SOURCE: "Satires of Tyrants and Toadeaters: Fielding and Collier," in Companions Without Vows: Relationships Among Eighteenth-Century British Women, The University of Georgia Press, 1994, pp. 41–60.

The toadeater—certainly a common type of humble companion—is often, and sometimes unjustifiably, first thought of when the subject of humble companionship arises. The word toadeater as applied to a political lackey (or toady) was new when in 1742 Horace Walpole called Harry Vane "Pulteney's toadeater."¹ Sarah Fielding, using it two years later in The Adventures of David Simple (1744) in its sense of a humble companion, defined it: "It is a Metaphor taken from a Mountebank's Boy eating Toads, in order to show his Master's Skill in expelling Poison. It is built on a Supposition … that People who are … in a State of Dependence, are forced to do the most nauseous things that can be thought on, to please and humour their Patrons."² The close connection between the political and the domestic application of the term is reinforced by the adaptation of the term patron to patroness in describing the employer of a domestic toady.

Though references to miserable humble companions are certainly to be found earlier, with the word toadeater, or toady, now available to describe the humble companion, the toadeater aspect of companionship could be even more readily recognized. Companions presented by earlier women writers were often sturdy and independent creatures or scheming adventuresses defying economic or social barriers in their determination to rise. Delariviere Manley in her autobiographical History of Rivella (1714) describes her six-month period as "favorite" to the Duchess of Cleveland as one in which she was afforded every indulgence; when the fickle duchess replaced her, she departed in dignity, after delivering a fine public reproach, to join a friend in the country and to commence her playwriting career by writing two subsequently produced plays.³ The companion in her tale "The Physician's Stratagem" (1720) is a devious and feisty inferior whose submission to her mistress, a count's daughter, is feigned. After having been seduced by the family physician, she takes her revenge by drugging her mistress so that the physician can secretly impregnate her and then win the family's gratitude by marrying the disgraced girl.⁴ This misfortune destroys the parents and renders their daughter miserable but profits the companion, whom the physician sells into servitude, nothing.

Another companion, Desideria, a gentlewoman of "Wit and Wantonness, but little Fortune," because of her gay humor and jauntiness, is welcomed into their homes for two or three months at a time by one great lady after another, where she "liv'd a Life very much to her Mind, in the midst of Balls, Visits, Musick, Intrigues and Admiration."⁵ She dupes a middle-aged soldier into marrying her but is caught in an intrigue, whereupon her husband kills her lover and immures his body in company with his ungrateful wife and her own companion. These companions, victims of the conventional sad fate awaiting disloyal subordinates, are not toadeaters, and Manley is an early example of the woman writer who understands the anger and revenge stimulated by the enforced social and economic inferiority of such women and hypocritically covered by manipulative charm.

The term toadeater, once introduced in its domestic application, soon became familiar. In 1746 Horace Walpole wrote from Windsor, "I am retired rather like an old summer dowager; only that I have no toadeater to take the air with me in the back part of my lozenge coach, and to be scolded."⁶ Francis Coventry referred in his 1751 novel The History of Pompey the Little to "Female Companions, or more properly Toadeaters"⁷ This sudden appearance of the word, used first in a political application, then almost immediately in a domestic one, must coincide with an increased consciousness of tyranny, or tyrannical power structures, in political and domestic contexts; and in both cases the contempt, though ostensibly turned upon the subjected ones, is contrived to discredit the tyrants who exact such humiliating servitude. An awareness of tyranny awakens most readily when one scrutinizes the advantages of one's oppressors or adversaries, and Walpole, son of an arch-tyrant (as he showed when he wrote The Castle of Otranto [1759]), had as little tolerance for his father's adversary William Pulteney (a good friend of Elizabeth Chudleigh and Elizabeth Montagu …) as for imperious old dowagers, just as Sarah Fielding had no tolerance for the companionship relationship. Political tyranny would continue to be recognized in the administrations of one's opponents, domestic tyranny in the power, however limited, of those who opposed one's will at home.

