SOURCE: Introduction to The History of Sir George Ellison, The University Press of Kentucky, 1996, pp. ix–xlii.

Sarah Robinson Scott was born to many advantages of education and upbringing that made her a writer, but if she had not needed the money, she would scarcely have turned out the nine books (at least) that made her a professional author.

In 1712 her father, Matthew Robinson (1694–1778), of Edgeley and West Layton Hall in Yorkshire and of a younger branch of a respectable Yorkshire family, married Elizabeth Drake (c. 1693–1746), a Kentish heiress, daughter of Councillor Robert Drake of Cambridge. Together they produced twelve children of whom seven sons and two daughters survived. In Yorkshire were baptized Matthew (1713), Thomas (1714), probably Morris (c. 1715), Robert (1717), Elizabeth (1718), and Sarah (1721); at Cambridge were baptized William (1727), John (1729), and Charles (1731).¹ It was a family of clever, loyal, close-knit siblings, most of whom remained intimately connected throughout their lives.

Elizabeth Drake Robinson's mother, Sarah Morris Drake, had married as her second husband, Dr. Conyers Middleton, the noted Cambridge scholar. The Robinson family spent some part of each year in Cambridge, and Middleton took considerable care with the education of all the children including the two clever girls. There were so many children that the family could not afford to live in London, Matthew Robinson's place of preference. Their circumstances became an additional advantage to the children, however, since, in order to make do in the country, their father turned the family into a club in which witty debate and contention for superiority in argument were the chief diversion. Elizabeth Drake Robinson became known, for her moderation, as "The Speaker."

The capacities of the elder children flourished under these unusually propitious influences. Matthew, Thomas, Elizabeth, Sarah, and William all are noticed in the Dictionary of National Biography (Morris, John, and Charles are briefly noted under their brother Matthew's entry), and all appear to have capitalized on impressive rhetorical and writing abilities. Matthew, who inherited his mother's Kentish estate of Mount Morris, or Monk's Horton, entered Parliament and was an author of political pamphlets; Thomas wrote a classic legal text before his early death at thirty-three; Morris studied law and became a solicitor; Robert was a sea captain for the East India Company and died in China in 1756; Elizabeth Robinson Montagu became a famous blue-stocking, business magnate, and author; William, a clergyman, was a lover of literature and close friend of Thomas Gray; John by 1749 was mentally ill and seems never to have recovered; Charles went briefly to sea with Robert, then entered the Middle Temple and after being called to the bar became recorder of Canterbury in 1763, a bankruptcy commissioner, and M.P. for Canterbury from 1780 to 1790.

By the 1730s the family had removed entirely to Mount Morris. Elizabeth and Sarah, the only two girls, were each other's intimate companions. "Remember the days," Elizabeth wrote in 1749, when the sisters were no longer of one mind, "when as Hermia says, we set on one stool, work'd one sampler, &c. and you will then imagine how much the happiness of your sister depends on you."² The girls were precocious, but not as precocious as has been imagined: their baptismal records show that Elizabeth was two years and Sarah three years older than had been previously recorded. In those early days their good looks and vivacity were so similar that Sarah was known as "Pea," for "peas in a pod," or as Bridget, as a complement to Elizabeth's nickname "Fidget." Yet Sarah's two nicknames, both contingent on comparison to Elizabeth as model, also suggest that she was the copy and Elizabeth the original. The distinction between them grew clearer when Elizabeth struck up a friendship with Lady Margaret Harley, daughter of the Earl of Oxford, and, after Lady Margaret's marriage in 1734 to the Duke of Portland, enjoyed London society as companion to her friend. Sarah, left alone in the country, wrote loving, sometimes longing letters, but Elizabeth, intent on establishing herself in another life, could no longer reciprocate whole-heartedly. Sarah's cry of pain at her desertion in October 1741 helps to explain a lifelong motivation for her writing: "The love of writing you see, enters into me as soon as you go out of the house; while you are with me I have all I desire, content is then my companion: but when you are gone I can't help writing in hopes you will send me some return for the affection and spirits that are gone with you, all of me that is portable you carry with you."³ Elizabeth, however, happy in her liberation, was at the same time writing to her cousin and mentor, Dean William Freind, "Her Grace has a friendship for me I can never find in any one else; nor indeed would it give me the same pleasure from any other person; because then I must be ungrateful, as it would be impossible for me to love any one as I do her. The duty and love I owe at home will make me leave her next spring, but (which is a secret) I do not propose to do it before."⁴ Elizabeth would subsequently regret and revise this priority of affection, but Sarah would never recover from its effects or entirely forgive.

By this time Sarah could no longer have hoped to follow her brilliant sister into society. The distancing of the triumphantly successful Elizabeth, celebrated in court circles for her liveliness and her wit, had been definitively emphasized when in April 1741 Sarah contracted the severe case of smallpox that ruined her complexion and her beauty. During her illness, for fear of infection Elizabeth was removed to the home of a neighboring farmer, from which she was not prevented by anxiety from writing the most amusing letters about a local conquest; the sisters were belatedly reunited in the open air, symbolically at a four-foot distance, without touching, and with Sarah's face veiled.

One of the most compelling preoccupations of Sarah Robinson Scott throughout her life was the relationship with her sister. Perhaps even without the catastrophe of the smallpox she had felt inadequate to the social challenge of equalling Elizabeth's triumphs. She may have been comparing the two in The History of Sir George Ellison, for she was never reluctant to denigrate Elizabeth's brilliant éclat: "Those who have specious manners, a good address, an easy assurance, and what we call the savoir vivre … have all the qualifications requisite to render them acceptable in the gay world; but such as are deficient in these particulars, however replete with unadorned good sense, integrity, strict honour, and general benevolence, will make but an indifferent figure there; and are much more judicious, when they fix in a less crouded scene" (GE, 191).⁵ Sarah was never comfortable at her sister's brilliant parties. After her smallpox it seems probable that she tried to adjust to the ruin of her beauty as Louisa Tunstall does in The History of Sir George Ellison. Louisa's vivacity had been so unbounded as to incline her mother "to think that the ravages a very severe small-pox had made in her face was no small blessing…. but, fortunately … the extreme plain ness of her face … made her much disregarded, and in some measure damped the redundancy of spirits which, if animated by vanity, might have proved dangerous" (GE, 199). Louisa accepts this view of the matter and becomes a serious student, acquiring French, Italian, Latin, Greek, geography, astronomy, geometry, history, and philosophy, and there is reason to suppose that Sarah Robinson occupied herself in the same way, thanking God for having saved her from frivolity with smallpox, as did Harriot Trentham in Millenium Hall:

In a very short time she became perfectly contented with the alteration this cruel distemper had made in her. Her love for reading returned, and she regained the quiet happiness of which flutter and dissipation had deprived her without substituting anything so valuable in its place. She has often said she looks on this accident as a reward for the good she had done … and that few benevolent actions receive so immediate a recompense.⁶

In making these radical adjustments, Sarah differentiated herself yet further from her sister, who studied in order to display her knowledge and intellect and read all the fashionable new performances in order to dis play her brilliance, whose spirits were in fact (as her friends were later to admit) animated by a vanity that grew inordinate.⁷

Elizabeth, however, in 1741 had a genuine use for all her assets. The family had developed a problem, perhaps to do with the growing incapacity of Mrs. Robinson, who was to die five years later, probably of cancer; and Elizabeth sought the opportunity to escape, and if possible to be useful to her siblings, by marrying. In August 1742, at twenty-three, she married the rich fifty-year-old Edward Montagu, grandson of the first Earl of Sandwich and a coal magnate. Almost at once she brought her three youngest brothers, aged about fourteen, thirteen, and eleven, from their York-shire school to the Montagu home at Allerthorpe for their holidays: though probably visited by their parents, they had not been home—perhaps because of the distance—for five years and were virtually unknown to their sisters.⁸

As a result of Edward Montagu's intercession, William and Jack were sent forthwith, in January, to Westminister School, and Charles was sent to sea with Robert (LEM, 2:226). Elizabeth Montagu also conscientiously sought to make a home for Sarah, who had been with her since her marriage and was present to welcome the boys, but who increasingly resisted living with the Montagus, though after 1746 their home appears to have been her base and the repository for her clothing. The two sisters would never cease to love each other—as time passed Elizabeth seems particularly to have yearned after Sarah—but their increasingly divergent courses were now irrevocably set.

That Sarah did not do the usual thing after her mother's death and find a home with her father, who moved to lodgings in London and then to a house, or with her unmarried eldest brother, who was now the master of her old home, Mount Morris, or with her sister, is indicative of her obstinate and self-sufficient integrity. Her father, a rather bawdy roué as well as a wit, may already have begun that liaison with his housekeeper that was to set the tone for his last years, and her brother, a brilliant but eccentric recluse on whom Sir William Ellison is apparently modeled, could accommodate neither her company nor her housekeeping, which he managed on his own plan. Elizabeth Montagu usually insisted on her prerogative as elder sister to direct Sarah's choices, which may have rendered her constant company oppressive, and Sarah could not but have observed that her own abilities did not shine in the fashionable world.

Sarah Robinson nursed her mother till her death but afterward was a wanderer, sometimes staying with the Montagus, sometimes visiting such Kentish friends as Caroline Scott Best or her cousin Lydia Lumley Botham, and once visiting Tunbridge with her father. In December 1747 she went to Bath with the Montagus. Her headaches, a lifelong affliction, were somewhat alleviated there, and when in May 1748 the Montagus went home, Sarah stayed on. She had met and struck up a sympathy with Lady Barbara Montagu, an invalid with heart problems, younger even than herself, and the daughter of the first Earl of Halifax.

