The Angel out of the House

Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England

Dorice Williams Elliott

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780813920887
• eBook ISBN: 9780813922010
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Was nineteenth-century British philanthropy the "truest and noblest woman's work" and praiseworthy for having raised the nation's moral tone, or was it a dangerous mission likely to cause the defeminization of its practitioners as they became "public persons"? In Victorian England, women's participation in volunteer work seemed to be a natural extension of their domestic role, but like many other assumptions about gender roles, the connection between charitable and domestic work is the result of specific historical factors and cultural representations. Proponents of women as charitable workers encouraged philanthropy as being ideal work for a woman, while opponents feared the practice was destined to lead to overly ambitious and manly behavior.

In The Angel out of the House Dorice Williams Elliott examines the ways in which novels and other texts that portrayed women performing charitable acts helped to make the inclusion of philanthropic work in the domestic sphere seem natural and obvious. And although many scholars have dismissed women's volunteer endeavors as merely patriarchal collusion, Elliott argues that the conjunction of novelistic and philanthropic discourse in the works of women writers—among them George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, Hannah More and Anna Jameson—was crucial to the redefinition of gender roles and class relations.

In a fascinating study of how literary works contribute to cultural and historical change, Elliott's exploration of philanthropic discourse in nineteenth-century literature demonstrates just how essential that forum was in changing accepted definitions of women and social relations.

1 “An Assured Asylum against Every Evil”

---

Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall and Mid-Eighteenth-Century Philanthropic Institutions for Women

IN 1766 NEWTON OGLE, deputy clerk of the closet to His Majesty George III, summarized the achievements of mid-eighteenth-century English philanthropists in a charity sermon delivered before the assembled governors of the Magdalen Charity: “Houses of Charity have been opened for every Malady incident to Man. The Aged, the Maimed, the Sick, the Foundling, the Woman Labouring of Child, even those polluted by the foul Effects of their own Vices, have justly been admitted to a Share of our Bounty.”¹ The “Houses of Charity” that Ogle lauds were charitable subscription societies modeled after joint stock corporations.² Although in previous centuries rich benefactors had often founded hospitals and almshouses to receive the sick and aged poor, these new societies were formed to meet a variety of specific social needs, many of them the result of increasing urbanization. Thus the institutions subscription societies founded would, it was hoped, have important economic and political, as well as humanitarian, effects.³

Based as they were on commercial and political principles, the modern philanthropic ventures Ogle praises were usually organized, supervised, and managed by men; in the numerous prospectuses for and reports of midcentury philanthropic societies, names of women occasionally appear as subscribers but never as directors or governors.⁴ Although women of the landed classes continued to play their traditional role in rural charitable activities by distributing largesse and advice to their poorer neighbors and tenants, tending to the sick, founding and teaching in charity schools, and, in some cases, leaving large benefactions in their wills, the developing ideology of domesticity threatened to make their active participation in newer businesslike charities seem inappropriate and improper.⁵ Excluded from the leadership of these new charitable projects, women faced the potential loss of the opportunities that philanthropy had offered them—occasions not only for useful public activity but also for an alternative vocation to marriage, as the celebrated Mary Astell had proposed in her A Serious Proposal to the Ladies in 1694 (1: 36). Thus when Sarah Scott came to write her novel about women and charitable activity, some sixty years after Astell's Serious Proposal, she faced the problem of reclaiming women's traditional prerogatives from a new kind of philanthropic practice that threatened to exclude them.

Scott's Millenium Hall, published in 1762 and her most successful novel, imaginatively resolves the problem of integrating the upper-class Englishwoman's traditional charitable role as Lady Bountiful with the principles of public, businesslike philanthropic institutions by utilizing both the discourses of philanthropy and of sensibility. While Millenium Hall has been read as a typical example of the novel of sensibility, its contribution to midcentury discussions of philanthropy has received less attention.⁶ Like novels of sensibility, many of the houses of charity promoted in philanthropic prospectuses and charity sermons aimed to rescue victimized single women, teach them to be proper domestic women, and restore them to their appropriate place in the home—ideally, by finding them husbands. Millenium Hall, with its utopian female community dedicated to charitable works, offers a feminized version of these male-run philanthropic institutions as a solution to the “problem” of unmarried and sexualized women as well as to the larger social problems such women symbolized. In so doing, Scott's novel helped to establish philanthropy as a defining characteristic of the domestic woman and to generate women's ambitious desires to contribute to the resolution of social, political, and economic questions. To authorize these ambitious desires, however, Millenium Hall must renounce its heroines' sexuality.

