Material Enlightenment : Women Writers and the Science of Mind, 1770-1830

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Material Enlightenment

Studies in the Eighteenth Century ISSN: 2398–9904 This major series from Boydell & Brewer, published in association with the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, aims to bring into fruitful dialogue the different disciplines involved in all aspects of the study of the long eighteenth century (c. 1660–1820). It publishes innovative volumes, singly or co-authored, on any topic in history, science, music, literature and the visual arts in any area of the world in the long eighteenth century and particularly encourages proposals that explore links among the disciplines, and which aim to develop new cross-disciplinary fields of enquiry. Series editors: Ros Ballaster, University of Oxford, UK; Matthew Grenby, Newcastle University, UK; Robert D. Hume, Penn State University, USA; Mark Knights, University of Warwick, UK; Renaud Morieux, University of Cambridge, UK.

Material Enlightenment Women Writers and the Science of Mind, 1770–1830

Joanna Wharton

T H E B OYD E L L P R E S S Published in association with

© Joanna Wharton 2018 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Joanna Wharton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2018 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978 1 78327 295 2 The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate This publication is printed on acid-free paper Typeset in Warnock Pro by Sparks—www.sparkspublishing.com

To D. M. W.

Contents List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Abbreviations

xi

Introduction 1 ‘Things themselves’: Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Lessons and Hymns 2 3

Honora Edgeworth and the ‘experimental science’ of education

1 31 73

Profession and occlusion: Hannah More’s ‘vital Christianity’ 113

4 Clearing out the ‘rubbish’: Elizabeth Hamilton’s domestic philosophy 161 5

‘The spirit of industry’: Maria Edgeworth’s object lessons 197

Afterword

231

Bibliography

237

Index

269

Illlustrations Figure 1. ‘May Foster’s House’. Doll’s house, c. 1800. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Figure 2. Detail of ‘May Foster’s House’. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Figure 3. ‘Honora Edgeworth ob. 1780’. Portrait medallion of Honora Sneyd Edgeworth, Jasper ware, by Josiah Wedgwood and Sons, c. 1780. 7 × 5.7 cm.© Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 82 Figure 4. Serena. Print depicting a young woman, seated and reading a book by candlelight. Mezzotint by John Raphael Smith after George Romney, 1782. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 85 Figure 5. Urn to John Locke, Barley Wood, Somerset.

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Figure 6. The Edgeworth Family by Adam Buck. Chalk, watercolour and pastel on paper, 1787. Estate of Michael Butler; photograph © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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Figure 7. Pencil drawing in ‘On the Education of the Poor’. Page of a notebook belonging to Maria Edgeworth, c. 1800. Edgeworth Papers, MS. Eng. misc. e. 1461, fol. 43v, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

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Figure 8. ‘The Reception of the Diplomatique and his Suite, at the Court of Pekin’ by James Gillray, published by Hannah Humphrey. Hand-coloured etching, published 14 September 1792. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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The author and publishers are grateful to all the institutions and individuals listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publishers will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

Acknowledgements This book is the product of doctoral and postdoctoral research undertaken, for the most part, at the University of York’s Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies. I wish to thank all those at the Centre who have provided inspiration, commentary and conviviality over the years. I am especially grateful to my Ph.D. supervisor, Harriet Guest, for her invaluable guidance and encouragement; to Emma Major for her perceptive readings of draft chapters and for the coffees that buoyed me up in the final months of writing; and to Jon Mee, for being as generous with knowledge as he is unsparing with puns. Further sincere thanks to John Barrell, Clare Bond, Mary Fairclough, Kevin Gilmartin, Mark Jenner, Catriona Kennedy, Jihee Kim, Jane Rendall, Deborah Russell, Millie Schurch, Brittany Scowcroft and Jim Watt. I also wish to thank my new colleagues at Lichtenberg-Kolleg, the Göttingen Institute of Advanced Study, where I completed revisions to the manuscript. This study would not have been possible without the assistance of staff at William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, The Huntington Library, Chawton House Library, the Bodleian Library, the National Library of Ireland and Dr Williams’s Library. Numerous members of the wider academic community have generously shared their time and expertise; my particular thanks to Stephen Bygrave, J. R. R. Christie, Aileen Douglas, Jeremy Davies, David Higgins, Richard De Ritter, Gillian Russell, Sharon Ruston and Kathryn Sutherland. Susan Manly has been a wonderful correspondent on all things Edgeworth, and I am grateful for her help and encouragement. I remain thankful to William McCarthy for nurturing my interest in Barbauld in the early days of my Ph.D. The archival research that went into this book was assisted by a ClarkHuntington Joint Bibliographical Fellowship, a visiting fellowship at the Leeds Humanities Research Institute, and a joint award from the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Bodleian Library. A visiting fellowship at Chawton House came at a crucial time; the Library’s collection of eighteenth-century children’s books and conversation with Grace Harvey, Mary Ann Myers, Jennifer Louise Mueller and Cliona O’Sullivan equally helped bring things together. I am extremely grateful to Mari Shullaw at Boydell & Brewer and the anonymous readers of my Ph.D. thesis and book manuscript for their helpful suggestions and constructive criticism.

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A final warm thanks to friends at Café Concerto; to Harry Smallwood, Katie Martin, Sophie Coulombeau, Rich Hardiman, Ruth Scobie, Adam Perchard, Azeem Zakria, Jeremy Ruston, Katie Markham, Annie Ikpa and Frank Brennand; to Harrie Neal, for her patience; and to George Wharton, Olivia Price Walker and Kate Nicholas, for ‘Love and Joy, and friendly Mirth’. My deepest gratitude goes to my mother, Ruth Wharton, for giving inspiration and support in equal measure. This book is dedicated to the memory of Dorothy Wharton, collector of minerals. Sections of Chapter 1 appear in ‘Inscribing on the Mind: Anna Letitia Barbauld’s “Sensible Objects”’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (December 2012), 535–50; and ‘“The Things Themselves”: Sensory Images in Lessons for Children and Hymns in Prose’, in Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives, edited by William McCarthy and Olivia Murphy (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 107–26.

Abbreviations ALB

Anna Letitia Barbauld

ALBVE Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment by William McCarthy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) EPBL

Edgeworth Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Department of Special Collections

EPNLI Edgeworth Papers, National Library of Ireland, Dublin, Department of Manuscripts H

Helen: A Tale, by Maria Edgeworth, 3 vols., Vol. 1 (London: Richard Bentley, 1834)

HE

Honora Edgeworth

NLI

National Library of Ireland

PE

Practical Education by Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth (London: J. Johnson, 1798)

RLE

Richard Lovell Edgeworth

SPP

Selected Poetry and Prose by Anna Letitia Barbauld, edited by William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Ontario: Broadview, 2002)

Introduction I want you to propose a metaphysical question to your Society, which Mr. B. and I have had great debates upon; and I want to know your opinion and my sister’s. It is this: If you were now told that in a future state of existence you should be entirely deprived of your consciousness, so as not to be sensible you were the same being who existed here, – should you, or should you not, be now interested in your future happiness or misery? or, in other words, is continued consciousness the essence of identity?1

T

he conundrum presented by Anna Letitia Barbauld is familiar in more than one sense. Writing from her home in Hampstead to her brother, Dr John Aikin, living over 100 miles distant in Great Yarmouth, Barbauld encourages enactment of philosophical debate outside of, within and between marital households. In her letter and through the epistolary act itself, she inscribes associations from one home to another, as well as to her brother’s Society, drawing imagined and material links between domestic spaces of exchange and a more formal and typically male space for deliberation. This is not to suggest that Barbauld was excluded from debate in similar social environments; for one thing, she regularly participated in vigorous intellectual conversation at the dinner parties of her (by that time) radical publisher, Joseph Johnson. Nor was Barbauld’s philosophical thought confined to private correspondence; quite the reverse, the enthusiasm for Enlightenment debate she demonstrates in her letter informed and spurred on her poetry and writing for children, and her ideas are boldly advanced in her political pamphlets and essays. The letter instead conveys her sense of inclusivity in sociable exchange, something she sees as inherent to the human condition. As she put it in her Remarks on Mr Gilbert Wakefield’s Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship

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Barbauld to Aikin, 1791, The Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld: with a Memoir, ed. Lucy Aikin (London: Longman, 1825), 2: 160.

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(1792), people are ‘prone … to associate together, and communicate the electric fire of correspondent feeling’.2 But if this strikingly precise formulation of contemporary scientific and technological thinking helps us to understand the proximity, for Barbauld, of public and social association, her letter to Aikin signals the tensions, fractures and collisions within and between spheres of debate. Barbauld’s ‘metaphysical question’ has a particular connection to her Dissenting circle, a social network that was distinctly, and in some ways perhaps paradigmatically, associational. It hinged on John Locke’s notion of personal identity as the ‘same continued consciousness’,3 a topic that had more recently been debated in the published correspondence of Joseph Priestley and Richard Price, prominent radical Unitarians with close ties to the Aikin–Barbauld circle. Priestley’s position in A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism and Philosophical Necessity (1777) was theologically contentious. He believed human beings to be wholly material, and held that after death the activity of the mind would be suspended until the Resurrection, when the parts of the body essential to personhood would be ‘re-arranged, in the same, or similar manner, as before, and the powers of perception would be restored’.4 Price contended to the contrary that personal identity would be lost in the destruction of the body; under Priestley’s argument, he wrote, ‘the resurrection [would] be, not a resurrection, but a creation of a new set of beings’.5 He also made the standard normative claim against Priestley’s materialism: because the idea of a wholly material soul seemed incompatible with that of the afterlife, it removed the incentive for virtue in this life for want of reward, or fear of punishment, in the next. In open dialectic with his friend, Price gave Priestley’s argument closer consideration than did many of its critics. Though Priestley’s view was in fact deistically monist, his disbelief in the immaterial soul came to provoke serious concern. As he relates in his Memoirs: I expressed some doubt of the immateriality of the sentient principle in man; and the outcry that was made on what I casually expressed on

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Anna Letitia Barbauld, Remarks on Mr Gilbert Wakefield’s Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship (London: J. Johnson, 1792), 7. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 346. Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism, and Philosophical Necessity, In a Correspondence between Dr Price, and Dr Priestley (London: J. Johnson, 1778), 88. Ibid., 71.

Introduction

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the subject can hardly be imagined. In all the newspapers, and most of the periodical publications, I was represented as an unbeliever in revelation, and no better than an Atheist.6

Thirteen years on from A Free Discussion, Barbauld’s ‘great debates’ on consciousness with her husband, the Presbyterian minister Rochemont Barbauld, took place at a time of fierce opposition to religious heterodoxy. In reviving the discussion, she may well have had its earlier disputants in mind: Price was dangerously ill, and died in April 1791. The events in France in 1789 had ignited fury against Priestley’s materialism, and hardened attitudes towards Dissenters in general; 1791 saw the ‘Church and King’ riots in Birmingham that destroyed Priestley’s home and forced his removal to London. Aikin’s medical practice in Great Yarmouth was also becoming untenable. His publication of two defences of Dissent and open support of the French Revolution led to ostracism by the established friends who in 1785 had persuaded him to return with cordial promises of good fortune.7 His daughter and biographer Lucy Aikin reports that he lost the company and business of all but one of his Church of England acquaintances, forfeiting patients to a rival physician who ‘with secret machinations’ had been invited to take up residence in the town.8 Aikin’s association with radical Dissent had more immediately menacing repercussions for his family. Even late in her life, Lucy Aikin would grievously recount being ‘pushed, hustled, and even struck’ by other children ‘to the cry of Presbyterian’.9 The family returned to London in early 1792. Though reeling at the injustice, Aikin was glad to move closer to his sister and expand his opportunities for intellectual sociability. Whether under duress or not, his membership of the Monthly Book Club at Great Yarmouth had come to

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Memoirs of the Rev. Dr Joseph Priestley, to the Year 1795 (London: J. Johnson, 1809), 79. For an account of the controversy surrounding Priestley’s materialism see John W. Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth Century Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 115–27. The Spirit of the Constitution and that of the Church of England, Compared (London: J. Johnson, 1790) and An Address to the Dissidents of England on their Late Defeat (London: J. Johnson, 1790); William McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2008), 301. McCarthy’s biography appears as ALBVE in subsequent footnotes. Memoir of John Aikin, M.D., ed. Lucy Aikin (London: Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, 1823), 1: 131–2. Memoir of Mrs Barbauld, ed. Anna Letitia Aikin Le Breton (London: G. Bell & Son, 1874), 19. As quoted in McCarthy, ALBVE, 301.

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an end in 1791,10 so Barbauld’s letter likely refers to the separate society begun there by Aikin, perhaps as compensation for, or in retaliation against this.11 His growing sense of personal, intellectual and professional isolation must have made correspondence with his sister particularly welcome at the time. She would certainly have sympathised with his frustrations, but the irony of the situation cannot have escaped her: as a young woman, she had struggled to remain ‘content’ within her ‘bounded sphere’ when Aikin left Warrington Academy to study medicine at Edinburgh.12 Because of her sex, she would have been excluded from membership of the Yarmouth book club and other male-led organisations, including the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, of which Aikin was an honorary member.13 From 1799, women were eligible to attend lectures at the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society,14 at the insistence of William Turner (secundus), an ex-student of Warrington Academy and friend of the Aikin–Barbaulds,15 but they could not participate in the inner debating club.16 By drawing her

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The Monthly Book Club was founded in 1780 by its first honorary secretary, the Church of England clergyman Richard Turner. His brother, James Turner, was the club’s first president, and his nephew another founding member. See Hugh Wiltshire, ed., The Monthly Book Club (Gorleston, Norfolk: RPD Printers, 2007), 5. Aikin’s institution of a society at Great Yarmouth is mentioned in his obituary by his son, Arthur Aikin (The Gentleman’s Magazine, January 1823, 87), and in J. Ewing Ritchie’s East Anglia: Personal Recollections and Historical Associations, Ebook of 2nd Edition, transcribed by David Price (London: Jarrold and Sons, 1893), 207. I have so far been unable to ascertain the dates and membership of this society. Barbauld, ‘To Dr. Aikin on his Complaining that she neglected him, October 26th 1768’, in The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 19. Ruth Watts, Gender, Power and the Unitarians in England, 1760–1860 (Abingdon: Routledge, 1998), 66–7. John Baillie, An Impartial History of the Town and County of Newcastle upon Tyne, and its Vicinity (Newcastle, 1801), 290. I thank Jenny Wilkes for sharing this source. Derek Orange, ‘Rational Dissent and Provincial Science: William Turner and the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society’, in Metropolis and Province: Science in British Culture, 1780–1850, ed. Ian Inkster and Jack Morrell (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 205–30. On the spatial and organisational aspects of women’s restricted access to the LitPhils of Northern England and, importantly, their contributions to such societies: see Jon Mee, ‘“Some mode less revolting to their delicacy”: Women and Intellectual Sociality in the Transpennine Enlightenment’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (forthcoming, Dec. 2019). It seems some women responded in kind: Lucy Aikin claims that she and Barbauld attended a ‘ladies’ book society’ in London, ‘into which not a single man [was] admitted, even to keep the accounts’. This was apparently a ‘great hobby horse’ to Barbauld and her niece. See Memoirs, Miscellanies and Letters

Introduction

5

brother into philosophical conversation Barbauld was providing consolation by reaffirming – perhaps for herself as well as her brother – the value of familiar domestic exchange. The reinforcement of limitations to the rights of Dissenters brought Barbauld and Aikin together in common purpose.17 Their pamphlets on the third failed repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, announced contemporaneously by Joseph Johnson in March 1790,18 demonstrate how close to home their political beliefs came.19 Begun in the same year, their work on the jointly authored Evenings at Home encapsulated familiar conversation as core to their Dissenting vision of domestic reform.20 Their poetic works of the period are equally redolent of the value of correspondence: Aikin’s epistles ‘To Mrs. Barbauld at Geneva’ and ‘To William Enfield’, published in his Poems of 1791, indicate the vitality of the letter in conceptions of community, especially in times of crisis. Indeed, in its title and content Aikin’s volume strongly suggests companionship with Barbauld’s Poems (1773, 1792). This is especially clear in Aikin’s ‘Sonnet to Mrs Barbauld, March 1790’, which refers back to ‘Corsica’ in Barbauld’s volume and, by ending with a plaintive ‘in vain’,21 echoes her ‘Epistle To William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade’, first published in

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of the Late Lucy Aikin, ed. Philip Hemery Le Breton (London: Longman et al., 1864), 126. Although the Act of Toleration (1689) brought greater freedom of worship, Dissenters who refused to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England were excluded from public office and could not matriculate from either of the English universities until the eventual repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828. See McCarthy, ALBVE, 279. Aikin, The Spirit of the Constitution and Barbauld, An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (London: J. Johnson, 1790). I discuss Barbauld’s better known essay in Chapter 1. Aikin and Barbauld, Evenings at Home; or, The Juvenile Budget Opened (London: J. Johnson, 1792–5). On sociability at Warrington see Anne Janowitz, ‘Amiable and Radical Sociability: Anna Barbauld’s “free familiar conversation”’, in Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain: 1770–1840, ed. Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 62–81. The subject of familiar collaboration between the Aikin–Barbaulds has been admirably explored by Scott Krawczyk in Romantic Literary Families (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); by Michelle Levy in Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and by contributors to Religious Dissent and the Aikin–Barbauld Circle, 1740–1860, ed. Felicity James and Ian Inkster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). John Aikin, Poems (London: J. Johnson, 1791), 75.

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the same year as Aikin’s Poems and then added to the revised 1792 edition of Barbauld’s celebrated volume. Barbauld’s letter to Aikin suggests that philosophical discourse occurring in familial correspondence and domestic spaces could inform more recognisably public modes of exchange, calling into question the Habermasian notion of the public and private as ‘separate spheres’ in bourgeois circles of eighteenth-century Europe.22 Though excluded from certain forums of debate, it is clear from Barbauld’s letter to Aikin that she saw herself and her sister-in-law as able participants in the commerce of ideas, and, moreover, as beings with an entirely equal claim to participate in Locke’s ‘proper Study of Mankind’.23 She called on men and women alike to make personal, practical, and – most resoundingly for the marginalised – Stoic use of philosophy.24 For such social thinkers as Barbauld, the philosophy of mind was both a privately meditative and a highly conversable topic; it worked towards her sense of intellectual participation in public matters and her understanding that ‘we are woven into the web of society’.25 Added to this, associationism enabled a distinctly sensory perspective on the extension of one’s ideas into the world. Blending theory and practice, Barbauld’s correspondence, published writings and innovative pedagogy convey a sophisticated and eminently adoptable science of mind. This book argues that women were central to the pre-disciplinary development of psychological theory and practice in late eighteenth-century Britain. They were denied the educational opportunities of their male contemporaries: the universities and even most radical Dissenting academies did not admit them as students; they were prevented from attending 22

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Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1991). Critiques of the separate sphere hypothesis include Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988); Lawrence Klein, ‘Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century: Some Questions about Evidence and Analytic Procedure’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 29, no.1 (1995), 97–109; Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, The Historical Journal 36, no. 2 (1993), 383–414; Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2000); Richard De Ritter, Imagining Women Readers, 1789–1820: Well-Regulated Minds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Locke, Human Understanding, 737. For further discussion, see E. J. Clery, ‘Stoic Patriotism in Barbauld’s Political Poems’, in Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives, ed. William McCarthy and Olivia Murphy (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 173–94. Anna Letitia Barbauld, ‘Johnson’ in The British Novelists (London, 1820), 26: iii.

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anatomy classes and debarred from the medical profession. Nevertheless, in a period of remarkably politicised interest in human consciousness and its relation to the material world, women writers engaged closely and enthusiastically with the ‘science of man’, taking significant risks in the act of publication alone. Speculation and disputation on the nature of mind were particularly precarious activities in the age of Revolutions and its war of ideas; the radical feminist, Mary Hays, whose ideas I discuss shortly, faced misogynistic attacks for her outspoken materialism. The central figures of this study did not share her convictions, but along with many others, they were active, enthusiastic, and sometimes highly combative participants in debate over the use of Lockean philosophy.

The Lockean paradigm The long eighteenth century in British philosophical culture began with a major shift in understandings of the human mind. Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, first published in 1689, challenged the notion of the mind as possessing innate ideas, marking a major departure from dualist traditions spanning from Plato to René Descartes. In Book I of the Essay, Locke argues that since there is no empirical evidence that children are born with innate ideas, there is no reason to suppose they exist. He compares the mind at birth to ‘white paper’ – although Locke himself did not use the term, this has come to be generally known as the tabula rasa hypothesis.26 In the second book, Locke advances his own account of the formation of the mind, arguing that

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Locke, Human Understanding, 81. The following provide good discussions of Locke’s theory of mind: Gary Fuller, Robert Stecker and John P. Wright (eds.), John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in Focus (London: Routledge, 2000); William Walker, Locke, Literary Criticism, and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Matthew Stuart, Locke’s Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Michael Ayers, Locke (London: Routledge, 1991); John W. Yolton, The Two Intellectual Worlds of John Locke: Man, Person, and Spirits in the ‘Essay’ (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2004). For recent interdisciplinary accounts of Locke’s influence, see Patrizia Nerozzi Bellman, ‘On the Sciences of Man in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Art: Anatomizing the Self ’, in Bioethics and Biolaw Through Literature, ed. Daniela Carpi (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 162–77, and Mark Blackwell, ‘The People Things Make: Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding and the Properties of the Self ’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 35 (2006), 77–94. For a summary account of Locke’s influence on philosophical tradition, see William Uzgalis, ‘The Influence of John Locke’, The Stanford Encyclopedia

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Material Enlightenment All ideas come from sensation or reflection. Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: – How comes it to be furnished? … To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE.27

Locke differentiates between two types of idea that constitute human consciousness: ‘ideas of sensation’ and ‘ideas of reflection.’ The latter are secondary, being formed after the mind is furnished with the initial building blocks of thought. In departure from Descartes, Locke’s theory was fundamentally concerned with the mind rather than the soul. Influenced by the anatomical lectures of Thomas Willis, Locke situated the mind in the body, stating that ‘the first capacity of human intellect is, – that the mind is fitted to receive the impressions made on it; either through the senses by outward objects, or by its own operations when it reflects on them’.28 ‘This’, he continues, ‘is the first step a man makes towards the discovery of anything, and the groundwork whereon to build all those notions which ever he shall have naturally in this world.’ Locke thus puts great emphasis on the first sensory perceptions in an individual human life, and the mind’s susceptibility to ‘outward objects’ – the things in the physical world that cause sensation – as ‘the original of all our knowledge’. From his foundational perspective, personal identity begins with things external to the body: All those sublime thoughts which tower above the clouds, and reach as high as heaven itself, take their rise and footing here: in all that great extent wherein the mind wanders, in those remote speculations it may seem to be elevated with, it stirs not one jot beyond those ideas which sense or reflection have offered for its contemplation.29

The passage moves towards transcendence in the ‘clouds’ and then, with wry humour, re-grounds humanity in the passive receptivity of the infant mind. This was a bold challenge to man’s view of himself; Locke’s notion of sensory education as key to personal and even spiritual identity threatened to upturn Judeo-Christian orthodoxy. Locke was ambivalent on the issue of the soul: while he did not explicitly refute its existence or immateriality,

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of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Spring 2014), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ locke/influence.html (accessed 20 April 2014). Locke, Human Understanding, 104. Ibid., 118. Ibid.

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he left these questions open, suggesting it was plausible that an omnipotent god could animate matter and give it sensation. Although this was a tentative move – Locke did not himself collapse the mind/body split – the bare suggestion of thinking matter was a radical departure from the dualist tradition, and prepared the ground for later materialist and atheistic theories, including Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques (1734). In this product of his ‘English period’, Voltaire took Locke to task for shying away from the obvious implications of his theory, and thus contributed to the rise of the French materialism and Humean scepticism so deplored by conservative British thinkers in the 1790s.30 For Locke, human identities were the product of circumstance. This idea came to be of crucial importance, shaping the way people thought about the beginnings of the self and granting special significance to the first impressions in each individual life. G. S. Rousseau argues that Locke’s Essay satisfies Thomas Kuhn’s categorisation of paradigms as ‘unprecedented’ and ‘open ended’ scientific works that define revolutions, stating that Locke was the ‘first to deal with a science… that had not as yet been developed: the science of man’.31 And it was a science of man in the universal, rather than the gender specific sense: nowhere was Lockean theory of clearer significance than in writing by and for women. Locke’s Essay fundamentally altered the terms of early feminist philosophy; following its appearance, arguments for the improvement of women’s education were increasingly based on his environmental account of mind. With exceptions such as Margaret Cavendish, the feminist publications of the late seventeenth century had generally used the dominant dualist model to underpin arguments for the improvement of women’s education and status, and they continued to do so after Locke’s Essay. Mary Lee Chudleigh and Mary Astell both maintained Cartesian views,32 and while Astell’s feminist writing incorporated Lockean 30

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See, for example, John W. Yolton, Locke and French Materialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Prominent French materialists included Baron D’Holbach and fellow salonniers Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Denis Diderot and Claude Adrien Helvétius. George S. Rousseau, ‘Nerves, Spirits and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility (1975)’, in Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture and Sensibility (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 162. On Cartesian women in the seventeenth century, see Eileen O’Neill, ‘Women Cartesians, “Feminine Philosophy”, and Historical Exclusion’, in Feminist Interpretations of René Descartes, ed. Susan Bordo (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 231–57. For a discussion of Astell’s Cartesianism see Joan K. Kinnaird, ‘Mary Astell and the Conservative Contribution to English Feminism’, The Journal of British Studies 19, no. 1 (1979), 53–75 and Brandy Lain Schillace, ‘“Reproducing” Custom: Mechanical Habits and Female Machines in Augustan Women’s Education’, Feminist

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environmentalism, she drew on Descartes to argue for the equality of souls, maintaining his distrust of the body, which, she says ‘very often Clogs the Mind in its noblest Operations, especially when indulg’d’.33 Locke’s emphasis on the role of the bodily senses in the formation of ideas posed something of a problem for devoutly religious feminists invested in Cartesian thought, but the feminist potential of sense-based psychology soon became clear. Mobilising both Lockean and Cartesian thinking, Judith Drake argued that: if [women] be naturally defective, the Defect must be either in Soul or Body. In the Soul it can’t be, if what I have heard some learned Men maintain be, that all Souls are equal, and alike … that there are no innate Ideas, but that all the Notions we have are deriv’d from our external Senses, either immediately or by Reflexion.34

Anticipating that, in the collapse of the binary distinction, the soul/mind might become sexed, Drake insisted that there was no difference between men and women’s physical ability to receive the sensations by which ideas are formed. Such responses might be understood in today’s terms as equality feminism, but it is important to recognise their religious element. Indeed, it would be hard to overstate the extent to which Lockean discourse was passed down through the interwoven domains of religion and education. Graham Beynon’s recent book makes clear that Isaac Watts and Philip Doddridge – both of whom were important influences on Barbauld – blended Lockean empiricism and passionate faith in their Dissenting works.35 As the discussions of this study suggest, the spaces of religion, the embodiment

33

34 35

Formations 25, no. 1 (Spring 2013), 111–37. On Astell, Locke and feminism, see Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, ed. William Kolbrener and Michal Michelson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), particularly chapters by Mark Goldie and Derek E. Taylor. On Locke’s influence more generally, see Kathryn J. Ready, ‘Damaris Cudworth Masham, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, and the Feminist Legacy of Locke’s Theory of Personal Identity’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 4 (Summer 2002), 563–76 and Feminist Interpretations of John Locke, ed. Nancy J. Hirschmann and Kirstie Morna McClure (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (London: Richard Wilkin, 1697 [1701]), 229. [Judith Drake,] An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (London, 1696), 11–12. Graham Beynon, Isaac Watts: Reason, Passion and the Revival of Religion (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), especially 19–63. Also see Isabel Rivers, ‘Dissenting and Methodist Books of Practical Divinity’, in Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Isabel Rivers (Leicester; New York: Leicester University Press; St Martin’s, 1982), 127–64.

Introduction

11

of hymnody, and attendant ideas of communicable devotional feeling and spiritual practice all fed into early psychology.36 In From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to William James (1998), Edward Reed makes the important point that the secularisation of psychology did not take place until relatively recently.37 While the currency of the word ‘soul’ in psychological discourse declined as the eighteenth century progressed, this does not necessarily signify the secularisation of the nascent field, though it may have contributed towards it.38 The increase in the use of the nebulous term ‘spirit’ as well as ‘mind’ might be taken as an indication of this continued religiosity. As we shall see, the movement from soul to mind was by no means straightforward, but was shaped by psychology’s diffusion over a number of interrelated spheres and concurrent discourses, including the physiologies of sexuality and ‘animal spirits’ that, as Darren Wagner argues, were crucial to the culture of sensibility.39 Neither was the terminology stable and clearly defined: although it gained prevalence with its later secular professionalisation, particularly after Sigmund Freud, ‘psychology’ was used alongside ‘moral philosophy’, ‘metaphysics’ and other terms to describe the science of mind far earlier.40 The mid-eighteenth-century theologian and physician David Hartley was perhaps first to designate psychology the ‘Theory of the human Mind’

36

37

38

39

40

On eighteenth-century Dissenting hymnody, see the essays in Isabel Rivers and David L. Wykes, eds., Dissenting Praise: Religious Dissent and the Hymn in England and Wales (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). On earlier traditions, see Jonathan Willis, ‘“By These Means the Sacred Discourses Sink More Deeply into the Minds of Men”: Music and Education in Elizabethan England’, History 94, no. 315 (2009), 294–309. On Dissenting correspondence and affect see Tessa Whitehouse, ‘“Upon Reading over the Whole of This Letter I Am Sensibly Struck”: Affectionate Networks and Schemes for Dissenting Academies’, Lives and Letters 3, no. 1 (Spring 2011), 1–17. Edward S. Reed, From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Modern Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to William James (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 3. For wider discussion of this process, including Barbauld’s unwitting contribution to post-Romantic secularism, see Colin Jager, The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Darren N. Wagner, ‘Body, Mind and Spirits: The Physiology of Sexuality in the Culture of Sensibility’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 39, no. 3 (1 September 2016), 335–58. The OED cites Henry Curzon’s Universal Library as the first English use of the term psychology to mean ‘the scientific study of the nature, functioning, and development of the human mind’. Curzon defines psychology as ‘doctrine of the soul’ which examines … the Mind of Man’. See Henry Curzon, The Universal Library: or, Compleat Summary of Science (London: George Sawbridge, 1712), 1: 27.

12

Material Enlightenment

alone.41 Developing from Locke’s suggestion that the wrong association of ideas was responsible for human error or prejudice,42 Hartley’s Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations (1749) gave a physiological account of thought as the product of sensory impressions. Hartley posited that sensory impressions are transmitted by vibrations of the nerves, which are then replicated in miniature in the brain. These miniature vibrations or ‘vibratiuncles’ form ideas, which then become associated with other ideas into trains of thought: ‘Any Sensations A, B, C, etc. by being associated with another a sufficient number of times get such a Power over the corresponding Ideas a, b, c, etc. that any one of the Sensations A, when impressed alone, shall be able to excite in the Mind b, c, etc. the Ideas of the rest.’ Over time, and through repetition, these sequences form clusters or ‘complex’ ideas, and clusters of complex ideas form what Hartley names ‘decomplex’ ideas.43 We will not be concerned with the theory of vibrations here, but the idea of the spreading network is worth keeping in mind, as is Hartley’s ambivalent position on materialism: It does indeed follow from this Theory, that Matter, if it could be endued with the most simple Kinds of Sensation, might also arrive at all that Intelligence of which the human Mind is possessed … But I no-ways presume to determine whether Matter can be endued with Sensation or no. This is a Point foreign to the Purpose of my Inquiries. It is sufficient for me, that there is a certain Connexion, of one Kind or other, between the Sensations of the Soul, and the Motions excited in the medullary Substance of the Brain; which all Physicians and Philosophers allow. I would not therefore be any-way interpreted so as to oppose the Immateriality of the Soul.44

Like Locke, Hartley equivocates over the material mind, acknowledging the possibility before declaring it inconsequential to his theory. But even as he defends himself from identification with materialism, the refutory rhetoric of the final sentence (the multiple negatives and use of the word ‘interpreted’) is perhaps deliberately evasive, leaving his personal beliefs unclear. Whether materialist or not, Hartley’s Observations put the science of mind to the service of Christian moral philosophy and natural theology. 41

42 43 44

Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (London: S. Richardson, 1749), 1: 354. Locke, Human Understanding, 400. Hartley, Observations, 1: 65, 77. Ibid., 1: 511–12.

Introduction

13

For Hartley, embracing the idea of the mind as mechanism and thereby abandoning philosophical free will did not lead, as in La Mettrie’s L’Homme machine (1747), towards religious scepticism, but instead towards ‘profound Humility and Self-annihilation’ in the recognition that we ‘are what we are intirely by the Grace and Goodness of God’.45 In the same vein, Hartley’s developmental account of emotions, in which he seeks to establish the dynamic relations between ‘Sensation’, ‘Imagination’, ‘Ambition’ and ‘SelfInterest’, and the ‘higher Orders’ and regulatory powers of ‘Sympathy, Theopathy, and the Moral Sense’,46 describes the spiritual progress of the individual towards ‘perfect Self-annihilation, and the pure Love of God’.47 This religiosity is maintained in Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind (1775), Joseph Priestley’s revised edition of Observations. In the first of his ‘Introductory Essays’ to the book, however, Priestley explicitly endorses theistic materialism, declaring himself ‘inclined to think that man does not consist of two principles, so essentially different from one another as matter and spirit [but rather] that the whole man is of some uniform composition’.48 With this disclosure, Priestley destabilised a theory that had previously been relatively safe territory for more conservative thinkers, and his Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777), which outlined his materialism in full, presented a serious threat to orthodox belief.49 In a time of revolution, Priestley threatened to radicalise a powerful psychological model and critics expressed outrage at what they saw as a materialist perversion of Hartley’s Christian philosophy.50 Anglicans and Dissenters alike were aghast. The Unitarian William Kendrick, Methodist John Whitehead, and 45

46

47 48 49

50

Ibid., 1: 510. For a recent discussion of La Mettrie and his place in the culture of sensibility, see Ildiko Csengei, Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 86–99. Hartley, Observations, 1: ii; 2: 245 et passim. Hartley coined the term ‘theopathy’ to describe the ‘Affections excited in us by the contemplation of the Deity’ (Observations, 1: iii). Ibid., 2: 282. Joseph Priestley, Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind (London: J. Johnson, 1775), xx. According to Robert E. Schofield, ‘More than a dozen refutations of the Disquisitions were published by the date of its second edition’ in 1782. See The Enlightened Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Work from 1773 to 1804 (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2004), 72. Refutations of Priestley’s materialism include A. Bicknell, The Putrid Soul: A Poetical Epistle to Joseph Priestley (London: J. Bowen, 1780); John Caulfield, An Essay on the Immateriality and Immortality of the Soul (London: J. Dodsley, 1778); and Andrew Baxter, The Evidence of Reason in Proof of the Immortality of the Soul (London: T. Cadell, 1799). See Richard C. Allen, David Hartley on Human Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 376.

14

Material Enlightenment

Anglican bishop Samuel Horsley each wrote alarmed letters to Priestley, the replies to which he published in his Free Discussion with Price. Priestley has nonetheless been credited with the popularisation of Hartleyan associationism, especially in Dissenting academies,51 though I will suggest that this requires some qualification. His abridgement certainly made Hartley’s ideas more accessible: he did away with much of the conjectural ‘doctrine of vibrations’, as well as most of the theological argumentation to which Hartley had dedicated his second volume. The ‘habitual associations’ Hartley’s Theory described were widely applied in educational writing and helped to shape narratives of psychological development in the novels of the 1790s. Associationism was particularly significant in the construction of late Enlightenment domesticity: according to Mary Hilton, it ‘gave a central role to mothers and became a popular science for women. They, being the earliest carers of the instinctual infant, were the adults most likely to set up the proper (or improper) associations between sensations and feelings.’52 Each of the writers central to this study drew on Hartleyan associationism in their educational writings; as Chapter 2 demonstrates, however, the application of Hartleyanism to domestic life was not always harmonious.

‘The Female Philosopher’ The eighteenth-century science of mind both informed, and was in turn informed by, the wider culture of sensibility – a culture with equivocal implications for women. Harriet Guest explains that, At the beginning of the wars with France, in 1793, sensibility provided a means to justify or explain the absence of women from discussions of the state of the nation, and the need to advance or resist reform, but … it was also the language to which women had recourse to express their sense of membership in the wider community of the nation, and

51

52

Isaac Kramnick, ‘Eighteenth-Century Science and Radical Social Theory: The Case of Joseph Priestley’s Scientific Liberalism’, The Journal of British Studies 25, no. 1 (1986), 29. Allen, David Hartley on Human Nature, 376. For an sustained analysis of Priestley’s philosophy and its reception in liberal dissenting academies, see Simon Mills, ‘Joseph Priestley and the Intellectual Culture of Rational Dissent, 1752–1796’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Queen Mary, University of London, 2009). Mary Hilton, ‘“Child of Reason”: Anna Barbauld and the Origins of Progressive Pedagogy’, Practical Visionaries: Women, Education and Social Progress 1790–1930, ed. Pam Hirsch and Mary Hilton (Harlow and New York: Longman, 2000), 26.

Introduction

15

identity with its concerns, because it signalled their exclusion from partisan or interested opinion and debate.53

During this period, Guest continues, ‘the availability to women writers of a language of humane feeling which appeared “unbounded”, which seemed to transcend social boundaries and political differences, acquired a new urgency and significance’.54 Guest has shown how writers ranging from Wollstonecraft to Austen accessed this language to reimagine human society and women’s place within it. Ideas of sympathetic, common feeling are, as we shall see, connected with – and sometimes displaced by – the associationist theories and practices examined in this book. Analyses of psychology’s role in the culture of sensibility have tended to emphasise the gendering of the nervous system, particularly by foregrounding the medical works of George Cheyne, who attributed women with more sensitive nerves than men and claimed women were thus more susceptible to mental shocks and disturbances.55 In his field-shaping study, The Culture of Sensibility (1996), G. J. Barker-Benfield argued that while nervous psychology held significant appeal for eighteenth-century feminists, it also provided a terminology for their subjugation. On the one hand, sense-based and materialist psychology allowed for an emphasis on the importance of education in the making of the mind. On the other, representations in medical texts and elsewhere of (especially middle- and upper-class) women as problematically nervous beings reasserted notions of physical difference, as Cartesian feminists seem to have anticipated. Barker-Benfield explains that: The fundamental issue for gender would be that of consciousness, of ‘mind’ inevitably associated with feeling, in short, of ‘sensibility,’ as the eighteenth century understood the term. The revolutionary 53

54 55

Harriet Guest, Unbounded Attachment: Sentiment and Politics in the Age of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 4. Ibid., 5. G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Also see George S. Rousseau, Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture and Sensibility (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) , 157–84; John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) and ‘Hypochondria and Hysteria; Sensibility and the Physicians’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 25, no. 2 (Spring 1984): 141–74; and more recently Erin Wilson, ‘The End of Sensibility: The Nervous Body in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Literature and Science 30, no. 2 (2012), 276–91.

16

Material Enlightenment possibilities for women’s consciousness were countered in the same terms, women’s subordination naturalized on the basis of their finer sensibility. The potential for women in sensational psychology seemed to be short-circuited.56

My argument seeks to complicate this position by showing how women’s ideas were not as easily contained by the gendering of the nervous paradigm as might be believed. It questions the impact – both in the period and its criticism – of the pathologising connotations of such a category as ‘nervous psychology’. I wish to suggest that perceptions of women’s uses of psychology have also been skewed by a bias in scholarly attention to more recognisably radical feminist writers such as Wollstonecraft; while it is without doubt the case that the paradigm Barker-Benfield identifies was used to naturalise women’s subordination, it is important to remember that the ‘potential for women’ in early psychology was not singularly directed towards radical feminist arguments. Debate on the philosophy of mind was central to the ideological battles in the age of revolutions roughly spanning 1775 to 1815. During this time, the significance of Locke’s theory of mental development was increasingly contested across political divides. As I have indicated, materialist philosophy was an offshoot of Lockeanism on either side of the Channel, but in the years following the French Revolution it came to be particularly associated with Gallic atheism, a phenomenon deemed wholly foreign to British morality: ‘we are not the disciples of Voltaire’, Edmund Burke insisted, ‘Helvetius has made no progress amongst us’.57 Fears over the threat to dualist orthodoxy were frequently expressed in gendered language; the French philosophes and ‘new philosophers’ of the English 1790s were represented as heretical sexual libertines, and women often bore the brunt of this: as Mary Robinson put it in 1799, female philosophers were ‘literary bugbears’, ‘treated with ridicule and contempt’.58 Caricatured as a ‘ridiculous’ and ‘unamiable’ woman,59 the ‘Female Philosopher’ was deployed against speculatively minded women by opponents of either sex; variously represented as ‘unsex’d’60 by her over-

56 57

58

59

60

Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, 3. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: J. Dodsley, 1790), 127. Mary Robinson, A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination. With Anecdotes (London: Longman, 1799), 40. John Corry, A Satirical View of London at the Commencement of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1801), 180. Richard Polwhele, The Unsex’d Females: A Poem, Addressed to the Author of the

Introduction

17

stepping of gender boundaries and sexually libertine in her emulation of the French,61 she was grotesquely embodied in satires across print culture.62 It is hardly surprising that very few women writers in late eighteenth-century Britain proclaimed themselves philosophers, let alone vocalised overtly materialist beliefs. Such representations make Mary Hays all the more remarkable. Hays is at the radical extreme of women’s engagement with the philosophy of mind, and in some respects went further than any eighteenth-century British writer, man or woman, in the public profession of her materialist convictions. As in her friend and fellow Unitarian Joseph Priestley’s thought, and that of her correspondent and friend William Godwin, this led towards necessitarianism, the belief that human action is determined by external causes, by chains of events beyond our control. For Hays, the doctrine of necessity provided a convincing answer to women’s supposed intellectual inferiority, and bolstered her argument for their rational education. Like Mary Wollstonecraft, another friend and mentor, Hays was an educationalist: Gina Luria Walker explains that her Letters and Essays, Moral, and Miscellaneous (1793) ‘combined the psycho-perceptual dynamics described by Locke and Hartley with Rousseau’s ethical pedagogy to convince women that their first responsibility was to educate themselves and their daughters’.63 But Hays’ idea of what should constitute female education radically subverts the epistolary conduct book genre in ways unexplored by Wollstonecraft. Three pieces in Letters and Essays are addressed to Amasia, whose name might recall the putative land of the Amazons or (more likely and as the title of Hays’ book suggests) the two Amasias in Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s Letters Moral and Entertaining (1729), which was reprinted

61

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63

Pursuits of Literature (London: Cadell and Davies, 1798). ‘There is scarcely a female Philosopher to be found that is not an EPICUREAN; and, as soon as the French Revolution commenced, the filles-des-joie were the first to distinguish themselves. At present, some of these Philosophesses are united in the spider-woven bonds of the Gallic-Hymen with the most famous of their legislators and warriors.’ Charles Lucas, The Infernal Quixote: A Tale of the Day, 4 vols. (London: Minerva Press, 1801), 1: 235. For further discussion of satires against the ‘Female Philosopher’, see Adriana Craciun, British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 41–9; Sarah Hutton, ‘The Persona of the Woman Philosopher in Eighteenth‐Century England: Catharine Macaulay, Mary Hays, and Elizabeth Hamilton’, Intellectual History Review 18, no. 3 (January 2008), 408–9; and Andrew McInnes, Wollstonecraft’s Ghost: The Fate of the Female Philosopher in the Romantic Period (New York and London: Routledge, 2016). Walker, Mary Hays (1759–1843): The Growth of a Woman’s Mind (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 70.

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Material Enlightenment

throughout the century. Whereas Singer Rowe’s didactic epistles warn of the fatal consequences of adultery (one Amasia is seduced, the other a seducer), Hays’ Amasia receives lessons in metaphysics with clear arguments in favour of materialism and necessitarianism. Despite the vicious misogyny Letters and Essays met with in the periodical press and criticism from Wollstonecraft that the book supplicated to men who would ‘utter warm eulogiums in private that they would be sorry openly to avow’,64 Hays held firm on her philosophical beliefs and her determination to publicly challenge the injustices of the gendered status quo. In her best-known work, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), she developed a bold synthesis of materialist philosophy and feminism,65 not only to argue for women’s right to a rational education, but also to insist on the utility of women’s sexual desire. The novel’s preface contains a disclaimer: Hays cautions readers that the narrative is ‘calculated to operate as a warning, rather than as an example’;66 Emma Courtney’s ‘hazardous experiment’ is a marked transgression from British sexual mores – the active pursuit of Augustus Harley, a man who (though equally enamoured) repeatedly refuses her advances, and when Emma eventually learns of his secret marriage, she proposes adultery. The preface thus betrays an understandable anxiety about the novel’s reception, but its disavowal of Emma’s behaviour is offset by Hays’ choice of philosophical authority: by quoting Claude Adrien Helvétius here, as she does throughout Emma Courtney, Hays points towards the belief that desire is the wellspring of the ‘understanding’ and ‘talents’.67 Especially at a time when anti-Gallic feeling ran high, Hays took a considerable risk in harnessing French materialist thought in her ‘continued rebellion’, as Walker puts it, ‘against the historical commandment that chastity is the preeminent virtue for women’.68 While early responses to 64

65

66

67

68

The English Review 22, 1793, 253; Wollstonecraft, ‘Letter to Mary Hays’, n.d., in The Love-Letters of Mary Hays (1779–1780, ed. Annie F. Wedd (London: Methuen, 1925), 225. For further discussion, see Scott Nowka, ‘Materialism and Feminism in Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney’, European Romantic Review 18, no. 4 (October 2007), 521–40. Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, ed. Eleanor Ty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4. Ibid., 3. In De L’Esprit, Helvétius not only posits that the pursuit of pleasure is the principal motivator of human action, but that of all the pleasures, ‘the love of women is, among civilized nations, the main spring by which they are moved’. Helvétius, De L’Esprit: or, Essays on the Mind, and its Several Faculties (London: Dodsley, 1759), 169–70. Walker, Mary Hays (1759–1843), 40.

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Emma Courtney in the press were generally favourable, the Critical Review took issue with Hays’ use of Rousseau and Helvétius,69 and in 1799 the AntiJacobin Review launched a hostile attack on Emma Courtney together with Hays’ second novel, The Victim of Prejudice (1799).70 Hays’ reputation fared worse in private correspondence. A well-known and particularly grotesque barrage of criticism comes from Coleridge: Of Miss Hay’s intellect I do not think so highly, as you, or rather, to speak sincerely, I think, not contemptuously, but certainly very despectively thereof. – Yet I think you likely in this case to have judged better than I. – for to hear a Thing, ugly & petticoated, ex-syllogize a God with cold-blooded Precision, & attempt to run Religion thro’ the body with an Icicle – an Icicle from a Scotch Hog-trough – I do not endure it!71

Of course, attempts to undermine women’s intellectual achievements have always resorted to the grossly embodied or sexualised, but attacks against Hays – including Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), which I discuss in Chapter 4 – should serve to highlight the bravery of Hays’ materialist social critique. As her philosophical heroine observes, ‘Those who deviate from the beaten track must expect to be entangled in the thicket, and wounded by many a thorn.’72 In light of Hays’ unification of materialist philosophy and feminist sexual politics, it might seem strange that she has not been given a chapter in this book. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, it is my intention to draw attention to cultural practices that are not necessarily represented by the kind of historiography that Hays’ materialism seems to call for. Secondly, Hays’ position as an outsider, even amongst dissenting women such as Barbauld and Lucy Aikin, invites scrutiny of the limits of apparently tolerant and progressive philosophical female communities. I am interested here in the question of how such limits present themselves, for instance in strategies of disassociation from and even disfiguration of figures such as Hays, strategies through which competing versions of the female philosopher take shape, even as they may have impeded their own recognition as 69 70 71

72

The Critical Review, 19 (1797), 109–11. Anti-Jacobin Review (May 1799), 54–8. STC to Robert Southey, 25 January 1800, in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 2: 563. Hays, Emma Courtney, 90. Cf. Helvétius, A Treatise on Man, trans. William Hooper (London: B. Law and G. Robinson, 1777), 263.

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Material Enlightenment

such. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, I wish to emphasise that Hays’ philosophy is a special case, bringing into relief its singularity through comparison with the writings of Anna Letitia Barbauld, Honora Edgeworth, Hannah More, Elizabeth Hamilton and Maria Edgeworth, women who were variously moderate, conservative and at times and by modern standards apparently anti-feminist in their approaches to gender, intellect and the separate spheres.

‘Bonds of union’ On 22 July 1804, Maria Edgeworth wrote to Anna Letitia Barbauld with the suggestion of establishing a periodical ‘written entirely by ladies’.73 Barbauld rejected the scheme, which was not Edgeworth’s idea but her father’s,74 stating in her reply that There is no bond of union among literary women, any more than among literary men; different sentiments and different connections separate them much more than the joint interest of their sex would unite them. Mrs. Hannah More would not write along with you or me, and we should probably hesitate at joining Miss Hays, or if she were living, Mrs. Godwin.75

Barbauld is firmly dismissive of the notion of a unilateral association between women writers; the ‘joint interest of their sex’ is an insufficient basis for such an alliance because it is trumped by forcefully held, divisive beliefs, as well as reputational anxiety. To fabricate a union under the auspices of Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s proposed ‘Feminiad’ would be to make a false association; it would disregard the heterogeneity of women’s writing, trivialise their work, and reinforce gender distinctions in literary culture. As Barbauld reminds Edgeworth, ‘There is a great difference between a paper written by a lady, and as a lady’, and to write always ‘as a lady’ would entail writing in ‘trammels’.76

73 74

75 76

Maria Edgeworth to Barbauld, 22 July 1804, in Barbauld, Memoir, ed. Le Breton, 236. For an excellent discussion of Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s condescension towards and attempted exploitation of Barbauld’s work, and of her response to it, see Krawczyk, Romantic Literary Families, 99–101. Barbauld to Edgeworth, 30 August 1804, in Barbauld, Memoir, ed. Le Breton, 236. Ibid.

Introduction

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The passage provides a useful opportunity to address an important methodological concern about the grouping of women writers, and especially writers who, as Barbauld points out, share neither ‘sentiments’ nor ‘connections’. It is equally important to guard against attributing commonalities to shared gender experience alone; similarities in their theories of mind should be considered in light of other factors, just as their dissimilarities must. I do not mean to suggest that ‘material Enlightenment’ constituted a ‘bond of union’ in the views of the women in this study; it is often their disunity that interests me. It is the case, however, that Anna Letitia Barbauld, Honora Edgeworth, Hannah More, Elizabeth Hamilton and Maria Edgeworth were variously associated through correspondence, family ties and shared beliefs about the importance of education. Barbauld shares a great deal of common ground with More, and was a friend to both Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Hamilton. Except for Honora Edgeworth, whose representation is a matter of greater controversy, each of these writers were highly regarded participants in public discourse on the science of mind. However, as Guest has argued, the ideas of Enlightened domesticity surrounding such exchange do little to challenge women’s exclusion from the spaces and professions enjoyed by men; rather, the confinement of domesticity ‘gains in value as a result of its continuity with the social or public’.77 My aim in this study is to examine how material applications of late Enlightenment psychology came to constitute such a continuity, enabling reform-minded women to imagine themselves as shaping the nation. Of the notable absences in this book, perhaps the most the significant is Wollstonecraft. She shared with the writers in this study what Mitzi Myers termed a ‘revisionist bourgeois ideology,’ though her critique of aestheticised femininity set her apart from Barbauld, and her support for the French Revolution placed her in opposition to political conservatives like More.78 The author remains a brilliantly compelling figure in scholarship today, but my aim here is to understand more fully the perspectives of writers such as Barbauld, who maintained that ‘virtues flourish’ in the ‘bounded sphere’, 79 and of politically conservative writers such as More, who have been neglected in discussions of eighteenth-century psychology. As we shall see, More’s occlusion of Wollstonecraft’s work was also an 77 78

79

Guest, Small Change, 15. Mitzi Myers, ‘Reform or Ruin: “A revolution in female manners”’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, no. 11 (1982), 207. ‘To Dr. Aikin on his complaining that she neglected him’, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Ontario: Broadview, 2002), 57.

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Material Enlightenment

acknowledgement of its appeal. In her reappraisal of conservative feminist responses to the French Revolution, Kathryn Sutherland argued that ‘the realignment of “left-wing” Wollstonecraft and “right-wing” More allows us to constitute women’s history as a more complex and more internally divided, and perhaps therefore historically more resilient, legitimisation of women’s negotiations with experience than has so far been allowed’.80 Identifying disassociative, as well as associative intertextualities can help to solidify our sense of ongoing debate and schism, conversation and ‘strong collision’,81 and helps resist the essentialism that so troubled Barbauld. By considering writers with divergent political beliefs and different religious backgrounds, I hope to contribute towards the recovery of a philosophical tradition that allows for both dissonance and agreement between women writers. Indeed, placing Wollstonecraft’s thought in the context of educational work by Dissenting, loyalist Anglican, Scottish Presbyterian and Anglo-Irish women helps open up a richly discursive philosophical field for further investigation. Much has been done to reassess the value of didactic children’s books, not least by Mitzi Myers, who described the ‘female tradition’ in children’s literature,82 and reminds us that instruction and delight are not oppositional concepts, but in fact ‘run like woof and warp through the fabric of children’s literature’.83 Such work has brought much needed attention to writers that have until relatively recently been neglected in English studies, but the nature and scope of women’s engagement with psychological theory remain underexamined. Though widely diffused and highly influential, moderate and conservative women’s philosophies of mind have been overlooked or oversimplified, perhaps in part because of their very instrumentality. Often conceptually grounded in domestic practice, the contributions of writers such as Barbauld, the Edgeworths, More and Hamilton have eluded

80

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82

83

Kathryn Sutherland, Hannah More’s Counter-Revolutionary Feminism (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), 35. Hannah More, Florio: A Tale, for Fine Gentlemen and Fine Ladies: and, The Bas Bleu: or, Conversation (London: T. Cadell, 1786), 84. Mitzi Myers, ‘Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Female Tradition in Georgian Children’s Books’, Children’s Literature 14 (1986): 31–59. Rebecca Davies, Written Maternal Authority and Eighteenth-Century Education in Britain: Educating by the Book (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 63–84. Mitzi Myers, ‘Wise Child, Wise Peasant, Wise Guy: Geoffrey Summerfield’s Case Against the Eighteenth Century’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 12, no. 2 (1987), 107.

Introduction

23

traditional and implicitly masculinist philosophical history.84 This has been further exacerbated until recently by literary elitism against educational writing and, whether knowingly or not, an aversion in today’s secular scholarship to theology and devout sentiment. Readjustment of perspectives on genre and interdisciplinarity in the period puts reform-minded women at the very foundations of what we might now recognise as applied psychology. Recognition of their work in this area is not without its challenges: the considerable successes of Barbauld, Maria Edgeworth, More and Hamilton are offset, from a modern-day liberal perspective, by their undeniably problematic gender politics. Though they themselves overstepped gender boundaries in the very act of publication, their domestic ideologies maintained the propriety of the different spheres. I do not seek to resolve this issue, nor do I wish to mitigate More’s repressive class politics. Though the scope of this book cannot sufficiently accommodate the contributions and resistances of the working classes to intrusive projects of reform, or the influence of women philosophers elsewhere in the world, I hope to indicate the potential for further research on this subject. In the interim, this book describes how a small group of women developed philosophical languages of materiality that revolutionised educational and charitable practice, and how in doing so helped initiate profound (though by no means unambiguous) psychological, social and political change.

Objects and practice In their unifications of theory and praxis, women such as More, Barbauld, Hamilton and Maria Edgeworth positioned themselves as the de facto inheritors of the doctrine of association; by embracing and innovating it they were reasserting the primacy of the domestic environment, its status as the first and most influential site for the construction of subject/nation. All four figure domesticity as power, though not without difficulty, often registering frustration even as they recommend women and girls remain within the ‘bounded sphere’. As Jennie Batchelor points out, women writers were often ‘deeply suspicious of a conduct-book ideology that sought to trivialise women not only by insisting that they engage in properly feminine but inconsequential employments, which lacked economic and cultural 84

For example, Edward S. Reed, From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Modern Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to William James (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); and Daniel N. Robinson, An Intellectual History of Psychology, 3rd Edition (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).

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status as work … but also by rendering invisible the very real labour daily expended in the tasks of domestic management, child rearing and charitable activities’.85 Indeed, one of the challenges for feminist scholars today is to seek approaches that recognise such tensions while recovering the strategies women used to negotiate them, and, if possible, to make visible their domestic labour and its exploitation. David Simpson has argued that, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, theory and method were ‘coming to be identified as either in themselves synonyms or effectively so in the dangerous confusion put about by the French politicians. Here the belief in method, in the progressive application of mental techniques to practical–political ends, comes itself to be regarded as wild and visionary delusion – a delusion of “theory”.’86 Elizabeth Hamilton’s burlesque of radical science in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers hinges on the representation of the New Philosophers as absurdly skewed in their vision as they attempt to put their idealist schemes into practice. However, her attempt to counteract such a culture did not necessarily constitute a rejection of theory or its application through practice, but rather sought to paint the New Philosophers as misappropriating the distinctly practical philosophical tradition of Enlightenment associationism, politically subverting and sexualising it in the process. I argue that what Hamilton was seeking to do through her satire was to clear the stage for her own domestic philosophy. Moreover, such efforts to expunge political radicalism from the philosophy of mind could reaffirm the very efficacy of its union with practice: as Chapter 3 shows, Hannah More’s evangelicalism draws on the revolutionary potential of science while denouncing its misapplication. While politically aligned with Burke, More is in agreement with Wollstonecraft in perceiving that the literary mode of his Reflections on the Revolution is France (1790) was problematic to say the least, and that his anti-theoretical approach, in harking back to the ‘frantic reign of chivalry’, was a violation of ‘common sense’ philosophy, something Hamilton in particular conceived of as transcending gender boundaries. Tending naturally towards practice, Enlightenment philosophy was for More and others ‘an excellent material of universal application’.87

85

86

87

Batchelor, Women’s Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 13. David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago: Chicago University Press), 8. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (London: T. Cadell, 1799), 1: 19.

Introduction

25

We perhaps take it for granted that the ‘two cultures’ of C. P. Snow’s disputed hypothesis were far from solidified in eighteenth-century Britain, but it is as important as ever to resist (often gendered) and anachronistic assumptions about the separation between the arts and sciences, as well as between scientific and religious thought.88 As Daniel White and Emma Major have shown,89 Barbauld’s religious background is of fundamental importance to her writing. Both scholars demonstrate that it is necessary to look beyond the ‘feminist/antifeminist debate’90 to gain a better understanding of how she configured her position as a Dissenting woman writer. Such work has been conducive towards a critical re-establishment of the centrality of religious devotion in the politics and literary productions of women such as Barbauld and More. Major argues that these writers possess overlapping views on the role and importance of the religious public. Although they responded to the challenges of the French Revolution and its aftermath in very different ways, both [Barbauld and More] seek a solution in the transparency of a public faith that collapses public and private boundaries and offers a tantalising space where gender is eventually irrelevant.91

Major’s study demonstrates that religion, alongside education, seemed to hold significant potential for some women as a means of shaping the nation, but that their religious professions could also meet with serious censure. As chapters 1, 3 and 4 respectively discuss, Barbauld, More and Hamilton sought to renegotiate the relationship between church (whether Dissenting, Anglican or Scottish Presbyterian) and individual mind, each asserting the importance of feeling as an energising counterpart to ‘dry systems’. We will see that their views are not always palatable, but that their works were intended to be nourishing, both to body and mind.

88

89

90

91

C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). Daniel E. White, ‘“With Mrs Barbauld it is different”: Dissenting Heritage and the Devotional Taste’, in Women, Gender and Enlightenment, ed. Barbara Taylor and Sarah Knott (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) 474–92; Emma Major, ‘Nature, Nation, and Denomination: Barbauld’s Taste for the Public’, ELH 74, no. 4, (Winter 2007), 909–30. Daniel E. White, ‘The “Joineriana”: Anna Barbauld, the Aikin Family Circle, and the Dissenting Public Sphere’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no. 4 (1999), 514. Emma Major, Madam Britannia: Women, Church, and Nation 1712–1812 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 272.

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The trajectory of this book is roughly chronological. Chapter 1 provides an interdisciplinary analysis of Barbauld’s Lessons for Children (1778–9) and Hymns in Prose for Children (1781), alongside two of her ‘gift poems’ to children. I discuss the ways in which Barbauld adapted and implemented theories of mental development in her use of sensible images, arguing that her pedagogic approach was underpinned by distinctly practical and yet visionary perspectives on the human mind in relation to the material world. I suggest some of the ways in which Barbauld’s theoretical influences might have been moderated and supplemented by her educational experience and religious beliefs, in light of her arguments about the propriety of instilling ideas in children and recognition of the limits of parental power. Continuing to focus on education and parental authority, Chapter 2 examines the pedagogic practices and scientific life writings of Honora Edgeworth. It offers material and cultural readings of the notebooks in which Honora recorded the lives and psychological development of her children, examining her critically neglected role in the family’s wider educational project. I consider the competing images of Honora presented to the public by Anna Seward and Richard Lovell Edgeworth to explore themes of appropriation and silencing in the construction of Enlightened domesticity, and reveal some of the problems of partiality inherent to the ‘experimental science’ of education detailed in Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s Practical Education (1798). Turning to the 1790s, Chapter 3 addresses Hannah More’s ‘vital Christianity’, focusing on her charitable and educational projects of loyalist Christian reform. I argue that More’s evangelicalism unites Locke with the Bible – arguably the two most important books of eighteenth-century Britain.92 The first section considers the role of the senses in the Mendip schools, feast and women’s clubs More established with her sister, Martha ‘Patty’ More, and develop a materialist reading of their attempts to structure and contain the association of the poor. I then focus on More’s renewed activity in the battle over Locke in the early 1800s, discussing the dissociative literary techniques she uses to realign Enlightenment thought with Christian morality against the likes of David Hume, Wollstonecraft and Godwin. Like More, Elizabeth Hamilton can be read as attempting to rehabilitate the theory of association after its appropriation in the ‘jacobinical’ novels of the 1790s, but her insistence on the freedom of thought makes Hamilton a far less conservative writer than her English contemporary. Chapter 4 explores 92

John Locke and English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), v. McClean opens with the assertion that Locke’s Essay is ‘The book that had the most influence in the Eighteenth Century, the Bible excepted.’

