Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690-1820s: The Long Eighteenth Century 1474419658, 9781474419659

Citation preview

Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690–1820s

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd i

17/11/17 4:59 PM

The Edinburgh History of Women’s Periodical Culture in Britain Series Editor: Jackie Jones Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690–1820s: The Long Eighteenth Century Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. Powell Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s–1900s: The Victorian Period Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1890s–1920s: The Modernist Period Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918–1939: The Interwar Period Edited by Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo, Barbara Green and Fiona Hackney Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s–2000s: The Contemporary Period Visit The Edinburgh History of Women’s Periodical Culture in Britain web page at www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ehwpcb

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd ii

17/11/17 4:59 PM

The Edinburgh History of Women’s Periodical Culture in Britain

Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690–1820s The Long Eighteenth Century

Edited by Jennie Batchelor, and Manushag N. Powell

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd iii

17/11/17 6:27 PM

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. Powell, 2018 © the chapters their several authors, 2018 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10 / 12 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, 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 1 4744 1965 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 1966 6 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 1967 3 (epub)

The right of Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. Powell to be identified as the editors 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).

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd iv

17/11/17 4:59 PM

Contents

List of Figures and Plates Introduction: Women and the Birth of Periodical Culture Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. Powell Part I: Learning for the Ladies Introduction

viii 1

23

1. Periodicals and the Problem of Women’s Learning James Robert Wood

25

2. Discontinuous Reading and Miscellaneous Instruction for British Ladies Eve Tavor Bannet

40

3. Constructing Women’s History in the Lady’s Museum Anna K. Sagal

53

4. Vindications and Reflections: The Lady’s Magazine during the Revolution Controversy (1789–1795) Koenraad Claes Part II: The Poetics of Periodicals Introduction 5. Dunton and Singer after the Athenian Mercury: Two Plots of Platonic Love Dustin D. Stewart 6. Women’s Poetry in the Magazines Jennifer Batt

67

85 87 101

7. ‘A lasting wreath of various hue’: Hannah Cowley, the Della Cruscan Affair, and the Medium of the Periodical Poem Tanya M. Caldwell

113

8. The Lady’s Poetical Magazine and the Fashioning of Women’s Literary Space Octavia Cox

129

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd v

17/11/17 4:59 PM

vi

contents

Part III: Periodicals Nationally and Internationally Introduction 9. Protesting the Exclusivity of the Public Sphere: Delarivier Manley’s Examiner Rachel Carnell 10. ‘A moral paper! And how do you expect to get money by it?’: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Journalism Isobel Grundy

151 153

165

11. Eliza Haywood’s Periodicals in Wartime Catherine Ingrassia

178

12. German Women’s Writing in British Magazines, 1760–1820 Alessa Johns

190

13. Travel Writing and Mediation in the Lady’s Magazine: Charting ‘the meridian of female reading’ JoEllen DeLucia Part IV: Print Media and Print Culture Introduction

205

219

14. ‘[L]et a girl read’: Periodicals and Women’s Literary Canon Formation Rachael Scarborough King

221

15. Reviewing Women: Women Reviewers on Women Novelists Megan Peiser

236

16. Reviewing Femininity: Gender and Genre in the Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press Pam Perkins 17. ‘Full of pretty stories’: Fiction in the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) Jenny DiPlacidi

250 263

18. ‘This Lady is Descended from a Good Family’: Women and Biography in British Magazines, 1770–1798 Hannah Doherty Hudson

278

19. Suitable Reading Material: Fandom and Female Pleasure in Women’s Engagement with Romantic Periodicals Evan Hayles Gledhill

294

Part V: Theorising the Periodical in Text and Practice Introduction

313

20. The Ladies Mercury Nicola Parsons

315

21. John Dunton’s Ladies Mercury and the Eighteenth-Century Female Subject Slaney Chadwick Ross

327

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd vi

17/11/17 4:59 PM

contents 22. Frances Brooke, Editor, and the Making of the Old Maid (1755–1756) Kathryn R. King

vii 342

23. Eyes that Eagerly ‘Bear the Steady Ray of Reason’: Eidolon as Activist in Charlotte Lennox’s Lady’s Museum Susan Carlile

357

24. ‘[T]o cherish Female ingenuity and to conduce to Female improvement’: The Birth of the Woman’s Magazine Jennie Batchelor

377

25. The Woman behind the Man behind the World: Mary Wells and the Feminisation of the Late Eighteenth-Century Newspaper Claire Knowles

393

Part VI: Fashion, Theatre, and Celebrity Introduction 26. Advertising Women: Gender and the Vendor in the Print Culture of the Medical Marketplace, 1660–1830 Barbara M. Benedict 27. Theatrical, Periodical, Authorial: Frances Brooke’s Old Maid (1755–1756) Manushag N. Powell

409 411 426

28. Fast Fashion: Style, Text, and Image in Late Eighteenth-Century Women’s Periodicals Chloe Wigston Smith

440

29. Magazine Miniatures: Portraits of Actresses, Princesses, and Queens in Late Eighteenth-Century Periodicals Laura Engel

458

30. Fashioning Consumers: Ackermann’s Repository of Arts and the Cultivation of the Female Consumer Serena Dyer

474

Appendix Notes on Contributors Index

488 495 501

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd vii

17/11/17 4:59 PM

List of Figures and Plates Figures Figure I.1 Figure I.2

Figure 22.1

Figure 22.2

Figure 24.1 Figure 26.1 Figure 28.1 Figure 28.2 Figure 28.3 Figure 28.4

Figure 29.1 Figure 29.2 Figure 29.3 Figure 29.4

Francis Hayman, ‘The Author and his Reader; a Frontispiece to The Tatler’ (1759). © Tate, London 2017. 4 Frontispiece to The Female Spectator (1744). Courtesy of the General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 9 Annotations in Lord Orrery’s hand to first page of Frances Brooke’s Old Maid No. 2. Courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. 347 Annotation in Lord Orrery’s hand to his reader-letter, signed S. P., in Frances Brooke’s Old Maid No. 18. Courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. 350 Frontispiece to the Lady’s Magazine (1789). © Special Collections and Archives, Cardiff University. 389 Woodcut advertisement for Anne Leverenst. © British Library. 417 ‘New & Elegant Pattern for a half Handkerchief or Veil’. The Lady’s Magazine (Jan 1808). © University of York. 445 Figures 134 and 135. The Gallery of Fashion (Apr 1797). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 449 Figures 204, 205, 206. The Gallery of Fashion (Jan 1799). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 453 Advertisement, Urling’s Lace House. The Lady’s Magazine (Apr 1819). This copy of the Lady’s Magazine was originally in the collection of the fashion designer Hardy Amies. © University of York. 455 ‘The Moment of Imagination’ (13 Jan 1785). © The British Museum. 464 ‘Charlotte Augusta Princess Royal of England’. The Lady’s Magazine (May 1786). © The British Museum. 466 ‘Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Charlotte’. The Lady’s Magazine (Feb 1806). © The British Museum. 467 ‘Mrs. Siddons’. The Lady’s Magazine (Dec 1812). © The British Museum. 468

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd viii

17/11/17 4:59 PM

list of figures and plates Figure 29.5 Figure 30.1

ix

Joseph Highmore. ‘Susanna Highmore’ (1740–5). © The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Felton Bequest. 470 ‘Repository of Arts, 101 The Strand’. After Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin. Repository of Arts 1 (Jan 1809). Private collection. 478

Plates Plates can be found between pages 406 and 407. Plate 1

Plate 2

Plate 3 Plate 4 Plate 5 Plate 6 Plate 7 Plate 8

James Gillray. ‘Hyde Park, Sunday, or both Hemispheres of the World in a Sweat’. 1789. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. ‘Fashionable Morning & Evening Dresses’. The Lady’s Magazine (Jan 1813). © Special Collections and Archives, Cardiff University. Mary Linwood, Self Portrait (1787). Private collection. ‘Mrs. Inchbald. From an Original Painting’. The European Magazine (Jan 1788). © The British Museum. ‘Lady’s Book-Case’. Repository of Arts 11 (Oct 1814). Private collection. ‘Patterns of British Manufacture’. Repository of Arts 1 (Jan 1809). Private collection. ‘Patterns of British Manufacture’. Repository of Arts 9 (Mar 1813). Private collection. ‘Walking Dress’. Repository of Arts 1 (1809). Private collection.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd ix

17/11/17 4:59 PM

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd x

17/11/17 4:59 PM

Introduction: Women and the Birth of Periodical Culture Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. Powell

A

main premise of the essays gathered in this volume is that to study eighteenthcentury periodicals and to do feminist scholarly work in the eighteenth century are inseparable tasks. This may seem counter-intuitive, since even today scholarship tends to view the periodical as a predominantly masculine vehicle. And so to convey to our readers the importance of this new volume on women and periodicals in the long eighteenth century, we will open with a favourite metric: Jane Austen read periodicals. Indeed, she was a consumer not only of works contemporary to her lifetime, like the Lady’s Magazine: or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770–1832), but also of the eighteenth-century classics, such as the more staid moral musings of the Rambler (Samuel Johnson: 1750–2) and Idler (Johnson: 1758–60): both are referenced in her novels.1 Her career is an example of a phenomenon this volume’s editors heartily wish to emphasise: that the power of the earlier essay periodical was quite current alongside the modern magazine – quite current, and of considerable interest to women. Notably, Austen’s posthumously published Northanger Abbey (1818), a novel profoundly interested in women’s reading habits, contains an oft-quoted defence of novels, especially novels penned by women. This elevation of novels takes place, tongue-incheek, at the expense of a very famous male-authored periodical. In the passage, a hypothetical young lady acts self-deprecatingly when caught reading a novel, but feels very differently about perusing the Spectator (1711–12; 1714) in public: ‘Oh! It is only a novel!’ replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. ‘It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda’; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed. . . . Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name; though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication . . . [which was] so frequently coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it. (Austen 2006: 31) The narrator dismisses Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s monumental periodical, although – or because – it had set the standard for genteel, masculine essay writing for more than a century to come. Not only is the Spectator out of touch and out of date by

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 1

17/11/17 4:59 PM

2

jennie batchelor and manushag n. powell

1818, the narrator implies, but for all its many stylistic beauties it is certainly guilty of a strongly supercilious attitude regarding the capacities of women: its condescending ‘fairsexing’, a term we discuss in detail below, is a major raison d’être. That Northanger’s narrator feels the need to attack the Spectator a hundred and more years after its first run shows that the periodical form itself was something being pushed specifically toward women readers, and critiqued by them as well. Northanger’s narrator rejects the work of a long-dead male periodicalist in favour of current female prose productions, but Austen’s own reading habits made room for periodicals: it is fairsexing she would avoid, not the form. The periodical form – or rather, forms – is one of the textual phenomena that make the long eighteenth century continuingly important: the vast potential and flexibility of its modern shape was birthed in our period. This volume, the first sustained treatment of women’s print media in this crucial moment in its development, is envisioned as an anchor to the series as a whole, as well as a major contribution to the field of long eighteenth-century studies in its own right. Modern periodical culture belongs to the eighteenth century because of the concomitant rise of the coffee house, the penny-post, and the newspaper; the emergence of writing as a viable paid profession; and the faster communication between readers and writers that all these changes enabled. Walter Graham opined in 1930 that ‘the history of the English literary periodical during the last two centuries is the story of the English author’ because of the staggering number of canonical novelists, poets, and dramatists who engaged in periodical writing (Graham 1930: 13). Still being told, though, is the story of the major role that women played in the periodicals that shaped the tastes and habits of a nation. The thirty essays cultivated in this volume will move women to the fore of a stilldeveloping and increasingly indispensable field. In March 1690, John Dunton’s launch of the twice-weekly miscellany called the Athenian Mercury, which promised to use its reputed panel of experts to answer ‘the most nice and curious questions’ it received, ushered in a sea change in British periodical culture. It inspired competitors like Daniel Defoe (much to Dunton’s irritation: he had created a new form, but he could not keep it to himself), and later, indirectly, Addison and Steele in the decades that followed.2 Importantly, the Athenian Mercury answered questions from both men and women, and although it also launched the first periodical aimed exclusively at women (the Ladies Mercury, 1693), it never abandoned the ladies as a key component of its main audience. Its chief contributor of verse would become the major poet Elizabeth Singer Rowe; the Athenian launched her career even as she increased its circulation and literary appeal. As the symbiotic relationship between Rowe and Dunton’s periodical indicates, if British print media was dominated numerically in the eighteenth century by men, women were nonetheless active – even courted – as key players on both the content and consumption sides of the literary marketplace. As we will discuss further momentarily, for most of the period 1690–1820 covered by this volume, women did not compete with men in numbers as periodical authors, contributors, or editors, though as the century wore on they began to increase both in population and influence. But women were an essential presence in the periodical world from the very start, both as economic actors (as printers, distributors, and purchasers) and as objects. The men commonly credited, though we borrow the patriarchal terminology critically here, as the fathers of the genre – Dunton,

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 2

17/11/17 4:59 PM

introduction

3

Defoe, Steele, Addison – were pointed in their inclusion of women as their readers and subjects both. (Jonathan Swift would denounce this in the Spectator, but ironically was himself replaced as editor of the Examiner (1710–14) by a woman.) The traditional critical understanding of periodical culture in eighteenth-century Britain is still somewhat deceived by the paucity of women authors. Women-authored periodical works have proved interesting, of course, but as odd case studies that prove the rule, at least until the dominance of the magazine, at which point women’s influence moves to the fore of the discussion, at the expense of the presumption of literary and intellectual merit for the periodical. This collection, we believe, forcefully resets this misunderstanding: there is no periodical culture in the English tradition without women, full stop; nor is there any simple way to sum up women’s multifaceted importance to the genre or how they shaped its public power. What gave the periodical its surprising presence in our period? A few statements about the periodical world of long eighteenth-century Britain are non-controversial. Periodical culture was closely tied to urban London culture, but not exclusively so: the overwhelming majority of the most popular periodicals originated in London, but they circulated widely throughout the provinces where literacy was on the rise, as was a reliable, cheap mail service. In Ireland, Dublin was likewise the centre for periodical printing, particularly pre-1760; it pirated London periodicals liberally but also innovated with serial publications of its own such as the Hibernian Magazine (from 1786 Walker’s Hibernian Magazine), which ran from 1771 to 1811. Edinburgh similarly had a thriving culture of letters and local news-sheets alongside London imports, with increasingly dominant titles of its own appearing in the second half of the century from the publication of the Scots Magazine (1739–1826) through to the founding of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1817–1980). For a long time, and following the influential, but not robustly qualified work of Jürgen Habermas, the stereotype of the periodical-reading public was of men collecting themselves to read and debate periodicals in male-dominated, English coffee houses (Habermas 1991: 43–53). In fact, however, periodicals also appeared at the tea- and breakfast tables (in homes, that is, as private family entertainment), and were mailed and circulated far outside their first urban environs: the Spectator famously estimated twenty readers per paper, urging families to take an ‘Hour in every Morning for Tea and Bread and Butter; and . . . for their Good to order this Paper to be punctually served up, and to be looked upon as a Part of the Tea Equipage’ (no. 10 (12 Mar 1711), vol. 1: 44–5). As this pairing of tea table with coffee house indicates, periodical readership was never envisioned by the authors or booksellers as a solely masculine affair: quite the opposite. Following Dunton, the most successful, and even some of the not-so-successful, male authors of periodicals never discounted the need to have women among their audience. As Manushag Powell has demonstrated, from the outset, ‘periodicals were frankly very interested in women as both subjects and readers’ (Powell 2012: 133). From their earliest beginnings, the Tatler and Spectator identified women as key constituencies of their audience. Indeed, the very title of the Tatler was presented by its eidolon, Isaac Bickerstaff, as (an admittedly backhanded) compliment to its imagined female readership (Steele, no. 1 (12 April 1709), vol. 1: 15). Addison, meanwhile, writing in Spectator 10, claimed that ‘there were none to whom this Paper will be more useful, than to the female World’ ((12 March 1711), vol. 1: 46). Both periodicals advocated for women’s rational capacity and cultural importance, and both promised

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 3

17/11/17 4:59 PM

4

jennie batchelor and manushag n. powell

Figure I.1 Francis Hayman, ‘The Author and his Reader; a Frontispiece to The Tatler’ (1759). © Tate, London 2017.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 4

17/11/17 4:59 PM

introduction

5

to furnish talk for the feminised, domestic setting of the tea table as well as for the male preserve of the coffee house. Swift pejoratively labelled this self-conscious pandering to women readers ‘fair-sexing’ (Swift 1948; vol. 2: 482). Although Swift’s criticism was motivated, in part, by personal and political animosity, particularly toward Steele, it reflects also his hostile response to the implications of the ‘growing impact of popularising literature’, epitomised by the periodical’s courting a female audience (Shevelow 1989: 98). More recent criticism of fair-sexing in eighteenth-century periodicals has tended to focus not on the fact of the periodical’s appeal to a female audience, but on the questionable terms in which that appeal was made. For if, as has been frequently pointed out, periodicals such as the Tatler and Spectator presented the tea table and coffee house as counterparts, they were never presented as exact equivalents. Bickerstaff’s infamous assertion in Tatler 172 that there is ‘a Sort of Sex in Souls’ ((16 May 1710), vol. 2: 44) exemplifies the problem, as does Mr Spectator’s vow to provide content that will lead women ‘through all the becoming duties of Virginity, Marriage, and Widowhood’ (no. 4 (5 March 1711), vol. 1: 21). The identification of women as an important readership for periodicals was inextricably bound up with the sense that women’s lives, interests, and potential were fundamentally different from those of men. Thus, following Kathryn Shevelow, it has become a commonplace in much periodical scholarship that serial publications including and following Addison’s and Steele’s hinged upon a seeming paradox that had lasting consequences, not only for women’s participation in periodical print culture, but also in the world outside its pages. Women’s increased visibility as the subjects and consumers of periodicals was intimately bound up with a more restrictive and prescriptive model of femininity grounded in a growing consensus that women were essentially (that is, biologically and socially) other than men (Shevelow 1989: 1–2). The rise of what we would now call women’s magazines from the mid-century onwards traded successfully on this assumption of gender difference with many, such as the Lady’s Magazine; or Polite Companion for the Fair Sex (1759–63) and later long-running Lady’s Magazine; or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770–1832) proudly co-opting the language of fair-sexing in their very titles. For Shevelow and others, this marketing strategy was little more than a sleight of hand by which mid- to late-century magazine editors’ accommodation of their contents to women readers’ alleged interests was marked by a change in the content deemed fit for female consumption, such as essays on conduct and morals, embroidery patterns, and fashion plates (Shevelow 1989: 188–9; Maurer 1998: 166). Yet as Harriet Guest has importantly argued of eighteenth-century literature more broadly, domesticity only ever presented ‘one of a set of contradictory demands on women’ and was ‘always a contested proposition’ (2000: 15). Periodicals and magazines register such contestation explicitly in the tone and content of individual essays, articles, fictions, and poems and their dialogic form. Innovations such as the fashion plate, advertisements, and embroidery patterns – considered in this volume by Serena Dyer and Chloe Wigston Smith – comprised only a percentage of all but the most high-end fashion magazines, and the majority of the pages of periodicals marketed directly at women continued to be filled with essays and polemics on female education or articles and series designed to improve their female readers’ knowledge of the world.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 5

17/11/17 4:59 PM

6

jennie batchelor and manushag n. powell

Indeed, the periodical’s continued preoccupation with women’s mental accomplishments, as they were sometimes quaintly described, is arguably one of the most important legacies of ‘fair-sexing’. Many eighteenth-century commentators themselves pointed out that the seriousness with which periodicals such as the Spectator treated ‘women’s nature and place in society’ served a ‘proto-feminist agenda’ that, despite these publications’ self-professed didacticism and sometimes essentialist depictions of gender difference, nonetheless emphasised ‘women’s intellectual capabilities and encourage[d] female learning’ (Italia 2008: 333). Part I of this volume contains essays by James Robert Wood, Eve Tavor Bannet, Anna K. Sagal, and Koenraad Claes that explore the complex, subversive, and often unexpected ways in which the form and content of eighteenth-century periodicals served or qualified this agenda. Fair-sexing, then, in almost any form, is far from a weak-minded marketing tactic; it is a highly vital impulse. Yet it is important not to follow Swift’s rhetoric too far and assume that there really were separate modes and topics – let alone spheres – consistently dedicated to women and closed off to men, or vice versa. In a telling example, in the arena where one might least expect to find women addressed, women championed, or women writing, we find that women are positively everywhere: politics. Their frequent and vigorous engagement with political writing is one of the elements that does really set anglophone periodical writing apart in the eighteenth century. While English freedom of the press was incomplete – libel prosecutions were a very real threat and troubled authors who appear in these essays, such as Eliza Haywood – there was no institutional pre-publication censorship of journalistic or periodical work after 1695.3 The Statute of Anne (or Copyright Act of 1710, which remained basically in force until 1842), protected the rights of the stationers far more than the authors who sold their copyright for a lump sum without royalties, but it also enabled and encouraged both anonymity and writing to order because all it required was that someone, not necessarily and indeed not usually the author, register copyright. And so the ground was ripe for growing partisan hacks who often bore strange fruit: many and varied periodicals were launched as political vehicles, but they seldom stayed that way. Toni Bowers makes a useful distinction ‘between people’s ideological assumptions and their partisan affiliations’ that helps explain how authors, like many periodicalists, can be active political agents while claiming and perhaps even believing themselves to be non-partisan (2011: 5). The novelist writing a seduction fiction to work through the vexed conflict between authority and virtue is not unrelated to the periodicalist mixing meditations on opera with condemnations of Walpole: such variety is not random or meaningless.4 And likewise, while practically all the major periodicals of the long eighteenth century insist they are not political, this is very seldom true, as Kathryn King will show of Frances Brooke, Catherine Ingrassia of Eliza Haywood, and Koenraad Claes of the Lady’s Magazine. Fair-sexing, this volume contends, is a red herring. It distorts our sense of the form, its readers, and its contents. While it gives us purchase on the strategies of some of the genre’s most canonical examples, especially the Tatler and Spectator, it tells only one story of women’s relationship to the vast number of periodicals available to them across the long eighteenth century. As many eighteenth-century periodicals such as the Female Spectator (1744–6), the Lady’s Museum (1760–1) and the Lady’s Magazine did, so all of the essays in this volume speak critically to the ‘fair-sexing’ question and assess its implications both for women readers and for the development of the earliest periodicals and magazines explicitly marketed toward them. Each attests to

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 6

17/11/17 4:59 PM

introduction

7

the wide spectrum of appeals to their female audiences, the various modes of compliant and critical reading they encouraged and the hazards of generalising about such a diverse and often internally contradictory print form. Several contributors take up Bannet’s compelling alternative to ‘fair-sexing’ in Chapter 2 – ‘woman-championing’ periodicals – a term that she uses to describe ‘the middle ground between mainstream and woman-authored periodicals’ (40) in the first decades of the century, but which more broadly characterises the various forms of female advocacy serial publications advanced throughout the eighteenth century and Romantic period. As importantly, every essay in this volume reminds us that women were not passively constructed by eighteenth-century periodicals and magazines, which may or may not have wanted to delimit their agency; they played a key role in the trade’s and genre’s development. As Paula McDowell has shown, women participated in periodical and newspaper culture not just as consumers, but also as printers, publishers, hawkers or ‘mercuries’, and distributors (1998). Some, like Abigail Baldwin, undertook more than one of these roles, distributing various periodicals and newspapers, as well as publishing the Female Tatler (1709–10) after its unknown author left its original publisher, Benjamin Bragge (Powell 2012: 60). Women were also, of course, the authors of various periodical contributions to question-and-answer and essay periodicals in the first decades of the eighteenth century, even in publications not titularly directed at a female readership. Rowe’s poetry in Dunton’s Athenian Mercury has already been mentioned and is explored in more detail in Dustin Stewart’s essay for this volume. The fairsexing Addison, as Isobel Grundy discusses in Chapter 10, ran an essay by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the Spectator in July 1714 (no. 573), some twenty years before she launched her own political periodical, the Nonsense of Common-Sense (1737–8). Samuel Johnson, who allowed few guest essays in his periodicals, published contributions by his bluestocking friends Elizabeth Carter, Catherine Talbot, and Hester Mulso in the mid-century Rambler. Although they were greatly outnumbered by their male counterparts, several women also acted as the editors of essay periodicals, miscellanies, and newspapers. The innovations and importance of each of these women – Delarivier Manley, Montagu, Eliza Haywood, Frances Brooke, Mary Wells, and especially Charlotte Lennox, who wrote and managed the extraordinary Lady’s Museum – are the subject of sustained attention in the chapters that follow. While women were active as readers, sellers, and sometimes writers from the very first, as the century wore on, their participation in periodical writing increasingly highlighted their presence as British authors. Professional women writers working in and across all genres from poetry to drama, translation, fiction, and non-fiction prose are well represented in periodicals, newspapers, and magazines from the mid-century onwards, sometimes under their legal names and often under pseudonyms. The likes of Mary Pilkington, Barbara Hofland, Amelia Opie, Susannah Stickland (later Moodie), and Mary Russell Mitford wrote regularly for one or more women’s magazines. As Megan Peiser and Pam Perkins take up in their essays, a notable few women writers including Anna Barbauld, Anne Grant, Mary Hays, Elizabeth Moody, and Mary Wollstonecraft became important critics for increasingly influential Reviews such as the Monthly (1749–1844), the Critical (1756–1817), and the Analytical (1788–99). The likes of Lennox, Pilkington (who was a staff writer and undertook unspecified editorial duties for the Lady’s Monthly Museum (1798–1828)), and Mary Robinson, who became poetry editor of the Morning Post in 1799, additionally played key

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 7

17/11/17 4:59 PM

8

jennie batchelor and manushag n. powell

administrative roles in the running of successful serial publications. Although their work for the periodical press was only one of many aspects of the varied careers by which they struggled to support themselves, these women surely can lay claim to being among the first professional women journalists. ‘Journalist’, however, is not the word they themselves would have used: in the eighteenth century it was a term reserved largely for political or governmental news reporting. Alternatively, the way the fair-sexing Addison employs the term, a ‘journalist’ is someone who, like the vapid Clarinda of Spectator 323, keeps a private journal of her daily activities (11 March 1712: 181). In contrast, the Female Spectator describes her composition process as beginning when she ‘commenc’d Author’ (Female Spectator book 1 (24 Apr 1744), vol. 2: 18). A note on another key term seems appropriate here: ‘periodical’ is a deeply difficult term to define in the eighteenth-century context; it can reasonably be argued to encompass everything from the news-sheet, to the advice column, to the essay periodical, to the magazine, and even pseudo-periodicals such as Eliza Haywood’s Invisible Spy (1755) or Lætitia Mathilda Hawkins’s Pharos (1787). ‘Periodical’ includes hundreds of titles, many short-lived and hard to trace; others stunningly voluminous and hard to summarise. Understandably, in order to give themselves some ground to stand on and something approaching coherent method, most studies of eighteenthcentury periodicals attempt to enforce sub-generic subdivisions: that newspapers are different from literary periodicals, or, very commonly, that the essay periodical and magazine are markedly divergent forms, the latter killing or devouring the former. This collection, in contrast, refuses the rigid enforcement of such boundaries, seeing periodical culture, like the women who contributed so crucially to its development, as a diverse but contiguous group. We use, then, ‘periodical’ to include question-and-answer vehicles like the Athenian and Ladies Mercuries; essay serials such as the Old Maid (1755–6), monthly miscellanies like the Female Spectator or Lady’s Museum; news collections like the Compendium that Haywood included with her Parrot (1746); and of course the ‘true’ magazines such as the Lady’s Magazine, which, as we have established above, were remarkable not only for variety of content but also for the variety of opportunities they proffered female authors. Not all women writers whose work was published in magazines were paid for their efforts, however; many found they had parts of their work excerpted without their knowledge or consent in popular miscellanies. Despite the absence of sufficient documentary evidence, it is reasonable to conclude that some of these writers might have viewed the periodical press’s widespread culture of reprinting extracts of already published texts in the form of excerpts or descriptive reviews as a means of promoting their work and enabling them to reach many more readers than they might otherwise have had access to through non-serial publication. If circulation estimates are to be believed, and admittedly the evidence is circumstantial in many cases, the extract of Austen’s Pride of Prejudice that appeared in Robinson’s Lady’s Magazine in 1813, the year of its publication, might have reached as many as ten times the number of readers than the 1,000–1,500 estimated print run of the first edition did, for instance. Others, such as literary critic and Gothic novelist Clara Reeve, however, remained unconvinced of the advantages and ethics of this practice. In the 1770s, she engaged in a public spat with George Robinson’s Lady’s Magazine about appropriating and misquoting her work, and declared the publication of her work without consent or payment a violation of decorum and a symptom of the trade’s lack of professionalism.5

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 8

17/11/17 4:59 PM

introduction

9

Figure I.2 Frontispiece to The Female Spectator (1744). General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 9

17/11/17 4:59 PM

10

jennie batchelor and manushag n. powell

Yet the culture of amateurism benefited at least some women writers. Magazines, in particular, were heavily reliant upon readers providing gratis content to fill pages not produced by staff writers or crammed with reprinted content. The Correspondents pages of ‘woman-championing periodicals’ are full of the names and pseudonyms of women and men, many of whom are entirely obscure to us today, but whose literary efforts were widely circulated and reprinted in the periodical press during their lifetimes. Although the culture of relying on unpaid content never quite died out, and indeed, is seeing a startling resurgence with the rise of online publications such as the Huffington Post today, this was a system that increasingly fell out of favour by the 1820s with the rise of the professional journalist. Whether amateurs or professionals, editors or writers, the subjects of periodicals or their imagined and actual audiences, women were vital to eighteenth-century periodical print culture. While we have lamentably few archives to work with except for odd publisher ledgers and the scattered correspondence of booksellers, editors, and periodical contributors, the thousands of pages of eighteenth-century periodicals, newspapers, and magazines printed between the 1690s and 1820s make clear that women’s involvement in the trade ran deep and wide. So deep and wide was it, in fact, that this volume cannot claim to be exhaustive, even if we declare our intention to offer in the essays that follow the newest and most comprehensive understanding to date of what these and many other women besides did in periodical culture, and what, it turn, that culture did for and with them.

The Digital Turn While we do, then, position this volume as a corrective, it is also true that it may not have been possible for many of the accounts here to exist in an earlier critical period. There is no doubt that without access to digital archives, our efforts to restore eighteenth-century women to their rightful place at the centre of periodical print culture would look quite different. The digital turn has revolutionised textual scholarship in the past two decades, and periodical studies is no exception to this rule. Many periodical scholars have made statements to the effect that ‘digitization has proven to be both a gift and a burden’, and rightly so (DiCenzo 2015: 25). Because of the possibilities that digital research opens up, including quantitative approaches, ‘methodological shifts are redefining what it means to “read” periodicals’, notes Maria DiCenzo – but while methods like distant reading and material enquiries are vital and exciting, ‘reading periodicals (closely or deeply) for their discursive and visual content – for how they may have generated meanings, for whom and why – remains central to research engaged in expanding historical and cultural fields’ (2015: 20). It is also true, though, that generally speaking, periodical studies in the eighteenth century is less theorised – or at least thus far less invested in purporting to be theorised – than in Victorian or modernist studies; as digital access continues to expand the research possibilities in our period, our scholars enjoy a special opportunity to make their own ways through the archive. A number of the methodological problems of working with serial publications – especially the unwieldy nature of the archive and difficulties of navigating its contents – are answered by the online archiving of rare surviving periodical issues and, in some cases, of complete runs of titles scattered across several copyright libraries on platforms such as Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (although

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 10

17/11/17 4:59 PM

introduction

11

periodicals are still under-represented in the database), Gale’s digitisation of the ‘17th and 18th Century Burney Collection of Newspapers’, Adam Matthew Digital’s Eighteenth Century Journals (I–V), Google Books, the HathiTrust Digital Library, and ProQuest. Digital surrogates make more historical periodicals available to more readers; they also promise easier analysis and synthesis of the contents of publications that can take weeks, months, or even years to read in research libraries. Keyword searching of digital surrogates aids topical navigation of single issues, volumes, or entire print runs. Additionally, digital texts present us with a rich, though as yet largely untapped, data corpus for various forms of text mining and data visualisation. Yale University Library’s ‘Robots Reading Vogue’ project, which has digitised and marked up the text and images of more than a century’s run of this iconic magazine, is yielding fascinating insights into the history, as well as the changing face, mood, and brand of the magazine over time. It is surely only a matter of time before similar projects begin to offer new insights into Vogue’s eighteenth-century predecessors (2017). But digitisation is no panacea for periodical scholarship and presents numerous methodological challenges of its own. The critical facts that many of the online archives and databases mentioned above carry hefty subscription fees that some institutions and almost all individuals cannot afford, and that OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is still not a wholly reliable technology, are only the two most obvious of these problems. Many titles remain only part-digitised, a reality that can encourage us to make generalisations about a particular periodical that might be undermined by the time-consuming and logistically challenging, if more enjoyable, process of reading though all successive issues. Similar problems can arise from keyword searching. A click of a search button might promise to reveal every instance of the word ‘dress’ or ‘politics’, ‘virtue’ or ‘education’ across the run of a particular title, but what do the resulting search lists really tell us? The short answer is very little unless we attentively read every article in which the search terms appear. A fuller answer would have to acknowledge that even this strategy is inadequate to the task in hand. How can we judge the status of an anti-fashion diatribe thrown up in a keyword search for ‘dress’ if we don’t know that it is immediately followed by an admiring and detailed report of the fashionable appearance of a famous actress in which the word ‘dress’ does not appear? How do we read an essay by an author wishing to circumscribe women’s education to domestic accomplishments if we have not been alerted to the fact that it appears next to the biography of a learned woman of antiquity? Perhaps the most insistent refrain of this volume is that few generalisations hold true for the entire run of a particular periodical or magazine; some fail to hold true even across a single part or issue. Digital texts can inadvertently conceal this important truth from us. Problems of a different kind, but no less pressing, stem from the digital text’s masking of key properties of its material original. For one thing, we read electronic texts differently from hard copies. When we are not hurrying through them via the expediency of keyword searches, we are all but forced to read digital texts sequentially. Essay-periodicals in their original condition may have lent themselves to this kind of reading, although once published in volume form individual essays could be read in any order their readers chose. Miscellanies, however, emphatically discourage sequential reading and even the most ambitious magazine editor surely never expected its readers to read from cover to cover. We can skim digital

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 11

17/11/17 4:59 PM

12

jennie batchelor and manushag n. powell

texts, of course, but it is very difficult to replicate the experience of reading a physical copy of a magazine in digital format, to recreate that peculiar pleasure of directing our own reading by flicking through pages to our favourite sections first, then following our eye to articles with the most arresting titles. There is also the conundrum that digitisation does not lend itself easily to widespread adoption of the texts in generalist or teaching contexts: as Desirée Henderson has observed, digitisation has meant a ‘staggering’ number of new archival opportunities, but it has not resulted in recovery in the sense of new ‘critical editions . . . widely adopted in college classes’ (2017: 2). And yet it is nonetheless true that ‘periodical studies is feminist recovery work’ – and, we contend, it is not only the authors whom we can recover (Henderson 2017: 4). If the reading experience is obscured by digitisation then so too are periodical readers. Several essays in this collection allude to the difficulty of establishing the readerships of eighteenth-century periodicals given the paucity of archival evidence. Nonetheless, a good deal can be established about the targeted readers of these publications, not just from their price point, but from their size, paper, and illustration quality, all of which features can be difficult to divine in digital facsimiles. Such characteristics can also vary a good deal between different editions of the same title. This is a particularly pressing problem when working with essay-periodicals, many of which went through several, and in some cases numerous, editions, later examples of which sometimes edited, renumbered, added, redacted, changed the layout, or otherwise obscured the original contents. A final genre-specific issue for digital surrogates of eighteenthcentury periodicals and magazines, as opposed to novels or volumes of poetry, is that they are only ever as complete as the single original from which they are scanned. This is especially problematic for periodicals and magazines which are usually duplicated from unique bound volumes that can differ as markedly from other copies of the same bound volume as from the unbound, stitched individual issues from which they are comprised. Advertisements, illustrations, portraits, song sheets, maps, fashion plates, and embroidery patterns, all of which are given attention in this volume, were integral parts of many eighteenth-century periodicals and magazines. Yet not all of these features made it past the binding cut. Relying on a single digital copy of a bound volume of a periodical that may or may not have these paratextual elements, depending on the accident of its provenance, gives a partial and potentially distorted impression of its contents and of the reading experience.

Readers The question of who and how many people read eighteenth-century periodicals, whether or not they were explicitly marketed to a female readership, is frustratingly difficult to answer because of the nature and patchiness of the available evidence. Literacy rates, in general, are hard to substantiate with absolute certainty, although what is clear is that there was a significant rise in the adult reading public between the beginning of the century and 1830. Michael Suarez has recently claimed that this demographic grew by over 3 million – or an increase of 238.4 per cent – between 1700 and 1830 (2009: 11). The growth in the number of women readers (from about 25 per cent at the time of the death of Queen Anne to 50 per cent in 1830) became especially noticeable after 1760, Suarez contends (9). 1760 was the year that Charlotte

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 12

17/11/17 4:59 PM

introduction

13

Lennox’s game-changing miscellany, the Lady’s Museum, was founded and, not coincidentally, a date after which periodicals that appealed specifically, if not exclusively, to women readers in their titles mushroomed. But how many adult readers of either sex – and we should not forget that children and adolescents read serial publications too – subscribed to, or otherwise enjoyed, individual periodical titles is difficult to deduce, reliant as we are when we seek to establish circulation figures on the statistics offered up by obviously interested editors and proprietors. As Gillian Williamson documents, Edward Cave’s proud declaration in 1748 that 12,000 copies of the Gentleman’s Magazine were being published monthly has been subject to intense and unresolved debate in the intervening 250 years (2016: 35). Even when an editor’s pronouncements are met with broad scholarly unanimity, however, the figures tell us only part of the story of a periodical’s success and circulation. Addison’s claim in Spectator 10 that ‘three thousand’ copies of the paper were being sold daily is not especially wide of the mark of more recent estimates of 3,500 to 4,000 copies, although it is a long way from the often-quoted 20,000 copies that numerous sources spuriously claim that Thomas Tickell boasted the periodical ran to.6 But of course, the number of copies printed or sold gives only one measure of circulation, which for long-running publications such as the Gentleman’s Magazine or Lady’s Magazine (the latter conventionally cited as printing around 15,000 monthly copies at the height of its popularity (Mayo 1962: 421 n. 75)) almost certainly fluctuated significantly over time. Additionally, we have to take into account that a single issue of a newspaper, periodical, or magazine likely had several, indeed many, readers through its circulation in coffee houses, libraries, and reading societies, as well as among family members: as noted above, Addison surmised that an individual Spectator paper likely had twenty readers, a figure that Richmond Bond in the 1950s doubled to forty (1952: 14). A more accurate gauge of circulation and readership must additionally consider reprintings of sold-out issues, single issues of essay-periodicals and magazines sold in bound bi-yearly or annual volumes, the several translations of popular periodicals that appeared in Europe, as well as the various, sometimes multiple, editions that prominent essay-periodicals such as the Spectator, the Female Tatler and the Female Spectator went through across the long period covered by this volume. In the case of periodicals such as the Female Spectator, for which we have little concrete archival evidence, such information is all we have available to judge the reach of a particular title. As Patrick Spedding demonstrates, this data can be mined to illuminate the success of a particular publication relative both to its competitors – by which yardstick Haywood’s periodical was only ‘moderately successful’ – and to the author/editor’s other works – against which standard the Female Spectator ‘was clearly a great success’ (Spedding 2006: 195). Even though we can be fairly certain that the Female Spectator had many more readers than Haywood’s non-periodical writing – and in general it should be noted that many leading eighteenth-century periodicals and magazines were printed in vastly larger runs than a single edition of a novel, for instance – such analysis still does not provide anything approximating a conclusive answer to the question of how many people actually read Haywood’s periodical. Nor does such analysis help answer the equally challenging question of who these readers were. Correspondence, memoirs, and diary entries can offer insights into individual periodical reading experiences – of bluestocking Hester Thrale reading the Spectator to her children, or the financially distressed governess Ellen Weeton owning

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 13

17/11/17 4:59 PM

14

jennie batchelor and manushag n. powell

and using embroidery patterns from the Lady’s Magazine – but drawing larger conclusions about a periodical’s readership requires a more solid and wider evidentiary base than such anecdotes can provide. In the near total absence of publisher archives that deal with the running of periodicals, slightly less rare surviving booksellers’ accounts can be enlightening.7 In Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, Jan Fergus, one of very few literary scholars and book historians to include periodicals and magazines in their histories of eighteenth-century readership, uses surviving account books of Midlands booksellers, the Clays, and Timothy Stevens of Cirencester, to examine the buying habits of magazine readers, and concludes, among many other insights, that men and male boarding schools were a prominent demographic of the early readership of the Lady’s Magazine (2006: 200–9). Yet even these detailed archives constitute only a partial record, forcing us to turn from external sources to the internal evidence – though we use the term cautiously – of periodicals themselves for information on their readers. The implied audience of a periodical can be inferred from various details. Price is one. Most weeklies in the first decades of the century cost just a penny per issue, as did the daily Spectator until paper taxes, which helped caused the demise of many less popular texts in the first half of the century, forced a price hike to 2d in 1712. By the mid-century, some periodicals, including those marketed directly at women readers, could command substantial prices on the clear assumption that their purchasers would have considerable disposable income. A monthly, stitched ‘book’ of Haywood’s Female Spectator in the mid-1740s was a shilling (the same cover price that Lennox’s elegant and beautifully illustrated Lady’s Museum would command in 1760), with the complete set of twenty-four books costing £1 4s unbound. Just three years after the last book of the Female Spectator was published, Jasper Goodwill’s bi-monthly, densely printed Ladies Magazine (1749–53), published by G. Griffiths, sold for just 2d an issue or 5s 6d for a year’s worth of twenty-four issues. Perhaps not coincidentally, Goodwill claimed his inexpensive magazine was intended for the ‘young’, and specifically addressed not only readers who had the leisure to spend their day in the ‘parlour’, but also those who spent their days in the ‘Shop’ or ‘Compting-house’ (title page). Like Griffiths, most magazine publishers throughout the century attempted to keep prices comparatively low to target as large a readership as possible. The Gentleman’s Magazine’s cost was kept at 6d a monthly issue from 1731 until 1783 when it doubled in price to 1s at the same time that it doubled its pages. The Lady’s Magazine managed to keep its costs down for even longer, and retained its 6d cover charge until 1800 when it doubled to include regular, coloured fashion plates that must have significantly raised its production costs. Its eventual rival La Belle Assemblée initially sold (in 1806) for £2 6d an issue – just one of many indications that John Bell’s elegant magazine espoused higher production values and targeted a more affluent or aspirational readership – although even this figure pales in comparison to the luxury price tag of 3 guineas per twelve issues of around four pages each for Niklaus Wilhelm von Heideloff’s gorgeous fashion magazine, the Gallery of Fashion (1794–1804). Further indications of implied readership can often be inferred from the full titles of periodicals and the advertisements placed in newspapers to alert readers to their imminent publication. In the overpopulated and at times aggressively competitive periodical marketplace, magazine proprietors and editors conjured increasingly specialist titles for markets they implied had been overlooked or underserved by existing

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 14

17/11/17 4:59 PM

introduction

15

periodical fare. Periodicals such as Goodwill’s Ladies Magazine, the 1756 Young Lady, or 1799 the Young Gentleman’s and Lady’s Magazine, or Universal Repository of Knowledge explicitly targeted the young, or young at heart. Some, such as the monthly Country Magazine: or Gentleman’s and Lady’s Pocket Companion (1736–7), marketed themselves to a geographically demarcated readership. Presenting itself as a work of ‘greater Variety, and more Use’ than any of its predecessors and contemporaries, the Country Magazine catered to what it claimed to be a neglected, non-urban male and female readership, who as well as valuing conventional magazine content – essays, anecdotes, poetry, current affairs, and birth-marriage and death notices – sought out seasonally relevant culinary and medicinal recipes and advice on gardening and husbandry. Other periodical titles attempted to define readers or their magazines’ contents socially. The full title of the Lady’s Monthly Museum (1798–1828) declared it to be aimed at a ‘polite’ class of readers, and early advertisements for the periodical in newspapers routinely noted that it was especially ‘adapted for families and boarding schools’. The Royal Female Magazine (1760), edited by poet Robert Lloyd, and Hugh Kelly’s variously titled Court Miscellany; or Ladies New Magazine (1765–9) declare affiliation (or perhaps just a mildly prurient interest) in the world of the court. Yet, the contents of these publications caution against drawing any definitive conclusions about the contents of periodicals based on their titles. Just as there is nothing especially ‘new’ about the New Lady’s Magazine (1786–95), which, in fact, reprinted without acknowledgement great swathes of content from its namesake and rival the Lady’s Magazine, there is little in Lloyd’s and Kelly’s publications that would be out of place in any number of contemporary magazines, regardless of whether they have royal or court, or gentleman or ladies in their titles. This final point is of central importance to this volume and begs a crucial but implausibly difficult question to answer: what constitutes a women’s periodical or magazine in the long eighteenth century? As Shawn Lisa Maurer points out, these terms are, at the very least, ‘problematic appellation[s]’ in our period (1998: 54). For one thing, they are anachronisms in an era in which the preferred gendered descriptors for periodicals were ‘female’ (the Female Tatler, Female Spectator) or, taking the lead from Dunton, ‘Lady’s/Ladies’. The latter, and more common, term, still proudly espoused by the longest-running weekly women’s magazine the Lady (1885–) – a magazine for ‘elegant women with elegant minds – can cause some modern readers to bristle because of its implied social and economic exclusivity. The word ‘Lady’ certainly possessed these same connotations in general parlance across the eighteenth century, but, as we have already implied, it doesn’t have quite the same currency in the eighteenth-century periodicals and magazines in whose titles the word frequently appeared. In social terms, the ‘Lady’ of eighteenth-century periodical and magazine titles is ostensibly a shorthand for women of the genteel and mercantile classes, whose lives, aspirations, and grievances often form the focus of much of these publications’ contents. The Lady’s Magazine, for instance, specifically addressed itself, in its inaugural August 1770 issue, to women from the ‘house-wife’ to the ‘peeress’, all of whom, the editor hoped, would ‘meet with something suitable to their different walk in life’ in the magazine’s pages. In fact, the periodical’s contents suggest its demographic was still wider, containing as it does letters putatively from, and countless stories about, daughters of cheesemongers and grocers, women in service and women labouring as shopworkers and governesses, even if not all of these women are treated with unqualified sympathy.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 15

17/11/17 4:59 PM

16

jennie batchelor and manushag n. powell

More often, however, ‘lady’ (like the term ‘fair sex’ with which it was so frequently coupled) functions as a moral rather than social marker in periodical titles. In the address ‘To the Ladies’ in the first issue of the Ladies Mercury of 28 February 1693, the editor vows that the periodical will ‘make it our Study to avoid even the least offensive Syllable, that may give any rude Shock to the Chastest Ear’ or ‘force a Blush into a Virgin-Cheek’ (1). The mockery underpinning the editor’s seeming chivalry is exposed immediately in the first question submitted to the Mercury in which a ‘perfect Magdalene’ describes her ‘Repentance’ at having allowed herself to be the mistress of ‘a lewd and infamous Rifler’ for nearly a year prior to marrying her a husband of whom she feels morally ‘unworthy’. The periodical’s response is characteristically pragmatic – since the woman’s ‘sin lyes concealed from the world’ and therefore shields her husband from infamy, there is no need for self-reproach – and its editor concludes by enjoining the correspondent to ‘[l]ook nobly up . . . to the bright Heaven before thee’ (1). Few periodicals for the ladies would contain as much explicit content devoted to extra-marital sex as the short-lived Ladies Mercury, and decidedly less tolerance toward what the New Lady’s Magazine described as ‘insipid, scandalous, or indecent’ content was extended as the century progressed (‘Address to the Ladies’. 1 (Feb 1786): n. p.). Nonetheless, magazines read by women sometimes showed considerable sympathy for women’s indiscretions, whether those of the reformed coquette eidolon of the Female Spectator, the fallen Misella in Samuel Johnson’s Rambler, or the clandestine lovers in countless magazine fictions in the century’s last decades. ‘Lady’, in other words, is not quite as morally absolute as a term as we might assume. More neutrally, ‘Lady’s/Ladies’ can function in periodical titles as ‘Female’ does, to imply a periodical’s positioning of itself in relation to existing titles. The precise nature of this positioning can be ambiguous or even downright misleading, but might suggest that a particular publication: (1) is in dialogue with an existing periodical; (2) sets itself up as a gender-specific rival to a known publication; or (3) is an attempt to cash in on the success of a popular serial work. Periodicals such as the Female Tatler, the Female Spectator, and the Lady’s Magazine have been read in all three ways in extant scholarship (and indeed, for many years such approaches have dominated scholarship on these periodicals), but as the essays devoted to them in this volume clearly demonstrate, each is a far more complex publication than such comparisons suggest, and each had a life and a brand very much of its own, independent of any namesake its strategically conjured. Perhaps the most misleading aspect of the ‘female’ in the Female Spectator or ‘Lady’ in the various lady’s museums, magazines, miscellanies, and repositories that appeared across the long eighteenth century, however, is the suggestion that these were exclusively magazines by and for women any more than the Athenian Mercury, the Spectator, or the Gentleman’s Magazine were men’s magazines. As we have noted above, some women wrote for all of these male-edited publications and many, many more read them, just as Oliver Goldsmith wrote and at some point edited the mid-century Lady’s Magazine (1759–63). Nor did writing from the vantage point of a female eidolon necessarily suggest either an implied female reader or a womanchampioning tone: around the same time Goldsmith was editing the Polite Companion for the Fair Sex (as the Lady’s Magazine was subtitled), Christopher Smart was putting forth the Midwife, by Mrs Mary Midnight (1751–3). Smart’s strange female eidolon was entirely unafraid of courting controversy with male authors, and reflected the

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 16

17/11/17 4:59 PM

introduction

17

learning and habits of Smart’s recent university education, even as Smart himself was performing in a vaudeville-like show, The Old Woman’s Oratory (1751), while crossdressed as his own creation. Meanwhile, Bonnell Thornton, who with George Colman would go on to write the important and polite Connoisseur (1754–6), launched the female-voiced Drury-Lane Journal (1752) by Madame Roxana Termagant specifically in order to attack Henry Fielding’s manly Covent-Garden Journal (1752) (other targets included Johnson’s Rambler and the Gentleman’s Magazine): with Thornton and Smart, the female voice had nothing to do with courting a female reader or adding a veneer of politeness to their work. Later in the century, the poets George Crabbe and Thomas Chatterton and novelist George Moore were just three of hundreds of men who wrote for the Lady’s Magazine and presumably, like the Midlands men and schoolboys brought to light in Fergus’s work, read it, too. In short, there really is no simple correlation between an author’s sex and the readers’, nor any desire for one on the part of the authors of this volume. Nonetheless, the assumption that eighteenth-century periodicals with female or ladies in their titles were ‘by women for women’ remains an enduring strain in the relevant scholarship, despite convincing efforts to by the likes of Maurer – who determines the phrase women’s magazine ‘oxymoronic’ – to debunk it (1998: 207). In no small part, this is because it is a myth (recognised as such even at the time of publication) that has its origins in the magazines that are our subject, and which frequently claimed to be produced by female pens for female amusement (Batchelor 2011: 245–67). Yet the presence of men as writers and readers need not disqualify a serial publication from the title ‘women’s periodical’ or ‘magazine’, especially in titles that claimed, as eighteenth-century periodicals directly marketed at female audiences often did, to offer distinctive content (on matters of sexual propriety, domestic economy, women’s education, fashion, needlework, or music) attuned to or discussed from the supposedly uniquely gendered perspective of their readership. In fact, all of these topics proved to be of interest in supposedly male-oriented periodicals too (the Hibernian Magazine even included monthly embroidery patterns, for instance), but the critical consensus, even among those scholars who are sceptical of the term ‘women’s periodical’ before the Victorian period, is that the women’s magazine in its recognisably modern form emerged around 1770 with the publication of the Lady’s Magazine (see for example, Maurer 2010). This volume does not contest this narrative, although it does challenge the conventional account of the separation of public from private spheres in the final decades of the century with which this narrative has been inextricably bound. Even so, it insistently questions the gendered assumptions about readership, content, and tone that are often bound up with the term women’s periodical. The essays that follow subscribe to a capacious, flexible, and sceptical definition of women’s periodicals and magazines. Essays address periodicals in which women were editors, dominant or merely occasional contributors; they examine magazines whose titles directly targeted women readers and others that did not but in which women played a key role as producers, purchasers, or subjects. The volume’s contributors illuminate periodical contents (such as fashion plates, needlework patterns, fiction) that have come to be seen as quintessential to the genre and others (mathematics, great lives, and politics) that have not always been identified in the early women’s magazine. Above all, they remain alert to the particularities of tone and form that worry away at so many of the

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 17

17/11/17 4:59 PM

18

jennie batchelor and manushag n. powell

essentialist assumptions commonly associated with the genre, but which, as numerous essays in this volume suggest, early women’s periodicals and magazines often qualified or actively resisted. Only by taking into account such complexities, this volume argues, can the first women’s periodicals achieve the central place they deserve in the history of eighteenth-century women’s writing.

Notes 1. See for example Mansfield Park, Ch. 16, and Ch. 3 of Northanger Abbey. 2. Daniel Defoe edited and wrote the Weekly Review of the Affairs of France, which ran under various names (and in bi- and tri-weekly forms) from 1704 to 1713, containing essays, news, and advice from a fictional ‘Scandalous Club’. For a recent treatment of Dunton’s well-known resentment of Defoe’s taking (loose) inspiration from his work, see King 2015. 3. On censorship, libel, and the government, see for example Black 2010: 95–138. 4. See also Parsons’s argument about the confluences between periodical publications and secret histories in Parsons 2017: 147–59. 5. The first of these altercations, about the misquoting of verse set to song, was reported in the magazine in the November 1773 issue (568). The dispute flared again in June 1778 (n. p.), shortly after the magazine published an extract of Reeve’s novel, The Old English Baron (1777) and invited her to become a regular, and presumably gratis, contributor to the magazine. 6. On the circulation of the Spectator see, for instance, Bond’s introduction to Addison and Steele 1965: lxxxiii. 7. A rare and invaluable exception can be found in the business papers and correspondence of John Nichols, whose printing house owned and edited the Gentleman’s Magazine from 1778 to 1856, and which are being archived by Julian Pooley. For more information on the in-progress Nichols Archive Project contact [email protected].

Works Cited Addison, Joseph and Richard Steele. 1965. The Spectator. Ed. Donald Bond. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Austen, Jane. 2006. Northanger Abbey. Ed. Barbara Benedict and Deidre Le Faye. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Batchelor, Jennie. 2011. ‘“Connections which are of service . . . in a more advanced age”: The Lady’s Magazine, Community, and Women’s Literary Histories’. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 30: 245–67. Black, Jeremy. 2010. The English Press in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Routledge. Bond, Richmond. 1952. ‘The Business of the Spectator’. University of North Carolina Extension Bulletin 32: 7–19. Bowers, Toni. 2011. Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance 1660–1760. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DiCenzo, Maria. 2015. ‘Remediating the Past: Doing “Periodical Studies” in the Digital Era’. ESC: English Studies in Canada 41.1: 19–39. Fergus, Jan. 2006. Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Graham, Walter. 1930. English Literary Periodicals. New York: Thomas Nelson. Guest, Harriet. 2000. Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 18

17/11/17 4:59 PM

introduction

19

Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Haywood, Eliza. 2001. The Female Spectator. Selected Works of Eliza Haywood. Part 2. Vols 2–3. Ed. Kathryn R. King and Alexander Pettit. London: Pickering & Chatto. Henderson, Desirée. 2017. ‘Recovery and Modern Periodical Studies’. American Periodicals 27.1: 2–5. Italia. Iona. 2008. ‘FAIR-SEXING IT’. Media History 14:3: 323–35. King, Rachael Scarborough. 2015. ‘Interloping with My Question-Project: Debating Genre in John Dunton’s and Daniel Defoe’s Epistolary Periodicals’. Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 44: 121–42. The Ladies Mercury. 1693. London: T. Platt. McDowell, Paula. 1998. The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678–1730. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Maurer, Shawn Lisa. 1998. Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the EighteenthCentury English Periodical. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —. 2010. ‘The Periodical’. The History of British Women’s Writing 1690–1750. Ed. Ros Ballaster. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 156–72. New Lady’s Magazine. 1786–95. London: Alexander Hogg. Parsons, Nicola. 2017. ‘Secret History and the Periodical’. The Secret History in Literature, 1660–1820. Ed. Rebecca Bullard and Rachel Carnell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 147–59. Powell, Manushag N. 2012. Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. ‘Robots Reading Vogue.’ 2017. (last accessed 6 Mar 2017). Shevelow, Kathryn. 1989. Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical. London: Routledge. Spedding, Patrick. 2006. ‘Measuring the Success of Haywood’s Female Spectator. Fair Philosopher: Eliza Haywood and The Female Spectator. Ed. Donald J. Newman and Lynne Marie Wright. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. 193–211. Suarez, S. J. Michael. 2009. ‘Introduction’. The Cambridge History of the book in Britain: Vol. V, 1695–1830. Ed. Michael Suarez, S. J. and Michael L. Turner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swift, Jonathan. 1948. Journal to Stella. Ed. Harold Williams. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Williamson, Gillian. 2016. British Masculinity in the Gentleman’s Magazine. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 19

17/11/17 4:59 PM

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 20

17/11/17 4:59 PM

Part I Learning for the Ladies

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 21

17/11/17 4:59 PM

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 22

17/11/17 4:59 PM

Learning for the Ladies: Introduction

I

n book 10 of the much-lauded Female Spectator (1744–6), Eliza Haywood’s main eidolon launches into a long disquisition about women’s minds and education, at one point imagining an antagonistic interlocution thus: ‘O but, say they, Learning puts the Sexes too much on an Equality, it would destroy that implicit Obedience which it is necessary the Women should pay to our Commands.’ The narrator responds, dryly, that it is certain ‘Knowledge can make the Bad [wives] no worse, and would make the Good much better than they could be without it’ (4 Feb 1745: 363–4). More interesting than this reasonably commonplace argument that education for women benefits men as well, is how the essay in its conclusion transforms this position into a meditation on the periodical genre itself: ‘my Readers will cry, that my Business, as a Spectator, is to report such Things as I see, and am convinced of the Truth of, not present them with Ideas of my own Formation’, but, she says, ‘much may be done by a steady Resolution,—without it, nothing’ (366). In other words, both the steadfast determination of the periodical author to keep creating output, and of the readers, men and women, to consume it and better their minds, must work together to achieve any progress. Periodicals, suggests this essay, were ever so much more than repositories of news and opinion. They could be, to use a term also employed by Haywood, ‘visionary’, moving their readers toward a more satisfying social structure using an educational programme of heterogeneous reading. The Female Spectator was a woman-championing periodical that was not, despite many modern claims to the contrary, a periodical designed only with women readers in mind, but it did give much weight to women’s educational obstacles. In eighteenthcentury England, while there were such shining exceptions to the rule as Margaret Cavendish or Elizabeth Carter, it was by no means assured that a woman would have any formal schooling or become either literate or numerate, let alone be able to improve her mind through extensive reading (as Mr Darcy famously suggested would be the ideal case). A learned woman might be a well-respected figure, but she was not one representative of the majority. In truth, female literacy always lagged behind males’, but both sexes saw major gains in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the 1750s, perhaps 40 per cent of women could read, mostly those in the middling and higher classes. Most education, male or female, began in the home, and was increasingly superintended by women; therefore, we witness a widespread, though diffuse, notion, like that seen above in Haywood: that for women to have some real knowledge and critical reasoning skill was a social good. Further, as we now know, women were not the major consumers of fiction in the eighteenth century: their reading was rather divided among religious, practical, and periodical writing. Because they provided women with access to a wide array of reading subjects, styles, and genres, and because they encouraged, though this variety, habits of reading that honed thoughtfulness and critical reasoning, periodicals were a crucial force in making available to women of middling to higher social status an education that reached beyond basic necessary and domestic skills. And some of them, as this first part of our volume will show, were interested in bringing education to women for its own sake, and not solely so that men

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 23

17/11/17 4:59 PM

24

part i: introduction

and children would find in their wives and mothers more useful appendages. Some even pushed the boundaries of women’s education beyond the relative safety of history and natural philosophy into theology or philosophy or even (that is, always) politics. The essays here take up the topic of periodical learning for women both in broad and narrow senses. One of the most useful movements in this group is Eve Tavor Bannet’s coinage of ‘woman-championing periodicals’ (a phrase that recurs throughout this volume) to describe works that, whether or not they are ‘by women for women’, pointedly adapt basic generic features of periodical writing to reorient them toward ‘the Ladies’. Non-vocational knowledge of all stamps was everywhere in periodical reading, and the diffuse and heterogeneous experience of reading in the genre in and of itself worked against sexual divisions in learning. Even so, periodical learning could also be a formalised affair. James Wood is quick to notice how carefully periodicals throughout the period interrogate the relationship between learning and politeness: as a whole, periodicals’ depictions of learning for women are ambivalent or positive, resisting the crude satires of learned ladies infamously found in some novels and conduct books. Though each defined it differently, women-championing periodicals from the Ladies Mercury (1693) to the Lady’s Magazine: or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770–1832) worked hard to negotiate a space where women’s extended learning was acceptable, even proper. Other specific case studies offer startling insights. Charlotte Lennox’s Lady’s Museum (1760–1), for example, was an innovative magazine far ahead of its time in numerous ways, one of which was its aggressive programme of comprehensive feminocentric education, which reaches far beyond the sometimes perfunctory didacticism that suffused other history reading recommendations for women. Anna K. Sagal tours us through Lennox’s ambitious plan to translate, revise, and write histories that would allow her readers not only world knowledge, but also alternative possibilities for what it means to be a woman in the first place. Part I concludes with the work of Koenraad Claes: no treatment of eighteenth-century educational debate would be complete without a consideration of how the upheaval of the French Revolution changed and catalysed matters, and Claes’s research into the Lady’s Magazine shows that the venue trusted its readers to handle controversy and political debate, meanwhile moderating against the conventional wisdom that the dominance of the magazine form at the end of the eighteenth century meant a shift away from an open embrace of women’s learning. In sum, Part I teaches us that the question of women’s learning in the periodical genre was an ambiguous, ambitious, and even a dominating theme.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 24

17/11/17 4:59 PM

1 Periodicals and the Problem of Women’s Learning James Robert Wood

O

ne of the questions posed in John Dunton’s question-and-answer periodical, the Athenian Mercury (1690–7), was ‘Whether it be proper for Women to be Learned?’ In its reply, the Athenian Mercury considered some possible responses to the question, ranging from the principle that women can be said to ‘have learned enough, if they can distinguish between their Husband’s Breeches and another Man’s’ to the proposal that women ought to be allowed to read ‘Novels, Plays, and Romances, with perhaps a little History’, but were to be kept well away from the ‘Edge-Tools of Philosophy’. The article concludes by opining, ‘we see no reason why Women should not be learned now, as well as Madam [Katherine] Philips, [Anna Maria] Van Schurman, and others, have formerly been’, although it is observed that many women could not avail themselves of such learning, with most of their waking hours spent either in paid or unpaid domestic labour (23 May 1691: 1). In the midst of considering the question of women’s learning, the Athenian Mercury is led to ask the more fundamental question: what is learning in the first place? Norma Clarke, in discussing this number, observes that in this context ‘women’s learning’ embraced a wide spectrum stretching from basic literacy to the erudition of a Margaret Cavendish: ‘Women being “learned” in 1691 might mean their having basic knowledge of reading, enough to puzzle out a pamphlet or page of the Bible; it might mean being able to write; or, at the other extreme, being proficient in Latin and Greek and sufficiently well read in such subjects as philosophy and theology to discourse with learned men’ (2004: 146). Clarke implies that it was men who decided which women were learned enough to participate in learned discourse. In contrast, Carol Pal has recently sought to question the assumption that learned women in the seventeenth century occupied a precarious place in the intellectual world. Pal argues that women represented ‘an integral component of a much larger intellectual commonwealth, known as the republic of letters’ (2012: 1). We should not assume, then, that women were necessarily marginal figures in the world of learning. In considering the role women’s learning plays in women’s periodicals over the long eighteenth century, however, I want to retain Clarke’s model of a continuum of learning rather than a sharp break separating the learned from the unlearned. Periodicals can offer insights into how women across the continuum participated in the wider culture of learning. Periodicals from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century sought to incorporate learning into women’s lives, reflecting, as they did so, on the meaning of women’s learning itself.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 25

17/11/17 4:59 PM

26

james robert wood

For all its facetiousness, the Athenian Mercury accurately anticipates how early periodical culture would seek to accommodate learning to politeness, a cultural ideal canonically articulated in the writings of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, who attempted, as Lawrence Klein has argued, to define the basis for a form of society outside the institutions of Court and Church (1994: 10 passim). Learning could potentially detach the learned person from others, making it impossible for him or her to participate in polite society. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator (1711–12; 1714) sought to distinguish polite learning from pedantry. Mr Spectator writes in Spectator 105 that ‘A Man who has been brought up among Books, and is able to talk of nothing else, is a very indifferent companion, and what we call a Pedant’ (30 June 1711, vol. 2: 437). However, the Spectator goes on to expand the word ‘pedant’ to include ‘every one that does not know how to think out of his profession and particular way of life’. Book learning is, for Mr Spectator, a subset of a larger type of impoliteness, rendering the pedant, wrapped up in the pursuit of a specialised subject, unable to enter fully into sociable commerce with others. In addition to the ‘Book-Pedant’, Mr Spectator names the ‘Man of the Town’, the ‘State-Pedant’, and the ‘Military Pedant’ as variations on the same pedantic theme. All these pedants are unable to converse outside their respective spheres of interest (30 June 1711, vol. 2: 437–8). The corruption of learning into pedantry in the Spectator emerges in the periodical as simply one variety of unsociability among many. One consequence of their programme of making learning polite is the anxiety it implies: namely that, in displaying one’s learning, one might so easily make oneself unsociable and ridiculous. In his anti-feminist satire L’Art de connaître les femmes (1730), translated into English in 1732 as The Art of Knowing Women, François Bruys suggested that this anxiety was especially acute for women. He asks the question, ‘Why is Knowledge in Women branded with a Kind of Shame?’ and gives as his answer to his own question that women ‘can only be learned by Halves’ and therefore ‘to avoid being ridiculed, it is better they should be wholly ignorant’ (96). If writers like Bruys suggested that women could only be learned ‘by Halves’, another line of attack on women’s learning was to argue that women could indeed become learned but could do so only by shirking their social and domestic responsibilities. The learned lady who neglects her household and personal appearance and flaunts socially accepted modes of behaviour frequently appears as an object of satire and opprobrium in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Nussbaum 1984: 43 passim). Tobias Smollett’s novel Roderick Random (1748), for instance, juxtaposes two women who are damaged socially in different ways through their learning: Mrs Sagely and Miss Williams. Mrs Sagely is described by Roderick sitting in her study surrounded by ‘books, globes, quadrants, telescopes, and other learned apparatus’ (1964: 218) along with a snuffbox, a dirty handkerchief, and a spittoon. She reclines in an awkward position ‘with one foot on the ground, and the other upon a high stool at some distance from her seat; her sandy locks hung down in a disorder I cannot call beautiful from her head, which was deprived of its coif, for the benefit of scratching with one hand, while she held the stump of a pen in the other’ (219). The novel’s other learned woman is Miss Williams, whose reading of Shaftesbury, Tindal, and Hobbes leads ineluctably to her seduction and subsequent fall into prostitution (117). Mrs Sagely and Miss Williams work as opposite sides of the same coin in Smollett’s novel, together implying that women’s learning is incompatible with polite society.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 26

17/11/17 4:59 PM

the problem of women’s learning

27

The social status of women’s learning from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century was, however, much more ambivalent than these satirical treatments would suggest. In the early part of the period, Bathsua Makin and Mary Astell wrote polemics in favour of education for elite women, contributing as they did so to the wider debate on the question of women’s learning, known in France as the querelle des femmes (Raftery 1997: 31–40). Makin’s Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen (1673) concluded with the hope that ‘some of these Considerations will at least move some of this abused Sex to set a right value upon themselves, according to the dignity of their Creation, that they might, with an honest pride and magnanimity, scorn to be bowed down and made to stoop to such Follies and Vanities, Trifles and Nothings, so far below them, and unproportionable to their noble Souls’ (41–2). In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694–7), Astell also sought to associate women’s learning with virtue, arguing that it is not learning but ‘Ignorance and a narrow Education’ that ‘lay the Foundation of Vice, and Imitation and Custom rear it up’ (2002: 67). Makin’s and Astell’s arguments indicate that the debate over women’s learning often revolved less around the question of whether or not women could be learned and more around the question of whether women’s learning tended toward vice or virtue. The debate on women’s learning continued into the eighteenth century, although it took on new inflections as the wider cultural imaginary changed and new forms of social affiliation appeared. Harriet Guest has argued, for instance, that during the eighteenth century the issue of women’s learning became increasingly intertwined with an emergent nationalism that sought to define Britain’s difference from and superiority to the Continent: ‘By the late 1760s and 1770s, publications by women could be welcomed simply because they were by women, and it became commonplace to claim that Britain was more civilised than other European nations because women were better treated in this culture, and were better educated’ (2000: 23). At the same time, new forms of sociability for women also opened up new lines of attack on learned ladies. Writers across the political spectrum aimed satires, for example, at the members of the loose society of learned women known as the Bluestockings, who began to meet as a group from the 1750s. They are targeted, for example, in Frances Burney’s unpublished play The Witlings (1779), in Charles Pigott’s chapter on the Bluestockings in The Female Jockey Club (1794), and in Thomas Rowlandson’s print Breaking Up of the Blue Stocking Club (1815) (Haslett 2010: 435, 439, 433). In this essay I argue that women’s periodicals were actively involved in negotiating the boundary that divided proper from improper learning for women. Whether implicitly or explicitly, women’s periodicals are engaged in wider discussions over where to place the line, dividing polite from impolite learning and how learning relates to other spheres of activity that tended to be marked off as distinctively feminine such as cooking, gossiping, or raising children. Periodicals addressed specifically to women readers do not simply aim to communicate or instil learning. Instead, they seek to engage their audiences in the wider cultural conversation around women’s learning and its place within women’s lives. My case studies will be the Ladies Mercury (1693), the Ladies’ Diary: or, the Woman’s Almanack (1704–1841), the Female Tatler (1709–10), the Female Spectator (1744–6), the Lady’s Museum (1760–1), and the Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770–1832). The titles of these periodicals make a specific appeal for the attention of women readers. However, it is

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 27

17/11/17 4:59 PM

28

james robert wood

important to remember, as Manushag N. Powell notes, that the readers of early periodicals ‘were almost always presumed to be sexually mixed, at least before the last third of the century’ (2012: 58; cf. Maurer 1998: 205). In this essay, then, I shall understand these periodicals as making bids for the particular, though not exclusive, attention of women readers.

The Ladies Mercury A few years after the Athenian Mercury had discussed the propriety of women’s learning, the Ladies Mercury appeared for a brief run of four numbers. The first number opens with an address to the ‘Gentlemen’ of the Athenian Mercury that seems to cede learning wholly over to that periodical: We acquiess to yield up to You that fair and larger Field; the Examination of Learning, Nature, Arts, Sciences, and indeed the whole World; being contented to bound our narrow Speculation to only that little Sublunary, Woman. Whilst Religion and Heaven, and other Sublimer Points, are your Gamaliel Studies; We are for sitting down with Martha’s humbler part, a little homely Cookery, the dishing up of a small Treat of Love, &c. (27 Feb 1693: 1) The Ladies Mercury goes on to propose a division of labour between love and learning, with itself claiming ‘Trifles and Vanities’ as its primary concern and the Athenian Mercury taking ‘more serious and weighty matters’ as its sphere of interest. In the process, the Ladies Mercury draws a distinction between learning and gossip that maps onto the distinction between the two sexes. This opening number of the Ladies Mercury, then, might be regarded as furnishing further evidence for Michael McKeon’s argument in The Secret History of Domesticity that the ‘separation out’ of the public and private in this period is closely bound up with the transition from a ‘one-sex’ to a ‘two-sex’ model of gender (2005: 272–7). But the very terms with which the Ladies Mercury proposes to leave learned topics to the Athenian Mercury undermines the opening announcement that no learning will appear in its pages. To understand the allusion to ‘Gamaliel Studies’, after all, a reader would have to catch the reference to the learned Pharisee who successfully defends Peter and his fellow apostles before the Jewish council in the Acts of the Apostles. Indeed, the promise to banish learning from the Ladies Mercury is immediately violated in the second number, whose first question is framed as an antiquarian query from a reader signing herself ‘Lucy C.’ who writes, ‘Our English History informs us, That about the Year 575, Etheldreda Daughter of Inah a King in the Saxon Heptarchie, was twice Married, kept her Virginity, and thence gained the title of St. Audrie’ and goes on to pose the question, ‘whether you believe She dyed a Maid or not, being Married to two Husbands? and supposing she did, whether, on that account she deserved the honour of being Canonized?’ (6 Mar 1693: 1). Even if she may well be a fictional correspondent, ‘Lucy C.’ gives expression to the interest many women in this period took in history, for whom, as D. R. Woolf has written, ‘antiquarian and especially genealogical pursuits were less a matter of amassing superfluous erudition than of constructing a personal historical domain by applying imagination and feeling to documentary and material evidence’ (1997: 653). Although Lucy C. does not claim any genealogical

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 28

17/11/17 5:00 PM

the problem of women’s learning

29

connection to Etheldreda, the story of the Saxon princess’s two marriages folds neatly into the concern with the private lives of public figures to which the contemporary genre of the ‘secret history’ catered (Bullard 2009). In its answer to Lucy C.’s query about whether the Saxon princess deserved to become St Audrey, the Ladies Mercury replied, we acknowledge her highly deserving the Honour of being Canonized. For supposing she was a Bedded as well as Wedded Wife, with the Innocence and Ignorance of never knowing nor designing to know WHAT’s WHAT; if all her Virtues and Piety were every way answerable, and she was as exemplar for Praying as for Fasting, and all other equal Mortifications and Abstinence from the rest of Worldly Temptations and Vanities, we can allow her no less than a Shining Saint of the First Magnitude. (6 Mar 1693: 1) The Ladies Mercury suggests that the impropriety imputed to women’s learning might be precisely what made it desirable for many women: the article slyly links antiquarian with sexual curiosity. Knowing about Etheldreda and knowing ‘WHAT’s WHAT’ become almost the same thing. This number of the Ladies Mercury gains a particular frisson, then, precisely by drawing attention to the possibility that sexual impropriety may attach to women’s learning. Although the Ladies Mercury would cease publication after only four numbers, its humorous article on Etheldreda anticipates how women’s periodicals would seek to draw a broad spectrum of readers into engaging with history and with learning more generally. As Eve Tavor Bannet notes in her essay in this volume, it was precisely the miscellaneous and fragmentary nature of the knowledge contained in the early periodicals that led them to be perceived as useful vehicles of learning for a broad spectrum of readers. Short, easily digestible forms like the anecdote were crucial in promoting learning in the early periodical. The anecdote’s formal separation from its surrounding context allows readers uninformed about Anglo Saxon history to engage with it. Short in form and pleasurable in effect, the anecdote could function equally well as a basis for moral speculation as it could function as a vehicle for historical knowledge (Wood 2014). By using an anecdote as the basis for a disquisition on whether or not virginity is a prerequisite for sainthood, the Ladies Mercury also succeeds in turning the antiquarian information it contains into an object of titillation, succeeding in allowing the article at one and the same time to offer an ‘Examination of Learning’ and ‘a small Treat of Love’. The strategy pursued by the Ladies Mercury in using short forms to make learning accessible to its readers would also be practised extensively in the much longer-lived Ladies’ Diary.

The Ladies’ Diary The Ladies’ Diary: or, the Woman’s Almanack was issued annually from 1704 to 1841, beginning in the reign of Queen Anne and ending early in the reign of Queen Victoria. In the first few years of its long run, the Ladies’ Diary contained recipes and fiction among the articles that framed the almanac proper. In 1709, however, the almanac’s editor John Tipper announced that the periodical would concentrate on enigmas and mathematical puzzles. Even before 1709, the Ladies’ Diary was already

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 29

17/11/17 5:00 PM

30

james robert wood

seeking to involve women in mathematical learning. In 1706, for example, Tipper printed an article explaining the causes of solar eclipses by claiming that ‘of all the Objects of our Thoughts, there is none more Noble, or give a greater Satisfaction to the Mind, than the Contemplation of the Heavenly Phaenomena, the Motions, Periodical Revolutions, Appulses, and other Passions and Effects of the Fixed Stars and Planets’. The article proceeds to invite its readers to model an eclipse of the sun by means of ‘a large Hoop of Two Yards Diameter’ (3 (1706): n. p.). Mathematical and astronomical abstractions are thus made to mesh with the world of everyday objects. The Ladies’ Diary’s presentation of mathematical puzzles in the context of an almanac can also be seen as a means of folding this knowledge into the routines of everyday life. The abstractions of mathematics arise from the lived experience of time: the rising and setting of the sun, the phases of the moon, and the passing of the seasons. The periodical’s short mathematical puzzles would be the main way it made mathematical learning pleasurable. A form of play rather than a chore, the mathematical puzzle could be pursued in periods of leisure outside the working day. These puzzles varied in difficulty. Some were solvable only by those who could follow the latest developments in mathematics. Shelley Costa notes, for example, ‘By 1720 the almanac had presented two problems involving Newtonian infinitesimal calculus – or “fluxions,” as it was then known in Britain – truly a cutting-edge technique at this time’ (2002: 53). The almanac also included easier problems such as the typical puzzle that ‘J. Hunt’ posed to the readers of the Ladies’ Diary in 1787: From the following equations, dear Gents, will appear An ornament greatly becoming the fair x + y + z = 20 x +2y +3z +20 x2 + y2 +z2 = 266 (84 (1787): 45) The solution, as revealed in the following year’s issue, is x = 3, y = 1, and z = 16 and the word formed by the third, first, and sixteenth letters of the alphabet is ‘CAP’ (85 (1788): 33). Like many other puzzles of the same kind in the Ladies’ Diary, the problem yields the name of a common object when solved. This variety of mathematical puzzle that produces a word as soon as it is solved argues for the similarity between the mathematical puzzles and the verbal enigmas that accompanied them in the periodical, which frequently had everyday objects as their solutions. In the 1709 issue of the Ladies’ Diary, Tipper described the enigma as, an ingenious and Beautiful obscuring the plainest things, which when discovered, strikes the Soul with Admiration, while we pleasingly wonder to see how it was possible to lay as it were a Veil before the Sun. It is an Artificial representing a Subject under the shape of those of another, with so much Cunning, that hides a thing while it discovers it, and persuades us it is something else than what it is really designed for. (6 (1709): n. p.) Like the anecdote, the mathematical puzzle and the enigma are short forms that produce an effect of revelation: a sense, however fleeting, of actually participating in the creation of knowledge as opposed to passively imbibing it.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 30

17/11/17 5:00 PM

the problem of women’s learning

31

The question naturally arises of how many women participated in posing and solving the mathematical puzzles in the Ladies’ Diary. Using Thomas Leybourn’s 1817 index of the posers and the answerers of puzzles in the mathematical sections of the Ladies’ Diary, Teri Perl finds that ‘Out of the 913 contributors listed in Leybourn’s index, only 32 were women (3.5%).’ At least one of these contributors who wrote under the name of ‘Ann Nichols’ was in fact a man posing as a woman (1979: 45). Conversely, it is likely that some women posed and answered mathematical problems under male names. Even taking the pseudonymous crossdressing into account, the true extent of which is unknown, Leybourn’s index suggests that the preponderance of people contributing to the mathematical content of the periodical were men. Perl finds further the proportion of contributors identifying themselves as women falling off over the course of the periodical’s run: ‘Seventeen women contributed between 1710 and 1725, while only fifteen women contributors are listed from 1748 to 1815’ – a decline that Perl ascribes to ‘the beginning of the current stereotypes about women and mathematics’ rather than to editorial policy (45–6). Of course, this does not suggest that few women attempted the mathematical puzzles, only that they may not have written back to the periodical to answer the puzzles in the same proportion as men did. Indeed, in the 1718 issue of the Ladies’ Diary, Tipper claimed that ‘foreigners would be amaz’d when I show them no less than 4 or 500 several letters from so many several women, with solutions geometrical, arithmetical, algebraical, astronomical, and philosophical’ (quoted in Perl 1979: 37). Many more women would have surely worked on the solutions than the few whose names appear in Leybourn’s index and the true number of women who pursued the mathematical puzzles of the Ladies’ Diary will remain unknown. What seems more significant, in any case, is the way the almanac seeks to integrate learning into women’s hours and days. The regular instalments in which eighteenth-century periodicals like the Ladies’ Diary were issued – whether those instalments were daily, monthly, or yearly – underpin the concern these periodicals show at the level of content for making learning a regular fixture of women’s lives.

The Female Tatler Women’s learning is a major concern of the Female Tatler (1709–10), whose first fiftytwo numbers are purportedly written by Phoebe Crakenthorpe, ‘a Lady that knows every thing’, as the periodical’s headnote informs its readers. This ambiguity about whether Mrs Crakenthorpe’s knowledge is of social affairs or learned matters, or indeed both, neatly captures the Female Tatler’s dual focus on learning and gossip. Although Tedra Osell describes Mrs Crakenthorpe as ‘no Bluestocking’ (2005: 293), she is in fact presented as being well-versed in modern and ancient literature in addition to being knowledgeable about the current stories doing the rounds about love affairs and social mishaps. In seeking to coordinate learning with gossip, Mrs Crakenthorpe resembles her male counterpart: Isaac Bickerstaff, the eidolon adopted by Richard Steele in the Tatler. In the opening number of the Tatler (12 Apr 1709), Bickerstaff proposes to publish different kinds of subject matter under the titles of London coffee and chocolate houses. He informs readers that he will include items of learning under the heading of ‘The Graecian’, an establishment which was, as Steele’s editor Donald F. Bond notes, ‘a favourite meeting place of lawyers, scholars, and

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 31

17/11/17 5:00 PM

32

james robert wood

members of the Royal Society’ (1987, vol. 1: p. 16 n. 5). More commonly, however, Bickerstaff tends to distribute learning and learned references into the Tatler as a whole, whose title, referring to the practice of tattling or gossiping, has been chosen by Bickerstaff in recognition of his female readers. By similarly claiming a prerogative to inhabit both the domains of gossip and learning, Mrs Crakenthorpe embodies the Female Tatler’s project to integrate learning into women’s everyday lives. We can see this project instantiated in the motto Sum Canna Vocalis (‘I am a talking reed’), which was appended to many numbers of the Female Tatler written nominally by Mrs Crakenthorpe and is explained in the third number. The motto is a reference taken from Ovid’s tale of King Midas’s barber, who, unable to share the secret that Midas has ass’s ears with other people, shares it with a hole in the riverbank, from which reeds later grow, broadcasting the information as they sway in the wind. Shawn Lisa Maurer writes that just as the motto ‘signals the transformation of nature, in the form of reeds played by the wind, into the culture of human discourse, so too does the publication’s own ability to metamorphose private scandal into public intelligence necessarily broaden the definition of [the] “women’s sphere”’ (2010: 161). The motto also signals the Female Tatler’s ambition to coordinate classical literature with the world of gossip. As a learned woman, Mrs Crakenthorpe is distinguished from another member of her circle, ‘Lady Wou’d-be’, who embodies the satirical stereotype of the lady determined to pursue learning to the detriment of her social and domestic obligations: Lady Wou’d-be, is a learned Piece, and has puzzled most Divines, she’s a great Admirer of Suckling, Milton she has by Heart, and Cowley her Bed-fellow; Plays are infinitely below her, Alexander she can bear, but a Comedy’s fit only for the Woman; she understands Architecture, and talks of the Corinthian, the Dorick, Ionick, and Tuscan Orders; her Language is Seraphick and Supernatural; and for those who use familiar Phrases, their Discourse is uncouth and jejune, and bears no Symmetry or Concatination. – Ask her, if she can make a Tansy? – She never hear’d of it. (29 July–1 Aug 1709: 1) A ‘Tansy’ is a plant used as a garnish for dishes, and the Oxford English Dictionary notes that in the eighteenth century the word could also refer to a pudding flavoured with its juice (‘Tansy’, n. 3). Lady Wou’d-be’s inability to understand what the word ‘Tansy’ means shows how her pursuit of learning – in English rather than classical poetry – has rendered her unable to participate in everyday conversation or to perform a domestic task like making a pudding. Even in a period in which cooking was increasingly the prerogative of the housekeeper in upper-class households, the lady might, as Gilly Lehmann observes in her social history of cooking in eighteenth-century Britain, ‘amuse herself with sweet dishes for the desert’ (2003: 286). Lady Wou’d-be’s ignorance of tansies shows her neglect of the varieties of domestic knowledge that highborn women were still expected to acquire. Like Elizabeth Carter, who, in Samuel Johnson’s description, ‘could make a pudding, as well as translate Epictetus from the Greek’ (quoted in Hill 1897, vol. 2: 11), the eidolon of the Female Tatler combines knowledge of polite literature with social and domestic competence. Learning is not just a personal acquisition in the Female Tatler but a social responsibility as well. A concern for learning is a necessary part of social and domestic life.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 32

17/11/17 5:00 PM

the problem of women’s learning

33

References to modern or classical literature tend to enter the Female Tatler through allusions or quotations that are prompted by immediate social concerns. Lady Wou’d-be’s public display of hypochondria in number 25, for example, provides Mrs Crakenthorpe with an opportunity to put her learning to use. For the edification of Lady Wou’d-be and the assembled company, Mrs Crakenthorpe reads out a passage from ‘a most Ingenious Author’ (31 Aug–2 Sep 1709: 1). The passage is an anecdote from Jean de La Bruyère’s Les Charactères (1688), which was first translated into English in 1699. In the anecdote, a character named Irene is represented as going to take medical advice from the Greek god Asclepius, who offers curt and commonsensical guidance: telling her, for example, to drink water when she complains to him that wine disagrees with her stomach (1700: 216–17). After reading out the extract, Mrs Crakenthorpe attempts to smooth over Lady Wou’d-be’s feelings: ‘Lady Wou’d-be was so sensible of her Vanity, and so out of Countenance at the false Steps she had taken to be a fine Lady, that I was forc’d to sweeten the roughness of Æsculapius with a Compliment, like giving her a Spoonful of Julip after a nauseous Medicine, to stifle a greater Confusion than I cou’d have imagin’d’ (31 Aug–2 Sep 1709: 2). The simile also obliquely serves as an image of how learning itself is made palatable in the Female Tatler by being placed in a social context. The same emphasis on the importance of learning in managing relations with others also appears when Mrs Crakenthorpe advises her friend Lady Mean-well to ensure that her son receive a proper education, setting out the ‘fatal Consequences’ that attend the ‘want of Erudition’, arguing that young men who have no taste of Books run into all manner of Extravagancies, and Time lying heavy upon their Hands, embrace the most sordid Company, show’d her several Fools of Fortune that flutter about this Town, and how contemptidly they appear before Men of Literature; that Estates but make ’em more conspicuous Coxcombs and that a Block–head was always brutish to his parents. (15–17 Aug 1709: 1) The very last number of the Female Tatler, probably authored by Bernard Mandeville, concludes with a paean to women’s learning. The last number is presented as a production of Lucinda, one member of the ‘Society of Ladies’ that replaces Mrs Crakenthorpe after the fifty-third issue. Surveying the course of women’s history, from the ‘first Ages of the World’ when ‘keeping of sheep and kneading of Dough were our ordinary employment’ through the Middle Ages when women were ‘condemn’d to the Distaff or the Seraglio, Elder and Chaster Monasteries than those founded on better Pretences’, Lucinda finds women persistently excluded from learning. She writes, however, that in the present age women have for the first time emerged with an equal claim to be as learned as men: By length of Time and negligence of our Tyrants, the Enclosures of learning wore, away, and Capacity and Inclination led many of our sex to venture on that forbidden Ground, and bright Examples the rest, that at present I believe, shou’d Apollo require a List of the Names of those Authors now in Being, to the great Joy of his impartial Goodness, he wou’d find his Female Votaries of almost equal Number and Industry to his Male, and put in as good a Claim to Immortality as those who endeavour to disappoint their Purpose or divert their Pursuit. (31 Mar 1710: 1)

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 33

17/11/17 5:00 PM

34

james robert wood

The last number of the Female Tatler implies that the periodical essay itself as a genre is a new form appropriate to a new age of women’s learning. In the process, this last number revives the trope of the ‘lost woman writer’ that Jennifer Summit has traced in writers in English from Chaucer to Queen Elizabeth, who used the myth of women’s exclusion from literature as a means of investing authority in modern vernacular writing (2000: 30 passim). The Female Tatler similarly uses the trope to authorise the new world of periodical culture. In the next two sections I examine two mid-century periodicals that self-consciously seek to define the possibilities and limits of women’s learning: Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator and Charlotte Lennox’s Lady’s Museum.

The Female Spectator Haywood’s Female Spectator, the eidolon of the periodical bearing her name, advises her female readers to read, though at the same time cautions them not to read too much: ‘It is not that I would perswade any one to a continual poreing over Books, too much Reading, tho’ of the best Authors, is apt to dull the Spirits, and to destroy that Attention which alone can render this Employment profitable’ (book 4 (24 July 1744), vol. 2: 125). This advice implicitly recommends the periodical itself as the kind of reading matter best suited to polite readers: a form that will not distract readers from social and domestic obligations. Throughout the Female Spectator, Haywood’s eidolon often gestures toward the need to contain women’s learning within proper limits. The Female Spectator approvingly reproduces a letter by ‘H.L.’ that commends her previous reflections on the immortality of the soul and thanks her ‘for recommending the Study of Philosophy to the Ladies, that is, that most useful Branch of it that teaches the Nature of the Soul’ (book 13 (2 May 1745), vol. 3: 26). This implies that some branches of philosophy may be more appropriate for women to study than others. This concern with setting bounds to women’s learning reappears in Book 15 of the periodical, which contains the correspondent ‘Philo–Naturae’s’ much-discussed letter recommending the study of natural philosophy to women. Philo–Naturae suggests that if women could only get into the habit of going out into the fields with their microscopes, then ‘They would doubtless perceive Animals which are not to be found in the most accurate Volumes of Natural Philosophy; and the Royal Society might be indebted to every fair Columbus for a new World of Beings to employ their Speculations’ (book 15 (6 July 1745), vol. 3: 88). Kristen M. Girten has argued that Haywood uses Philo–Naturae’s letter and the Female Spectator’s subsequent commendation of it to show how ‘women may turn their ostensibly trivial lives into lives of public significance, thus challenging the gendered separation of spheres that enables their confinement’ (2009: 57). Girten suggests that this prediction that women might contribute to the study of the natural world looks forward to the Royal Society’s publication of Caroline Hershel’s astronomical research in the 1780s and 90s and her eventual election to the Royal Society as its first female member in 1828 (Girten 2009: 59–60). Robin Valenza, however, places more emphasis on the restricted nature of the learning that ‘Philo–Naturae’ recommends to women, who clarifies that he would not want them to ‘fill their Heads with the Propositions of an Aldrovandus, a Malbranche, or a Newton: – the Ideas of those great Men are not suited to every Capacity; – they require a Depth of Learning, a Strength of Judgment, and a Length of Time,

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 34

17/11/17 5:00 PM

the problem of women’s learning

35

to be ranged and digested so as to render them either pleasing or beneficial’ (Book 15 (6 July 1745), vol. 3: 83). Here, Valenza argues, ‘Newton and his illustrious company are bodied forth as examples of that knowledge inaccessible to the untrained, the most prominent group of which is women’ (80). Where Girten sees the Female Spectator opening up possibilities for women’s investigations of the natural world, Valenza sees the periodical as closing them off. Their readings suggest the difficulty of taking account of the nuances that emerge even from a single discussion of women’s learning in one periodical. Periodicals like the Female Spectator are not straightforward calls either for expanding or restricting women’s learning. Rather, they attest to the complexities for a culture that saw women’s learning as both a necessary accomplishment and as a possible distraction from social and domestic life.

The Lady’s Museum The subject of women’s learning is also a central preoccupation in Lennox’s Lady’s Museum. The topic is frequently mentioned by the young female Trifler, who writes the introductory essays for each of the eleven monthly instalments of the Lady’s Museum, and is juxtaposed with her younger sister who shows no interest in learned matters. The question of women’s learning is also dramatised in the ‘History of Harriot and Sophia’, a serialised fiction later published as Lennox’s novel Sophia (1762). In the ‘History of Harriot and Sophia’, the studious and learned Sophia is contrasted with the vain and unlearned Harriot. Although the Trifler’s name might seem to imply a dismissive attitude toward women’s learning, the way that the Lady’s Museum begins its articles on natural history (entitled ‘Philosophy for the Ladies’) suggests that ‘trifles’ are the very basis and origin of knowledge: ‘We accumulate knowledge by golden grains, and find ourselves possessed of an ample treasure before we are even aware that we have attained the necessary store for our passing easily through life’ (1.2: 132). The topics featured in the Lady’s Museum echo the advice given in the essay included in the first issue, ‘Of the Studies Proper for Women’, a translation of Pierre Joseph Bourdier de Villemert’s L’Ami des femmes (1758), which recommends history and natural history as ‘alone sufficient to furnish women with an agreeable kind of study’ (1 (1760): 12). The Lady’s Museum ran a short history of Britain from the original Celts up to the Saxon Heptarchy and a collection of articles on small insects in the series ‘Philosophy for the Ladies’, including articles on the ‘Formica-Leo’ (1 (July 1760): 309–16), the ‘Swallow-tailed Butterfly’ (2 (Oct 1760): 467–73), and the ‘Ephemeron or Day-Fly’ (2 (Nov 1760): 633–40). The Lady’s Magazine’s focus on the theory as well as the practice of women’s learning is underlined by a series of selections in English translation from François Fénelon’s educational treatise ‘De l’Education des Filles’ (‘Of the Education of Daughters’). As Iona Italia has noted, Fénelon’s treatise, by contrast to the Lady’s Museum as a whole, tends to view women in the first place as teachers of children rather than students of learning in their own right (2005: 198). Indeed, as Anna K. Sagal has recently argued, Lennox allows women readers an active role in the creation of knowledge (2015). Interestingly, however, one single letter from a correspondent to the Lady’s Museum on an interpretive crux in Shakespeare’s Macbeth illustrates how periodicals sometimes sought both to tie women’s learning to a concern for children and parenting and to engage women readers in the active performance of critical judgement. The

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 35

17/11/17 5:00 PM

36

james robert wood

correspondent ‘C.D.’ argues on both historical and textual grounds that when Macduff, having been informed by Malcolm of the massacre of his family on Macbeth’s orders, remarks ‘He has no children’ that he is not referring to Macbeth but rather to Malcolm. ‘C.D.’ offers the analysis as a ‘trifling criticism’, which nevertheless may ‘perhaps occasion a different manner of reading and acting’ the scene from Macbeth in question (I, v, 409). If this short piece of criticism is thematically linked to conventionally ‘feminine’ concerns about the children of the characters in Macbeth – of the kind that would later be mocked by L. C. Knights in his essay ‘How many Children had Lady Macbeth?’ – it also pointedly routes these concerns through a speech by a male character composed by a canonical male playwright. Whatever the actual gender of ‘C.D.’ (who may well be a cover for Lennox herself), the letter she or he addresses to the Trifler suggests that a ‘feminine’ focus on the domestic situations of the characters in Macbeth may give rise to discoveries that would otherwise escape critics.

The Lady’s Magazine The long-running Lady’s Magazine featured learning as part of its content from its first appearance in 1770. Jacqueline Pearson notes in her study of women’s reading habits between 1750 and 1835 that the Lady’s Magazine carried articles on history, for example running a serialised ‘Concise History of England’ (1772–3) and another series of articles on natural history entitled ‘The Moral Zoologist’ (1800–5) that used natural history to encourage religious contemplation on the divine creator (1999: 66). Elsewhere in this volume, Jennie Batchelor takes up the subjects of the magazine’s ongoing conversation about women’s education and the magazine’s conversational form as a vehicle for women’s intellectual improvement. Here, I would like to focus on a different strand in the magazine’s framing of women’s learning: its alignment of learning with fashion. The ‘Address to the Reader’ that opens the first number of the Lady’s Magazine, for example, presents learning as a form of fashionable display. It promises its readers that ‘Every branch of literature will be ransacked to please and instruct the mind, besides the engravings designed to adorn the person’ (1 (Aug 1770): n. p.). In her previous work on the Lady’s Magazine, Batchelor has commented on how the textile metaphors embody the periodical’s mission as ‘a dual process of re-clothing: re-clothing women in a garb of probity and learning to make them more attractive and appealing wives, mothers and friends, and re-clothing probity and learning to render these virtues more attractive propositions to the magazine’s readers’ (2005: 111). The ‘Address’ even suggests that the fashion reports that it included might themselves be counted as a variety of learning – ‘a branch of information entirely new’ – thus giving fashion a place among the arts and sciences (1 (Aug) 1770: n. p.). Because the eighteenth century’s fascination with the ‘Orient’ produced both a programme of research into Eastern languages and literatures (Franklin 2011; Aravamudan 2011) and a fashion for Eastern clothes and commodities (Lemire and Riello 2008; Jenkins 2013), oriental learning was an ideal fit for the Lady’s Magazine’s programme of making learning fashionable. The magazine served as a venue for a popularised Orientalism, making narratives purportedly taken from Eastern texts available to its readers in French and English translations. As Srinivas Aravamudan notes, the Lady’s Magazine published short extracts from the Arabian Tales: or a Continuation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments between 1794 and 1796 (2011: 69). The magazine also

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 36

17/11/17 5:00 PM

the problem of women’s learning

37

prominently featured a number of stories that were termed ‘Oriental Anecdotes’ among its pages. One such anecdote, printed under the title ‘COMFORT FOR THE AFFLICTED’ and subtitled ‘From the Arabic’ was issued in the first number of the magazine: A POOR Dervise made his pilgrimage to Mecca, barefooted for want of shoes, cursing his lot, and accusing heaven of cruelty; but when he arrived at the gate of the great Mosque of Cousa, he perceived a poor man who had lost both his feet. The view of a man more miserable than himself, afforded him some consolation, and convinced him, that it was a greater affliction to be without feet, than without shoes. (1 (Aug 1770): 24) This ‘Oriental Anecdote’ inverts the aspirational logic of fashion, which compels the unfashionable to endeavour to emulate the dress and graces of the fashionable. Anecdotes like these could themselves, however, be perceived as items of fashionable knowledge: able to be treated both as small fragments of oriental learning and as aperçus to be used in polite conversation.

Conclusion To survey women’s periodicals over the long eighteenth century is to be struck by the many different types of learning that could be found in them, from antiquarianism in the Ladies Mercury, classical and modern literature in the Female Spectator, mathematics in the Ladies’ Diary, natural history in the Female Spectator, criticism in the Lady’s Museum, and Orientalism in the Lady’s Magazine. More than simply setting out to popularise learning, however, women’s magazines made contributions to the debate around women’s learning itself. One important continuity found across women’s periodicals of the long eighteenth century is the effort to bring learning into contact with spheres of life and literature that apparently lie outside it. So, for example, the antiquarianism is juxtaposed with secret history in the Ladies Mercury, enigmas with mathematical puzzles in the Ladies’ Diary, classical scholarship with gossip in the Female Tatler, countryside excursions with botany and zoology in the Female Spectator, literary criticism with parenting in the Lady’s Museum, and Orientalism with fashion in the Lady’s Magazine. Throughout this essay, however, I have left the question hanging that the Athenian Mercury implicitly asks in the act of considering whether it is proper for women to be learned: what, after all, is learning? We might answer this question by defining learning against other kinds of knowledge: learning as opposed to practical knowledge of how to make a table or a dress, for example. Or we might define learned texts against other kinds of texts: for example, the ‘novels or romances’ that the Athenian Mercury mentions as typical reading matter for women. Learning, we might say, is opposed to the immediate pressures of work and the pleasures of leisure. This implies, however, that learning is a relational and not a fixed term. Because women’s periodicals over the long eighteenth century show a persistent concern for connecting learning to other spheres of life, they tend to emphasise precisely the relational quality that characterises the idea of learning: the way that it emerges only over and against other kinds of knowledge. In particular, these periodicals remind us of the role that gender difference has played in defining what it means to be learned.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 37

17/11/17 5:00 PM

38

james robert wood

Works Cited Addison, Joseph and Richard Steele. 1965. The Spectator. Ed. Donald F. Bond. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Aravamudan, Srinivas. 2011. Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Astell, Mary. 2002. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. Ed. Patricia Springborg. Peterborough, Canada: Broadview. Batchelor, Jennie. 2005. Dress, Distress, and Desire: Clothing and the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bruys, François. 1732. The Art of Knowing Women; Or, The Female Sex Dissected. London: Printed for E. Curll, and T. Payne. Bullard, Rebecca. 2009. The Politics of Disclosure, 1674–1725: Secret History Narratives. London: Pickering & Chatto. Clarke, Norma. 2004. The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters. London: Pimlico. Costa, Shelley. 2002. ‘The Ladies’ Diary: Gender, Mathematics, and Civil Society in EarlyEighteenth-Century England’. Osiris 17: 49–73. Dunton, John, ed. 1690–7. The Athenian Mercury. London. Franklin, Michael J. 2011. ‘Orientalist Jones’: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746–1794. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Girten, Kristen M. 2009. ‘Unsexed Souls: Natural Philosophy as Transformation in Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator’. Eighteenth-Century Studies 43.1: 55–74. Guest, Harriet. 2000. Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Haslett, Moyra. 2010. ‘Bluestocking Feminism Revisited: The Satirical Figure Of The Bluestocking’. Women’s Writing 17.3: 432–51. Haywood, Eliza. 2001. The Female Spectator. Selected Works of Eliza Haywood. Part 2. Vols 2–3. Ed. Kathryn R. King and Alexander Pettit. London: Pickering & Chatto. Hill, George Birkbeck. [1897] 1966. Johnsonian Miscellanies. 2 vols. New York: Barnes and Noble. Italia, Iona. 2005. The Rise of Literary Journalism in the Eighteenth Century: Anxious Employment. London: Routledge. Jenkins, Eugenia Zuroski. 2013. A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Klein, Lawrence. 1994. Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in early Eighteenth-century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. La Bruyère, Jean de. 1700. The Characters, Or, The Manners of the Age. By Monsieur de la Bruyere, of the French Academy. Made English by Several Hands. 2nd edn. London: John Bullard. The Ladies’ Diary: or, the Woman’s Almanack.1704–1841. London. The Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex. 1770–1832 (1st ser. 1770–1819; 2nd ser. 1820–9; 3rd ser. 1830–2). London. The Lady’s Magazine; or, Polite Companion for the Fair Sex. 1759–63. London. The Ladies Mercury. 1693. London: T. Platt. Lehmann, Gilly. 2003. The British Housewife: Cookery Books, Cooking and Society in 18thCentury Britain. London: Prospect Books. Lemire. Beverly and Riello, Giorgio. 2008. ‘East and West: Textiles and Fashion in Early Modern Europe’. Journal of Social History 41.4: 887–916. Lennox, Charlotte. 1760–1. The Lady’s Museum. London: J. Newbury and J. Coote.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 38

17/11/17 5:00 PM

the problem of women’s learning

39

McKeon, Michael. 2005. The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Makin, Bathsua. 1673. An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen. London: Printed by J.D. Maurer, Shawn Lisa. 1998. Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the Eighteenthcentury English Periodical. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —. 2010. ‘The Periodical’. The History of British Women’s Writing, 1690–1750. Ed. Ros Ballaster. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nussbaum, Felicity. 1984. The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women, 1660–1750. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. OED Online. 2016. Oxford University Press. (last accessed 12 Sep 2016). Osell, Tedra. 2005. ‘Tatling Women in the Public Sphere: Rhetorical Femininity and the English Essay Periodical’. Eighteenth-Century Studies 38.2. 283–300. Pal, Carol. 2012. Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pearson, Jacqueline. 1999. Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perl, Teri. 1979. ‘The Ladies’ Diary or Woman’s Almanack, 1704–1841’. Historia Mathematica 6. 36–53. Powell, Manushag N. 2012. Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Raftery, Deirdre. 1997. Women and Learning in English Writing, 1600–1900. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Sagal, Anna K. 2015. ‘Philosophy for the Ladies’: Feminism, Pedagogy, and Natural Philosophy in Charlotte Lennox’s Lady’s Museum’. Eighteenth-Century Fiction 28. 140–66. Smollett, Tobias. [1748] 1964. The Adventures of Roderick Random. Ed. Paul Gabriel-Boucé. London: Oxford University Press. Steele, Richard. 1987. The Tatler. Ed. Donald F. Bond. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Summit, Jennifer. 2000. Lost Property: The Woman Writer and Literary History, 1380–1589. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Valenza, Robin. 2009. Literature, Language, and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines in Britain, 1680–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wood, James Robert. 2014. ‘Mr. Spectator’s Anecdotes and the Science of Human Nature’. Eighteenth-Century Life 38.1. 63–92. Woolf, D. R. 1997. ‘A Feminine Past? Gender, Genre, and Historical Knowledge in England, 1500–1800’. The American Historical Review 102: 645–79.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 39

17/11/17 5:00 PM

2 Discontinuous Reading and Miscellaneous Instruction for British Ladies Eve Tavor Bannet

T

his essay considers some of the ways in which ‘Ladies’ (and would-be ladies) were interpolated by features of periodicals that are frequently mentioned, but less often explored: their promise to instruct as well as entertain their readers; their miscellaneous character; their co-optation of conversational forms; and the interpretative and critical methods they modelled and taught. These were fixed generic features of eighteenth-century periodicals that contemporaries linked directly both to the composition of their target audiences and to the ways in which they expected periodical contents to be read and used. Manushag N. Powell has rightly stressed that ‘both male and female periodical writers tended to address all genders, or at least assume their presence in the readership’, and that most periodicals were read by women as well as men, while pointing out that this ‘does not mean they were treated exactly the same as their male counterparts’ (2012: 133). But there was also considerable variation in how women were treated, especially in male-authored periodicals. Along with those that ‘marginalised women, under the guise of polite gallantry’ (Copley 1995: 73), those that ‘constructed the ideal woman as sexually chaste, emotionally passive and economically unproductive’ (Maurer 1998: 7), and those that built on an erudite tradition of ‘misogynist satire’ to deride females as gossips, fools, or termagants (Browne 1992: 20), there were male-authored periodicals addressed primarily to ladies which claimed that ‘in Great Britain alone, the charming Sex maintain the Dignity of human Nature’ as rational beings, and sought to ‘embellish their Understandings . . . enlarge their Faculties, and open their Thoughts by Degrees’ (Free Thinker 1.3 (1718): vii, 8). This last understudied group is our focus here, exemplified by Ambrose Philip’s Free Thinker (1718–23), the Ladies Journal (1727), the Lady’s Weekly Magazine (1747) and the Female Mentor (1793–6). The Free Thinker and the Ladies Journal have male eidolons who characterise themselves as ‘Champions of the Fair’; the others use female characters to ‘dignify’ ladies, while demonstrating rhetorical patterns indicative of a well-trained male pen. All but the Lady’s Weekly were sufficiently popular and long-lasting to be reissued in volume form, the Free Thinker and the Female Mentor multiple times.1 While occupying a middle ground between mainstream and woman-authored periodicals and adopting some key contemporary feminist positions, ‘woman-championing’ periodicals such as these usefully illustrate ways in which generic features common to all periodicals could be adapted and reoriented to the Ladies.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 40

17/11/17 5:00 PM

discontinuous reading and instruction for ladies

41

Periodicals carried a miscellany of knowledge fragments: ‘learning’ in the arts and sciences (moral, political and natural philosophy, history, cultural geography, theology and religion, classical learning, modern literature, genre theory, literary and art criticism), factual information, practical receipts, political and commercial intelligence, ‘knowledge of the world’, ‘instructions unto life’, summaries of domestic, foreign, and American news. All periodicals were not equally instructive, or even instructive on all the same topics. But their reiterated promises to ‘disseminate useful knowledge among all ranks of people at a small expense’, as successive title pages of the Bee, or Literary Weekly Intelligencer (1790–4) declared, and to serve as ‘Repositories of Instruction’ as well as ‘Amusement’, should not be dismissed as trivial or marginal to more important party political and/or conduct-book functions. What Stephen Copley calls ‘general, non-vocational, non-specialist knowledge’ became a valuable and highly vendible commodity at the turn of the eighteenth century, when its dissemination began to serve both personal and national-imperial goals (Copley 1995: 67). As Isaac Watts observed, knowledge was needed to counteract the ‘narrowness of mind’ prevailing among men who travelled little beyond their native town or village, and ‘know not how to believe anything wise or proper besides what they have been taught to practice’. At once too credulous of superstitions and too disbelieving of new truths, men who ‘confine[d] themselves within the circle of their own hereditary ideas and opinions’ refused to believe that the sun did not rotate around the earth, that the telescope and microscope did not ‘delude the eye with false images’, or that the dress and customs of people in other places were not absurd or monstrous because different from their own. Widespread general reading must cure widespread ignorance and produce what Britain’s expanding commercial empire increasingly needed: men who knew enough about the world to take its diverse phenomena and peoples in their stride and whose ‘enlarged’ understandings could cope with experiences, discoveries, and truths that were constantly ‘new and strange’ (Watts 1743: 227, 231, 232). Acquisition of the knowledge disseminated by periodicals was ‘useful’ to individuals inasmuch as it contributed to a man’s social advancement, commercial success and/or prosecution of the business of life, and introduced him to subjects not yet readily available either in Latin Grammar or in ‘English’ schools. But the knowledge presented in periodicals also denaturalised the local, the provincial, and the insular by providing ‘general views’: subsuming persons under types and localities under regions; showing the ‘Country’ how it looked to the ‘Town’, the Town to the Country, the empty-headed leisured ranks to ‘the busie Part of Mankind’, and ‘factions’ to one another; contrasting British manners with French, Protestants with Catholics, and increasingly, through a series of wars, positioning Britain as an actor in Europe and the new World.2 One of the more important functions of periodicals, then, was to serve as what George Washington called ‘easy vehicles of education’ (quoted in Read 2005: 234). Contemporaries held that periodicals’ miscellaneous and fragmentary character was precisely what made them such ‘easy vehicles of education’. British periodicals were not addressed exclusively to an educated, leisured, and fashionable elite, as we sometimes suppose. They were geared to the ‘Unlearned’ – propertied gentlemen who had ignored or forgotten whatever education they had received (the condition of most of the traditional gentry and nobility, according to Addison and others throughout the century); ladies without much formal schooling, or conversant primarily with the standard female ‘accomplishments’; graduates of ‘English schools’ (the Vo-Techs of

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 41

17/11/17 5:00 PM

42

eve tavor bannet

the day); and those whose formal training had not proceeded much beyond the primer and the grammar book. According to Vicesimus Knox, the unlearned included people ‘of all conditions: the young and the old, the gentleman and the merchant, the soldier, the mariner, the subordinate practitioner in medicine and law, those who hold places in public offices . . . and lastly, though not least numerous or important, the ladies’ (1779, vol. 2: 11). But we have discovered that periodicals were read even further down the social hierarchy – by servants, country tradesmen’s wives, schoolchildren, students, apprentices, and clerks.3 Being incapable as well as unwilling to follow distant causes through long abstruse academic treatises, as Dr Johnson pointed out in Rambler no. 145, the unlearned needed literary ‘manufactures’ tailored to their intellectual girth (Johnson (1751) 1969: 10–12). This was a challenge if, as John Clarke said, the leisured ranks were easily distracted, reading only ‘by fits and starts’ and ‘without due Attention’ (Clarke 1731: 74) while ‘men who are engaged in the active pursuits of business’ had little time to devote to reading or study (Bee 1.1 (Dec 1790)). Providing a variety of short, informative, and self-contained pieces in language that could be readily understood was an ideal way of instructing readers such as these. As contemporaries explained, the brevity and perspicuity of periodical essays, letters, or reports meant that knowledge could be acquired without much time or effort on the part of the readers. The busy could easily read a short essay, report, letter, or poem in the ‘interstices’ of labour or during their few idle hours, and the sociable were spared the trouble of selecting extracts from books to read aloud and discuss in domestic or social settings – they could conveniently use one or other of the periodical’s short, preselected pieces to preface and stimulate conversation in company. Tailor-made too for readers with short attention spans, who were easily distracted and soon ready to move on to something else, the periodical’s miscellaneous variety of subjects, genres, and styles was widely supposed to increase potential market share by serving readers with diverse interests and tastes. At the same time, the relatively self-contained character of each issue, and of each item within it, invited and facilitated discontinuous reading – as did the collection of issues into volumes, since these more capacious repositories multiplied the miscellaneous options immediately available to a reader. Discontinuous reading here means reading individual items selectively according to one’s tastes, interests, or momentary inclination, as well as reading bits at different times, out of sequence, and/or without bothering to connect them to others. The miscellaneous contents of the group of woman-championing periodicals to be considered here did not differ markedly from that of other instructive periodicals. They were certainly not confined to the ‘feminine’ and domestic topics (dress, beauty, housewifery, marriage, love) that were reserved for women readers after it became what Hannah More called, in Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), ‘the Profession of Ladies’ to be ‘Wives, Mothers and Mistresses of Families’ (1818, vol. 8: 38).4 Edited and largely authored by Ambrose Philips, the Free Thinker’s 159 issues instructed its ‘Female Disciples’ in principles of rational reflection derived from John Locke’s ‘Of the Conduct of the Understanding’ (1706) as well as in religious controversies, the principles on which Britain’s mixed government had been established at the Revolution, the importance of trade and frugality to a flourishing empire, the cause of eclipses and other such ‘serious’ subjects. The periodical made it clear that love and marriage were matters of equal importance to men and women, and that the goal of its occasional issues on these subjects was to ‘reform both Sexes’

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 42

17/11/17 5:00 PM

discontinuous reading and instruction for ladies

43

in order to better ‘tally’ them to one another (1.13 (1718): 57). While simultaneously addressing ‘the vulgar or grosser Understandings who have no Leisure or Inclination to learn’ (1.16 (1718): 69), the ‘busie Part of Mankind’, and men ‘who had the Misfortune to grow old in Ignorance’ (1.23 (1718): 106) the periodical singled out ‘the Fair Sex’ for instruction in the art of thinking for themselves rationally and impartially (free thinking), because ‘Your tender Sex, for want of these Inquiries which they had long been disus’d to, were the greatest slaves in your notions’ (‘To the Ladies of Great Britain’ 1.1 (1718): vi). The twenty-two numbers of the Ladies Journal, which was likewise designed for ‘the Improvement of the Ladies, and the more unlearn’d Part of the World’ (no. 8 (1727): 57) were intended to instruct readers in ‘the liberal Sciences’; while the surviving number of the Lady’s Weekly Magazine (Thursday 19 Feb 1747) was devoted to a ‘History of the Transactions of the World’: it contextualised Britain’s war in Flanders in international relations, past and present (1). Woman-championing periodicals reoriented their instructive contents to ladies by adding miscellaneous elements promoting women’s education. Male periodicalists put their female readers on their mettle by telling them that ‘Learning’ would ‘embellish’ their minds as beauty embellished their bodies, and outlast their physical attractions (Free Thinker 1.3 (1718): 8); that study would ‘set them upon a Level with my own Sex, in our boasted Superiority of Reason’ and show that ‘Ladies have as nice a Sense of Things, and as good Judgment, as most Men, however objected against by some’; or that ladies ‘could obtain the Preference over Men by their Application to Learning’ (Ladies Journal no. 3 (1727): 20; no. 2 (1727): 11; no. 1 (1727): 96). They added to their medley of essay topics, essays on female education and essays describing women who had distinguished themselves by their learning or ingenuity, whether in antiquity or in modern times – indeed, a quarter of the Female Mentor’s forty-three issues were devoted to learned women and notable queenly consorts.5 They also exemplified rational and educated women with well-informed minds and sound judgements in their pages. The Lady’s Weekly Magazine had a female character explain Europe’s intricate international relations to two interested female characters, and highlighted the important role played by female rulers, such as the Empress of Russia, in international events. The Female Mentor made a thoughtful and well-read mother-character the definitive, authoritative voice. Others favoured essays praising the conduct of educated women who judged for themselves, often in binary opposition to more fashionably unlearned constructions of womanhood. Promoting women’s education bore on the instruction that woman-championing periodicals were actively offering ladies; it helped market the product. But this product also echoed, and helped to keep alive, principles and proofs earlier adduced by feminists such as Mary Astell, Lady Chudleigh, and Judith Drake, who had argued at the turn of the eighteenth century that women appeared to be fools only because they lacked men’s education – not, as men said, because they lacked Reason – and that once educated, they would prove men’s equals or superiors. Women-championing periodicals stopped short of recommending to ladies the extensive learning prescribed by a Bathsua Makin or Mary Astell. But they were less regulatory too; for in their efforts to appeal to diverse readers with diverse tastes, abilities, and opportunities, they recommended more than one kind of learning, even in the same periodical. The Free Thinker presented a course of reading for ladies wishing to learn to think and judge for themselves and acquire the same kinds of general knowledge as men. But with proper

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 43

17/11/17 5:00 PM

44

eve tavor bannet

gallantry and polite deference, it also addressed and supplied ladies seeking more restricted, detailed, and gossiping kinds of knowledge. The Female Mentor used its principal character to model a well-read and highly articulate mother whose intellectual arguments impressed and silenced gentlemen, and presented numerous examples of powerful ‘consorts’ in governing roles. But its essays on education drew on François Fénelon’s century-old Traité de l’éducation des filles (1687), which stressed moral and domestic education. The effect of this variety of models was to give ladies options for the kind of woman they wished to imitate, the kind/s of role they wished to play, and the kind/s of instructive reading they accordingly chose, even within the said periodical – and perhaps helped to pacify male readers who objected to women learning on the grounds that ‘they have other things to do [which] they will not mind if they be once Bookish’ (Makin 1673: 6). Periodicals did not, on the whole, bother to explain why men needed knowledge. Perhaps this was obvious enough, given the British Empire’s many new, educationdependent jobs and the fact that ‘learning’ was now enabling men in the lower orders to dramatically better themselves. Periodicals began to flourish at a moment when upward social mobility no longer depended solely on wealth acquisition or grammar-school scholarships leading to the learned professions (law, divinity, medicine). Many now rose from the humblest beginnings as clerks, bookkeepers, and ‘writers’ (i.e. clerks or factors in India or other foreign locales) in commerce; as secretaries, copyists, customs officers, and minor officials in government service at home and abroad; or as printers, booksellers, scriveners, writing masters, tutors and teachers, military and ships’ officers, engineers, surveyors and estate agents almost anywhere. The same could not be said for ladies or would-be ladies, who might reasonably wonder why they should exert themselves to develop their rational faculties and acquire general knowledge when they could be attending to the still room, helping in the shop, or picking out a new tune or gown. Woman-championing periodicals met this challenge by using ‘Conversation’ both to justify female learning and exemplify its results. During the first half of the century, these periodicals attached ladies’ need for knowledge to the fact that conversation was ‘mixed’. Some recent scholars maintain that, contrary to what we once thought, women always already inhabited the ‘public sphere’ – as servers, hawkers, and occasional visitors in coffee houses, for instance. But contemporaries tended to present ‘bring[ing] both Sexes to mix indifferently, in Conversation, in public Assemblies and in all the Diversions of Life, to the mutual Satisfaction and Improvement of each other’ (Free Thinker 1.3 (1718): 10) as something new. Judith Drake, for instance, described this as an import from France that would have a civilising and restraining effect on English men if adopted in England (1697). The Free Thinker described mixed conversation as an invention of ‘philosophers’ who had designed ‘Laws of Politeness and Good Breeding’ such as this to temper men’s natural fierceness (1.3 (1718): 10); while the Ladies Journal said that learning ‘despite the Tyranny of Custom’ would ‘render [ladies’] Conversation more acceptable to the wiser Part of Mankind’ (no. 2 (1727): 11). Conversation was also an important instrument of pedagogy, especially for girls and the unlearned who, even if able to write, had not acquired the habit of using writing as a natural aid to learning, memorisation, and application of what had been learned. Pedagogy – the need to educate children – became an alternative justification for ladies’ acquisition of knowledge after mid-century, when more and more women established themselves as teachers and

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 44

17/11/17 5:00 PM

discontinuous reading and instruction for ladies

45

teacher-owners of schools, and feminists began urging mothers to educate their own children (as fathers had earlier been urged to do). On both counts, conversation tended to figure larger in woman-championing periodicals than in other male-authored ones, both as an exemplification of the impact knowledge had on women’s conversation in mixed company, and as a vehicle of instruction in its own right. Here again, we are looking at the adaptation and reorientation of a generic feature, for all periodicals typically included some stylised conversational devices. John Dunton had cleverly appropriated for the Athenian Mercury the question-and-answer structure long familiar even to beginning readers from catechisms and grammars. Later essayperiodicalists preferred the ‘written conversation’ of letters to the editor (which incorporated questions and answers when these sought and received advice) and marked or unmarked letter-essays which positioned the public as addressees and ‘friends’. Since contemporary readers thought of language as situated between an I and a You about an It and conceived of reading as ‘conversing with books’, this was coupled with an eidolon designed (among other things) to provide readers with an obvious interlocutor who could, in turn, acknowledge readers’ shaping presence through bursts of colloquial style, occasional apostrophes and allusions to their qualities or needs. In mainstream ‘spectatorial’ periodicals and later magazines, however, such devices were increasingly overlaid by essays presenting the observations, speculations, or lucubrations of what Johnson felicitously called a ‘disembodied intelligence’ (or series of disembodied intelligences). Abandoning for the moment any quirks associated with the eidolon in favour of the rational exposition and seeming neutrality of a knowledgeable ‘looker-on’, spectatorial periodicalists might summarise conversations, comment on styles of conversation, or produce prescriptive ‘Essays on Conversation’; but they rarely recorded the interactions and speech-acts among conversing characters so that these could be directly ‘seen’ and ‘heard’. Woman-championing periodicals often did allow such conversations to be seen and heard in order to make conversation itself a vehicle of instruction. The Lady’s Weekly Magazine presented its ‘History of the Transactions of the World’ in dialogue form, explaining that ‘we have chose to convey our Sentiments by Way of Dialogue, as the most easy, familiar and natural Method for all Capacities, and which is likely to make the strongest Impression upon the Memory’ (no. 1 (1747): 1). The dialogue is generated by questions that a Miss Bloom and Lady Manley direct to Mrs Pry, who is ‘a connoisseur in both trade and politics’. Miss Bloom explains that her questions are intended ‘for my instruction, as well as my Aunt’s amusement, for I like to know what is doing in the world, as it will furnish me with knowledge useful in Conversation and pleasing to Society’ (1). Conversation was the stated goal as well as the means of instruction. After Mrs Pry’s answers demonstrate her extensive knowledge and shrewd critical judgment, Miss Bloom thanks her by saying: ‘you have given me more instruction with respect to the affairs of Europe than I could have reasonably expected in so short a time’ (2). The time it took to listen to an instructive conversation was all the more profitable for being short. The Female Mentor was subtitled ‘Select Conversations’. While privileging the oral disquisitions of the mother-mentor, it recorded the conversations of ‘an improving and rational society’ composed of both men and women. This society originated in the participants’ childhood, when the mother-character (Amanda) had regularly ‘assembled’ her own and others’ children ‘for recreation, entertainment and improvement, by a course of reading and

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 45

17/11/17 5:00 PM

46

eve tavor bannet

conversation’ of an afternoon (1 (1793): 1). The adult conversational circle here therefore departs in interesting ways both from the literary coteries that Margaret Ezell found reflected in the Gentleman’s Journal at the beginning of the century (Ezell 1992: 323–40), and from single-sex clubs or ‘societies of ladies’ modelled on the Spectator. More modestly, while occasionally introducing whole discourses verbatim, the Free Thinker used issues devoted entirely to letters to simulate ‘written conversation’ by answering his correspondents’ letters in epistolary form, rather than in the narrative voice that introduced them, and by highlighting the mixed-gender character of these conversations. In their uses of conversation, woman-championing periodicals resembled woman-authored periodicals such the Female Spectator (1744–6) and the Old Maid (1755–6) which, according to Sarah Prescott and Jane Spencer, dramatised women’s conversations in a manner ‘unusually open in its extended dialogue form’, represented political discussion ‘as properly placed in mixed-sex assemblies’, and refused to show women ‘taking the receptive role in polite discourse which is usually their place in Addison and Steele’s periodicals’ (2000: 45, 52, 49). Nevertheless, like other periodicals, most of them counted literature among the liberal arts in which they ‘usefully’ instructed readers. That is to say, periodicals not only contained poems, songs, fables, stories, and translations from the classics for the entertainment of the public; they also modelled and taught ways of thinking about literature and talking about texts – in theoretical essays about the actual and/or ideal characteristics of particular genres, in critical essays analysing specific classical or modern texts, and in quick comments on the style or content of the letters, poems, tales, or histories they introduced. Mainstream periodicalists generally strove to teach the public what they had learned in the course of their ‘liberal’ educations at grammar schools and/or universities politely, ‘as if they taught them not’. Though taking every care to expound and clarify what they meant, they pretended they were only displaying their taste and talents, or repeating what all right-thinking people already knew and thought. After years of studying British and American literature in modern academic systems that integrate some version of most of their critical approaches, we view their periodical essays as elegant but curiously familiar moments in the history of literary criticism, rather than as what they also and perhaps primarily were – a means of tactfully instructing the Unlearned in what they did not know. The Ladies Journal and the Free Thinker were at once more obvious and more basic in their literary instruction. The Free Thinker explicitly showed readers how to do comparisons, for instance between two critical essays on the same work. It provided a list of ten criteria for readers to use when judging the validity of arguments; gave ‘Rules for female Doubting’ (2.57 (1718): 6); and instructions for how to study. The Ladies Journal divided its serious essays into an expository half (Precept) and an illustrative story or poem (Example), generally separated by a gap on the page. As apprentices, servants, and daughters in domestic or commercial settings, most people learned adult skills and conduct by imitating the example of others, not by studying abstract general propositions; narrative or poetic examples made it easier for those who had difficulty with abstractions to grasp an essay’s point. At the same time, the obvious juxtaposition of philosophical exposition and literary exempla showed those who could follow both that these were variants – different languages for saying the same things – while illustrating the journal’s overall point: that ‘Poetry’ [i.e. literature] was ‘adorned with the other liberal Sciences’ and ‘a lovely Composition of the body of

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 46

17/11/17 5:00 PM

discontinuous reading and instruction for ladies

47

human Learning’ because ‘it teaches us the Secrets of Nature, the Knowledge of Man and Things, and pleasingly leads us into a sense of the innumerable blessings we owe the divine Creator . . . all of which it conveys to us, free from the expence of Travel, severity of Teachers, or pedantry of Schools’ (Ladies Journal no. 2 (1727): 13). Interestingly, the Ladies Journal assumed that the Ladies and Unlearned of 1727 would have no difficulty interpreting the hidden meanings of complex allegories or parables; like The Free Thinker, it published these genres without explanation or translation. The Ladies Journal strove instead to model and teach the newer ‘surface’ criticism of the day – that tissue of formal, belletristic, moral, and universalisinghuman criticism that qualified Joseph Spence for the Oxford Chair of Poetry during the mid 1720s, and that we tend to associate with Hugh Blair and the nineteenth century. For instance, no. 10 used the essayist’s example and a visit to the theatre to see Thomas Otway’s The Orphan, to show readers how to approach a drama ‘so worthy of their best Attention’ (1727: 73). A play was ‘partly for Recreation’, and ‘partly . . . Matter for Speculations’, readers were told. So while the essayist praised the correct emotional response to the play which he both dictated and attributed to ladies – ‘tender Emotions of Pity, and the Sympathetic softness of Sorrow that appear’d in the Breasts and Eyes of the gentle Compassionate Fair, at the undeserv’d Oppression of so much Virtue as made up the Character of Monimia, for Virtue never fails to attract the Esteem and tenderest Regard of generous Souls’ (1727: 73) – he made it clear that demonstrating sensibility was not enough. Ideally, the quality of the play should be judged by reference to the checklist of formal and belletristic criteria he rapidly provided (I have italicised key terms): ‘the Characters are so perfectly drawn, the Distresses so natural and moving, the incidents so proper and Accidental, and in short the whole Plot so judiciously and masterly wrought, that it is only what may at any time happen in private Life, so far is it from anything that’s improbable or uncommon’ (1727: 74). But beginners were not necessarily capable of adopting so much reflective distance or of seeing the play ‘whole’. Consequently, the essayist insisted that the main thing was to take pains to be ‘all Attention at a good Play’ (contrary to theatre audiences’ usual practice) and to ‘devour the Sentences as they issue from the Mouths of the Players’ (1727: 74) in order to find matter for reflection in particular sentences or sententiae. Like Spence whose written criticism followed a familiar schoolroom practice by citing a particular speech before discussing its beauties, didactic moral, and/or revelation of universal traits of human nature, the essayist used an extract from Castalio’s speech about ‘Friendship’ to deliver supposedly ‘loose Thoughts on so noble a Subject, thrown together without any set Method or Form’6 for the benefit of his ‘fair Readers’ (Thursday 23 Mar 1726–7: 74). In the last part of the same number, a letter to ‘The Author of the Ladies Journal’ containing ‘undigested thoughts’ about Poetry confirms that improving, universalising, and moralising ‘Thoughts’ that could be articulated and shared were the proper critical response. Ladies and the Unlearned must not only be moved; they must seek out, reflect upon, and discuss such practical wisdom as was to be found in short, judiciously selected extracts from poetry and plays portraying the common course of private life. Woman-championing periodicals were even more explicit about the uses to which their periodicals should be put. In the passages from the Lady’s Weekly Magazine cited above, Miss Bloom’s articulation of the function and value of the instruction she was receiving from her conversation with Mrs Pry informed readers of the benefits they

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 47

17/11/17 5:00 PM

48

eve tavor bannet

might expect from reading that issue of the periodical: reading the brief dialogue composing it was a quick way for readers to acquire knowledge they too could use in their own future conversations. This was another adaptation and reorientation of a generic feature of periodicals for the benefit of ladies. For all periodicals tried to show their readers how to read them, and why and how they were useful. But most were subtler about it. Except in prefatory material where that existed, they guided readers’ understanding through scattered hints and an occasional essay on the periodical genre, on being a periodical author, on the uses of print, or on genres that frequently found their way into periodicals (such as biography or marvellous tales). Woman-championing periodicals sometimes deployed these devices too. But they also blatantly told readers how to read and use periodicals, especially during the first half of the century when ladies’ education in rhetorical and literary matters was likely to be poor. Comparison makes the difference clear. The Spectator, which developed a variety of themes non-contiguously across its almost 600 issues, used an essay comparing reading to a hunt or chase to indicate to readers who collected Spectator papers as they appeared or bought them bound in volumes, that they could pursue (chase after) any theme they wished (Death, the English Language, Raillery and Wit, etc.) by jumping from relevant paper to relevant paper and reading the periodical discontinuously. But the Free Thinker, which developed themes in the same way, began almost every essay by announcing its subject and giving the numbers of the previous, non-contiguous issues that the current essay was continuing. Having explained to readers that the original papers had been revised for reprinting in volumes, it used the last issue in each volume to drive home instructions repeatedly given in previous issues, as well as to provide yet again the numbers of the issues in that volume to which it wished ‘the Fair’ particularly to attend. The last issue of volume 1 emphasised the importance of ensuring that the volume’s ‘preliminary’ essays or ‘Lectures’ on rational thinking were ‘seriously attended to’, and reminded readers that these were to be found in nos. 1, 45, 10, 14, 16, 26, 36 48, 50 and 53 (in that order). The last issue of volume 2 explained that the periodicalist was obliged ‘frequently to refer from one Paper to another’ to prosecute its educational goals, since by this Expedient, I am able methodically to resume, as well as to point out to my Readers, the Connection of so many different subjects, in the same Order as if they were printed consequentially, and it is by this kind of general Index, that I hope to keep my Thoughts out of Confusion, amidst the Variety, which is expected in a Work of this kind. (2.105 (1719): 235) The Free Thinker and the Ladies Journal devoted most of their efforts to instructing readers in how to regard and use the variety of genres, styles and subjects ‘which is expected in a Work of this kind’. They explained that it was their ‘Business’ as periodical writers to ‘endeavour to please every Body by suiting [their] Discourse, and varying [their] Subjects to the different Tastes of their Readers’ in order to ‘gratifie every Gusto’ (Ladies Journal no. 10 (Thursday 23 Mar 1726–7): 73) and that variety made a periodical ‘like an elegant Feast, where every Guest may find his Palate gratify’d in his Turn’ (Free Thinker 1.9 (1718): 36). ‘Lighter fare’ accommodated readers who ‘can neither relish nor digest, substantial Dishes’ (Free Thinker

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 48

17/11/17 5:00 PM

discontinuous reading and instruction for ladies

49

1.9 (1718): 36) and ‘contribute[d] to Diversify an Undertaking which, pursued without Interruption, would soon grow too serious for any but the Wise’ (Free Thinker 1.11 (1718): 45). This did not mean that ‘[l]ighter fare’ was not instructive too – both periodicals assured readers that it was. But it did mean that everyone did not have to read everything – every issue, or every part of every issue. Through warnings in the essay’s first paragraph, or categorisation of the kind of reader/s to which they thought it would appeal – ‘the Fair Sex . . . favour less serious Entertainments’ (Free Thinker 1.22 (1718): 99) – these periodicals excused readers from the ‘[l]ighter fare’ if their taste ran to more ‘substantial dishes’, and from ‘substantial dishes’ if they could neither relish nor digest them. One did not have to stop buying their periodical because one found a particular issue boring, heavy going, or trivial; one could skip that issue and those like it. There was bound to be something eventually in the periodical’s smorgasbord that would appeal. By the same token, one did not have to read a bound volume of periodical issues continuously from cover to cover either to find something one enjoyed or to make sense of the contents – even if, like the Spectator and the Free Thinker, there were a few thematically connected issues or run-on stories embedded amidst its variety, and/or a recurring eidolon. Establishing engaging recurrences and rudimentary continuities was another way of trying to keep readers faithfully buying and dipping into the patchwork of instructive and entertaining fragments periodicals offered. But in that patchwork, each essay, story, or poem also stood on its own. Both periodicals used letters to the editor containing correspondents’ contradictorily positive and negative judgements of a particular issue, essay, or letter to make this point, and invite readers to judge for themselves the utility or interest that individual articles held for them. Publishing correspondents who criticised and corrected a particular essay, praised its argument and added to it, condemned the contents of a particular issue as trivial or dull, complained that the last several numbers contained nothing of interest, and/or demanded that the periodical take up a particular topic, demonstrated to actual readers that others considered essays and issues piecemeal, and read them discontinuously and selectively, without giving the periodical up. Discontinuous reading was something that periodicals facilitated, anticipated, modelled, and got even after their first weekly, twice-weekly, or monthly publication – when isolated essays were reprinted in other periodicals or essay collections; when read ‘by fits and starts’ in an interval of labour or diversions; when dipped into for reading aloud in company; when taken up by readers in different moods, or with different tastes, who skipped what they did not like; when readers pursued diverse particular topics across non-contiguous issues; when the issues or volumes available to a reader were incomplete. Eighteenth-century periodicals were often didactic, even magisterial, in tone and sometimes stridently so, especially on gender issues. But readers’ discontinuous reading of miscellaneous fragments, together with their diverse selections and/ or trajectories through discontinuous materials, scattered the unified ideological message, and dissipated the inescapably regulatory impact attributed to them by modern analyses which (re)construct eighteenth-century periodicals as more or less organic wholes with clear, well-articulated didactic goals. The dispersing and dissolving effect of discontinuous reading was only compounded as readers

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 49

17/11/17 5:00 PM

50

eve tavor bannet

encountered bits and pieces from a variety of periodicals (to say nothing of other kinds of papers and books) – some bought, some borrowed, some found in library reading rooms, taverns or coffee shops, some heard with varying degrees of attention as they were read aloud during convivial evenings at someone’s house or shop. Here the bits and pieces presenting rational, educated, capable ladies in womanchampioning periodicals competed with bits and pieces presenting other types of ‘rhetorical femininity’:7 fashionably frivolous, non-intellectual types; modest and submissive Christian types; headstrong, managing ‘termagant’ types; crossdressing ‘masculine’ types; dutiful types; passionate types; prudes, coquettes, and more. The positive moral valency that one type was given in bits and pieces of one periodical was contradicted by bits and pieces ridiculing or criticising it in another – rhetorical femininities were subject to debate. The regulatory force of any single construction of femininity was further suborned by ‘non-compliant’ readings, such as those modelled and taught in critical or corrective letters to the editor, in letters rejecting whole areas of a periodical’s content outright, or in essays such as Ambrose Philips’s essay on rules for judging arguments. Indeed, Mark Towsey found that in practice, eighteenth-century readers often did not interpret works as they were ‘supposed’ to (2010).8 The fact that many periodicals vigorously condemned coquettes during the 1790s, just as they had during the 1710s and 1720s, for instance, suggests that, decade after eighteenth-century decade, significant numbers of non-compliant women readers skipped, ignored, rejected, or reinterpreted injunctions against female coquetry, wherever they appeared. Perhaps they interpreted didactic condemnations of the illegitimate power and pleasures enjoyed by coquettes as giving them excellent reason to behave like coquettes. Mary Wollstonecraft’s complaint at century’s end that women were still relying on their beauty and wiles to enslave men, instead of using reason and education to equalise gender-relations, suggests the same – that, decade after eighteenth-century decade, significant numbers of women readers were skipping, ignoring, rejecting or reinterpreting injunctions to educate and inform their minds and depend primarily upon themselves. And who is to say that women readers invariably read as women – allying themselves with one or other of the rhetorical femininities in a periodical and considering themselves interpolated only there? Might they not (also/sometimes/often?) have identified with ‘the Unlearned Part of Mankind’, and viewed text and world, discontinuously, through a male gaze? Perhaps unlearned male readers found a similarly convenient disguising screen in periodicals’ assurance that their sole design in delivering ‘the most abstracted Notions in familiar Terms’ and through ‘Metaphors, Similitudes, Illustrations and Allusions’ (Free Thinker 3.147 (1723): 203) was to enable ladies to understand them. Whatever gender identities readers embodied and/or mentally assumed while reading or being read to, it is hard to escape the conclusion that in periodicals perused by both women and men, didacticism promoting fixed gender-binaries and normative female proprieties was blunted, dissipated, and perhaps defeated, precisely by those fixed generic features that women-championing journals reoriented to British Ladies: their instruction of readers of all genders; the interpretative and critical methods they disseminated; their miscellaneous, piecemeal contents; and the discontinuous reading practices they serviced, fostered, and taught.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 50

17/11/17 5:00 PM

discontinuous reading and instruction for ladies

51

Notes 1. The Free Thinker in 1718–23, 1733, 1739, 1740, and 1742; the Female Mentor in 1793, 1796, 1798, and 1802. 2. This is not the argument made in Anderson (1983). Despite revisions in 1991 and 2006, Anderson’s thesis about print’s effect on nationalism depends on assumptions about eighteenth-century print culture which have been superseded (Howsam 2006; Baron et al. 2007; Bannet 2013: 122–33). 3. Fergus 2006; Donoghue 1996; Colclough 2007. 4. See also Bannet 2000. 5. Here, the Free Thinker singled out Queen Elizabeth I, the Ladies Journal Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Susannah Centlivre, and Eliza Haywood. 6. In fact, it was highly structured according to conventional rhetorical topoi: definition, arguments in favour of, arguments against, etc. 7. I am borrowing this term from Tara Osell, but extending from eidolons to other verbal constructions of femininity which ‘represent women as a class’ and do not necessarily correspond to actual persons (Osell 2005: 283–300). 8. See also Chartier 1995.

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Bannet, Eve Tavor. 2000. The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. —. 2013. ‘The History of Reading: the Long Eighteenth Century’. The Literary Compass 10.2: 122–33. Baron, Sabrina Alcorn, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin, eds. 2007. Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. The Bee, or Literary Weekly Intelligencer. 1790–4. Edinburgh. Browne, Stephen H. 1992. ‘Satirizing Women’s Speech’. Rhetorical Society Quarterly 22.3: 20–9. Chartier, Roger. 1995. Form and Meaning. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Clarke, John. 1731. An Essay upon Study. London: Printed for Arthur Bettesworth. Colclough. Stephen. 2007. Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities, 1695–1870. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Copley, Stephen. 1995. ‘Commerce, Conversation and Politeness in Early Eighteenth-Century Periodicals’. British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies 18.1: 63–77. Donoghue. Frank. 1996. The Fame Machine. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Drake, Judith. 1697. An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex. London: Printed for A. Roper and R. Clavel. Ezell, Margaret. 1992. ‘The Gentleman’s Journal and the Communication of Restoration Coterie Practices’. Modern Philology 89.3: 323–40. The Female Mentor. 1793–6. London. Fergus, Jan. 2006. Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Philips, Ambrose]. The Free Thinker. 1722–3. 3 vols. 3rd edn. London. Howsam. Leslie. 2006. Old Books, New Histories. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Johnson, Samuel. 1969. The Rambler. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. Volume V: The Rambler. Ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss. New Haven: Yale University Press.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 51

17/11/17 5:00 PM

52

eve tavor bannet

Knox, Vicesimus. 1779. Essays Moral and Literary, 2 vols. 2nd edn. London: Dilly. The Ladies Journal. 1727. London. The Lady’s Weekly Magazine. 1747. London. Locke, John. 1706. Posthumous Works of Mr. John Locke. London: Printed for A. and J. Churchill. Makin, Bathsua. 1673. An Essay to revive the antient education of Gentlewomen in religion, manners, arts and tongues. London: J[ohn] D[arby]. Maurer, Shawn Lisa. 1998. Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the EighteenthCentury English Periodical. Stanford: Stanford University Press. More, Hannah. 1818. The Works of Hannah More. 18 vols. London: T. Cadell. Osell, Tara. 2005. ‘Tatling Women in the Public Sphere: Rhetorical Femininity and the English Essay Periodical’. Eighteenth-Century Studies 38.2: 283–300. Powell, Manushag N. 2011. ‘New Directions in Eighteenth-Century Periodical Studies’. Literary Compass 8.5: 240–57. —. 2012. Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Prescott Sarah and Jane Spencer. 2000. ‘Prattling, tattling and Knowing Everything: Public Authority and Female Editorial Personae in the Early Essay Periodical’. Journal for EighteenthCentury Studies 23.1: 43–57. Read, Beverley. 2005. ‘Exhibiting the Fair Sex’. Periodical Literature in Eighteenth-Century America. Ed. Mark Kamrath and Sharon Harris. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Towsey, Mark. 2010. Reading the Scottish Enlightenment 1750–1820. Leiden: Brill. Watts, Isaac. 1743. The Improvement of the Mind: A Supplement to the Art of Logick. London: J. Brackstone and T. Longman.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 52

17/11/17 5:00 PM

3 Constructing Women’s History in the LADY’S MUSEUM Anna K. Sagal

W

hile Charlotte Lennox has long been the subject of significant scholarship, the Lady’s Museum remains a largely underexamined piece in her oeuvre. Produced during her most prolific decade, and encompassing a number of her other works in poetry and translation, it was among her most ambitious projects; it is certainly one that bolsters her (still contested) legacy as a feminist author. The Lady’s Museum was published in eleven monthly instalments from 1760 to 1761 and subsequently released in two bound volumes (Small 1969: 220; Schürer 2008: 32). Each number contained a wide variety of informative articles, including introductory essays from the Trifler (the periodical’s eidolon),1 pieces on geography, natural philosophy, and history, letters from correspondents, poems, songs, and biographies, two tracts on women’s education, and the first serialised printing of Lennox’s 1762 novel Sophia (Bataille 2000: 5; Powell 2012: 185). As a whole, the periodical was designed to be a comprehensive educational resource for its female readers; a resource, I contend, that accomplishes its ambitious aims through a distinctive vision of women’s history that enmeshes itself with the genre of romance. History and romance were already intertwined genres for early modern readers. The grand heroic romances of the seventeenth century, like Madeleine de Scudéry’s Clélie (1654–61), reimagined classical history, just as ambitious histories like the multi-authored A Universal History (1747–68) and Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) romanticised key historical figures and events. Amatory fictions regularly employed the term ‘history’ in their titles without pretending to historical accuracy or even historical content. Despite such mutual imbrication, however, critics in the period were invested in theorising the two genres as distinct. History was conceptualised as masculine, bound up as it was with notions of rationality and realism in contradistinction to the fanciful genre of romance (Strehle and Carden 2003: xv). Romance, on the other hand, was associated with the feminine and with women in often very negative ways, and popular critical opinion derided female readers for their links to the genre – whether or not they actually read romances. The two genres were believed to occupy opposite sides of an unbridgeable chasm, resolutely distinct in their attributes because history had not yet ‘lost its privileged status as a closed and final narrative outside the play of time’, while romance remained an homage to what Clara Reeve dismissed as ‘what has never happened, nor is likely to happen’ (Strehle and Carden 2003: xxiii; Reeve 1785: 111). Eighteenthcentury thinkers were also engaged in debates about the value of ancient versus modern

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 53

17/11/17 5:00 PM

54

anna k. sagal

history, often contesting the significance of either genre to contemporary experience, as well as the potential each possessed to be edifying or exemplary. As is evidenced in Lennox’s periodical, ancient and modern histories alike were deployed for both literary and critical purposes, as she draws upon a diversity of sources to create her educational publication. Lennox’s own efforts to write history for her female readers were remarkable. Historical essays in the Lady’s Museum not only defied conventional notions of generic separation, but did so in generative ways that accomplished more than a simple acknowledgement of their interconnectedness. If romance was to be designated a female genre, then history infused with romance could offer women more potent reasons for the reading of history than simply edification or the inculcation of values. In opening up space for a distinct type of history reading – history that was sexy, exciting, and playful – Lennox affirms the significance of female experience to the broader narrative of history and the importance of unique ways of telling that history. These histories also encompass a diversity of cultures, informing her readers about bygone societies while subtly underscoring the similarities between modern-day England and these seemingly fantastical pasts in order to highlight the enduring value of female experience. Thus, while Lennox’s readers were on the whole unlikely to marry dukes like the heroine of Bianca Capello or lead armies like the titular Princess Padmani, they could be inspired by illustrations of ingenuity and strength that contrasted with repressive contemporary notions of femininity. Indeed, contemporary conduct-of-life works such as Lady Sarah Pennington’s An Unfortunate Mother’s Advice to Her Absent Daughters (1761) endorsed models of appropriate female education and deportment that were ultimately quite restrictive. The Lady’s Museum was thus labouring against deeply entrenched attitudes in its attempts to promote an expansive vision of women’s history and female experience. Popular periodicals served as barometers for prevailing attitudes about women’s history reading. While Joseph Addison in Spectator no. 37 mocked a woman’s pretensions to reading ‘Seneca’s Morals’ and ‘Ogleby’s Virgil’ because of their placement in a library next to salacious texts like ‘The New Atalantis, with a Key to it’ and ‘Clelia: Which opened of it self in the Place that describes two Lovers in a Bower’, by mid-century attitudes toward women’s reading practices seem to have shifted (12 Apr 1711, vol. 1: 153–5). Eliza Haywood, for one, recommended extensive reading of classical history in book 15 of the Female Spectator (1744–6), listing, among many other Greek and Roman scholars ‘HERODOTUS, Thucydides, Dion, and Xenophon’, in an extensive essay on the importance of history to a holistic education (6 July 1745, vol. 3: 95). The Lady’s Museum also advocated for history reading, with one essay declaring, ‘Those striking pictures, that are displayed in the annals of the human race, are highly proper to direct the judgment, and form the heart’ (1.1: 13). The male-authored Lady’s Curiosity (1752) likewise praised women for judicious reading, differentiating between the sensible, domestic reading of ‘the Married Philosopher’ and the overly complex (and possibly scientific) reading of ‘the Blazing Comet’ (Druid 1752: 22). Finally, Jasper Goodwill’s Ladies Magazine: or, the Universal Entertainer (1749–53) ranked being ‘well read’ among the highest praises to be bestowed upon a woman: ‘She . . . was endowed with a surprising Memory. Her Elocution was remarkably fine, and her Action just. In a Word, she was well read’ (3.13 (2–16 May 1752): 195).

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 54

17/11/17 5:00 PM

women’s history in the LADY’S MUSEUM

55

In particular, eighteenth-century writers often believed that history about women would especially appeal to female readers. While women’s history was not a fully differentiated genre in the eighteenth century, texts like catalogues of ‘women worthies’ hint at the emergence of the genre and undergird the importance of understanding history written specifically about women as distinct from other types of history. Popular eighteenth-century contributions by both men and women included George Ballard’s Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain (1752), John Duncombe’s Feminead (1754), and Mary Scott’s The Female Advocate (1775). This was not a new trend in the eighteenth century, either; histories of famous female figures penned for a female reading audience trace their roots at least to Giovanni Boccaccio’s De Mulieribus Claris (1374) and Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies (1405). Yet many such texts were deeply rooted in conservative perspectives on subjects like religion, politics, fashion, and art, despite an ostensibly forwardthinking approach to female education and accomplishments. Periodicals, however, occupied a nebulous space between a traditionalist pedagogical model and a more progressive modus operandi; though they, too, contributed to the cultivation of emergent cultural and social values, the distinctiveness of the miscellany format enabled publications like the Lady’s Museum to lay claim to an educational imperative and accomplish that aim in innovative ways. In fact, though many critics have dismissed the educational claims of most magazines as insincere or insufficient, such critiques overlook what may have been genuine pedagogical value for actual women readers in the period.2 Furthermore, as a review of the historical content in the Lady’s Museum will demonstrate, the pedagogical value of such material transcended mere ‘women’s interest’ and instead became representative of the diverse possibilities for women’s intellectual and internal lives. As the periodical reimagines the stories of famous heroines like Joan of Arc, female readers see models of virtue, strength, and resilience that posit alternatives to modern examples of ideal femininity. The Lady’s Museum was deeply invested in the value of history reading and history writing for its female audience. Of the wide variety of texts that comprise the bulk of the periodical’s content, articles that may be considered ‘historical’ take up a little more than a third of entire publication.3 This is a remarkable proportion, even given the vogue for endorsing the reading of history among periodicals. While this initially suggests that Lennox was in part seeking to capitalise on a trend, it is also evident that she sincerely believed in the value of historical texts for her female readers. For example, an early essay in the first number extols women’s history with extended references to celebrated female historians and the viability of women as actors in the broader narrative of history: ‘Women have at all times had so great a share in events, and have acted so many different parts, that they may with reason consider our archives as their own; nay, there are many of them who have written memoirs of the several events of which they have been eye-witness’ (1.1: 13). The essay proceeds to name Anna Comnena and Christine de Pizan, medieval women renowned for their historical labour. Here, women are celebrated not only as participants in the vast ‘archives’ of history, but also as writers/creators of history, drafting ‘memoirs’, translations, and commentaries on significant moments in time. Staking a claim to historical authority as witnesses, female authors position their intellectual labour in the same sphere as male historiographic work: able to ‘with reason consider our [male] archives their own’, they toil under the same intellectual circumstances.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 55

17/11/17 5:00 PM

56

anna k. sagal

Yet this endorsement is problematic. However laudatory this passage seems, it has been preceded a mere two pages before by the admonition, ‘If their sex has produced Daciers and Chatelets, these are examples rarely found, and fitter to be admired than imitated: for who would wish to see assemblies made up of doctors in petticoats, who will regale us with Greek and the systems of Leibnitz’ (1.1: 11). In addition to its blunt critique of female intellectual labour, this statement also evokes the contemporary belief that the end of all women’s education was the cultivation of elegant manners and proper deportment. But why affirm the historical labour of de Pizan while critiquing similar work by Anne Dacier? Perhaps Dacier’s work as a translator of classics shifted her labour into an unfeminine sphere, although this prejudice did not seem to have an impact on the reputation of Elizabeth Carter, who was widely respected for her translations of Epictetus. A critique of Émilie du Châtelet is more plausible; as a mathematician and physicist, du Châtelet was perceptibly intruding upon ostensibly masculine spheres of inquiry. Female intellectual labour, then, was delimited in very specific ways in this particular essay; flexible enough to allow for the assembly of women’s history (de Pizan) or a history of family members (Comnena), but rigid enough to exclude classical translations and philosophical commentaries. It is also significant that none of the female intellectuals mentioned – appreciatively or otherwise – are English; academic achievement seems shunted to a European setting, as if the periodical hesitates to depict English women achieving or aspiring to advanced knowledge. Another solution, however, offers itself: these are not Lennox’s words at all, but a translation of Pierre Joseph Bourdier de Villemert’s L’ami des femmes (1758) that she may have done herself (Lorenzo Modia 2010: 204–5). Incorporated in the magazine as ‘Of the Studies Proper for Women’, this educational tract was a vital contribution to her educational programme in the periodical, but it also added to a consistent tension between the publication’s divergent attitudes regarding women’s education. Building upon the arguments of Judith Dorn (1992) and Claire Boulard Jouslin (2012), I submit that this particular essay substantiated the pedagogical ethos of the magazine without fully representing the periodical’s ultimate stance on the notion of women reading and writing history – a stance that is ultimately far more progressive than either critic has suggested. As such, Villemert’s condemnation of women’s history functions as a conservative attitude against which Lennox can position her unique vision of women’s history. That said, while the French authorship of this essay partially explains the omission of English women in this passage, it does not explain their absence from the entire periodical, a fact that problematises our assessment of Lennox’s project as a truly inclusive endeavour. Periodicals like the Lady’s Museum were likely a noteworthy resource for women’s entertainment, as well as edification; as Jan Fergus has shown through a study of borrowing and purchasing records, novels (romances among them) were not the primary genre women seemed to have been reading (2000: 159). In fact, as Paula McDowell observes, ‘eighteenth-century women as a group were more likely to participate in newspapers and periodicals’ both as authors and as readers (2000: 136). This may have been in part a function of practicality: around this time period, Fergus estimates that novels were ‘three to five times the cost of a magazine’, making their purchase prohibitive for most middle-class readers (2000: 163). Magazines, on the other hand, were more widely available both for purchase and for rent through newly founded lending libraries, circumstances that enabled further literary participation among middle-class

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 56

17/11/17 5:00 PM

women’s history in the LADY’S MUSEUM

57

readers (Ballaster et al. 1991: 45). This disparity between magazines and novels raises a number of questions. Did women look to periodicals as a source for entertaining reading in lieu of expensive, possibly forbidden novels or romances? Did periodicals like the Lady’s Museum represent a more creative (and possibly more pleasurable) pedagogical model than other contemporary educational texts for women? What was the value of the connections between romance and history for female readers? At least initially, one suspects that romances found a neat fit in the periodical because – like magazines – they were generously consumed by female readers. This shared audience may have been seen as an opportunity for profit; women were more likely to buy periodicals that had content they knew they would enjoy (and were likewise more likely to share such texts with friends and relatives, inspiring new readers and potentially new customers). Further, if, as critics have averred, periodicals themselves represented a certain gentility of intellectual consumption, the act of reading a periodical – however sensational the contents – could arguably be seen as a more ladylike act than reading a novel (Shevelow 1989: 2; Italia 2005: 6, 194). The educational imperative of many periodicals, especially those with aspirations to an audience of ‘ladies’, may have also served to recontextualise entertaining material in a more appropriate manner. Certainly, magazines like the Free-Thinker (1718–21), the Visiter (1723–4), and the Ladies Magazine pretended to a kind of educational aim and often directly addressed subjects like women’s reading, but they provided such materials within a miscellany of subjects without any strong pedagogical framework. Unlike many of these publications, Lennox’s periodical was an overtly pedagogical endeavour. As such, her work in negotiating a place for romance writing within the context of women’s history takes on added significance. Indeed, it was no simple task to recast romance as either edifying or useful. Romances were something of a critical scapegoat in the eighteenth century. Primarily translated from French and Italian, heroic romances like those Arabella from Lennox’s Female Quixote (1752) read were seen to promote sexual licence, religious laxity, and improper behaviour. Thus, while according to Sharon Smith Palo, earlier feminist authors like Judith Drake and Hannah Woolley argued that ‘romances teach young women to revere admirable human qualities, improve women’s conversation and their understanding of language, and provide knowledge of a world with which they might otherwise have limited experience’, by mid-century they were largely considered part of genre that was cause for nothing but suspicion.4 This is not to say that romances lagged in popularity; while the heroic romance of the seventeenth century lost some currency with readers, the surge in amatory fiction at the beginning of the eighteenth century has been seen as filling that generic gap, sustaining a vibrant tradition of what Ros Ballaster calls ‘love fictions’ targeted at female readers (1992: 51). Indeed, as Reeve’s The Progress of Romance (1785) reveals, critics remained uneasy about women’s romance-reading practices through the entire century. However, in the Lady’s Museum, Lennox works to rehabilitate conventions typically associated with romance through its intersections with the genre of women’s history. As Devoney Looser has shown, romance and history were far from completely differentiated in Lennox’s oeuvre, and often, she advances a fruitful mix of the two. The most common source for this observation has traditionally been The Female Quixote, in which Arabella spends the entire novel developing a kind of historiographic model of self-education by balancing the ancient history of her romances with the modern

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 57

17/11/17 5:00 PM

58

anna k. sagal

history of her peers (2000: 111). I suggest that while the romance model of history is seemingly dismissed in the conclusion, we cannot deny the power and influence it has afforded Arabella, nor the genuine education she gained from such texts, despite her idiosyncrasies.5 Ultimately, the notion of history as a category of static fact-telling was neither plausible nor appealing in The Female Quixote; nor was it appealing to Lennox herself. Lennox’s own efforts to publish by subscription ‘The Age of Queen Elizabeth’ (although eventually unsuccessful) were shaped by advice at the outset from William Robertson to avoid tedium and not ‘confine [itself] . . . wholly to historical transactions’ (Schürer 2012: 98). This characteristic lack of emphasis on fact-based history is a crucial factor in evaluating her pedagogical approach as innovative; instead, Lennox accentuates the value of narrative and rejects the notion of education-as-behaviourmodification in favour of education-as-experience. Armed with the benefits garnered from the entanglement of romance and history in her previous writings, Lennox’s work in the Lady’s Museum poses an equally compelling troubling of the two genres as pure and separate categories. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the task of sorting out history from romance in her periodical remains a challenging one, as in every number there are a number of articles arguably classifiable as historical: The History of the Duchess of Beaufort (nos. 1 and 2); The History of the Count de Comminge (nos. 2–9); An Account of the Vestal Virgins (no. 2); Essay on the Original Inhabitants of Great Britain (nos. 3–8); The Tryal of the Maid of Orleans (no. 3); The History of Bianca Capello (nos. 5–7); The History of the Princess Padmani (no. 9); and The Life of Anthony Van Dyck (nos. 10 and 11). In two cases (Comminge and Van Dyck), the subjects are male and therefore fall outside the purview of women’s history as I define it in this study. Essay on the Original Inhabitants of Great Britain, while predominantly a history of male-driven events taken from Paul de Rapin Thoray’s History of England (1726), does include a somewhat sympathetic four-page section on Queen Boadicea that is worth noting, if only as a point of contrast to many of the other feminocentric tales (Powell 2012: 183). Of the remainder, Princess Padmani is an oriental tale that Lennox found in an early eighteenth-century history of the Mughal Empire, although she may have also been influenced by more contemporary adaptations of this ubiquitous Rajput legend. Bianca Capello, while sensational and exciting, concerns a well-known historical figure and was likely written or translated by Lennox.6 Duchess of Beaufort is primarily drawn from the Memoirs of the Duke of Sully, a work that Lennox translated in 1751.7 The fact that she repurposed the material is not unusual (she did the same with a few poems, for example), and it was likely that she felt it important to maintain a robust historical presence in each number – Duchess of Beaufort is the only historical essay in the first issue. (It is also worthwhile to note that in this context she renamed the translation for the Duke’s mistress.) Vestal Virgins, which could have been pulled from any number of histories of Roman antiquity that circulated throughout England in the eighteenth century, represents a contribution from classical history. Finally, Maid of Orleans is carefully notated as ‘extracted from the Archives of Normandy’, although it is also conceivable that Lennox was inspired by Jean Chapelain’s popular epic poem La Pucelle, où la France délivrée (1656).8 The diversity of sources for her periodical indicates not only the extensive research she put into crafting her educational offerings, but also the important emphasis she placed upon breadth in her vision for women’s reading.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 58

17/11/17 5:00 PM

women’s history in the LADY’S MUSEUM

59

Essays featuring women’s history appear in nine of the eleven numbers. Three might be categorised as romances, while the others seem to typify conventional history in a strictly narrative sense. Each of those first three, crucially, employs the term ‘history’ in its title, a common rhetorical move in amatory as well as sentimental fiction. However, while we might then assume that Lennox is evoking ‘history’ in the novelistic sense of the term (as with Richardson’s Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady (1748), for example, or the periodical’s own History of Harriot and Sophia), it is potentially also likely that she used the term to market the pieces as history qua history in conjunction with Villemert’s declaration in favour of historical reading. ‘History’ as a generic term also seems to specifically target biographical pieces, whereas more expository essays on a time period, a set of circumstances, or a group of people are titled differently. In her choice of titles, Lennox is thereby engaging in an ongoing debate about what constituted history and, in particular, what was deemed valuable or significant history. By insisting upon the label of ‘history’ for biographical pieces versus, for example, the genre of ‘lives’ that her friend Samuel Johnson would later work with extensively, Lennox is affirming both the veracity of her work and its pedagogical value. It is clear upon reading the Lady’s Museum that each of these essays contributes to the historical thrust of the series. Thus, while Dorn remarks that these essays ‘stretch the contemporary meaning of “history” to the fullest’, I think it worth parsing the benefits of that ‘stretching’ and thinking flexibly about Lennox’s production of women’s history outside the generic boundaries that were proscribed for her readers (1992: 17). Appealing to women initially through their female characters, these pieces become valuable not only as stories about and for women, but as stories that can teach women how to negotiate a challenging and often dissatisfying modern English society. The articles also frequently raise questions about women’s social, intellectual, and legal freedoms, positing imaginative alternatives to the lived experience of their readers, which, although not viable models in themselves, represent the kinds of critical thinking and engagement the periodical could provide in service of a more fulfilling life. As Manushag N. Powell notes, Lennox is highly concerned with the value of reading to her female audiences and ‘is trying to reform female readers; not to make them more scholarly, exactly, but to use reading to modify their deportments with the aim of making them less miserable (yet more commodifiable, valuable) in a mixed-sex world’ (2012: 190). I would further suggest that the reading of women’s history in particular is used to cultivate a level of intellectual and emotional engagement that must be understood as deeply satisfying in and of itself. An early historical foray presented in the second number of the Lady’s Museum, An Account of the Vestal Virgins seems tailor-made for a female audience. In this essay, a group of isolated and well-educated women are offered privileges and benefits that exceeded those available to women in the broader society. Evoking the female communities of nunneries in medieval and early modern Europe, the Vestal community in ancient Rome represents a kind of ideal existence for women. Women are not forced into unloving marriages, nor are they subject to the social and financial strain of living as spinsters. More remarkably, they are also offered a kind of advanced education (albeit in religious worship) that encompassed the majority of their time in service. Lennox elaborates, ‘The first ten years were a kind of novitiate or probation, when they were instructed in all the sacred mysteries; the next ten were passed in the practice of them, and the last ten in teaching the novices’ (1.2: 116). In this society, women

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 59

17/11/17 5:00 PM

60

anna k. sagal

are even offered the opportunity to serve as educators to other women, modelling the kind of ideal, multigenerational female community that Sarah Scott would soon envision in her Millenium Hall (1762). Most importantly, ‘they were educated and maintained at the expense of the common-wealth’, ascribing greater social significance to these women, their education, and their lives (1.2: 116). In short, the Vestals are esteemed in Roman society because of opportunities that, as many authors lamented, were unavailable to modern women. In addition to the social and educational benefits the Vestals enjoyed, there were various legal and financial advantages as well. As Lennox notes: [V]ery great privileges and marks of distinction were at several times granted to the vestals. They had a right to make a will during their father’s life, and to dispose of their fortunes, without a trustee; for the Roman women were always under guardianship: they were forbid to take an oath, and in courts of justice their evidence was admitted upon their bare affirmation. (1.2: 116) Unlike contemporary English women (or historical Roman women), the Vestals have legal rights and protections that affirm their protected status. They have financial control over their own estates, the legal flexibility to determine the ultimate fate of their property and assets, and even the ratification of individual personhood inherent in the ability to appear in court independently of any male relative. In what almost reads like a fantasy scenario for struggling women in the eighteenth century, the Vestals transcend quotidian womanhood and represent a model of liberated femininity that has much to offer. Of course, whether in Lennox’s modern England or the world of historical Rome, this model is ultimately unsustainable. The remainder of the essay proceeds to detail corruption and scandals in the Roman religious network, as well as the draconian punishments meted out to the Vestals who failed in some aspect of their duties, either through laxity (in letting a sacred flame expire) or sexual licence (in violating their vows of chastity) (1.2: 117). And while Lennox shudders in horror at the excessive lengths to which Romans went to punish unchaste women, one cannot but be reminded of the many, many deaths of unchaste women in other eighteenth-century fictions. The remainder of this short essay begins to blur history with romance, as the escapades of Emilia, Marcia, and Licinia turn scandalous, evoking the excessive sexuality cautioned against in anti-romance tracts, with their promiscuity in pursuing and sharing multiple sexual partners. One suspects that in this narrative turn, Lennox is drawing the age’s anti-Catholic prejudices to their logical conclusion; virginity as a permanent category of female life was so closely associated with the concept of the nunnery and with Catholicism that it was impossible for her to imagine chastity as a viable option. However, this history also illuminates the relationship between a potentially ideal feminine society and a repressive masculine force that spoils that ideal, evoking some of the gendered tensions present in modern English society at a time when women struggled to negotiate ideal situations of their own. Here, Lennox uses a technique readers would soon come to recognise in the Gothic novel – the mitigation of a contentious topic through temporal and geographic distance. Vestal Virgins thereby has the potential to be thought-provoking and sensational in equal measure.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 60

17/11/17 5:00 PM

women’s history in the LADY’S MUSEUM

61

The Tryal of the Maid of Orleans is a historical biography with a more complex stance on appropriate femininity, women’s intellectual freedom, and the value of female worthies. As the title indicates, it retells the story of Joan of Arc’s rise to power, trial for blasphemy, and eventual execution, and it manages to do so with an unexpected degree of sympathy for a Catholic martyr (particularly surprising given Lennox’s own ambivalence about the Catholic religion in this publication). Here, the editorial apparatus of the Lady’s Museum makes a point of noting, as mentioned above, that Lennox herself did not write or even translate this particular piece, but that it was ‘Extracted from the Archives of Normandy, by John Nagerel, canon and archdeacon of the church of Notre Dame At Rouen [and] Communicated to the author by a friend’ (1.3: 212). The citation of source material is rare both for the Lady’s Museum and for periodicals as a genre; a lack of attribution was endemic among the periodical press, as loopholes in copyright and licensing laws left flexibility for the reproduction and repurposing of texts across publications (Italia 2005: 21, 201–2). It was also common for eighteenth-century descriptions of Joan of Arc to be drawn from historical record; Rouen, being the site of her execution, was a likely place for useful resources (Raknem 1971: 4). This specific attribution in the Lady’s Museum suggests that Lennox was taking pains to substantiate her content as pedagogically valuable and historically accurate, while at the same time preserving the fiction of multiple contributors to her miscellany periodical. Of course, romances often employed the fiction of ‘archival discovery’ as a framing device, a trend that complicates an assessment of this attribution as influenced by either history or romance conventions. Regardless of the inspiration for this attribution, the material was clearly positioned to appeal to female readers in a number of ways. This feminocentric tale features a ‘worthy’ woman whose intelligence and military prowess won her a spot in the annals of history as a legendary French heroine and Catholic martyr. In her portrayal in the Lady’s Museum, moreover, her intellectual abilities and the influence those abilities afforded her are the most valuable aspects of her character. Lennox explains, ‘she spoke with so much knowledge, with so much prudence and wisdom, that her opinion was often followed, and that of the most experienced generals laid aside’ (1.3: 213). Exceeding the expertise even of men with decades of military experience, Joan’s knowledge of the world, of politics, and of warfare become transcendent in this essay. And while her actual military intelligence is at least nominally attributed to religious revelation, the text as written in this periodical de-emphasises her religious inspiration to an almost surprising extent – so much so that what must have surely been a deep scepticism on Lennox’s (Anglican) part is absent from the text and the martyr’s eventual execution is condemned as ‘unjust’ (1.3: 228). Perhaps in this history, the unconventional behaviour of its heroine is laudable enough for Lennox to mitigate her anti-Catholic prejudices. This marked sympathy for the French Catholic Joan is also potentially a defensive reaction to contemporary critical accounts. While literary response to Joan’s role in French history and her gradual emergence as a saintly figure was largely positive in Europe, detractions typically concerned her religious visions and sexual purity, for example, as in Voltaire’s derisive parody La Pucelle D’Orléans (1762) (Raknem 1971: 24, 73). Featuring similar aspersions, Shakespeare’s scathing depiction of Joan in Henry IV (c. 1596–9) might have also influenced Lennox’s version – she did treat Shakespeare’s corpus extensively in her Shakespear Illustrated

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 61

17/11/17 5:00 PM

62

anna k. sagal

(1753–4) (Goy-Blanquet 2003: 2). Lennox carefully balances Joan’s assertiveness and non-traditional behaviour with their positive valences, eliminating the saintly cult of personality that characterised French accounts while still emphasising her essential goodness and innocence. She writes admiringly of her military heroine, ‘[e]very thing seemed familiar to her mind; her activity and address were equal to those of the most accomplished warriors’, but importantly also includes the seemingly irrelevant fact that ‘her mother had taught her to sew’ (1.3: 213, 221). Lennox is careful to modulate any aggression on the part of her French heroine, noting, ‘[Joan] did not call herself a warrior in these letters . . . [that information] had been since added to them’ (1.3: 223). Although she was evidently as talented and physically fit as ‘the most accomplished warriors’, she could easily adapt to feminine activities like sewing, and even at one point worked as a ‘maid-servant’ (1.3: 221). Joan’s contributions to the French war effort are more queenly than crass, as she moves through the troops with ‘the unaffected politeness and ceremony of a courtier’ and none of the grotesque physicality that was attributed to other warlike women (Lennox’s Boadicea among them, who ‘was of a masculine countenance, tall in stature, with yellow hair’) (1.3: 212, 277). Despite the heroine’s unfortunate demise, the story of Joan of Arc as retold by Lennox paints a portrait of respectable, independent femininity that can exist in a reimagined narrative space for women to enjoy and draw inspiration from. The periodical continues to offer edifying and entertaining stories about controversial women with The History of Bianca Capello. A historical biography with as much romantic flair as one could ask for, this piece concerns the true story of a sixteenthcentury Italian noblewoman and her various romantic entanglements. The young Bianca becomes the mistress and later wife of two different men, is embroiled in a number of court intrigues and death threats, and is eventually murdered along with her second husband. While the story was certainly salacious enough to form the backbone of Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women (1657), notorious as an excoriating interpretation of a fallen, ruthless Bianca, Lennox takes a wholly sympathetic stance. Throughout the narrative, Bianca is characterised as virtuous, kind, and good, largely innocent of any wrongdoing. As a young lady, she is ‘extremely beautiful, and of so winning and graceful behaviour as enhanced the lustre of her charms’, just as a heroine ought to be (1.3: 245). In a characterisation consonant with the romance genre, Bianca’s fall from grace into her first sexual relationship is largely out of her control; as Pietro Buonaventuri’s ceaseless efforts to seduce her proceed, she ‘began to regard with some attention the attractive graces of his person and manner, till this new reciprocal love augmenting every day, became sanctified at length by a private marriage, followed by many secret meetings’ (1.5: 345–6). And unlike every other secret marriage in the history of secret marriages, Bianca’s is legitimate; when the lovers flee to Florence upon her family discovering their affair, they are accepted into the Buonaventuri household and the duchy as a married couple. There, Bianca almost immediately becomes seduced into another love affair with Duke Francisco, who lures her from a self-imposed seclusion with a series of social contrivances until ‘having heard, she soon consented to accept his love: the charms of his conversation and person encreasing every day her inclination for him, till their passion became mutual’ (2.6: 459). In a narrative gesture that was common in femaleauthored romances, Lennox refers to her as ‘poor Bianca’, lamenting the ‘thorny paths

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 62

17/11/17 5:00 PM

women’s history in the LADY’S MUSEUM

63

that brought her to the flowery precipice into which she fell’: notably, as in many of Haywood’s works, the author treats a victimised woman with empathy, rather than scorn or derision (2.6: 459). In fact, Lennox conveys a Bianca who somehow remains faithful to both men in her life, loving her husband ‘to excess’ yet continuing to cheerfully consort with the duke. Dramatically unlike Middleton’s Bianca, whose seduction by the duke embitters and ruins her – recall the chilling lines, ‘I’m made bold now; I thank thy treachery, sin, and I’m acquainted; No couple greater’ (Middleton 2002: II, ii, 442–4) – Bianca in the Lady’s Museum is lovingly concerned for her husband’s safety. She cries, ‘Since my love for you exceeds all that is, or ever was, of passionate, and kind, let me by that conjure you, to hear me out with patience’, pleading with her husband to cease his all-too-public philandering (2.6: 464). When he unsurprisingly does not and is brutally murdered, Bianca ‘with the utmost violence of passion, was ready to destroy herself’ and only failed because of the duke’s intercession. And after an unspecified amount of time, the duke resolves to marry her himself, observing, ‘his love alone had obscured her virtues, which in themselves were both great and many’ (2.7: 535). Bianca here emerges as the closest thing we might imagine to a model romance heroine almost in the vein of Richardson’s Clarissa: she retains her virtue even through seduction, remains faithful to and elicits marriage from both of her sexual partners, and is above all innocent of any wrongdoing – even of the poisoning which takes her life and that of the duke. For Lennox’s readers, the tale of Bianca Capello occupies a space between history and romance; based upon a well-known true story, yet recast with a sympathetic and even potentially radical reading of a woman’s sexual freedoms, this particular piece in the Lady’s Museum offers another vignette of enticing yet ultimately unsustainable female behaviour. Obviously, Lennox is not endorsing a life of infidelity; what she does seem to be gesturing toward, however, is the notion that female virtue can survive in the most unexpected places. It is also clearly something of a recovery project – pushing back against accounts like Middleton’s that fail to view the woman’s role in such a determined series of seductions as wholly sympathetic. By emphasising both female vulnerability in the face of male sexual power/violence and the inner strength that women can call forth in such scenarios, Lennox rehabilitates Bianca Capello, turning her scandalous past into a model of female virtue worth considering. With the inclusion of The History of Princess Padmani in no. 9, Lennox returns with a title character who embodies many of the same gendered ambiguities as Joan of Arc and Boadicea, as the princess’s wartime expedition reflects her bravery and loyalty despite ultimately leading to disaster. While Padmani is unique among the Lady’s Museum offerings because of its oriental origins, oriental tales were quite popular at mid-century and here again Lennox may have been taking advantage of a vogue for particular subjects to promote her periodical. The content was pulled nearly verbatim from Niccolao Manucci’s The General History of the Mogol Empire (1709);9 given Lennox’s familiarity with Italian romances, she may have first discovered the legend in Francesco Vanneschi’s more recent Artamene (1746). Because of the immense popularity of the Padmani tradition in Rajput culture stretching back to the mid-sixteenth century, it is also conceivable that scholars of Near East Studies in England were familiar with the legend, and a reference to a ‘Portuguese historian’ in the text itself raises the possibility that Lennox came across a version in her translation work (Sreenivasan 2007: 2–3). Either way, the inclusion of an oriental tale in the periodical both expanded the cultural

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 63

17/11/17 5:00 PM

64

anna k. sagal

sphere of the periodical’s contents – exposing Lennox’s female readers to other historical genres – and deepened its commitment to exploring diverse female experiences. Lennox’s Padmani recounts the story of the conquering Mogul Emperor Ackebar’s lustful advances toward the Princess Padmani, the much-beloved wife of the Raja Rana. As with many of the other feminocentric tales in the Lady’s Museum, Padmani is forced to defend her own honour in the absence of male protection; namely, when her husband briefly considers giving her up to his rival to avoid bloodshed. She pushes her husband to regain his military authority (and, of course, masculine reputation) by ‘consum[ing] the enemy’s forces and extinguish[ing] his flame’ (2.9: 699). Here, the woman is the actor in a position of strength; unlike many other contested princesses, Padmani has a say in the way her fate is decided. And when her husband is eventually tricked and captured by his enemy, Padmani rises to the occasion with a few military tricks of her own. Lennox writes, ‘The gallant princess did not suffer herself to be overwhelmed with this unexpected disaster; she immediately got on horseback, and with her lance in her hand, appeared at the head of her troops, resolved to conquer or die’ (2.9: 703). Unlike poor Boadicea, however, who ‘became . . . inhumanly savage’, Padmani ‘shewed herself as much superior to the men in prudence and courage, as she surpassed in beauty all those of her sex’ (1: 277, 2: 704). Next, she pretends to capitulate to Akebar’s demands, only to secretly dispatch a squad of elite warriors into the heart of her enemy’s camp to wreck havoc and free her husband (2: 706–8). Unfortunately, Akebar, ‘baffled and outwitted by a woman’, becomes ‘enraged to the last degree’ and lays waste to the entire city, slaying Rana and inspiring the faithful Padmani’s suicide (2.9: 708–9). While The History of the Princess Padmani continues a troubling trend in bad ends for good women throughout the Lady’s Museum, it is valuable here to think through the benefits Lennox’s readers gain from reading the Indian princess’s grand adventures. Padmani displayed greater fortitude, sharper tactical intelligence, and a more substantial devotion to her marriage than her male compatriots. Exemplifying the best in female virtue while transcending the limits of conventional femininity, she is also clearly a candidate for the annals of ‘worthy’ women. Like the histories of the Vestals, Joan, and Bianca, Padmani’s life is not itself a model for eighteenth-century English women to imitate, but it is instead proof of enduring female qualities – resilience, bravery, intelligence, and loyalty. While modern readers of the Lady’s Museum had no occasion to take up a spear, they did likely need periodic reminders about their own strengths. And for Lennox, the story of the Princess Padmani is only one of the many ways in which her readers could learn such a valuable lesson. As brief as it has been, this review of selected historical pieces from the Lady’s Museum gives rise to a number of valuable observations about the role of history essays in this periodical. Initially, it is notable that for all of Lennox’s inventiveness in positioning romances and scandalous histories as intellectually valuable, she does not feel comfortable incorporating histories of English women – even those from a long-distant past. This at least partially contravenes her project of offering exciting, romance-inflected history as an inspiration for contemporary English readers, although it also underscores the prevailing attitudes about a restrictive English femininity that Lennox was working against. It is likewise apparent that each of these essays both incorporates and surpasses scandal in its efforts to project historical models of femininity as inspirations for modern readers. Offered up as part of the broader ethos

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 64

17/11/17 5:00 PM

women’s history in the LADY’S MUSEUM

65

of thoughtfulness and reflection that characterised the Lady’s Museum, these historical essays are vital components to a new and progressive pedagogical project. Ultimately, it is evident that for Lennox, the true value of history reading lies not in the cultivation of manners or the collection of historical facts, but in the vast possibilities of female experience available through relived and reimagined history, best achieved through the merging of history and romance.