From 1744, when Fielding published The Adventures of David Simple, to 1814, when Frances Burney published The Wanderer, the figure of the humble companion as toady was subjected to considerable scrutiny in works of literature. In Fielding's novel The History of the Countess of Dellwyn, the companion, Miss Weare, considers marriage and companionship to be the only two options open to a lone young woman of no fortune, and the terms in which the two are discussed in The Adventures of David Simple strongly reinforce the notion that Fielding conflated these two resources as very similar in their degrading demands. Her hero, David Simple, is traveling the world in search of a true friend, when in the course of his adventures and education Cynthia is introduced to his notice as a companion so ungrateful that she has schemed to marry her patroness's seventeen-year-old nephew—an untrue allegation. When her patroness has sent her from the room on an errand and then vilified her, another lady describes the ingratitude of her own companion:

When she came to be old enough to be capable of being of service, she only desired the Wench to keep her House, to take care of her Children, overlook all her Servants, to be ready to sit with her when she call'd her—with many more trifling things; and Madam grew out of humour at it, altho' she never put the Creature at all on the footing of a Servant, nor paid her any Wages as such, but look 'd on her as her Companion. Indeed, (continued she) I soon grew weary of it; for the Girl pined and cried in such a manner, I could not bear the Sight of her. I did not dare to speak to the Mynx, which I never did but in the gentlest Terms, only to tell her what a Situation she was in, and how unbecoming it was in her to think herself on a footing with People of Fortune; for that she was left by her Father on the World, without any Provision, and was beholden to me for every thing she had. And I do assure you, I never talk'd to her in this manner, but she had Tears in her Eyes for a Week afterwards, (pp. 99–100)

David Simple has the curiosity to inquire into Cynthia's history and circumstances and learns from her that she had a fortune of £2,000 with which her father designed she would make a financially advantageous marriage. She describes to David her suitor's proposal and her own response:

I am none of those nonsensical Fools that can whine and make romantick Love, I leave that to younger Brothers, let my Estate speak for me; I shall expect nothing from you, but that you will retire into the Country with me, and take care of my Family. I must inform you, I shall desire to have every thing in order; for I love good Eating and Drinking, and have been used to have my own Humour from my Youth, which, if you will observe and comply with, I shall be very kind to you, and take care of the main Chance for you and your Children. I made him a low Court'sey, and thanked him for the Honour he intended me; but told him, I had no kind of Ambition to be his upper Servant; Tho', indeed, I could not help wondring how it was possible for me to escape being charmed with his genteel Manner of addressing me. I then asked him how many Offices he had allotted for me to perform, for those great Advantages he had offered me, of suffering me to humour him in all his Whims, and to receive Meat, Drink and Lodging at his hands; but hoped he would allow me some small Wages, that I might now and then recreate myself with my Fellow-Servants, (p. 109)

Both the patroness of the companion and the suitor for a wife require someone to manage the home, the table, the servants, and the children; both expect to be thoroughly humored at all times; neither recognizes the servitude imposed or compensates it with wages. For her plain thinking and plain speaking, Cynthia is disinherited by her father, and at his death she must become a lady's companion. At first her treatment is bearable, but

by that time I had remained with her two or three Months, she began to treat me as a Creature born to be her Slave: whenever I spoke, I was sure to offend her; if I was silent, I was out of humour; if I said anything in the softest Terms, to complain of the Alteration of her Affection, I was whimsical and ungrateful. I think it impossible to be in a worse Situation. She had raised my Love, by the Obligations she had confer'd no me, and yet continually provoked my Rage by her Ill-nature: I could not, for a great while, any way account for this Conduct: I thought, if she did not love me, she had no Reason to have given herself any trouble about me; and yet I could not think she could have used one for whom she had had the least Regard in so cruel a manner. At last, I reflected, it must be owing to a love of Tyranny, and as we are born in a Country where there is no such thing as public, legal Slavery, People lay Plots to draw in others to be their Slaves, with the pretence of having an Affection for them. (p. 115)

In both marriage and companionship, that is, women may be drawn in, under the false presumption that they are regarded and loved, to become slaves to lovers of tyranny. Their finest feelings of obligation are violated.