Introduction

27

ideas of philosophical tradition, authority and originality in Hamilton’s work, beginning with her Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education (1801). It considers Hamilton’s domestic adaptations of associationist psychology, something she saw as lending itself to practical applications, and uniquely suited to use by women in the early education of children and management of the domestic environment. In this respect, Hamilton has much in common with other educationalists in this study, but her satirical novels and claims to autonomy of thought indicate an extraordinary determination to carve out a distinctive place in the philosophical canon. In Chapter 5, we return to the Edgeworthian science of education, picking up after the publication of Practical Education in June 1798 – a summer that saw rebellion in Ireland and a successful landing by the French on Irish soil. The chapter shows how, in a decade of personal bereavement, unrest in Ireland, and revolutionary anxiety in Britain, written practices of collection and collaboration were crucial to the cohesive, industrious, and scientific family identity that Richard Lovell and Maria promoted through their correspondence and published writings. Out of this partnership and innumerable other relations grew an educational project that became increasingly political in its aims and organisation, and whose history is as good evidence as any of the imbrications of the political and domestic in late eighteenthcentury educationalism. The chapter argues that, in Maria Edgeworth’s many publications for children, her Popular Tales and novels, the ‘science of education’ is expansionist in its ideological scope; acting self-defensively against insurrection in Ireland, promoting Lunar industry, Enlightenment and empire while using technologies of fiction to activate moral reflection in the reader. Understanding women’s contributions to the history of philosophy often necessitates approaches that are sensitive to idioms different to those which have normally been considered authoritative. This book seeks to understand not only how these writers put Enlightenment theory into practice, but how they understood literature as psychology in motion. It considers various objects, including books and manuscripts, as functioning – in varying degrees – on material, intellectual and emotional levels. I am aware of the pitfalls of such an approach. Kathryn Sutherland has spoken of the tendency for nostalgia in encounters with the manuscript text, which can surely be extended to artefacts and apparatuses.93 The challenge, then, is to 93

Kathryn Sutherland, ‘We are all materialists now: books after books’, presentation at the University of Edinburgh, 21 December 2015, http://www.ed.ac.uk/literatureslanguages-cultures/chb/books-and-new-media/professor-kathryn-sutherland (accessed 2 April 2016).

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avoid fetishising such ‘things’ while recognising what Sara Ahmed terms their ‘stickiness’ – their susceptibility to attachment, both when they are literally pasted-on and emotionally associated with other things – and their proneness to reconfiguration and disfigurement through collection and classification.94 In How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement, the archaeologist Lambros Malafouris undertakes to ‘provide a new account of the making of the mind’ by seeking to ‘understand how human minds came to be what they are by taking material culture seriously’.95 This strikes a particular chord with this study: arguably, it is what Anna Letitia Barbauld, Hannah More, Honora and Maria Edgeworth, and Elizabeth Hamilton understood themselves to be doing. Malafouris’ approach mirrors recent developments in cognitive science and philosophy, in particular the ‘extended mind hypothesis’ of Andy Clark and David Chalmers,96 which posits an active externalism, that is, a theory that cognitive activity includes processes outside of the brain. In their view, the physical environment plays an active role in brain function, so that the mind can be viewed as extended in the physical world. Thinking, in other words, can occur through things. I am not concerned so much with epistemological questions arising from recent studies in cognitive science and philosophy, such as whether (and if so how) we should understand textual and material objects as embodiments of cognitive processes, or if we can viably conceive of objects themselves as agents; nor is it my purpose here to investigate the ecological implications of the latter. My aim is to demonstrate how the writers in this book forwarded a comparable discourse that was representative of the material turn of their own day. Nevertheless, this study experiments with the notion that objects – including and especially written objects – do possess a certain agency; they shape physical behaviours, necessitate and define social associations. As Sonia Hoffkosh’s discussion of affect and materiality in Barbauld’s ‘Washing Day’ shows, material approaches can help to establish a critical language that acknowledges both domestic labour and intellectual endeavour.97 I am

94

95

96

97

Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, North Carolina and London: Duke University Press, 2010). Lambros Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2013), 8. Andy Clark and David Chalmers, ‘The Extended Mind’, Analysis 58, no. 1 (January 1998), 7–19. Sonia Hofkosh, ‘Materiality, Affect, Event: Barbauld’s Poetics of the Everyday’, in Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives, ed. McCarthy and Murphy, 83–106.

Introduction

29

responding in part to the growth of ‘vital materialism’ in current scholarship, which I believe offers new and exciting perspectives on practices of philosophical exchange. My argument is not intended to be normative, though I want to suggest the potential relevance of my study to environmentalist and post-environmentalist notions of ‘vital materialism’. 98 In Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Bennett argues for an understanding of the world and of ourselves as vitally material. There are interesting parallels between Bennett’s thinking and that of the eighteenth-century women in this study; both material turns challenge a cognitive distancing from the particular, and work towards spiritual or ethical understandings of matter as active. The theoretical framework of the material turn can thus give fuller sense not only of objects’ spatial ontology but also of their social, religious and political significance. By considering the materiality of women’s writings in light of their historical understandings of the human mind, I hope to open up new spaces for the female philosopher, as well as understand better the conditions that allow for such an identity to be imagined, contested and embodied.

98

Bruce Braun, ‘Environmental Issues: Inventive Life’, Progress in Human Geography 32 (2008), 667–79; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, North Carolina and London: Duke University Press, 2010).

Chapter 1

‘ Things themselves’: Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Lessons and Hymns

I

n the summer of 1769, the twenty-six-year-old Anna Letitia Barbauld (then Aikin) paid a social visit to Mr Turner, a Dissenting minister, and his family, in Wakefield, Yorkshire.1 Turner’s son, William (later of the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society) recalls that ‘at the close of her visit, she presented to the writer of this paper, then a little boy between seven and eight years old, an ivory memorandum book, on the leaves of which, after she was gone, were found written the following lines’.2 The poet begins by drawing an analogy between the young recipient’s mind and the pocket-book she puts into his hands: Accept, my dear, this toy; and let me say The leaves an emblem of your mind display; – Your youthful mind uncolour’d, fair and white, Like crystal leaves transparent to the sight Fit each impression to receive whate’er The pencil of Instruction traces there.3

The analogy of the pocket-book is not striking in terms of originality. Technologies of writing supplied metaphors of the mind for philosophers at least as early as Plato, and in Barbauld’s time the ‘impression’ upon the

1

2 3

Date attributed by William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft. See Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 235. ALB married Rochemont Barbauld in 1774. On her feelings about the change of name, see McCarthy, ALBVE, 128–9. On name change, value and status in eighteenth-century discourses, see Sophie Coulombeau, ‘“The Knot, That Ties Them Fast Together”: Personal Proper Name Change and Identity Formation in English Literature, 1779–1800’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of York, 2014). The Newcastle Magazine (Newcastle upon Tyne: W.A. Mitchell, 1825), 185. ‘Verses written in the Leaves of an ivory Pocket-Book, presented to Master T[urner]’ Poems, ed. McCarthy and Kraft, 27.

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page was a commonplace motif for sensory perception.4 The lines are of significance here, however, because they demonstrate Barbauld’s interest in the science of the mind even at a very early stage in her career: she was twenty-six, and it would be another two years before her first poems were published. The ‘ivory Pocket-Book’ is also particularly illuminative of Barbauld’s educational beliefs, and its practical application of the philosophy of mind marks the beginnings of a common imprint in many of Barbauld’s literary productions – a body of work substantiated by sensory objects. An ivory pocket-book was an apt choice of object, a literal tabula rasa for Lockean inscription. In the poem, Barbauld encourages Turner to ‘transcribe into the shining page’ the ‘virtue’ of youth, and to ‘grave upon the tablet of his heart/ Each lofty science, and each useful art!’ The transference of the figurative ‘tablet’ from mind to ‘heart’ and the choice of adjectives for the different spheres of learning are worth noting here, if only as indications of the poet’s perception of the aims and values of education. Barbauld next draws attention to the differences between the mind and the pocket-book, first of which is the impermanence of the marks on the ivory. She warns that whereas inscriptions in the book could be erased with a drop of water on the finger, inscriptions on the mind are indelible – perhaps, in the use of the pocket-book, Turner would remember this as he erased his mistakes with the touch of his finger; haptic engagement with the object would thus have reinforced the lessons of the poem. A further point of departure from the analogy is that the pages would stay blank if Turner did not write on them, whereas the mind cannot remain so: ‘Nature forbids an idle vacuum there’, so children must ‘toil’ lest ‘Folly… plant her tares’ and ‘weeds spring up in the neglected soil’.5 At this point, however, Barbauld disrupts her own ‘moralising strain’, observing that ‘Vain is the precept, and the caution vain/ To you, whose opening virtues bloom so fair’. She praises Turner and his family, comparing the boy to ‘a young tree’ planted by a ‘prudent’ hand and nourished with ‘generous juices’ until it ‘lifts its towering head’.6 Sustained throughout the poem, this language of nature and cultivation allows Barbauld to moderate Lockean didacticism; with self-awareness and subtle parody, she supplants the ‘pencil of Instruction’ and evokes instead a more comprehensive, social and environmental view of education, where the virtues are paramount. Leading our vision 4

5 6

For a diachronic study of technological models of memory see Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas about the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Poems, ed. McCarthy and Kraft, 27. Ibid., 28.

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33

from the page to the tops of the trees, where ‘proud auspicious shoots… every day grow nearer to the skies’, the poem culminates in religious devotion: Yet should kind Heaven thy opening mind adorn, And bless thy noon of knowledge as thy morn – Yet were thy mind with every science blest, And every virtue glowing in thy breast – With learning meekness, and with candour zeal, Clear to discern, and generous to feel – Yet should the graces o’er thy breast diffuse The softer influence of the polish’d muse – ’Tis no original, the world will tell, And all your praise is but–to copy well.

In this early expression of the Providential belief she held throughout her life, Barbauld makes a series of progressions that are illuminative of her entire educational philosophy. The poem moves from the particular (the ‘toy’), the sensory (‘crystal leaves’), and circumstantial (Turner’s environment), to the cultivation of virtue with intellectual ambition, and towards self-denial in the ultimate recognition of the God of nature. But while Barbauld submits all to the direction of ‘kind Heaven’, the poem also encourages Turner to ‘copy [her] well’: she suggests that ‘the softer influence’ of poetry gives ‘learning meekness’ and ‘candour zeal’. The verses thus celebrate literary–scientific education as a path to material Enlightenment, enabling renewed appreciation of ‘youthful mind’ and ‘crystal leaves’ alike. As Emma Major summarises, Barbauld’s ‘metaphors of books and nature become interchangeable… she is using associationists such as Locke and Hartley to develop in her infant readers a taste for the countryside’. This devotional taste for nature, Major argues, is ‘central to the claims Barbauld makes for the superiority of Dissenting education, faith, and patriotism’.7 The look and feel of the ivory notebook remain matters for the imagination, but the lines Turner diligently copied and kept, and eventually had printed in the Newcastle Magazine, give an almost palpable sense of Barbauld’s affection for the child. The tenderness of her address and the playful reflexivity between ‘toy’ and text both serve to highlight the social aspects of the gift-poem: as an instructive and affective object, it enacts its theme of inscription and at the same time embodies values of ‘generous’ feeling. The 7

Major, Madam Britannia, 223.

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transference of meaning between text and object was a familiar mode of expression for Barbauld: many of her poems are about, were inscribed onto, or accompanied objects that were given as gifts to friends – fire screens, chimney ornaments, sugar tongs, a doll’s house, and walnut shells, to name but a few. And in her highly popular and influential pedagogic texts, Lessons for Children (1778–9) and Hymns in Prose for Children (1781), objects take centre stage as the means by which ideas, social affections and devotional taste are communicated to the mind and implanted in the heart. As we shall see, Barbauld’s Enlightenment didacticism functions through the sensory evocation of familiar spaces and objects. Her innovative treatment of ‘sensible objects’ was fundamental to the success of her children’s books as ‘things themselves’, and the material turn provided her with spaces for experimentation, exploration and subversion.

The education of circumstances In his influential essay ‘The I altered’, Stuart Curran writes that ‘if a woman’s place is in the home, or in the schoolroom as in Anna Barbauld’s case, or in the garden, then the particulars of those confined quarters are made the impetus for verse’.8 While I agree that the turning of the physical realities of the ‘bounded sphere’ into a mode of conversation could be both a product of and a response to disenfranchisement, I want to suggest that Barbauld’s focus on the domestic object is more deliberately circumstantial – the domestic and particular are conceived of as distinctly capable of forming circumstances in the education of others. Barbauld is not just drawing from, but is drawing onto the domestic world. Her domestically focused writings are not just a response to her environment, but comprise an attempt to become an influential part of other people’s environments – they aim to instruct and affect. In short, they are an exercise in ‘environmental psychology’.9 As Barbauld explains in ‘What is Education?’ (1798): The education of circumstances – insensible education… goes on at every instant of time; it goes on like time; you can neither stop it, nor turn its course. What these have a tendency to make your child, that he will be. Maxims and documents are good precisely till they are 8

9

Stuart Curran, ‘Romantic Poetry: The I Altered’, in Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), 190. Barker-Benfield uses this term to describe the eighteenth-century belief that ‘human selves were made, not born’. See Culture of Sensibility, xvii.

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tried, and no longer; they will teach him to talk, and nothing more. The circumstances in which your son is placed will be even more prevalent than your example, and you have no right to expect him to become what you yourself are, but by the same means.10

‘Insensible’ should be taken to mean unconscious rather than separate from the senses, because it is through the senses that the ‘education of circumstances’ operates. Barbauld’s argument here is that humans learn constantly, without being aware of it; education is the totality of lived experience and therefore ‘goes on like time’ – as continuous as the breath, the mind takes in sensations ‘every instant’. Barbauld’s assertions might lead towards the sovereignty of the child’s mind against the didactic system – an idea I will explore later – but she also emphasises the importance of social and material contingencies. Again, it is not the narrow education of ‘Maxims and documents’ that will ‘make [the] child’, but the child’s experience that really matters: Do you ask then, what will educate your son? Your example will educate him; your conversation with your friends; the business he sees you transact; the likings and dislikings you express; these will educate him – the society you live in will educate him; above all, your rank and situation in life, your house, your table, your pleasure-grounds, your hounds and your stables will educate him.

Barbauld’s beliefs about education – and about ‘rank and situation’ – were undoubtedly shaped by the circumstances of her own education in Warrington, where her father taught at the celebrated Dissenting Academy. Here she met Joseph and Mary Priestley, and she maintained a close friendship with the Priestleys after they moved to Leeds in 1767. As outlined in my introduction, Joseph Priestley was a key proponent of associationism, the theory of mind advanced in David Hartley’s Observations on Man. Hartleyan associationism seems to have been of special importance to the culture of rational Dissent: Observations was, according to Richard Allen, ‘part of the core curriculum in the Dissenting academies’.11 Its influence in the later eighteenth century was due in no small part to Priestley’s edition 10

11

Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Ontario: Broadview, 2002), 323. This collection is henceforth cited in parentheses as SPP. Richard C. Allen, David Hartley on Human Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 434.

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of 1775; despite opposition to his materialist additions, Isaac Kramnick asserts that ‘Hartley, thanks to Priestley, was everywhere’.12 It should be remembered, though, that not all Dissenting academies were cut from same cloth, but were in fact hugely varied in their religious and political outlooks, from the radical New College, Hackney, where William Hazlitt read Hartley from half past nine until eleven on most evenings,13 to the numerous Baptist academies, where Priestley’s version would almost certainly have been frowned upon.14 Archival evidence from the more liberal academies does not always bear out claims regarding the centrality of Hartley’s Theory in curricula, at least at the end of the long century: John Pye Smith’s lecture notes from Homerton (c.1800–50) make no mention of Priestley’s book, opting instead for Hartley’s original alongside Belsham’s Elements of the Human Mind (1801).15 Nevertheless, Simon Mills has shown how Priestley’s philosophy found its way into lectures at Warrington in the early 1780s, long after Priestley had left, and (via Belsham) at Daventry and Hackney.16 Priestley’s influence on Barbauld has been well documented,17 not least by the man himself, who was keen to point out that his sermon ‘On Habitual Devotion’ had occasioned her poem ‘An Address to the Deity’ (1773).18 The poem and sermon offer a sense of active conversation in the Warrington community, and make it clear that dialogue with Priestley was an important spur for Barbauld’s writing at that time, even though she was excluded

12

13

14

15 16

17

18

Isaac Kramnick, ‘Eighteenth-Century Science and Radical Social Theory: The Case of Joseph Priestley’s Scientific Liberalism’, The Journal of British Studies 25, no. 1 (1986), p. 29. Lamb and Hazlitt: Further Letters and Records Hitherto Unpublished, ed. William Carew Hazlitt (London: Elkin Matthews, 1900), 35. Even relatively liberal academies could be anti-Unitarian: Thomas Belsham resigned from Daventry Academy in 1789 after his rejection of the Holy Trinity became known to the school trustees, and differences between tutors’ theological beliefs caused considerable friction at Warrington. The Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies project, Dissenting Academies Online provides extensive information on the academies http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/drwilliams/portal.html. Pye Smith MSS, NCL/L18/30, Dr Williams’s Library, London. Mills, ‘Joseph Priestley and the Intellectual Culture of Rational Dissent, 1752–1796’, 217–39. See, for example, William Keach, ‘Barbauld, Romanticism and the Survival of Dissent’, Essays and Studies: Romanticism and Gender, ed. Anne Janowitz, (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), 44–61; Joanna Wharton, ‘Inscribing on the Mind: Anna Letitia Barbauld’s “Sensible Objects”’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 4 (1 December 2012): 535–50. Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, Sermons (London, 1791), 118.

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from lectures at the academy.19 Both pieces progress from the concern that worldly matters can overwhelm devotion, that the minor objects of life can clutter one’s thoughts and obscure the idea of God, to the conclusion that, as Priestley puts it, the ‘truly good and perfect man’ sees ‘God in every thing, and sees every thing in God’.20 Hartleyan theory forms the basis for the sermon: Priestley’s ‘habitual regard to God’ stems from the associationist notion of mental connections being fixed through repetition. And, as in the sermon, Barbauld’s poem suggests the link between the material world and God can be established and maintained by a process of habitual association: … GOD is seen in all, and all in GOD. I read his awful name, emblazon’d high With golden letters on th’ illumin’d sky; Nor less the mystic characters I see Wrought in each flower, inscrib’d on every tree21

Barbauld’s devotion is expressed here as a habit of mind, which leads her to encounter God through the senses, through the practice of looking at, and perhaps also smelling and touching natural objects. Sensing nature is equated with reading, providing an intimation of how Barbauld conceptualised both as embodied acts: God is ‘read’ in the scent of flowers and in the knots of trees. This is religious devotion as physical, practical doing, which is nevertheless continuous with abstract thinking. Indeed, associationist theory appears to tend towards such implementation. As Priestley notes in his preface to ‘On Habitual Devotion’, Hartley’s theory ‘not only explains … many phenomena of the mind … but also leads to a variety of practical applications’.22

The ‘new Walk’ Barbauld asserts in her Advertisement to the first volume of Lessons for Children that ‘amidst the multitude of books professedly written for children, there is not one adapted to the comprehension of a child from two to three years old’.23 Lessons was meant to supply this want, and marked a 19 20 21 22 23

William McCarthy, ALBVE (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008), 75. Price and Priestley, Sermons,, 125. ‘An Address to the Deity’, in Poems, ed. McCarthy and Kraft, 4. Price and Priestley, Sermons, 117. Lessons for Children, from Two to ThreeYears Old (London, J. Johnson, 1787), 3.

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radical departure from much of the market; William McCarthy notes the ‘complete absence … of abstract “Moral Precepts” such as “Live Well that you may die well”, with which previous reading primers had sandbagged the hapless toddlers who were set to learn from them’. As McCarthy explains, Barbauld ‘drew her vocabulary instead from sights and sounds, flora and fauna of the country village where she wrote … and the daily life of the child for whom she wrote’.24 Earlier children’s books often incorporated an embodied element to learning – movables and books with product tie-ins were produced specifically for children from the mid-eighteenth century – but Barbauld was perhaps the first to be recognised as grounding the prose itself in the real world, initiating what Frances Burney famously called the ‘new Walk’ in children’s literature.25 The first editions of Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Lessons for Children did not contain illustrations, though later reprints did. Writing in the Monthly Review in 1778, Thomas Bentley voiced, in prose poorly imitative of Barbauld’s meticulously graded language, a demand for further, illustrated versions of Lessons: ‘Thank you a thousand times, say the Masters and Misses, good Mrs. Barbauld, for making such pretty little books; – pray go on and make us a great many more, and desire Mr Johnson to put some pretty pictures in them.’26 Yet even without illustrations, praise for Lessons often centred on the book’s images; as we shall see, Barbauld’s representations of material circumstances were thought by admirers of her work to evoke ideas nearly identical to those caused by the objects themselves. What ideas actually constituted was open to interpretation. There is disagreement today as to whether John Locke was an imagist,27 that is, whether or not he believed that ideas took the form of images in the mind, but his use of visual metaphors such as ‘pictures drawn in our minds’ might lead us to understand him in those terms.28 David Hartley is less ambivalent: ‘sensations’, he states, ‘leave certain Vestiges, Types, or Images, of themselves, which may be called, Simple Ideas of Sensation’. According to Hartley, the 24

25

26 27

28

William McCarthy, ‘How Dissent Made Anna Barbauld, and What She Made of Dissent’, in Religious Dissent and the Aikin–Barbauld Circle, 1740–1860, ed. James and Inkster, 58. Frances Burney, The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame D’Arblay), ed. Joyce Hemlow et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972–1984), 4: 187. Monthly Review 59 (July 1778), 26. According to Michael Ayers, Locke believes that ‘the only thing “which the Mind can be employ’d about in thinking” is a sensation or image’ (Locke: Epistemology and Ontology, London: Routledge, 1993, 1: 45). David Soles takes the contrary position in ‘Is Locke an Imagist?’ Locke Newsletter 30 (1999), 17–66. Locke, Human Understanding, 152.

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stronger and more frequent the impression, the more ‘vivid’ the idea. His further explanation gives a clearer sense of ‘ideas of sensation’ as embodied phenomena: if the sensation be faint, or uncommon, the generated idea is also faint in proportion, and, in extreme cases evanescent and imperceptible. The exact observance of the order of place in visible ideas, and of time in audible ones [shows] that these ideas are copies and offsprings of the impressions made on the eye and ear.29

Barbauld’s adoption of this language is no indication that she held strong, or indeed any, opinions on the physical nature of ideas – she is pragmatically ambivalent about such matters,30 and is closer to Elizabeth Hamilton and Common-Sense philosophy than to Hartley in this respect. It will be sufficient to note, then, that philosophers ‘call ideas the images of external things’.31 Bentley’s request for ‘pretty pictures’ voices the widespread expectation that books for children be illustrated, as Locke had recommended in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693): If [the child’s] Aesop has Pictures in it, it will entertain him much the better, and encourage him to read, when it carries the increase of Knowledge within it. For such visible Objects Children hear talked of in vain and without any satisfaction, whilst they have no Ideas of them; those Ideas being not to be had from Sounds, but either the things themselves, or their Pictures.32 29 30

31

32

Hartley, Observations, 1: 56. Barbauld’s reflections on the nature of the soul are open-ended; the questions in her late poem ‘Life’ (1825), for example, accommodate multiple metaphysical viewpoints. It is clear, however, that she held Lockean beliefs about the mind. In her poem ‘To a Little Invisible Being who is Expected soon to Become Visible’ (1799?), she imagines the human mind in its unborn state: ‘Senses from objects locked, and mind from thought!’ (SPP, 147–8, line 6). Joseph Priestley, An Examination of Dr Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind (London: J. Johnson, 1774), 30. Priestley adds that this is ‘known to be a figurative expression, denoting not that the actual shapes of things were delineated in the brain, or upon the mind, but only that impressions of some kind or other were conveyed to the mind by means of the organs of sense and their corresponding nerves, and that between these impressions and sensations existing in the mind there is a real and necessary, though at present an unknown connection’. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. John W. Yolton and Jean S. Yolton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 212.

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For Locke, pictures are useful for two related reasons: because they are entertaining, and because they facilitate comprehension of the text. Accurate ideas of ‘visible Objects’ which are not yet familiar to the child cannot be communicated by words alone – they must be acquired through the perception either of the ‘thing themselves’ or pictorial representations of those things. Locke states that books must be easily comprehensible to make reading enjoyable for the child: ‘for what Pleasure or Incouragement’ he asks, ‘can it be to a Child to exercise himself in reading those Parts of a Book, where he understands nothing?’33 But the epistemological gap between language and object had implications far beyond the incapacity of unfamiliar words to entertain. To quote Locke again, this time from his chapter ‘Of the Abuse of Words’ in Book Three of Human Understanding: Men having been accustomed from their cradles to learn words which are easily got and retained, before they knew, or had framed the complex ideas, to which they were annexed, or which were to be found in the things they were thought to stand for, they usually continue to do so all their lives … this insignificancy in their words, when they come to reason concerning either their tenets or interest, manifestly fills their discourse with abundance of empty unintelligible noise and jargon, especially in moral matters.34

Locke’s recommendations on the design and content of children’s books were bound up with this concern about insignificant discourse, a concern that was echoed by educationalists throughout the eighteenth century. Even in the early 1700s, insignificant speech was presented as much more than an unattractive ‘habit’ – it was a problem with moral, social and political implications.35 In his treatise on The Improvement of the Mind (1741), Isaac Watts warned that ‘Words without Ideas… lead young persons into a most unhappy 33 34 35

Ibid., 213. Locke, Human Understanding, 492. Jonathan Swift’s description of the political liar provides a classic example: ‘The superiority of his genius consists in nothing else but an inexhaustible fund of political lies… He never yet considered whether any proposition were true or false, but whether it were convenient for the present minute or company to affirm or deny it; so that if you think fit to refine upon him, by interpreting everything he says, as we do dreams, by the contrary, you are still to seek, and will find yourself equally deceived whether you believe or not: the only remedy is to suppose, that you have heard some inarticulate sounds, without any meaning at all.’ The Examiner, no. 14 (8 November 1710).

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habit of talking without Meaning, and boldly determine upon Things that are hardly within the Reach of human Capacity.’36 Watts’ position is to an extent anti-intellectual – he is advising here against ‘scholastick disputes’ – and his Divine Songs, Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children (1715) demonstrates the extent to which Lockean educationalism was about power and linguistic authority.37 For Watts, who was an important influence on Barbauld, the aim was to develop a language to ‘give the Minds of Children a relish of Vertue and Religion’.38 Katherine Wakely-Mulroney has argued that Watts envisions ‘child interiority [as a] space … defined by both its depth and its remoteness from adult surveillance or interference’.39 In order to plumb the depths of the child’s soul, then, Divine Songs was written in verse, which according to Watts had four benefits. First, it gave greater ‘Delight in the learning of Truths and Duties’, turning ‘Duty into a Reward’. Second, it was ‘retained longer in the Memory, and sooner recollected’, so that it could regulate behaviour: ‘the End of a Song running in the Mind, may be an effectual means to keep off … Temptations, or incline to some Duty’. Third, and most suggestively, the verses would be a constant Furniture for the Minds of Children, that they may have something to think upon when alone, and sing over to themselves. This may sometimes give their Thoughts a divine Turn, and raise a young Meditation. Thus they will not be forced to seek Relief for an Emptiness of Mind, out of the loose and dangerous Sonnets of the Age.

If, as this might suggest, Watts’ intended his Divine Songs to replicate the space of the church within the ‘Emptiness of Mind’, then his fourth point (that the Songs would provide ‘pleasant and proper Matter… to sing one in the Family’) considers the book’s social agency. In an 1802 letter to his brother, Henry Crabb Robinson, Thomas Robinson gives a brief description of his wife Mary’s routine in teaching their son to read:

36 37

38

39

Isaac Watts, The Improvement of the Mind (London: J. Brackstone, 1741), 187. See Susan Manly, Language, Custom and Nation in the 1790s: Locke, Tooke, Wordsworth, Edgeworth (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2007), esp. 139–55. Divine Songs, Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children. By I. Watts., 2ond Edition. (London, 1716), n.p. Katherine Wakely-Mulroney, ‘Isaac Watts and the Dimensions of Child Interiority’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 39, no. 1 (1 March 2016), 104.

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Material Enlightenment A great deal of Mary’s time is now occupied in attention to him, and she flatters herself that he repays her attention. An hour or two every evening is employed hearing him read and spell. We use Mrs. Barbauld’s and Mrs. Edgworth’s [sic] books, which convey to children ideas as well as words.40

Robinson’s letter indicates that Barbauld’s children’s books (and those by Edgeworth that followed) fulfilled the Lockean requisite for signification. Robinson also hints towards the social, as well as the physical elements of early childhood reading: it is something done together and aloud. Such practices are closely related to the conveyance of ideas in eighteenth-century educational discourse: Watts advocated conversational teaching in order to ‘engage the Attention, keep the Soul fixed, and convey and insinuate into the Mind, the Ideas of Things in a more lively and forcible Way, than the meer reading of Books in the Silence and Retirement of the Closet’.41 Language, then, is made more effective through physicalisation; spoken ideas make a stronger impression on the mind, but can also be subtly ‘insinuated’ there, so that children are unaware that they are being taught. Leaving aside for the moment the more troubling implications of this, we will see that Barbauld’s Lessons plays on the physical and social facets of reading in its distinctive combination of theory and practice.

The domestic and familiar In her ‘Advertisement’ to the Lessons, Barbauld writes that the ‘little publication’ was ‘made for a particular child’ (her nephew and adopted son, Charles) ‘but the public is welcome to the use of it’.42 Although her phrasing is modest – indeed, the ‘little book’ can be considered a trope for modesty in the period – Barbauld is making clear the value of her book, both as the product of experience and as something of ‘use’ to the public. In doing so, she highlights the manifold functions of the book – ‘use’ is, as Matthew Grenby points out, ‘a more inclusive, and frequently more accurate term than “reading” [which] has very often been more physical and interactive

40

41 42

Thomas Robinson, letter to Henry Crabb Robinson, 23 March 1802, Henry Crabb Robinson MSS, vol. 2, letter 44, Dr Williams’s Library, London. My thanks to Jane Giscombe at Dr Williams’s Library for drawing my attention to this resource. Watts, Improvement of the Mind, 38. Original emphasis. Lessons for Children, from Two to Three, 3.

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than cerebral and solitary’.43 The design of Lessons kept physicality in mind: in ‘adaptation’ to their needs, Lessons is small enough to fit in a young child’s hands, and the type is large – ‘necessary assistances’, Barbauld explains, for ‘the eye of a child and of a learner [which] cannot catch, as ours can, a small, obscure, ill-formed word, amidst a number of others all equally unknown to him’. Such innovations, she continues, can only be arrived at through experience: ‘They only, who have actually taught young children, can be sensible how necessary these assistances are.’44 Since early education was usually undertaken by women, the implication is that they possessed superior knowledge. But the domestic groundings of the book are also a logical extension of Lockean theory, which put the minutiae of daily experience at the very foundation of the mind. Positioning and distinguishing herself in relation to this tradition, and corresponding with William Cowper’s The Task (1785), Barbauld stresses that the occupation of education is ‘humble but not mean; for to lay the first stone of a noble building, and to plant the first idea in a human mind, can be no dishonour to any hand’.45 Though written with a ‘particular child’ in mind, Lessons features objects that would have been, if not within direct sight, then at least familiar to most of Barbauld’s child readers. In this respect, it textually replicates the multimodality of the children’s book. Gillian Brown has argued that ‘the material paraphernalia with which eighteenth-century publishers embellished and sold children’s books … bear witness to Locke’s understanding that mental processes rely on images, whether actual, remembered, or imagined’: this might equally be said of Lessons, both before and after its publication.46 The frequent demonstrative references to things – ‘here is a pin’, ‘here is a white butterfly’ – and the imperatives ‘see’ and ‘look at’ suggest, in the first place, Barbauld’s actual physical gesturing towards a particular proximal object, and subsequently a conceptual gesturing to or prompting of a familiar type of object; that is, the image of an object in the mind.47 The first lesson, however, centres on Charles’s physical interaction with the book itself, where he sits, how he holds it, and the implement with which 43

44 45

46

47

M. O. Grenby, The Child Reader, 1700–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 194. Lessons for Children, from Two to Three, 4. Lessons for Children from Two to Three, 4. Compare The Task, Book 4, ll. 290–304: ‘to nurse/ The growing seeds of wisdom…’. William Cowper: The Task and Selected Other Poems, ed. James Sambrook (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 121. Gillian Brown, ‘The Metamorphic Book: Children’s Print Culture in the Eighteenth Century’. Eighteenth-Century Studies 39, no. 3 (Spring 2006), 353. Lessons for Children, from Two to Three, 6; Lessons for Children of Three Years Old (London: J. Johnson, 1788), part 2, 36.

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he can pick out individual words: ‘Sit in mamma’s lap. Now read your book. Where is the pin to point with? Here is a pin. Do not tear the book.’48 As well as drawing attention to the physicality of the book, Barbauld ensures that the first object introduced in Lessons is one that was necessarily present for all her readers. Lessons continuously draws lines out to its (and the child’s) surroundings and in doing so replicates and attempts to shape dialogue between the mother and child. It encourages both child and adult to engage in particular physical behaviours: it is easy to imagine adult readers of Lessons gesturing towards things, perhaps even adapting the text to the child’s particular environment, or devising their own object lessons. Brown summarises this process of engagement with illustrated books: As an adult elucidates a picture for a child, pointing and commentating, the child learns that there is a frame of reference for the picture even as the picture provides a particular frame of reference … Correlations between pictures and personal experience, between pictures and external information supplied by an adult, and between pictures and print all manifest how illustrated books generate conversation.49

In Lessons, the frame of reference is the child’s actual surroundings, or the mental images gained from those surroundings. Moreover, since conversation about things forms much of the content of Lessons – conversation that would have been played out in the act of joint reading – the interrelations between text and body are fundamental to the social experience of reading the book. When mamma points out the pleasures of the sensible world to Charles, she is also transcribing for mothers the pleasure, for instance, of sharing juicy strawberries with their children, of playing with them, taking pleasure in their pleasure and partaking in it themselves. The mother in Lessons guides Charles in an exploration of the world through which he simultaneously engages with the objects in the book, the book as an object, and the objects surrounding both child and book. Gradually, Barbauld introduces abstract concepts by forging associations between names and ‘simple ideas of sensation’. For example, each month of the year is introduced through the various sensory experiences associated with it: February with the ‘Pretty white snow-drop, with a green stalk’, and the ‘Caw, caw, caw’ of rooks building their nests. In the summer months,

48 49

Lessons for Children, from Two to Three, 5–6. Brown, ‘Metamorphic Book’, 354.

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more pleasurable images are evoked, with Mamma exclaiming ‘How sweet the hay smells!’ after encouraging Charles to tumble in it.50 This is a marked departure from earlier reading primers, which often simply listed words to be learnt by rote; instead, Barbauld produces patterns of association. The prose becomes more complex in the later books of Lessons and then yet more so in Hymns, but recurring ideas and images throughout both works provide a contextual framework for this increasing complexity. A typical move in Lessons is from quotidian objects and occurrences outwards: Do not throw your bread upon the ground. Bread is to eat, you must not throw it away. Corn makes bread. Corn grows in the fields. Grass grows in the fields. Cows eat grass, and sheep eat grass, and horses eat grass. Little boys do not eat grass: no, they eat bread and milk.51

A commonplace domestic event occasions an associative lesson through which ideas are explored from different angles; bread is presented as food for Charles here, it is distinguished from the foods of other animals, and it is also traced back to its ingredients and production. The associative technique of Lessons and later Hymns resembles Hartley’s model of mental development: information is received through the senses, and the concomitant ideas are situated within an increasingly complex network. McCarthy has likened this progressive process to schema theory – a modern formulation of developmental building blocks.52 Grounding the work in the real world, and forming patterns of association, Barbauld’s texts gradually spread themselves out over the material and the everyday, mirroring the mind’s own development. Through the associative structures in the text, nuclei and networks are worked outwards, and integrated into a fabric that eventually forms the conceptual backdrop for more advanced narratives. On a linguistic level, the benefit of this is that once a network has been established, new words can be understood in relation to various other points in the network. Grass, for example, which is first mentioned in the extract above, later forms an element of lessons on colours and on haymaking. Later still, when it is associated with a number of attributes and uses, Barbauld has Charles engage in metaphorical thinking:

50 51 52

Lessons for Children of Three, part 1, 11–12; 20–1. Lessons for Children from Two to Three, 10–11. William McCarthy, ‘Mother of All Discourses: Anna Barbauld’s Lessons for Children’, in Culturing the Child, 1690–1914: Essays in Memory of Mitzi Myers, ed. Donelle Ruwe (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 94.

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Material Enlightenment O, here is a large round stump of a tree, it will do very well for a table. But we have no chairs. Here is a seat of turf, and a bank almost covered with violets; we shall sit here, and you and Billy may lie on the carpet. The carpet is in the parlour. Yes, there is a carpet in the parlour, but there is a carpet here too. What is it? The grass is the carpet out of doors. Pretty green soft carpet!53

Barbauld’s gradual use of metaphor here – initially providing both tenor and vehicle, and then finally the vehicle alone – is, as McCarthy states, a means of encouraging Charles to ‘think poetically’.54 The ‘pretty green carpet’ is returned to in Hymns in Prose: ‘If you fall, little lambs, you will not be hurt; there is spread under you a carpet of soft grass, it is spread on purpose to receive you’ (‘Hymn II’, SPP, 240). Because the metaphor has already been introduced in Lessons, this figurative devotional idea is ready to be assimilated into the child’s spreading network of cognitive associations. Of course, metaphor also gives images an increased vitality, and is thus an important means of making communication more powerful. Pat Rogers summarises the prevalence of this view in eighteenth-century literary criticism: ‘In virtually all writers on style before the Romantic era, it was the job of metaphor … to deliver a predetermined message with added impact … it was not normally in question that figurative language was designed to enhance, to adorn, to represent with special clarity.’55 In associationist terms, metaphors transfer the associations from one thing onto another thing; as Priestley has it, they ‘give strength and colour, as it were, to ideas,’ so ‘we naturally use them when our own ideas are peculiarly vivid, and when, consequently, we wish to communicate the same ideas, in the same strength, to the minds of others’.56 Indeed, recent research in cognitive literary studies indicates that visual metaphors are particularly evocative of mental images.57 By demonstrating the construction of metaphor for Charles, Barbauld is not merely encouraging him to think poetically,

53 54 55

56

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Lessons for Children of Three, part 2, 17. McCarthy, ‘Mother of All Discourses’, 101. Pat Rogers, ‘Theories of Style’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: The Eighteenth Century, ed. H. B. Nesbit and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 4: 365–80, 378. Joseph Priestley, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (London: J. Johnson, 1777), 188. Daniel W. Gleason, ‘The Visual Experience of Image Metaphor: Cognitive Insights into Imagist Figures’, Poetics Today 30, no. 3 (Fall 2009), 423–70.

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but also showing how to communicate images, and the ideas and feelings associated with them, to the minds of others more effectively.

Sensory devotion In her preface to Hymns in Prose, Barbauld makes explicit the Lockean groundings of her project: The peculiar design of this publication is, to impress devotional feelings as early as possible on the infant mind; fully convinced as the author is, that they cannot be impressed too soon, and that a child, to feel the full force of the idea of God, ought never to remember the time when he had no such idea – to impress them by connecting religion with a variety of sensible objects; with all that he sees, all he hears, all that affects his young mind with wonder or delight; and thus by deep, strong, and permanent associations, to lay the best foundation for practical devotion in future life. (SPP, 238)

Unmistakably, Barbauld sets out her project in the language of associationism. Hymns is introduced as a project of applied, or ‘practical’ associationism, of forging connections in the mind. As the emphatic repetition of ‘all’ suggests, Barbauld seeks to effect an immersion in pleasurable sensory impressions, directing the child’s whole being towards God. Following on from Lessons, Hymns focuses on simple, concrete ideas that would likely be familiar to the child – such as trees, rivers, flowers and birds – and develops habits of thought through melodic repetition. Since she understood ‘maxims and documents’ to be ineffectual in a child’s development, Barbauld draws on the sensory impressions to forge these connections. The hymns contextualise devotion within the realm of things in the real world: ‘sensible objects’, as she names them in her preface, a term borrowed from the language of philosophy. She concentrates on the sensations the objects in question provoke, and connects these sensations to the idea of God, introducing the child to the ‘habitual devotion’ of Priestley’s sermon and ‘An Address to the Deity’. The first hymn names objects and animals, connecting those ideas with God. She then focuses more closely on sensations, in this case sounds: birds ‘warble sweetly in the green shade’ and rivers ‘murmur melodiously’ (SPP, 239). Both are singing out in praise, and their song is discerned by the child’s ear. The child is then bid to praise God with his/her voice. The passive act of hearing inspires an embodied action; hymns, after all, are meant to be sung. Crucially, the sensations in question

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are pleasurable; the sounds are ‘sweet’ and ‘melodious’. This sensuousness is developed in the second hymn, where sensory impressions are steadily built up to quite hedonic effect: COME, let us go forth into the fields, let us see how the flowers spring, let us listen to the warbling of the birds, and sport ourselves upon the new grass. The winter is over and gone, the buds come out upon the trees, the crimson blossoms of the peach and the nectarine are seen, and the green leaves sprout. The hedges are bordered with tufts of primroses, and yellow cowslips that hang down their heads; and the blue violet lies hid beneath the shade. The young goslings are running upon the green, they are just hatched, their bodies are covered with yellow down; the old ones hiss with anger if any one comes near. (SPP, 239)

The sheer profusion of beauty here, the sense of joy and gaiety, is calculated to appeal to the child’s sensory delight in nature. Again, there is a call to embodied action in the opening words; a call to ‘listen’ and to ‘sport’ on the grass. The hymn ends on a similarly sensory note, offering God ‘the incense of praise’, in a natural setting, ‘on every hill, and in every green field’ (SPP, 240). The rituals of church worship are thus converted into a natural, sensory, and universal religion. Of course, Barbauld was by no means the first to enlist the senses in religious instruction – by necessity, the two cannot be separated.58 Nor was Barbauld alone amongst her contemporaries in applying associationist thinking to pedagogic practice: Emma Major has noted that the staunchly Anglican Sarah Trimmer also did so. As Major shows, however, whereas Trimmer aimed to impress a Scriptural sense of duty towards God, Barbauld turns the theory to a much more sensorial, and for Trimmer, alarmingly Dissenting 58

In her study of the olfactory senses in ancient Christianity, Susan Ashbrook Harvey writes that ‘both through ritual practice and through related instruction (homilies, hymns or other forms of didactic discourse), Christians granted value to the senses as channels through which believers could approach and encounter the divine’. See Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 99. Matthew Milner has recently argued that, notwithstanding the ambivalence towards the body with which postReformation thought has often been associated, ‘basic sensory instruction continued in English lay and clerical handbooks in the early sixteenth century’. See, The Senses and the English Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 180.

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purpose; her associationism is ‘central to a pedagogy which develops a taste for nature and poetry in a non-denominational way that Trimmer and others found objectionable’.59 As it crosses religious divides, it also appeals across the senses; the reading of Barbauld’s Lessons and Hymns can, I think, be understood as an intersensory experience. While the sense of sight is to an extent privileged in her work, Barbauld’s images include smells, sounds and tastes – even, in Lessons, the touch of a cat’s fur. In Hymns, the rose fills the air with a ‘sweet odour,’ as well as being the ‘delight of every eye’ (SPP, 242); ‘The thistle is armed with sharp prickles’ and ‘the mallow is soft and woolly’ (SPP, 250). Gustation also features, in ‘ripe apples’ and the observation that ‘some drink of the fruit of the vine; some the pleasant milk of the cocoa-nut; and others quench their thirst with the running stream’ (SPP, 248–9). Within the world of things, all senses can be appealed to in order to ‘impress devotional feelings’, so that ‘GOD is seen in all, and all in GOD’.60 McCarthy and Kraft thus see Hymns in Prose as Barbauld’s attempt to bring into being what she had hoped for, at the end of Thoughts on the Devotional Taste: a time ‘when the spirit of philosophy, and the spirit of devotion, shall join to conduct our public assemblies’.61 In order to effect wider religious reform, Barbauld joined the two ‘spirits’ together in Hymns, applying philosophical theory and devotional feeling to create a progressive, and in Barbauld’s view, providential text. Associationism is particularly fitting to this task – it lends itself to religious practice because, as is expressed in ‘An Address to the Deity’, it allows for an emphasis on a personal, habitual, and a feeling relationship with God: a ‘devotional taste’ so closely allied to sensory pleasure that even Priestley found it objectionable.62 As we have seen, Barbauld’s God is found not in the churches of the establishment, but in nature: Major argues that the ‘appropriation of nature is central to Dissenting claims to purer faith and patriotism’, and Dissenting pedagogy therefore aimed to deliver a ‘deeper understanding of nature’.63 In ‘Hymn VI’ Barbauld annexes science to religion, bidding the ‘child of reason’ to find God through sensory observations of nature: 59 60

61 62

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Major, Madam Britannia, 916. Anna Letitia Barbauld, ‘An Address to the Deity’, in Poems, ed. McCarthy and Kraft, 4. SPP, 235. See Katherine J. Ready, ‘Dissenting Heads and Hearts: Joseph Priestley, Anna Barbauld, and Conflicting Attitudes towards Devotion within Rational Dissent’, Journal of Religious History 34, no. 2 (2010), 174–90. Also see Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 174–5. Major, Madam Britannia, 913.

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Material Enlightenment CHILD of reason, whence comest thou? What has thine eye observed, and whither has thy foot been wandering? I have been wandering along the meadows, in the thick grass; the cattle were feeding around me, or reposing in the cool shade; the corn sprung up in the furrows; the poppy and the harebell grew among the wheat; the fields were bright with summer, and glowing with beauty. Didst thou see nothing more? Didst thou observe nothing beside? Return again, child of reason, for there are greater things than these. – God was among the fields; and didst thou not perceive him? his beauty was upon the meadows; his smile enlivened the sun-shine. I have walked through the thick forest; the wind whispered among the trees; the brook fell from the rocks with a pleasant murmur; the squirrel leapt from bough to bough; and the birds sung to each other amongst the branches. Didst thou hear nothing, but the murmur of the brook? no whispers, but the whispers of the wind? Return again, child of reason, for there are greater things than these. – God was amongst the trees; his voice founded in the murmur of the water; his music warbled in the shade; and didst thou not attend? (SPP, 245)

The Enlightenment child uses the senses of sight and hearing, and encounters beauty in nature, but this does not, at first, inspire an inner devotional feeling. By repeatedly connecting sense impressions with God, Barbauld forges deeper and stronger mental associations – associations that will, in time, become habitual. She ends this hymn by echoing the sentiment common to Priestley’s sermon and ‘An Address to the Deity’: ‘God is in every place; he speaks in every sound we hear; he is seen in all that our eyes behold: nothing, O child of reason, is without God; – let God therefore be in all thy thoughts’ (SPP, 246). In order to achieve this habit, the child must repeatedly ‘return again’ to nature; children have been taught to observe with the eye and the ear, the senses most favoured in Enlightenment thought, but Barbauld would have them not merely observe, but to sense nature, and to gain a devotional feeling for God in doing so. In his study of associationism’s literary legacy, Cairns Craig suggests a correspondence between the theory and Ezra Pound’s notion of the ‘image’. This, he contends, ‘is a modernised version of the “fusion” by which associationists had described the creation of complex ideas and their accompanying emotion’. Craig’s observation that Pound’s image possesses ‘the energy to provoke ideas and emotions (that is, associations) in its readers’ could,

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I think, equally apply to Barbauld’s children’s books.64 McCarthy too has identified a proto-Imagist quality in Barbauld’s books for children: ‘Language’, he writes, ‘seems to bloom from the pages of Lessons as if it were a new creation.’65 Certainly there is a peculiar immediacy to the images of both Lessons and Hymns that merits the comparison. ‘Hymn VII’ in particular is notable for the clarity of its images: Come, let us go into the thick shade, for it is the noon of day, and the summer sun beats hot upon our heads. The shade is pleasant, and cool; the branches meet above our heads, and shut out the sun, as with a green curtain; the grass is soft to our feet, and a clear brook washes the roots of the trees. The sloping bank is covered with flowers: let us lie down upon it; let us throw our limbs on the fresh grass, and sleep; for all things are still, and we are quite alone. (SPP, 246)

As in Lessons, the reader is not presented with this scene as a detached observer, but is addressed as if present. Again, a visual metaphor strengthens the image: the ‘green curtain’ encapsulates the shade of the canopy clearly and concisely. What makes the passage most evocative, however, is the focus of Barbauld’s description on the objects in the scene. The emphasis here repeatedly falls on the ways in which they affect the body, rather than on the objects themselves. In addition to various senses, different parts of the body feature here: tactile sensation extends from the heat of the sun on the head to the touch of the soft grass on the feet. Barbauld’s prose is restrained, and yet she manages to evoke a physical experience with remarkable intensity. Maria Edgeworth praised Lessons for its ‘poetic beauty, and eloquent simplicity’ and admiration for Hymns was framed in the same terms: Anna Seward noted their ‘touching simplicity, and perfect fitness to their design’.66 The sense of simplicity is in a large part due to Barbauld’s prose style: she keeps sentences short, with few clauses, and avoids long words. This is 64

65 66

Cairns Craig, Associationism and the Literary Imagination: From the Phantasmal Chaos (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 296. An aesthetic comparison might also be made with Edward Thomas’ poem ‘Tall Nettles’ (1917). Thomas knew Barbauld’s work: she is mentioned in the same breath as Paine, Franklin, Thomas Percy and Horne Took in his novella, ‘The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans’ (1913). McCarthy, ALBVE, 194–5. Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education (London: J. Johnson, 1798), 1:321; Anna Seward to Sally Fowler Childers, 30 March 1804, in Letters of Anna Seward: Written Between the Years 1784 and 1807 (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1811), 6: 145.

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especially striking in Lessons; because of the small size of the book, and the relatively large print, each page provides only a limited number of images. But this simplicity is also intrinsically linked to the image. As Edgeworth saw it: When a child, who has observed any of the beauties of nature, begins to read, he will be pleased with descriptions, that give him back the image of his mind. To form an early devotional taste, no book for young children can be better adapted than Mrs. Barbauld’s Hymns, from the simplicity, the sublime simplicity of description, and the captivating charm of the melodious language.67

For Edgeworth, Barbauld’s simplicity of language is important not only because it aids comprehension, but also because of the beauty with which it ‘gives back’ images. The emotive impact of Hymns thus seems dependent on precisely the recollective energy that Craig identifies in Pound. In Hymns, the instruction to observe is invested with a new, devotional purpose, as the sensory pleasures of nature are associated with the idea of God. ‘Hymn IX’ begins with a tactile and visual experience, an instruction to the child to ‘Take up a handful of sand’ and try to ‘number the grains of it’. Barbauld then introduces the idea of God: ‘You cannot count them, they are innumerable; much more the things which God has made’ (SPP, 250). This is a recurrent pattern in Hymns: Barbauld begins with the sensory perception of an object or objects and then relates this to God. The hymn goes on to describe numerous plants and flowers, all of which, says Barbauld, ‘are a part of [God’s] works’. Eventually, the practice of seeing God in nature becomes habitual; at this point ‘things’ come to supersede the author: ‘There is little need that I should tell you of God, for every thing speaks of him’ (SPP, 251). Notwithstanding the self-effacement implied here, Barbauld’s text was meant to play a very real part in the child’s engagement with nature. Indeed, considering the hymns were intended to be ‘committed to memory, and recited’, they may well have been repeated outside, as depicted in Elizabeth Sandham’s ‘Rambles of a Day’, when a young child recites ‘Hymn IX’ to her sister and friends while on a walk.68 Such fictional representation should not, of course, be taken as evidence for how Hymns was actually read and

67

68

Richard Lovell Edgeworth [and Maria Edgeworth], Essays on Professional Education (London: J. Johnson, 1809), 81. Elizabeth Sandham, ‘Rambles of a Day’, in Trifles; or, Friendly Mites towards Improving the Rising Generation (London: T. Hurst, 1800), 152–3.

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recited, but it does indicate that the book suggested such usage, whether or not child readers actually followed that suggestion. Recent studies on the use of children’s books in the eighteenth century have brought attention to the ways in which childhood reading was conceptualised as a physical act.69 This fundamental connection between books and the physical world did not always rely on the inclusion of illustrations or metamorphic elements in printed books; as I have suggested, in Lessons and Hymns certain physical behaviours were also written into the text. In another letter to his brother, Thomas Robinson associates the instructional use of Barbauld’s books with playful activity: At this precise moment I am sitting with Mary, and Thomas who is receiving instruction from his mother out of Mrs. Barbauld’s books. The scene brings strong to my recollection the time when you were about the same age amusing yourself in cutting out paper boys. I remember with what affectionate patience our dear mother submitted all to your interruptions.70

Even without the potential for tactile interaction with moving parts, then, Barbauld’s texts seem to have encouraged play, or at least evoked memories of play in adulthood, creating a nostalgic ‘scene’ of interaction between children and adults. In its emphasis on ‘delight’ (SPP, 238), Hymns recalls earlier children’s books, such as John Newbery’s The Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744), which was sold alongside a pincushion or a ball, and Mary Cooper’s spelling book, The Child’s New Play-Thing (1742), which had a page that could be cut up into alphabet tiles. The tangibility and manipulability of what Heather Klemann has recently called the ‘book-toy hybrid’ put into practice Locke’s belief that children learned best through play.71 As Locke observed, ‘Children may be cozen’d into a Knowledge of the Letters; be taught to read, without perceiving it to be any thing but a Sport, and play themselves into that others are whipp’d for.’72 This is encapsulated in Newbery’s motto, delectando monemus (instruction with delight), a principle that is also traceable in much of 69

70

71 72

Grenby, The Child Reader, Brown, ‘Metamorphic Book’; and Heather Klemann, ‘The Matter of Moral Education: Locke, Newbery, and the Didactic Book-Toy Hybrid’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 44, no. 2 (Winter 2011), 223–4. Thomas Robinson, letter to Henry Crabb Robinson, December 21, 1801, Henry Crabb Robinson MSS, vol. 2, no. 38, Dr Williams’s Library, London. Klemann, ‘Moral Education’. Concerning Education, 209.

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Barbauld’s writing for children – she too was a proponent of ‘playing children into learning’.73 And her books certainly did delight young readers; the disdain for eighteenth-century didacticism that ran from Lamb’s famous slur on the ‘cursed Barbauld crew’ to Geoffrey Summerfield’s charge that she ‘abandoned, or forswor[e], lyricism’ belies the recollections of genuine pleasure communicated by so many who actually read Barbauld’s work as children.74 Not to mention their long-lasting popularity: twelve editions of Hymns were printed in London alone during Barbauld’s lifetime, and over forty editions were published in the United States between 1797 and 1820.75 Hymns continued to be printed for a juvenile audience as late as 1905. The rehabilitation of Barbauld’s literary reputation has entailed countering her nineteenth-century reputation as a somewhat prim female educationalist.76 As McCarthy states, ‘The good that Barbauld was said to have done came to be identified almost exclusively as her books for children,’ something that ‘played badly in a climate of growing literary elitism.’77 While it is certainly important to rectify Barbauld’s misrepresentation mostly or solely as an educationalist in the Victorian era and beyond, it is equally important to resist the separation of her children’s literature from the rest of her oeuvre. Not only do distinctions between these strands of her writing ignore the intertextual links between, for example, the final episode in Lessons on the sun and moon with ‘A Summer’s Evening Meditation’ (1773), or between the habitual devotion set out in Hymns and ‘An Address to the Deity’, they also risk depoliticizing what was itself an intrinsically political act.

73

74

75 76

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‘Review of An Essay on Education by William Barrow’, Annual Review 1 (1803), 577. Author attributed by McCarthy, ALBVE, 648 n. 7. Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb, The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, 1796–1801, ed. Edwin W. Marrs, Jr (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1976), 2: 82; Geoffrey Summerfield, Fantasy and Reason: Children’s Literature in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 216; ALBVE, 216–17. McCarthy, ALBVE, 215. William Keach has pointed out that Barbauld’s literary reputation in the nineteenth century was skewed by Lucy Aikin’s refiguring of her aunt as an apolitical poet and educationalist. See ‘Barbauld, Romanticism and the Survival of Dissent’, in Essays and Studies: Romanticism and Gender, ed. Anne F. Janowitz (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), 45. William McCarthy, ‘A “High-Minded Christian Lady”: The Posthumous Reception of Anna Letitia Barbauld’, in Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception, ed. Harriet Kramer Linkin and Stephen C. Behrendt (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1999), 177.

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The politics of pedagogy In 1777 Joseph Priestley published his Hartleyan lectures on rhetoric under the title A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism. Priestley is particularly insistent here on the psycho-physiological impact of the written and spoken word on children: ‘Whatever … we should think improper for [children] to see, it is improper for them to read or hear; for they have like sensations, and retain similar impressions from both.’78 For Priestley, as we have seen, objects and ideas do not resemble each other. However, ideas caused by the written word and those caused by physical objects do, and it is therefore important that children are not given inappropriate reading – Priestley marks out romance in particular as unsuitable for children. However, associationism also provided a way of thinking about writing style as a means of stimulating psychological processes in the reader. Under Priestley’s view, language becomes the means by which mental states are not merely communicated, but are replicated in the listener’s or reader’s mind. His rhetorical doctrine, with this added element of a psychology based on physiological theory, brings together the written word, body and mind. According to Priestley: to represent things to the life, in order thoroughly to affect and interest a reader in the perusal of a composition, it is of singular advantage to be very circumstantial, and to introduce as many sensible images as possible … in nature, and real life, we see nothing but particulars, and to these ideas alone are the strongest sensations and emotions annexed.79

Priestley taught his view of rhetoric at Warrington Academy, and while Barbauld was not entitled to attend his lectures, the informal and domestic nature of sociable exchange within the academic community there makes it highly likely that she would have come into contact with his ideas on the subject. Considering how deeply invested in Hartleyan psychology Priestley was, even at this early stage in his career, it is probable that associationist language suffused everyday conversation with his family, as well as with close friends such as Barbauld. Certainly, her writing for children suggests a deep investment in associationist rhetoric. For Barbauld, as for Priestley, the strength of the image is crucial to the process of raising sentiment.

78 79

Priestley, Course of Lectures, 83–4. Ibid., 84.

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Confidence in the power of the circumstantial to ‘affect and interest’ is especially apparent in the story of the hunted hare in Lessons, which is worth quoting at length: Ha! what is there amongst the furze? I can see only its eyes. It has very large full eyes. It is a Hare. It is in its form, squatting down amongst the bushes to hide itself, for it is very fearful. The Hare is very innocent and gentle. Its colour is brown; but in countries which are very cold it turns white as snow. It has a short bushy tail; its lip is parted, and very hairy; and it always moves its lips. Its hind legs are very long, that it may run the better. The Hare feeds upon herbs, and roots, and the bark of young trees, and green corn; and sometimes it will creep through the hedge, and steal into the gardens, to eat pinks and a little parsley; and it loves to play and skip about in the moon-light, and to bite the tender blades of grass when the dew is upon them; but in the day time it sleeps in its form. It sleeps with its eyes open because it is very fearful and timid; and when it hears the least noise it starts and pricks up its large ears.80

Barbauld paints a vivid picture here, framing abstract concepts (‘innocent’, ‘gentle’) with an abundance of concrete, particular ideas. Such sensory detailing in Lessons forms a key element of Barbauld’s effort ‘to foster in Charles the sensibility of a poet’;81 without an idea of the sensible qualities of the hare, Charles would not feel so strongly at its subsequent (and quite graphic) death. This does not dissuade the mother from cooking it: ‘It is good for nothing now but to be roasted.’82 Yet, Edgeworth notes, ‘The pathetic description of the poor timid hare … will leave an impression upon the young and humane heart, which may perhaps save the life of many a hare.’83 Humans will continue to hunt hares, Barbauld suggests – change can only come about on a personal psychological level, and can only be assured through the preservation of virtuous feeling, which in turn relies on disinterestedness in power. Encoded in this is a Stoic reflection, I think, on

80 81

82 83

Lessons for Children from Three to Four Years Old (London: J. Johnson, 1788), 80–4. McCarthy, ‘Mother of All Discourses’, 101. It is interesting to compare Barbauld’s hare with Cowper’s: see The Task, Book 4, ll. 334–51. William Cowper, ed. James Sambrook, 122. Lessons for Children from Three to Four, 88. Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education (London: J. Johnson, 1798), 1: 320.

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political power and non-conformity; Barbauld’s child feels for the hare, will probably never hunt hares, but will eat it nonetheless. McCarthy draws comparisons between Barbauld’s pedagogic approach and today’s ‘whole language’ teaching: both favour a contextualised method of teaching to read over ‘phonics’, whereby letters, sounds and then words are learned by rote.84 Noting the polarised political associations of these two approaches, McCarthy remarks that although writers from across the political spectrum admired and emulated Barbauld’s method, the ‘preference for concepts, the materials of thinking, over memorized performance’ aligns itself more easily with ‘liberal Enlightenment’ ideals. Denomination also has an important bearing on this, distinguishing Barbauld’s books from catechistic educational works such as those of the Anglican Sarah Trimmer. Two stories from the first volume of Evenings at Home (1792), the book for older children that Barbauld co-authored with her brother John Aikin, illustrate the value for liberal thinkers of teaching ideas rather than mere words. In Aikin’s ‘Travellers’ Wonders’, Mr Fairborne tells his children about his travels to a strange land, where the inhabitants wear colourful skins and build their houses of fired earth. The story concludes, of course, with the father revealing that all of the supposedly exotic details in the story could also be used to describe England: I meant to show you, that a foreigner might easily represent every thing as equally strange and wonderful among us, as we could do with respect to his country; and also to make you sensible that we daily call a great many things by their names, without ever enquiring into their nature and properties; so that, in reality, it is only the names, and not the things themselves, with which we are acquainted.85

A second story, Barbauld’s ‘Things by Their Right Names,’ invokes Locke’s ‘abuse of words’ to drive home a more obviously radical message. Here the child listener is brought to question the real difference between war and murder, and must conclude that no such difference exists, except in scale. This politicisation of children’s literature touched a nerve for conservative educationalists, most notably Trimmer. Michelle Levy has shown how these stories contribute to the politics of Evenings at Home, arguing that the radicalism of the book ‘lies in [Aikin and Barbauld’s] reliance on an Enlightenment strategy of demystification, of calling “things by their right 84 85

McCarthy, ‘Mother of All Discourses’, 91–2. John Aikin and Anna Letitia Barbauld, Evenings at Home; or, The Juvenile Budget Opened (London: J. Johnson, 1792–6), 1: 31.

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names”’.86 But, as Richard De Ritter has argued, this is often simultaneously a process of re-mystification, as familiar ideas and objects are recast as sources of wonder, so that the domestic sphere ‘provid[es] children with the means of imagining themselves as citizens of the world’.87 The interconnectivity between the individual volumes of Lessons, of Hymns, of Evenings at Home and John Aikin’s Calendar of Nature (1784) both reflect and are products of the collaborationist approach to authorship. Intertextuality, though, extended beyond the Aikin–Barbauld circle; many of those entering the market in children’s books exploited Barbauld’s success by presenting their own works to be read in conjunction with, or as follow-ups to Lessons or Hymns.88 Barbauld publications thus formed a central part of the intertextual experience of early reading; their lines out to the physical world were supplemented by links with new books, forming a more integrated childhood canon. Many of these books reiterated the value of Barbauld’s pedagogical approach. In Ellenor Fenn’s Lilliputian Spectacle, for example, Miss Worthy writes to her brother of ‘a young lady but a little older than [herself ]’ whose parents had ill-advisedly given her Shakespeare, rather than Barbauld, to read: Miss Thompson and I walked into the garden; and she discovered so much ignorance about every thing around us, that I pitied her Mama’s mistaken notions. Had she read Mrs. Barbauld’s Lessons a few years since, she would have been acquainted with the origin of the Butterfly, whose beautiful painted wings I was admiring, whilst she repeated lines from Shakespeare, which she probably understood as little of as I did.89

Again, Lessons furnishes the mind with things rather than words, and this in turn supports an inquisitiveness about things. Lessons is considered a

86

87

88

89

Michelle Levy, ‘The Radical Education of “Evenings at Home”’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 19, nos. 1–2 (Fall 2006): 132. ‘Domesticating Wonder: Late Eighteenth-Century Writing for Children and the Home’. Paper delivered at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies Research Seminar, University of York, 5 February 2013. For example, [William Enfield], A New Sequel to Mrs Barbauld’s Lessons, Adapted for Children from Four to Seven Years Old (London: G. Sael, 1796); Pastoral Lessons and Parental Conversations: Intended as a Companion to Mrs Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose (London: Darton and Harvey, 1797). Mrs Lovechild [Ellenor Fenn], Lilliputian Spectacle de la nature: or, Nature Delineated (London: John Marshall, 1790), 3: 30–2.

