Historical Writing in Britain, 1688-1830

Visions of History

B. Dew, F. Price, B. Dew, F. Price

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137332639
• eBook ISBN: 9781137332646
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Historical Writing in Britain, 1688-1830 explores a series of debates concerning the nature and value of the past in the long eighteenth century. The essays investigate a diverse range of subjects including art history, biography, historical poetry, and novels, as well as addressing more conventional varieties of historical writing.

1

Female Worthies and the Genres of Women’s History

Philip Hicks

In The Christian Religion, as Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705), Mary Astell remonstrated against the fundamentally masculine character of historical writing, but she was not thinking of just any kind of history. She was thinking of a specific and very prestigious genre of political history that had originated in classical antiquity, and she was likely provoked by the greatest such work published in her lifetime, the 1st Earl of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (1702–04). Astell eagerly mined what she called ‘that useful and valuable History’ for two pamphlets she published in 1704. Yet while the History of the Rebellion fortified her High Church Tory polemical writings, it paid scant attention to women. The principal actors in Clarendon’s sprawling political narrative of the British Civil Wars were men, and his character sketches of them were an acclaimed feature of his neoclassical masterpiece.¹ Clarendon’s ‘great men’ conception of history certainly had a hallowed pedigree, but so too did a parallel historical tradition of ‘great women’ which Astell herself sometimes deployed. In fact, I shall argue that the discourse of ‘female worthies’ was the prime vehicle for the dramatic growth of women’s historical self-knowledge in Britain during the long eighteenth century. In Astell’s day, writers lamented the paucity of information about women of the past, and it was men who usually wrote collective female biographies, but by the end of the eighteenth century female authors dominated the genre and their works appeared in profusion. Ironically, the form of women’s history best suited to this tumultuous period of political and intellectual change was not an innovative new form but a classical one; it was not history, properly speaking, but biography.

While scholars have often dismissed this biographical component of women’s history as elitist and hagiographic, they are now rediscovering how female worthies served as role models for eighteenth-century women, how they fortified feminist arguments, and how they captured the imagination of the reading public. Harriet Guest has shown how they were appropriated to assert Britain’s cultural superiority over France, while Arianne Chernock has demonstrated how ‘“exceptional” women often became potent weapons in the multifaceted reformist attack on irrationality and privilege’.² Despite this newfound appreciation for the worthies, however, they have still been overshadowed by a Scottish historical genre of the 1760s. This ‘conjectural’ history of humanity, writes Karen O’Brien, ‘did much to introduce the idea that women in general – not just a few celebrated female “worthies” – did have a history’. Indeed, Miriam Elizabeth Burstein suggests that women’s history truly began with conjectural history, because it introduced complex notions of anachronism that were missing from the worthy tradition. Mark Salber Phillips observes that except for biography ‘there are few eighteenth-century works specifically devoted to the history of women’,³ yet he pays more attention to those few works of conjectural history than to the female worthies.

In analysing the ‘history of women’, it is important to distinguish between women as the subject of history and women as the writers of history. Eighteenth-century women wrote history in many genres, including memoirs, epistles, historical novels, travel writings, essays, poems and biographies,⁴ but most of the historical information about women appeared in biographical form, packaged as individual lives. Eighteenth-century Britons lacked a comprehensive narrative analysis of women’s history such as we might expect to read today, but they did possess biographical compendia of accomplished women. Over the course of the century, these worthy women became an increasingly inescapable part of British culture, appearing in multiple genres and media. George Frideric Handel’s oratorios featured Deborah, Esther and Theodora in title roles. Benjamin West depicted dramatic moments in the lives of famous women in his history paintings. Lady Mary Walker included an extensive catalogue of worthies in her epistolary novel, Letters from the Duchess de Crui (1776). Playwright Hannah Cowley had flattering remarks for Cornelia, Lucretia and Portia in her farce, Who’s the Dupe? (1779). Commentators on the Westminster election of 1784 compared the Duchess of Devonshire to Coriolanus’s wife. Later, the rules to a board game alluded to these same ‘Roman ladies’ as counterexamples of female benevolence.⁵