You cannot imagine what I felt; for to be used ungratefully, by any one I had confer'd Favours on, would have been nothing to me, in comparison of being ill used by the Person I thought myself obliged to. I was to have no Passions, no Inclinations of my own; but was to be turned into a piece of Clock-work, which her Ladyship was to wind up or let down, as she pleased, (p. 116)

In fact, it is the patriarchal family that is at fault.

I know not to what Malignity it is owing, but I have observed, in all the Families I have ever been acquainted with, that one part of them spend their whole time in oppressing and teazing the other; and all this they do … to shew their Power: While the other Part languish away their Days, in bemoaning their own hard Fate, which has thus subjected them to the Whims and Tyranny of Wretches, who are so totally void of Taste, as not to desire the Affection of the very People they appear willing to oblige, (p. 117)

I know of no other such analysis of the family in this period. Because Fielding had an important influence on Jane Collier, author of the locus classicus of the discussion of domestic tyranny, it is important to identify Fielding's ideas that a love of tyranny seems almost endemic to humans and that those who have the power in a family or a relationship will use it to impose misery on those who have not. Education was the tool that would, she hoped, abolish tyranny and encourage benevolence, as she demonstrates in The Governess (1749). Her friend Jane Collier shared her views.

Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier were girlhood friends in Salisbury, Sarah born in 1710 and Jane probably in 1714. Jane was one of the daughters of Arthur Collier, a learned but improvident Salisbury divine. Her brother Arthur, later a doctor of common law, specialized, in his earlier impecunious years and his later, in educating women in the classical languages and literatures. In educating his sisters and Fielding, he was apparently preparing them to become governesses. The two Collier sons were provided with professions, Arthur in the law and Charles in the army; but on their father's death in 1732 the two girls, Jane, aged seventeen, and Margaret, fifteen, were virtually unprovided for.⁸

In 1748 the sisters were in London living with their brother Arthur in Doctors' Commons, but their situation with him was evidently not satisfactory. Thereafter Margaret frequently lived with the family of Henry Fielding as governess to his daughters, and Jane was often with that of Samuel Richardson and by early 1750 was functioning as governess, companion, and friend. In February 1750 Richardson wrote to Lady Bradshaigh that he had walked with Miss Collier and his daughter Patty to North End, and shortly he informed her—she was suspicious of learned women—that Miss Collier was indeed an example "that women may be trusted with Latin and even Greek, and yet not think themselves above their domestic duties."⁹ Collier was still with the Richardsons when she wrote An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting in 1753, published in April by Millar. Generic satire by women in comparatively rare, and Collier's is fine satire, sustaining a witty, ironic appeal to reason. It has been suggested that Richardson assisted in the composition, but satire was not his forte. Martin and Ruthe Battestin have discovered another claimant to having rendered substantial assistance, an old family friend of both Collier and Fielding, James Harris.¹⁰ Richardson and Harris may have reviewed the manuscript and offered suggestions, but Collier's major assistance came from Sarah Fielding, who had made a close study of tyranny, had already expressed the important idea of the book, and was to collaborate with Collier on an allegorical and satiric novel, The Cry, in 1754. Collier's early intimacy with Fielding and their collaboration establish Collier as an important influence on the Bath community of women, though her early death—she was dead by 1755—may have precluded much personal contact with most of the community members.