Of Lady Barbara, her cousin George Montagu was to write after her death, "She was the one I always loved and passed all my youth with in daily gaiety and joy, for she had all the wit and humours of the family, generous, and beneficent; her constitution so delicate that her life has been a sufferance for many years."⁹ Sarah Robinson had a slender provision from her father, Lady Barbara only a meager fortune of £5,000,¹⁰ and each needed a companion with whom to pool resources. More important, Lady Barbara had eschewed the fashionable life of her own sisters, and the two young women, both serious Christians, were of one mind as to how to live. In August 1748 Sarah Robinson moved into her friend's house in Trim Street and, with minor interruptions, the two remained together, part of an important Bath community of women, till Lady Barbara's death in 1765. They were almost indeed like "two lovely berries molded on one stem." The novelist's longing for an inseparable and equally devoted sister was thus, for years, to be satisfied.

In these early days, however, she was not yet committed to the idea of a celibate life in a community of women, for she was in love with the brother of her friend Callie Scott Best. George Lewis Scott was a great burly man of multiple talents twelve years her senior who, though a member of the bar, had as yet no prospect of supporting a wife. The Scott family of Canterbury had been friends of the Robinsons, and Sarah had known George Scott well for many years. She may have been recollecting his courtship of her in the courtship of Louisa Tunstall by Mr. Blackburn that took his object so by surprise: "The uncommon qualifications of Miss Louisa, the excellence of her temper, heart, and understanding, had entirely captivated his affections, and given him such a prejudice in favour of her person, that although he perceived she had no beauty to boast, yet he thought it perfectly agreeable" (GE, 220).

The couple awaited only a subsistence in order to marry, although Sarah had no intention of deserting Lady Barbara, who was to live with them, as was indeed appropriate at the time. In these circumstances Sarah Robinson showed her resourcefulness. Her sister vehemently opposed the match, and perhaps not entirely on grounds of the impecuniosity of the pair, for her husband knew George Scott well. But Sarah Robinson was able to rouse her cousin Anne Knight Cresset to enlist her husband, James Cresset, secretary to the Princess of Wales, in her fiancé's aid, and with the help of others as well, he was in 1750 named sub-preceptor to the Prince of Wales. In the mean time Sarah had determined to do what she could herself, and wrote her first novel, The History of Cornelia, which was published by Andrew Millar on April 19, 1750, according to an advertisement in the Daily Advertiser.

In The History of Cornelia, the rich and beautiful heiress Cornelia is the object of the passion of her guardian uncle, who attempts to abduct her. In order to elude his pursuit she must leave home alone and incognito and remain so. A wanderer in the world without an identity (as female identity depended upon relationships with males), no longer afforded the protection of the patriarchal roof, she undergoes many trials and adventures including imprisonment, attempted rape, disguise as a university student and tutor, and romance with the worthy Bernardo, whom eventually she marries. For Sarah Scott marriage is no success unless the community benefits; and this couple makes the whole neighborhood happy by perfecting their own hearts, educating their offspring, loving one another without abatement, and distributing their money to all in need.

Scott in this novel poses the same question that other women writers like Charlotte Smith, Frances Burney, and Mary Brunton were later to pose: if absolutely free of all patriarchal supervision/oppression, absolutely on her own, how might a woman fare? Cornelia fares well, and for subsequent writers Scott's novel is an important influence. Moreover, as has been noted, although the book precedes Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764), it is almost Gothic.¹¹ That is, it expresses the oppression of the abusive and tyrannical patriarch, whose relentless will motivates the plot, and the failure under his aegis of the family unit. In order to disguise the indictment of the English social hierarchy, it utilizes symbolic (distancing) scenes and situations such as a continental setting, immurement in castles, abductions, and attempted rape. An element Radcliffe may have found here and used in The Mysteries of Udolpho is the calumniation of the hero as a libertine, so that having found him, Cornelia must demonstrate her moral strength and rational control over passion by rejecting him and continuing on her lone adventures again. The Gothic element missing, however, is the terror of the heroine resulting from imaginative powers which she must learn to subordinate to her reason; Cornelia instead is consistently fortitudinous, resourceful, and rational. The book in some ways expresses Scott's sense of her own situation, forced from home by failures of her family into the world where as a woman much on her own she must certainly have encountered perils, and opposed in her wish to marry by a sister who calumniated her lover. It expresses as well her determination to cope and survive.

The novel was no great success and probably did not earn enough to hurry Scott back to her desk, though she may already have been working on the tales that comprised her next book. At any rate, employment was found for George Scott at the end of 1750. The couple married on June 15, 1751, at St. Michael Bassishaw in London, and moved into a house in Leicester Square close to Leicester House, the residence of the Prince of Wales.

The remarkable thing about this disastrous marriage is that instead of dragging miserably on for thirty years and draining all of Scott's energies, which would have been the usual event of a mismatch, it ended dramatically nine months later with her removal from under her husband's roof by her father and brothers—an extreme and almost a unique response to marital incompatibility, and a response in which she must have been fully complicit, even instrumental. A wife's fleeing from her husband would have been of no legal significance whatsoever, but the involvement of the Robinson males, of whom Matthew Robinson Sr. and Morris were trained at the bar, made the separation—there would be no divorce—decisive. George Scott and the two Robinsons settled the finances: George Scott returned half of his wife's fortune to her father and undertook to provide her with £100 a year. Considering Elizabeth Montagu's later claim of responsibility for this extraordinary event (see below) it is indeed possible that in it she finally had her way—something she was always willing to labor hard to achieve—about the marriage.

The explanation for this debacle, however, was never publicly provided. As George Scott's employment was so very sensitive, his reputation had to be protected, and the stipend he paid his wife guaranteed her family's discretion. A silence fell into which Montagu whispered that "she and the rest of her friends had rescued her [sister] out of the hands of a very bad man, but for reasons of interest they should conceal his misbehaviour as much as possible," but that her sister was "very innocent."¹² George Scott's "explanation" to the Princess of Wales, retailed to Montagu by Scott as a ridiculous fiction, was that because of her brother Jack's madness she had broken their engagement, whereupon he had instead agreed to a celibate marriage, a condition he had found difficult to keep. The implication was that she had been removed because he was importunate, though the princess, very much the husband's advocate, was also making remarks about Sarah Scott's untoward extravagance in "setting out."¹³ Perhaps Montagu touches most closely on the truth in a subsequent letter to Scott of autumn 1767 when Scott hesitated about signing a lease for Hitcham because she was a "femme couvert": "As to being femme couvert, helas vous ne l'etiez jamais," wrote her sister, and suggested she could sign as "you are posses'd of property yr nominal Husband cannot touch (I dont here mean a double entendre)." Montagu's implication that Scott's was indeed a mariage blanc because of George Scott's incapacity is evident, but that in itself seems not reason enough for the violence with which they were separated, and probably he was detected in some more heinous practice.

Both Scott and Lady Barbara, who had been with her throughout the marriage, went back to Bath; and Scott, now neither maid, wife, nor widow, might have been marginalized as one of those dim, unclaimed, peripheral ladies of no interest to patriarchal genealogies and conscious of her insignificance. Instead, she determined, now that she had shed the final male overseer, to make her life significant.

To the efforts she and Lady Barbara subsequently made, Sarah Fielding was an important contributor. Fielding, ten years Scott's senior, had thought out many of the problems women like herself faced and had dealt with them in her writing. There was a great advantage to being unmarried, these women knew, because only unmarried women were free to work toward their own ends. And in regard to work they refused to be hampered by delusions of their own gentility. It became an important tenet of Scott and her circle that any honest labor became a lady or gentleman who needed a subsistence, and that no work was demeaning that was useful. In The History of Sir George Ellison the importance for both genders and all classes and ages of devoting one's life and most of one's time to meaningful work is consistently emphasized. Scott therefore out of financial necessity—her husband's stipend and her father's allowances (varying bits of money) would not go far—determined on a useful life of both writing and social experiment to remedy insofar as she could the injustices to which the events of her own life and the lives of the members of her circle had made her sensitive.

Her conclusions were shared by a small but powerful community of immense importance to her. Sarah Fielding, still writing herself, was a crucial member. Lady Barbara functioned almost as an alter ego, helping Scott build an excellent library, reading, discussing, and writing. Elizabeth Cutts, herself an occasional author, was an important member; so were the less well-defined (though only to us) Miss Arnold, a young, rather gay and fashionable woman who later wrote history, and Mrs. Adams. At Batheaston just outside of Bath, with her friend Margaret Mary Ravaud, lived Margaret Riggs, the hearty daughter of Captain Southwell Piggott, who had flirted with Scott at Bath.¹⁴ She was mother of the future Lady Miller of Batheaston vase fame.¹⁵ Riggs and Ravaud were soon to draw Scott and Lady Barbara to Batheaston. These women shared an important idea of community, based on writings by Mary Astell and Sarah Fielding among others, which inspired them to work together, to incorporate many colleagues and clients temporarily or permanently, and to annex many influential friends.¹⁶ The crucial point was that only women personally disconnected from the control of men could study, talk, think, work, and write as they themselves determined. It was for this reason that Astell had originally suggested a college, rather like a convent, for women. But Scott and her circle detested the very idea of a convent; they believed women should work as much in the world as possible and did so themselves to a greater extent than did the fictitious women of Millenium Hall.¹⁷

Perhaps it was also among these women that Scott became a committed politician, studying the political events of the time and taking a great interest in the minutest alterations in government, as letters abroad to her brother William and his wife in the early 1760s demonstrate. Her trespasses on this male domain would be tactfully presented in her histories, but she was by no means confined in her interests to feminine benefactions.

