SOURCE: Larson, Edith Sedgwick. “A Measure of Power: The Personal Charity of Elizabeth Montagu.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 16 (1986): 197-210.

[In the following essay, Larson analyzes Montagu's letters, arguing that money played an important role in her life and that she wielded power through financial charity.]

Elizabeth Robinson Montagu (1720-1800) is too often perceived in terms of stale images conjured up by Samuel Johnson's sobriquet for her, “Queen of the Blue-Stockings.”¹ Disparaging connotations of pretentious self-interest sometimes associated with the bluestockings have made it easy to dismiss her and her friends as women largely superfluous in terms of wielding any real humanitarian power. Curiosity, prolonged acquaintance, and a fresh perspective are all needed to separate Elizabeth Montagu from the hackneyed two-dimensional stereotype evoked by old labels. Happily, her manuscript letters at the Huntington Library can provide such a new perspective and reveal a practical, assertive, humanistic, but financially oriented woman who skillfully wielded considerable power when female dependence was the norm. When reading these letters, I have looked for the letter or phrase which seemed marked by the spontaneity of honesty rather than that which seemed composed with an eye on reputation. I have looked for the unguarded expression and the unconscious pattern.

The pattern I will discuss here reveals that Elizabeth Montagu's power was demonstrated principally through her financial charity. In this paper I will explore some of the ways she dispensed charity and comment on some of the individuals who sought shelter under the umbrella of her influence. In particular, I will focus on individual instances not mentioned in published editions of her letters:² on relatives, including those distantly related; on needy women; and on servants, in whom she took a matriarchal interest. Besides the significance of the breadth of the social spectrum encompassed by Elizabeth Montagu's charity, from servants to literary figures like Sarah Fielding, from relatives and friends to strangers like the workers in her husband's coal mines, two important points stand out. First, she saw herself as responsible for approaching the other members of her family, the majority of whom were men, and persuading them to contribute to needy relatives, and second, it was on issues of financial responsibility that she challenged and tested the power of the male heads of her family: her father, her eldest brother, and her husband.

Elizabeth Montagu's self-confidence and assertiveness were encouraged when she was a girl by her grandmother's second husband, Dr. Conyers Middleton, a professor of classical languages at Cambridge.³ She and her sister Sarah were brought up as members of the landed gentry in the Kentish countryside. Elizabeth Robinson was born at York, October 2, 1720. She was the fourth child and first daughter of Matthew Robinson and his wife, Elizabeth Drake Robinson. Sarah Robinson, the only other girl among the nine children who lived to grow up, was born September 21, 1723. When they were very young, their mother inherited an impressive ancestral estate, Mount Morris, from her brother. Although Elizabeth's father had attended Trinity College, Cambridge, he had no profession. His large family and lack of fortune forced him to take advantage of his wife's inheritance and settle in the country.

One learns from the correspondence in the manuscripts of the Montagu Collection at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, that living in the country cast a pall over Mr. Robinson's spirits. Furthermore, one learns that Elizabeth's father was always impatient and ill-tempered when confronted with financial transactions. It was Mrs. Robinson who oversaw the management of the estate and the family's records, and who at her death in 1745 left financial matters organized so that her husband had only to follow the pattern she had established. In being a good business manager she set a valuable precedent for her daughters, both of whom were to spend a substantial amount of time worrying about, making, and dispensing money as adults.

Initially, I approached the Montagu Collection, which numbers almost 7,000 pieces, searching for financial information regarding Elizabeth's younger sister, Sarah, who was a translator, novelist, and biographer. Beginning with the year 1762, when Sarah Robinson Scott's most popular novel Millenium Hall was published, I combed the letters looking for facts and figures, curious to know how much money Sarah earned. I wondered about her financial goals and what she thought necessary for her upper-middle-class standard of living. And I wanted to know exactly what she and her contemporaries saw as essential to living with a degree of comfort.

