Elizabeth Hamilton's Domestic Politics
[In the following essay, Thaddeus argues that Hamilton has been inaccurately labeled an anti-Jacobin conservative when her writings show a complexity far beyond such a limited categorization.]
I am well convinced that they must ever be content with a very narrow and superficial knowledge of human character, who do not study it at the seasons when it is to be seen in undress; or rather in the nakedness in which it sometimes appears in the domestic scene. The men who boast a knowledge of the world, know mankind only as they appear in one or two particular habits, and these assumed ones. They, therefore, do not seem to be aware of that infinite variety which in reality exists; nor do they enter into the minute circumstances by which that variety is formed. Women have more frequent opportunities for doing so than men have; but women seldom generalise: their attention is solely occupied with little particulars, from which they draw no general inferences; but where they are more capable, they have much in their power, as I am persuaded that a single week spent tête-a-tête with a person, in their own house, gives a more thorough insight into the mind and disposition than would in years be obtained in the common intercourse of society.
Elizabeth Hamilton, 18081
The fiction written in England during the period between the French Revolution and Waterloo is usually designated “Jacobin” or “anti-Jacobin,” and writers are gathered on one side or the other of this great divide. This template has been useful for writers like William Godwin, Robert Bage, and others, but it is not adequate for women writers. When applied by modern critics to Jane Austen, it has mainly generated controversy.2 It is certainly not sufficient for the works of Elizabeth Hamilton (1758-1816).
In Hamilton radical and conservative consort together in an even more complex way than is customary for women of her period. Her writings are an unusual amalgam of politics, domesticity, class consciousness, and explicit awareness of women's subjection. Yet she has characteristically been seen simply as a conservative. Chiefly for this reason, though designated in the patriarchal Dictionary of National Biography as an important writer, Hamilton has not been sufficiently studied by twentieth-century critics. Gina Luria's 1974 editions of three of Hamilton's works have not been followed up by further consideration.3 A few scholars writing on the popular novel have mentioned Hamilton in passing, and though most of these references accept the conservative designation, they also indicate the mixed messages she delivers. Linda C. Hunt, following the line of argument that divides writers into two opposing groups, sums up Hamilton's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers as an “antiphilosophic” novel, a riposte to Wollstonecraft and Hays following hard on the “anti-Jacobin reaction in England.” J. M. S. Tompkins, who includes Hamilton in her list of “anti-revolutionary” novelists, also speaks of her “humour” and “moderation,” as well as her dismay over the radical philosophies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft. Katharine Rogers summarizes one of Hamilton's books as “conservative but not benighted.”4 Claudia Johnson, while rejecting the Jacobin versus anti-Jacobin contrast as too simplistic, continues to apply the radical/conservative opposition to some writers, including Hamilton. Thus she ends her discussion of Memoirs of Modern Philosophers by incarcerating Hamilton in the conservative camp: “Conservative novelists, then, minimize the necessity for reflection. … Far from requiring the endorsement of our reason, the established forms of state and family save us where reason fails. Thus the plots of conservative fiction do not so much clarify or simplify moral problems as they deny that any exist.”5 On the other hand, Janet Todd boldly designates Hamilton as “the liberal novelist and poet.”6 How does Todd reach this conflicting reading of Hamilton?
The fact is that the liberal versus conservative yardstick—no more than the Jacobin/anti-Jacobin one—simply does not adequately measure women's politics. To place Hamilton on the liberal-conservative continuum, to judge her by these rules, is like trying a woman from one country by the laws of another. In the epigraph above, Hamilton quite neatly summarizes the distinctions we need to be making, the criteria we need to use. Her tone is genial, but her content calls for nothing less than a redefinition of political life. Men, Hamilton argues, are remote from daily reality. They generalize from “superficial knowledge,” and even that knowledge is deluded, based as it is on only one or two “assumed” habits. Men's knowledge, then, is both incomplete and wrong. What about women? Women have access to knowledge rarely available to men. Women's lives provide the “infinite variety which in reality exists,” together with “the minute circumstances by which that variety is formed.” But women seldom make use of their knowledge. This does not mean that Hamilton accepts a simple opposition between the sexes. Most men and women at the turn of the century led markedly different existences, and Hamilton is simply acknowledging this fact.7 Of course, Hamilton implies, if men spent more time “tête-a-tête” in houses they too could gain more accurate knowledge. Unfortunately, this opportunity for men rarely arises. Hence, neither men nor women truly understand human character—men, because they lack the opportunity, and women, because they are preoccupied.
On the other hand, “capable” women, women who observe—and generalize from their observations—will generalize more powerfully than men because they do so more truly. By writing these observations, Hamilton by implication excepts herself from the women who fail to generalize. She also explains why her generalizations do not conform to theories like Godwin's, male theories that are not rooted in the true complexities of life. Even Godwin admitted, “I am in principle a Republican, but in practice a Whig.”8 Hamilton takes this sort of disjunction as her starting point. The infinite variety of reality and the need minutely to know and sift that reality—this fact and this need establish what I have called Elizabeth Hamilton's domestic politics.
