[In the following essay, Thaddeus suggests that the text of Memoirs of Modern Philosophers displays a “Ventriloquist/Dummy” satirical technique (as defined by Margaret Doody), which allows it to subversively illustrate and support Godwinian philosophy while pointing out its potential abuses and limitations.]

Elizabeth Hamilton's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) was a book too intelligent for its audience. Satire requires especially proficient readers, but this need for a canny audience—especially at certain historical moments—breeds paradoxical effects. Some of the best readers deliberately reconfigure the text, ignoring whatever might hurt or change them. Satire, wrote Jonathan Swift in A Tale of a Tub, “'Tis but a Ball bandied to and fro, and every Man carries a Racket about Him to strike it from himself among the rest of the Company” (31), or, to change the metaphor, satire is a mirror in which a reader sees everyone but himself. Hence, when Hamilton anonymously published her second satire, she knew that she was returning to the most multifarious medium, but also the most uncertain.

THE UNCERTAIN MEDIUM

Many books are misunderstood, but in the 1790s, dominated by anti-Jacobin sentiment, misreadings of complex arguments were even more likely than they are at other times. In a century and a decade addicted to binary oppositions, the radical-conservative spectrum was often viewed as simple antithesis. Hence, the review of Modern Philosophers that appeared in the Monthly Mirror soon after it was published saw it as mere aggression. “This is an attempt to expose the absurdities of the modern school of philosophy, by shewing the effect of its precepts upon the conduct of its teachers and disciples,” the reviewer begins, reducing the novel to its simplest terms; and then, never considering Hamilton's myriad interlocking plots, concludes: “The monster [meaning William Godwin] has already received his death-wound, but the author of these Memoirs seems anxious to ‘make assurance double sure,’ by a repetition of the blow; although, therefore, he has had no hand in the victory, he arrives time enough [sic] to participate in the honours of the triumph” (34). This anonymous review is—not surprisingly, considering the political climate—reductive and unfair; it reads Hamilton's novel so prejudicially that it fails to note any of the complexity of her undertaking, the intricacy of her thought. In a period when simplistic political readings are ascendant, a satiric text often suffers this fate. Earlier in the century, for example, the unmodulated irony of Daniel Defoe's The Shortest Way with Dissenters was so egregiously misunderstood that his intended allies threw him in jail. Reviewers are of course even at the best of times notoriously unfair, but it is the particular variety of misreading we must consider here, the sort of misreading generated by a sense of political crisis, and the desire to quell opposition. A reader bent on seeing his own face in the glass would certainly in Hamilton's novel miss most of the content. Luckily, there are readers as well as reviewers, and though all readers may not read intelligently, they sometimes read differently. Although the Monthly Mirror reviewer thought Hamilton was flogging a dead horse, the public did not. The public was politically more mobile. Her novel raced through three editions and was translated into French. This work was without doubt extremely popular, and, as I have shown in a previous article on Hamilton's domestic politics, its author was regarded with respect as an influential thinker in Edinburgh's intellectual circles. Indeed, Modern Philosophers is a skillful, multilayered, and important novel, written at the end of a decade that is one of the watersheds of British history and literature.

To capture the inattentive or resisting reader, the satirist often includes a list of beliefs that are to be interpreted directly, telling the truth and for once not telling it slant. Thus Swift suddenly intervenes in “A Modest Proposal” with the signalizing statement: “Therefore, let no man talk to me of other Expedients” (116), and he lists ten suggestions, some of which could quite naturally appear in a parliamentary debate. In most of his works, Swift maintains a persistent irony, and this is often the satiric technique adopted by eighteenth-century satirists. Fielding's Jonathan Wild, for instance, is particularly unremitting. Hamilton has drawn, rather, on the tradition of “satura,” as defined as “Lanx Saturae,” the plate of varied fruits offered to the Gods, or “farcimen,” the mixed sausage to be digested by those attending the feast. Whether or not Hamilton was directly aware of this traditional definition, first methodically outlined by Diomedes in the fourth century, and carefully limned by Charles Knight in a recent article (139-42), it is certainly one of the important strands of satiric discourse, essential to the work of Rabelais, for example, or Swift's Tale of a Tub. Hamilton chose the most miscellaneous definition of satire. Ostensibly defining her book as Horatian, she takes as her epigraph “Ridiculum acri / Fortius et melius magnas plerumque secat res,” translated as “Ridicule shall frequently prevail, / And cut the knot, when graver reasons fail.” Further, she took the unusual step of mingling irony, parody, romance, and realistic narrative within one set of covers, letting each ricochet against the others. Her conscious manipulation of these genres is adept and fascinating. Her subtext, the unconscious elements, is equally intriguing. When like Swift she speaks of other expedients, chiefly a heterodox, portmanteau Christianity, her unmarried characters' independence persistently denies the humility and obedience her Christian doctrine invokes. Although Hamilton's novel was extremely popular and influential in its own day, and has been reprinted in ours, few readers have been shrewd enough or patient enough to listen to all of these voices or taste all of these fruits.

Indeed, there has been a tendency willfully to ignore a large segment of Hamilton's novel. The review in the Monthly Mirror is only a paragraph; the fourteen-page discussion in the Anti-Jacobin Review is of course much more detailed, but obviously this magazine, founded in 1797 as a government mouthpiece, is interested only in the attack on Godwin, and not in the rest of the novel. Of the many other characters in Modern Philosophers, then, the Anti-Jacobin Review says: “Among the rest of the characters all due poetical justice is distributed; but as they are not immediately concerned in the main design of the work, they necessarily excite not that interest which is produced by the philosophical portraits” (375). The Anti-Jacobin Review whets readers' appetites, defining this fiction chiefly as a roman à clef and then coyly refusing to provide the key: “[W]e shall leave it to each to discover his, or her own face, in the glass” (375). In the half of the novel ignored by the Anti-Jacobin, Hamilton includes a multiplicity of voices, some to be heard straight, some to be heard slant, with a number of modulations in between.

This is not satire that deconstructs itself entirely, consigning us ultimately to what Swift in A Tale of a Tub called “The Serene Peaceful State of being a Fool among Knaves” (110). Revolution is denied: Hamilton is liberal, but she does not wish to be radical. One conservative solution is a beneficent patriarchal government, but this would require politicians who were capable of imagining people's needs, which, as Hamilton knows, politicians do not understand. One of Hamilton's characters, for instance, argues that aristocrats, people with money and position, cannot clearly see how lesser people live: “[I]t is the peculiar misfortune of those who move in a certain sphere, to have their worst propensities so flattered as to render it almost impossible for them to escape the snare of self delusion. The possessors of rank and fortune are every one surrounded by a sort of atmosphere of their own, which not only distorts and obstructs the view of external objects, but which renders it difficult for them to penetrate the motives of their own hearts” (2: 303-4).

