Act of Union at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and some, such as Anne Hamilton, duchess of Hamilton, had influence in the Scottish Parliament despite being physically absent from it.62 Although lacking a parliament as a focus of female political influence after 1707, noblewomen’s public role continued across the eighteenth century. As I have discussed elsewhere, Jane Maxwell, duchess of Gordon developed close relationships with male literati such as Lord Kames. As a landed woman, Gordon was able to participate directly in the material project of agricultural improvement, and her reputation as an improver gained her inclusion in Enlightenment social circles.63 The example of the Duchess of Gordon illustrates the impact of social 59

Ibid. Ibid., ‘Laws of the Pantheon’. 61 Margaret C. Jacob, ‘The mental landscape of the public sphere: a European perspective’, Eighteenth-­Century Studies 28(1) (1994) 106. 62 Rosalind Carr, ‘Female correspondence and Early Modern Scottish political history: a case study of the Anglo-­Scottish Union’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 37(2) (2011) 39–57. 63 Rosalind Carr, ‘Women, land and power: a case for continuity’, in Katie Barclay and 60

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rank on women’s participation in Enlightenment culture. For middling women it was through the public sphere of debating societies and published texts that they were able to participate in intellectual and political culture. Peter Clark asserts that a major impact of the development of clubs and societies was the role of these institutions in allowing people access to regular political experience, either within organisations, for example, gaining experience in administration, or via the organisation in the wider political sphere, such as lobbying activity.64 In Scotland, this avenue of political agency was open to men to a much greater extent than it was to women. It remains the fact that women did not speak at the debates of the Dundee Speculative Society and the Pantheon Society. The impact of their participation can therefore be considered as less than that of the women who participated in London debating societies of the 1780s. In London societies women publicly spoke alongside men, and a number of female only debating societies were formed, such as La Belle Assemblée.65 However, although they did not speak, women at the Pantheon Society did vote upon each meeting’s question of debate. This act of voting in a period of extremely limited franchise for both men and women can be read as an act that asserted the participants’ political agency. The minutes of the Pantheon Society record the results of each meeting’s vote upon the question taken at the end of the debates. Sometimes the exact number of votes in favour or against is recorded and very occasionally women and men’s votes are listed separately.66 In a letter published in The Weekly Magazine on 10 August 1775, seven months after the admission of women to the Pantheon Society, the author discusses the society and women’s participation in it.67 Ostensibly written to transmit information from Edinburgh about the Pantheon Society to the author’s friends in a populous country town, as ‘it was intended to institute one or more of the same kind [debating society] in our town’, the letter provides a useful first-­hand account of the Society.68 In this letter the author describes the functions of the society, and emphasises its democratic character, writing that ‘visitors have an equal right with members to speak and vote upon every question that is proposed to be publicly debated in that society’.69 Discussing access to the Society’s debates, the author writes that ‘two hundred tickets are divided amongst the members to give to their acquaintances, as well ladies as gentlemen, for their admission as

Deborah Simonton (eds), Women in Eighteenth-­Century Scotland: Intimate, Intellectual and Public Lives (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). 64 Clark, Clubs and Societies, 465. 65 Thale, ‘Debating societies’, 10–17. 66 ‘Pantheon Debating Society Minutes’. 67 Weekly Magazine, vol. 29, 203–5. 68 Ibid., 203. 69 Ibid., 204.

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visitors’.’70 Attendance at the Pantheon often exceeded 200, particularly towards the end of the 1770s. The minutes state that in January 1775 the Society had determined that the popularity of the debates and the distribution of an indefinite number of tickets meant that: ‘the house was so crowded as to render it disagreeable to the Speakers & dangerous to the health; Therefore it was unanimously agreed to by the Society that the tickets (including Ladies tickets) should never exceed 200’.71 The reference to ‘Ladies tickets’ in the above excerpt reveals differences in the admittance of men and women. This is supported by the August 1775 Weekly Magazine letter, in which the author records that after paying six pence to the waiter for a ‘mutchkin of rum and a glass’, a gentleman ‘may take his seat in any place of the room he pleases, except the seats allotted for the ladies, who pay nothing and are also treated by the members with fruits in season’.72 According to the minutes, in June 1779 the Society decided its funds were sufficient enough that it could supply fruit to all visitors, but this was quickly rescinded on 1 July 1779, when members agreed ‘that to prevent the Society’s Expenses exceeding their Income the Oranges should in future be given to the Ladies only’.73 The practice of giving women fruit when men were given rum is symbolic of the adoption of a discourse of gender dichotomy. Oranges were an expensive product, and so the giving of them to women can be read as a celebration of their presence. It also ascribes a greater gentility to women than to men, something that is compounded by the simultaneous practice of giving men rum, a rougher product deemed to be unsuitable for female consumption. Here in miniature is the broader social process by which feminine women were placed on a pedestal. This celebration of sexual difference acted to deny women’s equal participation not just in the Pantheon Society, but in the public sphere overall. Despite the gendering of participation, the women attending the Pantheon Society are depicted in the Weekly Magazine letter as active participants. Describing the 20 January 1775 debate on the question, ‘Whether lenient or coercive measures would be the most effective method of terminating the differences betwixt Great Britain and her colonies?’, the author discusses the arguments put forward by the speakers. These included the idea that ‘Britain has been at an enormous expense of blood and treasure in supporting the colonies against their enemies’, thus the colonies would be ungrateful ‘to refuse subjection to the Parliament of Great Britain.’ Opposing arguments are also discussed, such as ‘that the dignity of the crown was indeed at stake by endeavouring to change the government of the colonies’, and that coercive measures ‘only served to embitter the 70

Ibid., 203–4. ‘Pantheon Debating Society Minutes’, 26 January 1775. 72 Weekly Magazine, vol. 29, 204. 73 ‘Pantheon Debating Society Minutes’, 1 July 1779. 71

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minds of the people past all hopes of reconciliation’.74 Discussing the result of the vote at the end of the debate, the author wrote: it was carried by a majority of nine, that coercive measures were the most prudent means of terminating the differences between Great Britain and her colonies. It was remarkable that most of the ladies, a very genteel company of near forty of whom were present, voted for coercive measures: so fond are the fair sex of power.75 This comment on women’s voting employs a notion of gender difference, and draws on gender stereotypes concerning women’s passion and tendency towards unreasonable, undemocratic power. Yet it also serves to highlight women’s autonomous intellectual and political action when voting at Pantheon Society debates. Further information on women’s voting patterns can be gleaned from the Society’s minute book. For example, on 26 January 1775, the second meeting to which women were admitted, the Society debated the question ‘Whether is a nation in a state of Barbarity, or a nation in a state of Luxury and refined manners the happiest?’. Although the majority attending voted for ‘Barbarity’, it is recorded that ‘Ten Ladies were present who appeared to listen with unusual attention to the debates & when their votes were called they voted unanimously for a state of Refinement.’76 This suggests not only a willingness on the part of female participants to form their own opinions and go against majority opinion, but also hints at the adoption by women of Scottish Enlightenment discourse regarding gender and progress. As discussed in the Introduction, the discourse of progress emphasised that only in a society governed by the social norms of refinement could women become the companions of men rather than their slaves or idols. These ideas are likely to have encouraged the women attending the Pantheon Society debate to vote for ‘refinement’. That the majority of men present voted for ‘barbarity’ reminds us that Scottish Enlightenment ­discourse, however dominant, was always contested. Like elite intellectual societies, the Pantheon Society was concerned with philosophical questions regarding society and the nation; questions of this nature included, ‘Can the principle of virtue be long preserved in a Commercial State?’ (debated 23 March 1775, majority yes) and ‘Has real patriotism or Self Interest produced the Greatest number of public spirited & heroic nations’ (debated 13 December 1776, majority for ‘real patriotism’).77 Similarly to the Select Society, ideas of gender were central to these debates. For example, the question, ‘Whether is youth, manhood or old age the happiest period of life?’ (debated 21 June 1775), 74

Weekly Magazine, vol. 29, 204. Ibid., 205. 76 ‘Pantheon Debating Society Minutes’, 26 January 1775. 77 Ibid., 23 March 1775, 13 December 1776. 75

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suggests an intellectual engagement with the stages of the male life cycle. The acceptance of manhood, the full acquirement of masculine identity, as a stage of life rather than as a life-­long bodily identity demonstrates a continuity with early modern ideas of manhood.78 Exactly what constituted manhood was also debated in the Society; on 6 February 1777, they discussed the question, ‘Is courage natural to man or can it be acquired by Experience or length of time?’. According to the minutes: ‘A greater number of speakers delivered their sentiments on this Question than on any former and it carried that Courage was natural to man.’79 The popularity of this question shows an active intellectual engagement with issues of the inherent, learnt, and socially constructed nature of manhood. That the majority voted in favour of courage being natural to man reflects the dominant ideology that certain aspects of masculinity, and by extension gender difference, were natural. The importance of mixed-­sex sociability was also a subject of debate at the Pantheon Society. On 14 January 1779, they asked ‘Whether the company of learned men, or that of the Ladies tends most to the improvement of youth?’ The records state that although at least nine out of twelve speakers were in favour of the company of ‘Ladies’, the majority vote was in favour of ‘learned men’. This vote demonstrates that there was no consensus on the issue of the benefits of female influence, and that ideas regarding the importance of homosociality remained prominent in late eighteenth-­century Edinburgh. At the Pantheon Society women were not simply objects of debate, as they had been at the Select and Literary societies, yet their participation was gendered. The discursive gender dichotomy that facilitated women’s participation is present in the use of the labels ‘ladies’ and ‘learned men’ in the question debated on 14 January 1779. This implies that ‘ladies’ possessed certain characteristics which differentiated them from ‘learned men’, such as delicacy and emotionality. It was these feminine characteristics that were perceived to have a positive influence on men’s development of refinement, as they were what (in theory) made women more sympathetic and less self-­interested than men.80 ‘Learned men’ are thus able to be placed in dichotomous opposition to ‘ladies’ and inferred to possess exclusively masculine rational abilities. In this discursive context it is ­unsurprising that women did not speak in debates. On 15 February 1776 the Pantheon Society debated ‘Is it consistent with good policy to have Ladies for Soveraigns?’. According to the minutes for that meeting:

78

Ibid., 21 June 1775; Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 22–3. 79 ‘Pantheon Debating Society Minutes’, 6 February 1777. 80 Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse, 117–18.

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it was carried by a great majority, that females ought not to be troubled with Soveraignty [sic], and that their Eminence over the Men was Sufficiently powerful, without their deviating from that line of Conduct which was evidently destined them by Providence to act in, all the Ladies present, except two, were of the same opinion.81 Here women’s eminence over men in the home is decreed to be more important than power in the political sphere. This domestic power was accessible to middling and gentry women in a way that familial political influence never was, and it may be for this reason that all of the women present, except two, agreed that women should not be sovereigns. Marriage too was a question of debate in the Society, illustrating the importance placed on the domestic sphere. One such debate, on the question ‘Whether should Love or Money, have the greatest influence in forming the Matrimonial connection?’ was held over two meetings on 10 and 17 December 1778 and attracted 348 people the first night and 406 the second.82 On the second night, for which male and female attendance is minuted separately, 180 women and 226 men attended. Reflecting women’s obvious interest in questions of marriage and domesticity, this figure is above the average for female attendance numbers.83 At this debate a woman presented an address, the only time it is recorded that a woman did so. According to the minutes, the woman did not literally speak, but ‘The anonymous Sentiments of a Lady were read by Mr Anderson which had been sent to him the day before; they were received by the audience with every mark of respect and applause.’84 In this instance, as in so many others, the anonymous woman was simultaneously present and absent in Scottish public intellectual culture. Reading, writing and publishing Women also participated in Scottish Enlightenment culture through reading the books, periodicals, and other texts generated by this epistemological revolution. As Katharine Glover has discussed, women’s education and reading were crucial to constructions of feminine identity in Scottish Enlightenment culture (especially for women of the social elite). Through the reading of newspapers and periodicals, novels, and intellectual texts such as philosophy and history, these women claimed a space in the intellectual culture of Enlightenment.85 This was not necessarily a feminist challenge to women’s subordination, but rather endorsed the Enlightenment view that women should be educated so as to converse intelligently with 81

‘Pantheon Debating Society Minutes’, 15 February 1776. Ibid., 10 December 1778, 17 December 1778. 83 Rendall, ‘Virtue and commerce’, 53–71; Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse, 95–113. 84 ‘Pantheon Debating Society Minutes’, 17 December 1778. 85 Glover, Elite Women, 50–78. 82

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men. Despite the cultural limitations on women’s intellectual agency, the growth in print culture and education did permit female access to Enlightenment thought, and alongside public debating societies, education facilitated the spread of ideas from elite institutions and associational culture to other sectors of society. Although often conducted in domestic space, reading was not a wholly private activity. Rather, it allowed women to perceive of themselves as members of a world of letters.86 As the social world of Alison Cockburn demonstrates, women’s participation in domestic sociability gave them access to the literary world. This intellectual participation illuminates the public character of domestic space, and shows that when it was combined with sociability, reading could engender a form of intellectual agency. Katharine Glover’s examination of female reading practices demonstrates that, despite women’s relative absence from the physical manifestations of intellectual culture in Scotland, they were present as active readers. This was not an accidental offshoot of a publishing revolution; rather, the assumption that women were possessed of a greater sensibility led male literati to desire female opinion on their texts, with women deemed able to assess a text’s impact on a reader’s sympathetic response. It was this that motivated William Robertson to solicit Margaret Hepburn’s opinions on his History of Scotland (1759), and Hume to seek Katherine Caldwell’s response to his History of England (1754–62). This was not a one-­way process; for writers such as Hume, history was deemed an appropriate subject for women’s intellectual endeavour, with figures from the past able to elicit emotional responses that would improve women, making them virtuous as well as intellectually conversant.87 Other Enlightenment literati also sought intellectual correspondence with women, such as Henry Mackenzie who regularly corresponded with his cousin Elizabeth Rose of Kilravock, in the Scottish Highlands. Rose was an avid reader, selectively recording extracts from texts in a commonplace book. In addition to her family’s large library, she borrowed books from the libraries of neighbours and friends. It is also possible that she borrowed books from local circulating libraries established in the final decades of the eighteenth century.88 As Mark Towsey has argued, subscription libraries provided women and men beyond the intellectual elite with access to the intellectual products of the Enlightenment through book borrowing. This process through which the Enlightenment permeated broader society was deemed by those involved to be essential to improvement. As with Haddington’s Gray Library, the majority of members of subscription libraries tended to belong to the professional classes who had accessed university education, and thus had prior exposure to Scottish Enlightenment 86

Glover, ‘The female mind’, 1–20. Glover, Elite Women, 67–78. 88 Towsey, ‘“Observe her heedfully”’, 15–33. 87

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thought. However, these men, and often their female relatives, were joined by men and women of the merchant and artisan classes.89 As with other elites, for Rose the use of public libraries was a supplementary form of book acquisition, but for those without access to the family libraries of landed gentry they provided an important means of access to the print revolution. In addition to access to knowledge via booksellers and circulating libraries, men and women could further the parish or burgh school education of their childhood through private education in schools established in people’s homes.90 In 1760, Simon Glendinning operated a school on the first stair above Halkerston’s Wynd, ‘for teaching Ladies and Gentlemen Writing and Arithmetick’.91 As illustrated by Glendinning’s school, Edinburgh’s private schools tended to offer education in specific subjects. For example, many schools provided English teaching, and some offered foreign languages, such as Mr and Mrs Mitchell who ran a ‘French Boarding School for Young Ladies’ in a room in the Covenant close, or Signor Nicolosi who lodged at Miss Sutherland’s in Monteith Close and planned to open a school teaching French and Italian.92 The existence of schools offering instruction in continental languages, as well as dancing and fencing masters, alongside those offering practical training in crafts such as sewing, indicates that urban education was multifaceted. It is also suggests that through this informal education system, women and men lacking elite birth could learn polite accomplishments. For cultural commentators such as William Creech, the character of female education was a measure of society’s moral state. Believing a moral collapse to have occurred between 1763 and 1783 due to a rise in luxury, Creech cited the fact that whereas previously ‘the sewing-­ school, the pastry-­school, were then essential branches of female education’, in 1783 ‘the daughters even of tradesmen’ spend their time ‘strolling from the ­perfumer’s to the milliner’s’ and ‘when she is disengaged from public or private amusements, in improving her mind from the precious stores of a circulating library’. Creech does not oppose women’s intellectual pursuits, but he sees their abandonment of education focused on domesticity as a cause of moral corruption, arguing that ‘too many of the young women assume the meretricious airs and flippancy of courtezans [sic]’.93 89

Mark Towsey, ‘“All partners may be enlightened and improved by reading them”: the distribution of Enlightenment books in Scottish subscription library catalogues, 1750–c.1820’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 28(1) (2008) 20–43; Vivienne S. Dunstan, ‘Glimpses into a town’s reading habits in Enlightenment Scotland: analysing the borrowings of Gray Library, Haddington, 1732–1816’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 26(1) (2006) 42–59. 90 On plebeian education in eighteenth-­century Britain, see Deborah Simonton, ‘Women and education’, in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds), Women’s History Britain, 1700–1850 (London: Routledge, 2005), 37–41. 91 Caledonian Mercury, 17 November 1760. 92 Caledonian Mercury, 5 November 1760; Edinburgh Evening Courant, 14 April 1762. 93 [William Creech], Edinburgh Fugitive Pieces (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1791), 84–5.

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Edinburgh’s urban geography facilitated female education, but provided only limited space for women to enter print culture as writers. A primary reason for this was the exclusion of women from intellectual associational culture. As discussed in the previous chapter, there was a symbiotic relationship between this world and the published output of the Scottish Enlightenment. That women’s exclusion from elite intellectual societies obstructed their contribution to print culture is further demonstrated by the comparative example of the London Bluestocking circle, which ­provided a form of female intellectual patronage.94 In Scotland, women did not fully enter the world of publishing until the final decade of the eighteenth century, and this corresponded with increased female involvement in intellectual associational culture. The first clear example of organised female intellectual-­political activity in Scotland occurred in the late 1790s. Jane Rendall has shown that during this period women became involved in radical Whig politics and the intellectual activity surrounding it. The radical discourses of moral, social, and material progress allowed for the active participation of women, although still to a limited extent. The women involved in this political culture included the daughters of the historian John Millar and the physician William Cullen, men who had both been active in the homosocial world of the urban literati earlier in the century. The radical Whig women of the 1790s also included Eliza Fletcher, famous for her autobiographical description of Edinburgh’s literary and political world during her lifetime; and Elizabeth Hamilton, a novelist and theorist on education. A Tory, Anne Grant of Laggan, author of Letters from the Mountains (1809), was also associated with these female intellectual networks. This network formed a cluster of female contributors to the political and intellectual culture of the late Enlightenment period in Scotland, both with regard to published work and intellectual sociability. According to Rendall, Eliza Fletcher’s house was a centre for Enlightenment sociability and an important space for radical Whig political networking. Like the Bluestockings of mid-­to late eighteenth-­century London, this culture of intellectual sociability enabled women to establish intellectual and political networks among themselves as well as with men.95 Carla Hesse has argued that the Bluestockings of England found cultural heiresses in the social and intellectual networks fashioned by the women of the late Scottish Enlightenment examined by Rendall.96 The London gatherings (or assemblies) of the female Bluestocking circle from mid-­century 94

Elizabeth Eger, Bluestockings: Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 59–120. 95 Rendall, ‘Women that would plague me’, 326–42; Jane Rendall, ‘Fletcher, Eliza’, in Elizabeth Ewan, Sue Innes, Siân Reynolds, and Rose Pipes (eds), The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 122–3. 96 Carla Hesse, ‘Introduction’, in Knott and Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment, 262.

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involved women such as Elizabeth Montagu and Elizabeth Vesey, who were both hostesses, and Elizabeth Carter and Hannah More. A self-­conscious manifestation of heterosocial intellectual improvement, their meetings were also frequented by men, including the writer Samuel Johnson, the actor David Garrick, and the painter Henry Reynolds.97 By creating a space for women’s public intellectual sociability, and providing women with access to literary patronage, the Bluestockings created a space for female publishing, with writers such as Elizabeth Carter and Catherine Macaulay making significant contributions to the English Enlightenment.98 A comparison of Scottish Whig circles at the end of century and the London Bluestockings of earlier decades begs the question as to why women did not achieve a prominent public role in Scotland earlier in the century? When answering this question it needs to be remembered that Scottish women did publish during this century, primarily in the poetry genre. Yet Scottish women are absent as published contributors to the Enlightenment during the period dominated by the group Richard Sher refers to as the ‘prime’ generation of writers who were born between 1710 and 1739, and who included David Hume, William Robertson, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson. Sher is correct to highlight women writers, specifically Elizabeth Hamilton and Joanna Baillie, as members of the ‘younger’ generation, or late Enlightenment, and I agree that the early nineteenth century was when ‘gender barriers to literary pursuits were gradually breaking down’.99 Yet the chronology is not entirely transparent. Prior to the interventions of Baillie and Hamilton, Jean Marishall contributed to Edinburgh’s print culture and attempted, with limited success, to establish herself as a ­professional writer.100 Marishall was born in Scotland, but began her literary career in London with the publication in 1765 of her novel The History of Miss Camilla Cathcart, and Miss Fanny Renton. This was followed two years later by The History of Alicia Montague. Despite succeeding in becoming a female novelist, Marishall was frustrated by the lack of financial support for her endeavours. When her first novel was rejected by a reputable publisher on the Strand in London because ‘they never purchase the productions of ladies’, she relied on recourse to the virtues of ‘Patience, Perseverence [sic], Humility and Prudence’.101 Eventually her tenacity was rewarded, and she obtained the support of the Duchess of Northumberland, whose influence enabled her to dedicate the work to the Queen, for which she received 10 guineas. 97

Elizabeth Eger, ‘“The noblest commerce of mankind”: conversation and community in the Bluestocking circle’, in Knott and Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment, 288–301. 98 O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment, 56–67; Eger, Bluestockings. 99 Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and their Publishers in Eighteenth-­Century Britain, Ireland and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 101. 100 Perkins, Women Writers, 45–53. 101 Jean Marishall, Series of Letters, 2 vols (Edinburgh: C. Elliot, 1789), ii, 160.

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This felt too much like charity to Marishall, and her desire to be a professional writer led her to publish Alicia Montague by subscription, an act that ­eventually earned ‘about a hundred guineas’.102 Although able to publish novels in London, Marishall was not particularly supported by London’s literati, and she could not obtain support for her third work, the play Sir Harry Gaylove, or a Comedy in Embryo. Frustrated in her attempts to have the play staged in London, in the early 1770s, Marishall sought the assistance of Edinburgh’s literati in getting Gaylove performed. Despite the cultural restrictions on female publicity, she was successful in obtaining the patronage of Kames, Hume, Smith, Ferguson, and Boswell, and although her play was not performed it was published. This achievement reflects the theatre’s function as a forum for female ­publicity, something which will be explored further in the next chapter. Marishall published anonymously until she produced her Series of Letters in 1789, and when promoting Sir Harry Gaylove her male patrons emphasised her femininity as an assurance of the play’s morality, and as an indication that she would inspire sympathy in the audience.103 However, Marishall did not passively adopt Enlightenment gender ideals. In the one text she published under her own name, Marishall gave her own contribution to Enlightenment discourses on gender. Reversing the tendency in Scottish writing on gender whereby men defined appropriate femininity (Gregory and Fordyce being exemplars), Marishall produced an epistolary text of letters written to her teenage nephew Charles in London, after he had left her care in Edinburgh and embarked on his transition from boy to man. Her aim was to aid Charles’s intellectual improvement and to help him develop into a gentleman, informing him that ‘every sensible person despises the insignificant character of a beau; and that it is only an improved understanding and a pure mind, that give lustre to dress, and make the complete gentleman’.104 In this mode, she criticises his spelling, and asserts that ‘an error in grammar in a scholar, appears with equal impropriety as a hole in the stocking of a gentleman’.105 Outward appearance was important in achieving gentility, and Marishall expressed concern when she heard ‘how you went to the assembly without getting your hair cut. I should think by this time it would be below the tip of your nose.’106 Despite the importance of appearance, in the formation of a gentleman Marishall considered it secondary to moral and intellectual improvement. Reflecting Scottish Enlightenment emphases on the importance of inner sensibility as the source of outward politeness, Marishall is sceptical of the 102

Marishall, Letters, ii, 193. Perkins, Women Writers, 50–2. 104 Marishall, Letters, i, 20. 105 Ibid., i, 30. 106 Ibid., i, 53. 103

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model of manhood promoted by the Earl of Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son (1774). In one letter she writes: I have not the least doubt, had his Lordship [Chesterfield] taken half the pains with his son in pointing out to him the manly virtues of the soul, which are inconsistent with the smallest spark of deceit, but he would have succeeded much better than he did in making him a man of the world.107 Marishall’s critique of Chesterfield is grounded in her adoption of Common Sense moral philosophy. Developed in its fullest form by Thomas Reid, this philosophy rejected the scepticism of Hume and asserted that natural human benevolence was founded on a common moral sense, itself bestowed by God.108 Of Chesterfield’s argument that women lack intelligence and men are ruled by the passions, Marishall wrote that our Creator would not have given us ‘passions impossible to govern, or created women incapable of virtue . . . No! the Chesterfield system is contradictory and false.’109 Rather than acting according to their passions, men’s actions should be motivated by reason, and ‘were men to act upon a rational principle, love and matrimony would go hand in hand’.110 In addition to Common Sense philosophy, Marishall was influenced by Rousseau. Whilst she adopted Rousseau’s argument concerning the importance of children’s education, she disagreed with him on the topic of children’s reason, asserting that ‘children very early understand reason if delivered in a plain and simple manner’.111 Following common sense was the means to happiness, and to maintain this happiness men needed to avoid focusing on business to the neglect of their domestic lives. According to Marishall, it was men’s neglect of their wives that led to ‘extravagance and dissipation’ in women, leading them to ‘fall a sacrifice to their passions’.112 Luxury also threatened happiness because it undermined men’s domestic oeconomy. Summing up the ideal gentleman in the last sentence of the first volume of her Letters, Marishall contended that: ‘He is oeconomical that he may be generous; and generous that he may be happy.’113 In the second volume, Marishall expanded upon her discussion of ideal domestic relationships with a case study of a marriage strained because the wife was too concerned with social rank, a fact signalled by her refusal to accompany the daughter of an artisan to the 107

Ibid., i, 106–7. Heiner F. Klemme, ‘Scepticism and common sense’, in Alexander Broadie (ed.), Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 127–32. 109 Marishall, Letters, i, 103. 110 Ibid., i, 124. 111 Ibid., i, 126. 112 Ibid., i, 123. 113 Ibid., i, 201. 108

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assembly. Through emotional coercion the husband was able to rid his wife of her prejudice and instil in her liberal and humane principles. These principles are expressed in a desire for a greater social equality, and Marishall asserted that rank is an advantage, but not a mark of superiority.114 These relatively radical ideas concerning social hierarchy mean that Marishall’s Letters should be included among the radical texts emanating from Britain in the wake of the American and French revolutions. Although not as eloquent as Mary Wollstonecraft nor as radical as Thomas Paine, Marishall’s publication is significant in being a rare piece of philosophical and political writing from a Scotswoman during the Enlightenment. Marishall began her writing career in London, and a similar trajectory was followed by Joanna Baillie, niece to the celebrated surgeons William and John Hunter, and the poet Anne Home Hunter (wife of John). Joanna Baillie was educated in Bothwell, then at boarding school in Glasgow, before migrating to London with her mother and siblings in 1784, following the death of her father, a professor of Divinity at the University of Glasgow. This family background gave Baillie access to knowledge and social connections, and it was in London during her twenties that she began a writing career that would last until the 1840s. That Baillie’s career began in London was partly due to the fact that it was there where she came into adulthood, but there was more to it than that. Like her aunt, Joanna Baillie benefited from intellectual networking afforded by London’s literary scene, and she developed friendships with other female writers, such as Susan Ferrier (another Scot in London), Maria Edgeworth, Harriet Martineau, Anne Grant of Laggan, and the actress Sarah Siddons. Typical of many eighteenth-­century British women, Baillie’s first publication was a volume of poetry published in 1790, but rather than remaining constrained in the poetry genre Baillie took advantage of the female publicity offered by the theatre and published A Series of Plays in 1798. Included in this was De Montfort, which was performed at London’s Drury Lane theatre for eight nights in April 1800.115 Baillie was a forerunner to, and then participant in, the explosion of female publication in Scotland that occurred in the early decades of the nineteenth century with the emergence of writers such as Anne Grant, Elizabeth Fletcher, Elizabeth Hamilton, and Christine Johnstone.116 This explosion was encouraged by the emergence of Romanticism as an intellectual movement. As well as Sir Walter Scott, Baillie developed intellectual friendships with William Wordsworth and Lord Byron.117 Despite her successes, Baillie was not immune from gender-­ based 114

Ibid., ii, 97. Judith Bailey Slagle (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie, 2 vols (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1999), i, 5–54. 116 Perkins, Women Writers. 117 Slagle, ‘Introduction’, 13. 115

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criticism, and she believed that male prejudice ensured that women would be more successful if they published anonymously. When her friend, Fanny Head published a translation of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s Messiah in the 1820s, Baillie was concerned that she had been pressured by friends to do so in her name.118 Writing to Scott in October 1826, Baillie asserted ‘I speak feelingly on this subject like a burnt child. John Any-­body would have stood higher with the critics than Joanna Baillie. I too was unwisely thwarted on this point.’119 When people discovered that Baillie’s plays were written by a woman, critics, including Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review, attacked her work. Although facing gender-­specific criticism, Baillie did achieve popular acclaim in Edinburgh with her play The Family Legend, which attracted large audiences in 1810. She also developed literary connections in the Scottish capital, corresponding regularly with Scott after they met in London in 1806, and with Henry Mackenzie, who wrote an epilogue for The Family Legend (Scott wrote the prologue). Her career was therefore not limited to London, but it is noteworthy that one of the first Scotswomen to gain a prominent place in Scottish intellectual life initially did so from London. The examples of Jean Marishall and Joanna Baillie demonstrate the means by which the expansion of print was a crucial component of Enlightenment culture. It not only facilitated female access to knowledge, but allowed women to participate in knowledge production. Yet their relative rarity also serves to highlight the limitations on women’s participation in intellectual culture during this period. Considering the extent to which women engaged in the Enlightenment through reading, it can be concluded that the maleness of institutional and associational culture, combined with social conventions governing the public performance of femininity, precluded most women from obtaining a public voice. Conclusion In order to properly comprehend the impact of the Enlightenment on women, it is necessary to recognise the effect of specific national and local contexts. Scotland shared a common political culture with England, but without a parliament Edinburgh lacked a focus of political action, including elite female political influence. The country was also without a royal court after 1603. Scotland thus lacked two key sites of early modern women’s public participation. The Scottish institutions that remained after regal and parliamentary union, namely the law, the universities, and the Church, were male institutions. The Scottish Enlightenment was thus formed in a public culture that was already manifestly male, and the maleness of this 118 119

Ibid., 11–12. Joanna Baillie, Hampstead, to Sir Walter Scott, Abbotsford, 13 October 1826, in Slagle, Letters, i, 439 (underline is Baillie’s).