In this turn-of-the century complexity, Hamilton is one of the strongest and most outstanding voices, but she is not alone. As critics have begun to study more closely the other women writers who flourished during the 1790s and past the turn of the century, more nuanced readings of their work have emerged. Thus, for instance, Margaret Doody and others have unfolded the doubleness of Frances Burney's apparent conventionalism, and Mitzi Myers has linked the educational attitudes of the “conservative” Hannah More and the “radical” Mary Wollstonecraft, both of whom wished drastically to change women's lives. Olivia Smith in The Politics of Language, 1791-1819 notes that More's work cuts across the bifurcation between vulgar and conservative language that had been developed in grammatical texts of the period, and which was being contested between radicals and conservatives in the political arena. “Because Hannah More did not believe in widely current notions of vulgarity,” Smith writes, “she had exceptional freedom as a writer. Her Cheap Repository tracts contrast sharply with both conservative and radical literature in the simplicity of the language, the portrayal of the poor as individuals, the use of credible dialogue, and the particularized portrayal of various situations, including different trades.”9 Edgeworth and Hamilton seized equal freedoms.
Nancy Armstrong, in Desire and Domestic Fiction, has recently reassessed the aims and effects of writers who concentrate on domesticity. Armstrong points out that at the beginning of the nineteenth century “domestic fiction actively sought to disentangle the language of sexual relations from the language of politics and, in so doing, to introduce a new form of political power.”10 Before Austen, Armstrong mentions few specific writers, mostly male. The new form of political power she has defined gains more complexity and force when applied to women writers at the turn of the century. Indeed, when women writers are included, Armstrong's generalizations are simply inadequate to the complexity of the subject. Mitzi Myers has begun this work, showing how such writers as More, Sarah Trimmer, Wollstonecraft, and Edgeworth created “moral fantasies of benevolent female power achieved through usefulness, not love, visions of domestically grounded heroism as potent for radicals like Wollstonecraft as for Evangelicals like More.”11 Hamilton is one of the promulgators of “benevolent female power.” Armstrong's brief discussion of Hamilton's Letters Addressed to the Daughter of a Nobleman on the Formation of Religious and Moral Principle (1806) misconstrues Hamilton's qualities and intentions. Hamilton, Armstrong points out, takes a quite different tack from most conduct books. Hamilton argues with every weapon she can find against the presupposition that members of the nobility are necessarily corrupted by their wealth and position. “On the basis of her familiarity with people of nobility,” Armstrong says, “Mrs. Hamilton insists ‘that the consciousness of high descent, and elevated rank, and splendid fortune, does not necessarily give birth to pride; no, not even where, in addition to these advantages, nature has bestowed the most transcendent talents, and the charm of every personal attraction!’” Armstrong is fully aware of how exceptional Hamilton's argument is, but she quickly dismisses it as old-fashioned and simply wrong. In fact, Hamilton's argument is new; it is based on her assumption that if people recognize how deeply what we might call “hegemonic” attitudes have affected their lives, they can summon the will to change their condition. This will to change applies to all classes—upper as well as middling and lower. Perhaps Hamilton is being too idealistic, but she is not naive or old-fashioned. She is following her own advice as given in the epigraph analyzed above; she is generalizing from her particular experience. In addition, Armstrong goes on to say that conduct books do not celebrate labor: “They generally found women who worked for their living to be morally bankrupt too.”12 Thus Armstrong's generalizations simply exclude such writers as Edgeworth, More, and Hamilton, all of whom celebrated women who worked for a living. In Hamilton's case in particular, instead of recognizing her originality and her strength, Armstrong dismisses her as behind her times. Hamilton kept up with her times, and they were trying times.
Part of Hamilton's originality derived from her secure conviction that intellectually she was a man's equal. Though her aunt had warned her to conceal her intellectual abilities, prompting Hamilton to hide a volume of Lord Kames's Elements of Criticism under her chair cushion, the same aunt also encouraged her writing, and she remembered vividly at the age of fifty a “good old lady” (her aunt?) “who, on my showing what she thought an extraordinary proof of intellect, for my time of life, wisely endeavored to make me sensible that every species of talent was a gift, for which I was to be strictly accountable.”13
Though encouraged by a woman, Hamilton modeled her mind—as did Edgeworth—chiefly on a man's. In Hamilton's case the chosen mentor was perforce not her father, who died soon after her birth, but her brother Charles, nearly five years older than she. Charles was stationed for fourteen years in India. During this military stint he became a scholar of Indian history and literature, translating the Hedaya, one of the two chief commentaries on Moslem law. In correspondence with him, and in conversations with her uncle, Hamilton honed her mind as best she could. Though she later thought of her childhood as happy, she occasionally complained that she had been confined to a monastery of the intellect. When her brother returned from India, the intellectual stimulation had the effect, according to her memorialist Elizabeth O. Benger, of “ingrafting liberality and candour on her native stock of good sense and mental independence.”14 This double education meant that although in her works she always centered on a domestic setting—indeed she is the author of the poem “My ain Fireside”—her political template was never far to seek. For instance, in a chapter about a farmer's funeral, she used as a chapter heading, “The doctrine of Liberty and Equality stripped of all seditious import.”15
If her brother was her first mentor, Hamilton's closest friend was a woman and fellow writer, Elizabeth Benger, who saw to it that Hamilton had a proper literary memorial after her death: a two-volume composite of biography, autobiography, letters, and excerpted works. And while Hamilton leaned on her brother and from time to time on other male mentors, her chief interest and subject was women—their position, their education, their means to power.
Hamilton maintained in her depictions of domestic life an awareness that character is socially constructed. She considered, as she put it, the “circumstances which it suited not the dignity of history to record,” and by this she meant chiefly the domestic life.16 History, written by men, failed to include the kind of material women know about, failed to “be aware of that infinite variety which in reality exists.” Though unmarried, and hence in some ways less tied to domesticity than most women, Hamilton never suggested that women should assume any characteristics defined as male, but rather that women could effect extraordinary changes by wielding the power of their domestic accomplishments. What she admired most in her aunt was that no other woman she had known possessed “a mind at once so gentle and so strong.”17 These are the characteristics Hamilton attempted to mirror in herself.