To change them was Hamilton's later project. She wished to work within the system, to re-educate the minds and hearts of those with rank and fortune, and to this end she published Letters on The Elementary Principles of Education in 1801 and Letters Addressed to the Daughter of a Nobleman on the Formation of Religious and Moral Principle in 1806. In 1808, she changed her tactic somewhat by publishing The Cottagers of Glenburnie, a novel about independent cottagers, suggesting ways in which they could make their labor profitable. Still, even in the case of this novel, Hamilton wanted those of rank and fortune to read it, to emphasize to them that they have no right to think that “the great mass of the people are … as so many teeth in the wheels of a piece of machinery” (ix). She continued writing treatises on education, each time directing her remarks at a slightly different audience, convinced as was Godwin that people can be molded.

To separate all of the voices in Hamilton's Modern Philosophers, to read it adequately, three contemporary critical concepts are the most helpful: discourse and heteroglossia, as defined by Michel Foucault and Mikhail Bakhtin, and ventriloquism, as applied by Margaret Doody to eighteenth-century poetry. Foucault and Bakhtin's terms are as familiar as they are useful, and do not require definition here. Doody's term is less well known, and demands some exegesis. Ventriloquism is important in this case, because Bakhtin's double-voiced discourse becomes, in ventriloquism, a conversation, and this sort of conversation appears in Hamilton. According to Doody, in this technique “the voice of the ‘real’ speaker (speaking for the poet, and his audience) is momentarily cast into the personification of the Opposite or Other; a dummy or puppet-speaker is given a strange voice. When the poet wishes, the whole piece can be carried on as a kind of dialogue between a ventriloquist's dummy and the ventriloquist as personal speaker” (44). Occasionally, Doody continues, “even mixed characters who are not enemies are treated rather as if they were, and we know that it is part of our job as readers … to catch the style out, to shoot the folly as it flies and recognize the source of the ventriloquy—even when we're not quite sure where exactly the ventriloquist would stand if he became personal speaker” (45). What Doody has noted in poetry also applies to the gallimaufry of voices and styles that constitute Modern Philosophers.

The parodic plot has captured the most attention in criticism of Modern Philosophers, both in contemporary and modern studies, and a canny reader must begin there, but unlike the Anti-Jacobin Review, must not stop there. What happens in Modern Philosophers is that the parodic figures and the “realistic” figures share philosophies that at first appear to oppose one another, and that ultimately the women seem to be the most effective philosophers. The author, who at first glance appears to be conservative, becomes in the discursive interchange a liberal, if not a radical, presence.

BACKGROUNDS: PUBLICATIONS, ATTITUDES, AND CRITICAL RESPONSES

The debate Hamilton was joining in 1800, the debate the Monthly Mirror defines as finished, was a particularly vicious and widespread attack on Godwin's An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Since the first two editions of Modern Philosophers were anonymous, and the putative author was male, reviewers did not realize that they were dealing once more with the writer who had been one of the first to attack Godwin, in her good-humored Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796). Hence, the statement that she “had no hand in the victory” (Monthly Mirror 34) was disingenuous. Her hand was there right from the start. Illness had hindered the writing of Modern Philosophers, and Hamilton herself realized that she was entering the lists rather later than she wanted to, after a crowd of other works on the subject, but, she said in the preface to the third edition, to which she added her name as author, “she did not find her own ideas so much anticipated by any of them, as to induce her to suppress the present work, or even to make the smallest alteration in its contents” (1: vi). The Monthly Mirror and the Anti-Jacobin Review stressed the resemblance between Hamilton and her contemporaries. Hamilton focused on the differences. Her book not only sold, but also raised her reputation in knowledgeable circles. After she moved to Edinburgh in 1804, according to Hamilton's friend and biographer Elizabeth O. Benger, she became an intellectual force, and her “private levee was attended by the most brilliant persons in Edinburgh, and commonly protracted till a late hour” (1: 174).

Hamilton knew what it was like to be a dependent, and it was this memory and this knowledge which drove her to sympathize with other classes and other lives. At the age of nine, Hamilton had been sent by her widowed mother to live with her aunt, and her aunt lived humbly, married to the “son of a peasant” (1: 20). Hamilton's family had had pretensions, and it was only with difficulty that her aunt, Mrs. Marshall, had reached the “true Christian humility” (1: 19) that allowed her to accept her position. She learned at last to ignore “the mortifications to which she was … exposed” (1: 18). Her husband, Mr. Marshall, had, however, “received the advantage of an education superior to his birth” (1: 20), so that Hamilton and her aunt suffered social but not intellectual deracination. For Hamilton, as I have argued elsewhere, this childhood meant that she understood poverty and deprivation with an awareness beyond benevolent condescension, a kind of intimate knowledge she never lost.

Hamilton's first attack on Godwin was light-hearted and not very clearly thought through. Along the lines of Oliver Goldsmith's Citizen of the World and Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes, the Hindoo Rajah was a playful satiric rendering of the opinions of Seeta Juin Zåårmilla, who writes to his friend Kisheen Neêay Mååndååra and receives a few replies. At this period, Hamilton was heavily influenced by her brother, who had died four years before. He had spent fourteen years in India, and through his letters he had provided his sister with what Benger calls “a second education” (1: 47). Hamilton admired her brother perhaps more than anyone else she was ever to meet, and the Hindoo Rajah was in some ways a memorial to him.

Her political views in this book, as Isobel Grundy and Susan Taylor have pointed out, squarely (and unsurprisingly) support the imperialist project. The satire of the philosophers has been generally designated as “conservative.” Zåårmilla meets not just one philosopher, but a whole passel of them, including Mr. Puzzledorf, Mr. Axiom, Dr. Sceptick, Mr. Vapour, and Miss Ardent. The Rajah discovers that “to involve the simplest question in perplexity, and to veil the plain dictates of common sense, in the thick mist of obscurity and doubt, is an easy matter with metaphysical Philosophers” (2: 165). Zåårmilla tells us that Mr. Vapour thinks “the age of reason … to be very near at hand. Nothing, he says, is so easy as to bring it about immediately” (2: 184). The Rajah is skeptical of this “credulous philosopher” (2: 184), and so are we. Miss Ardent, unlike Mr. Vapour, believes that in the age of reason women will be valued for their minds, rather than their youth and their beauty. Peter Marshall and a number of other critics see Miss Ardent as ironically presented; her mind is masculine and her manner aggressive (214). Still, regarding women's minds, this ventriloquist's dummy has certainly here expressed an opinion Hamilton would later agree with. She has also educated a very sensible girl, Olivia, who knows how to respond to emergencies. Zåårmilla does not like Miss Ardent, and he thinks it is foolish that she “pants” for the era when men will be attracted to older women for the qualities of their minds, rather than younger women for their beauty, but Zåårmilla is not merely the author's puppet (1: 188). The contradictions spar with one another. The male philosophers clearly represent Godwin, with his imitators and followers gathered round, while Miss Ardent seems more generalized as the aggressive, masculine woman. She makes a number of extremely sensible remarks, and if she represents Wollstonecraft, the portrait is not undermining. Although its feminism is remarkable, there is no evidence that Hamilton intended this book to be taken very seriously.