Collier's model for the Essay was Jonathan Swift's Instructions to Servants (1746), which tells servants how to do their worst. Swift writes from the establishment point of view, Collier from the nonestablishment. Her first chapter, "Instructions to Masters and Mistresses, concerning their Servants," turns the tables, informing us satirically of the torments inflicted upon the serving class. The second chapter, the longest and most detailed in the book, "To the Patroness of a Humble Companion," is the fruit in part of her own experience, in part of her consultations about their mutual positions with Sarah Fielding, who undoubtedly influenced her opinions and edged her satiric sword. Decorously and elegantly Collier claims her right to her subject in a closing fable attributing a poem about the agony of being devoured to the lamb rather than to the lion, leopard, or lynx because "it is from suffering, and not from inflicting torments, that the true idea of them is gained."

Collier begins the book by noting Fielding's point that the love of tormenting is endemic among humans, adding that it must be either implanted in our natures or inculcated very early. Fielding and Collier believed that even if the trait of tormenting were implanted, education could help a great deal to curb tyrannical propensities; else they would probably not have written. Much of the work of the Bath group would have been pointless had love of tormenting been irrevocably implanted in our natures; they appear to have considered that the tendency to tyranny was present but that a proper education could control it. In regard to the proper education of children, in her chapter "To Parents," Collier advises, "If you see them possessed with a due degree of obstinacy, wilfulness, perverseness, and ill-humour; if you find, that the passions of pride, cruelty, malice, and envy, have, like rank weeds, flourished, for want of rooting up, and overwhelmed every spark of goodness in the mind; then may you (as my true disciples) rejoice in having so far done your duty by them, as to have laid the proper foundation for their becoming no small adepts in this our useful science." Education could help, and her satire is essentially educational.

By providing careful analyses of the abuses practiced by those in power against the powerless, Collier's satire is calculated to shame the punishers of the weak into adopting the more beneficent ways to which they were already hypocritically pretending. She begins her examination of the treatment of humble companions by wondering, since the love of tormenting is so prevalent, why more families do not take advantage of those well-educated but indigent daughters of the services and the clergy who make such splendid victims. They are, she points out to potential mistresses, much more vulnerable than servants: unlike servants, they receive no wages and are always on hand "to receive every cross word that rises in your mind"; like servants, they must bear the insults of mistress, dogs, cats, parrots, and children, but they must bear the insults of the servants too. They are thus the ideal victims of tyranny.

The companion-as-victim, however, must be carefully chosen. Wellborn and well educated she must be, and "the more acquirements she has, the greater field will you have for insolence, and the pleasure of mortifying her." The best choice will be one who has lived happily with tender and indulgent parents, has a tender heart and a meek and gentle disposition, "for if she has spirit enough to despise your insults, and has not tender affections enough to be soothed and melted by your kindness (which must be sparingly bestowed), all your sport is lost." Finally, the patroness must make a choice either of a companion of good sense but plainness or deformity or of one with beauty but a weak capacity; a companion with both good sense and beauty would be too formidable a target.

Collier then provides intricate directions for tormenting in either case. If the companion is a weak-minded beauty, you are to call her nothing but Beauty, Pretty Idiot, Puppet, Baby-face, and the like, accuse her of flirting with the servants, and when she weeps, ask her in what romance she has learned that tears are becoming. You are to attack both the girl's weak points and her strong ones—and are always to accuse her of having sweaty feet and a nauseous breath. If the victim denies this last, you are to say,

"Oh to be sure! you are too delicate a creature to have any human failings! you are all sweetness and perfection! well, Heaven defend me from such sweet creatures!" Then changing your tone and looks into fierceness, you may proceed: "I tell you, Madam Impertinence, whatever you may think, and how impudently soever you may dare to contradict me in this manner, that all your nasty odious imperfections, have been often taken notice of by many people beside myself, though nobody had regard enough for you, to tell you of such things.—You may toss your head, and look with as much indignation as you please; but these airs, child, will not do long with me.—If you do not like to be told of your faults, you must find some other person to support you. So pray, for the present, walk off to your own apartment; and consider whether you choose to lay aside that pretty, becoming resentment of yours; or to be thrown friendless, as I found you, on the wide world again.—You must not be told of your failings, truly, must you! Oh I would not have such a proud heart as thine in my breast, for the world! Though, let me tell you, Mistress Minx, it would much better become my station, than yours."