Scott's biographer, Walter Crittenden, has identified what he considers a neurotic tendency in her to change her habitation. Although a certain restiveness may have been involved, in fact most of her moves can be attributed to one of two relentless conditions, ill health and poverty. She and Lady Barbara were constantly in search of cheaper satisfactory housing that would not exacerbate their ailments. When after trying a variety of houses and lodgings in Bath they moved into a farm house in Batheaston in 1754, they were, for the time being, entirely happy. Batheaston was a delightful spot, and Lady Barbara, who had secured the lease, erected a tent at the bottom of the garden overlooking the Avon; Bath was a two-mile walk along the river. Scott was always in best health in the country, and the tiny Batheaston neighborhood afforded the pair a well-defined arena for their social experiments.

Life even before Batheaston was busy, every moment filled. Social theories had to be put into practice, people in trouble befriended or taken in, servants helped through pregnancies, and babies boarded. The clients were of course endless. As early as 1752 Scott had been experimenting in employing the unemployable—two women servants, one totally deaf, the other mentally deficient. She and Lady Bab were already assuming responsibility for the unfortunate wherever they were met with. In addition, as she herself confessed, Scott loved ornaments and was a gifted painter and needlewoman, specializing in crewel. Both she and Lady Barbara painted and embroidered flowers, decorated various objects like the "toilette" she did for Montagu (which was sent to the Duchess of Portland for inspection), collected acorns, cones, and shells to make decorative swags for borders and walls; and probably marketed the results of their labors when they could. Each time they moved they took great pains with the arrangement of their home.

In Batheaston Scott and Lady Barbara put their schemes into a regular system so that when Montagu visited them in 1755 she thought (knowing the history of the idea) that the household, because of its regularity, resembled a convent—an idea Scott would have repudiated. After an early rising and household prayers, Scott cut out the sewing work for the twelve poor girls whom she and Lady Barbara were schooling; the girls made childbed linen and clothes for the neighborhood poor. She taught them writing and arithmetic. A school for twelve boys was also provided, and on Sundays Scott held Sunday school for all the children before church. The poor women in the neighborhood knitted simple items that Scott and Montagu sold to their acquaintance (LEM, 4:17).

Somehow Scott found time for writing with the intent both of earning money for their projects and of disseminating her—or the community's—ideas, particularly about the forming of girls' values. In early 1754 two of her books appeared. One was a translation, published by R. and J. Dodsley on January 24, 1754, of a French novel by Pierre de la Place, La Laideur Aimable. As Scott and Lady Barbara read all the new publications, both English and French, Scott's interest in translating this particular novel was motivated by her desire to demonstrate to young women that worthy plainness in a woman is superior to charming beauty; but the book must also have been a gloss on her relationship with her sister. One of two stepsisters is beautiful and charming, the other plain and good. The pretty sister is chosen to go out into the world as companion to Mademoiselle de Beaumont, but because of her flirting is disgraced and dismissed. When the second sister is given her chance, she develops her good parts and is valued for them. She follows her father's orders and marries a man other than the one she loves, but eventually her husband dies and she is enabled to marry the man of her choice—and to bring happiness to an entire community. Her sister, however, corrupted by her own charms, is disgraced and has to retire to a convent.

The other book, A Journey Through Every Stage of Life, is supposed to have been "Drawn from Real Characters. By a Person of Quality" and in fact Scott demonstrably often did draw upon real characters. The book is a series of separate tales. The first and longest is the story of beautiful Leonora, who runs away when her stepmother tries to make her marry a fifty-year-old miser, taking with her a cruelly-treated dependent cousin and a servant, and seems to be a fantasy of what might have happened if Miss Melvyn of Millenium Hall had refused to marry the odious Mr. Morgan and had had female allies. Leonora, disguised as a clergyman, proves irresistible to women, preaches a sermon so well that a lady offers her marriage and a living, slips off to London as tutor to a young gentleman, in London becomes a beau and a successful painter, next a successful schoolmaster, and, in short, liberated from petticoats, successfully employs all the talents Scott possessed before she resumes her sex and wins the man she has come to love. It is a fantasy of liberation which can also be read as a reproach to a society that did not allow women to enter the professions.

Those few critics who have addressed themselves to Scott's fictions have noted her failure to utilize the humor and satiric wit so prevalent in her letters.¹⁸ Scott the novelist adopted a high moral tone that was very like that of Sarah Fielding. For one thing, Scott had adopted the Johnsonian tenet, best expressed in Rambler 4, that "it is … not a sufficient vindication of a character, that it is drawn as it appears, for many characters ought never to be drawn"; that when good and bad qualities are mingled in a writer's principal personages, readers begin to lose abhorrence of their faults; that, as Johnson added, "in narratives, where historical veracity has no place, I cannot discover why there should not be exhibited the most perfect idea of virtue." Novelists like Richardson, Sarah Fielding, and Johnson himself who take this line do not ordinarily indulge in levity.

And then, as a woman writer who needed to publish and earn, Sarah Fielding had not been able very often to indulge the irony, jests, and facetious tone her brother used to such good effect; women with wit were under suspicion of moral failure; even Elizabeth Montagu, that celebrated wit, had written, "I am sorry to say the generality of women who have excelled in wit have failed in chastity" (LEM, 3:97). She spoke in a climate in which the sexual freedoms and the wit associated with them enjoyed by such writers as Aphra Behn, Delariviere Manley, and Eliza Haywood had to be lived down and repudiated by a new, more respectable generation. The tone of Scott's novels, even more than of Sarah Fielding's, is therefore determinedly and deliberately earnest and worthy in a manner in which she, evidently, was often not, and the humor, irony, and fun so remarkable in her letters are far less obvious in her published works. Scott's biographer Crittenden gives one comic passage from Scott's second novel worthy of inclusion in any contemporary comedy, in which Mrs. Colraine learns that her new maid's name is Wilhelmina, disdains the whole as pretentious, and successively rejects each part: "Will, no, no, that is too like a Fellow, that will not do; let me die if I should not be scandalized; Will, bring me my Shift; Will, put me to Bed; Will, pull off my stockings; Oh! frightful! who would not think it a He creature?"¹⁹ and in her last novel Scott relaxes so far as to exhibit a comic Welsh family, but these broadly humorous passages are rare. Scott had ample talent to anticipate Burney's Evelina in satiric fun (and popularity), but women writers could not have risked that in the 1750s, when even Eliza Haywood was trying to live down the Haywood stigma.

Nevertheless Scott does consistently exhibit a sly wit in her novels, a wit that if it is not anticipated may be overlooked. Indeed, the witty first sentence of The Preface to Sir George Ellison is not without malice. Her wit often sparks the novel: in the observation that fools may always call a little fresh folly to their aid (26); in the satire on London citizens' taste (145–46); in the simile of children dressed with the assistance of pins and more full of wounds than the anatomical figure in an almanac (197 and note); in sentences like "Mrs. Grantham had little taste for the dignity of abstaining from the enjoyment of splendor" (187) and passages like that on the bill of mortality of beauty (201)—bill of mortality parodies were a familiar form of humor at the time.

Her letters, moreover, by way of proof of her abilities, are lively, amusing, at times malicious or even bawdy. She could cheerfully call her neighbor fool and coolly assess the advantage to him of the death of his wife: encountering Mr. Le Marchant at Tunbridge in 1747, she wrote her sister, "I enquired after Mrs. LeMarchant, which produced a countenance more dismal than any of Mr. Sable's Chief Mourners, with many other signs denoting affliction, from whence I gathered that he had cause to rejoice, & try'd to hide I did so for him by lengthening my chin as much as so short-a-faced woman coud contrive. I have had a visit from him this morning & as I touchd on none of the benefits he had lately receiv'd from Providence he was very chearful & agreable."²⁰ On her maid's little girl Nanny whom she was looking after,

I don't think little Nanny has a heart that can be soften'd, in short I am afraid she has nothing that people mean by a heart when they talk of it in any other light than a Surgeon wou'd do, but I see she will soon have sense enough to be a good Hypocrite. I don't think it safe to try the way you mention to soften her, for she has long had a Doll, & the only proof of affection she gives it is taking it to bed with her, & since tendering of her temper takes this turn, two sober virgins can't encourage it, indeed her Doll is of the feminine gender, but if she learns to shew her love in that way one don't know how far she may extend it in time. [9 Feb. (1749)]

In a letter in 1762 to her brother William, Scott is malicious about their cousin Richard Robinson, newly made Bishop of Kildare, who was to rise to be Prelate of Ireland, and whom all the Robinsons, Elizabeth Montagu in particular, spoke of publicly with the highest respect. She adds acid remarks about the bishop's younger brother Septimus, formerly preceptor to the king's younger brothers, now knighted and named gentleman usher of the black rod:

I hear our Cousin Robinson does not much like his Promotion to Kildare; I suppose he does not entirely relish rising step by step; all travelling is expensive, & I believe none more than the passing thro' the various stages of Bishopricks; but I think he may be contented to rise a petit pas; nature went but a slow pace when she made him, & did not jump into one perfection, so that his rising at all seems to proceed only from a want of any thing to stop him, according to the philosophical axiom that put a thing in Motion & it will move for ever if it meets with nothing to obstruct its course. Sr Septimus is tolerably contented with his fate in a World so regardless of real merit, & therefore so little likely to reward his superlative deserts. I hear that a Week before he had this blackrod given him (a proper reward for a Preceptor) he declared that whoever wou'd eat Goose at Court must swallow the Feathers; but now they have been so well stroked down at least, he finds they go down easily enough.²¹

To the same brother she wrote an account of the effects of a fashion edict:

A Court Dress is going to take place at St. James's, the same as in France, which greatly distresses the old Ladies, who are quite clamorous upon the occasion, at a loss how to cover so much Neck as the stiffened Bodied Gowns are made to shew, & which they are sensible is not very appettisante after a certain Age, and likewise how to supply the deficiency which churlish time has made in their once flowing Tresses. Some Younger Ladies to whom Nature has been rather a step dame than a kind Mother join in their lamentations, & London is in an uproar, the exultation of those who conscious of their charms rejoice in laying aside as much covering as possible being as little silent as the distress of the others; they look on this allowed display as a sort of Jail delivery to their long imprisoned Attractions, & as Beauty is Nature, insist that it should be shewn at Courts, at Feasts & high solemnities, where most may wonder at the Workmanship, & that fashion has been hitherto unjust in concealing part of the superiority Nature has bestowed upon them. The consumption of Pearl Powder will certainly be much encreased, for when there is such a resource even fourscore will exhibit a snowy breast, & the Corpulent Dowagers will unite the Lillies of the Spring with all the copious abundance of a later Season.²²

Scott's tone in these passages is remarkably like the tone of the witty Elizabeth Montagu in her own letters; apparently the suppressed Pea could still on occasion privately emerge, and perhaps what she had most to fight in her sister was her own likeness—for her only route to equality, even superiority, was through the high moral ground she was ever increasingly to take.

In general Scott seems to have written consistently but to have readied her work for publication only when she needed a sum of money for a particular purpose. For eight years, until 1762, she published no known books, but Lady Barbara and Scott as well were involved with Samuel Richardson in 1758–59 in a Lockeian project to publish a set of cards to teach children geography, chronology, and history "with greater Ease" as "an Amusement, rather than a Labour"; the cards, printed by subscription, included maps, accounts of the soil, climate, government, and manners, the chronology of England, France, Germany, and Turkey from the eleventh century, and short histories of these kingdoms.²³ The scheme was to benefit a poor aged gentlewoman of Bath, but the price, a guinea, necessitated by the great expense of printing, prohibited their sale save to the charitable subscribers.

Publishing, in fact, was a means the Bath group used to raise money for others. In 1759 Lady Barbara also paid for the publication by Richardson of a novel by an anonymous woman, The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House;²⁴ and in 1775 Elizabeth Cutts published her verses Almeria; or, Parental Advice to benefit two indigent persons. But a need for additional money of Scott's own was gradually emerging; Lady Barbara was in best health at Bath, where she could drink the waters, and her health was worsening. The two women went into lodgings at Bath at periods, particularly in the winter, but it was becoming apparent that the invalid needed to move permanently to Bath. Scott, suffering from painful arthritis that sometimes prevented her even turning in bed, in addition to her headaches, was in best health in the country. For a period in 1760 and 1761 Scott probably hoped to raise enough money to support two establishments. She could work swiftly, and soon after the death of George II on October 25, 1760, she had completed her History of Gustavus Ericson, King of Sweden, with an Introductory History of Sweden from the Middle of the 12th Century, "by Henry Augustus Raymond, Esq.," a book very positively received. Scott took the then conventional view of history that it ought to provide exemplary and cautionary models. She had always been a great reader, and her knowledge of and interest in her subject, an exemplary monarch of the sixteenth century, may also have derived from her work on the pedagogical cards. At the moment when the popular young George III had just succeeded, she pointedly presented the portrait of a model king who "left his kingdom furnished with every encouragement of industry, ample regards for knowledge, relief for the poor, and consolation for the sick and diseased, in the magazines, the schools, and the hospitals which he established." The work was timely and well reviewed—and Scott had her own (if oblique) opportunity to attempt the education of the monarch to whom her husband had been sub-preceptor.

It was probably in 1761 that she arranged with John Newbery to publish a series of works, most likely for a fixed sum that would have met her need.²⁵ The first of these works, The History of Mecklenburgh, was another timely work that provided the background of Charlotte, the chosen queen of the newly-ascended George III, and defended her forebears the Vandals as hospitable, benevolent, just, temperate, wholesome lawgivers. This work may also have derived from the historical and geographical work on the cards; it was published in March 1762 and dedicated (over Newbery's signature) to the new queen. It received excellent reviews. A Description of Millenium Hall, published by Newbery in November 1762, was also part of the larger, uncompleted scheme, and for it, as only a minor part, Scott had contracted for no more than £30. As the rest of the scheme was not realized, probably because her health or other commitments interfered, she failed to earn the money to save Batheaston. In the autumn of 1762 the friends gave up their home and moved to a new house on a high, airy Bath street.

A Description of Millenium Hall was, however, in spite of the derision of the Critical Review (which referred to the author's costive brain), Scott's most successful work. It is of course the novel of which The History of Sir George Ellison is the sequel. It is a Utopian work, descriptive of an ideal community, as the title suggests, and is a telling critique of the economics, inhumane values, and hypocritical Christianity of Scott's contemporary society. The community is centered in the Cornish home of the founders, a group of women who succeeded to significant fortunes which they pool to finance their various schemes, but it comprises enough variety of habitations and inhabitants to make a sizable village, which is conventual only in the sense that the organizers themselves must remain celibate to be effectual. They have organized a home for indigent gentlewomen, schools of various kinds, a retreat for exceptional persons who do gardening; cottages for the old, who are employed in gardening, nursing, and knitting; a carpet industry; extensive landscaping; a policy of decency to animals; and a sensible, ecologically balanced domestic economy. The women travel freely and visit abroad, foster marriages, nurture and educate the young. Into their environment wander two travelers, the returned Jamaican planter George Ellison and his thoughtless young companion, Lamont, and to them the community is gradually revealed and explained. The past histories of the women organizers provide the stories, which demonstrate the injustices and cruelties to women encountered in the world.

Scott lacked a strong inventiveness, and her acquaintance are often recognizably adapted for presentation in her novels—one can detect Mary Delany's experience in Miss Melvyn, for instance—but never is this so blatant as in the portrait of Elizabeth Montagu as Lady Brumpton in Millenium Hall. Lady Brumpton is an excessively vain patroness of parties at which wit is everyone's object and solid information considerably less obtainable. Moreover her name derives from Steele's play The Funeral, in which Lady Brumpton schemes to be heir to all her husband's possessions and guardian of his dependents—exactly what Elizabeth Montagu attained at her husband's death in 1775.²⁶ That Montagu forgave her sister, perhaps as the best way of repudiating the resemblance, cannot mean that Scott's graceless action—another effort to establish the moral differences between the two sisters—was not deeply felt by her. But the effect was to lead Montagu, who could bear no moral inferiority on her own part, for some years to try to win Scott's approval on Scott's own high-minded terms.

Millenium Hall may have been written in a month, but its well-considered content had been the work of the whole community of women for years. Lady Barbara is sometimes credited with co-authorship;²⁷ but her contribution was to the content, not to the writing, something Scott claimed for herself when she said she had written it in thirty days. The book firmly established Scott's reputation, and there were four editions within the next sixteen years. What Scott had not been able to do in this book, however, was to demonstrate how an ordinary family might apply her benevolent systems. The idea of presenting George Ellison, the visitor to the Hall, as a convert and follower of its philosophies may have struck Scott at once, but, typically, she did not publish her sequel until she was once more in need of funds for a special project.

In early 1763 Scott was treating with Millar for an unfinished geography that was to come out in the summer.²⁸ Perhaps the book was laid aside because in 1763 Lady Barbara was awarded a £300 pension on the Irish establishment—too late to save Batheaston but enough to ensure the comfort of the pair. But Lady Barbara's health had been steadily failing, and by the summer of 1765 she was dying; she was dead in August. Elizabeth Cutts was with Scott throughout the devastating ordeal and remained a faithful friend and support, but Scott had again lost in Lady Barbara the sister she had lost when Montagu deserted her twenty-five years earlier.

Scott, encouraged to the last by Lady Barbara, may have known already what she would do next: undertake a new community like Batheaston and, perhaps to raise money for the project, write the sequel to Millenium Hall. By October she had given up the cold, drafty, and expensive new house in which it was impossible to keep warm and moved into rooms in the house where Elizabeth Cutts lodged. She worked with care on The History of Sir George Ellison, exposing him to every common cross-purpose and eventuality to show how a Christian might really live. When the novel was published by Millar in April 1766, it was well received by the reviewers and the public, though with a general incredulity that such a character could be. (The Critical Review was complimentary but suggested that Ellison was an inferior derivative of Sir Charles Grandison.) Montagu's own close friend, the scholar Elizabeth Carter, who after one lavish encomium had rarely mentioned Scott to her again, noted that she had called on Scott and Miss Arnold in London in May, and from Kent in June declared, "Sir G. Ellison is in high reputation among our reading people here."²⁹

Throughout the latter part of 1767 Scott worked on the arrangements of the new community, abetted by her sister, who was eagerly determined to make as much a part of the scheme as possible, particularly as her husband seemed to be rapidly declining. Her letters of the period express a great warmth and longing for her sister, and a need to impress her with her millennial activities. From Denton in Northumberland she writes of having engaged a schoolmaster to teach reading and writing to her coal miners' boys and her plans to begin a school for girls as well (7 Oct. 1767). "I know," she adds," my brother Coal owners will hate me & abuse me for this, because it may in time oblige them to the like, but every one must be guided by the dictates of his own conscience." And she makes a point of her having incorporated the entire family of her steward, the poet James Woodhouse and his wife, her housekeeper, into her establishment, noisy children and all.