Sarah Scott was well aware of the predicament of the victimized woman in mid-eighteenth-century England. Although she had been married briefly, her father and brothers had “removed her” from the marriage after less than a year. Her family feared for her reputation, as letters between her sister, the famous bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu, and various correspondents indicate.⁷ Scott's reputation was apparently salvaged when her husband returned half of her marriage portion; although her means were now modest, she had enough to retire to the country to live with her friend Lady Barbara Montagu and devote herself to charitable projects. Millenium Hall was evidently based in part on her life with Lady “Bab” in Batheaston.⁸

The problem that Scott addresses in Millenium Hall is one that many unmarried women confronted in the face of domestic ideology's prescription for women. While recent critics, especially Nancy Armstrong, have written convincingly about the role of a new domestic ideology in the eighteenth century, such accounts have not taken unmarried women into consideration.⁹ Like the eighteenth-century texts they discuss, their focus on the domestic woman as (sexualized) wife and mother implicitly casts unmarried women as misfits or “monsters.” Similarly, readings of Millenium Hall as a lesbian novel also reenact domestic ideology's definition of women by their sexuality.¹⁰ Scott's project in Millenium Hall, I contend, was precisely to contest the view that women could be defined only by their sexuality. For her, the problem was neither how to get her heroines married off nor how to represent an alternative sexuality, but rather her point was to show that a woman who was not married could define herself as something other than an “old maid” or a “fallen woman.” Scott's fictional solution to this problem is to use philanthropy as a vehicle for redefining both the sexualized female victim and the independent woman. Philanthropy was crucial to this project because it was a discourse that linked the masculine world of business and politics to the feminized world of domesticity. By writing a novel about women doing philanthropy, Scott purges the novel of its sexualized sentimental overtones; by casting it in the form of a philanthropic tract, she strips philanthropy of its specifically masculine component and makes it hospitable to nonsexualized women.

Because the ideological work that Scott's novel attempts had not yet received social recognition, however, Scott had to hide her identity by posing as an anonymous male author; there was as yet no precedent for a woman to participate in philanthropic discourse, even in novel form. It was certainly not uncommon for writers of either gender to publish anonymously in the mid-eighteenth century, and Scott may have withheld her name partly because publishing a novel could compromise her social standing, or for a variety of other reasons.¹¹ However, although many women wrote novels during this period, they were not writing philanthropic pamphlets, prospectuses, sermons, or public letters. Thus Scott's suppression of her female identity in favor of an anonymous male, in imitation of Jonas Hanway and others, would have given her philanthropic recommendations a weight they would not have had were she known to be a woman writing. Scott's novel, in fact, seems to have been the first published text authored by a woman that dealt seriously with the subject of philanthropic institutions.¹²

Attributed to “A Gentleman on his Travels,” Millenium Hall is narrated by a wealthy merchant who comes across a country estate in a remote location in Cornwall that is owned and inhabited by a group of six single women (one of whom conveniently turns out to be the narrator's cousin). The narrator, along with his foppish young companion, Lamont, is charmed with the ladies and their estate, especially with the extensive philanthropic system the women have established, and he gives their home the fictitious name of Millenium Hall to avoid offending “that modesty which has induced them to conceal their virtues in retirement.” Interspersed with the novel's descriptions of the ladies' various charities are a series of inset narratives in which Mrs. Maynard, the narrator's cousin, tells the story of each of the ladies, with most emphasis on the interlocking tales of the two devoted friends, Mrs. Morgan and Miss Mancel. Each of the inset narratives is like a miniature sentimental novel; each of the women has been a woman in distress whose virtue has been tried. As a result of the men's experiences at Millenium Hall, the rake Lamont is reformed and undergoes a religious conversion, while the narrator vows to “imitate [the ladies] on a smaller scale” on his own estate.¹³

Millenium Hall is written in the form of a long letter addressed to a bookseller in London; the narrator gives the bookseller permission and encouragement to publish the letter as an example “which may teach those virtues that are not easily learnt by precept and shew the facility of what, in mere speculation, might appear surrounded with a discouraging impracticability” (2). By framing her story in this way, Scott links her novel to a common form that philanthropic discourse assumed in the eighteenth century—the public letter.¹⁴ Uniting the sentimental novel with philanthropic discourse in this framework enabled Scott to rewrite both genres; Millenium Hall transforms the sexualized victim of both discourses into a desexualized agent of charity.¹⁵

