SOURCE: "Utopia Limited: Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall and The History of Sir George Ellison," in Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, Vol. 5, 1992, pp. 303-25.

In her introduction to the Penguin edition of Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall, Jane Spencer suggests that the novel "aims to educate men. The first indication of this is on the title page." Without disputing her identification of the book's primary audience, I would like here to investigate the implications of authority found in the title-page phrase that attributes the work to "A Gentleman on His Travels." The masculine perspective is essential to the conservative ideological message and method of representation introduced in 1762 in Millenium Hall and elucidated and elaborated in 1766 in Sir George Ellison.

Although both books treat traditional eighteenth-century feminist issues, such as the disparity of educational opportunities for men and women as well as the frequently tyrannical subordination of women by men in familial and marital relationships, reading Scott's earlier novel as the first third of a two-part whole reveals how successfully feminist concerns had become a part of masculine discourse by the 1760s. What might earlier have appeared to be shocking proposals for utopian reforms that radically challenged current social realities now seemed safely familiar when delivered by an authoritatively masculine voice supporting a reassuringly recognizable hierarchy of class distinctions. Certainly the earliest readers of Millenium Hall failed to find a radical message in it: the Critical Review; or Annals of Literature, 14 (December 1762) declared its "moral precepts trite" and the "very title unmeaningly and ridiculously pedantic" (p. 463); the more charitable Monthly Review, 27 (November 1762) "perused it with pleasure; and highly recommend[ed] it, as a very entertaining as well as a truly moral and sensible performance" (p. 390).

What enabled precepts, whose institution would have radically altered the actual conduct of society, to be received as "moral," "sensible," and even "trite?" And what made attribution of Millenium Hall to Oliver Goldsmith and Christopher Smart plausible? The reception of Scott's novels probably indicates the level of acceptance by the mid-eighteenth century of the proposals for education and marital reform earlier associated with a feminist and feminine minority of writers dating, in a direct line, back to the seventeenth century. The views of women like Bathsua Pell Makin, Mary Astell, Lady Chudleigh, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and others, cited, adapted, and paralleled by male authors including Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope, eventually found undeniable respectability, at least as propositions, when reformulated in the 1750s by Samuel Richardson and his friend Samuel Johnson.

To suggest that Richardson's and Johnson's fictions, rather than the writings of earlier feminist men and women, may have been the immediate influences on Scott does not diminish the achievement of their predecessors; such a suggestion underscores the contribution of their foremothers and forefathers to the continuum of intellectual engagement with feminist issues. Indeed, Richardson and Johnson were as intimately involved intellectually with women writers of their day—as patrons, collaborators, advisors, friends, and supporters—as any men could be.³ Consequently, the precise lines of transmission of feminist thought among the two men and their female contemporaries and predecessors cannot easily be distinguished. The men, however, served as conduits for ideas that had earlier been associated almost exclusively with female voices, which had less access to influence. Men like Richardson and Johnson authorized ideas that earlier women had authored.

The precipitating historical event that concentrated national attention on the plight of women in marriage, even though it certainly did not solve the problem, was the passage in 1753 of Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act and the debates that surrounded it. The issues of bad marriages and impossible divorces were certainly kept current six years later when Johnson, in Rasselas, had Princess Nekayah, probably the most feminist character to that date in male-authored, eighteenth-century literature, opine,

"I know not," said the princess, "whether marriage be more than one of the innumerable modes of human misery. When I see and reckon the various forms of connubial infelicity, the unexpected causes of lasting connubial discord, the diversities of temper, the oppositions of opinion, the rude collisions of contrary desire where both are urged by violent impulses, the obstinate contests of dis-agreeing virtues, where both are supported by consciousness of good intention, I am sometimes disposed to think with the severest casuists of most nations, that marriage is rather permitted than approved, and that none, but by the instigation of a passion too much indulged, entangle themselves with indissoluble compacts."⁴

Nekayah dismisses her brother's argument that marriage is necessary for procreation:

"How the world is to be peopled … is not my care, and need not be yours. I see no danger that the present generation should omit to leave successors behind them: we are not now enquiring for the world, but for ourselves." (p. 381)

The educational utopia found in Scott's novels is anticipated, if not influenced by, Nekayah's concluding wish, which she "well knew … could [not] be obtained":

The princess thought, that of all the sublunary things, knowledge was the best. She desired first to learn all sciences, and then purposed to found a college of learned women, in which she would preside, that, by conversing with the old, and educating the young, she might divide her time between the acquisition and communication of wisdom, and raise up for the next age models of prudence, and patterns of piety." (p. 418)