Notes 1. For more information on the fascinating and critically invaluable role that the Trifler plays in the Lady’s Museum, see Susan Carlile’s essay in Part V of this volume. 2. Adburgham 1972: 117; White 1970: 30; Small 1969: 224–5. 3. I am choosing to exclude from this estimation and this discussion the geographical essays (which do contain some historical content) because history is not their primary aim. 4. Palo 2005–6: 209; King 2012: 24; Pearson 1999: 77. 5. The debate over Arabella’s romance reading is voluminous and cannot adequately be addressed here, but interested readers can pursue work by Laurie Langbauer, Margaret Doody, Ruth Mack, Wendy Motooka, Scott Paul Gordon, Marta Kvande, Kate Levin, and others. 6. The correspondent who introduces the piece calls it a translation, but critics have been unable to find an original, leaving open the possibility that the ‘translation’ may itself be a fiction. 7. Despite its relevance, I do not focus further on this essay because it is a nearly a word-forword replication of her earlier translation and is not specifically adapted to this periodical. 8. Portions of this particular essay seem to have been taken from Lennox’s periodical (or another unidentified common source) for use in both the Lady’s Magazine (in 1780) and Southey’s Common-Place Book (in 1851). This indicates something of a popular reception for the story, if not for the Lady’s Museum itself. 9. Many thanks to Susan Carlile for this information.

Works Cited Adburgham, Alison. 1972. Women in Print: Writing Women and Women’s Magazines from the Restoration to the Accession of Queen Victoria. London: George Allen and Unwin. Addison, Joseph and Richard Steele. 1965. The Spectator. Ed. Donald Bond. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ballaster, Ros. 1992. Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684–1740. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ballaster, Ros, Margaret Beetham, Elizabeth Frazer, and Sandra Hebron. 1991. Women’s Worlds: Ideology, Femininity and the Woman’s Magazine. London: Macmillan. Bataille, Robert R. 2000. The Writing Life of Hugh Kelly. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dorn, Judith. 1992. ‘Reading Women Reading History: The Philosophy of Periodical Form in Charlotte Lennox’s. The Lady’s Museum’. Historical Reflections 18.3: 7–27. Druid, Nestor. 1752. The Lady’s Curiosity. London. Fergus, Jan. 2000. ‘Women readers: a case study’. Women and Literature in Britain. Ed. Vivien Jones. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 155–76. Goy-Blanquet, Dominique. 2003. ‘Shakespeare and Voltaire Set Fire to History’. Joan of Arc, a Saint for All Reasons. Ed. Goy-Blanquet. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 1–38.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 65

17/11/17 5:00 PM

66

anna k. sagal

Haywood, Eliza. 2001. The Female Spectator. Selected Works of Eliza Haywood. Part 2. Vols. 2–3. Ed. Kathryn R. King and Alexander Pettit. London: Pickering & Chatto. Italia, Iona. 2005. Anxious Employment: The Rise of Literary Journalism in the Eighteenth Century, London: Routledge. Jouslin, Claire Boulard. 2012. ‘Conservative or Reformer? The History and Fortune of Fénelon’s Traite de l’Education des Filles in Eighteenth-Century England’. The Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 12.4: 48–78. King, Kathryn R. 2012. A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood, London: Pickering & Chatto. The Ladies Magazine: or, the Universal Entertainer. 1749–53. London: G. Griffith. Lennox, Charlotte. 1760–1. The Lady’s Museum. London: J. Newbury and J. Coote. Looser, Devoney. 2000. British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670–1820. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lorenzo Modia, Maria Jesus. 2010. ‘Education for Women in the Eighteenth-Century Periodical: Charlotte Lennox’s The Lady’s Museum’. Differences, (in)equality and justice. Ed. Ana Antón-Pacheco Bravo et al. Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos. 201–12. McDowell, Paula. 2000. ‘Women and the Business of Print’. Women and Literature in Britain 1700–1800. Ed. Vivien Jones, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 135–54. Middleton, Thomas. 2002. ‘Women Beware Women’. English Renaissance Drama. Ed. David Bevington. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 1515–92. Palo, Sharon Smith. 2005–6. ‘The Good Effects of a Whimsical Study: Romance and Women’s Learning in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote’. Eighteenth-Century Fiction 18.2: 203–38. Pearson, Jacqueline. 1999. Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Powell, Manushag N. 2012. Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Raknem, Ingvald. 1971. Joan of Arc in History, Legend, and Literature. Oslo: Scandinavian University Books. Reeve, Clara. 1785. The Progress of Romance. 2 vols. Colchester: W. Keymer. Schürer, Norbert. 2008. Introduction to Sophia. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. —, ed. 2012. Charlotte Lennox: Correspondence and Miscellaneous Documents. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Shevelow, Kathryn. 1989. Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical. London: Routledge. Small, Miriam Rossiter. 1969. Charlotte Ramsey Lennox: An Eighteenth Century Lady of Letters. North Haven, CT: Archon Books. Sreenivasan, Ramya. 2007. The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Strehle, Susan and Mary Paniccia Carden. 2003. Doubled Plots: Romance and History. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. White, Cynthia. 1970. Women’s Magazines 1693–1968. London: Michael Joseph.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 66

17/11/17 5:00 PM

4 Vindications and Reflections: The LADY’S MAGAZINE during the Revolution Controversy (1789–1795) Koenraad Claes

M

any different and often clashing narratives have been suggested for the cultural-historical development of Western democracy, but nearly all historians agree on the importance of the chain of events together known as the French Revolution. This period, dramatically demarcated by the Storming of the Bastille prison on 14 July 1789 and Bonaparte’s Coup of 18 Brumaire year VIII (or 9 November 1799 on the Gregorian calendar), is commonly viewed as a rift in world history, with an incommensurable before and after. Political historian Gregory Claeys finds that ‘the French Revolution is incontrovertibly the defining act of modern politics’ not only because societies all over Europe and beyond came to redefine themselves in relation to it, but also because the contemporaneous debates on its significance gave rise to new political notions concerning class, faith, and gender that endure to this day (2007: 1). Each of these categories is relevant to the everyday lives of women, and therefore has been discussed – directly or indirectly – in women’s magazines, since the very start of the genre. In Britain, the heated responses to the French uprising have long been known as the ‘Revolution Controversy’, which is usually considered to have started in the autumn of 1789, when the first programmatic statements on the French Revolution started to appear, and to have settled down into an armed truce after 1795, when the Pitt government largely succeeded in subduing the public expression of radical reformism. The Controversy is justly described in historiography as Britain’s quintessential pamphlet war, but pamphlets were not the only publications in and through which its battles were waged. The more widely disseminated form of periodicals, including those primarily marketed toward women, was mobilised as well. This essay will examine how the Revolution Controversy figures in the most important British women’s magazine of the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century: the Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770–1832).1 Even though most scholars writing on the Lady’s Magazine have so far dismissed it as an organ of female domestication, this pioneering publication is uniquely qualified as a document of this troubled time. The combined advantages that it was Britain’s only monthly woman’s periodical that appeared throughout the Controversy, and that it drew a socially and ideologically diverse audience that participated to an unseen extent in its production, allow us to read case studies from its contents as responses to specific moments in this period. The French Revolution

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 67

17/11/17 5:00 PM

68

koenraad claes

is often treated as a single epochal event, but to gain insight into how it functioned in British public discourse it makes sense to consider it in distinct phases: an initial phase (1789–92) revolving around the fundamental controversy between Dissenter Richard Price and ‘Old Whig’ Edmund Burke; a second phase (1792–5) characterised by a democratic and internationalist radicalisation under the influence of the tracts of Thomas Paine and a conservative nationalist reaction after Britain joined the First Coalition in its war against France; and a third phase or aftermath (1795–9) in which loyalist ‘anti-Jacobin’ rhetoric through government repression finally defines the terms of the debate in its favour (Butler 1984: passim). As we will see, these three phases show distinctly from the contents of the Lady’s Magazine.

Lady versus Gentleman? Reading a late eighteenth-century women’s magazine for its discussion of historical events, even if it is one of the bestselling periodicals of its time, has long not been an obvious choice. Comparing editorial statements in the Lady’s Magazine after the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793 – then often cited as the casus belli between Britain and Revolutionary France – with those in the pioneering Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1922) of which it is at least in name the feminine counterpart, Mary Poovey influentially claimed that women’s magazines during the 1790s in the main shielded women from the supposedly corrupting influence of politics, then considered the prerogative of men. She found that ‘where the Gentleman’s Magazine explicitly warns its readers of a political and cultural menace, the Lady’s Magazine presents a reassuring picture of stability and continuity’ (1984: 16–17). This conclusion is in line with other historical accounts that discern an increasingly binary gender ideology in eighteenth-century women’s periodicals that culminates in the debilitating ‘FairSexing’ that Kathryn Shevelow perceived in women’s magazines in the second half of the century (1989: 188–90). The Lady’s Magazine’s most enduring subtitle, ‘Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex’, and the high-minded tone of its ‘To our correspondents’ page in which the as-yet unidentified editors reject submissions that are not appropriate for this mythical ‘Fair Sex’, do make it seem a case in point of the latter phenomenon. Although the editorials cited by Poovey of course do frame the content of the magazine’s body text, focusing on these short and unhelpfully formulaic prefatory statements amounts to privileging one voice over the many others that constitute the characteristically dialogic form of the magazine. Secondly, in late eighteenthcentury women’s periodicals the primary purpose of editorials was not commentary on topical events, but rather communication with the magazine’s community of readercontributors on submissions. Finally, it is not unthinkable that the editors intentionally omitted information from the editorials that could more subtly be communicated through other types of content. Nevertheless, the content of the Lady’s Magazine beyond these editorials has not fared much better in scholarship, usually being read reductively to make it fit preconceptions of late eighteenth-century women’s publications as focused on prescriptive conduct essays or, as Robert Mayo’s genre-defining study of eighteenth-century magazine fiction put it, ‘predominantly decorous, sentimental, and moral’ tales (1962: 188). The Lady’s Magazine’s editors nonetheless demonstrably aimed to secure as wide an audience as possible, and they did this through diversified content. As will be

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 68

17/11/17 5:00 PM

the LADY’S MAGAZINE

69

clear from a mere glance at the open-access annotated index provided by the Lady’s Magazine research project at the University of Kent, this periodical featured original literary contributions in prose, verse, and drama, as well as letters to the editor, advice columns, and essays on topical events, history, philosophy, and social issues (Batchelor et al. 2016).2 The range of the non-original content that was appropriated, often tacitly, from other periodicals or extracted from books, is also very wide, and draws from dozens of sources that do not fit the image of the depoliticised Fair. The characterisation of the magazine by Poovey and others makes it appear to have been in line with the counter-revolutionary conduct writer Laetitia Mathilda Hawkins, who in her Letters on the Female Mind (1793) held it a boon that ‘[t]he whole world might be at war, and yet not the rumor [sic] of it reach the ear of an Englishwoman’ (Hawkins 1793: 194). This seems to be confirmed by the insistence throughout the editorial addresses studied by Poovey that all contentious matter, such as overt politics, would be barred from its pages. However, the Lady’s Magazine’s monthly ‘Foreign’ and ‘Home’ news sections do in fact consistently cover global political and military conflicts connected to the French Revolution, and while these sections are too fragmentary and non-committal to yield clues about the editors’ ideological position in the Revolution Controversy, there are dozens of items that could be more helpful. Although admittedly the extracts in question mostly (though not solely) stem from the less controversial sections of their publications, in the 1790s the magazine features most of the major participants in the Revolution Controversy, with an undeniable predominance of the radical side. We do not have a lot of information on the Lady’s Magazine publisher at the time, George Robinson (1736–1801), but what is clear is that the man who was perhaps the most successful bookseller of late eighteenth-century London, like many of his profession, had radical sympathies. After Paine was ruled guilty of seditious libel and his Rights of Man was proscribed, an event to which we shall soon return, Robinson was fined for continuing to sell copies of the uncensored edition (West 1839: 133). This was a daring statement that at a later stage could have resulted in a prison sentence. Whereas Paine’s was the decade’s most widely disseminated radical publication, William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), published by Robinson, was the most influential philosophical tract among reformist intellectuals. Godwin’s Enquiry appeared but a few weeks after the execution of Louis XVI, and a popular theory holds that the only precaution that kept the author and his publisher out of prison was the fact that they famously priced the book so high as to keep it out of reach of the impressionable masses, who were then the main concern of government censors (Evans 2006: 69). Robinson disdained government censorship at least enough to continue visiting his friend Thomas Holcroft when the latter was briefly imprisoned in 1794 for attending reformist meetings (Kelly 2004), at a time when guilt by association was deemed sufficient grounds for treason allegations. Robinson is also on record as keeping Holcroft in work during the tough following years by commissioning translations (Hazlitt 1816: passim), and the author is consistently reviewed positively in the magazine. Surely, a strict avoidance of political content in one of Robinson’s publications, especially one with such a wide readership and therefore large propaganda potential as the Lady’s Magazine, would have been out of character for this intrepid publisher. This deceptively wide readership is another reason why the claim that the Lady’s Magazine was an intentionally apolitical publication deserves to be verified. The

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 69

17/11/17 5:00 PM

70

koenraad claes

assumption that a periodical entitled ‘Lady’s Magazine’ would be strictly aimed at women, albeit understandable, is incorrect. Although feminine-gendered contributions constitute the bulk of the magazine, a lot of content is explicitly presented as genderneutral, and many items even address male readers. A reception study by Jan Fergus indicates that the magazine was subscribed to by many male readers, as well as by boarding school pupils of both sexes (Fergus 2006: 200–9). Indeed, the editorial insistence on the magazine’s appropriateness for the Fair Sex appears to have functioned as a strategy to market it as family reading. To this end, one early editorial patronisingly implies that female and juvenile sensibilities are identical by promising in one sentence that the Lady’s Magazine will continue to address ‘[e]very topic conducive of inspiring the juvenile bosom with the love of virtue, and detestation of vice, or ornamenting the Sex with something more permanent and more attractive than mere beauty’ (‘Preface’. 4 (Jan 1773): n. p.). As Jennie Batchelor has explained, readers of both sexes and of all ages did not merely consume the Lady’s Magazine; they played a significant role in producing it, too, by submitting letters and original material in every genre and by engaging in informal editorial work by submitting extracts (2011: passim). They also reply to one another’s submissions, and the Lady’s Magazine made the most of the inherent potential of the magazine genre to accommodate contradictory voices. Throughout its run, male and female readers used the magazine as a democratic forum to have their say on the major questions of their age, and plausible figures for its readership go up to 16,000, surpassing all but the most widely disseminated pamphlets (Batchelor 2011: 247). As we shall see, these reader-contributors sometimes even anticipated arguments of since canonised works of political philosophy.

Fundamental Debates on Dissent and Gender (1789–92) Surprising as this neglect may be, in its first few months the French Revolution was deemed of little concern in the British press. France had too long been a hereditary enemy for the British to feel any sympathy for its embattled institutions, and a prevalent sense of moral and political superiority toward the French monarchy, Catholic and aspiring to absolutism, was shared by Whigs of all factions and most Tories alike. There was also some rejoicing in Britain about France’s internal conflict for strategic and geopolitical reasons. William Windham, Whig parliamentarian and later certainly no friend to the Revolutionaries, averred that before the start of its expansionist policy in 1792, ‘France, our ancient rival, was in a situation which, more than at any other period, freed us from apprehension on her account’ (quoted in Cobhan 1960: 23–4). In most newspapers and monthlies, coverage of the French Revolution was minimal in comparison to the attention that had gone to the recent American uprising and the subsequent Wars of Independence because the American Revolution was considered a domestic crisis. To illustrate the initial carelessness in the Lady’s Magazine, it may suffice to quote the unsigned article ‘New Fashions in Paris’ of October 1789, where the first mention of the ongoing events as ‘a revolution’ occurs in an article on a new style of women’s caps appearing in the French capital, as ‘[t]here could not be a doubt but a revolution, such as happened in France, would furnish several ideas of expressing it in the ton of fashion’ (20 (Oct 1789): 51; emphasis original).

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 70

17/11/17 5:00 PM

the LADY’S MAGAZINE

71

The Revolution Controversy only started a few months after the Storming of the Bastille, when British reformist commentators suggested that the grievances of the French against their deposed authorities were also relevant to Britain. Initially, the most vocal admirers of the French Revolution were religious Dissenters who perceived the curtailing of the despotic French monarchy as a belated parallel phenomenon to Britain’s own Glorious Revolution, a hot topic as the centenary of the latter had only just been celebrated. In November 1789 the philosopher and Dissenting preacher Richard Price delivered and published the sermon A Discourse on the Love of our Country that welcomed the French uprising as an opportunity to rekindle at home the reformist spirit of 1688 and do away with laws that imposed religious discrimination in favour of the Church of England. Price quickly came under attack in Old Whig and mainline Anglican polemics, most notably Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (Nov 1790). Burke, who only a few years before had championed peace with the American insurgents who had inspired the French, now warned in notoriously high-wrought rhetoric that all political projects based on abstract principles including human rights, and such as were witnessed in France, constituted a violation of tradition that would result in the breakdown of society. Burke’s insistence that those Britons who sympathised with the French Revolution were potential traitors to Britain was the spark that lit the fuse of the Revolution Controversy. Women writers weighed in on both sides of the debate, and for instance Mary Hays, Catharine Macaulay, and Mary Wollstonecraft were amongst the first thinkers to come to Price’s defence. Although Wollstonecraft wrote her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) before Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), already in that earlier book her interventions were motivated not only by Burke’s dismissal of the principles of the French Revolution and those commentators in Britain who had spoken out in its favour, but also by the halting effect that his traditionalist defence of the vested interest might have on the advancement of women in society. These early concerns come together in an easily overlooked debate in the pages of the Lady’s Magazine. In the December issue of 1789, a self-described male ‘young correspondent’ signing himself ‘R. Beaumont’ wrote in to propose a debate between readers on what today is still one of the most contentious couplets by Alexander Pope: Men, some to Bus’ness, some to Pleasure take; But ev’ry Woman is at heart a Rake. Beaumont proposes to debate whether this statement from ‘Epistle II. To a Lady’ (1743) is ‘founded on malice’, or ‘knowledge of the world’ (20 (Dec 1789): 622). Although Pope had died forty-seven years earlier, this topic was not an arbitrary choice. It explicitly links Beaumont’s periodical debate to contemporaneous debating societies, where, according to Donna Andrew, these exact lines were a regular topic (1996: 413). Mary Wollstonecraft, in her early Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), had listed Pope with Shakespeare and Milton as authors whose reputation was then deemed ‘indisputable’ in popular estimation, though readers, and young women in particular, should have more confidence in developing their own views (1787: 52). Later, in the 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she would again engage with Pope as ‘a well-known poet [who] might be quoted to refute [her] unqualified assertions’, and there dwells at length on the same two lines (1995: 202).

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 71

17/11/17 5:00 PM

72

koenraad claes

The topic furthermore tied in with ongoing religious controversies between Dissenters such as Price, who propagated ideas of continual progress, and mainline Anglicans, whose religious orthodoxy often mirrored a political acquiescence. After Beaumont and his first few respondents quibble uninspiringly on the exact interpretation of the term ‘rake’, these fundamental issues come to the forefront in the exchanges between the final two debaters. The first, signed alternatingly ‘William Edwy’ and ‘W. Edwy’, may seem to write under his legal name, but has likely named himself for the Anglo-Saxon king Eadwig or Edwy, who at the time was an icon of gallantry for standing by his morganatic bride Elgiva, and a fashionable topic in literature and history painting, for instance in a play by Frances Burney Edwy and Elgiva (1788). Additionally, Whig historiography in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tended to idealise pre-Norman kingship as a more democratic alternative to the present, authoritarian form of monarchy, supposedly brought in by William the Conqueror and reaching its peak under the maligned Stuarts, and even the more conservative historian David Hume portrays Eadwig’s accuser St Dunstan as a papist usurper of the sovereignty of the kings of England (Harris 2015: 394). W. Edwy objects to the inexact phrasing in the discussed poem, and presumes that what Pope understands by ‘rakishness’ is in fact merely ‘levity’. While this debater allows that many women are disposed toward levity, he argues that this is not enough to prove them to be rakes ‘at heart’, because numbers incline to this from imitation or bad examples, but not in conformity to the natural desires of the heart, which in its state of innocency, is always pure; though it is not uncommon afterwards to observe its purity corrupted, without any natural propensities being the occasion. (21 (Apr 1790): 188) W. Edwy does not exempt women from the allegation that they often behave regrettably, nor does he condemn them for such faults altogether. He is suspicious of slippery terms like ‘modesty, prudence or circumspection’. Rather than as unchanging principles to guide our conduct by, as true virtues should be, he sees these concepts as determined by prejudices that in male-dominated societies always put women at a disadvantage. According to W. Edwy, nothing would be able to save women if ‘the heart [were not] averse’ to the temptation of immoral behaviour, and the statement that all women ‘commenced rakes at first from the heart’ would therefore be fallacious. Claire Tomalin has noted in her biography of Wollstonecraft that after the latter had come to know the two opinion leaders on respectively the progressive and the conservative view of mankind, ‘it turned out that she was more interested in Dr [Richard] Price on natural virtue, than in Dr [Samuel] Johnson on natural vice’ (1992: 50). It is the same dichotomy that distinguishes W. Edwy, for natural virtue, from his opponents in the Pope debate, who explicitly adhere to the principle of natural vice. There are of course political consequences to a dichotomy between philosophical creeds that advocate a possibility of change to even the foundations of society, such as Price’s radical Whig doctrine of perfectibility, and those like Johnson, who link a belief in biological and social determinism to a mandatory preservation of social institutions, a position mainly found in the Tory and Old Whig camps. Understandably, during the French Revolution the distinctions between radicalism and conservatism at times informed political debate in the magazine more than in the preceding

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 72

17/11/17 5:00 PM

the LADY’S MAGAZINE

73

decades. In the Lady’s Magazine issue of March 1790 we find a seemingly trivial rebus by debater Beaumont, who supports the pro-Pope side by insisting on natural vice, of which the solution is said to reveal to the ‘rapturous eye / the name of him whose honest zeal is ready, / in virtue’s cause to stand by the distress’d, / and with softening care will succour the oppress’d’ (21 (Mar 1790): 160). The solution to the rebus is ‘Burke’. Although Burke had not yet published his Reflections, this rebus appears shortly after his announcement of this work and his first parliamentary speech against the Revolution of February 1790 (Claeys 2007: 13). The next participant in the debate, signed ‘C. J. Pitt’, also takes issue with W. Edwy’s belief in natural virtue. In his defence of Pope, Pitt starts by calling upon an even greater authority, reminding the reader that ‘[h]uman nature in the scripture is pronounced to be prone to error from the first dawning of reason, and the heart of man is naturally more disposed to depravity than excellence’ (21 (June 1790): 298). ‘Man’ is here intended as denoting the whole of humankind, as Pitt goes further than just stressing that not all women give into the ‘natural dictates of their hearts’, he also states that women are not inherently more depraved than men. However, ‘the subjection which, in the nature of things, they are obliged to be under to the men’ ill prepares them to resist these dictates. Remarkably, this is followed by a frank avowal that the difference between men and women is caused by their respective upbringing: ‘as custom has denied them so much of the advantages of education bestowed on men, their minds are consequently not so enlarged’, causing ‘an abridgement of their mental resources’. Nevertheless, no appeal to change this situation ensues, only the advice that ‘prudence attach them to the necessary employs of their domestic stations’ (21 (June 1790): 298). Even though this will now seem a strange lapse of judgement, it is consistent with most writings on female education that had been published before the 1790s. Even comparatively progressive educational writers who call for new pedagogic approaches in female education, such as the younger Wollstonecraft, did not yet fundamentally question the exclusively domestic ends that such education served. Catharine Macaulay’s Letters on Female Education (1790) was the first widely read defence of the provocative theses that ‘morals must be taught on immutable Principles’ and with ‘[n]o characteristic Difference in Sex’.3 Macaulay states in an extract from that book, appearing in the Lady’s Magazine of September 1790 issue, that ‘[i]t is a long time before the crowd give up an opinion they have been taught to look upon with respect, and I know many persons who will follow you willingly through the course of your argument, till they perceive it tends to the overthrow of some fond prejudice’ (21 (Sep 1790): 487). Interestingly, the Pope debate is again obliquely referenced in this extract, as Macaulay turns to her advantage Pope’s assertion in the same poem that ‘a perfect woman’s but a softer man’ to prove that the same moral precepts and educational principles should be upheld for both sexes (idem).4 Indeed, the obstacle of what the radicalised Wollstonecraft would soon call the ‘separate interest’ of the sexes (1995: 202) would have to be cleared before any further discussion of women’s role in society could take place. This would be the central thesis of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman two years later, and it is in this context that she, too, discusses the two verses by Pope. None of the three extracts from that work that appear in the Lady’s Magazine in June and July 1792 include her opinions on Pope’s views on women, but her statements on this subject, clearly influenced by Macaulay, hold that

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 73

17/11/17 5:00 PM

74

koenraad claes

Pope was right so far as that women often copy the behaviour of the (male) rakes who can secure their affections too easily, but women’s education does not prepare them to distinguish sincerity from affectation: [a]nd when all their ingenuity is called forth to adjust their dress, ‘a passion for a scarlet coat,’ is so natural, that it never surprised me; and, allowing Pope’s summary of their character to be just, ‘that every woman is at heart a rake,’ . . . till women are led to exercise their understandings, they should not be satirised for their attachment to rakes; nor even for being rakes at heart, when it appears to be the inevitable consequence of their education. (1995: 202) A few less elaborate items appear in the magazine during this first phase that are likewise relevant to the French Revolution, among which two stand out for their direct relevance to issues that were hotly debated in pamphlets at the time. In January 1791 an ‘Account of a Journey to Dunkirk’ is published, bearing the signature ‘A Citizen of the World’ (possibly the Irish radical pamphleteer Matthew Carey who was mainly active in the American press).5 Accounts of the antiquarian or natural assets of locations were very popular in the Lady’s Magazine as in other publications in the late eighteenth century, and the title implies an attempt to pass this item off as belonging to this innocuous category. This piece, which before appeared in the governmentcritical newspaper the Public Advertiser of 19 November 1790 as part of a series entitled ‘Tour of Pleasure through France’, moves from a short appreciation of the scenic beauty of the Dunkirk coastline to an avowal of a spirit of solidarity between the French and the English. An encountered Frenchman is quoted as stating that the ‘late happy expected revolution was not only patronised by a considerable majority of those of first rate abilities, but at least nine-tenths of the nation approved of the measure, and are determined to support them in it, at all hazards’ (21 (Supp 1790): 701–2). This seemingly objective account gains political significance when viewed in light of the contemporaneous campaigns of reformists to pave the way in Britain for democratic reform inspired by the French revolutionaries. In the Lady’s Magazine submissions of appropriated items by readers such as this are often accompanied by an introductory headnote signed by the reader acting as intermediary; the fact that no such preface appears with this ‘Account’ suggests that it was selected by the editors or staff writers, who will therefore have known its source and not have objected to its potential to be read as propaganda. Price would not experience much of the Controversy that he inadvertently caused, as he passed away in April 1791. He was succeeded at his parish in Newington Green by fellow Dissenting radical Joseph Priestley who had recently come down from Birmingham after his political activities there had made him the victim of loyalist rioters. Priestley’s funeral sermon for Price was the subject of an oddly uncharacteristic item in the Lady’s Magazine, which the editors explain they are running ‘though [they] are not very desirous of encouraging a controversy on such subjects’ (22 (May 1791): facing 227). The otherwise obscure Francis Wragg, reverend of St Anne’s in Aldersgate (London), delivers a rebuttal of Priestley’s contention that ‘after the dissolution of the soul and body, the soul will remain in a state of insensibility, till the day of resurrection’, a doctrine that fits the millenarian theology popular with Dissenting divines (22 (June 1791): 299). This religious dispute becomes conflated with Price’s political aspirations

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 74

17/11/17 5:00 PM

the LADY’S MAGAZINE

75

as the writer sarcastically states that if the late Dr Price upon the Resurrection were ‘informed, by an enemy to rational liberty, that a counter revolution in France had taken place’, he would be eager to deny any immediate continuation of our earthly existence in the afterlife (22 (June 1791): 300). This letter appears in the Gentleman’s Magazine in the same month, which suggests that Rev. Wragg submitted it to both periodicals simultaneously, considering the Lady’s Magazine an appropriate venue for such articles as well.

Radicalisation and Reaction (1792–5) While the Revolution Controversy was fought out in bitter terms throughout its first phase, the established order and its supporters generally treated their adversaries as profoundly misguided extremists who needed to be contained, but who ultimately posed little threat because they failed to connect to the general populace. Those polemicists who, as the phrase went, said ‘ditto to Mr. Burke’, tried to combat the appeal of the Revolutionary creed in Britain by portraying its advocates as abstract doctrinaires. As most historians now agree, in their zeal the radical pamphleteers regularly overstepped their mark by placing too much emphasis on their attack on organised religion and its moral teachings, and thereby alienated the uneducated masses who may have welcomed democratic reform but were wary of the anticlerical policies of the Revolutionary government in France. This relative tolerance on the part of the government disappeared after the distribution of cheap editions of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–2) in May 1792 by activist societies dedicated to bringing radical pamphlets within reach of the working classes and lower middle classes. The first part of Rights of Man (Feb 1791) had been a direct response to the philosophical objections to Revolutionary doctrines raised in Burke’s Reflections, but the second part (Feb 1792) was a much more incendiary tract, and like the first part written in a dangerously inclusive register (Philp 2011: 31). One extract from each part of Rights of Man appeared in the Lady’s Magazine. In August 1791, the magazine prints with slight paraphrase Paine’s anecdote from the first part of a Norman aristocrat who had suggested to Benjamin Franklin that he would assume the post of monarch of the newly independent United States (or be paid a compensation of £30,000 if this generous offer were rejected), that in the original serves to mock Burke’s contention that the Williamite Revolution settlement was superior to the recent French constitution. In the original, this anecdote ends with the ironic note that ‘the chivalry character which Mr. Burke so much admires, is certainly much easier to make a bargain with than a hard-dealing Dutchman’ (Paine 1995: 476), which is omitted in the magazine. Even so, a satire on aristocratic presumption is retained, and this by itself inoffensive extract could point curious readers to the pamphlet for the unexpurgated text, which is duly cited as its source. The less facetious second extract, stemming from the closing remarks of the second part, is reproduced verbatim. ‘[A]s religion is very improperly made a political machine’, Paine proposes to state his views on religious devotion by drawing an analogy of ‘a large family of children’ in which each of the children would show their love not as they were personally inclined instead of by ‘a concerted plan’ (23 (Apr 1792): 179). This obvious attack on state religion appears two months after the original publication in February 1792, again with the clear ascription ‘From

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 75

17/11/17 5:00 PM

76

koenraad claes

Paine’s Rights of Man, Part the Second’, suggesting a cautious endorsement of the source text that is confirmed by Robinson’s refusal to stop selling the pamphlet after it had been proscribed. Through these extracts the Lady’s Magazine helped popularise Paine’s thought, and even before the publication of the cut-price edition that drew the government’s ire, by conveying two of his central concerns: the democratic convictions that hereditary government is not self-evident but needs to be validated by the consent of the people, and that the powers of Church and State should be kept separate. One month after, and not coincidentally the same month as the cut-price edition appeared, Rights of Man was proscribed for its inclusion of an unguarded phrase that could be interpreted as stating that even constitutional monarchy was a form of tyranny, and its author was prosecuted for sedition. The second part of Paine’s pamphlet had arrived at a bad time as it coincided with the start of the Revolutionary Wars in the spring of 1792 (though not yet involving Britain) and anticipated the declaration of the French Republic in September of that year amidst escalated violence against the remaining vestiges of royalism. When in November the French government justified its occupation of the Austrian Netherlands by declaring that it would lend support to oppressed foreign peoples to liberate themselves from their reactionary governments, British pro-Revolutionary activists became a clear and present domestic danger. Paine fled to France, but his trial in absentia attracted much notice. The Lady’s Magazine published in its entirety Thomas Erskine’s court defence of Paine (Jan 1793). While this speech was published elsewhere in the press, for instance in newspapers, its inclusion in the Lady’s Magazine, again, nuances the preconceptions about this periodical established by earlier scholarship, and indeed the magazine’s own deceptive rhetoric. Hardly a month after Paine was convicted, Louis XVI was executed, resulting nearly immediately in Britain’s entry into the Allied side of the War and in a fierce backlash against pro-Revolutionary reformists. The Lady’s Magazine’s interest in sedition trials is consistent throughout this period, suggesting that Robinson did not only publish the Paine defence to clear his own conduct in continuing to sell copies of Rights of Man. It later also reproduces in their entirety Erskine’s defence speeches for the London Corresponding Society’s working-class leader Thomas Hardy (Nov 1794), and for John Horne Tooke (Jan 1795), the leader of the intellectual network the Society for Constitutional Information. Incidentally, although this had not been the main reason for the prosecution of these activists, both had been involved in the printing and the distribution of the cheap edition of Rights of Man. Obviously, these could have been reprinted with the excuse that the words of the defence counsel were rendered faithfully out of merely journalistic considerations. However, in December 1794, a ‘Sketch of the Life and Character of John Horne Tooke, Esq.’ also appeared, only a few days after the verdict of 22 November. The anonymous author is clearly an admirer of ‘[t]his gentleman, whose great abilities have long been the admiration of all who are intimately acquainted with him or with his writings’, concluding that Horne Tooke’s temperament and ‘genius . . . have undoubtedly been strong, and may, perhaps, in certain cases, have led him beyond the precise limits of moderation’, but imagining that ‘posterity, it may be, consigning to oblivion his narrow-minded persecutors, shall esteem him one of the ornaments of the age in which he lived’ (25 (Dec 1794): 619–23). The article mentions that Horne Tooke was acquitted after ‘after only ten minutes [sic] consultation, by a truly respectable and impartial jury of

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 76

17/11/17 5:00 PM

the LADY’S MAGAZINE

77

his countrymen’ (25 (Dec 1794): 622), emphasising thereby a discrepancy between the stances of the government and the British people. Disowning the government’s indictment of extremism was an important concern for any friend to reform in Britain. As the Revolution in France became increasingly violent from the summer of 1792, the Pitt government and its supporters attempted to implicate all supporters of the Revolutionary project in the regicide and messianic foreign policy of the French, especially that of the Jacobin faction after it came to power in May 1793. The loyalist strategy was to refer to all pro-Revolutionary discourse as ‘Jacobin’, for instance in the titles of the loyalist periodicals the Anti-Jacobin (1797–8) and the Anti-Jacobin Review (1798–1821), even though the leading British radicals were closer to the generally more moderate Girondin faction that was in power before Robespierre. British expatriates in Paris like Paine, Wollstonecraft, and Helen Maria Williams were targeted by the Jacobin regime for their earlier association with the former leader Jacques Pierre Brissot and for some time in peril of execution. At home, the violent episodes such as a massacre of Royalist prisoners in September 1792 and above all the execution of Louis XVI and later Marie Antoinette, which overall the British radicals abhorred as much as their loyalist opponents, had caused an outrage in the British press and managed to validate for many Burke’s earlier prophecies of doom. The reformist strategy therefore evolved from downplaying the excesses of the Revolution to distancing oneself from their perpetrators. In order to do this, a tactical reformist anti-Jacobinism was developed that out of context may easily be mistaken for loyalism to the established British government. This shift is reflected in the evolving accounts on the events in France that were being authored by British eyewitnesses. One of the most successful radical texts issued by Robinson during the 1790s was Helen Maria Williams’s Letters from France (1790–6), an eyewitness account that was excerpted copiously in the magazine. The first extracts that appear, drawn from the first two volumes of the Letters, which predate the execution of the king and Britain’s entering the war, reflect the political tendencies of those volumes by painting an all but untainted picture of Revolutionary France, intended by Williams to contradict negative portrayals in loyalist media. The extract ‘Observations on the Theatrical Amusement of Paris’ opens with the author’s statement that, coming down from Coblenz to the French capital, ‘[s]uch of our acquaintance as are aristocrates [sic], tell us how much we ought to lament the evil destiny which has led us to Paris at present, that the town has lost all its former eclat [sic]’. She goes on to contradict them: I am rather disposed to congratulate myself that I have missed the fine equipages, the laced liveries, and the good company at Coblenz; while I have an opportunity of observing the effects of a revolution, so noble in design, to astonishing in the sudden change produced in the sentiments of a whole nation, rising from the servility of abject servitude, to such an exalted spirit of freedom, that the contemplation inspired unwearied admiration and wonder. (23 (Sept 1792): 471–2) Predictably, Williams reassures the reader that she found Parisian theatre improved by the recent upheaval as well. While this subject may seem safe enough, it should be noted that the Lady’s Magazine reprinted this shortly after the declaration of the French Republic and the start of its expansionist wars, events that sent shockwaves through the British establishment.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 77

17/11/17 5:00 PM

78

koenraad claes

As several critics have discussed, Williams’s account of the Revolutionary years appeals to a wide readership, above all women, by borrowing plots and tropes from sentimental and Gothic fiction (cf. Keane 2012). The earlier extract ‘Auguste and Madelaine’ is subtitled in the magazine a ‘A Real Story’, and the author opens her purported anecdote with the declaration that she is not going to write as a ‘novelwriter’ who ‘by the aid of a little additional misery, and by giving the circumstances which actually happened a heightened colour . . . might almost spin a volume from these materials’ (23 (Aug 1792): 418). However, she goes on to deliver a sentimental tale that fits in with dozens of short fiction narratives that appeared in the magazine, the story of young aristocrat Auguste who falls in love with the poor Madelaine but unbeknownst to her is kept away from her by his father, upon which she resolves to take the veil. She is prevented from this fatal error by her lover turning up at the eleventh hour and informing her of ‘a decree of the national assembly, forbidding any nuns to be professed’. She ponders gratefully on her good fortune: ‘I have always loved the revolution . . . and this last decree is surely of all others the best and wisest—but if it had come too late!’ (23 (Aug 1792): 425). A few months before, the magazine had actually repurposed another extract as a serialised three-part novella ‘Family Pride and Parental Cruelty’ (Jan–Mar 1792), which is the famous long account of the French lovers kept apart near the end of the Ancien Régime by means of a lettre de cachet, that dreaded instrument of arbitrary power. The employment of the sentimental tale as a means of propagating the Revolution is notable throughout the magazine’s twentythird volume (1792). Immediately preceding ‘Auguste and Madelaine’, an extract from a well-known passage from Charlotte Smith’s epistolary novel Desmond (1792), also published by Robinson, and arguably the first of what would later be called English Jacobin novels, appears as the stand-alone tale ‘Adventures of a Breton’. In this item, the titular Breton recounts, among other mishaps, his bad treatment as a prisoner of war at the hands of his British captors during the American Wars. Ironically, this item appears a month before the aforementioned massacre of prisoners in Paris. The preface to the source text defiantly claimed the right for women to write about politics, and in the body text Smith repeatedly engages with Burke. While her more radical aims are not conspicuous in the extract, this does function as an advertisement for the whole novel, where readers could get the complete message. In 1793, however, after a period of mounting tensions and Britain’s declaration of war to France, the tenor of the magazine’s items related to the Revolution changes. In 1793 and 1794 several extracts appear from the Foxite moderate reformist John Moore’s Journal during a Residence in France from the beginning of August to the middle of December 1792 (1793/4), also published by Robinson, on topics such as the recent decline in royalist sentiment in France (Jan 1793 – the month of the king’s execution), the 1792 riots and massacres in Paris (Aug 1793), the dissolution of convents (Dec 1793), and the executions of the Queen of France (Dec 1793 and Supp 1793). All of these are dismissive of the events they discuss. The treatment of Marie Antoinette, at a far less critical stage already lamented by Burke, was a double outrage because it not only touched royal prerogative but was also a violation of femininity. The poet and novelist Mary Robinson, though a well-known radical herself, contributes the poem ‘Marie Antoinette’s lamentation’, decrying the ‘fell Barbarity’ of the French regime (24 (Apr 1793): 213). Nevertheless, explicit as these dismissals of Jacobin crimes are, they should not be viewed as retractions of support for the example of the Revolution.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 78

17/11/17 5:00 PM

the LADY’S MAGAZINE

79

As Steven Blakemore has noted, the anti-Jacobin tendency of the letters by Williams published after the fall of the Girondin faction to which she was attached, prominent in the fourth volume of Letters from France (1793), Letters Containing a Sketch of the Politics of France (1795), and A Tour in Switzerland (1798), is an attempt to dissociate the Revolutionary project from its Jacobin perversion (Blakemore 1997: 153–62). From the second source, a sympathetic ‘Character of Louis XVI’ is extracted in the magazine in August 1795, tellingly attributed to Reign of Terror martyr and Girondin figure Madame Roland. More assertively, shortly after the death of the Jacobin leader, the magazine published the informative ‘Memoires of Robespierre’, which is explicit it its disapproval, but still ends on the wry note that ‘[h]is fall, it seems probable, will be of little importance to the combined powers, who have laboured so earnestly to reestablish a monarchical government in that country’, echoing the insistent reformist contention that counter-revolutionary pressure from abroad had been instrumental in provoking the worst excesses of the French Revolution (25 (Sep 1794): 490). Related to this belief was a second reformist strategy developed in this period – that of pacifism aimed against British participation in the Revolutionary Wars. Throughout the Wars, readers submitted verse on brothers, sons, husbands, or sweethearts who were participating or had fallen in battle, and outside of their context it is often nearly impossible to tell patriotic endorsement of this sacrifice from an outright dismissal of the war effort that as part of the reformist appeal to the working classes still honoured the soldiers who risked their lives for an unworthy government. One clear case is the publication of the radical John Thelwall’s ‘Nelly’s Complaint. A Ballad’, which asks whether the young soldier must ‘from his country torn / a stranger’s doubtful cause sustain’ (26 (Jan 1795): 47). Thelwall had only the month before been acquitted of sedition during the same wave of trials that had seen Horne Tooke and Hardy indicted. As the ascription appearing with the poem frankly declares, it was taken from the recent collection Poems written during a close Confinement in the Tower and Newgate (1795). Like the ‘Sketch’ on Horne Tooke that appeared the month before, the inclusion of this poem can be interpreted as a triumphant declaration of victory over government repression.

Aftermath of the Controversy, and Conclusions The Revolution Controversy is usually considered to come to an end by the introduction of the so-called ‘Gagging Acts’ of the end of 1795: the Seditious Meetings Act that made organising reformist assemblies virtually impossible, and the Treasonable Practices Act that made all statements critical of the king or his government liable to be prosecuted as treason (Butler 1981: 49). The most undaunted radicals such as Thelwall kept organising, and some other critical contributions are still in print, but pro-Revolutionary reformism largely lost the support it had acquired during the first half of the decade (Claeys 2007: 154). In the Lady’s Magazine, reformists retained a strong presence, and notably authors such as Holcroft and young radicals including George Dyer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey make a regular appearance. Especially in the case of the latter poets, these often contain general statements in favour of abstract yet politicised notions such as liberty and peace, but despite the continuation of extracts from the accounts of Williams and from Directoire-era French publications that are duly dismissive of

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 79

17/11/17 5:00 PM

80

koenraad claes

the past Reign of Terror, there is much less engagement with topical events in the still ongoing Revolution in France. This overview of the contents of the Lady’s Magazine pertaining to the Revolution Controversy could only touch upon a selection of relevant items. Many more contributions pro and con the French Revolution can be found in the magazine. Nevertheless, it allows us to draw a number of conclusions. Firstly, although Poovey and Shevelow were right that late eighteenth-century women’s magazines played an important role in the construction of restricted notions of femininity and that these magazines often displaced the emphasis of earlier women’s periodicals on the acquisition of learning to ‘other forms of knowledge more directly relevant to women’s lives’ (Shevelow 1989: 188), in the case of the Lady’s Magazine at least this does not necessarily entail a complete ban of political content. Secondly, although the Lady’s Magazine, like most magazines, cannot be said to be a straightforward organ of any given ideological position, during the Revolution Controversy it consistently made room for publications of the radical reformist faction, including the most controversial. Thirdly, and finally: it is certain that readers of this period’s British women’s periodicals were better informed about ongoing political debates than we have long presumed.

Notes 1. In 1823 the magazine’s subtitle changed to The Lady’s Magazine; or, Mirror of the BellesLettres. 2. Research for this chapter was generously supported by a Research Project Grant awarded by the Leverhulme Trust, entitled ‘The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1818): Understanding the Emergence of a Genre’ for which the author was Research Associate between 2014 and 2016. 3. The titles of letters XXI and XXII. 4. Macaulay’s paraphrase; the original reads: ‘Heav’n, when it strives to polish all it can / Its last best work, but forms a softer Man’ (ll. 271–2). 5. Articles under this pseudonym from this period have been attributed to Carey in Carty 2015: 339. Carey edited the American Museum or Universal Magazine (1787–92), from which the Lady’s Magazine regularly reprinted articles.

Works Cited Andrew, Donna. 1996. ‘Popular Culture and Public Debate: London 1780’. Historical Journal 39.2: 405–23. Batchelor, Jennie. 2011 ‘‘Connections, which are of service . . . in a more advanced age’: The Lady’s Magazine, Community, and Women’s Literary Histories’. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 30.2: 245–67. Batchelor, Jennie, Koenraad Claes and Jenny DiPlacidi. 2016. ‘Research Data’. (last accessed 29 Sep 2016). Blakemore, Steven. 1997. Crisis in Representation: Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, and the Rewriting of the French Revolution. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Butler, Marilyn. 1981. Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 1984. ‘Introductory essay’. Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolution Controversy. Ed. Marilyn Butler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 80

17/11/17 5:00 PM

the LADY’S MAGAZINE

81

Carty, T. J. 2015. A Dictionary of Literary Pseudonyms in the English Language. 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Claeys, Gregory. 2007. The French Revolution Debate in Britain: The Origins of Modern Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cobhan, Alfred. 1960. ‘Introduction’. The Debate on the French Revolution: 1789–1800. Ed. Alfred Cobhan. London: Adam & Charles Black. Evans, Chris. 2006. Debating the Revolution: Britain in the 1790s. New York: I. B. Tauris. Fergus, Jan. 2006. Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harris, James A. 2015. Hume: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hawkins, Laetitia Matilda. 1793. ‘Postscript’. Letters on the Female Mind, its Powers and Pursuits. London: Hookham & Carpenter. Hazlitt, William. 1816. Memoirs of the late Thomas Holcroft. Vol. 3. London: Longman. Keane, Angela. 2012. Revolutionary Women Writers: Charlotte Smith & Helen Maria Williams. Tavistock: Northcote. Kelly, Gary. ‘Holcroft, Thomas (1745–1809)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2004. (last accessed 19 Sep 2016) The Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex. 1770–1832 (1st ser. 1770–1819; 2nd ser. 1820–9; 3rd ser. 1830–2). London. Mayo, Robert. 1962. The English Novel in the Magazines: 1740–1815. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Paine, Thomas. 1995. ‘Rights of Man. Part 1’. Collected Writings. Ed. Eric Foner. New York: Library of America. Philp, Mark. 2011. ‘Paine, Rights of Man’. The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the French Revolution in the 1790s. Ed. Pamela Clemit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Poovey, Mary. 1984. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology and Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shevelow, Kathryn. 1989. Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical. London: Routledge. Tomalin, Claire. 1992. The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft. London: Penguin. West, William. 1839. ‘Letters To My Son at Rome. Letter IX. Notice of the Robinsons’. Aldine Magazine 1.9: 133–5. Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1787. Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. London: Joseph Johnson. —. 1995. A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Right of Woman. Ed. Sylvana Tomaselli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 81

17/11/17 5:00 PM

5586_Batchelor & Powell_FM and Part-01.indd 82

17/11/17 5:00 PM

Part II The Poetics of Periodicals

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 83

17/11/17 5:00 PM

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 84

17/11/17 5:00 PM

The Poetics of Periodicals: Introduction

T

hroughout the long eighteenth century, poetry was one of the periodical’s most enduring and significant genres. From the verse of Elizabeth Singer (later Rowe) in John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury (1690–7), and Aphra Behn’s and Anne Finch’s poetic presence in Peter Motteux’s Gentleman’s Journal (1692–4), to the hundreds of poems by Felicia Hemans that appeared in the pages of the New Monthly Magazine (1814–84) and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1817–1980) in the 1820s and 1830s, thousands of original and reprinted poems by women writers appeared in newspapers, periodicals, and magazines. Yet these texts have been unjustly overlooked in literary scholarship, which remains sceptical of, and no doubt daunted by, the ubiquity, variable quality, and sometimes occasional nature of what was termed fugitive verse, as well as the difficulty of attribution posed by the pervasive culture of anonymous and pseudonymous publication. Indeed, periodical poetry is frequently used as evidence of the amateurism of the serial publications that printed them, of the magazine’s tendency toward piracy, and (particularly in the case of poetry by women and especially in magazines that explicitly addressed a female readership) of the hackneyed and maudlin sentimentality to which these periodicals have traditionally been deemed prone. While Victorianists such as Linda K. Hughes (2007) and Kathryn Ledbetter (2009) have ably challenged such views, their legacies have not yet been extensively scrutinised in our period beyond a few notable exceptions, the majority of which focus on individual titles such as the Gentleman’s Journal (Ezell 1992) or Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1922) (Ram 1999). Periodical poetry by women and poetry by men in magazines titularly marketed at a female audience have been given even shorter shrift. While Paula Backscheider’s (2005) and Stephen C. Behrendt’s (2009) important studies of eighteenth-century and Romantic women poets, respectively, devote some attention to poetry that appeared in newspapers and magazines as well as stand-alone volumes, much work needs to be done to establish: (1) the important contribution that periodicals played in the popularisation of verse forms and the cultivation of poetic tastes that upheld or challenged formal hierarchies; (2) how periodicals shaped the reception of canonical and now little-known, even anonymous, poets, whose works often sat side by side within an individual newspaper’s or periodical’s pages; and (3) the equally vital role that poetry played in the development and success of the periodical genre from early newsletters and miscellanies to the dedicated poetical magazines that flourished in the later eighteenth century. The chapters in this section lay down an important marker in this timely and necessary conversation. Analysing appropriations of already published poems as well as original poetry written for periodicals and magazines, they alert us to the potentially difficult position of the woman poet, who could find her work reprinted within a magazine’s pages without her consent or next to poems or editorial interpolations antagonistic to her own politics or aesthetics. Equally, they document the literal and metaphorical space periodicals opened up in the hands of forward-thinking (and commercially astute) publishers and determinedly ambitious women poets for the creation

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 85

17/11/17 5:00 PM

86

part ii: introduction

of a female poetic tradition. Two chapters take single-author approaches. Dustin Stewart’s important essay opens this part of the volume with an illuminating account of the poetry of Elizabeth Singer in the Athenian Mercury. As Stewart deftly observes, Singer Rowe, and most of the recent scholars who have argued for her importance as a poet and early prose fiction writer, have made it all too easy to forget her early periodical poetry. Yet her dealings with Dunton and with the Athenian Mercury crucially shaped not only Rowe’s later, and more famous, verse, but also the vision of prose epistolarity for which she would become famous. Tanya Caldwell similarly hones in on the work of a single, remarkable woman writer, Hannah Cowley, to illuminate her career and the moment in literary history that she helped to define. Documenting the flirtatious poetic exchange between Della Crusca (Robert Merry) and Anna Matilda (Cowley) in John Bell’s the World (1787–97), Caldwell illuminates how Cowley used the genre of ‘the periodical poem’ to intervene in radical affairs of the moment and to position herself and fellow female poets in relation to established literary traditions. The contributions by Jennifer Batt and Octavia Cox zoom out to take a wide shot of the complicated, sometimes fraught, two-way relationship between women poets and magazines. Batt’s essay on poetry by women in magazines from the 1730s to 1750s shows the extraordinary range of women’s poetry during these decades and their complex interactions with a genre that could make their careers or, in many cases, consign them to obscurity. Cox takes up this story later in the century and shows how it could take a very different turn in the hands of an entrepreneurial periodicalist such as James Harrison. Cox’s account of the Lady’s Poetical Magazine (1781–2), which gave more space to women poets than contemporary miscellanies and anthologies, reveals how Harrison envisioned his periodical as a space in which women and male poets were in dialogue, and how his efforts led to the canonisation of certain women poets at the turn of the nineteenth century. Taken together, all four essays show how impoverished our sense of eighteenth-century poetry is if we ignore its major, massmarket, venue: the serial publication.

Works Cited Backscheider, Paula. 2005. Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Behrendt, Stephen C. 2009. British Women’s Poetry and the Romantic Writing Community. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ezell, Margaret J. M. 1992. ‘The Gentleman’s Journal and the Commercialization of Restoration Coterie Practices. Modern Philology 89.3: 323–40. Hughes, Linda K. 2007. ‘What the Wellesley Left Out: Why Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies’. Victorian Periodicals Review 40.2: 91–125. Ledbetter, Kathryn. 2009. British Victorian Women’s Periodicals: Beauty, Civilization, and Poetry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ram, Titia. 1999. Magnitude in Marginality: Edward Cave and The Gentleman’s Magazine, 1731–1754. Utrecht: Universiteit Utrecht.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 86

17/11/17 5:00 PM

5 Dunton and Singer after the ATHENIAN MERCURY: Two Plots of Platonic Love Dustin D. Stewart

T

he pensive provincial churchman John Norris and the irrepressible London bookseller John Dunton could agree that platonic love is the love of angels even if they disagreed about what that meant. Norris took for granted that angels love God. He defined platonic love as ‘the Love of Beauty abstracted from all sensual Applications’, an ‘Angelical Affection’ because it lifts the lover toward the divine, the ‘first original Beauty’ (1687: 444). Dunton surmised that angels love other angels. In an early issue of the Athenian Mercury (1690–7), his innovative question-and-answer periodical, he settled on a formulation to which he often returned: a chaste cross-gender friendship conducted outside the body, a ‘strict Union of Souls’ and ‘a Conversation truly Angelical’ (1.11).1 Despite this difference, both men accepted that platonic love faces threats from below. Norris’s discussion warns that any ‘desire of corporal contact’ interrupts the soul’s ascent (1687: 444), and Dunton’s account – written in April 1691 with his anonymous collaborators, known as the Athenians, a group in which some scholars have mistakenly included Norris (Taylor 2009: 28) – also cautions that physicality breaks the spiritual spell: ‘all the fear is least the Friendship should in time degenerate, and the Body come in for a share with the Soul . . . which if it once does, Farewel Friendship’ (AM 1.11). Whether angelic spirits love God or one another, they evidently cannot love bodies. Dunton seized upon this idea of a higher affection predicated on physical absence to conceptualise epistolary relationships and to defend the use of women’s letters in his publications. By imagining that letters, ‘those little subtle Messengers’, carry ‘all the Soul’ of a writer but none of the body (AM 2.13), he turned platonic love into a theory of collaborative, cross-gender authorship: angelic conversation conducted by letter. Much as Dunton delighted in this theory, he delighted too in the narrative potential of platonic love gone sour, spoiled by physical presence and bodily desire. For decades after broaching what might be called the sinking plot of platonic love – the dangerous body comes in, and down goes the friendship – he produced further versions of it, most elaborately in The Athenian Spy (1704) and in ‘The Double Courtship’ (1710), two epistolary texts that revealed Dunton’s ongoing fascination with the woman who had previously become the Mercury’s star contributor: Elizabeth Singer (later, beyond the purview of this chapter, known as Elizabeth Rowe). Yet platonic love as Dunton understands it also faces a threat from above, namely Norris’s definition. One soul might cease loving another because it feels pressed to direct that love toward God instead. The philosopher and educational theorist Mary Astell wrestles with this difficult imperative in an exchange of letters she initiated with

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 87

17/11/17 5:00 PM

88

dustin d. stewart

Norris, published as Letters Concerning the Love of God (1695).2 Written in October 1693, during the same week that Singer had questions about strained relationships answered in the Mercury (AM 12.1), one of Astell’s contributions laments that her ‘strong Propensity to friendly Love’ keeps her from following Norris’s call to love God alone (1705: 32–3). In theory she accepts, as a later letter declares, that only love for the creator can ‘make us become Angels even whilst we dwell on Earth’ (67). In practice, however, she finds that parting company with fellow creatures increases her fondness for them. We are, she says, too much inclined to treat a person as ‘our Good whose Absence we find uneasie to us’ (34–5). A footnote added to the 1705 edition defensively insists that Astell checked this tendency to love, in something like Dunton’s fashion, the souls of absent friends and embraced Norris’s stricter alternative instead. Her struggle epitomises a second plot of platonic love, a different sort of break-up story in which the lover cuts ties with the beloved so as to ascend to some higher object. Dunton put this climbing plot to imaginative use in The Athenian Spy, having made overtures to it in The Art of Living Incognito (1700), an earlier book of anonymised letters. More familiar to literary historians is a real-life version of the plot. Dunton and Singer styled themselves platonic lovers in letters exchanged in the 1690s (with the full support, Dunton insisted, of his then wife); and a rare surviving letter of Singer’s, held with Dunton’s manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, suggests that her early poem on the topic was written at his behest (MS. Rawlinson d.72, fol. 31). First published in the Mercury on 24 December 1695, this poem, titled ‘Platonick Love’, aligns itself with Dunton’s defences: ‘Nor is the greatness of my Love to thee’, the poet says to an unnamed beloved, ‘a sacriledge unto the Deity’ (19.17). In later moving beyond the Mercury’s orbit, however, Singer both distanced herself from Dunton and broke from this poem’s perspective. Like Astell, she increasingly if not uniformly adopted Norris’s view of what angels love. Dunton meanwhile reused and repurposed ‘Platonick Love’, invoking the Astell-Norris model as a precedent for his relationship with Singer. To his mind she had been – and he still wanted her to be – an Astell to his Norris. In these post-Mercury publications, examined in this chapter, Dunton depicts Norris as a high priest of platonic love and uses the offbeat portrait to rationalise his appropriation of Singer’s writing. But what Dunton saw as a sinking plot, platonic love lost to bodily desire, Singer lived out as a climbing plot. She became an Astell in her way by leaving Dunton behind. Nor did she depart empty-handed. She took with her a powerful vision of the author as a spirit writing from the angelic world, a vision worked out in exchange with Dunton and developed from sources they shared (including Norris, whom Singer read more perceptively).3 She performed this authorial role so well that Dunton found himself emulating her, the editor imitating the star he discovered, later on. She took as well a strategy for organising epistolary narratives around poems. Dunton had begun to incorporate verse into the normal questionand-answer content of the Mercury, itself presented in a stylised epistolary format meant ‘to create an atmosphere of friendly exchange’ (Ezell 1992: 327). Sensing an opportunity, Singer, an aspiring young writer living in Frome, put some poetry into a letter to him and the Athenians in London. The first poem she sent, as early as autumn 1691, was probably ‘King William Passing the Boyne’, though the biblical paraphrase ‘Habbakkuk’ was the first one they published, in October 1693 (King

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 88

17/11/17 5:00 PM

dunton and singer after the ATHENIAN MERCURY

89

2002: 162; Backscheider 2011: 44). Tuck some verse into a letter addressed to the right person and the result, apparently, is a plot. Or in this case two: Singer’s career in print began (her verse became a popular feature of the Mercury and new poetrythemed issues gave the periodical a boost), and so did her fraught relationship with Dunton. She eventually transformed their shared obsession with unseen spirits communicating by letter into groundbreaking epistolary fictions written as though from the other side. The process by which she published her first poems, then, became the content of her final books. But Singer also learned from dealing with Dunton that the same poetry can serve different purposes – can activate divergent plots – when reframed by new letters.

Sinking ‘Platonick Love’ responds to widespread discussion in earlier issues of the Mercury, but the topic influenced the periodical even when not directly addressed. After the Athenians proclaim – in a reply underscored by Kathryn Shevelow (1989: 64–6) – that women’s learning is justified because women have ‘as noble Souls as we’ (AM 1.18) and then reaffirm their case for cross-gender spiritual friendship, the pervasive suggestion is that the Mercury itself offers a forum for conversation among the equally dignified souls of men and women: a hub for platonic love. Dunton’s periodical furthermore circulated the hopeful view that such love, seen as affection detached from embodiment, anticipates what souls feel for each other after bodily death. In an undated issue printed for the first full-volume set, a reader raises what became a recurring question: will we recognise our disembodied friends in heaven (AM 1.25)? Though Dunton himself changed his answer in the years to follow – tacking from his position in the Essay, Proving, We Shall Know Our Friends in Heaven (1698) to a negative response in The Christian’s Gazette (1709) and back – in the Mercury he and the Athenians hold that souls will know one another. The opinion has its basis in the assumed similarity between disembodied souls and angels: ‘’tis probable that there’s such a thing as Friendship among Angels’ and ‘we shall be like the Angels’, one issue reasons (AM 3.13), and another issue declares more emphatically that ‘we shall be then like the Angels, who we are sure know each other’ (AM 6.7). Defining platonic love as angelic experience, and angelic experience as disembodied conversation, the Athenians encourage readers to think they will recognise their friends in heaven to the same extent that they can discern their friends’ minds apart from their bodies in personal letters or the minds of different writers contributing to the periodical. In more realistic moments, however, Dunton and company either admit that talk of platonic love can be a ruse – alluring a purported friend into a sexual relationship – or resign themselves to the view that pure spiritual love between the sexes is doomed to sink to bodily lust. A cautious statement by the Athenians allows that while platonic love does exist, ‘’tis obvious there are Pretenders to it’ (AM 8.11). One such pretender slyly asked, in March 1692, whether ‘Kisses and chast Embraces may be admitted into that Friendship between different Sexes’. ‘Hold, good Mr. Platonique! not a Lips breadth further’, begins the printed reply. After chiding him for neglecting the body’s power, it concludes that he must avoid bodily contact except ‘as you may embrace or salute a Sister or a Neighbour’ (AM 6.17).

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 89

17/11/17 5:00 PM

90

dustin d. stewart

This disapproving language reappears verbatim in Dunton’s Athenian Spy, printed seven years after the final issue of the Mercury. His preface announces the triumphant return of the Athenians, though Dunton was working alone at this point, and the first part of the book comprises pseudonymous letters said to be exchanged between the Athenians and the women they courted in platonic romances, with a view (however playful) to platonic weddings. The opening letter, wooing one Madam Laureat, duplicates wording from the Mercury’s earliest definition: ‘a tender Friendship between Persons of a different Sex’, ‘a Conversation truly Angelical’ (Dunton 1704: 3). But Laureat remains a sceptic. Starting with the rebuff recycled from the Mercury – ‘Hold (Good Platonicks) not a Lips breadth further’ – she argues that ‘there’s certainly no better nor worse than meer Flesh and Blood at the Bottom’ of their celebration of spiritual affection (7, 11). The sentiment sounds familiar as a Swiftian critique of enthusiasm, but Dunton constructs a winningly doubtful female antagonist from his own periodical past, turning the Athenians into characters and turning their prior reservations against them. He also draws on the language of Mary Astell, who tells John Norris that ‘love is an insinuating Passion, and where-ever ’tis admitted, will spread and make its Way’ (1705: 64). Madam Laureat restates Astell’s point with help from Milton’s Satan: calling love ‘an insinuating Devil’, she proclaims that ‘if he gets but the tip of his Wing into your Heart, all the rest quickly follows’ (Dunton 1704: 12).4 The Athenians at their most doubtful similarly warn that sexual love takes cross-gender friendship and ‘totally sucks it up and drowns it’ (AM 3.13). The startling formulation at once evacuates purity and inundates it. A more measured reply, printed in the Mercury on 10 May 1692, is indicative of Dunton’s later tendency to associate the idealism of platonic love with verse and misgivings about it with prose. The Athenians, conceding that pure friendship of spirit can be made ‘ridiculous’ through misuse, nonetheless insist that several cases have cemented their belief in it. For ‘the latest’ they point to ‘a Copy of Verses writ by a Platonick Gentleman’ that appear ‘in the Gentlemans Journal for the last Month’. All five stanzas of the previously published poem follow, beginning with this one: Since Love hath kindled in our Eyes A chast and holy Fire, It were a Sin if thou or I Shou’d let this Flame expire. The poem works out an analogy between heavenly stars and lovers’ eyes made conventional by earlier defenders of platonic love. In the second stanza, the speaker tells the addressee that while they cannot meet in person, they may still love at a distance just as ‘the fixt Stars by their twinkling greet, / And yet they never joyn’ (AM 7.13).5 Literary history has attributed ‘Since Love Hath Kindled’ to Dunton – in May 1818 the Gentleman’s Magazine called it the only thing ‘worth preserving’ of all he scribbled about platonic love (88: 396) – and whether or not he wrote it, he reprised it frequently, in the Spy (1704: 53–4), for example, and in Life and Errors (1705: 186–7). In the latter he representatively uses the poem’s language to prove to another sceptical Madam Laureat type that ‘Platonick-Love is a Real Thing’ (186). Dunton can only treat the poem as evidence, however, by obscuring its original narrative context. In an entry in the April 1692 issue the Gentleman’s Journal, two young

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 90

17/11/17 5:00 PM

dunton and singer after the ATHENIAN MERCURY

91

people – a scholar and a woman with a ‘natural Inclination to Learning’ – commence an ‘abstracted Philosophical Union’ (1: 4–5). After three years, the woman wants something ‘more substantial’ and asks about marriage. Her ‘contemplative Lover’, opting to ‘confine himself to Ideal happiness’, sends her the poem as his rejection (5). In effect the poem kills her, and then word of her death kills him. The unsigned entry concludes with a seemingly counter-Duntonian moral against love at a distance: ‘Since absence hath such fatal consequences, Lovers should endeavour never to leave the object of their Passion’ (6). Dunton’s habit of extracting ‘Since Love Hath Kindled’ from this tragic story might suggest that he scrubbed the framing narrative from memory. Yet it nicely enacts his own argument that platonic love dissipates whenever ‘the Body come[s] in for a share with the Soul’ (AM 1.11). One partner’s earthly desires interfere with the other’s disembodied ideal, and a necessarily failed marriage proposal ends the relationship. Rather than forget about this pattern, Dunton held onto it and (in his telling) lived it out with Elizabeth Singer. Published in 1710, ‘The Double Courtship’ recounts their relationship and quotes from their supposedly platonic correspondence, which commenced, as Kathryn King has shown, with a notice in the Mercury on 8 January 1695 asking for her address (2002: 165), and which culminated, as E. J. Clery has explained, in a journey to Agford: ‘in September 1697, after the death of his wife, he travelled to Singer’s home in Somerset and proposed marriage’ (2004: 37). She quite sanely said no, and Clery concludes from Dunton’s reflections that he was haunted less by her rejection than by his own ‘failure to sustain the ideal of platonic love’ (37). Life followed art in this case, however, for Dunton had written about such a failure when defining platonic love nearly two decades before, and ‘Courtship’ adopts the basic structure of the 1692 Gentleman’s Journal story from which he had regularly pulled ‘Since Love Hath Kindled’ in the intervening years. His story, in other words, takes the shape of a stylised sinking plot, and the communication between John Norris and Mary Astell emerges as his self-flattering precedent. Dunton doesn’t bother to keep the ending a surprise. His point is his pattern, a descent from pure distance to impure presence: ‘when from courting her SOUL, I fell to courting her BODY, (and that’s the Reason I call this Project the Double Courtship) our Friendship (Mutually) chill’d’ (1710: 2). But the author does take pains to insist that the relationship remained chaste until then. He uses poetry to defend his ideal, interpolating and splicing together lines from poems he rarely names, including (in the first such stretch of verse) Singer’s own ‘Platonick Love’ (2). In this vein he reprints ‘Since Love Hath Kindled’ again (8–9), soon after making a revealing claim about his qualifications at the time: ‘I knew the Nature of Platonick Love lay wholly in the disinterested Union of two Minds, which were made (as Mr. Norris and Madam Astel’s were) of Inclination that was purely Spiritual’ (8). A footnote addresses readers who might not recognise Astell’s name: ‘The Lady the Reverend and Learned Mr. John Norris corresponded with in his Book entituled [sic], Letters concerning the Love of God, between the Author of the Proposal to the Ladies, and Mr. John Norris’ (8, italics reversed). By juxtaposing ‘Since Love Hath Kindled’ with Letters Concerning the Love of God, Dunton implicitly slots the co-authors of that book into the two characters in the Gentleman’s Journal narrative, and the casting choice seems to work: a reclusive scholar and a woman inclined to learning share a chaste relationship, becoming a model of platonic love. At least it works so long as one joins

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 91

17/11/17 5:00 PM

92

dustin d. stewart

Dunton in ignoring the rather significant point that Norris and Astell didn’t write letters about love felt for each other. For Dunton, the nature of their bond – a cross-gender friendship, ‘purely Spiritual’, carried out by letter – matters more than the content of their exchange, which in fact places love for God over and against love for other people. Dunton tightens the comparison between his correspondence with Singer and Norris’s with Astell when he attempts to justify not only having written letters about platonic love to an unmarried woman in the first place but also, now, publishing a few of her letters in his text: ‘the Reverend Dons have set me a President [precedent] in this Kind; the famous Norris, (now Rector of Bemmerton,) owns himself greatly honour’d by that Platonick Correspondence he had with Madam Astell, and has publish’d the Letters that past between ’em’ (25). Again overlooking a salient difference – Astell gave Norris permission to publish her letters – Dunton portrays himself as doing no worse than the pious rector of Bemerton had done. Near the surface here is the troubling insistence that Singer should in fact thank him for making her famous, even as Astell should thank Norris. The Athenian Spy should be seen as a precursor to ‘Courtship’, and not simply because of its dedication to Singer – which runs, as King notes, to eleven pages (2002: 165) and which evolved into the later work’s long biographical sketch. It is possible Dunton wanted to publish his correspondence with Singer on platonic love in the Spy but refrained at her request. (In that case some of the material appearing in ‘Courtship’, along with the additional letters Dunton threatens there to publish, was meant for the earlier book.) Even if not, as I explain below, he includes more of her writing in the volume than he admits. He also playfully tests out the examples of Norris and Astell in the Spy. A character known by Dunton’s pen name of Philaret, asked by his correspondent Irene about possible ministers for their hoped-for platonic wedding, can think of only one man suitably ‘Spiritual’, ‘Intellectual’, and ‘Platonical’ for the task: Now I have it, there’s Mr. Norris you know, Rector of Bemerton near Salisbury, begotten betwixt the Brains of Plato and Malbranche . . . He’s certainly the fittest Fellow in the Universe for the purpose; besides, he has writ a Book entituled [sic] the Ideal World; which shall be our Family-Book, and into this World we must endeavour to transport our selves, and live as little as is possible in this sensual World, where the very Air would spoil all our Platonism. (Dunton 1704: 67–8) Whimsical as this sounds, the passage confirms that Dunton has Norris in mind when he claims in ‘Courtship’ that early in his relationship with Singer the two didn’t want a real-world marriage but longed ‘to celebrate our Platonick Wedding in the Ideal World’ (1710: 8). Astell turns up in the Spy on a descriptive list of eligible women in London. Defined by her invisibility, she can nevertheless be admired in textual form, especially through Norris’s epistolary mediation: ‘She never insinuates her merit (as is seen by her Letters to Mr. Norris) by any other means than the fine things she speaks or writes’ (Dunton 1704: *13).6 Similarly, Dunton’s dedication asks Singer to grace the head of the 1704 volume in his praise of her even if her modesty kept her from actively participating. Yet this prefatory tribute can sound as though it describes Astell instead: her disdain for enthusiasm (‘your Zeal has nothing of Frenzy and Passion’), say, or her love for God more than the world (‘You do not over-love the Creature, your greatest hopes are anchor’d in Eternity’) (sig. A5v). Dunton’s notion

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 92

17/11/17 5:00 PM

dunton and singer after the ATHENIAN MERCURY

93

that he and Singer could prove another Norris and Astell antedated ‘Courtship’, then, by several years at least. The idea may indeed be traced to the peak of their relationship, before platonic love sank to something else, and may derive from Singer herself. In her most meaningful letter printed in ‘Courtship’, the young writer tells Dunton that one of his missives has been discovered by her strict father (Dunton 1710: 40). Eventually he yielded to her pleas to keep up the friendship, she writes, on the condition that they cease discussing ‘the old Theam’ of platonic love: ‘tho’ we think ’tis a pure Friendship – the old Gentleman can’t digest such exalted Notions of it’ (41, italics reversed). To encourage Dunton, but also to state her final words on the old theme, she interjects a quatrain: Keep your Love true, I dare engage that mine Shall like my Soul, Immortal prove; In Friendship’s ORB how brightly shall we shine, Where all shall envy, none divide our Love. (41) The lines come from Norris’s dialogical poem ‘Damon and Pythias: Or, Friendship in Perfection’, published in his undervalued Collection of Miscellanies (1687). In a long reply, printed next in ‘Courtship’, Dunton takes his turn, adapting lines from the same Norris poem to say that if he dies first, he will be Singer’s ‘guardian Angel’ (willing to ‘leave Elysium to converse’ with her), will attend her at her death, and (when she becomes a fellow spirit) ‘will embrace my New-Born Friend’ and never let her go (44, italics reversed). ‘Damon and Pythias’ underwrites as well as conveys the hope that angelic affection will endure in the next life. While early issues of the Mercury attest that Dunton knew Norris’s work before he knew Singer, the striking coincidence, within the span of two or three months in 1694–5, between the beginning of his correspondence with her and the publication of Letters Concerning the Love of God seems to have sealed a connection for him between Norris’s authority and his platonic relationship with Singer. Nor is this surprising given that her letters brought him snatches of Norris’s verse. When recalling the sinking, however, Dunton looks to a different literary authority. In ‘Courtship’ he discusses how, granted an opportunity as a new widower and goaded by the ban on his beloved topic, he travelled to Agford and turned his ‘Platonick Address’ into the proposal that miscarried (1710: 26). To vindicate his all-too-human desire for Singer’s body, he invokes at several points ‘the immortal Cowley’ (18). Dunton had long associated Elizabeth Singer with Abraham Cowley. It was because of her fluency in ‘Platonick Love and Poetry’, he contends, that the Athenians first ‘call’d her The Pindarick Lady’ (5). If so, ‘Pindarick Lady’ was to Dunton more or less synonymous with ‘Platonick Lady’; and Cowley, reviver of the Pindaric ode and erstwhile proponent of platonic love, forged the link between the two. His poetic career could itself be taken for a sinking plot. Early poems exult in the idea that souls meet and mix when bodies are apart: ‘Absence it self does Bounteous prove’ (1905: 27). But later poems turn anti-platonic: ‘When Souls mix ’tis an Happiness; / But not compleat till Bodies too combine’ (75). Singer’s poem ‘Platonick Love’ opens with the words ‘So Angels Love’, announcing itself as a riposte to Cowley’s ‘Answer to the Platonicks’, which begins: ‘So Angels love; so let them love for me; / When I’am [sic] all soul, such shall my Love too be’ (80). Breaking from his earlier view, Cowley declares that the

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 93

17/11/17 5:00 PM

94

dustin d. stewart

body, for now, proves necessary for love. Dunton built this trajectory – from defending to questioning platonic love, from soul down to body – into his presentation of Singer’s first book, Poems on Several Occasions (1696). In organising the contents Dunton placed her ‘Platonick Love’ first in the collection. But afterward he inserted, as a companion poem, ‘Humane Love: By a Country Gentleman’, which he claimed was written by a friend and which quotes Cowley to countermand Singer: ‘So Angels love, So let them love for me; / As mortal, I must like a mortal be’ (Singer 1696: 3, first gathering). Cowley exemplified and endorsed the movement from spiritual love down to corporeal love, a movement Dunton had recapitulated in bringing Singer’s early poetry together for the public. When, in ‘Courtship’, he summons both ‘Answer to the Platonicks’ (1710: 18) and ‘Humane Love’ (14) to explain his personal failure to sustain the ideal, he relies on a pattern familiar from his bid to portray Singer as a new Cowley. What started as an act of literary promotion resurfaced as an attempt at self-justification. Telling the tale in 1710, Dunton probably cannot recognise that he recounts the relationship in terms that had held sway in his imagination since before his correspondence with Singer flourished in the mid-1690s. Yet the structure appeared in the Athenian Mercury’s earliest argument for platonic love in 1691, with its warning about the body coming for a share, and it took clearer shape the next year in a Gentleman’s Journal vignette, from which Dunton culled a poem to sing the ideal of spirits in love. He didn’t altogether ignore the prosaic reality of the surrounding narrative. He made its descent to the flesh, leading to the death of a relationship, the fulcrum of his autobiographical story about loving Elizabeth Singer. Descent from platonic heights had a poetic pedigree too in Cowley, whose anti-platonic movement Dunton imposed upon Singer’s first book. ‘The Double Courtship’ is, in short, a decidedly literary construction. The pattern into which Dunton fits events preceded the events themselves. Indeed, the pattern may have shaped the events. This is by no means to say that he fabricated the platonic relationship or his proposal or her rejection. There’s no denying that he fell for Singer. But neither can it be denied that on some perverse level he wanted the proposal to fail, if only so he could sell the story of it, a story he had already been spinning for quite some time. In life as in periodical art, the sinking of platonic love was one of Dunton’s favourite plots. He should have remembered, however, that Norris’s example pointed in a different direction.

Rising Rather than worry that attachment to another soul may slide to something dangerously carnal, Singer’s poem ‘Platonick Love’ falters over the thought that her soul should aspire to something higher. In this sense the poem, first printed in the nineteenth of the Mercury’s twenty volumes, revises the periodical’s long-running conversation. It begins in agreement that platonic love is angelic experience: So Angels Love and all the rest is dross, Contracted, selfish, sensitive and gross. Unlike to this, all free and unconfin’d Is that bright flame I bear thy brighter mind. (AM 19.17)

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 94

17/11/17 5:00 PM

dunton and singer after the ATHENIAN MERCURY

95

First the soul (‘bright flame’) disowns the body, then it merges with the love it feels, and finally it blends with the friend’s ‘mind’, a spiritual fusion of the sort typically dramatised in the writing of Lady Chudleigh (1993: 79, 343–52). At the beginning of the fourth line, an assertion about the soul (it is unbound) morphs into one about the soul’s inseparability from the addressee (its flame is actually your flame). One possible concern, familiar to the Mercury’s readership, is that this blending subtly represents or encourages sexual union. Anticipating the charge, Singer’s second stanza admonishes that ‘no stragling wish, or symptom of desire’ reaches her ‘holy fire’. The fourth, despite appearing to mark a conclusion, reacts to a different concern: Nor is the greatness of my Love to thee, A sacriledge unto the Deity, Can I th’ enticing stream almost adore, And not prefer its lovely fountain more? Here is the poem’s genuine question, expressed with the image of the platonic lover as a stream and God as its source. The poet means to say that her love for the one doesn’t hinder her greater love for the other. ‘Almost’ is the first crux, sowing doubt about what it means almost to adore something (and allowing almost to glide too easily, in one’s reading, into most). The problem intensifies with the final line’s ‘not’, a negation intended to accompany the prior line’s ‘Can’: can I not prefer? Yet its delayed placement has the effect of rendering the two loves potentially incompatible. By adoring the stream, she may unwittingly choose not to prefer the source. The early poem cannot overcome the position, in other words, of Mary Astell, who haunts Singer’s final stanza. One of Astell’s letters to Norris relies on the same distinction between source and stream: ‘He that has discovered the Fountain will not seek for troubled and failing Streams to quench his Thirst.’ Unflinching, Astell proceeds to say of the soul, ‘Whenever it moves towards the Creature it must necessarily forsake the Creator’ (1705: 134). On the unlikely chance that Singer had not read Letters Concerning the Love of God, her poem ends up on the same intellectual track nonetheless. It nearly affirms, in spite of itself and of John Dunton, that moving toward another soul counts as sinking, and it stretches toward Norris’s vision of angelic love and toward a climbing plot, in which the poet forsakes the stream for the ‘lovely fountain’. Now Dunton wasn’t altogether oblivious to the charm of this alternative. He hinted at it by rounding out Singer’s Poems on Several Occasions with ‘A Farewel to Love’, in which the speaker renounces Cupid and his ilk and promises, Diana-like, to ‘find out the Remotest Paths I can’ (1696: 67, second gathering). If at the outset of the book (seen from Dunton’s perspective) she serves platonic love, and in the middle she follows Cowley and explores embodiment and earthly love, then perhaps in that final poem she flies love’s disappointments and pursues a higher calling. A richer example comes from The Athenian Spy, where the momentous real-life exchange in which Singer silences Dunton on the old theme, the correspondence he excerpted in ‘The Double Courtship’, makes a veiled earlier appearance. It is in this back-and-forth that Singer and Dunton shared portions of Norris’s conversation poem ‘Damon and Pythias’. Characters in the Spy, as it happens, quote the same two selections. First, Philaret interpolates the lines that Singer had written to Dunton (1704: 33), with the

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 95

17/11/17 5:00 PM

96

dustin d. stewart

winking suggestion that Dunton – who often wrote to Singer under the pen name Philaret – was now sending the verses back to her in print. Second, in the next cache of letters, the character Fido appeals to his reluctant platonic lover Orinda (one of the names Dunton uses for Singer in ‘Courtship’), and he inserts the same lines from Norris that Dunton had quoted to Singer. In fact, the paragraph preceding the quoted poetry, other than altered pseudonyms, is identical in the Spy and in the personal letters printed in ‘Courtship’ (Dunton 1704: 85–6; Dunton 1710: 43–4). Fido wins Orinda over to the cause of platonic love. Along the way, however, he hesitates, and he voices his doubts about the danger of his feelings in language borrowed from another Singer poem, ‘To Mrs. Mary Friend’ (1704: 93). But no sooner does Dunton lead the reader to suspect a sinking plot than he diverges from this pattern. After Orinda agrees to become Fido’s platonic spouse in the ideal world ‘if Norris will Marry us’ (99), Fido abruptly cuts off the relationship. And Norris’s poem ‘Seraphic Love’, with its vision of angelic affection that escapes bodies and lower beauties,7 becomes his break-up song to Orinda: But now, thou soft Enchantress of the Mind, Farwel; a Change, a mighty Change I find; The Empire of my Heart thou must resign. (Dunton 1704: 101; cf. Norris 1687: 22–3) Norris helps Dunton’s Fido learn that he must become angelic in a different way: ‘A fairer Object now my Soul does move; / It must be all Devotion, what before was Love’ (1704: 101). After quoting from ‘Seraphic Love’ Fido returns to prose and names his source to explain his action: these are, he says, ‘the very words of the Seraphick Norris, by which you see, had we both kept in the same Mind, he’d never have join’d us in Platonick Matrimony’ (101). The point of registering Dunton’s use of his personal correspondence with Singer in the Spy isn’t merely that he was, as one frustrated interlocutor complained, ‘a man that prints every Thing’ (King 2015: 126). One early manuscript letter admits that he can scarcely understand what Norris means when he writes about platonic love (Bodleian Library, MS. Rawl. d.72, fol. 98). Even so, Dunton normally took Norris’s precedent to justify intense cross-gender friendship in general and his own relationship with Singer in particular. In this sequence, though, he betrays his awareness of a countervailing definition. To become an angel, according to Norris and ‘Seraphic Love’, is to break away from other human loves. Dunton, wishfully and self-servingly assuming the role of Fido, fictionalises parts of his exchange with Singer (left to play Orinda) and fancies that it was he who left her behind and followed Norris heavenward. Another way to put this point is to say that Dunton in the Spy briefly dons the authorial persona that Singer was already fashioning and later developed into a famous self-image (Stewart 2013). He had tried out the gimmick of presenting himself as penning communications from the spiritual realm before – in The Art of Living Incognito the idea of withdrawal from the world culminates in an ‘Essay upon His Own Funeral’ (Dunton 1700) – and he returned to it soon enough – his Christian’s Gazette: or, News Chiefly Respecting the Invisible World (1709) appeared promising broadcasts from heaven. Although this novelty didn’t last for Dunton (no further news broke from heaven), the vision took hold for the woman who became Elizabeth Rowe.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 96

17/11/17 5:00 PM

dunton and singer after the ATHENIAN MERCURY

97

For her, as for Dunton’s Fido, Norris’s writing eventually demanded a reconsideration of platonic love. If Astell’s letters vex Singer’s unstable defence in ‘Platonick Love’, Norris’s earlier poem ‘Seraphic Love’ attacks that defence more directly. Where Singer begins by claiming that love for another soul is no sacrilege, Norris’s poem says of an analogous scenario that it is nothing else: Credulous and Silly I, With vain, with impious Idolatry, Ador’d that Star which was to lead me to the Deity. (1687: 23) The beauty of another person became its own end rather than a rung on the ladder to God, but now Norris concludes that ‘there is but One that’s Good, there is but One that’s Fair’ (23). For the sake of that one beauty he must soar past all others. Inserted into the narrative of her life, this poem became a climbing plot that Singer Rowe chose to tell herself about her break from Dunton and from her Athenian Mercury moment. Her commitment to this version of her autobiography comes out in the disdain she expressed later in life for the poems written in her Dunton years, which she demeaned as ‘trifles’, for example, when Edmund Curll in 1736 brought out an unauthorised edition (Singer Rowe 1739: 2.177). It comes out in her efforts to keep most of her early printed poetry out of print and off the record (King 2002), particularly away from the text that became her posthumous Miscellaneous Works. And it comes out in the changes she made to a few poems that did survive from the Mercury years. One such poem began its life in print as ‘Canticles 7.11’, first published in the Mercury on 7 January 1696 (AM 19.21). This biblical paraphrase closely follows another model provided by John Norris in his love poem ‘The Invitation’. With an epigraph from Canticles 7.11 – Norris renders the verse this way: ‘Come my Beloved let us go forth into the Field, let us lodge in the Villages’ (1687: 39) – he explores the joys of romantic passion. His effort begins, ‘Come thou divinest object of my love’ (1687: 39). Perhaps already alert to the danger of sacrilege, even with the sanction provided by the Song of Songs, Singer’s first version substitutes ‘most charming’ for ‘divinest’ (AM 19.21). In the rest of her poem, however, Singer easily outdoes Norris for erotic intensity. Her closing couplet, deploying the image familiar from ‘Platonick Love’, depicts her spirit and her beloved’s as flames burning and intermingling: ‘With how much heat shall I carress thee there, / And in sweet transports give up all my love.’ But in the modified version of the poem published after her death, in Miscellaneous Works, the poet addresses God instead of a fellow spirit, and she speaks from a position of devout seclusion: My pure desires, and holy vows, Shall centre all in thee; While ev’ry hour to sacred love Shall consecrated be. (1739: 1.44) Here and in her own rapt poem titled ‘Seraphic Love’ (1.56), the way of the mature devotional poet is the way of the mature Norris, channelling erotic and ecstatic energies toward God. Perhaps ‘centre’ in this stanza specifically echoes Norris’s argument that the heroically pious must love God alone and must ‘concenter our whole affections

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 97

17/11/17 5:00 PM

98

dustin d. stewart

upon him’ (1687: 288). Or perhaps it hearkens to Mary Astell, who wrote to Norris: ‘Love being the same to the Soul that Motion is to Bodies, as Bodies cannot have two Centers, or different Terms of Motion, so neither can the Soul have a twofold desire. We may as reasonably expect that a Stone should go up Hill and down Hill at the same time, as that the Soul should at once love GOD and any thing besides him’ (1705: 133). Either way, the final version of the poem that started as ‘Canticles 7.11’ appears to announce the triumph of one conception of platonic love over another. Not only does it celebrate the poet’s unmediated access to the divine. It also seems to exult in the poet’s freedom from a model of collaborative authorship that for a time made her dependent on the souls of men like John Dunton. Yet this indication of a clean break remains too tidy. To the extent that Singer distanced herself from Dunton, she moved both toward God and toward other people, especially her younger friend Frances Thynne, eventual Countess of Hertford. It is not too much to propose that the intense spiritual relationship Dunton liked to believe he once had with Singer – spoiled as he thought by his desire for her body – Singer ended up sharing with Lady Hertford. In the mid-1690s Dunton and Singer picked choice passages from Norris’s ‘Damon and Pythias’ to promise each other that their souls would keep corresponding after death. Not too terribly long after that, and certainly within recent memory of The Christian’s Gazette and Dunton’s promise of news from heaven, Singer Rowe was writing playfully to Hertford to declare that she was already dead and that her letters should be read as bringing news ‘from the immaterial world’ (1739: 2.68). Later, this self-proclaimed spirit-writer told Hertford that her death drew near: ‘then, tho’ I have no intention to haunt you as a ghost, I shall certainly make you some friendly, tho’ invisible, visits, and wait to make my compliments at your first entrance on the celestial coasts’ (2.172–3). It was the dream, once again, of Norris’s ‘Damon and Pythias’: she will be present to welcome her beloved friend into the afterlife. Singer and Dunton had claimed this promise together, but by now it was powerfully and perhaps singularly associated with her individual literary legacy, monumentalised in the massively popular fictions Friendship in Death: In Twenty Letters from the Dead to the Living (1728) and Letters Moral and Entertaining (1733–4), which ends with a modified rising plot of its own. The final exchange of letters in this three-volume work describes how an initially amatory affair turns platonic when a woman’s lover dies and then he returns as a benevolent spirit, tutoring her about higher loves and ‘superior Objects’ for her affection (Singer Rowe 1733–4: 3.129). During the years of her mature friendship with Lady Hertford, the author found a third way for platonic love, that is, a way that combined the two others. Instead of accepting the terms of a choice between another soul and God, she decided that some souls could guide one to God. The insight itself wasn’t new, of course, but the application of it to forge a career as a woman writer was. In devising a third plot of platonic love, Singer Rowe became both an Astell and a Norris: a model for later readers and readers, men alongside women, who thought that in following her they could climb to heaven. She also extended Dunton’s discovery, in the discourse surrounding platonic love, of a formula for narrative momentum. In the Athenian Spy and in ‘The Double Courtship’ he returns to a strategy he applied to a Gentleman’s Journal story from the beginning of the previous decade. If a poem can be extracted from its narrative

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 98

17/11/17 5:00 PM

dunton and singer after the ATHENIAN MERCURY

99

context to sing the ideal of platonic love, it can also be inserted into different narrative frames, usually into exchanges of letters between men and women, to generate new realistic plots. On this point, too, Singer Rowe did not so much break away from Dunton as adapt and refine his rough innovations to her own more durable ends. Her career began with her bold attempt to place some verse amid the Athenian Mercury’s questions and answers. To Dunton at the time she was an invisible reader of the periodical, so far removed from London society she may as well have been writing from the immaterial world. What made her gamble pay off was his gushing response. The periodical pioneer took the verse from her letters and resituated it in the public, though still epistolary, space of the Mercury, and soon enough she became a dominant presence in its pages, famous though still unknown. Later he reprinted some of the same poems in other projects, hiding his addresses to her in plain sight but also hoping to return to the intimacy of manuscript. She had other intimacies to pursue now, other correspondents to write to, and she recognised that souls can sometimes circulate more freely when detached from bodies that stay unseen. But she never broke away from the Mercury’s insistence that print offers a space for angelic spirits to interact. In fact, she turned her early perspective as an invisible reader of that periodical into a durable authorial identity: a spirit-reader and a spirit-writer. She went on to take that role as far as it could possibly go in the eighteenth century, in genres (from poetry to serial fiction) she saw practised in early periodicals, within their loosely epistolary framework. If Dunton spent the first decade of the eighteenth century trying to recapture the magic of a lost relationship and capitalising on the reputation he helped her to make, Singer Rowe spent the decades to follow returning the favour, reclaiming for her own innovations and for her higher loves, human as well as divine, the plots he had spun from her poems.

Notes 1. Following the precedents of Shevelow (1989) and Berry (2003), I cite the Athenian Mercury (hereafter AM) by volume and issue number. This method allows me to account for the many undated issues that Dunton, from the first through the seventh volume, used to supplement previously released numbers and to ensure that they would be purchased as a complete set. Access to these undated numbers is a practical concern nowadays: several electronic databases silently exclude them from the Mercury’s run. 2. The title page is dated 1695, but as Jacqueline Broad has observed (2015), the Term Catalogues show that the book appeared late in the previous year. I cite from the second edition of 1705. 3. Others shared this vision. Manushag Powell takes the example of Thomas Berington’s News from the Dead (1715–16) to show that ‘a periodicalist is always already deceased, or at least not quite at home among the living’ (2012: 202). 4. Dunton deploys Astell’s phrase with less licence in ‘The Double Courtship’: ‘Corporal Love’s an insinuating Passion’ (1710: 16). 5. Compare, in The Platonick Lovers (1636), William Davenant’s ‘guiltless Stars, who seem’d / To smile, and winke upon each other’ (Davenant 1665: 115). 6. The asterisk adjacent to the page number appears in the original. 7. For one attempt to save Astell from this poem’s vision and from Norris’s religious outlook, see Johns 2003: 32–5.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 99

17/11/17 5:00 PM

100

dustin d. stewart

Works Cited [Astell, Mary], and John Norris. 1705. Letters Concerning the Love of God. London: for Manship. Backscheider, Paula R. 2011. ‘Elizabeth Singer Rowe: Lifestyle as Legacy’. New Contexts for Eighteenth-Century British Fiction. Ed. Christopher D. Johnson. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press. 41–65. Berry, Helen. 2003. Gender, Society and Print Culture in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural World of the Athenian Mercury. Aldershot: Ashgate. Broad, Jacqueline. 2015. The Philosophy of Mary Astell: An Early Modern Theory of Virtue. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chudleigh, Lady Mary. The Poems and Prose of Mary, Lady Chudleigh. 1993. Ed. Margaret J. M. Ezell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clery, E. J. 2004. The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cowley, Abraham. 1905. Poems. Ed. A. R. Waller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davenant, William. 1665. Two Excellent Plays. London: for Bedel and Collins. Dunton, John. 1700. The Art of Living Incognito. London: for Dunton. —. 1704. The Athenian Spy. London: for Halsey. —. 1705. The Life and Errors of John Dunton Late Citizen of London. London: for Malthus. —. 1710. ‘The Double Courtship’. Athenianism. London: for Morphew. 1–61. —, ed. 1690–7. The Athenian Mercury. London. Ezell, Margaret J. M. 1992. ‘The Gentleman’s Journal and the Commercialization of Restoration Coterie Literary Practices’. Modern Philology 89: 323–40. The Gentleman’s Journal, or the Monthly Miscellany. 1692–4. London. The Gentleman’s Magazine. 1731–1922 (1st ser. 1731–1833; ser. 2–4 1834–68). London. Johns, Alessa. 2003. Women’s Utopias of the Eighteenth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. King, Kathryn R. 2002. ‘Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s Tactical Use of Print and Manuscript’. Women’s Writing and the Circulation of ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800. Ed. George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 158–80. King, Rachel Scarborough. 2015. ‘“Interloping with my Question-Project”: Debating Genre in John Dunton’s and Daniel Defoe’s Epistolary Periodicals’. Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 44: 121–42. Norris, John. 1687. A Collection of Miscellanies. Oxford: for Crosley. Powell, Manushag N. 2012. Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Shevelow, Kathryn. 1989. Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical. London: Routledge. [Singer, Elizabeth]. 1696. Poems on Several Occasions. Written by Philomela. London: for Dunton. [Singer Rowe, Elizabeth]. 1733–4. Friendship in Death: In Twenty Letters from the Dead to the Living. To Which Are Added, Letters Moral and Entertaining. 4 vols. London: for Worrall. Singer Rowe, Elizabeth. 1739. Miscellaneous Works in Prose and Verse. 2 vols. London: for Hett and Dodsley. Stewart, Dustin D. 2013. ‘Elizabeth Rowe, John Milton and Poetic Change’. Women’s Writing 20: 13–31. Taylor, E. Derek. 2009. Reason and Religion in Clarissa: Samuel Richardson and ‘The Famous Mr. Norris, of Bemerton’. Farnham: Ashgate.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 100

17/11/17 5:00 PM

6 Women’s Poetry in the Magazines Jennifer Batt

W

hen, in 1731, Edward Cave established the first periodical miscellany that would call itself a magazine, he quickly came to realise that poetry would form a key element of his publication’s appeal. Playing host to a range of verses – from essays to epigrams, songs to satirical sketches – by a miscellany of authors, the ‘Poetical Essays’ section became a regular feature of Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1922). As ever more magazines were set up as the century progressed, competitor after competitor echoed the format that Cave had developed; with so many titles following his example and devoting several pages of each issue to verse, by the middle of the century hundreds of poems were appearing in magazines every year. A small but significant proportion of that verse was penned by female authors, some of whom – including Anne Ingram, Viscountess Irwin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Jones, and Mary Leapor – have since become established figures in the canon of eighteenth-century poetry; and some of whom – including those whose identities remain shrouded behind pseudonyms such as Clarinda, Fidelia, Pastora, or Aishmella – have been seldom read, and even seldomer discussed, in the years since their work first appeared in magazines. This chapter sets out to offer an account of the place that female poets, both familiar and unfamiliar, occupied in the rich poetic culture that magazines made possible. Surveys of magazine verse, such as those by scholars including Calvin Yost (1936), Anthony Barker (1996), Titia Ram (1999), and Jacob Sider Jost (2015), have tended to focus narrowly upon a single publication, Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine. Yet important though Cave’s magazine was in establishing the magazine format, as the eighteenth century wore on it became just one of many titles in an increasingly crowded marketplace. While this chapter draws a number of its examples from the Gentleman’s Magazine, then, it also casts its net wider, drawing on that publication’s long-standing rival, the London Magazine (1732–85); on short-lived publications, such as the British Magazine (1746–51); and on regional publications such as the Newcastle General Magazine (1747–60) and the Scots Magazine (1739–1826). So much verse was published in magazines that this chapter does not pretend to offer a comprehensive survey of it all; rather, it offers a set of case studies from the 1730s, 1740s, and 1750s that reveal some of the complex ways that female poets interacted with magazines, and vice versa. These case studies shed light on some of the possibilities that magazines made available to female poets, such as the opportunity of having one’s voice (and one’s arguments) heard; of reaching a wide readership; of developing a public profile as a poet; and of participating in a poetic community. But these examples also demonstrate some of the ways that magazines could exploit female poets, by publishing their work without their knowledge or consent; impose restrictions upon them by framing their verse in ways that were limiting or problematic; or – because of the ephemerality of

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 101

17/11/17 5:00 PM

102

jennifer batt

the form – lead to even important pieces of verse being quickly forgotten. The case studies offered in this chapter reveal the vital role that magazines could play in making female poets, and their work, highly visible; they also reveal, however, how effective magazines were at disguising, or making invisible, that very same thing. Among the miscellany of competing viewpoints to which the poetry pages of magazines played host were a number of strident, female-authored, proto-feminist or feminist poetic essays which forcefully took issue with the ways that male authors had written about women. One such piece has, in recent years, come to increasing scholarly attention: Anne Ingram, Viscountess Irwin’s rebuttal of Alexander Pope’s Of the Characters of Women: An Epistle to a Lady. Pope’s poem had been published as a folio pamphlet in February 1735 before being included in the second volume of his Works later in the same year. Provoked by his scathing character sketches of vapid and changeable women, Ingram composed a response that contended that if women were, as Pope alleged, ‘Triflers’ more concerned with ‘Dress’ and ‘Beauty’ than with intellectual pursuits, it was because they had been ‘by Custom doom’d to Folly, Sloth and Ease’.1 Ingram proposed that the key factor in shaping women’s behaviour was the education they had – or more significantly, had not – received: ‘Unus’d to Books, nor Vertue taught to prize’, a woman’s ‘Mind’ became, all too frequently, ‘a savage Waste’, a ‘Void’ which ‘Trifles’ would inevitably ‘fill up’. ‘Misled by Custom’, ‘Strangers to Reason’, and with ‘their Morals left . . . to Chance’, how could more be expected of women? How could they ‘more Vertue show, / Or tempting Vice, treat like a common Foe?’ How could they ‘resist, when soothing pleasure wooes?’ And how could they ‘on other Themes converse or write, / Than what they hear all Day, and dream all Night?’ This forceful riposte probably had some circulation in manuscript before it was copied, on 16 December 1736, into the weekly newspaper The Old Whig, or Consistent Protestant as ‘An Epistle to Mr. Pope. By a Lady. Occasioned by his Characters of Women.’ Whether the decision to withhold the author’s identity was Ingram’s choice, or that of the poem’s copyist or the newspaper’s editor, the title under which her epistle was printed flipped that of Pope’s on its head, insistently positioning her response as the moment in which the subject of his poem spoke out against him. Shortly after its appearance in the newspaper, ‘An Epistle to Mr. Pope. By a Lady’ was copied into the Gentleman’s Magazine (6 (Dec 1736): 745) and the London Magazine (6 (Jan 1737): 47–8). It is unclear whether the publication of her poem in the newspaper – and its subsequent republication in the magazines – took place with Ingram’s knowledge or consent, but the effect was dramatic: publication in these periodicals transformed a poem that had previously had a limited manuscript circulation into a work that reached a vastly expanded potential readership. This audience would have been even larger than that which Pope’s Epistle to a Lady had reached, at least in the early years after that work’s publication: in the 1730s there would have been no more than a few thousand copies of Pope’s poem in circulation (Foxon 1991: 117–31), at a time when the proprietors of the Gentleman’s Magazine boasted sales of c. 10,000 copies per month, and the London Magazine had a regular monthly print run of 7,000 copies (McKenzie and Ross, 1968: 11–12). Ingram’s poem would go on to be reproduced in magazines at intervals throughout the century: a version appeared in London Magazine in October 1759 (28: 550–1), from whence it was also copied, the following month, into the regionally produced Newcastle General Magazine (580–1); and a different variant was printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine in August 1771 (41: 371–2) before being copied into the Universal Magazine (49: 98–9) and Scots Magazine

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 102

17/11/17 5:00 PM

women’s poetry in the magazines

103

(33: 431–2) of the same month. Publication in these magazines’ poetry sections was certainly not as prestigious as publication in a folio pamphlet or in a volume of the author’s collected Works but it did mean that Ingram’s arguments, which pushed back so forcefully against the propositions of her prominent male opponent, were brought within reach of a large, socially diverse, nationwide audience. Yet while magazines could be a space in which a female voice might be heard to speak out against her male peers, they were also a medium that facilitated the forgetting of those moments of opposition. For all that magazine proprietors encouraged their readers to view the magazine as an enduring record of the year’s events by printing title pages, prefaces, and indexes that could be bound together with a year’s worth of monthly issues, magazines were, fundamentally, topical and ephemeral publications. So many poems were published in magazines, month by month, that any single poem – however well-written and however provocative its arguments – could soon slip from memory, particularly when, lacking attribution or with authorship indicated only though generic epithets like ‘a Lady’, there was nothing to demand that a reader remember it. Hidden amongst the thousands of other poems that were published in magazines, and appearing in just a handful of scattered and minor miscellanies, ‘An Epistle to Mr. Pope. By a Lady’ largely disappeared from view until its recent rediscovery and subsequent anthology-driven reintegration into the canon of eighteenth-century poetry.2 It seems unlikely that Ingram had planned to use magazines as a medium to host her strident counterblast to misogynist polemic, but other female writers set out with precisely that aim. In late 1747, the pseudonymous (and as yet still unidentified) Clarinda submitted a short seasonal piece, ‘Christmas Morn’, for inclusion in the British Magazine. Yet, when she came to read her contribution in the issue for December 1747 (2: 558) she was dismayed by the company her poem had been forced to keep. Her piece appeared just a page or two after a lengthy extract from A Panegyrick on the Fair Sex (2: 555–7), an anonymous poem that had initially been published as a pamphlet in June 1747.3 Despite its title, A Panegyrick slandered ‘the Fair Sex’ as intemperate, vain, shallow, stupid, chattering, deceitful hypocrites; it illustrated its case with character sketches of various women, including an account of one Clarinda who ‘ne’er was silent for a minute, / Tho’ all she says has nothing in it’ (2: 556). The author of A Panegyrick probably did not have the pseudonymous poet Clarinda in mind when he crafted his portrait of a woman of that name but, when they reproduced his poem in their poetry section, the editors of the British Magazine – wilfully or accidentally – imposed an implicit connection between the poem’s sketch of Clarinda and the contributor who went by the same name. To find her poem following so closely on the heels of a piece which urged ‘dear Clarinda’ to ‘hold thy tongue’ (since ‘you’re always talking, always wrong’) (2: 556) might have felt to the pseudonymous female poet like a deliberate attempt to silence her; whether she was motivated by personal grievance or by a more general outrage at the misogyny A Panegyrick advanced, she was quick to react to what she had read. Making use of the possibilities the magazine form offered for prompt dialogue and swift rebuttal, she composed a reply and submitted it to the magazine editors within a month or so; her address ‘To the Author of a Poem, intitled a Panegyric upon the Fair Sex’ appeared in the February 1748 issue (3: 81–2). Just as Anne Ingram had done in her reply to Pope’s Epistle to a Lady, so too did Clarinda insist that the faults that the author of A Panegyrick identified in ‘womankind’ (3: 81) were caused not by their lack of raw potential but by the limits that had been placed upon them by custom. Ingram had argued that the only ‘Diff’rence’

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 103

17/11/17 5:00 PM

104

jennifer batt

between men and women ‘in Education . . . lies’ (Old Whig, 16 December 1736), and Clarinda – who may, perhaps, have read Ingram’s poem in a magazine or elsewhere – made the same observation, proposing that The man who with a son is blest, Sends him to school, ten years at least; But, if a daughter he shou’d rear, Perhaps he sends her – half a year! A time a boy wou’d scarcely know His alphabet as far as – O: If six months don’t compleat the daughter, She’s call’d a Dunce for ever after. (3: 82) Mirroring the satiric tetrameter couplets that the anonymous author of A Panegyrick had used, Clarinda charged him with the ‘weakness of [his] brains’; her point was made all the more scathing because, she implied, he was ‘void of thought’ even despite the educational advantages that he had, as a man, enjoyed. For those readers who wanted to judge her analysis of his talents for themselves, the title under which her poem was printed directed them back, by issue and page number, to the very piece that had provoked such a retaliation. While many of the exchanges that magazines hosted were, like this, a fleeting matter of provocation and response, occasionally magazines played host to exchanges that were prolonged and multidirectional. One such extended exchange began in 1734, when a pseudonymous poet from Lincoln who signed her verse ‘Fidelia’ put herself forward, over the course of a series of poems submitted to the Gentleman’s Magazine, as a potential wife and ‘help-meet’ to Jonathan Swift (4 (Sep 1734): 508; 4 (Nov 1734): 619). Yet in declaring ‘I love the Dean with the utmost affection’ (4 (Nov 1734): 619), Fidelia had to negotiate a position for herself in relation to the currents of misogyny that lurked throughout Swift’s verse. One example of that misogyny was ‘The Furniture of a Woman’s Mind’, a poem characterising women as frivolous, empty-headed, and excessively talkative that would appear in the February 1735 issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine (5: 99). Where Anne Ingram and Clarinda might have reacted to Swift’s attack by offering a critique of the ‘Custom’ that enforced stupidity upon women, Fidelia took a different approach. In a poem that was printed in the March 1735 issue of the magazine, she refused to renounce her affection for the Dean. Protesting that ‘I love him so – and ever shall’, she explained: And as to what he wrote not long since, Of female minds, upon my conscience, To think it general – would be nonsense. ’Tis like he meant some certain dame, Who falsely had aspers’d his fame, And he to be revenged on her, Writes thus at large her character: I vow I’m not offended by it, Let she it represents apply it. (5: 159)

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 104

17/11/17 5:00 PM

women’s poetry in the magazines

105

As Fidelia excused Swift by insisting that he had not composed an attack on the sex at large but rather a satire targeted at the reformation of a specific individual, readers who might have missed his poem were directed by a helpful annotation back to the page of the magazine’s previous issue where they could read his words for themselves. Instructing these readers in how to read his poem, Fidelia insisted that Swift’s aim as a satirist was not to ‘to ridicule the fair’, but rather ‘he wrote for some good end, / As a weak sister’s fault to mend’. And yet despite this defence of his methods, Fidelia concluded her poem by announcing that she would now forsake her pursuit of Swift’s affections: ‘Since I can’t obtain his favour, / Quite to forget him I’ll endeavour’ (5: 159). Her decision to move on was, it seems, a strategic one, for if her attempt to win the affections of Swift had not worked, she had instead won the admiration of many others. The March issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine contained poems about or addressed to Fidelia by Ignis Fatuus, Bardulus, and Sylvius, and offered apologies to Philander and R. L. of Lincoln for not including their pieces which had tended ‘to the same end’ (5: 155, 157). As Jane Brereton – under her pseudonym of Melissa (styled in this instance ‘M-a’) – would observe in the April issue, Fidelia had attracted ‘a retinue of poets, / From the highest class, quite down to the low wits; / From Apollo’s true sons, to his vain implorers, / [who] Most humbly profess themselves [her] adorers’ (5: 215). In the subsequent months, the magazine’s poetry section supported the development of a coterie that came together virtually as dozens of poems, the tone of which frequently pitched somewhere between flirting and flyting, were exchanged in print. At the centre of this poetic community were Fidelia, Melissa, Fido (Thomas Beach – unbeknownst to Jane Brereton, a real-life neighbour of hers), and Sylvius (John Duick), but others, including Eliza (Elizabeth Carter), Astrophil (Moses Browne), and the as-yetunidentified Lucius, Pastora, and Prudence Manage also contributed.4 As this frenetic exchange came to dominate the magazine’s poetry section throughout much of 1735, some contributors worried that it might become tedious to readers who were not a part of the coterie: as Fido remarked in an (unsuccessful) attempt to put an end to the poetic toing and froing in September: ‘We’ve plagu’d Cave’s readers long enough, / Till Mag. has groan’d with loads of stuff’ (5: 555). As well as plaguing readers, the coterie exchange may also have alienated some of the magazine’s would-be contributors; one such author, Bardus, wrote to the magazine’s proprietor to complain that those who participated in this exchange of verse were getting preferential treatment. Their submissions were jumping the queue for inclusion when non-coterie works were forced to wait: Our strains you neglect sometimes a whole year, Yet others as soon as transmitted appear; As Pastora, Fidelia, Melissa, and Fido, Who ne’er take such pains as my Comrades and I do. (5: iii)5 Well-executed verse was being omitted, Bardus argued, in favour of verse that was of a lesser quality but which continued the prolonged poetic dispute. ‘’Twere excusable sometimes to give ’em a column, / But it’s out of all reason to scold thro’ a volume’ he complained (5: iii), insisting that were Cave to persist in this vein, his pool of unpaid poetic contributors would shrink, and the quality of his poetry section would consequently suffer.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 105

17/11/17 5:00 PM

106

jennifer batt

Though the coterie exchange to which Bardus objected was fostered by male poets as much as it was by female writers, it is notable that in his complaint it was Fidelia, Melissa, and Pastora who bore the brunt of his attack. The right of women to write was a prevailing theme of these coterie exchanges, and there were strident opinions on both sides. Fido became particularly outspoken: in one poem he turned on both Fidelia and Melissa, declaring that the very act of picking up a pen was unfeminine behaviour. Addressing Melissa, he insisted that I neither burn for Fid, nor you. The easy vein in which she writes, And your more learn’d, judicious flights, May charm yourselves and please your friends, But wives shou’d answer other ends. (5 (Sep 1735): 555) Fido’s insistence that he only valued Fidelia and Melissa in as much as they were able to perform wifely duties provoked responses in retaliation, including that of the pseudonymous Pastora. Pastora did what Ingram and Clarinda would also do in response to other provocative texts: she mounted a general defence of the female sex. She addressed Fido directly: ’Gainst the whole sex, you open war declare, And subtly urge, that we have no pretence To raise our faculties and aim at sense; Gravely affirm, that all we ought to do, Is to inspect a family – and sew. Content in ignorance to drag our chain, And blindly serve our haughty tyrant man, Who vainly swell’d with his imperious rule, Thinks nature destin’d woman a – tame fool; A meer machine, devoid of reason’s guide, And like the brutes design’d to sooth his pride. (5 (Nov 1735): 675) Fido did not, however, take such a rebuttal with good grace. Mockingly imagining Pastora as ‘sound[ing] the charge – with drumming’ at the head of an army, he conceded defeat, but not because of the quality of her arguments: ‘I yield! I yield! to overmatches, / And dread no wounds like female – scratches’ (676). Pastora, for her part, refused to back down in the face of Fido’s continued ridicule. She turned her attention to female writers instead in one of the final coterie pieces that the magazine published; addressing Fidelia, she encouraged her to join with her and other female poets in an alliance against men such as Fido (5 (Dec 1735): 727). Though not all commentary on female poets that appeared in magazines was as provocatively scathing as that which Fido composed, even verse that celebrated female writers tended to frame their writing in particular, limiting ways because of their gender. Occasionally female poets might be hailed in magazine verse for their intellect, as Elizabeth Carter was in an epigram that referred to her as ‘learn’d Eliza’ (Gentleman’s Magazine 8 (Aug 1738): 429), or their abilities might be figured in a quasi-androgynous way, as those of Mary Jones were in a poem which declared that her verse revealed the

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 106

17/11/17 5:00 PM

women’s poetry in the magazines

107

‘touches of a master hand’ (Gentleman’s Magazine 19 (Feb 1749): 87). More often than not, however, the primary means of praising a female poet was to insist upon her attractiveness to men. In many poems in this vein a female poet was, typically, a young, bright, fair, graceful nymph or maid: Fidelia, for example, was a ‘young maiden’ and ‘nymph’ (Gentleman’s Magazine 5 (Mar 1735): 155); Elizabeth Carter was a ‘bright’ and ‘lovely maid’ (Gentleman’s Magazine 8 (Aug 1738): 429); Aishmella, a regular contributor of verse (including compositions in Latin and translations from Greek) to the British Magazine, was a ‘fair, of sense refin’d, / In whom each grace and virtue is combin’d’ (British Magazine 4 (Sep 1749): 388); and Mary Jones was a ‘fair maid’ and ‘bright nymph’ whose verse possessed a ‘resistless charm, and nameless grace’ (Gentleman’s Magazine 19 (Feb 1749): 87; 20 (Dec 1751): 567). An admirer and would-be lover informed Aishmella that her verse his ‘enraptur’d breast excite[d]’ (British Magazine 4 (Sep 1749): 388), while another told Charlotte Lennox that her beauty and poetic ability combined in such a way as to be irresistible: ‘Your verse creates, your form can fix desire, / Wishing we read, and gazing we admire’ (Gentleman’s Magazine 20 (Nov 1750): 518). One admirer of Mary Jones – who signed his or her work under the female pseudonym Laetitia Meanwell – praised her for the ‘winning ease’ with which she ‘sway[ed] the heart’, while a second remarked upon the way her ‘enchanting’ ‘song’ ‘draws the rapt swains insensibly along’ (Gentleman’s Magazine 19 (Feb 1749): 87; 20 (Dec 1751): 567). Even those celebratory poems which recognised poetic merit by awarding female writers the laurel inevitably and insidiously slid from celebrating ability to focusing upon the poet’s appearance: the laurel was thus awarded to both Elizabeth Carter and Mary Jones ‘to adorn’ their respective ‘brow[s]’ (Gentleman’s Magazine 8 (Aug 1738): 429; 20 (Dec 1751): 568). Yet since this focus on these women’s sexual allure brought with it potential accusations of immodest behaviour, even as this verse speculated on female poets’ attractiveness, it also tended to insist upon their chastity. Fidelia was thus declared to be a ‘chaste auth’ress’ (Gentleman’s Magazine 5 (Mar 1735): 155), and while ‘Love’ was ‘the inchanting subject of’ Charlotte Lennox’s ‘song’, she – and the passion she described – was yet ‘Tender as chaste, and innocent as strong’ (Gentleman’s Magazine 20 (Nov 1750): 518)..Where, in several poems, comparisons on grounds of poetic ‘genius’ were made between female poets and Sappho, Sappho’s ‘wanton’ reputation meant that special care had to be taken to insist upon the contemporary poets’ virtue: consequently, Lennox’s verse was declared to be ‘purer’, and Jones’ ‘more pure’ than that of their notorious predecessor (Gentleman’s Magazine 20 (Nov 1750): 518; 20 (Dec 1751): 567–8). Some of this interest in the female poet’s sexuality was figured as enquiries into their marital status that teetered on the verge of becoming marriage proposals: Aishmella was asked to reveal ‘if yet remain unpaid thy marriage vows’ (British Magazine 4 (Sep 1749): 388), while Fidelia’s husband was considered to possess all the luck: ‘Happy swain! whoe’er he be / Leagu’d in friendship, nymph, with thee, / Blest the hymeneal band! / Where Fidelia gives her hand’ (Gentleman’s Magazine 5 (Mar 1735): 155). While such references to marriage were, perhaps, an attempt to bring these poems’ literary flirtation within the bounds of respectability, ultimately what they implied, as Fido had aggressively suggested, was that whatever talents a woman displayed on a public stage, her only real worth was as a wife. There were other ways, too, in which a magazine might attempt to shape – and limit – the ways in which a female poet’s work might be received. In June 1749 the

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 107

17/11/17 5:00 PM

108

jennifer batt

London Magazine printed ‘Verses on Self-Murder, address’d to – by a Lady’, a poem in which the speaker had despairingly asked, ‘Why should I drag along this life I hate . . . / Why this mysterious being force t’ exist, / When every joy is lost, and every hope dismist?’ (18 (June 1749): 284) The editors followed this articulation of suicidal despair with a note that distanced them from the propositions the poem advanced: As it is to be suppos’d that we often differ from the sentiments of our correspondents, and sometimes disapprove them; so here we think this lady has suggested very immoral and pernicious advice; that she has not duly weighed that inimitable soliloquy of Hamlet, To be or not to be, – nor the many excellent Tracts that have been publish’d against Self-Murder; and, what is worse, seems to have forgot her Maker and her Christianity. (18: 284) By reproving the author for the arguments she had advanced, the editors were able to print the hitherto unpublished poem and at the same time position themselves as arbiters of morality. Attempting to guide their readers into dismissing her arguments, the magazine editors insisted that this account of despair suffered from its author’s failure to read and properly digest the key texts that have been written on her subject. Yet in their desire to decry the author’s immoral verse, the magazine editor’s denunciation of her failure of careful reading and rational thought was, perhaps, not strictly accurate: despite their assertion, as Shirley Tung has argued, the poem’s propositions can be seen to have much in common with Hamlet’s own (2014: 116). In addition to attacking the female author’s moral character and intellectual capacity, the editors of the London Magazine shaped how readers would respond to ‘Verses on Self-Murder’ in another very specific way: they drew conspicuous attention to the poet’s gender, even as they deliberately withheld her identity. In the middle of the eighteenth century well over half of the poems that appeared in the London Magazine did so without an attribution of any kind, and yet, though this poem could have been reproduced anonymously, the editors chose to identify its author as ‘a lady’, perhaps considering that this information imparted an important extra frisson to its transgressive sentiments. Having identified the author as a woman, though, the editors then chose not to name her, despite it being very likely that they were well aware that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had written the poem. On the same page that ‘Verses on Self-Murder’ was printed, the editors also included a second poem by Montagu, ‘A Ballad To The Tune of The Irish Howl’. The authorship of this lyric exploration of thwarted desire was unambiguously signalled with the attribution ‘By Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’ (18 (June 1749): 284). The appearance of two poems by Montagu in such close proximity to each other suggests that the magazine editors had reliable access to a manuscript or manuscripts containing her verse. And yet, though they deemed it acceptable to identify Montagu as the author of a ballad about sexual longing, they considered it to be beyond the pale to identify her as the author of lines on suicide. What lay behind such a decision was, perhaps, an assessment of the potential harm that an association with such a poem might do to Montagu’s reputation. In a poem published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1737 Catherine Cockburn had explained one of the problems facing women who wished to venture their intellect in published works:

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 108

17/11/17 5:00 PM

women’s poetry in the magazines

109

If some advent’rous genius rare arise, Who on exalted themes her talent tries, She fears to give the work (tho’ prais’d) a name, And flies not more from infamy, than fame. (7 (May 1737): 308) Cockburn argued that putting one’s name to one’s work – however well received that work was – risked one’s reputation. Wanting at least some recognition for her own writing, Cockburn signed this poem as being by ‘the Authoress of a Treatise (not yet publish’d) in Vindication of Mr. Lock’ (7: 308). Many years earlier Cockburn had published several plays under her maiden name Trotter; the attribution she employed here seems designed to distance herself from those early works and yet to draw attention to the intellectual projects upon which she had recently been working. A circumspection of a slightly different kind emerged after her death and the subsequent publication of The Works of Mrs. Catharine Cockburn in 1751. In two poems that remarked upon her the posthumous appearance of her Works, she was never unambiguously named, being instead variously described as ‘a most excellent and ingenious Lady’, ‘Mira’, and ‘Mrs. C-n’ (London Magazine 21 (June 1752): 280). The contradictory impulses of, on the one hand, wanting to gain credit for a body of work, while on the other, being anxious about becoming publicly known as a writer seems to have prompted many magazine contributors, both male and female, to conceal their identities behind pseudonyms. The coterie exchange that developed in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1734–5 reveals how a pseudonym could effectively connect works together. After two comic epistles were published under the name of Fidelia in September and November 1734 (4: 508, 619), a third piece appeared under the same pseudonym in December (4: 694). Readers including the pseudonymous Lucius and Sylvius recognised that ‘A Christmas Hymn’ was different in tone from the ‘prompt wit’ of Fidelia’s earlier comic verse, being instead a ‘hymn . . . full of heav’nly zeal’ (4 (1734): iv), written in a ‘serious solemn strain’ (5 (Mar 1735): 155). And yet as they read the poem, they seemed to ‘tak[e] it for granted’ (5 (Mar 1735): 155) that the same hand lay behind all three pieces. The magazine editors shared this belief, and by remarking that ‘we have a reason to think [all three pieces are] by the same Lady’, encouraged their readers in the same (4 (1734): iv). Yet if the same author did compose all three pieces, who was she? And, moreover, was the author – and were the other writers who adopted female pseudonyms, including Pastora, and Prudence Manage – in fact female? Fidelia’s boisterous verse and her predilection for scatological humour provoked some scepticism about the author’s gender, prompting Fidelia to retort that ‘I feign my name, but not my sex’ (5 (May 1735): 256). The truth of this statement remains unproven: while some pseudonymous contributors to the magazine have been identified, the real identity, and the real gender, of Fidelia is as yet unknown. Notwithstanding, in 1735 this pseudonymous author did become one of the Gentleman’s Magazine’s best known, and perhaps most notorious, contributors. Though Fidelia (it is to be assumed) chose her own pseudonym, and Catherine Cockburn figured the choice to reveal or conceal one’s authorship as belonging to the author herself, frequently the decision to include or withhold that information was made by someone else. Moreover, while that decision was sometimes bound up with a desire to deflect fame or infamy, identities could also be withheld for other reasons,

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 109

17/11/17 5:00 PM

110

jennifer batt

as certain practices of the London Magazine reveal. In July 1751, the magazine drew its readers’ attention to the fact that Two Volumes, in Octavo, have been lately printed, of Poems on several Occasions, by the late Mrs. Leapor, of Brackley in Northamptonshire; the one published in 1749, and the other last Month. They were printed by Subscription, for the Benefit of her surviving Father, a Gardener in that Country. (20: 311) The second of these two subscription volumes contained a prefatory epistle which provided a biographical account of this poet; declaring that ‘it is very extraordinary, that a Country Girl, without the Advantages of Education, should be capable of such Productions’ the London Magazine partially reproduced the text of this letter in the belief that ‘our Readers cannot but be pleased with some Account of her’ (20: 311). Yet as ‘extraordinary’ as this phenomenon was, the London did not draw its readers attention to the fact that the magazine had, in the previous eighteen months, already reprinted thirteen poems from the first volume of Leapor’s Poems on Several Occasions.6 Nor did it, as it proceeded to reprint at least fifteen more of Leapor’s poems from that first volume over the next three years, at any time inform its readers that they could find a handy digest of the poet’s biography in the issue for July 1751.7 Almost all of these poems appeared without attribution; though, in mid to late 1752 the magazine identified Leapor as the authors of a few poems, it soon reverted to printing her verse without acknowledging her authorship.8 And Leapor was not the only female poet to have her work reproduced in this way. Over a two-year period, starting in April 1752, the same thing happened to Mary Jones: the magazine reprinted fifteen poems from her Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1750), identifying only four of these as her work.9 In reproducing verse by Leapor and Jones, the London Magazine did not withhold the poets’ identities in order to spare their blushes; rather, it imposed anonymity upon verse that had already been published in volumes of these authors’ collected works. In Leapor’s and Jones’s volumes, the magazine’s editors had found a rich seam of relatively unknown, generically varied, high-quality verse which could be exploited to fill their poetry pages. By reproducing this verse without ascribing it to its authors, the editors could give the impression – perhaps to all but the very limited number of readers who had (and had read) a copy of Leapor’s or Jones’s verse – that their publication was brimful of diversely authored verse that was not to be found in any other rival magazine publication. This republication of Leapor’s and Jones’s verse meant that the potential readership of their writing was vastly expanded, but it also meant that almost none of the readers who encountered their work in this way would have known to whom give credit to for the verse they had read. Yet perhaps that may have brought a compensation of a sort: being published without attribution may have meant that these poets’ work, particularly those poems in which the poetic voice was not conspicuously gendered feminine, could be read without the limiting preconceptions and belittling assumptions that were almost inevitably imposed when a poet was identified as female. The London Magazine’s rather dishonest appropriation of their verse, then, meant that poems by Leapor and Jones were presented to readers in a way that allowed them to stand, for once, as equals with their male peers. ‘Parnassus loses more than half its pride, / Unless bright females grace his flow’ry side’, declared a poem published in the London Magazine in 1755 (24 (Appendix): 626) as it encouraged female poets to stand on an equal footing with men. The anony-

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 110

17/11/17 5:00 PM

women’s poetry in the magazines

111

mous author of this poem blamed women themselves – those ‘females’ who ‘flaunt at ball and play, / Or at the toilet waste the live-long day’ – for their sex’s absence from Parnassus, urging ‘each slothful toast and belle’ to ‘rouse . . . for shame’ and ‘wake to extasy the vocal shell’. Had they read this poem, Anne Ingram, or Clarinda, or Pastora might have responded by arguing that the reason so many ‘gay daughters of brocade’ were not ‘in sense as well as silks array’d’ was neither vanity nor laziness but rather ‘Custom’. That ‘Custom’ affected whether women were able to pick up a pen and what happened to their work once they had done so. Magazines played an important role in making women’s writing visible in the eighteenth century: they were a medium in which women’s voices could be heard, and through which female poets could reach a wide readership and develop or enhance their reputation. But magazines also employed practices which obscured, or rendered invisible, the activity of women writers: authorship might be concealed behind pseudonyms and generic epithets such as ‘a lady’ or it might be withheld entirely; poems might be placed in dialogue with prose or verse which imposed a belittling critique – often, based simply upon the poet’s gender – upon them; and while the very nature of magazine publication might mean that a poem could shine brightly for a brief moment, it also meant that that work might then disappear, perhaps for decades, perhaps indefinitely. As much as magazines offered considerable encouragement to female poets to set out toward Parnassus’s slopes, then, they also placed obstacles in the way of women succeeding and being recognised for their success in that adventure.

Notes 1. For the early publication of Pope’s poem, see Pope 1951: 38. 2. See for example its inclusion in Lonsdale 1989: 150–1; the Norton Anthology of English Literature from the seventh (2003) edition onwards; and its recent addition to Fairer and Gerrard (2015): 337–40. 3. For the date of the pamphlet’s initial publication see London Magazine 16 (June 1747): 296. 4. See de Montluzin. On Brereton not knowing the identity of Fido, see Turner 2004. 5. The poem was included as part of the volume’s prefatory matter, probably printed in early 1736. 6. ‘The Beauties of the Spring’, ‘A Summer’s Wish’, ‘The Month of August’, ‘An Epitaph’, and ‘Another’ (London Magazine 18 (1749): iii–iv); ‘On Winter’ (19 (Jan 1750): 37); ‘An Hymn to the Morning’ (19 (Feb 1750): 88); ‘The Linnet and the Goldfinch’ (19 (Apr 1750): 185); ‘Strephon to Celia. A modern Love-Letter’ (19 (May 1750): 230–1); ‘The Fox and the Hen’ and ‘On Sickness’ (19 (July 1750): 328–9); ‘The Fall of Lucia’ (19 (Dec 1750): 568); ‘Essay on Happiness’ (20 (Apr 1751): 183–4). 7. ‘The Moral Vision’ and ‘The Question. Occasioned by a Serious Admonition’ (London Magazine 21 (Feb 1752): 87–8); ‘The Sacrifice. An Epistle to Celia’ (21 (May 1752): 236); ‘The Charms of Anthony’ (21 (Sep 1752): 426); ‘Sylvia and the Bee’ (21 (Oct 1752): 475–6); ‘The Setting Sun’ (21 (Nov 1752): 524); ‘An Epitaph’, ‘An Ode to Mercy’ and ‘Friend in Disgrace’ (21 (Dec 1752): 569, 572–3); ‘To Artemisia. Dr. King’s Invitation to Bellvill imitated’ (22 (July 1753): 333); ‘The Head-Ach. To Aurelia’ (22 (Aug 1753): 385); ‘On Discontent. To Stella’ (22 (Oct 1753): 481); ‘Song to Cloe playing on her Spinet’ (23 (Jan 1754): 41); ‘The Enquiry’ (23 (Feb 1754): 89); ‘The Sow and the Peacock’ (23 (May 1754): 232). 8. The poems that were attributed appeared in the issues for October, November, and December 1752. 9. ‘On Miss Charlot Clayton’s Birth-day’ (London Magazine 21 (Apr 1752): 188); ‘On Miss Charlot Clayton’s Birth-day’ (21 (May 1752): 236); ‘On a favourite dog,

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 111

17/11/17 5:00 PM

112

jennifer batt supposed to be poisoned’, ‘To Mrs. Clayton, with a Hare’ (21 (July 1752): 330–1); ‘The Spider’ (21 (Aug 1752): 378–9); ‘To Stella, after the Small-Pox’, ‘Sublime Strains’ (21 (Sep 1752): 427–8); ‘From New Lodge to Fern-Hill’ (21 (Oct 1752): 475–6); ‘On Miss Charlot Clayton’s Birth-day’, ‘Birth-day’ (21 (Dec 1752): 573, 610); ‘Birth-Day’ (22 (May 1753): 235); ‘Soliloquy on an empty purse’ (22 (July 1753): 335–6); ‘Epitaph on Brigadier General Hill’ and ‘Epitaph on a Young Nobleman’ (22 (Aug 1753): 385); ‘Extempore: On a Drawing of the Countess of Hertford’s’ (22 (Dec 1753): 577). The poems that were attributed appeared in the issues for July, September, and October 1752.

Works Cited Barker, Anthony D. 1996. ‘Poetry from the Provinces: Amateur Poets in the Gentleman’s Magazine in the 1730s and 1740s’. Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon. Ed. Alvaro Ribeiro and James G. Basker. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 241–56. The British Magazine. 1746–51. London. de Montluzin, Emily Lorraine. ‘The Poetry of the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1731–1800: An Electronic Database of Titles, Authors, and First Lines’. (last accessed 20 November 2016). Fairer, David and Christine Gerrard, eds. 2015. Eighteenth Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology. 3rd ed. John Wiley and Sons. Foxon, David. 1991. Pope and the Early Eighteenth Century Book Trade. Ed. James McLaverty. Oxford: Clarendon Press. The Gentleman’s Magazine. 1731–1922 (1st ser. 1731–1833; ser. 2–4 1834–68). London. Jost, Jacob Sider. 2015. ‘The Gentleman’s Magazine, Samuel Johnson, and the Symbolic Economy of Eighteenth-Century Poetry’. Review of English Studies 66: 915–35. The London Magazine. 1820–9. (1st ser. 1820–4; 2 ser. 1825–8; 3rd ser. 1828–9). London: Baldwin, Craddock, and Joy. The London Magazine, or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer. 1732–85. London. Lonsdale, Roger, ed. 1989. Eighteenth Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McKenzie, D. F., and J. C. Ross, eds. 1968. A Ledger of Charles Ackers, Printer of the London Magazine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The Newcastle General Magazine. 1747–60. Newcastle upon Tyne. Pope, Alexander. 1951. Epistles to Several Persons (Moral Essays). Ed. F. W. Bateson. London: Methuen & Co. Ram, Titia. 1999. Magnitude in Marginality: Edward Cave and The Gentleman’s Magazine, 1731–1754. Utrecht: Universiteit Utrecht. The Scots Magazine. 1739–1826. Edinburgh. Tung, Shirley F. 2014. ‘Self-murder, female agency, and manuscripts ‘mangl’d and falsify’d’: Lady Mary Wortley’s “Verses Address’d To –” and the London Magazine’. British Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies 38.1: 115–34. Turner, Katherine. 2004. ‘Brereton [née Hughes], Jane’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (last accessed 5 Jan 2017). Yost, Calvin. 1936. The Poetry of the Gentleman’s Magazine: A Study in Eighteenth Century Literary Taste. PhD Dissertation. University of Pennsylvania.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 112

17/11/17 5:00 PM

7 ‘A lasting wreath of various hue’: Hannah Cowley, the Della Cruscan Affair, and the Medium of the Periodical Poem Tanya M. Caldwell

O

n Wednesday, 16 April 1788, Della Crusca – or Robert Merry – reinforced the principles of what was by then the second, English, wave of Della Cruscanism, a poetic movement that he and other travellers had begun and saw dwindle in Florence then rekindled in London in 1788. He interweaves inextricably the dramatic, nationalistic, and female emphases of reincarnated Della Cruscanism as he employs his eternising powers to praise the actress Mary Wells’s ‘Talents’: Then to thy brow, lov’d WELLS! is due, A lasting Wreath, of various hue, Hung with each perfum’d Flow’r that blows, But chief, the Cowslip and the Rose: For surely thou art she! THYSELF– benign Simplicity. (World 16 Apr 1788)1 By conflating with the glories of the countryside Wells’s ‘Simplicity’ and her ‘Mimic Pow’rs’, Della Crusca aligns the actress’s chief arts with those of the correspondence dominated by himself and Anna Matilda in his new paper the World: poetry, drama, and nationalism draw strength from each other. By endowing upon her a ‘lasting wreath of various hue’ he projects her, as a female dramatic artist, into the permanent annals of English letters. He thereby achieves a major goal of this project, simultaneously trumpeting poetry, female talent, and the dramatic arts through the periodical presses with their mass outreach. John Bell founded the World along with Major Edward Topham at the beginning of 1787.2 From the start, the paper was connected with celebrity theatre folk such as Topham’s mistress, Mary Wells, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Immediately too it made a splash through the poetry of Della Crusca, or Robert Merry, who appeared in England as the first editions did. Hannah Cowley would respond right away as Anna Matilda in a pseudonymous correspondence that took the fashionable world by storm. Her flirtatious correspondence with Della Crusca became a phenomenon that not only made the World the most popular paper of its time but also enabled this periodical and others like it to further the principles of miscellany publications that had eroded generic and gender hierarchies as the eighteenth century unfolded.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 113

17/11/17 5:00 PM

114

tanya m. caldwell

For Cowley the playwright (1743–1809), becoming involved in the venture was characteristic of her ever-surprising modus operandi. Her pseudonymous flirtatious exchange with Merry as Della Crusca would lead inevitably to mockery, with her apparent poetic cuckolding of her faithful husband becoming the subject of verse satire. The correspondence reflects, however, the risks she took throughout her career that belie her demure front and that placed her at the heart of London’s poetic and dramatic scenes. Her contemporaries knew the bold housewife and mother from the provinces throughout her dramatic career not only for efforts to cultivate and expand English poetic traditions but also for her constant generic experimentation, as Angela Escott has outlined extensively in her impressive study of Cowley as playwright. Della Crusca’s tribute to Mary Wells here thus indirectly explains Cowley’s participation in the racy exchange that seems not to fit with her private persona, for Bell facilitates the kind of changes in poetic publication that allow for the appeal of Cowley’s plays and her poetry, which aimed to bring together tradition and the contemporary and to integrate female artists fully into renowned traditions, making them visible to a broad audience. Collaboration with John Bell, Cowley would have seen immediately, fit with her vision of the future of English letters.3 Bell’s progressiveness, inherent not only in his periodical publications but also in his editions and collections, afforded, as Cowley recognised, opportunities for fundamental change in the way readers viewed and preserved poetry. Cowley’s aim, throughout her career, and the potential she seized in these publications, with their novel medium, was a holistic integration of women into the annals of English letters by writing them into national traditions. Her poetic exchange with Della Crusca recognises, as Bell’s print endeavours do, the evolutionary nature of the English canon as it is shaped by imperialistic impulses and the classical past. Bell’s ability to capture the imagination of what Claire Knowles calls ‘emergent mass culture’ and to shape national literary tradition, in other words, both drove and was reinforced by the exchange between Della Crusca and Anna Matilda (2009: 17–44). The responses of both poets in their pseudonymous roles to Mary Wells further highlights the goals of Bell and those who aligned themselves with him through the World. The impact of the Della Cruscan correspondence and its involvement in London theatre is evident a year later when the Morning Star congratulates itself, on 12 May 1789, on acquiring a fresh piece of this sensational poetic correspondence – this time an address supposedly by Anna Matilda to Mrs Wells. As Lucyle Werkmeister discusses in detail, the Star had been rivalling the World in its popular success (1963: 180–97). This poem may, therefore, have been by a spurious Anna Matilda. Whatever the case, the poem – and the appeal that the Star aimed for – reveals the hallmarks of Anna Matilda’s (and Hannah Cowley’s) poetry with its tribute to English and Western poetic traditions as well as in the sensational appeal of celebrity gossip. By capitalising on the Della Cruscan phenomenon as it extended to these conversations with Wells, the Star highlights its importance in English literary history. This poem, by Anna Matilda or an imitator of her style, pushes the possibilities of English poetry even beyond progress made through the commercial and heteroglossic endeavours of the eighteenth-century miscellanies. Beginning with Dryden and Lintott, the miscellanies had worked to dismantle notions of generic hierarchy and legitimised reader tastes, just as the theatre did. In this poem consoling Mrs Wells on the loss of her lover, Topham, Anna Matilda’s confidence in her own and her subjects’ fame is embodied in her tone and the poetic ancestry she draws upon. As she teases Della Crusca, ‘who rid’st thy Pegasus so high,

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 114

17/11/17 5:00 PM

hannah cowley and the periodical poem

115

Beating BELARAPHON and Mrs. Hughes’, she invokes, miscellany-style, English myth and Rabelais with a hint of Thomas Gray (‘Ode on a Favourite Cat’), as she asks him, What is the CAT that glides so glib? Is it a tabby or a gib! Is it the puss of Whittington, Lord May’r? Or ROBILARDUS, that with hideous claws, Made trembling PANURGE scream and quake and flare. . . . (Morning Star 12 May 1789) The poet says she would ‘give my pair of pink Parisian shoes’ to ‘share’ Della Crusca’s ‘pretty pastimes’. As well as appealing to a contemporary audience, this ephemeron, as a poetic focus, creates in its interplay with light-hearted but time-tested literary material – Gray’s unfortunate tabby, Dick Whittington’s cat, and Rabelais’s monstrous feline – a Dryden-Lintott-style mixture of registers, voices, and ages that deflects the authority of the classics. Anna Matilda’s poem may seem clunky in moments, as William Hazlitt would proclaim of Hannah Cowley’s poetry, but it underscores the mix of traditions and varied local voices that sustain English literary culture by the end of the eighteenth century.4 In her flagrant dismantling of hierarchies, work that both Rabelais and Dryden undertook in their mock-heroics and (in Dryden’s case) in the miscellanies, Anna Matilda continues a tradition of questioning authority. She also assumes agency as a woman writer. The ‘pink Parisian shoes’ become part of the ‘pretty’ diversions of serious traditions. Anna Matilda then complicates the tradition of female poetic friendship central to poetry by women.5 She bids Della Crusca, O send me down a lovely kitten, To send to lovely Mrs. Wells! For Topham all aghast, Frowns on the nymph e’erwhile so lov’d. (Morning Star 12 May 1789) The immediate appeal again is sensational: the poem’s topicality targets the contemporary audience drawn to periodicals and masquerades. Yet, in seeking her poetic lover’s help to comfort the actress, Mrs Wells, with a whimsical gift, Anna Matilda simultaneously acknowledges the power of a female poetic tradition by the late eighteenth century (that of female friendship), and she expands it. By including Mrs Wells in a pseudonymous correspondence, the two main players in this poetic drama also create a teasing masquerade-like scene in lines that refer haphazardly to living, literary, and mythical figures, and to contemporary and mythical events. Cowley excelled in employing pseudonyms for authorial agency, in the tradition of women writers.6 The Anna Matilda of this poem, like Della Crusca in his tribute to Wells a year earlier, creates a poetic masquerade that reflects the varied tastes of the kind of audience that frequented the Pantheon and bought periodical newspapers. Whether or not this poem is by the original Anna Matilda, both it and Della Crusca’s shed light on why the respectable matronly Cowley participated, under a mask that might easily be flipped up, as the following discussion will show, in the racy correspondence. They offer experimental modes and an appeal to a broad fashionable audience enabled by

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 115

17/11/17 5:00 PM

116

tanya m. caldwell

periodical publication to manipulate revered male traditions in English letters.7 Because of John Bell’s innovative endeavours to shape a more creative English literary heritage, Cowley knew her poems would be enshrined in lasting tomes: anthologies. In this way she would entwine women in the colourful laurels of English letters: a lasting wreath of truly various hue. A key element of this repositioning of women artists is Anna Matilda’s consciousness of an ancient female poetic ancestry that coexists with the male one promoted especially by Dryden and Pope at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In her tribute to Wells, Anna Matilda’s allusions profile that ancestry. By the mid-eighteenth century, as Paula Backscheider demonstrates, a declaration of unlettered lineage that went back to the ancient poets was common on the part of female poets. Cowley’s theatre contemporary and fellow Della Cruscan, Mary Robinson, is perhaps her closest kindred spirit in terms of what Backscheider calls her ‘commitment to Poetry’. In Robinson’s To The Muse of Poetry (1791) she hails the ‘souls like mine’ that ‘Beam with poetic rays divine’ (quoted in Backscheider 2005: 25). Also common, as Backscheider remarks, citing Mary Leapor’s Hymn to Morning, is an ancestry traced to Sappho in particular (2005: 26).8 In the address to Mrs Wells under discussion here, with its myriad allusions to high and low subject matter and voices through the ages, Cowley (or Anna Matilda) taps the spirit of Dryden of whom she has a constant sense. The female poetic ancestral tradition that Backscheider acknowledges begins with the mighty Poet Laureate’s ode ‘To the Pious Memory of the Accomplished Young Lady Mrs. Anne Killigrew’. Dryden praises the variety and permanence of the work of the young poet, claiming that if her ‘Praexisting Soul’ Was form’d, at first, with Myriads more, It did through all the Mighty Poets roul, Who Greek or Latine Laurels wore, And was that Sappho last, which once it was before. (1969: 110 ll. 29–33) The lasting wreath of various hue and ‘celestial kind’ that Killigrew shared with Sappho also had a masculine element, however. Part of Dryden’s motive in this poem to a relatively obscure female poet was praise of her father: ‘Thy Father was transfus’d into thy Blood: / So wert thou born into the tuneful strain’ (1969: 110, ll. 26–7). Anna Matilda evokes both the masculine and feminine components of her heritage in her tribute to Wells. In the tradition of male poets like Dryden, she heaps one upon the next allusions to Gray, Rabelais, and English mythology, as discussed above, to reinforce the timelessness of the passions addressed. She simultaneously calls upon her literary lover, Della Crusca, to join with her in supporting Mrs Wells in friendship – an expansion of both the male and female poetic traditions of friendship. Her purpose is to comfort her fellow artist as Wells grieves Topham’s loss of affection and to support all three of them as they are made vulnerable to ‘merciless John Bell’, who ‘Kicks out the World, and bids it go to hell’. Yet this poem was part of the new literary world, that, Cowley, Merry, and all those involved with the Della Cruscan undertakings recognised, was opened up by Bell’s boldness. Among Bell’s greatest innovations, as Carrie Smith remarks, ‘was the incorporation of engraved landscape genre scenes within the text and commissioning

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 116

17/11/17 5:00 PM

hannah cowley and the periodical poem

117

copper-plate engraved portraits of the most prominent actors of the day’.9 The actor portraits ‘boosted sales’, including of his ‘affordable, illustrated pocket volumes of Shakespeare’s plays’. They also shed light on ‘the dynamics of eighteenth-century theatrical celebrity’ (Smith and Werner 2012). In the poem composed for the Morning Star on 12 May 1789, Anna Matilda draws the actress’s contemporary drama into her poetic masquerade as she provides a portrait with voyeuristic satisfaction and blends the British theatre world with that of the long literary culture she has evoked. She sketches a real-life vignette of an actress that seems designed to have the kind of appeal Bell strove for in his portraits. This literary portrait replicates the emotional poses of the engraved portraits in imagining the grief of Mrs Wells: Think, o think how this must grieve her! Tears and sighs will not reprieve her; ... For ghostly counsel and advice, To Parson ESTE she calls in vain. . . . The poem then descends into the kind of farce that William Gifford would target at the Della Cruscans in the 1790s, and Anna Matilda’s portrait of Wells takes on a Hogarthian quality. Following the practice of Bell’s innovative editions, she makes a celebrity out of an actress who has been ill-used and includes her in a discourse that stretches beyond the contemporary affairs she uses here for diversion. Anna Matilda’s consequent achievement in placing the female arts at the heart of national discourses was a constant goal of Hannah Cowley, the patriotic playwright. By this point in the correspondence, the poems had garnered national and international attention, and Cowley’s aim was to integrate women into the possibilities opened by Bell. The ‘great object’ of John Bell’s ‘ambition’, as he publicly announced in the 1788 ‘Address to the World’, was to ‘retrieve and exalt the neglected art of printing in England’ (repr. in Morison 1981: n. p.). Bell achieved his planned revolution as the first printer in England to use ‘modern face’ and by abolishing the long S in printing (Morison 1981: n. 2). He also engaged in the canon-making editorial activities of the age to produce editions and collections that appealed to all kinds of readers, like the now ubiquitous miscellanies. As the ‘Note Addressed to the Members of the First Edition Club’ of John Bell remarks, he violated the ‘unwritten law of the booksellers of London, who were then also its publishers, by printing better than they did, and much cheaper, those works by classical English authors which old established firms regarded as an inherited asset’ (Morison 1981: n. 3). Included in these new classics was the kind of portrait described above, which helped establish the celebrity actress and made the public rethink the dynamic between classical literature and the contemporary theatre world. Bell’s Theatre collection also established plays by women alongside those by Shakespeare and other successful male playwrights and aimed them at a popular audience.10 So the man who began in newspapers reshaped notions of timeless works and timeless English writers using as a basis the principles of periodical publication. In the midst of these revolutions in print and publication, Bell underscores Anna Matilda’s role as female mystery poet. In early June 1788, the London Chronicle whets its audience’s appetite by promising the ‘charming poetry of Della Crusca, Anna Matilda, and Arley’ that it ‘has been delighted with’ in ‘two handsome pocket volumes, most beautifully printed by Mr. Bell at his own new and ingenious presses’.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 117

17/11/17 5:00 PM

118

tanya m. caldwell

These innovative volumes, a product of the charms of periodical publication and designed to impress posterity, are explicitly associated with the theatre as well as one of the most influential literary figures in the nation: they are ‘dedicated by permission to R. B. Sheridan’ and ‘will include an original Tragedy . . . by Della Crusca’ as well as the ‘various poems, which have at different times appeared with distinguished reputation in the public papers’. A week later, on 20 June 1788, the World declares that these forthcoming volumes ‘are not more distinguished for their charms as poetical compositions than they are admired for their TYPOGRAPHICAL elegance and perfection’. On the strength of the alluring poetry and print that Bell has facilitated, English publications can now compete in an international arena: ‘his presses may now vie with the boasted excellences of Didot at Paris, who has long been accustomed to look on the productions of England in the typographical art, with contempt and ridicule’. The international scope of Bell’s achievement and the miscellany-like appeal that is grounded in English tradition are profiled in that first advertisement. The puff for The Poetry of the World in the Morning Herald on 14 June promises poems by Della Crusca, Anna Matilda, and Arley as well as ‘The Ancient Muse Burlesqued, in five numbers – Sonnets by Benedict – The African Boy – Extempore on Lady T-yr-l’s Ring; to which are added an original Tragedy, by Della Crusca.’ A similar range of genres, periods, and pitches characterised the miscellanies of Dryden and Tonson then Lintott. ‘The African Boy’ is a reminder of the expansion of empire at the heart of culture as well as politics and theatre (Morning Herald 14 June 1788). The charm of the poetry boasted in the advertisements as crucial to the success of a publication revolution is centred on Anna Matilda. The puffs also present her as the centre of intrigue. At the end of 1788, sandwiched between advertisements for Bell’s British Theatre (at fifteen volumes by this stage) and a proposal for his Poets of Great Britain – reiterations of Bell’s ongoing efforts to consolidate English letters – is a review of The Poetry of the World that highlights the enticement of the periodical exchange. The focus is on Anna Matilda. Noting that the World has not ‘seen fit’ to reveal the ‘real Authors’ of the Della Crucan correspondence, the reviewer comments, however, that ‘Della Crusca is supposed to be Mr. Merry, that Arley is certainly Mr. M. P. Andrews, and that the Bard is thought to be a Mr. Berkley.’ The identity of the key correspondent is still the subject of social intrigue: ‘Time, who is celebrated for babbling the profoundest secrets, will probably, if we exercise a little patience, acquaint us with the real name of Anna Matilda, which is now, we find, carefully concealed.’ None of the poets, the reviewer reminds us, can be ‘vulgar Writers’ (World 26 Dec 1788). The standing, the appeal, the persistence of the verse, and its transmutations are testimony to its quality. Even so and despite being anchored in a new popular medium, Della Cruscan poetry was not without criticism from the start. As Knowles notes, ‘conservative critics’, in particular, were ‘deeply’ concerned at the degradation of poetics that Della Crusca and his followers initiated with their popular movement (2009: 37). Those condemning Merry’s seduction ‘by the tinsel of affectation’ and damning what they saw as a deficiency of harmony, and overabundance of ‘tropes and metaphors’ were judging the Della Cruscans by neoclassical standards (38). Yet the initial exchange between Della Crusca and Anna Matilda demonstrates the poets’ conscious effort to revitalise classical and neoclassical traditions from within for a mass audience. Such innovations were the forte of Hannah Cowley who made space for authentic female voices inside recognisable genres and jeux d’esprit. That Cowley, or Anna Matilda, did

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 118

17/11/17 5:00 PM

hannah cowley and the periodical poem

119

lack the poetic skill of her male ancestors is beside the point; she uses the periodical to revitalise revered traditions in order to continue discourses begun by ancients and continued through male poets like Dryden and Gray. The exchange that sparked English Della Cruscanism underscores the main players’ rejection of exhausted modes. It also places them in a venerable tradition of poetic revivification that goes back to ancient times. Della Crusca reignites the poetic phenomenon on his return to England in 1787 by publishing ‘The Adieu and Recall to Love’ in the General Evening Post (28–30 June 1787). Like Ovid’s first poem in the Amores, this is a recusatio that begins in each case with a ‘feign’d surprise’, as Della Crusca frames it. Cupid’s unpredictability as well as his centrality to virile poetry is the focus of Ovid’s poem and Della Crusca’s. Ovid begins by declaring he must, despite his intentions, write love poetry because Cupid stole a foot from his lines, making them inadequate for epic. The poet complains of not having subject matter (‘nec mihi materia est’) when the playful Cupid shoots one of his accurate darts, facilitating the muse of Love (‘certas habuit puer ille sagittas. / uror, et in vacuo pectore regnat Amor’). Della Crusca likewise begins without a subject: ‘I’m free at last.’ He also profiles Cupid’s playfulness as well as his own by unusually dismissing him (‘I quit thy pow’r’) and celebrating his freedom from ‘the roguish leer’ and ‘wanton wing’ of the boy with his ‘arrow keen’ (an almost direct translation of Ovid). Weaving this poem into the theatre discourse that is a key part of Della Cruscanism, Della Crusca playfully bids Cupid to find his victims elsewhere: ‘on Louisa’s breast repose!’ Yet, like Ovid’s speaker, he realises that without Cupid there will be no poetry to intrigue the eavesdropping audience: ‘O hasten back then, idle Boy, / And with thine anguish bring thy joy!’ (General Evening Post 28–30 June 1787). Anna Matilda responds in a poem ‘For the World’: ‘The Pen’. She creates a dialogue between poetic lovers where the Amores consist of the male poet’s monologue in imagined dialogues with Cupid and his lover. The male speaker’s pain for the arrow shot through his heart in Amores 1.2 (‘haeserunt tenues in corde sagittae’) becomes in Anna Matilda’s poem the power of Della Crusca’s pen on a female heart: O! seize again thy golden quill, And with its point my bosom thrill; With magic touch explore my heart . . . (10 Jul 1787) The focus of both Ovid’s and Anna Matilda’s poems is that articulated by the male lover in Amores 1.3: the passion that Cupid incites makes for rich poetry (‘te mihi materiam felicem in carmina praebe’). Recognising the collusion of Cupid and Apollo, Anna Matilda points to the inextricable nature of poetry and passion: ‘The one poetic language give; / The other bid thy passion live’ (10 July 1787). Anna Matilda extends the tradition of poetic revivification to include Dryden in her subsequent response to Della Crusca as she continues the exchange in the World a month later.11 She claims, ‘Thou bidst! “my purple slumbers fly!”’ Here she regrets that time has taken the ‘rose-bud’ from her ‘cheek’, sprinkled her ‘tresses . . . with thy snow’ and ‘warp[ed]’ her ‘slim form’. Yet, thanks to the ‘Poet’s fire’ that Della Crusca engenders, she can still kindle her ‘torch’ and ‘follow his superior flight’. Anna Matilda feminises a common motif from Dryden’s ongoing insistence in his old age that he retained yet his poetic virility, despite losing his official positions and being beaten up

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 119

17/11/17 5:00 PM

120

tanya m. caldwell

in Rose Alley. She frames her powers with a favourite metaphor of Dryden. Her poetic vigour remains, she claims: Nor yet, the pencil strives in vain, To wake upon the canvas plain, All the strong passions of the mind . . . (4 Aug 1787) She has appropriated both Dryden’s masculine trope of sexual poetic powers and his conceit of ‘A Parallel Betwixt Painting and Poetry’.12 In asserting her poetic powers, Anna Matilda also expresses melancholy for ‘him . . . my bosom’s LORD’, who had ‘ador’d’ her ‘slim form’ (4 Aug 1787). In Ovid, the male lover imagines encountering his beloved’s husband at a dinner party. The scandal of Ovid is in this way muted to a woman poet’s reflection on her domestic past in love even as she revives her powers within a classical tradition that is sexually based. At this moment also, the pseudonym that Cowley manages to stand behind longer than other Della Cruscans becomes vulnerable, as a fragment of her autobiography slips in. Her fashionable friends might well have guessed the identities behind this sad reflection on the absent but ‘so lov’d’ lord by a skilled poet and wearer of masks. We need to be mindful that this initial exchange between Della Crusca and Anna Matilda took place in the periodical presses. Its illicit subject matter is geared toward the gossipy beau monde of the theatre and salons. Anna Matilda’s pseudonym gives her a degree of protection that would last the length of the correspondence, but, as Manushag Powell says of the ‘eidolon’ figure in the periodicals, marriage was not compatible for such a figure who remained ‘exposed to the public’ and smelling ‘faintly of a kind of mental prostitution’ that runs counter to the mental and physical chastity required of marriage (Powell 2012: 137). Cowley’s marriage was known publicly for the intense devotion expressed by Anna Matilda’s longing for her absent lord. As Anna Matilda, an ageing poet reviving her powers through a sexually charged exchange, Cowley metamorphoses a classical masculine motif. She presents instead a non-gendered stimulation of the poetic soul through correspondence with another poetic voice in a voyeuristic space, in which neither the audience nor the poets know actual identities. The female poet regains her old vigour. She not only offers a daring variation on the old male poet-silent female object scenario but also supplies domestic memories instead of the prospect of sex. In the process, Cowley has also reworked the mid-century partially respectable female periodical eidolon. This masked writer, framed by classical traditions, like the disguised wife or fiancée in the Parthenon, whose mask could be pulled away at any moment, dominates a public sphere. As Russell says of Cowley’s heroine in The Belle’s Stratagem (performed 1780, published 1781) and of her performance in the Parthenon to win over the hero through sentimentality, the ‘self’ Letitia finally offers to Doricourt, establishes her both as an ‘English wife’ and a sexualised entity. The identity is established through performance and disguise, and it ‘represents a romance of female selfhood that exceeds and transcends performance, a vision of a kind of subjectivity that, validated by patriarchy, liberates both the individual and society into an empire of love’ (Russell 2007: 221). Appealing to mass audiences through sentimentality and the dismantling of classical forms is also a novelising process, as commentators on miscellanies and the periodical observe. Early in the correspondence, Anna Matilda determines to break through

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 120

17/11/17 5:00 PM

hannah cowley and the periodical poem

121

neoclassical standards and map the way for sentimental poetry. In ‘To Della Crusca’ in the World on Saturday, 22 December 1787, Anna Matilda rejects confined metres: I HATE the Elegaic lay– Chuse me a measure jocund as the day! Such days as near the ides of June Meet the Lark’s elab’rate fame. . . . She praises Della Crusca’s uninhibited verse: ‘Poetic chains should fall, before such bards as thee.’ As the Romantic poets would espouse and poets like Gray already had, Anna Matilda argues that nature should be heard in poetry’s notes: ‘And in thy verse meand’ring wild, / Thou who art FANCY’s favourite Child’ (22 Dec 1787). This poem, like almost all those of the Della Cruscans in the World, is framed by allusions to the stage. In this case is juxtaposed a report on the ‘very numerous and brilliant attendance on Lee Lewes’s Benefit’. Lewes performed in and spoke the prologue of several of Cowley’s plays. His performance skills are, in this report, put on a par with ancient achievement: in ‘a well-penned farewell Address, Mr. Lewes was what Horace recommends – he FELT, and made his Audience feel so forcibly, as to draw from them the most unbounded applause’ (22 Dec 1787). While separate from the poem, this news-from-the-theatre has the sensational immediacy of an advertisement aimed to satisfy the ‘immediate need’ for novelty that the periodical so well catered to, as Barbara Benedict points out (2007: 198).13 It also complements for readers the contents of the poem to which it lies adjacent. It is part, therefore, of the dramatic and the classical components inherent in the periodical publications that facilitated English Della Cruscanism as well as part of the anthologies that quickly sprang up from them.14 Powell pinpoints the integrated nature of stage and periodical as agents of literary change for printers, consumers, and readers in the latter part of the eighteenth century. She notes the appeal of each to the masses, even as periodical poems and dramatists alike looked to tradition for authority, and the fact that both were in a state of flux (2012: 9). As novel texts for a mutable age, the Della Cruscan poems are therefore enhanced by the juxtaposed advertisements, which achieve, as Benedict says, a fundamental redefinition of the familiar (2007: 199). We should remember that all the key elements of English Della Cruscanism that I have focused on here – the drama at its centre, the consciousness of passion at the heart of true poetry, and the Janus-faced observation of past and future – were at its origins. Noting that Edward Topham’s desire for Mrs Wells and his efforts to establish her theatre career ‘led to the establishment of The World’ in conjunction with John Bell, Stanley Morison declares of the publication that truly ‘Love first created the World’ (1981: 72). The inherent theatricality of the pseudonyms heightens the dramatic nature of the poetry that, as Morison also notes, ‘attracted to itself shortly afterwards as much public notice as ever fell to the share of a daily publication’ (1981: 72). This pseudonymous theatricality enhanced the feminised nature of the World since pseudonymous poetry was particularly associated with women by the late eighteenth century, as Backscheider remarks (20). The new world that Cowley would shape is evident in Anna Matilda’s poem published in the World on 23 November 1787, in response to Della Crusca’s ‘Elegy Written on the Plain of Fontenoy’, which appeared in the World on 16 November 1787. Anna Matilda acknowledges the newspaper’s goal of offering a response to

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 121

17/11/17 5:00 PM

122

tanya m. caldwell

immediate public demand on one hand and the reassurance of native poetic permanence on the other hand. The note prefacing Anna Matilda’s response is headed ‘O matre Pulchre, filia pulchrior’ (‘Oh beautiful mother, more beautiful daughter’): the poet’s assurance that her poem is born from what has gone before in the genealogical tradition that Dryden nurtured. Yet, the accompanying note informs the public, this response to that ‘transcendent Poet’ (Della Crusca) is written for the kind of immediate gratification that periodical publication delivered: it appears ‘not forty hours after! – the World was very highly favoured with the following STANZAS’ (23 Nov 1787). Merry’s, or Della Crusca’s, poem on the defeat, in 1745, of the forces of the Duke of Cumberland during the War of the Austrian Succession, picks up from Gray and his famous Elegy, in particular, notes of the sublime, a deep patriotism, condemnation of the destructive ambition of rulers, and praise of fallen soldiers. Like many artists, writers, and playwrights of the late eighteenth century, Hannah Cowley and Richard Brinsley Sheridan included, Della Crusca places his poem against the backdrop of empire. Its ending draws attention, as would Cowley’s last play, The Town Before You (1795), to the struggles encompassing the globe in an age of trade: From barb’rous Turkey to Britannia’s shore, Opposing int’rests into rage increase; Destruction rears her sceptre, Tumults rear, Ah! where shall hapless Man repose in peace? (World 16 Nov 1787) Although Anna Matilda’s poem in the World begins with praise for Della Crusca’s ‘transcendent’ powers, its focus and achievement are her transcendence of these traditions. Establishing the quality of the poets engaging the attention of the World’s audience, its editor also immediately declares that both ‘rank’ with ‘the Genius which is thus described to have excited them’ – Thomas Gray, in other words (23 Nov 1787). The manipulation of readers’ judgement is akin to that of early eighteenth-century anthologies with their medley of material, as Benedict reminds us: the interconnections between ‘publishers, editors, authors, and readers . . . consolidate a consensus of literary values; at the same time, they enfranchise individual readers to pursue their own tastes regardless of the consensus’ (1996: 212). Further insisting upon Della Crusca’s and Anna Matilda’s place in a timeless English discourse and placing Anna Matilda on equal footing with her male counterparts, the editor equates their ‘poetic energy, and philosophic truth’ as well as their ‘grace and force of numbers’ (23 Nov 1787). All these terms were used of Hannah Cowley’s first play, The Runaway (1776) in a poetic review. The editor would naturally not expect the audience to make the connection; in both cases, however, laudatory language once spared for classical and neoclassical poets is used of a woman playwright from the country and periodical correspondents, including a woman. Traditional categories are confounded. In responding to Della Crusca’s poem on a battle almost half a century old, Anna Matilda hears in it the threat of future lives lost in contemporary strife. In ‘the coarse din that Trade and Folly form’, she reflects, echoing Gray, ‘the Muse’s Son again I meet – / I catch his notes amidst the vulgar storm’. The deep value of Della Crusca’s poem is in keeping alive the best of the nation in poetry and so contemporary consciousness.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 122

17/11/17 5:00 PM

hannah cowley and the periodical poem

123

In her lines live English pastoral, neoclassicism, Shakespeare, and a reminder that the glory of the past is in the hands of poets: His notes now bear me, pensive to the Plain, Cloth’d by a verdure drawn from Britain’s heart; Whose heroes bled superior to their pain, Sunk, crown’d with glory, and contemn’d the smart. (23 Nov 1787) The poem’s first medium is a periodical for the masses: a commercial enterprise that stirs the literate and makes the less literate a little more so. As she captures a wide market, Anna Matilda also changes the male-centric focus of such poetry. She plunges her readers into timeless scenes of war, but her poetic perspective is distinctly female. In a line that has the chiasmic resonance of a line of epic battle translation (Dryden or Pope translating Virgil or Homer), she focuses not on the immediate victims but those waiting at home: Deep bitter groans, still deeper groans resound, Whilst Fathers, Brothers, Lovers, Husbands die! She bids the ‘blest Bard’ turn ‘thy mental eye’ to every outpost of imperial reach (to ‘hamlets, cities, empires’); her focus is again domestic loss: Where, do not Husbands, Fathers, dying moan? Where, do not Mothers, Sisters, Orphans weep? The authority of her female poetic voice and her feminised medium is reinforced, ironically, by the admission of error printed at the end of the periodical version, the ‘Erratum, in Anna Matilda’s last Verses to Della Crusca.’ The erratum recalls that Gray’s Elegy too was first published in periodicals and magazines and with sufficient inaccuracies that ‘Gray requested Walpole to have it printed in a more respectable and accurate manner’ (1840: xxix). Anna Matilda’s periodical poem follows the path of a venerated male poet, who himself relied on the evolutionary workings of English letters. In inserting herself into this malleable literary culture, Anna Matilda extends through the commercial presses a process begun in the Restoration miscellanies, which, as Benedict has shown, broadened reader inclusivity through slippages between forms and registers. Readers and reading material had become profoundly heteroglossic. The eighteenth century demanded greater decency than the collections that Aphra Behn and the Earl of Rochester had made popular, with Behn not respectable reading, though Cowley made a concerted effort to trace her lineage from her. With old hierarchies dismantled, late eighteenth-century anthologies, like the wax exhibits, public shows, plays, and the masquerades of the cosmopolitan capitals, mingled high and low across national and all nature of other boundaries. That the Della Cruscans’ immediate success extends, like that of Hannah Cowley’s plays, not just across the nation but across the international borders imperative to an imperialist future is apparent in the first collection that includes their poems.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 123

17/11/17 5:00 PM

124

tanya m. caldwell

This is a sampling of the contents of volume 3 of The English Lyceum, or, a Choice of Pieces in Prose and Verse Selected from the Best Periodical Papers, Magazines, Pamphlets, & Other British . . . Printed in Hamburg 1787: THE FOUNTAINS. A FAIRY TALE THE MAN OF FEELING LA FATA MORGANA HISTORY OF LA ROCHE. A FRAGMENT. Traits of the Life of the late ATHENIAN STUART. A DIALOGUE between PERICLES, a Modern GREEK and a RUSSIAN. To ANNA MATILDA. Speech of OLIVER CROMWELL to a Dutch Ambassador. LETTERS FROM THE LATE MR. STERNE. (Never printed before.) THE SLAVES. An Elegy. CUPID AND DEATH. From Beloe’s Poems. (Lately Published) ODE TO SIMPLICITY. Addressed to Mrs. WELLS. Extract from a Review of the Grievances and Government of Quebeck. CUPID AND PSYCHE. ODE To Miss Farren. Letter to the Editor of the Gazetteer. Political materials lie cheek by jowl with poetry, classical with contemporary, sentimental with ancient rhetoric, fairy tales with historical tracts. The periodical nature of the publication is flaunted in an international collection that has a timeless element to it. The Della Cruscans feature prominently as a commodity and tribute to the theatre and to the ladies, who are subjects and consumers. So, the Della Cruscans achieved permanence in English letters, despite their secondrate poetry. Through a collection like this and The Poetry of the World, discussed above, as well as Bell’s The British Album (1789) they made their mark internationally and influenced the Romantic poets (Morison 1981: 133). The British Album reproduces the poetry from the first anthology, thereby reiterating its national importance, as Gamer remarks, and it has the inclusiveness of Bell’s Theatre (2003: 48). As with individual poems in the World, evidence of editing confers status. Bell offers the poems ‘in a more complete, finished, and correct state’ in the dedication to Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Again too Bell assures readers of quality: he will ‘render justice’ to the ‘superior excellence of the Poetry itself’. As dedicatee, Sheridan, the theatre manager and playwright, becomes a Garrick for his time, further linking cultural arts and literature, as Bell calls him the ‘best Critic, the first Scholar, and the most admired Genius of the age’. Doubtless hugely satisfying for Cowley, whom Sheridan tried to freeze out after Garrick’s death and who remained her rival in the theatre, the first poems in The British Album are those that realign gender power balances in poetry, as described above: ‘Adieu and Recall to Love’ and ‘The Pen’. Before the British Album appeared, Cowley and Bell capitalised on what Backscheider called a ‘rapid advancement’ of women’s writing amongst publishers and consumers in the last part of the century, anthologising from the Della Cruscan exchange The Poetry of Anna Matilda (1788) (2005: 3). As an ingénue playwright, Cowley had declared in the prologue to her first play, The Runaway (1776), that she had an

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 124

17/11/17 5:00 PM

hannah cowley and the periodical poem

125

advantage as a woman writer. She claims it ‘has a thousand faults, which, if written by a Man, would have incurred the severest lash of Criticism’ (‘Dedication’. The Runaway. n. p.). Even the arrangement of The Poetry of Anna Matilda profiles women as readers and artists, placing them permanently within English letters – the original aim of the Della Cruscans. The ‘Preface’ makes Anna Matilda’s purpose explicit: to ‘have her name united with that of DELLA CRUSCA’s, longer than the fleeting fame of Newspapers allows’ (Cowley 1788: n. p.). In another surreptitious move to authorise her collection through poetic ancestries and Gray’s practices, in particular, Anna Matilda adds to her poetry a ‘Fragment’ from the autograph of the famous Sir William Waller; ‘an important Actor in the busy drama of the last century’.15 The collection begins with a set of object poems16 that profile female friendship and link the age of sentiment to that of neoclassicism. As Benedict points out, seventeenthcentury and early eighteenth-century ‘occasional’ miscellanies feature poems on objects or transitory events; ladies are frequently the subject as well as the intended readers and these ‘socialised things cause and express feeling’ (2007: 199). Occasional object poems by Pope, Swift, and Gay especially both satirised and capitalised upon the commodity culture that women fed and were victims of. Here, Anna Matilda takes a recognisably feminised trope, which, as Benedict also notes, poets use to transform traditional genre in a commodified world. She uses it in her anthologised periodical poems to infuse the neoclassical world of the Restoration and Pope’s age with the sentimentality of her own. She makes women agents rather than objects of the poems, as she did in her response to ‘Adieu to Love’. The collection begins with a poem ‘Written the Morning after Anna Matilda’s Return from a Friend’s House, Close on the Verge of Windsor Forest’. The woman writer behind the mask feels tangible as she praises her friend ‘Harriet’s polish’d mind, / Her sense reflective, and her taste refin’d’ (Cowley 1788: 2). The opening lines evoke what Backscheider calls a ‘unique’ public space for women, that of the ‘friendship poem’ (2005: 175): Have I then left you, sweet Hygeian bowers– Oh! have I left you friendship’s holy hours? The English setting (Windsor forest) with its classical inhabitants (the ‘venerable Dryads’ that watch Anna Matilda’s friend Harriet ‘graceful move’) conjures the neoclassical ancestry of Pope (Cowley 1788: 2). The humble tone and focus on female friendship shift agency and artistry to women as the collection opens. Two poems later, the register is humbler still. The poet is conscious of her English heritage but again profiles domestic female concerns. In the process, ‘Charity’, the proclaimed subject of the ‘Address to Two Candles’ eradicates or at least undermines the commercial element of the venture, aiding Cowley’s efforts in her anthology to turn what began as periodical poems into permanent fixtures of English letters in a way that reflect and shapes the age. The brief preface to the poem remarks, ‘At a Cottage on an eminence, Anna Matilda had ordered the Candles to be removed from the Window, but the Night was dark; and recollecting the situation, she replaced’ and ‘addressed them’. This address reflects, like Dryden’s Religio Laici, that in the darkness, a ‘weary traveller may roam’ without a ‘guide’ (Cowley 1788: 4–5). Yet this is no philosophical or religious tract. The candles become symbols of hope for ‘an aged parent’ or ‘a child’

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 125

17/11/17 5:00 PM

126

tanya m. caldwell

who ‘Bemoans, forlorn, in yonder glades’. The humble candles are no ‘ignis false’ but a tribute to and embodiment of nature’s gifts: The rose, the violet, and the thyme That scent the Morning’s dewy shower, Combin’d their aromatic gifts, And form’d ye for the present hour. (Cowley 1788: 5) In these humble notes of the countryside are echoes of Dryden and Gray recast in a distinctly female framework. The ‘Adieu to Love’ and ‘The Pen’ as well as the Plains of Fontenoy poems follow, completing Anna Matilda’s presentation of English poetry. Pope condemned multiple women writers in The Dunciad (first published in 1722) in an effort to undermine their success. William Gifford’s 1797 satirical The Baeviad and The Maeviad’s focused attacks on the Della Cruscans is likewise a response to their destabilisation of literary traditions in general and Anna Matilda’s empowering of the female artist in particular. The impact of the Della Cruscans is betrayed in Gifford’s complaint that ‘from one end of the kingdom to the other, all was nonsense and Della Crusca’ (1797: xiii). Gifford’s efforts to undermine a movement that had affected ‘mass’ readership reveal his fears that the Della Cruscans were dismantling old hierarchies as their print phenomenon progressed: periodical poems became anthologies and more anthologies. Ironically part of and evidence of the success of this phenomenon were Gifford’s satires attempting to stymy these irrefutable changes in literary production, agency, and genre.17 One of Gifford’s main targets is ‘the mad jangle of Matilda’s lyre’, by which Cowley not only heightened the correspondence but through which she also affected change in the theatre under her own name. Her centrality to the Della Cruscan efforts as well as to the stage of her time in subtly bringing about fundamental shifts in artistic production, media, and consumption deserves still more attention. Angela Escott, Gillian Russell, and other commentators have begun to demonstrate how Cowley’s experimentation exploded paradigms and created space for women as artists and subjects. In assuming the mask of Anna Matilda and joining with an innovator like Bell to bring together the stage and poetic traditions, and past and present, Cowley goes far beyond engaging in an inexplicable racy correspondence. She demonstrates the powerful and long-term impact that periodical publications could have as they constantly metamorphosed and she showed what the most unassuming woman writer of the time could achieve.

Notes 1. There are no page numbers for the World. 2. Morison notes that ‘Under the editorship of Topham and printed by John Bell at his own establishment, Vol. 1, No. 1 of The World or Fashionable Gazetter came out on January 1, 1787’ (1981: 8). 3. Michael Gamer also notes the appeal to the Della Cruscans of Bell’s innovations and his determination to turn periodical publications into something more lasting (2003: 33). 4. Barbara Benedict’s Making the Modern Reader throughout traces role of miscellanies in establishing variety and novelty as central to reader demands.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 126

17/11/17 5:00 PM

hannah cowley and the periodical poem

127

5. Backscheider in her Chapter 5, ‘Friendship Poems’, traces the history of this genre, ‘the only significant form of poetry that eighteenth-century women inherited from women’ (2005: 175). 6. Backscheider discusses the tradition of women writers’ use of pseudonyms in EighteenthCentury Women Poets. For Hannah Cowley’s use of a pseudonym in a venture with the newspaper and theatre personality Henry Bate, see Caldwell 2012: 25–53. 7. Backscheider demonstrates throughout Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and their Poetry that women writers experimented with established traditions to the point of reclaiming some. She shows, for example, how ‘women were the major participants’ in the eighteenthcentury sonnet revival (2005: 316). 8. This ancestry is established in the periodical the Morning Post & Advertiser (Friday, 1 Mar 1776) with a poetic review of Cowley’s first play, The Runaway (1776). The playwright is compared to ‘ancient Sappho [who] charm’d the breast / With energy divine’ and can equally command the ‘tragic scene’ or (as Thalia, the muse of comedy, states in the poem) ‘reign / In comic and instructive lays’. 9. Carrie Smith and Sarah Werner, ‘John Bell: Bibliographic Nightmare’ (last accessed 1 Dec 2016). 10. Morison notes that Bell’s ‘British Theatre does not print a list of subscribers. The public appears to have generously supported the British Theatre, if we may judge by the reprints which later became necessary’ (1981: 93). 11. By this point in the exchange, the World recognises the importance of Della Crusca’s and Anna Matilda’s energy as a focal point for the second wave of Della Cruscan poetry and promises to gather the individual pieces into an anthology: Above Anna Matilda’s poem a brief epigraph reads ‘We pay no compliment to the Poems which have appeared under the signatures of Arley, Della Crusca, and Anna Matilda, in saying, that when the different pieces which have occasionally honoured this paper, shall be collected together – those Poems will form its happiest part’ (World 14 Aug 1787). 12. In 1695, Dryden publishes De Arte Graphica: The Art of Painting, By C. A. Du Fresnoy with Remarks. Translated into English, Together with an Original Preface containing A Parallel betwixt Painting and Poetry. By Mr. Dryden. (Dryden 1969: 37). 13. Benedict also quotes Pat Rogers’s claim that ‘advertising did much to create taste’ and was (this is Benedict now) ‘recognised as a quasi-literary genre, crawling over walls and corners, eating into newspapers and books, absorbing the physical and mental space writers might have filled with their own language’ (2007: 195). 14. The combination was a powerful one that attracted audiences drawn by the elements of the theatre as well as the sentimental novels of the period and the result was phenomenal. Knowles stresses that Della Cruscan poetry, ‘at heart a poetry of sensibility’ was also ‘selfconsciously theatrical and spectacular’ and people loved it. She quotes Werkmeister that ‘the extent of The World’s success has no precedent in the history of newspapers’ and that ‘every newspaper felt obliged to have at least one Della Cruscan among its contributors’. Knowles notes that ‘The World sold between 3000 and 4000 copies of each edition’ but many people would have access to each copy sold (2009: 30). 15. Gray’s collection not only reveals the editing process it has undergone but pays tribute to famous bygone authors. 16. Benedict calls these ‘thing-poems’ in her discussion of the phenomenon throughout the Restoration and eighteenth century (2007). 17. Gifford’s canon-forming efforts are explicit in fact in his introduction to The Maeviad. He begins by remarking that the former satire was ‘received more favourably than I expected’ with the result too that ‘Della Crusca appeared no more in the Oracle’. His ultimate triumph is that Milton and Pope resumed their superiority’ (1797: 65).