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sphere was reinforced by an Enlightenment ideology that ascribed dichotomous gender roles to men and women. Against these material and ideological forces, women in Scotland were able to obtain only a muted voice in public intellectual culture. That the gendered boundaries of this culture were relatively more permeable in London and Paris means that we should be cautious in drawing overarching conclusions concerning women and the British, or European, Enlightenment.120 Women’s participation in public intellectual culture is not, however, the whole story; female involvement in the Scottish Enlightenment also encompassed public sociability. Including the theatre, assemblies, and concerts, public sociable spaces symbolised and facilitated enlightened improvement, and it is to these and other manifestations of urban sociability that we now turn.

120

Eger, Bluestockings; Dena Goodman, ‘Enlightenment salons: the convergence of female and philosophic ambitions’, Eighteenth-­Century Studies 22(3) (1989) 329–50.

3

Urbane and Urban Sociability in Enlightenment Edinburgh Describing the process of social change leading to civility, David Hume wrote in 1752: The more these refined arts advance, the more sociable men become: nor is it possible, that, when enriched with science, and possessed of a fund of conversation, they should be contented to remain in solitude, or live with their fellow-­citizens in that distant manner, which is peculiar to ignorant and barbarous nations. They flock into cities; love to receive and communicate knowledge; to show their wit or their breeding; their taste in conversation or living, in clothes or furniture. Curiosity allures the wise; vanity the foolish; and pleasure both. Particular clubs and societies are everywhere formed: Both sexes meet in an easy and sociable manner; and the tempers of men, as well as their behaviour, refine apace. So that, beside the improvements which they receive from knowledge and the liberal arts, it is impossible but they must feel an encrease [sic] of humanity, from the very habit of conversing together, and contributing to each other’s pleasure and entertainment.1 For Hume, refined urban sociability, or urbanity, indicated progress, and he uses it to assert European cultural superiority.2 Offering a Eurocentric vision of ‘barbarous nations’, Hume’s depiction of the eighteenth-­century European world is also misleading; rather than reading his description of things as they were, his vision needs to be understood as an ideal. It was the striving to reach and defend this ideal that underpinned the culture of improvement, which itself was fostered by Scottish Enlightenment philosophies of progress. In Hume’s Edinburgh, the ordered and ‘improving’ spaces of clubs and societies operated within an urban culture that 1

David Hume, ‘Of refinement in the arts’ [1752], in Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, [1777] 1987), 271. 2 Hume’s adoption of a concept of European racial superiority is demonstrated by his discussion of ‘negro’ inferiority in a 1753 footnote added to his 1748 essay, ‘Of National Characters’. For a discussion of Scottish Enlightenment debates on race, see Silvia Sebastiani, ‘National characters and race: a Scottish Enlightenment debate’, in Thomas Ahnert and Susan Manning (eds), Character, Self and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 187–205.

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included spaces of polite sociability, such as dancing assemblies, and more socially diverse spaces, including taverns, the theatre, and wynds occupied by female streetwalkers. In this chapter I investigate the place of Enlightenment culture in the eighteenth-­century city. In contrast to associational culture, the urbane social sphere that encompassed sociable and improving spaces in the urban realm enabled women to participate in the public culture of civility and improvement. I will explore the development of the assembly as a space of mixed-­sex sociability, and consider the role of the theatre, which straddled high and low culture, and facilitated female publicity. I then examine the place of alcohol in Enlightenment culture, investigating the world of convivial clubs and tavern-­based male sociability. The chapter concludes with a study of prostitution, and I argue that this world of vice was also part of urbane Enlightenment culture. These case studies will demonstrate the interconnectivity of the various manifestations of urban sociability. Throughout I will illustrate the fluidity between polite and impolite spaces, and highlight the importance of social class in defining politeness and disorder. Following the seminal work of Peter Borsay, historians of eighteenth-­ century Britain have long recognised that the emergence of politeness was accompanied by an urban renaissance. Manifested by building development in the wealthier areas of cities, towns, and resorts such as Bath, this urban renaissance created new uniform and symmetrical houses, streets, circuses, and squares influenced by the Classical styles encountered by young men, including the influential Scottish architect Robert Adam, on their European tours. This new architectural style symbolised the improvement project and created new spaces of public interaction, including paved streets for heterosocial promenading. These not only reflected the discursive impetus of politeness, but also the commercial character of eighteenth-­century Britain, providing spaces such as coffeehouses for merchant cooperation and enabling increased consumerism with shops selling luxury products.3 As John Brewer has illustrated, during the eighteenth-­ century the arts themselves ‘became the property of a larger public’, and the process by which this occurred was distinctly urban.4 As elsewhere in Britain, Scotland’s urban revolution provided spaces for the performance of varying displays of male gentility and politeness, and enabled new forms

3

Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660–1760 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991); Helen Berry, ‘Polite consumption: shopping in eighteenth-­century England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 12 (2002) 375–94; Rosemary H. Sweet, ‘Topographies of politeness’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 12 (2002) 355–74; Jon Stobart, ‘Culture versus commerce: societies and spaces for elites in eighteenth-­century Liverpool’, Journal of Historical Geography 28(4) (2002) 471–85. 4 John Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997), xvii–xviii.

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of female publicity.5 As Jane Rendall discusses, the ideal Habermasian public sphere, separate from the state and emerging from a private family sphere, is too rigid an idea to recognise the fluidity of the boundaries of public and private.6 This fluidity is demonstrated by the entry of the public into private space, through reading for example, and by women’s participation in cultural activities of the public realm through domestic activity such as tea drinking.7 That this urban renaissance had a gendered dimension was also exhibited by its provision of new spaces for female public activity, and by the impact of new urban spaces on male and female behaviour. Women and the social sphere The eighteenth-­ century urban public sphere expanded the scope of upper-­and middle-­ status women’s public participation.8 In Scotland, this participation included public dancing at assemblies and balls, theatre and concert attendance, and tea parties.9 These spaces constituted a mixed-­sex, heterosocial social public sphere, and its emergence heralded a change in women’s social practice and gave them a degree of cultural influence. Yet the relationship between femininity and the social sphere was contested. Despite the importance placed on feminine influence in mixed-­sex social interaction as a progressive force of civility, the social sphere remained an unstable site for femininity. The perception that the social sphere posed a threat to feminine virtue is apparent in John Gregory’s didactic text, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774).10 Here, Gregory presented female modesty as a means by which women could achieve happiness, and as a necessary characteristic in governing women’s behaviour in the public sphere. Although adhering to the dominant belief in women’s positive influence with regard to male refinement, Gregory contended that in conversation 5

Katharine Glover, Elite Women and Polite Society in Eighteenth-­Century Scotland (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011). 6 Jane Rendall, ‘Women and the public sphere’, Gender & History 11(3) (1999) 479–82. 7 Kathryn Gleadle, ‘“Opinions deliver’d in conversation”: conversation, politics, and gender in the late eighteenth century’, in Jose Harris (ed.), Civil Society in British History: Ideas, Identities, Institutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 61–78. 8 Rosemary Sweet and Penelope Lane (eds), Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth-­Century England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2003); Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 225–84. 9 Jane Rendall and Sue Innes, ‘Women, gender, politics’, in Lynn Abrams, Eleanor Gordon, Deborah Simonton, and Eileen Jane Yeo (eds), Gender in Scottish History since 1700 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 50; John Buchan, Capital of the Mind: How Edinburgh Changed the World (London: John Murray, 2003), 242–9; Rosalind K. Marshall, Virgins and Viragos: A History of Women in Scotland from 1080–1980 (London: William Collins, 1983), 170–8. 10 John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (Dublin: John Colles, 1774).

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women should be modest, and generally silent.11 As he stated, ‘The great art of pleasing in conversation consists in making the company pleased with themselves. You will more readily hear than talk yourself into their good graces.’12 Adopting ideas similar to Hume concerning male gallantry and women’s influence, for Gregory women’s participation in conversation was to create a space for men’s performance of ‘civilised’ sociability. Connected to this was the exhortation that women show ‘delicacy and sentiment’ in their dress; ‘A fine woman shews her charms to most advantage, when she seems most to conceal them.’13 Following this line of argument, it was important for women to avoid amusements that might corrupt feminine delicacy, such as viewing English comedies at the theatre or partaking in gambling.14 As with most other prescriptive literature, Gregory warned against these activities because women were partaking in them. Assemblies In 1710, the Assembly, a space for public dancing, was opened in Edinburgh. This was immediately condemned by Presbyterian ministers, and it soon closed down. This religious opposition was eventually overcome, however, and the Assembly re-­opened in 1723. Regular assemblies were again established in 1746, and forty-­one years later gained permanent premises on George Street in the New Town, with the building still called the Assembly Rooms today.15 In many respects the establishment of the polite social pastime of public dancing followed a linear progression that mirrored that of the Scottish Enlightenment itself; religious intolerance was overcome and the principles of urbane civility reigned.16 This notion of progression informed ‘enlightened’ views of the world, and within this epistemology assemblies symbolised and facilitated improvement. Here the place of women as indicators and agents of civility was paramount. The 1723 Assembly was established and run by a group of women led by the Countess of Panmure, an act which, as Katharine Glover explains, transposed ‘their private, domestic role as hostesses into the public setting of the Edinburgh assembly rooms’.17 This was part of a wider British phenomenon in which throughout the century assemblies were, as Amanda Vickery has demonstrated, ‘associated with collective female influence’.18 11

Ibid., 3, 13–15. Ibid., 15–16. 13 Ibid., 26. 14 Ibid., 27. 15 Buchan, Capital of the Mind, 251; Anad C. Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History (London: Croom Helm, 1976), 198. 16 Alexander Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2001), 113–50. 17 Glover, Elite Women, 95. 18 Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 242. 12

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In 1724, a man writing under the name Fergus Bruce submitted two letters to the London periodical The Plain Dealer.19 Introducing Bruce’s first letter, the editor Aaron Hill wrote that it ‘is writ with the Politeness of a Gentleman, and in the Stile of a Man of Learning’.20 Just as Bruce is depicted as a polite gentleman, so his two letters to the periodical aimed to demonstrate to the periodical’s readership that Edinburgh was a centre of urban civility and culturally equal to London. In his second letter, Bruce writes of the previous edition of The Plain Dealer having ‘arrived in North Britain’, of which he represents Edinburgh as the ‘Metropolis’.21 That the mixed-­sex social sphere was included in this correspondence as evidence of the city’s civility shows that this sphere was a key component in the ­construction and assertion of Edinburgh’s urbanity. Bruce’s second letter of 28 September 1724 focused on the heterosocial assembly as a prime example of Edinburgh’s metropolitan status, writing that ‘The fair assembly’ ‘consists of our best-­bred Ladies, of different Qualities and Ages’.22 He then criticised the Presbyterian clergymen who ‘rail’d against it, as they did, of Old, against Perukes [periwigs] and Tobacco,’ presenting their opposition to the Assembly as founded upon outdated religious prejudice.23 Suggesting that religious moderation was gaining ground, Bruce asserted that: ‘the holy Fire is now much spent, and we are at Liberty to meet in our great Hall, without Danger of the Kirks Anathema’, and he claimed that ‘some of the Wives and Daughters of the Sanctified, begin of late to grace our Fellowship’.24 In a mocking fashion, Bruce continued: ‘I despair not to see the Reverend themselves, eating sweetmeats in our Company: And mixing innocently, in our Country Dances.’25 Bruce’s tongue-­ in-­ cheek desire for clergymen’s involvement in the Assembly extends to the governance of the institution, writing: ‘notwithstanding they are worthy Ladies, of undisputed Virtue and Honour, who preside over the Fair Assembly, I should be better pleased to see at our Head, a Moderator from the General One’.26 The leadership of the Church would mean that ‘Husbands would allow their Wives to go into Company, without Jealousy, and Parents send their daughters, without fear of their leaving behind them anything that they ought to bring back again.’27 The sexual innuendo in this quote illustrates the lack of seriousness with which Bruce is suggesting that the Church of Scotland establish itself as governor of the Assembly. 19

Aaron Hill, The Plain Dealer, Being Select Essays on Several Curious Subjects, . . ., Published Originally in the Year 1724, 2 vols (London: J. Osborn, 1724). 20 The Plain Dealer, i, 391. 21 Ibid., 461–2 (original emphasis). 22 Ibid., 466. 23 Ibid., 467 (original emphasis throughout). 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid.

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This mocking attitude towards the Church is also apparent in his concluding sentence concerning clergymen’s attendance and Church influence, writing that ‘till that Halcyon Day arrives, we must be contented with the want of Sanction and dance and drink tea without them’.28 Written approximately a year after the Assembly was re-­ established, Bruce’s discussion of clergymen’s attitudes, and his mocking suggestion that they should take a leading role in the Assembly’s governance, was an assertion of the independence of urbane culture. The Kirk’s power over the culture of Scotland’s metropolis is recognised, but its ability to enforce cultural norms is questioned. Instead, the Kirk is presented as itself needing to adjust to a new culture that was being forged outside its authority in the emergent public sphere. Bruce’s letters should not be read as an indication that the Kirk had lost cultural authority by the 1720s, instead they are an early example of a challenge to the cultural authority of religious ­evangelicals that would become stronger as the century continued. Indicative of the multifaceted nature of improvement, when a building where polite company had previously publicly assembled became available in 1746, it was decided ‘that so good a design for the improvement and entertainment of the Nobility and Gentry of both Sexes and such a considerable fund of Charity for the Poor should not be lost’.29 It was therefore decided to establish a new assembly. Aiming to polish the youth, the directors of this Assembly sought broader social reformation, too, by raising money from ticket sales for the workhouse, the Royal Infirmary, and other charities. The idea that the Assembly was a force of social virtue influenced its operation. One of the initial rules determined that ‘No Dance to be begun after Eleven o’Clock at night’, suggesting a view that later in the night urban culture turned lascivious. As with intellectual societies, which also met in the early evening, time of day was not enough to ensure that the behavioural norms of politeness were adhered to, and the rules of the Assembly were intended to enforce polite decorum. Most of these focused on ensuring that dancing between men and women did not induce licentiousness. These included the rule that ‘No Misses in Shirts and Jackets, Robecoats nor Stay bodied Gowns to be allowed to Dance Country Dances but in a Sett by themselves’; these clothes clearly not being suitable attire for energetic mixed-­sex dancing. Decorum was also maintained with the rule that ‘No Tea, Coffee, Negus, nor other Liquor to be carried into the Dancing Room’.30 A list of the rules was hung up in the assembly hall, and as with associations such as the Select Society, their explicit enforcement of polite behaviour facilitated the personal improvement of participants. 28

Ibid. ‘Minutes of the Edinburgh Assembly’, ECL YML 28A, 1. 30 Ibid., 12–14. 29

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In the case of the Assembly, the enforcement of politeness was also a means of publicly demonstrating their moral probity. This demonstration was necessary in a city where the national Presbyterian Kirk still held a large degree of authority (though less than in Glasgow or smaller towns). That the Kirk was becoming more moderate and evangelical pressure was decreasing in Edinburgh during the second half of the century is indicated by the fact that, in 1773, it was decided ‘that the rule for not Dancing after Eleven be left out and that matter be left intirely [sic] to the judgement of the Lady Directrix for the night’.31 Of most significance to the display of moral probity by the Assembly was the role of the Lady Directresses. When the resolutions of the Assembly were determined in May 1746, it was decided ‘That all Dancing in the Assembly Hall and every thing relating thereto shall be under the Inspection and Management of Ladies Directresses’, who would wear a badge indicating their position.32 The social power of the Lady Directress during assemblies was founded not only on the authority of this position, but the fact that the women were drawn from the landed gentry and nobility, with the first directresses being ‘the Right Honourable the Countess of Leven, Glencairn and Hoptoun and the Ladies Minto and Milntoun’, and in later decades including Mrs Murray of Stormont, Lady Napier and the countess of Dundonald.33 The employment of Lady Directresses drew on an earlier association between female governance and the Assembly’s operation established by Panmure. Women maintained a central role in the various manifestations of the Assembly throughout the eighteenth century, but this role remained circumscribed by gender. The Lady Directresses played a significant public role in Edinburgh’s Assembly as moral arbiters of mixed-­sex dancing, and in the distribution to charities of their choice of one-­third of the money raised by ticket sales. Yet, as with other public institutions, the ‘Overseeing and Manadging’ of the Assembly was conducted by men. Encompassing the urban elite, these men belonged to the landed classes, including Lord Minto and Lord Dunmore; the professional classes, including the advocate Mr John Hamilton; and the merchant class, with the treasurer being Mr Hugh Clerk, a junior merchant in Edinburgh. Compared with the exclusively landed status of the Lady Directresses, male governance of the Assembly encompassed a relatively socially diverse group. However, men’s cultural agency was not equal. The idea of re-­establishing an assembly was formulated in 1746 by two merchants, James Stirling, treasurer of the city workhouse, and Gavin Hamilton, bookseller and treasurer to the infirmary. Despite both men being respectable members of society, they sought the support of the city’s landed gentry before they embarked on their plan, and quickly employed 31

Ibid., 137–8. Ibid., 5. 33 Ibid., 10–135. 32

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the help of men such as judge of the Court of Session and baronet Gilbert Elliot, Lord Minto. For the people who attended the Assembly, it provided a space to pursue the leisure activities of dancing and mixed-­sex conversation, and gave men and women beyond the landed classes a means to participate in the culture of improvement. Yet, as with the organising committee, the Assembly itself was a social space demarcated according to rank, with the rules of the society requesting ‘that all Ladys and Gentlemen will order their Servants not to enter [the hall]’.34 Other social classes were also excluded from the Assembly; in the 1720s, Panmure refused attendance to a brewer’s daughter, and while social restrictions probably eased during the century, entry was available only to those who could afford a ticket, set at half a crown in 1746.35 Participation in other manifestations of urbane sociability was also determined by social rank. Edinburgh’s Musical Society held regular concerts attended by women and men. As a formal society, the membership of the Musical Society was male, but its concerts, regularly advertised in the newspapers, were open to the men and women of the city who could afford the tickets; in 1768 costing 3 shillings and 6 pence, and available at Balfour’s coffeehouse and Bremner’s music shop.36 For some concerts members could obtain special tickets to distribute to ladies.37 These concerts were not always public. As well as concerts exclusively for members of the Society to which they could sometimes bring ladies, the daughter of the composer J. C. Schetky, who played violin for the Musical Society in the later eighteenth century, wrote of concerts at St Cecilia’s, where the audience was ‘composed exclusively of the aristocracy’.38 Not all Edinburgh social spaces in which elite women were present were so socially exclusive; the practice of the theatre was in marked contrast. The theatre As with assemblies, the establishment of regular theatrical performances in Edinburgh signaled improvement, and indicated a decline in evangelical religious authority. Rather than a conflict between religion and a secular culture, the struggle to establish a theatre in Edinburgh from the 1720s to the eventual construction of the Theatre Royal in 1767 was one between Enlightenment-­informed religious moderation and conservative evangelicalism. When the poet Allan Ramsay established the first regular theatre in 34

Ibid., 13. Glover, Elite Women, 96; ‘Edinburgh Assembly’, 6. 36 David Fraser Harris, St Cecilia’s Hall in the Niddry Wynd (Edinburgh: Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier, 1899), 118. 37 Ibid., 218–20. 38 Quoted in Harris, St Cecilia’s Hall, 67. 35

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Edinburgh in 1736, it faced closure after only six months, and although plays were again being performed by the winter of 1737, by 1739 the theatre had closed down. In this case, the opposition of the Kirk was strengthened by the 1737 Licensing Act. This Act required all theatres except Covent Garden and Drury Lane in London to obtain a licence from Lord Chamberlain. In Scotland, the Kirk took advantage of the new licensing laws and, working with the City Guard, they were able to have the players arrested for circumventing the law. Defended in court by Henry Home (later Lord Kames), the members of the company were fined £50, but they had already absconded from the city.39 Although in the immediate sense Ramsay’s attempts were a failure, the eventual establishment of regular theatre performances from 1747 profoundly changed Edinburgh’s cultural landscape. Rather than a direct challenge to religious authority, the establishment of the theatre was a process of negotiation; initially performances had to be held in the newly built Canongate Concert Hall, where under the guise of a concert they were less likely to invoke censure from the Church.40 Ramsay himself cast the theatre in terms of improvement and progress against religious bigotry. Writing in 1739 to a Scottish lord in London, Ramsay noted that his joy at the Parliamentary members’ bill in support of Edinburgh’s theatre was: like to turn to sadness, if a few sour pedants & ignorant Bigots get their will, who this week have been busy drawing up pitifull petitions against the encouragement of chearfull virtue, & the most Rational amusements, as if indeed grace & good humour were diametrically opposite, they are a seditious crew who will be the ruine of this poor town if they get their will.41 In the long term, the evangelicals of the Scottish Kirk did not ‘get their will’, but the theatre remained a crucial battleground in the cultural ­conflict between piety and politeness in eighteenth-­century Scotland. In the autobiography of the Reverend Alexander Carlyle, a leading moderate minister and a man immersed in social world of the literati, the conquering of the Church’s opposition to the theatre is a crucial stage in the cultural and epistemological dominance of liberal sentiments.42 Carlyle himself faced the ire of the evangelical establishment when he attended a performance of Douglas in 1757, a play that had already drawn church anger because it was written by a clergyman, John Home. Supported by the 39

Campbell, Playing for Scotland, 10–15. Adrienne Scullion, ‘The eighteenth century’, in Bill Findlay (ed.), A History of the Scottish Theatre (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 95. 41 Letter from Allan Ramsay concerning the Bill for a theatre in Edinburgh, 1739, NRS, GD45/14/437. 42 Alexander Carlyle, The Autobiography of the Rev Dr Alexander Carlyle Minister of Inveresk (Blackwood: Edinburgh, 1861). 40

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literati, the success of Douglas is depicted by Carlyle as a watershed moment, writing: ‘The play had unbounded success for a great many nights in Edinburgh, and was attended by all the literati and most of the judges, who, except one or two, had not been in use to attend the theatre.’43 Whereas in the first half of the eighteenth century there was popular opposition to the theatre, after the 1750s it was increasingly accepted as a respectable form of entertainment, and became a popular urban pastime.44 The opposition of the evangelical wing of the Church centred upon the corrupting effect of the theatre on lower-­ranking members of society. Responding to Douglas, the Church emphasised the negative moral impact of the theatre on ‘on Servants, Apprentices and Students’.45 Previously, the presence of ladies at the theatre had also troubled the Church. In 1727, when Irish travelling player Tony Ashton performed in Edinburgh with the support of Ramsay, the Kirk attempted to shut down the performance by employing the authority of the city magistrates, who ‘had plac’d a guard of soldiers with their bayonets on their muskets, at the door of his Theatre, to prevent the Ladies going in, and put an end to the Acting’. That women of the social elite wanted to attend is significant because apparently ‘the Ladies had pretty considerable influence’ in the higher court, and eventually ‘the prohibition was taken off and Tony restor’d to his privilege of diverting the town’.46 According to Donald Campbell, this influence stemmed from the fact that the ladies probably included women such as Lady Elliot of Minto and other wives and sisters of High Court judges.47 From its early establishment, the theatre was a mixed-­sex space, and this character was a crucial factor in its placement as a social activity symbolising cultural improvement and toleration in opposition to what among the social elite was increasingly viewed as a backward-­looking Kirk. Like assemblies, theatre performances created public spaces in which women could actively participate, and they were prominent as actresses on the stage and as audience members. While some women on the British stage were the subject of sexual scandal and associated with prostitution, during the century a more respectable actress emerged, associated with virtuous feminine sensibility.48 Women’s presence on stage had a distinct class dimension, with actresses of a lower social status named in theatre advertisements and those of a higher rank anonymised as a ‘gentlewoman’ 43

Carlyle, Autobiography, 311. R. A. Houston, Social Change in the Age of Enlightenment: Edinburgh, 1660–1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 205–9; Scullion, ‘The eighteenth century’, 97. 45 Quoted in Scullion, ‘The eighteenth century’, 104. 46 Mist’s Weekly Journal [1727], quoted in Donald Campbell, Playing for Scotland: A History of the Scottish Stage 1715–1965 (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1996), 6 47 Campbell, Playing for Scotland, 6–7. 48 Laura J. Rosenthal, ‘Entertaining women: the actress in eighteenth-­century theatre and culture’, in Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn (eds), The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 159–73. 44

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or ‘lady’. For instance, in May 1762, the theatre in the Canongate put on a week of plays starting on 11 May with The Provoked Wife, followed by The Orphan or the Unhappy Marriage, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. In all of these performances the female part was to be played by a gentlewoman, or in the case of Macbeth, ‘a young gentlewoman’.49 This is in contrast to the performance of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera in which all four actors, including two women, Mrs Parsons and Mrs Mozeen, are named.50 Certain female actresses appear regularly, such as Miss Jarrat at the Theatre Royal in the late 1770s.51 By performing in the theatre, actresses could obtain a cultural influence denied to other women of their rank. One example is Sarah Ward, an Englishwoman who began her career in York before transferring to Edinburgh with her husband, opening the Canongate Theatre with the actor West Digges in 1747, and performing in Edinburgh, Dublin, and London.52 This public female cultural agency through acting was encouraged by the association of sensibility and femaleness. The eighteenth-­century theatre was intended to emotionally involve the audience, and in doing so could refine their inner sensibility. In Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith used examples of audience responses to theatre when explaining the operation of sympathy, and he argued that theatre succeeds by ‘exciting the passions’.53 The heightened emotionality of a female actor could facilitate the sympathetic process that theatre encouraged. In his anonymous reviews of the Edinburgh theatre in 1759, James Boswell celebrated the actress Mrs Cowper’s easy engagement with the audience. Describing her performance of Shakespeare’s Juliet, Boswell narrated that ‘the Softness of her Voice inspired us with the most tender feelings, while the Sweetness and Sensibility of Virtue sat on her Face’.54 Tellingly, no male performance is described by Boswell in these terms. The theatre provided roles for women and men that indicate the lack of a gendered public–private divide, but that adhered to the boundaries of dichotomous gender identities. The possibility of female participation in the theatre also included writing, and it was the site of one of the few instances of female publication in Scotland prior to the late Enlightenment, as ­illustrated by Jean Marishall’s work discussed in the previous chapter. The specific character of female involvement in the theatre was influenced 49

Edinburgh Evening Courant, 10 May 1762. Ibid., 26 May 1762. 51 Caledonian Mercury, various editions, 1778. 52 Adrienne Scullion, ‘Ward, Sarah (1726/7–1771)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), online edition available at: http://www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/64362, accessed 14 December 2012. 53 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759, revised 1790), available from the Library of Economics and Liberty, at: http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smMS.html, I.II.13 and III.I.124, accessed 5 January 2013. 54 [James Boswell], A View of the Edinburgh Theatre During the Summer Season, 1759 (London: A. Morely, 1760), 17. 50

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by social class. As with Edinburgh’s Assembly, the support of landed women was important to the functioning of the theatre. For example, the patronage of an influential noblewoman could aid the economic success of a performance. Hoping for a full house on her first performance in Scotland, the English actress Mrs Abington wrote to Lady Frances Scott requesting that she act on her behalf in acquiring the patronage of the Duchess of Buccleugh.55 The support of noblewomen was advertised by performing plays ‘on their desire’, for instance, on 11 May 1762, The Provok’d Wife was performed on ‘Desire of her Grace the Duchess of Hamilton’.56 As this example, and that above concerning the Assembly’s Lady Directresses, illustrate, within spaces of urban improvement landed women retained a high level of cultural capital due to their social class. As with other polite locales, the theatre was a key space for the formation and enactment of female social networks for women of the elite.57 In 1784, Miss Trotter of Morton Hall, outside Edinburgh, wrote to her cousin Miss Marion Innes at St Andrews Square in the city, discussing her attendance at the performance by the celebrity actress Sarah Siddons as Belvidera in Venice Preserved. Exclaiming that ‘Words cannot paint to you how divine Belvidera was last night – indeed nothing could exceed the Gamesters wife except Belvidera – I wish you would trot down here tomorrow that I may describe her and her elegant grand dress,’ Trotter makes an explicit link between intimate and public space, her home, Morton Hall, and the theatre.58 Sometimes these public and intimate spaces intertwined, for instance, when Marion Trotter invited Jane Innes and her sister Marion to dine at Morton Hall as ‘your friend Jessica and her Brother dine here tomorrow for the conveniencing of dressing for the assembly’.59 As shared cultural experiences, assemblies and the theatre enabled women to establish intimacy and reputation within a social group. In addition to her desire to share her experience of Siddon’s performance with her in person, Trotter informed Marion Innes that she had also ‘dispatched a large sheet & a half to Bess today with an account of all our sufferings and delishes caused by Mrs Siddons’.60 The confident tone of Trotter’s discussion of her attendance at a theatrical performance is in contrast to that of Dorothea Jackson of Rose Street, Edinburgh. Jackson wrote to John Bruce Esq. in London in April 1790 discussing the performance of Miss Williams. Possibly because she was writing to a man, and one of higher rank, or perhaps because she had a different 55

‘Letter to Lady Frances Scott’, n.d., NRS, GD1/479/18/1. Edinburgh Evening Courant, 8 May 1762. 57 Katharine Glover, ‘Polite society and the rural resort: the meanings of Moffat Spa in the eighteenth-­century’, Journal for Eighteenth-­Century Studies 34(1) (2011) 65–80. 58 Miss [probably Margaret] Trotter of Morton Hall to Marion Innes, ca. 1784, NRS, GD113/5/81B/2. 59 Marion Trotter to Jane Innes, n.d., NRS, GD113/5/81B/23. 60 GD113/5/81B/2. 56

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personality to Trotter, Jackson simultaneously displays and disparages her cultural knowledge: Have you seen my Elegant friend Miss Williams and what do you think of her Julia (for I cannot doubt your having seen that work). I regret it had not come out before you left Edin:r. A word from you might have been of vast consequence in shaping its literary merits – I was vastly pleased with Mr Creechs manner of speaking of it – it would be presumption in me to attempt giving any opinion of it; all that I coud doe was to fly about acting as a Gazette extraordinary in publishing its merits in the little circle of my acquaintance. Although Jackson had read reviews of the performance, she downplayed her knowledge with the comment: what most of all vexes me is the Criticisms upon its want of Plot & deficiency of incident – but such is my stupid want of taste that the very dificences are to me, one of its greatest recommendations. Despite her self-­deprecation, Jackson’s letter represents an assertion of an individual opinion formed via engagement in the public cultures of the theatre and print. On the basis of her engagement in this culture, she asserts her superiority over other women of similar social rank, declaring that: what mortifies me exceedingly, is to find many Ladys who woud throw away their money with profusion at a Perfumer or in a Haberdashers Shop but Consider any thing tending to the improvement of the mind as a expense thats perfictly unnecessary.61 In addition to demonstrating a woman’s place in the processes of improvement, attendance at the theatre could provide an important means of reaffirming friendship networks. Writing of their mutual friend, Colonel Gordon’s purchasing of theatre tickets for the group, Miss Trotter informed Marion Innes that: it will answer him and us much better to come on Sunday to you but do come tomorrow and tell me how that day will answer. If we get these two rows I would wish to take with us Miss Gibson, Miss Mackay to whom I am under strict promises, and I would like to take John who did not go last night – Anne is for joining too with us and we must take our Gallant Colonel [Gordon] into our rows to guard our lives & propertys.62 The importance placed on the presence of Colonel Gordon suggests that the theatre was a space in which men could perform gallantry by ­protecting 61

Dorothea Jackson, 15 Rose Street, to John Bruce Esq., London, April 1790, NRS, GD15/126. 62 GD113/5/81B/2.