Behind Johnson's airing of the issues of women in marriage and education lies the work of another of the most popular authors of the 1750s. Suggestions for a community of unmarried women can be traced back from Johnson's Rasselas to Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, first published in 1753-54 and re-published beginning in February 1762 in its fourth edition, the last Richardson had worked on before his death in 1761.⁵ We know from letters to her sister that Sarah Scott read Richardson's novel as it appeared when originally published. Scott may have hoped that her own novel, which she said took less than a month to write, would profit by association with the re-publication of Richardson's. Her relationship with Richardson was personal as well as professional: she and the late novelist had been acquainted through her companion, Barbara Montagu. Both women were among Richardson's principal correspondents during the last decade of his life. Scott's admiration for Johnson is clear in a letter she wrote to her brother, William Robinson, on 27 July 1762 on the subject of Johnson's recent pension: "The King has given Johnson a pension of 300£ per ann:, a necessary step for one who wishes to be thought the Patron of Litterature, & what everyone must approve."⁶

But Scott did not allow the probable immediate influence of male voices to obliterate the female authors that lay behind them. As Bridget Hill notes, "The name chosen for this female community [Millenium Hall] was surely not accidental. Earlier Mary Astell in her preface to … Reflections upon Marriage (1706) had looked forward 'to those Halcyon, or if you will, Millennium [sic] Days, in which … a Tyrannous Domination which Nature never meant, shall no longer render useless … the Industry and Understandings of half Mankind.'"⁷ Precedents for Scott's vision of a Protestant nunnery devoted to the education of women, moreover, may be found in Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752), the latter a novel with which both Richardson and Johnson were certainly intimately familiar. And a probable non-English influence was Madame de Maintenon, who founded the female academy at St. Cyr at the end of the seventeenth century, and whose letters that included references to the school had been published in England in 1753. The description of the founding of the school had been recommended to Scott by her sister, Elizabeth Montagu, as "wise in the design & all the rules for the support of it…. I wish we had such a foundation here, for our married Ladies are too much employ'd in the more necessary duties of the Play house & Opera to give any attention to their daughters."⁸

Richardson and Johnson gave currency to ideas they had taken possession of, directly and indirectly, from the earlier women writers. Scott had recently demonstrated her penchant for timely publication. The History of Gustavus Ericson (1761) and The History of Mecklenburgh (1762) exploited, respectively, the occasions of George III's accession to the throne in 1760 and his marriage to his queen, Charlotte. The earlier work, a biography of the sixteenth-century king of Sweden, Gustavus Vasa, was intended as a kind of mirror for magistrates, one of a spate of works that appeared during the first few years of the new reign. Coming to the throne at the age of twenty-two, George III was hoped by many of his subjects to be a patriot king like Gustavus, who put his country's interest above those of personal or party factions.⁹ As Johnson observed to Giuseppe Baretti in a letter in June 1761, "You know that we have a new King … We were so weary of our old King that we are much pleased with his successor; of whom we are so much inclined to hope great things, that most of us begin already to believe them."¹⁰ This atmosphere of optimism probably encouraged Scott to resurrect the visions of social reform lately reauthorized in the works of Richardson and Johnson. Given the recent embrace of feminist issues by two of the best known of her male contemporaries, Scott's first readers would probably have assumed a masculine influence on the anonymously published Millenium Hall even without the explicit verbal signs they found on its title page.

Richardson's precedent may account for the epistolary form and the sometimes preachy tone of Scott's novel, though didacticism was pervasive in eighteenth-century literature of all types, and the genre of the letter was a conventional vehicle for essaying unconventional as well as informal proposals when one wanted to avoid the requirements of a systematic treatise. Certainly, Richardson, through his exemplary titular character, gave Scott an impeccable masculine authority for addressing the plight of women:

The longer, said Sir Charles, a woman remains unmarried, the more apprehensive she will be of entering into the state. At seventeen or eighteen a girl will plunge into it, sometimes without fear or wit; at twenty she will begin to think; at twenty-four will weigh and discriminate; at twenty-eight will be afraid of venturing; at thirty will turn about, and look down the hill she has ascended; and, as occasions offer, and instances are given, will sometimes repent, sometimes rejoice, that she has gained that summit sola.¹¹

To Mrs. Reeves's observation that poor women may not have the luxury of choice, Sir Charles responds,

… We want to see established in every county, Protestant Nunneries; in which single women of small or no fortunes might live with all manner of freedom, under such regulations as it would be a disgrace for a modest or good woman not to comply with, were she absolutely on her own hands; and to be allowed to quit it whenever they pleased …

… The governesses or matrons of the society I would have to be women of family, of unblameable characters from infancy, and noted for their prudence, good nature, and gentleness of manners. The attendants, for the slighter services, should be the hopeful female children of the honest industrious poor. (4: 355)

The community of women would combine the incomes of its members to be self-supporting and "might become a national good; and particularly a seminary for good wives" (4: 355). But anticipating the society in Millenium Hall, and unlike that in Astell's Proposal, the community would not be restricted to the never-married: widows and even wives whose husbands were absent at sea would be welcome. Scott's novel extends Richardson's vision by having the wellborn women in the Hall accept the obligation to educate future generations. Grandison's desire appears to have been at least the partial model for the charitable "convent" Sarah Scott and Barbara Montagu had established by 1755.¹²