Eighteenth-century Scotland delivered decidedly mixed messages to women. The common law was quite supportive of women, but the Kirk dealt fiercely with all sexual infractions. Both women and men could obtain divorces for a four-year desertion or for adultery and had been able to do so since the mid-seventeenth century. In England, by contrast, no divorce for a husband's adultery was granted before 1858. In Scotland, church discipline for sexual transgressions was severe, however, and women occasionally suffered considerable social pressure for relatively minor violations of the sexual code. On the other hand, the attitude of the Kirk toward fornication and adultery was so unwavering that men were less likely in Scotland than in England to desert seduced and pregnant women.18 Men and women were, on the whole, treated more nearly as equals in Scotland, and could even be educated together. Hamilton herself, Benger emphasizes, “had a playmate of the other sex, by whose example she was stimulated to feats of hardihood and enterprise, and, happy to escape restraint, she readily joined her companion in fording the burns in summer, or sliding over their frozen surface in winter.” This androgynous upbringing was reinforced by the fact that her aunt and uncle, who acted as her guardians, sent her from Monday to Saturday to Stirling to attend a mixed school whose director was a man. Her aunt insisted that she should value herself: “She wished me to be self-dependent; and, consequently, taught me to value myself upon nothing that did not strictly belong to myself, nor upon any thing that did, which was in its nature perishable.”19
Hamilton's self-confidence was also reinforced by her class background, which was mixed in such a way as to make her feel at home in all kinds of surroundings. Her autobiographical fragment tells us that her father's family was descended from old, distinguished Jacobite stock, ancestors forced by their religious beliefs into “employments that little corresponded with the high pretensions of their birth.”20 Her father, whom, of course, she never knew, had to leave the university and go into business when his father died. Her aunt had married a farmer—an intelligent and well educated farmer, but nonetheless a farmer, a “son of a peasant.” The decision had cost her quite a lot of soul-searching, but she had chosen well, and Hamilton idealized their marriage.21 When Hamilton's father died within a year of her birth, her mother eventually sent her youngest child to live with that aunt, and life in the isolated farmhouse sharpened the child's sensibilities to class distinctions. She was thus able to write about the laboring classes with somewhat less condescension—and more unmediated knowledge—than her contemporaries. As a result of these personal experiences, combined with the Scots' national tradition of woman's independence, Hamilton wrote with particular self-assurance.
Writing on the popular novel, J. M. S. Tompkins claims that Scotland “was behind England in assimilating the female author.”22 Nonetheless, drawing on sources of confidence that were not available to most women in Scotland, by the early 1800's Hamilton was recognized in Edinburgh as an important writer. She presided over weekly literary gatherings and was granted a government pension. Benger quotes from a letter she received from a friend of Hamilton after her death:
I first became acquainted with Mrs. Hamilton in 1804. A female literary character was even at that time a sort of phenomenon in Scotland. Even 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. … It was, therefore, most fortunate for the interests of her sex, that when an authoress did appear amongst us, she should be one whose kind heart and unpretending manners, should set the sneers of prejudice at defiance. Mrs. Hamilton was exactly that person. … Her house was the resort, not only of the intellectual, but of the gay and even of the fashionable; and her cheerfulness, good sense, and good humour, soon reconciled every one to the literary lady. So much were her morning levees crowded the first six months she passed in Edinburgh, that I remember her friend Mr. M'Neil told her, he really believed she had as many visitors as the Irish giant.
Benger herself mentions that part of Hamilton's personal appeal was her fund of anecdote, her ability to dramatize, and “the ardor and benevolence of her nature.” One of Hamilton's favorite authors was Burns, and what she admired in Burns reinforces Benger's description of her personality as a combination of sympathetic emotions, an active mind, and a maverick sense of humor. Hamilton felt for Burns perfect sympathy: “In his emotions there was a strength, an energy, that came home to my heart.” All of Hamilton's public qualities, Benger notes, were enhanced in private, with her “few select friends.”23
Hamilton's works are remarkable for their variety and originality of form and content. Her three works of fiction include a set of satiric citizen-of-the-world letters, a satiric rendering of the Godwin circle, and a tale about how a woman's domestic knowledge can transform a town. Hamilton rounded out her career by writing educational tracts for women and a biography of a woman.
