SOURCE: Kelly, Gary. “Elizabeth Hamilton: Domestic Woman and National Reconstruction.” In Women, Writing, and Revolution: 1790-1827, pp. 265-304. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

[In the following essay, Kelly provides a detailed analysis of Hamilton's post-1800 works, asserting that she covertly feminized traditionally masculine discourses—such as philosophy, history, biography, and theology—in an environment of post-revolutionary remasculinization.]

Helen Maria Williams and Mary Hays found their Sentimental and Revolutionary feminism increasingly under attack in the later 1790s and the Revolutionary aftermath, and had to turn to other ways of sustaining their social critiques. By contrast, Elizabeth Hamilton seemed well positioned to become a major post-Revolutionary critic of feminism. In fact, she moved closer to Revolutionary feminism after 1800, resisting the increasing remasculinization of culture and restriction of women to narrowly defined domesticity. Like a number of other women writers, she did so by following the lead of Hannah More's Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, reconstructing domestic woman of the earlier conduct-book tradition for the post-Revolutionary crisis of ‘national’ unity and imperial defence. At the same time, she continued her work of feminizing ‘masculine’ discourses, aiming to intellectualize women's culture by popularizing, novelizing, and thereby disseminating philosophy, theology, and history, and doing so in a way that offered herself as model for the new intellectual-domestic woman.

Her first move in this programme was Letters on Education (1801), a feminization of Enlightenment epistemology and moral philosophy in the acceptably ‘feminine’ guise of educational writing. This was less like More's Strictures than Catharine Macaulay Graham's Letters on Education (1790), a Bluestocking feminist synthesis and popularization of a wide range of learned discourses and philosophical, cultural, and social issues. Hamilton's synthesis takes in a range of such discourses that would have been congenial to Williams, Hays, and even Wollstonecraft. It includes Enlightenment epistemology (Dugald Stewart, Thomas Reid), liberal theology (Joseph Priestley, Bishop Taylor), ‘philosophical history’ (Edward Gibbon), cultural anthropology and cultural criticism (Kames), and education and socialization (Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth's Practical Education). But like her argumentative and didactic novels of the Revolutionary decade, her non-fiction work is composed so as to exemplify the kind of cultural revolutionary for which the work argues—a woman intellectual able to contribute to national peace and progress without abandoning acceptably feminine discourses of the domestic, the educational, the local, and the practical. In the context of post-Revolutionary anti-feminism, remasculinization of literary discourse, and hostility to ‘blue-stockings’, the textual construction of such an ‘author’ constitutes an act of cultural resistance and political polemic.

In fact Letters on Education constructs its ‘author’ as something like the ‘female philosopher’ in the texts of Mary Hays, one of Hamilton's main satiric butts during the Revolution debate. On one hand the text is epistolary, pretends to be no more than a simplified rendering of eighteenth-century liberal theology and associationist psychology, deals dialogically with objections raised by the correspondent, and uses illustrative anecdotes—compositional elements often used by women writers dealing with subjects some might have found unfeminine. Yet the book is organized like a philosophical treatise, starts from first principles and elaborates consequences, proceeds in a formal argumentative way, deploys the language of eighteenth-century epistemology, and is less informal and uses fewer anecdotes and common-life observations than most books by women on such a subject. Hamilton also distinguishes her position on the education of women from that of the Revolutionary feminists without distancing herself from it, advancing the same Pricean theology of spiritual equality that grounded Wollstonecraft's Vindication, declaring that the aim of education is to cultivate ‘the powers of human beings, so as to bring them to the greatest perfection of which they are capable’, thus making ‘no distinction of sex’ in matters of intellect and dismissing ‘natural’ female inferiority as a ‘hereditary prejudice’—a phrase by now associated with Revolutionary sympathizers (pp. 36-7). But she also blames Revolutionary feminists for ‘this portentous crisis’, arguing that ‘the human character’ is elevated ‘into dignity and importance’ and ‘Divine favour’ by ‘an equality of moral worth’ rather than ‘an equality of employments and avocations, founded upon the erroneous idea of a perfect similarity of powers’ and ‘admission into the theatre of public life’ that is pervasively contaminated by courtly values of ‘honour’, ‘glory’, and ‘ambition’ (pp. 243-4). Finally, Hamilton assimilates this revised Revolutionary feminism to the post-Revolutionary concern for social reconciliation, toleration, and sense of common ‘national’ identity and purpose. In short, the argument and form of Letters on Education are designed to manifest a way of being a woman intellectual and social critic without going as ‘far’ as the Revolutionary feminists and without relapsing into counter-feminism.

But there was a fine line between the wish to popularize ‘philosophy’ for women readers and the need to construct an authoritative ‘female philosopher’ in the text. Concerned that the book was too abstract and philosophical, Hamilton quickly rewrote it to ‘render the subject perfectly clear and intelligible to readers of every description’ (‘Advertisement’), and republished it as Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education, ‘second edition’ (1801). Reviewers were also ambivalent, welcoming Letters on Education for its moral and political principles but deploring its ‘unfeminine’ philosophical character. Paradoxically, the Monthly Review was glad to see Hamilton write a ‘more serious and important’ work than a novel and one that ‘would produce a most desirable revolution in the state of the world’ by causing ‘a wonderful change in the knowledge, opinions, and habits of mankind’. The reviewer also expected that ‘readers will be rather surprized, perhaps, on seeing a lady undertake to tread’ in the path of Locke and Watts, but reassured them that ‘here is no female champion arisen, who seeks to contest the prize with those veteran heroes’, for Hamilton takes ‘a more humble station’ than the philosopher, aiming only ‘to furnish parents, nurses, and superintendants of young children, with the proper theory of the infant mind, and with the most effectual method of fostering the tender bud of intellect’. The Critical Review thought the book showed ‘great judgement, an intimate knowledge of the human heart, and delicacy of sentiment’, though ignorance of real children. The reviewer agreed that ‘No man of sense will hold a well-educated woman in contempt’, and insisted that women may ‘possess … an elegance, and often an elevation of sentiment, which renders them capable, in many instances, of instructing and directing their husbands’, yet ‘they do not naturally possess that strength of judgement, that force of mind, competent to adapt them to the more important, the more abstracted, intellectual functions’. The British Critic contrasted More and Hamilton, the former ‘an humble Christian, of more than ordinary reading and observation’, and the latter ‘a metaphysician of the school of Hartley’ that was associated with Revolutionary ‘metaphysicians’, and pursuing interests ‘ill becoming the elegance of the female mind’.¹

This reception and Hamilton's own doubts about her method in Letters on Education may have affected a different work she was engaged on, feminizing theology in an analysis of Paul's epistle to the Romans. Hamilton was drawn to this text because it dealt with a problem that was central to her own religious belief—whether salvation was predestined or the result of free will. This was also the basis of difference between the Presbyterianism in which Hamilton was raised and the Episcopalianism to which she adhered as an adult. In the 1790s many had seen a parallel between this religious issue and the difference between English Jacobin ‘necessitarianism’ and anti-Jacobin emphasis on individual responsibility. Thus the heart of the epistle to the Romans has several resonances for Hamilton and the immediate Revolutionary aftermath. It also had relevance to her as a woman, for the epistle was notoriously difficult of theological interpretation, controversial, and the subject of learned dispute—on all counts supposedly beyond the education and capacity of women. Women could practise devotional writing because, unlike theology, it was by convention personal and emotional and did not require any great learning or powers of reasoning. In a fragmentary preface addressed to her sister, Hamilton acknowledges this gendering of religious discourse but brushes it aside. Male theologians consider the Epistle to the Romans as the ‘most abstruse and difficult’ of Paul's writings, yet she confidently embarks on interpreting it, sarcastically attributing her boldness to ‘some deficiency of capacity’ or ‘a deficiency in that stock of learning which is necessary in order to enter into the associations of the learned’. She declares her intention to pay ‘little attention’ to the learned theologians because ‘the Scriptures themselves’ supply ‘the solution of every difficulty’, and rather than proceed as a man would, by ‘abstract reasoning’ and analysis of separate parts, she prefers ‘a system of our own’—a feminizing, integrative method, reconciling difficulties ‘not to any particular and favourite theory, but to the general tenor and spirit of the author’.² This attitude is characteristic of the disregard of merely professional theology found in Scottish philosophers Hamilton was reading, especially Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart, and of the post-Revolutionary reaction against narrowly professional and dehumanizing ‘philosophy’ supposed to have inspired French Revolutionaries and ‘English Jacobins’ such as those Hamilton satirized in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers. The same attitude was expressed in the 1790s by writers such as Helen Maria Williams, but in the post-Revolutionary remasculinization of culture it was adopted by many men, but especially Coleridge, in what would later be called Romanticism. Hamilton's essay in theology expresses her awareness of the contradictions in being a woman writer in other ways. Her theologizing clearly arises from daily experience, the conventionally ascribed site of women's knowledge, and is first personal and private, like much women's writing. Secondly, her experiment in personal and domestic yet rational and reflective theology may have been, like her satire on Revolutionary feminists, a reaction to the scandalous activity of another woman, Joanna Southcott, an uneducated servant who proclaimed prophecies and led a millenarian movement made up largely of lower-class women in the late 1790s and 1800s. Hamilton herself did not complete or publish her experiment in theology—perhaps another indication that she thought the price of transgressing gendered boundaries of discourse too high at this time—though she continued such writing in journal form, published in part after her death.

She was also preoccupied with feminizing yet another ‘masculine’ discourse—historiography—while illustrating her argument for a feminized state and civil society founded in individual subjectivity and domesticity and validated by Christian faith. Memoirs of the Life of Agrippina, the Wife of Germanicus (1804) is another experimental work, a quasi-novel or text in which non-fiction material predominates over fiction. Like Letters of a Hindoo Rajah and Memoirs of Modern Philosophers it presents a critique of the present by defamiliarizing it, through historical analogy rather than the alien perspective or burlesque distortion.³ This again was a technique associated with men's writing, especially eighteenth-century ‘classical republicans’ and ‘commonwealthmen’, and the French philosophe Barthélemy used it in Voyage du jeune Anacharsis (1788), a critique of the ancien régime. But women became interested in the form, with such works as the Bluestocking Cornelia Knight's Marcus Flaminius; or, A View of the Military, Political, and Social Life of the Romans (1793), because the historical quasi-novel enabled them to practise various discourses conventionally reserved for men, including historiography, archeology, and classical studies, literary and art criticism, and political and cultural critique, under the guise of the acceptably feminine form of prose fiction.

Hamilton's Preface declares the aim of communicating her intellectual and moral philosophy to a wider readership by means of ‘a more agreeble medium’ than the ‘didactic form’ of Letters on Education. She rejects fiction as such because it enables an author ‘to promote the reception of a favourite theory’ but ‘can never be considered as a confirmation of its truth’. Biography, however, both engages the reader's sympathetic interest and makes a deeper moral impression because it is known to be true (vol. i, pp. xiii-xiv). Hamilton's biographical method is based on the Enlightenment epistemology, set forth in Letters on Education, that also underpinned English Jacobin ‘necessitarianism’: ‘to trace the progress of an extraordinary mind from the first dawn of genius to maturity; to mark the circumstances from which it received its peculiar bent; to develope the sources whence the understanding derived its stores; and thus … to pourtray the characteristic features of the soul’. But an element of fiction is required because history is ‘imperfect’: public acts may be recorded but the exercise of subjective virtues is ‘not of a nature to be disclosed’ and the exercise of domestic virtues' is or ought to be ‘for ever veiled from vulgar eyes’ (pp. xvii-xviii). Yet these virtues are more important and instructive than the actions of ‘conquerors and disturbers of the earth’, on which biography and historiography have hitherto focused (p. xxvi)—a reference to the French Revolution and Napoleon. By contrast, Hamilton intends to favour ‘Minerva’ over ‘Mars’ and to avoid modern controversies by choosing a subject both domestic and classical. This ‘may have the appearance of presumption’, but a woman may popularize learned discourse, especially for the improvement of her own sex, and will know how to describe with ‘probability’ those ‘domestic avocations, society, &c.’ which ‘it suited not the dignity of history to record’ (pp. xxviii, xxxii), but which are the foundation of the national character and destiny.