During this search I discovered that Elizabeth, who as an adult was in a stronger financial position than Sarah, mentioned money and business as often and almost as obsessively as Sarah did. I came to realize that Elizabeth showed remarkable consistency over many years in her attitude toward money. It was always important to her and dictated her marriage choice as well as her most compelling interests once she was locked into that marriage. I noticed that she was concerned not only with her own financial situation but with that of many others, and that she gradually achieved considerable power over other's lives because she cared intensely about what she saw as the just apportionment of whatever charity she had to bestow, the well-being of all her relatives—even those she disliked—and the general shape of people's lives. In short, she was a controlling person who always realized and guarded whatever financial power she had and she consistently used this power to give and sometimes to withhold favors, positions, influence, and money.

Her financial support crossed boundaries of class and relationship in surprising ways. For example, in 1748 she was supporting the baby of one of her sister's ex-servants by sending Sarah money to pay for the baby's wet nurse, and in 1771 she, with her husband's support, had taken full responsibility for the care of an insane brother, John Robinson. The first charity cost her a guinea every three months and lasted a relatively short time. The second cost £100 a year and lasted until she and her brother both died in 1800. The list of her projects is long and its diversity reveals her involvement in a way of life whose dimensions reach far beyond the drawing rooms and salons where one is encouraged to envision the bluestockings.

She was consistently concerned about the financial well-being of her sister, Sarah. It was she, rather than one of her brothers or Sarah herself, who struggled with her father over the money due Sarah after her separation from George Scott. The Scotts had been married, without Elizabeth's approval, early in 1751, when Sarah was twenty-eight. George Scott was a newly appointed sub-preceptor to the twelve-year-old Prince George who was to become George III. Elizabeth's match to Edward Montagu had been primarily prompted by Edward's solidity in terms of family background and property—he was the grandson of the Earl of Sandwich, an established M.P. from Huntington who owned several estates, and twenty-nine years older than Elizabeth. But Sarah's marriage was based on personal preference and proceeded in spite of strong family opposition. The marriage took place in 1751, and lasted only until the beginning of 1752, approximately a year. The circumstances of the marriage's failure are tantalizingly unclear.

It is clear, however, that Sarah left her husband without making adequate legal arrangements for her separate maintenance. Her situation was made more difficult because she was unable to rely on the good offices of her father, whom she seemed to mistrust almost as much as she did her estranged husband.

In May 1752, Elizabeth's friend, Mrs. Donnellan, wrote to condole with her about Sarah's situation and commented: “all I say is that you entirely justify Mrs. Scott, and I am sure you must know the truth. I hear, too, he has given her back half her fortune, and has settled a 150 pounds a year on her; this, I think, is a justification to her.”⁴ Although George Scott did, for a while anyway, make quarterly payments to Sarah, they were not always prompt. Her fortune, half of which was £500, was in her father's hands, and she was not prepared to fight for it.

Her goal was to buy a house in Bath, and this she could not afford. Knowing this, and unasked by Sarah, Elizabeth approached their father who was not known for his tractability. She reports the results to Sarah as follows:

I address'd to him after dinner when he was in good humor, but he said he understood from Morris [their attorney brother] that Mr Scott might claim your fortune of him & he wd not change the property into the form of a house. I assured him I believed he could not be a loser by a purchase of that kind at the Bath & that indeed it was a strange & hard case you should be thus unprovided for, he grew into passion I used all methods of every species of Rhetoric the persuasive the menacing ye flattering ye censuring ect & told him Mr Scott had some handle for a reflection on your family not very honorable to it viz that you had been duped by your Family in regard to your circumstances this I thought a good stimulating argument to a man of pride & passion. … My father said the match was not of his making, I told him I did not absolutely think so, for what a Father permits he encourages, & that he had more to do in it than anybody. Mr Montagu says I held him well by the nose, in short he grew cool at last.⁵

On this occasion Elizabeth was manipulative as well as insistent. After presenting Sarah's case, she says, “I kiss'd him & spoke many pathetic sentences about you which after he had spent his fire & fury seemd a little to melt him & so we parted. I should tell you we asked him to dine with us as it was better to introduce this discourse without seeming to make an express visit for it.”⁶ In this instance Elizabeth's intervention was rewarded with some success. While Sarah was not given enough to buy a house in Bath, her father provided an allowance which Elizabeth attributed to her own insistence.

