CHAPTER X

The Eighteenth Century The New Middle Class

The publication of a new edition of Ascham’s The Schoolmaster in 1711 reflects the widespread interest in education which marked the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries1. The charity school movement, which many women fostered, was one result of this interest. The lively activity of dissenting academies in various parts of England was another. At these academies, many others than men intended for the dissenting ministry were educated, for in them a sound education could be acquired without subscription to the Articles of the Church of England and far more cheaply than at Oxford and Cambridge. Dissent was increasing in the early years of the century among the middle classes and critical congregations demanded the services of well-trained ministers. Women in middle-class families benefited by the quickening of intellectual interests in their male relations, although not even the dissenting academies were broadminded enough to contemplate receiving women students. It is certain that many of the girls’ schools which flourished in this period were not particularly efficient. Hackney was the most popular suburb for girls’ schools in the early eighteenth century as it had been a century earlier, and a glimpse of the girls at one of them gossiping with three boys at the back door is preserved in the diary of young Dudley Ryder, the Nonconformist draper’s son who became Chief Justice of the King’s Bench. The schoolmistress sharply rebuked the girls ‘for their having held discourse with a man, and entertaining them upon the wall. One of the Lancashire girls talked very smartly to her again’2. Dudley Ryder, who was a grandson of a minister ejected in 1662, was educated at the dissenting academy at Hackney, whence he had gone on to Edinburgh and Leyden to study civil law. His French, Latin and shorthand were good. The fragment of his diary which has survived was written when he was twenty-four. His sister’s education is never mentioned, but she and her girl friend, a tailor’s daughter, could hold their own in Bath society. Dudley Ryder easily fell in love, but found it hard to talk to girls. He greatly envied the young men of his acquaintance who could take liberties and tumble them about with impunity. He did not marry until he was forty-three and had made his mark in the law. One of his letters to his wife expresses a strikingly civilized attitude to marriage: ‘I look upon matrimony as it really is not only as a society for life, in which our persons and fortunes in general are concerned, but as a partnership wherein our very passions and affections, our hopes and fears, our inclinations and aversions, all our good and ill Qualities are brought into one Common Stock’1. The women of the family, his mother, his aunts and sisters are constantly and affectionately mentioned in Dudley Ryder’s youthful diary, though he was much concerned at the oddness of his grandmother: ‘… her continual finding fault, her appearing never obliged, her rash censuring upon every little occasion, and impregnable obstinacy in whatever she once asserts, though never so false or absurd, makes it a very uneasy thing to live in the house with her’. He could only agree with his Aunt Billio that it was the result of her husband’s ‘narrow way of living’, which made her ‘such a slave’ that she did not know how to spend her ‘plentiful fortune that is entirely at her own disposal’2.

A glimpse into another middle-class dissenting circle is afforded by the letters of Philip Doddridge, who died in 1751 at the age of forty-nine3. Like Dudley Ryder he was a grandson of one of the ejected ministers of 1662. Philip Doddridge was the youngest of a family of twenty children, of whom he and one sister were the only survivors. Consumption carried his sister off when she was still a young woman and was the cause of his own early death. He was thirteen when his father died and only the help of a dissenting minister, Samuel Clark, enabled him to enter the dissenting academy at Kibworth to study for the ministry under its head, Mr. Jennings. From that time to his death Doddridge kept up a close correspondence with an expanding circle of friends. In his early days he enjoyed writing playful letters to many young women, and often reverted to the relations between the sexes: ‘too many of the sex are as empty and worthless as the generality of our own’, he wrote to a Miss Farrington, whom he addressed as his ‘dear mamma’ or his ‘best mamma in the world’1. Miss Hannah Clark, sister of Samuel Clark, he called Clio, once beginning his letter ‘dear, sedate, methodical Clio’. He reproached her for suggesting that their friendship would end when she found a lover: ‘Is there anything suspicious in such a platonic friendship as ours that you imagine your future husband will be offended? Pray tell him that my share in your friendship is one of the dearest things I have in the world and that I will never give it up: but shall expect to call you Clio when I cannot call you Clark’2. Clio embroidered for him ‘turnovers’, a curious article worn over the shoulders like a long collar, and was the recipient of his confidences about the young ladies with whom he fell in love, Miss Kitty Freeman3 and ‘the blooming Florella’4, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Mr. Jennings. In 1730 he met and married Mercy Maris, of Upton-on-Severn. He wrote to Hannah Clark, by this time addressed as Cordelia, to describe his affection for ‘that lovely Charmer’, Mercy, whom he called ‘Sabrina’ and ‘Cleora’5. The correspondence with Clio does not seem to have survived his marriage.

Doddridge kept up a more desultory correspondence with Hannah’s sister, Elizabeth, whom he called Philomela. To both sisters he described himself as Celadon. Philomela was, perhaps, more critical than her sister, for Doddridge wrote to her with particular care: ‘It is such an awful business’, he declared in 1723, ‘to write to a lady of so delicate a taste and so exact a judgment as Philomela, that I confess I have been seven weeks contriving how I should begin’6. In 1726 Philomela started a girls’ school and Doddridge sent her his good wishes in a postscript to a letter to Hannah, adding ‘I congratulate those young ladies who are to be under her care’7. In June Doddridge wrote to Philomela herself, for she had described ‘teaching a large school’ as ‘a great undertaking’ and asked him for advice. He agreed that the office of a schoolmistress was one ‘of much labour and difficulty’, but comforted her with the reflection that ‘it is a post of the most honourable and important service that a member of your sex can be engaged in; nor are there many employments in our male world which can be compared with it’. He felt that her pupils might ‘possibly have found some other mistress equally capable of instructing them in the dexterities of the needle, or in those other playful arts which it is generally expected they should learn; though I believe there are few who would have the vanity to pretend to rival you in these; but I conceive that they could not have found a more beautiful pattern of judicious taste, elegant sentiment, and polite behaviour; much less could they have fallen into the care of a person equally capable and equally solicitous to lead their dawning minds into the knowledge and love of practical religion, untainted by the awkward, though fashionable, mixture of affectation, censoriousness, superstition, and bigotry’1. Perhaps it would have been too much to expect the future head of the Northampton dissenting academy to recommend learning as well as religion to the attention of those who taught young women.

Doddridge’s letters as he grew older display a patronizing attitude to women which was probably much that of other men less well educated than he. In his youth he had felt respect and affection for individual women, in particular his sister and Mrs. Jennings, the wife of the Principal of Kibworth. While at college he kept ‘upon very civil terms with all’, but was ‘intimate with nobody but Mrs. Jennings’. She, he sadly told his sister, ‘is always either tired or busy’2. The first young woman he wanted to marry he described to Samuel Clark as ‘prudent, generous, cheerful, genteel, complaisant, and, above all, remarkably pious’, but, he concluded, ‘considering the family and neighbourhood in which she has been brought up, it is next to impossible that she should be the mistress of a great deal of politeness: but she has naturally a very good genius; and as I conceive that I have her education in my own hands, I will not be wanting on my part to form her more completely, at least to my own fancy’3. It is not perhaps surprising to learn that the young lady refused in the end to have any more to do with him. When any woman of his acquaintance criticized him in conversation he never replied in anger but went home and wrote to her kindly, but firmly, setting out her own faults. Mrs. Wingate, having been ‘so kind as to tell’ him ‘of some things which’ she ‘thought amiss in’ his behaviour, received a long letter written the next day accusing her of vanity, egoism, and jealousy. Having told her that her vanity had spoiled many a dish of Chocolate drunk with her he had the effrontery to subscribe himself ‘Your very great Admirer, your affectionate Friend, and obliged humble Servant’1. Even Mrs. Jennings, who, as his tutor’s widow, might well have felt free to speak her mind, did not escape reproof. She was, he said in a letter written the day after she had told him of his own faults, ‘pettish and morose’, ‘prone to contradict those with whom she was at all displeased’, apt to treat the faults of those she loved ‘with too great severity, and sometimes with an air of contempt’2.

Doddridge wrote in a very different strain to aristocratic ladies. An early friend, with whom he corresponded until her death, was the widow of the sixth son of the Duke of Bedford. She had married again, but was always addressed by Doddridge as ‘Lady Russell’. Their acquaintance began when Mr. Jennings, who attended at her home at Maidwell to teach her daughter astronomy and the globes, took Doddridge over with him from Kibworth in 1721. ‘I lay there all night’, he told his sister, ‘and when I went away her ladyship gave me a guinea and told me that she hoped I should be no stranger to Maidwell while she continued on this side of the country’3. As he grew older he seems to have sent either a sermon or one of his volumes entitled The Family Expositor to individual ladies who might sympathize with his views. In this way he became acquainted with Lady Hardwicke, wife of the Lord Chancellor Hard-wicke, with the Duchess of Somerset, and with Lady Huntingdon.