Hamilton first feminizes classical studies by popularizing them in a ‘Genealogical Sketch’ of her main characters and ‘Preliminary Observations on the History and Character of the Ancient Romans’, similar to the ‘Preliminary Dissertation’ in Letters of a Hindoo Rajah. This framing device gives an Enlightenment sociology of the rise, decline, and fall of republican Rome, a favourite theme of eighteenth-century classical republicans and commonwealthmen.⁴ Like these men, Hamilton attributes the greatness of Rome to its citizens' love of liberty; because their ‘idea of liberty’ was connected with the common good, ambition ‘swelled the tide of national prosperity’ rather than ‘the selfish gratification of individual interest’. Hamilton feminizes this argument, however, by insisting that this ‘patriotic zeal’ in turn depended for its strength and dissemination on ‘the influence of female manners’:

Taught to place her glory in the faithful discharge of the domestic and maternal duties, a Roman matron imperceptibly acquired an elevation of sentiment, a dignity of manners, which rendered her equally the object of esteem and of respect. Her country was no less dear to her than to her husband; but the same spirit of patriotism which impelled him to exert his valour in the field, or his wisdom in the senate, animated her mind in the instruction of her children, and the regulation of her family.

(i. 18-19)

She further feminizes the argument by insisting that the only thing lacking to soften and perfect this ‘patriotic’ character was the Christian religion.

The fall of Rome, like its rise, depended on the same factors. Lacking the check of Christianity, the Romans' love of freedom and country degenerated into love of ‘power’ over others, including conquered nations, slaves, and even members of the same family. Foreign conquests expanded slavery, introduced luxury and decadence from the Orient, encouraged social emulation, and resulted in the decline of the female character: ‘The Roman females soon caught the contagion of licentiousness’, chastity was no longer ‘the matron's glory, or the maiden's pride’, and ‘the care and instruction of her children’ and ‘management of domestic affairs, no longer conferred dignity’ (i. 46-7). This plot of Roman history has two obvious modern parallels—Revolutionary history from the early 1790s, through the republican turmoils and expansionism of 1792-4, the decadence of the Directory, and the rise of a new ‘Emperor’; and Britain's decline from virtuous liberty established by the Glorious Revolution, through the increasing luxury and orientalization of the eighteenth century, the civil strife of the 1790s, and post-Revolutionary social decadence and political corruption.

The story of Agrippina and Germanicus illustrates this historical process outlined in Hamilton's ‘Preliminary Observations’. Much of volume one is spent describing their ideal companionate and egalitarian marriage and contrasting it with others of the time, especially within the imperial family. When Germanicus is stationed in Germany, the couple find the domestic virtues and respect for women equally prevalent among this ‘primitive’ people, but in Rome Germanicus and Agrippina stand out from the vice and intrigue of the imperial court and become objects of envy and resentment. Even their virtues are limited without Christian faith, however, and when Germanicus falls victim to court intrigues Agrippina indulges in grief and a desire for revenge. Although the populace loved Germanicus they too lack the basis for principled and effective political action and are easily corrupted by flattery and bribes, for ancient philosophy—a parallel to Revolutionary and English Jacobin ‘philosophy’—remained the diversion of an elite few. Even Agrippina's children, Agrippina and Caligula, were corrupted in such a divided, selfish, and individualistic society and became two of the most notorious characters of antiquity. Agrippina herself is banished, abandoned by the intimidated ‘giddy multitude’, and in frustration tries to starve herself to death.

This is the low point of Agrippina's story, but the narrator reminds the reader that meanwhile another event was occurring to transcend and transform this history of degeneration:

While Tiberius, the creature of a moment, whose lengthened reign is but a speck in the annals of time, was exercising his power in spreading terror and desolation, the messenger of the Most High announced to the righteous the tidings of everlasting joy! In the resurrection of Christ, such full assurances were given of a future state, as should thenceforth render the transitory ills of life only dust in the balance!

(iii. 282-3)

The narrator's exclamations signal her participation in this triumph over history as irredeemably temporal, relative, and conflicted, a condition caused by class difference: ‘In the separation made by rank and circumstances, the tie of a common nature, that tie which ought to bind man to man, was in the pagan world completely lost.’ Worse still, Roman society lacked the religion necessary to overcome these differences:

The rich and the poor, the noble and the lowly, knew not what it was to meet on equal terms in the house of God, to join in the same acts of humility and contrition, to rejoice in the same hopes of mercy, and to send their prayers and praises in unison to one common Parent, one universal Lord, one great Creator! They considered not each other as joint heirs of immortality, beings equally frail by nature, and who might be equally enriched by grace!

(iii. 327-8)

Here Christian virtues are equated with those conventionally ascribed to women, and society is envisaged as a family, though a patriarchal one. The narrator's concern is obviously less with pagan Rome than with un-Christian, socially divided Britain and un-Christian, warlike, and imperialist France. Agrippina's fate shows that despite her feminine virtues she lacked true religion as ideological defence against the passions and ambition of her time, thus ‘cherished the seeds of misery and corruption’ even in her own family, and thereby unintentionally contributed to the decline and fall of her country.

The narrator concludes with a moral for the present: ‘Let those who have an opportunity of forming [their idea of virtue] upon a purer model, learn to prize the inestimable privilege they enjoy, in having clearer views of moral excellence, and brighter prospects of future reward, than ever opened on the unfortunate Agrippina!’ For in Memoirs of Agrippina Hamilton attempts to go beyond the Revolution debate in three ways. In giving her version of the transition from republican to imperial Roman society she invokes a central theme of the eighteenth-century classical republicanism that was a common source of Revolutionary politics in France and English Jacobinism in Britain, but she adapts that theme for her counter-revolutionary politics by insisting that Christian faith is necessary to complete classical republican private and social virtue. At the same time, by relativizing private virtue, political principles, and history in the light of eternity she appropriates the historicism of the eighteenth-century classical republicans and the social critiques of the Enlightenment. Secondly, by feminizing history and social analysis, and by asserting that the motive force of both is the private and domestic affections extended into the public and national arena, she gives her own interpretation to the post-Revolutionary idealization and heroization of domestic woman as source of the ‘national’ identity, culture, and destiny. Finally, in her experimental quasi-novel Hamilton attempts to go beyond the Revolutionary decade's conflicts of form, genre, and discourse by feminizing historiography.

This experiment did not succeed, at least in the view of reviewers, who were polite but did not believe that a woman could purposely transgress boundaries of discourse; experiment, especially when by a woman, was again read as bad writing. The Annual Review doubted ‘the expediency of composing historic novels’ and complained of ‘an inconvenient confusion of fact and fiction’. The Monthly Review faulted Hamilton's scholarship, thought the mixture of ancient history with Christian reflections showed ignorance of literary decorum, and considered the book ‘too didactic and too moral ever to become a favourite at the circulating libraries’ as Hamilton seemed to hope. The Critical Review thought that ‘there is nothing essential in the work to distinguish it from a novel’ but that women readers would not get past the third page. In contrast, the British Critic thought that Hamilton's ‘talents’ had never been so ‘conspicuous’, that she would fix ‘the reader's attention’ completely ‘through the whole three volumes’, and that the ‘Preliminary Observations’ contained ‘judicious reflections’ offering ‘lessons of practical wisdom’ for ‘Britons of every rank and every age’. Nevertheless, this reviewer, too, thought the fiction vitiated the biography and that the Roman world was too different for any moral to be inferred from it for the present.⁵

Nevertheless, Hamilton's earlier counter-revolutionary contributions were recognized with a royal pension in 1804; the penetration of her counter-revolutionary feminism into the dominant class was recognized in a request from a Scottish nobleman to supervise his daughters' education. She was reluctant, having told a friend in 1803, ‘in our sex, the cultivation of the intellectual faculties is so much considered as a secondary object, that to undertake the education of a female is in some respects to be put on a footing with fiddlers and dancing-masters; in short, to be deprived of the respectability of independence.’⁶ She accepted the position on condition of having a ‘separate establishment’ to maintain her status as a genteel professional, but after six months she found her ‘personal independence’ was compromised and declined to continue.⁷ The experience did produce another book, Letters, Addressed to the Daughter of a Nobleman, on the Formation of Religious and Moral Principle (1806), aiming to exemplify in practice the theory of Letters on Education and to feminize both ‘philosophy’ and theology. It is, accordingly, in epistolary and dialogical form, based on a professionalized relation of domestic affection, and addressed to ‘Lady Elizabeth’ (Bingham, daughter of Lord Lucan), a former pupil, in order to render the author-teacher's mentorial presence permanent, in print. It incorporates personal observations and short illustrative narratives, and has a more belletristic range of reference and quotation than Hamilton's earlier Letters on Education. It stakes out a middle ground between books such as Hays's Letters and Essays and More's Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, both of which Hamilton knew, being less miscellaneous, materialist, and feminist than the former and more ‘philosophical’ and less Evangelical than the latter, aiming to reconcile Revolutionary feminism and counter-revolutionary feminism by emphasizing the common objective of both—to confer autonomous subjectivity and thus a degree of social independence on women by training them in the same self-discipline and critical thinking necessary to professional men.

Thus the Preface rejects the rote learning usually imposed on women in favour of training in critical thought, while insisting that only relations of domestic affection buttressed by orthodox religion, not mere professional method, can sustain such training. The first volume outlines the religious and philosophical rationale for ‘constant and habitual exercise’ of both critical thought and moral sensibility, validated by religious principle, extended to every activity, relationship, and moment of life, thereby relativizing merely social categories of personal worth and internalizing the professional middle-class discourse of subjective merit and capitalist investment mentality, validated by the light of eternity and, in an aptly financial yet biblical metaphor, called ‘accountableness’ (i. 30, 31). Such internalization of the moral economy of professionalized ‘virtue’ is necessary because merely social ‘securities’ are ever-changing due to ‘fashion’, social conflict, and the fluctuations of ‘power’ in society. This is especially the case with the upper class, who are always being flattered and manipulated by courtly intriguers, ‘for who but the self-interested and depraved will practise the arts necessary to obtain an ascendancy over the mind either of an equal or superior?’ (i. 129). The second volume describes the religious basis of this programme, subsuming features of rational Dissent in the Anglican doctrine of good works as well as true faith, and confronting Eve's place, as representative woman, in the Christian scheme of time and eternity. This was a major theme in Revolutionary feminist critique of patriarchal religion, and Hamilton tries to reconcile anti-feminist and feminist interpretations by reading Eve's punishment as an allegorical act of divine mercy, offering women ‘a peculiar hope’ for redemption through means appropriate to their condition of maternity and domesticity (ii. 28-30), but insisting that this option cannot be exercised without intellectual training and the freedom to acquire moral discipline (ii. 131-2).