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preventative for affectation and wordiness; instead, it promotes the empirical observation of nature. In the dedicatory preface to The Calendar of Nature, Aikin applauds his sister for bringing about a paradigm shift in children’s literature: Though some of the warm admirers of your poetry have censured you for employing talents of so superior a kind in the composition of books for children, yet, I believe, that there are few parents who do not think themselves obliged to you for this condescension: and if you are ambitious of higher approbation, you may assure yourself of that of the genuine philosopher, who must agree with you in thinking, that to lay a foundation for such a structure as that of the human mind, cannot be an ignoble employment. Nor have your services in this important design been confined to your own exertions. It has been partly from your example that others have been induced to consecrate respectable abilities to the same useful purpose; and the great superiority observable in the books for the instruction of children published within a few years past, to those of former periods, is owing to the superior literary rank of the authors.90

Aikin’s address to his sister underscores the political import of children’s literature, its significance in the Enlightenment thinking of the ‘genuine philosopher’. It also serves as a reminder of Barbauld’s impact on the genre; Aikin suggests that she has ennobled a literary form hitherto considered beneath the talent of the ‘superior’ author. Many of these writers, of course, were women. On this subject, Laura Mandell writes that ‘Even Trimmer, who repudiated radically egalitarian views, and Maria Edgeworth, who did not share her father’s radical sympathies, were galvanized into professional authorship by the breath of egalitarian logic emanating from Barbauld’s Lessons and later instances of the genre, a breath that was a breath only and thus did not require self-repudiation by women who were not “feminists.”’91 I agree with Mandell that the ostensibly neutral politics of Lessons enabled women who were politically opposed to Barbauld to follow her ‘new Walk’. Barbauld’s books for young children, however, were not always considered apolitical. Pointing to the increasing distrust of Dissenters after the French Revolution, Emma Major writes that the emphasis on pleasure in Hymns accounts in part for Trimmer’s anxiety about Barbauld’s writing for children: 90 91

The Calendar of Nature (London: J. Johnson, 1784), iii–iv. Laura Mandell, ‘Johnson’s Lessons for Men: Producing the Professional Woman Writer’, Wordsworth Circle 33, no. 3 (Summer 2002), 111.

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‘Taste and pleasure in understanding God, though apparently ecumenical, are not neutral in Barbauld’s children’s books, but instrumental in the promotion of a new national religious character and a new vision of the British Protestant Church.’92 This anxiety seems to have been shared by Sir William Bolland, whose privately circulated poem of 1800 gives a hostile take on her pedagogy: The purity of infants Barbauld stains, Infusing her poison in their milky veins; Taught in her youth a Priestley to admire, And tune for him her puritanical lyre.93

As suggested here, Barbauld’s reputation came to be perceived amongst the establishment elite as bound up with that of Priestley. The transgressive enthusiasm associated with Priestley’s brand of Dissent was considered, by Bolland at least, to have found an outlet in her children’s writing.94 While Lessons and Hymns are (quite appropriately) written in a different voice and contain none of the vitriol of the radical political pamphlets An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (1790) and Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation (1793), Barbauld’s reputation in the 1790s might well have cast a retrospective shadow for some over her previous writing. It is important to keep in mind that the second-generation Romantic backlash against her writing, typified by Lamb’s famous slur on the ‘cursed Barbauld crew’, followed her demonisation by conservatives during this period. Enlightenment didacticism did not always negate or obstruct the transcendental potential of the child’s imagination. In Barbauld’s writing, close observation of the material world often serves as a springboard to the sublime, and the ‘wonder’ through which she transforms the particular 92 93

94

Major, Madam Britannia, 223. Sir William Bolland, The Campaign. To His Royal Highness the Duke of York. And Britannia in the Year One Thousand Eight Hundred (London: T. Bensley, 1800), 50. Bolland was a lawyer and book-collector who ran for legal office in the City of London. W. P. Courtney, ‘Bolland, Sir William (1771/2–1840)’, rev. Hugh Mooney, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004 (http:// www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2797, accessed 5 October 2013). Jon Mee notes that ‘For all his stress on Reason as the core of Christian life, it was easy for Joseph Priestley to be represented as a throwback to the enthusiasts of the seventeenth century when he mixed religious prophecy with political radicalism.’ Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 34.

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and domestic helped shape the culture of Romanticism in Britain; as Daniel White has pointed out, ‘the early romantic voice … emerged in no small degree from the particularities of late-eighteenth-century Dissent’.95 Although Lyrical Ballads (1798), in particular Wordsworth’s ‘I am Six’ and ‘Anecdote for Fathers’, is critical of the catechistic tradition Barbauld came to represent, her influence is tangible elsewhere, especially in Coleridge’s Unitarian period in the 1790s. Though addressed to his ‘cradled infant’ (his son, Hartley), ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1798) might, I think, be read as a paean to Barbauld. The first stanza of the poem contains a meditation on the relation between animated object and the ‘idling Spirit’ which ‘makes a toy of Thought’.96 Coleridge’s ambivalence here about whether the mind is a passive or active entity seems to prefigure his famous rejection of Hartleyanism in Biographia Literaria (1817), where he propounds ‘the natural difference of things and thought’,97 but it also recalls the imaginative play of Barbauld’s ‘sensible objects’. His nostalgia for the domestic education of his own infancy in the second stanza, when he and his sister were ‘both clothed alike!’, seems to echo Barbauld’s ‘To Dr Aikin, on his complaining that she neglected him, October 1768’, in which she remembers how ‘hand in hand with innocence [they] stray’d’.98 In his poem, Coleridge joyfully anticipates for his son an education that unites Rousseauvian and Barbauldian models, and his final published stanza strongly evokes the imagistic Lessons and Hymns: Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, Whether the summer clothe the general earth With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch, Of mossy apple tree99

Coleridge ends his poem by ‘Quietly shining to the quiet Moon’,100 providing a further link with ‘A Summer Evening’s Meditation’ (1773), as has recently

95

96

97

98 99 100

Daniel White, ‘“Properer for a Sermon”: Particularities of Dissent and Coleridge’s Conversational Mode’, Studies in Romanticism (Summer 2001), 198. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’, in Selected Poetry, ed. Richard Holmes (London: Penguin, 1996), 46. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson (London; J. M. Dent, 1974), 54. Poems, ed. McCarthy and Kraft, 18. Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’, 65. Ibid., 66.

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been identified by Isobel Armstrong,101 but there is also an intimation here of the Romantic ‘silencing of the female’ described by Richardson.102 Such observations should not, of course, be taken as an attempt at validating Barbauld’s genius; yet it is worth remembering that later Romantic attitudes towards her writing for children have occluded this early influence on Coleridge and others. The positive application of diminution and simplicity, important aspects in the work of earlier eighteenth-century writers including Watts, Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson,103 was philosophically developed by Barbauld, Coleridge and Wordsworth later in the century. As Barbauld’s poem ‘The Baby House’ demonstrates, this expressive strategy had a subversive potential. Composed at an unknown date and first published in the posthumous Works (1825), ‘The Baby-House’ is in some ways a remarkably radical children’s text. It moves from the topic of domesticity to childhood imagination; to a history lesson, offering a distilled primer for what Daniel Watkins identifies as her visionary, expansive perspective on history;104 to prorevolutionary sentiment, anti-imperialism and republicanism. The poem acts to miniaturise global historical events, bringing them to the attention of a young girl, and insisting that these are issues both necessary and proper for her to know about. At the same time, it expands the domestic space to a monumental scale and seeks a material realisation of political change on a psychological level. As a text that functions by referring out to physical objects, ‘The Baby-House’ engages in what I have been describing as a material application of associationist psychology. Presumably written for and given as a gift to Agatha, the young addressee of the poem, this compact and yet richly complex piece of children’s writing suggests the political bent of Barbauld’s teaching. It is likely, I think, that she taught along similar lines at Palgrave School, and in her later tuition and mentorship of girls; indeed, this seems credible given the thematic links between ‘The Baby-House’ and ‘Written on a Marble’, which was likely written for the ‘weekly chronicle’ at Palgrave (SPP, 109).

101

102

103

104

Isobel Armstrong, ‘Anna Letitia Barbauld: A Unitarian Poetics?’, in McCarthy and Murphy (eds.), Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives, 80. Richardson, ‘Silencing the Female: Romanticism and the Colonization of the Feminine’, in Romanticism and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 81–92. See Freya Johnston, Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking 1709–1791 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Daniel Watkins, Anna Letitia Barbauld and Eighteenth-Century Visionary Poetics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).

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Barbauld’s description of the doll’s house, with its furnishings designed ‘to give guests a treat’, is suggestive of the inclusive domestic sociability that, for Barbauld, constituted an important mode of participation in public life. Her complacent understanding of the potentiality within the ‘bounds of female reserve’ was no doubt gained from her education at Warrington: as Janowitz puts it, Barbauld ‘might well have had an idealized notion of how pliable were the boundaries of the domestic scene’.105 Barbauld’s insistence on the value of the feminine ‘virtues’ accords with what White has described as a ‘determined and sustained attempt to “domesticate” … rational Dissent’, and published and unpublished children’s writing alike were means of disseminating this Dissenting vision.106 A doll’s house would encourage the child’s rehearsal of informal sociable exchange within the home; play is performative in this respect.107 The child would also be able, of course, to shape their own miniature domestic environment, physically manipulating the rooms and furniture, and perhaps engaging in their own domestic production, as recommended in Edgeworth’s Practical Education (1798).108 In order to gain an idea of what the toy may have looked like, I include images of a turn-of-the-century doll’s house made for a girl named May Foster (Figures 1 and 2). Although the toy that belonged to Agatha might not have replicated such an opulent home, Foster’s house is by no means elaborate compared to some. It is also valuable for this study because it is abundantly furnished, as is the one described in the poem. As in Barbauld’s other writings for children, ‘The Baby-House’ encourages and participates in what De Ritter identifies as an imaginative defamil­ iarisation of the domestic.109 The senses play a key role here in bringing about delight: Barbauld’s description of the ‘hurry-scurry’ sound of the fairies’ feet is particularly evocative and playful. She then encourages actual physical play with the line ‘you’ll do well to try and find/ Tester110 or ring they’ve left behind’ (lines 7–8). The imaginative expansion of spatial scale that follows in the poem is mirrored by an expansive temporality: Barbauld stretches her history lesson

105 106 107

108

109 110

Janowitz, ‘Amiable and Radical Sociability’, 66. Daniel E. White, ‘The “Joineriana”’, 515. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2003). Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education (London: J. Johnson, 1798), 4. De Ritter, ‘Domesticating Wonder’. A sixpenny piece; a pertinent choice of object considering the economic themes of the poem.

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Figure 1. ‘May Foster’s House’. Doll’s house, c. 1800.

Figure 2. Detail of ‘May Foster’s House’.

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back to the Egyptian pyramids. She renders these imagistically, and the sense she gives of their size and weight also evokes the temporal weight of history on the land. She then moves swiftly back to pressing contemporary issues, with the contraction of time111 in the words ‘he looks again’. Politically, the succeeding lines speak for themselves: The peasant faints beneath his load, Nor tastes the grain his hands have sowed, While scarce a nation’s wealth avails To raise thy Baby-house, Versailles. And Baby-houses oft appear On British ground, of prince or peer (lines 37–40)

This is radical imagery. Next, Barbauld depicts a tourist visiting a fallen and decrepit Britain, with the line, ‘Trees, the pride of ages, fall’, prophesying environmental ruin in the collapse of the establishment. She gives a condensed apocalyptic vision of the end of Britain’s imperialist power (Eighteen Hundred and Eleven in miniature) and then imagines a redistribution of the wealth gained from imperialism, the ‘treasured coins from distant lands’. The final couplet of ‘The Baby-House’, ‘Then do not, Agatha, repine/ That cheaper Baby-house is thine’, recalls her suggestion elsewhere, for example in ‘To Dr Aikin, on his Complaining’, that women’s exclusion from certain forms of public life is the basis of their virtue. I do not mean to gloss over the conservatism of this stance but also wish to resist presentism in modernday feminism. A more nuanced reading comes from Guest, who shows that Barbauld ‘represents the “household virtues” as continuous with and necessary to more obviously patriotic virtues because their privacy is the basis for an inclusive conception of the civic’.112 In ‘The Baby-House’; and other writings, Barbauld submits to the forces of circumstance while acting – in whatever small way – towards political change. The poem can certainly be read as a consolatory address to a young girl about not being able to own the world, but the closing words, the ‘cheaper Baby-house is thine’ reasserts the cold hard fact of women’s disenfranchisement. It is a matter of 111

112

Jennifer Krusinger Martin comments that Barbauld’s ‘technique of contraction reorder[s] the space and time for conventionally and developmentally separate mediums: the public realm of national identification and reform, and the (seemingly) juvenile discourse of caterpillars and “Baby Houses”’. ‘Raising a Nation: Anna Letitia Barbauld as Artistic and Pedagogic Mother of the Romantic Citizen’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Northeastern University, 2010), 38. Guest, Small Change, 251.

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no minor significance that what is surely Barbauld’s most radically political (known) children’s text is addressed to a girl – arguably, Agatha’s gender is an enabling factor for such incendiary rhetoric. But the deployment across Barbauld’s children’s writing of similar themes and techniques suggests a rejection of gender distinctions in the proper content and form of literature for boys and girls. When Lucy Aikin published ‘The Baby-House’ in 1825, it might have provided a reminder to anyone that virtue depends on anything but the ‘pomp and folly’ of the establishment elite.

The authority of education The final volume of Lessons, aimed at children from three to four years of age, begins, ‘Charles, here are more stories for you, – stories about good boys, and naughty boys, and silly boys; for you know what it is to be good now.’113 Charles is now ready to read ‘connected stor[ies]’, and is able to understand moral narratives because the proper ideas have been attached to the abstract notion ‘good’.114 What counts as good or bad has certainly been prescribed in accordance with what is, as Sarah Robbins points out, ‘a teaching philosophy promoting (and helping define) middle-class values as founded in at-home education.’115 Yet this lesson does not end with a judgement on which of the boys in the tale is good; instead, Charles is asked to decide ‘which [he] love[s] best.’ Figuring the child as an active participant in dialogic exchange, acts of play, and sensory delight in the natural world, Barbauld signals some departure from the catechistic method of her predecessors.116 For Barbauld, association is ‘that great law on which the power of memory entirely depends’.117 Lessons and Hymns were shaped to a great extent by this belief, but her experience of teaching children brought with it an understanding of how minds are bound to be shaped by circumstances beyond the educator’s control. As her essay ‘On Prejudice’ (1800) suggests,

113 114 115

116

117

Lessons for Children, from Three to Four, 3–4. Lessons for Children, from Two to Three, 3. Sarah Robbins, ‘Lessons for Children and Teaching Mothers: Mrs. Barbauld’s Primer for the Textual Construction of Middle-Class Domestic Pedagogy’, The Lion and the Unicorn 17, no. 2 (December 1993), 142. Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 128. ‘Essay on Akenside’s Poem on the Pleasures of Imagination’, in Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination (London: Cadell and Davies, 1796), 26.

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Barbauld’s attempts to ‘impress on [the] mind[s]’ of her pupils at Palgrave the ‘sentiments of patriotism – the civic affection’ may very well have been hindered by the ‘party sentiments and connections’ of their parents (SPP, 340). Perhaps Charles’s adolescence also had a part to play in her cautionary words here that ‘the growth of [a child’s] reason and the development of his powers will lead him with a sudden impetus to examine every thing, to canvass every thing, to suspect every thing’, until ‘he will rather feel disinclined to any opinion you profess, and struggle to free himself from the net which you have wove about him’ (SPP, 343). In ‘On Prejudice’, Barbauld argues that an education entirely free of prejudice is both impossible and undesirable. Curiously, Barbauld’s insistence on the limits of education stems from the selfsame theory that underpins Lessons and Hymns: it is, in truth, the most absurd of all suppositions that a human being can be educated, or even nourished and brought up, without imbibing numberless prejudices from every thing which passes around him. A child cannot learn the signification of words without receiving ideas along with them; he cannot be impressed with affection to his parents and those about him, without conceiving a predilection for their tastes, opinions, and practices. He forms numberless associations of pain or pleasure, and every association begets a prejudice; he sees objects from a particular spot, and his views of things are contracted or extended according to his position in society; as no two individuals can have the same horizon, so neither can two have the same associations; and different associations will produce different opinions, as necessarily as, by the laws of perspective, different distances will produce different appearances of visible objects (SPP, 338).

Content will eventually be re-evaluated and, quite possibly, rejected, as young people’s rational powers reach maturity. At this point, attempts to assert control over their beliefs will be futile; the ‘mind must now form itself ’ (SPP, 343). This does not, however, undermine Barbauld’s belief in the necessity for early rational education; in fact, the questioning of authority is itself embedded in the rhetoric of her writing for children. ‘Things By Their Right Names’ and ‘Travellers’ Wonders’ encourage young adults to interrogate the power of words, but Lessons is the first step in laying the groundwork for this cognitive ability. As Laura Mandell puts it, ‘Lessons for

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Children is nothing if not a primer exhibiting various thought processes’.118 While Barbauld’s purpose in Hymns is to ‘impress devotional feelings as early as possible on the infant mind’, even here she encourages the child to be active, rather than passive, in their own education, to ‘reverence [their] own mind’, to ‘cherish it’, and ‘feed it with the truth, nourish it with knowledge’ (SPP, 238, 253–4). Barbauld’s pedagogy thus encourages and enables the eventual questioning of all systems, including her own. Unlike Richard Lovell Edgeworth, she did not subscribe to Hartley’s belief that ‘children may be formed or moulded as we please’.119 It is clear, however, that her pedagogy did make a lasting impression on the minds of her readers. Her practices not only had a profound influence on those she taught at Palgrave, but also went some way towards vindicating her belief in education as a means of bringing about political reform.120 Barbauld’s Lessons and Hymns were read and enjoyed by generations of children. Their ‘sensible images’ epitomised Enlightenment thinking about the relations between mind and matter; as ‘things themselves’, they were also a means of moving social values and devotional feeling into the political world. In the Edgeworth family papers at the Bodleian Library is an unpublished letter/essay, circa 1778, from Richard Lovell Edgeworth to Anna Letitia Barbauld. The foliation is incomplete: 61 of the original 75 folios remain, along with two copies of part of the essay in the hand of Mary Sneyd, and two pages of comments in an unidentified hand.121 The text on the first pages of the master copy reads as follows: excited by the benevolent desire of being useful gave up to this humble Employment that time and those Talents which might have been bestowed upon a Subject that would have added to your former reputation. As your name and the intrinsic merit of the books will induce many parents to put them into the hands of their Children; and as the subject, appears to me, of the highest importance I take the liberty of

118 119 120

121

Mandell, ‘Johnson’s Lessons for Men’, 110. Observations on Man, 2: 453. For an account of the careers of Palgrave alumni, which included political reformers such as Thomas Denman, see William McCarthy, ‘The Celebrated Academy at Palgrave: A Documentary History of Anna Letitia Barbauld’s School’, The Age of Johnson 8 (1997), 317–23. Papers relating to Practical Education, Edgeworth Papers, Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. misc. c. 895, fols. 1–61; fols. 62–8; fols. 69–70. Collection henceforth abbreviated EPBL.

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troubling you with a few remarks upon such parts of them as appear to one susceptible of improvement in a future Edition.122

He goes on to assure Barbauld that to ‘To discuss is not to condemn… if any thing I shall say seems to you worthy of reply our different opinions may be before the Publick without our incurring from it or from each other the common Odium that is created by literary Warfare.’ Barbauld’s Dissenting beliefs will be no hindrance to a published correspondence: education, he asserts, is unrelated to ‘Religion or politics’, making it a safe discourse through which to ‘communicate our Sentiments to each other and the Publick without Having Idea of Competition’.123 It is not known whether the letter was sent, but it is easy to imagine how it would have been received. His attempt to capitalise on the cultural value of her name aside,124 the letter contains a number of points to which Barbauld may have taken serious offence, including the following: Attention… may undoubtedly be given to very young children by ease, by patience and address; but never by teaching them en badinant; a mode of Instruction copied from the French; which like their other fashions weakens and dissipates the Mind.

Considering Rochemont Barbauld – a teacher himself – was French, as well as Barbauld’s own teaching ‘en badinant’ (through play), this would have been a serious faux pas. Richard Lovell goes on to outline his researches in children’s literature, claiming to have started writing a book for his children before he saw Barbauld’s Lessons, which ‘saved [him] part of [his] intended labour’. He tells of his (in fact his wife Honora’s) success in teaching his children to read ‘in six weeks’ with the use of Barbauld’s book, and proceeds to give an account of the value of education in sole terms of its benefits to the male professions. He also draws frequent parallels between education and medicine, which is an indication of both a corrective view of child psychology and the gender exclusivity attendant to processes of institutionalisation:

122 123 124

EPBL, MS. Eng. misc. c. 895, fols. 2–3. Ibid., fols. 3–4. Scott Krawczyk argues that Edgeworth’s later attempt to co-opt Barbauld into producing a ‘Lady’s Paper’ was an attempt to exploit Barbauld’s ‘literary kinship network’ as a means to ‘increase … [his] own familiar-literary stock’. See Romantic Literary Families, 99–102.

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After outlining his system, Richard Lovell provides a twenty-six-page critique of Lessons, detailing each of its errors in reason – he had a particular problem with the use of metaphor in the instruction of young children. Barbauld would have disapproved of such cold rationalism in children’s literature; her books, as we have seen, encourage poetic thinking and devotional feeling, and in her focus on cultivation rather than cure she pushes against the notion of the child as physically and morally abject.126 This was something that Maria Edgeworth seems to have appreciated: she commended Barbauld’s books for ‘cultivat[ing] the imagination of children, and their taste, in the best possible manner’.127 Richard Lovell Edgeworth may have been one of the interlocutors that Barbauld had in mind in ‘What is Education?’, which was published just before Practical Education. It is not known whether the letter was sent, but William McCarthy suggests that ‘What is Education?’ might have been a response to the ‘respectful but detailed’ criticism of Lessons in Practical Education, and I think this is certainly possible.128 Her description in the essay of the ‘gentleman’ who engages her in discussion on education is at several points striking; even though he (unlike Richard Lovell) is a Dissenter, we learn that he ‘rose in the world by… industry’, and as we shall see, ‘industry’ is a key term in Practical Education. The sarcasm with which Barbauld relates her acquaintance’s proposition is also worth noting: As he knows I have been engaged in the business of instruction, he did me the honour to consult me on the subject of his researches, hoping, he said, that, out of all the systems before him, we should be able to form a plan equally complete and comprehensive… I gave him my

125 126

127

128

Ibid., fols. 11–12. On Barbauld’s view of education as the cultivation of innate selfhood, see Jessica Taylor Calderone, ‘Cultivating the Acorn: Education in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Children’s Literature’ (Published M.A. dissertation, Lehigh University: Proquest, 2009). Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education (London: J. Johnson, 1798), 1: 320–1. ALBVE, 376. McCarthy conjectures that Barbauld may have reviewed Practical Education for Joseph Johnson.

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thoughts with the utmost freedom, and after I returned home, threw upon paper the observations which had occurred to me.129

The essay ends with the most important distinction between Barbauldian and Edgeworthian perspectives on education: the education of your house, important as it is, is only part of a more comprehensive system. Providence takes your child, where you leave him. Providence continues his education upon a larger scale, and by a process which includes means more efficacious. … Faded beauty, humbled self-consequence, disappointed ambition, loss of fortune, this is the rough physic provided by Providence… There is no malady of the mind so inveterate, which this education of events is not calculated to cure, if life were long enough; and we shall not hope, that he, in whose hand are all the remedial processes of nature, will renew the discipline in another state, and finish the imperfect man? (SPP, 331–2)

As well as a more targeted attack on ‘remedial’ educationalism, this prophetic statement along the same lines as Sins of Government and Eighteen Hundred and Eleven is a check on the ambitions of all would–be educators of the nation, the new guard in Lockean educationalism that included More and the Edgeworths. In a devastating judgement on the morality of the nation, Barbauld concludes: States are educated as individuals, by circumstances; the prophet may cry aloud, and spare not; the philosopher may descant on morals; eloquence may exhaust itself in invective against the vices of the age: these vices will certainly follow certain states of poverty or riches, ignorance or high civilisation. But what these gentle alternatives fail of doing, may be accomplished by an unsuccessful war, a loss of trade, or any of those great calamities, by which it pleases Providence to speak to a nation in such language as will be heard. If as a nation, we would be cured of pride, it must be by mortification; if of luxury, by national bankruptcy, perhaps; if of injustice, or the spirit of domination, by a loss of national consequence. In comparison of these strong remedies, a fast, or a sermon, are prescriptions of very little efficacy.

129

SPP, 322.

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Uniting Locke and the Old Testament,130 Barbauld’s last word on the subject of education is an admonishment to Anglican loyalists and Dissenters alike: neither ‘fast’ nor ‘sermon’ could cure Britain’s ‘pride’, ‘luxury’, ‘injustice’ or ‘spirit of domination’. Even ‘national consequence’, the visionary asserts, is a trifling matter compared with the ‘strong remedies’ of Providence.

130

‘Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew my people their transgression’. Isaiah 58:1. SPP, 332.

Chapter 2

Honora Edgeworth and the ‘experimental science’of education On the 27 of Novbr 1778 An. & Ho. 5 ½ 4 ½ began to spell in Mrs Barbauld’s little book – on that day fortnight a piece of paper with some raisins seald up in it, was given to each of them, & these words written on the outside ‘Open this & eat what you find in it’ – They had no assistance & in twenty minutes, Honora read it without making any mistake.1

H

onora Edgeworth records in her notebook a pivotal fortnight in the education of her step-daughter, Anna, and daughter, another Honora. In an application of empiricism to the teaching of young children, she collects information on the methodology, duration and results of an experiment in the teaching of literacy. Her use of Barbauld’s ‘little book’ and the reward of raisins help situate Honora’s practices within the educational culture of the British Enlightenment, with its Lockean emphasis on ‘instruction with delight’. But the entry, as it appears in her manuscript ‘Notes on Education’, might also attest to the emotional dimensions of such a milestone; the author’s pride is detectable, particularly in her namesake’s achievement. Honora’s observations would eventually provide material for Practical Education (1798), the monumental study in developmental psychology that Maria Edgeworth wrote with the input of her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth.2 Several notes appear in chapters of the book and others are reproduced alongside Maria’s in the appendix. The entry above is used in a chapter on Tasks, with two alterations. First, it adds that the words on the paper were ‘marked according to our alphabet’, referring to the attractive 1 2

HE’s notebook [1778], EPBL, MS. Eng. Misc. e. 1459, fol. 27. The preface to Practical Education attributes chapters on Tasks, Grammar, Classical Literature, Geography, Chronology, Arithmetic, Geometry and Mechanics to Richard Lovell, but it is generally understood that Maria wrote most of the book.

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engraving of a phonetic chart included in Practical Education. Second, in the published version of events, both children successfully complete the challenge. While these embellishments may seem of little consequence, they are illuminative of wider problems of partiality in the ‘experimental science’ of education that developed from, and eventually eclipsed, Honora’s work. According to the preface to Practical Education, Maria Edgeworth was ‘encouraged and enabled’ to write the book ‘by having for many years before her eyes the conduct of a judicious mother in the education of a large family’.3 Honora is further accorded the status of contributing editor on the project: The chapter on Obedience was written from Mrs. Edgeworth’s notes, and was exemplified by her successful practice in the management of her children; the whole manuscript was submitted to her judgement, and she revised parts of it in the last stage of a fatal disease.

As we shall see, child obedience was certainly something Honora had strong feelings about, but it is Maria’s disagreement with Rousseau on the matter of liberty that dominates much of the argument in the chapter referred to here. Moreover, Honora’s notes did not provide the empirical observations for the chapter: the ‘Little W—’ who features here was William, born in 1788 to Elizabeth Sneyd Edgeworth, Honora’s sister and Richard Lovell’s third wife. Honora cannot, therefore, have seen the full manuscript before she died, though she may have revised sections of it. It is of course impossible to accurately gauge the experiential component of Honora’s influence on her stepdaughter. In Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography, which contains the fullest account to date of Honora’s contribution to the educational project, Marilyn Butler indicates that Maria’s desire for intimacy with her stepmother was stifled by the latter’s ‘chilly’ and ‘repressive’ letters.4 Honora seems to have approached the education of the Edgeworth children, especially that of the neglected, unhappy, and hence unruly Maria, with single-minded determination for their ‘improvement’. For Maria, this meant being sent away in 1775 to Mrs Latuffiere’s school in Derby, where according to Butler she ‘learnt the routine accomplishments of the better-taught upper-class women of the period, such as French, Italian,

3

4

Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education (London: J. Johnson, 1798) 1: x. Henceforth cited in parentheses as PE. Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 56.

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dancing, embroidery and handwriting’.5 The conditionality of Honora’s affection seems to have been plainly apparent. In a letter addressed to her ‘Mamma’, the eight-year-old Maria wrote that ‘school now seems agreeable to me: I have begun French and Dancing & intend to make great improvement in every thing I learn; as I know it will give you great satisfaction to hear that I am a good Girl’.6 Honora’s notes reflect her disciplinarian attitude: ‘Children should be taught that the best method to make themselves pleasing is not to be troublesome’, she writes, ‘because they will please more in a length of time by this negative habit than they will by any positive geniality’.7 A letter to her sister-in-law gives further intimation of Honora’s belief in the importance of instilling obedience in young children: I think no person should undertake the management of a child without having absolute power over its body & mind – In trusting a child of yours to my care, my dear Sister, you ought to recollect also, that it is my opinion that almost every thing that education can give, is to be given before the age of 5 or 6 – therefore I think great attention & strictness should be shewn before that age; particularly, if there is any thing refractory or rebellious in the disposition, that is the time to repress it, & to substitute good habits, obedience, attention, & respect towards superiors; without which, by the concurrence of fortunate circumstances, & its own good understanding, a child may educate itself, but can never be educated by others.8

The extract speaks for itself, but the values Honora cites as paramount in the ‘management’ of the child are worth noting: ‘good habits, obedience, attention’ and ‘respect’. These were, no doubt, points upon which Honora arrived through her real-life experience in the ‘management’ of children, particularly the rebellious Maria,9 which should be a reminder of the Edgeworth children’s agency in, as well as their subjection to, a rigorous educational regime. As we shall see, ‘obedience’ and ‘attention’ are key objectives

5 6

7 8

9

Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 52. Maria Edgeworth to Mrs Honora Edgeworth, March 1776, , MS 10166/7, Pos. 9026 (10), Edgeworth Papers, Department of Manuscripts, National Library of Ireland. Collection henceforth abbreviated EPNLI. HE’s notebook [1778], EPBL, MS. Eng. Misc. e. 1459, fol. 13. Mrs Honora Edgeworth to Mrs Ruxton. Written at Northchurch [n.d.], MS 10166/7, Pos. 9026 (10A), EPNLI. Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 44–9.

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in Practical Education. ‘Good habits’ and ‘respect’ figure more ambiguously in Maria’s publications, as Honora’s preference for quiet docility in children is supplanted by an emphasis on disciplined thought or ‘mental labour’ (PE, 1: 113), with the aim of fostering inventiveness, industriousness and a capacity for rational critique in the developing mind. If Honora’s pedagogical outlook was anti-Rousseauvian, it was with good reason: before his marriage to Honora, Richard Lovell Edgeworth had applied some of Rousseau’s ideas to the education of Maria’s older brother Richard, Anna Maria Edgeworth’s first child. Like the fictional Emile, Richard was ‘left as much as possible to the education of nature and accident’.10 The intention was to encourage in him the ‘manly virtues’ so fêted by Rousseau, and Edgeworth claims in his Memoirs to have had some success in this respect: Richard grew to be a ‘bold, free, fearless’ and ‘generous’ adolescent.11 Unsurprisingly, however, he was also ‘not disposed to obey’ his elders – a trait that would become increasingly problematic as he grew older. Sometime after Richard Lovell met Honora, he left his thenwife Anna Maria at her parent’s estate in order to travel to France with his friend Thomas Day, to whom we will return shortly. Day and Edgeworth took Richard with them, and Richard Lovell hired a tutor so as not to be overly encumbered with the eight-year-old. In Paris, the young Richard met but failed to impress Rousseau himself, who reported to Richard Lovell that although his son was ‘a boy of abilities’, he exhibited ‘a propensity to party prejudice, which will be a great blemish in his character’, an assessment Richard Lovell later considered prophetic.12 From Paris, the group travelled to Lyons, where Richard Lovell’s engineering projects occupied much of his time and attention. Anna Maria visited with her sister but, probably due to Richard Lovell’s neglect, she was unhappy in France, and soon returned to England with Day. Alone in Lyons, Richard Lovell gave over Richard’s education entirely to the tutor, who found him impossible to control: ‘the boy soon obtained the mastery’, he later recalled.13 Unfortunately for Richard, the Rousseauvian experiment would conclude with its antithesis – a period in a Catholic seminary. Richard Lovell writes penitently of the whole business in his Memoirs, but is pleased to reassure the reader that his son remained unconverted to Catholicism, recounting an anecdote in which Richard confounds one of the 10

11 12 13

Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Maria Edgeworth, Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth (London: R. Hunter, 1820), 1: 178. Ibid., 1: 179. Ibid., 1: 258. Ibid., 1: 275.

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Jesuits with a logical refutation of his catechism.14 Nevertheless, the time in France left Richard Lovell regretful of having not himself ‘vigorously counteracted’ and thereby ‘cured’ his son’s ‘faults’.15 After his father’s marriage to Honora in 1773, Richard, like his sister, was packed off to attend a public school in England. In 1779, when he was fifteen, he left school to go to sea, with the reluctant acquiescence of his father.16 Richard abandoned ship in 1783 and was more or less disowned by the family thereafter; he married and settled in South Carolina, where he died in 1796.17 Previous to her marriage, Honora had come into contact with a still more troubling example of ‘Rousseaumania’: Thomas Day’s notorious ‘failed experiment’ with Sabrina Sydney, one of two foundling girls he adopted in 1769 with the aim of creating an ideal future wife.18 Richard Lovell was personally involved in what he calls Day’s ‘romantic’ scheme and the account he gives of it in his Memoirs betrays little concern for its morality, though Day’s intentions seem to have caused consternation among acquaintances in London.19 In 1770, Day brought Sabrina to live with him at Stow Hill near Lichfield, close to the home of the physician and poet Erasmus Darwin, and Bishop’s Palace, home of the Sewards and their foster-daughter Honora Sneyd. According to Richard Lovell, Sabrina ‘became a link between Mr Day and Mr Seward’s family, that united them very strongly’.20 But Day seems to have lost interest in Sabrina sometime after meeting Honora, and in the summer of 1771 he asked the similarly smitten (but already married) Richard Lovell to deliver to Honora a ‘packet of some sheets of paper’ containing ‘the sum of many conversations’ and a marriage proposal or ‘plan of life’.21 14 15 16 17

18

19

20 21

Ibid., 1: 279. Ibid., 1: 276. Ibid., 1: 353. See Julia V. Douthwaite, The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 136–8. Memoirs of RLE, 1: 214–27, 1: 236–40, 1: 245. For a concise account of Day’s adoption and treatment of Sabrina Sydney and Lucretia, see Douthwaite, The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster, 139–41. For a full history, see Wendy Moore, How to Create the Perfect Wife (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2013). Maria Edgeworth famously based the story of Virginia and Clarence Hervey in Belinda (1801). For further discussion, see Mitzi Myers, ‘My Art Belongs to Daddy? Thomas Day, Maria Edgeworth, and the Pre-Texts of Belinda: Women Writers and Patriarchal Authority’, in Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century ‘Women’s Fiction’ and Social Engagement, ed. Paula R. Backscheider (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 104–46. Memoirs of RLE, 1: 241. Ibid., 1: 248.

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This Edgeworth did, and Honora sent her rejection the following morning. She detested Day’s views on women and thought his educationalism perverse. As Richard Lovell’s Memoirs relate, Miss Honora Sneyd would not admit the unqualified control of a husband over all her actions; she did not feel, that seclusion from society was indispensably necessary to preserve female virtue, or to secure domestic happiness. Upon terms of reasonable equality, she supposed, that mutual confidence might best subsist; she said, that, as Mr Day had decidedly declared his determination to live in perfect seclusion from what is usually called the world, it was fit she should decidedly declare, that she would not change her present mode of life, with which she had no reason to be dissatisfied, for any dark and untried system, that could be proposed to her.22

The ‘reasonable equality’ and ‘mutual confidence’ Honora seems to have secured with Richard Lovell, or at least in his account of their marriage, was not only productive in terms of ‘domestic happiness’. Together with the birth of their children, Honora and Lovell, their studies of Hartley’s Theory and Barbauld’s Lessons, and Richard Lovell’s ‘growing preference for Lunar practicality’ over Rousseau,23 Honora’s work formed the basis for an educational system of ‘practice’ and ‘experience’ rather than ‘dark and untried system’, and set a precedent for familial collaboration in the decades to come. What follows is only partly concerned with Honora’s direct influence on Practical Education. While it aims towards a fuller understanding of her contribution to the educational project, and of the project itself as a collaborative whole, I am more interested in the accumulated layers of meaning between Honora’s practices and notebooks, her representation in print, and the framing of her work as a scientific endeavour. This chapter explores the often problematic associations between praxis and theory in the Edgeworthian ‘science’ of education. It considers Honora’s notebooks as emotional objects and as knowledge objects: first as repositories of the 22

23

Ibid., 1: 250. After Honora’s rejection, Day set his sights on her sister Elizabeth Sneyd who, in an astonishing inversion of his treatment of Sabrina Sydney, directed Day to improve his manners by visiting France, where he ‘put himself for every species of torture, ordinary and extraordinary, to compel his antigallican limbs, in spite of their natural rigidity, to dance, and fence, and manage the great horse’ (Memoirs of RLE, 1: 260). Elizabeth declined Day’s proposal soon after he returned to England. Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 59.

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psychological and physical growth of Maria, Anna, Emmeline, Honora and Lovell, and then (after Honora the elder’s death) as artefacts of exemplary motherhood. I argue that, as technologies of paper and as gendering processes, the copy, annotation and deletion of Honora’s writings are illustrative of wider problems of visibility and visuality for women in intellectual circles of late eighteenth-century Britain. Notwithstanding the appropriation and manipulation of her image, I hope to show that Honora’s writings provide small but significant insights into Enlightenment didacticism, and especially its use as an apparatus of disciplinary power. Before turning to the notebooks themselves, however, it is necessary to unravel some of the complex private, public and material entanglements at play in Honora’s representation as an exemplary mother and experimental scientist.

Honora Sneyd Edgeworth Honora was born in Bath in 1751 to Susan and Edward Sneyd, but was raised from the age of six in the home of the clergyman, Thomas Seward. Here she formed a close and in more than one sense formative relationship with her foster-sister and mentor, Anna Seward, the so-called ‘Swan of Lichfield’ who achieved, in Guest’s words, ‘almost mythological status’ as a national poet in the 1780s.24 According to Teresa Barnard’s carefully detailed biography of Seward, Honora learned French – as Maria would later do – at Mrs Latuffiere’s day school, became fluent and translated Rousseau’s Julie (1761) for her adoring foster-sister.25 Honora returned to her father’s home in 1771 but maintained her intimacy with Seward; the two were active participants in literary society at Lichfield, regularly meeting with Darwin, Day and Edgeworth – each of whom went on to become members of the celebrated Lunar Circle of Birmingham.26 Richard Lovell became infatuated with Honora – hence his removal to France with Day and Richard. His first wife Anna Maria died in early 1773 after giving birth to another daughter, Anna, who features in this chapter’s opening extract. On receiving this news, Richard Lovell returned to London and, hearing from Day that Honora was still unmarried, he raced to Lichfield, proposed, and was accepted. That summer, they moved to Richard Lovell’s estate in Edgeworthstown (otherwise 24 25

26

Guest, Small Change, 253. Teresa Barnard, Anna Seward: A Constructed Life: A Critical Biography (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 36. For a biographical history of the group, see Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Inventors of the Modern World 1730–1810 (London: Faber & Faber, 2002).

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known as Mostrim) in County Longford, Ireland, returning to England in 1777 to live at Northchurch, Hertfordshire. During what Butler describes as ‘the critical years’ of 1777-80, when Richard Lovell was ‘powerfully under the influence of Lunar pragmatism’,27 Honora turned her attention to the education and observation of her children. In 1779 she wrote a book for children, entitled Practical Education: Or, the History of Harry and Lucy, which was privately printed early in 1780 with a preface by Richard Lovell. Honora and Richard Lovell intended to publish the book as part of a series, together with a volume by Thomas Day, which would be the basis for The History of Sanditon and Merton (1783–9), and a third volume would use the data Honora collected to ‘open the whole issue raised […] by Hartley, of the nature of the child’s responses to learning’.28 The intellectual partnership was short-lived, however: after catching a cold in the spring of 1779, Honora’s health deteriorated. She died of tuberculosis in Bighterton, Staffordshire on 1 May 1780. Richard Lovell was plainly devastated by the loss. Marilyn Butler notes the ‘moving account of Honora’s last days’ in Richard Lovell’s Memoirs and the ‘sympathetic picture’ his unpublished journal gives of their marriage.29 The same strength of feeling is evident in Honora’s will: I am possessed of one thing of value – it is the picture of my dearest & valued Husband – when I die I leave it in trust to him, beging [sic] him to present it, to that Woman whom he shall think worthy to call his, for her to wear, so long as they both shall LOVE. At the end of that time, which I hope may be their lives, I desire, my beloved Husband, to let it become the property of that Child of all his Children then living, who has given him the greatest happiness, & shewn, & felt the greatest love, attention, & respect towards him; – To become hers, at his Death, or his Wife’s Death, or after Marriage, as he shall direct.30

In her will, Honora invests the portrait of Richard Lovell with an agency that could outlive its possessor. She seems, albeit with a heartfelt desire for his happiness, to have envisaged the object as a form of afterlife mediation in Richard Lovell’s next marriage – a daily and intimately physical reminder of her own, as well as her husband’s ‘value’. This perhaps adds to the sense 27 28 29 30

Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 60. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 68. As quoted in Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 68.

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of Honora’s peculiar high-mindedness respecting her husband’s future wife – it was apparently in accordance with Honora’s dying wishes that Richard Lovell married her sister, Elizabeth Sneyd, in December 1780.31 As Butler asserts, the will ‘shows the strength of [Honora’s] mind and the extent to which her thoughts centred on Edgeworth – for’, she notes, ‘her own two children do not figure in it’. However, Honora’s bequest that the portrait be given to Richard Lovell’s favourite child after his or his wife’s death, or in the case that said wife was not ‘worthy’ of it, carries other implications. While intense emotions are naturally at play here, Honora appears to have faced her imminent death philosophically and practically; her directions for the evaluation of interiority – of what the Edgeworth children ‘felt’ – seems a logical extension of her ‘experimental education’, as well as her love for her husband. Like the notebooks, then, the portrait of Richard Lovell resists classification: it is simultaneously a rational reward for ‘filial piety’ and a potentially divisive token of partiality, and thus belongs both within the experimental educationalism and the emotional life of the family.

Possessing Honora Portraiture would play a critical role in Honora’s memorialisation, in ways she and her husband cannot have anticipated. Three days after her death, Richard wrote to Josiah Wedgwood and Thomas Bentley to commission twelve commemorative medallions of Honora, ‘from a profile of Mrs. Harrington and an excellent picture of Smart’.32 Figure 1 below shows a trial version – they were later produced in the signature blue and white Jasper ware. Wedgwood’s portrait medallions exploited the fashion for miniature portraits, and may have replicated some of their sentimental effects: like miniature portraits, medallions were eminently portable and could be carried next to the chest, taken out and shown to others. Their tactile qualities might have added to the appeal, especially in times of mourning. Richard Lovell presumably gave the medallions to close friends and family members who would appreciate such an object both as a memento of Honora and as a reminder of her ties with the celebrity, industry and commerce of the Lunar men. Harriet Guest’s discussion of Wedgwood’s medallion of Barbauld, 31

32

Elizabeth died on 18 November 1797. Richard Lovell’s fourth and last wife was Frances Anne Beaufort (1769–1865), a writer, artist and botanist. In total, Richard Lovell fathered twenty-two children, several of whom died in childhood, including the bright and much loved Honora of the raisin experiment. RLE to Wedgwood and Bentley, 4 May 1780, MS 10166/7, Pos. 9026 (32), EPNLI.

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with the ‘uncompromising seriousness or monumental impassivity’ of its Roman style, makes for a useful comparison here.33 As Guest demonstrates, the implications of that image contrast intriguingly with the ‘notion of women as merely decorative and excessively feminine’. On the one hand, Guest explains, the portrait of Barbauld plays on associations between femininity, softness and youth, and on the other it possesses a ‘defeminizing seriousness and authority’. The Honora medallion similarly activates a form

Figure 3. ‘Honora Edgeworth ob. 1780’. Portrait medallion of Honora Sneyd Edgeworth, Jasper ware, by Josiah Wedgwood and Sons, c. 1780. 7 × 5.7 cm.

33

Guest, Small Change, 220.

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of exemplarity that combines ‘softness’ and ‘seriousness’, but the contemporary styling of the hair and clothes make for a more proximal figure of Enlightenment domesticity. According to Barnard, Richard Lovell visited Anna Seward in 1779 to show her a portrait of Honora by the miniaturist John Smart, on which the Wedgwood medallion was partly modelled. By this time, the two women were estranged, and Honora was seriously ill.34 Seward was unimpressed by Smart’s likeness and angered by Richard Lovell’s callous behaviour (he played at hiding the portrait from her), and came to hold him partially responsible for Honora’s death.35 In 1781, Seward published her Monody of Major André, which presents a very different portrait of Honora. The poem laments the death of John André, who was executed in 1780 as a British spy in the American Revolutionary War. Before joining the army, André had been a close friend of Seward and was a fervent admirer of Honora, but her parents had prohibited their marriage on account of his meagre salary.36 Leaving aside the formation of sentimental patriotism in Seward’s Monody, which has been incisively discussed elsewhere,37 I want to draw attention to the following lines, which precede the moment the hero conceals, on his capture by the opposition, a miniature portrait of Honora inside his mouth: Shade of my Love tho’ mute and cold thy charms, Ne’er hast thou blest my happy Rival’s arms! To my sad heart each Dawn has seen thee prest! Each Night has laid thee pillow’d on my breast! Force shall not tear thee from thy faithful shrine! Thou ne’er wert his, and shalt be ever mine!38

Though ‘mute and cold’, the portrait is not only an external, tangible instantiation of André’s love; as Honora’s ‘shade’ it is intimately and inexorably tied to her past existence. The object is a focal point for a highly sensational 34

35 36

37 38

Seward blamed Edward Sneyd for the end of her correspondence with Honora. Possibly, the father was reacting to Seward’s platonic companionship with the (married) musician John Saville. See Barnard, Anna Seward, 105. Barnard, Anna Seward, 81–2. RLE plays the attachment down in his Memoirs, but admits that on first meeting the two he had believed there ‘might exist some courtship between them’ – something, he adds, that Seward at that time denied. See Memoirs of RLE, 1: 243. Guest, Small Change, 252–67. Anna Seward, Monody on Major Andre. By Miss Seward. (Author of the Elegy on Capt. Cook); To Which Are Added, Letters Addressed to Her by Major Andre, in the Year 1769 (Lichfield: J. Jackson [1781]), 16–17.

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and sentimental language, and it encapsulates through that language Seward’s notions of emotional authenticity and fidelity. Marcia Pointon has described the eighteenth-century miniature portrait as taking on an almost sacred significance by its proximity to and, in the case of Seward’s Monody, literal incorporation into the body of the lover.39 In this light, the poem’s fetishisation of the object seems broadly pitched towards a readership acclimatised to material cultures of sensibility, but Seward also seems to have had a more precise target in mind: the line ‘Thou ne’er wert his, and shalt be ever mine!’ elides the portrait with its subject, and seems calculated to provoke Richard Lovell’s jealousy. At the beginning of her Monody, Seward presents herself as the ‘Muse, that marks the solemn scene’.40 She alludes here to the success of her Elegy on Captain Cook (1780), which, as Ruth Scobie has shown, was ‘crucial in the construction of Cook’s sympathetic celebrity’.41 The ostensible aim of the Monody is to pay André – the ‘Belov’d Companion’ of Seward’s youth – a similarly patriotic tribute, while also offering readers a privileged insight into his personal life. Appended with a selection of letters from André to Seward, the poem invites readers to imagine themselves as participants in the private act of mourning, just as Seward surveys the emotional landscape through the material object: she bids the ‘recorded days’ of the past to ‘rise’ so that the traces of her friendship with André assist the ‘glance reverted’ of ‘Eagle-memory’.42 Seward recollects her friend as a man of ‘gen’rous virtue’ and ‘taste refin’d’, noting in particular his talent for portraiture: André’s ‘pencil, with his colours warm/ Caught ev’ry grace, and copied ev’ry charm’.43 This idea of the ‘warm’ and ‘faithful’ portrait is integral to Seward’s representation of the poem’s romantic triad, allowing her at once to exalt André’s sentimental heroism, recover Honora’s image, and promote her own poetic identity. Seward’s annotations to the Monody make further extratextual links between sentiment and object, between the sensational and the evidential. In one footnote, she quotes a letter from André ‘to a friend’, confirming that he had indeed hidden the portrait inside his mouth.44 In another we learn

39

40 41

42 43 44

Marcia Pointon, ‘“Surrounded with Brilliants”: Miniature Portraits in EighteenthCentury England’, The Art Bulletin 83, no. 1 (2001), 67. Seward, Monody, 2. Ruth Scobie, ‘The Many Deaths of Captain Cook: A Study in Metropolitan Mass Culture, 1780–1810’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of York, 2013). Seward, Monody, 3. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 16.

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Figure 4. Serena. Print depicting a young woman, seated and reading a book by candlelight. Mezzotint by John Raphael Smith after George Romney, 1782.

that André painted two portraits of Honora – one for himself and one for ‘Julia’ (the name André gave Seward in their correspondence).45 This second portrait now ‘smiles’ on the poet’s arm and ‘beguiles’ her sorrows with an occultish affective power, embodied and redirected through Seward’s tears for the ‘hand that form’d the spell’. The ingenuity of the poem lies in its binding of the object with the romantic triad and its channelling of identity 45

Ibid., 5.

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through the material form of the text, but it is hard to deny its sensationalist bent: a further footnote makes the false claim that André’s enlistment to the army was precipitated by the news of Honora’s marriage. While Seward’s identification of ‘Miss Honora S’ maintains a measure of anonymity and the ‘gentleman’ she married is not named, their identities would of course have been known to many in Lichfield and beyond. Indeed, Seward seems to present the Monody as a campaign against domestic obscurity: André’s portrait, and by extension the poem itself, are ‘ordain’d to save/ Honora’s semblance from her early grave’.46 Thus, Seward’s recapture and reproduction of Honora’s image can be understood as an act of resistance to patriarchal authority and appropriation; a claim to commercial glory through the personal, sentimental and original, as opposed to the cold, mercantile and inauthentic. In the decades following Honora’s death, Seward seems to have attached the memory of her friend to an engraving of George Romney’s Serena Reading (1781), which appeared as an illustration to William Hayley’s The Triumphs of Temper in 1781 (see Figure 4).47 In 1792, she wrote to Mary Powys, Honora’s cousin, who had also been foster-mother to Elizabeth Sneyd when she was a child, telling of a visit by Lovell, Honora’s son. Seward writes that she showed the eighteen-year-old a miniature of Honora by Powys herself and a copy of ‘Romney’s Serena, which appeared to [her] exactly what [Honora] was at sixteen’.48 In 1797, she sent one of the Romney prints, in a frame inscribed ‘Such was Honora Sneyd!’, to Sarah Ponsonby, one of the famed Ladies of Llangollen, with a letter remarking on Romney’s having ‘accidentally formed a perfect similitude’ of Honora’s ‘sweet, sacred decency, that sacred decency, that reserved dignity of virgin grace, which characterised her look and air, when her thoughts were tranquil’.49 After Seward’s death in 1809, the image had a more public form of dissemination: an engraving entitled ‘Miss Sneyd’ by James Hopwood (after Smith) appeared in the insert to the Lady’s Monthly Museum for October 1811. It accompanied a biography of Honora that makes no mention of her educational work, and in which Richard Lovell is all but effaced. Instead, Honora’s biography focuses most intently on Major André, as an example to ‘the female sex’ of a

46 47

48 49

Ibid., 4. Arthur Bensley Chamberlain, George Romney (London: Methuen, 1910), 386–9; Barnard, Anna Seward, 157. Quoted from Chamberlain, George Romney, 386. Anna Seward, Letters: Written Between the Years 1784 and 1807 (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1811), 5: 16.

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man ‘who may be celebrated for the constancy of his attachments’.50 It then provides an extract from Seward’s will, where the poet names Powys as the beneficiary of a second miniature of Honora, ‘drawn at Buxton, in the year 1776, by her gallant, faithful, and unfortunate lover, Major Andre’. Devotees of Seward’s who were familiar with her Monody would no doubt have been tantalised by this information. The following year, the Lady’s Monthly Museum published further extracts from Seward’s will, revealing additional details about the Romney portrait: The mezzotint engraving, from a picture of Romney’s, and which is thus inscribed on a tablet at top, ‘Such was Honora Sneyd’, I bequeath to [Honora’s] brother, Edward Sneyd, Esq. if he survives me; if not I bequeath it to his amiable daughter, Miss Emma Sneyd, entreating her to preserve it, as the perfect, though accidental resemblance of her aunt, when she was surrounded by all her virgin glories – beauty and grace, sensibility and goodness, superior intelligence and unswerving truth.51

Seward’s will and her direction that it be published make clear the poet’s longstanding desire for her vision of Honora to prevail, beyond the inner social circle and down the generations. What began as an ‘accidental resemblance’, became, over time and through copy after copy after copy, a ‘faithful’ image of Seward’s Honora. Once the plate was removed from the magazine’s binding (and hence divorced from the information about Romney’s Serena in the biography), the portrait and the name ‘Honora Sneyd’ below it were effectively united; indeed, the sitter in the Serena prints was misidentified as Honora until the twentieth century. As we shall see, such an appropriation of Honora’s image was not something Richard Lovell would leave unchallenged, but Seward brought to the contest a shrewd understanding of celebrity culture – particularly in terms of how the public and the private could be contained in, and marketed using, the sentimental object. Honora is best known today for her friendship with Seward, whose many poetic tributes have long been a focus for scholars interested in female friendship and varieties of same-sex desire in the late eighteenth century.52

50 51 52

‘Mrs Honora Edgeworth’, The Lady’s Monthly Museum, October 1811. ‘Miss Seward’s Will’, The Lady’s Monthly Museum, April 1812. Stuart Curran, ‘Dynamics of Female Friendship in the Later Eighteenth Century’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 23, no. 2 (1 January 2001), 226–31. Also see Fiona

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In addition to the ‘Honora sonnets’,53 evocations include ‘To Time Past. Written Dec. 1772’, first published in Seward’s Llangollen Vale collection of 1796, which as Barnard illustrates, ‘transforms the material factor of the hearth … into the spiritual value of warmth and companionship’, and the ‘Elegy Written at the Sea-Side, and Addressed to Miss Honora Sneyd’, which also focuses on the material world to reflect on ‘the transient image of Honora’s name’ and inscribe ‘a lasting monument to love’.54 While it is tempting to be dismissive of Seward’s commercialism, her poems to and about Honora are often astonishingly intricate mediations of past and present that embody deeply felt grief and physical yearning. Undoubtedly, as Myers notes, Seward had ‘an extraordinary capacity for friendship with both men and women’.55 Nevertheless, the aesthetic value she assigns to Honora undermines, even as it purports to celebrate, female friendship: as Claudia T. Kairoff points out, ‘we never hear Honora speak’.56

‘Practical education’ The appendix to Practical Education gives Honora’s notes the following introduction: Several years ago a mother, who had a large family to educate, and who had turned her attention with much solicitude to the subject of education, resolved to write notes from day to day of all the trifling things which mark the progress of the mind in childhood. She was of opinion, that the art of education should be considered as an experimental science, and that many authors of great abilities had mistaken their road by following theory instead of practice. (PE, 2: 733–4)

A footnote informs the reader that this mother is ‘Mrs Honora Edgeworth’, and goes on to repudiate Seward’s claim that André’s reason for joining the

53

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55 56

Brideoake, The Ladies of Llangollen: Desire, Indeterminacy, and the Legacies of Criticism (Lanham, Maryland: Bucknell University Press; Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 202–3. Claudia T. Kairoff, Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 207–25. Barnard, Anna Seward, 108–9. For a queer material cultures reading of Seward’s memorialisation of Honora, see Brideoake’s valuable study, The Ladies of Llangollen, 202–3. Mitzi Myers, ‘My Art Belongs to Daddy?’, 240 n57. Kairoff, Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century, 225.

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army was the news of Honora’s marriage. In addition to the presentation of data, then, the appendix serves to patrol Honora’s posthumous reputation through annotative appeal to ‘fact’. Displacing Seward’s sentimental figure, Practical Education memorialises Honora as an exemplary wife and mother, and, moreover, as a pioneer of scientific educationalism. We learn that the core hypothesis of the project – that education should be considered an ‘experimental science’ – as well as the terminology of ‘Practical Education’ were originally devised by Honora (PE, 2: 734). We are also informed that Honora had actually carried out an idea Thomas Reid later proposed, of keeping a ‘distinct and full history’ of a child’s individual psychology.57 A footnote refers us to the preface of Maria’s first book for children, The Parent’s Assistant (1796), where Richard Lovell makes same point but without reference to Honora.58 While they admit that the comparison with the eminent Reid might inflate the significance of Honora’s notes, the authors of Practical Education apparently hoped their publication would help a fledgling science take off as a wider movement: The reader, we hope, will not imagine that we think we can present him with this treasure, natural history; we have only a few scattered notices, as Bacon would call them, to offer: perhaps, even this slight attempt may awaken the attention of persons equal to the undertaking; if able preceptors and parents would pursue a similar plan, we might, in time, hope to obtain a full history of the infant mind. (PE, 735)

Had the attempt to chart the growth of the child’s mind been replicated so as to become generic, Honora’s notes might have been considered formative in the emergence of developmental psychology as a distinct field of study – it would be half a century before Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin’s grandson, began taking notes of his son William Erasmus Darwin, and for which he is hailed as a ‘founding father’ of the discipline.59 I am wary of 57

58

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Reid was in fact imagining a history of the child by the child, which he deemed to be impossible because it would require a mature capacity for self-reflection. See Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense (Edinburgh: A. Millar, 1764), 11–12. Maria Edgeworth, The Parent’s Assistant; Or, Stories for Children, Part 1, 2nd Edition (London: J. Johnson, 1796), v–vi. John R. Morss, The Biologising of Childhood: Developmental Psychology and the Darwinian Myth (Hove: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1990), xiii. Morss argues that Charles Darwin’s contribution to the field bears the ‘indelible stamp’ of ‘non-Darwinian’ biology, and that ‘outdated biological concepts’ are still traceable in the modern discipline.

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making too strong a claim here and am conscious that the term ‘developmental psychology’ is (strictly speaking) anachronistic, but there is surely a case to be made for the Edgeworths’ ‘experimental science’ as a missing chapter in the pre-history of the field.60 Moreover, their work appears to anticipate some of the ethical and methodological problems of the modern discipline, as well as many of its ‘commonsensical beliefs’.61 As I will argue here, however, it is in the record’s indistinctness and incompletion – its failings as a ‘treasure of natural history’ – that its most human insights emerge, including, as even Richard Lovell conceded, the ‘powers of affection and vanity’, and ‘partiality’ to child and theory.62 In presenting their Baconian ‘scattered notices’, the Edgeworths acknowledge that anecdotes about children are mundane except to the very few. Nevertheless, they signal in the preface to Practical Education their sustained attempt to overcome emotional biases: we have frequently been obliged to record facts concerning children which may seem trifling, and to enter into a minuteness of detail which may appear unnecessary. No anecdotes, however, have been admitted without due deliberation; nothing has been introduced to gratify the idle curiosity of others, or to indulge our own feelings of domestic partiality. (PE, 1: vi)

By this time, of course, the educational significance of ‘trifling’ minutiae had been long established, so that to access this language was to enter into a recognisable field of psychological discourse. The Edgeworths thus bolster their scientific credibility by positioning their work within the associationist tradition, setting themselves on the well-trodden path set out by Locke, Hartley, Priestley and Barbauld. In the recording of ‘facts’ however, 60

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For a traditional history, which finds the roots of the discipline in Locke and Rousseau, see Dennis Thompson, John D. Hogan and Philip M. Clark, ‘Establishing a Background for Developmental Psychology’, in Developmental Psychology in Historical Perspective (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 1–17. David William Jardine, Piaget & Education Primer (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 2. It is interesting to compare Jean Piaget’s contributions to the twentieth-century discipline with Maria Edgeworth’s ideas. Particularly striking is Piaget’s concern in Judgement and Reasoning in the Child (first published 1928) with ‘the structure of children’s reasoning’ rather than ‘the content of their ideas’. Like Edgeworth, Piaget sought to understand children’s language on its own terms, rather than assessing it according to the ‘ready-made schema’ of adult thought. See Jean Piaget, Judgement and Reasoning in the Child (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 135–6. Maria Edgeworth, The Parent’s Assistant, 1: vi.

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Practical Education appears genuinely ahead of its time, especially in the explanation of its methodology: It may occur to parents, that writing notes of the remarks of children would lessen their freedom and simplicity in conversation; this would certainly be the case if care were not taken to prevent the pupils from thinking of the note-book. The following notes were never seen by the children who are mentioned in them, and though it was in general known in the family that such notes were taken, the particular remarks that were written down were never known to the pupils; nor was any curiosity excited upon this subject. The attempt would have been immediately abandoned, if we had perceived that it produced any bad consequences. (PE, 2: 735)

This early formulation of what is known to modern psychology as the observer effect demonstrates a certain level of rigour in Honora’s, and later Maria’s, note-taking practices. The authors of Practical Education also considered the ethical implications of publication: a footnote to the above passage indicates that the anecdotes ‘were read to the children’ before the book was published, and their names do not appear anywhere in the text. Nevertheless, the closing sentence of Practical Education, which comes after the notes in the appendix, concedes that some degree of ‘domestic partiality’ is inevitable, and possibly insurmountable: We shall not trespass upon the reader’s patience with any more anecdotes from the nursery. We hope, that candid and intelligent parents will pardon, if they have discovered any desire in us to exhibit our pupils. We may mistake our own motives, and we do not pretend to be perfectly impartial judges upon this occasion; but we have hoped, that only such conversations or anecdotes have been produced as may be of some use in Practical Education. (PE, 2: 775)

Again, we should be wary of the apparent self-deprecation with which the work is presented – the key word here is ‘use’, which is fundamental to Edgeworthian notions of value. But while Practical Education vigorously resists the parental urge for the display of offspring, its exhibition of the ‘child register’ – and of Honora herself – underscores the difficulties of separating emotionality from scientific practice.

