Women’s autobiography, as we have seen, became much more diverse and more self-consciously artful in the eighteenth century, and in some ways more mature, than it had been in the seventeenth century. Its social base broadened considerably. Many of the elements discussed in Chapter III remain important as factors in the growth of autobiography; but as autobiography itself becomes more complex, so too do the various social and literary developments by which it is affected. To pinpoint all of them would require a book, if indeed it could be done at all. Following my practice in Chapter III, I shall attempt only to isolate some of the more striking of the factors which shaped and influenced the growth of women’s autobiography over the course of the eighteenth century.

Religion plays a less conspicuous part in the history of eighteenth century women’s autobiography than it does in that of the seventeenth century. Secular autobiography no longer required justification--with the result that the century saw the production of a widely varied group of works whose authors made little or no reference to their religious beliefs. In the seventeenth century, even the authors whom we have considered as primarily secular make their religious commitment clear; in the eighteenth century, many authors tell us next to nothing about their spiritual lives. We cannot infer from this omission that they were lacking in religious devotion, but we can at least conclude that they regarded it as a less memorable aspect of their lives than did their seventeenth century counterparts. Some authors, such as Elizabeth Thomas and the Countess of Strathmore, did indeed give some attention to the formation of their religious beliefs during their youth, but there is little indication of how these beliefs were manifested in their later lives. That is not to say that the tradition of religious autobiography did not thrive along side the development of secular autobiography. Religious autobiographies obviously continued to be written, but they formed a smaller proportion of the total.

Of the religious autobiographies that were written, the writings of Quakers continue to form the majority. The Quakers had grown phenomenally, so that by 1700 they were the largest by far of the sects dissenting from the Church of England.¹ Quakerism itself had also undergone some changes. It had become increasingly conservative; "[e]ven before 1725," writes Luella M. Wright, "the early aggressiveness of the Quakers had shifted to a quietistic view of the place of religion in life."² No longer do we find records of massive disruptions of Anglican services. Quakerism had also gained a measure of respectability. Gone, for the most part, are the scarifying persecutions described by Elizabeth Andrews and Elizabeth Stirredge. As early as 1712, Elizabeth Webb, an obscure Quaker preacher, was corresponding with the august chaplain of the consort of Queen Anne.

By now, too, the form of Quaker autobiography has become so standardized that there is little room for innovation (Elizabeth Ashbridge, as we have seen, is a partial exception). To some extent, such formulizing follows inevitably from the assumptions underlying the genre; as Luella Wright remarks:

These confessions are unmistakably dominated by a prevailing consciousness of the group mind. The dominance of the Society intervenes between the personality of the writer and the mind of the reader. The Quaker memorandist constantly played a double rôle. As an individual, recounting the events of his life, he stressed those that duplicated the experiences of others within the group; as spokesman for the Society, he subordinated personal episodes in his own life to those shared by the group.³

Quaker autobiography at first seemed precocious in its self-analysis; by the eighteenth century, the fresh psychological insights are to be found largely in secular works.

The issue of women’s preaching is no longer such a shocking one. Boswell in 1763 still finds it worthy of note, eliciting the notorious Johnsonian reply: "Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."⁴ It is around this time that Margaret Lucas writes of her initial aversion to women’s preaching. But we no longer find women debating with their detractors as Elizabeth Stirredge and Joan Vokins had a century before. For the most part the Quaker women preachers go about their business matter-of-factly.

Other sects, too, produced a small body of autobiographical writings. A little group of Scottish Covenanters are represented by Marion Fairly Veitch and Elizabeth Cairns. Later in the century, the Methodists turned out a number of autobiographies. Stauffer writes,

What the Quakers accomplished during the first half of the century, the Methodists carried on during the second half, largely through a single act of John Wesley. "Mr. Wesley," writes Thomas Jackson, "requested many of the Itinerant Preachers who were employed under his sanction to give him in writing an account of their personal history, including a record of their conversion to God, of the circumstances under which they were led to minister the word of life, and the principal events connected with their public labours. . . ."⁵

Unlike the Quakers, however, Methodist itinerant preachers were almost exclusively male, so women were not materially affected by Wesley’s request. It is Hester Ann Roger’s husband, and not she herself, who is a minister; she faithfully accompanies him on his evangelizing travels in accordance with the more traditional patter.

The process of sectarian diversification which had begun in the seventeenth century continued into the eighteenth century. Moreover, the sects tended, as we have seen with the Quakers, to become more institutionalized as they grew and matured; that is to say, religious diversity acquired a quasi-official sanction as various sects become almost a sub-stratum of the establishment. This process is in keeping with the general trend towards broadening the social base which characterized many aspects of English life in the eighteenth century. The expansion of the sects, and their concomitant growth of respectability, tended to break down still further the monolithic influence of Christianity as expressed through the Church of England; its dicta could no longer be received as unchallenged authority. While it would be difficult if not impossible to trace any direct relationship between these developments and specific autobiography, it seems likely that such occurrences as the Quaker insistence on women’s preaching contributed to a re-examination of the traditional interpretation of Pauline pronouncements and, in a more general way, to a questioning of the ageless assumption of female inferiority. This questioning was not yet extensively articulated or translated into action, but it did promote a clearer recognition of the double standard and certain traditional inequities in male-female relationships.

Another force which held considerable sway in the first half of the eighteenth century, to the detriment of traditional religion, was the deistic "heresy." Deism held in essence that the existence of God and his commands could be naturally recognized by man (as, for example, natives of parts of the world which had never been exposed to Christianity). This doctrine was articulated as early as 1624 by Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and later espoused by Bolingbroke and by Pope in his Essay on Man. But by the end of the seventeenth century writers such as John Toland in Christianity not Mysterious (1696) and later Matthew Tindal in Christianity as Old as Creation (1730) began to flirt with the radical idea that scripture, revelation, and ultimately institutionalized religion were unnecessary. Such ideas were naturally rejected firmly by orthodox theologians and did not gain many thorough-going adherents; but the fact that they were in the air and voiced in some form by a writer such as Pope (who was hardly trying to set up as an apostle of dissent) suggests that the tenets of revealed religion (including subordination of women) were in a small way being undermined during the general intellectual ferment of the period.