In 1783, Hamilton admitted to her brother that she was not particularly conversant with politics: “to what a length am I running on a subject I hardly ever spoke upon in my life!” Her context was that her countrymen were themselves apolitical, more so than the Irish. In matters having to do with government, she wrote, the Scots “seem to adopt the maxim of Mr. Pope, that whatever is, is right.” Paola Bono uses Hamilton's statement as one of the epigraphs for her book on radicalism in Scotland, contrasting it with a 1792 quotation from the Caledonian Mercury that indicates a dramatic change in the political milieu since 1783. Radical clubs had sprung up all over the country—seventeen in Edinburgh and fifteen in Glasgow.24 Hamilton, too, had developed an increasing interest in politics. Indeed, her statement at the age of twenty-five that she had “hardly ever spoke” about politics was not even then strictly true. From the start, Hamilton was drawn to stories of women who attempted to grasp political power. As a girl, she wrote a biography of Arabella Stuart, whose pretentions to the English throne eventually resulted in imprisonment and insanity. As an adult she chose Agrippina, wife of Germanicus, who helped her husband to rule, although her desire for power was hampered by the social limitations on her sex. Throughout the biography of Agrippina, Hamilton introduced as a counterpoint the greater strengths and freedoms of Germanic women, and her admiring summary is worth quoting at length:
The observations Agrippina made led (or might have led) her to conclude, that the esteem and respect in which the German women were held by their male relations, was as much the cause as the consequence of their superior merit. Conscious of having a character to support, they were impelled by the most generous motives to the exercise of all the virtues on which their nation set the highest value. In war they accompanied their husbands to the field, and after the battle, it was on them that the care of the wounded entirely devolved. They were the only surgeons, and by their skill in the art of healing supported that character of superior wisdom, which they had imperceptibly acquired. How it came to be acquired will be easily accounted for, when we reflect, that in the intervals of peace, while the other sex were engaged in gaming, drinking, and quarreling, or in the indulgence of sloth, no less injurious to the mental powers, they were in their domestic avocations accustomed to the perpetual exercise of judgment. Hence, when questions of importance came to be discussed, they who were neither blinded by the fury of the passions nor the fumes of intoxication, had an evident advantage over their impassioned lords; and were frequently enabled by their sagacity and discernment to penetrate into the probable consequence of events, in a way that to minds incapable of reflection appeared almost extraordinary. The Germans had the good sense not to despise the judicious counsels of their female friends; but to rescue the pride of sex from the mortification of acknowledged inferiority, they ascribed the wisdom of which they availed themselves to the inspiration of the gods! Whether it was the old women only who were believed to be thus inspired, or whether illumination was particularly attributed to the young and beautiful, could not perhaps be easily ascertained; but neither in youth nor age did the German females disgrace the sacred character with which they were thus invested.25
This discussion of the way the German women moved from the private to the public sphere, carrying their knowledge with them, is archly rendered, embodying humorously the theory that women's knowledge is in many ways superior to men's, and that male activities are destructive both of reason and happiness. The underlying assumptions, however, are quite clear: that—as Hamilton argued in the passage which serves as my epigraph—women learn “in their domestic avocations” how to generalize, how to think about “questions of importance.” The German men accepted this domestic politics, though they miscalled it divine inspiration.
Hamilton's philosophical letters from a Hindu Rajah present women's ideal condition as being “free agents!”26 The exclamation point is the Rajah's—and hers. She did not, however, support the kind of freedom which would undermine women who were still struggling in an unsupportive social context. In Hamilton's novel Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) both the beautiful heroine Julia Delmond and the headstrong female philosopher Bridgetina Botherim believe in the idea of free love promulgated by the Godwin circle—and they are both shattered by the consequences of this belief. This mixture of radical and conservative is most fully realized in Hamilton's other novel, The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808). This novel is a work of fiction, but it is certainly not a romance or an anti-romance. The best way to designate it is as an enlarged Cheap Repository tract, a designation I will return to below. In this book the main character, Mrs. Mason, has taken upon herself what I have defined above as the politics of domesticity, here not operating in a separate sphere as in Nancy Armstrong's formulation, but set in a dialectical relationship. Unlike Agrippina and Arabella Stuart, whose efforts were thwarted, Mrs. Mason changes Glenburnie by convincing the cottagers to adopt the domestic virtues. She introduces ideals of cleanliness, economy, and education. These are not at this period either static concepts or even necessarily conservative ones.
Mrs. Mason is like her creator, a mixture of seemingly inconsistent characteristics, both gentle and strong, kindly and coercive. Though Hamilton confers her own personality on Mrs. Mason, she attributes this personality to even more distinctly humble origins, and except for her unmarried status and the fact of being orphaned at the age of nine, Mrs. Mason's biography differs markedly from the author's. Thus the Cottagers contains two stories: Mrs. Mason's childhood, and her life with and effect on the Cottagers at Glenburnie.
Mrs. Mason, who shares her name with the firm and energetic surrogate mother in Wollstonecraft's Original Stories, by definition is a person who builds houses out of rock, houses that will last. By adopting the name Mrs. Mason, Hamilton emphasizes how similar her theme is to Wollstonecraft's—that practical knowledge is the truest way to power, and that reason can root out faults. Indeed, in Hamilton's story, where the characters are lower on the social scale, practical knowledge is the only way to power.
Rock-like though Betty Mason is, her most important characteristic is that she recognizes the needs of others, that she takes care of others, just as, in Wollstonecraft's Original Stories, the chief virtue is “the joy of doing good.”27 When Betty Mason's mother was dying, she was already a servant in an aristocratic household, and she helped support her bedridden parent, knitting stockings and selling them, bringing things from the castle where she was helping out—and where her employers understood how sick her mother was. This could be cloyingly sentimental, but Hamilton carefully controls the material. When the people at the castle mention that they will take care of her when her mother dies, Hamilton emphasizes their crassness—the child did not know her mother was dying. She goes home and complains to her mother “of her having concealed from me that she was so very ill” (28). The mother is certainly long-suffering and the child to a modern mind extraordinarily dutiful, but Hamilton's presentation is rather matter-of-fact. Later, when a poor relation, an orphan, comes to live with the family, Mrs. Mason wonders why the new arrival is sad, since she owns a number of fine gowns and has no work to do. What Betty Mason finally learns is that “peace of mind, the only happiness to be had on earth, is distributed by Providence with an equal hand among all the various classes in society” (49). This argument—that class really makes no difference to moral or truly intellectual accomplishments—is pervasive in Hamilton. Her own upbringing in Stirlingshire had early inculcated this attitude. Hamilton's later recognition, through her brother's scholarship and her own, that Indian society and Germanic mores differed markedly from her local experience served to further this initial egalitarianism. Rigorously, Hamilton returned to the infinite variety of reality, and generalized from what she found there.