On another occasion of striking similarity ten years later, in the spring of 1762, Elizabeth approached her father on Sarah's behalf and seems to have forfeited his good will because of her directness. She learned that Lady Bab Montagu and Sarah (Lady Bab was no relation to Edward and Elizabeth), who lived together, were forced by lack of money to give up their summer residence in Batheaston, a spot near Bath, in order to be able to afford to rent a more comfortable and well-situated winter house in Bath.⁷ Elizabeth knew what their summer retreat meant to them and went to her father to inquire about an increase in Sarah's allowance. She sent Sarah the following account:

Two days before I left Town I went to my Father, and after other conversation proposed to him to add twenty pound a year to ye allowance and said Mr Montagu should do the same, that you might not part with a place so necessary to your health and comfort. My Father flew into a passion, & said it was a monstrous proposal & unreasonable, & he could not afford to comply with it. I told him you had had but a thousand pound of him, & you could not have been maintaind for the interest of that sum if you had staid in his house, that he had got back part of that thousand pound, & every one must think you was hardly used, that you was much pitied, & he was not at all free from censure … he said he cared not a farthing for me or what I desired, & he did not desire Mr M to trouble his head with his family & then got up & took me by the hand & put me out of the room. I told him I did not expect to be insulted in that manner, however I was not sorry to find myself on the other side the door where I shall remain till he please to visit me & there ends the chapter of paternal love.⁸

The failure of this confrontational approach helps one understand and sympathize with the necessity of some kind of manipulativeness in dealing with Mr. Robinson. It is significant that on the two occasions outlined, and on others I have not mentioned, Elizabeth went unasked to petititon for Sarah. The comfortable position she occupied as Edward's wife and the fact that she need ask her father for nothing for herself freed her to act on Sarah's behalf.

It is also worth noting that Elizabeth seemed to feel it would be improper for her to ask Mr. Montagu to add to Sarah's income if her father would not, or to add more than her father would add. This same principle operated in the case of a more distant relation, one Mrs. Fry, an out-of-the-way cousin, whose desperate case (she was literally starving) was brought to Elizabeth's attention by Mrs Boscawen, and for whom Elizabeth canvassed her family. She wrote to her brother in 1765 about her contribution for Mrs. Fry: “I have fix'd my sum at the same as my Fathers because it wd be improper & disrespectful to him to give more, & my compassion for ye poor Woman will not allow me to give less, even tho I could not conveniently spare it. My private purse is never very heavy, but my heart is still lighter, but wd not be so if ye reproach of a neglected Relation lay at ye bottom of it.”⁹

Sarah was a special relation and Elizabeth never neglected her. During the decade between Lady Bab's death in 1765 and Edward Montagu's death in 1775, she loaned Sarah her comfortable London house for several weeks, gave her presents, such as several yards of white satin, and sent her and Sarah Fielding, who was Scott's close friend in Bath, numerous partridges, fresh fowls, bottles of wine, pots of beef, and offers of emergency assistance. All this she did consistently, but she never, as far as I know, gave her a significant amount of money. As far as I can tell, she never gave anyone any significant amount of money while Mr. Montagu was alive. After his death, she gave Sarah an annuity of £200 a year. She was then, at last, at fifty-four, a very wealthy widow, while Sarah was still economizing and moving from one rented lodging to another. Elizabeth explained to her brother Morris what some might interpret as the meanness of the £200 annuity:

I know she [Sarah] has a great deal of delicacy, and any considerable sum might have distressed her, it is always pleasant to receive little marks of a friends love, but when they are increased to obligations they are heavy, I wd put a gold ring on ye finger of a friend but not a fetter, which they wd be to a mind so generous as Mrs. Scott … from some study of human nature, in which I read my own imperfections and those of others, I shall never confer any favour which can create a new set of duties to be expected by me or paid by another, for from such arise uneasy jealousies on all sides.¹⁰

Although Sarah's continued need for economy may seem unjust in light of the close relationship between the sisters and the relative splendor of Elizabeth's new wealth (she had over £7,000 a year),¹¹ the annuity was significant. It enabled Sarah to live in London, which she had been unable to afford, and it apparently enabled her to stop writing for a living. She published nothing after 1775 although she lived another twenty years and had published a well-received biography, The Life of Theodore Agrippa d'Aubigné, in 1772. In fact, Elizabeth's support and her determination to gain others' support for Sarah may have been the factor that allowed Sarah to maintain her upper-middle-class status and which kept her from dying as another eighteenth-century woman writer, Charlotte Lennox, did, alone and destitute.

