Changing Sentiments and the Magdalen Hospital

Luxury, Virtue and the Senses in Eighteenth-Century Culture

Mary Peace

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315308333
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Literature

This book charts the complex ideological territory of eighteenth-century sentimental discourse through the uniquely revealing lens of the London Magdalen Hospital for Penitent Prostitutes. The establishment of the London Magdalen House in 1758 is read as the cultural high watermark of sentimental confidence in the compatibility of virtue and commerce. It is the product of a whiggish, moral-sense discourse at its most ebullient and culturally authoritative. Equally visible, though, in this context, are the ideological limitations of moral-sense thinking and an anticipation of the ways in which its ideas ultimately failed to underwrite commercial virtue. Sentimental discourse fractures in the course of the mid-century: in part it becomes increasingly divorced from the world; retreating into a primitivist, proto-Romantic virtue which claims no purchase on "things as they are." Where sentimental vocabulary persists in a worldly context, it becomes divorced from a vocabulary of moral virtue. It is overlaid with a French usage where "sentiment" and "sensibility" describe exquisite emotion rather than refined and cultivated virtue.' Changing Sentiments and the Magdalen Hospital registers the fracturing and shifting ground of sentimental discourse in the changing institutional practise of the Magdalen institution, most particularly in its increasingly embrace of evangelical religion.

1 A peculiarly sentimental institution

On 22 March 1758, Jonas Hanway stood up at a meeting of the Society for Encouraging Arts, Manufactures and Commerce to propose a prize for the best plan for a charity house or houses to address the problem of prostitution: one for women who were in danger of becoming prostitutes, the second for “Common Prostitutes as are inclined to forsake their Evil Course of Life, and become Virtuous and useful Members of the Community.”¹ The history of this competition and its outcome, I suggest, offers ample evidence that the sentimental rhetoric which surrounded the Magdalen House is neither negligible nor skin-deep, but rather a fundamental aspect of the institution. And it is the peculiarly sentimental character of this institution, I will argue in this chapter, which renders impossible any unproblematic co-option of the charity either as the end point of the mercantilist Enlightenment tradition which generated the population charities, or as a proto-evangelical institution which merits Compston’s characterisation as “the mother Penitentiary of our Empire.”² Rather, as I have suggested, the foundation of the London Magdalen House represents the high-watermark of the polite moral-sense sentimental tradition, offering the possibility of reconciliation between two sides of one of the most aggravated embodiments of the conflict between commerce and morality: virtue and prostitution.

The competition to establish the best plan for a Magdalen charity

Hanway’s proposal of a prize for the best plan for a charity house to address the problem of prostitution was accepted by the meeting as a valid cause for the Society, and a competition to find the best proposal ensued.³ By the deadline of 17 May, nine plans had been submitted.⁴ Most of these were anonymous, or virtually so, with just initials or mottos.⁵ Of those which can be identified there is: Robert Dingley’s Proposals for Establishing a Public Place of Reception for Penitent Prostitutes; Jonas Hanway’s Letter, presumably a version of his Letter V. to Robert Dingley, Esq; being a proposal for the relief and employment of friendless girls and repenting prostitutes; Joseph Massie’s A Plan For the Establishment of Charity Houses For Exposed Or Deserted Women And Girls, And For Penitent Prostitutes; and one from John Fielding, magistrate and brother of the novelist Henry Fielding, entitled A Plan for a Preservatory and Reformatory, for the Benefit Of Deserted Girls, And Penitent Prostitutes. A further plan was submitted after the deadline by Fielding’s fellow magistrate Saunders Welch. This plan, entitled A Proposal To Render Effectual A Plan To Remove The Nuisance of Common Prostitutes From The Streets Of The Metropolis, was accepted by the committee on the 31st May.⁶

The plans are all, roughly speaking, characterised by anxieties about population generated by the calculations of political arithmetic. This is not at all surprising given that the Premiums, or prizes, established by the Society were precisely designed to encourage Arts and Manufactures.⁷ Improbable as it might now seem, in the judgement of the committee, Hanway’s proposal of a Magdalen charity project perfectly fitted this description: by tackling the problem of prostitution, the charity would “lend assistance to destroy one of the numerous causes of the decrease of the people, which must at length involve arts, manufactures, and commerce, in one common distress.”⁸

Yet, though they do all address the concerns of political arithmetic, there is a distinct difference of tone and approach in the plans – to such an extent that a considerable controversy ensued when the panel of judges initially decided to award the premium to the High Constable of Holborn, Saunders Welch. Jonas Hanway vetoed this decision, and prevailed with the committee not to award the premium to Welch. This committee of fifty-one members included such well-known personalities as David Garrick, Samuel Johnson and John Wilkes. Indeed, it seems that the premium was never actually awarded, although the institution was, as I will demonstrate, clearly founded according to Dingley’s, rather than Welch’s, proposals.⁹