Godwin's treatise, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, had come out three years before the publication of Hamilton's Hindoo Rajah. In the charged radical atmosphere of 1793, Godwin's anarchist book had been a stirring tonic. Hazlitt in The Spirit of the Age described its popularity: “No work in our time gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the country as the celebrated Enquiry concerning Political Justice. Tom Paine was considered for the time as a Tom Fool to him; Paley an old woman; Edmund Burke a flashy sophist. Truth, moral truth, it was supposed, had here taken up its abode. … ‘Throw aside your books of chemistry,’ said Wordsworth to a young man, a student in the Temple, ‘and read Godwin on Necessity’” (33). Godwin's arguments were bold and particularly flattering to strong minds. He claimed that mankind's perfectible nature is inhibited by social and political institutions, and that marriage, government, even the mutual obligations of parenthood and childhood—indeed even gluttony and lust—would appropriately wither away in a free, truthful, and democratic world.

This was an important debate about ideas that had briefly fascinated myriad liberal as well as radical thinkers, both men and women. Hazlitt claimed that Godwin “carried with him all the most sanguine and fearless understandings of the time” (37). In spite of the three-guinea price Political Justice was widely read. An anonymous contemporary wrote that “in many places, perhaps some hundred, in England and Scotland, copies were bought by subscription, and read aloud in meetings of the subscribers” (Allen 57n. 2). However, the clamor of support was soon overwhelmed by a horde of attackers. Besides Hamilton's own characterization of Godwin and Mary Hays in the Hindoo Rajah, there were at least a score of others. For example, in Isaac D'Israeli's Vaurien; or, Sketches of the Times (1797), Godwin is Mr. Subtile, Holcroft perhaps Mr. Reverberator, and Thelwall Mr. Rant Subtile: “coldest-blooded metaphysician of the age” (Marshall 214). In 1798, John Ferriar satirized Godwin in a Lucianic Dialogue in the Shades. This was followed in the next year by Sophia King's passionate fiction, Waldorf; or The Dangers of Philosophy, showing how women could be undermined by sweet-talking theory; Jane West's similar tale of seduction and death, Tale of the Times; and George Walker's The Vagabond, where Godwin is Stupeo, and, as in Hamilton, Godwin's actual text is often quoted and misinterpreted. For a new twist, in 1800 Mary Anne Burges used a Bunyan imitation as a vehicle for an attack on Godwin, including characters called Mr. Hate-Controul, Mr. False-Reasoning, Mr. Credulity, Mr. Philosophy, Mr. Mental-Energy, and Mrs. Sensibility. Hence, by 1800, according to the Monthly Mirror, Hamilton was supposed to be hooting over an issue already written to death.

From our greater hindsight, we should not read Hamilton's Modern Philosophers as narrowly as did the Monthly Mirror or the Anti-Jacobin Review. The Jacobins, after all, were associated with a revolution clearly gone bloody, and many besides benighted conservatives feared the specter of the guillotine in their city squares. The weight of current, twentieth-century discussion of the period is moving toward a more nuanced reading of the works once easily docketed as antirevolutionary. Hamilton has not always been included, although J. M. S. Tompkins long ago—and more recently Katharine Rogers and Janet Todd (among others)—noted her liberal tendencies.

On the other hand, Claudia Johnson, most notably, sees Hamilton as sweepingly conservative. Johnson, in spite of her subtle rendering of Austen's politics, still presents Hamilton's Modern Philosophers under the rubric of “Conservative novelists” who “minimize the necessity for reflection” (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; her earlier effort to generalize through binary contrast does not truly reflect the complexity of her reading. I would question, however, her implication that Edgeworth and Hamilton were only half aware of what they were doing. The one full-length article on Modern Philosophers, by Eleanor Ty, argues that Hamilton, and many other women writers in the 1790s, “learned to circumvent criticism by employing more indirect means of examining the legitimacy of masculine authority” (114). Ty further argues that Hamilton often “inadvertently” supported Godwin—and Mary Hays—even as she undermined them, chiefly by including their own words as part of her parody and not wholly denying them.

I disagree with all three of these critics. Hamilton's Modern Philosophers is full of reflection and rarely inadvertent. Her liberalism is not so much a reaction to Godwin as indigenous: her childhood had sensitized her. One of her favorite poets and the source of many of her epigraphs was Robert Burns, and she shared many of his experiences and preoccupations. Hamilton is one of the most self-analytical authors I have discovered in the eighteenth century, and though the object of her analysis is mainly women, their social construction, and their proper response to it, she does not neglect politics and class, or the interrelations among these elements. Her one blind spot is race.

So far as I can tell, Hamilton never really questions the imperialist project from the point of view of the native peoples. In Modern Philosophers, when the tragic heroine's father Captain Delmond in order to support his family goes to fight in Africa, the native peoples are never mentioned—only the fact that Delmond's health is ruined by the climate. Hamilton does not defend imperialism here; there is no statement countervailing Delmond's loss of health with a reference to the justness of his cause. But she never undermines imperialism, never directly attacks it. The foolish philosophers in Modern Philosophers intend to migrate to Africa and live with the Hottentots, whom they picture as an ideal race, a people who avoid marriage, and who live free. Hamilton implies that the misguided philosophers have not informed themselves about the destructive climate, but she never gives the Hottentots a voice of their own, and their idealization is ironically presented. The philosophers simply describe them, and no realistic ventriloquist's voice enters the conversation. It is clear that their idealization is misplaced; the Hottentots are merely a metaphor for noble savages, not a realistically presented alternative to British life. Nor do they ever obtain a voice sufficient to subvert the author's presentation of them. Hamilton's stereotypical Africa may be in part simply the product of her own ignorance; it is not clear how much she knew about Africa. She was certainly familiar with India. She had studied, through her brother's researches, Hindu beliefs and practices, but her brother was never critical of his own enterprise, and she remained loyal to him. Although regarding her own country her subversive faculties were very well developed, she inflexibly assumed throughout her career that although Englishmen will invariably lose their health in far tropic places, they are without doubt helping to civilize the people they find there. Suppressed native peoples, however, are the only notable absence from her liberal chorus.