When the girl has gone away to her room, to prevent her leaving and escaping your ministrations, send your maid with sweetmeats, fruit, or anything she likes to report how kindly you have spoken of her and to coax her downstairs again. Then offer new clothes, a pleasant jaunt, or any pleasing indulgence and continue your kindness until the girl begins to blame herself and is ready for the next round of torment. The alternation of cruelty with occasional kindnesses, all without reference to the girl's behavior, is a positive necessity.

Collier's detailed instructions continue: If the companion is plain and of good understanding rather than a dull beauty, the mistress is to say she hates anything about her not pleasant to look at and is to accuse her of being a wit at least a hundred times a day. The companion should be induced to say that she is not greatly concerned about her plainness, and then, if she dresses well, she can be accused of vanity; if ill, she can be called "trollop, slattern, slut, dirty beast, &c." The patroness is often to observe "that all Wits are slatterns;—that no girl ever delighted in reading, that was not a slut;—that well might the men say they would not for the world marry a WIT." But she is also to remember that the more understanding the companion has, the more her chains have to be gilded over with real indulgences, and she must ever be shown great tenderness and affection before company so that if she departs, she can be accused of the highest ingratitude. Then, "Remember to keep her as much in your sight as possible; because the only chance of comfort she can have, is in being out of your presence."

In dealing with both kinds of companions, the patroness must note how the girl tries to please her and never appear pleased; if the companion is very obliging, she is never to be told what is wanted so that she can be stormed at when she does not guess. The patroness is to develop foibles, such as hatred of noise, so that the girl will often have to transgress; and she is never to listen to the girl's defenses after the servants or members of the family have complained against her. Finally there is the fine game of compassion: the patroness is to talk to her of her parents and her loss; dissolve her into tears with which she mingles her own; announce herself a second parent and protectress; then suddenly grow into a rage with her over nothing "to make the girl more sensible than before of the loss of indulgent parents, by the cruel reverse she now so strongly experiences."

In contrast to this excellent and experienced advice, Collier's chapter on husbands is brief and uninspired. She makes no attack on marriage, never suggests that it may be deleterious to women. Though she attacks tyranny in many forms in this book, she is the most cursory with the tyranny of husbands and is careful to name abuses that are either admittedly egregious or comic and not pernicious. First, she exempts from her discussion husbands in low life, who, she says, quickly break either their wives' bones or their hearts; next she exempts those in high life, who keep mistresses and ignore their wives entirely. Thus with jests, which nevertheless manage to suggest that there are no marital relationships worth consideration in the top and bottom sectors of society, she avoids confronting her subject. Concentrating then on husbands in middle life, she suggests that the husband may take the maid for a mistress; may smoke if it makes his wife sick; may express displeasure with all that comes to his table and praise all that he has eaten elsewhere; and may always come home in an ill humor. Such humiliation techniques are designed to convince the wife that she is unattractive, powerless, incompetent, and unappealing, but they are nothing compared to the subtle tactics practiced by the patroness. The latter, more refined psychological torments, however, were probably recognized by many a wife as those used by her husband upon herself, despite Collier's prudent restraints. It took only a little consideration to recognize that no matter how great the wife's fortune had been, marriage reduced her to, at best, an allowance dependent upon her good behavior and thus she was not so different from the companion: like the companion she received no wages; she was in fact her husband's humble companion. It was no secret that women were commonly rewarded with marriage for their ability to bear humiliation, as a backward glance at the marriage choices of the Reverend Mr. Myddelton and the Jamaican merchant and the remarks about marriage of Delany, Thrale, and Montagu demonstrate…. A recent popular book on male misogyny lists the strategies for torture available to Collier's patroness in a checklist designed to enable women to determine whether they are involved with misogynists: the nine points covered include the empowered one's assumption of the right to control; devaluation of the inferior's opinions, feelings, and accomplishments; yelling, threatening, or withdrawing into angry silence when displeased; reducing the inferior to "walking on eggs" to avoid offending; switching from charm to rage without warning; and blaming the inferior for everything that goes wrong.¹¹ The recognition in both systems of the importance of the strategy of arbitrary alternation of cruelty and kindness (in Susan Forward's system "switching from charm to rage without warning") in maintaining the inferior's confusion, insecurity, and vulnerability is striking as is the equal importance of devaluation, the belittling of the inferior's strong points, and the mockery of her weak points.