Philanthropic Discourse and Unmarried Female Victims

When Saunders Welch published his “thoughts upon the subject of providing for prostitutes” in 1758, he noted that it was a subject “which at present seems to engross the attention of…many worthy minds.” “Prostitutes,” Welch reports, “swarm in the streets of this metropolis”; a stranger would think “that the whole town was one general stew.” The consequences, Welch declares, are “a general depravity of morals, a constant supply of sharpers and robbers to infest our streets, and a chain of other evils, which naturally flow from minds depraved by lust and enervated by debauchery.”¹⁶

As Welch's comments indicate, midcentury perceptions that the number of prostitutes was increasing were tied to more general concerns about the disorder and social chaos that seemed to pervade England. Welch's contemporaries worried about the regular influx of displaced rural laborers and soldiers into London.¹⁷ Particularly during the wars of the 1740s and 1750s, there was concern about the ill health and moral depravity of the laboring classes as well as about the economic conditions that were thought to contribute to the idleness and extravagance of the nation's workforce.¹⁸ Thus, at a time when a strong and growing populace seemed the key to both national prosperity and security, many feared that the venereal diseases that the prostitutes spread to their customers would not only enervate men and make them less fit to function as soldiers and citizens but would also infect innocent wives and the children they bore. Since sexual debauchery, even without the risk of venereal diseases, was believed to render women infertile, prostitution also robbed the nation of productive mothers.¹⁹ Regarded as idle, prostitutes were thought to lure men into lives of idleness, depravity, and extravagance, turning productive workers into thieves and young men of the middle and upper ranks into rakes. With prostitutes to meet every man's taste readily available, some feared there would be no incentive for men to marry at all.²⁰ If, as Donna T. Andrew claims, the major social aims of philanthropists in the middle of the century were to increase the population and to improve society's morals, the prostitute was a convenient figure on which to pin both concerns.²¹

While the prostitute could be used to figure these widespread anxieties about social dislocation and crime, her supposed opposite, the domestic woman, was represented as the reservoir of morality and stability. This domestic ideal, which pictured women as modest, chaste, and devoted only to the interests of their families, was an integral part of the bourgeois ideology that gradually displaced the older aristocratic model of society during the eighteenth century.²² Domestic ideology, on the one hand, defined itself against an image of a woman that emphasized her vanity and voracious sexual desire; the domestic woman, on the other hand, exercised charm only with her virtue and her desires all conformed to the will of her husband or father. Although, as Armstrong suggests, this domestic ideal furthered the interests of the developing middle classes, it was held up to women of all classes.²³ A domestic woman was by definition one whose sexuality was channeled into marriage; curbing her own and men's desires, she became the repository of a social morality that countered anxieties about general moral laxness and shifting economic and social conditions. Fears about social problems could thus be translated into concerns about women's ungoverned sexuality, which could be assuaged by reassurances about the naturally tractable nature of the domestic woman.

The fact that so many of the new philanthropic ventures that originated in the middle of the century had somehow to do with women's sexuality or its consequences demonstrates how fears about social problems were often translated into gendered terms.²⁴ The Foundling Hospital, for instance, which was still being discussed and debated at midcentury, provided for the offspring of women's (presumably illicit) sexual relations; the Lock Hospital treated women for venereal diseases; Magdalen asylums reclaimed penitent prostitutes; the Asylum for Female Orphans aimed to prevent prostitution; and even the Lying-In Hospital and the Lying-In Charity were intended to foster marriage and legitimate childbearing among poor women.²⁵ Those who promoted such ventures invariably pointed out not only how the institution would benefit the unfortunate female victim but also how it would solve the social problems the female victims seemed to incarnate. Plans for female asylums were frequently published jointly with treatises on crime or on the inadequacy of the poor laws.²⁶ Hanway, for instance, links prostitution to social concerns: “was there nothing more in view than political prudence, with regard to the increase of the species, and the good order of the state, there is the utmost reason to check the progress of this baneful vice.”²⁷ In his charity sermon for the London Magdalen Asylum, Ogle compares the vice that is associated with the prostitute to a “raging sea” and suggests that the asylum will prevent such “Overflowings as might end in general Ruin.” Treating the problems that come from wayward female sexuality has “now become necessary,” he declares, “and should be made to accompany our Increase of Empire, Wealth, and Luxury” because such “Increase” produces “great Inequalities” that necessarily, in his view, “open new Veins of Vice.”²⁸