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Urbane and Urban Sociability in Enlightenment Edinburgh 115 their female companions. When popular actresses such as Siddons performed, the theatre could be a very crowded and somewhat threatening space, not least because of the presence of people lacking genteel social status. In the same letter, Trotter described both the intensity of the crowds and the ability of the elite to negotiate this, writing: words cannot paint the mob at the door, it far exceeded that night you was there – there was for about 20 yards round the door an impenetrable black wall of people all waiting to burst in the instant the door was opened – we stood long waiting, and if it had not been for the valiant Colonel Gordon and a most active dauntless serjeant of the 9th Regt (formerly under his command) we had I do believe stuck at the door yet – when we did get to our row, we sat most charmingly, having fine air (at least better air than most of the other people) as we were in the first row of a stage box and so when the scenes move backwards and all that we got some air oftentimes.63

As in London, social status was mapped onto the theatre, with the location of a person’s seat indicating their social position; the propertied elite sat in stage boxes, professionals and other middling sorts in the pit, tradesmen in the middle gallery, and servants, footmen, and others of the poorer classes in the upper gallery.64 Belonging to the landed elite meant that the Trotter’s and their friends were able to obtain their stage box and enjoy ‘better air than most of the other people’. Deploying their wealth to their advantage, on at least one occasion bribery was employed by the Trotter’s in order to avoid the crowds; asking her to confirm whether she and her sister would be joining them, Marion Trotter informed Jane Innes that: our David has taken in hand to go to the Gallery door keeper and bribe him with 3 shilling tickets, to let our party in at a private door . . . with you two, that will be ten shillings of a bribe to the door keepers.65 Because of its position as a space that straddled social boundaries, the theatre could also be a site of wider social discord. On the performance of Sarah Siddons in Venice Preserved, Miss Trotter assured Marion Innes that she had ‘a capital story for you about the stratagem of a Tailor to get in to the gallery in spite of all the bayonets pushes & knocks of the mob’.66 As well as general unruliness, the theatre could foster organised disorder. In 1760, a group of Edinburgh footmen were insulted by the representation of their profession in the play High Life Below Stairs. Published in London in 63

Ibid. Jim Davis, ‘Spectatorship’, in Moody and O’Quinn (eds), Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 57. 65 Marion Trotter to Jane Innes, n.d., GD113/5/81B/18. 66 GD113/5/81B/2. 64

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1759, this short play is a satire upon the manners and virtues of the servants of Lovel, a West Indian merchant. The central story concerns a party held by the servants when the master is away, and includes a disorderly scene where they drink their master’s burgundy and tokay instead of the ale more suitable to their social class. At the end of the play Lovel proclaims that If persons of rank would act up to their standard, it would be impossible that their servants would ape them. But when they affect everything that is ridiculous, it will be in the power of any low creature to follow their example.67 In this final statement elite culture is condemned, but the immorality of servants is the focus of the play, and it was this that aroused the footmen’s anger. They initially responded by issuing a letter to the playhouse. This being unproductive, they then attended the theatre and engaged in raucous behaviour aimed at stopping the performance. According to the report in the Glasgow Journal, this action resulted in them being removed from the theatre, with all footmen banned from future entry and those responsible for the disorder being fired by their respective masters.68 By disrupting the performance at the playhouse in January 1760, the footmen behaved in a manner that transgressed the boundaries of polite conduct. They did so to assert a manhood founded upon occupational status, ­utilising disorder to defend their public honour. This riot illustrates the means by which the social mixing that occurred in the theatre could amplify social tensions. Indicating an intrusion of the politics of the street into the gallery, in 1767, an audience rioted and almost destroyed the theatre because they were unhappy that popular Irish actor, George Stanley had been refused employment.69 As well as demonstrating the theatre’s straddling of popular and elite culture, events such as these remind us of the broader urban context in which Scottish Enlightenment culture operated. Order and disorder Eighteenth-­century Edinburgh was renowned for its foul stench.70 It was a crowded city, and in Robert Fergusson’s famous poem Auld Reekie (1773), it is depicted as a place where women gossip loudly in doorways, fops lie drunk in gutters, and whores congregate on street corners. This imagery reminds us that the literati existed in an urban environment in which people of different classes and persuasions shared crowded city streets. 67

James Townley, High Life Below Stairs: a Farce, in Two Acts (London: J. Newberry, 1759), 54. Glasgow Journal, 21–28 January 1760. 69 Campbell, Playing for Scotland, 31. 70 Elizabeth Foyster, ‘Sensory experiences: smells, sounds and touch’, in Elizabeth Foyster and Christopher A. Whatley (eds), A History of Everyday Life in Scotland, 1600 to 1800 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 220–1. 68

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The building of a New Town to the south of Edinburgh could indicate a desire among the city’s social elite to escape the Old Town, but as Charles McKean points out, the New Town was not fully completed until 1823, and the migration of the city’s wealthier classes to it was slow and incomplete.71 The urban development symbolised by the ordered streets and neo-­ Classical architecture of the New Town was accompanied by developments in the Old Town, including the building of new squares, such as Assembly Close directly off the High Street. In Edinburgh Fugitive Pieces, the publisher and bookseller William Creech figured himself as Theophrastus, and noted the improvement of Edinburgh over the past twenty years, with the building of areas such as George Square in the city’s south where twenty years earlier ‘were fields and orchards’.72 Edinburgh had extended beyond its city walls, built the North Bridge and Princes Street, and work was continuing (after some delay) on Register House, designed by the Adam brothers. Rapid economic growth and an increase in the number of professionals meant that by 1783, ‘Triple the number of merchants, physicians, surgeons &c. keep their own carriages, than ever did in any former period,’ and Edinburgh could now claim its place as a modern, civilised city.73 For Creech ‘The environs of Edinburgh cannot be surpassed in views of the sublime, picturesque and beautiful,’ and the people occupying the city included a growing literary class that had ‘distinguished themselves in a remarkable manner in many departments of literature’.74 A commercial publisher, Creech also noted the growing economic value of this explosion in Scottish writing, placing it alongside developments in manufacturing and the establishment of a polite consumer culture, with haberdashers and perfumers joining the barbers and wigmakers who were already numerous in 1763.75 In Creech’s estimation this urban improvement was matched by an increased dissolution in manners, and he highlighted the decline in religious observance over the past twenty years, so that in 1783 ‘The streets are often crowded in time of worship; and, in the evenings, they are shamefully loose and riotous.’76 Changing gender relations both precipitated and symbolised this corruption; in 1763, it ‘was the fashion for gentlemen to attend the drawing-­rooms of the ladies in the afternoon, to drink tea, and to mix in the society and conversation of women’. By 1783, ‘The drawing-­ rooms are totally deserted; and the only opportunity gentlemen have of being in ladies company, is when they happen to mess together at dinner

71

Charles McKean, ‘Improvement and modernisation in everyday Enlightenment Scotland’, in Foyster and Whatley (eds), History of Everyday Life, 65. 72 [William Creech], Edinburgh Fugitive Pieces (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1791), 64. 73 Ibid., 67. 74 Ibid., 65–8. 75 Ibid., 70. 76 Ibid., 77.

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or at supper; and even then an impatience is often shewn until the ladies retire.’77 Drinking alcohol to excess was a part of elite male culture, while remaining a form of behaviour that could be antithetical to true civility, and, as with the theatre, this leisure pursuit illustrated a lack of clear boundaries between polite and impolite culture. Indeed, as the following case studies of drinking and prostitution show, whether or not these activities could be incorporated into polite society was largely determined by the social class of the participants. Drinking In 1760, intellectual societies and professional institutions participated in a public campaign to end the giving of vails (drink money) to servants. The customary practice of house guests giving drink money in the form of tips to resident servants was represented by this campaign as not conducive to hospitality and as a threat to servants’ morals. Occurring alongside agitation for higher duties on spirits to limit their consumption by the poor, this campaign had moral and financial motives. A form of boycott, the campaign against vails required gentry and other elites to refuse to give money to servants when visiting households, with the stated aim of saving servants from licentiousness. The employment of servants by clubs and institutions during meetings meant that these bodies were able to declare their collective stopping of vail-­giving alongside other civic and social groups, such as the Freemasons and landed rural elites. One of the first groups to announce that they would stop the practice were the Faculty of Advocates, who wrote in the Caledonian Mercury on 2 February 1760 that they were ‘convinced that such a practice not only tends to corrupt and debauch servants, but is also a obstruction and disgrace to all true hospitality’, and they would ‘not suffer their servants to receive any vails or drink money’. They were joined in this condemnation by the Select Society, who declared that the custom was ‘unknown to other nations, and a reproach upon the police and manners of this country, has a manifest tendency to corrupt the morals of servants, to obstruct the exercise of hospitality, and to destroy all social intercourse between families’. They would ‘exert themselves to the utmost, in order to remove this publick nuisance’.78 In this campaign, the associational public sphere was joined by landowning elites, such as the Freeholders, Justices of the Peace, Commissioners and Supply, and heritors of the county of Renfrew, who referred to the practice of giving drink money as ‘reproachful to hospitality and conducive to the debauchery of servants’.79 Reflecting their position as employers 77

Ibid., 76–7. Caledonian Mercury, 6 February 1760. 79 Glasgow Journal, 7–14 March 1760. 78

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of large numbers of servants, the landed elites were particularly involved in this campaign, with Renfrew joined by Mid-­Lothian, Lanark, Perth, Fife, Roxburgh, Galloway, Dumfries, Forfar, Stirling, Berwick, Linlithgow, Tweeddale, and Caithness, the latter recording in the Caledonian Mercury that they supported the resolution even though ‘our servants have not as yet arrived at that height of licentiousness and have not been indulged with such extravagant wages, as servants in places of the nation more exposed to temptations’.80 The public campaign against vails was about class as much as it was about alcohol, and it reflects an anxiety among some elites concerning the aping of high fashions by servants. This anxiety is apparent in the frustrated musings of Matthew Bramble in Tobias Smollett’s 1771 novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, particularly with regard to Bath where ‘a very considerable proportion of genteel people are lost in a mob of impudent plebeians, who have neither understanding or judgement nor the least idea of propriety and decorum’.81 The threat of fashion to social distinctions is repeated in an article in the Trifler periodical, reprinted in the Aberdeen Magazine in 1788. Here the writer complained that there was now little distinction between genteel and vulgar fashions, and when ‘there is scarcely any petty tradesman, servant, or other person of low rank, but who can get drunk, violate the marriage bed, play cards, lose his business, and become bankrupt with all the ease and effrontery of a person of rank’, the only answer was for men of rank to give up the vices and follies of the rogue, and instead ‘be distinguished by dignity of manners’.82 The participation of the lower classes in the vices of the gentleman rake enabled this commentator to emphasise the vulgarity of vice. Although critical of elite rakes, the class hierarchy is not critiqued. Rather, to maintain proper hierarchy, an alternative, refined, and polite masculinity is required. In both of these texts, the negative consequences of luxury are heightened when it is embraced by the lower classes.83 The same was true of alcohol consumption; it was typically disorderly and impolite when the lower classes partook of it, and a belief that they did so often is suggested by the concern among the managers of the Edinburgh Assembly that the musicians hired to play at their dances might arrive ‘in Drink’.84 By comparison, among the elite alcohol consumption was often considered to be conducive to genteel sociability. 80

Caledonian Mercury, 14 May 1760. Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1771] 2009), 37. 82 ‘A Plan for Rendering Persons of Fashion Distinguishable from the Vulgar’, The Trifler 19, reprinted in The Aberdeen Magazine, Literary Chronicle and Review, 25 September 1788, 577–9. 83 On distinctions in Edinburgh between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, see Houston, Social Change, 147–233. 84 ‘Edinburgh Assembly’, 8. 81

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Drinking was an integral part of Enlightenment culture, particularly in convivial clubs. Whereas formal intellectual societies enforced a strict behavioural code of polite refinement, clubs that met in taverns provided an environment more conducive to fluidity in behavioural norms. Yet we should not assume that convivial societies meeting in taverns necessarily transcended the boundaries of politeness; instead, they could import a very specific form of polite behaviour into this space. Carlyle did not condone excessive drunkenness, yet in his autobiography taverns are depicted in a positive light, as important spaces for sociability. For Carlyle, free and easy conversation was a key indicator of superior manners in a gentleman, and he considered free conversation with claret to be more improving ‘than the speeches in the Society’.85 Despite their different atmospheres, convivial and formal societies shared many of the same characteristics, including an interrelationship between space and their all-­male gendered composition. The homosociality of convivial clubs is unsurprising as taverns were traditionally male spaces. Although women were sometimes the proprietors and staff of drinking establishments, the clientele of these establishments was predominantly male.86 Lower-­class women accompanied by men were present in taverns, but women of middling and upper status were far less likely to enter this space unless the tavern had been hired for a specific event such as a ball.87 By meeting in taverns, club members were able to engage in an expression of male sociability that included behaviour that would have been considered as indecent in the mixed-­sex social sphere governed by a discourse of politeness and sensibility. In Fugitive Pieces Creech noted with disappointment the fact that men had become enamoured of homosocial alcohol consumption and had abandoned the mixed-­sex social custom of tea drinking. Instead, men now deserted the drawing rooms and ‘the dignity of the female character, and the respect which it commanded, is considerably lessened, and the bottle, and dissoluteness of manners, are heightened, in the estimation of men’.88 Considering the importance placed on female influence in Scottish discourses of sensibility, it is no surprise that Creech cites a lack of mixed-­sex sociability as a cause of what he perceives to be moral decay. Yet also ­important are the explicit connections Creech makes between space, consumption, and gender. As with England, in Scotland tea drinking in

85

Carlyle, Autobiography, 297–8. Marshall, Virgins and Viragos, 152–4. 87 James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 213. For a discussion of the impact of status on female incursions into male spaces, see Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 205–12. 88 [Creech], Fugitive Pieces, 77. 86

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drawing rooms had a feminine characteristic, whilst alcohol consumption in taverns was a male pursuit.89 Studies of early modern English masculinity cite the alehouse as an important space for the performance of an alternative masculinity to that which centred upon man’s position as the head of the household.90 The position of the tavern, or alehouse, as an alternative site for male sociability during the eighteenth century highlights a continuity with the early modern period, and it is likely that the relationship between drinking and the performance of manliness within them also continued.91 In these spaces masculinity was separated from discourses of domesticity and was free from women’s potentially feminising influences. Yet these spaces did not remain unchanged, but rather adapted to the developments occurring in eighteenth-­century British society. One indication of these changes was the fact that men began to frequent taverns within the organised framework of a club meeting. Responding to the growth of an associational public sphere, innkeepers sought to benefit from the culture of sociability by accommodating clubs, in some cases establishing or financing them, and by supporting other sociable activities, such as sporting events and plays.92 In England prior to the eighteenth century, taverns were chiefly spaces for plebeian social interaction, but during this century they began to attract men of middling and gentry status, and offered socially segregated spaces with separate rooms for this new clientele.93 Indicative of similar developments in Scotland is an advertisement placed in the Caledonian Mercury in 1760 informing readers that the inn at the Burgh of Brechin, ‘is presently kept by Alexander Grant from Edinburgh, who has fitted up the house and stables thereto belonging in a very commodious and genteel manner, for the reception of travellers of all ranks’.94 Various manifestations of the homosocial public sphere met in taverns. For example, when members of the landed elite needed to meet in Edinburgh to discuss the militia issue, they met at Cross Keys tavern, and eighteen years later, the Wig Club, chaired by the Duke of Hamilton, met

89

Karen Harvey, ‘Barbarity in a tea cup? Punch, domesticity and gender in the eighteenth century’, Journal of Design History 21(3) (2008) 209–12. 90 Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 103–11; Elizabeth Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999), 40–1. 91 Among plebeian men drinking remained an activity often associated with male bonding during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (and was often connected to other forms of male solidarity, such as those formed between men engaged in the same craft, for example, cotton spinners), see Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 30–4. 92 Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 164. 93 Melton, Rise of the Public, 230–1. 94 Caledonian Mercury, 9 July 1760.

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at Fortune’s tavern.95 Of Edinburgh’s taverns, Fortune’s was particularly popular with genteel society. As well as the Wig Club in 1778, the Stoic club met there in 1774, and the tavern also held private balls, attended by men and women of the elite, including the Countess of Crawford at the Ayrshire ball in 1768.96 Women were able to participate in tavern-­based sociability when events such as balls were held, but this participation occurred only in the changed context of polite mixed-­sex sociability established by the ball, which operated according to similar cultural norms as the assembly. The fluid demarcation of the tavern as a social space is even more apparent in the homosocial context of convivial clubs, which combined formal and free aspects of male sociability. In his study of associational culture, Peter Clark argues that in contrast to more formal societies, the heavy drinking, swearing, and obscene songs that defined the conviviality of many clubs, was a means of preserving what was perceived as traditional male sociability against the imposition of new ideals of male refinement.97 Yet, rather than reverting to a ‘traditional’ masculinity, these convivial clubs often sought to combine associational culture with informal male ­sociability centred upon drinking. Some literati took a critical attitude towards male conviviality. Although he considered social interaction with friends and strangers to be conducive to the maintenance of reason and the expression of sympathy, Smith also asserted that the ‘jollity and gaiety’ of the conversation in convivial societies was not necessary for a man’s development of friendship and ‘exquisite sensibility’. Indeed, the prudent man would avoid these societies as ‘Their way of life might too often interfere with the regularity of his temperance, might interrupt the steadiness of his industry, or break in upon the strictness of his frugality.’98 This prudent man of sensibility was an ideal type, and the popularity of convivial societies suggests that many men did not share Smith’s opinion. Recording his life as a lawyer in Edinburgh from the 1760s to the 1780s, Boswell depicts drinking as a crucial component of professional sociability. On 9 July 1774, he describes a meeting at Fortune’s tavern with friends from the legal profession to whom he owed a gambling debt: we grew very noisy and drunk but very cordial as old friends. In short we had a complete riot which lasted until near twelve at night. We had eleven Scotch pints of claret, two bottles of old hock, and two of port, and drams of brandy and gin; and the bill was 6.18.5. So my five-­guinea bet turned into a seven-­guinea one.99 95

Caledonian Mercury, 27 February 1760 and 24 January 1778. James Boswell Esq., James Boswell’s Edinburgh Journals 1767–1786, ed. Hugh Milne (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 2001), 70–1, 177. 97 Clark, Clubs and Societies, 203. 98 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, VI.I.10. 99 Boswell, Edinburgh Journals 1767–1786, 118. 96

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Urbane and Urban Sociability in Enlightenment Edinburgh 123 These informal professional gatherings were often connected to formal institutions. At the beginning of the journals in 1767, Boswell writes of attending a meeting at the Faculty of Advocates and following this with drinking at Clerihue’s Tavern.100 This interrelationship of organised associational sociability and the free atmosphere of the tavern is a theme repeated throughout the journals. Boswell was active in what can be defined as the Habermasian public sphere. He was a member of the Select Society, an honorary member of the Belles Lettres Society, and was a member and eventually master of the Freemasons Lodge of Canongate and Kilwinning. Illustrating the interconnected character of various sociable leisure pursuits, on 11 December 1775 Boswell recorded going to the theatre to see The Recruiting Officer with members of his Freemason’s Lodge, followed by supper and brandy punch at a coffeehouse on Princes Street, in the New Town, where he stayed to gamble for the rest of the night.101 This journal entry not only illustrates different aspects of sociability at different times of day, it also indicates that we need to be careful when thinking about space. It is easy to draw a distinction between the coffeehouse and the tavern – one a site of polite conversation and economic exchange, the other a site of raucous conviviality – but in Boswell’s world some coffeehouses were a space for drinking and gambling much like the tavern. In a similar manner, convivial clubs existed in a cultural continuum from very formal societies to groups of friends who would meet regularly in a specific tavern at a specific time and thereby declare themselves as club, such as David Stewart Moncrieffe’s club. On his first attendance at Moncrieffe’s club Boswell wrote that: After finishing my paper, I went to David Stewart Moncrieffe’s, the first evening of his club, or tavern as he calls it, for this session. I played pretty well at whist, and won a little. We were sixteen at supper. The conversation was flashy and vociferous. I resolved to be at this club every Friday, as a place where I can play whist, see the best company of this country, hear intelligence from various sources, and be ­exhilarated with sociality once a week.102 On this occasion Boswell departed the club before midnight, aiming to avoid drinking heavily and staying up late. This was one of many attempts at self-­regulation. Boswell’s frequent heavy drinking sometimes resulted in illness, poor performance in his work as an advocate, or violence towards his wife, Margaret Montgomerie. On 3 February 1768, after a night of heavy drinking, he records being ‘quite out of order and feverish after my debauchery. I felt myself a very rake as I pleaded a cause before Lord Monboddo’, while on 18 September 1774 he lamented: 100

Ibid., 45. Ibid., 217–18. 102 Ibid., 209. 101

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It gave me much concern to be informed by my dear wife that I had been quite outrageous in my drunkenness the night before; that I had cursed her in a shocking manner and even thrown a candlestick with a lighted candle at her . . . there is no knowing what violent crime I might commit. I therefore most firmly resolved to be sober.103 Whilst it did not stop him from drinking and becoming ill or violent, or having sex with women working as prostitutes, Boswell did engage in a notable amount of self-­analysis. For Boswell, drinking represented an abandonment of his rational self, and his relationship with alcohol signifies a deeper inner conflict between refined and passionate masculinity.104 The importance placed on conversation and easy sociability in convivial clubs such as Moncrieffe’s connects them to the formal intellectual societies explored in Chapter 1, whilst their informality distinguishes them from this sphere. Their position on a continuum of homosociality raises important issues in seeking clear definitions of eighteenth-­century masculinity; elite gentlemen adapted their performance of masculinity according to the space they occupied and the time of day. An illustration of the lack of clear distinction between polite and impolite spaces is provided by the Poker Club, established in 1762 to campaign for a Scottish militia. Although meeting in taverns, the Poker Club existed as a site of politeness and improvement similar to the more formal Select and Literary societies. Describing the Club in his autobiography, Carlyle wrote that it ‘was frugal and moderate, as that of all clubs for a public purpose ought to be’, and the alcohol consumed was ‘confined to sherry and claret’.105 He also noted that meetings began at 2 p.m. and finished by 6 p.m., presumably to distinguish the Poker Club from convivial tavern-­based clubs that met later in the evening. Due to its political purpose, the Poker Club was an organisation in which male sociability and the practice of politics and patriotism intertwined. Its membership included ‘about all the literati of Edinburgh . . . together with many country gentlemen, who were indignant at the invidious line drawn between Scotland and England’.106 The division referred to was created by the 1757 Militia Act which, seeking to defend Britain from possible French invasion during the Seven Years War, created a militia in England, but not in Scotland. The members of the Poker Club deemed the extension of the Act to be necessary for domestic defence and to assert Scotland’s equal and loyal place in the British nation. It was also conceived of as a means of defending civic virtue within a commercial society through the 103

Ibid., 66–8, 152–3. Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660–1800 (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001), 183–97. 105 Carlyle, Autobiography, 420. 106 ‘Minutes of the Poker Club’, EUL Sp. Col. Ms.Dc.5.126. 104

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maintenance of martial values of courage and self-­sacrifice.107 The ideology underpinning the Poker Club’s efforts confirm the continuation of martial values in Scotland, and this had an impact on masculine identities. As will be explored further in Chapter 4, notions of courage and personal honour remained crucial to many elite men’s conception and performance of manhood. The Poker Club was mostly composed of male professors, other professionals, and gentry. Included among the first list of forty-­three members are influential members of the literati: Alexander Carlyle, David Hume, William Robertson, Hugh Blair, and Adam Ferguson.108 Also included in the club’s membership were prominent political figures such as Henry Dundas, Lord Advocate, the powerful younger brother of Robert Dundas who had been a member of the Select Society. As discussed in Chapter 1, clubs and societies provided men with important networking opportunities that could facilitate career advancement or enable a level of political influence unavailable to those excluded from this culture. In the Poker Club, patronage extended to direct political participation as they functioned as a lobby group on the militia issue. For example, on 26 July 1782, ten members were appointed, ‘to be a committee to form a bill for a Scotch militia’.109 As displayed in a letter from Lord Mountstuart to William Mure of Caldwell, the conviviality of the Poker Club was inseparable from its political purpose. Writing in 1775 about the raising of an English militia and arguing that Scotland should campaign for a Scottish militia, because, ‘Cannot the Scotch defend themselves?’, Mountstuart wrote, ‘I hope to hear from you soon, and that the Poker Club is revived, and that I am very popular amongst the members.’110 In Mountstuart’s representation of the Poker Club, there is an intimate connection between male sociability and political purpose. The formation of the Poker Club suggests a desire to construct an elite masculinity that maintained martial masculine virtues within a commercial society. One of the most prominent members of the club was Adam Ferguson, a moderate Presbyterian cleric and a professor at Edinburgh University. Unlike Smith and Hume, Ferguson’s moral philosophy did not accept a direct correlation between the advent of commercial society and the strengthening of social bonds. Indeed, for Ferguson, commercial society posed significant risks to social bonds, which he considered to be

107

John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985), 11, 164. 108 ‘Minutes of the Poker Club’. 109 Ibid. 110 Lord Mountstuart to Baron Mure, 1 November 1775, in Selections From the Family Papers Preserved at Caldwell (Maitland Club, Glasgow, 1854), Pt II, ii, 264–5.

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rooted in pre-­modern social organisation and manifested most acutely through communal conflict such as war.111 Although they did not, as far as the record suggests, engage in militia-­ type activity as a club, their practice of male sociability was ‘traditional’ in that it centred upon meeting in taverns and drinking.112 In the first section of the manuscript minute book, there is a handwritten history of the club written by Carlyle. He asserts that although the club met in taverns, ‘According to the members who attended most regularly no approach to inebriety was ever witnessed.’113 That the Poker Club was deemed to be free of inebriety was not because they did not drink, but because eighteenth-­ century conceptions of alcohol consumption differentiated regular and repetitive drinking from drunkenness, and claret and sherry were distinguished from hard liquor.114 In Carlyle’s autobiography, sharing a bottle of claret between two friends is not considered to result in drunkenness.115 Sociable drinking was a positive social pursuit, and the only direct reference to drinking in the Poker Club minutes is positive. For the meeting of 30 July 1779, it was recorded that: ‘Mr Nairne and Mr Adam Ferguson Drank the Scotch Militia the King & all the other Friends of the Militia but not the absent members.’116 Meeting in the traditionally homosocial space of taverns, clubs such as the Poker Club provided a space in which men could engage in an alternative form of male sociability to that of the structured polite debate of intellectual societies, but they remained within the boundaries of male refinement. However, what was deemed polite could be a contested issue. In his London journal, Boswell recorded his experience of the Poker Club, reflecting that: I must find one fault with all the Poker Club, as they are called; that is to say, with all that set who associate with David Hume and Robertson. They are doing all they can to destroy politeness. They would abolish all respect due to rank and external circumstances, and they would live like a kind of literary barbarians. For my own share, I own I would rather want their instructive conversation than be hurt by their rudeness. However, they don’t always show this. Therefore I like their company best when it is qualified with the presence of a stranger.117 111

Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). Along with other literati, Carlyle obtained some experience of militia activity when he joined a volunteer corps to defend Edinburgh against Jacobite attack in 1745. 113 ‘Minutes of the Poker Club’. 114 Corey E. Andrews, ‘Drinking and thinking: club life and convivial sociability in mid-­ eighteenth-­century Edinburgh’, The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs: An Interdisciplinary Journal 22(1) (2007) 77. 115 Carlyle, Autobiography. 116 Minutes of the Poker Club. 117 Boswell’s London Journal (1762–3), quoted in Davis D. McElroy, Scotland’s Age of Improvement: 112

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Boswell’s criticism of the Poker Club members’ lack of politeness centres on their disregard for social rank, and it highlights the importance of social status in determining politeness. Corey E. Andrews argues that the lack of politeness in the Poker Club differentiates it from associations such as the Select Society, citing Boswell’s observations and Hume’s desire for the ‘plain roughness’ of the Poker Club expressed in a 1763 letter to Adam Ferguson.118 The character of the sociability of the Select Society and Poker Club differed, but their common membership and location in the same urban public sphere meant that they shared a cultural milieu within which a continuum of masculinities was performed. Boswell attended meetings of formal intellectual societies and informal clubs, and was typically in favour of both forms of sociability. In October 1775, he wrote of visiting St Giles Lodge with his Canongate and Kilwinning brethren, recording: ‘I was directly in such a fit as often seized me in the days of the Soaping Club, and supped and drank and roared and played with vast keenness.’119 Rather than embodying a space antithetical to polite culture, the Poker Club reveals the means by which organised tavern-­based sociability existed within the urbane social sphere. Men’s varied drinking practices in different spaces and at different times of day in eighteenth-­century Edinburgh demonstrates that elite men’s behaviour existed on a continuum from the refined conversation of the tea party, and the gallantry of the ballroom and theatre, to the less self-­regulated, more passionate behaviour encouraged by alcohol consumption and the largely homosocial atmosphere of the tavern. Yet even when elite male sociability did involve drunkenness, it was not necessarily disorderly. When elite men were out drunk in the streets at night, they did not suddenly cease to be defined as belonging to the polite classes. In his study of social change in Edinburgh from the mid-­seventeenth to the mid-­ eighteenth centuries, R. A. Houston notes that by the 1760s there was a marked division between ‘the settled, respectable poor and the floating, marginal elements’ of society.120 For the poorest in society, urban improvement meant greater social control. This increased control stands in stark contrast to the freedom that urban spaces, including the street, offered to elite men. Compared with men of the lower orders, whatever their behaviour, at whatever time of night men of elite social status were still deemed to belong to the polite. Boswell’s diaries depict a city in which he could move freely at night. Alcohol and women working as prostitutes were readily available for his consumption. As Craig Koslofksy has shown, the emergence of the public sphere was A Survey of Eighteenth Century Literary Clubs and Societies (Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, 1969), 167. 118 Andrews, ‘Drinking and thinking’, 67. 119 Boswell, Edinburgh Journals, 203. 120 Houston, Social Change, 287.