But she condemns social protest, whether based on gender or class, as a sign of sinful pride. Though sympathetic to the dependent and impoverished condition of most women, she represents ‘the distinctions of society’ as ‘not only essential in a political, but necessary in a moral, point of view, as means of exercising and proving our virtue’, and anticipates ‘the hour’ when ‘the transient distinctions’ that separate ‘the owner of the rich domain’ and ‘the rustic hind who labours it’ will ‘be annihilated’, along with ‘all the unhallowed passions which these distinctions might have inflamed’ (ii. 169-72). The same cold comfort had been offered to the oppressed by Burke and More in the 1790s and was being offered again in the Revolutionary aftermath by the likes of the Religious Tract Society. Paradoxically, Hamilton argues that the trials of social difference benefit the middle class most because their ‘selfishness, as well as pride, meets with so many checks, and is so universally opposed and reprobated, that even by the common intercourses of life it must be in some measure subdued, or at least restrained’, resulting in ‘benevolent feelings’ toward others, expressed in acts of charity (ii. 253). Implicitly, therefore, it is women and the middle classes, differently but equally oppressed, who are best placed to ameliorate social conflict and misery, thereby leading social and national reconciliation on earth while acquiring the spiritual merit necessary to salvation hereafter.

Though a second edition of Letters was soon called for, reviewers were becoming impatient with Hamilton's feminization of ‘masculine’ discourses. The Monthly Review writes condescendingly that she ‘occasionally wanders a little out of her depth’ and ‘has not sufficiently studied the subjects of Christian theology, to justify her public discussion of them’. The Critical Review objects to some of her theological arguments and questions her intellectual competence by accusing her of ‘grammatical inaccuracies’, ‘uncouth expressions’, and ‘unmanageable or broken metaphors’. The British Critic distinguishes her previous work from that of most women writers in displaying ‘powers of thinking, and of thinking justly’, and acknowledges the ‘many profound as well as useful reflections, expressed in elegant language’ in her present work. But the reviewer also deplores the ‘petulant self-sufficiency’ of her preface as ‘unbecoming the female character’, worries about her venturing into ‘the thorny labyrinth of controversy’ where ‘a lady’ would not commonly ‘choose to take her literary walk’, and devotes almost two pages to Hamilton's grammatical and stylistic errors.⁸

Letters to the Daughter of a Nobleman attempts to feminize both philosophy and theology while subsuming Revolutionary feminism in her counter-revolutionary project of religious, social, and political reconciliation in the aftermath of the Revolution debate. Hamilton carried out a similar project in her personal and public life to challenge the post-Revolutionary remasculinization of literary culture. Though ‘most Scotchwomen read, and were not inferior to their southern neighbours in general information and good taste, very few had ventured to incur the dangerous distinction of authorship’ and there was a widespread prejudice against ‘bluestockings’, which Hamilton ‘set at defiance’ by avoiding any appearance ‘that she valued her literary reputation on any other ground but as a means of usefulness’, by ‘her cheerfulness, good sense, and good humour’, and by managing a number of charitable institutions, especially the Edinburgh House of Industry.⁹

This was ‘instituted for the purpose of affording assistance to aged females of respectable character, when thrown out of employment, and of training the young to habits of industry and virtue’. Located near the Magdalene Asylum established in 1797 to receive prostitutes from prison, the House of Industry was probably meant to complement the Asylum by rescuing women who were on the verge of prostitution.¹⁰ It had three branches. The spinning room provided work-for-welfare for older women on the verge of indigence or prostitution—growing concerns to middle-class reformers and ratepayers. The lace factory employed girls and young women for ten hours every day, giving six hours ‘to lace-working, three to needlework, and one to reading and spelling’. All meals were provided, payment was by piecework with deductions for materials and overheads, a shilling and sixpence a week went to each girl's parents, any surplus was put aside to buy clothes, and the girls later went into the School for Servants, where lack of funds meant that there was only one meal of bread and broth a day. Those employed from the School were investigated annually and rewards given to those with good behaviour. The managers of the House also aimed to reform the inmates' parents by drawing them into the economy and the religious services of the institution. Despite this comprehensive plan for a self-supporting programme of social reform and education for subordination, the House of Industry remained dependent on local middle-class subscribers who worried that educating the poor would give them ambitions above their station, or that the workhouse would compete with other businesses. Consequently, the managers assured subscribers that ‘it is not so much their object to make accomplished readers and needleworkers, as to make active, diligent, and sober-minded servants, well instructed in their duty to God and man, and who have acquired habits which may accord with and support their principles’.

At about this time Hamilton began a fictional work to disseminate the same diminutive form of professional middle-class ideology and culture. Sometime in 1805 or 1806 she began ‘a little tale for the lower orders’ as the first in a series of tracts designed to resemble Hannah More's Cheap Repository of the 1790s, but probably inspired by Maria Edgeworth's Popular Tales (1804), published a year after Hamilton and Edgeworth had met in Edinburgh, and short stories by women writers such as Harriet and Sophia Lee and Amelia Opie, adapted from the Sentimental tale of the late eighteenth century in reaction against ‘novels of manners’, ‘Gothic romances’, and ‘political romances’ of the 1790s.¹¹ Despite their modest appearance, these tales represent the embourgeoisement of domestic and rural life as the basis for a national moral and cultural reconstruction in the Revolutionary aftermath. Hamilton's The Cottagers of Glenburnie: A Tale for the Farmer's Ingle-nook was published in 1808 and it too addresses major post-Revolutionary developments, including increasing class alienation, uncertainty over Britain's governability, the deepening international crisis, and especially concern for the condition of the lower classes, seen in such works as Thomas Malthus's Essay on Population (1798, revised 1803) and Patrick Colquhoun's Treatise on Indigence (1806), and numerous local and national projects to ‘improve’ the lower classes through education in basic literacy, distribution of Bibles and religious tracts, the ‘suppression of vice’, and institutions of charitable relief and social reclamation. Philanthropic aims justified efforts at ideological subjection and social control by replacing the lower-class lottery mentality with a middle-class investment mentality. Like the Edinburgh House of Industry, The Cottagers of Glenburnie was intended to contribute to this effort, but like Cheap Repository its form, format, and price indicate that it was to be bought by the middle classes and distributed to the ‘lower ranks’.

Its political purpose is indicated by the dedication to Hector Macneill, whose Skaith of Scotland assimilated the popular dialect verse tradition of Robert Burns but eliminated Burns's ‘licentiousness’ and ‘immorality’, and especially his pro-Revolutionary sentiments, in order to ‘reform’ the lower classes while creating a ‘national’ Scottish identity within that of Britain—in fact a projection of middle-class culture. Hamilton claims that her ‘dull prose’ is beneath the dignity of poetry such as Macneill's, yet it too may interest ‘the well-wishers to the improvement of their country’. First, however, she criticizes nationalism that is mere nostalgia or produces ‘a blind and indiscriminating partiality for national modes, manners, and customs; and a zeal that kindles into rage at whoever dares to suppose that our country has not in every instance reached perfection’ (pp. viii-ix)—both confrontational anti-Jacobin jingoism and reform-minded regional patriotism that had threatened Britain's stability in recent years. She also follows Maria Edgeworth in promoting the modernization of her part of Britain in order to eliminate social, cultural, and economic disparities that threatened the unity of state and empire. Such work of conciliation would be considered as acceptably feminine involvement in public and political affairs, yet Hamilton declares that it may accomplish more than the ‘politician’ or economist can:

The great mass of the people are, in their estimation, as so many teeth in the wheels of a piece of machinery, of no farther value than as they serve to facilitate its movements. No wonder if, in their eyes, a regard to the moral capacities and feelings of such implements should appear visionary and romantic. Not less so, perhaps, than to the war-contriving sage, at the time he coolly calculates how many of his countrymen may, without national inconvenience, be spared for slaughter!

Happily, there are others, to whom the prosperity of their country is no less dear, though its interests are viewed by them through a very different medium. National happiness they consider as the aggregate of the sum of individual happiness, and individual virtue. … They forget not that the pleasures of the heart, and of the understanding, as well as those of the senses, were intended by Providence to be in some degree enjoyed by all; and therefore, that in the pleasures of the heart and the understanding, all are entitled to participate.

(pp. ix-xi)

Discourses conventionally gendered masculine and feminine are contrasted and the latter declared to have their special, and even superior province in subjectivity, domesticity, and individual experience that are the basis of the national interest and character. Hamilton's specific targets here are political economy and utilitarianism, newly prominent factions in the professional middle-class cultural revolution, associated with both Revolutionary ‘philosophy’ and the Revolution's latest embodiment, the ‘war-contriving sage’ Bonaparte.

Thematically and formally The Cottagers of Glenburnie is designed to promote Hamilton's own post-Revolutionary social vision. It takes up central themes of the professional middle-class cultural critique, as redefined during the Revolutionary aftermath. It shows how decadent court culture has permeated all levels of society, from the landed gentry to rural and factory labourers, from the towns to remote villages, bringing individuals and families to the brink of ruin and opening the populace to ‘Jacobinism’, and requiring national reform necessarily beginning at the local level in the individual family. It takes up pre-Revolutionary projects such as Sarah Trimmer's The Œconomy of Charity, urging middle-class women to take their domestic expertise into local social work and policing, reinforced during the Revolution debate by Hannah More, Jane West, and others, illustrated with numerous examples in Trimmer's second edition of 1801, and now extended by Hamilton to national social reconciliation, renewal of the paternalistic social structure, and resistance to evils of urbanization and industrialization. The Cottagers of Glenburnie is constructed to appeal to a readership unconcerned with high art and probably suspicious of ‘mere’ novels. It uses familiar didactic devices such as the ‘Socratic’ dialogue, one-dimensional or ‘humour’ characters, a progressive main plot, parallel sub-plots showing characters with similar or diverging destinies, closure according to narrative justice or appropriate rewards and punishments, a protagonist of almost godlike power to transform the world around her, and a hierarchical linguistic universe centred by standard written English—rapidly becoming the cultural property and dialect of the professional middle class. At this period these devices are also characteristic of didactic writing for children and for the ‘lower orders’, who were seen by their ‘betters’ as childish or childlike.

The most prominent formal devices are characterization of the protagonist, use of language, progressive plot, and characterization of the narrator-author, and they are chosen, shaped, and interrelated so as to address such a readership and represent clearly Hamilton's social vision. The protagonist Mrs Mason (aptly named social rebuilder) is a local reformer and reconciler and therefore appropriately a woman; she is also a professional, though within acceptably feminine callings such as housekeeper, governess, and companion, and when she performs her reforming ministry in Glenburnie she has retired from employment and acts as a social volunteer. As a pragmatist she is guided by the Church of England Arminianism Hamilton adopted in the early 1790s and affirmed in her educational writings after 1800, asserting that true faith, good works, and the exercise of free will are necessary to salvation. Mrs Mason's successful reform of all ranks suggests that all have similar problems and common or parallel interests and that this process need not be sought through political revolution. At the same time, Mrs Mason's failures and the intervention of social forces and accidents of mortality beyond her control indicate the importance of free will in individual and social destiny, while relying on divine benevolence and justice in the long term. This is a post-Revolutionary vision of social reform without social conflict, in the ‘national’ interest.