Under Grandison's proposal, the women will be overseen by a masculine eye:

A truly worthy divine, at the appointment of the Bishop of the diocese, to direct and animate the devotion of such a society, and to guard it from that superstition and enthusiasm which soars to wild heights in almost all Nunneries, would confirm it a blessing to the kingdom. (4: 356)

Both Richardson's and Scott's visions are not so much alternatives to contemporary society as complements to it. In Scott's novel, the masculine overseer is the narrator, whose oversight becomes more active in the last two-thirds of her vision, published in 1766, when we learn that he is named Sir George Ellison. The image of oversight is introduced by the first noun of the novel published in 1762: A Description of Millenium Hall. … This male-narrated account is a description, a writing down of that which is seen, a rendering verbal the visual. Through representation, the narrator exerts control over that which he has experienced.

The primacy of the sense of sight is conveyed by the book's frontispiece, which shows two men, presumably the narrator and the young rake Lamont, peering through a pale of trees at "the noble mansion" (p. 33). At first, the frontispiece seems to emphasize the exclusion of the watchers from the seen, but as the existence of the succeeding narrative proves, the pale of trees keeps the women in rather than the men out. The pale is the initial case of the pattern of images of containment and separation that reinforce the book's advocacy of order through hierarchy.

Scott's narrative strategy is one of containment: a male narrator relates to a male correspondent what he has seen and heard. Within the large box of the letter, we find smaller boxes reinscribed by the narrator. The novel even includes a transitional inscriber, Mrs. Maynard, whose familial relationship to the male narrator seems to lend her the authority to circumscribe the narratives of her fellow inmates. Female voices and characters (subjects) are inscribed by the characters (the marks on the page) of the narrator, who re-presents them as would an engraver. The metaphor is the narrator's own, and by having him grant to the "Dear Sir" who receives the lengthy letter the power to reinscribe it in print (the book's "Advertisement" identifies the recipient as the publisher), Scott adds another level of masculine oversight and circumscription to the pale of words that contains the female voices in the novel:

… Your constant endeavors have been to inculcate the best principles into youthful minds, the only probable means of mending mankind; for the foundation of most of our virtues, or our vices, are laid in that season of life when we are most susceptible of impression, and when on our minds, as on a sheet of white paper, any characters may be engraven…. I therefore submit the future fate of the following sheets entirely to you…. (pp. 29-30)

Despite his assertion that he is a passive Lockean tabula rasa, which experience inscribes, a passive perceiver—"I have no other share than that of a spectator and auditor, in what I purpose to relate" (p. 30)—the narrator almost immediately exercises the power of naming, controlling the identity of what he has seen: "a place which I shall nominate Millenium Hall" (p. 29). Throughout the novel, his labels assure the reader that this community is visionary and impractical. He calls it "a scene truly pastoral" (p. 31), an "earthly paradise," "enchanted ground" (p. 33), "a community of saints" (p. 132), "a female Arcadia" (p. 33), and "this heavenly society" (p. 195). The "amiable family" (p. 29) of Millenium Hall will have no effect on the world beyond the pale until it gains the narrator as the missing father-figure, a role he takes in Sir George Ellison.

The narrator finds a matriarchy, bereft of father-figures by death, absence, and irresponsibility, that maintains the traditional social hierarchy sans its patriarchal head. To do so, the women need one more commandment than the ten found in the Decalogue to enforce order. The matriarchs of the Hall are analogues of the male narrator. Our initial encounter with four of them finds each engaged in forms of visual representation: painting, carving, engraving, and drawing.

The opening four descriptions close with that of Mrs. Morgan, presented as a figure of Lady Bountiful or Nature herself: "rather plump, and extremely majestic…. One would almost think nature had formed her for a common parent, such universal and tender benevolence beams from every glance she casts about her" (p. 35). She may be intended to appear as the proper heir of the heroic and even messianic figure that we find in the last paragraph of Astell's preface to Reflections upon Marriage:

… if that GREAT QUEEN [Anne] …, this Glory of her own Sex and Envy of the other, will not think we need, or does not hold us worthy of, the Protection of her ever Victorious Arms, and Men have not the Gratitude for her sake at least, to do Justice to her Sex, who has been such a universal Benefactress to theirs: Adieu to the Liberties not of this or that Nation or Region only, but of the Moiety of Mankind! To all the great things that Women might perform, Inspir'd by her Example, Encourag'd by her Smiles, and supported by her Power! … To their destroying those worst of Tyrants Impiety and Immorality, which dare to stalk about even in her own Dominions, and to devour Souls almost within view of her Throne, leaving a stench behind them scarce to be corrected even by the Incense of her Devotions! … In a word, to those Halcyon, or if you will Millennium Days, in which the Wolf and the Lamb shall feed together….¹³