VENTRILOQUISM: THE AUTHOR

To discuss ventriloquism, one must begin with the ventriloquist, and in Modern Philosophers Hamilton veiled the author in many layers. As described by Benger, Hamilton herself was a very proper woman, always practicing “that delicacy which was her peculiar characteristic” (1: 128). Benger ascribes the anonymity of Modern Philosophers to “female diffidence” (1: 131). The forceful expressions that appear in all of Hamilton's works seem to belie or at any rate to mitigate this description, although one will never find in Hamilton what Donna Landry calls in Mary Wollstonecraft “the discourse of sexual pleasure” (269). In fact, one of Hamilton's messages appears to be that women who avoid sexual pleasure, even those who avoid marriage, are in a much stronger and ultimately more pleasurable position than their married counterparts. Hamilton was, in her own poetic summary written at the age of twenty-five to foreshadow herself at fifty-five, “one cheerful, pleased, old maid” (Benger 1: 95). She also, in Scots dialect, wrote a poem confronting old age (“Is that Auld Age that's tirling at the pin?”) and was the first to celebrate in poetry the joys of her own single hearth: “My ain fireside, my ain fireside, / O cheery's the blink o' my ain fireside” (Keddie 322, 327). She was certainly less aggressive toward men than Mary Astell, but like Astell one of her most persistent ideals was the unmarried intellectual woman who was every man's equal and was cheerful as well as pleased. In keeping with her view that sexuality should be controlled, she regretted that Burns had “sunk into vice” (Benger 2: 3), but blamed his failures on his lack of an independent position. She and Burns shared a sense of humor, strong feelings, and a satiric twist of mind: “Even the strong light in which he saw the ridiculous, was, I fear, too agreeable to me” (Benger 2: 3). Hence it was clearly for more complicated motives than Benger ascribes to her that Hamilton adopted a male persona for Modern Philosophers. The veil was useful as well as protective. Speaking of Scottish society in the 1820s, Henry Mackenzie, who had printed Hamilton's earliest publications in his periodical the Lounger, could describe women authors in his Anecdotes and Egotisms as “ladies, most of whom are known or shrewdly guessed at; but, like the beauties of Spain, come out veiled” (in Murdoch and Sher 133). For the purposes of Hamilton's novel, a male dummy-voice could condescendingly address sentimental readers as “the dear boarding-school angels” (2: 169) in a way Hamilton would never choose to do in her own voice. That voice could also ironically imagine the philosophers weighing or measuring tears without implicating Hamilton herself, as author. Thus Hamilton can continue to sympathize with the people who really cry. A male voice can presume to be above gender, superior to the “kind reader, of whatever age or gender thou mayest haply chance to be” (2: 216). Hamilton has not, then, chosen the Fielding puppet-voice, but rather the ventriloquist's dummy, who can assume a discourse quite different from the author's, though occasionally reassuming the author's voice. The message here is that the reader of “whatever” gender should question always whether or not he or she has understood the motives of another person. Hamilton herself is nearly always aware of “the other” and conjures her readers to be equally aware.

Hamilton's putative author, besides being male, is rendered completely anonymous and thrust into critical controversy. His character and history are quite obliterated. An anonymous lodger in an unnamed inn, he has rather decorously died, bequeathing his manuscript to the landlady to pay his bill. The landlady has judged the manuscript worthless and has already burned the first fifty pages. Another lodger hears about the manuscript, admires it, and sends it to a group of critics, both male and female, who disagree profoundly about its merits. At last, “a gentleman of great worth and knowledge” (1: xiii) named Geoffry Jarvis argues for publication, confidently claiming “that in publishing this work, you will deserve the thanks of society” (1: xvi). This passel of mixed opinion immediately unsettles us. The ventriloquist is anonymous; the dummy is not even the author, but a critic, and yet of course the author controls the dummy. As Donna Landry invokes this ventriloquist technique first outlined by Doody, the emphasis is on the “subversive twist,” where the dummy independently begins “to challenge the master by altering the master's texts” (6). Hamilton's text often requires to be read against the grain, but one must begin by analyzing her intentions in the ventriloquist segments. As ventriloquist, she speaks through double voices; the characters are not her own dummies, but another's. In the introduction, this extra author is critic Geoffry Jarvis; in the text the dead male lodger occasionally comments; other voices erupt into the text through the parodic renderings of Godwin's and Mary Hays's words. In addition, the reader cannot ignore the characters whom the Anti-Jacobin Review dismissed as those “not immediately concerned in the main design of the work” (375). Many of these apparently secondary characters speak in various ways for the author. As much as the more apparently philosophical characters, they reflect her philosophy, and Godwin's. To understand this book, a reader must first listen to all of the ventriloquist's dummies—the romantic dummies, the anarchist dummies, the ironically undermined dummies, the dummies of each gender and every persuasion. Sometimes the ventriloquist is in full control; occasionally the dummy unsettles the text.

In the Introduction to the first edition of Modern Philosophers Geoffry Jarvis, the critic who recommends the publication of the newly discovered manuscript, says about Political Justice that the lodger-author does not mean to “pass an indiscriminate censure on that ingenious, and in many parts admirable, performance; but to expose the dangerous tendency of those parts of his theory which might, by a bad man, be converted into an engine of mischief, and be made the means of ensnaring innocence and virtue” (1: xiv). Hence, right at the beginning, Hamilton the ventriloquist-author has said through one of her dummies that she is attacking only abuses of Godwin's ideas—not the ideas themselves—adding that those ideas are in part, admirable. This is hardly inadvertent. Is it ironic? Is Hamilton the author differing from Jarvis, her dummy-critic? As I hope to show, there is enough evidence within the novel to prove that here at the beginning the ventriloquist has sufficient control over this particular dummy.

The anonymous author occasionally abandons his humorous condescension and attacks an offending institution with blistering accuracy, and, at points like these, Hamilton drops the ventriloquist's stance and speaks out as ironic manipulator. The best example of this kind of attack is a segment on war. Here, we must turn to Bakhtin, applying through italics the technique he uses in analyzing Dickens, to discover the “hybrid construction” of the heteroglossia in the prose (304). In the Index to the fifth volume of the Anti-Jacobin Review, Godwin is condemned for “common-place cant against war in general,” and even the most casual reader of Godwin will agree that he does not support the idea of war, which in his perfect society will no longer exist. Hamilton may in some instances be anti-Godwin, but she is also certainly antiwar. Consider, for instance, this statement from Memoirs of Modern Philosophers:

The two nations then at war, having at length sacrificed such a quantity of human blood, and expended such a portion of treasure, as was deemed sufficient for the amusement of the governing powers on either side, thought proper to make a peace; and after a few preliminaries, in which the original cause of dispute was not once mentioned, and things were put as nearly as possible into the same state in which they were at the commencement of hostilities, its ratification was formally announced.