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joined by a nocturnalisation of the night, and this had a distinctly gendered character. Where previously elite mixed-­sex sociability had occurred in the context of courtly culture that extended seamlessly from day into night, from the late seventeenth century women were denied access to the new nocturnal institutions such as coffeehouses. Elite women could access some nocturnal spaces such as theatres and balls, but their access to night-­time culture was restricted.121 It is commonly accepted that within polite circles men and women dined together, but after eating the women retired to take tea while the men stayed on and drank alcohol, often to the point of inebriation. Of course, this was not always the case, as Boswell’s diaries indicate, sometimes men would meet with women after attending the theatre and drink with them. But typically the polite mixed-­sex sociability of the afternoon and evening did not extend into late-­night culture. The gender segregation of urban late-­ night activity can be gleaned from the cultural practices surrounding the evening concerts held by Edinburgh’s Musical Society. Concerts normally started at 5 or 6 p.m. and finished at 7 p.m., and at least until the 1780s, men often followed concerts with a homosocial drinking session at a tavern, normally Fortune’s, where they would toast the ladies. This act of drinking to the beauty and virtue of various ladies was a means of men celebrating mixed-­sex sociability, but in a homosocial environment. It was, for example, a regular feature of the meeting of the Hodge Podge Club, a convivial society composed of Glasgow merchants.122 With regard to organised sociability in Edinburgh, Creech noted that the practice of toasting the ladies after music concerts had ceased by 1783.123 Read alongside his observation that men had abandoned the afternoon tea table for the bottle, this suggests that men’s drinking habits were becoming less demarcated according to time, but remained homosocial. As the evening drew on, polite women tended to retreat from urban sociability, excluded from coffeehouses and taverns. Yet, as Koslofsky emphasises, we should not ignore those women who played prominent roles in urban night-­time culture, such as female tavern keepers, servants, pamphlet hawkers, and prostitutes.124 As elite women withdrew, those of a lower status remained. Prostitution Adopting Enlightenment discourses concerning reason and the passions, Boswell viewed drinking and illicit sex as an abandonment of his rational self to the passions. In June 1767, he wrote to a friend describing a night 121

Craig Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 186–9. 122 Hodge Podge Club, The Hodge Podge Club 1752–1900: Compiled from the Records of the Club by T. F. Donald, ed. T. F. Donald (Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons, 1900), 17. 123 [Creech], Fugitive Pieces, 85. 124 Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire, 192–3.

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of drunkenness and sex, recording that after ‘drinking Miss Blair’s health, I got myself quite intoxicated, went to a bawdy-­house, and passed the whole night in the arms of a whore’. He finishes his discussion with self-­ admonishment, asserting that ‘I am abashed, and determined to keep the strictest watch over my passions.’125 A student of Adam Smith’s during a brief period of study at the University of Glasgow in 1759–60, Boswell was clearly influenced by Smith’s moral philosophy; throughout his journals Boswell attempted to critique his behaviour through the gaze of the impartial spectator. This often led to personal condemnation and an uneasiness about his manly status after he had drunk too much, stayed out late, had sex with prostitutes, and particularly after he had violently assaulted his wife when drunk. These anxieties were often exacerbated when he was bodily afflicted with venereal disease, and he was concerned that he would pass the disease to his wife.126 When defending to himself his participation in prostitution in London in 1776, Boswell contended these were ‘Asiatic satisfactions, quite consistent with devotion and with a fervent attachment to my valuable spouse.’127 Back in Edinburgh, he began to lust after his wife’s niece, Annie Cunninghame, who was staying in his household. On these passions he wrote: ‘I cherished licentious schemes, and was fretted, forsooth when she made any opposition. I was truly Asiatic.’128 The association of illicit sex with Orientalism suggests that Boswell adopted the dominant Scottish Enlightenment discourse of social progress, particularly ideas of Asian debauchery developed by John Millar and William Alexander. Both Millar and Alexander deployed assumptions about the position of women in Asian cultures to argue for the superiority of the European model of gender complementarity, whereby women were valued as companions rather than only as sex objects. The corruption of Asian society led to its downfall and was symbolised in the social restrictions under which women lived, with Alexander asserting that Asian women were confined and valued ‘only as an article of delicacy and pleasure’, and this diminished their social utility as wives and mothers (though their confinement apparently meant that they had time to excel in embroidery and were superior in this craft to European women).129 As Barbara Taylor has argued, these ideas fed an Enlightenment ideology of domesticity. Relating to men as well as to women, this ideology encouraged fidelity in men. Just as women’s 125

Boswell, Edinburgh Journals, 56. Katie Barclay, ‘Sex, identity and enlightenment in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Jodi A. Campbell, Elizabeth Ewan, and Heather Parker (eds), The Shaping of Scottish Identities: Family, Nation and the Worlds Beyond (Ontario: University of Guelph, 2011), 35–9. 127 London Journal, 23 March 1776, quoted in Milne (ed.), Boswell’s Edinburgh Journals, 253. 128 Boswell, Edinburgh Journals, 270. 129 William Alexander, The History of Women, From the Earliest Antiquity to the Present Time; giving some account of almost every interesting particular concerning that sex among all nations, ancient and modern, 2 vols, 3rd edn (London: C. Dilly and R. Christopher, 1781), i, 117–19. 126

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f­ emininity could civilise them, so too would women’s moral charms encourage men to direct their sexual passions to the marriage bed.130 Enlightenment thinking on sexuality was not uniform. As discussed in the Introduction, Hume maintained that male infidelity was a lesser vice than drunkenness. This corresponds with his assessment in Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) that erotic attraction was ‘the first and original principle of human society’.131 Although the Presbyterian religious context meant that the Scottish Enlightenment was less sexually celebratory than the English Enlightenment explored by Roy Porter, it too expressed ‘mixed feelings’ towards sexuality.132 At the radical end of the spectrum, Robert Wallace celebrated venery as a natural source of pleasure for men and women. Yet Wallace was not celebrating infidelity, rather he believed that pleasurable sexual relations between married couples would reduce promiscuity.133 Boswell’s diaries illustrate an adoption of the Enlightenment hypothesis that licentiousness had a foreign, particularly Asian, character, but he is not being wholly negative when he describes his behaviour as ‘Asiatic’. This suggests that Boswell did not totally adopt the notion that this form of male sexuality negated ‘civilised’ manhood. His self-­criticism after having sex with some prostitutes could indicate that he considered illicit sexuality to be antithetical to virtue, and outwith the boundaries of polite culture. Yet we should not assume too easy a distinction between polite and impolite, moral and immoral behaviour when assessing Boswell’s actions. Boswell’s sex with prostitutes was sometimes cast as virtuous. Whether Boswell’s ‘dalliances’ were virtuous or not was dependent on the class of the woman with whom he engaged in sex. On 19 January 1768, Boswell got very drunk at the anniversary meeting of the Faculty of Advocates, he then went down the Luckenbooths, a poor district of the Old Town, to ‘seek out the illegitimate daughter of the late Lord Kinnaird’, and declaring her ‘a fine lass’, recorded that he ‘stayed half an hour with her and drank malaga and was most amorous being so well that no infection remained’.134 This encounter was deemed to be relatively more virtuous than others because Boswell was not physically diseased, and because the woman with whom he had sex was the illegitimate daughter of a member of the social elite. Rather than being an impolite interaction, the woman’s tenuous links to the elite social classes made Boswell feel that the sexual act represented 130

Barbara Taylor, ‘Feminists versus gallants: manners and morals in Enlightenment Britain’, Representations 87 (2004) 130–4. 131 Quoted in Roy Porter, ‘Mixed feelings: the Enlightenment and sexuality in eighteenth-­ century Britain’, in Paul-­ Gabriel Boucé (ed.), Sexuality in Eighteenth-­ Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), 4. 132 Porter, ‘Mixed feelings’, 1–27. 133 Norah Smith, ‘Sexual mores and attitudes in Enlightenment Scotland’, in Boucé (ed.), Sexuality in Eighteenth-­Century Britain, 60–1. 134 Boswell, Edinburgh Journals, 66.

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virtue mixed with licentious love.135 He wrote that it ‘made me humane, polite, generous’, and noted that ‘lawful love with a woman I really like would make me better still’.136 This was repeated in 1777, when Boswell met Miss Montgomerie, an illegitimate daughter of Lord Eglinton, and noted that his ‘fancy was pleased with Miss Montgomerie having noble blood in her veins. She was not sixteen, and was fresh, plump, and comely. Before dinner she allowed me luscious liberties with kindly frankness.’137 In the latter case, Boswell was married at the time, and his attitude towards his behaviour became more critical after he was upbraided by his wife. Yet in his immediate response on both occasions the women’s biological links to the elite were paramount. Boswell’s depictions of the two illegitimate daughters of men of the social elite are in contrast to his descriptions of other street prostitutes, such as the ‘big fat whore’ he picked up on the street in 1777, or the ‘two whores’ he spent over an hour with ‘at their lodging in a narrow dirty stair in the Bow’ in 1774.138 In their 1987 study of the ‘sexual underworlds’ of the European Enlightenment, G. G. Rousseau and Roy Porter argue for recognition of the importance of questions of sexuality in eighteenth-­century thought and culture, while warning against simple characterisations of this as either a permissive or punitive age. Though it may illustrate an increasing cultural acceptance of sex as a legitimate form of pleasure rather than as an act solely intended for procreation, we should not view texts such as John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749) as indicative of the lived experience of most female prostitutes. Art does not simply illustrate life, and Rousseau and Porter emphasise the need for studies that take a more holistic approach, integrating not only questions of gender, but also those of class.139 The figure of the prostitute could be viewed as a transgression of the Enlightenment ideal of the virtuous and increasingly domesticated woman.140 In this categorisation of the prostitute, a woman’s natural propensity towards the passions was deemed to have undermined her virtue. This ‘fallen woman’ was invariably of genteel or middling social origin. Yet, as Tony Henderson has demonstrated in relation to London, the social background of the majority of prostitutes belies the eighteenth-­century

135

As Katie Barclay has shown, during this era illegitimate children of the elite were often denied financial and other support, see Barclay, ‘Sex, identity’, 33–5. 136 Ibid., 66. 137 Ibid., 297 138 Ibid., 181, 292. 139 G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (eds), Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 1–16. 140 Markman Ellis and Anne Lewis (eds), ‘Introduction: venal bodies – prostitutes and eighteenth-­century culture’, in Prostitution and Eighteenth-­Century Culture: Sex, Commerce and Morality (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 3–4.

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myth of the genteel or bourgeois fallen woman.141 This myth was encouraged in popular novels, particularly Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), and it was expressed in Scottish literature through novels such as Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748) and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771). In Man of Feeling the female character Miss Atkins is fond of books, and her obsession with romance causes her to fall in love with a man of false refinement and follow him to London. This man, Mr Winbrooke then rapes her and dumps her in a brothel, where she is eventually rescued by the main protagonist, Harley. The same trope was employed by the author of ‘Verses For my Tomb Stone, if I ever shall have one. By a Prostitute and a Penitent’, published by Creech in Fugitive Pieces apparently after it had been passed to him by ‘a gentleman in the medical profession’ who had visited the poem’s ‘author’ on her deathbed.142 In this (most likely fictional) poem the prostitute depicts herself as a ‘lost, love-­ruin’d Female’, and narrates the moral downfall caused by her seduction by a charming and deceiving man, as ‘One step to vice, stole on without control, Till, step by step, perdition wreck’d the soul . . . Cover’d with guilt, infection, debt, and want, My home a brothel, and the street my haunt . . . The dupe of Passion, Vanity and Man.’143 Tellingly, this sympathetic representation of prostitution contrasts with Creech’s observations of the practice in Edinburgh in 1763 and 1783 in the same publication. A woman who adhered to the ‘fallen woman’ stereotype evoked sympathy, but common whores did not. Like London, the actual social background of prostitutes in Edinburgh presents an alternative narrative to literature’s ‘fallen woman’ trope. The vast majority of the women working as prostitutes were poor, and their fathers were typically unskilled labourers (or in a minority of cases they were the illegitimate daughters of men of the city’s elite). A sample of the Tolbooth Black Books at five-­year intervals from 1750 to 1800 show that 119 women were arrested by the city guards for street strolling or being in a house of bad fame. For 45% of these women the place of birth is recorded, and of this group 84% were born outside of Edinburgh.144 For women of the lower social classes who were single, widowed, married to a soldier serving abroad, or abandoned by their husband, life in eighteenth-­century Edinburgh was economically precarious.145 Although the city provided work for women, in 1791 their wages were two-­thirds lower than men’s

141

Tony Henderson, Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-­Century London: Prostitution and Control in the Metropolis 1730–1830 (Harlow: Pearson Education, 1999), 186–92. 142 Creech, Fugitive Pieces, 59–60. 143 In Fugitive Pieces, 60–2. 144 ‘Edinburgh Burgh Court Black Books’, ECA, SL233, vols 3–6. 145 Of the 119 women arrested, the marital origins of 54% are unknown; 33% are recorded as single; 2% widowed; and 11% married. Of the married group, more than half were married to soldiers and thus likely to be living apart from their husbands.

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wages.146 Probably also lacking the support of local family, it is likely that women arrested for prostitution engaged in this activity as a result of economic necessity. However, there is a need for caution in attempts to define the geographical origins of women working as prostitutes in the city; their predominance among the women whose place of birth is recorded in the Black Books might instead suggest that women from outside Edinburgh were more likely to be arrested for soliciting. Straddling polite urbane and disorderly urban culture, the immorality of prostitution was placed firmly on the impoverished women working as prostitutes. Tolbooth records indicate that the elite men who participated in this activity were immune from prosecution. Lower-­ class men were sometimes arrested for order offences when found in houses of bad fame and other disorderly houses, but gentlemen were not. On one occasion in 1775, a gentleman was confident enough of his immunity from prosecution that he had a servant, Mansfield Esplin, arrested for stealing a large sum of money from him in a brothel.147 Significantly, the lower-­class Esplin was not arrested for being in the brothel, but for stealing in it, making this case exemplary of the sexual double standard in the city’s response to prostitution.148 In a similar case, Thomas Hamilton, a shopkeeper, was banished for five years for stealing from his master’s shop and ‘disposing & squandering the same amongst low bawdy houses and disorderly women’.149 In these cases the crime’s connection to prostitution compounded the offence, but the charges remained that of theft. More than any other, prostitution was a gendered crime. The women arrested for prostitution stand out as a gender category, but they did not comprise a distinct social category. Indeed, the female prostitute appears in a manner closely aligned to other poor women making their living on the streets of Scotland’s urban centres. As with England, in Edinburgh women’s work in prostitution formed part of a makeshift economy, and they are not easily distinguishable from other women of the lower orders.150 The Tolbooth books record 332 arrests of women. Those arrested for prostitution comprise 36% of this total, with the second most common crime being theft (including pick-­pocketing and fencing) at 28%, followed by disorderly behaviour (including rioting and fighting) at 15%, and with smaller totals for keeping disorderly houses, vagrancy, child exposure, and fraud.151 A focus of city guards operating under the authority of burgh magistrates and directed by the complaints of city residents, prostitution’s predominance in Tolbooth Black Books confirms that women’s 146

Christopher Whatley, ‘Women and the economic transformation of Scotland c. 1740– 1830’, Scottish Social and Economic History 14 (1994) 33. 147 ‘Edinburgh Burgh Court Black Books 1774–1792’, 28 June 1775. 148 Keith Thomas, ‘The double standard’, Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (1959) 195–216. 149 ‘Black Books 1774–1792’, 10 December 1790. 150 Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700–1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 94–6. 151 ‘Black Books’, vols 3–6.

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participation in the practice was considered to be an offence against public order. The prostitute had a powerful public presence and could serve as a warning of the dangers of women’s presence on the streets. Creech noted that along with ‘the multitudes of females, abandoned to vice’ occupying the city’s streets, ‘Gentlemens [sic] and citizens daughters are upon the town, who, by their dress and bold deportment, in the face of day, seem to tell us that the term WH-­-E ceases to be a reproach.’152 Women’s sexual virtue is depicted here as their own responsibility, and they are denied identification as virtuous women if they fail to present themselves in modest attire. This notion was not new; women had long been at risk of being defined as harlots when occupying public space. At the beginning of the century a by-­law was passed in Edinburgh prohibiting women from wearing clothes that might cause men to confuse them with women working as prostitutes. This law was an addition to a 1700 Act that, rather than abolish prostitution, accepted its place in urban culture and aimed to segregate the women involved in the trade by ordering that ‘common thieves and whores should be marked upon the nose’.153 That physical marking was to be applied to thieves and whores illustrates the association of female prostitution with other manifestations of disorder among the urban lower classes. During the eighteenth century, the treatment of women arrested for prostitution became less severe as the punishments of branding and transportation to the American colonies were abandoned, but it remained punitive.154 However, by 1800 the number of prosecutions had decreased. Rather than indicating a decline in the practice, this signifies that at the beginning of the nineteenth century prostitution was increasingly seen as a social problem. This change in attitude is confirmed by the establishment of a Magdalene Asylum in Edinburgh in 1797.155 Like earlier institutions in London and Dublin, Edinburgh’s Magdalene Asylum sought to rescue women from a life of vice by inculcating them in Christian virtues and providing them with skills required for work.156 Taking in young women, normally aged twenty and younger, the primary purpose of work in the asylum was to equip the inmates with skills that would enable them to enter domestic service. The moral redemption and reclaiming of virtue was essential to a woman’s transformation in the asylum, and in philanthropic discourse this could be achieved through the development of a work ethic and maintained via economic independence. As with the Magdalen Hospital in London fifty years earlier, the discourse 152

Creech, Fugitive Pieces, 81. Quoted in Linda Mahood, The Magdalenes: Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1990), 25. 154 Houston, Social Change, 172–4. 155 Mahood, Magdalenes. 156 Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (London: Allen Lane, 2012), 264–8. 153

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underpinning these efforts presented prostitutes as victims in need of redemption and adopted the ‘fallen woman’ trope.157 However, reflecting the influence of what would become the nineteenth-­century social reform movement, this discourse recognised the poverty of the prostitute, depicting her as coming from the respectable working class, rather than a bourgeois or genteel social origin.158 Equipping women with the skills for work therefore had a practical and moral purpose. In the reports following the fortnightly visits of the Asylum’s Ladies Committee, the industry of the female inmates was often positively noted. Indicative of this is a minute from 13 June 1799 recording that ‘Mrs Paterson & Mrs Watson has [sic] visited the House for the preceding Week and have had much satisfaction in observing the Industry and order that prevailed.’159 On 5 November that year, the women’s ‘seeming earnest desire after Religious knowledge, and gratitude for their present situation’ was also noted.160 In addition to work to finance the running of the Asylum and earn a small wage, female penitents were taught to read and received religious instruction. As Linda Mahood discusses, this process amounted to a domestication of women in the asylum.161 In this way, the establishment of the Magdalene Asylum in Edinburgh indicates an extension of the identity of virtuous womanhood to lower-­class women where it had previously been deployed principally in relation to elite, polite women. This application of Enlightenment-­defined femininity to the women of the Magdalene Asylum is revealed in the minute of 3 July 1800, where it was recorded that: ‘Mrs Rae and Miss Panton having visited the House for the last month, have had a great satisfaction in observing the industry, quietness, & civility of the women.’162 Employing a Foucauldian analysis, Mahood argues that the establishment of Edinburgh’s Magdalene Asylum in 1797 and Glasgow’s Lock Hospital in 1805 (the latter established to treat venereal disease in women) reflected a new form of social discipline of the urban poor. Rather than punishment, these new institutions embodied ‘new technologies of power’ that defined sexual deviance as a female crime, and hoped to achieve moral reformation through the imposition of bourgeois values. Also supporting Foucault’s thesis, women incarcerated in the Magdalene Asylum were not without agency.163 Expressions of agency are apparent in some women’s resistance to the behavioural norms enforced in the Asylum. Deviant behaviour included refusal to work, fighting with other women, being ‘unreasonable’ 157

Sarah Lloyd, ‘“Pleasure’s golden bait”: prostitution, poverty and the Magdalen Hospital in eighteenth-­century London’, History Workshop Journal 41 (1996) 57–64. 158 Mahood, Magdalenes, 56–9. 159 ‘Ladies Committee Minute Book 1798–1834’, ECA SL237/2/1, 13 June 1799. 160 ‘Ladies Committee’, 3 November 1800. 161 Mahood, Magdalenes, 75–94. 162 ‘Ladies Committee’, 3 July 1800. 163 Mahood, Magdalenes, 13.

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and insolent. This behaviour could result in solitary confinement and prohibition from taking tea with the other women, to exclusion from the asylum itself. In 1798, the Ladies Committee considered the benefits of cutting off women’s hair in order to confine them to the Asylum for the first three months of their incarceration, and in the 1830s head shaving was adopted by directors facing a lack of discipline within the Asylum.164 The reformative character of the Magdalene Asylum meant that deviant behaviour was forgiven if apologised for and not repeated, but records of women excluded from the Asylum indicate that the programme of reformation was not always successful. In July 1800, the Visitors were informed of ‘the gross misconduct of Janet Forbes and are of opinion that she is no longer a fit object of the Society’s care’.165 In a later case, Sarah Ross behaved very ill to Miss Cleland, & refused to do her work, & spoke very insolently both to Miss Aikman, Miss Elliot & Miss Cleland, some of the Ladies have spoke with her this day but find her very stubborn & not willing to make any apology for her behaviour.166 In 1808, the minutes of a male subcommittee record that: ‘Jacobina Pringle, who had been on probation for eight days, eloped on Tuesday evening the 5th curt and carried with her several articles of new cloathing.’167 The Asylum manifested a form of social control aimed exclusively at a subgroup of women in the urban community, yet the female Visitors to the Asylum and the mistress of the house, Mrs Coutts, were the primary enforcers of this authority. For the bourgeois Christian women who formed the Ladies Committee, the Magdalene Asylum was a site of public power, and was part of what Vickery refers to as an ‘extraordinary explosion’ in female-­ led philanthropic activities at the end of the eighteenth century.168 As with female writers such as Elizabeth Hamilton, who negotiated and extended the boundaries of feminine domesticity to establish herself as a participant in public culture, the members of the Magdalene Asylum’s Ladies Committee forged a space in Edinburgh’s public institutional culture in the context of the ideology of domesticity; in this case via their maternalistic control of lower-­class female ‘deviants’.169 That the Magdalene Asylum was an evangelical mission is not insignificant. As Lesley Orr’s study of women and religion in Scotland showed, during the nineteenth century women’s involvement in missionary work and other church activities resulted in the Scottish churches developing 164

‘Ladies Committee’, 9 July 1798; Mahood, Magdalenes, 80. Ibid., 29 July 1800. 166 Ibid., 28 July 1815 167 ‘Sub-­committee Minute Book’, 1808“1825’, ECA SL237/1/2, 4 May 1808. 168 Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 257. 169 Pam Perkins, Women Writers and the Edinburgh Enlightenment (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 56–84. 165

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Urbane and Urban Sociability in Enlightenment Edinburgh 137

a distinctly feminine character.170 Motivated by the Christian ethos of redemption, the presence of the female Visitors lent a degree of social probity to the functions of the Asylum. This was not dissimilar to the influence of Lady Directresses at the Assembly who ensured that the activities retained a virtuous decorum. Like the Directresses, the role of the Lady Visitors signifies female agency and influence, but it remained secondary to the all-­male governing committee. In addition to providing a space for bourgeois female public involvement, the establishment of the Magdalene Asylum indicates a change in attitudes towards prostitution in Scotland. Women working as prostitutes remained deviant, but this deviance was deemed to require reformation rather than criminalisation. In the decades that Boswell recorded his life in the city (1760s–1780s), prostitution was common but not accepted by the authorities and was resisted by some city residents. This meant that women on the streets faced a punitive system of social control enforced by the city guards. By the end of the century, the imposition of burgh authority with regard to prostitution was becoming more lenient, and the establishment of the Magdalene Asylum is indicative of the influence of an Enlightenment-­inspired humanitarian discourse concerning the policing of private and public morality.171 Although easily cast as immoral, prostitution was as a part of the urban economy. Taking a broad view of urban culture, it appears that the universities, professional institutions, and clubs and societies from which the Enlightenment grew also provided a ready market for prostitution. In Fugitive Pieces, Creech portrays prostitution as an unwelcome by-­product of improvement, recording (and exaggerating) that whereas in 1763 there were ‘about six or seven brothels or houses of bad fame in Edinburgh’, by 1783 ‘the number of brothels and houses of civil accommodation are increased to some hundreds’.172 Here, developments in Edinburgh appear similar to London but on a smaller scale. In London most women working as prostitutes congregated around the theatres and taverns of the West End and the professional City district. For men, prostitution was one of many leisure activities available in London.173 That this was also the case in Edinburgh is suggested by evidence from the early nineteenth century that race meetings at Musselburgh led to an influx of women into the city, seeking to earn money via commercial sex with men attending the races.174 Considering the ubiquity of prostitution in the eighteenth-­century city, it 170

Lesley A. Orr Macdonald, A Unique and Glorious Mission: Women and Presbyterianism in Scotland, 1800–1930 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2000). 171 Leah Leneman and Rosalind Mitchison, Sexuality and Social Control, Scotland 1660–1780 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 70–8. 172 [Creech], Fugitive Pieces, 81. 173 Elizabeth Campbell Denlinger, ‘The garment and the man: masculine desire in Harris’s List of Covent-­Garden Ladies, 1764–1793’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 11(3) (2002) 367. 174 Mahood, Magdalenes, 46.

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is likely that the combination of a key event in the social calendar and an increase in prostitution was an eighteenth-­as well as a nineteenth-­century phenomenon. Prostitution’s accepted but uneasy place in elite culture is illustrated by the case of Margaret Burns who worked in the city in the 1780s. Sketched by John Kay and called ‘a celebrated beauty’, Burns frequented Edinburgh’s evening promenades and was known to be a prostitute. Her story was close to the narrative of the ‘fallen woman’; she had lost the financial support of her wealthy merchant father after his second marriage and had been forced into prostitution by economic necessity at the age of twenty.175 Like other women working as prostitutes, Burns faced prosecution, but she was able to overturn her banishment from the city, and she received support from literary figures including the poet Robert Burns. In a pamphlet recording legal answers to Burns’s petition against her sentence, the advocate, historian, and professor Alexander Fraser Tytler, depicts Burns as disorderly and a symbol of a ‘licentious age’, in contrast to the virtuous residents of her neighbourhood.176 The elites who contributed to the ‘corrupt fashions’, and ‘follies and vices’ of the times did not escape censure, with Tytler citing the court deposition of James Aitken, writer, who stated that ‘he has been very often disturbed in the night time by chairmen and drunk gentlemen calling at the defender’s [Burns’] door for admission’.177 However, it was Burns and not the gentlemen who bought sex from her, who was subject to criminal prosecution. In the exchange of sex for money, the prostitute’s performance was often deemed to be disorderly, but the custom of the elite male client rarely was. Whether something was polite or impolite was determined as much by the socioeconomic position of the participants as the act itself. This is apparent in Boswell’s notion (discussed above) that sex with the illegitimate daughter of a lord was a more virtuous activity than his ‘dalliances’ with common street prostitutes. This distinction drawn by Boswell suggests a desire to integrate prostitution into the culture of politeness. This desire is most obvious in the 1775 publication, Ranger’s Impartial List of the Ladies of Pleasure in Edinburgh. Mimicking Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, published in regular new editions from the 1760s to the 1790s, the Ranger’s List is aimed at gentlemen. Like Harris’s List, it records only a small proportion of the prostitutes working in the city and was a form of pornography as much as an actual guide.178 Also like the Harris lists, Ranger’s List begins with an introduction defending prostitution as a cultural practice. 175

Siân Reynolds, ‘Burns, Margaret’, in Elizabeth Ewan, Sue Innes and Rose Pipes (eds), The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 54 176 Alexander Fraser Tytler, Answers for William Sprott Procurator-­Fiscal of the City of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1789), 16. 177 Ibid., 9 178 Denlinger, ‘The garment and the man’, 358–62.