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 127

17/11/17 5:00 PM

128

tanya m. caldwell

Works Cited Backscheider, Paula R. 2005. Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Benedict, Barbara. 1996. Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. —. 2007. ‘Encounters with Object: Advertisements, Time, and Literary Discourse in the Early Eighteenth-Century Thing-Poem’. Eighteenth-Century Studies 40.2: 193–206. Caldwell, Tanya M. 2012. ‘Hannah Cowley, the Dilemma of the Female Playwright, and the Pseudonymous Prelude to Which is the Man?’ Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 27.1: 25–53. Cowley, Hannah. 1776. The Runaway. London. Dodsley; Becket and Cadell; Longman; and Carnan and Newbery. —. 1788. The Poetry of Anna Matilda. London: John Bell. —. 1795. The Town Before You. London: T. N. Longman. Dryden, John. 1969. The Works of John Dryden. Ed. Earl Miner and Vinton A. Dearing. Vol. 3. Berkeley: University of California Press. —. 1989. The Works of John Dryden. Ed. George R. Guffey, Alan Roper, Vinton A. Dearing, and A. E. Wallace Maurer. Vol. 20. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gamer, Michael. 2003. ‘“Bell’s Poetics”: The Baeviad, the Della Cruscans, the Book of The World’. The Satiric Eye: Forms of Satire in the Romantic Period. Ed. Steven E. Jones. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 31–53. Gifford, William. 1797. The Baviad and the Maeviad. London: J. Wright. Gray, Thomas. 1840. The Poetical Works of Thomas Gray. London: William Pickering. Knowles, Claire. 2009. Sensibility and Female Poetic Tradition, 1780–1860. Aldershot: Ashgate. Morison, Stanley. 1981. John Bell, 1745–1831: Bookseller, Printer, Publisher, Typefounder, Journalist, &c. Introd. Nicolas Barker. New York, London: Garland. Old Whig, or Consistent Protestant. 1735–8. London. Ovid. 1977. Heroides. Amores. Trans. Grant Showerman. Rev. G. P. Goold. Harvard University Press: Loeb Classical Library. Powell, Manushag N. 2012. Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Russell, Gillian. 2007. Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Carrie and Sarah Werner. ‘John Bell: Bibliographic Nightmare’ (last accessed 1 Dec 2016). The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure. 1747–1814. London. Werkmeister, Lucyle. 1963. The London Daily Press 1772–1792. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. The World, or Fashionable Gazette. 1787–97. London.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 128

17/11/17 5:00 PM

8 The LADY’S POETICAL MAGAZINE and the Fashioning of Women’s Literary Space Octavia Cox

Too long has Man, engrossing ev’ry art, Dar’d to reject the Female’s rightful part Lady’s Poetical Magazine 1 (1781)

T

he LADY’S POETICAL Magazine; or, Beauties of British Poetry (hereafter LPM) ran to four volumes, 1781–2, and was edited by James Harrison. The Harrison publishing house was a family affair: James’s uncle, Thomas, established the company in 1750; his father, also James, was involved in its running, as was his mother, Mary. The whole family’s livelihood depended on the commercial success of their ventures, including LPM; making money was paramount. According to the family record, James Harrison II was born in 1765, and died in 1847 (Harrison 1950: 6), making him only fifteen or sixteen years old when LPM was first published. He may have been precociously young, but Harrison clearly had his finger on the pulse of the market. The judgement of the House of Lords, of 22 February 1774, in the case of Donaldson v. Beckett, effectively ended perpetual copyright for British authors, meaning that publishers such as Harrison could take advantage of all the material which thereby became available.1 Selling collections of work previously published, whose popularity was already established, was now a relatively quick and easy way of turning a profit.2 ‘In the vast majority of cases’, Suarez notes, ‘poetical miscellanies were created as moneymaking endeavours’; ‘Miscellanies were an attractive, because potentially very profitable, product for booksellers at every level of the market’ as ‘there was usually no need to pay fees to any of the authors whose work was being used’ (2001: 218; 223–4). Harrison was one ‘of the first persons who embarked, with much spirit and upon such an extensive scale, in such a mode of publication’ (Rees 1896: 21). His first venture into this sphere was to edit the Novelist’s Magazine (1780–8), which ran to twenty-three volumes and was, according to Rees, ‘published weekly, at sixpence each’ (1896: 21). Apparently an ebullient character, Harrison determinedly went on to publish British Magazine and Review (1782–3) and Harrison’s British Classicks (1785–7). Evidently buoyed by the success of LPM, in the subsequent decade Harrison produced another magazine ostensibly aimed at women, Lady’s Pocket Magazine (1795–6?). Harrison has been called a ‘barometer’ of popular late eighteenth-century ‘taste’ (Gamer 2008: 173–4; Taylor 1993: 638), and his endeavours evidently were financially rewarding (the Harrison publishing company continued into the late twentieth century). His editorial agenda in LPM, however, broke with normal convention; he included more

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 129

17/11/17 5:00 PM

130

octavia cox

poetry by women than was standard in contemporary miscellanies, as well as a high proportion of original poetry by women. In this essay, I first interrogate the physical space that women writers occupy in LPM; compare LPM to other contemporary publications, in terms of creating a space for women writers (and readers); and consider LPM’s contribution to the canonisation of eminent women writers in the late eighteenth century. In the second part, I consider the poetry itself. I examine Harrison’s own poetic contributions in order to establish, in his own words, what ‘species of poetry he wishes to see cultivated’ (LPM 2 (1781): 1). I turn to the authoresses to explore how these writers define themselves, their voice, their space – both in familiar poems that had already been published extensively before LPM, and in the poetry original to it. I elucidate ways in which these women perform self-circumscription and attempt self-liberation. While financial prosperity was a real and pressing concern, Harrison did not allow commercial anxieties prevent him from fashioning a space for women writers to contest and challenge conventional authorial female-ness.3

LPM vs Contemporary Publications The 13–16 January 1781 issue of the London Chronicle advertised the first edition of ‘A New Magazine for the Ladies’ (issue 3764: 53). The material would be ‘Selected in the manner of Mr. Dodsley’s celebrated Collection.’ It cost one shilling per number, published monthly, with six numbers making up each volume (London Chronicle issue 3976 (23–5 May 1782): 499). Harrison states that it was called LPM for two reasons: first, ‘because it will not contain a single article improper for the perusal of the fair sex’; and second, crucially, ‘because it will include the productions of the Ladies, which are wholly omitted in all the editions of the Poets, though many of them would obtain infinite honour to the most distinguished writers of the other sex’ (issue 3764: 53). Harrison might have had in mind compendious anthologies such as William Creech’s British Poets (1773–6) or Samuel Johnson’s recent Lives of the Poets (1779–81), which only included male authors. It was not strictly true, however, that women were ‘wholly omitted’ from poetical collections: Robert Shiells’s Lives of the Poets (1753), for instance, contains several women; and James Elphinston’s Collection of Poems, From the Best Authors (1764) includes poems by Anne Finch and Judith Cowper/Madan. Harrison wanted to plug the gap, and remedy female exclusion from the literary sphere; or, at least, he wanted to advertise LPM as filling a perceivable gap in the market, by promoting it as rectifying a dearth. Overall, ‘The whole [of LPM will] comprehend . . . a complete library of entertaining poetry’; thus, Harrison makes it clear that women’s poetry must be included in order to have ‘a complete library’. The implication of the assertion that female authors rank alongside ‘the most distinguished writers of the other sex’ is that male readers should read their poetry too. The LPM ‘is therefore equally calculated for the amusement of the Ladies, and of all such Gentlemen as are rational enough to prefer the elegant and entertaining, to the dull, licentious, and uninteresting parts of poetry’. An appeal to male readers was not in itself unusual. The first issue of Jasper Goodwill’s Ladies Magazine: or, the Universal Entertainer (1749–53), for example, declared itself a ‘profitable Entertainment for young Masters and Misses’ (1 (18 Nov 1749): 1). However, the later Lady’s Magazine; or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex – which was first published a

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 130

17/11/17 5:00 PM

the fashioning of women’s literary space

131

decade before LPM and outlived Harrison’s publication (1770–1832) – was targeted explicitly at female readers. Its ‘Address to the Fair Sex’ noted that: ‘The press groans with monthly collections calculated for the peculiar entertainment or improvement of men . . . it is something surprising that no periodical production should at present exist calculated for your particular amusement’ (1 (Aug 1770): 2). Perhaps to distinguish LPM from the Lady’s Magazine, or perhaps so as not to discourage potential male purchasers, Harrison stressed that the LPM was ‘equally calculated’ for both sexes. Further evidence that Harrison wanted to emphasise LPM as a collection of poetical beauties comes from the way in which its subtitle, Beauties of British Poetry, appears more prominently throughout than the title’s first half: at the top of each page of the body of LPM is, written in capitals, ‘BEAUTIES OF POETRY’; and the layout on the title page has the second half emboldened to a much greater extent, and in a clearer font, than the first half. Those who contributed to LPM viewed its remit in similar terms. In the preface to her Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous (1793), Mary Hays wrote that ‘The Invocation to the Nightingale has been inserted in Harrison’s Collection of British Poetry’ (1793: ix–x). Hays’s poem was original to LPM, and her first published item (Walker 2006: 23–4). Clearly, she viewed herself as having contributed to a publication that emphasised collecting ‘British Poetry’ above poetry only for ‘Ladies’; she does not refer to it as a magazine specifically for women. So why affix ‘Lady’s Poetical Magazine’ to the title at all? Harrison may have had a commercial motive, given the ever-expanding market of female readers; Johnson had remarked on 29 April 1778, rather disparagingly, that ‘all our ladies read now, which is a great extension’ (Boswell 1980: 979). Harrison was nothing if not ‘economically astute’ (Taylor 1993: 637). Other previous publishers had used the idea of branding collections as being for ‘ladies’ as a marketing ploy. Despite its title, for instance, the Ladies Miscellany, dated 1718, contains only one poem by a woman – ‘Ode to Hygeia’ by ‘Mrs [Susanna] Centlivre’ – and seems merely to have been a ruse for repackaging and eking out a profit from Edmund Curll’s unsold stock, and an advertising platform for other books he had recently published.4 Harrison might also have promoted his production as a ‘Magazine’ to tap into the growing demand for publications with the title: having plateaued between 1760 and 1780, the number of publications entitled ‘Magazine’ increased by half again in 1790, and doubled in 1800.5 Harrison differentiated LPM from other productions on the market in numerous ways: for instance, he set out to demarcate women’s space in LPM by attributing the author and her/his sex to each and every contribution, which was not standard practice at the time. In Collection of the Best Modern Poems (1771), for instance, no authors are ascribed, only each poem’s title, including poems that are also in LPM (such as Elizabeth Carter’s ‘Written at Midnight in a Thunder Storm’ and David Mallet’s ‘Edwin and Emma’). Elsewhere, the sex of authors was not plainly delineated. In Dodsley’s Collection of Poems, for example, ‘Town Eclogues’ (1748, vol. 3: 274–98) is listed as ‘By the Right Hon. L. M. W. M.’, so attention is not drawn to the fact that she is female. This contrasts with LPM (4 (1782): 182–200), which states that the poem is ‘By Lady Mary Wortley Montague [sic].’ Harrison ascribes a gendered identity to the poem’s author, whereas Dodsley does not. The vast majority of poems contributed to miscellanies during the long eighteenth century were not attributed: of the 40,000 poems entered into the Digital Miscellanies Index, 16006 (40 per cent)

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 131

17/11/17 5:00 PM

132

octavia cox

are unattributed. By contrast, the name, and gender, of all contributors to LPM is explicit.6 In providing gendered attributions for all the selected poems, Harrison is making a decided statement: both that women merit space in such collections, and that their identities deserve to be celebrated publicly. In his ‘Postscript’, Harrison explains, rather mealy-mouthedly, the reason behind his decision: From a conviction that the Publick are in general desirous to be acquainted with those who endeavour to contribute to their entertainment, the Editor of this Collection has as much as possible gratified a curiosity . . . by affixing to each production the NAME of its respective Author[.] (LPM 4 (1782): 479) In a review of LPM that appeared in Harrison’s British Magazine for May 1783 (2: 357–9), the writer, probably Harrison himself, remarked that LPM, by affixing to each production the name of its respective author, was ‘Contrary to all other collections we have hitherto seen.’ Harrison might have been rather disingenuous in claiming that LPM differs from ‘all other collections’, but he continues the tone of the advertisement by maintaining his conviction that the public should be acquainted with female authors. Although trailblazing to some extent, then, Harrison was not the first male editor to proclaim that women deserved an equal literary status with men. In 1755, George Colman and Bonnell Thornton had produced a poetical anthology, Poems by Eminent Ladies (hereafter PEL-1755), which was the first substantial collection of women’s poetry (Lavoie 2009: 55). In the preface, the editors stated that they wanted the compendium to be ‘proof that great abilities are not confined to the men’ and that ‘genius often glows with equal warmth . . . in the breast of a female’ (1 (1755): iii). Not everyone welcomed the innovation. In its only known review (Forster 1990: 69), an anonymous response in the Monthly Review for June 1755 was dismissive: the entire review reads: ‘As the materials that compose these volumes are collected from books, &c. formerly printed, and most of them very common, we need say nothing more of them’ (12: 512). As its name suggests, PEL-1755 only included poetry ‘by’ women. The editors claim the ‘remarkable circumstance, that there is scarce one Lady, who has contributed to fill these volumes, who was not celebrated by her contemporary poets . . . [the all male] . . . Cowley, Dryden, Roscommon, Creech, Pope, or Swift’ (1 (1755): iii). The implication is not so much that it should be a ‘remarkable circumstance’ that women poets were ‘celebrated’ by renowned, male, poets; but that ‘celebrated’ authoresses should now have to be reintroduced to the public. Of course, however, using the authority of eminent men to judge the worth of the poetesses still works to enshrine the standard that men and their approbation measure poetry and its success. PEL-1755 grouped all poems alphabetically by author, and included a biography of each author at the beginning of every section. Perhaps the reason for affixing biographies was to expand knowledge of these authors beyond the limited coterie of ‘contemporary poets’, into the wider sphere of the reading public. In contrast, LPM does not group its entries together by author – or, seemingly, any other organised structure – and neither does it include a biography for any author, either female or male, whether previously unpublished or a household name. Lavoie argues that Colman and Thornton used organisation by surname, introductory paragraphs, and exegetic footnotes (all revolutionary editorial choices in 1755) to raise the status of the

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 132

17/11/17 5:00 PM

the fashioning of women’s literary space

133

women poets they included and, concomitantly, themselves (2009: 64–7). Harrison’s omission of biography, on the other hand, suggests that he was less concerned with the lives of the individual authors per se, and was more interested in fashioning a space in which poetry by women and men visibly sat alongside each other, thus equalising their status. The editors of PEL-1755 and LPM may have had a financial motivation for marketing their books to women, but this does not mean that they were not also attempting to fashion a literary space for women writers and readers. Not all editors of poetical collections targeted at ‘ladies’ evinced any such concern. We might, for instance, compare a work that appeared roughly in between these two: Oliver Goldsmith’s Poems for Young Ladies (1767; hereafter PYL). Goldsmith divides the poems into three parts, ‘Devotional, Moral, and Entertaining’, the order of which is telling in ‘comprehending the three great duties of life’ (iv). The book is ‘for’ young ladies, and definitely not ‘by’ young ladies. Indeed, women are completely denied a literary space in Goldsmith’s anthology: its title proclaims it to be ‘a Collection of the Best Pieces in Our Language’, yet not a single one is by a woman. The Monthly Review, which had been so sniffy about PEL-1755 only including poems ‘formerly printed’, had no such qualms about Goldsmith’s collection. Rather, the opposite was the case. The Monthly’s review of PYL, in March 1767, happily lists several of the wellknown poems included, and promotes them as ‘pieces as innocence may read without a blush’ (36: 240). Despite billing themselves as for women, PYL, Curll, and their ilk, underplay writing by women. Harrison seems to be unusual in insisting more than most contemporaries that women readers should be able to experience good work composed by others of their sex. Goldsmith sets out his agenda for PYL in the preface: he claims that an unwitting young lady will read the volume seduced by the idea of being amused, but will be duped into acquiring knowledge; ‘while she courts only entertainment, [she will] be deceived into wisdom’ (iii). The preface opens by stating: Doctor Fordyce’s excellent Sermons for young women in some measure gave rise to the following compilation. In that work, where he so judiciously points out all the defects of female conduct to remedy them, and all the proper studies which they should pursue, with a view to improvement, Poetry is one to which he particularly would attach them. (iii) Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women had been published in the previous year (1766). Goldsmith follows Fordyce’s prescriptions precisely in including only male writers. ‘Your business chiefly is to read Men’, Fordyce instructed, ‘in order to make yourselves agreeable and useful’ and ‘lead to your principal ends as Women’ (1766, vol. 2: 11). Making oneself ‘agreeable and useful’, presumably to men, was what Fordyce considered the majority of women’s reading should encompass. ‘Poetry of all kinds’ is recommended, but only ‘where a strict regard is paid to decorum’ (1766, vol. 2: 16). We might guess how Jane Austen felt, a generation later, about Fordyce’s Sermons from her decision to have the pompous and sanctimonious Mr Collins, in Pride and Prejudice (1813), read it aloud to provide ‘instruction’ to the Bennet daughters (2004: 52). Although Austen elsewhere admired Goldsmith’s own work, in editing PYL he might well be among those against whom she railed in Northanger Abbey (1818), as

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 133

17/11/17 5:00 PM

134

octavia cox

‘the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator’, and imagines that he should be ‘eulogized by a thousand pens’ (2003: 23). John Milton and Alexander Pope are included in PYL, and three Joseph Addison poems that Goldsmith includes were originally from the Spectator (1711–12; 1714).7 Perhaps rather surprisingly, given his palpable hostility to female authorship, Goldsmith was sometime editor of the Lady’s Magazine; or Polite Companion for the Fair Sex (1759–63). One should also point out, however, that Harrison’s collection hardly represents a radical departure in its choice of male authors. LPM includes more than a quarter of the poems, and most of the authors, featured in PYL. Of the thirty poems in PYL, eight are included in LPM; of the nineteen men in the former, sixteen also appear in the latter. There is also overlap between the contents of PEL-1755 and LPM: of the eighteen poetesses featured in PEL-1755, exactly one-third (six) feature in LPM. In total, the authors who had appeared in PEL-1755 contribute nine poems to LPM. Lavoie argues that Harrison ‘borrowed older materials from the first edition of PEL to include in LPM’ (1999: 279). That is unfair to Harrison, though, since he only re-used three poems from PEL-1755, all of them well known and popular.8 If anything, Harrison’s choices suggest that he was trying to create a space for female writers different from that established in PEL-1755. This is further evidenced by the fact that there are a number of original poems contributed by women writers to LPM: of the thirtythree poems by women included overall, I deduce that seven of them were original (or, at least, seldom or scarce enough printed that they would be unfamiliar to readers), which is over a fifth. Unlike PEL-1755, which aimed to include poetry by relatively ‘celebrated’ authors (1: iii), originality was one of Harrison’s stated aims. In the London Chronicle advertisement for 13–16 January 1781, he had promised that LPM would include ‘a great variety of original pieces’ (issue 3764: 53). In calling it a ‘Magazine’, Harrison highlights LPM’s inclusion of ‘original pieces’ alongside reprinted content (a characteristic of most magazines of the period). Although in some ways Harrison broadly adhered to standard contemporary editorial practices, then, he was unusual in situating original poetry attributed to women alongside celebrated, well-known poetry by men; implying, albeit obliquely, that contemporary female poets should be considered as equals to, and aspire to the reputations of, well-established male authors. A poem I surmise is original to LPM, titled ‘On A Supposed Slight from A Friend’ by ‘Miss Roberts’ (2 (1781): 189–90), for example, appears in the same volume as Pope’s ‘Universal Prayer’ (2 (1781): 15–16) and Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ (2 (1781): 410–16).9 Of course, in some ways providing a space for women authors in which they are seen to stand shoulder to shoulder with men can be seen as proto-feminist in implying equality between the sexes; but, on the other hand, it again supposes that poetry by men is the standard by which women poets should also be measured. LPM influenced subsequent volumes aimed at women, which capitalised on the space forged by Harrison. In the mid-1780s, an expanded edition of PEL-1755, Poems by the Most Eminent Ladies of Great Britain and Ireland, which claimed to have made ‘considerable Alterations, Additions, and Improvements’, was ‘RePublished’ (hereafter PEL-c.1785).10 PEL-c.1785 clearly used LPM as a template. Only five poems by women in LPM did not appear in PEL-c.1785 (and all the poems in LPM which appear to be original are transposed into PEL-c.1785). There is only one female author in LPM who does not also provide material for PEL-c.1785 (Elizabeth

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 134

17/11/17 5:00 PM

the fashioning of women’s literary space

135

Tollet). If it were not clear from the content of the two publications that PEL-c.1785 lifted material from LPM, then it would be evident from their shared typographical idiosyncrasies. Both, for example, attribute ‘Invocation to the Nightingale’ to ‘Miss Heys’ (LPM 2 (1781): 464–5; PEL-c.1785, vol. 1: 109–10). She would go on to publish various works as ‘Mary Hays’, of which the most radical was an Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (1798). Additionally, both have peculiar attributions of Mary Whateley/Darwall.11 LPM, therefore, helped to fashion a space for women’s poetry distinct from that of previously established, ‘eminent’, women, in part by containing voices unheard of before. This space was later colonised by the offspring of that mid-century publication; PEL-c.1785 attracted 396 subscribers, including ‘cultural luminaries’ such as Joshua Reynolds and Horace Walpole (Suarez 2001: 225). Ezell has identified that the two PEL ‘volumes prepare the way for the later nineteenth-century critics’ and anthologists’ demarcation of a “feminine” literary sphere’ (1993: 117). LPM was foundational, then, in contributing to the canonising of ‘eminent’ women writers at the end of the eighteenth century. In highlighting women’s right to share public literary space with men, Harrison might have had noble aims, but the content did not entirely match the rhetoric.12 In the first volume (1781), ten of the eighty-four poems are by women (11.9 per cent). Of the 474 pages on which poetry appears, poetry by women appears on only thirtyseven of them (7.8 per cent). In contrast, Mallet’s ‘Amyntor and Theodora’ covers more pages than all the women’s entries combined (1 (1781): 218–58 and therefore forty-one pages or 8.6 per cent). In the second volume (also 1781), six of the sixty-one poems are by women (9.8 per cent). Of 476 pages on which poetry appears, poetry by women appears on only fourteen of them (a miniscule 2.9 per cent). Harrison’s own poem, ‘Albina and Lothario’, covers the same number of pages (2 (1781): 1–14), despite claiming in its ‘Advertisement’ that it was merely a ‘little piece’. Along with Harrison, there are six other male authors whose poems cover the same, or a greater, number of pages. In the third volume (1782), a paltry three of seventy-eight poems are by women (3.8 per cent). Of 474 pages on which poetry appears, poetry by women appears on only eleven of them (an even more miniscule 2.3 per cent). Volume 4 (also 1782), however, is better in terms of female inclusion: fourteen of sixty-four poems are by women (21.9 per cent). Of 474 pages on which poetry appears, poetry by women appears on eighty-one of them (17.1 per cent). Perhaps the space afforded women is greatest in the final volume because Harrison was, by then, more sure of his readership. Or, perhaps Harrison had, by then, included most of the men he felt he had to incorporate; an impression also created by his Novelist’s Magazine (1780–8). A similar pattern emerges from the content of the Novelist’s Magazine, of which Rees estimates that ‘at one time 12,000 copies of each number were sold, weekly’ (1896: 22). There, no contribution states it is by a woman until Vol. IX (when Sarah Fielding’s David Simple (1744) makes an appearance). In the final volume, however, four of the six novels are by women.13 In LPM, the overall percentage of poems by women is 11.9 per cent. In each of the four volumes of the LPM, the percentage of pages covered by the writing of a female poet is less than the number of poems contributed by women, which means that Harrison chose shorter contributions by women. There are over 140 male authors, but only twenty-three women authors in total; which means that there are almost six male authors for each female one. That might look like lopsided representation, and indeed it is, but one must consider the context. Of the

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 135

17/11/17 5:00 PM

136

octavia cox

3,984 different authors whom the Digital Miscellanies Index has so far identified as having contributed to eighteenth-century miscellanies, 302 writers are known to be women (7.6 per cent). In other words, Harrison allotted in LPM a larger space (by almost one-third) for women’s poetry than seems to have been the norm.

Women and their Writing within the Lady’s Poetical Magazine Perhaps Harrison also chose to call his production a ‘Magazine’ as a signpost for how readers should engage with its contents. In a poetical ‘Magazine’, the meaning of individual poems is re-mediated by their juxtaposition with those that precede and succeed them. How do the poems across the volumes of LPM speak to each other, and what are we to take from these engagements? The May 1783 review of LPM, in Harrison’s British Magazine, determines to leave it to readers to ‘judge of [Harrison’s] claim to a place in the Temple of the Muses from . . . The four introductory poems’, affixed to the beginning of each volume (2: 357). This review, despite the writer’s protestations against any ‘suspicion of . . . partiality’, was a puff piece designed to advertise Harrison and LPM. The British Magazine claims that ‘The first of these poems at once points allegorically to the nature of the Collection’ (2: 327). LPM’s ‘Introductory Address’ (1 (1781): 1–4) opens by stating that women have been denied their ‘rightful’ place as creatures who have valuable minds: Too long has Man, engrossing ev’ry art, Dar’d to reject the Female’s rightful part; As if to him, alone, had been confin’d, Heav’n’s greatest gift, a scientifick mind. (1 (1781): 1) Harrison explicitly inserts his production into the discussion that had raged throughout eighteenth-century publications: whether or not women were inherently different from men in what they were capable of mastering, and, as a corollary, whether or not literature for and by women should therefore be confined to particular ‘sexed’ spheres. The question at stake, in other words, was whether women should write about putatively ‘masculine’ topics, such as matters ‘scientifick’. In Tatler no. 172 (16 May 1710), Richard Steele had written: I am sure, I do not mean it an Injury to Women, when I say there is a Sort of Sex in Souls . . . the Soul of a Man and that of a Woman are made very unlike, according to the Employments for which they are designed. (2: 444) The term ‘Sex in Souls’ was subsequently taken up by other periodicals when discussing women and writing (Shevelow 1989: 93–101, 155–9, 173–4). Thus, Harrison is directly opposing himself to Steele when he writes, ‘let the smooth and tranquil paths to [poetic] fame . . . Be, as the soul, to neither sex confin’d.’ Provocatively, he continues: ‘Where is the wretch’ who would ‘deny’ that ‘female skill with boasted man’s may vie!’, daring readers to repudiate this claim. ‘Then why’, he asks confrontationally, ‘refuse them [women] to an equal share?’ In using ‘them’, women are still othered; the voice is male, speaking to men. While Harrison’s assertion that past treatment

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 136

17/11/17 5:00 PM

the fashioning of women’s literary space

137

of women was ‘Unjust’, and should be regarded with ‘shame’ suggests that he promotes a female-friendly agenda, nevertheless he retains the traditional model, of active masculinity and passive femininity, in suggesting that men should ‘let’ women ‘share the road to fame’ (1 (1781): 1–2). This refrain, that women should be allowed – ‘let’ – to do things by men, is repeated throughout LPM in poetry authored by both sexes.14 It is perhaps most peculiarly played out in Anna Laetitia Aikin’s/Barbauld’s ‘The Mouse’s Petition’ (1 (1781): 423–5), which includes the lines: ‘Let not thy strong oppressive force / A free-born mouse detain’ (1 (1781): 423). Even in this call to recognise living creatures as ‘free-born’, the speaker still entreats, in a supplicatory, submissive tone, to ‘Let’ the ‘free-born’ be free (see Ready 2004). ‘Happy for England’, Harrison continues, ‘were each female mind, / To science more, and less to pomp inclin’d’ (1 (1781): 2). Here Harrison again uses language that had long been part of the discussion about what is desirable in women. A decade later, in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) Mary Wollstonecraft would also lament that ‘cumberous pomp supplied the place of domestic affections’, believing that ‘it is not the enchantment of literary pursuits, or the steady investigation of scientific subjects, that leads women astray from duty’ (1995: 232, 265). Harrison holds up Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, as an exemplar of ‘the flame of virtue’. Charlotte was a prolific, wide-ranging reader: her library eventually numbered more than 40,000 volumes, in various languages, and in subjects including theology, philosophy, travel, history, belles-lettres, and science (Campbell Orr 2002). Harrison then declares of the Queen, ‘Behold, in HER, a scientifick wife!’ (1 (1781): 2). So, while the poem opens by boldly stating that ‘a scientifick mind’ should be ‘to neither sex confin’d’, it justifies this by reference to traditional gendered roles. As Hansen notes, Harrison reintroduces the concept of gender, the importance of which had been denied in the previous lines (2013: 54). But he was not unusual, for his time, in advocating female advancement while concomitantly assuming gender stereotypes: Wollstonecraft also promoted female education on the grounds that it would make women better wives and mothers. Harrison’s approval of women’s capability in scientific fields is supported by his inclusion of Tollet’s ‘Microcosm’ (4 (1782): 431–8), with its scientific references; for example, to Robert Hooke’s illustrations of insects in Micrographia, 1665, ‘in the microscope thou canst descry / The gnat’s sharp spear, the muscles of a fly’ (4 (1782): 435; see Fara 2002). Harrison closes the ‘Introductory Address’ by self-consciously referring to the ‘Great . . . task’ that he has ‘assign’d’ himself in creating LPM: he describes the ‘task’, of plucking up all the best poetry without leaving anything that could be potentially corrupting, as being like weeding a garden; he must ‘traverse Nature’s garden all around’, and not ‘leave a single flow’r . . . Which owns a scent less fragrant than the air; / Least it’s foul breath contaminate the whole, / And . . . poison of the soul’ (1 (1781): 3). Using lapsarian imagery, he promises there will be no devilish snakes in the grass, so that ‘howev’r incautiously she tread’, the female reader cannot ‘place her foot upon the adder’s head’ (1 (1781): 4). With self-congratulation, Harrison exhorts his readers, to ‘view’ his ‘skilful’ work ‘With rapture’ and ‘deem’ it to be ‘a blessing to the Fair!’ (1 (1781): 4). As elsewhere, traditional imagery is reinforced; female readers will be chaperoned through the ‘garden’ of LPM, and will not be permitted the – potentially dangerous – freedom of an Eve.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 137

17/11/17 5:00 PM

138

octavia cox

Harrison’s poem anticipates John Duncombe’s ‘Feminead; Or, Female Genius’ (4 (1782): 463–74), the final poem in LPM’s final volume – the two acting like bookends – which is an encomium in praise of women poets, and criticises ‘lordly man’, the ‘Tyrant of verse’ who denies ‘the female right’ to ‘the Muse’s tributary bay’ (4 (1782): 463). The way Duncombe suggests that men should ‘Admire’, ‘praise’, and ‘Tell’ women that they ‘charm’, ‘shine’, and are ‘divine’ (4 (1782): 463) is, however, couched in decorous, objectifying terms. Duncombe insists that we do not need to ‘rove’ ‘from our own Britain’ to find female ‘genius’, although he praises Sappho, the Ancient Greek poetess, for her ‘tuneful lyre’ (4 (1782): 466). Sappho is also the only female poet mentioned in Madan’s ‘Progress of Poetry’ (1 (1781): 135–43), which the Monthly Review for April 1783 judged to be ‘a muster-roll of some of the principal poets in chronological order, from Homer down to [George] Granville and [Nicholas] Rowe’ (68: 355–6). The review does not question that ‘the principal poets’ of the country do not include a single woman. Duncombe expressly approves Madan’s ‘polish’d taste’, noting that ‘Praise well-bestow’d adorns her glowing lines’ (4 (1782): 469). Cowper/Madan was obviously proud of Duncombe’s comments; she transcribed his lines about her into her commonplace book (MS.Eng. misc.d.636). It is worth noting here that LPM also includes a poem, ‘Verses Addressed to Mrs Digby’ (2 (1781): 461–3), by ‘Mrs Collier’, seemingly original, which celebrates another British woman’s poetry.15 Echoing Duncombe’s praise of Madan’s ‘polish’, Collier aspires to ‘reach’ Elizabeth Carter’s ‘polish’d’ and ‘charming line[s]’: ‘O Carter! could I reach thy polish’d verse’ (2 (1781): 463). At the close of ‘Feminead’, Duncombe meets a ‘maid’ who praises him for writing the first poem to champion the female poet’s ‘cause’: be this thy praise and pride, That thou, of all the numerous tuneful throng, First in our cause hast fram’d thy gen’rous song. (4 (1782): 474) He thus implies that women should be grateful for the attention he has shown them. Jones argues that ‘Duncombe’s Feminiad . . . though celebratory, contributes to an aesthetic orthodoxy’ (1990: 141). While it, too, celebrates female writers, Harrison’s poem, likewise, ultimately propounds a conventional view of gender relations. As Bonnell has noted, Harrison’s poems in volumes 2 to 4 describe the traditional arc of a woman’s life, from premarital, to connubial, to maternal concerns (2008: 323). In its prefatory ‘Advertisement’, Harrison remarks that ‘Albina and Lothario; Or, The Fatal Seduction. A Moral Tale’ is ‘a specimen of that species of poetry he wishes to see cultivated by persons of superior genius and learning’. Note the gender neutrality of ‘persons’. Albina’s is a cautionary tale for female readers, ‘Approach your Poet—fain would he relate, / (To guard from ills like her’s) Albina’s fate’, equally, it is a cautionary tale for male readers, ‘But, to compleat the purpose of these rhymes, / And shun Lothario’s woes—avoid his crimes!’ (2 (1781): 2). Lothario seduces, impregnates, then abandons, Albina; presented as a thoughtless cad, he wastes his time and money on women, wine, and gambling. In describing Lothario as unable to ‘see . . . the latent thorn beneath the flow’rs’ (2 (1781): 7), Harrison harks back to his own ‘Introductory Address’, in which he claimed that in LPM ‘each fair-one may adorn / Her brow with roses, fearless of the thorn’ (1 (1781): 3), because potential ‘thorn[s]’

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 138

17/11/17 5:00 PM

the fashioning of women’s literary space

139

have been expunged. Thus, Harrison rates men and women as equally susceptible to being pricked by a hidden ‘thorn’ among flowers. In this poem, Harrison counters the implication within his ‘Introductory Address’ that only Eves are susceptible to nasties hidden in gardens. Within his own poems, then, Harrison encourages readers to read across volumes in order to challenge apparent meanings. In ‘Conjugal Felicity’ (3 (1782): 1–13), Harrison describes parents educating their children. The wife, with conventional feminine meekness and admiration: with mute attentions sits, And hears her little family receive The seeds of virtue and of science mix’d, Instructive, by the skilful father’s care[.] (3 (1782): 6) Although ‘mute’ during this lesson, elsewhere, she does not ‘neglect to give advice, / Such as she can’ (3 (1782): 6). Harrison qualifies her abilities in teaching: she gives guidance ‘Such as she can.’ The poem also describes how Britons should be proper patriots, and revere the: firm protectors of their country’s rights, When despots would have made a heavy yoke, And bow’d them to the earth! (3 (1782): 4) ‘Dunnotter Castle’ (1 (1781): 200–3) is attributed to ‘Miss Scott’. She has been mistakenly identified as Mary Scott (Holladay 1984: x (f.2)), but it is in fact by Susan Scott, later Carnegie (1743–1821). It had been published in another collection, Lessons in Reading (1780) only a year before it appeared in LPM.16 The poem recounts a moment of triumph in the castle’s history, when, during the Civil War, Ogilvie of Barras, Dunnottar’s lieutenant-governor, refused to surrender to Cromwell’s forces. Illustrious Caledonians, patriots bold! With joy your heroism I rehearse, And give your mem’ry all I can—a verse. (1 (1781):201) Scott/Carnegie celebrates those who are ‘patriots bold’; but instead of doing something heroic herself, she does ‘all I can’, which is ‘rehearse’ the ‘heroism’ of others in ‘verse’, insinuating that the way young women can be ‘patriots’ is to live vicariously through the ‘mem’ry’ of such ‘heroism’. When she invokes to her ‘aid’ the ‘Muse’ of ‘flowing verse’, Scott/Carnegie adopts a traditional feminine passivity in describing her writing. Scott’s/Carnegie’s poem celebrated, in verse, past glories; in his poem in the final volume – ‘A Monody to the Memory of the Seven Innocents . . . Who Were Consumed by Fire . . . January 18, 1782’ (4 (1782): 1–5) – Harrison laments present distress through alluding to past verse. This fire actually occurred, so this poem would have felt very contemporary to readers. The poem opens, ‘Ah! whither, “goddess of the tearful eye,” / Sadly mournful dost thou stray’ (4 (1782): 1). The quotation might

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 139

17/11/17 5:00 PM

140

octavia cox

be from James Grainger’s poem, ‘Solitude’, which appeared in the previous volume (3 (1782): 436–44; 441). Harrison may also be alluding to Joseph Warton’s wellknown ‘Ode to Fancy’, which referred to ‘matron Melancholy, / Goddess of the tearful eye’ (Dodsley 1748, vol. 3: 78–84; 80–1). Melancholy was often characterised as feminine in eighteenth-century poetry – another example is ‘Black Melancholy’ in Pope’s ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, 1717 (Twickenham, vol. 2: 333 (l.165)) – hence, in referring to Melancholy as ‘goddess’, Harrison’s poem is in keeping with the predominant gendering of this affliction, which continues into, for example, John Keats’s depiction in ‘Ode on Melancholy’ (1820). ‘Effusions of Melancholy’ (1 (1781): 443–4) by ‘Miss Roberts’ (which appears to be original to LPM), reverses this with melancholic ‘black Despair’ characterised as a male ‘tyrant’, to whose ‘will’ she is ‘Obedient’: That gloomy tyrant now resumes his seat, O’er my sad soul extends his racking sway; Obedient to his will my pulses beat[.] (1 (1781): 443) Roberts is oppressed by masculine Melancholy; the only respite she foresees is death, where she will ‘Reach the bright mansions of eternal rest’ (1 (1781): 444). Despite this reversal, however, both poems ultimately reinforce traditional gender stereotypes: Harrison’s feminine Melancholy is a ‘Dear Sympathetick maid’ (4 (1782): 2); Roberts’s masculine Melancholy is aggressive and overbearing, and leaves her feeling ‘suppress’d’ (1 (1781): 443). More generally speaking, in LPM, conformist, conventional rhetoric is not confined to male writers. Sally Carter’s ‘Hymn to Prosperity’ (3 (1782): 257), which seems to be an original contribution, is a banal catalogue of the qualities she aspires to possess: O bless me with an honest mind, Above all selfish ends; Humanely warm to all mankind, And cordial to my friends. (3 (1782): 257) Meanwhile, Elizabeth Rowe’s popular ‘Love and Friendship’ (4 (1782): 298–300) stages a dialogue in which two women discuss whether female friendship or romantic love should be one’s muse. That these two women have a right to, and are perfectly capable to write, poetry is taken as read; and yet still, Rowe’s poem would circumscribe women’s poetic space. That women’s poetry might encompass other topics, like politics or war, is ostensibly inconceivable. Other contributions, however, explicitly push against acceptance of conventions, such as Wortley Montagu’s ‘Town Eclogues’ (4 (1782): 182–200), which was ironically described as ‘too womanish’ by Horace Walpole (Grundy 1999: 417).17 This poem jousts with Pope’s ‘Rape of the Lock’ (LPM 3 (1782): 192–215) – and, while Wortley Montagu was less censorious than Pope was of women who lived with double binds she understood, nevertheless, she was equally as sharp a critic of the society in which they lived (Grundy 2006: 184–96). In ‘Rape of the Lock’, Thalestris rages against the futility of the labour that Belinda has put into her toilette in the famous lines:

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 140

17/11/17 5:00 PM

the fashioning of women’s literary space

141

Was it for this you took such constant care The bodkin, comb, and essence to prepare? For this your locks in paper durance bound? For this with tort’ring irons wreath’d around? For this with fillets strain’d your tender head, And bravely bore the double loads of lead? (3 (1782): 208–9) Wortley Montagu alludes to these lines, when Roxana, a rebuffed member of ‘the court’, asks: ‘Was it for this, that I these roses wear, / For this new-set the jewels for my hair?’ (4 (1782): 183). Her poem is a satire on those who seek preferment at the expense of their own sense of self, ‘For thee, ah! what for thee did I resign? / My pleasures, passions, all that e’er was mine’ (4 (1782): 183). In ‘Rape of the Lock’, Pope plays with eighteenth-century conventions of Virgilian epic translation in the construction ‘Was it for this’ – the same convention that William Wordsworth later developed in the opening line of his two-part Prelude (Hodgson 1991). There was, by the eighteenth century, a convention in English translations of the Aeneid to formulate Anna’s exclamation at her sister Dido’s suicide thus. In the popular eighteenthcentury translation by Joseph Trapp, for instance, Anna asks ‘Was it for This, / My Sister?’ (1731, vol. 2: 274 (bk IV, ll. 895–6)). Pope undermines Belinda by linguistically comparing her plight with Dido’s.18 Pope draws on eighteenth-century conventions of language for epic translation, in order to stretch the play of his ‘mock-heroick’; similarly, Wortley Montagu uses the same formal construction to riff on Pope’s mockery in her mock-georgic poem. Wortley Montagu shows off her poetic credentials by manipulating ‘high’ literary forms and engaging in politics. Other writers within LPM might not be as overt as Wortley Montagu, but their commitment to contesting gender-norms should not be overlooked. Frances Greville’s ‘Prayer for Indifference’ (LPM 1 (1781): 183–5) was, according to Lonsdale, ‘the most celebrated poem by a woman in the period’ (1989: 190); and yet it challenged one of the fundamental aspects of accepted femininity: sensibility (see McGann 1996: 50–4; and Ingram 2011: 79–80). The eighteenth century saw the two become inextricably linked (see Ellis 1996); as, for example, when Fordyce enjoined women to exercise ‘virtuous sensibility on your part’ (1766, vol. 1: 53). Greville’s poem is sometimes described as a response to her difficult relationship with her husband (Burney 1889, vol. 1: 26). She examines the deep paradox of sensibility: that those ‘who have most to love have most to lose’ (in Hannah More’s words, in Sensibility (1782: 281), in response to Greville’s poem). Instead, Greville resolves: ‘Half-pleas’d, contented will I be, / Content but half to please’ (1 (1781): 185). This couplet breaks in half, with each line serving to highlight the injustice of a woman’s position: the first half concerns a woman being pleased, the second with a woman pleasing others. The first line shows the position that many women have to put up with – that they must choose to accept being ‘contented’ with what makes them only ‘Half-pleas’d’. The second, more controversial statement, is saying that from now on she will be ‘Content . . . to please’ others only by ‘half’ (especially her husband). Fordyce extols in woman ‘an example equally unexceptionable and pleasing’ (1766, vol. 1: 50); Greville subverts the idea that women should seek fully ‘to please’. Together these lines challenge the double standard contained in the inequality of society’s expectations about giving and

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 141

17/11/17 5:00 PM

142

octavia cox

receiving pleasure. Greville herself seems to have projected, perhaps even cultivated, a ‘masculine’ aura: her god-daughter, the novelist Fanny Burney, remarked that ‘Her understanding was truly masculine’ (1832, vol. 1: 56). Greville rejected oppressive femininity, as can be deduced from her unpublished, semi-autobiographical novel, in which Mrs Castletown defends female rationality, in a dialogue with the unpleasant Sir James Saville. Saville opines that he ‘hate[s] Sensible Women, & learned Women . . . Their learning is always inferior to that of a School Boy, & their Sense answers no purpose but to make them presumptuous and dogmatical. They have nothing to do but to be pretty, clean & good humoured.’ Castletown retorts: ‘Obedient you would have added’ (Rizzo 1994: 242). Todd argues that ‘Prayer for Indifference’ is not ‘questioning . . . sensibility’s worth or even . . . [expressing] . . . genuine uneasiness at its connection with femininity, but simply an elegant expression of the very quality it decried’ (1986: 61). More than this, however, Greville attempts to repudiate sensibility, to critique its dangers, even as she acknowledges that she struggles to do so. In questioning sensibility, Greville is de facto questioning femininity; and thus unsettling those who wished femininity to remain unquestioned. Isabella Howard responded to Greville with her own poem, ‘Fairy’s Answer to Mrs Greville’ (1 (1781): 186–8), which Harrison placed immediately after ‘Prayer for Indifference’. In Lonsdale’s words, Howard ‘stressed the positive aspects of “sensibility”’ (1989: 190). By including Grenville’s poem in LPM, Harrison opens up possibilities for his female readers to think about the way in which society conditions their ‘sensibility’; but, in directly following it with Howard’s response, he seems almost immediately to close them down again. The ‘spirit’ in Howard’s poem retorts: why she sends a prayer so new I cannot understand . . . No grain of cold Indifference Was ever yet ally’d to Sense . . . I obey, as others must, Those laws which Fate has made . . . [otherwise] what might be the horrid end[.] (1 (1781): 187–8) The spirit concludes: I dare not change a first decree, She’s doom’d to please, nor can be free! Such is the lot of Beauty. (1 (1781): 188) At first reading, this poem seems to endorse the status quo and to refute Greville’s questioning of a woman’s duty ‘to please’. Yet the tone somehow pulls against this, the resignation in ‘She’s doom’d to please . . . Such is the lot of Beauty’ problematises whether this statement is necessarily true. Moreover, by using the word ‘Beauty’ as a synonym for women, Howard is on one level poking fun at people who see women’s only role as adhering to artificial notions of ‘Beauty’, or that women must be viewed

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 142

17/11/17 5:00 PM

the fashioning of women’s literary space

143

as a collective entity. The poem’s final lines have the narrative voice remark that the spirit’s ‘words . . . Imprinted on my mind’ (1 (1781): 188), suggesting that the poet wishes to make a similar impression on readers, who, like Oberon, are left to reflect on whether they agree with the spirit. Hence, while Lonsdale is correct to say that the spirit, with ‘His little voice’, might emphasise ‘the positive aspects of “sensibility”’, it is not clear that the poem as a whole straightforwardly endorses that view. In fact, the poem ‘dare[s]’ readers to push against such ‘a first decree’. Greville’s and Howard’s poems stand in contrast to Thomas Pennant’s ‘Ode to Indifference’ (LPM 4 (1782): 446–7), which does not dare to challenge the idea that ‘Indifference’ is incompatible with proper femininity: ‘Indifference’ is ‘insipid maid’, ‘hated maid’, ‘wanton maid’ (4 (1782): 446). Harrison’s encouragement to readers to scrutinise poems’ meanings extended beyond LPM itself. Toward the end of LPM’s final volume is Elizabeth Sophia Tomlins’s ‘Connal and Mary’ (4 (1782): 385–8), apparently original to LPM, which seeks to urge readers to dissect assumptions about gender roles and subjectivity in writing and reading poetry. The male lover Connal believes he has been betrayed by Mary: this appears to be a standard tale of the ‘wound[ed] . . . faithful lover’ (4 (1782): 387) who has been betrayed by a fickle woman. But the poem was subsequently extended; with what is printed in LPM becoming the first part, and a second poem, ‘Mary and Connal. A Sequel to Connal and Mary’ (1783), detailing Mary’s response to Connal’s criticisms. The latter was printed in Harrison’s British Magazine (3 (July 1783): 49), along with a plug for ‘Harrison’s Collection’ (that is, LPM; note, again the ungendered presentation).19 Perhaps Tomlins apprised Harrison of her plans for a sequel when the first poem was published in LPM; in any event, the second poem undermines the complacency shown by Connal in the first, and suggests that readers should interrogate the views put forward there. Despite any financial pressures he was under, in creating LPM Harrison fashioned a space for women writers that aspired to a greater level of equality than was usual; to grant ‘the Female’s rightful part’ alongside ‘Man’ (1 (1781): 1). It is true that there are ways in which LPM espoused the conventional. Nonetheless, it was above the average for miscellanies in the amount of women’s poetry it included. Moreover, 21 per cent of the poetry by women appears to have been original; in some cases, such as that of Hays and Tomlins, these are the first-time publications of women who would go on to become established writers. Harrison provided a space for female voices unheard before; which was unlike publications, such as PEL-1755, which preferred already ‘celebrated’ authoresses. These previously unheard voices were then incorporated into the ‘eminent’ writers of PEL-c.1785, a significant publication in terms of women’s writing anthologies. Both sexes visibly contribute to the ‘BEAUTIES OF POETRY’. The attributions, moreover, imply that women deserve a public voice and identity, and should not have to be hidden behind the anonymous sobriquet ‘By a Lady’. The divergent views conveyed, across the wide range of poems thrown together cheek by jowl, encourages readers to read them in dialogue with each other, and so compare, assess, agree, or disagree with the disparate stances on display. LPM fashions a space that encourages readers, of whichever sex, to read across the volumes to appraise competing ideas of ‘female-ness’, to evaluate disparate perspectives on what women should write about, and, ultimately, allows them the freedom to draw their own conclusions.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 143

17/11/17 5:00 PM

144

octavia cox

Notes 1. See Rose 1993; Saunders 1992; and Woodmansee and Jaszi 1994. 2. Except where explicit, I use ‘magazine’, ‘miscellany’, ‘anthology’, ‘compendium’, ‘collection’ etc. interchangeably; although I acknowledge the distinctions between them, that is not my focus (see Benedict 1996: 3). 3. Claire Knowles, elsewhere in this volume, examines how newspapers provided sympathetic editorial support likely to encourage women, especially, to pursue literary careers. 4. Despite the title’s claim to originality, it was in fact a collection of works already separately issued (1716–17) bound together, as testified by the non-linear pagination. It includes four pages that list ‘Poetry Lately Published’ ‘All Printed for E. Curll’ (1718: approx. 240–3). 5. In 1760, twenty-two British publications were published called ‘Magazine’; in 1770, nineteen; in 1780, eighteen; in 1790, thirty; and in 1800, forty-three (data from Crane and Kaye 1979). 6. Gender can be identified either through titles (‘Miss’, ‘Mrs’, ‘Mr’ etc.), or through the suffix ‘Esq’, or through the given qualifications that were only available to men (‘Dr’, ‘LLD’, ‘MA’, etc.). Although Mallet’s ‘Amyntor and Theodora’ (1 (1781): 218–58) does not have a specified author, its dedication ‘To Mrs Mallet’, who the first line refers to as ‘faithful partner’ (1 (1781): 218), makes his identity and gender clear. 7. ‘Providence’ is from Spectator no. 441; ‘Gratitude’ is from no. 453; and ‘Creation’ is from no. 465. 8. Laetitia Pilkington’s ‘Trial of Constancy’, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s ‘Town Eclogues’, and Carter’s ‘To a Gentleman’. 9. It is uncertain who ‘Miss Roberts’ is. Lavoie suggests it might be ‘Rachel Roberts’ (1999: 319). Ashfield has suggested one ‘Elizabeth Roberts’, as well as contributing, actually edited LPM, although he provides no evidence for this; Ashfield also suggests that Mary Hays may have co-edited LPM, although again, he provides no evidence for this (1997–8, vol. 1: 29). Another possibility is Radagunda Roberts, who wrote for various magazines, including the Lady’s Magazine in the 1770s (see DiPlacidi 2016). 10. The PEL-c.1785 title page has no publication date, but does state that it was printed by W. Stafford, known to have been active in the publishing trade in 1784–5 (Suarez 2001: 247 (f.12)). The ESTC assigns a date of ‘1785?’ Ostensibly ‘A New Edition’ of PEL was published in 1773, although this was actually a reissuing of remaining sheets from 1755 (Suarez 2001: 224). 11. Ode, both ascribe to ‘Mrs Darwall’; Ode to May, both to ‘Miss Whately’; and, Pleasures of Contemplation, LPM attributes to ‘Mrs Darwal, formerly Miss Whatley’, PEL-c.1785 simply to ‘Miss Whately’; perhaps the spelling mistake meant that the connection was not made. The division is particularly odd in PEL-c.1785, which lists her as two separate authors. 12. My counting differs from Bonnell’s (2008: 322). He counts Wortley Montagu’s ‘Town Eclogues’ as six poems, for example, whereas I consider it as one. Likewise, I count William Collins’s ‘Oriental Eclogues’ as one poem. This is because Harrison treats them each as one item in the indices (4 (1782): 476; 2 (1781): 477). 13. Of sixty contributions overall, ten are novels by women (16.7 per cent), and one is a translation of a female writer (1.7 per cent). Thus, contributions by women total 18.4 per cent. 14. See, for example, Whateley’s/Darwall’s ‘Hymn to Solitude’: ‘Then let me range the shadowy lawns’ and ‘Let me invoke the Pastoral Muse’ (1 (1781): 311–13). See also William Shenstone’s ‘Pastoral Ballad’: ‘Nay, on him [a rival lover] let not Phyllida frown; / —But I cannot allow her to smile’ (1 (1781): 148–55). 15. Evidence to support the idea that Mrs Collier (and Mary Hays) was personally known to Harrison comes from Harrison’s British Magazine. In March 1783 appears ‘Verses on the

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 144

17/11/17 5:00 PM

the fashioning of women’s literary space

16.

17. 18. 19.

145

Birth-Day of Miss Hays. May 4, 1781. By Mrs. Collier’ (2: 218). I have been unable to find this poem published elsewhere. The poem was later published in the Auguest 1796 Aberdeen Magazine (143–5), in which it was attributed to ‘Miss Scott of Benholm, (Now Mrs Carnegie of Charlestown)’, that is, Charleton House, in Montrose. It does not seem to have been widely printed; the letter prefixed to the poem reads ‘the following beautiful Poem is now become very scarce’. The attribution is corroborated by Mackie’s assertion that the poem emanates ‘from the pen of the pious and accomplished Mrs Carnegie of Charlton’ (1849: 292). From Mackie we learn ‘The date of the original MS. is 1763.’ See also Cormack (1966: 34). It is not clear how Harrison found the poem, given that Lessons in Reading was published in Aberdeen. Perhaps Scott/Carnegie was helped by James Beattie, with whom she corresponded as Arethusa. Beattie’s Retirement appears in the same volume of LPM as Scott’s/Carnegie’s poem (1 (1781): 215–8). Alternatively, it could be that Harrison himself read Lessons in Reading; the title page states it was ‘sold’ by ‘J. Bew, No. 28, Paternoster Row, London’, the Harrisons were based at No. 8 Paternoster Row. Authorship disputed: see Grundy (1999: 104–7). Compare Griffin (1995: 105–6). Tomlins’s contribution to LPM could well have been her first publication in print. Previously it has been thought that the novel Conquests of the Heart (1785) was her debut in print (see ODNB). Both poems, renamed, were later reprinted in Tributes of Affection (1797): ‘Connal’, attributed to ‘S. 1782’ (103–5); and ‘Mary’, attributed to ‘S. 1783’ (106–8).

Works Cited The Aberdeen Magazine; Or, Universal Repository 1796–8. Aberdeen. Addison, Joseph and Richard Steele. 1965. The Spectator. Ed. Donald F. Bond. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ashfield, Andrew, ed. 1997–8. Romantic Women Poets. Rev. 2nd edn. 2 vols. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Austen, Jane. 2003. Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon. Ed. James Kinsley and John Davie. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 2004. Pride and Prejudice. Ed. James Kinsley. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benedict, Barbara M. 1996. Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bonnell, Thomas. 2008. The Most Disreputable Trade: Publishing the Classics of English Poetry 1765–1810. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boswell, James. 1980. Life of Johnson. Ed. R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burney, Frances. 1832. Memoirs of Doctor Burney: Arranged from his Own Manuscripts, from Family Papers, and from Personal Recollections. 3 vols. London: Edward Moxon. —. 1889. The Early Diary of Frances Burney, 1768–1778. Ed. Annie Raine Ellis. 2 vols. London: G. Bell & Sons. Campbell Orr, Clarissa. 2002. ‘Queen Charlotte: Scientific Queen’. Queenship in Britain, 1660–1837: Royal Patronage, Court Culture and Dynastic Politics. Ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 236–66. Collection of the Best Modern Poems. 1771. London: n. pub. Cormack, Alexander Allan. 1966. Susan Carnegie, 1744–1821: Her Life of Service. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Cowper/Madan, Judith. ‘Commonplace Book’. Bodleian Library. MS.Eng.misc.d.636. Crane, R. S., and F. B. Kaye. 1979. A Census of British Newspapers and Periodicals, 1620–1800. London: Holland Press.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 145

17/11/17 5:00 PM

146

octavia cox

Creech, William, ed. 1773–6. The British Poets. 44 vols. Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and W. Creech, and J. Balfour. Curll, Edmund, ed. 1718. Ladies Miscellany. Consisting of Original Poems, by the Most Eminent Hands . . . To which are added, Court-Poems, on Several Occasions. London: E. Curll. Digital Miscellanies Index. University of Oxford. (last accessed 16 Dec 2016). DiPlacidi, Jenny. 29 February 2016: (last accessed 16 Dec 2016). Dodsley, Robert, ed. 1748. A Collection of Poems in Three Volumes, By Several Hands. 3 vols. London: J. Hughs for R. Dodsley. Ellis, Markman. 1996. The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elphinston, James, ed. 1764. A Collection of Poems, From the Best Authors. London: James Bettenham. Ezell, Margaret. 1993. Writing Women’s Literary History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fara, Patricia. 2002. ‘Elizabeth Tollet: A New Newtonian Woman’. History of Science 40.2: 169–87. Fielding, Sarah. 1744. The Adventures of David Simple. 2 vols. London: A. Millar. Fordyce, James. 1766. Sermons to Young Women. 2 vols. London: A. Millar and T. Cadell, J. Dodsley, and J. Payne. Forster, Antonia, ed. 1990. Index to Book Reviews in England, 1749–1774. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Gamer, Michael. 2008. ‘Select Collection: Barbauld, Scott, and the Rise of the (Reprinted) Novel’. Recognizing the Romantic Novel: New Histories of British Fiction, 1780–1830. Ed. Jillian Heydt-Stevenson and Charlotte Sussman. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 155–91. Goldsmith, Oliver, ed. 1767. Poems for Young Ladies. In Three Parts. Devotional, Moral, and Entertaining. The Whole Being a Collection of the Best Pieces in Our Language. London: J. Payne. Griffin, Robert. 1995. Wordsworth’s Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grundy, Isobel. 1999. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 2006. ‘Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Six Town Eclogues and Other Poems’. A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry. Ed. Christine Gerrard. Oxford: Blackwell. 184–96. Hansen, Mascha. 2013. ‘Scientifick Wives – Eighteenth-Century Women Between Self, Society and Science’. Discovering the Human: Life Science and the Arts in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. Ed. Ralf Haekel and Sabine Blackmore. Göttingen: V&R Unipress. 53–68. Harrison, Guy. 1950. Harrison: A Family Imprint. London: Harrison & Sons. Harrison, James, ed. 1780–8. The Novelist’s Magazine. London. —. 1781–2; 91. The Lady’s Poetical Magazine; Or, Beauties of British Poetry. London. —. 1782–3. The British Magazine and Review; Or, Universal Miscellany of Arts, Sciences, Literature, History, Biography, Entertainment, Poetry, Politics, Manners, Amusements, and Intelligence Foreign and Domestick. London. —. 1785–7. Harrison’s British Classicks. —. 1795–6? The Lady’s Pocket Magazine; Or, Elegant and Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex. London. Hays, Mary. 1793. Letters and Essays, Moral, and Miscellaneous. London: T. Knott.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 146

17/11/17 5:00 PM

the fashioning of women’s literary space

147

—. 1798. Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women. London: J. Johnson and J. Bell. Hodgson, John. 1991. ‘“Was It for This . . .?”: Wordsworth’s Virgilian Questionings’. Texas Studies in Literature and Language 33.2: 125–36. Hooke, Robert. 1665. Micrographia; Or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses: With Observations and Inquiries Thereupon. London: Jo. Martyn and Ja. Allestry. Ingram, Allan. 2011. Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century: Before Depression, 1660–1800. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Johnson, Samuel. [1799–81] 2006. The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on their Works. Ed. Roger Lonsdale. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jones, Vivien, ed. 1990. Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity. London: Routledge. Keats, John. 1978. The Poems of John Keats. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. The Ladies Magazine: Or, The Universal Entertainer. 1749–53. London. The Lady’s Magazine; Or, Polite Companion for the Fair Sex. 1759–63. London. The Lady’s Magazine; Or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, Appropriated Solely to Their Use and Amusement. 1770–1832. London. Lavoie, Chantel. 1999. ‘Poems by Eminent Ladies: A Study of an Eighteenth-Century Anthology’. PhD thesis, University of Toronto. —. 2009. Collecting Women: Poetry and Lives, 1700–1780. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Lessons in Reading; or, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Verse, Selected from the Best English Authors. 1780. Aberdeen: Joseph Taylor. The London Chronicle. 1757–1800. London. Lonsdale, Roger, ed. 1989. Eighteenth Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGann, Jerome. 1996. The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mackie, Charles. 1849. The Castles, Palaces and Prisons of Mary of Scotland. London: C. Cox. Monthly Review. 1759–89. London. More, Hannah. 1782. Sacred Dramas: Chiefly Intended for Young Persons: The Subjects taken from the Bible. To which is added, Sensibility, A Poem. London: T. Cadell. Poems by Eminent Ladies. 1755. Ed. George Colman and Bonnell Thornton. 2 vols. London: R. Baldwin. Poems by the Most Eminent Ladies of Great-Britain and Ireland . . . Selected, with an Account of the Writers, by G. Colman and B. Thornton, Esqrs. A New Edition. 1773. 2 vols. London: T. Becket & Co. and T. Evans. Poems by the Most Eminent Ladies of Great Britain and Ireland. Re-Published from the Collection of G. Colman and B. Thornton. With Considerable Alterations, Additions, and Improvements. c.1785. 2 vols. London: W. Stafford. Pope, Alexander. 1961–9. Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope. Ed. John Butt et al. 11 vols. London: Methuen. Ready, Kathryn. 2004. ‘“What then, Poor Beastie!”: Gender, Politics, and Animal Experimentation in Anna Barbauld’s The Mouse’s Petition’. Eighteenth-Century Life 28.1: 92–114. Rees, Thomas. 1896. Reminiscences of Literary London, from 1779 to 1853. With Interesting Anecdotes of Publishers, Authors and Book Auctioneers of that Period, &c. &c. With Extensive Additions by John Britton. Edited by a Book Lover. London: Suckling & Galloway. Rizzo, Betty. 1994. Companions Without Vows: Relationships Among Eighteenth-Century British Women. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 147

17/11/17 5:00 PM

148

octavia cox

Rose, Mark. 1993. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Saunders, David. 1992. Authorship and Copyright. London: Routledge. Scott, Mary. 1984. The Female Advocate; A Poem. Occasioned by Reading Mr. Duncombe’s Feminead. (1774). Ed. Gae Holladay. UCLA, LA: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. Shevelow, Kathryn. 1989. Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical. London and New York: Routledge. Shiells, Robert. 1753. The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, to the Time of Dean Swift. Compiled from Ample Materials Scattered in a Variety of Books. 5 vols. London: R. Griffiths. Steele, Richard. 1987. The Tatler. Ed. Donald F. Bond. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Suarez, Michael. 2001. ‘The Production and Consumption of the Eighteenth-Century Poetic Miscellany’. Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays. Ed. Isabel Rivers. Leicester: Leicester University Press. 217–51. Taylor, Richard. 1993. ‘James Harrison, The Novelist’s Magazine, and the Early Canonising of the English Novel’. Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 33.3: 629–43. Todd, Janet. 1986. Sensibility: An Introduction. London: Methuen. Tomlins, Elizabeth Sophia. 1785. The Conquests of the Heart. 3 Vols. Dublin: Price, S. Watson, Moncrieffe, Jenkin, Walker, Burton, Burnet, White, Byrne, H. Whitestone, Parker, Marchbank, Colbert, and W. Porter. Tomlins, Elizabeth Sophia, and Thomas Tomlins. 1797. Tributes of Affection: with The Slave; and Other Poems. By a Lady; and Her Brother. London: H. and C. Baldwin. Trapp, Joseph, trans. 1731. The Works of Virgil: Translated into English Blank Verse. With Large Explanatory Notes, and Critical Observations. 3 vols. London. J. Brotherton, J. Hazard, W. Meadows, T. Cox, W. Hinchliffe, T. Astley, S. Austen, L. Gilliver, and R. Willock. Walker, Gina Luria, ed. 2006. The Idea of Being Free: A Mary Hays Reader. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1995. A Vindication of the Rights of Men; with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and Hints. Ed. Sylvana Tomaselli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woodmansee, Martha, and Peter Jaszi, eds. 1994. The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wordsworth, William. 1977. The Prelude, 1798–1799. Ed. Stephen Parrish. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-02.indd 148

17/11/17 5:00 PM

Part III Periodicals Nationally and Internationally

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 149

17/11/17 5:01 PM

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 150

17/11/17 5:01 PM

Periodicals Nationally and Internationally: Introduction

J

ürgen Habermas’s thesis (1991), that in the eighteenth century a literary public sphere gave rise to a bourgeois, democratic public sphere, has of late been regarded with a scepticism that places it somewhere between heavily qualified and a canard; most models now posit at a minimum multiple overlapping public spheres – and yet it is impossible to regard the modern landscape of periodical studies without giving the important role Habermas’s model played in shaping their prominence some due. The essays in Part III engage, both implicitly and explicitly, how periodicals think about their (and their authors’) role in national and transnational public spheres. To begin with, despite the ubiquitous tendency on the part of periodical authors to claim theirs is a studied and genteel neutrality, the role of partisan politics in providing reasons for periodicals to write is hard to overstate, and, crucially, this is true for women as well as for men. When Delarivier Manley silently took over the Tory Examiner from Jonathan Swift in 1711, she may very well have become the first woman to edit a major English periodical – and she did so much less for feminism than on behalf of Harley’s ministry. But as Rachel Carnell shows, this does not mean that she approached her editorship in the same way as the faux-cordial Swift or their rival Medley (1710–12) editor, Arthur Maynwaring. Rather, Manley channels the position of partisan outsider that is her default as a political woman writer to bring into relief a ‘public sphere that included exchanges not merely between educated male “Friends” but among a broader set of voices’ that included those like her own. Denied access to major masculine public sphere venues like the coffee house, Manley effectively found other routes to serve her ambitions, using wit and gossip in place of the old boys’ network. From the other major political party, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote her first periodical essay in secret for the Spectator (no. 573: 28 July 1714) and later launched her own (mostly) pro-Walpole vehicle, the Nonsense of Commonsense (1737–8). Isobel Grundy delivers a masterful long view of Montagu’s surprisingly diverse, and successfully secret, periodical writing career; the vision of Montagu that emerges from her readings shows a thoughtful combination of patriotism and independentmindedness. We are used to imagining Montagu as outspoken even in the face of male castigation; but it is only through periodical writing that we can also see her as a bona fide professional writer. Periodical writing is always hyperaware of its professional, reader-dependent status. Even without a pointed political topic like those that helped provoke Manley and Montagu, English periodicals are always cognisant that theirs is an English – occasionally British – audience. But this English readership does not exist in exclusion of, or opposition to, the rich Continental print culture; rather they are very much in conversation. In a typical example, while referencing some lauded French conduct writers, the Young Lady’s (1756) Euphrosine laments the lack of ‘perspicuity in their argumentations’, such that it is a ‘great pity that those gentlemen whose opinion . . .

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 151

17/11/17 5:01 PM

152

part iii: introduction

gives laws to almost all the polite courts of Europe, should not take care to be more explicite [sic] in the rules they lay down’. Interestingly, ‘all the polite courts of Europe’ seems to include the English one, for, Euphrosine notes, the English belles and beaux ‘are liable to fall into very gross mistakes on . . . account’ of French imprecision – that is, the essay is not contrasting French with English writing; it is worrying about the effects of French style on English and other readers (Haywood 2001, no. 2 (13 Jan 1756): 279). Nor was French the only important intertext for anglophone periodicals. Alessa Johns explains that German women writers were very consistently covered in English periodicals. Importing German books was arduous business, but periodical notice (though it was not always positive) meant that mainstream English audiences could still be conversant with German literary trends, including the work of at least a dozen women. While German women authors were, like English women authors, treated differently from male counterparts, still most periodical treatments ‘stressed connection and the cultural illumination that translation can accomplish’. Part of the turn to German subjects stemmed from the problem that war with France somewhat dampened the appetite for and accessibility of French writing. And yet European war, such a frequent event across the eighteenth century, as a general rule served to fuel periodical writings’ engagement with the Continent. As Catherine Ingrassia reminds us, Haywood’s major periodical writing was all undertaken during wartime, and is highly conscious of that fact: her work, rather than enforcing a separation between women and matters military, serves to ‘illustrate how England’s military engagements shape the British character and the construction of gender’. Even and especially for women, there is no attempt to interrogate a national identity kept isolated from an international one, though there is a sense that the sexes may engage national questions differently. In Chapter 13 of this volume, JoEllen DeLucia memorably explains, ‘globalism in the eighteenth century was scaled differently for different audiences’, with the magazine acting as an innovator in finding new ways to remediate and transculturate between global texts and the gendered reading publics they served. If the Lady’s Magazine might seem to make the world ‘a smaller and more delicate place’, it simultaneously extended the reaches of women’s sphere far beyond domestic borders. All of these essays together show periodicals trying to shape national taste and character by engaging the question of who is authorised to speak and write publicly, and why. Most importantly these chapters make absolutely clear that periodicals are not reactive, but productive forces in such debates.

Works Cited Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Haywood, Eliza. 2001. The Young Lady. The Selected Works of Eliza Haywood, Set 1. Vol. 3. The Wife, the Husband, and The Young Lady. Ed. Alexander Pettit and Margo Collins. London: Pickering & Chatto.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 152

17/11/17 5:01 PM

9 Protesting the Exclusivity of the Public Sphere: Delarivier Manley’s EXAMINER Rachel Carnell

A

s the narrator of the Spectator opines in the inaugural issue of 1 March 1711: ‘I have observed that a reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure until he knows whether the writer of it be a black or a fair man, of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor’ (Addison (1711) 1987, vol. 1: 1). The author behind this voice, Joseph Addison, like many periodical writers of his era, provides clues about himself but not a complete or accurate description, nor even full disclosure that there was more than one author writing as ‘the’ Spectator. The seemingly authentic voice of the first-person narrator is, as Manushag N. Powell terms it, an ‘eidolon’ that gestures toward ‘the existence of an author, but it does not follow that [it is] meant to disclose the truth of the author’ (2012: 26). This type of eidolon, Powell suggests, is a performance that both reveals and conceals the actual author and creates ‘gaps between object and ideal’ (26). Such gaps thus may call attention to differences between the ostensibly universalising humanism of the eighteenth-century public sphere, as theorised by Jürgen Habermas, and the de facto limits to such ‘universality’ that many other scholars have identified (Wilson 1995: 75–7; Derrida (1994) 1997: 279–81).1 As Jacques Derrida observes in The Politics of Friendship, the ideal of equality at the ground of civic engagement resides in a notion of friendship and equality between citizens: ‘We would not be together in a sort of minimal community . . . speaking the same language or praying for translation within the horizon of the same language, if only to manifest disagreement, if a sort of friendship had not already been sealed before any other contract’ (1997: 236). Writers like Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, in the voices of their eidolons, address their readers as if they might be friends chatting together at Will’s Coffee-house. In underscoring the bond of ‘friendship’ that is at the heart of the public sphere, Derrida also acknowledges the ‘double exclusion we can see at work in all the great ethico-politico-philosophical discourses on friendship, namely, on the one hand, the exclusion of friendship between women, and, on the other hand, the exclusion of friendship between a man and a woman’ (1997: 278–9). Perhaps because of these exclusions, eidolons could be violently at odds with their creators (Powell 2012: 26). Eliza Haywood, for example, took on the eidolon of a green parrot in her Parrot (1746), adopting a perspective that allowed her to emphasise her many-faceted exclusion as a woman and a Jacobite sympathiser concerned about the executions of those involved in the 1745 Rising (Carnell 1998: 205–6). When the Tory secret historian Delvarivier Manley in June 1711 replaced Jonathan Swift as author of the Examiner – which ran as a propaganda vehicle for Robert

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 153

17/11/17 5:01 PM

154

rachel carnell

Harley’s ministry from September 1710 through July 1711 – she was no longer writing from the position of partisan outsider (as she had been in 1709 and 1710 when writing against the Whig ministry in her political secret histories), since the Tories had just retaken control of Anne’s Ministry and won a majority in Parliament. Nevertheless, by ventriloquising the eidolon developed by Jonathan Swift over the previous six months, Manley entered anonymously, but as an outsider, the public (male) sparring match that Swift, as the (Tory) Examiner, was engaged in against Arthur Maynwaring (and sometimes John Oldmixon), author of the (Whig) periodical, the Medley – which ran from October 1710 through July 1711, as a response and rebuttal to the Examiner. Although Manley adopted the eidolon of the implicitly male Examiner, she resisted the assumption that there was a tacit bond of friendship between her and her political opponent, probably because she knew she did not have the same classical education or access to the same political clubs and coffee houses as either her opponent at the Medley or her predecessors at the Examiner. Like Swift and Maynwaring, Manley regularly addresses her partisan opponent as ‘Friend’ in an ironic acknowledgement that they are not partisan friends, but political opponents. However, she pushes against the category of friend more intensely than Swift and Maynwaring had previously done. Through her focus on the falseness of this use of ‘Friend’, Manley underscores the sameness even among partisan opponents in the public sphere, as well as the difference between norms of male friendship – which allowed public sparring and self-serving ambition – and those of female friendship – which demanded more self-effacement. When we compare her eidolon in the Examiner with the eidolon in her earlier epistolary work Letters Writen [sic] by Mrs. Manley (1696), we see how Manley’s vision of a public sphere included exchanges not merely between educated male ‘Friends’ but among a broader set of voices, including those – like herself – writing from the margins of polite society and at the gendered edge of public political discourse.

The Examiner and his ‘Friends’ As a gentlewoman and daughter of a royalist military commander, yet excluded from polite society because of her personal life, Manley was, by 1711, also something of a celebrity as the author of the bestselling Memoirs and Manners . . . from the New Atalantis (1709), a gossipy secret history that targeted the most prominent members of the social and political elite. Writing in the format of a political secret history – an anecdotal and fragmentary genre that undermines the grand narratives of those in power – Manley related steamy gossip about powerful Whigs that she had gleaned from former royal mistresses and friends from the theatre. Yet she did not deploy an authorial eidolon outside of her dedicatory prefaces, but instead muted her own voice, probably as a strategy (albeit unsuccessful) to avoid a charge of libel for The New Atalantis (Carnell 2015: 12). Instead, Manley used the narrative frame of the travelogue in which the visiting deity Astrea returns to Earth to take a tour of the corruption at the heart of the New Atalantis (England) and in particular Angela (London); Lady Intelligence and others relate court gossip to Virtue and Astrea. Manley produced her brilliant political satire through multivocal framing rather than through the voice of a single Swiftian eidolon – whether the ‘“personated” narrator’ of ‘the Grubian Sage of A Tale of a Tub’ or ‘the gentleman-astrologer Isaac Bickerstaf Esq.’ (Ellis 1985: xxxiv).

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 154

17/11/17 5:01 PM

delarivier manley’s EXAMINER

155

In the first issue of the Examiner that Manley authored (no. 7), written in September 1710 (before Swift began his stint as Examiner), she was still writing in the mode of a Tory secret historian calling attention to the Whigs’ falseness to Queen Anne, whom she represents as the King of Sweden imprisoned by the Turks. In an issue designed as propaganda before the upcoming parliamentary election, Manley explains in the voice of the Examiner that the King of Sweden (Queen Anne) has escaped from Bender to return to ‘His old and true Friends’ (7–14 Sep 1710: 3), i.e. the Tories – as Queen Anne did metaphorically by dismissing the powerful Whig ministers Robert, Earl of Sunderland and Sidney, Earl of Godolphin earlier that year.2 In this passage, Manley’s use of the word ‘Friend’ does not function in the universalising sense that Derrida understands but in the more partisan sense of political ally. She then finishes the issue in the voice of the ‘correspondent from Bender’ in an ostensible first-hand account of the King of Sweden’s escape. Here she again demonstrates her skill at producing satire through the voice of someone other than her own eidolon. In June 1711, with the Tories securely in control of Parliament, Manley formally took over responsibility for the Examiner from Jonathan Swift, possibly at the request of Robert Harley (Herman 2003: 134), who had just been made Earl of Oxford. Manley concludes no. 46 (understood to have been started by Swift) by observing ‘how little those Writers for the Whigs were guided by Conscience or Honour, their Business being only to gratify a prevailing Interest’ (7–14 June 1711: 7). In this issue she again turns to the voice of a fictitious persona, this time the author of a ‘humble Petition’ of the Whig pamphleteers now out of work, who offer ‘to write in Defence of the late Change of Ministry and Parliament, much cheaper than they did for your Predecessor, which your Honours were pleas’d to refuse’ (8). She then insults ‘the Author of the Medley’ as ‘a Dunce out of his Element, pretending to intermeddle with Raillery and Irony, wherein he has no manner of Taste or Understanding’. As she explains, ‘His Irony consists of the Words MY FRIEND.’ She adds, ‘Does he think that when he says, my impious Friend, my stupid Friend, and the like . . . that it is either Wit, Humour, or Satyr?’ (9). While the phrase ‘MY FRIEND’ had been used ironically by both Swift and Maynwaring during the previous six months of their political sparring, their exchange was nevertheless marked by civility. Maynwaring may refer to the Examiner as having ‘little Wit, and less Judgment’ and claim that he has ‘never heard one Person of his own side speak the least kind word of him, or his Performers’ (Medley no. 12 (18 Dec 1710): 106), but he was probably aware of the popularity of the Examiner and the frequency with which it was cited (Ellis 1985: xlviii).3 In other words, even when Swift and Maywnwaring seem to be calling each other ‘Friend’ ironically, there remains an underlying ground of friendship between these two classically educated men. They moved in some of the same circles (both were friends of Richard Steele) and were familiar with the rhetoric on both sides of the partisan divide: Maynwaring had started life as a Jacobite and then converted to the Whig cause, while Swift had initially identified as a Whig until Robert Harley (who had also begun his career as a Whig) persuaded him to take up his pen for the Tory ministry in the fall of 1710 (viewing themselves less as Tories than as Old Whigs). When Maynwaring teases Swift for expressing the desire that his ‘Papers, reduc’d into a more durable Form, shou’d live till our Grandchildren are Men’ (Medley no. 12 (18 Dec 1710): 106), he is also acknowledging the desire that both of these

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 155

17/11/17 5:01 PM

156

rachel carnell

men shared: that their satire and their reputations as writers might outlive them. Maynwaring, of course, is taking Swift’s phrase out of context, since Swift had merely speculated that ‘if these Papers . . . should happen to live ‘till our Grandchildren are Men’, he hopes they would ‘consult Annals, and compare Dates’ (Examiner no. 19 (7 Dec 1710): 84–5, emphasis added) to make sure they understood which party was correctly using facts in their cause.4 Maynwaring’s irony seems heavy when he refers to the ‘durable Form’ of the Examiner that Swift hopes might be correctly contextualised by future generations of readers: ‘What a Present is here intended for the future Republick of Letters!’ (Medley no. 12 (18 Dec 1710): 106). However ironically weighted, this comment nevertheless acknowledges a truth of what both men clearly understood they were attempting to create: a rational ‘Republick of Letters’, an idealised exchange of ideas, which Jürgen Habermas would subsequently describe as part of the bourgeois public sphere (1991). They also knew that a reprinting in ‘durable Form’ of periodicals such as theirs was a definite possibility: the Tatler, which Steele had recently discontinued, was already being reprinted in a four-volume set during the winter and spring of 1710 to 1711. Delarivier Manley herself, a friend of Jonathan Swift (who regularly dined with her and her printer, John Barber, at Barber’s home and printing house – where Manley lived from about 1709 until her death in 1724) had been a close friend of Richard Steele in the late 1690s and might well have known Maynwaring through the world of the theatre (Manley had produced plays in 1696 and 1707 and Maynwaring was the lover of the actress Anne Oldfield). Manley had at least once sought patronage from the Whig Montagu family (Carnell 2008: 147), so she would seem to have been well positioned to take up her voice as an oppositional ‘Friend’ who understood both sides in this Whig-Tory sparring match being played out by Swift and Maynwaring. However, when she took up the pen of the Examiner, Manley was not armed with the same classical education as Swift. She was well read and fluent in current political affairs; she also knew how to give the appearance of more classical learning than she possessed by strategically drawing from Politeuphuia, Wits Commonwealth. Or a Treasury of Divine, Moral, Historical, and Political Admonitions, Similes, and Sentences (Carnell 2008: 61). Nevertheless, the tacit epistolary friendship that was at the heart of the civil exchange of details about the ‘facts’ of the late Whig ministry was not something that she could take for granted as someone who was neither male, nor classically educated, nor welcome as a writer and a wit in the coffee houses that her male peers frequented. Derrida’s point that women have long been excluded from the male-male friendship at the heart of the public sphere is strikingly illustrated in Manley’s case. When Swift was writing his issues of the Examiner, he was invited to attend the meetings of the ‘Saturday Club’ at Robert Harley’s home. Manley was supposed to write as if informed by the same position of insider knowledge although her only access to it would have been through the gossip provided by the printer John Barber, with whom she was living (Carnell 2008: 206). In other words, Manley’s access to the male world of political gossip that she was expected to spin into a periodical occurred mainly through her relationship with Barber, born into a lower social rank than she, although well connected with the Tories whose works he printed. Maynwaring, writing the Whig Medley, was a member of the Kit-Cat Club, like Richard Steele; moreover, Swift and Maynwaring had long moved within the same literary circles, even if they were

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 156

17/11/17 5:01 PM

delarivier manley’s EXAMINER

157

not members of the same partisan club in 1711. Meanwhile Manley was excluded, by her gender, from membership in any political club. In Examiner no. 47, Manley compliments Queen Anne’s recent speech and then offers a critique of the moral evil of ‘Avarice’, praising God that the Queen is now ‘free’ of the influence of her avaricious ministers and favourites. Manley also disparages the former Ministry’s fiscal policies, and its dependence on expensive ‘Publick Credit’, as well as the late excessive Growth of Infidelity, Heresy and Profaneness (14–21 June 1711: 12–13). Manley alludes to earlier numbers of the Examiner in which she claims to have ‘formerly . . . touched upon the nature of this Synod, and their Divisions’ (14–21 June 1711: 13), referring to issues authored by Swift. Overall, however, no. 47 reiterates previous points rather than offering fresh satire. Manley’s particular skill as a satirist lay in her ability to imagine a scene and to depict the thought process of the figures she was satirising, either through a first-person narrator or through shifts into free indirect discourse. She might put herself inside the head of a victim of Whig avarice – as she does in the New Atalantis when recounting the stories of young women seduced and deceived by powerful politicians. She could just as easily voice the thoughts of an ambitious Whig minister; she succinctly expresses in a passage in The New Atalantis both the pleasure and the still unsatisfied ambition that William Bentinck must feel after he has been made Duke of Portland: ‘’Twas Glorious to be a Sovereign Prince, tho’ but of a Petty State!’ (Manley 2005, vol. 2: 36; Carnell 2015: 13). Yet in the issues of the Examiner in which she narrates from a single eidolon, Manley’s satire is less sharp than when she ironically takes on the voice of opposing political position. In the next issue of the Examiner (no. 48), as if realising that the single didactic narrator did not best suit her satirical talent, Manley introduces other narrators through the means of letters ostensibly written to her periodical, observing that there was a ‘Fashion’ among those with ‘Wit’ and ‘Leisure’ to write to ‘us Weekly Writers’ (21–8 June 1711: 17). One of her putative correspondents is a Whig whose letter she includes in full, as she explains, so that he will not ‘charge me with unfair Quotation’ (19). In this letter, the Whig advises her to ‘renounce the Tories, and come over to Us’ (19). The Examiner’s first foray into writing for the Whigs, this Whig advises, should be to ‘write a Treatise which will be very fashionable and useful, call’d The Art of shifting Sides’ (19). He provides a rough draft of a dedication, addressed ‘To all Honest WHIG Gentlemen, and virtuous WHIG-Ladies, in and about the Cities and Liberties of London and Westminster’ (19). Here, as in her earlier secret histories, Manley takes the reader inside the head of one of her political opponents. In this case, her ever-pragmatic (and clearly fictitious) Whig correspondent points out that ‘the Tories [have] as Many Interests, as there are Persons’ while ‘we [the Whigs] have but One’ (19). Her correspondent insists that ‘the many unanswerable Steps you have taken for the Good of the Nation’ may be explained by simple avarice: ‘your Concern for the Publick Credit, and your Readiness to advance Mony [sic] upon great Emergencies’ (20). In suggesting that the Whigs’ main concern has been advancement of their own financial interests, under the guise of public credit and the public good, Manley emphasises the narrowness of their positions in contrast to the ‘many Interests’ the Tories represent. Ruth Herman has suggested that Manley’s task, when taking over as author of the Examiner, was probably to try to unify and appease the multiple different factions of the Tory party (2003: 149). As a secret historian, recounting anecdotes

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 157

17/11/17 5:01 PM

158

rachel carnell

in the voices of multiple narrators, Manley had long been appealing to different Tory factions: she had dedicated her New Atalantis to a known Jacobite Tory (the Duke of Beaufort) but had been ambiguous as to which young prince – James Edward Stuart or George of Hanover – the visiting goddess Astrea had come to Earth to educate as the nation’s future leader (Carnell 2008: 169). Jean McBain suggests, in analysing Manley’s inclusion of letters in the Examiner, that the epistolary structure permitted Manley to play between ‘external, often unknown or anonymous correspondent . . . alongside a simultaneous positioning of the editor or writer as disinterested intermediary’ (2017: 13). And yet, for Manley, the narrator is never disinterested, but always writing as a Tory trying valiantly to represent the multiple voices of the Tory party in opposition to what she describes as the simple avarice and self-interest of her Whig opponents. Manley’s narrator also slyly nods to the perspective of those whose voices are excluded from both the Whig and the Tory public spheres. In addressing herself, through the voice of her pragmatic Whig correspondent’s suggested dedication to the ‘virtuous WHIG-Ladies’ (in addition to the ‘Honest WHIG Gentlemen’), Manley observes, ‘Were your Plea to Vertue and Beauty less evident, you might stand more in need of a Champion’ (21–8 June 1711: 19). This dedication ironically reminds readers that many beautiful, wealthy Whig ladies – no doubt including Queen Anne’s quondam friend the Duchess of Marlborough – had long wielded more than their share of influence with the Queen. Yet this satirical dedication also reminds readers that those ladies purported to be virtuous may not be any more virtuous than those who, like Manley herself and many of the women she describes in her secret histories, had been seduced by rising political figures. While the implicit premise of the public sphere is that everyone speaks from the sameness and equality of a platonic friendship, Manley continues to remind readers of the very real differences between subject positions: between Whigs who are self-interested and Tories who hold a variety of political views; but also between men and women, and between women deemed virtuous and those who lost their reputation in intrigues that ruined the reputation only of the woman, not the man involved. In the next issue (no. 49), Manley writes only two sentences in the voice of the Examiner, devoting the rest of the issue to the epistolary voice of the writer from Bender ostensibly in the retinue of Charles XII of Sweden – again a political standin for Queen Anne. The correspondent alludes to the ‘Unanimity’ of the ‘Assembly’ (i.e. Parliament, which had been controlled by the Tories since the elections in November 1710), through which the ‘Abuses now discover’d’ will be corrected (28 June–5 July 1711: 24). Although Manley herself had long celebrated the different voices of the Tory party, it is clear that she thought they might be aligned, with Unanimity, in their delight at the possible downfall of the Marlboroughs. When Manley returns to the eidolon of the Examiner in the final two issues of the periodical, she focuses less on the unanimity of the Tories than on her own defence against the Medley’s accusations in the previous week’s issue (no. 40, 2 July 1711) of becoming ‘insipid and contemptible . . . so flat and low, that all the World agree he has the least Wit they ever knew’ (quoted in Manley 2005, vol. 5: 247 n. 3). Manley responds that while it ‘sometimes happens that I am either Sick, or Lazy, or Splenetick’, it also the case that ‘sometimes, perhaps, like other Authors of great

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 158

17/11/17 5:01 PM

delarivier manley’s EXAMINER

159

Reputation, I am Dull by design’ (Examiner no. 50 (5–12 July 1711): 25). She protests that she would gladly respond to ‘this Person, who will be my Friend whether I will or no’, if he would only ‘cavil with me, Paper by Paper’ so that their duel is ‘this Medley contra that Examiner’ rather than ‘every Medley against all the Examiners’ (26). Grudgingly accepting that he would be her ‘Friend’ (or public sphere sparring opponent) whether she wants the friendship or not, Manley insists that they spar by a consistent set of ground rules. Manley then refutes the Medley’s accusation that she has been including letters putatively by actual correspondents but which she herself probably authored. She responds by claiming to be citing lines from five different letters on topics of interest to the Tories, resulting in a list of concerns rather than a compendium of satirical anecdotes. Manley was talented at developing different full-length anecdotes and stringing them together in the diffuse form of secret history. Yet, it would not be possible to achieve the satirical sting of all those varied anecdotes in the narrow confines of a single periodical issue. She acknowledges something of this impossibility in her penultimate issue (no. 51) of the Examiner when she writes: ‘I knew my Paper would insensibly dwindle into the thing himself and his Party desired, and my time be lost in managing a Dispute fruitless to the Town and insignificant even to our selves’ (12–19 July 1711: 29). Manley devotes most of no. 51 to a single secret history-style anecdote, echoing the mode of her New Atalantis (ostensibly translated from the Italian) in its claim to be a ‘Translation’ from a ‘very scarce Manuscript out of certain Library’, concerning Mark Antony’s wife Fulvia, ‘going to the House of Pride’ (12–19 July 1711: 29–30). Here she again takes on the well-known avarice and pride of the Duchess of Marlborough, as well as her ‘Ingratitude’ (31). In reminding readers of the Marlboroughs’ ingratitude to Queen Anne, by whose favours they had risen to power and wealth, Manley also implicitly alludes to the character of Monsieur Le Ingrate in her New Atalantis, a figure for her former friend Richard Steele, editor of the (then Whig controlled) governmental journal of record, the London Gazette (begun in 1665 and still published today). Manley’s resentment of her former friend was also the resentment of her marginal position as a bestselling Tory satirist who had yet to be acknowledged or paid anything by the Earl of Oxford (Carnell 2017: 23–4). Steele – male, Whig, and a member of the Kit-Cats – had not struggled as Manley had. Despite his own affairs and illegitimate children and occasional financial insolvency, Steele was able to marry twice to his financial advantage, while Manley had been forever ‘ruined’ after having been seduced at a young age by her already married first cousin. Moreover, Swift’s friend Arthur Maynwaring, currently sparring in the Medley against Manley’s Examiner, had helped Swift secure the editorship of the Gazette, which paid £300 per annum (Aitkin 1899: 8 n. 2). Such a paid position would have given Manley the financial security that had long eluded her and perhaps a sense of tacit equality or friendship with her political opponent at the Medley. In the final issue of her Examiner, Manley responds again to those who complain that she has not been adequately entertaining, that her ‘Business was to Instruct’ and she ‘would not descend to Divert’ (no. 52 19–26 July 1711: 35). As Herman has argued, Manley appeared to be tackling multiple topics, trying to reach a broader Tory readership than Swift had reached with his single-topic approach; Herman

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 159

17/11/17 5:01 PM

160

rachel carnell

suggests that ‘this multioptic approach makes Manley’s Examiners appear to be more superficial than Swift’s and perhaps less polished’ (2003: 149). These issues, as Manley appears to acknowledge, may be less diverting than Swift’s – in part because of her attempt at covering a broader ranger of topics than Swift had done and in part because she does not have the space in which to develop the multivoiced narrative framing that marked her earlier secret histories. Nor does she appear to feel the confidence of tacit friendship and equality with her political opponent that Swift clearly felt when he wrote in the eidolon of the Examiner. In a letter of 2 October 1711, a few months after having given up the Examiner, Manley wrote to the Earl of Oxford: ‘had I either Instruction or incouragement I might succeed better’ (quoted in Carnell 2008: 206). She suggests that she could be of more use to him if she were included at the table of the ‘club’ that was writing for his ministry. In fact, by the time she sent that letter, Manley had already demonstrated how effective she could be as a satirist when she was given the official party line that she was expected to convey. In A True Narrative of What Passed at the Examination of Monsieur de Guiscard the Cock-pit the 8th of March 1710/11, a pamphlet published in April 1711, Manley offered a version of Guiscard’s stabbing of Harley that showed Harley and the Queen in more heroic colours than Swift had managed to in his Examiner of 15 March (no. 33). Although it appears from the tone of her October letter that Manley had not yet had any direct contact with Oxford by 1711, it was also clear that someone in the government had managed to convey to her that Swift’s narrative of the Guiscard stabbing needed to be corrected. In September 1711, also without direct communication from Oxford – but with an understanding of the angle that would best please the ministry – she wrote her two most admired pamphlets, The Duke of Marlborough’s Vindication, written as a defence of the Examiner and in response to a pamphlet by Maynwaring, Bouchain: In a Dialogue Between the Late Medley and Examiner. In her Vindication, Manley vigorously defends the Examiner’s eidolon, both hers and Swift’s, as she responds to Maynwaring’s spirited defence of the Duke of Marlborough (Herman 2003: 168). Apparently recognising that she was not able to be as diverting as she would like in speaking to a broad spectrum of Tory concerns in the Examiner, Manley knew that she could be both diverting and instructive in the single eidolon of the satirical pamphleteer, especially when informed of the angle the government most wanted her to emphasise. Writing as an outsider whose skill was in the ironic double-voicing of a secret historian, Manley may have failed to divert her readers in the Examiner, although she would impress them as the author of Bouchain, in which she effected the satire through a dialogue between two political opponents. Less well known as a periodical writer than her friends Jonathan Swift or Richard Steele – because of the paucity of her production in this genre and the indifferent reception of her issues of the Examiner – Manley nevertheless began her career with an epistolary publication that, while not a periodical, augured the confidant conversational tone adopted by Addison and Steele a decade letter in the Tatler and the Spectator. In Letters Writen by Mrs. Manley (1696), Manley manages to challenge the confines of the male friendship that shaped public sphere debate by writing as both a woman and a political exile in her epistolary travelogue describing a stagecoach journey from London to Exeter.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 160

17/11/17 5:01 PM

delarivier manley’s EXAMINER

161

The Eidolon of a Satirical Stagecoach Rider The daughter of a royalist military commander who found military employment on the Continent during the Protectorate and on Jersey after the Restoration, Manley was born during her father’s exile from mainland Britain, an exile that he spent decades trying to remedy by pulling strings at court that were ultimately only powerful enough to bring him as near to London as Landguard Fort, on the Suffolk coast. After her father’s death in 1687, Manley’s sense of exile and estrangement was furthered by James II’s flight from England during the Revolution of 1688–9, which dashed her dreams of getting to court as a maid in waiting for Mary of Modena; instead she and her younger sister were exiled to the countryside with an elderly relation, their only diversion volumes of French romances. Manley finally managed to get herself to London only by her illicit ‘marriage’ to her (bigamous) cousin, John Manley, sixteen years her senior and subsequently a Tory MP. After bearing a son and separating from her cousin, Manley lived thereafter in quasi-exile from polite society and was obliged to make her way in the world in the company of court and royal mistresses, actresses, playwrights, and theatre managers. Her lifelong sense of ‘exile’ thus continued (Carnell 2008: 10–18), shaping the tone of the eidolon she would adopt in her first published work: that of a witty, politically astute female (‘Mrs. Manley’) who demonstrates the confidence of Swift’s Examiner without the pretence of being a classically educated male or the concerns that she may not be an equal sparring partner with the Medley. Nor is she held back, at this juncture, by the concerns about libel that probably inspired her to veil her own authorial voice through multiple narrative frames in The New Atalantis. Published in February 1696, Letters Writen by Mrs. Manley begins with Manley lamenting her need to leave London. She describes herself as taking the stagecoach ‘with Mr. Granvill’s Words in my Mouth’; she then cites from her friend George Granville’s as yet unpublished translation of Seneca’s Thyestes: ‘Place me, ye Gods, in some obscure Retreat: / Oh! Keep me innocent: Make others Great . . .’ (Manley 2005, vol. 1: 59). Seneca’s (Granville’s) speaker, in lines Manley does not cite, describes his desire to save himself from the ‘Factions’, ‘Wars’, and ‘Crowns usurp’d’ of life in the capitol (quoted in Manley 2005, vol. 1: 270 n. 9). Manley alerts her readers that she is ventriloquising the sentiments of her friend Granville, who was himself a staunch enough Tory that he stayed out of politics under William and Mary, only pursuing a seat in Parliament after Anne was crowned in 1702 (Manley 2005, vol. 1: 270 n. 9). In leaving London with Granville’s words in her ‘Mouth’, Manley speaks in a voice simultaneously her own and that of her male friend and, she suggests, fellow political exile. She establishes her authorial voice as female (signalled by the name ‘Mrs. Manley’ in the title); she further acknowledges her sexual identity by suggesting that she is unwillingly leaving a lover (who had pleaded with her to stay) and by describing a young man in the stagecoach who flirts with her. At the same time, she frames her exile as a political retreat, echoing the voices of so many (male) classical satirists who wrote about their moral need for a pastoral retreat from the corruption and political factions of the capitol. Manley also establishes her credentials as someone who is widely read, citing not only Seneca but also works by Horace, Themisctocles, John Donne, John Cleveland, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, and Abraham Cowley. Manley’s

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 161

17/11/17 5:01 PM

162

rachel carnell

frequent literary allusions establish her education and credentials, while her tonguein-cheek observations on her fellow passengers establishes her self of humour. She describes a baronet’s son whose change of attire to a silver-brocade coat and vest she ignores. She sums up their exchange: ‘He perceiv’d by my Sullenness that I had a great deal of Wit; though I understood he had but little by his Remark’ (2005, vol. 1: 61). Presenting herself as an educated wit, whose reasons for leaving the capitol resemble Seneca’s, Manley genders her authorial eidolon here as more ‘male’ than the feminised baronet’s son who wants reassurance about his sartorial extravagance. She emphasises her moral seriousness and erudition when she announces in the seventh letter, after her arrival in Exeter: ‘My Study has fallen upon Religion’ (2005, vol. 1: 73). In contrast to the more defensive and more overtly female voice in the prefaces to her first two plays, also published in the spring of 1696, Manley’s eidolon in Letters Writen clearly anticipates the conversational, witty tone of Steele’s Tatler and other early eighteenth-century periodical eidolons. Unlike her assumed eidolon of the male ‘Friend’ and opponent of the Medley, Manley, in the stagecoach, must hold her own as a wit while accepting or rejecting the advances of a young man trying to flirt with her. Gender here defines her position in public rather than serving as mere domestic background for a male voice in the public sphere, for whom the sexual contract implicitly preceded the social contract (Pateman 1988: 15–16). The difficulty for Manley is that writing a periodical-like reflection in the eidolon of a confidant, witty, politically astute woman commenting on public events required a regular presence in a public place. During her six-day stagecoach journey, she was in the mixed company of men and women travelling together, dining in public inns in the towns they passed through. She enjoyed, during this brief journey, the vantage of a something like a coffee house gathering, where ideas are exchanged and new faces constantly pass through. Manley also apparently had money enough to cover her immediate travel expenses, yet she was leaving the city, possibly because she was looking for a less expensive way of living, or else perhaps because she was pregnant (Carnell 2008: 83). While she was in retirement in the country, she would not have access to the same sort of public gatherings from which she might continue to write her daily epistle to her correspondent in the city. In future years, Manley would likewise not have access to the coffee houses from which Steele would produce his Tatler, as he explains: either from ‘White’s Chocolatehouse’, when writing about ‘gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment’; or from Will’s Coffee-house, when writing about ‘poetry’; or from the ‘Grecian’ when discussing ‘learning’; or from ‘St. James’s Coffee-house’ when reporting on ‘foreign and domestic news’; or from his ‘own apartment’ when touching on ‘any other subject’ (Steele (12 Apr 1709) 1987, vol. 1: 16). Manley, by contrast, had the possibility of writing only from her own apartment. This was not always a disadvantage: in April of 1709, while Steele was busy inaugurating his public sphere reflections as the Tatler, Manley was in her own apartment busily turning decades of court gossip into what would become her bestselling New Atalantis. Moreover, despite her lack of access to court or coffee houses, Manley managed to convey enough gossip about the Tories’ schemes of breaking with the Marlboroughs and Godolphin that the Marlborough’s son-in-law, Lord Sunderland, would forcefully interrogate her, trying to discover the sources for her the court secrets she made public (Carnell 2008: 187–9).

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 162

17/11/17 5:01 PM

delarivier manley’s EXAMINER

163

Recent scholarship has corrected the somewhat naïve presumption by twentiethcentury scholars that Manley – who was once friends with the playwrights Catherine Trotter and Mary Pix – would have held a feminocentric world view. In fact, as Victoria Joule has pointed out, Manley was ‘less concerned with collaboration and more with “Ambitious purpose”’ (43). She was not a good friend, according to the nurturing norms of female friendship, but instead followed a more male model of public friendship, which allowed for cut-throat competition and putting one’s own personal-political agenda above that of one’s friends. For example, the nineteenthcentury editor of an edition of Steele’s Tatler points out the ‘growing coldness between Swift and his old friends [Addison and Steele]’ by the autumn of 1710, and cites Swift who, in the eidolon of the Examiner, would refer to the ‘scurvy Tatlers of late’ (Aitkin 1899: xxiv). In other words, the competitive public-sphere friendship between men allowed for ambition and self-promotion at the expense of old friends, while models for female friendship required more self-sacrifice. Having begun her career with the eidolon of the female wit in Letters Writen, Manley disguised her own voice through multiple narrators taking turns revealing secrets in her New Atalantis and appealing to a broad range of Tory viewpoints. When ventriloquising the male eidolon of the Examiner, she emphasised the limits in perspective of the coffee house public sphere, even when the Tories controlled the government. Finally, in The Adventures of Rivella (1714), she returns to a male narrator, Sir Charles Lovemore, to tell her life story. Lovemore, ardently in love with Manley, relates the particular of her life in the most sympathetic terms to a visiting French courtier. This conversation, taking place in the public space of the gardens at Somerset House, emphasises simultaneously Rivella’s feminine allure and her (masculine) wit. Lovemore concludes that ‘If she had been a Man, she had been without Fault’ (Manley 2005, vol. 4: 10), thus underscoring the exclusion of voices like hers that match in wit yet contradict in gender the norms of male friendship that structured the eighteenth-century public sphere.

Notes 1. See also Downie 2003 and Mackie 2005 for interrogations of the accuracy, appropriateness, and relevance of the term to eighteenth-century British culture. 2. All references to Manley’s Examiner essays are taken from Manley 2005, vol. 5. 3. All references to Maynwaring’s Medley essays are taken from Ellis 1985. 4. All references to Swift’s Examiner essays are taken from Ellis 1985.

Works Cited Addison, Joseph and Richard Steele. 1965. The Spectator. Ed. Donald F. Bond. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Aitken, George. 1899. Introduction to The Tatler. Ed. George Aitkin. 4 vols. London: Duckworth, vii–xxvii. Carnell, Rachel. 1998. ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green: Gender and Friendship in Eliza Haywood’s Political Periodicals’. Eighteenth-Century Studies 32.2: 199–214. —. 2008. A Political Biography of Delarivier Manley. London: Pickering & Chatto. —. 2015. ‘Slipping from Secret History to Novel’. Eighteenth-Century Fiction 28.1: 1–24.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 163

17/11/17 5:01 PM

164

rachel carnell

—. 2017. ‘The Adventures of Rivella as Political Secret History’. New Perspectives on Delarivier Manley and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Power, Sex, and Text. Ed. Aleksondra Hultquist and Elizabeth J. Mathews. New York: Routledge. 15–28. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. The Politics of Friendship. Trans. G. Collins. London: Verso. Downie, J. A. 2003. ‘How Useful to Eighteenth-Century English Studies is the Paradigm of the ‘Bourgeois Public Sphere?’ Literature Compass 1.1: 1–19. Ellis, Frank, ed. 1985. Swift Versus Mainwaring: The Examiner and The Medley. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Herman, Ruth. 2003. The Business of A Woman: The Political Writings of Delarivier Manley. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Joule, Victoria. 2013. ‘Feminist Foremother? The Maternal Metaphor Present in Feminist Literary History and Delarivier Manley’s The Nine Muses’. Women’s Writing 20.1: 32–48. McBain, Jean. 2017. ‘Examined in Manley Style: Epistolary Modes in the Periodical Writings of Delarivier Manley’. New Perspectives on Delarivier Manley and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Power, Sex, and Text. Ed. Aleksondra Hultquist and Elizabeth J. Mathews. New York: Routledge. 188–200. Mackie, Erin. 2005. ‘Being Too Positive about the Public Sphere’. The Spectator: Emerging Discourses. Ed. Donald J. Newman. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. 81–104. Manley, Delarivier. 2005. Selected Works of Delarivier Manley. Ed. Rachel Carnell and Ruth Herman. 5 vols. London: Pickering & Chatto. Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Powell, Manushag N. 2012. Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Steele, Richard. 1987. The Tatler. Ed. Donald F. Bond. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wilson, Kathleen. 1995. ‘Citizenship, Empire, and Modernity in the English Provinces, c.1720–1790’. Eighteenth-Century Studies 29.1: 69–96.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 164

17/11/17 5:01 PM

10 ‘A moral paper! And how do you expect to get money by it?’: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Journalism Isobel Grundy

L

ady Mary Wortley Montagu left her mark at several points in the history of women and periodicals. She wrote a paper for the Spectator (1711–12; 1714) which remains its only identified female-authored issue (no. 573: 28 July 1714); she made a vituperative contribution to the masculine territory of public debate in the Flying-Post; or, The Postmaster in 1722; and in 1737–8 she became almost the earliest woman to launch and run a periodical in English: the single-author, nine-number, progovernment journal titled the Nonsense of Common-Sense.1 Her forays into journalism are seldom as well remembered as her letters, her poetry, her smallpox inoculation, or even her feud with Alexander Pope. Yet her periodical contributions, like her fiction, deserve more attention than they have received. They deserve it both for their style and substance, and also as probably the only ones among all her writings that reached print through her own agency. The periodical press was the only part of the book trade that offered her the freedom to move ‘in the element of Printing’, as Elinor James put it (1715: n. p.). The precise spur for publishing in each case is hidden. Nor do we know whether Montagu wrote, or submitted, or even printed other periodical essays besides the eleven listed above. Each of these is identifiable only because a holograph manuscript survives; how many other drafts of periodical pieces might she have failed to preserve over her years of peripatetic and sometimes harried living? However unusual her career may be among women writers, it is typical in the way that unanswered questions spring up from any examination of what is known. She began writing, as the adolescent Lady Mary Pierrepont, in poetry and fiction that inhabits a romance world of love, idealism, and friendship. When her pieces address the topic of writing itself then writing means poetry, an assertion of skill and of values, a claim to respect and a bid for fame. Poetry is the young writer’s ‘dear my darling choice’; the default poet is male, unworldly, and morally superior: ‘haughty in rags, and proudly poor’, contemptuous of the nobleman who returns his contempt.2 If the proudly poor poet was an unlikely role model for a female sprig of nobility, the writer for hire was more awkward still. Montagu’s class background aligned her with the nobleman. Her courtship letters insist that she cares nothing for material things and is uncomfortable with her family’s wealth; she would rather be merely a gentleman’s daughter than a duke’s – but the wish places her still above the need for earnings. She later patronised needy writers, but pitied her cousin Sarah

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 165

17/11/17 5:01 PM

166

isobel grundy

Fielding for needing to write for money, assuming that this was an expedient that Sarah despised. Montagu’s surviving writings never acknowledge a desire to see her own work in print, and frequently express regret that it was. Print was linked with payment, and the journalist was more deeply embedded in the commercial world than the novelist, since from the Tatler (1709–11) onwards most periodicals (including eventually Montagu’s own) incorporated advertisements cheek by jowl with social or philosophic writings. On the other hand, Steele and Addison were gentlemen who moved in her own social circles; her future husband, when at odds with her father over the hypothetical marriage settlement, published his views on the custom of entail in two Tatler papers. The periodical might finesse its commercial links, as it finessed its party political links, by obliquity (as in the Spectator’s Tory squire Sir Roger de Coverley, who is presented as lovable but as politically clueless). The question quoted in my title, written in 1738, is part of a scenario in which the naïve author, seeking to print a paper on the value of friendship, finds nothing is valid tender but the commodity of political propaganda, whether pro- or anti-government. Here a high-minded periodical writer, confronting a corrupt market, conforms to the ideals of the young Lady Mary. The newly married Montagu had associated herself with periodical writing not as a trade but as a cultured pastime. From involuntary rustic retirement she wrote to her husband on 8 December 1712: ‘If I was as qualified all other ways as I am by idleness, I would publish a daily paper called the Meditator. The terrace is my place consecrated to meditation, which I observe to be gay or grave, as the sun shews or hides his face’ (Montagu 1965–7, vol. 1: 175). Meditation outdoors (in December!) and journalising were to be a relief for eyes exhausted by serious study, an outlet for introspection and for thinking about natural philosophy (the effect of weather on the mind). The passage comes in a correspondence centred on personal politics and money (her husband was in London negotiating for rapprochement with her powerful family). But her periodical is to engage not with allegiance or patronage but with processes of the mind. Lady Mary’s writing had already moved away from romance toward satirical comment on transactions involving money and power. Her earliest extant letters, from her teenage and early twenties (to female friends, not to Edward Wortley Montagu), are deeply engaged with social, ephemeral, merely entertaining texts: oral gossip, ‘a cargo of lampoons’, as she wrote to Frances Hewet in October 1709 (Montagu 1965–7, vol. 1: 17), fiction and scandal-memoirs including the successive instalments of Delarivier Manley’s New Atalantis (1709). Her own confections of the latest news and scandal emanate from the same milieu as her early adult poetry, a competitive world of ambition, consumerism, and display. This world, just as much as philosophic meditation, is that of the emerging periodical essay. When Manley was arrested for the New Atalantis, Lady Mary Pierrepont wrote (8 Nov 1710): ‘Miserable is the fate of writers; if they are agreeable, they are offensive; and if dull, they starve.’ This does not associate her with published authors as the Meditator passage does; starving authors are ‘they’. Lady Mary regrets the loss of the further Atalantis instalments, which may now remain unwritten, and regrets, in a letter to Frances Hewet (12 Nov 1709), that Manley’s ‘faint essay’ will now not provoke ‘some better pen to give more elegant and secret memoirs’ (Montagu 1965–7, vol. 1: 18). Damage to the genres written by Manley seems more regrettable than damage to the author herself. Lady Mary may even have fancied succeeding Manley as that

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 166

17/11/17 5:01 PM

lady mary wortley montagu and journalism

167

‘better pen’ (18). Still unmarried, not yet committed to pleasing Edward Wortley Montagu, she might well have contemplated writing ‘elegant and secret memoirs’. In any case she now applauds secret history, which exposes vice, while condemning ‘that vile paper The Tatler’, which bedaubs its subjects with flattery (Montagu 1965–7, vol. 1: 19). Flattery was in question because Steele’s attack on scandal-writers had elevated the practice of eulogy as against lampoon. Libellers, says Tatler no. 92 (10 Nov 1710) are a ‘low race of men’, ‘the worst of mankind’, who would rather pull down ‘extraordinary merit’ or fasten on its only flaw than attack the thoroughly vicious, as real satirists do (Steele 1987, vol. 2: 74). This exemplifies a habit of celebration (or complacency) in the Tatler, especially in matters of gender and in contrast to the New Atalantis. In no. 92, Steele acts as cheerleader not only to great men but also to the practice of reverencing great men; he maintains that ‘love of praise dwells most in great and heroic spirits’, and that tributes to great men are ‘the business of every man of honour and honesty’ (76, 77). Tatler 90 (5 Nov 1709) offered brief eulogies of William III and Queen Anne, and no. 81 (15 Oct 1709) an apotheosis of ancient heroes both military and intellectual. Lady Mary’s condemnation of the Tatler as sycophantic (sent not to a husband but to a witty friend) predates her fantasy about writing the Meditator. For her husband she approves periodical support for the status quo. Her first letter to him (22 Oct 1712) wonders how to begin, being ‘perfectly unacquainted with a proper matrimonial stile’ (Montagu 1965–7, vol. 1: 168). She solves this problem by using a Spectator paean to married life. Through allusion to no. 500 (3 Oct 1712), on the patriarchal pleasures of a large family (written by her husband’s close friend Joseph Addison), she conjures up a future of happy, complacent parenthood for herself and her spouse. In celebrating Addison’s ideal of companionate marriage, rational domesticity, and tender patriarchy, she allies herself with the social prescriptivism of the periodicals. The Spectator helps her to her proper matrimonial style (Montagu 1965–7, vol. 1: 168). These early references recalibrate expectations about Montagu’s view of the groundbreaking, genre-forming Tatler and Spectator, papers which are generally read as satirical and reformative. She knew both Steele and Addison socially, and deeply admired Addison’s non-periodical works. Her own periodical writings follow the footsteps of these two canonical titles. Yet in her iconoclastic youth she read them as forerunners of An Essay on Man (1733–4) or Pangloss: celebrators of whatever is right in the England of Queen Anne. When she made her presumably first foray into periodical publication, in Spectator no. 573 (28 July 1714), she was replying to Addison’s no. 561 (30 June 1714).3 That number uses an invented Widows’ Club to expose stereotypically female bad behaviour. Addison’s paper is not without complexity, since its account of sexually or financially insatiable widows is mediated through the voice of an equally deplorable, equally rapacious male, ‘a tall, broad-shoulder’d, impudent’ fortune hunter, a wouldbe predator on widows (Addison 1965, vol. 4: 515). Nevertheless, each member of Addison’s Widows’ Club embodies a well-worn joke: one is mercenary, others sexually voracious; some get drunk and others ‘manage’ their husbands (Montagu 1993: 69).4 This satire focuses on individuals and on oft-repeated female failings, not on the social system or its treatment of women. Montagu’s reply seeks to demonstrate, through a series of satirical sketches of unappetising husbands, that widows cannot be blamed

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 167

17/11/17 5:01 PM

168

isobel grundy

for not mourning these men. This picks up and reverses direction of the gendered satire on individuals, but more significantly it targets women’s status in marriage. Her protagonist-narrator, President of the Widows’ Club, is sold into her first marriage as a child, and is later reminded the hard way (by his selling it) that her husband owns her property. This essay sharply highlights society’s injustice to women. It also targets the prevalence in fiction of women being depicted as angels, victims, or monsters. Montagu’s protagonist (once a victim) becomes a ruthless woman who not only exploits men, but delights in discomfiting them. She is just what Steele imagined in Tatler no. 85, which reproves women for a ‘meanness of spirit’ that takes ‘pleasure in your power to give pain’ (1987, vol. 2: 39).5 As a young, first-time widow she revels in taking revenge ‘out of pure Malice’ on the Honourable Edward Waitfort and treats him ‘like a Dog for my Diversion’ (Montagu 1993: 70). (He, meanwhile, despises her as a person and expects to get his hands on her fortune with the least possible effort or inconvenience to himself.) Montagu mounts no defence, but seems to say: So she behaves badly. Get over it. The running joke of Waitfort, whose only failing is exploiting and disregarding women, and who reappears for re-rejection whenever Madame President becomes available, makes a serious point about the cliché of the courtship plot. He falls in love with our heroine’s fortune, but repeatedly loses out by assuming superiority and the expectation of marital authority. She often comes close to choosing him, but he cannot resist behaving like a husband, and she cannot resist jilting him again. This plotting seems designed to resist even the possibility of marriage as happy ending. Addison’s essay (Spectator 561) often mentions the tender age at which women are consigned to marriage: ‘She was a Widow at Eighteen. . . . She was married in the 15th Year of her Age to [a septuagenarian] by whom she had Twins nine Months after his Decease. . . . broke her first Husband’s Heart before she was Sixteen’ (Addison 1965, vol. 4: 516, 517). Montagu approaches this from the viewpoint of a fourteen-year-old who knows her uncle and guardian receive kickbacks from the sale of her, and that her husband reckons on acquiring ‘a meer Child, whom he might breed up after his own Fancy. . . . poor Thing. . . . how should I know . . . I was too great a Coward to contend, but not so ignorant a Child to be thus impos’d upon’ (Montagu 1993: 69–70). Some defence of the child bride is implied here, but the essay does not defend women as a sex. Admirable ladies (as enumerated in the Female Tatler on 20 February 1710 and in other periodicals) are irrelevant to this social world. The former victim is never reasonable, always capricious, indulging in anarchically bad behaviour which elicits the reader’s amusement without condemnation. Having lived with the impotent Sir Nicholas Fribble she chooses potency: ‘John Sturdy Esq . . . just Five and Twenty, about six Foot high, and the stoutest Fox-hunter in the County.’ Yet she is not sex-obsessed: Sturdy’s lifestyle makes her wish ‘Ten thousand times for my old Fribble again’ (Montagu 1993: 71). Her next bad choice after Sturdy is a rakish officer who has ruined several women – whom she marries ‘out of pure spite’ to Waitfort and his ‘insolent Lecture upon the Conduct of Women’. Her new husband nearly bankrupts her (a different kind of ruin), but is instead ‘deliciously killed in a Duel’ (71). Having reached the stage of finding a husband’s death delicious without, I believe, incurring the reader’s censure, she makes two more marriages (to a hypochondriac nobleman and to a miser) which yet more clearly result from her need to snub the ever-hopeful

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 168

17/11/17 5:01 PM

lady mary wortley montagu and journalism

169

Waitfort and to show ‘the young Flirts about Town, it was yet in my Power to give pain to a Man of Sense’. Her treatment by men has shaped her into what men fear in women (72). Montagu’s portrait of her widow, like the young Jane Austen’s of Lady Susan, depicts the female villain triumphant, very much as a misogynist might draw her though with more self-awareness and more humour. Presenting her marriage to a miser as mortal combat, Montagu’s widow takes up spending as a programme of self-defence. She ‘appeared before him in a two thousand Pound Diamond Necklace; he said nothing, but went quietly to his Chamber, and, as it is thought, composed himself with a Dose of Opium. I behaved my self so well upon the Occasion, that to this Day I believe he died of an Apoplexy’ (italics added). She is now a murderess, but her censoring of her own thought-processes (see no evil, hear no evil) is pure fun (73). With this brief tale, one of her most virtuoso pieces, Montagu not only eschewed eulogy, but learned how the periodical essay can combine satire with idealism and strong social critique with irresponsible fun. Her Spectator essay occupies the centre of Spectator territory: character sketches, gender relations, humour. Only the attitudes are extraordinary – the acceptance and dramatisation of stereotypes of women as parasites upon men; the airy avoidance of poetic justice; the unsparing presentation of customs like child weddings, male sexual licence, women’s sexual vulnerability, wives’ lack of property rights. It is remarkable that Addison accepted this highly unusual Spectator contribution, and odd that it seems to have aroused no contemporary comment. Montagu’s next known foray into journalism aimed not at amusement or social satire but the promotion of inoculation against smallpox, a reform much more concrete and specific than overhaul of marriage law and customs. She chose a very different outlet, The Flying-Post; or, The Post-Master, whose editor in 1722 – her essay appeared in the paper of 11–13 September of that year – was George Ridpath (one of Pope’s dunces). Though the database Eighteenth-Century Journals lists its contents as ‘Religion, Politics, Satire, Humour, Poems, Advertisements’ (which also describes the Spectator), religion and politics predominate here. The paper’s overall purpose is news, not literature. After the blatantly fictional widow, Montagu here adopts the guise of a ‘Turkey Merchant’, designed for the reader to believe in. This solid citizen, who earns his livelihood by trade, is too upright to make money for writing. ‘I shall sell no drugs, nor take no Fees . . . ’Tis no way my Interest (according to the common Acceptation of that word) to convince the World of their Errors, that is, I shall get nothing by it, but the private satisfaction of having done good to Mankind, and I know no body that reckons that Satisfaction any part of their Interest’ (Montagu 1993: 95). Idealism leads directly to attack. The merchant follows a factual and measured account of smallpox inoculation in Turkey with denunciation in the grossest terms of English doctors who escalate the procedure and endanger lives, all because they care more for their fees than their patients. The ‘Murders that have been committed on two unfortunate Persons that have dy’d under this operation, has been wholly occasion’d by the preparatives given by our Learned Physicians, of whom I have too good an Opinion not to suppose they knew what they did, by weakening Bodys that were to go through a distemper’ (Montagu 1993: 96). Gashes instead of pinpricks, massive doses of infectious matter, cordials (that is alcohol)

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 169

17/11/17 5:01 PM

170

isobel grundy

may put an end to their Lives; and after some few more Sacrifices of this kind it may be hop’d this terrible design against the Revenue of the College may be entirely defeated, and those Worthy members receive 2 guineas a day as before, of the wretches that send for them in that distemper. (96–7) ‘Gentlemen’, members of the high-status College of Physicians, whose Hippocratic Oath promises disinterestedness, are accused by a businessman of deliberate murder to protect income. The advocate for integrity implies a continuity between professional and trading profits (96). If not proudly poor he is proudly non-profiteering, and holds an Enlightenment commitment to benefiting humankind. The same spirit informs Montagu’s most extensive periodical writing (and publishing): the Nonsense of Common-Sense, which ran weekly, with some gaps, for nine numbers from 16 December 1737 to 14 March 1738. Montagu remained anonymous and unidentified: the first of her two surviving notes to her journal’s trade publisher, James Roberts, appears (though it is in part purposely obliterated) to be seeking reassurance that her anonymity would be preserved (Montagu 1965–7, vol. 2: 114). Here she sets out to do something new for her. Her title identifies a party loyalty even while she denies party bias, since it pits her periodical against Common Sense, or, The Englishman’s Journal (1737–44), which, says the ODNB under Robert Walpole, this year became ‘the leading opposition journal’ (Taylor 2004). The Nonsense of Common-Sense claims party neutrality, paying allegiance only to reason and the common good. But its neutrality is transparently a cloak, since it maintains that reason and the common good are on its side. In no. 7 (14 Feb 1738) it argues that the distinction between ‘Court’ (the Opposition’s insulting label for the government) and ‘Country’ (the government’s insulting label for the Opposition) is absurd. The Court can have no interest separate from the country – and the country’s interest lies ‘in the support of the present Government as by law established’ (Montagu 1993: 135). As to the political allegiance behind the statements of principle, Montagu’s editor Robert Halsband cites her loyalty to Robert Walpole and his ruling Whigs (Montagu 1993: 3); Shawn Lisa Maurer agrees with Halsband and adds that Montagu was responding to the ‘woman-hating attitudes’ in Common Sense that were becoming ‘increasingly prevalent in male-authored periodicals’ (Maurer 2010: 163). More specifically, the moving spirits behind Common Sense, Lords Chesterfield and Lyttelton, were each notorious for dismissiveness toward women. Chesterfield’s letters to his son were still in the future, but Lyttelton had published the poem Advice to a Lady (1733), which Montagu had skewered in a two-line summary ending: ‘In short, my dearee, kiss me and be quiet’ (Montagu 1993: 264). As Halsband observes, just a week before her periodical debut, Common Sense (on 10 Dec 1737) had featured the goddess Nonsense claiming to have ‘the Ladies, the Poetasters, and the M[inistry] on my Side’ (Montagu 1993: 105). But the Nonsense did not always back Walpole. Its second number argues for reducing interest rates to benefit trade, though the scheme for reducing the interest on the national debt, when proposed by the prominent merchant Sir John Barnard a few years before, had been squelched by Walpole for fear of ‘disobliging the moneyed men in the House of Commons’ (Sedgwick under Sir John Barnard). Here the Nonsense argues against Walpole. On specifics of party policy, it seems, Montagu retained some independence, making up her own mind issue by issue.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 170

17/11/17 5:01 PM

lady mary wortley montagu and journalism

171

A specific uncertainty attends her periodical: her identifying note on her manuscript of the first issue: ‘all these wrote by me M.W.M. to serve an unhappy worthy man’. This is first and foremost an assertion of authorship, parallel to that in the album which is now Harrowby MS 256: ‘all the verses and Prose in this Book were wrote by me, without the assistance of one Line from any other. Mary Wortley Montagu’ (Montagu 1993: 172). But it is also a statement of purpose, and the ‘unhappy worthy man’ resists certain identification. The phrase has a note of condescension inappropriate for Walpole, the most powerful man in the country. But if Montagu wrote this three months or more after ending her periodical then she wrote it, too, after the death of Walpole’s beloved second wife, the former Maria Skerrett. For the recent widower of an intimate friend, ‘an unhappy worthy man’ would be fitting despite his political power.6 Montagu’s explicitly male eidolon presents himself as, like the Turkey Merchant, indifferent to personal gain. His disinterestedness is unusual for a hack writer living in, as described in no. 9 (14 Mar 1738), a ‘humble Cell, (vulgarly called a Garret)’ (Montagu 1993: 148); most periodical writers who claim indifference to profit also claim a genteel unearned income (Italia 2005: 54). He is closely attentive to economic issues and to the way they impinge on relations between the classes and sexes. Though he evinces great respect for what might be seen as conservative (gentlemanly and scholarly) as well as Enlightenment values, he nevertheless consistently favours trade. He often backs middle-class virtues against upper-class corruption, yet also supports the industrious poor against their profiteering employers. It is his propensity to side with the underdog which makes him alert to conflict between male and female interests, as revealed in no. 6 (25 Jan 1738): ‘as I profess my selfe a protector of all the oppressed I shall look upon [women] as my peculiar care’ (Montagu 1993: 131). Rational benevolence, that is, necessarily makes a man a male feminist. He expresses this in different ways: he opens his second essay (of 27 Dec 1737) ‘I have allways been an Humble Admirer of the Fair Sex’, and his sixth ‘I have allways (as I have allready declar’d) profess’d my selfe a Freind thô [sic] I do not aspire to the character of an admirer of the Fair sex’ (Montagu 1993: 109, 130). Either way, enlightenment ideals commit a man to caring about women in the same non-partisan way that they induce him to care about trade and politics, in the course of seeking, like the Turkey Merchant in the Flying-Post paper, ‘the private satisfaction of having done good to Mankind’ (Montagu 1993: 95). The periodical form offered Montagu, uniquely, the opportunity to engage with topics like labourers, tradespeople and investors, interest rates, and the freedom of the press. A periodical essay had carte blanche to skip from one topic to another, pursuing connections which might not be immediately obvious. And whatever the topic under discussion, the questions of how best to write about it, and how much difference writing can make, are never far from Montagu’s mind. The Nonsense of Common Sense takes issue from time to time with particular issues of Common Sense; it is continuously self-referential, full of critique of periodical writing and its place in public life. Her first number (16 Dec 1737) aligns her paper not with critique but with acceptance of things as they are. It is Common Sense, it maintains, that breathes doom and gloom, offering its readers the opportunity to indulge their spleen; The Nonsense of Common Sense will on the contrary encourage good humour and defend ‘any reasonable attempt I see’ on the part of government to govern (Montagu 1993: 106).

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 171

17/11/17 5:01 PM

172

isobel grundy

Montagu energetically supports the mourning decreed for the recently deceased Queen Caroline, on the grounds that it will benefit the wool trade (whose products are necessary and useful rather than luxurious). But this defence of the ministry’s measures slides into fierce attack on cartels that keep wages down, on employers and monopolisers who ‘without mercy grind the Faces of the Poor’ (Montagu 1993: 108). No. 2 (27 Dec 1737), the argument for lower interest rates, puts forward the fiction that it is women, not the government, who have insisted on keeping rates high, and attributes this mistaken policy to their exclusion from education in how the world works. The writer deplores the way that women are shut out from learning and from ‘every part of Government in the State’, yet ‘his’ argument is thus couched in a context of regretting the influence exercised by unenlightened women. This sympathiser with women is shocked to see ‘them’ using arguments ‘in opposition to Reason, Justice, and the common Welfare of the Nation’ (Montagu 1993: 109). It is unusual at any time before Wollstonecraft to see such bold assertion of women’s subjection coupled with such unforgiving diagnosis of the way subjection produces ignorance and pig-headedness in the oppressed. Montagu’s mouthpiece at least hints at stereotypical jokes about women: wives, he remarks, carry no weight with husbands, so women exercising influence through men are ‘Mothers, sisters, and mistrisses’ (Montagu 1993: 109). But he also approaches the mainstream-political or economic issue of interest levels first and foremost through its impact on women. The ability to subsist on investment alone means that shopkeepers’ daughters will live genteelly and uselessly instead of being apprenticed to ‘honest Trades’ (Montagu 1993: 110); women of higher rank will dream of a grand marriage and be left on the shelf, instead of wedding an ‘Honest Merchant’ (Montagu 1993: 111) and contributing to population growth. The argument concludes by likening a government enforcing unpopular measures to a mother forcing necessary medicine on a resisting baby; this female metaphor for the exertion of political power must have irked Montagu’s printer, since he added the metaphor of a lover forcing himself on a woman (a rape joke, in fact), a use of ‘Bawdy’ over which she had no control (Montagu 1993: 112, 127). After interest rates, it seems that Montagu decided her paper needed more levity. Numbers three and four deal with the replacement of opera singers by automata and the custom of holding levees. Each brings a streak of originality to familiar periodical territory. Montagu’s comments on the levee (a custom introduced to save precious time which has evolved into a time-waster) bring in not only the fashionable Hogarth but the relations between Horace and Maecenas. Balducci, who signs the fictional correspondent’s letter in Nonsense no. 3 (3 Jan 1738), is a not untypical projector, whose proposal defies logic to build fantasy on fantasy, while scattering topical jokes about castrati and prima donna catfights. Though he never reveals just how he will capture the authentic tones of some actual singer for each of his singing machines, he would need to travel to the singer’s native land to hear the voice for himself before constructing the machine. And though he needs to hear a voice with his own ears before reproducing it, he is confident that ‘if the Pope should turn Christian’ and the supply of castrati dry up, he could somehow reach back in time to bring Orpheus himself upon the stage (Montagu 1993: 129). After these two, the five final numbers hunt bigger game: freedom of the press, relations between the sexes, periodical writing itself, the class system, and finally (a subject

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 172

17/11/17 5:01 PM

lady mary wortley montagu and journalism

173

frequently touched on already) the moral standards of authors. The multiple targets of every paper often include topics pigeonholed under women’s issues, but these are not the focus as they are in the Female Tatler or later Female Spectator (1744–6).7 The Nonsense does not share the Female Tatler’s enduring interest in famous women, gendered personality traits, recipes for successful marriage, or sexual issues like chastity or rape. No. 5 (17 Jan 1738), on the liberty of the press, seems to be taking the same line that Montagu had censured in Steele a quarter of a century earlier. The writer says he had always supposed that the liberty of the press was secure, if only from the observable flourishing of outrageous and often unjust raillery that sacrifices truth to easy laughs and popularity. ‘’Tis very easy to be witty in marking out the Frailties of particular men’ (Montagu 1993: 125). ‘He’ had therefore supposed that ‘his’ moral papers were safe from censorship; the worst that could befall them was to be accounted tedious. He found, however, that ‘the combination of the Booksellers, printers, pamphlet sellers, Authors, etc.’ operates a stronger censorship than parliament could, so that an upright author finds it ‘as impossible . . . to express his thoughts to the public as it would be for one honest Fishmonger to retail Turbots in a plentiful season below the price fix’d on them by the Company’ (Montagu 1993: 129). Montagu knew plenty about combinations (not of workers in a trade union but of entrepreneurs for the purposes of supply management and price-fixing), since her husband was a leader in the Grand Alliance of coal magnates, established in June 1726, which managed the production and marketing of coal from the all the mines in the Tyne and Wear district (Grundy 1999: 184). In this essay the mature Montagu returns to the conundrum at the heart of printing and publishing: how to reconcile a commercial business with the service of truth? The writer seeking an audience cannot opt for being ‘proudly poor’ and despising money; readership is accessible only through a money-making system. The gatekeeper – the printer – will reject copy that fails to follow the tried-and-true recipe of partisanship and coarse jokes (plagiarised or not), and he sees the author who is indifferent to money as simply non compos mentis. After this essay on the silencing of minority views comes the most markedly protofeminist essay in the series, no. 6 (24 Jan 1738). Its spur is an issue of Common Sense in which Chesterfield wrote, in tones of light-hearted jocularity, that society must require women to be sexually pure but can tolerate their being ornamental, empty-headed, and conformist. Montagu’s persona opens his essay by appealing to male readers; only at the end does he ringingly and uniquely address himself to female readers. As usual he enlists Reason against the force of ‘vulgar prejudices’, but, also as usual, his analysis uncovers economic causes for social behaviour or ideological beliefs. Treating women with contempt, he says, does public as well as private damage since it makes them ‘useless members of the common wealth’ (Montagu 1993: 131). He then links this argument back to that of the previous essay: periodicals, that is the media, cater to vulgar prejudice against women because that sells papers. And misogyny sells papers because ordinary male individuals have financial interests which clash with those of their womenfolk. Dowries for sisters ‘are to run away with the money that would be better bestow’d’ in gambling; a jointure must be paid to ‘an old Mother good for nothing’; a wife persists in ‘remain[ing] alive to hinder his running away with a great Fortune’ (Montagu 1993: 132). It is the financial dependence of a sister, a mother, a wife, that makes her a burden and makes her hated.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 173

17/11/17 5:01 PM

174

isobel grundy

Again the feminist attitudes in all this are an aspect of broader socially progressive attitudes: those of a social commentator, not an activist with an agenda for reform. If the writer employed footmen, he says (another indication that his social rank is below Montagu’s, or even that of Mrs Crackenthorpe of the Female Tatler), he would not tell them that servants are naturally liars and cheats, but ‘that Birth and Money were accidents of Fortune . . . that the real Distinction between Man and Man lay in his Integrity’ (Montagu 1993: 133). This fictitious male journalist rejects the belief of many of his sex that ‘as they are men all the Reason that has been allotted to Humankind has falln to their share’ (Montagu 1993: 133). On the contrary, he believes that Reason animates the domestic virtue of women, and that such women’s virtue is purer than that of a philosopher who has his eye on the reward of public fame. This may sound like the kind of separation of spheres that is portrayed and accepted by the Female Tatler and Female Spectator, by the person in the street and by a mouthpiece for his age: ‘Our bolder Talents in full view display’d, / Your Virtues open fairest in the Shade’ (Pope ‘Epistle to a Lady’ 1735: 11). This Nonsense essay does not challenge the economic status quo (dowries, jointures, fortune hunters, and all). Imbalance of power between men and women, like imbalance of power between masters and servants, is here to stay. But the essay does challenge the foundations of this imbalance in principle or theory, rebuking opinions like Chesterfield’s which throw women ‘below the Dignity of the Human Species’ (Montagu 1993: 134). The next essay, about periodical writing itself, gives more attention than usual to attacking Common Sense. The latter’s number for January 1738, written by Chesterfield, begins with an earlier Opposition victory in the defeat of Walpole’s Excise Bill (presented as a victory for a free press). Freedom of speech is identified in a patriotic and eulogistic rant as a British, or English, characteristic: Liberty is ‘our Boast, and the Envy of our Neighbours, the Source of that Virtue, Courage, Capacity, and Science, in which you, to whom I am now writing, so much excel the rest of Mankind’ (Common Sense 1 (21 Jan 1738): 350).8 Walpole’s recent Licensing Act, 21 June 1737, is ‘that masterly Invention of the Inquisition, chief Support of the Papal Throne, and sworn Devourer of all true Piety, Liberty and Virtue’ (Common Sense 1 (21 Jan 1738): 353). This number of Common Sense moves on from politics to long and tediously elaborated jokes based on double entendres about penises. Montagu’s answer, in no. 7 of 14 February (which appeared after an unprecedented three-week gap), begins with a statement of her own political neutrality (condemning ‘their puns and ordures’ (Montagu 1993: 134) but condemning, too, the inanities of official government publications) and turns to concentrate on the issue of indecency in public debate. Even in this context she maintains her habit of considering both sexes. Puerile dirty jokes are too stupid to corrupt either boys or girls; the dim-witted author who chooses to specialise in indecency may need help from a kept mistress who doubles as a writer of smut. In considering clean language Montagu also considers the dignity of literature, high-principled in the previous generation, dragged down by party hacks with plagiarised anti-feminist jokes. This gives a smooth transition to the next number, which returns to the question of liberty but which considers this Opposition shibboleth in a philosophical light. A ‘free people’ (Montagu 1993: 141), it suggests, is not a people liberated from the Gin Act but a people free from pride, envy, and other vices which enslave their hosts; liberty depends on moral choices. Lastly, the writer demonstrates his own freedom of opinion by approving a number of Common Sense.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 174

17/11/17 5:01 PM

lady mary wortley montagu and journalism

175

This is the closest the Nonsense comes to a simple ‘moral paper’. Like the passage in praise of invisible female virtues, it is almost a moralists’ cliché: it is not riches but integrity that brings happiness. Montagu seeks to free her readers from envy by pointing out the predisposition of the rich to idleness, luxury, and therefore disease, the higher survival rate among those unable to afford a doctor, the likelihood that professions of friendship to the rich and powerful will be insincere, and the certainty that slanders will stick to them more persistently than to others. She writes, from the middling status of her mouthpiece, of the rich man (italics added): ‘His Hours are now past in the Mist rais’d round him by his Money, through which allmost all Objects appear false to him, and none clear’ (Montagu 1993: 143); these ideas ‘ought to make us thankfull to the providence that has plac’d us in an Industrious or Laborious course of life’ (Montagu 1993: 145). The final essay (no. 9 (14 Mar 1738)), which follows this, is equally moral in tone. It deplores the modern vice of impudence (exhibited in lampoon and scandal-mongering), expresses nostalgia for the gendered virtues of old – bravery and chastity – and laments the state of literature: ‘I cannot help looking upon Poetry (the Mistress of my Youth) with the same Compassion and Abhorrence, the Angel in Milton does on Lucifer, / How chang’d! How fall’n!’ (Montagu 1993: 148). This sounds valedictory, though the writer promises to fight on with praise of virtue. ‘I will save as many as I can from Oblivion, I will praise, though with the peril of being insipid; nay, I will praise a first Minister . . .’ (149). This no doubt caught her readers’ attention, though the minister turns out to be Fleury in France, not Walpole in Britain. Nevertheless, the final number of the Nonsense carries an air of capitulation. It is shorter than usual; its nostalgia verges on the reactionary; its dispraise of lampoon seems to leave no space of approval for satire; and its policy of lauding the great and good has just that potential for insipidity which Lady Mary had once deplored in the Tatler. The reader is left wondering: was her exit from the print arena willing or unwilling? Only three sets of Nonsense are known to survive (at Victoria and Yale Universities, listed in OCLC WorldCat, and at the Bodleian, listed in ESTC), which suggests a fairly restricted circulation. Montagu evidently did some circulating herself, since she requested half a dozen copies of the first issue (Montagu 1965–7, vol. 2: 114). The paper’s legend, ‘To be continued as long as the Author thinks fit, and the Publick likes it’ (Montagu 1993: 109), asserted her freedom from political or commercial pressure: the freedom of an amateur writer to make her own rules. The venture was a success in that three of its nine issues were re-used, in whole or in part, by the London Magazine (1732–97) or by that and the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1922). Her public voice, then, may have been stilled for purely personal reasons – by free choice, as it had begun. This does nothing to explain why she went public at all. Non-periodical printing had always been thrust on her: Curll had published her Court Poems in 1716 (through James Roberts, incidentally); letters and poems by her had ended up in periodicals; Pope himself may have engineered the printing of her attack on him in the 1733 Verses Address’d to the Imitator of Horace (McLaverty 1998: 184). There is no solid reason to disbelieve her statement that she never printed a line (of verse) (Grundy 1999: 516–17). Her periodical ventures are her sole intentional publications. Their circumstances remain largely unknown: whether Addison requested a Spectator essay or she volunteered

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 175

17/11/17 5:01 PM

176

isobel grundy

one; how either of them regarded the transaction; how she arranged to enter the inoculation fray in print as well as by private action. Her two surviving notes to James Roberts, who printed the Nonsense of Common-Sense, make it clear that, despite her comic complaints of power-struggles with her printer, she was in charge. He was apparently accustomed to business meetings at her house. She specified how many copies she required for her own use, and that the original copy should, contrary to common practice, be returned to her. This is the only glimpse that history affords of Montagu moving in the world of the professional author, quite unlike the solitary space in which she had imagined composing the Meditator. She remains an outsider in the Augustan periodical world, unlike such battling women as Manley, Susanna Centlivre, or Eliza Haywood, and equally unlike such aristo politicians as Lyttelton and Chesterfield. The high-minded hack who speaks in the Nonsense of Common-Sense imagines a different climate of journalism, perhaps a fantasy but with some resemblance to a later, actual climate: that in which, for instance, the Society of Women Writers and Journalists was founded in 1894 – a world in which a garret writer can seek to benefit humankind, can find an audience, and perhaps can even see her or himself as living by an honest trade.

Notes 1. As female author or editor of a periodical she was preceded only by Delarivier Manley (the Examiner, 1711, which Manley took over from Jonathan Swift with at least mostly male contributors), and possibly Centlivre or some other actual female hand behind the Female Tatler, 1709–10. Italia (2005) discusses Montagu’s own periodical in Chapter 4. 2. Her youthful albums survive as volumes 250 and 251 in the Harrowby MSS Trust, Sandon Hall, Stafford (Harrowby MS 250, fol. 3). 3. On Montagu’s periodical writings, see also Powell (2014: 85–90). 4. Apologies for some inevitable overlap with Grundy (1999: 7–12, 217–18, and 371–8). 5. Montagu’s widow perhaps owes something to Female Tatler no. 14, the tale of Clarissa, who loves Cynthio but is married by her parents to Senorio. After Senorio dies, Clarissa scorns Cynthio and marries someone else. She, however, is left after a second widowhood still repenting her loss of Cynthio, so ‘poetic justice’ is served. 6. Italia assumes that the unhappy worthy man is Walpole; I have formerly expressed doubt (Italia 2005: 95; Grundy 1999: 371). 7. Italia points out that when Emilia in the Female Tatler says that but for male tyranny ‘we had sat in Parliament long before this time’ (8 Mar 1710) it seems uncertain whether readers are meant to agree or to laugh (Italia 2005: 61–2). 8. References to Common Sense (which ran intermittently from early 1737 to late 1743) are taken from the two-volume compilation published by Purser and Hawkins (1738–9).

Works Cited Addison, Joseph, and Richard Steele. 1965. The Spectator. Ed. Donald F. Bond. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Common Sense: or, the Englishman’s Journal. 1738–9. London. J. Purser and G. Hawkins. Grundy, Isobel. 1999. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Comet of the Enlightenment. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 176

17/11/17 5:01 PM

lady mary wortley montagu and journalism

177

Italia, Iona. 2005. The Rise of Literary Journalism in the Eighteenth Century. Anxious Employment. London and New York: Routledge. James, Elinor. 1715. Mrs. James’s Advice to all Printers in General. London. McLaverty, James. 1998. ‘“Of which being publick the Publick judge”: Pope and the Publication of Verses Address’d to the Imitator of Horace’. Ed. David L. Vander Meulen. Studies in Bibliography 51: 183–204. Maurer, Shawn Lisa. 2010. ‘The Periodical’. The History of British Women’s Writing 1690–1750. Ed. Ros Ballaster. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 156–72. Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. 1965–7. Complete Letters. 3 vols. Ed. Robert Halsband. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —. 1993. Essays and Poems. With Simplicity, a Comedy. Ed. Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pope, Alexander. 1735. Of the Characters of Women: an Epistle to a Lady. London: Lawton Gilliver. Powell. Manushag N. 2014. ‘Women Readers and the Rise of the Periodical Essay’. A Companion to British Literature, Vol. III: Eighteenth-Century Literature 1660–1837. Ed. Robert DeMaria, Jr, Heesok Chang, and Samantha Zacher. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. 78–94. Sedgwick, Romney, ed. 1970. ‘John Barnard (c. 1685–1764), of Mincing Lane, London, and Clapham, Surr.’. The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1715–1754. Oxford: Boydell and Brewer. (last accessed 2 July 2017). Steele, Richard. 1987. The Tatler. Ed. Donald F. Bond. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Taylor, Stephen. 2004. ‘Walpole, Robert, first Earl of Orford (1676–1745)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (last accessed 18 Jan 2017).

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 177

17/11/17 5:01 PM

11 Eliza Haywood’s Periodicals in Wartime Catherine Ingrassia

T

he index to Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator (1744–6) does not include an entry for ‘war’. Battles, casualties, and munitions do not appear in the two alphabetised columns of topics and episodes. Haywood’s narrative persona, the Female Spectator, states ‘it is my business, as a Spectator, to let as little as possible escape me’. Since evidence of Britain’s involvement in global conflicts as well as a violent domestic rebellion would have been undeniable to all but the most inattentive observer, war becomes an inevitable topic for the periodical.1 The Female Spectator describes how ‘—our Fields are cover’d with Tents;—our Streets swarm with Soldiers;—in every Quarter we hear Drums beating—Trumpets sounding—nothing but military Preparations going forward’ (book 2 (24 May 1744): 70).2 The markers of war are pervasive, a physical, indeed sensory (‘we hear . . .’) presence. In book 2, Haywood specifically foregrounds England’s involvement in multiple military conflicts: ‘We are now engag’d in three Wars— threaten’d with Invasions—Popish Pretenders—Plots, and what not;—great Fleets are equipping;—huge Armaments getting ready;—pressing for Land and Sea Service’ (24 May 1744: 70). Published during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–8), the Female Spectator (twenty-four issues between April 1744 and May 1746) seamlessly weaves descriptions of soldiers, military commanders, military equipment, and battles into discussions of cultural issues, social events, and personal relationships. The integration of the martial and the domestic, the global and the local, evinces the persistence of war and its presence in print culture. War seeped into the cultural consciousness and contemporaneous literary texts, whether through newspaper accounts, returning veterans, or national fast days. Haywood’s readership arguably normalised what Mary Favret terms ‘wartime’, the everyday state of war (2009: 2). Our ability to recognise the presence of war in Haywood’s periodical has, perhaps, been obscured by the periodical’s simultaneously immediate and enduring readership. Clara Reeve, praising Haywood’s ‘labours to the service of virtue’ later in her career describes the Female Spectator as one of ‘those works by which Haywood is most likely to be known to posterity’, suggesting the perceived timelessness of the text (1785, vol. 1: 121). On the one hand, monthly publication inherently claims a certain topicality with its commentary on contemporary social mores, treatment of current events, and integration of letters from readers, creating the illusion of immediate dialogue within a community of contemporaries. But on the other hand, the text’s appeal to subsequent generations and its iteration as a bound periodical – complete with index – screens that immediacy, even in an era when ‘news’ moved at a slower pace. The values it endorses align with the norms of the emergent British identity in an increasingly global environment.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 178

17/11/17 5:01 PM

eliza haywood’s periodicals in wartime

179

While Haywood refers to specific wartime incidents in the Female Spectator, her objective is not to relay details about the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–8), but to illustrate how England’s military engagements shape the British character and the construction of gender. The periodical has often been read as an example of the new ‘reformed Haywood’, an approach persuasively debunked by scholars such as Eve Tavor Bannet (2006) and Kathryn R. King (2006). Rather, the text’s urging for modulated behaviour stems in part from Haywood’s sensitivity to the environment in which she wrote. The sustained condition of wartime prompts, indeed requires, reflection upon the appropriate behaviour for the civilian and the soldier, for men and for women. The pressures war places on a culture, or a couple, intensify their fundamental elements. The Female Spectator seeks to engender moderation, attentiveness, and contemplation in its readers. The Female Spectator herself makes repeated laudatory comments about those in military and naval service, emphasising their importance in maintaining the commercial and political interests of the nation. These sentiments, aligned with a more conservative Patriot perspective, insist readers understand – and reflect upon – the chain of economic and institutional relationships underpinning consumer culture. If the Female Spectator eschews minute details about battles and military strategy, Haywood’s follow-up project, the Parrot, is long recognised as a periodical that more actively engages specific current events. During its brief run of only nine titles (roughly weekly from 2 August to 4 October 1746), the Parrot directly discusses global and domestic military situations. Detailed descriptions of the European conflict recount specific battles, casualties, and treaty negotiations, while the discussion of the aftermath of the Jacobite Rebellion focuses on the trials and punishments of the rebels. With the ‘Compendium of the Times’ that follows the body of the periodical, Haywood creates an implicit dialogue between the information her readers gather in contemporaneous newspapers and what she herself provides. As the subtitle describes, the compendia take the well-known form of ‘A Letter to a Friend in the County’ and seek to communicate ‘a little Summary of such Occurrences as appear worthy of Attention’ (no. 1 (2 Aug 1746): 189).3 Each letter is dated, heightening the sense that the Parrot is conveying ‘news’. The compendia appeared in only numbers 1–5 and again in number 9. Nos. 6 through 8 have only a ‘truncated note’, and, as Christine Blouch suggests, perhaps relaying recent news and current events ‘proved difficult to sustain’ (Haywood 2001b: 175). The Parrot, true to his name, distinguishes himself as ‘the Reporter’ not the Author, drawing his ‘Intelligence’ from ‘whatever either the public Prints, or such Private Correspondence as I am let into’ (no. 1 (2 Aug 1746): 189). The compendia’s epistolary form within the Parrot makes the entire periodical a more personal, less contemplative narrative poised to generate emotion not just reflection. The somewhat less polished, arguably more hurried prose also conveys the sense of immediacy that haunts the text. Despite the difference in purpose and narrative form, the two periodicals share a continuity in their representation of behaviour during wartime. In discussing war in both periodicals, Haywood touches on some fundamental organising principles of eighteenth-century culture – the construction of gender, national identity, and the connection between the political and the personal. Private actions shape the public good. Yet, as always, Haywood is also keenly aware of the marketplace and the commercial value of the discourse of war. During the 1740s, the specific military events Haywood’s

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 179

17/11/17 5:01 PM

180

catherine ingrassia

texts engage – the Battle of Dettingen and the Jacobite Rebellion – became the subject of myriad popular cultural venues, ranging from songs and prints to re-enactments of the battles in theatres and pubs. Writers, whether publishing in newspapers, periodicals, broadsides, or volumes, found a willing audience and such texts complemented the other commercial elements of war; as Kathleen Wilson details, mugs, plates, teapots, medals, and other tokens of military victory were desirable consumer goods (1998: 146–7). Even though Haywood is not marketing the war exclusively, its presence increases her texts’ topicality and appeal. This essay discusses Haywood’s representation of war in the Female Spectator and the Parrot. The Female Spectator advocates that female readers gain knowledge of England’s military efforts in the face of inevitable war and advises a modulated, rational response both from those readers and the English nation at large. It warns of the dangers of myopic zeal in the soldier and the civilian. Through her narrative about the effects of the Battle of Dettingen on one couple, Haywood details the consequences of failing to achieve a balance between the martial and the domestic. More emotional and narratively raw, timely rather than timeless, the Parrot graphically illustrates the consequences of excessive passion – whether in the Rebels or the punishing Duke of Cumberland. Passion, for good or for ill, fuels strong political allegiance, national identity, or personal attachments – all the stuff of which wartime is made. Both periodicals urge regulated behaviour for the soldier, the coquette, and the national leaders alike. However, the Female Spectator constructs those behavioural norms as enduring, regardless of context, while the Parrot, published in a crisis moment, shares those norms but examines their situational relevance. Exploring the discourse of war in these two Haywood periodicals enriches our understanding of Haywood as an author, her strategies for those publications, and the domestic effects of war on mid-century British culture.

The Female Spectator and the Parrot The Female Spectator admits she does not address the specific details of military conflict at all, claiming some topics come not within the Province of a Female Spectator—such as Armies marching,— Battles fought,—Towns destroyed,—Rivers cross’d, and the like:—I should think it ill became me to take up my own, or Reader’s Time, with such Accounts as are every Day to be found in the public Papers. (book 8 (4 Dec 1744): 295) That distinction between the daily ‘public Papers’ and a periodical like the Female Spectator marks the difference between the immediate gratification offered by ‘news’ and the more reflective practice her monthly periodical seeks to engender. As the narrator reminds readers from the beginning, she wants to satisfy their ‘reigning Humour’, ‘Curiosity’, in a fashion that simultaneously makes her ‘as universally read as possible’ and teaches readers to ‘regulate their own’ behaviour (book 1 (24 Apr 1744): 18). Regulation results from cultivating a community of informed, engaged female readers who will, with the Female Spectator as a guide, gain an understanding of the effects of global conflicts on domestic life, effects they see all around them. Although most often away from the battlefield, women regularly witness the products of war if not the particulars of the military action.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 180

17/11/17 5:01 PM

eliza haywood’s periodicals in wartime

181

As the Female Spectator notes, ‘many of my readers were spectators’ to the events she describes. Her perspective and commitment to be an ‘ear witness’ provides a foundation for women’s action. Such guidance is particularly urgent in a culture where women are ‘most fond of military gentlemen’ (book 2 (24 May 1744): 77). For such women, the highest priority should be preserving their spouse’s ‘Fame’. The periodical exemplifies this ideal with a public moment the Female Spectator claims to have witnessed wherein the audience of that theatre spontaneously erupts in applause and huzzahs ‘when the Wife and two Sons of a great Admiral came into the Box’ (77). As ‘the Voice of the People is the best Trump of Fame’, this episode is a testament to his success. Public adoration in his absence, Haywood suggests, not only compensates for that absence but, in fact, exceeds the pleasure he himself could provide his wife: ‘his Glory, dearer to her than all the Satisfaction his Presence could have bestow’d, dearer to her than even his Life, since it was so to him, enabled her to take a Pleasure even in the Sufferings by which he purchased it’ (77). Her pleasure and identity, completely drained of self, is the obverse of the narcissism that, as Haywood details, increasingly plagues military men. The Female Spectator focuses on the constructions of masculinity the absence or presence of war produces, valuing men who align with the norms of civic humanism. As King notes, the periodical shares the general feeling that England under Walpole was slipping into ‘weakness, effeminacy, and national shame and that nothing short of a reassertion of military might would restore the nation’s moral fiber’, a sentiment consistent with the Patriot argument (2003: 10). Book 2 vividly presents the dangers of highly effeminate men unmoored from the responsibilities or insights appropriate to a citizen. The Female Spectator reflects upon the claim by ‘a lady’ who observes the ‘long Peace’ produces an abundance of ‘Coxcombs and Finikins’ who are too easily seduced by ‘softening Luxuries’ (24 May 1744: 70). Predictably, such ‘fine Gentleman’ remain ‘as calm and unconcern’d as ever’ during wartime – except when ‘the Interruption of our Commerce prevents from being imported’ those commodities central to their personal appearance including clothes of ‘the French cut’, ‘fresh Orangeirie and Beramot’, and ‘Vermillion Paste’ (70). This consumer mentality presents ‘an insuperable Difficulty’ for such men ‘to bring themselves to that Hardiness and Neglect of personal Ornaments, which suits with the Life of a Soldier’ (71). However, even ‘the military Gentlemen’ are ‘infected’ with this ‘Over-Delicacy’ (71). Soldiers have adopted the personal grooming habits of the fop. The Female Spectator produces a copy of a bill from one ‘Cornet Lovely’, ‘a Gentleman now in the Army’ (71). The invoice for £38 9s 6d – notably dated 6 June 1743, exactly three weeks before the Battle of Dettingen – includes items such as ‘a Riding Mask to prevent Sunburn’, ‘12 Pots of cold Cream’, and ‘30 Pounds of perfum’d Powder’. Men like Lovely are the inevitable product of a consumer society that seduces men away from their civic and military interests. The narcissistic preoccupation with appearance and self-presentation runs counter to the esprit de corps that should characterise a soldier. The soldier’s loss of the items listed in the invoice – ‘Ammunition’ for this ‘Doughty hero’ (71) – ‘would have given him more concern than the rooting of the whole Army, provided his own dear Person had escaped without a Scar’ (72). The valuing of self over unit, personal appearance over national interest, marks the failure of the male citizen and of the principles of civic humanism. Such ‘effeminancy’ borne of ‘the softening Luxuries of their Silken Youth’ must be cast aside before these ‘new-fledg’d Warriors’ can ‘Soar to Glory’ (72).

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 181

17/11/17 5:01 PM

182

catherine ingrassia

Although persistent effeminacy threatens to erode the effectiveness of the British soldier, the other extreme – a military man who neglects ‘all Decencies of Life to prove his Attachment to his Vocation’ – is an equally narcissistic ‘Affectation’. Eschewing a tent and choosing to ‘lie on the bare Earth, exposed to all the Inclemencies of the Air’ has ‘an equal share of Vanity’ as adorning a pavilion with ‘velvet and Embroidary’ (72). The theatre of war becomes the site for the performance of hypermasculinity. ‘Bravery’, when purely symbolic and ‘of no service’, becomes a form of idleness, as dangerous as Syrena Tricksey’s performative ‘virtue’ in Haywood’s Anti-Pamela (1741). Cunningly, Haywood identifies in the compromised military man the faults eighteenth-century culture most frequently ascribed to women – vanity, narcissism, idleness – problems the Female Spectator attempts to eradicate in its female readers. Notably, the Female Spectator privileges the importance of modelling ‘emulative’ behaviour among military men. She notes that ‘the Example of Others’ during ‘Frequent Campaigns’ will teach ‘new-fledg’d Warriors’ how to ‘wear off’ this effeminacy. The role of the community in the shared reinforcement of behavioural norms replicates in a masculine, martial sphere the stated objective of the Female Spectator in the feminine domestic sphere: to regulate behaviour through the creation of meaningful communities. This irregular behaviour by military men has consequences beyond the field of battle, however. The army’s masculine, homosocial environment threatens to erode more appropriately modulated behaviour of men when they return to society. Military action can create a sense of self-importance that completely skews a man’s self-awareness and connection to others. ‘Having done a gallant Action in the Field’, a man may look ‘upon himself as a little Deity’ and as a result ‘dispense with all other Obligations’ (72). That word ‘obligation’ encompasses both the domestic responsibilities one might have toward tenants, creditors, or employers, and emotional commitments and reciprocal relationships within a romantic context. The Female Spectator’s concern that the military causes men to privilege male homosocial relationships (which, in the extreme, are narcissistic) above private, heterosexual bonds, extends to a consideration of the specific effects battle has on individual men and, in turn, the women to whom they are attached. The narrative of Aminta and Amaranthus illustrates these concerns, potentially shared by many readers. Prior to embarking on the Continental campaign that culminates in the Battle of Dettingen, Amaranthus proposes to his beloved Aminta. Although military glory ‘till now had been the darling Idol of Amaranthus’s soul’ (73), his love for Aminta initially makes a soldier’s life less appealing. However, their inevitable separation produces very different reactions. After Amaranthus departs for the Continent, Aminta becomes preoccupied with military actions: ‘all the Conversations she coveted was such as inform’d her concerning the Army’ (73). Although her interest is prompted by an awareness of ‘the Dangers to which a Life . . . must inevitably be exposed’ (73), it results in her acquiring knowledge at a detailed level about the actions of the British army. Whether gaining knowledge through conversation or news, Aminta ‘was only pleas’d or sad according as she heard they were near, or at a Distance, from the Enemy’ (73). She follows, to the degree possible, the actual troop movements. The romantic love that prompts Aminta’s interest causes her to be a more engaged and informed British subject with a clear-sighted ability to sustain interest in one topic, and one person, over a long period of time, a desirable quality in a female civilian.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 182

17/11/17 5:01 PM

eliza haywood’s periodicals in wartime

183

By contrast, Amaranthus reveals his vacillating nature during his deployment. Although his commitment to Aminta has always been marked as temporally contingent – he ‘loved with the utmost Passion at that Time’ (73, emphasis Haywood’s) – his experience at the Battle of Dettingen fundamentally changes him. A pivotal encounter during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–8), also known in England as King George’s War, the Battle of Dettingen (27 June 1743) is of importance in British history almost solely because of the sovereign’s presence on the battlefield. The ‘Pragmatic Army’, a force of roughly 37,000 British soldiers and 13,000 allied troops consisting of Austrian and Hanoverian soldiers confronted French troops in excess of 70,000, who actually had the British surrounded. George II himself led in the field of battle, with the Horse Guards allegedly playing ‘Britons, Strike Home!’ as they charged. The French lost between 4,500 and 6,000 men while the alliance casualties were between 2,000 and 3,000 in total, with British casualties only about 850 by most estimates. This battle generated fierce popular cultural coverage. For example, in the two months following the battle the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1922) published four poems celebrating the victory. Handel wrote a Te Deum in celebration of the victory, poet Elizabeth Boyd penned a hymn (‘Glory to the highest, a thanksgiving poem. On the Late victory at Dettingen’), and James Worsdale composed a rousing song, ‘The Routing of the French Forces’. The particulars of the battle were so widely known that it even became fodder for a joke that appeared in the 1745 publication The Whet-Stone: or the spawn of puzzle. Being a fresh collection of conundrums, never before publish’d (‘Why is Admiral M. like the English at Dettingen?’).4 Haywood’s choice of Dettingen as the site of Amaranthus’s actions in the field underscores the popular (and marketable) knowledge of the battle, making this a recognisable, translatable moment for many readers. Although Amaranthus’s Regiment ‘suffer’d greatly, and he himself was wounded in many Places’, he refused to leave the field of battle; ‘he behaved with the utmost Intrepidity’. These wounds ‘purchased him immortal Honour’, giving his family ‘greater Reason to congratulate than condole them’. Only ‘an unlucky Blow upon the Head’ stops him; he appears to be dead and ‘for some Hours discover’d no Symptoms of Breath’ (74). Haywood details the fragile lines of communication, the likelihood of misinformation, and the disorder of war. ‘In the Confusion everyone was after the Battle’ it is understandable ‘that in the Accounts transmitted of it, this young Hero’s Name should be inserted in the List of those who were Kill’d’ (74). Such mistakes, also a common trope in dramas and fictional narratives, might affect anyone with a loved one in military service. On the home front, this erroneous information throws Aminta into ‘Grief and Despair . . . too violent to endure long Continuance.’ When Amaranthus does return alive, however, he is ‘no longer the same person’ (76). Dettingen fundamentally changes him; he experiences an ‘Alteration of his Behaviour’ (75) that ultimately prompts a rejection of Aminta and causes her to leave society altogether. This conclusion is a key departure from the romance trope where the couple ends up united despite the misinformation. A twenty-first-century perspective might mark this alteration, Amaranthus’s ‘fundamental change of temper’, as a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. For Haywood, however, it is evidence that ‘Love and Glory are things incompatible’ for some men. Buoyed by his military success (or perhaps his own survival), Amaranthus has become as narcissistic as the foppish Cornet Lovely, with ‘Eyes that seem intent rather on Things within himself, than any thing he can find without’. His slightly

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 183

17/11/17 5:01 PM

184

catherine ingrassia

feminised mannerisms, ‘a scornful Toss of the head, a careless Fling of the Arms’, mark the new Amaranthus, a man ‘full of Self-sufficiency’ (76). Rejecting the once-prized romantic relationship with Aminta, Amaranthus now ‘seems to think what he has done commands as his Due, the Love and Respect of all who see him’. It is ‘beneath him even to regard, much less imagine himself oblig’d by’ anyone (76). Service to country within a military context confers a form of masculinity achievable only within hierarchical male homosocial relationships. Yet, when that service supplants all other relationships and ruins the capacity to interact meaningfully with a broader culture, the solipsism drains such dedicated service of all value. Amaranthus ‘now thought no woman worthy of the serious Passion of a Man like himself’, believing ‘a tender Intercourse with the Ladies took up too much of a Soldier’s Mind’ (75–6). While patriotic fervour is to be applauded, it, ‘like all other virtues, degenerates into Vice, by being carried to an Extreme’ (72). When ‘Zeal for the Service of his King and Country’ supplants his affections for Aminta, making country, not another woman her chief ‘Rival’, that rejection marks Amaranthus as more ‘savage’ than ‘true hero’ (76). It fractures the civilising bonds of a domestic relationship and denies Aminta the ability to contribute to the public good as a supportive and adoring spouse. In using such personal narratives as the basis for moral education, the Female Spectator invites the kind of criticism levelled by ‘Curioso Politico’ in book 9: that despite promises of relaying a ‘perfect Account of the most momentous Actions’ she has instead offered only ‘Home-Amours, Reflections on Human Nature, the Passions, Morals, Inferences, and Warnings to your own Sex’ (3 Jan 1745: 293). Haywood’s reply, borne out by her treatment of the Battle of Dettingen, locates national values primarily in personal actions: ‘the better we regulate our Actions in private Life, the more we may hope of public Blessings, and the more we shall be enabled to sustain public Calamities’ (296). The applicability of that approach crosses gender, pertaining as powerfully for the wife at home as it does for the soldier for whom she waits. While the Parrot ultimately espouses a similar message, it assumes a different method for presenting it. The immediacy of the weekly periodical, the inclusion of news items, and dated compendia, results in a more current if less polished text. The main body of the Parrot discusses the domestic and global situation in general, often philosophical terms, while the compendia offered more detailed information. The discussion of international events, though more frequent, is less personalised, more remote. The Parrot recounts ‘the most dismal Scenes of war and Devastation’. (‘A Body of Five Thousand Men, commanded by M. Mirepoix, has been three Times repulsed by the King of Sardinia’s Troops’ (no. 1 (2 Aug 1746): 189)). He shares shifting public opinion about the strategic value of hard-won colonial outposts: You will be surprized, I believe, to hear that Cape Breton, a Place of so much real Importance to our Trade, and which to be possest of has cost so much Blood and Treasure, is now beginning to be insinuated in some of our News-Papers, as of much less Consequence than it has been represented. (no. 4 (23 Aug 1746): 236) And he details negotiations that raise ‘Hopes of an Approaching Peace’ in the War of Austrian Succession while lamenting the unreliability of the ‘Plentipotentaries’ responsible for making it happen: (‘. . . in all Human Contingencies there is always, and ever will be a Danger of some unlucky if, that throws every thing back into its former

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 184

17/11/17 5:01 PM

eliza haywood’s periodicals in wartime

185

Channel’ (no. 3 (16 Aug 1746): 223)). While these accounts navigate the fine line between critique and reportage, they generally remain more purely factual and less narratively engaging. However, the cultural fascination with the Jacobite Rebellion and its aftermath, arguably the kind of ‘Public Calamity’ to which Haywood refers, demanded Haywood meaningfully and consistently address that crisis moment since the Parrot emerged during the height of coverage. The Rebellion (1745–6), though failed, represented a legitimate attempt by Stuart loyalists to reclaim the crown of England. Capitalising on the British commitment of troops in Europe to the War of the Austrian Succession, the Jacobite army, led by Charles Edward Stuart (or ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’), invaded Scotland in July 1745. Gathering 6,000 men, the Jacobite army moved south, entering England in November and ultimately coming within 120 miles of London. Although at that point the army returned to Scotland, its numbers nearly doubled as it headed south again in January 1746. Hampered by a lack of funds, the Jacobite army ultimately confronted the alert, organised, and well-fed British troops led by the Duke of Cumberland, ending with the disastrous Battle of Culloden on 16 April. The trials of the captured rebels in the summer months captivated London. The London Evening-Post of Thursday 31 July to Saturday 2 August 1746, the week the Parrot was first published, demonstrates the cultural preoccupation with rebellion and all its participants. For example, on the front page, that issue features news stories about raising money for the Pretender, the ‘Disposition and Cantonment of his Majesty’s Troops now in Scotland, consisting of 16 Regiments’, and details of the Duke of Cumberland’s visit to York. On the following page, the advertisement for the Parrot sits adjacent to a text addressing the legal ramifications of treason: the second edition of Some Considerations on the Law of Forfeiture, for High Treason. Occasion’d by a Clause, in the late Act, for making it Treason to correspond with the Pretender’s Sons, or any of the Agents, &c., ‘corrected and much enlarg’d, with an Appendix, concerning Estates-Tail in Scotland’. Questions of loyalty, political affiliation, and national identity literally surround the Parrot; to not deal directly with the rebellion would have been commercially unwise and journalistically out of touch. Throughout the compendia, Haywood conveys information about the rebels, their trials, and their executions, seeking to remain a kind of news aggregator, the ‘reporter’ she claims to be from the start. For example, she describes the pursuit of rebels or ‘Runaways’ by Captain James Campbell, acknowledging ‘Some of the News Papers give a very particular Account of this skirmish’ which to repeat ‘would be too tedious for a Letter’. However, she does see fit to provide a body count (‘all were very much wounded, and all their private men killed, except three’ (no. 2 (9 Aug 1746): 208)), and a commentary on the quality of the Highlander’s munitions: ‘On our side, none were so much as touched, though the Balls went through the Cloaths of several.— Their Powder or their Shot, I have observed, has been always extremely defective’ (no. 2 (9 Aug 1746): 208). The familiarity of terms, names, and movements signals the broader cultural knowledge. Haywood uses a number of different strategies for presenting this domestic war and its aftermath to her readers. Sometimes Haywood taps into already sensationalised, already circulating accounts related to the rebels. For example, in a postscript to Compendium no. 1 ‘Saturday, Aug. 2, 1746’ she recounts the romantic story and ‘sad Catastrophe’ of rebel James Dawson whose beloved dies upon his execution when

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 185

17/11/17 5:01 PM

186

catherine ingrassia

she sees ‘the Fire kindled, which was to consume that Heart she knew so devoted to her’ (no. 1 (2 Aug 1746): 193). Haywood withholds a prolonged narrative with ‘any Repetition of what she suffered’, insisting ‘none, excepting those utterly incapable of feeling any sort of generous Emotions, but may easily conceive her Agonies’ (no. 1 (2 Aug 1746): 193). Although the narrator shares her own reaction – ‘the Story very much affected me, as I doubt not but it will you, and all who hear it’ – it compels the reader to seek other sources for a fuller accounting of the day. Haywood’s strategic inclusion of that tale – ‘Just as I had finished the Above, I received the following Account, . . . [and] opened my Letter again on purpose to insert it’ (no. 1 (2 Aug 1746): 192) – might betray a capitulation to market pressures. Alternately, Haywood reiterates the bodily violence done to the punished Highlanders. Listing the names of nine Highlanders ‘executed at Kennington-Common’ (no. 1 (2 Aug 1746): 191), the Parrot recounts how ‘They suffered the Death of Traitors, their Hearts and Bowels burnt by the Common Hangman, and I hear their Heads are to be set up as a Memento on the Gates of London, Manchester, and Carlisle’ (191–2). The identification of the specific places within London, and within the kingdom, where readers can actually see either executions or ‘mementos’ of the same heightens the material reality of the war’s aftermath. Yet Haywood observes that she does ‘not find that the gay World are enough affected with the Troubles of the Times, to deny themselves any Part of their usual Diversions’. That wilful indifference prompts her to demonstrate that violence is not limited to victims of war, or perhaps, that wartime produces unanticipated victims. ‘[U]gly Casualties’ also include domestic ‘casualties’ of ‘some particular Families’: ‘Two have cut their Throats, one hanged himself, three have been drowned by Accident, and two by their own Design’ (no. 1: 192). These domestic casualties of unspecified cause (disappointed Jacobites? despondent individuals?) should remind readers that the ‘Troubles of the Times’ in fact always already surround them. By pointing to both the public and the domestic evidence of violence, Haywood lays bare the persistence presence of wartime in its multiple forms. Throughout the treatment of the Jacobite Rebellion and its aftermath the maxim articulated in the Female Spectator – private actions shape the public good – guides the advice offered in the main body of the periodical. The narratives range from meditations on foreign troop movements and diplomatic policy to stories harvested from the ‘very choice Collection of Curious Pieces’ the Parrot has ‘treasured up in [its] Mind’ (no. 1 (2 Aug 1746): 186), readily familiar to Haywood readers. However, when such narratives sit between accounts of Scottish rebels and a compendium with detailed information from their trials, they assume a different meaning. For example, Parrot no. 3, published 16 August 1746, includes two seemingly unrelated narratives: an examination of the motives of two Scottish peers condemned to death and the story of the ‘celebrated Toast’ Climene. First, the Parrot explores the rationale and defence of two Scottish peers in the Tower under the sentence of death. The Parrot engages them in a kind of ad hoc dialogue, as though he were cross-examining them, while also humanising their series of unfortunate decisions. The rebels’ plea in court for leniency, their language italicised, is interspersed with the Parrot’s commentary: They urge, as an Alleviation of their Crime, That they entered into a Service so contrary to their Allegiance, without Thought, without Consideration; —that, indeed, I am very ready to believe was the Case: —That they had no sooner

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 186

17/11/17 5:01 PM

eliza haywood’s periodicals in wartime

187

engaged themselves, than they repented of what they had done; —that may be, yet they returned not to their Duty: —That they fought, yet were not desirous of Victory; —that appears a little incredible, but if true it is an undeniable Argument, that what I alledged was just: —That they prevented all the Mischief they could; —yet still they persevered in Measures, which it was easy to foresee would be the Ruin of their Country: —That after the Defeat at Culloden, they might easily have escaped the King’s Forces if they had been so minded, but chose rather to be made Prisoners than preserve their Liberty; —which it is ten to one but they have also repented them of since. (no. 3 (16 Aug 1746): 212) The passage highlights the iconic words of the rebellion (crime, mischief, Culloden) and the key concepts of citizenship: allegiance, liberty, and duty. However, the vacillation the rebels’ narrative presents – the provisional nature of their actions (‘they had no sooner engaged themselves, than they repented’) and the inconstancy of thought (‘they fought, yet were not desirous of victory’) – mark their failure as subjects, resulting in their treasonous activities. This vacillation also compromises their masculinity. The sequence of their actions – thoughtless decision, repentance, complaisance, rationalisation – anticipates the progression of Climene’s narrative that follows, underscoring the rebels’ feminised position. The narrative of Climene shares that thoughtlessness and indecision, although the Parrot initially withholds commentary. Too easily seduced by Lysander, Climene is subject to a complex series of deceptions by which he pretends to be married to ‘an old creature’ (no. 3 (16 Aug 1746): 216) in order to avoid any marital entanglements with her. While Climene ends up happily married to another, the narrative reminds the reader that ‘Human Nature is frail’, prompting the Parrot to advise that ‘the Ladies, as well as the Men, well weigh the Consequences of everything they are about to do, before they bring it to Action’ (no. 3 (16 Aug 1746): 219). Climene, like the rebels, acts on passion with no thoughtful regard for the ramifications of her actions. Climene’s punishments seem minor, even non-existent: she must live with the personal knowledge of her failing and deception, but it’s never revealed to the community as a whole. Similarly, the fate and identity of the peers is withheld within the Parrot, until revealed in the Compendium, creating the illusion that the Parrot shares that information only with his designated recipient, not with the world at large. There, the Parrot unceremoniously states: ‘Last Monday the Earl of Kilmarnock and the Lord Balmerino were beheaded on Tower-Hill, before the greatest Concourse of People that were ever seen together on such Occasion’ (no. 4 (23 Aug 1746): 237). The latter ‘died a Scotchman; then laid down his Head and immediately bid the Executioner to do his Office, whose Hand I am told trembled in such a Manner, that is was not without three Blows the Head of that unhappy Lord was severed from his Body’ (237). The juxtaposition of these narratives reminds readers of the shared motivations of soldiers, rebels, patriots, and lovers. Actions have consequences for all.

Implications of Wartime Within these periodicals’ preoccupation with regulating behaviour, Haywood also expresses concern for more overtly political aspects of war. Which nations should assume responsibility for funding martial efforts? What was England’s obligation

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 187

17/11/17 5:01 PM

188

catherine ingrassia

to its allies on the Continent? Should foreign policy really be determined by shifting domestic politics and leaders? Haywood offers some veiled opinions but drives her readers to newspapers and other accounts that will give them insight into these issues. Haywood wants her female readers, though excluded from the larger conversations about military actions, taxation, and foreign policy, to be knowledgeable of such things and admonishes those who feel otherwise. For example, in a letter to the Female Spectator, Bellemonte complains of a suitor who entertains her only with talk of current events: ‘some grave Reflections on that uncertain Element,—the unhappy Fate of Brave Admiral Balchen,—and the Loss the Navy and whole Nation had of him’ (book 8 (4 Dec 1744): 286). Bellemonte dismisses this approach: ‘as if I had any thing to do with the Admiral, the Navy, or the Nation’ (286). Looking at the sea should summon images of Venus, not the navy. Haywood recognises that many other readers ‘may equally stand in need of that Advice she alone has vouchsafed to ask’ (291), but she is swift and unequivocal in her endorsement of this particular suitor. His ‘Reflections’ should serve to prompt hers and the recognition that, in fact, Bellemonte has everything to do with ‘the Admiral, the Navy and the Nation’. They make her way of life possible. In suggesting that Haywood’s periodicals are ‘at the centre of a cultural matrix addressing important larger questions’, Manushag Powell identifies Haywood’s motivations for incorporating war into her periodicals (2012: 76). She not only wants to delineate appropriate behaviour for both genders – and suggest strategies for communities to subsequently monitor themselves – she always wants her readers to recognise the implications of their own behaviour on character, national identity, and the public good. While that recognition is crucial at any time, it assumes renewed importance during wartime.