Hamilton uses two forms of language in The Cottagers of Glenburnie—English and Scots. Scots is used in accord with the new, non-burlesque treatment of lower-class life and the representation of ‘national’ character. Hamilton had used Scots in her youthful writing and expressed her patriotic feelings toward it in a letter of 1801 to Hector Macneill, claiming that its ‘simplicity’ is ‘infinitely better adapted’ to descriptions of nature ‘than the cold refinement of modern language’, and hoping that the work of Macneill and Burns will soon make ‘the study of gude braid Scotch’ a part of upper- and middle-class education.¹² Like many professional intellectuals at the time she was concerned at the loss of a separate ‘national’ identity and power through loss of the distinctive ‘national’ language. But the standard written language of Scotland, as of the rest of Britain, was English. To represent Scottish ‘national’ identity within Britain and commanded by the professional middle class, Hamilton uses a written form of spoken Scots, but distributed almost entirely to lower- or lower middle-class characters and subordinated within the text to the standard English of the omniscient third-person narrator, a figure for the author who, implicitly, alone commands both ‘national’ dialects.

This linguistic structure connects with characterization of protagonist and narrator by implying a hierarchy in which narrator and reader are on the same narrative plane, ‘above’ the dialect speakers. Mrs Mason ‘speaks’ the same dialect of standard written English as the narrator, clearly indicating her place in the novel's hierarchy of truth and value. The narrator is further characterized for the reader by energetic and mildly ironic tone of description and sharp evaluative commentary on the characters and incidents. Mrs Mason is implicated in these devices, too, especially when the narrator uses free indirect discourse to report Mrs Mason's thoughts and feelings, establishing another basis of identity between her and the narrator. The plot of re-education is managed by these two characters, within the novel by Mrs Mason and for the novel by the ‘author’, an implied character constructed as the narrator.

Like many ‘tales’, Glenburnie opens in medias res. Mrs Mason, returning to Scotland from England, stops with her friends the Stewarts on her way to retirement after a lifetime of service to the upper-class Longlands family. Mr Stewart is a virtuous professional man, formerly the Longlands' steward (hence his name). But his two daughters, Bell and Mary, have contrasting characters (as their names indicate), the former spoiled by friendship with the courtly Mrs Flinders and the latter educated to be like her father. In the first third of the novel Mrs Mason tells Mary, her ideological and cultural daughter, the story of her life from humble beginnings to servant and then governess to the children of Lord and Lady Longlands. Through self-culture and self-discipline she became a professionalized domestic woman and as such saved the Longlands family and their estate from ruin by reforming their insubordinate servants, their courtly domestic intrigues, their aristocratic extravagance, and their false social relations. But the Longlands estate was inherited by a son spoiled by his courtly mother, Lord Longlands' first wife; the family disperses and Mrs Mason is forced into retirement. This part of the story can be read as an allegory of Britain's history in the eighteenth century, from courtly decadence, through reform and progress culminating in the reign of George III, to imminent return of court government led by the decadent Prince of Wales and his social and political followers. Mrs Mason's actions in the rest of the novel show the way forward to social reform without political revolution, through the feminization of private and community life.

Mrs Mason retires to the remote village Glenburnie to live on the proceeds of stocks acquired during her lifetime of professional domestic service—apt symbol of her commitment to the investment mentality. Her friends are surprised, since Glenburnie is notorious locally for its disorderly and vulgar inhabitants and consequent dilapidation, dirt, and poverty. Scotland and the Celtic fringe had a similar reputation with the English, as did Britain's overseas empire. Mrs Mason finds Glenburnie to be as she was told; she also finds that the cottagers of Glenburnie are unwilling to take responsibility for their situation. Most blame it on some secular or religious version of the lottery mentality—custom, luck, fate, predestination. Others blame it on their ‘betters’, and take up Jacobin doctrines of ‘liberty and equality’. Mrs Mason rejects custom, Presbyterian predestination, and Jacobin sedition; as the basis of her reform programme she enunciates an Anglican theology of true faith, good works, and free will. When Mr MacClarty stoutly maintains that ‘“We maun trust a' to the grace of God’”, Mrs Mason replies:

God forbid that we should put trust in ought beside … but if we hope for a miraculous interposition of divine grace … without taking the means that God has appointed, our hope does not spring from faith, but from presumption. It is just as if you were neither to plough, nor sow your fields, and yet expect that Providence would bless you with an abundant crop.

(p. 186)

Later Mrs Mason confronts the secular version of the MacClartys' Calvinist theology of predestination when she tells them that taking ‘trouble’, or in local dialect ‘being fashed’, becomes habitual and saves labour. Her hostess responds, ‘“Ilka place has just its ain gait, … and ye needna think that ever we'll learn your's. And indeed to be plain wi' you, cusin, I think you have our mony fykes’” (p. 205). The phrases ‘Ilka place has just its ain gait’ and ‘I canna be fashed wi' it' recur throughout the novel, becoming figures for a popular culture relying on custom and a lottery mentality and corresponding to the popular Presbyterianism of the Scottish lower classes. Indeed, the novel made these phrases into popular expressions with the reading public. But as Mrs Mason observes, ‘this fear of being fashed is the great bar to all improvement’ (p. 206). She proclaims an ideology of ‘improvement’, demonstrates the method required to achieve it, and organizes an investment economy to sustain it. Ideology, practice, and institution are validated by her Arminian theology, seconded by the authoritative figure of the good pastor, Mr Gourlay, who assists Mrs Mason's work.

Mrs Mason exemplifies this theology by intervening in history as the transmission over generations of false consciousness including custom, the lottery mentality, predestinarian apathy, and courtly intrigue and emulation, which either sustain court government by disarming resistance or encourage ‘Jacobinism’ by leaving no alternative but violent resistance. Mrs Mason emphasizes the importance of free will guided by ‘reason’, or the analytical, critical, reconstructive mentality characteristic of the virtuous professional. She demonstrates her programme for local and thus national reconstruction by relationships with two contrasting families, the MacClartys and Morrisons, and through them with all the ‘cottagers of Glenburnie’—implicitly all residents of Britain and its empire.

The feckless, vulgar, unteachable MacClartys are Mrs Mason's relations and first hosts in Glenburnie. The dirt and disorder of their household are detailed by the narrator with a comic energy characteristic of eighteenth-century novelists such as Hamilton's fellow Scot, Smollett. Such ‘domestic realism’ was becoming a leading feature of post-Revolutionary fiction, serving a renewed taste for fiction of common life in reaction to novels of manners in high life and ‘Gothic romances’ of the exotic, and to what was seen as the merely theoretical character of ‘political romances’ of the 1790s. Thus such ‘realism’ has a polemical and political edge, partly through being figural as well as representational, for the dirt and disorder of the MacClartys' house are both the result of and correlative to the moral and social disorder in the family divided within by conflicts of gender and generation and without by competition with neighbours. These divisions make the MacClartys resistant to Mrs Mason's reform programme and it is only when Mr MacClarty dies and Mrs MacClarty is ‘incapacitated’ by illness that Mrs Mason is able to reform the household economy, beginning, significantly, with the younger females:

The girls, though at first refractory, and often inclined to rebel, were gradually brought to order; and finding they had no one to make excuses for their disobedience, quietly performed their allotted tasks. They began to taste the pleasure of praise, and encouraged by approbation, endeavoured to deserve it; so that though their tempers had been too far spoiled to be brought at once into subjection, Mrs Mason hoped that, by steadiness, she should succeed in reforming them.

(pp. 258-9)

But Robert MacClarty, ‘who had ever shewn a sulky antipathy to Mrs Mason’, inherits the farm and the girls ‘relaxed into indolence, and became as pert and obstreperous as ever’. In language reminiscent of the Revolution debate, the narrator observes, ‘Mrs Mason saw that the reign of anarchy was fast approaching’ (p. 278).

Reluctantly she finally leaves the MacClartys to lodge with William and Peggy Morrison:

They were poor; and therefore the small sum she could afford to pay, might to them be particularly useful. They were humble, and therefore would not refuse to be instructed in matters which they had never before had any opportunity to learn. She might then do good to them and to their children; and where she could do most good, there did Mrs Mason think it would be most for her happiness to go.

(pp. 281-2)

The Morrisons are poor because William became infected with social emulation and ambition. He confesses to Mrs Mason:

had I been contented to go on with my business, as my father did before me, on a scale within my means, my profits, though small, would have been certain. But I wished to raise my wife and bairns above their station; and God, who saw the pride of my heart, has punished me.

(p. 286)

Pride gives a theological cast to William's ideological error, but it is used throughout the novel to describe what readers would recognize as social emulation leading to a fall.

The significance of this error is developed further when Mrs Mason is called away to Gowan-brae, the home of the Stewarts, whose daughter Bell, misled into social ambition by her courtly friend Mrs Flinders, has married the extravagant and ostentatious ‘Captain’ Mollins. But Mrs Mason recognizes Mollins as a tradesman's son whose ‘“ambition to be genteel led him into the society of the showy and dissipated’” where he was soon ruined, and he married Bell Stewart thinking she was an heiress. Nevertheless he loves her and has a kind heart, and Mrs Mason mediates a family reconciliation. Mr Stewart is delighted to learn that his son-in-law is middle class after all, and promises to help him in business. Stewart blames the Flinders, who are vulgar upstarts themselves, and tells his daughter Bell:

I do not despise the Flinders's on account of their want of birth, but on account of their paltry attempts at concealing the meanness of their origin by parade and ostentation. It is them, and such as them, who, by giving a false bent to ambition, have undermined our national virtues, and destroyed our national character; and they have done this, by leading such as you to connect all notions of happiness, with the gratification of vanity, and to undervalue the respect that attends on integrity and wisdom.

(pp. 342-3)

As elsewhere in this and Hamilton's earlier novels, it is the women who are first seduced by courtly ‘parade and ostentation’ and spread the evil to their menfolk and thence through all classes in society.

Having established social harmony on the foundation of middle-class values at Gowan-brae, Mrs Mason returns to her work reforming Glenburnie. She improves the Morrisons' domestic economy and, following Mr Gourlay's suggestion, puts William Morrison in place of the old schoolmaster, a pedant and thus a bad teacher. Such criticism of the ‘mere’ learning practised by men is found elsewhere in Hamilton's work and is common in women writers conscious of their socially acceptable yet subordinate role as popularizers of learning for practical, everyday use. Gourlay and Mrs Mason direct Morrison's efforts and reorganize the school according to the Lancasterian monitorial system, emphasizing order, discipline, and subordination as the necessary context for constructing the pupils' subjective selves for ‘obedience and self-government’. These are in turn necessary for the pupils to become efficient workers later in life (pp. 285-6). The connection between education and the rural socio-economic order is reflected in the school's organization:

Each of the three classes were … divided into three distinct orders; viz. landlord, tenants, and under-tenants. The landlord prescribed the lesson which was to be received as rent from his tenants: Each of the tenants had one or two under-tenants, who were in like manner bound to pay him a certain portion of reading, or spelling lesson; and when the class was called up, the landlord was responsible to the master, as superior lord, not only for his own diligence, but for the diligence of his vassals. The landlord who appeared to have neglected his duty, or who permitted the least noise or disturbance in his class, was degraded to the rank of an under-tenant.

(pp. 387-8)

This system applies only to the boys.

The girls are educated to be domestic producers and Mrs Mason teaches them herself, since their character will determine that of Glenburnie. In principle and method the system she adopts resembles that advanced by Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, designed to imbue women with the same powers of critical thought and consequent self-discipline essential to the education and careers of professional men. Mrs Mason has concluded that the relative intellectual inferiority of girls to boys of the same age in Glenburnie is due to the fact ‘that their education had been more neglected’, not so much in schooling as its application in everyday life. Boys were called upon to use observation and analytic reasoning learned in school in their occupations out of it but the girls were not; accordingly, Mrs Mason endeavours ‘to rouse the sleeping faculties’ by engaging the girls in critical appraisal of each others' work, which is predominantly domestic in nature, in effect professionalizing the ‘household work’ to which most ‘girls in their station’ are destined by subjecting it to the same intellectual ‘operations’ and ‘exercise’ required by boys in their work. The result is the girls' ‘improvement in personal neatness and good-breeding’ (pp. 391-2).