I have said that Elizabeth seemed never to give away significant sums while Edward was alive. The letters suggest that she simply did not have such sums—say amounts over £20—at her disposal. An incident which illustrates this occurred in 1763 when she and Mr. Montagu were staying in Northumberland on coal mining business. An opportunity arose to help the nurse who had cared for the Montagu's only child who had died years earlier when he was eighteen months old. The woman, Mrs. Kennet, applied to Mrs. Montagu for £50, probably to use as a portion for her daughter. Mrs. Montagu was eager to comply, but the surprising thing is that she borrowed the £50 from her close friend Lord Bath, an immensely wealthy person with a reputation for avarice. More significantly, when she returned to London, she wrote Mrs. Kennet, advising her to keep the matter a secret from Mr. Montagu. On December 28, 1763, she wrote:

It is with great pleasure I send you the enclosed bond, and you shall not pay interest upon it, & I hope at some time to be able to surrender up the bond itself. The fifty pound is lodged with my Brother Morris Robinson in Chancery Lane from whence you may have it whenever you please to send for it. In any transaction with Mr Montagu you need not mention the fifty pound I lend you, for it is my own money. I heartily wish to hear your daughter is happy in her marriage.¹²

Thus, after twenty-one years of marriage to a man of considerable means who obviously valued her business judgment, and who had valued their dead son too, Elizabeth apparently was not able to borrow £50 from her husband to give to their son's nurse. Furthermore, she seems to have felt there would be unpleasant repercussions if her husband were to find out that she had loaned the woman £50. Elizabeth Montagu was the soul of propriety; she must have seen Mr. Montagu as someone to be placated with great care if she preferred to ask Lord Bath for the loan, and since, it appears, she felt constrained to ask for secrecy from her ex-servant. Her personal means cannot have been extensive, and Mr. Montagu's means were not at her disposal except for selected items which he endorsed.

Although she did not have free access to Mr. Montagu's purse, she seemed to have complete access to his financial decision making, which was often torturously slow and involved. She gained power over him in this sphere because of her constant participation in his coal mining enterprises. By virtue of her shrewd judgment and patience with her husband's hesitancy, he came to value and rely on the business sense which she demonstrated over many years. She went over all the agreements with other mine owners and all the agents' accounts with him. When they were apart, they corresponded constantly regarding negotiations for opening new mines, increasing their property, and hiring new agents. Elizabeth's interest in business was genuine. Two-and-a-half weeks after Mr. Montagu's death at eighty-four, in 1775, she wrote to Elizabeth Carter, “I find business diverts my mind much better than reading at present.”¹³

If one word were to be selected to describe Elizabeth's approach to her husband, it might well be “careful.” Given her circumstances, this is not surprising. She had grown up in a family where every £100 was significant. When she married at twenty-two, she did not bring her husband her £1000 fortune, but her father's bond for £1000. (Mr. Montagu eventually received the money.) The landscape of her life was dotted with women of good birth whose futures were bleak because they had no money or not enough money: Mrs. Fry, her distant relation, brought up genteelly, but starving with an invalid husband; the Granville sisters, orphaned daughters of Lord Landsdown, living on the uncertain bounty of a half-brother, Lord Weymouth; and her own sister, Sarah Scott, who married for love and spent the rest of her life worrying about expenses.