The wretched remains of those numerous armies which in the beginning of the contest had marched forth, elate with health and vigour, were now returned to their respective countries; some to languish out their lives in hospitals, in the agony of wounds that were pronounced incurable; some to a wretched dependance [sic] on the bounty of their families, or the alms of strangers; and the few whose good fortune it was to escape unhurt, according to the seniority of their regiments, either disbanded to spread habits of idleness and profligacy among their fellow-citizens, or sent into country quarters to be fattened for fields of future glory.

(1: 119-20)

Here, Hamilton has juxtaposed the discourse of battle and the language of ironic subversion. We can see in the first paragraph especially how deftly Hamilton subverts the official language, how few words she needs. The renegade language draws a number of motives and assumptions into the political dialogue here. The rulers are distant, unnoticing—and hence amused. They know the uses of silence and omission. And under them nothing changes. Their “wretched” employees endure bodily pain, poverty, or a descent into vice. We should pause over the word “wretched,” which later in the Godwinian parody is misapplied to proud and hard-working laborers. There, the word is seen by the laborers as an insult, but here it is accurate. These are the wretched crew who people Burns's rousing anarchist cantata The Jolly Beggars. Here, as there, they have not been treated by their employers as human beings. Swelling to epic alliteration, the prose indicates that only the lucky few will be “fattened for fields of future glory,” with the implication that their leaders will finally devour these men who have been degraded into animals. Surely the Anti-Jacobin reviewer could have accused Hamilton as well as Godwin of “common cant against war.”

After Modern Philosophers, Hamilton's antiwar stance actually increased in intensity. In the Cottagers of Glenburnie, published in 1808, Hamilton 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).

DOUBLE DISCOURSE: PARODY AND TRAGEDY

Within the novel itself, we must first consider the main plot, which is a sentimental story of the tragic destruction of Julia Delmond. Interinvolved with that plot is the parodic presence of a group of Godwinian philosophers, and it is this presence which reviewers then and now have mainly dwelt upon, and which is the chief element by which Modern Philosophers takes its place in a discussion of satire. These fictional characters are, however, not alone. They inhabit a more realistically presented world filled with people who in various ways speak and represent Godwinian ideas.

In form, Hamilton's novel is a parody of the romantic marriage plot. Her quadruple heroines are Bridgetina Botherim whom she names as “the ostensible heroine of these Memoirs” (3: 332), Harriet and Maria Orwell, and Julia Delmond. Harriet and Maria are realistic figures and as is proper in a romantic plot, they both marry at the end. Bridgetina is a farcical Godwinian extremist: her fate is to become ordinary, but, because she is ugly, to remain unmarried. Julia is romantic and idealistic, hence doomed of course to tragedy. Both Harriet and Bridgetina are in love with Henry Sydney, a doctor, a triangle that is responsible for a number of comic misunderstandings. Bridgetina, in this roman à clef, is a portrait of Mary Hays, and in some ways a cruel portrait. Mary Hays, author of The Memoirs of Emma Courtney, was evidently not tall, but Bridgetina is so short as to be dwarf-like, and she squints so badly that she cannot quite look at the person she intends to talk to and often engages the wrong person in conversation. For these unfortunate characteristics, sympathetic characters are drawn to her, though of course unthinking people and nasty people make fun of her. It is difficult for the reader to like Bridgetina, however, in spite of the physical defects she can have no control over. She frequently draws “up her long craggy neck so as to put the shrivelled parchment-like skin which covered it upon the full stretch,” and in this rooster-posture is likely to intone, “Beauty … is a consideration beneath notice of a philosopher” (1: 195). She is self-centered to the point of solecism; the one person she truly talks to is her mother, to whom she is unrelievedly caustic. She has memorized Godwin's works, and spouts them whenever they are even faintly relevant, with the interesting result that Godwin's words—nearly always footnoted and printed in italics—invade Hamilton's text. When Hamilton includes Godwin's words, she usually alters them slightly, showing in Bridgetina's case that although Bridgetina can mimic Godwin's words, she does not really understand his ideas. If she did, she would not, for instance, cherish her passion for Henry Sydney, the sort of passion Godwin claimed would wither away. Hamilton has read her Godwin widely and carefully. She distinguishes, for instance, between the editions of Political Justice, and quotes as well from The Enquirer. She has also clearly read some of his novels and his memoir of his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft.

Bridgetina, the “ostensible heroine” (3: 332), has also read novels, and when she thinks about Henry, though still as usual “stretching her craggy neck” (2: 82), she switches away from Godwin's rhetorical flourishes to the language of romance: “O Julia! Julia! what a heart-moving history is mine” (2: 81). The autobiography that follows this exclamation additionally mixes the language of romance with the standard mock-heroic history of a powerful male. Bridgetina begins at birth, where she anticipated the midwife with “energetic impetuosity which scorned to wait for her arrival, and generated a noble spirit of independence, which brought me into the world without assistance” (2: 83). Hamilton does not mention the absent mother, though she is implied. This kind of reality cannot enter this kind of discourse. By a footnote, however, she leads us to Mary Hays's novel Emma Courtney, “a philosophical novel; to which Miss Botherim seems indebted for some of her finest thoughts” (2: 85). Hays's Emma gives a standard romantic-novel history of herself, which Hamilton evidently intends to reverberate with her mock-heroic version.

Hamilton's portrait of Hays was a palpable hit, and according to Maria Edgeworth “the name, the character of Bridgetina Botheram [sic] passed into every company, and became a standing jest, a proverbial point in conversation” (623). The portrait of Bridgetina is so vivid, filled as it is with the ironies of Bridgetina's willful misunderstandings of her hoped-for lover's statements, that it magnifies her insensitivity, dwelling as well on the ugliness which alone saves her from being seduced and abandoned. The physical characteristics attributed to Bridgetina have no counterpart in the Godwin portraits. Hamilton could have made good use of Godwin's “snorting laugh” (St. Clair 65) or even his long nose, but chose not to do so. Why was Hamilton, usually so sympathetic to women, so unremitting in Hays's case? Hamilton seems to agree that Bridgetina's and Hays's insistence that women are free to pursue men as they wish is, in the ventriloquist Geoffry Jarvis's word, true “poison” (1: xv). Bridgetina is calculated by ridicule both to scare young women who think they can pursue recalcitrant men, and to save them from treacherous seducers.