Wollstonecraft's Mrs. Mason is a widow who has raised her own children; Hamilton's character is “Mrs.” only by courtesy, and this unmarried and hence independent condition is one of her strengths.28 The power of an unmarried woman is central to The Cottagers of Glenburnie. Mrs. Mason never even considers marrying. Hamilton altogether avoids the romantic plot, never raising the possibility of a romantic life for her protagonist. As Hamilton foresaw of herself, Mrs. Mason is “one cheerful, pleased, old maid.”29 Independence is what Mrs. Mason wants and needs. In this society, total independence for a woman of any class is not easily available. Since Mrs. Mason is a single woman, she does need a haven of some sort, a place where she belongs. Eventually, when she manages to accumulate a tiny yearly income, the haven she chooses is a place where she can also be useful. She goes to live in Scotland with a cousin, Mrs. MacClarty, who is a cottager at Glenburnie. The idea is that her rent money will help support the family. Mrs. MacClarty is a decent and hardworking woman but she is not a good housekeeper. In her room Mrs. Mason finds just-plucked feathers in her pillow (the stink is overwhelming), insects in her bed, and windows so dirty they almost entirely shut out the light. The MacClartys throw their slops just outside the door, dry their dishes with “a long blackened rag” (146), and in addition have decided that the outside air is noxious. None of the windows can be opened: “she could not help wondering at the perverted ingenuity, which could contrive to give to the sleeping rooms of a country house, all the disadvantages which attend the airless abodes of poverty in the crowded lanes of great and populous cities” (192). Hamilton's cottagers speak the vernacular. And Hamilton reproduces this speech, not to put them down, but because she admires the vigor and flexibility of their language. It was partly because of the language that she loved the poems of Robert Burns. The MacClartys cannot manage their children any better than their house, owing to Mrs. MacClarty's philosophy that she “canna be fash'd,” she can't be bothered; it will “do weel enough.” Ultimately, this philosophy that “I canna be fash'd” is the family's undoing. Over their objections, their son Sandy goes to the fair, and is inveigled through drink into enlisting. Trying to find him, Mr. MacClarty is robbed, and he returns with a fever. Shut in one of the airless rooms, with neighbors crowded round, he suffers from the perverse theories of the town, which destroy health. Mrs. MacClarty is too proud to take Mrs. Mason's advice about fresh air and cool liquids, and Mr. MacClarty rather realistically dies.
The effect of this death, unlike the sufferings of the poor in Hannah More's tracts, is not simply to provide an opportunity for a benevolent donor generously to descend. Olivia Smith remarks that “More relentlessly demonstrates that the poor exist to be saved by the upper classes,” and that in More “the basic plot of a poor person saved by the chance arrival of a generous and wealthy man occurs over and over again.”30 Although Mrs. Mason cannot save Mr. MacClarty, and lacks the money to dispense the kind of pelf More's upper class characters provide, she effectively educates the other families in Glenburnie. She convinces them that if they direct their work more carefully, and pay more attention to the daily small tasks, their lives will improve. Thus among other things, the townspeople amend their economic condition. Their butter, for instance, since it is no longer full of cow's hairs, is more saleable. By expanding to a town the domestic virtues that govern a house, Hamilton creates a political philosophy which is the opposite of the patriarchal assumption that the best influences sift down from above. Hence she teaches the townspeople of Glenburnie to generalize from the infinite variety of daily life, and by generalizing to assume power.
As mentioned earlier, The Cottagers of Glenburnie might be read as an enlarged Cheap Repository tract. In fact Hamilton says in her introduction that she considered publishing the Cottagers as a Cheap Repository tract. Ultimately, Hamilton decided against this format, aimed only at the poor and uneducated, meant only for “the class of persons for whose use they were intended” (vi), because she wanted to reach the politician and the man “who thinks riches and happiness synonymous” (ix). This is an important distinction, once again less condescending than the assumptions in More's Cheap Repository tracts. “Alas!” More sighed to her journal, “I know with whom I have to deal, and I hope I may thus allure these thoughtless creatures on to higher things.”31 What More assumed in her writings, she also applied in practice. After helping Ann Yearsley, the milkmaid poet, to publish her works, More wanted to manage her money for her—an effort that Yearsley ungratefully resisted. Hamilton's introduction makes clear that she has much larger concerns than simply alluring the poor into better conduct. Hamilton's contemporaries noticed this distinction between her writings and More's. Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review judged that Hamilton's work contained much greater “merit and originality” than “Miss Hannah More's productions in the Cheap Repository.” Edgeworth claims that the Cottagers was “universally read in England and Ireland, as well as in Scotland,” because the faults it satirizes are not “represented as forming their established unchangeable character,” but arise from particular historical circumstances.32 Jeffrey thus notes and praises the most essential characteristic of Hamilton's domestic politics.