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‘Notes on Education’ Now held in the Bodleian Library’s Special Collections, Honora Edgeworth’s ‘Notes on Education’ comprise two quarto exercise books, covered in marbled paper and marked 1 and 4; and an eight-page folio, marked with a 6.63 The folio had at some time been attached to the inside cover of notebook 4 – both bear the circular black marks from the wafers used to bond them. On the outer cover of both books is written ‘Notes on Education by H. E.’, though this does not seem to have been the original intention for their use: a second title, ‘On Springs to Carriages’, is crossed through on the cover of notebook 1.64 The first six pages of notebook 1 are taken up with notes on the history of Europe. While not directly relevant to the aims of this chapter, the opening sentence is worth briefly registering, since it gives an indication of Honora’s studies around the time: The discovery of the new world, & the passage to the Indies by the Cape of good-hope, was a very interesting event to all the World, to the people of Europe in particular – since this passage & America have been known, the nations which were nothing are become powerful, & others which made Europe tremble are much weaken’d: – The people which have polish’d others, have always been commercial – 65

Honora’s knowledge of contemporary ideas in political economy provides a link with Maria Edgeworth’s theoretical training. As is well known, Richard Lovell instructed his daughter to read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in preparation for her role as assistant in the management of his estate.66 I will argue in Chapter 5 of this book that Smith’s theory of capital is core to the imperialist psychology Edgeworth forges in her didactic writing; indeed, the accumulation of collected facts might itself be understood as a capitalist practice or form of labour.

63 64

65 66

I have been unable to ascertain the existence or whereabouts of further notebooks. RLE relates in his Memoirs that ‘About the year 1769, [he] made a phaeton of uncommon lightness, and so furnished with springs, that each wheel could rise over any obstacle in its way.’ See Memoirs, 1: 171. HE’s Notebook [1778], EPBL, MS. Eng. Misc. e. 1459, fol. 2. Marilyn Butler, ‘Irish Culture and Scottish Enlightenment: Maria Edgeworth’s “Histories of the Future”’, in Economy, Polity, and Society: British Intellectual History, 1750–1950, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore and B. W. Young (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 160.

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Helpfully enough, annotations to Honora’s notes in what could be Maria’s or her father’s handwriting indicate which sections were used in chapters of Practical Education. Three entries are annotated with ‘Parent’s Assistant’, though their use in that book is oblique. Small crosses appear beside several notes, the signification of which is unclear but might suggest the use of the notebooks as working objects – it is likely, I think, that Maria and Richard Lovell collaborated on the selection of entries to be included in Practical Education. There are few instances of the text being totally obscured or deleted; paragraphs have been carefully crossed out, preserving the text beneath. The material condition of the notebooks is in some respects typical of the Edgeworth archive, which is remarkably full and well-preserved, thanks in part to Maria’s fastidiousness as a record keeper, but the respect that was obviously shown to Honora’s writings could also indicate their emotional value for the grieving Richard Lovell. As a work of collection, the notebooks contain a miscellany of observations on the behaviour and idiosyncrasies of the children, anecdotes, short conversations between siblings and conversational lessons with their mother or father, occasional strictures, and (often comically nonsensical or affecting) instances of the children’s speech. They follow no discernible system, chronological or otherwise, and certainly do not seem, at first glance, to resemble scientific documents: what comes across most strongly is Honora’s affection for and pride in her children. To give an example of the arrangement and content of the entries: Lovell 3 yrs ¼ seeing a snail in its shell on a walk & ask’d if it had legs. being told that it had not, he said, ‘it can hang then’. – Lovell 3 yrs observing a pendulum, said – ‘that goes up again, down again’ Lovell 3 yrs 4 months understood a pair of bellows – & described them +

Scientifically, there can have been little to gain from the first of these recollections, except perhaps as an instance of a child picking up and misapplying adult phraseology, and none of the entries above were deemed useful or impartial enough for inclusion in Practical Education. While they provide minimal information, they are of interest as evidence of the kinds of object lessons carried out in the early stages of the project, and from which the Edgeworths developed their theories – bellows feature in the chapter on educational toys in Practical Education, as well as in Honora’s Harry and Lucy. At this early stage in the project, however, the mere recording

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of young Lovell’s actions and achievements takes precedence over the methodical development of scientific narrative. As is clear from the published notes, Maria recorded lessons and conversations in far greater detail than her predecessor. While Honora’s notes perhaps give a heightened sense of the spontaneity of the children’s speech, Maria’s longer, contextualised dialogues are presented to the parent as textbook models of conversational lessons, and cover all manner of subjects, including mechanics, literature, natural history, astronomy and medicine. Richard Lovell figures as an exemplary father and man of science throughout. They also provided an opportunity for the commercial promotion of Lunar industry: a meticulously detailed extended experiment, which apparently provided the children with much entertainment, demonstrates that Wedgwood ware can contain oil without any leakage. The children’s reported eagerness to read Darwin’s Zoonomia (1794) unites and mutually promotes Lunar science and Edgeworthian educationalism. Interspersed with Maria’s recordings are anecdotes that illustrate points made in the main text of Practical Education, for example that ‘Young people may acquire much knowledge by consulting books, at the moment that any interest is excited by conversation upon particular subjects’ (PE: 1, 750). Like Honora, Maria collected instances of naïve eloquence: ‘S— saw a beautiful rainbow, and said, “I wish I could walk over that fine arch”.’ This specimen is followed up with a demonstration of the writer’s own literary resourcefulness: walking over rainbows is, she observes, ‘one of the pleasures of Ariel, and of the Sylphs in the Rape of the Lock’. But while this correlation clearly gratified the child’s interlocutor, such imaginative language was to be contained: ‘S— was not praised for a poetic wish, lest he should have learnt affectation’ (PE, 2: 747). Accordingly, the chapter in Practical Education on ‘Taste and Imagination’ argues that ‘reverie’ or ‘castle-building’67 should be discouraged; rather, imaginative children should be taught to submit their flights of mind to reason (PE, 2: 641–4). The reproduction of the ‘simple language of childhood’ is vaunted in Practical Education as proof of the ‘accuracy’ and ‘veracity’ of its data (PE, 2: 735). It also plays a crucial role in the understanding of, and thereby power over, the mind of the child. By closely attending to the speech of children, taking stock of their ideas by asking them what they mean by things, it would be possible to accurately determine the knowledge they already possessed and their readiness for more complex ideas, which would be delivered in graded language by the adult interlocutor. Importantly, 67

Cf. Locke on ‘castles in the air’, Human Understanding, 250.

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however, the child was to be involved in dialogue about their education, rather than merely being subject to it: if they were not at a stage to receive complex ideas, they would be told so, and the lesson would be postponed. Like Barbauld, Maria Edgeworth saw ‘properly managed’ conversation as key to effective education (PE, 2: 775). Moreover, it was a mode of national improvement. In her insightful study of radical Lockean linguistics in the 1790s, Susan Manly draws attention to the striking parallels, but significant differences, between Edgeworth’s ‘simple language of childhood’ and Wordsworth’s ‘real language of men’.68 Whereas Wordsworth’s literary aesthetics ultimately obstruct the democratising potential of a common language, Manly observes that For Edgeworth, the authentic thought and ‘real language of [children]’, encouraged and enabled through ‘conversation-lessons’ with parents in which care is always taken to ensure that children fully understand the words they hear and use, is a means of producing a different kind of society, one in which sincerity and autonomous reasoning is prized above artifice and obedience to meaningless conventions and unjust laws, or ‘pre-established codes of decision.’69

The anti-despotic orientation of Edgeworth’s writings comes across most clearly in her consistent promotion of self-determination across genders and classes. As we shall see in Chapter 5, Edgeworth’s social semiotics align with her distinctly Anglo-Irish perspective on the material improvement of the lower classes, a preoccupation (and at times an urgent concern) she shared with her father. But while Edgeworth’s emphasis on ‘autonomous reasoning’ suggests some divergence from Honora’s authoritarian belief in arbitrary ‘good habits’ and unquestioning ‘respect’, the obedience of children remains a necessary pre-condition of the educative process, however benevolent or progressive its paternalistic aims.

Attention and obedience Perhaps the most revealing of Honora’s notes is the following, which appears with alterations in Practical Education: 68

69

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems. In Two Volumes. By W. Wordsworth, Second edition (London: printed for T. N. Longman and O. Rees, by Biggs and Co. Bristol, 1800), v. Manly, Language, Custom and Nation in the 1790s, 140.

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Material Enlightenment I have observed, that there are periods (as long as two or three months ^ at a time) in the lives of young children, wherein their bodies appear remarkably active & vigorous, & their minds dull & inanimate incapable of comprehending any new idea, & forgetful of those they have already received – As this extraordinary bodily exertion subsides, they betray much restlessness, & disdain for their usual plays, the intervals between meals, appear long to them,^ they ask a multitude of questions, & they are continually looking forward to some future good. If at this time any some [?] employment be presented to them they receive it with the utmost avidity, pursue it with assiduity & their minds appear to have acquired additional powers from having remain’d for a considerable time inactive. – 70

There are traces here of the humoral and vitalist beliefs that overlapped with eighteenth-century associationist theory, but Honora’s naturalistic observations on the movement of ‘powers’ between body and mind also suggest the influence of Erasmus Darwin. Whether from conversation or reading, Honora was familiar with Darwin’s theories – she notes elsewhere that Hartley provides an answer to ‘Dr Darwin’s Phenomenon of a double object being seen single’.71 Darwin’s work on sensory perception, in conjunction with Hartleyan associationism, provided Practical Education with a theoretical framework for the phenomena Honora sketches here – all of which relate to the subject of attention. For Honora, the ebb and flow of the child’s attention was essentially mysterious; it was an involuntary physiological process that demanded patience and the careful timing of intellectual ‘employment’. In her notes, Honora summarises one of the foundational tenets of Practical Education, that ‘The play things of children should be calculated to fix their attention’, but does not develop a rationale for this, beyond the decree that ‘they may not get a habit of doing any thing in a listless inattentive manner’.72 Richard Lovell evidently gave the matter serious consideration, but for him the question of how to command, direct and ‘fix’ the child’s attention met with a more resounding answer in the doctrine of association. Richard Lovell’s essay-letter to Barbauld, which I discussed in the previous chapter, shows that the training of attention was for him a matter of discipline, of creating associations between obedience and pleasure, disobedience and pain. The system of reward and punishment is fictionalised 70 71 72

HE’s Notebook [1778], EPBL, MS. Eng. Misc. e. 1459, fols. 15–16. Cf. PE, 2: 739. Ibid., fol. 29. Ibid., fol. 6.

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in Honora’s Harry and Lucy, with Mother’s edict that the children make their beds in the morning before they have their breakfast (she nevertheless lets Harry off by granting his sister’s unlikely request that she be allowed make his bed for him – an early lesson in feminine amiability).73 In wealthy families, as Butler notes, this would normally be a job for housemaids, so it seems to have been intended more as a means of establishing obedience than instilling a particular ‘good habit’. It is not clear that Honora conceived of this practice in the associationist terms adopted by Richard Lovell but, as intimated above, Honora was reading Hartley’s Theory around the time she was observing the children. In her register, she cites a section of the book on the senses of taste and smell, opining that ‘we are able to raise up stronger miniatures of particular tastes & smells by the force of imagination than [Hartley] allowed’. Most interestingly, she cross-references Hartley with her own experience, commenting that a paragraph of his on the development of language ‘is illustrated by the practice of children, who do as it there said the supposed savage people would do in similar circumstances’, that is, to name previously unknown things according to their likeness with known things.74 But Honora seems to have taken little from Hartley, beyond that which provoked this brief anthropological reflection on the behaviour and development of children. Practical Education asserts that the ‘fixing’ of the child’s attention is ‘absolutely essential to successful instruction’ (PE, 1: 112). As ‘the first object in the early cultivation of the understanding’ (PE, 1: 57), the attention is initially developed by establishing a primary association between learning and pleasure, as per the Lockean tradition. Care should be taken not to overindulge children or to make extravagant promises of material reward – this would be both expensive and deleterious in its effect. It is better to coax children with ‘small, certain, regularly recurring motives’ (PE, 1: 86) such as raisins than to force them into learning with violence, not only because this would create a ‘false association’ between pain and attention, but because ‘violent or continual stimulus’ causes a sensory excitement that acts to ‘disturb and dissipate’ the attention (PE, 1: 85). The ‘stimulus’ of instant reward is withdrawn as children learn that ‘success’ in itself is ‘a great pleasure’ (PE, 1: 87). When a child is young, the Edgeworths explain, ‘we depend upon particular associations of place, time, and manner, upon different sorts of excitation, to produce habits of application’, but as they get older, it is important to ‘substitute the power of voluntary, for the habit 73

74

Honora Edgeworth, Practical Education; or, the History of Harry and Lucy (Lichfield: printed by J. Jackson. And sold by J. Johnson, London, 1780), 2: 5–8. Priestley, Hartley’s Theory, 125.

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of associated attention’. All ‘temporary excitements’ are removed from the process and replaced with a ‘large, but distant object, some pursuit which is not to be rewarded with immediate praise, but rather with permanent advantage and esteem’. This programme gradually develops the ‘ambition of youth’ and at the same time forms a less hierarchical relationship between teacher and pupil: All the arrangements should be left to the pupil himself, all the difficulties should be surmounted by his own industry, and the interest he takes in his own success and improvement will now probably be a sufficient stimulus; his preceptor will now rather be his partner than his master, he should rather share the labour than attempt to direct it: this species of sympathy in study diminishes the pain of attention, and gives an agreeable interest even in the most tiresome researches.

The training of the child into the habits of ‘industry’ and ‘associated attention’ thus enables familial collaboration as it develops self-discipline and other ‘manly’ virtues of later life: When a young man perceives that his preceptor becomes in this manner the companion of his exertions, he loses all suspicion that he is compelled to mental labour … he discovers … that all the habits of attention which he has acquired, are those which are useful to men as well as to children, and he feels the advantage of his cultivated powers on every fresh occasion. He will perceive, that young men who have been ill educated cannot by any motive command their vigorous attention, and he will feel the cause of his own superiority, when he comes to any trial of skill with inattentive men of genius. (PE, 1: 113)

There is a clear link here with the construction of industrious upper-class masculinity in Essays on Professional Education (1809), which similarly rests on the development of ‘vigorous attention’. I will return to the subject of ‘skill’ and ‘genius’ in Chapter 5, where father–son relationships are more closely considered. It is worth noting here, though, that Maria Edgeworth was equally insistent on the development of the powers of attention in girls and young women.75 75

‘I do not desire to make my daughter merely a musician, a painter, or a poet; I do not desire to make her merely a botanist, a mathematician, or a chemist; but I wish to give her early the habit of industry and attention, the love of knowledge, and the power of reasoning: these will enable her to attend to excellence in any pursuit to which she

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As another of Honora’s records demonstrates, it is hard to tell whether her techniques were, as Richard Lovell would have us believe, a reduction of Hartley to practise or mere instances of parental resourcefulness: Ho[nora] – about 9 months old, when she first began to observe the hardness of bodies & was clasping her hand upon a table when a cat came under her hand & it fell upon the cats back – she was very much terrified to feel it so soft, & could not be prevailed upon to touch any thing of the same kind without agitation ’till near 4 yrs old, tho’ every gentleness was used to conquer her antipathy – her having a ^wooden cat toy which was cover’d with fur affected it, at last – +76

To an extent, the integration of such practices into Practical Education serves to highlight the seemingly natural affinity between associationist theory and domestic practice. However, the doctrine was also imposed onto parenting techniques in less organic and more deliberate ways, which encourage a reading of the ‘science of education’ as quantitative, material study with objective, physical outcomes. As Butler puts it, ‘What struck [Richard Lovell] Edgeworth about Hartley’s Theory was the prospect that psychology, and thence education too, might cease to be subjective and speculative, and, if Hartley’s work were correctly applied, might be counted among the sciences’.77 For Richard Lovell, the successful application of associationism hinged on the precise and habitual use of reward and punishment. Writing to Barbauld, Richard Lovell outlines his technique of teaching numeracy using raisins – a commodity that seems to have been used frequently in lessons: At some time when He was unoccupied I would lay before Him two Raisins and desire Him to stand still and count them; when He has done He should have the Raisins to eat the next day I would increase the number, and every day for six or seven days I would add one to the number counted the preceding day: – If care were taken to keep Him quiet if proper times were chosen, and if He has no other fruit or sweet thing except at his meals He would probably make no mistake even in His first Lessons; – If He did, the Raisins should be put away without

76 77

may direct her talents.’ Maria Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies. To Which Is Added, an Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification (London: J. Johnson, 1795), 73–4. HE’s notebook [1778], EPBL, MS. Eng. Misc. e. 1459, fol. 18. Compare PE, 1: 156. Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 62.

100 Material Enlightenment any thing being said until the next day – I would not promise them, as a reward if He counted right, or say He should not have them if He counted wrong; I would give all my Attention to what He was about. and would send him away the instant He had done.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, the use of sweet foods had a long history in Enlightenment educationalism. However, the above makes for a stark comparison with the sensory indulgence of Barbauld’s Lessons, particularly in her use of food: Do you love strawberries and cream? Let us go then and gather some strawberries. They are ripe now. Here is a very large one. It is almost too big to go into your mouth.78

The emphasis Richard Lovell puts on not promising the child his ‘reward’ is in direct opposition to the delight Barbauld takes in presenting food for the sake of pleasure alone.79 Under Richard Lovell’s system, close scrutiny of the child’s demeanour was necessary to ensure that such rewards did not have the effect of encouraging indolent greed, the countering of which would be a key didactic objective of several of Maria Edgeworth’s stories for children, including ‘Lazy Lawrence’ and ‘The Purple Jar’ in The Parent’s Assistant, which, as Deborah Weiss has recently shown, provide early lessons in navigating commodity culture and luxury. As Weiss explains, such stories ‘work towards the goal of inculcating good economic traits by presenting child protagonists who, when they work and save to reach their economic goals, do so for the good of their families – a good that ultimately produces benefits for the whole community’.80 In Chapter 5, we will see that the habit of attention is closely tied to Edgeworth’s project of economic improvement; indeed, she envisaged attention as a form of ‘mental labour’ (PE, 1: 113), and aimed to encourage its development in her books for children and adults. In Castle Rackrent (1800), as Alex Howard has shown, Edgeworth promotes active, intertextual reading through complex annotative techniques: the footnotes and glossary provide the industrious reader with exercises that challenge and reward the ‘pains of attention’.81 78 79 80

81

Lessons for Children, of Three Years Old, Part 1, 22–3. McCarthy, ALBVE, 203–4. Deborah Weiss, ‘Maria Edgeworth’s Infant Economics: Capitalist Culture, GoodWill Networks and “Lazy Lawrence”’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 37, no. 3 (1 September 2014), 396–7. Alex Howard, ‘The Pains of Attention: Paratextual Reading in Practical Education

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The recommendation in Practical Education that ‘Bodily exercise should immediately follow’ periods of focused attention bears some relation to Honora’s observations on the shifting interests of children (PE, 1: 84), and makes a commonsensical case for variety in lessons. However, the chapter on Attention marks a distinct turn towards a more medicalised view of childhood. The Edgeworths draw on Darwin throughout the chapter, but the following is worth consideration for its gendering and classing of irrational bodies: Dr. Darwin observes, that when we experience any disagreeable sensations, we endeavour to procure ourselves temporary relief by motions of those muscles and limbs which are most habitually obedient to our will. This observation extends to mental as well as bodily pain; thus persons in violent grief wring their hands and convulse their countenances; those who are subject to the petty, but acute miseries of false shame, endeavour to relieve themselves by awkward gestures and continual motions. A ploughboy, when he is brought into the presence of those whom he thinks his superiors, endeavours to relieve himself from the uneasy sensations of false shame, by twirling his hat upon his fingers, and by various uncouth gestures. Men who think a great deal sometimes acquire habitual awkward gestures, to relieve the pain of intense thought. (PE, 1: 83)

Practical Education dispenses a preventative and a cure for ‘habitual awkward gestures’ associated with attention, warning that these can impede the performance of the gentleman orator in ways that will leave him ‘abashed’ and his father ‘sorry’. When the child is attending to something, such as a book, they must be entirely still and the parent should watch for the ‘first symptoms of any awkward trick’ (PE, 1: 84). If children have already developed an association between the ‘contortions’ of their bodies and attention, then it is necessary to ‘cure’ them ‘either by sudden slight bodily pain’ or else ‘by a total suspension of all the employments with which these habits are associated’. When the child next shows an interest in learning, parents should gratify their curiosity only on the condition that they remain ‘perfectly still’ (PE, 1: 85).

and Castle Rackrent’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 69, no. 3 (1 December 2014), 293–318. For further reading, see Natalie M. Phillips, Distraction: Problems of Attention in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016).

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As mentioned earlier, the authors of Practical Edgeworth claim that Honora was the originator of the chapter on Obedience. But the chapter begins by paraphrasing a premise of Richard Lovell’s, that ‘obstinacy … arises from an Association of pain with Obedience & of pleasure with the contrary’, which appears in an incomplete note, dated 1780.82 The note is one half of a written exchange between Honora and her husband, and was occasioned by a particular incident that might adjust our perceptions of Honora’s ‘strictness’.83 Initiating discussion with her husband, Honora writes that ‘Little Lovell’ was asked to spell some syllables, which he began to do but then refused to continue. Rather than conceding to the will of the child by ‘telling him how to say it’, Richard Lovell had extracted the answer from him with ‘several honest strokes with a whip’. Honora takes this as an opportunity for philosophical reflection, asking, ‘What does obstinacy in children arise from? Is there no danger of making them cowards by beating them? Is it not pain or fear of pain, that makes them yield to the person who is stronger than themselves?’ She questions whether corporal punishment might not cause a child to grow into an aggressive adult, or else develop a ‘servile base disposition’ in ‘being govern’d alone by fear of bodily pain’. She presses Richard Lovell further: What would you think of a man who was restrained from committing murder only by the fear of being hang’d? If a child shows such marks of obstinacy that you cannot doubt of his being so, if you beat him till he submits to do, or say what you wou’d have him – do you cure him of the fault in his disposition – or do you only make him yield to your will at the time or perhaps favour to you – but wou’d he not show obstinacy to those who did not make him yield by the same means? Will he not continue to be obstinate when he grows [?] & is not under your care? I do not know that this wou’d be the case – perhaps when a child who had not shown obstinacy & had been treated in this manner was old enough to understand the reasonableness of what his parents requir’d he wou’d feel no inclination to be obstinate.84

In his reply, Richard Lovell explains in associationist terms the origin of Lovell’s ‘obstinacy’ – he had experienced pain in his feet when learning to walk and was disinclined to cross a room, even for food. His nurse had forced him to walk ‘only by harsh words & threats … without giving him 82 83 84

Papers relating to PE, EPBL, MS. Eng. misc. c. 895 (77). Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 50. Papers relating to PE, EPBL, MS. Eng. misc. c. 895 (76).

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pleasure when he had done’. To counter this ‘habit’ of obstinacy, Richard Lovell continues, the ‘sensation of pain must be joined with disobedience and pleasure with complaisance’, which ‘requires great attention’ and ‘perseverance of address’. In further answer to Honora’s concerns about cowardice, Richard Lovell asserts that Lovell ‘may be made so by these means and so he may by giving him sweetmeats if it be done improperly!’ Against such frivolity with treats, he stresses the importance of regular and systematised action – the ‘success’ of associationist education ‘depends upon the frequency and certainty of the same ideas being combined together in the mind – so that one foolish or froward person in a family may frustrate the utmost care and attention of the most enlightened parents – .’85 It seems clear from this that Richard Lovell imposed his associationist regimen on the entire household,86 while critiquing Honora’s parenting, educating her in his new pet theory and insisting that she now think of herself as ‘enlightened’. But an enlightened woman is still a woman, after all – though the whipping of her son prompted Honora to seriously question the moral effects of corporal punishment, Richard Lovell is dismissive of her attempt to engage in discussion ‘upon a subject in which’, he says ‘you are interested only to ^make me justify or inform my conduct, and for which I know you have not any particular taste in your own mind…’.87 The theory of obedience put forward in Practical Education builds on the notions Richard Lovell presented to Honora, but with significant adjustments. In the book, it is asserted that obedience ‘must be taught as a habit’ but should be replaced with ‘reason’ when the child is able to understand it. Although punishment is a ‘disagreeable … business’, the failure of parents to carry out threats is a ‘mistaken mercy’ that is ‘in reality, the greatest cruelty’ (PE, 1: 244), for children soon learn that such threats are empty. If parents threaten children without actually causing pain, then ‘with fear they excite all the passions and habits which are connected with that mean principle of action, and extinguish that vigorous spirit, that independent energy of which is essential to all the active and manly virtues’ (PE, 1: 243–4), and if children become habituated to finding that their ‘daily pleasures depend not so much on their own exertions as upon the humour and caprice of others’ they develop ‘arts of persuasion’ and ‘crouching hypocrisy’. This revision of Rousseau’s individualism has political as well as gendered overtones, as was almost inescapable in the 1790s, particularly where it came to the subject 85 86

87

Papers relating to PE, EPBL, MS. Eng. misc. c. 895 (77). For a discussion of the treatment of servants in PE, see Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism, 54. Papers relating to PE, EPBL, MS. Eng. misc. c. 895 (77).

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of reading. As Richard De Ritter persuasively argues, during this decade and in the educational works of the Edgeworths and others, ‘the scene of reading is presented as a highly charged encounter between instructor and pupil, encompassing an uneasy blend of benevolent tutelage and more forceful coercion and manipulation’. 88 De Ritter observes that Within this combustible atmosphere, rational authority figures can easily mutate into tyrants, as they impose their will upon their weaker subjects. Conversely, the pupil’s seemingly reasonable desire for liberty, when thwarted, risks developing into a more volatile demand, driven by violence and irrationality. The pedagogic relationship might, then, be viewed as a microcosm exploration of the use and abuse of power, and of the reaction it provokes: a concern of obvious public relevance in the 1790s.

A humanistic concern with tyranny and liberty inflects the treatment of obedience in Practical Education, to the effect that some violence towards the child seems an inevitable, if regrettable, part of the process of instilling habitual, involuntary submission as a condition for the development of rational, voluntary self-discipline. It should be noted, however, that ‘love and esteem’ are the most effective and ethical means of securing obedience: parents who ‘neglect to cultivate the affections of their pupils will never be able to excite them to “noble ends” by “noble means”’. For Maria Edgeworth, unjust parents, like unjust governments, command over a ‘dominion of fear, from which reason will emancipate herself, and from which yet more certainly revolt’ (PE, 1: 89). If the project treated children as subjects to be studied for the acquisition of knowledge of, and thereby power over, their bodies and minds, Honora’s notebooks also betray the limits of authoritarian pedagogy, and even hint towards the resistance of the child to the demands of the teacher. In the following quotation, Honora records a somewhat ironic dialogue between herself and her stepdaughter Emmeline: Em. [?] – What is Filial Duty Em) Filial Piety M) What is Filial Piety. Em) Filial Duty – M) But what do you understand by Filial Duty Em) – Filial Piety – M) And what is meant by the words Filial Piety – Em) I don’t know89

88 89

Richard De Ritter, Imagining Women Readers, 1789–1820, 91. HE’s notebook [1778–9], EPBL, MS. Eng. Misc. e. 1460, fols. 4–5.

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Was Emmeline delighting in the circularity of her answers, or was she merely being stubborn, perhaps bored by Honora’s attempts to impress upon her the obligations of a daughter towards her parents? The passage might put us in mind of Wordsworth’s ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ and ‘We are Seven’, in that the child’s speech draws attention to the arbitrary power involved in the prescription of values, but it is also a very real example of the frustrations of teaching young children, as well as the futility of words without ideas.

‘Harry and Lucy’ On 20 February 1780, Richard Lovell wrote to his fellow Lunar man, Joseph Priestley, asking for assistance with a project. Accompanying the letter was Practical Education: Or, the History of Harry and Lucy, written by Honora and privately printed in 1780.90 In his letter, Richard Lovell credits Priestley’s edition of David Hartley’s theory of mind with having revolutionised his educational practice: ‘Before that work had fallen into my hands’, he writes, ‘I had been able to form the temper of my children … but I could not pretend to form their Characters with any degree of precision’.91 Locke and Rousseau, though ‘full of excellent observations’ and advice on ‘what should be followed and what avoided’, were insufficient to the task of moulding children with ‘precision’ and ‘certainty’. Richard Lovell goes on to introduce Honora’s book to his friend: The greatest part of the little volume, which accompanies this letter was written by a Lady for the use of her own children; her chief design has been to associate with the objects, which are every day unnoticed by the generality of children’s ideas of Analogy, Causation and Utility: She proposes to pursue this plan and hopes with the assistance of her friends to introduce … the first principles of many sciences or rather the facts upon which those principles are founded. She wishes to inscribe this volume to Dr Priestley, as she learned from his writing the Doctrine upon which it is founded; she requests his strictures upon what has already been attempted before it be published; and his ideas of what may be done in the subsequent volumes

90

91

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states that Honora and RLE ‘projected a small three-volume work, to be entitled Practical Education, of which only volume two was printed anonymously (1780), but not published’. Draft of letter by RLE to Priestley, EPBL, MS. Eng. misc. c. 895.

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The dedication was surely a carefully considered choice – this was intended, after all, as the family’s first publication – but the exchange was unsuccessful in its apparent aim of making this a Lunar venture. Priestley’s reply was unenthusiastic: he thanked Richard Lovell for the dedication but considered the inclusion of a glossary to be pointless, and closes his letter by stating that ‘I should with much pleasure have given Mrs Edgeworth “my idea of what may be done in the subsequent volume”, if it had been a subject to which I had given much attention, and had anything worth communicating to her about it.’92 Presumably he considered writing for young children, however Hartleyan a practice, to be Barbauld’s arena. Honora began work on Harry and Lucy around 1778.93 In her continuation of Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s Memoirs, Maria tells us that her father printed the first copies of the ‘little volume … literally for his own children’.94 Two of these are held at the Bodleian Library, and bear Honora Edgeworth’s name embossed in gold letters on the cover, though it does not appear on the inner pages, and Richard Lovell assumes authorship in his preface. One of the Bodleian copies belonged to Maria and it contains her corrections to the text, which she made in ink. Maria’s changes made for more precise and readable prose, and she replaced ‘Mother’ with the less formal ‘Mamma’. The revised version was published in Maria’s Early Lessons (1801–2) and was the first part of the Harry and Lucy series that ran through Continuation of Early Lessons (1814) to Harry and Lucy Concluded: Being the Last Part of Early Lessons (1825). A second copy contains annotations in the hand of a young child and further marks suggest that the family used it in the education of the Edgeworth children, perhaps in the development of the annotative system of phonetics later outlined by Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth in Practical Education and A Rational Primer (1799). The instructions for the use of the phonetic chart in Practical Education gives an indication as to the method employed: once a child had mastered the sounds of the vowels and consonants, they were to be given their first book: ‘One of Mrs. Barbauld’s lessons for young children, carefully marked in the same manner as the alphabet, should … be put into our pupils hands’ (PE, 1: 48). As with Richard Lovell’s mechanical diagrams in the appendix to Practical Education and the instructions he provides in the text, the phonetic chart exists in working, real-world relation with the technology of the book,

92

93 94

Priestley to RLE, 20 February 1780, MS 22471 (1). Correspondence of RL E on Education, Department of Manucripts, National Library of Ireland (henceforth NLI). Memoirs, 2: 334. Ibid., 2: 334–5.

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though whether it was an improvement in teaching methods is a matter for debate. Like Barbauld’s Lessons, Honora Edgeworth’s ‘little BOOK’ (as the dedication terms it) is situated in the everyday: after the aforementioned bed-making episode, Lucy visits the dairy and learns about the extraction of cream from milk.95 Later, Harry receives his first lesson in moral economy through two encounters with two labouring men: a brick-maker and a blacksmith. Harry is curious about the softness of some unfired bricks, which he spoils by pressing his fingers into them. The brick-maker reprimands him and demands payment for the spoiled bricks, and Harry promises to give him the first two pence he comes by. He and his father then go to the forge, where Harry helps the blacksmith by blowing the bellows, thereby earning the two pence he owes the brick-maker, who praises his honesty and offers to show him how to make bricks. Harry shares his new knowledge with Lucy, and the two set out on project to manufacture bricks themselves, providing a lesson for the child reader in industry and industriousness. After learning about different kinds of earth, Harry digs up some clay but is unable to shape it into bricks. A conversation with his sister solves the problem: he tells her that the brick-makers ‘have a little box, made in the shape of a brick, without top or bottom, into which they put the clay upon a table, and with a straight stick, like a ruler, scrape to the clay even with the top of the box’.96 The entries in the ‘Glossary’ for ‘clay’, ‘ruler’ and other objects instruct the child to ask to see them, linking words on the page with objects in the physical world. Lucy tells her brother that the box has a name: ‘It is called a mould.’ After a conversation between the siblings, Lucy gains her mother’s approval to have a carpenter make a mould, providing further lessons in collaboration and filial obedience, as well as construction: Lucy’s mother let the carpenter make a brick-maker’s mould for Harry; but the man could not begin, until he knew what size it should be: how many inches long, how many inches broad, and how many inches thick. Harry did not know what the carpenter meant; but Lucy, being older, and having always lived with her Mother, who had been very kind to her, and had taught her a great many things, knew what the carpenter meant, and as she wished to have bricks the size of those, with which her father’s house was built, she went and measured some of the bricks 95

96

Practical Education; or, the History of Harry and Lucy, vol. 2 (Lichfield: printed by J. Jackson. And sold by J. Johnson, London, 1780), n.p. Ibid., 77–8.

108 Material Enlightenment in the wall, and finding, that a great number were all of one length, she said to her Brother, that she supposed, that they were all alike: Harry told her, that as the brick-makers used but one mould, whilst he saw them at work, he supposed, that they made a great number of bricks of the same size, and that the wall would not look so regular, as it did, if the bricks were of different sizes. Lucy therefore thought, if she could measure one brick, it would be sufficient.97

Honora thus offers a demonstration of how the education of girls in mathematics and geometry might, through their application in the collection and sharing of empirical data, be put to profitable use. Like Barbauld, Honora seeks to encourage the replication of lessons by readers, providing quite detailed instructions – we are told, for example, that the bricks ‘stuck to the mould, unless the mould was wetted’.98 Indeed, Barbauld’s influence is clear throughout Harry and Lucy: the preface praises ‘the ingenious Mrs Barbould’s’ [sic] Lessons and towards the end of the story Harry is given a copy of the book by his mother, from which he reads Barbauld’s ‘story of the fidler [sic]’, a moral tale in which three boys receive a cake each, and respectively gorge on it, hoard it, and share it.99 Harry and Lucy concludes with a moral tale about a ‘grateful’ chimney sweeper and a ‘humane’ gentleman, which, as in Barbauld’s story of the fiddler, concludes with the children being asked to choose which of the characters they prefer.100 Thus, the child reader is provided with a narrative that allows them to exercise a degree of autonomy in their moral judgement.

A ‘wise and excellent mother’ Referring to Practical Education: or, the History of Harry and Lucy in a letter of 1798, eight years after Honora’s death, Richard Lovell Edgeworth asserts that ‘From that single grain has sprung all the works on Education which have since been written by my daughter & myself ’.101 The metaphor of cultivation might remind us that in the study of educational practices we are inevitably dealing with something transitory, as well as transformational. In seeking to recover some of Honora’s practices, this chapter has 97 98 99 100 101

Ibid., 79–82. Ibid., 85. Lessons for Children from Three to Four, 13–31. Ibid., 102. RLE to [?], c. 1798, Correspondence of RLE on Education, MS 22471 (5), NLI.

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contended with variably gendered mythologies, in addition to the commonplace problem in the history of science, that any origin story or collection is constructed, subject to choice, and shaped as much by omission as inclusion. We have seen that Honora’s work was an important factor in the nascent educational project, but it was a factor operating in a world of social and material agents.102 Richard Lovell’s identification of his deceased wife’s book as the genesis of all that followed should not, therefore, be taken as a statement of fact, but rather as a reminder of how affective ties can shape scientific narrative. As emotional objects, Honora’s notebooks played an important role in her material afterlife. The final two entries are in Richard Lovell’s hand, and appear as follows: April 30th. the wise and excellent mother who wrote the above ceases to be – —— A Rainbow Father if is that Rainbow at any other place if we were there103

Unlike the notes taken by Honora, this observation does not identify the child. The incomplete sentence reads as a pained attempt at the continuation of Honora’s task. Perhaps Richard Lovell felt the loss of his wife even more acutely on finding himself unsuited to the documentation of his children’s daily lives.104 But notetaking also provided some comfort. In his Memoirs, Richard Lovell recounts taking notes at Honora’s deathbed: ‘I took out my pencil, and determined to note whatever she said and did at this awful period, an employment that might enable me to bear with more fortitude the scene that I was to witness.’105 Maria experienced something similar in her attempts to continue the ‘Harry and Lucy’ series after the death of her father. She recalls that ‘The want of his mind working along with my own, I knew must be in this attempt peculiarly felt; but I have been 102

103 104

105

Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Notebook MS. Eng. Misc. e. 1460. ‘The illness of Mrs. Honora Edgeworth interrupted the progress of that little volume, and after her death, the ideas associated with it were so painful to my father, that it was not at that time continued’ (Memoirs, 2: 335). Memoirs, 1: 368–9.

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encouraged to persevere by the assistance afforded me by his and my own scientific friends.’106 The educational project demanded exchange with others in the family and their extended network. Collaborative work strengthened, as well as depended on, social ties, and no doubt provided a sense of continuity after loss. Honora’s voice may be muted by Anna Seward’s memorialisation, focused as Seward was on the visual charms of her lost friend, but Richard Lovell’s contestation of Honora’s image subsumes her individual beliefs and practices, which we have seen did not always accord with his, even as it promotes her to the status of scientific pioneer. This figuration of Honora as an exemplary Enlightenment mother is central to the claims of pragmatism in Practical Education, but over time, as Myers observes, ‘credit for the [educational] project, the methodology and the tales themselves migrate … from Honora Sneyd and Maria Edgeworth to Richard Lovell Edgeworth alone’.107 A French translation and parallel reader of Honora’s Practical Education: Or, the History of Harry and Lucy was published under Richard Lovell’s name in 1803108 and Maria accredits authorship of the original to her father in her continuation of his Memoirs (2: 335). The literary project, as a process of collection, is thus subject to human partiality, but examination of its material traces bring an alternative Honora into view: a participant in the development of the ‘experimental science’ of education, and an affectionate – if somewhat disciplinarian – mother, critical of associationist education as a system of violence. Maria’s continuation of the educational record (mainly between 1796 and 1797) not only provided her with material for her Practical Education. According to Butler, it was ‘an education in itself ’ that ‘taught her to value precision and objectivity, and trained her to a habit of observation and note-taking that extended into other spheres, including … the sphere of story-writing.’109 But the elements of fictionality in Practical Education, of which the raisin experiment that began this chapter is but a single instance, might alert us to the limits of ‘precision and objectivity’ in Maria Edgeworth’s later work and in Enlightenment science of mind more broadly.

106

107

108

109

Maria Edgeworth, Harry and Lucy Concluded; Being the Last Part of Early Lessons (London: R. Hunter, 1825), 1: ix. Mitzi Myers, ‘“Anecdotes from the Nursery” in Maria Edgeworth’s Practical Education (1798): Learning from Children “Abroad and At Home”’, Princeton University Library Chronicle 60, no. 2 (Winter 1999), 232. Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Harry and Lucy: Being the First Part of Early Lessons, trans. Louis Claude Chéron de la Bruyère (London; Paris: J. Johnson; Xhrouet, 1803). Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 65.

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Honora’s contribution to Practical Education is a scientific controversy on a domestic scale. It seems clear that her ideas, practices and writings were in some ways crucial to the conception of Practical Education. That is not to make the strong claim that Honora was the originator of the educational project that would became synonymous with Edgeworthstown in the years after her death, though her observations may deserve a small stake in the prehistory of developmental psychology. Nevertheless, Honora’s notes help to identify certain seams of thought, as well as emotional fault-lines, in the groundwork of ‘Practical Education’; they reveal continuities and breaks between emotion and Enlightenment empiricism at the interface between domestic and scientific worlds.

Chapter 3

Profession and occlusion: Hannah More’s ‘vital Christianity’

I

n June 1791, a notice appeared in The Gentleman’s Magazine as postscript to a contribution by the Anglican clergyman and antiquarian John Elderton: That great friend to literature, Mrs. Montague, of Portman-square, has lately presented to Miss Hannah More an urn, to the memory of Mr. Locke, to be erected at Wrington, in this county, the place of his nativity. The inscription is very plain, and runs thus: To JOHN LOCKE, born in this village, this memorial is erected by Mrs. MONTAGU, and presented to HANNAH MORE1

While it was far from unusual for Montagu’s acts of patronage to attract such publicity, this gift and the correspondence surrounding it are particularly revealing. The report was published just a few days after the urn’s initial installation in the garden at Cowslip Green, More’s home at Wrington, before Montagu had sent payment to the sculptor commissioned for the work.2 In a subsequent letter, Montagu lightly chides More for allowing news of the gift to spread prematurely: ‘I fear’, she writes, ‘you have made me incur the blame of the artificer, who must think me forgetful of the debts I owe, and the honour and pleasure I receive.’3 As Montagu’s choice of words suggests, the 1 2

3

The Gentleman’s Magazine (June 1791), 511. Nicholas D. Smith, The Literary Manuscripts and Letters of Hannah More (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), 108. Montagu to More, 1791. Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs Hannah More, ed. William Roberts (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1834), 1: 371. In her reply

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transaction combined elements of commodity exchange and gift exchange; Montagu’s articulation of the ‘honour and pleasure’ she receives in return for her expense highlights the commerciality of her patronage, as well as its affective aspects. The urn’s meaning is thus partially determined by its role in solidifying socio-economic ties, but its gifting was also a cultural and political statement. By giving this object, Montagu asserts her authority as a participant in the conservative appropriation of Enlightenment philosophy More was increasingly looking to effect. I argue in this chapter that the project of reforming Locke was central to More’s written, embodied and material practices from the early 1790s onwards. The urn marks the start of the struggle of (and increasingly between) women seeking to wrest possession of the liberal Locke from republican hands.4 The urn memorialises the philosopher in neoclassical form, with a ‘very plain’ inscription that befits his epistemology of ‘simple ideas of sense’. Once dominant over the urn itself, the inscription is now only faintly legible (Figure 5), but its arrangement of the three names, each in capitals, is intriguing: the titled ‘Mrs Montagu’ appears between the full, untitled names of John Locke and Hannah More, placing the latter two in visual symmetry with each other and suggesting Montagu’s role as mediator. These choices are in part commonplace to literary dedication, and contribute generically to the stately aesthetic of the memorial, but they are also peculiarly self-reflexive. The object seems to call attention to its very materiality: the capitalisation of ‘Memorial’ heightens its formality by recalling earlier spelling history, but might also gesture towards Locke’s epistemological, as well as typographical distinction of the object.5

4

5

to Montagu, More denies responsibility for the report, and conjectures that ‘someone who saw it in the Artificer’s yard at Bath gave this premature publication’. More to Montagu, 14 August 1791, MSS MO 4002, Elizabeth Montagu Papers, Huntington Library, California. Cited in Nicholas D. Smith, The Literary Manuscripts and Letters of Hannah More, 108. For a summary overview of Locke’s politics see Alex Tuckness, ‘Locke’s Political Philosophy’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , ed. Edward N. Zalta (Winter 2012), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/locke-political/ (accessed 2 March 2014). On Locke’s liberalism, see Ruth Grant, John Locke’s Liberalism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010) and Martin Seliger, The Liberal Politics of John Locke (London: Allen and Unwin, 1968). The capitalisation of nouns fell sharply from fashion in English printed books from the mid- eighteenth century. See N. E. Osselton, ‘Spelling-Book Rules and the Capitalization of Nouns in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Historical and Editorial Studies in Medieval and Early Modern English, for John Gerritsen, ed. Mary-Jo Arn and Hanneke Wirtjes (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhof, 1985) , 49–61.

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Figure 5. Urn to John Locke, Barley Wood, Somerset.

The urn and its inscription boldly proclaimed Montagu’s taste and intellectualism, concretising the union of commerce and culture that typified the Bluestockings’ model of elite sociability. This distinct combination had been exemplified in More’s poem ‘The Bas Bleu; or, Conversation’. Composed in

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1783 and privately circulated before its publication in 1786, the poem represents Bluestocking conversation, in Harriet Guest’s phrase, as ‘feminine sociable currency’,6 the intrinsic value of which is in putting Enlightenment philosophy to ‘use’. More draws at once from Smithian economics, Lockean educational philosophy and Humean aesthetics in her eulogy: Let Education’s moral mint The noblest images imprint; Let Taste her curious touchstone hold, To try if standard be the gold; But ’tis thy commerce, Conversation, Must give it use by circulation; That noblest commerce of mankind, Whose precious merchandize is MIND!7

Like the urn, ‘The Bas Bleu’ embodies and celebrates the commerce of Enlightenment ideas within the Bluestocking circle. Both objects of exchange provided opportunities for polite philosophical discussion in private and domestic environments that were also significant cultural and political spaces.8 Such gifts were aimed towards strengthening the intellectual friendship between Bluestockings and, as Elizabeth Eger states, ‘Female friendship and professional support were vital components in establishing the bluestockings as a group who cultivated intellectual conversation about literature, history and politics.’9 Indeed, that Elderton anticipated public interest in the urn suggests the extent to which the exchange of Enlightenment ideas between Montagu and More contributed to a sense of national literary culture and philosophical heritage. However, the poem and urn also provide early indications of the divergence between the two women’s views on the uses of philosophy. In her poem, More implies that the value of philosophical exchange is limited unless it achieves wider ‘use by circulation’, embracing ‘mankind’ more generally. The real ‘end’ of conversation, More goes on to

6 7

8

9

Guest, Small Change, 191. More, ‘The Bas Bleu’, in Florio: A Tale, for Fine Gentlemen and Fine Ladies: and, The Bas Bleu: or, Conversation (London: T. Cadell, 1786), 82–3. In 1818 More welcomed two Persian travellers to Barley Wood, who were reportedly ‘delighted at seeing Locke’s urn’. Letters of Hannah More to Zachary Macaulay, Esq., ed. Arthur Roberts (London: James Nisbet, 1860), 107. Also see Anne Stott, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 99. Elizabeth Eger, Bluestockings: Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 60.

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assert, is ‘not to indulge in idle vision’, but to unify ‘sense and learning’, and ‘thence produce/ What tends to practice and to use’ (lines 324–9). As we shall see, this formed the modus operandi of the evangelical ministry More developed over the coming decades. Her philosophical thought found new sensory translations as she turned away from elite sociability zealously to devote her attention to social and religious reform. Given at a decisive period in this process, the gift of the urn appears an assertion of Montagu’s intellectualism, and a friendly reminder to More of her debt to the ‘Queen of the Blues’. In terms of the economies it defines and the philosophical tradition it memorialises, Locke’s urn bears complex relations with More’s own practices of exchange. The first half of this chapter discusses how More’s material and textual applications of Lockean associationism, as related to but clearly distinguishable from Montagu’s, were fundamental to her evangelical project of social reform. It centres on More’s charitable work in the Sunday schools and women’s clubs she established and managed with her sister Martha More from 1789, demonstrating that, from this time onwards, More worked with increasing determination to appropriate sense-based psychology for her Christian cause. I begin by showing that although her Sunday schools followed a ‘limited and strict’ curriculum, she promoted relatively progressive Enlightenment pedagogic techniques, which in turn informed her ‘superintendence’ over working-class adults and her propagandist tracts. I draw on anthropological perspectives on gift relations in my discussion of her ministry to the bodies and minds of the poor, and discuss the role of the senses in her structured socio-religious events in the Mendips. I suggest that More sought to unite scientific and medical thought with Christianity’s ‘daily bread’,10 increasingly figuring herself as apothecary to the nation. The second half of the chapter discusses the associationist intertextual techniques More adopted and developed in order to realign Enlightenment thought with Christian morality from 1799 onwards. It looks first at her representation of Wollstonecraft in Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), showing how More disassociates the philosopher from British Enlightenment by linking her to corruptive European literature, and particularly to notions of suicide as a German cultural phenomenon. I discuss More’s exploitation of the discourse of suicide, arguing that although she gestures towards the debunking of the myth of the English as 10

‘Still have these ready hands th’ afflicted fed,/ And minister’d to Want her daily bread?’. Hannah More, ‘Reflections of King Hezekiah, in His Sickness’, in Sacred Dramas: Chiefly Intended for Young Persons: The Subjects Taken from the Bible. To which is Added, Sensibility, a Poem (London: T. Cadell, 1782), 259.

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a melancholic nation who were prone to self-murder, More was evidently anxious that zealous women might view suicide as a means of self-expression, particularly as a means of asserting themselves as patriotic actors or Christian martyrs. In order to assuage envy for men’s more public patriotic capacities, she frames the domestic as a space of female self-sacrifice in Cœlebs in Search of a Wife (1808), but her intertextual choices in the novel suggest that More struggled to subdue this herself. I argue that Godwin’s Things as They Are; Or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) was a key target of More’s counterattack against novels of sensibility, and work towards a clearer understanding of the dissociative techniques she uses to revision memory and transform the hero of romance into a Christian ideal.

The Mendip schools and feasts In 1788, Hannah and Martha More visited Sarah Trimmer’s pioneering school at Brentford and the following year opened their first Sunday school in Cheddar.11 Instigated in part by William Wilberforce and principally funded by him, the school was the first step in More’s mission to bring ‘vital religion’ to bear on the lives of individuals in rural Somerset.12 Wilberforce had been appalled by the conditions of the poor he encountered during a visit to Cowslip Green in August 1789, and his entreaty that ‘something must be done for Cheddar’ was met with swift action: towards the end of September, Hannah and Martha set off from Bristol to make their initial investigations.13 They were alarmed at the inadequacy of local Church ministry – the incumbent clergyman lived in Oxford and the curate twelve miles away, and Martha More recorded in her journal that there was ‘as much knowledge of Christ in the interior of Africa as there is to be met with in this wretched, miserable place’.14 Immediately setting to work, the Mores secured premises for the school, and following Sarah Trimmer’s model annexed to it a ‘School of Industry’,

11 12

13

14

Stott, Hannah More, 105. After first meeting in 1787, More’s friendship with Wilberforce was rapidly solidified by their shared commitment to anti-slavery campaign; her alliance with him and other members of the Clapham Sect was a crucial means of support for the Mendip schools. See Chapters 4 and 5 of Stott, Hannah More. Martha More, Mendip Annals: or, a Narrative of the Charitable Labours of Hannah and Martha More in their Neighbourhood, ed. Arthur Roberts (London: James Nisbet, 1859), 13. Ibid., 16.

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hoping to engage children in the paid labour of knitting, sewing and spinning.15 Unable to compete with local manufacturers, this project was soon restricted to spinning worsted for stocking makers in nearby Axminster, but the sisters were encouraged by the early success of Sarah Baber, their appointed teacher.16 In a letter to Wilberforce, More reports jubilantly that ‘Upwards of thirty said the Catechism perfectly, forty could sing three psalms, and several great girls were beginning to know something of the Scriptures; the face of the village much changed; not a child to be found on the cliffs on a Sunday; the church gradually filling.’17 Whether or not she overstated these figures, her enumerations make clear that More envisaged the school as an effective means of physical and social containment, as well as religious indoctrination.18 Over the following decade, the Mores established ten other schools in the area, at Shipham, Rowberrow, Nailsea, Blagdon, Sandford, Banwell, Wedmore, Congresbury, Yatton and Axbridge. The Mendip schools contributed to a rapidly expanding social phenomenon in eighteenth-century Britain.19 At the same time as engaging children in mechanistic physical employment, Sunday schools reinforced class distinctions by circumscribing working-class access to a ‘world of letters’ through which, according to Habermas, the reading public gains ‘clarity about itself ’.20 Like others in the charity school movement, More 15

16 17 18

19

20

Sarah Trimmer, The Œconomy of Charity; or, an Address to the Ladies concerning Sunday-Schools; The Establishment of Schools of Industry Under Female Inspection; And the Distribution of Voluntary Benefactions (London: T. Bensley for T. Longman, G. G. and J. Robinson and J. Johnson, 1787). Trimmer recommends school beneficiaries purchase spinning wheels and train children to produce linen for their middleclass neighbours, as she had at her school at Brentford, even providing a plate with a diagram of the machine and instructions for its use. Mendip Annals, 23. Ibid., 24. E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991) has been hugely influential in shaping conceptions of the Sunday school movement as a tool for the repression of the poor. Thomas Walter Laqueur also considers the meteoric rise of the Sunday school in Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). Unlike Thompson, Laqueur considers the schools to have been a product of both middleclass reformism and working-class culture, a view which Malcolm Dick contests in Malcolm Dick, ‘The Myth of the Working-Class Sunday School’, History of Education 9, no. 1 (1980), 27–41. For a comprehensive account of the rise of charity schools and their influence in the development of education in Britain see Mary G. Jones, The Charity School Movement: A Study of Eighteenth Century Puritanism in Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938). Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 51.

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was acutely aware of the potentially democratising effects of literacy.21 In an effort to contain this problem, the curriculum at the Mendip Schools was, in More’s words, ‘very limited and strict’22 – ‘I allow of no writing for the poor. My object is not to make fanatics, but to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety.’23 Accordingly, More produced her own texts and carefully selected those of others for display and use in the classroom: The only books we use are two little tracts called ‘Questions for the Mendip Schools’ [the] Church Catechism (these are hung up in frames, half-a-dozen in a room), the Catechism broke into short questions, Spelling-books, Psalters, Common Prayer-book, and Bible. The little ones learn Watts’ Hymns for Children – they repeat the Collect every Sunday. In some of the schools a plain printed sermon and a printed prayer are read in the evening to the grown-up scholars and parents, and a psalm is sung.24

More’s Questions and Answers for the Mendip and Sunday Schools (1800), which she refers to here, is a particularly oppressive catechistic text, with all the mechanistic, prescribed ‘pseudo-talk’25 of the format, and an emphasis on obedience and the correction of children’s ‘wicked ways’: ‘Are we able to do anything of ourselves? No, for we are by nature children of wrath.’26 More’s strict adherence to the ninth of the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles, ‘Of Original or Birth-Sin’, and particularly her interpretation of the ‘infection of nature’,27 marks a point of divergence from Barbauld, who 21

22

23

24 25

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27

The problem of the democratisation of literacy in More’s engagement with popular print culture has been ably discussed by a number of scholars. See, for example, Kevin Gilmartin, ‘“Study to be Quiet”: Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain’, ELH 70 (Summer 2003), 493–540 and Mark Philp, ‘Vulgar Conservatism, 1792–3’, English Historical Review (February 1995), 42–69. Mendip Annals, 6. More echoes Trimmer: ‘It is … generally thought injurious to excite an emulation in Charity Boys to write a fine hand, and, unless they are intended for teachers in schools, this certainly had better be avoided’. Reflections upon the Education of Children in Charity Schools (London, 1792), 20–1. Letter to the bishop of Bath and Wells, 1801. The Letters of Hannah More, ed. Reginald Brimley Johnson (London: John Lane, 1925), 183. Ibid. Gary Kelly, ‘Revolution, Reaction, and the Expropriation of Popular Culture: Hannah More’s Cheap Repository’, Man and Nature 6 (1987), 152. Questions and Answers for the Mendip and Sunday Schools, 14th Edition (Bath, 1800), 9. Article IX states that sin ‘is the fault and corruption of the Nature of every man’, that man is ‘of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary

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McCarthy suggests had an ‘optimistic Miltonic view’ of the doctrine of original sin.28 In comparison to Barbauld’s Hymns, the language and syntax of Questions and Answers is complex, and abstract concepts are left unexplained and uncontextualised: ‘Why is he called our Redeemer and Saviour? Because he continually intercedes for us at the right hand of God.’29 The inculcation of Anglican doctrine, rather than ‘devotional taste’, appears paramount. However, as More’s inclusion of Watts on the curriculum suggests, she also paid shrewd attention to the senses in her management of the schools. More recognised that banishing sensory pleasure from the schools would be counter-productive; in a letter to Wilberforce she expresses her opinion that ‘whatever makes them hate Sunday is wrong.’30 Like Barbauld, More followed Locke in promoting the use of visual aids and ‘plain’ print, and insisted that teachers ‘make [learning] pleasant by cheerful manners, by striking out a hymn when labour had been long continued, and by avoiding corporeal punishment.’31 Although she does not seem to have used Barbauld’s Lessons and Hymns in her schools, opting for the less controversial, but still Dissenting Watts,32 More’s sensory approach to education in some ways resembles that of Barbauld, whom she knew and greatly respected.33 Indeed, as Emma Major has shown and this chapter continues to detail, the distinctions between More and Dissenters like Barbauld are often subtler than might be imagined. Barbauld certainly believed that they shared a great deal of common ground: as she wrote to More in 1799, ‘The field is large, and labourers of every complexion, and who handle their tools very differently, are all called upon to cooperate in the great work.’34 Nevertheless,

28 29 30

31 32

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34

to the spirit’, and that ‘therefore in every person born into this world, it deserveth God’s wrath and damnation’. For an online text see: https://www.churchofengland. org/prayer-worship/worship/book-of-common-prayer/articles-of-religion.aspx McCarthy, ALBVE, 152–3. Ibid., 7. More to Wilberforce [1792 or 1793]. William Wilberforce Letters, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. Cited in Stott, Hannah More, 124. Ibid. Major states that, after the French Revolution, Sarah Trimmer ‘increasingly treated any Dissenting writer, even honorary Anglicans like Watts, with greater caution’. See Madam Britannia, 222. More pays tribute to Barbauld in her poem ‘Sensibility’: ‘My verse thy talents to the world shall teach,/ And praise the genius it despairs to reach.’ Hannah More, Sacred Dramas: Chiefly Intended for Young Persons: The Subjects taken from the Bible. To which is added, Sensibility, a Poem (London: T. Cadell, 1782), 172. Major, Madam Britannia, ; William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs Hannah

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doctrinal differences seem to have prevented More from forming too close an association with her Dissenting counterpart.35 Along with a growing number of educationalists in the late eighteenth century, More recognised the limitations of the catechistic method, but rather than eschewing the form altogether, or significantly reshaping it as Barbauld had, she encouraged teachers themselves to give greater animation to the process of religious instruction. In one of the letters published in Mendip Annals, More defensively explains her system to an unknown correspondent: A few plain things … well digested, appear to me more useful than long, dry, tedious explanations, which, though they may be learned as a task, yet, if they are not made lively and interesting, the children will not delight in it. The grand subject of instruction with me is the Bible itself … To infuse a large quantity of Scripture into their minds, with plain, practical comments in the way of conversation, is the means which I have found, under Providence, instrumental in forming the principles and directing the hearts of youth.36

By using key terms such as ‘delight’ and ‘plain, practical… conversation’, More situates herself within the Lockean pedagogic tradition. At the same time, she casts herself as an instrument of God engaged in the ministering of spiritual food to the poor, prescribing ‘lively and interesting’ conversation with the objective of ‘infusing’ otherwise ‘dry’ and unpalatable Scriptural knowledge. Like Barbauld, More claims the authority of personal experience. It should be noted, however, that it was the teachers she employed who principally enacted, and thereby shaped practices in the schools – labouring-class women such as Sarah Baber at Cheddar. More’s emphasis on her first-hand experience obscures these women’s work even as she claims humble subservience to ‘Providence’ but, as I will suggest, the Cheap

35

36

More, 4th Edition (London: Seeley and Burnside, 1836), 2: 44–5. In a letter to More, Barbauld writes, ‘If any one were to ask me whether Miss More & Mrs. Barbauld correspond, I should say, we correspond I hope in sentiments, in inclinations, in affection, but with the pen I really cannot say we do.’ More’s annotation to the letter reads, ‘This clever woman was alas! a socinian!!’. Barbauld to More, 22 May [no year], MISC 4132: from Palgrave. New York, Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New York Public Library. My thanks to Sophie Coulombeau for sharing this source. Mendip Annals, 8.

Hannah More’s ‘vital Christianity’ 123

Repository Tracts indicate that Baber and other intermediaries provided a crucial socio-linguistic link with the Mendip poor. Material incentives played an important role in the running of the Mendip schools and clubs, and the Mores were repeatedly forced to resort to bribery to promote peaceful compliance among children and adult attendees: as More admits in a letter to Wilberforce, ‘bribes are necessary’.37 In growing recognition of the utility of physical pleasure in coaxing children towards religious instruction, they established an annual feast in the area. Martha More relates in a journal entry of 3 July 1791 that ‘the prospect of the feast … was a charm so captivating, that it procured many a task to be learned with pleasure, for the sake of obtaining one good dinner’.38 Her animated account of the inaugural ‘Mendip Feast’, which took place on on Callow Hill on 4 August 1791, gives an idea of the scale of the enterprise, and is evocative enough of its sensory aspects to invite lengthy inclusion: We left Cowslip Green in the morning, with some friends, mounted in a wagon, dressed out with greens, flowers, &c. Another followed with the servants, thirteen large pieces of beef, forty-five great plum-puddings, six hundred cakes, several loaves, and a great cask of cider. The children by order were concealed in a valley, whilst all the preparations were making, such as railing in a large piece of ground, and placing the dinner upon the grass to the best advantage. In the meantime we were arranging the children below. At the sound of the horn, the procession began. A boy of the best character carried a little flag; we walked next, then Ma’am Baber, followed by the Cheddar children, and so on according to seniority; all the schools, one after another, singing psalms. Upwards of four thousand people were assembled to see this interesting sight. After marching round our little railing, all were seated in pairs as they walked. The dinner was then carved, and each child had laid at his feet a large slice of beef, another of plum-pudding, and a cake. The instant they were served, all arose, and six clergymen, who were present, said grace. All were again seated, and were permitted to eat as much as their stomachs would hold, and talk as fast at their tongues would go. When the children were properly feasted, and the company had regaled themselves with their leavings, grace was said again, when some little examination into their acquirements took 37

38

More to Wilberforce [1892 or 1793], William Wilberforce Letters, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. Cited in Stott, Hannah More, 115. Mendip Annals, 36.