Comedy, said Horace Walpole, is addressed to those who think, tragedy to those who feel. Satire like Swift's derives its point from the fact that if one puts feeling or sensibility out of the question and uses only the measure of reasonable expedience, programs like that of the Modest Proposer are sensible and practical; but such satire seriously calls into question the use of no measure but that of reasonable expediency. So with Collier's satire: if we accept her proposed first premise that the love of tormenting is basic to our natures and that it is good to gratify it—a perverse negative expression of the Shaftesburian premise that love of benevolence is basic to our natures and that it is good to gratify it—then her instructions follow as eminently helpful and inspiriting.

Following the publication of Collier's Essay in April 1753—and its considerable success—Charles Hanbury Williams, the politician and wit, contributed an essay to the fashionable periodical the World on September 13, 1753, that was almost certainly inspired by Collier.¹² It purports to be the account, written by herself, of Mary Truman, the widow of an affluent tradesman, left with no more than £1,000, which, placed in the hands of a friend (rather than in safe government lowyield bonds), give her £40 a year on which she retires quietly into the country. There an old lady of great fortune, Lady Mary, takes a fancy to her and insists she come live with her. In the first year all goes well, but then the failure of the friend into whose hands the widow had placed her money ruins her, and she becomes truly dependent. She informs Lady Mary that she will now indeed be in need of all those proffered presents which hitherto she has refused, and on the instant she becomes plain "Truman." She is threatened when she breaks a teacup: "Do you think I can afford to have my china broke at this rate, and maintaining you into the bargain?"

Truman is now no longer a friend, but a complaisante, or humble companion, and a toadeater. She is constantly employed in fetching, carrying, ringing the bell, filling the pot, stirring the fire, calling servants, bringing water, and administering medicines. No one but she can please at preserving, pickling, and pastry. She makes up the linens, mends, washes lace, makes butter and cheese, and is scolded when any of this is improperly accomplished. The servants now refuse to respect or serve her, and at table she is forbidden to taste any dish that might appear again cold or hashed—beef, ham, venison, fowl, brawn, or sturgeon. She is allowed no wine, punch, or fruit. She is clothed in Lady Mary's old clothes and thus offends the lady's maid. She must ride backward in the daily airings, though it makes her sick. She must tend the favorite animals and is blamed for their accidents and illnesses. She is the only attendant allowed in her employer's illnesses and must have a perfectly sound tooth drawn to encourage Lady Mary to give up a rotten one. She must prepare and taste all physics, water gruels, and the camomile tea that Lady Mary takes (in contemporary terms) as a vomit, at which Truman must officiate, ruining her clothes in the process. Even Truman's moral autonomy is stolen: Lady Mary tells lies to company and makes Truman attest to their truth and forces Truman to judge her right in all contests so that the neighbors too detest her.