Mrs. Morgan's "every virtue is engraven in indelible characters on her countenance" (p. 35). We discover the inscription of inscribers inscribing characters with characters. All are engaged in reconstructing the characters of their social inferiors so that proper subordination can be re-established and stabilized. This quest for order has the highest patriarchal authority: as Miss Mancel observes, "Everything to me loses its charm when it is put out of the station wherein nature, or to speak more properly, the all-wise Creator has placed it" (p. 44). Hierarchy has an aesthetic dimension: the narrator notes that after seeing the order of "the amiable family…. My mind was so filled with exalted reflections on their virtues that I was less attentive to the charms of inanimate nature than when I first passed through the gardens" (p. 41). And Lamont confuses art and nature when he sees "a very fine wood" (p. 41). He fails to recognize God as the primary ordering artist. Significantly, at the end of the book, after his exposure to the Hall, we find Lamont studying the Word of the Father in the New Testament.

As the heads of the social hierarchy in Millenium Hall, the women are the earthly surrogates for God the Father because the intervening males are lacking. The women have not usurped male roles; as social superiors, even in "the great world" (p. 38) outside the Hall they would have the same obligations to those men and women below them in station, obligations Scott and Montagu accepted when they set up their "convent." The absence in the novel of male social equals or superiors makes the women's activity and responsibility more visible. Inside or outside the novel, the sustaining premise of hierarchically structured societies is that order must be maintained from the top down, or else the societies will collapse. Dominance is defended by asserting that the weight of social responsibility is heavier at the top than below. As Miss Trentham remarks, "Every station has its duties, those of the great are more various than those of their inferiors" (p. 127). And more influential as well: "The example of the great infects the whole community" (p. 126). The ideology of the Hall is as conservative as one should expect from Scott, who like Aphra Behn, Mary Astell, Charlotte Lennox, and many other women before her, was a firm believer in hereditary monarchy:

It is common to blame the lower sort of people for imitating their superiors; but it is equally the fault of every station, and therefore those of higher rank should consider it is their duty to set no examples that may hurt others. A degree of subordination is always acquiesced in, but while the nobleman lives like a prince, the gentleman will rise to the proper expenses of a nobleman, and the tradesman take that vacant rank which the gentleman has quitted; nor will he be ashamed of becoming a bankrupt when he sees the fortunes of his superiors mouldering away and knows them to be oppressed with debt. (pp. 126-27)

One price the heads of society must pay if order is to be maintained is the exercise of continuous, vigilant supervision of those below them. In a properly functioning social hierarchy, those at the top bear a larger burden of responsibility than those below, as Miss Mancel observes:

… Each state has its trials; the poverty of the lower rank of people exercises their industry and patience; the riches of the great are trials of their temperance, humility and humanity. Theirs is perhaps the more difficult part, but their present reward is also greater if they acquit themselves well; as for the future, there may probably be no inequality. (p. 197)

Obligations flow down as well as up: in Miss Mancel's words, "What I understand by society is a state of mutual confidence, reciprocal services, and correspondent affections …" (p. 79). Hence an old woman tells the narrator, "There never passes a day that one or other of the ladies does not come and look all over our houses, which they tell us, and certainly with truth, for it is a great deal of trouble to them, is all for our good, for that we cannot be healthy if we are not clean and neat" (p. 40). By noting that the matriarchs "condescended" (p. 40) to settle quarrels and "are so condescending to us" (p. 41), the woman gratefully acknowledges her own inferior social station. The neatness of her home is a material reflection, an objective correlative, of her acceptance of her place in the social structure.

The happiness of Millenium Hall depends upon control and containment. When the narrator is taken on a "little tour" (p. 155) to see the satellite community the matriarchs have set up, they are rowed by servants in "a very neat boat" to "a neat house," whose "extreme neatness rendered it an object worthy of observation." The house, with its "little pieces of furniture," has a "little garden that was neat to an excess," in which he finds children "tying up and putting in order" the flowers. The younger children are "all dressed with the same neatness as" their mother (pp. 153-54). The narrator praises the "little arbour" with its "little seats" where "little whims" (p. 155) can be indulged.

Scott celebrates the matriarch's school for girls with images of restriction:

… Here we found fifty girls, clad in a very neat uniform and perfectly clean, already seated at their respective businesses. Some writing, others casting accounts, some learning lessons by heart, several employed in various sorts of needlework, a few spinning and others knitting, with two schoolmistresses to inspect them. The schoolroom was very large and perfectly clean, the forms and chairs they sat on were of wood as white as possible; on shelves were wooden bowls and trenchers equally white, and shining pewter and brass seemed the ornaments of one side of the room; while pieces of the children's work of various kinds decorated the other; little samples of their performances being thus exhibited as encouragement to their ingenuity. (p. 154)