To strengthen the point about the dangers women undergo, Hamilton has intermingled her parody with tragedy. Julia's innocence and thoughtfulness represent an even more dangerous combination than Bridgetina's. Her innocence is a familiar presence in many novels of this period, though her thoughtfulness is not. When Bridgetina apostrophizes, “O Julia,” Julia cannot resist a laugh, failing to notice (though Hamilton alerts the reader) that she is using the same flawed discourse. Julia has invented an orphan babyhood for her lover Alphonso Vallaton and even assumes that she has located his parents. In reality, Vallaton is the child of a prostitute (though she never owned him), called by his neighbors “the funny vagabond” (1: 44). He has also worked as a hair-dresser; he has always been perfidious. Incidentally, wide as Hamilton's sympathies are, they do not cross over into the discourse of Vallaton's rogue history and soften the portrait of Vallaton's hanged mother. When Vallaton, a “bad man” (1: xiv) of the sort mentioned by Geoffry Jarvis in the introduction, deftly manipulates Julia with Godwin's arguments about free love, he succeeds in seducing her. In Hamilton's didactic world, if not in her moral world, a seduced woman must be punished. Julia eventually attempts suicide by taking poison, and although the poison does not immediately kill her, and she regrets her action, she dies from its effects.

In this roman à clef, the character who represents Mary Hays is very obvious. But where is Mary Wollstonecraft? The answer is not obvious. One of the Godwin figures, the philosopher Myope, travels with a companion called “the goddess of Reason” (passim). She is certainly not Wollstonecraft, though it has been claimed that she is (Ty 116). This Goddess has a very heavy French accent, keeps a pug dog, and is interested mainly in fashion. Later she proves to be named Emmeline; Emmeline runs off with Myope's friend Vallaton, and when Vallaton proves inconvenient, she betrays him to the guillotine. Although Godwin's companion would by a simple parallel seem to be Wollstonecraft, the target here is rather the French Revolution itself, represented by the woman the Anti-Jacobin Review calls “the strumpet who officiated at Paris as the Goddess of Reason” (41). Readers of Modern Philosophers must always be wary of simple parallels.

There is one direct reference to Wollstonecraft during a discussion between Henry Sydney and Bridgetina about Rousseau. Bridgetina claims that Rousseau was “a stranger to the rights of women,” and Henry replies that “The inconsistency and folly of his system … was, perhaps, never better exposed than in the very ingenious publication which takes the Rights of Women for its title. Pity that the very sensible authoress has sometimes permitted her zeal to hurry her into expressions which have raised a prejudice against the whole. To superficial readers it appears to be her intention to unsex women entirely. But—” and Bridgetina interrupts him, insisting that there should be no distinctions between the sexes at all. Hamilton must here be denying Thomas J. Mathias's statement in his poem The Pursuits of Literature that “Our unsex'd female writers now instruct, or confuse, us and themselves, in the labyrinth of politics, or turn us wild with Gallic frenzy.” Richard Polwhele had popularized this view by borrowing the words for the title of his poem The Unsex'd Females (1798 [3] n.), including a particularly sleazy attack on Wollstonecraft. Henry, who is a trustworthy speaker, shows that Polwhele's attack is unfounded in the case of Wollstonecraft. Bridgetina's response shows that in her case, Polwhele's attack is more nearly justified. Bridgetina—who claims to be a philosopher, and yet foolishly believes, as so many eighteenth-century men believed, that you can force someone else to love you—suffers from high-decibel confusion about sexuality.

Though interrupted, Henry clearly reads Wollstonecraft sympathetically and not superficially. Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Hamilton had all suffered particularly from superficial readership, and were sensitive to reader-resistance. The implication, of course, from a speaker we can mostly trust, is that Hamilton reads Wollstonecraft in full recognition that her “zeal” is not the whole story. Thus she aligns herself with Godwin, who felt that Wollstonecraft had humanized him.

I would argue that the Wollstonecraft figure in Modern Philosophers is the second romance heroine, Julia Delmond, the woman who is seduced by Vallaton. Like Wollstonecraft, Julia chooses to cohabit with a lover without marrying him; like Wollstonecraft, she attempts suicide. The ironies of Julia's life are more terrible than those in the life of her original: Julia dies eventually from the lingering effects of the poison she has taken; she is never happily married as Wollstonecraft briefly was. This is parody, but it is tragic rather than comic parody, another fruit of the satura. Julia is fictional, overwrought, unnatural—and hence gains power even though she is a parodic figure. This power is reinforced by the fact that in this novel there are many other women who, through no fault of their own, find themselves in similar positions, and these women are realistically portrayed. Hamilton includes a homeless woman who is just about to sink into prostitution, and mentions the House of Industry, a haven for the seduced and abandoned. Unnamed hordes in the real world share Julia's story. Julia certainly suffers for her belief in Godwinianism, but she is also commended for these same beliefs. She is frank, brave, and open; she refuses to hide her pregnancy and abandonment—she will not skulk in the country until her baby is born.

VENTRILOQUISM: GODWIN AS THE OTHER; GODWIN AS THE SELF

The perpetrator of Julia's seduction and abandonment, Vallaton, is a follower of Myope-Godwin and his shopkeeper hanger-on, Mr. Glib; he is a Godwin-dummy, forever quoting the master's words, or rather slightly misquoting them. The power of this flawed discourse is partly that it appeals to Julia's best qualities. Vallaton caters to Julia's pride in her energy and independence. Marriage is not his object, so he attacks it in Godwinian terms. Vallaton says, for instance, of Julia's father's relationship with her mother: “in the hateful spirit of monopoly, he chose by despotic and artificial means to engross a pretty woman to himself” (1: 165). The dummy is not saying what the author thinks, or even what Godwin thinks. Vallaton, like Bridgetina, misuses Godwin, with the difference that she is an inaccurate imitator and he is a designing hypocrite. What happens here is that the dummy heightens and changes the meaning of the original, with the effect that the original endures, to some degree, unscathed. “So long as I seek to engross one woman to myself,” Godwin argues in Political Justice, failing to stress that the woman might be pretty, “and to prohibit my neighbour from proving his superior desert and reaping the fruits of it, I am guilty of the most odious of all monopolies.” Godwin suggests the abolition of marriage, saying, “The abolition of marriage will be attended with no evils” (850), and further arguing that men will cease to be jealous when there is no marriage, and that relationships between the sexes, like all relationships, must be guided by “the unforced consent of either party” (851). “Unforced consent” is the argument Bridgetina so woefully misunderstands. Godwin minimizes the power of sensuality, arguing that inhibition can only “irritate and multiply” our tendency toward “lust and depravity” (851). In his idealistic view, the best women will be available to all, and sex will lose its importance: “We may all enjoy her conversation; and we shall all be wise enough to consider the sensual intercourse as a very trivial object” (851). Hamilton's point is not so much to scuttle these views as to argue that in the world as constructed in 1800, a sensual and predatory man would use these arguments about marriage to his advantage, wantonly seducing all the “pretty” women.