The “Veins of Vice” that troubled Ogle were not only the laboring classes' perceived lax morality and unruliness, represented in the figure of the prostitute and her unlicensed sexuality, but also their seeming lack of productivity. In his sermon Ogle expresses fears that the poor of his time have acquired “an Aversion from Labor” and will be “either tempted to recur to unlawful Means to gratify their Wants, or must patiently submit to that Misery which is the Consequence of their Irregularities.”²⁹ With prostitutes regarded as idle and extravagant, in contrast to domestic women, who were noted for their frugality and industry, another female figure, however, could also stand in for the fear that the poor were unproductive—the “old maid.” Since, according to domestic ideology, a woman's virtue and value were defined in relation to her reproductive capacities, a single adult woman was by definition a misfit or a burden; she was unproductive. In fact, both the terms “old maid” and “spinster” picked up their pejorative connotations in the eighteenth century, when unmarried women, whose desires were not channeled into marriage and motherhood and who were not producers of population, posed a challenge to domestic ideology's ability to contain anxieties about changing social conditions.³⁰

The anxiety the figure of the spinster aroused was almost as strong as that provoked by the prostitute, and it was generally less sympathetic, as the numerous biting satires about “old maids” produced during the period attest. Arthur Murphy's 1761 play “The Old Maid,” for instance, portrays the humiliation of a forty-three-year-old woman who has rejected many suitors in hopes of procuring the kind of husband her vanity leads her to believe she deserves. Murphy implies that the “old maid,” like the prostitute, is driven by (what for her are ludicrous) sexual desires; she breaks off what her contemporaries would call a more prudent engagement with a wealthy but older man in order (she thinks) to marry a more attractive younger man. Murphy's play wastes no sympathy on his “old maid.” In the end she is refused by both suitors and vilified by her brother and his beautiful wife, who, presumably along with the audience, find her predicament hilarious. Like most other “old maid” satires, Murphy's play blames the woman's vanity and her ungoverned desires, not her economic situation, for her embarrassing fate.³¹

The figure of the “old maid” attracted such opprobrium because, like the poor, she was both too dependent and too independent. Without adequate economic resources, unmarried women of almost all classes could drain the finances of their families or, in the case of spinsters of the lower classes, the parish ratepayers. If women were of age and not married, however, they were legally independent. Similarly, the laboring classes were also economically at risk and a burden because they were dependent on the resources of “their betters”; Ogle recognized that it was often the lot of the poor to “patiently submit to…Misery.” As the poor seemed to become more numerous and more destitute than ever before, the problems of dealing with poverty became more troublesome and received more attention, as the concern devoted to reforming the poor laws suggests. The laboring classes were also, though, as another philanthropic writer worried, more independent than ever before; the English common people, writes Josiah Tucker, “have been growing up into Freedom for several Generations back, and are now become entirely independent, and Masters of themselves and their own Actions”—no longer subject to “discipline.”³² Domestic ideology, however, made it possible to displace such concerns onto the figure of the “old maid” or the prostitute, both of whose situations, like that of the poor, combined economic dependence with a threatening legal independence.

In the mid-eighteenth century, then, anxieties about social disruption could be transformed into fears about women's sexuality and independence. Domestic ideology also provided a solution to such “problems”—return sexualized women to the domestic sphere where their desires could be properly governed. This, of course, was the goal of the many philanth...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 - “An Assured Asylum against Every Evil”: Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall and Mid-Eighteenth-Century Philanthropic Institutions for Women
• 2 - “The Care of the Poor Is Her Profession”: Hannah More and Naturalizing Women's Philanthropic Work
• 3 - Hannah More's Heirs: Women Philanthropists and the Challenge of Political Economy
• 4 - “The Communion of Labor” and Lectures to Ladies: A Midcentury Contest between Male Professionals and Female Philanthropists
• 5 - The Female Visitor and the Marriage of Classes in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South
• 6 - Educating Women's Desires: The Philanthropic Heroine in the 1860s
• 7 - George Eliot's Middlemarch: The Failure of the Philanthropic Heroine
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index