Nowhere is the paradox of freedom through subordination as the central theme of Millenium Hall more directly displayed than in the scene depicting the "maintenance of the monsters" (p. 199). Like the unseen women in the mansion behind the pale of trees that confronts readers in the book's frontispiece, the "monsters" gain happiness through confinement. Before Lamont learns what is behind the fence, he articulates the paradox: "But still I am puzzled; what we behold is certainly an inclosure, how can that be without a confinement to those that are within it?" (p. 44). Like the matriarchs because of gender, the "monsters" because of physical deformity have lost their places in the outer world. To be without a place is not to be free; it is to be enthralled by chaos. In the outer world, what Scott sees as the natural urge for hierarchy, order, and subordination has been perverted in the "monsters" by abuse: "Even those poor wretches had their vanity, and would contend for superior merit, of which, the argument was the money their keepers had gained in exhibiting them" (p. 46-47). To achieve "a regular and rational way of life" (p. 37), "those poor creatures who are rendered miserable from some natural deficiency or redundancy" (p. 44) must be led by reason and persuasion to internalize the value of proper subordination and thus attain "rational chearfulness, and polite freedom" (p. 131).

Scott rejects not the premise of hierarchy as the basis for society but its misapplication. The location of the "monsters" is a microcosm of the larger world of the Hall that contains it. And by extension, Scott offers the Hall as a potential microcosm of the larger world represented in Millenium Hall by the narrator and more fully developed in Sir George Ellison, which, as a letter from Scott to her sister dated 31 January 1763 implies, was from the beginning intended as an elaboration of the vision in Millenium Hall: "[I received] very little [money] by Millenium, much less than ever I did by any thing, but I bargained for the price in an agreement for a more extensive scheme…."¹⁴

The microcosmic quality of Millenium Hall is underscored by the role it plays in the narrative structure of Sir George Ellison. Scott adds an additional level of containment and control to those in Millenium Hall itself by creating the later novel as a narrative box around the earlier. Ellison is not simply a sequel; it is a prequel, to use a twentieth-century film term, as well. It begins not after the narrator leaves the Hall but before he arrives there, briefly refers to his visit there, and then details the course of his life.

The inscribing narrative voice of Ellison is explicitly masculine and again assumes the power of naming by giving a fictitious identity to a character he says is based on a real person. Published without a frontispiece in two volumes in 1766, coincident with the publication of the fifth edition of Sir Charles Grandison, Ellison seems intended as Scott's attempt to depict a Richardsonian hero as social reformer rather than social visionary. At least one of Scott's first readers recognized the most likely immediate model from which she worked: "those who do not recollect Mr. Richardson's Grandison, will discover great merit in [Ellison], as the style is in general elegant, and often pathetic" (Critical Review; or Annals of Literature, 21 [April, 1766], 288).

Ellison may also be seen as a revision and extension of Scott's abiding concern with the theme of active charity that had appeared in her earliest novels The History of Cornelia (1750) and A Journey through every Stage of Life (1754). The latter contains "The History of Leontius," a benevolent man who anticipates Ellison's good deeds. Presumably so that he may serve as an exemplum to as many men as possible, Ellison is not rewarded with the title of baronet (the title Grandison holds) until the close of the novel. Although he exhibits to an implausible degree the Grandisonian virtue of subordinating passion to principle, Ellison's is not intended to be a saint's life because then it would be inimitable. But neither is his a mixed character because then readers would likely identify with his faults rather than with his virtues. The narrator seeks "to lay before the public a life, which in some particulars every man, and in all particulars some men may imitate, his actions being confined within the common sphere of persons of fortune, in several articles within the extent of every gentleman's power" (p. v)

Scott circumscribes the efficacy of the lessons learned at Millenium Hall by reinscribing the narrator of the earlier book in need of physical and moral regeneration as "the younger son of an ancient and opulent family" (p. 1), who is already so good that the narrator of Ellison must avoid letting him become "an object of … wonder" (p. 7) rather than imitation. No longer the mercantile trader from Jamaica who, for the sake of profit, "sacrificed the greater good in pursuit of the less" and gave "up the substance for the shadow" (Millenium Hall, p. 30), Ellison in 1766 is the dutiful son whose heart has been properly educated by his father. The androcentric nature of his universe is quickly established: his brother merits a name; his sister and late mother do not. When his trade in Jamaica becomes profitable enough, he sensibly chooses a wife, a local, wealthy widow seven years his senior. When he expresses his "attachment, in terms of esteem and rational passion, the widow, without coquettish airs, or affected reluctance, accepted his proposal" (p. 17).