He found these ladies very kind and appreciative. The Countess of Hardwicke, thanking him for his books sent in 1748, expressed the wish that ‘more of our writers employed their pens to better their own hearts and those of their readers, and then the press would not abound, as it does, with books calculated to destroy both our civil and religious liberties’4. The Duchess of Somerset, writing from Percy Lodge in 1750 after her husband’s death, said that she ‘had not the pleasure of being acquainted with any of your writings till I was at Bath three years ago, with my poor Lord, when an old acquaintance, the Dowager Lady Hyndford, recommended me to read the Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul; and I may with great truth assure you that I never was so deeply affected with anything I ever met with as with that book, and I could not be easy till I had given one to every servant in my house who appeared to be of a serious turn of mind’. She added that her ‘dear Lord read your former volumes with great attention and satisfaction, and frequently spoke of them as the best books he had ever seen upon the subject’1. Doddridge’s correspondence with the Countess of Huntingdon began in 1744, when he sent her a sermon asking ‘that I would sit, with pen and paper by me, to mark all I could find amiss in it’. It must have given him pleasure when the Countess replied ‘with all my care, I was not able to make a single objection, nor even to fear one from any mortal for you; and I must beg you will be so good to let me have a hundred sent, in order to give away’2.

Selina, Countess of Huntingdon (1707–91), was one of the three coheiresses of the second Earl Ferrars and married Theophilus, ninth Earl of Huntingdon, in 1728. This marriage brought her into the ambit of Lady Elizabeth Hastings, who, with her young half-sisters, was leading a life of piety and charity at Ledstone Hall3. References to Lady Huntingdon in contemporary letters before her conversion give no hint that she was to become the foundress of a religious connection, which has survived into the modern world. Mrs. Pendarves, in one of her letters to her sister, described Lady Huntingdon’s dress before any of the others worn at the prince’s birthday in January 1739 because it was the most impressive of them all. She wore a black velvet petticoat embroidered in chenille in a pattern of a large stone vase with ramping flowers and between each vase a pattern of gold shells. Her gown was of white satin, also embroidered with chenille and with gold ornaments. Mrs. Pendarves thought ‘it was a most laboured piece of finery’ and its wearer ‘a mere shadow that tottered under every step she took under the load’4. In March of the same year Lady Huntingdon was one of the ladies who stormed the House of Lords when the Lords had ordered the gallery to be closed during a debate on the Spanish question. Mrs. Pendarves was there, too, and told her sister how ‘the ladies bore the buffets of a stinking crowd from an hour after ten in the morning until five in the afternoon’ without any food5. They learned that while they remained outside, the door would not be opened to the Members of the House of Commons so they allowed the Commons to come up and rushed in with them. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu described them as ‘heroines’, who had shown ‘their zeal and appetite for knowledge in a most glorious manner’6.

Soon after this exploit Lady Huntingdon was converted to Calvinistic Methodism by her sister-in-law, Lady Margaret Hastings, who herself went so far as to marry in 1741 one of the Methodist preachers, Benjamin Ingham. The death of two sons from smallpox in 1743 turned Lady Huntingdon’s mind even more closely to religion. Lord Huntingdon died in 1746, leaving her a wealthy widow, able to make her own life. She lived until 1791, although she wrote to Doddridge in 1747 describing herself as ‘weak and ill’1. In that year the Methodist preacher George Whitefield became her chaplain and, as she wrote to Doddridge, ‘some of the great of this world hear with me the gospel patiently; and thus much seed is sown by Mr. Whitfield’s preaching’2. The Methodists and Dissenters felt themselves in sympathy with each other, but inevitably the growth of Methodism drew people from the congregations of the Old Dissent. Lady Huntingdon never wished to leave the communion of the Church of England or abandoned her belief in episcopacy, but from the time of her conversion she was the friend and protector of many clergymen whose views were suspect to orthodox churchmen. She claimed and exercised the right as a peeress of appointing as many chaplains as she chose, and in 1761 sold her jewels to build her first regular chapel at Brighton. She thereafter built chapels in places frequented by people of fashion, such as Tunbridge and Bath.

She has been described as ‘a child of emotion’, and is said to have likened herself to ‘a ship before the wind carried on by an impulse she could not resist or describe’3. Nevertheless she must have been a good woman of business. In 1768 she founded a seminary in North Wales to train young men for the ministry, making it plain that after three years of study they could enter the ministry of the Church of England or any other Protestant congregation. She believed in moving her chaplains from place to place every three years. If she came to disapprove of any one of them she dismissed him. This happened in the case of Thomas Wills, a Cornishman who had been a successful minister in the Church of England. At Bath he met Miss Selina Wheeler, a niece of Lady Huntingdon’s. They were married in 1774 and Lady Huntingdon invited Wills to join her connection ‘and change a stationary life for one of a more itinerant nature’. He therefore left his parish and after a time became incumbent of a new chapel which Lady Huntingdon had built at Spa Fields. The incumbent of Clerkenwell protested at this intrusion and after the case had come before the consistorial court of London many of Lady Huntingdon’s chaplains judged it expedient to secede from the Church of England. Wills seceded in 1782 and took out a licence as a Dissenting minister. He remained in Lady Huntingdon’s connection until July 1788, when after he had preached at the Spa Fields chapel on 6 July he received during the following week a letter from Lady Huntingdon ‘signifying that she had no further occasion for his services, and in consequence gave him his dimission’. Permission to preach a farewell sermon was denied him1.

Lady Huntingdon was always ready to take on new responsibilities. When George Whitefield died in 1770 and left her his American property she had no hesitation in sending missionaries there. Her beliefs were clear-cut and she firmly made known her disapproval of developments in Wesleyan Methodism after 1770. Almost to the end of her life she kept the control of her connection in her own hands, but in 1790, when she felt her end approaching, she asked that an association should be formed to help her, and to carry on the work after her death. She died in 1791 and her place as head of the connection was taken by her friend, Lady Anne Erskine. Lady Huntingdon’s administrative powers have always been recognized, but her humanity and her charity have perhaps been underestimated. The expenses of maintaining her chapels and her missionaries were so great that she reduced her own style of living and was not always able to respond to deserving requests for help. Her bequest to Lady Anne Erskine was simply an annuity of £100. But it was Lady Huntingdon who defrayed two-thirds of the cost of sending Doddridge to Portugal in a vain search for health. She never hesitated to undertake a distasteful task if she felt it was her duty. She visited her cousin Laurence, Earl Ferrars, while he was in prison awaiting execution for the murder of his steward. She was the life-long friend of her aunt, the beautiful Lady Frances Shirley, born like her in 1707, who made no secret of the fact that she was Lord Chesterfield’s mistress. By 1750 the affair was over and Lady Frances became a Calvinistic Methodist like her niece. When she died in 1778 she left the bulk of her fortune to Lady Huntingdon and was buried in the cemetery attached to Lady Huntingdon’s chapel at Bath2.

Her social position enabled Lady Huntingdon to make full use of her faculties, and experience the delight of creating and dominating a large religious organization. For the middle-class woman with intellectual ambitions there remained the less exciting activities of correspondence with others of their kind, the construction of elegant verse, and modest adventures in scholarship. Before the middle of the century one such woman had won for herself a considerable reputation for learning. Elizabeth Carter was born in Deal in 1717, the eldest daughter of Nicholas Carter, perpetual curate of Deal. Her father, the son of a large farmer in the vale of Aylesbury, had been intended for his father’s business but made such progress in his studies that he went to Cambridge and entered the Church. He gave a sound classical education to all his children, both boys and girls. Elizabeth was so slow at first in acquiring the ancient languages that her father besought her not to struggle further with them, but she persisted, and, reading early and late, taking snuff and chewing green tea to keep herself awake, she at length gained a sufficient mastery of both Latin and Greek. Like the women scholars of the Renaissance period she went on to acquire a smattering of Hebrew, French, Italian, and Spanish. In the hope of getting a place at court she began to learn German and in later life taught herself something of Arabic and Portuguese. Her father would have liked her to marry, for he had by his second wife an increasing family and was without private means. ‘I will lay no commands upon you’, he wrote in reference to the last proposal made for her, ‘because it is more immediately your own affair, and for life: but you ought certainly to consider with great attention, before you reject an offer, far more advantageous in appearance than any other you can ever expect. You can always count on my indulgence; but do not let my indulgence mislead you. If you cannot bring your mind to a compliance, I and all your friends will be sorry for your missing so good a prospect’1.

Great strength of mind must have been necessary to resist such anxious care. Elizabeth Carter remained single, bearing cheerfully the burdens which fell upon the eldest daughter of a long family. In 1747, when she was already famous, she wrote without complaint of ‘labouring on in the beaten track through whole dozens of shirts and shifts’ and, to amuse her correspondent, described how she once made a pudding ‘so overcharged with pepper and brandy that it put the whole family in a flame’. She ‘happily applied’ herself ‘to forming a special good sweet cake, with such success that the former mishap was forgot, and I was employed to make every christening cake that happened in the family ever after. And though I say it, that should not say it, several grave notable gentlewomen of unquestionable good housewifery have applied to me for the receipt’1. She was delighted to be able to take sole charge of her youngest brother’s education and prepare him for the university. She was a woman of happy disposition, interested in everything about her. She was sensitive to the beauty of the countryside around her home, and wrote of her long walks very much as a modern woman might. She wrote poetry and loved music and read every book that came her way. There is never a hint that she felt frustrated by the limitations custom imposed on a woman’s ambition. She was, indeed, more fortunate than many other women, for she had kinsfolk in London and friends in the close of Canterbury who were glad to entertain her for the long visits customary in those leisurely days. Above all, owing to her father’s friendship with Edward Cave, founder of the Gentleman’s Magazine, she had the pleasure of seeing her work in print when she was seventeen.