There was no single event in the political sphere in the eighteenth century which had the far-ranging impact of the two great upheavals of the seventeenth century, the Civil Wars and the Glorious Revolution. These events had become history; and more than just history, they formed the mythical underpinnings for the increasing democratization that characterized the period. Gerald M. Straka has written that the "eighteenth century Englishman believed in the reigning House of Hanover because it acted as guarantor of the Settlement; the Settlement, conversely, was the guarantee of Protestant religious freedom, the regularization of parliamentary sittings, and due process."⁶ Hume wrote as follows of the years that followed 1688:

Public liberty, with internal peace and order, has flourished almost without interruption: Trade and manufactures, and agriculture, have increased: The arts, and sciences, and philosophy, have been cultivated. Even religious parties have been necessitated to lay aside their mutual rancour. . . . So long and so glorious a period no nation almost can boast of: Nor is there another instance in the whole of mankind, that so many millions of people have, during such a space of time, been held together, in a manner so free, so rational, and so suitable to the dignity of human nature.⁷

This is ideological rhetoric, not history, but it suggests the extent to which events of the seventeenth century have caused succeeding generations to articulate the idea of governmental accountability to the people.

But probably the real forces that shaped the lives of English people in the eighteenth century were economic. It was in this century that the foundations of the modern British state were laid; the eighteenth century saw the establishment of modern party politics, the emergence of Britain from the isolationism to internationalism, the change in economic policy from mercantilism to laissez-faire capitalism, the growth of the British empire, and the start of the industrial revolution.

For the most part, women’s participation in these processes was indirect. Among the autobiographers we have been discussing, only Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, can be said to have played anything approaching an active role in policy-making. But the life patterns of English women were radically affected by the changes in social and economic conditions, and many of the new features of women’s autobiography of the period are linked with these developments.

To explain the changes which took place in the condition of women over the course of the eighteenth century, it is necessary to say a few words about the economic situation in general. It has been estimated that the population of England in 1714 was around 5.5 million, and that this figure increased slowly during the first half of the century.⁸ After 1780, the population began to increase very rapidly;⁹ the first national census, taken in 1801, showed a population in excess of nine million and laid to rest once and for all widespread fears that England was becoming depopulated.¹⁰ The reasons for the increase included immigration from Ireland,¹¹ improved hygienic methods in the cities (for example, the partial covering over of Fleet Ditch, an open sewer in London, in 1737¹²), and lowered infant and child mortality rates resulting from obstetrical advances and the establishment of lying-in hospitals and orphanages.¹³

The distribution of the population also underwent a radical change over the course of the century, from country to city and from South to North. At the beginning of the century the population of England was largely rural; such towns as existed were concentrated on the coast.¹⁴ London, even at the beginning of the century, had truly become a capital city; its growth had greatly exceeded, for example, that of Paris,¹⁵ and in 1801 it accounted for roughly ten percent of the population of England.¹⁶ But the eighteenth century saw a population boom in such towns as Bristol, Manchester, Sheffield, and Birmingham¹⁷ in response to the enticements and demands of increasing industrialization.

The mushrooming of the cities caused inevitable growing pains. Despite improvements in sanitation and the introduction of street lights, city life was difficult and dangerous. Crime and disease were rife, and alcoholism was a serious problem. The inhabitants were usually from somewhere else; they lacked the roots that traditionally supported village dwellers and the inherited sense of where they fit into the picture. But this rootlessness could be a blessing as well as a curse. The Cities permitted greater social mobility and offered much more diverse economic opportunities than were possible in a rural setting; many successful entrepreneurs--Watt, Wedgwood, Arkwright, and Peel, to name a few--rose from the lower middle classes.¹⁸ Rural life, though more stable, also underwent changes. There was an increasing consolidation of power and wealth in the hands of a few. According to Plumb:

From the end of the seventeenth century, possibly since the Civil War, there had been a tendency for estates to grow larger, and this was beginning, by the early eighteenth century, to affect the nature of rural society. By prudent marriages and careful purchases, some of the aristocratic families of the seventeenth century amassed estates which made them far richer than many of the sovereign powers of Germany. . . . This made them a class apart form the small squire. The distinction was further underlined by the way of life which these agrarian millionaires designed for themselves. The point of pride was the rural palace. There was no modesty felt about the ostentation of wealth.¹⁹

Advances in breeding of livestock and improved agricultural practices (crop rotation, for example) made farming more efficient and profitable. The rapid acceleration in the enclosure of common lands stimulated this sort of innovation, since it permitted controlled experimentation;²⁰ but since enclosure required a considerable financial outlay, many yeoman farmers were squeezed out and either went to the workhouse or flocked to the cities.

All these changes added up to the birth of a capitalistic economy. The population growth, to quote Plumb, "increased the home market, provided more labour, and swelled the growing, man-eating towns."²¹ Agricultural improvements lowered the price of food and enabled the country to feed the cities. Industrialization allowed the production of "cheap goods for a mass market,"²² says the French historian F. Crouzet, noting that "A. H. John has pointed out that this permanently affected the level of consumption in most classes and even aroused an appetite for mass consumption."²³ Property was virtually sacrosanct; a child could be hanged, and often was, for pilfering a handkerchief. Marriage yielded increasingly to economic demands; Ian Watt remarks that:

There is much evidence to suggest that marriage became a much more commercial matter in the eighteenth century than had previously been the case. Newspapers carried on marriage marts, with advertisements offering of demanding specified dowries and jointures; and young girls were driven into flagrantly unsuitable marriages on grounds of economic advantage. . . .²⁴

An important development of this period, which was undoubtedly stimulated to some extent by the needs of the industrial society, was the growth of literacy. Plumb states that:

Although higher education decayed, primary education improved immensely through the charity school movement. This began in the latter years of the seventeenth century. At first, the schools were run largely by Dissenters, and then by mixed bodies of Anglicans and Dissenters, who were also associated together in the three other societies concerned with moral education--the Society for Propagation of Christian Knowledge, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and the Society for the Reformation of Manners. However, by the reign of George I the charity school movement was dominated by High Anglican Tories, some said by Jacobites. It provided educations for the artisans’ and small shopkeepers’ children. In the expanding world of commerce there was an ever-increasing demand for clerks, and these schools provided them.²⁵

Not that there was anything approaching universal literacy, even as we know it today, but the great increase in the number of printing presses in London²⁶ and in the number of provincial newspapers during the early part of the century²⁷ suggest the expansion of the reading public. The demand for printed matter created a need for writers, and many literary hacks were able to support themselves through their efforts. (It is this drawing of literature into the capitalistic economy, with its inevitable subjection of values to popular taste, which Pope protests in The Dunciad; though ironically it also enabled good writers, like Pope, to support themselves.)