Only the practical arrangements for the community are noted in the sisters' correspondence and none of the plans for life and work, but Montagu referred twice to the community as Millenium Hall and once as "our Bower of bliss." Clearly Hitcham's inhabitants were to practice first the domestic economy, then the charitable activities of the Hall. The garden and the animal stock were to render the community as independent as possible; there was to be a democratic society run by rules and implemented by good will; and there would be a school, a Sunday school, and various schemes for employing the local poor. The house pitched upon was Hitcham House in Hitcham, Bucks, where Scott had once taken Lady Barbara for her health. It was only about two miles across the Thames from Maidenhead and about thirty miles from the neighborhood of the Montagus' Berkshire estate, Sandleford, just outside Newbury. Both Hitcham and Sandleford were near the Bath road, Hitcham about twenty-eight miles from London, Sandleford fifty-six, so that Montagu could take in Hitcham on her way to and from Hill Street. Anticipating using the house as a country retreat from her great establishments, and incidentally being identified as a prominent member of the community, Montagu was enthusiastically helpful. She would be one of the four major shareholders in the venture—with Scott, Cutts, and her newly widowed cousin Grace Freind—paying her £50 share but willing also to assume many other expenses. (She had in her husband's growing incapacity assumed full responsibility for his coal mines and other ventures, and had, as she liked to crow, much increased the profits.) If Sarah Fielding, now dying in Scott's lodgings in Miles Court at Bath, was well enough to join them, Montagu would pay her share. She would send her butler, Joseph Woodhouse (brother to her steward Woodhouse) over to inspect and oversee the preparation of the garden. She was at pains to find a proper gardener who could also protect "the virgins." She stocked the poultry yard from Sandleford and sent other livestock. As she loved eatable ice, she begged that the ice house be furnished with care. After twenty-five years of marriage, she was excited at the prospect of living once again with her sister even though—or perhaps, now, especially—on her sister's terms.

From the beginning there were formidable problems, many of them financial. Grace Freind, widowed in November 1766, was insufficiently provided with money, so that the Hitcham scheme seemed ideal for her. Hitcham House and forty acres were available for £13 a year—probably a reduced rate—from her son, its owner, but were sublet to a tenant; both had to approve the lease. But Freind's younger son William (and perhaps her elder son Robert as well) was at odds with his mother and was delaying the lease to bring her to heel. His feckless sister Grace, whose father had bequeathed her £4,000 to be paid only at the death of her mother, had recently eloped with a conscienceless fortune hunter, Duncan Campbell, a lieutenant of marines, who now demanded a handsome maintenance in order to keep her and was probably jockeying for the payment of the entire fortune; in fact he extorted considerable sums, which his mother-in-law could not afford. William Freind—"a fool by nature, & a knave by habit" said Montagu—was his partisan. Another problem was that the Hitcham scheme, though simple, proved more expensive than Scott had reckoned, as a great deal of repair, putting in order, and bringing in of supplies was necessary before the desired domestic economy could be instituted. Then Edward Montagu, rather inconveniently, did not die as he had seemed about to do, but instead remained in precarious health, demanding his wife's attendance. Finally, Scott's own health was poor; she had been ill with headaches for months, had left Bath earlier that year for Bristol to seek help, and was still much impaired, in no condition to undertake the major work of organizing the community.

Hitcham was an L-shaped early seventeenth-century house with two stories, an attic, and a good garden.³⁰ Montagu consulted mightily with Scott about the furniture and contributed to the store. When the lease was at last settled, Scott had to delay moving in during the final illness of Sarah Fielding, who it had been hoped might be included in the scheme. Fielding died on April 9, 1768, and Scott, further worn down by nursing her friend, was in Hitcham shortly afterward. She was joined not only by Elizabeth Cutts and Grace Freind but also by Miss Arnold. A little testimony remains of how the spring was passed at Hitcham, where Montagu made a visit at the end of April and then sent her respects to "the happy spirits of Millenium Hall," thanking Scott for "ye pleasing hours you gave me in yr millenium, as it resembles yr millenium in quality I wish it did so in quantity." In spite of the difficulties, it seems a good start had been made.

Scott's health, however, worsened under the strain, and in August she was in Chelsea at the establishment of Dr. Dominiceti, who offered a regimen of medicated baths and fumigations for almost every ailment.³¹ She was accompanied to London by Cutts and Arnold, which left Grace Freind alone too long at Hitcham. In October Scott was still in Chelsea but planning to let some of the land at Hitcham and buy in some cattle; at the end of November, back in Hitcham, she announced the end of the experiment: "I would cherish any chance of continuing at this place coud it be done, but even coud the expence be brought within proper bounds, I see not how it coud be." If she could keep it on without Grace Freind, Freind, now impoverished, would wish to stay on as a boarder, and Scott would not have her now "on any account" (Nov. 30, 1768). Freind had brought her daughter into the house, perhaps at the occupants' expense, for Montagu responded by noting her disillusionment in Freind (whom she had loved and respected from childhood), her sorrow that Freind and her family had drawn Scott into such expense, and her rage at Freind's behavior to Cutts. In fact, Grace Freind, in a desperate attempt to provide for her foolish daughter, had rendered the Hitcham experiment no longer feasible. A new tenant had been found to assume the lease, and Montagu was already eagerly looking for a new location for their scheme. But though many houses were investigated with vigor, none was ever taken.

In the end, perhaps, it was Scott's ill health that most critically injured the project; her absence for almost four months had left their weak link, Grace Freind, the only member with double loyalties, alone and at the mercy of her children, who wished to use Hitcham as a convenient home for the Campbells and perhaps considered that their due. Scott was now forty-seven and would probably never again have the energy or the consistent good health for an undertaking of which she was the driving force and inspiration. Had she been able to be present, she, Arnold, and Cutts could have controlled Grace Freind. In those circumstances, shortness of funds might have prolonged the time necessary to establish the household economy but would not have destroyed the scheme. But the scheme was not renewed elsewhere, and henceforward Scott seems to have confined herself to proselytizing by writing.

She had never ceased to write. While at Dominiceti's she noted to Montagu that Cadell had refused a translation she had made, and at the end of December Montagu retrieved two manuscripts for her and sent one of them, a novel, to Cadell. No more is known of these works (though some may have appeared unrecognized as hers), and there may have been many others over which she labored, working on exemplary fiction, exemplary history, and geography. She was very ill in November 1771 but had at least three projects in train. One of these, the geographical work Carter mentioned, apparently came to nothing.³² Of the others, she published for herself her last novel, A Test of Filial Duty, issued by Carnan, in January 1772, and Edward and Charles Dilly published The Life of Theodore Agrippa d'Aubigné in May. A Test of Filial Duty, told in the letters of two young women, was written, Scott notes in a preface, to emphasize "one of the greatest duties of social life," "filial obedience … in the important article of matrimony"—a theme common to many of her works.³³ She was thinking of Grace Campbell when she wrote, "If I am so fortunate as by the following sheets, to be the means of saving one family from the complicated affliction which is usually the consequence of such [clandestine] marriages, I shall think myself greatly rewarded for my time and trouble." Two of her young women, though frustrated in their predilections, are patient, refuse to elope, and eventually marry as they wish, but a third elopes with unfortunate consequences.

Her last work, the life of Theodore Agrippa d'Aubigné, is both history and the biography of an exemplary Huguenot life, that of a Sir George Ellison with a political and religious cause. Like her other histories, it was highly praised.

After 1772 Scott is not known to have published again—though it is very likely that some of her works have escaped bibliographers—and seems to have lived quietly among her friends, visiting Bath, London, Tunbridge, and Sandleford, Montagu's Berkshire home. On Edward Montagu's death in 1775, Elizabeth Montagu settled an annuity of £200 on her sister, and on her father's death in 1778 Scott acquired the income for life of a Yorkshire estate and an additional annuity of £50.

In the winter of 1784–85 Scott spent three months with a Mr. and Mrs. Freeman in Norwich and found herself free of headache. Despite Montagu's objections at her removing so far from her friends, she then settled in Catton, just outside Norwich, in May 1785 and, though she continued to travel, made her home there for the remainder of her life.³⁴ She died there on November 3, 1795, at age seventy-five. After her death, her executor, at her direction, burned her private papers.

The reputation of Scott's writing in her own time was inextricable from her own reputation for piety and good works, as she intended; she lived the life that validated the work and pruned the work to validate the piety. Even before her marriage hers was a remarkably self-directed, uncompromising life. Scott demonstrated both what a woman could achieve in her time and the cost of the achievement. Her influence on her successors is to be tracked in their works; in the Wanderer figure utilized by Burney, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Brunton; in the Gothic plots of Ann Radcliffe, in the character of Louisa Tunstall in Sir George Ellison, adapted by Burney as Eugenia in Camilla; and in the phrase "sense and sensibility," which she may have been the first to use (GE, 220). Though her followers outdid her own novels, she was for them an important model.