Her first contribution to the Gentleman’s Magazine appeared in 1734 and was followed by many others, although not everything under the name Eliza was from her pen. To Edward Cave Miss Carter owed both the production of her first slender volume of poems in 1738 and her introduction to Dr. Johnson in the same year. It was certainly Cave who suggested to her that it might be profitable to publish the translations she had made of two modern works: Crousaz’s criticism of Pope’s Essay on Man from French and Algarotti’s explanation of Newton’s philosophy for the ladies from Italian. Although these books appeared in 1739 without the name of the translator on the title-page Cave saw that it was well known who had done the work. Miss Carter herself had no exaggerated opinion of their value and in later life deprecated any reference to them. But they brought her much renown at the time of their publication, and in the Gentleman’s Magazine Thomas Birch described her as ‘a very extraordinary phenomenon in the republick of letters’. Cave understood, as a good business man, the interest which could be aroused by the spectacle of a learned and personable young woman who yet could write readable books and poems. He would have liked Miss Carter to write more, and in 1746 complained in a letter to her father ‘I cannot persuade Miss to undertake anything, and the world wants to know what she is about’2.

A new influence entered Elizabeth Carter’s life in 1741 when she met Catherine Talbot, who was the granddaughter of William, Bishop of Durham. To the close friendship which grew up between them, Elizabeth Carter owed her introduction to a far wider circle than her own. Two of the most eminent ecclesiastics of the time, Joseph Butler, Bishop of Gloucester and later of Durham, and Thomas Secker, Bishop of Oxford, Dean of St. Paul’s, and later Archbishop of Canterbury, had each been helped in the course of his promotion by Catherine Talbot’s grandfather. Her mother had been left poorly off by her husband’s early death and it was in keeping with the generosity of Thomas Secker’s character that he invited Mrs. Talbot and her daughter to join his household. He superintended Catherine Talbot’s education, and the letters she and Elizabeth Carter exchanged reveal two circles in which intelligent young women are leading active, useful, and innocently happy lives. Evenings were spent in reading aloud, sometimes Clarendon’s History of the Great Rebellion, sometimes Steele’s essays, sometimes Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters. The publication of Mrs. Cockburn’s works was eagerly awaited, and both Catherine Talbot and her mother were subscribers.

It was at the impulse of Catherine Talbot that Elizabeth Carter began in 1749 to translate the works of Epictetus. Many young women had started on this before, but none had completed the work. Miss Carter sent the sheets to Miss Talbot as she wrote them and Miss Talbot told her what she and Bishop Secker thought of the work. In the bishop’s opinion she was making too smooth and elegant a translation. He added a postscript to the letter, ‘Let me speak a word for myself: Why would you change a plain, home, awakening preacher into a smooth, fine, polite writer, of what nobody will mind? Answer me that, dear Miss Carter’. Later he wrote ‘Good Miss Carter’ a long letter explaining his preference for ‘a rough, almost literal translation, if it doth but relish strongly of that warm and practical spirit, which to me is the characteristick of this book’1. When the work was finished, and the bishop insisted that nothing should be omitted, he set about encouraging Miss Carter to write notes to the text and a life of Epictetus as an Introduction. At the same time he was looking for a publisher. He decided at last on publication by subscription, half a guinea to be paid on placing the order and half on receipt of the book.

The bishop’s guidance did not end there, for he read the proofs and found it necessary to reprove Miss Carter for carelessness. ‘Do, dear Madam Carter, get yourself whipt, get yourself whipt. Indeed, it is quite necessary for you. I know you mean to be careful; but you cannot without this help. Everything else hath been tried, and proves ineffectual. Here are some sheets come down. I have this moment open’d them; and the first thing I have cast my eyes upon is Epictetus for Epicurus, p. 73. I will look over the whole in a day or two; but one needs go no further to see what prescription your case indicates’1. As the book was in the press more subscribers than were ever expected paid their half-guineas, so that an extra two hundred and fifty copies had to be printed. The printer was Mr. Richardson, the author of Clarissa and the friend of many contemporary women. His bill for the first edition, apart from the extra copies, was £ 67 7s. od. A thousand and thirty-one people subscribed and Miss Carter made ‘nearly, if not quite, a thousand pounds’2. Miss Carter’s nephew, in writing her life, described how ‘some years after, Dr. Secker, then Archbishop of Canterbury, brought a bookseller’s catalogue to her, saying “Here, Madam Carter, see how ill I am used by the world; here are my Sermons selling at half-price, while your Epictetus truly is not to be had under eighteen shillings, only three shillings less than the original subscription”.’3 Two more editions were published in Miss Carter’s lifetime and another one after her death.

Miss Carter owed gratitude to Thomas Secker for financial help as well as for training in scholarship. In 1763 he noted in his diary ‘This year I lent Miss Carter, to whom, I believe, I had given about fifty pounds before, £150 upon her note, without interest. And I do not intend that she shall repay it me’4. Secker had been translated to the see of Canterbury in 1758, the same year that Epictetus appeared, and it is probable that Elizabeth Carter’s reputation as a scholar profited by her association with the archbishop’s household. Thomas Secker was a Nottinghamshire man and was educated for the Nonconformist ministry at three Dissenting academies, but he came under the influence of Edward Talbot, Miss Talbot’s father, and joined the Church of England. He deserves to be remembered, with Dr. George Hickes and Bishop Burnet, as a man great enough to realize a woman’s capacity and generous enough to help her to develop it. Miss Carter preserved a revealing story about him. She was complaining one day in the palace at Lambeth about the unfair way in which the translators of the Bible had rendered I Corinthians vii. 12 and 13: ‘that for the evident purpose of supporting the superiority of the husband they had translated the same verb as applied to the husband put away and as applied to the wife leave: Let him not put her away and Let her not leave him. The Archbishop denied the fact, and asserted that the words in the original were not the same; but finding his antagonist obstinate, “Come with me, Madam Carter”, he said at length, “to my study, and be confuted”. They went, and his Grace, on consulting the passage, instead of being angry that he was found to be in the wrong, said with the utmost good humour, “No, Madam Carter, ‘tis I that must be confuted, and you are in the right”.’1

The success of her book enabled Elizabeth Carter to spend longer periods in London, and in her own lodgings. Her home remained with her father at Deal, but she passed the early months of the year in London. She owed her introduction to London society to Miss Talbot, but her own quality made friends for her within it. The literary hostesses of the day, such as Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Vesey, welcomed her to their houses. The letters that passed between Catherine Talbot and Elizabeth Carter often refer to aristocratic ladies in more revealing phrases than Lady Mary Coke or her young cousin, Lady Louisa Stuart, used. Lady Mary refers to Miss Anne Pitt frequently, sometimes as ‘the old Virgin’. To Miss Talbot, Miss Anne Pitt was ‘one of the liveliest, most friendly-looking persons’ she saw when she attended the queen’s drawing-room2. Nine months later Miss Talbot again mentioned Miss Anne Pitt as ‘surely most inchantingly agreeable. There is with all her archness somewhat so natural and unaffected for the heart of me I cannot be afraid of her, though with that superiority of understanding to be sure I ought’3. Lady Mary Coke herself is not, in this correspondence, the figure of fun that Lady Louisa Stuart made her. Miss Carter ‘was particularly charmed by Lady M. Coke’s appearance and would have given’ her ‘ears to hear her talk’ but she was shy and ran away4. In later years Elizabeth Carter often dined with Lady Holdernesse at Walmer Castle and on one occasion told Miss Talbot that she spent the greatest part of the afternoon walking on the seaside with Lady Holdernesse and Lady Mary Coke. On returning to the castle they saw a girl ‘in stout contention with a cow, which she was lugging by the horns to pull her up the hill’. ‘With the agility of a mountain nymph’ Lady Mary went to the bottom and at once the cow ‘gallopped up the hill before her Ladyship as hastily, though not as lightly, as a kid’1. Anyone who has tried to drive an unwilling cow will appreciate Lady Mary’s skill.