The ventriloquist's Godwin-dummy in Modern Philosophers speaks in many forms and many voices, complicating the reader's perceptions of the limitations of those who hold Godwinian concepts. Mr. Myope the philosopher is mentally nearsighted; he spouts his views, barely noticing their effects on those around him; he is a particularly dangerous kind of dummy, dangerous because so insouciant. Mr. Glib the shopkeeper parrots not Godwin, but Myope. The “author” remarks that the Godwinian characters persist in misunderstanding the world around them, “translating every sentence into their own language” (2: 234), and each does this in his special way—Bridgetina in various styles, depending on her mood; Vallaton in rhetoric borrowed from Gothic villains; Myope in a high philosophical vein; and Glib in a staccato form like the one Dickens will later use for Mr. Micawber. Although no one physically resembles Godwin, Glib is fond of double negatives, as was Godwin. Glib is apt to give advice like “Live with no one one does not like. Love no one but for what is in them” (2: 255). Glib is less dangerous than Vallaton or Myope, and as a lowly shopkeeper, more vulnerable. For his metaphysical innocence, he is betrayed into jail by the villainous Vallaton.

I have already noted that in a number of instances, untangling Hamilton from Godwin is more difficult than at first appears. Godwin inveighs against war; Hamilton does the same. Godwin decries poverty; Hamilton agrees with him. Godwin supports energy and independence; Hamilton supports them as well. Besides the characters already discussed, there are others—especially Martha Goodwin, Maria Fielding, and Mr. Sydney—who in some way represent Godwin—and Hamilton. They are not ventriloquist's dummies, because they do not actually borrow Godwin's words. But their ideas are certainly involved with Godwin's, and the separate discourses often cross. Hamilton divides herself as author among these characters, and she also divides Godwin among them.

Two women, Mr. Sydney's sister-in-law, Martha Goodwin, and Mr. Sydney's first love, Maria Fielding, speak the wise woman's version of the Godwinian system. Mrs. Goodwin, Godwin with an extra “o,” is independent and strong; she faces death with an equanimity worthy of Hume, though supported by religion. One of the most important points she makes to her niece Harriet Orwell is that she has conquered passion. Thomas Laqueur remarks, following Barbara Taylor, that “Wollstonecraft shares with early socialist feminists a commitment to ‘passionlessness,’ whether out of some sense of its political possibilities, an acute awareness of passion's dangers, or a belief in the special undesiring qualities of the female body” (24). Certainly Hamilton nowhere discusses an undesiring female body, but she is acutely aware of passion's dangers, and of both the personal and political possibilities of celibacy. Like Hamilton, Mrs. Goodwin is a “cheerful, pleased old maid,” but she emphasizes that she achieved this condition with difficulty. “By struggling with passion, I invigorated my virtue; by subduing it, I exalted the empire of reason in my breast. I learned to take a different view of life and its pursuits. I no longer cherished the idea, that all happiness was comprised in prosperous love; and that the lives of such as were united by the tender bonds of mutual affection, must inevitably be crowned with unclouded felicity” (2: 134). Public opinion was not helpful, and she had to steel herself against it: “[T]he forlorn state of celibacy, the neglect, the ridicule to which it is exposed, threw at times a temporary damp upon my spirits” (2: 134-35). Her remedy for these moments of discontent was to attempt to increase the happiness of others. In addition, the act of subduing her passion strengthened her reason, and this, too, has added to her happiness. “In the approbation of my own conscience; in the endearments of friendship; in the gratitude of those I have endeavoured to serve, or to comfort; and in that undisturbed peace which is the exclusive privilege of the unmarried; I have found an ample recompence [sic] for the mortification of hearing myself called Mrs. Martha” (2: 135-36). This speaker is certainly not the Godwin of Political Justice, but she shares some beliefs with Godwin and with Wollstonecraft. She feels that passion can be subdued, that eventually it will wither away.

Also unmarried, Mrs. Fielding has nurtured her passion for a man, even known that it was requited, though he—inveigled into thinking she had deserted him—has been rather happily married to someone else. Even so, she too is happy in her single life. When her lover's wife dies, she refuses to marry him. As Godwin would have had her do, all these years she has enjoyed her lover's conversation—his words rather than his body. She has also helped to raise his son. And she has spent much of her time aiding women who have been victimized by men, working in a place she calls the Asylum of the Destitute. It is here that Julia comes to die. And Mrs. Fielding is the character who commends Julia for her bravery in wanting to state publicly that she is about to bear an illegitimate child. Even Bridgetina begins to interpret her Godwin more effectively, to obey the ventriloquist. She begins at last to respect what Martha Goodwin called the “endearments of friendship” (2: 136). At Julia's deathbed Bridgetina sees that if she had not been ugly, she too might have died as Julia dies, seduced and abandoned. Hays was present at Wollstonecraft's deathbed, but the implication of this scene is that Hays did not learn to love and to care for others as Wollstonecraft did and as Bridgetina does. Eventually, Bridgetina values even her mother.