Williams made an important point about the violence done Truman's integrity when, against her own moral judgment, she is forced to support Lady Mary's erroneous views. But though he noted this violence, like Collier he failed to face squarely the truly deleterious effect of toadyism on the character of the toady, when she has at last become no longer indignant about such violation and no longer cares for the truth. Nor had Sarah Fielding employed that theme in The Adventures of David Simple. It may have been introduced by Fielding in 1759 in The History of the Countess of Dellwyn with the character of Miss Weare. That forced subservience to the moral judgment of the tyrant hurts the character of the oppressed was an important idea. It obviously meant that being a humble companion was morally injurious, and it implicitly meant that being a wife was equally so. Though women authors were subsequently to be consistently concerned with the evil effects of toadyism on the subordinated partner, in 1753 no such inferences distinguished Collier's work from Williams's essay. Nevertheless, there is a discernible gendered distinction between their approaches. Williams's tale is cautionary, exposing a wrong version of woman, that is, a woman given complete autonomy who then shows herself unworthy of that autonomy. Lady Mary's change of attitude toward Truman occurs instantaneously at the precise moment when Truman loses the power to leave her and when a woman of proper sensibility would have become most benevolent and kind. Williams recognized the propensity of humans to curb their autocratic and tyrannical tendencies when they have no power to express them and then to express them on the instant when the occasion arises—but he appears to be assigning that propensity only to women. His essay is characteristically midcentury in the suspicion it casts on the irrational nature of woman, a creature not to be entrusted with authority but not yet defined as by nature docile and altruistic. Williams would instead support the more realistic thesis that if docility in women is desired, it must be imposed early, and the imposition sustained wherever and whenver possible. His essay, though comic, suggests that women like Lady Mary (who incidentally may share some character traits with his own estranged and independent wife, Lady Frances, who had recovered her own fortune after having contracted venereal disease from him) should not be empowered to the point of anything resembling autonomy; he implicitly warns men to correct the vicious tendencies of women toward domination. Collier's book, by contrast, dealing with tyrants of both sexes and many kinds, is a warning to humankind to recognize and curb its endemically vicious tendencies. And in general from this point onward male authors dealing with the topic of humble companionship were to attack the termagant mistress and depict the victimized companion as an angel of complaisance; it was a splendid way of endorsing the ideal of complaisant womanhood.

Sarah Fielding and Collier both were endorsing the Shaftesburian or sentimental system, which assumes that sympathy and benevolence toward others are potential characteristics in all humans. They would not have bothered to protest against domestic tyranny had they not thought so. In this regard at least they fulfilled the growing expectation that women exalt sensibility as the highest human attribute. At the same time they suggested that when men and women reached this highest form of consciousness, they would be recognized as equals in such important matters as moral judgment and emotional relationships. Williams, however, endorses no such system, which would do away with male prerogative. His agenda is to underscore the unnaturalness in a woman of tyrannical behavior. If Lady Mary had been a husband and Truman his wife, much of that tyrannical behavior would have appeared entirely normal. Any wife was expected to attend her husband at all hours, to see to the pickling and preserves, to nurse him in illness, to support him in company. Lady Mary's more extreme abuse, such as the denial of food and the drawn tooth, would therefore show up the inappropriateness of allowing a woman to assume a male's prerogative.

The great question, addressed by Fielding and Collier, was whether human nature was such that anyone could actually enjoy the moment-to-moment business of humiliating and hurting an assigned inferior, rendering the inferior's entire life miserable. The answer of both women was yes, but their efforts demonstrate that they considered the situation remediable by implementing the development in people of altruism to temper their aggressiveness. Collier's satire, which includes a chapter addressed to wives with instructions on tormenting husbands and a long chapter to parents explaining how to torment their children—demonstrating a very early consciousness of the abuse of parental power—proves that she considered tyranny a problem endemic to the human condition. Unlike Williams, who fully enjoyed his own privileges, both women sought to abolish tyranny, to educate it away.

Sarah Fielding's Miss Weare had demonstrated the bad effects of toadyism on the subordinate, an important aspect of the problem of tyranny, by the time Scott took up the subject. Forced to countenance and abet a morally despicable employer because of a refusal to give up the comforts she provided, Miss Weare becomes cowardly and dishonest in every particular. She has given up her own moral standards and autonomy. This insight into the damage done the character of the companion (or wife)—no deferential angel, as these women see, though she may act the part—is often thenceforward an important component of discussions of companionship by women.