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Urbane and Urban Sociability in Enlightenment Edinburgh 139 The anonymous author claims that sexual desire is a product of human nature, and thus To attempt a suppression of this almighty impulse in the human species, would be a task as rash and as idle, as to bid the hills touch heaven . . . The mighty call will be obeyed, and men and women always rebel against such weak restrictions.179

Significantly, this defence employs improvement rhetoric, arguing that sex with women working as prostitutes could be a conduit for happiness and virtue: With her the youth is taught the lesson of the mind practised in genuine taste, and learns the right use of things. Here the drunkard drops a while his swinish appetite, and gazes like a man upon beauty. The lawyer in the case of love, forgets his quirks and equivocations, and is for that short space honest and upright.180 The explicit link between prostitution and a virtuous civility made in the introduction to Ranger’s List is continued in the list describing individual female prostitutes. In addition to describing women’s beauty and their skills in sexual activity, the author also makes a point of noting the gentility of brothels and of the women that worked in them. Miss Tibby Nairn in Fowles Close is described as keeping ‘the genteelest house for celebrating the mysteries of Venus that is in this city’;181 Miss Walker of Bess Wynd is also noted as keeping a ‘very genteel house’.182 The women who are good company are also celebrated, such as Miss McLean who is in no way deficient in the most essential points which are necessary in the universal art of love; besides this she is very good company, and agreeable in her conversation, which makes her more carrassed [sic] by men of sense, than others who boast of any external charms.183 Another woman, Miss Peggy McLean, is ‘entertaining in her conversation, and remarkably funny in company; she also sings very well, which renders her a number of friends’.184 These descriptions measure the women’s worth according to the same guidelines we see in prescriptive literature and other moral texts – they are valued according to their ability to converse with men. In some cases this placement of the figure of the prostitute in the same ideological context as polite women is carried to the extent that women’s modesty is noted as a positive attribute, such as Miss Peggy Murray 179

Anon., Ranger’s Impartial List of the Ladies of Pleasure in Edinburgh, with a Preface by a celebrated Wit (Edinburgh, 1775), iii–iv. 180 Ibid., v. 181 Ibid., 26. 182 Ibid., 18. 183 Ibid., 18. 184 Ibid., 15.

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who ‘when she approaches the altar of love, she does it with all the modesty and sanctity of a vestal virgin’.185 As discussed in previous chapters, the influence of feminine women was considered to be essential to the development and defence of ­commercial civility. It was also a primary category within the definition of civility. Ranger’s List suggests that this feminine identity could be extended to women outwith polite social circles; via material gentility and good conversation even the prostitute could become urbane rather than merely urban. Conclusion An analysis of the social public sphere of Edinburgh indicates far greater levels of female publicity than is apparent if we restrict our view of Enlightenment culture to the associational public sphere. Reflecting discourses of femininity and civility, women’s participation in public activities such as dancing and the theatre were crucial to the improving function of these spaces. Assemblies and, to a lesser extent, convivial clubs operated largely within the context of polite society, but other spaces, such as the theatre, facilitated fluidity between elite and plebeian culture. Considered alongside the reading of Enlightenment texts by men and women of the merchant and artisan classes, the theatre demonstrates that Enlightenment culture was not irrelevant to the lower classes. That Enlightenment culture permeated social boundaries is not surprising when we consider the shared lives of rich and poor, particularly in crowded urban streets. Prostitution is an obvious example of a coming together of the elite and lower classes, but other less illicit examples are also available, including the participation in Enlightenment culture by female servants such as the Miss Robertsons, who were employed to prepare tea, cook, and clean for the Assembly.186 Literature, too, supplies us with examples of the shared, but differently encountered, experiences of the elites and servants, such as the inclusion of letters from the servants Humprhy Clinker and Winifred Jenkins in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker. Urban sociability existed in a continuum, and assemblies and other expressly polite manifestations of this were integrated with those that straddled the boundaries of polite and impolite, including the theatre, and with pastimes that can be mistakenly read as existing entirely outwith the boundaries of this world, such as prostitution. The experiences of men such as James Boswell certainly do not reflect the experiences of all elite men in this period, and his journals need to be read alongside alternative accounts such as that provided by the Reverend Alexander Carlyle’s autobiography. Despite their obvious limitations, Boswell’s journals do serve to highlight the interconnections between ‘high’ and ‘low’ life in Scotland’s metropole, 185 186

Ibid., 23. ‘Edinburgh Assembly’, 10.

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Urbane and Urban Sociability in Enlightenment Edinburgh 141 and prompt us to critique a division between high and low in narrating the lived experience of eighteenth-­century culture. His experiences show that men’s performances of gender were dependent not only on a man’s social rank, but also on the specific spaces he occupied at different times. The limitations of a hegemonic model for understanding gender identity that I have suggested here will be further examined in the following chapter, which investigates the refined male violence expressed through duelling. As with Boswell and prostitution, the cultural practice of duelling illustrates a tension in men’s behaviour between the demands of reason and Stoic self-­control that underpinned gentlemanly refinement, and passions inflamed by sexual desire or assaults upon men’s sense of honour.

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Enlightened Violence? Elite Manhood and the Duel On 14 April 1762 the Edinburgh Evening Courant reported that: two young gentlemen coming from the tavern, and supposed to be the worse for liquor quarrelled in the parliament close. A scuffle ensued, in which one of them wounded the other with a knife, or some sharp weapon, so dreadfully, that his life yesterday was looked upon to be in danger. The aggressor was next morning taken into custody, and ­committed to the Tolbooth.1 This conflict occurred in public, on the streets of Edinburgh at the height of the Scottish Enlightenment. Whereas coffeehouses, intellectual associations, and convivial clubs are emblematic of the Enlightenment project, this incidence of public violence suggests a failure in the processes of refinement. With this chapter I integrate the history of violent manhood with that of men engaging in polite conversation and debate in a sociable urbane world, and ask what place personal violence had in the performance of elite manhood. The main focus of this chapter is a study of duelling. As an elite male cultural ritual, duelling provides useful insights into the relationship between public honour, violent behaviour, and men’s assertion of gentlemanly status. I examine Enlightenment discourses on duelling before moving on to a study of the place of duelling within urban polite society, the duel’s function in men’s assertion of social status, and the sociable and public functions of the duel. I will conclude with an examination of the impact of Enlightenment discourse on men’s understanding of the duel. In his autobiographical Anecdotes on the ‘Manners and Customs of Edinburgh’, the author Henry Mackenzie noted that ‘Duels rarely happened in Edinburgh.’2 Although not a common practice, duelling was considered an issue of enough importance to warrant the attention of the Scottish literati. On 26 February 1760, the Select Society debated ‘Whether the practice of duelling be advantageous?’, and, on 28 January 1763, the

1 2

Edinburgh Evening Courant, 14 April 1762. Henry Mackenzie, The Anecdotes and Egotisms of Henry Mackenzie 1745–1831, ed. John Dwyer (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996), 69.

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Belles Lettres Society asked ‘ought duelling to be permitted?’.3 If he had been present at either meeting, Mackenzie’s answer would have been yes; duelling ‘May be called a barbarous custom, yet it has some advantages in civilising society,’ indeed, it was ‘necessary or highly expedient in a state of polished society, which applies the law of honor and delicacy, well understood though unwritten, to life and manners’.4 Here Mackenzie presents a position similar to Bernard Mandeville in Fable of the Bees (1714), who argued that men’s fear of causing offence and thus being challenged to duel to the death, provided a bedrock of modern politeness. Reflecting an adoption of Hobbesian philosophy, Mandeville asserted that politeness was founded upon artificial behavioural codes motivated by men’s self-­liking and sense of honour, and it would collapse into violence if men were not afraid of giving offence.5 Like Mandeville, Mackenzie’s ideas contradict eighteenth-­century anti-­ duelling rhetoric that deemed this practice to be antithetical to civility and virtue.6 His example also challenges a commonly adopted narrative that connects politeness, refinement, and a decline in violence in eighteenth-­century British culture. Placing ideological changes, including Enlightenment and evangelical revival, in their material urban context, Robert Shoemaker has demonstrated a decline in public male violence in London, pointing to increased social condemnation alongside changing cultural practices, including a decline of sword-­wearing among elite men.7 In the context of Scottish Enlightenment gender ideology, violence was antithetical to male refinement, yet duelling and other forms of violent behaviour continued among men whose gentlemanly status placed them as members of polite society. As Elizabeth Foyster demonstrates in relation to domestic violence, the Enlightenment did not stop male violence but it did affect people’s understanding of it.8 As with domestic violence, duelling provides a means by which to assess the impact of Enlightenment discourse on actual behaviour. More common during periods of military conflict, especially the Napoleonic Wars, duelling in Scotland demonstrates that martial values remained valid among elite men, and that concepts of honour grounded in notions of chivalry retained a cultural currency. The Enlightenment was 3

‘Minutes of the Select Society’, NLS, MS Adv. 23.1.1, 155; ‘Minutes of the Belles Lettres Society 1761–1764’, NLS, MS Adv. 5.1.6, 28 January 1763. 4 Mackenzie, Anecdotes, 70. 5 Markku Peltonen, The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003), 263–302. 6 Donna T. Andrew, ‘The code of honour and its critics: the opposition to duelling in England, 1700–1850’, Social History 5(3) (1980) 409–34. 7 Robert Shoemaker, ‘Male honour and the decline of public violence in eighteenth-­ century London’, Social History 26(2) (2001) 190–208. 8 Elizabeth Foyster, ‘Creating a veil of silence? Politeness and marital violence in the English household’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 12 (2002) 395–415.

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not irrelevant, however, and men employed ideas of sensibility to avoid, and sometimes to defend, duelling. Violence in Scottish Enlightenment thought Dominant conceptions of manhood in Scottish Enlightenment thought deemed that male honour was founded on inner virtue rather than on the ability to violently defend it in a duel.9 In his 1742 essay on the ‘Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’, David Hume argued that duelling separated ‘the man of honour from the man of virtue’.10 In Hume’s depiction, duelling is indicative of false refinement, or artificial politeness. He argued that through the act of the duel, and due to social approbation for it, the greatest profligates have got something to value themselves upon, and have been able to keep themselves in countenance, tho’ guilty of the most shameful and most dangerous vices. They are debauchees, spendthrifts, and never pay a farthing they owe: But they are all men of honour; and therefore are to be received as gentleman in all ­companies.11 According to Hume, duelling as a form of social public display allowed men to express an honour, which, not being founded on inner virtue, was corrupt. It was also a modern invention and not based upon natural passions. As Hume contended: ‘The ancients certainly never had any notion of honour as distinct from virtue.’12 Hume’s duellist is represented as a libertine, embodying a masculine identity that was at odds with an Enlightenment project of improvement, which sought to combine increased wealth and political liberty with a commitment to the social good. From this perspective, gentlemen’s participation in duelling as part of polite social practice can be located in the artificial politeness encouraged by the earl of Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son published in 1774. Chesterfield defended duelling as a ‘humane, sensible and equitable method of decision of right and wrong’.13 In this context it represented an alternative expression of gentlemanliness to the inner virtue and refinement encouraged by Scottish moral philosophy. As explored by John Dwyer, discourses 9

Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660–1800 (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001), 72; Robert Shoemaker, ‘Reforming male manners: public insult and the decline of violence in London, 1660–1740’, in Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen (eds), English Masculinities 1660–1800 (London: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999), 133–40. 10 David Hume, ‘Of the rise and progress of the arts and sciences’ [1742], Essays Moral, Literary and Political, ed. Eugene F. Millar (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, [1777] 1987), 626. NB: this reference to duelling was removed after the 1770 edition of the Essays. 11 Hume, ‘Rise and progress’, 626. 12 Hume, ‘Rise and progress’, 627 (original emphasis). 13 Quoted in James Kelly, ‘That Damn’d Thing Called Honour’: Duelling in Ireland 1570–1860 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), 159.

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Elite Manhood and the Duel 145 of sensibility and refinement were formulated partly in response to perceived social and moral problems, such as selfishness, encouraged by a politeness not conjoined with refinement.14 In her examination of duelling in Germany, Ute Frevert cites six key arguments against duelling within Enlightenment thought: it was irrational; it was unchristian and immoral; it was illegal; it represented feudal privilege; it was symbol of military exclusivity; and it was a crime which enjoyed the protection of the state.15 Reflecting the emphasis on sensibility in Scottish thought, Enlightenment discourse focused on the lack of inner virtue exemplified by the duel. The duel was an expression of false refinement, artificiality, and could be placed in the same context as other forms of selfish behaviour, including that of the Fop. Whether duelling was condemned because it was violent is less obvious. Within stadial theories of progress, the practice of violence as a customary norm was deemed to negate the development of refinement in society. In The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1779), John Millar argued that the violence of ‘savage’ societies suppressed the moral characteristics of ­benevolence and tenderness. The continual struggle for subsistence and resulting lack of leisure time in a pre-­agricultural society made violence crucial to the gaining and enactment of power. Writing about past European barbarous societies (societies that he, and many other sociological historians, saw as analogous with contemporary ‘savage’ cultures in the ‘New World’), Millar asserted that: When men are in danger of perishing for hunger; when they are exerting their utmost efforts to procure the bare necessaries of life; when they are unable to shelter themselves from beasts of prey, or from enemies of their own kind, no less ferocious; their constitution would surely be ill adapted to their circumstances, were they endowed with a refined taste of pleasure, and capable of feeling the delicate distresses and enjoyments of love, accompanied with all those elegant sentiments, which, in a civilised and enlightened age, are naturally derived from that passion.16 In Millar’s history of the progression of society from the savage to the civilised state, civility and violence appear as incompatible. This idea reflects those of William Robertson, who proclaimed in A View of the Progress of Society in Europe from the Subversion of the Roman Empire to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century (1769) that: 14

John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late Eighteenth-­Century Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), 61–5. 15 Ute Frevert, Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel, trans. Anthony William (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 18–21. 16 John Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (Bristol: Thoemmes Antiquarian Books, [1779] 1990), 44–5.

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Among uncivilised nations, there is but one profession honourable, that of arms. All the ingenuity and vigour of the human mind are exerted in acquiring military skill or address. The functions of peace are few and simple, and require no particular course of education or of study as a preparation for discharging them. This was the state of Europe during several centuries. Every gentleman, born a soldier, scorned any other occupation; he was taught no science but that of war; even his exercises and pastimes were feats of martial prowess.17 Although he did not consider it antithetical to virtue in barbarous societies, Robertson deemed feudal violence, especially private wars between nobles and the practice of trial by combat, to be an inhibitor of social progress. Despite clear associations between violence and barbarity in Enlightenment historiography, there was divergence within Scottish Enlightenment thought concerning the relationship between violence and refinement. Even Adam Smith and David Hume, influential spokesmen for the civilising effects of commerce and refinement, did not reject outright the benefits of violence in a controlled and martial context. In Political Discourses (1752), Hume argued that commercial society improved men’s martial spirit, asserting that the honour associated with militarism was enhanced by the knowledge and education available in ‘advanced’ societies, whilst the courage necessary for martial honour was improved when combined with the discipline and increased skill that accompanied commercial progress. In Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith maintained that commercial society was less able to protect itself than other forms of social organisation. This was a negative consequence of increased wealth, and Smith sought to marry refinement with national defence through the introduction of professional standing armies and the use of martial exercises to combat the debilitating effects of the division of labour that he had proposed. 18 Unlike Smith and Hume, Adam Ferguson did not accept an automatic correlation between commercial society and the improvement of manners. In his moral philosophy, Ferguson sought to incorporate courageous violence with civility, arguing in Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) for the importance of martial honour to the maintenance of virtue and community spirit in an increasingly wealthy and luxurious age. Rather than viewing wealth as a primarily civilising force, Ferguson contended that it promoted selfish desires over men’s natural propensity to act as members of society. He claimed there were few examples of states that ‘by arts or policy’ have 17

William Robertson, A View of the Progress of Society in Europe from the Subversion of the Roman Empire to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century (1769), available from Electronic Library of Historiography, at: http://www.eliohs.unifi.it/testi/700/robertson, accessed 27 March 2013, 58. 18 John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985), 63, 91, 212–23.

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improved the original dispositions of human nature.19 For Ferguson, ‘rude nations’ possessed natural communal bonds that were strengthened through frequent conflict with other communities. This bond meant that for ‘the human species in its rudest state; the love of society, friendship, and public affection, penetration, eloquence, and courage, appear to have been its original properties, not the subsequent effects of device or invention’.20 Significantly, in Ferguson’s work it is communal conflict, or war, that encourages manly virtues such as courage, generosity, and a ‘zeal for the public’.21 He asserted that these virtues could not be separated from the strength of the nation, arguing that whatever its population and wealth, ‘a nation consisting of degenerate and cowardly men is weak; a nation consisting of vigorous, public-spirited, and resolute men, is strong’.22 Writing about men’s involvement in war, Ferguson states: ‘They are sentiments of generosity and self-­denial that animate the warrior in defence of his country.’23 Opposed to this communal defence, conflicts between individuals were the result of those ‘unhappy and detestable passions’ such as malice, hatred, and rage.24 Within Ferguson’s moral philosophy, ­interpersonal violence was detestable. Ferguson’s philosophy reminds us of the continuing significance of martial values in eighteenth-­century Scotland, and the concerted attempt to blend these with civility. This attempt is apparent in the popular Ossian poetry published by James MacPherson as Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760), Fingal (1762), and Temora (1763). The depiction of warrior heroes in Ossian, displaying the classical virtues of courage and self-­sacrifice, and the sentimental virtues of love, benevolence, and generosity, projected an idea of an ancient Scotland that embodied the best qualities of past and present societies.25 As Dwyer suggests, Ossian poetry offered ‘a hybrid of classical and modern virtues’, blending courage with sentimentality.26 The Ossian poems celebrate chivalric martial virtues in a Gaelic culture considered by many literati to represent an early stage of progress. According to Millar, chivalric masculinity was expressed in a knights’ ‘sincere and faithful passion’ towards women, and in the art of war where men learn that it is their duty to ‘restrain the oppressor, to protect the weak and defenceless; to behave with fairness and humanity even to an 19

Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society [1767], ed. Fania Oz-­Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 195–6. 20 Ibid., 93. 21 Ibid., 144. 22 Ibid., 213. 23 Ibid., 28. 24 Ibid., 29 25 John Dwyer, ‘The melancholy savage: text and context in the poems of Ossian’, in Howard Gaskill (ed.), Ossian Revisited (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 169. 26 John Dwyer, The Age of the Passions (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1998), 154.

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enemy, with modesty and politeness to all’.27 An essential stage in the development of civility, chivalry was represented in stadial theory as inferior to commercial urbanity. As Millar argued, societies were naturally improved by ‘the advancement of opulence and the gradual refinement of manners’.28 In Robertson’s narrative of European progress, during the middle ages violence declined, civil jurisdictions advanced, and nobles developed ‘liberal and generous’ sentiments that were expressed in a ‘spirit of chivalry’.29 It was because chivalry encompassed ‘valour, gallantry and religion’ that its development contributed to the progress of manners in Europe.30 Chivalry lessened the ferocity of war, initiated modern concepts of honour, and introduced polished manners. Yet, like Millar after him, Robertson considered this development to be step towards modernity. It was commercial trade between nations that ‘softens and polishes the manners of men’, and with ‘progress of science, and the cultivation of literature’, it contributed to the establishment of regular government.31 In modernity, chivalry was outdated. Robertson’s views were not shared by Gilbert Stuart. Rather than viewing chivalry as a step towards modernity, Stuart considered the values espoused by chivalry to be rooted in older manners, ‘which we too often despise as rude and ignorant’.32 Belonging to the generation that followed Robertson’s, Stuart’s critique of the linear approach could represent a change in conceptions of progress during the later Enlightenment period. Yet Millar’s work was initially published in 1771 and substantially revised in 1779, one year after Stuart published A View of Society in Europe in its Progress from Rudeness to Refinement (1778). Among the older or ‘prime’ generation of literati there was also a lack of consensus concerning progress; in John Gregory’s 1765 natural history, for instance, he represented the ideal manly character as one that combined attributes of ‘savage’ and ‘civilised’ culture, and he saw this ideal type depicted in Ossian.33 As with luxury, debates concerning the process of progress were ongoing. The question of violence was a critical subject in this debate. A positive view of the violence of the duel and the concept of honour that underpinned it was given by Mackenzie. As editor and author of the Mirror journal produced by the Mirror Club, Mackenzie was able to influence 27

Millar, Origin of the Distinction, 79, 75. Ibid., 57. 29 Robertson, View of the Progress, 60. 30 Ibid., 61. 31 Ibid., 62, 71. 32 Quoted in Silvia Sebastiani, ‘“Race”, women and progress in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 80. 33 Mary Catherine Moran, ‘Between the savage and the civil: Dr John Gregory’s natural history of femininity’, in Knott and Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment, 8–29 28

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Elite Manhood and the Duel 149 public discourse.34 In the 2 March 1779 edition, in a discussion about fencing, Mackenzie proclaimed that as the Mirror ‘has always been a very polite paper’ he was ‘not, therefore, well disposed to bestow on a practice so gentleman-­like as duelling, those severe reprehensions, equally trite and unjust, in which some of my predecessors have disposed themselves’.35 Here Mackenzie places himself within the Enlightenment tradition, while deviating from the condemnation of duelling by literati of the previous generation, including Hume and Ferguson. Mackenzie asserted that although a duel occurs between acquaintances or friends, and is a different expression of fighting skill than meeting an enemy in the field, it is a crucial marker of gentlemanly status. Writing during the American War, Mackenzie lamented that the rapidly increasing size of the military meant that ‘patriotic consideration will tend to relax the etiquette formerly established, for every officer to fight a duel within a few weeks of the date of his commission’.36 For Mackenzie this development necessitated the assumption of an officer’s courage even when it had not been proven, and this was emblematic of an overall loss of gentlemanly character among the expanding officer corps. Writing twenty years earlier, in the context of the Seven Years War, Ferguson shared similar concerns concerning the dilution of the character of the officer corps. In Reflections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia, published anonymously in 1756, the gentry are envisioned as the natural saviours of society’s martial spirit, and they are criticised for failing to fulfil their role in this regard. Ferguson argued that the reason for their loss of the ‘military spirit’ lay in their placement of wealth as the highest marker of social distinction. Emphasising the dominance of ‘Arts and Manufactures’ and the denigration of the military profession due to its limited ­profitability, he asserted that: Even our Gentry have learned to estimate the Profession in the same Manner, and we may well be ashamed to own, how few are to be found in our Army . . . The Profession of Arms, so becoming the Birth and Station of a Gentleman, is not courted, because its profits are trivial.37

Ferguson’s influence can be seen in Mackenzie’s emphasis on the importance of martial virtues, yet Mackenzie’s support for duelling represents a divergence from Ferguson’s position. This support could be read as illustrative of a change in codes of elite masculinity. Michèle Cohen has charted a discursive development towards chivalry and away from politeness from 34

John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse, 25–6. [Henry Mackenzie], Mirror (Edinburgh: William Creech), 2 March 1779, 1 (original italics). 36 Ibid., 2 37 Adam Ferguson, Reflections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia (London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1756), 9. 35

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the late eighteenth century, citing texts such as Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) and Walter Scott’s 1814 ‘Essay on Chivalry’.38 Cohen emphasises that the shift from politeness to chivalry was not total, but that ‘chivalry provided a vocabulary for refashioning the gentleman as masculine, integrating notions of national identity with enlightenment notions of progress and civilisation’.39 Yet, supporting Catriona Kennedy’s findings on masculinity and honour among subaltern officers in the British army, explicit patriotism is largely absent from the masculine identity performed in duels and depicted in court depositions. Duels served to maintain public reputation among a man’s peers rather than to display patriotic virtue.40 Chivalry did, however, inform men’s motivations in duelling and their understanding of this cultural practice. Operating on the periphery of Scottish Enlightenment culture, but firmly within the boundaries of elite manhood, the display of male honour through the duel provided an alternative to a gentlemanly refinement founded on inner sensibility and outward self-­command. The difference between Mackenzie’s attitude towards duelling, and that of his older contemporary Lord Kames, signals the uneasy status of male refinement as a dominant code for masculine social performance. Kames’s attacks on luxury as the cause of social and moral degeneracy, discussed in the Introduction, included a condemnation of duelling. In his chapter on ‘Manners’, Kames asserted that: The frequency of duels in modern times, is no slight symptom of degeneracy: regardless of our country selfishness is exerted without disguise when reputation or character is in question; and a nice sense of honour prompts revenge for every imagined affront without regard to justice. Yet, in a footnote to this discussion, Kames condemns the law’s definition of duellists as outlaws or murderers, stating that a combat between two individual men who ‘have agreed to decide their quarrel by the honourable way’ should be censured ‘by disgrace, not death’.41 Kames did not reject the importance of honour, but he condemned duelling as a means to display it, labelling it selfish.

38

Michèle Cohen, ‘“Manners make the man”: politeness, chivalry and the construction of masculinity, 1750–1830’, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005) 312–29. 39 Cohen, ‘“Manners make the man”’, 315. 40 Catriona Kennedy, ‘John Bull into battle: military masculinity and the British army officer during the Napoleonic wars’, in Karen Hagemann, Gisela Mettele, and Jane Rendall (eds), Gender, War and Politics: Transatlantic Perspectives, 1775–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 127–46, esp. 135. 41 Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, Sketch 5, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1807), i, 335–7.

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Elite Manhood and the Duel 151 Duelling and polite society

To fully understand the impact of divergent ideals and expressions of elite manhood we need to look beyond discourse and examine men’s performance of these discourses in cultural rituals. The following sections examine the relationship between duelling and Georgian urbanity, the social function of duelling in assertions of professional and gentlemanly status, the duel’s place in military culture, and its sociable and public functions. Examining responses to duelling as much as its occurrence, I place the duel in the context of changing patterns of urban society and authority. Duelling was not entirely antithetical to politeness, but it could be viewed as an action that negated the social harmony envisioned within Addisonian ideology. As Rosemary Sweet has established, within ideologies of politeness formulated by the Earl of Shaftesbury and the Spectator, and adopted by philosophers such as Smith and Hume, exposure to conversation and the arts within the sociable context of urban space was crucial not only to politeness but to the civilising project. Politeness was a product and driver of civility within urban elite and upper-­middling society. It provided a code of behaviour that made the varied social relationships required of town life possible.42 Not addressed in Sweet’s analysis is the way in which the same urban spaces, especially social spaces such as the theatre and the assembly hall, could provide occasion for insults to be levied and received which were grounded in notions of reputation and honour rooted more deeply in chivalry than civility. In 1790, at a ball in Edinburgh, Mr MacDonnell felt that Mr MacLeod had looked at him the wrong way, leading to an argument during which MacDonnell hit MacLeod with his cane. This act of violence insulted MacLeod’s bodily autonomy and led to a duel in which MacLeod was killed.43 In a similar case, a duel that resulted in no injuries was precipitated by a scuffle between two men at an Edinburgh theatre in 1794.44 In another case, clearly located in the social processes of urban improvement, in 1797 Mr Anderson and Mr Barker fought a duel in Leith after Barker, a brewer, made sarcastic comments concerning the rules that Anderson had drafted outlining the running of the Leith Assembly Rooms.45 The role of urban space in precipitating conflict is further illustrated by a 1789 court case instigated by James Fennell, an English actor working in Edinburgh. This case ended in a duel between two members of the legal profession, Charles Hope, advocate, and John Wylde, writer. Hope was representing Fennell against a group of Edinburgh lawyers and justices, including Robert Dundas, Lord Advocate, who had sent a letter to the 42

Rosemary H. Sweet, ‘Topographies of politeness’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 12 (2002) 355–74. 43 Stephen Banks, A Polite Exchange of Bullets: The Duel and the English Gentleman (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010), 253. 44 Ibid., 259. 45 Ibid., 261.