124 Material Enlightenment place. One girl could repeat twenty-four chapters, another fifteen; and many questions put to them, which were answered to the satisfaction of the company, and to the credit of the children. As the design of the day was to prove to them the possibility of being merry and wise, we all joined in singing ‘God save the King,’ and amusing them by a little mirthful chat. At four o’clock all the pleasure was over, and the children marched out of the circle in the order they entered, each school headed by their master and mistress, singing psalms and hallelujahs, till they were lost in the valley. Thus were five hundred and seventeen children, and three hundred others, made happy, and really feasted for the sum of £15.39

The passage conveys the delight Martha took in her charitable work; though structured by ceremony and ritual, the event seems to have been an effort to bring real enjoyment and happiness to the children. Calculated as a powerful inducement to Anglican worship, the feast was a means of establishing connections between active religion and sensory pleasure. In addition to providing a meal for the Sunday school children, it brought opportunities for social interaction between the Mores, their teachers, and ministers of the Church. As Stott states, the feasts ‘were attempts to help people identify with their parish churches, and to promote solidarity between classes and neighbourhoods, a particularly important consideration in the ideologically charged 1790s.’40 However, they also bring attention to the limits of community, to spatial partition and exclusion: as More told her friend Mrs Kennicott, the group was ‘enclosed in a fence’.41 The representation in The Mendip Annals of the local poor as a ‘savage’ people belies the fact that their connectedness was a significant concern for Hannah More. Indeed, that she used her annual speech to the Shipham club in 1794 to denounce women who gossiped together and enjoyed organised events such as ‘licentious dancing-matches’ and ‘lewd plays’ in neighbouring towns suggests that isolation was far from the reality of these people’s lives.42 The Mendip feasts were meant to bring such individuals together into Christian association, through which their activity could be monitored and contained, but even such closely regulated loyalist gatherings could provoke anxiety about a gathering of the poor. More herself feared that the event might become a site of unrest – the passage above suggests that it 39 40 41 42

Mendip Annals, 36–7. Stott, Hannah More, 114. Mendip Annals, 38 Ibid., 112–13.

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was a draw for adult parishioners who, according to the More sisters, came in droves to witness the spectacle. The numbers of spectators in their two accounts differ slightly and are probably exaggerated: Martha reports that there were ‘upwards of four thousand’ people watching, while Hannah reckons on five thousand. Neither sister gives indication of why these outsiders came, whether to watch the procession or the eating, but whatever their real number and intentions, it was enough to make More ‘very uneasy … lest it should disturb the decorum of the festivity’.43 The threat of the mob aside, it is clear that More considered the event in a political light: ‘I permitted a general chorus of “God save the King”, telling them I expected that loyalty should make a part of their religion.’44 In the cautious promotion of joint and embodied patriotic expression, the feast seems to partially resemble Hannah Arendt’s ‘public spaces’, or ‘specifically political forms of being together with others, acting in concert and speaking with each other’.45 Seyla Benhabib has explained that under Arendt’s ‘associational view’, a ‘public space … emerges whenever and wherever … “men act together in concert”’.46 However, political action rests on the human conditions of ‘freedom’ and ‘plurality’ – the capacity of each individual to do something new, that is, to revolutionise. The public space is political insofar as it allows for individual action and freedom of speech – both of which ‘God Save the King’, like the catechism, sought to structure and contain. As we shall see, the events attached to the schools also provided situations in which the private concerns of the poor might be closely monitored. More’s notion of domestic reform is thus markedly social in its expansionist aims; as Arendt states, ‘with the rise of society, that is, the rise of the “household” (oikia) or of economic activities in the public realm, housekeeping and all matters pertaining formally to the private sphere of the family have become a “collective” concern’.47 We should not infer from this a strict division between the political and social – on the contrary, Arendt says, ‘the two realms … constantly flow into each other like the waves in the never-resting stream of life itself ’. So while it is clear that More was aiming for socioreligious rather than ‘specifically political’ association, she also considered

43 44 45

46

47

Ibid., 38. Ibid. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 162. Seyla Benhabib, ‘The Embattled Public Sphere: Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and Beyond’. in Reasoning Practically, ed. Edna Ullman-Margalit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 166. Arendt, The Human Condition, 33.

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herself to be involved in directing the political spirit of the age, in regulating the associational activity of the poor so that the ‘vital’ spirit could be safely contained, structured and diffused along loyalist and Anglican lines. More’s work in the Mendips saw her turning away from Montagu’s elite sociability towards the ‘vital religion’ of the Clapham Sect. As Major has shown, the incorporation of reworked text from her 1770s Essays into her Strictures suggests ‘a corresponding shift away from the polite model of conversational femininity towards a paradigm that is defined more clearly by Christian duty, rather than by a polite Christian sociability’.48 My discussion here likewise suggests that More was working to increasingly remove herself from elite ‘worldliness’ through vital Christianity. Though Montagu, like More, ‘was ever conscious of the links between material and intellectual culture’,49 More’s activities in the Mendip villages mark a radical departure from the forms of exchange situated in and shaped by the luxurious and exotic spaces of Montagu House in Portland Square. Her Lockeanism participated in this conceptual and environmental shift and, while it also shaped her thought, charitable practice underwent an incremental, vitally Christian and associational transformation. In contrast to Montagu’s May Day feasts for London chimney sweeps on the lawn at Montagu House from 1782, which concluded with beer and dancing, More sought through her ministry to draw communities together into structured and superintended religious spaces. For More, as we shall see, the performative aspect of charity – typified by Montagu’s self-styling as ‘Lady Bountiful’ in the 1780s50 – contravened the Biblical instruction to give without ‘sound[ing] a trumpet’.51

Gift relations in the Mendip clubs Although she claims that the feasts encouraged pupils at the Mendip schools to learn ‘with pleasure’, it remained an irritation to More that they did so in anticipation of a reward, as opposed to taking active pleasure in the task itself. In Hester Wilmot, one of the Cheap Repository Tracts authored by More, Rebecca’s refusal to send her daughter to Sunday school unless Mrs Jones ‘will pay her for it’ is met with outrage:

48 49 50 51

Major, Madam Britannia, 274–5. Eger, Bluestockings: Women of Reason, 108. Major, Madam Britannia, 77. Matthew 6:1–8.

Hannah More’s ‘vital Christianity’ 127 ‘Pay her for it!’ said the lady, ‘will it not be reward enough that she will be taught to read the word of God without any expense to you? For though many gifts both of books and clothing will be given the children, yet you are not to consider these gifts so much in the light of payment as an expression of good-will in your benefactors.’

In resisting perceptions of bribery, More seeks to counter self-interest in the poor; she demands that in place of an attachment to charitable gifts as material objects, they develop affective attachments, or bonds of obligation, to God and to the rich. Notwithstanding the example More makes of Mrs Jones here, she and her sister did engage in bribery of adult women in the clubs, as well as effecting punishment by withholding rewards: one woman who ‘refused the benefit of prayer … was denied the pleasure of beef’.52 The association of ‘prayer’ with ‘pleasure’ suggests that More was replicating the union of Lockean pedagogy and scripture as she extended her ministry from the schools to the clubs. However, the women in the clubs were far from passive, repeatedly forcing their benefactors to fall back on bribery of one form or another. Such concessions to ‘worldliness’ seem inconsistent with More’s beliefs, but might also, I think, have contributed to her conceptualisation of religion itself as a material force. Though we may have some reservations as to the veracity of Martha More’s report of an ‘old women’ who ‘is now beginning to taste the pleasures in the promises of the gospel’,53 the repeated emphasis on embodiment in the Mendip Annals underlines how closely the Mores’ understanding of the vital spirit approached a devotional taste, even though bodily desire could be inimical to Christian reform. In a letter to Wilberforce that gives further indication of the barriers facing the sisters’ efforts, More describes the negotiations that enabled the successful institution of women’s clubs at Rowberrow and Shipham, the intention for which was to provide financial assistance during periods of sickness and post-natal rest. More recounts, ‘It was no small trouble to accomplish this; for, though the subscription was only three halfpence aweek, it was more than they could always raise.’54 She also faced objections from the women that the money would be better spent on ‘tidy’ funerals, which she dismisses as an ‘absurdity’, reflecting a common concern among the middle classes about overly elaborate ‘pauper funerals’.55 Finally, it was 52 53 54 55

Martha More, Mendip Annals, 55. Ibid., 57. Martha More, Mendip Annals, 66. See Thomas Laqueur, ‘Bodies, Death, and Pauper Funerals’, Representations I (1983), 109–31.

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agreed that ‘a separate sixpence each at the time of a death would amply assist the poor family’. Monetary bargaining aside, however, More emerges unbeaten in her report: One article mentioned in the rules gave universal satisfaction – namely, that on the day any young woman married, who had been bred in the school, and was of a good character, if she produced a paper to this effect, signed by a minister of the parish, she should have for her marriage portion, a pair of white worsted stockings of our own knitting, five shillings, and a Bible. To this, I must confess, there was not the shadow of an objection, but a universal smile graced their ferocious countenances.56

Seeking to police female sexuality through bribery in what Stott calls ‘an unashamed piece of social engineering’,57 the sisters fostered close scrutiny of the clubwomen’s behaviour, demanding multiple forms of evidence to ensure that only the demonstrably chaste and pious were rewarded. Ever careful to avoid appearing indulgent, More assured the High Church layman John Bowler (brother of Henrietta Maria and Thomas Bowdler, of the expurgated Family Shakespeare [1818]) that the ‘trifling encouragement has had a good effect’58 on the ‘ferocious’ women. Trifling in monetary terms they may have been, yet the gifts were loaded with social and religious meaning; the act of giving a hand-knitted product and a ‘handsome bible’59 alongside currency signifies a carefully negotiated and multi-faceted gift exchange. The materiality of these gifted objects was central to their affective functions in establishing a personal, though unequal and relatively distant gift relationship, under which the recipient was obliged to reciprocate by upholding More’s social and religious values. By choosing to give these three objects, More seeks to establish financial, affective and religious ties between herself and recipients. She does so through practices of personal gift relations as distinct from commodity relations. James Carrier explains the distinction between these two categories: In gift transactions, the object is linked to the giver, the recipient and the relationship that binds them. In commodity transactions, the object is not linked in any significant, personal way to the transactors: it 56 57 58 59

Ibid. Stott, Hannah More, 120. More to Bowdler, in Mendip Annals, 7. Ibid.

Hannah More’s ‘vital Christianity’ 129 is an alienable and impersonal property. The third variable is the degree to which transactors are linked and obligated to each other. In gift relations the parties are personally linked and bound to each other.60

There is a further variable at play that Carrier does not mention here: the conditions of an object’s production are also crucial to the extent to which it might be considered personal (like a gift) or alienable (like a commodity). Writing on the gift relations of needlework in Elizabethan England, Lisa Klein has commented on the heightened affectivity of handicraft productions, pointing out that that ‘a personal gift such as an embroidered dress or book is particularly appropriate for fostering the mutual obligation that was the aim of the gift exchange’. Klein’s argument that ‘A hand-wrought gift has a particular intimacy, authority, and efficacy that other gifts, like money or plate, lack’61 could, I think, have cross-cultural and cross-period significance, as Mauss implies.62 However, the degree of closeness suggested by the hand-made gift has more culturally specific valence here; in a period of innovation in the textile industry, the knitted stockings were a distinctly domestic product, most likely of higher quality than those which could have been purchased cheaply.63 Moreover, when it comes to the class politics of charitable exchange in the 1790s, such exchange was particularly charged; at this time, as Zionkowski and Klekar state, gifts ‘served as a touch point in the transformation from the old society to the new’.64 More’s exchange of a product of personal domestic labour seems to disrupt the hierarchy of the charitable economy by rendering the relationship more immediately tangible and familiar; the stockings, like Barbauld’s object poems, were 60

61

62

63

64

James G. Carrier, Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism since 1700 (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 11. Lisa M. Klein, ‘Your Humble Handmaid: Elizabethan Gifts of Needlework’, Renaissance Quarterly 50, no. 2 (June 1997), 471. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Cohen and West, 1966), 2. Worsted was a smooth, durable yarn made from combed long-fibre wool. It was better suited to machine spinning than felt-like yarns, and was factory produced in Lancashire from 1787, and in the West Riding from the early 1790s. However, machine-spun worsted did not gain popularity among weavers until 1800. See D. T. Jenkins, ‘Early Factory Development in the West Riding of Yorkshire, 1770–1800’, in Textile History and Economic History: Essays in Honour of Miss Julia de Lacy Mann, ed. N. B. Harte and Kenneth G. Ponting (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), 264. Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar, introduction to The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

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meant to act as affective objects. Indeed, that More gave multiple objects to the women underlines how carefully calculated her charitable economy really was; somewhat analogous to the act of knitting, More ties threads of various kinds – affection, mutual obligation and commerce – to strengthen bonds between different orders of society. From a Maussian perspective, gifts do not merely betoken relationships, they define them; More, then, does not merely use gifts to secure social attachments, the objects are in a certain sense agents – they are in themselves the ties that bind. As Gregory elucidates, ‘commodity exchange establishes a relationship between the objects exchanged, whereas gift exchange establishes a relationship between the subjects’.65 That More gave objects knitted by her own hand suggests her identification with the poor in a very real sense; in carrying out such domestic labour, More was assuming a common physical language. A modest gift in both senses, the white worsted stockings would have been practically useful – indeed, they were literally grounded in their use. If as Eve Kowaleski Wallace has argued,66 they were an attempt at rendering ‘savage’ bodies respectable for contact with middle-class women, they also functioned as a habitual and affective reminder to the poor of their obligations to their benefactors, and, moreover, as exemplary acts of giving for those bound by duty to take an active interest in their wellbeing. My argument here agrees with Jennie Batchelor’s point that such exchange ‘naturalized subordination’67 even as it sought to ameliorate it, and suggests that material and sensory cultures were central to this process. In his discussion of More’s tract Tom White, Kevin Gilmartin describes the ‘contractual foundations of a political economy of charitable relief ’,68 and considers these relations in terms of the hierarchical obligational bond between the ‘object’ of charity and a middle-class benefactor. I think it was certainly the case, as Gilmartin suggests, that charitable giving ‘worked to establish material incentives … which, if accepted, implied a form of consent to the revised social hierarchy’. I would add, however, that in her material as well as her textual condescensions, More constructed affective ties with the poor in order simultaneously to resist notions of paternalism and advance her ministry. More’s contractualism, under this view, is bound up with her associationism; though her politics of the ‘natural order’ are, 65 66

67 68

C. A Gregory, Gifts and Commodities (London: Academic Press, 1982), 19. Eve Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 68. Batchelor, Women’s Work, 47. Kevin Gilmartin, ‘“Study to be Quiet”: Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain’, ELH 70 (Summer 2003), 497.

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unlike Barbauld’s, drawn from Robert Filmer’s royalist contractualism rather than Locke’s liberal notion of ‘consent’, her charitable economy has a Lockean sensory inflection. As I have discussed, she incorporated into her relations with the poor an affective exchange that was more characteristic of female friendship than charity. In doing so, she aimed to bind social classes together into religious union, adopting material and sociable practices drawn from her experience in different milieu, and applying Enlightenment rationalism to maximise their efficiency. More’s gift relations functioned towards the ‘framework of an aggressive national movement to reform the social order’ she was working within; they were calculated to forward her evangelical programme through associational and affective practices of exchange, rather than through commercial transactions alone. Dorice Williams Elliott has therefore argued that ‘Because she rejected the language of the market-place, More seemed to react against the capitalist economy that was coming to dominate England; her new-styled paternalism, however, used philanthropy’s gift economy to replicate capitalism – without seeming to.’69 While I agree that More’s gift economy ran parallel to the capitalist system, her attitude towards ‘worldliness’ suggests that her (conscious) aims were quite distinct from it. At the end of the century, More fiercely pitted vital materiality against worldly sensibility in her Strictures. ‘A worldly temper’, she declaims, is the vital spirit, the essential soul, the living principle of evil. It is not so much an act, as a state of being; not so much an occasional complaint, as a tainted constitution of mind … it is at work within, stirring up the heart to disaffection against holiness, and infusing a kind of moral disability to whatever is intrinsically good. It infects and depraves all the powers and faculties of the soul; for it operates on … the affections, by disordering and sensualizing them; so that one may almost say to those who are under the supreme dominion of this spirit, what was said to the hosts of Joshua, ‘Ye cannot serve the Lord.’70

Assuming an authoritative medical and ecclesiastical voice, More pronounces condemnation on worldliness. Her language of medicine takes a markedly pathological turn here: embodied in its internal ‘infusion’, worldliness is a pervasive corruption of the ‘vital spirit’ – it is the ‘living principle’ of evil. Venomously critical of the ‘sensualisation’ of the affections by the

69 70

Williams Elliott, ‘“The Care of the Poor Is Her Profession”’, 180. More, Strictures, 2: 210.

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elite, this attack on the culture of sensibility hinges on her notion of the spirit as a physical force. The stockings are the antithesis of this misdirection of vital energy; working in ill health herself, More insisted to the elite and poor alike that self-denial was crucial to breaking the link between worldliness and the sensible spirit. She was equally zealous in her attempts to recruit the middle and upper classes to the cause; as her charitable work expanded, More targeted these audiences by theorising her practices in the fashionable language of sentimental psychology.

The charitable œconomy In her conduct writing and elsewhere, More demanded that middle- and upper-class women direct their time and resources towards the poor in order to bring ‘vital religion’ into embodiment. In doing so, she maintained class and gender distinctions; as Wilberforce put it, ‘it has graciously pleased the Supreme Being so to arrange the constitution of things, as to render the prevalence of true religion and of pure morality conducive to the well-being of states, and the preservation of civil order’.71 However, for More and Wilberforce, the security of the social order was less an end in itself as it was a means of persuading the rich into compliance with evangelical reform. Like More, Sarah Trimmer appealed to practice rather than the ‘visionary impractical scheme’.72 Charity was thus rendered an associational science that could provide a genteel occupation for married, and especially, unmarried ladies. In her discussion of the cultural implications of domestic and manual labour in women’s writing in late eighteenth-century Britain, Batchelor shows how anxieties over maintaining class distinction emerged over a period of increasing interaction between classes.73 Works such as Trimmer’s Œconomy of Charity (1787) and Family Magazine (January 1788–June 1789) thus aimed to provide women with practical advice on charitable visitation and school management. Trimmer’s naming of her model ‘the personal distribution of voluntary benefactions’ is, I think, revealingly precise, describing an active role for women outside of the home, as well as reflecting a consciousness that charitable gifts were

71

72 73

William Wilberforce, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christians (London: T. Cadell, 1797), 422. Trimmer, The Œconomy of Charity, 49. Batchelor, Women’s Work, 15.

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liable to misdirection under earlier indirect methods of philanthropy.74 As Trimmer writes of impersonal gifts in her Œconomy, ‘they are of the utmost benefit to many deserving objects; but are often obtained by persons who do not need them’.75 Trimmer’s distinction between ‘deserving objects’ and undeserving ‘persons’ suggests that while such modes of giving provided assistance to the needy, they were also insufficient as a means of establishing superintendence over the poor. ‘Personal distribution’, then, worked to ensure that recipients of charity were its proper ‘objects’. More similarly considered it the duty of the rich and middle class to particularise their charitable acts. Rather than giving in only a generalised manner (through subscription, for instance), they should personally familiarise themselves with the conditions of the local poor, in order to educate and superintend. Giving in person had the additional benefit of effecting a reformation of the benefactor: had the frivolous daughters of Mrs Ranby in More’s Cœlebs in Search of a Wife visited the poor, for example, their ‘flexible young hearts would have been wrought upon by the actual sight of miseries, the impression of which was feeble when it reached their ears at a distance, surrounded as they were with all the softnesses and accommodations of luxurious life’.76 Again, self-denial is crucial to charitable morality for More, and as we shall see it played an important part in her fashioning of a viable female profession in religious work. In her Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World, a text I return to later, More writes that the promiscuous myriads which compose the society, falsely so called, of the gay world … by the mere force of incessant and indiscriminate association, weaken, and in time wear out, the best feelings and affections of the human heart. And the mere spirit of dissipation, thus contracted from invariable habit, even detached from all its concomitant evils, is in itself as hostile to a religious spirit as more positive and actual offences.77

More voices the belief that the sensory over-indulgence of the rich eventually dulls religious sensibility. Figuring the nerves as conduits to ‘spirit’, 74 75 76

77

Ibid., 1–2. Ibid., 106. Hannah More, Cœlebs in Search of a Wife: Comprehending Observations on Domestic Habits and Manners, Religion and Morals, ed. Patricia Demers (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2007), 72. Hannah More, An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World: By One of the Laity (London, 1791), 206–7.

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she suggests that the misdirection of ‘feeling’, as opposed to feeling itself, threatens the similarly embodied ‘religious spirit’. Charity, for More, was the ideal means for women to extend this spirit through interaction with the material world. By channelling feeling into acts of charity, then, a proper association would be established between benevolence and pleasure, but this too was liable to excess. More is evidently anxious about the sensory impact of charitable work on women of sensibility: An ill-directed sensibility leads a woman to be injudicious and eccentric in her charities also; she will be in danger of proportioning her bounty to the immediate effect which the distressed object produces on her senses: and she will be more liberal to a small distress which presents itself to her own eyes, than to the more pressing wants and better claims of those miseries of which she only hears the relation.78

While echoing Trimmer in recommending visits to the poor as a means of reforming the rich, More attempts to rein in sensibility by attaching it to a strict framework of religious conduct and conservative rectitude. As objects of sense, contact with individuals in need of charity threatened to exacerbate women’s nervous impulses; rather than acting on religious principle, they would gratify themselves with ‘immediate’ and minor acts of charity. In this way, even personal charity could approach the sensual indulgence and frivolity of the upper classes, and such ‘false profession’ ran directly counter to More’s belief that ‘a vital faith manifests itself in vital acts’.79 As women of the middle classes engaged more immediately in charitable activity, representations of charitable visitation came to be widely expressed in the fashionable language of sensibility.80 Charity takes a particularly sensory immediacy when Trimmer connects church teaching on the ‘duty of clothing the naked’ with women’s personal benefactions. ‘Surely’, she writes, ‘the precepts that recommend this branch of charity will strike the mind with double force when the immediate objects of it stand before them in tattered garments, that make silent but powerful claims on 78 79 80

Ibid., 104–5. Hannah More, Christian Morals (London: T. Cadell, 1813), 1: 92. Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall is a good example of this, as Jennie Batchelor has ably discussed. See her ‘Fictions of the Gift in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall’ in The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 159–76.

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their humanity.’81 However, sensory engagement with objects of charity could also closely resemble indulgence; enabled by women’s supposedly inherent nervous ‘delicacy’, the aestheticisation of the sensory economy between individuals threatened to promote a commoditised philanthropy that More perceived as bordering on heretical, and even hysterical. This was especially the case when it came to extreme sensibility to the suffering of the sick, as typified by Hays’ Emma Courtney and her later novel, The Victim of Prejudice (1799): ‘If the object of its regard happen to be sick, what inquiries! what prescriptions! … What an unaffected tenderness for the perishing body! Yet is this sensibility equally alive to the immortal interests of the sufferer?’82 For More, such conspicuous displays of benevolence were brought on by the disassociation of philanthropy from Christian practice, and were incompatible with her notion of charity as a disinterested act of religious duty. In Strictures, she criticises representations of the charitable practices of the rich in British novels, complaining that ‘Creditors are defrauded, while the money due to them is lavished in dazzling acts of charity to some object that affects the senses.’83 She therefore seeks culturally and practically to divorce philanthropy from worldly self-interest by framing it as a religious embodiment. In Strictures, More outlines the educational practices developed in the Mendip schools. She emphasises to mothers the ‘importance of early communicating religious knowledge, and of infusing an early taste for Scriptural phraseology’, insisting that religious education should be guided by the Bible and guide young minds towards it.84 However, and as we have seen, More also resembles Barbauld in her pragmatically Lockean approach: ‘Confine not your instructions to mere verbal rituals and dry systems; but instruct them in a way which shall interest their feelings; by lively images, and by a warm practical application of what they read to their own hearts and circumstances’. She observes that ‘religious learning is too often rather considered as an act of the memory than of the heart and feelings; and that children are turned over to the dry work of getting by rote as a task that which they should get from example and animated conversation’. She enjoins women to instead ‘Teach as HE taught, by seizing on surrounding objects, passing events, local circumstances… Call in all creation, animate

81 82 83 84

Œconomy of Charity, 48. Ibid., 112–13. More, Strictures, 1: 35. Ibid., 1: 254.

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and inanimate, to your aid.’85 This can also be taken as a formulation of the design and aims of her Cheap Repository Tracts.

The Cheap Repository for Moral and Religious Tracts Anne Stott has remarked on the ‘physical context’ of Village Politics, noting that it is ‘both allegorical and rooted in an idealized contemporary reality’,86 and Kevin Gilmartin has identified the ‘precisely situated sense of rural virtue’ in More’s later tract History of Tom White the Postilion (1795).87 The inclusion of attractive woodcut prints in the Tracts also signals their educational inheritance: like Barbauld’s Lessons and Hymns, their physical design was shaped by Locke’s notion of the pedagogic value of ‘sensible images’, as entertainment and aids to literacy. Though little is known about how the Tracts may, or indeed may not, have been read by the poor, the illustrations on their covers and those within were clearly meant to make the pamphlets as desirable and accessible as possible. The Tracts were priced to encourage bulk sales for dissemination among the poor, but their re-publication in more expensive forms from 1796 might suggest that they were more popular among the middle classes.88 By packaging Tracts for the wealthier consumer, More brought her lessons in reformism closer to the eye of the elite, and their sales in turn helped subsidise the ongoing production of cheaper tracts for the poor. How they were received by the increasingly literate poor is hard to ascertain, but there seems to have been demand for these: their first publisher, John Marshall, continued to produce the Tracts in their original form even after More had moved her business elsewhere. Again, however, it may have been the bulk sale of the Tracts to the reformminded middle class that proved most profitable. More’s writing for the poor invites a final comparison with Barbauld’s children’s literature. In Village Politics, More seeks to reclaim the educational application of Lockean semantics; as Stott points out, ‘Running through Village Politics is a semantic debate, reflecting the loyalist attempt to wrest control of the political language from the revolutionaries and restore the older, less ideologically charged uses.’89 More engages in this battle

85 86 87 88 89

Ibid., 1: 229–30. Stott, Hannah More, 140. Kevin Gilmartin, ‘“Study to be Quiet”’, 493. Stott, Hannah More, 176. Ibid., 140.

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through her dialogue between Jack Anvil and Tom Hod, which reaches stichomythic climax in a series of questions and answers: Tom. What then dost thou take French Liberty to be? Jack. To murder more men in one night than ever their poor king did in this whole life. Tom. And what does thou take a Democrat to be? Jack. One who likes to be governed by a thousand tyrants, and yet can’t bear a king. Tom. What is Equality? Jack. For every man to pull down every one that is above him, till they’re all as low as the lowest.

In her reverse catechism – the learner asks the questions here – More adopts an associationist pedagogic technique to affix ideas of death and disorder to seditious language. Her didactic assimilation of Locke’s ‘abuse of words’ puts Village Politics in ideological opposition to Barbauld, as well as Paine, but there is a sense of dialectic too, in their shared, social view of semantics. Where Evenings at Home used informal conversation to ‘teach [children] to think’ beyond established meaning, Village Politics turned intellectually regressive pedagogy to the loyalist re-education of workingclass adults. More’s tracts foreground labouring activity, often representing good and bad examples of women’s domestic practices and management in close detail. While no doubt accompanied with a real concern for the material and spiritual wellbeing of the poor, More contrived characters such as Rebecca and her daughter Hester in Hester Wilmot to both censure and placate working-class women, and she went on to target middle- and upper-class women in a similar way in Cœlebs: as her narrator puts it, ‘my notion of “household good” … does not include one idea of drudgery or servility, but … involves a large and comprehensive scheme of excellence’.90 Writing against the indolence and indifference of the affluent classes, she encourages her readers to consider domestic practices as exalted patriotic and religious acts. In The Sunday School and Hester Wilmot, More represents the administrative work of founding a school. Drawing on her experience in the Mendips, the former tract models for reform-minded conservatives an effective response to middle-class fears over educating the poor. In dialogue with a rich local farmer, Mrs Jones – a partial self-portrait – acknowledges the 90

More, Cœlebs, 41.

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risk of literacy ‘doing more harm than good’, but insists that problem only materialises ‘if you teach them to read, and then turn them adrift to find out books for themselves’.91 While limiting the curriculum in the Mendip schools was one means of assuaging anxieties over widening literacy, More saw the superintendence of conduct outside of the schools as incumbent on the members of the wider community, in particular the local clergy, to the aggravation, no doubt, of ecclesiastics like Thomas Bere. In The Sunday School, for example, a girl who is about to ‘read, sing, and to learn by heart’ a book of ‘ribaldry’ is quizzed by Mr Simpson the clergyman on whether the soul or body is more valuable. He manages to persuade her that the book is ‘poison’,92 again drawing a link between religious and medical professions, with the inference, of course, that More’s tract might be ministered by its middle- and upper-class subscribers as an antidote. In tacit recognition of the democratisation of reading the schools would help to effect, More sought to promote greater vigilance over the bodies and minds of lowerclass parishioners. The experience of running the schools and clubs, and the evangelicalism of the social network that supported them, were fundamental to the vision of reform presented in the Cheap Repository Tracts. As Henry Thornton, another leader of the Clapham Sect, explains, they were intended as ‘an antidote to the poison continually flowing thro’ the channel of vulgar and licentious publications’.93 Published in subsidised cheap pamphlets and more expensive forms, More’s Cheap Repository Tracts were aimed, as Williams Elliott states, at ‘both the poor to whom they were explicitly addressed, and those who in a sense read over their shoulders’,94 in this sense mirroring Barbauld’s Lessons for Children, which, as I discussed in Chapter 2, inscribed a familiar idiom while providing teaching strategies for mothers. More aimed to make an analogous innovation in the language of the working poor. Nearly five years before the publication of Paine’s Rights of Man in 1791, William Weller Pepys wrote to More requesting, on behalf of Montagu and himself, that she write ‘a dialogue between two persons of the lowest order’ to illustrate the ‘many absurdities which would follow from the cry of equality being reduced to practice’.95 Conceptualising the tract as an antidote to socio-economic 91 92 93

94 95

Hannah More, The Sunday School (London, 1796), 10. Ibid., 14. Henry Thornton, A Plan for Establishing by Subscription a Repository of Cheap Publications, on Religious and Moral Subjects (London, 1795), 174. Williams Elliott, ‘The Care of the Poor Is Her Profession’, 184. Letter from William Weller Pepys to Hannah More, 15 August 1786, in A Later Pepys: The Correspondence of Sir William Weller Pepys, Bart., Master in Chancery 1758–1825,

Hannah More’s ‘vital Christianity’ 139

discontent, Pepys figures More as apothecary to the body politic, which he believes is ‘in great peril’. Montagu and Pepys recognised that More’s work in the Mendip schools, as well as her literary talent, positioned her ideally to address the lower classes in print; ‘Who knew the common people’ writes Stott, ‘the patterns of their lives, their hopes and fears, their colloquialisms, the rhythms of their speech – better than she?’96 However, as Mark Philp demonstrates, such engagement in the print battle with radicals comprised a concession on the part of conservative writers: by writing her tracts, [More] was looking, like many others, for a bridge between respectable and vulgar culture, through which the latter might be transformed. But in the very willingness to take on the challenge of a printed battle with the reformers, these writers also accepted that the ideas of the latter (in however mangled a shape) had to be addressed. In doing so, they were playing their part in the formation of a popular political culture with a national political agenda.97

According to Philp’s account, Village Politics helped enable public discourse between politically minded labouring men. More’s awareness of this perhaps accounts for the delay between the tract’s conception and its eventual publication, which was in direct response to the more pressing threat of Painite pamphlets. Philp identifies Village Politics as unique among the tracts published by the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, being ‘the only one to set the dialogue between two members of the labouring classes’.98 Addressing Olivia Smith’s point that conservative tracts sought to limit the poor’s intellectual

96 97

98

ed. Alice C. C. Gaussen (London: John Lane, 1904), 2: 283. Pepys was brother of the King’s physician, and admiring correspondent of Mary Hartley, David Hartley’s daughter, who knew More and was friends with other women with connections to the Bluestocking circle, in particular Frances Burney and Ann Ord. A survey of her letters to Pepys reveals a mixture of spiritual, medical and educational advice with conceptual similarities to her father’s Observations on Man, and Hartleyan language also surfaces in Pepys’ correspondence with More. See, for example, his letter of 15 August 1786 in A Later Pepys, 264–5. Stott, Hannah More, 139. Mark Philp, ‘Vulgar Conservatism, 1792–3’, English Historical Review (February 1995), 68. Ibid., 62. Philp argues that ‘writers identifying with loyalist … became committed to a project of popular instruction profoundly at odds with their original intent and their professed commitment to the status quo. The result was that loyalism found itself attempting to create a “vulgar” conservatism.’

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engagement with politics,99 he argues that though this was certainly the case, they ‘must also be read as instructive instances of the difficulties of characterising the voice of the labouring man, and the costs of doing so effectively’.100 While their ‘anti-intellectual’ language circumscribed political identity, they begrudgingly acknowledged the agency of the poor, representing (though always eventually overcoming) individual resistance to evangelical reform, as in Mrs Jones’ struggle with Rebecca in Hester Wilmot. It is also plausible, I think, that the intermediaries most valued by More contributed to the Tracts. Mrs Crew, Mrs Jones’ appointed teacher in Hester Wilmot, bears clear parallels with Sarah Baber, adopting her method of having the children repeat the meaning of Scriptural passages back to her ‘in their own words’.101 More perhaps paraphrases Baber in Mrs Crew’s advice that ‘Those who teach the poor must indeed give line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little, as they receive it.’ Baber’s use of a ‘plain, practical’ language familiar to local working-class children no doubt contributed to the educational model More promoted through Tracts, but with an eye to her middle-class readers, she also represents Mrs Crew as an authority on Lockean thought, an educationalist who, like Barbauld, knows that rote learning ‘remained in the memory without having made any impression on the mind’.102 More’s attempts to replicate the ‘vulgar tongue’ were no doubt also shaped by pedagogic advice from experienced teachers like Baber, but it also marginalises their voices: Mrs Crew is celebrated as a ‘humble teacher’.103 More figures such intermediaries as obscure, and yet active agents of her evangelical reform. Indeed, Baber’s influence is most clearly vocalised in the reflections on her death in Mendip Annals. Though More (perhaps with the rebellious Ann Yearsley in mind) controls her exemplary reputation, the remarkable response of the Cheddar villagers after Baber’s death indicates how central to the community she had been. Martha More reports to her sister that hundreds attended the funeral, all with ‘some token of mourning in their dress … not one single voice or step was heard; – their silence was dreadful … their poor little ragged pocket-handkerchiefs, not half sufficient to dry their tears’.104 While Baber’s name does not appear

99 100 101

102 103 104

Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). Mark Philp, ‘Vulgar Conservatism, 1792–3’, 62. Hannah More, Cheap Repository: The History of Hester Wilmot: or, the Second Part of The Sunday School (London, 1796). Ibid. Ibid., 9. My emphasis. Martha More to Hannah More, 18 August 1795, in Roberts, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs Hannah More, 1: 562–7.

Hannah More’s ‘vital Christianity’ 141

in More’s tracts, this may have been intended to afforded protection for the teacher; More herself navigated religious profession by signing her tracts ‘Z’, and initially publishing Cœlebs and other works anonymously.105 More’s committed engagement with the quotidian and domestic puts her in conversation with Enlightenment economic discourse, particularly Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). Although Smith put the home at the centre of his theory, Sutherland argues that he ‘refuses or conceals the female contribution to the economy’.106 Making a similar point, Keane notes that Smith’s ‘economic vision … paid scant attention to the actual running of households’, and ‘was, in fact, largely responsible for severing the primary semantic link between the term “oeconomy” and the running of households’. Conversely, she argues, More ‘placed women at the centre of economic regulation, as the “invisible hand” of domestic and national organization’.107 Though their work was – and indeed often remains – invisible in the sense of unacknowledged, under More’s evangelical vision women’s labour acts principally as a material expression of providence, under which class and gender distinctions remain in place. Since this economy falls within her evangelical vision, it might usefully be understood, along with Scott’s Millenium Hall, as a ‘feminized, Christian economy’,108 or, if we accept Keane’s account of its etymology, a Christian œconomy. This profession is driven by and in turn informs a notion of ‘vital religion’ that was at once stringently conservative and yet drew purposefully on the materialist and vitalist theories of radical thinkers. This, as I have indicated, was not without its problems, and I have discussed some of the challenges facing More in her applications of Lockeanism through her ministry to the Mendip poor, particularly in resisting ideas of bribery. I have suggested that the charitable economy she and her sister established in the Mendips led More to increasingly figure herself as Christian apothecary to the nation, and 105

106

107

108

Thoughts, An Estimate, and Village Politics were also first published without More’s name. For a discussion of publishing practices and questions of professionalism amongst religious women writers see Major, Madam Britannia, in particular Chapter 8. Kathryn Sutherland, ‘Adam Smith’s Master Narrative’, in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Stephen Copley and Kathryn Sutherland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 97–121; 117. Angela Keane, ‘The Anxiety of (Feminine) Influence: Hannah More and Counterrevolution’, in Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution, ed. Adriana Craciun and Kari E. Lokke (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 120. Gary Kelly, introduction to Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1995), 34.

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that she conceived of this role as a physical embodiment of the providential spirit – she may have thought of ‘inanimate objects’ such as the Tracts as extensions of this. The concluding parts of this chapter show how she became increasingly embattled in her attempts to defend Anglican philosophy from what she saw as troublingly materialist appropriations of its revolutionary potential.

Occluded intertexts: the New Philosophy Even late in her life, More engaged closely with developments in psychological theory. In 1819, at the end of the famous ‘vitalist controversy’ between John Abernethy and William Lawrence, the 74-year-old More wrote in her Moral Sketches that In the more advanced Christian, religion may seem to be less prominent in parts of the character, because it is infused into the whole. Like the lifeblood, its vital power pervades the entire system: not an action of the life that is not governed by it; not a quality of the mind which does not partake of its spirit. It is diffused through the whole conduct, and sheds its benign influence, not only on the things done, but on the temper of the doer in performing them. The affections now have other objects, the time other duties, the thoughts other employments. There will be more exertion, but with less display; less show, because the principle is become more interior; it will be less obtrusive, because it is more rooted and grounded. There will be more humility, because the heart will have found out its own corruptions.109

More describes the exact antithesis of the ‘living principle of evil’ she had railed against in Strictures.110 The self-regulation she recommends to her readers was crucial to the stability of her own evangelicalism: the ‘lifeblood’ of her belief demanded discipline, lest in vocal profession it spilled over into enthusiasm or pride, and her efforts to rein in the passions required that she herself had to ‘Carefully distinguish between the feverish heat of animal fervour, and the vital warmth of Christian feeling’.111 Under More’s associationist model, the ‘infused’ spirit is directed through an embodied 109

110 111

Hannah More, Moral Sketches of the Prevailing Opinions and Manners, Foreign and Domestic, 2nd Edition (London: T. Cadell, 1819), 128–9. More, Strictures, 2: 210. Ibid., 120.

Hannah More’s ‘vital Christianity’ 143

framework ossified by practice and habit, something that demanded close scrutiny of one’s own ‘energies’ and a determination to work towards their correction. Associationism also allowed More to conceptualise the extension of religion’s ‘vital power’ through her work in the Mendips and beyond, but in the popularisation of her Lockean Christianity to the middle and upper classes, she had to ensure that the Enlightenment philosophy on which she drew remained clear of any atheistic European taint. More’s use of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding in her best-known piece of conduct literature is informed and yet restrained. In comparison to Wollstonecraft, who had no hesitation in advising parents to ‘follow Mr. Locke’s system’,112 and Hays, who asserted that ‘The natural fitness or unfitness [of women] for the study of any particular science is an occult phrase that conveys no distinct apprehension, except to those who contend for the obsolete notion of innate ideas’,113 More is somewhat cautious in her deployment of Lockeanism. Although she applies associationist logic throughout Strictures, and acknowledges Locke’s ‘broad sanction’ as ‘the Great author’,114 she provides her readers with few explicit points of reference to his work. Indeed, More quotes Locke directly (though at length) only once in Strictures, choosing a passage from his discussion of the ‘abuse of words’ to open her chapter ‘On the Use of Definitions’. Here she laments the misuse of language in fashionable circles, a particular vexation being that ‘Some ludicrous association is infallibly combined with every idea of religion.’115 More uses Locke, then, to recalibrate habitual associations she saw as deleterious to the national character. Far from betraying uncertainty about Locke’s theory, More’s intertextual restraint was an astutely strategic element of her reformist project. More begins her introduction to Strictures with a familiar affirmation of the primacy of education in the formation of character: ‘It is a singular injustice which is often exercised towards women, first to give them a most defective Education, and then to expect from them the most undeviating purity of conduct; – to train them in such a manner as shall lay them open to the most dangerous faults, and then to censure them for not proving faultless.’116 Of course, Wollstonecraft and Hays had made similar points earlier in the decade; the latter, as we have seen, highlighted the 112

113 114 115 116

Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life (London: J. Johnson, 1787), 11. ‘Reply to J. T. on Helvetius’, Monthly Magazine (June 1796). More, Strictures, 1: 197. Ibid., 15. More, Strictures, 1: ix.

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hypocrisy of attitudes towards women’s ‘sexual character’. As contemporary and more recent commentators have remarked, there are significant parallels between discussions of female improvement in More’s Strictures and Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.117 There is also a common investment in associationist psychology; More, Wollstonecraft and Hays, like most other thinkers at the time, base their educational arguments on the premise that minds are shaped by habit and circumstance; indeed, this belief provided the impetus for educational publications across the political spectrum. However, while they share a fundamental concern with the connection between female education and identity, their divergent political and religious perspectives are manifested in their paratextual decisions. Whereas Hays repeatedly directs her readers to Godwin and Helvétius through quotations and footnotes, More suffuses Strictures with scriptural quotations, encouraging cross-referencing to the Bible, while seeking to moderate female reading by careful reference to select literary and philosophical works they might have found on surrounding library shelves. References to the bible comprise more than half of More’s direct intertextual footnotes in Strictures. The remainder include literary, classical and theological sources, as well as the philosophy of Locke, Robert Boyle and Edmund Burke. She makes oblique reference to a number of radical figures, but does not provide the titles of their work. For example, Rousseau’s Émile is alluded to as ‘An ingenious (and in many respects useful) French Treatise on Education’.118 Though most of her readers would have recognised the work in question, More was clearly loath to associate her writing with that of ‘the great master of splendid paradoxes’.119 She gives greater scope to Locke than any other philosopher, but keeps direct citations even of his work to a minimum. More’s book thus resists ideological identification with any specific doctrine other than that of the King James Bible. Such an approach might also betray a concern over the latent materialism of Lockean thought. As I discussed in the Introduction, the rise of atheism 117

118 119

Regina Janes, ‘On the Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”’, Journal of the History of Ideas 39, no. 2 (1978), 293. Janes points out Walpole’s identification of Wollstonecraft as an educationalist in his letters to More, and demonstrates that contrary to common belief, early reviews of the second Vindication were predominantly favourable. On the continuum between Wollstonecraft and More, see Myers, ‘Reform or Ruin’ and Harriet Guest, ‘The Dream of a Common Language: Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft,’ Textual Practice 9, no. 2 (1995), 306. More, Strictures, 1: 159. Ibid., 1: 212.

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in French materialist philosophy had demonstrated that the tabula rasa hypothesis sits uncomfortably with Christian orthodoxy. The twin beliefs of original sin and the immaterial soul, though not incompatible with Lockean thought, are more obviously aligned with innatist beliefs. This inflects More’s approach in Strictures: if she was to maintain that all humans are inherently ‘corrupt’, possessing ‘evil dispositions’ from birth,120 she had to incorporate Locke’s sensational psychology into her writing without drawing attention to his equivocation on the nature of the soul, or to the ideas of those who had identified the materialist potential of his theory. Writing at the end of the 1790s, More appears confident enough to claim in Strictures that the threat posed by the atheistic materialism of ‘Voltaire and his associates’ had passed, having been defeated by the prevailing ‘good sense and good principles’ of the English.121 The bifurcation of the philosophical tradition into French and English strands was not enough, however, to eliminate the threat entirely: according to More, the ‘modern apostles of infidelity’ had simply ‘chang[ed] their weapons’, and now sought to ‘destroy the principles of Christianity’ in Britain by ‘attempting to attain their object under the close and more artificial veil of German literature’.122 For More, German plays and novels such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) aestheticised the sins of adultery and self-murder; the currency of their ideas in British translations and imitations endangered the religious characters of young middle- and upper-class women, and thereby the very foundations of the domestic Christian economy. At the same time, however, More cleverly exploits the notoriety of Goethe’s valorisation of suicide in particular, representing his novel, which More declines the honour of title and attribution in Strictures, as a threat to the female body and body politic. More’s refusal to read Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is well known.123 She refuses even to name Wollstonecraft in Strictures. This works on a similar rhetorical basis to her disassociative treatment of other philosophers she deems to be dangerous, but there is an additional force at play: a direct vindication of adultery was for the first time attempted by a woman, a professed admirer and imitator of the German suicide 120 121 122 123

Ibid., 1: 57. Ibid., 1: 38. Ibid., 1: 39–40. More to Walpole, 18 August 1792. Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, Yale Edition, ed. W. S. Lewis, 31: 370; http://images.library.yale.edu/hwcorrespondence/.

146 Material Enlightenment Werter. The Female Werter, as she is styled by her biographer, asserts in a work, intitled The Wrongs of Woman, that adultery is justifiable, and that the restrictions placed on it by the laws of England constitute part of the wrongs of woman.124

As the repetition suggests, More was trying to fix the association between Wollstonecraft and ‘German suicide’ – an association, More points out, that Godwin made in his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), but which Michelle Faubert has argued neglects Wollstonecraft’s notion of suicide as a rational response to extreme suffering and oppression.125 As I discuss shortly, suicide was a particularly contentious issue for More, with ties to libertinism and the ‘revolution in manners’ that sympathy with the post-mortem Wollstonecraft perhaps threatened to bring about. In Dying to be English: Suicide Narratives and National Identity, 1721–1814, Kelly McGuire argues that ‘the novel participates in the construction of a national consciousness through its deployment of a particularly gendered form of suicide reconstituted as sacrifice’; it produces a ‘sense of national identity and authority consolidated not so much through the loss as through the voluntary forfeiture of one kind of identity in exchange for another’.126 For a woman as zealously patriotic as More, this must have struck an alarming chord; in response, she figures the domestic space as an arena of self-sacrifice, insisting to women that a lack of fortitude within this sphere only reasserted their unsuitability for the kinds of political action reserved for men. Notwithstanding the zeal with which she seeks to restrict female sensibility, there are hints in Cœlebs of More’s sense of a repressively masculine public sphere. This surfaces when Charles describes the metropolis: here, More structures her language to be architecturally and culturally resistant to female readers, while ventriloquising her own experience of London society and providing women readers with an insight into it. ‘To a speculative stranger’, Charles remarks, ‘a London day presents every conceivable shape, of which human life is susceptible. When you trace the solicitude of the morning countenance, the anxious exploring of the morning paper, the 124 125

126

More, Strictures, 1: 44–5. William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ (London: J. Johnson and G. G. and J. Robinson, 1798), 112; Michelle Faubert, ‘The Fictional Suicides of Mary Wollstonecraft’, Literature Compass 12, no. 12 (1 December 2015), 652–9. Kelly McGuire, Dying to be English: Suicide Narratives and National Identity, 1721–1814 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), xii–xiii.

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eager interrogation of the land, and perils by sea – taxes trebling, dangers multiplying, commerce annihilating, war protracted, invasion threatening, destruction impending – your mind catches and communicates the terror, and you feel yourself “falling with a falling state.”’127 But More’s quotation from Pope’s ‘Prologue to Mr. Addison’s Tragedy of Cato (1713)’ also encodes dissatisfaction with exclusion from civic politics, especially in turbulent times. The line appears in the following passage: A brave man struggling in the storms of fate, And greatly falling with a falling state. While Cato gives his little Senate laws, What bosom beats not in his Country’s cause? Who sees him act, but envies ev’ry deed? (lines 20–5)

The republican sentiment expressed here makes More’s reason for omitting the surrounding lines clear, but her choice of quotation hints towards the frustrations of confinement within the domestic sphere, as well as a more comprehensive notion of political action beyond the ‘little Senate’. Pope’s equation of patriotic fervour with envy, a sin of the flesh,128 was perhaps uncomfortably familiar to More; indeed, she appears highly sensitive to women’s exclusion from specifically political spaces of self-sacrifice. Cato is an appropriate figure for translating such sentiment: More’s own education had been ‘random’,129 with her father refusing to continue teaching her Latin, despite, or perhaps because of, her early promise.130 In order to palliate such exclusion from knowledge, More imagines the domestic world as a political space for ‘brave’ women, recommending to educated female readers the inclusive potential of philanthropic activity. This is emphasised by Charles’ further reflections on London life, which are most positive in his orderly description of charitable organisation, in contrast to the discord of business, ‘frivolous discourse’ and ‘luxurious dissipation’ of mixed evening entertainment. Pope’s poem and Addison’s play are important intertexts for Cœlebs, as suggested by More’s naming of Lucille after Addison’s Lucia. The classical figure of self-sacrifice also strengthens the links between More’s novel and her Strictures, when she compares the merits of the study of history to those 127 128 129

130

More, Cœlebs, 73. 1 Corinthians 3:3 Clark Library MS, More to Sir William Pepys, 11 November 1783. Quoted in Stott, Hannah More, 6. See Stott, Hannah More, 6.

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of Christianity. After touching on Cato’s suicide here, More asserts that ‘while those who exercise a habit of self-application a book of profane history may be made an instrument of improvement … so without this habit the Bible itself may, in this view be read with little profit’.131 She continues with a conservative feminist statement of ‘vital Christianity’: It will be to no purpose that the reader weeps over the fortitude of the Christian hero, or the constancy of the martyr, if she do not bear in mind that she herself is called to endure her own common trials with something of the same temper: if she do not bear in mind that, to control irregular humours, and to submit to the daily vexations of life, will require, though in a lower degree, the exertion of the same principle, and supplication for the aid of the same spirit which sustained the Christian hero in the trying conflicts of life, or the martyr in his agony at the stake … And let me again remind the warm admirer of suffering piety under extraordinary trials, that if she now fails in the petty occasions to which she is actually called out, she would not be likely to have stood in those more trying occasions which excite her admiration.132

More reminds her readers of the continuity between personal and political ‘fortitude’ under Christian belief, while reasserting the physical difference between women and men – the ‘irregular humours’ which required the spirit to be disciplined towards religious action. Using the nervous paradigm to circumscribe political action, she insists that women’s true self-sacrifice was in willing submission to prescribed gender roles and their ‘daily vexations’. Fearful that an overflowing vital spirit might encourage emulation of Christian martyrdom, and thus replicate the ‘female Werther’, she directs the ‘admirer of suffering’ towards ‘public worship’. The Christian profession More offers women as a mode of patriotic action draws on her Lockean pedagogy, as well as her notion of vital spirit. Vocal profession alone could not embody evangelical religion; though women may profess devotion though public worship, this was not sufficient as a means of divine expression: The evil does not lie in their not being always on their knees, but in their not bringing their religion from the closet into the world: in their

131 132

More, Strictures 1: 187–8. Ibid., 1: 188–9.

Hannah More’s ‘vital Christianity’ 149 bringing the spirit of the Sunday’s devotions into the transactions of the week: in not transforming their religion from a dry, and speculative, and inoperative system, into a lively, and influential, and unceasing principle of action.133

Believing that ‘it is not enough that the doctrines of the gospel furnish a subject for discussion, if they do not furnish a principle of action’,134 More foregrounds charity as a religious outlet: as Mrs Stanley puts it, ‘Charity is the calling of a lady; the care of the poor is her profession.’135 Charity converts profession from vocal to practical act and is thus a conservative move that valorises the ‘quiet beauty’ of the silent women over performative ‘display’,136 but also envisages a more public role, or ‘national view’ for her exertions.137

Cœlebs and corrective association As I have discussed, More’s evangelicalism is directed at and adapted towards multiple audiences, including elite women such as Montagu. Her distress at the spiritual and physical condition of the poor was accompanied with a real disaffection for the profligacy of the upper classes, and she wrote zealously to urge fashionable women to cultivate charity over material dissipation and frivolity, often couching her message in flatteries such as ‘reformation must begin with the GREAT’.138 Emboldened, perhaps, by the popularity of her Cheap Repository Tracts among the affluent classes, More renewed her evangelical campaign with what must be acknowledged as an astounding achievement: a best-selling Christian novel. Though its rigid formalism and aesthetic of austere morality make for less entertaining reading than others in the genre, Cœlebs is in some ways a fascinating text, at once seeking to wipe the slate clean while reshaping and redeploying the techniques of her political opponents. Cœlebs provided an alternative vehicle for More’s model of Christian economy to her tracts and Strictures. During his visit to London, More’s protagonist and narrator Charles (Cœlebs) co-operates with the amiable 133 134 135 136 137 138

Ibid., 1: 216. More, Cœlebs, 72. Ibid., 228. More, Moral Sketches, 129. More, Strictures, 1: 192. Hannah More, Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society, 2nd Edition (London: T. Cadell, 1788), 114.

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but only casually religious Lady Belfield to provide charitable relief for a young woman whose mother has died. As Wilberforce had funded the Mendip Schools, so Charles requests Lady Belfield to ‘direct [his] purse’, and she proceeds to conduct her charity in accordance with More’s template, making enquiries on the girl’s conduct, piety and industriousness, and subsequently relieving her poverty in a modest and practical rather than ostentatious or extravagant manner. But although she thus far exemplifies More’s charitable woman, Lady Belfield’s worldly sensibility makes her as prone to the temptation of objects of luxury as she is awake to those of charity; she is a sentimental, rather than a purely Christian benefactor. When her favourite maid falls seriously ill, Lady Belfield is acutely affected by her suffering, and provides the sick Toinette with not one but two surgeons. However, Charles relates that at the moment she is about to go to her servant, ‘the milliner came in with such a distracting variety of beautiful new things, that there was no possibility of letting them go till she had tried everything on, one after the other’.139 Toinette dies in the interim, and having illustrated the point, no more is said of her. Declining to gratify readers of romance with ‘details that have amusement only for their end’,140 More provides a clear, if heavy-handed contrast to Lady Belfield in the exemplary Lucille. Mr Stanley proudly tells Charles that his daughter ‘imposes on herself ’ a ‘union of charity with every personal indulgence’, and that from this association she has acquired another virtue, for … she is sometimes obliged to content herself with practicing frugality instead of charity. When she finds she cannot afford both her own gratification, and the charitable act which she wanted to associate with it, … she compels herself to give up the indulgence also.141

Unlike Lady Belfield, Lucille is willing to forgo material pleasure for charity’s sake, but she has achieved More’s ideal of self-denial by associating sensory pleasure with charity in the first place. Again, Lockean pedagogy informs her pragmatic approach to physical and psychological reform. The notion that habit and circumstance were the most important factors in shaping identities had been central to the nervous introspection of the so-called ‘Jacobin’ novels of the 1790s, including Hays’ Emma Courtney and Godwin’s Caleb Williams. In both of these texts, associationism and 139 140 141

More, Cœlebs, 108. More, ‘Preface’ to Cœlebs, 38. More, Cœlebs, 236.

Hannah More’s ‘vital Christianity’ 151

necessitarianism underpin the eponymous narrators’ accounts of their childhoods as causally decisive periods in their lives. Again, however, More appropriates techniques used by her opponents, and adapts these towards her Christian reformism. Unlike Godwin and Hays, More’s use of associationism in Cœlebs is externalised and socialised; rather than focusing on the feelings of individual characters, she examines the psychology of the subject as it is linked to others in the domestic economy. She uses the novel to convey ideas she had earlier put forward in her conduct writing. In An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World (1791), for instance, More argues that an ‘invariable œconomy’ could too easily ‘incline the heart to the love of money’, and recommends associationist economic practice to correct this: Nothing can effectually counteract this natural propensity but the Christian habit of devoting those retrenched expences to some good purpose; and the œconomy, instead of narrowing the heart, will enlarge it, by inducing a constant association of benevolence with frugality. An habitual attention to the wants of others is the only wholesome regulator of our own expences [sic], and carries with it a whole train of virtues, disinterestedness, sobriety and temperance.142

In Cœlebs, More applies this Hartleyan notion of habitual association to assimilate charity into a Christian economy in which ‘the wants of others’, rather than the desires of the body, are paramount. Whereas Lady Belfield’s sentimental charity is undirected by religion and is thus merely equivalent to other ‘indulgences’, Lucille’s Christian charity rests on physical and habitual self-denial; a religious associationist self-discipline through which More seeks to render abstention a physical pleasure. But More is optimistic about effecting such a change in her elite readership: a ‘good field’, perhaps, to Montagu’s ‘pointed hill’, Lady Belfield demonstrates More’s belief in their receptivity to religious cultivation. In Cœlebs, More engages with Godwin in a battle of genres, appearing increasingly embattled as she adopts the form favoured by the New Philosophers as a ‘vehicle’ for politics in the 1790s. Believing that ‘novels, which chiefly used to be dangerous in one respect, are now become mischievous in a thousand’,143 she worked scrupulously to distinguish Cœlebs from the sentimental and ‘Jacobin’ novels of the 1790s, refusing to name them directly, 142

143

More, An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World. By One of the Laity (London: T. Cadell, 1791), 69–70. Ibid., 31.

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much less quote them, as Hamilton had in her satirical novel Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800). Instead, she mounts an intellectual defence of the Church of England that seeks to controvert Godwin’s account of what human perfection means. More refigures the eponymous protagonist of his Caleb Williams in her nomenclature. Cœlebs (meaning unmarried) resembles Godwin’s Caleb (loyal servant or perhaps dog) in pronunciation, and the ligature in More’s spelling visually suggests a wedding as well as domestic œconomy, perhaps in further sarcasm towards Godwin and Wollstonecraft. More reasserts Caleb’s significance as a biblical figure and model of devoted action.144 Believing that ‘Ignorant free-thinker[s]’ like Godwin misread and misrepresented the bible, More denounces ‘the extreme disingenuousness of the new philosophers, when writing on every thing and person connected with revealed religion. These authors’, she asserts, ‘often quote satirical poets as grave historical authorities.’145 The eponymous protagonist of Godwin’s novel must have been easily recognisable to contemporary readers, as the title of an 1809 sequel, Cœlebs Suited, or the opinions and part of the Life of Caleb Cœlebs, Esq.,146 suggests. Without directing attention or encouraging interest in Godwin’s novel, for the informed reader More’s nominal choices place Cœlebs in intertextual combat with Caleb Williams. In her own representation of ‘things as they are’, More draws on personal experience: the unyielding sectarianism of Ned Tyrrel, More’s counterpoint to Godwin’s feudal Mr Tyrrel, recollects her encounters with clergymen during the Blagdon controversy – those putting undue restrictions on evangelicalism, More suggests, are the real tyrants. Unlike Hamilton, More refuses to replicate ‘jacobin’ novels through explicit parody, but she nevertheless mirrors Godwin and Hays in her use of the novel as a vehicle for politics: on this level at least, Cœlebs is to Strictures what Caleb Williams is to Political Justice. She strips the romantic intrigue of pathological interiority from her novel, leaving a stark but highly intelligible associationist narrative. Jon Mee has argued that Cœlebs ‘is aimed at an internal enemy in the shape of moral complacency and religious laxity among the elite. It adopts the strategies of the anti-Jacobin novelists, using conversations within the 144 145

146

Numbers: 13:6–14:38. Hannah More, Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society; and An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World, New Edition (London: T. Cadell, 1809), 170. George Rover [pseud.], Cœlebs Suited, or the Opinions and Part of the Life of Caleb Cœlebs, Esq. A distant relation of the late Charles Coelebs, Esq. deceased (London: Edmund Lloyd, 1809).

Hannah More’s ‘vital Christianity’ 153

domestic space to meet and overcome these dangers.’147 The enemy was internal in more than one sense; it was a corruption of the physical and psychological being. For More, as she writes in Remarks on the Speech of M. Dupont (1793), ‘it is not so much the force of French bayonets, as the contamination of French principles, that ought to excite our apprehensions’.148 More affirms her providential Loyalism by stating that ‘through the blessing of GOD’ Britain will be ‘defended from their open hostilities by the temperate wisdom of our Rulers, and the bravery of our fleets and armies’, ‘but’, she continues, ‘the domestic danger arising from licentious and irreligious principles among ourselves can only be guarded against by the personal care and vigilance of every one of us who values religion and the good order of society’.149 This was no simple opportunism, nor was it a response to a waning threat; what More proposes is a psychological counter-revolution.

Memory and revision In 1809, less than a year after the publication of the first edition of Cœlebs, Godwin published Essay on Sepulchres, an essay that applies associationist psychology to the very matter of building national identity. Godwin addresses questions of who should be memorialised and where – fundamentally questions about heritage, about how history should be defined and by whom. He suggests that a ‘very slight and cheap’ white wooden cross could be erected to mark the places of interment of the ‘illustrious dead’.150 Paul Westover has given an anthropological reading of what he terms Godwin’s ‘necromantic’ work, arguing that Sepulchres were an ‘attempt to ground, through tourism, the reading experience in materiality.’ Westover notes that Like Godwin’s Political Justice, the Essay puts its trust in the reason and moral sense of individuals, appealing not primarily to government, but rather to ‘an extensive private subscription’ and to a volunteer ‘committee of men, who should feel, This is our Business.’ Nevertheless, the

147

148

149 150

Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community 1762 to 1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 225–6. Hannah More, Remarks on the Speech of M. Dupont, with a Prefatory Address in Behalf of the French Emigrant Clergy, 2nd Edition (London: T. Cadell, 1793), 44. Ibid., 45. William Godwin, Essay on Sepulchres, in The Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), 6: 1.

154 Material Enlightenment Essay concerns itself with building national community: it is, in the end, a ‘scheme for Great Britain.’ 151

While Godwin makes room for the participation of any man who feels ‘this is [his] business’, in failing to address the manual labour involved, he writes the working man out of his scheme. Westover does not surmise who Godwin envisaged would actually do this work, whether paid labourers or the (male) volunteers themselves; indeed, the class politics of Sepulchres remains an underexamined topic in critical analyses of the essay so far. Moreover, all of those Godwin marks as worth memorialising are men, bar Richardson’s fictional Clarissa Harlow – indeed, he ridicules the idea of memorialising Anne Chaucer. Perhaps in part an attempt at amendment of the scandal following the publication of his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), Godwin’s essay uses associationism to masculinise memorialisation. Like Political Justice and Caleb Williams, Sepulchres operates on the cusp between individual psychology and politics. Published in the February of ‘a particularly morbid year’, seeing the death of Thomas Holcroft and Godwin writing in increasingly ill health,152 the essay is fundamentally concerned with the interrelations between private and public identity. As Westover discusses, memorialisation was increasingly linked to national identity during the Napoleonic wars. A memorial was proposed to mark Nelson’s death in 1805, and was erected in Birmingham in October 1809, the same year as the publication of Sepulchres. As the first monument in the country to be paid for by public subscription, the national significance of such an event must have been considerable; Godwin and More, then, were writing in a period of intensified public interest in memorialisation. Whether or not she read Godwin’s essay, it is clear that More’s writing at this time had Godwin, among other things, in its sights; his renewed activity was doubtless regarded by More as revolutionary iconoclasm; however democratically limited and implausible his scheme of national memory was, it was an attempt to wrest national history from the establishment elite. Thus, in her essays Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society; and An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World, republished together in revised form soon after Sepulchres, More redoubled her efforts against Godwin’s appropriation of associationist theory. 151

152

Paul Westover, ‘William Godwin, Literary Tourism, and the Work of Necromanticism’, Studies in Romanticism 48, no. 2 (2009). Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason: The Life and Thought of William Godwin (London: Routledge, 2010), 225.