… In the circumstances surrounding the evolution of the ideas of Fielding and Collier there is ample evidence to suggest that new insights such as the recognition that hierarchical social relations instigate moral damage in both the empowered and the powerless are often generated not so much by individuals as in community. For women the circumstances in which Fielding and Collier found themselves—they were educated equally to most upper-class men, in propinquity to each other, unmarried and partially dependent upon their brothers, and desirous of earning money and independence by writing—were extremely rare. The creativity of their response to these circumstances helps to elucidate the great handicap under which most women who were ambitious to write or to think labored, isolated as they were in domestic settings where they were expected to do womenly tasks, comparatively uneducated or self-educated, without contact with others like themselves….

Notes

¹ Walpole, Correspondence, 17:487 and 20:39.

² Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple, ed. Malcolm Kelsall (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 113. Subsequent references to this work will be by page numbers in the text.

³ Delariviere Manley, The Adventures of Rivella; or, the History of the Author of the Atalantis (London, 1714), pp. 31–40; reprinted as The Novels of Mary Delariviere Manley, ed. Patricia Koster, 2 vols. (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1971), 2: 729–856. Subsequent references to this work (as AR) will appear by volume and page number in the text. Manley's mistress-companion relationship here is conceived with reference to the Restoration model of the game of love: a short period of favoritism followed by rejection and recourse to a new favorite. The eighteenth-century model was that of marriage: a short honeymoon after which the relationship continued with tyranny and abuse. In the first case the mistress is gratified through a series of "romances," in the second through the abuse of a reliable victim.

⁴ Delariviere Manley, "The Physician's Stratagem," in The Power of Love: In Seven Novels (London: John Barber and John Morphew, 1720), pp. 141–74.

⁵ Manley, "The Husband's Resentment. In Two Examples," ibid., pp. 229–71. Though published as late as 1720, and though demonstrating Manley's consciousness that wifely adultery was not acceptable, Desideria attended various ladies for short periods according to the Restoration model of affairs rather than marriage and took a lover in the same spirit.

⁶ Walpole., Correspondence, 19:298.

⁷ Coventry, History of Pompey the Little, p. 43.

⁸ As in the case of the Fieldings and the Robinsons (Sarah Scott's family), only the boys were provided with professions as a means of livelihood. In all cases the daughters lived in greater penury than their brothers. Arthur Collier became an advocate in Doctors' Commons and was one of the counsels who advised Chudleigh to make her bigamous marriage …; Charles Collier was thought to have reached the rank of colonel in the army (see Robert Benson, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Rev. Arthur Collier [London: Edward Lumley, 1837]). Parish records for Collier's parish, Steeple Langford in Wiltshire, show Arthur born October 13, christened October 27, 1707; Charles christened February 25, 1712; Jane christened January 16, 1715; and Margaret born at Salisbury August 7, 1717, and christened there September 2. For this information I am indebted to Miss Rundle of the Wiltshire County Record Office. See also Robin Jarvis, "Jane Collier," and Amelia Whitehead [Betty Rizzo], "Margaret Collier," in Janet Todd, ed., A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers, 1660–1800 (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985).

⁹The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, ed. Anne Letitia Barbauld, 6 vols. (London: Richard Phillips, 1804), 4: 371–74 and 6:79. Subsequent references to this work will be by volume and page number in the text. Lady Bradshaigh had written: "Great learning would make strange work with us. You know we are to submit and obey; and it is as much as ever we can do, often more, in our inferior state of knowledge" (ibid., 6:71). In other words, learning made submission more difficult for women.

¹⁰ Martin C. Battestin with Ruthe R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 392 and p. 665, n. 218, which notes that Harris's daughter Katherine heard that her father "had written great part of the Art of Tormenting."

¹¹Susan Forward and Joan Torres, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them (Toronto: Bantam, 1986), p. 10. Forward and Torres identify as misogynists men who in the eighteenth century might have seemed normal or mildly authoritative patriarchs.

¹² Collier's book was advertised as "This Day" in the DA, April 19, 1753. William's essay is attributed to him in the preface to the World, in A. Chalmers, ed., British Essayists, vol. 26 (London, 1802), p. xlviii….