The nineteenth century myth that the eighteenth century was one of history’s peaceful backwaters has long since been discredited by responsible historians. There was a great deal of popular unrest over the course of the century, and during the last quarter of the century much of Europe and America was shaken by revolution. In 1780, the discontent of the poor was expressed in the Gordon Riots, when London was in the hands of an unruly mob for several days before order could be restored. Even among citizens of unquestioned loyalty, dissent from government policy became a respectable position. The reasons for this ferment are complex, but the grim working conditions in the factories, the relative rootlessness of the city-dwellers, the visible disparities in wealth, the influx of foreign ideas as a result of trade, and the rapid and unsettling changes in social circumstances must all have played a part. The American revolution and subsequent loss of the colonies had raised the issue of freedom as a right and had deeply divided the nation; the French revolution, though it didn’t threaten the British Empire in the way that the American revolution had, brought to prominence even more basic questions regarding the rights of individuals and governmental accountability.

All of these phenomena had a profound effect upon women. Marriage remained, as it had been, the principal respectable option for women. Indeed, certain traditional alternatives were becoming more restricted. Midwifery, a traditional women’s occupation, was being taken over by men. Unmarried women, once at least an economic asset to a household, were no longer needed for spinning, weaving, and similar tasks, since these industries were moving into factories; Old Maids became figures of scorn and were frequently caricatured in eighteenth century literature. So more than ever, it was incumbent upon women to marry well; indeed, it was a matter of economic necessity. T. C. Phillips’ endless lawsuit to preserve her marriage long after love and respect have evaporated testifies to the importance of matrimony both for economic and for social reasons.

But at the same time, various forces conspired to make it more difficult for a woman to make a satisfactory marriage. For one thing, economic pressures tended increasingly to make financial considerations rather than the happiness and compatibility of the partners the criteria for suitability. Thus we see Mrs. Delany married at seventeen to a man she despises and who is nearly three times her age; Lady Vane’s disastrous second marriage is dictated by financial matters; Mary Robinson allows herself to be tricked into a loveless marriage by Mr. Robinson’s false claims to wealth. Moreover, it was a man’s market. The 1801 census revealed a surplus of women in England which had probably existed throughout the century. A character in Steele’s Tender Husband suggest that the war has devalued women:

SIR HARRY: Ay, but Brother, you rate her too high, the War has fetched down the Price of Women: The whole Nation is overrun with Petticoats; our Daughters lie upon our Hands, Brother Tipkin; Girls are Drugs, Sir, mere Drugs.²⁸

Then too, men were evidently marrying later, and the opprobrium attached to spinsterhood did not apply to bachelors. Furthermore, as Utter and Needham point out in Pamela’s Daughters, a woman in the home had become more of a luxury than a necessity:

Under the domestic system of industry a wife was no less an economic asset to a man than a husband was to a woman. They bore practically equal shares in the economic burden of the family. They worked together as a unit, the wife not only performing the household tasks, but working with the man in whatever industry was his. Thus it was less often a question of whether a man could afford to marry than whether he could afford not to. But by the beginning of the eighteenth century the capitalistic organization of industry on an individual basis had advanced so far as to free men from much of their economic dependence on their wives, and woman’s economic value was lessened.²⁹

Above the level of the servant class women were not educated to perform useful tasks like cooking; even gardening was considered a man’s job--Charlotte Charke, when she took it up, considered it an unusual and masculine pursuit for a woman. Instead, women were expected to acquire accomplishments, such as music, and decorative skills, such as needlecraft. Since their idleness and uselessness were an advertisement for their husbands’ affluence, women were actually encouraged to cultivate weakness. Burke warned that an "air of robustness and strength is very prejudicial to beauty. An appearance of Delicacy, and even fragility, is almost essential to it." He added that the "beauty of women is considerably owing to this weakness, and is even enhanced by their timidity."³⁰ A good many women probably undermined their health in their efforts not to appear too athletic or robust.

The one thing women did remain useful for was continuation of the species--or, on a more personal level, production of heirs to the wealth and prestige that a man might amass. Hence Samuel Johnson’s argument for the double standard of morality:

Confusion of progeny constitutes the essence of the crime; and therefore a woman who breaks her marriage vows is much more criminal than a man who does it. A man, to be sure, is criminal in the sight of GOD: but he does not do his wife a very material injury, if he does not insult her; if, for instance from mere wantonness of appetite, he steals privately to her chambermaid. Sir, a wife ought not greatly to resent this. I would not receive home a daughter who had run away from her husband on that account. A wife should study to reclaim her husband by more attention to please him. Sir, a man will not, once in a hundred instance, leave his wife and go to a harlot, if his wife has not been negligent of pleasing.³¹

In her quest for a husband, a woman’s positive skills were of little market value; she was not expected to perform much in the way of useful work, and superiority of intelligence was as threatening and frightening to men as it had always been. Only the passive attributes of virginity, wealth, and comeliness counted for anything. And a lapse from virtue, even once, even before marriage, could never be retrieved; when Boswell asked Johnson if this judgment wasn’t a little sever, Johnson retorted:

Why no, Sir; it is the great principle which she is taught. When she has given up that principle, she has given up every notion of female honour and virtue, which are all included in chastity.³²

Boswell, no feminist, was simply playing devil’s advocate; it would be difficult to find a man who did not equate premarital chastity with female virtue. Most women, of course, accepted the traditional formulation as well. But some, like T. C. Phillips and George Anne Bellamy, had the courage and originality to interrogate their own experience and protest the social code whereby a man is exonerated for promiscuity even if he is married and woman is damned for yielding once to a seducer--or for being raped--even if she is unmarried.