This ‘revolution in female manners’, in Wollstonecraft's phrase, spreads from the school to the village and beyond. It also coincides with a domestic revolution on the Longlands estate. The sudden death of the wastrel Lord Longlands leaves the estate to his younger brother, aptly named Mr Meriton, the man of merit whom Mrs Mason had saved from a fire in his infancy and whom she had taught when he was a boy. As a result of this change, Mrs Mason ‘received a great addition to her consequence in the eyes of her neighbours’, and the new Lord Longlands' approval of the revolution in Glenburnie validates her ‘wisdom’. Patronage may be useful after all, and the revolution in Glenburnie spreads. The school is soon ‘increased by scholars from all parts of the country’:

To have been educated at the school of Glenburnie was considered as an ample recommendation to a servant, and implied a security for truth, diligence, and honesty. And fortunate was the lad pronounced, whose bride could boast of the tokens of Mrs Mason's favour and approbation; for never did these fail to be followed by a conduct, that ensured happiness, and prosperity.

(pp. 399-400)

The schoolmaster, Morrison, soon pays his creditors, ‘and from that moment he seemed to enjoy the blessings of life with double relish’, and Mrs Mason allows his daughters ‘to succeed her in the charge of the school’.

By contrast, the MacClarty family disintegrates. Robert is tricked into marrying a smuggler's daughter and quarrels with his mother. She enters factory work with her daughters in a nearby town, where Meg MacClarty is seduced and abandoned. Having been ‘exposed to disgrace’ in her local community, she is forced to seek ‘service’ in Edinburgh ‘and was never heard of more’—implying that she became a prostitute. Throughout the novel, as in Henry Sydney's account of Scotland in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, towns and factories are seen as places of moral, social, and political corruption, in part reflecting the experience of the 1790s, when manufacturing towns such as Glasgow were hotbeds of plebeian ‘Jacobinism’, attributed to the relative independence afforded working men and women by factory wages. As the women of Glenburnie put it, ‘“Glasgow, by a' accounts, is an unco place for wuckedness: but than wha can wonder, whar there's sae mony factories’” (p. 219). Meg MacClarty disappears into Edinburgh, the more fashionable city, but her fate still represents the interconnection of moral and political transgression; the fact that once there she ‘was never heard of more’ suggests a loss of social identity resulting from such transgression. In the second edition Hamilton added a letter from a traveller who found Jean MacClarty and her husband running a roadside inn of predictable squalor, again described with Smollettian comic vigour. Domestic disorder reproduces itself and disappears or escapes into the public sphere.

Mrs Mason herself ‘at length acceded to the wishes of her friends, and took possession of the pretty cottage, which had been built for her by Lord Longlands, in the midst of the pleasure grounds at Hill Castle’, where ‘she tranquilly spent the last days of a useful life; looking to the past with gratitude, and to the future with the full assurance of the hope which is mingled with peace and joy’ (p. 402). Having instilled Hill Castle, Gowan-brae, and Glenburnie with her feminized version of professional ideology and culture, Mrs Mason receives her earthly reward and merely awaits its final validation after death. The relationship between Hill Castle, Gowan-brae, and Glenburnie remains unchanged, like the patriarchal and paternalist structure of rural society, but revolutionized from within by a woman symbolically stationed in a paradise on earth, between past and future, earth and heaven—like Hamilton herself, the mediator between them. As promised in the novel's Dedication, Hamilton has shown how a woman may revolutionize the revolution while remaining within ‘her’ sphere, and thus accomplish what men, in their public and political sphere, apparently could not.

Its publisher had been reluctant to take Glenburnie, but it became one of the books of the season—at first with middle-class readers rather than ‘the lower orders’. The Scots Magazine reported in September 1808 that it had ‘excited an extraordinary sensation’ in Edinburgh.¹³ According to Hamilton's biographer ‘the demand for the work … induced the publishers to print a cheap edition, which circulated to the Highlands, where even the genius of the mountains’—supposedly resistant to innovation—‘confessed the influence of good sense, and the importance of domestic economy.’ It was read with such ‘avidity’ in Stirlingshire that one of Hamilton's poorer friends was able to make some money ‘by lending her single copy for a penny each reader’. Another friend later claimed:

Perhaps few books have been more extensively useful. The peculiar humour of this work, by irritating our national pride, has produced a wonderful spirit of improvement. The cheap edition is to be found in every village-library; and Mrs. M[a]cClarty's example has provoked many a Scottish housewife into cleanliness and good order.¹⁴

The novel was widely read in England, too: ‘“I canna be fash'd” became a popular phrase; and the name of Mrs. M[a]cClarty resounded in the polished circles of fashion, of elegance, and beauty.’¹⁵ It was one of Maria Edgeworth's favourite novels.¹⁶

Many reviewers and readers, English and Scottish alike, placed its ‘realism’ in the vanguard of a literary revolution. The English Lady's Monthly Museum found Hamilton's ‘picture of the national characteristic of the Scottish peasantry’ to be ‘both accurate and amusing’. The Scots Magazine thought the picture would not apply to ‘the opulent farmers of Lothian and Berwickshire’, but certainly ‘to the little farmers in remote districts, and to most of the peasantry’. Anna Lætitia Barbauld, the leading woman intellectual of English Dissent, praised Hamilton's realism for both rhetorical effectiveness and feminine delicacy: ‘perhaps few writers, without “overstepping the modesty of nature,” can produce scenes equally comic, or, without departing from the airiness of narration, administer counsel equally weighty.’ The Edinburgh Review declared that Glenburnie contained ‘as admirable a picture of the Scot[t]ish peasantry’ as Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent and Popular Tales did of the Irish, ‘and rivals them, not only in the general truth of the delineations, and in the cheerfulness and practical good sense of the lessons which they convey, but in the nice discrimination of national character, and the skill with which a dramatic representation of humble life is saved from caricature and absurdity’. The Edinburgh recognized that ‘humble life’, for centuries considered material mainly for comic or burlesque literature, was now being given serious and not necessarily sentimental treatment. The Critical Review found this treatment feminine in character, the story ‘blended … with much sweetness, good sense, and sound morality’, and the characters ‘drawn to the life, with much force of outline’ but also ‘with a delicate discrimination in the colouring’. A decade later, after male novelists and poets had endowed such realism with ‘literary’ status, Elizabeth Benger insisted that Hamilton gave it characteristics one might expect from a woman writer: ‘Glenburnie affords a striking example that deep and intense interest may be excited by a narrative composed of the most simple and even homely materials, but which exhibits the real workings of the human heart.’¹⁷

Reviewers saw Hamilton's handling of dialect as central to the novel's cultural politics, for good or ill. The Scots Magazine thought Hamilton had performed a national service by exhibiting ‘perhaps the purest colloquial Scots that ever appeared in print’, free from admixture of English, thus enabling ‘the language and manners of our country, with all their imperfections’, to be ‘handed down to posterity in full purity’. The Englishwoman Anna Lætitia Barbauld found the dialect an obstacle, though intelligible enough ‘to gratify every reader of taste, and every lover of humour’. The Edinburgh Review found it ‘a specimen of the purest and most characteristic Scotch which we have lately met with in writing’ but thought it could be ‘intelligible’ to only a ‘small number of readers’ and admitted ‘a sort of malicious pleasure’ in thinking that English readers would not understand it unless they ‘take the trouble thoroughly to familiarize themselves with our ancient and venerable dialect’.¹⁸ This attitude would have confirmed Hamilton's fear that such representations of ‘national’ culture would increase differences within Britain. The Scots Magazine thought the novel's portayal of the Scots would, unintentionally perhaps, reinforce such divisive ‘national’ stereotypes and prejudices, and portrayed the relation between England and Scotland as a war in which the ‘fortress’ had been betrayed to the ‘enemy’ by a ‘strong a part of the garrison’—its innermost, domestic quarter.

The century-long debate in Scotland over the benefits of union with England was redirected in the Revolutionary aftermath by continuing political instability and the problem of harnessing the new nationalism, supposedly inspired by Revolutionary ideas, to the kind of cultural, social, political, and economic modernization that would strengthen Britain's resistance to French imperialism. The Scottish professional middle class led this drive to eradicate negative, pre-modern aspects of the Scottish ‘national character’, attributed to ‘prejudice’ and stubborn attachment to ‘custom’ and ‘tradition’. It was generally felt that Hamilton's novel would reinforce this effort. The Edinburgh Review thought such a ‘reformation’ unlikely to be effected by Glenburnie alone:

But a strong current of improvement runs at present through all Scotland, and a much smaller impulse than would once have been necessary, will now throw the peasantry within the sphere of its action. Besides, our cottagers [unlike those elsewhere in Britain] are reading and reasoning animals; and are more likely perhaps to be moved from their old habits by hints and suggestions which they themselves may glean up from a book, than by the more officious and insulting interference of a living reformer.

The Satirist expected ‘extensive benefit to all classes of society’ because ‘In its affecting pages the rich may read a clear statement of the best mode to ensure popularity, the moderate in fortune and desire may trace the best source of domestic comfort, the poor may perceive the best way to independence, and even the indigent may learn how to grow content’.¹⁹ But the Edinburgh Review also thought the book's form and price would limit its usefulness ‘to our peasants at home’ unless Hamilton would ‘strike out all the scenes in upper life’ and ‘print the remainder upon coarse paper, at such a price as may enable the volume to find its way into the cottage library’.²⁰ Such claims for the social effect of books like The Cottagers of Glenburnie may seem exaggerated, but they were reprinted in editions of varying cheapness well into the period that saw the ‘rise of respectable society’ in all classes. This fact suggests that if such books did not directly inspire social and cultural change, they at least reinforced decisions to change that individuals, families, and classes were taking for other reasons.²¹

Hamilton pressed on with ideological and cultural reformation of all classes. Exercises in Religious Knowledge; for the Instruction of Young Persons (1809) is a catechism ‘originally composed for the use of young persons brought up in a charitable institution’—her Edinburgh House of Industry²²—but now offered ‘to the consideration of those of higher rank’. The implication is provocative, calling for a democracy of subjectivity: ‘Whatever be the station, it must be of importance to impress the heart and understanding at an early period, with a sense of individual interest in the scripture doctrines of salvation; as until they are thus brought home to the conscience, there is little room to expect that they will have any powerful influence on the conduct’ (p. vi). Such restructuring of the subjective self is again to be achieved by avoidance of rote learning in favour of understanding, for mere memorization is not incorporated in the self, leaves subjective space free for undesirable kinds of self-construction, and so enables the pupil to elude the policing of the self by the instructor. In Exercises the ‘Teacher’ delivers a discourse followed by question and answer with the pupil—an asymmetrical dialogue in which one side is always right and has all the answers, a dramatization of knowledge as power. Yet Exercises also covertly challenges that power-knowledge as gendered discourse: in overall form it is an analytical outline of the Bible, enabling Hamilton to present her own interpretation of the Word and thus to practise theology, a discourse conventionally gendered masculine, under the guise of the acceptably feminine discourse of religious education.

