Miscellany — Autumn 2017

The Electronic Enlightenment Project is pleased to publish a mini-edition and critical analysis of 25 letters between the Bluestocking socialite and Shakespeare critic Elizabeth Montagu and select correspondents. This collection has been transcribed, edited, annotated and “re-read” by Jack Orchard (Swansea University), for the Digital Humanities component of an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award undertaken with the Electronic Enlightenment Project, Bodleian Library, Oxford.— Dr Robert V. McNamee, Director Electronic Enlightenment & Oxford Text Archive

Reading and sociability in the correspondence of Elizabeth Montagu and friends — a shared reading of letters in a born-digital mini-edition.

Compiled primarily from Montagu holdings across the UK, the editorial rationale behind the collection are three-fold.

1. Material and archival diversity

Firstly, there was a material focus: I wanted to include samples of letters which were fragmentary as well as complete, had print instances as well as manuscript, and which came from a wide-variety of archival sources. Represented here are letters from:

• The British Library [Montagu Papers], London
• The John Rylands Library, Manchester
• King’s College Aberdeen Library Special Collections, Aberdeen
• Nottingham University Library, Nottingham
• Dr Johnson’s House, London
• Bedfordshire Archives Service, Bedford

2. Broad range of correspondents

Secondly, I wanted to give as broad a range as possible within these materials of the key correspondents within Montagu’s creative life, both those who are well-recognised correspondents, such as Elizabeth Carter and James Beattie, and those who have largely escaped scholarly attention but were key members of Montagu’s epistolary circle, such as her early Bullstrode Circle friends William Friend and Anne Donnellan, and the most overlooked beneficiary of her literary patronage, the put-upon cleric Robert Potter. The collection is also supplemented by a letter from Catherine Talbot, one of the Bluestocking scholars central to my own research. The correspondents represented in this edition, who all have comprehensive or updated EE Biographies, are:

• James Beattie (1735–1803)
  Scottish Enlightenment philosopher and poet for whom Montagu served as patron, assisting in the production and distribution of his major poetic work The Minstrel (1771, 1774) and the quarto edition of his 1770 philosophical treatise, Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1776).
• Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806)
  Poet and translator of All the works of Epictetus (1758); one of Montagu’s most consistent correspondents, Carter and Montagu maintained a near-continual discussion of intellectual, political, and social matters from their first acquaintance in the 1750s, to Montagu’s death in 1800. Included in their epistolary discussions of literature was a long-running discussion of classical tragedy, which provided Montagu with one of the conceptual seeds of her Essay on Shakespear (1769).
• Jemima Yorke, Marchioness Grey [née Campbell] (1722–1797) — new EE biography
  A peripheral Bluestocking figure, second only to Elizabeth Carter as a major intellectual companion of Catherine Talbot’s life, the pair of them discussed the latest developments in the literary world, alongside their own projects such an investigation into the historiography of the English Civil War, through the 1740s and 50s.
• Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, duchess of Portland [née Harley] (1715–1785)
  One of Montagu’s early intellectual friends, and the centre of the Bulstrode circle that included Montagu, the correspondent and collagist Mary Delaney, the Anglo-Saxonist Elizabeth Elstob, and the poet Edward Young. The letters from Montagu to Bentinck convey an insatiable curiosity and playfulness which provide an informative counterpoint to her later, more sober intellectual exchanges with figures like James Beattie.
• Anne Donnellan (1700/1702–1762) — new EE biography
  Another member of the Bulstrode circle, Donnellan served as Montagu’s primary intellectual correspondent in the 1740s, sharing in Montagu’s excited engagement with figures such as Cicero and Plutarch. Writing to Donnellan appears to have been a source of consolation to Montagu at times of crisis, such as her sister’s quarantine with smallpox.
• Reverend William Freind (1715–1766) — new EE biography
  A peripheral Bulstrode figure, and one of the clergyman academics who are a constant presence in the Montagu correspondence. Montagu maintained a fairly regular exchange of letters with Friend, first as an intellectual companion, and then, after he married Grace Robinson, 2nd cousin of Elizabeth’s father, as a distant member of the family.
• Lady Mary Catherine Knollys, Viscountess Wallingford [née Law] (1711—1790) — new EE biography
  A minor Bulstrode circle-member, only 8 letters from Montagu to Knollys are accounted for between 1738 and 1747, but from the tone of the sample in this collection, Montagu appears to have had at least a superficially intimate relationship with Knollys, giving a comic and allusive account of the political climate and her wry observations on high society.
• George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton of Frankley (1709–1773)
  Probably Montagu’s closest intellectual companion apart from Elizabeth Carter (and possibly her sister Sarah), Lyttelton and Montagu corresponded throughout his lifetime. She contributed to his set of neoclassical dialogues, Dialogues of the Dead (1760), while he engaged with her in extensive discussion of her Essay on Shakespear.
• Elizabeth Montagu [née Robinson] (1718–1800)
  Bluestocking socialite, coalmine owner, author of the Essay on Shakespear (1769); she also authored approximately 8,000 letters to various correspondents. Montagu’s correspondence represents a unique opportunity for exploring the evolution of coterie interpretative practices in the eighteenth century, given the breadth and extent of her reading, and the variety of ways in which she responded to the literary world, which we will explore below.
• Hannah More (1745–1833) — new EE biography
  Second-generation Bluestocking scholar, conduct-book writer, evangelist, abolitionist campaigner, and conservative educational theorist, Hannah More’s epistolary relationship with Montagu primarily revolves around their shared disastrous attempt to patronise the working class poet Ann Yearsley in 1785. The letter from More to Montagu in this collection attests to their early relationship, based on a shared interest in philanthropy and mutual friendship with the Shakespearean actor David Garrick.
• Hester Lynch Piozzi [formerly Mrs Thrale; née Salusbury] (1741–1821)
  Poet, biographer, lexicographer and historian, Hester Thrale Piozzi pursued a warm, though not extensive correspondence with Montague during the 1770s and early 1780s, when they were competing Bluestocking-hostesses in London: before Piozzi’s second marriage soured relations. In 1786, however, Montagu still wrote in support of Piozzi’s Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson, when James Boswell attacked it as part of the ongoing battle between ‘Bozzy and Piozzi’ over who got to be Samuel Johnson’s definitive biographer.
• Reverend Robert Potter (1721–1804) — new EE biography
  A Norfolk-based clergyman and academic, Montagu came to act as Potter’s London patron in soliciting support for his translations of the Greek tragedians in the late 1770s and early 1780s. A consistently put-upon and anxious man, Potter’s very deferential and formal letters to Montagu alternate between accounts of the progress of his writing, re-iterations of his financial straits, and reflections on his unkind reviewers. Potter appears to have been the Montagu ‘client’ whose relationship with her is the most conventional, without the easy informality of exchange she enjoyed with either Beattie or Woodhouse.
• William Pulteney, 1st earl of Bath [4th creation] (1684–1784)
  Politician, aristocrat, and jocular ‘rival for Montagu’s affections’ with his political opposite number, Lord Lyttelton. Bath and Montagu enjoyed a prolific correspondence from the late 40’s until his death, extensively discussing a wide variety of topics of literary and political controversy, such as the furore over John Wilkes North Briton ’45 (1763). The note from Bath to Montagu, included here, attests to the social role of material texts in their friendship, and the genres of literature they discussed.
• Sarah Robinson (fl. 1782–1789)
  Not to be confused with either Sarah Robinson Scott (see below) or Sarah Hougham, nèe Robinson (1759–1839): the first Elizabeth Montagu’s sister and the second the daughter of her brother Charles. This Sarah Robinson was the daughter of her other brother, William Robinson and his wife Mary. So far we only know of 4 letters by her, but she does appear to have had an interest in copying Elizabeth Montagu’s letters, and through this had a hand in provoking her towards a reflection on her epistolary legacy — though to what extent remains unclear.
• Sarah Scott [née Robinson] (1723–1795)
  Elizabeth Montagu’s younger sister, novelist, and queen-bee of her own network based in Bath Easton. The contents of their letters to one another range from discussions of the estates and family business, to reflections on current political and social events, to discussions of their nascent works. The letter in this collection is an example of the latter: Montagu writing to Scott to criticise Samuel Johnson’s 1765 edition of Shakespeare, as part of the initial critical spark which would inspire Elizabeth’s own Essay on Shakesepear 4 years later.
• Catherine Talbot (1721–1770) — new EE biography
  Essayist, poet, and collaborator with Elizabeth Carter and Samuel Richardson, Talbot’s letter is included in this edition for the light it throws on the nature of creative reading and letter writing. Where Montagu occasionally engages in parody and imitation throughout her letters, preferring detached analysis of literary texts, the Talbot letter quoted below is a lengthy and sustained pastiche which conveys equal proportions of creative input and interpretative reflection.
• Anna Williams (1706–1783) — new EE biography
  Anna Williams, poet and companion of Samuel Richardson, appears in this collection as one of the beneficiaries of Montagu’s philanthropic habit of giving pensions to those within her social circle that she saw as in need. This category included James Beattie, Dorothea Gregory, Robert Potter, and the Aberdeen-based dwarf, Tom Cassie. For more information about Williams, see the previous miscellany — Enlightenment & Visual Impairment in the 17th & 18th Centuries