The marriages in seventeenth century secular autobiography by women and those in the eighteenth century are a study in contrasts. The latter are as studded with unhappiness and boredom as the former with love and devotion. To some extent this may reflect a difference in the social strata from which the authors came; yet at least some of the authors--Delarivière Manley, Laetitia Pilkington, and T. C. Phillips, for example--seem to have started out genteelly enough and slid down the social scale only later, when they had failed to consolidate their positions by successful marriages. This difference will be discussed in greater detail in chapter VII; but given the obstacles to a union based on love and supported by the contributions of both partners, it is hardly surprising that the possibilities for extracting satisfaction from marriage have deteriorated considerably.

What happened to the women who were not able to gain social and economic security through marriage and who in one way or another lost their gentility and respectability? Many of the autobiographers gravitated to London and in some fashion capitalized on their own downfalls. The existence of a sizable reading public with a taste for mémoires scandaleuses actually enabled several to support themselves, at least in part, as authors. Manley, Thomas, Pilkington, Phillips, and Gooch wrote poetry or novels as well, and though they suffered many indignities were at least spared the necessity of turning common prostitutes. Since the Restoration, women had been allowed to take female roles on the stage, and theatre attendance grew steadily over the course of the century; so several women, like Bellamy and Gooch, turned to the stage. Mary Robinson tried both these alternatives with considerable éclat. Some, too, like Elizabeth Elstob and Mary Robinson, responded to increased demands for lower education and were able to support themselves for a time by teaching children. Thus, the economic revolution, while cutting off many of the old options, did at least create a few new opportunities which while not considered desirable at least allowed women to live by their wits or talents rather than their bodies; many of the secular autobiographies of the period, indeed, are the sustenance as well as the record of their authors’ lives. Indeed, some of the new characteristics of eighteenth century autobiography--the scandals, the sensationalism, the unhappiness--are undoubtedly a result of the operation of the market economy upon autobiographical writing; audience demands were greater and very different than they had been for the seventeenth century autobiographers. These new sources of income, however, were very unreliable and did not often obviate completely the necessity or temptation to make capital of their bodies. Phillips, Gooch, Bellamy, and Robinson all became professional mistresses, throwing themselves under the "protection" of a succession of wealthy men. Even so, several authors were no strangers to the inside of a debtor’s prison, and a couple engaged in more or less criminal activities; Elizabeth Thomas, it will be remembered, stole some letters of Pope for surreptitious publication. On the whole, the eighteenth century cannot have been an easy time for a human being who had the misfortune to have been born female in England.

But the foundations for a theoretical rejection for the oppression of women were being laid in the democratic ideals which were being asserted in the American and French revolutions. For a concern with the Rights of Man raises implicitly the issue of the Rights of Woman; and though most of the defenders of the former did not have the latter in mind at all, it is hardly surprising that the connection should occur to at least a few of those most directly concerned (i. e., women).

The philosophical tendencies of the eighteenth century are not easy to generalize about. Many ideas, vaguely interrelated but often confusing and even contradictory, were in the air as thinkers attempted to grasp, explain, respond to, or criticize the social upheavals which marked the period. A number of these issues implicitly raised questions about the status of women, although this was often not the original intention of those who formulated the ideas. Especially in the latter part of the century, many ideas surfaced which profoundly affected the way women thought about themselves, and the way men though about them.

Arthur O. Lovejoy has devoted a whole book to the Great Chain of Being, a view of the world which was very pervasive in the early part of the century. Stated simply, this view held that there was an immutable hierarchy extending continuously from God to nothingness; it professed to resolve the problem of evil in the world by asserting that what seemed like evil to one member of the chain was ultimately for the good of the chain as a whole. Pope stated this view most succinctly in his Essay on Man, which we should remember was one of the firmest foundations of his reputation in his own time:

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;

All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;

All Discord, Harmony, not understood;

All partial Evil, universal Good:

And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,

One truth is clear, "Whatever IS, is RIGHT."³³

This doctrine, which Basil Willey has called "cosmic Toryism,"³⁴ in effect sanctifies subordination as a principle of existence and insists that power remain concentrated wherever it is already found. As Willey remarks, "It was in essence an apologia for the status quo."³⁵

The economic developments which we have been discussing were clearly antithetic to this philosophy, since they tended by their very nature to break down the traditional hierarchical structure and substitute a more immediate economic one; a poor man need not--and if he is to be economically productive, should not--resign himself to a life of deprivation simply because he is born to poverty. By the middle of the century, "Whatever IS, is RIGHT" was an idea whose time had passed. When Soame Jenyns attempted another popularization of it in 1757, he drew forth a heated reply from Samuel Johnson, who refuted point by point the whole argument and in particular rejected the notion that the poor should be kept in ignorance, "the only opiate," Jenyns felt, "capable of infusing that insensibility which can enable them to endure the miseries"³⁶ of destitution and drudgery. Johnson was neither a feminist nor a radical democrat; he saw subordination as a perquisite for an orderly society but rejected it as divinely ordained justification for perpetuating misery and extreme deprivation. His review of Jenyns’ work suggests that the Chain of Being was no longer tenable as a Weltanschauung. The breakdown of this doctrine allowed for a greater elasticity in thinking about traditional role assignments of all sectors of society, including those of men and women.