Notes 1. As Alexander Pettit reminds us, ‘it is impossible to determine whether Haywood herself compiled the index’. Nevertheless, as he goes on to note, ‘[t]he original indexes are unavoidably interpretive, noticing certain passages and ignoring others’ (Haywood 2001a, vol. 2: 79). That interpretative element is, I’m suggesting, what is important. The indexes are not completely without the mention of the military, although those references occur primarily in connection with social behaviour: e.g. ‘Women, why fond of Military Gentleman’; ‘Wife of a late General, her Behaviour’; or ‘Effeminancy in Army censur’d’. 2. All quotations from the Female Spectator are taken from Haywood 2001a. Part 2. Vol. 2. The number after FS indicates the relevant book number. 3. All quotations from the Parrot are taken from Haywood 2001b. Part 2. Vol. 1. 4. ‘Because he was ill-seconded.’ Admiral M is Admiral Thomas Mathews (1676–1751) who was the subject of a parliamentary inquiry and court martial following his retreat at the 1744 Mediterranean naval Battle of Toulon. Richard Lestock, the ‘second’, abandoned his pursuit of fleeing Spanish ships at, he said, Mathews’s command. Lestock was acquitted and given another position; Mathews was dismissed from the navy (The whet-stone 1745: 11). Boyd’s hymn, like Worsdale’s song, refers to the French generals (Francois-Marie, first Duke de Broglie and French marshal Adrien-Maurice, third Duke de Noailles) by their familiar names ‘Broglio’ and ‘Noailles’. This shorthand suggests the deep familiarity with this battle. Interestingly, Worsdale’s satiric song points to the same effeminacy of the French as Haywood does. For example, in stanza VII, Worsdale writes, ‘There Noailles the Hero, thunders / All his Captains, threat’ning Wonders; / Impatient, long’d to give their Foes, / A Sample of their—fine lac’d Cloaths’. (Cibber 1743: 79).

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 188

17/11/17 5:01 PM

eliza haywood’s periodicals in wartime

189

Works Cited Bannet, Eve Tavor. 2006. ‘Haywood’s Spectator and the Female World’. Fair Philosopher: Eliza Haywood and The Female Spectator. Ed. Donald J. Newman and Lynn Marie Wright. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. 82–103. Cibber, Theophilis. 1743. Cibber and Sheridan: or, the Dublin Miscellany. Dublin. Favret, Mary. 2009. War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Haywood, Eliza. 2001a. The Female Spectator. The Selected Works of Eliza Haywood. Part 2. Vols 1–2. Ed. Kathryn R. King and Alexander Pettit. London: Pickering & Chatto. —. 2001b. The Parrot. The Selected Works of Eliza Haywood. Part 2. Vol. 1. Ed. Christine Blouch, Alexander Pettit, and Rebecca Sayers Hanson. London: Pickering & Chatto. 179–320. King, Kathryn R. 2003. ‘Effeminate Pacifists and War-Mongering Women: Thoughts on War and Peace in the Long Eighteenth Century’. 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquires in the Early Modern Era. 9: 3–21. —. 2006. ‘Patriot or Opportunist? Eliza Haywood and the Politics of The Female Spectator’. Ed. Donald J. Newman and Lynn Marie Wright. Fair Philosopher: Eliza Haywood and The Female Spectator. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. 104–21. Powell, Manushag N. 2012. Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Reeve, Clara. 1785. The Progress of Romance, through Times, Countries, and Manners. 2 Vols. Colchester: W. Kaymer. The whet-Stone: or the spawn of puzzle. Being a fresh collection of conundrums, never before publish’d. 1745. London. Wilson, Kathleen. 1998. The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wright, Lynn Marie and Donald J. Newman, eds. 2006. Fair Philosopher: Eliza Haywood and The Female Spectator. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 189

17/11/17 5:01 PM

12 German Women’s Writing in British Magazines, 1760–1820 Alessa Johns

B

ritish readers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries could enjoy the latest Continental European literature translated and reviewed in the magazines. While French literature dominated, interest in German offerings increased throughout the period and became popular as political conflicts with France reduced British gusto for French fare. Scholarly attention has focused, in the past half-century, on canonical male authors. However, German women writers consistently received notices in British periodicals. This essay seeks to draw attention to some of these neglected female authors by bringing their contributions to light; it explains their inclusion in the British magazines, reconstructs their reception, and assesses their significance. Ultimately, an understanding of German women’s writing in British magazines in the period conveys the substantial profit of studying transnational trends in gender socialisation. Scholarship undertaken on German literary influence in Britain has concentrated on central figures of the Romantic period: the travels and studies of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William and Dorothy Wordsworth in Germany from 1798 to 1799, for example; Henry Crabb Robinson, who lived in Germany from 1800 to 1805, studied at the University of Jena for three years, and wrote a series of influential articles about German philosophy published in the Monthly Register (1802–3); the remarkable popularity of the dramas of August von Kotzebue, whose play Lover’s Vows (trans. 1798) was incorporated by Jane Austen into her novel Mansfield Park (1814). Setting the stage for these figures were earlier exchanges, however, which – aside from the popularity of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, particularly The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774, trans. 1779), and Friedrich Schiller’s play The Robbers (1781, trans. 1792) – have not received thorough academic consideration.1 The limited attention to pre-Revolutionary foreign literary influences overall has been paid mostly to French contributions.2 These productions did still dominate the market for translations in the mid-eighteenth century, and a good number of the German works available were actually translated via French versions, as was the case with the first English publication of Werther. (Other translations of Werther from the original German appeared in 1786, 1799, 1801, 1802, with another from the French in 1789 (Stockley 1929: 138).) In addition, an argument continues to hold sway that the scant interest that existed in German literature before the French Revolution was entirely squelched by reactionary criticism in the 1790s; German writings were tainted by radical ideology and rejected. While some notices in the periodicals do disparage the sensibility or doctrinal freedom displayed in German texts – examples of which will appear below – consideration of

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 190

17/11/17 5:01 PM

german women’s writing in british magazines

191

German literature in the magazines, while perhaps slowed, was in fact not interrupted during the Napoleonic era. Perhaps the market itself imposed the greatest limitations. Importing books was difficult and expensive, and sometimes the material condition itself of the German books, especially paper and print, was not good (Jefcoate 1996: 47; Brown 2005: 113). Even for those interested in and determined to read German literature by the early nineteenth century, it was hard to get their hands on German volumes. A ‘Sketch of Foreign Literature’ in the London Magazine (1820–9) lamented: While the Germans publish reprints and translations of the best English works at a fourth part of the price that we pay for the originals, we cannot afford to do the same with theirs; and even those who understand the German language are not able to purchase, as they would gladly do, on account of the high prices charged by the London booksellers, which are partly to be ascribed to the heavy duty on importation. (8 (Aug 1823): 210) As a consequence, periodicals played an important role in conveying to British readers events in the German literary world. Over twenty different British journals offered notices, reviews, extracts, and translations of German works in the period 1760–1820 (Morgan and Hohlfeld 1949). During the Seven Years War, for example, periodicals convey a fascination with Frederick the Great, the warrior and friend of the arts, and this whetted interest in what was happening generally in German letters; mideighteenth-century British readers were especially keen on finding out about such prominent religious figures as Nicolaus Zinzendorf, the Herrenhuters, or the Moravians. Popular interest in German literature continued to increase in the second half of the eighteenth century, with the interest in sensibility, horror, and the Gothic accelerating the rate and number of translations, especially in the 1790s, and then substantially from the 1820s on. As for German women writers, I have counted well over a dozen female authors who received attention in the British magazines in the years under review: Karoline Fouqué, Therese Huber, Amalie von Imhoff, Anna Luisa Karsch, Margarete Klopstock, Sophie von La Roche, Wilhelmine Lichtenau, Amalie Ludecus, Johanna Merlau, Benedikte Naubert, Karoline Pichler, Johanna Schopenhauer, Karoline Stahl, Rahel Varnhagen, Karoline von Woltmann, and Caroline von Wolzogen. The best known of these writers composed prose fiction, and because of the lively interest in such narratives – often disparaged as hackwork – some commentators felt that the best German writing was not making its way to Britain. In The Stranger in England (1807), the German traveler C. A. G. Goede explained: ‘Many English consider German literature immoral and dangerous; but they have formed their hasty opinion on some trifling German novels, which too easily find their way from circulating libraries to the toilet of beauty’ (vol. 2: 152).3 Indeed, women, prime customers of the circulating libraries, formed a significant part of the reading public, and the popular Gothic novels that offered toilet-table diversion were, it was feared by conservative commentators, vitiating their taste. But religious piety and moral themes also found favour. German author Salomon Gessner’s The Death of Abel (trans. 1761) and Christoph Martin Wieland’s Abraham (1764) were the best-known German works at mid-century; they ‘were specially popular with women readers, who, at that time, having much more leisure, read much more than men. It is worth noting also how

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 191

17/11/17 5:01 PM

192

alessa johns

many of the early translators were women’ (Stockley 1929: 6). Mary Collyer translated The Death of Abel (1761); she and her husband and co-publisher Joseph were among the most active purveyors of German material up until their deaths in 1763 and 1776 respectively. In addition to the fascination with Werther, there were in the magazines further translations of Gessner, for example; extracts and reviews of popular plays like Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Emilia Galotti (1772) and novels like von La Roche’s The History of Lady Sophia Sternheim (1771); examples of the poetry of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Gottfried August Bürger and Johann Gottfried Herder and Lessing; extracts from and discussions of the physiognomy of Johann Kaspar Lavater; examples of the medical and literary and religious work of Albrecht von Haller; travel writings by Johann Kaspar Riesbeck; philosophical works of Johann Georg Zimmermann; critical essays by Johann Joachim Winckelmann; and so forth – in short, a wide range of writings appeared, were discussed, and were often then reprinted in additional periodicals, which attests to the desire of publishers and readers to distribute and read this foreign material.4 However, despite the variety of German writings available in the journals, and despite a reading public consisting of both men and women, Bayard Quincy Morgan and A. R. Hohlfeld – the most active twentieth-century researchers on the subject – largely accepted a gendered valuation of the literature, with contributions deemed feminine misprized. In Morgan and Hohlfeld’s German Literature in British Magazines 1750–1860, gender becomes a way of explaining how non-canonical authors could be promoted in the journals: Attention paid to minor and even insignificant writers is often out of all proportion to the interest in really great German men of letters; compare for instance the ten references to Anna L. Dürbach (Karschin) with the five to Herder. . . . The great interpreter of Ossian, of Percy’s work, and of Shakespeare thus remains practically ignored during the eighteenth century. (Morgan and Hohlfeld 1949: 42) Anna Luisa Karsch’s popularity and representation in the periodicals, according to Morgan and Hohlfeld, demonstrates a failure of standards; British periodicals were catering to the faulty taste of a feminised readership, promoting the feeble productions of a woman writer at the expense of truly muscular, masculine literary achievement. But as we will see, Karsch was brought forward precisely because of her strength: she was seen as a natural genius, a kind of Ossian figure, which, whatever the perceived quality of her verse, may have rendered her at the time more interesting than Herder, the talented but derivative interpreter of Ossian. It would therefore seem important to inquire: what actually determined the inclusion and assessment of German women writers in British periodicals? Was their presence in periodicals similar to or different from that of their male counterparts? What does their presence tell us about British cultural preoccupations, gender expectations, and transnational aesthetic trends? It should be noted that both female and Germanist reviewers for the periodicals did exist, even though they were few in number. Such reviewers included, for example, the author and editor Anna Letitia Barbauld and William Taylor, the prolific translator from the German, both of whom wrote notices for the Monthly Review (1749–1844); Mary Wollstonecraft famously called herself ‘the first of a new genus’ for embarking on a career that included writing notices for

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 192

17/11/17 5:01 PM

german women’s writing in british magazines

193

Joseph Johnson’s Analytical Review (1788–99). Since the reviews were published anonymously it is hard to trace authorship precisely, but it is important to remember that reviewers were not generally, as is sometimes suggested, inexperienced or unqualified hacks (Waters 2004: 59–60). I will begin with the fascinating figure of Karsch, just mentioned, and I will then explore more broadly the British reception of a few of the German women writers in magazines between 1760 and 1820, with an occasional forward look to the late Romantic and Victorian era. While the British periodical reception of German women’s writing makes up only a part of foreign translation in the period, it underscores the increasing impact of transnational literary consumption and production and points to suggestive areas for research. Significantly it reveals how, in evaluating a period of war, aesthetic shifts, revolutionary turmoil, and imperial expansion, scholars have consciously or unconsciously shaped a narrative that lopsidedly stresses national identity and thereby reinforces the language boundaries, state divisions, and gender differentiations that some of the periodicals in those tumultuous times actually challenged or sought to diminish. Engagement in a modern, international literary world allowed, through recognition of commonalities in addition to distinctions, a better understanding of Britain’s place among political allies, foes, and Continental neighbours.

Anna Luisa Karsch, Unlettered Genius Anna Luisa Karsch offers a notable example because of her status as an unlettered working-class poet with a knack for improvisation. She gained a certain celebrity in Britain: her work and biography were presented to readers, male as well as female, of the Annual Register (1758–), the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1922), the Scots Magazine (1739–1817), and the Court Miscellany: or Gentleman’s and Lady’s New Magazine (1765–71). The first notice of Karsch appeared in the Scots Magazine of December 1761, as an ‘Extract of a letter from a gentleman in Germany to his friend in England, Magdeburg, Nov 22. 1761.’ It focuses on Karsch as a low-born genius who excels especially in odes and tales and can compose remarkably quickly: ‘The most admirable ode only costs her a few minutes, and she one day made twelve in one evening on different subjects, all alike surprising.’ To establish her singularity and notability the account emphasises her unattractive appearance and poignant biography: She is a very disagreeable figure, was born in Silesia, of the lowest extraction, and had never any kind of education or instruction. Her parents forced her to marry a tailor, who treated her in a very barbarous manner; she composing verses, while he made suits. She is now separated from her husband, and lives at Berlin, from whence she came hither to see the court. Every body is curious to see her, and a volume of her poems will soon be published by subscription. She not only surpasses by far all our German poets, but even the ancients. (23 (Dec 1761): 637) In a period when the poems of Ossian were a sensation, finding a living poet who was truly a rustic autodidact or improvisational bard aroused great interest. The next, more extensive account of Karsch appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine three years later, submitted to Mr Urban by a correspondent who found her case

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 193

17/11/17 5:01 PM

194

alessa johns

especially noteworthy ‘as the person is a woman, and her condition such as made literary knowledge more difficult to her than it was either to the learned taylor, Magliabechi, or James Woodhouse’ (34 (Dec 1764): 558–9). These figures were themselves all autodidacts who had earlier gained notice in the Gentleman’s Magazine and elsewhere: the learned tailor, Robert Hill of Buckingham, interested in ancient languages; Antonio Magliabechi, a goldsmith’s apprentice who ultimately became librarian to the Grand Duke of Tuscany; and James Woodhouse, a shoemaker who published Poems on Sundry Occasions in 1764 (see Gentleman’s Magazine 29 (Feb 1759): 51–2; also Goodridge and Keegan 2004: 285). The account of Karsch draws on information from the newly published edition of her works, Auserlesene Gedichte (1764). It was then copied and expanded upon in the Annual Register and Gentleman’s Magazine of 1765, with an added segment on native poetic genius by the editor and including as well a prose translation of her extempore Ode ‘sacred to the memory of her deceased uncle, the instructor of her infancy’. One verse of that poem reads: ‘Under yon green arched roof, I used to repeat to thee twenty passages in praise of God supreme, tho’ they were much above my comprehension; and when I asked thee the meaning of many a dark sentence in the Christians sacred records—Good Man! Thou didst explain them to me’ (Annual Register 8.2 (1765): 42–5, quotation 45; Gentleman’s Magazine 35 (1765): 5–6). So the biographical account of Karsch in the British periodicals shifted. She began as an unlettered, natural genius, and three years later – depicted as gaining instruction at home from a generous uncle – her story became that of an exceptional working-class female figure. The poem dedicated to her uncle demonstrates a becoming gratitude, filial devotion, obligation, piety, and sensibility. Consequently, the verses appealed as well to readers who would see in Karsch’s words a young woman’s proper deference to age and masculine authority. In England she took a place among the group of working-class poets who had gained celebrity, for example Stephen Duck, Mary Collier, William Vernon, Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, and others, who became objects of fascination among philanthropists and patrons. Aficionados of ancient and rustic verse-making took interest in peasant poets who seemed to come from another world, whether it was the English countryside, Scotland, Wales, or Germany (Kord 2003). But Karsch fitted into another category too; readers of the Annual Register were shown two of Karsch’s odes about Anglo-German royal ties that appeared later in the same volume of the journal and were translated into verse (8.2 (1765): 274–7). The first of these satisfied a curiosity about the new British queen recently arrived from Germany: ‘the departure for England of her Serene Highness the Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg Strelitz, betrothed to his Britannic Majesty’, which in part reads: Elbe’s banks are crowded, while his flood With ships is cover’d o’er; She, with a look benign and good, Departing, views the shore. Her smiles, whene’er she passes by, Amidst our grief impart Delight to each admiring eye, And rapture to each heart.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 194

17/11/17 5:01 PM

german women’s writing in british magazines

195

With gold the burnish’d galley glow’d All gorgeous to the view, Which Egypt’s queen down Cydnus row’d, The Roman to subdue. Yet she, tho’ fair, deserv’d far less The homage of mankind; Humanity and nature dress Our Charlotte’s fairer mind. (275) Readers learn of the pride felt by Germans in sending their young and honourable princess to become Britain’s queen. Karsch’s second poem interested British subjects in the Continental aristocrats who supported British military interests; it described the ‘death of Prince Henry of Brunswick, killed in Westphalia, July 20, 1761’, an allied casualty of the Seven Years War: ‘Where is he? Where is Henry laid? My tears shall bathe his wound’; With these maternal cries each shade, Each hill, each vale, resound. Ah! In the thick-embattled plain, Where fame, where valour calls, Nor youth, nor danger can restrain His ardour—see! He falls! (276) Karsch’s glorification of aristocratic heroism and spectacle gained her favour among the elites as well as among readers of the middling ranks hoping to gain information and insight about the wider world through the journals. Consequently, British interest in Karsch’s poetry reinforces the period’s fascination with natural poetic aptitude, derives from the newsworthiness of her verses, and increases because of the unusual foreign perspective she offers on contemporary social and political events. It is noteworthy, however, that national difference plays no meaningful part in the poetry itself or in the commentary on the poet. There is no attempt to distinguish national character or to differentiate between German and British manners or customs. Such a contextual analysis thus allows a very different viewpoint from the dismissive one of Morgan and Hohlfeld, who, perhaps guided by mid-twentiethcentury American critical formalism, elevated the significance of Karsch’s (lack of) command of literary-aesthetic rules over any influence gender norms, national identity, or class limitations might have exercised on her work or its reception. In addition, Karsch’s example of a ‘celebrated German poetess’ improvising for court and salon audiences anticipates the heroine of Germaine de Staël’s Corinne (1807). The immediate model for Staël’s Anglo-Italian improvisatrice Corinne was the Italian female poet Corilla Olimpica, who, like Corinne was crowned at the Roman Capitol; however, the example of Karsch, welcomed to court by Frederick II, emphasises that the improvisatrice was a transnational and to some extent a transhistorical phenomenon lending impetus to the developing figure of the public female poet. It

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 195

17/11/17 5:01 PM

196

alessa johns

enables us to draw comparative international conclusions broader even than the ones suggested by Staël’s travel novel. Indeed, in Women Peasant Poets in Eighteenth-Century England, Scotland, and Germany, Susanne Kord (2003) sees a transnational parallel between the critical attitude toward peasant poets like Karsch and toward women writers in general. She points to the focus on biography, the denigration of artistic merit, the consequent shift of attention to their literature for social and national rather than artistic ends, and the cult of unlettered genius. She then posits a hypothesis: that bourgeois art came to be defined by its exclusion of women’s and non-bourgeois literature, and that art, now defined as masculine and bourgeois, determined which works became canonised. By contrast, women’s and peasants’ literature was assessed as the unexpected but laudable effusions of nature or as unskilful attempts to mimic bourgeois art. This would certainly seem to account for Morgan and Hohlfeld’s reaction to the poetry of Karsch. However, while a survey of German women authors in British periodicals reinforces Kord’s supposition in some cases, it also suggests that the very diverse group of female writers who appear in British magazines were introduced to British readers for a variety of reasons, some depending on the novelty or interest of their texts and some on the ideological aims of the journal. Certainly different genres contributed to varied foci. German women writers’ appearances in British magazines in the period 1760–1820 take the form of reviews, extracts, full translations, notices of translations into English with commentary, biographical accounts, and letters. It is clear that the British magazines from the mid-eighteenth century onward were concerned to bring interested cosmopolitan ‘readers’ and ‘fair readers’ up to date on international literary trends. The Monthly Magazine, for example, offered an article on the Weimar ‘Musenhof ’ or ‘Court of the Muses’, titled ‘Anecdotes of German Authors and Authoresses residing at Weimar in Saxony’ (11 (1801): 40–3 and 145–50), which included short biographies of such male authors as Johann Gottfried Herder and Jean Paul Richter alongside those of Caroline von Wolzogen and Amalie von Imhoff. Imhoff is singled out for having her poem The Ghosts of the Lake ‘set to music by the celebrated composer Wölf l of Vienna’ (150), and the poem itself was translated the next year in the same journal (13 (1802): 45–6). Particular emphasis is laid on Imhoff’s having as a child ‘resided with her parents in England’ so that she still ‘writes and speaks English like her mother-tongue’ (11 (1801): 150). In a similar vein the ‘German Reviews’ in the Scots Magazine of 1820 conclude with an ‘Account of Mrs Caroline Pichler’, called ‘the Madame de Stael of Germany’ even though she lacks ‘so masculine an understanding as the lamented Baroness. She was not cradled amidst those storms of political revolutions which seem to have called forth the manly energies of the French woman’ (ns 86 (Dec 1820): 499–504, quotation 503). So by 1820, comprehensive, comparative literary-historical accounts about foreign authors confidently set the puzzle pieces of European literary history in place for readers of both sexes, and they appear consistently to have included female writers. The same cannot be said for Thomas Carlyle’s later, magisterial review article on ‘The State of German Literature’ for the Edinburgh Review (92 (Oct 1827): 304–51), a journal that forewent broad coverage intended for a wide audience and instead offered longer, analytical review articles on focused topics for readers keen on critical treatments of learned subjects (Butler 1993). The market for accounts of foreign literary productions in the magazines appears to have grown substantial enough to be divided into interested lay and specialist readers.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 196

17/11/17 5:01 PM

german women’s writing in british magazines

197

Women Mistaken for Men: Sophie von La Roche, Benedikte Naubert, and Johanna Schopenhauer Despite women’s inclusion in the earlier reviews, male authors were given preference, as can be seen in the cases where German women writers were mistaken for men. Under such circumstances their treatment, perhaps unsurprisingly, was more extensive and their value generally heightened. Sophie von La Roche’s novel The Adventures of Sophia Sternheim, translated in 1775, was thought to be written by her renowned cousin and editor Christoph Martin Wieland. His great reputation ensured that the novel received careful attention. Both the Hibernian Magazine (1771–1811) and the Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure (1747–1814) reprinted extended (and identical) translated extracts that continued through several issues. Their introductory paragraph trumpets the appeal of the novel’s didactic message: The following Memoirs are sketched from a new Work, which has been greatly celebrated Abroad. The Author in his Writings seems to have made Mr. Richardson his Model. In all his Productions he has evinced himself to be an able and warm Advocate for VIRTUE; he every-where exhibits to the Reader the Amiableness, the Pleasure, and Dignity of a virtuous Life; and all the ingenious and all the instructive Writings he hath published conspire to illustrate this great Truth, that VIRTUE, however oppressed and involved in temporary Calamities, appears great and glorious in the midst of them, will providentially emerge from them, and ultimately crown its Possessor with signal Honour and substantial Felicity. (Universal Magazine 59 (Nov 1776): 234; also Hibernian Magazine 6 (1776): 829) Not all the journals were as enthusiastic, however. The Monthly Review opined: If a Writer has genius sufficient to rise above the barrenness and insipidity of modern novels, it requires no small share of good sense and taste to avoid extravagance and improbability. The present work, like the former production of Mr. Wieland, is faulty in this respect. We observe many just and striking sentiments; much boldness of colouring; and a great variety of characters and incidents; but we every where meet with violations of nature and propriety. The virtuous characters are elevated to a degree of perfection, and the vicious sunk to a depth of villainy, scarcely to be supposed: incidents are related too extraordinary to be credited; and events are brought about, which though they surprise by their novelty, evidently appear to be the creation of fancy. (55 (Aug 1776): 157) The third sentence of the first Monthly review was copied verbatim by the Scots Magazine to form its notice of the initial Joseph Collyer translation (38 (Aug 1776): 447). But the novel enjoyed a second translation in the same year by Dr Edward Harwood and again received critical attention. The Monthly Review quipped: Dr. Harwood judged very properly in making choice of an agreeable Novel for his Exercise book, when he undertook the tedious task of learning German . . . but we are surprised to find that he has ventured to publish his Exercises, as Miss Sophy Sternheim has already appeared in an English dress, and therefore could

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 197

17/11/17 5:01 PM

198

alessa johns

not be expected to gain much additional notice from any embellishments which Dr. Harwood could give her. We must, however, allow the new Translator the merit of exhibiting this lady before his countrymen in a more pleasing form than that in which she first appeared; and to such of our Readers as are fond of German beauties, we beg leave to introduce her as an agreeable sentimental companion. (55 (Oct 1776): 319) The journal cannot ignore the importance of a second translation from ‘Wieland’, and, however cursorily, it must evaluate the quality of that work. Even so, the notice aims for a jocular tone as it focuses on the translator and the study of the German language more than on the text itself. Again, the Scots Magazine cribs the first half of the second sentence as its commentary on the new translation (38 (Oct 1776): 552). Consequently, despite these periodicals’ lukewarm reception of novels in general and their lack of warmth for Sophia Sternheim in particular, Wieland’s name on the title page means that they felt it necessary to repeat notices of the novel, in both its translations, in their pages. Another example of mistaken authorial identity comes with Benedikte Naubert’s 1788 novel Hermann von Unna, translated into English in 1794 as Herman of Unna, a Series of Adventures of the Fifteenth Century, in which the Proceedings of the Secret Tribunal under the Emperors Winceslaus and Sigismond are delineated. In 3 vols, written in German, by Professor Kramer. Why or even which Professor Kramer is credited with the story is not yet clear (Brown 2005: 113). This translation received long treatments in the Critical Review (1756–1817), the British Critic (1793–9), and the Monthly Review, all of which included extended extracts and an appended historical essay explaining the main feature of the novel, the account of the Vehmgericht, or secret tribunal. The story was so popular that a theatrical adaptation by James Boaden, The Secret Tribunal, appeared in 1795, and the novel then reappeared in abridged form under that same title. Hilary Brown explains the fascination of a secret court to readers who had received dreadful reports of the French Terror and Revolutionary Tribunal: ‘Britons were gripped by a proliferation of conspiracy theories, holding that foreign or even home-grown networks of Jacobins, Freemasons, or Illuminati were plotting the fall of the civilised world. It is unsurprising that the Vehmgericht [was] thrown into relief’ (2005: 115–16). The story offered ways for anxious readers to imagine the mysterious workings of a dark politics. But gender is significant in the reviews too. The British Critic judged that ‘Professor Kramer’s’ work ‘appeared to us in a higher light’ than the other novels, mostly by women, reviewed in the same issue (fictions of Mrs Holford, Mrs Parsons, Mrs Robinson, Mrs Smith, Mrs Roche, and male authors Mr Cazotte and Mr Cumberland): ‘We do not with peculiar warmth recommend the reading of these novels, because we think almost every other innocent species of reading more advantageous’ (3 (Jan 1794): xv–xvi). Yet, as with Ann Radcliffe’s novels, Naubert’s Herman of Unna offered a foreign setting, historical interest, the explained supernatural, and it ultimately reinforced norms that appeared to elevate the genre, and it has indeed been suggested that Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797) was influenced by Naubert’s work (Brown 2005: 125–8). In particular, the British Critic praised Herman of Unna for avoiding ‘violence to probability’, remaining within ‘the bounds of moderation’, and spurring thoughtful reflection ‘on the mysteries of political science, the gloom of bigotry, and the miseries of ignorance’ (3 (Mar 1794): 279). The Monthly Review saw in this work ‘the full force of originality’ (ns 15 (Sep 1794): 21),

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 198

17/11/17 5:01 PM

german women’s writing in british magazines

199

while the Critical Review enjoyed its ‘striking picture of the manners’ of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century (14 (May 1795): 69). Chances of receiving a positive review would appear to have increased substantially if you were, or appeared to be, a man and a professor. Johanna Schopenhauer was also mistakenly identified as ‘Johannes’ when the translation of her short story The Eagle’s Nest appeared in the Dublin University Magazine (12 (Sep 1838): 346–61). This is odd because Schopenhauer, having travelled in Britain in the years 1787 and 1803 and published an account in 1818, saw an 1827 book of stories reviewed and correctly attributed in the Monthly Review, which emphasised how prolific and familiar she was. Again, Schopenhauer was given a harder time as a female author in 1827, than when she had been taken for a male writer: Johanna Schopenhauer is the authoress of many works, good, bad, and indifferent; and we are afraid that the volumes before us cannot be ranked in the former class . . . [Readers], however, whose principal object is the excitement of curiosity, will find no fault with these tales, for it is absolutely impossible, until within the last page or two, to foretel [sic] how the affair will terminate. Imminent danger, hair-breadth escapes, death by usual and unusual means – from the sick bed to the falling of an avalanche – with the essential accompaniments of romance, love, and marriage, form the principal incidents. (ns 8 (May 1828): 132) This notice apparently failed to alert later editors to the author’s proper name and sex. Even though the misidentified Eagle’s Nest contains precisely those wild traits enumerated in the earlier review, the story is translated in full and praised as a narrative people ‘will read with pleasure’ (Dublin University Magazine 12 (Sep 1838): 346). In the tale a poor young woman’s newborn is stolen by an eagle; she climbs a sheer cliff to rescue it, and her astonishing heroism, witnessed by the townspeople, persuades the rakish father of the child to marry her. Perhaps the story was translated in the first place because it was framed by the memoir of a German man visiting Scotland and running into an English friend with whom he had attended the University of Göttingen; they, with the bride of the Englishman, witness the heart-stopping eagle scene on their mutual trip to the Scottish Highlands. The sex of the speaker and the focus on male friendship in the frame likely account for the assumption that the author was a man, and this mistake appears to have helped predispose the editor to commend the work. Moreover, the posthumous publication of Schopenhauer’s autobiography, including the account of her English travels, suggests that Continental women’s writing was more likely to pass critical muster if it took up such masculine subjects as political and social revolution. Schopenhauer’s autobiography became available in translation to British readers in 1847, edited by her daughter Adele and reviewed in the Spectator (20 (1 May 1847): 423–4) and the Eclectic Review (86 ns 22 (Aug 1847): 250). While the former reported that ‘as a life, there is not very much to be said of these volumes, owing to the deficiency of events in the heroine’s career’ (423), the latter by contrast characterised Schopenhauer’s life as ‘full of incident’, because she witnessed major upheavals (‘the dismemberment of Poland . . . Paris just prior to its fearful tragedy . . . the battle of Jena’), with the book as a result exhibiting ‘more than ordinary attractions’ (250). Increasingly stark gendering of speaker and incidents plays into the reception of a foreign woman’s writing.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 199

17/11/17 5:01 PM

200

alessa johns

Margarete Klopstock, Model Wife If female authors profited from being reviewed as men or offering masculine subjects, nonetheless they could gain praise simultaneously for displays of feminine devotion and selflessness. Margarete Klopstock, wife of the German poet Friedrich Klopstock, procured a reputation in Britain as ‘Klopstock’s Meta’. She wrote three letters to Samuel Richardson, and these were included in the volume of Richardson’s correspondence edited by Anna Letitia Barbauld in 1804. An article about that volume, appearing in the Edinburgh Review (1802–1929), praised Margarete Klopstock’s letters as ‘very beautiful and interesting’; ‘they have pleased us infinitely beyond any thing else in the collection’, despite or perhaps because of the ‘lisping innocence of the broken English in which they are written’ (5 (Oct 1804; 3rd edn 1806): 39). In those letters Margarete Klopstock details, in raptures of love and religious piety seemingly inspired by Richardson’s epistolary heroines, how she met and eventually married the poet Friedrich Klopstock. ‘After having seen him two hours, I was obliged to pass the evening in a company, which never had been so wearisome to me. I could not speak, I could not play; I thought I saw nothing but Klopstock. I saw him the next day, and the following, and we were very seriously friends. But the fourth day he departed. It was an [sic] strong hour the hour of his departure!’ (39). And she then conveys how they gradually discovered their love for each other, the years they waited to gain her mother’s approval, and the happiness they found: ‘still I dote upon Klopstock as if he was my bridegroom’ (40). The kind of ardour expressed by Margarete would appear later to have become associated with German women, if Anna Jameson’s experience in the early 1830s is any indication. Jameson reports being ‘asked twenty times since my return to England, whether the German women are not very exaltée—very romantic?’ and concluding that, compared to British women, she simply found them ‘less calculating, less the slaves of artificial manners and modes of thinking’ (Jameson 1834, vol. 1: 174). Characterisations like that of the Klopstocks would appear to have spurred national notions of gendered identities. Indeed, the Klopstocks excited a popular following, something the critical journals sought to leverage for their own political ends, as later reviews of the Klopstocks’ Memoirs indicate. Inspired by Margarete’s direct and devout language, as well as with the ardour of Friedrich’s poetry, the evangelical writer Elizabeth Smith undertook a translation of the Memoirs of Frederick and Margaret Klopstock, Translated from the German. By the author of ‘Fragments in Prose and Verse’ (1808). This volume was given lengthy reviews in a diverse group of periodicals. The reactionary Anti-Jacobin Review (1798–1821) and the Christian Observer (1802–74) drew particular attention to Margarete Klopstock’s piety and homage to her husband. The Anti-Jacobin concluded that ‘the entire tendency of this publication is excellent; the perusal of it must tend to pacify and exalt the mind, and to leave upon it a glow of devotional feelings, most delightful and congenial to every well-trained soul’ (23 (June 1809): 156–8, quotation 158). The Christian Observer emphasised how Margarete Klopstock’s rapturous words offered a stark contrast to the other, impious German works so enthusiastically garnering attention in England: The evils which the productions of the German press have contributed to propagate during the last twenty years, have proved a fruitful topic of declamation . . .

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 200

17/11/17 5:01 PM

german women’s writing in british magazines

201

The sacrilegious boldness of the biblical critics, we have more than once had occasion to denounce . . . This spirit may be considered as a curious contrast to the sickly sensibility, which forms, as we apprehend, to our young men and misses, the most powerful attraction in the plays and novels imported from Germany and done into English; and which serves to varnish, and even to recommend, every thing that is profligate in sentiment and vicious in conduct. The extent of the mischiefs which German literature is believed to have produced, makes us more forward to notice any works proceeding from the same quarter, which may tend to counteract the evil. (8: 92 (Aug 1809): 512–21, quotation 512) It would appear that, to some reactionary journals, German works alone can inoculate against or serve as a proper antidote to unhealthful German literature. However, while the Christian Observer approves of Mrs. Klopstock’s adoration of her husband, it warns British girls not to copy her German ways: as it appears to us to be very characteristic of the German manner (certainly no English woman of our acquaintance would have written thus to a stranger whom she had never seen, and to whom she was writing only for the second time), we shall give it at length. We think it proper, however, to warn our fair readers, that while we are disposed to smile at Mrs. Klopstock’s simplicity, and while we admire, as they will believe, her devotion to her husband, we are far from recommending to their imitation, in similar circumstances, either the sudden determination of her affections to an unknown object, or the undisguised frankness of her present communication. (514) A similar caution applies to the husband Friedrich Klopstock’s poetry, which is clearly inspired by devotion and feeling; however, ‘we look in vain for any thing like that doctrinal precision which we of this country are accustomed to aim at, or like what is called religious experience’ (519–20). Nonetheless, and significantly, the focus on the ardour of the work should demonstrate that ‘we ought not to decide against his religious character because he may use expressions which we deem inaccurate’ (520). Medicine can taste bitter but remain salutary. Journals from a very different political angle wish to engage the socio-politics of criticism but still judge Margarete Klopstock in a way similar to that of the reactionary journals. The Monthly Review, which disagrees with Friedrich Klopstock’s being elevated to ‘The Milton of Germany’, still praises his wife, ‘who seems to have been a very accomplished woman’, whose style evinces a ‘natural and tender simplicity’, and who ‘after the model of Mrs. Rowe . . . composed some imaginary letters from the dead to the living; and we fully agree with their present editor that they greatly excel their original’ (ns 64 (Jan 1811): 76). Even the coarse and scoffing Satirist, or Monthly Meteor (1807–14), which finds Friedrich’s popular poem The Messiah unbearable – a ‘heterogeneous collection of all that is unintelligible in religion; tiresome in prose, and ridiculous in poetry’ (4 (1809): 294) – nonetheless concludes that Margarete’s letters possess merit: ‘The letters of Mrs. Klopstock to Richardson, are both entertaining and amusing, though much of their effect must be ascribed to the peculiarity of their idiom’ (297–8). Strictures of gender manage to span the vast political differences represented by these periodicals.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 201

17/11/17 5:01 PM

202

alessa johns

Interestingly the reviews, whatever their ideological commitments, consistently address readers of both sexes in tandem even as they ponder the issue of appropriate, differentiated gender socialisation – that is, until the Victorian period. At that point the Ladies’ Pocket Magazine includes ‘Margaretta Klopstock’ in its series on ‘Traits of Female Character; Exemplified in Sketches of celebrated Women’ (1.1 (1838): 88–94). This sketch is evidently meant for women’s separate edification. It was compiled by one ‘Mrs. D. L. Child’ from the earlier books and reviews. It includes, for the first time in the periodicals, complete transcriptions of Margarete’s three letters to Samuel Richardson, and it dwells on her death following the birth of her son, and on her husband’s simultaneous deep grief and Christian forbearance. Margarete Klopstock becomes, not a strange German example, but a transnational gendered figure of feminine devotion and sacrifice. As a result, we see how the reception of the Klopstocks in the magazines – ranging from reactionary to liberal to radical to conservative – offers a telling example of cultural difference represented by the German couple. There is both a British popular embrace and a qualified approval of a German discourse of courtship and marriage, even as there is an uneven response offered to the wife’s distance from English norms on the one hand and her husband’s perceived remove from poetic ones on the other. The interpretation of national difference, especially as it is emphasised by the reactionary periodicals, corresponds with their ideological goals. And so the Klopstock example registers an early nineteenth-century interest in the construction of gender and nation and shows, in the subsequent Victorian period, the way norms are further reinforced via readers’ sexual separation.

Conclusion The examples of German women published in the British magazines suggest more than just an interest in philosophy, sensibility, or Gothic horror. Their inclusion appears to depend, to begin with, on the German women’s being exemplary in one way or another. First, the authors selected often convey a flattering sense of the importance of and fascination with things British; they stand apart because they know and appreciate British culture. Samuel Richardson is held up as an international celebrity imitated abroad, as in the notices about von La Roche and Margarete Klopstock. Stories like Johanna Schopenhauer’s, which introduce Scottish places and subjects, appear also to win favour, and Amalie von Imhoff’s command of the English language warrants attention. Second, German women’s writing provides ways of reinforcing gender socialisation as a transnational imperative, as in the praise of Karsch’s devotion to her uncle, the admiration of Margarete Klopstock’s life and letters from all ideological angles, and the attention to self-sacrifice displayed by Schopenhauer’s heroine in The Eagle’s Nest. Third, British readers appreciate the topical importance of and information provided by German women’s writing: for example, in the depiction of the secret tribunal in Naubert’s novel, Schopenhauer’s descriptions of political events, or Karsch’s poetry in praise of Anglo-German royals. The rationales for German women’s inclusion in British periodicals diverged. Sometimes their work fed British cultural preoccupations, sometimes it reinforced aesthetic trends, sometimes it solidified ideas about gender, sometimes it shed light on life and events abroad, sometimes it boosted national confidence. Noteworthy is the fact that most reviews, except for the most reactionary, did not dwell extensively on national

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 202

17/11/17 5:01 PM

german women’s writing in british magazines

203

or linguistic differences but in fact stressed connection and the cultural illumination that translation can accomplish. At the same time, underlying German women writers’ inclusion in British periodicals was the fact that their sex, whether commented upon or ignored, consistently made a difference in how they were reviewed, and it ensured evaluations distinct from those received by male authors. In this, reviews of German women’s work echo the reception experienced by many British women writers in the same magazines; they therefore reinforce for us the importance of studying gender as a transnational cultural force in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Notes 1. See Ashton 1980; Jefcoate 1996; Stark 1999; and Stokoe 1926. 2. See McMurran 2009; Hayes 2008; Cohen and Dever 2002. 3. Excerpts from this book appeared in the Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex 38 (Aug 1807): 428; 38 (Sep 1807): 458, 535; 38 (Oct 1807): 538. 4. The journals with the most notices of German material in the period under review were: Analytical Review; Anti-Jacobin Review; Athenaeum; Blackwood’s Magazine; British Critic; Critical Review; Edinburgh Review; European Magazine; Foreign Quarterly Review; Gentleman’s Magazine; Lady’s Magazine; Lady’s Monthly Museum; Literary Gazette; Monthly Magazine; Monthly Review; (Colburn’s) New Monthly Magazine; The Scots Magazine; Universal Magazine (Morgan and Hohlfeld 115–16).

Works Cited Analytical Review. 1788–99. (1st ser. 1788–98; 2nd ser. 1799). London. Annual Register. 1758–. London. The Anti-Jacobin Review. 1798–1821. London. Ashton, Rosemary. 1980. The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought 1800–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The British Critic. 1793–1843 (1st ser. 1793–1813; 2nd ser. 1814–25; 3rd ser. 1825–6; 4th ser. 1827–43). London. Brown, Hilary. 2005. Benedikte Naubert (1756–1819) and her Relations to English Culture. Leeds: Maney Publishing. Butler, Marilyn. 1993. ‘Culture’s Medium: the Role of the Review’. The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism. Ed. Stuart Curran, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 120–47. The Christian Observer. 1802–14. London. Cohen, Margaret and Carolyn Dever, eds. 2002. The Literary Channel: The International Invention of the Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press. The Court Miscellany: or Gentleman’s and Lady’s New Magazine. 1766. London. The Critical Review. 1715–1817 (1st ser. 1756–90; 2nd ser. 1791–1817). London. The Dublin University Magazine. 1833–82. Dublin. The Edinburgh Review. 1802–1929. Edinburgh. The Gentleman’s Magazine. 1731–1922 (1st ser. 1731–1833; ser. 2–4 1834–68). London. Goede, C. A. G. 1807. The Stranger in England. 3 vols. London: Mathews and Leigh. Goodridge, John, and Bridget Keegan. 2004. ‘Clare and the Traditions of Labouring-Class Verse’. The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1740–1830. Ed. Thomas Keymer and John Mee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 280–95. Hayes, Julie Candler. 2008. Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture in France and England, 1600– 1800. Stanford: Stanford University Press. The Hibernian Magazine. 1771–85 (later Walker’s Hibernian Magazine). Dublin.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 203

17/11/17 5:01 PM

204

alessa johns

Jameson, Anna. 1834. Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad with Tales and Miscellanies Now First Collected and a New Edition of the Diary of an Ennuyée. 4 vols. London: Saunders and Otley. Jefcoate, Graham. 1996. ‘“Hier ist nichts zu machen”: Zum deutschen Buchhandel in London 1790–1806’. Literatur und Erfahrungswandel 1789–1830. Ed. Rainer Schöwerling, Harmut Steinecke, and Günther Tiggesbäumker. Munich: Fink. 47–59. Kord, Susanne. 2003. Women Peasant Poets in Eighteenth-Century England, Scotland, and Germany: Milkmaids on Parnassus. Rochester, NY: Camden House. The Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex. 1770–1832 (1st ser. 1770 –1819; 2nd ser. 1820–9; 3rd ser. 1830–2). London. London Magazine. 1820–9. (1st ser. 1820–4; 2nd ser. 1825–8; 3rd ser. 1828–9). London. McMurran, Mary Helen. 2009. The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. The Monthly Review. 1749–1844. (1st ser. 1749–89; 2nd ser. 1790–1825; 3rd ser. 1826–30; 4th ser. 1831–44). London. Morgan, Bayard Quincy and A. R. Hohlfeld, eds. 1949. German Literature in the British Magazines. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. The Satirist, or Monthly Meteor. 1807–14. London. The Scots Magazine. 1739–1817. Edinburgh. Stark, Susanne. 1999. ‘Behind Inverted Commas’: Translation and Anglo-German Cultural Relations in the Nineteenth Century. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Stockley, V. 1929 (1969). German Literature as Known in England 1750–1830. Port Washington, NY and London: Kennikat Press. Stokoe, F. W. 1926. German Influence in the English Romantic Period, 1788–1818. With Special Reference to Scott, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure. 1747–1814 (1st ser. 1747–1803; 2nd ser. 1804–14). London. Waters, Mary A. 2004. ‘“Slovenly Monthly Catalogues”: The Monthly Review and Barbauld’s Periodical Literary Criticism’. Nineteenth-Century Prose 31.1: 53–81.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 204

17/11/17 5:01 PM

13 Travel Writing and Mediation in the LADY’S MAGAZINE: Charting ‘the meridian of female reading’ JoEllen DeLucia

I

n June 1784, the editor of the Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770–1832) published an excerpt from Captain Cook’s Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (1784) entitled ‘A Description of the Natives of the Sandwich Islands’.1 The excerpt focused on native dress and featured ‘a capital high finished engraving of a man and woman of the Sandwich Islands’ executed by an eminent artist and commissioned by the magazine. The engraving and article competed with a regular feature entitled ‘Fashionable dresses for May and June’, an excerpt of a tour through Spain, a pattern for a handkerchief, and a brief history of English birds. The Cook excerpt proved popular, and the next issue of the magazine began with a letter to correspondents announcing in July 1784 that: THE great encouragement we have been favoured with, and the numerous thanks we have received, on account of the late elegant Plate, and the Extract of Captain Cook’s last Voyage, has animated us with a laudable ambition to preserve that esteem with which Female generosity has crowned our attempts, by farther exertions to enlarge, to improve, to adorn our plan. With this view, we have decorated the present month with a capital Engraving of a Lady of Otaheite carrying a present. And, as the original work is become scarce, and the first price so much increased, as to be too dear for the purchase of every one; we have thought it would be acceptable to our patronesses, to accommodate them with an abridgement, adapted to the meridian of Female reading. (15 (July 1784): 339) The editor continues to describe the abridgement as ‘adapted entirely to Female taste, and Female curiosity; enabling the Fair Sex to form a judgment between native sentiments, even with respect to Female virtues, and dress, and cultivated delicacy’ (339). The term ‘meridian’ used by the editor to describe the process of abridgement indicates that globalism in the eighteenth century was scaled differently for different audiences. In fact, the abridgement and its serial publication within the magazine suggest that gender produced new forms of mediation, what John Guillory has defined as the ‘hidden complexity of the representational process’, including ‘the material and formal qualities of cultural expression’ (2010: 346). In Clifford Siskin and William Warner’s work on Enlightenment as a major event in the history of media, they describe the magazine as generating ‘a new dimension to the very act of mediation

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 205

17/11/17 5:01 PM

206

joellen delucia

itself in which each individual act came to be understood – and the result deployed – as working not only in its own terms, but as part of a cumulative, collaborative, and ongoing enterprise’ (2011: 285). Within the knowledge project of the Enlightenment, the magazine republished and remediated stand-alone texts and incorporated them into an ‘ongoing enterprise’ that altered and sometimes negated how a book might have been understood on its ‘own terms’. The remediation of travel narratives within early women’s magazines raises important questions about the gendered dimensions of mediation. As standard three-volume travel narratives are broken into bits and redistributed over months and even years in periodicals such as the Lady’s Magazine, what happens to the worlds they describe? How does the remediation of canonical travel narratives like Cook’s within women’s periodicals affect our understanding of the processes of transculturation and intercultural exchange staged and reported in these accounts? Representative of a larger trend in the Lady’s Magazine the Cook adaptation, which unfolded over the next five years, was one of several travel narratives repurposed to address the tastes of the magazine’s imagined female reader.2 In addition to regular accounts of domestic and European travel, readers encountered accounts of travel in South America, India, the Middle East, and China. The magazine’s remediation of these travel narratives points up the malleability of the worlds created by print, and the role mediation and magazine culture played in producing readers’ sense of women as both citizens of the world and self-interested members of the British Empire. The first section of this essay uses excerpts from George Leonard Staunton’s An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China (1797), republished in the magazine under the title ‘Account of the Embassy of Lord Macartney to China’, to explore the Lady’s Magazine’s remediation of the non-Western world for the ideal female audience it was designed to please. In the second part, I consider the relationship of the ‘Embassy of Lord Macartney’ to the other features it ran alongside over the course of its two-year serialisation (1798–9), arguing that attention to the popular magazine format challenges established understandings of travel writing’s contribution to the type of world-building typically associated with Enlightenment. This essay describes how the abridgement and reformatting of travel narratives within the Lady’s Magazine produced feminised vantages on globalism and empire; at the same time, it argues that the serialisation of travel narratives in the medium of the woman’s magazine alters the way we understand the scope of women’s culture in the late eighteenth century. The magazine’s remediation of travel accounts recharted distances, both between Britain, Europe, and the non-Western world and between readers and texts. Through the process of abridgement, the Lady’s Magazine made the world a smaller and more delicate place; at the same time, it pioneered a magazine format that mixed travel narratives, oriental tales, and fashion plates with discussions of global politics and theories of good governance, extending the parameters of the feminine sphere well beyond domestic and even commercial concerns. In remediating geographical space and renegotiating the relationship between gender and genre, the magazine makes plain that the mediation in which the travel narrative appeared shaped its reception and had the potential to alter the ideas it contained.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 206

17/11/17 5:01 PM

travel writing in the LADY’S MAGAZINE

207

Excerpting for Women Although Jacqueline Pearson does mention travel writing’s popularity in her important study of women’s reading in the later eighteenth century (1999: 55–7), less attention has been paid to women as readers of travel writing than to women as consumers of novels or history. Like magazines themselves, travel narratives have occupied an ambiguous status within literary studies; Ina Ferris has called travel writing ‘a quasi genre on the edge of the settled literary field, straddling the genres of entertainment on the one hand . . . and those of utility on the other’ (1999: 453). Fiction from the period often recommends it as an alternative to the more dangerous excitements of the novel and the theatre. In Maria Edgeworth’s moral tale Belinda (1801), the eponymous self-improving heroine avoids novels and instead reads moral philosophy and Moore’s Travels. In Mansfield Park (1814), travel writing acts as an antidote to the deleterious effects of theatre. After an uncomfortable conversation with Edmund about the family’s misguided theatrical aspirations, he leaves to return to the stage, commenting that ‘You in the meanwhile will be taking a trip into China, I suppose. How does Lord Macartney’s go on? – (opening a volume on the table and then taking up some others.) And here are Crabbe’s Tales, and the Idler, at hand to relieve you, if you tire of your great book’ (Austen 1990: 144). In other popular fiction, travel narrative appeared to be more appropriately consumed by men. One of the Lady’s Magazine’s competitors, John Bell’s La Belle Assemblée (1806–32), also incorporated the Embassy of Lord Macartney, but it did so more sparingly. Although the magazine features a brief description of the Lake Tsay-Vou-Cang in 1808, the sustained serialisation found in the Lady’s Magazine is absent. Most tellingly, the Embassy is mentioned in Catherine Hutton’s serial fiction ‘Oakwood House’ (later published as a novel in volume form under the title Oakwood Hall in 1819). In an excerpt of the fiction from February of 1811, the Embassy of Lord Macartney appears in a description of the lavish library of the heroine’s brother, ‘My brother’s library is all that an English gentleman or scholar . . . could desire. . . . All Voyages and Travels, from Columbus to Lord Macartney’ (3 (Feb 1811): 75). The mention of these travel narratives is certainly, as Gillian Hughes argues, an instance of this serial publication ‘effectively enfold[ing] many of the features of the magazine itself’ (2015: 475) – after all, the magazine featured many accounts of travel; however, unlike its competitor the Lady’s Magazine, it positions travel narrative within a masculine realm, a place women readers visit but do not comfortably inhabit. Despite the attention of these Romantic-era heroines to the Embassy of Lord Macartney and travel narratives more generally, contemporary critics of travel writing, when considering gender, focus almost exclusively on the female travel writer. Elizabeth Bohls and Nigel Leask have studied the work of eighteenth-century and Romantic-era women travel writers from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Maria Graham, both of whom were also published serially in the Lady’s Magazine. These critics contrast female writers with their male contemporaries (Bohls 1995; Leask 2002), and many of their conclusions fit neatly into conventional histories of gender and literature. In Bohl’s view, women writers trouble the abstract and disinterested stance of the male travel writer and instead bring an embodied and more emotionally engaged perspective; similarly, Leask extends arguments about separate spheres to travel, suggesting that women’s relationship to the domestic enabled them to document private spaces in ways that often escaped their male counterparts.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 207

17/11/17 5:01 PM

208

joellen delucia

The Lady’s Magazine’s adaptation and serialisation of popular travel narratives does much more than document a woman’s first-person perspective on the non-British world; the magazine’s remediation of travel writing by men and women feminised the problems introduced by the extension of trade and British political economy to non-European parts of the world, channelling debates on the moral and economic progress of civilisation through discussions of dress, fashion, and luxury goods. The reformatting of George Leonard Staunton’s An Account of the Voyage and Embassy of his Excellency the Earl of Macartney to China in the Lady’s Magazine exemplifies remediation’s impact. Like Cook’s Voyage, the Embassy of Lord Macartney was abridged for the magazine and published in monthly segments from January 1798 to the Supplement of 1799. Staunton wrote his account after he returned with Lord Macartney from Britain’s ‘first diplomatic embassy to Qing China’ (Kitson 2013: 8). Peter Kitson has argued that the Macartney embassy was central to ‘the production of new knowledge about China’ and ‘should be seen as a crucial part of the processes of knowledge exchange and cultural translation between Britain and China’ as well as a ‘major event in the formation of Romantic sinology’ (2013: 129). As Kitson recounts, Sir Joseph Banks helped organise and staff the embassy, ensuring that the party included botanists, scientists, and members of the pottery trade – observers who could return with additional knowledge of the cultivation and production of tea, silk, and porcelain. The first excerpt in the Lady’s Magazine covers much of this territory. It provides an overview of the mission, including the embassy’s commercial and intellectual objectives, which were to ‘promote and regulate the commercial intercourse between that great country and Great Britain’ (29 (Jan 1798): 28). The initial extract cites as the primary motive for the expedition the British appetite for tea, which Staunton claims has grown in the eighteenth century from a habit of ‘fifty thousand pounds weight’ annually to one nearing ‘four millions of pounds’ (29 (Jan 1798): 32). This growth argued for the necessity of establishing ‘a connection with the court of Pekin as might, in its consequences, tend to place the British trade to China upon a less precarious footing’ (29 (Jan 1798): 33). Macartney and his fellow travellers hoped to open up trade with China beyond Canton and correct Chinese perceptions of the English. The Chinese perceived the English as excessively violent and obsessed with trade and expansion; Staunton describes the Chinese people’s dismissive attitude toward the English who they ‘long distinguished only by the contemptuous appellation of Hoong-ow-zkin, which as nearly as can be translated, may answer to that of carrotty-pated race’ (29 (Jan 1798): 30). The narrative also explains that ‘Besides the considerations of policy and commerce, a view to the improvement of knowledge was entertained by the promoters and patrons of this undertaking’ (29 (Jan 1798): 33). His Majesty’s letter to the Chinese emperor, which appeared in February, concluded with this sentiment: ‘no views were entertained except those of the general interests of humanity, the mutual benefits of both nations, and the protection of commerce under the Chinese government’ – according to the king, the expedition was not for conquest but for ‘the sake of increasing knowledge of the habitable globe’ (29 (Feb 1798): 72). The first few entries set out familiar British commercial and intellectual rationales for expansion, but the excerpts that followed seemed chosen, at least in part, to satisfy feminine tastes, including accounts of hairstyles and dress in the ports the expedition visits, such as Rio de Janeiro and later Batavia (present day Jakarta). Women’s position

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 208

17/11/17 5:01 PM

travel writing in the LADY’S MAGAZINE

209

as arbiters of taste and consumers of imported luxury goods has been well documented and described as a shaping force in the ideology of empire by Laura Brown (1993) and others. These existing narratives help make sense of the excerpts on tea, fashion, hairstyles, and even the theatre productions staged by merchants and rulers encountered by the embassy. The excerpts also engage with what E. J. Clery has called ‘the feminisation debate’ (2003), which she describes as an ongoing eighteenth-century conversation about the feminising effects of capitalism and commercial development, the parallel progress of women, and the potentially deleterious influence these economic and social developments had on British morals. As Chi-ming Yang has argued, China presented a unique challenge to these emerging British theories of development. Perceived as both commercially and morally advanced, China disrupted narratives of British progress and became a landscape upon which to project British anxieties about ‘overconsumption’ and ‘moral and financial ruin’ (2011: 169). The uncertainty the abridgement conveys about the status of women in Chinese society reflects a larger anxiety about the relationship between commercial and social progress and the relationship between Britain and the Far East. The magazine’s excerpts of Staunton return repeatedly to the advanced state of Chinese society, particularly the superior learning, refinement, and delicacy of the Chinese, described in an account of court manners as an ‘Asiatic grandeur, which European refinements have not yet attained’ (30 (July 1799): 308). In European thought, excessive refinement and delicacy often resulted in an elevation of feminine sentiments that led to an increased mixing of the sexes and greater social and public roles for women. Interestingly, the court’s superior delicacy served to both erase and exacerbate the differences between the sexes. The paradoxes of gender the expedition confronted raised questions about the relationship between the mission’s commercial objectives and social progress and Britain’s own position within larger schemas of development. Examples of delicacy and refined manners in Chinese society did not always graft easily onto British narratives of progress: The sentiment to which is given the name decency, as pointing out what is becoming to do, increases generally with the progress of civilization and refinement, and is carried no where perhaps so far as among the Chinese, who hide, for the most part, in their loose and flowing robes, the bulk and form of their limbs. In this respect, there is scarcely any differences between the dresses of the two sexes. Even the imitation, by art, of the human figure, either naked, or covered only with such vestments as follow and display the contour of the body, is offensive of Chinese delicacy; a delicacy which has retarded the progress of painting and sculpture, as far; at least, as relates to such subjects, in this country. (30 (June 1799): 272) In this instance, delicacy gauges an uneven progress. Although it blurs visual distinctions between the sexes, it interferes with the progress of the arts. In addition, extreme delicacy (at least at court) does not contribute to mixed sociability or a blurring of the separate spheres. For instance, Staunton describes a magnificent reproduction of Pekin in the lady’s garden of the palace, ‘where the scenes of common life, and the transactions and confusion of the capital are faithfully represented’ (30 (July 1799): 308).

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 209

17/11/17 5:01 PM

210

joellen delucia

He regrets being barred from it because of his sex, but concedes, ‘The ladies of the palace, shut out from the world, would no doubt be delighted by such a representation of what passes in it; and the emperor could feel no reluctance in gratifying their curiosity, and, in some instances, his own’ (30 (July 1799): 311). The delicacy and refinement of the court in this instance traps the women of the palace, who are only able to gaze on a mediation of a world that will remain out of their reach – a situation that mirrors that of most of the women readers of travel narratives like Staunton’s. This uncanny doubling suggests that, despite the relative power women exert in the social sphere, British society also imposes limits on women’s mobility. In the Chinese court, which is clearly scientifically and culturally advanced (Staunton often concedes its superiority to the British world), he discovers an extreme delicacy, which both blurs sartorial distinctions between the sexes, delays the progress of art, and physically separates the men and women of the court. Such mixed observations call into question delicacy as an effective gauge of social development as well as the relationship between cultural and commercial development and the progress of women. Notably, footbinding becomes another means of gauging the Chinese empire’s complex relationship to social development and Britain’s own relationship to the Far East. The magazine tracks footbinding throughout China. In April of 1799, the magazine describes the northern frontier, including the Great Wall, and notes that ‘In the villages beyond the wall there were yet to be seen several Chinese families, and women with little feet. It is not said that any of a Tartar race have imitated the Chinese in the mutilation of their limbs; though they frequently have in other respects’ (30 (Apr 1799): 173). The purportedly less culturally and economically developed ‘Tartar race’ has adapted to much of Chinese society, but – curiously – they have refused the fashion for footbinding. As the embassy returns to Canton, Staunton notes that in ‘the province of Kiang-fee which lay by the river-side abounded with plantations of bamboo.—the feet of the women here were not crippled, being left in their natural state’ (30 (Dec 1799): 550). Staunton’s longest meditation on footbinding appears in a 1798 excerpt. Soon after arriving on the mainland, the embassy visits Ting-hai, which Staunton describes as reminiscent of the refined and fashionable ‘Venice, but on a smaller scale’ (29 (Oct 1798): 451). Despite his lengthy description of the ‘torment’ girls and women must undergo to achieve this ‘artificial diminutiveness of the feet’ (452), the conclusion he arrives at works to undermine any sense of superiority British readers might feel: Opinion, indeed, more than power, governs the general actions of the human race; and so preposterous a practice could be maintained only by the example and persuasion of those, who in their own persons, ha[ve] submitted to it. Men may have silently approved and indirectly encouraged it, as those of India are supposed to do that much more barbarous custom of widows burning themselves to death of their husbands. But it is not violence, or the apprehension of corporeal suffering, but the horror and disgrace in consequence of omitting, and the idea of glory arising from doing, what is considered to be an act of duty, at the expense of life, which leads to such a sacrifice. In that influence ages must have past to ripen prejudices of a consequence so dreadful; but the pride of superiority, and the dread of degradation, have been frequently found sufficient to surmount the common feelings of nature; and to many women voluntary

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 210

17/11/17 5:01 PM

travel writing in the LADY’S MAGAZINE

211

constraint upon the body and mind is, in some degree habitual. They who recollect the fashion of slender waists in England, and what pains were taken and suffering endured to excel in that particular, will be somewhat less surprised at the extraordinary efforts made in other instances. Delicacy of limbs and person has, no doubt, been always coveted by the fair sex, as it has been the admiration of the other. (29 (Oct 1798): 453) It would have been easy for Staunton to align the expedition’s commercial ambitions and Britain’s native humanity with the greater relative freedom of British women. In general, it was thought that an openness to trade corresponded with a more progressive attitude toward women’s role in society. Staunton could have linked China’s more isolationist approach to commerce with the extreme delicacy that results in footbinding and the separation of sexes that he observes at court. For the most part, he resists this. Remarkably in this last example, footbinding links women from China, India, and Britain, and invites us to consider delicacy as operating outside an imperial narrative that merely reinforces British exceptionalism. The excerpt on footbinding fosters a transnational sense of identity for its readers, many of whom not only remember the ‘fashion for slender waists’, but also would have worn the stays, hoop skirts, and panniers of the 1770s and 80s. The magazine shortens the Embassy of Lord Macartney, resizes it for a female audience; in doing so, it highlights a complex conversation about gender and development.

Women’s Worlds While the excerpts of the Embassy of Lord Macartney chosen for the magazine draw attention to delicacy and the feminine elements of imperial and commercial discourse, the magazine format embeds the travel narrative within a larger intercultural and transnational dialogue that includes China, Britain, Peru, and Germany. Although the abridgement might be understood as downsizing or feminising the scope of the narrative, the format of the magazine has the opposite effect. A cursory glance at the table of contents over the course of 1798 and 1799 shows that the world of the magazine included British and European literature, fiction, and politics and a number of sources that are more difficult to classify. The table of contents provides one means of understanding the way in which the act of excerpting the Embassy of Lord Macartney can be understood as a part of the ‘cumulative enterprise’ of the Lady’s Magazine itself, an enterprise that – to borrow from Siskin and Warner’s more general discussion of eighteenth-century magazines – ‘changed the possibilities and expectations for what mediation could accomplish’ (2011: 285). For most of 1798, the Embassy of Lord Macartney ran alongside excerpts from the ‘Memoirs of the Life and Reign of the late Empress of Russia, Catherine II’ and ‘Royal Evening Entertainments; or, Lessons on the art of Government, by the late Frederic III, King of Prussia’. It also frequently appeared in 1798 and 1799 with an anonymous translation from the German of Christoph Martin Wieland’s oriental tale, ‘The Golden Mirror; or the King of Schesschian’, which in the spirit of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters uses an oriental setting to explore the principles of good government. In addition to the fictional and idealised Chinese ruler encountered in the Wieland translation, readers also encountered instructions for good government from the ambitious and expansionist Prussian

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 211

17/11/17 5:01 PM

212

joellen delucia

king as well as the most powerful female ruler of the Enlightenment. These fictional and real sovereigns act as foils or counterparts to the leaders found in the Embassy of Lord Macartney, setting the British king and his commercial ambitions alongside the Chinese emperor’s careful and sceptical treatment of Macartney and his men. The dialogues about just political rule and imperialism initiated by these regular features were often magnified in particular issues by single features or essays. For instance, in the February 1798 issue, the Embassy ran alongside two other travel accounts that had been remediated for the magazine’s audience. The ‘Description of the Ruins of Balbec’ was an excerpt of Constantin-Francois Volney’s Travels Through Syria and Egypt, in the years 1783, 1784. The magazine also commissioned an engraving made specifically for its readers illustrating Volney’s work. The excerpt and engraving introduced the magazine’s audience to Volney’s account of the great civilisations of the Middle East and Egypt and may have acted as an advertisement for the first English translation of Volney’s Travels, which was published by George Robinson, who also published the Lady’s Magazine. Robinson issued the first English translation of Volney’s Travels in 1787, and published another edition in 1788 and one in 1805. In addition to Volney’s European perspective on the Middle East, the issue also included an entry entitled ‘A Curious and Interesting Description of Peru’, which was a translation of an article from El Mercurio Peruano (A Peruvian Journal), an early Peruvian newspaper published in Lima. Notably, within this single issue, readers could find segments of Volney’s Travels and the Embassy of Macartney beside a South American newspaper. By renaming this news article a ‘Curious and Interesting Description of Peru’, the magazine obscures its origins and transforms it into a curiosity, distancing it from its birth in contemporary Lima and binding it to the oriental tales and travel narratives regularly featured in its pages. Despite this, the magazine preserved the stated aim of the article, which was to challenge European travellers’ observations of Peruvian life and culture: ‘The principal object of our periodical paper is to convey a better knowledge of the country we inhabit, – a country respecting which foreign writers have published so many fictions and absurdities’ (29 (Feb 1798): 57). After citing some of the most troubling European authored descriptions, the unnamed authors state: From such loose materials as above . . . almost all the histories, reflections, charts, geographical tracts, and compendiums, which have been published respecting Peru on the banks of the Seine and of the Thames, have been compiled. The spirit of system, national prejudices, ignorance, and caprice, have by turns so much influenced the greater part of these productions that the Peru which they describe to us, appears to be a country altogether different from the one which we are practically acquainted. (29 (Feb 1798): 57) Alluding to the fantastic flora and fauna often included in European accounts and the equally outrageous descriptions of the native inhabitants, the Peruvians who authored this essay call into question the methods and devices that organised the knowledge project of Enlightenment, specifically the natural histories, maps, charts, and histories produced by travel narratives like Volney’s Travels and Macartney’s Embassy and used to organise a Eurocentric world as Mary Louise Pratt and others have argued. In fact, since Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, scholars of travel writing have had to consider the ways in which

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 212

17/11/17 5:01 PM

travel writing in the LADY’S MAGAZINE

213

travel writing contributed to ‘the construction of a global-scale of meaning’ and the ways in which this new scale supported a Eurocentric ‘planetary consciousness’ (Pratt 2007: 15). The magazine’s remediation of these travel narratives suggests that this ‘global-scale of meaning’ or ‘planetary consciousness’, although overwhelmingly Eurocentric, was much less stable or even totalising than Pratt suggests. Despite the magazine’s renaming of this piece in an effort to suture it to the more typical fare of the magazine, the Lima excerpt contests this totalising view. The authors survey a country with which they are ‘practically acquainted’ and conclude by suggesting that improving Peruvian agriculture and infrastructure would guarantee national autonomy. As the authors write, ‘Agriculture might, generally speaking, be made to supply our wants, insomuch that our subsistence ought not to be so precarious as it is, nor so dependent on foreign aid’ (29 (Feb 1798): 60). Significantly, the authors not only reject material aid from Europe but also the importation of knowledge, concluding with a description of Lima’s Royal University at St Mark’s and other Peruvian universities that provide centres for literature and diffuse an ‘abundant light to the whole of the circumference’ (29 (Feb 1798): 61). The authors add that, ‘Knowledge is general throughout Peru . . . on account of the natural quickness and penetration of its native inhabitants [and] through their fondness of study’ and even claim that ‘the fair sex has commonly the advantage over ours’ in ‘whatever does not require a meditated combination of ideas’ (29 (Feb 1798): 61). Despite the backhanded nature of this compliment, the article’s comments on women gesture toward a progress of women that does not seem to depend wholly on European gauges of development (29 (Feb 1798): 61). This account of Peru, which did not continue in the magazine, momentarily undercuts the commercial and intellectual arguments that underwrote expeditions like the one recounted in the Embassy of Macartney and reveals a globe filled with contested ideas surrounding development and gender. Although there does not appear to be a direct reaction to the Lady’s Magazine’s remediation of the Embassy of Lord Macartney, in the September 1798 issue, the magazine published a dialogue between a Chinese emperor and his subjects, taken from Priscilla Wakefield’s Leisure Hours or, Entertaining Dialogues (1794). Wakefield’s engagement with good government and economics makes it possible to read the excerpt as a form of response. Originally published by the Quaker author as an educational device, Leisure Hours was designed for ‘the protection of those, who are engaged in the education of children’ and who know ‘from experience the utility of presenting the same object, to their lively imaginations, under different points of view’ (Wakefield 1794: i). She goes on to suggest that the dialogues ‘would afford an excellent opportunity to the Preceptor of giving a useful lecture on history, by requiring the Pupil, if sufficiently informed, to point out what country, age, and nation that story then under consideration referred to’ (Wakefield 1794: ii). The interactive nature of the dialogue was intended to provide ‘an agreeable and useful method of acquiring a considerable acquaintance with the histories of different nations’ (Wakefield 1794: ii). The excerpt of Leisure Hours printed in the Lady’s Magazine ‘The True Nature of Riches’, took the form of an imagined dialogue between the Chinese emperor, a mandarin, a merchant, a manufacturer, and a farmer. Competing for a prize for the best invention in science and art, the three men present to the emperor their discoveries. The manufacturer offers a machine for producing finer yarn, the merchant a

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 213

17/11/17 5:01 PM

214

joellen delucia

method for finding the ‘hidden wealth of mines’, and the farmer an irrigation system that allows for the watering of rice grounds (29 (Sep 1798): 409). Although the merchant believes he has won, the emperor bestows the prize on the farmer, stating ‘the utility of your pursuits elevates you above the rank of your equals’ (409). He makes the farmer a mandarin and scolds the merchant, claiming that increasing the appetite for diamonds would only ‘corrupt the morals of the people, by converting that labour which should procure bread for the hungry, clothes for the naked, into useless toil, for the glittering toys of pride and ambition’ (409). Within the September issue, Wakefield’s dialogue ran right before the Embassy excerpt, which was followed by the ongoing translation of Wieland’s ‘Golden Mirror’. In this instance, the magazine elevated Wakefield’s dialogue, stripped it of its association with the nursery, and put it in conversation with Staunton’s official account of China and Wieland’s oriental political allegory. Wakefield participates in the magazine’s ongoing conversation about imperialism and global politics, and, in this case, Europe’s relationship with the Far East. Her dialogue, presented as a brief moral tale, serves as an important caveat to the Embassy of Lord Macartney’s commercial ambitions, which are not structured around utility but luxury goods such as tea, porcelain, and silk. Interestingly, Wakefield’s economic advice in the Lady’s Magazine appeared in the same year as her only book for adults, Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex (1798), which has been described as a ‘feminist critique of the economic and social role of women that was presented as a response to Smithian political economy’ (Dimand 2003: 195). The magazine anticipates and reinforces Wakefield’s contribution to political economy and her resistance to a Smithian economics predicated on the idea that fostering commerce, trade, and expansion would ultimately result in not only the economic but also the moral improvement of humankind. Wakefield’s dialogue signifies differently when excerpted alongside the Embassy of Lord Macartney, Wieland’s oriental tale, and Frederic III’s advice to his nephew. The Lady’s Magazine not only generated abridgements that feminised the globe, but also positioned women writers and readers within larger conversation about empire and politics. These magazine excerpts pointed out the centrality of gender to imagining Britain’s place in a new global order and raised questions about women’s status both inside and outside of the British Isles. The reader is left wondering how to define the type of world-building done by the magazine. Srivinas Aravamudan has suggested that travel narratives and oriental tales, which were also a popular feature in the Lady’s Magazine, might be considered an ‘alternative to the genre of the domestic novel’, which has dominated critical accounts of prose narratives in the eighteenth century. If the domestic novel ‘support[s] the same old story of the nation and modernity triumphing over the rest of the world’ (a story made familiar, as Aravamudan recounts, by Ian Watt, Michael McKeon, and others), then the travel narrative evokes an alternative ‘global comparativism’ (2012: 7). I suggest here that the Lady’s Magazine adds a new and gendered dimension to the ‘global comparativism’ Aravamudan describes. In addition, it challenges perceptions of the woman reader, whose pleasures and desires are typically linked in our imaginations to the small interior worlds of the domestic novel. The Lady’s Magazine bills itself as an ‘entertaining companion for the fair sex, appropriate solely to their use and amusement’. The sheer number of travel narratives within the Lady’s Magazine forces us to rethink the scale of the desires and pleasures of the women reader in the eighteenth century. Although the imagined female readers of the magazine are not the ‘mobile bodies’ of travel narratives that Susan

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 214

17/11/17 5:01 PM

travel writing in the LADY’S MAGAZINE

215

Lanser describes as ‘troubling in a world in which women are (supposed to be) legally and socially anchored to men who “own them,”’ the magazine’s remediation of travel texts allowed female readers to circumnavigate ‘norms and structures’ that dictated everything from appropriate reading for women to national and cultural hierarchies that placed Britain on the top (Lanser 2014: 52 and 59). In the Lady’s Magazine, the hypothetical woman reader’s desires are often not directed toward the home or even nation but fuelled by dreams of distant places and global politics. It even offers glimpses of a potential global identity for all women that fosters horizontal identifications between nations and cultures instead of hierarchical and imperial arrangements that reinforce British exceptionalism. In this way, travel writing in the Lady’s Magazine presents a much-needed alternative to the well-worn scripts we have developed about women readers that revolve around the domestic and often very English novel.

Notes 1. In 1823 the magazine’s subtitle changed to The Lady’s Magazine; or, Mirror of the BellesLettres. 2. See Jennie Batchelor’s ‘“Connections, which are of service in an advanced age”: The Lady’s Magazine, Community, and Women’s Literary Histories’ for a discussion of the tension between the magazine’s ‘disingenuous’ address to an entirely female audience and the actual male and female readers of the publication (245–6). Her definition of the magazine as a ‘female-oriented and female-dominated mixed sex literary community’ is particularly useful (250). For more on the magazine, see also her Leverhulme project blog The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1818): Understanding the Emergence of a Genre. (last accessed 10 Sep 2016).

Works Cited Aravamudan, Srivinas. 2012. Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Austen, Jane. 1990. Mansfield Park. London: Penguin Classics. Batchelor, Jennie. 2011. ‘“Connections, which are of service in an advanced age”: The Lady’s Magazine, Community, and Women’s Literary Histories’. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 30.2: 245–67. Bohls, Elizabeth. 1995. Women Travel Writers and the Language of the Aesthetics, 1716–1818. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clery, E. J. 2004. The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dimand, Robert. 2003. ‘An Eighteenth-Century English Feminist Response to Political Economy: Priscilla Wakefield’s Reflections (1798)’. The Status of Women in Classical Economic Thought. Ed. Robert Dimand and Chris Nyland. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. 194–205. Edgeworth, Maria. [1801] 2008. Belinda. New York: Oxford University Press. Ferris, Ina. 1999. ‘Mobile Words: Romantic Travel Writing and Print Anxiety’. Modern Language Quarterly 60.4: 451–68. Guillory, John. 2010. ‘Genesis of the Media Concept’. Critical Inquiry 36: 321–62. Hughes, Gillian. 2015. ‘Fiction in the Magazines’. The Oxford History of the Novel in English, vol. 2: English and British Fiction 1750–1820. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 461–77. Hutton, Catherine. 1811. ‘Oakwood House’. La Belle Assemblée 3 (ns): 73–7. Kitson, Peter. 2013. Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Exchange 1760–1840. New York: Cambridge University Press.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 215

17/11/17 5:01 PM

216

joellen delucia

The Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex. 1770–1832 (1st ser. 1770 –1819; 2nd ser. 1820–9; 3rd ser. 1830–2). London. Lanser, Susan. 2014. The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Leask, Nigel. 2002. Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pearson, Jacqueline. 1999. Women Reading in Britain, 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pratt, Mary Louise. 2007. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge. Siskin, Clifford, and William Warner. 2011. ‘If this is Enlightenment then What is Romanticism?’ European Romantic Review 22:3: 281–91. Wakefield, Priscilla. 1794–6. Leisure Hours; or Entertaining Dialogues. London: Darton and Harvey. Yang, Chi-ming. 2011. Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in EighteenthCentury England, 1660–1760. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-03.indd 216

17/11/17 5:01 PM

Part IV Print Media and Print Culture

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 217

17/11/17 5:01 PM

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 218

17/11/17 5:01 PM

Print Media and Print Culture: Introduction

T

he periodical’s – and particularly the literary periodical’s and Review’s – selfdeclared role as a standard-bearer of literary taste and quality has long been recognised in eighteenth-century and Romantic studies. It was a mantle that the medium wore proudly, and its adoption had far-reaching implications for the reception of individual authors, works, and genres, as well as for literary history – over whom, what, and how we remember. Reviews and magazines in this period presented vast quantities of imaginative and non-imaginative literature to large reading audiences that often dramatically eclipsed in size those for works published in volume form. These periodicals attempted to create cultural consensus about good writing and good writers among this substantial readership in various ways, but their two principal mechanisms were: descriptive and evaluative notices of works lately published; and their prioritisation of particular genres and writers above others in their wide-ranging contents lists. The result was the creation of a hierarchy in which attention to the vibrancy of the contemporary literary marketplace served ultimately to elevate a select group of writers above the many, and great works above what was deemed mundane or even deleterious. As each of the contributors to Part IV documents, the criteria upon which these supposedly qualitative, aesthetic differentiations were made in fact betray formal, political, and gender biases. It has long been a truism of periodical scholarship – and not without justification – that in its attitude to the literary, the periodical (and most especially the Review) was, ultimately, a masculine domain, the cultural authority of which was inextricably tied to its denigration of genres such as the novel, which were closely associated with women. So effective was this manoeuvre, according to Clifford Siskin (1998: 197), that the periodical’s rise was not simply complicit with, but instrumental in, what he terms the ‘Great Forgetting’ of the eighteenth-century woman writer at the turn of the nineteenth century. This volume as whole complicates such narratives and speaks back to literary histories that have enshrined them by revealing women’s agency as readers, authors, and editors of periodicals; their formative role in the genre’s development; and the periodical’s reliance upon and celebration of women’s learning, as well as their literary and cultural achievements. In Part IV, contributors hone in more specifically on the complexity of the periodical’s mediation of the genres and works they reviewed and contained, as well as the women who read and authored them. Chapters by Rachael Scarborough King, Megan Peiser, and Pam Perkins each show how reviews in the famous quarterlies and monthlies, as well as more general magazines, engaged in a richly textured debate about women’s reading and women’s writing that was not always as uneasy or as combative as has been commonly argued. Nor were women passive observers of this conversation. While the majority of reviewers in the period were men, several women, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Anne Grant – whose career is the subject of Perkins’s essay – and Anna Letitia Barbauld and Elizabeth Moody – whose anonymous reviews for the Monthly are illuminated by Peiser’s chapter – worked as literary critics for prominent periodicals, and used their position

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 219

17/11/17 5:01 PM

220

part iv: introduction

to establish their own cultural influence and to challenge any kind of anti-feminist consensus about the literary, in general, or about women’s writing or the woman writer, in particular. Indeed, as Jenny DiPlacidi’s, Evan Hayles Gledhill’s, and Hannah Hudson’s essay contend, the very notion of consensus on such matters is undermined by close examination of the content of eighteenth-century serial publications. If periodicals have always had a vexed relationship to a literary canon structured around particular authors and a very select group of genres, then this is in part because their form and content are often eclectic, unashamedly popular, even defiantly non-canonical. Collectively, the essays in this section demonstrate three important principles: that periodicals did much to institute a literary hierarchy that prioritised certain novels (many the work of notable women) above most other writing; that despite this hierarchy, periodical writing, which included a great deal of narrative fiction, remained popular and culturally powerful; and that periodical versions of popular genres such as the novel, what we would now call genre fiction, and biography were especially sensitive to gender because of the unique pressures of periodical publication.

Works Cited Siskin, Clifford. 1998. The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain 1700–1830. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 193–209.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 220

17/11/17 5:01 PM

14 ‘[L]et a girl read’: Periodicals and Women’s Literary Canon Formation Rachael Scarborough King

J

ane Austen in Northanger Abbey (1818) provides three successive lists of acceptable and unacceptable literature for female readers. First, in a narrative aside that has been the subject of extensive scholarly debate, Austen contrasts a shopworn volume containing ‘some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter of Sterne’ to ‘the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them’: Frances Burney’s novels Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796), and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801). Just a few paragraphs later she offers another list: one of the Gothic novels that fill Isabella Thorpe’s pocketbook – The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793), Clermont (1798), Mysterious Warning (1796), Necromancer of the Black Forest (1794), Midnight Bell (1798), Orphan of the Rhine (1798), and Horrid Mysteries (1796) – all, like those in the first group, real novels in circulation at the time. The reader’s task is to distinguish between the lists; to learn to value novels with ‘the most thorough knowledge of human nature . . . conveyed to the world in the best chosen language’ over Gothic novels and, Austen adds, over the Spectator, with its ‘improbable circumstances [and] unnatural characters . . . and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it’ (Austen 2006: 30–1). The reader is put in the position of the ‘young lady’ being interrogated about her choice of reading material and having to admit, ‘with affected indifference, or momentary shame’, that it is ‘“only a novel”’ (31). She must decide whether to adopt or reject this indifference and shame. Austen was combating critical truisms that favoured the ‘masculine’ periodical or anthology over the ‘feminine’ novel; almost as soon as the Spectator appeared it was hailed a model of polite letters, while the novel in the late eighteenth century remained a debated, denigrated form. But in doing so, she employed a technique that was also a favourite of periodical writers discussing women’s reading material: listing. In the second half of the century, the literary periodical and critical review emerged as vital venues for popular consideration of a wide range of belles-lettres, which had generally been excluded from earlier summary periodicals like the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1922) or the History of the Works of the Learned (1680–1740) (Percy 2009: 123). As extra-academic sites for the discussion of literature – and with the antinovel debate raging – periodicals took as one task the dissemination of literary standards for women. The associations of the novel with female readers and writers were an ever-present source of anxiety, indignation, and what we might now call ‘concern trolling’ – magnifying worry to generate controversial and eye-catching essays. To

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 221

17/11/17 5:01 PM

222

rachael scarborough king

supplement articles detailing the dangers of novels or, much less frequently, defending the form, writers often reverted to supplying lists of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ works: either a non-novelistic group of preferable alternatives or a select few novels. The author of a Weekly Miscellany essay ‘recommend[ed] the Guardians, Spectator, the Rambler’ (6 Nov 1775: 137–8), while the conveyer of ‘Advice to a Sister’ noted, ‘let a girl read with attention the works of our most celebrated poets and dramatic writers, not forgetting the Spectator, Tatler, &c. avoiding as much as possible the licentious wit of our comic writers’ (Town and Country 4 (June 1772): 317). And the spokeswoman for a self-described group of ‘Female Literati’ assured the publisher of the Morning Chronicle: we often meet with more entertainment in the perusal of one page of your paper, than we do in one hundred barren leaves of a modern novel; and we hope to see the day when some ingenious gentleman will undertake a daily series of letters upon the plan of the Spectator, Guardian, &c. (21 Apr 1775: 2) Periodical authors used the form of the list, piling up edifying examples, to endorse the reading of other periodicals as an alternative to the morally and literarily suspect novel. Austen seized on the convention as a vehicle for ironic commentary. Mid- to late-century periodicals repeated a set of clichés about the novel genre. However, as I will show, this tactic in the period’s culture wars had the paradoxical effect of introducing the novel into the canon of literature. John Guillory has highlighted the syllabus as the site of canon formation, writing: the canon is an imaginary totality of works. No one has access to the canon as a totality. . . . What does have a concrete location as a list, then, is not the canon but the syllabus, the list of works one reads in a given class, or the curriculum, the list of works one reads in a program of study. (Guillory 1994: 30) The canon can only materialise in the form of syllabi: lists of particular works. Taking up Guillory’s focus on the institutional spaces that disseminate such lists, this essay examines an early moment of syllabus- and thus canon-formation in the eighteenth-century periodical’s persistent interest in the status of the novel genre. As Guillory writes, ‘the distinction between the canonical and the noncanonical can be seen . . . as an effect of the syllabus as an institutional instrument, the fact that works not included on a given syllabus appear to have no status at all’ (30). The lists that reviewers included alongside their considerations of novels shaped an emerging consensus about the genre. Over and over, authors concerned with women’s reading moved from condemning ‘the generality of novels [which] are positively pernicious’ (Universal Magazine 93 (Sep 1793): 164) to making exceptions for certain novels; initially comprising Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Sterne, this list would expand to include ‘some other modern novels, the productions of ingenious ladies, which are I believe less objectionable than many others; as the Evelina, Cecilia, and Camilla of Miss Burney. The Emmeline and Ethelinda of Charlotte Smith; Inchbald’s Simple Story; Mrs Brook’s Emely [sic] Montague; and the Female Quixote’ (Scots Magazine 59 (Sep 1797): 664). The periodicals’ lists offered the beginnings of a canon of eighteenth-century novel writing.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 222

17/11/17 5:01 PM

periodicals and women’s literary canon formation

223

Furthermore, once such exceptions to the general anti-novel sentiment had been made, the battle was essentially lost, as the debate could then revolve around an individual novel’s merit rather than upon the novel genre as a whole. In order to justify their own attention to novels, periodical writers had to acknowledge positive exceptions to ‘all the wretched productions under which the press has groaned for the destruction of precious time’ (Critical Review 21 (Feb 1766): 157). Austen in Northanger Abbey satirises the lists along these lines, critiquing both periodicals and Gothic novels as she offers a male protagonist, Henry Tilney, who judiciously enjoys a wide range of fiction and non-fiction and teaches the heroine Catherine Morland to do likewise. Examining periodical articles and reviews by both men and women in the second half of the eighteenth century, I will argue that the periodical was an important location for the discussion of women’s reading material and, ultimately, the elevation of the novel. A nearly invisible tool in this process was the syllabus or list, which condensed arguments into easily digestible form – much in the way of the present-day ‘listicle’ – and produced easy copy as writers reinforced and repeated emerging standards. Periodicals’ interest in women’s reading was not a question solely of sexism or gender ideology, but also of competition between evolving print genres in the increasingly crowded marketplace of the second half of the eighteenth century. The critical review was, in fact, an even newer genre than the novel, so that reviewers ‘tended to project onto novels the very traits – popularity, ephemerality, disposability – that they most wished to deny about themselves’ (Gamer 2015: 536). As periodical authors offered negative generalisations alongside prescriptive lists of novels, novelists pushed back against such constraints with their own syllabi, a process that played an important role in the ongoing incorporation of the novel into the literary canon.

Forging ‘Justness of Distinction’ in the Critical and Monthly Reviews The understanding of the periodical as a site of extra-academic literary instruction began almost with the genre itself; the preface to the first volume of John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury (1690–7) noted the journal’s purpose ‘to communicate Knowledg [sic] more generally and easily than has formerly been done’ (1.1), while twenty years later, Mr Spectator in Spectator no. 10 set the agenda for his paper when he wrote, ‘I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought Philosophy out of the Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee-Houses’ (Addison 12 Mar 1711, vol. 1: 39). But early periodicals paid little attention to the yet-inchoate novel genre, focusing instead on their own kind – other serials and newspapers – as well as on natural history, philosophy, scientific experiment, and, in the literary realm, poetry and theatre. It was in the postRichardson decades following the ‘Pamela media event’, which ‘help[ed] to inaugurate a shift in media practices’ (Warner 1998: 178), that the novel became both increasingly associated with women and increasingly important to larger cultural discussions. In the 1750s, Samuel Johnson, in no. 2 of the Rambler (1750–2), dated 31 March 1750, assumed a male novel reader, employing masculine pronouns in his discussion of the genre while at the same time declaring that such works were ‘written chiefly to the

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 223

17/11/17 5:01 PM

224

rachael scarborough king

young, the ignorant, and the idle’ (1969: 29). But over the second half of the century, often in periodical venues, the association between women and novels cemented. The proliferation of repetitive periodical essays attacking novel reading and policing women’s choices intersected with the spread of review magazines, beginning with the Monthly Review in 1749 and Critical Review in 1756. While earlier scholarly periodicals rarely included discussion of popular fiction, these forums began considering a wider range of material; they also began offering opinion and summary in addition to long extracts (Percy 2009: 120, 123; Forster 2003: 644). As Joseph Bartolomeo points out, prior to mid-century commentary on the novel genre had taken place in the prefaces and other paratextual materials of the novels themselves, but the reviews ‘foreground[ed] a systematic and professional approach to judging fiction’ (Bartolomeo 1994: 20, 11). Review journals provided multiple tiers of discernment: books were first judged worthy of inclusion and then divided between the main article section, comprising ten to fifteen essays, and the catalogue list of short reviews and summaries, a sorting that constituted ‘a value judgement by the editors’ operating upon a ‘principle of selectiveness’ (Forster 2003: 634). As Frank Donoghue writes, ‘The pages of the Monthly and the Critical were an important battleground on which the war to determine refined taste in a consumer society was waged’ (1996: 4). The inclusion of novel criticism in the reviews was a signal of the genre’s new status, even as many of the articles condemned novel reading and writing in increasingly gendered terms. The Monthly and Critical reviews began the process of making the novel a constant object of interest for periodicals, repeatedly criticising novels for their supposedly repetitive, hackneyed characters and incidents, subpar style and grammar, and improbable events. These elements were also connected to female writers and readers, as women were depicted as lacking the education to write correctly or to distinguish between good and bad literature. Reviews therefore elevated the genre by considering it alongside works of history, science, religion, biography, and politics, but at the same time continued to give it a secondary status. Neither periodical ever devoted copious space to reviews of novels: in the first full year of the Critical and Monthly, novels comprised 5 and 6.5 per cent of all reviews, respectively. Even as both magazines added catalogue sections with shorter notices of publications, novels generally made up less than 10 per cent of titles; in the Monthly, novels rose from 5 per cent of the catalogue in 1760 to 10 per cent in 1770, before falling to only 3 per cent in 1780 – when the magazine complained of ‘an uncommon dearth of this kind of food’ (62 (Mar 1780): 244) – and increasing again to nearly 8 per cent in 1790.1 In the Critical, novels made up 2 per cent of articles and 8.5 per cent of the catalogue in 1760 and nearly 10 per cent of articles and 8 per cent of the catalogue in 1770, before dropping to just 4 per cent and 1 per cent, respectively, in 1780, and then levelling out at around 1 per cent of articles and 10 per cent of catalogue reviews in 1790 and 1800. While the critical reviews together surveyed 76 to 95 per cent of all new novels produced (Gamer 2015: 539), they gave greater prominence to works of politics, poetry, and history. This numerical discrepancy was mirrored in the language of the reviews. Discussions of individual novels were, for the most part, critical, condescending, and dismissive. The notices tended to be shorter than those for other genres, and made clear that novels were interpreted as part of a class rather than on their own terms. As a Critical reviewer wrote of The Old Maid in 1770, ‘If we had a desire to inflict

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 224

17/11/17 5:01 PM

periodicals and women’s literary canon formation

225

a punishment upon those that hate us, we could not think of any more severe than to oblige them to go through the drudgery of reading the wretched writings which pass under the name of Novels’ (30 (Dec 1770): 478).2 In the same year, the Monthly branded The Unhappy Wife – like The Old Maid, a female-authored novel in ‘a series of letters’ – ‘[a]nother scandalous catchpenny’, adding, ‘Of all the worthless productions of this kind which have been imposed upon the public, we never perused any so totally uninteresting and unentertaining as the present; which, at the same time, into the bargain, is, in a great measure, unintelligible also’ (42 (Mar 1770): 250). In addition to such scathing denunciations, backhanded compliments were the norm: in 1756 the Critical wrote of The Life and Surprising Adventures of Crusoe Richard Davis, ‘Of all the innumerable pieces of the novel manufacture which have proceeded from the warehouse of Mr. Noble, this production seems to be of the least flimsy texture’, while a decade later it noted of The History of Miss Harriot Fitzroy, and Miss Emilia Spencer, ‘Amongst the numerous imitations of Richardson’s Clarissa, we think this novel is far from being the most contemptible. The style is at least easy if not elegant, the sentiments chaste if not sublime, and the characters mostly natural if not new’ (2 (Nov 1756): 351; 22 (Nov 1766): 354). The feminine genre of the novel was held to a low standard, but also treated more harshly than masculine histories, biographies, and poetry. Women were berated for producing and consuming such fare as the increasing quantity and popularity of novels was held up as evidence of women’s lack of literary ability and taste. Repeatedly, the reviews and other periodicals called out the repetitive nature of novels, often using the metaphor of industrial manufacturing to criticise their similarities in plot, character, and style. At a time when the status of the author was accelerating toward its Romantic-era apotheosis, these articles depicted women as entering – or being forced into – the literary marketplace solely for remuneration and therefore producing derivative imitations, thus denying female novelists originality or imagination. As a writer for the Universal Magazine wrote, ‘From the workman-like facility, with which modern novels are composed, and from their increasing number, it is not, perhaps, too ridiculous to suppose that, in a case where genius is so little consulted, the operation might be performed by a machine’ (93 (July 1793): 8). While this trope stressed mechanised production, in discussions of novels’ reception women’s bodies were the source of concern; in either case, women were not rational, thinking writers and readers, but rote, physical beings. Critics of novels frequently employed the metaphor of digestion: in an extract from Thomas Gisborne’s Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797), the Monthly Visitor (1797–1800) noted of the habit of novel reading, ‘The appetite becomes too keen to be denied; and in proportion as it is more urgent, grows less nice and select in its fare. . . . The produce of the bookclub, and the contents of the circulating library, are devoured with indiscriminate and insatiable avidity’ (1 (Feb 1797): 132). Or, as the Critical’s review of Female Friendship, or the Innocent Sufferer (1770) noted, ‘Those who devour books of this kind, without digesting them, may . . . fall to with a good appetite to dishes which would turn our stomach. Such feeders have ideas too gross for a literary entertainment’ (29 (Feb 1770): 148). Women writers and readers, by implication, were either mindless machines or irrational bodies. In the process of condemning novels, however, such articles paradoxically established the importance of the genre, granting it a power beyond that of other forms.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 225

17/11/17 5:01 PM

226

rachael scarborough king

As the Universal Magazine noted, ‘This is not a subject of trivial importance. That which has such visible effect on the manners and sentiments of the age, demands our attention’ (93 (Sep 1793): 163). To address the apparent problem of the novel’s growing influence, therefore, periodical authors employed the ‘principle of selectiveness’ that was the motivating standard of the critical reviews. They asserted the necessity for good alternatives, or a select few acceptable novels, that could constitute a canon of ‘improving literature’. In a typical construction, the Universal Magazine author allowed: it is by no means the intention of the writer to throw indiscriminate blame on all novels, as if all were equally destitute of pure entertainment and just morality. There are no doubt a few, which may be read with advantage by young persons, and which will greatly entertain, and may in some degree instruct, by interesting their imaginations, and engaging their affections on the side of virtue struggling with temptation and distress, and finally crowned with success. But the number of the novels which may be so recommended is small, and to the best of them objections may be offered, although I still would not include them in the list of trash, against which these letters are principally directed. (93 (Sep 1793): 163) Likewise, the Critical Review noted in 1780: Novel-writing, it has been contended by many, is too often attended with fatal and destructive consequences, more especially to the younger part of the fair sex. . . . We have always, notwithstanding, been of opinion, that this species of writing, if well executed, may afford both innocent amusement, and profitable instruction. (50 (Sep 1780): 168) And the Berwick Museum summed up the sentiment by noting, ‘’Tis the excess I blame . . . Novels and romances are to be met with, where the best and truest pictures of human life are delineated, and which tend to inculcate the most amiable virtues, and best lessons of morality’ (3 (Jan 1787): 19). Paradoxically, these authors laid the groundwork – in diction as well as content – for Austen’s defence, but they rarely praised the novel in absolute terms. But periodical authors did not only assert the need for selective taste; they also provided lists of select examples. The reviews, which often included long summaries and extracts, began by comparing the particular novel under consideration to its predecessors, generally focusing on the models of Richardson and/or Fielding. In September 1780 the Critical wrote of Margaret Minifie’s The Count de Poland, ‘we may venture to recommend the piece before us, which, though far inferior to the compositions of Richardson and Fielding, may boast no inconsiderable share of real merit’, while two months later it commended The Parsonage House, advertised as ‘by a young lady’, in almost identical language: Though we shall not . . . say that this performance can boast of that perfect knowledge of the human heart which appears in Clarissa, or Sir C. Grandison, or the inimitable humour of Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, we shall readily acknowledge that the Parsonage House is possessed of no inconsiderable share of real merit. (50 (Sep 1780): 168; 50 (Nov 1780): 373)

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 226

17/11/17 5:01 PM

periodicals and women’s literary canon formation

227

In a more negative vein, a 1770 Critical review of The Prediction: or the History of Miss Lucy Maxwell observed, ‘The perusal of these volumes, written by a lady, cannot afford great entertainment to readers who are capable of relishing the writings of a Sheridan, a Montague, a Lennox, and a Brooke; those, however, who take up a new book merely to kill time, will not be disappointed’ (30 (Oct 1770): 306). While making an unusual exception for a group of exemplary female authors, this list confined comparison of women writers to each other, suggesting that a novel ‘by a lady’ was not in the same category as one by Richardson or Fielding. Periodicals identified the problem with novels as one of oversupply and a resulting deficiency of discrimination, a skill that young women lacked but that reviewers would provide for them through their syllabi. The practice of listing dovetailed with the review magazines’ physical make-up, where novels, sometimes with little more information than their titles, were more likely to appear in the back catalogue of twenty to forty brief summaries than in the front section of longer articles. In the advertisement to the first issue of the Monthly Review, editor Ralph Griffiths noted that the problem of choosing between an apparently overwhelming number of new books could only be solved with ‘a periodical work, whose sole object should be to give a compendious account of those productions of the press, as they come out, that are worth notice’, a process that would operate by ‘justness of distinction’ (1 (May 1749): 9). Including a work in the periodical’s list of titles was the first step toward creating such distinctions. The review articles expanded upon this tendency by forging an early consensus of primarily male ‘good’ novelists to whom the current, growing group of ‘ladies’ was compared.

The Expanding Canon in Late-Century Periodicals The selective practices of the Critical and Monthly reviews, which first gave sustained attention to novels, expanded in more essayistic periodicals as the novel genre, rather than individual works, became a topic of discussion. Here, too, the repetitive nature of the articles is striking, as they use similar language to critique ‘common novels’ – particularly those found in circulating libraries – for their corrupting influence on young women’s minds and morals, while at the same time making allowances on grounds of virtue or literary quality. Writers continued to complain about the excess of amusing, seductive novels and to provide an increasingly standard list of exceptions. In 1794, the Town and Country Magazine declared, ‘this is a reading age’, as evidenced by ‘the continued swarms of new publications, the increase of circulating libraries, and the establishment of book-clubs in every part of the kingdom’. However, the author would allow novels only tenuous entrance into the category of ‘literature’, writing in opposition to such ‘vehicles of amusement’, ‘Works of deep and refined erudition are as seldom published as they are inquired after or read’ (26 (Mar 1794): 114). Similarly, the Weekly Magazine (1768–79) decried the ‘nauseous trumpery as are now imposed upon us from circulating libraries and booksellers with wide consciences’, but continued, ‘The works of Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and Smollet, are sufficiently diffused, of easy purchase, and might be rendered signally serviceable in the sweetning [sic] way’ (37 (21 Aug 1777): 183). This list – Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and Smollett – was repeated throughout the second half of the eighteenth century.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 227

17/11/17 5:01 PM

228

rachael scarborough king

At the same time as this grouping represented a rarely contradicted critical consensus, many periodicals began to add to it, a process that, as Katherine Binhammer points out, ‘paradoxically asserted the novel’s centrality to literary production and ultimately had the positive effect of differentiating certain kinds of novels from others and certain scenes of reading from others, thereby promoting a new literary critical paradigm for valuing literature’ (2003: 3). For example, in 1778 the Weekly Miscellany offered both positive and negative lists of the ‘[n]ovels and plays [which] have been injurious to thousands’, noting, ‘the impious buffoonery, false wit, and indelicacy of a Rochester, a Haywood, a Behn, a Pilkington, a Congreve, and others, of the last and present ages, are the delight of the gay, the volatile, and the inconsiderate’, while the works of ‘an Addison, a Milton, a Steele, a Tillotson, a Pope, a Foster, a Fordyce, a Young, a Blair, a Melmoth, a Hawkesworth, a Langhorne, a More, an Aikin, &c.’ offered ‘manly eloquence and sublimity of sentiment’. Meanwhile, ‘Few novels, except those written by that shining ornament of human nature, the late S. Richardson, and the ingenious author of Sir George Ellison, can properly lay claim to substantial merit and classic elegance’ (11.274 (28 Dec 1778): 298).3 Likewise, The Bee (1790–4) observed in 1792, ‘after reading the works of Feilding [sic], Richardson, and Smollet, instead of being either amusing or instructive, it becomes a grievous task to proceed with patience to the end of almost all our modern novels’ (8 (28 Mar 1792): 126). William Lane’s Polite Repository presented its entire purpose as making selections for readers; consisting of excerpts from newly published ‘Novels and little tracts of Entertaining History’ and featuring the title-page motto ‘We cull the choicest’, its goal was to ‘extract the sweets’ and avoid the need to ‘drudge through a numerous collection, some heavy, uninteresting, and insipid, and others of such dangerous tendency, that they only mislead the Judgment, and vitiate the taste’ (1 (1791): i). By the close of the eighteenth century, a canon of ‘choice’ works had solidified as reviewers repeatedly compared a novel under discussion to the top tier of Richardson and Fielding and second tier of Smollett and Sterne. Women authors who were working their way onto the ‘good’ list, often through comparison with Richardson and, less commonly, Fielding, merited special treatment in the magazines and reviews. This group, which grew to include Frances Burney, Sarah Scott, Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Turner Smith, Charlotte Lennox, and later Jane Austen, did not receive the same broad critiques as many of their contemporaries. In a 1790 review of Smith’s Ethelinde, the Monthly Review acknowledged this tendency, writing that the novel ‘is possessed of such particular merit, that we are unwilling to dismiss it by general terms, as is, frequently, our practice with this class of productions’. The author added that a review was hardly necessary, as ‘the character of Mrs. Smith, both as a poet and as a novelist, is so firmly established’ (2 (June 1790): 161). An article a few months later reviewing Lennox’s Euphemia similarly observed, ‘We have been better pleased with Mrs. Lennox’s Novel, than with many others of the same class, which have lately passed under our review; though indeed there is no prodigality of commendation in this sentence, as most of them have excited our displeasure.’ Lennox, like Smith, was in a separate class of novelists from the generality: We always imagined, with respect to the literary abilities of this Lady . . . that it was impossible for a writer endowed with so much genius, to offer any

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 228

17/11/17 5:01 PM

periodicals and women’s literary canon formation

229

performance to the public, that would prove unworthy the perusal of readers who have any pretensions to praise of discernment and taste; – and we are still of the opinion. (3 (Sep 1790): 89–90) Such reviews appeared in the main section of articles, rather than the catalogue list, so that they offered certain works or authors entry into the realm of ‘polite literature’. By giving some novels more sustained attention, periodical authors began to distinguish a primarily female group that could be favourably compared with Richardson and Fielding. As both novel readers and writers became increasingly gendered as feminine over the second half of the eighteenth century, therefore, women made their way onto the syllabi of ‘improving’ novels.4 Periodical articles from the mid-century period do not necessarily assume the feminine status of the novel; for example, in 1753 a letter to the editor of the World instructed, ‘as a censor, you ought to take notice, and should assure our young men and young women that they may read fifty volumes of this sort of trash, and yet, according to the phrase which is perpetually in their mouths, know nothing of life’, continuing that the only unobjectionable novels were those ‘stampt Richardson or Fielding’ (1.19 (10 May 1753): 114–15, 120). But by the end of the century, periodicals took novels’ connection to women for granted and, as E. J. Clery has argued, they used this association to locate conservative social anxieties about gender and class roles within ‘the scope of an individual woman’s choice of reading’ (1995: 100). As the Monthly Visitor noted in a discussion of novels, ‘There is one species of writings which obtains, from a considerable proportion of the female sex, a reception much more favourable than is accorded to other kinds of composition more worthy of encouragement’ (1 (Feb 1797): 131). The New Annual Register (1781– 1826) praised magazines as a ‘means of diffusing a variety of general knowledge’, while allowing for a very few exceptional novels: Smollet [sic] came next to Fielding; and Richardson has been the most happily imitated by ladies. As for the common trash of Novels, under which the press has groaned, which have introduced so wretched a taste of reading, and have been so hurtful to young minds, particularly of the female sex, they are unworthy to be named, excepting in the way of censure. (2 (1781): xviii, xxv) In 1790, the Monthly Review went further in gendering the genre, writing that of the ‘various species of composition . . . there are none in which our writers of the male sex have less excelled, since the days of Richardson and Fielding, than in the arrangement of a novel. Ladies seem to appropriate to themselves an exclusive privilege in this kind of writing’ (3 (Dec 1790): 400). In the pages of periodicals, women became the readers, writers, and subjects of novels, which therefore necessitated greater oversight and circumspection. But in the process, some female authors were able to claim a place in the expanding canon, even as the overall primacy of Richardson and Fielding – as the above quotation indicates – remained taken for granted. Many novelists responded to the periodicals’ sweeping condemnations and lists of exceptions by offering their own analyses of the genre and associating themselves with the ‘good’ examples. Late-century authors incorporated periodicalists’ language and technique of listing into their own works, and in doing so further contributed to the

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 229

17/11/17 5:01 PM

230

rachael scarborough king

emerging novel canon. Such metacritical commentary appeared in both paratextual materials, such as prefaces and advertisements, and in the bodies of novels themselves. Burney dedicated her first, anonymous novel, Evelina (1778), to ‘The Authors of the Critical and Monthly Reviews’. In the work’s preface, she adopted the language and syllabus of the reviewers, noting of the novelist, ‘among the whole class of writers, perhaps not one can be named of which the votaries are more numerous but less respectable’, but adding that while in the annals of those few of our predecessors, to whom this species of writing is indebted for being saved from contempt, and rescued from depravity, we can trace such names as Rousseau, Johnson, Marivaux, Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett, no man need blush at starting from the same post. (Burney 2008: 9) Here Burney describes an author generally as ‘a man’ and adds herself to an allmale list. Edgeworth, meanwhile, used the advertisement to Belinda to attempt to class the work as a ‘Moral Tale’ rather than a novel, and wrote of a largely female canon, ‘Were all novels like those of Madame de Crousaz, Mrs. Inchbald, Miss Burney or Dr. Moore, she would adopt the name of novel with delight’ (2008: 3). Attempting to associate The Man of Feeling (1771) with such exemplars, Henry Mackenzie wrote in the introduction to his ‘found’ manuscript that ‘had the name of a Marmontel, or a Richardson, been on the title page – ’tis odds that I should have wept’ (1967: 5).5 By adopting the technique of comparison through listing, but offering a more varied group, novelists adapted periodicalists’ means of allowing newer works entry to the ‘improving’ list. Austen both continues and ridicules this tendency in Northanger Abbey, bringing the paratextual commentary of authors like Mackenzie, Burney, and Edgeworth into the body of her novel. She eschews both reviewers’ and novelists’ practice of attempting to distance themselves from the genre, writing, ‘I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom, so common with novel writers, of degrading, by their contemptuous censure, the very performances to the number of which they are themselves adding’, and continuing, ‘Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans’ (30). But at the same time as she argues against engaging with the review magazines’ ‘threadbare’ tropes, she employs the standard one of syllabus creation, offering the negative list of an abridged history of England, a poetry anthology, and the Spectator in contrast to the positive one of Cecilia, Camilla, and Belinda – the latter group being works ‘in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language’ (Austen 2006: 31). Turning the periodicalists’ criteria against the founding text of the periodical genre – although, admittedly, one that rarely mentioned novels – she critiques the Spectator for ‘improbable circumstances’ and ‘unnatural characters’, precisely the problems reviewers identified in ‘common novels’. Austen defends the novel genre by responding to the reviewers’ clichés, but in doing so she employs the common technique of listing to attempt to establish her own new hierarchy.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 230

17/11/17 5:01 PM

periodicals and women’s literary canon formation

231

Canon Wars from Periodicals to Books The back-and-forth interaction between periodicals and novels forged an emerging consensus around an early, extra-academic syllabus of ‘good’ or ‘improving’ novels that could be considered as part of the realm of literature alongside poetry, history, and the classic periodical essays of the Tatler, Spectator, and Rambler. In many ways, this consensus remains with us today, revealing the periodicals’ decades-long consideration of the novel genre as an important step in the creation of an eighteenthcentury novelistic canon. Toward the end of the century, this canon began to move also into educational treatises, which were often excerpted in periodicals and thus worked alongside them to cement new ideas about the novel genre. Educational works directed toward young women almost always included discussions of novel reading. Charles Allen’s The Polite Lady: Or, A Course of Female Education (1760) was unusual for its wholesale defence of novels and romances, a ‘large field of reading . . . in which you may employ your time with great pleasure and delight’, and it offered a list not of selected novels but of periodicals, which were held up not as amusing, like novels, but edifying: ‘the Spectators, Guardians, and Tatlers, which will serve to give you a notion of the fashions and foibles of the last age; as also the Rambler, Idler, Adventurer, and Connoisseur, which will let you into the prevailing humours of the present’ (1760: 119). Many other educational treatises continued the periodicals’ anti-novel language and separated works by genre rather than title, preferring history and philosophy to fiction: John Aikin recommended ‘strengthening the mind with the dictates of a masculine and high-toned philosophy’ (1796: 12–13), while William Alexander’s The History of Women noted, as the generality of the fair sex . . . spend many of their idle hours in poring over novels and romances, which greatly tend to mislead the understanding and corrupt the heart, we cannot help expressing a wish, that they would spare a part of this time to look into the history of their own Sex. (1779: n. p.) In The Progress of Romance, Clara Reeve – who was occasionally afforded entry onto the ‘good’ novel list for her work The Old English Baron – noted, ‘The learned men of our own country, have in general affected a contempt for this kind of writing, and looked upon Romances, as proper furniture only for a lady’s Library’ (1785: xi). Her treatise’s dialogues offered extended considerations of a broader range of authors than generally appeared in periodicals, including Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, Daniel Defoe, and Sarah Fielding in addition to Richardson, Fielding, Lennox, Smollett, Rousseau, and Sterne. By tracing an extensive genealogy for the novel – while the male antagonist in the dialogue, Hortensius, only allows for the status of Richardson and Fielding – and establishing Behn, Manley, and Haywood as mothers of the novel even as she condemned them for immorality, Reeve offered a new understanding of the role of women in the novel’s critical rise. In both periodicals and treatises, then, there was an ongoing instability in the supposedly feminine nature of the novel genre, as new novels by and for women were compared to those of an existing canon of male authors. While women were added to the list, the original grouping remained surprisingly stable. However, the commentary

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 231

17/11/17 5:01 PM

232

rachael scarborough king

of ‘real’ women on their own reading material reveals both an interest in genre and a more heterogeneous literary landscape. The group of correspondents around Elizabeth Montagu, including novelist Sarah Scott and poet Elizabeth Carter and now known as the Bluestocking Circle, frequently discussed their reading and writing practices. And while the women often read fiction, their commentary tended to follow the generic ranking put forward by the periodicals, even when surveying their own works. The letters of this admittedly exceptional group of women show both support for the review magazines’ gendered hierarchy of genres, and continual subversion of such norms through their own varied reading and praise of female authors engaging in a range of genres. In 1762 and 1763, Montagu and her sister, Scott, considered Scott’s recently published novel, A Description of Millenium Hall and the Country Adjacent. Scott professed a purpose in writing the novel that accorded with the reviewers’ moralising dictates, noting, ‘shou’d it bring into any persons mind & inclination the means of doing one benevolent action I shall be very happy’ (Nov 1762: MO 5299). However, she later wrote that this effort did not satisfy the reviewers, who had ‘abused it more than ever they did the Lady of Pleasure, or any of those infamous Books’. Compared to her History of Gustavus Ericson or a planned volume of geography, she saw Millenium Hall as one of ‘those light things for which one has no where to search but in ones own brain’ (31 Jan 1763: MO 5300). A few months later, she expressed wonder ‘at my Father’s liking Millenium Hall . . . You may if you please tell him in confidence that he bears the same Relation to Gustavus, for I am surprized he does not feel some apprehensions, lest I apply myself only to Novels’ (Apr 1763: MO 5301). Montagu apparently agreed with this genre hierarchy, writing to William Pulteney, Earl of Bath, ‘I have sent you Millenium Hall. . . . I beg your Lordship not to read longer than you are amused. I think you will see the writer has talents above her subject, & I hope she will employ them on something of a higher rank in les belles lettres than novel writing’ (1762?: MO 4554). Montagu’s letters surveyed a wide range of genres, from history and biography to magazines, criticism, letters collections, and translations of the classics. She frequently expressed a preference for such ‘masculine’ genres while praising women who practised them; she wrote of Sarah Fielding’s translation of Xenophon, ‘Her genius points to the Portico & academic groves, never let it saunter in the tuilleries translating les amours & amourettes of Mr Le Marquis de – or les memoires d’un homme de qualité retiré du monde’, while she praised Carter’s introduction to Epictetus’ discourse as ‘one of the finest things in our language. How unlike the flimsy stuff and feeble phrase of our modern writers!’ (Feb 1762: MO 5787; 29 Oct 1792: MO 1423). Montagu and her correspondents often employed similar language to that of periodical writers, even as they showed women directing a wide variety of literary practices. In the late eighteenth century, as these periodicals, treatises, and letters show, the novel remained a source of contention, outrage, and debate. Whether or not women actually constituted the majority of novel readers,6 particular genres became increasingly gendered in the second half of the century, and the periodicals’ approbation of history and essays over novels was a key element of what Jacqueline Pearson has more broadly described as ‘a rearguard battle to preserve established literary forms from contamination from the new, especially the novel, and a

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 232

17/11/17 5:01 PM

periodicals and women’s literary canon formation

233

desire to preserve male hegemony over a print culture in which female writers and readers were becoming increasingly central’ (Pearson 1999: 19). The overlooked technique of listing, creating categories of good and bad works and genres, was a practical means by which the burgeoning review and magazine form asserted precedence over its similarly expanding, ephemeral, and entertainment-oriented rival, the novel. But by making the novel, unlike any other genre, a point of such profound cultural concern, the periodicals not only initiated an eighteenth-century novelistic canon but also raised the status of the form as a whole. As Guillory has written of the twentieth-century canon wars, ‘The canon debate signifies nothing less than a crisis in the form of cultural capital we call “literature”’ (Guillory 1994: vii, viii). Likewise, eighteenth-century periodicals’ repetitive, apparently excessive condemnation of the novel and the female novel reader offers a window into the period’s changing literary hierarchies and struggle over grand categories of literary value such as imagination, realistic representation, and relatable characterisation. The interplay between novels and periodicals generated not only a nascent syllabus of the eighteenth-century novel, but also an emerging critical consensus about the features of good and bad writing. I would like to thank Nazanin Keynejad for her assistance with research for this essay.

Notes 1. James Raven points out that, while the print marketplace grew at an overall average rate of 2 per cent per year from 1740 to 1800 and 3.5 per cent per year in the 1780s, there was a steep decline in novel production that ‘lasted from about 1775 to 1783, coterminous, it seems, with the American War of Independence’ (Raven 2015: 5, 7). 2. The reviewer was referring not to the more famous work of that name, Frances Brooke’s periodical Old Maid (1755–6), but to Ann Skinn’s The Old Maid; or, History of Miss Ravensworth (1771). 3. While members of the Bluestocking circle were aware that Scott was the author of The History of Sir George Ellison, the novel was published anonymously and the author was often assumed to be male in contemporary reviews. This list is therefore ambiguous as to gender. 4. Scholars have debated whether novel readers and writers were in fact predominantly female. Peter Garside writes that while author counts indicate a higher percentage of male novelists, women were more productive and dominate in title counts. As late as the 1770s about 31 per cent of new titles were written by men, compared to 22 per cent by women and 46 per cent unknown, but a shift began in 1785; titles by women outnumbered those by men in every year from 1785 to 1789 and overall in the 1790s (Garside 2015: 41–5). However, the high proportion of anonymous and/or unattributed titles makes definitive conclusions about sex difficult. 5. As these examples show, the canon also included a number of European authors. Rousseau was commonly compared with Richardson, having published the epistolary Julie. However, like the female exceptions/additions to the initially male-dominated list, the reviews treated foreign authors as supplements to a primarily English genre. 6. As Pearson writes, ‘women readers are paradoxically both the most visible in the literature and the most invisible in the historical record’, making it difficult to know what proportion of a novel’s audience was female, or how much women read on average (1999: 12).

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 233

17/11/17 5:01 PM

234

rachael scarborough king

Works Cited Addison, Joseph, and Richard Steele. 1965. The Spectator. Ed. Donald F. Bond. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Aikin, John. 1796. Letters from a Father to His Son. 3rd ed. London: J. Johnson. Alexander, William. 1779. The History of Women, from the Earliest Antiquity, to the Present Time. London. W. Strahan. Allen, Charles. 1760. The Polite Lady: Or, A Course of Female Education. 2 vols. London: J. Newbery. Austen, Jane. [1818] 2006. Northanger Abbey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bartolomeo, Joseph F. 1994. A New Species of Criticism: Eighteenth-Century Discourse on the Novel. Newark: University of Delaware Press. The Bee: Or Literary Weekly Intelligencer. 1790–4. Edinburgh. The Berwick Museum, or, Monthly Literary Intelligencer. 1785–7. Berwick. Binhammer, Katherine. 2003. ‘The Persistence of Reading: Governing Female Novel-Reading in Memoirs of Emma Courtney and Memoirs of Modern Philosophers’. Eighteenth-Century Life 27.2: 1–22. Burney, Frances. [1778] 2008. Evelina. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Clery, E. J. 1995. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The Critical Review. 1756–1817 (1st ser. 1756–90; 2nd ser. 1791–1817). London. Donoghue, Frank. 1996. The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-Century Literary Careers. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Dunton, John, ed. 1690–7. The Athenian Mercury. London. Edgeworth, Maria. [1801] 2008. Belinda. Oxford and New York: Oxford World’s Classics. Forster, Antonia. 2003. ‘Review Journals and the Reading Public’. Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays. Ed. Isabel Rivers. London: Continuum International Publishing. 171–90. Gamer, Michael. 2015. ‘Assimilating the Novel: Reviews and Collections’. The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume Two: English and British Fiction 1750–1820. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 532–49. Garside, Peter. 2015. ‘Authorship’. The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume Two: English and British Fiction 1750–1820. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 29–52. Guillory, John. 1994. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Johnson, Samuel. 1969. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. Ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss. Vol. 5. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Mackenzie, Henry. [1771] 1967. The Man of Feeling. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Montagu, Elizabeth (Robinson). 29 Oct 1792. Letter to George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton of Frankley. Box 42, MO 1423. Elizabeth Robinson Montagu papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. —. Feb 1762. Letter to Sarah (Robinson) Scott. Box 42, MO 5787. Elizabeth Robinson Montagu papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. —. 1762? Letter to William. Box 42, MO 4554 Elizabeth Robinson Montagu papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. The Monthly Review. 1749–1844 (1st ser. 1749–89; 2nd ser. 1790–1825; 3rd ser. 1826–30; 4th ser. 1831–44). London. The Monthly Visitor. 1797–1800. London. The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser. 1769–1862. London. The New Annual Register, or General Repository of History, Politics and Literature. 1781–1826. London.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 234

17/11/17 5:01 PM

periodicals and women’s literary canon formation

235

Pearson, Jacqueline. 1999. Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Percy, Carol. 2009. ‘Periodical Reviews and the Rise of Prescriptivism: The Monthly (1749–1844) and Critical Review (1756–1817) in the Eighteenth Century’. Current Issues in Late Modern English. Ed. Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Wim van der Wurff. Bern: Peter Lang. 117–50. The Polite Repository; Or, Amusing Companion 1791–2. London: William Lane at the Minerva. Raven, James. 2015. ‘Production’. The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume Two: English and British Fiction 1750–1820. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 3–28. Reeve, Clara. 1785. The Progress of Romance. 2 vols. Colchester: W. Keymer. The Scots Magazine. 1739–1817. Edinburgh. Scott, Sarah (Robinson). Nov 1762. Letter to Elizabeth (Robinson) Montagu. Box 46, MO 5299. Elizabeth Robinson Montagu papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. —. 31 Jan 1763. Letter to Elizabeth (Robinson) Montagu. Box 46, MO 5300. Elizabeth Robinson Montagu papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. —. Apr 1763. Letter to Elizabeth (Robinson) Montagu. Box 46, MO 5301. Elizabeth Robinson Montagu papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. The Town and Country Magazine; or Universal Repository of Knowledge, Instruction, and Entertainment. 1769–96. London. The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure. 1747–1814 (1st ser. 1747–1803; 2nd ser. 1804–14). London. Warner, William B. 1998. Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. The Weekly Magazine, or Edinburgh Amusement. 1768–79. Edinburgh: Wal. Ruddiman. The Weekly Miscellany: or, Instructive Entertainer. 1773–82. Sherborne: R. Goadby. The World. By Adam Fitz-Adam. 1753–6. London: R. Dodsley and M. Cooper.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 235

17/11/17 5:01 PM

15 Reviewing Women: Women Reviewers on Women Novelists Megan Peiser

I

n her first review of a novel for the Monthly Review (1749–1844), Elizabeth Moody, her female voice hidden behind the anonymous, genteel, masculine one of the periodical, stated that: Of the various species of composition that in course come before us, there are none in which our writers of the male sex have less excelled, since the days of Richardson and Fielding, than in the arrangement of a novel. Ladies seem to appropriate to themselves an exclusive privilege in this kind of writing; witness the numerous productions of romantic tales to which female authors have given birth. . . . We, though of the harder sex, as men, and of a still harder race as critics, are no enemies to an affecting well-told story: but as we are known not to be very easily pleased, it may be imagined that those performances only will obtain the sanction of our applause, which can stand the test of certain criteria of excellence. (3 ns (Dec 1790): 400)

Moody, cross-dressing in her role as reviewer, claims for the voice of her review not only that of ‘the harder sex’, as opposed to the fair sex she actually shares with the many novelists she praises, but also more specifically that of the ‘harder race’ of ‘critics’. Reviewers had a reputation for abrasively criticising the novel in the late eighteenth century. This broad censuring tendency, and Moody’s specific wariness toward ‘the numerous productions of romantic tales to which female authors have given birth’, take on additional weight when we consider that the decades from 1790 to 1820 was the first period in history when more British women published novels than men.1 Although Moody’s first novel review was of a man’s work, the Rev. James Thomson’s The Denial; or, the Happy Retreat (1790), she focuses on the prowess of female novelists during this period. Moody goes on to outline what makes a good novel, and how those characteristics influence readers – effectively delineating what Thomson’s novel does not do, while also highlighting both how her knowledge of these characteristics qualified her as a reviewer, and how female authors’ inclusion of these features made them superior novelists. Moody’s review, although outwardly presenting as authored by an anonymous male critic, critiqued her fellow women writers precisely at the moment when they were excelling in establishing the literary value of the novel. All reviews in the Monthly were unsigned and published under the guise of anonymous, communal authorship, following the periodical’s extended title which

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 236

17/11/17 5:01 PM

women reviewers on women novelists

237

claimed to be ‘by several hands’. Yet we know that forty-three of 721 reviews of novels published between January 1790 and December 1820 (that is, 17 per cent) were authored by female reviewers. There is evidence of only three female reviewers writing for the Monthly Review and two were writing during this period: the aforementioned Elizabeth Moody, and well-known poet and education author Anna Letitia Barbauld.2 Moody’s and Barbauld’s criticisms of the novel, hidden behind the mask of masculine anonymity, offer a rare opportunity to uncover a crossroads where scholars of the novel and of periodical book reviews have until now seen only a binary: female novelists on one side, male critics on the other. Periodicals have historically been largely overlooked by scholars of literature because they do not fit the single-author heroic narratives that structure conventional literary history, a circumstance that underscores accounts like Margaret Ezell’s of the until-recent scholarly neglect of women’s writing (1993: 1–13). Because periodicals’ voices are collaborative, often anonymous/pseudonymous, because they are published serially, stretching articles and stories across multiple volumes, they require readers to chase their commitment to these publications through multiple issues rather than declaring completeness and authority through a single accessible printing. In the recovery projects of women’s literary history, periodicals authored by women and titularly targeting female readerships, such as Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator (1744–6) and Charlotte Lennox’s Lady’s Museum (1760–1), have been paid attention, but we are left to wrestle with what we are to do about periodical work by women authors that seems overtly aligned with masculine standards? This chapter asks: What is the place of women writers in literary history, and the history of women’s print media? Because the Review presented an authoritative voice on the period’s literature, and British readers consumed such publications in attempts to elevate their literary tastes, it is certainly significant that female critics contributed to the genre’s authority, albeit invisibly.3 As Jennie Batchelor argues of collaboratively written periodicals during the late eighteenth century, ‘contributors . . . did not always speak with one voice, or even necessarily with harmony’ (2011: 256). In light of this, I want to claim that it is not because Moody or Barbauld were straying from the official, collective voice that the Monthly had established that they deserve closer study; rather it is because, as women, their adherence to the Monthly’s voice and reviewing traditions means something different. As literary critics of a genre associated strongly with women and in asking what their responsibility was as critics, Moody and Barbauld represent the past selves of this volume’s contributors. This chapter takes up these two female literary critics, and analyses their reviews of novels to establish how these writers manipulated their own invisible presence to bolster the work of other women writers from the period. I first provide a short history of the Monthly Review and Moody’s and Barbauld’s careers. I then read Moody’s and Barbauld’s novel reviews, marking the significance of their adherence, as female critics, to wider reviewing trends and comparing their style to the Monthly’s corpus of over 700 novel reviews during this period. This largescale comparative review reading is done using Megan Peiser’s Novels Reviewed Database, 1790–1820 (NRD) (Peiser 2016), which enables me to read Moody’s and Barbauld’s reviews in context of the Monthly’s novel-reviewing tradition to uncover the ways that these female critics posed in their reviews as critical authorities who were also hyperaware of their sister authoresses’ dominance on the novel-writing scene. The NRD catalogues all reviews of novels published in the Monthly Review and its

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 237

17/11/17 5:01 PM

238

megan peiser

competitor, the Critical Review, from January 1790 to December 1820 – spanning both Moody’s and Barbauld’s critical careers for the journal. Cataloguing 1,641 review articles of 1,215 novels and 445 identified authors, the NRD most significantly includes only reviews of works that the Reviews themselves identified as novels in the work’s subtitle, by using the word ‘novel’ in the review, or by classing it under the heading of ‘Novels and Romances’ in the Monthly Catalogue, a section of the Reviews described below. Therefore, the reviews by Moody and Barbauld that I read here provided English readers with criticisms of the novel as it was then understood, a vision that often differs from that of modern scholars whose sense of the genre is inevitably inflected by its story in the Victorian period and beyond. The NRD also functions as a tool to help us see how Moody’s and Barbauld’s reviews compare to the work of their colleagues thanks to its data on publishing, cost, format, length of works, as well as location and length of review article, etc. In sum, we can tease out both what is standard and what is exceptional about their work with respect to contemporary and modern trends. As Derek Roper notes, Reviews ‘have for the most part remained unread except by scholars seeking particular articles; and the articles have sometimes been misunderstood through inadequate knowledge of the Review’ (1978: 28). Scholarship focused on Review periodicals has been largely limited to three realms: (1) histories of the Reviews, much indebted to the indexing and textual history contributions of Antonia Forster (1990, 1997, 2001); (2) establishing the role of the Reviews in influencing England’s literary taste (Downie and Corns 1993; Donoghue 1996); and (3) uncovering the authorship of single review articles to add to their author’s literary corpus. This third area of enquiry advances a project begun by Benjamin Christie Nangle’s index to contributors of the Monthly Review (1934, 1955), and continued by articles uncovering authorship of individual article contributions to the Critical and other Romantic periodical reviews.4 Mary A. Waters, the only scholar to work on Moody’s and Barbauld’s contributions to the Monthly, has shown how it was communities of religious dissenters that made Moody’s and Barbauld’s positions as professional critics possible at the Monthly, and illustrates elsewhere how dissenting communities supported other such important literary critics as Mary Wollstonecraft (2004a: 12; 2004b; 2004c: 60–1). Review articles, and Reviews in general have been largely left out of recovery work on women writers because they are so highly contextual – depending for their value and interpretation on the work under review, the Review’s tone and intention, and even other articles within an issue.5 Because Moody’s and Barbauld’s sex was invisible to their contemporary readers, and is still invisible to scholars who pluck reviews out of journals on the basis of the author or work under review, it is easy to overlook the ways that these two critics were carving a space for women writers. Ezell called on feminist critics to observe carefully what assumptions they brought to the writing of women’s literary history, that we might then ‘analyse the angles through which [women writers] have been lost, using an approach that intentionally seeks to make the literary past unfamiliar through a steady questioning of the ways in which we have previously organised and categorised it’ (1993: 7). Studies of book review periodicals have overwhelmingly categorised the short, often terse, reviews of novels published in the aforementioned Monthly Catalogue section as negligible. Waters, however, reminds us that even these short reviews ‘offer a rare glimpse of a woman writer’s role in one of the most professional

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 238

17/11/17 5:01 PM

women reviewers on women novelists

239

forms of Romantic-era literary work’ (2004a: 122). Following Waters’s work, this chapter will focus mainly on Moody’s and Barbauld’s Monthly Catalogue reviews. I forego the Review’s own organisation structure that represented these reviews as less valuable, and seek to demonstrate how women writers navigated this space, even and especially because they did so under the Monthly’s guise of collective, anonymous authorship. Skilled and professional critics, Moody and Barbauld produced attentive novel reviews that adhered closely to the Reviews’ mission and traditional methods for evaluating literature. In the process, they demonstrated that they were perhaps more qualified than their male colleagues to review novels during this period because they were women. Contemporary critics, readers, and writers were all acutely aware of women’s majority authorship among novelists, and were watching and critiquing this pivotal moment in women’s literary history as it was happening. Carefully attuned to the politics of this moment, Moody’s and Barbauld’s reviews are also thoughtful criticisms, which illustrate their conflicted position as professional female writers imparting evaluations of women’s novel-writing reign during their ascendancy.

A Short History of the Monthly Review In 1749 London publisher Ralph Griffiths sought to fill a void in England’s book market by publishing the Monthly Review, the country’s first periodical devoted exclusively to reporting on Britain’s literary output. By the time Moody began reviewing for the journal in the 1790s it had been in operation almost fifty years. The Monthly was followed quickly by its competitor, the Critical Review (1756–1817). Launched by Tobias Smollett ‘with bombastic advertisement’, the Critical would eventually come to align itself with Tory politics as opposed to the Whiggish Monthly (Roper 1978: 20). Both Reviews originally intended to offer excerpts and short commentary on recently published literature, giving a dispassionate account of the book market. Both eventually leaned away from their attitude of reviewing everything objectively. Whereas their original intention had been to supply excerpts from the text indicative of its whole character, slowly the reviews began to offer judgement on works, and to use those excerpts to support their criticism. They also moved swiftly into a two-tiered review system. Works on the top tier – those assumed to be more valuable by the Reviews’ standards – were reviewed in 10- to 12-page articles in the front section of the Review, with long critical discussions and multiple pages of excerpts. Lesser texts in this twotiered system appeared in the Monthly Catalogue attached to the back of each number. These catalogue reviews were short. Each included a couple of sentences about the text listed, sometimes condemning it for its subject matter or the quality of its writing. The catalogue was where the bulk of the Reviews’ novel critiques were located.6 Siv Gøril Brandtzæg shows that the two-tiered review system created a high- versus low-literature dichotomy that particularly victimised novels – relegating the formulaic productions of the Minerva Press and the like to the Monthly Catalogue, while ironically providing formulaic evaluations of them (2015: 172). Contemporary readers of the Reviews could use the location of a work’s review to evaluate its quality: the elevated or important in the front section, versus those poor works that were ‘consigned to the catalogue’. The two-tier structure was powerful because it provided a guiding system for the Reviews’ many readers, indicating a work’s importance. The Reviews had a large

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 239

17/11/17 5:01 PM

240

megan peiser

reading audience by the end of the eighteenth century. C. H. Timperley put the Monthly’s 1797 annual sales figures at 5,000, and 3,500 for the Critical (1842: 795). Derek Roper estimates that these sales figures indicate ‘one-sixth of the contemporary reading public’ purchasing one of the two leading review periodicals. He goes on to note that each of these copies sold was probably read by several if not dozens of readers due to some of their locations in lending libraries, book clubs, and coffee houses (Roper 1978: 23–5). Furthermore, the Reviews circulated outside of London, reaching readers and libraries far removed from the daily happenings of the metropolis’s book market. Considering this circulation, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the average reader would regularly encounter a Review periodical, and would consider the trends in reviewing as part of their knowledge of the English book market. This puts a large portion of English population reading Moody’s and Barbauld’s reviews, which were circulating far beyond the print runs of either of their own literary productions. Indeed, it is likely that more contemporary readers read their criticism than their writings in other genres, albeit without the knowledge of the articles’ authorship. In the introduction to Women Critics 1660–1820, the first collection of textual criticism by women in the eighteenth century, the editors of the Folger Collective on Women Critics argue that female critics’ ‘consciousness of [their] gender and its attendant social contradictions’ meant that they ‘give significantly more attention than do their male colleagues to women writers’, but that that ‘by no means precluded harsh judgements’ (1995: xvii). The novel reviews in the Monthly, then, provided the perfect opportunity to engage with works by women, since it was only in its novel criticism that the Review was open to works that were new, anonymous, and/or poorly written alongside more established and celebrated titles. Its comparative openness when it came to selecting novels for review meant that women were better represented in the genre than elsewhere, and so Moody and Barbauld, in choosing to write on novels, were also making an opportunity for themselves to write about other women writers. It was marked even more so in their case because by writing what was often seen as the official criticism of England’s literature for the Monthly, a periodical with a collective masculine voice, Moody and Barbauld participated in ‘a domain potentially unsettling to their traditional subordination and to the construction of letters as a male preserve’ (xvi). Both Moody and Barbauld were well-qualified reviewers, and Griffiths was shrewd to take advantage of their literary talent when he had the chance. Three scholars have studied the life and works of Elizabeth Moody: Jan Wellington’s dissertation (an edition of Moody’s collected works), an article by Adeline Johns-Putra on Moody’s poetry, and a chapter by Waters on Moody as a reviewer. Moody was herself a published poet, and regular contributor of letters, poems, and miscellaneous materials to the St James’s Chronicle (1788–1803), a weekly newspaper in which her husband, Christopher Moody, had a share. Christopher Moody began contributing to the Monthly in 1787; his connection with Griffiths came from their both having shares in the Chronicle, and both being part of the dissenting community (Wellington 1997: 18). Two years later, Moody’s first review for the Monthly appeared. An eight-year gap in Moody’s reviewing for the Monthly, between August 1791 and January 1800, can possibly be explained by a slight of her work when Griffiths forgot that he had sent Moody Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791) to review, and so reviewed it himself.7 Heated letters were exchanged between Christopher Moody and Griffiths about the error, resulting in Griffiths

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 240

17/11/17 5:01 PM

women reviewers on women novelists

241

apologising to Moody (Wellington 1997: 18). It is also, however, possible that Moody’s poetic occupations kept her from reviewing during these years. She published her Poetic Trifles in 1798 with the prestigious publisher Thomas Cadell. Despite her poetic success, however, her obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1922) claimed ‘her prose was above all power to admire it enough’ (84 (Dec 1814): 613). Aside from her correspondence (occasionally published in the St James’s Chronicle), Moody’s only known prose works are her reviews for the Monthly. Anna Letitia Barbauld had a more mainstream writing career, publishing poetry, educational texts, and essays. She had a varied periodical publishing career as well. Barbauld not only wrote for the Monthly, but also for the Analytical Review (1788– 99); the Monthly Magazine (1796–1825), edited by her brother John Aikin; the Annual Review (1804–9), edited by her nephew Arthur Aikin; and likely also the Athenæum (1807–9) and the Gentleman’s Magazine (Waters 2004a: 127).8 Barbauld began reviewing for the Monthly in July 1809, just after Moody left, suggesting that Griffiths had grown accustomed to having a female critic on staff. She was still working on her famous British Novelists series (1810) when she began. Barbauld reviewed other genres in the Monthly Catalogue as well: poetry, plays, children’s literature, translations, educational texts, and more (Waters 2004a: 128). She was well qualified to review these works, as she herself was an educator, having previously run Palgrave School, and was also a poet and author of educational texts (Brown et al. 2006). The bulk of Moody’s and Barbauld’s novel reviews for the Monthly appeared in the Monthly Catalogue section of the periodical. As already noted, most such reviews were short, ranging from a paragraph or two of plot summary to a few lines outlining the reviewer’s disapproval. The NRD shows that the average length of a Monthly Catalogue review in the Monthly during this period was two-fifths of a page. Both Moody’s and Barbauld’s Catalogue reviews were longer than the Monthly’s average, however: Barbauld’s average half a page, and Moody’s span to four-fifths of a page and both managed to stretch some articles to one and a quarter pages.9 They used this extra space not only to establish their knowledge of reviewing practices, but also to highlight the strong contributions of women novelists to the genre. In short, we can see Moody and Barbauld participating in the ‘larger pattern of oscillation encouraged imaginative, prospective, and confrontational judgements’ described by Bartolomeo when he discusses how texts are treated across the Reviews by reviewers clearly aware of each other’s pronouncements (1994: 134). Their adaptations illustrate a negotiation of their responsibilities as critics, with their respect for and desire to recognise the dominance of women writers of the novel.

Women Reviewing Women Moody and Barbauld adapt criticisms of poor writing that the Monthly traditionally volleyed at women novelists, highlighting such infelicities in novels by male authors, and laying the blame for mechanical and ridiculous plot elements in novels equally at the feet of both sexes. Both Moody and Barbauld use their first novel review to chastise a male novelist who has overstepped his authorial bounds to criticise the Reviews. By recognising women writers’ majority among novelists, Moody and Barbauld then argue for the significance of their fiction by establishing that the works by these female novelists’ male counterparts are unsound. In these first reviews Moody and Barbauld

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 241

17/11/17 5:01 PM

242

megan peiser

announce both their knowledge of their genre, and judiciously outline the ideal object for review: the perfect novel. In doing so the Monthly’s female reviewers build a careful recognition of women novelists’ work, contributing, albeit invisibly under the guise of the Reviews’ collective masculine identity, to the high- versus low-genre division of the novel. It is this high/low distinction, as Brandtzæg argues, that legitimises the novel as an imaginative literature – if there is a low, there must perforce be a high (2015: 2). And Moody and Barbauld show that ‘high’ is the arena of women writers. Moody’s first review, of Thomson’s Denial, was published in the front section of the Review in December 1790, rather than in the Monthly Catalogue. In many ways Moody’s review is typical of the style of the Monthly’s articles in that it provides: a summary of the novel, a discussion of its merits, and linguistic and grammatical shortcomings (common Review criticism). As we have seen, Moody’s evaluation is striking in that she begins it by pointing out that contemporary women are the ones dominantly and most successfully authoring the novel: ‘Ladies seem to appropriate to themselves an exclusive privilege in this kind of writing’ (3 ns (Dec 1790): 400). This is even more striking because she is, as Jan Wellington calls her, a ‘cross-dressing double agent, . . . acutely aware of and much amused by her situation’ (1997: 23). Though the focus of her article should be Thomson’s work, she begins by working through how remarkable it is that women were dominantly authoring the novel at the time, and that they were doing it well. Moody’s review of Thomson claims a great void in good novel writing by men: none ‘since the days of Richardson and Fielding’ some forty years earlier (3 ns (Dec 1790): 400). Before launching into her criticism of Thomson’s work Moody proceeds with ‘a sketch of what a novel should be to please us’: The story of a novel should be formed of a variety of interesting incidents; a knowledge of the world, and of mankind, are essential requisites in the writer; the characters should be always natural; the personages should talk, think, and act, as becomes their respective ages, situations, and characters; the sentiments should be moral, chaste, and delicate; the language should be easy, correct, and elegant, free from affectation, and unobscured by pedantry; and the narrative should be as little interrupted as possible by digressions and episodes of every kind: yet if an author chuses [sic] to indulge, occasionally, in moral reflections, in the view of blending instruction with amusement, we would not wish, altogether, to frustrate so good a design:—but, that his precepts may obtain the utmost efficacy, we would recommend them to be inserted in those periods of the history, where the reader’s curiosity can most patiently submit to suspense. (3 ns (Dec 1790): 400–1) The list that Moody provides for a pleasing novel is the foundation for her ensuing criticism. Though she concedes that ‘it would be a great injustice to the sensible writer, if we did not speak of his performance as entitled to a considerable degree of distinction above the common crowd – the cantabile of modern romances and novels’, Moody goes on to judge Thomson’s novel unfavourably against the criteria she outlines above. As to the charge that a novel includes a ‘variety of interesting incidents’, Moody regrets that The Denial features only textual events that reflect ‘a beaten path, which has been trodden by almost every novelist and dramatic writer’. With regards to her requirement that ‘the narrative should be as little interrupted as possible by digressions and episodes

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 242

17/11/17 5:01 PM

women reviewers on women novelists

243

of every kind’, Moody regrets that in Thomson’s ‘the volumes abound with pious and moral reflections, not unworthy the pen of a clergyman: but we should have admired this piety and this morality still more, had the language (especially of the earlier letters,) been less verbose, and the style less stiffened with hard words’. With these careful words Moody enters the Monthly’s rank of novel-reviewers, always sure to cite her evaluative methodology. It advocates for her fellow female writers – valorising female novelists by recognising that not only are they authoring more novels, but that they are also superior novelists. Moody’s advocacy for female novelists also uses the space afforded to her rare front-section review to negotiate her own space as a female critic – navigating a delicate, and possibly contradictory, role of bearing witness to her fellow sex’s accomplishment. She uses her critical occupation to record women novelists’ ascendancy in a place where it would receive attention and be preserved: connected to a man’s novel in a periodical voiced by men, that recorded England’s literary history. Moody’s long reviews take the time to outline clearly examples that support her critiques, whereas, as we shall see, Barbauld falls in more with the Review’s tradition of short evaluations. In addition to addressing review trends, and outlining her evaluative process, Moody makes a dramatic show of participating in the Monthly’s traditional criticism of language and grammar. Whereas Moody argues that in a high-rate novel ‘the language should be easy, correct, and elegant, free from affectation, and unobscured by pedantry’, she critiques The Denial’s style: ‘Terms of the same signification are frequently coupled together*: a mode of writing rather suitable to an indenture than a book of entertainment; and peculiarly inconsistent with the natural ease and freedom of the epistolary style.’ Moody’s comment is accompanied by a footnote that takes up half of the Review’s printed page, which catalogues exhaustively such errors from the novel, even noting their page numbers: ‘For instance, “black criminality”, pref. p. 7.; “Wanton lasciviousness”; p. 9.; “mutual reciprocation”, ib. p. 16 . . .’ (3 ns (Dec 1790): 400–1). Carol Percy’s study of the Reviews’ policing of authors’ language and grammar indicates that ‘reviewers’ invocation of an ideology of standardisation . . . helped them establish their own new roles in the print-culture of the period’ (2010: 56). Moody’s extensive criticism of linguistic infelicities – half an entire page of the Review – established her place in the invisible chorus of reviewers, illustrating that she could provide critiques that aligned with the Review’s conventional practices. Baker suggests that such extensive catalogues of errors in reviews served as extended errata of the works themselves, and so Moody’s criticism here can also be seen as another form of collaborative authorship, manifest in her feeling of a shared responsibility for ‘editing the text of eighteenth-century literature’ (1997: 328). Later editions that corrected language and grammatical errors noted by the Reviews silently folded review writers into that work’s textual history.10 In subsequent reviews in which she mentions women writers, however, Moody illustrates a difficulty in navigating between her responsibility as a reviewer and her recognition of her sex’s success as novel writers. Moody is not excessive in her praise of fellow female novelists: she provides her fair share of stinging evaluations of the often-formulaic Gothic romances turning from the presses. In her first novel review in the Monthly Catalogue, Moody again works through her difficult position. ‘If Reviewers are said to be liberal of their censures, let it not also be said that they are “niggards of their praise,”’ Moody proclaims. She goes on to provide the anonymously authored Semphorina (1790) with ‘a tribute of our approbation’ (4 ns (Mar 1791): 343). Garside

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 243

17/11/17 5:01 PM

244

megan peiser

et al. show that as many as 80 per cent of anonymously published novels from this period were authored by women (2000, vol. 1: 46–7; vol. 2: 73). The female pronoun that Moody ascribes to Semphorina’s author, then, when she declares that ‘she is capable of painting a good story with all its necessary embellishments’ is likely accurate. But Moody criticises women novelists too – even when such comments are unnecessary to her review. In critiquing Samuel William Ireland’s Rimualdo (1800), Moody continues to compare male novelists to their female counterparts, but states that ‘like some sister Novelists, he deals too profusely in poetic description, and the common operations of Nature are never detailed in common language’ (34 ns (Feb 1801): 204). This association is wholly unnecessary to Moody’s argument about Ireland’s dealing ‘too profusely in poetic description’, a statement of evaluation that Moody, as a professional reviewer, could have made without comparison to other writers. Her inclusion of female novelists here lays bare the conflicted nature of her work – that though some of her reviews take time to highlight the strength of women writers’ contributions to the genre during this period, she is not incapable of rehearsing common anti-women’s writing pronouncements in the Reviews by making this statement about her sister novelists. And, although Moody’s (and the Monthly’s) criticisms of women novelists were not always unfounded, Moody’s repetition of these common criticisms even when unneeded shows that these female critics were alone in building a process by which to write the reviews they were paid for, while acknowledging the successful work of other women, since their colleagues were entirely male. Moody’s reviews illustrate her both establishing her qualifications, fitting into the Monthly’s form and rhetoric by unnecessarily repeating criticisms of women novelists, while also acknowledging the strong contributions by them. That Moody was not a consistent champion for the writing of other women places her outside the expectations that, as Ezell notes, we bring to writing women’s literary history: that they should either support or censure other women writers, but not both. And, that Moody’s work lies in the too-often neglected space of the Review periodical compounds our neglect of her and Barbauld’s work as women in print media. Like Moody, Anna Letitia Barbauld takes time to establish her place in the Monthly by critiquing a work authored by a man in her first novel review. All of the reviews authored by Barbauld, a respected literary professional, featured in the Monthly Catalogue, a fact which gives the lie to conventional wisdom that such items were merely hack work.11 Though Monthly Catalogue reviews are short, they mirror the Monthly’s rhetoric about novels, as exemplified by Moody’s front-section review. Barbauld’s Catalogue reviews demonstrate her acute attention to reviewing practices, and her role as a professional critic. Barbauld’s first novel review, that of James Amphlett’s Ned Bentley (1808), published in the Monthly in September 1809, begins by recognising itself as the audience of the author’s prefatorial argument: ‘Mr. Amphlett adverts in his preface, with some acrimony, to the “slovenly monthly catalogue” in which novels are generally classed by Reviewers.’ Continuing in her ‘slovenly monthly catalogue’ review, Barbauld shrewdly notes that Amphlett’s preface pre-emptively attempts to situate him in the Review’s criticism by ‘affirm[ing] that “a novel writer enters the list of authors with his mind made up to receive every species of ill-usage.”’ Barbauld’s sharp critique moves from this ‘humble though sturdy declaration’ that ‘he is “content if his work be allowed to class among the least exceptionable ones of its kind”’ to follow along the same lines as Moody’s review: she asserts the required traits of a good novel and the current work’s failure to meet that standard (60 ns (Aug 1809): 94).

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 244

17/11/17 5:01 PM

women reviewers on women novelists

245

Circling Ned Bentley with the traditional review element of summary, armed with a barb of critical discontent, Barbauld’s Monthly Catalogue review differs from others in that it does not mechanically perform one piece of the Monthly’s title: to ‘give an account with proper abstracts of, and extracts from’ all new books as they came out. Rather, she takes advantage of the space afforded her to perform her well-practised skills in literature reviewing, showing herself well equipped for her new position. In her first paragraph Barbauld declares, ‘If to contain nothing which can alarm the delicacy or offend the piety of the reader may constitute a novel “unexceptionable,” the history of Ned Bentley is intitled [sic] to the negative praise to which its author aspires’, effectively turning Amphlett’s falsified humility and acerbic criticism of the Review against him. Barbauld, like her predecessor, shows that she is keen to establish her authority as a reviewer within the context of the anonymous, masculine collective voice of the Monthly. She insists on behalf of herself and the entire Monthly tribunal that ‘though we feel some respect even for this sort of recommendation, we cannot allow a freedom from impurity to claim for it an exemption from criticism’. ‘We must state our opinion then’, Barbauld declares, ‘that the story is contradictory as well as improbable.’ She then launches into a plot summary that highlights such improbabilities. By noting that the main character was a boy ‘brought up as a servant till his seventeenth birthday, suddenly emerging from the kitchen, well acquainted with living manners and dead languages’, Barbauld folds criticism into her plot summary, maximising the small space of the ‘slovenly monthly catalogue’ (60 ns (Aug 1809): 94). Barbauld, like Moody, also shows close attention to language and grammar. She declares that ‘it is to be wished that all authors, who have previously been readers, would sometimes revert to the elementary and laudable exercise of Parsing; and, in imitation of Mr. Amphlett, we shall transcribe a definition of this word from Johnson’s Dictionary’, which she does immediately following, taking up significant valuable review space: To PARSE. To resolve a sentence into the elements or parts of speech. ‘Let scholars reduce the words to their original: to the first case of nouns or first tense of verbs, and give an account of their formation and changes, their syntax and dependencies, which is called parsing.’ This definition aligns Barbauld’s review with the Monthly’s tradition of policing novelists’ language, and gives her the foundation upon which her review concludes: ‘If Mr. Amphlett had examined his manuscript by this rule, he could hardly have left in it such a string of grammatical errors.’ She then goes on to transcribe a list of errors and gives only small praise, noting that the work ‘is written throughout with much spirit’ (60 ns (Aug 1809): 94). Barbauld’s later reviews would focus specifically on grammar; her entire review of Says She To Her Neighbour, What? (1812) is merely a list of errors and their page-marks. Laura Runge notes that as most reviewers were men, their sharp policing of female novelists’ grammar ‘directly conflict[ed] with gallantry, a highly rhetorical and standard code of behaviour for men in polite culture’ (2004: n. p.). Runge goes on to show that ‘the treatment of women writers in the Reviews can be seen as another important discourse in which to trace the negotiation of public and private expressions of gendered identity, especially as this process relates to disciplinary divisions that emerge within that genre’ (2004: n. p.). Thus, by taking up these reviewing

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 245

17/11/17 5:01 PM

246

megan peiser

practices traditional to the Monthly, especially in their first reviews of novels written by men, Moody and Barbauld negotiate expressions of their own gender identity as invisible female reviewers. They illustrate their ability to adhere to Review standards. They also establish themselves as part of the masculine, dominant voice in the Review/ novel-writer interaction by reviewing first male-authored novels. Perhaps in simultaneously writing reviews that so strongly adhered to the Review’s traditions, while also critiquing the work of a male author who underperformed when compared against his female counterparts, Moody and Barbauld reminded their colleagues at the Monthly that not only were they qualified, but that simply being male was not itself a qualifier for good writing. Barbauld further illustrates this position by reversing a Review tradition. Frequently when the authorship of a novel was not known, the reviewers assumed female authorship. Moody follows this tradition in her review of the anonymously published Semphorina: ‘from the writer’s style, that she is capable of painting a good story with all its necessary embellishments’ (4 ns (Mar 1791): 343). Attributing female authorship to anonymous works is not a practice the Monthly uses universally; the male pronoun is used to refer to anonymous authors of works in other genres. The NRD records twenty-five instances during the period of the Monthly that assume female authorship of an anonymous work. Barbauld, however, in one of her thirty-five novel reviews, assumes the author of Faulconstein Forest (1810) to be male, even though there is no evidence of this. The work had no name on the title page, and its dedication to Rev. W— B— featured an anonymous signature of ‘his sincere friend’ in asterisks (Faulconstein 1810: n. p.). Her stinging words claim that though ‘the author appears to possess considerable taste and genius’, ‘[h]e has, however, published this tale in a somewhat undigested state’ (62 ns (May 1810): 97).12 But Barbauld’s casting the author of Faulconstein Forest as male not only offers her another opportunity to reproach a male novelist; it also shows her shaping her authority as a literary critic in the same mould as her male colleagues by pointedly identifying authors in need of her aid so that they might learn to better themselves. She in the end gives Faulconstein Forest a favourable review. ‘We would not have dwelt so largely on the defects of this tale’, she tells its author and the readers of the Monthly, ‘if we had not been still more struck with its merit’ (97). Where she could have had the opportunity to praise a fellow female writer by casting the anonymous novelist as a woman, Barbauld instead proclaims that ‘we look forward to the future productions of the author as a source of amusement’ (98). Unlike Moody, whose reviews take care to bring up women novelists even when they are not the subject at hand, Barbauld’s method of negotiating her position as a female literary critic of a genre written largely by women was to enforce in her work a system of equality. While her male colleagues were reviewing novels by women and giving them, as Runge notes, advice for the improvement of their writing in a fatherly manner, Barbauld, a practised literary critic and experienced teacher, does the same for men. Moody and Barbauld expertly fit their novel reviews into the Monthly’s traditional review practices, showing their skill even though their articles blended seamlessly with the Review’s standard voice. Now that we can recover their articles, we can observe in them professional women writers who not only read the novels of their sister-authors, but also inscribed those novels’ place in literary history by recording them in the annals of the Reviews. Where the Monthly’s extended title promises to ‘give an account, with

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 246

17/11/17 5:01 PM

women reviewers on women novelists

247

proper abstracts of, and extracts from the new books, pamphlets, &c. as they come out’, Moody and Barbauld take time to give an account of the unique moment they witness. Their account folds themselves, as women writers, into their writing of it, albeit invisibly behind the Monthly’s communal authorship. Moody’s and Barbauld’s criticism of the novel, and its majority female authorship during this period show their role in women’s print media: to ensure the writing of women’s literary history. For this volume, Moody and Barbauld illustrate that such writing took place even in masculine-voiced periodicals, even by invisible female contributors, expanding our definition of what it looked like to be a woman working in and writing for print media in eighteenth-century Britain.

Notes 1. Peter Garside and James Raven’s survey of prose fiction 1770–1829 shows women novelists outpaced men for the 30-year stretch from 1790 to 1820, when the novel’s dominant authorship was returned to men with Sir Walter Scott at its helm (Garside et al. 2000: vol. 1: 46–7; vol. 2: 73). 2. Benjamin Christie Nangle identified Griffiths’s shorthand attributions to articles by Elizabeth Moody marked alternately ‘Mrs. Moy’, ‘Mrs. Mo-y’, or ‘Mrs. Moo—’; those by Barbauld are identified with ‘Mrs. Bar’ (1955: 46–7, 5–6). The third female critic for the Monthly was likely Isabella Griffiths, wife of the periodical’s founder, Ralph Griffiths. See Betty Rizzo’s entry on Isabella Griffiths in Todd, ed. 1985. Isabella Griffiths died in 1764. No scholarship has yet studied her possible contributions to the Monthly Review. 3. Like Derek Roper, I use ‘Review’ in reference to the journal, and ‘review’ to indicate an article. 4. See for example, Jones 1946, or more recently, Wainwright 2014. 5. Some reviews have been reprinted in Nixon, ed. 2009; and Folger Collective on Early Women Critics, eds. 1995. Despite extensive scholarly work on Anna Letitia Barbauld’s British Novelists (1810) series, which she was working on just as she began her work for the Monthly, only Waters has explored Barbauld’s criticism for review periodicals. Waters’s is also the only scholarship on Elizabeth Moody’s Monthly contributions, which is much indebted to Nangle’s identification of Monthly contributors. His identifications of these female critics were left unnoticed and uncelebrated for almost fifty years until Waters told their stories. Some of Moody’s reviews have been reprinted in Waters 2009. 6. The Monthly and the Critical’s stinging reviews of novels especially set the stage for what would become a reviewing tradition of harsh criticism against that growing genre. This tradition depended on the craze for reviewing that grew as the eighteenth century progressed. By the end of the century the Monthly and Critical were joined by the Analytical Review, the Edinburgh Review (1802–1929), and the Quarterly Review (1809–1967). 7. Though it was not uncommon for reviewers to review the work of friends, readers perhaps received a less biased evaluation of the novel from Griffiths, as Moody and Inchbald were close friends. 8. Yet Broadview Press’s edition of Barbauld’s Selected Poetry and Prose (2002), which includes excerpts from the British Novelists series, provides none from her periodical criticism. 9. The longest Monthly Catalogue review of a novel in the Monthly during this period was the three-page review of Isabella Kelly’s Joscelina (1797) in the November 1797 issue, written by James Bannister. 10. Rev. James Thomson’s The Denial; or, the Happy Retreat 2nd edn (1792) corrects the errors that Moody lists in her review.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 247

17/11/17 5:01 PM

248

megan peiser

11. For many novels from this period a Monthly Catalogue review is the only evidence of their existence, since no extant copies survive. It is also likely that some lesser-known novels were preserved because they were reviewed – the Reviews providing some indication that the work was once important enough for consideration. 12. It is possible that the reviewers had insider knowledge of the author’s identity. Griffiths’s hand is scrawled under the review of Dinarbas; a Tale: being a Continuation of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1790) noting it was by ‘E. Cornelia Knight, daughter of Lord Knight’, for instance (8 ns (May 1790): 106).