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Edinburgh Theatre desiring that Fennell be dismissed from his position as an actor. It was also alleged that, in a related case, thirteen young men, also of the legal profession, had attended the theatre after dining together at an Edinburgh tavern, and once there had seated themselves in the pit with the aim of hissing Fennell off the stage.46 Their anger towards Fennell was due to the fact that he had tried to participate in polite society on an equal footing to the gentlemen. He had been educated at Eton and Cambridge, but for these men the fact that Fennell was an actor made his participation in polite society improper and insulting.47 That Fennell sought redress for the insult he believed he had suffered from the gentlemen, via the courts rather than through interpersonal violence, supports Shoemaker’s claims in reference to London, that as the eighteenth century progressed men became increasingly likely to use the courts rather than their fists, swords, or pistols to settle disputes.48 Yet the case also complicates this narrative; the conflict that led to the duel between Wylde and Hope began in court when Hope, speaking on behalf of Fennell, insulted the writers in what one correspondent referred to as ‘one of the most foolish speeches ever’.49 For the writers the only appropriate response to insults received in a public court was to issue a challenge to duel, which, acting on the group’s behalf, Wylde did. The next day, Wylde and Hope, attended by two seconds, met at Salisbury Crags (just outside Edinburgh’s urban environs). Following the ritual of the duel, the men fired pistols at each other; in this case neither shot was fatal. That the men did not fire again was due to the intervention of the seconds, and the conflict was finally resolved with Hope agreeing to give a public apology.50 As with most of the conflicts examined this chapter, this duel was precipitated by an insult made in public, and it was fought to restore public reputation. That the conflict began in a court room indicates that the public function of urban institutions could lead to violent conflict as well as social cohesion. The Hope–Wylde duel also illustrates the connections between public reputation and professional status. Stephen Banks’s research on England has demonstrated that taken as a social group lawyers were often involved in duelling, particularly during the 1790s. A primary motivator for this participation was a desire to assert their gentlemanly status through participation in an act that they believed reflected a chivalrous honour.51 Belonging to one of the few remaining Scottish institutions following the 1707 Union, members of the Scottish legal profession had a recognised social status and 46

John Clerk of Penicuik to his daughter Margaret, 30 January 1789, NRS, GD18/5486/18/1. Donald Campbell, Playing for Scotland: A History of the Scottish Stage 1765–1965 (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1996), 33. 48 Robert Shoemaker, ‘The taming of the duel: masculinity, honour and ritual violence in London, 1660–1800’, Historical Journal 45(3) (2002) 543–4. 49 GD18/5486/18/1. 50 GD18/5486/18/1. 51 Banks, Polite Exchange, 84. 47

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were integrated by birth and patronage with the landed elite. Supporting Banks’s model regarding the assertion of status and likelihood of duelling activity, duelling among lawyers in Scotland was relatively rare. Yet it did occur occasionally. In addition to the Hope–Wylde conflict, a lengthy property dispute between the Duke of Hamilton and Archibald Douglas (nephew of the Duke of Douglas), which began in the Scottish courts and ended in the House of Lords, precipitated a (eventually non-­fatal) duel in London’s Kensington Gardens in 1769, after Mr Andrew Stewart of the Duke’s legal team was insulted by Mr Edward Thurlow, counsel for Douglas.52 Reflecting the increased wealth and power of the upper strata of their social group in a rapidly commercialising Scotland, tradesmen and merchants were also involved in duelling, particularly in the early nineteenth century. For example, in 1826, a disagreement over a financial transaction led to a duel between two men identified as esquire and by their trade, banker and tanner, respectively.53 In the context of social status, duelling can be understood as an indicator of anxieties concerning rank and status in a Scotland where increased wealth enabled men (albeit a minority of men) to claim the rank of gentleman despite lacking genteel birth. In 1778, Marion Innes wrote from Edinburgh to her brother Robert that: You will read of a Duel in the papers – ’tis Sir Thomas Wallace that has shot a Mr Ross of I don’t know what thro’ the small Guts, the Gentle-­ man who it seems behaved very unlike a Gentleman, is despaired of [dying] and Sir Thomas is fled.54 In eighteenth-­century Britain the status of gentleman became increasingly fluid. An increase in personal wealth, spurred in part by an increasing demand for goods and services, particularly in newly urbanising areas, meant that it was possible for ever growing numbers of men to earn large incomes through mercantile or professional activity. In some cases, this wealth enabled them to purchase property and earn an income from this property, and thus claim the rank of gentleman. In other cases, one’s professional designation itself, as a lawyer or doctor, for example, was enough to claim gentlemanly status.55 Both Robert Shoemaker and Stephen Banks have shown that in England participation in duelling provided a means to assert this status.56 Their respective analyses add fluidity to Victor G. 52

Ibid., 246. Anon., ‘Fatal duel!’ (1826), available from The Word on the Street: Broadsides at the National Library of Scotland, at: http://digital.nls.uk/broadsides/broadside.cfm/id/15371, accessed 21 June 2011. 54 Marion Innes to her brother Robert Innes, Edinburgh, 28 September 1778, GD113/5/505/6. 55 Penelope J. Corfield, Power and the Professions in Britain 1700–1850 (London: Routledge, 1995). 56 Shoemaker, ‘Taming of the duel’, 526; Banks, Polite Exchange, 81–2. 53

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Kiernan’s cultural-­Marxist analysis of the duel as a means of maintaining class cohesion among the elite, arguing that ‘the combatant’s honour merged into the class to which he and his antagonist belonged, and to which they were both enjoying a joint obeisance’.57 The public response to this assertion of gentility was, however, ambiguous; Marion Innes’s comment that Sir Thomas duelled with ‘a Mr Ross of I don’t know what’ suggests a cynical response to the increasing numbers of gentlemen in Edinburgh.58 Duelling and the military The men most often involved in duelling were officers in the British military. Of the thirty-­one duels and challenges in Scotland from 1763 to 1842, for which I have concrete evidence from letters, newspapers, and court documents, officers were key protagonists in eleven, the highest number of any single group. This participation indicates a strong association between military culture and duelling. It was also a class-­specific manifestation of martial manhood. An officer’s martial identity was different to that applied to rank-­and-­file Highland soldiers. Following the defeat of the Jacobite rebellion in 1746 and Highland military service during the Seven Years and American wars, dominant Lowland and English conceptions of Highland manhood shifted from an emphasis on rebellious barbarity towards an image of courageous and loyal soldiers fighting for the British Empire.59 Whilst different to that of the martial Highland soldier, the masculinity of the military duellist was firmly grounded in the martial tradition and was, as Banks states, very ‘attuned to the nuances of honour’.60 To duel was to display the twin characteristics of gentlemanliness and courage necessary to the duties of a military officer.61 As Matthew McCormack has discussed, this connection between politeness and martial manhood in the army is evident in the close association of dancing, particularly the minuet, and military drill.62 Participation in duelling provided a means to assert martial honour and belonging, reaffirming an officer’s status as a gentleman. Scottish officers were integrated into polite society, but their position was sometimes 57

Victor G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 15. 58 For the profits made by Scotsmen through trade and commerce and resulting social mobility, see T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire 1600–1815 (London: Penguin, 2003), 330–4. 59 Rosalind Carr, ‘The gentleman and the soldier: patriotic masculinities in eighteenthcentury Scotland’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 28(2) (2008) 102–21; Robert Clyde, From Rebel to Hero: The Image of the Highlander 1745–1830 (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1995). 60 Banks, Polite Exchange, 79; see also Frevert, Men of Honour, 36–82. 61 Shoemaker, ‘Taming of the duel’, 536; see also Kiernan, Duel. 62 Matthew McCormack, ‘Dance and drill: polite accomplishments and military masculinity in Georgian Britain’, Cultural and Social History 8(3) (2011) 315–30.

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uneasy; their status as officers, and the wealth earned from their commissions meant that they were able to assert a genteel social status, but they often risked indebtedness in order to maintain the material requirements of polite society.63 The entrance of officers into polite society is depicted in contemporary novels such as Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), where characters such as Captain Lishmahago are depicted as rough but gallant, and with a particular concern for the maintenance of their honour. The social function of duelling in asserting courage and status is particularly apparent in the context of the Napoleonic Wars when the rapid expansion of the military made precarious the relationship between officer status and gentlemanliness.64 As in the seventeenth century, it is likely that the expansion of the military caused martial honour codes to filter down the social scale.65 Supporting this contention is an upturn in instances of duelling in Scotland during the French and Napoleonic wars. This upturn follows a similar pattern to that seen in England, where Banks notes a significant increase in duels recorded in The Times.66 Ireland also witnessed increased involvement of military men in duelling in the early years of the nineteenth century, but in this case there was a concurrent drop in the number of gentlemen involved in duelling and therefore no overall upturn.67 At all points in eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­century Scotland, military men made up the majority of duellists, and more officers meant more duels. Of the thirty-­one recorded duels in Scotland, thirteen occurred between 1795 and 1815. Illustrating the popularity of duelling among officers in Scotland during the Napoleonic Wars are four duels fought in 1805. One was fought in Kirkliston by two officers stationed at Edinburgh Castle; in this case, ‘After exchanging shots, the matter was amicably adjusted, by the interference of the seconds, in a manner honourable to both parties.’68 The second duel occurred in Aberdeen between a junior militia officer and a resident of the town.69 Two more were fought in Musselburgh, near to Edinburgh: the first, on 8 October, was between two members of the military who are not given any designation in the newspaper report, and which was not fatal; the other, on 10 October, was fought by Lieutenant Nimmo of the Berwickshire 63

Stana Nenadic, ‘The impact of military professions on Highland gentry families, c. 1730– 1830’, Scottish Historical Review 85(1) (2006) 85–7. 64 Kennedy, ‘John Bull’, 129–31. 65 Keith M. Brown, ‘Gentlemen and thugs in seventeenth-­century Britain’, History Today 40(10) (1990) 29. 66 Banks, Polite Exchange, 70; see also Kiernan, Duel, 190–1. 67 Kelly, That Damn’d Thing, 228. 68 Aberdeen Journal, 27 March 1805. 69 ‘Letters and papers regarding conduct of Lt. Col. William C. C. Graham, 28th Militia, in connection with a duel between Ensign Livingstone and Mr. Booth of Aberdeen’, 1805–6, NRS, GD22/3/337.

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militia and Lieutenant Blacklock of the Dumfriesshire militia. In this case, Blacklock was shot in both thighs and mortally wounded; Nimmo absconded.70 The inclusion of militia officers in these cases should not surprise us; as Banks has discussed, militia officers shared the same honour code as regular officers and were accorded the same rights of satisfaction.71 There was a certain ambiguity and contestation regarding the social status of militia officers in comparison with regular officers, with the lack of skill and battle-­proven courage of the former derogated by the latter.72 In this context, it is probable that militia officers sought to assert an equal status through adherence to a martial honour code that encouraged the display of courage through the ritual of duelling. This ritual is described by Mackenzie in his Mirror article on duelling by officers. In his exposition, Mackenzie pays ‘infinitely more regard to their [the rituals] honour, than their safety’, and, emphasising the importance of fair play, he is critical of those who aim their weapons. Significantly, different levels of insult required different responses; in duels fought with swords ‘a blow, or the lie direct, can scarcely be expiated but by a thrust through the body; but any lesser affront may be wiped off by a wound in the sword-­arm; or, if the injury be very slight any wound will be sufficient’. In this circumstance, reparation is paid when either party receives the wound. In the case of pistol duels, the nature of the insult should regulate the distance men stood from each other, with ‘those of atrocious sort, [requiring] a distance of only twenty feet’.73 The ritual of duelling as represented by Mackenzie offered a means to settle disputes between men and to display honourable courage. It is significant that Mackenzie’s outline of the ritual of the duel occurred in the context of his reflections on the expansion of the officer corps during the American War. In Shoemaker’s examination of violence in London, he states that officers were particularly encouraged to engage in duelling because they ‘were keen to maintain their authority over their fellow soldiers’.74 Before we can properly ascertain incidences of duelling among Scottish officers, more research is needed on duelling by officers posted elsewhere in the British Isles and overseas. Initial examples include a duel between two Scottish officers, Major Campbell (cousin of the Earl of Breadalbane) and Captain Boyd, in Northern Ireland in 1808, following a quarrel in the mess and resulting in the death of Boyd. In this case, Campbell was found guilty by a jury and executed. The severity with which Campbell was treated, relative to similar cases, was probably due to the 70

Scots Magazine (Edinburgh: Archibald & Co., 1805), vol. 67, 965. Banks, Polite Exchange of Bullets, 91. 72 Matthew McCormack, ‘Stamford standoff: honour, status and rivalry in the Georgian military’, in Kevin Linch and Matthew McCormack (eds), Britain’s Soldiers: Rethinking War and Society 1715–1815 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, forthcoming 2014). 73 Mirror, vol. 11, 3. 74 Shoemaker, ‘Male honour’, 196. 71

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fact that the conflict was a disorderly one, fought immediately after the altercation, without allowing Boyd time to acquire a second or settle his affairs.75 The ritual of the duel – standing at paces and shooting without aiming – was crucial to its place within chivalric masculinity. The duel had to be honourable in practice. In 1805, Lieutenant William Cunningham Graham was brought before the military’s Board of Enquiry concerning a duel between an Aberdeen resident and Ensign Livingston, a junior militia officer under Graham’s command. Graham was accused of encouraging the duel; this accusation, he stated, was not only ‘ruinous to him as a soldier but highly prejudicial to his character as a Gentleman’.76 The crucial issue was not whether Graham had encouraged the conflict and the subsequent duel. Instead, the circumstances which threatened Graham’s ‘character both as a Soldier and a Gentleman’ centred upon whether he encouraged his junior officer to fight the duel by unfair means, specifically by ‘inhumanly taking the life of his antagonist by calling to him at the moment he was about to Discharge his pistols that it was uncocked, and taking advantage thereof as it is expressed to tumble his adversary’. Graham stated that he was not acquainted with Booth, the Aberdeen resident killed in the duel, and so it was ridiculous to suggest that he could be guilty of such ‘barbarity’ as to ‘advise a person who was about to meet with him, on an affair of honour, basely to assassinate him after throwing him off his guard’.77 Here the illegality of the duel was not at issue, what was crucial was the question of honour and whether it was a fair fight. In addition to officers, other military men, including surgeons, could become embroiled in honour disputes. In 1810, a regimental surgeon, Mr Cahill, fought a duel with an officer, Mr Rutherford at Hadgton. Rutherford had made a formal complaint against Cahill, accusing him of taking newspapers from the officers’ mess into his private rooms. Offended by the complaint, Cahill accused Rutherford of holding a grudge against him. Finding this defamatory, Rutherford challenged Cahill to duel. They duly fought and Rutherford was killed. Cahill was charged with murder but later acquitted.78 In many respects this is a typical case, reflecting a need among the military elite to answer negative aspersions cast on their personal honour publicly.79

75

Kiernan, Duel, 123–4. GD22/3/337. 77 GD22/3/337. 78 Banks, Polite Exchange, 272; ‘High Court Minute Books’, NRS, JC8/8. Cahill was acquitted at the High Court of Justiciary on 2 February 1811, with two jurors in dissent. 79 Arthur N. Gilbert, ‘Law and honour among eighteenth-­century British army officers’, Historical Journal 19(1) (1976) 75–87. 76

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The social functions of the duel The Rutherford–Cahill dispute was caused by a conflict over the shared use of space and resources, suggesting that duelling in the military was encouraged by a culture that combined gentlemanly martial values with the everyday annoyances of living conditions in barracks.80 Although typically associated with the feminine, the home remained an important site of male authority across the eighteenth century, and men’s achievement of domestic oeconomy was indicative of their achievement of masculine self-­governance.81 Having to share domestic space with other men rather than a wife, children, and servants could thus be a cause of anxiety for officers concerning their status and authority. In this case, anxiety over shared space resulted in a duel. Cahill’s lack of respect for the rules of conduct within the sociable space of the officers’ mess was the likely provocation of Rutherford’s initial complaint. This complaint was made through formal channels, but when it was responded to with a personal insult that undermined Rutherford’s probity a socially accepted response was to engage in the ritual of the duel. In a similar case in 1801, Captain Murray (cousin to Lord Cathcart) fought a non-­fatal duel in Hamburg with Sir Samuel Hannay after a ‘trifling dispute’ in a public room. In this case, the duel was fought after some fellow officers decided that it was ‘not exactly consistent with military regulation to be reconciled without fighting’.82 Being cast as dishonourable within a community of officers could lead to social ostracism. Where a duel was required to reassert honour, it had an explicit social function in encouraging adherence to officers’ shared culture. This ‘adherence to a shared code of military duty’ was, as Kennedy emphasises, crucial to men’s construction of an honourable identity that was mirrored by their fellow officers, and where courage was paramount.83 Duelling proved a man’s courage, and although the Articles of War officially prohibited it, it was socially sanctioned and was sometimes demanded by the military’s unofficial ‘honour code’.84 Duelling’s place within military culture was not restricted to the barracks, and its appearance in public urban space could excite popular condemnation. This is illustrated by a poem published anonymously around 1720 as a broadside lamenting the deaths of Captain Chiefly and Lieutenant Moody in a duel fought with swords on Edinburgh’s Canongate:85

80

Kennedy, ‘John Bull’, 132. Karen Harvey, ‘Men making home: masculinity and domesticity in eighteenth-­century Britain’, Gender & History 21(3) (2009) 520–40. 82 Caledonian Mercury, 14 September 1801. 83 Kennedy, ‘John Bull’, 134. 84 Gilbert, ‘Law and honour’, 79–84; Kennedy, ‘John Bull’, 135. 85 Kiernan, Duel, p. 123. 81

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Elite Manhood and the Duel 159 Let deepest Sorrow dictate every Word, Each sentence savor of the fatal sword Joy quite forgot, let no such thing be here, Sound sad Quarelas O ye Tragick Quier While I do Write, and Weep and Write again Two sons of Mars, who bravely fought in late campaigns Withstood their Foes, and fors’t their fronteer Lines. Brave martial spirits, tho mid’st Death and Wounds, They did not fear to Face the French Platouns, But fought for Honour and for Laural Crowns. Till War determin’d in a happy Peace Ah! Peace for them open’d for Death a Door, Now cursed Wrath doth dearest friends Disjoint Each ’gainst his Fellows Breast presents his Points Brave Cheifly, why was Fate to thee so Cruel To suffer thee to Die as doth a Fool Escapt in Fight, and yet fell in a Duel. Or why dear Moody now doth Fortune Scoff, Which once assisted thee to carry off Thy colours from the Proud insulting Foes, Regardless of their Fury or their Blows.86

In this poem, courage in the face of the violence of warfare is celebrated and placed in comparison to the lamentable passions of duelling that turn friend against friend and result in unnecessary death. The author separates martial honour from the individual honour that men mistakenly sought to assert through the duel. That the poem was published as a broadside suggests that a public appetite for a celebration of martial culture which condemned duelling existed in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Duelling was less common in Scotland than it was in England or Ireland (with duelling most popular in the latter, reaching a height of over 300 duels between 1771 and 1790).87 Reasons for the relatively low levels of duelling include the fact that Scotland did not have a parliament, making its capital an unlikely site for politically motivated duels such as those seen in London or, prior to 1801, in Dublin. That there were relatively fewer duels than in England or Ireland, may also have been a result of Scotland’s Presbyterian religious context, and it is certainly significant that the primary anti-­duelling text of the period, The History and Examination of Duels (1720), was written by a Scottish minister, John Cockburn, Doctor of Divinity.88 86

Anon., Poem on the much lamented Death of Captain Chiefly and Lieutenant Moody (ca. 1720). Kelly, That Damn’d Thing, 127. 88 Andrew, ‘Code of honour’, 417. 87

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Yet we should not place too much emphasis on the religious context, for Ireland and England were far from secular countries. More likely to have driven down duelling rates in Scotland is the fact that most duellists were army officers, and most Scottish regiments were posted overseas. Outside events also affected responses to duelling in Scotland. An apparent increase in the prosecution of duellists in the early years of the nineteenth century reflects a democratising tendency in the enforcement of social order in Scotland in response to the French Revolution and local radical agitation during the 1790s.89 In 1805, it was reported in the Scots Magazine that ‘two Gentlemen were brought before the Court of Police at Edinburgh, charged with having given and accepted a challenge, which they admitted’. For this crime they were fined and bound over to keep the peace. Citing an act conferring new powers on the Edinburgh police, ‘the leading principle of which is the prevention of crimes of every kind and all offences against peace and good order’, the judge stated that he felt it was his duty to repress duelling. His ability to do so was facilitated by the new Act, which gave judges the power to ‘punish by fine, by imprisonment in the Tollbooth of Edinburgh, or by commitment to Bridewell, all offences against peace and good order’.90 That the men before the judge in this instance were issued with a fine rather than imprisonment was because it was ‘the first instance of a challenge or a duel’ which had been brought before this judge. The motivations for this crackdown were that: all respect of persons must be attached to their strict observance of the laws of their country, and those who bid defiance to the laws, in whatever station they may otherwise be placed, are equal in that respect, and ought equally to feel the force of those laws which they contemn.91 The judge’s desire to make duellists face the legal consequences of their actions reflects a discursive development in the late eighteenth century, examined by Donna Andrew, in which an ‘outpouring of opposition’ criticised the principles of the code of honour and argued instead for an egalitarian rule of law. The rejection of duelling within this discourse was in part caused by the very characteristics that made it desirable to some gentlemen; namely, its rituals limited it, and, by extension, the claiming of honour and special status before the law, to men of the elite.92 In the judge’s verdict recorded in the Scots Magazine, we have a clear assertion that no man is above the law, no matter what his status in society might be. 89

David J. Brown, ‘The government response to Scottish radicalism, 1792–1802’, in Bob Harris (ed.), Scotland in the Age of the French Revolution (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2005), 117. 90 Scots Magazine (1805), vol. 67, 644. 91 Ibid. 92 Andrew, ‘Code of honour’, 420–3.

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Elite Manhood and the Duel 161 Violence and rank As a display of honour rather than strength, duelling was regulated and highly ritualised violence, serving to differentiate it (at least in perception) from lower-­class violence and thereby assert the social privilege of the participants.93 To challenge a man to duel was to assert an equality of genteel rank. In 1774, when the lawyer, diarist, and biographer, James Boswell Esquire was critical of Scotland’s Lord-­Justice Clerk in an anonymous article published in the London Chronicle, he was accused of defamation by the Lord Justice’s son and challenged to a duel. In his response, Boswell accepted that the perceived defamation required him to accept the challenge, but he was vexed ‘that I had a boy for my antagonist’. His challenger was ‘an effeminate-­looking creature’ and not really a man, therefore to fight him would make Boswell look ridiculous.94 This judgement was supported by Boswell’s cousin, who informed him that ‘to fight with a boy would be like fighting with a footman, as no honour could be had by it’.95 Removed of its function as a means to display and defend manly honour, this duel had no purpose for Boswell and with the help of friends he successfully avoided a physical conflict by offering an apology to the boy, which was accepted. In this case, it was age rather than social status that undermined a challenge to duel. In other cases, it was difference in rank that made duelling an impossibility. Even when both men’s rank was considered sufficient for them to engage in a duel, differentiations of status between men of elite rank could inform later representations of the conflict. In a pamphlet published to defend Major Alexander Campbell’s posthumous honour after he was executed for murdering Captain Boyd in a duel, the anonymous author stressed that Campbell was a man ‘of signal humanity and generosity of character’, and that he was ‘jealous of his honour as a Highland Gentleman’.96 He therefore did not deserve severe exemplary punishment; indeed, Boyd was more to blame. Boyd had become an officer by merit, and thus he ‘had probably been less accustomed to govern and suppress his feelings than those who had been always subjected to the restraints of refined society’.97 It was, the author maintained, this lack of refinement that caused Boyd to reject Campbell’s offer of reconciliation. Criticising the guilty verdict of an Irish jury, the author draws on Enlightenment notions of generosity and self-­ command, and uses them in a class-­specific manner to impute that Boyd’s behaviour was more violent and therefore more blameworthy. Despite the 93

Frevert, Men of Honour, 3; Kiernan, Duel. James Boswell Esq., James Boswell’s Edinburgh Journals 1767–1786, ed. Hugh Milne (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 2001), 167. 95 Boswell, Edinburgh Journals, 168. 96 Anon., A Short Vindication of the Memory of the Late Major Alexander Campbell of the 21st Regiment of Foot (Edinburgh: George Ramsay, 1810), p. 11 (original emphasis). 97 Ibid., 22. 94

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fact that they were both equally drunk when the argument and subsequent duel took place, ‘the suddenness of the meeting was owing entirely to the violence of Captain Boyd’.98 As well as informing perceptions of the duel, social class influenced men’s specific expressions of public violence. This is illustrated by a duel fought in 1790 between Mr Simon Macrae and Sir George Ramsay, and reported in the Scots Magazine. The conflict began when Macrae felt that he had been insulted by Lady Ramsay’s footman at the Edinburgh theatre, and responded to this insult by beating the footman. Macrae later apologised to Ramsay, but in the meantime the footman, James Merry had begun legal proceedings against Macrae for assault. Macrae then demanded that Ramsay intervene and stop the prosecution, which Ramsay refused. This led to Macrae sending a friend, Mr Amory, to inform Ramsay that Macrae looked upon him ‘not as a gentleman, but, the contrary, as a scoundrel’. Ramsay then decided that the only honourable action was that he and Armoury would met at Bayles coffeehouse to set ‘a place of meeting’, where it was agreed that Ramsay and Macrae would duel at Wards, Musselburgh, the next day. This they duly did; standing about 14 yards apart ‘they both fired at the same instant’, and Ramsay was mortally wounded.99 The Macrae–Ramsay duel was an organised and highly ritualistic affair; it did not occur immediately after the first provocation, but was the result of a series of events. Yet the duel’s rituals, and its cold-­rather than hot-­ bloodedness, should not blind us to its possible similarities with other manifestations of male violence. The event which began the whole affair, Macrae’s assault of Ramsay’s servant, was a public act of violence. It is significant that Macrae’s beating of the footman is included in reporting of the incident in order to highlight Macrae’s excessive sense of honour, but it was the duel which followed that attracted the greatest censure. Nonetheless, Merry’s act of seeking to charge Macrae with assault demonstrates that the lower classes were not without legal recourse, and did not consider their low place in the social hierarchy to mean that they lacked legal protection from acts of bodily violence, including those perpetrated by their social superiors. Lyndal Roper has recently called on cultural historians to reintegrate the body into history.100 Duelling is one social ritual where the physical experience was a crucial component not just in the act itself, but in the events that led to a challenge. Challenges to duel frequently resulted from one man infringing upon another’s physical autonomy, such as hitting him with a cane or poker. In these cases the infringement provided the trigger 98

Ibid., 73–4. Scots Magazine (April 1790), vol. 52, 206–7; Herbert Maxwell, ‘Duel between Sir George Ramsay and Captain Macrae’, Scottish Historical Review 14(56) (1917), 301–39; copy of correspondence between Macrae and Ramsay, 3 April 1790, NRS, GD113/5/136c/3. 100 Lyndal Roper, ‘Beyond discourse theory’, Women’s History Review 19(2) (2010), 307–19. 99

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point at which the duel became the necessary response to preserve public honour. This importance of physical autonomy to public honour is further evidenced by punishments for various crimes, such as the ritual of being publicly whipped through the streets. Physical autonomy was thus important across classes, though how it was infringed and defended differed. In the case of Macrae’s assault on Merry, we can see that rank did not give customary legitimacy to acts of assault. Where rank played a prominent role was in Merry’s response to this violence. A crucial characteristic of duelling was the assumption of social equality between the two protagonists; Merry, a servant, could not challenge Macrae to duel. Merry did eventually succeed in his assault claim and was awarded damages in February 1792, but by this stage Macrae had fled to France to avoid murder charges after killing Ramsay.101 By accusing Macrae of assault, Merry asserted a certain legal equality but not a social equality. Organised fights, whether boxing, duelling, or brawling, typically occurred between men of similar ranks. In a 2001 article, using cases from late seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century London, Shoemaker places elite violence within a general pattern of violent behaviour among men, and argues that men’s fighting was indicative of ‘commonly held understandings of male honour’.102 In Edinburgh, the duels that received attention in the ­newspaper media also occurred within a continuum of male violence. This continuum is illustrated by disorderly violence among soldiers and officers. The violence of the battlefield may have been viewed as legitimate, and was often glorified and sentimentalised, and the rituals of the duel signalled the same notions of honour and courageous violence. However, the violence of army officers could be anything but honourable. In April 1760, the Caledonian Mercury reported that: [on] Saturday night, an acting recruiting serjeant, belonging to some of the corps of Highlanders here [Edinburgh], endeavouring to enlist a journeyman weaver, at the head of Leith-­wynd, the poor fellow making some resistance, the rascal cut him so desperately with his broad sword in several places of his body, that he was carried off almost dead and expired the next morning. The villain immediately absconded.103 Through this act of violence, lacking ritual and not enacted against a personal or national enemy, the officer concerned acted not as an honourable gentleman, but as a ‘rascal’ and a ‘villain’. Accepting that military men could engage in dishonourable violence bordering on the disorderly, we also need to accept that concepts of martial honour could be transmitted to common soldiers as well as to 101

Maxwell, ‘Duel’, 309. Shoemaker, ‘Male honour’, 198–200. 103 Caledonian Mercury, 14 April 1760. 102

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officers. This ideal was embodied in the loyal Highland soldier; in the 10–17 March 1760 edition of the Glasgow Journal an advertisement was placed encouraging men to enlist in Keith’s battalion of Highland volunteers. They would be given ‘three guineas bounty money and a crown to drink his majesty’s health, they have new arms, good cloathes, and everything fit to equip them as brave Highlanders. God Save the King.’104 The idea of the brave, loyal Highland soldier is largely a myth developed in the second half of the eighteenth century and finding full expression in the nineteenth, is founded upon notions of an inherent propensity to violence among men of Celtic ethnicity. Yet soldiering was not an alien occupation to Highland men, and so we should not assume that martial values had no currency among them.105 At the Circuit Court of the High Court of Justiciary at Inveraray in May 1760, Duncan McPharlane, a soldier in the Argyllshire Fencibles, was indicted for the murder of Chelsea pensioner, John Campbell, ‘by a stroke with the foot on the belly, of which he died’.106 Away from the battlefield, the violence of common soldiers lacked obvious ritual, making their expression of martial honour in interpersonal violence less obvious. Yet, despite its apparent lack of ritual, we should not assume that fights such as this were not motivated by honour disputes. Contemporary understandings of the impact of class on the character of honour disputes between men can be gleaned from Smollett’s Humphry Clinker. In this epistolary novel, following a gentry family on a tour of Britain, there are number of duels and near duels; all of these are motivated by honour disputes, including Jeremy Melford’s defence of his sister Lydia’s honour following the advances of a man he believed to be an actor. Yet duelling is not always presented as the correct course of action to restore honour. During the journey to Scotland, Clinker, a footman (and, it is later revealed, natural son) of Squire Matthew Bramble, finds himself in conflict with Jeremy Melford’s valet over the affections of Winifred Jenkins, maid servant of Bramble’s sister. The valet, Mr Dutton, had taken Jenkins to the theatre in Newcastle, with both of them aping the high fashion of their social superiors. Yet realising ‘their real character and condition’ the local people ‘hissed and hooted all the way, and Mrs Jenkins was bespattered with dirt’, and called Jenkins a painted Jezebel. Holding Dutton to blame for Jenkins’s disgrace, Clinker upbraided him. Considering this reproach to be bad manners, Dutton threatened to horsewhip Clinker. In response, Clinker requested permission from Dutton’s master, James Melford, to fight Dutton. 104

Glasgow Journal, 10–17 March 1760. Andrew Mackillop, ‘For king, country and regiment? Motive and identity in Highland soldiering 1745–1815’, in Steve Murdoch and Andrew Mackillop (eds) Fighting for Identity: Scottish Military Experience c. 1150–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 186–210. 106 Glasgow Journal, 5–12 May 1760. 105

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Elite Manhood and the Duel 165 In this scene, Clinker accepts Melford’s ultimate control over Dutton’s physical autonomy, and explicitly recognises the impact of rank on legitimate expressions of violence. Informing Melford that he has been ­challenged to ‘fight him [Dutton] at sword point’, Clinker asserts that it doth not become servants to use those weapons, or to claim the privilege of gentleman to kill one another when they fall out; moreover I would not have his blood upon my conscience for ten thousand times the profit or satisfaction I should get from his death.’107

Considering duelling to be inappropriate to his class and against his religious convictions, Clinker instead engaged Dutton in a fist fight. That honour was at stake is not questioned by any of the protagonists, and ­significantly the dispute was precipitated by Dutton’s and Jenkins’s visit to the theatre, a space often associated with polite society. The simultaneous convergence and differentiation of elite and lower-­class culture highlighted in this short scene was mirrored in reality. The forms of violence a man engaged in depended on his social position and that of his antagonist. Public honour, popular culture and the law The importance of the defence of honour was accepted in Enlightenment discourse. Smith, for example, did not discount the duel’s place in honour culture; indeed, he saw the causes of duelling in the failure of the law to properly address honour-­related offences. In Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), he condemned resentment as an ‘unsocial’ passion, but qualified this with the assertion that a man who did not defend himself against serious insult was a just target for social disapprobation.108 Following a similar line of argument, in his Lectures on Jurisprudence delivered at the University of Glasgow in the 1760s, Smith depicted an attack on one’s ‘reputation or good name’ as an infringement of an individual’s natural rights. He argued that the law failed to properly recognise the seriousness of affronts to reputation and gave ‘but a very small satisfaction for them’. Emphasising the inadequacy of legal sanctions for actions that insulted honour as well as assaulting the body, such as spitting in someone’s face, punching them in the face, or pulling their nose, Smith cited the levying of small fines of around £10.109 From Smith’s perspective, duelling was a social problem that could best be addressed through a change in the law. Reflective of Smith’s stadialist approach to progress, following legal change a change in manners would 107

Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1771] 2009), 209–10. 108 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759, revised 1790), available from the Library of Economics and Liberty, at: http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smMS.html, I.II.23, accessed 5 January 2013. 109 Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982), 122.