While the essentially conservative ideas embodied in the Great Chain of Being became less influential, some more democratic ideas gained ground over the course of the century. The idea that man was endowed with certain inalienable, "natural" rights had held a place in the mainstream of English philosophical thought at least since Locke, but the controversies aroused by the American and French revolutions spurred a more practical application of these ideas. The fervency of the opposition to them is a measure of their threat to the established order; for, as I pointed out above, once a notion of the "natural rights of man" has been lodged in a nation’s collective mind, the question of the natural rights of oppressed groups within society will inevitably be raised sooner or later in some form. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman--the title itself is suggestive--stemmed indirectly from conversations on the subject of the French revolution with Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Joseph Priestley, Henry Fuseli, and other radicals; it was written only a year after her Vindication of the Rights of Man, which was an attempt to answer Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, a masterly statement of the conservative position. This is not to say, of course, that feminism and political radicalism necessarily go hand in had; even in France, many of the most ardent supporters of a democratization of society resisted the idea of equality for women. Condorcet advocated suffrage and equal education for women and opposed other forms of social inequity; but others, like Rousseau (whom Mary Wollstonecraft refutes at great length) justified subordination by a kind of argument which today would be summed up as "biology is destiny."

A related idea, that of man’s innate original goodness, was expressed in various guises over the course of the century: the noble savage, the Golden Age, the state of nature. (Hobbes and others, to be sure, had a considerably less exalted notion of the state of nature.) This idea, not altogether consistently, is also found in the Essay on Man:

The state of Nature was the reign of God:

Self-love and Social at her birth began,

Union the bond of all things, and of Man.

Pride then was not; nor Arts, that Pride to aid;

Man walk’d with beast, joint tenant of the shade;

The same his table, and the same his bed:

No murder cloath’d him, and no murder fed.

In the same temple, the resounding wood,

All vocal beings hymn’d their equal God:

The shrine with gore unstain’d, with gold undrest,

Heav’ns attribute was Universal Care,

And Man’s prerogative to rule, but spare.

Ah! how unlike the man of times to come!³⁷

Children, too, were sometimes depicted as creatures of nature, unspoiled by civilization. Rousseau’s glorification of children was an aspect of his thought which Mary Wollstonecraft much admired. This primitivism, as it is generally called, tended by implication to promote the dignity of women, since it glorified the natural responses and put a greater value on accomplishments which were not the result of superior education.

It would be difficult to ascribe specific developments in women’s autobiography to these currents, but taken together they probably produced a philosophical climate which enabled the form to thrive. The very fact that there exists a body of secular autobiographies by women without independent means stands as a kind of assertion of their authors’ dignity. A new sense of self-worth surely underlay the questioning of the double standard, the anger at men, and the resentment of cruel treatment which run in and out of such works as those of Pilkington, T. C. Phillips, Jemmat, Bellamy, Gooch, and Robinson; unlike Anne Clifford more than a century before, they will not gloss over marital strains and ruptures. And the increased appreciation of children, combined no doubt with a somewhat lowered infant mortality rate, probably encouraged a new attitude towards children which is starting to become evident in the later eighteenth century autobiographies. One work, that of Ann Wall, is actually devoted entirely to the author’s childhood, a circumstance unheard of in seventeenth century works by women. Mary Robinson gives us a touching picture of her child uttering her first words. George Anne Bellamy distinguishes between the characters of her two sons. For most women, however, their attitude towards their children remains casual; we only learn of the existence of T. C. Phillips’ child (she does not mention its sex) and its death at the age of eleven when she includes its care and funeral costs in her list of expenditures incurred by her lover Tartufe.

But the philosophical tendencies which most directly and immediately influenced the way in which women perceived themselves were what are variously known as benevolism, philanthropy, sentimentalism, sensibility, or sensibilité. The impact of sensibility on women came largely through the novel, but it had its roots in philosophical thought reaching back through Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks, in which he praised "enthusiasm" over rationality and equated emotional indulgence with "following nature," to the Latitudinarian divines of the period from 1660 to 1725. R. S. Crane, in "The Genealogy of the ‘Man of Feeling’," has outlined their tenets under four headings: (1) "Virtue as universal benevolence"--advocating a kind of practical Christianity which saw the locus of faith as love of God and a universal charity towards man rather than in particular adherence to particular doctrines and forms of worship; (2) "Benevolence as feeling"--opposing the chilly rationality of the Stoics and enjoining pity and tenderheartedness as the marks of a good Christian; (3) "Benevolent feelings as ‘natural’ to man"--rejecting the Puritan notion of natural depravity and the Hobbesian picture of man as an egotistical creature whose natural passions are selfish and anti-social; and (4) the "Self-approving joy"--maintaining that benevolent feelings are pleasurable and that even the sorrow that comes of pitying another’s distresses can be pleasurable.³⁸

A number of fairly succinct expressions of sensibility as it had developed by the middle of the eighteenth century can be found in the autobiographical writings of women of the period. George Anne Bellamy provides a number of examples, some of which were quoted in chapter V; another is the following passage, when her ex-husband has an opportunity to relieve a poor woman’s distress:

Oh how I envied Sir George his feelings upon this occasion! For the exquisite sensation such a benevolent act must excite in a susceptible mind is truly enviable.--Though envy is a vice, with which, thank Heaven, I am totally unacquainted, yet I never hear of the performance of a generous action, but a wish instantly arises in my breast, that I had been the happy person who possessed the power with the inclination to perform it. . . . To light up the face of distress into gladness, and to pour the blame of comfort into the wounded mind, is the truest felicity the human heart is capable of feeling.³⁹

Bellamy, Gooch, Robinson, and Lamenther were profoundly affected by the cult of sensibility, as, to a lesser extent, were the earlier authors Jemmat, Pilkington, and T. C. Phillips. A related development is the interest in scenery, picturesque or sublime, and its power to stir powerful emotions. This interest is manifested most clearly in Gooch and Robinson.