By marrying, Ellison moves from overseeing profits to overseeing the slaves on his wife's plantation. Since emancipation would be impolitic, he becomes the model slaveowner, treating his slaves like children. They, in turn, confuse him with God. Not yet a master of domestic politics, however, Ellison allows his wife, who thinks him foolishly indulgent to the slaves, to "enslave" him by playing on his good nature. The argument between Ellison and his wife over slavery was quoted at length by the earlier reviewers, with the Critical Review calling Ellison's "sentiments upon this occasion … noble, generous, humane, [deserving] to be engraven in the heart of every West Indian planter" (p. 282). Scott's point seems to be that women as well as men can be morally mistaken. But because Scott had earlier used the metaphor of enslavement in discussing Ellison's relationship with his wife, Ellison's confession that as a slaveowner, "I am exerting a power merely political, I have neither divine, nor natural right to enslave this man" (p. 35) may be intended to suggest that the subjugation of one sex by the other, like that of the African by the European, is based on custom and power, rather than nature and right. Scott's treatment of slavery, two decades before the sustained abolitionist movement in Britain, also elicited the praise of Ignatius Sancho, the Afro-English author and composer, in a letter of 21 July 1766 to his friend Laurence Sterne: " … of all my favorite writers, not one do I remember, that has a tear to spar[e] for my poor moorish brethren, Yourself, and the truly humane author of Sir George Ellison excepted."¹⁵

Though Ellison warns a young woman, who later becomes his sister-in-law, that a husband's tyranny can "lead a woman to wish for a power to which she must be conscious she has no right, and cannot assume without acting out of character, and rendering herself ridiculous" (p. 71), Ellison does not yet recognize that a husband's abdication of his proper authority can have the same result, as the power structure of his own family demonstrates. He has not yet fully realized the implications of the concept of freedom through order and control that is the lesson of Millenium Hall and which he can articulate when he defends his treatment of the slaves to his wife:

… I … was born in a country [Britain], that with all its faults is conspicuously generous, frank, and merciful, because it is free; no subordination exists there, but what is for the benefit of the lower as well as the higher ranks; all live in a state of reciprocal services, the great and the poor are linked in compact; each side has its obligations to perform. (pp. 37-38)

The timely death of his wife releases Ellison from domestic tyranny, and never again will he relinquish his authority or his place in the domestic, political, or social hierarchy.

To educate his son, whose character has been jeopardized by his mother's misrule, Ellison returns to Britain, bringing great wealth and six domestic slaves with him. On his doctor's advice, he tours Britain to repair his health damaged by the Jamaican climate and the deaths of his wife and father. Hence, he discovers Millenium Hall one quarter of the way through Ellison. In the earlier book he had been in his early forties at this stage; here he is thirty-four years old. Inspired by the example of the Hall, Ellison decides that in the modern age of commerce and civilization the feminine standards of benevolence and virtue should prevail, and to institute Millenium Hall reforms on the ramshackle estate he buys next to that of his cousin, Sir William, a baronet, he requests a housekeeper from the Hall. He, of course, becomes the ideal country gentleman, treating his workers so well that his cousin mocks him and farming some of his own land because of "that patriarchal, hospitable appearance, which constituted its greatest charm" (p. 128). Sir William is a fifty-year old misogynist, soured by a fiancee who jilted him long ago.

The patriarchal role Sir William's rank and title suggest he should (but does not) play is quickly filled by the natural aristocrat, George Ellison, "a master in the science of benevolence" (p. 176). Ellison becomes the patron of many local children, "in a manner, father to seven children, and well pleased with his paternity" (p. 206); of the poor in general, as treasurer of the poor fund; and of the common people, as justice of the peace monitoring their behavior and pleasures:

… It was not in his power absolutely to prevent that succession of fairs or wakes, which take the people from their work, during one or two of the busiest months in summer; but he suppressed so many of the entertainments exhibited at them, and so strictly watched over their meetings, that he rendered them too dull and sober to be any great temptation even to the most idle. (p. 194)

By prohibiting any other diversions, Ellison intentionally bores the common folk into church on Sundays.

Ellison's wealth, ultimately derived from slavery, enables him to act as God's surrogate, bringing good out of evil, acting behind the scenes to manipulate the lower orders for their own welfare, and constantly scrutinizing the actions of all who come within the range of his influence. And his virtue is self-rewarding: his acts of benevolence allow him to control his temporarily frustrated passion for the former Miss Allin, now married to Dr. Tunstall, "But of all Mr. Ellison's charities, none gave him such exquisite delight as the release of prisoners confined for debt" (p. 208). Experiencing this delight at the beginning of each year, Ellison should be grateful for the adversity of others. As one of the recipients of charity from Millenium Hall tells Ellison later in the novel, by being objects of benevolence, the lower orders give the higher "refined pleasure" and "in accepting their bounty, … seem to confer an obligation, and do in reality confer a benefit" (p. 277).

Ellison is too wise to relinquish the position that allows him to dispense charity. When his cousin accuses him of living a life that lacks the dignity proper to his station and that encourages insubordination, Ellison responds, "I raise no one to the same affluence that I enjoy … I am no leveller" (p. 216). Gradually, by argument and example, Ellison wins over his cousin, who contributes money to support his projects.