In the Cottagers Hamilton particularly objects to what she considers to be a widespread and dehumanizing view that one class exists simply to serve another, that “the great mass of the people are … as so many teeth in the wheels of a piece of machinery” (ix). She attacks especially the “war-contriving sage,” who simply ignores the feelings and moral capacities of his fellow citizens “at the time he coolly calculates how many of his countrymen may, without national inconvenience, be spared for slaughter!” (x). Earlier in her career, Hamilton had patriotically supported her brother's efforts in India. Evidently she changed her mind about war in general. Writing in 1808, Hamilton implies that she deplores the number of people in Scotland who were being inducted to fight the war with France, at that point raging in Spain and Portugal. Scotland was being stretched to the limit. For instance, for the year 1801 the estimates of citizens of the Scottish Highlands who had been recruited into the military range as high as twenty per cent of the total population.33 When in the Cottagers Mrs. MacClarty's son Sandy is “enticed … wi' drink” and “listet,” no one has any perception that the national honor is involved; he will be in the company of “loons and vaigabonds.” Sandy's family never think that he might be fighting for a just cause; they simply want him back home (214).
Some battles Hamilton does not choose to fight here. The cottagers whom Hamilton is writing about are not cottars—peasants on a nobleman's estate—they own their land. Her sole mention of the dependent relationship of cottars, some of whom still existed in Scotland, is at the beginning of the book when Mrs. Mason asks Lord Lintot's permission to live in the village on his estate where she has been raised as a servant. Lord Lintot refuses; in fact he tears down all the cottages and throws the cottagers out. Mrs. Mason makes no comment here; she simply states her humility in terms which oddly consort with the forcefulness of Hamilton's introduction. Mrs. Mason says, humbly, “but though I should have been thankful for his granting my request, I have no right to resent his refusing me” (112). Humility, for someone in Mrs. Mason's position in society, is evidently, according to Hamilton, absolutely necessary. Talking of her upbringing, Mrs. Mason says, “my advantages indeed were great. I had a good mother, who, when I was a little child, taught me to subdue my own proud spirit, and to be tractable and obedient” (24). Later, when Mrs. Mason is talking to Mr. MacClarty, she says that parents should not worry so much about teaching their children book-learning as teaching them to be “kind-hearted, tractable, and obedient” (188), and the point is that Mrs. Mason, though kindly, tractable, and obedient, is also very forceful in her way. Kind-hearted here takes the first place, and it is the supremely important virtue. Mrs. Mason says gently, “I would tenderly cherish every kindly affection,” and then she adds the element of coercion: “and enforce attention to the feelings of others” (188). This kind-heartedness is not taught by the upper classes to the lower classes, but by parents of any class—and by teachers to children. It is not merely patriarchal, since mothers teach it as well as fathers, and boys should learn it as well as girls. Members of the nobility can—or at least they could and should—learn it from cottagers.
Readers of The Cottagers of Glenburnie were and are immediately reminded of Edgeworth's Rosanna, published four years earlier in 1804. Edgeworth and Hamilton were good friends. In the article on Hamilton printed as her obituary in the Gentleman's Magazine, Edgeworth emphasizes how popular and influential the Cottagers was in Ireland.34 Both writers promoted women's benevolent power and domestic politics, but with a difference. Marilyn Butler argues that Edgeworth's radicalism was not essential to her personality. “By inclination,” Butler writes, Edgeworth “was the least controversial of Anglo-Irishwomen, and it was only through complex personal circumstances that she became the author of three progressive, at times even radical, studies of the Anglo-Irish in Ireland.”35 If inclination is not only psychologically determined, but also generated by circumstances, Edgeworth's comfortable childhood on her father's estate would have conditioned her more radical inclinations. At any rate, she was always aware that her own social conditioning was distinctly privileged. Edgeworth, even in her most progressive works, always includes the landlord as an influential character. Hamilton, on the other hand, personally experienced a plunge in status which freed her from the hierarchy Edgeworth both scorned and benefited from. Because of her own maverick childhood, Hamilton could with confidence marginalize the landlord. Similarly, Hamilton's more extensive experience enables her to present finer distinctions among the working classes. In Edgeworth's story of Rosanna's mill, where the Gray family succeeds through cleanliness and industry, the moral is that: “There are two sorts of content: one is connected with exertion, the other with habits of indolence; the first is a virtue, the second a vice.”36 In this case, Edgeworth retains the pervasive eighteenth-century habit of binary opposition, often reinforced by ingrained class distinctions. Hamilton avoids balance and antithesis. Some of the characters in the Cottagers are indolent, but indolence is not the point; Hamilton's Mrs. MacClarty works ineffectively, but she works hard. Hamilton is inculcating not merely behavior, but pragmatic education. Mrs. MacClarty is intelligent, but she has not applied her intelligence to her daily life; she “canna be fash'd,” but in fact she is always busy doing the wrong things. In a better-organized house, she would not have to work nearly so hard.
Edgeworth admires in Hamilton many of the qualities evident in her own best work: good humor and genial satire. She also admires Hamilton's forthrightness and her persistent intellectual bent. Marilyn Butler points out that Edgeworth invented the sociological novel. Before Edgeworth, “heroes and heroines are relatively free of their environment: they are individuals. After her, characters in fiction are increasingly dominated by their social and economic circumstances, and it is a short step to that mid-nineteenth-century fictional universe in which the heroes and heroines are commonly seen as society's prisoners.”37 The interaction of character and environment, both in fiction and in life, is Hamilton's central subject. Edgeworth admires most of all Hamilton's advice in the Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education,38 of which the Cottagers might be said to be a dramatic rendition. In this book on education, using her knowledge of Hindu practices and of Locke's association of ideas, Hamilton showed, in Edgeworth's words, “how the knowledge of metaphysicks can be made serviceable to the art of education.” The interaction of character and environment is Hamilton's subject, but she adds to this material the possibility that character can change environment, that those who are aware of their socially constructed personalities are freer to change their condition. In Letters on … Education Hamilton directs women to “reflect upon their own minds, and to observe what passes in the minds of their children.” This detailed psychological study of children, boys and girls alike, was in Edgeworth's opinion quite without precedent: “She has opened a new field of investigation to women—a field fitted to their domestic habits, to their duties as mothers, and to their business as preceptors of youth.”39 Edgeworth clearly respected Hamilton; her obituary is much more enthusiastic than even that encomiastic genre requires.