When carried to extremes, as it often was, an indulgence in sensibility can be absurd and even nauseating. Mrs. Gooch, for example, seems to select for misery and pass over briefly periods of her life which were relatively comfortable almost as though it were disreputable or unfeeling to be happy. And her reiterated assertion that her faults proceeded not from a "depraved mind" but "the want of a friend" tends to suggest a kind of amoral determinism in which she abdicates all responsibility for her own actions. She takes such pleasure in wallowing in misery that she seems to become wrapped up in the compositional aspects of the picture she is painting, as in the following description of her mother and her stepfather’s mother upon her stepfather’s death:

On her arrival she [her mother] sent for me, and our meeting was truly affecting: the affliction she was in, (for she had sincerely loved Mr. Hutchinson [her stepfather]) the dismal dress she wore, the grief of the old lady for her son, and the melancholy appearance of us all, made up a sad picture of human woe, the most calamitous where it is the least expected.⁴⁰

Worst of all, her sensibility seems to deprive her of every facility for coping with the real world, for she is constantly trusting people who dupe, betray, and steal from her. But despite the unattractiveness of sensibility at its whining worst, it did provide a good corrective for certain aspects of traditional ideology, for it encouraged women to forgive themselves for their own faults and to concentrate upon their own emotions and feelings rather than simply pleasing others.

"Significantly enough," writes John Tinnon Taylor, "the new novel and the new reading public grew up together."⁴¹ He might have included autobiography in this analysis as well. Like the novel, the autobiography changed and was changed by the expanding reading public. Moreover, the interaction between novel and autobiography during this formative period is a significant aspect of the history of both genres. Donald A. Stauffer writes (of biography, in which category he includes autobiography):

In the first half of the eighteenth century, the rise of the novel radically altered the art of English biography. Conversely, the established biographical tradition affected the development of the novel to an extent not yet fully realized. During this period, neither form can be fully understood without the other.⁴²

To understand the relationship of the novel to women’s autobiography and the implications for women’s autobiography of the expansion of the reading public, it will be useful to go back a step and trace briefly the development of women’s reading habits during the period. The increasing sex role specializations fostered by capitalism and the emergence of lower and lower middle class women as an economic force created certain instabilities in the relationship between the sexes which demanded social readjustment. A particularly charged subject was that of women’s education. The greatly increased availability of reading material, the increased leisure among middle class women, and the need for working class women with at least some clerical skills made the rise in literacy among women inevitable; but the extent and form which their education was to take aroused considerable controversy.

By the last decade of the seventeenth century a number of voices were beginning to speak out in favor of equal educational opportunities for women. Mary Astell asserted that the apparent differences between the intellectual capacities of men and women were a consequence of educational inequities and proposed the establishment of an academy for women. John Dunton vigorously defended her against criticism in the Athenian Mercury and said of women’s ability to learn, "we believe there’s no Essential Difference between theirs and ours."⁴³ Defoe included in his Essay on Projects, published in 1767, a proposal for "An Academy for Women"; he argued:

I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in the world, considering us as a civilized and a Christian country, that we deny the advantages of learning to our women. We reproach the sex every day with folly and impertinence, while I am confident, had they the advantages of education equal to us, they would be guilty of less than ourselves. One would wonder indeed how it should happen that women are conversible at all, since they are only beholden to natural parts for all their knowledge. Their youth is spent to teach them to stitch and sew, or make baubles; they are taught to read, indeed, and perhaps to write their own names, or so, and that is the height of a woman’s education; and I would but ask those who slight the sex for their understanding, what is a man (a gentleman I mean) good for, that is taught no more?⁴⁴

Isolated voices continued to speak up for women’s education, and for their equal intellectual potential, over the course of the century. For the most part, however, women were taught to believe that learning was no asset; even Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, advising her daughter on the education of her granddaughter, recommended concealment of whatever knowledge she attained.⁴⁵

The opposition to learning for women took many forms and often betrayed a note of hysteria. The learned lady was a well-known satiric figure on the stage and in the literature of the period from the late seventeenth century on through the eighteenth--stimulated particularly by the comedies of Molière. This phenomenon was of course not simply a conspiracy to keep women down; whenever a skill or activity is associated almost exclusively with one sex in any culture, the sight of the other sex engaging in that activity will strike people as comic and incongruous. Moreover, the obstacles to a woman’s acquiring an extensive body of knowledge in a well-disciplined fashion were such that most learned women were only relatively so; as Swift wrote, "after all the Pains you may be at, you never can arrive, in Point of Learning to the Perfection of a School-Boy."⁴⁶ And society was simply not prepared to cope with intellectual women. Elizabeth Elstob, as we have seen, was a competent Anglo-Saxon scholar; yet it was unthinkable that she should teach at or be formally enrolled in a university. Consequently, she ended her days teaching children, much to the detriment of her scholarly pursuits.

But opposition to women’s learning also had a darker side. Both advocates and opponents realized that extending educational opportunities for women would have far-reaching social implications; the opponents correctly perceived, as the advocates often did not, that ignorance was the cornerstone of subordination and that intellectual parity would ultimately create a challenge to male domination. (This reasoning clearly applies to any system of subordination; in the dispute between Dr. Johnson and Soame Jenyns, both recognized the role of ignorance in perpetuating the existence of a poor and unskilled working class.) Lady Bradshaigh feared such a threat to the status quo and wrote to Richardson, whose views were very progressive for his day:

Everything moves easiest in its own sphere. Indeed, Sir, great learning would make strange work of us. You know we are to submit and obey; and it is much as ever we can do, often more, in our inferior state of knowledge.⁴⁷

Those who saw the subordination of women as the natural order of things often justified their position by asserting the innate intellectual inferiority of women; Halifax, for example, wrote in his immensely popular "The Lady’s New Year’s Gift: or, Advice to a Daughter":

You must first lay it down for a Foundation in general, That there is Inequality in the Sexes, and that for the better economy of the World, the Men, who were to be the Lawgivers, had the larger share of Reason bestow’d upon them; by which means your Sex is the better prepar’d for the Compliance that is necessary for the better performance of these Duties which seem to be more properly assigned to it.⁴⁸

Steele, who brought condescension towards women out of the pulpit and on to the coffee table, took a more subtle tack and formulated a kind of separate-but-equal argument.