The dominant role Ellison as father-figure plays in relation to the women of Millenium Hall is re-emphasized by an additional embedding of the Hall within the narrative of his life. He returns to the Hall to find the matriarchs engaged in a scheme of education for girls, "the education of boys [being] above their sphere" (p. 248). Having already demonstrated that "they could have better performed a mother's part … without having stood in that relation to any one" (p. 256), the matriarchs plan to create three levels of schools to counteract the baleful influence of novels, pastorals, and mothers on the education of girls of all stations. Each school will have a maximum of twenty students so that the teachers "might be able to keep a vigilant watch over them, and instruct them fully" (p. 258).

The first level would prepare the proper girls to become ladies of the highest social rank. The second

… "was chiefly designed for such as had no prospect of considerable fortunes; and therefore were not entitled to any higher expectations than marrying men in good trades, country gentlemen of small estates, or men in the church, army, or some other small employment, which yielding only a life income, disqualified them from getting wives of fortune, on whom they could make no adequate settlement." (p. 262)

The third level of school would serve as the bulwark of the consciousness of rank and distinction. Designed for daughters of "the lowest shop-keepers in country towns" (p. 265), they would teach only writing and accounts. To avoid vanity, dancing would not be taught, and

"… For the same reason, the title of Miss was banished at the school, though great civility of behavior was required; but to preserve this, it is by no means necessary that the children of chandlers and alehouse-keepers should treat each other with the applications of Misses, and young Ladies; which teaches them to confound the distinction that ought to be kept up between them and their superiors." (p. 267)

Even the fundamentals of Christianity taught would be adjusted to the social levels of the students, "as the obligation to the duties peculiarly adapted to their stations were particularly inculcated" (p. 268). "Grown such Utopians … by [their] retired way of life" (p. 271), the matriarchs seek the patriarch's advice and support to put their project into effect. He enrolls some of the girls under his patronage as students in the first rank of school.

The concluding volume of Ellison observes our hero maintaining constant vigil over his domain, including schools he has convinced the ladies of Millenium Hall to establish nearby for the two lower ranks. One is tempted to agree with the judgment found in the Critical Review: "To recapitulate all his charities, would fill a moderate volume; for, indeed, one half of this history contains nothing else, except the episodes which are interwoven as memoirs of those objects who attract his attention" (p. 285). But one must agree with the reviewer's remark that "The history concludes with a most amiable picture of domestic felicity and social happiness" (p. 288), though how "amiable" one now finds it depends upon one's attitude toward an idealized patriarchal social structure. During school vacations, surrounded by all the children whose education he is supporting, Ellison "kept a strict watch over their behavior and tempers, and carefully endeavoured to rectify every thing that was amiss" (p. 46). All stations are kept in order under his control, and order is kept within stations:

… "Mr. Ellison's house contained also many children of inferior rank; his servants had inter-married, the blacks with blacks, the white servants with those of their own colour: for though he pro-moted their marrying, he did not wish an union between those of different complexions, the con-nection appearing indelicate and almost un-natural…. By this indulgence of his domestics his house gave one some idea of those of the ancient patriarchs: he seemed as much the father as the master of his family." (pp. 48, 50)

Ellison's care extends to his slaves in Jamaica, who, at his death, are to receive annuities almost sufficient for independence, their benevolent and practical master "designing by this moderate provision to leave a spur to their industry, and yet give them the power (as he enfranchised them) of chusing their own master" (p. 44).

Perhaps because even patriarchal paragons occasionally require chastising by a higher authority, Ellison suffers a seemingly fatal accident after the nowwidowed Mrs. Tunstall agrees to marry him and he "experienced the danger of extreme joy; hitherto benevolence had always possessed the first place in his thoughts, but at this period he was too much intoxicated with his own happiness, to give his usual attention to the happiness of others" (p. 162). His unexpected recovery allows him to demonstrate how a true Christian would have died.

When Sir William dies, George inherits his cousin's title and estate, thus gaining an even wider scope for his surveillance. Lady Ellison assumes supervision of the local children, particularly the girls. She convinces parents to dress their infants in waistcoats, "only making them somewhat stiffer as they advanced in size, being as great an enemy to the slatternly appearance of too unconfined a waist, as to the impenetrable boddice worn by the common people in the country" (p. 216). She also gives her mark of approval—scarlet ribbons—to fifteen-year-old girls who are "sober, modest, industrious, and cleanly" (p. 218). When they are married to deserving young men, the couple receive furnishings for a homestead, as well as "a decent, sober weddingdinner" (pp. 218-19). Images of restraint can be more disturbing: we read of "the youngest Miss Louisa Tunstall, whose vivacity was so unbounded as frequently inclined her mother to think that the ravages a very severe small-pox had made in her face was no small blessing" (p. 224).