They did not always agree, however, and though in both women radical and conservative intermingled, Hamilton came by her radicalism more naturally. In the Letters on … Education, Hamilton carries on a running dialogue with Edgeworth, mostly arguing with the tenets of Edgeworth's Practical Education, always arguing for more intellectual freedom. For instance, Hamilton, unlike Edgeworth, contends that mothers must not cloister their children's minds; they must never cut out of books the passages that might puzzle or mislead their infants. They should face those difficulties, and mutually talk them out. Books written specifically for children, prettifying books, will merely pervert their young readers with portrayals of wealthy and inconsequential people. Fairy tales may create false impressions, but their replacements are worse. Children should not be fed pap of any sort: “It was not by means of pretty story-books, abridgments, and beauties of history, nor yet by scraps of poetry selected from the best authors, that a Lady Jane Gray or a Lady Anne Askew, attained those high accomplishments, and that intellectual energy, which has rendered them the admiration of succeeding ages.”40
The fact that Hamilton chooses these martyrs to admire (for efficient burning, Lady Anne Askew had to be tied with special care to the stake, since both legs were broken), in spite of her more pervasive admiration of domestic accomplishments, indicates the depth and complexity of her respect for women's moral power. Hamilton also stresses that boys and girls need to be treated equally, and that qualities too often reserved for one sex need to be inculcated in the other. Mothers need to teach their sons modesty, their daughters intellectual acumen.
Throughout this essay, I have been emphasizing Hamilton's more radical and original qualities. I began by saying that she was a mixed author, typical of her period, and here at the end I need to return to that definition. The review of the Hindoo Rajah in the Analytical Review, the periodical edited by Wollstonecraft's publisher, praised the book in spite of its attack on Godwin for its “judicious and sensible observations, on various subjects, especially on the female mind and manners,” while objecting to Hamilton's “fierce … zeal for Christianity,” which is indeed pervasive in her work.41 In Hamilton's last book, Hints Addressed to the Patrons and Directors of Schools,42 these attitudes are fully intermingled. The book is original in its insistence that teachers concentrate on the qualities of the child's own mind, expanding the child's knowledge by building on its interests. Religious zeal fiercely appears, however, in the appended questions, which are chiefly questions about God, and God's approval. The questions are intended to lead the child to active benevolence, to an understanding of others' needs and sufferings, but the road to benevolence is undeviatingly Christian.
The fact remains, nonetheless, that in her most influential work, The Cottagers of Glenburnie, and through the Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education, Hamilton is deliberately creating the kind of world that she hopes will eventually displace the insouciant, libertine men who inhabit her Memoirs of Modern Philosophers. The combination of Hamilton's mingled class background and her experience of the more supportive Scottish attitudes toward women—this combination freed Hamilton to explore in her fiction with a clarity and full self-knowledge exceptional for her time the subject that interested her most. This subject was domestic politics—how women could assume power without losing their moral stature, and how having assumed that power they could at first change a town, and perhaps eventually change society at large.
Notes
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Quoted in Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger, Memoirs of Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton, 2 vols. (London: Longman, etc., 1818), 1:251-52. This is one of a series of excerpts that appear to come mostly from Hamilton's papers.
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See Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1975); Gary Kelly, “Jane Austen and the English Novel of the 1790's” in Fetter'd or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670-1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1986), 285-306; Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1988).
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These works are: The Cottagers of Glenburnie, Letters Addressed to the Daughter of a Nobleman, and Memoirs of Modern Philosophers.
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Linda C. Hunt, “A Woman's Portion: Jane Austen and the Female Character,” in Schofield and Macheski, Fetter'd or Free?, 12. J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800 (Lincoln; University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 300-301, 319. Tompkins argues Hamilton shared the anti-Jacobin concern that Godwin's and Wollstonecraft's philosophy could be especially dangerous in the hands of an unscrupulous man. Katharine M. Rogers, Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), 240.
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Johnson, Jane Austen, 14. Later on, Johnson modifies this argument, observing that both Edgeworth and Hamilton “sneak moderately feminist suggestions” into their works by burlesquing a feminist character. “As a rhetorical device, the freakish feminist exemplifies the effort of sceptical novelists to subvert the anti-Jacobin novel from within, as it were, to use its own conventions against itself, to establish an alternative tradition by working within an existing one in a different way and to a different end” (21). Here, Johnson exactly hits the mark. I would question, however, her implication that Edgeworth and Hamilton were only half aware of what they were doing.
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Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660-1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 209; cf. 216. Many other women critics neglect Hamilton. She receives no mention in Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760-1830 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), or Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); in Dale Spender's Mothers of the Novel (London: Pandora, 1986), her three novels are listed, but she is mentioned only in passing as the creator of Bridgetina Botherim.
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Citing Hamilton's Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education, Janet Todd emphasizes that Hamilton and other women “thought public office highly improper for women.” Hamilton does argue against women in public life, primarily because she thinks women should not be taught, as men are, that public adulation is the most important aim in life. Sign of Angellica, 224; Elizabeth Hamilton, Letters, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (Bath; R. Cruttwell, 1802-1803), 1:253.
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To Lady Caroline Lamb in 1819, in Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780-1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 5.