Mrs. Montagu, as the wife of a rich husband, was able to do more for Miss Carter than merely invite her to parties. She took her to Lord Bath’s country house near Maidenhead and in 1761 invited her to spend the season with her at Tunbridge. Lord Bath showed both kindness and delicacy of feeling by asking Mrs. Montagu to buy ‘silk or damask or what you please’ to make ‘a small present to Mrs. Carter to make her fine when she comes to Tunbridge’. To persuade her to accept it he wrote saying that he had found some Greek books in his library, which were of no use to him, but might be to her, that he had also ‘two pounds of very bad tea which he cannot take himself’, also he has found ‘in the drawer of an old India Cabinet a piece of silk with this wrote on it Enough for a mantua and petty coat’, neither of which he could wear. At the same time he asked Mrs. Montagu to find some way of giving Miss Carter two twenty-pound notes which he enclosed, without letting her know from whom they came2.

When Lord Bath died at the age of eighty-two in 1764 many people seem to have been surprised that he did not leave Miss Carter an annuity. Lady Hervey, writing to her sons’ former tutor, said ‘I wish he had left Mrs. Carter the forty pounds a year you mention, but she is not named in his will; whilst he lived he made her several presents, and, as I have been told, solicited a pension for her from the crown. She has great merit, but very little money, and as he saw her often, and profited by the one, ‘tis pity he did not furnish her with the other’3. Lord Bath’s heir was his brother, who died in 1767, when Mr. and Mrs. Pulteney, to whom the property passed, settled £100 a year on Miss Carter. About three years before she died the annuity was increased by £504. Mrs. Montagu’s husband died in 1775, leaving his large fortune to his wife. One of her first acts was to secure an annuity of £100 to Miss Carter. After Miss Talbot’s death in 1770 her mother entrusted all her manuscripts to her friend, giving Miss Carter permission to deal with them as she wished. Miss Carter, in the same year, published at her own expense a volume of religious reflections by Miss Talbot and again in 1772 a volume of Miss Talbot’s essays. The reflections passed through many editions and the profits to Miss Carter ‘were not inconsiderable’1. When Mrs. Talbot died she left Miss Carter a legacy of £200 and a few years later a childhood friend left her an annuity of £40. Through an unusual combination of personal charm and business sense she had come before the end of her life to a position of financial security and something more.

Her old age was spent in her own house at Deal. In 1763 she acquired several tenements held under the Archbishop of Canterbury by different leases. At her request Archbishop Secker allowed her to hold them all under a single lease and would take no fine from her on its renewal. While she was abroad repairs were carried out and her father was installed there. He rented the house from her and they lived there together, each with a separate study and meeting seldom, except at meals. His death in 1774 made little difference to her way of life. Her reputation increased with age. When she died in 1806 she had been ‘the famous Miss Carter of Deal’ for close on seventy years. Her teachers and guides had been old-fashioned classical scholars and ordained ministers of the Church of England. The study of the Bible was a lasting pleasure to her and she left many notes and criticisms of the accepted translation behind her. Perhaps the influence of her early friend Edward Cave may have helped her to become a good business woman. Her life was never that of the unworldly scholar who seeks to open new paths and advance the frontiers of knowledge. In this she differed to her own comfort from Elizabeth Elstob, thirty years her senior. But today Elizabeth Carter’s Epictetus gathers dust on library shelves or is thrown away as salvage while Anglo-Saxon scholars are searching, often in vain, for the modest products of Elizabeth Elstob’s scholarship.

The adulation poured out upon Miss Carter is an example of the interest in the capacities of women always latent in society, but always stronger in times when internal peace directs attention to the arts of civilization rather than the art of war. Tracts on the position of women had always sold well since Cornelius Agrippa’s time, but women’s achievements in the seventeenth century gave a new twist to the tracts of the succeeding age. The earlier tracts were written by men, but women were publishing their own views before the century was over. It was natural that journalists should exploit this situation and begin to write anonymous tracts, pretending to speak as women. The identity of ‘Sophia, a person of Quality’, who in 1739 wrote Woman not inferior to Man, has never been established, but it is unlikely that a woman wrote it1. On the title-page the author put a few lines from Rowe’s play The Fair Penitent, beginning:

‘How hard is the condition of our Sex

Thro’ every state of Life a Slave to Man’.

The argument of the tract was that woman should have equality of education and opportunity with man. Women should not be excluded from government, from public office, or the teaching of the sciences; ‘with regard, however, to warlike employments, it seems to be a disposition of Providence that custom has exempted us from them’2.

It seems unlikely that a woman who felt deeply about the exclusion of women from all professions would have written like the so-called Sophia. It is perhaps significant that the tract first appeared in the same year in which Miss Carter produced her popular translations from French and Italian. It enabled ‘Sophia’ to quote ‘an Eliza not more to be envied for the towering superiority of her genius and judgment, than honour’d for the use she makes of them’. The author declared ‘I shall forbear to characterize her; content to see the work already done to my hand, by that sex itself: and therefore refer my readers for a further account of this true Woman to what the Reverend Mr. Birch says of her in the History of the Works of the Learned: which is so much the more to be relied on as it comes from a Man’3. Surely such advertisement must have been inspired by Miss Carter’s publisher, Edward Cave. The appearance in 1751 of Beauty’s Triumph or the superiority of the Fair Sex invincibly proved strengthens the argument that ‘Sophia’ was a male journalist4. The book is in three parts, the first being a reprint, with a few additions, of ‘Sophia’s’ tract. The second part is an answer to ‘Sophia’ setting out The Natural Right of Men to Sovereignty over the other Sex. The third part is ‘Sophia’s’ rejoinder offering further proof that women are ‘superior in excellence to men’. The whole book is of a piece and its style, to the present writer, seems to betray the masculine author. No woman to whom the accepted superiority of man was a burning injustice would write coyly about ‘my fair partners in oppression’1.

In 1753 William Kenrick, who has been described as ‘the enemy of every decent and successful person’2, had the temerity to put out a nasty little tract described on the title-page as The Whole Duty of Woman, by a Lady, written at the desire of a noble lord3. He wrote in flowery language and separated what he had to say into twenty-four sections, each dealing with a different subject, such as Knowledge, Elegance, Modesty, Affectation and so on. ‘It is not for thee, O woman, to undergo the perils of the deep, to dig in the hollow mines of the earth, to trace the dark springs of science, or to number the thick stars of the heavens.

‘Let the kingdom rule itself, let the wise-men and the councellors enact laws and correct them: the policy of government is a hidden thing, like a well of water in the bottom of a deep pit.

‘Thy kingdom is thine own house, and thy government the care of thy family.

‘Let the laws of thy condition be thy study, and learn only to govern thyself and thy dependants’4. These pearls of wisdom are part of the section on knowledge. That a third edition of this tract was required in the year of its publication is a warning against assuming that the fulsome praise given to Miss Carter indicates a fundamental change in the attitude of men to women.

Miss Carter herself was always conscious of the inert mass of opinion hostile to women moving out of their domestic duties into a wider sphere. According to her nephew she never made any efforts to cultivate the society of men of letters largely because she felt ‘an extreme partiality for writers of her own sex. She was much inclined to believe, that women had not their proper station in society, and that their mental powers were not rated sufficiently high’. Nevertheless ‘she detested the principles displayed in Mrs. Woolstonecroft’s wild theory concerning the “Rights of Women”, and never wished to interfere with the privileges and occupations of the other sex, yet she thought that men exercised too arbitrary a power over them as too inferior to themselves’1. The attitude of mind set out in these sentences was shared by all the ladies who met at London parties and wrote each other long letters from their country homes. They were not revolutionaries, but they believed in the capacity of their own sex.

This attitude appears again in the writings of Hester Mulso, better known as Mrs. Chapone, who was born in 1727 at Twywall, Northamptonshire. Her early promise was checked by her mother’s jealousy, and it was not until 1750, when her mother was dead, that she was free to choose her own way of life. She made use of her new freedom to gain the acquaintance of Miss Carter, and of Samuel Richardson, with whom she corresponded at length. He liked and understood women and his successful novels owed much to the love-letters he had written for three young girls in Derby when he was a young man. At his house, Hester Mulso met a poor attorney and fell in love with him. He is chiefly remarkable because he was the son of Sally Chapone—the Sappho of Mrs. Delany’s youth—and became Hester Mulso’s husband. Their marriage was delayed for some six years because her father withheld his consent. Her letters to Richardson about the relationship between parents and children are forcibly expressed. It was not God, she argued, who made daughters more dependent on their parents than sons. ‘Custom, indeed, allows not the daughters of people of fashion to leave their father’s family to seek their own subsistence, and there is no way for them to gain a creditable livelihood, as gentlemen may. But amongst the lower ranks of people, daughters are as soon independent as sons. The girls and boys are alike sent out to provide for themselves’2. Before her marriage Hester Mulso carefully thought out and sent to Richardson a statement of her beliefs about the married state. She did not question the husband’s ‘divine right to the absolute obedience of his wife’, although she remarked with a touch of asperity ‘in many marriages the natural superiority in all mental excellencies, is evidently on the woman’s side’3. Her own married life was soon cut short by her husband’s death.