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follow. Here we can see a strong similarity in views concerning the impact of the law on social practice and social progress with those of his contemporary Hume, who wrote that: ‘From law arises security: From security curiosity: And from curiosity knowledge. The latter steps of this progress may be accidental; but the former are altogether necessary.’110 As with more ­explicitly disorderly violence, such as fights, duels undermined the authority of the law and therefore undermined the progress of civility. Gentlemen do not appear in the Tolbooth books which record people arrested on the street and briefly imprisoned before being banished from the city (sometimes whipped), or occasionally released on a bond of good behaviour. It is likely that elite men did occasionally fight in the streets, but they were unlikely to be arrested for disorder. Edinburgh was policed by salaried city guards, and their low social status meant that they lacked manly independence and did not have customary authority to arrest higher ranking men for petty crime.111 As with drinking, the distinctions of social class ensured that elite men’s non-­lethal violence was not viewed as disorderly. Yet the threat of disorder was always apparent within homosocial culture, hence the importance of polite conduct in spaces such as intellectual clubs. Young men drinking together in a tavern were likely to behave differently than they would in a drawing room or assembly hall where ladies were present. In fact, the emphasis so often placed by Enlightenment theorists on the civilising influence of women implies an assumption that all-­ male company could be a source for ill-­mannered behaviour among elite men. Homosocial drinking was an important part of male sociability, but it could lead to social conflict, as illustrated by a duel in 1763 between two gentleman farmers in Aberdeen.112 James Abernethy of Mayen had been drinking with other gentlemen at Campbell’s Tavern in Aberdeen’s Castlegate when he clashed with James Leith of Leith Hall. According to the deposition of John Richardson to whose house Abernethy had gone shortly after the duel, the quarrel began when Leith accused Abernethy of starting a rumour that he had sold mixed meal to a Captain Forbes, an act which, if true, undermined Leith’s status as an honest man worthy of financial and social credit. Abernethy, finding the accusation that he had slandered Leith insulting, claimed that it was a ‘Damned falsehood for he never had said any such thing, and they were a Liar that said it.’113 This conflict then escalated into a situation in which 110

Hume, ‘Rise and progress’, 119. David G. Barrie and Susan Broomhall, ‘Policing bodies in urban Scotland, 1780–1850’, in Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline van Ghent (eds), Governing Masculinities in the Early Modern Period: Regulating Selves and Others (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 266–7. 112 Karen Harvey, ‘Barbarity in a tea cup? Punch, domesticity and gender in the eighteenth century’, Journal of Design History 21(3) (2008) 205–21; Stana Nenadic, ‘Middle-­rank consumers and domestic culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow 1720–1840’, Past and Present 145 (1994) 147–51. 113 ‘Precognition Taken at Banff’, 11 February 1764, NRS, GD248/82/3, 7. 111

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Leith challenged Abernethy to duel, and despite attempts by friends to avert it, the duel was fought almost immediately with pistols and resulted in Leith’s death. Importantly in terms of class and male violence, this duel did not follow the ritual whereby men would retreat and meet to fight a day or so later, often in a space outside the urban area. Instead, the duel that took place between Abernethy and Leith occurred very soon after the argument (once the servants had collected pistols), and they fought in the town near to the tavern, presumably while still drunk.114 The duel’s place in everyday culture is indicated by a macabre incident in Edinburgh, in June 1804, when two young brothers got hold of loaded pistols and played at duelling, resulting in one of them being shot dead.115 As indicated by newspaper reports and its inclusion in people’s correspondence, duelling was a subject of public interest. Scottish newspapers not only reported Scottish duels, but also those that occurred in England, Ireland, the continent, India, and North America. In addition to reporting duels, the public nature of newspapers made them a possible source of insult. In the Caledonian Mercury newspaper on 24 January 1801, they reported a possible duel near Perth between Lieutenant R. and Mr R., merchant, taking pains to convey that this was not yet authenticated.116 The following Thursday, the paper reported that ‘we have received a letter, stating that a duel was likely to have taken place there between Lieutenant R. and Mr R. but that it really did not happen’. They then apologised to the correspondent ‘for not inserting all that he has transmitted upon that subject, as we rather wish to allay rather than foment a quarrel’.117 The editors of the Caledonian Mercury were aware of the possible personal impact of the popular press, and they took care to designate the men as Lieutenant R. and Mr R. rather than report their names. However, press anonymity was often thinly veiled. This is apparent in the ‘Whig Song’ written by Alexander Boswell of Auchinlek (the eldest son of James Boswell) and published in the Glasgow Sentinel. According to contemporary reports, the target of the poem, James Stuart, ascertained that Boswell was the author of the libellous text after he saw papers written by Boswell containing ‘obnoxious passages as to Mr Stuart’s character’.118 Stuart then confronted Boswell demanding he either deny his authorship or apologise and declare his song a squib and regain Stuart’s friendship. It was Boswell’s refusal to submit to these demands that led to the duel in which he was killed.119 114

Ibid. Aberdeen Journal, 8 June 1803. 116 Caledonian Mercury, 24 January 1801. 117 Caledonian Mercury, 29 January 1801. 118 Deposition of John Douglass, reported in ‘Trial and Acquittal’ (1822), available in Word on the Street, at: http://digital.nls.uk/broadsides/broadside.cfm/id/14682, accessed 21 June 2011. 119 ‘The Whole Particulars of the Trial of Mr James Stuart’ (1822), available in Word on the 115

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Stuart’s trial for murder in 1822 was widely reported in newspapers and broadsides, attesting to its popular appeal. A duel between two gentlemen was a sensational affair, with one broadside reporting that the court was full throughout the 18-­hour trial, while outside ‘Parliament Square was almost filled with people’.120 Reflecting the sympathetic treatment of Stuart in the press, these crowds cheered when Stuart was found not guilty of murder. Not only did Stuart have popular support for his actions, but he was acquitted by the unanimous decision of a jury, which included eleven gentlemen, two merchants, a clothier, and an ironmonger.121 Stuart achieved wide social support not only though an emphasis on Boswell’s unwillingness to apologise, but through performing sensibility. When his defence counsel, Mr Cockburn, spoke of Boswell’s death, Stuart is reported to have ‘burst into tears’,122 and Cockburn stated that ‘not a friend of the deceased had felt such poignant anguish at his heart’. Stuart had acted only out of ‘moral necessity’.123 As represented in court, Stuart’s motivation to duel, and his response to its outcome, blended sensibility and chivalry, and the broad public support for Stuart suggests that they accepted that his actions were a legitimate expression of his gentlemanly honour. In his closing address, Stuart’s defence counsel is reported to have argued that his acquittal was ‘consistent with the principals of the law’.124 Technically this was not the case, but the acquittal was consistent with the treatment of duellists in the courts. Duelling was a capital crime in Scots law. In his 1819 Commentaries of the Laws of Scotland, David Hume (nephew of the philosopher and historian, David Hume Esquire) explains that ‘where a duel takes place on a challenge, and is followed by the death of one of the parties, it is murder in the survivor, how fair and equal soever the manner of conducting the combat’.125 In strict legal terms whether the fight was fair may not have been of consequence, but the Stuart case illustrates that honour was crucial to popular understandings of the duel and influenced legal outcomes. Duellists did not, however, necessarily feel certain of acquittal, as shown by their propensity to abscond after the event. In 1801, Godfrey Margarey, late ensign in the 3rd North British or Lanarkshire militia, and Edward Bagnet Harvey O’Keefe, late lieutenant in the 71st Regiment of Foot, failed to appear in court ‘after being sundry times called’ to face murder charges for killing Street, at: http://digital.nls.uk/broadsides/broadside.cfm/id/15322, accessed 21 June 2011. 120 ‘The Late Duel’ (1822), NLS Broadsides, available at: http://digital.nls.uk/broadsides/ broadside.cfm/id/14682/criteria/the%20late%20duel, accessed 21 June 2011. 121 Ibid. 122 Ibid. 123 ‘Trial and Acquittal’. 124 Ibid. 125 David Hume, Commentaries on the Law of Scotland Respecting Crimes (Edinburgh: Law Society of Scotland, [1819] 1986 reprint), 442.

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Lieutenant Stewart Watson in a duel in the Dundee area, with Margarey the chief protagonist and O’Keefe his second. The men were publicly declared outlaws and fugitives, with all their moveable goods and gear forfeited to the crown.126 Whereas the Margarey–O’Keefe case suggests a willingness of court authorities to act against duellists, this does not fit the pattern emerging from the cases that went to trial; Macdonnell was acquitted in 1790, Cahill in 1810, Stuart in 1822, and Landale in 1826. Jurors’ tendency to acquit duellists was recognised as a problem by contemporaries who opposed duelling. In an 1805 letter to the editor of the Scots Magazine, entitled ‘Plan for the Prevention of Duelling in Edinburgh’, the author emphasises that the laws concerning duelling are sufficient; the problem was that the law was not being enforced. He singles out juries for particular criticism, accusing jurists of being ‘influenced by pity for the individual, forgetting that compassion to one may be cruelty to many, or overawed by the opinion of the world respecting the crime’. The author, a ‘student of law’, asserted that if juries would avoid compassion and execute the law, ‘it would soon put an end to this pernicious practice’. Although duellists are clearly unafraid of dying, ignominious death by execution would prove a severe enough deterrent, as would commitment to Bridewell: A bully, or coffeehouse lounger, would perhaps think picking oakum for a few weeks a very insipid amusement, and not very honourable; and perhaps he might not very much relish, to have his head shaved, to be fed upon coarse bread and broth, to be bathed in cold water every week whether he chooses it or not. This experience might convince ‘gentlemen of fashion’ to avoid duelling and make Edinburgh ‘the first city in the empire that shakes off this remain of barbarism’.127 That the author felt the need to write the above letter suggests that, like elsewhere in Europe, in Scotland duelling enjoyed what Frevert refers to as ‘customary legitimacy’.128 Despite its place in popular culture, the illegality of duelling meant that duels normally occurred away from central city spaces. In the case of Edinburgh, places near to the city, but offering a rural location hidden from immediate public observation, such as Salisbury Crags and, as the city grew, Musselburgh and Queensferry, were popular locations. Fought in these spaces, duels were intimate affairs involving two male protagonists joined by a small community of men, namely the seconds, and sometimes an attending surgeon and servants. The homosocial nature of the duel is highlighted by a conflict in 1824 between Captain William Gurley of the 51st Aberdeenshire militia and Mr Waistall, a merchant, in which Gurley 126

NRS, JC11/45/24; Caledonian Mercury, 4 October 1800. Scots Magazine (1805), vol. 67, 200. 128 Frevert, Men of Honour, 27. 127

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was killed. The initial cause of this duel was a bet at the Doncaster Races, in which Waistell had lost 7 guineas. This debt went unpaid, and when the two later met at Edinburgh’s Black Bull inn, Gurley demanded payment. To Waistell’s claim that he would pay when he was able, Gurley called him a scoundrel and a rascal, to which Waistell replied that Gurley was a liar, leading Gurley to strike him with a poker. Once recovered from the blow, Waistell challenged Gurley to fight, and on being told that he would fight only once the debt had been settled, Waistell declared Gurley to be a ‘bullying coward’.129 As Captain John Duguid testified after the event, Gurley ‘was not a man of mild temper but rather quarrelsome’.130 Waistall was intoxicated during the initial conflict, and had later hoped to ‘compromise matters’ with Gurley. Yet he also needed to restore the public honour that had been undermined by allowing another man to strike him.131 An honourable compromise could not be reached, and the two men met at the North Ferry attended by their seconds, David Setton for Waistell and Duguid for Gurley, two medical attendants, Dr Home and Mr Liston, and John Grandison, Gurley’s servant.132 The actual duel occurred three-­quarters of a mile from Queensferry, off the road in a small dell surrounded by hillocks ‘so that no person could see into it’.133 In this respect, it was private, away from urban environs and public view. However, it was not wholly private, instead, it was a sociable, if unpleasant, affair involving a group of men who all had a part to play. This homosocial aspect places the duel firmly within male culture, and highlights the importance of friendship and loyalty. Social obligation is most evident in the case of seconds, who could face prosecution for their presence at a duel. Although seconds in Scotland, as in England, were sometimes active in attempts to reach a compromise between protagonists, their presence was a significant cultural enabler; to follow the rituals of the duel, their presence was required.134 In the case of the Gurley–Waistell duel, Setton also made a material contribution as second, providing pistols and showing Waistell how to hold his.135 On shooting Gurley dead, the inexperienced Waistell was so distressed that he pointed his pistol to his head and was stopped from committing suicide only by the intervention of Dr Home, who forcefully removed the weapon. Waistell then asked Dr Home to write to his father, and at the time the case went to court he had apparently not been seen or heard from 129

J. M. Legget, Scotland’s Penultimate Duel: After a Bet at the 1824 St. Leger (Kinloch: Crossmount House, 1998); ‘Declaration of J. G. Barr’, 2 November 1824, NRS, AD14/24/389, 7, 9. 130 ‘Declaration of John Duguid’, 2 November 1824, NRS, AD14/24/389, 2. 131 ‘Precognition of Dr Alexander George Home’, NRS, AD14/24/389. 132 NRS, AD14/24/389; Legget, Scotland’s Penultimate Duel. 133 ‘George Home’, NRS, AD14/24/389, 10. 134 For the changing role of seconds in English duels, see Shoemaker, ‘Taming of the duel’, 531–5. 135 ‘George Home’, AD14/24/389.

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again. The witness depositions for this case show that Waistell had hoped to reach a compromise with Gurley, but this was scuppered by the need to restore his public reputation after Gurley had struck him with a poker.136 Although this duel was fought in a space ‘that no person could see into’, its function was public. Sometimes there was social pressure for men to duel, but alternative honourable exits were available. Within Scottish law it was illegal to issue a challenge to duel, and this illegality could provide an honourable escape from a possibly fatal conflict.137 In 1818, James Rollo, lieutenant in the 59th Regiment of Foot and residing in Perth, was accused by Thomas Ritchie, son of tenant farmer George Ritchie, ‘of sending a challenge to fight a duel or single combat’.138 Rollo was found guilty by the court, but he was not sentenced; the case had been brought by Ritchie as a private prosecution and he declared himself satisfied with the verdict. The court case had enabled Ritchie to assert his honour in a public forum, and he was supported by peers in his community, as indicated by the men who provided evidence in support of his libel: a bookseller, an army lieutenant, and a manufacturer. In 1802, member of parliament, Sir John Henderson of Fordel, took a similar course of action when he utilised legal sanction against John Horne, Writer to the Signet, who attacked him in George Street, Edinburgh, endeavouring ‘by every means in his power, to provoke the petitioner [Henderson] to fight a duel or single combat with him’, loudly calling Henderson a scoundrel and threatening to hit him with a stick. This, Henderson asserted, was a ‘flagrant breach of the peace’. Denying these accusations, Horne claimed that he had confronted Henderson only after Henderson had called him a scoundrel. It was because Henderson had ‘acted a most ungentlemanlike part’, that Horne had publicly insulted him.139 This duel originated in a dispute over council elections, but unlike Ireland, where duels often arose from political disputes, Henderson is probably typical of Scottish politicians in seeking to avoid armed conflict.140 A man’s profession and temperament, and the exact nature of the conflict, all influenced whether he would respond to conflict with restraint or violence. Conclusion: the impact of Enlightenment Alternative conceptions of honour meant that men did not always have to duel; sometimes a man’s peers would pressure him to restore his honour through duelling, but, as in James Boswell’s case, friends could also act to 136

AD14/24/389; Legget, Scotland’s Penultimate Duel, 48. Hume, Commentaries, 442–3. 138 North Circuit Court Minute Books, James Rollo, Perth, 29 September 1818, NRS, JC11/59/32. 139 Caledonian Mercury, 7 October 1802. 140 Kelly, That Damn’d thing, 127–47. 137

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prevent a duel. In some circumstances, such as the Abernethy–Mayen duel in Aberdeen, a man’s friends would physically intervene in an attempt to stop the fight. However, in others, such as the Waistell–Gurley duel, friends could be significant enablers of the violence. In addition to the specific social context, the factors that could lead to violent conflict were numerous. The maintenance of public reputation was typically crucial, yet other indirect causes such as drunkenness were often contributory factors. Denial of bodily autonomy through striking with hands or an object often precipitated further conflict, and rank was, of course, significant. Violence was also informed by broader cultural discourses, and the Scottish Enlightenment is significant here not as a unified discourse, but as one that informed men’s understanding of honour and of violence. Duelling contradicted the dominant dictates of gentlemanly refinement, but, as shown by Alexander Paterson, brought before the High Court in 1789, Enlightenment ideas could inform a duellist’s understanding and representation of his actions. Alexander Paterson, writer in Edinburgh, was charged before the High Court with challenging and assaulting Andrew Mackenzie, attorney for Colin Mackenzie, a merchant in London. After Mackenzie had refused Paterson’s challenge ‘to fight him with pistols’, Paterson ‘publicly kicked the said Andrew Mackenzie in the Parliament close, addressing himself at the same time to a Gentleman in company with Mr McKenzie and asking his pardon for kicking a Scoundrel in his company’.141 Rather than retaliate physically, Mackenzie decided to restore his honour via the courts; in this case, the conflict was not just between two men, but between two competing ideals of masculinity. In his defence Paterson claimed high provocation. The initial conflict had arisen over debt litigation concerning an estate inherited by an infant, Mr Munro, whose father died in India in 1777. Paterson had been successful in this debt litigation, but Andrew Mackenzie, the attorney responsible for releasing the funds, had refused to act. According to Paterson’s deposition Mackenzie’s vacillation had caused him financial hardship and ruined his credit. It also hurt his extended family, including his cousin Miss Munro, aunt to the infant Mr Munro, and towards whom the treatment of Mackenzie ‘had been truly deplorable’.142 Believing funds to have been settled on her by the estate, her creditors took legal action to obtain their share of the inherited funds. However, because Mackenzie had not released the estate’s funds to her, Miss Munro could not pay. This led to a warrant being issued against Munro, and she was arrested ‘upon a Sunday on the public street as she was going to church and immediately dragged her to jail like a common Felon’.143 The damage to Munro’s reputation by such a public act, ‘the disappointment, the 141

‘High Court Minute Books – Series D’, NRS, JC7/46/69. JC7/46/85. 143 Ibid. 142

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affront and horror of her situation’, made her ‘absolutely delirious and in that miserable situation she has ever since remained’.144 In his deposition Paterson constructed a masculine identity in which his duty to protect his female relatives was paramount. This case had always been a family affair; Paterson’s initial claim on the estate was made on behalf of himself and his sister, and in his defence against the current charges he emphasised the hardship she had faced, particularly her ‘­vexatious disappointment’ at lacking the funds to take up a position as governess in North America.145 This image of Paterson as protector of female family victims is placed in direct comparison to Mackenzie, who is portrayed as acting ‘without regard to the privileges of her Sex’.146 The ‘her’ specifically referred to here is Miss Roach, a mutual relative of Paterson and Munro. When she visited Mackenzie to obtain funds for Munro’s release from imprisonment for debt, Mackenzie ‘intemperately threatened to kick Miss Roach down stairs’.147 Through these examples Paterson the would-­be duellist becomes the gentleman and Mackenzie becomes a brute. Whilst displaying Paterson’s adoption of a masculine identity founded upon financial probity and authority within the family, ideals carried over from the seventeenth century, this case also illustrates the impact of Enlightenment discourse on men’s understanding of violence. In claiming provocation, Paterson stated: The immoderate exercise of resentment is, by all moral teachers condemned. A pusillanimous desertion of our rights in Society is equally faulty. There is a medium betwixt these two extremes which every man ought to follow, and therein consists propriety of conduct. When this medium is observed the actor meets with the approbation and sympathy of the rest of mankind; they then enter into his feelings, and turning their eyes into their own minds, reflect that as the principles of human nature are invariably the same, that man acts properly who acts conformably to these unerring dictates. However highly therefore the mild virtue of patience may be recommended, whether in a serious or ludicrous strain still it must be acknowledged and the united voice of mankind admitts [sic] that there are certain degrees of provocation which no mere man either can or ought tamely to submitt [sic] to; and which even the remedy afforded by a Court of Justice cannot in the eye of feeling sufficiently compensate. As these are undoubtedly the natural feelings of mankind so the general principles of law have not deviated from them. The laws of all countries have wisely admitted that in a case like the present Provocation is a defence sufficiently relevant

144

JC7/46/85–6. JC7/46/101. 146 JC7/46/88. 147 Ibid. 145

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either to alleviate or entirely exculpate from the charge. This doctrine is founded on reason. It is the dictate of common sense.148 Paterson’s deposition is both a summary and a negotiation of Enlightenment debates concerning sympathy, reason, the passions, social order, and individual autonomy. That Paterson included these topics in his judicial defence demonstrates the ways in which Enlightenment discourse influenced people’s self-­image. There was disagreement rather than consensus among the literati concerning the virtues of duelling. Sensibility could provide a conception of male honour that enabled men to resist duelling as a barbarous social custom, but it did not negate the importance of public reputation. Duelling was not antithetical to Enlightenment, instead it impacted upon and existed in negotiation with this epistemological revolution. Ideas of sensibility and refinement had a significant impact on male behaviour and men’s self-­fashioning, but this discourse did not create a hegemonic gender identity among the male elite. Exactly what constituted gentlemanly behaviour was a continually contested and negotiated terrain, and was influenced by martial culture as well as Scottish Enlightenment ideologies.

148

JC7/46/75–6 (original underlining).

Conclusion The John Kay sketch that adorns the cover of this book depicts five unnamed people standing on Edinburgh’s North Bridge. The men look to each other as if in conversation, while the women stand between them, with one facing away from the viewer. The women appear as listeners rather than as discussants themselves. They are present and yet they are relatively passive. In many respects this image is symbolic of women’s place in Scottish Enlightenment culture. As this book has demonstrated, women did play a part in the Scottish Enlightenment, but it was a peripheral one. They were excluded from the intellectual societies that were crucially important to the development of Enlightenment thinking in Scotland, and this position was the same in other manifestations of the public sphere, especially convivial clubs and their usual home, taverns. As with women elsewhere in eighteenth-­ century Britain, Scotswomen participated in the Enlightenment in an informal sociable capacity, discussing ideas with male literati over tea and in private correspondence. They were able to do this because female education was not entirely neglected during the eighteenth century and, like men, women had access to Enlightenment ideas via the expanding world of print. Yet, unlike in England, women in Scotland did not make a significant contribution to the world of publication until the beginning of the nineteenth century. This was due in part to a close-­knit male culture in Edinburgh, with its close connections to the male-­defined institutions of the universities and courts, and the lack of opportunities for female ­intellectual ­networking compared with that available in London. Jane Rendall’s pioneering work on gender in Scottish philosophy drew attention to the centrality of the feminine to Enlightenment conceptions of progress and civilisation.1 This work’s greatest impact has not been in Scottish History, but in histories of gender and Enlightenment beyond Scotland, particularly those encompassing the British experience, such as Karen O’Brien’s Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-­ Century Britain.2 Along with a commitment to the enactment of reason, concepts 1

Jane Rendall, ‘Clio, Mars, and Minerva: the Scottish Enlightenment and the writing of women’s history’, in Thomas M. Devine and John. R. Young (eds), Eighteenth-­Century Scotland: New Perspectives (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1999), 135–41. 2 Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-­ Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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progress and civility created a unified, if not homogeneous, European Enlightenment project. The recognition of the importance of the feminine to progress and civility has encouraged scholars to move away from a caricatured Enlightenment consisting of a small group of philosophes spouting misogynist ideas. As the magisterial collection Women, Gender and Enlightenment illustrates, this development has led to nuanced analyses of the treatment of women in Enlightenment thought, and studies of women’s participation in the Enlightenment project.3 Yet while the Scottish stadial historiography examined by Rendall is often cited as evidence of women’s centrality to Enlightenment, the gaze of current historians of Enlightenment and gender turns away from Scotland to England, France, and other national sites of Enlightenment where public intellectual women are more readily located. In this book I have maintained a focus on Scotland in order to comprehend why women’s discursive presence in Scottish philosophy negated rather than facilitated their public involvement in Scotland’s Enlightenment project. The Enlightenment was a European-­wide phenomenon, but it manifested itself in distinctive ways in different national contexts. Women’s experience of Enlightenment in Scotland proves this. Scottish women were not closeted in a private sphere, and the influence of the spatial turn in historiography has made historians of gender increasingly aware of the significance of women’s participation in public sociable spaces. In this study, the theatre and the assembly hall have been shown to be spaces where women’s presence was invested with symbolic importance, embodying the civilising process. It is no coincidence that it was with poetry and plays that women in Scotland first participated in the world of print; these two genres were readily associated with the feminine virtue of sympathy. In general, however, the importance placed on femininity as an indicator of improvement acted to constrain women’s participation in the Scottish Enlightenment project. If it had not, one might assume that women’s sociable public role would have forged greater intellectual public engagement. The development of a homosocial public intellectual culture was encouraged by fears of male effeminacy. Anxieties concerning the impact of feminine influence on men, as well as ideas about female unsuitability for rigorous debate, encouraged the formation of male-­ only intellectual spaces. As a small nation attempting to assert cultural equality with England, and trying to forge a new social morality in a world coloured by increased wealth, and where the grip of evangelical Presbyterianism was loosening, the imperative to maintain social progress, to achieve improvement, and to resist moral degeneration was very strong. Scotsmen needed to be refined but to avoid Frenchified effeminacy. The impact of this desire 3

Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

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Conclusion 177

on women’s performance of gender is revealed, for instance, by the fact that even when they entered the spaces of intellectual debate in the form of public debating societies they did not speak. In order to comprehend the gendered character of Scottish Enlightenment culture, it has been necessary to look beyond female exclusion and to consider male inclusion also. The maleness of intellectual culture in eighteenth-­century Scotland is demonstrated by the fact that intellectual societies were exclusively male, it was men’s voices that were heard in public debating societies, and the published Enlightenment was almost entirely written by men. Excepting Jean Marishall’s important, but atypical, intervention, ideas of manhood were forged by men, as were ideas about femininity. It is perhaps for this reason that within Scottish Enlightenment thought, there was more contention over appropriate models of manhood than there was concerning womanhood. Like other historians of eighteenth-­century masculinity, the more I interrogate the ideology and lived experience of eighteenth-­century manhood the less comfortable I become with ideas of hegemonic gender identity, even when applied to specific classes or locales. We can perhaps see hegemonic processes occurring at the very specific level of space, such as a club meeting room, but this is so specific as to undermine the very notion of hegemony; although less powerful, the term dominant is possibly more useful. Within Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy, the refined gentleman, with an inner sensibility and outward politeness, appears as a dominant type, existing in opposition to the stereotypes of the effeminate Fop and barbarous savage. This ideal gentleman embodied improvement and civility. Yet when elite men performed masculinity, the boundaries of what constituted ‘civilised’ manhood became blurred and ideas of politeness did not entirely replace older conceptions of honour. That martial values retained a cultural currency during this period is unsurprising given the regularity of war during the eighteenth century. Responding to this context, we see in elite men’s practice and understanding of violence, particularly concerning the duel, a desire to blend martial honour, politeness, and sensibility. The Scottish literati were divided on the subject of duelling, as they were on many issues, including the very processes and aims of progress (compare Adam Smith’s ideas with those of Adam Ferguson, for example). The idea and ambition of improvement in a post-­Union commercial and imperial world unified Scottish Enlightenment thought, but this thought was not uniform. Therefore, it is not surprising that the culture of Enlightenment allowed for a multiplicity of masculine performance within the boundaries of ‘civilised’ manhood. It was a different case with femininity, and an analysis of Scottish Enlightenment thought from the intellectual canon to fiction and didactic literature reveals a hegemonic femininity where women of the elite and middling classes were encouraged to be learned but modest. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Scotswomen

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made their first substantial entry into the world of publishing, they constructed new conceptions of womanhood. They did not reject ideas of feminine domesticity, but transformed them to allow scope for public activity. This process can also be seen in the public role adopted by the ‘female visitors’ of Edinburgh’s Magdalene Asylum. Perhaps a shift from the polite to the domestic placed fewer restrictions on women than the performance of a femininity that symbolised civility. In order to properly understand gender in eighteenth-­century Scotland, it is vital also to consider class. The Scottish Enlightenment was largely an enlightenment of the elite. This social rank encompassed the landed aristocracy and gentry, professionals, military officers, and wealthy merchants. However, these categories are not easily distinguishable, with members of the landed gentry also working in the professions, such as law or academia, or serving as officers. Most of the literati were of, or closely connected to, the elite, and participation in intellectual societies such as the Select Society facilitated men’s inclusion in patronage networks. Class also determined whether a particular expression of manhood was polite and therefore ‘civilised’. The connection between class and civility is most obvious in the case of the duel. The rituals of the honourable duel ensured that the violence involved remained ‘civilised’, and only men of the elite could legitimately participate in this particular ritual. Class determined women’s position in eighteenth-­century urban culture too. Impoverished women working as prostitutes did not exist in a separate world to the elite, and, as illustrated by Ranger’s List, they could, at a stretch, be figured as symbols of civility. Most of the time, women working as prostitutes were a conduit for the passions of men, and liaisons with these women provided gentlemen with a space for the performance of a masculinity far less controlled than that performed in an intellectual society, assembly, or concert hall. Of course, not all men engaged in prostitution, but Boswell’s journals and extant legal records of women arrested for prostitution in Edinburgh indicate a large market for illicit sex. The women providing this service (often out of economic necessity) normally stood at the other end of the spectrum to the ideal feminine elite woman, whose natural sensibility encouraged polite gallantry in gentlemen. In the context of eighteenth-­century Scotland it is difficult to think of sex and not think of the Church. Kirk session and presbytery records for this period are full of references to fornicators and adulterers brought before and punished by the Church. Yet, as is well known, the Church of Scotland became more moderate during this period under the leadership of men such as the Reverend William Robertson. This religious moderation (or toleration) is evident in the changing cultural landscape of Edinburgh, where the evangelicals were eventually defeated in their opposition to dancing assemblies and the theatre. Yet elsewhere in Scotland, especially in smaller towns and villages, this religious moderation was slower to establish itself. An evangelical approach to public morality also continued to police

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Conclusion 179 the behaviour of the poor more than it did the rich. Although the arrest of women for prostitution is evidence of a gender double standard, it also indicates moral policing based on class; it is almost unfathomable that a man of Boswell’s rank would have been arrested for soliciting sex. He was certainly never afraid of arrest. Boswell may have been more afraid of arrest, or social condemnation, if he had lived a similar life at the beginning of the century. The period considered here was one in which the Enlightenment came to enjoy a cultural ascendancy, especially in urban areas. This was an age of improvement and, as this book has shown, these processes of improvement were intertwined with changing ideals and performances of gender. The refined gentleman and feminine woman together signified improvement, but these were identities that were forged in the lived experience as well as in ideology. Whilst changing gender identities signified the cultural power of Enlightenment thought, the changing economic landscape was also important. During this century the numbers of people who could claim membership of the social elite increased as Scotland profited from engagement in the British Empire (including slavery), agricultural modernisation, and industrial development. The Enlightenment was a response to these changes, and provided an epistemology for them, demonstrated most obviously in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). Yet there were continuities too; men sought to maintain martial courage as a core part of their gender identity and women remained primarily associated with the home. By utilising a range of sources from the philosophical canon to literature and didactic texts, and including legal records, newspapers, and private correspondence, I have sought to address the cultural impact of the Scottish Enlightenment. Enlightenment philosophy was responsive rather than static, and the lives of men and women influenced the ideas of the eighteenth century just as they were influenced by them.