Works Cited Baker, James. 1997. ‘Criticism and the Rise of Periodical Literature’. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Ed. H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson. 7 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vol. 4: 316–32. Barbauld, Anna Letitia. Selected Poetry and Prose. 2002. Ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Bartolomeo, Joseph F. 1994. A New Species of Criticism: Eighteenth-Century Discourse on the Novel. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press. Batchelor, Jennie. 2011. ‘“Connections, which are of service . . . in a more advanced age:” The Lady’s Magazine, Community, and Women’s Literary Histories’. Tulsa Women’s Studies in Literature 2.3: 245–67. Brandtzæg, Siv Gøril. 2015. ‘Aversion to Imitation: The Rise of Literary Hierarchies in Eighteenth-Century Novel Reviews’. Forum for Modern Language Studies 51: 171–85. Brown, Susan, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, eds. 2006–16. ‘Anna Letitia Barbauld’. The Orlando Project. (last accessed 8 Dec 2016). Donoghue, Frank. 1996. The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-Century Literary Careers. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Downie, J. A. and Thomas Corns. 1993. ‘Telling People What to Think: Early EighteenthCentury Periodicals from The Review to The Rambler’. Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 16.1: 1–7. Ezell, Margaret. 1993. Writing Women’s Literary History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Faulconstein Forest, a Romantic Tale. 1810. London: Hookham Jr. Folger Collective on Early Women Critics. 1995. Ed. Virginia Walcott Beauchamp, Matthew Bray, Susan Green, Susan Sniader Lanser, Katherine Larsen, Judith Pascoe, Katharine M. Rogers, Ruth Salvaggio, Amy Cohen Simowitz, and Tara Ghoshal Wallace. Women Critics 1660–1820. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Forster, Antonia. 1990. Index to Book Reviews in England, 1749–1774. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. —. 1997. Index to Book Reviews 1775–1800. London: The British Library. —. 2001. ‘Review Journals and the Reading Public’. Books and their Readers in EighteenthCentury England: New Essays. Ed. Isabel Rivers. London: Continuum. 171–90. Garside, Peter, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling, eds. 2000. The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johns-Putra, Adeline. 2010. ‘Satire and Domesticity in Late Eighteenth-Century Women’s Poetry: Minding the Gap’. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 33.1: 67–87. Jones, Claude. 1946. ‘Contributors to Critical Review 1756–1785’. Modern Language Notes 61: 433–41. The Monthly Review. (1st ser. 1749–89; 2nd ser. 1790–1825; 3rd ser. 1826–30; 4th ser. 1831–44). London.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 248

17/11/17 5:01 PM

women reviewers on women novelists

249

Nangle, Benjamin Christie. 1934. Monthly Review, first series, 1749–1789: indexes of contributors and articles. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —. 1955. Monthly Review, second series, 1790–1815: indexes of contributors and articles. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Nixon, Cheryl, ed. 2009. Novel Definitions: An Anthology of Commentary on the Novel, 1688–1815. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Peiser, Megan. 2016. The Novels Reviewed Database, 1790–1820. (last accessed 8 Dec 2016). Percy, Carol. 2010. ‘How Eighteenth-Century Book Reviewers Became Language Guardians’. In Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English. Ed. Päivi Pahta, Minna Nevala, and Arja Nurmi. Amsterdam: Benjamins Press. 55–85. Roper, Derek. 1978. Reviewing before the Edinburgh, 1788–1802, Newark: University of Delaware Press. Timperley, C. H. 1842. Encyclopaedia of Literary and Typographical Anecdote; Being a Chronological Digest of the Most Interesting Facts Illustrative of the History of Literature and Printing. 2nd edn, London. Todd, Janet. M., ed. 1985. A Dictionary of British and American Writers, 1700–1800. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld. Waters, Mary A. 2004a. British Women Writers and the Profession of Literary Criticism, 1789– 1832. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. —. 2004b. ‘“The First of a New Genius”: Mary Wollstonecraft as Literary Critic and Mentor to Mary Hays’. Eighteenth-Century Studies 37.3: 415–34. —. 2004c. ‘“Slovenly Monthly Catalogues”: The Monthly Review and Barbauld’s Periodical Literary Criticism’. Nineteenth-Century Prose 31.1: 53–81. —, ed. 2009. British Women Writers of the Romantic Period: An Anthology of Their Literary Criticism. Basingstroke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wainwright, Valerie. 2014. ‘The Journalism of Tobias Smollett and Oliver Goldsmith: Attributions for the Critical Review’. Notes and Queries 61: 417–29. Wellington, Jan. 1997. The Poems and Prose of Elizabeth Moody. The University of New Mexico, PhD dissertation.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 249

17/11/17 5:01 PM

16 Reviewing Femininity: Gender and Genre in the Late Eighteenth- and Early NineteenthCentury Periodical Press Pam Perkins

I

n the spring of 1803, the Scottish writer Anne Grant was awaiting, with some anxiety, the publication of her first book, a volume of poetry. As she explained in a letter to a friend, she was nervous about how the birth of her career would be affected by the intervention of ‘those rough nurses, the critics, whose hands do not spare nor their eyes pity’ (Grant 1807, vol. 3: 176). Some years earlier, her contemporary and acquaintance Elizabeth Hamilton had been even more negative in her characterisation of the impact of literary critics on the works and the writers they reviewed. In a periodical essay that remained unpublished during her lifetime, she described critics as ‘the murderer[s] of reputation’, differing from the common assassin only in that critics wounded nobody but ‘those who voluntarily expose themselves to the blow’ (Benger 1818, vol. 1: 341). Grant and Hamilton were of course being playfully hyperbolic in their rhetoric, but as they imagine victimisation at the hands of sadistic or murderous reviewers, they underscore the uneasy relationship that women had with the culture of the literary reviews during the opening years of the nineteenth century. Looking back from the perspective of 200 years, it is easy to sympathise with that uneasiness: the notoriously harsh critical discourse of the day could be damagingly prescriptive about women’s writing, and toward the women themselves was often dismissive at best, hostile at worst. Yet that is not the full story. Whatever their anxieties about the critics, Grant and Hamilton received mostly sympathetic and relatively detailed reviews of their debut publications, which is noteworthy given that Grant’s poems and Hamilton’s novel were not typical examples of ‘ladies’ work in those genres. Especially when contrasted with the reception of similar works published around the same time, those reviews make clear that metaphorical violence was far from being all that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century periodical critics had to offer their women subjects and readers. On occasion, they could also provide a productively complicated understanding of how female authors should write and what ‘feminine’ writing should look like. Inconsistencies in Romantic-era reviewers’ ideas about ‘feminine’ writing have not attracted a lot of attention, perhaps in part because the reception history of women writers around the turn of the nineteenth century has remained, until recently, a relatively under-studied area. Most of the work that has been done on the critical reception of women in those periodicals has tended to concentrate on a handful of major figures: Frances Burney, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and, above all, Jane Austen. Yet as

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 250

17/11/17 5:01 PM

reviewing femininity

251

Ann R. Hawkins has noted, that focus on now-canonical writers has had a distorting effect on our understanding of the wider discussion of female authorship in the periodical reviews. The very limited contemporary critical response to Austen – only seventeen reviews in her lifetime – has, Hawkins argues, ‘inadvertently shaped our narratives . . . of how women writers fared within’ the literary reviews, fuelling an assumption that, among other things, women ‘were not frequently reviewed within the periodical press’ (2011–13, vol. 1: xv). Implicit or explicit challenges to that perception of critical indifference have tended to go to the opposite extreme and focus on the sort of outright hostility that, in another familiar narrative about the critical response to turn-of-the-nineteenth-century women, supposedly drove Barbauld and Burney into silence after their sprawlingly ambitious and uncharacteristically political late works, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812) and The Wanderer (1814). While more recent critics have questioned stories about the destructive impact of those reviews on the writers themselves – Orianne Smith suggests that Eighteen Hundred and Eleven was ‘the last poem Barbauld published because it was meant to be just that: a final warning’ (2013: 189) – disputing the individual impact of reviewers’ hostility does not, in itself, complicate narratives about the wider critical climate that women faced in the periodicals of the day. What does complicate that narrative is re-examining the relationship that women had with the reviews both as readers and as writers. One can begin doing that not just by exploring women’s reactions to individual articles but also by recognising the sheer quantity of material about women’s writing that was being published in the literary press in the years around 1800. There is in fact a substantial body of criticism of books by women: Hawkins’s recent edition of reviews of Romantic women writers covers only the four years from 1789 to 1793 but nonetheless stretches to nine volumes. Paying attention to some of the range and variety of that material is important because the periodicals played a vital role in shaping ideas of what the work of a woman writer – or, even more specifically, a woman poet or novelist – might look like. As Manushag Powell has argued, it was the periodicals that ‘invented a space . . . to think out loud about what it meant to be a professional writer’ (2012: 3), and while Powell is referring specifically to the periodical essays of the earlier eighteenth century, others have made overlapping arguments about the quarterly or monthly literary reviews that became more prominent in the second half of the century. Frank Donoghue, for one, has claimed that by mid-century, understandings of what constituted ‘authorship’ were becoming ‘increasingly defined in popular criticism’, with the result that ‘from 1750 onward, literary careers were chiefly described, and indeed made possible, by reviewers’ (1996: 3). The effect that those periodical debates about authorship had on women writers has generally been perceived as being uniformly negative. Donoghue himself observes that the tendency of ‘[t]he major Reviews’ to ‘evaluat[e] women’s writing by a different, less demanding standard’ established ‘a double standard that all but disabled the hopes any woman author might have of achieving a level of success comparable to that enjoyed by the best male writers’ (1996: 6, 161). Moreover, while Donoghue sees this ‘programmatic condescension’ (1996: 161) of the literary reviews fading by the end of the century, as women (following in the footsteps of Mary Wollstonecraft) began to establish themselves as reviewers, other critics have argued or implied the opposite, suggesting that the situation was rapidly getting worse. For one thing, relatively few

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 251

17/11/17 5:01 PM

252

pam perkins

Romantic-era women followed Wollstonecraft into reviewing; as Alexis Easley (2004) and Joanne Wilkes (2010), among others, have shown, it was not until the 1830s that women began establishing a fairly solid place for themselves as reviewers. In addition, the articles that can be identified by earlier female contributors to the periodical reviews were far from uniformly welcoming to other women writers. Anne Grant is representative: in a March 1821 review of Joanna Baillie’s Metrical Legends published in the Edinburgh Magazine (and identifiable only because a fragmentary draft manuscript in Grant’s handwriting survives in the Edinburgh University Library), Grant takes a gratuitous swipe at Jane Porter’s immensely popular Scottish Chiefs (1810), dismissing it as an ‘absolutely sickening’ work that turns William Wallace into an implausibly sentimental ‘swain of Arcady’ (8: 261). Mary Hays, who wrote the Analytical review of Elizabeth Hamilton’s debut novel, Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), was more measured in her dislike of Hamilton’s work than Grant was of Porter’s, but perhaps even more devastating in her assessment, attacking Hamilton for both her politics and her style. When Hamilton discovered the identity of the author, she used much the same language in a letter breaking off her friendship with Hays as she had in her evocation of masculine critical violence in her earlier periodical essay. ‘You, in the dark, and with a muffled dagger’, Hamilton writes furiously, ‘aimed the blow which was to fix, as far as it is in the power of a review to fix, the fame and character of the person you saluted as a friend!’ (Walker 2006: 174). As her rhetoric makes clear, Hamilton did not see women as being any less likely than men to use the power of an anonymous review to silence or sideline writers whose views they disliked. More generally, and notwithstanding these scattered contributions by women, the perception has been that women were being erased from the more serious critical discourse emerging around the turn of the nineteenth century, with no place in it except, perhaps, as readers. In his pioneering work on the Romantic-era review, John O. Hayden set out to provide ‘a reliable representation of reviewing practices’ in the years following the 1802 founding of the Edinburgh Review, but he apparently took for granted that those ‘practices’ could be studied without thinking at all about how women were affected by them, as he not only excluded women from his list of authorial case studies but also omitted any reviews of fiction, the one genre in which women were proportionately represented and at least relatively welcome (1969: 2).1 Likewise, when later critics of the Romantic-era periodical have turned their attention to women, the focus has tended to be on explaining their absence, with the blame usually going to the new style of reviewing exemplified by the stern elitism of the Edinburgh Review. With its decision to forego capsule reviews and to limit its attention strictly to ‘works that either have attained, or deserve, a certain portion of celebrity’ (‘Advertisement’. Oct 1802: n. p.), the Edinburgh notoriously sidelined women, both as reviewers (no woman wrote for it before the 1830s) and as subjects, contributing to what Clifford Siskin has called ‘the great forgetting’ of female authors (1998: 193–209). Even Stuart Curran, who has provided a detailed study of Francis Jeffrey’s sympathetic reviews of Madame de Staël and Maria Edgeworth, acknowledges that, despite this sprinkling of serious critical engagement with two prominent women writers, the Edinburgh was notable in its early years mainly for its ‘dismissive treatment of women authors’ (2002: 198). Given this focus on the reviews’ tendency to either ignore or condescend to women writers, it might seem that Grant’s and Hamilton’s concerns about critical violence

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 252

17/11/17 5:01 PM

reviewing femininity

253

were overblown, even allowing for the (later) cautionary examples of Burney and Barbauld. Yet as Mark Parker has noted, ‘almost no aspect of periodical study is unproblematic’ (2000: 4), and generalising about what Hawkins has demonstrated is the vast body of periodical criticism of women, much of which still remains uncollected, is obviously impossible. As it turned out, Grant and Hamilton did not have any need to worry about the critics, but that was not because they were dismissed or ignored. At a time when most novels or poems, especially those by previously unknown and unpublished women, could expect at best a paragraph or two, their debut works were met with a flurry of surprisingly detailed reviews, many stretching over several pages and, in one case for Grant, over two numbers of a journal. Moreover, both attracted these detailed, generally sympathetic reviews with books – a novel and a volume of mainly occasional poems – that could be seen as conventionally feminine in terms of genre but that at the same time overtly displayed their authors’ strong intellectual and political interests. Even while it is true that, as Amelia Dale has observed, ‘[w]omen writers had to negotiate expectations that they conform to the laws of appropriate femininity’ in order win the approval of reviewers (2014: n. p.), the reception of Grant and Hamilton suggest that ideas of what constituted ‘appropriate’ modes of feminine writing could be more malleable than we might expect. That critical engagement with two previously unpublished women writers is all the more striking given that at the launch of their careers, both Grant and Hamilton were already in their forties and had spent most of their adult lives in rural Scotland: despite having cultivated some literary friendships in Edinburgh and London they were not in any sense insiders in the publishing world. Arguably, therefore, it was the seriousness with which they were treated by reviewers that helped them in developing their remarkably successful ‘professional life stor[ies]’ as writers (Donoghue 1996: 6). Grant quickly established herself, through collections of letters and essays, as a major contributor to the literature of the Scottish Highlands, while Hamilton became one of the era’s most popular writers of educational fiction and philosophy. Even though they vanished from the canon for much of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, overshadowed by Sir Walter Scott and Edgeworth, the degree of success that both women achieved during their lifetimes suggests that far from shutting down potentially unfeminine ambition or attempting to push them back into a narrowly feminised version of literary achievement, their initial reviews encouraged them in their literary careers. Studying the receptions of Grant and Hamilton can thus make clear that Romantic-era reviewers did not always limit their concepts of ‘feminine’ writing to the decorative or the unassuming. That said, late eighteenth-century women with literary ambitions would not have had any trouble finding material in the periodical press telling them that their work should look very different from men’s. Even female-centred publications such as the Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770–1832) are full of offhand comments about gendered style. A letter writer who calls himself Telemachus assumes, for example, that the ‘justness and energy’ of a novel he admires means that it must be by a man, since women’s work is characterised by ‘delicacy and softness’ (28 (June 1797): 254). Yet even such apparently unambiguous statements can be slippery. Hedging his bets in case the novel in question, Vicissitudes in Genteel Life (1794), turned out to be by a woman (and it was; the author was Alethea Lewis), ‘Telemachus’ adds that it is possible for a woman of ‘rare and admirable endowments’

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 253

17/11/17 5:01 PM

254

pam perkins

to unite those qualities. The stylistic prescriptiveness of the periodical reviews could also be ambiguously gendered in a manner that potentially widened the literary scope for women authors. Matthew Grenby has argued that by the end of the eighteenth century the reviews saw themselves as a type of ‘literary police force’, charged with ensuring that the literature ‘avoid[ed] any explicit or implicit clash with “decency”’ (2001: 176–7), but as Grenby also shows, the reviews’ emphasis on ‘purity’ and ‘morality’ meant that women as well as men could win lavish praise for energetically polemical work, as long as its politics were sufficiently conservative. Given the highly loyalist, even reactionary, review culture that Matthew Grenby outlines, the positive critical reaction to Grant and Hamilton is, on one level, easy enough to explain. Grant was a proud, lifelong Church-and-King Tory, and while as Claire Grogan (2012) has shown, it is difficult to pin Hamilton down to any single school of political thought, she was associated with the anti-Jacobins even before she launched a literary war against Mary Hays and the Godwin circle with the publication of Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800). Both Grant and Hamilton inaugurated their careers with books that the British Critic or Anti-Jacobin audience would unquestionably have found politically congenial. Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah is an unapologetic contribution to debates about imperial politics in which, among other things, Hamilton takes up the defence of Warren Hastings against Edmund Burke and energetically supports the East India Company’s intervention in a controversial 1770s war between a British-allied ruler and an Afghan tribe whose territory had been annexed. Grant’s unambitiously titled Poems on Various Subjects (1803) is less overtly polemical, but the volume is dominated by The Highlanders, a major work in five books of heroic couplets, which, if one includes the substantial historical notes that Grant appends on the history and culture of the region, runs to nearly 120 pages. In addition, the volume features translations from Gaelic and an essay on James Macpherson and Ossian, making it, by any standards, a serious attempt to contribute to contemporary debates about national culture. Yet what is striking about the reviews is that they do not content themselves with simply endorsing the political agendas of the books in question, but also take some pains to absorb the very obviously ambitious, politically minded authors into a discourse of genteelly feminine literary achievement. This creation of a version of ‘feminine’ fiction and poetry that allows for both creative ambition and energetic political engagement is clearer in the initial response to Grant, who was read, from the beginning, in terms of her qualities as a woman as well as of the qualities of her verse. If the critical commentary never followed the predictable route of eroticising her through a close focus on her ‘elegance’ or her ‘sensibility’, that might have been in part simply because she began her career too late to be assimilated into the role of the literary ingénue. When she published her first book in 1803, she was a 48-year-old widow with eight surviving children: as Christian Johnstone rather unkindly observed in a review of a posthumous collection of her letters, Grant had thus always belonged to ‘the dowager division’ of Edinburgh literary society (Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 11 (Mar 1844): 175). Johnstone was not alone in this assessment; four decades earlier, Grant’s original, anonymous, reviewers had first brought her to public attention by finding in her poems an evocation of the homely, unpretending virtues of respectable middle age. The British Critic envisions her as a kindly matron, ‘affectionate to her family’, ‘warm in her private friendships’, and

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 254

17/11/17 5:01 PM

reviewing femininity

255

‘respected’ in her ‘own country’ and concludes that the poems will be ‘a lasting monument of female genius and good sense, exerted without any neglect of the humbler tasks of middle life’ (22 (Sep 1803): 292, 297). The Anti-Jacobin (which took Grant seriously enough to open its October 1803 number with a review of her book and to continue it the following month) also singles out ‘GOOD SENSE’ as ‘the most prominent feature’ of Grant’s ‘intellectual character’, and, while deprecating some aspects of her ‘expression and stile’, praises her for her dignity, respectability, and ‘rectitude of judgment’ (16 (Oct 1803): 116). In foregrounding Grant’s personal qualities, especially as a wife and mother, in this way, the reviews establish her as an unequivocally feminine writer, despite her refusal to limit herself to decorative occasional verse. That focus on modest respectability might have been reinforced, at least in part, because in the hopes of easing some of the financial difficulties she faced after her husband’s death, Grant had chosen to launch her career by publishing a subscription volume. Precisely because of a contemporary assumption that such collections were little more than a decorous cover for soliciting charitable donations (‘one naturally has a prejudice against a subscription-book’, one contemporary reader sniffed (Clark 1895, vol. 3: 171)), it was a mode of publication that could be read as downplaying any potentially unfeminine literary ambitions. While Grant herself does not highlight her widowhood or her financial straits, critics at the time had no difficulty in sketching a narrative around books published by subscription by previously unknown or little-known writers. Two months after its review of Grant, the British Critic noted, in reference to a collection of poems by Mary Young Sewell, that when ‘a clergyman’s widow’ chooses to bring her verse into print by subscription, ‘the necessary inference will be drawn by every benevolent reader’ (22 (Nov 1803): 553). Such benevolence was frequently, however, only one step away from condescension. The British Critic might assert that the circumstances that led Sewell to publish gave her ‘a very forcible claim to our respect and attention’ (22 (Nov 1803): 553), but that ‘respect’ was manifested there and elsewhere by the critical equivalent of a dismissive pat on the head. The British Critic reviewer contented himself with a few polite compliments on Sewell’s ‘refined feelings and correct taste’ (22 (Nov 1803): 553) while the Monthly Review offered some general commentary about the ‘softness and sensibility’ of the verse (44 (May 1804): 101), and the Annual Review did little more than call attention to the ‘just sentiments’ presented in the ‘elegant little volume’ (2 (1803): 591). Even as the reviewers were gentle with Sewell, the terms of their praise thus make clear that they were more interested in her as a deserving object of charity than as a poet, a move that gives her little grounds for carving out a place for herself as a writer. The generically minimalist commentary on Sewell is fairly typical of the response by reviewers to women using a subscription volume to seek charity while maintaining an impeccably feminine persona: they get sympathy and a few kind words but little in the way of serious critical engagement. Grant, perhaps inevitably, received some of this politely conventional dismissiveness as well; the Annual Review notes that the volume was published under ‘circumstances which excite interest and bespeak indulgence’ (2 (1803): 560), while in one of the few capsule reviews that Grant received, the Monthly Mirror offers merely a passing glimpse of the ‘simple and pleasing’ verse of the ‘fair authoress’ (17 (Mar 1804): 182). Yet most reviewers go well beyond this positioning of Grant within the feminised world of the subscription volume, and the very marked contrast between Grant’s and Sewell’s receptions points to the

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 255

17/11/17 5:01 PM

256

pam perkins

willingness of at least some critics to accommodate ambitiously polemical work within this safely and conventionally feminine mode of publication. In particular, neither the Anti-Jacobin nor the British Critic appears to have any difficulty in seeing Grant as both a respectably unthreatening object of charity and a redoubtable ally in their political battles. The Anti-Jacobin approvingly contrasts her with the ‘WOLLSTONECROFTS and WILLIAMSES of the age’ (16 (Oct 1803): 123), while the British Critic excuses some moments of what it considers splenetic satire on the grounds that it is directed against those who ‘adopt modern philosophy, and follow the false lights of France’, (22 (Sep 1803): 293) then links Grant with ‘its darling, Jane West’ (Grenby 2001: 199) as a pre-eminent exemplar of ‘female genius’ (22 (Sep 1803): 297). Both the Anti-Jacobin and the British Critic are, of course, unequivocally partisan. Grenby places them at the forefront of the movement that had made politics ‘inextricably a part of what was still ostensibly literary criticism’ (2001: 177), while Hayden notes that they can be trusted to provide ‘competent appraisals’ only of ‘non-political works’ (1969: 7). Yet their willingness to give Grant lengthy, detailed reviews, while being politely dismissive of Sewell’s contemporaneous work in the same mode, cannot be explained simply by a tendency of both reviews to celebrate uncritically all things conservative. On the contrary: even while approving of the general ideological drift of her work, reviewers were prepared to take issue with Grant as both a polemicist and a poet, making clear that they were not reading her in merely ideological terms. Most significantly, by engaging with both the content and style of Grant’s commentary on Highland culture and society, the reviewers demonstrate what might be a surprising willingness to read her work as something other than sweetly feminine verse, on the one hand, or straight-up propaganda on the other. The British Critic stepped back from ideology and into something approaching a critical analysis of her scholarship as it discussed her use of Highland oral culture to assess the authenticity of Ossian. Likewise, both the Monthly and the Eclectic (in a review of the second, retitled edition of Poems) summarised then disputed Grant’s conclusions about the impact of emigration (44 (July 1804): 273–4; 4.2 (Nov 1808): 1035). Even the Annual Review, though somewhat sceptical about Grant’s implicit demands to be read ‘as a philosopher or politician’, pointedly refused to single out that ambition as a major blemish (2 (1803): 560). Finally, the Anti-Jacobin places Grant’s ‘bold, but faithful’ picture of Highland society (16 (Oct 1803): 120), one ‘not less distinguished by political and moral wisdom than by good poetry’ (16 (Nov 1803): 237), among the works that it sees as rescuing British literature from the ‘melodious insignificance’ of the popular verse of the previous decade (16 (Oct 1803): 114). This is more than just a predictably anti-Jacobin dig at 1790s radicals: in effect, the reviewer is claiming that Grant’s serious intellectual and cultural interests make her both more admirably feminine and a better poet than writers who limit themselves to pleasingly ‘melodious’ occasional verse. Rather than simply deploying Grant as a (willing) weapon in their ideological battles, in other words, the Anti-Jacobin is using her work to make an aesthetic argument about the relative importance of content over style in poetry. A preference of this sort for robustly intellectual content over smoothly harmonious versification is particularly noteworthy in the context of a critical discourse that, as the reviews of Sewell suggest, tends to define ‘femininity’ in terms of such stylistic qualities as ‘elegance’ or ‘softness’. That tendency makes it all the more striking that even as reviewers were willing to read Grant as working within the decorously feminine mode

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 256

17/11/17 5:01 PM

reviewing femininity

257

of the subscription volume, they are nearly unanimous in what they see as her major flaw: her prolixity and her occasionally ‘harsh’ and ‘prosaic’ lines (Monthly Review 44 (July 1804): 279). On one level, of course, this criticism of Grant’s language can in itself be read as a return to a gendered mode of criticism. As Olivia Smith has demonstrated, at the turn of the nineteenth century conservatives attempted to undermine the substance of writing by disempowered groups, including women, by attacking their supposed failures of style (1986). Even if Grant was saying things that conservative reviewers wanted to hear, in other words, they were still prepared to check her intellectual ambition by murmuring doubts, as did the Anti-Jacobin, about whether or not Grant understood the ‘genuine import’ of all the words she used (16 (Oct 1803): 116), or, like the Annual, by proclaiming that despite the ‘indulgence’ demanded by Grant’s circumstances, it had a ‘duty to the public’ to point out failures in diction and prosody (2 (1803): 561). Yet what is going on in the reviews of Grant is something a little more complicated than a reflexive mockery of a woman writer’s non-standard English. The Anti-Jacobin gives the game away in its observation that many of Grant’s alleged verbal failures betray traces of the ‘vicious provincial utterance’ and ‘depraved pronunciation’ to be found ‘to the North of the Tweed’ (16 (Oct 1803): 116–17). ‘Elegance’ or ‘softness’ of the sort that Sewell was praised for is, in this context at least, opposed not to unfeminine ambition but rather to Scottishness. As the reviewer brackets off linguistic flaws as a matter of national, rather than gendered, identity, he leaves open for Grant the possibility of developing, even as a properly feminine woman poet, a ‘professional life story’ that privileges sense over sound. While it is difficult to measure the direct impact of reviews of this sort on any literary career, Grant, who wrote to a friend that affecting to ignore criticism ‘betrays hardihood, insolence, and indeed some hypocrisy’ (1807, vol. 3: 183), seems to have quickly and readily incorporated a more positive version of these critical observations about her linguistic ‘harshness’ into her self-construction as an author. In a letter dated before the publication of her Poems, but not printed until years afterwards, she cheerfully admits that her verse lacks the ‘Elegance’ demanded by readers in ‘these days of universal polish’, contrasting her work with that of successful female contemporaries such as Mary Robinson and Anna Seward, whose poems she imagines as overdressed coquettes, ‘bedizzened’ in ‘spangled plumes’ and ‘pompous trains’ (1811, vol. 1: 272, 297–8).2 As Grant rhetorically transforms what the reviewers see as inelegant provincialisms into an unadorned and specifically Scottish simplicity, she simultaneously challenges and expands their version of properly ‘feminine’ poetic style. Indeed, even though Grant waited until the end of her career to publish a second volume of poetry, turning instead to autobiographical letters and essays, when she did so, she re-embraced the forcefully socio-political subject matter that the reviewers had concentrated on in their commentary on Poems on Various Subjects. With its titular allusion to Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s final poem, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, Grant’s Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen (1814) was arguably even more provocative in its intervention into national affairs than The Highlanders had been. Barbauld’s critics were (in the words of Adriana Craciun) ‘shocked’ that ‘a woman had dared to speak so critically of British imperial ambitions’ (2005: 24). In contrast, Grant’s poem was welcomed for the ‘new and forcible lights’ in which were presented the ‘excellencies’ of the British political system and for the ‘poetic powers’ it displayed in evoking ‘this annus mirabilus of Europe’ (Gentleman’s Magazine 84.2 (Nov 1814): 459; British

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 257

17/11/17 5:01 PM

258

pam perkins

Critic 2 (Sep 1814): 326, 324). Even the relatively unenthusiastic reviewer for the Eclectic was far more concerned about its length than its politics. The fact that Grant was praising British imperialism might of course seem sufficient explanation for the contrast between the reception of her poem and Barbauld’s. Yet as Orianne Smith notes, it was not just Barbauld’s politics, unpopular as they were, but also her ‘vatic stance’ that attracted the ‘extreme opprobrium’ of the critics (2013: 187). Grant mirrored this stance – in Smith’s phrase, she ‘assumed the mantle of a rival prophet’ (2013: 187) – but in her case, critics read it as a measure of properly feminine warmth and enthusiasm rather than as an inappropriate move into political analysis. As Grant wins critical praise and maintains a reputation for impeccable femininity while writing poetry that is prolix, strongly political, and self-consciously unadorned in its style, she implicitly expands, even overturns, conventional ideas that ‘feminine’ verse is sweetly and charmingly unassuming. Elizabeth Hamilton’s work in fiction makes a good counterpoint to Grant’s work in poetry, and not just because the two were almost exact contemporaries who, after a late start as published authors, enjoyed substantial, immediate success. Like Grant, Hamilton also received engaged reviews for a politically and intellectually ambitious literary debut in a conventionally feminine genre, although the praise in her case was tempered less by concerns about style than about her satiric asperity (that was the main concern of Hays’s Analytical review) and her somewhat top-heavy focus on Indian politics, culture, and religion. Yet just as with Grant, the seriousness and the detail of the critical response to her first publication offers Hamilton a basis for constructing a more complex version of her own role as an author than would have been available to contemporaries who were doing similar work but received only brief, superficial praise. Whatever the reason that these two middle-aged Scotswomen attracted such an unusual degree of critical attention – whether it was their conservatism, the fashionable nature of their subject matter, or something else entirely – their reception demonstrates that ‘femininity’ could encompass a range of styles in fiction as well as in poetry. Admittedly, there were far fewer women writing fiction set in India than were publishing subscription verse. The Hindoo Rajah is generally accepted as being only the third Anglo-Indian novel to appear in print, and neither of the previous two – one of which was by a woman and one of which implied that it was, although the European Magazine reviewer was sceptical (12 (July 1787): 40) – had received much in the way of substantive criticism. Reviewers of the first of those earlier novels, The Disinterested Nabob (1787), generally found it unconvincing, with the Monthly lamenting the author’s apparent lack of first-hand knowledge of the country and consequent inability to provide useful information. Two years later, Phebe Gibbes’s Hartly House, Calcutta fared somewhat better, ‘arous[ing] much interest’ in the press (Brown et al. 2006–16), yet the original reviews have remarkably little to say about the specifics of the book and, again, seem mainly interested in whether or not it offers any practical guidance to travellers. After dismissing Gibbes’s ‘extremely feeble’ plot, the European Magazine and London Review observes temperately that the book might afford ‘solid and useful information’ for ladies going to India, while in the single sentence that comprises its review, the Town and Country Magazine, notes merely that ‘much information is conveyed in these volumes’ (17 (Feb 1790): 118; 21 (Sep 1790): 416). William Enfield, in the Monthly, was even less enthusiastic: while he found the novel ‘lively and elegant’,

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 258

17/11/17 5:01 PM

reviewing femininity

259

he didn’t think that it contained ‘any thing sufficiently novel’ to remark upon (Enfield 1 (ns) (Mar 1790): 332). Even Mary Wollstonecraft, whose review in the Analytical is by far the longest, at just under two pages, devotes much of that space to extracts and confines her remarks to general praise of the ‘animated account of Eastern manners’ (Wollstonecraft 4 (June 1789): 147). A woman writing fiction about India might have had the appeal of novelty, but as Gibbes’s polite but brief reviews indicate, the critical engagement with Hamilton cannot be attributed simply to her relatively unusual subject matter. Even if, in writing an information-heavy novel about India, Hamilton can be seen as following the precedent set by Phebe Gibbes, she goes well beyond the sort of domestic practicalities that earned Gibbes her sentence or two of praise from the reviewers. What Hamilton offers is something far more ambitious, even as her framework allows her to maintain a foothold in the critical discourse on the acceptably ‘feminine’ genre of the novel. The reaction of one of Hamilton’s more critical reviewers, the writer for the Monthly, is particularly illuminating on this point. Even while admiring Hamilton as a novelist – he concludes that she offers her readers ‘much entertainment’ (21 (Oct 1796): 179) – he clearly finds the non-fictional content on India a key component of the book and devotes a substantial portion of his review to a critical analysis of Hamilton’s ‘epitome of the religious and political opinions of the Hindoos’. In general, he is unimpressed, but the grounds for his complaints highlight Hamilton’s swerve from the relatively utilitarian traveller’s tale that Gibbes was praised for providing. ‘In assigning the Barampooter as the eastern limit of Hindostan, she cuts off some of its richest provinces’, he grumbles; likewise, ‘in bestowing on its antient government a federative form, she has embraced too readily a most questionable hypothesis’ (21 (Oct 1796): 177). In effect, the Monthly presents Hamilton as writing a treatise with a novel tacked on, rather than as enlivening a novel with some unfamiliar local colour. (Perhaps significantly, in the 1818 general index of its first eighty-one volumes, the Monthly placed its review of the Hindoo Rajah not under fiction but in its miscellaneous category, between two of Hamilton’s non-fictional sources.) The Monthly reviewer might not have agreed with Hamilton’s observations about Indian geography and political history, but in taking them seriously enough to dispute, he helps shape the groundwork of a ‘professional life story’ that envisions Hamilton as much as a geographer or historian as a novelist. Just as Grant encloses her polemics on emigration and other Scottish subjects within the framework of a poem, Hamilton is able to use fiction to sweeten her didactic message about India. The Monthly reviewer was not alone in reading the Hindoo Rajah in this way. Both the British Critic and the Critical Review establish Hamilton as a respectably feminine novelist but then rapidly jettison the sort of anodyne praise that might conventionally be expected for woman’s fiction, concentrating instead on meditations about the wider intellectual currents in which she is working. The Critical, for example, approved at least as much of Hamilton’s take on controversies ‘agitated in the last session of parliament’ (quoting at length her satiric commentary on the misapplication of game laws) as it did of her ‘pretty and pathetic’ forays into sentimentality (17 (July 1796): 242, 248). The British Critic likewise made a conventionally vague gesture of approval toward Hamilton’s ‘delicacy of taste’ but spent the bulk of the review focusing on what it saw as the ‘sound judgement’ that it felt Hamilton had displayed in choosing the appropriate ‘machinery’ to ‘impress moral and political truth on the mind’

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 259

17/11/17 5:01 PM

260

pam perkins

(8 (Sep 1796): 241, 238, 237). The message in the reviews is clear enough: even if (like the Monthly) reviewers were not always convinced that Hamilton was successful in living up to her ambitions, what interested them most in her work was the attempt to use fiction as a framework on which to hang her political and philosophical views. This was true even of Mary Hays’s review, whatever her distaste for Hamilton’s politics. According to Hays, the main value of the book lay in its appeal to ‘cultivated understanding’, and her main regret was that Hamilton ignored ‘the proper method of making rational converts’, relying on ‘abuse’ rather than ‘candid and calm discussion’ (Hays 24 (Oct 1796): 431). Hamilton also parallels Grant in her decision to pursue, in her later work, some of the more ambitious and unconventional elements of her literary debut that had been singled out for discussion, if not unanimous praise, in the periodical reviews. What is remarkable about this move is that even as Hamilton forfeited some popularity through this display of intellectual ambition, she maintained and even improved her critical reputation. Notoriously, Hamilton doubled down on the ‘abuse’ for which Mary Hays criticised her when, in her highly successful Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) she created the foolish, ugly, and utterly self-absorbed Bridgetina Botherim, who was immediately recognised as a caricature of Hays. Yet her third ‘novel’, Memoirs of the Life of Agrippina, Wife of Germanicus (1804), can be read as a subtler engagement with the commentary by her original critics. Like the Hindoo Rajah, Agrippina offers readers information about a distant culture, framed through the conventions of fiction. In this case, however, Hamilton insists that history and moral philosophy are the primary focus of the book and that the novelistic elements are there merely to fill out the gaps in the biographical record. Agrippina did not enjoy the popular success of Hamilton’s two previous novels, but it nonetheless received substantial attention in the press, much of which focused on its treatment of early Imperial Roman history, thereby reinforcing the critical narrative about Hamilton’s serious intellectual interests that had been launched with the reviews of the Hindoo Rajah. Yet strikingly, even while assessing Hamilton’s abilities as a classical historian, critics continued to read the book in the context of domestic fiction. The Monthly reviewer is representative in taking pains to point out that Hamilton was not offering any ‘elucidation of obscure passages’ or ‘new light on disputed facts’ of classical history while, at the same time, taking for granted that Agrippina was intended for ‘the circulating libraries’. (He concluded, regretfully, that it was ‘too didactic and too moral ever to become a favourite’ there (50 (July 1806): 275, 278).) Anybody reading the reviews of Agrippina might have had doubts about whether to run out and obtain the book, but they would not have had any doubts at all that Hamilton was an innovative, ambitious author – and one who also somehow managed, simultaneously, to be writing admirably feminine fiction. In the last few years, assumptions about the more or less rigidly masculine world of the Romantic-era periodical reviews have begun to change. As David Stewart has recently argued, the perception that the early nineteenth-century periodicals were ‘divided . . . from each other in terms of gender’ (2011: 56), with the ‘serious’ reviews falling solidly on the masculine side of that divide, misrepresents the way that the periodicals were read. Grant and Hamilton provide support for Stewart’s arguments about women’s consumption of the supposedly ‘masculine’ reviews: they were, after all, both enthusiastic readers of the Edinburgh Review. Yet the trajectory of their

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 260

17/11/17 5:01 PM

reviewing femininity

261

careers also points to their engagement with the reviews as writers, as well as readers, and thus suggests some of the other potential complexities of this ‘masculine’ reviewing culture. Even as the receptions of Gibbes, Sewell, and numerous other writers bear out perceptions of critical indifference and condescension, the critical narratives built around Grant and Hamilton, and their tacit embrace of those narratives, make clear that not every Romantic-era woman writer was destined to be a hapless victim of critical violence or a passive object inscribed within a narrowly prescriptive and trivialising version of literary femininity. While there is no question that the conservative elements in Grant’s and Hamilton’s work influenced their positive reception, politics alone are not a sufficient explanation for the sophisticated and detailed critical engagement with their work. That engagement in turn makes clear that our own critical narratives have tended, so far, to underestimate the complexity of the roles played by periodicals in shaping early nineteenth-century concepts of gender and authorship.

Notes 1. According to Stephanie Eckroth, ‘50.1% of the novels reviewed in the Monthly in the years 1789–1823 were written by women or by authors who presented themselves as women’ (2012: 17). Eckroth’s assumption that at least some male novelists were engaging in a form of literary cross-dressing reminds us that there could in fact be some perceived advantages, at the time, to publishing fiction as a woman. 2. Robinson and Seward were not identified by name until the letter was republished in the 1845 edition of Letters from the Mountains.

Works Cited Analytical Review. 1788–99. (1st ser. 1788–98; 2nd ser. 1799). London. The Annual Review. 1804–9. London. The Anti-Jacobin Review. 1798–1821. London. Benger, Elizabeth, ed. 1818. Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Hamilton with a Selection from her Correspondence and Other Unpublished Writing. 2 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown. The British Critic. 1793–9. London. Brown, Susan, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, eds. 2006–16. ‘Phebe Gibbes: Writing’. The Orlando Project. (last accessed 18 Aug 2016). Clark, Alice, ed. 1895. Gleanings from an Old Portfolio: Containing some Correspondence between Lady Louisa Stuart and her Sister Caroline, Countess of Portarlington. 3 vols. Edinburgh: Privately Printed. Craciun, Adriana. 2005. British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. The Critical Review, or Annals of Literature. 1756–1817 (1st ser. 1756–90; 2nd ser. 1791–1817). London. Curran, Stuart. 2002. ‘Women and the Edinburgh Review’. British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review: Bicentenary Essays. Ed. Massimiliano Demata and Duncan Wu. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 195–208. Dale, Amelia. 2014. Review of Romantic Women Writers Reviewed. Ed. Ann R. Hawkins. The BARS Review 44. (last accessed 19 Aug 2016). Donoghue, Frank. 1996. The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-Century Literary Careers. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 261

17/11/17 5:01 PM

262

pam perkins

Easley, Alexis. 2004. First Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830–70. Aldershot: Ashgate. Eckroth, Stephanie. 2012. ‘Celebrity and Anonymity in the Monthly Review’s Notices of Nineteenth-Century Novels’. Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity in the Long Nineteenth Century. Ed. Ann R. Hawkins and Maura Ives. Farnham: Ashgate. 13–32. The Eclectic Review. 1805–68 (1st ser. 1805–13; 2nd ser. 1814–28; 3rd ser. 1829–36; 4th ser. 1837–50; 5th ser. 1851–6; 6th ser.1857–8; 7th ser. 1859–61; 8th ser. 1861–8). London. The Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany. 1785–1803 (1st ser. 1785–91; 2nd ser. 1793–1803). Edinburgh. The Edinburgh Review. 1802–1929. Edinburgh. The European Magazine and London Review. 1782–1826 (1st ser. 1782–1825; 2nd ser. 1825–6). London. The Gentleman’s Magazine. 1731–1922 (1st ser. 1731–1833; ser. 2–4 1834–68). London. Grant, Anne. 1807. Letters from the Mountains. 3 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown. —. 1811. Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders. 2 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown. Grenby, Matthew O. 2001. The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grogan, Claire. 2012. Politics and Genre in the Works of Elizabeth Hamilton, 1756–16. Farnham: Ashgate. Hawkins, Ann R., ed. 2011–13. Romantic Women Writers Reviewed. 9 vols. London: Pickering & Chatto. Hayden, John O. 1969. The Romantic Reviewers, 1802–1824. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. The Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex. 1770–1832 (1st ser. 1770–1819; 2nd ser. 1820–9; 3rd ser. 1830–2). London. The Monthly Mirror. 1795–1811 (1st ser. 1795–1806; 2nd ser. 1807–11). London. The Monthly Review. 1749–1844 (1st ser. 1749–89; 2nd ser. 1790–1825; 3rd ser. 1826–30; 4th ser. 1831–44). London. Parker, Mark. 2000. Literary Magazines and British Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Powell, Manushag. 2012. Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Siskin, Clifford. 1998. The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain 1700–1830. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Smith, Olivia. 1986. The Politics of Language, 1791–1819. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, Orianne. 2013. Romantic Women Writers, Revolution, and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters, 1786–1826. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stewart, David. 2011. Romantic Magazines and Metropolitan Literary Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine. 1832–61 (1st ser. 1832–4; 2nd ser. 1834–61). Edinburgh. The Town and Country Magazine; or Universal Repository of Knowledge, Instruction, and Entertainment. 1769–96. London. Walker, Gina Luria. 2006. Mary Hays (1759–1843): The Growth of a Woman’s Mind. Farnham: Ashgate. Wilkes, Joanne. 2010. Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth Century Britain: The Critical Reception of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Elliot. Farnham: Ashgate.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 262

17/11/17 5:01 PM

17 ‘Full of pretty stories’: Fiction in the LADY’S MAGAZINE (1770–1832) Jenny DiPlacidi

Mrs. Radcliffe’s romances will be entitled to rank highly in the scale of literary excellence . . . The works of this ingenious writer . . . are also distinguished by a rich vein of invention, which supplies an endless variety of incidents to fill the imagination of the reader; by an admirable ingenuity of contrivance to awaken his curiosity, and to bind him in the chains of suspense; and by a vigour of conception and a delicacy of feeling which are capable of producing the strongest sympathetic emotions, whether of pity or terror. Monthly Review 15 (1794): 278–9

C

ontemporary reviewers of Ann Radcliffe, the highest-paid, best-selling novel writer of the 1790s, praised the quality and originality of her writing, positioning her Gothic works as the benchmark to which other authors of the genre could only aspire. The Monthly’s review of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) commends Radcliffe’s ‘literary excellence’, ‘invention’, and ‘vigour’ – terminology that prevails in the critical lexicon characterising her novels from the eighteenth century to the present. Nineteenthcentury critics including Walter Scott argued that no one else writing in Radcliffe’s ‘style of composition . . . approached the excellencies of the original inventor’ (1833: 68) and modern scholars note Radcliffe’s ‘powers of enchantment’ and descriptions that are capable of ‘conjuring an emotional terrain’ (Miles 1995: 15). While Radcliffe’s reputation as an ingenious and innovative novelist has been reaffirmed throughout various shifts in the history of literary criticism, her predecessors in the periodicals have not fared nearly so well. The long-forgotten, anonymously authored serial novel ‘The History of an Humble Friend’ (Lady’s Magazine Sep 1774–Supp 1776) is almost entirely unknown to us today, yet it deploys what would become standard Gothic tropes often ascribed to Radcliffe.1 The work portrays, for example, the heroine’s reclamation of the missing mother that is often noted as a Radcliffean convention: it does so not only early on in traditional chronologies of the Gothic genre, but also decades before Radcliffe’s novels were published. The serial also presents the figure of the sentimental orphan, prefiguring later representations popularised in novels by Frances Burney and Charlotte Smith. In her first steps into the world beyond the protective confines of her boarding school, Harriot West faces the vulnerability of her position: ‘detached, as it were, from every human creature, I felt myself a solitary being, in the wide world, without a parent, without a friend, without a protector: a girl, whom nobody knew – for whom nobody cared’ (5 (Nov 1774): 578).

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 263

17/11/17 5:01 PM

264

jenny diplacidi

Abducted and conveyed to a convent in France to prevent her from receiving the addresses of a wealthy young man, Harriot meets an older woman also imprisoned in the convent. On hearing Harriot’s sobs, the woman comforts her and an instant sympathy grows quickly into an intimate bond, with Harriot’s new friend revealing her personal history and details of the boarding school where she was forced to leave her daughter. The revelation that follows this disclosure, much like one that Radcliffe would write in The Italian (1797), is one of mother-daughter reunion. Harriot’s mother exclaims ‘Gracious God! Is it possible! Do I then see my long-lost child? My Harriot! Come – come to my arms – to my heart – my dearest daughter’ (7 (Apr 1776): 193). Harriot shows her mother ‘a crystal heart, set in gold, which I had at times worn about my neck, and on which there was my name in a cypher. My mother immediately recognising this trinket, told me that my real name was Constantia Darnley’ (193). The anonymous Lady’s Magazine author participates in a long tradition of staged recognition scenes such as those found in The Mysterious Mother (1768) by Horace Walpole, Richard Steele’s The Conscious Lovers (1722) and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740). The scene is more akin to the sentimental family reunions of Steele and Richardson than those of Walpole or Matthew Lewis and it prefigures by some twenty years two of Radcliffe’s iconic moments of recognition in The Italian. The first is that between the heroine Ellena and the nun with whom she instantly sympathises during her imprisonment and who is revealed to be her mother, Olivia; the second is that in which the monk Schedoni, moments from stabbing the sleeping Ellena, recognises the miniature portrait worn on her neck and identifies her as his kin. Such genealogies between magazine and mainstream fiction are rarely noted. Indeed, the very terms employed to express approval of Radcliffe appear inversely in scholarship on periodical fiction: Robert Mayo, for example, argues that ‘most new magazine fiction published between 1740 and 1815 was lacking in vigour and permanent value’ (1962: 2); criticism that is pointedly gendered in its indictment of the fiction’s perceived deficiencies in strength, force, and endurance. Yet the thematic, stylistic, tonal and psychological sophistication that scholarship has ascribed to the form of the novel is prevalent in magazine serials; such continuities reveal both forms to be part of a larger, generic tradition of prose fiction. Magazine fiction in eighteenth-century periodical publications such as the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) has, on the whole, been left out of literary surveys of the development of prose fiction in the eighteenth century. Mayo’s vast survey of fiction in English periodicals was undertaken to correct the neglect of periodicals in traditional literary histories of the eighteenth century; as he argued: ‘there is a considerable repository of prose fiction which seldom figured in the publishers’ lists and which was rarely mentioned in the reviews, but which nevertheless enjoyed a wide currency in eighteenth-century England, and was both “pre-romantic” and “popular”’ (1962: 1). Mayo’s goal, however, was not to redress critical misconceptions about the role of periodical fiction in shaping eighteenth-century prose fiction; rather, he believed that ‘the chief value of periodicals for the study of prose fiction’ lay in their ability to ‘provide a more accurate picture of the amorphous character of the eighteenth-century reading audience’ (1962: 3). For Mayo, the fiction is a means to an end rather than a body of work worthy of study on its own literary merits. In spite of some recent reevaluations, such as Edward Copeland’s analysis of the popularity (if not the quality) of the periodical’s fiction and illustrations in Women Writing about Money: Women’s

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 264

17/11/17 5:01 PM

fiction in the LADY’S MAGAZINE (1770–1832)

265

Fiction in England, 1790–1820 (2004), the magazine’s tales and serials remain largely overlooked and undervalued. When they have been the focus of scholarship, they have been disparaged as unoriginal and derivative work. Gillian Hughes’s recent essay on the subject tends to maintain the critical status quo that dismisses the fiction’s potential value or permanence, describing it as ‘typical’ and authored by ‘amateurs’ and ‘hack writers’ (2015: 465, 461). Yet as this chapter will demonstrate, and contrary to the conventional perception of the fiction’s ephemerality and inferior status, it, like the Lady’s Magazine itself, was designed to last, with the monthly issues and yearly supplements annually bound into volumes intended to be read and reread. As Jennie Batchelor has argued of the periodical, ‘its influence extended beyond the years of its publication to inform a new generation of professional authors’ (2011: 262). That the fictional content of the Lady’s Magazine was a large part of the periodical’s immense and lasting popularity is noted by a reader who described her satisfaction in receiving a miscellany so ‘full of pretty stories, and other fine things’ (6 (Oct 1775): 530). It was a valued commodity, making the journey across the Atlantic to the American colonies where it was read by George Washington’s stepdaughter Patsy, for one. In the spring of 1772 Martha Washington and Patsy ‘had a happy time unpacking a late order George had sent for the previous summer. It was a treasure chest of pretty things for Patsy’ that included, among many other items, ‘a new prayer book with silver clasps, silk stockings, and Lady’s Magazine, together with more workaday items such as thread, pins, hairpins, and laces’ (Bryan 2002: 170–1). The magazine circulated among a range of readers and locations not only as intact copies but also in excerpted form. Several early American periodicals republished tales and serials from the Lady’s Magazine, usually without acknowledgement of the original source. The June 1792 edition of the Philadelphia Lady’s Magazine, and Repository of Entertaining Knowledge (1792–3), for example, reprinted the moral tale ‘The Infant Rambler, or Distressed Mother’ that had first appeared almost ten years earlier in the Lady’s Magazine (14 (July 1783): 399–400). Likewise, the Gothic serial novel ‘The Two Castles’ by E.F., first published in the Lady’s Magazine from June 1797 to November 1798, was reprinted in its entirety the following year in the Philadelphia Dessert to the True American (1798–9) and New York Weekly Museum (1791–1805). British periodical fiction, often with no provenance and appearing under the pretext of originality, was ubiquitous in the early American magazines; though the extent of such fictional influences on American literature is beyond the remit of this chapter, it bears further scrutiny. The original fiction in the Lady’s Magazine ranges from sentimental, Gothic, and epistolary novels, to moral tales, experimental offerings, and children’s literature. Its influence can be discerned in the productions of respected writers such as Charlotte Smith, Jane Austen, and Frances Burney, as well as in expanding audiences for newly emergent genres like the Romantic fragment and the domestic novel. This chapter will examine a range of texts from the Lady’s Magazine to demonstrate the crucial role that periodical fiction played in the development of the novel in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. ‘The History of an Humble Friend’ (1774–6), ‘The Governess’ (1778–80), ‘The History of Lady Bradley’ (1776–8), ‘The Motherin-law’ (1785–6), ‘Harriet Vernon; or, Characters from Real Life’ (1807–9) and many other contemporary periodical fictions are preoccupied with issues such as women’s education and work, the laws regarding marriage and inheritance, threats to female

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 265

17/11/17 5:01 PM

266

jenny diplacidi

bodies and reputations, and the conflict between duty to family and self-autonomy. The thematic, stylistic, and tonal complexities of magazine serials are analogous to those of novels printed in volume form; these continuities reveal the instability and permeability of generic and formulaic boundaries. In other words, magazine novels reflect concerns that were central to eighteenth-century society and that featured prominently – and similarly – in later now-canonical novels. Scholarly misrepresentation of periodical fiction as unoriginal and derivative has significantly distorted our sense of the development of prose fiction in this key literary historical moment. Magazine fiction such as the novels and tales prevalent in the periodicals such as the Lady’s Magazine and Lady’s Monthly Museum (1798–1828) was, in the main, innovative and original. Far from being ephemeral, this fiction was an enduring and significant cultural form that helped to establish and shape eighteenth-century popular literature.

Criticism and the Marginalised Magazine One of the challenges of accepting the originality of magazine fiction is that doing so contests traditional chronologies around which the rise of the novel was once structured. Part of the critical denigration and neglect of the magazines and their fiction has its origins in Ian Watt’s influential survey of the history of the English novel The Rise of the Novel (1957). Watt’s summary of the novel’s development pays scant attention to the second half of the century, arguing that most fiction produced from 1770 to 1800 ‘had little intrinsic merit; and much of it reveals only too plainly the pressures toward literary degradation which were exerted by the booksellers and circulating library operators in their effort to meet the reading public’s uncritical demand for easy vicarious indulgence in sentiment and romance’ (1957: 290). Such critical assumptions have come under increasing scrutiny from literary scholars, including scholars focusing on Gothic fiction who have objected to the linking of romance to literary degradation. Michael Gamer convincingly demonstrates that ‘Watt here takes his cue from more than two centuries of literary criticism that share the assumption that higher demand for fiction and marked departures from established novelistic techniques of realism leads to “literary degradation”’ (2004: 62). Watt thus reproduces the long tradition in literary criticism of viewing popularity as synonymous with inferiority. That 1770, pinpointed as the year that booksellers and consumer demands caused the onset of literary degradation, is also the year that the Lady’s Magazine began production seems no mere coincidence. While Watt prizes earlier periodicals such as the Spectator (1711–12; 1714) as cultivating the public’s taste for literature and being ‘produced by the best writers of the day’, later miscellanies such as the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1922) are pointed to as symbolic of ‘an important change in the organisation of the reading public’ (1957: 52). The change, Watt contended, was for the worse. In addition to arguing that the magazine’s founder, Edward Cave, was ‘an enterprising but ill-educated journalist and bookseller’, Watt further claims that its ‘contributions were mainly produced by hacks and amateurs’ (1957: 52). This view of the Gentleman’s Magazine and its contributors has long dominated the scholarly conversation surrounding eighteenthcentury magazine writers and the fictional content many produced, although in recent decades studies have moved away from some of Watt’s assumptions. Clifford Siskin, for example, notes ‘a steep decline’ in the publication of novels in the 1770s before ‘the output jumped – more than doubled’ in the 1780s, linking this surge to the increasing

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 266

17/11/17 5:01 PM

fiction in the LADY’S MAGAZINE (1770–1832)

267

number of periodicals published from the 1770s. Siskin establishes the periodical’s importance to eighteenth-century literary culture in creating ‘new kinds of audiences – desiring readers who proved crucial to the quantitative rise of prose fiction’ (1999: 28). Despite such revaluations, however, the critical perception of the magazine as a popular genre designed to exploit the demands of an uncritical public – produced and sold for maximum profits by avaricious booksellers and penned by second-rate writers – has been an enduring misconception. Viewing the decades following 1770 as a period of literary inertia allows Watt to argue that earlier male writers such as Defoe provided the model for Austen’s interest in ‘the social and moral problems raised by economic individualism and the middleclass quest for improved status’ or that ‘she follows Richardson in basing her novels on marriage and especially on the proper feminine role in the matter’, and so on (1957: 298). Yet more convincingly, Edward Copeland and Jennie Batchelor have made compelling cases for Austen’s familiarity with the magazine; Copeland notes connections between Austen’s characters’ names and those in the Lady’s Magazine tale ‘The Shipwreck’ (25 (Supp 1794): 681), such as Charlotte, Brandon, Willoughby (1989: 170–1) and Batchelor (2016b) points to commonalities of plot points and thematic concerns between Austen’s Emma (1815) and the earlier Lady’s Magazine tale ‘Guilt Pursued by Conscience’ (33 (Nov 1802): 563–5). It is more fruitful to examine Austen in light of the magazine writers, who, during and beyond the productive period between 1770 and 1800, published dozens of novels focusing on just those social and moral concerns that Austen would later take up in strikingly similar ways. The anonymously authored ‘The History of Miss Butler’ (1777–8), for example, opens by sketching out the details of the heroine’s family and birthplace before outlining the disastrous consequences of primogeniture for herself, her sister, and their mother. Miss Butler describes herself as ‘the second daughter of a country gentleman who possessed a considerable estate in a pleasant village in Lincolnshire’ and of how, at age eleven, she was ‘robbed of one of the best of fathers by the cruel hand of death . . . he had not time to make a will, nor settle any family affairs whatever; but left a large family unprovided for. As my eldest brother of course inherited the estate, my mother was therefore scarcely able, with the greatest oeconomy, to support her family in the manner she wished’ (8 (Mar 1777): 144). When Miss Butler is sixteen, while collecting wild flowers in the countryside, she is startled by the sudden appearance of a Mr William K–, who becomes the story’s love interest, and she suffers a potentially dangerous fall. Mr K– half-carries her home, seemingly a gallant rescuer and the parallels to Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) continue when, much like Willoughby, Mr K– proves himself unworthy of the penniless heroine’s love when he marries a young woman of large fortune. ‘The History of Miss Butler’ is just one of many examples that make clear that Mayo’s argument that ‘writers of original magazine fiction in the eighteenth century tended to imitate one another more than they did the English novelists’ (1962: 4), like Watt’s, rests on a false distinction between ‘writers of original magazine fiction’ and ‘English novelists’. Another intriguing example of a writer who explodes this distinction is the anonymous author of ‘Memoirs of a Young Lady’ (Apr 1783–Nov 1786), who appears to have moved from the magazines into a lengthy career as a novelist in volume form. The epistolary novel is a well-written and absorbing account of the heroine, Lucretia Bertie, and the constant persecutions she faces at the hands of the primary villain, Lord

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 267

17/11/17 5:01 PM

268

jenny diplacidi

Belton, and his wife, her former friend Sophia. The novel’s more outrageous plots and schemes are located within a longer narrative that focuses on the heroine’s mundane struggles to find gainful and respectable employment – she works variously in a milliner’s shop and as a companion – and her witty observations expose some of the absurdities of the social circle in which she moves. The work appeared three decades later in volume form as Vicissitudes of Life; Exemplified in the Interesting Memoirs of a Young Lady, in a Series of Letters (1815) by J. West. Jane West, born in London as Jane Iliffe, was a self-confessedly prolific teenage writer. Yet until now the first published work attributed to her is Miscellaneous Poetry (1786). In her influential Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), Marilyn Butler examines the influence of West’s novel A Gossip’s Story (1796) on Sense and Sensibility, an analysis that considered in conjunction with the discovery of West’s early publication in the magazines, further erodes the critical distinction between established fiction writers of the period and magazine novelists.

Magazine Fiction and the Domestic Ideal From its inception, the Lady’s Magazine published fiction that anticipated the concerns, form, and tone of popular novelists such as Burney and Austen without receiving the critical acclaim of the works of these later writers. One such work is the anonymous serialised novel ‘The History of Lady Bradley’ (Supp 1776–Aug 1778), which offers a first-person account of the eponymous heroine and her sister’s experiences in courtship and marriage. Lady Bradley’s parents have chosen husbands for their daughters solely to advance their fortunes and position without consulting the girls’ desires, but the livelier sister, Maria, determines to make her own choice. Observing her sister’s clandestine courtship, Lady Bradley cautions Maria regarding her behaviour and urges her to obey their parents. Maria replies: ‘“Do not tell me of propriety,” replied she;— “that is properest which pleases us best:— I am to live with the man I marry, not my father and mother”’ (8 (Feb 1777): 84). In Austen’s Sense and Sensibility Elinor similarly advises her impetuous sister Marianne to behave with more restraint during courtship, to which Marianne replies ‘if there had been any real impropriety in what I did, I should have been sensible of it at the time . . . and with such conviction I could have had no pleasure’ (2002: 52). Maria, like Marianne, confuses the relationship between pleasure and propriety, and the portrayals of the sisters in both novels draw on a device typical of the period’s conduct literature by highlighting the appropriate model for emulation via contrasting traits. Yet ‘The History of Lady Bradley’ resists categorisation as a didactic work: while Maria’s elopement leads to an abusive marriage that hints at the possibility of a moral lesson, the text moves away from such a simplistic conclusion. Lady Bradley, who marries her parents’ choice, describes the ‘odious character’ of the man she wed as brutal, disgusting, and severe, and her marriage as ‘a state of captivity’ (8 (Oct 1777): 525). Both sisters are left young widows – Lady Bradley an extremely wealthy one – and despite many opportunities to remarry, they choose to remain widows and reside together overseeing the education of Lady Bradley’s daughter, Fanny, assisted by their faithful servant Anne. Although Mayo claims that magazine writers were ‘preoccupied with genteel subjects’ and unconcerned with problems such as social justice (1962:

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 268

17/11/17 5:01 PM

fiction in the LADY’S MAGAZINE (1770–1832)

269

352–3), the anonymous author of ‘Lady Bradley’ is engrossed in just these questions of equality and injustice, exposing and negotiating the varying legal rights of women as daughters, wives, mothers, and widows in terms of property, settlements, inheritance, child custody, and spousal abuse. The narrative entertains the prospect of promoting a female utopia akin to that achieved in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762) until Fanny marries Mr Frampton, the nephew of Lady Bradley’s first lover, Mr Summers, who thereafter becomes a constant and welcome presence in the sisters’ household. Providing the protagonist with a loyal love interest she refuses to marry allows Lady Bradley to retain her fortune and freedom and to maintain her sister – all of which had been forbidden by her husband – while enjoying the pleasure of Mr Summers’s company. The ‘History of Lady Bradley’, like much magazine fiction, fails to conform to scholarly expectations of the genre and not just those that compare magazine fiction to the novel. Comparisons to earlier periodical fiction are equally (and equally unfairly) unflattering. In her examination of the Female Spectator (1744–6), Kathryn Shevelow asserts the crucial role of fiction within Eliza Haywood’s essay-periodical, arguing both that the magazine’s editor, a reformed coquette equipped with hindsight and at times interrupted and corrected by other characters, comments on a series of anecdotes espousing disparate moral perspectives to ‘suggest the relativity of moral judgement’ and that ‘the periodical offers an illustration of the subjectivity of moral pronouncement’ (1989: 171). According to Shevelow, essay-periodical fiction should be distinguished from fiction in miscellanies such as the Lady’s Magazine on the grounds that women’s submissions to the Lady’s Magazine were subject to editorial acceptance or rejection ‘consistent with the periodical’s newly adopted position as a course of education in what Steele called “the arts and sciences of female life” (Tatler No. 75). Those arts and sciences included writing, just as they included instruction in embroidery and fashionable dress, and as such were subject to the regulation of the periodical’ (1989: 190). Fiction in the Lady’s Magazine, Shevelow suggests, became an extension of the magazine’s presumed mission to create an ideal of femininity and ‘train’ its readers to correspond to it (1989: 190). Yet the fiction submitted to the Lady’s Magazine eludes any simple classification as part of a ‘specifically feminine’ curriculum (1989: 190): it is diverse and heterogeneous. The first-person narrator in ‘The History of Lady Bradley’, for example, resembles more closely the editorial voice of experience and hindsight that offered a range of subjective positions on questions of morality and conduct in Haywood’s essay-periodical than it does a project of ‘explicit instruction in feminine behaviour’ (1989: 190). ‘Lady Bradley’, like many of the works of fiction published in magazines, focused on depicting and addressing the tenuous position of women in eighteenth-century society; as such, it explicitly works against the ideal, domestic paradigm of woman that the later eighteenth-century magazines are said to have constructed and circulated. Another magazine writer similarly invested in exposing the dangers of patriarchy is the ‘young lady’ who anonymously authored ‘Harriet Vernon; or, Characters from Real Life’ (Jan 1807–Mar 1809), a serial that represents the damaging consequences for women dispossessed under the system of primogeniture and that are exacerbated by the social and class constraints prescribing women’s work. ‘Harriet Vernon’ earns a mention in Mayo’s study by virtue of its length – ‘Harriet Vernon’ is the longest magazine novel at 113,000 words (1962: 332) – but this is its least interesting feature. This

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 269

17/11/17 5:01 PM

270

jenny diplacidi

epistolary novel shares many similarities to Austen’s works and particularly to Sense and Sensibility, including key character names (‘Harriet Vernon’ has a Mr Wentworth, Jane, Susan, Marianne), character profiles (it includes a middle-aged career colonel stationed in the East and a parsimonious older half-brother), and plot devices (it follows two financially distressed sisters who were the product of a second marriage and a first, failed relationship in which a libertine lover weds an heiress). The novel details the lives of two young women, Harriet and her sister Maria, as they navigate through various courtships, betrothals, and disappointments. In the end, both sisters marry – Maria marries Mr Charles Wentworth after his marriage to an unfaithful, Catholic cousin is annulled, and Harriet marries Mr Johnson, who plays a pivotal role in exposing her lover’s marriage for money. The serial novel opens with a letter from Miss Harriet Vernon to Miss Susan West in which she describes her life in London with her sister Maria and their miserly older half-brother, Mr George Vernon: A difference nearly of twenty years in our ages precludes, in some degree, that pleasing freedom and familiarity that should mark the fraternal conduct. I believe he loves us better than any thing on earth, his darling money excepted: that he regards in a superlative degree is a notorious fact, and were you to witness our manner of living, you would consider us labouring under the inconveniences of a narrow income; but the world speaks him a man of a very large fortune, and he does not contradict the report but by his actions. (38 (Jan 1807): 25–6) Mr Vernon is frugal to an extreme, and much like John Dashwood, he views his halfsisters as a financial burden. George Vernon writes about his half-sisters to his friend of twenty-one years, Colonel Ambrose, deploring his father’s second marriage: ‘He left them very young: a foolish man, to marry so late in life, unless he could have provided for them! They are quite dependent on me. I had thought of apprenticing them to milliners or mantua-makers; but they ask such high premiums . . . I e’en determined to keep them at home, as perhaps they might get husbands’ (38 (Jan 1807): 28). In providing for his half-sisters in their dependent situation, Mr Vernon, like Fanny Dashwood who limited her husband’s financial assistance to Elinor and Marianne, offers minimal monetary support. When writing to Colonel Ambrose, whom MrVernon has not seen since he left England for the East Indies years earlier, Mr Vernon displays his pennypinching by delaying sending his letter until a free conveyance is available because he refuses to spend a shilling on postage. Such stingy behaviour creates mortifying situations that Harriet describes in her letters; Mr Vernon’s introduction of Mr Wentworth to Colonel Ambrose is one such moment: ‘“I give him thirty pounds a year and his board, and he is not contented.” To describe the confusion of poor Charles is impossible. Maria’s face was suffused with the deepest crimson, and, I believe, mine was the same hue’ (38 (Jan 1807): 30). The financial strictures the sisters face drive much of the novel’s plot that is frequently narrated through Harriet’s often ironic voice that exposes the foibles of herself and those in her social circle. The author of ‘Harriet Vernon’, attuned to what Watt describes as the connection between the novel’s liability to weakness and unreality and ‘the dominance of women readers in the public for the novel’ (1957: 299), plays with the contemporary discourse condemning modern novels and their fraught relationship with gender and consumerism.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 270

17/11/17 5:01 PM

fiction in the LADY’S MAGAZINE (1770–1832)

271

Harriet humorously rejects the alignment of popular romances and sentimental novels with degradation when she describes her subscription to a circulating library as a consolation for being unable to afford attending the lord mayor’s ball: I have subscribed to a circulating library, and have set myself down to study novels. This was much against the approbation of Maria, whose superior prudence I have ever acknowledged. From this kind of reading I have imbibed a romantic idea of love; and unless a swain will die for me, I believe I shall never think him worthy my concern. I know nothing of the world, or of love; but if the descriptions given in these books are just, it must be the most charming thing in nature to see the world, and obtain admirers. I think I will read no more of them, for I begin to be very discontented with my lot. (38 (Jan 1807): 26) The tongue-in-cheek reflections Harriet provides of her views of love engage with the ongoing debates over the potentially dangerous influences of novels on women readers, acknowledging and poking fun at the notion that novel reading made women unfit for domestic life or that romances gave women unrealistic ideas of love. While she claims to have ‘imbibed a romantic idea of love’ she is, unlike Austen’s Marianne who cannot understand the ‘polite’ affection of Elinor and Edward, keenly attuned to love that appears less overt and intense. Harriet writes about her sister’s love interest, Mr Charles Wentworth, revealing to Miss West that she has discovered ‘an attachment to him on Maria’s part; but, with all my penetration, I cannot determine whether she holds an equal place in his affections’ (38 (Jan 1807): 26). Harriet, although a great reader of novels from the circulating library, knows that love and attachment are often readily concealed or set aside to abide by the dictates of prudence or financial necessity. Oliver MacDonagh, following Watt’s association of the realist novel with gritty economics, argues that Sense and Sensibility may be ‘the first English realistic novel, and that getting and spending is the ground floor, if not the very foundation of realism. Moreover, in a book which set out to face the material facts of contemporary marriage, it was most effective as well as artistically right to be economically specific’ (1991: 65). Such specificity is, however, demonstrably not unique to Austen; the anonymous author of ‘Harriet Vernon’ pays close attention to the details of income, debts, and the costs of carriages and clothes. Harriet experiences first-hand the betrayal of a man who, as Austen would later describe, ‘learned to rank the innumerable comforts of a clear estate and good income as of far more importance, even to domestic happiness, than the mere temper of a wife’ (2002: 249). Her fiancé marries secretly ‘an heiress of not less than thirty thousand pounds’ so that he can pay off the debts contracted through a dissolute lifestyle and which his inheritance of £300 per annum is insufficient to cover (38 (Dec 1807): 634). Likewise, when Miss Susan West writes to Harriet of the affection between the penniless Maria and Mr Wentworth she opines that: there is little comfort to be expected in a marriage where there is a lack of money on both sides; unless, indeed, your brother could be prevailed on to draw his purse-strings, which, from your account of his disposition, I fear is not likely. Prudence cannot always direct in the choice of a lover; but it is surely in our power

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 271

17/11/17 5:01 PM

272

jenny diplacidi

to conquer an imprudent passion, though we may not be able to transfer our affections to another. (38 (Feb 1807): 68) The economic tensions within the novel underlie romantic relationships and are fraught with emotional and social embarrassments and disappointments that are at times represented through the giving, receiving, and refusal of gifts. When the Colonel sends the sisters dresses so they can attend a masquerade, a luxury in which they have been unable to indulge, Maria tells the excited Harriet: ‘We have, it is true, every reason to think highly of Colonel Ambrose, but I conceive it highly improper to put ourselves wholly in his power; to say nothing of the obligation we shall lie under to his generosity, for these masquerades are expensive amusement’ (38 (Feb 1807): 67). The debate between the sisters continues for the remainder of the letter and continues into the next instalment of the novel where it is presented from the perspectives of Charles Wentworth and Harriet Vernon to offer multiple analyses of the gift, its motives and what is revealed through the sisters’ responses to it. This type of conversation is, as Linda Zionkowski has shown, familiar from the novels of Samuel Richardson, Burney, and Austen, who also offered sustained, detailed, deliberate discussions of the complex interactions between the cultures of the gift and the market and in featuring these interactions as the conceptual focus of their fiction as a whole. . . . [T]hese three authors exhaustively analyse the sentiments of donors and recipients in light of the matrix of gendered social power in which gift practices occur. (2016: 18–19) The author of ‘Harriet Vernon’ also details a range of gifts throughout the novel, signalling a variety of shifting social, familial, and romantic relationships via the giving and receiving of clothing, jewellery, charity, settlements, and money. In a particularly revealing scene, the sisters are with a rich but stingy distant relation, Mrs Meadows, who is applied to for a donation to assist a family whose house was destroyed by fire. Harriet and Maria immediately offer Mr Rogers half-a-crown each to help the family, which he refuses, judging correctly that they can ill afford such generosity. The wealthy Mrs Meadows only reluctantly gives the same amount, ungraciously asking ‘Will that do, sir?’ Mr Rogers replies that ‘any thing will be accepted’ but makes a note of the amount in his ledger: ‘“Let me see,” said he – “Mr. Jackson, five guineas; Mr. Perkins, three guineas; Mrs. Morris, three guineas; Mrs. Francis, one guinea; Miss Francis, half-a-guinea; Master Francis, five shillings; a gentleman unknown, one guinea; John Long, the beadle, who also assisted at the fire, five shillings; Mrs. Meadows, twoand-sixpence. Good morning to you; I must speed away, or my fifty pounds will not be made up this morning”’ (38 (Supp 1807): 692). The author presents the giving and receiving of charity through a detailed, comparative list that locates gifts within a range of attributes including the donors’ gender, occupation, marital status, age, social status, and/or abode. The minute list of pecuniary details works to subvert the ideal of the beneficent patroness and sentimental charity while nonetheless portraying the sisters’ moral virtue through their sympathetic response to a charitable appeal. The anonymous author’s examination of gift practices, reading and writing, and their links to the economic realities of social life draws on similar, earlier analyses identified by Zionkowski as the conceptual focus of Burney’s and Richardson’s works. The author’s

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 272

17/11/17 5:01 PM

fiction in the LADY’S MAGAZINE (1770–1832)

273

deployment of this focus within ‘Harriet Vernon’ as underlying the courtship and marriage plot following two financially disenfranchised sisters both prefigures and provides a model discernible in Austen’s engagement with these concerns in Sense and Sensibility.

Periodical Fiction and Writers Beyond the Magazines After 1800, over thirty years into the lifespan of the Lady’s Magazine most of the magazine’s popular fiction continued to be published anonymously, pseudonymously, or without an authorial signature of any kind. This culture of anonymous and pseudonymous publication has contributed to scholarship’s failure fully to appreciate the influence of periodical authors’ fictional output. Mayo describes these contributors as ‘amateurs or semi-professionals whose identity outside the miscellanies is a matter of pure speculation’ (1962: 299) and points to the financial appeals of writers such as Miss E. Yeames (Elizabeth Yeames, or Clabon after her marriage) in the Lady’s Magazine and D. P. Campbell in the Lady’s Monthly Musuem (both in 1814) as proof of their status as ‘graduate amateurs [who were] more typical of miscellany writers from 1785–1815 than were genuine professionals. Most of them were never heard from again’ (1962: 300). This is, however, far from the case. D. P. Campbell of the Lady’s Monthly Museum is better known as Dorothea Primrose Campbell, who would go on to publish a novel with A. K. Newman in 1821 and her poetry, published in editions in 1811 and 1816, was not only praised in contemporary reviews but has also been the subject of scholarship by Isobel Grundy (2004–14) and more recently Constance Walker (2014). Batchelor’s recent discoveries regarding Elizabeth Yeames reveal that she wrote prose and poetry for the Lady’s Magazine for decades, with her fiction being republished in American journals long after her death (2016a). Mayo’s examples, indeed, give the lie to claim that magazine fiction and its writers were usually confined to the miscellanies, and are rather proof of the magazine writers’ enduring legacies beyond the periodicals. Many other magazine writers did publish outside of the magazines as professionals in the literary marketplace and works first printed in the magazines were later published in volume form.2 For instance, E.F.’s Gothic novel ‘De Courville Castle’ (Feb 1795–Apr 1797), in addition to being conveyed to a transatlantic audience via its pirated publication in multiple American periodicals, was published in volume form in 1801 and another of E.F.’s novels, ‘The Two Castles, a Romance’ (1798), was published in multiple editions after it appeared in the Lady’s Magazine. A review of George Moore’s novel ‘Grasville Abbey’ (Mar 1793–Aug 1797) states that the novel, originally published in the Lady’s Magazine before being reprinted by the magazine’s owners, the Robinson family, is reprinted . . . at the request of the subscribers to that publication. It is not often that such requests indicate merit, or confer honour; yet the present may be allowed to be an exception. . . . The story is interrupted by digressions, and the interest it creates is powerful. The situations, likewise, have the merit of being new and striking. (Critical Review 21 (1797): 115–16) Though derisive in tone toward the magazine, the language of the review indicates that such reprintings were not in themselves unusual. Likewise, the Gothic Serial novel

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 273

17/11/17 5:01 PM

274

jenny diplacidi

‘Derwent Priory’ (Jan 1796–Sep 1797) was subsequently published as Derwent Priory; or, Memoirs of an Orphan with the subtitle ‘In a Series of Letters, first published periodically; now republished with additions’ (1798). The novel, attributed later to the obscure A. Kendall, is described in its prefatory material as being the author’s ‘first attempt’ (1798: 4). Reviews were generally favourable; one reviewer in the Monthly Mirror found ‘characters to amuse and instruct, and such as are to be found daily in the beaten and busy road of life’ before giving ‘a specimen of the author’s talent for poetry’ (5 (May 1798): 290), and the European Magazine claimed that Kendall ‘advocates the interests of virtue, and blends agreeable amusement with moral instruction’ (33 (1798): 392). Such reviews echo the Lady’s Magazine’s oft-repeated mission to ‘combine amusement with instruction’ (29 (Jan 1798): iii). A. Kendall would go on to publish The Castle on the Rock; or Memoirs of the Elderland Family (1798), Tales of the Abbey (1800), Tales and Poems (1804), Moreland Manor, or Who Is the Heir? (1806) and The School for Parents (1810?). An important indication of Kendall’s success in her own period is that her novel The Castle on the Rock was translated into French by L. F. Bertin as Éliza, ou Mémoires de la famille Elderland (1798).3 Neither authors nor the works of fiction that debuted in the magazines simply disappeared from literary history, then, but played an ongoing role in experimenting with and defining popular literature for a diverse and broad readership. One such author is C. D. Haynes, who published her first Gothic novel, ‘The Castle of Le Blanc, A Tale’ (1816–19) in the Lady’s Magazine; Miss C. D. Haynes or Catharine Day Haynes, later Mrs Catharine Day Golland (Shattock 1999: 930) would go on to publish several novels with the popular Minerva Press. Her Lady’s Magazine novel ‘The Castle of Le Blanc’ blends genres and forms, opening in conventional Gothic style with a young bride, Clara, travelling to the castle of her new husband. On the journey the Marquis le Blanc seems unaccountably agitated and cold but when Clara presses him to explain his distant behaviour he forbids her to question him. Reaching his ancestral home ‘the ponderous gate of the castle opened to receive them—a cold shivering ran through the frame of Clara; she viewed it as the grave of the departed happiness’ (37 (Oct 1816): 439). The novel takes on an increasingly Radcliffean tone of threatening, patriarchal power when Clara, pregnant and alone in the castle with her husband, is desperately unhappy and feels trapped, ‘distant from all her relatives, in the power of a man in whom she now had no confidence’ (38 (Aug 1817): 357) and regrets her decision to wed him rather than Carlos, her childhood companion. Then, drawing on conventions from The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Clara hears the strains of a lute accompanied by a song that offers comfort in her despair. Far from merely reworking familiar Gothic tropes, however, Haynes weaves an unusual amalgamation of sentimental and moral tales into the novel via an inset courtship narrative that provides background on Clara’s parents. The inset tale introduces comic elements and feminist undertones when the virtuous heroine Julia cross-dresses as a gamester and, assisted by the faithful Selena, successfully wins her lover’s fortune from him before he loses his estates to his enemies, persevering despite his seeming preference for a beautiful siren, Camilla. Haynes apparently did not view her paid work for the Minerva Press as a move beyond writing for the Lady’s Magazine, but rather as contiguous to her work for it. First, Haynes’s novels The Foundling of Devonshire, or Who is She? (1818) and Augustus and Adeline, or, the Monk of St. Barnardine: a Romance (1819) were printed

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 274

17/11/17 5:01 PM

fiction in the LADY’S MAGAZINE (1770–1832)

275

with the Minerva Press/A. K. Newman while ‘The Castle of Le Blanc’ was still being serialised in in the Lady’s Magazine, indicating a potential overlap between the production of Minerva and magazine novels. Second, in 1822, after Haynes had published at least three novels in volume form (in addition to the aforementioned two, she published Eleanor, or the Spectre of St. Michael’s: a romantic tale (1821, tr. Fr. 1841) she sent the editors of the Lady’s Magazine another manuscript. Her offering, however, was rejected by the Lady’s Magazine editors who, although aware of Haynes’s paid work for the Minerva Press, did not seem to view the mantle of professionalism implied by publication in volume form as a basis for publishing more of her works in their magazine. The editors note that they received her tale, the ‘Single Gentleman, or a Flight of Fancy’ before sarcastically opining ‘that this produce of her fancy does not suit our new arrangements or our present system: the manuscript, therefore, will be returned by our publisher on demand’ (53 (Nov 1822): 640). Haynes would publish at least another four novels in the decades to follow. Though her fiction in the magazines is not the most original or skilled work to be found in contemporary periodicals, it is for precisely that reason that her professional career is so fascinating. An average writer for the magazines, Haynes was nonetheless a paid novelist with over half a dozen titles in some of the most popular presses of the day. This hints at the intriguing possibility that the writers of magazine fiction who were the most original and skilled (such as the anonymous authors of ‘Humble Friend’ or ‘Harriet Vernon’) may also have been publishing novels in volume form at a far greater rate than previously imagined. In the Lady’s Magazine the culture that fostered novelists and created a thriving environment in which they could publish lengthy prose fiction largely dried up after 1819. The editors of the magazine notified those Correspondents who are in the habit of supplying us with occasional Tales, that no Tale can, in future, be admitted into our Miscellany which extends longer than three of four numbers: and the authors of all the Novels now in progress are particularly requested to bring them to a conclusion as early as possible; as we have plans in perspective for the amusement of our readers, which we cannot mature till we have a little more space. (50 (Mar 1819): n. p.) In light of such restrictions, contributors such as the author of the ‘Castle and The Cottage’ (June 1818–Feb 1819, uncompleted) left the magazine and took their works elsewhere. The prolific, anonymous writer of the ‘Castle and The Cottage’ moved to the Lady’s Monthly Museum, where the entirety of the unfinished novel was published from 1822 to 1823, along with several other serial novels throughout the remainder of the decade. Mayo writes of the original miscellany fiction that ‘there is nothing in the over-all picture from which the eighteenth-century apologist can take heart’, describing it as ‘trashy, affected, and egregiously sentimental. Judged as literary art, it was devoid of imagination and wretchedly written’ (1962: 351). One need not, however, be an apologist to take heart at the wealth of magazine fiction that was well-written, original, and fundamental to the development of the novel, the ongoing popularity of Gothic, revitalisations of the epistolary form and highly attuned to the social and legal injustices of its contemporary society. Magazine fiction refutes traditional literary criticism that judges it to be unoriginal and unprofessional and its contributors a mob of scribbling amateurs. Rather, the magazines can be understood as

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 275

17/11/17 5:01 PM

276

jenny diplacidi

both a medium through which emerging writers reached a wide audience, to view and respond to the reception of their work by the magazine’s readership and a space in which professionals continued to publish in and return to. This is perhaps unsurprising; as literary historian Edward Copeland points out about the immense popularity of the Lady’s Magazine, ‘everybody’ read the periodical (2004: 121).

Notes Research for this chapter was generously supported by a Research Project Grant awarded by the Leverhulme Trust, entitled ‘The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1818): Understanding the Emergence of a Genre’ for which the author was Research Associate between 2014 and 2016. 1. Radcliffe’s most popular novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), was published by George Robinson’s immensely successful family-run firm. The Robinsons also published the Lady’s Magazine and had a reputation for publishing innovative and popular fiction that sold well. In addition to publishing popular novels and periodicals, Robinson also published political works such as William Godwin’s expensive Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). His commitment to radical literature caused Robinson to be fined in 1793 for selling Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791); JoEllen DeLucia’s excellent essay examines Radcliffe’s writings in light of her relationship with Robinson and his radical circle (2015). 2. Mayo argued that much of the fiction ‘was not considered worth publishing in separate form’ (1962: 2) and Hughes suggests that the women’s magazines could rarely ‘serve as a starting point for the professional novelist’, citing only C. D. Haynes as such an example (2015: 467). 3. The title page of the 1798 edition of Derwent Priory states that the work is ‘by the author of “The Castle on the Rock”’, referring to the 1798 novel The Castle on the Rock; or, Memoirs of the Elderland Family. This novel was reviewed in the Monthly Mirror, immediately preceding a review of Derwent Priory, as having ‘no affectation in the style of this well wrought fable; its sentiments are those of purity; its characters those of nature; and its moral unexceptionable’ (5 (May 1798): 290).

Works Cited Austen, Jane. 2002. Sense and Sensibility. Ed. Claudia L. Johnson. New York: Norton. Batchelor, Jennie. 2011. ‘“Connections, which are of service . . . in a more advanced age”: The Lady’s Magazine, Community, and Women’s Literary Histories’. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 30.2: 245–67. —. 2016a. ‘Confessions of a Periodicalist’. (last accessed 20 Dec 2017). —. 2016b. ‘Jane Austen, the Lady’s Magazine and what if Mr Knightley didn’t marry Emma?’ (last accessed 20 Dec 2017). Bryan, Helen. 2002. Martha Washington: First Lady of Liberty. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Copeland, Edward. 1989. ‘Money Talks: Jane Austen and the Lady’s Magazine’. Jane Austen’s Beginnings: Juvenilia and Lady Susan. Ed. J. David Grey. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. 153–71. —. 2004. Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DeLucia, JoEllen. 2015. ‘Radcliffe, George Robinson and Eighteenth-Century Print Culture: Beyond the Circulating Library’. Women’s Writing 22.3: 287–99.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 276

17/11/17 5:01 PM

fiction in the LADY’S MAGAZINE (1770–1832)

277

Gamer, Michael. 2004. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grundy, Isobel. 2004–14. ‘Dorothea Primrose Campbell’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (last accessed 10 Dec 2016). Hughes, Gillian. 2015. ‘Fiction in the Magazines’. The Oxford History of the Novel in English: English and British Fiction 1750–1820. Ed. Peter Garside and Karen O’Brien. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 461–528. MacDonagh, Oliver. 1991. Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Mayo, Robert. 1962. The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740–1815. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miles, Robert. 1995. Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Radcliffe, Ann. 1794. The Mysteries of Udolpho. London: G. G. and J. Robinson. —. 1796. The Italian. London: T. Cadell and W. Davies. Scott, Sir Walter. 1833. The Complete Works of Sir Walter Scott; with a Biography. Vol 6. New York: Conner and Cooke. Shattock, Joanne. 1999. The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, 1800–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shevelow, Kathryn. 1989. Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical. London: Routledge. Siskin, Clifford. 1999. The Work of Writing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Walker, Constance. 2014. ‘Dorothea Primrose Campbell: A Newly Discovered Pseudonym, Poems and Tales’. Women’s Writing 21.4: 592–698. Watt, Ian. 1957. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 277

17/11/17 5:01 PM

18 ‘This Lady is Descended from a Good Family’: Women and Biography in British Magazines, 1770–1798 Hannah Doherty Hudson

If the morning of the present age was . . . rendered brilliant by . . . men, a constellation of female genius, no less splendid, illumines the evening. . . . To indulge immediate curiosity, as well as to furnish authentic materials for subsequent biography, we shall make it an object of our peculiar attention to record the memoirs of such of our contemporary authors as shall be distinguished by public approbation, more especially of those females, whose writings reflect so much lustre on themselves and their country. ‘Biographical Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald’. General Magazine 1 (Oct 1787): 115.

B

iography, in many guises, features largely in the periodicals of the late eighteenth century. Publications like the New London Magazine (1785–93) – by its own modest proclamation, ‘A Work far Superior to other Monthly Publications’ – specifically name ‘Biography’ as one of the features on which their superiority depends (July 1785: title page). Others, like the European Magazine (1782–1826), include many different kinds of content yet begin virtually every issue with a biography of an influential figure. Explicitly biographical magazines sprang up every few years in the last quarter of the century, including the Historical, Biographical, Literary, and Scientific Magazine (1799–1800), the Literary and Biographical Magazine (1791–4), and at least three different short-lived Biographical Magazines (1776; 1791; 1794).1 Despite its near ubiquity, however, the magazine biography was not an equal-opportunity genre: through much of the eighteenth century women were largely excluded from its purview, although I discuss some important exceptions to this below. As I will suggest in this essay, the axes of ‘genius’, ‘curiosity’, and ‘public approbation’ laid out by Elizabeth Inchbald’s biographer in the epigraph above made it peculiarly difficult for many women to fit within their confines.2 Gender informed eighteenth-century periodical biography in both implicit and explicit ways. ‘Sketches of Female Biography’ (1776–7), an occasional feature in the Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770–1832), for instance, implies that ‘biography’ was male-focused unless otherwise specified; such an assumption is borne out by the marked predominance of male-centred biographical pieces in most magazines of the period. The Biographical Magazine launched in 1794, for example, contains 138 profiles of luminaries ranging from Chaucer to Christopher Wren to Jonathan Swift – not a single woman, however, is included. One might expect

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 278

17/11/17 5:01 PM

women and biography in british magazines

279

men to outnumber women in this sort of historically based line-up, given the disproportionate number of men who were famous, but the complete omission of even such well-known women as Queen Elizabeth or Mary, Queen of Scots clearly seems to indicate a programmatic exclusion rather than a simple imbalance of representation. Indeed, looking across the range of magazines in the 1770s, 1780s, and 1790s reveals this to be largely the case. To take a characteristic example, in the New London Magazine’s October 1785 issue there are eighteen biographies.3 Just one is of a woman, the balloonist Mrs Sage; not only is she outnumbered, but her biography itself is minimised, featured alongside that of her fellow aerialist (a man) and focusing almost entirely on her famous ascent, not her life (1: 178). Similarly, the first volume of the European Magazine (Jan–June 1782) features sixteen biographies; only two are of women. If the brief ‘Anecdotes of Authors’ included in most issues are counted, the ratio decreases still further; no women at all are included, while several men are discussed each month. Women are seldom featured in magazines like these – and when they are, the exceptionality of the circumstance is often highlighted: it is unusual, noteworthy, requiring explanation or defence. Yet, even readers who expected biography to be masculine by default were clearly interested in the lives of women – at least, certain women, in certain circumstances. Female magazine biographies increase in frequency and scope in the final decades of the eighteenth century, culminating in the launch of several new magazines – in particular, the Lady’s Monthly Museum in 1798, La Belle Assemblée in 1806, and the New British Lady’s Magazine in 1819 – that featured illustrated biographies of contemporary women on a near-monthly basis.4 In this essay I broadly consider the state of female magazine biography prior to the dramatic reshaping and growth of the genre that followed the first publication of the Lady’s Monthly Museum in 1798. I offer two case studies to illuminate the discussion: first, an account of all the headlining biographies of women in the European Magazine during this period, and second, a comparative close reading of a group of biographies of Elizabeth Inchbald, one of the very few women to feature in multiple lengthy and high-profile biographies before 1798. By and large, the inclusion of women in periodical biographies in this period seems to depend on two considerations. First, is the woman in question sufficiently interesting? This ‘interest’ might derive from genius or talent, from social connections, or from other kinds of accomplishment. Considered from this angle, it is unsurprising that relatively few women are featured: women were unlikely to be bishops, generals, explorers, barristers, or to intervene in world events in the way that men in these professions, who were frequently profiled, could. The other consideration is more slippery: is it appropriate for a woman to be featured publicly, and if so, what can be revealed about her? Depending on a woman’s occupation and status, the answer to this question seems to vary considerably. Magazines at times adopt an almost protective tone toward their subjects, implying that it would not be ladylike for certain facts about them to be revealed. The very scarcity of contemporary women in magazine biographies may thus be due in part to an editorial reluctance to exploit and potentially harm women by featuring them as subjects – or, more cynically, a reluctance to alienate readers who might find exposés of women unseemly. Different authors and different magazines adopt a variety of approaches to this problem, but a central paradox must always be accounted for: a female biographical subject must be admirable, yet for a woman there seems to be something profoundly not admirable about being featured so publicly.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 279

17/11/17 5:01 PM

280

hannah doherty hudson

Varieties of Biography A discussion about magazine biographies of women must begin first of all with defining what we mean by ‘biography’, a more complicated problem than one might anticipate, given the wildly rich and various troves of information contained within the pages of these publications.5 I have identified biographical essays headed in various magazines as ‘Some Account’, ‘Memoirs’, ‘Sketch’, ‘Biographical Anecdote’, ‘Life and Writings’, ‘Biographical Memoir’, ‘A Genealogical Account’, ‘The Life’, ‘Genuine Memoirs’, ‘Authentic Memoirs’, ‘Literary and Biographical Anecdotes’, and ‘An Account of the Life’; even this list is not exhaustive. Moreover, pieces with exactly the same kind of titles as previously identified biographies often prove not to be substantial biographies. Inconsistency rules, and the reproduction of identical pieces under different headings in different magazines seems to confirm that biographical terminology was used in a variety of ways by different publications. Thus, indices and tables of contents, while theoretically helpful, conceal many biographies under misleading subheadings and label other pieces as biographical which turn out, under closer inspection, to be primarily anecdotal, fictional, or merely so brief as to provide virtually no useful information. Simply paging through every issue of each magazine, while obviously the most time-consuming approach, is also the most rewarding: doing so reveals the wealth of biographical material belied by the scarcity of long-form, prominent biographies of women. There are biographies of women labelled as ‘female biography’ and those that are not. There are biographies of women masquerading as book reviews, as obituaries, as gossip items, and biographical titbits sprinkled throughout articles on all sorts of other topics. Magazine biography, in short, takes many forms. Given the by-definition miscellaneous quality of eighteenth-century magazines, it is unsurprising that the kinds of women’s biographies we find within them would be varied: this holds true for biographies of men as well. The fact, however, that women appear with relative frequency in some kinds of biographical writing (obituaries and historical biographies, particularly) and much less frequently in others (substantial contemporary profiles) also has something to do with the genre of biography itself. Periodical biographies necessarily walk a line between repetition and revelation: their subjects usually must be well known enough to spark readerly interest; at the same time, periodicals must promise (if not always deliver) new information to merit reading, month after month.6 This tension is especially marked for women subjects, for whom a place in the public eye, however purposefully established or artfully maintained, often carried a risk of perceived impropriety, unfeminine self-aggrandisement, or worse.7 Thus, a three-sentence ‘Biographical Anecdote’ of an aristocratic woman, focused entirely on her lineage and jointure, escapes most negative associations – obviously, however, such an approach also forecloses the biography’s role as vehicle for critique or publicity, and much of its potential interest as well. Similarly, a ‘memoir’ of a long-deceased woman, such as Catherine de Medici or Boadicea, may more freely discuss (or invent) its subject’s facts and foibles than might a work describing a still-living powerful woman. Claims about ‘biography’, then, must first be carefully delineated: which biographies, exactly, are being discussed? While noting the incredible diversity of biographical pieces in eighteenth-century periodicals, for the remainder of this essay I focus on what might be termed ‘feature biographies’: substantive pieces, primarily concerned with the life-to-date of

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 280

17/11/17 5:01 PM

women and biography in british magazines

281

the subject, often with an accompanying portrait. In particular, I attend to the prominent illustrated biographies that are found on the first pages of many of the period’s magazines. These rare biographies that write at length about contemporary women are, I suggest, of particular interest for their carefully orchestrated portrayals of their subjects’ accomplishments and vulnerabilities. Hinting at titillating details while maintaining (at least ostensibly) the excellence of the women they describe, the biographers resort to various stratagems to carry out their delicate task. Many deploy genealogy – a standard ingredient in eighteenth-century biography – strategically, using claims about the virtue or importance of a woman’s family as implicit justification for her inclusion in the magazine as well as assurance of her good character. Naturally, this strategy is most noteworthy when either the importance of the family or the morals of the lady seem somewhat in question, as in the quotation from my title, which is the first line of a biography of the admired – but undeniably scandalous – actress and author Mary Robinson (Scots Magazine 56 (July 1794): 403). Magazine biographers are also no strangers to the art of the delicate evasion, as when the Lady’s Monthly Museum, after a one-sentence allusion to Robinson’s infamous and highly publicised affair with the Prince Regent, continues primly, ‘Our remarks will now be confined to Mrs. Robinson’s literary pursuits’ (6 (Jan 1801): 2). As authors were among the most commonly profiled female subjects, the strategy of ‘confin[ing]’ discussion to ‘literary pursuits’ – focusing on work, rather than personal lives – provided one simple means of bolstering the subject’s celebrity without crossing the line into infamy. In 1774, the Hibernian Magazine (1771–85) gave Madame Du Bocage, ‘This celebrated authoress’, top billing in their August issue, featuring an ‘Elegant Portrait of that Lady’ along with a substantial two-anda-half-page ‘memoir’ in the magazine’s opening pages (4: 431–3).8 A closer inspection, however, reveals that this length is deceptive: only the first paragraph contains biography, and that is limited to a positive remark on her ‘elegant writings’ and ‘lovely form’, and a brief recitation of her lineage, marriage, and travels. The rest of the piece comprises a list of her writings (accompanied by the remark that ‘not to have heard of her works, argues a person to be quite a stranger in the republic of letters’ (431)) and the reproduction of a poem and a letter written by her. Nothing untoward is revealed in such a recital, and the lady’s reputation seems unlikely to be harmed by it; on the other hand, a reader hoping to learn something actually new about the subject may well be disappointed. Actresses are the other group of women most frequently featured in biographies. While the tone of these pieces, like those about authors, is nearly always positive and full of praise (at least overtly), there seems to be a greater willingness on the part of the biographer to expose the personal foibles or past missteps of the subject, who has, after all, already placed herself conspicuously in the public eye. Thus, while actresses are often lauded for their talent in terms nearly as strong as those used to describe female authors, their presence on the stage seems to indemnify the biographer, to some extent, from charges of violating feminine modesty. The moral tone, accordingly, is rather different: what would not be acceptable in a discussion of a novelist or poet, the content of these biographies suggests, is already taken for granted in the portrayal of an actress. As Laura Engel suggests in her essay in this volume on celebrity periodical portraiture, the portraits that so often accompany these biographies heighten the sense that their subjects are at once ‘distant objects and . . . available commodities’ (469);

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 281

17/11/17 5:01 PM

282

hannah doherty hudson

they are lovely, unreachable, and admirable, but also available for visual consumption and personal critique.9 In ‘Some Memoirs of Miss Hughes’, another Walker’s Hibernian Magazine first-page feature from June 1788, we see these differences illustrated from the title onwards. Whereas Madame Du Bocage’s portrait was described as that of a ‘Lady’, Miss Hughes’s (which shows her full body, as opposed to just her face) is characterised as showing ‘that much followed Actress’ (281). The slight backhandedness of this description – is she talented, or merely ‘much followed’? – echoes through the piece, which, after describing the various performances in which Miss Hughes has acted, concludes with another ambiguous declaration: ‘Of her theatrical abi[l]ities, it would be needless to enlarge, as most of our readers must have seen her perform, and of course, have already formed a judgment of them’ (281). This statement sounds relatively similar to the claims about universal familiarity with the writings of Madam du Bocage above, yet coupled with the rest of the biography – which details Miss Hughes’s ‘taste for splendor, elegance, and polite dissipation’ and refers to her multiple love affairs as ‘common fame’ – it leaves a less respectful impression (281). A Walker’s Hibernian Magazine biography of the actress Miss Farren in July 1794 occupies a middle ground. The biographer describes her ‘great merit and superior talents’ (1) in apparently sincere terms, and spends considerable time listing the different performances in which she appears, but also details her troubled financial history and the ‘most sincere attachment’ of her suitor Lord Derby, suggesting, most damningly, that ‘It is probable . . . that her own merit . . . would never have raised her to the eminence she now holds; or, at least, would never have attracted so much public attention, had she not kindled a flame in the breast of the Rt. Hon. C. J. Fox’ (2). While talent is generally a precondition of biographical subject-hood (though, as we shall see below, there are exceptions), it is often presented in these pieces as inversely proportional to another desirable quality, the ability to satisfy readerly curiosity. Another actress, Miss Brunton, who was profiled in the opening pages of the Westminster Magazine (1773–85) in November 1785 in much kinder terms, illustrates this point. This biography begins with the unpromising line: ‘Of the life of an actress so young much cannot be expected as a biographical sketch’ (13: 563). And indeed, the article contains very little to satisfy an enquiring reader: it discusses her father’s finances, lists the theatres in which she has appeared and the roles she has played, and takes the tone of a faintly condescending review when praising her ‘sweet and powerful’ voice and her ‘not very expressive, but pleasing’ face (13: 563). But the biographer’s overall impression is unequivocally positive: calling her a ‘prodigy’, the profile goes on to declare, ‘Genius, only, could have made Miss Brunton what she is’ (13: 563, 564). Strikingly, even as this praise bolsters her credibility as a biographical subject – she possesses the outstanding qualities, genius in particular, that merit biographical coverage – the biographer’s minimal treatment of the rest of her life suggests that more interesting revelation here would likely dilute or detract from the positive portrait. She is at once a genius and ‘perfectly feminine’ (13: 563). The actress’s youth may indeed mean that the biographer hasn’t much to work with; however, deliberate brevity is also a strategy, which here functions protectively to highlight the subject’s accomplishments. A biography of a woman may praise her moral qualities, laud her genius, or be long and interesting – but only in a few rare cases can all three characteristics coexist.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 282

17/11/17 5:01 PM

women and biography in british magazines

283

The European Magazine’s Female Subjects The European Magazine, as one of the longest-running monthly magazines from this era to feature a biographical profile and engraved frontispiece at the front of nearly every issue,10 provides a fascinating longitudinal study of the ways that women were represented in feature biography in the 1780s and 1790s. The magazine began in January 1782; it was not until March of 1786 – more than four years and nearly fifty opening biographies later – that a woman graced the first page.11 ‘Mrs. Anna-Lætitia Barbauld, formerly Miss Aikin’, was the woman who received this honour, and the magazine acknowledges the novelty of the choice, beginning the profile with a description of the ‘universal’ and ‘absurd’ ‘aversion which used to prevail against female claims to literary reputation’ (9: 139). Fortunately, the author suggests, ‘present times’ have banished such prejudices, and now the contributions of women to ‘science . . . human knowledge, and . . . the innocent and improving amusements of life’ can be freely appreciated (139). The magazine’s progressive stance mirrors attitudes seen in other publications around this time;12 as we shall see, however, the editorial decision to include more women did not necessarily obviate problems in writing biography about them. Barbauld, or ‘Our authoress’, is praised as ‘no less celebrated for her intellectual than her personal endowments’ (139). She ‘had the advantage of an excellent education from her respectable father, and seems early to have shewn her poetical genius’ (139). A large proportion of the biography is spent reproducing several specimens of Barbauld’s poetry, as well as describing her other publications. The tone is interestingly ambiguous: the admiration of her work seems wholehearted, but also predicated on a belief in Barbauld’s stereotypically feminine modesty. While the ‘excellence’ of her poems is praised, the biographer also remarks approvingly that ‘Since her marriage, she seems to have devoted her attention to the initiation and improvement of children in letters’, producing ‘several little pieces . . . useful and unambitious performances’ (140). While the praise of Barbauld’s ‘genius’ and the choice to represent her, in her portrait, in classical guise – she appears in profile, as in a Roman frieze, wearing classical garb and a wreath – hints at a timeless and non-gendered intellect, the admiration is in fact strongly inflected by gendered expectations. In closing, the biographer cites one of Barbauld’s own poems as ‘not inapplicable to herself’, and the choice of work is not coincidental: the poem speaks ‘Of gentle manners, and of taste refin’d’ and a subject whose ‘ready fingers plied with equal skill / The pencil’s task, the needle, or the quill’ (140). Barbauld is admirable for her genius, yes, but only because that genius comes in a pleasingly feminine, retiring, and domestic package, as skilled at needlework as in poetry. Barbauld’s purported lack of ambition, her willingness to marry and thereafter dedicate her work to such a typically ‘feminine’ pursuit as the education of children, paradoxically authorises the biographer to write about, and praise, her. By deliberately avoiding the public eye, Barbauld becomes an appropriate subject to be lauded in the public venue of biography. However conflicted the European Magazine’s updated thinking on the matter of female accomplishment may have been, the appearance of Barbauld’s biography does seem to mark a shift in gender representation in their most visible biographies. While it had taken over four years for their first illustrated profile of a woman subject to appear, the next one, of Mrs Fitzherbert, famously the mistress and secret wife of

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 283

17/11/17 5:01 PM

284

hannah doherty hudson

the Prince of Wales, was published the very next month, in April 1786. Only a few months later, in July, another woman, Hester Thrale Piozzi, was featured in the top position, and the following April, the Duchess of Devonshire took the spot. After this initial rush, however, whatever energies inspired the shift seem to have slowly dwindled again, rather than gaining momentum. From 1787 to 1789, one or two issues per year feature women on the frontispiece; from 1790 to 1792 three women were featured, all in 1791. The 1793–5 issues feature just one woman per year, and 1796–7 saw no women at all, with the next one appearing in March of 1798, the final year of my analysis and three years after the last front-page female biography. Who were these women? Unsurprisingly, the majority of the women profiled in these biographies fit into the two categories I discuss above: by and large, they are authors or actresses (or, in a few cases, both). The occupations of the fourteen subjects break down as follows: eight authors; five actresses; and seven women who are especially notable for their social rank or aristocratic associations – four duchesses, Mary Robinson, the Chevalier D’Eon,13 and Mrs Fitzherbert, royal mistress and secret wife. Two of the authors, Elizabeth Inchbald and Mary Robinson, were also actresses (and, in Robinson’s case, a royal mistress as well), and the Chevalier D’Eon was known for writing as well as social connections and numerous other exploits. All have been included in my counts in all relevant categories. Elizabeth Inchbald, who was featured on the first page of the January 1788 issue, is a particularly interesting subject, largely because of her dual identities as scandalous actress and respectable author; I discuss her European Magazine biography as part of my analysis in the next section. Mary Robinson’s profile, which is similarly intersectional, appeared in January 1793, and is notable for its efforts to establish the already (in)famous Robinson as a retiring and sensitive author. It begins, ‘This lady, whose literary talents we have had frequent occasions to celebrate, is descended from a good family’, employing the same appeal to family respectability used the next year by the Scots Magazine, but simultaneously making it clear that ‘literary talents’, not Robinson’s other accomplishments or escapades, are to be the grounds on which she is here assessed (23: 3). One column is spent discussing her ‘ancient family’ and the excellence of her early education, with her theatrical career summed up in less than a paragraph, attributed to her father’s ‘embarrassed . . . circumstances’ (3). Three seasons of performances are listed in a single sentence, and her role as Perdita (the one in which she famously captured the heart of the Prince Regent) is mentioned only as follows: ‘In the latter character she attracted the notice of a distinguished personage, which occasioned her secession from the Theatre’ (3). Thereafter the piece discusses only Robinson’s writing, and though the biographer declares, ‘Of a lady whose name is so well known, it will be expected we should gratify our readers with some further particulars’, these particulars consist only of the claim that her European Magazine portrait is the ‘best celebration of her exquisite beauty’ and a quote from a source that speaks of her ‘exquisite sensibility and tenderness of mind, blended with a vivacity of temper that has frequently led her into hasty decisions’ (4). The piece closes with a tacit assurance that these kinds of hasty decisions are unlikely to occur again, noting both that Robinson educates her daughter ‘with the cautious exactitude of the most rigid governess’ and that the author has been ‘for near six years . . . a victim of rheumatic attacks’ (4). All hints of past disreputability are explained away by ‘vivacity’ and such possibilities are foreclosed for the future with the image of a woman who is both a doting and strict parent and a retiring invalid.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 284

17/11/17 5:01 PM

women and biography in british magazines

285

Profiles of authors known primarily for their writing include Mrs Hester Piozzi (formerly Mrs Thrale; now perhaps best-known for her diaries and travel writing) and Mrs Hannah Cowley. The former, featured in July 1786, is described as impeccably respectable, with ‘a very careful education’ and ‘excellent talents’; her renown is, however, very clearly attributed to her association with a better-known male figure: ‘by means of the friendly intercourse which has subsisted between her family and Dr. Johnson, [she] has obtained no inconsiderable portion of literary reputation’ (10: 5). Considerable space is devoted to the reproduction of a letter written by Mrs Thrale about her meeting with Johnson; this occurrence is described as ‘the most conspicuous one respecting Mrs. Thrale’ and her subsequent life is described as placid and homely – the ‘years passed on with few varieties’ and ‘Domestic employments and literary pursuits filled up her time’ (5–6). The Johnsonian focus is largely explained by the eventual revelation that ‘we have derived most of this article’ from Piozzi’s ‘Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson’ (6); through these means, the author is praised, but also diminished, presented as tidily domestic and willingly subordinate to more powerful and prominent men. This approach is doubtless due in part to the limited availability of material about Piozzi – in 1786 few of her significant writings would have been available to the public – but also seems consistent with the gendered approaches to women subjects seen in other profiles.14 The playwright and poet Hannah Cowley (16 (June 1789): 427–8) receives much stronger praise in her own right. ‘From few authors now living has more theatrical entertainment been derived’ the biographer remarks, and ‘from scarce any one, when we reflect on the fertility of her genius, is more to be expected’ (427). That keyword, ‘genius’, is accompanied by its usual gendered corollaries here: admiration and lack of fascinating detail. Mrs Cowley’s ‘respectable’ family is described, along with an excerpt of one of her poems praising her parents. Her marriage and early writing career are also discussed, with speculations as to her possible secret identity as the poet ‘Anna Matilda’ as well as the interesting claim that ‘she is not merely distinguished by literary endowments; for her engaging person and manners render her conspicuous in those lines where ladies generally like to be conspicuous’ (427). Literary accomplishment, this remark implies, is not an arena in which ladies ought to aspire to conspicuousness (and certainly not at the expense of their charming ‘person and manners’), and the conclusion of this biography makes this explicit: ‘In the life of one devoted to literature there is seldom to be recorded either incident or adventure. In that of Mrs. Cowley, the even tenor of domestic life has been little varied, consequently no circumstance has arisen worthy of particular notice’ (428). An unadorned list of her works follows. The features on highly ranked women are, on the whole, very short. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that for these profiles the biographer clearly cannot include scurrilous details, but also lacks the ability to fill page space with lengthy listings of works. Nonetheless, the effect is slightly comical, and occasionally even a bit insulting. In the July 1791 issue, for instance, the opening biography begins: At the desire of some Correspondents, we deviate this Month from our usual custom, and leaving literature and politics to a future opportunity, present our Readers with what must always afford pleasure to the beholder—a portrait of a Lady not less distinguished by her beauty, than by her high rank and accomplishments. (20: 3)

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 285

17/11/17 5:01 PM

286

hannah doherty hudson

The following piece, featuring Jane, the Duchess of Gordon, takes up less than a third of the page and does emphasise her rank, but mentions nary an accomplishment (save children); its brevity is only emphasised by the fact that it is immediately followed by a three-page biography of a male subject. In this, the magazine was relatively consistent; two years prior, the biography of the Duchess of Rutland (16 (Dec 1789): 395) consisted of a single paragraph. The Duchess of Devonshire, the first subject in this category, received, at least, a full page of praise (April 1787); it is, however, entirely of a domestic and feminine nature; while she was in fact an author, albeit anonymously, at the time of the piece’s publication, the biographer makes no mention of her writing, her political activities, or her famously tumultuous personal life, instead focusing on her beauty and maternal qualities. Indeed, the piece begins with a claim we may recognise by now, but which stands out nonetheless as either sarcastic or deliberately ingenuous, given its patent untruth in this particular case: ‘Of a lady on whom fortune has bestowed youth, wealth, and beauty, little of incident is to be expected’ (9: 219). Another aristocratic subject, the Chevalier D’Eon, merits a much lengthier profile, but also challenges categorisation in more complex ways.15 The Chevalier is described in the biography explicitly as a woman, in keeping with widespread opinion at the time16 – the European Magazine refers to ‘Mademoiselle la Chevaliere d’Eon’ and uses female pronouns throughout. However, as the biographer notes, the Chevalier lived as a man for many years, and the accomplishments and adventures recounted in this piece are narrated in a way that aligns more with mainstream biographies of men than those of women. Lengthy enumerations of the Chevalier’s educational qualifications, writings, career accomplishments, daring travels, and diplomatic machinations sit uneasily beside the biographer’s assertion that since ‘an express order for the resumption of her sex’, ‘Mademoiselle D’Eon’ has been perhaps best-known for, among other things, ‘the sprightliness of her wit’ and ‘her many very respectable friends’ (19 (Mar 1791): 164). Mrs Fitzherbert, the only female subject with neither artistic talents nor aristocratic birth, is profiled in a biography that is a masterpiece of backhandedness, maintaining the complimentary tone of all the other biographies while simultaneously denying her any grounds for genuine admiration. It begins: ‘Deeming it our duty to furnish information concerning such persons as may at any time become the objects of publick attention, we shall, for the entertainment of our readers . . . leave both the great and the learned, to pay our respects to a lady, whose fame is, in a great measure, owing to her personal accomplishments’ (9 (Apr 1786): 227). These ‘accomplishments’ are never described, but the reader is left in little doubt as to their nature as the writer meditates upon ‘[t]he caprices of youth, the influence of beauty, [and] the charms of wit’ before describing her first marriage and cryptically declaring, after a reference to her relationship with a ‘Great Personage’: ‘In what character she is to be considered, whether as wife or widow, conjecture alone can be exerted’ (227). The rather unflattering portrait that accompanies the biography adds to the tone of mockery. Interestingly, given the relative frequency with which actresses are profiled elsewhere, the European Magazine’s first feature biography of a woman known primarily as an actress was not published until 1794 – more than twelve years after the magazine’s founding. Yet from 1794 until 1798, the only women featured were actresses: Susannah Cibber, Margaret Woffington, and Mrs Abington. This shift in

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 286

17/11/17 5:01 PM

women and biography in british magazines

287

focus is mirrored by another: two of the three profiles were posthumous, an unprecedented circumstance in the Magazine’s front-page coverage of women to date. These two subjects, Cibber (25 (Oct 1794): 243–5) and Woffington (27 (Jan 1795): 3–5) both merit unusually lengthy biographies – Cibber’s runs across an impressive three issues of the magazine – and it seems plain that their deaths free the biographer to speak candidly about such issues as extramarital relationships, without necessitating the kind of accompanying moral judgement that we might see in a living subject. One of Cibber’s affairs is described matter-of-factly, for instance: Mrs Cibber ‘by this time having lost all regard for [her husband], continued a connection with [a] Mr. Sloper, which had begun before, and resided with him during the absence of her husband’ (245). While the author does briefly characterise this as a ‘disgraceful state’, the apparently ‘despicable’ Mr Cibber is really the only one to be criticised – he is described as ‘an object of both pity and contempt’, while his wife continues to be described positively for the rest of the lengthy essay (245). Mrs Abington, the one of this group to be featured while still alive, is nonetheless described in very post-tense terms: her biographer begins with a quotation bemoaning the fact that an actress’s skill ‘can but faintly glimmer through the memory or imperfect attestation of a few surviving spectators’ (33 (Mar 1798): 147). As we eventually learn, the actress is not in fact dead, but merely retired; though the lengthy profile is filled with ecstatic descriptions of her talent, it closes with clear approval of her retreat from the public: ‘To these very distinguished talents . . . let the praise of private life be added’ (151).

‘Our heroine’: Biographies of Elizabeth Inchbald Despite the massive imbalance in biographical coverage during the period, there were a few late eighteenth-century women who defied the odds, receiving not just one, but multiple substantive magazine biographies during their own lifetimes. Being featured in any one magazine vastly increased the chance that a woman would be discussed elsewhere (often in exactly the same words, as many biographies were reprinted in other periodicals with only minor changes). One such highly visible woman is the playwright, translator, actress, and novelist Elizabeth Inchbald. Her popularity is not, perhaps, surprising, given Inchbald’s fame and the evolution of her career, which spanned both of the occupations (author and actress) most common to female biographical subjects, providing ample fodder for gossipy speculation as well as intellectual credibility. In the 1780s, well before the rapid rise in female magazine biography in the later 1790s, Inchbald was featured as a major biographical subject in at least five magazines: the General Magazine (1787–92), Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, the Monthly Mirror (1795–1806), the New London Magazine and the European Magazine. While there is, characteristically, significant content overlap between these profiles – they offer variations on two basic templates – they are, as a body, lengthy and substantial enough to merit in-depth consideration.17 These biographies all, as might be expected, convey the details of Inchbald’s birth, family, and career; all praise her talent and her person. However, what is particularly interesting about them is how they balance the competing demands of interest and propriety, handling Inchbald’s fascinating past escapades while also maintaining an appropriate level of respect for her as a current author. The General Magazine explains Inchbald’s popularity as a biographical subject in terms that precisely illustrate the

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 287

17/11/17 5:01 PM

288

hannah doherty hudson

already-discussed divide between representations of female authors (admirable, but less interesting) and female actresses (interesting, but less admirable). Whereas male subjects seem to have had an easier time being both interesting and admirable, only a rare woman like Inchbald, with a scandalous past, a popular present, an impressive intellect and (perhaps most importantly) an arc of reform in her life story ticks all the boxes. Writes the biographer: It is a usual observation, and commonly true, that the life of an author is seldom sufficiently diversified to be generally entertaining. We, however, commence our biography with an exception to this general rule, in the memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, who by her various dramatic pieces, has rendered her welfare an object of public concern, and her memoirs an object of public inquiry. (1 (Aug 1787): 115–16) The General Magazine, strikingly, refers to Inchbald repeatedly as ‘our heroine’.18 Such a formulation hints at the constructed nature of the biographical narrative – Inchbald is the protagonist as well as the subject, a character, in a sense, whose positive role in the story to come is established from the beginning. This aspect of the biography is heightened by the magazine’s emphasis on Inchbald’s other qualities: the first paragraph to mention any specifics of Inchbald’s life declares that ‘our heroine was extremely beautiful’ (116). The youthful author, we are told, was also shy and lonely, such that (in a gender-reversed borrowing from Thomas Gray), ‘Melancholy marked her for her own’ (116). This is a recognisable narrative of genius, certainly, but unlike Gray’s unknown poet, Inchbald’s persona is as much sentimental heroine as reclusive genius. Her youthful desire for knowledge of the wider world is described in a passage that could easily have been lifted from a popular novel: she at length resolved to effect by stratagem the design which she could not accomplish by permission. She was now sixteen years of age, and was become still more beautiful: her hair was of that bright gold-colour, so much celebrated by eminent poets and painters; her complexion was the glow of loveliness itself; her eyes dark, and her teeth exquisitely white; she was tall, and the symmetry of her person was elegant and correspondent to every description of perfect drawing. Such was our heroine . . . (117) Even were we willing to suspend our disbelief sufficiently to accept the anonymous biographer’s knowledge of 15-year-old details, including the state of Inchbald’s teenaged teeth, the fictionalised quality of the story is repeatedly foregrounded: ‘that a young and beautiful female, without communicating her intention to any one, destitute not only of a lover, but even of a confidant, should “wander forth, to see the world, alone,” is a phenomenon which would better suit the page of fiction than of history’ (117). And indeed, the highly eventful story that follows breaks off with a novelistic cliffhanger: ‘Our poor adventurer . . . was turned out of doors near midnight, and, with an aching heart and streaming eyes, left to wander in the streets of London’ (120). The tale picks up again in similar fashion in the September issue, with dramatic anecdotes about the youthful Inchbald flinging a ‘basin of scalding water on [the] face and bosom’ (174) of one of the many men making improper advances to her, and a sudden marriage-plot-style

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 288

17/11/17 5:01 PM

women and biography in british magazines

289

twist: ‘Thus, in an unexpected moment, and in an unexpected manner, our heroine became both a wife and an actress’ (1 Sep (1787): 175). Yet these detailed and often somewhat salacious stories from the past are balanced by a marked attention to what need not be discussed or revealed. ‘Respecting Mrs. Inchbald’s theatrical career, there is little to relate’ (175), remarks the biographer, later echoing, ‘It is needless to descant on the merits of compositions so well known to the public’ (178). Similarly, the author balances the implausible level of detail about certain aspects of Inchbald’s life with marked claims for accuracy and selectiveness in others. Though often offered further sources of information about Inchbald, ‘we are here obliged to decline them all, lest we risk our veracity by adopting those which are fictitious’ (173), the biographer notes; another section reads, ‘these are private occurrences which come not within the verge of our knowledge; and we shall not stain the authenticity of these memoirs by giving as facts the conclusions of conjecture’ (178). As lines like these clearly indicate, the biographer deploys authenticity and fictionality, revelation and concealment, strategically to hold readerly interest while deflecting potential critiques. If the biography opens with Inchbald’s connections, it closes with her lack of them, emphasising her reclusive behaviour. ‘Her friends are few, and selected’ – the gentle tearful heroine of the early pages of the biography has resolved into a more acerbic author; ‘ridicule and pointed satire are the weapons with which she retaliates’ (179). Yet this too is ultimately framed as a positive: she is a loyal and sincere friend to those few she does take into her confidence, and her unwillingness to curry favour is characterised as a ‘refined delicacy’, which prevents her from doing anything that ‘might lay her under a necessity of receiving obligations’ (179). As this detailed look at the General Magazine’s biography allows us to see, the problems surrounding the writing of female biography are inseparably linked with the magazine’s own economic and ethical imperatives. The biography needs to attract readers, and the popular novel offers a generic model already proven to appeal to many consumers. The subject-as-heroine pose draws readers in with familiar tropes of suspense; it also allows for a sort of suspension of disbelief, or readerly judgement: a novel heroine can certainly get away with actions that would not be so admirable in a real person. By blurring the boundaries between the two figures, the young Inchbald’s escapades become entertainment – implausibly detailed, even as we are assured of their accuracy. By the end of the piece, when Inchbald’s age and success have rendered the ingénue role less fitting, the biographer takes a new tack: now the fear is overexposure, and the disinterested, reclusive authoress described here seems well calibrated to please an audience attuned to ‘appropriate’ female behaviour. At once, the magazine makes claims for the admirable modesty of its subject, her stereotypically retiring nature, and points out how fortunate its readers are to be getting this exclusive glimpse into Inchbald’s closely guarded private life. The European Magazine’s biography of Inchbald, like the General Magazine’s, begins with claims about gender and accomplishment. ‘The Dramatic Muse has been particularly favourable to the ladies’, the biographer notes (13 (Jan 1788): 5). ‘Of the several species of literature in which they have essayed to rival their male companions, this seems to be a favourite, and more than ordinary [sic] successful pursuit’ (5). Comparing contemporary female authors favourably with the ‘Behns, the Manleys, and the Centlivres’ of the past, the biographer suggests that women are worth

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 289

17/11/17 5:01 PM

290

hannah doherty hudson

discussing only when their talents are equalled by their ‘decency and propriety’ (5). Unsurprisingly, then, this version of Inchbald’s past is considerably less dramatic. There is no mention of running away, no aggressive suitors or flinging of scalding water, and no marital problems. Inchbald’s artistic success is described not as a foregone conclusion or the result of innate genius (though her ‘merit’ is praised (6)) but rather as a series of stepping stones, highlighting her persistence and work ethic. The author’s accomplishments, and the audience’s natural curiosity about her, are presented as closely tied to the magazine: ‘Her last performance is noticed in our Magazine for December, where both her motives for permitting its representation, and her apology for its defects, are inserted. Mrs. Inchbald, we learn, is preparing another piece for Covent Garden Theatre, which in due time will be noticed in this Magazine’ (6). The other three biographies of Inchbald all adopt one of these two templates, sometimes with minor alterations or additions. The Monthly Mirror, for example, largely reproduces the General Magazine’s account, but prefaces it with a claim about Mrs Inchbald’s hard work and resolution: ‘Few women have had more of the difficulties of life to encounter than Mrs. Inchbald, and still fewer have had the magnanimity to find their way through them’ (3 (May 1797): 259). The New London Magazine’s account, in contrast, trims the European Magazine’s version, ending with the remark that ‘the heroine of these memoirs continues, as far as the business of the theatre will permit, to live much retired; her friends are few and selected’ (5 (Sep 1789): 451). What we see across the accounts is an emphasis on Inchbald’s good character and a distancing, in one way or another, of any parts of her past that might seem to contradict such a claim.

Biography at Century’s End When a correspondent, ‘W.J.’, wrote to the editor of the Monthly Magazine in August 1798 volunteering to ‘communicate, under the head of Neglected Biography, brief memoirs of such eminent persons as have been entirely omitted in biographical collections, or have been but slightly mentioned in them’ (6: 96), he or she did not specify whether women were included in the scope of this concern – the only examples given in the letter are men. Yet three things at least are clear from reading the magazines of this age: biography, far from losing steam, was only growing in popularity; the scope and nature of biographical coverage was a subject of concern both to readers and publishers; and women were increasingly involved in the biographical enterprise, as subjects, readers, and as biographers. As the Lady’s Monthly Museum noted in July 1798, writing biography was a literary pursuit in itself, and one well suited to women: in the ‘Acknowledgements to Correspondents’ section, the magazine notes that: offers of assistance and communications have been received from some of the first Literary Females of the present day . . . Particular thanks are due to the writer of the Memoirs of Mrs. H. More, and it is hoped that many other Biographical Sketches of distinguished Female Characters will come from the same source. (1: 84) The contours of female biography had changed: whereas in 1787 Elizabeth Inchbald’s biographer was speaking of a ‘constellation of female genius’ as if this were a relatively new and noteworthy phenomenon, little more than a decade later, the Lady’s

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 290

17/11/17 5:01 PM

women and biography in british magazines

291

Monthly Museum began a January 1799 profile of her with the claim that ‘The story of this Lady has been long before the public’ (2: 1). At century’s close, magazine biography by, for, and about women expanded the boundaries of the genre and challenged gendered preconceptions about biography’s function.

Notes 1. Titles and dates are drawn from the English Short Title Catalogue or Ward. Some of these publications appear to have only run to a single issue and may be better understood as pseudo-periodicals than as magazines. 2. On the relationship between ‘genius’ and periodical biography, see Higgins 2005 and 2009. 3. Biographical counts given here are approximate; due to the porous boundaries of the genre discussed below, virtually every issue contains at least one or two pieces that are difficult to firmly declare as ‘biography’ or not. For the purposes of this research, my count is based on explicitly biographical pieces with at least some attempt at summation or comprehensiveness regarding life or character. It thus generally excludes ‘Anecdotes’ featuring only one incident, brief mentions of people in the context of other stories, or ‘Lives’ of fictional people. 4. These magazines share an explicit orientation toward a female audience, but this alone doesn’t account for their prominent focus on contemporary female biography. Earlier women’s periodicals such as the Lady’s Magazine and the New Lady’s Magazine did frequently contain biographical pieces, very often of women; however, they tended to feature women from past decades or centuries rather than contemporary living women, and they did not generally highlight biography as the newer magazines did, by using an illustrated memoir to open each issue. 5. My discussion of eighteenth-century magazines is informed, in particular, by Ballaster, Shevelow, and Wheatley. 6. This imperative is not exclusive to female subjects or, indeed, to biographies. I discuss the phenomenon in relation to portrayals of the poet Byron in ‘Byronic Advertising’ (Hudson 2016); Tom Mole notes a similar pressure on Byron’s own artistic endeavours (2007: 134). On late eighteenth-century celebrity, see especially the essays in Mole, ed. 2009b. 7. See Mole’s discussion of this conundrum in ‘Mary Robinson’s Conflicted Celebrity’ (2009a). 8. From 1786 to 1811 the magazine was published as Walker’s Hibernian Magazine. The magazine only gave volume numbers for its first few volumes. 9. Engel’s extended discussion of portraits of Elizabeth Inchbald and Mary Robinson are particularly relevant to my own argument. 10. I found a few instances in which the opening profile featured a building such as the Wynnsay Theatre (Feb 1786: n. p.) instead of a person, but this was very much the exception, happening only three times over the course of the magazine’s first decade of monthly publication. 11. The magazine did contain some substantial biographies of women in other sections during these early years; characteristic examples include: ‘The Memoirs of Mrs. Roupe’ (1 (May 1782: 327–8)); ‘A Sketch of the Memoirs of Mrs. Mahon, the Bird of Paradise’ (2 (June 1782): 404–6); several Theatrical Portraits, including that of Mrs Abington (3 (Feb 1783): 94–5), Mrs Crawford (3 (Apr 1783): 245–7), Mrs Siddons (4 (Sep 1783): 163–5), and Miss Younge (25 (Jan 1794): 13–15); ‘Account of Mrs. Macauley Graham’ (8 (Nov 1785: 330–4)); ‘Account of Mademoiselle Theresa Paradis, the celebrated blind performer on the Pianoforte’ (7 (Feb 1785): 80), and ‘The Memoirs of Mrs. Catharine Clive’ (8 (Dec 1785): 408–12). 12. My epigraph’s quotation from the General Magazine provides one example; other magazines I surveyed showed similar interests. The New London Magazine, in particular, did

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 291

17/11/17 5:01 PM

292

13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

hannah doherty hudson not explicitly discuss female biography but showed a sudden and remarkable (albeit shortlived) rise in representations of female subjects in the late 1780s. The Chevalier D’Eon’s inclusion in this list derives from the magazine’s identification of D’Eon as a woman; see my discussion on page 286 of this volume and accompanying notes below for more detail. Thanks to Nush Powell for this point about the limited availability of Thrale/Piozzi’s work in 1786. The Chevalier D’Eon was a popular biographical subject, featured in several other magazines in the early 1790s. See Hawkins (2013) for bibliographical editions of the various biographies. For more details about D’Eon’s life and gender identity, see Kates (1995); Setzer provides an interesting account of Mary Robinson’s literary repurposing of D’Eon’s life story (2000). Other women who received prominent biographical attention in multiple venues during the 1780s and early 1790s include Hannah Cowley, Frances Brooke, Dorothy Schlözer, and the Chevalier D’Eon (see n. 13). See Hawkins 2011: 177–92 for collated editions of the first three authors’ biographies in 1789. See pages 116, 118, 171 and 173–9 for examples.

Works Cited Ballaster, Rosalind, Margaret Beetham, Elizabeth Frazer, and Sandra Hebron. 1991. Women’s Worlds: Ideology, Femininity, and the Woman’s Magazine. Basingstoke: Macmillan. The Biographical Magazine. Containing Portraits and Characters of Eminent and Ingenious Persons of Every Age and Nation. 1794. London. English Short Title Catalogue. British Library. (last accessed 16 Dec 2016). The European Magazine and London Review. 1782–1826 (1st ser. 1782–1825; 2nd ser. 1825–6). London. The General Magazine and Impartial Review. 1787–92. London. Hibernian Magazine. 1771–85 (from 1786 Walker’s Hibernian Magazine). Dublin. Hawkins, Ann, ed. 2011. Romantic Women Writers Reviewed. Vol. 3. London: Pickering & Chatto. —, ed. 2013. Romantic Women Writers Reviewed. Vols. 7–9. London: Pickering & Chatto. Higgins, David. 2005. Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity, Politics. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. —. 2009. ‘Celebrity, Politics and the Rhetoric of Genius’. Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850. Ed. Tom Mole. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 41–59. Hudson, Hannah Doherty. 2016. ‘Byronic Advertising: Biography, Celebrity, and the London Magazine’. The European Romantic Review 27.6. 747–67. Kates, Gary. 1995. Monsieur D’Eon Is a Woman: A Tale of Political Intrigue and Sexual Masquerade. New York: Basic Books. The Lady’s Monthly Museum. 1798–1828 (1st ser. 1798–1814; 2nd ser. 1815–28). London. Mole, Tom. 2007. Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. —. 2009a. ‘Mary Robinson’s Conflicted Celebrity’. Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750– 1850. Ed. Tom Mole. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 186–206. —. ed. 2009b. Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. The Monthly Magazine. 1796–1825. London. The Monthly Mirror. 1795–1811 (1st ser. 1795–1806; 2nd ser. 1807–11). London. The New London Magazine. 1785–93. London.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 292

17/11/17 5:01 PM

women and biography in british magazines

293

The Scots Magazine. 1739–1826. Edinburgh. Setzer, Sharon. 2000. ‘The Dying Game: Crossdressing in Mary Robinson’s Walsingham’. Nineteenth-Century Contexts 22.3: 305. Shevelow, Kathryn. 1989. Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical. London: Routledge. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine. 1786–1811 (formerly The Hibernian Magazine). Dublin. Ward, William S. 1953. Index and Finding List of Serials Published in the British Isles, 1789– 1832. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. The Westminster Magazine. 1773–85. London. Wheatley, Kim, ed. 2003. Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass. Zionkowski, Linda. 2016. Women and Gift Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Richardson, Burney, Austen. New York and Oxford: Routledge.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 293

17/11/17 5:01 PM

19 Suitable Reading Material: Fandom and Female Pleasure in Women’s Engagement with Romantic Periodicals Evan Hayles Gledhill

T

hrough their published responses to literary culture within periodicals – as correspondents, as reviewers, and as fiction authors – women constructed their identities as readers and as writers. Noting that many characters in literature are shaped, even defined, by their reading habits, William St Clair has argued that ‘our best resource for understanding the impact of the reading of the literature of the Romantic period may be literature itself’ (2004: 412). Taking St Clair’s point and running with it, this chapter explores women’s reading and authorship as they are represented in – and evidenced by – women’s Romantic periodicals, focusing particularly on the Lady’s Monthly Museum (1798–1828). The status of women’s writing and the intertwined, but not identical, matter of writing for women was a key preoccupation of this and rival publications, but it was never a topic treated consistently or even logically. Women’s enjoyment of literary works were of secondary consideration, their pleasure considered an indulgence when no moral justification for the entertainment could be produced, which accounts for much of the ire directed at what we would now term genre fiction within the periodicals’ pages, even as these periodicals’ own contents traded on the popularity of such fiction. The Lady’s Monthly Museum, for instance, included from its inception a regular section called ‘Review of Female Literature’, yet rarely are even half of the featured authors female, and the reviewers themselves remain anonymous and usually ungendered; the literature featured then belongs conceptually, in the periodical’s arrangement, to some sort of feminine space or genre independent of the sex of its authors and critics. Other periodicals were similarly ambivalent, promising to champion women’s writing but often tearing it down in deliberately gendered terms. In the preface to their second volume, the editors of the Philadelphia-based Lady’s Magazine (1792–3), which appropriated heavily from the Robinsons’ London-published Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832), wrote that their aim was ‘to rescue the fair sex from that obscurity in which the timidity of female delicacy would hide itself, as well as to animate the breast to seize the laurels due to their vivacity and their merits’ (1793: ii), suggesting they considered the promotion of female authorship to be noteworthy, and a selling point to their readers. Yet, within several women’s periodicals, a steady stream of criticisms and pedantic instructions sought to contain and direct women’s reading and writing. As has been noted by scholars such as Jacqueline Pearson (1999), women were often

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 294

17/11/17 5:01 PM

women’s engagement with romantic periodicals

295

encouraged to read prescriptive texts that provided moral and social advice in appropriate behaviours; in the reviews sections of the Lady’s Monthly Museum the moral worth of a book is as frequently critiqued as its stylistic merits or practical use. At the same time, of course, as Jenny DiPlacidi documents elsewhere in this volume, these periodicals are also filled with genre fiction: their contents and critiques together paint a rather puzzling tableau. Women’s investment in reading and creating Gothic and romantic fictions for late eighteenth-century periodicals disrupted traditional and gendered value systems that dominated publishing, and demonstrates characteristics that bear some striking similarities to those of modern textual fan communities. That the fictional texts or authors that attract fannish interest in these magazines are not often those that attract critical praise is as true of the Romantic era as it of modern times. For example, Corin Throsby’s examination of the texts most often copied into Romanticera commonplace books demonstrates that the female audience for poetry was not necessarily responding to the most popular authors, as judged by sales or literary reputation (2009). Throsby cautions against attributing too much subversive significance to commonplacing and female fandom in general in this era, arguing ‘it is very unlikely that the women who owned these books saw themselves as part of a “counterculture” of readers’ (2009: 234). However, my contention here is that for these engaged literary women, as for the modern fans described by critics such as Cornel Sandvoss, reading and authorship constituted resistant practices: ‘within particular socio-historic positions female fandom has fostered subversive pleasures, and constituted a form of resistance’ (2005: 16). The Gothic and romantic fictions published, and discussed, in women’s periodicals were far from inherently radical in their content or form. The resistance they offered was subtle, yet they carved out a space in which distinctly feminine subjectivity became possible, and textual pleasures were paramount.

Gender and Genre Fiction Romantic women’s magazines were part of a broad cultural moment that saw a rapid expansion in the presence and accessibility of genre fiction, which easily attached to feminine associations in the critical imaginary. Always the most self-reflexive of genres, periodical writing highlights how very conscious such fiction was of its place and reception. The highly heterogeneous publishing world was, of course, still one in which critical and scholarly standards were set largely by men. The coffee houses and political circles that were key arenas for textual circulation and discussion were, as Clara Tuite and Gillian Russell (2006) emphasise, models of specifically masculine social life; women might have access to the same or similar text sets, but not in the same spaces. Yet Deidre Lynch (2006) helpfully suggests expanding our understanding of the spaces that were thought of as public in the Romantic era, encouraging a broader definition of the texts and behaviours that were taken up socially. Building on Lynch’s work I argue that the main repositories for women’s fiction, particularly the circulating library and the women’s periodical, were spaces in which young women enacted agency, and were encouraged to do so. Thus the textual space of the periodical can be seen as disrupting the dynamics of the normative public literary sphere, as when

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 295

17/11/17 5:01 PM

296

evan hayles gledhill

the editor of the Lady’s Monthly Museum rejected a male contributor’s efforts with the explanation that ‘we certainly expect that the production of correspondents shall have some reference to the female character and pursuits’ (ns 4 (Mar 1813): 120). As Margaret Beetham observes of this exchange, men were welcome in this space as long as ‘they located themselves in relation to the feminine’ (1996: 21), a neat reversal of the usual mode. A resistance to masculine norms did not only take the form of overt disagreement, but was also expressed in the development of new feminine norms for literature. As Jennie Batchelor notes in this volume, the periodicals’ editors and contributors urged their readers to cultivate active and discerning reading habits. Such encouragements directly challenged popular mockery of women in contemporary satire. For instance, a print called ‘The Circulating Library’ (1781) depicts a young woman whom the inscription terms a ‘pretty lisper’ perusing the catalogue and accepting volumes labelled Cruel Disappointment, Reuben, or Suicide higho!, Seduction, Unguarded Moments, and Frederick, or, The Libertine. She rejects True Delicacy, School of Virtue, Test of Filial Duty, and Mental Pleasures.1 The contemporary associations among the library, romantic and Gothic novels, and women as readers and authors are all exhibited here. Correspondents of the Lady’s Monthly Museum refer repeatedly to the circulating libraries’ contents in highly negative terms, such as ‘noxious trash’ (10 (Jan 1811): 8).2 Romantic periodicals for women, then, make a similar move in depicting the problem of women’s reading choices, even as they act as a smaller versions of the circulating libraries such prints as the one described above attack. The underlying premise of this cartoon, and much of the instructive content of periodicals such as the Lady’s Monthly Museum on women’s reading choices, is that women’s literary tastes are inferior and their pleasures are base. Yet, Jan Fergus’s analysis of the records of booksellers and libraries persuasively makes the case that women were not an undiscerning readership and were more likely to check out the first volume of a multi-volume work than the last (2006: 112). Or, as Batchelor notes, the readers of the Lady’s Magazine ‘were not simply “consumers” who bought into the ideals of gender, class, and community the magazine promoted; they actively shaped the magazine’s content, more than occasionally in the form of essays and narratives that challenged and contested those ideals’ (2011: 256). Women who read periodicals could, like a library patron, simply discontinue a displeasing serial or skip over harsh moralising: access to a magazine, or a library membership, enabled them to become an active critics in their own right – just as a library membership gave readers access not only to volume fiction, but also to the magazines and reviews that shaped critical taste. Although the circulating libraries were not as overtly geared toward women’s readership as women’s periodicals, they subscribed to such periodicals and thereby enabled access to them for those who could not afford individual subscriptions. Through these and other strategies, proprietors of circulating libraries also sought to make their trading spaces suitable and welcoming to women readers. The illustrated business card of the circulating library of Francis Noble, for instance, depicts an elegant lady female patron, and the bookplate of Mrs Hill’s circulating library in Ramsgate advertises that she also sold haberdashery (Adburgham 1972: 112). Adburgham suggests that ‘the chief encouragement for women to become novelists’

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 296

17/11/17 5:01 PM

women’s engagement with romantic periodicals

297

in the Romantic period came from the promotion of anonymous female novelists in the circulating libraries (1972: 113). The larger of these libraries were often attached to a press as a means to advertise and circulate the productions of that press and consequently held a high concentration of contemporary women’s fiction, particularly works anonymously signed as by ‘a lady’. Edward Jacobs’s more recent quantitative analysis of the gendered output of the circulating libraries’ associated presses, in comparison to traditional publishers without an attached library, concludes that this mode ‘not only increased the visibility of “feminine” fiction and femininity, but also constructed feminine fiction as the particular stock-in-trade of circulating library publishers’ (2003: 10). Jacobs suggests that the high proportion of anonymous authors who identified as ‘ladies’ foregrounded gender and class, rather than individual identity, as important authorial attributes. A similar effect is created by magazines such as the Lady’s Monthly Museum in which there was no clear separation between producer and consumer: the editors wrote to ‘their correspondents’ directly, and published private correspondence for public consumption, thereby positioning all readers as potential authors. Women as authors, grouped and offered as a distinct product for other women to consume in periodicals and listed in large numbers in the library catalogues, were in some measure thus encouraged to view their work as belonging to a distinctive category. That these circumstances created a recognisable genre of women’s writing in this period is demonstrated in the many parodies published within the periodicals of these fictions, and their authors. The Lady’s Monthly Museum published such works as ‘The Journalist, or debut of a female author’ by Mary Pelham (1 (Aug 1798): 113–18) which uses the structure of the romance to tell the tale of a writer who works in the Gothic genre, and parodies authorial as well formal models: let me consider –The Apparition of the Castle – now that won’t do – Flat, common and insipid – Infernal Mysteries of the Bloody Banquet, a Tale from the German . . . for my dungeons are so deep – my skeletons so disgusting – and their wounds so dreadful. (‘The Journalist’ 1 (1 Aug 1798): 114) Two years later the magazine published ‘The Complaint of a Ghost’ by Sam Scribble, a satirical short story narrated from the perspective of the ghost who wishes to be released from his genre (5 (May 1800): 365–70). Parodic fictions such as these demonstrate clear self-awareness in their mockery of generic conventions. Outside of the female-focused periodical, the reception of fiction by women in genres associated with women could be considerably less enjoyable in tone. In the short-lived Fireside Magazine and Monthly Epitome (1819), the genre fiction fan Amelia Hopeful notes that her favourite books are called ‘trash’ but defends both her education above her station in life and reading pleasure, with the support of her Captain ‘to whom she is irrevocably pledged’ (1 (Apr 1819): 121). A real-life Catherine Morland, she is writing her own romantic adventure. An ‘attempt to point out their absurdity and to advocate the pleasures that continually flow from a sentimental and affectionate mind’ does her no good with her parents, so Amelia turns to the periodical editors and readers for support (122). Although this is the leading letter of this issue of the publication, suggesting that the topic would be considered

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 297

17/11/17 5:01 PM

298

evan hayles gledhill

widely interesting or provocative, all the author receives from the editors in response is mockery that targets her neglect of her domestic duties: let her not trouble herself about the making of a pudding or a pie, or any such servile occupation . . . food, too, the consideration for which belongs only to such whose appetites are depraved by sensuality, and which we never read of as occupying the thoughts of a heroine of romance, is far too gross a thing for the refined imagination of our correspondent. (122–3) The editor’s response continues to parody Amelia’s chosen genre through making facetious suggestions for the improvement of her writing. Her work, and her letter, would likely have received a respectful, if not supportive, response in such publications as the Lady’s Monthly Museum, with its community of fiction fans amongst the readership.

Fandom – Then and Now The contributors to, and readers of, women’s Romantic periodicals are not consciously, as Throsby indicates a ‘counterculture’; instead, they are members of a community whose preferences often ran counter to the dominant conceptions of good taste. The membership of these communities can be hard to determine. As Batchelor notes of the widespread culture of anonymous and pseudonymous publication eighteenth-century periodicals espoused: ‘resisting and troubling so many of the analytical categories upon which we rely – of author, gender, class, and political affiliation, for example – it is hard to know how to talk about the Lady’s Magazine at all’ (2011: 249). Nonetheless, and in spite of hard evidence on the precise constituency and membership of these mixed-sex, but often apparently female-dominated, periodical communities, we can characterise their workings, and the centrality of fandom and fan communities to their success. In Fans: The Mirror of Consumption, Sandvoss defines fandom broadly as ‘the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text’ (2005: 8).3 A lone enthusiast, then, does not establish a visible pattern for study, but the formation of communities around a fan object is often productive of their own texts and creative projects. In this, I see clear parallels between fan community practices in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, and the readers and writers of the Lady’s Monthly Museum. Textual fan communities, like the online fan fiction repository the Archive of Our Own (Ao3), digital commonplacing site Tumblr, or based around discussion boards devoted to a particular literary or media text, are often predominantly female spaces.4 Community standards and friendships develop, conversations and debates are held on diverse topics, and an editor or moderator often holds sway over a forum, or discussion ‘thread’, to maintain a coherent order to the conversation by occasionally removing an off-topic post or an objectionable contributor who seeks to disrupt, rather than to join, the community. These textual communities based around fanzines, fan fiction archives, and fan community message boards, develop their own distinctive norms of communication styles and quality measures for fictional writing. Community members also dedicate work to other readers, as friends or the object of their affection, and engage in competitive exchanges of thematic creative work; many fandoms based

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 298

17/11/17 5:01 PM

women’s engagement with romantic periodicals

299

on Ao3 run an annual Christmas ‘fic exchange’, for instance, where contributors are matched up to write each other a story.5 The specific textual communication practices of modern fandoms are in many ways anticipated by the Romantic periodical press, where there were many prolific female authors, poets, and essayists contributing published work regularly, frequently without remuneration, and in dialogue with each other. Individual communities that grew up around individual periodicals, each with their own priorities, had their own tone. The communities foregrounded in Eve Tavor Bannet’s chapter for this volume focused on women’s political and educational advancement. By contrast, the community that formed around the Lady’s Monthly Museum focused primarily upon literature; their preferred genres and the object of their fandom were the romance and the Gothic. Presaging the modern fan community, correspondents to the Lady’s Monthly Museum wrote letters to the editor, responses to each other’s essays, and exchanged verses. In October 1811, for example, ‘Agnes’ responded to the poetry of ‘Oscar’, published in a previous issue, as though it were a song: ‘what sounds where those so ravishing soft, that stole upon mine ear? (10: 237–8). Oscar responds in kind, continuing the musical theme: ‘I pause to think that one, blest with a lyre so ravishing as thine, should sweep its music in the praise of mine’ (10 (Nov 1811): 297). Correspondents also published verses as gifts – another common practice in modern fandom. In the issue for May 1800, an untitled, anonymous poem was dedicated to ‘Eliza, on her birthday’ (5: 404–5). Tracing an exchange of verse or letters in the pages of a regularly published periodical is straightforward when the poet addresses the composition, ‘A Reply: to miss Lucy W—’s enquiry after the derivation of the word sympathy’ (2 (Oct 1798): 331), or the letter appears in the next edition, but it also creates a set of self-referential texts understandable only on their own terms, a hallmark of the fan community, which finds unity in referencing texts that are well known within a community but not necessarily beyond it.

Reading and Writing, as a Woman In contrast to the public-private fan writing of occasional poems, periodicals simultaneously presumed upon (and reinforced) the obvious value of canonical classics. Although formal education for women, even in the upper classes, was still relatively rare in this period – and the individuals most likely to have the resources and freedoms to achieve a high standard of erudition were, of course, wealthy men – letters or essays in the Lady’s Monthly Museum, as in other periodicals, often open with an epigraph from a canonical text. Its regular agony aunt column, the ‘Busy Body’, was fond of allusions to the works of Pope and Milton, for example. Often, extracts from such canonical – and male – authors’ works appeared without attribution, which indicates the extent of literary knowledge expected of the periodical’s readership. These expectations, and the deference they imply to male-authored textual authority, have gendered implications. The maintenance of a, at least nominally, gendered separation of literary production, in which men’s works predominate, led Judith Fetterley to argue that the female reader of canonical literature experiences ‘the invocation to identify as male’ (1978: xiii). Tavor Bannet, in this volume, turns this argument on its head by exploring the potential in women readers to read against their

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 299

17/11/17 5:01 PM

300

evan hayles gledhill

sex. In this chapter, I pursue the periodicals’ creation of a third possibility: where women actively pursue and celebrate interests deemed to be feminine, trivial, foolish, and insipid through their reading and writing of romance and the Gothic fiction. In foregrounding fandom of these genres, I demonstrate how resistant reading practices based on investment in feminine forms of literature disrupt gendered hierarchies of value. Simply reading and referencing respected male authors, or writing in traditionally masculine genres, did not amount to a guarantee that a woman could enjoy the respect granted to male authors and scholars. In the Lady’s Magazine series ‘A Letter from a Brother to a Sister at Boarding School’, a young man, who regularly stresses that women’s duties include subservience to men, suggests that all women ‘were they guided by reason and nature, acknowledge that . . . the improvement of the intellectual powers is not the first, the peculiar, province of their sex’ (19 (Dec 1788): 675). He references Hannah More’s ‘A Rural Entertainment’ in support of his argument, that ‘woman shines but in her proper sphere’ (675). Miss More was a popular source of quotations for moralistic articles in many British periodicals. More’s success depended on balancing an appropriately feminine approach, in a style that was admired by the masculine standard-bearers of the day, regarding issues such as political opinion. Women’s writing often received condemnation if it was considered too ‘masculine’: the Lady’s Magazine’s regular contributor ‘The Trifler’, in his essay ‘On Female Authorship’, railed against women’s learned writing without regard to the quality of the end result: we admire the diligence and classical knowledge which could give us a correct translation of an obsolete author, form a perfect addition, or compile a lexicon; yet when we learn that it is the work of a lady, however highly we may prize her production, we must pity that error of judgement which could engage her in pursuits so repugnant to female delicacy, so derogatory to the natural character of her sex. (20 (June 1789): 297) Likewise, works such as A Tour of Switzerland, by Helen Maria Williams, met with overtly anti-feminist criticism in the Lady’s Monthly Museum: the author was labelled ‘as bold and abrupt as the precipices over which she scrambles, and her composition, in our apprehension, wears, in many places, the aspect more of a masculine than feminine understanding’ (1 (Aug 1798): 154). Williams’s efforts are thus termed ‘the abuse of talent, better fitted for household than political discussion’ (155). However, the author received praise in the pages of the Lady’s Magazine, which also published several extracts of the same work of travel documentary the other magazine derided (29 (Mar, May, July 1798): 125, 213, 302). There was, in short, no certain recipe for female authors to avoid gendered critique. The publication model of the women’s periodicals depended upon the growing ranks of literate women not only for a readership, but also to provide publishable contributions. Though editors – as seen above – stated their aim to encourage female authorship, these publications were, nonetheless, often full of material that sought to direct and limit women’s authorship, and their reading. To counter the ‘wrong’ sort of reading, some articles tried directing readers to more suitable reading choices, and even proffered guides to the act of reading itself. The Lady’s Magazine published many such articles including ‘Hints on Reading’, signed by a gentleman known only

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 300

17/11/17 5:01 PM

women’s engagement with romantic periodicals

301

as D., who advised on what to read, ‘those who have little leisure to read, should read only what is instructive’; how to read and how long to read for, ‘reading, I say, should be regular – not jumping from history to novels – from novels to divinity – and from divinity to poetry’; and even where to read it, recommending ‘something light’ for when with the hairdresser (20 (Feb 1789): 79–81). The Lady’s Monthly Museum published many similar letters of advice, both directly addressed to the reader and as a sample of private correspondence that deserved a wider audience, in the same vein. Of this sort, the ‘Admonition of a Father to his Daughter at Boarding School’ is typical. Although kindly in tone, its suggested reading list is very much limited to religious and moral work, and suggests that writing practice be kept to the copying out of particularly useful passages, or keeping a journal for spiritual improvement (2 (Feb 1799): 110–17). Of course, opinions on women’s reading were far from homogenous; after printing an essay that decried advanced education for women the Lady’s Monthly Museum also published a spirited rebuttal: allowing, Sir, that there really is one . . . in the world, whose intellectual acquirements have tended to make her rather ridiculous than respectable, are we naturally to infer, that a cultivation of the mind would be injurious to the whole female sex? (5 (Aug 1800): 93–6) As the ‘Notes to Correspondents’ section at the end of each issue of the Lady’s Monthly Museum demonstrates, the editors exercised a great deal of control in the presentation of the material, yet as they were also entirely reliant upon their contributors for content to publish in the first place, it would seem, at least, that they received more chastisement than rebuttals given the letters they chose to publish. Crucially, however, though the content of articles in the Lady’s Monthly Museum directly addressing women’s reading and education was often didactic, and reinforced patriarchal hierarchies of both gender and class, the act of reading the magazine did not necessarily reinforce the same values.6 The possibility that ostensibly conservative and gender normative genres might encourage readings against the apparent grain of their plots has been illuminated in recent scholarship on genre fiction. For example, romance novels’ celebration of marriage as the ultimate goal of womanhood might seem to reinforce ‘a culture that locates [legitimacy and personhood] in the roles of lover, wife, and mother’ (Radway 1987: 34). However, despite the limited model of womanhood these texts seem to present, what is equally – perhaps even more – important for those reading them is the validation it gives of the reading experience and the encouragement to authorship it might provide. This is especially, perhaps, the case in Romantic-era women’s magazines in which, as Pearson notes, reading was so widely ‘thematised . . . that girls and women read stories about reading, and were everywhere confronted with images, Utopian or monitory, of themselves as readers’ (1996: 4). The self-reflexive nature of the periodical form creates possibilities for women readers that may not be available to women in the texts they read. As Radway reminds us, there is a difference between ‘the event of reading and the meaning of the text constructed as its consequence’ (1987: 7). Perhaps for these very reasons, the female reader, even when not a fan per se, was widely regarded in the Romantic period as a disruptive cultural and social force; even if her access to texts was limited, her response to those texts could not be. In many

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 301

17/11/17 5:01 PM

302

evan hayles gledhill

essays decrying the education of lower-middle-class women above their station, across several women’s periodicals of this era, we see the links between the education of women and the contemporary fear of not just gender, but also class revolution.7 In a ‘Letter to the Editor’ in the Lady’s Monthly Museum, a contributor tells the unfortunate story of one Sally Sutton, who says she ‘considered myself as the most unfortunate of beings from having been born in a station so completely below my merits’ (1 (Sep 1798): 140). The implication is that had she not become aware of her merit, or her potential for it, through her education, she would have cheerfully succumbed to working drudgery alongside her parents. Education and especially reading are presented here and in numerous similar periodical articles as pernicious influences that will cause young women, and women of the lower classes in particular, to demand more from life than contemporary society was willing to offer. Women periodical readers enact these possibilities through the resistant practice of reading (and writing) fannishly. Precedents for the kinds of resistance Radway observes in modern romance readers – who ‘use their books to erect a barrier between themselves and their families in order to declare themselves temporarily offlimits’ (1987: 12) – are evidenced over and over by correspondents to Romantic-era periodicals. A gentleman identified as Michael Murmer, for instance, writes to the ‘Busy Body’ in the Lady’s Monthly Museum to complain that his wife reads when he wishes her to play the piano, and wants to play cards when he is ready to read (10 (Apr 1811): 188–91). This gentleman readily admits that he married this woman for her social capital alone, but having retired from the social scene before he ‘made a public exhibition’ of her (189), he now finds her reading and resistance to wifely duties frustrating; further complicating their marital discord is that they do not read the same materials or read in the same ways. Successful couples must have similar reading habits, particularly when it comes to genre fiction: the Gothic fans depicted lovingly, yet satirically, by Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818) know that their favourite fictions are often judged as unworthy, and that their disputed worth is linked to gendered expectations; as Catherine Morland declares to Henry Tilney, she expects ‘gentlemen read better books’ (2006: 77), and is pleasantly surprised that he shares her tastes. The pleasures that such narratives report women gained from their reading and writing presage the reports of modern communities of female fans, in that magazines like the Lady’s Monthly Museum provided a space within the usual domestic environment in which women can recognise and indulge their own enjoyment, particularly in feminine forms of cultural expression. As a reader, this space takes one away from other duties, from the demands of society and the family upon time. As an author, it is a space in which to create, perhaps, an alternative narrative for a woman’s experience, more exciting than the usual life of duty and domesticity – for which the romance and the Gothic are particularly famous.

From Readers to Writers The changes in the kinds of fictional content published by the Lady’s Monthly Museum, over the course of some thirteen years from its inception, suggest a continuity of experience with the twentieth-century fandoms in which ‘romance reading . . . profoundly changes at least some women by moving them to act and to speak in a public forum’

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 302

17/11/17 5:01 PM

women’s engagement with romantic periodicals

303

(Radway 1987: 17). The increased focus on fiction in this magazine indicates a distinct modification in the editorial policy, in both content and structure, in response to the demands of their reader-correspondents. In the first decade of the magazine’s publication there is a pronounced shift in the types of fictions it published: narratives such as ‘Ali, an Oriental Tale’ (2 (Jan 1799): 19) were edged out first by historical fiction, for example the issue for May 1800 began with ‘Jane of Flanders, a dramatic romance set during the Siege of Henneborne’ (4: 333–6). The September issue of the same year saw the publication of the first part of ‘The Knight of St John of Jerusalem’ (5: 213–18). The first suggestions of a Gothic influence creep into the fiction under the guise of historical romance, through the titles such as ‘Edric of the Forest, a romance’ (2 (Sep 1798): 218–26), which echoes Ann Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest (1791) in title, but less so in content. In 1798, the editors refused to publish the ‘monstrous fabrications’ contained in the ‘Midnight Tale’ of a correspondent styled ‘Old Lady Wrinkle of the Haunted House’. The editors stated that they were ‘well aware of the imminent danger there is, in impressing young imaginations with gross improbabilities, unnatural horrors, and mysterious nonsense’ (2 (Nov 1798): 420). Gothic tales were clearly at first unwelcome on moral grounds, even as the need to reject them explicitly registered a public groundswell of interest in such writing. The morally questionable nature of the romantic fiction, also, led a correspondent to the Lady’s Monthly Museum to threaten the withdrawal of their subscription for the publication due to its serialised fictions. This correspondent, signed ‘Tell Tale’, wrote in from a boarding school that seemed to hold multiple subscriptions, noting that the father of one of the pupils objected to the magazine for containing fictions ‘no better than the genuine ebullitions of insanity’ (2 (Nov 1798): 391), particularly referencing the tale ‘Schabraco’ which began in August of the same year (2 (1798): 85–93). The patriarchal condemnation traditionally links femininity to irrationality. It is interesting that the gentleman’s daughter initially remonstrated that ‘these are the very things we like best . . . both the Miss Feelings8 actually fainted’ (391), linking female pleasure to bodily sensation, and even such an excess of sensation so as to exceed rational consciousness. According to the letter writer, whose role in the situation is unclear, the governess of the school supported the parent whose child then promised, ‘I will never again read anything again my father dislikes or forbids’ (392), thus establishing the superiority of masculine expression and rational thought over feminine expression and bodily pleasure. At the same time, in drawing the reader’s attention to such extreme bodily responses, they raise a titillating interest in what content could provoke the Miss Feelings to faint. These discussions of the merits, or otherwise, of Gothic or romance fiction focus entirely upon the moral value of the tale. The anonymous author of the story felt forced to respond in kind, to defend her own morality, asking ‘do they not tacitly accuse her of fabricating tales positively calculated for the destruction of the purity of the unconscious reader?’ (2 (Dec 1798): 468). She notes the moral ending to the tale, suggesting it might influence readers for the good if ‘she who nourishes in her disposition the seeds of such destructive faults, may be brought to shudder at the exemplification and its attendant miseries’ (470). No attempt is made to justify the work on artistic grounds by the author, implicitly supporting the idea that women’s pleasure in reading without edification is an activity to be condemned – or simply suggesting that

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 303

17/11/17 5:01 PM

304

evan hayles gledhill

such traditional critical consideration is not the point here. Indeed, another respondent to the Lady’s Monthly Museum decries the hypocrisy of such moral objections, given the community nature in which these texts are created and circulated: ‘with respect to the immorality of modern romances, much has been advanced, and the severest censures passed upon them by those who have not only read them with avidity, but have even themselves been the authors of similar productions’ (2 (Dec 1798): 471). This anonymous supporter further warns that ‘“Patience Rewarded” will be torn up, leaf by leaf, to curl auburn locks . . . while the romance is perused with rapture’ (472). This is the only defence of female reading pleasure so far published by a magazine expressly stating its publication for a female readership. Although it might be suggested that the mere existence of women’s periodicals makes such defences unnecessary, I would counter that there is a significant difference between the tacit acceptance that women’s motivations for reading include enjoyment, and an active support for enjoyment without an educational or moral purpose. Like the historical fictions of Jane Porter, which were reviewed in its pages, the ‘general character’ of the writing in the Lady’s Monthly Museum was ‘very acceptable to females; indeed, they are well calculated not only for the amusement, but for the instruction of readers’ (10 (July 1811): 2). Even a woman’s learning was to be deployed in the service of others, not herself; ‘her cultural capital was the mark of his economic capital’ (Beetham 1996: 30). Women’s pleasure and taste were secondary considerations; their enjoyment was considered an indulgence when no moral justification for the entertainment could be produced. However, within ten years Gothic and Romantic titles such as ‘The House on the Cliffe [sic]’ (11 (July 1810): 23–8) predominated in the magazine, and my sense is that this is a direct result of women – acting now like unabashed fans – actively pursuing pleasure for pleasure’s sake in reading and writing. Throughout 1811 there were never fewer than five serialised fictions running in the Lady’s Monthly Museum, alongside shorter tales and poems. The last issue of the eleventh volume, for June of that year, in fact, contained only poetry, serialised fiction, and the regular feature ‘The Gleaner’, a collection of anecdotes and historical sketches. In the prologue to the next volume, the editors justify their decision, stating that they are ‘not insensible that in some instances we may have substituted “sound for sense”; for novels and tales, through the liberality of our friends, have been showered upon us with such profusion’ (12 (1811): v). They further state that: With due deference be it spoken, it is the intention of the editor to restore the Monthly Museum to its original construction – to make it a repository of useful and miscellaneous information . . . we must necessarily confine our Novel and Romance writers within narrower bounds. (vi–vii) However, the editors cannot print what they do not receive: the fans’ influence is real and effective. Whatever their intentions to spur their contributors to send in something other than novels and romances, their efforts bore little non-narrative fruit. In October 1811, though they included two literary portraits of famous women, a letter to the editor, and the regular feature ‘the Gossiper’, the non-fiction portion of the publication still totalled only half as much content as the fiction – and the letter took the form of a true-life tale. The fictions serialised in this issue included the final part of ‘St Aubin, or a Woman

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 304

17/11/17 5:01 PM

women’s engagement with romantic periodicals

305

Vindicated’ (191–202), the fourth parts of ‘The Banditti of the Forest, or The Mysterious Dagger’ (204–11) and ‘The Strollers Tale’ (211–18), and the fifth part of ‘Ellen – or, The Parsonage’, an epistolary novel (218–25). There is no evidence of the editors accepting any less fiction, less genre fiction, or shorter tales than they had previously. These serialised tales are almost entirely in the Romantic and Gothic style, with ‘Ellen’ being more pastoral, displacing completely the ‘Oriental’ mode that predominates in their earlier editions and older serials, including earlier issues of the Lady’s Magazine. Yet, the view of the pernicious nature of immoral art remained unchanged; in fact, the editors of the same magazine saw fit during this period to limit the poetry accepted into the publication, as – in language strikingly similar to the usual mode of denouncing socalled female fiction – the submitted works were judged ‘dangerous writings for youth to indulge in’ as they ‘soften and enfeeble the mind’ (‘Preface’ 13 (1812): iv). But importantly, there was also no sudden increase in regard for the genres and publication modes dominated by women, such as the Gothic and Romantic. Nevertheless, the impact of fannish reading can be seen in its effects upon the editorial direction of the Lady’s Monthly Museum, through the self-reflexive productions of the readers inspired to become writers themselves. That the editors of the Lady’s Monthly Museum so revised their publication strategy with regard to the Gothic and the romance, and that fictional works came to dominate the publication, suggests the mobilisation of a genre based ‘fandom’. Alhough defending one’s reading or writing preferences for romance in a letter or article in a periodical was relatively rare, perhaps because authors feared being labelled as immoral themselves, submission rates of creative work kept rising.

A ‘particular commitment in the face of dominant opposition’ Regular diatribes against romantic and Gothic fictions were published in the same women’s periodicals that also published them in serialised form. A seemingly supportive article, written in a highly engaging and entertaining style, ‘On the Good Effects of Bad Novels’, by E.A. in the Lady’s Monthly Museum, hopes for the reform of the romance fans as they develop the habit of reading: ‘to these lichen-like novels we owe the foundation of real improvement’ (1 (Oct 1798): 260). This correspondent makes the links once again among genre, periodical, and the circulating library; wishing to see ‘very stupid stories written . . . because they attract readers’, E.A. offers, ‘thanks to circulating libraries, I shall not wish in vain’ (262). Ending the essay with a direct address to female readers, this author urges them to ‘read on; gather together all the novels that you can find; read them till – till you have acquired sense enough to see their worthlessness!’ (263). E.A., though facetiously supportive of reading purely for pleasure, still linked it ultimately to an educational benefit: at last the reader will become discerning, a critic and not a fan. For his indulgent approach, this correspondent received a rather humourless and disapproving rebuke two issues later, suggesting that he must be a man, since he does not have an appropriate sense of the danger to young women posed by such novels (1 (Dec 1798): 434–6). Though both the moral and the artistic worth of these works were questioned extensively, there are few attempts to defend the Romantic and Gothic genres in terms of their art, only their morality; always and again the focus returns to the apparently insatiable readers in evaluating these genres.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 305

17/11/17 5:01 PM

306

evan hayles gledhill

I suspect that this continual opposition to their reading habits may well have fuelled genre fans’ ardour. In the face of opposition to their choice of form and content in their writing and reading, the women of the Lady’s Monthly Museum’s readership, like modern fans, ‘require a particular commitment in the face of dominant opposition’ just to keep doing what they do, to write and to read, but it is a commitment which many are able to make (Sandvoss 2005: 17). The magazines’ amateur authors, like their readers, were working in a genre that did not conform to the dominant paradigms of worth or value in literary taste, and were pursuing interests and activities that were often decried on the basis of their gender. Just as female authors who conformed to more masculine standards could be censured for abandoning their femininity, authors who wrote in the recognised feminine genres of contemporary fiction did not escape, nor could they expect to escape, gendered censure. In publishing protestations against women as authors, against the genres women authors dominated in the marketplace, and against the circulating libraries that were the major market to which women could sell their fictions, the women’s periodical editors were in one respect opposing the very community they had helped to create through their own publishing model. Although complaints against contemporary fictions were often presented as being based on quality alone, consideration of the gender of the author or the reader was raised in many articles decrying the genres most associated with women. Romantic-era women’s periodicals exhibit a profusion of articles bemoaning women’s engagement with publishing and insisting that the market was flooded, and all convinced that the peak of this trend had either been reached or was soon to be so. The Lady’s Magazine published an extract from ‘The Trifler’, for example, suggesting in 1789 that this was ‘a time when the press overflows with the production of female pens’ (20 (June 1789): 297). An anonymous letter writer to the Lady’s Monthly Museum, signing themselves M. six years later seems similarly convinced that the era of such productions is waning: ‘there was a period of time when the rage for novel writing was so indiscriminately managed, that every wretched author . . . was sure to meet with a ready sale’ (2 (Dec 1798): 434). Other complainants continually invoke feminine superficiality for the increase in novelistic output from the publishers: ‘Short Remarks on Misrepresentation of the Human Character’ by E.A.K., in the Lady’s Monthly Museum, decries the influence of fashion ‘for who would read a novel of a month old?’ (5 (Feb 1800): 134). This argument was still being advanced a quarter of a century later by William Hazlitt, who suggested that women ‘judge of books as they do of fashions . . . which are admired only “in their newest gloss”’ (1826: 63). These negative perspectives did recognise a trend, however: the profusion of fiction being produced either by women (or by those men who sought to position their work within feminine genres). But they misidentify the cause as a mere fad. I suggest, instead, that this is in part a development that is directly linked into the fannish experience of being part of a textual community, through the periodical and to a lesser but mutually imbricated extent the circulating library. Critics often expressed the view that there was an inherently masculine or feminine mode of expression in a text itself, whether the sex of the author was known or not. Oliver Goldsmith declared of novels ascribed to ‘A Lady’ that ‘it is plain by the style, and a nameless somewhat in the manner, that pretty fellows, coffee critics, and dirty shirted dunces, have sometimes a share in the achievement’ (1798: 232). Goldsmith suggests he will henceforth assume all anonymous offerings are from the pens of men;

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 306

17/11/17 5:01 PM

women’s engagement with romantic periodicals

307

his conclusion that this will discourage poor authorship demonstrates that he believes that men can release substandard quality under female pseudonyms and in the genres of women’s fictions because women’s tastes and productions are inherently inferior. Following Tedra Osell, I thus suggest that what is important here – in both the genre fiction and the women’s periodical – is the ‘rhetorical femininity’ that ‘genders the text generally, not specifically, claiming to represent women as a class rather than specific women writers’ (2005: 283). The real source of the complaints is neither wholly moral nor based in concerns of quality, but based almost entirely on the gender of the majority of authors and readers of these genre fictions, and concerns about women’s pleasure as socially disruptive. Romantic writers of fiction for the periodicals constructed consciously self-reflexive genre fictions and found they were creating not only escapist entertainment, but also the door to an experience of textual community that foregrounded and valued femininity. William Hazlitt, writing about his own personal library, suggested that readers reread favourite texts to form ‘links in the chain of our conscious being [which] bind together the different scattered divisions of our personal identity’ (1826: 66). However, Hazlitt has, as he acknowledges, all of literary history to draw on to find a ‘valued friend’, and in his opinion Romantic era novels rework ‘what has been served up entire and in a more natural state’ by previous authors (65). This ‘natural state’ identified by Hazlitt, like the ‘universal’ everyman identified by Fetterley, is constructed by a man and confused a gendered perspective for a neutral one. The Gothic and romance stories published in the Lady’s Monthly Museum may be a way of constructing a sense of a more feminine ‘chain’ of being: consciously (re)constructing textual forms, rather like Frankenstein’s creature, another great creation of a Romantic female author.

Notes 1. The Circulating Library (1804), hand-coloured etching from a print by John Raphael Smith, 1781, British Museum, London. 2. In this, they were part of a wider trend of articles condemning modern novels. Of particular reference to the circulating library, see: E. ‘On the titles of modern novels’. Monthly Magazine and British Register (4 (Nov 1797): 347–9); Miss Hunter. ‘Letter to the Editor’. Lady’s Monthly Museum (10 (Jan 1811): 8). 3. Tulloch and Jenkins distinguish further between followers and fans of a particular serially issued text, with the latter term being defined by a social identity and a claiming of the term by the fans themselves (1995: 23). Sandvoss notes that the study of fandom ‘does not necessarily include all fans and their activities, but rather focuses on specific social and cultural interactions, institutions and communities, that have formed through the close interaction of committed groups’ (2005: 5). 4. Like the periodicals themselves, these are textual spaces in which authors are often anonymous or pseudonymous, so all data on contributor and reader demographics is self-reported. In 2013 one self-motivated fan performed a census on the database Ao3, which reported a female dominated demographic base. CentrumLumina (2013). 5. ‘Yuletide Exchange’. Archive of our Own, (last accessed 20 Jan 2017). 6. Jacqueline Pearson (1999) acknowledges that all texts are available for a resistant reading, which was recognised at the time: in debates about suitable reading material for women, even the devotional and educational text did not escape scrutiny and occasional censure. Janice Radway (1987) suggests that the act of reading enables relief from the domestic

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 307

17/11/17 5:01 PM

308

evan hayles gledhill

pressures women experience in their roles as wives and mothers, even though the chosen texts reinforce in their content the dominant cultural paradigms that create such pressures. 7. Articles on the perils of educating women above their class expectations were a longstanding, and far-reaching theme. See ‘On Female Universities and Academies’. Lady’s and Gentleman’s Pocket Magazine 1 (Aug 1796): 116–18; ‘The Gossiper’. Lady’s Monthly Museum 11 (Dec 1811): 303–5; ‘Seduction’. Female Preceptor 1 (Jan–Feb 1814: 41–8, 103–11. 8. Each individual in the letter writer’s narrative is identified by a satirical nickname, though the narrative itself is not presented as satirical in and of itself.

Works Cited Adburgham, Alison. 1972. Women in Print: writing women and women’s magazines from the Restoration to the Accession of Victoria. London: Allen & Unwin. Austen, Jane. 2006. Northanger Abbey. Ed. Barbara Benedict and Deidre Le Faye. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Batchelor, Jennie. 2011. ‘“Connections, which are of service . . . in a more advanced age”: The Lady’s Magazine, Community, and Women’s Literary Histories’. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 30.2: 245–67. Beetham, Margaret. 1996. A Magazine of Her Own: Domesticity and Desire in the Women’s Magazine 1800–1914. London: Routledge. CentrumLumina. 2013. ‘Gender: Ao3 Census Data Analysis’. The Slow Dance of the Infinite Stars. (last accessed 12 Jan 2017). Female Preceptor. 1813–15. London. Fergus, Jan. 2006. Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fetterley, Judith. 1978. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press Goldsmith, Oliver. 1798. ‘On Jemima and Louisa’. Essays and Criticisms by Dr Goldsmith, with an account of the author. London: J. Johnson. 232–4. Vol. 3. Hazlitt, William. 1826. ‘On Reading Old Books’. The Plain Speaker; opinions on books, men and things. Vol. 2. London: Henry Colburn. 63–84 Jacobs, Edward. 2003. ‘Eighteenth-Century British Circulating Libraries and Cultural Book History’. Book History 6: 1–22. The Lady’s and Gentleman’s Pocket Magazine. 1796. New York. The Lady’s Magazine: and Repository of Entertaining Knowledge. 1792–3. Philadelphia. The Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex. 1770–1832 (1st ser. 1770– 1819, 2nd ser. 1820–9, 3rd ser. 1830–2). London. The Lady’s Monthly Museum. 1798–1828 (1st ser. 1798–1814; 2nd ser. 1815–28). London. The Monthly Magazine and British Register. 1796–1825. London. Lynch, Deidre. 2006 ‘Counter Publics: Shopping and Women’s Sociability’. Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 211–36. Osell, Tedra. 2005. ‘Tatling Women in the Public Sphere: Rhetorical Femininity and the English Essay Periodical’. Eighteenth-Century Studies 38.2: 283–300. Pearson, Jacqueline. 1996. ‘“Books, my greatest joy”: constructing the female reader in The Lady’s Magazine’. Women’s Writing 3.1: 3–15. —. 1999. Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 308

17/11/17 5:01 PM

women’s engagement with romantic periodicals

309

Radway, Janice A. 1987. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. London: Verso. Sandvoss, Cornel. 2005. Fans: the Mirror of Consumption. Oxford: Polity Press. St. Clair, William. 2004. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Throsby, Corin. 2009. ‘Byron, Commonplacing and Early Fan Culture’. Romanticism and Celebrity Culture 1750–1850. Ed. Tom Mole. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 227–44. Tuite, Clara and Gillian Russell, eds. 2006. Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tulloch, John, and Henry Jenkins. 1995. Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek. London: Routledge. ‘Yuletide Exchange’. Archive of our Own. (last accessed 20 Jan 2017).

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 309

17/11/17 5:01 PM

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-04.indd 310

17/11/17 5:01 PM

Part V Theorising the Periodical in Text and Practice

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 311

17/11/17 5:02 PM

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 312

17/11/17 5:02 PM

Theorising the Periodical in Text and Practice: Introduction

P

eriodical studies is a relatively young field, at least as a self-aware and selfreflective research area. No strong consensus exists even over the definition of ‘periodical’ itself, let alone how best to approach its study, but the question is a profoundly freighted one, particularly as digitisation increases but also radically changes how easily readers are able to access periodical archives, and how they read, or read into, them. Ease of access is welcome, of course, but it also turns an already unmanageably large field into something nearly unthinkable, particularly with the advent of the magazine toward the end of our period. Yet after a long period of seeming sleepiness for the field, dynamic scholars, often younger ones, are drawn to the exploding frontier of periodical studies in accelerating numbers. The essays gathered in this penultimate part of the volume do not advocate any cohesive single method for reading the woman-championing periodical (how could they?), but each poses a new and unique approach to a popular and well-known title, coming together to sketch out the cutting edge of gendered queries into periodical writing from the eighteenth century. They write, not, like Frances Brooke, ‘in defiance of all criticisms’, but ahead of them (Old Maid no. 1 (15 Nov 1755): 1). The first periodical to address women explicitly in its title, the Ladies Mercury (1693), was short-lived but has garnered plenty of attention even so. Nicola Parsons and Slaney Chadwick Ross nonetheless offer two fresh approaches. Parsons makes a persuasive case that we should not consider the Ladies Mercury a straightforward appendage of its parent periodical, the Athenian Mercury (1690–7): the Ladies Mercury is different and divergent, not in treating women’s issues, which the Athenian certainly did, nor in the fact that it presumes male interest in its pages, but rather because it clearly disagrees with some of the Athenian’s handling of its women-centred content. Both Parsons and Ross argue that the Ladies Mercury is rewarding to scholars who read it on its own terms as well as (traditionally) in context with the Athenian. Ross also introduces the context of the Spectator (1711–12; 1714), as in her take the dominating theme of the Ladies Mercury is not privacy; it is surveillance. In the Ladies Mercury, but not in the more dominant Spectator, ‘women act as witnesses to their own characters, conduct, and actions, and they are assumed to be telling the truth’. That this is a ‘radical departure’ from legal reality is a correct and startling observation. The middle of the eighteenth century was witness to the truly remarkable, and enduring, periodical writing of Eliza Haywood, but it also saw two other prominent women author-editors, Frances Brooke and Charlotte Lennox, come out with boundaryshattering periodical ventures of their own. Kathryn R. King treats Brooke’s Old Maid (1755–6) by reminding us – in a marked departure from virtually all other scholarship on the title – that Brooke was more than a chief author of that work; she was its editor as well, and was not by any means a passive one. Most periodicals, including the major canonical ones, were collaborative works, and to forget that this is true of the female-authored ones is distorting. ‘Literary history proceeds in part through change in

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 313

17/11/17 5:02 PM

314

part v: introduction

focus’, King reminds us, and both hers and Susan Carlile’s essay enable exactly such a salutary refocusing. Carlile’s tour through the Lady’s Museum (1760–1) vis-à-vis the Trifler essays that headline its numbers demonstrate that Lennox had in mind to frame her magazine less as a miscellany than as an unusually ambitious project to offer challenging intellectual content to her women readers. Using the anonymous and fictional letter writers to the Trifler, Lennox constructs a simulacrum of a reading public with whom she can debate and whom she might persuade. While periodical scholars are often painfully aware of the problem posed by unverifiable letters to the editors, Carlile arrives at an apt suggestion for how to treat their effects, if not their origins. The decade following Lennox’s innovative work saw the launch of ‘the longest running monthly periodical for women published in the eighteenth century’, as Jennie Batchelor describes the Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770–1832). Batchelor’s essay works to upend problematic assumptions about women’s magazines that have continued to dominate writing about periodicals for much longer than they ought. For one, the Lady’s Magazine was, despite its own claims, like most other periodical ventures in that it knowingly served both sexes. Its notable innovations were not with respect to audience, but to its miscellany contents, which indeed also did not hasten any apocryphal decline of women’s popular reading into narrow domestic bounds. Whatever else the Lady’s Magazine may have been, it was neither anti-intellectual nor trivial: it was a richly ambitious and rightly popular collaborative work. In a final revisiting of older periodical theory, we return in the conclusion to Part V to the public sphere. Naturally a prominent response to Habermasian thought has been the impropriety of positing any public that lacks women; all of the essays in this section make clear that even if the genre did not tend toward gender egalitarianism, no such exclusively masculine sphere was shaped by periodicals, either. Claire Knowles rejects the idea of the newspaper as a ‘gentleman’s club’ explicitly, arguing that while male dominance was definitely a fact of the genre, so was active and effective female participation. Through the case study of the World (1787–94) and its debt to the fascinating actress Mary Wells, whose career the periodical was created in part to puff, Knowles makes clear that the literary marketplace was not immune to that most novelistic of shaping forces: love. None but the brave deserve the fair, and none but the steadfast shall become a periodicalist. These essays rise to the challenge.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 314

17/11/17 5:02 PM

20 The LADIES MERCURY Nicola Parsons

A

s the first English periodical addressed specifically to women, the Ladies Mercury occupies a position in literary history that is incommensurate with its brief, four-issue, run. Its inaugural issue, published on the last day of February 1693, promises its anticipated readership both novelty and familiarity. The paper’s title claims an immediate relation to John Dunton’s pioneering periodical, the Athenian Mercury (1690–7) that the address with which the first issue opens amplifies into a specific kind of kinship. In this address, the editors responsible for the new periodical, figured in its pages as a dimly realised Ladies Society, declare their exclusive interest in ‘that little Sublunary, Woman’, an area of interest and a readership they suggest the Athenian Mercury has recently forsaken ‘as trifles and vanities for more serious and weighty meditations’ (‘To the Athenians’. 1.1).1 Accordingly, the issues of the Ladies Mercury that follow treat matters such as whether it is immoral to simulate virginity or, for that matter, actively avoid pregnancy, and how a miserly husband might best be managed, questions deemed of special – though not exclusive – interest to women. Although the topics they intend to address are framed as complementary, yet distinct, from those canvassed in the pages of the Athenian Mercury, the new paper follows its Athenian counterpart in format and genre: inviting male and female readers to send questions anonymously, and printing those queries verbatim, with no obvious editorial intervention. The visible efforts to demarcate the content but not the format of the Ladies Mercury from its established counterpart have led some critics to suggest it was a spin-off of Dunton’s own devising, a way for him to capitalise further on the Mercury’s active cultivation of female readers and querists.2 Even those who are less certain of authorship read the paper as continuous with its Athenian predecessor. These approaches understand the Ladies Mercury in the terms laid out in the paper’s own initial issue: positing a supplementary relationship between the two periodicals and suggesting, implicitly, the Ladies Mercury only sought to extend, not alter, the aims and rhetoric of the Athenian Mercury. Yet in responding to questions from readers, the editors of the Ladies Mercury often take issue with the advice dispensed and the positions espoused by the Athenian Society, actively positioning themselves and their periodical not as an extension of the Athenian Mercury but as an alternative to it. This essay, then, not only examines the place accorded to women – that is, accorded to female correspondents and to concerns designated female – in the Ladies Mercury, it also reads closely the differences and discrepancies between the interest in women prominently declared in the Athenian Mercury and the contents of the Ladies Mercury in order fully to account for the place of the latter paper in the history of women and print media.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 315

17/11/17 5:02 PM

316

nicola parsons

The authorship of the Ladies Mercury has not been conclusively determined. Most scholars conjecture Dunton was responsible for the new periodical, regarding the paper as an ‘adjunct’ or a ‘companion’ to the Athenian Mercury (Clery 2004: 36; Shevelow 1989: 64). Helen Berry suggests the Ladies Mercury was Dunton’s venture, published pseudonymously, and proposes its short run was due to the fact that ‘the original periodical relied too heavily upon female readers to have them diverted elsewhere’ (2003: 23). Dunton’s silence on the advent of the Ladies Mercury certainly invites this conclusion, especially when it is considered in the context of his treatment of other periodicals that sought to capitalise on his success. When the Lacedemonian Mercury, an imitative rival and a parody of the Athenian Mercury, commenced publication in February 1692, Dunton responded by aggressively asserting his property in the question-and-answer format he developed.3 The next Athenian Mercury alerted its readers to a new periodical that ‘interfere[es] with our Athenian Project’, and advised they will answer themselves the questions the rival paper addresses, a defensive strategy reiterated in periodic notices in the months that followed.4 Almost two decades later, when the competitive advantage that might accrue from denigrating other periodicals had long since expired, Dunton continue to remonstrate with rival periodicals for ‘interloping with my Question Project’.5 That he did not admonish the Ladies Mercury in the same way gives rise to the suggestion that Dunton was at least amenable to, if not responsible for, its existence.6 However, although the Ladies Mercury is not identified by name, the Athenian Mercury took decided issue with both its ethos and its contents. The day after the fourth and, as it turned out, final issue of the Ladies Mercury appeared, the Athenian Mercury reprinted questions from the Ladies Mercury’s first number and offered their own answers that often run counter to the Ladies Society’s advice. Arguably this issue, overlooked in previous discussions of the Ladies Mercury, is an instance of the strategy for dealing with potential rivals Dunton delineated the previous year: that is, to reprint any questions included in a rival periodical and offer advice from his own Society. The differences in the advice extended in the Ladies Mercury and that offered subsequently by the Athenian Society is discussed below, but the very existence of this issue compels a different treatment of the Ladies Mercury. These specific textual connections not only indicate a more complicated relationship between the papers than that hitherto acknowledged, but also suggest important differences in the respective space the papers accord to women and their treatment of matters identified as of special importance to female readers. In announcing women as its primary topic and principal readership, the Ladies Mercury enters territory the Athenian Mercury had already made its own. Attention to matters deemed of special interest to women and an address to female readers were central to the Athenian Mercury’s initial mission and remained a cornerstone of the paper. It has also become central to critical arguments made about the Athenian Mercury, the basis for the important position it now occupies in the history of women’s writing. Kathryn Shevelow argues the Athenian Mercury not only created a space for the articulation of female lives and circumstances in print, but it also contributed to forging an association between women and private matters that would prove enduring. Emma Clery agrees, identifying the publication of Athenian Mercury as an important moment in the feminisation of popular culture. Less than three months into their venture, the Athenian Mercury’s evident interest in female readers was formalised with dedicated ladies’ issues. Declaring questions posed by women were ‘pressing and

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 316

17/11/17 5:02 PM

the LADIES MERCURY

317

numerous’ (1.18), the Society announced a regular monthly issue would be devoted to answering ‘all the reasonable questions sent us by the fair sex, as also any others relating to Love and Marriage’ (2.3). Yet these dedicated ladies’ issues registering and addressing the Athenian Mercury’s sizeable female readership are usually understood as a short-lived experiment. Identifying a total of ten ladies’ issues, the last published in January 1692, Berry concludes the periodical’s explicitly gendered issues were not a viable venture (2003: 61, 246). This perception facilitates particular readings of the Ladies Mercury, which is understood first to occupy the space left vacant by the demise of the Athenian Mercury’s ladies’ issues and then as further evidence that a periodical which foregrounded its appeal to female readers was unsustainable. However, the Athenian Society’s commitment to female readers persisted long past the date customarily understood as its terminus. The more complete archive made available by electronic databases reveal ladies’ issues were promised, forecast, and delivered throughout the first three years of the Athenian Mercury, the period that leads up to and extends beyond the Ladies Mercury. Ladies’ issues were advertised monthly throughout 1692 and 1693, and questions concerning love from male and female querists were addressed with regularity.7 Tellingly, the advent of the Ladies Mercury coincides not, as its editors claim, with the diminution of interest in feminised topics in the Athenian Mercury but with its intensification. On 25 February 1693, a mere two days before the publication of the first Ladies Mercury, the Athenian Society announced their ladies’ issues would now appear weekly, not monthly, and heralded an annual publication that would gather together and index the advice the Society had dispensed on love and marriage, subsequently published as the Ladies Dictionary (1694). The Society promised that: The Ladyes Questions shall be answer’d next week, and whatever Questions are sent us by the fair Sex shall be Now answer’d sooner than formerly, our Intentions being to Allott One Day in every Week for Answering the Ladies Questions, concerning Love and Marriage, &c, and besides this, shall at the end of the Year make a Collection of all the Questions receiv’d on that Subject. (9.22) The Athenian Mercury published two ladies’ issues during the three weeks the Ladies Mercury appeared, which address questions concerning women’s use of patches and paint, deliver a verdict on a report of a gentleman who believes a woman in Covent Garden calls to him through a speaking trumpet, offer advice to a female querist who is concerned about the solace she finds in ‘the pleasing conversation of an ingenious young gentleman’, and express incredulity at a report of a gentleman ‘without faults’ who is unable to find a wife, among other topics (9.26). Moreover, the notices appended to these issues are increasingly solicitous of female readers, promising additional issues devoted to ladies’ queries and continuing to advertise a yearly compendium of the advice extended to date, termed a ‘Love Dictionary’.8 In introducing the Ladies Mercury to the reading public, then, its editors position their periodical in relation to the Athenian Mercury in disingenuous terms. The double address with which the inaugural issue opens – first to the gentlemen of the Athenian Society and then to the female readership the editors anticipate – secures the rhetorical space of the Ladies Mercury, by misrepresenting their Athenian counterpart. Its anonymous editors undertake not to encroach on the Athenian Mercury’s territory, identified as ‘the

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 317

17/11/17 5:02 PM

318

nicola parsons

examination of learning, nature, arts and sciences and indeed the whole world’, concerning themselves instead with ‘that little Sublunary, Woman’. Describing the knowledgeable concerns of the Athenian Mercury as ‘Gamaliel studies’, the Ladies Society name their own preserve as ‘Martha’s humbler part: a little homely Cookery, the dishing up a small Treat of Love’. Invoking these two biblical parallels – Gamaliel, an esteemed scholar of Mosaic Law, and Martha, who prioritises domestic labour over the contemplative listening and learning her sister Martha favours9 – works to demarcate decisively the concerns of two periodicals. In this way, the authors of the Ladies Mercury secure a rhetorical space that is linked to the Athenian Mercury but that is subordinate to it. Subsequent issues reiterate this supplementary construction with notices that solicit correspondence concerning ‘Love &c’ from would-be querists and remind them that ‘questions relating to Learning, Religion, &c’ fall outside their purview as they refuse ‘to infringe on the Athenians’.10 These rhetorical moves effectively rewrite the concerns of the Athenian Mercury, refiguring their explicit engagement with male and female readers on a range of quotidian topics as esoteric discussion. Moreover, it elides the Athenian Mercury’s foundational concern with female readers and feminised topics. The Ladies Mercury positions itself as a supplement to the Athenian Mercury, its discussions subordinate to the knowledgeable and weighty meditations the Athenian Society facilitate. It is the figure of the female reader – heralded in the title and foregrounded in the opening address – that underscores this rhetorical move and secures this supplementary space. In doing so, the Ladies Society are rehearsing the Athenian Society’s own strategy and claiming it as their own. As Shevelow influentially argues, the attention periodicals such as the Athenian Mercury (and, later, the Tatler (1709–11) and Spectator (1711–12; 1714)) paid female readers should be understood as an attempt ‘to bring women and “ladies’” topics into the community of the text, as it existed in relation to the authoritative society’ (64). Here, it is the new periodical, rather than a particular readership, that is positioned in relation to the authoritative Athenian Mercury. As existing readings of the address to the fair sex in periodicals like the Athenian Mercury, the Tatler, and the Spectator have demonstrated, the nominal use of ‘ladies’ does not signal the gender of the anticipated audience so much as it designates an area of experience as ‘feminine’ (Shevelow 1989; Clery 2004; Maurer 1998). This is evident in the Ladies Society’s description of their intended contents as a ‘homely treat, a little dish of love’. An advertisement appended to the first issue of the Ladies Mercury, soliciting correspondence from ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’, makes it plain that the editors do not envision a readership wholly made up of women. Indeed, eight of the sixteen questions addressed in the four issues of Ladies Mercury are posed by male readers whose gender forms an important part of their query. The third issue of the periodical, for example, contains a question from ‘a man of Honour’ who, unable to divorce his adulterous wife, has taken a mistress and wonders if his actions are sinful, and one from a ‘young fellow, scarce twenty, of considerable Quality, and Heir to a very great Estate’ whose father has forced him to break a marriage he entered privately and who asks the Ladies Society to adjudicate his father’s actions (1.3). The queries that are selected for inclusion in the Ladies Mercury and the manner in which they are addressed foreground its differences with the Athenian Mercury. The first issue of the paper includes as its second question a letter from young gentleman who wishes to know if his anticipatory imagining of the joy his wedding night will bring is a sin. Having requested the opinion of the Ladies Society, he

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 318

17/11/17 5:02 PM

the LADIES MERCURY

319

discloses ‘I have long since sent this Question to the Athenians, but could never obtain an Answer’ (1.1). Electing to address a letter from a reader who has been unable to obtain advice from the Athenian Society indicates that the Ladies Mercury will offer its readers a different, and perhaps more expansive, forum. Subsequent issues amplify these differences into specific distinctions. The second issue includes a letter from a self-described ‘Virgin lady of some considerable quality’ that remarks on the differences she anticipates between advice she might receive from the Athenian Society and that which she expects from the society she now addresses. After posing her question – ‘whether a Maiden-Lady at years of Discretion may Marry utterly against her Parents[’] Consent without a sin in doing so’ – the female querist notes she dare not interrogate the Athenian Society because ‘they have all along declared in several of their Papers, that though they enjoyn us not to an Active Obedience to parents in Marrying those Husbands they think fit to choose, yet thy oblige us to Passive Obedience, in not Marrying those they refuse us’ (‘Q3.’ 1.2). In addressing themselves to her dilemma, the Ladies Society confess themselves ‘dissenters’ to the oracles she has consulted, nominating conjugal duty as superior and more lasting than filial. Both the question and answer are underpinned by knowledge of the stance taken by the Athenian Society on previous occasions: in response to questions from male and female querists alike, they declare repeatedly that parents are neither to dispose of their children like chattel nor are children to marry without parental consent.11 While the Athenian Mercury advocates what the Ladies Society rightly identify as ‘passive obedience’ – a position that attempts to hold filial duty in tension with individual desire – the Ladies Mercury prioritise romantic love and over and above filial duty and obligation. The editors of the Ladies Mercury continue to position themselves and their periodical against the Athenian Mercury over the course of their four issues. This is apparent not only in the advice they formulate in response to readers’ questions, but also in direct references to the activities of the Athenian Society. The third issue of the Ladies Mercury includes a query seeking the Society’s opinion of the Athenian Society’s recently announced venture that aims to gather together the advice the periodical has dispensed to female readers under the title, the Ladies Dictionary. Cribbing its text from the advertisement that ran in the Athenian Mercury only three days before, the letter asks the Ladies Society: What’s your Opinion of the Athenians undertaking of a LADIES DICTIONARY, to Contain Answers (Alphabetically digested) to all the most nice and Curious Questions concerning Love, Marriage; the Behaviour, Dress and Humours of the Female Sex, whether Virgins, Wives, Widows, &c. designed for a Directory to the Ladies and Bachelors upon all Occasions, the work to be compleat and publish’d about the 20th April next. (‘Q3.’ no. 3 (10 Mar 1693): 1)12 Rather than a sincere advertisement for the Ladies Dictionary and for the Athenian Society’s endeavours, as it has been described (Shevelow 1989: 70), the Ladies Society takes the opportunity provided by the query – genuine or otherwise – not only to raise questions about the promised publication, but also take issue with the Athenian Mercury’s treatment of female readers. The editors highlight the many ways in which the alphabetical order of a dictionary is incompatible with the question-and-answer

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 319

17/11/17 5:02 PM

320

nicola parsons

structure of the Athenian Mercury. They also raise questions about the material the new publication will contain, casting doubt on the periodical’s regard for their female readers. If the forecast volume is to be made up of anything more than recycled, overly familiar material, the Ladies Society argue their Athenian counterparts must either ‘prevaricate with their recent promise of assigning at least one Mercury in the Week to answer the Ladies Questions’ or disclose a cache of questions, long ignored in spite of their ‘repeated assurances of speedy satisfaction’ (3). Either way, the Athenian Mercury must break faith with its female readers. It is telling that the issues of the Athenian Mercury that bracket this issue of the Ladies Mercury treat queries from their female readers lightly, with levity and irony in equal measure. In the Athenian Mercury published on 7 March 1693, a self-described ‘poor distressed Virgin’ complains her previous requests for advice have gone unanswered, a silence she attributes to the fact her letter was ‘either not believed, or thought troublesome and impertinent’ (‘Q4.’ 9.25). In the following issue, the Athenians respond to a woman asking advice about which of two marriage proposals she should accept by questioning her sex: seizing her inclusion of two lines from Ovid’s Ars Amatoria in their original Latin, they address their answer to ‘your Hee-Ladiship’ and devote as much space to scrutinising the femininity her letter performs as they do addressing her query (‘Q5.’ 9.26 ).13 Weighing up the merits of the Ladies Dictionary (1694), then, allows the editors of the Ladies Mercury to suggest the forum the Athenian Mercury provides for the discussion of feminised topics might be unsatisfactory in a context that might incline readers to a similar view. As part of their address to female readers in their first issue, the Ladies Society undertake to observe strict notions of propriety, promising their readers that their paper will ‘avoid even the least offensive Syllable that may give any rude Shock to the chastest Ear’. In making such a statement, the Ladies Mercury rehearses the sentiments that might have been familiar to readers from other periodicals. Notably, the first issue of the Gentleman’s Journal, begun by Pierre Motteux in 1692 and often considered the first English magazine, began with a similar address to women.14 The editor assures readers that: The fair Sex need never fear to be exposed to the Blush, when they honour this with a reading; ’tis partly writ for them, and I am too much their Votary to be guilty of such a Crime . . . this is no less the Ladies Journal than the Gentlemens. (1 (Jan 1692): 1) The Ladies Society reprise these conventional declarations, respecting the modesty of their female readership and providing assurances that topics breaching decorum will be avoided, but use it to frame quite a different discussion. In spite of the editorial virtue invoked in the initial issue, the letters selected for inclusion in the Ladies Mercury and the discussion they elicit often exceed the bounds of propriety. Many of the letters address questions of sexual morality, seeking advice on when marital chastity might be expected and when it may be dispensed. Most correspondents write to seek particular advice on matters of female sexuality, inviting consideration of a range of questions that might be considered immodest. The letter addressed first in the initial issue is a case in point. It is penned by a ‘young woman’, who confesses she maintained an illicit relationship with a ‘lewd and infamous rifler’ for nearly a year before her present marriage, and seeks advice as to

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 320

17/11/17 5:02 PM

the LADIES MERCURY

321

how she should now conduct herself. Now felicitously married to a gentleman of worth and honour with whom she has fallen in love, she regrets pretending to virginity on her wedding night and asks the Ladies Society how she might ameliorate her ‘Love-Sick and Shame-Sick’ condition (no. 1 (28 Feb 1693): 1). The Society responds by assuring their female querist her affair does not wrong her husband as it began and ended when he was ‘not so much as thought on’, insisting ‘no Obligation even of the most Rigid Laws compelled you to be your own Accuser’. Redoubling their efforts to absolve her guilt, the Ladies Society invoke Jacob’s example in the Old Testament, who manipulated his father into conferring on him his elder brother’s birthright and attendant blessings, as a divinely-sanctioned instance of the good fortune that can result from deception. Shawn Lisa Maurer astutely observes that, in focusing on their female querist’s ‘present contrition’, the response of the Ladies Society reconfigures the active, illicit desire the young lady confesses as chaste marital sexuality. She goes on to argue that the letter and response demonstrate the efforts of the Ladies Mercury to ‘promulgate an ethos of penitent sexuality’ (1998: 57), that is in keeping with the editorial declaration with which the issue begins. The letter itself, however, gives voice to the young lady’s sexual experience. In addressing the Ladies Society, she invokes the anonymity the periodical offers, noting parenthetically that ‘Since Black and White cannot blush, I venture under the Skreen to make you my Confessors’, which frames her letter as a kind of public confession and emphasises the intimate detail it contains. She confesses, for example, the ‘practiced Cheats and impostures’ used to counterfeit virginal innocence on her wedding night (1). Even though she narrates her actions in language that excoriates her past immorality, her letter also creates space for the curious reader to imagine details of ‘the vilest Arts’ that are omitted. This opens a suggestive, speaking, discrepancy. The juxtaposition of this detailed question and response with the assertions of editorial virtue with which Ladies Mercury is framed suggests that the editors were inviting questions on topics they seemed to disdain. The fact that the second letter in the initial issue also invites consideration of sexual modesty only foregrounds further this suggestive discrepancy. Here, a young gentleman enquires if the physical intimacy he has cultivated with his betrothed and his eager anticipation of ‘the Raptures of Possession, and all the darling joys of the Bridal-Bed’ are lawful (no. 1 (28 Feb 1693): 2). Again, the Ladies Society take an unexpectedly permissive stance, declaring that, as long as their marriage eventuates, the physical affections the couple enjoy and those they anticipate are no sin. Finally, a letter addressed in the second issue of the paper describes a proposition made to its author by a young woman. She has refused the querist’s marriage proposal on pragmatic grounds – the fact they are both of little fortune means a shared future would be a straitened one – but declares herself ready to gratify his desire if he ‘can by any Art or Study propose a way for opening the Lock without spoiling the Wards’. In answering, the society elaborates the lady’s proposition further for their querist, teasing out the kinds of physical relationship she might envisage. The Ladies Society’s more knowing reading of this invitation emphasises the querist’s naïvety, calling attention to the comical discrepancy between his confident introduction of himself as a ‘Beau’ and his inability to decode the racy innuendo of the letter, but they neither judge the morality of the proposal nor censure the lady for making it. The appeals readers make to the Ladies Mercury for advice or information often depend on intimate and personal circumstances, narrated in detail in their letters. The letter with which the Ladies Mercury opens, discussed above, is a case in point. The

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 321

17/11/17 5:02 PM

322

nicola parsons

‘very young woman’ details her present circumstances, her past affair and her pressing shame at length, the idiosyncratic narration turning her otherwise conventional story of seduction and remorse into an individual account. Her description of her husband returns to and reiterates his virtue – he is a ‘Person of very great Honour and Worth, trebly my superior in Birth, in Fortunes infinitely [. . .] besides the handsomest, wittiest &c, I have the kindest and most passionate of men in a Husband’ (no. 1 (28 Feb 1693): 1) – the repetition speaking volumes about her regard for him and her own remorse. Her letter is a feeling account of shame and regret, and it is the particular detail in which it is narrated that makes the Ladies Society’s response – especially their determination to absolve her of her guilt – seem fitting. In this instance, as in others, the young woman’s letter dwarfs the response, allowing the female querist a greater voice in the periodical than its editors. A further instructive example comes from the letter that concludes the same issue. The query occasioning this letter is not personal; its author narrates an old story concerning a gentleman, rumoured to be impotent, who married two woman in succession before shame drove him to suicide, and solicits the Society’s opinion of the contrasting conduct of his two wives. The story is narrated at length, but its many digressions and parenthetical asides are left to stand by the Ladies Society, allowing the female querist’s distinctive narrative voice to stand. By publishing contributions from female querists without obvious editorial intervention, the Ladies Mercury creates a space for the female subject in print. Kathryn Shevelow has written persuasively about the implications of the space accorded to female querists in the pages of the Athenian Mercury. Focusing on examples drawn from the mid- and end-point of the periodical’s run, she argues that the Mercury’s ‘publication of letters presented as the autobiographical work of women created a space for the representation of the female writing subject in print, asserting the legitimacy of the expression of feminine experience in writing and the authority of women to ‘tell their own stories’ (1989: 90). However, the dynamic she identifies was not characteristic of the Athenian Society’s response to querists in 1693. Although Shevelow contends the Mercury published ‘self-revelatory, quasi-narrative letters’ from its ‘inception’ (1989: 66), the letters she analyses were all published in the final years of the Mercury’s run, some even did not appear until after its conclusion.15 The ladies’ issues of the Athenian Mercury did not offer female querists a space for personal, self-revelatory narratives until later in the periodical’s run. Instead, the questions sent to the Athenian Society and addressed in the periodical’s pages were short and abstract. Brief questions such as – ‘Whether the woman’s condition in marriage is not worse than the man’s?’ (‘Q6.’ 1.13), ‘Whether beauty be real or imaginary?’ (‘Q1.’ 1.18); ‘Why love generally turns to coldness and neglect after marriage?’ (‘Q3.’ 2.13); and ‘Is it proper for a Woman to yield at the first address, tho’ to a Man we love?’ (‘Q1.’ 4.13) – often met with lengthy disquisitions from the Athenian Society that made reference to literary and historical precedent. Even queries that seem to be motivated by personal circumstances are cast in general terms. For instance, one reader asks the Athenians to adjudicate the following situation: A Gentlewoman that has a Husband who used her barbarously, makes her go in danger of her Life, and keeps a Whore, refusing to live with her, but making her work for her Bread, having the offer of a single Gentleman that will maintain her very well: Whether it be any Sin to accept of his kindness?’ (‘Q2.’ 5.13)

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 322

17/11/17 5:02 PM

the LADIES MERCURY

323

Personal details are all but absent from this narrative; the fact that it is recounted in the third person distances the circumstances from both the querist and the periodical’s editors, facilitating a response that focuses entirely on principles. Restating the situation in plain terms – ‘whether a Woman ought to turn Whore because her Husband is a Whoremaster’ – they declare accepting support from a single gentleman, however well intentioned, poses a risk of such gravity that ‘to be so dangerous that ’tis much more honourable and honest to get her Living by painful Labour, nay almost by begging it self’. Further, it was not uncommon for material to be edited from letters, the elisions noted by the Society as a means to save readers from extraneous or inappropriate detail. These interventions position the Society as superior to their readers, cementing their position as crucial mediators of queries as well as adjudicators. The final issue of the Ladies Mercury was published on Friday 17 March 1693, almost three weeks to the day since the periodical began. Nothing in the paper alerts readers to the fact this is the final issue; in fact, the issue concludes with a notice soliciting further correspondence from readers and promising that questions ‘shall be weekly answered with all the Zeal and Softness becoming the Sex’ (2) However, the next day an issue of the Athenian Mercury was published that responds to the Ladies Mercury and functions as its terminus. Although the issue does not identify the Ladies Mercury by name, the Athenian Society reprints questions addressed in the first two issues of the Ladies Mercury and takes issue with the answers originally provided by a ‘late author’. This issue of the Athenian Mercury takes up four questions already addressed by the Ladies Society but abbreviates, rewrites and, in some cases, distorts the original letters. The long letter from a ‘poor distressed virgin’ confessing her consuming shame at the illicit affair she entered into before her marriage becomes a short paragraph that places more weight on her deception and her concern her guilt will ruin her looks than her metaphysical anxiety. The length edited from the query is more than made up for in the Athenians’ reply, which surpasses the letter by more than double. Rather than addressing themselves to the lady’s circumstances, the Athenians focus on the advice offered in the Ladies Mercury. Seizing on their assurance that she should not feel guilt because her husband was not yet thought of when she begun the affair, they accuse the Society of sophistry – noting the real question is ‘Why did you marry him, which you ought not in strict Virtue and Honour to have done, and whereof he takes care not to say one word.’ They also take issue with the use to which biblical examples are put in the Ladies Mercury, declaring it was more appropriate to reach for the story Tamar, who disguised herself as a prostitute to deceive her father-inlaw, Judah, into impregnating her (Genesis 38), than to excuse her hypocrisy by referencing Jacob. The Athenians’ response to the second query published in the Ladies Mercury – from a young gentleman who wishes to know if his anticipatory imaginings of the joy his wedding night will bring is a sin – proceeds in a similar manner. First refuting the querist’s claim that his letter to the Athenian Mercury met with silence – noting that ‘the same Question, or exactly to the same purpose if not in the same words, has been formerly answer’d in one of our Mercuries’ – the Athenians then take issue with the morality and logic of the advice the Ladies Society has offered, asking ‘Pray Sir, what Religion or University are you of, for this is excellent Logick and Divinity.’ The Athenian Mercury does not reprint the letter in order to provide an alternative forum for the original query, but rather to

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 323

17/11/17 5:02 PM

324

nicola parsons

establish their own authority at the expense of their erstwhile rival. The responses from the Athenian Society to the queries first published in the Ladies Mercury not only subsume the original query but, in their orientation to the author of the Ladies Mercury, turn their outsized response into a contest of authority. Over the course of their brief four-issue run, the Ladies Mercury provided a space for the articulation of female concerns and desires that was anything but supplementary. Beginning publication at a moment when the Athenian Mercury’s interest in their female readership intensified, rather than flagged, the Ladies Mercury enters into an implicit dialogue with their established counterpart that centres on how that readership should be solicited and represented. At a moment when the Athenian Society found letters from female querists an opportunity to showcase their expertise in identifying feminine concerns and style, the Ladies Mercury used the epistolary format to provide a forum for the articulation of private lives and circumstances, especially in negotiating the crucial experience of courtship, and space for their idiosyncratic narration. In this way, the periodical provided an important forum for female voices that demands regard alongside the Athenian Mercury but also rewards consideration in its own terms.