Sarah's anxiety was made bearable by Elizabeth's support, and Sarah was not the only relative who received financial support from Mrs. Montagu. Her younger brother, John, had had a mental breakdown in 1751 when he was a young man. Apparently he spent many years under the personal care of an individual named Mrs. Hately, whose death in 1771 caused a crisis in the family. Sarah alerted Elizabeth, who immediately went to London to see their father about John's future. In this case she used Edward's increasing wealth and her own skill at hiding her true feelings to best advantage. She assumed full responsibility for her insane brother, who was to live another twenty-nine years. After seeing her father, she reported to Edward:

What you say is very just, that no one could have acted with the same authority that I have done, but I owe that authority to your kindness, & may Heaven reward you with a long & happy life [he was already eighty] for having renderd me by your kind regard & attachment an object of respect. All has pass'd with great civility between the old Gentleman [her father] & me, but tho I have kept my temper outwardly I have been inwardly wounded deeply, for tho I knew there was a want of tenderness in his Nature I never imagined there was on Earth a Person so very pityless.¹⁴

Elizabeth's responsiveness to suffering and her ability to deal effectively with her father must have been clear to Sarah, who wrote to her about John rather than to their eldest brother, Matthew, or their attorney brother, Morris.

This responsiveness was not limited to near relations. When her cousin Lydia Botham's daughters were left penniless orphans by the death of their clergyman father, Elizabeth wrote to her eldest brother, Matthew, who had inherited the Mount Morris estate at Horton, Kent, which had been their mother's during her lifetime. Her theory was, that since as eldest male child in the Robinson family he had received more than the other eight children, he should be willing to donate more of his resources to less fortunate family members, even those with whom he had no immediate acquaintance. Elizabeth suggested that he contribute £10 a year to an annuity for the girls, an annuity to which she and the other relatives would also contribute.

Her eldest brother, who was a sixty-year-old bachelor, did not agree. He responded in an extremely long letter explaining in detail his own responsibilities and his opinions in regard to orphaned clergymen's daughters. Although he agreed to contribute ten guineas, he could not agree to Elizabeth's long-range plan because “such annuities dont suit my affairs.” Further, he could not endorse Elizabeth's concept of family obligation. He explained that he felt a crucial difference between relations with whom one had been born and bred and those, like these cousins, with whom he was not acquainted and did not know by sight. Although he could not acquiesce in the annuity, he had some advice for the young women. He commented gallantly to his sister:

I am used to receive your Ideas with so much respect, that I hardly allow myself to question them. But let me beg of you yourself on this occasion to consider, whether there does not enter the Spirit of Magnificance as well as that of charity into the proposition of finding £100 a year for two young women whose parents have left them without a Shilling. I much doubt whether their mother had in her single State near half that. I don't know that it will be any real kindness to them to teach them to value or set themselves up too high. God knows, such a dependent subsistence may from many & many a cause & accident fail them. I am sure were they my own daughters, & I could foresee such an event, I should most earnestly recommend to them to endeavor rather to assist themselves & to earn, if possible, in some degree their own bread, than to be totally dependent on the very precarious provision of the generosity & charity of others.¹⁵

Elizabeth and Sarah agreed with him in so far as they wished to see needy women placed above total dependence on others. Moreover, this wish was not confined to those related to them. They interested themselves in the adversity of women of all ranks, from their own, to servants, to those somewhere in between who might qualify for governess' positions. For example, in 1762, Elizabeth, working with Lady Westmoreland, managed to secure the position of wet nurse to the royal family for one Mrs. Ned Scott, a woman of the same class as herself, whose sister had been Sarah's close friend and who had fourteen children and slender financial resources. This was valuable employment which entailed many benefits such as positions in the royal household for some of Mrs. Scott's children, and a £300-a-year pension for the nurse after the prince was taken from her care. Elizabeth worked hard to convince the royal family that Mrs. Scott was exactly right for the job. She said she was moved “to serve a family of unportioned children” not only because it was her duty, but also, because she herself “was once to a certain degree in the same circumstances.”¹⁶

While Elizabeth could identify with Mrs. Scott's large family of portionless children because she came from a similar one, she also helped many who were of a much lower class. For instance, on October 6, 1772, she wrote imploringly to her close friend, Elizabeth Carter:

I beg of you to inquire among all yr friends, Neighbours, & correspondents whether they wd accept, as a servant, a modest, sober, ingenious young person who works admirably, can get up fine linen, pickle, preserve, & make jellies, who wd be glad to be housekeeper in a small family … I am the more desirous to get her a service, because she has, thus far, withstood ye temptation of her papist relations to put her above servitude if she will quit the Protestant church. She will undergo ye martyrdom of service but ye severer martyrdom of starving may be too much for her.¹⁷