The History of Sir George Ellison

The Sir George Ellison of this novel is not precisely the Ellison of Millenium Hall, a forty-year-old retired West Indian planter who revealed no particularly benevolent past. This new Ellison is thirty-five on his return and already remarkably attuned to the society he encounters. But his utility to Scott is clear: it is as if she thought, "Suppose we had the money and were of the sex who might carry out our plans within an ordinary family and neighborhood. Suppose we had the power to alter society rather than being crushed by it." If Sarah Fielding demonstrated that the community of The Adventures of David Simple was unable to protect itself, Scott intended that Ellison's would be stronger.

The History of Sir George Ellison (1766) contrasted English society in all its corruption to the society Ellison, a disciple of Millenium Hall principles, constructs in and around his home. Ellison, who has been absent from England for fifteen years—the course of his adult life—has returned a widower with one son and a fortune to discover his native society afresh in the traditional manner of the outside observer used by Montesquieu in the Persian Letters and Goldsmith in the Citizen of the World. In the course of the book he anatomizes and does what he can to amend the West Indian systems of slavery and education and the English systems of marriage, child rearing, the education and the status of women, charity, justice, imprisonment for debt, Parliament, the church's clergymen, and the treatment of the mentally alienated.

In the course of the book Ellison contrives to reform the condition of his slaves, establish a family with an ideal domestic economy, relieve and employ the poor of his neighborhood, educate all the young and assist them to appropriate marriage, reconcile neighboring families, instruct a farmer elevated to a dukedom in decorum and restraint, raise the status of educators and the clergy, and make annual tours of nearby prisons to relieve the worthy among the debtors.

Scott contrived to endorse a gradualist and meliorist approach to reform and to apply instrumental arguments, an approach which appealed to, reassured, and enlarged her audience; but her uncompromising revelation of the corruption of her society is clear-sighted, arresting, and hard-hitting. Ellison's own tolerance—"I am no leveller," he says—is contrived to procure Scott a hearing, but his analysis of such institutions as Parliament made the reviewers gasp.

Yet feminist critics of Scott's two Utopian works, particularly of the first, have reluctantly concluded that she was politically and socially conservative, endorsing the class and even the gender structure of her time.³⁵ A close study of Sir George Ellison suggests an alternative theory. When Scott's own model, Sarah Fielding, was publishing The Governess, a collection of tales exemplifying how to moderate character flaws in children, her printer, Samuel Richardson, knowing her opinion, argued that she should speak out against corporal punishment of children. Her friend Margaret Collier responded for her that though the book contained many sly hints, still "There is no occasion that she should teach the children so punished that their punishment is wrong."³⁶ Nor was there any occasion for angering potential readers and thus preventing their adopting other important views, such as that morality was as necessary to be taught to children as was learning.

Altogether Scott seems carefully to have calculated those reforms she could safely advocate (and still hope to be influential) and those she could not. She could and invariably does present Ellison as a genuine Christian, thus reminding her readers of what they too as Christians might be expected to perform. There are arguments she apparently cannot safely make, and she takes the safe side on the question of miscegenation, perhaps because of sensitivity to her audience and what it would bear (139). Any other agenda, such as an argument for gender, class, or racial equality, Scott relegates to "sly hints"—which, however, are not undetectable. That gender, class, and racial equality are her ideals is undeniable because they are the conditions she attributes to heaven. "When you and I are laid in the grave," Ellison tells his wife, "our lowest black slave will be as great as we are; in the next world perhaps even greater; the present difference is merely adventitious, not natural" (13). And what is natural, Scott tells us again and again, takes moral precedence over what is merely socially constructed. Ellison makes the distinction when he says he has no natural right to enslave, only a political one (16); he makes it again when he notes that the Blackburn children have both a natural and a legal right of inheritance of their grandfather's estate (128). In this context Ellison's note that "nature's Agrarian law has been abolished by political institutions" (41) is telling; by nature land is distributed more equally, and natural right is morally superior to political. And Scott notes that tyrants in marriage as well as in slavery have no natural right: but "Human nature always abuses a power which it has no right to exert" (16). The very abuses of marital partners and slave owners are the effect of their not being naturally empowered.

These are sly hints enough to suggest that Ellison's (and Scott's) meliorist positions are an accommodation and that underlying Scott's accommodation is a sense of outrage controlled by an intellectual perception of what she could and could not propose. She could, for example, banish corporal punishment from Ellison's plantation. She could not abolish the institution of slavery; she could only insist on its injustice.

In terms of class divisions, her acceptance at first seems more unquestioning. She seems to uphold the class divisions, based on money and privilege, of her society, envisioning in the conventional way a three-part social division into the landed and idle rich, the profitably employed merchants, tradesmen, and shopkeepers, and the laboring poor. All benefits bestowed including education were bestowed with the condition of the recipient in mind. And yet Ellison gives another sly hint when he reminds Lamont that rank and fortune are indispensable steps to honor, poverty an impenetrable cloud concealing merit, whereas a great estate or high birth frequently exalts those who are unfit (41). Ellison attributes the corruption of the country to "the necessitous state of too many of the individuals" (188), a hint at the inequity of distribution. A telling argument against class is Scott's belief that honest labor is honorable for anyone, that one should forget one's condition and do the work that makes one independent and useful, even though it be the labor ordinarily assigned to lower stations (34). Ellison protests he is no leveller (79), but labor, that great leveler, Scott requires of everyone: of the protégés of Millenium Hall, of Ellison's enfranchised slaves, of the poor children and the elderly of his neighborhood, of the poor gentry, of the privileged upper classes in behalf of the less privileged, and even of Ellison's schoolchildren in vacation lest they esteem idleness a pleasure. Moreover, to some extent it is suggested that appropriate labor be apportioned to the individual according to circumstance and talent rather than station.

Education is also of prime concern to Scott, and better education, we learn in this novel, more closely approximates both slaves and women to free men. If everyone were to labor and if labor were not class-determined, if all were to be educated, even if only according to class, if money were to be more equitably distributed, as Scott gently suggests, what then would become of class distinction?

Ellison dissociates himself from the Levellers and would apparently also have endorsed the anti-democratic 1654 manifesto of the Baptists requiring the saints to await the last judgment before the "Rule and Government of the World should be put into their hands, meanwhile patiently to suffer from the world."³⁷ But such a direction gives a new significance to the name Millenium Hall, that place where the saints do indeed rule and govern their world.³⁸

Scott appears also to attack the class pretensions (and distinctions) of the professionals, those educated but dependent upon their earnings and without the resources to ensure their children's gentility. She believes not only that genteel but unprovisioned dependents ought to abandon class pretensions and take positions as teachers, personal attendants, or servants, but also that the test of their worthiness is their willingness to do so. Both slaves and women are seen to improve with proper education, which for Scott is the key to a better society. Children are born with particular natures, and educators must carefully adapt their instruction to each. Ellison's son is the primary example: he is born with his mother's "natural violence and imperiousness of temper" (138), but we see his father devise a successful education that considers the training of his passions to be as important as the training of his mind. His poorly educated mother, on the other hand, is imperious and manipulative.

The control of the passions, "the deceitful varnish of passion," "the intoxication of passion" (183, 184), is a great object of education for Scott. She is suspicious of the passion of love, which can be avoided by attending to one's work, but which, if it is incurred, must be controlled. That is the point of Ellison's courtship, disappointment, long patience, and final success with Miss Allin: passion might assail him, but in each crisis, including his brush with death just before he marries her, his behavior is exemplary, as it remains after marriage when the temptation to forget his duties to others and slip into domestic bliss must be fought. That he is human is amply proven by his joy on hearing of the fatal illness of her first husband, his friend; but that he is thoroughly controlled is proven by every response he makes.

A proper moral education, such as that Ellison provides for his slaves and all his other charges, is essential for moral behavior. Ellison's efforts with his own children, the Granthams, and the Blackburns are so successful that whereas by nature so many would not have proved deserving (205), all eventually do. Scott notes again and again that the teachers of the young deserve generous wages for the important work they undertake and she labors hard to raise the prestige of the profession. On this point and on other educational issues Scott, like Richardson and Sarah Fielding, follows Locke in his Thoughts on Education (1693); the line of influence is clear. Pamela deliberates at length over Locke's advice in Pamela II, Sarah Fielding echoes it in The Governess (1749), and Scott in this volume follows Pamela's (or Richardson's) ruminations on Locke in the conclusions that the tutor must be very carefully chosen and treated with respect, that a tutor at home with a group of five to eight pupils is the best plan of education, that leaving children in the care of the lesser servants, who are often, in Locke's words, unbred and debauched, is pernicious. Scott works consistently to raise esteem for the educators of children, and to emphasize the importance of their work, which was to establish both intellectual and moral foundations and which had also to be reinforced by parents. And as a particular duty of the mother, educating the daughters and the younger sons implied a necessity for her own careful education.

Scott labors in other subtle ways to raise the position of women. When Ellison leaves Jamaica, it is his sister-in-law and Miss Reynolds who are made monitors of his steward's treatment of the slaves, and not his own brother. And whereas Henry Fielding never introduced a learned woman in his novels without ridiculing her pretensions or impugning her chastity, Scott equates learning in women with virtue and right thinking: the best women in her novels tend to be learned. Mrs. Tunstall and her daughters, particularly Louisa, are joined by young Ellison's beloved Miss Blanchard, who has begun her studies under his direction.