Hamilton's confidence in carrying on this kind of work and recommending it to other women seems to have derived from her own self-construction as woman and intellectual. Throughout her life she was aware that intellectual pursuits were widely considered unfeminine, and like such friends as Joanna Baillie and Maria Edgeworth, she successfully maintained a literary career without sacrificing the appearance of domesticity. Hector Macneill mingled ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ traits in his description of Hamilton when he recalled never having known a woman ‘with a finer mind, a warmer heart, a clearer head, or a sounder understanding’, but he was particularly impressed with her powers of critical thought: ‘Such was the clearness of her conceptions, and such the quickness of her discrimination, that she seldom or never hesitated a moment to give her opinion decidedly on any subject introduced,—and what is equally remarkable, seldom or never were her opinions erroneous.’²³ These powers of ‘mind’ were the basis of professional middle-class work and culture; they were claimed for women by Revolutionary feminists of the 1790s in order to end gender inequality vitiating the professional middle-class cultural revolution; and in the Revolutionary aftermath they were prescribed for women by writers from More to Hamilton in order to sustain the cultural revolution without threatening social stability or national unity. Like many women, however, Hamilton found that the stress of sustaining a contradictory identity caused periodic psychosomatic illness and doubts about her intellectual and artistic ability, such as her delay in completing Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, her failure to complete her analysis of Paul's Epistle to the Romans, and her inability, due to ‘doubt and diffidence’, to complete a novel she sketched in 1813.²⁴ This experience stimulated a philosophical interest in the nature of subjectivity, and the ‘chosen companions of her private hours’ were Dugald Stewart's Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792) and Outlines of Moral Philosophy (1793), Archibald Alison's Essay on Taste (1790), and William Paley's Moral and Political Philosophy (1785) and Natural Theology (1802).²⁵ Like Wollstonecraft, Hays, Edgeworth, and other women intellectuals of her time, she sought to validate her sense of self through Enlightenment epistemology and moral philosophy, together with a strongly personal religious outlook.

To this end she kept a private journal consisting ‘of a series of papers, composed with a view to assist the writer in the exercise of self-examination, which she considered as the basis of moral and religious improvement’. Significantly, she kept this journal from 1788, just after her brother's arrival from India, to just before her death, and in it she developed a ‘mental philosophy’ similar to the materialism she had satirized during the Revolutionary decade, based on the belief that circumstances form character and that the authentic self is private and domestic, in contrast to the social self. ‘Women have more frequent opportunities’ for observing this self than men do, she argues in her journal, ‘but women seldom generalise: their attention is solely occupied with little particulars, from which they draw no general inferences’, though women who ‘are more capable’ have the ‘power’ to gain considerable ‘insight into the mind and disposition’ by domestic observation alone.²⁶ The restriction of women to the domestic sphere deprives them of training in the professional's ability to generalize, but it is precisely this restricted experience that gives women their peculiar ‘power’—a superior understanding of the authentic being of others. A similar point was made by women writers from Wollstonecraft, Hays, and Williams to Edgeworth and Austen. Hamilton felt she possessed this power herself, and believed she could ‘trace the mental peculiarities of individuals to circumstances over which they had no control’, such as education and social and economic conditions, for ‘whatever state of mind these circumstances tend to produce, will, by the frequent recurrence of them, become habitual; and when thus habitual, all new ideas will be rejected that do not accord or correspond with it’.²⁷ This confers on women skilled in subjective analysis, such as herself, a unique and valuable insight into the public, political sphere in an age of transgressive individualism.

This argument informed all Hamilton's work but she advances it with new clarity and emphasis in A Series of Popular Essays, Illustrative of Principles Essentially Connected with the Improvement of the Understanding, the Imagination, and the Heart (1813). As the title suggests, by popularizing ‘mental philosophy’ it again treats a conventionally masculine discourse in an acceptably ‘feminine way’. This aim is implied in the dedication to Archibald Alison, the Scottish philosopher, addressed here as minister of an Episcopal Chapel in Edinburgh rather than as a philosopher, for Hamilton again feminizes Scottish Enlightenment epistemology by fusing it with Anglican (in Scotland, Episcopalian) ethical theology. She again disclaims any intention to transgress discursive boundaries, ironically assuring her readers that though she discusses ‘the science of mind’ she does not mean ‘to be dull, deep, and metaphysical’, for ‘as it is not in my power to be very deep, I have taken care to be as little dull as possible’. Her ‘conclusions’ and illustrations have been drawn from ‘the objects of our familiar observation’—the conventionally acknowledged scope of women's knowledge—justifying the term ‘popular’ in the title (vol. ii, p. xvi). She claims to be content with the established female role of popularizing ‘the observations or discoveries of superior minds’—implicitly men—though she also claims only partial dependence on them, ‘not having been as yet convinced, that there is any subject within the range of human intellect, on which the capacity of any intelligent Being of either sex, may not be profitably, or, at least, innocently employed’ (p. xxxi). In fact, her aims were shared by a number of women writers in the Revolutionary aftermath. First she aims to recuperate ‘philosophy’ from the odium it acquired during the Revolution debate: ‘if it can be proved that a knowledge of the various powers and faculties of the human mind may be rendered essentially instrumental in confirming our religious faith, and in improving our moral qualities, no science can be put in competition with it, either as interesting or useful’. Secondly, this science is necessary both to understand the ‘selfish principle’ behind post-Revolutionary increase in commercialism and luxury and to engage the opposing, divinely implanted ‘benevolent affections’, or conventionally feminine values of social sympathy and philanthropy. Finally, this ‘science’ is required for extending ‘the benefits of education to the lower orders of society’ (p. xlii), thus ensuring social stability and national harmony. To make her arguments more accessible she planned illustrations from ‘history, sacred and profane’, but abandoned them because the book would have become even more expensive than its £1.4s.—hardly a ‘popular’ price.

In fact the book is a philosophical rationale in laywoman's language for Hamilton's post-Revolutionary programme of social transformation. The first of the five essays, on ‘the utility of the study of the mind’ and its relation to educational reform, is a theoretical justification for the rest; the second essay deals with Hamilton's favourite idea that ‘attention’ is the key to intellectual development and thus the focus for education; and the third essay relates this argument to the development of ‘imagination’ and ‘taste’. But the centre of Hamilton's politics is in the last two essays, ‘on the propensity to magnify the idea of self’ and development of the providentially implanted ‘benevolent affections’, arguing that the critical thought essential to professional work is the basis of liberty and political stability for a society divided by class, gender, and ‘party’. Thus the core of the book is a social psychology of power, a theory of the politics of ideology and culture. Hamilton argues that the basis of the ‘selfish principle’ is the ‘love of power’, diffused through society by emulation as the less powerful magnify themselves by identifying with the more powerful. This argument was long established in critiques of court government, but the recent history of France and Britain raised the question of how this principle operates in democracies or republics. Hamilton argues that each faction tries to attain complete and permanent power over the others, becoming a despotism. But ‘this lamentable conclusion of the history of a free people’ may be prevented by ‘the intellectual energy that inevitably results from a free exercise of the intellectual powers’ (ii. 19)—another way of describing the professional middle-class discourse of critical thought. Hamilton then postulates a historical dialectic between the ‘love of power’ and ‘intellectual energy’, concluding that ‘the propensity to magnify the idea of self, appears indeed to have been the prime agent in the revolutions of empires’.

For magnifying the self through power requires controlling the thoughts of the ruled and produces the desire of the ruled to identify with the ruler. Paradoxically, this leads in turn to the decline of ‘intellectual powers’ of the ruled, the basis of that national glory (‘wealth, grandeur, and power, produced by the industry, wisdom, taste, and valour of the people’) by which the ruler's self is magnified (ii. 27). Similarly, the upper classes magnify their own ‘glory’ by adopting ‘the tastes and opinions which prevail in the court’ and, consequently lacking ‘any exercise to the noblest faculties of the mind’, ‘degenerate into a race of puny triflers’ (ii. 30). Here ‘noblest’ subverts social rank with intellectual merit in an obvious reference to both the ancien régime in France and the Regency in Britain. Hamilton concludes that the form of government best suited to the national interest is a constitutional monarchy with ‘the powers and prerogatives of royalty so accurately defined, as necessarily to lay a restraint on that selfish principle’ which leads to national decline, and giving ‘the benevolent principle’ ‘perpetual exercise’ in the monarch's ‘breast’; this advantage was ‘conferred on the kings of Great Britain by the Revolution’ of 1688 (ii. 33).

Hamilton goes on to consider gender difference as a form of ‘magnifying the self’ through ‘party’ and ‘an instance sufficiently extensive, as it comprehends the whole of the human race’, for ‘every individual of each sex’ is, ‘in his or her mind, identified with the whole of the sex to which he or she individually belongs’. This implicitly explains Revolutionary feminism. Women of ‘strong feelings and generous hearts’ become ‘champions’ of their own sex and ‘anxious, not only to defend the character, but to extend the privileges of the sex with which the idea of self is particularly connected’, they consider ‘every circumstance which marks their situation in society’ as a ‘grievance’, blaming the other sex for their own ills ‘when blame probably attaches in equal portions to both’ (ii. 81). Hamilton gives her own historical sociology of women's oppression, from subjection of women by mere physical force in the ‘savage state’ to intellectual subjection in court societies, arising from the desire of men to magnify themselves. Gender oppression is similar to political despotism and requires the same remedy—free exercise of professionalized critical thought.

Clearly, Popular Essays is, despite its modest title and ostensible subject, a very ambitious book—nothing less than a political theory of ideology, culture, and politics designed to account for the past quarter-century of revolutionary upheaval—including Revolutionary feminism—and recommend a way to sustain necessary and desirable social transformation without resort to such upheaval. But reviewers were as condescending to Hamilton's feminization of political philosophy as they had been to her feminizations of epistemology, theology, and historiography. The Monthly Review calls her ‘not unknown as a novelist’ though ‘still more distinguished as a preceptress’, but accuses her of listening ‘too much to the metaphysicians’, wrongly attributing intellect to education rather than heredity, and writing a book that is ‘prosing because it studiously shuns the picturesque or brilliant colouring of poetic eloquence’, supposedly more appropriate for a woman writer. The Critical Review gave unusually prominent, lengthy, and detailed consideration for such a work, especially by a woman, and compared ‘three distinguished ladies’ of England, Scotland, and Ireland, known for their devotion to the ‘improvement’ of ‘their fellow creatures’: ‘Mrs. More is grave, sensible, and discriminative; Miss Edgeworth fertile of invention, witty, and humourous; and Mrs. Hamilton calm, observant, and metaphysical.’ Yet ‘nothing is more fatiguing than too much good sense’, and the reviewer finds Hamilton's book well-intentioned and an honour to her sex, but ‘more allusive and illustrative, than original or profound’, self-contradictory, often unclear, and restating the obvious.²⁸

Popular Essays was followed by a far less ambitious work, though one that sketched out the practical basis for her feminized social revolution. Hints Addressed to the Patrons and Directors of Schools (1815) is a handbook for application of Hamilton's ideas on education, dedicated to the Edinburgh Education Society, addressed to the educational movement for social control of the lower ranks, and ostensibly based on Pestalozzi's educational theories, but in fact aimed at the growing number of middle-class women who were engaging openly in political activity through various philanthropic movements. Hamilton assumes that ‘the wisdom and eligibility of teaching the children of the poor to read and write’ are widely accepted and the only question is the appropriate means. She holds out the example of Scotland, where lower-class literacy was well established, with ‘moral effects’ ‘exhibited in the conduct of our countrymen in every quarter of the globe’ (p. 3)—reference to the Scots' contribution to the just-concluded wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. During the 1790s there were claims that the literacy of Scottish artisans had opened them to Paine and ‘Jacobinism’, but Hamilton blames urbanization and industrialization (p. 6) and aims ‘to effect such a radical improvement in the intellect, temper, and dispositions of the hundreds of children who may be assembled under the same roof, as will, when converted into habits, render them good and useful members of society, promote their interests in this world, and lead to the attainment of everlasting happiness in the world to come’ (p. 76). She condemns ‘those who take no farther interest in the education of the lower orders than as it affords additional security to property’ (p. 144n). In laying out her own method she plays the mediator between contending supporters of the Bell and Lancaster monitorial systems and insists that careful management and domestic reinforcement of the programme are more important than theoretical niceties. She again opposes mere rote learning for ‘exercise’ in ‘principles’ until they become ‘habits’, and seeks confirmation in Pestalozzi's method (also promoted by the Edgeworths) for adapting instruction to the growth of the child's mind, abolishing artificial inducements of reward and punishment, and establishing a relation of ‘domestic affection’ between pupil and teacher.