To replace Godwin's philosophy, Hamilton offers an enlightened Christianity. This belief, she feels, might have saved Julia. Hamilton attempts to leach the patriarchalism out of her version of Christianity, but still it is two men in particular, Dr. Orwell and Mr. Sydney, who represent the religion she presents as so supportive of women. Dr. Orwell is the local rector, and Mr. Sydney a dissenting minister, and yet their doctrinal differences do not separate them. The religion Hamilton is defining in Modern Philosophers is, to begin with, a religion of equality. Men and women are equal, since Jesus did not distinguish between them: “His morality was addressed to the judgment without distinction of sex” (1: 200). In addition to sexual equality, Martha Goodwin suggests resuscitating the creed that “I believe it is my duty to love my neighbour as myself, and to do to others as I would have others do to me on the like occasion” (1: 203). Mr. Sydney defines this idea as revolutionary: “The confession of charity and brotherly love would be justly deemed an innovation big with alarm, and quite inimical to the spirit of party zeal” (1: 204). Yet this “innovation big with alarm” in many ways bears comparison to Godwinian schemes. Godwin assumes that once his ideal society has been created, poverty and profusion will be replaced by equality. In the current economic world of mutual envy and exploitation, he sees little to commend. In one scene, Bridgetina, in her role as a parodic surrogate for Godwin, speaking to a group of men scything some hay, calls them “wretches” and sympathizes with their presumed misery. Unlike the suppressed native peoples—the Hindus and Hottentots—the hay makers have a voice. When Bridgetina calls them wretches, an old man replies, “What should make me wretched?” (1: 208). These hay makers are not overworked. Indeed, more of them are hired than are needed, and the profit motive is apparently not the only or even the first motive for their hiring. Indeed, “many found employment there who would have been rejected by more scientific farmers” (1: 206). By their lights they live well. This laborer is happy—he is independent and well paid. But other classes do suffer, and in the subsequent conversation in this scene and others, it becomes clear that Hamilton agrees with Godwin that the system itself, the nascent capitalist system, is at fault. Mr. Sydney's son Henry feelingly describes the squalor he saw in city after city. The new luxuries, the new manufacturing towns, have created the worst inequalities in society.

“A monopoly of wealth and power,” Mr. Sydney argues, is “an evil of mighty magnitude” (3: 240). He and Dr. Orwell agree that their children, who are about to marry, do not need “a splendid establishment” (3: 240). “To the mind of Mr. Sydney, a monopoly of wealth and power appeared an evil of mighty magnitude; and far from wishing his children to become accessaries [sic] in continuing a system, to which, in his opinion, might be fairly attributed the greater part of the miseries that have scourged the human race, he had labored to impress their minds with a sense of its turpitude and injustice” (3: 240). Mr. Sydney has written a tract suggesting that all landed proprietors should make “an equal division of their property among their children, to begin that gradual and rational reform, which would ultimately be productive of an increase of public happiness and virtue” (3: 241). Many economic analysts, including Lord Kames and Adam Smith, had queried the process of entail, particularly in Scotland, by which the great landowners were further consolidating their fortunes and their power. Paradoxically, the growth of manufacturing was strengthening this element in the Scottish economy (Campbell 94). Hamilton's suggestion did not prevail and might not have helped if it had. Given the consolidation of wealth in Scotland, Mr. Sydney agrees theoretically but not practically with Mr. Myope.

But while he applauded the abstract notions entertained of each of these noble principles, he plainly demonstrated their inutility in the direction Mr. Myope had given them; and proved that to these, as well as to every other virtue, the principles of Christianity were the best, the only support. “I do indeed admire and applaud the zeal with which you espouse the cause of the poor and oppressed part of our species,” said Mr. Sydney; “it does honour to your heart. But what does your system do for them? What does it propose to do?”

(3: 290)

Myope says that by his system all people will give up their property. This, Sydney considers impractical. Carefully, Sydney argues through with Myope every portion of his philosophy, eventually showing him that “not an evil complained of could have existence in a society, where the spirit of christianity [sic] was the ruling principle of every heart” (3: 293). At the end, then, the Godwinians have either died or been converted. Vallaton has been guillotined, Julia perishes, Glib and Bridgetina settle down to ordinary life, and Myope seems convinced that Christianity is a better doctrine. Only Emmeline, the French Revolution, continues to pursue her destructive ways. This is the ending that the Hamilton-author would like to support, quite obviously. But how likely is it that the Godwins of this world will turn Christian?

The lodger-author ties up a different part of the plot. When all the young girls except Bridgetina find mates at the end, the male lodger archly invokes his readers: “But how could we have the heart to disappoint the Misses, by closing our narrative without a wedding? A novel without a wedding is like a tragedy without murder, which no British audience could ever be brought to relish” (3: 354-5). A couple of weddings are provided, but this ending is undercut by Mrs. Fielding's refusal to marry Mr. Sydney, by her preference for the peace of old age. Nor does Mr. Sydney indicate how he is going to put into practice the Christianity he has convinced Mr. Myope to believe in. The combined energies of all the good women and all the good men in this novel are considerable, but what will they change? Eighteen hundred years of Christianity have led to the conditions Hamilton's characters deplore. We might ask with Sydney, “But what does your system do for them? What does it propose to do?” (3: 290). Hamilton is suggesting a revolution as complete as Godwin's. And yet is it really enough that loving your neighbor is an “innovation big with alarm” (1: 205)? Hamilton does not give us an adequate answer. What will Christianity do that is different from what it has done before?

Thus Hamilton's surrogate at the end of her novel converts the Godwin figure, while agreeing with him about many of the ills in the world. Although the text does not overtly distinguish between Godwin and Hamilton except as theorists, it may be that the chief distinction between Godwin and Hamilton is not that Hamilton occasionally and inadvertently agrees with Godwin, or that Hamilton by art or by chance would, as Claudia Johnson put it, “minimize the necessity for reflection” (14), but that Godwin theorizes and Hamilton generalizes, and that Hamilton values human connection more than Godwin does. Godwin was known for being a rather remote person. This essential remoteness was what bothered Hamilton the most. She gently shows that Mr. Sydney suffers from it somewhat, for when he is seized by a botanical interest or an idea, he fails to notice his son's preoccupations. Perhaps by ridiculing Mr. Sydney in this way she intends to show that as a male he does not really study his fellow human beings in the detailed way Mrs. Goodwin or Mrs. Fielding would do. For Hamilton, every abstraction about human beings was embodied in a group of persons. She did not abstract. She generalized, and before she generalized she considered her group of persons, one by one. Godwin, in his famous conundrum about whether you would rescue Fénelon or the chambermaid from a burning building, chose Fénelon. He says he would choose Fénelon, even if the chambermaid was his wife, his mother, or his benefactor. Hamilton, I would hazard, would have chosen the chambermaid.

Throughout this essay I have stressed the difficulties of reading Hamilton and shown that eighteenth- and twentieth-century readers alike misread or half-read her work. Her particular satiric mix is an extremely effective experiment. Certainly, too, she needs to be doubly read, and the contradictions in her text must not be ignored. I wish to stress, however, that the liberal Hamilton is not merely a modern invention. Hamilton did have at least one reader, one person among the untrustworthy reviewers and the superficial public, who found in her work the energies I have been discussing. The writer of her obituary in the Scots Magazine said of Modern Philosophers that Hamilton “was far from displaying here that violent spirit of Anti Jacobinism, conspicuous in many similar works, and which arose from the reaction of the too violent tendency to innovation which had preceded. There breathed through it, on the contrary, a very liberal spirit, and a zeal, within certain limits, for the freedom of philosophical inquiry” (564).

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