Resistance to permitting women to expand their horizons through reading was not limited to outrage at the prospect of women’s studying Latin or discussing Thucydides. One of the most popular targets of the critics was the novel. To be sure, hostility to the novel was not strictly on women’s account. The genre had a disreputable past and did not meet the standard literary criteria for didactic value. And admittedly a number of eighteenth century novels, particularly before Richardson, have little socially redeeming value; the romans à clef often provided juicy scandal and erotic titillation, and not much else. But women formed a large part of the eighteenth century novelists’ new constituency; and indeed, of the novels published during the eighteenth century, more were written by women than by men. George Anne Bellamy, forbidden to read the one romance in her father’s library, admitted that this is the book she would have chosen above all others. To quote Taylor, "As young as the novel itself in their enjoyment of any sort of rights and educational privileges, women seemed the persons most susceptible to the inordinate sensibility which was generally accredited with being the worst type of poison contained in this dangerous plant."⁴⁹

Opposition to the novel took many forms. The traditional objection was on religious grounds; it was conducive to frivolity and wasted time. Among religious autobiographers, as we have seen, the novel often came to symbolize the wicked world which a committed Christian must renounce. Hester Ann Rogers’ father warned her against reading novels and romances; later, when her father died, she lapsed into sinful habits: "I . . . obtained all the Novels and Romances I possibly could. . . . Thus was my precious time mispent, and my foolish heart wandering far from happiness and God; yea, urging on to endless ruin!"⁵⁰ Mary Alexander called them "publications of an unprofitable tendency" and came to feel that "nothing I had ever been in the practice of, had so much alienated my mind from the simplicity of the pure truth, as books of this kind."⁵¹

Other objections to the novel were raised on the premise that it distracted women from their duties, created unrealistic expectations for their relationships with others, and gave them a taste for more excitement than their humdrum existence as devoted wives could offer. Swift made an eloquent case for this position in his unfinished essay "On the Education of Ladies":

That a humor of reading books, except those of devotion or housewifery, is apt to turn a woman’s brain. That plays, romances, novels, and love-poems, are only proper to instruct them how to carry on an intrigue: That all affectation of knowledge, beyond what is merely domestic, renders them vain, conceited, and pretending. That the natural levity of woman wants ballast; and when she once begins to think, she knows more than others of her sex, she will begin to despise her husband. . . .⁵²

Although it is always wise to suspect irony in Swift, the context does not suggest that we are to take these words other than seriously. Addison in Spectator 37 made fun of the books in a lady’s library and claimed that reading romances "has given her a very particular turn of Thinking"; thought he patronizingly approved of reading in preference to "Diversions that are less Reasonable, though more in Fashion," he wished she had been guided to such Books as have a tendency to enlighten the Understanding and rectify the Passions, as well as to those which are of little more use than to divert the Imagination."⁵³ When Addison and Steele published their own Ladies’ Library, it was largely a compilation of seventeenth century devotional works and traditional advice to women. The woman whose brain was turned by reading novels was a popular butt of satire; though her ancestry can be traced to Cervantes, it is interesting that in the eighteenth century a woman rather than a man was most often portrayed as suffering from this sort of insanity. Biddy Tipkin in Steele’s The Tender Husband, Arabella in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, and Lydia Languish in Sheridan’s The Rivals are among the better known examples of this type.

Is there any fire amidst all this smoke? John J. Richetti argues that novel-reading did in fact affect the responses of women of the period towards themselves and towards the world:

It is probably no accident that the most considerable writers of scandalous memoirs during the eighteenth century were women, and it is certainly likely that their most eager readers were largely women as well. It is important to say this without lapsing into that condescension with which the Augustans regarded female literature and scribbling women, for the changes which take place in prose narrative are partly the result of the changes in the market brought about by the needs of an expanding female audience. Given the increased leisure time of many middle-class women and the widespread literacy among the female upper-servant class, as well as the severe legal and social limitations upon female action, it is not surprising that novel-reading, with its great possibilities for vicarious experience and liberating fantasy, formed an important part of their lives. Neither should we underestimate the importance of that ‘social learning’ and extension of emotional capacity which novel reading made possible for many eighteenth century women.⁵⁴

Although Richetti is speaking primarily of the period before 1739, the autobiographies we have been discussing suggest that throughout the century the novel influenced women’s perceptions of themselves and the ways in which they organized their thinking about their lives. This tendency can be observed from the very beginning of the century. Both Delariviere Manley and Mary Wortley Montagu, writing in the third person, use romance settings and romance names for themselves and others. Mary Wortley Montagu calls particular attention to the way in which she perceives her life as a kind of romance adventure--she being, obviously, the heroine: "I am going to write a history so uncommon, that in how plain a manner so ever I relate it, it will have the air of a romance, though there shall not be a syllable feigned in it except that of the names, which I cannot resolve to set down at length."⁵⁵ Mary Granville Pendarves Delany also uses romance names, and sets forth her autobiography in a series of actual letters to a friend; as in the more sophisticated epistolary novels, the recipient’s reply can actually alter the course of the narrative. George Anne Bellamy also uses the letter form, and she is even more conscious of the analogy to fiction. Her recipient is evidently imaginary, though she is endowed with a rudimentary personality (she is sympathetic, intelligent, and insistent upon thoroughness; clearly this indicates the relationship which the author wishes to establish with her audience). She sees her life as a series of adventures which arrange themselves into chapter-like divisions:

As I fix, which you must have observed, on the most remarkable periods of my life for the introduction of my letter, in imitation of the division of their chapters by chronologers; and as I am now about to enter on the beginning of my theatrical existence on the Dublin Stage, I shall here conclude.⁵⁶

The autobiographers refer frequently to prominent novelists, especially Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne. That Catherine Jemmat consciously considers herself in the light of a Richardson heroine is clear:

But why may not the true story of Catherine Yeo, who absolutely does exist, divert as much, allowing for the different abilities of the authors, as those of Miss Pamela, [sic] Andrews, or Miss Clarissa Harlowe, who never had any local habitation except in the happy fancy of their admirable author, whose characters of virtue and constancy are the native children of his truly benevolent soul?⁵⁷

George Anne Bellamy chooses a more unlikely fictional analogue:

Indeed, my life has been productive of so many untoward, and almost incredible events, that were there not many persons still living who can bear witness to the authenticity of them, I should be ashamed to relate them; as they must appear rather the memoirs of a female Crusoe, than a relation of facts.⁵⁸

Mary Robinson, as we have seen, charges her entire past with the atmosphere of a Gothic novel. And surely there is no more bizarre instance of the way in which novels affected women’s self-image than that of Frances Anne Vane, who paid Smollett to introduce her as a character in his novel, interacting with fictional characters and telling them her memoirs as a digressive episode.