In addition to these figures and letters new EE biographies for two key figures in the dissemination of Bluestocking ideas in the generation following the correspondents in this edition. First, Amabel Hume-Campbell (1751–1833), daughter of Jemima Grey and historian of the French Revolution, in whose education Catherine Talbot took an active interest; and second, Montagu Pennington (1762–1849), nephew of Elizabeth Carter and early 19th Century publisher of Carter’s memoirs, of Talbot’s works, and of their correspondences.

3. Diversity of interpretative techniques & functions

The third and final editorial rational behind the collection grows from the thematic basis of my own doctoral research: namely, the concepts of shared reading-experience and community interpretation, which is evident in a variety of different forms within this selection of letters. I will close this miscellany by outlining a few particularly prominent examples of this read/critique experience. Firstly we have the most direct expression of community interpretation in direct critical discussion of a literary text, seen here in the aforementioned discussion of Samuel Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare (1765) in the letter from Elizabeth Montagu to Sarah Scott:

Montagu’s diagnosis of the flaws in Johnson’s analysis of Shakespeare is fascinatingly prescient: a) anticipating her Essay on Shakespear (1769), where she argues for his superiority over contemporary French drama taking the emotional impact of Shakespeare’s characterisation as its central subject, anticipating the Romantic turn in Shakespeare scholarship, preceding William Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817) by almost half a century.

The second form of interpretation that Montagu practices is the abstraction from a number of sources into broad theories of history and culture. Her correspondence shows her analysing and dissecting ancient Greece and Rome, ancient Scotland, the Georgian court and political world, the London beau monde, the industrial north, and Revolutionary France, through a combination of literary allusion and personal reflection. Among the letters in this collection there is a particularly rich seam of cultural critique in her letters with James Beattie. Like Montagu’s other correspondents within the Scottish Enlightenment, he participated in her cultural reflections inspired by reading the conjectural stadial histories and Ossianic nationalist myths that filled the Edinburgh presses in the 1760s and 70s. Here is her reflection, following a lengthy exchange over the Ossianic poetry, on the correlations between national and ethnic character, and the poetic language employed by that nation:

Drawing on a collection of insights from contemporary historians, including Henry Home, Lord Kames, and William Ferguson, as well as some of her own theoretical reflections formulated in an abortive ‘Essay on Ornament’, sent in a letter to Kames 6 years earlier, Montagu articulates the Stadial historical commonplace of a continuum between art, historical status, political condition, and national character, to present a theory of the way in which Asian and Ossianic poetry can be used as a critical resource for examining their fundamental characteristics as peoples. In a letter to Lord Kames a year prior to this, she would go so far as to assert that poetry provides a more useful resource for understanding past ages than direct historical analysis.