Hannah More’s ‘vital Christianity’ 155

By this time, Godwin was no longer writing novels and treatises. In 1805, he and Mary Jane Godwin opened their radical children’s bookshop and publishing company, T. Hodgkin’s at the Juvenile Library, on London’s Tottenham Court Road, which later moved to The Strand under the name of the French and English Juvenile and School Library. This might be read as a retreat, and his anonymity suggests that in a sense it was, but such a movement towards the educationism favoured by heavy-weight reformists like More was an alternative and possibly more effective vehicle for his politics than Political Justice and Caleb Williams. In its first year, the Juvenile Library published Godwin’s Fables Ancient and Modern (1805) under the pseudonym Edward Baldwin; a portmanteau perhaps of his own and Barbauld’s surnames. In his introduction, Godwin makes familiar Enlightenment claims on the pedagogic efficacy of ‘simple’ conversation, adopting Trimmer’s use of the fable in Ladder to Learning (1789, 1792) to generate delight in moral lessons. Julie Carlson notes that ‘Godwin’s Fables patiently unfold the initial context or final conclusion of each fable … and forges connections between the world of the fable and the contemporary world’,153 which might again remind us of Barbauld. ‘The Stag Drinking’, one of the fables Godwin adapts from Aesop, provides a critique of the established system of government analogous to his writing in the 1790s. But the fable’s sensory description of the deer, as well as the dogs which ‘tear it almost to pieces’154 is also strongly reminiscent of Barbauld’s hunted hare in Lessons. Godwin makes clear his disapprobation for the sport of the elite, leading the child towards acquiescence with his views in familiar, conversational prose: ‘For my part, I do not quite like this hunting of the deer. Do not you think it is cruel, to call the frightening a poor creature … a sport?’155 The fable’s connection to Political Justice and Caleb Williams is furthered by a gendered inflection of establishment motifs which calls to mind Caleb’s sensualised subordination to Ferdinando Falkland. A primer for Godwin’s utilitarianism, the moral reads, ‘Another time, when I undertake to decide the value of a thing, I will consider, not merely whether it looks beautiful, but what use is to be got from it. I now know that swift legs are more worth having than the most magnificent horns that ever were seen.’156 Godwin’s educational writing, like that of 153

154

155 156

Julie Carlson, England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 236. William Godwin [as Edward Baldwin], Fables, Ancient and Modern. Adapted for the Use of Children, 9th Edition (London: M. J. Godwin and Co., 1821), 17. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 20.

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Wollstonecraft and the writers considered in this book, was closely bound up with his politics.157 Fables received mostly favourable reviews, but Trimmer, for one, considered it highly objectionable.158 Though she seems not to know who the author is, her review of Fables suggests that she recognised it as a worrying addition to the genre. Like More, she engages in selfcensorship, purposefully omitting particularly troubling sections of book, and bemoaning its misappropriation of a form she had adopted in her own writing for children. In an addition to the revised essay, ‘An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World’ of 1809, More refers to Locke’s Human Understanding as ‘a monument of wisdom’,159 perhaps with the urn somewhere in mind. Having worked through the 1790s to rehabilitate Enlightenment thought into conservative politics, More now seeks to register victory in the war of ideas. If, as Sutherland argues, More wants to ‘sever the masculinist rhetoric of late eighteenth-century popular democracy from its revolutionary roots and appropriate it’,160 this necessitates a refutation of the viability of that rhetoric. In her preface to the original Estimate, More writes that Philosophy … (as Unbelief, by a patent of its own creation, has lately been pleased to call itself ) will not do nearly so much mischief to the present age as its primitiva apostles intended: since it requires time, application, and patience to peruse the reasoning veterans of the sceptic school: and these are talents not now very severely devoted to study of any sort, by those who give the law to fashion; especially since … the same principles may be acquired on cheaper terms, and the reputation of being philosophers obtained without the sacrifices of pleasure for the severities of study; since the industry of our literary chemists has extracted the spirit from the gross substance of the old unvendible poison, and exhibited it in the volatile essense of a few sprightly sayings.161 157

158

159 160 161

Julie Carlson is one of the first to have fully recognised this; see her excellent England’s First Family of Writers, 232–45. Also see Robert Anderson, ‘Godwin Disguised: Politics in the Juvenile Library’. in Godwinian Moments: From the Enlightenment to Romanticism, ed. Robert M. Maniquis and Victoria Myers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press , 2011), 125–48, and Susan Manly, ‘William Godwin’s “School of Morality”’, The Wordsworth Circle 43, no. 3 (2012), 135–42. Sarah Trimmer, Review of William Godwin’s ‘Fables, Ancient and Modern’, The Guardian of Education (1806), 282–96. More, Thoughts; and An Estimate, 164. Sutherland, Hannah More’s Counter-Revolutionary Feminism, 33. Hannah More, An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World. By One of the

Hannah More’s ‘vital Christianity’ 157

Perhaps thinking of Priestley’s condensed Hartley’s Theory in her chemical analogy, More claims that the very fashionability of philosophy weakens it, as does its dissemination through compendiums targeted at those with only a superficial interest. Notwithstanding her dismissal of Hume, More’s additions to her Thoughts; and An Estimate show her taking the domestic threat more seriously in 1809. While seeking to avoid appearing reactionary, she writes in her preface to this new edition that ‘The awful and unparalleled public events which have occurred’ since the initial publication of the essays in the 1790s ‘seem to furnish no new reason why the standard of Religion … should be lowered.’162 More maintains that the elite must remain vigilant; in a period of warfare abroad and increasing fears over public disorder in Britain, she seeks to recover associationist theory from its reappropriation by radical thinkers like Godwin. In a renewed effort to align philosophy with piety in ‘An Estimate’, More breaks with her generalised approach to philosophical tradition by giving a précis of a select few philosophers. Demonstrating through these examples that ‘as much rhetoric and logic too may be shown in defending revelation as in attacking it’,163 she reserves her most enthusiastic praise for theists, and in opposing their work to Hume’s ‘Essay on Suicide’ (1777) adds a footnote in which she taunts the posthumous Hume in his own materialist language. More’s note is worth quoting in full: The Essay on Suicide was published soon after Mr. Hume’s death. It might mortify his liberal mind (if matter and motion were capable of consciousness) to learn, that this his dying legacy, the last concentrated effort of his genius and his principles, sent from the grave, as it were, by a man so justly renowned in other branches of literature, produced no sensation on the public mind. And that the precious information that every man had a right to be his own executioner, was considered as a privilege so little desirable, that it probably had not the glory of converting one cross road into a cemetery. It is to the credit of this country that fewer copies of this work were sold than perhaps ever was the case with a writer of so much eminence. A more impotent act of wickedness has seldom been achieved, or one which has had the glory of making fewer persons wicked or miserable. That cold and cheerless oblivion which he held out as a refuge to beings who had solaced themselves with the soothing hope of immortality has, by a

162 163

Laity (London: T. Cadell, 1791), 16–17. More, ‘Preface’ to Thoughts[…]; and An Estimate, vi. Ibid., 165.

158 Material Enlightenment memorable retribution, overshadowed his own last labour: the Essay on Suicide being already as much forgotten as he promised the best men that they themselves would be. And this favourite work became at once a prey to that eternal night to which he had consigned the whole human race.164

While her primary target here is Hume, the subtext contains a virulent attack against Godwin’s necromanticism, as suggested by ‘the glory of converting one cross road into a cemetery’. Riding roughshod over Godwin’s scheme as well as Hume’s grave, More’s caricature highlights the impracticality and, more dubiously, the historical ‘impotence’ of the materialist philosophy they shared. More’s attack is ingeniously multilayered; in terms of book history, her additions are a foil to Hume’s removal of ‘On Suicide’ and another essay, ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’, from his original Five Dissertations (1756), and the subsequent insertion of ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ in their stead in a newly bound volume entitled Four Dissertations (1757). Arguing against the Thomistic notion of suicide as a violation of divine order and questioning the doctrine of eternal life respectively, the essays caused an outcry amongst its prepublication readers, and the threat of a lawsuit from one. They were eventually published anonymously in France in 1770 and England in 1777, but More was probably thinking of the 1783 edition, which appeared under Hume’s name. Evidently aware of the controversy surrounding its publication, More casts ‘On Suicide’ as entirely ineffectual in subverting the twin doctrines of immortality and immateriality, which could now, she implies, be safely referred to and refuted in open discourse. Of course, that More thought it necessary at this point to address Hume’s essay, if only to dismiss it, could conversely be read as indicative of a growing apprehension of materialist philosophy and its revolutionary links to suicide; even as she claims victory against Hume, his inclusion here (and Godwin’s ostensible exclusion) betrays an acute desire to neutralise the ongoing effects of such writings on the British public. Whereas Hume’s body is consigned to the ‘cold and cheerless oblivion’ of More’s footnote, the body of the female philosopher, as grotesquely exemplified by Hamilton’s Bridgetina Botherim at the start of the century, finds no such presence in More’s writing. By writing such burlesque out of her Cœlebs, More suggests that the Female Philosopher had failed to become a reality in fashionable circles; ironically, she cannot achieve embodiment

164

Ibid., 164–5.

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because women’s attention is disposed to be consumed by physicality. As Mr Stanley puts it: I have known twenty women mismanage their affairs, through bad education, through ignorance, especially of arithmetic, through a multiplicity of vain accomplishments, through an excess of dissipation, through a devotedness to personal embellishments, through an absorption of the whole soul in music, for one who has made her husband metaphysically miserable.165

It is revealing that this discussion is added to a discussion of the causes of irreligion in the youth of the elite, in which she seeks to counter, as she does in ‘An Estimate’, the belief that religion ‘is the declared enemy to wit and genius.’166 More’s long-held belief was that the ‘Christian Character’, though ‘little understood by the coteries of the world’, was the pinnacle of ‘intellectual life’.167 More’s extraordinary success in the print market showed that unlike the ‘new philosophers’, she could write accessibly in the language of the elite. Indeed, as Emma Major notes, More ‘did actually speak’ the language of the established clergy and was thus able to ‘inform clerical practice’168 in a way that freethinking writers like Godwin, Hays, and even Priestley, could not. William Cowper declared that the original essays were ‘universally read’,169 and like her other publications they sold exceptionally well: the joint reprint was the tenth edition of Thoughts, the sixth of An Estimate. It was published in August 1809, on the same day as a new (tenth) edition of Cœlebs.170 One might reasonably question why More choose to engage more directly with Godwin at this point, over a decade after the publication of Caleb Williams, when Sepulchres seems to have garnered little attention and did not run beyond the first edition.171 Whether or not More considered Godwin 165 166 167

168 169

170 171

Ibid., 294. More, Thoughts […]; and An Estimate, 164. More, ‘The Christian Character’, July 1827. Hannah More Collection, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles. MS.1997.009, Series 2, 4.46. Major, Madam Britannia, 300. Cowper to James Crogswell, 15 June 1791, The Letters of the Late William Cowper, Esq., to his Friends., ed. John Johnson (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1820), 501. ‘Advertisements & Notices’. The Morning Chronicle, no. 12557 (9 August 1809). On the underwhelming response to Sepulchres, see Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 323.

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a continuing threat to domestic morality, both writers seem to have been working with an increasing historical awareness; both were attempting to lay stake to a language which could shape the events of the previous decade in national memory. It was natural for the dominant model of memory to play a role in this ideological process, but considering More’s practical applications associationist theory, she may well have considered Godwin’s scheme a vandalisation of British philosophical heritage. More, we have seen, did not passively absorb scientific ideas more generally associated with radical politics; indeed, the determination with which she sought to defend British Enlightenment thought shows that she considered it to be, if not a conservative tradition, then one eminently capable of being moulded towards Loyalist Anglican ends.

Chapter 4

Clearing out the ‘rubbish’: Elizabeth Hamilton’s domestic philosophy

A

review in The British Critic (1802) situates Elizabeth Hamilton’s Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education (1801) squarely in associationist tradition.1 It surmises that Hamilton is ‘a metaphysician of the school of Hartley’ and that her book, in contrast to More’s Strictures, is the product of ‘studying and meditation’.2 Nonetheless, the reviewer is pleased to find Hamilton’s work untainted by ‘that materialism, which Priestley and some other pupils of that school have so unfairly represented, as the necessary consequence of the principles of their master’.3 Hartley, the reviewer continues, ‘was a pious man’, so while his philosophy is the ‘prominent feature’ of Hamilton’s book, it still ‘breathes sentiments of purest piety’. Hamilton would no doubt have agreed with the last of these assessments, but the remark that her work was the product, not of an ‘acquaintance with the living world’, but of the ‘school of Hartley’ would surely have disappointed her. For Hamilton repeatedly stated that her science of mind had its basis in ‘observation and experience’,4 and though she considered the basic principles of association to be self-evidently true, she also queried the use of associationism ‘to explain all the phaenomena of the human mind’.5 While Hamilton’s educational treatise draws extensively on Hartley and the Common Sense philosophy of her Edinburgh Enlightenment friend Dugald Stewart,6 she declares herself, in the first letter of the book, ‘at no 1

2 3 4

5 6

Hamilton’s book originally appeared in 1801 under the title Letters on Education. Unless otherwise indicated, I refer to the revised second edition (1801–2). The British Critic and Quarterly Theological Review 19 (1802), 232. Ibid., 233. Elizabeth Hamilton, Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education (London: G. and J. Robinson, 1801), 1: xi; A Series of Popular Essays, Illustrative of Principles Essentially Connected with the Improvement of the Understanding, the Imagination, and the Heart, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Manners and Miller, 1813), 2: 201; Memoirs of the Late Mrs Elizabeth Hamilton, ed. Elizabeth Benger (London: Longman, 1819), 2: 4. Hamilton, Elementary Principles, 1: 18. For an analysis of Hamilton’s work in the context of the Edinburgh literary world,

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pains to adopt, or to avoid, the peculiar phraseology of this or that particular school’, explaining that the ‘principles’ of her work ‘are not implicitly adopted from any author, however celebrated; they are not chosen to suit any system, however plausible’.7 Hamilton elucidates her position: Of systems I have none, save the system of Christianity. Of theories I cannot be said to adopt any; since I follow none one step farther, than reflection upon the operations of my own mind, and observation upon those of others, fully justifies. Nor do I mean to stand bound for all the opinions of every author, whose sentiments I may occasionally quote.

This might give the impression of a writer seeking to establish a safe distance from the speculative metaphysics of the 1790s but it is in fact a bold statement of religious purpose and autonomy of thought. Like More, Hamilton proclaims Christianity as her sole moral guide, but whereas More was careful to disassociate her work from the theories of her political enemies, Hamilton claims the freedom to adopt ideas from wherever she chooses. Reaffirming liberal Enlightenment values against party prejudice, Hamilton insists, I make it a principle never to despise truth, even when it is spoken by an enemy; nor shall I ever be led to reject it, because the person by whom it is advanced, has in some points embraced opinions opposite to my own. Silently to steal the sentiments of such persons, where they happened to suit me, while I pronounced a general censure against the authors, is a line of conduct that is, in my mind, firmly associated with the idea of dishonour.8

Indeed, Hamilton’s markedly open, non-partisan attitude towards the philosophy of mind is clear throughout Elementary Principles, in which she draws on sources as politically divergent as More and Priestley. Hamilton becomes more daring in her claims to autonomy even as she alludes to the limitations of her education, asserting that the ‘effects of association occurred to [her] mind, long before [she] was in possession of the word’.9 She cites Lord Kames’ Elements of Criticism (1762) as having been

7 8 9

see Chapter 2 of Pam Perkins, Women Writers and the Edinburgh Enlightenment (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010). Hamilton, Elementary Principles, 1: 18–19. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 1: 20.

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her introduction to the theory – a further indication of her Scottish Enlightenment groundings.10 As Jane Rendall has discussed, Hamilton’s debt to Common Sense philosophy, and particularly that of Stewart, is clear from her frequent quotation of his Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792), the organisation of the content and altered title of the second edition of Elementary Principles.11 But, especially when read alongside her fictions, Hamilton’s epistolary treatise communicates a science of mind that is innovatively domestic in its foundational aims, and which makes a virtue of critical distance from the male philosophical tradition. Hamilton’s confession in the introductory letter that she had (wrongly) thought of Locke and Hartley ‘as philosophical writers, far too abstruse for my simple judgement to comprehend’ might thus be read as an implicit critique of exclusionary scholasticism.12 Her tone is occasionally apologetic, but underneath this is a defence of her self-education and an assertion of philosophical authority. Hamilton’s apparent modesty in confessing the limits of her education and ‘simple judgment’ barely conceals the boldness of her claim to have come to understand associationist psychology even before she had a name to put to it, and without the privilege of a university education. Her female readers may have recognised this as a strategic form of humility. Indeed, Hamilton plays on shared experience with women to make oblique criticisms of male authority, for example in her comment to her ‘friend’ that ‘we [are] often deterred from seeking for information, not only upon subjects which are the peculiar province of the learned, but likewise upon those points that are interesting to every rational being’.13 But the improvement of women’s rational education is only part of Hamilton’s project: the language of philosophy must be reformed both in order for it to be more accessible to women and to resituate it within the realm of observation and experience. Driving home her view of the philosophy of mind, Hamilton concludes her first letter with a nod to Locke via Stewart and an appeal for inclusivity in the science of mind: ‘greatly do I wish to see this subject divested of all extraneous matter, cleared from the rubbish of systems and

10

11

12 13

Hamilton’s biographer relates that as a girl she once concealed a copy of Kames’ Elements under a cushion, for fear of being thought ‘unfeminine’ by reading it. Memoirs of the Late Mrs Elizabeth Hamilton, with a Selection from her Correspondence, and Other Unpublished Writings, ed. Elizabeth Benger (London: Longman, 1819), 1: 50. Jane Rendall, ‘“Elementary Principles of Education”: Elizabeth Hamilton, Maria Edgeworth and the Uses of Common Sense Philosophy’, History of European Ideas 39, no. 5 (2012), 7. Hamilton, Elementary Principles, 1: 20. Ibid., 1: 20.

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hypothesis, and rendered so plain to every capacity as to become a part of common education’.14 What Hamilton is attempting to initiate here is not only a popularisation of the philosophy of mind amongst women, but the establishment of a reconstructed system, cleared of ‘rubbish’ and rendered useful by its alignment with everyday experience; ambitiously, she seeks to achieve a material reformation of philosophy itself. Hamilton’s ideal of the female philosopher is an ideal of metaphysical religiosity. Like More and Barbauld, her writings on education unite Lockeanism and Christianity; she considers psychology and religion as mutually illuminative, but her theological perspective is more insistently nonsectarian than either Barbauld or More. Hamilton was born in Belfast but was raised by her paternal aunt and uncle near Stirling in Scotland. It was a mixed-sect household (Mr Marshall attended Episcopalian chapel, Mrs Marshall attended the established Kirk) in a rural community where she was free, as a young child, to play in and explore the natural environment. According to her friend and biographer Elizabeth Benger, this upbringing greatly shaped Hamilton’s ‘moral and religious sentiments’, within which we can include her aversion to the ‘bigotry of sectarism and the rancour of party’ and her understanding of the ‘taste for the beauties of nature in the material world’ as ‘connected’ with both ‘devotional’ and ‘moral feelings’.15 The religious aspect of Hamilton’s philosophy will not be my primary focus here but it should be understood that her Christian beliefs are fundamental to her philosophical writings, and not only insofar as she uses associationist psychology to promote Christian faith through the education of children. I will indicate at the end of this chapter the need for a fuller understanding of Hamilton’s religio-psychological category, ‘the propensity to magnify the idea of the self ’, or the ‘selfish principle’, which she developed in her Popular Essays of 1813. Hamilton’s claim to philosophical authority in Popular Essays moves well beyond the model of Enlightenment domesticity. Nevertheless, 14

15

Ibid., 1: 20–1. In his Elements, Stewart repeatedly refers to the speculations of contemporary metaphysicians as ‘rubbish’. See Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1792), 1: 15, 1: 46. Locke figures himself as ‘an Under-Labourer … clearing Ground a little, and removing some of the Rubbish, that lies in the way to Knowledge’. By ‘Rubbish’, Locke means ‘Vague and insignificant Forms of Speech, and abuse of Language, [which] have so long passed for Mysteries of Science; And hard or misapply’d Words, with little or no meaning’, which he says have been ‘mistaken for deep Learning, and height of Speculation’, but are in fact ‘Covers of Ignorance, and hindrance of true Knowledge’. See his ‘Epistle to the Reader’, Human Understanding, 9–10. Memoirs of the Late Mrs Elizabeth Hamilton, ed. Benger, 1: 39; Hamilton, Elementary Principles, 2: 317; 2: 321.

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educationalism along the lines of Barbauld, More and the Edgeworths (with whom Hamilton would form a cross-channel friendship16) provided her with an entry point into the genre of the philosophical treatise. In Elementary Principles, Hamilton makes the familiar appeal to philosophical pragmatism: ‘I must’, she writes, ‘beg your patient attention to minute detail, as it is by a reference to facts alone, that the danger of systematizing and arguing from mere hypothesis can be avoided.’17 Hamilton aligns herself with the anti-scepticism of Stewart and Reid here, but the consistent emphasis in Elementary Principles on women as practical, and thus superior treasurers of philosophical learning is an innovation. Hamilton is tacitly critical of the entire philosophical tradition following Locke; she sees it as having failed to bring about any real change in society. For her, the reason philosophers had been unable to engender real human progress was that they had not acted on what Locke had made readily obvious: that the foundational building blocks of the mind were the most significant, and that since it was women who were generally responsible for this, their rational education ‘would do more towards the improvement of the species than all the discoveries of science, and the researches of philosophy’.18 Hamilton’s account of psychological development puts Hartleyan associationism into plain language: ‘A child who has been accustomed to pay attention to its perceptions, has received, from the various objects of sense, a fund of ideas which are ready to be brought into use; these, by the power of association, assist the mind in forming new conceptions.’19 Hamilton is discussing very early education here, ‘the first link of the chain’, something she insists has not been granted proper significance in the philosophical tradition:

16

17 18 19

Hamilton met Maria Edgeworth in Edinburgh in 1803 and visited Edgeworthstown in 1813. Their correspondence seems to have been lost and Edgeworth refused permission for Benger to publish it in her biography (see Claire Grogan’s introduction to Hamilton, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, ed. Claire Grogan {Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000), 25). A draft of a letter from Richard Lovell Edgeworth to Hamilton survives, in which he writes, ‘You speak of our differing in opinion upon education but we cannot find any material difference between your precepts and ours.’ RLE to Elizabeth Hamilton, 23 August 1801, MS 22471, Correspondence of RLE on Education, National Library of Ireland. My thanks to Jane Rendall for sharing her transcription. Hamilton, Elementary Principles, 1: 23. Ibid., 1: 2–3. Ibid., 1: 39.

166 Material Enlightenment That it is by means of the senses that ideas are first acquired, is a fact, which, I apprehend, to be now established beyond the reach of controversy. It has, for more than half a century, been generally admitted by philosophers; but the belief of it has, as far as I know, induced little additional attention towards that period of life, when the knowledge acquired by the senses first begins to be communicated to the mind.

Hamilton’s description of the opening of the child’s senses and the development of affectionate attachments is remarkably lucid, and indeed covers an earlier period of life than was treated by any of the writers in this study, with the exception of Barbauld’s ‘To a Little Invisible Being Who Is Expected Soon to Become Visible’ (c. 1795).20 Possibly, she had identified a gap in Edgeworth’s Practical Education, for early motherhood was apparently less of an ‘experiment’ than it was a domestic labour. Indeed, Hamilton suggests that part of the reason that the philosophy of mind had so far had a limited impact on the improvement of human understanding was that it had remained the domain of men, whose involvement in education generally came at a later stage of the child’s development. In her letter on ‘Perception’ in Elementary Principles, Hamilton regrets that it is thought ‘sufficient that children learn to prate by rote upon subjects which require the powers of judgement and reflection to comprehend. They repeat the ideas of others, and we are satisfied’.21 The instilling of words without ideas creates prodigies, she argues, but these are ‘a species of forced plants’, which may at first ‘appear fair and flourishing’, but in fact have ‘neither strength nor flavour’. Echoing Locke, she clarifies her use of the term ‘perception’ as ‘denot[ing] the impression made upon the mind by all the objects of sense’, and ties it to the universal human capacity for ‘reflection’, stressing that this is ‘understood by every one who reflects on what he does, when he hears, sees, feels, &c.’22 Again, this signals a philosophy of mind that – at least in Hamilton’s view – deals impartially with self-evident truths, but which inclines towards Scottish Enlightenment. Hamilton uses ‘perception’ and ‘impression’ to figuratively describe ideas, as Priestley does, but she also asserts that there is a clear difference between perceptions of sense and reflection; like Reid and Stewart, Hamilton is a realist – she rejects imagism and the ‘storehouse’ model of memory, but as we shall see, she makes entertainingly figurative use of everyday objects to convey ideas in the science of mind. Before her Elementary Principles, 20 21 22

Date attributed by McCarthy. See McCarthy, Poems, 296. Hamilton, Elementary Principles, 2: 33. Ibid., 34.

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however, she used satire in increasingly cutting ways to clear the field for her own configuration of associationist psychology, a Christian philosophy built on experientially tested materials from sources both close to and far from home.

Partiality, prejudice and perspective In her obituary for Hamilton, Maria Edgeworth writes that the central purpose of Memoirs of Modern Philosophers was ‘to expose those whose theory and practice differ, to point out the difficulty of applying high-flown principles to the ordinary but necessary concerns of human life, and to show the danger of bringing every man to become his own moralist and logician’.23 The critique of individualism Edgeworth identifies in the novel is certainly a reading that Hamilton would have endorsed, and Edgeworth accords with Hamilton’s self-representation in not casting her friend as belonging to any distinct philosophical party. Nevertheless, it is easy to see why Hamilton’s satire has been read as an anti-Jacobin novel.24 Modern Philosophers associates the New Philosophy with the French Revolution, sexual libertinism and atheism; it ridicules hard necessitarianism and denounces Godwin’s rejection of natural filial affections in the name of utility, warning of the potential abuse of a system that ‘teaches, that by cancelling the bonds of domestic affection, and dissolving the ties of gratitude, the virtue and happiness of the world is to be increased’.25 It is somewhat surprising, then, that the materialism commonly understood as relating to, if not a shaping factor of these perceived wrongs, escapes Hamilton’s derision, especially considering a central target of her parody is Mary Hays; as I explained in my Introduction, materialism underpins Hays’s necessitarianism and thereby her feminism. In fact, Hamilton espouses sensational psychology (though never all-out materialism) in Modern Philosophers. Repeatedly stressing the abstracting tendency of the New Philosophy, that is, its removal from the practical and the everyday, Hamilton shows how Hays’ speculative philosophy pulls the attention away from the material world to detrimental effect, though she paints it as absurdly unsuccessful even in this regard.

23 24

25

The Times, October 1816. See, for example, Matthew Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Hamilton, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, ed. Claire Grogan (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000), 191–2.

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Hamilton’s views on materialism exemplify her philosophical liberalism. In a letter to Stewart of 1810, published in Benger’s Memoirs, Hamilton writes that the ‘doctrine of materialism has appeared convincing to so many persons, whose wisdom and virtue I hold in high estimation, that I am far from entertaining any prejudices against it’.26 Rather than making any normative claim against the theory, Hamilton asserts that ‘if the arguments in favour of [materialism] have failed to produce conviction in my mind, it is because they seem to me, however plausible, to fall short of that degree of proof necessary to thorough conviction’. Like Stewart, her common-sense position is that metaphysical speculation over the materiality of mind is futile, because it deals with the unknowable.27 She thus ‘rest[s] in a belief that the object of enquiry is placed beyond the reach of human intellect’ and has ‘confined [her] enquiries’ to ‘those operations of the human mind that are obvious to human observation’. Extricating herself from both sides of the materialist controversy, Hamilton positions herself within the traditions of Enlightenment empiricism and educational practice, maintaining a Lockean ambivalence on the materiality of mind while extending tolerance towards, and even expressing respect for, materialists of ‘wisdom and virtue’. To better understand Hamilton’s reflections on prejudice, partiality and differences of philosophical perspective, it is useful to consider her first satire, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), which draws on and pays tribute to the Orientalist collections and translations of Hamilton’s deceased brother Charles Hamilton and his associates. Much beloved and deeply mourned by his sister, Charles had been an East India Company employee favoured by Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of Bengal, to whom Hamilton dedicated her book despite Hasting’s impeachment in 1787 and lengthy trial on charges of corruption.28 As Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell note, ‘No reader in 1796, opening the first volume and 26 27

28

Memoirs of the Late Mrs Elizabeth Hamilton, ed. Benger, 2: 132–4. Stewart accuses materialists of forgetting that ‘body, as well as mind, is known to us by its qualities and attributes alone, and that we are as ignorant of the nature of the former, as of that of the latter.’ Elements, 1: 5. For discussion of Hindoo Rajah, Hastings and Orientalist scholarship, see Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell, introduction to Elizabeth Hamilton, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, ed. Perkins and Russell (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2004), 22–31. On Hindoo Rajah as tribute to Charles Hamilton, see Julie Straight, ‘Promoting Liberty through Universal Benevolence in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 25, no. 3 (Spring 2013), 589–614. On Hindoo Rajah and the impeachment of Warren Hastings, see Mona Narain, ‘Colonial Desires: The Fantasy of Empire and Elizabeth Hamilton’s

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seeing the dedication … could be left in any doubt about Hamilton’s political engagement and allegiances, at least not on the vexed Indian question.’29 Along with loyal affection for her brother, Hamilton held a firm belief in the value of knowledge acquisition in India – whether or not it was subsidised by colonialism – and faith in the notion that the ‘long suffering Hindoos’ had ‘experienced a happy change’ in liberation, through British rule, from the ‘ignorant bigotry of their [former] Mussulman rulers’.30 In the ‘Preliminary Dissertation on the History, Religion, and Manners, of the Hindoos’ in Hindoo Rajah, Hamilton praises the ‘amiable and benevolent character’ of the Brahmin caste, dwelling in particular on their pacifism and religious toleration. While providing the introduction to Orientalist scholarship necessary to make her narrative intelligible, the ‘Dissertation’ also sheds light on Hamilton’s theological position, particularly where she quotes Charles Wilkins’ 1785 translation of the Bhagavad-gita: ‘“He, my servant,” says Krishna, speaking in the person of the Deity, “He, my servant, is dear to me, who is free from enmity, merciful, and exempt from pride and selfishness, and who is the same in pain and in pleasure, patient of wrongs, contented, and whose mind is fixed on me alone.”’31 It is notable that Hamilton capitalises ‘God’ ‘Being’ and ‘Deity’ throughout her discourse on Hinduism. She writes admiringly of the Hindu ‘spirit of unbounded toleration’ and ‘abhorrence of shedding blood’, though she goes on to say that the ‘religion of the vulgar’ has ‘degenerated into the grossest idolatry’, accounting for the ‘ignorance’ and ‘superstition’ of the Indian ‘multitude’ by pointing to the ‘jealous care with which the tribe of Brahma’ guarded the ‘avenues to science and to truth’.32 It is clear that Hamilton considers the diffusion of knowledge as similarly useful to the ‘improvement’ of Britain, and as we shall see, the principles of religious meekness she finds so appealing in Hinduism continued to inform her critique of ‘pride and selfishness’ in Christian society. The novel itself tells the story of the Indian Raja Zāārmilla’s travels in England, giving an account of its culture and society from his perspective and those of his correspondents, including the Brahmin Priest Sheermal, and

29

30

31 32

Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah’, Studies in Romanticism 45 (Winter 2006), 585–98. Perkins and Russell, introduction to Elizabeth Hamilton, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, 23. Elizabeth Hamilton, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1796), 1: l–li. Hamilton, Hindoo Rajah, 1: ix; 1: xxi. Ibid., 1: xviii; 1: xv; 1: xxvi.

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Māāndāāra, the Zimeendar (landholder) of Cumlore, Rohilcund. As Anne K. Mellor has shown, Hamilton ‘articulates these multiple perspectives’ to develop a ‘liberal consensus’ that can ‘transcend a misleading scientific or weak objectivity’;33 that is, to overcome prejudice and arrive at something closer to truth. Mellor thus argues that the complex satire of Hindoo Rajah subverts the orientalist narrative in order to interrogate power structures in Britain. In the process, it takes a survey of contemporary philosophy in England. Zāārmilla meets Doctor Severan, a philosopher with a ‘sincere and disinterested love of truth’, whose researches into the ‘Laws of Nature’ and ‘various phaenomena of the material world’ have given him an ‘enlarged view of things’.34 Through Zāārmilla, we are introduced to the contrasting school of ‘Metaphysics’, ‘a philosophy which disdains the slow process of experiment, and chiefly glories in contradicting common sense’, and whose ‘main object is to shew, that the things which are, are not, and the things which are not, are’ – a pointed reference to Godwin’s Caleb Williams.35 Leader of the metaphysicians is Doctor Sceptic, an atheist whose influence on his nephew has fatal consequences: young Sceptic seduces his cousin, refuses to marry her on the basis that ‘marriage was a piece of priest craft – an ignoble bondage – a chain, which no man of honour should submit to wear’.36 The cousin drowns herself after discovering she is pregnant and young Sceptic, apparently overwhelmed with guilt after reading her letter, also commits suicide. The horrified Zāārmilla’s sardonic response leaves little doubt as to Hamilton’s view of such social aberrations: Ah! how little do the Christians of this country consider the nature and extent of the obligations they are under to those enlightened men, whose indefatigable endeavour it is, to free them from the narrow prejudices of their religion! O, ye incomparable moralists, who so freely blow out your own brains, from a sense of general utility, little doth the world consider how much it is indebted to your labours!37

Among the proselytes of Doctor Sceptic, there is also Mr Axiom, a materialist who thinks the soul exists as a ‘certain stamina’ situated ‘in that 33

34 35 36 37

Anne K. Mellor, ‘Romantic Orientalism Begins at Home: Elizabeth Hamilton’s “Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah”’, Studies in Romanticism 44, no. 2 (2005), 155. Hamilton, Hindoo Rajah, 2: 67. Ibid., 2: 181. Ibid., 2: 269. Ibid., 2: 373–4.

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part of the brain which approaches the nearest possible to the very top of the nose’,38 and the Utopianist Mr Vapour, who looks forward to an ‘age of reason’ when ‘the world shall contain only a race of men’.39 A very different perspective is presented in the Wollstonecraftian Miss Ardent, who ‘pants for that blessed period, when the eyes of men shall no longer be attracted by the charms of youth and beauty; when mind, and mind alone, shall be thought worthy the attention of a philosopher.’40 While Hamilton may have doubted, with Zāārmilla, Miss Ardent’s belief that the ‘perfection of the female understanding will … be universally acknowledged’, and perhaps feared that her arguments were tainted with a desire to ‘drive the chariot of state, and guide the steeds of war!’,41 there is also a level of admiration at play here. Associationism does not escape Hamilton’s satire in Hindoo Rajah. An attempt on the part of the philosophers to turn sparrows into bees is founded on the ‘power of external circumstances’; the experiment kills the birds.42 But a story Zāārmilla relates in the very next letter re-emphasises the importance of associationist psychology as applied by women in the domestic education of girls. Julia, Caroline and Olivia are sisters (the latter two being twins) educated by different people: the eldest, Julia, at a fashionable boarding school; Caroline by Captain Ardent’s younger sister Lady Grey; and Olivia by his elder sister, Miss Ardent. Zāārmilla remarks that, notwithstanding the similarity of their looks, ‘the opposite characters impressed by education is visible’ in the twins: ‘While over the graces of Miss Caroline is thrown the bewitching veil of timidity, and her every action is bound in the silken fetters of decorum; the adopted daughter of Miss Ardent speaks her sentiments with an energy that has never known restraint.’43 After a carriage accident in which a man is seriously hurt, Julia runs back to the house, where she has a hysteric fit. Olivia follows, hoping to find help and medicine, and stirs those who had been occupied with Julia to return with her to the scene of the accident. Caroline stays behind to comfort the injured man, and administers the medicine brought by her sister. The man is saved, and Caroline and Olivia both self-deprecatingly put this down to the actions of the other. Upbraiding Julia for her accusation that the twins lacked sensibility, Lady Grey asserts that true sensibility 38 39 40 41 42 43

Ibid., 2: 192. Ibid., 2: 212. Ibid., 2: 215. Ibid., 2: 216. Ibid., 2: 227. Ibid., 2: 252–3.

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inspires action. Unable to comprehend the union of feminine feeling with philosophy, Mr Axiom attributes her words to Hume, and Mr Puzzledorf to his own writing – they cannot place it in the male tradition, Hamilton implies, because it is, like her own philosophy, inspired by feeling for ‘the doctrines and examples of Jesus Christ and his Apostles’.44 By showing Olivia’s actions after the accident to be as essential and commendable as Caroline’s, Hamilton seems to encode sympathy for Wollstonecraft’s perspective as she presents an alternative female philosophy based on devotional feeling. Mellor thus observes that ‘Hamilton’s evocation of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1796, in the figure of Miss Ardent, is presented as a viable alternative to the female behavior practiced by Charlotte Percy and Lady Grey.’45 Miss Ardent is certainly admirable in the extent of her knowledge, which, as Mellor points out, reflects that of Hamilton in her expertise on Indian history, but she is equally presented, through the eyes of Dr Severan and Zāārmilla, as ‘masculine’ and therefore unamiable.46 Because these dichotomous views are filtered through two differently prejudiced male perspectives, Hamilton’s satire demands that the reader question how such women are, and how they ought really to be seen. Since Lady Grey is depicted in entirely glowing terms, without the ambivalence that surrounds Miss Ardent’s character, the Wollstonecraftian model of female behaviour is not presented as a truly viable subject position – it is simply too progressive to be accommodated. However, since Caroline and Olivia are equally indispensable in the episode of the carriage accident, Hamilton communicates a hopefulness that future generations of daughters will find a way to blend reason and sensibility for the benefit of society. She wishes them, in other words, to be Lady Greys and Miss Ardents, embodying her own philosophy as well incorporating elements of Wollstonecraftian heroism. In a move that reveals her relative liberalism, as well as a commitment to Lockean philosophy, Hamilton shapes a feminist philosophical debate in an accessible form for women readers, and provides a thought experiment for this in her study of the twins. By placing the episode of the sparrows directly prior to this story, Hamilton has divergent applications of associationist doctrine compete. In showing how the circumstances of Julia, Caroline and Olivia’s different educations shape their responses to the disaster, Hamilton approaches the psychological causation narrative of Hays and Godwin, while at the same time making clear the potential for this psychology to be taken to extremes. She shows women applying philosophy to true utility 44 45 46

Ibid., 2: 259. Mellor, ‘Romantic Orientalism Begins at Home’, 161. Hamilton, Hindoo Rajah, 2: 199.

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through education, where Sceptic’s madcap plan succeeds only in producing a bad smell.

Memoirs of Modern Philosophers In an anonymous review of Hindoo Rajah, Hays took issue with Hamilton’s representation of the ‘long-suffering hindoos’ as experiencing a ‘happy change’ through British colonial control: ‘these injured people’, she declares, ‘have merely changed masters, and one species of oppression for another’.47 Hays firmly asserts that the ‘interference of foreign states in the internal government of nations is generally equivocal in its motives, and always mischievous in its tendency’, and identifies the problem of partiality that threatens to undermine the novel’s stance on prejudice: Hamilton’s ‘compliments’ to Hastings, Hays writes, ‘will be adjudged by the reader, either as just, or the grateful language of private obligation or friendship’. Though acknowledging that the ‘production manifests a cultivated understanding and benevolent affections’, Hays further accuses Hamilton of partisanship in her take on philosophical culture (‘Had the design of these volumes been less evidently systematic, they would have been more generally interesting’), and contends that ‘little knowledge and great assumption are manifested’ in Hamilton’s ‘illiberal … attack upon moral philosophy and metaphysical inquiry’. As is well known, the authorship of the review, which Hays initially denied but eventually admitted to, occasioned a furious letter from Hamilton, and a more public dressing-down in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers.48 Where the parody of philosophy in Hindoo Rajah is general, Modern Philosophers is cuttingly direct. It follows three female protagonists: Julia Delmond, whose unregulated sensibility leads to her seduction by the scheming and false New Philosopher, Vallaton; Harriet Orwell, a paragon of female virtue and Christian rectitude; and Bridgetina Botherim, a ruthless caricature of Mary Hays. The effectiveness, as well as the cruelty, of Hamilton’s attack on her erstwhile friend hinges on how she genders the issue

47

48

Mary Hays (?), ‘Review of “Letters of a Hindoo Rajah”’, The Analytical Review (October 1796), 429–31. Authorship attributed by Marilyn Brooks in Hays, The Correspondence (1779–1843) of Mary Hays, British Novelist, ed. Marilyn Brooks (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004), n. 85, 313. Hamilton’s letter to Hays is reproduced in Brooks (ed.), The Correspondence (1779–1843) of Mary Hays, British Novelist, ed. Brooks, 313–15. For further discussion, see Walker, Mary Hays (1759–1843), 173–6; and Perkins, Women Writers and the Edinburgh Enlightenment, 87–9.

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of abstract philosophy. Against Bridgetina’s distaste for domestic work, Harriet insists, I do not think that there is any thing either slavish or disagreeable in the task [of caring for one’s family]: nor do I think a woman’s energies, as you call them, can possibly be better employed. Surely the performance of the duties that are annexed to our situation, can never be deemed mean or ignoble? For my share, I always feel exalted from the consciousness of being useful.49

Echoing Barbauld’s advertisement to Lessons, Hamilton has what De Ritter describes as ‘an expansive understanding of the domestic sphere’;50 she, like Barbauld, insists that the care of young children is ‘neither undignified nor confined’.51 Through this manoeuvre, Hamilton implies that philosophy of mind is not only safe ground for women, but in fact fits more easily with women’s domestic roles than it does with the views of radicals such as Hays. To put it simply, associationism belongs for Hamilton on the side of the pragmatic woman and her enlightened domesticity. Like Hays, she sees women’s education as necessary to their individual well-being, but unlike Hays, she contextualises this within community, rather than what she sees as an abstract notion of society: ‘a well-informed mind, exerting its powers to promote the happiness and comfort of those within the reach of its exertions, might be little less usefully employed than in forming speculations upon general utility’.52 Nevertheless, Hamilton has more in common with Hays than may at first appear. Both Hamilton’s Harriet Orwell and Hays’ Emma Courtney marry men in the medical profession, and there is a hint of agreement between them in Emma’s care of the dying Augustus Harley and Harriet’s care of the stricken Julia. However, whereas Emma voices a regret that she is debarred from the medical profession, Harriet aligns the physical care of others with domesticity. Hamilton makes clear that it is she, rather than Henry Sydney, who provides the greater part of Julia’s care, appearing more adept in this role, which might suggest that Hamilton too saw women’s exclusion from the profession as wasteful. Her use of narrative frames also resembles that of 49 50

51 52

Hamilton, Modern Philosophers, 102. De Ritter, ‘Female Philosophers and the Comprehensive View: Elizabeth Hamilton’s “Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education”’, European Romantic Review 23, no. 6 (2012), 698. Hamilton, Elementary Principles, 1: 2. Hamilton, Modern Philosophers, 180.

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Hays: at the start of the novel, the fictional reviewer of Modern Philosophers writes to its editor, who had ‘discovered’ the manuscript. Distancing herself from the narrative by two removes, perhaps partially as a dig at what she perceived as the cowardice of Hays’ anonymous review of Hindoo Rajah and subsequent denial of its authorship, Hamilton’s fictional reviewer writes that ‘the character of Bridgetina, appears … as an excellent antidote to the poison; calculated to make an impression upon those whom serious disquisitions would have been addressed in vain’.53 By offering her philosophy in the feminised form of the novel – the same vehicle chosen by both Hays and Godwin – Hamilton, as a reviewer in the Anti-Jacobin Review concurs, uses ‘the same means by which the poison is offered … the best by which their antidote may be rendered efficacious’.54 We have seen that More consciously presented her writing as an antidote to poison, but Hamilton’s invocation of this trope seems to satirise the condescension of such a view; her readers, presumably, would be astute enough to recognise Bridgetina’s characterisation as more absurd than dangerous. Hamilton also adopts an associationist narrative of early impressions, habits and consequences that coincides with the necessitarian rhetoric of both Hays and Godwin. This is turned against the New Philosophers, but, as Eleanor Ty argues, parody also complicates Modern Philosophers, which ‘perches precariously between dependence and independence, between mockery and admiration of the parent texts and their philosophies’.55 But, crucially, the parody also opens a sure and stable space for her own philosophical vision: a middle way that borrows insights into the human mind from Godwin and others, and applies these to the matter of living while maintaining the overarching importance of Christianity as moral guide. To engage with Ty’s term directly, it is not only Godwinian philosophy that is ‘refunctioned’ in Hamilton’s text, but philosophy as a whole; Hamilton seeks to build a new model for female philosophy. Whatever Hamilton thought of Godwin, she certainly did not think women should be dissuaded from reading his work. Unlike her treatment of Hays, whose language she mostly approximates, she directly references Godwin’s Political Justice in footnotes. The fictional reviewer even praises Godwin, while providing a rubric for the assessment of his opinions: To impute evil intention to the author of every speculative opinion that has an evil tendency, is equally illiberal and unjust; but to expose 53 54 55

Ibid., 37. Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine 7 (September 1800), 39–46. Ty, ‘Female Philosophy Refunctioned’, 118–19.

176 Material Enlightenment that tendency to the unsuspicious, is an office of charity, not only innocent, but meritorious. From the use that is made by Vallaton of some of the opinions promulgated in Mr. Godwin’s Political Justice, it appears to me to have been the intention of your author not to pass an indiscriminate censure on that ingenuous, and in many parts admirable, performance, but to expose the dangerous tendency of those parts of his theory which might, by a bad man, be converted into an engine of mischief, and be made the means of ensnaring innocence and virtue.56

Hamilton again defends herself from accusations of prejudice, indicating her liberal attitude towards radical philosophy while pointing to its potential for misuse. As in Elementary Principles, she draws on a range of perspectives from diverse political and religious sources: Priestleyan ‘habitual devotion’ is also occasionally discernible in Modern Philosophers, appearing, unsurprisingly, in a far more favourable light than Godwinianism. The narrator describes the Dissenting minister Dr Sydney ‘contemplating the beauty of a tree in full blossom’ and ‘expatiating on the charms of nature… as the association of his ideas led “from Nature up to Nature’s GOD”’.57 Sydney closely echoes Priestley and Barbauld again when he writes to his son: ‘the study of Nature leads us up to Nature’s GOD. Thus does the material world itself give evidence of the probability of a revelation.’58 When Harriet counsels Julia on the benefits of religious devotion, she entreats her to ‘Call it not enthusiasm … a constant reference to the Divine will, and an habit of modelling to it our thoughts and actions, cannot fail of having the happiest influence upon our conduct.’59 The theory of association, then, is brought back in line with Christian belief, but we shall see that this has consequences for gender beyond the ‘conduct’ of women.

Memory and the body In contrast to Harriet’s devotional ingenuousness, Bridgetina constantly parrots extracts of Godwin’s Political Justice, and in doing so appears incapable of original thought. Harriet reflects on Bridgetina’s ability to quote from memory:

56 57 58 59

Hamilton, Modern Philosophers, 35–6. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 312. Ibid., 164.

Elizabeth Hamilton’s domestic philosophy 177 Memory, though an original faculty, is capable of improvement. It will be strong in proportion to the strength of the impression made upon it, and the impression most frequently recurring will of course become the strongest. Thus it happens, that trifling people are found only to remember trifles; that the vain and the selfish can so well recollect every minutiae of every circumstance in which they were themselves particularly concerned; and that even among those who pique themselves on superior taste, so many are found capable of retaining the exact words of a well-sounding author, while to the few is confined the more estimable power of impressing the sense and substance in the mind.60

Again, Hamilton appropriates associationist philosophy, but memory, while fundamental to that theory, is double-edged. As Margaret Doody has argued, this was the case for Locke too, and she provides a compelling discussion of the troubling gendered and class-based implications of both overactive and deficient memories in his work and beyond.61 Indeed, Bridgetina’s imbecility recalls Locke’s anxiety over ‘words without ideas’, and Harriet’s ability to argue from common sense and experience contrasts with Bridgetina’s unthinking regurgitation of passages of Political Justice learnt by rote. In Hamilton’s book, this not only acts to demonstrate the propriety of women’s study of philosophy, but also the superiority of the material science of mind over metaphysical speculation. Hamilton herself admitted to having a poor memory. In a letter of 1801, she writes that ‘my poor brains have been of late so completely fused in the furnace of metaphysics, that they have become a complete calx. I have been obliged, in pursuit of hints, to wade through volumes: keeping neither common-place book nor memorandum, have been forced to stupefy myself in search of passages in my memory, while every trace of the place in which I had found them was lost.’62 Even in seeming to downplay her abilities, Hamilton demonstrates her scientific knowledge, using a chemical analogy to suggest the substance of her intellect, albeit in the stupefaction of memory. Hamilton believes that those who do not pay proper attention to sensory perceptions do not build strong memories, and thus live only in the here and now. Doody’s argument that ‘Locke makes the irrational, affectional

60 61

62

Ibid., 166–7. See Margaret Doody, ‘“A Good Memory is Unpardonable”: Self, Love, and the Irrational Irritation of Memory’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 14, no. 1 (2001), 67–94. Hamilton to Hector McNeill, in Memoirs, ed. Benger, 2: 11.

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memory feminine’63 is particularly useful as a means of understanding this because it helps to illuminate an important departure from Lockeanism in Hamilton’s novel. I want to suggest that what Doody terms ‘female or matrilineal unwritten memory – familial or affectional memory’ is inextricably bound up with ‘sensible objects’ in this discourse. This is apparent in the passage Doody examines from Locke, which pathologises women’s long-lasting grief over the death of their children. Perhaps with material practices of memorialisation in mind, Locke writes that ‘Till time has by disuse separated the sense of that Enjoyment and its loss from the Idea of the Child returning to her Memory, all Representations, though never so reasonable, are in vain… [women] spend their lives in mourning, and carry an incurable Sorrow to their Graves.’64 Because memory is gendered by such claims, Bridgetina’s failure to read Henry Sydney’s emotions can be read as a failure of sense perception and hence also the feminine affective memory described by Doody. Hamilton’s Modern Philosophers, like her Elementary Principles, explores what philosophical and scientific discourse on body and mind means specifically for women. Her insistence on the domestic application of ideas from such discourse does not entail a belief, however, that women should not be confined to drudgery – indeed, Bridgetina only ever appears intelligent when placed in contrast to her mother, who does little but wait on her feckless daughter. Neither, though, can women become useful through abstract philosophy alone. It is not that Hamilton disagrees with Hays on the effects of women’s subjection and the limitations of their education; far from it, she seeks a viable feminist alternative to Hays’ misapplication of philosophy, what Edgeworth called her ‘middle path’. In Hamilton’s writing, this path involves a close attention to physical circumstances, which in turn supports affective memory. Bridgetina’s memory, in this sense, is gendered masculine. Whereas in Doody’s account memory determines civic and psychological integrity, Bridgetina’s genius for memorisation acts to eclipse the authentic self: just as those who do not remember at all are void of ideas and incapable of reflection, those who remember too precisely, in regard to texts especially, leave no room for individual reflection. Ty is right, then, in stating that Modern Philosophers ‘as a whole celebrates rather than condemns the power of woman’s capacity for emotion, and the expression of this feeling’;65 indeed, the crucial point of Hamilton’s burlesque is that Bridgetina’s affectional capacity has been warped by supposedly masculine 63 64 65

Doody, ‘A Good Memory is Unpardonable’, 71–2. Locke, Human Understanding, 399. Ty, ‘Female Philosophy Refunctioned’, 125.

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modes of thinking. Her rote learning would have been easily distinguishable from intellectual brilliance by readers, and her friends being momentarily duped by her parroting is comedic. Furthermore, as Ty points out, although the book replicates Hays’ ideas through parody, it distorts them while providing close approximations of her Wollstonecraftian complaints about the subjection of women. Bridgetina’s limited education thus paradoxically reinforces the premises of Hays’ argument, though not the conclusion; they agree, at least, that women’s education is deficient, but disagree on the best way to go about rectifying this. Real learning, Hamilton suggests, involves the social affections as they functioned within the wider domestic economy. Accordingly, women’s influence relies on their ability to communicate linguistically and affectively with others. Bridgetina’s conversation frequently baffles her friends; she has not developed a true understanding of the mind and the social role of familiar conversation, and is unable to persuade because she merely repeats what she has read without applying it to particulars. As Grogan observes, Hamilton ‘suggests … that the reader and she share a common nationality characterized by specific codes of conduct, behaviour and language competence’.66 In her argument against Julia’s necessitarian stance on remorse, Harriet claims that she is ‘not qualified to argue from books, [so is] under the necessity of appealing to [her] feelings’. She asks Julia to ‘consult these, … they will declare themselves of a different party from your favourite authors’.67 Harriet succeeds in making a lasting ‘impression’ on Julia’s mind, and she determines to confess her relationship with Vallaton to her father. This has an immediate physical effect on the convalescent Julia: ‘Not sooner had this resolution taken possession of her mind, than she found herself restored to tranquillity. Vivacity once more sparkled in her eyes, and the elastic spirits of youth recovering their tone, bid defiance to the puny evil of confinement.’68 Such embodiment of mental states is also apparent in the death of Julia’s father, when Maria Sydney reports to her brother that ‘In proportion as he becomes weaker, the more powerful emotions subside.’69 Hamilton shares with Hays, then, the same underlying nerve-based rhetoric, with, however, an important difference: Hamilton detaches embodied psychology from romantic love. When Henry is recovering from a gunshot wound to his arm, his physical frailty causes a loss of interest in Harriet, with whom he is in 66 67 68 69

Grogan, Politics and Genre, 59. Hamilton, Modern Philosophers, 167. Ibid., 168. Ibid., 292.

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love: ‘No sooner did returning health begin to re-brace the unstrung nerves, and re-invigorate the feeble frame, than the mind reverted to the objects of his former interest; and though (contrary to the usual practice of lovers in similar circumstances) he had not during his delirium once mentioned the name of Harriet, her image now reassumed its wonted place in his breast.’70 Significantly, Henry’s love for Harriet depends on the health of his body. This at once reaffirms the mind–body relation, while at the same time suggesting Hamilton’s resistance towards the narrative potential of disordered nervousness; whereas sickness enables the disclosure of romantic love in Emma Courtney, in Modern Philosophers romantic love is a social matter – as in More’s Cœlebs, it is associational in that it is solidified and acted upon through consultation with various members of a community or network, rather than explored through an individualistic, introspective rendering of nervous impulses. Divested of sexual associations in this way, Henry’s love for Harriet appears in marked contrast to the distempered ‘nervous’ passion of Hays’ Augustus Harley. Hamilton parodies Hays’ use of this rhetoric, as Bridgetina closely echoes Emma Courtney’s introduction to her necessitarian memoir (and Hays’ overuse of punctuation): ‘The history of my sensations are equally interesting and instructive. You will see there, how sensation generates interest, interest generates passions, passions generate powers; and sensations, passions, and powers, all working together, produce associations, and habits, and ideas, and sensibilities.’71 Taking aim at the Jacobin novel’s fixation with causes and necessity, Hamilton has Bridgetina continue to relate her ‘history’ after ‘stretching her craggy neck, wiping the rheum from her eyes, and fixing them on the sharp point of her turned-up nose’: The remoter causes of those associations which formed the texture of my character, might, I know, very probably be traced to some transaction in the seraglio of the Great Mogul, or to some spirited and noble enterprise of the Cham of Tartary; but as the investigation would be tedious, and, for want of proper data, perhaps impracticable, I shall not go beyond my birth, but content myself with arranging under seven heads (I love to methodise) the seven generating causes of the energies which stamp my individuality, observing, that the knowledge of mind is alone to be attained.72

70 71 72

Ibid., 334. Ibid., 174. Ibid.

Elizabeth Hamilton’s domestic philosophy 181

While professing to trace psychological ‘causes’ outside the self, Bridgetina’s philosophy is inescapably individualistic, comically and unkindly embodied in the focus of her eyes on the end of her own nose. As De Ritter argues, ‘Bridgetina’s squint functions as a physical manifestation of the perceptual distortion that ensues when individuals become concerned with abstract theory, rather than practical application.’73 It also cruelly perpetuates the notion that Hays was physically unattractive; Hamilton objectifies Hays by making her ‘a thing, ugly and petticoated’, just as Coleridge had. As Ty notes, ‘Hamilton adopts a somewhat masculine means of controlling what society sees as a disruptive female force’ but the ‘parodic version of Hays’s Emma Courtney, unlike its original, is non-threatening to the patriarchal order, precisely because she is so comic … The potentially disturbing force is thereby contained and neutralized.’74 At the same time, Hamilton exploits and perpetuates the association of the New Philosophy with the French and their supposed sexual libertinism. Sexual desire, she implies, is the real foundation of the philosophies of both Bridgetina and Vallaton – and at the crisis of the book, he tempts Julia to London by speaking French. Though the danger is Gallic, it is at risk of becoming domestic. Although she distrusts the distempered introversion of progressives like Hays and Godwin, Hamilton nevertheless considers the study of one’s own consciousness, observations and experiences to be the test of philosophical truths. As Janice Farrar Thaddeus asserts, ‘Rigorously, Hamilton returned to the infinite variety of reality, and generalized from what she found there.’75 This is inverted in Modern Philosophers as philosophical speculation disfigures the body. Throughout the novel, Bridgetina’s embodiment is most forcefully asserted at moments when she is particularly insistent in her attempts to transcend the physical in pursuit of Henry Sydney. This has the effect of comically deflating her philosophy, as well as her apparently ‘rational regard’ for Henry. In a particularly humiliating episode, Bridgetina’s rapturous soliloquy on what she mistakenly believes is a proof of Henry’s love for her is interrupted by a drove of pigs, which surround and terrify her until ‘a violent push from a huge untoward beast laid her prostrate on the ground’.76 As Gilmartin notes, such a ‘comic lapse into self-communion is a typical feature of anti-Jacobin narrative, and so too is the rude collision with the material world that abruptly brings it to an end’.77 This debasement 73 74 75 76 77

De Ritter, ‘Female Philosophers and the Comprehensive View’, 692. Ty, ‘Female Philosophy Refunctioned’, 119. Thaddeus, ‘Elizabeth Hamilton’s Domestic Politics’, 275. Hamilton, Modern Philosophers, 158. Gilmartin, Writing Against Revolution, 155–6.

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is particularly striking because it is closely preceded by a discussion during which Bridgetina congratulates Vallaton on his having broken an arm: I cannot but congratulate you … on the glorious opportunity you now enjoy of proving the omnipotence of mind over matter. What is pain to those who resolve not to feel it? Physical causes sink into nothing, when compared with those that are moral. Happy had it been for the world if not only your arm, but every bone in your body had been broken, so that it had been the means of furnishing mankind with a proof of the perfectibility of philosophical energy!78

Unable to escape the base materiality of the body, Bridgetina’s philosophy literally falls on its face. More importantly, this is a deliberate misreading of Hays’ materialist philosophy and conflation with Godwin’s idealism. Contrary to the conflation of Hays’ thought with Godwin’s in twentiethcentury scholarship,79 Godwin had distanced himself from materialism in Political Justice by reasserting the ‘omnipotence of mind’. Unlike Bridgetina, Hays certainly did not concur with him in this respect. While Hays’ Emma Courtney is very liberally interspersed with philosophical quotations, it is Helvétius, not Godwin, whom she cites most frequently. It is unlikely that this would have escaped any serious reader (let alone Hamilton, who demonstrates a keen understanding of the materialist debate) and this omission cannot, therefore, be put down to a straightforward misunderstanding of Hays’ philosophical position, even taking into account her professedly poor memory. Rather, Hamilton makes a conscious decision to represent Hays/ Bridgetina as a ‘disciple of Godwin’. As I have suggested, Hamilton’s attitude towards the philosophy of mind is by no means straightforward; she is no anti-materialist, but in fact draws on certain elements of materialist thinking. Seen in this light, her refusal to engage with Hays on her own terms can be most coherently understood as part of an effort to rehabilitate sensebased psychology. Hamilton appears to write unequivocally against Hays on sexual distinctions but in Modern Philosophers, Henry Sydney defends Wollstonecraft’s critique of Rousseau: The inconsistency and folly of his system … was, perhaps, never better exposed than in the very ingenuous publication which takes the Rights

78 79

Hamilton, Modern Philosophers, 154. Adams, ‘Mary Hays, Disciple of William Godwin’.

Elizabeth Hamilton’s domestic philosophy 183 of Women for its title. Pity that the very sensible authoress has sometimes permitted her zeal to hurry her into expressions which have raised a prejudice against the whole. To superficial readers it appears her intention to unsex women entirely. But—.

At this point, Bridgetina interrupts, ‘And why should there be any distinction of sex?’80 Hamilton seems to suggest that Hays obstructs the correct understanding of her mentor and friend. As Grogan notes, Mary Wollstonecraft also meditated on Locke and Hartley, and included a chapter on the association of ideas in her second Vindication. Grogan implies that Hamilton needed to disassociate herself to an extent from Wollstonecraft in favour of Stewart, of whom she writes ‘prudent women educationalists found another authority, whose name conveyed both personal respectability and philosophical orthodoxy’.81 I agree that Hamilton certainly holds Wollstonecraft at a distance (for instance by having her male characters voice her attitude toward the feminist), but she does not seek to disassociate herself from Wollstonecraft entirely; indeed, she seems to imagine an amalgamation of their perspectives. Since she also draws on Priestley, Hamilton engages in an appropriation of associationist psychology’s feminist potential; detaching it from Hays’ approach, she forms a more politically and religiously orthodox model, but one which consciously incorporates ideas from opposing camps. Hamilton provides several female characters as paragons of her domestic politics, which are to varying extents self-modelled. The unmarried Miss Fielding in Modern Philosophers, for instance, instructs and improves the young, and in order to ‘raise a little fund for charity … composed several little treatises, chiefly intended for the benefit of her own sex, … calculated to restore that intellectual vigour which the whole course of their present mode of education tends so effectually to destroy’.82 As in Barbauld’s Lessons, the word ‘little’ here both belies and enables its political scope and ambition. In comparison to the more straightforwardly conservative novels of Jane West, Hamilton’s narrative gives greater scope to minute psychological events. Marilyn Butler writes that West’s The Advantages of Education (1793) makes no use of the experiential techniques of the sentimental novel. The plot poses contrasted characters in opposition to one another. 80 81 82

Hamilton, Modern Philosophers, 101. Rendall, ‘Elementary Principles of Education’, 6–7. Ibid., 2: 252.