Before examining how female worthies became such a ubiquitous feature of British historical consciousness, we ought to consider briefly how the tradition had developed in the centuries leading up to Astell’s engagement with it. The Greek biographer Plutarch is traditionally credited with founding the genre of exceptional women, although the idea of citing illustrious women to contest or confirm the gender status quo is more ancient still. When Roman women thronged the forum to protest the sumptuary laws in 195 BC, for instance, the tribune of the plebs defended their action by citing patriotic worthies in early Roman history. In antiquity, and indeed until the advent of conjectural history in the eighteenth century, history proper – as distinct from related genres such as biography and memoir – only took notice of women when the description of political and military affairs required it, as when Livy recorded this memorable episode. Plutarch plucked from such accounts the scattered female actors in ancient historiography for his moral treatise Mulierum Virtutes. In it he declared that ‘man’s virtues and women’s virtues are one and the same’ and he drew up parallel lives showing, for example, that Portia possessed the same ‘high spirit’ as her husband Brutus.⁶ Strictly speaking, the term ‘female worthies’ was only coined in the Middle Ages, when writers proposed various women as counterparts to the Nine Worthies, the most renowned males in world history – Hector, Alexander, Caesar, Joshua, David, Judas Maccabeus, Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon, according to one influential fourteenth-century list. During the Renaissance elaborate catalogues such as the one contained in Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies (1404–05) contributed to the querelle des femmes, a battle of the sexes over the moral character and abilities of women.⁷

By the early modern period, the tradition was sufficiently well known in Britain that pageants sometimes featured the living embodiments of all 18 worthies, male and female. Such line-ups, it must be emphasised, were always mutable, but one fairly representative listing, compiled by Thomas Heywood in 1640, included Deborah, Judith, Esther, Boadicea, Penthesilea, Artemisia, Æthelflæd,⁸ Henry VI’s consort Queen Margaret of Anjou, and Queen Elizabeth. During the Civil Wars and Interregnum, women cited the Old Testament examples of Abigail, Deborah, Esther and Jael to justify their political petitioning.⁹ Later, the reigns of Queen Mary (1689–94), co-regent with her husband William III, and of Queen Anne (1702–14) were responsible for a heightened interest in female lives. Both queens quickly came to be regarded as worthies in their own right, and Mary inspired two encomiastic catalogues of worthies, William Walsh’s A Dialogue Concerning Women, Being a Defence of the Sex (1691) and Nahum Tate’s A Present for the Ladies: Being a Historical Vindication of the Female Sex (1692).¹⁰

These writings provided one context for Mary Astell’s critique of marriage and proposal for a female academy in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694, 1697) and Some Reflections Upon Marriage (1700). Astell’s works were grounded in Cartesian feminism and Christian Platonism, yet she also argued biographically, citing the example of Tudor women as a precedent for her college and using heroines from the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament to refute ‘the common Prejudices of Mankind’ slandering women.¹¹ Even so, Astell complained about the comparative absence of women from the historical record, a circumstance that she ascribed to the male-centredness of traditional history. Astell realised that it was males, by and large, who wrote, read and made history. ‘Histories are writ by them,’ she reminded readers; ‘they recount each other’s great Exploits, and have always done so’. By defining history in martial and political terms, men had effectively barred women from historical instruction and consigned them to oblivion: ‘tho’ it may be of Use to the Men who govern Affairs, to know how their Fore-fathers Acted, yet what is this to us, who have nothing to do with such Business? […] how will this help our Conduct, or excite in us a generous Emulation? since the Men being the Historians, they seldom condescend to record the great and good Actions of Women’.¹²

Despite the way men had monopolised the past, Astell recognised that women could make a place for themselves in history by publicising their own ‘great and good Actions’. Indeed, she asked women to become famous by cultivating their own virtue and intellect in imitation of women who had already achieved a foothold in history: ‘Remember, I pray you, the famous Women of former Ages, the Orinda [Katherine Philips]’s of late, and the more Modern Heroins’, she entreated.¹³ In a more radical move, however, Astell also questioned the traditional criteria for historical significance. She contrasted the political skulduggery of conventionally famous males with the self-sacrifice of ordinary wives and mothers, who ‘certainly perform a more Heroick Action, than all the famous Masculine Heroes can boast of, she suffers a continual Martyrdom to bring Glory to God, and Benefit to Mankind’. In her view, such domestic heroines faced greater trials on a daily basis than did classical heroes like Cato, whose stoicism and suicide she found risible.¹⁴ Astell was proposing that women’s history might be augmented by a new kind of female worthy, one whose private exertion in service of God and family deserved more recognition than the putatively ‘great man’ of antiquity.