Notes 1. References to the Athenian Mercury will be given by volume and issue number. 2. Stearns 1930: 45; McEwen 1972: 103; Parks 1976: 104; Shevelow 1989: 64, 70; and Norton 2011: 91; all conclude Dunton was responsible for the Ladies Mercury. Maurer (1998: 54), Benedict (2002: 128) and Powell (2012: 133) follow these conclusions in attributing the Ladies Mercury to Dunton. 3. This periodical first appeared on 1 February 1692 as the London Mercury before changing its title to the Lacedemonian Mercury in its eighth issue, the reference to Sparta in the new title highlighting its rivalry with the Athenian Mercury. It was published twice weekly before folding on 30 May of the same year. For more detail, see Boyce (1939: 38–45). 4. This notice was included in the Athenian Mercury 6.1, published on 2 February 1692. For other instances, see 6.2, 6.11, 6.13, 6.14, and 7.19. 5. Dunton focused his attention on four periodicals that were contemporary with the Athenian Mercury: the Lacedemonian Mercury, the Weekly Review, the General Review upon Trade, and the British Apollo. See Dunton 1706: 8, 88; 1710: 113. 6. Shevelow explicitly draws this conclusion, noting that ‘it must have been published with his approval, or he would surely have reviled it, the way he did other competitors, as an interloper’ (1989: 70). 7. Regular ladies issues are advertised in: 6.1 (6 Feb 1692); 6.16 (19 Mar 1692); 7.15 (17 May 1692); 7.18 (28 May 1692); 7.23 (14 June 1692); 7.29 (5 July 1692); 8.6 (17 Sep 1692); 8.10 (1 Oct 1692); 8.25 (22 Nov 1692); 9.8 (7 Jan 1693); 9.10 (14 Jan 1693); 9.22 (25 Feb 1693); 9.24 (4 Mar 1693); 9.28 (18 Mar 1693); 9.29 (21 Mar 1693). It is especially notable that the project of dedicated ladies issues did not wane following the hiatus of the Athenian Mercury between 26 July and 17 September 1692 that was forced by a complaint made to the King’s Licenser by the Earl of Northampton (see McEwan 1972: 59–66). Instead, attention to the ‘ladies questions’ was advertised immediately as the periodical resumed. In addition to ladies issues, in this period the Athenian Mercury also advertised two projects tailored to its female readership: the first described as ‘a very Ingenious Project newly found out for the Ladies Entertainment those Winter Evenings’ (9.1; 9.3); the second, the Ladies Dictionary discussed below.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 324

17/11/17 5:02 PM

the LADIES MERCURY

325

8. For example, a note appended to the Athenian Mercury 9.24 published on Saturday, 4 March promises both of the following week’s issues will be devoted to ladies questions. Advertisements for the Ladies Dictionary are included in 9.22, 9.25, and 9.26. 9. Gamaliel is introduced in Acts 5: 34 and appears again in Acts 22: 3. The story of Martha and Mary appears in Luke 10: 38–42 10. Indeed, this demarcation is further reinforced with a note appended to the Ladies Mercury’s second issue in which the editors claim to have redirected two questions ‘concerning Cain &c. Elias &c’ to ‘the other Society’ as they are questions more appropriately considered by the Athenian Mercury. 11. See for example, 1.13, 6.25, 7.9. Indeed, as if in response to the Ladies Mercury, the Athenian Society reiterate this stance in their issue published the next day. They write: ‘As a Child can’t lawfully dispose of it self without the Consent of its Parents; so on the other side, we don’t understand that the Parents can marry their Children without their Consent’ (‘Q5.’ 9.25). 12. The advertisement appended to Athenian Mercury 9.25 reads: ‘There is going to the Press a Work Entitled THE LADIES DICTIONARY, which will contain Answers (Alphabetically digested) to all the Nice and Curious Questions sent concerning Love, Marriage, the Behaviour, Dress and Humours, of the Female Sex: As also Answers to whatever entertaining Questions else are sent concerning our English Virgins, Wives, Widows or the Fair Sex in General. This Love Dictionary, when finisht, will serve as a Directory to the Ladies and Batchelors upon all Occasions. This Work will be Publisht about the 20th of April, next, all Ladies and Batchelors therefore that have any thing very Curious by ’em upon any of the aforementioned Heads are desired speedily to send it to Smith’s Coffee-House in Stocks-Market, Directed for the Undertaker of the LADIES DICTIONARY.’ 13. Letters from other readers included in the Athenian Mercury in this period seem to anticipate their sincerity might be questioned. One querist beseeches ‘[n]ow I would desire you to deal ingeniously by me, for I am real’, while another declares ‘[t]his is a real matter of fact, therefore I desire your speedy answer’ (9.25). In response to a question from a reader, who asks ‘how you come to have the Art of discerning, and to distinguish a Male Query from a Female’ (9.15), the Athenian Mercury outlines their expertise in identifying feminine concerns and style. 14. Adburgham highlights the ‘wide readership’ by women of the Gentleman’s Journal (1972: 31). Ezell discusses the verse and fictive contributions to the Journal made by women, noting that these pieces were presented in a way that drew attention to the author’s gender (1992: 337). 15. Shevelow analyses three long letters from female querists to make her case: the first is drawn from the third volume The Athenian Oracle (350), a collection published almost two decades after the periodical’s demise; the second and third from issues of the Athenian Mercury published in late November 1693 and August 1694 respectively (1989: 59, 66, 74).

Works Cited Benedict, Barbara M. 2002. Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Berry, Helen. 2003. Gender, Society, and Print Culture in late Stuart England: The Cultural World of the Athenian Mercury. Aldershot: Ashgate. Boyce, Benjamin. 1939. Tom Brown of Facetious Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clery, E. J. 2004. The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Dunton, John, ed. The Athenian Mercury. 1690–7. London.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 325

17/11/17 5:02 PM

326

nicola parsons

Dunton, John. 1706. Dunton’s Whipping Post: Or, a Satyr upon Every Body. London: B. Bragg. Ezell, Margaret J. M. 1992. ‘The Gentleman’s Journal and the Commercialisation of Restoration Literary Coterie Practices’. Modern Philology 89.3: 323–40. The Gentleman’s Journal, or the Monthly Miscellany. 1692–4 London. The Ladies Mercury. 1693. London: T. Pratt. McEwan, Gilbert D. 1972. The Oracle of the Coffeehouse: John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury. San Marino: Huntington Library. Maurer, Shawn Lisa. 1998. Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the EighteenthCentury English Periodical. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Norton, Mary Beth. 2011. Separated by their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Parks, Stephen. 1976. John Dunton and the English Book Trade: A Study of his Career with a Checklist of his Publications. New York: Garland. Powell, Manushag N. 2012. Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Shevelow, Kathryn. 1989. Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical. New York: Routledge. Stearns, Bertha-Monica. 1930. ‘The First English Periodical for Women’. Modern Philology 28.1: 45–59.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 326

17/11/17 5:02 PM

21 John Dunton’s LADIES MERCURY and the Eighteenth-Century Female Subject Slaney Chadwick Ross

S

ince at least the late seventeenth century, the English periodical genre has been linked to a culture of surveillance upon which the (often) male eidolon depends in order to ratify his authenticity and that of his narrative. However, while being careful not to sanction women’s perspectives too strongly, early periodicalists rely on surveillance from female correspondents, as well as their eidolon’s direct surveillance of women’s behaviours and situations, in order to present their readership with an ostensibly fully realised account of society. As a result, these early periodicals position women as uniquely endowed with the capacity for particular kinds of surveillance, and the periodical eidolon as possessing the authority to interpret what the female subject sees. While women are perfect fodder for the eidolon’s surveying eye, the female writing subject also, wittingly or not, trains her surveyor in the necessary arts of duplicity. This essay examines how women are presented as both surveyed and surveying subjects in two distinct early eighteenth-century periodicals: John Dunton’s Ladies Mercury (1693) and Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s the Spectator (1711–12; 1714). The Ladies Mercury and the Spectator are, of course, an uneven pairing in terms of their longevity and cultural significance: the Spectator ran for 555 issues and spawned numerous imitators, influencing English sociability, and literary production, in countless ways. The Ladies Mercury ran for four issues and is usually studied in relation to its hardier sister publication, the Athenian Mercury (1690–7).1 The Ladies Mercury remains comparatively understudied, while the Spectator is often seen as representative of early eighteenth-century women’s entrance into the public sphere. However, Dunton’s sympathetic, if also exploitative and surveying, representation of women in the Ladies Mercury and beyond is a crucial facet of representation of the early modern female reading and writing subject. Moreover, we can best understand the radical nature of Dunton’s project when we compare it with Addison and Steele’s. Both of these endeavours were formulated at a moment when representations of women were beginning to be codified and solidified in print in ways that would endure through the century. The contrasts between them are, therefore, crucial to our understanding of which forms of female representation were encouraged and welcomed, and which were dismissed because they were commercial failures, or otherwise unviable.2 These two early periodicals respond to women as part of their reading public, but also as a category of subject matter that they seek to examine and regulate. In doing so, the periodicals link gender and surveillance by presenting and simultaneously

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 327

17/11/17 5:02 PM

328

slaney chadwick ross

deconstructing men and women’s different experiences of watching and being watched. I argue that one strand of representation – that which Dunton begins in the Athenian Mercury and attempts to continue in the Ladies Mercury – did not survive the sea change. Dunton’s panel of writers – who call themselves the Mercurians to distinguish themselves from the Athenian Mercury’s Athenian Society – solicit and publish letters about the private lives of women featuring incredibly salacious details that would not be out of place in scandal narratives. The advice column format creates a fantasy of privacy that both readers and writers indulge. One letter writer even fashions this relationship in quasi-religious terms: ‘for since black and white cannot blush, I venture under this skreen [sic] to make you my confessors’ (no. 1 (28 Feb 1693): 1). However, the Mercurians treat this information with singular respect and good humour, and repay it with information and reassurances of their own, rather than critique. Female surveillance in the Ladies Mercury is a two-way street, and the highly particular nature of the Mercurian advice columns allows both readers and writers to imagine behavioural regulation that is at once built around voyeuristic, even salacious, surveillance and genuine sympathetic engagement. We can, therefore, look to the Ladies Mercury to see, at least in part, what the Spectator’s view of women as in need of regulation and assessment supplanted.

Social Reform and the Advice Column If Mr Spectator, the Mercurians, and the Athenians similarly address women as a vital part of their reading public, their other likenesses are few. The Ladies Mercury, like Dunton’s better-known publications, follows a question-and-answer format that allows space for inquirers to generate and control their self-representation, while the Spectator positions women within a larger project of social reform in terms of both morals and manners. The women who write to the male editors of the Ladies Mercury lay bare their souls to the Mercurian Society in return for advice. They survey themselves to the additional benefit of the Mercurians and the reading public and are considered, by the Mercurians at least, to be reliable reporters of their own interior states as well as their civic and legal situations. By contrast, the Spectator is in many ways a conservative reaction to the type of advice meted out to women in the Ladies Mercury and Dunton’s more widely read periodical, the Athenian Mercury. By the time of the Spectator’s publication, which began almost twenty years after the brief life of the Ladies Mercury, male writers were increasingly advocating that women’s positions in the public sphere be regulated. A key aspect of these arguments involved portraying women as prone to frivolity and irrationality and therefore in need of rules and boundaries, rather than particular advice. These two periodicals advocated radically different ideas about women as subjects and had completely different experiences within the marketplace. In them, we can sense a tension between modes of representing women’s subjectivity, which suggests that early periodicalists disagreed amongst themselves about what readers wanted – or should want – in the female subject. Mr Spectator, the Spectator’s idealised eidolon, is more clearly delineated than the Mercurian Society’s panel of learned men. The Mercurians do not announce or introduce themselves, except for the purpose of distancing their project from that

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 328

17/11/17 5:02 PM

john dunton and the female subject

329

of the Athenian Society, which, they say, has ‘abandon’d such trifle and vanities, for more serious and weighty meditations’ (no. 1 (28 Feb 1693): 1). Unlike the Athenians, the Mercurians say that they will make it their business to attend solely to matters concerning women. However, the Mercurians and the Athenians both treat individual cases with particularity, taking into account the details and mitigating aspects of the writers’ situations, rather than broadly applying rules and morals. By contrast, Mr Spectator makes a point of saying that he ‘shall pass over a single foe to charge whole armies’ (no. 16 (19 Mar 1711): 71): that is, his goal is not to single out individuals, but to address behaviours of wide representative members of social groups. The Mercurians’ attempt to mitigate some of the more painful and unjust aspects of women’s lives, ranging from unwanted pregnancy, forced marriage, and infidelity to inadequate financial support and bad sex, and the Ladies Mercury’s level of detail and insight into the particular lives of individuals, has little corollary in the Spectator. Although he sometimes publishes queries or challenges from readers, Mr Spectator largely watches society and reports back to readers with commentary that critiques the behaviour he has witnessed, while the Mercurians publish questions from readers and then comment directly to the inquirer. While the writers of the Ladies Mercury receive most of their information about women from writers who selfreport their behaviour, Mr Spectator is himself the source of most of the information his readers receive about women. One of the Spectator’s particular innovations with regards to his female subjects is in drawing attention to forms of femininity and feminine knowledge in order to defuse or discredit them. In doing so, Mr Spectator also distinguishes himself from early surveillance narrators by establishing his own social and economic position as above, and therefore above the reproach of, his readers. Mr Spectator is largely concerned with self-fashioning and behaviour, but is less interested in the process of behaving, and its attendant internal struggles at the level of the individual. As self-proclaimed arbiter of what makes behaviour good, he is also unconcerned with how one distinguishes good behaviour from bad. These finer points, however, make up the substance of the advice columns in the Athenian Mercury and the Ladies Mercury. Mr Spectator further differentiates himself from eidolons such as the Mercurians and Athenians by placing himself and his commentary in a national and global context. He and his correspondents have a strong sense of England’s place in a global social, economic, and even military hierarchy. This is true of the Mercurians to a much smaller degree (more than one querist bemoans the impact on the domestic economy of King William’s war with France), but it is not the impetus of their project. Mr Spectator worries that both men and women are overly concerned with the trappings of politeness, rather than politeness itself, and he offers behind-the-scenes glimpses into women’s lives in order to explicate moments of slippage between the true self and the social self for his readers. Although the writers of the Spectator consider women’s issues part of their project of social reform and address them as such, there is a limit to the subjects Mr Spectator is willing to cover, and to his willingness to empathise. The Spectator deals in the salacious, to be sure, but the subject matter doesn’t come close to that in the Ladies Mercury or the Athenian Mercury, which address masturbation, impotence, and

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 329

17/11/17 5:02 PM

330

slaney chadwick ross

premarital sex, among other spicy topics. Although Mr Spectator famously deplores the way fashionable women are raised, in that ‘The Toilet is their great Scene of Business, and the right adjusting of their Hair the principal Employment of their Lives’, he presents himself as doing a service to women by helping them to ‘a more elevated Life and Conversation’ in order to benefit ‘their Male-Beholders’ (no. 10 (12 Mar 1711): 46). In Spectator 4, he proclaims his intention to ‘lead the young through all the becoming duties of virginity, marriage, and widowhood’, while also promising that he will adjust his language ‘[w]hen it is a woman’s day in my works’ (5 Mar 1711: 21). In subsequent issues, Mr Spectator never actually modifies his language for ‘women’s days’, but his proclamation of this intention at the outset of the project establishes an intention to demarcate between the sexes suggesting there is information to which women should not be exposed. He similarly massages his language on matters of love, starkly delineating the boundaries of his subject matter: while he ‘shall never betray what the eyes of lovers say to each other in my presence’, he also doesn’t promise unmitigated confidentiality, but instead will ‘endeavour to make both sexes appear in their conduct what they are in their hearts’ (22). As we shall see, Mr Spectator’s desire not to be implicated in private scandal and his promise to reveal bad behaviour in order to encourage good differs drastically from the Mercurian project. Although the Mercurians publish people’s secrets, they advocate a certain amount of personal privacy and even glorify concealment. The point is carried in Spectator 16, in which Mr Spectator further outlines exactly the type of subject matter – and contributor – from whom he wishes to distance himself, denouncing those ‘who fill their letters with private scandal, and black accounts of particular persons and families’, even as he subtly relies on variations of these accounts for his own content. He includes female discourses in the Spectator only as far as he can report upon them in his own regulatory terms. In adjusting his style to ‘exalt the subjects I treat upon’ when dealing with women’s issues, and in singling out women as particularly requiring his advice, Mr Spectator positions women’s issues as fixed and resolvable in a way that the Ladies Mercury never endorses. And while the Mercurians especially solicit letters from women, Mr Spectator distances himself from women’s personal accounts, making it clear that he thinks of female discourse as messy, overly personal, and even illegible. He complains of ‘lampoons sent me by people who cannot spell’ and particularly singles out ‘letters in womens hands that are full of blots and calumnies’ (no. 16 (19 Mar 1711): 71). These ‘blots and calumnies’ in the women’s letters are a fine example of their need for both physical and moral regulation, of their need for a Mr Spectator, but Mr Spectator is not interested in what they actually say: women’s first-hand accounts of themselves have no place in his publication. At the same time, in declaring that he has no intention of publishing private domestic stories such as ‘some account of a fallen virgin, a faithless wife, or an amorous widow’, he distances himself from the very subjects the Mercurians most often treat. This nullifies the remarkable particularity of the Mercurians’ letters, reducing early advice columns to women into generic types that correspond with broad ideas about women’s life cycles, and making it possible for Mr Spectator to maintain control of his own self-presentation as the voice of reason and sociability. Although its declared project is to moralise upon the behaviour of groups, rather than individuals, the Spectator is hardly short on detail: Mr Spectator relishes

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 330

17/11/17 5:02 PM

john dunton and the female subject

331

thorough descriptions. His depiction of a posturing woman in Spectator 38, for instance, is illustrated with a richness that is entirely alien to the Mercurian project. Here, he describes the actions of an anonymous woman as she takes her body through various contortions in order to show herself off: . . . she writhed herself into many different postures to engage him. When she laugh’d, her lips were to sever at a greater distance than ordinary to shew her teeth: her fan was to point somewhat at a distance, that in the reach she may discover the roundness of her arm; then she is utterly mistaken in what she saw, falls back, and smiles at her own folly, and is so wholly discomposed, that her tucker is to be adjusted, her bosom expos’d, and the whole woman put into her airs and graces. (no. 38 (13 Apr 1711): 159–60) The details here, like the woman herself, become hyper-extended: individual parts are stretched and disembodied for the reader’s examination until there is no individual at all but only severed lips, teeth, rounded arm, exposed breasts, and props like the fan and the tucker. The woman’s body is surveyed at such close proximity that it cannot possibly be shown in a positive light, but exists only to highlight the flirtatious behaviour behind her excessive movement and thus, her excessive existence. She is so particularised as to be grotesque. Mr Spectator’s distaste for her may tell us something larger about the way surveillance of the female body works in the Spectator: the closer the reader gets, the less desirable she becomes. Moreover, the surveyed woman has no control over her presentation: Mr Spectator mediates the sight of her distorted body as an object lesson for readers, while what she sees from her position as surveyed subject is of no account. As this example shows, the highly particular subjects that make up the Mercurians’ stock-in-trade are those from whom Mr Spectator seeks to distance himself. Spectator 15 encapsulates his concerns about women who want to be ‘looked upon’, establishing women as subjects in need of regulation, rather than individuals who might need advice. For every Inkle and Yarico (no. 11 (13 Mar 1711): 47–51), there is an injunction for readers ‘to pull the old woman out of our hearts’ (no. 12 (14 Mar 1711): 52–5) or to avoid the behaviours of superstitious women (no. 7 (8 Mar 1711): 31–5). If women such as Spectator 11’s Arietta are sometimes particularly represented and publicly praised for their ‘good sense’ (50), women en masse are unreasonable and unruly, and ‘smitten with everything that is showy and superficial’ (no. 15 (17 Mar 1711): 66). In contrast, the ‘showy and superficial’ are, in many ways, the central fodder of the Ladies Mercury, which encourages and rewards the confessional mode in its letter writers. Take, for instance a question posed in the fourth number (14 Mar 1693: 2) by a woman, self-described as, ‘though I say myself, a handsom [sic] young woman, pretty tall and shapely’ who has recently married a wealthy widower whose affection to his pretty new wife does not extend so far as to grant her a new coach. She must make do with the rig of her predecessor, ‘a little dowdy runt’, whose coach ‘is an old rusty low built tool’ which, to compound the affliction, ‘were absolutely impossible for a woman of my stature with the additional superstructure of a fashionable topknot, to sit upright in’. Marshalling all their resources, the Mercurians declare themselves appalled at these ‘insupportable indignities’ and, taking a hint from the lady’s mention that her cramped quarters have caused her ‘some indisposition of body’, suggest that she exploit her recent maladies by frequent visits to a sympathetic doctor, which will both wear out the horses

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 331

17/11/17 5:02 PM

332

slaney chadwick ross

and run up medical bills far in excess of the cost of a new coach. If this doesn’t work, the Mercurians suggest more extreme measures: ‘threaten him with dying, and make it your last request to be buried by such an aunt or a granum, a hundred and fifty miles off’. If these measures still do not produce the desired effects, the Mercurians declare, the letter writer’s husband is ‘in a condition much sicker than thou’, and she may ‘hope to be speedily a young rich widow, and able to buy thee a coach thyself’. The Mercurians may be responding in jest, winking at their readers while making fun of their frivolous correspondent, but not only is there is the germ of a good idea in their advice, the logic behind it is sound (that the woman show her unreasonable husband what unreasonable really looks like) (no. 3 (10 Mar 1693): 2). We can compare this situation to Mr Spectator’s brief, but cutting, remarks in number 50 on country women’s hairstyles: ‘They let the hair of their heads go to great length, but as the men make a great show with heads of hair that are not their own, the women who they say have very fine heads of hair, tie it up in a not and cover it from being seen’ (no. 50 (27 Apr 1711): 92). The Mercurians’ response, whether we take it to be in jest or in earnest, meets the writer on her own terms, not bothering to moralise upon the general situation of the young and beautiful, but poor, woman unwisely and unhappily married to an older miser, but rather addressing the situation itself. That the advice is entertaining does not negate its value as advice. This leads us to another notable difference between Mr Spectator’s treatment of women and that of the Mercurians: Mr Spectator assumes that women need access only to reason and guidance in matters of behaviour, whereas the Mercurians address women in their situations as extra-legal subjects who often don’t have access to information about their own bodies or their rights. The advice given by the writers of the Ladies Mercury allows women (and men) loopholes that they would not find in conduct manuals or, for that matter, in later periodicals. In, for instance, allowing women to hide the sins of their pasts, or in granting hope for couples separated by harsh parental injunctions, or in acknowledging that a sexless marriage might be an untenable prospect for a woman, the Mercurians come down on the side of common sense rather than strict moralising. They respond to the plights of the individuals, rather than using the individual plights as a platform for admonishing the behaviour of womankind. The writers of the Ladies Mercury do not seek to pry into the psyche or glean the common causes of misbehaviour, but instead allow for the possibility of private lives and private motives. The Mercurians are thus willing to offer women concessions for what might be considered bad behaviour by Mr Spectator (premarital sex, for instance). This sympathetic edge is no longer apparent in advice literature by the time the Spectator arrives on the scene.

The Ladies Mercury and the Confessional Mode While Dunton often bemoaned his personal relationships with women, particularly his mother-in-law,3 he was business-oriented enough to call upon their expertise.4 In suggesting, as the Ladies Mercury does, that women should have access to information about themselves as legal and sexual beings, Dunton enjoys the act of revealing intimate secrets to his reading audience, and suggests that the future of print publishing lies in such

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 332

17/11/17 5:02 PM

john dunton and the female subject

333

material. In this, he was correct. Dunton’s long and varied career includes many spectacular failures, but his pioneering question-and-answer advice columns, made famous by the Athenian Mercury, continue with us to this day. Dunton had a canny knack for deploying the language of established literary respectability under cover of producing something entirely new.5 In the case of the Mercury publications, his particular innovation is a back-and-forth between readers and writers that creates, or presumes to create, a sense of shared authorship and even ownership of the projects. In order to make this happen, contributing writers (real or imagined) offer themselves and their experiences up for the surveillance of the Mercurians and the larger reading public. Although there is some overlap between the content of the two publications, the Ladies Mercury more directly participates in the discourse of gossip that Nicola Parsons has identified as a strategic way for women to claim space for subjectivity and secrecy in the late Stuart era (2009: 23). The tone and content of the letters to the Ladies Mercury is solely focused on issues of women’s sexuality, privacy, and status as legal subjects. However, the Ladies Mercury draws from Dunton’s most successful periodical in several ways: the structure of the Ladies Mercury follows the Athenian Mercury’s question-and-answer format, and we can also see the Athenian Mercury as a precursor to the Ladies Mercury in its preoccupation with giving legal and even sexual knowledge to women readers. The broad outline of subjects covered in the Athenian Mercury extended to topics that were generally not included in most programmes of female education in the late seventeenth century, so women readers would have been exposed to information that they would not have been able to get anywhere else easily. Some of this information might have had strong legal and social ramifications, as Helen Berry points out, noting that ‘questions on the subject of marital violence and infidelity frequently articulated the suffering of wives, and advised them on the legal grounds for separation from their husbands’ (1997: 267). The introduction to the Ladies Mercury claims that the periodical will reify the distinction between men’s and women’s ‘issues’ in its avowed determination not to tread on the toes of the Athenian Society, as the writers feel that questions about private relationships require a separate publication (no. 1 (28 Feb 1693): 1). Of course, certain forms of information were under the purview of ‘ladies’, well before the discourse of separate spheres became an ultimate arbiter of identity, making such separation commonplace. In the Ladies Mercury, however, male voices are also deployed to reinforce, rather than to counteract, the female perspective. Despite the performance of gendered separation in the introduction, questions to the Ladies Mercury were submitted by both men and women, although letters from women make up a narrow majority: there are eight questions from inquirers identified as women, five identified as men, two wherein the sex of the letter writer goes unstated, and one letter posed as a question that is, in actuality, an advertisement for another Dunton publication. Of the anonymous letters, two contain questions regarding the behaviour of women, and one letter writer is assumed by the Mercurians to be a man. Although the Ladies Mercury is distinctly feminocentric and even ‘woman championing’, as Eve Tavor Bannet discusses in her essay for this collection (see page 40), the topics have little to do with domestic cares, nor do they concern women’s behaviour as related to courtship and marriage.6 Surprisingly, the Mercurians are not, on the whole, speaking of private relationships in terms of their salacious details (although some of the letters

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 333

17/11/17 5:02 PM

334

slaney chadwick ross

do contain such things), but rather are concerned with issues of authority, contract, and property rights as they relate to matters of the heart and sexual relationships. Topics include whether ‘conversation implies a contract’ (no. 1 (28 Feb 1693): 2), whether a woman whose life will be in danger if she has another baby is still obligated to sleep with her husband (no. 4 (17 Mar 1693): 2), and whether one is always bound to follow the dictates of one’s parents in choosing a spouse, as well as issues of adultery, marital property, and divorce, entangled as they are with both lust and legality. Women readers of the Ladies Mercury, therefore, are offered information that may assist them with their own such struggles, through the window of private stories about anonymous, although particular, women. If, as Mary Beth Norton points out, ‘the ideas initially crystallised in the Mercury and some of Dunton’s other publications served as one of the key foundations for what were to become pervasive eighteenth-century understandings of the appropriate activities of men and women’, we should also consider the Ladies Mercury as a particularly woman-championing text, which propounded radical ideas about how women might exist under a patriarchal system while also fulfilling their own desires (2011: 77). The pages of Dunton’s periodicals gave space to women’s voices, suggesting both the possibility of a wide female readership and interest in these issues from readers who were men. These readers may have been upper-class women who frequented coffee houses with male chaperones, female owners and employees of coffee houses, or even maidservants (Berry 1997: 261). The Athenian Mercury advertised directly to female readers, soliciting them for questions. In May of 1691, a little after a year after it began publication, the Mercury began featuring questions from women every first Tuesday of the month (Berry 1997: 259). While textual evidence suggests, however, that they were probably authentic (Berry 1997: 264–5; Berry 2003: 35–62), it is, of course, impossible to validate the letters printed in the Athenian Mercury or the Ladies Mercury: we don’t know if they are real, or the work of Society members masquerading as (male or female) querists. It is entirely possible that the letters that purport to be from women are written by men masquerading as women, imagining themselves in the position of the female subject, a practice that persists in woman-championing periodicals throughout the eighteenth century. This possibility adds another dimension to the idea of the female writing subject in the early modern periodical: she may exist largely in the mind of the male author, who imagines himself in her position while also asking himself what scenarios will be of interest to both male and female readers. The female reader of the Ladies Mercury, then, has her experiences triangulated by and refracted through the public consciousness of Dunton’s panel of male authors. Women’s experiences are simultaneously sources of voyeuristic entertainment and genuine pathos. While the advice column depends on readers at least agreeing to suspend their disbelief and accept the authenticity of both the questioners and the advisors, the form itself, like that of the early domestic novel, is dependent on readers’ sympathetic imaginations. Advice columns ask readers to imagine various possible outcomes for their subjects, placing the reader in the position of a silent advisor to the questioner (who may or may not be real or a figment of the publisher’s imagination), who may also allow herself to be advised by the answerer. This work of imagining can lead the sympathetic reader to a critique of the social conditions that placed the asker in the position of needing anonymous advice. Dunton and the Mercurians knew that people wanted to read about women’s issues, and using women

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 334

17/11/17 5:02 PM

john dunton and the female subject

335

as anonymous sources allowed readers to feel they were being granted unique access into their private lives, placing the readers – and the Mercurians – in the position of surveyors. Rather than making these women more vulnerable, the Mercurians’ sympathetic responses gave credit to women’s feelings and their subjectivity. Revealing private aspects of one’s life to the Mercurians did not expose a person to ridicule or censure. Before we given Dunton too much credit for broad-mindedness, we must remember that although the male-voiced group of Mercurian advisors are sympathetic to women, their work still depends on women’s need to appeal to male authority for information about themselves. Dunton’s female subjects are active participants in ‘symbolic economies of secrecy and disclosure’, which Parsons contends permeated late seventeenthcentury discourse about women in the public sphere (2009: 4). In a cultural moment when ‘images of women were used to figure and focus anxieties over what constituted legitimate influence in a landscape that was becoming increasingly democratic’, the private legal and sexual problems of Dunton’s female-identifying letter writers take on political significance (Parsons 2009: 4). Rather than portraying women as conspiratorial arbiters of forbidden forms of knowledge (as in the secret history genre that was also popular at the end of the seventeenth century), women’s letters to the Ladies Mercury reveal gaps in their knowledge about how to perform in morally ambiguous situations (the type that conduct manuals, for instance, are unlikely to cover). Women are assumed to have access to certain types of knowledge and not to others, and their letters reveal gaps in their knowledge that the Mercurians are happy to fill. In this way, the Ladies Mercury defuses a prevailing idea of women as potentially dangerous figures of influence over authority figures, one that had clung to women at least since the Restoration (Parsons 2009: 4). The surveyed and surveying female figure in the Ladies Mercury relies on sympathetic male authority to intercede in her internal struggles (as in the case of the woman wracked with guilt over having premarital sex) as well as her social ones. With the Mercurian and Athenian Societies, Dunton participated in an emergent strain of educational and conduct literature in the vein of John Heydon’s Advice to a Daughter in Opposition to the Advice to a Sonne (1658) and Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694) that privileges women’s innate dignity and ability to learn. Dunton’s early advice columns also indicate an exploitable gap between the available scripts for women’s conduct and a knottier, more complex reality that sometimes necessitates sidestepping the conduct manual or the religious treatise. As John Paul Hunter argues, the particularity of the advice column speaks to a reading public interested in specific situations typically not addressed in the moral literature of the day (1990: 12). The advice given to women in the Ladies Mercury runs counter to much of the advice that was circulating in conduct literature.7 One of the major takeaways from the Mercurians’ advice is that survival as a woman sometimes necessitates deception, a deception that the Mercurians are happy to help women practise. There is sometimes humour embedded in these strategies, to be sure, but the trickery in the Mercurians advice is also a survival strategy, and the lighthearted tone masks the gravity of the issues at hand, linking deception and masquerade with self-preservation. In this, as David M. Turner puts it, we see Dunton’s contention that ‘the periodical could perform a proactive role as an agent of moral regulation’ rather than simply ‘a passive resource of advice’ such as a conduct manual (2002: 66). As a result, the

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 335

17/11/17 5:02 PM

336

slaney chadwick ross

Ladies Mercury reflects duelling ideas about women’s conduct and women’s rights in the late seventeenth century. The Mercurians are forgiving of vice, sympathetic to women’s already-nullified legal status, and even subversive, while also being carefully tongue-in-cheek. Unlike feminist writers of the day, however, Dunton draws no distinction between voyeurism and advocacy: the introduction, after all, also promises readers tantalising glimpses of ‘chambering and wantonness’ (no. 1 (28 Feb 1693): 2). Long before the latter half of the eighteenth century, when magazines were marketed toward women in earnest, Dunton’s experimental periodical revels in a loophole it finds between conduct literature and advice in order to advocate, in some small way, for women’s right to self-direction, while also allowing readers to revel in previously unseen glimpses of women’s private lives. The majority of the letters position women as sexual beings, although their subjects differ in their level of experience with sex. In one case, a woman has a right to privacy after making a sexual mistake; in another, a woman has a right to advocate for her own sexual enjoyment. In both cases, the Mercurians allow women the same privileges of privacy and enjoyment that are usually assumed to be the sole purview of men. The Ladies Mercury also combines its impulse to advocate for women with a more capitalist, and more prurient, ideology: these questions and answers that centre on sex are also designed to titillate readers. Readers are expected to be sympathetic to women’s plights, but the Mercurians see no reason why they should not be titillated as well. The theme of sexual enjoyment as an allowable practice for both men and women is solidified in the third and final letter of the first issue, which deals with the delicate topic of male impotence. The writer tells the story of two wives of a wealthy merchant. The first wife took the secret of her husband’s impotence to her grave. His second wife, or rather, her mother, was not as amenable to the situation. The merchant, appropriately, fell upon his sword in shame when his second mother-inlaw confronted him with his impotence. The letter writer, who has heard the story and condemns the second wife’s behaviour – both her desire for sex and her sharing of marital problems with her mother – wants support for her condemnation of the second wife’s behaviour, but the writers of the Ladies Mercury take her side, asking the letter writer to imagine the lives of both wives, and ultimately proclaiming that ‘the resentments of the last wife, were highly just, and reasonable, in having sacrificed her self to a marriage-bed, where the ends of her creation were never to be answered’ (no. 1: 28 Feb 1693: 2). Such graphic sexual imagery offers insight into both men’s and women’s minds and bodies in order to educate and entice readers. It also offers the Mercurians an opportunity to champion women’s right to sexual enjoyment. In this case, the Mercurian men are arbiters of a dispute between women: the letter writer, who is appalled at the revelation of male sexual secrets by a wife and who thus identifies with the merchant’s first wife, who died unsatisfied, and the second wife and her mother, who held the merchant accountable for his inability to fulfil the marital contract. Continuing the theme of sexual sin as both object lesson and source of voyeuristic satisfaction for readers, the second letter of the first issue is from a gentleman who admits to having sexual fantasies (‘transports of thought, even to the highest felicity’) about the woman he is courting, because ‘having studied a little divinity, not all love, I have read that chambering and wantonness are proscribed as criminal; that the lust

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 336

17/11/17 5:02 PM

john dunton and the female subject

337

of the eye, and of the heart, are capital offences, etc.’ He also confesses that he and his beloved engage in ‘those prelimarys [which] are lawful virgin donations, where the hand and heart are resolved soon to follow after ’em’. The writer says he has ‘long since sent this question to the Athenians, but could never obtain an answer’, suggesting (erroneously) that the Athenians preferred not to handle such subject matter, once more distancing Athenian practice from Mercurian, and suggesting to readers that the Ladies Mercury is their specialised source for access into private lives. The answer to this more graphic letter is again sympathetic, but comes with added caution on behalf of the unengaged woman whose paramour is having such a difficult time repressing his sexual urges. The Mercurians declare such behaviour innocent with the caveat that the letter writer must marry the person with whom he dallies. Again, the advice comes down on the side of the woman, and in particularly legal terms, noting that ‘your warm meeting lips, and your endearing conversation tacitly implies a contract’. Heavy petting should be exchanged ‘for a more manly consummation’, both for the sake of the woman’s reputation, and also because marital sex contains ‘more substantial and more legitimate delights’ (no. 1 (28 Feb 1693): 2). Here again the Ladies Mercury does not moralise. Most significantly, the writers advocate responsibility to women and endorse pleasurable sex for all parties concerned. This theme of sexual enjoyment as right pervades the Ladies Mercury because sexual surveillance is such strong fodder for narrative. I will conclude by examining the first question-and-answer of the first issue, which sets the Ladies Mercury’s tone of sympathy and even subversion: the writer, a beautiful woman who was seduced before her marriage to a man of quality, is racked with guilt because of her premarital indiscretion. This is the stuff of amatory fiction and later, the novel, both in content and particularity. The writer spares no details: ‘(Heaven forgive me) I practiced even the vilest of arts in his very bridal night-joys, being in that dearest scene the highest of counterfeits.’ Eighteenth-century narrative is peppered with such heroines, but few have such a sympathetic reception as this: the Ladies Mercury admires her ‘lovely picture of penitence’ and tells her it is enough. Advising her to continue to love her husband and children, the writers absolve her from her guilt and assuage her self-reproaches in practical terms: ‘Infamy (the more substantial and sensible wrong) you brought none, for your sin lyes concealed from the world. Your Husband, for his part, tasted no fainter nor weaker sweets in your embraces for having a rose-bud crop’d before him: for ignorance keeps up the devotion’ (no. 1 (28 Feb 1693): 1). This advice, to a woman who admits to being pretty, who has married well and managed to keep the secret of her premarital indiscretion, contains liberality found almost nowhere else in public discourse at the time. Some readers may have found it alarming that the Mercurians assume that the ‘picture of penitence’ actually reflects internal penitence. This demonstrates that the Mercurians are willing to distinguish between different types of deceit: the letter writer’s hiding her seduction is mitigated by her self-declared repentance. Moreover, they allow for, and even encourage, certain forms of deceit: the letter writer should hide her seduction from her husband because she has repented, as is evident in her confession. Rather than castigate the writer, the Ladies Mercury tacitly congratulates her on screening herself from the censure of the world, and forgives her for her private sins. The advice is not only sympathetic, but pragmatic: who would benefit from her confession? It is enough that she has told the Mercurians and the readers of their

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 337

17/11/17 5:02 PM

338

slaney chadwick ross

periodical – the writers and the readers are both in a position to provide an absolution that a husband is capable of, but probably would not grant. In a strange inversion, the court of public opinion has weighed in, and declared the letter writer’s privacy, and her past, sacrosanct. The Ladies Mercury treats its first letter writer with compassionate sincerity, offering her private redemption for a sin committed long ago and relieving her of the burden of both her premarital affair and her guilt at keeping her husband in ignorance. This is highly unusual in the context of the conduct writing of the period which, as Patricia Meyer Spacks reminds us, taught women to practice deception while wringing their hands over the possibility that they would do so: ‘Moralists inveigled against [hypocrisy], despite the fact that their instructions to young women often recommended something very like it’ (2003: 12). The Mercurians’ advice also follows legalistic discourse, as they mine the writer’s story for ways to save her from her transgression, rather than condemn her for it. In order to do this, they focus on evidence and intent: there is no proof of the letter writer’s sin, there was no malicious intention to the woman’s deception, and there was really nothing so bad in the original sin, as it were, either. In a neat logical twist, the writer suggests that ‘’twas no part of yours to unveile [sic] the mistake’ that her husband made in assuming she was a virgin when they married; by this logic, the man is to blame for making such an assumption, rather than the woman for not confessing: ‘no obligation even of the most rigid laws compel’d you to be your own accuser’. The writers of the Ladies Mercury assure the woman that she is probably not alone in her situation, and that others like her manage to thrive, whereas ‘if all the private wounds of feminine honour felt your remorse and pain, I am afraid we should have but a sickly age, and a drooping world’ (no. 1 (28 Feb 1693): 1). Moreover, it is taken for granted that the writer is telling the truth in her letter. Her self-representation is assumed to be accurate, as is her confession, and her record of her inner turmoil. There is no sarcasm in the Mercurians’ answer: they take her at her remorseful word, and do not assume that women are deceitful in private. While this example illustrates the tension between deception and appearances that fomented around representations of women in print in the late Stuart period, it also shows periodical writers modelling behaviour – in this case, a presumption that women tell the truth – that they would have their readers imitate. In the letters to the Ladies Mercury, women act as witnesses to their own characters, conduct, and actions, and they are assumed to be telling the truth. This is a radical departure from the legal reality. The Ladies Mercury speaks to the ways in which the forces behind sex, money, and legality can combine to imprison women. In this regard, the periodical is a precursor to Delarivier Manley’s New Atalantis (1709–11) and Eliza Haywood’s legal fictions of the 1720s such as The City Jilt (1726) and The Mercenary Lover (1726).8 The Spectator is not so much a regression in terms of representations of women in the early periodical as a completely different interpretation and construction of women’s public voices, one that draws from a conservative strain of conduct literature and educational philosophy. The voice of the Spectator has endured for longer in public memory and imagination, and been subject to far more analysis, than the brief Ladies Mercury. While advice columns throughout the century continue to feature sexual scandal, the messy, singular, and often overtly salacious type of woman who unburdened herself to the Mercurians was not allowed to continue in full view of the reading public, but was increasingly consigned to fictions.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 338

17/11/17 5:02 PM

john dunton and the female subject

339

Notes 1. David M. Turner has discussed the significance of the Athenian Mercury in terms of the broader discourse surrounding conduct and morality in late seventeenth-century literature: ‘The Athenian Mercury functioned as a forum for setting the dictates of individual conscience against the time-worn prescriptions of religious teaching. Its letters highlighted vividly the tensions between human sympathies and moral judgment. In the process a more rounded picture of the problems surrounding adultery emerged, the limits of moral prescription were exposed, and the very meaning of extra-marital sex was interrogated’ (2002: 67). 2. In some of the earliest modern scholarship on Dunton, Bertha-Monica Stearns called the Ladies Mercury ‘the first English periodical for women’ (1930). While men undoubtedly were also among the Ladies Mercury’s readers, the ‘Ladies’ in the title might have been Dunton’s attempt to carve out at least the impression of an exclusively female reading audience. 3. John Paul Hunter gives a particularly detailed account of the entanglement of Dunton’s business and personal interests: ‘“Eccentric” is not a strong enough word to describe Dunton in his later years, when a combination of bad luck and his own naïve and disorganised refusal to stay on top of his business interests led him into serious debt, legal tangles, political turmoil, spells of dubious sanity, and perpetual clashes with competitors, customers, and his wife and mother-in-law’ (1990: 102). For all that the Ladies Mercury and the Athenian Mercury are uniquely sympathetic toward the unevenness of women’s social position, Dunton was not above pressing his own advantage in this regard: the letter writer ‘Anonymia’ accuses him of publishing her private correspondence, while an another anonymous writer (likely Isaac Watts) in 1710 charges Dunton with using Rowe’s name to advance his flagging career (Berry 2003: 40). 4. Dunton’s paper not only gave space to women, but it also employed them: women were involved in the production and distribution of the Athenian Mercury (Berry 1997: 258). In his autobiography, Dunton names the female sellers or ‘Mercury women’, who sold the Athenian Mercury on the streets for a penny. That Dunton lists them by name – ‘Mrs Baldwin, Mrs Nutt, Mrs Curtis, Mrs Mallet, Mrs Groom, Mrs Grover, Mrs Barners, Mrs Winter, Mrs Taylor’ (Berry 2003: 21) – suggests that they were known to him personally as well; at the very least, he attested his appreciation for them by dedicating an issue of the Athenian Gazette to them (Berry 2003: 21). The Athenian Gazette was both the original title of the Athenian Mercury (so renamed after the second issue at the behest of the London Gazette), and the name under which issues of the Athenian Mercury were reprinted and bound in twenty volumes. Dunton dedicated Volume 11 (July–October 1693) to the Mercury Women (Berry 2003: 21). Finally, a woman named Mary Smith, who with her husband operated the coffee house where the Athenians met, was not only a witness to the Athenian Society’s Articles of Agreement, but was in charge of the letters left for the Society (Berry 1997: 261). Beyond Dunton’s operation, this affirms that women were involved in every aspect of early periodical culture. 5. Dunton, as part of the vanguard of early Grub Street writers, was engaged with questions of authorship and authority as they related to both men and women. The frontispiece to Charles Gildon’s History of the Athenian Society (1692) portrays ‘as a panel of twelve erudite gentlemen receiving questions from men and women of all ranks’ (Berry 1997: 258), while in reality, three men – Samuel Wesley, Richard Sault, and Dunton – answered the majority of readers’ questions. As Manushag Powell discusses, Dunton’s representation of the Athenian Society as a collection of learned, erudite individuals, rather than the brainchild of a bookseller, was an act of class-crossing authorial drag (Powell 2012: 32; Parks 1976: 75). Although the Athenian Mercury did

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 339

17/11/17 5:02 PM

340

slaney chadwick ross

not use the eidolon through which the Tatler and Spectator later projected their classconscious identity, Dunton (who wrote anonymously) was concerned with projecting the image of a collective of educated, socially erudite men and women who were experts in everything from mathematics, science, and astronomy, to the finer points of biblical law, classical scholarship, and more contemporary concerns such as property rights, courtship, and etiquette. Dunton’s conspicuous deployment of the collective intelligence of a learned society suggests he was trying to placate the ‘reigning literati’ that Hunter has described as opposed to the new forms of literature emerging in the 1690s, which stalwarts took as a ‘hostile reaction’ to the idea of literature ‘as a republic of letters with a distinct history, a given variety of forms, and a specific burden of truths to impart’ (1990: 11). 6. One advertisement ‘desire[s] we may not be troubled with other questions relating to learning, religion &c, we resolving . . . not to fringe on the Athenians’, and the author elsewhere critiques the Athenians’ ability to engage with women on their terms (no. 3 (10 Mar 1693): 2). 7. In this, Dunton was influenced by new writings by feminists and advocates for women’s intellectual and social life, such as Mary Astell, Lady Mary Chudleigh, Elizabeth Singer Rowe (whose writings he published and whose person he courted unsuccessfully). 8. See Miranda Burgess’s ‘Bearing Witness: Law, Labour and the Gender of Privacy in the 1720s’ (2001) for an excellent discussion of how Haywood’s legal fictions interrogate the public/private dichotomy.

Works Cited Addison, Joseph and Richard Steele. 1965. The Spectator. Ed. Donald F. Bond. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Astell, Mary. [1694] 1970. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. New York: Source Book Press. Berry, Helen. 1997. ‘“Nice and Curious Questions”: Coffee Houses and the Representation of Women in John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury’. The Seventeenth Century 12.2: 257–76. —. 2003. Gender, Society and Print Culture in Late Stuart England: The Cultural World of the Athenian Mercury. Aldershot: Ashgate. Burgess, Miranda. 2001. ‘Bearing Witness: Law, Labour and the Gender of Privacy in the 1720s’. Modern Philology 98.3: 393–422. Dunton, John. 1693. The Ladies Mercury. London: Printed for T. Platt. Haywood, Eliza. 1726. The City Jilt, or the Alderman Turned Beau. London: J. Roberts. —. 1726. The Mercenary Lover, or the Unfortunate Heiress. London: N. Dobb. Heydon, John. 1658. Advice to a Daughter in Opposition to the Advice to a Sonne. London. J. Moxton. Hunter, John Paul. 1990. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New York: W. W. Norton. McEwen, Gilbert D. 1972. The Oracle of the Coffee House: John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury. San Marino: The Huntington Library. Manley, Delarivier. [1709–11] 1992. The New Atalantis. Ed. Rosalind Ballaster. London: Penguin Books. Norton, Mary Beth. 2011. Separated by Their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Parks, Stephen. 1976. John Dunton and the English Book Trade: A Study of His Career With a Checklist of His Publications. New York: Garland Publishing. Parsons, Nicola. 2009. Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 340

17/11/17 5:02 PM

john dunton and the female subject

341

Powell, Manushag N. 2012. Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. 2003. Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stearns, Bertha-Monica. 1930. ‘The First English Periodical for Women’. Modern Philology 28.1: 45–59. Turner, David M. 2002. Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex and Civility in England, 1660–1745. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 341

17/11/17 5:02 PM

22 Frances Brooke, Editor, and the Making of the OLD MAID (1755–1756) Kathryn R. King

Murphy has promis’d me now & then a Paper: if you have read his Gray’s Inn Journals you will know this is an offer not to be despis’d. I think if you was here, we three writing alternately might do much & get something pretty. Frances Brooke, letter to Richard Gifford

T

hus wrote Frances Brooke, née Moore, to her lifelong friend and collaborator Richard Gifford, chuffed by news that journalist and theatrical up-and-comer Arthur Murphy had agreed to write ‘now & then’ for her essay-paper The Old Maid (1755–6) (1756: n. p.).1 He would be joining a roster of contributors known to have included Lord Orrery (nine numbers), Gifford (three numbers), John Brooke, Frances’ clergyman husband (one number), and others as well, among them the poet James Robertson and very possibly Tobias Smollett.2 Discussions of the Old Maid tend to downplay the involvement of these men in the project, if not deny it altogether. One early critic proclaimed Brooke author of ‘the whole thing’ (New 1973: 9). This is wishful thinking posing as fact, and flat-out wrong as it turns out, but it reflects an unexamined assumption that continues in subtle ways to shape accounts of female authorship in the eighteenth century: that anything short of sole authorship (or perhaps collaboration with another woman) hobbles a woman’s creative vision and compromises her artistic integrity. Never mind that an eighteenth-century essay-paper was from its Tatler (1709–11) and Spectator (1711–12; 1714) origins a collaborative enterprise. A paper’s female conductor is nonetheless often imagined as a woman alone, picking her way through a treacherously masculine periodical culture. The tricky business of writing as a woman for the public has fascinated scholars for a good while now, myself included, and attention to issues of female authorship in the Old Maid has generated trenchant discussion of Mary Singleton, Spinster, the eidolon or fictive editor created by Brooke.3 Singleton is indeed a dazzling experiment in female persona-fashioning but the focus on the editor-figure to the exclusion of the actual conductor has resulted in neglect of Frances Brooke, Editor, regarding whom a surprising amount of evidence survives. The Old Maid was launched on 15 November 1755 and appeared without interruption every Saturday until 24 July 1756 for a total of thirty-seven numbers – a respectable showing at a time when, as Singleton writes in no. 1, essay-papers swarm ‘like summer insects’ that ‘just make their appearance, and are gone’ (Brooke 1764: 1). It was published by Andrew Millar, who also published Henry and Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Brooke’s collaborator Lord Orrery, and other celebrated literary authors.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 342

17/11/17 5:02 PM

frances brooke, editor

343

Brooke, a 31-year-old newcomer to the literary marketplace, may be thought fortunate to have placed her first publication with such a highly regarded (and famously generous) bookseller. He brought out a revised collected volume in 1764. Two decades later the British Magazine and Review remembered the Old Maid as ‘that celebrated periodical paper’ (2 Jan 1783: 101), but the collected edition never saw a reprint, and by most measures the paper was at best a modest success in its own time. Among scholars of periodicals and women’s writing, however, Brooke’s venture has assumed an importance that goes well beyond its contemporary impact, not least because, as Manushag Powell writes, the imaginative vigour of the paper ‘indicates that our old notion of exclusively masculine periodical culture is inadequate as a description of the period’ (2012: 168). The Old Maid is, in fact, one of several crucial texts in a burst of female editorial activity at mid-century that marked the emergence of a new (if unheralded) female triumvirate of wit consisting, along with Brooke, of Eliza Haywood, editor during the final decade of her life of the Female Spectator (1744–6), The Parrot (1746), Epistles for the Ladies (1748–50) and The Young Lady (1756), and Charlotte Lennox, editor of the shortlived but important monthly Lady’s Museum (1760–1) with its eidolon-essay series ‘The Trifler’.4 A full account of the challenge this triumvirate poses to the model of a thoroughly masculine periodical scene must await further research, but the present essay is a start. It offers a fresh reading of information about the Old Maid’s contributors first presented by Brooke’s biographer Lorraine McMullen, focusing especially on the marginal notes to the original issues inscribed by the paper’s chief contributor, Lord Orrery. His annotations constitute a largely unquarried source of information about Brooke’s practices and understanding of herself as an editor, cast light on her ambiguous relationship with the nobleman who supplied nearly a quarter of the paper’s materials and commented in some detail on every number, and open up new ways to think about the dynamics of the relationship between a female author-editor and her male contributors. Because the discussion casts a sideways light on Haywood’s editorial practices, her collaborations will get a few paragraphs of their own. I conclude with some thoughts on why the female editor is often passed over in the stories we tell of female authorship in the eighteenth century.

Conducting a Periodical Since the role of the conductor of an essay-paper is more layered than is sometimes realised, it may be useful to begin by putting the Old Maid in the context of editorial practice at mid-century. A periodical was at bottom a business proposition, whatever its editor’s gender or literary ambitions. ‘Periodicals were attractive undertakings’, Harry M. Solomon explains; ‘they had low start-up costs, but a successful periodical could be phenomenally remunerative, the source of immediate profit, and when collected later into volumes, a continuing income’ (1996: 90). Start-up costs were borne by the paper’s proprietor, the bookseller, or in some cases its political patrons, who accrued the profits. The conductor of a successful paper could expect modest but regular earnings, by the week or by the issue, sometimes in ‘lump’ payment as was the case evidently with Brooke. Author-editors generally took it upon themselves to compose their own copy although some preferred to cajole, badger, or otherwise persuade their friends to submit materials and, failing that, to hope that the publisher’s colophon might prompt suitable contributions (‘Letters to Mrs Singleton, frank’d or post paid, are taken in at Mr. Millar’s in the Strand’). In the finish it fell to the editor to produce content when none was at hand, and Singleton in the Old Maid no. 26 (orig. 8 May 1756) may express the feelings of any

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 343

17/11/17 5:02 PM

344

kathryn r. king

number of actual editors when, after humorously evoking a long bout of laziness (‘I have for this month past, drank my coffee, nodded in my elbow chair, pored over the NewsPapers, half-slumbered over my knitting, without taking a pen in hand’), she professes herself grateful to have a supply of reader-letters at the ready: ‘had not my correspondents been very liberal, I know not what would have become of my paper’ (Brooke 1764: 218). Samuel Johnson represents the other end of the spectrum. The editor of the Rambler (1750–2) made it ‘pretty much a Rule . . . to write his own Papers’, reports Samuel Richardson, adding that Johnson professed to believe that ‘most of those directed to the Spectators as Papers of others, were written by the Authors themselves’ (Carroll 1964: 247). In fact, Addison and Steele depended heavily upon outside contributions; Johnson was actually describing his own practice. He wrote nearly everything in the Rambler, from the supremely Johnsonian moral essays to the bulk of the ‘reader’ correspondence. He was able to dispatch his obligations in a brief paragraph in the final paper (no. 208), crediting himself with all but four numbers (one supplied by Catherine Talbot and two by Elizabeth Carter), and parts of three others. In contrast, Edward Moore, who as Adam Fitz-Adam conducted the hugely popular the World (1753–6), welcomed the assistance of a host of talented and fashionable contributors, some three dozen of them in fact. Of 210 numbers, Moore wrote sixty-one.5 Regarded as ‘that bow of Ulysses, in which it was the fashion for men of rank and genius to try their strength’ (Duncombe 1773: xxvi), the World published essays and fictitious correspondence from the likes of Orrery, Lyttleton, Chesterfield, Horace Walpole, and many others – including, it has been plausibly argued, Brooke herself under her maiden name Moore (Brown et al. 2006). As for earnings, Moore seems to have taken pride of place among Brooke’s immediate contemporaries. He was handsomely remunerated at the rate of three guineas per paper whether he wrote the paper himself or, as the contract puts it, did ‘cause [it] to be written’.6 Johnson was fairly well paid for writing the Rambler at two guineas per biweekly issue. In the 1730s, when the popularity of the oppositional Craftsman was at its height, its exceptionally talented editor and chief writer, Nicholas Amhurst, earned a ‘decent living’ (Varey 1993: 61), perhaps as much as four guineas a week.7 Benjamin Norton Defoe earned a guinea per issue for editing a rival paper in 1739 (Battestin and Battestin 1989: 266). In 1753 Arthur Murphy received one-and-a-half guineas a week editing the much-dwindled Craftsman (Varey 1982: xiv). Fielding may have received even less for his work on the Champion for 1739–40; such, at least, is the implication of a hostile account that has him writing three essays a week at ‘the humble Price of 5 s. each, and a Sunday’s Dinner’ (quoted in Battestin and Battestin 1989: 266). No evidence survives to indicate what Thomas Gardner paid Haywood for editing the monthly Female Spectator (or her subsequent periodicals for that matter) but her bibliographer, in an estimate based upon previous payments per sheet of copy, thinks she may have earned £63 per annum (Spedding 2006: 197–8), which would come to £5 5s a month or roughly a guinea a week, which seems in line with the going rate. And what about Frances Brooke? The terms of her agreement with Millar are unknown, but the Millar ledgers preserved in the Coutts & Co Archives shows a single payment to ‘Mrs Brooks’ of £21 16s 6d on 13 July 1757 entered, oddly enough, nearly a year after the run of Old Maid had come to an end.8 If this figure represents her entire remuneration for her work on the paper, then she was paid at a lower rate than many of her fellow editors, slightly under 12 shillings per number. If Brooke was dissatisfied with her earnings, she may have vented her frustration in the final issue,

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 344

17/11/17 5:02 PM

frances brooke, editor

345

no. 37 (orig. 24 July 1756), when Singleton declares herself ‘tired of the confinement of writing every week, whether I chuse it or not; a slavery not at all agreeable to the volatile spirit of woman’ (Brooke 1764: 303). But there is another explanation for her relatively low earnings. A few months earlier Millar had published her blank-verse classical tragedy Virginia ‘for the author’, meaning at Brooke’s expense, but the ledgers record no receipts from ‘Mrs Brooks’. It is possible that Brooke, anxious to get the tragedy into print after its rejection by Rich and Garrick, had negotiated for its publication in lieu of the earnings due her for editing Old Maid. In return for their pay, conductors read through submissions, accepting and rejecting as they saw fit and, often as not, ‘correcting’ submissions and developing ‘hints’ an aspirant correspondent might offer. But the most important work was done at the front end. To gain a readership and increase the odds that the paper would reappear as the always-to-be-desired collected edition, the projector of an essay-paper needed to create a distinctive tone and voice, usually by means of the eidolon – an Isaac Bickerstaff, Caleb D’Anvers, Hercules Vinegar, Female Spectator, Mary Singleton, and so on. This fictitious editor-figure interacted on the pages of the periodical with real and made-up correspondents so as to project the appearance of a lively, engaged, and in some sense interactive community of like-minded readers, a kind of extension of the ‘club’ device made famous by the Spectator and still employed at mid-century. Powell (2012) has shown how eidolons enabled self-conscious performances of individual authorship, but eidolons served a ‘club’-building function as well. Indeed, the editorcontributor ‘club’ created in the Old Maid is one of Brooke’s greatest achievements, perhaps appreciated more in the present moment than in her own. Singleton is an agreeable companion; a self-liking and likeable old maid of nearly 50. Her satisfaction in the single life and manifest sympathy for odd folk of many stripes – ‘ladies of her own order’ as well as ageing virgins of the other sex, one of whom, in no. 6 (orig. 20 Dec 1755), happily styles himself an ‘Old Maid of the masculine gender’ (Brooke 1764: 8, 41) – stand as an invitation for correspondence from a range of quirky misfits and gender outliers, personated and perhaps in some cases genuine, and their firstperson stories give Old Maid at times the feel of a report from the margins of what today we might call the heteronormative sex-gender system.

The Orrery Annotations Anyone interested in the phenomenon of the female periodicalist should be grateful that John Boyle, fifth earl of Cork and Orrery (1707–62), took it upon himself to record his responses to various aspects of all thirty-seven original numbers of Old Maid. The annotated issues, bound in a volume inscribed ‘Corke 1756’ in the front inside cover, is in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library of the University of Toronto.9 Boyle assumed the title of Lord Cork in 1753 but he is known to literary history as Lord Orrery, and thus is he styled here. Scion of a distinguished literary and scientific family, friend of Swift, Pope, Johnson, and Chesterfield, he is remembered today as author of the rapidly selling Remarks on the Life and Writings of Jonathan Swift (1752), which went through five London editions in a year. In the usual manner Orrery concealed himself behind a number of epistolary personae in his letter-essays to Old Maid – L.C., Johannes Amatissimus, S.P., Sarah Whispercomb (a hilarious impersonation in no. 24 of a disastrously curious young woman ‘Intended for the benefit and correction of a particular Person’ (Boyle 1756: 139)) – and at least three times he

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 345

17/11/17 5:02 PM

346

kathryn r. king

wrote in the voice of Singleton herself. Orrery was more deeply invested in the making of the Old Maid than one might expect from a man of his social and literary position, so the question naturally arises: how did a nobleman, a leading gentleman-author of his time, become involved in this fledgling periodical venture? We do not know when or how Orrery entered into Brooke’s professional life, but it is not entirely surprising that he did. Brooke was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, and at the commencement of the Old Maid was living in London as a clergyman’s wife, or soon to become one.10 Her clerical connections could easily have brought her into contact with high-ranking households. For his part, Orrery devoted much of his time to literary matters and in common with the better studied Swift and Johnson he assisted women writers in various ways. Swift’s protégée Mary Barber hails him as ‘my great Patron and Benefactor’ in the preface to her Poems on Several Occasions (1734: xxi). The London writer Charlotte Lennox thanked him for his help compiling materials for her Shakespeare Illustrated by dedicating that work to him in 1753.11 The previous year he had used his influence with a wavering Millar to move forward publication of the Female Quixote (1752).12 (Millar published the commercially successful London edition of Remarks on Swift.) Orrery saw himself in the lineage of the aristocratic ‘Maecenas’ tradition, and we have Johnson’s testimony that he ‘would have been a very liberal patron’ had he been rich (Hill 1964, vol. 5: 238), which he was not. He inherited enormous debts from his father and by the early 1750s his finances ‘were so hopelessly confused that he was obliged to place his estates in the hands of his trustees’ and, in September 1754, he removed to Italy to reduce living expenses (Smith 2009). He returned to London in November 1755 around the time the Old Maid was launched. His history with Millar invites speculation that he may have interceded on Brooke’s behalf as he had done earlier for Lennox. Orrery had a flair for the epistolary form and enjoyed writing anonymously for periodicals. The co-editors of the Connoisseur (1755–7) refer to him in no. 140 (orig. 30 Sep 1756) as their ‘earliest and most frequent correspondent’ (Colman and Thornton 1760: 270) and he contributed to other essay-papers as well, among them Common Sense (1738–9), the World (1753–6) and Oliver Goldsmith’s short-lived the Busy-Body (1759). He has not fared well with critics today, however. Lance Bertelsen thinks it ‘unfortunate’ that Swift scholars ‘despise’ him and dismiss his writings. He finds Orrery ‘a fluid and entertaining essayist’ (1986: 60), and I do too. Some of the most memorable reader-letters in Old Maid come from his hand, including the very funny mock-cautionary tale offered by Sarah Whispercomb in no. 24 and L.C.’s wittily acerbic send-up in no. 11 (orig. 24 Jan 1756) of the preference of families for boys ‘only because the blockheadly son is to continue the letter A to the nineteenth century’ (Brooke 1764: 81), which has been called the ‘periodical’s most explicitly feminist statement’ (Italia 2005: 176). In a copybook he explained that ‘Weekly essays’ in the Spectator tradition ‘have always afforded great delight to me. A Paper of that kind [Busy-Body] having been set up toward the latter end of this year [1759], I was glad to employ my restless nights in giving the authors some assistance. Who those authors were I neither knew nor enquired’ (quoted in Prince 1948: 201.) That last bit of aristocratic insouciance gives pause. It has been assumed that Orrery and Brooke were ‘friends’ in the sense of personal acquaintances, but there is nothing to exclude the possibility that their collaboration was conducted entirely by correspondence, as seems to have been the case with Busy-Body, and, beyond Orrery’s possible intercession with Millar, there is nothing to indicate patronage. The nature of their relationship must remain something of a puzzle.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 346

17/11/17 5:02 PM

frances brooke, editor

347

Figure 22.1 Annotations in Lord Orrery’s hand to first page of Frances Brooke’s Old Maid no. 2. Courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. The annotations themselves, to which we now turn, read like a running commentary on individual issues of Old Maid as they appeared. Interesting in themselves, Orrery’s assessments provide valuable indirect evidence of Brooke’s editorial practices. She was by all accounts a forceful personality and, as will be seen, her relationship with Orrery defies ready generalisations about class-and-gender power dynamics. For his part Orrery was by temperament and habit a meticulous annotator of his own and others’ work and possessed of the strong preservationist instincts of an archivist. At the close of the first number he wrote: ‘The person and name of Singleton, in these papers, is assumed by Mrs Brooke, the wife of the Revd Mr Brooke, who has a living near Norwich: and is at present Lecturer at Somerset House Chappel’ (Boyle 1756: 6).13 Commentary on the first seven numbers is shot through with anxious speculations about the likelihood of the paper’s success, suggesting some manner of involvement in the project from the outset. If he had recommended publication to Millar, perhaps he was feeling some responsibility. ‘No bad Introduction’ (1: 1), he opines of the number in which Singleton famously describes the paper as ‘an odd attempt for a woman’; but his assessment of no. 2 is more sceptical: ‘This paper begins well but falls off: & ends injudiciously’ (7). The reference is to an ill-judged skirmish with Mr Town of the Connoisseur, whom Orrery blames for an ‘ungenerous’ attack on ‘a sister Writer’ – with no apparent

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 347

17/11/17 5:02 PM

348

kathryn r. king

provocation Mr Town had depicted Singleton as inflamed by sexual frustrations – but regrets the ‘improperly expressed’ (7) vehemence of her response: it ‘ought to have been humorous: not virulent’ (12). Orrery’s response has taken abuse from feminist critics as an example of male intolerance of unwomanly speech (see for example, Larsen 1999: 264), but it should be kept in mind that Orrery was an experienced periodical-essayist disposed to think in terms of audience response. Regarding no. 3, for example, he writes: ‘She must alter her style and manner, or she will not succeed’ (13), and he was certainly right to think that readers of a paper in the Spectator-Rambler tradition would more likely be won over by humour than virulence. Brooke later cancels the regrettable passage in no. 2 (orig. 22 Nov 1755) but not without a touch of faux-gracious irony that seems characteristic. Since Mr Town had removed the offending bit in the Connoisseur, the editor ‘with pleasure destroys all traces of the dispute’ (Brooke 1764: 13), slyly intimating that she had bested an adversary who had stood down.14 Orrey’s first contribution comes in no. 8, 3 January 1756, an excursion in classical literary criticism in Singleton’s voice, and it brings a change in the tenour of his annotations. ‘Very faultily printed’ (43), he grumps, and marks a number of printing errors, thinking ahead perhaps to the collected edition that would appear somewhat belatedly in 1764. (The Advertisement to this ‘Revised and corrected’ volume informs readers that the numbers ascribed to ‘L. C.’, written by a ‘late Nobleman, well known in the literary world’, had been ‘marked and corrected’ by him. Rough comparison of Orrery’s marked copies with the 1764 edition indicates that incorporation of these corrections was fairly hit-and-miss.) Twice more he will write in Singleton’s voice, in nos. 28 and 29. Min Wild has called his personation of Singleton an ‘appropriation by invitation’, and she stresses the elements of misogyny and gender boundary-marking that attend Orrery’s assumption of Brooke’s editorial persona (1998: 423). But what looks from one angle like appropriation looks from another like collaboration. It was common at this time for multiple contributors to share an editorial persona, and the significance of this practice is not always appreciated. In a discussion of the editorial workings of the Craftsman, Simon Varey notes that critics tend to assume that the fictive editor Caleb D’Anvers was a pseudonym for the real-life editor, Nicholas Amhurst, when in fact, and ‘in the manner of the Spectator and countless other papers, Caleb D’Anvers was actually a pseudonym for a whole team of anonymous authors, Amhurst among them’. He judges this ‘an important distinction’ (1993: 72 n. 20), and it applies to Old Maid as well. We do not have a ‘team’ of Singletons, to be sure, but we do have an arrangement in which a woman editor of no particular social eminence and a gentleman-author of high rank take turns using the same persona: one crafted by the lady. By general agreement Singleton is a singularly engaging editor-figure, so it might be thought testimony to Orrery’s discrimination and good taste, as well as his delight in epistolary role-playing, and possibly his protofeminist sensibility, that he would opt to take up her mask. If close examination of the annotations allows for a more nuanced view of Orrery, it also provides a telling picture of what a veteran essayist believed was required for success from the editor of an essay-periodical. It was not enough that she compose genteel, elegant, entertaining essays as required: that Brooke could do, handily. (‘A paper of sense: well written and conducted’ (Boyle 13: 73); ‘An

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 348

17/11/17 5:02 PM

frances brooke, editor

349

entertaining Paper’ (15: 85); ‘A genteel Proper Paper’ (17: 97); ‘A genteel compassionate, proper paper’ (19: 97).) She needed also to apply the period equivalent of the blue pencil to the outside contributions, some of which failed to meet his high standards. The reader-letter in no. 16 ‘wants lopping’; its ‘attempt at wit’ reaches ‘only to pertness and affectation’ (91). Particularly distressing was no. 23, the Robertson contribution, which he judged a serious lapse in editorial judgement: ‘An attempt at Some humour: but not right. The Verses unintelligible’ (133); the latter ‘appear rather sent to hurt than to adorn these Lucubrations’ (138). Shoddy writing, whatever its source, has the potential to damage the paper’s reputation and the Singleton brand: ‘It seems Paper is not Mrs Singleton’s’ but its insertion ‘will be deemed want of Taste’ (133). The ‘miserable Verses’ in no. 35 from an unnamed London citizen ‘will Hurt the Paper’ (209). (They were silently removed in 1764.) A penchant for detecting deficiencies in taste, discrimination, and judiciousness came readily, all too readily perhaps, to a man of his lordship’s entitlements, but it would be a mistake to read his comments simply as expressions of patriarchal or aristocratic superiority. They should remind us that contemporaries of all ranks expected an essay-paper to be to some degree a product of many authors that rose or fell on the strength of its conductor’s guiding hand. For those interested in the dynamics of the Brooke-Orrery relation, the most intriguing annotation is found beside the letter from S.P. attributed to Orrery in no. 18 (orig. 13 Mar 1756). Writing as a ‘constant reader, and a zealous well-wisher to your undertaking’, S.P. recreates in satisfying satiric detail a coffee house scene in which the Old Maid is the target of violent male abuse. He informs Singleton of the ‘pelting’ and ‘hissing’ inflicted on her paper by ‘that tribe of mischievous animals the little critics’ who, predictably, deride the paper as the work of a stupid ‘old woman’. Their frenzied malice is an amusing foil to some modern notions of cool and rational coffee house masculinity. The hissing men, poring over a file of Old Maids, are likened to ‘witches round a conjuring cauldron, every one throwing in his invidious ingredient, as the malice of his heart, or the phrenzy of his head, suggested’ (Brooke 1764: 151). With its pungent language, gender reversals, and gleeful skewering of coffee house misogyny, S.P.’s letter is exactly the sort of ‘talking back’ one wishes Brooke had written – which makes Orrery’s reproachful note especially tantalising. ‘This letter is so altered, curtailed, and mangled’, he complains, ‘it may be said to be the old Maid’s’ (106). Ah, so in some sense the letter is Brooke’s after all. It is consistent with what is known of her unshrinking nature that she would feel herself at liberty to revise so freely the work of so eminent a contributor. How freely we will never know though the annotations provide one tiny clue. Orrery has struck out blockheads in ‘army of licentious blockheads’ and replaced it with the more specific and possibly less rude praters (107), in order, perhaps, to stress the mindless talk of these noisy ‘little critics’. It is too bad he did not record his disgruntlement in more detail so that we might judge for ourselves the extent of Brooke’s alterations, but it seems safe to assume that Orrery had words with her. Beside his next contribution, no. 20, he has written, ‘Printed very exactly from the Mss’ (115). Nevertheless, his express dissatisfaction with ‘the old Maid’s’ meddling with his earlier contribution gives room to suppose that Brooke had some hand in S.P.’s cheeky send-up of unenlightened masculine self-assurance.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 349

17/11/17 5:02 PM

350

kathryn r. king

Figure 22.2 Annotation in Lord Orrery’s hand to his reader-letter, signed S.P., in Frances Brooke’s Old Maid no. 18. Courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

Gifford Additional information about Brooke’s practices and understanding of herself as an editor is found in the 1756 letter cited earlier to Richard Gifford,15 clergyman-author of the three Antigallican letters that have fun (too much fun?) with the conceit of an English army of bare-bosomed women whose mammary charms would immobilise a French invasion force. She returns to Gifford a paper in which she has ‘ventur’d to put in two or three lines, where I tho’t it might make the Sence plainer’, an instance of that editorial intervention that irritated Orrery although Gifford seemed to welcome her assistance, and she mildly chides him for failing to translate a Latin motto as requested. Like any editor she shows herself keen to gain new readers. The ‘O. M. gains ground every Day’, she tells him, and attributes much of its success to the Antigallican letters. The presence in Old Maid of these letters, with their ironic take on women’s martial spirit that amounts to a satire on modern male effeminacy, and their whiff of bawdry, furnishes another example of Brooke’s ability to attract the kind of edgy, gender-inflected humour that Gifford and Orrery were able to provide. Brooke also evinces a healthy appetite for publicity. ‘I have a great Longing to hear myself abused,

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 350

17/11/17 5:02 PM

frances brooke, editor

351

by the way’, having learned from one of ‘Orator’ Henley’s famously crazed newspaper notices that ‘Mrs Singleton & single life’ would be a topic in his next sermon. Of his abuse she takes a bright view: ‘his mention of us, is a sign we grow popular’; it ‘will introduce us to the acquaintance of the mob of Readers, amongst whom we are not yet so much known as in Grosvenor Square’ (Brooke: 1756, n. p.). The fanciful idea that the paper is seldom read outside the ultra-elegant Mayfair district tells us that, while Brooke is anything but averse to expanding her ‘mob of Readers’, she relished an image of Old Maid as gentry reading. The Frances Brooke, Editor, who comes into view in these sources is a woman who takes obvious pride in her paper and ability to fulfil her editorial responsibilities. She solicited correspondence, answered letters, recruited or attracted a writing team that included Orrery, Gifford, Robertson, probably Arthur Murphy and possibly Tobias Smollett, as well as others. She looked to them for a range of social and literary commentary, topical satire, and comic description, what in her letter to Gifford she called ‘a kind of a – sort of a – humor’; in return, judging from their contributions, they looked to her for that ‘Singleton’ spirit that infused the whole and to some degree inspired their own performances. She was not afraid to exercise her editorial prerogative to revise submissions, including those of a clergyman and a nobleman who numbered among his friends some of the pre-eminent literary minds of his age. She could insist upon accurate printing when necessary. Her earnings were not grand, but by editing a respected paper she was able to establish a foothold in the print ecosystem as a literary professional, more woman of letters than hackney-for-bread; she may have contrived to get her tragedy Virginia into print through Millar’s auspices. For seven months she saw to it that tea tables and coffee houses would be graced every Saturday by a new issue of Singleton’s paper. Her achievements as an editor are, in short, considerable, and it is time to confront the question of why female editors have received short shrift in the stories we tell of women and eighteenth-century print culture.

Rethinking the Female Editor The first and most obvious reason for neglect of the female editor is the Great Forgetting, so-called, of the female literary past generally and female-edited periodicals more specifically, but subtler reasons are to be found in the author-centred approach to the periodical enterprise that surfaces, for example, in the tendency to regard Mary Singleton, Spinster, as the ‘voice’ or ‘alter ego’ of Frances Brooke rather than the voice of the periodical as a whole. Students of periodicals often use the terms ‘author’ and ‘editor’ interchangeably, as if they mean the same thing, but of course they do not.16 The example of the World’s Moore shows the error of assuming that the conductor of an essay-paper did most of the writing, but this admittedly is an unusual case. The broader problem is a conceptual one. To elide editor and author, singular, is to lose contact with the messy, hard-to-pin-down reality of partly concealed multiple authorship within the context of collaborative periodical production in the eighteenth century. To some degree Singleton speaks for her creator, of course, and studies of relations among author, eidolon, reading public, and gender will continue to be a rich topic for study for years to come. But Singleton is also a carefully crafted vehicle for a mode of shared authorship and collaborative periodical production for which we have no good name.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 351

17/11/17 5:02 PM

352

kathryn r. king

An important case in point is Brooke’s predecessor and contemporary Eliza Haywood, editor of four periodicals, one of which, the Young Lady, overlapped with the Old Maid. Haywood does not seem to have loaned out her Female Spectator persona as Brooke did Singleton, but she did encourage correspondents to enter into dialogue with her eidolon and clearly conceived of at least two of her periodicals as (to some degree) collaborative ventures. Yet she is nearly always described as ‘the’ author of her periodicals. Her bibliographer typifies current opinion when he says of the twenty-four books of Female Spectator: ‘There is little doubt that Haywood was the sole author’ (Spedding 2004: 431). There is immense room for doubt, actually, even if the evidence requires some teasing out. We can start with the implications of the language of Haywood’s obituary notice. Since it was almost certainly provided by her long-time publisher, or someone close to him, the ascriptive language applied to the Female Spectator and its successor Epistles for the Ladies should give pause: hers was the ‘great Hand’ in those productions (Whitehall Evening Post 26 Feb 1756: 3), which is to say that she was not, as our century would have it, the ‘sole author’ but rather the conductor and chief writer of these periodicals. That she drew upon the services of various unnamed contributors is confirmed by a second category of evidence, a widely circulated advertisement for Books 2–5 of the Female Spectator that appeared in numerous papers over a four-month period. In it the ‘Authors’ – which I take to be Haywood’s pseudonym for herself, although the plural carries an element of truth – acknowledge ‘the great Helps they continually receive from Persons whom they are not authorised to Name’ (General Advertiser 8 May 1744: 3). This reference to ‘great Helps’ and unnamed ‘Persons’ indicates that by Book 2, if not earlier, Haywood had assembled a company of associates to help put together Female Spectator, and, given what we know about periodical culture, and considering the demands of Haywood’s particular undertaking – roughly sixty-four octavo pages a month – it seems odd to think she would proceed in any other way. Close reading of a pre-publication notice for Epistles for the Ladies casts further doubt on the sole-authorship notion. Considered generically, Epistles is about as rogue a periodical as you will find (see Powell 2014: 171–4), but it was clearly intended to be delivered in monthly one-shilling parts. The fact that serial publication was halted by its conductor’s severe illness does not alter the fact that Haywood and her publisher conceived of Epistles as a periodical from the start or that in her editorial capacity she seems to have begun early on to gather materials from friends and acquaintances. A prominent page-one notice in the Whitehall Evening Press for 29 October 1748 (the first monthly issue would appear mid-November) gratefully acknowledges ‘the Helps we have already received in this Undertaking’ and, following usual practice, directs would-be correspondents to send materials on ‘Amusing, Philosophic, Moral, or Religious Subjects’ to Mr Gardner’s printing office in the Strand. Somewhat more unusually, a postscript identifies by pseudonyms and initials seven contributors whose materials were already in hand and, judging by the names adopted, they were a mixed gender group: Aristander, Albinus, Leonidas, A.Z., Perollo, Stella, and Clio. Their identities are today unknown with one important exception. Leonidas is the wellknown moniker of the City poet Richard Glover, who published a much-ballyhooed anti-Walpole epic of that name in 1737. Epistles sports at least one Glover contribution, the Patriot-themed Epistle XLV subscribed ‘Leonidas’.17 Barring the near-miracle of the discovery of an annotated copy of Epistles à la the Orrery Old Maid, it is

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 352

17/11/17 5:02 PM

frances brooke, editor

353

unlikely we will learn much more about the team of coadjutors assembled by Haywood, but on the basis of the public notices discussed here it is safe to say that Epistles and probably Female Spectator before it, drew upon a mix of male and female talent in which hers was the initiating and controlling but not the ‘sole’ hand. If the surviving evidence on the making of the Old Maid, Female Spectator, and Epistles for the Ladies has only one thing to teach us, it is this: we should be wary of any claim that a female-edited periodical is ‘entirely’ or even ‘almost entirely’ written by its editor. The rashness of such a claim is all too evident in the 1973 article mentioned earlier. In the heady excitement of the first days of the feminist recovery project, William New proceeded with blithe disregard of the evidence and jaunty use of scare quotes to declare Brooke sole begetter of everything in the paper: ‘the “correspondence” that gave the journal its weekly material was sheer artifice. Frances Moore [i. e., Brooke] “edited” and wrote the whole thing’ (9). (Similar assumptions underlie descriptions of the correspondence in Female Spectator, described in one representative account as a device that ‘allowed Haywood to experiment with male personae’ (Ballaster et al. 1991: 58).) Critics in recent years nod at least in the direction of the Old Maid’s male contributors, usually in a footnote, but have shown little enthusiasm for pursuing the implications of, say, Orrery’s involvement, except here and there to disparage it. We might suspect the residual effect of a romantic-feminist myth of literary purity that would scour women’s literary past of male influence, as if reinstatement of an imagined female self-sufficiency would somehow redress the very real omissions and distortions of literary history. It is perhaps discomfiting to a certain idea of female creative autonomy to know that a periodical beloved for its feminism and lively female perspectives acquired some of its liveliest feminist materials from male contributors. Whatever the reason, mentions of the men who helped write the Old Maid are few, perfunctory, peripheral, and designed it sometimes seems to leave intact the misleading impression that the content of the paper is chiefly, if not exclusively, Brooke’s.18 Wild is certainly right to say that the ‘question of attribution of material in the eighteenthcentury periodical is a heart-breaking business’ (2008: 48); but where solid evidence exists, as is the case with the Old Maid and to a lesser extent the Female Spectator and Epistles for the Ladies, it is wrong to compound the confusion with wishful thinking. The fantasy of three-way collaboration found in the epigraph to this essay tells me that Brooke took real delight in the prospect of ‘writing alternately’ with Murphy and Gifford. Although she would surely be pleased by feminist efforts to place her paper within the ‘constellation of competing periodicals which are to an overwhelming degree masculine productions’ (Wild 1998: 422), Brooke might well be puzzled by the accompanying tendency to detach her from the collaborators she obviously valued and regarded as vital to the success of the Old Maid. It is time we recognise, or at least consider, that much of the fascination exerted by the paper for readers today, and possibly readers then, comes from Brooke’s ability to project an imagined space where the quirky, gender-inflected humour of her male contributors intermingles with the generous sympathies of its companionable, proudly spinster editor-figure to create, nearly every week, the illusion at least of a reading community of kindred spirits. Literary history proceeds in part through changes in focus. Focus on women’s work as editors, in addition to their achievements as authors, is needed to stretch the frame of periodical studies generally and, by directing attention to the collaborative (and mixed-gender) editorial work highlighted in this paper, bring new detail and depth to

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 353

17/11/17 5:02 PM

354

kathryn r. king

the stories we tell of female agency in eighteenth-century British culture. An approach to Brooke, and to Haywood and Lennox as well, that attends to the editorial side of the conductor’s creative vision would surely bring us closer to an adequate account of the burst of female periodical energies that occurred in the middle years of the century.

Notes 1. Outraged comments on the Byng affair and reference to a recent Gifford contribution (no. 30 or no. 33) date the letter to late June or early July 1756. It is the first item in a collection of undated correspondence between Brooke and Gifford in MS ENG 1310, Houghton Library, Harvard. 2. For Orrery, Gifford, and Brooke, see McMullen 1983: 25–9. Murphy probably contributed the letters from Jack Eitherside and T. Lyric in no. 36 (17 July 1756); the timing is right, the letters are not otherwise ascribed, and Murphy had written as Thomas Lyric in Gray’s-Inn Journal no. 17 (10 Feb 1753). Materials signed ‘J.R.’ in no. 23, including the poem ‘On Sweetness’, often anthologised under the name Robertson, came from an obscure poet, James Robertson, who flourished in the 1770s and 1780s, for whom see Rothstein 1981: 226. For a contribution ‘quite possibly’ by Smollett, often overlooked by Brooke scholars, see Basker 1988: 23–4. 3. See, for example, Wild 1998; Prescott and Spencer 2000; Powell 2012: 131–44. 4. Lady’s Museum saw the appearance of ‘the first novel by a major female author written specifically for serial publication’, Lennox’s own Sophia, republished in 1762 (Schürer 2012: xxviii). See also Powell 2012: 183–5. 5. For the making of the World, a good starting point is Winship 1957. 6. Moore’s ‘Memorandum’ with Dodsley is in the British Library, Egerton MS 738, f. 16; reprinted in Winship 1957: 194, n. 3. 7. Information supplied by Thomas Lockwood. He tells me that John Kelly was paid one guinea per week for editing Fog’s Weekly Journal in 1737. 8. From a transcript of the Millar ledgers prepared by Isobel Long of Coutts & Co Archives. Cited with permission of Coutts & Co. 9. Discussion of the Orrery annotations relies upon a meticulous transcription of the ‘Corke’ annotations prepared by Angela Du, graduate student at the University of Toronto, with support from Thomas Keymer. My great thanks to them both. 10. Her wedding date is uncertain. McMullen (1983: 9) has her married ‘[b]y early 1756’; Mary Jane Edwards has her married in 1754, but on what evidence we are not told. 11. For his collaboration on Shakespeare Illustrated (1753) and future ventures, see Clarke 2005: 107–8; ‘Orrery served as her assistant and co-author, an arrangement that survived for a good ten years’ (108). 12. See Schürer 2012: 18–20, and xxxiv. 13. Subsequent Orrery citations refer to Boyle 1756 and are keyed to issue and page numbers in the Fisher volume. 14. For the ‘short paper war’, see Powell 2012: 162–4. The Connoisseur attack is supposed to have been motivated by a combination of misogyny and economic territoriality but it is unclear why a leading weekly would feel threatened by a paper from the hand of a littleknown writer that came out on a different day of the week. Moreover, the tenor of Town’s attack is uncharacteristic of the tone of Connoisseur more generally, aptly described by Goldsmith 1757: 444, as ‘perfectly satyrical, yet perfectly good-natured’. Personal animus on the part of one or both co-editors of Connoisseur may be suspected. 15. See n. 1 above. 16. See, for example, Italia 2005: 13.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 354

17/11/17 5:02 PM

frances brooke, editor

355

17. See King 2012: 167. 18. Berland (1988: 29), for example, acknowledges the contributors in a note, but the text, while not inaccurate, seems to imply Brooke’s authorship: the ‘periodical-essay format also allows the fabrication of letters from various fictitious correspondents and allows the Menippean approach of shifting voice to suit a variety of satiric purposes’.

Works Cited Ballaster, Ros, Margaret Beetham, Elizabeth Frazer, and Sandra Hebron, eds. 1991. Women’s Worlds: Ideology, Femininity and the Woman’s Magazine. London: Macmillan. Barber, Mary. 1734. Poems on Several Occasions. London: Rivington. Basker, James G. 1988. Tobias Smollett: Critic and Journalist. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Battestin, Martin C. and Ruthe R. Battestin. 1989. Henry Fielding: A Life. London and New York: Routledge. Berland, K. J. H. 1988. ‘A Tax on Old Maids and Bachelors: Frances Brooke’s Old Maid’. Eighteenth-Century Women and the Arts. Ed. Frederick M. Keener and Susan E. Lorsch. New York: Greenwood Press. 29–35. Bertelsen, Lance. 1986. The Nonsense Club: Literature and Popular Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Boyle, John, fifth Earl of Cork and Orrery. 1756. Autograph annotations to Frances Brooke. The Old Maid. 15 Nov 1755 – 15 July 1756. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. British Magazine and Review. 1782–3. London: Harrison and Co. Brooke, Frances. [1756]. Letter to Richard Gifford, MS ENG 1310, item 1. Houghton Library, Harvard. —. 1764. The Old Maid. By Mary Singleton, Spinster. London: A. Millar. Brown, Susan, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, eds. 2006. ‘Frances Brooke: Possible Periodical Apprenticeship’. Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Online. (last accessed 31 July 2016). Carroll, John, ed. 1964. Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Clarke, Norma. 2005. Dr Johnson’s Women. London: Pimlico. Colman, George and Bonnell Thornton. 1760. The Connoisseur. By Mr. Town, Critic and Censor-General. 3rd edn. Vol. 4. London: R. Baldwin. Duncombe, John. 1773. Letters from Italy, in the Year 1754 and 1755, By . . . John Earl of Corke and Orrery. London: White. Edwards, Mary Jane. 2004. ‘Brooke, Frances (bap. 1724, d. 1789)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sep 2015. (last accessed 28 July 2017). General Advertiser. 8 May 1744. Goldsmith, Oliver. 1757. ‘The Connoisseur’. Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal. 16 (May): 443–5. Hill, George Birkbeck, ed. 1964. Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Rev. L. F. Powell. Vol. 5. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Italia, Iona. 2005. The Rise of Literary Journalism in the Eighteenth Century: Anxious Employment. London and New York: Routledge. King, Kathryn R. 2012. A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood. London: Pickering & Chatto. Larsen, Elizabeth. 1999. ‘A Text of Identity: Frances Brooke and the Rhetoric of the Aging Spinster’. Journal of Aging and Identity 4.4: 255–68. McMullen, Lorraine. 1983. An Odd Attempt in a Woman: The Literary Life of Frances Brooke. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 355

17/11/17 5:02 PM

356

kathryn r. king

New, William H. 1973. ‘The Old Maid: Frances Brooke’s Apprentice Feminism’. Journal of Canadian Fiction 2.3: 9–12. Powell, Manushag N. 2012. Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. —. 2014. ‘Eliza Haywood, Periodicalist (?)’. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 14.4: 163–86. Prescott, Sarah and Jane Spencer. 2000. ‘Prattling, Tattling and Knowing Everything: Public Authority and the Female Editorial Persona in the Early Essay-Periodical’. British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 23: 43–57. Prince, Mildred Weeks. 1948. ‘The Literary Life and Position in the Eighteenth Century of John, Earl of Orrery’. Dissertation, Smith College. Rothstein, Eric. 1981. Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry 1660–1780. Boston and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Schürer, Norbert, ed. 2012. Charlotte Lennox: Correspondence and Miscellaneous Documents. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Smith, Lawrence B. 2009. ‘Boyle, John, fifth earl of Cork and fifth earl of Orrery (1707–1762)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press online edition. Solomon, Harry M. 1996. The Rise of Robert Dodsley: Creating the New Age of Print. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Spedding, Patrick. 2004. A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood. London: Pickering & Chatto. —. 2006. ‘Measuring the Success of Haywood’s Female Spectator’. Fair Philosopher: Eliza Haywood and The Female Spectator. Ed. Lynn Marie Wright and Donald J. Newman. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. 193–211. Varey, Simon, ed. 1982. Lord Bolingbroke, Contributions to The Craftsman. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —. 1993. ‘The Craftsman’. Telling People What to Think: Early Eighteenth-Century Periodicals from The Review to The Rambler. Ed. J. A. Downie and Thomas N. Corns. London: Frank Cass. 58–77. Whitehall Evening Post. 1718–1801. Wild, Min. 1998. ‘“Prodigious Wisdom”: Civic Humanism in Frances Brooke’s Old Maid’. Women’s Writing 5.3: 421–36. —. 2008. Christopher Smart and Satire: ‘Mary Midnight’ and the Midwife. Aldershot: Ashgate. Winship, George P. 1957. ‘The Printing History of the World’. Studies in the Early English Periodical. Ed. Richmond P. Bond. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 183–95.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 356

17/11/17 5:02 PM

23 Eyes that Eagerly ‘Bear the Steady Ray of Reason’: Eidolon as Activist in Charlotte Lennox’s LADY’S MUSEUM Susan Carlile

O

n 15 January 1759 the British Museum opened its doors for the first time. A collection of books, manuscripts, natural specimens, antiquities, prints, and drawings composed the first national public museum in the world. Entry was free and ‘all studious and curious Persons’ were invited to peruse its wonders. Located in Bloomsbury, on the same site as it is today, the building was a twenty-minute walk from the London author Charlotte Lennox’s home. By this year, Lennox was a well-known and respected author, with twelve titles to her name, including an anthology of Greek drama, poems, plays, novels, translations from French, and a work of Shakespeare criticism.1 Given her own scholarly inquiries, it would not be surprising if she were one of the museum’s early visitors. Just one year after this remarkable space dedicated to learning opened, Lennox featured her own collection of material that she hoped would inspire inquisitive minds. Her Lady’s Museum (1760–1) harnessed a boon in the publishing world,2 just as the periodical genre was rapidly expanding. Lennox, who loved learning, offered a growing literate female population an educational programme in an ideal format, one that promised access to a much wider reading public.3 She believed that expanding the mind toward an understanding of how the world, and the humans living in it, operated was too wonderful to be withheld from one half of the population. Her magazine, and specifically the vibrant debate about the content and value of women’s learning that she facilitated through it, would work toward that goal. Lennox’s ‘women’s miscellany magazine’,4 which as Jennie Batchelor’s essay in this collection points out was part of an important moment in media history, has previously been considered notable for sharing the milestone status of containing the first novel written intentionally for serial publication in the author’s own magazine.5 ‘The History of Harriot and Sophia’ (later published as Sophia (1762)) featured a young heroine whose ‘mind became a beautiful store-house of ideas’ and advocated for the idea that ‘the highest intellectual improvements were not incompatible with the humbler cares of domestic life’ (1.1:19). Instalments of this novel were placed in between texts that illustrated the difficult, often no-win, decisions that a young and well-read woman like Sophia had to make in mid-eighteenth-century England, and which functioned as a female curriculum. The texts that did this most effectively were ones that formed a conversation between Lennox’s eidolon, which she ironically

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 357

17/11/17 5:02 PM

358

susan carlile

called the Trifler, and her readers. This exchange of ideas was the unifying feature in the Lady’s Museum and formed a public conversation, almost exclusively between women, about not only the value of women’s minds, but also what they should learn. Although others have suggested that this education was primarily focused on instructing women in conventional femininities,6 I will argue that the anonymity and pseudonymity of the voices in the Lady’s Museum’s Trifler essays worked cleverly to facilitate a more ambitious goal, one that advocated for cultivated female minds set on acquiring intellectual content. Two prior English periodicals, Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator (1744–6) and Frances Brooke’s Old Maid (1755–6) were, to borrow Eve Tavor Bannet’s descriptor, woman-championing enterprises that were also edited by women. They shared Lennox’s mission to shine a light on women’s constrained social position and instruct them in moral virtue. In some cases these periodicals, as well as others that were edited by men in the first sixty years of the century, took opportunities to encourage female learning. For example, as Anna K. Sagal points out elsewhere in Chapter 3 of this volume, Eliza Haywood in the Female Spectator included an ‘extensive essay on the importance of history to holistic education’ and Jasper Goodwill’s Ladies Magazine: or, the Universal Entertainer (1749–53) ‘ranked being “well-read” among the highest praises bestowed on a woman’ (X). The slightly later Lady’s Magazine: or, Polite Companion for the Fair Sex (1759–63) asserted through its probably pseudonymous editor Caroline A. Stanhope that women demonstrated intellectual equality and proof of their abilities in their publications: The great Increase of Magazines, for the Use and Amusement of Gentlemen, and the almost total Disregard that has been shewn the Ladies on that Head, will naturally plead in favour of this Attempt . . . It has been said, certainly with the greatest Justice, that Women are not inferior to Men in point of Genius. . . . When I see the Writing of my Sisters Lenox and Carter, shine in a Quixote and an Epictetus; nay, when I observe a Female Genius, though of foreign Growth, indulged by the fostering Hand of British Approbation; can we doubt an equal Share of Favour in behalf of our own Countrywomen . . . My Sex has Talents, and the World has Candour. (1 (Sep 27 1759): 306) Lennox is invoked, here, to respond to the desires of these earlier periodicalists and, in the Lady’s Museum, answers their call with as much candour for her own countrywomen as she considers wise. As Iona Italia has asserted, the Lady’s Museum depicts periodical writing as ‘both more transgressive and more scholarly’ than in early periodicals directed at a female readership (2005: 194). Not only was the focus of the Lady’s Museum more centrally located around a conversation about women’s learning, but it also expanded the discussion. While Stanhope suggests ‘Subjects . . . fit for the Delicacy of our Sex, and yet perhaps not beneath the Notice of any Part of the other’, Lennox takes up the question of what is ‘fit’ for women, stretches the boundaries of what they could and should study, and makes this topic a central feature of every issue (1 (Sep 27 1759): 306). Lennox’s periodical urged readers to develop their minds beyond traditional female subjects, such as the nearconstant messages about how to be courted and marry well and other moralistic prescriptions.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 358

17/11/17 5:02 PM

eidolon as activist in lennox’s LADY’S MUSEUM

359

The Lady’s Museum was advertised as ‘A Course of Female Education and a Variety of other Particulars for the Information and Amusement of the Ladies’ to be ‘publish’d on the first of each Month with the Magazines’ and sold ‘by the Booksellers in Great Britain and Ireland’.7 In eleven undated monthly numbers, the Lady’s Museum included a wide range of genres and topics designed to instruct and delight. Continuous pagination that owners could later bind into two volumes and separate title pages for these volumes suggests that the periodical was conceived of as a cohesive and interrelated enterprise. Given the relative length of instalments and the beautifully detailed copper-plate illustrations they contained, each issue was a bargain at the cost of one shilling. In addition to the novel, ‘Harriot and Sophia’, this miscellany magazine included entries dedicated to natural science (botany, zoology, astrology), history, pedagogy, biography, ethnography, philosophy, literary criticism, poetry, and other fiction. Titles include ‘Of the Studies Proper for Women’,8 ‘Philosophy for the Ladies’, ‘The Lady’s Geography’, ‘An Essay on the Original Inhabitants of Great Britain’ (which includes accounts of Boudicca and Rowena), ‘An Ode by a Lady’, François Fénelon’s ‘Treatise on the Education of Daughters’, and ‘The Tryal of the Maid of Orleans’ (a biographical profile of Joan of Arc).9 Although some had been published previously, like ‘Of the Studies Proper for Women’, Lennox’s magazine also presented a wide range of original pieces, like ‘Philosophy for the Ladies’ and ‘The Lady’s Geography’. These titles were often begun in one number and then continued over several more, demonstrating how Lennox employed the useful strategy of enticing readers to buy the next issue. Evidence of Lennox’s intentions for her own magazine appeared in October 1759, a month before Stanhope’s letter was published, and entreated the Lady’s Magazine; or, Polite Companion for the Fair Sex to boldness. Four months before the first number of her own periodical was published, Lennox may have inspired Mrs Stanhope with a letter which directly named the problem: men had the power and thus enforced an unjust status quo.10 Lennox wrote with activist zeal, referencing the spirit of her own novel The Female Quixote (1752). She called the editors of the Lady’s Magazine not ‘meer women’ but ‘champions for the fair sex; a knight errant’ whose cause ‘seemed to be utterly deserted’. She insisted that it was ‘the duty incumbent upon every woman . . . who has leisure, and capacity, to join [the editors] in the important task’ and boldly noted that the goal of the magazine was to ‘shew those over-bearing men that they have no advantage of us but what they derive from prejudice, and like tyrants, from having the power in their own hands’. ‘C— L—’ considered it a civic duty to rally publicly for a magazine that took women’s minds seriously and wrote, ‘I will answer for [women’s] justice. I will answer for their gratitude’ (1 (Oct 1759): 64).11 Although she does not specifically mention her own forthcoming magazine, these lines are an overt plea to promote female intellectual engagement. Lennox was responding to a history of periodical publication and eidolon employment that included women more often as acts of tokenism than in more ambitious ways that took their minds seriously. Several earlier periodicals included fictionalised personae that occasionally featured strong female identities and noted the beauty and delight, even pleasure, of study for women. Haywood’s parrot eidolon in her nine-issue Parrot: With a Compendium of the Times (1746) is, according to Manushag Powell, ‘used in conjunction with female voices as a satirical agent that helps the authors to adopt risky political, rather than primarily sexual, stances’ (2012: 172). Brooke’s Old

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 359

17/11/17 5:02 PM

360

susan carlile

Maid offers an audacious eidolon who declares, ‘in defiance of all criticism – I will write!’ (1 (15 Nov 1755): 2). These eidolons, while bold, did not centralise, as Lennox did, a pointedly intellectual course of reading for women. Women’s learning has been the focus of substantial conversation in eighteenthcentury studies. The growing notion that women had rights and responsibilities, and that they were ‘the primary keepers of the moral flame’ (Backscheider 2005: 69) meant that they would be looked to for some degree of intellectual acuity. The basic fact that they did apply themselves to learning and the kind of content they learned was discussed in a wide range of forums, from poems, plays, and novels, to sermons and magazines. However, reading women were also seen as threatening. Before 1760 we know something of the kind of content they were encouraged to learn (the polite accomplishments of French, music, and dancing), as well as where and how they learned (mostly in the home under the idiosyncratic tutelage of family members, mostly male). Samuel Johnson was at the forefront of this conversation, representing in his Rambler (1750–2) and Idler (1758–60) essays about the problems facing women and pointing out the need for them to be aspirational in their learning (Eadie 2011: 32, 34 n. 29).12 While men debated ideas about what women should learn and how much energy and attention they should give to learning in public forums, in most magazines (even in those more explicitly focused on women readers), female readers had few spaces where they could discuss their own education in print. Women did write about female learning, at least to some extent, in other formats. For example, they advocated for their minds through poetry. In 1755, just a few years before the Lady’s Museum was founded, Mary Masters, a poet whom Lennox patronised, asked how one defines good learning. She challenges the idea that women are taught lesser subjects and with inferior methods and thus have lesser ideas. Masters believes that if women were exposed to the same intellectual reading as men, this would reveal how much more astute they are than men.13 In the same year, the poet Elizabeth Tollett, made a similar argument about equality in educational material through the speaker Hypatia, the daughter of a mathematician and lecturer on philosophy, who discusses her interest in how ‘the Elements combine’, how metals form, ‘When knows th’ refluent Ocean to obey’, ‘the alternate Impulse of the lunar Ray’, and a desire to study the past.14 The periodical genre could answer these desires for learning. With instalments that were longer than average, the magazine made substantial content more accessible to a wider range of readers and could also be offered by diverse authors, such as women writers and those not privy to inner literary circles. Lennox used periodical writing to give female voices an opportunity to draw more public attention to the debate about women as aspiring intellectuals.

The Trifler The Lady’s Museum expanded the conversation about women’s minds in a magazine that offered a discussion that promoted intellectual ambition in women. We can best see this through the Trifler eidolon and her exchanges with readers. Each number of Lennox’s periodical began with a multi-page essay titled ‘The Trifler [Number I]’, ‘The Trifler [Number II]’, etc. However, only three of these essays (I, II, and V) were written in the voice of the Trifler persona herself. The other nine Trifler instalments

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 360

17/11/17 5:02 PM

eidolon as activist in lennox’s LADY’S MUSEUM

361

comprised signed letters written to the Trifler from her readers. Working in tandem with these eleven instalments were another nine letters titled ‘To the Author of the Lady’s Museum’ or ‘To the Author of the Trifler’. The question of whether letters to periodicals were fictionalised by their editors and paid staff is a perennial bugbear of periodical scholarship and difficult to answer with confidence. The letter writers I refer to here may have been real people or may have been constructed by Lennox. Regardless, the anonymity or pseudonymity of these letter writers allows for multi-layered readings. For example, one reader (or fabricated reader) calls the Lady’s Museum ‘a shrine’ (2.7: 481). If Lennox wrote this letter as E.F., then we can see in it her own pride in what she is accomplishing. If someone else wrote this, we can see appreciation from the public. There is always a third possibility with these publications, which is that a friend of the editor or staff writer wrote it.15 Still, the fact that the source of reader letters was unknown in some ways adds to their entertainment value because it invites speculation and thus active reader engagement. Equally important, as discussed in Powell’s essay in this collection, is how such letters created dialogue between audience and text and between periodicals themselves. In total, twenty essays and letters in the Lady’s Museum, some with the same signature, engage in a debate about what should be expected of a woman’s mind. Of these essays, which include a total of fifteen voices, ten are written by women, four offer no explicit authorial gender, and a further one seems gender neutral, but later is addressed as a man by a female correspondent who disagrees with the writer’s assumptions. Invoking a male author adds to the interest that the debate encourages. Another important feature is that five of the writers, Maria (no. 4), Anoeta (no. 8), Parthenissa (no. 9), Grace Pythoness (no. 10) and an anonymous final woman writer (no. 11) are drolly satirical. The other ten writers express their points in a mostly serious tone. This variation in tone satisfies the magazine’s goal of being thoughtful, but not too sober as to repel readers. It also reinforces the idea, fictional or not, that Lennox is engaging a willing and diverse public. The Trifler, with her mysterious identity and playfulness, initiates this clever tension between sincerity and humour. She acknowledges that she has given herself a moniker that is opposite to her persona. That is, her purpose in writing is to discourage trifling behaviour in women and to encourage engagement with intellectual ideas. This eidolon is trifling with readers’ expectations about who she is and upon what her authority rests. This game is initiated by the title page, which clearly states that this periodical was written by ‘The Author of the Female Quixote’, which had been Lennox’s brand for the previous eight years. Advertisements also give her credit, including capitalising all the letters of her name – ‘By Mrs. CHARLOTTE LENNOX’ – in nearly the same size font as the periodical’s large title. Thus, Lennox’s hand in this ‘course in female education’ is incontrovertible. Yet, the now-seasoned 31-year-old Lennox does not allow her authorship to play centre stage. Instead, she eclipses herself behind the Trifler to distance herself from the activism of her eidolon. Based on the title page and advertisements, the ‘I’ she begins with in her preface could be read as Lennox herself. However, she lowers expectations by explaining that she ‘does not set out with great promises to the public of the wit, humour, and morality, which this pamphlet is to contain, so I expect no reproaches to fall on me, if I should happen to fail in any, or all of these articles’ (1.1: 1). This disclaimer, on face value, attempts to relieve Lennox of authorial responsibility. Yet she reverses her strategy with the next sentence which declares her strong sense of duty:

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 361

17/11/17 5:02 PM

362

susan carlile

‘I will always be as witty as I can, as humorous as I can, as moral as I can, and upon the whole as entertaining as I can.’ With the next sentence, though, she introduces the Trifler: ‘However, as I have but too much reason to distrust my own powers of pleasing, I shall usher in my pamphlet with the performance of a lady, who possibly would never have suffered it to appear in print, if this opportunity had not offered’ (1.1: 1). Lennox’s fictional public persona is a modest, shy, and reticent ‘young writer’ who would not have dared to publish without Lennox’s prompting. Lennox then uses this figure, who supposedly possesses conventional female qualities, to engage her audience, and she notes that only if this young writer is ‘[met] with encouragement’ will she ‘be prevailed upon . . . to continue’ (1: 1). This approach prompted her readers to sense female agency and potentially send in their own writings. That is, Lennox, through her eidolon, encourages female writing talent with her magazine. Lennox’s readers, or the fictional readers that Lennox creates, recognise this strategy immediately and are determined to find out if Lennox is the actual author of the Trifler essays that begin each issue. However, given that this convoluted prefatory explanation was designed to be elusive, the identity of the Trifler is not straightforward. The first reader whose letter is published in a Trifler essay is written under the pen name of Penelope Spindle. Opening the third number, Spindle straightforwardly addresses the natural inclination of a reader to try to guess the personality of the author she is reading. Pointing out that the Trifler has forced her readers to conjecture about who she is, she asserts and goads: ‘It is impossible in reading a book not to form some image of the writer. You have told us little about yourself’ (1.3: 163). The first instance in which a reader declares her belief that the Trifler is in fact Lennox is in the fourth issue, in which Perdita in ‘To the Author of the Lady’s Museum’ declares: The gaiety with which you set out in your first paper, and the agreeable manner in which you acknowledge your fondness for admiration, persuaded several of your readers, that the character under which you appeared was not assumed, but a real one: however, I am much mistaken if the Trifler is not written by the same moral pen that has given us so beautiful a picture of female virtue, in the history of Henrietta. (1.4: 244) Perdita emphasises this belief that Lennox is the Trifler in her second letter when, instead of beginning ‘To the Author of the Lady’s Museum’ as all prior letters have done, her letter boldly begins, ‘To the Author of the Trifler’ (I.5: 323). She has settled it in her own mind. Since five years earlier Lennox had publicly denied her authorship of the Old Maid, her inclusion of Perdita’s claim is confirmation of Lennox’s authorship of the Trifler.16 Another correspondent, Parthenissa, indulges a common impulse, to know not just the purpose of a text, but also of its author. She begins her letter by undermining the Trifler’s practices, explaining that the emphasis on a trifling nature is simply a ruse to draw readers in: I cannot help suspecting that you artfully mean to cajole your fair readers into sense and seriousness, and that you only bait your periodical labours with a Trifler merely to captivate our attention, while you mean nothing less than our acquaintance with all useful and polite literature. (2.9: 641)

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 362

17/11/17 5:02 PM

eidolon as activist in lennox’s LADY’S MUSEUM

363

Parthenissa declares what seems to be Lennox’s goal with her magazine: to acquaint all women with not just some reading material, but ‘all useful and polite literature’, and to coax them into ‘sense and seriousness’ (2.9: 641). The readers Spindle, Perdita, and Parthenissa are determined to reveal Lennox as not just the editor, but as the one who wanted to promote an affection, or even a devotion, to learning that would improve the lives of all women. In ‘Trifler I’ we see a thoroughly literary persona who first establishes the irony of using the word ‘trifler’, when in fact she ‘has strong passion for intellectual pleasures’ that are ‘too laudable to be restrained’ (1.1: 4). Through this move, which acknowledges a love of fashion but also a love of study, this eighteen-year-old single woman asserts that we admire ‘all human excellence, as well as all human happiness’ . . . ‘in proportion as we excel others’ (1.1: 3). She declares herself ‘ambitious’. However, she qualifies her ambition. Tradition would assume that if she is ‘ambitious of pleasing’ she must be a ‘coquet’ (1.1: 3). But she refutes this claim by saying that she prefers to devote her attention to creative intellectual achievement (the laurel) rather than to love and marriage (the myrtle). In spite of her anti-intellectual mother, she is ambitious to study books and to learn substantial content. Readers could assume that she might want to study ‘An Essay on the Original Inhabitants of Great Britain’, or any of the other textbook-style pieces yet to come. This first essay sets the stage for an ongoing conversation about women’s intellectual ambition by linking women’s passion for learning with language that describes her body and its natural ability. That is, Lennox uses ‘the eyes’ as a synonym for a young woman’s thinking inner life, which is often described as ‘seeing’, and which is highly regulated by parents and society at large. The Trifler begins by recounting her own experience when she is told to ‘cast her eyes’ on her books. She thinks the old gentleman who says this is well-intentioned, but offers a condescendingly limiting piece of advice. She intends not merely to observe, but also to write about her observations. The struggle that a ‘seeing’ woman faces appears in an even more intimate scene that also employs the eyes-as-windows-to-the-mind trope. The Trifler’s mother has a ‘slight disorder in her eyes’ (1.1: 5), and it leads her to heap ‘ineffable scorn’ upon women who are ‘book-learned’ (italics in original) (1.1: 5). The Trifler illustrates with a story in which the daughter tries to explain to her mother how hurt she feels that her mother prefers her sister to her. She shows her mother an Aesop’s fable with a plot that illustrates this problem. However, her mother only notices that the mother in the story is portrayed as an ape and declares to everyone who visits that her daughter is morally corrupt: ‘a girl who at nine years old could be so wicked, as to compare her mother to an ape, would never come to good’ (1.1: 7). This painful mother-daughter relationship is used as the basis for the Trifler’s distress. Rather than being ‘an excellent economist’ like her mother (1.1: 5), the Trifler’s studies made her ‘not used to be contradicted in an argument’ (1.1: 4). She quotes Matthew Prior’s ‘Disputing with a Lady, Who Left me in the Argument.’ (1704): ‘If seldom your opinions err; / Your eyes are always in the right’ (1.1: 4).17 Prior’s poem ends with the lover fleeing from the woman he disagreed with. Invoking the optical metaphor, and now more clearly reflecting the mind, the Trifler acknowledges that she is opinionated. She also notes: ‘we always triumph in a dispute, though I cannot help allowing, that we often triumph without victory’ (1.1: 4). What victory actually means for a woman is the subject of all future Trifler essays and letters ‘To the Author’. These essays and letters form a debate about the

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 363

17/11/17 5:02 PM

364

susan carlile

benefits and drawbacks of intellectual ambition and thus ask the questions, ‘Does it produce the best life for women?’ and ‘Does more substantial learning for women produce a better society?’ ‘Trifler II’ takes up the theme of a woman’s mind with another reference to her body. Here, in the spirit of Lennox’s protagonist Arabella in The Female Quixote, the clever and feisty Trifler describes her longing for an earlier age (or even Spain at this very moment) when/where women saw/see their own value, rather than accept what society sees in them. She begins by acknowledging her own inclination to love power, which, she admits, is ‘not the least prevailing [passion] of mine’ (1.2: 81). Women today ‘in this degenerate age’ (1.2: 81) care more about ‘a party at whist, or a match at Newmarket’ (1.2: 82) rather than improving their minds or having influence. This mid-century English woman who is thought to be more independent than a Spanish woman, in fact, has no authority since her suitor ‘loves her for the superficial qualities he admires in himself’ (1.2: 84). The Trifler ends this essay with a follow up reference to Prior’s poem from ‘Trifler I’, suggesting that victory for a woman will arrive when she has courage to be far more than simply a ‘fine picture’ who is only interested in improving her ‘personal charms’ (1.2: 82). ‘Trifler V’ extends the theme of well-functioning eyes with an essay that associates light with open and thoughtful intellects. The essay critiques those women whose minds ‘are always dark; and ignorance, like a thick cloud, wraps them up in impenetrable gloom’ (1.5: 321). The Trifler laments that these women only use their eyes to ‘sparkle and languish’ and believe that reading will ‘spoil their lustre’. Reading would ‘incroach upon their precious time which is all devoted to pleasure’. In fact, reading is not perceived by these women to offer them any benefit, since it cannot ‘teach [them] how to improve [their] complexion’ or ‘repair the ravages made by time in [their] face’. They have not experienced what it is like to ‘think seriously for a single moment’ (1.5: 322). In fact, women who do not exercise their learning and reason are in great danger in the world outside their own home. The Trifler invokes an Arab proverb that the only recourse for women who do not exercise their minds is to ‘Shut the windows that the house may be light.’18 The point here is that these women’s ‘eyes are too weak to bear the steady ray of reason’ (1.5: 321).

Readers Write Back As we see, the Trifler is interested in spurring women’s intellectual engagement. Her message in ‘Trifler I’ is enacted through the rest of her periodical when she yields her own space to her readers’ letters and content. After these three essays, the Trifler does not include another of her own. Instead, readers’ letters appear both at the opening of each number under the heading ‘The Trifler’ and in each of the numbers between instalments with the heading ‘To the Author’. By beginning many of her issues with readers’ letters and by also including them within each issue Lennox was repurposing the notion of a woman’s usefulness and presenting readers who are engaged in the radical notion that women could take their own minds more seriously. Most correspondents acknowledged the Trifler’s subversive agenda. Some were supportive, and others were more hesitant, even critical. However, what is most interesting is how they challenged conventional assumptions about female identity in both direct and satiric tones. The individual contributors’ competing registers illustrate the tensions

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 364

17/11/17 5:02 PM

eidolon as activist in lennox’s LADY’S MUSEUM

365

they experienced between themselves. Their philosophical jousting thus begins the rest of the numbers and is, notably, interspersed between content designed for women’s study and critical dialogue. Penelope Spindle, whose seriousness throughout her letter is a moving target, is the first contributor to engage in this debate when her letter appears at the beginning of the third number. She is less concerned about the true identify of the Trifler than she is to contend that the Trifler is not qualified and is too simple-minded to offer useful material for young women. Spindle invokes the first journalistic persona, Richard Steele’s Sir Isaac Bickerstaff’s joke (Tatler 1709–11), in the first line of her letter, alluding to the tradition of the eidolon to assume an influential identity for herself. She explains that Bickerstaff ‘endeavoured to secure a kind of reception by deducing his genealogy, and proving his relation to the whole family of the Staffs’. Joining in on this well-worn eidolon strategy she demands proof of the Trifler’s lineage and adds a classical literary layer to the witticism: If you can either by proximity of blood, or similitude of mind, shew your alliance to the numerous and powerful generation of Triflers, you may bet any other race of mortals at defiance; for very little is to be feared from any power against which the Triflers shall form a combination. (1.3: 161) Sharing the name of Penelope from the Odyssey, Odysseus’s wife who weaves all day and each night unravels her work, Spindle also believes herself entitled to be classed as a Trifler. In making this claim, she raises the question, ‘Who deserves to be allowed to take on the authority of a writer, who tells and retells?’ In fact, this kind of authority is reserved for only one sex: woman. Her ‘spinning’ involves an explanation (which would have seemed fantastical to most of her readers) that it is the ‘peculiar practice of our family to count their pedigree on the female side’. Having ‘the advantage of a strong memory, diligently stored with repeated narratives’, Spindle boasts that she can rehearse the entire family line, and each of these matrilineal ancestors have ‘engaged the elegant and the gay for two centuries and a half’ (1.3: 162). In so doing, Spindle emulates the Tatler’s Bickerstaff who ‘became the first of the many eighteenth-century periodical personae who was to take on a reforming role for society as a whole’ (Wild 1998: 22). Even Spindle’s jokey tone contributes to the cultural mission of Lennox’s Trifler, which is determined to alter standards to incorporate female intellectual ambition. However, Spindle wonders if the Lady’s Museum Trifler is too idealistic – even too high-minded – and cannot understand or doesn’t agree that ‘to love and to be loved is a serious business’ (1.3: 164). Spindle’s concerns about this Trifler’s credentials extends to a critique of the latter’s ability to help women pragmatically. She imagines that the Trifler, ‘a votaress of studious tranquility’ (1.3: 164), lacks ‘the initiation of the boarding-school, or the completion of the ball-room’ (1.3: 162) and is instead a thirty-year-old ‘rural virgin’ who spends her time in ‘reading and needle-work among groves and brooks’ (1.3: 163). This naïvety, she says, means that the Trifler doesn’t understand the very real dilemma of most women: ‘love and courtship’ should not be subjects for a person who calls themselves merely a ‘trifler’. ‘If love be a Trifle, what can we call serious? The truth is almost all other female employments are the sports of idleness; and that they seldom cease to trifle till they begin to love’ (1.3: 163). Love, Spindle believes, is not a subject to be treated so lightly, since ‘those operations’ are the

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 365

17/11/17 5:02 PM

366

susan carlile

ones that ‘unite us forever to tyrants or to friends, to savages or to sages’. As these are the very manoeuvres that ‘terminate the flighty wit, or the airy flutterer’ in a woman and make them into wives, economists, mothers, and grandmothers, Spindle provides a voice for doubting readers and those who have not understood that the Trifler’s name is meant to invoke an opposite intention by listing expected objections against giving too much attention to book learning. Like Spindle, Agnes Woodbine is resolute that women should take their minds seriously. However, rather than love, Woodbine believes that young women should have a much fuller education. She also makes comparisons to Bickerstaff, but she compliments the Trifler on having just as much forthrightness and jocularity as Steele’s eidolon (1.4: 289). She also notes that Steele’s and Lennox’s eidolons share the practice of publishing their readers’ letters. Her letter ‘To the Author of the Lady’s Museum’ in the same issue connects to Spindle’s in participating in the dialogic nature of these exchanges. Agnes writes to the Lady’s Museum because another correspondent, ‘W.M.’, infuriated her. She refutes ‘W.M.’, whom she declares is a man – despite a lack of evidence in the letter itself – on the subject of what young women should study. ‘W.M.’’s letter appears just after Spindle’s ‘Trifler III’ letter with the title ‘To the Author of the Lady’s Museum’. In it, ‘W.M.’ acknowledges that the Lady’s Museum exists not only to promote morality but also ‘literary improvement’ (1.3: 182). However, he insists that women’s learning will only result in pride and therefore the whole enterprise of female education is at fault because women, and most dangerously young women, think the grandeur associated with learning and happiness come as a package. Female education is in fact just what Agnes Woodbine, a noblewoman who calls herself an ‘old maid’, is interested in. She argues that W.M. only states the obvious by ‘display[ing] the wide difference there is between riches, power, and titles, and heartfelt satisfaction’ (1.4: 290). She acknowledges that she has benefited greatly from her good fortune, that is, being born of a class that allowed her a good education. However, she believes great ladies’ education is now severely lacking: ‘It has been my misfortune to see quite the reverse of what that gentleman complains of; not insignificant girls taught too much, but great ladies taught too little’ (1.4: 290). Instead of dealing in stereotypes as W.M. does, Woodbine offers anecdotes about how her cousin, the Countess of— severely neglected her own daughters’ education. Agnes is specific about what young women should be taught. In a jab at what the periodical genre has previously had on offer, she notes what women would not learn if they only read newspapers and instead insists they should read in ‘their own language and other languages in proper books . . . stories of all ages and countries’. This intellectually more rigorous education is the means to ‘[i]ntroducing [great ladies] properly into the world’, gives them dignity, and imparts ‘universal benevolence to all . . . fellow creatures’ (1.4: 291, 293). In fact, in making this claim, she is responding to not only male readers, as represented in W.M., but also to the critiques of readers like Penelope Spindle. The problem is not women’s access to learning or the false learning they have in the absence of the kind of proper education Agnes advocates but that women should be able to feel dignity and not defensiveness as a result of their newly acquired knowledge. Their more in-depth learning will produce greater understanding among all people. Maria, another letter writer who enters this debate in Lennox’s Trifler papers, is also an advocate of Lennox’s project to enable women to take their own minds more seriously. Yet she humorously declares, ‘there is nothing serious but cards’ (1.4: 241).

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 366

17/11/17 5:02 PM

eidolon as activist in lennox’s LADY’S MUSEUM

367

Her contribution suggests that women should have a choice: ‘trifling’ or something ‘solid and rational’. In contrast to Woodbine she declares learning simply insufferable and says she would prefer that the Trifler employ ‘the strength of [her] reasoning’ to write ‘dissertations on whist’, ‘a panegyric on loo’, and about ‘the mazes of quadril’ and the ‘daring flights of brag’ (1.4: 243). In short, she asserts feminist values of choice, but models a belief and behaviour that the Lady’s Museum ultimately mocks. Another satirical letter, written by Anoeta, continues the debate about the content of a woman’s education and the appropriateness of making it more intellectually rigorous. Anoeta addresses the ‘scope and design of [women’s] being’ in an extremely scornful tone and criticises those few women who maintain the ‘exploded nonsense’ of valuing reason, courage, and honesty in women (2.8: 562). The satire here is clear in her critique of the opinionated Miranda, the ‘sworn enemy of all triflers’ (2.8: 566). Thankfully, according to Anoeta, there are only a small percentage of women like Miranda who have ‘extraordinary’ (2.8: 567) notions and a genius that is expanded by the kind of virtue that rejects idleness. In casting off inertia, Miranda ‘pretends to have opinions of her own’ (2.8: 566), and she ‘has got such a way of colouring things, and of recommending her notions’ (2.8: 567) to make her a ‘dangerous enemy’ (2.8: 568) to the majority of women who aim to be ‘delightfully idle’ (2.8: 562). Anoeta, who exalts ‘the dismal vacuity (2.8: 565) of most women’s minds, is humorously pragmatic in noting that ‘the annals of all ages are in our favour; for at what place or period could’ women like Miranda’s ‘nature and reason prevail over’ all other women’s ‘folly and vanity’ (2.8: 568). And on the subject of happiness: ‘we have fixed [the] basis [of virtue] in the extinction of all reasonable ideas, and, to enjoy life the more perfectly, have fairly consented to lose sight of all the ends of living’ (2.8: 565). Anoeta drolly presents the problem for society of not encouraging women to study more interesting content. Through such satirical letter writers, Lennox shows the folly behind many of the claims – especially those made by women themselves – about why women should not pursue learning for the pleasure it affords or for its empowering qualities. Parthenissa, in ‘Trifler IX’, continues the satirical vein and argues for the ‘pernicious consequences’ (2.9: 641) of what she calls Lennox’s ‘Platonic system’ (2.9: 644), which might satisfy in an abstract and transcendent way, but will not materially suffice and is thus undesirable. Parthenissa, with a name that references Boyle’s 1655 heroic-historical romance, makes a case for why being an enlightened woman is bad. She begins by accusing the Trifler: ‘you artfully mean to cajole your fair readers into sense and seriousness’ by baiting them with the provocative Trifler eidolon, ‘like teaching children their letters by gingerbread alphabets’ (2.9: 641). But here’s the problem: ‘if we poor women furnished our minds with moral and historical truth, and took pains to acquire the true principles of taste and criticism, we should be very apt upon this supposition to discern the deficiencies of our admirers’ and ‘grow quickly disgusted at each other, and so risk our establishments for the sake of accomplishments no longer respected’ (2.9: 642). She asks for even one example of a woman who is ‘advantageously settled in life’, but whose ‘metallic charms were wanting’ (2.9: 642). For Parthenissa, being bedazzling and charismatic were requisite to obtaining a comfortable life, and thus knowing too much can hurt more than help: ‘We have already more light in our minds than is friendly to our pursuits and desires’ (2.9: 643). She invokes ‘our whole family’ to imply that all French romances have ‘a mortal antipathy to every thing that is severe and formal’ (2.9: 643). ‘We are utter strangers to’

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 367

17/11/17 5:02 PM

368

susan carlile

‘that method and attention’ which she has been told is ‘very necessary to obtain the proper fruit of study and application’ (2.9: 643). She believes that she only needs two books: ‘a spelling dictionary’ and ‘Grey’s Love Letters’ and that it is possible to learn Italian in nineteen hours, French in a fortnight, and history in sixteen hours (2.9: 644). You can say, no doubt, many plausible things in recommendation of your Platonic system, such as, that you do not purpose to convert ladies into philosophers and mathematicians, but only to qualify them for rational conversation; that you can’t apprehend any danger that ladies may be more remiss in the proper discharge of all duties, merely because they understand better the obligations they lie under to the performance of them: that ignorance of such matters as are necessary to be known, is not only highly contemptible but even criminal. Whatever Lennox’s belief, Parthenissa does not worry. She is fully confident that Lennox’s ‘Platonic system’ will be ‘infallibly drowned amidst the noise and dissipation of public life’ (2.9: 644). Although for twenty-first-century readers this may seem a bleak collection of letters that offers little hope for a more enlightened future for women, through these debates Lennox is meeting her audience where they are and in turn challenging rigidly held beliefs about what society should consider valued ‘accomplishment’ in women. Lennox’s magazine presents the various beliefs about the purposes of women’s education: to find love and/or make a good marriage, to become morally upright, to be able to choose better for oneself, or to appear gracious in public. Lennox suggests that these are all goals for the benefit of men in power, but that perhaps personal pleasure, the joy of learning, and society as a whole should also be added to the equation. Satire makes these conversations, which are presented as short-sighted and selfish, not only palatable, but possible.

Content Designed for the Ambitious If one were to read the essays by Maria, Anoeta, and Parthenissa in isolation, hope for a future in which women’s minds could be more expansively challenged might seem futile. However, it becomes especially clear that these essays are exaggerations when they are read in tandem with the rest of the Trifler essays, the ‘To the Author’ letters, and the rest of the periodical as a whole. The debates that have been set up to consider just what is most beneficial for women to learn are in fact calling into question what ‘beneficial’ actually looks like. What kinds of benefits could society enjoy and what kind of changes would it need to make to genuinely appreciate them? The combination of straight and satirical, paired with the male and female, helps parse nuances in what bad female pride versus good female pride might look like. Who are the more ‘dangerous’ women, those who ‘succumb to folly and impertinence’ (1.5: 311) or those who embrace learning? Extended narratives in the Lady’s Museum that detail individual female stories serve to answer questions about what happens when women want to be admired for the wrong things and reject their ability to use reason. What is the result when they accept that their bodies are their best commodities, rather than their minds? Perdita, who wishes she could write as well as the Trifler, offers the most comprehensive

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 368

17/11/17 5:02 PM

eidolon as activist in lennox’s LADY’S MUSEUM

369

story about the dangers of these beliefs. Her candidly expressed and sad story, which is punctuated by her name, which means to be lost or ruined in Italian, illustrates how ‘the solid instructions’ (1.5: 323) from her father did not help her discern when someone who called herself her friend was so determined to be admired for her looks that she stole Perdita’s husband. Perdita is satisfied that at last her writing resulted in many sympathetic responses from readers of the Lady’s Museum who agreed that this ‘friend’ was to be abhorred and that ambitions to be admired for one’s beauty should be scorned. Another narrative that illustrates the problem of not thinking critically is a short letter written ‘To the Author’ by Grace Pythoness. Her amusing name sets the stage for this satiric essay. Pythoness is a woman believed to be possessed by a soothsaying spirit, like the pagan priestess of Apollo at Delphi. Giving her the first name Grace comically invokes a need to sympathise with this 64 year-old woman who laments a past in which most people believed in superstition. Humorously, she is asking the all-reasonable Trifler (perhaps assuming that she is what her name suggests) to help her teach her granddaughters to take heed of ‘celestial warnings’ (2.10: 722) and to ‘stand in awe of spirits, hobgoblins, fairies, death-watches, and Will I’the wisp’ (723). Grace Pythoness is clearly the butt of Lennox’s joke and most likely fabricated, but she illustrates that if women do not learn serious content and use reason, they will try to pass down silly superstition to the next generation. Such women – real or not – represent the result of women not having enough useful learning that will teach them to reason well. The Lady’s Museum as a whole, through the content that populates each issue is dedicated to offering women expanded learning, through instalments focused on subjects such as ‘Of the Universe Considered Under a General View’, ‘The Manners and Customs of the Inhabitants of Amboyna’, ‘An Essay on the Original Inhabitants of Great Britain’, and ‘Of the Metamorphosis of Animals, and the Several Changes Observable in Animal Life’. Biographies not only of men’s, but of women’s, lives (including Joan of Arc, Boudicca and Rowena) were also an important feature of the magazine. Taken together they could be considered as part of a course in not only literary criticism, but also psychology. This ambitious project taught readers through diverse educational content and employed the Trifler and her readers to educate by offering a range of perspectives. In addition to the letters, the readers also seem to have sent in content that they believed others like themselves would be interested in learning about. The first appearance of such submitted material was published in the fifth number and came from Offaria Celina, who calls herself Lennox’s ‘constant reader’ and compliments the editor on her ‘useful and entertaining Museum’19 (1.5: 344). However, she has one complaint: that the magazine lacked diversity among the published letters, for, ‘You have yet admitted no foreigners but those of France’ (344). Offaria is Florentine born, but she has lived in England for a long time and introduces (and might have even translated this version of) a biography of Bianca Capello. Capello was mistress to Archduke Francesco de Medici and an extremely clever woman with remarkable spirit, courage, and mental powers who was thus accused of vanity and ambition (Steegman 1913: viii–xi). Offaria calls her story ‘a piece of history, perhaps as extraordinary and exemplary as can be found in those of any nation’ and notes that it ‘gives [readers] some insight into the characters and manners of [sixteenth-century] Italians’ (1.5: 344). Including Bianca Capello’s story, framed by Offaria’s urging readers to learn about other ways of living outside of

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 369

17/11/17 5:02 PM

370

susan carlile

England and France, highlights, as Sagal’s essay in this collection also suggests, the need for exceptional female models who do not comply by the norms that have been established for and accepted by English women. This Italian reader’s suggested educational material for English readers is seamlessly folded into Lennox’s educational project. Intellectual ambition should include models of female living free from English constraints. ‘The History of the Dutchess of Beaufort’, ‘An Account of the Vestal Virgins’, ‘The Tryal of the Maid of Orleans’, ‘The History of Princess Padmani’, and ‘The Tale of Geneura’ also hold up non-English female models of strength, intellect, and reason. As we have seen in the example of her inclusion of ‘W.M.’s letter, Lennox recognises that no study of women’s minds is useful without a consideration of the social position, mental capacity, and conscience of men. Curiously, four contributions by ‘A.B.’, ‘C.D.’, ‘E.F.’, and ‘J.F.’ do not indicate the gender of their authors, yet they share a thematic interest in the social and cultural positions of men – specifically those of powerful males. ‘A.B.’ writes an extensive, two-part report that discusses the justice of Laurence Shirley, fourth Earl Ferrers’s execution (a hanging for the murder of his wife’s long-time servant), wearing his wedding clothes. This author thought his choice of attire symbolic of his ‘depraved imagination’ (1.4: 270) since it was assumed these clothes marked his belief that his wedding began his downfall. In fact, it was well known that Ferrers had been so cruel that his wife had been able to secure a very rare legal separation. Most remarkable to ‘A.B.’ was how his fate proved the equality of the law, since an evil nobleman could share the same destiny as a common criminal. These reflections on equal treatment across social classes can be seen as serving the larger magazine’s project of questioning social codes among the sexes as well. By offering male biography as a form of female education in ethics, the Lady’s Museum offers reflections on good male behaviour set next to good female behaviour. As part of the series of alphabetical pseudonyms, ‘C.D.’ is also interested in the male psyche, submitting a misunderstood passage in Macbeth the writer aims to ‘occasion a different manner of reading and acting’ the play. ‘C.D.’ expresses a hopes that by exposing about whom McDuff said ‘He has no children’ (2.6: 410) (i.e., not about Macbeth, but about his consoler, Malcolm), the reader of Macbeth will understand that this is a moment of pure pain and loneliness at the moment McDuff learns of his son’s massacre.20 Even McDuff’s close friend Malcolm does not understand his agony. McDuff, ‘C.D.’ suggests, is a ‘reflection of a wise considerate man’ (2.6: 412). Following this theme of analysing male morality, ‘E.F.’ sent in to the Lady’s Museum a study of the powerful male figure, Castruccio Castracani. ‘E.F.’ presents a standard telling, reminiscent of Edward Dacres’s 1640 translation, but deviates in the last part of the narrative (starting at 2.7: 489), turning to a more novelistic approach, which begins, ‘He was much heated and fatigued by the long and laborious combat . . . caught a cold, and . . . a fever . . . beyond the limits of medicinal power’ (2.7: 489). ‘E.F.’s poetic indictment includes descriptions of an extremely cruel human being: No comments are requisite to illustrate the life of such a man: his actions are a continual comment upon themselves: they represent him an active, bloody, remorseless soldier; not unsusceptible to the calls of gratitude and friendship, but vindictive to a degree that makes human nature almost tremble at his name. (2.7: 490)

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 370

17/11/17 5:02 PM

eidolon as activist in lennox’s LADY’S MUSEUM

371

Rather than focus on Castracani’s repentance and final message of peace that marks the 1640 conclusion, ‘E.F.’ wants readers to consider an example of a ‘remorseless’ person whose story strikes fear in the reader (2.7: 490).21 These men: the bad, the good, and the complicated, are all offered to Lady’s Museum readers as important lives for them to study. The letter that concludes the last number of the Lady’s Museum is perhaps the most telling of all the essays and letters written by and to the Trifler, as it offers a form of female education in the value of gender equality. The letter that begins issue eleven, and thus titled as a Trifler essay, is written by ‘Unknown’. She identifies herself as female and is the second author to note that she is writing ‘To the Author of the Trifler’ and not ‘To the Author of the Lady’s Museum’. What is most interesting is how she presents material to Lady’s Museum readers and the material itself. Her letter is short and could at first be read as sincere. However, the entry she has sent reveals both the reality of a woman’s submissive position under her brother in a family, as well as her stealth ability to communicate an important message about the need for female learning. ‘Unknown’ presents her brother, ‘A.M.’, as a ‘great scholar’ of Greek who is too humble to reveal his own identity. He has translated Xenophon’s ‘Dialogue Between Socrates and Aristarchus’22 so that ‘the trifling part of your readers’ – which the pompous sounding ‘A.M.’ ‘supposes to be by far the greater number [of the Lady’s Museum’s readers] may learn that there were trifling, that is idle people, in the time of Socrates’ (2.11: 793). His hope is that these readers ‘will be corrected by the wise admonitions of the great divine’ (793). ‘A.M.’ also asks his sister ‘Unknown’ to communicate that the Trifler ‘be particularly careful that no mistakes are made in the spelling and point’ (2.11: 794). And after she has closed the letter, her brother has insisted on a postscript: ‘My brother says Socrates was not a divine, but a philosopher’ (2.11: 794). This seems to have come up in their conversation after the letter had been finished, but it also presents a clear acknowledgement of a difference of opinion about Socrates’ role and this brother’s unquestionable authority over his sister. This would all seem a straightforward letter to introduce this dialogue, except that the translated discussion reveals far more than that there were idle people in the time of Socrates. Unknown’s brother seems to be a literal thinker, whereas what is presented is far more profound, even revolutionary. In this dialogue Aristarchus presents his problem to Socrates. He is responsible for ‘not less than fourteen gentlewomen’ refugees who ‘on account of the war a great multitude have forsaken the open country, and fled into Piraeum’ (2.11: 795). These ‘helpless sisters, nieces, and cousins’ need to be cared for, but none of the usual resources from landed estates, renting houses, the sale of furniture, slaves, or even borrowing are available (795). Aristarchus believes he is in an impossible situation and they will perish. Socrates advises that he is forgetting that the women themselves are a tremendous resource. Aristarchus cannot imagine putting women to work, since baking bread and making clothes is the work of ‘handicraftsmen’ (796). Socrates reprimands him with a series of questions. Does Aristarchus think that gentlewomen ‘have nothing to do but to eat and sleep?’ Does he think they cannot be happy if they both know and practise the necessary employments of life? Or do you apprehend sloth and idleness to be more conducive towards a man’s learning what he ought to understand, or remembering what he has learned, or to his health and strength

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 371

17/11/17 5:02 PM

372

susan carlile

of body, or, in fine, toward his attaining or preserving the requisites of life? while industry and care are worth nothing. (797) He proceeds to argue for the worth of women’s minds and their labour: ‘for which makes men the most virtuous – living in idleness, or being engaged in useful business? (798). In fact, he proclaims: ‘it is my opinion, that neither you love them, nor they you’. Socrates explains that the women feel they are a burden to Aristarchus, and he has ‘become weary of them’ (798). As a result ‘kindred and affection fades away’ (798). And just when Aristarchus might have suggested that it was somehow disreputable to have gentlewomen performing such menial tasks, Socrates counters: If any thing scandalous was proposed to be done, death is rather to be chosen. But now these women know to perform what is very laudable, very becoming their sex—and whatever we know how to do, that we do with the greatest facility and pleasure. Wherefore make no hesitation to press them to what will be of service to yourself and them; and it is my opinion they will with pleasure agree to the proposal. (798–9) This proposal worked beautifully. The women worked hard, and ‘instead of sour glances they looked with chearfulness on each other’ (799). They also had a harmonious relationship with Aristarchus, even joking with him. ‘They now accuse me as the only person that eats idle bread in the house’ (799). A fable ends the dialogue, which tells of the interdependence between the lamb who provides wool and the dog who provides their protection. This dialogue, which is a centrepiece of the last issue of the Lady’s Museum, not only illustrates a necessary bond between men and women, but it also advocates the value of women in society. Only when men allow women to use all their talents will the society thrive and female and male partners live in harmony. ‘Unknown’, who read the Lady’s Museum and now is acting on its behalf, illustrates what the Lady’s Museum is advocating for. Through her own learning, she had become wise enough to see the value in stories from the past that appreciated the value of women. Her own mental acuity helped her to see what her brother could not. He believed women were ‘mere triflers’, while his sister asserted herself by submitting a fable that featured the wisdom of the revered Socrates. By choosing it to conclude the Lady’s Museum project, Lennox illustrates the agency that women can have – in spite of controlling family members – when they open their eyes and educate themselves. Whether ‘Unknown’ and these other writers were Lennox herself, a fictional construction of characters written by Lennox, or genuine letters submitted by real people, a female conversation in print has been concentrated in the Lady’s Museum among texts designed to expand the intellect. What we see from the content of the Trifler essays and correspondents often unshackled from invisibility is a periodical that allows its female authors more freedom to question the status quo and let in the light of new ideas. As ‘champions of the fair sex’, Lennox’s wish in her letter to Caroline Stanhope, they would show how men ‘have no advantage of us but what they derive from prejudice’. Like the British Museum, Lennox’s periodical set out not only to woo ‘the studious and the curious’, but also to challenge them to action. Through anonymity and pseudonymity, and through disparate entries, ideas that might have been too radical from female pens are allowed a public viewing. Like

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 372

17/11/17 5:02 PM

eidolon as activist in lennox’s LADY’S MUSEUM

373

Xenophon’s conversation, these essays and letters work in tandem to insist on the question: ‘How will society justly treat a woman’s mind? Not only what is the right thing to do, but what is the most efficacious?’ By employing the fractured-whole of the periodical, Lennox’s Lady’s Museum is not only able to offer intellectual content for women whose eyes are eager ‘to bear the steady ray of reason’, it also facilitated an open dialogue about the value of more ambitious learning for women, a conversation in which women are prepared to participate (1.5: 321). Lennox must have been gratified to see some subsequent magazines, like the long-running Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770–1832), successfully take up the mantle and encourage this vibrant discussion, which continued well into the nineteenth century as well as today. I would like to thank Kathryn R. King for indispensible conversations about women’s periodicals that informed the nascent stages of this argument.

Notes 1. Poems on Several Occasions (1747); ‘On the Birth Day of her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales’ (Gentleman’s Magazine 20 (Nov 1750): 518–19); The Life of Harriot Stuart (1751); The Female Quixote (1752); Shakespear Illustrated (1753–4); Memoirs of Maximilian de Bethune, Duke of Sully (French translation, 1756); Memoirs of the Countess of Berci (French translation, 1756); The History of the Count de Comminge (French translation, 1756); Memoirs for the History of Madame de Maintenon of the Last Age (French translation, 1757); Philander (1758); Henrietta (1758); The Greek Theatre of Father Brumoy (French translation, 1759). 2. At least fourteen other new periodicals began between the end of 1759 and the beginning of the 1760s, the greatest period yet in English history for production of new periodicals. Oliver Goldsmith’s biographer condescendingly proclaims, ‘The booksellers were never more active than at the close of 1759 . . . Every week had its spawn of periodical publications; feeble, but of desperate fecundity . . . Of specimens which a very few weeks, between the close of 1759 and the beginning of 1760, added to a multitude already wearing out their brief existence. They were: the Royal Magazine, or Gentleman’s Monthly Companion; the Impartial Review, or Literary Journal; the Weekly Magazine of Gentlemen and Ladies’ Polite Companion; the Ladies Magazine; the Public Magazine; the Imperial Magazine; the Royal Female Magazine; the Universal Review; the Lady’s Museum; the Musical Magazine; and the British Magazine, or Monthly Repository for Gentlemen and Ladies’ (quoted in Forster 1848, vol. 1: 185–6). The Young Misses Magazine and the Young Ladies Magazine edited by Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont are left out. The ‘Ladies Magazine’, referenced here, is the Lady’s Magazine; or, Polite Companion for the Fair Sex, which Goldsmith seems to have edited. 3. See studies by Powell (2012) and Italia (2005). 4. I adopt this category from Powell’s comprehensive 2012 study of eighteenth-century English periodicals (170). 5. Lennox shares this distinction with Tobias Smollett whose The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves appeared in his British Magazine two months before ‘The History of Harriot and Sophia’ first did (January 1760). Since Lennox was unlikely to know this fact, it is believed that she came up with the idea on her own (Schürer 33). 6. For example, see Shevelow (1989: 180–6) and Adburgham (1972: 117). 7. First advertisements appeared in the London Chronicle (19–21 Feb 1760: 178); Whitehall Evening Post (21–3 Feb 1760: 4); and Public Ledger (23 Feb 1760: 147).

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 373

17/11/17 5:02 PM

374

susan carlile

8. Lennox translated ‘Of the Studies Proper for Women’ from Chapter 2 of Villemert’s 1758 L’Ami des femmes ou La Morale du sexe. 9. Other instalments include: ‘The History of the Dutchess of Beaufort’, translated and adapted by Lennox; ‘An Ode’; ‘To Death. An Irregular Ode’; ‘On Reading a Poem’; ‘A Song, Philander’, set by Mr. Oswald; The History of the Count de Comminge, translated by Lennox; ‘An Account of the Vestal Virgins’; ‘The History of Bianca Capello’; ‘The Morning’; ‘The History of Princess Padmani’; ‘On Reading Hutchinson on the Passions’, by Lennox; ‘Shallum to Hilpa’; ‘The Tale of Geneura’, Ariosto’s fifth chapter in Orlando Furioso; ‘The Judgement of Paris. A Poem’, written by a friend; ‘The Life of Sir Anthony Vandyck’; ‘To Ismene Playing on a Lute’; ‘A Poetical Epistle’; and ‘A Dialogue between Socrates and Aristarchus’. The authorship and translation of many of these instalments is difficult to determine. 10. This letter was signed ‘C—L—’ and dated ‘Chelsea, September 2, 1759’. 11. See Shevelow (1982: 83) and Carlile (2018). 12. See especially Ramblers 42, 130, 133, 138, 170, 171, 191 (3: 227–31; 4: 325–31; 4: 340–5; 4: 364–9; 5: 135–9; 5: 140–5; 5: 233–8), as well as Idler 13 (2:42– 5). Idlers 98 and 100, which address the nuances of women’s education, were published in the first three months that the Lady’s Museum appeared (2: 300–2 and 305–8). Idler 94, published on 2 February 1760 – just a few weeks before the Lady’s Museum was advertised, observed that learning (no gender is mentioned) is ‘at once honored and neglected’ (2: 289–92). 13. Masters, Letter 18, ll. 4–13 of the first poem of this letter (77–8). Souls have no Sex, not Male, nor Female there, A manly Mind informs the well-taught Fair. While Fops have female Follies in Excess, Who nothing study, bu the Art of Dress: From Diff’rent Teaching, diff’rent Notions rise, Hence Women less, and Men appear more wise, But Erudition chang’d we soon should see, What stupid Things these Boaster then would be; Whilst Wisdom Science, ev’ry Art divine, In Women would with fullest Lustre shine. 14. Backscheider describes this poem as going ‘further in its defense of women’s share in the Enlightenment’ and ‘a brilliant defense of women’s pursuit of learning that has some of the spaciousness of mid-century poems such as Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes and many of the opinions propagated by end-of-century women such as Mary Wollstonecraft’ (2005: 71). 15. Hugh Kelly served as an apprentice to Lennox. Some have claimed that Hugh Kelly was a co-editor with Lennox; however, this fact has been discredited (Bataille 2000: 5) and Carlile (forthcoming). 16. ‘Mrs Lenox having been informed that she has been consider’d by the Town, as the Writer of the Old Maid, a Weekly Paper, publish’d by Mr. Millar; and being unwilling to gain, or lose Reputation undeservedly, thinks it proper to declare, in this publick Manner, that she neither has, nor will have, any Part in that Paper’ (London Evening Post 23 Dec 1755). 17. Prior’s poem was first published in John Dryden’s Poetical Miscellanies, The Fifth Part (1704: 607). 18. Lennox may have come across this phrase in John Howe’s 1774 Sermons on Several Occasions (31). He refers to the phrase as an Arab proverb. This phrase was taken up more widely in nineteenth-century English Puritan writings.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 374

17/11/17 5:02 PM

eidolon as activist in lennox’s LADY’S MUSEUM

375

19. Thomas Middleton used the biography of Bianca Cappello for his tragedy Women Beware Women (1657). The Lady’s Museum translation was republished in 1786 in New Novelists Magazine I: 16-24. 20. This analysis does not appear in Lennox’s Shakespear Illustrated (1753–4). 21. Lennox’s friend Giuseppe Baretti had published his own version of Castracani’s biography in An Introduction to the Italian Language (1755: 152–99), noting how fortune makes men great, not prudence. Baretti’s conclusion neither praises nor condemns the warrior. 22. This story was published in English in numerous texts before the Lady’s Museum. For example: John Newball, A Scheme to Prevent the Running of Wool Abroad, ‘Conversation between Socrates and Aristarchus on the Subject of Honest Labour’ (1744: 77–81). See also The Memorable Things of Socrates in Four Books. Translated from the Greek of Xenophon (Dublin 1747): see ‘Conversation between Socrates and Aristarchus on the Subject of Honest Labour’, 255–59; and Glasgow, 1757: see Ch. VII ‘Socrates Sheweth Aristarchus How to Get Rid of Poverty’, 115–22.

Works Cited Adburgham, Alison. 1972. Women in Print: Writing Women & Women’s Magazines from the Restoration to the Accession of Victoria. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. Backscheider, Paula. 2005. Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bataille, Robert. 2000. The Writing Life of Hugh Kelly. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Brooke, Frances. Old Maid. 1755–6. London: A. Millar. Carlile, Susan. 2018. Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Dryden, John, ed. 1704. Poetical Miscellanies, The Fifth Part, Containing a Collection of Original Poems. London: Jacob Tonson. Eadie, Lorraine. 2011. ‘Johnson, the Moral Essay, and the Moral Life of Women: the Spectator, the Female Spectator, and the Rambler’. The Age of Johnson, 21: 21–42. Forster, John. 1848. The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith. London: Bradbury & Evans. Haywood, Eliza. 2001 ‘The Female Spectator’ in Selected Works of Eliza Haywood, Series II, vols. 2–3. Eds. Kathryn R. King and Alexander Pettit. London: Pickering & Chatto. Italia, Iona. 2005. The Rise of Literary Journalism in the Eighteenth Century: Anxious Employment. London and New York: Routledge. Johnson, Samuel. 1963. The Idler and the Adventurer. Ed. W. J. Bate, John M. Bullitt, and L. F. Powell. Vol. 2 of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. New Haven: Yale University Press. —. 1969. The Rambler. Ed. Walter Jackson Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss. Vols 3–5 of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. New Haven: Yale University Press. King, Kathryn R. 2014. ‘The Pious Mrs. Haywood; or, Thoughts on Epistles for the Ladies (1748–1750)’. Journal for Early Modern Studies 14.4: 187–208. The Ladies Magazine: or, the Universal Entertainer. 1749–53. London: G. Griffith. The Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex. 1770–1832 (1st ser. 1770–1819; 2nd ser. 1820–9; 3rd ser. 1830–2). London. The Lady’s Magazine; or, Polite Companion for the Fair Sex. 1759–63. London. The Lady’s Monthly Museum. 1798–1828 (1st ser. 1798–1814; 2nd ser. 1815–28). London. Lennox, Charlotte. 1760–1. The Lady’s Museum. London: J. Newbury and J. Coote.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 375

17/11/17 5:02 PM

376

susan carlile

Masters, Mary. Familiar Letters and Poems on Several Occasions. London: 1755. Powell, Manushag. 2012. Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Schürer, Norbert, ed. 2012. Charlotte Lennox: Correspondence and Miscellaneous Documents. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Shevelow, Kathryn. 1989. Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical. London and New York: Routledge. Steegman, Mary. 1913. Bianca Cappello. London: Constable and Company. Wild, Min. 1998. ‘“Prodigious Wisdom”: Civic Humanism in Frances Brooke’s Old Maid’. Women’s Writing 5.3: 421–36.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 376

17/11/17 5:02 PM

24 ‘[T]o cherish FEMALE ingenuity, and to conduce to FEMALE improvement’: The Birth of the Woman’s Magazine Jennie Batchelor

The press groans with monthly collections calculated for the peculiar entertainment or improvement of men . . . Yet, as your sex is in this age more employed in reading than it was in the last, it is something surprizing that no periodical production should at present exist calculated for your particular amusement, and designed to improve as well as delight. . . . With this view the following work is presented to the radiant eyes of beauty. The Lady’s Magazine 1 (Aug 1770): 1

W

ith these words, an unknown editor launched the first issue of the longest running monthly periodical for women published in the eighteenth century: the Lady’s Magazine; or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770–1832).1 The editor’s opening gambit blends the familiar with the fresh. Like countless periodical proprietors and eidolons before him, the editor declares, on the one hand, the popularity and inescapable ubiquity of his genre and, on the other, his identification of a completely overlooked niche in the market for which his publication is uniquely provisioned to cater. By the time the Lady’s Magazine launched in August 1770, and for decades afterwards, declarations that women were a ‘totally neglected’ audience for periodicals were proverbial (1). They were also, as this collection of essays amply demonstrates, simply untrue. As Manushag Powell notes, although ‘there was no strong presence of what we would think of as women’s magazines’ until the ‘last third of the eighteenth century’, periodicals whose titles declared a primarily male readership had always been ‘frankly very interested in women as both subjects and readers’ (2012: 133). These periodicals jostled for sales with the dozens of ‘periodical production[s]’ that had declared themselves to be designed specifically for the ‘particular amusement’ of women readers following the publication of the Ladies Mercury in 1693. The Lady’s Magazine certainly had more in common with its predecessors than its claims to novelty would suggest. Improvement and amusement were hardly surprising watchwords for a periodical or indeed most print forms of this era. The Lady’s Magazine did, however, promise what it understood to be a distinctly feminine slant on its twin ambition by promising to render women’s ‘minds’ and ‘persons’ equally ‘amiable’ (1). Alongside contributions representing every ‘branch of literature’, calculated to ‘recommend virtue’ and to pass ‘the inspection of reason’, the magazine also promised ‘engravings’ designed

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 377

17/11/17 5:02 PM

378

jennie batchelor

to ‘inform [its] distant readers with every innovation that is made in the female dress’ (not, in fact, a regular feature until after 1800), just as it avowed to capitalise on the ‘progressive improvement made in the art of pattern-drawing’ by publishing ‘elegant patterns for the Tambour, Embroidery, or every kind of Needlework’ monthly (1). Even without the fifty-plus pages of double-columned print contributions and copperplates that every issue of the magazine contained, the editor could legitimately boast that the publication represented good value for money. One such pattern purchased from a haberdasher’s shop would cost ‘double’ the six pence fee a copy of the Lady’s Magazine carried until its price rose to a shilling in 1800, in part to cover the expence of the long-promised regular fashion plates. It was an impressive ‘bill of fare’ by anyone’s standards, a true miscellany in the spirit of that popularised by Edward Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine (launched 1731). Yet in its inclusion of ‘Interesting Stories, Novels, Tales, Romances’ and a prominent travel serial – ‘A Sentimental Journey’ by ‘A lady of some eminence in the literary world’ – as well as regular fashion intelligence, the Lady’s Magazine marked itself out as distinctive and innovative: a magazine by and for women from the ‘house-wife’ to the ‘peeress’ (1). Although the editor’s pronouncement that the Lady’s Magazine’s ‘success’ was ‘inevitable’ betrays considerable wishful thinking, the periodical more than made good on its promises. Over the next six decades, it would see off numerous, shorter-lived rivals and imitators to become the most popular periodical aimed at a predominantly female readership of the long eighteenth century, even if many of its contributors and readers were, in fact, men. The magazine helped to launch the careers of the likes of poet George Crabbe and Gothic novelist Catharine Day Haynes (later Golland), just as it galvanised those of the likes of Mary Russell Mitford, whose Our Village (1824–32) first appeared as sketches in the magazine from 1822. The magazine’s influence was felt widely, both in the form of reprintings of some of its original content in later periodicals in England, Scotland, and America and in the inspiration it gave to professional women writers in the making including Jane Austen (Copeland 1989: 153–71) and Charlotte Brontë (Batchelor 2011: 262). Equally importantly, as I have argued in more detail elsewhere, the Lady’s Magazine provided a publication opportunity for hundreds of amateur, mostly unpaid, reader-contributors, whose ‘favours’ the magazine encouraged, and whose poems, puzzles, essays, translations, and fiction sat alongside excerpts from the printed works of many of the best-known writers of the day (2011: 245–67). Yet despite its extraordinary popularity, endurance, and undoubted cultural and literary influence, most literary historians have written off the Lady’s Magazine and its nearest competitors as, at best, mere ephemera or, at worst, as symptomatic of a regression in the periodical form that had significant and lasting implications for women. Kathryn Shevelow, for instance, has argued that the ‘new configuration of feminine “learning”’ as imagined by the Lady’s Magazine, abandoned the educational ambition or earlier periodicals such as Charlotte Lennox’s Lady’s Museum (1760–1) in favour of ‘instruction’ in ‘the arts of femininity’ – ‘manners and morals’, ‘cookery, needlework, and fashion’ – as a means of regulating women’s behaviour and habits of consumption (Shevelow 1989: 188–9). As several essays in this book attest, Shevelow’s decline into domesticity thesis has been influential in subsequent studies of eighteenth-century periodicals, the chronologies of which tend to be end-bracketed by the emergence of the women’s magazine in the 1770s (Italia 2005; Maurer 2010).

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 378

17/11/17 5:02 PM

the birth of the woman’s magazine

379

This chapter challenges the underpinnings of these claims. Considering the formal, thematic, and ideological through-lines between early eighteenth-century essayperiodicals and magazines for women and their late-century successors, it argues, forces us to question accounts that have seen the first recognisably modern women’s magazines as marking the beginning of the end for women readers. Dislodging the erroneous association of the genre with anti-intellectualism and an oppressively conservative gender politics allows us to see the birth of the women’s magazine as an important moment in media history, in which the scope of a genre so familiar to us today from news-stands, corner shops, coffee tables, and doctors’ surgeries had yet to be determined.