184 Material Enlightenment The purpose bears no relation to Maria’s sensations – which actually in this context are suspect – but to the ethical courses open to her. No English novels before or since have been so unremittingly ethical as the conservative novels of the generation following 1790: no other novels, surely, have consciously rejected emotional experience as a proper field of interest.83

In her Letters to a Young Lady, West is dismissive of philosophy’s relevance for women: ‘Without wasting our time in a philosophical analysis of the peculiar construction of our intellects, or the physical organization of our bodies, we may rest assured that we are endowed with powers adequate to the design of our creation; namely, to be the helpmate of man.’84 While Hamilton’s Modern Philosophers, in common with West’s writing, resists to some extent the interiority – what Butler calls the ‘experientiality’ – that typifies both Emma Courtney and Caleb Williams, and indeed, Bridgetina’s sentimental introspection often provides the material for Hamilton’s burlesque, she does not share West’s anti-philosophical perspective. Reflecting on her plans for a memoir in a letter of 24 November 1801, Hamilton writes from personal experience on the philosophical utility of studies of character formation: a train of thought … has beguiled the tedium of two sleepless nights, and … has led me back through all the scenes of my past life; – a life which appears too void of incident and adventure, that to have conceived the idea of leaving a sketch of it behind me, may seem ridiculous. I am, however, convinced, that to my own sex at least it might convey instruction; nor is an accurate account of the formation of those associations which form the character, beneath the attention of the philosopher.85

Echoing the introspective rhetoric of Wollstonecraft, Godwin and Hays, Hamilton again insists that women’s lives are a proper province for philosophy. Gary Kelly notes that Hamilton

83 84

85

Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 97. Jane West, Letters to a Young Lady, in which the Duties and Character of Women are Considered (London: Longman, 1806), 1: 39. Hamilton to Hector MacNeill, in Memoirs of the Late Mrs Elizabeth Hamilton, ed. Benger, 2: 17.

Elizabeth Hamilton’s domestic philosophy 185 uses elements conventionally associated with men’s genres, including satire, burlesque, the learned quasi-novel, the social survey, the Quixotic tradition, the roman-à-clef, and the philosophical dialogue, historically used to satire ‘false’ ideologies. In redeploying them against the attack of ‘modern philosophers’ on domestic women, Hamilton has to become something like the kind of ‘female philosopher’ she deplores.86

Similarly, Hamilton adopts a narrative structure that in some respects resembles those of her opponents in its focus on the importance of early education in the shaping of character, and on the formative potential (favourable or otherwise) of literature. Yet, she is careful to point out the way that the psychological narrative, in the hands of Jacobin novelists, is overwrought and rendered absurd giving the power of association too great a scope. Whereas the necessitarians Caleb Williams and Emma Courtney trace the origins of their psychology in the wrongs of society, the narrative trajectories of Hamilton’s novel begin and end with the domestic environment.

Pegs and Plato Responding in Elementary Principles to her fictional correspondent’s scepticism as to the power of associations, Hamilton argues that the influence of early associations on later life depends on their ‘frequent repetition’.87 By focusing on common, everyday occurrences, Hamilton guards against speculative applications of the philosophy of mind: ‘we need be under no apprehension concerning those slight and transient associations, to which, by a certain class of philosophers, so much has been attributed’.88 What Hamilton proposes instead amounts to a domestication of associationist psychology, and her expansive understanding of domesticity as ‘neither undignified nor confined’ casts this psychology as a matter of supreme public importance. As Harriet Guest observes, in Elementary Principles, Hamilton ‘attributes a degree of public and patriotic significance to women in their domestic role which depends on and yet exceeds the cherished modesty and privacy of domesticity’.89 86 87 88 89

Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 144. Hamilton, Elementary Principles, 1: 26. Ibid., 1: 26–7. Guest, Small Change, 325.

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Hamilton’s philosophical mode is distinctly domestic. In Elementary Principles, she uses knitting to demonstrate Hartley’s principle of automatic actions, whereby the attention is imperceptible but nevertheless focused. Hamilton jokes to her readers, ‘Should any grave philosopher deign to look into these pages, I will permit him to smile at this simple illustration, which he may, if he pleases, call, argumentum ad feminam; but, if it aid my design of exhibiting the power of attention, as essential in every voluntary operation of mind or body, it will fully answer the purpose for which I intended it.’90 On memory, too, Hamilton provides a domestic example: the greater the number of our ideas, the more materials will the laws of association have to operate upon in our minds. These ideas are like so many pegs, on which to hang the new ideas we receive. Where the pegs are weak, or few in number, little will be hung up, all will fall down into the abyss of forgetfulness. Now those whose memory is chiefly employed on objects of perception, are exactly in this predicament; there are no pegs in the minds of such whereon to hang their new ideas, but two, viz. time and place: these are the only associations which assist the memory of the vulgar.91

The mind’s ability to assimilate new ideas into an associative network depends on the capacity and strength of the memory, its ability to accommodate and hold onto the objects of perception it receives. In her note to this passage, Hamilton quips, As Plato had his cave in the mind, and Mr. Locke his dark room, I don’t see why I may not drive up a few pegs in it. Placed by my feeble hand, they can do no injury. Whereas, had an ancient philosopher made use of such a figure, the world might have gone by the ears, about their length and dimensions. —— See Berkeley and Hume upon Ideas.92

These passages help clarify Hamilton’s determined effort to write philosophy for women in an engaging and entertaining manner. Unlike More, she provides clear references to the works of relatively controversial philosophers, and seeks to ensure that potentially non-expert women could understand the ideas she wants to communicate. The materiality of her analogy recalls the ‘domestic Muse’ of Barbauld’s ‘Washing Day’ (published 90 91 92

Hamilton, Elementary Principles, 2: 158. Ibid., 2: 158–9. Ibid., 2: 158.

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1797), a poem which inscribes the physical movements involved in doing the household laundry (the ‘coarse check’d apron, with impatient hand / Twitch’d off when showers impend’, ‘All hands employed to wash, to rinse, to wring, / To fold, and starch, and clap, and iron, and plait’).93 While Barbauld acknowledges the drudgery of women’s domestic labour, the poem is also a celebration of the work, paying homage to wives and servants against the ‘sports of children and the toils of men’.94 ‘Washing Day’ also provides a remarkably sensational evocation of childhood memory. In a similar way, Hamilton is participating in and defending a domestic discourse shaped by women, and seeking to initiate a new philosophical tradition which could be readily incorporated into the matrilineal language of domestic practices. By using sensible objects, Hamilton addresses Lockean concerns about teaching words without ideas. She is careful, however, to avoid appearing to patronise her readers, and thus, unlike More, provides multiple references to philosophical works. While doubting that male philosophers will ‘deign’ to read her work, she adopts the strategic humility I discussed earlier, and mockingly invites accusations of ‘arguing ad feminam’. She encodes for her female readers a critique of masculine philosophy, and with a humour that belies her seriousness, demands a space for her own ideas. Guest indicates in her discussion of the shifting discourse on domesticity that exclusion from the specialisation of the professions could be framed variously as rendering women unsuited to public life, or as better fit for it because it enabled what Hamilton calls the ‘comprehensive view’.95 Narrowness of vision, which, as De Ritter shows, epitomises Hamilton’s burlesque of Hays, is symptomatic not of her adoption of the wrong kind of philosophy, but of a failure to implement philosophy properly, that is, to its most useful sphere. The greatest threat that the New Philosophy poses is that which it poses to domesticity. In Hamilton’s writing the domestic sphere is both the product and the foundation of female virtue and influence. Her satire pits domestic philosophy – the use of philosophy within and for the home – against speculative philosophy, which is damaging precisely because it has become detached from everyday life. For her, the only real utility of the philosophy of mind lies in its practical application in the home, because that is where minds are most effectively shaped; this environment, and the minds formed within it, are primarily shaped by women.

93 94 95

SPP, 144–7, lines 43–4 and 76–8. Ibid., line 84. Hamilton, Elementary Principles, 2: 377.

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Hamilton herself understands such knowledge as necessary to women’s ability to be the ‘directing counsel of parent or husband’,96 and draws on Stewart in this respect. As he writes: there are two opposite extremes into which men are apt to fall, in preparing themselves for the duties of active life. The one arises from habits of abstraction and generalisation carried to an excess; the other from a minute, an exclusive, and an unenlightened attention to the objects and events which happen to fall under their actual experience.97

Stewart’s associationist notion of common sense contains and is shaped by clearly gendered class distinctions, between ‘men from inferior walks of life’ and those of the professions.98 Of the faults of these two classes he continues, that ‘The one is the defect of a vigorous, an ambitious, and a comprehensive genius, improperly directed; the other, of an understanding, minute and circumscribed in its views, timid in its exertions, and formed for servile imitation.’99 The former defect is clearly that of the philosophers in Hindoo Rajah, and later, more scathingly, in Modern Philosophers. As Thaddeus states, this informs Hamilton’s critique of men: her ‘generalizations do not conform to theories like Godwin’s, male theories that are not rooted in the true complexities of life’.100 Conversely, women’s lack of speculative ambition means that their minds are often ‘useful … in a high degree, when confined to [their] proper sphere, but destined, by the hand that formed [them], to borrow [their] lights from another’. Eleanor Ty has pointed out that the absurdity of Bridgetina’s applications of philosophy underlines how ill-suited Godwinian theory was to everyday life and occurrences,101 highlighting the fact that neither Mr Myope nor Mr Sydney can provide a real solution for poverty. Indeed, the only successful character in this respect is Mrs Fielding. Like Stewart, Hamilton adopts a terminology of economics in comparing the management of a family to the government of a country. She writes that ‘A large family is a complicated machine’,102 and that ‘the direction of such a machine depends upon too comprehensive an arrangement of ideas, to be 96 97 98 99 100 101 102

Ibid., 2: 380. Dugald Stewart, Elements, 1: 230. Ibid., 1: 231. Ibid., 1: 232. Thaddeus, ‘Elizabeth Hamilton’s Domestic Politics’, 267. Eleanor Ty, ‘Female Philosophy Refunctioned’, 117. Hamilton, Elementary Principles, 2: 378.

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ever attained by an attention to particulars’. This must be achieved through ‘generalization’,103 that is, the ability to direct and apply abstract thought. She then conservatively reasserts that the proper sphere for female philosophy is ‘the management of a family, far from being an avocation of that mean and degrading nature, which, by some ill-advised advocates for the rights of our sex it has been injudiciously represented, calls forth all the faculties of the mind which have passed in review before us’.104 In a certain sense, then, Hamilton’s educational writing is itself speculative. She uses visual metaphors, as De Ritter shows, to examine philosophy, but she is also deeply concerned with how the act of seeing might be actively speculative in terms of its economic extension outwards. As a woman, the challenge for Hamilton was to ensure that she neither over-speculated, that is, placed too high a value on her work, nor under-speculated, and thus made no real gains. The philosophical speculation of her work thus has a scale of vision that was understood through, granted value from, and politicised by her grounding of the nation’s psychology in domestic economy. As Hamilton writes in a particularly illuminating section of Elementary Principles, Be not afraid, my good Friend, that I intend making speculative philosophers of your daughters. The duties of mankind in general, and of the sex in particular, are active; and an ever-wakeful attention to the minutiæ of which they are composed, is absolutely essential to their performance. Small coin is found necessary even in the richest states; without it the petit detail of transactions of the day could not be carried on. But man is not considered rich, whose stock consists of sixpences: though where his capital is of such a nature as renders it impossible to be converted into ready specie, his wealth is useless, and he may starve in the midst of plenty. Thus it is where the reasoning powers are so entirely occupied by general and extensive speculation to prevent an attention to the lesser, but more essential, concerns of common life. Where a habit of quick and accurate attention to surrounding objects has been established, there is little danger of the mind’s being absorbed by speculation, in such a manner as to incapacitate it for the performance of the active duties.105

The language of domestic economy in this passage, with its emphasis on the significance of ‘minutiae’, ‘petit detail’, ‘small coin’ and ‘attention to 103 104 105

Ibid., 2: 379. Ibid., 2: 379–80. Ibid., 2: 361–2.

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surrounding objects’, might recall Barbauld’s diminutions, and points towards Maria Edgeworth’s Lockean–Smithian moral economy, which we will come to in the next chapter. Claire Grogan comments on Hamilton’s knowledge of economics, noting that her ‘personal mathematical knowledge arose from running her uncle’s household for years, from her active participation in the intellectual circles of Edinburgh and in particular from personal communications with Professor Playfair, joint professor of Mathematics and Geology, at Edinburgh University’. Grogan argues that her ‘extremely practical application of mathematical knowledge … is intertwined with her use of autobiography or life writing to offer a model of economic awakening rather than sexual awakening’,106 as opposed to Hays. Hamilton’s associationism is fundamental to this training of feminist thought through domestic economy that diverges so radically from Hays’ sexual and idealist model. It is worth remembering that two of her most happy and ‘useful’ characters are Mrs Fielding and Mrs Mason – the former suggests Barbauld, the latter shares her name with the teacher in Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories. Neither of these characters is married – they, like Mrs Hannah More, have attained the prefix in other ways. As has recently been discussed by Rendall, Hamilton herself would later be involved in philanthropic work, standing on the female committee of a House of Industry established in 1801 by the Edinburgh Society for Encouraging the Industry and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor; Hamilton’s Exercises in Religious Knowledge (1809) was written for the industrial school and includes a description of it. She went on to stand on the committee of a Lancastrian school in Edinburgh, and pushed for further educational reform, following the system of Johann Pestalozzi, in her final work, Hints Addressed to the Patrons and Directors of Schools (1816).107 Hamilton continued to blend philosophy and Christianity in the experiential psychology she outlines in A Series of Popular Essays, Illustrative of Principles Essentially Connected with the Improvement of the Understanding, the Imagination, and the Heart (1813). The use of the word ‘popular’ in the book’s title is somewhat misleading: while reflecting her use of plain language, Hamilton’s aims go well beyond the popularisation of science. She hopes that, even when a ‘superficial acquaintance with other branches of science has become too common to confer distinction, the science of

106 107

Grogan, Politics and Genre, 86–7. Jane Rendall, ‘Female Improvers: Women, Philanthropy and Border Crossings’. Plenary lecture, 15th International Conference of the British Association for Romantic Studies, University of York, 28 July 2017.

Elizabeth Hamilton’s domestic philosophy 191

mind may be resorted to as a desideratum in polite education’.108 In order to achieve this ‘desirable revolution in public taste’, Hamilton argues, it is necessary to ‘divest the subject … of that metaphysical garb which proves so repulsive, and is so apt to excite horror and disgust’. This requires a total disengagement with the ‘rubbish’ of the past, rather than lengthy refutation, for a ‘minute description of the wild and visionary speculations which had formerly been contended for as truths’ will only cause ‘intolerable fatigue’ in the reader.109 Presumably, the ‘wild and visionary’ scheme was best dealt with by satire. Hamilton continues: Happily for us we have no occasion to disturb the ashes of any of the numerous theories respecting the mental phenomena which have passed into oblivion. But though these have proved to be ‘o’ the stuff that dreams are made of,’ their evident want of solidity affords no argument against applying to useful purposes knowledge of a more solid texture, derived from observation, and resting on facts familiar to our every day’s experience.

Despite this generic appeal to the familiar and everyday, Hamilton came under fire for presuming to claim ‘the honours of originality’ in Popular Essays.110 This accusation is related to the ‘propensity to magnify the idea of self’, which Hamilton modestly but plainly states ‘appears to me the source of all the malevolent and vindictive passions’.111 Unlike ‘selfishness’ and ‘selflove’, Hamilton theorises, ‘the propensity to magnify the idea of self ’ does not depend ‘on any particular direction of attention for its development’ – it is beyond the power of habitual associations and ‘is seen to act with equal energy in the wise and the ignorant, the timid and the bold’. This ‘selfish principle’ might lead women to aggrandise themselves with fashionable possessions, or lead the ‘puny master’ to identify himself with his ‘spacious mansion’;112 it is universal to human nature, ‘inherent in our hearts’. Hamilton’s critique of the will to power thus transcends gender, but the most damaging forms of the ‘selfish principle’ are unmistakably male-associated – the desire for dominance, conquest, and so on.113 108

109 110 111 112 113

Hamilton, A Series of Popular Essays, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Manners and Miller, 1813), 1: 5. Ibid., 1: 6. Critical Review 5 (March 1814), 236. Hamilton, Popular Essays, 1: xxviii. Ibid., 1: 290–3. Ibid., 2: 200.

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Like Smith, Hamilton develops her theory through a stadial history, considering the instantiation of the ‘selfish principle’ in ‘Asiatics’, those in a ‘savage state’, and ‘Hindoo tribes’,114 only to denounce the ‘selfish principle’ as the basis of ‘national prejudices’. As she herself states, whereas those who seek to ‘improve’ their country are neither ‘blind to defects, nor anxious to defend them’, the selfish ‘propensity… seeks not to improve, but to justify’, it feeds a ‘national bigotry’ which ‘begets national hatred to all countries with which the bigot is not identified’.115 Likewise, in religion, there are those for whom ‘zeal is not a zeal for establishing the dominion of God in the heart of man, but for establishing the dominion of their church or sect, over all other sects and churches’. ‘Intolerance’, Hamilton says, ‘is the natural fruit of this principle. It has not only no connexion with religion, but is so utterly incompatible with its spirit, that they are to each other as light and darkness.’116 Elsewhere in Popular Essays, Hamilton is acerbically critical of sectarian prejudice and other forms of male power. She insists on the importance of revealed religion over doctrine: ‘It is surely to be regretted, that philosophers have so seldom availed themselves of the assistance derived from Scripture, in the study of the human mind; – to be regretted, on the other hand, that those most conversant in Scripture have frequently, from despising the knowledge obtained by observation and experience, been led to form notions respecting the nature of man repugnant to all that experience and observation has justified.’117 Thus, religion reforms philosophy and vice versa. Metaphysical religiosity is, moreover, distinctly social, and it is in this respect that it is most useful, for it points towards a means of conquering the ‘selfish principle’: it makes the ‘benevolent affections maintain an habitual ascendancy in the breast’, and develops the ‘germ of affection’ in children.118 This psychology depends, like all ‘intellectual powers’, on the ‘master-key’ of the attention, but also on social circumstances – it requires ‘habitual sympathy’ with qualities in the minds of others.119 Sympathy is, Hamilton insists, ‘a principle of the mind’, and is therefore ‘susceptible of cultivation and improvement’, regardless of gender.120

114 115 116 117 118 119 120

Ibid., 1: 293–302. Ibid., 1: 411–12. Ibid., 2: 169. Ibid., 2: 201–2. Ibid., 2: 206; 2: 210. Ibid., 2: 207. Ibid., 2: 214–15.

Elizabeth Hamilton’s domestic philosophy 193

Rendall observes that Hamilton agrees with Wollstonecraft on ‘women’s potential for intellectual if not social or political equality’, but I see her position as somewhat stronger than this.121 According to Hamilton’s Christian philosophy, men should be educated to become more like women. She seems to have understood that association operates on a socio-cultural level to establish gender values. In Elementary Principles, she argues that ‘false associations’ have been made regarding women and religion: Meekness, gentleness, temperance and chastity; that command over the passions which is obtained by frequent self-denial; and that willingness to sacrifice every selfish wish, and the cultivation of the social and benevolent affections; are considered as female virtues, derogatory to the dignity of the manly character. Nay, further. By this unfortunate association, has religion itself come into disgrace; devotional sentiment is considered as a mere adjunct of female virtue, suitable to the weakness of the female mind, and for that reason, disgraceful to the superior wisdom of man.122

The feminisation of religion is damaging to society as a whole because it exempts men from acting selflessly. Hamilton’s answer to this is to use education to decouple or culturally disassociate Christianity from femininity, and thereby rehabilitate the Christian social values of ‘meekness, gentleness, temperance and chastity’. The ‘champions of sexual equality’ have not sought, as Hamilton believes they should, an ‘equality of moral worth … nor for an equality of rights with respect to the Divine favour’ but ‘for an equality of employments and avocations, founded upon the erroneous idea of a perfect similarity of powers’.123 Such feminism is, according to Hamilton, ‘Infected by the prejudices which associate ideas of honour and esteem with knowledge and science, independent of moral virtue’: it does nothing to challenge, and in fact reinforces power structures by further valorising the ‘short-lived glories of ambition’. Women who ‘desire for their sex an admission into the theatre of public life, and wish to qualify them for it by an education in every respect similar to that of men’ are fighting a losing battle: men ‘scoff at their pretences, and hold their presumption in abhorrence’. However,

121 122 123

Rendall, ‘“Elementary Principles of Education”’, 6. Hamilton, Elementary Principles, 1: 248–9. Ibid., 1: 252–3.

194 Material Enlightenment men do not consider, that these pretences, and that presumption, have been caught from the false notions of importance which they have themselves affixed to their own peculiar avocations. Taught from earliest infancy to arrogate to themselves a claim of inherent superiority, this idea attaches itself to all the studies and pursuits which custom has exclusively assigned them.124

Hamilton argues here for a recalibration of societal values: if children of both sexes were ‘taught to value themselves on no superiority but that of virtue’, then ‘man would become more worthy, and woman more respectable’. Highlighting the double standards of sexual morality, Hamilton further asserts that were the chauvinistic ‘prejudices’ of men ‘annihilated’, then the supposedly female ‘virtues of temperance and chastity would not in the mind of man be associated with ideas of contempt, as merely proper to be observed by the inferior part of the species; nor’, she continues, ‘would habits of licentiousness be considered as a light and venial evil, but regarded with the same horror which is happily still attached to female depravity’.125 Because her philosophy is linked to a domestic ideology (and to the works considered in this chapter we might add as a further example her 1808 novel The Cottagers of Glenburnie), Hamilton’s feminism could easily pass as conservative; yet her writings proffer innovative, covert feminist strategies for power, which build in part on the divisiveness of personal attack even as they appeal to union and impartiality. She is perhaps most useful to this study because of the way she conceptualises the science of mind as a comprehensive female philosophy; a domestic adaptation of embodied psychology that combines the religious, social and experiential. More work remains to be done on the correspondence between Hamilton and the Edgeworths, as well as Barbauld and Joanna Baillie, who Hamilton may have been drawing on in her use of the language of the passions, and who she consulted in the development of her theory of selfishness. All of this gives us a sense of the discursive field within which Hamilton understood herself to be working, and helps us understand Hamilton as weaving together material associations to produce something new. As her claims to originality in Elementary Principles suggest, what distinguishes Hamilton most radically from Hays is her reluctance to subscribe to any particular system, her consciousness of the dangers of investing too much in the words of others. This itself is a failing of female education, and merely adopting another male philosophy will

124 125

Ibid., 1: 253. Ibid., 1: 254.

Elizabeth Hamilton’s domestic philosophy 195

not counteract it, especially if the objects of that philosophy are prone to misappropriation by sexually opportunistic men. Hays’ philosophy is represented as disengaged from reality, and her uncritical acceptance of it as a symptom of her limited education. If we are to see the character of Emma Courtney as a fictionalisation of Hays’ frustration and desire for philosophical recognition, then Hamilton’s self-fashioning as a philosophess made the question of philosophical authority one of ‘simple [domestic] judgement’. As this chapter has indicated, however, Hamilton’s philosophy ultimately draws attention to her own blind spots.

Chapter 5

‘The spirit of industry’: Maria Edgeworth’s object lessons

A

dam Buck’s 1787 portrait of the Edgeworth family represents the home as a space of industrious Enlightenment. In its depiction of domestic life, it shows how the ‘experimental science’ of education developed in the decade following Honora Sneyd Edgeworth’s death (see Figure 6). The ‘relative equality’ between Maria and her father, the more passively benign figure of Elizabeth Sneyd Edgeworth, and the interaction between the children present a harmonious collective identity; the portrait epitomises ideals of intergenerational exchange, joint venture and benevolent patriarchy. As the family expanded, older siblings, including Maria, took a greater share of the responsibility for the education of the younger children; scholars have thus read the family portrait as exemplifying the conversational mode of knowledge transmission promoted in Practical Education and its associated narrative fictions.1 Certainly, the inquisitive faces of the children communicate the success of ‘mutual’ pedagogy in terms of both instruction and delight. For the purposes of the present study, however, the most important features in the portrait are its objects. The composition invites us to consider the document on the table as an entity in the family circle, drawing individuals together, perhaps even exhibiting agency as a participant in the spirited exchange between Richard Lovell and Maria.2 As the brightest part of the painting, it seems to emanate light, literally enlightening the family – including Elizabeth, who looks directly at it. A further object of interest is the terrestrial globe, which looms behind the adolescent Honora and frames her head, halo-like. Together with the document, it adds to the sense of Edgeworthstown House as a space that was populated by knowledge objects. It might also alert us to the ‘science’ of education’s geopolitical fields of reference. 1

2

Myers, ‘“Anecdotes from the Nursery”’, 244–9; Manly, Language, Custom and Nation, 140–2. For a description of the reading lessons at Edgeworthstown see Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 98–9.

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Figure 6. The Edgeworth Family by Adam Buck. Chalk, watercolour and pastel on paper, 1787.

The use of knowledge objects (including manuscripts, telescopes, mechanical toys, botanical specimens and aerial telegraphs) is both a fundamental concern and a defining component of Maria Edgeworth’s fiction. Indeed, the astonishing wealth of ‘things’ in Edgeworth’s oeuvre is such that almost countless stories might be told: of origination or invention, construction and deconstruction; of use/value and potentially treacherous effects.3 Considerable attention has already been paid to the materiality and materialism of Edgeworth’s writing.4 The influence of Richard Lovell and Lichfield society on her ‘Lunar mentality’ is firmly established and continues to be productive for research on predisciplinarity in the eighteenth-century arts 3

4

I am borrowing ‘Use / Value’ from a panel organised by Paul Keen, Kevin Gilmartin and Jonathan Sachs at the British Association for Romantic Studies annual conference, University of York, 2017. Catherine Gallagher considers Edgeworth’s application of political economy to literary production in the context of her management of the family finances and the business of books in Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995). On Edgeworth’s materialist philosophy, see Fiona Price, Revolutions in Taste, 1773–1818: Women Writers and the Aesthetics of Romanticism (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009).

Maria Edgeworth’s object lessons 199

and sciences.5 Scholarship on colonialism, slavery, empire and globalisation has shed further light on the objects of her industrious fiction.6 And, as Aileen Douglas’ very recent study of the materiality of writing shows, the Edgeworth archive continues to provide fascinating insights into the physical realities of Maria’s literary production and – crucially – the colonial pedagogies developed in Ireland by Richard Lovell Edgeworth and in India by Andrew Bell.7 This chapter traces the evolving literary–scientific practices at Edgeworthstown in the 1790s, showing how events in Ireland over the course of that decade impacted on the family’s collective work into the 1800s. It presents new findings to suggest that the industrious materialism Edgeworth developed in writing Practical Education was more proximate to her father’s political career than has hitherto been understood, and considers the role of industry and technology in Edgeworth’s fictions, focusing on ‘The Orphans’ (1800) and ‘The India Cabinet’, a mini-saga in the Continuation of Early Lessons (1814). While Richard Lovell’s prodigious talent for mechanical innovation has perhaps been overshadowed by the success stories of better-known Lunar associates,8 Maria was a key figure in the promotion of Lunar industry and its ideology. As we will see, however, these phenomena coexisted in uneasy peace with her philosophical objectives. Building on the themes of Chapter 2, I suggest that the fault lines inherent to ‘Practical Education’ persist and are widened by the politicisation of its developmental psychology. In my closing discussion, I examine some of the ways 5

6

7

8

James Chandler, ‘Edgeworth and the Lunar Enlightenment’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 45, no. 1 (14 October 2011), 87–104. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Malcolm Kelsall, ‘Civilization, Savagery and Ireland: Maria Edgeworth’s Tour in Connemara’, European Journal of English Studies 6, no. 2 (1 August 2002), 173–87; Fraser Easton, ‘Cosmopolitan Economy: Exchangeable Value and National Development in Adam Smith and Maria Edgeworth’, Studies in Romanticism 42, no. 1 (2003), 99–125; Sharon Murphy, ‘“The fate of empires depends on the education of youth”: Maria Edgeworth’s Writing for Children’, in Young Irelands: Studies in Children’s Literature, ed. Mary Shine Thompson (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011), 22–30; Dermot Ryan, Technologies of Empire: Writing, Imagination, and the Making of Imperial Network, 1750–1820 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013); Ashley L. Cohen, ‘Wage Slavery, Oriental Despotism, and Global Labor Management in Maria Edgeworth’s Popular Tales’, The Eighteenth Century 55, no. 2 (10 July 2014), 193–215. Aileen Douglas, Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 1690–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). For an account of RLE’s technological achievements, see Desmond Clarke, The Ingenious Mr Edgeworth (London: Oldbourne, 1965).

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Edgeworth seeks to resolve such metaphysical discord in her later novel, Helen (1834). More speculatively, this chapter asks what happens to genre and gender when we consider Edgeworth’s books themselves as psychotechnologies of Enlightenment.

‘The Orphans’ The stories in The Parent’s Assistant (1796), Edgeworth’s first published collection for children, materially enact – and in doing so, adjust – the values of Practical Education.9 According to Richard Lovell’s preface to the book, the aims of its story of ‘Lazy Lawrence’ were to ‘excite a spirit of industry’ while taking care to ‘proportion the reward to the exertion’; to show that ‘people feel cheerful and happy when they are employed’ and ‘to separate, as much as possible, the spirit of industry and avarice … lest we introduce Vice under the name of Virtue’.10 In the stories themselves, however, associationist discipline is moderated by sympathetic, Smithian ‘fellow-feeling’ for the child protagonists.11 In uniting Smith and Locke, stories such as ‘Lazy Lawrence’ centre on and seek to shape (in Kathryn Sutherland’s words) ‘sociable little capitalists’,12 who act industriously out of real, embodied feelings of love for their friends, both animal and human, to the benefit of family and wider community. The social imperative of the book is clear: as Sharon Murphy puts it, The Parent’s Assistant ‘manag[es] the textual and extra-textual child and parent… impressing upon parental readers that they will inevitably suffer if their children’s education is inappropriate or neglected’.13 But while Edgeworth seeks to ‘manage’ domestic education, she also speaks to child readers in a notably companionate voice, and strives to inhabit a child’s-eye view of the world that is both levelling in its effect and instructive for the 9

10

11 12

13

As Gallagher points out, this intertextuality applies across Edgeworth’s oeuvre: ‘The fictions, Maria Edgeworth continually stated, were to the treatises as particulars are to generalities, examples to precepts, illustrations to ideas, material signifiers to immaterial thoughts’. See Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, 273. Maria Edgeworth, The Parent’s Assistant, Part 1, 2nd Edition (London: J. Johnson, 1796), ix. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London, 1759), 5. Kathryn Sutherland, ‘Conversable Fictions’, in A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture, ed. Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 401. Sharon Murphy, ‘“The fate of empires depends on the education of youth”: Maria Edgeworth’s Writing for Children’, in Young Irelands: Studies in Children’s Literature, ed. Mary Shine Thompson (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011), 23.

Maria Edgeworth’s object lessons 201

book’s respective readerships. Moreover, while the title, like Trimmer’s The Teacher’s Assistant (1792), advertised its practical use and status as an active auxiliary to the parent, it should be noted that this was not Edgeworth’s choice: Richard Lovell ‘had sent the Parent’s Friend’ to the publisher, but ‘Mr. Johnson… degraded it into the Parent’s Assistant’, a title Edgeworth ‘dislike[d] particularly from association with an old book of arithmetic called the Tutor’s Assistant’14 Had the book carried its original title, which was presumably drawn from Arnaud Berquin’s L’Ami des Enfans (1782),15 it might have been viewed as gesturing towards the more radical and idealist notions of friendship that were current to the debates of the 1790s.16 Indeed, Edgeworth’s affectionate, entertaining and scientific letter to one of her young fans strongly suggests that she thought of children in enlarged terms of kinship: your letter not only pleased me but several of my brothers & sisters and my father & mother & aunt who were present when I read it. I received it at supper time and read it aloud & every body smiled & liked what I read. I read it again at breakfast next morning to some of my brothers & sisters who had been in bed at supper time, & they liked it – your ‘good Mamma’ told you very truly that you should write letters as you would speak to the persons to whom you were writing; you did so & therefore your letter was agreeable; we all think you are very fond of your Mother and that she is very kind to you; – are we mistaken? and we think the brother who took the trouble of copying your letter is a very good brother, and that you must be fond of him too, Are we mistaken? And we think you are a happy little boy since you have a good mother & a good brother, and a good friend, are we mistaken? –17 14

15 16

17

Helen Zimmern, Maria Edgeworth (London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1883), 29. Edgeworth refers to Francis Walkingame’s The Tutor’s Assistant: Being a Compendium of Arithmetic and a Complete Question Book, first published in 1751. I am grateful to Susan Manly for providing this suggestion. See Uglow, Lunar Men; Mee, Conversable Worlds; Katrin Berndt, Narrating Friendship and the British Novel, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Taylor and Francis, 2017); Jennifer Golightly, The Family, Marriage, and Radicalism in British Women’s Novels of the 1790s (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2012); Felicity James, Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth: Reading Friendship in the 1790s (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Emrys Jones, Friendship and Allegiance in Eighteenth-Century Literature (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). Maria Edgeworth to ‘My dear little boy’ (c. 1800). HM 28593, Maria Edgeworth MSS, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

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Edgeworth’s congenial and spirited address to the child adds to the sense of the letter as a material link or associative agent between homes. Awake to physical realities as she is committed to imparting knowledge, Edgeworth encourages her ‘dear little boy’ to embark on an imaginative journey between England and Ireland, assisted by an object lesson in geography: she instructs the child to ‘Take a map of Ireland and put it on the table before you. Now look for the county of Longford. It is just in the middle of the map, and now look in the middle of the county, and there you will see printed in little letters Edgeworthstown, and that is the place at which I live.’ The diminutive citizens of The Parent’s Assistant likewise occupy material–social worlds. As Butler states, the stories ‘manage to give the impression of being “placed” within a landscape, or inside a house’.18 Such realism, Butler suggests, is ‘largely a matter of enlisting the reader’s imaginative cooperation, for the information which Maria gives, although specific, is only fleetingly visual’. As in Barbauld’s works for children, Edgeworth focuses on the particular and everyday to enable the associative recognition of ‘things themselves’ in the mind of the child, but the emphasis in The Parent’s Assistant is on the practical use of those things rather than the sensations they give. Butler continues, Instead of a general view … the reader hears about the triangle of common land where the children like to play. He also knows how Susan and Jem earn every penny of their treasures. Indeed, it would usually be possible to name the exact sum in the pocket of any of Maria Edgeworth’s twelve-year-olds. Whatever is relevant to the immediate issue, and small sums of money are always relevant, it is in large, clear focus.19

Edgeworth is exact not only in the sum of the money her child characters possess but also in accounting for its provenance: each guinea, shilling and sixpence is tied to an action in a specific time and place. Equally legible, and at the core of the transactional narratives of the stories, is the moral psychology of the child. ‘The Orphans’, which first appeared in the 1800 edition of The Parent’s Assistant, tells of a family whose poor but ‘honest and industrious’ mother dies, leaving the children to fend for themselves.20 The ‘hard hearted’ agent 18 19 20

Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 162. Ibid., 162–3. Maria Edgeworth, The Parent’s Assistant; or, Stories for Children, 6 vols., Vol. 5 (London, 1800), 79.

Maria Edgeworth’s object lessons 203

of the absentee landowner on whose estate they live refuses to postpone the rent payment and evicts them. Rather than relying on the charity of their neighbours, the children set to work building a makeshift home in the ‘ruins of the old castle of Rosmore’,21 support themselves though ‘honest’ industry, and thereby earn the goodwill and assistance of the local gentry. However, the children’s salvation ultimately rests on the luck of having philanthropists close at hand, so that when, at the close of the story, the ‘industrious orphans’ are given a house ‘as a reward for their honesty’,22 the material circumstances of the preceding narrative might, for adult readers at least, offset its ‘moralising strain’. Edgeworth is aware of what she is about and is not uncritical of her class – for orphaned children should not have to rely on such luck. Furthermore, although Edgeworth’s didacticism may seem heavy-handed to modern-day readers, there is scope here for imagined camaraderie and imaginative recreation, if not quite for flights of the imagination, for example in sympathetic identification with abandoned children who come up against ‘hard hearted’ adults, or through familiarity with the self-directed, serious play of den building. The construction of the Irish gothic is also notable, both as an imaginative spur and as a link to the themes of Castle Rackrent, which was published in the same year. Though with differently aged audiences in mind, both national tales target the socio-economic degradation brought about by the neglectful upper classes and, more forcefully, the ‘middle-men’ who exploited and abused the poor in their stead.23 This intertextuality means that, in the building of a ‘castle in the air’ about orphans, Edgeworth at once offers children the imaginative escape of the adventure, if not the fairy-tale, and delivers for her adult readers a weighty and highly politicised social commentary. As a socio-economically ‘useful’ fiction, ‘The Orphans’, like More’s Tracts, provides practical suggestions for the alleviation of poverty through cottage industry: Mary makes her brother Edmund some ‘cloth shoes, with soles of platted hemp’, the ladies Isabelle and Caroline request a dozen pairs and sell them to their friends, encouraging Mary to make more for sale at ‘the Repository at Dublin’,24 and Edgeworth provides information on the materials and construction of the shoes, having herself (a footnote tells us) ‘seen a pair of shoes, such as here described, made in a few hours’.25 It is unlikely that Edgeworth expected the story to reach many working-class Irish 21 22 23 24 25

Ibid., 76–8. Ibid., 132. Edgeworth revisits this theme in The Absentee (1812). Ibid., 94–7. Ibid., 94.

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children: as in English charity schools, religious instruction and unpaid labour were the major constituents of curricula in the Charter Schools of Ireland.26 Nevertheless, ‘The Orphans’ delivers lessons in entrepreneurialism, co-operation and philanthropy – it was intended to be useful to all levels of society, and on either side of the Irish Sea. In addition to the promotion of Irish craft industry, Edgeworth uses footnotes to trade knowledge across borders. In the following example, the typography adds to the sense of a link being made between ‘word’ and ‘thing’: * Goody is not a word used in Ireland; Collyogh is the Irish appellation of an old woman: but as Collyogh might sound strangely to English ears, we have translated it by the word Goody. † What are in Ireland called moats, are, in England, called Danish mounts, or barrows. ‡ Near Kells, in Ireland, there is a round tower, which was in imminent danger of being pulled down by an old woman’s rooting at its foundation, in hopes of finding treasure.27

As in Castle Rackrent, Edgeworth uses annotation to draw and revise associations, and to challenge assumptions about the respective value of Irish and British languages and cultures. At the same time, Alex Howard points out, she exercises readers’ attention so that they become more industrious (and hence less prejudiced) readers.28 Building on the theory of attention put forward in Practical Education, her annotative writings might thus be seen as material interventions into the knowledge economy that bind Britain and Ireland together with the currency of ‘fact’, while preserving or newly inscribing cultural differences.29 It is ironic, then, that it should be 26

27 28

29

Protestant ‘Charter Schools’ were established in the 1730s in response to the increasing popularity of Catholic-taught ‘hedge schools’. For a comprehensive history, see Kenneth Milne, The Irish Charter Schools, 1730–1830 (Dublin: Four Courts, 1997). For an overview of the development of schools in Ireland prior to the National School system and a local history of schools in County Wicklow see Michael Seery, Education in Wicklow: From Parish Schools to National Schools (Dublin: Creathach Press, 2014). Ibid., 111. Alex Howard, ‘The Pains of Attention: Paratextual Reading in Practical Education and Castle Rackrent’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 69, no. 3 (1 December 2014), 293–318, doi:10.1525/ncl.2014.69.3.293. Howard builds usefully on Gary Kelly’s discussion of the ‘footnote novel’, which was ‘developed by women writers… to practise learned discourses and engage in political issues conventionally closed to them’. See Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 133. Edgeworth’s treatment of Anglo-Irish relations through the currency of fact might

Maria Edgeworth’s object lessons 205

the counter-rational bogey-woman, Goody Grope, who delivers the line: ‘It is all luck, all luck in this world… Think o’ the luck of these childer, that have found a pot of gold, and such great grand friends.’30 As Claire Connolly points out, Edgeworth’s Irish tales are ‘characterised by an engagement with objects that disfigure cultural patterns’.31 Her efforts to stabilise AngloIrish identity through the collection of vernacular language and her parodic reflections on that process will not be my primary focus here, but it remains essential to understand the objects of The Parent’s Assistant in the context of her experiences in Ireland over the course of the revolutionary 1790s. The family moved permanently to Ireland in 1782, with Richard Lovell resolved ‘to dedicate the remainder of [his] life to the improvement of [the] estate’.32 As Butler relates, his ‘first task’ was to make a thorough survey of every holding. To do this he rode out daily in the second half of the summer of 1782. He had to have an assistant to go with him on these expeditions, taking notes of what was said by him, and by the tenants; at home he also needed a secretary to keep his records and accounts. His wife was expecting her second baby in September, and his eldest son had left home. He therefore turned to the fourteen-year-old Maria, and it was she who … sat by his side with the rent book in March and September.33

As Butler points out, Maria was not only collecting information on the finances of the estate; she was also collecting information on the material circumstances and language of its working-class inhabitants. We have already seen how practices of collection were foundational to the identity building of Practical Education; the collection of ‘facts’ was equally essential to

30 31

32

33

count Jonathan Swift’s The Drapier’s Letters (1724–5), Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and the frontispiece to Swift’s Works (1735) among its forebears. See Seán Moore, ‘“Our Irish Copper-Farthen Dean”: Swift’s Drapier Letters, the “Forging” of a Modernist Anglo-Irish Literature, and the Atlantic World of Paper Credit’, Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural, and Historical Perspectives 2, no. 1 (April 2005), 65–92; and Gregory Lynall, ‘Swift’s Caricatures of Newton: “Taylor”, “Conjurer” and “Workman in the Mint”’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 28, no. 1 (1 March 2005), 19–32. Edgeworth, The Parent’s Assistant, 5: 130–1. Claire Connolly, A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790–1829 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 22. Memoirs of RLE, 2: 1. For a history of RLE’s innovations, see Charles John Thomas Carson, Technology and the Big House in Ireland, c. 1800–c. 1930 (Amherst, New York: Cambria Press, 2009). Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 87–8.

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economic improvement. Indeed, Practical Education compares ‘accumulating facts’ with ‘amassing riches’ (PE, 1: 346), if only to demonstrate that it is the use they are put to that really matters. Setting himself up in opposition to neglectful landowners, and critical of Protestant magistrates who meted out partisan justice on the Catholic poor, Richard Lovell saw the proper management of the tenant class as crucial to Ireland’s economic development and social coherence. As Butler relates, however, agrarian discontent became a growing concern in the early 1790s, sectarian division and violence was on the rise, and by 1795 ‘such a state of lawlessness prevailed in County Longford that extraordinary action was necessary’: that year, Richard Lovell brought government troops to Edgeworthstown.34 He also ‘presented to Lord Camden, then Lord Lieutenant’ a ‘memorial’ proposing that a system of aerial telegraphs be built in Ireland as a means of ‘quick and certain communication’ between province and metropolis. This was rebuffed: ‘His Excellency… did not think such an establishment necessary.’35 After standing (unsuccessfully) in a 1796 by-election, Richard Lovell again submitted his telegraphic plan to the government, this time meeting with greater interest. As a means of communication, ‘aerial’, ‘optical’ or ‘semaphore’ telegraphy was far swifter than road travel. For the transmission of military intelligence, it had an additional advantage: semaphore messages were decipherable only by those who possessed its ‘vocabulary’.36 Though Richard Lovell claims to have ‘practised telegraphic communication in the year 1767, long before it was ever attempted in France’, the use of the Chappe telegraph by the revolutionary government was undoubtedly his motivation for its revival. According to Maria’s continuation of Memoirs, Richard Lovell built a trial system in August 1794 ‘between Packenham Hall and Edgeworthstown’ – a month after Claude Chappe and his brothers completed their line between Paris and Lille.37 Two years later, with France and Britain at war and the French government in negotiations with United Irishmen, Richard Lovell was determined to see the scheme through. The second ‘memorial’ to the government was stylistically improved: ‘Aware of the natural antipathy, that public men feel to the sight of long memorials’, the redrafted plan ‘was

34 35 36

37

Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 115–16. Memoirs of RLE, 2: 160. Richard Lovell Edgeworth [and Maria Edgeworth], ‘An Essay on the Art of Conveying Secret and Swift Intelligence’, The Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy 6 (1797), 95–139. Memoirs of RLE, 159–60.

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made short enough, to give it a chance of being read’ (162). Maria provides a transcription of this document in Memoirs, adding that a letter of a single page accompanying this memorial … stated, that to establish a telegraphic corps of men sufficient to convey intelligence to every part of the kingdom where it should be necessary, stations tenable against a mob, and against musketry, might be effected, for the sum of six or seven thousand pounds: it was further observed, that, of course, there must be a considerable difference between a partial and a general plan of telegraphic communication; that Mr. Edgeworth was perfectly willing to pursue either, or to adopt, without reserve, any better plan, that government should approve. –38

The government initially approved a line of machines from Cork to Dublin, but in November 1796 they suddenly rescinded their support. The following month, a French fleet arrived off Bantry Bay in County Cork, accompanied by the United Irishman Theobald Wolfe Tone. The landing was abandoned but the attempt was a stark warning to the government, which responded with devastating brutality in the ‘dragooning of Ulster’.39 Nevertheless, the summer of 1798 saw widespread rebellion in the country and, for the thirtyyear-old Edgeworth, the very real threat of orphanhood.40

38

39

40

Ibid., 162. Compare the discussions of telegraphy and ‘universal language’ in Mary Fairclough, The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, and James W. Carey, ‘Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph’, in Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, ed. J. Carey, New York: Routledge, 2009, 201–30. Ulster was violently contested by the ultra-Protestant Peep o’ Day Boys and Catholic Defenders. During the ‘dragooning’, government-authorised, ultra-Protestant ‘yeomen’, including the notorious Orangemen, joined with the army to terrorise the Catholic populace and thereby overpower United Irish organisation in the region. See Jim Smyth and Nancy J. Curtin, eds., ‘The Magistracy and Counter-Revolution in Ulster, 1795–1798’, in Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Union: Ireland in the 1790s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 38–54. The military repression of the rebellion was particularly bloody and ruthless in its terrorisation of United Irish communities. The classic history of the rebellion is Thomas Pakenham, The Year of Liberty: The Great Irish Rebellion of 1798 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1969). On the risings in Wicklow and Wexford counties, see Dáire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong, eds., The Mighty Wave: The 1798 Rebellion in Wexford (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996); Daniel Gahan, The People’s Rising: The Great Wexford Rebellion of 1798 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan Ltd, 1995); and Daniel Gahan, Rebellion ! Ireland in 1798 (Dublin: O’Brien Press, Limited, 1997). On revolutionary activity after the rebellion, see James G. Patterson, In the Wake of the Great

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On 22 August 1798, a small French expedition successfully landed at Killala in County Mayo and advanced towards Dublin through County Longford. The Edgeworths now believed themselves in immediate danger: with French troops approaching the town came reports of Catholic tenants taking up arms.41 Richard Lovell had a corps of (Protestant and Catholic) yeomen but no weapons, and evacuated his family from the manor house, seeking protection at the town of Longford where an army garrison was stationed.42 At Longford, he ‘undertook, with fifty men… to defend the gaol’ and stayed there overnight, leaving his family at the inn. News of the French and rebel defeat came the following day, at which point things took an alarming turn. From a window at the inn, Edgeworth watched as a Protestant mob threatened to lynch her father, apparently in the belief that he was a French spy. Richard Lovell escaped – unscathed, but shocked and outraged. Memoirs states that on returning home he immediately dispatched ‘a memorial to the Lord Lieutenant, desiring to have a court martial held on the sergeant, who by haranguing the populace, had raised the mob at Longford’.43 The man – a yeoman who was not yet subscribed to the army – was eventually tried in a civil suit, where it emerged that he ‘was a mere ignorant enthusiast, who had been worked up to phrenzy by some, more designing than himself ’.44 Assessing the moral character and feelings of the accused, Richard Lovell decided that ‘the poor culprit, who was now ashamed and penitent, should not be punished’, and magnanimously if paternalistically forgave him.45 The additions to The Parent’s Assistant of 1800 suggest that the encroaching violence impacted deeply on Edgeworth’s literary objectives: along with her philanthropic literary treatment of orphans, there is the troubling presence of militia in ‘Simple Susan’46 and

41

42

43 44 45 46

Rebellion: Republicanism, Agrarianism and Banditry in Ireland after 1798 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). On the experiences of Irish women and their representation during the rebellion and its surrounding years, see Catriona Kennedy, ‘“What Can Women Give but Tears”: Gender, Politics and Irish National Identity in the 1790s’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of York, 2004). Memoirs of RLE suggests this was out of fear of Protestant attack rather than in support of the United Irish cause (2: 193–4). In her dramatic account of the escape, Maria tells of a soldier being seriously wounded by an exploding ammunition cart and of Elizabeth Sneyd Edgeworth’s heroism in going to the assistance of the man, giving him her carriage and riding back to her family, waiting for her at home. See Memoirs of RLE, 216–17. Memoirs of RLE, 233. Ibid., 256. Ibid., 257. Susan Manly reads ‘Simple Susan’ as ‘a narrative that reflects critically on middleclass attempts to control social inferiors, and that represents politically fraught

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the countering of the ‘spirit of revenge’ in ‘Forgive and Forget’. Indeed, the recurrence of the word ‘spirit’ in the terminology of The Parent’s Assistant hints towards a vital materialist understanding of energies that could easily turn from ‘industry’ to ‘phrenzy’.47

‘The Irish Education Bill’ The manuscript culture at Edgeworthstown brought the literary and political worlds together in distinctly material ways. Indeed, we get an early intimation of this in a letter from Richard Lovell to his friend Daniel Augustus Beaufort, where he refers to the Longford gaol episode thus: ‘We, that is to say Maria (which is always meant by we, when writing is in question) have notes taken during every part of the transaction – which are interesting & which she can make entertaining.’48 The projected pamphlet on the events at Longford (to be published in England) never came about; instead, the ‘science of education’ returned to the fore, reimagined as a non-violent means of social control. After Elizabeth Sneyd Edgeworth’s death in November 1797, Richard Lovell stood again for parliament, this time successfully.49 His most pressing concern was educational reform, and on 25 February 1799, he presented to the Parliament at Dublin Castle a report ‘from the Committee appointed to enquire into the State of the Education of the lower Order of

47

48

49

debates about common resources, common custom, and common land in a form readily accessible to child readers at the domestic fireside’. See Manly, ‘“Take a ‘poon, pig”: Property, Class, and Common Culture in Maria Edgeworth’s “Simple Susan”’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 37, no. 3 (17 August 2012), 307. For a discussion of eighteenth-century understandings of collective sympathy as vitally material communication, see Mary Fairclough, The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). RLE to DAB, 29 September 1798. MS 10166/7, Pos. 9027 (198), EPNLI. Transcribed in Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 139–40. Elected as MP for St Johns Town in 1798. For Maria Edgeworth’s account of RLE’s brief parliamentary career, see Memoirs, 2: 239–55. Although a Unionist, RLE voted against the 1801 Act of Union, believing it unrepresentative of the wishes of the majority of landowners and not to Ireland’s national economic advantage. He was also an advocate of Catholic emancipation: see Richard Lovell Edgeworth, The Substance of Three Speeches, Delivered in the House of Commons of Ireland (London: J. Johnson, 1800). On the debates over Pitt’s Act of Union, see A. Jackson, ‘The Irish Act of Union’, History Today 51, no. 1 (2001), 19–25, and Douglas Kanter, ‘The Foxite Whigs, Irish Legislative Independence and the Act of Union, 1785–1806’, Irish Historical Studies 36, no. 143 (May 2009), 332–48.

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the People and the Means of improving the same’.50 The report proposed that a national system of education be established in Ireland, its key resolution being that ‘the present State of the Education of the lower Orders of the People in this Kingdom is highly defective, and requires the Interposition of the Legislature’.51 According to the London Chronicle, Richard Lovell’s ‘very elaborate speech of over two hours’ pointed to the ‘restless and fatal propensity’ of the Irish poor, which he blamed on ‘ignorance’. Further, he warned that the disaffection of the populace for their Anglo-Irish overlords could be converted by agitators into a ‘revolutionary engine’.52 The Committee was instructed to bring a bill to the House; this Richard Lovell did on 28 March 1799. It was rejected – apparently because members believed the money better spent on military defence, though its provisions for Catholic instruction cannot have helped.53 A draft copy of the bill, dated 1799, was brought to light by Edward F. Burton in 1979. As Burton tells us, comparison with the report of Richard Lovell’s introductory speech in the Dublin Evening Post of 2 April 1799 and the Committee’s resolutions suggests that this is the draft Richard Lovell presented to parliament.54 However, the attribution of the draft education 50

51 52

53

54

Regulations proposed for Irish provincial schools, MS 22471 (2) 7, Correspondence of RLE on Education, NLI. RLE’s Draft Education Bill MS 22471 (1), Correspondence of RLE on Education, NLI. RLE was by no means the first to point to education as essential to national security in Ireland. In the early years of the French Revolutionary War, the barrister John Donovan wrote that ‘France bestows the utmost attention to her rising generation, and it must follow as certainly as any effect from its cause, that if their republic should stand on its present principles, the French will be in future, even more than they are at present, a nation of soldiers; what force then could Ireland oppose to such a nation, in a future contest, if our peasantry continue as they now are, uneducated, miserable, and without attachment to their country.’ Thoughts on the Necessity and Means of Educating the Poor of Ireland, and Attaching Them to Their Country. By John Donovan, Esq. Barrister at Law (Dublin: printed for R. E. Mercier and Co., 1795), 23–4. Donald H. Akenson, The Irish Education Experiment: The National System of Education in the Nineteenth Century (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 75; Edward F. Burton, ‘Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s Education Bill of 1799: A Missing Chapter in the History of Irish Education’, The Irish Journal of Education / Iris Eireannach an Oideachais 13, no. 1 (1979), 29–30. Brian W. Taylor, ‘Richard Lovell Edgeworth’, The Irish Journal of Education / Iris Eireannach an Oideachais 20, no. 1 (1986), 45–6. A National School System was eventually established in Ireland in 1831. For a diachronic social history of education in Ireland, see the essays in Deirdre Raftery and Karin Fischer, eds., Educating Ireland: Schooling and Social Change, 1700–2000 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2014). Taylor, ‘Richard Lovell Edgeworth’, 28.

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bill to Richard Lovell requires some scrutiny. Although Burton notes that the manuscript has a section written in another hand, he does not identify the handwriting. In fact, the majority of this working draft is in Maria Edgeworth’s script; the second, which appears on a pasted-on slip of paper, is probably that of Frances Anne Beaufort Edgeworth, Richard Lovell’s fourth wife.55 Of course, it is impossible to know Maria’s precise role in the drafting of this legislation, but no matter where we place the act of writing on the collaborative spectrum – whether as amanuensis, copyist,56 or contributor – it is safe to say she had a hand in the process.57 A letter to her aunt Charlotte Sneyd, written in Dublin on 2 April 1799, suggests that Edgeworth thought of herself and other women in the family as supporting actors in Richard Lovell’s political career: In the paper of tonight you will see my father’s farewell speech on the Education Bill. He keeps his temper about a thousand times better than I could in his situation. What signify all the compliments paid, when no assistance has or will be given – Some time ago my dear Aunt Charlotte amongst some hints to the Chairman of the Committee of Education, you sent one which I have pursued. You said that the early lesson for the poor should speak with detestation of the spirit of revenge. I have just finished a little story called Forgive & Forget upon this idea … I am very much obliged to Bessy and Charlotte for copying the errata of Prac Ed for me and I should be extremely obliged to the whole Committee of Education & Criticism at Edgeworthstown if they would send me corrections from their own brains.58

55

56

57

58

I am indebted to Susan Manly for her help in identifying the handwriting on the draft bill. Aileen Douglas persuasively argues that the ‘peculiar advantages’ Edgeworth gained from being her father’s copyist are an important and enduring theme in her fiction, to the extent that ‘her works represent access to social power… through acts of copying’. Douglas, ‘Maria Edgeworth’s Writing Classes’, 371; Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 153. Copies of the ‘Resolutions entered into by the Committee of Education’ and ‘Regulations proposed to be observed in provincial schools for the Education of the lower Irish’ also appear to have been written by Maria, indicating ongoing involvement in the documentation of the legislative process, if not autographic influence. MS 49672/ 28 (2), Additional papers of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, NLI; MS 22471 (2) 7, Correspondence of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, NLI. For a transcription of the ‘Resolutions’ and the bill, see Burton, ‘Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s Education Bill’. ME to CS, MS 10166/7, Pos. 9027 (224) , EPNLI.

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As a woman, Edgeworth could only imagine how she would have performed in her father’s place. Nevertheless, there is some slippage here in the fine distinction she makes between the ‘Committees of Education’ and the ‘Committee of Education & Criticism’. While her collaboration with Bessy and Charlotte is ostensibly confined to literary production, Edgeworth inscribes a link between collective ‘brains’, her own writings, and the political spaces from which she was excluded; in doing so, she suggests that the wider educational project encompasses Richard Lovell’s parliamentary activities. The letter makes it clear that there are significant overlaps between the newly politicised educational project and the changing objectives of Edgeworth’s fiction. The theme of ‘Forgive and Forget’ relates directly to an unpublished and incomplete essay ‘On the Education of the Poor’ (1800), written by Maria with annotations by Richard Lovell and another unidentified hand.59 In the essay, it is put that education is the ‘most certain and safe method of relieving the wretchedness of the poor’. It is also held up as a mode of disciplinary control: It is in vain you exhort the servant or the manufacturer to diligence and sobriety, unless he has acquired in his childhood good habits … [it is] in vain you expect that the poor should neither be discontented or seditious, unless you teach them how their happiness is connected with their obedience to the laws, & how those laws which are beneficial to society in general are advantageous to them in particular.60

We might be reminded here of Honora Edgeworth’s edicts: ‘good habits, obedience, attention, & respect towards superiors’, as well, perhaps, as the refrain of Barbauld and Aikin’s political epistles: ‘In vain… in vain’.61 Richard Lovell’s associationist use of reward and punishment seems a more direct influence, and Practical Education had also pointed to the ‘connexion between [the child’s] happiness and obedience’ and ‘the laws on which prosperity of society depends’ (PE, 1: 229). Edgeworthian pedagogy develops this line of thinking by encouraging parental scrutiny of the psychology of individual children: by reading the child’s interiority and disciplining them accordingly, teachers would increase the ‘probability of [their] pupil’s yielding not only an implicit, but an habitual, rational, voluntary, happy 59

60

61

The essay’s first person reference to Richard Lovell’s closing speech on the Education Bill suggests it was intended for publication under his name. Incomplete draft of an essay, ‘On the Education of the Poor’, c.1800, EPBL, MS. Eng. misc. e. 1461. See p. 5.

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obedience’ to ‘laws’. The aim, therefore, is to forge in the mind of the child a dispositional attitude based on the ‘connexion which he believes, and feels that there exists, between his social duties and his social happiness’. Jason Quirk, the avaricious villain of Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, is a thought experiment in the consequences of educating the poor without instilling obedience and respect – the inference being that the industrious improvement of the working class should be geared against the ‘spirit’ of rebellion. As Andrew J. Smyth argues, however, Edgeworth also draws attention to the circumstances that give rise to disrespect and disobedience, and thereby ‘questions the Smithian capitalist enterprise’. In ‘The Education of the Poor’, as Smyth explains, Edgeworth ‘condemns the demand for luxury with which she associates the growing prosperity of industrial England and contrasts the happiness of country peasants with the depraved lifestyles of poor factory workers’. Thus, while the essay ‘promotes top-down education to instil solid character in the working poor, the picture Edgeworth develops of urban manufacturing conditions expands the problem to one of environment’.62 It is clear, then, that Edgeworth was equally cognisant of the potentially harmful effects of industrialisation to the body politic, and the threat to the social hierarchy represented by unfettered access to the knowledge economy.

‘Machinery for Domestic Purposes’ Richard Lovell retired from parliament in 1800, exasperated and exhausted by the recent debates over the Union with Britain. That March he wrote to Dr Beaufort, informing him of his change in occupation: ‘I shall now resume my pen, with the same sincere intention of being useful, and I shall write and draw Mechanoiconomia, or a Description of Machinery for Domestic Purposes.’63 The ‘Mechanoiconomia’ was never published, though it may have been the technological basis for the Edgeworthstown School Lessons. We do know, however, that Richard Lovell ‘employed ingenious mechanical contrivances and small structural alterations’ to the family home to ‘make the interior more efficient and comfortable for his large family’.64 Butler 62

63 64

Andrew J. Smyth, ‘That This Here Box Be in the Natur of a Trap: Maria Edgeworth’s Pedagogical Gardens, Ireland, and the Education of the Poor’, in Time of Beauty, Time of Fear: The Romantic Legacy in the Literature of Childhood, ed. James Holt McGavran (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 51–2. Memoirs of RLE, 2: 253. Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 82.

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provides an extract from the ‘Black Book’ of Edgeworthstown,65 which evocatively describes the space, ‘with its big rooms lined with books, its workshop, its clocks, its large maps on the walls, its innumerable ingenious mechanical devices, … the central hall hung with family pictures, adorned with stuffed birds and foreign “curiosities”’.66 As we have seen, this space demanded industrious labour and increasingly inventive defence. A drawing from ‘On the Education of the Poor’ (see Figure 7) makes visible the contemporaneous pursuits of Edgeworth and her father in the early 1800s, if not their common purpose. The canopied chair seems to have been one of Richard Lovell’s inventions – preliminary sketches for the contraption appear in the preceding pages of the notebook. But while the annotations seem bizarrely juxtaposed with the drawing, ‘the savages natives of Botany Bay’ should alert us to the colonial anxieties that underpin both the essay and the ‘mechanoiconomia’. However cumbersome its epithet, Richard Lovell’s ‘mechanoiconomia’ will ring a bell for anyone familiar with Practical Education, particularly its chapters on ‘Toys’ and ‘Mechanicks’. It is the first of these that will be my focus here. According to the preface to Practical Education, the ‘first hint of the chapter on toys was received from Dr. Beddoes’ (PE, ix), a proRevolutionary chemist and Oxford-educated physician of what Butler terms ‘yeoman stock’, who had married Maria’s sister Anna in 1794.67 Like his father-in-law, Thomas Beddoes would become a keen educationalist and admirer of Barbauld;68 in 1798, he took in as pupils the two sons of William Henry Lambton, one of his consumptive patients.69 He was also patron to the Bristolian mathematics lecturer Benjamin Donne who, like the itinerant lecturer of Edgeworth’s ‘Lame Jervas’, gave public lectures and

65 66 67 68

69

The record of the family estate begun by RLE’s father. Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 251–2. On Beddoes and the Edgeworths, see Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 109–11. In ‘Notice of Some Observations Made in the Medical Pneumatic Institution’ (1799), Beddoes identifies one of the subjects of his experiments with nitrous oxide as ‘MRS. BARBAULD – THE CHILDREN’S FRIEND’. He notes that she experienced ‘pleasurable sensations occasioning involuntary laughter; some momentary faintness afterwards’ (as cited in McCarthy, ALBVE, 646, n. 37). Beddoes’ biographer cites his ‘minute criticism’ of Barbauld’s Lessons. See John Edmonds Stock, Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Beddoes (London: John Murray, 1811), 151. For her part, Barbauld found Beddoes a ‘very pleasant man’. See McCarthy, ALBVE, 403. The elder son, was George John Lambton, later 1st Earl of Durham and known as ‘Radical Jack’ for his role in the Reform act of 1832. On Beddoes’ educationalism, see Dorothy A. Stansfield, Thomas Beddoes M.D. 1760–1808: Chemist, Physician, Democrat (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984), particularly Chapter 6.