Hester Chapone won a high reputation among her contemporaries for her Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, which had been written for the benefit of her niece. Fifteen hundred copies of the first edition were sold out at once and a second edition was being set up within a year of publication. The absolute correctness of the advice made the book popular. Girls should consult their parents before giving a lover the least encouragement1. Mrs. Chapone advised her niece not to try to acquire the learned languages. ‘The danger of pedantry and presumption in a woman, of her exacting envy in one sex and jealousy in the other—of her exchanging the graces of imagination for the severity and preciseness of a scholar, would be, I own, sufficient to frighten me from the ambition of seeing my girl remarkable for learning. Such objections are perhaps still stronger with regard to the abstruse sciences’2. Mrs. Chapone urged her niece to be careful in her choice of friends. ‘Your equals in rank are most proper for intimacy, but to be sometimes among your superiors is in every way desirable and advantageous, unless it should inspire you with pride, or with the foolish desire of emulating their grandeur and expense. Above all avoid intimacy with those of low birth and education! nor think it a mark of humility to delight in such society; for it much oftener proceeds from the meanest kind of pride, that of being the head of the company, and seeing your companions subservient to you’3. If any married friend ‘encourages or tolerates the addresses of a lover … I can only say that, after proper remonstrances, you must immediately withdraw from all intimacy and confidence with her’4. The prudential morality of the Victorian age is already implicit in the writings of Mrs. Chapone.

It is a remarkable sign of the improvement in the education generally given to girls that from the ‘forties of the eighteenth century a continually increasing number of women won for themselves a modest place in the national memory by their intellectual achievements. Without considering such a giant in her own day as Hannah More, born in 1745, or such a best-selling novelist as Fanny Burney, her junior by seven years, it is easy to compile a list of remarkable women, born in widely separated parts of England, who in different ways illustrate this release of the female intellect. Before these women had time to prove their quality the Reverend John Duncombe had written, as part of his courtship of Susanna Highmore, a poem in praise of women called The Feminiad.5 Though an indifferent poem it deserves to be remembered for its excellent sentiments and the pleasure they gave to women.

‘To these weak strains, O thou ! the sex’s friend

And constant patron Richardson attend’

sang Duncombe. He praised his own love as Eugenia:

‘With lovely mien Eugenia now appears

The muse’s pupil from her earliest years’.

Susanna Highmore could turn verses, but she is best known as the artist who sketched the picture of Richardson reading Sir Charles Grandison to his friends in his grotto at North End, Hammersmith, with Hester Chapone sitting in the middle of the circle. Duncombe, although celebrating eminent women, declared

‘Nor mean we here to blame that father’s care

Who guards from learned wives his booby heir …

The wise themselves should with discretion chuse

Since letter’d nymphs their knowledge may abuse

And husbands oft experience to their cost

The prudent housewife in the scholar lost.’

Mrs. Cockburn’s collected works had recently been published by subscription and Duncombe’s father had taken a copy. His son described her as ‘Philosopher, Divine and Poet’. But with all his desire to praise women,

‘The modest muse a veil of pity throws

O’er Vice’s friends and Virtue’s female foes

Abashed she views the bold unblushing mien

Of modern Manley, Centlivre, and Behn,’

Duncombe did not subscribe to Ballard’s book, nor does he seem to have seen it.

Twenty years after The Feminiad appeared a Miss Mary Scott wrote a poem called The Female Advocate, which was ‘occasioned by reading Mr. Duncombe’s Feminead’1. In her dedicatory letter ‘To a Lady’ Mary Scott recalled how they had both often read Mr. Duncombe’s Feminiad with grateful pleasure, but regretting that ‘it was only on a small number of Female Geniuses that Gentleman bestowed the wreath of Fame’2. ‘Prompted by a most fervent zeal for their privileges’ Mary Scott therefore set out to supply verses celebrating other women deserving of renown. Like Duncombe she had not subscribed to Ballard’s book, but the women she wrote about are generally those whom Ballard also described. She began her researches with Katherine Parr and continued them into her own lifetime. Footnotes to the verses tell the reader something about each woman who is being praised. The poem represents much devoted work by a woman ‘in whom years of ill health have impaired every faculty of my mind’. Its interest lies in the author’s indignation at the limitations imposed on women’s education. Do not men, she asks, ‘regard the woman who suffers her faculties to rust in a state of listless indolence, with a more favourable eye, than her who engages in a dispassionate search for truth?’ Mary Scott believed ‘that it is a duty absolutely incumbent on every woman whom nature hath blest with talents, of what kind soever they may be, to improve them; and that is much oftener the case than it is usually supposed to be’1.

Among her own contemporaries Miss Scott found many women whose works she could praise. She even saw resemblances to Pope in the Essays in Prose and Verse by Miss Mary Jones, of Oxford:

‘Her wit so keen, her sentiments so true

Like him the charming maid, with skill refined

Hath pierced the deep recesses of the mind’2.

The most remarkable feature of Miss Jones’s book is a fifty-page list of subscribers; among them Miss Scott herself, described as of Barham, Kent3, and Mr. Christopher Smart, M.A., Fellow of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. It is unlikely that the great precursor of William Blake drew much satisfaction from the mild verses in which Miss Jones attributed human feelings to D’oman, her cat. But it was possible for Miss Scott to find two other men whom she could praise as ‘generous pleaders of the female cause’. One, whom she called Philander, was probably her own father. The other was Dr. Seward, Canon of Lichfield, who earned her commendation by the poem which he printed in Dodsley’s Miscellanies called The female right to Literature, in a Letter to a young Lady from Florence. He was the father of Anna Seward (1747–1809), who as a child was encouraged to write poetry by Erasmus Darwin. She spent her life at Lichfield and was able to supply Boswell with anecdotes of Dr. Johnson. She nursed her father through his slow decay, wrote poems on national occasions, corresponded with an ever-growing circle of friends and became to a younger generation ‘The Swan of Lichfield’1. The neglect of later generations has perhaps justified Horace Walpole’s condemnation of ‘the harmonious virgins’ of his day. But they deserve credit for trying to cultivate their modest gifts in an indifferent world.

Anna Letitia Aikin, better known as Mrs. Barbauld (1743–1825), is particularly interesting from her early environment. She was the daughter of John Aikin, who was a pupil of Philip Doddridge at Kibworth and succeeded him as head of the academy there. He married Jane Jennings, daughter of the founder of Kibworth and one of the girls whom Doddridge had thought of marrying. Anna was born at Kibworth, but her father left it to teach in the newly established dissenting academy at Warrington when she was fifteen. She was a clever and diligent girl, but her father was only with difficulty persuaded to teach her the ancient languages. Her brother encouraged her early attempts to write and persuaded her to print a volume of poems in 1773. She was greatly cheered when Mrs. Montagu wrote to her appreciatively about them. In the next year she married Rochemont Barbauld, who had been a student at the Warrington academy and had entered the Dissenting ministry. Mrs. Barbauld enjoyed teaching and helped her husband while he kept a school in Suffolk. They had no children of their own, but adopted a nephew for whom Mrs. Barbauld wrote Early Lessons for Children and published it in 1778. After Barbauld died his widow produced a fifty-volume edition of the best English novelists, with an historical introduction and biographies of each author. It is, perhaps, Anna Barbauld’s chief distinction that she carried far into the nineteenth century a living tradition of the Dissenting academies which arose in answer to the Great Ejection of 1662.

The inspiration of Mrs. Barbauld’s Early Lessons encouraged Mrs. Sarah Trimmer (1741–1810) to make a book of the early lessons she had given to her own children. An Easy introduction to the Knowledge of Nature appeared in 1782 with a sketch of Scripture History, which Mrs. Trimmer afterwards enlarged into a separate work. Mrs. Trimmer was the daughter of John Kirby, a Suffolk artist, who became clerk of the works at Kew Palace, a connection with court which was useful to his daughter. Her first fourteen years were spent at Ipswich where she attended a good school kept by a lady who had been cast off by her family because of ‘an imprudent marriage’1. When her parents moved to London they were accepted in the literary circle dominated by Dr. Johnson and Sarah was able on one occasion to produce a copy of Paradise Lost from her pocket for the settlement of a textual point disputed by the company. Sarah married when she was twenty-one and settled with her husband at Brentford. She educated her six daughters entirely herself and directed the education of her six sons, except for their classical studies. She said herself that in those years she ‘could find but little leisure for reading; the needle was my principal occupation when I was not nursing or teaching’2. As her elder children grew up Mrs. Trimmer anticipated the methods afterwards most used in the education of the masses by allowing the older children to instruct the younger in their own newly acquired knowledge. She was in this way ‘at length released from every part of education, except casual advice or admonition’3.