Because Mrs. Montagu's recommendations were not easily obtained, they were taken seriously. Ten days later, she wrote back to Mrs. Carter, “A thousand thanks for yr goodness about my young Woman.”¹⁸

Finally, Elizabeth Montagu was a concerned and compassionate estate owner who was energetically active in pursuing business interests and in trying to alleviate ignorance and misery among the farm workers and coal mining families on her estates. In the 1760s Mr. Montagu inherited a number of coal mining properties which had been inadequately supervised because of his relative's incompetence and long sickness. The Montagus invested all the capital they could command in the renovation and development of these mines and they journeyed to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Northumberland, where in the fall and winter of 1763, Mrs. Montagu worked untiringly on complicated business problems. As the November cold deepened, Mrs. Montagu wrote to one of her favorite correspondents, Lord Lyttelton, “I have not stirr'd out of my room for some days, & the fireside, which if in London would be encircled with beaux esprits & blue stocking philosophers is now filled by stewards & people who are in the business of the mine.”¹⁹

The mines prospered and as Mr. Montagu aged, his wife's interest in business detail exceeded his own. After his death on May 20, 1775, she spent a short time recuperating and then set off in June to visit the Yorkshire estates and Northumberland collieries which were now hers. The following undated letter to Sarah Scott written in 1772 shows her real concern for others' suffering. She writes in detail, confident of her sister's interest:

My principal attention has been to providing food for my poor Neighbours, who are in ye most litteral sense starving. We make 8 quarts of rice milk daily for ye suppers of hungry babes, when we do not bake. Baking days said milk & rice is consolidated into pudding. Of Broth we make Oceans, yet such is ye general misery that there remains still every day many croaking bowels. I carried a Rice pudding in my chaise tonight to a family of poor Children on Greenham Common. The Father is a Labourer, he earns 6^s & 6^p pr week, the Mother is sickly, they have 11 children living, 7 are at service. The poor man was laid up with ye rheumatism in part of ye winter which put him back in ye World, so that ye 4 little ones at home have only a bit of blanket each to cover them. I saw one of them in this naked condition on saturday I sent to buy cloth for a smock & linsey woolsey for a jacket which I also carried home. The poor Woman was quite astonished & said it was ye first kindness she had ever received except half a crown Mr Griffith got ye Parish to give her when she was very ill in her lying in of her eleventh child. … If the rich people do not check their wanton extravagance to enable them to assist the poor I know not what must become of ye labouring people.²⁰

This is not the commentary of a woman interested primarily in dominating a crowded drawing room. These are the observations of a woman of energetic versatility, who was as interested in her account books and neighbours' welfare as she was in the Essay on Shakespeare which she published in 1769. Elizabeth Montagu accepted many of the conventions of her time regarding proper womanly behavior, but she did not accept them passively. She astutely used the leverage her marriage and her belief in the power of moral benevolence gave her to challenge her father and brothers. She organized support for people of varying conditions and circumstances, and she shrewdly worked to increase her network of friends and business connections so as to maximize whatever independence her conventional marriage allowed and to provide a firm basis for twenty-five years of totally independent widowhood.

Elizabeth Montagu's mother bore twelve children and organized the family's estate. Elizabeth effectively rallied support for dozens of individuals, and helped run considerable coal mining enterprises. Her sister, Sarah Scott, dealt successfully with publishers and booksellers. As one thinks of these accomplishments, one remembers James Mellow's comment that “the famous are only the tip of the iceberg; the generating life of the age lies below the surface.”²¹ And one is led to question the generalization of female acquiescence in dependence in the eighteenth century. It may have been what society expected, but there may well have been a more significant number of women wielding a measure of power than we have been led to believe. Certainly, Elizabeth Montagu did so, not only in the drawing room, but more important, in the larger world of work and need which appealed to her curiosity, compassion, and sense of justice.