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On Burney, see, chiefly: Margaret Doody, Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Kristina Straub, Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), and Julia Epstein, The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women's Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). Mitzi Myers, “Reform or Ruin: ‘A Revolution in Female Manners,’” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 11 (1982): 199-216. Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791-1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 92.
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Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 3.
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Mitzi Myers, “Hannah More's Tracts for the Times: Social Fiction and Female Ideology,” in Schofield and Macheski, Fetter'd or Free? 277.
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Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 78. Olivia Smith argues of the word “hegemonic” that although Antonio Gramsci's “application of this concept is relatively modern, by the 1790's radical writers began to study ideas about language in relation to poltical and social behaviour,” Politics of Language, x.
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Benger, Memoirs, 1:50, 249.
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Ibid., 1:108.
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Elizabeth Hamilton, The Cottagers of Glenburnie, A Tale for the Farmer's Ingle-nook (1808: reprint, New York: Garland, 1974), chap. 12: 248. Subsequent references are to this edition and will appear in parentheses in the text.
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Elizabeth Hamilton, Memoirs of the Life of Agrippina, the Wife of Germanicus, 3 vols. (London: G. and J. Robinson, 1804), introduction, xxxi.
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Benger, Memoirs, 1:42.
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Norah Smith, “Sexual mores and attitudes in Enlightenment Scotland,” in Paul-Gabriel Boucé, ed., Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), 50.
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Benger, Memoirs, 1:32-33, 43.
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Ibid., 1:18.
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Why Hamilton herself chose not to marry is not clear. The lack of a dowry and the need to take care of her uncle may have been sufficient barriers. Her brother invited her to India, suggesting that she might find a husband there. She replied that she would not be able to find the right sort of husband, that money was less important to her than “a similarity of disposition.” Benger also refers glancingly to a “vision,” a “happiness” which vanished, “happily without casting an invidious shade on her future existence.” Perhaps this was a romantic attachment of some sort. Benger's language is misty; it is also muddled, since she speaks of Hamilton's “practised pen,” and yet argues that she probably did not “aspire to literary fame” (Benger, 1:92-94). A nineteenth-century biographical article bemoans a failed romance, “such a shipwreck of her womanly hopes and eclipse of her womanly dreams as compasses the wreck of many a woman's nature,” but the evidence for this is slight. Sarah Tytler (pseud. for Henrietta Keddie) and J. L. Watson, The Songstresses of Scotland, 2 vols. (London: Strahan, 1871), 1:310-12.
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Tompkins, Popular Novel, 22.
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Benger, Memoirs, 1: 175-78; 2:2.
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Ibid., 1:89-90. Paola Bono, Radicals and Reformers in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland, an Annotated Checklist of Books, Pamphlets, and Documents Printed in Scotland 1775-1800 (Frankfurt: Verlag Peter Lang, 1989), 10.
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Hamilton, Agrippina, 1:272-74.
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Elizabeth Hamilton, Translation of the letters of a Hindoo Rajah, with a preliminary dissertation on the history of the Hindoos [1796] 2 vols. (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1819), 1:25.
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Mary Wollstonecraft, Original Stories (London: Joseph Johnson, 1788), 149.
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A Mrs. Mason also appears in a Cheap Repository tract, Domestic Contrasts; or, The Different Fortunes of Nancy and Lucy, Part 1 (London: Cheap Repository, n.d.). Although she advises Mrs. Carter on how to bring up her children, Goody Mason has no personal history at all; she is a disembodied neighborly voice, but like the other Masons she is building a house that will last. She wants Mrs. Carter to raise children who will help her in her old age.
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Benger, Memoirs, 1: 95. This is the last line of Hamilton's poem, “Anticipation,” which she wrote at the age of 25, in “anticipation” of being 55.
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Smith, Politics of Language, 93.
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Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, 3rd ed., ed. William Roberts, 3 vols. (1835), 2:427, in Smith, Politics of Language, 94.
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Francis Jeffrey, review in Edinburgh Review 12 (April-July 1808): 410. [Maria Edgeworth], “Character and Writings of Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton,” Gentleman's Magazine 86 (July-Dec. 1816): 623.
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T. M. Devine, “Social Responses to Agrarian ‘Improvement’: the Highland and Lowland Clearances in Scotland,” in Scottish Society 1500-1800, ed. R. A. Houston and I. D. Whyte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 161.
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[Edgeworth], “Character and Writings,” 623-24. Hamilton was 45 in 1803 when she met the 35-year-old Edgeworth “who was introduced to her at Edinburgh and with whom at the first interview she was pleased—at the second, charmed,—proceeding in regular gradation, through the progressive sentiments of cordiality, attachment, and affection. She was ever disposed, not only to recognise merit, but to love it; and it was often her generous boast, that women of talents, by their reciprocations of kindness and friendship, verified the fable of the nine sister muses” (Benger, Memoirs, 1:164). Unfortunately, the correspondence between Hamilton and Edgeworth has been lost. Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 220n.
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Butler, Edgeworth, 125.
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Maria Edgeworth, Tales and Novels, 18 vols. (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1932), 4:191.
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Butler, Edgeworth, 398.
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Edgeworth calls this book Letters on Female Education; but she must mean the 1801 Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education.
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Edgeworth, “Character and Writings,” 624.
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Hamilton, Letters on … Education, 2:260.
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In the Gina Luria Introduction, Cottagers, 7.
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The full title is: 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, 1815).
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Elizabeth Hamilton: Domestic Woman and National Reconstruction
Elizabeth Hamilton's Modern Philosophers and the Uncertainties of Satire