In 1785 Mrs. Trimmer began to keep a journal after reading Dr. Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations. For her own improvement she examined her behaviour minutely and meditated on God and her soul. A modern reader may be allowed to regret that she omitted so much about the ordinary business of her life. The Vicar of Ealing, Mr. Sturgess, was responsible for drawing Mrs. Trimmer’s attention to the work of Robert Raikes at Gloucester, where he had started his first Sunday-school in 1780. Mrs. Trimmer’s long practice in teaching her own children and her pity for the ignorance of the poor combined to make her welcome the opportunity and Sunday-schools were opened at Brentford on 18 June 1786. ‘My attendance at them’, she wrote on 2 July, ‘prevented the continuing of my Journal. It is a most interesting employment to assist in instructing the poor children. To see them hunger after spiritual food,—who would not exert his best endeavours for their benefit’4. On 15 August she noted ‘The Sunday-schools engross all the time I used to spend on my Journal’5. In November of the same year Queen Charlotte consulted Mrs. Trimmer about establishing Sunday-schools at Windsor and as a result of this interview Mrs. Trimmer wrote a guide for those who wished to undertake such work, entitled The Œconomy of Charity.

Mrs. Trimmer’s activities soon became widely known and in 1786 Mrs. Denward, a charitable gentlewoman who was looking for an almoner, wrote to Elizabeth Carter and asked to be introduced to Mrs. Trimmer1. At Mrs. Denward’s suggestion Mrs. Trimmer started a School of Industry at Brentford. In November 1786 Mrs. Denward wrote saying, ‘I met the other day with an account in a newspaper, of a spinning wheel so constructed that eighteen small children might spin at the same time, which twists the thread of itself, at the pleasure of each spinstress. It was invented about twenty years ago … it cost at first only five pounds and is very seldom out of repair; now dearest Madam, you are so prone to do good, that I will make no apology, but wish you to get one of them, and present it as your own gift to the poor of your parish. I think it will be of infinite service, as it will inure them early in life to industry. I have therefore taken the liberty of enclosing a little draft to purchase the spinning wheel’2. It was also at Mrs. Denward’s suggestion that Mrs. Trimmer wrote a story called The Two Farmers, to persuade the children of the poor to be kinder to animals, and introduced descriptions of animals into her Charity School Spelling Book. Many of Mrs. Trimmer’s books remained for years on the list of works recommended by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. The Story of the Robins remained popular almost to the present generation.

Little seems known of Mr. Trimmer, though his illnesses and recoveries are mentioned in his wife’s journal. He helped the education of his family by gathering the children together in the evening and setting one of them to read aloud3. On 22 May 1792 Mrs. Trimmer wrote in her journal, ‘This day the silent tomb is closed upon the remains of my dear departed husband’4. Mr. Sturgess, writing from St. Mary’s Vicarage at Reading, recommended to her ‘immediate perusal the affectionate letter of the pious Mrs. Doddridge to her children’ informing them of Philip Doddridge’s death at Lisbon.5 Hannah More delayed her condolences until August ‘rather out of tenderness and apprehension, than from unkindness and neglect’6. Although the recorded facts of Mrs. Trimmer’s life show that she was more than competent to manage her own affairs she had no sympathy with the views of Mary Wollstonecraft, of whom she spoke as ‘a woman of extraordinary abilities’, adding ‘I cannot help thinking they might be employed to more advantage to society’. In regard to the Rights of Woman she declared ‘I found so much happiness in having a husband to assist me in forming a proper judgment and in taking upon him the chief labour of providing for a family, that I never wished for a further degree of liberty or consequence than I enjoyed’1

Mary Wollstonecraft and Sarah Trimmer belonged to different worlds of thought and action. Mrs. Trimmer is important in social history because of the part she played in stemming the revolutionary forces represented by Mary Wollstonecraft. The labours of Mrs. Trimmer in the cause of popular education, her intercourse with influential persons, and the controversies in which she was involved were all inspired by a determination that the teaching of the children of the poor must be based on religion interpreted by the principles of the Church of England. Her example was an encouragement to all who wished that popular education, however widely it might be extended, should still be controlled by the framework of thought and organization inherited from the Anglican

A writer of a different quality from these literary ladies of the eighteenth century, with an independent mind denied to Mrs. Trimmer, is Mrs. Catharine Cappe (1744–1821), who has received less than her due both from her contemporaries and from historians of literature. Her memoirs, written in her old age and published after her death by the pious care of her stepdaughter, form a document of the first importance for the lives of ordinary people in the north of England. They also indicate the mental activity possible in this age to a woman who had received no education of any formal sort2. Her account of rustic society at Long Preston in Craven, where she was born, has already been quoted3. While Catharine was still a girl her father accepted the living of Catterick and moved his family there. Although she was brought up in the Church of England Catherine Harrison comes into the story of the Dissenting academies, for her husband, Newcome Cappe, had been educated for the Dissenting ministry for one year under Aikin at Kibworth and for three years under Doddridge at Northampton. In her old age Mrs. Cappe herself was largely responsible for arranging the removal of the Manchester academy to York.

Her early education was neglected, for her father ‘had imbibed some of the prejudices of that day, in respect to the cultivation of the female mind’1. He spent fruitless hours teaching his son, who had also the advantage of going to Cambridge, whereas Catharine’s teaching was left to a female dependant of the family. ‘Far from recommending or pointing out to me’, she wrote, ‘any little plan of mental cultivation he frequently insinuated incidentally in conversation, that domestic occupations and household duties, were the proper province of women. This, indeed, I was ready to admit, but I would have added, if I could have taken courage, “Surely not exclusively”.’2 When she was twelve Catharine was sent to a school in York, where her schoolfellows mocked at her because her father did not keep a coach, her parents had only four servants, and her mother had not supplied her with ‘a gauze suit of linen’3.

Catharine’s two ‘worthy aunts’ lived in York and continually warned her against spending her time reading. ‘They never knew it come to any good’, was their argument, for they had ‘a great horror of learned ladies’4. When Catharine’s father died his widow and daughter were left poorly off and the follies of Catharine’s brother made their position worse. She thought of keeping a school in York, but her aunts ‘could not endure the thought that a niece of theirs, who was well known to have been in the habit of associating with some of the first families, in the city where they lived, should engage in an undertaking, which in their estimation, would remove her from the rank of a gentlewoman’5. It is curious that this should have been felt in York while Hannah More and her four sisters were making a fortune out of an efficient girls’ school at Bristol. But they had no position to lose, whereas Catharine Harrison was descended on her mother’s side from the younger son of a baronet and her maiden aunts could not forget it. Catharine’s cousin was Sir Roland Winn, of Nostell Park.

Catharine Harrison’s way of life was determined by her admiration for Theophilus Lindsey, her father’s successor at Catterick. His pastoral work was in advance of his time. Before Robert Raikes had begun his work at Gloucester, Lindsey was holding a Sunday-school at Catterick, which Catharine Harrison imitated at Bedales in the back kitchen of the cottage in which she and her mother lived. But in 1773, after some four years of mental struggle, Lindsey resigned the living of Catterick to become an independent Unitarian minister1. It was an heroic decision, for his whole future would depend on his success in attracting a congregation to the preacher of an unfashionable doctrine which had no emotional appeal. When he left Catterick he was uncertain whether to go to Bristol or to London. His early friendship with Lady Elizabeth Hastings, in whose house he had spent his holidays from school, and his consequent acquaintance with Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, may have prepared the way for his change of opinion, although in becoming a Unitarian he took a path which each of these ladies would certainly have condemned2. Catharine Harrison, after thinking out the whole question for herself, followed him out of the Church of England.

For some twenty years, Catharine Harrison engaged herself in every form of charitable work open to the unmarried daughter of a widow of narrow means. For a time, she and her mother lived in a mining village, where she established a Female Benefit Club for the wives and daughters of the colliers. In 1782 they moved to York, where Catharine helped to found a similar association—the first of its kind in the city. She brought into being a spinning school for the employment of children who had been working in a rope factory, and she persuaded the governors of the Grey-coat School for Girls to improve the regulations under which it was managed. Scarcely a day passed on which she did not visit one or other of these schools. On coming to York, she joined a Unitarian congregation under the Rev. Newcome Cappe, a leader in the varied activities which made York at that time a local capital. In 1788 she and Newcome Cappe were married. Mr. Cappe’s health had already begun to decline. The first of a series of strokes came on him in 1791 and he died in 1800. Mrs. Cappe helped him to prepare for the press his sermons on the providence and government of God, which appeared in 1795. In her widowhood she brought out more of her husband’s sermons and wrote a memoir of his life to serve as Preface. Her interest in charity schools remained as keen as ever, and she published an account of her own experiences to help others in the work. Three years before her death she wrote a pamphlet advocating the appointment of female visitors to women confined in public hospitals and asylums for the insane. To the end of her life, every movement for the benefit of helpless persons, from chimney boys to pauper lunatics, received her warm and most efficient support.