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Figure 7. Pencil drawing in ‘On the Education of the Poor’. Page of a notebook belonging to Maria Edgeworth, c. 1800.

‘lessons to gentlemen and ladies in their own homes’.70 An essay of Donne’s on Mechanical Geometry, published in 1796, is prefixed with a letter in which Beddoes relates his plan to ‘establish a manufacture of RATIONAL TOYS’.71 After privately circulating his ideas amongst ‘literary and scientific friends’, Beddoes published ‘a proposal for subscriptions for rational toys’, but the scheme was never realised, apparently for want of funding.72 70

71

72

Eric Robinson, ‘Benjamin Donn (1729–1798), Teacher of Mathematics and Navigation’, Annals of Science 19, no. 1 (1963), 30. Benjamin Donne, An Essay on Mechanical Geometry, Chiefly Explanatory of a Set of Schemes and Models (Bristol, 1796), vii. Stock, Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Beddoes, 183. On the radicalism of Beddoes’

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In some respects, the recommendations in Practical Education dovetail with Beddoes’ proposal for manufacturing ‘rational toys’. Edgeworth quotes Beddoes’ suggestion that ‘toys… calculated to give pleasure merely by exciting surprise… give children’s minds such a tone, that they are afterwards too fond of similar useless baubles’ (PE, 1: 16), and in doing so taps into the longstanding, gendered debates over fashion, taste, spectacle and utility that were closely bound up with the unstable category of the ‘toy’ in eighteenth-century economic discourse.73 The Edgeworths argue that children’s playthings should be ‘useful’; that is, they should contribute to the child’s psychological development. This did not preclude such things as ‘juggling tricks and puzzles’ (PE, 1: 17), which ‘can exercise the invention or patience’, or ‘trials of dexterity and activity, such as tops, hoops, balls, battledores and shuttlecocks, ninepins and cup and ball’. According to the Edgeworths, such games ‘are excellent’ for encouraging ‘ease and dexterity’ – something ‘we often attribute to the power of natural genius’ but which is ‘simply the consequence of practice and industry’. The chapter also points to the importance of rational conversation as a means of making play productive, asserting that a ‘man of sense will see’ in the child’s love of kite-flying ‘the symptoms of a love of science’, and ‘will feel that it is in his business to direct this activity, to furnish his pupil with materials for fresh combinations, to put him, or let him put himself, in situations where he can make useful observations’ (PE, 1; 18–19). Practical Education thus presents a model of exemplary scientific fatherhood as it lays the foundations for ‘professional’ or ‘manly’ education. In the teaching of young children, the Edgeworths explain, even very basic units can be profitably used to develop the attention, and ‘any species of knowledge’ could be connected to ‘occupations which are immediately agreeable’ to them (PE, 1; 58). The example the authors provide to illustrate this recalls Harry and Lucy: ‘if a child is building a house, we may take that opportunity to teach him how bricks are made, how the arches over doors and windows are made… &c.’ Note the gendering of the child here – for

73

proposals, see Hugh Torrens and Joseph Wachelder, ‘Models, Toys, and Beddoes’ Struggle for Educational Reform, 1790–1800’, in Trevor Levere et al., The Enlightenment of Thomas Beddoes: Science, Medicine, and Reform (Routledge, 2016) (digital edition). A toy could be any non-essential item. For further discussion, see Vanessa Brett, ‘Derided and Enjoyed: What Was a Toy – What Was a Toyshop?’, History of Retailing and Consumption 1, no. 2 (4 May 2015), 83–8; on the wider economic debate, see Robert W. Jones, Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Analysis of Beauty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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while Practical Education supplies the parent with object lessons for both sexes, including drawing lessons and the analysis of print illustrations, it implies that more advanced mechanics are for ‘young workmen’ only. An inventory is then provided for parents who ‘may not be sufficiently good carpenters to know distinctly every thing that is necessary’ for early lessons: ‘Card, pasteboard, substantial, but not sharp pointed, scissors, wire, gum, and wax, may in some degree supply the want of carpenter’s tools at that age when we have observed the saw and plane are useless.’ The authors next recommend that Models of common furniture should be made as toys, which should take to pieces, so that all their parts, and the manner in which they are put together, might be seen distinctly; the names of the different parts should be written or stamped upon them: by these means the names will be associated with realities, children will retain them in their memory, and they will neither learn by rote technical terms, nor will they be retarded in their progress in mechanical invention by the want of language. (PE, 1: 23)

The physical attachment of words to things and progressive aversion to ‘rote’ learning do not require further discussion, but the element of deconstruction here is worth noting. As Richardson puts it, Practical Education insists that ‘the child’s deconstructive energies are to be harnessed to the pursuit of experimental knowledge’.74 Indeed, Edgeworth enthusiastically recommends the deconstruction of mechanical toys. We learn that Richard Lovell took apart a toy cuckoo belonging to his daughter Honora in order to show the family its inner workings, and that this was met with the ‘extreme pleasure’ of the children: ‘probably, more was learnt by this cuckoo, than was ever learnt from any cuckoo before’ (PE, 1: 16). There are other innovative ideas here: the authors apparently intended to provide the public with ‘an inventory of the present most fashionable articles in our toy-shops, and a list of the new assortment, to speak in the true style of advertisement’ (PE, 35). This would not only save parents the ‘trouble of hunting through a number of different shops’ for suitable toys, but would help them to safely navigate the market for children’s commodities – a toy cuckoo might be sold in a shop alongside all manner of wares. Following the observational grading of children, which establishes the lessons suitable to their age-group, the child can be introduced sequentially 74

Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism, 53.

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to ‘models of architecture’, ‘models of simple machines … such as wheelbarrows, carts, cranes, scales, steelyards, jacks, and pumps’, and thence ‘more complicated machinery’: ‘spinning wheels, looms, paper-mills, wind-mills, water-mills’, and ‘chemical toys’ (PE, 1: 24–5). As Practical Education advertises, the Edgeworth children took part in just such object lessons; they had also been entertained by Beddoes’ chemical experiments during their stay in Bristol between 1793 and 1794.75 Possibly, it was Beddoes’ chemistry as well as his revolutionary sympathies that made his ‘rational toys’ a cause for concern: in oblique reference to Beddoes’ radicalism, the chapter on ‘Toys’ concludes with the observation that a ‘revolution even in toy-shops should not be attempted, unless there appear a moral certainty, that we both may and can change for the better’. Notwithstanding their desire to ‘increase the wisdom and happiness of mankind’,76 the Edgeworths assert that ‘The danger of doing too much in education is greater even than the danger of doing too little’. Thus, the scientific education required disciplinary caution, the ‘moral certainty’ of what was to be excluded as well as included in the curriculum. While Richard Lovell’s sons worked alongside him in the physical construction of the telegraph, Maria assisted in compiling the telegraph’s ‘vocabulary’. In a ‘partial’ sense, Practical Education seeks to replicate these forms of gendered collaboration in the families of its middle- and upperclass readers. In the more ‘general’ contexts of class, nation, and empire however, the question of what to teach the young becomes more loaded. This is most anxiously framed in ‘Lame Jervas’, a story in Popular Tales (1804), where the fictionalisation of the telegraph demonstrates the extent to which access to technological knowledge was, for Edgeworth, a pressing geopolitical concern.77 It is necessary to leave her involvement in the telegraph project – the plans for which appear to have travelled to India – for future discussion. As the following shows, however, Edgeworth’s object lessons continued to provide a platform for mental industry, as well as a touchpoint for domestic encounters with the East.

75 76 77

Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 109–10. RLE, ‘Preface’ to The Parent’s Assistant (1796), vi. See Ashley L. Cohen, ‘Wage Slavery, Oriental Despotism, and Global Labor Management in Maria Edgeworth’s Popular Tales’, The Eighteenth Century 55, no. 2 (10 July 2014), 208–9.

Maria Edgeworth’s object lessons 219

‘The India Cabinet’ It will be a great while, before we come to the India cabinet. First, there are arrangements for several journies [sic] to be made. Whoever has a clear head for these things, and who can understand, at first hearing it told, how various people intend to go and to come, and to meet upon the road, may, if they please, read the following page – Others had better skip it, because they certainly will not understand it.78

In ‘The India Cabinet’, a chapter in ‘Rosamond’ in the Continuation of Early Lessons (1814), Edgeworth provides lessons in literature, science and technology through a child’s encounter with a collection of exotic objects. First, however, she primes and tests the attention, encouraging readers to willingly embark on mental ‘journies’ in the space of the ‘clear head’. Developing a sense of the social environment that will be crucial for us to ‘understand’ the cabinet, Edgeworth relates the comings and goings of Rosamond and her family, over the course of which the young protagonist meets Mrs Egerton – known as ‘the lady of the black bonnet’79 – a name that belies her true character as an ‘instructive and entertaining… old lady, who was particularly fond of children’.80 Eventually, Mrs Egerton takes Rosamond to her dressing room and shows her the mysterious cabinet, opens its doors and tells Rosamond ‘that she might look at all that was contained in the twelve drawers’. There follows a series of object lessons, beginning with the nautilus (which provides a lesson in physics) and pinna shells. Darwin had described both in The Botanic Garden, which Edgeworth quotes here: ‘Firm to his rock, the silver cords suspend/ The anchor’d pinna, and his cancer friend’. A footnote invites the industrious reader to locate the line in Darwin’s book, and highlights Edgeworth’s alteration to the original.81 Rosamond elicits knowledge from Mrs Egerton, asking ‘What is meant by his ‘cancer friend?’, and Edgeworth nods to Lunar exchange in her explanation of the metaphor:

78

79 80 81

Maria Edgeworth, Continuation of Early Lessons… A New Edition (London: J. Johnson, 1815), 1: 214. All further references are to this edition. Ibid., 215. Ibid., 217. Ibid., 224. Botanic Garden, canto iii, line 67; and note xxvii, page 72 (as cited in Continuation of Early Lessons). The original version reads ‘Firm to his rock with silver cords suspend/ The anchor’d Pinna, and his Cancer-friend’. See Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden: A Poem, in Two Parts (London: J. Johnson, 1789), 72.

220 Material Enlightenment I am told… that the cancer divides with his friend pinna all the booty, or food, which he brings home to his shell.’ ‘How curious!’ cried Rosamond. ‘I did not think, that fishes could be such good friends – but ma’am is this really true? Are you certain of it? For I observe you said, ‘I am told,’ or “It is said.”’ ‘As I have not seen the cancer and pinna myself ’ said Mrs. Egerton, ‘I cannot be certain; I can only tell you what I have read and heard asserted by persons, whose truth I have no reason to doubt. When the poet speaks of friendship, you cannot suppose, that there is really friendship between these fish; but there is some mutual interest, which makes them perform services for each other.’82

Through conversational mediation of the object and poem, Edgeworth encourages her juvenile readers to similarly question the relationship between world and language, to make sure what they read and hear from others is ‘really true’. While she wards against anthropomorphism – a bugbear of Richard Lovell’s – the passage demonstrates Maria’s understanding of the value of the literary imagination in bringing science to life: not only does the poem heighten the child’s curiosity, its conversibility enables reflection on different types of exchange, on what is ‘really friendship’ and what is only ‘mutual interest’. In its editorial partition and disclosure of its contents, drawer by drawer, ‘The India Cabinet’ textually replicates the collection of material specimens, so that the book itself becomes a kind of curiosity cabinet; we might be reminded of Locke’s ‘empty cabinet’ and of Watts’ spatial model of mind.83 It is also an insistently sociable text: ‘if I look at [the objects] by myself ’ Rosamond acknowledges, ‘I shall not have half so much pleasure; all the pleasure of talking, and hearing, I shall lose.’84 As concerned with moral issues of luxury and novelty as it is with providing furniture for the mind, Rosamond’s mother supplies a disciplinary lesson in self-denial and patience. The child is instructed to wait for tomorrow before opening further drawers in the cabinet, and though she struggles against her instincts, she is eventually reasoned into acquiescence by her unyielding but patient mother. The following day she returns to Mrs Egerton’s house to find that the object in the next drawer is a piece of coral. Finding a limit to Mrs 82 83

84

Continuation of Early Lessons, 225. On the cultural phenomenon of the curiosity cabinet, see Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). Continuation of Early Lessons, 227.

Maria Edgeworth’s object lessons 221

Egerton’s knowledge here, Rosamond’s curiosity is thwarted – providing a further lesson in patience, as well as introducing the theme of prejudice: ‘if people would avoid being in the wrong, they must often have patience to wait, till they know more facts, before they attempt to decide’.85 The next drawer Rosamond opens contains a set of Chinese toys, men and women rowing boats, or seeming to draw water in buckets from a well; or tumblers, tumbling head over heels down stairs, and performing various feats of activity. These toys were set in motion by touching or winding up some machinery withinside, which was concealed from view. For some time, Rosamond was amused so much by seeing their motions, that she could think of nothing else; but, after she had seen the boatmen row the boat ten times round the table, and after she had seen the watermen pull up and let down their empty buckets twenty times, and the tumblers tumble down stairs fifty times, she exclaimed – ‘I wish I knew how all this is done! – Oh, if papa was here! – How I wish, that my father and Godfrey were with us!’86

Thanks to the burgeoning trade in mechanical toys, the automata Edgeworth describes may very well have been familiar to her child readers, but their designation as Chinese is highly unusual.87 ‘Chinese toys’ might, for adult readers, have instead called to mind the issues of globalisation and empire that shaped discourses of Orientalism, particularly in terms that Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins calls the ‘“trinketing” of chinoiserie’ that she shows ‘reverberates throughout the eighteenth century’.88 Readers of Edgeworth’s generation might have been reminded of James Cox’s successful export of automata to China and India in the late 1760s, and his Museum of ‘curious toys’, which provided fashionable entertainment to the London elite from the early 1770s.89 ‘Chinese toys’ would from the 1790s have signalled 85 86 87

88

89

Ibid., 236. Ibid., 237–8. For an image and description of tumblers, see Gerard Turner, ‘Scientific Toys’, British Journal for the History of Science 20, no. 4 (1987), 388. There are no advertisements for, or mentions of, ‘Chinese toys’ in the 17th–18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers and only one, from 1868, in 19th Century Newspapers. Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins, A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 116. Whether through advertisements in the newspaper press, attendance in person, hearsay, or perhaps familiarity with Frances Burney’s Evelina, adult readers would almost certainly have known of Cox’s museum. See Marcia Pointon, ‘Dealer in

222 Material Enlightenment

Figure 8. ‘The Reception of the Diplomatique and his Suite, at the Court of Pekin’ by James Gillray, published by Hannah Humphrey. Hand-coloured etching, published 14 September 1792.

the precariousness of British trading interests on the continent of Asia, as well as anxieties over tea-drinking and the assimilation of Oriental taste. Indeed, ‘The India Cabinet’ presents an antithesis to the mode of consumption represented in James Gillray’s The Reception of the Diplomatique & his Suite, at the court of Pekin (1792), which satirises the sole meeting Emperor Qianlong granted to George Macartney’s unsuccessful embassy to China.90 In the picture, the indifferent, fat, opium-smoking Emperor looks on

90

Magic: James Cox’s Jewelry Museum and the Economics of Luxurious Spectacle in Late-Eighteenth-Century London’, Vol. 31, in Economic Engagements with Art: Annual Supplement to Volume 31, History of Political Economy, ed. Neil De Marchi and D. W. Goodwin (Durham, North Carolina and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 423–51; also see Clare Le Corbeiller, ‘ James Cox and His Curious Toys’ , The Metropolitan Museum of Art 18, no. 10 (1960), 318–24. ‘Samples of the best British manufactures, with mechanical toys to entertain the octogenarian emperor Qianlong, were shipped. After enjoying the customary

Maria Edgeworth’s object lessons 223

unimpressed while the British envoy impotently offers up its trinkets and toys.91 The suggestion is that other Europeans have got there first: the court already possesses a prize from the French in the shape of a miniature hot air balloon. According to Nigel Leask, the ‘global crisis of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars’ brought about a change in the cultures of collection in Europe. Curiosities were, Leask explains, ‘increasingly “mobilised” for purposes of national prestige as well as for motives of private connoisseurship or the increase of scientific knowledge. The key terms “utility”, “curiosity”, and “credit” were over-laden with new prerogatives of war and empire.’92 Thus, in Travels in China (1804), John Barrow put Macartney’s failure down to the inferiority of the Chinese as collectors: the value of the diplomatic gifts was ‘lost and thrown away upon the ignorant Chinese, who immediately after the departure of the embassador [sic] are said to have piled them up in one of the lumber rooms of Yuen-min-yuen’.93 Edgeworth’s story initially seems to capitalise on these associations: rather than passively consuming the novelties she is presented with, Rosamond wants to see the ‘machinery withinside’. I want to suggest, however, that Edgeworth ‘makes’ the toys Chinese in order to deliver an implicit critique of European assumptions of technological and cultural superiority.94 It should first be noted that, unlike Barrow and Gillray, Edgeworth makes no assertions as to the national character of the Chinese. However, her child

91

92

93 94

spectacles enjoined by Chinese hospitality, Macartney was presented to Qianlong at Jehol on 14 September 1793. The event, in which Macartney alone was able to avoid making the ceremonial kowtow to the emperor, was caricatured by Gillray. Thereafter he barely glimpsed the emperor.’ Roland Thorne, ‘Macartney, George, Earl Macartney (1737–1806)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn, May 2009. Macartney took with him gifts valuing £15,000 from the British East India Company, which Barrow reports to have included ‘A large planetarium of curious and intricate workmanship … the largest and most perfect glass lens that perhaps was ever fabricated – orreries, transit instruments, reflecting and refracting telescopes, theodolites, air-pumps, electrical machines, and an extensive apparatus for assisting to explain and illustrate the principles of science’. John Barrow, Some Account of the Public Life, and a Selection from the Unpublished Writings, of the Earl of Macartney, 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1807), 1: 348–9. Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel-Writing, 1770–1840: ‘From an Antique Land’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 103. Barrow, Some Account of the Public Life … of the Earl of Macartney, 1: 349.. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989).

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characters do voice certain prejudices. Here is Rosamond again, and some unruly objects of the tea trade: ‘Oh! if Laura were here, how I should like to show her these strange drawings on these Chinese skreens!’ [sic] continued Rosamond, taking one of them in her hand, and laughing. ‘Very different from the nice tables and chairs, in perspective, which Laura draws! Look at those men and women, sitting and standing up in the air, as nobody could ever sit or stand! and the cups and saucers, and teapot, all sliding off that ridiculous table!’95

Rosamond has none of the taste for the Oriental fashion that Edgeworth parodied in The Absentee,96 but delights in looking at the ‘strange drawings’ nonetheless, if only to draw an unfavourable comparison with her friend’s skill in drawing perspective. Her comments bear a striking resemblance to the following passage, from a review of Barrow’s Travels in China (1804) in the Monthly Review for August 1805, which also situates Chinese art in the context of the toy trade: ‘The Chinese are uncommonly quick in learning an art: they now not only make Cuckoo clocks, (formerly an article of importation,) but watches, and intricate pieces of machinery, similar to those that have been sent from Europe… and Chinese toys, made of ivory, are unrivalled. The colours used by this people are very vivid and beautiful: but we have long been witnesses of their ignorance in the rules of perspective, and in the arts of painting.’ Edgeworth similarly plants the idea of Chinese decorative arts as stylistically inferior, but as adult readers we might reasonably question her aesthetic judgement – her ‘clear head’ is yet to be furnished with ideas about the east, and her taste is undeveloped, though it is already being shaped by social relations and partiality to her friends. ‘The India Cabinet’ thus replicates in miniature the difficulties of ‘knowing’ China.97 As Barrow’s reviewers put it At present, we are only collecting the rudiments of Chinese history; and we ought to act agreeably to the rules and injunctions of the great founder of Experimental Philosophy, by stating mere facts, with fidelity and exactness. It is the business of a remoter period, and of riper 95 96

97

Continuation of Early Lessons, 238. Maria Edgeworth, ‘The Absentee’ in Tales of Fashionable Life (London: J. Johnson, 1812), 5: 229. William Christie, ‘“Prejudice against Prejudices”: China and the Limits of Whig Liberalism’, European Romantic Review 24, no. 5 (1 October 2013), 509–29.

Maria Edgeworth’s object lessons 225 knowledge, to arrange such materials into classes, to enliven them by remark, and to point to them with precept: but, from the present fashion of writing, it is difficult to view facts in their complete nudity; since they are dressed out in the finery of philosophic reflection, and encumbered by the embellishments of comment. They do not come to us pure and unadulterated, but in conjunction with prejudice and partiality; tinctured with the spirit of system and distorted by generalisation; and we want some test, some preparation of critical chemistry, to precipitate the primary substances from their adventitious combinations. A substitute for such a test may be procured from the different relations of the same series of occurrences; and hence it is, that, from the three publications respecting China, our knowledge of that country must be more exact, than it could have been if derived from one singly.98

While encouraging comparison between eastern and western arts, Edgeworth refuses to draw generalisations, maintaining a liberal, cosmopolitan view of the value of the commerce in knowledge objects. Though she appears to use China as a foil to British science and culture, Edgeworth invokes this discourse while emphasising the universal value of knowledge and drawing attention to the problems of ‘prejudice and partiality’. As we have seen, ‘The India Cabinet’ encourages parents to conversationally mediate the child’s encounter with curiosities and commodities in order to promote ‘delight’ and social affection. The gaining of knowledge through ‘different relations’ was something that Edgeworth might well have wished to emphasise: at the time she was writing ‘The India Cabinet’, Richard Lovell’s health was in serious decline and her brother Lovell was still incarcerated in France.99 In light of this, Rosamond’s wish that her father and brother were there seems a voicing of the writer’s acute sense of the value of conversation with her male relatives, and with Richard Lovell in particular. But the story also shows how knowledge is socially constituted: Rosamond’s understanding of the objects depends on the information she receives from others, and this will inevitably reflect their own limited spheres of knowledge. Eventually, Rosamond’s father returns to reveal the mechanics of the boat as ‘a common piece of clock work’, and explains the motion of the ‘tumblers’ in such detail that it seems likely the Edgeworth children actually owned these toys.100 At the end of the exhibition, Rosamond’s brother 98 99 100

Monthly Review 47 (August 1805), 337–8. Released in March 1814. Edgeworth, Continuation of Early Lessons, 243–5.

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Godfrey announces that ‘though these Chinese toys were ingenious, he did not think, that they were of any great use; that his father had shown him some machines, large real machines, which were much more useful, and which therefore he liked better.’101 Rosamond is ‘a little vexed’ by his judgement, perhaps betraying a hint of Edgeworth’s frustration at the confines of her own sphere of activity, as well as her ambivalence towards ‘large real machines’. As Butler points out, a visit to a foundry in Harry and Lucy Concluded (1825) demonstrates Edgeworth’s distaste for the industrial landscape of the English midlands: whereas Harry marvels at the achievements of men, Lucy pronounces it ‘the most frightful country she had ever beheld’.102 The objects in Edgeworth’s ‘India cabinet’ are foci for the issues surrounding Lunar imperialism. Such use of materialist practices for the interrogation of colonial imaginaries bears some similarity to Hamilton’s Hindoo Rajah, in that Edgeworth presents the accumulation of knowledge objects as useful insofar as it promotes industrial and moral improvement; indeed, the stories themselves might be considered a form of psycho-technology, closing the gap between technologies in and of print. However, the story also shows how the forging of connections between the text and collected ‘thing’ in the world – be it a toy or a piece of vernacular language – ultimately undermines the Enlightenment appeal to objective truth.103 Such linguistic constructs as the ‘India cabinet’ and ‘Chinese toys’ draw attention to themselves as choices rather than contingencies. To the attentive reader, the prejudices voiced by the child characters of ‘The India Cabinet’ might thus work to reinforce Mrs Egerton’s assertion that, to ‘avoid being in the wrong’, people ‘must often have patience to wait, till they know more facts, before they attempt to decide’.

‘The art of teaching to invent’ In her introduction to Harry and Lucy Concluded: Being the Last Part of Early Lessons (1825), Edgeworth reflects on the trajectory of the science 101 102

103

Ibid., 245–6. Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 143–4; Maria Edgeworth, Harry and Lucy Concluded: Being the Last part of Early Lessons (London: R. Hunter, 1825), 2: 165. Saba Bahar argues that Edgeworth ‘cannot but contribute to linguistic instability and to literature’s increasing awareness of this instability’. See Bahar, ‘The “value of a NAME”: The Representation of Political Economy in Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee’, Genre 35, no. 2 (1 June 2002), 285.

Maria Edgeworth’s object lessons 227

of mind in the late eighteenth century, considering her father’s place and, more obliquely, her own place within it: Metaphysics, after being too much in fashion, have been thrown aside too disdainfully, and their use and abuse have been confounded. Surely it would be doing good service to bring into a popular form all that metaphysicians have discovered which can be applied to practice in education. This was early and long my father’s object. The art of teaching to invent – I dare not say – but of awakening and assisting the inventive power by daily exercise and excitement, and by the application of philosophic principles to trivial occurrences – he believed might be pursued with infinite advantage to the rising generation. 104

Edgeworth scholarship can seem an operation akin to technological deconstruction; the complex mechanisms of her fiction encourage industrious reading, and demand readers work to gain knowledge capital. It is no wonder that John Ruskin, in his Præterita of 1885, recalled looking on the Menai Suspension Bridge ‘as Miss Edgeworth had taught [him], with reverence for the mechanical skill of man, – little thinking, poor innocent, what use I should see the creature putting it to, in the half century to come’.105 But Richard Lovell’s partiality to Lunar industry does not go unquestioned in his daughter’s inventive fictions, and nor does his insistence on the authority of the metaphysical system. Edgeworth’s writings offer insights into the inextricable links between art and science, as well as the perhaps irreconcilable differences between them. To return briefly to Practical Education, Whilst some [philosophers] have treated Imagination with contempt, as the irreconcilable enemy of Reason, by others she has been considered, with more respect, as Reason’s inseparable friend, as the friend who collects and prepares all the arguments upon which Reason decides, as the injured, misrepresented power, who is often forced to supply her adversaries with eloquence, who is often called upon to preside at her own trial, and to pronounce her own condemnation. (PE, 2: 604)

The ‘friend who collects and prepares’ might remain subservient to ‘Reason’, 104 105

Maria Edgeworth, Harry and Lucy Concluded (London: R. Hunter, 1825), 1: xvii–xviii. John Ruskin, Præterita (New York, London and Toronto: Everyman’s Library, 2014), 84.

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but she is equally capable of deconstructive critique. The connection of words with ‘facts’ can be understood to establish a scientific hegemony of the mind – a psychology geared towards industrious improvement. Richard Lovell’s prefaces to his daughter’s publications suggest that their objects are primarily scientific. This can be read most negatively as a bio-political commodification of the child’s attention. We have seen, though, that while certainly seeking to promote economic growth, Edgeworth works to cultivate the imaginative powers of the child to promote a literary–moral sense, which at once develops the social affections and provides a position from which to evaluate the systems of society. Long after her father’s death, Edgeworth would return to the building of ‘castles in the air’. In Helen, she explores the gap between rationalism and Romance with deftness and satirical wit. Space does not permit for a detailed discussion of the novel – it would take another book to explore its permutations of the philosophical debates of Edgeworth’s lifetime – but by way of a conclusion it is fitting to register some of its commentary on the science of mind, politics and gender. Take, for example, Cecilia’s tongue in cheek observation that It is always permitted… for a woman to use her intellects so far as to comprehend what man says; her knowledge, of whatever sort, never comes amiss when it serves only to illustrate what is said by one of the lords of creation. Let us note this, my dear Helen, as a general maxim for future use, and pray, since you have so good a memory, remember to tell mamma, who says I never generalise, that this morning I have actually made and established a philosophical maxim, one that may be of some use too, which cannot be said of all reflections, general or particular.106

There is clearly an element of self-parody in Edgeworth’s depiction of Cecilia’s mother, Lady Davenant. Though she is not named as such, Lady Davenant is intriguingly codified as the female philosopher of the novel. She tells Helen the cautionary tale of her naive interference in her husband’s political career, putting her aberration down to frustrated desire and a taste for French literature: ‘Ambition first rose in my mind from the ashes of another passion. Fresh materials, of heterogeneous kinds, altered the colour and changed the nature of the flame […]. I forgot to tell you that

106

Helen: A Tale, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1834), 1: 212–13. Henceforth abbreviated as H.

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when Madame de Staël’s book, Sur la Revolution Française, came out, it made an extraordinary impression on me’ (H, 150). Lady Davenant goes on to question Staël’s observations on the ‘timidity’ of the ‘ladies of England’. She recounts taking issue with the notion that in England there were ‘ladies distinguished as writers’ (and Staël had named Edgeworth as one such writer107) but ‘no ladies who have any conversational and political influence in society, of that kind which, during the old regime, was obtained in France by what they would call their femmes marquantes, such as Madame de Tencin, Madame de Deffrand, Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse’. One might wonder what Hannah More or Sarah Trimmer would have said to such a roll call. Lady Davenant continues: This remark stung me to the quick, for my country and myself, and raised in me a foolish, vainglorious emulation, an ambition false in its objects, and unsuited to the manners, domestic habits, and public virtue of our country. I ought to have been gratified by her observing that a lady is never to be met with in England, as formerly in France, at the Bureau du Ministre; and that in England there has never been any example of a woman’s having known in public affairs, or at least told, what ought to have been kept secret. Between ourselves, I suspect she was a little mistaken in some of these assertions. (H, 150–1)

Given the mode of Edgeworth’s own involvement in ‘public affairs’, I will end this chapter with a final reflection on material cultures of writing. Lady Davenport shows Helen her autograph book, and they look it over together. On coming to the ‘gallant Earl of Essex’, Davenport exclaims: ‘What a crowd of associated ideas rise at the sight of that autograph! who could look at it without some emotion.’ Helen could not. Beauclerc in a tone of raillery said he was sure, from the eager interest Miss Stanley took in these autographs that she would in time become a collector herself; and he did not doubt that he should see her with a valuable museum, in which should be preserved the old pens of great men. (H, 258–9)

Thus, at the end of her career, Edgeworth highlights the affective power of the autograph to make us question what we ourselves do as collectors, the 107

See Clíona Ó Gallchoir, ‘Gender, Nation and Revolution: Maria Edgeworth and Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis’, in Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830, ed. Elizabeth Eger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 201.

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associations we make, the values we place on ‘old pens of great men’. With her typically subtle partiality, she encourages the female reader to become ‘a collector herself ’. The tales and novels Edgeworth penned, many of which were reprinted into the twentieth century, are repositories of inventions: presented with a theatricality that rivals her father’s skill as a ‘conjurer’, their intertextual mechanisms animate the text.108 Edgeworth’s innovative fictions seem to demand and direct materialist readings, but her collections – as industrious as they are conflicted – speak of the vital necessity of the literary imagination to material Enlightenment. This, she suggests, is a mode of resistance to psychological hegemonies.

108

Letter from Erasmus Darwin to Matthew Boulton, 1766, ‘Revolutionary Players’, http://www.revolutionaryplayers.org.uk/letter-from-erasmus-darwin-to-matthewboulton-1766/ (Accessed 15 May 2017).

Afterword

H

owever we define their material turn, it is clear that the affective relations between matter and mind played an important role in the educational, devotional and charitable practices of women writers in the late eighteenth century. The associational world, both imagined and externally manifested, is written into their texts in highly purposeful ways. Whether to cultivate feelings of habitual devotion, vitalise Anglican spirit or activate the critical imagination, the configurations of Enlightenment described in this book participate in the construction of a domestic ideology founded on environmentally grounded notions of human subjectivity. We have seen that women’s experimental and domestic practices moved out of the home in innovative forms and to various spaces of social, religious and political activity. Women writers, I have argued, played a key role in the development of psychology in Romantic Britain and Ireland. As Barbauld’s sensible objects, the Edgeworths’ experimental science of education, More’s associations and disassociations, and Hamilton’s clearing and rebuilding each suggest, ideas in the late-Enlightenment science of mind did not arise in isolation from practice – they were products of circumstance, gaining new meaning as they migrated between individuals, through networks and across fields. The history of ideas and the history of practice do not merely run parallel to and intersect with each other, but continuously merge together. The domestic and familiar associationism popularised to a significant extent by Barbauld enabled others to envisage Enlightenment practices as a means of engagement with the life-force of the nation, and not only through the education of children. The charitable model More helped popularise impacted significantly on women’s movement into the socialised public sphere in the longer term. We might recognise a trace of this in Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse when Mrs Ramsay seeks to impress on her daughters the duty of providing succour to the lighthouse men, painting for them the desolation of life on the rock while knitting stockings for the lighthouse keeper’s son.1 Such activity allows Mrs Ramsay to imagine an existence beyond that of ‘a private woman’ for whom charity is ‘half a 1

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 7.

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sop to her own indignation, half a relief to her own curiosity’, and towards self-identification as ‘what with her untrained mind she highly admired, an investigator, elucidating the social problem’.2 We might be reminded here of Sarah Trimmer’s recommendation of charity as an ‘experiment’ for women of the middle and upper classes, and More’s characterisation of it as a woman’s ‘profession’. However, if such activity signifies a personal route to ‘usefulness’ that could bypass male structures of power, it also gives testament to the lasting problems of conservative feminism outlined in this book. There is a great deal more research to be done on Barbauld’s influence on nineteenth-century writers of the Dissenting tradition in Britain such as Lant Carpenter, Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as in America, for example in the work of the Unitarian and abolitionist children’s writer Lydia Maria Francis Child, whose The Girl’s Own Book (1833) includes two of Barbauld’s riddles. Child’s writings, which were published on both sides of the Atlantic, seem to replicate and amplify many of the themes I have identified in Barbauld’s writing for children. In The Gift Book of Biography for Young Ladies (1850), an ornate volume with gilt-edged paper, illustrated with engravings, Child and her co-author Miss M. Kendrick (possibly of the Warrington Kendricks) provide exemplary and cautionary biographies of women. In its ‘Concluding Remarks’, the book takes an affectionate tone, addressing its readers as ‘My dear young friends’ to request they ‘reflect’ on the moral content of the book: ‘What does it teach you?’, the writers ask. The moral is familiar (‘make religion your guide—not a mere professional adoption of it … but a practical one’), as is its message for young girls: ‘The life of Hannah More presents a bright example … You may neither possess her capabilities nor sphere of action; but you may humbly imitate her line of conduct.’3 This study has traced some of the tensions, fault-lines and conflicts in the material ‘science of man’, but it has also gone some way towards showing that the associationist model was not always as passive or rigidly mechanistic as Coleridge and others since have represented it. More supple, naturalistic forms of associationism could also give great – indeed almost boundless – scope to the imagination, individual spirit or will: the sublime trajectory of Barbauld’s ‘A Summer Evening’s Meditation’ is a case in point.4 Maria Edgeworth may not have achieved such transcendental flights, but 2 3

4

Ibid., 12 Miss M. Kendrick and Mrs. L. M. Child, The Gift Book of Biography for Young Ladies (London: T. Nelson, 1850), 265–7. Rob Browning, ‘Anna Letitia Barbauld’s “A Summer Evening’s Meditation” and the

Afterword 233

the extent of her knowledge and her genius for invention cannot fail to impress. I have indicated that the substance of Edgeworth’s books and the wealth of material in the archive are important to the history of psychology, particularly as it intersects with economics and the social sciences. Maria Edgeworth was one of the first women to be elected an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1842, just five years before her death.5 She and the other writers in this study would not in their lifetimes see women included as equals in the sciences. Indeed, scientific societies still routinely excluded women even after the Sex Disqualification (Removal Act) of 1919, which made it illegal for a person to be ‘disqualified by sex or marriage from the exercise of any public function, or from being appointed to or holding any civil or judicial office or post, or from entering or assuming or carrying on any civil profession or vocation, or for admission to any incorporated society’.6 The modern science of mind rarely bears testament to the work of eighteenth-century women, though their work was not entirely excluded from nineteenth-century evolutionary psychology. James Sully, a founding member of the British Psychological Society, references Maria Edgeworth several times in his 1894 textbook Outlines of Psychology, directing readers to chapters in Practical Education on attention, memory and sympathy.7 Incidentally, Sully also wrote on the ‘natural instinct to magnify self ’,8 something that might well remind us of Hamilton’s Popular Essays. The writers I have considered took stances on gender politics that are perhaps less appealing to us than those of the perceived ‘champions of sexual equality’, Hays and Wollstonecraft. However, while Hays can be understood as a ‘lone amateur scientist’,9 striving to carve out a viable discursive space for female philosophy, Elizabeth Hamilton’s use of associationism might equally be viewed as an attempt to realise and popularise what was a highly unusual subject position for women in late eighteenth-century Britain.

5

6

7

8 9

Cosmic Voyage since Paradise Lost’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 39, no. 3 (1 September 2016), 395–412. Clare O’Halloran, ‘“Better without the Ladies”: The Royal Irish Academy and the Admission of Women Members’, History Ireland (8 March 2013), http://www.historyireland.com/18th-19th-century-history/better-without-the-ladies-the-royal-irishacademy-and-the-admission-of-women-members/. The first three women were accepted as members of Royal Society in London until 1943. See Joan Mason, ‘The Admission of the First Women to the Royal Society of London’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 46, no. 2 (1992), 281. James Sully, Outlines of Psychology: With Special Reference to the Theory of Education (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1884), 103; 106; 300; 570. James Sully, ‘Self-Esteem and Self-Estimation, The Cornhill Magazine 33 (1876), 165. Walker, Mary Hays (1759–1843), 134.

234 Material Enlightenment

More moderate applications of psychology may have been more ‘useful’ at a time when conditions were fraught for polemic engagement in philosophical discourse, and when radically feminist positions were seen as counterproductive. As Lucy Aikin wrote of Hays in 1803: She is a great disciple of Mrs. Godwin, you know, and a zealous stickler for the equal rights and equal talents of our sex with the other; but, alas, though I would not so much as whisper this to the pretended lords of the creation— Her arguments directly tend Against the cause she would defend.10

It is interesting to note, however, that Hays turned to works of social ‘improvement’ in the 1800s: her The Brothers; Or, Consequences, A Story of What Happens Every Day; Addressed to that Most Useful Part of the Community, the Labouring Poor (1815), a moral tale for the lower classes, comes with an account of the Poor Man’s Friend Society in Bristol – Hannah More’s territory in more than one sense. Hays’ Family Annals; or, The Sisters (1817) is prefaced with a dedication to ‘Miss Edgeworth, whose name ought never to be pronounced without gratitude and respect’, and to whom ‘the public is indebted for a revolution in works of imagination’.11 Hays is explicit about having written this moral tale with Edgeworth in mind: ‘I have been induced to resume a pen long thrown aside, by no other view or solicitude than that of co-operating [with Edgeworth] and others of my own sex who have entitled themselves to a portion of the same grateful respect’. In realigning herself with ‘female improvers’, Hays gives a materialist take on the Parable of the Talents:12 ‘Though only one talent should have been entrusted to me; we are taught by the purest of moralists, that one cannot, with impunity, be folded in a napkin, or suffered to rust disused.’ The material focus of women’s work in the science of mind was both key to its perceived success in communicating words with ideas and, paradoxically, accounts in part for its invisibility in the history of philosophy and science. As a mode of exchange, the material turn can be highly strategic, both as a response to disenfranchisement and through insistence on the 10

11

12

Aikin quotes Jonathan Swift’s ‘Furniture of a Woman’s Mind’ (1727, published 1735). Aikin to Mrs Taylor, 27 January 1803, in Lucy Aikin, ed. Le Breton, 125–6. Mary Hays, Family Annals; or the Sisters (London: W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1817), n.p. Matthew 25:14–30; Luke 19:12–27.

Afterword 235

fundamental and even universal power of circumstance. The radical materialist offshoots of Lockean ideas seem to call for history of ideas approaches, and though these are useful for reading the work of women writers, I hope to have shown that material and sensory perspectives add a great deal more to the picture, allowing us to see their work both through and, as scholars are increasingly looking to do, ‘beyond domesticity’.13 Overstepping boundaries even in the act of writing and publishing, groundings in the domestic did not signify a retreat for Barbauld, More, Hamilton, Edgeworth and others. Though often circumscribing women’s participation in public life, their educational writings encouraged young women to think of their roles in similarly expansive terms. Embracing the cognitive sciences could also inform Stoic resilience, or what Austen called ‘Elasticity of mind’.14 Nevertheless, the case of Honora Edgeworth makes clear the bounds and tensions of Enlightenment domesticity, especially as associationism was brought to bear on the lives of women and children. While there is no evidence that the women in this study shared the philosophical convictions of Hays or Priestley, they certainly understood that certain forms of materialism could coexist with and inform Christian belief, and the equivocations of Barbauld and Hamilton on the nature of the soul indicate at least an openness to materialist theory. Barbauld’s steadfast belief in the universal power of Providence or circumstance was a central element of her educational philosophy and, of course, her ‘devotional taste’ for nature – a sense of nature as one great ‘all’ that is arrived at through attentiveness to particulars and that raises ethical questions about particularity and positionality.15 While beyond the scope of this book, such amalgamations of association and religion carry significant potential for vital materialist ecocriticism of the Romantic period. In its synthesis of material and literary history, the focus of my study has been on the Enlightenment science of mind, but it points towards the lasting significance of sensible objects, even to the minute and particular.

13

14 15

Kate Singer and Nanora Sweet, Beyond Domesticity: Felicia Hemans in the Wider World; A Special Edition of Women’s Writing (April 2014). Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. Gillian Beer (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 145. See Alice G. Den Otter, ‘Pest, Parasites and Positionality: Anna Letitia Barbauld and “The Caterpillar”, Studies in Romanticism 43, no. 2 (Summer 2004), 209–30. On Barbauld and environmental crisis, see Lisa Vargo, ‘Anna Letitia Barbauld and Natural Rights: The Case of “Inscription for an Ice-House”’, European Romantic Review 27, no. 3 (2016), 331–9.

Bibliography Manuscript collections Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Department of Special Collections: Edgeworth Papers. Dr Williams’s Library, London: Henry Crabb Robinson Manuscripts. Pye Smith Manuscripts, New College, London Collection. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California: Elizabeth (Robinson) Montagu Papers. National Library of Ireland, Dublin, Department of Manuscripts: Richard Lovell Edgeworth Papers. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles: Hannah More Collection.

Published primary sources Aikin, Arthur. ‘Obituary of Dr John Aikin’. The Gentleman’s Magazine (January 1823): 85–9. Aikin, John. An Address to the Dissidents of England on their Late Defeat. London: J. Johnson, 1790. ——. The Calendar of Nature. Warrington: J. Johnson, 1784. ——. Poems. London: J. Johnson, 1791. ——. The Spirit of the Constitution and that of the Church of England, Compared. To which are added by another hand, remarks on two letters, addressed to the delegates of the several congregations. London: J. Johnson, 1790. Aikin, John, and Anna Letitia Barbauld. Evenings at Home; or, The Juvenile Budget Opened. 6 vols. London: J. Johnson, 1792–5.

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Index Affect  28, 50–1, 55–6, 84–6, see also under Gift relations Affections, social  34, 104, 166, 179, 192–3, 225, see also Benevolence and Sympathy Aikin, John  1, 2, 3–6, 57–8, 59 Aikin, Lucy  3, 4 n.16, 19, 54 n.76, 234 Ambition  193–4, 228–9 and industry 98–9 Annotation  92–3, 106, 204, see also Practices, manuscript Arendt, Hannah  125 Associationism 12–15, see also ‘False associations’ and Anglicanism  142–3, 157, see also entries under More, Hannah and domesticity  174, 185–90, 231–2 and education  27, 35, 90, 96–103, 110, 151, 165, 171–3 and ‘habitual devotion’  33, 36–9, 47–52 and memorialisation  153–5 and the novel  150–3, 174–5, 185 and the senses  36–9, 44–5, 47–51, 55–6 and sensibility  134–5 and sympathy  15, 55–6 Association and disassociation  20–22, 117–8, 142–6, 183 of the poor  124–5 social  1–2, 20–1, 28, 121–2, see also Correspondence

theory of, see Associationism Attention  75–6, 96–8, 100–1, 177–8, 186–90, 204, 216, 228 Austen, Jane  15, 235 Autonomy  95, 104, 108, 125, 137, 162 Baber, Sarah  119, 122–3, 140–1 Baillie, Joanna  194 Barbauld, Anna Letitia and Dissent  5, 25, 33, 35–7, 48–50, 57–8, 61, 72 and gender  20–1, 23, 65–6 influence and reception  38, 41–2, 51–4, 58–62, 68, 78, 106–7, 108, 155, 214, 232, 108, 130 and John Aikin  1–3, 58–9 and Joseph Priestley  2–3, 35–7, 49, 50, 55–6, 60 political beliefs  5, 21, 56–8, 67–8, 71–2 on Providence  33, 49, 71–2 and ‘sensible objects’  33–4, 37–40 Works: ‘An Address to the Deity’  36– 7, 47, 50, 54 ‘The Baby-House’  62–6 Evenings at Home [with John Aikin]   5, 57–8, 137 Hymns in Prose for Children  26, 34, 45–54, 58, 59–60, 66–8, 121, 136 Lessons for Children  26, 34, 37–8, 42–7, 49, 51–3, 54, 56–7, 58–60, 66–70, 78, 100, 106, 108, 121, 136, 138, 155, 174

270 Index ‘On Prejudice’  67 Poems 5–6 ‘What is Education?’  34–5, 70–2 ‘Verses written in the Leaves of an Ivory Pocket-Book’ 31–3 Barbauld, Rochemont  3, 31 n.1, 69 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth  232 Beddoes, Anna Maria Edgeworth (ME’s sister)  73, 74, 79 Beddoes, Thomas  214–6, 218 Benevolence  134, 135, 151, 192–3 Bluestocking sociability  114–7 Burke, Edmund  16, 144 Catechism  57, 61, 66, 76, 119–22, 125, 137 Charity  177, 118–35, 203, 231–2 economy of  129–35 and evangelical Christianity, see entries under More, Hannah and gift relations  126–33, 231 and self-denial  132–3, 150–1 schools  118–24, 190, 204 as women’s profession  149–51, 183, 232 Child, Lydia Maria Francis  232 Childhood development  67, 73, see also Children, minds of, and Psychology, developmental discipline, see Discipline literacy  41–2, 53–4 play  53–4, 63, see also toys and toy-books rebellion  67, 102, 104 Children language of  94–5 minds of  7, 34–5, 40–2, 47, 55, 202 observation of  73, 80, 93–7, 109, 110, 217 Children’s literature and book design  38–40, 42–3, 53

and canonicity  22–3, 58–9 and conversation  42, 44 politics of  56–60, 62, 65–6, 67–8, 155–6 Circumstances, education of  9, 34–5, 71–2, 135, 144, 150–1, 171–2, 192, 213, 231 and Providential belief, see Barbauld, Anna Letitia, on Providence Clapham Sect  118 n.12, 126, 138 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  19, 61–2, 232 Collaboration  5–6, 27, 58, 78, 98, 107–8 see also under Edgeworth, Maria Collection, practices of  27–8, 92, 93–4, 109–10, 205–6, 229–30 ‘Common sense’ philosophy  24, 39, 161–3, 170, 188 Correspondence  1–2, 5–6, 21, 11 n.36, 122 n.35, 165 n. 16 Curiosity 220–3 Darwin, Charles  89 Darwin, Erasmus  77, 79, 94, 96, 101, 219, 230 n.108 Day, Thomas  76, 77–8, 80 Descartes, René  7–10 Discipline  41–2, 75–7, 96–105, 121–2, 126–8, 212–3, 220–21, see also Punishment, Reward and Self-discipline Disciplines, separation of  25 Didacticism  22, 32, 53–4, 61–2, 100, 137, 202–3 Dissenting academies  6, 14, 35–6, see also Warrington Academy and Palgrave School Dissent, religious  3, 5, 10–11, 61, 121–2, 232 Domesticity  23–4, 28, 129–30, 132, 141, 174, 186–7, 188–90, see also ‘Enlightened Domesticity’

Index 271 Dualism, see Mind-body dualism Economy charitable, see Charity Christian  141, 145, 149–52 domestic  141, 150–2, 179, 188–90 knowledge  204, 213 moral  107, 189–90 political  92, 130–1, 141 sensory 134–5 Edgeworth, Anna Maria Elers (ME’s mother)  76, 79 Edgeworth, Elizabeth Sneyd  78 n.22, 81, 86, 197–8 Edgeworth, Emmeline (ME’s sister)  79, 104–5 Edgeworth, Frances Anne Beaufort  81 n.31, 211 Edgeworth, Honora Sneyd  21, 26, 69 and Anna Seward  26, 79, 83–9, 110 and associationism  96–7, 99, 102–3, 110 educational beliefs  74–8 experimental practices  91, 88–91, 96–7, 99 death 80 marriage  78, 79–81 ‘Notes on Education’  73, 88–90, 91–4, 95–7, 104–5 contributions to Practical Education (1798)   26, 73–4, 76, 88–91, 92–4, 95–9, 101, 110–11 Practical Education; Or, the History of Harry and Lucy (1780)   80, 93, 96–7, 105–8, 110, 216 representations of  78–9, 81–9, 110 Wedgewood portrait medallion 81–3 Edgeworth, Honora (daughter of HE and RLE)  73, 81 n.31

Edgeworth, Lovell (son of HE and RLE)  93, 102–3 Edgeworth, Maria and Anna Letitia Barbauld  20–1, 51, 59, 70 collaborative work  93, 210–12, 218 education  74–5, 92, 205 educational beliefs  95, 98, 100, 104, 201, 212–3, 216–8 and Elizabeth Hamilton  165, 167 and Lunar industry  94, 199, 226, 227 on industriousness  98, 100, 197, 199, 200, 202–4, 213, 227–8 and imagination  202–3, 220, 227–8 and legislature, see ‘Irish Education Bill’ observations of children  94, 110 on prejudice  221–6 Works: Castle Rackrent  100, 203, 204, 213 Early Lessons 106 ‘Harry and Lucy’  106, 109–10, 226–7 ‘The India Cabinet’  199, 219–26 Helen 228–30 ‘Lame Jervas’  214, 218 ‘On the Education of the Poor’ 212–5 Parent’s Assistant, The  89, 93, 100, 200–5, 208–9 ‘The Orphans’  202–5 Practical Education [with RLE]  27, 63, 70–1, 101–2, 103–4, 106, 110–11, 166, 197, 199, 200, 204, 205–6, 212, 214–18, 227, 233, see also under Edgeworth, Honora Sneyd Edgeworth, Richard ‘Dick’ (brother of ME) 76–7

272 Index Edgeworth, Richard Lovell  69–70, 76–81, 83, 197–9, 208 and Barbauld  20, 68–70 collaboration with ME  93, 209–11 contributions to Practical Education (1798)   73 n.2, 106–7, 217 educational beliefs  76–7, 78, 96, 99–100, 102–3 improvement of estate  205–6 marriage with HE  76, 78, 79–81, 86, 108–9 political career  206, 209–11, 213 prefaces to ME’s books  89, 200, 228 and Priestley  105–6 technological innovations  92 n.64, 206–7, 213–4 Edgeworthstown, Co. Longford  79– 80, 198, 206, 213–4 ‘Committee of Education’ at 211–2 manuscript culture at  209–11 Education and gender  9–10, 66–7, 69–70, 101, 103, 143–4, 163–5, 216 politics of  27, 40, 103–5, see also under Children’s literature religious  47–50, 59–60, 69, 118–24, 135–6 of the poor  117, 118–23, 126–8, 140, 190, 209–13 ‘Emotional objects’, see Objects Emotions  13, 27–8, 50–1, 55–6 and empiricism  73, 90–1, 93, 111 ‘Enlightened domesticity’  14, 21, 26, 82–3, 137, 164, 174, 197, 235 Empiricism  7, 10, 58–9, 73, 110–11, 168, see also Experience, observation and; and Experiment Environment, see Circumstances, education of, and Nature

Evangelicalism, see Vital Christianity Experience  8, 35, 43–4 see also Circumstances, education of, and Senses observation and  43, 78, 97, 110, 122, 161, 163–6, 177, 181, 191, 192 Experiment  170, 232 Experimental educationalism  73–4, 76–8, 88–91 ‘False associations’  12, 97, 193 ‘The Female Philosopher’  14–17, 19, 29, 158–9, 164, 228 French Revolution  3, 16–17, 21–2, 24, 60, 167 Freedom, see Autonomy Friendship, radical  201 Gender boundaries  4, 6–7, 15–17, 19, 21, 23, 34, 63 and class  132, 141, 188 and pedagogy, see Education politics  23, 233 Gift-poems  31–4, 62–6 Gift relations  113–7 and affect 33–4, 114, 127–31 and charity  126–33 Godwin, William  17, 146, 151–60, 167, 182, 188 Works: Caleb Williams  151–2, 170 Essay on Sepulchres 153–4 Fables Ancient and Modern 155–6 Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication 146 Political Justice  175–6, 182 Habermas, Jürgen  6, 119 Hamilton, Elizabeth Christian philosophy of  164, 175–6, 193–4 and Maria Edgeworth  165, 167

Index 273 and Hays  19, 167, 173–5, 178–83, 190, 194–5 and Stewart  161, 163, 188 on memory  166, 176–8 on metaphysical speculation  167–8, 170–1, 174, 189–90 self-fashioning as philosopher  26–7, 161–8, 194–5 on the ‘selfish principle’  164, 191–2 and Wollstonecraft  171–2, 182–3 Works: Cottagers of Glenburnie 194 Elementary Principles of Education  161–4, 165–6, 185–90 Exercises in Religious Knowledge 190 Hindoo Rajah 168–73 Hints … to the Patrons and Directors of Schools 190 Memoirs of Modern Philosophers  19, 24, 167, 173–85 Popular Essays  164, 190–2 Hartley, David and Christianity  12–13, 37, 151, 161 ‘doctrine of vibrations’  12, 14 and education  17, 33, 55, 80, 96–7, 99, 118, 165 and materialism  12–13 Observations on Man  11–13, 38–9 and Rational Dissent  35–6 on ‘Self-annihilation’  13 Hartley, Mary  139 n.95 Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind (Priestley)  13–14, 35–6, 78, 97, 99, 105 Hays, Mary  7, 17–20, 143, 144, 151 and Hamilton  19, 167, 173–5, 178–83, 190, 194–5

materialist beliefs  17–19, 182 Works: The Brothers; or, Consequences 234 Family Annals; or, The Sisters 234 Letters and Essays 17–18 Memoirs of Emma Courtney  18–19, 135, 150–1 ‘Reply to J. T. on Helvetius’ 143 The Victim of Prejudice  19, 135 Home, Henry, Lord Kames  162–3 Hume, David  26, 157–8, 172, 186 Ideas association of, see Associationism of sensation  38–9, 44, 114 and reflection  8 Imagism philosophical  38–9, 166 poetic  50–1, 61–2, 65 Imagination  61–2, 63–5, 70, 94, 202, 203, 220, 227–8, 230, 232, see also Invention ‘Improvement’  74, 94–5, 100, 114, 148, 165–6, 169, 205–6, 213, 226, 228, 234 Industrialism  213, 226, 227 Industriousness  76, 97–8, 100, 107, 120, 150, 197, 199, 200, 202–4, 216 Industry habits of, see Industriousness Lunar, see Lunar Circle of Birmingham Schools of, see Schools Institutions, scientific  4, 6–7, 233 ‘Instruction with delight’  53–4, 74 Intertextuality  22, 54, 58, 100, 143–4, 147–8, 152, 200, 203, 230 Invention  76, 213–8, 227–30 Ireland Act of Union with Britain (1800)  209 n.49, 213

274 Index Rebellion of 1798  27, 207–9 schools 204 ‘Irish Education Bill’ (1799)  209–12 Johnson, Joseph  1, 5, 70 n.128, 201 ‘Knowledge objects’, see Objects La Mettrie, Julien Offray de  9 n.30, 13 Liberty, see Autonomy Locke, John on the ‘abuse of words’  40, 57–8, 177 and educationalism  17, 32–3, 41–3, 47, 53–4, 71–2, 97, 105, 121–2, 135–7, 140 and feminism  9–11, 165 and materialism  8–9, 16 and memory  177–8 ‘Urn to John Locke’  113–7 and ‘Vital Christianity’  126–7, 131, 143–5 Works: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding  2, 6–10, 12, 38, 94 n.67, 156 Some Thoughts Concerning Education  39–40, 53 Lunar Circle of Birmingham  79, 81, 94, 105–6, 198–9 Luxury  71–2, 100, 150, 213, 220 ‘Material Enlightenment’  21, 23, 24, 33, 230 Materialism  2–3, 12–14, 144–5, 157–8, 161, 167–8, 182, 199, 226, 235 French  9, 145 and feminism  15–20 Vital  29, 209 Materiality and affect  28, 31–4, 128–9 of books  42–4, 106

of mind see Materialism Mauss, Marcel  129–30 Medicine  15, 101, 174 metaphors of  69–71, 131–2, 138 Memory  66, 166, 176–8 Memorialisation and materiality  80–1, 114, 178 and national identity  153–4 Metaphor  46–7, 51, 70 Metaphysics  11, 170, 177, 191, 227 Mind metaphors of  31–3, 38, 41, 186–7, 220 science of, see Psychology Mind-body dualism  7–10 Modesty  42, 163, 185 Montagu, Elizabeth  114–7, 126, 138–9, 151 More, Hannah and Barbauld  120–2, 136–7 and Bluestocking sociability  113– 7, 126 charitable practices  126–31 and Godwin  150–60 Lockeanism of  114, 121–2, 135, 143–5, 150, 156 Mendip feasts  123–6 Mendip schools  118–24 on suicide  145–8, 157–8 on Wollstonecraft  143–6 women’s clubs  117, 124, 127–31 ‘Vital Christianity’ of  26, 118, 120–1, 126, 132, 138, 141–3, 148–9 Works: The Bas Bleu 115–6 Cœlebs in Search of a Wife  118, 133, 137, 146–53, 159 Cheap Repository Tracts 126– 7, 136–41 An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World  133–4, 151, 156–7

Index 275 Questions and Answers 120–21 Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education  24, 117–8, 126, 131–2, 135–6, 142–6, 148–9, 161 Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great 149 Thoughts …; and An Estimate  152, 156–9 Village Politics 136–9 More, Martha ‘Patty’  26, 117, 118, 123–5, 127, 140 Nature  32–3, 37–9, 47–50, 52, 58–9, 164, 176, 253 Necessitarianism  17–18, 151, 167, 179–81, 185 Nerves  12, 15–16, 39 n.31, 134–5, 179–80 Obedience  74–5, 95–7, 101–4, see also Discipline Object lessons  43–4, 93, 202, 216–20 Objects emotional  78–9, 80–1, 83–4, 109 knowledge  78, 197–8, 225–6 ‘sensible’  34, 47–50 ‘Observation and experience’, see under Experience Palgrave School  63, 67, 68 Partiality  73–4, 90–1, 110, 168, 173, 224–5 Philanthropy, see Charity Philosophy of mind, see Psychology Pleasure  44, 48–9, 52, 59–60, 96–7, 100, 102–3, 121, 123–4, 126–7, 150, see also ‘Instruction with delight’ Practice, theory and  23–4, 27, 48–9, 53–4, 78, 88, 116–7, 132, 165, 227

Practices educational  42–4, 53, 73, 99–100, 102, 121–3, 135–6, 168 charitable  123–30, 132–3 religious  37, 48–9, 52, 135 manuscript  78–9, 109–10 collaborative, see Collaboration Prejudice  66–7, 162, 168–70, 192–4, 204, 221, 224–6 Priestley, Joseph  17, 35–7, 39 n.31, 46, 49, 55, 60, 105–6, 176 ‘On Habitual Devotion’  36–7, 50 Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind 13–14, 35–6, 78, 97, 99, 105 materialism of  2–3, 13–14, 161 Price, Richard  2–3 Psychology  9–12, 21, 34–5, 89–91, 99, 154, 165–6, 231, 233, see also Associationism developmental 89–90 and the nervous system  12, 15–16 and religion  10–11, 13, 25, 143, 164 Punishment  102–4, 121, see also Reward and punishment Reid, Thomas  89, 165, 166 Religion, feminisation of  193–4 Reward  41, 73, 80–1, 203 and punishment  96–7, 99–100, 127, 212 Rote learning  45, 57, 135, 140, 166, 177–9, 217, see also Catechism Rousseau, Jean Jacques  19, 74, 76, 78, 90 n.60, 105, 182–3 Ruskin, John  227 Schema theory  45 Schools charity and Sunday schools, see entries under Charity Dissenting, see Dissenting academies, Warrington Academy and Palgrave School of industry  118–9, 190

276 Index in Ireland  204 Science of mind, see Psychology Scottish Enlightenment  161–3, 166 Self-discipline  98, 104, 132–3, 142–3, 148, 150, 203 Self-sacrifice  118, 146–8 ‘Selfish principle’, see under Hamilton, Elizabeth Senses  8, 10, 38–9, 49–50, 97 see also Ideas of sensation ‘Sensible objects’, see Objects Sensibility  11, 13 n.45, 14–16, 84, 131–2, 134–5, 150, 171–2 Seward, Anna  51, 79, 83–9, 110 Sexuality  11, 16–19, 180–1, 190 policing of  128, 194 Signification  40–1, 57–8, 104–5, 163–4, 166, 187, 217, see also Locke on the ‘abuse of words’ Smith, Adam  92, 116, 141, 192, 200, 213 The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe) 145–6 Speculation, philosophical  163–4, 167–8, 174, 181, 185, 187–9 see also Metaphysics Stewart, Dugald  162–3, 164 n.14, 165, 166, 168, 183, 188 Stoicism  6, 56–7, 235 Suicide  117–8, 145–8, 157–8, 170 Sydney, Sabrina  77 Sympathy  15, 55–6, 192–3 Taste  33–4, 48–9, 59–60, 94, 127, 164, 216, 224 Toy-books 53 Toys and domesticity  63–6 Rational 216 utility of  216–8, 221–6

Trimmer, Sarah  48, 57, 59–60, 120 n.22, 121 n.32, 155, 156, 201, 232 charity school  118–9 The Œconomy of Charity 119 n.15, 132–5 Turner, William  4, 31–3 Tyranny 103–4 Unitarians  2, 13, 17, 61, 232 Universalism  48, 235 ‘Use’, see Utility Utility  32, 42, 91, 116–7, 164, 174, 188, 190, 198, 203–4, 234, see also Toys, utility of ‘Vital Christianity’, see under More, Hannah Vitalism  96, 131–2, 141 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet  9, 16, 145 Warrington Academy  4, 5 n.20, 35–7, 55 Watts, Isaac  10, 40–2, 62, 120–1, 220 Wedgwood, Josiah  81–3 Wilberforce, William  118–9, 123, 127, 132 Wollstonecraft, Mary  17, 18, 20, 21–2, 143–6, 171–2, 182–3, 193, 234 Works: Original Stories 190 Thoughts on the Education of Daughters 143 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman  144, 145, 183 Wordsworth, William  61, 62, 95, 105 ‘Words without ideas’, see Signification and Locke on the ‘abuse of words’

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