We also find novelistic techniques being used in autobiography. As Stauffer remarks:

In reconstruction and recording life, a certain amount of imagination is necessary to the biographer no less than to the novelist, for the process is that of bringing into the actual present what does not exist. If biographers taught novelists how to imitate nature by imitating actual memoirs, the novelists reciprocally exercises a fortunate influence upon the writers of lives: they showed them that the record of human life may be an art; that the attempt at interpretation and appraisal may be of more significance than the setting down of dates, facts, and actions; and that in reviving the dead, the prevalence of the imagination is less dangerous than its absence.⁵⁹

People and places are made to seem more real by naturalistic descriptions and details of appearance and gesture. The following passage from Mrs. Gooch is practically a set-piece:

But soon we repented our temerity--nothing could exceed the horrors of that road. We were in two separate carriages, to which horses and oxen were yoked in abundance. The mountains were nearly perpendicular. To our right were tremendous precipices; at the bottom of them was a river we could scarcely discover, and a very low parapet wall bordered the road, which preserved us from falling down more from appearance than from strength. The road was cut out in these rocks, and so narrow as hardly to admit of the breadth of a carriage. To our left were mountains whose heads were lost in the clouds, and from the top of which ran foaming cataracts, which crossed the road, and descended into the labyrinth beneath. Night came on, and added horror to the already-dreadful scene.⁶⁰

The use of an intrusive narrator to create a kind of double time-scheme--what Natascha Würzbach calls "narrator’s present" and "the narrative past"⁶¹--may also reflect the influence of the novel. In the following passage from Bellamy’s Apology, for example, we see the author sitting at her desk emoting over her past as she describes it.

We are now arrived at the most important crisis of my fate: the moment which was to determine the tenor of my future life. The die was to be thrown, and my happiness was to be the stake.--My heart flutters at the recollection.--But I will endeavor to still it, and proceed.⁶²

Mary Delany often seems to be reliving her past as she writes: "I assure you the recollection of this part of my life makes me tremble at this day. I must relieve my spirits by concluding this letter: adieu."⁶³ There also emerges from Mrs. Delany’s work a rather sophisticated sense that the narrative has its own demands, a life of its own:

This is a little digression from the main story, which you must excuse; I spare you any more particulars about this unfortunate brother, though I feel myself inclined to enlarge on this subject.⁶⁴

Charlotte Charke actually projects her narrative into the future, creating a kind of suspense that even the narrator could not resolve:

. . . I hope, ere this small Treatise is finish’d, to have it in my power to inform my Readers, my painful Separation from my once tender Father will be more than amply repaid, by a happy interview. . . .⁶⁵

As I mentioned in speaking of philosophical currents of the period, the novel was the primary medium through which sensibility was disseminated among women. I suspect it would be difficult to overestimate the role which Richardson and his followers played in giving a kind of dignity to "tender weeping" and its validity as a positive and mature response to life. Utter and Needham, in Pamela’s Daughters, remark on the functions of cultivating one’s sensibilities in promoting self-consciousness:

Most important of all in the consideration of the quality of Richardson’s sentimentality is his sense of emotional values. His declared purpose in Pamela is "to teach the man of passion how to subdue it"; his effect was to teach the novelist of passion how to dramatize it. . . . [T]he emotional essence is distilled thoroughly drop after drop for page after page. The process is even more slow and thorough in Clarissa. It is undubitably of the essence of Richardson’s moral purpose. It is our feelings, he implies, that move us to actions right and wrong. The motion may come from a feeling so obscure as to be unperceived, unsuspected. Therefore no feeling is trivial enough to neglect. Each down to the minutest must be observed, scrutinized, analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively for its faintest traces of right and wrong. This self-consciousness in every conscious moment is essential in Richardson’s purpose and method, and self-consciousness in all moments is inevitably sentimentality in most. It is important in the history of Pamela’s daughters because they inherit from her the trait of self-consciousness that so often spells sentimentality, and the sensibility that so often finds expression in terms of liquid sorrow.⁶⁶

The implications of this expanded self-consciousness for women’s autobiography are clear enough. It would hardly be an exaggeration to describe Gooch, Bellamy, Robinson, Jemmat, Lamenther, and even T. C. Phillips, Pilkington, and Charke, as "Pamela’s daughters," no less than the heroines of contemporary novels. The role of literature in the formation of personality has not been explored with much sophistication to date, but the eighteenth century novel and its female readers would surely be fertile ground for such a study.

Although the novel seems to me the most important literary influence upon eighteenth century women’s autobiography, there are other literary forms which deserve mention as having exerted some influence upon autobiography. Drama is the most salient, if for not other reason than that a number of female autobiographers were professional actors: Charke, Bellamy, and Robinson were all associated with the theatre. Quotations from Shakespeare and many other dramatists are sprinkled liberally throughout the works of the period. The following scene form Mrs. Gooch was quite obviously staged:

On her arrival she sent for me, and our meeting was truly affecting: the affliction she was in, (for she had sincerely loved Mr. Hutchinson) the dismal dress she wore, the grief of the old lady for her son, and the melancholy appearance of us all, made up a sad picture of human woe. . . .⁶⁷

Echoes of travel and even utopian literature occur occasionally, though they were probably filtered through the novel. And by now, of course, the woman’s autobiography has developed a set of conventions unto itself: the focus on love interests, the seduction and loss of virtue, the temptation to suicide, and so forth are practically de rigueur in secular autobiography by the end of the eighteenth century.

There is probably a great deal which could be added to this chapter, but I believe I have touched on the most outstanding historical factors involved in the autobiographical writings of British women in the eighteenth century. I think at this point that it would be useful to turn to the changes in the perception of themselves and of their lives which occurred over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as manifested in their autobiographies, and to attempt to draw some conclusions about the evolution of women’s consciousness during that period.