Mrs. Cappe kept an almost childlike simplicity and directness of outlook which enabled her to express herself with clarity. She felt no envy of those who escaped financial difficulties and her own never embittered her. When she wrote her memoirs in old age she made a particular effort to describe the people she had met in order that others might share with her the lessons of her experience. The pages of her autobiography contain vignettes of many girls and women, whose careers always show virtue triumphant and vice or indifference bringing its due reward. The lives of two sisters who were at school with her become in her hands a cautionary tale. One of them thought of nothing but dressing finely and making conquests. At one time she could count twenty admirers, but to get away from an uncomfortable home she married ‘a dignitary of the Church, having become such by the interest of his near connexions; for in himself he was a very poor creature in every respect, but good tempered’. They lived in a secluded part of the country and saw few people. She made no effort to amuse her husband, but spoiled her only son, who ‘grew up insolent and tyrannical, became early the slave of depraved appetite and passion, and died a victim to disease, brought on by his vices, at the age of nineteen or twenty. The unhappy father did not long survive him’. His widow married a man of whom she knew nothing. He would never settle anywhere, and she led a wretched wandering life. The other sister, who had always been industrious, married happily and had a large family. She retained her habits of industry to the end, constantly helping people poorer than herself. ‘She was attended most assiduously and affectionately by her exemplary daughter, and is most deeply lamented by her friends, and by all the poor in the village where she resided’1.

Like other women of her generation, Mrs. Cappe accepted the established relationship between the sexes without any apparent repining. She would certainly have agreed with Miss Scott that women ought to develop their talents, and her experience had brought her into contact with many women of ability, engaged in charitable works in York and elsewhere in the north. She made no comment on, and had probably never read, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman. Nor were her thoughts stirred by the French Revolution. Like many other excellent women she lived from day to day doing the work to her hand to the best of her abilities. Her religion was her overriding interest. Her adoption of the Unitarian creed had carried her away from the mental region in which most of her contemporaries lived happily. It limited her range of friends, but it did not limit her capacity for social service. Unlike Hannah More, she had never attempted to enter the fashionable world of London or tried her hand at popular or didactic writing. Hannah More was an Evangelical churchwoman in close touch with many influential friends, but in their attitude to the education of the poor, in their hatred of the slave trade, and in their sense of social responsibility Catharine Cappe and Hannah More were of one mind.

They both lived on into a new age in which their eighteenth-century attitude to politics and religion was out of date. The woman born before 1750 who challenged most directly the prevalent conceptions of her time died before the mass of Englishmen had felt the full impact of the revolutionary ideas which stemmed from France. Catharine Macaulay (1731–91) is described in the Dictionary of National Biography as ‘historian and controversialist’, a description which could have been given to no Englishwoman before her. She was the first woman to attempt the writing of history on a large scale, based on materials, in manuscript as well as in print. Over a period of twenty years she published eight massive volumes covering the history of England from the accession of James I to the coming of the Hanoverian kings. Her narrative is supported with ample footnotes, giving the sources of her information and extracts from them. A century later, Lecky, writing with supreme impartiality a history of the age in which she lived, described her as ‘the ablest writer of the New Radical School’1. In her Preface to the first volume she set out her reasons ‘for undertaking a subject which has already been treated of by several ingenious and learned men. From my early youth I have read with delight those histories which exhibit liberty in its most exalted state, the annals of the Roman and Greek republics. Studies like these excite that natural love of freedom which lies latent in the breast of every rational being, till it is nipped by the frost of prejudice, or blasted by the influence of vice’2. To her, ‘liberty became the object of a secondary worship’ and she determined to write a history of England in which justice should be done ‘to the memory of our illustrious ancestors, … still having an eye to public liberty, the standard by which I have endeavoured to measure the virtue of those characters which are treated of in this history’1.

Catharine Macaulay’s republican attitude is sufficiently indicated by her constant reference to Cromwell as a ‘usurper’2 and her description of Ludlow as ‘vigilant and sagacious’ and ‘brave and honest’3. She shared this outlook with her brother John Sawbridge, of Olantigh Park in Wye, Kent, who figured on the popular side in the controversy between John Wilkes and the Government, and was described by a contemporary memoir writer as ‘a stern republican’4. A description of Catharine Sawbridge at the age of twenty-six is preserved in a letter to Catherine Talbot from Elizabeth Carter who met at Canterbury ‘a very fine lady, who after curtseying to me for several years past with more civility than I had any title to, and with much more than fine ladies usually show to such awkward-looking folks as me, did me the honour this year to take to me mightily by way of conversation, which she introduced by subscribing in a very handsome manner to me’ (that is, Epictetus), ‘and railing very heartily at the Stoics. She is a very sensible and agreeable woman, and much more deeply learned than beseems a fine lady; but between the Spartan Laws, the Roman politics, the philosophy of Epicurus, and the wit of St. Evremond, she seems to have formed a most extraordinary system’. Miss Carter concluded that she would have hesitated to hold such a conversation at a party ‘with a professed philosopher or scholar, but as it was with a fine fashionable well-dressed lady, whose train was longer than anybody’s train, I had no manner of scruple’5. It is a pleasant impression of the first English woman to write history.

When she was twenty-nine in 1760 Catharine Sawbridge married Dr. Macaulay, a Scottish doctor, who was a friend of Smollett and had helped him in his financial difficulties. The first volume of her history, which covered the years 1603 to 1628, appeared in 1763 and showed that she had a contemporary purpose in writing. ‘Whosoever attempts to remove the limitations necessary to render monarchy consistent with liberty’, she wrote, ‘are rebels in the worst sense; rebels to the laws of their country, the law of nature, the law of reason, and the law of God. Can there be such men? was I to put the question to my own heart, it would answer that it was impossible there should be such. But the annals of this country have a shameful tale to tell, that such a faction has ever existed in this state, from the earliest period of our present constitution. This faction has not only prevented the establishing any regular system to preserve or improve our liberties; but lies at this time in wait for the first opportunity that the imperfections of this government may give them, to destroy those rights, which have been purchased by the toil and blood of the most exalted individuals that have ever adorned humanity’1. Such words brought her under attack as a political writer, and in the eighteenth century no holds were barred.

Dr. Macaulay died in 1766, the year in which his wife published her second volume. The last volume appeared in 1783. Despite party criticism she rapidly attained a high reputation. In 1774 Mary Scott addressed her thus:

But thou Macaulay, say, canst thou excuse

The fond presumption of a youthful Muse?

A Muse, that, raptured with thy growing fame,

Wishes (at least) to celebrate thy name;

A name to every son of freedom dear,

Which patriots yet unborn shall long revere’2.

In the year this poem appeared Mrs. Macaulay moved to Bath. There she became ‘the centre of a little circle of politicians, to whom she was accustomed to give lessons on general politics and constitutional history’3. Dr. Wilson, the non-resident rector of St. Stephen’s, Walbrook, placed his house4 and library in Alfred Street at Mrs. Macaulay’s disposal. He even set up a white marble statue of her in the character of History within the altar-rails of his London church. On 2 April 1777 he organized a magnificent birthday party at which six odes written in her praise were ‘read with great propriety and expression’5. The day was ‘ushered in by the ringing of bells and other public demonstrations of joy’. ‘Mrs. Macaulay, very elegantly dressed, was seated in a conspicuous, elevated situation in front of the company’. After the ‘poetic offerings’ Dr. Wilson presented her with a gold medal struck in Queen Anne’s reign and her doctor presented her with a copy of his own works with a dedication to her in which he advertised his remarkable success in curing her of a serious illness. At the conclusion of ‘these solemnities’, wines were served and Mrs. Macaulay moved about among the company until nine o’clock when ‘the doors of another apartment were thrown open, in which sideboards were ranged round, and covered in a sumptuous manner, with syllabubs, jellies, creams, and ices, wines, cakes, and a variety of dry and fresh fruits, particularly grapes and pineapples’1. The story of this happy day was printed and sold at Bath for the benefit of a distressed clergyman ‘in the eastern counties’, who ‘has had fifteen children, eight of which are still living and mostly small’2.

Mrs. Macaulay visited Paris in 1775 and again in 1777 and was received with great honour by the leading men and women of the day. Her marriage in December 1778 to William Graham, a younger brother of her doctor, shocked her friends and delighted her enemies, for he was only twenty-one and not half her age. Dr. Wilson removed her statue from his church and declared that he would hold Alfred House against her, although he had to admit that he had given it to her. Mrs. Macaulay Graham, as she was thereafter known, gave up her home in Bath and settled with her husband at Binfield, Berkshire. Her History, despite its length, by no means absorbed all her energies. She found time in 1769 to comment on Hobbes’s Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society, and to draft ‘a short sketch of a democratical form of Government’ for the benefit of Pasquale Paoli and the republicans of Corsica3. In 1770 she replied to Burke’s Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, and in 1774 she wrote A modest Plea for the property of Copyright. Her sympathies were naturally with the colonists in the War of American Independence, and in 1784 she sailed for America to see for herself the new republican state. She and her husband spent ten days with George Washington in 1785, and she corresponded with him until her death. Washington’s careful letters show that to him she represented radical opinion in England. In reply to a letter congratulating him on his achievements, Washington set out at length his own diffidence and his hopes for the future happiness of his country. ‘There is scarcely any part of my conduct’, he wrote from New York on 9 January 1790, ‘which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent. Under such a view of the duties inherent in my arduous office, I could not but feel a diffidence in myself on the one hand; and an anxiety for the Community that every new arrangement should be made in the best possible manner on the other’. Washington concluded his long letter: ‘Mrs. Washington is well and desires her compliments may be presented to you. We wish the happiness of your fireside, as we also long to enjoy that of our own at Mount Vernon. Our wishes, you know, were limited; and I think that our plans of living will now be deemed reasonable by the considerate part of our species. Her wishes coincide with my own as to simplicity of dress, and everything which can tend to support propriety of character without partaking of the follies of luxury and ostentation. I am, with great regard, Madam, Your most obedient and humble servant Geo. Washington’1. It would seem that Catharine Macaulay had been advocating the antique simplicity of Roman manners to her illustrious host.