The spate of marriages that concludes Sir George Ellison seems intended to offset the impression given in Millenium Hall that, despite statements to the contrary, women are happier unmarried. Scott does not, however, ignore feminist concern over the oppression possible in marriage. One servant declines to live with her newly-married daughter because "when a woman was married she ought to have no one's temper to study but her husband's; double subjection was too much" (p. 198). Even the physically unattractive Louisa Tunstall finds a desirable husband, who will presumably control her excessive energy within the confines of wedlock. As an extension and circumscription of the earlier book, Ellison demonstrates that Scott's Utopian vision is one of the back-to-the-future variety. As Ellison's refusal to run for election to Parliament indicates, Scott does not call for radical political change. Nor does she explicitly call for radical social change. Ellison's elevation to the hereditary title of baronet does not make him a peer of the realm, qualified to sit in the House of Lords; he remains a commoner, eligible to be elected to the House of Commons. The ideal baronet, represented by Grandison, Ellison, and later Charlotte Smith's Sir Orlando (Somerive) Rayland in The Old Manor House, is, in Smith's words, a member of "an order that made a very proper barrier between the peerage and the squirality."¹⁶ Sir George supervises his social superiors as well as his subordinates. His advice to his neighbor Grantham, who inherits a dukedom, indicates that Scott believes that the needed reforms can be supervised by a regenerated (both Ellison and Grantham are collateral heirs) patriarchal aristocracy infused with conventionally feminine sentiments.

The generally linear, progressive chronological structure of Ellison reflects Scott's ideological position that social reform requires a masculine agent to be realized. Without him, reform remains, as one of Millenium Hall's inmates acknowledges, merely "Utopian" (Ellison, p. 271), a project as static as the narrative frame that contains it. To structure her earlier book, Scott uses the récit, or narrative interpolations of characters' autobiographies, a narrative device associated with the improbable plots of romances; for her later work, she chooses the narrative structure associated with tales of truth like biography and history to subsume the récit. But in both books, the future she imagines must be a Utopia of confines because restrictions and boundaries define the conservative concept of a benevolent hierarchy overseen by a loving patriarch that Scott accepts as necessary to the happiness and order of human existence. By circumscribing her female voices with authoritative masculine discourse and locating them within a familiar hierarchy of rank, Scott makes her feminist call for economic and educational equality that would alter social realities appear "truly moral and sensible" even to eighteenth-century male readers. The images of confinement that pervade Scott's bipartite depiction of a brave new world recuperating an idealized and feminized aristocracy may strike a twentieth-century reader as oppressive, but Scott employs them to represent the desirable delimitations essential for the implementation of her vision of utopia limited.¹⁷

Notes

¹ Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall, ed. Jane Spencer (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), p. xi. Although Spencer's edition is currently the most widely available, it is incomplete, lacking the frontispiece and "Advertisement." All quotations from Scott's novel, cited by page numbers parenthetically within the text, are taken from Walter M. Crittenden, ed., A Description of Millenium Hall (New York: Bookman Associates, 1955).

² All references to The History of Sir George Ellison, cited hereafter by page numbers parenthetically within the text, are to the first edition microfilmed in the Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue collection.

³ For the involvement of Johnson and Richardson with contemporaneous women authors, consult the index of Janet Todd, ed., A Dictionary of British and American Writers 1660-1800 (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman & Littlefield, 1987).

⁴ Donald Greene, ed., Samuel Johnson (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), p. 380. All references to Rasselas, cited hereafter by page numbers parenthetically within the text, are to this edition.

⁵ For the publication history of Sir Charles Grandison, see T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 401-18.

⁶ Quoted in Gaby Esther Onderwyzer, "Sarah Scott: Her Life and Works" (unpub. doct. diss., Univ. of California, 1957), p. 55.

⁷ Bridget Hill, "A Refuge from Men: The Idea of a Protestant Nunnery," Past and Present, 117 (1987), 107-30. The quotation is from p. 124.

⁸ Quoted in Onderwyzer, p. 144.

⁹ For a fuller discussion of George III as a Patriot King, see Vincent Carretta, George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron (Athens, Ga.: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1990), chapter 2.

¹⁰Letters of Samuel Johnson ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), I, 137-38.

¹¹The History of Sir Charles Grandison, ed. Jocelyn Harris (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), IV, 354-55. All quotations from Grandison, cited hereafter by page numbers parenthetically within the text, are from this edition.

¹² On the charitable "convent," see Eaves and Kimpel, p. 462.

¹³ Bridget Hill, ed., The First English Feminist: Reflections Upon Marriage and Other Writings by Mary Astell (Aldershot: Gower Publishing Co., 1986), p. 87.

¹⁴ Quoted in Onderwyzer, p. 273.

¹⁵The Letters of Laurence Sterne, ed. L. P. Curtis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), p. 282.

¹⁶The Old Manor House, ed. Anne Henry Ehrenpreis (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 34-35.

¹⁷ I thank my colleagues Jane Donawerth and Susan Lanser for their helpful criticisms of an earlier version of this essay.