Hamilton assigns women a special place in this feminized, domesticated educational system but insists that they must first be professionalized by intellectual training and religious belief, or ideological discipline, if they are ‘to enlarge their sphere of usefulness, and to extend, beyond the narrow precincts of the domestic roof, the beneficial influence of maternal solicitude and maternal tenderness’. For, Hamilton claims, women have ‘instituted and endowed’ more than three-quarters of the small charity schools in Britain and Ireland and almost all those established for girls (pp. 42-3). Yet such projects are bedevilled by gender and class difference because women volunteers too often defer to the men who are usually appointed heads of these institutions. ‘Is it in these enlightened times to be supposed,’ she demands, ‘that women of good sense and good education are so incompetent to judge or to act, that the choice and application of proper means for the education of their own sex cannot properly be committed to them?’ (pp. 74-5). Men also interfere in the administration of schools to distribute ‘patronage,—the root of many evils’, in the appointment of teachers and other employees (p. 177). The result is that such institutions fail, as evidenced by the claim that ‘a vast proportion’ of the women who fall into prostitution ‘have been brought up in charitable institutions, endowed and supported for the very purpose of preserving them in virtue’ (p. 156). Hamilton ignores the possibility that prostitution may be a form of social rebellion by women subjected to incarceration and social control by their ‘betters’. She argues that these institutions fail because they provide neither the ‘exercise’ of mind necessary for moral independence and the religious principles to bolster it, nor the practical skills needed to obtain ‘honest’ employment. Even needlework, a staple of training in such schools, including Hamilton's Edinburgh House of Industry, is taught as a mere mechanical skill rather than as a branch of ‘that cultivation of the moral and intellectual faculties, which is essential to the performance of every duty’ (p. 127). On the same principle she offers ‘Examples of Questions Calculated to Develop the Faculties of the Infant Mind’, the kind of catechism promoted by Evangelicals and others to ensure that the right ‘principles’ have been internalized in the pupil's subjective being, thus protecting him or her against both upper-class courtly values and the plebeian lottery mentality and subjecting him or her to a diminutive version of professional middle-class culture.

This was Hamilton's last work published in her lifetime. Its views were by now shared by many throughout Britain, in movements ranging from Evangelicalism and Utilitarianism to Romanticism. But as the great cycle of revolutions and wars begun in 1789 was drawing to an end, Hamilton, like many others, turned for understanding of it to the Bible and especially the Book of Revelation.²⁹ Hamilton was probably aware that the plebeian woman prophet Joanna Southcott (who died in 1814) was particularly associated with this text, having claimed to be the woman clothed with the sun in Revelation. As with her earlier, unfinished reflections on Paul's Epistle to the Romans, however, Hamilton was more concerned with defying the conventional restriction of biblical interpretation to professional men. She again insists that such interpreters have only further mystified a divine message designed for common understandings (ii. 245-6), and she feminizes theology in several ways. Rather than compose a systematic treatise based on extensive scholarship for professional peers, she writes daily reflections on chapters and verses of Revelation as they occur to her amidst the realities of local daily domestic life, addressed to her sister. Unlike many who read Revelation as a prophecy of particular recent public events, she insists that it contains only a general message warning believers against moral and spiritual enemies in private life (ii. 362), and she particularly rejects reading it in terms of an increasingly nationalistic or sectarian triumphalism that saw the defeat of France as a sign of divine favour to Britain, its people, its government, and its religion (ii. 338-9). Hamilton insists that Revelation recommends tolerance and forbearance and announces salvation for all peoples, of any nation or religion, including those in the empire (ii. 292-3).

She does, however, condemn what she sees as the perversion of reason by sceptical philosophy, meaning the Enlightenment materialism that was blamed for the French Revolution and which she had attacked in her novels of the 1790s (ii. 331). For she reads Revelation as a condemnation of ‘idolatry’, by which she means the worship of things made by man; these could include the French Revolution, with its claims to remake humanity without divine assistance, but they could also include the British constitution or established Church (ii. 311-12). In fact, concerned more with Britain's internal condition than its international situation, Hamilton reads Revelation as a warning against ‘bigotry’, or any creed, sect, or party claiming a monopoly of truth—a reference to competition between various factions of cultural revolutionaries, including Evangelicals, Utilitarians, industrial capitalists, political economists, Orientalists, Romantics, and new Dissent—as well as the power of the state and state religions to exclude certain groups. For ‘It has been the aim of this deformed and degenerate spirit, in every age, to arrogate to itself the sole disposal of temporal honours, and temporal enjoyments’ (ii. 307-9)—an allusion to parliamentary rejection of Catholic emancipation and denial of full citizenship to various groups on grounds of religion. Hamilton emphasizes prophecy as well as admonition in Revelation—the prophecy of a great teacher coming to spread truth and destroy the heresies that afflict the present age. Then good works as well as true faith will be judged, and division and discord will cease. Underlying this reading is a cyclical view of history, from an original harmony of the human and divine, through the Fall and millenniums of discord, conflict, and death, to redemption and reharmonizing of mankind and the divine. Such a reading particularly suited those, including women writers such as Hamilton, Hays, and Williams but also others such as Edgeworth, Austen, Morgan, and Hemans, who undertook the task of national reconciliation and mediation after the shock of Revolutionary rupture. Furthermore, in its main arguments Hamilton's reading of Revelation anticipates that of modern feminist theology, just as her approach to theology and religion in general anticipates in certain respects that of modern feminism, rejecting an avenging God for one of compassion, insisting on the authenticity of women's religious experience, and claiming that experience as a valid basis for understanding of deity, Scripture, and ecclesiastical doctrine.³⁰

Hamilton's reading of Revelation advances what many in her own time would have seen as a woman's theological discourse, and she had some intentions of publishing it as a ‘tract’. But her health was failing, and an inflammation of the eyes drove her to Harrogate spa for relief, where she died on 23 July 1816. Some of her work continued to be reprinted. Part of Hints Addressed to the Patrons and Directors of Schools, entitled Examples of Questions Calculated to Exercise the Infant Mind, was published in London in 1815 and republished in Dublin in 1841 as a ‘valuable work’, though ‘comparatively but little known’ (‘Preface’). Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education went through five editions by 1818 and was reprinted in 1837 in an elegant small edition by Charles Tilt's ‘Miniature Classical Library’. But her best-known work was The Cottagers of Glenburnie, which reached a seventh edition in 1822 and survived well into the nineteenth century. Though originally a pseudo-popular fiction designed, like Hannah More's Cheap Repository tracts, to supplant the chapbooks of the common people, it did become a popular classic, judging by an Irish edition of the 1830s in a series that included old chapbook favourites such as Joe Miller's Jests, Robin Hood's Garland, and Valentine and Orson as well as chapbook versions of more recently popularized fashionable novels such as The Children of the Abbey, Paul and Virginia, and Elizabeth; or, The Exiles of Siberia, and lives of Irish patriots.³¹Glenburnie was also reprinted by William and Robert Chambers, great purveyors of ‘useful’ books to the people, who hoped that their cheap edition of 1859 would be ‘peculiarly suited by its price for popular use’, and thereby become ‘the means of conveying into still more minute channels the excellent moral and economical lessons of the Authoress’.³²

Nevertheless, the post-Revolutionary remasculinization of literature, culture, and civil society was already marginalizing the contribution of Hamilton and others to this phase of the professional middle-class cultural revolution. By the time Elizabeth Benger's biography of Hamilton appeared in 1818 she was referred to condescendingly as ‘this most conscientious, most principled, most industriously useful, and most zealously religious author’, and as ‘an excellent woman’ and ‘useful writer’ whose Memoirs of Modern Philosophers successfully exposed ‘the morbid sensibility and pseudo-philanthropy of the French Revolutionary school’, though ‘its immediate day is perhaps gone by’, and whose Cottagers of Glenburnie ‘is considered a grand national work’ in Scotland.³³ Maria Edgeworth, the leading post-Revolutionary woman popularizer of conventionally masculine discourses from science to political economy, praised Hamilton's novels of the Revolution debate but claimed that The Cottagers of Glenburnie was much read in Ireland and had done much good there because of its ‘humour’, implying an opposition between the confrontational discourse of satire and the conciliatory discourse of ‘humour’. Edgeworth thought Hamilton's major contribution to literature and society was of ‘a more solid and durable nature’, in ‘works on education’ that freed ‘philosophy’, or critical thought, from its associations with the Revolution and Revolutionary feminism and made it accessible, attractive, and usable for women, without encouraging dangerous gender conflict. More important, Edgeworth claimed that Hamilton exemplified throughout life ‘that uniform propriety of conduct’ and ‘all those virtues which ought to characterize her sex, which form the charm and happiness of domestic life, and which in her united gracefully with that superiority of talent and knowledge that commanded the admiration of the public’.³⁴ Edgeworth justly inscribes Hamilton in her own post-Revolutionary conjunction of ‘domestic woman’ with popularizing and feminizing discourses conventionally gendered masculine. Hamilton's intervention in the Revolution debate was by now overshadowed, as she wished, by her ‘practical’ and ‘useful’ contributions to post-Revolutionary conciliation in the ‘national’ interest.

Hamilton's writing in the Revolutionary aftermath, like that of Williams and Hays, seems more disparate, less politically focused, less confrontational, and less polemical than during the 1790s. In part this appearance is due to continuing realities and changed circumstances. In the Revolutionary aftermath women such as Williams, Hamilton, and Hays still had to respect commercial considerations in order to support themselves and their relations by writing, negotiate past commercial and literary gatekeepers or even (in Williams's case) police censors in order to get published, observe changing social conventions in order to avoid moral or critical condemnation, and compromise literary convention and innovation in order to challenge an oppressive discursive order and generic and stylistic practices without confusing or alienating their readers. It is true, too, that in contrast to the expanding opportunities of pre-Revolutionary Sensibility and the heroic struggles of the Revolutionary decade, the horizons of possibility for women writers such as Williams, Hays, and Hamilton seemed relentlessly narrowed by post-Revolutionary counter-feminism and remasculinization of culture. As Joan Kelly points out, ‘if we apply Fourier's famous dictum—that the emancipation of women is an index of the general emancipation of an age—our notions of so-called progressive developments, such as classical Athenian civilization, the Renaissance, and the French Revolution, undergo a startling re-evaluation.’³⁵ The relation of women, writing, and revolution from the 1790s to the 1820s may seem not a history of triumph but at best a history of resistance within the professional middle-class cultural revolution while serving that revolution in ways permitted to women, even as it increasingly discouraged, marginalized, and silently appropriated their work.