What’s in a name, or when is a periodical not a periodical? The difference between ‘periodical’ and ‘magazine’ is a technical one, but it is one frequently overlaid with qualitative judgements. Almost all magazines – one-shops and bookazines aside – are periodicals. Not all periodicals are magazines, however, nor are all periodicals created equal. The differences between periodicals and magazines can seem arbitrary from a reader’s point of view, but they have far-reaching consequences for the reception of both kinds of publication. Periodicals, of course, are defined temporally, by frequency and regularity of publication. Magazines, by contrast, are defined formally. They might be published weekly, fortnightly, monthly, or annually, but they are all defined principally by their miscellaneous character and the absence of the kind of unifying perspective provided by eidolons such as Mr Spectator, the Female Spectator, or the Old Maid. The pitting of essay-periodicals – polite, original, and tradition-forming – against magazines – popular, derivative, and ephemeral – is common in eighteenth-century and Romantic studies. It is hardly coincidental that many of the most studied magazines of these periods are ‘literary magazines’ – Blackwood’s (1817–1980) and the Edinburgh Magazine (1817–26), for instance – the generic classification of which serves not only to describe these publications’ contents, but also as a marker of aesthetic value and scholarly respectability. When the eighteenth-century women’s magazine has been discussed in the wider history of periodical culture, it has frequently been cast as the commercial, illegitimate poor relation of its culturally and intellectually ambitious predecessors. Iona Italia puts the contrast between the essay-periodical and magazine starkly. While essay-periodicals such as the Tatler (1709–11) and the Spectator (1711–12; 1714) had clear ‘aspirations to literary gentility’ and widely influenced literary culture, the magazine, is a ‘second-rate’, ‘unscrupulous’ genre that, in its reliance on repurposed content, even when printed alongside original contributions, reveals a ‘growing disparity between literary values and journalistic practice’ (2005: 21). The difference between periodicals and magazines is more marked after 1770, Italia claims, in no small part due to the publication of the Lady’s Magazine. Although acknowledging that magazines of the ‘late eighteenth century form a vital link in the history of journalism’, Italia concludes that they necessitate ‘a very different approach’ from ‘their predecessors up to 1770’ (2005: 22). In part, Italia implies, this is because magazines of this ilk are not literary in the way that the original, posterity-oriented and tradition-forming essay-periodicals of Addison and Steele were. That such distinctions have their origins in the eighteenth century itself is indicated by those

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 379

17/11/17 5:02 PM

380

jennie batchelor

periodicals whose editors and publishers adopted other nomenclature. Susan Carlile is surely right that Charlotte Lennox’s decision to call her magazine a ‘Museum’, a term later adopted by the Lady’s Magazine’s rival and eventual partner, the Lady’s Monthly Museum (1798–1828), was a pointed move to dissociate her title from the gentlemen’s and ladies’ magazines that preceded it, and to signal her ambition to provide learned content that was envisaged to be a ‘long-lasting . . . and durable part of the reader’s library’ (forthcoming).2 It is nonetheless ironic that Lennox, by implication, and her successors, by near universal default, have associated magazines with the trashy and perishable given that the term adopted by Cave when he set about styling a new kind of periodical was chosen to indicate a shoring up of assets for future use. Samuel Johnson may have defined the magazine at mid-century as a ‘miscellaneous pamphlet’ after ‘a periodical magazine named the Gentleman’s Magazine, by Edward Cave’, but he defined it first as ‘a storehouse . . . or repository of provisions’ (Johnson, vol. 2). This latter descriptor more nearly captures the aims of Cave and his successors, which was to provide a armoury of knowledge, information, and entertainment – original and tried and tested – that could be ransacked for edification and amusement for decades or centuries to come. We need only consult the binders’ instructions printed at the back of the end-of-year volumes of publications such as the Lady’s Magazine to see that publishers envisaged their long-term preservation. That these hopes were realised is corroborated by the personal correspondence of readers such as Charlotte Brontë, who wrote a letter to Hartley Coleridge dated 10 December 1840 that recollected an 1820s childhood spent poring over 1790s copies of the Lady’s Magazine that belonged to her mother or aunt instead of minding her lessons (Brontë 1995: 236–7). Countless further examples of the magazine’s longevity are found in its own pages, where readers answer other contributors’ queries with information gleaned from scouring previous volumes. For example, in 1803 Catharine Bremen Yeames, a regular contributor, proffered a solicited cure for hair loss after remembering one by the medical columnist, Dr Turnbull, in the magazine for 1784, the year of her birth (34 (May 1803): 252). Filleted though surviving bound volumes of magazines such as the Lady’s Magazine are – their embroidery patterns, song sheets, and plates were often removed pre- or sometimes post-binding – these are literally substantial works, with monthly tables of content pages and annual indexes to direct readers to items of particular interest long after an initial perusal. The reality of the magazine’s durability, however, has been insufficient to silence allegations that it was and remains an insubstantial, messy ‘open-ended, heterogeneous, fragmented’, and, therefore, feminised form (Ballaster et al. 1991: 7). This is partly because the magazine is erroneously assumed to be a particularly and self-consciously commercial genre. I refer here not just, or primarily, to the advertisements for books, cosmetics, cures, and wares advertised on the wrappers of the Lady’s Magazine and stylishly presented as a discrete bound-in section in John Bell’s high-end La Belle Assemblée (1806–32), but to the consuming practices encouraged through magazines’ inclusion of fashion plates and embroidery patterns, as well as the advice offered explicitly or by stealth in essays, biographies, fiction, and engravings. This association has cast a long shadow over our understanding of the relationship between historic women’s magazines and their readers. Tellingly, eighteenth-century women who devoured periodicals are most commonly and uncontroversially presented as readers; readers of eighteenth-century women’s magazines, however, are more

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 380

17/11/17 5:02 PM

the birth of the woman’s magazine

381

usually presented as consumers, ‘educated’, in the words of Shawn Lisa Maurer, ‘in the consuming practices that would increasingly come to validate their worth and desirability as women’ (2010: 166). If the magazine is a cannibalistic genre, one that ‘consumes other, smaller genres or microgenres’ (Mazella unpublished), then much criticism on early magazines suggests that the female magazine reader is its second prey, rendered as she is as a passive consumer of the domestic ideology the genre touts under the spurious guise of improvement. Such criticisms are hardly novel. No. 60 of Henry Mackenzie’s Lounger (Saturday 25 Mar 1786), for instance, pointedly satirised women’s magazines and their promise of an ‘excellent education’ for subscribers. Taking the form of a letter to the editor, Lounger 60 outlines Projector Literarius’s ‘entirely new’ ‘plan’ for a miscellany solely for ‘female subscribers’ that would be ‘perfect, classical, and feminine’ in its publication of ‘Foreign Intelligence’, ‘Sketches and Interesting Anecdotes’, ‘Fashions’ (Anon. 1786: 238), works by ‘Female Essayists’, a ‘Critical Review of Books’, ‘Poetry’ (239) and, more ominously, works of ‘Freethinking’ (240). The unreliable Projector Literarius satirises his mock plan with every word. Privileging fashion, scandal in high life, and a lubricious interest in the ‘marriage ceremonies of distant countries’ (238) – an ongoing anthropological preoccupation of late-century women’s magazines – the education his periodical offers is clearly viewed as nothing of the kind. Barbara Benedict has read Lounger 60’s encapsulation of ‘the infamous triad of the feminine, the sentimental, and the modern’ as indicative of the tendency to view the ‘miscellany’ as ‘reflect[ing] the sins of a decadent culture’ (1990: 424). Yet, the criticism runs more locally and deeper, too. Specifically targeting ‘monthly Miscellanies’ for and by a sex ‘hitherto . . . excluded’ from the ‘republic of letters’ (237), Lounger 60 borrows directly from the rhetoric of the annual ‘Addresses’ that prefaced publications such as the Lady’s Magazine. The letter’s satire may be many-pronged, but its argument is unambiguous: women’s magazines could never meet their promise to ‘enlarge the sphere of female knowledge’ (237). The magazine format, which offered readers the ‘liberty of dipping’ into, without fully engaging with, its multifarious content guaranteed its pedagogical failure (239). Lounger 60 and more recent scholarly accounts arrive at the same conclusion from different starting points. For Lounger 60, women’s magazines engendered promiscuous and intellectually enervating reading habits. For Shevelow (1989) and Maurer (2010), the magazine format encouraged reader passivity and the entrenchment of a conservative gender politics that privileged women’s bodies above their minds. This chapter contests such arguments by comparing the conversations about women’s education in eighteenth-century periodicals and magazines. My claim is that these genres had much more in common than has been allowed, but it is not my intention to paper over the important differences between them. One vital point of departure between magazines and the more literary and better-known periodicals that preceded them, for instance, was the greater autonomy granted to subscribers and purchasers as readers – able to pick and choose from its diverse offerings – and as potential authors of the content of future issues. This and other formal differences between the miscellany and essayperiodical are crucial to the argument that follows, which concludes that the instability and dynamism inherent in the magazine format encouraged active reading practices that, contrary to Projector Literarius’s fears, served, not thwarted, the educational agendas laid out by some of the magazine’s most learned periodical predecessors.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 381

17/11/17 5:02 PM

382

jennie batchelor

Early Lady’s/Ladies’ Magazines ‘Woman-championing’ essay-periodicals and magazines, to borrow the phrase coined by Eve Tavor Bannet in this collection, had co-existed for decades before 1770. Despite its protestations to the contrary, the Lady’s Magazine owed much to predecessors in both genres in terms of its content and even title. John Coote and John Wheble’s Lady’s Magazine, ownership of which was transferred, much to Wheble’s annoyance, sometime in March 1771 to George Robinson and John Roberts, was not the first Lady’s Magazine. The Lady’s Magazine; or Universal Repository, a shilling monthly launched in March 1733, was advertised in the Universal Spectator on 6 April 1733. No known copies survive and we have only one copy each of two of its later namesakes: a tuppence weekly entitled the Lady’s Magazine; or, the Compleat Library, the eighth number of which for 3 February 1739 is held by the National Library of Scotland; and a single copy of the 19 February 1747 of the Lady’s Weekly Magazine, ‘Publish’d under the Direction of Mrs. Penelope Pry’. A longer run was enjoyed by the fortnightly Ladies Magazine: or, the Universal Entertainer (1749–53) by ‘Jasper Goodwill’. Carrying fiction, anecdotes, question-and-answer dialogues, reviews and abridgements of novels, songs, enigmas, and news, Goodwill’s venture ceased publication only on its proprietor’s death. Its content, twin-columned presentation, and overall tone had a good deal in common with later women’s magazines except for its near total neglect of fashion, and its obsession with accounts of contemporary crimes. Its legacy can be felt more immediately in the Lady’s Magazine; or, Polite Companion for the Fair Sex (1759–63), putatively edited by its eidolon, the Honorable Mrs Caroline A. Stanhope, but commonly associated with Oliver Goldsmith, who was a contributor to it and seems, eventually, to have been its editor. The mid-century Lady’s Magazine’s presentation spoke to the polite ambitions advertised in its subtitle. It was predominantly single-columned and boasted engravings, including an early fashion plate in the December 1759 issue. Goodwill’s earlier magazine’s claim to utility was grounded in its promise to provide ‘a most innocent, diverting, and profitable entertainment for young Masters and Misses, by giving them an early View of the Polite and busy World’ (‘To the Publick’. 1.1 (Saturday 18 Nov 1749): title page). Stanhope’s later Lady’s Magazine, by contrast, more specifically targeted women’s education, or in the words of correspondent C– L– of Chelsea, ‘the ‘important task’ of seeking to ‘enlarge the knowledge, correct the judgment, and polish the manners of the fair sex’ (‘To the Honorable Mrs. Stanhope’. 1 (Oct 1759): 64). As Carlile documents in her essay for this collection, C– L– lightly conceals the identity Charlotte Lennox, and although Lennox’s letter may reveal more about the aspirations she would seek to realise in her own Lady’s Museum than the achievements of the magazine to which she wrote, Stanhope’s Lady’s Magazine undoubtedly offered a more varied intellectual offering than many of its predecessors. A familiar diet of moral essays, tales, poetry, conduct-book style advice, and a keen interest in the worlds of fashion and theatre were enriched by numerous essays and articles on history, current affairs, and science. These were all topics to which Lennox’s Lady’s Museum returned even as it significantly advanced the objectives of Stanhope’s Lady’s Magazine in its development of an ambitious pedagogical programme (Italia 2005: 178–205; Shevelow 1989: 185–6). The Lady’s Museum is an importantly transitional and hybrid periodical, that achieved, on the one hand, the cultural authority of the essay-periodical through its inclusion of its

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 382

17/11/17 5:02 PM

the birth of the woman’s magazine

383

eidolon essay-serial ‘The Trifler’, which opened each of its eleven instalments and, on the other, the intellectual breadth and depth of content made possible by the miscellany form. Other essays in this collection by Carlile, Sagal, and Wood account for the richness of Lennox’s groundbreaking publication. It was certainly, as Powell suggests, a periodical ahead of its time (2012: 184), both formally and pedagogically; it mapped out new possibilities for the women’s magazine, not as a surrogate for women’s education, but as its principal vehicle. However, the suggestion that the Lady’s Museum was ahead of a time that never came for the woman’s magazine, as Lennox’s hopes were dashed by the form’s acquiescence to the lure of fashion and commerce, warrants further scrutiny. Lennox’s achievements, and those of fellow mid-century woman-championing female periodicalists Eliza Haywood and Frances Brooke, among others, were frequently remembered in late-century women’s magazines. Elegant engravings of Brooke – the author of ‘a periodical paper of some merit’ – and Lennox accompanied the generally laudatory accounts of these women’s impressive writing careers that appeared in the Lady’s Monthly Museum, for instance (‘Memoirs of Mrs. Brooke’. 12 (May 1812); ‘Memoir of Mrs. Lennox’. 13 (June 1813)). Various extracts (admittedly not always acknowledged as such) from Haywood’s Female Spectator (1744–6), the Parrot (1746), and Epistles for the Ladies (1748–50), as well as Brooke’s Old Maid (1755–6) can be found in the first five decades of Robinson’s Lady’s Magazine. Excerpts of various of Lennox’s works find their way into its pages too, including pieces from the Lady’s Museum itself. Most striking among these is the Lady’s Magazine’s serial publication of ‘A Treatise on the Education of Daughters’ (1780–1), an unsigned translation of François Fénelon’s Traité de l’éducation des filles (1687). Eschewing George Hickes’s 1750 translation of Fénelon’s work, the magazine instead reprints verbatim instalments from a translation – the work of an unspecified friend of Lennox’s – of the same work from the Lady’s Museum. This clear through-line between the pedagogically determined Lady’s Museum and cynically commercial Lady’s Magazine is both telling and striking. It is telling because it speaks to an overlooked conversation between earlier and later eighteenth-century periodicals and magazines for women. It is striking because it suggests that one of the focal points of this conversation was women’s education, attention to which topic has most commonly been seen to divide their aspirations and achievements.

Conversing about Education in the Lady’s Magazine Women’s education was the dominant preoccupation of the Lady’s Magazine. To assert as much is not to claim that the magazine’s position on women’s education was radical or even internally consistent, nor is to suggest that its readers were always in sync with the views on female learning of editors, prominent columnists, or each other. Dissent on this subject, as on many others the magazine energetically pursued throughout its run, was licensed by the miscellany format. Disagreement and debate were especially encouraged on the subject of education, however, not least because women’s successful navigation of debates surrounding it powerfully demonstrated their intellectual competency. The Lady’s Magazine remained steadfast in its belief in its female readers’ educable potential and rational capacity even if, as we shall see, it vacillated on the question of how far women’s education might extend. It similarly demonstrated

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 383

17/11/17 5:02 PM

384

jennie batchelor

unshakeable faith in its fitness as a vehicle to ‘do Honour to the Genius of [the female] Sex’, to contribute to the ‘Culture of intellectual Endowments’ by ‘extend[ing] the Bounds of female Knowledge’, and to afford ‘Exercise to’ their readers’ ‘Ingenuity’ (‘Address to the Public’. 27 (Jan 1786): 304). In thousands of pages over more than six decades it staged debates, some of which, like that between Sukey Foresight and the inaccurately self-styled Impartial Combatant, lasted several months, but all of which tended ultimately to refute claims that nature had been more ‘liberal to the male than the female part of the human race, in . . . [the] share of mental endowments’ (‘Letter to the Editor’. 11 (Feb 1780): 70). Hosts of original contributions and reprinted extracts endorsed the views of Foresight and her allies, many by attacking how custom was too often presented as the will of nature. An early example comes from the pen of Lucinda, who in June 1771’s ‘On the Strength and Bravery of the Female Sex’ warns against judging ‘the intentions of nature’ from culturally determined ‘appearances’. Attention to the lessons of history, she argued, to the governance and ‘female administration[s]’ of the ancient civilisations of Lacadaemon, Athens, Assyria or, closer to home, to the court of Elizabeth I, showed clearly that ‘delicacy of constitution’ was not characteristic of the sex but ‘only the consequence of our bad education’, in which the ‘malice of man’ conspired (2 (Jan 1771): 261). Characterising the magazine’s ‘intention’ as a will to ‘avenge the sex, and reinstate us in those qualities which prejudice unjustly refuses to acknowledge our property’, Lucinda suggested that her role as contributor was to ‘offer you my assistance toward re-establishing woman in all her rights’ and to challenge the cultural consensus that ‘a retired domestic way of life, is the only one suited to the [female] sex’ (261–2). Lucinda’s take on the magazine’s mission unquestionably exaggerates its editors’ more temperately stated goal to ‘turn away the female eye from the glitter of external parade, to fix it upon more permanent and more brilliant objects of mental acquisitions’ (‘Address to the Public’. 8 (Jan 1777): 3). In presenting the magazine’s stance on women’s position within society as more radical than some of its own rhetoric would indicate it to be, her article is, however, characteristic of countless of those authored by fellow readers who also took advantage of the publication’s openness to reader contributions to set its agenda for themselves. In fact, her yoking of the discussion of female education to the language of woman’s rights was a well-rehearsed move of the magazine’s contributors throughout its run. In the words of regular columnist, ‘The Friend to the Fair Sex’, ‘understanding’ was ‘of no sex’. Women had a right to learning, and it was both their duty and within their ‘power’ to ‘exert’ these ‘rights’ ‘for their own advantage’ and ‘to change the face of society’ (5 (Apr 1774): 200). Some fourteen years before the phrase would be made notorious by Mary Wollstonecraft, and subsequently and irrevocably politicised by the revolution controversy, the magazine’s editors would themselves embrace this rhetoric by declaring that its contributors had helped the magazine to generate a ‘revolution in female manners’, in which women strove to ‘excell [sic] each other . . . in their scientific studies’ rather than in the ‘trifling of dress, and . . . the arts of dissipation’ (‘Address to the Public’. 9 (Jan 1778): 3). If the magazine was unequivocal that women were capable of study and that society as a whole would benefit from ‘training up women in learning’ (‘The State of Female Literature in England in the Sixteenth Century’. 22 (Nov 1791): 563), the question of precisely what these studies should encompass and to what end was less clear-cut, though. For all its talk of rights and revolution, the magazine’s gender

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 384

17/11/17 5:02 PM

the birth of the woman’s magazine

385

politics could be deeply conservative. Despite the fact that it reproduced extracts from Wollstonecraft’s Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) and Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), as well as a vigorous ‘Defence’ of the author’s posthumous reputation in February 1805 (78), it also gave ample room to the objects of Wollstonecraft’s strongest criticism, including: James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women (1765, excerpted 1784 and 1792) and Character and Conduct of the Female Sex (serialised in 1776, its year of publication), Dr John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774, excerpted in 1782, 1783, and 1784) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile (1762, excerpted in 1778 and 1780). Yet even these writers’ insidious conflation of accomplishments and education, on the one hand, and of female virtue and the domestic sphere, on the other, paled in comparison to the views of some of the magazine’s more reactionary original contributors. The opening line of the sanctimonious 1788 serial ‘Letters from a Brother to a Sister at a Boarding School’ speaks for some of the magazine’s least enlightened (if mercifully minority) contributors in its suspicion of women’s rational capacities: ‘Do you know, Mary, that you are very ignorant?’ (19 (Feb 1788): 107). The less objectionable J. H–T., author of an essay ‘On Female Oratory’ in the May 1780 issue, speaks for more of the magazine’s reader-contributors, and is more in tune with the publication’s editorial rhetoric, in his acknowledgement that women were ‘rational creatures’, suited to the ‘pursuits of learning’ despite concluding that women should ‘limit the exercise’ of their ‘eloquence to the circle acquaintance’ from which ‘they will find sufficient field for improvement’ (11 (May 1780): 251). J. H–T. is further representative of a faction of the magazine’s contributors in his tendency, first, to define women’s education by what it should not consist of rather than by what it should and, second, to advocate the pursuit of serious scholarly endeavour only for the few rather than the many. Biographies of exceptional learned women from antiquity to the Bluestockings and salonierres of eighteenth-century Britain and Europe form a rich periodical subgenre worthy of more in-depth study than this chapter can provide and offer another clear point of continuity among early-, mid-, and late-century periodicals for women. These memoirs powerfully countered popular satires on learned women and female pedantry and served as proof, to quote Elenir Irwin’s ‘Defence of Women’ (1810–11), an apparently original serial translation of Benito Jerónimo Feijóo’s framebreaking Defensa de las Mujeres (1726), that the greater prevalence of learned men could only be ‘attributed to the influence of custom, by which no women are invited to literary pursuits, except such as discover a peculiar propensity for them; whereas all men are forced to application in their youth, without much consideration of their natural bias’ (32 (July 1811): 321).3 But few articles in the Lady’s Magazine so wholeheartedly endorsed the sentiment that learned women should be the rule rather than the exception. Even the ‘Friend to the Fair Sex’ confirmed the view that while classical education could be admired in the careers of individuals, it was inappropriate for the sex as a whole. Women such as Émilie du Châtelet or Madame Dacier ‘ought rather to be admired than imitated’ en masse, because the ‘austere science’ in which they excelled posed a threat to family and home (‘Of the Studies proper to the Sex’. 4 (Aug 1773): 401). To quote an article the magazine reprints from the periodical the Trifler (1788– 9), a title whose invocation of Lennox’s enlightened eidolon in her Lady’s Museum seems cruelly ironic in this instance: ‘Few men would (I imagine) wish their wives

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 385

17/11/17 5:02 PM

386

jennie batchelor

and daughters to prefer Horace and Virgil to the care of their families, or a sedulous pursuit of intricate points in Epictetus, to a prudent management of domestic affairs’ (‘On Female Authorship’ 20 (July 1789): 297). The nod to Elizabeth Carter, translator of All the Works of Epictetus (1758) and classical scholar who along with fellow Bluestockings Elizabeth Montagu, Hester Chapone, and Catherine Cockburn, was widely lauded in the Lady’s Magazine, is significant. Carter can be celebrated, despite her ‘sedulous pursuit of intricate points in Epictetus’ because, as Samuel Johnson famously remarked, she could make a pudding as well as she could translate ancient Greek. To quote the author of ‘The State of Female Literature in the Sixteenth Century’, Carter and her sister Bluestockings ‘far exceeded’ their learned predecessors not only because of the ‘general and extensive utility of their writings’, but because they did ‘not esteem’ themselves ‘above the ordinary duties of domestic life’ (22 (Nov 1791): 564–5).4 Such pronouncements might seem to corroborate dominant scholarly accounts that contend that the emergent women’s magazine insidiously reconfigured ‘feminine “learning”’ in a bid to train women in the arts of being good wives, mothers and consumers. In fact, the Lady’s Magazine’s understanding of what might constitute ideal domestic femininity was as contentious as its take on what might constitute the best kind of female education. Books could be, and indeed have been, written about the complexity of early women’s magazines’ construction of their ideal female readers (Beetham 1996; Fraser et al. 2003). It is perhaps sufficient to note here that an education consisting solely, or even pre-eminently, of the accomplishments that are synonymous with the kind of domestic femininity Shevelow associates with early women’s magazines is commonly lampooned in the Lady’s Magazine. Domesticity, here, as in the periodicals, essays, polemics, and novels that Harriet Guest illuminatingly considers in Small Change (2000) ‘is always a contested proposition’ (15). Countless articles in the periodical demonstrate how inadequately accomplishments fitted women for the mercenary and precarious world its essays and fiction, in particular, imagined. Nowhere is this clearer than in the deluge of letters addressed to the magazine’s agony aunt, The Matron, otherwise known by the likely pseudonym Martha Grey. Mrs Grey conducted an advice column that ran monthly from 1774 to 1791 when it abruptly ceased without explanation before being briefly revived by the Matron’s supposed granddaughter, Sophy, in 1817. Martha Grey’s and Sophia Grey’s columns repeatedly assert that the ‘present fashionable mode of education’ (‘The Matron. Number CXCII’. 19 (Oct 1788): 532), especially that provided by boarding schools, was scarcely worth the name. Despite being reliant upon boarding schools for subscriptions and publishing the efforts of pupils from superior boarding schools who solved the magazine’s riddles and entered the translation competitions it ran in its first decades, the magazine as a whole overwhelmingly suggests that the education offered by the weakest and most fashionable of these institutions equipped women poorly for the lives they might lead beyond their walls. Predictably, the dangers to lower middling sort of women were presented as all the greater, as in the case of a Martha Firkin, a farmer’s daughter turned cheesemonger’s wife, whose name appears under a letter published in the September 1788 Matron column. Writing about her sole surviving daughter of nine births, Martha Firkin explains how her husband acquired genteel ways in service as a butler, which encouraged him to send his child to boarding school. Miss Firkin leaves the school with the ‘knowledge of gentility’ her father wanted for her, but none of the skills required to

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 386

17/11/17 5:02 PM

the birth of the woman’s magazine

387

work his shop on completion of her so-called education and with her virtue in tatters following an affair with a ‘young officer’. The Matron’s response, which was published the following month, notes that ‘such an education’ is ‘not . . . at all necessary for a tradesman’s daughter’ (‘The Matron. Number CXCII’. 19 (Oct 1788): 530). The impression the Matron column and the Lady’s Magazine as a whole gives, however, is that ‘such an education’ is neither necessary nor desirable for anyone’s daughter if it comes at the expence of the cultivation of the intellectual endowments and various practical skills women of different stations require to be good daughters, wives, mothers, spinsters, and benefactresses. To take just one example, a letter in the same October 1788 Matron column tells the story of two sisters, N. and A.M., who have been recently orphaned. Their father, who once boasted a ‘lucrative place’ (532) squandered his fortune and left his boarding-school-educated daughters accomplished in ‘doing the honours of the table’ and the etiquette of paying visits, as well as ‘music, drawing, French, and several kinds of fine but useless works’. Although ‘willing to undertake any work’, they are ‘not capable’ of it and beg the Matron for advice on how to earn a subsistence (533). Ultimately, however, where a woman acquired her education and of what that education should consist was of less interest to the magazine than the method of instruction to which it hoped her mind might become habituated. The important question of how best to ‘enlarge the knowledge, correct the judgment and polish the manners’ of the fair sex was as much a preoccupation of the Lady’s Magazine as it was to Lennox’s letter to Mrs Stanhope or her Lady’s Museum. An especially provocative contribution to the magazine’s ongoing dialogue about how women might best acquire knowledge appeared in an extract from poet and educationalist Samuel Whyte’s The Shamrock: or, Hibernian Cresses (1772), entitled ‘Thoughts on Education’. The essay opens with a searing condemnation of the arrogation of ‘a superiority of intellect’ by the ‘imperious Lords of the creation’, before quickly articulating an impassioned protest against ‘the neither just nor rational’ because purely ‘mechanical’ nature of girls’ and young women’s education (3 (Oct 1772): 470–1). Taught to imbibe social graces and scant knowledge ‘[w]ithout idea, without sentiment’, Whyte warns passionately against precisely the kind of mental passivity that modern scholarship has ironically associated with the historical women’s magazine reader (472). While Whyte, the headmaster of an interdominational, co-educational school in Dublin, was especially forward thinking, his conviction in women’s potential as active learners was shared by many of the Lady’s Magazine contributors. That modern scholarship has overlooked the insistence upon active learning across hundreds of articles in the Lady’s Magazine is unsurprising. One of the occupational hazards of working with such a vast archive is that selective mining can prove that the magazine – any magazine – subscribes to almost any argument or ideological position you want it to. Attention to a preponderance of evidence and the particularity of form can help to keep us honest, however, and in this case, makes clear the Lady’s Magazine’s commitment to a mode of female education based upon dialogue. If we define education, as it is defined in the magazine’s discussion of James Nelson’s Essay on the Government of Children (1753), as ‘the communication of knowledge, or the cultivation of the understanding’ (‘Letters from a Brother to a Sister at a Boarding School’. 19 (July 1788): 337), then the magazine, as a form, was uniquely placed to achieve both aims simultaneously. Individual articles could communicate discrete items of

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 387

17/11/17 5:02 PM

388

jennie batchelor

information, such as lessons from history or biography, news of scientific discoveries or political events, the anthropological insights gleaned from travel writing, or improving maxims. But the status of these texts, and their ‘Exercise’ to readers’ ‘Ingenuity’, is very different from what it would be if they were published in single sheets, as self-contained pamphlets or in volume form, because these articles actively encouraged readers to respond to them (‘Address to the Public’. 17 (Jan 1786): 4). Sometimes, these encouragements were explicitly stated, as with the enigmas and rebuses the magazine printed or the French passages for reader translation it provided in its first decade. More creatively, such engagement was solicited in the form of foldout maps of Great Britain, Europe, and the Americas which were printed alongside essays on this history and flora and fauna of these regions. Some earlier women’s periodicals published maps too. The Lady’s Museum, for instance, had included such an engraving to accompany its serialised ‘Essay on the Original Inhabitants of Great Britain’. But the Lady’s Magazine seems to have been one of the first publications of its kind to encourage readers to instil geographical knowledge by inviting readers to stitch the contours of nations onto fabric. These examples illustrate just one aspect of the open invitation that the Lady’s Magazine, like many of its rivals, extended to readers to engage with everything it printed. Any piece of content published within the magazine could be responded to by its readers and, if their written responses passed editorial muster – and if the magazine’s monthly ‘Correspondents’ columns are to be believed its editors received hundreds of these each month – they could find themselves printed within the magazine within a matter of weeks. Indeed, the magazine actively encouraged debate by regularly publishing controversial articles such as F.H.’s appallingly misogynist attack on women’s writing in the February 1782 issue ‘in the hopes that some of [the magazine’s] numerous correspondents will take up their pen and work the writer of it handsomely, for his monstrous freedoms’ (‘Women of Genius Attacked, 13 (Feb 1782): 88). The magazine also promoted the ‘cultivation’ of its readers’ ‘understanding’ in subtler ways made possible by its miscellany format. The juxtaposition of individual essays, tales, and articles against others on similar topics but offering slightly or widely divergent viewpoints in the same or subsequent issues invited readers actively to work away at the attainment of knowledge through reflection on these textual dialogues. It was the business of the Lady’s Magazine to ‘habituate the [reader’s] mind to think on paper’, a process that it hoped would lead individuals ‘to the paths of accuracy’ (‘Advertisement’. 7 (Jan 1776): n. p.) Once acquired, the habit of thinking on paper enabled individuals to ‘converse with [thems]elves’, as the anonymous author of ‘Essay on Reading’ put it, and allowed them to cultivate an ‘independency of intellect’ that was a vital conduit to meaningful engagement in the real world beyond the magazine’s pages (22 (Supp 1781): 710) In the words of the serial ‘Essay on Friendship’, mankind was ‘formed for conversation and community’, the former being the bedrock of the latter (12 (Dec 1775): 633). Men, of course, had various opportunities to acquire such conversational and social prowess. As regular columnist and Johnsonian imitator ‘The Female Rambler’ put it in her opening number in May 1771: ‘Men may roam abroad, and get practical information, by conversing with mankind.’ But such opportunities were rarely extended to women: ‘The world is [presumed] too miscellaneous a work for their chaste perusal’ (468). The Female Rambler was not the only contributor to suggest that the heterogeneous form of the magazine served as a mirror to the vertiginously complex modern society. In the magazine’s first issue, the father in ‘Friendship.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 388

17/11/17 5:02 PM

the birth of the woman’s magazine

389

Figure 24.1 Frontispiece to the Lady’s Magazine (1789). © Special Collections and Archives, Cardiff University.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 389

17/11/17 5:02 PM

390

jennie batchelor

An Allegory’ describes the world as ‘a large volume, that will instruct those who how to read in it’ (1 (Aug 1770): 18). Teaching women how to read and exchange ideas about not just texts but the world they inhabited, was the tantalising promise of the Lady’s Magazine and many of its competitors whose own contributions to the debate on women’s education sadly lie beyond the scope of this essay. The miscellany format, an inherently interactive one that promoted active reading – ‘freethinking’ of a less dangerous kind than that imagined by Projector Literarius – as well as dialogue was integral to that vision. Whether the Lady’s Magazine was successful in realising its ambition to help inaugurate a ‘happy revolution in female instruction’ (‘Address to the Public’ 21 (Jan 1790): 3) is an unanswerable question. The magazine did not offer a curriculum of female learning in the way that Lennox’s Lady’s Museum did. Indeed, it studiously avoided it, presenting a bill of fare much more varied than the predecessor against which its achievements are commonly judged. Nonetheless, the Lady’s Magazine contained all of the constituent elements of Lennox’s title: essays on history, geography and science, engravings, poetry, fiction, eidolon columns and fiction, and so on. The main difference between the publications is formal. The Lady’s Magazine is generically more diverse and diffuse than the Lady’s Museum; it is clearly the work of many more hands; and in its inclusion of fashion plates, reports, and patterns discussed elsewhere in this collection by Chloe Wigston Smith it paid more attention to women’s bodies than almost any periodical that preceded it. Italia claims that this formal diffusion and diversification of contents weakened the magazine’s ‘authority as an educational work’, ensured that any improvement in its readers’ knowledge and understanding of the world was ‘fortuitous rather than planned’ (2005: 190). Shevelow, by contrast, presents the pedagogical rhetoric of eighteenth-century women’s magazines very differently by arguing that they are too authoritative in their efforts to turn women readers into consumers of a particular model of femininity insidiously associated with show rather than substance and with the body rather than the mind. This is an impossible circle of evidence to square: how can magazines be too conversational and dialogic, on the one hand, and too determined, on the other, to make readers passively accept its gender prescriptions? One of the principal contentions of this essay has been that neither of these arguments fully accounts for the richness and ambition of the first women’s magazines. The miscellany’s conversational form, rather than weakening its impact, was germane to the pedagogical aspiration of publications such as Robinson’s Lady’s Magazine. Formal orthodoxies have distorted our understanding of the content of such publications and the significant contribution they made to debates on women’s education, in part by building on the foundation of similar conversations in earlier women’s periodicals and magazines such as Lennox’s Lady’s Museum. To argue as much is to point out that the magazine has been represented by analogous biases to those that have historically clouded the history of women’s education. As Michèle Cohen has convincingly demonstrated, the ‘history of education’s narrow understanding of “education”’ – the default definition being male, formal, classical – neglects ‘social skills which were fundamental to education of the time’ (2009: 100). Cohen’s account places process – listening, remembering, and being able to converse about what one has come to know and understand – rather than simply product at the heart of the current scholarly dialogue about the history of women’s education. This is a conversation that can be enriched by a fuller consideration of those that took place over a

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 390

17/11/17 5:02 PM

the birth of the woman’s magazine

391

period of more than sixty years in the pages of the Lady’s Magazine and its rivals. In these periodicals, form and content blended and clashed to ‘Exercise [the] Ingenuity’ of its far-from-passive readers in ways that actively sought to challenge their habits of thinking and to realise Lennox’s hope that a periodical for women might ‘Improve the knowledge of our sex, not by forcing them over the mountains, and wildernesses of science, but by leading them through the gardens, and groves; not by giving amusement the austere air of study, but by rendering study an amusement’ (‘To the Honorable Mrs. Stanhope’. Lady’s Magazine 1 (Oct 1759): 65).

Notes Research for this chapter was generously supported by a Research Project Grant awarded by the Leverhulme Trust, entitled ‘The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1818): Understanding the Emergence of a Genre’ for which the author was Principal Investigator between 2014 and 2016. 1. In 1823 the magazine’s subtitle changed to the Lady’s Magazine; or, Mirror of the BellesLettres. In July of 1832 the magazine merged with the Lady’s Monthly Museum. This continuation was entitled the Lady’s Magazine and Museum of Belles-Lettres (1832–7). In 1838 the magazine incorporated the Court Magazine and Belle Assemblée (formerly La Belle Assemblée, or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine). This final title was published as the Court Magazine and Monthly Critic, and Ladies’ Magazine and Museum of BellesLettres and ran until 1847. 2. This was not the original title projected for the Lady’s Museum, however. A petition for royal licence lodged by one of its publishers, John Coote, in 1759 noted that its title was originally to be the Female Magazine; or Lady’s Polite Companion. (PRO/SP/36/44/ folio46). See Fitzpatrick 2000: 255 n. 70. Why the title was revised and who initiated the change are not entirely clear, but Lennox may well have been involved in the decision. In 1770, Coote inaugurated the Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, which has an uncannily similar title to that originally imagined for the Lady’s Museum, before selling his proprietor’s interest in it to George Robinson and John Roberts in March 1771. 3. An earlier, serialised English translation of Feijoo’s work appeared in the earlier Lady’s Magazine; or, Polite Companion for the Fair Sex from January 1760. This claimed to be a direct translation ‘from the original Spanish . . . Never attempted in English before’ (197). Irwin’s translation in Robinson’s Lady’s Magazine differs substantially from this particular translation, as it does from the three other English translations of Defensa de las Mujeres that appeared in 1765, 1774, and 1778, and which have been identified by Monica Bolufer Peruga (private correspondence). 4. For a detailed and compelling account of the complex relationship between Carter’s association with the domestic sphere and her reputation for learning, patriotism, and piety, see Guest (2000), esp. 111–33.

Works Cited Anon. 1786. ‘Scheme of a literary projector for a new sort of periodical publication’. The Lounger no. 60: 234–42. Ballaster, Ros, Margaret Beetham, Elizabeth Frazer, and Sandra Hebron. 1991. Women’s Worlds: Ideology, Femininity and the Woman’s Magazine. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 391

17/11/17 5:02 PM

392

jennie batchelor

Batchelor, Jennie. 2011. ‘“Connections which are of service . . . in a more advanced age”: The Lady’s Magazine, Community, and Women’s Literary Histories’. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 30: 245–67. Beetham, Margaret. 1996. A Magazine of her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914. London and New York: Routledge. Benedict, Barbara. 1990. ‘Literary Miscellanies: The Cultural Mediation of Fragmented Feeling’. ELH 57.2: 407–30. Brontë, Charlotte. 1995. The Letters of Charlotte Bronte: Vol. 1, 1829–1847. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Carlile, Susan. Forthcoming. Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Cohen, Michèle. 2009. ‘“Familiar Conversation”: The Role of the “Familiar Format” in Education in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England’. Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices. Ed. Mary Hilton, Jill Shefrin. Farnham: Ashgate. 99–116. Copeland, Edward. 1989. ‘Money Talks: Jane Austen and the Lady’s Magazine’. Jane Austen’s Beginnings: The Juvenilia and Lady Susan. Ed. J. David Grey. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. 153–71. Fitzpatrick, Barbara L. 2000. ‘Physical Evidence for John Coote’s Eighteenth-Century Periodical Proprietorships: The Example of Coote’s Royal Magazine (1759–71) and Smollett’s British Magazine (1760–7)’. Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography. 11 (ns): 211–58. Fraser, Hilary, Stephanie Green and Judith Johnston. 2003. Gender and the Victorian Periodical. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guest, Harriet. 2000. Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Italia, Iona. 2005. The Rise of Literary Journalism in the Eighteenth Century: Anxious Employment. London and New York: Routledge. Johnson, Samuel. 1756. A Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd edn. London: J. Knapton; C. Hitch and L. Hawes; A. Millar; R. and J. Dodsley; and M. and T. Longman. The Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex. 1770–1832 (1st ser. 1770– 1819; 2nd ser. 1820–9; 3rd ser. 1830–2). London. The Lady’s Magazine; or, Polite Companion for the Fair Sex. 1759–63. London. The Ladies Magazine: or, the Universal Entertainer. 1749–53. London: G. Griffith. The Lady’s Monthly Museum. 1798–1828 (1st ser. 1798–1814; 2nd ser. 1815–28). London. Lennox, Charlotte. 1760–1. The Lady’s Museum. London. J. Newbury and J. Coote. Maurer, Shawn Lisa. 2010. ‘The Periodical’. The History of British Women’s Writing, vol. 4 1690–1750. Ed. Ros Ballaster. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 156–72. Mazella, David. Unpublished. ‘Temporality, Microgenres, Authorship and the Lady’s Magazine’. Powell, Manushag N. 2012. Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Shevelow, Kathryn. 1989. Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical. London: Routledge.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 392

17/11/17 5:02 PM

25 The Woman behind the Man behind the WORLD: Mary Wells and the Feminisation of the Late Eighteenth-Century Newspaper Claire Knowles

I

n the wake of the influential work of Jürgen Habermas it is easy to think of the world of the late eighteenth-century newspaper as operating as a gentleman’s club of sorts.1 This is certainly how the scene is presented in Lucyle Werkmeister’s masterful history of the papers, The London Daily Press, 1772–1792 (1963) and there is a good deal of truth in the idea that newspapers, with their focus on such traditionally masculine pursuits as politics, trade, and sport, were dominated by men and created to serve typically male interests. An air of male clubbishness certainly dominates printer John Bell’s account of the origin of his popular eighteenth-century newspaper the World (1787–94): In the year 1786, having sold my Shares of the Morning Post . . . about the month of June, Captain TOPHAM being casually at my House, I communicated to him my plan and resolution of publishing a NEW PAPER on the first of January following; with the observation, that I had declared such resolution previous to my having parted with my property in the Morning Post. Captain TOPHAM then approved of my resolution, and proposed himself as a Partner in the undertaking. (World 14 May 1789 repr. in Werkmeister: 383) In Bell’s account, the World began as a result of a casual business conversation at a private home, and indeed the paper was later to disintegrate as a result of the rupture of this gentlemanly pact between Topham and Bell. But despite the predominance of male voices and interests in the world of late eighteenth-century newspapers, as the century progressed women came to play an important role in this media form. They did this as readers of the papers; increasingly as contributors to them; and even occasionally as newspaper editors. Moreover, a number of newspapers themselves shifted in focus over the course of the eighteenth century in order to better appeal to a female audience: theatrical intelligence, fashionable gossip, and poetry of all sorts became an important part of the appeal of papers of ‘elegance’ such as the World, the Oracle, and the Morning Post. In order to highlight the significance of what I see as the growing feminisation of the daily newspaper in the final decades of the eighteenth century, this chapter examines the contribution made to Topham and Bell’s popular paper the World not only by female contributors in general, but by one woman in particular, Mary Wells.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 393

17/11/17 5:02 PM

394

claire knowles

Wells remains a relatively shadowy figure in recent accounts of the World – accounts driven, in large part, by an increasing interest in the poetry of the Della Cruscans – but she had an extraordinarily interesting life. Mary Wells was born in Birmingham in 1762, the daughter of Thomas Davies, a carver and gilder. From the account given in her autobiography, Mary’s life as a young child was marked by sorrow. According to Mary, her father’s business partner, a Mr Griffiths, loaned him a large sum of money, and then used this loan to put an execution on the family home, ostensibly because he had designs on Mrs Davies. Thomas Davies became so distressed by this turn of events that he ‘became insane, and was conveyed to a madhouse’ where he died (Sumbel 1811, vol. 1: 7). When Mary’s mother subsequently resisted Griffiths’s affections, she and her family were thrown out of their home and Mary was sent to stay with a family friend in London. Meanwhile, back in Birmingham, another family friend, Mr Yates – the proprietor and manager of the local theatre – suggested that Mrs Davies might add to her income by trying her luck as an actress. Her first appearance on the stage was unfortunately marred by a bad case of stage fright but Yates, undeterred, suggested to Mrs Davies that her young daughter might enjoy better success. It was thus that Mary began her stage career in Birmingham while still a teenager. She debuted in the character of the Duke of York, and ‘continued for some time to wear the breeches’ onstage due to her youth’ (vol. 1:19). After playing in the regional theatres of Bath, York, and Cheltenham, Mary obtained an engagement at Gloucester where she played Juliet to Ezra Wells’s Romeo. The two leads fell in love and were married. It was, however, an ill-fated match, with Wells soon afterwards sending his young bride back to her mother claiming that she was ‘too young and childish’ for marriage (vol. 1: 35). After acting in Bristol and Plymouth, Wells moved on to the larger stage of the London theatres. She debuted at Haymarket Theatre on 1 June 1781 in Love in a Village and The Author. It must have been a memorable performance. The next day, the Morning Chronicle observed that a ‘beautiful young actress by the name of Wells’ had made her debut: Her vocal powers are her highest recommendation; and in her person and her acting consist her chief excellence. In Madge and Mrs. Cadwallader (for she appeared last night in both those characters) she displayed a real comick genius, without running into extravagance, the common fault of provincial comedians, who are apt to mistake mummery for humour. This lady is very young, and seems to possess so many requisites for the theatre, that we have little doubt of her soon becoming a very valuable addition to the London stage. (2 June 1781) Thus began an illustrious career that would see Wells perform at all of the London theatres. In a vindication of the Morning Chronicle’s focus on her ‘comic genius’, Wells was to become particularly well known for her comedic roles. But she was also much praised for her ‘imitations’, in which she would entertain audiences with her impersonations of popular actresses such as Sarah Siddons and Dorothy Jordan. Like many eighteenth-century actresses,2 she acquired sobriquets based on the roles for which she had become famous; in Wells’s case, ‘Becky’, after her debut performance as Becky Cadwallader, and ‘Cowslip’, after her much praised later turn as Cowslip, a part expressly written for her in John O’Keefe’s The Agreeable Surprise (1783).

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 394

17/11/17 5:02 PM

the woman behind the man behind the WORLD

395

At the height of her stage career, Wells became the mistress of noted theatre-lover (and soon-to-be-proprietor of the World), Edward Topham. John Fyvie suggests that Wells’s intrigue with Topham must have begun around 1784. ‘Mrs. Wells’s autobiography’, he writes, ‘is remarkable for the absence of dates; but it must have been around this time that she first became acquainted with Edward Topham, an officer in the Life Guards, who had a very pretty talent for the writing of prologues and epilogues. He was almost as eccentric a character as Becky herself’ (Fyvie 1906: 321). Topham was a fashionable and flamboyant man-about-town who counted among his friends many in the London theatrical scene including Sheridan and George Colman the Elder. He and Wells became acquainted after he wrote an epilogue for the actress to perform for her benefit performance. Soon afterwards, the two noted ‘eccentrics’ became one of the most recognisable couples in the London theatrical scene and as Wells tells it, Topham even made the actress an offer of marriage. The two could not marry in England because Wells had never been officially divorced from her husband, so ‘as we could not be legally united in this kingdom, he proposed going to Italy’ (Sumbel 1811, vol. 1: 57). As it turns out, Topham and Wells never did make it to Italy, but they did live together from about 1785 to 1791 and go on to have four children together. It was a partnership that also helped to produce the World – one of the most successful papers of the late eighteenth century.

Wells and the World As we have already seen, John Bell suggested that the World was created to further his interests as a printer and to continue an association with daily newspapers established during his tenure at the Morning Post. But Topham’s account of the origins of the paper implicated Wells herself in its establishment. In an autobiographical essay appearing in Public Characters of 1805, Topham suggests that it was ‘from a wish to assist Mrs. Wells in her dramatic life, that the paper of the World first originated’. (Topham 1805: 205). There is undoubtedly a degree of truth in both men’s accounts of the origins of the World – Bell was clearly looking to the paper to provide a vehicle to promote his own publishing interests, while Topham, ever the great lover of theatre, placed rather more stock in the World’s possibilities as a puffing machine for his mistress. But these differing accounts of the origins of the paper also highlight the tensions between the male-dominated world of politics and publishing inhabited by Bell, and the increasingly feminised world of theatre and popular entertainment within which Topham and Wells (and indeed, a large number of the World’s correspondents and writers) circulated. When these two worlds came together in the pages of the World, a new type of paper was created. The paper’s offices were at the Beaufort buildings in the Strand, where Topham and Wells and their young family lived, and the very first issue of the paper appeared on 1 January 1787. It immediately sold an impressive ‘3,000 copies with an additional 1,000 printed to meet demand’ (Robinson 2011: 35) and Werkmeister notes, ‘the immediacy and extent of the World’s success has no precedent in the history of newspapers’ (1963: 158). The paper’s close ties to the theatre (via Wells and Topham) meant that it was well placed to offer its readers the latest in theatrical news and gossip. It was also, as Werkmeister argues, quick to exploit a growing public interest in

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 395

17/11/17 5:02 PM

396

claire knowles

‘personalities’ and ‘anecdotes’ (1963: 6). If you needed to know who was travelling where in the theatrical world, who was ill, and who was facing bankruptcy, the World was only too happy to oblige with this information. Sir Andrew Acid, a character in Notoriety (a play written by Frederick Reynolds as a vehicle for Wells and performed in 1791) offers us a comic insight into how such a paper might have been read by its fashionable audience: . . . and here’s the paper (sitting down, and taking up newspaper). Now for it! now for bad news! ‘Theatre Royal—new comedy.’ Psha, making people grin and distort their faces. Give me a deep, horrible, agreeable tragedy. Bankrupts.— aye, here they are, One, two, three—thirteen. Come, very well; that’s very well. Promotions—there they are with their curst joy again. Stocks fallen one and a half— some lame ducks, however—Marriages, ten—well, long life to you, for you’ll be as miserable. (3) All is (somewhat grumpy) entertainment here – bad news, the theatre, bankrupts, promotions, marriages – all of these facets of the newspaper work to offer a momentary diversion from the business of Sir Acid’s day. Perhaps better than any other paper of its day, the World understood the value of distraction. Werkmeister suggests that much of the miscellany and theatrical commentary of the World was written by Topham, but ‘when he was out of town, the “theatrical criticism” was supplied by Mrs Wells’ (1963: 155). Topham, however, being a great lover of ‘country pursuits’, was often out of town, and if Wells herself is to be believed, her editorial responsibilities at the paper were far more extensive than Werkmeister’s account suggests. ‘I have’, she remarks in her Memoirs, ‘in the course of conversation, often heard the expression, seen a great deal of the world; but, for my part’, Wells puns, ‘I saw too much of it – for the principal burden of carrying it fell at last upon my shoulders’ (Sumbel 1811, vol. 1:59). While Topham was away, he relied heavily upon his mistress ‘to read proofs, to give instructions to reporters, to interview people on business matters, and to report to him all that went on at the office’ (Fyvie 1906: 232). Wells also contributed theatrical commentary to the paper and regularly attended the trial of Warren Hastings as the paper’s correspondent.3 Indeed, according to Fyvie: The historian [Thomas Babington Macaulay] does tell us that ‘there Siddons, in the prime of her majestic beauty, looked on a scene surpassing all the imitations of the stage.’ But he does not tell us that there also sat Becky Wells, taking in all the details of the scene, day by day, and publishing it, in and to the World, each succeeding morning. (Fyvie 1906: 324) Judging from his commitment to shooting in the season, Topham does not appear to have allowed his gentlemanly pursuits to be overly compromised by his responsibilities at the World. Wells, in contrast, seems to have had an impressive work ethic, working at the paper throughout her theatrical engagements, and even during her recovery from childbirth. ‘When I have been confined by my lying-in’, she comments in her memoirs, ‘he [Topham] requested me (as has been shewn), the first thing after leaving

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 396

17/11/17 5:02 PM

the woman behind the man behind the WORLD

397

my room, to look after the affairs of The World, which I always punctually obeyed’ (Sumbell 1811, vol. 1: 82). Wells’s Memoirs emphasise her eagerness to accede to Topham’s wishes in managing the affairs of the World, often at the expense of her own health – she even goes so far as to publish Topham’s letters to her on newspaper business – but the actress’s close association with the paper most certainly had material benefits for her own public image. Throughout her career Wells was associated with irrational behaviour, even madness, by her friends, colleagues, stage rivals, and eventually, by her lover, Topham. She was also, as we will see, confined for insanity for a short time in the 1790s under the care of the king’s physician, Dr Francis Willis. Contemporary opinion differed as to whether Wells’s eccentric behaviour was real or performed. Renowned actress Sarah Siddons, for example, found herself in Weymouth at the same time as Wells in the summer of 1789, and observed to a friend: ‘Mrs. Wells is here and is either really mad, or effects to be so, opinions of her malady are various, I for my own part think it put on, entre nous’ (Engel 2008: 190). Whatever the case, there can be little doubt that Wells’s behaviour was often shocking to those she encountered. In his Retrospections of the Stage (1830), John Bernard presents the actress as one of the greatest eccentrics of her age: Becky loved to oppose all the tastes and customs of the world; to wear furs in the summer, and muslins in the winter; to improve her heath by riding down to Oxford or Cambridge in Hackney coaches, and to relieve the ferment of town society, by incurring premeditated debts, and getting into sponging-houses, where she might enjoy her reflections undisturbed: —of all of which vagaries the gallant editor [Topham] supplied the means with his purse, and defended the propriety with his pen. That amiable creature Miss Pope, endeavouring one day to reason with her, observed—‘Think, Mrs. Wells, what the “world” says of such conduct!’—Becky’s head only ran upon Topham’s ‘World’; and she answered, ‘I beg your pardon, Ma’am, the “world” never abuses me!’ (Bernard 1830, vol. 2: 245) Wells’s supposed comments to Miss Pope here make clear just how beneficial her close relationship with the World was in mitigating the effects of her socially dangerous behaviour. The paper gave Wells a space where she might present herself in the most positive light: the opinions of the social world could be countered by the World. Newspaper puffing was an art deployed with great success by public women such as Wells as a means of shaping their public personae and of gaining publicity for their literary and theatrical productions. Leigh Bonds, writing of contemporary actress and writer Mary Robinson, for example, observes ‘all of the notes [in the daily newspapers] pertaining to Robinson’s private life and literary production permitted the public to develop a relationship with her – or at least their perception of her’ (2013: 45). Wells’s status as semi-official editor of the World probably meant that she had access to puffs (whether written by herself or by Topham) without having to pay for them as Robinson did.4 She seems to have used these puffs primarily to highlight her professionalism and popularity on the stage – in other words, to provide a counternarrative to the commonly told accounts of her madness and instability. For

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 397

17/11/17 5:02 PM

398

claire knowles

example, the ‘Theatricals’ section of the paper for Thursday, 11 September 1787 promotes Wells’s upcoming appearance at Drury Lane and remarks: What avidity and novelty did before—certainty and excellence will do again, in all probability; and having no part of the house unfilled before, it is to be supposed the same crouds [sic] and the same expectations will again attend here. As a Performance, we never witnessed upon any stage—a species of amusement brought to such accurate perfection—as her Imitations. They are the drawings of Sir Joshua, with the resemblence of Stewart: —and while Mrs. Siddons is seen daily, and Mrs. Crawford is so remembered—never will the praise of Mrs. Wells be lost. Those two characters are beyond all value, and will be thought so—as long as they are heard.5 In what can only be a puff, Wells’s imitations are presented here as singular works of amusement and entertainment, guaranteed to fill the theatre with enthralled patrons. Wells is depicted as taking her comic responsibilities seriously, with the imitations’ success being presented as a ‘certainty’. Even the World’s illustrious stable of poets appears to have been happy to contribute to Wells’s publicity machine. The most famous of these poets, Della Crusca (Robert Merry), published ‘Ode to SIMPLICITY: Addressed to Mrs. Wells’ in the World on 16 April 1788. One of the most important elements of Wells’s newspaper puffs in verse and prose is that they work to both preserve and strengthen the impact of the actress’s otherwise ephemeral theatrical performances. This function is reflected in the editorial comment attached to Della Crusca’s poem that notes, ‘the FAME of this charming poet [Della Crusca], naturally gives Fame wherever his praise may be bestowed’. It goes on to suggest that through Della Crusca’s poetry, ‘that which might be transitory, will now live; and the remembrance “that such things were”, will not perish—Mrs. Wells therefore, has to reckon this, not among the least of her late Honours’. Poems like Della Crusca’s work then, to embalm ‘that which might be transitory’ allowing a whole new audience access to Mrs Wells’s performances. In this poem, one of a trio published by the poet for the World in 1788 praising London’s most popular actresses – Siddons, Wells, and Elizabeth Farren – Della Crusca highlights the ‘sweet simplicity’ of Wells.6 Ignoring the well-known complexities of Wells’s personal life, Della Crusca focuses instead on the simplicity embedded in the ingénue roles for which the actress became famous. After highlighting the simple charms of nature in the poem’s first three stanzas, Della Crusca moves on to celebrate the charms of Wells explicitly: Then to thy brow, lov’d WELLS! Is due, A lasting Wreath, of various hue, Hung with each perfum’d Flow’r that blows, But chief, the cowslip and the Rose; For surely thou art she? THYSELF—benign Simplicity. And when thy MIMIC Pow’rs are shewn, Each other’s Talents are thy own,

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 398

17/11/17 5:02 PM

the woman behind the man behind the WORLD

399

Appropriate to thyself we find, The thrilling Voice, the wounded Mind; The starting Tear we see In Nature’s pure Simplicity. This collocation of simplicity and a profession grounded thoroughly in artifice, works to fascinating effect in this poem. Simplicity becomes a sexualised pose designed to highlight the desirability of the actress’s body on display. At no time is Wells more desirable to Della Crusca than when she is performing this simplicity: And Loveliness delights to dwell, Upon thy Bosom’s snowy swell, To bid the streamy Lightnings fly, In liquid peril from thine Eye. And to each Heart decree The triumph of Simplicity. As Labbe suggests, the swell of Wells’s ‘snowy breast conveys uncomplicated desire: the reader’s eyes are directed at a body part, the mind encouraged to conjure an erotic image’ (2000: 47). The Wells presented in this deeply ironic puff poem bears very little resemblance to the sociable, worldly woman who ‘loved to oppose all the tastes and customs of the world’. But by focusing on Wells’s professional persona, rather than her public performances, Della Crusca clearly hopes to provide readers with an alternative narrative for understanding the actress and for enjoying her charms. A rather more humorous take on Wells’s public persona can be seen in the poetic letter of ‘Aunt BRIDGET to her sister MARGARET, mother of SIMKIN and SIMON’, published in the World on 25 June 1789. This poem is one of the numerous ‘Simpkin’ poems published in the World over the course of the late 1780s and 90s written by Ralph Broome, who had recently returned from India where he had worked as a Judge Advocate and a Persian translator in the Bengal Army.7 The Simpkin poems became a popular draw card for the World in the years immediately following the defection of Della Crusca, Anna Matilda (Hannah Cowley) and many of their poetic followers to rival paper the Oracle in 1789. Simpkin’s poems take as their subject the highly theatrical impeachment of Warren Hastings, former Governor General of Bengal, and they are written in the form of poetical letters: predominantly those sent by ‘Simpkin’ to his brother ‘Simon’ back in Wales. Occasionally, however, other family members take up the pen, and in this letter published on 25 June 1789, Simpkin and Simon’s Aunt Bridget reports on her own experience of attending the trial, where she encounters Mrs Wells (no doubt attending in her capacity as the World’s correspondent): There I found Mrs. WELLS, who, for new Imitations, Might challenge with safety all COUNTRIES and NATIONS. With resemblance surprising, she imitates all The SPEAKERS that figure in WESTMINSTER HALL. When, like Fox, I observe her all veh’ment to speak, She has got to the life—his rat tat and his squeak.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 399

17/11/17 5:02 PM

400

claire knowles

When she imitates EDMUND, the Irishman’s tone Is so like, that you’d swear ’twas the ORATOR’s own: ... But what will surprise you still more than the rest, —And I solemnly tell you it is not a jest— She wrote twenty lines, and I stood by the while, Exactly in SIMKIN’S own manner and style: And as SIMKIN acknowledg’d he could not write better, He stole them to fill up a space in his Letter. The people who heard her, are led to suppose That as soon as the Trial shall draw to a close, She’ll exhibit her CHARACTERS all on the Stage— Where she never can fail to amuse and engage. One proof of her merit, must all people strike, Which is, vulgar papers express their dislike. Till CHARACTER rises in fame and renown, ENVY’s never employ’d in the pulling it down— It is difficult to see this amusing account of Wells’s great powers of mimicry, focused on the characters of Hastings’s impeachers and deployed in the rather unlikely setting of Westminster, as being anything other than a publicity puff for the actress. In fact, the poem seems specifically designed to counter the narratives offered by the rival ‘vulgar papers’ that, as part of their campaign against the World, had mercilessly satirised Wells. The Morning Star, for example, had as recently as 1 June, published a coarse anecdote titled ‘Topham and Becky’ ridiculing the relationship between the two editors of the rival paper: From BECKY WELLS to CAPTAIN TOPHAM NEDDY, By the living Jingo, if you don’t couple me in my summer tour, where I am to be hawked about with REYNOLDS, I’ll play hell.—Dare you, ye dog, say no. ANSWER My dearest Beck, You know I am your slave. I have sent you ENTICK’s dictionary; and as you are in fact EDITOR of the paper, write what you please. Send me my NEXT PUFF about yourself. The writer of this anecdote clearly intends to feminise Topham by suggesting that Wells is the real power behind the paper, and to link Wells with prostitution by suggesting that she will be ‘hawked about’ by Reynolds in her summer tour. The puffery in Simpkin’s poem becomes even more self-evident less than a week later when, on 1 July the poet admits that Becky Wells does regularly assist him with his letters. And now, my Dear Simon, I hope you’ll excuse My dullness this time if I fail to amuse; The LADY who formerly us’d to assist,

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 400

17/11/17 5:02 PM

the woman behind the man behind the WORLD

401

To recal to my mind any point that I mist; To whose good understanding, sound judgement and taste, I submitted the lines which I scribbl’d in haste; Who expung’d all the parts she consider’d unfit, And their places suppl’d from the stores of her wit, To CHELTHEHAM has fled!— Highfill et al. note that Wells performed in Cheltenham in the summers of 1788 and 1789 (1993: 348) and it is notable that the Simpkin poems appear more regularly in the World during periods when Wells was away from London. Wells’s key role in Simpkin’s poetical account of the Hastings trial is a reflection both of her literary and journalistic abilities and of the significance of her status as one of the key editorial figures at the World. It is clear that Wells felt that she had a stake in the success of Simpkin’s poems, and this is reflected in the editorial control she appears to have exercised over them. The marshalling of poets like Della Crusca and Aunt Bridget in support of Wells and her stage career also reflects the possibilities for cross-genre publicity being opened up in the increasingly popular literary space of the daily papers in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. Gillian Russell suggests that ‘the press was important in the process whereby the masculinist culture of the clubs and taverns, linked to the republic of letters, “staked out” its relationship to the alternative feminised public sphere of the world of fashion’ (2007: 15). While this is undoubtedly true, the World takes this process one step further by deliberately aligning itself with the feminised world of fashion and theatre through its close association with Mary Wells.

Poetry, Heterosexual Romance and the Feminisation of the World Betsy Bolton reminds us that although discussions of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’ tend to divide the realm of ‘rational-critical debate’ between the male domains of the coffee house, newspaper, and parliament and the feminised realm of the novel, ‘theatre, ignored by historians and critics alike as a degraded form, offered an intermediate public sphere, producing political fictions and commentary in a mixedgender, mixed-class setting’ (2001: 4). I suggest here that one of the ramifications of the World’s close association with the theatre via Topham and Wells was that it became one of the first papers to be more closely aligned with the ‘intermediate public sphere’ of the Georgian theatre, than it was with the traditionally male-dominated world of the newspaper. Through her participation in the World, Mary Wells was able to shape the way in which news of her public activities was presented to the public. But more than this, Wells’s key role as editor of and writer for Topham’s paper, combined with her successful career on the stage, gave her access to a type of social mobility that was denied to most women. Wells’s association with the World enabled her to move with ease between the realms of politics, theatre, and literature. James Gillray’s 1789 caricature, ‘Hyde-Park, Sunday, or both Hemispheres of the World in a Sweat’ (see Plate 1), emphasises the mobility and visibility offered to Wells through her association with the World by picturing her riding ostentatiously through

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 401

17/11/17 5:02 PM

402

claire knowles

Hyde Park with Topham and William Douglas, the fourth Duke of Queensbury, commonly referred to, rather unflatteringly, in prints and caricatures as ‘Old Quiz’. The text at the bottom of the etching begins: The World—and all the great which it inherit—was there—Equestrian motion universal—we saw all—mark’d all!—the Duelist with one Curl & the Fraternal one degree higher, down to the intelligencers of the Low Prints (who cast their eyes around, that witnessed huge affliction & dismay); all was splendid—who (& what dignity but concerned in that monosyllable?) not present?—Becky—was there!!— attraction spontaneous!—. The editorial team of Wells and Topham is presented here as a public spectacle, a spectacle that is perhaps unable to be matched by the dismayed ‘intelligencers of the Low Prints’ (that is, the newspapers that were in direct, and rather vicious, competition with the World). The idea that Wells and Topham and the paper to which they were attached set the style for the ton is reinforced by the fact that ‘Mans mercers & Womans mercers’ have hurried to the scene, eager, one supposes, to find inspiration for their future creations in the fashionable dress on display in Rotten Row. The excitement generated by the unlikely editorial combination of the dashing horse guard (pictured in the print in military uniform and with his signature flamboyant hat and whip) and his striking actress-mistress reflects the edge that the fashionable World had over its more conventional print competitors. The unconventional heterosexual relationship at the centre of the World’s editorial team was, of course, mirrored in the heterosexual (non-)relationship at the centre of the extraordinarily popular serialised love poems of Della Crusca and Anna Matilda (Hannah Cowley) that played a large role in the paper’s early success. The popularity of what came to be known as the ‘Della Cruscan’ school of poetry inspired a host of other poets to publish in the World and in doing so to establish it as the ‘Paper of Poetry’.8 In his infamous satire of Della Cruscanism, The Baviad and Mæviad (1797), William Gifford suggests that the puffing editorial introductions to the work of poets like Della Crusca and Anna Matilda played an instrumental role in the success both of the World and of Della Cruscan poetry more generally. Gifford notes that while poetry had long ‘claimed a prescriptive right to infest most periodical publications’, the editors of these publications had never before sought to guide public taste. A paper, therefore, that introduced their trash with hyperbolical encomiums, and called on the town to admire it, was an acquisition of the utmost importance to these poor people, and naturally became the grand depository of their lucubrations. (1797: x) It is worth pointing out that the ‘hyperbolical encomiums’ that Gifford is so critical of here bear a striking similarity to the prologues and epilogues that bookended performances in the eighteenth-century theatre and that were often reprinted in the daily newspapers. Bolton highlights the importance of prologues and epilogues to a performance, noting ‘a witty prologue could earn a play a favourable hearing; a skilfully written and delivered epilogue could save an unpopular play from being “damned”’ (2001: 13). While Gifford obviously disapproves of Topham and Wells’s

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 402

17/11/17 5:02 PM

the woman behind the man behind the WORLD

403

decision to import promotional tactics perfected in the theatre to the realm of literature, there can be little doubt that the couple’s combined experience in writing and performing for the stage played a significant role in the successful way in which the poetry published in the World was promoted to its audience. By deliberately associating the world of theatre with the world of poetry the World opened up an important space for poetry written by women within the confines of the daily newspaper. Judith Pascoe notes that the ‘theatrical components of Della Cruscan self-presentation and poetic style allowed women writers a visible place in the literary culture of the early 1790s’ (1997: 72). But the space of the paper itself was also congenial to the promotion of female literary endeavour. For a female poet who might have been anxious about the ramifications of publishing her work, the World provided two potential means of alleviating this anxiety: the puffing introduction (a feature bestowed on many, although not all, of the poems it published), and the ability to write under an appropriately theatrical pseudonym. It is not surprising, then, that a number of female poets, including Cowley, Mary Robinson (‘Oberon’, ‘Laura’, ‘Laura Maria’, and others) and Henrietta Vaughn (‘Cesario’) found the newspaper a particularly lively space to develop their literary careers. I would not want to suggest that it was Wells alone who was responsible for the increasing feminisation of the fashionable daily newspaper in the 1780s and 1790s. Nonetheless, it is clear that the sensibility that both Wells and Topham brought with them from the stage to the World helped to make the daily paper into a space that actively encouraged female participation, and that attempted, through an increased focus on popular poetry and the theatre, to cater for the interests of a growing number of female readers. In his account of his time at the World, Topham suggests that it is not surprising, given that he was in love with Wells, that he (through the newspaper) ‘would devise every method to become serviceable to her interests and dramatic character, and think his time and talents never better spent than in advancing the reputation of her he loved’ (Topham 1805: 205). But, of course, the strategy that Topham and Wells adopted in the World to advance the actress’s career was one that could be adopted with equal success by other women hoping to advance their literary or theatrical fame through the newspapers. Mary Robinson, for example, undoubtedly learned a great deal about the strategies for self-promotion offered by the newspaper during her time writing poetry for the World and the Oracle and she used these strategies to great effect once she became the poetry editor of the Morning Post in 1799. Pascoe writes, ‘Robinson the performing poet was well served by the theatrical poetic medium provided by the Post, which gave her a stage, an eclectic audience, and a steady supply of dramatic material’ (1997: 183). A background in the theatre thus became a distinct advantage for women like Wells and Robinson who at once understood the significance of cross-media promotion, while also recognising the importance of catering to the desires of a diverse audience.

The End of the World By 1788, Mary Wells appears to have been ‘dividing her favours between Topham, with whom she was still living, and the dramatist, Frederick Reynolds’ (Werkmeister 1963: 168). In 1790, the actress gave birth to a child two months early in consequence ‘of a fright I received, occasioned by a duel being fought between two gentlemen

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 403

17/11/17 5:02 PM

404

claire knowles

on my account, from some expressions dropped respecting me. Mr. Reynolds, the dramatist, was one of the seconds’ (Sumbel 1811, vol. 1: 84). In the account given in her Memoirs, it was while Wells was ill after her unexpected delivery that she overheard a servant talking about Topham’s new amour, ‘a lady, whom I ever conceived my bosom friend’ (1811, vol. 1: 85). According to the actress, the shock of this led to her being immediately seized with a milk fever that, in the words of Topham, ‘disordered her brain’ (Topham 1805: 207). Wells was sent, by Topham it seems, to recuperate from this bout of mental instability at the house of the king’s physician, Dr Willis. There is some question as to whether Wells might have actually used this stay with Willis not to recuperate from mental illness, but rather to ‘elicit sympathy [after her break with Topham] and avoid being arrested for debt’ (see Engel 2008: 193). Whatever the case, Topham and Wells’s relationship never really recovered. Once his relationship with Wells disintegrated beyond repair, Topham professed to have no longer had much interest in maintaining his relationship with the World. He writes: They who have known what the daily supply, the daily toil, the daily difficulty, the hourly danger, and the incessant tumult of a morning paper is, can alone know the chaos of the brain in which a man lives who has all this to undergo. Terror walks before him: fatigue bears him down: libels encompass him, and distraction attacks him on every side. He must be a literary man, and a commercial man: he must be a political man, and a theatrical man; and must run through all the changes from a pantomime to a prime minister. What every man is pursuing, he must be engaged in; and from the very nature and ‘front of his offence’, he must be acquainted with all the wants, the weaknesses, and wickedness, from one end of London to the other. (208–9) Topham’s account intimates, I think, that he lost interest in the paper once the principal responsibility for running it fell to him, and not to Wells. And it was quite a responsibility. Werkmeister notes that ‘On 1 July 1790, Topham was tried in the Court of King’s Bench for libel on the memory of Earl Cowper and was convicted’ (1963: 209). At the same time, he was being pursued for payment of an annuity by one of shareholders in the paper, the Rev. Charles Este (who had taken over John Bell’s shares when he left the paper to begin the Oracle) (Werkmeister 1963: 209). While a woman as well connected and vivacious as Wells might have relished being ‘acquainted with all the wants, the weaknesses, and the wickedness, from one end of London to the other’, Topham preferred a quieter life. Once his tenure at the World was up, he ‘lived two hundred miles from the metropolis, without once visiting it during the space of six whole years’ (Topham 1805: 209). Over the course of the early 1790s, Topham gradually distanced himself from the paper he had founded, and the once-trendsetting paper ceased publication altogether in 1794. The ebbs and flows of romantic love appear, then, to have played a key role in the shifting fortunes of the World. Not only was the relationship between Topham and Wells central to the paper’s success but so, of course, were the extraordinarily popular serialised love poems of Della Crusca and Anna Matilda. When that particular poetic love affair cooled in 1789 (after an apparently none-too-inspiring real life meeting between Merry and Cowley) the two poets and a number of their followers were

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 404

17/11/17 5:02 PM

the woman behind the man behind the WORLD

405

wooed over to Bell’s rival paper the Oracle. The Oracle went on to become the chief repository for Della Cruscan poetry and the World began its slow decline. The World was, for a brief moment in the late 1780s, the most popular newspaper in London. ‘It was looked to as a repository for all the best writers of the day’ and ‘it gave the tone to politics’ (Topham 1805: 207). It provided a vehicle for the publication and promotion of female writers and actresses, it made fashions, and it bent people’s noses out of joint. But the World, as a result of the innovative editorial stewardship of Topham and Wells, had an impact on the cultural life of London much greater than its own short lifespan might suggest. The paper that was, at least according to Topham, begun to launch the career of one actress and her lover, irrevocably changed the shape of the literary marketplace in the 1780s and 1790s. The author would like to thank Kim Baston for her perceptive reading of an early draft of this chapter.

Notes 1. See Habermas 1991. In this much-critiqued book, Habermas argues that the newspaper, along with the male-only institutions of the club and coffee house, became important centres for the construction of a bourgeois public sphere. 2. For example, Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson. 3. Warren Hastings, the former governor general of Bengal, was impeached for ‘high crime and misdemeanors’ in 1786. The case was brought before the House of Lords on 13 February 1785, and he was eventually acquitted of all charges in 1795. For a more detailed account of this trial see O’Quinn 2005. 4. According to Bonds, ‘On 11 February 1797 the Telegraph listed Robinson among forty-two others who “pay to have their names puffed in the newspapers”’ (2013: 44). 5. The World has no page numbers. 6. For more detailed discussion of this poem, see Knowles 2009: 35. 7. See Burney 1973 for biographical information about Ralph Broome. 8. For a more detailed account of the Della Cruscan phenomenon see McGann 1996; Pascoe 1997; Labbe 2000; and Gamer 2003.

Works Cited Bernard, John. 1830. Retrospections of the Stage by the Late John Bernard, manager of the American Theatres and formerly secretary to the Beef-Steak Club, in two volumes. London: Henry Colburn. Bolton, Betsy. 2001. Women, Nationalism and the Romantic Stage: Theatre and Politics in Britain, 1780–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bonds, Leigh. 2013. ‘The Power of the Puff: Mary Robinson’s Celebrity and the Success of Walsingham’. The CEA Critic 75.1: 44–50. Burney, Fanny. 1973. The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame D’Arblay). Vol. 4. Ed. Joyce Hemlow. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Engel, Laura. 2008. ‘Notorious Celebrity: Mary Wells, Madness and Theatricality’. EighteenthCentury Women: Studies in Their Lives, Work and Culture 5: 185–209. Fyvie, John. 1906. Comedy Queens of the Georgian Era. London: Archibald Constable. Gamer, Michael. 2003. ‘“Bell’s Poetics”: The Baviad, the Della Cruscans, and the Book of The World’. The Satiric Eye: Forms of Satire in the Romantic Period. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 31–53.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 405

17/11/17 5:02 PM

406

claire knowles

Gifford, William. 1797. The Baviad and Mæviad. London: J. Wright. Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Highfill, Philip H., Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans. 1993. A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800. Vol. 15: Tibbet to M. West. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Knowles, Claire. 2009. Sensibility and Female Poetic Tradition, 1780–1860: The Legacy of Charlotte Smith. Farnham: Ashgate. Labbe, Jacqueline. 2000. The Romantic Paradox: Love, Violence and the uses of Romance, 1760–1830. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. McGann, Jerome. 1996. The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style. Oxford: Clarendon Press. O’Quinn, Daniel. 2005. Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London 1770–1800. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pascoe, Judith. 1997. Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry and Spectatorship. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Reynolds, Frederick. 1792. Notoriety: A Comedy. Dublin: P. Byend. Robinson, Daniel. 2011. The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Russell, Gillian. 2007. Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sumbel, Leah (Mary Wells). 1811. Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Sumbel, late Wells: of the Theatres-royal, Drury-lane, Covent-garden, and Haymarket, in three volumes. London: Printed for C. Chapple. Topham, Edward. 1805. ‘Major Topham’. Public Characters of 1805, volume 7. London: Richard Phillips. 198–212. Werkmeister, Lucyle. 1963. The London Daily Press, 1772–1792. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press. The World, or Fashionable Gazette. 1787–97. London.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-05.indd 406

17/11/17 5:02 PM

Part VI Fashion, Theatre, and Celebrity

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 407

17/11/17 5:03 PM

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 408

17/11/17 5:03 PM

Fashion, Theatre, and Celebrity: Introduction

M

ore self-consciously than any other print forms in the long eighteenth century, the periodical, newspaper, and magazine were commercial genres. As new media and as multi-media publications, they played a key role in what Neil McKendrick famously called the ‘consumer revolution’ to which the period bore witness (McKendrick et al. 1982). Vying for space in a literary marketplace that was overcrowded and often ruthlessly competitive, periodicals adopted various marketing strategies to sell themselves to potential subscribers, readers, and library borrowers, not the least of which was persuading them that in buying their contents they were purchasing more than mere words. In addition to purveying information and ideas, periodicals, newspapers, and magazines sold other commodities in the form of advertisements, reviews and notices of books and theatrical productions, fashion plates, embroidery patterns, maps, illustrations, as well as elegant engravings of household interiors and celebrated (or sometimes notorious) men and women. In the process, then as now, periodicals sold the promise that they could educate their readers in recreational commerce: that is, in how to become fashionable, discerning, and canny consumers of books, the arts, luxury items, and everyday necessities. It would be wrong to assume that this education targeted only women readers, but the consuming habits periodicals championed and condemned were undeniably bifurcated along gendered lines. Several previous studies of eighteenth-century periodicals have focused on the genre’s construction of the female consumer they both cultivated and scapegoated for various socio-economic ills. Indeed, so synonymous has the eighteenth-century periodical become with commerce that women who enjoyed periodicals – and especially the magazines that flourished in the last third of the century – are often referred to not as readers, but as consumers who in perusing the magazines’ contents bought into particular ideas about the scope or limits of their economic agency and their value as women (see, for instance, Maurer 2010: 166). The essays in this part of the book – in keeping with this volume as a whole – contest the erroneous, yet damagingly persistent, narrative that early women magazine readers were merely passive consumer of fashions or goods any more than they were of conventional gender ideologies. They reframe this conversation by examining closely the relationship among printed periodicals, their paratexts, and other media, in order to demonstrate the diverse forms of cultural production in which they enabled the women who wrote, managed, read, and advertised in them to participate. Several of the essays in this section follow Barbara Benedict’s lead in examining how women’s connection to domesticity and the body was a site of potential privilege as well as limitation in eighteenth-century serial publications. Benedict’s essay brings into view the little-known women physicians who capitalised on their gender, and the opportunities opened up by the rise of literacy and serial publications in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, to advertise their expertise, cures, and cosmetic recipes. Chloe Wigston Smith’s and Serena Dyer’s essays shift our focus from

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 409

17/11/17 5:03 PM

410

part vi: introduction

producer to consumer and fast-forward to the other end of the late eighteenth century to illuminate how embroidery patterns and fashion plates in the Lady’s Magazine: or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770–32) and its higher-end rivals and the images of furniture and shops and textile swatches in Rudolf Ackerman’s Repository of Arts (1809–28) imagined their readers as ‘productive’ consumers. Equipped with the skills, as well as the practical, visual, and haptic knowledge these publications cultivated, their readers were enabled to engage in acts of self-production through the making and purchasing of goods that, in Smith’s words, turned ‘print into bodily experience’. The periodical’s reach beyond its printed pages is attested to in the final two essays in this section, which expose the fascinating intersections of periodical, the theatre, court, and celebrity. Nush Powell’s chapter reveals that while the histories of the periodical and theatre were complexly intertwined from the former’s inception, Frances Brooke’s brilliant and experimental Old Maid (1755–6) uniquely capitalised on their relationship in order to ‘inscribe women as the proper guardians of their nation’s performative poetics’, styling herself, in the process, as the ‘actor-managerauthor’ of her innovative periodical production. Women’s claims to fame, visibility, and cultural authority are revisited from a different but complementary perspective in Laura Engel’s final chapter in this section, which demonstrates how the portraits of actresses and members of the royal family that circulated widely and inexpensively in late-century periodicals promoted forms of identification and self-styling that disrupted conventional gendered dynamics of looking and seeing. Collectively, all five essays attest to the multiple forms of agency women assumed when they read, managed, contributed to, or otherwise helped to style this most fashionable of eighteenth-century genres.

Works Cited Maurer, Shawn Lisa. 2010. ‘The Periodical’. The History of British Women’s Writing, vol. 4 1690–1750. Ed. Ros Ballaster. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 156–72. McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and John Harold Plumb. 1982. The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England. London: Europa.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 410

17/11/17 5:03 PM

26 Advertising Women: Gender and the Vendor in the Print Culture of the Medical Marketplace, 1660–1830 Barbara M. Benedict

A

dvertising as a printed form in Britain came to life in the Restoration and grew into a formidable genre in the capitalistic world of early eighteenth-century Britain (Cody 1999: 103). Especially in London, vendors of anything from coins to coaches, soap to schooling, touted their wares on the handbills and newspapers distributed at coffee houses and affixed to walls; the Daily Advertiser (1730/1–96) posted its first four issues (3, 4, 5, 6 Feb 1730) on public pillars and gave out free copies (issue 18 (22 Feb 1731); Harris 1987: 51). Read for pleasure and profit, these documents provided serialised entertainment as well as information (Domingo 2016: 19). Indeed, Restoration newspapers contained virtually no news, and consisted mainly of advertisements, becoming so inexpensive for advertisers and profitable for papers that they came by the third decade of the eighteenth century to occupy some third of all a paper’s columns.1 When the Daily Advertiser appeared in 1730, it presented advertising as news. The paper grew so successful and imitators replicated the term ‘Advertiser’ so often that it lost the meaning of information ‘by means of a public announcement in a journal or by a circular’ to become commonplace.2 Still, the two main aspects of advertisements, information and print, whether on handbills or in newspapers, make it a key genre in the literary culture of the long eighteenth century. From the Restoration to the first third of the eighteenth century, the two commodities most commonly advertised were medical cures and books, which later outstripped cures. Along with medicines came physicians, licensed and not, apothecaries, and healers. While most were men, women physicians also practised, and customers of both genders sought service and solutions from both. These physicians confronted several problems: competition, the anonymity of the metropolis, and the transformation of what had been, especially for the underclasses, a free service into a commodity (Porter 1989: 21; King 2006: 72). Printed advertisements provided a solution: issued serially, they could keep the vendor’s name in consumers’ sight, while descriptions of the seller, the services, and the medicines allowed for introduction and persuasion. Women physicians, however, faced more difficulty as medicine became the province of male professionals in the late seventeenth century (Beier 1987: 217). At the same time, women were beginning to constitute an important market. Studies of later eighteenth-century consumption have long noted the identification of women with luxurious items, especially those concerning the body like cosmetics, dresses, potions, and comestibles (Kowaleski-Wallace 1997: 5; Raven 1993: 108). Nonetheless, although women

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 411

17/11/17 5:03 PM

412

barbara m. benedict

proportionately published more than men after 1641, early advertisements by and for women remain an understudied category (Crawford 1984: 66). When and how did these early advertisements identify or solicit consumers by gender? This essay analyses the representations and self-representations of women medical practitioners in handbills and newspaper advertisements from 1660 to 1751. It argues that the rough-and-tumble world of advertisement provided women with opportunities to capitalise on their gendered physicality. Nevertheless, it was an enterprise fraught with social difficulties, because of what Catherine Gallagher has identified as gender-related prejudice opposing writing and femininity (1994: passim). Kathryn Shevelow argues that early periodicals represent women as ‘different in kind rather than degree from men’, and as ‘writing subjects of their own discourse, published as a discourse of private life’ (1989: 3, 15). Medical ads by women physicians share this ambiguous position as simultaneously participants in the public world, the printed marketplace, and as privileged or limited by their special connection to domesticity, and particularly to the body, which was rapidly becoming sanitised out of polite discourse (Cody 1999: 108). Print becomes the means to compete in the world of quasi-professional medicine.

Gender and the Vendor Advertising medicine was particularly suited to women sellers and consumers because its publicity paradoxically allowed privacy. Traditionally a female practice since the body constituted the area of women’s expertise, early modern physicians occupied a fraught cultural space (Pelling 2003: 191). By putting the physical body at the forefront, these advertisements enabled women to use their very physicality as a source of cultural authority, especially since women were legally prohibited from prescribing medicine, although actually many made a living from it (King 2006: 70–1). Early modern British women of all classes engaged in healing practices: nursing, midwifery, concocting medicines, practising magical healing, and even writing medical books (Pelling and Webster 1979: 234–5; Crawford 1984: 66). Whether they touted learned home remedies for minor ills, or folk healing practices, these advertisements suggest that the emergence of modern, masculine science did not eradicate their ancient claim to bodily knowledge (Porter 1989: 82; King 2006: 72). Indeed, like female-authored periodicals, women’s medical ads forefront the practitioner’s gender to announce a specifically female point of view, playing off male models (Shevelow 1989: 21). At the same time, female vendors promised female consumers privacy by selling through the post, or providing private consultations. Advertisements obeyed fairly static conventions. They relied on ‘Continuity and design recognition’, as well as conventions of rhetorical presentation, and printers produced both as shopkeepers and entrepreneurs commissioned them (Raven 1993: 103). At the same time, advertisers frequently use novelty as a tactic to attract customers (Gotti 2005: 28): medical ads might claim a physician has ‘lately arrived’. The language, often employing the third person – a particularly useful formality for women – was polite, respectable, and wordy, designed especially in newspapers for a genteel and leisured reader.3 Much of the wordiness arose from the always-multiple litanies of the diseases cured by the physician or the product (Keller 2004: 2). Much also came from physicians’ self-touting, which unlike most ads may use first-person

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 412

17/11/17 5:03 PM

advertising women

413

declarations. All advertisements include, foremost, the seller, then often the price, and also a description of what they are advertising and the location of their practice or product, usually prominently displayed in a different and frequently larger font from the descriptive paragraph either at the top or the bottom of the ad (Keller 2004: 71). Medical ads in particular use two main formulae: if the practitioner had a regular shop, the location appears prominently at the head of the ad with very specific directions since many shops and vendors dwelt in and around Holborn, where competing establishments hung differently coloured balls signalling their wares; itinerant practitioners announce their times and locations at the foot. Medical practitioners relied on printed advertisements to keep customers informed of their often-changing places of practice and to tout the superiority of their offerings, and many, such as Cornelius à Tilburg and Dr Wells, regularly commissioned new handbills or reruns of older ones (Longman 1971: 10; Sandage 1961: 147). Indeed, as advertisement and stamp duties rose during the eighteenth century, advertising rhetoric itself became a commodity (Mason 2013: 31; McIntosh 1998: 34) For example, J. Hodson, MD, purveyor of Parisian Vegetable Syrup to cure venereal disease in youths and Persian Restorative Drops, goes so far as to patent his own advertisements and to publish ‘Medical facts and Advertisements’, a pamphlet deriding imitators: [Since] Persons calling themselves Physicians, but incapable of writing their own Advertisements or Pamphlets, having taken the liberty of copying and adopting mine, I have thought it necessary, in order to prevent such Piracy in the future, to have them entered at Stationers Hall: Therefore whoever, from the date hereof, shall copy any passage or sentence from this or any other existing Advertisement or Pamphlet published by me, will be subject to Prosecution . . . Dr. Hodson purposely avoids all that parade and bombast in his advertisements which are calculated more to allure the unwary multitude than to inform the man of sense: – He wishes to address himself to the rational faculty, rather than to the passions. (3–4) Hodson’s proclamation illustrates the importance of advertisers – especially those describing bodily matters – to retain polite diction in a world becoming increasingly concerned with linguistic decorum (McIntosh 1998: 106). Crucially, these debates take place entirely in the unbodied marketplace of print. Many men also used literary techniques, especially satire, both to ensnare customers through entertainment and to mount a gentlemanly posture. For example, Robert Bateman, locked in a battle with his rival Blagrave to prove himself ‘the true Preparer of the Right Approved Spirits of Scurvy-Grass’, published an advertisement that illustrates the bond advertisers sought to forge with readers. In A GENTLE DOSE for the FOOL turn’d Physician, or, A Brief Reply to Blagraves Ravings, Bateman characterises himself as a gentleman, and flatters readers as ‘serious’ correspondents: I must beg the serious Reader’s Pardon, for Condescending to answer this Clamorous Impertinent, It being in Effect but to Syllogize to an Oyster wench, or Wrastle [sic] with a Chimney Sweeper . . . but since the Interest and Health (nay, lives) of people are Concern’d, to prevent his dangerous Imposing on the Vulgar, who are apt to mistake Railing for Reason, Noise for Victory, and count him that has the last word

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 413

17/11/17 5:03 PM

414

barbara m. benedict

Unanswerable; I have prevailed with my self to bestow a little pains upon him, and that partly in Charity; Because Correction being generally a necessary part in the Cure of a Mad-man, who knows but this may do him Good? (C. 237, f. 76) Bateman’s witty parallelisms, alliteration, and rhetorical questions give his advertisement a literary stamp, which he subsequently reinforces by accusing Blagrave of false logic and deceit in his advertisements. The two quacks thus engage in a printed duel equivalent to that of the astrologer John Partridge and his nemesis, Jonathan Swift. Women, however, eschew literary rhetoric, especially satire. This may be because its aggressiveness and irony can easily turn on the speaker, and women make more vulnerable targets than men. Instead, some ‘gentlewomen’ adopt a sentimental rhetoric that claims a moral, even divine, imperative for healing: it is God, rather than any professional, who authorises and authenticates their skills. For example, Sarah Cornelius de Heusde, ‘Widdow of Dr. Sasbout, and Grand-mother of the Doctor that had his Stage upon Great Tower-Hill, and did so many Cures before the Fire’, opens her ad almost as a prayer: Loving Reader, God Almighty hath not created, Man for himself, neither for his own ends, but hath given him a natural affection to love his Fellowes, and loving them to cure them by all means; and whereas I have many Sciences and Mysteries of nature, as likewise particular Experiences, new Inventions, natural secret Arts. . . . could I not forbear to cause these to be printed for to make me known unto every one, without which it would be too long before I should be known. It may be some will say, that this my Science is but a deceitful enterprize, as there are some old Women and Midwifes, who sometimes have a little Book, out of which they gather their Sciences, whereby they intend to cure all men: But it is not so with me, who have learned these my Sciences of my Father and Husband, who werre [sic] both Physicians . . . And whereas many Women became to be subject unto the hereafter specified Diseases, and for shames sake, remained hidden, because they durst not discover them to any Physician, whereby they were forced to remain in their misery: Therefore my Father and Husband were necessitated to discover such Diseases unto me, and to teach me the curing thereof; whereby (under Gods blessing) I have restored above a thousand Women and young Maidens. (f. 16) This ad combines several of women’s characteristic tactics for claiming authority. Its declaration of disinterestedness evokes the seventeenth-century ideal of the selfless and charitable ‘Good Woman’ healer, who avoids competition with men or encroachment on their territory but lives to serve others (King 2006: 74). In addition, this discourse harkens to the traditional practice of women as village healers who would not only concoct their own medicines, but treat their families, household members, neighbours, and community for free. Although she cures all diseases, like all female physicians de Heusde primarily treats women’s problems. These include not only physical problems concerning fertility but psychological and emotional maladies that appear more often associated with women than men. As she explains, ‘There is also another kind of Disease when the Mellancholy is not purged so that a body alwayes is very sorry and occasionally troubled with heavy thoughts;

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 414

17/11/17 5:03 PM

advertising women

415

wherefore I have cured many that were come so far, that they were in a rage, or mad; so that they endeavoured to kill themselves, or another.’ This condition, although not limited to women, renders the patient so vulnerable that she would need the expertise of a female doctor. Finally, de Heusde defends herself against claims of magic and superstition by declaring quasi-formal training at home. The sheer length of her defence testifies to the fragility of women physicians’ position and the advantages of the printed marketplace. Uniquely, women healers like Sarah Cornelius de Heusde address their readers affectionately, and sometimes in these cases also use the first person. This creates the illusion of an intimacy characteristic of the households and families in which village women or midwives practised their medicine. In another example, ‘I, Willemina Sasbout van Soeburgh’ combines the conventional claim of exotic experience with the claim of moral obligation: Beloved READER Being but lately come into this Kingdom, I do according to my duty, make my self known unto you all by this present Paper, which without the same, might otherwise be many years before I be known, and so hindred from the exercise of true Christian duties unto my Neighbours, seeing it hath pleased the Almighty God to bestow such mercies of Knowledge upon [me] . . . with the which I have cured many thousands of Women and maids . . . to the glory of God and the benefit of your Health. (f. 138) Typically, this physician excuses her use of print on the basis of her benign purpose. A further way to acquire respectability as a female physician was by proclaiming a relationship with a male one. Most often, as in the case of Sarah Cornelius de Heusde, the male relatives were husbands or fathers, whose livelihood relied on the help of their female relatives but were often deceased because of the late marriages typical of male physicians (Porter 1989: 84; Pelling 1995: 400). Sometimes these women were advertised as the delicate alternative to their male relatives. The German doctor at Boat-and-Spatterdash near Drury Lane, for example, adds: ‘If any Woman be unwilling to speak to me, they may have the conveniency of speaking to my Wife who is expert in all womens Distempers’ (551.a.32, f. 51). Another doctor’s wife declares, ‘She has been prevailed with to use this way of Publication, that many Women, who, through Modesty, are unwilling to let a Common Physician know their Distempers, may know where lives one of their Sex, by whom they may be help’d to a Private, Speedy, and Certain Cure’ (f. 187). Again, Margaret Searl, ‘the Surviver [sic] of my Father Edmund Searl, and late Husband Samuel Searl’, claimed to have inherited a treatment for deafness (10 April 1706: 551.a.52, f. 59). By specifying the length of the familial relationship, these ads imply that the female physicians worked under careful and continuous supervision; they thus stand as surrogate male physicians. However, the peculiarly intimate training possible in a familial environment also signifies to customers the women’s particularly close experience of working with and on the body. Sometimes, however, women set up on their own after working as assistants to male practitioners, and in these cases their gender could work to underscore their subservience as service providers, or servants. In one case, at least, the woman rose from a lowly aide to a practising cupper:

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 415

17/11/17 5:03 PM

416

barbara m. benedict

CANBURY COLD BATH, ISLINGTON. This is to acquaint all Ladies and Others, That MARY LUCAS Cups Ladies at Home or Abroad, whenever required. She hopes those Ladies she had the Honour to guide at the late Mr. Jones’s COLD BATH in Newgate-street, will be pleased to employ her; and that those who have since honoured her with their Favours will continue the same, which will be most gratefully acknowledged by their Most Obliged, and most Humble Servant, MARY LUCAS (551.a.32 A Collection of Advertisements, f. 182) By its luxurious spacing, relatively fine production and ceremonial rhetoric – the triple repetition of ‘Ladies’, the terms ‘Honour’ and ‘Favours’ – this handbill signals its designed customers: primarily ‘Ladies’ who may be sure of being treated with obsequious respect and gentility. Women advertisers of medicines faced another problem. Gentleman physicians, licensed and authorised by universities and professional colleges, specified their credentials, and many others claimed degrees and licences – some specified and some not – to imitate their elite rivals. The imprimatur of a foreign university also spoke of both experience and exotic secrets, unique to the lands beyond the Channel. However, although some women, like Mrs Mary Green of Chancery Lane, did acquire official permission to practise medicine, since the official medical colleges were restricted to men, they needed other sources of expertise. Many thus imitated male quacks by inveigling vague foreign credentials only realised by and in print. One distinguished example is ‘a German Gentlewoman’, Anne Laverenst. Heading her series of unusually elaborate advertisements ‘To LADIES, and All others of the FEMALE SEX’ in large letters, she simultaneously announces her qualifications and solicits customers by gender, in effect specifying her expertise in female sexual matters (551.a.32, f. 31; f. 71). While her advertising texts remain the same, the format changes slightly: one (f. 31) is surrounded by ornamental border, and another (f. 26) adorned with two-headed eagle crowned with ‘Cum Priuilegio’ (‘at the King’s pleasure’) spread between heads on either side of crown, clutching a sword and ecclesiastical sceptre in one claw and an orb in the other. In this ad, she also provides physical evidence of her skills: ‘In Arundel-street . . . where you will see a Red-Cloth hang [sic] out at the Balconey, with Coagulated Stones, taken out of the Bodies of the Female Sex’ (f. 26). As well as the usual claim of inherited skill, foreign training, and divine guidance, Anne Leverenst lists the female ills she can cure in great detail. This works to normalise women’s sexual maladies, as well as to identify and explain specifically female suffering in a technique that parallels the litany of complaints that cosmetic-purveyors promise to cure. For example, the ad specifies ‘Suffocation or rising of the Mother’, a common enough complaint, but this advertisement lists its causes: bad food, blockage, disease, or an Imposthumation in the Womb, which may be easily discern’d, for there oftentimes proceed a great Dizziness in the Head, Anguish of Heart, an inclination to Vomit, much rising and rumbling in the Belly, from when oftentimes proceed very fatal Accidents; as Barrenness, Imposthumes, Inflammations of the Lungs, an

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 416

17/11/17 5:03 PM

advertising women

417

Figure 26.1 Woodcut advertisement for Anne Leverenst. © British Library.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 417

17/11/17 5:03 PM

418

barbara m. benedict

unusual Paleness, and shivering in the Limbs, Collick, Strangullion, Obstructions, Wringings, and Tertians of the Guts, &c. (f. 26) Other problems include ‘the greedy desire, and unnatural Appetites that Maids have to Chalk, Coals, &c. and many other destructive things’, and ‘another sort of Sickness, when the Melancholly is not cleans’d and taken away, it occasions Grief and heavy Thoughts, nay sometimes Ragings, and an ill mind towards themselves and others’, adding, ‘There may be other Cures in Women, which Modesty will not permit to be here Inserted.’ These symptoms are so specific that they guarantee Laverenst’s uniquely female experience of women’s maladies. Moreover, Laverenest, like other women physicians, promises to diagnose urine women send to her lodgings if they cannot come, concluding, ‘If any Persons troubled with Distempers, whether through Weakness, or that the nature of the Distemper requires a close Confinement to their Chambers, if desired, they may be lodg’d at my House, and accommodated with all things necessary, at a reasonable Rate.’ Thus, the advertisement deploys public print to assure female readers of Leverenst’s discretion, if not secrecy. Advertisements thus provided yet further privacy for women by their anonymity. Paradoxically public, they could supply the means for women to attain remedies privately (Cody 1999: 109; Porter 1989: 84). Laverenst was not alone in claiming German gentility. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, German universities, especially the University of Leiden, were renowned for medical expertise, and immigrants had long been medical practitioners in Britain (Geyer-Kordesh 1985: 182; Pelling and Webster 1979: 185). However, Laverenst had a particular rival, Elizabeth Maris, ‘the True German Gentlewoman. Lately Arrived’ (f. 49). Her advertisements also demonstrate the importance of print to women physicians’ livelihood: Having but very lately Arriv’d in this Kingdom, and so consequently a Stranger, I would not proposed a better Method to make my self known, than by this Printed paper, without which, I might for some Years have remained unknown to you; and consequently incapable of imploying that Talent which Heaven hath bestow’d on me, to be imploy’d for all your benefits and good. (551.a.25, f. 49) As this rhetoric shows, print bridges the anonymity of the city and permits even modest and pious women to advertise for the ‘benefit and good’ of the public.

Gender and the Consumer Gender also characterises the consumer. Among the most persistent of advertising conventions is that of first-person testimony: this characteristically includes details of the witness’s cure, name, profession, and address, which convey authenticity and accountability, and reveal gender no less that 96 per cent of the time (Keller 2004: 107). These details invite both sexes as customers: male witnesses confirm that even cures by women work on male bodies, while women witnesses signal that the medical vendor can treat even delicate bodies. In addition, expressions of gratitude, especially ‘humble servant’, which almost always appear, work to reinforce the conventional formality of the doctor-patient relationship while signalling the benign superiority of the doctor or medical vendor (Keller 2004: 109; Fries 1997: 57–73). For example, The

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 418

17/11/17 5:03 PM

advertising women

419

London Advertiser and Literary Gazette for March to April 1751 includes an advertisement for, Mrs Pearman, a self-employed physician, whose skills are avowed by two eye-witness sources: James Grace, a chandler in Vine-street, Westminster, and Richard Wate, a carpenter, ‘living in Petty-France, Westminster’ (n. p.). Rather than supplying her own testimony, Mrs Pearman relies on that of her cured patients to introduce her to the faceless public. Women did not only compete with men as medical practitioners; they also concocted and touted cures of their own devising, but by so doing they encroached on male professional ground. The notable case of Mrs Joanna Stephens illustrates both the ways in which women could claim medical authority, and the ways in which these claims were received. Although an amateur without a prior reputation for physic, she devised a cure for gravel and kidney-stones so effective that by an Act of Parliament in 1749 she received the staggering sum of £5,000, and subsequently published her recipe in the Gazette. The physician David Hartley (bap. 1705, d. 1757), who initially proposed the Act, verified her cure by publishing a pamphlet account of ‘Ten Cases of Persons who have taken Mrs. Stephens’s Medicines for the Stone, with an Abstract if some Experiments, tending to Illustrate these Cases’ in 1738, followed the next year by ‘A View of the Present Evidence For and Against Mrs. Stephens’s Medicines, as a Solvent for the Stone. Containing A Hundred and Fifty-five Cases. With some Experiments and Observations. By David Hartley and in 1741 by De Lithontriptico a Joanna Stephens’, which stamped the remedy with the authority of the Royal Society of Surgeons in the language of learning (f. 4). Not all were so enthusiastic. As late as eleven years after the Act, one anonymous author published a satirical pamphlet containing six satires on doctors, medicines, and the business of physicking, but aimed primarily at Stephens. Various Ironic and Serious Discourses on the Subject of Physick (1749) demonstrates the threat that unlicensed physicians and potions posed to the medical establishment (Pelling 2003: 188). In the prefatory Advertisement to the Reader, the author observes: Mrs. Stephens’s Affair . . . well deserves the being maturely considered and properly looked into . . . as the artful rather than sincere Discovery that was made thereof. Then the full Attestation of the C– or Phys–ans. Now whether some might not judge such Attestation and Approbation preferable to the Deploma [sic] of the Degrees of Doctor from the University, is what I shall not determine. Or had her great Patrons got her such by Mandat, it need not more to have been wondered at; nay, nor even had the former thought fit to receive her as one of their own Body . . . The Business of the College of Physicians, is not to examine into the Discoveries and Improvements made in Physick, but to authorize those fit to Practice; or to hinder ignorant Practitioners from doing it (‘Advertisement’: 31) Pretending to disinterested investigation, the author implies that Joanna Stephens manipulated the College of Physicians into, in effect, licensing her as one of their members. While the justification for the satire rests on the need to expose the corruption of the College of Physicians and the profession of medicine, Joanna Stephens’s sex presents an additional insult. The Parliamentary Act itself, he notes, ‘Certainly . . . is the most superlative Complement that could well be made to this Female’: the capitalisation and

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 419

17/11/17 5:03 PM

420

barbara m. benedict

final placement of the term ‘Female’ suggests that the recipient’s gender disqualifies her for the honour (3–4). The use of the term ‘Body’, also capitalised, draws an ironic parallel between the conceptual corpus of the educated physicians and Mrs Stephens’s embodied self. At the end, the author reiterates this rhetoric, urging the authorities to examine ‘upon Oath (in a proper Court of Place) this so very ingenious and so very well-meaning Female’ and to ask where she got the recipe, and attacking the Parliamentary Act for implying, ‘that this Spinster hath acquired a Knowledge of Medicines, and the Skill of preparing them . . . beyond what is known by the Persons learned in the Science of Physick (24, 11). Further attacks on the authority of ‘this so very knowing Lady herself, who thus teaches all the Profession’ similarly emphasise the incongruity of her amateur status and national reputation as an expert, while his speculations on the origins of the remedy pit women’s home-made medicines against those of apothecaries (21). Claiming that he predicted that her main ingredient would be that staple of female housewifery, soap (which does, indeed, form part of her concoction), he accuses her of fraud and conspiracy with a ‘Poss [sic] of veteran Females, not to use the harsh expression of old Women that had all been assembled together, at the contriving, wording and writing, of this most admirable and unparallell’s Receipt’ (23–4). However, women were accorded expertise in one area of medicine, cosmetics, and this comes to dominate their newspaper advertisements by mid-century. Newly popular, luxury products aimed specifically at women, these especially promised to improve skin tone, remove wrinkles and unwanted hair (or restore it), and plump and redden lips. For purveyors of cosmetics, the moral imperative vanishes in face of the social one: beauty needs no justification. In such ads, particularising descriptions of the blemishes cosmetics can cure replace the form’s usual litany of particularised details (Campbell 2002: 251). The Gentlewoman . . . hath a most excellent Wash to Beautifie the Face . . . And also a most delicate Oyntment to anoint the Face so soon as the Small Pox begins to dry, which certainly prevents all Scars or Pits, as also a most excellent Secret to prevent hair from falling, causing it to grow where it is wanting in any part of the Head, and can alter any Red or Gray hair to a most delicate light or dark Brown which will continues [sic] for even without any soil or smooting. She also shapes the Eye brows, taking off the uneven hair, and making them perfectly beautiful, without any pain, and makes low Foreheads as high as you please, taking off the hair so that it shall never come again. (551.a.32, f. 24) As well as ‘a curious red Pomatum to plump and colour the Lips, which keeps them all the Winter from chopping [sic], and a Plaister to take off Hair from any part of the Body’, she has ‘other rare Secrets in Physick, not here to mention’. The narrative detail of symptoms and remedies invites readers perhaps to invent imagined ills, but also to envision other or better-looking selves, a key element of imaginative literature, especially Romantic and sentimental fiction directed at women and featuring delicate, beautiful, and flawless heroines. A further source of quasi-medical authority relatively impervious to the attacks of male physicians and open to female healers was fortune-telling. Traditionally, those practising this skill had also served as healers in country villages: ‘cunning men’ and ‘cunning women’, whose expertise arose from their privileged knowledge of secret arts

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 420

17/11/17 5:03 PM

advertising women

421

and innate second sight (Thomas 1971: 178, 240). Among the most prominent and popular of their abilities was the discovery of lost items; this also constitutes one of the main functions of advertisements (Lamb 2004: 949–67). However, whereas village cunning women were known to all by word of mouth, in the competitive world of the metropolis, they had to advertise themselves. Both the function and form of printed advertisements became a natural substitute. Often, advertisements link this skill with cosmetics through the term ‘art’, and thus present in print a specifically female space in which women can consult on private matters. A serial advertisement for cosmetics in the early issues of the Daily Advertiser for 1731, for example, announces that ‘a Gentlewoman lately arriv’d from abroad, who hath [acquired] by her Experience several curious ARTS, [which] before never was Publish’d’ (issue 18 (Tuesday 23 Feb)). The term ‘curious’ indicates techniques both skilful and rare, implying talents of a quasi-mystical nature, while the capitalised term ‘ARTS’ suggests traditional and secret knowledge. Other ads openly announce second-sight. One such advertisement touts a practitioner available from nine a.m. to nine at night, operating vaguely ‘By Allowance’, and, instead of detailing the advertiser’s credentials, announces that ‘a Gentlewoman, Who (without making any preambles how or from whence she gain’d her Art) is willing to tell the World in few words, that (through the blessing of God) she is to a wonder successful in working a speed cure on those that have either Rickets, or Deafnes’ (C. 237, f. 156) The mysterious origins of her ‘Art’ and the phrase ‘to a wonder’, along with the usual gesture toward piety, ‘through the blessing of God’, hints at miraculous powers and pave the way for the announcement of occult powers. Following the promise of cures, cosmetics, and ‘a most Excellent and Wonderful Art to make the hair grow’ for ‘both rich and poor’, she advertises her magic powers: ‘This same Gentlewoman is always ready to give an answer to any reasonable question that shall be askt her, of what kind soever it be, whether of things past, things now depending, or things to come’ (f. 156). While men may also wish for such answers, by hitching cunning skills to cosmetics the ad effectively winnows them out, and since women more probably than men had questions of a private nature to ask, they would therefore in all likelihood prefer a female confidante. By linking fortune-telling with cosmetics, advertisers solicit women customers. Other advertisements for fortune-telling medical practitioners include examples of specific questions customers might ask that again suggest a largely female clientele: The next Door to the Castle-Tavern . . . liveth a Gentlewoman, who Resolveth these Questions following. Life, whether it be long or short, happy or unhappy? a Person absent, whether dead or alive? if alive, when return? Whether One shall be rich or poor? If rich, when and by what means attain it? A journey if good to go it or no? When the best time is to undertake any thing that you would have prosper? Reports concerning Husbands, Wives, Children, Friends, Ships at Sea, or other things; if true or false? Whether a Woman be with Child or no? if with Child, whether a Male or Female? Whether one shall fall into the danger they fear, or how they may escape it? What kind of person one shall Marry; if Marry the Person desired, and the time when? Whether the Sweet-hearts Portion be great or small? Money owing, if recoverable? Suits at Law, who shall overcome? If one may obtain the preferment they desire,

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 421

17/11/17 5:03 PM

422

barbara m. benedict

and when? A Friend whether real or no? Whether one may obtain what they hope for? And in a word, all other Questions depending upon Astrology, She resolveth: She Calculateth Nativities, according to the exactest Rules yet known . . . She hath all sorts of excellent Medicines . . . she also hath a proper Specifick that cureth Barrenness in Women: and a rare Water which beautifies the Face. (551.a.32, f. 86) Although the list of questions includes matters pertinent to both sexes, the emphasis falls on questions of marriage and childbirth, while the cure for barrenness and cosmetic water that finish the ad address women openly. By the rhetorical device of archaic locutions, the ad also underscores the traditional association between the arts of medicine and astrology. In another example, ‘a Gentlewoman’, living in Fleet street, will ‘(by the Blessing of God upon her Endeavours) resolve to her own Sex all manner of lawful questions, as far as Reason can Require or Art warrant’, and supplies a catalogue of similar questions before concluding with her astrological abilities, ‘most excellent Washes for the face, and skills in shaping eyebrows’. Since the fortune-telling skills precede both the astrological prowess and the beautification potions, it seems probable that customers would associate second sight with female issues (551.a.32, f. 87).

Conclusion Early medical advertisements reflect several social changes. The democratisation and spread of reading enabled new classes, including women and servants, to participate in the world of print as sellers, buyers, or merely readers; at the same time, increasing opulence and consumption, with the arrival or invention of new commodities, many designed for women, made advertising and purchasing vital to commercial and social life. Indeed, by stressing their novelty as freshly arrived in the city, these selfstyled physicians package themselves as commodities from afar. Ads by both women and men use a rhetorical strategy that flatters readers as intelligent consumers, and deploys piety and altruism with formality, politesse, and authenticating devices like printers’ ornaments, illustrations, licences, eye-witness testimony, and boastful self-characterisations that proclaim the seller’s authority, professionalism, and trustworthiness. By an exclamatory, redundant prose style, often using such literary techniques as satire, alliteration, grammatical parallelisms, continuous sentences with ‘a syntax of accumulation and a semantics of discovery’ that prevent the reader from stopping, metaphors, mini-stories and wonder-tales, these ad-writers make the language of advertisement part of the rhetoric of the public world of print and imaginative literature (McIntosh 1998: 88; Campbell, 2002: 251–91). The differences between ads by women and men suggest that in newspapers, as in periodicals, gender operated as a means to differentiate women from men. As consumers, women appear characterised by gender-related psychological-humoral disorders associated with problems of menstruation, ‘stoppages’, and reproduction, and are more often assured that they can be cured without invading the body by ‘cutting’, that might compromise fertility. While women practitioners more often than men defensively justify using public print, their sympathetic addresses to the reader and announcement of familial connections humanise their self-presentations and the practice of medicine by evoking traditional healing and family structures. Thus, women’s ads tend to mediate formality with a rhetoric of empathetic kindness and

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 422

17/11/17 5:03 PM

advertising women

423

intimate descriptions of the sufferings or failures of the body, and by so doing, bridge the space between faceless print and the individual reader. This may have been especially important because of the reputation of male physicians ‘as generally “unprofessional” in their behaviour, fractious, ill-educated and unregulated’ (Bynum 1985: 111). Although certainly women of the gentry and aristocracy were expected to take care of the health of the members of their household with minor remedies, many of these advertisers sell their services and products for a living, and thus do not belong to the upper classes (King 2006: 72; Pelling 2003: 193). Hence, ads by women vendors hint at female powers, natural and occult: respect for the patient’s modesty, desire for privacy, and the intimacy of domesticity; personal experience and thus expertise in dealing with sexual issues of the body; the sentimental values of compassion and piety. Indeed, many suggest that they operate as an exercise in sisterly self-sacrifice, rather than for profit. Print enabled early female medical practitioners to compete in the medical marketplace.

Notes 1. See Black 1987: 3; Raven, 1993:103–5; 105. 2. See Fries 1997: 58; Johnson 1755; OED 1985 (‘Advertiser’); Elliott 1962: 95; Ferdinand 1997: 208. 3. See Gotti 2005: 23; Görlach 2001: 208–9.

Works Cited Beier, Lucinda McCray. 1987. Sufferers and Healers: The Experience of Illness in SeventeenthCentury England. London and New York: Routledge. Black, Jeremy. 1987. The English Press in the Eighteenth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bynum, W. F. 1985. ‘Physicians, Hospitals and Career Structures in Eighteenth-Century London’. William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World. Ed. W. F. Bynum and R. Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 105–28. C. 237 A Collection of Advertisements (British Library). Campbell, Jill. 2002. ‘Domestic Intelligence: Newspaper Advertising and the EighteenthCentury Novel’. Yale Journal of Criticism 15.2: 251–91. Cody, Lisa Forman. 1999. ‘“No Cure, no Money”, or the Invisible Hand of Quackery: The Language of Commerce, Credit, and Cash in Eighteenth-Century British Medical Advertisements’. SECC 28: 103–30. Crawford, Patricia. 1984. ‘Printed Advertisements for Women Medical Practitioners in London, 1670–1710’. Society for the Social History of Medicine Bulletin 35: 66–70. The Daily Advertiser. 1730/1–96. Domingo, Darryl P. 2016. The Rhetoric of Diversion in English Literature and Culture, 1690–1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elliott, Blanche B. 1962. A History of Advertising. London: Business Publications Ltd, with B. T. Batsford Ltd. Ferdinand, C. Y. 1997. Benjamin Collins and the Provincial Newspaper Traded in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fries, Udo. 1997. ‘Electuarium Mirabile: praise in 18th-century medical advertisements’. Studies in English Language and Teaching. In honor of Flor Aarts’. Ed. Jan Aarts, Inge de Mönnink, and Herman Wekker. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 423

17/11/17 5:03 PM

424

barbara m. benedict

Gallagher, Catherine. 1994. Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Geyer-Kordash, Johanna. 1985. ‘German Medical Education in the Eighteenth Century: The Prussian Context and its Influence’. William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World. Ed. W. F. Bynum and R. Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 153–205. Görlach, Manfred. 2001. Eighteenth-Century English. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Gotti, Maurizio. 2005. ‘Advertising Discourse in Eighteenth-Century English Newspapers’. Opening Windows on Texts and Discourses of the Past. Ed. Janne Skaffari, Matt Peikola, Ruth Carroll, Risto Hiltunen, Brita Wårvik. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 23–38. Harris, Michael. 1987. London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole: A Study in the Origins of the Modern English Press. London: Associated University Presses. Hartley, David. 1738. Ten Cases of Persons who have taken Mrs. Stephens’s Medicines for the Stone, with an Abstract of some Experiments, tending to Illustrate these Cases, 1738. London: for S. Harding . . . and J. Roberts. Tracts 1738–45. BL 1188 f.4 (A Collection of Advertisements) f. 1. —.1739. A View of the Present Evidence For and Against Mrs. Stephens’s Medicines, as a Solvent for the Stone. Containing A Hundred and Fifty-five Cases. With some Experiments and Observations. By David Hartley followed. London: for S. Harding et al. Tracts 1738–45. BL 1188. f 2. —. 1741. De Lithontriptico a Joanna Stephens Nuper Invento Dissertation Epistolaris Auctore Davide Harley, A. M. & R. S. S. Luduni Batavorum: Joh. & Herm. Verbeek. Hodson, J., MD. 1799. ‘Medical facts and Advertisements, submitted to the Consideration of the Afflicted’. London: Aurora Press. 551.a.20 Medical Tracts 1718–1823. f.6. Johnson, Samuel. 1755. A Dictionary of the English Language. London: W. Strahan. Keller, Caren auf dem. 2004. Textual Structures in Eighteenth-Century Newspaper and Book Advertisements: A Corpus-Based Study of Medical Advertisements and Book Advertisements. Aachen: Ahaker Verlag. King, Steven. 2006. ‘Accessing Drugs in the Eighteenth-Century Regions’. From Physick to Pharmacology: Five Hundred Years of British Drug Retailing. Ed. Louise Hill Curth. Aldershot: Ashgate. 49–78. Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth. 1997. Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping and Business in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press. Lamb, Jonathan. 2004. ‘The Crying of Lost Things’. ELH 71.4: 949–67. Longman, Kenneth L. 1971. Advertising. New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. McIntosh, Carey. 1998. The Evolution of English Prose, 1700–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mason, Nicholas. 2013. Literary Advertising and the Shaping of British Romanticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. The Oxford English Dictionary. 1985. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pelling, Margaret, with F. White. 2003. Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London: Patronage, Physicians, and Irregular Practitioners, 1550–1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pelling, Patricia and Charles Webster. 1979. ‘Medical Practitioners’. Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century. Ed. C. Webster. Cambridge, London, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 165–235. —. 1995. ‘The Woman of the Family? Speculations around early Modern British Physicians’. Social History of Medicine 8.3: 383–400. Porter, Roy. 1989. Health for Sale: Quackery in England 1660–1850. Manchester and New York. Manchester University Press.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 424

17/11/17 5:03 PM

advertising women

425

Raven, James. 1993. ‘Serial Advertisement in 18th-century Britain and Ireland’. Serials and Their Readers 1620–1914. Ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris. Winchester: St. Paul’s Biographies; Delaware: Oak Knoll Press. 103–22. Sandage, Charles H. 1961. ‘Basic Functions of Advertising’. The Promise of Advertising. Homewood, IL: Richard D. Irwin. Shevelow, Kathryn. 1989. Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical. London and New York: Routledge. Thomas, Keith. 1971. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Various Ironic and Serious Discourses on the Subject of Physick. 1749. London: for W. Owen.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 425

17/11/17 5:03 PM

27 Theatrical, Periodical, Authorial: Frances Brooke’s OLD MAID (1755–1756) Manushag N. Powell

To Greece no more the tuneful maids belong, Nor the high honours of immortal song; To More, Brooks, Lenox, Aikin, Carter due, To Greville, Griffith, Whateley, Montagu! Theirs the strong genius, theirs the voice divine; And favouring Phœbus owns the British Nine. Anonymous Review of Hannah More’s The Inflexible Captive (Monthly Review 50 (Apr 1774): 243)

T

he trope of lauding groups of British women as modern muses enjoyed a popular cultural moment in the 1770s.1 Many readers are familiar with Richard Samuel’s interesting 1778 painting, Nine Living Muses of Great Britain (which was famous at least in part for being painted without Samuel’s troubling himself to discover what any of his fabled nine looked like). Nine Living Muses immortalised several famous authors featured in the poetic epigram above: Anna Laetitia Aikin (later Barbauld), Hannah More, Charlotte Lennox, Elizabeth Carter, Elizabeth Griffith, and Elizabeth Montagu. But while Samuel included the painter Angelica Kauffman, historian Catharine Macaulay, and songstress Elizabeth Sheridan, the anonymous Monthly Review (1749–1845) writer has an alternate nine that sticks firmly with the belles-lettres, rounding out the group with the poets Frances Greville (a fiery personality, and godmother to Frances Burney) and Mary Whateley – and with the person who chiefly concerns us here, Frances Moore Brooke (1723–89). In this little verse, Brooke is given pride of place next to Hannah More, whose theatrical work was the subject of the actual review that followed the epigram; on her other side, suggestively for our purposes, is Charlotte Lennox. Brooke and Lennox were the two most eminent female periodicalists after Eliza Haywood in the eighteenth century, but their positioning is also provocative because they immediately follow the bluestocking More, who, though she is best remembered today as a poet and moralist, is here situated foremost as a dramatist. The anonymous reviewer is oddly prescient in this arrangement, for while The Inflexible Captive would never be brought to the London stage,2 each of the first three British muses were shortly to see their most successful dramatic efforts come to life: More in Percy (1777, which debuted to rapturous applause); Brooke in Rosina (1782, an enormously popular afterpiece); and Lennox in Old City Manners (1775, a modest success). And yet to position Brooke next to More is also a juxtaposition, for while More famously met encouragement

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 426

17/11/17 5:03 PM

frances brooke’s OLD MAID

427

from the great actor-manager David Garrick and found substantial success writing for the stage early in her career, Brooke met with an early repulse from Garrick and began a feud with him at the start of her career – that is, her periodical days – that would for decades dog her theatrical ambitions.3 This essay begins in two well-worn premises. One, theatrical criticism and periodical writing are intimately linked from their origins, in no small part because there was a great deal of overlap between major periodicalists and dramatists.4 Two, just as women’s activity was a vital element to the dynamism of the post-Restoration English stage, so too were women a vital presence in developing periodical culture. In other words, in both theatrical and periodical writing, women, though usually a minority in the authorial population, were connected to major generic evolutions throughout the eighteenth century. Yet even granting these premises, little enough has been done to chart the intersections of the theatre with the periodical, particularly where women are concerned as agents other than celebrity actresses. I will attempt in this chapter to illustrate the usefulness of pursuing such a conversation through the case study of Frances Brooke’s cheeky and successful essay periodical, the Old Maid (thirty-seven weekly issues 1755–6).5 Brooke, her continued animosity with Garrick aside, would become a thoroughly respected author with long-running but only laterealised dramatic ambitions, and for several years was the successful manager of an opera house. The Old Maid and her never-staged play Virginia were her first ventures into print, and Kathryn King, elsewhere in this volume, plausibly speculates that Brooke may well have undertaken her Old Maid to pay for the printing she defiantly commissioned Andrew Millar to run of Virginia.6 In these ventures, linked as mutually imbricated textual commodities if not in medium or subject matter, it is easy to see the acorn of the interesting and varied career of a woman who never stopped writing publicly and for profit, who quarrelled with men in their professional world and suffered for it, but nonetheless held on to her reputation. David Garrick, an outsized personality by turns forward-thinking and temperamental, never forgave Brooke for a rejoinder against his succumbing to the popularity of Nahum Tate’s adaptation of King Lear that she ran in Old Maid no. 18 (13 Mar 1756).7 Garrick thought, no doubt correctly as far as he went, that the essay was an attempt at revenge for his having declined (shabbily, Brooke thought, and in an underhanded manner) to produce her tragedy Virginia. He did some damage to her professional career as a result, meddling with her reputation as a translator. Brooke, for her part, later set up as a theatre-manager with another woman, Mary Ann Yates, a notable tragedienne who had smarted under Garrick’s management and made him smart in turn, and Brooke finally became a successful playwright after Garrick died. Here we run into a surprising nexus: Yates was a dear friend of not only Brooke, but also Charlotte Lennox, the author-editor of the Lady’s Museum, which was one of the clearest early examples of a true magazine by women and for women. Lennox was, like Brooke, an early writer of North American novels; and, also like Brooke, someone whose Shakespearean criticism had deeply offended male members of the literati, including Garrick. (Lennox had not treated Shakespeare as enough of a sacred cow in Shakespear Illustrated (1753), while Brooke had preferred the original Bard to meddling modern adaptors, but the end result was similar: male guardians of the Bard howled.) Brooke, Lennox, and Yates were all theatrically adept women who found considerable success in striking out on their own both generically and socially, but it is

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 427

17/11/17 5:03 PM

428

manushag n. powell

Brooke who draws the most deliberate attention to this pose when she champions the authority of an ‘Old Maid’’s writing over the theatre, not to mention society at large. With a few exceptions, attention to Brooke’s theatrical writing has focused on her brutal send-up of Garrick in her comic novel, The Excursion (1777), but it is clear if we turn our attention to her periodical writing that her ambition to contribute to stage culture, and in particular to establish the provenance of women as authorities over the theatre, extends far beyond wanting revenge against Garrick. Early in the Old Maid, she writes, ‘I have some thoughts of establishing a little court of female criticism, consisting of myself, and six virgins my own age . . . whatever is said in this paper on theatrical affairs, will be the united opinion of the whole sisterhood’ (Old Maid no. 4 (6 Dec 1755): 29).8 Subsequent essays weigh issues such as the behaviour of women in theatrical audiences, the differences between the Paris and London theatrical experiences, Shakespearean performances (as regards to both Lear and Henry VIII), and opera divas. While the Old Maid is, as Betty Schellenberg has shown, markedly political in many areas and (as I have elsewhere argued) is not oriented toward a particularly gender-segregated market, it nonetheless works hard and without a blush to inscribe women as the proper guardians of their nation’s performative poetics.9 In the end it shows, perhaps, more what might have been achieved than what English popular media was ready to allow, but the experiment is one worth revisiting. Their contemporary critics failed to shout down women like Brooke (and Yates, and Lennox). If their legacies have been neglected, blame must lie at the feet of we later critics who neglected their afterlives. Brooke married relatively late in life (at around thirty-one), and commenced her periodical at about the same time as her marriage. Writing as ‘Mary Singleton’, she invented the persona of a fifty-year-old spinster, a figure that, curiously enough, was better authorised to speak forth in the sexual climate of the mid-century than a wife and mother still in the prime of life would have been. Brooke’s persona of Mary Singleton, then, was ‘probably not autobiographical’, understates Iona Italia (2005: 166), who also notes the periodical ‘is exceptional among’ mid-century contemporaries ‘in the amount of space it dedicates to its [sentimental] frame narrative’, i.e., parts of almost half its issues (2005: 174). In keeping with this novel-adjacent framing, Singleton claimed to be writing for an audience with strong female representation, but (also in keeping with its novel-adjacent framing) seemed sure that her audience was far from exclusively female, noting in her second number that, ‘as I write chiefly for the amusement of my own sex, I will not be judged by the impertinent criticisms of the other; and I hereby forbid all coffee-house wits pretending to find fault with what is not intended for them’ (Old Maid no. 2 (22 Nov 1755): 9–10). Yet despite her attempts at pre-emptive defensive manoeuvring here, the Old Maid had already encountered considerable trouble from male critics. After her very first number, the well-regarded and usually even-tempered Connoisseur attacked her paper in its number 95 (20 Nov 1755), apparently finding the idea of an Old Maid’s speaking in public too repugnant to pass without comment. (In her essay, Kathryn King makes the case for ‘personal animus’ between the editors (n. 22).) The Old Maid fired back that the Connoisseur’s author was obviously ‘of humble rank, and accustomed to very low conversation’ (Old Maid no. 2 (22 Nov 1755): 10).10 Later editions of both the Connoisseur and Old Maid edited out much of their war, Brooke noting from the generous position of a smug victor in her 1764 revised edition that she ‘with pleasure

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 428

17/11/17 5:03 PM

frances brooke’s OLD MAID

429

destroys all traces of the dispute’ (Old Maid no. 2 (1764): 13). As I have elsewhere argued, Brooke’s periodical consistently, even hard-headedly, demanded that all its readers treat her with respect; this was not a common trait for periodicals by men or women (Powell 2012: 168).

Theatre in the Old Maid The first modern versions of theatrical reviews appeared in early eighteenth-century periodicals, and became a regular feature of the genre later in the period; like the book review, this particular mode of writing owes its existence and continued popularity to the eighteenth-century periodical experiment. Richard Steele’s Tatler (1709–11) engaged in reviews of performances and staging, and the Female Tatler (1709–10) dipped into contemporary stagecraft as well, so an interest not simply in drama but in stagecraft and audience reactions and responses have been intertwined with periodical culture since the inception of the essay form. Critics have sometimes noted that while Brooke’s clear interest in theatre criticism is tantalising, she does not pursue the topic with much regularity; Berland, for example, notes that while she comes close to openly denouncing the monopoly of the managers Garrick and Rich, ‘she does not make this threat good’ (219).11 This sense of irregularity is true enough, but also leaves out part of the story: it is important, in revisiting the Old Maid, to view Brooke as an editor as well as a main source of its text, or as Kathryn King has more eloquently put it in Chapter 22 of this volume, our usual means of proceeding ‘has resulted in the neglect of Frances Brooke, Editor, regarding whom a surprising amount of evidence survives’ (342). In fact Brooke depended quite a bit upon the contributions of others: while she wrote about twenty-one of the periodical’s thirty-seven numbers, more than 40 per cent of its content came from male contributors: Lord Orrery (by far her most important single contributor, with nine numbers in part or in whole), her friend Richard Gifford, her husband, her brother-in-law James, Arthur Murphy, and others including possibly Tobias Smollett (McMullan 1983: 25–9; Basker 1988: 23–4).12 It is unlikely that Brooke was in a position to dictate the contents of her friends’ work. At the same time, she clearly exercised an editorial prerogative at times. Orrery’s personal copy of the Old Maid contains handwritten annotations, apparently by the Earl himself, which among other things complain of no. 18, ‘This letter is so altered, curtailed, and mangled, that . . . it may be said to be the Old Maid’s’ (quoted in McMullan 1983: 26; Kathryn King in this volume: 349). Only eight Old Maids (nos. 2, 3, 4, 5, 15, 17, 18, 26)13 deal in substance with theatrical matters – but Brooke wrote them all. That is, while less than a quarter of the periodical’s essays concern themselves with drama, nearly 40 per cent of its editor’s contributions do. This would seem to suggest strongly that Brooke’s interest in theatre criticism was neither transient nor neglected. It is likewise true, and important to keep in mind, that across her career Brooke never seems terribly inclined to back down from a fight, even one she’s unlikely to win – and that her attack on Garrick was deliberately provocative, even if his resentment was outsized and petty (Berland 1991: 220–1).14 But it does not follow that her sole intent in writing the essay was to provoke. The infamous Lear essay is in Old Maid 18 (13 Mar 1756). It opens with Singleton, on the advice of her niece Julia and niece’s bosom friend Rosara, having attended Spranger Barry’s performance of the play accompanied by ‘three of my six critical

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 429

17/11/17 5:03 PM

430

manushag n. powell

virgins’, where not only the spinsters but actually ‘the whole house’ is reduced to tears, ‘the young people especially’ (103). This, then, is theatre doing what the Old Maid insists it can do at its best: reaching the audience and opening the capacity of hearts – particularly those of the young and strong, ‘the rising generation’ (103) – to moral reform. The essay has a deliberately complicated structure. In brief, it (1) praises Barry’s performance on the grounds of its tenderness and being ‘perfectly consistent with the whole meaning of the poet’, which she determines by comparing his performance to Shakespeare’s lines II, iv, 94–8; (2) praises Barry’s physicalisation of the role: ‘you lose Mr. Barry’ when you see him as Lear; ‘his whole action is of a piece; and the breaks in his voice . . . seem the effects of real, not personated, sorrow’ (104); (3) establishes the bona fides of her Shakespearean criticism by criticising the common staging of the Gentleman Usher, who has become far too frivolous and comic, ‘contrary, as I apprehend, to the apparent meaning of the author’ (105); (4) turns her attention to Nahum Tate’s ‘wretched alteration of King Lear’, professing particular surprise that Garrick, ‘who is determined, if I may use his own words, in the prologue to the Winter’s Tale, “To lose no drop of this immortal man”’, ‘should yet prefer the vile adulterated cup of Tate’ (105). And finally in a parting blow, (5) praises Barry once again for being handsome and a fine physical actor, while admitting to never having seen Garrick in the same role and thus giving him no chance for comparison. The essay then concludes with a letter, originally by Boyle but evidently much altered by Brooke, that warns Mary Singleton that ‘the little critics’ have determined the Old Maid ‘should be most virulently pelted and hissed at’ over the commonplace problem of printers’ errors (106). This omission of Garrick’s own performance in a lengthy, complicated essay can be read as unfair, but if so, it is at least not thoughtlessly unfair. Brooke is, in a sense, doing to Garrick what she thinks he did to her Virginia: Garrick’s claim was that he had never read the play until after Samuel Crisp’s version was ready to stage, presumably out of some sense of fairness to the prior commitment; what this meant to Brooke was that her own work was never given a chance to stand or fall on its own quality, was denied a fair contest in which it might possibly have shown merit. Yet the larger point I would like to make is that Brooke is firing back at Garrick as a sort of value-added component to her essay; while understandably this moment has received more modern critical attention than any other in the Old Maid, her anger with Garrick should not be the first (or only) thing we recall about the periodical. Indeed, it is even at least debatable that she’s calling out Garrick in part as a put-on: as Gwendolyn Needham points out, in addressing Barry and Garrick as rival Lears, Brooke surely knew she was courting popular interest: the ‘Romeo war’ between the two had happened only a few years ago in 1750, and Barry himself was clearly taking on the role of Lear, one of Garrick’s signature roles, as a trial of Garrick’s dominance (Needham 1961: 48). Brooke may well be engaging in an eighteenth-century version of what we would now call click-baiting, which would make this the calculated move of a professional editor, and not merely the vented spleen of a would-be authoress scorned. Jodi Wyett, who characterises Brooke’s career as insistent ‘upon women’s key contributions to the cultural work of the theatre’ (2013: 26) notes that in her Lear essay, Singleton thoughtfully contrasts the role of the critic with that of the audience member, whom she seems to expect will be more sympathetically and actively engaged than the critics; she also pushes back against the cultural presumption that male coffee-house amateurs are given a free pass to opine while even well-read ladies

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 430

17/11/17 5:03 PM

frances brooke’s OLD MAID

431

such as her Singleton persona are given no respect as public critics (30).15 My sense (even as I replicate the error here) is that Garrick’s presence may be too dominant in treatments of Brooke. Brooke’s attack against Garrick was almost certainly meant to be personally wounding, but it also does a great deal more than this – and, I would argue, is ultimately less about Garrick himself, or even about Shakespeare, than it is about who has access to the mantle of the critic, who is permitted to speak seriously and to be when necessary publicly negative about Capital-L Literature.

Actresses and Theatrical Networks In 1753–4, Charlotte Lennox had published in two volumes Shakespear Illustrated: Or, The Novels and Histories on which the Plays of Shakespear are Founded; Collected and Translated from the Original Authors, with Critical Remarks. Shakespear Illustrated was a remarkable piece of research; nothing at the time came near to its thoroughness in identifying and explicating the source stories Shakespeare used for many of his plays. Lennox’s investigations, in which she had aid from her dedicatee, Lord Orrery, were widely – and often without credit – used by the male Shakespearean scholars of her day, Samuel Johnson included (Ritchie 2014: 59–60). But her critical remarks, which often took the Bard to task for complicating or altering for the worse the sources she’d uncovered, drew serious fire. Garrick maintained friendly relations with Lennox as he had not with Brooke, but his equanimity did not extend to her criticism of the author he spent his career championing (minus his decision to stage Tate’s version of Lear, of course).16 A rather sheepish letter to Lennox from 12 August 1753 has him explaining that his notes on her book are destroyed, for, ‘the Remarks I had made were . . . perhaps stronger Proofs of my Zeal for Shakespear, than of my Judgment. . . . I imagined that you had betray’d a greater Desire of Exposing his [Errors] than of illustrating his Beauties—there appeared to me (and indeed to many others) a kind of severe Levity & Ridicule’ that could not be justified when applied to ‘so Excellent an Author’ (quoted in Schürer 2012: 47–8). The reference to ‘many others’, while not inaccurate, is telling: Garrick excuses his behaviour when he appeals to a standard set by (male) critics that prevents an author of lesser status (Lennox) from treating Shakespeare as her intellectual equal, or as a fit object for her critical scrutiny. The problem is not that Lennox is wrong in her analysis, exactly; it is her tone, her daring in criticising ‘the mighty Shakespeare rather than any deficiency in her critical standards’ (Ritchie 2014: 56). Garrick and men like him act as gatekeepers not only for aspiring playwrights who would see their performances staged, but more broadly for those who might like a say in how anything important is staged.17 While she returns to Garrick’s failures in the Old Maid after the galling Lear essay, Brooke makes clear these larger stakes, because her target is not his acting ability but his managerial and authorial missteps. If the Lear comparison was Brooke’s first shot across Garrick’s bow, she followed up with an interesting, and too-neglected, broadside in Old Maid 26 (8 May 1756). The essay is perhaps her most sustained formal foray into theatrical criticism, which she links carefully to the periodical project as a whole – and it is also in its way a more direct attack on Garrick’s abilities that was Old Maid 18, which at least overtly had simply professed astonishment that Garrick opted to stage Tate. Old Maid 26 addresses in its opening pages a perfectly common concern among professional authors, and periodical author-editors especially: depression,

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 431

17/11/17 5:03 PM

432

manushag n. powell

and its relationship to writing. But from experiencing editorial ennui, she moves on to theatrical criticism as a bright spot in the dreary winter, and a way to goose her deadened writer’s impulse: ‘For my own part . . . this unkindly spring has reduced me to a meer Non-Entity; and I have for this month past . . . nodded . . . without taking a pen in hand, and had not my correspondents been very liberal, I know not what would have become of my Paper’ (Old Maid no. 25 (8 May 1756): 152). ‘However’, she continues, ‘the season has been very favourable to the Theatres: and I myself have frequented them at this latter season, much oftener than I should have done, but from the motive of forgetting, for two or three of the worst hours in the evening, cold weather and spleen’ (152). The essay goes on to praise Kitty Clive’s ‘truly humorous’ performance in Lethe and her parody of ‘the present favorite female at Hay-Market’ (152). Singleton professes herself no enemy of opera, but prefers to hear its praises sung in moderation; it must not, Italian as it is, be raised above the best that the English theatre – and its best actresses – can offer.18 Lethe, or Esop in the Shades was a metatheatrical comedy solely authored by David Garrick, first as an afterpiece in 1740 (it was then Garrick’s only produced play, in fact). Garrick frequently revised and expanded the popular piece to suit new satirical targets of its evolving moment, and in the 1756 season had added the character of Lord Chalkstone (Pedicord and Bergmann 1980: 380–1). While she praises Clive, an actress whom Garrick valued but sometimes had difficulty managing, Singleton is not impressed with the actor-manager-author’s revisions: ‘I do not think [the new character of Chalkstone] strongly enough marked, to justify the propriety of’ advertising the play as new, for ‘what is there new in a Lord’s having the gout, loving a bottle, pretending to taste, or being followed by a flatterer’ (153). Indeed, Singleton’s review of the theatrical production itself is diverse, but of Garrick’s choices, its criticism is unstinting, unremitting: ‘Folly, Intemperance, Vanity, and Disease, are not at all confined to Nobility, nor is there any such peculiarity in the manner in which they appear in this character, as to give it any title to Novelty’ (153). Brooke believed her Virginia had been deliberately passed over in favour of two other men’s less capable takes on the same theme. Here, her praise of a woman’s professional theatrical abilities in deliberately nationalistic terms, while dismissing the playwriting powers of Garrick as unoriginal in the extreme, certainly seem thematically consistent with her sense of herself as having been wronged by him. She concludes with several paragraphs lamenting the poor behaviour of theatre audiences and her enjoyment in watching an Ambassador of Morocco experience the highs and lows of a British playhouse, hoping, ‘As I am jealous of my country in all respects’ that he will soon ‘see Mr. Garrick in Richard, or some equally striking part’ (156). This essay is generally read by Brooke scholars as being in praise of Garrick, but in fact it is quite careful to critique his writing and judgement of stage success while praising his acting (though not in Lear), leaving pointedly open the possibility that his is a fallible professionalism after all. This engagement with professionalism when she attacks Garrick matters not only because it moves our understanding of her words beyond the realm of spite, but also because it underscores a key element of Brooke’s self-conceptualisation as an author: she thinks herself, and has ambitions as, a professional author, as someone for whom what she does is rewarding work, but work nonetheless. In Rosina, her major comic opera, the titular heroine, a well-bred girl who has fallen on hard times and must glean to live, tells her rich suitor, ‘I only wish for so

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 432

17/11/17 5:03 PM

frances brooke’s OLD MAID

433

much leisure as makes me return to work with fresh spirit’ (14). I suspect Brooke may be indicating a broad admiration for a female work ethic here; she elsewhere praised Mary Ann Yates for her tirelessness in studying to perfect her professional craft. Garrick, by the way, had rejected Brooke’s smash hit Rosina in 1772; it was not produced until Brooke was in a professional position to take matters into her own hands as one of the owner-managers of an opera house. If he did not trust her judgement with respect to Shakespeare, then, Garrick was plagued by some very poor judgement of his own with respect to Brooke’s merits as an author. (Brooke did have her revenge, publishing a very funny, mean satire of Garrick’s management in her novel the Excursion in 1777, once Garrick was retired and could do nothing but fume: but this was many decades and tense exchanges after the Old Maid.)19 Garrick’s spite against Brooke is clear enough in the letter he wrote discouraging the French novelist and actress Marie Jeanne Riccoboni from working with Brooke as a translator (despite Brooke’s tremendous success in bringing her Juliet Catesby to an English audience in 1760): I am not acquainted with Mrs. Brooke: she once wrote a play, which I did not like, & would not act, for which heinous offence she vented her female Spite upon Me, in a paper she publish’d call’d the Old Maid, but I forgive her as thoroughly as her Work is forgot. (quoted in Nicholls 1976: 45–6) Garrick is not being truthful about either the forgiving or forgetting: note that the slight in the Old Maid had taken place seven years earlier, though the journal’s continued popularity may have been its own vengeance – and that here Garrick claims not to like Virginia, whereas he had earlier claimed (probably truthfully) simply not to have read it (see Donkin 1995: 47–8).20 Further, the Old Maid would be reissued in a revised edition in 1764; clearly the periodical was not failed and forgotten. Moreover, not only his history here is in error: Garrick’s advice was bad; Riccoboni never found the same level of success with an English audience or translator as she had with Brooke. Brooke cared more about the theatre and her vision for it than she did for Garrick’s dismissal, and in time, from 1773–8, became an excellent co-manager of the King’s Theatre opera house and a major player in the reception of Italian opera in London, though she never secured the theatrical patent she longed for (Wyett 2013: 31). Her success in the realm of drama is ineluctably wrapped in her long friendship with her eventual co-manager and owner, the actress Mary Ann Yates, who was the premiere English tragedienne before the age of Sarah Siddons – and yet another successful woman whose relationship with Garrick had never been precisely easy.21 Brooke wrote Yates’s main obituary, and in that periodical essay she reveals the depth of their friendship and her respect for Yates’s talent, but also returns to her own abiding interest in theatrical criticism that encompasses the presence and behaviour of the audience.22 According to the ‘Authentic Memoirs’ of Yates, Mary Ann was generous, kind to the poor, and naturally elegant, but like Rosina, best characterised by discipline: personally she was ‘abstemious in the extreme’ (Brooke 1783: 25). Most of the ‘Authentic Memoirs’, however, are not given over to biography and private virtues but to describing Yates’s stage presence and career, and her popularity with the public that she and Brooke felt was ‘the highest honour to please, because accustomed to no

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 433

17/11/17 5:03 PM

434

manushag n. powell

common degree of theatrical merit’ (27). While Brooke insists upon Yates’s natural talent, she also emphasises her professional work ethic: ‘She idolised her profession, and to excel in it was an ambition that filled her whole soul . . . she pursued the studies necessary to that laudable purpose with unremitting ardor’ (28). She also openly compares Yates to Garrick: ‘she possessed that infinite variety of powers so admired in Mr. Garrick, and which we do not recollect to have seen displayed except in these two incomparable performers’ (28). ‘May the remembrance of what she was, inspire emulation in the bosom of rising genius!’, concludes Brooke (32).

Opportunities Met and Missed While she was alive, Yates’s ‘society was sought’ by ‘the most respectable characters in the world of literature’ (Brooke 1787: 25) – including another of the living muses, Charlotte Lennox. Brooke was not Yates’s only close female companion: Lennox and Yates had a friendship that lasted decades as well – indeed, it was through Yates that Brooke and Lennox, the only women writing major woman-championing periodicals in the 1750s–60s (that is, the post-Haywood era), most likely met each other. The Rev. William Beloe, a friend to Lennox and Yates, wrote that when visiting at Yates’s house, ‘he immediately became acquainted with some of the most distinguished literary characters of the time. There he met . . . Mrs. Lennox, Mrs. Brooke, and various other eminent individuals’ (quoted in Small 1969: 42). Samuel Johnson’s oft-quoted remark to Lennox, ‘I have seen Mrs. Brookes, [sic] and Miss Reid, since I saw you, and I heard of you at both houses, yet, what much surprised me I heard no evil’, likewise implies Lennox and Brooke knew each other to some extent, though it also suggests they were not close (Johnson 1992: 137). Or perhaps it does not: Johnson heard no evil of Lennox out of Brooke; had he heard good? Interestingly, if Yates joined Brooke in rebellion against Garrick’s influence, Lennox helped Yates reconstitute a profitable relationship with him in the same period, as Garrick asked Lennox to intervene on his behalf when, in 1774, he was trying to lure her to return to acting at Drury Lane. Evidently she did so successfully, because return Yates did, after rejecting Garrick’s first several overtures (Small 1969: 40–1). Brooke and Lennox must almost certainly have known one another, then, though it seems unlikely they usually moved in the same social circles:23 Yates’s celebrity standing gave her a social mobility not common to other women, even professionals like authors. The actress, and the theatrical world from which she comes, works as connective tissue between two rare and important woman-championing periodicals that, unfortunately, do not otherwise interact. It is a great sadness that our two tremendously important woman periodicalists never did collaborate; in many ways theirs could have been a fruitful relationship. The connections between Lennox and Brooke are tenuous but multiple. They were true contemporaries: Lennox lived c. 1730–1804 and Brooke 1724–89. Both lived transatlantically and wrote important novels about that experience. Both (like Yates as well) lost their parents at relatively young ages.24 Both had marriages that could be considered difficult, and sometimes lived apart from their husbands. And while their social status was not equal, both had very good reputations as authors and virtuous women despite long careers in the public eye; neither was ever subject to the kind of ad feminem attacks that dogged Eliza Haywood, the greatest female periodicalist of the century. Indeed, perhaps their most provocative connection has to do with this

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 434

17/11/17 5:03 PM

frances brooke’s OLD MAID

435

public’s reception of professional writing from any woman: Lennox, when her fame was riding high from the publication of The Female Quixote and Shakespear Illustrated, was assumed to be the author of Brooke’s Old Maid. She refuted it in the London Evening Post (23 Dec 1755): ‘Mrs. Lenox . . . being unwilling to gain, or lose Reputation undeservedly, thinks it proper to declare, in this publick Manner, that she neither has, nor will have, any Part in that Paper.’25 Indeed, it would be years before Lennox began work on the Lady’s Museum, but the misattribution is interesting both because of what it hints about contemporary conventional wisdom regarding the periodical genre – that it was a venture unusual enough for a woman that only someone already famous and in strong repute would undertake one – and about Brooke – that her work as a fledgling author was evidently passable as the labour of one of the premiere women writers of the age. Frances Brooke was an excellent professional writer. To borrow Backscheider’s apt phrasing, across her lifetime Brooke ‘published almost every kind of economically profitable literary type – and succeeded notably at each’ (Backscheider and Cotton 1997: ix). Brooke was, moreover, consistently well respected for her abilities and style. Yet when she is remembered today it often still has more to do with a man who – and he was a major outlier in this – did not respect her abilities compared to the many readers who did. Frances Burney’s journal offers some interesting insights into how, contrary to Garrick, for whom Brooke was a constant irritant, learned British ladies might have viewed both Brooke and Yates: as a young woman, Burney is most pleased to meet ‘the celebrated authoress’ Mrs Brooke (2002: 83), and more so when in October 1774 Brooke invites Burney, her mother, and sister to be her guests at the opera house she manages with Yates. Upon arrival, though, Burney is dismayed to find Brooke and Yates are a package deal (‘inseparably annexed’ is her exact term (2002: 92)): Burney calls this ‘disagreeable’ and wonders ‘how a woman of Character & reputation, such as Mrs. Brooke, can have reconcil’d herself to becoming intimate with one whose fame will bear no scrutiny’ (2002: 91). A theatrical career, then, offered money and mobility to some women, but not social safety. Brooke evidently didn’t care; Burney – a young and unmarried woman – did. Of Charlotte Lennox, Burney shows similar apprehensions to those she had for Yates, ‘I think all her Novels far the best of any Living Author, – but Mrs Thrale says that though her Books are generally approved, Nobody likes her’ (2002: 155). ‘Nobody’, whatever it means, clearly did not mean Samuel Johnson, Lennox’s long-time friend and colleague; nor did it encompass Samuel Richardson, or Brooke’s intimate Mary Ann Yates. Yet whatever her feelings about Yates, Burney evidently maintained the acquaintance, for, in the autumn of 1783, Brooke floated the idea of co-authoring a new periodical with Burney. Burney declined, claiming a disinclination to write after having finished her lengthy novel Cecilia in 1782.26 Brooke’s intriguing answer was, ‘more’s the pity. This being the case, I shall take the whole on myself.’ She signs off by asking that Burney keep her proposal secret, for, ‘I do not intend to be known’ (31 Oct 1783; quoted in McMullin 1983: 205). If Brooke ever did launch a second periodical venture, it indeed remained unknown. Her Old Maid had ended abruptly decades earlier with its half-promise of a continuation apparently unfulfilled. Aesthetically, the careers of Frances Brooke, Mary Ann Yates, and Charlotte Lennox were surely major successes; financially at least Brooke’s and Yates’s were because they enjoyed the theatrical success Lennox pursued but never entirely

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 435

17/11/17 5:03 PM

436

manushag n. powell

managed. And Brooke and Lennox both wrote pioneering periodicals at a period in which editorial women had, for a time, backed off the genre. But the Old Maid and Lady’s Museum are only lately being re-recognised for their extraordinary qualities; Brooke and Lennox are still most likely to be read and studied primarily as novelists, though this underplays the complexity of their careers to an absurd degree. Once hailed as living muses, they were also women who moved in circles with the most exalted authors – male and female – and stage celebrities. These circles intersected at multiple points, but were very far from concentric or neatly organisable around a single novelistic effort. In Old Maid 3, Brooke’s Mary Singleton defends her contemporary moment as ‘an age of genius’, though she wishes her country did more to appreciate and pursue the arts (29 Nov 1755: 13). She champions in particular dramatists, noting that while ‘I would not be understood to mean, that our modern theatrical pieces are really equal to those of the last age; but that it is not from want of fire in some of the writers, that they fall short of them; but from particular circumstances which I may perhaps endeavor to explain in another paper’ (16). A woman whose own inner fires burned brightly, Brooke showed in her periodical work an ability to compose original pieces, act in an imagined persona, and manage a bevy of male contributors – on a different scale and through a different medium, she unapologetically lived her own version of actor-manager-author. But the attempt remained, as the Old Maid called itself, ‘odd’. Brooke did build a powerful professional network of artistic women but she did it only through the theatrical medium, and not through the periodical one.27 It is hard not to lament that fact.

Notes 1. See Lucy Peltz 2008: 60–3, and a brief discussion of this epigram on her: 57. 2. It did play at Bath in 1775, where Garrick, an important patron of More’s, staged it at the Theatre Royal. 3. Charlotte Lennox’s experience with Garrick and with stage writing was in between Brooke’s and More’s: he encouraged her playwriting and produced her Old City Manners in 1775, but declined several other productions. 4. Powell 2012: 43. 5. The Old Maid was reissued in an edited and revised version in 1764. All quotations here are from the original 1755–6 periodical unless otherwise indicated. 6. Brooke had the misfortune to write her Virginia when playwright appetite for Livy’s tragic tale of virginity fetish and patriarchy gone wrong was at a surprising high: two other versions (by Samuel Crisp at Drury Lane and John Moncrieff at Covent Garden) were submitted at about the same time hers was, and they were produced; neither did well. Brooke blamed Garrick for holding back her play in favour of the male Samuel Crisp’s version (c.f. Backscheider and Cotton 1997: xi–xii; Donkin 1995: 41–4). Brooke was then largely unknown, and Garrick’s behaviour, if not precisely courteous, is easy to understand, but his attitude in the rest of their relationship is petty. After the Old Maid essay on 13 March 1756 lamented Garrick’s use of Tate’s Lear, Garrick clearly had a bee in his bonnet with respect to Brooke (discussed by Donkin 44–5; she points out that Samuel Foote, for one, made exactly the same complaint in rather stronger terms without drawing Garrick’s ire). 7. See, for examples of the many more detailed discussions of their tiff, Berland 1991: 219–21, Donkin 1995: 1–44, and Backscheider and Cotton 1997: xi–xii. 8. James Basker speculates that Brooke may have borrowed inspiration here from, or collaborated with, Tobias Smollett, who may have written one of the reader contributions in this

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 436

17/11/17 5:03 PM

frances brooke’s OLD MAID

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

437

number (1988: 23–4; 288 n. 42). Smollett also gave Brooke a notably positive review for the published version of Virginia (Critical Review April 1756: 276–9), offering commiseration with her over its rejection (Basker 1988: 24). Betty Schellenberg points out that Brooke is remarkable for her ‘most explicit and particular’ engagement with politics: Brooke takes on specific policies and political figures in her writing; to remember her, as she sometimes is remembered now, as primarily sentimental, is inaccurate (Schellenberg 2005: 45–6). Furthermore, argues Schellenberg, ‘Brooke’s contemporaries responded to both her texts and her public activity primarily in terms of her views, and only secondarily in terms of her gender’ (which is not at all to say that Brooke was exempt from sexist attacks) (Schellenberg 2005: 48). On Brooke and her readership, see Powell 2012: 160–1. For a more detailed discussion of the paper war, see Powell 2012: 161–4. In Backscheider’s view, while her plan for the periodical had called for prominent theatrical criticism and ‘take the theatres under inspection’ on behalf of superannuated virgins, ‘what she produces is’, though astute, ‘as sporadic and unsystematic as that in periodicals produced by others, including the playwrights’ Arthur Murphy, Colman the Elder, Henry Fielding, and Hugh Kelly (who collaborated in some fashion with Lennox on her Lady’s Museum) (Backscheider and Cotton 1997: xv). On the differences between Brooke and her contributors, see Wild 1998: esp. 426–30. In Old Maid 2, muses Mary Singleton, ‘I have thoughts of taking the theatres in an especial manner into consideration, because they have been almost entirely neglected by the best of our late essay writers, and because the few things that have been published on that subject within these two or three years, have been neither wrote with judgment, nor impartiality’ (22 Nov 1755: 9). In Old Maid 4, after a humorous essay on puffing and the importance of early critical reception to an author’s success, turns to praising Queen Elizabeth in part for ‘her protection of arts and sciences . . . and Shakespeare in particular’ (6 Dec 1755: 22). It also contains a letter from ‘T.S.’ asking her for more papers on the theatre, to which she replies, ‘I agree . . . as to the utility of the stage, and believe whatever may have been wrong in the management, is to be in great measure charged upon the Town, which often condemns and approves without knowing why’ (23–4). ‘I could wish a society of real judges were incorporated . . . to take the theatres under their inspection; till that happens I have some thoughts of establishing a little court of female criticism’ (24). In Old Maid 5, concerned with the Lisbon Earthquake, Singleton explicitly defends the theatres from neopuritan demands to shutter them in the name of morality, not only on existential grounds but also because it is no ‘act of piety or religion’ to ‘distress the many hundreds of poor people who in different branches of business, for I do not here speak of the managers and principal performers, depend upon them for their daily bread’ (13 Dec 1755: 29). Brooke also calls herself ‘a young author, though an old woman’ (26). Old Maid 15 (21 Feb 1756) contains a letter reprimanding the poor behaviour of ‘a woman of distinction’ who interrupted an actress in the middle of a tragic scene, an actress so delicate and beautiful that the letter-writer ‘should have thought it impossible for any person to insult her’ (89). Of the fight with Garrick, Schellenberg points out that – as is typical of Brooke – what’s unusual is how she does not confine herself to generalities. She attacks Garrick specifically, ignoring Rich, who also declined her play, and not initially making any excuse regarding the state of the theatre management system post-1737 License Act (Schellenberg 2005: 49). For a further discussion of this essay and its examination of audience reactions in context with the contemporary climate around the theatre and sentimentality, see Ritchie 2014: 161–7. Naturally Garrick’s theatrical profession required that he maintain relationships with important professional women (his actresses), but more than that, interestingly, he liked to think of himself as a patron of women playwrights. As Donkin points out, this was not

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 437

17/11/17 5:03 PM

438

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

manushag n. powell an unmixed virtue of his: ‘He took pleasure in their public demonstrations of gratitude’, and his mentoring a select few functioned in no small part as gatekeeping (Donkin 1995: 26). Berland, determined to be a critic who is not blinded by the ‘bright light that Garrick attracted’ similarly points out that Garrick could be difficult to work with, and that it ‘was even less easy to work in his shadow’ (Berland 1991: 217). As Donkin argues, the fact that women in the eighteenth century were legally allowed on stage does not by any means indicate they were welcome into the theatrical world as authors and critics: ‘They were not.’ On average across the century, ‘there were ninety-three male playwrights for every seven female’ ones, in large part because entry into the theatrical world was ‘tightly controlled’ by powerful male theatre managers (Donkin 1995: 1, 3). Charles suggests that what is unusual about Brooke’s theatrical ‘vision’ is the prominence it devotes to great actresses, whose emotive power is a key element to the theatre’s power to enact social good (2014: 259). Rosina was not only tremendously popular on stage, but also in print, running through eleven editions from 1783 to 1786 (Berland 1991: 218). A Scottish tune adapted by her composer, William Shields, found major popularity with audiences; we sing it now as ‘Auld lang syne’ (Staves 2006: 396). Garrick insists in his letters to Riccoboni, and later to Frances Cadogan (quoted Berland 1991: 227) that he ‘never knew’ Brooke, which is absurd, even given that Garrick may be trying to insinuate that he does not recognise Brooke as a social equal or intimate. Yates acted for Garrick from 1754 to 1755 to the 1766–7 season, when she left for Covent Garden; in 1773 she joined forces with Brook (and their husbands) to purchase and run the King’s Theatre, in the hopes of gaining a patent to stage regular plays as well as musical entertainments. She returned to act for Garrick from 1774 to his retirement in 1776, but also performed in Edinburgh and Birmingham. The ‘Memoirs’ may not have been Brooke’s only print depiction of Yates. Katherine Charles argues forcefully that Maria, the heroine of Brooke’s Excursion (which she wrote and published while the two were engaged in the King’s Theatre venture) is as much a biographical portrait of Mary Ann Yates as one of Brooke herself, and that the Excursion is really best understood as moral-didactic Bildungsroman and a paean to Brooke’s own theatrical ‘female-driven professional network’ (2014: 258). ‘A woman who lacked elegance and delicacy and thrived on spontaneity and artfulness, Lennox does not fit into our common understanding of mid-century women authors’ (Carlile 2004: 107). According to Brooke’s ‘Authentic Memoirs’ of Yates, she lost her mother early and ‘received an excellent education from the care of her father’, a ship’s steward (1787: 23). My thanks to Susan Carlile, whose advice on this piece has been invaluable in general, for also drawing this specific excerpt to my attention. Schellenberg, interestingly, suspects Burney of some disingenuity in her refusal (2005: 74). Min Wild has a nice phrase: ‘The Old Maid must first and foremost be understood as an intervention in a polyphonic constellation of competing periodicals which are to an overwhelming degree masculine productions’ (Wild 1998: 422).

Works Cited Backscheider, Paula and Hope D. Cotton. 1997. ‘Introduction’. The Excursion. Frances Brooke. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. ix–xlvi. Basker, James. 1988. Tobias Smollett, Critic and Journalist. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Berland, K. J. H. 1991. ‘Frances Brooke and David Garrick’. Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 20: 217–30.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 438

17/11/17 5:03 PM

frances brooke’s OLD MAID

439

Brooke, Frances. 1755–6. The Old Maid. London: A. Millar. —. 1764. The Old Maid: A New Edition, Revised and Corrected by the Author. London: A. Millar. —. 1783. Rosina, A Comic Opera: In Two Acts. Performed at the Theatre-Royal, in CoventGarden. Dublin: B. Smith. —. 1787. ‘Authentic Memoirs of Mrs. Yates’. Gentleman’s Magazine 58 (14 July 1787): 585–9. Repr. 1803. A Miscellaneous Collection. London: J. Ginger, Piccadilly. 23–32. Burney, Frances. 2002. A Known Scribbler: Frances Burney on Literary Life. Ed. Justine Crump. Peterborough, ON: Broadview. Carlile, Susan. 2004. ‘Expanding the Feminine: Reconsidering Charlotte Lennox’s Age and The Life of Harriot Stuart’. The Eighteenth-Century Novel 4: 103–37. Charles, Katherine G. 2014. ‘Staging Sociability in The Excursion: Frances Brooke, David Garrick, and the King’s Theatre Coterie’. Eighteenth-Century Fiction 27.2: 257–84. Donkin, Ellen. 1995. Getting into the Act: Women Playwrights in London 1776–1829. New York: Routledge. Italia, Iona. 2005. The Rise of Literary Journalism in the Eighteenth Century: Anxious Employment. New York: Routledge. Johnson, Samuel. 1992. The Letters of Samuel Johnson, Volume I: 1731–1772. Ed. Bruce Redford. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lennox, Charlotte. 2012. Charlotte Lennox: Correspondence and Miscellaneous Documents. Ed. Norbert Schürer. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. McMullen, Lorraine. 1983. An Odd Attempt in a Woman: The Literary Life of Frances Brooke. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Needham, Gwendolyn. 1961. ‘Mrs. Frances Brooke: Dramatic Critic’. Theatre Notebook 15: 47–55. Nicholls, James C., ed. 1976. Mme Riccoboni’s Letters to David Hume, David Garrick, and Sir Robert Liston, 1764–1783. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 149: 45–6. Pedicord, Harry William and Fredrick Louis Bergmann, eds. 1980. The Plays of David Garrick. Volume I: Garrick’s Own Plays, 1740–1766. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Peltz, Lucy. 2008. ‘Living Muses: Constructing and Celebrating the Professional Woman in Literature and the Arts’. Brilliant Women: Eighteenth-Century Bluestockings. Ed. Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz. New Haven: Yale University Press. 57–93. Powell, Manushag N. 2012. Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Ritchie, Fiona. 2014. Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schellenberg, Betty A. 2005. The Professionalisation of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schürer, Norbert, ed. 2012. Charlotte Lennox: Correspondence and Miscellaneous Documents. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Small, Miriam Rossiter. [1935] 1969. Charlotte Ramsay Lennox: An Eighteenth-Century Lady of Letters. New Haven: Yale University Press. Staves, Susan. 2006. A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wild, Min. 1998. ‘“Prodigious wisdom”: Civic Humanism in Frances Brooke’s Old Maid’. Women’s Writing 5.3: 421–36. Wyett, Jodi. 2013. ‘Frances Brooke on (the) Stage: Theory and Practice’. Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 28.2: 25–43.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 439

17/11/17 5:03 PM

28 Fast Fashion: Style, Text, and Image in Late Eighteenth-Century Women’s Periodicals Chloe Wigston Smith

W

hen the Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770– 1832) launched in 1770, it opened with ‘An Address to the Fair Sex’ that advertised the many useful and amusing subjects on offer in its pages (1 (Aug 1770): n. p.).1 Among the topics itemised in the ‘bill of fare’ was dress – ‘a branch of information intirely new’ – that the Lady’s Magazine would endeavour to provide to London and rural readers: ‘as the fluctuations of fashions retards their progress into the country, we shall by engravings inform our distant readers with every innovation that is made in the female dress’ (1 (Aug 1770) n. p.). The Lady’s Magazine followed through on this promise by printing a plate of ‘A Lady in Full Dress’ immediately following the address, but such fashion plates would prove an intermittent presence in the periodical up until the early 1800s. The periodical, however, did include monthly embroidery patterns from its start: ‘it is intended in this collection to present the sex with most elegant patterns for the Tambour, Embroidery, or every kind of Needlework’ (1 (Aug 1770): n. p.). This essay studies the innovative changes in fashion journalism in the later eighteenth century, initiated by the Lady’s Magazine’s groundbreaking coverage of trends, advice, and style, as it developed a ‘branch of information intirely new’. Through its fold-out embroidery patterns, fashion plates, and coverage of royal birthday celebrations, the Lady’s Magazine circulated knowledge about particular trends and styles, ranging from reticules and caps to colours, silhouettes, and shoes. While the Lady’s Magazine has long been recognised as the first British women’s periodical to provide its readers with consistent fashion reporting, my essay brings new attention to how its fashion journalism stressed manual reproduction. Editorials and captions encouraged readers to adapt London styles to their own wardrobes, relying on the sewing skills that formed a standard part of women’s education in the period. The Lady’s Magazine’s patterns encouraged women to create new things for themselves and their homes, from the front flap of mule shoes to a drawing for the mantelpiece (beside which presumably one could read the latest issue). The Lady’s Magazine’s fashion coverage highlighted reproduction and replication, drawing on a common language shared by periodicals and women readers (a vocabulary made visible in its fashion quizzes). In addition to features and illustrations that focused on fashion, the publication included other less direct commentaries and depictions of dress and style, such as illustrations to fiction, plates of accomplished women, and advice columns about clothes. As Jennie Batchelor has detected, its fashion journalism trod neither a straightforward nor a transparent path, but settled rather on a contradictory strategy of both promoting fashion content and attempting to police the

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 440

17/11/17 5:03 PM

fast fashion

441

morality of female appearance (2005: 112–19). This essay focuses less on the tense moral debates surrounding femininity and fashion that played out in the pages of many periodicals – since at least the days of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Tatler and Spectator papers, as documented by Erin Mackie (1997) – and more so on the material practices encouraged by late eighteenth-century women’s periodicals. I argue the Lady’s Magazine’s tactile print practices inaugurated an early form of ‘fast fashion’, in which monthly patterns formed the cornerstone of its emphasis on manual production. In a period in which most middling and elite clothes were bespoke, fashion journalism placed the agency of style in the hands of readers. I examine first how the Lady’s Magazine developed an innovative print approach to style via the marketing of reports and plates commissioned specifically for its readers. While Jan Fergus’s research has demonstrated that men read, subscribed, and contributed to the Lady’s Magazine (2006: 200–9), the needlework patterns targeted the manual habits of women readers. In providing embroidery patterns to women in and outside the metropolis, the Lady’s Magazine imagined its audience as both readers and wearers of its style. The publication’s coverage of both practical handiwork and fashion knowledge forged a formidable path in print culture and its emphasis on style shaped the pages of its competitors, as I discuss in my second section. Here I turn to periodicals from the 1790s and early 1800s, the Gallery of Fashion (1794–1803) and La Belle Assemblée (1806–32), in order to document how the Lady’s Magazine influenced the periodicals market at the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century. Women’s periodicals contributed to the growing availability of pictorial illustrations to non-elite audiences, spurred by print technologies that, according to Patricia Anderson, reduced the cost of printed engravings in the late eighteenth century (1991: 17–18). Finally, I return to the Lady’s Magazine issues from the mid-1790s into the early 1800s, a period in which its visual fashion coverage stabilised in comparison with its sporadic presence in the 1770s and 1780s. I argue that this shift was a response to the increasing competition within fashion journalism, which the Lady’s Magazine itself established as a key component of women’s periodicals. Together these periodicals demonstrate that pragmatic fashion advice and craft knowledge were coveted and desired by readers, forming an essential part of their self-promotion to the public. This knowledge created new routes of circulating fashion information via text and image, ones that existed outside the gatekeeping of dressmakers, milliners, haberdashers, and modistes. Ultimately such access to fashion, coupled with the Lady’s Magazine’s tactile advice, participated in the democratisation of style in late eighteenth-century print culture.

Fashion, Patterns, and the Lady’s Magazine The Lady’s Magazine is often singled out not only for its popular format, significant readership, and staying power, but also for its groundbreaking coverage of fashion and style.2 Batchelor has argued that its fashion journalism cut across the contents: dress ‘is an implicit, or often explicit, subtext of countless articles, letters and fictions on various subjects throughout the magazine’s history’ (2005: 110). As she has shown, references to style appear not only in specific fashion plates and summaries of styles worn to royal birthday celebrations, but also in advice columns, portrait engravings, serialised fiction, poetry, and non-fiction articles. Kathryn Shevelow identifies a shift in the type of instruction offered to women readers in late-century

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 441

17/11/17 5:03 PM

442

chloe wigston smith

periodicals, in which ‘guidance in cookery, needlework, and fashion’ and other ‘specifically feminine learning’ supplanted the broader curriculum offered by midcentury magazines (1989: 189). In Shevelow’s view, late-century subjects narrow to practical information and domestic crafts in contrast with the more expansive scientific and philosophical subjects of earlier decades. At the same time, the Lady’s Magazine’s fashion knowledge enabled readers to develop forms of agency outside traditional domestic and commercial institutions, as Batchelor also argues in this collection. My emphasis on craft squares with Richard Sennett’s efforts to recuperate the ‘intelligent hand’ that bridges corporeal skill and manual habits to the mind (2008: 149–50). As I contend, the Lady’s Magazine’s printed patterns constituted a vital form of textual and manual epistemology, rather than the programmatic tools of domestic repression. The Lady’s Magazine patterns have been viewed as both linked to and separate from the periodical’s fashion content – a function no doubt of the scarcity of extant patterns and their ambiguous relationship to the periodical. The patterns constitute the most consistent visual source of dress knowledge in the Lady’s Magazine until the 1790s, but their material status renders them a ghostly presence in bound volumes and scholarly studies. The patterns were printed on thinner paper than the periodical’s other pages (in the early 1800s, their paper weight increases) and they were omitted from the annual supplement’s instructions to the binder that detailed the placement of illustrations. Such editorial excision assumes perhaps that readers would have used the patterns by the time they delivered their issues to the binder at the end of the year. At the same time, each issue’s table of contents promoted the patterns alongside other illustrations and music scores, promising consumers, ‘This Number is embellished with the following Copper-Plates’ (6 (Jan 1775): n. p.). As Batchelor has noted, the lack of binding instructions for patterns and music sheets turned these features into ‘parts of the magazine that were never designed to be preserved, not even by the editors who boasted of their inclusion’ (‘Patterns and Posterity’ 2015). Adburgham separates the engraved patterns from the Lady’s Magazine’s fashion coverage, arguing that ‘the elegant pull-out patterns on thrice-folded tissue paper were not of dresses, but simple embroidery patterns for embellishing aprons, handkerchiefs, gentlemen’s ruffles and waistcoats’ (1972: 129). Her argument faults the Lady’s Magazine for overselling its fashion reporting in its first two decades of publication (1972: 129). The patterns, however, constituted a critical part of the Lady’s Magazine’s fashion content and they provided pragmatic advice on style underestimated in Adburgham’s emphasis on their simplicity. Transferring print patterns to cloth required a good degree of manual skill and the patterns’ ‘simple’ aesthetic fits firmly within the late-century move toward neoclassical elegance. Their market value was made clear as early as 1786 when the rival New Lady’s Magazine; or, Polite and Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1786–95) boasted of ‘A new and elegant PATTERN for a Lady’s Work-Bag, &c. drawn by one of the first Artists in the Kingdom’ (1 (Feb 1786): n. p.). Unlike the periodical that it copied, the New Lady’s Magazine included its patterns in its annual instructions to the binder (1 (Supp 1786): 672). Other publications, such as Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, or, Compendium of Entertaining Knowledge (1771–1812) also listed its embroidery patterns in its binding instructions (see, for example, the list of plates for 1787). It is difficult to conclude whether or not these instructions implied that the patterns should be bound and preserved, rather than being used for actual embroidery. Whereas Jane Taylor has shown that the periodical market documented the many ways in which women were ‘expected to engage in fashionable consumption at a textual level’ (2016: 7), the Lady’s Magazine patterns remind us of the tactile stakes

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 442

17/11/17 5:03 PM

fast fashion

443

of this venture. Throughout the eighteenth century, fashions for accessories changed far more rapidly than those for gowns. New styles for accessories spread seasonally and sometimes even weekly in comparison with the slower annual pace for fabric design and silhouettes. As Anne Buck describes, elite and middling women rarely cut and stitched their own gowns (1979: 182), although the introduction in the 1790s of the simple chemise dress made domestic production possible. Buck notes that women embroidered purchased gowns, adding trimmings and embellishments at home (1979: 182). Frances Burney’s novel, Evelina (1778), models how women traded opinions of each other’s handiwork when the Branghton sisters quiz Evelina about her embroidered apron: ‘the young ladies began, very freely, to examine my dress, and to interrogate me concerning it. “This apron’s your own work, I suppose, Miss? but these sprigs a’n’t in fashion now”’ (2002: 71). While Evelina depicts this as an intrusive exchange – reflective of the Branghtons’ judgemental eye – the language suggests that trends in embroidery style, down to the small detail of a floral sprig, set the fashion. The Lady’s Magazine provided readers with patterns to update their accessories (and indeed occasionally their gowns) with their own hands, affirming its commitment to knowledge that reflected the quickly changing landscape and provided economical fixes for reticules, aprons, and bonnets. The patterns transformed the experience of subscribing to and reading the Lady’s Magazine into a corporeal and tactile one that extended the periodical’s reach beyond the boundaries of its printed pages. In encouraging readers to make full use of the patterns at home, the Lady’s Magazine provided a material and embodied experience for readers and their circles. Readers could wear the Lady’s Magazine on their garments and apply its patterns to workbags that often never left the sides of accomplished women. For instance, in March 1808, the Lady’s Magazine printed ‘A new and elegant Pattern for a WORK-BASKET’, creating a self-referential loop, in which the tools of pattern production were collected in a basket stamped by the periodical’s aesthetics. The August 1770 ‘Address’ positions the patterns within familiar discourses of improvement: ‘by the progressive improvement made in the art of pattern-drawing [readers will] be furnished with drawings that will shew both the elegance of their taste, and their own perfection in managing the needle’ (n. p.). The language of improvement applies both to the production levels of the periodical’s plates and to its audience’s needlework skills. The address emphasises the patterns as a powerful mode of aesthetic self-production made possible by the hands of readers. A loyal subscriber could outfit herself top to toe in the Lady’s Magazine’s patterns. The periodical distributed patterns to embellish aprons, caps (for adults and children), cloaks, cuffs, flounces, gowns, handkerchiefs, lappets, muffs, nets, petticoats, pocket books, women’s and men’s ruffles, scarves, shawls, shirts, shoes, sleeves, tippets, trimmings, tuckers, turbans, veils, waistcoats, and work-bags. Patterns could be adapted to multiple techniques such as one for ‘Working or Painting an English Shawl’ (6 (May 1775): n.p.) or applied to the reader’s choice of object as in ‘Six new and elegant Patterns of Sprigs’ (Aug 1776) and ‘A new Pattern for a Work-bag, Fire-Screen, Muff, &c.’ (Supp 1788). By 1819, pattern titles had grown generic, such as ‘Pattern for Ladies’ Work’ (50 (Jan 1819): 50). In general, the patterns reflect period aesthetics for either floral style embroidery or neoclassical designs that evoke Grecian friezes. The table of contents for April 1808, for instance, featured ‘A new and elegant PATTERN of an ETRUSCAN BORDER’, which was probably designed for furniture and other domestic goods as that same month included a separate print for textile borders and

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 443

17/11/17 5:03 PM

444

chloe wigston smith

trimmings. Other patterns applied to a wide range of domestic objects such as ‘Toilet Pincushion’ (June 1775); ‘Watches Cases’ (Sep 1775); ‘an Elegant Map of Europe, for Needle-Work’ (Oct 1776); ‘A new and elegant DRAWING of a CARD BOX’ (June 1807); ‘An elegant new Pattern for the Ornament of a Chimney-Piece’ (March 1807). A brief paragraph explains that this last pattern was requested by a reader named Dorothée, but leaves the ornament’s colours up to readers’ ‘own ingenuity and taste’ before describing the original’s hues (Mar 1807: 156). April 1807’s issue also included a copper-plate engraving of a ‘New and elegant DRAWING for the ORNAMENT of a CHIMNEY-PIECE’. The Lady’s Magazine’s aesthetics could run rampant over domestic space, spilling over the brims of printed pages, moving past the edges of library shelves and drawing room tables. Moreover, the portable patterns circulated in domestic and public spaces, moving with the bodies and limbs of women. They functioned as material evidence of the periodical’s readership, their needlework practices, and a sociable community of craft. Did women recognise specific designs on the garments of their family, friends, and acquaintances? Were the Lady’s Magazine patterns discussed and evaluated alongside the magazine’s serialised fiction and moral advice? The patterns contain few clues about their social functions and almost no instructions beyond their titles (such gaps in instruction would later be filled in by Victorian periodicals). They relied on the nonverbal manual skills that so many women shared during the period, whether by choice or imposition, and as such functioned as semi-verbal parts of a periodical whose success hinged on growing literacy rates among women. Some print captions indicate somewhat more detail than others, such as the pattern from June 1789 for a ‘New Pattern of Trimmings to be Work’d for a Gown in Colours’ (other designs for August 1789 specify the use of colour) or ‘A new and elegant PATTERN for the Centre of a REGENCY SHAWL’ (Dec 1811) which indicates the position on the accessory. Another pattern from November 1810 shows a lush foliage border for a ‘Black Net kerchief for the Head’, thereby specifying the type and colour of fabric. Such details suggest that other patterns might have been worked in white, which was typical for period embroidery. The size of the patterns indicates an unstable relationship to the periodical itself, in that the dimensions of the patterns often exceed the pages of the Lady’s Magazine. In extant copies at the Special Collections Libraries at the University of Cardiff and the University of York, bound-in patterns are frequently folded to fit the issues’ dimensions. Their outsized dimensions demanded a different kind of tactile engagement distinct from turning the periodical’s other pages. The January 1808 engraving for a ‘New & Elegant Pattern for a half Handkerchief or Veil’ (see Fig. 28.1) constitutes a typical example. The fold-out sheet exceeds the width of the periodical’s pages by 14 centimetres (patterns could exceed either the height and/or width of the periodical’s pages). The design combines floral sprigs with geometric circles and stars, showing the scalloped corner of the fabric (likely muslin). The pattern is to scale, as most patterns were, especially starting in the last decade of the eighteenth century. At the top of the paper, the inscription ‘Engraved for the Lady’s Magazine’ conveys how the periodical promoted its patterns as a special and exclusive feature; it’s a line that recurs across extant examples. Inevitably patterns are ‘new’ and always ‘elegant’, suggesting the market value and appeal of patterns pitched directly to the periodical’s community of readers. The captions repeat the point, almost every month, that subscribers could rely on the Lady’s Magazine to deliver manual experiences that would last beyond the initial receipt of the monthly issue.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 444

17/11/17 5:03 PM

fast fashion

445

Figure 28.1 ‘New & Elegant Pattern for a half Handkerchief or Veil’. The Lady’s Magazine (Jan 1808). © University of York. While the patterns functioned as a visual variation on the didactic dress advice offered elsewhere in the Lady’s Magazine, they also promoted readers’ aesthetic agency, in concert with the periodical’s multiple, and sometimes competing, aims to entertain and instruct. The final appearance of the embroidery designs would have varied widely in practice; outcomes would have been shaped by the quality of threads and fabrics, colours, and degrees of skill and experience. Patterns, in particular, for borders and trimming left many decisions in the hands of women. ‘A New & Elegant Pattern for the Bottom of a Dress’ (May 1808) showcases a richly detailed floral design and the engraving indicates a wide range of thin and thick stems, leaves, and flowers. Another engraving of ‘Various Patterns for different parts of a Lady’s Dress’ from September 1811 places decisions entirely in the imaginations of readers. Such patterns leave a number of design questions unanswered, such as the number of repetitions around the hem and the precise placement of the border at the bottom. What is clear is that the ‘lady’ of the Lady’s Magazine was imagined as both a reader and wearer of the periodical’s pages.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 445

17/11/17 5:03 PM

446

chloe wigston smith

Fashion and the Print Marketplace The Lady’s Magazine affirms how fashion coverage was a selling point for readers, even if the periodical struggled to provide this content in its early decades (apart from the regular patterns). As Edward Copeland has argued, from ‘the beginning in 1770 of the Lady’s Magazine’s long life, fashion was its operative language’ and its focus on new patterns of consumption ‘gave a strong illusion of contemporaneity’ (1995: 117, 119). Despite the production challenges of including fashion plates (which featured bespoke clothes that may well have been beyond the purchasing power of subscribers), the magazine introduced many innovations into the British periodicals market following the first fashion plate in its inaugural issue. By the mid-1770s, the publication was already including text to describe the fashions in its plates, as well as fashions that were not illustrated, and had designated a fashion correspondent, Charlotte Stanley, who provided sporadic reports between 1774 and 1782, alongside other anonymous contributions. In February 1789, it showcased a deluxe, coloured plate titled ‘The Fashionable Full Dress of Paris’, copied from the sophisticated plates of the 20 August 1788 issue of the Magasin des Modes (1786–9). Even the irregular appearance of fashion plates offered a template for the magazine’s many imitators and competitors. Fashion plates, as opposed to patterns, were the primary source of visual knowledge adopted by later periodicals such as the Lady’s Monthly Museum, or Polite Repository of Amusement and Instruction (1798–1832), which included handcoloured plates but not patterns. The Lady’s Magazine model was followed by several periodicals in the 1790s, a decade that witnessed the expansion of periodicals directed at a female audience and has been identified as a watershed for fashion periodicals by Margaret Beetham (1996: 31) and Bermingham (1994: 96), among others. Most famous – and luxurious – of these was Niklaus Wilhelm von Heideloff’s Gallery of Fashion. While Heideloff’s Gallery of Fashion was a slim volume (usually running to four pages per issue), its detailed, hand-coloured plates far surpassed the production standards of the Lady’s Magazine. Adburgham recounts how Heideloff brought his experience as a miniaturist in Paris to London and employed fellow émigré dressmakers and illustrators who had fled the French Revolution (1972: 205–7). The monthly issues included two plates with detailed descriptions of the dress, but eliminated the much broader range of topics and news covered by the Lady’s Magazine. Figure numbers identified specific outfits in the plates, with some pages showing up to three ensembles. This was fashion journalism for the sake of fashion, available to annual subscribers who could afford three guineas for twelve issues (non-subscribers could purchase individual copies at seven shillings and six pence each). This was not an inconsiderable luxury when compared with the much cheaper price of the Lady’s Magazine (6d an issue until 1800, when the price rose to 1s). As he outlines in his opening advertisement, Heideloff hoped to close a gap in the print marketplace: ‘A Gallery of Fashion is a work long wanted, and wished for, and now makes its appearance upon a very extensive plan.’ His ambitious plans included high publication values and insider knowledge. Heideloff drew attention to the ‘utmost accuracy’ of his plates, which were printed on the ‘finest woven paper’. He stamped his coverage of style with a sense of exclusivity and urgency, assuring readers that some plates, such as those for court birthday

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 446

17/11/17 5:03 PM

fast fashion

447

dress, will be printed ‘before they are seen by the public’. Moreover, his first advertisement marries fashion to individualism by soliciting contributions from readers (echoing the Lady’s Magazine’s invitations to its readers); Heideloff promised that ‘the credit of the invention of the different dresses, will be secured to those Fair Subscribers who contribute to the embellishment of this work (if they have no objection to their names being mentioned)’ (‘Advertisement’. Apr 1794: n. p.). Heideloff aimed to gratify an English public long aware of the superior reputation of French style by marketing the periodical as a nationalist product: ‘This work, so necessary to point out the superior elegance of the English taste, is the first and only one ever published in this country; it surpasses any thing of the kind formerly published at Paris.’ In contrast with the Lady’s Magazine’s appeal to the purse strings of savvy subscribers, he positions the periodical as an elite product by underscoring his own connections to high society: ‘Several Ladies of rank and fashion have not only approved of this plan, but they have at the same time granted permission to the Publisher to make drawings of their new dresses, and to insert them in this GALLERY’ (‘Advertisement’. Apr 1794: n. p). Despite this tantalising promise, only two fashions were attributed over the periodical’s lifetime: a court dress credited to ‘Madame Beauvais, Milliner to her Majesty’ (Feb 1795: Figure 43) and another court dress a year later, described as ‘New Dress, in the Roman Style, introduced at the Opera by a foreign Lady of distinction’ (Feb 1796: Figure 87). Heideloff aimed at the highest echelons, but was careful to welcome a wider class of subscribers: ‘This Gallery will not only be interesting to Ladies of the highest fashion, but must be deemed absolutely necessary to every person concerned in the fashions of the day’ (‘Advertisement’. Apr 1794: n. p.). Monthly issues collated a range of wear for different settings, activities, and times of the day, including court dress, morning and afternoon dress, and examples of full and half-mourning gowns. As a ‘gallery’, the periodical exhibited fashions to be viewed by the public. By 1796, Heideloff claimed that his periodical had launched so successfully that subscribers could ‘boast to possess an unique repository of English national Dresses of Ladies; which, considering the limitation of copies, must become in time very scarce, and of course very valuable’ (‘Advertisement’. Apr 1796: n. p.). Heideloff stresses, in the advertisement to the Gallery of Fashion’s second year of publication, the periodical’s relevance to contemporary and future readers: ‘as it records all the elegant varieties of female dress, is not only interesting at present moment, but must become much more so at a remote period, being a complete history of the Fashions of the day, and as such it may not be undeserving a place in the first libraries in Europe’ (‘Advertisement’. Apr 1795: n. p.). His magazine looks forward as it looks back, cementing itself as both a vision of future style in the present moment and an encyclopaedia of past style in the future. Not only did the Gallery of Fashion differ in quality from the Lady’s Magazine – the gold and silver paint glitters on the page – but Adburgham argues that its compositions mirror those of conversation pieces by placing figures in social settings (1972: 206). The Lady’s Magazine did, on occasion, show female figures in conversation-type compositions prior to the appearance of the Gallery of Fashion, such as February 1775’s ‘Fashionable Dresses in the Rooms at Weymouth’. Heideloff, however, vastly expanded his settings by positioning figures in drawing rooms and opera boxes, at the tea table, the harp, and pianoforte and by the seaside and on country walks, frequently filling in

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 447

17/11/17 5:03 PM

448

chloe wigston smith

the interior and exterior backgrounds of his plates (the Lady’s Magazine would catch up with such compositions in the second decade of the nineteenth century). Heideloff’s figures participate in fashionable activities as they model clothes, accessories, and hairstyles. Their refined poses and performance of leisured activities in elite venues promoted a vision of aristocratic fashion, unconcerned with the mud or grass that might attach to white muslin. For instance, in the plate ‘Two Ladies, en negligé, taking an airing in a phaeton’, two figures dressed in white sit in a delicate phaeton; the figure on the left leads the two white horses, while her companion holds a green umbrella (Sep 1794: Figs. 21, 22). Heideloff’s figures are often in the midst of conversation, such as the two figures who gaze directly at each other, ignoring the country scenery around them (Sep 1796: Figs. 111, 112). In this plate, the figure on the left holds an open fan that mirrors her posture; her companion holds a closed fan that points downwards in the direction of her seated friend. Sometimes the styles look somewhat incongruous in their surroundings, such as the figures in 317 and 318 (Nov 1801), who stroll together in white muslin gowns, while gazing at a thatched cottage. We watch the figures while they stare at the humble cottage in the distance. The plate promotes picturesque viewing practices – setting the figures in rural scenery dotted with an arresting object – that indicates the periodical’s participation in contemporary aesthetics. While the Gallery of Fashion’s luxurious plates create a more refined and expansive world than those of the Lady’s Magazine’s patterns (Heideloff’s figures are never shown sewing), the periodical shared in the Lady’s Magazine’s emphasis on the materiality of fashion. It followed the Lady’s Magazine’s lead in forging new routes of production, in which the pages of print would be reproduced as material items. Heideloff envisioned the text as supporting his readers’ ability to replicate the fashions on view: ‘To each figure will be annexed such a plain and particular description of every article, that it will be impossible to err in the arrangement of the dress’ (‘Advertisement’. Apr 1794: n. p.). These are not merely plates to be studied and scrutinised, but styles to be replicated and worn. Heideloff anticipates the transfer of fashion plates to drawing rooms, echoing the Lady’s Magazine’s investments in the tactile production of style. He revisited the coupling of fashion knowledge with material production in 1795 by connecting his plates to actual garments: ‘all the new dresses inserted into the Gallery of Fashion are not imaginary, but really existing ones’ (‘Advertisement’. Apr 1795: n. p.). Dozens of plates build on this claim to show the physical movement of fabric, conveying the tactile feel of garments and accessories in motion. Shawls lift in the wind (Apr 1800: Fig. 252); gowns sway during country rambles, displaying how muslin and cambric drape (May 1802: Figs. 335, 336); hems catch on the edges of wooden stairs (Apr 1796: Figs. 92, 93). In another plate (see Fig. 28.2), textiles confront the British rain when figures 134 and 135 encounter a storm in Hyde Park (Apr 1797), although their gowns remain dry and their bonnets fixed in place as sheets of drops descend. The wind lifts their gowns and shawls by several feet, modelling the movement and buoyancy of their muslins, calicoes, and satins. It raises the grey-chequered calico gown of figure 135 to expose her ‘White sandals laced with coquelicot riband’ (Apr 1797); the movement of the French fabric casts a shadow on the grass below. Such plates position fashion as a physical experience – not merely a scopophilic one – with garments that drape around bodies and move with limbs through space and familiar settings. While the Gallery of Fashion stopped short of explaining how its style could be manufactured at home, even as it invoked the tactility of garments and textiles, La Belle Assemblée united the Lady’s Magazine’s printed patterns with Heideloff’s focus on

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 448

17/11/17 5:03 PM

fast fashion

449

Figure 28.2 Figures 134 and 135. The Gallery of Fashion (Apr 1797). ©Victoria and Albert Museum, London. plates. The periodical took cues also from the Gallery of Fashion by attributing styles to specific women, such as January 1807’s ‘authentic Roxborough Evening Dress, as worn by the Duchess of Roxborough’. Similar to the Lady’s Magazine, the Belle Assemblée described not only the figures in its fashion plates, which starting in 1807 were often hand-coloured, but also broader trends. From its inaugural issue, the periodical

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 449

17/11/17 5:03 PM

450

chloe wigston smith

promoted its fashion journalism and printed patterns, advertising in its table of contents (in addition to two plates of notable women and a song): ‘Three whole length Portraits, and four Head Dresses of the London Fashions’; ‘Five whole length Portraits of Parisian Fashions’; ‘Four New Patterns for Needle-Work’ (Feb 1806). It tended to present generic patterns, often described as new, elegant, and original, which were less refined than those of the Lady’s Magazine, in that their lines were thicker, their ink sometimes uneven. The Belle Assemblée boasted also of special commissions: in February 1806, the caption for a fold-out page of four borders describes the ‘Original Patterns for Needlework designed expressly for the first Number of La Belle Assemblée, March 1. 1806.’ By the following month, the pattern was downsized to fit the periodical’s pages, but this represents an anomaly for the year. Extant patterns from the Belle Assemblée reveal a gap between the pattern titles in the table of contents and the actual patterns within the issue’s pages. July 1807, for instance, advertises ‘A new and elegant Pattern for Needle-Work’ in the table of contents, but the caption on the pattern titles the design an ‘Entire new Collar for a Morning Dress’; similar textual gaps emerge in November 1807’s pattern for the ‘Bottom of a Round Dress’ and December 1807’s ‘for the Neck of a Shirt’, as well as for the majority of issues from 1808. Absent patterns make it all the more challenging to determine how frequently the table of contents generalised the monthly design. The table of contents assured consumers that patterns awaited them each month, but readers would need to turn the pages to discover the precise design inside. Caption titles, on occasion, relate some instruction for home production (evoking the Lady’s Magazine’s infrequent guidance about coloured threads and technique). For instance, September 1808’s border might be worked in ‘White or Colour’d Silks’. However, most patterns yield scant information about execution, allowing readers to make their own choices about thread, colour, fabric, and technique. By 1809, the Belle Assemblée patterns had grown less elaborate. They offered two bands of floral sprigs and the captions grew more concise, noting merely ‘Engraved for La Belle Assemblée’ (Sep 1809). The moderate size and detail of the Belle Assemblée’s late patterns suggest that fashion plates, which had improved in colour and sophistication since the publication’s first years, were beginning to dominate its fashion coverage. Fashion plates offered more visual impact than black and white patterns, but they also diminished the presence of craft knowledge and the agency of readers’ manual habits. The plates positioned the publication as self-consciously elegant, pitched at affluent readers who preferred, or at least aspired to possess the means, to commission their clothes rather than produce them at home. Prior treatments of the Belle Assemblée and women’s periodicals more broadly have minimised the political implications of their fashion journalism and illustrations. For instance, Peter John Miller’s dismissal of the space devoted to dress in Belle Assemblée reflects a simplistic – and I would add dusty – view that fashion should be divorced from other fields of knowledge such as politics and history. Miller, for instance, complains that in the Belle Assemblée ‘there is not the slightest interest shown in the important social and political issues of the day’ and that ‘a regular feature of the magazine during the Napoleonic Wars was its review and illustrations of the fashions being worn in Paris’ (1971: 238). Such readings ignore the politics at stake for readers of periodicals and for the plates that joined British readers with French women in the sociable world of print and image despite the incivilities and sacrifices demanded by war. As Bermingham has noted, British women’s consumption of the clothes and goods of foreign countries was neither a neutral nor an apolitical act: the ‘freedom to consume the dress of other countries confirmed Britain’s growing international economic and political power’ (1994:

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 450

17/11/17 5:03 PM

fast fashion

451

103). In contrast to Miller’s view, women readers would have been all too aware of the implications of viewing fashions from Paris during a period in which trade with and travel to France were compromised. Moreover, French fashion from the 1790s onwards made broad use of revolutionary politics. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell has charted Parisian fashions for revolutionary cockades (2015: 272–4). As Aileen Ribeiro details, dressmakers advertised gowns ‘à la republicaine’ and following the fall of Robespierre, women embellished their hairstyles with red ribbons, a blunt reference to the guillotine’s cut (1995: 91–2). Napoleonic culture continued to show a mastery of appearance by committing itself to a stark neoclassical style that evoked the timelessness of antiquity, as if to indicate the longevity and authority of their new regime. Thus the presence of French fashions and even their absence during the Revolution and Napoleonic wars constituted neither neutral nor apolitical print practices. Rather fashion plates show how style intersected with broader political discourses, as well as how British women asserted their engagement with other nations via the culture of appearance and consumption.