Scott also impugns the inequity of concentrating family inheritances in the eldest son. Whereas Ellison's father was comparatively impoverished as a younger son, Ellison himself insists on a more equal division with his brother and sister. The story of Mrs. Alton, left entirely dependent upon her brother and treated like a servant by his wife (101–9), is a blow against such a custom; and Ellison himself makes a point of saving fortunes for the younger Blackburn and Grantham children and intends to provide additional stipends for his unmarried daughters. The evils of entrusting the family fortunes entirely to the husband are twice glanced at, in the Tunstalls and the Blackburns, cases in which Ellison has to convey money secretly to the wife, who is far more competent to handle it.

Marriage as an institution also comes under Scott's scrutiny. An unenlightened marriage is dreadful, as Scott suggests by moving directly from an examination of slavery to that of Ellison's first marriage. "Perhaps few have more severely lamented their being themselves enslaved by marriage," writes Scott, than Ellison does at becoming the owner of slaves (10). Ellison is enslaved by the passions of his first wife, as Mrs. Reynolds is by those of her husband; the proper form of marriage is that of Ellison and his second wife. Finally, the monkey imagery in the novel actually suggests the superiority of women. For young Lamont women are playthings for men, "a race somewhat superior to monkeys; formed to amuse the other sex during the continuance of youth and beauty, and after the bloom was past, to be useful drudges for their convenience."³⁹ For Ellison, however, the spectacle of a rich man accessible only at the end of a suite of elegant rooms is like that of a monkey in a temple (80). And Ellison also notes that a wife's submission to a capricious husband "is such as might be expected from a man enslaved by a race of monkeys …; he would be passive from a sense of their power, but despise them for the capricious manner wherein they exercised it" (28). The callow young man sees women as very like monkeys, but the reliable Ellison assigns that likeness to prideful or tyrannical men, and in the last analogy, assigns the superior position to women.

Scott would probably not have chosen to distract attention from her task of examining almost every social institution by introducing an exciting plot even if she could have done so. Ellison examines and, if he can, reforms the institutions of slavery, marriage, education, law, local justice, imprisonment for debt, and parish charity. He devises his own systems for employing the local poor, managing his estate, settling his expenses, and handling the lunacy of a near relation. He refuses to stand for Parliament and gives a full indictment of its corruption and its system of elections. He insists on interfering in every neighborhood contretemps as one of his primary duties. Aware that he works hand in hand with Providence, he interests himself in the distresses of everyone he encounters.

The book fits, therefore, into several categories. It is primarily a Utopia—Ellison is indeed "fit for Utopia" (133)—and Scott knew the genre.⁴⁰ Its first part is a West Indian tale that might be profitably coupled with Aphra Behn's Oroonoko. It is a Christian exegesis and exemplum that demonstrates how a genuine Christian lives and dies and suggests that Providence cooperates with the just, testing but ultimately rewarding. Its structure is thematic, about rising to proper and falling to improper behavior, a structure reinforced by the rise and control of the passions, the success or failure of right reason, the alternate endorsement and suggested collapse of the striations of class, gender, and race. A constant reference to implicitly understood vertical distinctions derives from a belief in two levels of reality, earthly and heavenly. Rising to successfully correct behavior or falling to incorrect behavior, the characters are each barometrically analyzed. The frequent contrast on this vertical scale of such characters as Reynolds's two wives, Sir William and Sir George when thwarted in love, Mr. and Mrs. Blackburn and Dr. and Mrs. Tunstall as parents and domestic economists also produces a consistent vertical ranking the recognition of which, in fact, is what Scott most requires of her readers.

The Man of Real Sensibility

In 1774 The History of Sir George Ellison assumed new life under the title The Man of Real Sensibility in a condensation made for a special purpose. All of the books of this title, published by different publishers, repeat the same text, prepared apparently for James Humphreys, Jun., in Philadelphia in 1774. American piracy of English publications was then a commonplace, and Humphreys was an industrious pirate;⁴¹ Scott almost certainly had nothing to do with the project, which attracted publishers because the question and the problems of slavery had become important considerations, particularly in America.

The condensation therefore prints all of the opening of Scott's novel to the point where Ellison leaves Jamaica. It then condenses the remaining plot to focus on Ellison's courtship and marriage. The effect is to provide the plot with a consistent theme of slavery: Ellison ameliorates the conditions of his slaves and then is himself liberated from the slavery of his first marriage into the partnership of his second.⁴²

The climate into which Humphreys's novel was released, that of Philadelphia in 1774, was contentious on the subject of slavery. Many Pennsylvania slaveholding Quakers had fought the movement by abolition-minded Quakers to prohibit slavery for members of their meeting. In 1772 the slave-holders had attended the annual meeting and defeated the movement. In 1774 the meeting first moved to ban slaveholding.⁴³ Humphreys, a prominent printer, may have been commissioned by an abolitionist Quaker to publish the condensation of Scott's work, for Scott emphasizes the equal humanity, spiritual and intellectual potential, and (to use an anachronistic term) the human rights of Ellison's slaves. However, her meliorist position, her failure to insist on abolition of slavery, might also conceivably have provided the slave-holders with an attractive justification and program.⁴⁴ The title of the condensation may have been a reflection on James MacKenzie's popular The Man of Feeling (1771), about a protagonist with extreme sensibility of no use either to himself or to others.

Subsequent editions pirated from the first (see bibliography, 233–34) were probably undertaken by publishers who foresaw a good market: three more in Philadelphia, two in Edinburgh, one in Delaware, one in Massachusetts. If Scott did know of this publication and its uses, she was undoubtedly happy and proud about it. Though it assumed only a meliorist position, like its original it questioned man's natural right to enslave, revealed that slavery of any kind is oppressive and unnatural, and both explicitly and implicitly denied the inferiority of blacks and women. Probably in the event it was Scott's most influential work.

Notes

¹ Information from the International Genealogical Index of the Church of Latter-Day Saints adjusts and corrects the birthdates. Elizabeth Robinson was christened at Holy Trinity, Goodramgate, York, on October 13, 1718; Sarah Robinson was christened there on March 5, 1721. At least the three youngest children were born in Cambridge at the home of their maternal grandmother, wife of Conyers Middleton (see n. 8). John entered Trinity Hall in 1747, but took no degrees at Cambridge, though he is reported, surely erroneously, to have been a fellow of that college (1750–1805). As the correspondence of his sisters and his father's will show, he actually lived in custodial care from about 1749 until his death in 1800.

² From a letter of Elizabeth Montagu at Tunbridge to Sarah Robinson at Bath dated 29 August 1749, now in the Lewis Walpole Library at Farmington, Connecticut, quoted by permission. For the allusion, see Midsummer Night's Dream, where Helena (not Hermia) paints a picture of the two girls as the Robinson girls might have been, creating "both one flower, / Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion, / Both warbling of one song, both in one key. / … Two lovely berries molded on one stem" (III.ii. 204–11).

³ From a letter in the Montagu Collection at the Huntington Library, and quoted by permission. Subsequent quotations from letters in this collection, quoted by permission, are identified in the text by date.

⁴The Letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu, ed. Matthew Montagu, 4 vols. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1809–13), 2:8. Subsequent references to this work are by volume and page number in the text with the abbreviation LEM.

⁵The History of Sir George Ellison (London: A. Millar, 1766). Citations in the text are to this edition, using the abbreviation GE.

⁶ Sarah Scott, A Description of Millenium Hall, ed. Jane Spencer (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986), p. 199.

⁷ On this subject see, for instance, Lady Louisa Stuart, Selections from her Manuscripts, ed. James A. Home (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1899), pp. 157–58; Hester Chapone, The Works of Mrs. Chapone, 2 vols. (New York: Evert Duyckinck, 1818), 1:124; Betty Rizzo, Companions without Vows: Relationships among Eighteenth-Century British Women (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1994), pp. 127–28.

⁸ Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Montagu, the Queen of the Blue-Stockings, ed. Emily J. Climenson, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1906), 1:121. A letter from Dr. Conyers Middleton to Montagu on the occasion of her marriage, dated 4 Oct. 1742, notes that he is pleased with her account of her brothers "who after being exposed as it were on the mountains of Yorkshire, were discovered at last, like Enfans trouvé, by a sister unknown to them." He also notes that the three boys were all born under his (Cambridgeshire) roof (Montagu Correspondence, Folder 9, Princeton Univ. Library), printed in LEM, 2:201.

⁹ Horace Walpole, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, 48 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1937–83), 10:169. George Montagu perhaps uses the word sufferance in three senses: as something to be endured, to be suffered, to be barely tolerated (OED).

¹⁰ The usual dowry of a duke's daughter was £10,000 and that was considered small for the grandeur of the marriage she was expected to make, except that her connections were also conceived of as contributing to her fortune. Lady Barbara's money, invested in the safe government bonds that yielded only 3 to 5 percent, could have given her an income of £250 at most; a London establishment with servants and a carriage required an annual income of at least £1000.

¹¹ Walter Marion Crittenden, The Life and Writings of Sarah Scott—Novelist (1723–1795) (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1932), p. 67.

¹² Mary Delany, The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs. Delany, ed. Lady Llanover, 6 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1861–62), 3:115. For more on this subject, see Rizzo, Companions without Vows, pp. 303–5.