The differences between the rival plans of Welch and Dingley are instructive in terms of understanding quite how distinctively sentimental the London Magdalen House was in its original incarnation. Dingley’s Proposals for Establishing a Public Place of Reception for Penitent Prostitutes (1758) stresses, above all, the need for compassion towards the “objects” of the charity on the grounds that prostitutes are predominantly virtuous victims of a vicious world:

Humanity in its utmost efforts pleads their cause more powerfully than anything I can offer on the subject; and I appeal to every mind, from its own experience, if there can be greater Objects of Compassion, than poor, young, thoughtless Females, plunged into ruin by those tempations, [sic] to which their very youth and personal advantages exposes them, no less than those passions implanted by nature for wise, good and great ends?¹⁰

These women are victims because:

Surrounded by snares, the most artfully and industriously laid, snares laid by those endowed with superior faculties, and all the advantages of Education and fortune, what virtue can be proof against such formidable Seducers, who offer too commonly, and too profusely promise, to transport the thoughtless Girls from Want, Confinement, and Restraint of Passions, to Luxury, Liberty, Gaiety, and Joy?¹¹

But the peculiar distress of their plight is that, after they have been victims of seduction, they are

deserted by their Friends, contemned [sic] by the World, they are left to struggle with want, despair, and scorn, and even in their own defence to plunge still deeper and deeper in sin, till Disease and Distress conclude a miserable Being.¹²

These are, Dingley argues, women in whom the “seeds of virtue would exert themselves, but alas! the possibility is removed.”¹³ The proposed Place of Reception for Penitent Prostitutes, Dingley hopes, will address this lack.

It will be a means of employing the idle, of instructing them in, as well as habituating them to work; of reforming their Morals; of rescuing many bodies from Disease and Death, and many Souls from Eternal Misery.¹⁴

Dingley’s plan envisages that applicants will send a petition to the hospital to be considered by the Committee of governors who will enquire into the applicant’s suitability. If “Found Proper,” she will be made an “articled Servant to the MATRON, for seven Years.”¹⁵ Dingley specifies that one of the officers of the charity should be a chaplain who must always be present at admissions to “influence Decency,” and who must “read Morning and Evening Prayers, Pray and Preach twice every Sunday.”¹⁶ The successful applicants are to be separated into different wards according to their former rank in life and are to be employed either in devotion or in “mending of Linen – Scowering Pewter – Making Bon Lace – Black Lace – Artificial Flowers, Children’s Toys. Etc.”¹⁷ Above all, as we saw in the last chapter, Dingley insists:

Ever observing, as well in this, as in every other Circumstance, the utmost Care and Delicacy, Humanity and Tenderness; so that this Establishment may be coveted, and not thought an House of Correction, but an happy Asylum, and desirable Retreat from their wretched and distressful Circumstances.¹⁸

The vocabulary of sentimental discourse, with its valorisation of “feminised” virtues such as “delicacy” and “tenderness,” is scattered throughout this proposal. Indeed, Dingley describes how his own charitable sensibility emanates from “the Tenderness of [his] … own Constitution.”¹⁹ And this “feminisation” of virtue clearly underpins the belief that the Magdalens will be essentially virtuous but unfortunately corrupted, but also, Dingley’s vision that women will be actively involved in supporting the Magdalen charity.²⁰

The title of the rival plan, A Proposal To Render Effectual A Plan To Remove The Nuisance Of Common Prostitutes From The Streets Of The Metropolis, points to the considerably more hard-headed, punitive and pragmatic nature of Welch’s ideas. Whereas Dingley focuses on the need for care, delicacy, humanity and compassion, Welch wants to see “a due mixture of mildness and severity.”²¹

Welch’s plan, which is prefaced by the statement that he wishes to contribute to, rather than “depreciate” the labour of “Mr Dingley, and Mr. Hanway,” does not reject Dingley’s proposals outright, but he certainly does not see all prostitutes as essentially virtuous victims.²² Instead, he proposes that Dingley’s “Asylum” should be only a part of any proposed institution.²³ On its own, he believes, it would scarcely scratch the surface of the problem. His long experience as a High Constable of Holborn, h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Introduction: The critical debate: hospital, house or asylum?
• 1 A peculiarly sentimental institution
• 2 The romance of the Magdalen House: Clarissa, Lady Vane and the “original” letters of the Magdalens
• 3 Prostitute memoirs, luxury and the Fall of Rome
• 4 The rise of primitivist sentiment: Clarissa and La Nouvelle Héloïse
• 5 Magdalens and the performance of virtue: Sterne and Crébillon
• 6 “Chaplain extraordinary”: The unfortunate Dr Dodd, The Sisters and the limits of the moral sense
• Conclusion: The Magdalens and the revolution of sentiment: Rousseau, Wollstonecraft and Burke
• Bibliography
• Index