Style, Time, Practice The Lady’s Magazine’s fashion journalism constitutes an early harbinger of the fast fashion system that would eventually upend the bespoke dress and tailoring trades that dominated the eighteenth century. In contemporary cultures of consumption, fast fashion conjures images of global sweatshops and cheap, expendable garments. For Juliet B. Schor, fast fashion shapes not only our purchase and treatment of clothes but a range of consumer goods, provoking a cycle of acceleration in which ‘the cycle of purchase, diffusion and, eventually, discard accelerates’ almost beyond recognition (2013: 37). Contemporary fast fashion thrives on the acceleration of style and offers low-cost fashions modelled after luxury trends (Annamma Joy et al. 2010: 275). In the eighteenth century, time was intimately linked to fashion, as new styles negotiated the present, future, and past, as Timothy Campbell has explored, notably in his discussions of fashion illustrations in women’s pocketbooks (2016: 64–6). While eighteenthcentury fashion developed changing seasons well before the late-century proliferation of periodicals, the fashion magazine played a central role in the print distribution of fashion knowledge and contributed to the temporal acceleration of style that today drives fast fashion. For Bermingham, fashion magazines, with their monthly proclamations of new trends that waxed and waned over the year, created a print culture in which ‘the endless cycle of fashion was a cycle of sudden breaks and equally sudden repetitions’ (1994: 101). The Lady’s Magazine made the circulation of fashion knowledge from the metropolis to rural parishes a central tenet of its contents; its patterns enabled the reproduction of bespoke fashion in the home. Magazines positioned fashion as a news item and their predictions projected the sense that readers could keep pace with its temporality and even anticipate future styles. The Lady’s Magazine patterns played with this sense of time and repetition of trends in two distinct ways. First, the patterns depended on time: without the hands of leisured women, the patterns could not be executed. Second many of the patterns were designed to be repeated not only across the borders of garments, but across individual items such as sleeves and reticules. I have argued elsewhere that the Lady’s Magazine’s patterns delivered practical, elegant, and economic information that dovetailed with broader shifts toward democratic style in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Smith 2013: 182–4), but here I want to develop more fully how manual

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 451

17/11/17 5:03 PM

452

chloe wigston smith

habits rendered the patterns an accessible form of craft knowledge that undermined the authority of the professional dress and tailoring trades. For Buck, the Lady’s Magazine’s patterns created new routes of circulation for needlework knowledge; previously patterns could only be purchased from commercial pattern-drawers and in haberdasher’s shops (1979: 182), unless they were copied or created by amateurs. In fact, the patterns were marketed as an intrinsic part of the periodical’s value; the 1770 opening address promises that, ‘They will find in this Magazine, Price only Six Pence, among variety of other Copper-Plates, a pattern that would cost them double the money at the Haberdashers’ (1 (Aug 1770): n. p.). Thus the patterns are placed in direct competition with more traditional and costly sources for craft knowledge; they undermined commercial practices by making needlework knowledge accessible to thousands of subscribers and their circles. Such practices shaped the first four decades of the publication’s history; by the 1810s, the Lady’s Magazine had started to promote particular styles produced at Bond Street shops, naming specific dressmakers and milliners. The periodical negotiated a fine balance between fashion knowledge and moral advice, showing its responsiveness to market competition. While it remains difficult to pinpoint Heideloff’s influence on the Lady’s Magazine, its later plates mimic the Gallery of Fashion’s genteel figures. In 1796, the Lady’s Magazine had reintroduced periodic fashion reports and after the first third of 1799, these reports appear in each monthly issue. It now covered Paris and London styles in separate columns and the last five months of 1800 showcased hand-coloured plates. Similar to Heideloff’s fashion conversation pieces, in which figures sit at the breakfast table, stroll in Hyde Park, or gather on a park bench, the Lady’s Magazine’s Paris dress of September 1800 sets its female figure in a scene laden with interior details. The woman’s hands are casually placed on a bureau and hat stand. The November 1800 issue depicts a woman walking hand in hand with a young child, demonstrating the partnership between fashion and other daily activities, and replicating plates from Heideloff that feature mother and child together in the sitting room or at the seaside. The trailing fabric at the bottom of her dress suggests the movement of walking, echoing the Gallery of Fashion’s active scenes. Both figures are accompanied by text that not only describes the dress on view (its fabrics, colours, the method of looping a ribbon through a hat), but also offers broader insights into current Parisian style. Thus the text distributes additional knowledge, far more so than the Gallery of Fashion’s emphasis on individual figures. The Lady’s Magazine mixes details with wider fashion trends, including information about Continental styles that very few readers could witness in person in 1800. In January 1813, the Lady’s Magazine revisited another composition from the Gallery of Fashion in a plate titled ‘Fashionable Morning & Evening Dresses’ (see Plate 2). The plate depicts a standing figure and a seated figure, who holds a copy of the Lady’s Magazine in her left hand. Neither figure sports embroidered garments or accessories, but the seated figure holds open the issue’s table of contents, which listed both the monthly patterns and plates. Fourteen years earlier, the Gallery of Fashion had shown a plate with two women and a child (Sep 1799: Figs. 204, 205, 206), in which the seated figure holds a copy of the periodical open to the title page (see Fig. 28.3). This plate is filled with fabric and other coverings, from the voluminous folds of cambric and calico in the women’s round gowns to the densely patterned carpet, thick curtains, and panelled walls. The central figure remains transfixed by the periodical, oblivious to the flurry of textiles that surround

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 452

17/11/17 5:03 PM

fast fashion

453

her and to the conversation between the child and other female figure. The composition thus prioritises attention toward the periodical itself, creating a self-referential cycle that embeds fashion within print. Moreover, the wash of the figure’s grey gloves (which appear more blue than the grey noted by the text) mirrors the colour

Figure 28.3 Figures 204, 205, 206. The Gallery of Fashion (Jan 1799). ©Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 453

17/11/17 5:03 PM

454

chloe wigston smith

of the periodical, creating visual connections between the figure’s hands and her reading material. Both plates underscore how the circulation and knowledge of fashion depends on textual absorption and how periodical culture produces fashion knowledge. By 1818, the Lady’s Magazine’s patterns had shrunk to fit the dimensions of its other pages, mirroring the smaller scale of patterns in the Belle Assemblée. At the same time, this smaller size remained inconsistent, as seen in the wide, folded pattern from the following year for a child’s cap (Mar 1819). Apart from the child’s cap, the designs now focus on borders and trimmings, rather than on the comprehensive collection of objects such as reticules, chimney pieces, and maps from its first two decades. In general, the increasing presence of hand-coloured fashion plates, with sophisticated production values, was balanced against the diminished role of patterns toward the end of the publication’s run. On the one hand, these smaller patterns conform to the periodical’s standard size and no longer need to be folded to fit its dimensions. On the other hand, their reduced size stabilised their material status, matching them to the other pages. In April 1819, the patterns stopped featuring in each month’s table of contents, even though issues continued to include two fashion plates. The Lady’s Magazine, by now published as a new series, prioritised plates; no editorial commentary explains the disappearance of the patterns. Nevertheless, subscribers could encounter tactile fabrics via the advertisements attached to the end of each issue. These advertisements were rarely bound into annual volumes; however, a rare example from April 1819 includes an advertisement for Urling’s Lace House in the Strand (see Fig. 28.4). The fold-out feature includes a lengthy textual description of Urling’s specially patented thread, positioned alongside an engraving of the shop. At the bottom of the engraving, thread and lace samples have been inserted in place of the shop’s front windows. The advertisement’s blend of sample, text, and image replicates the marketing and haptic consumer practices at the heart of Ackermann’s Repository of Arts (1809–20), as delineated by Serena Dyer in this volume (page 483). Beneath each sample, captions note that Urling has included his own products so that readers can compare and contrast his ‘Patent Thread, free from Fibre, of which his Lace is manufactured’ with inferior ‘Cotton [thread], full of Fibre, of which Common Lace is manufactured’ (Apr 1819). Lace was a frequent presence in the periodical’s fashion reports; the same issue featured a plate of a walking dress topped with a bonnet trimmed ‘on the front [with] a full broad blond or Valenciennes lace’ (50 (Apr 1819): 217). The advertisement creates an integrated marketing experience for subscribers. The text elaborates that the ‘superior clearness and transparency of Urling’s Lace, are best seen by holding it up to the light’ (Apr 1819). The reverse of the engraving shows lengths of green paper that secure the samples to the page and are stamped with two royal wax seals (‘by the Queen’s authority’), as well as Urling’s trade card. The page’s large scale and its fabric inserts mirror the tactile engagement promoted by earlier patterns. The Lady’s Magazine’s patterns demanded manual manipulation just as this advertisement encouraged potential consumers to handle and touch its material parts, to observe its qualities close to the light. While the patterns themselves may has vanished from its contents, it’s clear that their legacy of tactile engagement lived on in other forms that rendered the periodical both a reading and manual experience.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 454

17/11/17 5:03 PM

fast fashion

455

Figure 28.4 Advertisement, Urling’s Lace House. The Lady’s Magazine (Apr 1819). This copy was originally in the collection of the fashion designer Hardy Amies. © University of York.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 455

17/11/17 5:03 PM

456

chloe wigston smith

The Lady’s Magazine’s fashion journalism, like those of other late-century women’s periodicals, depended on unusual and innovative publishing practices that joined print culture to manual habits, fashion to print circulation, and invited readers into a sociable world of style. The regular printing of patterns suggests the very tactility of the Lady’s Magazine’s fashion knowledge. As Sennett detects, ‘language struggles with depicting physical action’ (2008: 179), a tension that the periodical sought to smooth by turning to visual designs that required minimal text. In a genre that relied on language, sentences, and stories, the needlework patterns traded in the visuals of craft. In so doing, the patterns developed corporeal links between periodicals and readers in multiple ways, from the manual habits required to reproduce them to the wearing of the periodical’s aesthetics. The patterns were deeply embedded in the Lady’s Magazine’s print practices and marketing strategies, yet they also connected the publication to other material realms. The patterns required other objects such as needles, threads, and fabric, developing a series of tactile dependencies that evoke Ian Hodder’s insights into the interconnectedness of things (2012: 52). At the same time, they produced a series of entanglements, to use another of Hodder’s terms, in their dependence on humans to transform them from print to artefact; their blending of periodical pages with material practice; their combining of different discourses of text, image, and objects; their drawing in of readers into the Lady’s Magazine’s aesthetics. Ultimately their ephemeral and equivocal relation to the periodical as whole constituted a strength rather than a weakness; they allowed the Lady’s Magazine to reach into the homes and hands of readers, to turn print into bodily experience.

Notes 1. In 1823 the magazine’s title changed to the Lady’s Magazine; or, Mirror of the BellesLettres. 2. For significant studies of the Lady’s Magazine’s history, see Fergus 2006: 216–17; Hunter 1977: 104–5; White 1970: 31. On its coverage of fashion, see Adburgham 1972: 128 and McKendrick 1982: 47.

Works Cited Adburgham, Alison. 1972. Women in Print: Writing Women and Women’s Magazines from the Restoration to the Accession of Victoria. London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd. Anderson, Patricia. 1991. The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, 1790–1860. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Annamma, Joy, John Sherry Jr, Alladi Venkatesh, Jeff Wang, and Ricky Chan. 2010. ‘Fast Fashion, Sustainability and the Ethical Appeal of Luxury Brands’. Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 16.3: 273–96. Batchelor, Jennie. 2005. Dress, Distress and Desire: Clothing and the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. —. 27 April 2015. ‘Patterns and Posterity: or, What’s not in the Lady’s Magazine’. The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1818): Understanding the Emergence of a Genre. < https://blogs.kent. ac.uk/ladys-magazine/2015/04/27/patterns-and-posterity-or-whats-not-in-the-ladysmagazine> (last accessed 10 Dec 2016). Beetham, Margaret. 1996. A Magazine of her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914. New York: Routledge.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 456

17/11/17 5:03 PM

fast fashion

457

La Belle Assemblée, or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine, Addressed Particularly to the Ladies. 1806–32 (1st ser. 1806–10; 2nd ser. 1810–24; 3rd ser. 1825–32). London. Bermingham, Ann. 1994. ‘The Picturesque and Ready-to-Wear Femininity’. The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape, and Aesthetics since 1770. Ed. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 81–119. Buck, Anne. 1979. Dress in Eighteenth Century England. New York: Holmes & Meier. Burney, Frances. 2002. Evelina. Ed. Edward A. Bloom and Vivien Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Campbell, Timothy. 2016. Historical Style: Fashion and the New Mode of History, 1740–1830. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Chrisman-Campbell, Kimberly. 2015. Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Copeland, Edward. 1995. Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fergus, Jan. 2006. Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The Gallery of Fashion. 1794–1803. London. Hodder, Ian. 2012. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Hunter, Jean E. 1977. ‘The Lady’s Magazine and the Study of Englishwomen in the Eighteenth Century’. Newsletters to Newspapers: Eighteenth-Century Journalism. Ed. Donovan H. Bond and W. Reynolds McLeod. School of Journalism, West Virginia University. 103–17. The Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex. 1770–1832 (1st ser. 1770–1819; 2nd ser. 1820–9; 3rd ser. 1830–2). London. McKendrick, Neil. 1982. ‘The Commercialisation of Fashion’. The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialisation of Eighteenth-Century England. Ed. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb. London: Europa Publications. 34–99. Mackie, Erin. 1997. Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in the Tatler and the Spectator. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Miller, Peter John. 1971. ‘Eighteenth-Century Periodicals for Women’. History of Education Quarterly. 11.3: 279–86. The New Lady’s Magazine; or, Polite and Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex. 1786–95. London. Ribeiro, Aileen. 1995. The Art of Dress: Fashion in England and France, 1750 to 1820. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Schor, Juliet. 2013. ‘From Fast to Connected Consumption: Slowing Down the Spending Treadmill’. Culture of the Slow: Social Deceleration in an Accelerated World. Ed. Nick Osbaldiston. Basingstoke: Palgrave Connect. 34–51. Sennett, Richard. 2008. The Craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shevelow, Kathryn. 1989. Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical. London and New York: Routledge. Smith, Chloe Wigston. 2013. Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Jane. 2016. ‘“Important Trifles”: Jane Austen, the Fashion Magazine, and Inter-Textual Consumer Experience’. History of Retailing and Consumption. 2.2: 113–28. White, Cynthia L. 1970. Women’s Magazines, 1693–1968. London: Michael Joseph.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 457

17/11/17 5:03 PM

29 Magazine Miniatures: Portraits of Actresses, Princesses, and Queens in Late EighteenthCentury Periodicals Laura Engel

T

his essay explores images of actresses, princesses, and queens in periodicals such as the Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770–1832), La Belle Assemblée (1806–32), and the European Magazine (1782–1826) from 1780 to 1830.1 Comparing portraits of Sarah Siddons, Mary Robinson, and Elizabeth Inchbald to images of Queen Charlotte and Princess Charlotte Augusta, I propose that periodical portraits function as celebrity pin-ups (versions of the same image) as well as markers of individual character (celebrating specificity and originality). These images participated in the creation of ideas about women’s claim to fame, legitimacy, and visibility. Readers who worshipped actresses could ‘own’ an image of their favourite player by purchasing a periodical, and they could also feel somehow connected to royal women, who resembled their most cherished theatrical stars. At the same time, the legitimacy bestowed on queens and princesses transferred visually to famous actresses who appeared in very similar costumes and poses (Asleson 2001; Perry 2008; Engel 2011). Looking closely at the ways in which artists employed similar iconography in these portraits, particularly in relation to dress, gesture, and expression, suggests ways of seeing that connect to contemporary modes of visual display, particularly to the repetition and serial nature of pictures on Facebook, which promote a sense of intimacy and familiarity with the portrait’s subject that is ultimately a construction. Framing devices used in periodical portraits, specifically the portrait oval and theatrical motifs such as curtains, connect these images to formal full-length paintings as well as to portrait miniatures, prints, and engravings. Periodical portraits thus foreground the inherent tension between formality and intimacy highlighted in images of celebrated female figures. The appearance of images of famous women in periodicals reflects a larger preoccupation with the politics of representing identities across a variety of visual media at various prices. From elaborate full-length portraits to miniatures set in diamonds, to relatively inexpensive prints, engravings, and pictures in newspapers, by the late eighteenth century almost everyone could afford to own an image of a famous person (Clayton 1997: 22–3; Ballaster et al. 1991: 66–7; Copeland 1995: 119). Images in periodicals were often copies of existing portraits or prints. The serial nature of these pictures created a network of images that went beyond the page and extended the image across various types of media and materials. As Elizabeth Fay reminds us, in the late eighteenth century,

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 458

17/11/17 5:03 PM

portraits of actresses, princesses, and queens

459

the reigning ideology had shifted from a focus on the monumental individual associated with the public gaze – the space of civic virtue and public identity that locates and frames the public sphere – to the miniature, the portrait gallery, and the magazine illustration . . . portraiture and portraitive practices provided an increasingly self-conscious Romantic period public with the means by which one could recognise oneself in, and project oneself onto, a rapidly changing world. (2010: 4, 118) Magazine miniatures in late eighteenth-century periodicals provided an opportunity for readers to imagine themselves through private domestic practices. Rather than going to a museum or public gallery, reading periodicals and collecting images of famous women represented another strategy for potential self-fashioning that did not involve putting one’s own body on display. Recognising oneself through magazine miniatures in periodicals gave female readers an opportunity to connect to the presence and style of women on the public stage while remaining safely behind the scenes. In her recent article on Jane Austen and fashion magazines, Jane Taylor explains that women’s magazines like the Lady’s Magazine, La Belle Assemblée, and the Lady’s Monthly Museum (1798–1828), offered a gauge and catalogue of current tastes in all areas of fashionable consumption, from literature to clothing. . . . Fashion magazines represent one of many ways in which women were, by the end of the eighteenth century, expected to engage in fashionable consumption at a textual level, whether by browsing the fashions and fictions featured in fashionable magazines or by recording their expenditure in fashionable pocketbooks. (2016: 120) Readers of these periodicals thus engaged in ‘fashionable consumption’ on visual and textual levels. They could glance at fashion illustrations, figures with anonymous faces, and make connections between their own self-images and possibilities for public display. We can speculate that a similar process of identification, comparison, judgement, and admiration may have occurred when readers encountered the familiar faces of famous women included alongside the periodical’s narrative material. Fay’s idea of ‘portraitive practices’ is particularly relevant to the ways in which we might theorise how readers (particularly female readers) may have experienced looking at images of actresses, queens, and princesses. In this chapter, I want to highlight the potential relationship between oval-shaped portraits of actresses, queens, and princesses and the phenomenon of the portrait miniature in order to argue that images of actresses and queens in periodicals may have had a tangible collectible function. I suggest that ‘magazine miniatures’ in periodicals disrupt the gender and power dynamics that characterise traditional modes of circulation and exchange present with object-miniatures. The anonymous viewers and collectors of oval images in periodicals represent a diffuse and diverse audience. Their presence creates dynamic alternative ways of thinking about what inexpensive portraits of famous women meant to individuals. Considering how magazine miniatures might have been used, displayed, circulated, saved, or manipulated suggests a series of

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 459

17/11/17 5:03 PM

460

laura engel

performances and performative traces surrounding these materials that highlight the ways in which reading and looking were connected to embodied experience. In her essay in this volume, Chloe Wigston Smith argues that monthly patterns in the Lady’s Magazine created an opportunity for readers to participate in an early form of ‘fast fashion’, which allowed them to take control of their own style (page 441 in this volume). I want to echo Smith’s important and innovative focus on the ‘tactile’ nature of the Lady’s Magazine. While most readers probably did not attempt to copy the fashions in portraits of actresses and queens in exact detail, these images may have provided an inspirational model for active strategies of self-styling.

Miniature Madness While portrait miniatures and portraits in periodicals are not the same thing, I want to draw connections between the two formats to suggest how these images foreground and disrupt dominant ideologies surrounding visual representations of women and the politics of gendered forms of looking and desiring. As less expensive portrait objects, magazine miniatures function differently than portrait miniatures. Yet, because the form of portraits in periodicals is so similar to traditional portrait miniatures, magazine miniatures are always ironically and sometimes satirically connected to ideas of hierarchy, ownership, and value associated with the original more expensive format. Miniature portraits were both private and public entities at the same time; they could be worn and displayed or hidden secretly away. According to the art historian Marcia Pointon, ‘Portraiture was, it seems, relatively as much a part of eighteenth-century urban life as it is today; it enabled individuals to rerepresent themselves and their possessions’ (2001: 48). Pointon describes miniatures as ‘object portraits’ (2001: 48). What made these tiny representations so compelling was the uniqueness of the minute detail of their representation as well as their function as a transferrable, often wearable object. The giving and receiving of portrait miniatures signified rituals of courtship, marriage, familial ties, mourning, and in some cases foreign relations when miniatures were exchanged as gifts between visiting dignitaries during political negotiations. (Clayton 1997; Pointon 2010; Reynolds 1988) Well-known eighteenth-century authors, aristocrats, and royal figures often had significant collections of miniatures. A contemporary of Queen Charlotte describes her apartments as ‘ornamented, as one expects a Queen’s should be, with curiosities from every nation that can deserve her notice . . . On her toilet, besides the gilt plate, innumerable knick-knacks. Round the dressing room, let into the crimson damask hangings in a manner uncommonly elegant, are frames of fine impressions, miniatures etc.’ (Pointon 2001: 50). Considering ‘magazine miniatures’ of the famous actress Sarah Siddons along with portraits of the beloved Princess Charlotte Augusta, who died tragically in childbirth and sparked an unprecedented period of national mourning accompanied by an excessive production of material goods emblazoned with her image, highlights what may have been the main draw of small portraits of celebrated women: they could be used as fashion plates, memorial souvenirs, and/or as decorative personal artefacts.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 460

17/11/17 5:03 PM

portraits of actresses, princesses, and queens

461

Images of well-known women in periodicals may also have sparked inspiration for self-expression across media, and for claiming artistic and authorial agency, as is the case in the artist Mary Linwood’s embroidered self-portrait and its resemblance to a portrait of the actress, playwright, and novelist Elizabeth Inchbald reproduced in the European Magazine (see Plates 3 and 4). The images are so similar because they are both based on original portraits by John Russell (Strobel 2016: 186). Looking at Inchbald and Linwood’s portraits together suggests significant ties between images in periodicals and other material objects, creating a space for thinking about how readers might have participated in particular kinds of fandom and acts of collective national identity through the repetition of familiar iconographic gestures and formats. Mary Linwood’s artistic decision to embroider her oval self-portrait was perhaps inspired by oval portraits of other women. Linwood and Inchbald’s portraits are opposites poses; they are mirror images of one another. This mirroring represents the physical process of copying an image using a printing press: the image always emerges in reverse. Thus, these two portraits represent lost traces of the material labour involved in re-printing and re-representing portraits in periodicals. The Linwood/Inchbald comparison highlights the fact that portraitive practices tied to actresses and queens were not limited to theatrical and royal figures. Examining images of actresses and queens connects contemporary readers to other late eighteenth-century women who were highly visible at the end of the century. Representations of famous women in periodicals echo the variety of celebrated female figures that appeared in formal portraits, an artistic practice that inspired growing anxieties about the overlapping spheres amongst theatrical performers, aristocrats, and royalty (Asleson 2003; Engel 2011). Artists such as Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, and Thomas Lawrence made their living painting actresses and queens because that is what audiences wanted to see. Periodicals similarly followed the details of the lives of women who were visible in the public sphere. As Clarissa Orr observes, ‘Women of high social status were public figures too. Their marriages, lyings-in and deaths were matters of public comment; their tombs dominated parish churches; their social entertainments included “public days” at the family seat; their sexual or sartorial indiscretions (like those of their male partners) were the subject of salacious gossip’ (2002: 36). The magazine miniature portraits that often accompanied these narratives gave periodical readers a chance to imagine these activities and experiences with a vivid picture of the individual in their mind.

Tête-à-Tête: Celebrity Portraits in Miniature Readers would have been familiar with the possibility of finding images of their favourite celebrities in the pages of many eighteenth-century periodicals, particularly the Town and Country Magazine, which featured a series called tête-à-tête showcasing narratives of the latest scandalous liaisons paired with portraits of the hottest couples. Cindy McCreery’s excellent work on the tête-à-tête images offers valuable insights into the ways in which readers may have understood these images in the wider context of eighteenth-century celebrity culture. According to McCreery, three aspects

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 461

17/11/17 5:03 PM

462

laura engel

of the tête-à-tête series, ‘its topicality, its appeal to both fashionable and middle-class elements of society, and its place within an on-going commentary on gender roles and the relation between sexes’ (1997: 207) help to account for the series’ extraordinary success. Readers’ engagement with this kind of news reflects ‘eighteenth-century society’s preoccupation with comparing individual’s private lives with their public characters’ (208). The format of the tête-à-tête portraits resemble paired miniatures and echo the traditional function of marriage portraits, which were typically hung side by side (213). These images of aristocrats, royalty, and actresses either joining forces or stepping out represent in many ways a satiric commentary on established visual modes of representing and recording relationships between the sexes. In addition, they functioned as a kind of celebrity Instagram, or the eighteenth-century equivalent of TMZ. Dual celebrity portraits operated as snapshots capturing a moment in time perhaps right before or after a break up. The images are a kind of substitute shorthand for the performance of the relationship itself. It is important to consider how these magazine miniatures might have been used outside of the periodical format. McCreery speculates: In addition to being kept for information about fashion, the portraits may well have been pasted into scrapbooks or used to extra-illustrate bound volumes by collectors keeping records of famous people of the day. The portraits, like the print series advertised in contemporary print sellers’ catalogues, may also have been used as inexpensive room decorations. (1997: 216) Considering pictures of famous women in periodicals as inexpensive miniatures represents a way of imagining how these accessible portraits compare to the paradoxically private and public nature of traditional miniatures.

Picturing Power: Actresses, Aristocrats, Royal Women, and Miniatures A brief look at actresses, aristocrats, and royal women holding miniatures in portraits tells us something about the ways in which miniatures signified forms of power, ownership, and loss. As Pointon explains: Queens and other women of quality are known to have worn miniatures of their husbands; these were not hidden but placed facing outward as part of their apparel. Such ambulant portraits were re-inscribed in large-scale portraiture, suggesting allegiance both to fashion and to a spouse who had almost total legal rights over a wife’s person. (2001: 51) A print of Queen Charlotte by Francesco Bartolozzi features the Queen surrounded by an oval of flying putti, and wearing a miniature of her husband George III prominently on her breast. The echoing of oval shapes in the composition highlights the fact that the image is a miniature that contains a miniature. Charlotte’s display of the King’s image on her body suggests his power and ownership of her person (Pointon

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 462

17/11/17 5:03 PM

portraits of actresses, princesses, and queens

463

2001: 51). In a very different picture, Gainsborough’s famous portrait of the actress Mary Robinson (1781) in the role of Perdita (the part she played the night the Prince of Wales fell in love with her), Robinson holds the prince’s miniature delicately in her hand. Gainsborough’s composition frames their narrative of scandal and thwarted romance within a theatrical framework that blurs the boundaries between the stage and reality. In a satirical print entitled ‘Under Hoop & Bell’ (1787), the actress Mary Wells sports an image of her lover, the playwright and journalist Edward Topham, emblazoned on her muff (Engel 2015: 16–18). Questions of desire, scandal, authority and ownership circulating around miniatures in images of Queen Charlotte and Mary Robinson are reimagined and embodied in the raunchy accessory and the narrative of the cartoon, which suggests that Wells is literally and metaphorically ringing Topham’s bell. In another caricature by Isaac Cruikshank, entitled ‘Thoughts on Matrimony’ (1795), George IV dangles a miniature of Queen Caroline on a chain while looking at a portrait of one of his mistresses, Lady Jersey, on the wall. A portrait of Mary Robinson hangs behind him. Cruikshank plays here with the idea that George IV is surrounded by prominent visual ‘reminders’ of his many indiscretions, while at the same time the form of the miniature suspended in his grasp frames the image of his wife, who has been reduced to an annoying appendage that is chained to his person. An anonymous cartoon entitled ‘The Moment of Imagination’ (13 Jan 1785) features Edward Topham kicking over his writing table and raising his clenched fist. Three crumpled documents on the floor read: ‘Epilogue Mrs. W—- [Wells] Hay-Market’, ‘Epilogue Mrs. S—- [Siddons] Drury Lane’, and ‘Prologue for Mrs. F—-[Farren] Covent Garden’. A parrot in a cage behind his head squawks, ‘Bravo Cptn Prologue Bravo!’ Floating above him is an oval portrait of Sarah Siddons, an image that looks very much like a portrait of the actress from a periodical. Images of Siddons from the Universal Magazine (1783) and the Lady’s Pocket Magazine (1795) depict the actress in profile, prominently displaying her long pointed nose. The association that the artist is making between Topham’s ‘moment of inspiration’ and an oval image of Siddons is striking. The playwright is frustrated here because he is charged with writing prologues and epilogues for three of the most famous actresses of the day. Topham’s attempt to be inspired by visualising Siddons (the actress who overshadowed Farren and Wells) means thinking of an image of her from the newspapers – one of her ‘stock photos’, so to speak. The juxtaposition between the contained quality of Queen Caroline’s miniature in the Cruikshank print and the omnipresent nature of the oval image of Siddons in the anonymous print offers another way of thinking about the potential power of the circulation of images of famous women in the public sphere. George IV’s control over the Queen is both implied and real, while Siddons exists outside the realm of familial dominance. As a celebrity she is ubiquitous in people’s minds and imaginations. Unlike Queen Caroline who is imagined in relation to the image of the King, Siddons’s image is juxtaposed with other actresses creating a very different trajectory. The circulation of Siddons’s portrait suggests the possibility of female agency and professionalism, while the repetition of Caroline’s picture diminishes her subjectivity representing her as nothing more than a dangling accessory.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 463

17/11/17 5:03 PM

464

laura engel

Figure 29.1 ‘The Moment of Imagination’ (13 Jan 1785). © The British Museum.

Magazine Miniatures The complicated associations in these images between actresses and royalty, dignified and scandalous celebrity, are echoed in the conventions of late eighteenth-century periodicals. Ros Ballaster suggests that the fascination with royal women in the Lady’s Magazine foreshadows our contemporary obsession with the private lives of modern queens and princesses (1991: 72). She emphasises that the Lady’s coverage of royal women moved uneasily from the representation of queens and princesses as classical models of femininity – distant, beautiful objects of fantasy and idealism for their ‘public’ and the now more familiar rhetoric that locates the royal family as the extension of the ‘family’ of the magazine and its readers – well known, much loved, and fallible human beings. (72)

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 464

17/11/17 5:03 PM

portraits of actresses, princesses, and queens

465

Orr reminds us that like actresses and prominent aristocratic women, ‘Royal women were at the centre of the “celebrity culture” of this period. They could influence taste, fashion, social customs, and moral values’ (2002: 7). For example, a portrait of Charlotte Augusta Princess Royal of England in the Lady’s Magazine for May 1786 depicts the princess posed in profile in a fashionable gown with an elaborate headdress and pearls. The oval miniature is placed against a patterned background, suggesting the idea of a portrait hanging on a wall. A rectangular box is suspended below the portrait by ribbons and doves. Her Majesty Queen Charlotte in the Lady’s Magazine for February 1806 is luminous with her crown and sceptre drawn outside of the boundaries of the oval, as if the frame cannot contain her power and signification. Sarah Siddons in the Lady’s Magazine for December 1812 has a similarly regal feel with the actress adorned in an ermine fur-trimmed shawl and jewels. Much has been written about Siddons and her connections to queens and Queen Charlotte in particular (West 2005; Engel 201l; Nussbaum 2010), but it is also highly interesting to consider the relationship between images of Siddons and portraits of Princess Charlotte Augusta. Magazine miniatures of Siddons and Princess Charlotte highlight the importance of portraits as memorial objects. Portraits of Siddons late in her career and Princess Charlotte after her death provided readers with a way to extend and capture the afterlife of their favourite performer and royal subject. Steven Behrendt has written eloquently about the proliferation of materials – miniatures, portraits, jewellery accessories, and china as well as poems, verses, and tributes – created in honour of the Princess after her untimely death. According to Behrendt: Everyone, it seems, might be seen to have a stake in Princess Charlotte Augusta: not just citizens in the aggregate but also the artists and engravers whose efforts replicated her image, the authors and publishers in whose works she featured, the manufacturers and suppliers of articles of fashion from costume and cosmetics to furniture and equipage. (1997: 44) Importantly, the details of Charlotte’s life and her death were played out in periodicals. Behrendt explains, somewhat disparagingly, ‘Charlotte’s affairs were observed and reported by any number of journals, most of which, like La Belle Assemblée, were intended for a female readership, and which therefore typically occupied themselves with matters of costume, cosmetology, and conviviality’ (44). While earlier images of Princess Charlotte presented her as an attractive fashion plate, after her death idealised images of her in periodicals emphasised her regal elegance and functioned as memorial posters. Portraits of Sarah Siddons later on in her career, like the image of her in the Lady’s Magazine from 1812, also represented the actress as a royal icon. By 1812, Siddons had declared her intention to leave the stage. She was well past her prime and suffering from exhaustion. In January of 1812 Siddons embarked on a tour of farewell performances in Scotland. After fifty-seven appearances throughout the year, she made her official exit from the stage in her signature role of Lady Macbeth. Siddons’s uncanny ability to achieve iconic status as well as her connection to royalty has been well documented by scholars such as Robyn Asleson, Heather McPherson, Shearer West, and Lisa Freeman; tracking the progression of her ‘magazine miniatures’ creates another way of thinking about what images of the actress might have meant to readers and audiences at different periods in her career. Images of Princess Charlotte similarly established a narrative of princess as stylish ingénue

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 465

17/11/17 5:03 PM

466

laura engel

Figure 29.2 ‘Charlotte Augusta Princess Royal of England’. The Lady’s Magazine (May 1786). © The British Museum.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 466

17/11/17 5:03 PM

portraits of actresses, princesses, and queens

467

Figure 29.3 ‘Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Charlotte’. The Lady’s Magazine (Feb 1806). © The British Museum.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 467

17/11/17 5:03 PM

468

laura engel

to the princess as a symbolic national treasure. A portrait of Princess Charlotte from the Lady’s Monthly Museum, which appeared on Wednesday, 19 November 1817, depicts the princess in regal profile, wearing a veil, a crown of pearls, and a sumptuous velvet empire-waist gown. Below her image in scripted type is the inscription of her name: ‘Her Royal Highness Princess Charlotte of Wales and of Saxe Coburg’. Adding Charlotte’s name to her portrait suggests that it might have been designed to be a kind of memorial pin-up miniature, a souvenir memento of the lost princess. Similarly, in Siddons’s portrait in the December 1812 Lady’s Magazine, she wears a veil and formal dress adorned with ermine fur. She is placed in front of a theatrical curtain, her name appears below her oval image. Siddons’s face in this portrait appears to be an amalgam of earlier and later pictures of her, echoing particularly George Henry Harlow’s portrait of Siddons as Lady Macbeth (1814) and Thomas Lawrence’s full-length image of the actress completed in 1804. Lawrence’s view of Siddons as a regal presence in her own

Figure 29.4 ‘Mrs. Siddons’. The Lady’s Magazine (Dec 1812). © The British Museum.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 468

17/11/17 5:03 PM

portraits of actresses, princesses, and queens

469

right, a legitimate learned actress, whose career afforded her a kind of status reserved formerly only for aristocrats and queens, is represented by the grandeur of her dress and pose. Her hair is up and pulled back from her face; she looks out serenely and seriously at the viewer. Siddons’s 1812 ‘magazine miniature’ seems to translate these details into an affordable ‘snapshot’ format, allowing her audience to connect to the actress’s most memorable and idealised qualities in an immediate way. These magazine miniatures of Sarah Siddons and Princess Charlotte highlight the fine line between celebrity pin-ups and memorial artefacts. As portraits meant to conjure the power of memory and loss, they represent traces of affective experience, a way for periodical readers to perhaps capture and display the presence of beloved public icons in private spaces.

Breaking the Frame Depictions of royal women with symbolic objects breaking out of the oval frame suggests the idea of the tactile materials reaching out to the viewer in some way – a kind of breaking of the fourth wall of the image. This relates to the ways in which celebrity operated in the late eighteenth century, especially in terms of actresses.2 Audiences wanted to feel as though they had constant access to actresses’ lives behind the scenes. The blurred boundary between actresses and queens as distant objects and as available commodities echoes the complex boundaries between the periodical as object and the readers of periodicals as consumers and as producers of that object. The Lady’s Magazine, for example, contained articles and commentaries written by the magazine’s readers and aimed at a predominantly middle-class female readership from the ‘house-wife’ as well as the ‘peeress’ (1 (Aug 1770): 1). The periodical itself was a typical melange of eighteenth-century subjects: including biography, politics, theatrical and literary reviews, fiction, poetry, gossip, and travel writing. The Lady’s Magazine also contained pull-out inserts for readers featuring embroidery patterns, fashion plates, and music sheets (see Smith in this volume, page 442) In her excellent digital project on the Lady’s Magazine, Jennie Batchelor writes eloquently about patterns included in the periodical and what these materials can tell us about readers: At the very least, their inclusion is a strong indication that for all its interest in the elaborate and extravagant fashions worn at court and by contemporary celebrities such as Mary Robinson or Sarah Siddons, the Lady’s expected its middling readers (lady does not mean aristocratic, here) to fashion themselves in a modest and simple style. Ornamentation, in all things, merely for ornamentation’s sake was to be despised. In both their intellectual and sartorial pursuits, the magazine’s readers were instead supposed to be characterised by a considered elegance, marked by grace and cultivated through reflection and practice. I strongly suspect that the embroidery patterns the magazine published played an important part in shaping this ideal. (Batchelor 2015) Tear-outs suggest that periodicals such as the Lady’s Magazine, the New Lady’s Magazine, and La Belle Assemblée had a multifaceted purpose and that the object itself was meant at times to be deliberately dismantled. Even though readers might not have been encouraged to fashion themselves as actresses or queens, it might have

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 469

17/11/17 5:03 PM

470

laura engel

been very enticing for them to cut out these pictures and collect them, bringing them somehow closer to the images of celebrated women reaching out of their frames. As Ballaster suggests, ‘The Lady’s Magazine offers its women readers a programme of femininity as ornament; becoming feminine is a task to be accomplished through the acquisition and consumption of the magazine itself, but a task that can be a pleasure, not a labour’ (1991: 74). Imagining readers as potential collectors highlights the idea that there is a pleasurable or affective attachment between images and viewers.

Mirror Images The pleasures involved in seeing oneself as reflected by images of others, imaging and representing oneself according to current trends, styles, and ideas of beauty is part of the allure of the fashion magazine. The oval shape of the portrait and the miniature is also the shape of the eighteenth-century mirror and looking glass. What

Figure 29.5 Joseph Highmore. ‘Susanna Highmore’ (1740–5). © The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Felton Bequest.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 470

17/11/17 5:03 PM

portraits of actresses, princesses, and queens

471

happens, though, when we consider how these images might connect to one another and across visual genres? Elizabeth Inchbald’s portrait in the European Magazine copied from a pastel drawing of her by John Russell, and Mary Linwood’s embroidered self-portrait, modelled after John Russell’s portrait of Inchbald, links these women as intellectual artistic agents as well as stylish commodities (see Plates 3 and 4). Inchbald and Linwood were both professional women (actress and artist) working for themselves in the centre of London. Inchbald began her career as an actress and later became a very successful playwright and novelist. Linwood made her living embroidering paintings by Gainsborough and other well-known artists, and then staging her own gallery installations. Heidi Strobel proposes that, ‘In Linwood’s gallery, her embroidered paintings acted as objects that produced a new version of public femininity that countered what was essentially a masculine activity, the exhibition of her works’ (2016: 187). Strobel’s astute assertion that Linwood actively creates ‘a new version of public femininity’ through exhibiting her work echoes Fay’s idea of the significance of varied ‘portraitive practices’ available at the turn of the century. Linwood’s embroidered self-image mirrors Inchbald’s magazine miniature – the pose of the head tilted slightly to the side with a hand resting on the cheek – is reversed in each. This reversal suggests the process of printing an image from a printing press – the original picture is flipped as a result of the procedure. Thus when considered together the images gesture toward the intangible labour of the object’s production.

Playing with Portraits Joseph Highmore’s portrait of his daughter Susanna (1740–5) holding up a miniature depicting a woman in ‘Turkish style dress’ is a curious example of a girl in the act of making something with an oval portrait. There are paper dolls on the mantle next to her, suggesting that perhaps Susanna is contemplating pasting the miniature onto the paper body (Reinhardt 2006: 43). A large cat sitting on the mantle staring at the portrait signifies the playfulness and mischievousness of this image. What is startling about this image for me is the ways in which the portrait confronts us with a series of images coming out of the frame and engaging with the audience. What game is Susanna Highmore playing? And what does it mean for girls and women to display or collect other images of women? These performances potentially reframe the associations between portraiture, authority, and ownership inherent in the production and exchange of traditional object miniatures. For Pointon, ‘miniatures are historically, quintessentially about the oscillation between self and other’ (2001: 63). In the case of the object portrait the relationships are clearly designated; in the periodical portrait a similar staging occurs but between the known celebrity and the anonymous reader or the fan. All these different forms of media contribute to our understandings of the mechanisms of eighteenth-century celebrity culture and the invisible performances surrounding these material artefacts. Whether or not periodical portraits were considered to be paper miniatures, or were meant to be cut out of pages, collected, rearranged, and curated for individuals in personal ways, it seems important to consider how representations of famous women connect across media and time. Looking closely at ‘magazine miniatures’ represents one way to chart a history of the often paradoxical nature of celebrated female figures of the past and present.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 471

17/11/17 5:03 PM

472

laura engel

Notes 1. In 1823 the magazine’s subtitle changed to The Lady’s Magazine; or, Mirror of the BellesLettres. 2. See Asleson 2001, 2003; Engel 2011; Nussbaum 2010; and Perry 2008.

Works Cited Asleson, Robyn. 2001. A Passion for Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 2003. The Notorious Muse: The Actress in British Art and Culture, 1776–1812. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ballaster, Ros, Margaret Beetham, Elizabeth Frazer, and Sandra Hebron. 1991. Women’s Worlds: Ideology, Femininity, and the Woman’s Magazine. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Batchelor, Jennie. 2015. ‘Patterns and Posterity: or, What’s not in the Lady’s Magazine’. The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1818): Understanding the Emergence of a Genre. (last accessed 8 Dec 2016). Behrendt, Stephen C. 1997. Royal Mourning and Regency Culture: Elegies and Memorials of Princess Charlotte. New York: St. Martin’s Press. La Belle Assemblée, or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine, Addressed Particularly to the Ladies. 1806–32 (1st ser. 1806–10; 2nd ser. 1810–24; 3rd ser. 1825–32). London. Clayton, Timothy. 1997. The English Print: 1688–1802. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Copeland, Edward. 1995. Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790– 1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Engel, Laura. 2011. Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. —. 2015. Austen, Actresses and Accessories: Much Ado about Muffs. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. The European Magazine, or London Review. 1782–1826 (1st ser. 1782–1825; 2nd ser. 1825–6). London. Fay, Elizabeth. 2010. Fashioning Faces: The Portraitive Mode in British Romanticism. Lebanon: University of New Hampshire Press. Freeman, Lisa A. 2015. ‘Mourning the “Dignity of the Siddonian Form”’. Eighteenth-Century Fiction 27.3–4: 597–629. The Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex. 1770–1832 (1st ser. 1770–1819; 2nd ser. 1820–9; 3rd ser. 1830–2). London. The Lady’s Monthly Museum. 1798–1828 (1st ser. 1798–1814; 2nd ser. 1815–28). London. The Lady’s Pocket Magazine; Or, Elegant and Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex. 1795–6? London. McCreery, Cindy. 1997. ‘Keeping up with the Bon Ton: the Tête á Tête series in the Town and Country Magazine’. Gender in Eighteenth Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities. Ed. Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus. London and New York: Longman. 207–29. McPherson, Heather. 2015. ‘Tragic Pallor and Siddons’. Eighteenth-Century Studies 48.4: 479–502. Nussbaum, Felicity. 2010. Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theatre. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Orr, Clarissa Campbell, ed. 2002. Queenship in Britain 1660–1837: Royal Patronage, Court Culture, and Dynastic Politics. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Perry, Gill. 2008. Spectacular Flirtations: Viewing the Actress in British Art and Theatre 1768–1820. New Haven: Yale University Press.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 472

17/11/17 5:03 PM

portraits of actresses, princesses, and queens

473

Pointon, Marcia. 2001. ‘“Surrounded with Brilliants”: Miniature Portraits in EighteenthCentury England’. The Art Bulletin. 83.1: 48–71. —. 2010. Brilliant Effects: A Cultural History of Gem Stones and Jewellery. New Haven: Yale University Press. Reinhardt, Leslie. 2006. ‘Serious Daughters: Dolls, Dress, and Female Virtue in the Eighteenth Century’. American Art. 20.2: 33–55. Reynolds, Graham. 1988. English Portrait Miniatures, Revised Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strobel, Heidi. 2016. ‘Stitching the stage: Mary Linwood, Thomas Gainsborough, and the Art of Installation Embroidery’. Materializing Gender in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Ed. Jennifer Germann and Heidi Strobel. Burlington: Ashgate. 173–92. Taylor, Jane. 2016. ‘“Important Trifles”: Jane Austen, the Fashion Magazine, and Inter-textual Consumer Experience’. History of Retailing and Consumption 2.2 (2016): 113–28. The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure. 1747–1814 (1st ser. 1747–1803; 2nd ser. 1804–14). London. West, Shearer. 2005. ‘Siddons, Celebrity and Regality: Portraiture and the Body of the Ageing Actress’. Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660–2000. Ed. Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 191–213.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 473

17/11/17 5:03 PM

30 Fashioning Consumers: Ackermann’s REPOSITORY OF ARTS and the Cultivation of the Female Consumer Serena Dyer

C

onsumption has served as one of the key explanatory frameworks for economic and social change in eighteenth-century Britain. The influence of consumption on debates surrounding political and moral economy has been undeniable, inspiring the application of transformative phrases – such as the ‘consumer revolution’ and ‘consumer society’ – to characterise the century (McKendrick et al. 1982; Langford 1989). Yet, amidst the rich and interdisciplinary literature on the growth of a ‘consumer society’, little attention has been paid to the figure at the heart of this debate: the consumer. Key questions remain regarding who these consumers were, how they were perceived, and how they were cultivated. In particular, the female consumer, who was the subject of extensive contemporary comment, has been obscured by a veil of disapproving, and at times misogynistic suspicion (Styles and Vickery 2006: 2). This gendered stereotype of the consumer has simultaneously been painted by contemporary commentators as an idle browser, an extravagant spendthrift, and a careful housekeeper (Smith 2012). Yet, toward the end of the long eighteenth century, this contradictory consumer character gained clarity and definition in the public eye. These decades bore witness to the emergence of a new, productive consumer character, who epitomised patriotic spending and polite fashionability. The periodical press played a fundamental role in the formulation and dissemination of the figure of the productive female consumer: both in terms of her public representation, and her practical guidance. Epitomised by Rudolph Ackermann’s Repository of Arts (1809–28), upon which this chapter will focus, such periodicals first propagated an ideal consumer character and practice, and then guided their readership toward embodying that character. Aside from encouraging their intrinsic consumption of the periodicals themselves, editors also guided the readership in their consumption of fashionable dress and furniture, as well as ceramics, glass, books, and the various components of the domestic interior. In other words, the periodical press encouraged its readers to appreciate, and potentially purchase, a specific, polite, and metropolitan set of material goods. For middling and elite women, being part of fashionable urban society was not only expressed by who you were and how much money you had, but also, and perhaps more importantly, through your engagement with the new world of goods (Batchelor

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 474

17/11/17 5:03 PM

the cultivation of the female consumer

475

and Kaplan 2007: 1; Greig 2013). These new luxury goods could display taste and promote industry; however, they were by no means easy to navigate (Berg and Eger 2002: 61). Indeed, the pitfalls of misjudging your consumption could lead to ridicule and social exclusion (Vickery 1998: 219). A myriad of considerations, including taste, quality, workmanship, patriotism, patronage, and suitability meant that the consumer needed more information about the goods available to them than simply to know what was fashionable. By the early nineteenth century, the periodical press recognised and responded to this need, expanding upon the now-established fashion plate to arm its female consumer-readers with the information required to access the material culture of metropolitan polite society. In this chapter, I argue that the periodical provided a key tool for the female consumer, helping to hone her consumer skills, and guide her spending.

The Productive and Patriotic Consumer The figure of the productive, patriotic consumer provides the key link between the material world of goods and the economic market. British economist Daniel Boileau wrote in 1811 that consumers could be ‘divided into productive and unproductive’, with the latter characterised by their idleness, and the former by their contribution to ‘the community at large’ (1811: 365). The idle, frivolous consumer was a long-standing trope and, constructed through the male gaze, has been responsible for masking careful and skilled browsing as an irresponsible and irreverent leisure activity (Kowaleski-Wallace 1997: 73–108; McCreery 2004: 139). As early as 1712, the Spectator, in no. 336 (26 March) contained a fictionalised letter in which Rebecca, a china retailer, described these women as ‘Female Rakes’ (Addison 1965, vol. 3: 245). The rake, traditionally a male figure, was characterised both by his social status, and his criminality. However, the rake’s negative, violent, and criminal features were often overlooked because of his assumed prestigious and elite status (Mackie 2009: 35). The characterisation of idle consumers as female rakes accorded them a similar status: public menaces and a nuisance to commerce, yet entertained by retailers, and shielded from general censure, due to their elite status. As they ‘tumble Silks they have no mind to buy’, these consumers were depicted as enacting consumption as a fashionable pastime, but failing to engage with their economic responsibility to purchase (Campbell 1747: 197). In other words, they were seen to browse for their personal pleasure and the social spectacle, but to neglect to consume for the public commercial good. However, the work of Helen Berry and Kate Smith has revealed that the browsing practice at the heart of women’s vilified consumption habits not only enabled women to express their financial awareness through bargaining, but also required the use of haptic skills to assess the quality and workmanship of items (Berry 2002a; Smith 2012). By looking at, handling, and discussing goods with retailers, consumers were able to build up both a somatic memory of the objects on offer, and a more general knowledge of the market, enabling them to make sound consumer decisions. These twinned skills of economic and material literacy were central to the productive consumer figure of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Perhaps most importantly, acknowledging these skills recognises that the consumer engaged with the commercial market in a productive way not only through purchasing, but also through the purposeful browsing of goods in order to gain material and market knowledge. Productive consumption

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 475

17/11/17 5:03 PM

476

serena dyer

could not take place without premeditated browsing – a key concept which the periodical would come to acknowledge. Material and economic literacy were key traits of the productive consumer; however, these skills alone were not enough to benefit ‘the community at large’ (Boileau 1811: 365). To be a truly productive consumer required a greater awareness of the implications – both economic and social – of your consumption. Frank Trentmann has argued that consumption practices did not lead to the development of any sort of consumer consciousness in the eighteenth century, yet the notion of social conscience as a motivation for consumption, or non-consumption, is frequently evident in this period (Trentmann 2006: 19–70). Perhaps the most apparent example of this conscientious consumption was the abolitionist boycott of sugar, itself discussed in the Repository of Arts (Ackermann 1809: 1, 167–70; McDonald and Topik 2008: 109–27). Similarly, the ‘buy Irish’ campaign following the Act of Union in 1801 promoted the consumption of Irish linen in order to support the intertwined British economy (Powell 2013: 282–302). Patriotic consumption was increasingly popular among the polite urban elite toward the end of the century. Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, and her daughters were recorded as having a ‘patriotic sense of duty toward the struggling Spitalfields silk industry’ in 1791 (Lister 2003: 56). In the same year, the Society for the Improvement of British Wool was established by Sir John Sinclair, which linked the promotion of British products with the improvement of product quality and agricultural methods (Gascoigne 1994: 189). By the 1830s, the concept of ‘buying British’ was established as a patriotic and conscious consumer action. Indeed, it was even discussed in a House of Commons debate in 1838 that all attendants at the coronation of Queen Victoria should be seen to wear British manufactured garments (HC Deb 30 Apr 1838, 42, cc674–5). This notion – to be seen to purchase in order to promote trade and industry – was advocated in the printed press, both through explicit advertising, and through the more implicit espousal of polite, metropolitan British values (Berry 2002b: 1–17). The shift toward the recognition of a conscious consumer can be read as only part of a broader change in British economic structure, from one based on trade to one based on industry (Berg 1994). The productive consumer articulated in periodical publications was a key component of a national character built around commerce and manufactures.

Shops and the Consumer in Ackermann’s Repository of Arts As a periodical, Ackermann’s Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions, and Politics epitomises the values of the productive, patriotic consumer. The publication as a whole began with no clear gendered audience – setting it apart from previous periodicals that had guided female consumers through fashion plates and news. Its articles were varied and wide ranging, conforming to Ackermann’s claim that he wanted the Repository of Arts to ‘beguile the unlearned into an acquaintance with the arts and sciences – and occasionally to assist even the man of letters in cultivating a taste for both’ (1 (Jan 1809): 3). The periodical presented a world of modern learning, merging poetry and fashionable goods with political news and scientific essays. The readers of the Repository of Arts – both male and female – were encouraged to engage

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 476

17/11/17 5:03 PM

the cultivation of the female consumer

477

with this modern, urban world not only as passive readers, but also as consumers. The Repository of Arts foregrounded the consumer as a core component of the magazine’s readership, and identified and played off the marriage between the consumer and the British patriot, and between the consumer and polite urban culture. Not only did the publication provide a series describing various metropolitan shops, it also contained innovative fabric sample pages, as well as fashion plates and images of fashionable furniture. This multifaceted approach to guiding the consumer character reveals a nuanced relationship between the periodical and the commercial market. Rudolph Ackermann (1764–1834), the publisher and editor of the Repository of Arts, was an Anglo-German bookseller, inventor, and businessman. Originally a carriage designer, he prized invention and innovation. He patented a method for waterproofing cloth, and maintained a strong interest in science, which was reflected in the essays in the Repository of Arts. One of Ackermann’s first publications, drawn from his early work as a carriage designer, was Imitations of Drawings of Fashionable Carriages, published in 1791, which he quickly followed with further books of designs. By 1794, he published under his own imprint, and within the decade, he had established 101 The Strand as a publishers and drawing school, which he named the Repository of Arts in 1798. Nearly a decade later, Ackermann included an image of the interior of 101 The Strand in the first volume of the Repository of Arts in its periodical form, explicitly linking the publication with the establishment from which it originated (Fig. 30.1). This image, and its accompanying description, marked the ‘commencement of a series of plates intended to exhibit the principal shops of this great metropolis’ (1 (Jan 1809): 53). This commercial appropriation of the same format Ackermann used in his Microcosm of London series (1808–10) demonstrates the explicit focus of the Repository of Arts on polite urban culture. Microcosm of London was a three-volume set containing 104 aquatints depicting the interior and exterior of London’s major buildings and their inhabitants, reflecting Ackermann’s focus ‘on the social and cultural institutions of London, the theatres, the shops, and the markets; the things that made the city an exciting and interesting place’ (Bermingham 2000: 135). The marriage between the commercial and the urban is apparent throughout the periodical, and was by no means a new concept. The pre-eminence of London fashion had long been acknowledged. In 1773 the Lady’s Magazine provided an often-quoted narrative on the usual progress of fashion information: If a lady of elevated rank . . . should . . . dress herself in a particular manner, all the rest of the sex would adopt her ton of dress . . . the contagion commences from those who are familiar with the person who introduces the new mode; after which it communicates itself to their acquaintances or those who behold them . . . from the city it spreads to the country. (1773: 199–200) This explanation for the emerging fashion plate – published over thirty years prior to the first edition of the Repository of Arts – exemplifies not only a provincial desire for elite urban fashions, but also a thirst for visual access to them. Fashion news itself – as it may have been obtained through letters or the descriptions given by proxy shoppers – was not sufficient (Vickery 1993: 280; Lambert 2009). For consumers of fashionable

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 477

17/11/17 5:03 PM

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 478

17/11/17 5:03 PM

Figure 30.1 ‘Repository of Arts, 101 The Strand.’ After Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin. Repository of Arts 1 (Jan 1809). Private collection.

the cultivation of the female consumer

479

goods, visual access to the material urban world was essential, alongside explanations of what they were looking at. The lively vigour and vitality of the images included in both Microcosm of London and the Repository of Arts is characteristic of Ackermann’s use of visual sources to drive the content of his publications. Indeed, the accompanying text of Microcosm of London – primarily descriptions of the images – was verbose at best. The images themselves were created through a partnership between Augustus Pugin (1762–1832), an Anglo-French architectural draughtsman and father of the Gothic architect, and Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827), the caricaturist (Ford 1983: 39). The images they produced were an ingenious merging of the pair’s skills, in which Pugin’s detailed and architecturally exact settings were inhabited by Rowlandson’s characterful and vivid figures. Rowlandson and Pugin were again employed to produce the image of the interior of 101 The Strand for the Repository of Arts in 1809, as well as a number of the subsequent images in the series. The unique visual style of this partnership meant that these images not only depicted what the shops looked like, but also how people shopped there. On the one hand this was a voyeuristic view into a fashionable urban lifestyle. However, it also afforded readers with a mimetic experience, which they could replicate through their own shopping practice. The figures depicted are not passive – instead they actively engage with their surroundings. They leaf through portfolios, talk with the shop assistants, and inspect the artworks, curiosities, and sculptures that adorn the room. Through these images, the readership of the Repository of Arts was invited to see themselves as the inhabitants of the space depicted, whilst simultaneously being subtly instructed how to interact with the goods within the shop. In a later image in the series Messrs Harding and Howell, a haberdasher’s and draper’s shop, is depicted. In this image female consumers touch and handle fabric, inspecting its drape and movement (1 (Mar 1809): 187). Similarly, in an image of Wedgwood’s Rooms, female consumers hold and handle pottery, feeling its weight and balance (1 (Jan 1809): 102). Through engaging in the browsing practice depicted in the Repository of Arts, consumers could uncover faults and flaws, gauge suitability, and develop their personal material literacy (Smith 2014: 150). In other words, the shop series in the Repository of Arts was an endorsement of the productive browsing process identified by Smith and Berry (Berry 2002a; Smith 2012: 3–4). It simultaneously promoted and disseminated this productive consumer behaviour. The Repository of Arts’ shop series was diluted with other, non-commercial establishments by the end of 1809, such as the Bank of England and the houses of various prestigious families. However, the initial goal stated by Ackermann had been to focus on shops, his explicit intention being to ‘afford the opportunity of entering into a partial detail of the different manufactures that are exposed in them for sale’ (1 (Jan 1809): 53). In the text accompanying the image of his own establishment, Ackermann not only took advantage of the opportunity to advertise the subscription prices for his circulating library of prints, but also provided a detailed history of the previous uses of the building. In doing so, the Repository of Arts – both as a shop and a periodical – meshed the cultural and social prestige of its aristocratic background as the home of the Beaufort family, with the commercial and economic productivity of its current use. The Repository of Arts was simultaneously a means of entrepreneurial selfpromotion, and of advocating the polite urban lifestyle with which it associated itself.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 479

17/11/17 5:03 PM

480

serena dyer

The second subject of the shop series, Wedgwood’s Rooms, was the most complete and thorough account of any of the shops, providing a full history of pottery, the production process, and the interior of the shop. Furthermore, it explicitly engaged with the vocabulary of the patriotic consumer, foregrounding Josiah Wedgwood’s position as an iconic British manufacturer. Ackermann openly acknowledged Wedgwood’s importance in the accompanying text, stating that ‘the potteries are so truly British manufactures, are of so much importance to commerce, and add a lustre even to the arts of the country’ (1 (Jan 1809): 102). Through marrying Britishness with commerce and the arts, Ackermann again emphasised his interlinked ideals of commercial patriotism, invention and innovation, and polite urban taste. Wedgwood’s pottery was not only the product of ‘fertile genius’ and ‘extraordinary discoveries’, but was also explicitly British. Production also emerges as a key focus of the Repository of Arts series on shops. The artificial division often placed between production and consumption in scholarly work has been questioned by Maureen Daly Goggin, Beth Fowkes Tobin, and Kate Smith (Goggin and Tobin 2009; Smith 2014: 85–7). Not only, as Smith has argued, are the consumers depicted in the accompanying image of the Wedgwood Rooms shown haptically to inspect the quality and workmanship of the objects they are browsing; but also, through the Repository of Arts, they were provided with a detailed description of how the objects were made. This description was by no means superficial, perhaps reflecting Ackermann’s personal interest in manufactures and invention. It not only described the process of producing basic pottery – from the initial treatment of the clay through to the final firing – but also described four different types of pottery manufactured by Wedgwood: terracotta, Basaltes, porcelain bisque, and the iconic Jasperware. This knowledge of production was key to the material literacy of consumers, and was simultaneously a means of polite education, and of developing practical judgement. Sadly, the detail provided in relation to Wedgwood’s manufacturing processes was not repeated in the subsequent articles in the shop series. Pieces on other metropolitan shops followed, such as Messrs Harding and Howell, haberdashers and drapers, Messrs Lackington, Allen and Co., booksellers, and Messrs Pellatt and Green, glassmakers. However, these entries follow a more descriptive pattern, recounting the varieties of goods on offer, and occasionally providing a brief history of the trade or manufacture to which the shop belonged (1 (1809): 187, 251, 330). We learn, for example, that upon first entering Messrs Harding and Howell, the visitor would first be confronted with an area ‘exclusively appropriated to the sale of furs and fans’, followed by a second department containing ‘articles of haberdashery of every description, silks, muslins, lace, gloves &c.’ (1 (1809): 187). These descriptions often read more like contemporary advertisements and trade cards, listing what might be purchased, with only the brief histories of the establishments setting them apart (Berg and Clifford 2007). Ackermann’s interest in invention and innovation re-emerges in relation to the invention of Messrs Pellatt and Green’s patent for a glass invention that allowed light into the interiors of ships and buildings; however, this information bears little relevance to the consumer who might visit the shop to view decorative glassware, as is depicted in the accompanying image. This inconsistency should not, however, be read as a faltering resolve in relation to the publication’s intent to guide and cultivate the British consumer character. Indeed, it instead provided an opportunity to revaluate and refocus how the publication integrated its various strands of consumer guidance.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 480

17/11/17 5:03 PM

the cultivation of the female consumer

481

Fashion and Furniture When a shop was again revisited in the series, it was fashionable furniture store Messrs Morgan and Sanders’s Ware-Room, on Catherine Street off the Strand – a nearby neighbour of Ackermann’s (2 (1809): 122; Beard and Goodison 1987: 241). Unlike previous entries, this shop, which primarily sold furniture and soft furnishings, was closely linked to other aspects of, and articles published in, the Repository of Arts. The article began by referencing a piece in a previous edition on historical customs, and draws a direct comparison between the ‘simple habitations’ of our ‘good forefathers’, described in the earlier essay, with the ‘innumerable conveniences and luxuries’ which were available in this shop. The Repository of Arts enthusiastically wrote that ‘perfection, modern ingenuity and invention have arrived’ in the articles of furniture on display in this shop. Again, Ackermann’s rhetoric of modernity, invention, and patriotism is evident. This furniture, the piece enthusiastically states, is an example of the ‘beauty of design, and exquisite workmanship . . . manufactured in the metropolis of the British empire’ (2 (Aug 1809): 123). However, it is tempered with a greater awareness of what the consumer-reader might want to know. Production and manufactures are touched on, as is prestigious royal patronage, and the ‘honour and integrity’ of the retailers. In other words, the piece articulates that this shop provided the highest quality manufactured goods, with elite patronage, and from trustworthy retailers. Prints of ‘Fashionable Furniture’ were a key fixture of the publication from the outset; although they were not as long-standing as the fashion plate, which continued to be a component of every volume in the Repository of Arts’ nineteen-year run. The prints followed in the footsteps of the furniture catalogues of the second half of the eighteenth century. A tradition begun by Thomas Chippendale’s 1754 catalogue, Thomas Sheraton, George Hepplewhite, and numerous other cabinetmakers had followed suit (Vickery 2009: 279). These furniture manuals provided an attractive means for genteel consumers to educate themselves about current fashionable designs and styles. Novelty and choice – identified as two of the key driving factors behind eighteenth-century consumer culture – were offered in these pages (Bianchi 1998). Just as the magazine as a whole encapsulated the values of polite urban society, Ackermann’s replication of the furniture catalogue format in the pages of the Repository of Arts provided readers with access to these compendiums of fashionable furniture in miniature. However, they also provided an additional sense of the rapidity of changing fashions. While the makers’ catalogues were not frequently updated, the Repository of Arts was able to boast an almost monthly update on what they interpreted as fashionable and desirable at that moment. This simultaneously manufactured and cemented the periodical’s own vital importance as a key tool to navigate these rapidly changing fashions, as is also reflected in Chloe Wigston Smith’s contribution to this volume. Indeed, the Repository of Arts did not blithely and passively recount fashions – instead it confidently trained and guided its readership. That the magazine was designed to articulate Ackermann’s polite, urban agenda is apparent in the willingness to convey strong opinions in regard to fashionable goods. For example, in August 1809, the description that accompanied the plate showing fashionable furniture confidently berated the ‘barbarous Egyptian’ style, which had recently prevailed in fashionable circles (2 (1809): 132). Instead, the volume declared that ‘the classic elegance which

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 481

17/11/17 5:03 PM

482

serena dyer

characterised the most polished ages of Greece and Rome’ should be preferred. Key traits of ‘taste’, ‘skill’, and ‘ingenuity’ are again foregrounded in the text describing the image of the classically styled ladies’ toilette furniture, which accompanied this declaration of aesthetic preference. Aside from the fashion plates and ladies’ fashion news, the ‘Fashionable Furniture’ prints provide one of the few areas of the periodical that was explicitly gendered from an early stage. Amanda Vickery has argued that the eighteenth century bore witness to a blossoming language of ‘his and hers’ in relation to furniture (Vickery 2006). These pieces displayed little difference in terms of construction, aesthetic, materials, or decorative motifs. It was not the case that the soft rococo styles were favoured by women, and the strong lines of the neoclassical reserved for men (Vickery 2009: 280). Instead, women’s furniture was smaller and neater, while men’s was more robust and functional (Beard and Goodison 1987: 205). The Repository of Arts conformed to this gendered language of furniture, and most commonly presented ladies’ furniture. In 1814 the ‘Fashionable Furniture’ section described a ‘lady’s book-case’ (11 (Oct 1814): 178). It is described (see Plate 5) as being ‘calculated for a lady’s boudoir, being extremely light, and occupying a very small space’. That it is ‘pleasing’, ‘elegant’, and ‘tasteful’ are key selling points in the text. The accompanying image depicts a neat and elegant piece of furniture. It illustrates how it might be used, with books nestled in the shelves at the back, the silk curtains slightly pulled back from the fretwork doors, and a drawer – perhaps for storing letters – pulled out below. Not only did the Repository of Arts display to its readers the aesthetic styles which were fashionable, it showed them how they worked and how to use them. Although early editions did include scales or measures, the focus on aesthetics and use was quite a contrast to that of the catalogues and directories of cabinetmakers, which generally provided more technical drawings, showing plan views and dimensions rather than focusing on domestic utility (Vickery 2009: 280–1; Shimbo 2016: 31–4). However, much like the furniture-makers’ catalogues, advertisement was a central part of the purpose of this feature. The cabinet depicted was manufactured by Messrs Morgan and Sanders – the very establishment which had appeared in the shops series five years previously, attesting to an ongoing commercial network between Ackermann and other retailers. The inclusion of such images was specifically aimed at consumers, utilising the magazine format to directly appeal to potential customers. Readers were simultaneously informed that this particular design was fashionable and desirable, shown how it might be used within their own home, and given all the information required to purchase it. Indeed, a similar device was employed for the ladies’ fashions. For example, in the same volume as the lady’s bookcase, the cloaks and gowns depicted in the fashion plates are attributed to Mrs Gill of Cork Street, whom the Repository of Arts credits with ‘taste and invention’ (11 (Apr 1814): 241). Aside from promoting the wares of specific retailers, the ‘Fashionable Furniture’ section of the Repository of Arts was also used to perpetuate the periodical’s focus on patriotic British manufactures, and on the cultivation of taste and judgement amongst its consumer-readers. In 1827, the periodical’s Fashionable Furniture section focused on a ‘Gothic Whist-Table’ (10 (Dec 1827): 56). After reflecting on the history of table design, the text goes on to approvingly discuss the design feature of the table, such as the well-positioned candlesticks which ‘otherwise would have been of the persons engaged at play’. Finally, the piece reflects on the Gothic style of the piece, a style which the Repository of Arts seems to have particularly favoured. Given the

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 482

17/11/17 5:03 PM

the cultivation of the female consumer

483

magazine’s association with the Pugin family, it is unsurprising that the periodical takes such an explicitly positive view of this style (Shimbo 2016: 202). Indeed, the text goes so far as to say that ‘Great Britain exhibits more magnificence in this kind of furniture that any other country in Europe, particularly in this style being the only country at present where this beautiful style of architecture is understood’ (10 (Dec 1827): 56). In other words, the Repository of Arts places Britain at the forefront of commerce and manufacture, as well as the arts more generally. Not only did the Repository of Arts see itself as a commercial vehicle for self-promotion, but it also explicitly credited itself with the ‘cultivation of the arts’ and the cultural education of its readership (11 (Apr 1814): 236).

Patterns of British Manufacture: Fashion and the Patriotic Consumer The Repository of Arts’ insistence on British pre-eminence was a consistent theme throughout the periodical. However, one area where this confident patriotism becomes more nuanced is in relation to dress. While early editions focused on ‘Fashions for Ladies’ which were implicitly British, later editions, from 1816 onwards, segregated ‘London Fashions’ from ‘French Female Fashions’ (2 (1816): 53). Intertwined with political relations, Anglo-French fashion conversations were always tense. Traditionally it had been ‘France, whose Edicts govern Dress’, as the English poet Soame Jenyns wrote in his 1742 work, Fashion, a Satire. To the English, these French fashions were simultaneously desirable and distasteful. As Aileen Ribeiro has argued, Anglo-French attitudes consisted of ‘a complex mixture of envy, bafflement and dislike’ (Ribeiro 1991). The cache of fashions from France was consistently strong throughout the century, and French a byword for style, elegance, and modishness. Yet France’s fashionable superiority was diluted by the increasing desirability for decidedly English, rational styles of dress. Twinned with the recognition of the consumer as a patriotic economic force – an economic strategy France had acknowledged but failed to implement – English fashions enjoyed a resurgence of patriotic popularity from the 1790s to 1815 (Chrisman-Campbell 2015: 7). This view was repeated in the Repository of Arts, perpetuating a view of British economic and commercial superiority. It was in this climate of patriotic anglomania that the Repository of Arts was born (Bolton 2006). Perhaps the most explicitly patriotic element of the publication – which was a key segment throughout the entire nineteen-year run – were the ‘patterns of British manufacture’. Surrounded by an allegorical woodcut, these ‘patterns’ were samples of fabrics and ribbons, accompanied by descriptions of the items, and directions regarding where they might be acquired. In itself, this was a comparatively innovative inclusion, at least amongst British periodical publications. Through making the materiality of fabrics the core focus of these pages, Ackermann recognised how important being able to haptically and visually examine fabrics was to the female consumer (Smith 2012: 4). The importance of tactility to how readers engaged with the material practices of production and consumption, also highlighted in Chloe Wigston Smith’s essay in this volume, are brought to the forefront. Just as the browsing process was depicted in the shop series, the patterns pages acted as a locum shop counter, over which the consumer-reader could view, touch, and become informed about the wide variety of goods available.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 483

17/11/17 5:03 PM

484

serena dyer

It was broadly accepted that commerce ‘was the engine which drove a state’s power and wealth’, and that manufacture and trade had become inextricably linked with national identity (Colley 1992: 64–72). The Repository of Arts proudly stated that the patterns included were always of British manufacture. Furthermore, the allegorical woodcuts that surrounded the patterns drove home this link between patriotism and the consumer, instilling a connection between the good of the country, and the material goods it produced, in the minds of the periodical’s readership. The woodcuts that appeared came in two forms, which were used interchangeably. The first (see Plate 6) used the patriotic figure of Britannia at its forefront, where she sits with Neptune, father of Albion, and mythological god of the seas that surrounded and protected the nation, representing Britain’s thalassocracy and naval dominance. From the mid-century, the Anti-Gallican Association had claimed Britannia as a key part of its anti-French iconography, and prominently included her in the society’s coat of arms (Lindfield 2015). During the 1780s, such symbols – widely recognised and understood by an educated elite or middling consumer – became increasingly used on marketing ephemera; particularly that associated with international trade (Beddoes 2015). The symbols of British mercantile greatness proudly and unambiguously surrounds the fabric samples, drawing unmistakable associations between consumer goods, and patriotic support of the nation. In the second allegorical woodcut (see Plate 7), these patriotic messages were extended through the use of iconography linked even more closely with trade and empire. Dominating the image, royal patronage was displayed in the regal crown and Prince of Wales plumes at the top and bottom of the image. These symbols are flanked by the masts of a trading ship: a clear reference to trade and empire. Reigning over the woodcut, at the centre of the image, is a bust of Britannia surrounded by classical accoutrements and references to the wider arts. To the left, a girl works industriously at her loom in an idealised image of manufacture, undoubtedly a reference to Penelope, wife of Odysseus, who was often represented as a weaver. To the right are displayed books and masks, referencing learning and the arts. These ‘patterns’, or fabric samples, did not exist in isolation within their woodcuts. The Repository of Arts also included detailed information about what they could be used for, and where they could be obtained – much in the same vein as the information provided to the consumer-reader about the fashionable furniture. From the very first edition, the fabric samples were carefully integrated with the other features of the magazine. For example, the ‘gold-coloured velvet’, which provided one of the samples in the first volume, was linked to a fashion plate published only a few pages away (Plates 6 and 8). The text explicitly states that this fabric is ideal for the ‘mantle of the morning gown’ which appeared in the accompanying fashion plate, directly facilitating the reader to consume the fashions that the periodical advocated (1 (Jan 1809): 53). Ackermann prefaced his introduction of this innovative marketing method to his periodical publication as follows: Patterns afford the manufacturer an opportunity of circulating a new article more extensively in one day, than can be done by sending a dozen riders with it through the country. It will likewise afford persons at a distance from the metropolis the means of examining and estimating the merit of the fabric, and of being made acquainted with the tradesman from whom it may be purchased. (1 (Jan 1809): 58)

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 484

17/11/17 5:03 PM

the cultivation of the female consumer

485

Aside from the implicit self-promotion afforded in this statement, the centrality of the consumer to this plan is evident. The inclusion of fabric samples is not intended to act only as a means of education and information, but as a precursor to visiting the tradesmen from which it originated and making a purchase. In other words, the patterns of British manufacture not only promote metropolitan fashion information, they also advocate trade and commerce. The fabrics included further supported the patriotic consumer message of the publication. For example, the ‘cotton-thread shirting’ to the bottom right of March 1813’s patterns section was the subject of an ‘imperial patent’ (see Plate 7). As well as informing the reader that this fabric might be got from ‘Mr Millard, the proprietor of the East India Warehouse, No. 16 Cheapside’, the Repository of Arts goes on to declare that ‘its superior durability, and its great economy’ made it ‘equal to, and nearly half the price of’ foreign linens (9 (Mar 1813): 181). This particular fabric was not included as an example of a highly fashionable fabric for an elegant gown or pelisse, but rather as a patriotic consumption choice for practical garments. The Repository of Arts even included samples of French émigrés’ work, informing the reader that one particular fabric, a Persian kerseymere, was ‘worked in tambour by a society of unfortunate, but industrious French emigrants, residing in the west of England’ (6 (Dec 1811): 326). The italicised emphasis of the plight and origin of the manufacturers of this fabric encouraged readers to consume goods which were simultaneously fashionable, and which supported the national economy. The work of these French emigrants would still maintain the cachet of French fashionability, whilst supporting the national economy of their new home in England. A generation earlier, the Anti-Gallican Association had sought to ‘discourage the introduction of French modes and oppose the importance of French commodities’ partly in order to promote and preserve the prosperity of the British economy (Berg 1999: 77). However, now that desirable French fashions were available to a British market as a domestically produced product, they no longer necessarily threatened, but instead supported the national economy.

Conclusion The Repository of Arts was part of a long narrative of print being used to disseminate ideas about fashionable consumption across the country with speed, dating back to at least the 1750s. The question of geographical scope and reach of fashionable objects and goods, articulated throughout the century in relation to the quasi-social networks of information and exchange provided in magazines, was a key issue in forming a recognisable, if not uniform, British consumer. Unlike her predecessors, such as the Gallery of Fashion (1794–1803) and La Belle Assemblée (1806–32), which are discussed in Chloe Wigston Smith’s essay, this magazine was intended not only for personal improvement and entertainment, but also acted as a proponent of the country’s national economic growth through trade and industry. The London-centric approach to fashion consumption – dominated by an urban elite of retailers and merchants – further enabled the creation of an analogous national consumer. In essence, the Repository of Arts was a microcosmic representation of the values and preoccupations of the city, and its cultured and polite inhabitants, and in turn the nation as viewed and shaped by the state. In the publication’s own

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 485

17/11/17 5:03 PM

486

serena dyer

words, it intended to be ‘useful and polite’, and to appeal to the affluent middling sort (1 (Jan 1809): 1). The consumption of fashionable goods – whether dress, furniture, or the periodical itself – was one element of this broader urban lifestyle, which also included discussion of politics, medical and naval reports, and information about fashionable furniture. This rounded, polite, urban populace was the epitome of the idealised British public, and was the crucible for the productive, patriotic consumer.

Works Cited Ackermann, Rudolph, ed. 1809–28. The Repository of Arts. London: R. Ackermann. Addison, Joseph. 1965. The Spectator. Ed. Donald F. Bond. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Batchelor, Jennie and Cora Kaplan, eds. 2007. Women and Material Culture, 1660–1830. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Beard, Geoffrey W. and Judith Goodison. 1987. English Furniture 1500–1840. London: Phaidon Christie’s. Beddoes, Emalee. 2015. ‘The National Drink: Advertising, the United Kingdom Tea Company and Nationalism’. Rule Britannia?: Britain and Britishness 1707–1901. Ed. Peter Lindfield and Christie Margrave. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 101–20. Berg, Maxine. 1994. The Age of Manufactures. London: Routledge. —. 1999. ‘New Commodities, Luxuries, and Their Consumers in Eighteenth-Century Britain’. Consumers and Luxury in Europe 1650–1850. Ed. Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 63–87. Berg, Maxine and Elizabeth Eger. 2002. ‘The Rise and Fall of the Luxury Debates’. Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods. Ed. Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 7–27. Berg, Maxine and Helen Clifford. 2007. ‘Selling Consumption in the Eighteenth Century: Advertising and the Trade Card in Britain and France’. Cultural and Social History 4.2: 145–70. Bermingham, Ann. 2000. Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art. London: Paul Mellon. Berry, Helen. 2002a. ‘Polite Consumption: Shopping in Eighteenth-Century England’. Transaction of the Royal Historical Society 12: 375–94. —. 2002b. ‘Promoting Taste in the Provincial Press: National and Local Culture in EighteenthCentury Newcastle upon Tyne’. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 25.1: 1–17. Bianchi, Marina. 1998. ‘Taste for Novelty and Novel Tastes: The Role of Human Agency in Consumption’. The Active Consumer: Novelty and Surprise in Consumer Choice. Ed. Marina Bianchi. London: Routledge. 64–87. Boileau, Daniel. 1811. An Introduction to the Study of Political Economy. London: Cadell and Davies. Bolton, Andrew. 2006. AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Campbell, Richard. 1747. London Tradesman. London: T. Gardener. Chrisman-Campbell, Kimberley. 2015. Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. London: Yale University Press. Colley, Linda. 1992. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. London: Yale University Press. Ford, John. 1983. Ackermann, 1783–1983. London: Ackermann. Gascoigne, John. 1994. Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goggin, Maureen Daly and Beth Fowkes Tobin, eds. 2009. Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750–1950. Farnham: Routledge.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 486

17/11/17 5:03 PM

the cultivation of the female consumer

487

Greig, Hannah. 2013. The Beau Monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian London. Oxford: Oxford University Press. House of Commons Debate. 30 Apr 1838. 42, cc674–5. Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth. 1997. Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping and Business in the Eighteenth Century. Chichester: Columbia University Press. The Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex. 1770–1832 (1st ser. 1770–1819; 2nd ser. 1820–9; 3rd ser. 1830–2). London. Lambert, Miles. 2009. ‘Sent from Town: Commissioning Clothing in Britain During the Long Eighteenth Century’. Costume 43: 66–84. Langford, Paul. 1989. A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783. London: Guild Publishing. Lindfield, Peter. 2015. ‘National Identity Through Design: The Anglicisation of the Rococo in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain’. Rule Britannia?: Britain and Britishness 1707–1901. Ed. Peter Lindfield and Christie Margrave. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 3–42. Lister, Jenny. 2003. ‘Twenty-Three Samples of Silk: Silks Worn by Queen Charlotte and the Princesses at Royal Birthday Balls, 1791–1794’. Costume 73: 51–65. McCreery, Cindy. 2004. The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McDonald, Michelle Craig and Steven Topik. 2008. ‘Americanizing Coffee: The Refashioning of a Consumer Culture’. Food and Globalisation: Consumption, Markets and Politics in the Modern World. Ed. Alexander Nuetsenadel and Frank Trentmann. Oxford: Berg. 109–27. McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and John Harold Plumb. 1982. The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialisation of Eighteenth-Century England. London: Europa. Mackie, Erin. 2009. Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates: The Making of the Modern Gentleman in the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Powell, Martyn J. 2013. ‘Consumption: Commercial Demand and the Challenges to Regulatory Power in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’. Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire. Ed. Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 282–302. Ribeiro, Aileen. 1991. ‘Fashion in the Eighteenth Century: Some Anglo-French Comparisons’. Textile History 22.2: 329–45. Shimbo, Akiko. 2016. Furniture-Makers and Consumers in England, 1754–1851: Design as Interaction. London: Routledge. Smith, Kate. 2012. ‘Sensing Design and Workmanship: The Haptic Skills of Shoppers in Eighteenth-Century London’. Journal of Design History 25: 1–10. —. 2014. Material Goods, Moving Hands: Perceiving Production in England, 1700–1830. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Styles, John and Amanda Vickery, eds. 2006. Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art. Trentmann, Frank. 2006. ‘The Modern Genealogy of the Consumer: Meanings, Knowledge, and Identities Before the Age of Affluence’. Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges. Ed. John Brewer and Frank Trentmann. London: Berg. 19–70. Vickery, Amanda. 1993. ‘Women and the World of Goods: A Lancashire Consumer and Her Possessions, 1751–81’. Consumption and the World of Goods. Ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter. London: Routledge. 274–304. —. 1998. The Gentleman’s Daughter. London: Yale University Press. —. 2006. ‘His and Hers: Gender, Consumption and Household Accounting in EighteenthCentury England’. Ed. Lyndal Roper and Ruth Harris. The Art of Survival: Gender and History in Europe, 1450–2000 (Past and Present): 12–38. —. 2009. Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England. London: Yale University Press.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 487

17/11/17 5:03 PM

Appendix 1690–7 The Athenian Mercury. London. 1692–4 The Gentleman’s Journal, or the Monthly Miscellany. London. 1692 The Lacedemonian Mercury. London. 1693 The Ladies Mercury. London. 1695–1731 The Flying-Post, or, The Postmaster. London. 1704–1841 Ladies’ Diary, or, the Women’s Almanack. London. 1709–10 The Female Tatler. London. 1709–11 The Tatler. London. 1710–14 The Examiner. London. 1710–12 The Medley. London. 1711–12; 1714 The Spectator. London. 1718–1801 Whitehall Evening Post. London. 1722–3 The Free Thinker. London. 1723–4 The Visiter. London. 1726–52 The Craftsman. London. 1727 The Ladies Journal. London. 1727–97 The London Evening-Post. London. 1728–46 The Universal Spectator. London. 1730/1–96 The Daily Advertiser. London. 1731–1922 The Gentleman’s Magazine. 1731–1922 (1st ser. 1731–1833; ser. 2–4 1834–68). London. 1732–82 The London Magazine, or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer. London. 1733 The Lady’s Magazine; or Universal Repository. London. 1737–44 Common Sense; or the Englishman’s Journal. London. 1737–8 The Nonsense of Common-Sense. London. 1739–41 The Champion, or British Mercury. London. 1739–1826 The Scots Magazine. Edinburgh. 1744–6 The Female Spectator. London. 1746–51 The British Magazine. London. 1746 The Parrot. London. 1747 The Lady’s Weekly Magazine. London. 1747–60 The Newcastle General Magazine. Newcastle upon Tyne. 1747–1814 The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure. (1st ser. 1747–1803; 2nd ser. 1804–14). London. 1748–50. Epistles for the Ladies. London. 1749–53 The Ladies Magazine: or, the Universal Entertainer. London. 1749–1844 The Monthly Review. (1st ser. 1749–89; 2nd ser. 1790–1825; 3rd ser. 1826–30; 4th ser. 1831–44). London. 1750–2 The Rambler. London.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 488

17/11/17 5:03 PM

appendix

489

1751–3 The Midwife, or Old Woman’s Magazine. London. 1752 The Lady’s Curiosity, or Weekly Apollo. London. 1753–6 The World. By Adam Fitz-Adam. London. 1755–7 The Connoisseur. London. 1755–6 The Old Maid. London. 1756–1817 The Critical Review, or Annals of Literature (1st ser. 1756–90; 2nd ser. 1791–1803; 3rd ser. 1804–11; 4th ser. 1812–14). London. 1756 The Young Lady. London. 1757–79 The Gentleman’s and Ladies’ Diary and Palladian. London. 1757–1800 The London Chronicle. London. 1758– Annual Register. London. 1758–60 The Idler. London. 1758–60 The Universal Chronicle; or, Weekly Gazette. London 1759 The Bee. London. 1759 The Busy-Body. London. 1759–63 The Lady’s Magazine; or, Polite Companion for the Fair Sex. London. 1759–71 The New Royal Magazine, or Gentleman’s and Lady’s Companion. London. 1760–7 The British Magazine, or Monthly Repository for Gentlemen and Ladies. London. 1760–1 The Lady’s Museum. London. 1760–1836 The Public Ledger. London. 1760 The Royal Female Magazine. London. 1761–5 The Court Magazine, or Royal Chronicle (later the Court and City and then The Court, City, and Country). London. 1761–1866 St. James’s Chronicle; or, the British Evening Post. London. 1762–70 The Universal Museum, or Gentleman’s and Lady’s Polite Magazine of History, Politicks, and Literature. London. 1765–71 The Court Miscellany, or Ladies’ New Magazine . . . By Matilda Wentworth, of Piccadilly, and others. (later The Gentleman and Lady’s New Magazine). London. 1768–79 The Weekly Magazine, or Edinburgh Amusement. Edinburgh. 1769–1862 The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser. London. 1769–96 The Town and Country Magazine; or Universal Repository of Knowledge, Instruction, and Entertainment. London. 1770–1832 The Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex. 1770–1832 (1st ser. 1770–1819; 2nd ser. 1820–9; 3rd ser. 1830–2). London. 1771–1811 Hibernian Magazine (from 1786 Walker’s Hibernian Magazine). Dublin. 1772–1937 The Morning Post, or Cheap Daily Advertiser. London. 1773–7 The Sentimental Magazine, or General Assemblage of Science, Taste, etc. London. 1773–82 The Weekly Miscellany: or, Instructive Entertainer. Sherborne. 1774 The Monthly Miscellany, or Gentleman and Lady’s Complete Magazine. London. 1775 The Matrimonial Magazine, or Monthly Anecdotes of Love and Marriage. London. 1777–8 The Gentleman’s and Lady’s Museum. London. 1777 Magazine à la Mode, or Fashionable Miscellany. London. 1779–80 The Mirror. Edinburgh.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 489

17/11/17 5:03 PM

490

appendix

1780–8 The Novelist’s Magazine. London. 1781–2; 1791 The Lady’s Poetical Magazine; Or, Beauties of British Poetry. London. 1781–1826 The New Annual Register, or General Repository of History, Politics and Literature. London. 1782–3 The British Magazine and Review. London. 1782–1826 The European Magazine and London Review (1st ser. 1782–1825; 2nd ser. 1825–6). London. 1785–7 The Berwick Museum, or, Monthly Literary Intelligencer. Berwick. 1785–1803 The Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany. (1st ser. 1785–91; 2nd ser. 1793–1803). Edinburgh. 1785–7 The Lounger. Edinburgh. 1785–93 The New London Magazine. London. 1786 The Fashionable Magazine, or Lady’s and Gentleman’s Recorder of New Fashions. London. 1786–95 The New Lady’s Magazine: or, Polite and Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex. London. 1786–7 The New Novelists’ Magazine: or, Entertaining library of pleasing and instructive histories, adventures, tales, romances, and other agreeable and exemplary little novels. London. 1787 The Female Guardian . . . By a Lady. London. 1787–92 The General Magazine and Impartial Review. London. 1787–94 The World, or Fashionable Gazette. London. 1788–99 The Analytical Review (1st ser. 1788–98; 2nd ser. 1799). London. 1788–9 The Family Magazine, or, a Repository of Religious Instruction and Rational Amusement. London. 1788–9 The Trifler. London. 1789 Lady’s Gazette, and Evening Advertiser. London. 1789–94 The Oracle, or Bell’s New World. London. 1790–4 The Bee: Or Literary Weekly Intelligencer. Edinburgh. 1791–6 The Bon Ton Magazine. Or Microscope of Fashion and Folly. London. 1791–2 The Polite Repository; Or, Amusing Companion. London. 1792–6 The Carlton House Magazine: or, Annals of Taste, Fashion and Politeness. London. 1792–3 The Lady’s Magazine: and Repository of Entertaining Knowledge. Philadelphia. 1793–9 The British Critic. London. 1793 The Female Mentor; or, Select Conversations. London. 1794 The Biographical Magazine. Containing Portraits and Characters of Eminent and Ingenious Persons of Every Age and Nation. London. 1794–1803 The Gallery of Fashion. London. 1794–5 The Pocket Magazine, or Elegant Repository of Useful and Polite Literature. London. 1795–6[?] The Lady’s Pocket Magazine; or, Elegant and Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex. London. 1795–1811 The Monthly Mirror. (1st ser. 1795–1806; 2nd ser. 1807–11). London. 1796–8 The Aberdeen Magazine; Or, Universal Repository 1796–8. Aberdeen. 1796–1825 The Monthly Magazine and British Register. London. 1798–1821 The Anti-Jacobin Review. London.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 490

17/11/17 5:03 PM

appendix

491

1798–1828 The Lady’s Monthly Museum. (1st ser. 1798–1814; 2nd ser. 1815–28). London. 1799 The Young Gentleman’s and Lady’s Magazine, or Universal Repository of Knowledge. London. 1802–14 The Christian Observer. London. 1802–1929 The Edinburgh Review. Edinburgh. 1802–3 The Monthly Register. London. 1804–9 The Annual Review. London. 1805–68 The Eclectic Review (1st ser. 1805–13; 2nd ser. 1814–28; 3rd ser. 1829–36; 4th ser.1837–68). London. 1806–32 La Belle Assemblée, or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine, Addressed Particularly to the Ladies. 1806–32 (1st ser. 1806–10; 2nd ser. 1810–24; 3rd ser. 1825–32). London. 1807–9 The Athenaeum, a Magazine of Literary and Miscellaneous Information. London. 1809–28 The Repository of Arts. London. 1809–1967 The Quarterly Review. London. 1813–15 Female Preceptor. London. 1815–18 The British Lady’s Magazine and Monthly Miscellany. London. 1817–1980 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Edinburgh. 1819 The New British Lady’s Magazine. London. 1820–9 The London Magazine. London. 1822 The Gazette of Fashion and Magazine of the Fine Arts. London. 1822–47 The Forget-Me-Not. London. 1824 The New Female Instructor. London. 1824–44 Friendship’s Offering, or the Annual Remembrancer. London. 1824–40 The Ladies’ Pocket Magazine. London. 1825–34 The Literary Souvenir, or Cabinet of Poetry and Romance. London. 1825–32 The Winter’s Wreath. London; Liverpool. 1826–36 The Amulet, or Christian and Literary Remembrancer. London. 1828–57 The Keepsake. London. 1828–30 The Bijou; or, Annual of Literature and the Arts. London. 1829–37 The Juvenile Forget-Me-Not. London. 1832–61 Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine. (1st ser. 1832–4; 2nd ser. 1834–61). Edinburgh. 1833–82 The Dublin University Magazine. Dublin. In an ideal world for periodical studies, this appendix would present both a chronology of women’s periodicals and a handy alphabetical guide for our source texts, providing the reader and incipient scholar with such useful information as prices, editors, circulation figures, and format for each title. Instead we present this brief explanation of why an appendix such as the one just described above is unlikely for our period. To begin, one of the major contentions of our volume is just how difficult it is to rigidly define ‘women’s periodical’ in this particular period – indeed, this is one of the eighteenth century’s standout characteristics. Our chronology is not a list of women’s periodicals of the long eighteenth century. Rather, it reflects the volume’s contents in totem, and includes periodicals by women (there are only a few of these), periodicals targeted primarily to women (also not the majority – and even those, we believe,

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 491

17/11/17 5:03 PM

492

appendix

tended to have important adolescent and adult male readerships), and periodicals in which women have a major presence as authors, editors, and/or readers (by far the majority of our texts). Prices: We do not include prices with our titles, because in too many cases we do not know them, or do not know them for enough of a particular title’s run. Sometimes individual numbers of a journal advertise a price on them; often they do not. Prices were rarely printed on covers of periodicals in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and in any case most covers – or wrappers, as they were called at the time – have almost all been destroyed as they were usually removed prior to binding in annual or bi-annual volumes. To establish prices a scholar must search newspaper advertisements and track changes over time; this can be a labour of months for even a single title, particularly one like the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832), which changed its price often over the course of its six decades. Also, later in the period, some periodicals (like La Belle Assemblée) were available in more than one version (one with coloured and one with black and white plates) and so had more than one price point at a single moment in time. Still, for the sake of context we can make a few generalisations. Early essay periodicals like the Athenian Mercury, Tatler, and Spectator sold for a penny an issue, though it was more economical to read them in coffee houses or, if one could afford it, purchase the bound volumes (which sold for everything from a guinea all the way down to half a crown or three shillings per volume, depending on size and quality). The 1712 Stamp Act pushed the prices of periodicals higher along with everything else, and encouraged multi-sheet formats over single-sheet formats; subsequent laws such as the 1725 Stamp Act thrust prices still higher and pressed periodicals to innovate with respect to their contents in order to justify the fact that prices were going up faster than the rate of inflation. In one important example, Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator could sell for anything from a shilling per issue to more than a pound for bound sets; meanwhile her shorter Parrot asked only 4d per number. Many monthly magazines, as we discuss in more detail in our introduction, were sold at 6d an issue from the 1720s to the last quarter of the century, but there are simply no hard and fast rules as far as pricing is concerned. Most of the time, it is safe if not especially helpful to say that periodicals remained more expensive than broadsides and basic news-sheets, and cheaper than novels. Editors: Editors of eighteenth-century periodicals are known in some cases, but are commonly not (and especially not for magazines). Because copyright law required only that the copyright holder, and not the author, register any given publication, anonymous and pseudonymous publication of popular media was the rule in the eighteenth century, and not the exception; the same goes for editorial and translation work. It is important to note here also that the term ‘editor’ was an unstable one in the little over a century covered by this volume. Editor, compiler, conductor, publisher, and proprietor were all terms in use at the time to describe individuals or groups of people who had oversight of the selection and presentation of periodical material. Sometimes, these job titles were used in the trade in ways that indicate that they were at least partly interchangeable, but it is also apparent that they could mean quite different things on individual titles. We know, for example, the names of the men who made up the Athenian Society from John Dunton’s Mercury, but have little information on to what extent Dunton might have solicited, altered, or fabricated the letters to the editor that were that periodical’s raison d’être. (Indeed, as essays in this book repeatedly

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 492

17/11/17 5:03 PM

appendix

493

register, there are few more persistent or more unanswerable questions in periodical scholarship than: ‘who really wrote the letters to the editor?’) We might be able to say confidently, for example, that Charlotte Lennox edited the Lady’s Museum, but she may have had help from others and may not have been its sole editor. In another telling example, Barbara Laning Fitzpatrick has demonstrated that John Coote, one of two publishers of the Lady’s Museum and founder and short-lived proprietor of the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) often undertook extensive editorial work on the many magazines he had a stake in during his career even when other editors seem to have been in place. It is as hard to disprove Coote’s editorial involvement in the many periodicals in which he had a hand as it is to prove it. To give a different kind of illustration of editorial ambiguity, we know, from odd pieces of surviving correspondence, that Mary Pilkington undertook some editorial work on Vernor and Hood’s Lady’s Monthly Museum, a periodical that claimed to be run by a ‘society of ladies’. However, none of these extant letters makes clear whether Pilkington was, as seems unlikely, a sole or principal editor of the Museum, what her editorial duties might have involved, or for how long she undertook them. In other cases again, once-treated-as-fact editorships (such as the editorship of one of the two versions of the Female Tatler) are now disputed or have been convincingly disproved with no firm alternatives given. If we are in the dark about what seems like such a fundamental part of periodical print culture then we can at least take some consolation from the fact that these publications’ own societies were, too. Even such sharp minds as Lord Chief Justice Mansfield’s were bewildered by the question of editors and what they actually did. In July 1771, Mansfield presided over a trial, at King’s Bench, Guildhall, to determine who had the right to publish the Lady’s Magazine following Coote’s sale of his proprietary interest in it to George Robinson and John Roberts in March of that year. Much of the trial turned on the vagueness of the terms publisher, compiler, and proprietor. Those who claimed these job titles also claimed to have undertaken significant editorial work of various kinds for the magazine – although, tellingly, the term ‘editor’ itself is not used in the trial proceedings. Establishing who had done the bulk of this creative and administrative work was seen by various of the key figures who testified at the trial as vital to determining who had a right to claim the periodical as their own. In trying to untangle the web of conflicting evidence before him, Mansfield had to rely on various witnesses who were called upon to explain the day-to-day workings of periodical publishing to the court, including John Rivington (then a shareholder in the London) and John Newbery (who had co-published the Lady’s Museum with Coote). Mansfield found in Robinson and Roberts’ favour but concluded that the matter was so ambiguous that the future of the magazine rested with readers who would simply determine which of the two versions of the magazine would survive through their patronage. Circulation figures: As we discuss in detail in the introduction, these figures, are a true bugbear in our period. In most cases, we simply do not have the data and most figures quoted in the relevant scholarship rely on the (possibly exaggerated) pronouncements made by editors or publishers who had a vested interest, of course, in making their sales look healthier than they were. Worse, there is no fixed correspondence between number of purchasers and number of readers. Addison famously estimated that twenty people read every purchased number of the Spectator, and some modern scholars put that number even higher. These problems are compounded by the facts that: complete publisher archives are rare for this period; periodicals were routinely

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 493

17/11/17 5:03 PM

494

appendix

issued in multiple formats (see below) and editions; and periodicals could be accessed by readers in various ways, including by subscription or direct purchase of individual issues or volumes from publishers and booksellers, by reading them in coffee houses, or loaning them from libraries. They were also frequently passed along among friends and families, travelling from urban centres to the provinces via the penny post or other economical means. Format: Unlike the majority of modern periodicals, eighteenth-century periodicals often aspired to and enjoyed bound afterlives to their initial print appearances: following the Tatler and Spectator, they actively aimed for and planned for volume form. (Think National Geographic rather than Cosmopolitan.) This introduces a further wrinkle into all this information and lack of information we grapple with above: reissued editions could be edited, renumbered, extracted, bound with new introductions or conclusions, have mottoes added in or translated into English, essays retitled, and see the lot distributed at multiple price points in multiple formats. Which version of the Spectator ought to be most crucial to an appendix like this one: the original, daily, one-penny version; the eight-volume version that was popular well into the nineteenth century; or the most common extracts, like the De Coverley papers, that were probably read far more often than the collected set was? Which edition of Brooke’s Old Maid is the correct one for scholarship: the most widely available 1764 ‘Revised and Corrected’ reprint edition, or the hard-to-find 1755–6 edition that contains references to controversy and paper wars that Brooke later removed? To conclude our appendix in which nothing is concluded, then: periodicals in the long eighteenth century were a particularly diverse, dynamic, and mutable set of texts. Their study is thus endlessly exciting and renewable, but – like the very concept of a ‘woman’s periodical’ – it is also extremely difficult to standardise along post-nineteenthcentury expectations for the genre. Rather than mislead our readers by forcing an artificial conformation, we hope they will, as this volume’s essays do, embrace the formal heterogeneity of the field.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 494

17/11/17 5:03 PM

Notes on Contributors

Eve Tavor Bannet is George Lynn Cross Professor Emeritus, University of Oklahoma. Her recent publications include Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1688–1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720–1810 (Cambridge University Press, 2011); a critical edition of Emma Corbett (Broadview, 2011); and essays on Eliza Haywood, Sarah Scott, Elizabeth Griffith, Susanna Rowson, Catherine Macaulay, and Mercy Otis Warren, as well as late eighteenth-century adultery fiction. Her most recent monograph, Eighteenth-Century Manners of Reading: Print Culture and Popular Instruction in the British Atlantic World, is currently in press. Jennie Batchelor is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Kent. She has published on eighteenth-century women’s writing, material culture, gender, sexuality and the body, and women’s periodicals. Her most recent book is Women’s Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750–1830 (Manchester University Press, 2010). Between 2014 and 2016 she was Principal Investigator of a two-year Leverhulme Project Grant on the Lady’s Magazine and she is currently writing a book on the place of the magazine in Romantic print culture. Jennifer Batt is a Lecturer in Eighteenth-century English Literature at the University of Bristol, and was formerly project manager of the University of Oxford’s Digital Miscellanies Index. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century poetic culture, with particular interests in labouring-class poetry, miscellanies, magazines, and newspapers. Barbara M. Benedict is the Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. She has published Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745–1800 (AMS, 1994); Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early-Modern Literary Anthologies (Princeton University Press, 1996); and Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (University of Chicago Press, 2001). She has co-edited with Deirdre LeFaye Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey for Cambridge University Press. She has written on the literary, book, material and popular culture of the long eighteenth century, and is currently working on representations of collecting in literature. Tanya M. Caldwell is Professor of English and Associate Graduate Director at Georgia State University. Her most recent books are Virgil Made English: The Decline of

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 495

17/11/17 5:03 PM

496

notes on contributors

Classical Authority (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and her edition, Popular Plays by Women in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Broadview, 2011). She has published articles on a variety of subjects in the long eighteenth century, including Hannah Cowley, on whom she is currently composing a critical biography. Susan Carlile is Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach and author of Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind (University of Toronto Press, 2018). She edited Masters of the Marketplace: British Women Novelists of the 1750s (Lehigh University Press, 2010) and co-edited Charlotte Lennox’s 1758 novel Henrietta (with Ruth Perry, University Press of Kentucky, 2008). She has published essays and reviews on Anna Letitia Barbauld, Frances Burney, Samuel Johnson, Charlotte Lennox, and Delarivier Manley. Rachel Carnell, Professor of English at Cleveland State University, is the author of Partisan Politics, Narrative Realism, and the Rise of the British Novel (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and A Political Biography of Delarivier Manley (Pickering & Chatto, 2008). With Rebecca Bullard, she is co-editor of The Secret History in Literature 1660–1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She is also the co-editor, with Ruth Herman, of the five-volume Selected Works of Delarivier Manley (Pickering & Chatto, 2005). Koenraad Claes is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Ghent University (Belgium), where he is employed on the three-year individual research project ‘Narratives of Continuity: Form and Function of the British Conservative Novel in the Long Nineteenth Century’, funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). Before that, he was a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Research Associate on the project ‘The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1818): Understanding the Emergence of a Genre’ at the University of Kent. His first monograph, a history of the little magazine genre in the late Victorian period, is under contract with Edinburgh University Press. He is the managing editor for the open-access journal Authorship. Octavia Cox recently completed her doctorate, on literature of the long eighteenth century, at the University of Oxford. She is currently writing her first book, entitled Alexander Pope in the Romantic Age, and teaches for the University of Oxford. JoEllen DeLucia is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of the Women and Gender Studies at Central Michigan University. She is the author of A Feminine Enlightenment: British Women Writers and the Philosophy of Progress, 1759–1820 (2015) and essays on women writers, gender, and moral philosophy. Jenny DiPlacidi is a lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Studies and Romanticism in the School of English at the University of Kent. Her research focuses on representations of gender, sexuality, violence, and transgression and their relationship to concerns central to eighteenth-century society, such as the legal position of women, kinship, and autonomy. She explores these topics in areas often neglected by scholarship: anonymous works, the Gothic, and periodical fiction. Her book Gothic Incest: Gender, Sexuality and Transgression (forthcoming, Manchester University Press) analyses the complexities of the incest thematic in Gothic novels, manuscripts, and plays. Her second book (in progress) examines the vast but largely neglected archive of eighteenth-century and

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 496

17/11/17 5:03 PM

notes on contributors

497

Romantic-era magazine fiction and its relationship with the period’s popular – and canonical – literature. This books draws on her research as a postdoctoral associate on the 2014–16 Leverhulme project ‘The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1818): Understanding the Emergence of a Genre’. Serena Dyer is Curator of the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, Middlesex University, and an Associate Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Warwick. She completed her PhD thesis, entitled ‘Trained to Consume: Dress and the Female Consumer in England, 1720–1820’, at the University of Warwick in 2016. She is currently researching the material literacy of the eighteenth-century consumer, and has previously published her work in History Compass and the Journal of Urban History. Laura Engel is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature and Drama at Duquesne University. Recent publications include: Austen, Actresses, and Accessories: Much Ado about Muffs (Palgrave Pivot Series, 2014); Fashioning Celebrity: EighteenthCentury Actresses and Strategies for Image Making (Ohio State University Press, 2011); and Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660–1830 (edited with Elaine McGirr) (Bucknell University Press, 2014). She is currently at work on a new book tentatively titled: The Archival Tourist: Women, Performance, and the Material of Memory, 1780–1915. Evan Hayles Gledhill is a PhD candidate at the University of Reading, working on a thesis exploring representations of anomalous embodiment and queerness in the Gothic. Their research interests include intertextual audience engagement and the history of fandom. Isobel Grundy, Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, Canada, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, was until 2003 Henry Marshall Tory Professor in the University of Alberta’s Department of English. She holds a DPhil from Oxford University (St Anne’s College) and taught at Queen Mary, University of London, 1971–90. She is author of Samuel Johnson and the Scale of Greatness (1986), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Comet of the Enlightenment (1999), and (with Virginia Blain and Patricia Clements) The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (1990). She has edited various texts by Montagu, and Secresy (1795) by Eliza Fenwick. She is a Patron of Chawton House Library, and co-editor (with Susan Brown and Patricia Clements) of Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, Cambridge University Press, . Hannah Doherty Hudson is Assistant Professor of English at Suffolk University. Her research explores the popular print culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She is currently writing a book about the novels of the Minerva Press, and is at work on a new project that traces the development of biography in eighteenthcentury British periodicals. Her essays have appeared in publications including The Eighteenth Century Novel and The European Romantic Review. Catherine Ingrassia is Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. She works primarily on women writers of the long eighteenth

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 497

17/11/17 5:03 PM

498

notes on contributors

century and her publications include Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 1998), ‘More Solid Learning’: New Perspectives on Pope’s Dunciad (co-edited with Claudia N. Thomas, Bucknell University Press, 2000), and Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel and Culture (co-edited with Paula R. Backscheider, Blackwell, 2005). In addition to publishing many essays on eighteenth-century literature and culture, she has also edited Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela (Broadview, 2004) and co-edited British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). Most recently she edited the Cambridge Companion to Women Writers, 1660–1789 (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Alessa Johns is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Bluestocking Feminism and British-German Cultural Transfer, 1750–1837 (University of Michigan Press, 2014) and Women’s Utopias of the Eighteenth Century (University of Illinois Press, 2003); she has published articles on Jane Austen, the translation of women writers, and feminist utopianism, and has edited the anthologies Dreadful Visitations and Reflections on Sentiment. Kathryn R. King is Professor Emerita of Literature at the University of Montevallo and former Director of Faculty Development. Her research focuses on women’s lives, writings, and professional careers in the long eighteenth century. Her books include A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood (Pickering & Chatto, 2012) and Jane Barker, Exile: A Literary Career 1675–1725 (Oxford University Press, 2000). She is co-editor (with Alexander Pettit) of Haywood’s Female Spectator (2001) and has published articles in RES, ELH, JEMCS, The Eighteenth-Century, Studies in the Novel, and many other journals. She has held ACLS, NEH, and other fellowships, is former editor of the eighteenth-century section of Literature Compass, and is currently working on concepts of old age, posterity, and legacy formation in the emerging culture of print. Rachael Scarborough King is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School at the University of Virginia as well as of short-term fellowships from the Huntington Library, the Bibliographical Society of America, and the Lewis Walpole Library. She is the author of articles on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century newspapers, newsletters, and periodicals, and her book Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press. Claire Knowles is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at La Trobe University, Melbourne. She has published numerous articles on eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury women writers, and her book, Sensibility and Female Poetic Tradition, 1780–1860: The Legacy of Charlotte Smith, was published by Ashgate in 2009. Her current project is a book on poetry and late eighteenth-century newspapers. Nicola Parsons is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on the early eighteenth-century novel, in particular novels by women. Her first book, Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth Century England, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010. She is currently completing a book manuscript, entitled Form

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 498

17/11/17 5:03 PM

notes on contributors

499

and Matter in the Early Eighteenth-Century Novel (funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (2011–14)), that focuses on transformations of romance by women novelists such as Eliza Haywood, Jane Barker, and Elizabeth Rowe, as well as a study of John Dunton’s periodical, the Athenian Mercury. Megan Peiser is Assistant Professor of Eighteenth-Century British Literature at Oakland University. She is the creator and project manager of the Novels Reviewed Database 1790–1820 (NRD). Her research areas include periodical culture, women writers, digital humanities, and book history. Her forthcoming monograph explores criticism of the British novel from 1790 to 1820, when women published more novels than men, to uncover the Reviews’ influence on novels, authors, and our modern literary canon. Pam Perkins teaches eighteenth-century and Romantic-era literature at the University of Manitoba. Her publications include a monograph on the literary careers of Anne Grant, Elizabeth Hamilton, and Christian Johnstone as well as editions of Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (for Broadview Press) and The Cottagers of Glenburnie (for the Association of Scottish Literary Studies). Most recently, she has co-edited Anne Grant’s Letters from the Mountains and Elizabeth Isabella Spence’s Letters from the North Highlands for the Chawton House Women’s Travel Writing series with Routledge. Manushag N. Powell is Associate Professor and University Faculty Scholar at Purdue University. She is the author of Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals (Bucknell University Press, 2012) and co-author with Fred Burwick of British Pirates in Print and Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); some of her essays on various matters periodical have appeared in SEL: Studies in English Literature, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Literature Compass, JEMCS, and Eighteenth-Century Studies. Slaney Chadwick Ross received her PhD from Purdue University. Her research engages with secret histories, spy narratives, and the culture of surveillance in the eighteenth century. Her work has been published in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and her additional research interests include early modern espionage, economics, Restoration drama, amatory fiction, and the domestic novel. She teaches at Fordham University. Anna K. Sagal earned her PhD at Tufts University and is currently at work on a book project entitled ‘Experimental Women: Reclaiming Women’s Scientific Work in the Long Eighteenth Century’. She has previously published on natural philosophy in women’s periodicals and disability theory in novels. Current research interests include eighteenth-century science studies, women and gender studies, disability studies, and eighteenth-century periodical culture. Chloe Wigston Smith teaches in the Department of English and Related Literature and the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York. She is the author of Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and has also published on costume, female servants, trade

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 499

17/11/17 5:03 PM

500

notes on contributors

cards, object narratives, and the marriage plot. Her current project examines gender and material culture in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world; a portion of it appeared in the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies in 2017. Dustin D. Stewart is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His recent work appears in the collection Milton in the Long Restoration (2016). James Robert Wood is Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Drama, and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He has published articles on eighteenthcentury literature and intellectual history in Eighteenth-Century Life, EighteenthCentury Fiction, and Eighteenth-Century Ireland and has recently completed a book entitled Anecdotes of Enlightenment.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 500

17/11/17 5:03 PM

Index

Note: ‘n’ indicates chapter notes; italics indicate images. Aberdeen Magazine; Or, Universal Repository, The (1796–8), 145n16 Abington, Mrs (actress), 286–7 abolitionism, 476 Ackermann, Rudolph, 477–86 activism, 357–73 actresses, 281–2, 286–7, 394, 397, 431–4, 438n18 portraits, 117, 458–63, 464, 468, 469 Adburgham, Alison, 296–7, 442, 446, 447 Addison, Joseph, 1, 7, 54, 134, 153, 160, 166–9, 175–6, 327, 344; see also The Spectator advertising, 14–15, 118, 121, 127n13, 361, 411–23, 412–18, 417, 418–22 furniture, 482, Plate 5 medical, 412–23, 417 see also fashion; puffs advice columns, 69, 328–32, 334–5, 440–1 agony aunts, 299, 302, 386–7 see also question-and-answer content Aikin, Anna Letitia see Barbauld, Anna Letitia Aikin, Arthur, 241 Aikin, John, 231, 241 Alexander, William, The History of Women, 231 allegories, 47, 214, 483–4 Allen, Charles, The Polite Lady: Or, A Course of Female Education, 231 American magazines, 265 American Revolution (1765–83), 70–1 Amhurst, Nicholas, 344, 348 Amphlett, James, Ned Bentley, 244–5 Analytical Review, The (1788–99), 193, 241, 252, 259 Anderson, Benedict, 51n2 Anderson, Patricia, 441 Andrew, Donna, 71 anecdotes, 29, 33, 37, 75, 159, 400 Anglo-Indian novels, 258–9 Anne, Queen of Great Britain, 155, 157, 158 annotations, 345–60, 347, 350, 429 Annual Register, The (1758–), 193–4 Annual Review, The (1804–9), 241, 255–7 anonymity and activism, 358, 361, 372–3 fiction writers, 243–6, 248n12, 261n1, 267, 273, 275, 297, 298–9, 306 poetry, 109–11, 131–2 reader-contributors, 315, 321, 333–5, 361 reviewers, 193, 219, 236, 243–6, 247n2, 248n12, 252, 254, 261n1 anthologies, 116, 121–6, 132 Anti-Jacobin Review, The (1798–1821), 200, 254, 256–7 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 36, 214 artists, women, 114, 116, 125–6

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 501

Astell, Mary, Letters Concerning the Love of God, 43, 87–8, 90–3, 95, 97–8, 99n7 astronomy, 30, 34 Athenaeum; a Magazine of Literary and Miscellaneous Information, The (1807–9), 241 Athenian Mercury, The (1690–7), 2, 28, 37, 45, 87–97, 99, 99n1, 223 relationship with the Ladies Mercury, 2, 313, 315–20, 323, 324n7, 333–4, 339n1, 339n4 Austen, Jane, 1, 133, 169, 228, 251, 378, 459 Emma, 267 Mansfield Park, 190, 207 Northanger Abbey, 1–2, 221–3, 226, 230, 302 Pride and Prejudice, 8 Sense and Sensibility, 267, 268, 270–3 authorship, 171, 197–9, 251, 294, 316, 351–3, 361; see also anonymity; pseudonymity Backscheider, Paula R., 85, 116, 121, 124, 125, 127n5, 374n14, 437n11 Baillie, Joanna, Metical Legends, 252 Baldwin, Abigail, 7 Ballaster, Ros, 57, 464, 470 Bannet, Eve Tavor, 7, 29, 40–50, 179, 299, 333, 358, 382 Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 137, 192, 219, 237–47, 247n2, 283 British Novelists series, 241, 247n5, 247n8 Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, 251, 257 Barber, John, 156 Barber, Mary, 346 Baretti, Giuseppe, 375n21 Barker, Anthony, 101 Barry, Spranger, 429–30 Bartolomeo, Joseph, 224, 241 Bartolozzi, Francesco, 462 Basker, James, 436n8 Batchelor, Jennie, 36, 70, 215n2, 237, 265, 267, 273, 296, 298, 314, 377–91, 440–2, 469 Bateman, Robert, 413–14 Batt, Jennifer, 101–11 Battle of Dettingen, 180, 182–3 Beach, Thomas (‘Fido’), 105–7 beauty, 106–7, 142, 420–2 Bee: Or Literary Weekly Intelligencer, The (1790–4), 41, 228 Beetham, Margaret, 296 behaviour, 182, 188, 329, 332, 336 Behn, Aphra, 123 Behrendt, Stephen, 465 Bell, John, 113–18, 124, 126n3, 127n11, 393, 395, 404–5 The British Album, 124 see also La Belle Assemblée; The Oracle, or Bell’s New World

17/11/17 5:03 PM

502

index

Belle Assemblée, La (1806–32), 14, 207, 279, 380, 391n1, 441, 448–50, 458, 469 Beloe, William, Rev., 434 Benedict, Barbara M., 121, 122, 123, 125, 126n4, 127n13, 127n16, 381, 409, 411–23 Berington, Thomas, News from the Dead, 99n3 Berland, K. J. H., 355n18, 429, 437n16 Bermingham, Ann, 450 Bernard, John, 397 Berry, Helen, 316, 317, 333, 475, 479 Bertelsen, Lance, 346 Berwick Museum, or, Monthly Literary Intelligencer, The (1785–7), 226 binding, 390, 442, 444 Binhammer, Katherine, 228 Biographical Magazine, The (1794), 278 biography, 278–91, 291n3, 291n4, 385 Blakemore, Steven, 79 Blouch, Chrstine, 179 Bluestocking Circle, 13, 232, 233n3, 386 Bocage, Anne-Marie (‘Madame du Bocage’), 281–2 bodies, women’s, 95, 331–2, 390, 411–12, 418 Bohls, Elizabeth, 207 Boileau, Daniel, 475 Bolton, Betsy, 401, 402, 403 Bond, Donald F., 31–2 Bonds, Leigh, 397, 405n4 Bonnell, Thomas, 138 Bowers, Toni, 6 Boyd, Elizabeth, 183 Brandtzæg, Siv Gøril, 239, 242 Brereton, Jane (‘Melissa’), 105–6 British Critic, The (1793–9), 198, 254–6, 259 British Empire, 42, 44, 122, 206, 208–10, 254 British identity see national identity British Magazine, The (1747–51), 101, 103, 107 British Magazine and Review, The (1782–3), 129, 132, 136, 143 British manufacturing, 481, 482–5, Plate 7 British Museum, 357 Broad, Jacqueline, 99n2 Brontë, Charlotte, 378, 380 Brooke, Frances, 313, 342–54, 354n10, 358, 383, 426–36 The Excursion, 428, 438n22 Rosina, 426, 432–3, 438n19 Virginia, 351, 427, 430, 436n6, 436n8 see also The Old Maid (1755–6) Broome, Ralph, 399 Brown, Hilary, 198 Brown, Laura, 209 Brunton, Miss (actress), 282 Buck, Anne, 443, 452 Burke, Edmund, 68, 71, 77, 78, 254 Burney, Frances, 142, 228, 251, 272, 435, 438n26 Evelina, 230, 443 Busy-Body, The (1759), 346 Butler, Marilyn, 268 Caldwell, Tanya M., 113–26 Campbell, D. P., 273 Campbell, Timothy, 451 canon, women’s literary, 221, 227–33, 233n5, 253, 299 Carey, Matthew, 74 caricatures, 463, 464, Plate 1; see also satire Carlile, Susan, 314, 357–73, 380 Carlyle, Thomas, 196

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 502

Carnell, Rachel, 151, 153–63 Caroline of Brunswick, Queen of the United Kingdom, 463 Carter, Elizabeth, 7, 32, 56, 106–7, 232, 386 Carter, Sally, ‘Hymn to Prosperity’, 140 Cave, Edward, 13, 101, 105, 266, 380 celebrity, 117, 173, 202, 281–2, 291n6, 434–5 portraits, 458, 461–2, 465 see also gossip censorship, 69 Chapelain, Jean, La Pucelle, où la France délivrée, 58 Chapone, Hester, 7, 386 Charles, Katherine, 438n22 Charlotte, Queen of England patriotic consumption of, 476 portraits of, 458, 460, 462–3, 467, 468–9 reading of, 137 Charlotte Augusta of Wales, Princess, 458, 460, 465–6, 466 childbirth, 422 children, women’s education of, 35–6, 44–6, 139, 213 Chrisman-Campbell, Kimberly, 451 Christian Observer, The (1802–74), 200–1 Christian’s Gazette: or, News Chiefly Respecting the Invisible World, The (1709), 96, 98 Chudleigh, Lady Mary, 43, 95 Cibber, Susannah, 286–7 circulating libraries, 295–7 circulation, 13, 265, 276 Clabon, Elizabeth see Yeames, Elizabeth Claes, Koenraad, 67–80 Claeys, Gregory, 67 Clarke, John, 42 class, 41–2, 165, 229, 297, 302, 386–7 classical learning, 41, 54, 56, 58, 60, 156, 371–2 classicism, 32, 118, 120–1, 260 Clery, E. J., 209, 229, 316 Clive, Kitty, 432 clubs, 46, 156–7, 345, 393 Cockburn, Catherine, 108–9 coffee houses, 162, 163, 295, 339n4 Cohen, Michèle, 390 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 79 collaboration, 313–14, 339n5, 342, 348, 351–2 Collyer, Mary, 192 Colman, George, 17, 132–3 Poems by Eminent Ladies anthology, 132–4 Common Sense; or the Englishman’s Journal, The (1737–44), 346 Comnena, Anna, 55 Connoisseur, The (1755–7), 17, 346, 347–8, 354n14, 428–9 conservatism, 72–3 consumerism, 209, 409, 411–12, 446–51, 476–83, 478 female consumers, 296, 418–22, 474–6 patriotic, 475–6, 479–80, 483–5, Plate 7 productive, 475–6 see also fashion content, 220, 315, 343–4 contributors see reader-contributors; writers Cook, James, Captain, 205–6 Coote, John, 382, 391n2 Copeland, Edward, 264–5, 267, 276, 446 Copley, Stephen, 41 copyright, 6, 129 cosmetics advertising, 420–2 Costa, Shelley, 30

17/11/17 5:03 PM

index Country Magazine: or, Gentleman’s and Lady’s Pocket Companion (1736–7), 15 Court Miscellany: or Gentleman’s and Lady’s New Magazine, The (1765–71), 15, 193 Cowley, Abraham, 93–5 Cowley, Hannah (‘Anna Matilda’), 113–26, 127n8, 285–6, 402, 404–5 The Runaway, 122, 124–5, 127n8 The Town Before You, 122 Cowper, Judith see Madan, Judith Cox, Octavia, 129–43 Crabbe, George, 378 crafts, 441–2, 450, 452 Craftsman, The (1726–52), 344, 348 ‘Caleb D’Anvers’ eidolon, 345, 348 Creech, William, British Poets, 130 Critical Review (1756–1817), 198–9, 223–8, 230, 239–40, 259 Cruikshank, Isaac, 463 Curll, Edmund, 97 Curran, Stuart, 252 Dacier, Anne, 56 Daily Advertiser, The (1730/1–96), 411, 421 Dale, Amelia, 253 de Heusde, Sarah Cornelius, 414–15 de Pizan, Christine, 55–6 Defoe, Benjamin Norton, 344 Defoe, Daniel, 2, 18n2 Della Cruscan poetry, 113–26, 127n11, 127n14, 394, 398–9, 402–5 DeLucia, JoEllen, 152, 205–15 d’Éon, Chevalier, 286, 292n15 Derrida, Jacques, The Politics of Friendship, 153, 156 Dessert to the True American (1798–9), 265 Devonshire, Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of, 284, 286 DiCenzo, Maria, 10 didacticism, 49–50 DiPlacidi, Jenny, 263–76, 295 dissent, 70–5 distinguished women, 43, 51n5 distribution, 339n4 Dodsley, Robert, Collection of Poems, 131 domestic femininity, 386 domesticity, 5, 32, 35, 182, 378, 442 Donkin, Ellen, 437n16, 438n17 Donoghue, Frank, 224, 251 Dorn, Judith, 56, 59 Drake, Judith, 43, 44, 57 Dryden, John, 114–16, 119–20, 125–6 du Châtelet, Émilie, 56 Dublin University Magazine, The (1833–82), 199 Duncombe, John, ‘Feminead; Or, Female Genius’, 138 Dunton, John, 2–3, 315–16, 327–38, 334–6, 339n3, 339n5, 340n6 The Art of Living Incognito, 96 The Athenian Spy, 87–8, 90, 92, 95–6, 98 ‘Courtship’, 92–4 ‘Essay upon His Own Funeral’, 96 ‘Humane Love: By a Country Gentleman’, 94 ‘Since Love Hath Kindled’, 90–1 ‘The Double Courtship’, 92, 95–6, 98 see also The Athenian Mercury Dyer, George, 79 Dyer, Serena, 409–10, 454, 474–86 Easley, Alexis, 252 East India Company, 254

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 503

503

Eckroth, Stephanie, 261n1 Eclectic Review, The (1805–68), 199, 256, 258 Edgeworth, Maria, 228, 252 Belinda, 207, 230 Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany, The (1785–1803), 252 Edinburgh Review, The (1802–1929), 196, 200, 252, 260 editorial practices, 304–6, 343–5, 348 editors, 2, 7, 132, 151, 176n1, 205, 313, 317–20, 342–54, 431–2 education, women’s, 41–4, 46, 48, 56–7, 73, 102, 137, 231, 302, 333, 381, 382–91; see also children, women’s education of; learning, women’s eidolons, 23, 31–4, 40, 43–5, 49, 51n7, 120, 153–4, 157–63, 171–2, 327, 339n5, 345, 348, 359–73, 379 ‘elegance’, 393, 444 Elphinston, James, Collection of Poems, From the Best Authors, 130 embroidery see patterns employment, women’s, 7, 339n4, 344 Enfield, William, 258–9 Engel, Laura, 281, 410, 458–71 enigmas, 29–30 Enlightenment, 206, 211–12 Epistles for the Ladies (1748–50), 343, 352–3 equality, 143, 246, 269 Escott, Angela, 114, 126 essays, 34, 42–7, 54, 58–9, 171–5, 269, 361–4 Este, Charles, Rev., 404 Etheldreda (historical figure), 28–9 European Magazine and London Review, The (1782–1826), 258, 274, 278–9, 283–90, 458, 461, 471, Plates 3–4 European print culture, 151–2 Examiner, The (1710–14), 3, 151, 153–63 ‘The Examiner’ eidolon, 158, 160, 163 excerpts see reprintings; serialisation Ezell, Margaret, 46, 135, 236, 238, 244, 325n14 fabric patterns, 483–5, Plates 6–7 fandom, 295, 297–9, 461 Farren, Miss (actress), 282 fashion, 36–7, 70, 205, 209, 440–56, 445, 483–5 ‘fast fashion’, 441, 451, 460 plates, 380, 446–51, 449, 454, 455, 477, 484, Plate 2, Plate 6, Plate 8 trends, 451–6, 453, 455 Faulconstein Forest (Anon.), 246 Favret, Mary, 178 Fay, Elizabeth, 458–9, 471 Female Mentor; or, Select Conversations, The (1793–6), 40, 43–6 Female Spectator, The (1744–6), 9, 13–14, 34–5, 46, 54, 173–4, 178–88, 269, 344, 352–3, 358 ‘Female Spectator’ eidolon, 8, 9, 34, 178–182, 184, 188, 345, 352, 379 Female Tatler, The (1709–10), 7, 31–4, 168, 173–4, 176n1, 176n5, 429 eidolons, 31–3 reader-contributors, 33, 384 ‘feminine’ learning, 378, 386 ‘feminine’ writing, 250, 253–61, 295–7, 300, 303, 306–7 femininity, 50, 53, 64, 123, 137, 139–42 ‘feminisation’, 209, 214, 401–3

17/11/17 5:03 PM

504

index

feminism, 1, 43, 53, 57, 102, 171–4, 377–8 anti-feminism, 26, 174, 220, 300 see also equality Fénelon, François, ‘De l’Education des Filles’ (‘Of the Education of Daughters’), 35, 44, 383 Fergus, Jan, 14, 56, 70, 296 Ferris, Ina, 207 Fetterley, Judith, 299 fiction, 220, 254, 258–60, 295–8, 303–7, 338; see also canon, women’s literary; fandom; Gothic fiction; novels; romantic fiction Fielding, Henry, 227–9 Fielding, Sarah, 165–6, 232 finances, 14, 129–30, 344–5, 354n7 financial advice, 214 financial journalism, 171–2 Finch, Anne, 130 Fireside Magazine and Monthly Epitome, The (1819), 297–8 Firkin, Martha, 386–7 Fitzherbert, Mrs (mistress to Prince of Wales), 283–4, 286 Flying-Post; or, The Postmaster, The (1695–1731), 165, 169 Fordyce, James, Sermons to Young Women, 133, 141 Forster, Antonia, 238 fortune-telling, 420–1 Free Thinker, The (1718–23), 40, 42–4, 46–9, 51n5, 67 freedom of speech, 174–5 freedom of the press, 6, 172–5 French culture, 44 French fashion, 483, 485 French periodicals, 151–2 French Revolution see Revolution Controversy (1789–95) friendship, 115–16, 125, 140, 153, 163, 434 political ‘Friends’, 154–60 frontispieces, 4, 9, 283–4, 339n5, 389 Fyvie, John, 395, 396 Gainsborough, Thomas, 461, 463, 471 Gallery of Fashion, The (1794–1803), 14, 441, 446–8, 449, 452–4, 453, Plate 2 Gamer, Michael, 126n3, 266 Garrick, David, 427–34, 436n4, 436n6, 437n14, 437n16, 438n20, 438n21 Garside, Peter, 233n4, 243–4, 247n1 gender, 5, 28, 37, 40, 43, 49–50, 68, 70–5, 136–43, 152, 162–3, 179, 214, 229, 245–6, 314, 316, 384–5 ‘fair-sexing’ term, 2, 5–8, 68 and genre fiction, 295–8, 306–7 and German literature, 192, 197–9, 202 gendered advertising, 412–18, 417 gendered attribution, 131–2, 144n6 gendered consumerism, 418–22, 474, 482 gendered reviews, 253–4 gendered surveillance, 327–8 General Evening Post (newspaper), 119 General Magazine (1787–92), 278, 287–90 genius, 192, 193–6, 256, 278–9, 282–3 genre fiction, 295–8, 306–7; see also romantic fiction Gentleman’s Journal, or the Monthly Miscellany, The (1692–4), 46, 90–1, 94, 98, 320, 325n14 Gentleman’s Magazine, The (1731–1922), 13–14, 68, 75, 90, 104–9, 175, 183, 193–4, 221, 241, 266 poet-contributors, 101, 103–7, 109, 111

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 504

geography, 359, 388 German literature, 190–2 women’s writing, 192–203 German medical practitioners, 416–18 German periodicals, 152 Gessner, Salomon, The Death of Abel, 191–2 Gibbes, Phebe, 258–9, 261 Gifford, Richard, 342, 350–1 Gifford, William, 117, 126, 127n17 The Baviad and Mæviad, 402–3 Gildon, Charles, 339n5 Gillray, James, ‘Hyde Park, Sunday’ (caricature), 401–2, Plate 1 Girten, Kristen M., 34 Gisborne, Thomas, Enquiries into the Duties of the Female Sex, 225 Gledhill, Evan Hayles, 294–307 globalism, 178, 205–6, 208–9, 214 Glorious Revolution, 71 Glover, Richard (‘Leonidas’), 352–3 Godwin, William, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 69 Goede, C. A. G., The Stranger in England, 191 Goldsmith, Oliver, 16, 306–7, 346, 382 Poems for Young Ladies anthology, 133–4 Goodwill, Jasper, 14, 54, 130, 382 gossip, 28, 31, 32, 44, 114, 151, 154, 156, 162, 166, 396; see also celebrity Gothic fiction, 60, 78, 191, 221, 243, 263–6, 273–4, 295–6, 300–7 Gothic style, 482–3 Grace, James, 419 Graham, Walter, 2 Grant, Anne, 219, 250, 252–7, 260–1 The Highlanders, 254–5, 257 Poems on Various Subjects, 254–5, 257 Granville, George, 161 Gray, Thomas, 122–3, 125–6, 127n15 ‘Great Forgetting’ of female literature, 219, 252, 351 Grenby, Matthew, 254, 256 Greville, Frances, ‘Prayer for Indifference’, 141–3 Grey, Martha, 386–7 Grey, Sophia, 386–7 Griffiths, Isabella, 247n2, 247n7 Griffiths, Ralph, 227, 239–41, 257n2 Grogan, Claire, 254 Grub Street writers, 339n5 Grundy, Isobel, 151, 165–76, 273 Guest, Harriet, 5, 386 Guillory, John, 205, 222, 233 Habermas, Jürgen, 3, 151, 153, 156, 393, 405n1 Halsband, Robert, 170 Hamilton, Elizabeth, 250, 252–4, 257–61 The Disinterested Nabob, 258 Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, 254, 260 Memoirs of the Life of Agrippina, Wife of Germanicus, 260 Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, 252, 254, 258–9 Handel, George Frideric, 183 Hansen, Mascha, 137 Hardy, Thomas (activist), 76 Harley, Robert, 153–6, 160 ‘Harriet Vernon; or, Characters from Real Life’ (Anon.), 269–73 Harrison, James, 129–43 ‘Albina and Lothario’, 138–9 ‘Conjugal Felicity’, 139

17/11/17 5:03 PM

index Harrison’s British Classicks (1785–7), 129 Hartley, David, 419 Harwood, Edward, 197–8 Hastings, Warren, 254, 396, 405n3 Hawkins, Ann R., 251, 253 Hawkins, Laetitia Mathilda, Letters on the Female Mind, 69 Hayden, John O., 252, 256 Hayman, Francis, ‘The Author and his Reader’, 4 Haynes, Catharine Day, 274, 378 ‘The Castle of Le Blanc’, 274–5 Hays, Mary, 71, 131, 135, 143, 219, 252, 254, 260 Haywood, Eliza, 151–2, 178–88, 313, 338, 352–4, 383 Anti-Pamela, 182 The City Jilt, 338 The Mercenary Lover, 338 The Young Lady, 151–2 see also The Female Spectator; The Parrot Hazlitt, William, 306 Heideloff, Niklaus Wilhelm von, 446–8, 452; see also The Gallery of Fashion Henderson, Desirée, 12 Herman, Ruth, 157, 159–60 Hershel, Caroline, 34 Hertford, Frances Thynne, Countess, 98 Hewet, Frances, 166 Hibernian Magazine (1771–1811), 3, 17, 197, 281–2; see also Walker’s Hibernian Magazine hierarchies, 114–15, 126, 220, 230, 232, 301 Highfill, Philip H., 401 Highmore, Joseph, ‘Susanna Highmore’ portrait, 470, 471 historians, 55–6 historical fiction, 303–4 history genre, 28–9, 35–6, 53–4, 57–9, 63–4 ‘History of an Humble Friend, The’ (Anon.), 263–4 ‘History of Lady Bradley, The’ (Anon.), 268–9 ‘History of Miss Butler, The’ (Anon.), 267 History of the Works of the Learned (1680–1740), 221 Hodder, Ian, 456 Hodson, J., 413 Hohlfeld, A. R., 192, 195–6 Holcroft, Thomas, 69, 79 Horne Tooke, John, 76–7 Howard, Isabella, ‘Fairy’s Answer to Mrs Greville’, 142–3 Hudson, Hannah Doherty, 278–91 Hughes, Gillian, 207, 265 Hughes, Miss (actress), 282 humanism, 153 humour, 361–2 Hunter, John Paul, 335, 339n3, 339n5 Hutton, Catherine, 207 identity, 120, 131–2, 197–9; see also national identity Idler, The (1758–60), 1, 207, 231, 360, 374n12 illustration, 46, 117, 281, 440; see also portraits Imhoff, Amalie von, The Ghosts of the Lake, 196, 202 imperialism, 118, 122, 212–14, 258; see also British Empire Inchbald, Elizabeth, 247n7, 278–9, 284, 287–90, 458, 461, 471, Plates 3–4 A Simple Story, 240–1 Ingram, Anne, Viscountess Irwin, 102–5, 111 ‘An Epistle to Mr. Pope. By a Lady. Occasioned by his Characters of Women’, 102–5 Ingrassia, Catherine, 152, 178–88 international culture, 151–2, 190, 193, 196, 211 Ireland, 3, 476

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 505

505

Ireland, Samuel William, Rimualdo, 244 Irwin, Elenir, ‘Defence of Women’, 385, 391n3 Italia, Iona, 35, 176n7, 379, 390, 428 Jacobinism, 77, 79 Jacobite Rebellion (1745–6), 180, 185–6 Jacobs, Edward, 297 James, Elinor, 165 Jameson, Anna, 200 Jeffrey, Francis, 252 Jenkins, Henry, 307n3 Joan of Arc, 61–2 Johns, Alessa, 152, 190–203 Johnson, Joseph, 193 Johnson, Samuel, 7, 32, 45, 59, 72, 285, 380, 386, 434 Lives of the Poets, 130–1 see also The Idler; The Rambler Johns-Putra, Adeline, 240 Johnstone, Christian, 254 jokes, 174 Jones, Mary, 106–7, 110 Jones, Vivien, 138 Jost, Jacob Sider, 101 Joule, Victoria, 163 journalism, 8, 165–76; see also news Jouslin, Claire Boulard, 56 Karsch, Anna Luisa, 192, 193–6, 202 Kelly, Hugh, 15, 374n15 Kelly, Isabella, Joscelina, 247n9 Kelly, John, 354n7 Kendall, A., The Castle on the Rock, 274, 276n3 King, Kathryn R., 91, 92, 179, 181, 313, 342–54, 427, 429 King, Rachael Scarborough, 221–33 Kit-Cat Club, 156 Kitson, Peter, 208 Klopstock, Friedrich and Margarete, 200–1 Knights, L. C., ‘How many Children had Lady Macbeth?’, 36 knowledge acquisition, 41, 43–5, 48, 56, 333, 387–8 knowledge creation, 35 Knowles, Claire, 114, 118, 127n14, 314, 393–405 Knox, Vicesimus, 42 Kord, Susanne, 196 Kotzebue, August von, Lovers’ Vows, 190 La Bruyère, Jean de, Les Charactères, 33 Labbe, Jacqueline, 399 Lacedemonian Mercury, The (1692), 316, 324n3 Ladies’ Diary: or, the Women’s Almanack (1704–1841), 29–31 Ladies Dictionary, The (1694), 317–20 Ladies Journal, The (1727), 40, 43, 44, 46–8, 51n5 Ladies Magazine: or, the Universal Entertainer, The (1749–53), 14, 54, 130, 382 Ladies Mercury, The (1693), 2, 16, 28–9, 313, 315–24, 325n11, 327–38, 377 Ladies’ Pocket Magazine; or, Elegant and Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, The (1794–5), 202 Ladies Society, 315–16, 318–23 Lady, The (1885–), 15 Lady’s Curiosity, or Weekly Apollo, The (1752), 54 Lady’s Magazine; and Repository of Entertaining Knowledge, The (1792–3) (America), 294, 296

17/11/17 5:03 PM

506

index

Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, The (1770–1832), 1, 5, 377–8, 391n1 biography in, 278, 291n4 fashion coverage, 440–56, 455, 477 fiction in, 263–76, 276n1 frontispiece, 389 ‘The Matron’ agony aunt, 386–7 portraits in, 458–60, 464–9, 466, 467, 468 reader-contributors, 71–4, 253–4, 265, 273, 275, 385, 388 readership, 13–15, 130–1, 314 reviews on women’s writing, 253–4 serialisation, 8, 36, 378, 383, 385, 388 sewing patterns in, 14, 440–5, 445, 450–2, 454, 469 travel writing in, 205–15 on women’s education, 36–7, 314, 358–9, 383–91 Lady’s Magazine; or Polite Companion for the Fair Sex, The (1759–63), 5, 16, 35, 67–80, 80n1, 134, 382 ‘Hon. Mrs Caroline A. Stanhope’ eidolon, 358, 382, 391 Lady’s Magazine; or Universal Repository, The (1733), 382 Lady’s Monthly Museum, The (1798–1828), 15, 266, 273, 279, 281, 290–1, 294–307, 380, 383, 468 ‘Busy Body’ column, 299, 302 reader-contributors, 303, 305–6 Lady’s Museum, The (1760–1), 13–14, 35–6, 53–65, 314, 354n4, 357–73 articles, 35, 54, 58–64, 65n8, 370 influence of, 380, 382–3, 388, 390, 391n2 reader-contributors, 36, 361–3, 365–9, 403 ‘The Trifler’ eidolon, 35, 53, 300, 306, 314, 358, 360–8, 383 Lady’s Pocket Magazine; or, Elegant and Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, The (1795–6?), 129, 463 Lady’s Poetical Magazine; or, Beauties of British Poetry, The (1781–2), 129–43 Lady’s Weekly Magazine, The (1747), 40, 43, 45, 47–8, 382 Lane, William, Polite Repository, 228 Lanser, Susan, 214–15 Laverenst, Anne, 416–18, 417 Lavoie, Chantel, 132–3, 144n9 Lawrence, Thomas, 468–9 Leapor, Mary, 110, 116 learning, women’s, 25–37, 43–4, 53, 55, 172, 229, 335, 358–73, 378 ‘improving’ literature, 45, 47, 207, 226, 231, 364, 388 instruction, 41–2, 45–8, 378, 441–2 see also education, women’s; reading, women’s Leask, Nigel, 207 legal fiction, 338 legal status, women’s, 332–4, 336, 338 Lehmann, Gilly, 32 Lennox, Charlotte, 107, 313–14, 346, 357–73, 427–8, 434–6 Euphemia, 228, 435 The Female Quixote, 57–8, 359, 364 Old City Manners, 426, 436n3 Shakespear Illustrated, 71–2, 427, 431, 435 Sophia, 35, 53, 354n2, 357 see also The Lady’s Museum Lessons in Reading (1780), 139, 145n16 letters, readers’, 42, 45–6, 49–50, 87–93, 95–9, 157–8, 188, 253–4, 300–3, 306, 339n4, 360–71

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 506

annotations, 345–60, 347, 350, 429 exchanges, 104–6, 109, 120, 126 see also question-and-answer format; readercontributions Lewes, Lee, 121 Lewis, Alethea, Vicissitudes in Genteel Life, 253–4 Leybourn, Thomas, 31 libel, 6, 69, 154, 161, 167 liberalism, 46 liberty, 174 Linwood, Mary, 461, 471, Plates 3–4 listing (device), 221–3, 227–30, 233 literacy, 12, 390 literary criticism, 35–6, 46 literary magazines, 378–9 literary periodicals, 221, 227–8 Lloyd, Robert, 15 Locke, John, ‘Of the Conduct of the Understanding’, 42 London Advertiser and Literary Gazette, The, 419 London Chronicle, The (1757–1800), 117, 130, 134 London Evening Post, The (1727–97), 185, 435 London Gazette, The (1665–), 159 London Magazine, or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer, The (1732–82), 101–2, 108, 110–11, 175 London Magazine, The (1820–9), 191 Lonsdale, Roger, 141, 142–3 Looser, Devoney, 57 Louis XVI of France, 76, 77 Lounger, The (1785–7), 381 love, 317, 322–3, 365–6 heterosexual, 401–4 platonic, 87–99 luxury goods, 420, 475 Lynch, Deidre, 295 Macaulay, Catharine, Letters on Female Education, 71, 73, 80n4 McBain, Jean, 158 McCreery, Cindy, 461–2 MacDonagh, Oliver, 271 McDowell, Paula, 7, 56 McKendrick, Neil, 409 Mackenzie, Henry, 230, 381 McKeon, Michael, The Secret History of Domesticity, 28 Mackie, Charles, 145n16 McMullen, Lorraine, 343 Madan, Judith, 130, 138 ‘Progress of Poetry’, 138 Magasin des Modes (1786–9), 446 magazines, 5, 10, 15, 45, 101, 377–91, 379–80, 382–3 difference to periodicals, 379–81 poetry in, 101–11 Makin, Bathsua, 43 Mandeville, Bernard, 33 Manley, Delarivier, 151, 153–63, 166, 338 Letters Writen by Mrs. Manley, 154, 160–2 Memoirs and Manners . . . from the New Atalantis, 154, 158–9, 162, 166, 338 manners, 328–9 maps, 388 Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, 77, 78 Maris, Elizabeth, 418 marketing, 42–3 marriage, 120, 167–9, 200–2, 302, 317, 318, 320–3, 422; see also love masculinity, 53, 181–2, 187

17/11/17 5:03 PM

index mass culture, 114, 120, 123, 126 Masters, Mary, 360, 374n13 mathematical puzzles, 29–31 Mathews, Thomas, Admiral, 188n4 Maurer, Shawn Lisa, 15, 17, 32, 170, 321, 381 Maynwaring, Arthur, 151, 154, 155–6, 160 Mayo, Robert, 264, 267, 268, 269, 273, 276n2 mediation, 205–6 medical advertisements, 411–23, 417 Medley, The (1710–2), 151, 154, 156, 158–9 melancholy, 140 ‘Memoirs of a Young Lady’ (Anon.), 267–8 men see writing, male Mercurian Society, 328–9 Merry, Robert (Della Crusca), 113–22, 398–9, 404 Microcosm of London series (1808–10), 477–9 Millar, Andrew, 342–4, 351 Miller, Peter John, 450–1 Milton, John, 134 Minifie, Margaret, The Count de Poland, 226 miscellanies, 114, 117, 120, 129–31, 143, 388–90 misogyny, 102–6, 133, 173, 227, 388 Mitford, Mary Russell, 378 Montagu, Elizabeth, 232 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 7, 151, 165–76 ‘Ballad, to the Irish Howl’, 108 ‘Town Eclogues’, 140–1, 144n12 ‘Verses on Self-Murder’, 108 see also The Nonsense of Common-Sense (1737–8) Monthly Magazine, The (1796–1825), 196, 241, 290 Monthly Mirror, The (1795–1811), 255, 274, 276n3, 287, 290 Monthly Register, The (1802–3), 190 Monthly Review, The (1749–1844), 132–3, 138, 192, 197–9, 201, 219, 223–30, 239–41, 248n11, 261n1 reviews in, 236–9, 241–7, 248n9, 255–6, 258–60, 263 Monthly Visitor, The (1797–1800), 225, 229 Moody, Christopher, 240–1, 247n7 Moody, Elizabeth, 219, 236–47, 247n2 Moore, Edward (‘Adam Fitz-Adam’), 344, 351 Moore, George, ‘Grasville Abbey’, 273 Moore, John, 78 morality, 108, 138–9, 173–5, 254, 294–5, 300–6, 328–9 More, Hannah, 300, 426–7 The Inflexible Captive, 426 Percy, 426 ‘A Rural Enlightenment’, 300 Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, 42 Morgan, Bayard Quincy, 192, 195–6 Morison, Stanley, 121, 126n2, 127n10 Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, The (1769–1862), 222 Morning Herald, The (newspaper), 118 Morning Post, or Cheap Daily Advertiser, The (1772–1937), 127n8, 403 Morning Star, The (newspaper), 114, 117–18, 400 mother-characters, 43–5 Motteau, Pierre, 320 mottos, 32 Murphy, Arthur, 342, 344 muses, 426 Nagerel, John, 61 Nangle, Benjamin Christie, 238, 247n2

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 507

507

Napoleonic Wars, 450–1 national culture, 151–2, 179–81, 184, 200–2 national identity, 178–9, 198, 211, 215, 257, 461, 484 natural vice vs. virtue debate, 71–4 Naubert, Benedikte, 197–9 Needham, Gwendoyln, 430 Nelson, James, Essay on the Government of Children, 387 neoclassicism, 118, 120–3, 125, 451, 482 New Annual Register, The (1781–1826), 229 New British Lady’s Magazine, The (1819), 279 New Lady’s Magazine; or, Polite and Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, The (1786–95), 15, 16, 291n4, 442, 469 New London Magazine, The (1785–93), 278–9, 287, 290, 292n12 Newcastle General Magazine, The (1747–60), 101–2 Newman, A. K., 273–5 news, 8, 178–9, 185, 188, 195; see also journalism Newton, Isaac, 34–5 Nichols, John, 18n7 Noble, Francis, 296 Nonsense of Common-Sense, The (1737–8), 7, 151, 165, 170–6 Norris, John, 87–8, 90–8 Collection of Miscellanies, 93 ‘Damon and Pythias’, 93, 98 ‘The Invitation’, 97 ‘Seraphic Love’, 96, 97 Norton, Mary Beth, 334 Novelist’s Magazine, The (1780–8), 129, 135 novels, 1, 56–7, 220, 221–33, 233n4, 242, 247n1, 248n11, 270–1, 307 object poetry, 125, 127n16 Old Maid, The (1755–6), 46, 313, 342–54, 347, 350, 358, 426–36, 438n27 ‘Mary Singleton’ eidolon, 342, 345–8, 351, 428–32, 436, 437n13 Old Whig, or Consistent Protestant, The (newspaper), 102 opera, 172, 427, 432–3 Oracle, or Bell’s New World, The (1789–94), 404–5 orientalism, 36–7, 58, 63–4, 210–11, 214, 305 Orr, Clarissa, 461, 465 Orrery, John Boyle, 5th Earl of Cork and, 345–60, 347, 350, 354n11, 429, 431 Osell, Tedra, 31, 51n7, 307 Otway, Thomas, The Orphan, 47 Ovid, 32, 119–20 Oxford Chair of Poetry, 47 pacifism, 79 Paine, Thomas, 68, 69 Rights of Man, 69, 75–7 Palo, Sharon Smith, 57 pamphlets, 160 Panegyrick on the Fair Sex, A (Anon.), 103–4 parables, 47 parenting, 35 Parker, Mark, 253 parody see satire Parrot, The (1746), 153, 179–87 ‘The Parrot’ eidolon, 179, 186–7 Parsons, Nicola, 313, 315–24, 333, 335 party politics, 151, 153–5, 166, 170, 254, 256 Pascoe, Judith, 403 patriarchy, 303

17/11/17 5:03 PM

508

index

patterns fabric, 483–5, Plates 6–7 sewing, 14, 440–5, 445, 450–2, 454, 469 Pearson, Jacqueline, 36, 207, 232–3, 233n6, 294, 301, 308n6 peasant poets, 196, 204 pedagogy, 44–6, 55, 57 Peiser, Megan, 236–47 Pelham, Mary, ‘The Journalist, or debut of a female author’, 297 Pennant, Thomas, ‘Ode to Indifference’, 143 Percy, Carol, 243 periodicals, 1–10 difference to magazines, 379–81 digitization of, 10–12 ‘Lady’s/Ladies’ as term, 15–16, 318, 339n2 Perkins, Pam, 250–61 Perl, Teri, 31 Pettit, Alexander, 188n1 Philip, Ambrose, 40, 42, 50 philosophy, 34, 359, 371–2 physicians, 411–22, 417 Pierrepont, Mary see Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley Pilkington, Mary, 7 Piozzi, Hester Thrale, 284, 285 Pix, Mary, 163 platonic love, 87–99 Poems by Eminent Ladies anthology (Colman and Thornton), 132–4 Poems for Young Ladies anthology (Goldsmith), 133–4 poetry, 42, 46, 79, 165, 192–6, 201, 360, 374n13, 374n14, 398–403 by women, 101–11, 115–16, 123–6, 130, 132, 135–6, 254–7, 403 see also Della Cruscan poetry Pointon, Marcia, 462, 471 political writing, 6, 8, 69, 80, 140–1, 171–3, 254–8, 401, 450–1; see also party politics Poovey, Mary, 68–9, 80 Pope, Alexander, 71–4, 125–6, 134, 175 Of the Characters of Women: An Epistle to a Lady, 102 ‘Rape of the Lock’, 140–1 Porter, Jane, 252, 304 Scottish Chiefs, 252 portraits, 458–60, 470, 471, Plates 3–4 miniatures, 459–71, 464, 466, 467, 468 tear-outs, 469–70 Powell, Manushag N., 3, 40, 59, 99n3, 120, 121, 153, 188, 251, 339n5, 343, 361, 377, 383, 410, 426–36 Pratt, Mary Louise, 212–13 Prescott, Sarah, 46 Price, Richard, 68, 71–2, 74–5 printing, 3, 117, 121, 156, 173, 176, 442 Prior, Matthew, 363 privacy, 333, 336, 412, 418 pseudonymity, 31, 108–11, 115, 120–1, 273, 298, 316, 348, 352, 358, 361, 403 Public Advertiser, The (newspaper), 74 public sphere, 151, 153–63, 179, 314, 401, 461 publicity, 350–1, 397–403 publishing, 7, 18n7, 117–18, 129, 165, 173, 175, 297, 342–3, 373n2, 395 puffs, 118, 136, 314, 395, 397–403, 405n4 Pugin, Augustus, image ‘The Strand’, 478, 479, 483

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 508

queens, 458–9, 461 question-and-answer content, 45–6, 88, 99, 315–23, 324n7, 325n11, 325n13, 328, 332–8, 339n1, 339n3 Radcliffe, Ann, 263–4 The Italian, 198, 264 The Mysteries of Udolpho, 263, 274, 276n1 Romance of the Forest, 303 radicalism, 69, 72–3, 75–9 Radway, Janice, 301, 302, 308n6 Ram, Titia, 101 Rambler, The (1750–2), 1, 42, 223, 343–4 Raven, James, 233n1, 247n1 reader-contributors, 10, 28–9, 33–6, 70, 105–6, 188, 253–4, 290, 302–3, 306, 343–4, 352–3, 361–9, 378, 384, 388, 403; see also letters, readers’; question-and-answer content readership, 5, 12–18, 40–2, 49, 69–70, 110–15, 151–2, 318, 393 reading, women’s, 34, 36, 41–2, 49, 54, 56–9, 137, 252, 303–4, 360, 381 novels, 219, 221–5, 228–32, 233n4, 233n6 romantic fiction, 294, 296, 299–302, 305–6, 307n6 realism, 271 Reason, 3, 43, 48, 142, 173–4, 385 Rees, Thomas, 129, 135 Reeve, Clara, 8, 18n5, 53, 57, 178 The Progress of Romance, 231 Repository of Arts, The (1809–28), 474–86, 478 reprintings, 8, 10, 15, 18n5, 273–4 reputation, 108–9, 281 Restoration period, 411 reviews, 192–3, 196–9, 219, 221, 223–4, 250–1, 294–5 women reviewers, 236–9, 241–7, 248n9 of women writers, 255–6, 258–60, 263 Revolution Controversy (1789–95), 67–79, 450–1 aftermath, 79–80 Reynolds, Frederick, 403–4 Ribeiro, Aileen, 451, 483 Riccoboni, Marie Jeanne, 433, 438n21 Richardson, Samuel, 200, 202, 227–9, 272 Ridpath, George, 169 rights, women’s, 332, 336, 384 Roberts, James, 170, 176 Roberts, John, 382 Roberts, Miss (poet), 140, 144n9 Robertson, James, 354n2 Robinson, George, 69, 76, 77, 212, 276n1, 382 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 190 Robinson, Mary, 7, 78, 116, 257, 261n2, 281, 284, 397, 405n4, 458, 463 To The Muse of Poetry, 116 Rogers, Pat, 127n13 romantic fiction, 53–4, 57–8, 60, 294–307, 307n6 Romantic period, 190, 251–2 Roper, Derek, 238, 240 Ross, Slaney Chadwick, 313 Rowe, Elizabeth Singer, 2, 7, 87–9, 93–9 ‘Canticles 7.11’, 97–8 ‘Farewel to Love, A’, 95 ‘Love and Friendship’, 140 Miscellaneous Works, 97–8 ‘Platonick Love’, 88–9, 91, 93–5, 97 Poems on Several Occasions, 94–5 ‘To Mrs. Mary Friend’, 96

17/11/17 5:03 PM

index Rowlandson, Thomas, image ‘The Strand’, 478, 479 Royal Female Magazine, The (1760), 15 royalty, portraits of, 458, 462–5, 466, 467 Runge, Laura, 245, 246 Russell, Gillian, 120, 126, 295 Sagal, Anna K., 35, 53–65, 358, 370 Sage, Mrs (balloonist), 279 St Clair, William, 294 St James’s Chronicle (1788–1803), 240–1 Samuel, Richard, Nine Living Muses of Great Britain (painting), 426 Sandvoss, Cornel, 295, 298, 307n3 Sappho, 107, 116, 127n8, 138 satire, 126, 127n17, 141, 154–63, 166–7, 296–7, 361–8, 413–14, 419 portraiture, 463, 464 see also caricature Satirist, or Monthly Meteor, The (1807–14), 201 Schellenberg, Betty, 428, 437n9, 437n14, 438n26 Schopenhauer, Johanna, 197–9, 202 The Eagle’s Nest, 199 Schor, Juliet B., 451 Scotland, 3 Scots Magazine, The (1739–1826), 3, 101–3, 193, 196, 197–8, 284 Scott, Susan (later Carnegie), 228, 232, 233n3 ‘Dunnotter Castle’, 139, 145n16 Millenium Hall, 60, 232, 269 Scott, Walter, 263 Scribble, Sam, ‘Complaint of a Ghost, The’, 297 Searl, Margaret, 415 ‘secret history’ genre, 28–9 Sennett, Richard, 442, 456 sensationalism, 185–6 sensibility, 141–3, 254 serialisation, 8, 35, 206–11, 265, 304–5, 354n4, 357, 378, 383, 385, 388; see also reprintings Seward, Anna, 257, 261n2 Sewell, Mary Young, 255–6, 261 sewing see patterns sexuality, 16, 29, 107–8, 120, 320–3, 329–38 Shakespeare, William, 123, 370 Henry IV, 61 King Lear, ‘Lear essay’, 429–30 Macbeth, 35–6, 370 Shamrock: or, Hibernian Cresses, The (1772), 387 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 113, 124 Shevelow, Kathryn, 5, 68, 80, 89, 269, 316, 318, 322, 324n6, 325n15, 378, 390, 441–2 Shiells, Robert, Lives of the Poets, 130 shops, 476–80, 478 Siddons, Sarah, 397, 458, 460, 463–5, 464, 468, 468–9 ‘Simpkin’ poems, 399–401 Siskin, Clifford, 205, 219, 252, 267 Skinn, Ann, The Old Maid; or, History of Miss Ravensworth, 224–5 smallpox inoculation, 169–70 Smart, Christopher, ‘Mrs Mary Midnight’ eidolon, 16–17 Smith, Carrie, 116–17 Smith, Charlotte Turner, 228 Desmond, 78 Smith, Chloe Wigston, 390, 409–10, 440–56, 460 Smith, Elizabeth, 200 Smith, Kate, 475, 479, 480 Smith, Mary, 339n4

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 509

509

Smith, Olivia, 257 Smith, Orianne, 251, 257 Smollett, Tobias, 227–9, 436n8 social commentary, 174–5 social justice, 268–9 social mobility, 44, 401–2, 415–16, 422, 434 social reform, 328–32 social status, 32–3, 35 Socrates, 371–2 Solomon, Harry M., 343 soul, the, 89, 94–5, 98 source material, 58, 61 Southey, Robert, 79 space, women’s literary, 130–1, 134–5, 140, 143, 295–6, 307n4 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 338 Spectator, The, 1–3, 5, 13, 46, 48–9, 54, 134, 151, 153, 160, 165, 167, 169, 175, 199, 221, 230, 266, 313, 327–31, 338, 475 ‘Mr Spectator’ eidolon, 5, 328–32 Spedding, Patrick, 13 Spence, Joseph, 47 Spencer, Jane, 46 Staël, Germaine de, Corinne, 195 Stanley, Charlotte, 446 Staunton, George Leonard, An Authentic Account of an Embassy, 206, 208–11 Steele, Richard, 1, 136, 153, 156, 162, 166–7, 279, 327, 344 ‘Sir Isaac Bickerstaff’ eidolon, 3, 5, 31–2, 365 see also The Tatler Stephens, Joanna, 419–20 Sterne, Laurence, 227–8 Stewart, David, 260 Stewart, Dustin D., 87–99 Strand, The, 477, 478 Strobel, Heidi, 471 style, 440–1, 447–8, 452 Suarez, Michael, 12, 129 subjects, women as, 327–38 submissions, 302–5, 345 subscription books, 255 sugar boycott, 476 Summit, Jennifer, 34 surveillance, 327–31 Swift, Jonathan, 125, 153–6, 159–60, 163 ‘fair-sexing’ term, 2, 5–6 ‘The Furniture of a Woman’s Mind’, 104–5 Talbot, Catherine, 7 taste, 129, 152, 208–9, 219, 225, 402, 475, 482 Tatler, The (1709–11), 3–5, 31–2, 136, 156, 160, 162, 166–7, 429 ‘The Author and his Reader’ frontispiece, 4 Taylor, Jane, 442–3, 459 Taylor, William, 192 teaching profession, 44–5 testimonies, first-person, 418–19 theatre, 114, 117–18, 120–5, 190, 192, 207, 395–403, 433 theatrical criticism, 426–7, 429–32, 437n11, 437n13, 438n17 Thelwall, John, 79 themes, 48–9 Thomson, James, The Denial, 242–3, 247n10 Thornton, Bonnell, 17, 132–3 Poems by Eminent Ladies anthology, 132–4

17/11/17 5:03 PM

510

index

Thrale, Hester, 13 Throsby, Corin, 295, 298 Timperley, C. H., 240 Tipper, John, 29–30 Tollett, Elizabeth, 360 Tomalin, Claire, 72 Tomlins, Elizabeth Sophia, ‘Connal and Mary’, 143, 145n19 tone, 49–50, 361–2, 374–5 Topham, Edward, 113, 116, 121, 395–404, 463, 464 Tories, 153–9, 161, 162 Town and Country Magazine, The (1769–96), 227, 258, 461–2 Towsey, Mark, 50 translation, 190–3, 197–8, 232, 274, 388, 433 Trapp, Joseph, 141 travel writing, 205–15 Trentmann, Frank, 476 Trifler, The (1788–9), 385–6 Trotter, Catherine, 108–9, 163 Tuite, Clara, 295 Tulloch, John, 307n3 Tung, Shirley, 108 Turner, Charlotte, Ethelinde, 228 Turner, David M., 335–6, 339n1 Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, The (1747–1814), 102, 197, 225–6, 463 Valenza, Robin, 34–5 Varey, Simon, 348 Vickery, Amanda, 482 Victorian period, 202 Villemert, Pierre Joseph Bourdier de, L’Ami des femmes, 35, 56 Visiter, The (1723–4), 57 Volney, Constantin-Francois, Travels Through Syria and Egypt, in the years 1783, 1784, 212 von La Roche, Sophie, The Adventures of Sophia Sternheim, 197–8 Wakefield, Priscilla, Leisure Hours or, Entertaining Dialogues, 213–14 Walker, Constance, 273 Walker’s Hibernian Magazine (1771–85), 282, 287, 291n8, 442 Waller, William, 125 Walpole, Horace, 140 Walpole, Robert, 170–1, 174 War of the Austrian Succession (1740–8), 178–9, 183–4 Warner, William, 205 wartime, 152, 178–88 Washington, George, 41 Washington, Martha, 265 Wate, Richard, 419 Waters, Mary A., 238–40, 247n6 Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel, 266–7, 270

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 510

Watts, Isaac, 41 Wedgewood Rooms, 479–80 Weekly Magazine, or Edinburgh Amusement, The (1768–79), 227 Weekly Miscellany, 222, 228 Weekly Museum, The (1791–1805), 265 Weekly Review of the Affairs of France, The (1704–13), 18n2 Weeton, Ellen, 13 Wellington, Jan, 240, 242 Wells, Mary, 113–17, 121, 314, 393–405, 463 Memoirs, 396–7 see also The World Werkmeister, Lucyle, 114, 393, 395–6, 404 West, Jane, A Gossip’s Story, 268 Westminster Magazine (1773–85), 282 Whateley, Mary, 135 Wheble, John, 382 Whigs, 70, 72, 154–7, 170 Whyte, Samuel, 387 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 191, 197–8, 211 Wild, Min, 353, 438n27 Wilkes, Joanne, 252 Williams, Helen Maria, 300 Letters from France, 77–9 A Tour of Switzerland, 300 Williamson, Gillian, 13 Wilson, Kathleen, 180 Windham, William, 70 wit, 151, 162–3 Woffington, Margaret, 286–7 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 50, 71–3, 77, 192–3, 219, 259, 384–5 Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, 385 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 137, 385 woman-championing periodicals, 7, 10, 43–50, 333–4, 382 Woolf, D. R., 28 Woolley, Hannah, 57 World, The (1787–94), 113–14, 118–22, 124, 127n14, 229, 314, 344, 346, 351, 393–405 Worsdale, James, 183, 188n4 Wragg, Francis, 74–5 writers, male, 16–17, 328–9, 334–5, 342, 429 writers, women, 3, 7, 71, 136–43, 145n19, 414 writing, women’s, 219, 225–9, 233n4, 247n1, 250–61, 261n1, 290–1, 299–302, 426–8; see also ‘feminine’ writing; poetry, women’s; canon, women’s literary Wyett, Jodi, 430 Yates, Mary Ann, 427–8, 433–6, 438n21, 438n22 Yeames, Catharine Bremen, 380 Yeames, Elizabeth, 273 Yost, Calvin, 101 Zionkowski, Linda, 272

17/11/17 5:03 PM

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 511

17/11/17 5:03 PM

Plate 1 James Gillray. ‘Hyde Park, Sunday, or both Hemispheres of the World in a Sweat’. 1789. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Plate 2 ‘Fashionable Morning & Evening Dresses’. The Lady’s Magazine (Jan 1813). © Special Collections and Archives, Cardiff University.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 512

17/11/17 5:03 PM

Plate 3 Mary Linwood, Self Portrait (1787). Private collection.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 513

17/11/17 5:03 PM

Plate 4 ‘Mrs. Inchbald. From an Original Painting’. The European Magazine (Jan 1788). © The British Museum.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 514

17/11/17 5:03 PM

Plate 5 ‘Lady’s Book-Case’. Repository of Arts 11 (Oct 1814). Private collection.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 515

17/11/17 5:03 PM

Plate 6 ‘Patterns of British Manufacture’. Repository of Arts 1 (Jan 1809). Private collection.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 516

17/11/17 5:03 PM

Plate 7 ‘Patterns of British Manufacture’. Repository of Arts 9 (Mar 1813). Private collection.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 517

17/11/17 5:03 PM

Plate 8 ‘Walking Dress’. Repository of Arts 1 (1809). Private collection.

5586_Batchelor & Powell_Part-06.indd 518

17/11/17 5:03 PM