While Astell saw the stunted quality of women’s history as an unintended consequence of male historiography, others detected more sinister motives at work, alleging that a conspiracy had distorted historical accounts in the interest of male hegemony. The anonymous author of An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (1696) – most likely Judith Drake – charged: ‘[I]f any Histories were anciently written by Women, Time, and the Malice of Men have effectually conspir’d to suppress ‘em; and it is not reasonable to think that Men shou’d transmit, or suffer to be transmitted to Posterity, any thing that might shew the weakness and illegallity of their Title to a Power they still exercise so arbitrarily’. The Dutch expatriate Bernard Mandeville, writing in The Female Tatler (1709–10), concurred: men had ‘engross’d the writing of History to themselves’ out of envy for women, and so ‘industriously hid’ the names of deserving women, while ‘very diligently’ recording the women ‘Famous for their Crimes’.¹⁵ As a remedy to this state of affairs, at least one woman decided that women had to take matters into their own hands and build up their own storehouse of historical knowledge. In 1709, Elizabeth Elstob, the foremost female scholar of her time and one of Astell’s close associates, began amassing a comprehensive collection of women’s lives. She embarked on a catalogue of all the world’s famous women, calculating that such a work would present a convincing case for the value of female education. Her focus was on learned women, including Saint Brigitta, Hildegard of Bingen, Mary Queen of Scots, Anne Clifford (patron, diarist and Countess of Pembroke) and Elizabeth Pepys. In the event, her project had to be abandoned for financial reasons,¹⁶ yet it is significant to note that Elstob intended to solve the problem of women’s history biographically, by searching for the names and stories of a greater number of accomplished women, rather than by writing in other historical genres or inventing new ones. In this sense, like Mandeville and Astell, she remained captive to the ‘worthy’ paradigm of history, neoclassically conceived as the record of those persons whose illustrious deeds ought to be preserved to instruct posterity.

When an episode of the querelle des femmes broke out in the 1730s, some of these attitudes towards women and history were reprised. Ann Ingram, Viscountess Irwin echoed Astell’s critique of male criteria for historical worth, as did Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who insisted that ‘A Lady who has perform’d her Duty as a Daughter, a Wife, and a Mother, appears to my Eyes with as much veneration as I should look on Socrates or Xenophon.’ In a major feminist treatise, the pseudonymous ‘Sophia’ boasted, ‘I could, from the single evidence of History, which is so much perverted to debase us, throw such a dazzling glory round my whole sex, as would suffice to render their honour inaccessible by the most presumptuous and da...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Visions of History
• 1 Female Worthies and the Genres of Women’s History
• 2 Reading the Past: Women Writers and the Afterlives of Lady Rachel Russell
• 3 Constructing the ‘English School’: Contested Narratives of Nation in the Writing of Richard Graham and Bainbrigg Buckeridge
• 4 An Economic Turn?: Commerce and Finance in the Historical Writing of Paul de Rapin Thoyras, William Guthrie and David Hume
• 5 ‘Caledonian plagiary’: The Role and Meaning of Ireland in the Poems of Ossian
• 6 Tracing a Meridian through the Map of Time: Fact, Conjecture and the Scientific Method in William Robertson’s History of America
• 7 Lyricist in Britain; Empiricist in France: Volney’s Divided Legacy
• 8 Making History: Social Unrest, Work and the Post-French Revolution Historical Novel
• 9 Don Quixote and the Sentimental Reader of History in the Works of William Godwin
• 10 Fictions of History, Evangelical Whiggism and the Debate over Old Mortality in Scotland and Nova Scotia
• Bibliography
• Index