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UNPUBLISHED THESES McElroy, Davis D., ‘The Literary Clubs and Societies of Eighteenth-­ Century Scotland’, (University of Edinburgh, 1952). Moran, Mary Catherine, ‘From Rudeness to Refinement: Gender, Genre and Scottish Enlightenment Discourse’ (Johns Hopkins University, 1999).

Index Aberdeen, 42, 44–5 clubs and societies, 39, 44, 49, 54, 56–8 duels, 155, 157, 166–7 University, 9, 44, 58, 64 Aberdeen Magazine, 119 Aberdeen Philosophical Society, 39, 44, 49, 56–8 debates in, 64 fees, 54 meeting place, 56 membership, 44, 58 Abernethy, James, 166–7, 172 Abington, Mrs, 113 actors, 111, 112, 151–2 actresses, 111–14 Adam, Robert, 103, 117 Addison, Joseph see Spectator Advocates Library, 51 alcohol, 17, 57, 70, 83, 89, 103, 107, 118–24, 126–8, 130, 142, 162, 166–7, 172 Alexander, William History of Women, 12–13, 30, 32–3, 38, 129 American Revolution, 99 American Revolutionary War, 26, 68, 70, 89–90, 149, 154, 156 Archibald, Douglas, 153 Argyll, Duke of, 33, 37 aristocracy, 24, 39–40, 43, 46, 54, 87, 96, 113, 122, 178 artisans, 4, 54, 94, 98–9, 115, 140, 153 Ashton, Tony, 111 Asiatic, 32–3, 129–30 assemblies (dancing), 5, 7, 13, 18, 34, 36, 45, 76, 83, 101, 103, 104, 105–9, 113, 119, 122, 140, 166

Lady Directresses, 108–9, 113, 137, 151 Athenian Society, 76, 79, 80 Ayrshire, 42, 122 Baillie, Joanna, 75, 96, 99–100 balls, 63, 76, 104, 120, 122, 127, 128, 151 Bath, 34, 119 Beggar’s Benison, 69–70 Belles Lettres Society, 38, 39, 49, 58–9 debates in, 63–4, 65, 142 membership, 58, 123 Berwick, 119 Black Bull inn, 170 Blacklock, Lt, 156 Blair, Rev. Hugh, 47, 54–5 Belles Lettres Society, 58 Poker Club, 125 Select Society, 47 Sermons 24–5, 67 Bluestockings, 8, 95–6 Boswell, Alexander, 167–8 Boswell, James, Esq., 69, 97, 112, 122–4, 128–31, 137, 138, 140–1, 161, 171 Poker Club, 126–7 Belles Lettres Society, 123 Boyd, Capt., 156–7, 161 Brechin, 121 Britishness, 7, 30–1, 33, 39, 45, 60–1, 62–3, 176 North Britishness, 32–4, 45, 46, 61, 79, 105 broadsides, 158–9, 168 Burns, Margaret, 138 Burns, Robert, 138 Bute, James Stuart Earl of, 32

198

Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

Butler, Judith, 2–3, 56 Byron, Lord, 99 Cahill, Mr, 157–8 Caithness, 119 Caldwell, Katherine, 93 Caldwell, William Mure of, 125 Caledonian Mercury, 28, 43, 67, 68, 118–19, 121, 163, 167 Cambridge University, 9 Campbell, John, 164 Campbell, Major, 156–7, 161 Canongate Theatre, 110, 112 Cape Club, 38–9, 68 Carlyle, Rev. Alexander, 22, 42, 47, 48, 110–11, 120, 124–6, 140 Carter, Elizabeth, 96 Chesterfield, Earl of, 29, 98, 144 chivalry, 143, 147–8, 149–50, 168 Church of Scotland, 8, 24, 48, 83, 100, 106–7, 178–9 General Assembly, 36, 39, 47, 106 see also Presbyterianism civic humanism see Classical Republicanism class, 1–2, 4, 18, 23–4, 37, 39–40, 47, 54, 84–5, 87, 93–4, 103, 108–9, 111–13, 115, 116–17, 118, 119, 120, 127, 130–1, 132, 133, 134–5, 140, 142, 149, 151, 153–5, 160, 161–2, 163, 164–5, 166, 177–8 Classical Republicanism, 19, 21, 22, 24, 147 Cleland, John, 131 Clerk, Hugh, 108 Cochrane’s Political Economy Club, 38, 44 Cockburn, Alison, 81, 93 Cockburn, Dr Rev. John History and Examination of Duels, 160 coffeehouses, 7, 39, 41, 49, 52–3, 80, 103, 123, 128 Exchange, 52 John’s, 53 Balfour’s, 109

commerce, 7, 12, 22–3, 25, 32, 33, 34, 36, 45, 117 commercial society, 1, 3, 4, 9, 10–13, 14, 16, 17, 21, 23–4, 31, 33, 36, 44, 52, 53, 56, 59, 62–3, 103, 117, 124–6, 144, 146, 153, 177 Common Sense philosophy, 9, 98 concerts, 13, 34, 36, 67, 101, 104, 109 Connell, R. W., 3–4, 41 consumption, 6, 29, 82, 103, 114, 117, 153 Convention of Royal Burghs, 39 conversation, 13, 14, 49, 54–6, 75, 79, 92–3, 102, 104–5, 109, 117–88, 120, 122, 127, 139–40, 151 convivial clubs, 2, 38–9, 56, 70, 103, 120–4, 127, 140 Cowper, Mrs, 112 Craig, James, 7 Craig, William, 48 Crawford, Countess of, 122 Creech, William, 64, 94, 114, 117, 120–1, 128, 132, 134, 137 crime, 132–4, 137, 142, 145, 160, 163, 166, 168–9 Cross Keys tavern, 121 Cullen, William, 46, 95 dancing, 94, 107–8, 109, 140, 154; see also assemblies; balls Dick, Robert, 58 Digges, West, 112 disorder, 24, 43, 58–9, 115–16, 117, 119, 133, 163–4, 166 domesticity, 5, 9, 15–18, 71–2, 79, 92, 93, 98, 121, 129–1, 158, 178 double-standard, 17 Douglas, 110–11 drinking see alcohol Drummond, George, Esq., 47 duelling, 22, 141–74, 178 opposition to, 144–5, 150, 159–60, 169 Duguid, Capt. John, 170 Dumfries, 119

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Index 199 Dundas, Henry, Viscount Melville, 33, 125 Dundas, Robert, Lord Advocate, 47, 125, 151 Dundee Speculative Society see Speculative Society, Dundee Dundonald, Countess of, 108 Dunmore, Lord, 108 Edgeworth, Maria, 99 Edinburgh, 5, 9, 25, 28, 33–4, 42–3, 74, 76, 102–3, 105–40, 142, 169, 175 clubs and societies, 38, 45–7, 48, 70, 84, 85–92, 102 duels, 151–2, 153–4, 155, 158–9, 163, 175 New Town, 7–8, 105, 117 theatre, 110–16, 151–2 Tolbooth, 132–4, 142, 160, 166 University, 9, 25, 38, 42–3, 44, 47, 49, 51, 58, 68, 95 Edinburgh Evening Courant, 67, 68, 142 Edinburgh Gazette, 67 Edinburgh Miscellany, 80–1 Edinburgh Review, 67 Edinburgh Society for Encouraging Arts, Sciences, Agriculture and Manufactures in Scotland, 46, 52 education, 94 men, 42–3, 63–4, 84 women, 15–16, 50–1, 76, 77–8, 82–3, 92–3, 94, 99, 134–5, 175 effeminacy, 9, 14, 19, 25–6, 27, 29–31, 38, 53, 55, 62–3, 176 Elliot, Gilbert, Lord Minto, 7, 108, 109 Elliot, Lady of Minto, 108, 111 empire, 1, 102, 116, 177, 179 Native Americans, 11, 30 Roman, 32–3 Scottish participation in, 33, 43–4 slavery, 33, 43–4, 179 England, 6, 14, 33, 45, 46, 63, 65, 74, 85, 100, 121, 155, 159 clubs and societies, 41, 88, 95–7

duels, 153, 156, 159 Enlightenment, 4, 8, 9, 12, 95–6, 101, 130, 176 London, 6–7, 27–8, 33–4, 47, 67, 76, 95–7, 99, 100, 101, 106, 113, 126, 143, 153, 172, 175 prostitution, 27, 129, 131–2, 134–5, 137, 138 theatre, 110, 112, 115 English Enlightenment, 4, 8, 9, 12, 95–6, 101, 130, 176 European Enlightenment, 6, 8, 9–11, 16, 19, 98, 101, 145, 176 Faculty of Advocates, 39, 49, 51, 68, 118, 123, 130 Faculty of Physicians, 68 Fair Intellectual Club, 74, 76–82 femininity, 4–5, 11–14, 19, 30, 34, 38, 49–50, 71, 73, 78, 83, 89, 91, 97, 104, 112, 114, 120–1, 135, 175–6, 177–8 feminism, 6, 12, 16, 73–4 Fennell, James, 151 Ferguson, Rev. Adam, 11, 37, 47, 96, 97 History of Civil Society, 146–7 Poker Club, 125–7 Reflections, 149 Fergusson, Robert, 116 Ferrier, Susan, 99 Fife, 67, 119 Fletcher, Elizabeth, 95, 99 Fop, 3–4, 29, 31, 53, 55, 61, 145, 177 Fordyce, Rev. James, 13, 14–15, 17, 26, 31, 58, 97 Forfar, 119 Fortune’s tavern, 122, 128 Foulis, Robert and Andrew, 43 Four Stages history see stadial history France, 25–6, 29–32, 176 Enlightenment, 6, 8, 9, 10, 39, 101, 176 Paris, 4–6, 8, 74, 101 Revolution, 5, 40, 99, 160

200

Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

Freemasons, 51–2, 70–1, 118, 123, 127 French Enlightenment, 6, 8, 9, 10, 39, 101, 176 feminine influence, 30 salons, 8, 39 French Revolution, 5, 40, 99, 160 French Revolutionary Wars, 155 Friday Club, 38 Galloway, 119 gambling, 34, 105, 122–3, 170 Garrick, David, 96 General Assembly see Church of Scotland gentility, 42, 59, 83–5, 89, 90, 97, 103–4, 115, 117–18, 119, 121, 131, 139–40, 152–5 gentry, 2, 23–4, 32, 40, 42, 43, 56, 67, 93–4, 108–9, 111, 115, 118–19, 125, 133, 149, 178 Glasgow, 42, 43–4, 45 clubs and societies, 38, 44–5, 48–9, 50, 128 economic growth, 43–4 University, 9, 38, 42, 43, 44, 48–9, 50–1, 62, 66, 99, 129, 165 Glasgow Journal, 116 Glasgow Sentinel, 167 Godfrey, Margarey, 168–9 Gordon, Charles, 51 Gordon, Duchess of, 87 Graham, Lt William Cunningham, 157 Grand Tour, 63–4 Grandison, John, 170 Grant, Anne, 95, 99 Gregory, John, 15, 97, 148 A Father’s Legacy, 13, 15, 17, 104–5 Gurley, Capt. William, 169–70, 172

Hamilton, John, 108 Hamilton, Thomas, 133 Hannaway, Sir Samuel, 158 Harris’s List, 138–9 Head, Fanny, 100 Henderson, Sir John, 171 Hepburn, Margaret, 93 Highlands, 1, 42, 93, 154, 161, 164 Hobbes, Thomas, 9–10 Hobbesian philosophy, 143 Hodge Podge Club, 128 Home, Dr, 170 Home, John see Kames, Lord Home, Rev. John, 110–11 homosexuality, 31, 69 homosociality, 18, 36–9, 41, 47–8, 49–53, 54–9, 68–71, 85–6, 90, 100–1, 118, 120–4, 126–8, 166, 170, 176–7 honour, 7, 22, 27, 31, 106, 116, 125, 141, 142–4, 146, 148–9, 150–4, 157–8, 161–3, 164, 171, 172, 174, 177 Hope, Charles, 151–3 Horne, John, 171 Hume, David Commentaries on the Laws of Scotland, 168 Hume, David, Esq., 1, 10, 22–4, 46, 54–5, 67, 81, 93, 96, 97, 98, 125, 126–7, 146, 151, 166 Belles Lettres Society, 58 Essays, 17, 23, 49–50, 102, 105, 144 Life, 32 Select Society, 46–7, 51 Treatise of Human Nature, 27, 130 Political Discourses, 146 Hunter Family, 99 Hurd, Richard, Letters on Chivalry, 150 Hutcheson, Francis, 10, 17–18, 20, 37

Habermas, Jürgen, 39–40, 104, 123 Hamilton, Anne Duchess of, 87 Hamilton, Duchess of, 113 Hamilton, Duke of, 46, 52, 121, 153 Hamilton, Elizabeth, 75, 95, 96, 99

improvement, 1, 33, 41, 48, 68, 79, 101, 102–3, 107, 109, 111, 137, 144, 176, 177, 179 agricultural, 87 economic, 21, 33, 46, 117, 179

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Index 201 national, 21, 33, 46, self, 6, 36, 48, 53, 55–9, 70, 78–9, 80, 83, 91, 93, 94, 96, 97, 105, 107, 114, 120, 124, 139, 140, 146–8 social, 6, 46, 53, 60, 70, 93, 105, 110, 140, 146–8 urban, 6–7, 45, 73, 76, 101, 103, 113, 117, 127, 151 see also urbanity Incorporation of Bakers, 68 Incorporation of Hammermen, 68 independence, 19, 21–4, 34, 166 Industrial Revolution, 9, 43–4, 179 Innes, Marion and Jane, 113–15, 153 Inveraray, 164 Ireland, 155, 159, 161, 167 Dublin, 112, 134, 159 Islay, Earl of see Argyll, Duke of Jackson, Dorethea, 113–14 Jacobite Rebellion (1745), 32, 126n112, 154 Jacobitism, 46 Jarrat, Miss, 112 Jeffrey, Francis, 100 Johnson, Samuel, 96 Johnstone, Christine, 99 Kames, Lord, John Home, 37, 87, 97, 110 Select Society, 47, 61–2, 66 Sketches, 25, 29–30, 61–2, 145 Kant, Immanuel, 19 Kay, John, 138, 175 Kirk see Church of Scotland Laigh Council House, 51 Lanark, 119 landed classes see gentry Lauderdale, Earl of, 46 legal profession, 8, 28, 34, 36, 51, 83, 100, 111, 122, 123, 151–2, 152–3, 171, 172–3, 178 Leith, James, 166–7, 172 Lemon Tree tavern, 56

Leven, Countess of, 108 liberty, 9, 18, 19, 21–2, 23–4, 25, 26–7, 29–31, 45, 53, 59, 62, 63, 144 libraries, 45, 51, 93–4 Linlithgow, 119 Liston, Mr, 170 Literary Society, 39, 43, 44, 55, 56, 59, 124 debates, 62, 66 meeting place, 50 membership, 48–9, 58 Livingston, Ens., 157 London Chronicle, 161 lower classes, 24, 109, 111–12, 115–16, 118–19, 120, 127, 132–3, 135, 140 luxury, 9, 23, 24–7, 30, 33, 34, 55, 61–3, 98, 119, 150 Macaulay, Catherine, 9, 77n15, 96 MacKenzie, Andrew, 172–3 Mackenzie, Henry, 93, 100 Anecdotes, 142–3 Lounger, 29 Man of Feeling, 27–9, 31, 34, 67, 132 Mirror, 29, 148–9, 156 MacPharlane, Duncan, 164 MacPherson, James Ossian, 147 Macrae, Simon, 162 Magdalene Asylum, 134–7, 178 management (political), 37 see also patronage Mandeville, Bernard Fable of the Bees, 143 Marishall, Jean, 75, 96–9, 100, 112, 177 Alicia Montague, 96–7 Camilla Cathcart, 96 Harry Gaylove, 97 Letters, 97–9 marriage, 17–18, 64–5, 71, 76–7, 92, 98–9, 129–30 Marriage Act (England), 64–5 Martineau, Harriet, 99

202

Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

masculinity, 90–1, 127, 143–4, 158, 173–4, 178; see also honour; homosociality courage, 91, 125, 147, 154, 158 crying, 27, 168 drinking, 89, 120–4, 126–8 gallantry, 12, 49–50, 105, 114–15, 127, 178 hegemonic, 3–4, 41, 141, 174, 177 independence, 21–2, 23 libertinism, 14–15, 69–70, 119, 123–4, 129, 144 martial, 125–6, 146–7, 149, 154–8, 164, 177 refinement, 3, 11–12, 22, 26–8, 34, 36, 37, 38, 41, 50, 53, 54–9, 62, 66, 79, 97, 103–5, 119, 122, 123, 126–7, 144–5, 150, 172, 176, 177 self-command, 16, 20, 50, 55–6, 141, 150, 161 medical profession, 51, 117, 132, 153, 157, 170 men see masculinity merchants, 21, 23, 38, 43–4, 76, 84–5, 108–9, 140, 153 Merry, James, 162 middle classes, 23–4, 67, 84–5, 88, 93–4, 115 Mid-Lothian, 119 military officers see officers, military militia acts, 121, 124–5 Millar, John, 66, 95 Literary Society, 66 Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, 11–12, 33, 66, 129, 145 Milntoun, Lady, 108 Minto, Lady see Elliot, Lady Minto, Lord see Elliot, Gilbert Monro, Alexander, 46 Montagu, Elizabeth, 96 Montesquieu, Baron de, 10 Montgomery, Archibald, Major, 46 Moore, Hannah, 96 Mountstuart, Lord, 125 Mozeen, Mrs, 112 Munro, Miss, 172–4

Murray, Capt., 158 Musical Society, 109, 128 Mussleburgh, 137, 155, 169 Napier, Lady, 108 Napoleonic Wars, 143, 155 Nimmo, Lt, 155–6 nobles see aristocracy North Britain Extraordinary, 33–4 Northumberland, Duchess of, 96 novels, 27–9, 31, 34, 67, 96–7, 119, 132, 164 officers, military, 46–7, 143, 149, 150, 154–8, 163–4, 178 O’Keefe, Edward Bagnet Harvey, 168–9 Ossian, 147, 148 Oxford University, 9 Paine, Thomas, 99 Paisley, 42 Panmure, Countess of, 105, 109 Pantheon Society, Edinburgh, 16, 75, 85–92 Parsons, Mrs, 111 Paterson, Alexander, 172–4 patriotism, 25–7, 32, 39, 41, 45, 46, 60–1, 62–3, 70, 83, 90, 124–5, 150, 154, 164 patronage, 18, 21, 33, 37–8, 40, 41, 47, 95–6, 113, 125, 178 performativity, 2–3, 36, 38, 41, 54–9, 83, 112, 137, 176–7, 178 Perth, 42, 119, 167, 171 Philosophical Society, Edinburgh, 38 Plain Dealer, The, 80, 106–107 poetry, 62, 75, 80–1, 86, 96, 99, 116, 132, 159 Poker Club, 124–7 politeness, 6–7, 34, 41, 42, 78–9, 83, 143, 147–8, 149–50, 151 architecture, 7, 103 artificial, 27, 28, 29–30, 32, 34, 53, 143, 144, 145, 177

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Index 203 conduct, 14–15, 16, 22, 36, 49–50, 55–9, 97–8, 107–8, 116, 126, 130, 151 leisure, 7, 113 material culture, 15, 103–4, 117–18, 155 status, 126–7, 152 political culture, 1–2, 7, 9–10, 21, 24, 26–7, 29, 36–8, 40–2, 46, 47, 54, 88, 100, 124–5 post-structuralism, 2 Presbyterianism, 130, 135–7, 159–60, 178–9 see also Church of Scotland evangelical, 13, 106, 109–11, 176 moderate, 24, 37 47, 105, 106–7, 108, 125 print culture, 5, 41, 45, 66–7, 175 broadsides, 158–9, 168 libraries, 45, 51, 93–4 newspapers, 28, 43, 67, 68, 116, 118–19, 121, 142, 155, 157, 163, 167 novels, 27–8, 34, 96–7, 119, 132, 164 periodicals, 6, 13, 43, 52, 53, 66–7, 77, 80, 82–5, 86, 88, 89–90, 92, 100, 105, 106–7, 119, 148–9, 151, 156, 160, 161, 162, 169 poetry, 62, 75, 80–1, 86, 96, 99, 116, 132, 159 publishing, 43, 67, 75, 80–1, 86, 95, 96–7, 99–100, 117 reading, 43, 52, 54, 67, 77–8, 92, 93, 100, 104 professional associations, 39, 44, 49, 51, 68, 118, 123, 130 professional classes, 9, 18, 23–4, 48, 51, 56, 83, 84, 108–9, 111, 115, 117, 125, 153, 178 professors, university, 25, 38, 43, 48–9, 58, 62, 64, 99, 125 progress, 9, 11–12, 14, 16, 23–4, 27, 30, 36, 41, 45–6, 59, 63, 71, 85, 101, 129, 142, 148, 150, 151, 165–6, 176

prostitution, 27, 103, 111, 124, 127, 128–41, 178 public debating societies, 2, 49, 75, 82–92 public sphere, 18, 36–45, 54–9, 67–8, 70, 75–76, 88, 103–5, 112, 121, 127–8, 140–1, 175–7 publishing, 43, 67, 75, 80–1, 86, 95, 96–7, 99–100, 117 Queensferry, 169–70 race, 11, 30, 102, 129, 145, 164, 177 races (horse), 34, 137, 170 Ramsay, Allan, elder (poet), 109–10 Ramsay, Allan, younger (painter), 47 Ramsay, Sir George, 162 Ranger’s List, 138–40, 178 reading, 43, 52, 54, 67, 77–8, 92, 93, 100, 104 Red Lion tavern, 56 Reid, Thomas, 10, 66, 98 religion see Presbyterianism; Church of Scotland Rendall, Jane, 20, 40, 73–4, 95, 104, 175–6 Renfrew, 118–19 Reynolds, Henry, 96 Richardson, Samuel Clarissa, 132 Richardson, William, 62 riot, 115–16 Ritchie, George, 171 Robertson, Rev. William, 37, 47, 67, 93, 96 History of Scotland, 93 Poker Club, 125, 126 Select Society, 47 View of the Progress of Society, 145–6, 148 Rollo, James, 171 Rose, Elizabeth of Kilravock, 93 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 98 Roxburgh, 119 Royal College of Surgeons, 39 Royal Infirmary, 107

204

Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

Royal Society of Edinburgh, 38 Rutherford, Mr, 157–8 St Cecilia’s Hall, 109 Scots Magazine, 43, 66, 67, 160, 162, 169 Scott, Joan W., 2 Scott, Lady Frances, 113 Scott, Sir Walter, 99, 100 Essay on Chivalry, 150 Scottophobia, 32 Select Society, 25, 39, 43, 45–8, 49, 54, 56, 57–8, 59, 107, 124, 125, 127, 178 debates, 46, 60–3, 66; on gender, 60, 62–3, 64–5, 71, 142 fees, 54 meeting place, 51–53 membership, 46–7, 58, 123 self-interest, 9–10, 19, 20, 21, 23–4, 24–7, 31, 34, 44, 55–6, 61, 90, 91, 143, 145, 146, 150 sensibility, 3, 7, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19–21, 26–9, 32, 34, 56–9, 93, 97–8, 112, 120, 122, 144, 147, 150, 168, 174 servants, 24, 109, 111, 115–16, 118–19, 133, 140, 161, 162, 167, 170 Setton, David, 170 Seven Years War, 26, 32, 70, 124, 149, 154 sexuality, 17, 31, 69, 129–31, 139 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 151 Shakespeare, 112 Siddons, Sarah, 99, 113, 115 Simson, Robert, 48 slavery, 11, 33, 43–4, 50, 90, 179 Smith, Adam, 1, 22–4, 37, 50, 53, 66, 96, 97, 122, 129, 146, 151 ‘impartial spectator’, 20, 55–6, 129 Lectures on Jurisprudence, 10–11, 165 Literary Society, 48 Select Society, 46–7, 53 Theory of Moral Sentiments, 10, 19–21, 28, 55–6, 112, 165

Wealth of Nations, 10–11, 21, 44, 56, 146, 179 Smollett, Tobias Humphry Clinker, 34, 119, 140, 155, 164–5 Roderick Random, 132 Soaping Club, 127 sociability, 10, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20–1, 22, 26–7, 28, 38, 39, 42, 48, 53, 56, 103–5, 117–18, 119–24, 126, 127–8, 166, 170 social status see aristocracy; class; gentry; merchants; lower classes; middle classes; professional classes Society for Promoting the Reading and Writing of the English Language, 46 Society of Running Stationers, 68 soldiers, 27, 32, 111, 132, 154, 163–4 Spanish Enlightenment, 8 Spectator, 6, 13, 53, 77, 151 Speculative Society, Dundee, 82–5 stadial history, 10–12, 30–1, 45, 66, 101, 105, 165–6 gender, 11–12, 16, 38, 49–50, 59, 105, 114, 145–8, 176 race, 11, 30, 102, 129, 145 Stewart, Andrew, 153 Stewart, James, Captain, 46 Stirling, 119 Stoic Club, 122 stoicism, 19, 20, 141 Stormont, Mrs Murray of, 108 Stuart, Gilbert View of Society, 148 Stuart, James, 167–8 sympathy, 10, 13, 18, 19–20, 27, 29, 53, 97, 112, 173–4, 176 Tatler, 6, 53, 77 taverns, 22, 45, 52, 56, 103, 120–4, 127–8, 137, 152, 166, 170 tea, 18, 75, 104, 107, 117, 120–1, 127

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Index 205 theatre, 5, 13, 24, 28, 34, 36, 67, 97, 99, 101, 103, 109–16, 123, 127–8, 137, 140, 151–2 Thurlow, Edward, 153 Times, The, 155 Townley, James High Life Below Stairs, 115–16 Trifler, 119 Trotter, Miss, 113–15 Tweeddale, 119 Tytler, Alexander Fraser, 138 Union, Act of (1707), 1, 8, 32, 33–4, 36–7, 47, 61, 87, 100, 153, 177 universities, 8–9, 36, 38, 39, 42–3, 44, 47, 48–9, 50–1, 63–4, 66, 68, 84, 93, 95, 100, 129, 165 professors of, 25, 38, 43, 48–9, 58, 62, 64, 99, 125 urbanisation, 1, 6–7, 9, 13, 22, 33–4, 36, 42, 45, 67, 127 urbanity, 6–7, 12–13, 22, 33–4, 38, 41–2, 53, 63–4, 76, 80, 94–5, 103–4, 105, 113, 115, 116–17, 127, 140–1, 151–2 Vesey, Elizabeth, 96 violence, domestic, 124, 143 violence, interpersonal, 142–74

Waistall, Mr, 170, 172 Wallace, Robert, 130 Ward, Sarah, 112 Weekly Magazine, 82–5, 86, 88, 89–90 Wig Club, 121 Williams, Miss, 113–14 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 9, 12, 16, 77n15, 99 women education, 15–16, 50–1, 76, 77–8, 82–3, 92–3, 94, 99, 134–5, 175 economic position, 76, 132–3 intellectual associations: exclusion, 8, 41, 48, 49–50, 71–2, 82, 95, 176–7; inclusion, 76–92, 95 public role, 4–5, 13–14, 38, 40–1, 51, 75–101, 102–9, 111–15, 120, 128, 134, 135–7, 140–1, 175–7, 178 virtue, 14–16, 50, 93, 104–5, 111, 112, 130–1, 134–6, 176 writing, 5, 75, 80–1, 86, 95–100, 112, 176 see also femininity Wordsworth, William, 99 Wylde, John, 151–3