It may perhaps be argued that in approaching history as a lover of liberty to point a moral to her own generation Catharine Macaulay forgot that the true historian should come to his subject with a mind cleared from every prejudice, even in favour of virtue. But such impartiality was impossible to an eighteenth-century writer about events almost within living memory. If the title of historian is denied to Catharine Macaulay on this account, her contemporaries and successors must lose it too. Mary Wollstonecraft, indicating to younger women the path to the new age, saw Mrs. Macaulay as ‘the woman of the greatest abilities that this country has ever produced’, and thought it shocking that her death had passed almost without notice. She rightly pointed out that in Mrs. Macaulay’s style of writing ‘no sex appears, for it is like the sense it conveys, strong and clear. I will not call hers’, she continues, ‘a masculine understanding, because I admit not of such an arrogant assumption of reason; but I contend that it was a sound one, and that her judgment, the matured fruit of profound thinking, was a proof that a woman can acquire judgment in the full extent of the word’1. With this opinion on the potentialities of women, expressed by the first of modern feminists, the nineteenth century was to find good reason to agree. But Catharine Macaulay’s successors quickly passed beyond the principles of eighteenth-century radicalism for which she had stood, and within a generation of her death she had become little more than a half-remembered name. In Binfield Church a marble memorial to Catharine Macaulay Graham, inscribed moerens conjux posuit, bears a medallion of her head, showing strong clear features and thick rippling hair. Above her head, Minerva’s owl looks out into the dark church.

1 Ed. with notes by James Upton; reissued in 1743.

2 The Diary of Dudley Ryder (1715–16), ed. William Matthews, London, 1939, p. 84.

1 The Diary of Dudley Ryder, quoted in the Introduction by the editor, p. 20.

2 Ibid., pp. 545.

3 The Correspondence and Diary of Philip Doddridge, ed. John Doddridge Humphries, London, 1829.

1 Doddridge, vol. i, pp. 802, 89.

2 Ibid., pp. 4952.

3 Ibid., pp. 257, 341 and 420.

4 Ibid., vol. iii, p. 34.

5 Ibid., p. 35.

6 Ibid., vol. i, p. 268.

7 Ibid., vol. ii, pp. 1078.

1 Doddridge, vol. ii, pp. 1467.

2 Ibid., vol. i, p. 185.

3 Ibid., p. 375.

1 Doddridge, vol. ii, pp. 2528.

2 Ibid., pp. 2489.

3 Ibid., vol. i, p. 47.

4 Ibid., vol. v, p. 79.

1 Doddridge, vol. v, pp. 1846.

2 Ibid., vol. iv, pp. 3301.

3 See above, p. 225.

4 Mrs. Delany, vol. ii, p. 28.

5 Ibid., p. 44.

6 Letters and Works, vol. i, p. 391.

1 Doddridge, vol. iv, p. 530.

2 Ibid., vol. v, p. 38.

3 Ibid., vol. iv, p. 328 n.

1 W. Wilson, History of the Dissenting Churches of London, London, 1810, vol. iii, pp. 11821.

2 E. Shirley, Stemmata Shirleiana, 2nd ed., 1873, pp. 21719.

1 Montagu Pennington, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, London, 1807, pp. 201.

1 A series of Letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot, ed. Montagu Pennington, London, 1809, vol. i, pp. 21819.

2 Memoirs, p. 71.

1 Memoirs, pp. 11215.

1 Memoirs, p. 140.

2 Ibid., p. 141.

3 Loc. cit.

4 Ibid., p. 274.

1 Memoirs, p. 110.

2 Carter—Talbot letters, vol. iii, p. 19.

3 Ibid, p. 37.

4 Memoirs, p. 153.

1 Memoirs, p. 272.

2 E. J. Climenson, Elizabeth Montagu, the Queen of the Blue-stockings, London, 1906, vol. ii, pp. 2356.

3 Letters of Mary Lepel, Lady Hervey, p. 308.

4 Memoirs, pp. 2637.

1 Memoirs, p. 281.

1 London, for John Hawkins, price one shilling.

2 Woman not inferior to Man, p. 55.

3 Ibid., p. 47.

4 London, for J. Robinson.

1 A similar work to ‘Sophia’ is Female Rights Vindicated; or the Equality of the Sexes morally and physically proved, by a Lady, London, 1758. This appeared again in 1780 under a new title Female Restoration, by a moral and physical vindication of Female Talents, by a Lady, with no indication that it was merely a reprint of an earlier tract. Without saying dogmatically that these tracts are written by a man, the present writer much suspects they were.

2 Dictionary of National Biography.

3 London, for R. Baldwin.

4 Ibid., pp. 1718.

1 Memoirs, p. 303.

2 Bluestocking Letters, ed. R. Brimley Johnson, London, 1926, p. 193.

3 Ibid., pp. 1978.

1 Letters on the improvement of the mind addressed to a Lady, London, 1810, p. 96.

2 Ibid., pp. 1567.

3 Ibid., p. 81.

4 Ibid., pp. 901.

5 London, 1754, price one shilling. The poem is generally quoted as The Feminead, but in the copy I have used the word is spelt Feminiad.

1 For Joseph Johnson, London, 1774, price two shillings.

2 Ibid., p. v.

1 The Female Advocate, p. viii.

2 Ibid., p. 19.

3 She dated the Preface to The Female Advocate at Milborne Port, 10 May 1774.

1 A good impression of Miss Seward can be gained from The Swan of Lichfield, being a Selection from the Correspondence of Anna Seward, ed. Hesketh Pearson, London, 1936.

1 Some Account of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Trimmer, London, 1814, vol. i, p. 2.

2 Ibid., p. 16.

3 Ibid., p. 15.

4 Ibid., p. 111,

5 Ibid., p. 112,

1 Some Account of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Trimmer, p. 153.

2 Ibid., p. 169.

3 Ibid., p. 16.

4 Ibid., p. 301.

5 Ibid., p. 353.

6 Ibid., p. 356.

1 Some Account of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Trimmer, p. 355.

2 Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Catharine Cappe, written by herself, 2nd ed., London, 1823; with a portrait. First published in 1822. A list of Mrs. Cappe’s writings is printed at the end of the book.

3 Above, pp. 11314.

1 Mrs. Cappe’s Memoirs, p. 19.

2 Ibid., p. 55.

3 Ibid., p. 46.

4 Ibid., p. 53.

5 Ibid., pp. 1968.

1 The Apology of Theophilus Lindsey, M.A., on resigning the Vicarage of Catterick, Yorkshire, London, for J. Johnson, 1774, is a book of 508 pages.

2 Mrs. Cappe’s Memoirs, p. 116.

1 Mrs. Cappe’s Memoirs, pp. 5764.

1 W. E. H. Lecky, The History of England in the Eighteenth Century, 3rd ed., London, 1883–90, vol. iii, p. 256.

2 Catharine Macaulay, The History of England from the accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line, London, 1763, vol. i, p. vii.

1 The History of England from the accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line, pp. vii and ix.

2 Ibid., e.g. vol. v, p. 190.

3 Ibid., vol. v, pp. 275,159. The owner of the manuscript of Mrs. Hutchinson’s life of her husband had been often solicited for permission to publish it ‘particularly by Mrs. Catharine Macaulay’. Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. C. H. Firth, p. ix.

4 Wraxall, Memoirs, vol. i, p. 105.

5 Carter—Talbot Letters, vol. ii, pp. 2601.

1 Mrs. Macaulay’s History, vol. i, p. xi.

2 The Female Advocate, p. 27.

3 Joseph Hunter, The Connection of Bath with the Literature and Science of England, London, 1853, p. 57.

4 Alfred House, so called from the bust of King Alfred still to be seen over the door in Joseph Hunter’s time. Ibid., p. 56.

5 Six Odes presented to the justly-celebrated Historian Mrs. Catharine Macaulay on her Birthday, and publicly read to a polite and brilliant Audience, Assembled April the second, at Alfred House, Bath, to congratulate that Lady on the happy Occasion. Bath, price one shilling and sixpence.

1 Six Odes presented to the justly-celebrated Historian Mrs. Catharine Macaulay, pp. vii—xv.

2 From the title-page.

3 Loose Remarks on certain positions to be found in Mr. Hobbes’ Philosophical Rudiments …, 2nd ed., 1769.

1 Notes and Queries, 5th series, vol. ix, Jan.-June 1878, pp. 421–2.

1 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 3rd ed., London, 1796, p. 235.

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