¹³ For the text of Sarah Scott's letter see Rizzo, Companions without Vows, p. 305.

¹⁴ For these women see ibid., pp. 383–84, nn. 28–30.

¹⁵ Anna Riggs (1741–81) in 1765 bestowed her large fortune on John Miller, an Irish baronet in 1778. By 1775 Lady Miller had set up an antique Italian vase in their Batheaston villa as the recipient for verses with which their guests competed for wreaths of myrtle. Attendance for this fashionable amusement was select and four volumes of the poems were published: see R. A. Hesselgrove, Lady Miller and the Batheaston Literary Circle (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1927).

¹⁶ Vincent Carretta has pointed out the important contributions of both Richardson and Johnson (and, a bit parenthetically, of Charlotte Lennox, who was first among these) to the development and endorsement of the idea of a women's community of scholars and/or unmarried women (see his "Utopia Limited: Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall and The History of Sir George Ellison" Age of Johnson 5 [1992]: 303–25); but he has failed to note the debt of all three to Mary Astell, who in 1694 in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies suggested an all-female college or Protestant nunnery where women could live the life of the mind (see Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986], pp. 98–119; Perry also notes precedents for Astell's idea, pp. 118–19). Carretta emphasizes the ratification of the idea by Richardson and Johnson, but that had little practical effect and generated little subsequent endorsement. As he notes, the vision of a Protestant nunnery for women appears in Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752), Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), in which the hero proposes the establishment in every county of Protestant nunneries "in which single women of small or no fortunes might live," and Johnson's Rasselas (1759), in which the Princess Nekayah dreams of a college of learned women over which she might preside. Astell's view of the sequestered nature of the place is emphasized in all these schemes: a convent, a nunnery, or at the least a college. Sarah Fielding, too, in The Countess of Dellwyn (1759) proposes a scheme for a community of gentlewomen, and as she was an intimate friend of Richardson's may well have convinced him herself in conversation of the worthiness of the scheme, whereas Johnson may have been most influenced by his friend Charlotte Lennox. Scott of course knew the work of all these writers: as Bridget Hill notes, she probably took a hint from Astell when she named Millenium Hall; see Carretta, p. 306, and Bridget Hill, "A Refuge from Men: The Idea of a Protestant Nunnery," Past & Present 117 (Nov. 1987): 107–30, but see also n. 38 below. Scott took various points from Astell's works and was in intimate communication with Sarah Fielding. But she much disliked the concept of confinement in a convent: see next note.

¹⁷ The fuller title A Description of Millenium Hall and the Country Adjacent … suggests Scott's dislike of confinement. She expresses her distaste for conventual life in The History of Cornelia; see also her letter to her brother of 26 May 1762 (Huntington, quoted by permission) on shutting oneself up in a cloister: "No one can be very free, but it is strange that any shou'd endeavour to render themselves absolute Slaves, without a possibility of Manumission; & as strange that people shou'd think an useless life, a life of religion."

¹⁸ See, for example, Crittenden, Life and Writings, pp. 73–74; L. M. Grow, "Sarah Scott: A reconsideration," in Coranto 9, no. 1 (1973): 9–15.

¹⁹ Crittenden, Life and Writings, pp. 73–74.

²⁰ Undated letter of Sarah Scott to Elizabeth Montagu (Winter 1748–49) in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, quoted by permission. Mr. Sable is the lugubrious undertaker in Steele's comedy The Funeral; or, Grief a la Mode (1701), from which Scott would also take the name "Lady Brumpton" for Montagu (see below).

²¹ Letter of Sarah Scott to William Robinson dated 26 May 1762 in the Huntington Library, quoted by permission.

²² Letter of Sarah Scott to William Robinson dated 10 April 1762 in the Huntington Library, quoted by permission. Portions of some of Scott's letters to William Robinson and his wife, formerly in the possession of Sir Egerton Brydges, were published (see bibliography), but such passages as these were not.

²³ T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 462–63, also note that Lady Barbara paid Richardson £56 to produce the cards; see also the Daily Advertiser, 30 April 1759, where they are fully described.

²⁴ Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, pp. 463–64. Montagu wrote to Elizabeth Carter, "There is a novel published which I believe to be chiefly written by your friend Mrs. Fielding" (LEM, 4:216). Entirely fictitious, it was a pious attempt to warn women, but if Fielding wrote it she did not wish to have her authorship known.

²⁵ See A Description of Millenium Hall, ed. Walter M. Crittenden (New York: Bookman, 1955), p. 15.

²⁶ Ibid., pp. 145–48; Rizzo, Companions without Vows, pp. 127, 296–97.

²⁷ The claim of co-authorship derives solely from Horace Walpole's notation in his copy of the work that it "is the work of Lady Barbara Montagu and Mrs. Sarah Scott." Walpole's information would have come from his friend George Montagu, Lady Barbara's cousin, who may have been confused by a knowledge of Lady Barbara's participation in planning the work into assuming she had also participated in writing it.

²⁸ Crittenden, Millenium Hall, p. 15. The book may be what Elizabeth Carter was referring to in July 1772 when she wrote to Montagu that she had seen a geographical work on a very large plan advertised which she was afraid would interfere with Scott's (Elizabeth Carter, Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, to Mrs. Montagu, Between the Years 1755 and 1800, 3 vols. [London: F. C. & J. Rivington, 1817], 2:146).

²⁹ Carter, Letters, letters dated 24 May and 29 June 1766, 1:296, 305.

³⁰ Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in Buckinghamshire, 2 vols. (London: His Majesty's Stationery Of fice, 1912), 1:205.

³¹ Bartholomew Dominiceti, in 1762 a druggist and apothecary bankrupt in Bristol (Daily Advertiser, 24 May 1762; A Short and Calm Apology in regard to the many injuries and repeated affronts … met with … in Bristol [Bristol, S. Farlew, 1769]), author of medical works, including A Plan for Extending the Use of Artificial Waterbaths (1771), in August 1767 petitioned for a patent for his method of making "arbitrarily heated and medicated baths, pumps, and stoves, both moist and dry, and a variety of fumigations from herbs, seeds, &c, and an infinite variety of machines for applying the above to the human body" (Calendar of Home Office Papers of the Reign of George III, 1766–1769, ed. Joseph Redington [London: Longman, 1879], p. 268). Dominiceti at least prevented some deaths by dehydration. His establishment was in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. (See also Reginald Blunt, "Aesculapius Fumigans, Dominiceti of the Baths," In Cheyne Walk and Thereabouts [London: Mills & Boon, 1914], pp. 137–55.)

³² Carter, Letters, letters dated 24 May and 29 June 1766, 1:296, 305.

³³ On this subject see Caroline Gonda, "Sarah Scott and 'the Sweet Excess of Paternal Love,'" Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 32, no. 3 (Summer 1992): 511–35.

³⁴ Letters between Montagu and Scott of 1785–86 from the Huntington Library, quoted by permission. I am indebted to Barbara Schnorrenberg for lending me her copies of these letters and to Mary L. Robertson, curator of manuscripts at the Huntington, for additional information about Scott's movements at this time.

³⁵ Moira Ferguson, for instance, includes an interesting discussion of Sir George Ellison in Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 100–105; she detects a very faint anti-patriarchal whisper, but in general concludes of Scott's meliorist and gradualist approach that, as with any charity, "The unstated subtextual monster is profit, cornerstone of the rising and predacious capitalist-colonialist economy" (p. 104). I would add that Scott, rather than playing along with the prevailing profit motive, was urging the moral position to the utmost extent she thought productive.

³⁶The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, ed. Anna Letitia Barbauld, 6 vols. (London: Richard Phillips, 1804–6), 2:62.

³⁷ Quoted by E. P. Thompson, The Making of the Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1980), p. 32.

³⁸ See note 16.

³⁹ P. 40. Lamont is eventually, at the end of the novel, reformed under Ellison's influence but is appropriately paired with the worthy Mrs. Blackburn, who also has no great sensibility. However, as a measure of Lamont's improvement, Scott allows him to be captivated by an experienced woman whose bloom is specifically stated to be past.

⁴⁰ Scott had evidently read Thomas More's Utopia: competition among gardeners is permitted at Millenium Hall as it was the only form of competition permitted in More's Utopia.

⁴¹ The Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue lists 122 entries for Humphreys between 1774 and 1810, including almanacs, grammars, sermons, political treatises, law cases, charitable prospectuses, plays, histories, novels and tales, and, during the British occupation, army proclamations. Among his other 1774 piratical publications were Hannah More's pastoral drama The Search After Happiness and Sterne's works in six volumes.

⁴² Moira Ferguson, pp. 110–11, 114, discusses The Man of Real Sensibility as an anti-slavery document and notes the thematic connection to the subject of marriage, but assumes that the pagination is the same in all editions and that Scott was herself responsible for its preparation. She may here follow Crittenden, Life and Writings, who knew only of the Chapman Whitcomb edition and assumed wrongly that it was published in England in about 1770 (p. 43). Of course no English edition has been found.

⁴³ Jean R. Soderlund, Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), p. 172.

⁴⁴ Matthew ("Monk") Lewis (1775–1818), novelist and West Indian planter, for instance, was a great meliorist but no abolitionist; see his posthumously published Journal of a West Indian Proprietor (1833). Lewis, like Ellison, abolished harsh punishments, lessened labors, increased comforts and holidays, and arranged a system whereby in his absence his slaves could not be mistreated; he was idolized by the slaves throughout Jamaica. Scott may well have been an important influence on him.