Yet during the Revolution debate women writers such as Williams, Hays, and Hamilton insistently feminized politics, ideas of civil society, and discourses previously gendered masculine, especially ‘philosophy’ as social critique, themes that were already becoming central in representations of the Revolution and in Romantic culture, in part at least because of these women's work. They and others met the challenges of the Revolutionary aftermath with, if anything, even more determination and inventiveness than in the era of Revolutionary possibility and struggle. If political polemic came to be seen as still more ‘unfeminine’ after 1800 than before, writers such as Hays, Hamilton, and even Williams turned their social critique into cultural themes and genres only apparently apolitical, and in some ways more effectively political because more acceptably ‘feminine’, less dismissible, and more accessible than their work of the 1790s. The relationship between these writers and their younger contemporaries and immediate successors is difficult to determine, and may well have been mediated partly by men writers who appropriated their work. But there is some evidence that elements of Revolutionary feminism were continued in radical political circles such as the Owenite socialists, and that elements of post-Revolutionary or counter-revolutionary feminism, often further reshaped into femininism, were continued into the work of women writers as diverse as Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, Anna Wheeler, Sarah Ellis, Harriet Martineau, Maria Jane and Geraldine Jewsbury, Agnes and Elizabeth Strickland, Anne Katharine Elwood, Barbara Bodichon and the Langham Place feminists, Anna Brownell Jameson, and George Eliot.³⁶ But even if these connections remain obscure, the work of writers such as Williams, Hays, and Hamilton, their complex, subtle, and shifting negotiations with contradictions of class, gender, and writing in an age of revolutionary crisis, challenge not only the literary, cultural, and social history of their time, but the history and definition of women's writing and feminism themselves.

Notes

1. Monthly Review, ns 38 (Aug. 1802), 408; 39 (Sept. 1802), 49; Critical Review, ns 34 (Feb. 1802), 181, 187; see also 36 (Nov. 1802), 291-8; British Critic, 19 (Mar. 1802), 232-3.

2. Elizabeth Benger, Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (London, 1819), ii. 240-1.

3. On the quasi-novel see Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789-1830 (London, 1989), 252-60.

4. See John A. W. Gunn, Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of Self-Recognition in Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Kingston, Ontario, 1983), ch. 1, ‘Parliament and the Caesars: Legal Tyranny in the Political Rhetoric of Eighteenth-Century England’.

5. Annual Review, 3 (1804), 542; Monthly Review, ns 50 (July 1806), 274-8; Critical Review, 3rd ser., 7 (Feb. 1806), 190, 189; British Critic, 26 (July 1805), 26-33.

6. Benger, Memoirs of Hamilton, ii. 53.

7. Ibid. i. 177-8.

8. Monthly Review, ns 54 (Sept. 1807), 17-20; Critical Review, 3rd ser., 9 (Nov. 1806), 303; British Critic, 29 (Apr. 1807), 347-57.

9. Benger, Memoirs of Hamilton, i. 193-4; the description of the Edinburgh House of Industry is a separately paginated four-page notice bound at the end of Hamilton's Exercises in Religious Knowledge, originally written for the inmates.

10. Linda Mahood, The Magdalenes: Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1990), 75.

11. Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford, 1972), 198-9; Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 71-4.

12. Benger, Memoirs of Hamilton, ii. 12-13.

13. Scots Magazine, 70 (Sept. 1808), 678-9.

14. Quoted in Benger, Memoirs of Hamilton, i. 196-7.

15. Ibid. i. 184.

16. Butler, Maria Edgeworth, 199.

17. Lady's Monthly Museum, ns 5 (Sept. 1808), 138; Scots Magazine, 70 (Sept. 1808), 679; Monthly Review, ns 60 (Oct. 1809), 217; Edinburgh Review, 12 (July 1808), 401-2; Critical Review, 3rd ser., 15 (Dec. 1808), 421; Benger, Memoirs of Hamilton, i. 185-6.

18. Scots Magazine, 70 (Sept. 1808), 678-9; Monthly Review, ns 60 (Oct. 1809), 217; Edinburgh Review, 12 (July 1808), 402-3.

19. Edinburgh Review, 12 (July 1808), 410; The Satirist, 3 (Dec. 1808), 542-3.

20. Edinburgh Review, 12 (July 1808), 402.

21. Thomas W. Laqueur, Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture 1780-1850 (New Haven, Conn., 1976); F. Michael L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain 1830-1900 (London, 1988).

22. Benger, Memoirs of Hamilton, i. 183 n.

23. Ibid. 238-9.

24. Ibid. 216.

25. Ibid. 221.

26. Ibid. 270-1.

27. Benger, Memoirs of Hamilton, i. 231.

28. Monthly Review, ns 74 (Aug. 1814), 402-6; Critical Review, 4th ser., 5 (Mar. 1814), 225-41.

29. ‘Remarks on the Revelation’, in Benger, Memoirs of Hamilton, ii. 245-371.

30. Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, The Book of Revelation: Justice and Judgment (Philadelphia, 1985); for a survey of the work of Fiorenza, Mary Daly, Rosemary Ruether, and others see Marie Tulip, ‘Religion’, in Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct, ed. Sneja Gunew (London, 1990), 229-68; see also Letty M. Russell (ed.), Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (Philadelphia, 1985), and Adela Yarbro Collins (ed.), Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship (Chico, Calif., 1985).

31. According to the title-page, the edition was published by C. M. Warren of Dublin, but a yellow paper cover of the kind commonly put on chapbooks bears the imprint of J. Smyth, Belfast.

32. The Cottagers of Glenburnie: A Tale (London and Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers, 1859), p. viii.

33. Monthly Review, ns 88 (Feb. 1819), 221-2; British Critic, ns 10 (July 1818), 96.

34. Monthly Magazine, 42 (Sept. 1816), 133-6. Edgeworth's account is printed, with some variations, in Benger, Memoirs of Hamilton, i. 224-7, though there the source is said to be an Irish newspaper.

35. Joan Kelly, ‘The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women's History’, Signs, 1 (Summer 1976), repr. Women, History and Theory (Chicago, 1984), 2-3.

36. See Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1983); Philippa Levine, Victorian Feminism: 1850-1900 (London, 1987); Norma Clarke, Ambitious Heights: Writing, Friendship, Love—The Jewsbury Sisters, Felicia Hemans, and Jane Welsh Carlyle (London, 1990).

Bibliography

1. Works by Hamilton and Hays

[Hamilton, Elizabeth,] Letter by ‘Almeria’, The Lounger, 46 (24 Dec. 1785), 181-4; repr. in Elizabeth Benger, Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton, with a Selection from Her Correspondence, and Other Unpublished Writings, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (London, 1819), i: 297-311.

———, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah; Written Previous to, and During the Period of His Residence in England; To Which is Prefixed a Preliminary Dissertation on the History, Religion, and Manners of the Hindoos, 2 vols. (London: G. G. & J. Robinson, 1796).

[———,] Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, 3 vols. (Bath: R. Cruttwell, for G. G. & J. Robinson, London, 1800).

———, Letters on Education (Bath: R. Cruttwell, for G. G. & J. Robinson, London, 1801).

———, Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education, ‘2nd edn.’, 2 vols. (Bath: R. Cruttwell, for G. & J. Robinson, London, 1801).

———, Memoirs of the Life of Agrippina, the Wife of Germanicus, 3 vols. (Bath: R. Cruttwell, for G. & J. Robinson, London, 1804).

———, Letters, Addressed to the Daughter of a Nobleman, on the Formation of Religious and Moral Principle, 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1806).

———, The Cottagers of Glenburnie: A Tale for the Farmer's Ingle-nook (Edinburgh: Manners & Miller, and S. Cheyne; London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, and William Miller, 1808).

Hamilton, Elizabeth, Exercises in Religious Knowledge; for the Instruction of Young Persons (Edinburgh: Manners & Miller; London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1809).

———, A Series of Popular Essays, Illustrative of Principles Essentially Connected with the Improvement of the Understanding, the Imagination, and the Heart, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Manners & Miller; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Brown; and T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1813).

———, Hints Addressed to the Patrons and Directors of Schools; Principally Intended to Shew, That the Benefits Derived from the New Modes of Teaching May Be Increased by a Partial Adoption of the Plan of Pestalozzi; To Which Are Subjoined Examples of Questions Calculated to Excite, and Exercise the Infant Mind (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Brown, 1815).

———, Examples of Questions Calculated to Excite and Exercise the Infant Mind (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Brown, 1815).

Hays, Mary, [and Elizabeth Hays,] Letters and Essays, Moral, and Miscellaneous (London: T. Knott, 1793).

2. Other Books and Articles

Benger, Elizabeth, Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton, with a Selection from Her Correspondence, and Other Unpublished Writings, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (London, 1819).

Butler, Marilyn, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford, 1972).

Clarke, Norma, Ambitious Heights: Writing, Friendship, Love—The Jewsbury Sisters, Felicia Hemans, and Jane Welsh Carlyle (London, 1990).

Collins, Adela Yarbro (ed.), Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship (Chico, Calif., 1985).

Fiorenza, Elizabeth Schüssler, The Book of Revelation: Justice and Judgment (Philadelphia, 1985).

Gunn, John A. W., Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of Self-Recognition in Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Kingston, Ontario, 1983).

Hamilton, Charles (trans. and ed.), An Historical Relation of the Origin, Progress, and Final Dissolution of the Rohilla Afghans in the Northern Provinces of Hindostan; Compiled from a Persian Manuscript and Other Original Papers (London, 1787).

——— (trans. and ed.), The Hedaya, or Guide: A Commentary on the Mussulman Laws, 4 vols. (London, 1791).

Kelly, Gary, English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789-1830 (London, 1989).

———, ‘Revolutionary and Romantic Feminism: Women, Writing and Cultural Revolution’, in Keith Hanley and Raman Selden (eds.), Revolution and English Romanticism: Politics and Rhetoric (Hemel Hempstead, 1990), 107-30.

———, ‘Unbecoming a Heroine: Novel Reading, Romanticism, and Barrett's The Heroine’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 45 (Sept. 1990), 220-41.

———, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (London, 1992).

Kelly, Joan, ‘The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women's History’, Signs, 1 (Summer 1976), repr. in Joan Kelly, Women, History and Theory (Chicago, 1984), 1-18.

Laqueur, Thomas W., Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture 1780-1850 (New Haven, Conn., 1976).

Levine, Philippa, Victorian Feminism: 1850-1900 (London, 1987).

Mahood, Linda, The Magdalenes: Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1990).

More, Hannah, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, with a View of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent among Women of Rank and Fortune, 2 vols. (London, 1799).

Russell, Letty M. (ed.), Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (Philadelphia, 1985).

Taylor, Barbara, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1983).

Thompson, F. Michael L., The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain 1830-1900 (London, 1988).

Trimmer, Sarah, The Œconomy of Charity; or, An Address to Ladies Concerning Sunday-Schools; The Establishment of Schools of Industry under Female Inspection; and the Distribution of Voluntary Benefactions; To which Is Added an Appendix, Containing an Account of the Sunday-Schools in Old Brentford (London, 1787); rev. edn., The Oeconomy of Charity; or, An Address to Ladies; Adapted to the Present State of Charitable Institutions in England: With a Particular View to the Cultivation of Religious Principles, among the Lower Orders of People, 2 vols. (London, 1801).

Tulip, Marie, ‘Religion’, in Sneja Gunew (ed.), Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct (London, 1990), 229-68.