Notes

1. Almost always these images are pejorative. As Barbara Schnorrenberg remarks after citing two books dealing with bluestockings published in the early twentieth century, “The very name Blue Stockings became synonymous with a learned and hence unfeminine woman.” Barbara B. Schnorrenberg with Jean E. Hunter, “The Eighteenth-Century Englishwoman,” in The Women of England: From Anglo-Saxon Times to the Present, ed. Barbara Kanner (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1979), 188. This negative attitude to the bluestockings still persists. Lawrence Stone, for example, comments on “the arrogant intellectual claims of the coterie of bluestockings in their literary salons.” Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England: 1500-1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 356.

2. Early editions of selected letters were edited by her nephew and heir, Matthew Montagu, 1810-1813, her great-great niece, Emily J. Climenson, 1906, and Reginald Blunt, 1925. Also see Dr. John Doran's A Lady of the Last Century (Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu): Illustrated in Her Unpublished Letters: Collected and Arranged with a Biographical Sketch, and a Chapter on Blue Stockings (1873: reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1973).

3. Matthew Montagu, ed., The Letters of Elizabeth Montagu with Some of the Letters of Her Correspondents (Boston: William M'Illenny, 1810), 4-5.

4. Mrs. Donnellan to Elizabeth Montagu, May 1752, Elizabeth Montagu, The Queen of the Blue-Stockings: Her Correspondence from 1720 to 1761, ed. Emily J. Climenson (London: John Murray, 1906), 2:7.

5. Elizabeth Montagu to Sarah Scott, December 1752, MO 5728, Montagu Collection, Huntington Library. Unless otherwise specified, all quotations from the Montagu Collection are here quoted for the first time, as far as I know, and will be designated when possible by their manuscript number. (I have retained the original spelling and punctuation of the unpublished quotations.)

6. Ibid.

7. Sarah Scott to Elizabeth Montagu, 5 June 1762, MO 5294.

8. Elizabeth Montagu to Sarah Scott, spring 1762, MO 5791.

9. Elizabeth Montagu to Morris Robinson, 7 July 1765, MO 4791.

10. Elizabeth Montagu to Morris Robinson, 5 July 1775, MO 4802.

11. So far I have found no evidence in the Montagu Collection regarding a jointure for Elizabeth Montagu. Dr. John Doran quotes Horace Walpole as writing to William Mason after Mr. Montagu's death: “The husband of Mrs. Montagu, of Shakespearshire, [she had published an Essay on Shakespeare in 1769] is dead, and has left her an estate of 7000L a year in her own power. …” A Lady of the Last Century, 193.

12. Elizabeth Montagu to Mrs. Kennet, 28 December 1763, MO 3004.

13. Elizabeth Montagu to Mrs. Carter, June 1775, MO 3362.

14. Elizabeth Montagu to Edward Montagu, 16 September 1771, MO 2775.

15. Matthew Robinson-Morris, 2nd Baron Rokeby to Elizabeth Montagu, 19 December 1773, MO 4852.

16. Elizabeth Montagu to William Pulteney, Earl of Bath, spring 1762, MO 4521.

17. Elizabeth Montagu to Elizabeth Carter, 6 October 1772, MO 3307.

18. Elizabeth Montagu to Elizabeth Carter, 16 October 1772, MO 3308.

19. Elizabeth Montagu to Lord George Lyttelton, November 1763, MO 1428.

20. Elizabeth Montagu to Sarah Scott, 28 July 1772, MO 5930. The importance of even inadequate assistance from propery owners like Mrs. Montagu can be measured against Dorothy Marshall's comments on the subsistence level of existence of the rural poor in eighteenth-century England. “While they had their health and strength and times were not hard they could manage. But they had no reserves and no means of acquiring any. This was partly because wages and earnings were too low, but also because there was no incentive to save, and nowhere except a stocking for savings. Everywhere there was a certain recognized standard of life to which the worker was supposed to be entitled: what was earned over this went to the beer house. As a result illness, ill luck, or old age pushed most workers over the line that divided the labouring poor from the pauper. The Poor Relief administered by the parish became their only refuge.” Dorothy Marshall, Eighteenth Century England (New York: David McKay Company Inc, 1962), 35.

21. James R. Mellow, “Determined On Distinction: The Letters of Margaret Fuller,” The New York Times Book Review, 19 June 1983, 23.