The third mechanism of textual engagement seen here is the social functions of texts, whether this be in terms of book-borrowing and exchange, shared reading, or patronage. In all of these scenarios discussions or references to texts have a function in establishing the terms of the relationship between the correspondents, beyond that inherent in the shared intellectual exchange itself. A little example from this selection includes Lord Bath’s invitation to tea (Electronic Enlightenment letter ID: montelEE0160072a1c) with its casual allusions to unknown pamphlets and the enclosure of the ‘second volume’ of the Histoire de Jean Sobieski, Roi de Pologne (1761) — it is reasonable to assume that Montagu is receiving volume 2 having finished volume 1. This illuminates the way in which an ongoing reading experience becomes part of the social fabric of their relationship: as much a part of their social interaction as the letter itself, or the tea to which it refers. A more substantial case is that of Robert Potter, whose letter in this collection reflects a desire to participate in the kind of intellectual exchange Montagu enjoys with Beattie, but which is ultimately subsumed by the need to please and assert his worth and deference:

This reflection on contemporary literary controversies, the literary critical squabbles between Jacob Bryant and Samuel Johnson over the merits of seventeenth-century poet Samuel Rowley, and the competing Pope biographers Joseph Warton and Owen Ruffhead, looks initially not dissimilar to exchanges Montagu has with Beattie and Carter about the Ossian controversy, or with Lord Bath on the latest works of professional public-enemy Charles Churchill. In context, however, preceded by an account of the critical attacks on Potter’s translation of Euripides, ‘they are grossly illiberal, and mainly ignorant’, and a description of the loss of his daughter, ‘a violent inflammation seized her lungs, an unrelenting Hectic burnt her up, and she was carried off very rapidly’, the discussion quickly deteriorates into bitterness and self-deprecation. By the time Potter refers to ‘gentlemen . . . tak[ing] pains to understand an author, before they undertake to comment on him’, he isn’t referring to Pope any more, but once again to the ‘Critical Reviewers’ who he claims have ‘abused’ the first volume of his Euripides.

The third aspect of reading experience, and one which persists throughout Montagu’s intellectual life, but is particularly noticeable in her early correspondences of the 1740s, is that of satirical or emphatic quotation. A particularly poignant example of this is in the letter from Montagu to William Freind included here:

This letter, employing the characteristic pose of imaginative detachment which she will employ as an aspect of her epistolary persona throughout her life, the 21 year old Montagu reflects on the purity of a friendship experienced in youth, before the forced worldliness of day-to-day life and responsibility descends. To this end she creatively misquotes Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man:

Pope’s original text is refers to a golden age in the evolution of human society, when the savagery of prehistory has been transcended, but before commerce and artificial sophistication has entered to destroy the purity and immediacy of interpersonal sincerity. Placing her relationship in the context of this golden age, Montagu not only presents a touching and literary vision of her own youthful state, but shows an interest in the correlation between historical and personal states of being. This interest is, of course, the same one which we have seen manifesting itself, 30 years later, in the conversation with James Beattie.

The final interpretative resonance found in Montagu’s letters is best represented within this collection by the letter from Catherine Talbot to Jemima Grey. This literary pastiche goes one step beyond allusion to creatively extend the analogy between text and reality with comic, thought-provoking effect. Here is the opening of Catherine Talbot’s pastiche of the Cave of Montesinos episode from Don Quixote, with Jemima Grey cast as Quixote in search of her husband Philip Yorke:

Like Montagu, Talbot plays with the applicability of her source to her situation, but the format of pastiche enables her to draw out the ironic juxtaposition until it evolves into something more. Not only does the figure of the Lady Errant, by inverting the damsel-in-distress paradigm, come to represent ironically a masculine mechanism for valorising the devotion of a wife towards her husband, the ability to read imaginatively and with a sense of humour is presented throughout the letter as empowering. Unlike Cervantes original, in which Don Quixote is laughed at because he sees Palaces where there are none, Talbot’s Jemima is celebrated for being able to see a real ‘Magnificent Palace’ that is hidden to the ‘vulgar’, who aren’t able to use their interpretative faculties imaginatively. As it unfolds, the letter becomes a celebration of Talbot and Jemima’s relationship and reading practices, simultaneously enacting and describing a new theory of interpretation.

Thus, in this mini-edition, we see a microcosm of the reading and interpretative practices employed by Elizabeth Montagu and her correspondents. They are by no means unique in responding to texts in this way, however, and by bringing these letters into the context of Electronic Enlightenment, the hope is that they will be able to be put into dialogue with other community interpretative practices of other epistolary communities.

— Jack Orchard
Collaborative Doctoral Award AHRC, University of Swansea
© 2017 Bodleian Library, University of Oxford

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